obligatory navel gazing! laugh! cry! snore! |
|
I was conceived and born in the usual way in 1973. Most of my childhood was a drag and hardly worth mentioning... except maybe the precursive event of being summarily ejected from Girl Guides for having an authority problem. Precocious and smartassed, I was cutting classes in grade four out of sheer boredom; and, as I learned later, managed to give the teacher a nervous complex.
Oh, the 80s, sweet 80s. We wore leg warmers, skinny leather ties (mine even had a ZIPPER on it), big plastic jewelry, fedoras, white lipstick and pink eyeshadow, pinned our pants so tight they almost cut off the circulation to our feet, turned the collars of our pink shirts up, sprayed our hair into spikes, and listened to all kinds of crappy synth-pop. Let it be stated here that I hope that decade NEVER comes back. At age fourteen I would have killed a man for one of those Ocean Pacific sweatshirts. Now you and a million other people in cyberspace know my shame. To the left is me at age 11, in my fly Fame sweatshirt and plastic cube earrings. In 1984, I loved that sweatshirt more than life itself. When I saw the movie Revenge of the Nerds, it was like they were telling my life story. NEEEEEERDS! Stumbled through adolescence, made it to university, got a Fine Arts degree. I went through a phase of painting huge canvases of naked men, two of which were sold to a mysteriously anonymous "buyer" in Montreal... hope they look good on the wall of that gay bar wherever it is. My mom never really figured out what the point was. She just kept asking, "But Krista... why a PENIS?" Luckily for her I moved out of that phase and into painting Madonnas in bondage and holding guns. The thing I learned in art school is that artists are just as full of shit as anyone else. Half the time when they do something, there's no meaning. There's no direction. They just either get obsessed with crafting mugs in the shape of skulls or they think it looks really cool. On the other hand, learning to look at art is like learning to read a text. The art piece isn't necessarily "about" something other than the artist interested in exploring a certain idea. I went on to do both a Master's degree and Ph.D. in Women's Studies at York. This makes me something like only the twelfth person to get a Ph.D. in Women's Studies in Canada. My master's research involved women's online zines, links to which I have included for your reading pleasure. My Ph.D. dissertation involved women working in technology. You can read my Master's paper online. I also have the notes from my comprehensive exams up.
Chris is a nuclear physicist, which sounds as cool as "cowboy" or "astronaut". If the gamma particle beam on your phaser ain't working, you call him and he'll tell you not to eat the radioactive source. Plus he can probably tell you the latest gossip on which company has just been busted for gross environmental violations. He works in the control room of the Pickering nuclear reactor and has already heard all the Homer Simpson and "glow in the dark" jokes. Outside of work, he spins hard trance as Gamma Fodder, the DJ with the phattest beats and a funkiness score of 19. If you're into canoeing, especially in the Temagami area, his mom has a fabbo canoeing page . If your interests lie in a more cerebral direction check out his father's Hamilton Amateur Astronomers page. He can tell you if that face on Mars is really Elvis. And, of course, I couldn't let this page go by without mentioning the newest member of the family, my nephew Halen, born July 27, 2002. I saw a baby come out of a lady's tummy!
Oh yeah, and after grad school, I got a haircut and got a real job, but that's much more grown up and boring, so who cares? |
I repeated that dubious feat (tag-teamed with my best friend Rebecca, aka Rebugga for her weird entomological leanings) in grade nine, laying to waste a science teacher with a Ph.D., who, it was rumoured, had blown himself and half the chem lab up some years later. Dr. Lai, if you're out there, sorry about the time we screamed with hysterical laughter when Rachel lit her hair on fire. 
Presently I live with my partner Chris. We met on a minigolf course in South Carolina when I was fifteen (by the way, gentle readers, we did not get married at fifteen, nor did we get married after only dating each other, so please don't start writing emails about shotgun weddings. One misguided person has already emailed me to tell me what an inbred trailer park loser I am). Chris endeared himself to me by making fun of other people right off the bat. Plus there was the frisson of danger as on that trip we were almost attacked by an alligator. Now years later it's still us against the world.
Okay, so what am I doing with my life now? Well, I can often be found getting up to crazy and/or stupid shit with my best girlfriend, Ethel to my Lucy, Butthead to my Beavis,