I was chatting with Jessie Thavonekham this afternoon and she brought up wanting to start an artist’s collective. I told her about Slutniks and how I wanted to make an art community from it but no one else seemed interested in it, possibly because the name was off putting. I explained that the name was a take on the Sputnik space program, which sent the first living creatures into orbit. She was immediately interested.

I expounded as much of my previous plans for Slutniks as I could remember, and we set about trying to flesh out the idea. We’ll meet tomorrow to work on it further. It’s very exciting.

Today marked the first of the summer moves I will be partaking in. As far as I know there are two more households I will be helping to relocate. Today was Aidan Connelly, a friend of Laura’s from Fine Arts. He has lived a few blocks away from us for years and he’s only come over once or twice, and this was the first time we ever saw his place. It was pretty nice, and large enough for a one and a half. It was filled to the brim with paintings, instruments, amps, speakers, stereos, and various computer hardware. He is a prolific artist and pack-rat.

The building’s fat, balding, tattooed concierge sat outside with his fat, jolly wife all day with their dog. He seemed like a grumpy asshole. He was throwing a squeaky bone toy for his dog who was on a two metre leash, and then yelling impatiently at the dog to come back and give him the toy to be thrown again. The dog was in a constant state of bliss, despite his human being such a douche bag. Unrelated to his shitty attitude, he had an appearance which struck me as quintessentially Quebecois, possibly because of his mild resemblance to the father of Bruno, a childhood friend.

His building has the most annoying elevator I have ever had to deal with.

It took about three hours to get everything from the apartment to the ten foot long cube van. We were done by 7:30 in the evening, and I had completely forgotten to eat all day, so I was rather famished by then. Laura and I hurried home and made some pasta. Any time I eat my mother’s pasta sauce, my urine smells like it afterward.

Up until today Laura and I were rather worried about our financial situation, but it has all fallen into place, with commission money from Arun coming just in time.

Laura and I have decided that from here on in, we support each other. Laura is no longer being supported by her grandfather as she is no longer in school. I have been mostly independent since moving to Montreal, more and more so by the year. So now, while we will still try to split things equally, if one of us cannot cover a cost, it’s both of our problems. It’s not a significant change to how we have been dealing with money since we moved in together, but having made the decision, spoken aloud, it feels like a nice, important step in our relationship.

I have been playing an abundance of Modern Warfare 2 over the past few days. It started when Taigan came to visit. While we’ve known each other and been distant friends since kindergarten, Taigan and I don’t have all that much in common. More pertinently, Laura and Taigan share a vested interest in makeup. They started in on discussing makeup just after supper, so I took a seat on the couch and started up MW2.

I’m not great at video games, but I enjoy the hell out of them. This especially applies to online gaming. I’ve been slowly leveling up in the game. I’m just passed level 40. Most people have already maxed out their levels once and are going on their second round of leveling to 70. The main reason I’m so far behind is not so much that I suck at the game, but that I play so rarely. I will often go for more than a month without playing a console game. When I started up MW2 the other day, though, I decided to start leveling up my weaponry. This also happened to help me make more kills as I was more focused on certain kinds of kills. It’s very interesting how it added another layer to the game. Another shallow, mindless, addictive, violent level to the game.