VACATION TIME!!!

I'm on vacation!

YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAYYY!!!

A whole 10 and a half days for me to do NOTHING!

So expect very little blogging. Or maybe lots. Depending on what my mood is. Oh who cares, I'm on vacation so NYAH-NYAH-NYAH-NYAH-BOO-BOO! *raspberry*

Going to see the One Man Star Wars show and the One Man Lord of the Rings show tonight - welcome to nerdfest '05! A post about it to come.

Also, the first of my friends' wedding is taking place Saturday. Some plithy commentary on how beautiful/corny/overhyped weddings are in general (still trying to get over my sister's 2003 wedding) will ensue.

In the meantime, what the hell is with Dufferin Mall? It's so OOGIE. I was just there to pick up a few things at the Wal-Mart and ended up having Mclunch in the food courtarium. Horrible horrible horrible! Granted, Dufferin Mall's done a lot to improve itself - lots of renovations, new washrooms, more big name stores, etc. Yet it retains that if-I-ever-worked-here-I'd-slit-my-wrist-in-three-weeks kind of feeling.

(For a really cool site on these types of malls, visit deadmalls.com.)

I once read an interesting article about the invention of the shopping mall, the different categories, and how shopping centres, from the suburban plaza to hugungous megamalls, evolved. I can't find it online, but it basically outlined how shopping centres are classed according to their main draws: major department stores like Sears and the Bay, grocery stores, lower-end outlet department stores like K-Mart and Zellers, and so forth.

In my mind, I think there are only two basic classes of malls: the malls that deliberately separate the people with money from the people that don't; and the malls that don't have bookstores and usually have birds living in them.

Dufferin Mall is of the latter. Of course, it doesn't have any of the ooginess that either the Promenade Mall (the one at Dupont, not Thornhill) or Gerrard Square have. Now THOSE are ghetto. It comes down to this: if there are more dollar stores or crap stores than, say, washrooms on the first level, it's a ghetto mall. To take a page from John's musical life:

"In the ghetto mall...
the poor man walks to the dollar store/
and he learns how to steal off the sales floor/
in the ghetto mall...."

Understandably, these craptacular malls reflect the clientele and the neighbourhood they're in. I saw groups of old men who obviously didn't do much more than meet and yak all day in the food courtarium; teens with too much makeup and dead looks; and the ubiquitous mothers with crying screaming kicking children in tow. I wonder what would happen if the mall were to be filled with health food stores and clothing co-ops? Since so many people tend to spend so much time in these places, would regular exposure to wholesome things change them?

Probably not, but in my universe...