Boxing Week

Today I was fit for a bridesmaid dress and it was an eye-opening experience.

"It's too tight," I whined to the lady who had just been hugging me with measuring tape. "I need a bigger size."

She looked at me critically. "Where?"

"My tummy," I said, brushing it.

But she would not agree. She made me go sit down and then walk around until I agreed that in fact it was not too tight around the tummy; that indeed, I looked dangerously good and that the size up I subsequently tried on looked like crap.

"It's up to you, of course," she said. "It's a comfort level thing. But if you go up a size you'll need lots of alterations and you looked good in the first."

"Alright, I'll get that and then drop weight on purpose if I need to," I said, remembering both the series of perhaps seven consecutive huge meals I'd had over the past week with shortbread scarfed in the breaks, as well as the strange adolescent taste of a toothbrush to the back of the throat.

"Don't do that," she said dismissively. "If you're really worried about the waist just wear a ____." This was some word for a dressing concept I didn't understand then and don't remember now, but it seemed to be built in to pantyhose to act like a stomach squisher.

Anyways, I ordered the dress and got a 10% discount on an already good value sale (although since its a very pale lime green for a late spring wedding I'm going to have to pay, financially and physically, for some tanning sessions before a pallid death's head like me dares wear it in public) which I almost immediately squandered on some thigh highs from American Apparel (I don't like American Apparel but Lady reccommended these thigh highs by looking really good in them). And I thought about how I like baggy clothes and how I can almost never tolerate them actually touching my waist. At first I wondered if it's some weird sort of neurotic modesty or a conviction that girls like me should be draped, not wrapped.

Then I realized itreally is just a comfort thing, but in the sense that if there's ever an impromptu war or other disturbance of some kind, I want to be able to leap into unhindered action. That's the reason I don't wear shoes I can't run and kick in. But here's the thing: I'm 28 and I still haven't started my career as a superhero. Something has to give.

The Red Dragon is being dangerously bashful

That was nice. Christmas sped by this year, maybe with the awareness that I might not be home next year, maybe because of losing Grandpa this year unsubtly demonstrating you just can't count on everybody being there forevs.

Anyhoo. The brunch was great and the presents I got were phenomenal - including a massage mat I can bring to work and attach to my chair, smoothing over the twilight months of my time with that company by making my co-workers horribly, bitterly jealous. Thanks, Luke Duke.

Among other awesome things, Figaro took and mounted some lovely pictures of my beautiful kitty Lexie. Here she is, taken much less beautifully by me but showing all her feline loveliness.

And now back to our regular scheduled ranting

Straight into some pre-emptive complaining about the fact that Patrick Suskind's Perfume has been made into a film. Now, I don't have favourite books. There are many, many books I love very much and I love them all seperately but equally, sort of like how Americans used to imagine God felt about the different races. But I've really loved Perfume for years, and if you haven't read it I strongly advise you do. Although this book isn't everybody's cup of tea, its power and appeal is undeniable to everyone I know who has read it, although their tastes have often been very different from each others'. This is a book that can change people's ideas about what words can do.

The other couple of Patrick Suskind things I've read, the Pigeon and Maitre Muissard's Bequest, are similar in that sense - that as you read them, you feel he's doing something absolutely new with words - but Perfume's scale is grander. It's also the only one I've got Book Nazi about - the Pigeon is too unsettling for me to go around reccommending and MMB is too scary. I don't scare with books, but I felt chilled to the bone after MMB.

I don't want to go on about Perfume because the less you know before reading it the better, which means read it FAST. The publicity for the film already looks pretty aggressive in England and it will be here too if it goes over well there, I suppose. So just read it. And bear with me while I complain that there are some reasons I'm obliged to go see the film, even though the only book-to-film projects I've ever really enjoyed were good films from shit books, like the Godfather.

First, Tom Tykwer directed it and I loved Run Lola Run back in the day. Second, much as I can't resist talking to even unattractive complete strangers when they're in a conversation about a book I love, I can't resist going to see someone else's vision of this book on a big screen. And third, I'm pissed it was made into a movie. It was already an essentially perfect project. There was nothing to fix and nothing to add, at least from my point of view as a reader. So I have a feeling I'm going to need to complain about this movie, alot, and I should see it before I do, at least so my complaining makes more sense.

Finally, I have very little hope the film will be a quarter as astonishing as the book. But I live to be surprised.

The Red Dragon is Unimpressed

I haven't fully learned how to use this camera, but hopefully on a good monitor you can make out the Jeebus between the two upper-storey windows. I can see benefits to raising kids in small towns, but this isn't one of them.

Still overeating, still happy, still Christmasy. Happy whatevs, y'all.

The Red Dragon is Overfed

A quick note to wish any intrepid Christmas readers a good one, both for their benefit and to demonstrate I am not in so much awe of spurious Christian traditions that try to convince us Jeebus was a Capricorn that I cannot type on the fake day of his birth. Especially considering we're postponing the non-churchy bits of Christmas (that is, PRESENTS PRESENTS PRESENTS) until the young people get here on the 27th. Nonetheless, Happy Christmas to all, especially people who are actually interested enough to read this blog. You have no idea how endearing that makes you to me.

There are no complaints from here yet. We've been eating like pigs and my family is well. Although Magnum had to respond to a fire last night and his plat0on ch1ef was an oaf who nearly got people killed for the sake of an empty building. There's something of a romantic hero about Magnum, which could be why I've never been into the Romantic Hero type. But because of his romantic-type heroism I've never worried too much about him being a f1reman, figuring it was a socially wonderful outlet for that heroism, better than the army or being a cop or something. Also, Rescue Me is some damn fine television. But now I'm a little more worried thinking of how the decisions of incompetent or stupid rank superiors could endanger him. That's hard to countenance.

That's as exciting as the present gets, although I'd like to commemorate the vast quantity of food we prepared and ate last night, including TWO tomato sauces, one with shrimp and the other with salt cod. But duty calls in the shape of jumping on Figaro to wake his lazy ass up and of washing my hair before going to my yearly Catholic service - keeping my hand in, in case the doors to Heaven don't open to Quakers, though you'd really have to wonder what sort of Heaven would be closed to an earnest Quaker and open to a ersatz Catholic. So I'd like to leave you with the news that it's been snowing ever so lightly during the nights and making things pretty in the morning, which is all this "look but don't touch" winterphobe could ask from Santa.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

Say It Again Y'all

No work today or until after New Years, and yet so much to do. Yesterday I applied for a job which is just so, so me; you know, one of those jobs whose descriptions fall into your lap at exactly the time you want them to fall into your lap, and where you start thinking "Jeebus, maybe I can start using my powers for good instead of evil; maybe MY WHOLE LIFE UP TO THIS POINT HAS BEEN PREPARING ME FOR THE BEAUTIFULLY INEVITABLE CAREER I WILL HAVE AT THIS WONDERFUL PLACE." Which of course creates a bit of a sense of pressure, and meant I was actually having things that felt like palpitations before, while and after I applied.

No worries - I'm betting that actually has more to do with the four Pocket Coffees I ate in quick succession than a dicky heart or even any actual excitement. Anyways. There's really nothing for me to do in the interim besides apply to other interesting opportunities and keep my fingers crossed/pray - it'd be nice if you could keep yours crossed/pray for me too.

Speaking of pseudo-religion, last night I went to a lantern festival in Kensington Market to celebrate that our hemisphere has halted and gently reversed its slide into seemingly interminable darkness. I've been whining about it so much that it would be daft for me to not celebrate it, and you know what, it finally got me into the Christmas spirit. It certainly helped that my neice and nephews were there and just enchanted by the crazy sights of shadow puppets and paper lanterns and Burning Men and all the rest of it.

Hippies do manage to do an awful lot of things right and family-friendlyish festivals are one of them (intermittently). What I don't get is why they're still 'singing' tedious, whiny Lennon standards about peace when they could be really getting the audiences going with War (What is it Good For). Even those of us who are backwardly unacquainted with the Motown catalogue know that one either from Homer's naked church scene in the "The HΩmega Man" or from the Springsteen cover, and say what you will about Bruce Springsteen; only a patently insane woman would refuse to ride his face in favour of John Lennon's at its prettiest. And that's what peace is good for. Riding face.

Hippies need to learn how to reframe the debate.

They'll be my jackals when I feed

Well, it's amazing what defining yourself in the face of opposition and provocation can do. I know much more about myself than I did at this time last week, and it's not a matter of me liking it so much as knowing it's there. Those flower children going off in the sixties to 'find themselves' should have just put up with a job in advertising media analysis and cripplingly annoying conversations with their parents. Two or three times a week. In lieu of that, with whatever passed for Evangelical Christians back then. I suppose the hallucinogens were much more fun, though.

Not much to say today - my cold miraculously scarpered as though to give me a chance to think about my options and I am, furiously. In what seemed like a too-good-to-be-true coincidence, I heard about a whole new one last night that I'm so keen on I can't even write about here in case I jinx it.

Speaking of superstition, I watched the 1931 version of Dracula with Philip Glass's score last night. It wasn't scary, and Figaro had told me it was really boring, but I found it nice to watch with the score; Béla Lugosi just looks so good and the acting was all cute and stylized. Sadly (in the pathetic sense), my freakoutability kicked in while I was watching the documentary afterwards and heard the original pre-credit shot of Dr. Van Helsing saying "When you're at home in the dark under the covers and thinking about the movie you just saw, et cetera, just remember: there are such things!" And of course that goes right to the heart of what everybody like me who refuses to watch horror films is really worried about.

Perhaps it would have just given me a frisson and passed, but I glanced out the window and saw a police cruiser creeping by, slowly, as though looking for something. I wasn't afraid of the po-po trying to track down a vampire in my trashtastic neighborhood. But my brain did choose that inauspicious pre-bedtime moment to make a creepy conclusion about vampirism being an archetype explaining the root of the parasitic human evil splashed across our news media and on plain view in this neighborhood every day.

If we could look at our species objectively, I think we would think of ourselves as more cannibalistic than chimpanzees and lions who eat each other's young. So many notions of success are based directly on the misery of other people. There are so many people on crack in this neighbourhood, and worst to see for me for some reason, so many crackwhores - maybe people who started off all bright and interesting and shit, and somebody making money I can't even imagine off ruining them.

I am not a whore

UPDATE

Aw yeah! C0nstructive d1smissal, baby! Feeeeeeeeeeeeeel that!

MAIN BODY

I am so pissed, and yet not pissed at all, if I'm honest about it.

How to explain to my readers? And I don't hesitate to explain, just to explain in such a way that won't be googled by my co-workers, who (as soon as they open the email that Robin, my less big boss, sent around late last night) will be googling furiously in an effort to find out what their rights are. Or at least I will be. I'd be doing it now, except if I'm honest with myself once more, I'm not furious.

Here's the thing. I'm a rese&rcher and wr&ter for an ind&stry ma&azine about t&levision - about how great it is and why adv&rtisers should spend their hard-earned m&rketing bud&ets on that instead of on pr1nt, r@dio, 1nternet, outd0or, et cetera. As far as my girlish hopes and dreams go, I've never thought it was much of a job, but it was okay; 80% of the things I spend my day reading are nice things like the Economist or the Globe and Mail or some such, and I like writing. What I had to write about fell into two categories: trends within &ndustries (for example, right now I'm working on a little article about how the new f&lm Blo0d D1amond is making the d1amond industry go on the defensive in a huge way so as to shore up traditionally huge H0liday sales) and trends within @dvertising, specifically t&levision @dvertising, especially in terms of how great it is.

The first category is fun. The second is stupid and the perpetuation of a great lie, since there is no solid proof any t2levision c@mpaign ever increased the m@rket for anything, and quite a bit more proof in the opposite direction. That is, almost all @dvertising b&dgets across the board are absolutely sqaundered, and that the only thing that moves a product is so-called 'br@nd buzz' - a fancy (i.e. GAY) term for people trying a product, liking it, and reccommending it to their freinds.

This has been a little disheartening for me . . . leads to spontaneous prayers throughout the day along these lines:

Oh, merciful Jeebus, in your wisdom tell me why your Father allows his children here below to waste billions of dollars and a whole industry of college grads trying to map out and understand br@nd buzz when it's obvious it might have something to do with, I don't know, the fucking QUALITY and DISTRIBUTION of the product, and while there are millions of children slowly starving to death because we haven't quite figured out the importance of food distribution either?

. . . but I could live with it. The m@rketing 1ndustry, hollow shell of smelly useless bullshit though it may be, is the cornerstone of North American capitalism and it boggles the mind to think about the white-collar unemployment that would slam down on this continent if it was flushed down the shitter for the shit it was tomorrow.

What I can't live with is last night's announcement that when Batman, my big boss who I love, ret1res in a few months, the m0gazine is going to be practically decommissioned and our jobs will migrate to helping the t&levision ch@nnels prepare s@les p@ckages to convince @dvertisers to buy time.

Obviously, I can't countenance doing such a thing, because I'm not a big stupid whore. I'm praying to get sacked or that the change in out job descriptions is going to be so radical I can demand severance so I can cash in on EI. And considering the F-word is so frustrated with illegal shit work, we may leave Canada a little earlier than I was thinking. (Don't worry, Sugar, I'll be back for the wedding if we leave before.) My only real regret is that this boom fell while I've got an awful head cold and can hardly think through my options, outside of spending the next two months glued to the Guardian job board while I feverishly apply for - well, actually there's only one more PhD programme I'm applying to, so while I feverishly apply to one more PhD programme.

I need time to digest, but I don't look forward to seeing my co-workers this morning or our Christmas party this afternoon. One of them is getting married and another just had a baby.

Young man, there's no need to feel down

At the F-word's unsubtle urging (he bought me goggles for my birthday), I've started 'swimming'. Once upon a time, I knew how to swim, although I've got pretty clear memories of failing the introductory 'otter' course six or seven times when I was little. Something to do with a crippling, pathological fear, not of water, but of hammerhead sharks swimming out of the ducts on the sides and eating me. It's not fully gone. As a matter of fact it's not gone at all; I don't think I could swim alone in a pool. Luckily I go to the YMCA and the pool is always crowded with people who are more thrashy and better marbled and aged than I, so I think I'd be able to escape with my life.

Anyways, it's fun, even if I have a tendance to 'swim' with the awkard, rigid form of an offended housecat who's been chucked in against her will. That's once I scrape together the balls to actually let go of the kickboard, of course. And I thought I had a nicely working cardiovascular system but it turns out I don't so it feels like a nice workout.

That pisser I've been in has been lifting. It's miraculous what a day spent writing, working out and cooking can do. Today, I don't go to the stupid office until two, which is good because I have more writing to do. Including the fucking, fucking Christmas cards which I suppose I should just dress up as PC and call New Years' cards at this point. I don't know what the big problem is with writing Christmas cards, but every year it's a pain in my ass. Putting together the list of who to send to (which I've already done) is the worst part, although this year it's rather better. Simply because this year I have fewer 'estranged friends' - you know, the sort who said something that you interpreted as deeply insulting either about you or your mother so you stopped returning their calls, and now you're wondering if you were right to be insulted, and maybe now is the time to send them a little note that indicates at the very least you wish them more good than harm, and it'll all be fucking Christmassy and great.

And you know? I have no idea if I have fewer estranged friends because I don't take offence as easily, or because I'm better at forgetting people, or because I've actually got to a point in life where I choose friends who are pretty inoffensive. No idea at all.

You'd better watch out . . .

Feeling profoundly off game these days. There's drudge work involved in so many things and people are just not fucking jolly anymore. North American Christmases set up retarded expectations. In Europe you drink mulled wine or proper foamy eggnog with lots of alcohol and that makes you jolly, but here we're expected to get jolly on a diet of saccharine Christmas carols, garish store displays and seasonal goodwill towards all men when we spend the rest of the year punching each other in the head to get on the fucking metro first. The least, the fucking least the provincial government could do to help us get into the true spirit of Christmas is let us drink outside in December. Although I understand why it doesn't. Ontarioans have been coddled with infantile, retarded drinking laws for so long we've become infantile, retarded drunks, and any relaxation of the laws will probably result in a generation of 18-to-50-year-olds dying in a series of ever more infantile, retarded drunken mishaps.

As you can tell, the Nutcracker only went so far to put me in the mood. It was exactly like last year in terms of staging and production, which made me feel gypped: if it's such a money-spinner for the National Ballet, you'd think they could throw in a few fucking surprises here and there. Gigi's pleasant inclusive non-denominational politically correct holiday party went a little farther. Today I'm not going to work and will take care of my Christmas cards, which may have some effect. But the truth of the matter is that there are a couple of things pissing on whatever errant sparks of seasonal joy fly within me. First, it's mid-December and it's 13 degrees above zero outside. Much as I fucking hate the winter, the warm makes me very unsettled and worried about the future of the planet and of myself: it fills me with happy, Christmassy visions of parching to death in an arid, ruined landscape that used to be a thriving city. Weeeeeeee!

Second, I'm having a hard time with some sort of second adolescence. When I was a real adolescent, I was sulky and angry and awful, but far too pre-occupied with what passed for angst to come to any useful conclusions about my relationship with my parents. And now that I'm older it's hard to realize how avoiding conflict with them has created a distance between us. Because now I can feel emotionally and creatively undermined when I've accomplished - well, not so much, but obviously more than they were expecting - even though I honestly believe they have no intention of doing any undermining. I haven't been talking with them in the right way and now I'm afraid I've lost the balls to talk with them properly at all - just carry on through life running away from what I interpret as their disapprobation and never scraping together the balls to do what's really right for me. Being afraid of it is probably a good sign I'm going to deal with it soon, but you know what? For the moment, it puts me in an un-Christmassy pisser.

I bet you write wonderful letters

There's this Spencer Tracy/Katharine Hepburn vehicle called Desk Set which was striking all sorts of chords with me - about a research department that thinks it's getting replaced by an International Business Machine 'electronic brain' (though I'm not sure how much I'd mind getting replaced by an electronic brain). Uber-aggressive product placement aside, it's really cute - especially cute if you care about the human and organic organization of information, have to put up with arrogantly incompetent tech departments at your office, and if you're curious about how people thought about computers before they were called computers and before acronyms.

My point is that I'm going to stop calling them computers and start calling them electronic brains. Also that I love Spencer Tracy . . . and . . right. Finally, that arsing off in an office situation should be both allowed and encouraged.

Tonight we're seeing the Nutcracker, my not-so-surprising Christmas present to the F-word. Seeing the Nutcracker is going to be my annual Christmas tradition, no matter where I am in the world, and if that does mean Qatar on a lousy pay package I'll just make some Fisher Price action figures dance it out. A child's hallucination of a ballet to that pretty, pretty music - good God, I love the Russians. So pagan - the death and regeneration of the warrior prince! That's the true fucking spirit of Christmas and we all know it when we watch the Nutcracker . . . anyways, I hope that's the case, because I'm so not in the Christmas spirit at the moment. More in the weekend spirit. I wish I was allowed to drink at work.

Old Person River, He/She Just Keeps Rolling Along

Yesterday's workshop was so lousy on top of more or less zero sleep the night before that I tried to drown myself in a glass of water. I made the effort while the seminar leader tried to inform us "between" and "among" were the same thing, except "among" was for more than two (ex. "There was enmity between Livia Augusta and Tiberius" and, uh, "There was enmity among Livia Augusta, Tiberius, and Agrippinilla.")

We also 'learned' that while sexist language is unacceptable (ex. "If someone knocks, let him in") the natural migration of the third person plural to third person singular neutral (ex. "If someone knocks, let them in") is not yet acceptable English, so we should construct unnatural and silly sentences to get around the whole fucker (ex. "Let in those who knock.")

Fuck, man.

Besides the people from my office, with whom I had a bit of a laugh, I wanted to murder everyone there, especially this dick of a woman who kept using the word "oftentimes". What sort of piece of shit word is that. I think it's replaced "orientated" as the thing I hate the most about the English language.

Anyways, I went home early, had a good long nap, and thought about what I want from life exactly. The upshot is I'll go back to English teaching if I need to, and I won't complain for months. I liked it more than I like being a media/ad dollars prostitute/pimp and it's the only job I've ever had wherein I made a decent living working the 20 hours a week that let me write at will, and write fiction.

The truth is the apex of frustration I hit yesterday drove home to me that there are many things in my life that are not satisfying my essentially modest demands, and while I can't fix everything I can sure as fuck fix my time distribution and profession. I have to say there's a temptation to just scarper altogether right now. I don't think I can - as much as I need to take back control of my life I also need to go to see Elvis, and I need to get a bridesmaid dress for the wedding of the century, I need to max out the RRSPs before I leave, and many such things. But even thinking of scarpering right now makes the world that little bit more engaging.

Off to work.

Pisser, pure and simple

Holy shit, am I ever sick of myself today. I mean, this mood is awfully bad. Very victimized. Very world-is-out-to-get-me. And on the basis of no evidence at all. I have a lovely family but sometimes going home rubs me the wrong way, and I don't like the layer that gets revealed through the polishing.

Ag. Off to a fucking all-day seminar now, which is in no way contributing to an alleviation of this mood.

Don't call my momma, don't call the doctor, don't call the preacher

I am pathetic and gross, and I miss my boyfriend. Last night I dreamt Paris (or some other Haussmann-type city) was quickly drowning in a tide of lava, and even though we were only on the second floor I was having a hard time caring because it was so nice to see him. But somehow we caught a train out of there that got us to a town that was some sort of hybrid of Scilla and Scarborough, which assuredly wasn't flooded with lava. We couldn't decide what restaurant to go to based on their poshness and the amount of customers already inside - ended up going to a high-scale pizza joint where we had to go in the back door. I was bodychecking people out of my way to get to the small line-up at the front door.

There was more to it, but it's rude and I had to get that down in note form here to be ready for analysis on Wednesday. I feel that I won't write anything else today. I always pay more attention to my dreams and things here because I always think it's going to be relaxing and liesured but it never is. And things here are surprisingly busy even by normal standards. It was actually a struggle to find time to see J*Fish because there was lots of preparation and disassembly from all the Christmas music my mum has been organizing for her orchestra (the concert was quite nice) and the carol thing yesterday - painful, but gave me a chance to ponder the miracle of God being born a man.

That's the only bit of Christian belief that's joyful and beautiful to me instead of just being "Oh, Lord, You're so big, so awfully huge. We're all really impressed down here, I can tell you!" or pleas to not get sent to a hell that was depicted in such lurid, horrific detail over the past couple thousand years. The idea that you have a perfectly powerful god who's willing to go through all the pain of being human, as though to demonstrate to us that even when you get killed in a way that was brutal by brutal early Empire standards, things can't be as bad as they're cracked up to be. I can totally buy celebrating that at Christmas. It makes sense. The days start to get longer and we can drag ourselves from the depths of comparatively sunless, foodless despair and start thinking about a viable growing season again.

My point is, things here are fine but I'm glad I'm going back to Toronto tomorrow.

Obviously, I don't want to know

I've altered this photo and I think it's screamingly obvious where, but I'm still screamingly proud of this first silly Lycrasoft effort. Soon I'll alter the whole world to look the way I want it to. There are a couple of substantial changes I can think of.

I'm off to the north and feeling sad about not being with the man for a few days. You wouldn't believe how pathetic that makes me feel. Why do I have such silly intimacy issues? Why do I have to think all macho? Why can't I just accept my emotions as they happen? That's why Monsieur makes the big bucks I suppose (although I'm still paying on a sliding scale, thank god. I keep thinking I see the end of credit card debt and then bang! Some completely predictable massive expenditure comes along and I take three steps back.)

We had a great session last Wednesday. One would like to leave parts of one's childhood behind but they don't always leave one behind, I suppose . . . people (well, me) resist the idea of impact from childhood carrying on into adult life but that doesn't hold up, really - such an educational time of life and so easy to learn the wrong lessons. And one acts on those stupid lessons over and over, all the while claiming one's dealt with the past and it's over.

Not much else to tell you as we go into this long weekend (or just normal weekend, if you're not meeeeeee - ha ha ha ha), except bundle up, drink lots of ginger tea and vitamins, and gargle salt water every morning to keep colds at bay.

General Meating

Soon I have to go to my company's general meeting, where we hear in shocking, gratuitous financial detail our progress in terms of perpetuating the Great Lie it is all our jobs to defend. I find my position difficult. They are good to me - to us - and will shortly institute a regimen to give us more money. And yet our mandate is morally corrupt. Not morally corrupt like making chemical weapons for use against civilians or anything, but enough to make it hard for me to feel any pride in my job at all.

Something that helps me is Harpo Marx:




And oh yes, Chico - in an undeniably sexy way, too. I've heard he was a massive womanizer. But who wouldn't want to be womanized by a guy who can tickle the upper keys like that? Hehhhhh.



Anyways. Last night we watched At the Circus and I meant to find you Harpo's routine from that which was just shockingly good, but either YouTube doesn't have it or I don't have the patience to find it - not sure which. Figaro has caught on that I've got no problem waiving the mid-week reefer ban if he gets Marx Brothers movies or episodes of Monty Python I've never seen, so I'm laughing a lot these days. Good hard belly laughs. Good for the abs.

Faaaaaack. Time to meat.

Who knows shit about shit anyways

I'm listening to the Charlotte Gainsbourg album written for her by Air and Jarvis Cocker. It's pretty, but her voice hasn't come a long way since "Zeste de Citron." I like the sorts of albums French actresses release but apparently I don't like them enough to buy them, since I resent her voice's presence on an otherwise honestly good album. Lucky ho, except she got to be Serge Gainsbourg's daughter, which isn't really a fate I would wish on anybody. Well, maybe in private he was a really nice, even-keeled guy. Who knows, when it comes to people who end off their lives famous for being famous.

Did I mention I stopped looking at gossip sites? There were two on one day that made fun of a girl actress my neice's age so I just couldn't rationalize my own voyeurism anymore.

Gah . . . instead I'm ploughing through Robert Hughes' memoirs, Things I Didn't Know, and I must say it's craptastic. He finds something nasty to say about anyone, including people he otherwise claims are inoffensive or well-loved, and unlike in his art criticism seems incapable of giving it a context or placing it in a coherent structre - so many fucking textual loopdy-loops which add nothing - makes Katherine Hepburn's Me look like Jane Eyre. I thought asking for a review copy of this book would be like asking for a steak dinner at Boba's; what I've been delivered on a plate are new uppers for my Blundstones made out of rancid, bitter whale blubber.

And if that sounds over the top - my god - you should read this man discuss his sexual life. According to photographic evidence he was attractive when he was young, and hopefully a little less hard-boiled then, because his discussion of what he's sure living in a homo-erotic boarding school DIDN'T do to him is enough to pull the plug on a bathtub full of female sexuality. After reading about 150 pages of him last night, it took me fuckin' minutes to get into the mood.

Anyways, I'll finish it off and try not to hate it. Maybe he'll magically pull everything together when he starts writing about not being in Australia anymore. I doubt it though. He started these memoirs in a spirit of bitterness and - textually and stylistically - it shows. Not in a fun way, either.

Grandad

Now, my British grandparents haven't always been the easiest people for me to get along with, and part of the great blow to me in my grandfather's recent death was being aware we weren't as close as other girls sometimes are to their grandfathers. No fault of his, or even I think my own; he welcomed me with open arms into his home and I went to see them in Yorkshire whenever it was at all practicable. Nonetheless, it seemed talking across the barrier of generations, countries, cultures, attitudes to the boiling of vegetables, ethnic feuds and the sea was a thing that didn't always come naturally to us, and then in the last year or so his mind turned more inwards to deal with his body and its demise. I was fortunate to have visited them last March, after my thesis defence and before he started preparing himself in earnest.

Since he died I've appreciated more and more the bits of me that come from him - a certain not-incompetency with money, the ability to coldly analyse out of a hot situation, an abstract spiritual faith based on love and rational optimism - and while I'm not so sure we'd be any better at being close today if he was still alive than we were a year ago, I am sure that as much as I loved him then, I'd be more understanding of him now. I miss him.

This is on my mind in a poignant but cheerful way today, because the days I used to go to England - in my plans to see him, in reality to bury him - were, with the agreement of my manager, sick days, since I didn't think I had any vacation time left. It turns out I do; and in the almighty fucking wisdom of the Canadian labour establishment I have to use them before the Christmas break instead of cashing them in or carrying them over to next year. So next weekend will be four days long and the weekend after that will be threepointfive.

Now, much as I'd prefer to carry the days over to next year, I'm not complaining; I need a couple of days off to get shit done and organized, and as you all know I'm not crazy about being at work in the first place. But what I am doing is asking myself what I should do with these days, that feel like a gift-from-beyond-the-grave from Grandad, when by any stretch of the imagination I only need one long weekend to get shit done. I feel just as I did back in university, when they still sent me money for Christmas and I resisted, generally successfully, the natural inclination to spend it on reefer instead of something clever like mutual funds or panties.

Maybe I should go home and see my parents. I'm going to see them for five or six days at Christmas but of course that will be all crazy with people and parties. Grandad would no doubt approve. Maybe I should go to Vancouver and see Elvis, who I've never gone to visit out there. Grandad would approve of that too, though not the massive deficit spending it would entail. Also Elvis works in flowers so he's retardedly busy in December. Maybe I should go to Montreal to see the Virgin and Miss T, or Mrs. R I suppose she is now, but in all honesty I neither want to go to Montreal without Figaro (who gets no time off) nor do I want to drop in on friends last minute (for it would be this Friday) at this time of year. Also Grandad would approve less. Especially of the Virgin.

So unless I have some bright fucking ideas or remember suddenly that what Grandad always wanted from life but never did was to find a cheapish flight to Costa Rica and smoke reefer in the jungle for a few days with that nice Roumanian girl I used to work with who moved there six or seven months ago, I think I'll go up north this weekend. Any other ideas?

The Red Dragon Tries to Get Her Dander Up

If I don't miss my guess by a college mile and if my calendar with the twee archaic maps is right, it's the fourth of December, which means there are only 17 days left of the days dwindling and dwindling until any scrap of sunlight feels like a secret swig of bourbon downed behind a dumpster. And then they get longer. Joy. There's a reason we celebrate Christmas then, even though Jesus was probably a Leo or something. Capricorn Jesus? Suuuuuuuure, Catholic Church. And every sperm is sacred, too.

This weekend didn't see me at the top of my game. Thursday's flu shot made me ill in a really bizarre way that included my pointing fingers feeling broken and a bi-polar tummy, which was trying as other physical type aches and pains were on the cards too and I drank far too much on Friday night.

I dealt by smoking lots of reefer and sleeping when I got sleepy, which means not-fit-for-print fun and frolic aside I've got nothing to tell you about besides Robert Hughes' memoirs being bitter and unpleasant, a bit of a nasty slog, but since I was sent a free review copy I have to review it soon or I'll stop getting free reveiw copies of things, and since it doesn't look like it's going to be a glowing review I have to read it carefully too.

Also, the Ansel Adams exhibit at the AGO is really, really worth seeing. It's up until January 4th so there's lots of time to do it. Go. I like the AGO. The special exhibition prices are, I think, prohibitive at $15 (I can't shake the feeling that the whole fucking point of a museum should be that they're free - my inner Palace of the People-type pinko speaking, I suppose) to the degree that one is tempted to go watch the new Bond movie instead. But the Ansel Adams exhibit is just breathtaking, especially to anybody who wants to know stuff about photographing stuff.

Motherfuck, time to start the work week.

The Red Dragon Picks and Chooses

So, Casino Royale is better than any James Bond movie since, like, Octopussy. The theme music was crap, the credit sequence was crap, the bit where Daniel Craig was naked was crap because I couldn't bear to look because his testicles were getting whipped, the product placement was obtrusive and the lovey-dovey scenes were crap. But it really doesn't matter because the all the action sequences were good, especially for someone like me who usually thinks action scenes are retarded.

As for Daniel Craig, well . . . If our Lord held a gun to my head and commanded me to have a two-man threesome with the partners of my choice, they would be Daniel Craig and Benjamin Biolay. Which is really the point of good Bond, isn't it? Except if I walked into a bedroom where Benjamin Biolay and Daniel Craig were waiting, I think my knees would give out. Not that it would matter; I don't think the point of a two-man threesome would be me doing a lot of stuff.

No other news. No other news in particular from Belgium; perhaps that ship has sailed. I wonder how much that bothers me. Some. Some not. This weekend will be nice. I need to decompress because work has really been making me want to shoot myself lately. Maybe if I didn't have a job like the one I do now, I wouldn't notice product placements in Bond films. Maybe Dr. No was actually full of product placements in equal measure, and I never noticed because Ursula Andress was so pretty.

Oh god, I hate the advertising so. Yesterday I editted an article about a television advertising campaign in the States for stomach stapling or banding or something, that's going to go on air post-holidays when everyone is feeling extra fat. Merciful fuck. I can't take this shit anymore.

The Red Dragon Gets Sentimental

Who says heartbreak is for babies?

This change of my tune hasn’t come about from a new round of my own heartbreak, as I cynically suggested it would in yesterday’s comments; all remains quiet on the Eastern front. It’s from that same track I was going on about yesterday, “Little Darlin.’” Yesterday I ate big slabs of the Midnight Madness cake for lunch, topped by a few chocolate chip cookies, and finally felt the full import of the song with the sweet rush of the lyrics “mon coeur, j’ai echoué” into the Carter Family tune, and damn near cried.

Eating retarded amounts of chocolately sugar and getting weepy over French pop at work. Yes. Sometimes I prefer the Red Dragon to come out sort of angry, but not when I have cake.

See, it reminded me of all the heartbreak that’s been before. I think I get tetchy about heartbreak as a general idea because mine hasn’t followed standard patterns too well; it’s too Catholic, too guilty, too confused. There’s always been the idea of failure in it – either mine or theirs - and failure, as we all know, is for losers, and losers are a bad thing to be or to have emotional intercourse with. Benjamin Biolay makes it beautiful, though.

Okay, I’ll try to move on from Benjamin Biolay tomorrow – going to see Casino Royale tonight and I have a feeling I’ll be distracted from Biolay’s melodic loveliness by Daniel Craig’s sweaty grunty muscley loveliness.

Sans dévoiler trop de mystère

I wish to continue to treat myself visually (and orally - oh yes - it's coming with me everywhere today) to this Baker Street 'Midnight Madness' cake, just as I continue to treat my ears to Benjamin Biolay. Track 7 of Négatif, "Little Darlin,'" is the prettiest thing I've heard in ages and the remix of the bluegrass track through it brings out what I've always liked about bluegrass while leaving out all the annoying buzzes and pointy things that never have enough bass to give them a context.

Anyways, it's so very good. Négatif is copy protected. I don't mind that - on principle one should buy rather than borrow an album this good. I'm just annoyed because I can't buy it. I guess I can pay to download it from somewhere, but in all honesty I, like Melbine, have my Luddite tendencies. I dearly like to have a CD to hold and put somewhere appropriate. Too many computers have crapped out on me for me to want to trust them with my music.

"Little Darlin'" is a song about offing oneself, which came up as a topic of conversation recently in the context of a person of my acquaintance who'd been more or less promising to, over a former relationship. Friends, initially supportive, are becoming alienated, feeling used and under-appreciated in their efforts to be there for him, which often end in "I hope you tell _____ what she's doing to me."

So when does one walk away? God, what a question, eh? As a general question it's ridiculous, of course, since every case is different.

But I think in this case some of the frustration of the people around him comes from confusion over being suicidal and being depressed. This person doesn't seem depressed in the medical sense. But in my experience depression and suicide don't have the direct causal link people think they do. The more the sad-ass stories about this person sink in, the more it seems like he's un-depressed enough to have the energy to actually do it. And at the same time, it's like he's furiously applying this energy to chase away the people who are there to support him.

Don't know why I'm going on about it, except it's disturbing me and I need to think about it in general terms to deal with it. Damn: I wish people paid less attention to relationships sometimes. North American society has got to a point where romance is the only really obligatory passion and that's pathetic. Not in the case of this person particularly, but in the broader scheme. Thinking of killing yourself over a peice of ass . . . I don't blame him for it or anything like that, he's suffering and he's sick right now, and not knowing him well enough to have ended up taking care of him in any way I can feel bad for him without feeling annoyed. But I do rather blame the world around him for making it seem like an okay idea.

Yesterday I heard from my favourite kid student from Paris. She's hitting puberty now and dealing with drama over her first boyfriend. It fucking begins so young . . . I told her not to take seriously anything anyone her age, including boys, says for the next ten years. I love that kid like a neice so I hope she listens. Love + drama + dissappointment = silly pigshit. God, it's awful to think of the kids in my family or old students getting sucked into these so-called adult romantic notions. Arts and crafts are so much more fun. Sigh.

Hooray for Biolay

The man you see before you, this musical child of Gainsbourg who, unlike his father, hurts neither eyes nor ears as he delivers gently beautiful melodies and soft but sharp lyrics backed by lovely arrangements, has struck deep into my brain.

I have a feeling this song, "Los Angeles", is ubiquitous because I've heard it more times than I can count. Nobody else around me seems to have heard it, though. I've realized that since the concept album it's from, Rose Kennedy, came out while I was living in Paris it's possible that it was only ubiquitous there as background to that most emotionally sloppy and difficult period, and it stuck with me because that repeated trumpet rise perfectly delineates the resigned melancholy with which I wandered through a bad dream life.

This would mean people in Canada might not know about Benjamin Biolay (as is evidenced by his stuff's non-availability on Amazon.ca - I had both Rose Kennedy and Négatif on order for assfucking months before I gave up and borrowed them from Mr. N, and his lady was complaining last week about how he'd made her go into every record shop in Montréal trying to find more) and that's just wrong, wrong, do you read me, wrong. This is a bilingual country. If we have to put up with French/English cereal boxes, we might as well listen to lovely French music too.

Anyways, treat yourself. It's really nice. I don't like him as much as I like Serge Gainsbourg because I like the perv and the bizarre (I mean, a concept album about Rose Kennedy isn't a bad idea, but a concept album about killing your lover and her coming back as a rabbit that eats your head which has turned into a cabbage - which would you rather listen to?) but he sure is prettier. Some trivia for you: his wife Chiara is the daughter of Catherine Deneuve and and Marcello Mastroianni. HAWT.

28 years of Spliffery

Another year older and still too lazy to look up how you wrap text around images using HTML. My birthday was pretty good. Red dragon started yowling on the afternoon of it, not from any sort of angst about aging; more about not having a reservation for a pre-opera restaurant on Saturday night in a badly underserved downtown core and the oppressive early darkness of the beginning of winter combined with the knowledge that it's just going to get worse until the 21st of December.

Mentioned it to Figaro and he said he always found it was more cold temperatures that got him down, and that when things got dark so early he found other ways to look at things as beautiful. Beauty isn't the problem as far as I'm concerned, though. Early dark is beautiful. Everything being night when people are still buzzing around on banal kinds of business, this sort of inky artificial blackness pressing down among the streetlights, lit-up shop windows fighting back our natural urge to go off and sleep or something - it's pretty cool. It also fills me with strange little flutters of panic and fury that it's dark when I still want sun.

Fitting, then, that my birthday opera was that funny old Masonic parable of the victory of sunny truth over starry coloratura, The Magic Flute, as produced by Opera Atelier. Made me cry. Penelope Randall Davis stuck in a few extra high notes during the Queen of the Night's big aria that got me going, as did Papageno's first song. Otherwise, I don't have much to say about it - Marshall Pynkoski didn't offer a pre-opera talk, which was refreshing; the orchestra was great, the singers okay, the dancers underused, and the stage directions occasionally baffling or annoying. It was sung in English as the Magic Flute often is because of all the spoken dialogue, I suppose. Gigi found that outright alienating; I found it annoying. I know librettos are usually stupid in any language but romance language rhyme with fewer struggles and German just sounds cool.

Got a lovely stack of music in presents this year: Rebirth of Cool, new K-os, Rimsky-Korsakov, mixed CDs from Mr. N - he does such a good fucking job - as well as the loan-to-copy of two Benjamin Biolay CDs, sexy yum - and of course KC and the Sunshine Band. I'm almost looking forward to work so that I have enough time sitting in one spot to listen. Almost.

End of week round-up

It's official. After having the bird-talk with my mother, managing to rein in my finances over the past month, working out a realistic yet generous Christmas budget and making a household decision to only smoke reefer on weekends (mostly), I'm getting the Panasonic Lumix TZ1 for my birthday, which seems easy to use while having a ten-times zoom. It's very exciting. In preparation Figaro has been letting me mess around with his camera, which is much more complicated, so hopefully at this point it just gets easier.

So I've started a flickr page so everyone can look at the gross, retarded or outside pictures I take. There's a lot I want to remember about Toronto too, after I leave . . . things to look at. Toronto has a funny cocktail of ugly, nice and busy. I think it will be fun to have a camera here.

Now for something completely different - last night we watched Fawlty Towers. I didn't like it much. Maybe it suffered because Figaro dug up some old Monty Python episodes a couple of weeks ago, and since I hadn't actually sat down and watched the Monty Python series while I was snaked - like, EVER, now that I think about it - I was amused to the point of peeing myself. I'd forgotten how absurd and unpredictable it was and all that collage animation is cute when I'm high. Anyways, the three episodes we happened to see didn't have John Cleese in them, and you know, they didn't suffer for it. And then Fawlty Towers; well, you know. Too much story. Too much humour based on discomfort. I like things that don't make sense and it made too much sense.

Anyways, here comes the weekend and my birthday. Yesterday a package arrived from Melbine, and I'm pretty sure I know what it is, but I won't open it until tomorrow. Even though I want to because I figure it will make my working day much more energetic. Bootywise. You're the best, lady!

Sexy Russians

We went to the symphony last night for a Russian-themed concert that inexplicably included a piano concerto from Schumann. I like Schumann, but not much. Despite the fucking brilliant pianist Anton Kuerti - like, he was as good as Chico Marx, even if he didn't actually shoot the keys - it was my least favourite of the night. Too smooth. Far, far, far and away the Russian pieces we were treated to were way, way better.

(Pardon me for not being able to think of words that can express 'way, way better' this morning - there was a car crash outside our bedroom window at four in the fucking morning and I'm dopey and sleepy today. By the way, what sort of expression is 'way, way better'? Way is a funny word.)

Anyways, one of them was the Canadian premiere of a peice by Sofia Gubaidulina, The Rider on the White Horse, and motherfuck. Every stop was pulled out. Organ (and Roy Thomson Hall has a BEAUTY), crazy percussion, tubular bells - wow. It was, in fact, very wildy horsey. Until I can afford to buy myself a pony I think I'll content myself be getting a copy of this. I really reccommend it to anyone prone to Byronesque fits of melancholy or frustration.

The second half was taken up with Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade which was a little more tempered in terms of loud, loud emotion - it had quiet emotion too. And a harp. Good god, it was beautiful. Sentimental, like the Schumann, but never once did it creep into treacle or surrender its balls. I want to buy that too. Figaro has it on vinyl in Australia, which is profoundly unhelpful.

I think I have a little crush on the conductor from last night, Gianandrea Noseda. He gave'er. I mean, he was practically conceptually dancing up there while he was directing difficult modern peices, and it came off as note perfect so I suppose it was working. There were several points where I noted he was off the floor altogether. I think that was his modus operandi because you could see his muscles flexing under his conductor suit. Heh.

But what it can't get I can't use

Yesterday was stupid and boring until I got out of work and discovered what a rather staggering rate of compound interest has already done to my retirement 'savings'. How funny that money is such a feel-good thing when it's there or there's the prospect of more!

Our almost imaginary economic system - so abstract, so based on things we usually neither know nor understand - has become so deeply ingrained into our very bones that we can associate numbers on a statement with our basic well-being and not even blink when the news media casually shits on the communist organization of goods as intrinsically flawed without considering we've never had a proper communist system - just a bunch of starving Russians and Chinese et cetera taking up arms and doing what they could with what they'd got. And that may well be the longest sentence I've ever written. Brontësque in its monstrosity.

My point is, I think England should go communist so the rest of us can watch what happens. Wasn't that supposed to happen before the gentle left co-opted the labour movement back whenever?

I'm getting excited for my birthday. Besides celebrations spread out over the weekend, of course I'm excited about presents. Like a camera. Oh boy. And then there's the opera. I love birthdays. Speaking of which, today is Miss G's birthday - she's in New York; does anyone have her address there?

I ain't no monkey

One of the Jungian institutes in Zurich (there are two - I discussed it with Monsieur, who studied there, and he told me there were two because the original one had a meltdown over some issues that seemed piffling. I think my mouth gaped at that and then he told me a strong background in Jungian analysis doesn't always mean you can resolve your own damn conflicts. I think I'll concentrate on tying it in to conflict resolution in my studies if I ever go that route) has started offering distance training by contracting out the requisite 300 hours of analysis to any IAAP-approved analyst you can find in your own nieghbourhood.

I suppose they had to, since these studies involve a pretty big practicum and there aren't quite enough crazy people in Switzerland to go around to all the trainees, or at least not enough crazy people who are poor enough to consent to work with a trainee analyst instead of a real one, or instead of doing lots and lots of drugs.

Anyways, I'm over the moon that if I go that route I won't nescessarily have to live somewhere dark or cold or Swiss while I do it. I would have to go there six weeks a year, but you know, six weeks a year in Switzerland sound okay. I liked Switzerland. Definitely not enough to live there, but certainly enough to listen to the pleasant cowbells and funny moon-man languages six weeks a year.

I'm still riding high over what I've heard from Belgium. We'll see if my defeciencies will be acceptable to them but in any case it's emboldened me to contact other schools. The future is very exciting now, as firmer shapes rise up in the grey mist of often-inscrutable Potential. I guess I'm no closer to knowing what will be happening this time next year but that seems much easier to take this week.

Well, this post is a silly navel gaze that's all about me, me, me. Here's another article I wrote about Turkey and the EU, maybe that will get the flavour of self-absorbed Spliffedom out of your mouth.

Oh frabjous day

My favourite-esque university prospect (in Belgium) has just responded, telling me things look good. And Figaro promised he'd call me "Doctor" when we're feeling amorous. Besides that, I feel like I don't have much to say today. The one thing getting me down is that Belgium might be as I-want-to-shoot-myself dark as Toronto is right now. Everything is fine and I still feel like removing part of my skull just so I can get some direct sunlight to the brain.

One question: how the fuck do you make a makeshift sub? I know some of you reading must know. Tell me. Inquiring minds, et cetera. This is interesting because I just read a 2002 book about how a member of the Russian military tried to sell the Medellin cartel a diesel submarine back in the 1990's - complete with crew - for something like $5 million. Looks like they saved a dollar to spend $90 million.

Here's to the Mens

Crazy as they are beautiful, no amount of simple or complex thought is ever enough to figure them out, and yet sometimes there's nothing more straightforward. When they're good they're very very good, and when they're bad they're horrid, but the good ones are good enough to redeem the whole gender and sometimes the horrid ones are delicious. Yerp. I'm on some different kind of mid-month dragon this weekend. A much nicer one, who still makes my brain do strange things.

Saw Little G last night and had the first frank sex talk I'd had with a girlf in awhile, which was different of course because there are ways one can be a little more frank and funny with a girl than with a boy, whose more tender sensibilities must always be protected.

I used to think sex talks were great fun, and then decided they were pretty inappropriate, but now I'm thinking they're mostly useful because they can point to common patterns - little clues about where such and such a thing might have come from, insights about some behaviour thing or other - extra dribs and drabs of information that help one, in the long run, to be an easier person to live with.

Not much other news as the weekend breaks over us - I decided yesterday should be Friday so today I'm pretending it's Saturday and I'm having to go to the office to clear up a backlog of work. I will commit myself accordingly, that is, hardly at all.

People these days (cinema edition)

Figaro, as an artistic type, has an affinity for older movies, particularly older schlock like the Godzilla series and the Creature from the Black Lagoon. He gets a big kick out of seeing how scary or kerrrrr-azy effects were produced with minimum know-how and money - a huge kick. I sympathize but I don't care all that much unless I'm snaked, until it comes to the film noir, which, thankfully, he also gets a kick out of. Last night we saw The Third Man and I was suitably flabbergasted.

The producers really benefitted from having Vienna right there, in a state of what was for the forties quite artful destruction I suppose. Still a fucking beautiful city with just enough rubble to make the chase scenes scintillating and to illustrate a pre-Cold War tension Americans could only get an echo-y chill of (which was quite enough for them, I'm sure). And I suppose they also really benefitted from the caustic but very human wit of Graham Greene, who did the screenplay as well as the novel it was based on. And they were fortunate to have a really capable cast - a fucking lovely cast - though that was obviously more good management or good directing than good luck.

But damn, those huge advantages aside, the film was so fucking good that I really had to ask myself what the hell happened to mainstream American film. The effects of tension and things equally lovely - big fucking spotlights creating the most incredible shadows - low lights shining on Orson Welles' little white fingers poking through a grille. And the creation of conflicting sympathies for at least four characters with opposing interests - it was art, and it was exciting.

I suppose what I'm driving at is that if the American mainstream was producing films that good in 1949 with lousier cameras and low-tech lighting effects, there's no excuse for the rubbishy crap it produces presently, and now I'm even more determined that studios whining about declining profits and cinema attendance should just shove it up their asses and stop expecting us to pay $12 to watch their awful cocking rubbish.

A bird in the hand is worth you in my bush

Here's something none of you know about me, and I'm sure you don't because I forgot about it myself until last night when I was trying to explain to Figaro why I need a twelve times zoom on the digital camera I plan to get before long. Sorry for the long sentence - I was reading the chapter of Busman's Honeymoon last night that's in the form of the Dowager Wimsey's diary. Her sentences are mighty beasts.

I really like birds. I like watching them and photographing them, I used to do that in an organized fashion with my mum up North, and I decided I needed a ridiculous camera when J*Fish showed me a picture he'd taken of a sparrow wherein you could make out the individual little feathers on its chest. It makes me sad when there aren't enough birds around and disproportionately happy when there are - even if its just a bunch of fuckhead starlings roosting outside our bedroom window on a cold morning waking us the fuck up.

Toronto is hard in a sense because almost all the birds are pigeons. Even though it's so much warmer than where I grew up the grind of the city keeps them away and the lake is too out of my way to go admire the diving birds more than once every long while. So I get pigeons, and starlings and sparrows too, which Lexie occasionally attacks and - twice - has caught. But then when I wake up early enough and look out back - even in the mess of urban jungle where I live - I get to see cardinals, which we didn't have up in North Bay, and blue jays, which we did but I'm still fond of. And of course, the occasional turdus migratorius (pffffft!) which is unduly exciting to spot this late in the year since one expects them to have left this stupid shitty weather behind long ago.

And there maybe is the mystery of why I like these smelly, filthy little creatures so much, besides as a plaything for my cat. They don't really have to be where they don't want to be. Either they leave or they die. Pigeons aside (although I maintain a well-groomed wood pigeon would be one of the handsomest animals in creation if its head wasn't so tiny), they shun insalubrity and keel over when you bring them into a mine with too much carbon monoxide or whatever in it. But if they're happy, they sing, and what's more, fly stupidly huge distances to get to the places that make them happy or else find ways to adjust to ridiculous temperatures like in North Bay - by huddling or standing on a badly insulated roof or something - so they can be happy in retarded weather.

The times I was happiest in Paris - where, for all my complaints, I was often happy - was when I was walking home from parties at five or six in the morning. I'd always have to walk instead of take a cab or the metro because of the birds. During the day, Paris is just a pigeon's paradise with no sounds in earshot besides traffic and French people - but at dawn the whole town erupts into a symphony of beautiful birdsong . . . I've been to alot of beautiful places but I don't know if any of them were as beautiful as Paris when the birds are singing.

Anyways, my point is that I need a camera with high resolution and twelve times zoom. And that birds taste delicious.

A Room With a View

Last night I dreamt my office building was being moved from where it is now to some raised foundations on the river (which isn't there. On Sunday whilst photographing prettiness with Figaro, I realized how fucked it is there isn't a proper river in the city.) I thought the move was the height of idiocy, especially since it happened in the middle of the working day whilst we were all there. But as we approached the river and I realized the sweet fucking view I was going to get, I experienced a moment - just a moment - of pleasure.

Anyways, the building movers overshot the mark and released us in the middle of the river just past the foundations. It felt as though my skyscraper was rocking back and forth on a sandy riverbed, about to topple. Luckily I had broken my window in a fit of pique earlier that day, and gauged that I could use my chair to beat down my co-workers while I broke the windows on the opposite side of the building. The fact I was on the 16th floor didn't seem to bother me; the only thing that bothered me was waiting to see which way the building was going to fall so I could scramble out the other side.

It was sensible that it didn't bother me, because the building turned into a schoolbus floating in a huge pool. My broken window was just above the water level. My co-workers started acting like retards, talking about opening the doors and going out, forgetting the water would wash in and maybe break their necks. I was annoyed but couldn't get my tits up to climb out my own window without a sort of group acquiescense until I saw someone in a floating schoolbus ahead of us do just that. I scrambled out, clambered over the side of the pool, and went back to my apartment to search for the reefer a Basque terrorist had hid in my jewelry box.

The moral of the dream?

I need a new fucking job. But will it help? Since I gave up television, never liked magazines that weren't the Economist (though I am waiting for my first issue of the Utne Reader, that I bought from my neice while she was carrying out a subscription drive for her crazy-ass school) and don't watch MSN Video, I'm exposed to comparatively little aggressive advertising, but it's more than enough. I could quit my job ten times over, and the only result would be that I didn't have to study and write about methods of aggressive advertising - I'd still see them every day.

Sometimes I think the real reason I want to move back to France is that it's still socially acceptable for angry young men there to spray-paint obscene messages on billboard advertising about how much they fucking hate advertising.

Voyeurism and Intimacy in a Exhibitionistic Society: Ick

I was thinking of being lazy today and just posting an article I wrote elsewhere about Turkish accession to the European Union, but I decided most of my readers would rather see this:



Pretty fucking sweet, no?

Except there's something wrong. Hard to explain. Figaro remembered the clip above from his childhood and showed it to me while we were snaked to the gills, and then we looked for more. It looks like the man who was Piffy, based on the one video we saw of him as a grown-up, may have turned into (?) a nutter. Maybe he hasn't; maybe the video we saw was a weak part of an ongoing online YouTube joke, but he seems to be a nutter.

And then one asks oneself, poor kid, his parents were probably awful to him in my terms by making him practice that act ad nauseum, and who knows how that would ever not make you a nutter? I've been on extremely intimate terms with enough people whose parents could only show their love in difficult ways (which made them difficult people in the end) to feel sort of queasy at this prospect. Not queasy out of sympathy, but queasy that I have to think about these things in terms of complete strangers. It feels far too intimate. But maybe it's my fault for watching him on YouTube when I wanted to be further amused by his act. Maybe it's my fault for wanting other people to amuse me once in awhile.

But what the fuck is WITH people posting videos of themselves on YouTube? I only realized this weekend that there are THOUSANDS of people who do it. I sort of knew from having to cover that Loney Girl shit for my work magazine, but I didn't understand until just now.

What I don't understand is why it's such a mystery to me. With this blog I can pretend it's just a question of personal expression and I'm not just splashing my own brand of nutbarishness across the screen. I write for a living for a crappy industry-promotion magazine so this is a way to be allowed to write with my real opinions, swearwords and shitty grammar. But those seem like lousy excuses even to me, and I'm sure most people would say it's probably something like the same exhibitionism that makes people post emotional videos of themselves on YouTube.

The thing is, videos are different. Harder to just look away from. More raw than words. Stopping it feels like you're insulting the person who made it. And then being presented with the video feels like a hijack of my faculties for intimacy, and that makes my tummy feel funny. From what I remember of TV, that was part of the reason I had to stop watching it. Too many highly personal narratives. On reality television, even on fucking commercials. Too much for me.

I suppose what I'm saying is that the fact that a woman who likes porn and streetfights as much as I do has to make an effort to look away from alot of things these days shows we live in degenerate times.

I've been to Paradise AND to me. Hah.

Good Friday morning, doves. Not Good Friday in the sense of not eating meat today like the shining example of chaste Catholicism I am, but Good Friday in the sense of me not being able to fucking believe it's Friday when every day has felt like it should be Friday, all fucking week. I like Daylight Savings because it gives me more morning time, and I'm endlessly productive in the mornings, but it screws me blue when it comes to my perception of temporal reality.

Jiri, this is a shout-out to you. I just put on the mixed CD you gave me a few years back when we met up in Vienna and went off together. I miss you! The first track was that sort of theme from Velvet Goldmine, that Rhys Meyers lip-synchs and Thom Yorke tarts it all up on. And it's the strangest thing, but the opening chords brought me right back to leaving Prague on the bus and listening to the CD for the first time, and then back to second-year university when my mind was blown by the idea of Jonathon Rhys Meyers and Ewan McGregor getting it on while Thom Yorke sang.

I haven't had the most dramatic life ever, like, I haven't discovered a new country or ridden a camel or got nailed by two guys at once. But since I left home everything has been an exciting mess and I've never spent more than two years or so in any given city at a time (although it looks like I'll hit an even three in Toronto, or come close to it, by the time we leave. Or have I already? Fucking temporal distortions) and I've liked it that way. I think we'll look for a place to settle - but it'll be a place with alot of things around it.

However, it's left me feeling kind of schizo, having a hard time reconciling all these bits of life to each other. Friends help. It never feels unreal because I'm still close to people from all these bits of my life, and have got to know them in other bits of my life.

But without iconic music and, oddly enough, the occasional iconic smell - a waft of fabric softener that reminds me of an old sweetheart, high altitude snow, pastries being deep-fried, and of course reefer - I think there are parts of my life that would retreat into unreality. The risk is already there; it's why Jiri's CD can give my brain such a pleasant tug, re-acquaint it with lovely things that have happened before, and give it an appetite for more.

Sorry for the navel gaze. Next week I'll be rigorously reportive. Kisses.

Late fall blah humbugs

Figaro reads this blog sometimes. That’s fine by me, I haven’t had much to write about him that I haven’t said to his face, and if I did I wouldn’t write it here. In a general kind of way, when I started this blog I made the decision that anything I put in it could be read by anybody, except possibly my parents, though even them without inducing tears or deep, sinking feelings of dread in the pit of their stomachs. So I don’t mind that he reads it once in awhile.

Now I think one of my ex-boyfriends has found this blog. I don’t know how I feel about that, exactly. I’ve decided to not think about it any more. Besides mentioning it now, and saying I guess that I’m being as diplomatic as I care to these days. So read on, MacDuff. But I’m not absorbing any more anger from spectators when there’s so much else they could be looking at.

That said, not much else to say today. Lady's Big Bertha is just devastating. Pardon the ongoing whine but it's driving me crazy how little time I have to do what I really want to do instead of work, especially since if just a few key things changed at work (like the mandate of the company, the morality of my industry, or even the distribution of my hours), work'd be what I want to do. It's harder to take these days because of the uber-dark evenings, I guess; it's bloody sick to live in a country that's night when you leave your office at 5:30.

Visualisation

I feel sort of like the Sopranos jumped the shark when Steve Buscemi's character was introduced so we're taking a bit of a break. Instead - because moving pictures are great when you're high and for some reason I just have not been giving a shit about movies lately at all - we've watched most of a series called American Visions, narrated by Robert Hughes - a brief snapshot of American art history.

Figaro told me he'd heard a Barry Humpries (Dame Edna) interview about how, out of that whole "Push" group of Australian ex-pats wherever they were when they started getting famous, Robert Hughes was the one who fucked all the ladies because he was HAWT. Time is inexorable.

Anyways, the series was nice. I don't know anything about modern art except how to sit around in a Rothko room and calm down after whatever indignity life has lately subjected me to, so it was lovely and interesting to look at the evolution of American art into Jeff Coons or whatever that slick bastard is called. But really Hughes could have been saying anything coherently and I'd have believed it. It all sparked off some great mental masturbation that I'd write about here, but I have a stupid cocking conference now.

Tally ho, team players

I haven't been to the gym since my grandfather died. I have for classes and stuff, gentle ones like Pilates and tai chi (yes, Pilates is pretty gentle at my gym - lots of old bones), but not to work out properly. I forgot all my stuff there when I left for England and my locker was cleared, and I've felt too silly - and lazy - for weeks to do anything about it.

I have a fairly active lifestyle outside of gymmy shit, so I still look recognizably hourglassy, but it's always funny to see my body sort of shift around when the only muscles getting used are quite select. It means I have a pooch - a very oddly shaped one, but I like it - and I'm wondering if there's some way to keep it now that I've done something about the stuff that was cleared away and can start going to the gym again.

Sometimes I think fuck gyms. My grandfather played rugby and when that got to be too much transitioned to golfing and lawn bowling. He played some sort of sport until he was around 92 and kept watching it afterwards, though never football because he was a bank manager back in the day that still meant something. My dad is in his sixties and still playing football - his nose is twistier than a Roald Dahl short story - and transitioning into golf. All three of my brothers golf, Elvis also playing Ultimate and Magnum playing hockey.

I think what I'm trying to get at is that it's a good thing to get alot of pleasure from using your own body in a way that isn't all sexy or based on some sort of masochistic gymmy pain-gain factor, so I've put away any highschool dislike I may have had for jocks. There was a fair amount. Half the local OHL team went to my highschool and they were not nice to women. But who cares. That shouldn't chase the rest of us away from the institution.

Nonetheless in the city it's easier to just go to the gym or maintain an active-ish lifestyle (ie no car or public transport). It's all I can do to make it to one regular appointment with Monsieur, who's flexible about hours. Having some sort of a team expecting me to show up somewhere all the time fills me with the sort of suffocating dread I felt when I was single and imagined getting back into a long-term relationship.

No, actually, I don't like you

Went to some ROM exhibit about Italian design. Full of Italians, and I'm betting the half the attendees hadn't been to a museum since they'd been on a root-tracing trip to Italy. The exhibition was something nice, I guess. Left me with an overwhelming feeling that most of what was ugly and splashy about domestic decor was the bastard child of ooooo-look-what-I-can-do Italian design and discoveries in plastics and mass production.

One guy was dressed up as Borat and being followed by a bevy of people . . . the Borat movie was released here on Friday night so I wasn't sure if it was just some moron fanboy or a guerilla marketing technique. Either way I wasn't impressed. The Borat character isn't my favourite and I'm not excited about this movie.

With all of Baron-Cohen's characters, there's a real reliance on the person he's talking to either getting hilariously pissed off or else giving him the benefit of the doubt out of sheer politeness. Witness is borne to this by the unfunny, unmitigated crap that was Ali G Indahouse.

And with none of his characters is this more true than with Borat, who says the most shocking things to the plainest people. "Bruno" and "Ali G" I like alot better; it's directed at celebrities and fashion types who should know better because they court that kind of attention. But the humour around Borat's akin to running up to someone on the street, farting in their face, and filming their reaction.

It's lazy - makes us laugh because we're glad it's not us getting nad-palmed, glad that no confused, earnest foreigner is anxiously asking us to join a sing-a-long called 'Throw the Jew Down the Well," glad because it makes us look smarter than the people on camera. Whatever. I'm past the point of paying eight bucks to go to a movie on cheap night so that I can feel superior to my fellow man. I'll wait to see it on an aeroplane or a long-haul coach trip or something.

The Red Dragon is a vicious Mistress

But at least she's here. For the first couple of months co-habiting with Figaro I just ignored myself reproductively besides being pissed off when we had to be careful, but yesterday I reached the point of being madly delighted that the Red Dragon had finally attacked, even though it was followed within minutes with the feeling that I was a racehorse with terminal colic.

So that gave me a good reason to go home early, and in a burst of clarity and precious, precious fucking time (Is it a feature of being happy, that time seems like the dearest thing in the world? Or just of having a stupid full time job? Or a combination?) I put together the template of a letter for promoters, and most of the proposal itself. The letter should start going out today, but after some tweaking I'm going to send the proposal for vetting elsewhere - not as though it matters so much, since I can't send it out until someone agrees to promote me.

And if no one does, why, then I've got a great excuse to just be a normal whack job instead of an academic one. There's probably more money in it, after all. I want this opportunity quite a lot - but at the same time, I feel like either fork this thing takes can be appealing.

Going to work this morning is not.

Oh well.

Developing a tolerance

Most of last night's analysis was about internal problems, but Monsieur did make a point of general interest late in the session after I launched into a minor tirade about how annoyed I am people complain about being single when it's so easy - no worries about hurting feelings, no worries about over-reacting to minor annoyances, no questionable sense of dependency, et cetera. His answer could have gone straight on a Hallmark card: being in relationships helps secular Westerners improve their comprehension of the human condition. Okay, maybe it would need a little editting but nonetheless I found the idea cloyingly icky.

But then he pointed out that the annoyances to which our lovers subject us, which we can't walk away from because of our emotional attachment, force us to confront ourselves by witnessing our reactions, and force us to ask questions about our lovers because we care enough to want to understand. The difficulties of romantic or reproductive relationships translate into better comprehension of the self and the human condition. That means single people get to skip lots of annoyance but by so doing skip parts of the learning process, since the second they're annoyed they can withdraw from the situation instead of asking questions about how it came to be.

Other relationships that may have picked up the learning-through-annoyance slack, like with the church, extended family, or community groups, have eroded in modern secular society to the degree that people don't learn from them the way they used to, since it's so much easier (thank god!) to walk away from them now. And so, people who want to learn about themselves and their race want to be in relationships.

It makes sense, I guess. When I think back on being single, it seemed like a pleasant but fairly boring tropical holiday with too much lying down on the beach and not enough trekking through a savage jungle full of hallucinogenic plants, mysterious ziggurats, and silly monkeys. That's not bad, but it's not good either. So I'll try to stop complaining about people who complain about being single. No promises, though.

I can't even tell you

I'm so unsettled, it feels like I hardly have a stomach. Not in a bad way, I don't think. As of yesterday, I've had to face the very real possibility I have no nemesis. It may radically change my world view. If he isn't evil incarnate, maybe Hannah Arendt was even righter than I thought she was about that banality thing, and the evil comes facelessly in the social and institutional machine.

Next, I'm going to promote a specific brand. Harmony Milk. Probably only available in Ontario. It's organic, but since it comes in cute little bottles that you can return for a substantial refund it works out to be slightly cheaper than normal milk. It reminds me of the milk my grandparents used to get delivered to their door every morning - in the pint bottles, fresh and unpasteurized so the fatty creamy stuff floats to the top and makes your cereal or even a cunt of a Nescafe into a little piece of heaven. Mmmmm. Anyways, as long as Ontario retains its absurd pasteurization laws, Harmony is the tastiest cow milk out there and underprices goat milk by $1.57. After refund.

Figaro and I have been trying to eat organic food, which isn't the easiest thing to do because we're broke. I dropped out of the Food Share programme because our drop-off point, at least, was plagued by incompetence and only delivers every other week, if that. That made things harder because they're cheap. There are other organic food-share programmes but in all honesty I like food shopping too much to pay that little extra for them.

I love food shopping. I could do it professionally. And not just in chi-chi places full of pretty things like Pusateri's, either. I'll get a thrill from the lousiest, grimiest No Frills in the city, which is good because that's the one across the road from us. Probably because of my starving peasant background, it's so damn exciting to see all that food from all over the province and the world. And then deciding which bits of it I'm going to buy, prepare and eat - sheer joy. Not to mention the shelving choices that face you with surreal little surprises. I thought I had to go seven or eight blocks to buy Marmite, for example, but it turns out No Frills stocks it in the baking section next to the bread-yeast products.

Now that the organic farmer's market is gone for the winter (it was an exercise in country hippies ripping city hippes off, but I wanted to encourage the brand) organic food shopping is slightly more difficult than normal food shopping because the pricing patterns are absurd. At the organic shop just up the street, some food items are well cheaper than in the shop in Kensington that has other items well cheaper. Produce is especially expensive at the shop here, which sucks because we eat alot of it. And then Dominion underprices them both on organic bananas, which, however, tend to be too green for me. Not to mention they're almost the only organic stock that Dominion carries, besides a carrots-and-kale corner I visit more out of duty than love.

Wendell . . . I'm not content.

I've started assistant-editing the culture section of Blogcritics.org under a semi-sobriquet that looks more and more like a sobriquet for 'pussy' the more I look at it. It gives me something to do in the afternoons at work when I'm tired of emailing other bored office workers about how bored we are, and it teaches me things about editing, electronic publishing and how weird people think.

Also, my analyst told me ages ago, when I was voicing discontent with my company's mandate, that I should play little games to make it more fun for me until I was ready to quit. So for awhile, every day I'd put words into my articles no one in my industry could reasonably be expected to know, like 'pullulate' or 'pyroclastic,' and wait for my editor to bring it up with me. That stopped being fun when he never did. So now every week I'm looking at one of the nasty advertising things I have to write about for work and then writing something nasty about it on Blogcritics.

The truth is I want anything I can call preparation for a new job. I want a new job so bad, and I can't really leave this one yet, because I want to save some money and then look for work in an E.U. country Figaro's teaching license is recognized in and where I can get some good fucking baking, warmer fucking winters and prettiness, or save some money and start a doctoral programme in such a country if that's how the cookie crumbles. And because I want to have enough time in my present role to brag on a resume that I'm not a big fat quitter. Now you know the base discontent frying the ass of Mistress La Spliffe.

I've hated my company's mandate since I started working for it, but I liked the conditions and the substance of my work, which is researching and writing: two of my favourite non-putting-things-into-me activities. But hating the mandate has slowly extended to hating going to the office in the morning, and hating staying there.

Ah, it's a naughty world.