Bend me, shape me, any way you want me

Yesterday I had my first Shiatsu massage. I had no idea what to expect – knew nothing about Shiatsu besides a vague idea you keep your clothes on and there are pressure points – so it was a big surprise. And it worked – there’s still a touch of iffiness in my back, but no stiffness. They really wrestle you around a good bit, don’t they? I felt manipulated in a way that was almost embarrassing – certainly no man has manipulated me that authoritatively since 2001. Oh Paolo . . . what I wouldn’t give for just five minutes . . . anyways, the oddest bit was when my slip of a masseuse grabbed some part of my arm and back and rotated my whole shoulder mechanism in what felt like a huge socket until it stopped making gross clicking noises, and then the same in the other direction. Wow.

Then I watched the tail end of the Argentina/Germany game, and felt nostalgic for sexual relations. Oh sexual relations . . . what I wouldn’t give for just five minutes . . . I’m sorry Argentina’s out because they're practically Italian, and in my opinion they were the hottest team, pound for pound. Also I think Italy would have wiped the floor with them, and now Italy has to go through Germany instead, and it probably won’t because Germany is kind of, uhm, better.

Then I got driven to North Bay where I got bombed at Magnum’s house. Magnum, thanks to his new young girlfriend, is now surrounded by a coterie of girls my age. It’s funny to see him in their midst, sort of like a silverback gorilla swarmed by a bunch of fun-loving female bonobos. He looks pretty happy though. He and his girlf made burgers wherein goat cheese was mixed into the patty – fucking genius. In our family we always mix cheese into the burger patty, in the spirit of meatballs, to give it some cohesion and flava. Usually we use a hard pecorino or parmesan though – using a soft unripened goat cheese was a coup. Bravo, Magnum. He’s the greatest.

Off home for the weekend

North Bay is still home? Maybe? Apparently? Anyways . . .

Last night I ate a huge bowl of roast marshmallow ice cream from the Tequila Bookworm (good – not La Cigale of Chelsea or Berthillon or anything Italian, but good) after a pretty good burger from Epicure. J*Fish was at a loss to decide whether the Shanghai Cowgirl beats out the Epicure for burgers, and I understand his confusion. But on reflection Shanghai Cowgirl’s higher juiciness/fat content and sweet potato fries DO beat out Epicure’s shmancy toppings and superior freshness – it’s close, but there you are. I mean, Epicure uses prosciutto crudo as a topping, which sounds really nice and looks really nice, but when you bite into a great big burger it just amounts to a layer of saltiness. There’s a reason a big old slab of peameal tastes so great on a Cowgirl burger – it’s not just about salt. The peameal is thick enough to have its own texture in the midst of all that burger – and then, of course there’s all that yummy yummy pig fat goodness mingling into the irresistible juiciness of a good rich beef haché.

Saints preserve us. Thank god that gall bladder thing turned out to be stress, and not stones. I could live without animal fat binges, but it’s just so much better this way. And if there are any vegetarians reading, I feel bad for you if this is gross and overly graphic. I admire vegetarians. I really do. But it’s in the same back handed way I admire women who put on make-up every morning, i.e., I know I should be more like you, but then I’d be a fucking sucker.

Anyways, because of a throwaway comment about how I’d lost a lot of weight from J*Fish’s brother, who I pretty much never see, I realized I probably actually was as fat as I thought I was back during my undergrad and might not be now. That was interesting. I have noticed clothes have fit exponentially better and shopping has been exponentially easier ever since fourth-year ACL surgery made me stop eating for a few weeks and permanently took away my taste for processed foods, but I guess I’d always figured that was because everybody else in the world had got fat without me really being able to notice and now clothesmakers were shifting size values to make us all feel better about being fat.

Transference, grinfucking, and positive negatives

I love love love my analyst. Last night, aside from the magical-fagical blah blah blah that isn't fit to print, we discussed my advisor still not having got back to me about a reference (two weeks isn't much time in terms of this man's responses, but it's slowing down my whole brain when it comes to the proposal). See, I’ve been educated to ignore my problems and hope they go away, but my lovely analyst won’t let me – he was all "He's French and passive aggressive! Maybe you'll have to grinfuck him some more!" (“Grinfuck” is my analyst's word for something between ass-kissing and glad-handing.)

I agreed, since this is an important enough thing to grinfuck for until my face bleeds, but I was really at a loss in terms of where else to go since I'd already praised the advisor’s teaching, writing, interviewing, advising ad nauseum (and in fairness, he IS a great writer and interviewer). So my analyst told me to Fed-Ex him some maple syrup before August, when everybody in France puts their brains in a jar for a month. So simple! But so right! Man, I love my analyst.

Moving on. When you realize once in awhile, say, "I've been happy for some time. . . why, I'm still happy!" does it make you feel sort of furtive, like you've slipped under a wire or something and it might get taken away? I do a couple of times a day . . . decided to just get used to the feeling and let it make me count my stars.

While I was in the Elysian Hills talking to a marvellous brown boy with azure eyes, I came up with a positive, if personal definition of happiness. This was while we were discussing how most people think of happiness in a negative way - safety from hunger, safety from loneliness, safety from oppression - and how reactions against this into luxury, hedonism and individualism don't make people happy at all. Happiness is strange. Negative things are strange. I think it would be lots of fun if we all spent the day thinking of what makes us happy in a positive sense - that is, to rip off Margaret Atwood's phrasing for a sec, thinking about what "freedom to"s we need and not what "freedom from"s we want. Because it's better than working.

And I now know you will satisfy me

Yesterday was the second BRC television gala I’ve attended. I think I wrote about the first in my first virginal poke of a blog on Friendster that “married but open” guy I worked with once thought I should start – let’s see - here it is. I’m attaching the link because it was pretty much identical this year – same lovely roast, same stupid critics (though they talked less this year, which was precious of them) - except I was even less interested because I’m through with television. There wasn’t a single new show previewed I was at all interested in, except possibly that comedy about robbing Mick Jagger's penthouse. But not interested enough to watch. "Let's Spend the Night Together" had been playing in a groceteria the day before so the synchronicity and all was sort of cute. Mick Jagger must have made girls so horny back in the day.

Anyways, I've realized I fucking hate television even more than I thought I fucking hated television. I just look at any television now and see crap that tries to make you watch long enough to be too hypnotized to TiVo the commercials. Commercials. Ahhhh. I love marketing - I hate advertising. It's so ubiquitous; why be sporadically entertained by loooong shows to get some more of it? Two points in case: our table got some fun swag, like a pen from the Global network that has a built-in writing light and a Bluetooth headset that I’m going to try to hawk – I’m getting a new handset soon but if I need a wireless device giving me head cancer I’ll just hold the cellphone right against my ear, please and thank you. Point two: finding the above link was the first time I’ve looked at that Friendster blog in kablages and they’re selling ad space on it now. Sick. As if anyone has looked at it in a good ¾ of a year. Ad noise, everywhere. Fuck TV.

The Red Dragon feels put upon

Okay. I’m happy to have people rely on me for some things: not for fucking others. This botany project has turned into pure bullshit. Pure fucking bullshit. Hmmph. And my back is completely fucked, which makes sitting at that bullshit hard. My painful back confuses me. Miss G. volunteered the idea that 11 hours in a Greyhound combined with a series of strange beds, luggage and odd bits of stress, like being table-waited by an ex’s new woman, riding a scooter down country highways for an hour and hoisting babies at Mel’s birthday might have something to do with it. She’s probably right.

Last night, while I waited for a home cocktail of codeine and alcohol to take me to a painless dreamland, I finished reading Hunger’s Rogues, a book by Jacques Sandulescu which is apparently so obscure amazon.ca doesn’t have it. I’m not surprised. It’s not Pulitzer material or anything. His sentences are worse than the Guardian’s. However, it is so good at painting pictures of the men who scraped a tidy profit off the black market in post WWII Germany, and contains many repetitions of the self-exculpatory phrase “who cares? They were the ones who started the war . . .” as they variously fleece and befriend the people who’s country they’re stuck in (“they” being a bunch of non-Germans who were stuck there for various reasons, waiting to be shipped off home or to the New World). I really reccommend it if it crosses your path – nothing if not exciting.

The Red Dragon looks for a home

I have so many better things to be doing than work. Or being here. This week stretches out busy, including another bland steak dinner at the Four Seasons, until a long weekend I'll spend in the Bay doing proposal things - I think I'm in flight mode from the city. I can read all the Jane Jacobs I want but the reality remains: I want some fucking trees and solitude - not bitchy-ass fuck-off-I-gots-other-things-to-do city solitude, but the sort of non-city solitude where you aren't hearing the din of a dozen people at once.

No - actually it's not the city thing - I've just had enough of Toronto. This is enough, now. June 18 was my two year anniversary of being back in Canada - today is probably my two-year anniversary of being back in Toronto. Thank you. That's enough. Nothing personal. I want to explore some more now. Oh well - I know when I'm leaving and it's soon enough, and when it happens I'll probably be shocked and dismayed about how my time here sped by.

Oh - if anybody feels the need to tell me anything along the lines of how she thinks I should suck 'it' up, whatever she thinks 'it' might be (and I'd be fascinated to know what she thinks the 'it' might be in a case like this), I'd like to tell her I've been flying the Red Dragon since Friday and this is the first whinge she's even smelt off me. So . . . you know . . . suck it up.

I'll give back all the knowledge

I’ve been wearing the cunning strappy little Campers sandals I bought in Paris three years ago for the past three days as I zipped around the greater Outaouais region. Today they started, for the first time ever, fucking killing. Weird. Maybe it was from the hike in the woods with Mr. H on Friday - how serious Mr. H is! To think I never saw how serious he was! Huh - maybe it was from the scooter ride with Blonde Bitch from the Elysian Hills to Ottawa on those zippy country highways when every ounce of common sense told me I should have been wearing boots - obviously I was fine, but my ridiculously exposed feet were sunburned.

Blonde Bitch is someone I trust nearly completely, I realize. I'd leave a newborn at her doorstep, if such a thing were called for. I don't think I'd have consented to take a scoot like that with most other people but with her it was just mad fun. And then we got to Ottawa for the tail end of Mel's birthday! Happy birthday, Mel! I bet you thought I'd forgotten or was wilfully ignoring your reminders, but I wanted to be a birthday surprise.
So Ottawa was lovely and/or interesting, and so were the Elysian Hills. Outside of missing Mr. H when he moves to Halifax with his woman, I'm really going to miss that place, as you can tell from the euphemism (I don’t know why I bother giving a euphemism to such a tourist destination – I still want it to be a secret!) I like the community, I like the way those people make connections between their lifestyles and the way they feel about the world. And I like boys who are into that because their bodies get lean and brown; when they talk it's not about video games and they try to understand things instead of narrowing their mental categories as fast as normal people tend to do. I, of course, am still a chaste young Penelope, but I was charmed.

So among other realizations, the weekend served to show me I'm kind of sick of Toronto. And also, I suppose, that there are things I'm capable of I wasn't sure I was before - hard to say what I mean. I guess the thing is I'm not scared of people relying on me for certain things anymore. That's allowed. They're allowed. I prefer it that way.