Tick tick tick

I don’t know how to get through this day – my tummy isn’t exactly fluttering but I sure feel a pretty big disconnect between my head and body. As I type it’s last call for F's plane. Isn’t live updating incredible? I remember when I first started travelling alone when I was eighteen – we already had things easy then, now flying tranatlantically is as easy as a great big belch. When my parents came to Canada it was on boats . . . that sounded quite cool too. I want to cry a little bit whenever Dad tells me about his crossing though there’s nothing particularly sad about it, I think it would make a very nice film – why am I getting maudlin in my dotage?

Anyways, you see I’m going to be useless at work this morning. I should have just taken the whole day off. I would like to say, however, while I’m saying something, that I’m so glad there’s a ceasefire in effect in Lebanon. I knew it was scheduled but I didn’t think it would hold, and I’m so glad I was being a gloomy gus. But of course the conflict becomes nauseating in a whole new way: 1100 dead Lebanese, more than a 100 dead Israelis, and for what? So Hezbollah could consolidate its hold on the hearts and minds of southern Lebanon? What the fuck did Olmert's administration expect to achieve? Because if this was it, the administration is stupid as well as evil. There, I said it. Evil.

UPDATE - I have got nothing done in the last four hours. Gigi helped me get nothing done by sending me this. If he gets stuck, you can 'help' him with your cursor.

I'm free to do what I want

The F-man arrives tomorrow - still seems like an excruciatingly long time until he gets here, but some perspective is entering the situation as I realize how little time I have left to do the things I want to have done before he gets here. So far I have:

1. Cleaned the apartment
2. Made and frozen the perfect meat sauce
3. Made a tin of chocolate-covered halva
4. Started another tin of random and delicious sweets
5. Actually, just done a fuckload of cooking
6. Got a haircut
7. Started flavouring myself pineapple

I must still:

1. Depilitate
2. Clear the rubbish off my rooftop
3. Finish the random and delicious sweet-tin
4. Make reefer butter
5. Repair the flat on the Guest Bicycle

Errrrrm . . . I think that's all. What's my point, you ask? My point is Milan Kundera is a bastard. When I was twelve I read The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and I can't think of a better argument for keeping grown-up books away from moron kids. The problem is you believe things when you're that age. And he stated ever so categorically in that book, I'm pretty sure, that any breakage of patterns from the honeymoon phase of the relationship represents an emotional betrayal so one should be ever so careful not to overstretch oneself during the honeymoon phase.

This has not been borne out in my experience, wherein my men and I have all operated on the basis of "I'm in an indulgent mood so enjoy it while you can" that had very little to do with the honeymoon status of whatever anyways . . . besides, if Figaro's arrival marks the beginning of another honeymoon it'll be our fifth or something. So after fifteen years of always having Milan Kundera squatting on my brain like a big frowny misogynist frog, telling me not to flavour myself pineapple for special occasions or else my relationships will end as soon as I stop, I'm going to say as categorically as he,

Fuck off, Milan Kundera. Fuck off like Ayn Rand. Philosophical novels are the fucking musical parodies of the literary world and that's what you write. The problem is you write them so much prettier than most other authors of philosophical novels, which just makes the manipulation of characters who should be living and breathing their own lives through the pages of your books and who you instead turn into laboured mouthpeices of your own gloomy gloomsalotism all the more perverse.

I'm crazy for trying and crazy for crying

Oh, the tears that have been jerked. C.R.A.Z.Y. made me cry and cry and cry. It made Brokeback Mountain, the last film that jerked forth my tears, look like an Adam Sandler movie (a looooooooong, boooooooooring Adam Sandler movie). See Melbine’s old post about the cathartic nature of Quebecois films – seriously, no fucking film made me cry that much since Les invasions barbares. I recommend it.

I’m also taking the step of recommending Happiness: A History – I had to return it and borrow it again from the library because it’s a new release so I’m not quite finished, but the section on liberalism and its discontents when it comes to the idea of the pursuit of happiness is so fucking good that McMahon could spend the last 100 pages describing how to increase personal happiness by shaving your beard to spell “I am a cunt” and I’d still recommend it for the Grade Nine Ontario curriculum.

And in a few moments of pure navel gaze,

A.I have short hair now.

B. On Friday Sugarplum and I were talking about kids, and I was reflecting on what an awful mother I would be. Or maybe we were talking about co-habitation, and I was being nervous about sharing my life with someone, no matter how adorable, when everything is just the way I like it these days already. Anyways, whatever I was going on about I was approaching my emotions as though I have a limited supply of love that must be spent carefully or else I run the risk of Love Bankruptcy. Sugarplum pointed out loving people is an addition to your life, and not some sort of emotional capitalist calisthenic. That sounds simple enough but I don’t think I understood properly until she mentioned how she couldn’t imagine loving her first cat less after getting her second cat even though she loves her second cat so much. Sounds basic, but I think I would do well to take her attitude to heart.

C. Yesterday I got a massage at the Carrot Common. It was so good, I can’t even tell you. I saw the only RMT at the Shiatsu clinic, who was a man, which makes this the first time a man has given me a massage that wasn’t a prelude to me being taken advantage of. And I must say it was a very manly massage. He wasn’t messing around at all – thumb-pummeled that pain right away. And he handled my ass and legs so well, which was a drooling joy as they get stiff from all the biking and silly shoes. Top marks. I walked out of there feeling like my body had smoked a joint and forgotten to tell my brain. The fun thing was that meant walking straight out into the Taste of the Danforth and getting a grilled jumbo shrimp skewer dipped in butter.