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.