Tongapup

2007-03-01T09:34:00.000-05:00

Minimal bloggage lately. I have been working at Big Media and employees are blocked from using web-based e-mail or blogging. Kind of shocking, especially because everyone's computer screen is visible to everyone else all the time, so any serious delinquency would be hard to get away with anyway. There is one computer on our floor that isn't blocked and it sits in a far corner with a nearby bottle of Purell and is known as the Porn Computer.

Discretion is [fill in the blank]'s Right-Hand Man

2007-02-22T20:34:00.000-05:00

I'm never sure how much I can say here about Big Media, and I'm not entirely sure why I'm being discreet. Unlike at the Film Festival, my contract with BM never stated that I was prohibited from blogging about my job (oops!). Nonetheless, I sense that they didn't get to be Big Media by leaving stones uncovered, so I'm not going to say anything incriminating.

Those of you who know who BM is, hear this: check for me this Saturday.

It was the hardest [insert low sum of money here] I've ever made, but it's worth it to see my name in [insert proposterously high number here] households this weekend.

Behold the State Muffin

2007-02-20T16:26:00.000-05:00

For rizzle, people.

Does every state have a "state muffin"? So far I have only found seven.

Minnesota: Blueberry
New York: Apple
Massachusetts: Corn
Hawaii: Coconut
Washington: Blueberry (!)
California: Poppyseed
Texas: (iffy) Chocolate chip

Texas's state muffin is debatable, as it is not listed on the state legislature homepage; however, Texas's state pastries are (strudel and sopaipilla). Looks like Massachusetts and Washington will be going head to head for the privilege of blueberry. Word to the wise: aronia make a tasty antioxidant muffin too y'all!

Meanwhile, Massachusetts has scooped chocolate chip as its state cookie.

For a complete/unreliable listing for all states, click here.

Ornographic Mysteries of the Googleverse

2007-02-20T12:41:00.000-05:00

Sometimes I do not understand the internet.

I did a Google search for "Bulgarian juice" and got porn sites. What I don't understand is why many porn sites have random strings of words attached that look like Dadaist poetry. "Lawless member computerize the accomplishable black bike week booty clips orbs with Bulgarian juice" is what one hit said. Is it to lure in businessmen who are legitimately working, maybe needing to type "computerize" into Google for a business-related search, and then -- whammo! -- they are lured into looking at porn?

But that doesn't explain "black bike week."

(I didn't want to put the P on "ornographic" in the title of my post in case it should lead to spam. "Ornographic" probably means something like "of the imagery of birds" but do not be deceived.)

The Bulgarians Are On the Antioxidant Tip

2007-02-17T16:28:00.000-05:00

Bought this today at the local Polish deli. It's aronia juice. It's extremely high in antioxidants. This juice cures colon cancer. (Not really!) It tastes like the writing on the box looks. Really Soviet. It tastes like berries in the summertime dust with something like lead paint mixed in. It's nostalgic! If you never had a chance to visit the USSR, you can know what it was like by drinking this Bulgarian juice.

Fun With Auctioneers

2007-02-17T12:29:00.000-05:00

Auctioneer champs
1964
1976
1985

Givin'er!

Okay, One More Thing

2007-02-16T18:32:00.000-05:00

The other night, Tits's companion Mr. Pants (I do not make these names up to be cute; they actually call each other by those names) loaned me a DVD of Werner Herzog's short docs. I'd never seen anything by Herzog before.

Well.

Tasty treats, let me tell you. There was a doc about a ski-jumper who jumped such huge jumps that he called himself a "ski-flyer". Great suuuper-slow-mo footage of him leaping into the frame and soaring through the air. He always kept his mouth open because otherwise he said he felt like he would just be "cramping everything up", so you can see his face all wind-tunnelishly distorted, his lips and cheeks just on the verge of flapping. Also lots of footage of ski-flyers wiping out, and I mean wiping out, falling ass over teakettle down these ENORMOUSLY STEEP runs, coming to a sliding halt at the bottom, looking like rag dolls.

Then a documentary covering the 1976 Auctioneer World Championships, held in Pennsylvania. Tons of footage without commentary, just ambient sounds. Tons of Pennsylvania "Dutch" (Germans), in bonnets and throat-beards (not at the same time). And then the auctioneer spiels! Wow.

Finally, this really fucked up project where he visits St. Vincent when it's been evacuated because the huge volcano on the island is coughing clouds of sulfur and looking like its going to erupt. He goes roaming up the mountain with his cameramen. It's definitely his most German project, and he gets in lots of deadpan German-accented exposition about what the apocalypse means to him.

Werner: three thumbs up!

2007-02-16T17:24:00.000-05:00

Hey, I hope you all know that the icon I have chosen to represent Tongapup is an actual dog, not some sort of Dark Crystal puppet.

Anyway, I did about three hours of work today and wrote about 500 words, which means I'm allowing myself to blog. And the thrilling theme of this post is, Physical Intimacy in 19th Century Russia. Because I'm reading Turgenev's "Fathers and Sons." (I always need to have a hard-to-penetrate book to read before bed because if I have anything I like too much, I will read it compulsively until it's finished, even if that means staying awake for five hours.) And there is so much embracing and grasping and kissing going on in this book that if the FBI were around then, they'd be all over Turgenev. "He touched his cheek three times with his perfumed moustaches," is one of my favourite lines. Moustaches, plural. You really get the full picture (below): Now those are moustaches! Clearly bifurcated, with lots of initiative on either side.

Why don't fathers and sons do any of that grasping and embracing and kissing any more? It's not just because they don't have big perfumed moustaches. I don't know the answer, but it's kind of sad.

This Is Starting to Worry Me

2007-02-16T11:27:00.000-05:00

White girl: So, what do you mean you guys don't have stockings on Christmas?
Hispanic girl: Spanish people's Christmas is more about expensive electronic gifts.
White girl: I just don't understand -- you also use all new decorations every year.
Hispanic girl: Yeah, we don't really do tradition well.
White girl: Spanish people are weird.
Black girl: Yeah, well, white girls smell like potato chips.
--from Overheard at the Office.com

"Shapes Fitting Into Shapes," eh?

2007-02-15T17:15:00.000-05:00

Nothing makes me feel quite so much like throwing my hands up at Beyonce as when I fix things around the home. Today I fixed both the dripping kitchen faucet and the ever-running toilet tank. It's pretty simple, actually, it's just about what shapes fit into what other shapes.

Thought I'd take it a step farther and help my housemate, Tits, out by replacing the hideous light fixture in her bedroom (yummy hints of Portugal and wagon wheel). I've rewired lamps before so I'm pretty confident, but because the hazards of fcking up include burning down the house and electrocuting self, I thought I'd look at an online DIY guide. I discovered something: electricians operate in a very, very sexy world, a world of hickeys, nuts, nipples and studs. Click on image to enlarge, and see for yourself.

Question is, are handymen horny because they work with these terms all day, or were these dirty terms coined because handymen are always horny?

(Aren't handymen horny all the time? No?)

2007-02-15T11:18:00.000-05:00

I work for Big Media, y'all. Yes, I got the job, against my every expectation. And I didn't even lie in the interview (well, not hardly at all)!

I'm starting next Wednesday. But until then I have this article I'm supposed to be finishing for Monday, which means that, once again, I will feel compelled to blog every single theory and thought that pops into my head. Gee, where to start? With the description of how I toast bread even though I have no toaster? (It's not in the oven!) With the news of my completely warm 40-minute dog walk this morning despite temperatures of minus ass (-19C)? With praise for Donovan, who I was listening to yesterday?

I've been meaning for some time now to mention that the staff in the Tim Hortons (that's the official spelling -- no apostrophe! Amazing the stuff you know when you're a Canadian copy ed) in the building of M'Lady magazine is a veritable United Nations. There are West Indians, East Indians and Hispanics working there, and not once have I been "tranged" by any one of them. What is tranging? My friend Thor was late to meet me once and he explained that he had been shopping at the No Frills near his house (in crummy Lower Parkdale) and the cashier, a woman named "Trang," was the cause. She sloooowwwly rang in the purchases of the guy in front of him, and then she sloooowwwly rang in Thor's purchases, looking around very spacily the whole time... "I was Tranged," sighed Thor. Now, this is something I really do not get. If I were her I would be having races with myself to see how fast I could ring everything through. Now, I don't want to attach any judgement to tranging, per se -- maybe she comes from one of those lovely, slow-moving East Asian cultures where people still remember the value of family and friends and are not caught up in our Western rat-race mentality. And I'm not saying it's necessarily healthier to do what I do, which is act like I'm racing everybody out of the TTC station when I get off the subway. That being said, being tranged makes me fucking homicidal. So -- the staff of Tim's -- impeccable. Whatever innate temporal values they may have espoused have been sweated out of them by Fordist stopwatch training.

Speaking of the UN, my viewer-tracker informs me I have readers in Nunavut, Andorra and Bangladesh! Shout outs!

More later, undoubtedly...

2007-02-13T14:03:00.000-05:00

Confession: I have always wanted to try modelling. I don't know why. I DON'T KNOW WHY! It's an evil industry that promotes poor self-esteem, but that has nothing to do with the glorious sensation of being the admired focus of the camera's eye. As most of you know, I am not an extrovert, or even particularly vain, so it's an unlikely fantasy. But after watching a few too many America's Next Top Models, my head full of Blow-Up-like visions of writhing around on the floor irresistibly while a photographer in a frenzy of inspiration yells, "Yeah! YEAH!", I signed myself up to the Aveda models' database. Aveda = hair salon, so I figured it wouldn't be humiliating all-over scrutiny, just hair scrutiny. Then I forgot about it.

Until today, when I got an e-mail saying they're having a model call next week! There will be catwalking involved! The thought of showing up to (and competing with!) what must surely be an orgy of toothpick-limbed 15-year-old girls and strutting divas has me both terrified and fascinated. I might also end up with a humiliating haircut, if I make it through to the final show. Yoiks! Do I have the reserves of femininity and self-confidence to get me through this? Should I even put them to the test?

2007-02-12T19:59:00.000-05:00

Would you like to see ultra-slow-motion footage of a dog's tongue as it drinks water? Of course you would.

*Photo by "pt" on flickr.

Don't Mind Me, I'm Just Picking Shrapnel Out of My Socks

2007-02-12T17:10:00.000-05:00

Had another meeting with Big Media today. Oh, fickle Mr. Big. I went in fully primped (but not too primped; I wanted them to know I was serious and I didn't just want the salary for my wardrobe) and good-smelling, with a dozen story ideas and what I hoped was a bridal glow of positive energy. I had a good answer formulated for the question I was sure they'd ask, which was "Why did you spend six years freelancing when you could have (should have) been climbing the corporate ladder?" They never asked me, though. They asked me instead if I really, really wanted to work in [insert specific type of media here] and if I had a five-year plan and what did I really feel myself to be, a writer or an editor (you can only pick one). I hated it. Haaaated it. If only I were predisposed to lying, but I literally can't. So I said "writer." That got me some raised eyebrows, since I'm applying for an editing job. Shoot self in foot much? But what they should know is that I am the queen of ideas. Even though, after I spent hours this weekend generating top-drawer ideas for them, they asked to hear specifically "a couple." A COUPLE? How can they possibly get a feel for my genius based on a couple of ideas? And if they overlook the fact that I am the queen of ideas, that's their loss. OK, OK, it's mine too, since I'll be gliding past the three-year mark of not going to the dentist, to say nothing of my horrid glasses.

I'm clearly at that difficult crux of hatred and desperation. Hatred borne of desperation, in fact.

But here, an example of the beauty that can arise from labour discontents.

Mini-Rant

2007-02-11T12:51:00.000-05:00

Headline on the National Post on Friday: Is environmentalism the new religion?

Hm, let's think about this. Religion = faith-based. Environmentalism = grounded in scientific fact.* Religion = starts wars. Environmentalism = saves ecosystems.

So I guess the answer would be a resounding NO!

Thanks, National Post. After reading your headline, all your SUV-driving readers can breathe a little easier (while those of us on bikes continue to take deep draughts of their exhaust).

*In some neo-con circles, this is, incredibly, debatable.

A Loogie in the Eye of the Capitalist Dream

2007-02-11T12:37:00.000-05:00

Sad malls. Is there any public place so defeated-feeling as a sad mall? It’s like a death on Christmas day. It’s supposed to be merry, and the supposed-to-ness of it only highlights the grim element. But then again, because it’s just a mall and not a death, I must admit I take a perverse glee in their existence: in their own way, they are transgressive. They are a loogie in the eye of the capitalist dream.

Sad Mall #1: The Galleria, Dufferin and Dupont. Galleria! A word that, for me anyway, evokes Zappa’s seminal “Valley Girl”. But this ratty-ass mall could not be farther from Silicone Valley’s gleaming, iconic shopping paradise. Observe: the “anchor stores” (I made up that terminology, but it’s pretty good) are a Zellers and a Price Choppers, and a bad Price Choppers at that, like the kind where not only have they not heard of wasabi, but they don’t know what you mean when you ask for capers. And when I think of Zellers, I smell plastic and the sizing on cheap clothes. There is an excellent “common area” that was probably supposed to be a food court, or at least get filled with chairs and tables, but it’s still a vast, echoey, empty space that is also very dim, with sparsely located, dingily-coloured pot lights. The vendors come from places that probably only saw their first malls in the last five years, and they sell things like cheap, ugly synthetic clothes (maroon hoodies with Canadian flags on the front) and junky-looking home appliances. The one nice thing about the crummy mall is that I took Awesome Dog to the pharmacy there a few times and no one kicked us out. In fact, the pharmacist gave A.D. a Social Tea cookie.

Sad Mall #2: Greenwin Square, Sherbourne and Bloor. This mall’s size works against it, but still. It contains a couple of dry cleaners, a McDonalds, a PharmaPlus, and a host of totally insignificant stores. Oh, and a Goodwill! The trim is a really raunchy teal colour, and the halls have green and blue neon tubing along the ceiling. There is a markedly strong smell of cleaner or air deodorizer that I guess is meant to evoke baby powder, but at some points it gets so overwhelming that, when combined with restauranty whiffs from Mickey D’s, it’s like being suffocated in a woman’s deodorized armpit.

Sad Mall #3: Gerrard Square! I haven’t been there in so long, but that place is legendary. Not quite in Little India, but with a slightly third-world feel anyway. Don’t have much to say about it because the details have faded from memory, but I wanted to have more than two malls on my list and The Atrium on Bay is up for debate.

Honourable Mention totally goes to the Dufferin Mall, but in the last decade it has really pulled itself out of the gutter. The cool thing is, it still has personality. The Food Court in the winter is overrun with Old World patriarchs getting together to shoot the shit away from the house. Lots of them fall asleep in the chairs throughout the mall. There’s a store with funky fat-girl clothes and a place selling churros, those South American donut things. The food court has a place called “Roasty Jack’s,” the logo of which is, mysteriously, a running shoe, and the motto of which is “Endless roastability!” Catchy.

A Boon for Pedophiles Everywhere

2007-02-08T17:45:00.000-05:00

Mmm! Instant "recess breath"!

Big Media's Big Flirtation

2007-02-08T10:20:00.000-05:00

You know when you're feeling self-pitying (usually this involves being broken-hearted) and you're listening to music and thinking. "That song's, like, totally about me and X!" And somehow 6 out of 10 songs sound like they're about you and X. Well, after being jerked around by Big Media, I heard these lyrics: "Nothing fuels a good flirtation like heat and anger and desperation," and I thought, "Wow, that song is, like, so totally about Big Media and me!" Yes, Big Media is back in the picture. After telling me they hit a snag and probably wouldn't be able to hire me, they've zagged once again and I have to go in AGAIN (this is visit #3) and jump through some more hoops and prove to them that I REALLY REALLY WANT THIS (this is like ponying up for an engagement ring for a fickle fiancee) and they may just hire me.

My stomach hurts.

Open Letter

2007-02-07T12:26:00.000-05:00

Dear Sour Co-Worker,

Why won't you meet my eye? What is it about me that seems to drive you into a frenzy of sullenness whenever I draw near? I try to be friendly to you even though you consistently try to put a damper on any good relations. I don't especially like you either, but I pretend to and that's what you should do too. A different co-worker said to me today, unbidden, "You cheer me up!" Apparently I have the opposite effect on you. Do I remind you of someone? A past foe? Have you completely erroneously diagnosed me as "perky"? I understand that perkiness is annoying. Anyway, you are driving me crazy, but I am going to keep shooting you with my love gun.

It's Got a Wes Anderson Feel

2007-02-07T11:44:00.000-05:00

Oh my god. Have you seen the Citibank ads that appeared in recent issues of the New Yorker? I'm looking at them, and I'm looking at them, and I'm thinking, there's something quirky here. There's something weirdly off-beat about these ads, something weirdly un-bank-ad-like. But also something oddly... familiar. Two men on an airplane, one an older, squinty (or do I mean flinty?), smug Gene Hackman type sitting in his seat, reading War & Peace, and the other a geeky Napoleon Dynamite type, minus the puffy hair, standing in the aisle beside him, looking hard-done-by, holding up a handwritten sign. What a mismatched pair! So... quirky! They remind me of... they remind me of... oh my god, it's a Rushmore ripoff! Suddenly I wanted to punch a bunch of ad men in the teeth! I could just see them selling the job to the Citibank fat cats, repeating over and over again, "It's got a Wes Anderson feel." "It's got a Wes Anderson feel." You fucking no-talent sneaky unoriginal ripoff artists! Stealing a true original's aesthetic to peddle your steenkeeng alpha corp's bullshit bank loans! Special circle of hell for you! Crackle crackle, crispy crispy [sound of ad men burning].

Rhinal Horrors

2007-02-06T15:55:00.000-05:00

Rhinal horrors I have seen unfold on the TTC:

1. Attractive black woman inserts pinkie into one nostril, turns it, withdraws it.

2. Asian man yanks out own nostril hairs.

3. Retarded man picks nose enthusiastically, rubs fingers together, releasing cascade of flaky boogers onto unsuspecting fellow passenger.

Binary Life

2007-02-05T12:24:00.000-05:00

NO: TTC. I Googled "I hate the TTC" and there were 473 hits. I was impressed. Then I Googled "I love the TTC" and there were 2,900 hits! I really, truly wondered for a moment if the TTC was seeding the internet with that phrase. There are two main reasons I hate the TTC. 1) Delays. 2) Ornery employees. Today I saw a driver eject a woman from the streetcar because she had a transfer and had walked back a stop to wait in a shelter in -15 weather. She wasn't boarding at the transfer point, so, you know, freeze to death, bee-yotch!

YES: Licorice allsorts.

NO: People not returning (my) phone calls.

YES: The view from my desk at work.

NO: Ketchup on Indian food.

YES: Recycling old cell phones and computer parts.

NO: Ruching.

YES: Wearing socks underneath tights on a cold day! Otherwise the acrylic of the tights will quickly become cold and damp and keep your feet cold all day.

Reasons to Move to New York

2007-02-04T19:28:00.000-05:00

(Besides the existence of Brooklyn's CB I Hate Perfume, which sells perfumes that purport to smell like "Coppertone circa 1967, blended with a new accord I created especially for this perfume, North Atlantic. The base of the scent contains a bit of Wet Sand, Seashell, Driftwood and just a hint of Boardwalk," and "English Novel taken from a Signed First Edition of one of my very favorite novels, Russian & Moroccan leather bindings, worn cloth and a hint of wood polish.")

This conversation:
Jerk in back row: Paul McCartney should have stopped after the Beatles. I mean, what the fuck else good did he do after that? Nothing. Not a goddamn thing. He couldn't go from point A to point B. What's the shortest distance from A to B, again? Like, the hypotenuse of a triangle? He never found the hypotenuse without Lennon.
Annoyed man in front of him: Dude, the hypotenuse is the longest side. Now shut the fuck up.
Annoyed man's girlfriend: That was so hot.

Everything about that exchange is just so right.

More From the Vaults

2007-02-04T18:28:00.000-05:00

How about that other girl who sat with the popular clique in grade six? I once overheard her telling the other popular kids that her mother had entered her into a Marilyn Monroe look-alike competition. Maybe that explains why she later went on to do an MA in Women's Studies. Now she's an articling student at an environmental law firm.

Meanwhile, this girl was an unremarkable friend of mine (by grade seven, I had changed schools, and was downtrodden by the evil popular clique no more). I can't actually remember anything about her except that she was kind of short and wore a lot of Roots clothes. Now she too is a lawyer; her specialty is family law.

Here, I bring you another member of the popular clique of grade six. He used to be cute. These days he's making movies. His movie on skaters showed at Sundance in 2007.

Finally, I'm pretty sure this guy used to be one of my best friends. We were both hopelessly nerdy. I remember him telling me once that he hated all contemporary music except two songs: "I Am a Rock" by Simon and Garfunkel, and the theme from Dr. Who! Rumour had it that he later came out of the closet.

Big Media Are Indian Givers

2007-02-01T16:33:00.000-05:00

Call from BM today. There is internal wangling that is jeopardizing my position. Will know for certain early next week. It is to weep.

Where Are They Now?

2007-01-30T22:38:00.000-05:00

Remember that girl that sat behind you and was part of the popular clique in grade six? After a stint on Animal Planet and some show called "Cold Pizza," she's now a correspondent for Entertainment Tonight! It says on Celebopedia that she's "a woman with a variety of interests, and a singular beauty."
Remember your former best friend who had an endearing way of sticking her tongue between her teeth when she pronounced "th" and whose mother was a poet? A famous harpist.

Remember that kid whose family were all Shakespearian actors and who had a minor role in "The Wind in the Willows" at the O'Keefe Centre? Lead singer for a popular indie band that is often compared to the Smiths (OMG, the Smiths didn't even exist when I knew him!).

I'm still working on finding a photo of the kid who farted on my head and many years later dated my best friend.

Colour Me McNugget

2007-01-29T21:08:00.000-05:00

I enjoy collecting myths about white people. Philip Roth taught me that Jewish people think of goys as big drinkers. A Jewish friend of mine said, when I served him mulled wine, "This is a real shiksa drink."

And now, this, from overheardinnewyork.com:
Manager: My son likes white girls. I'm like, 'Boy, don't you know white people smell funny?! They smell like chicken when it's wet outside!'
Coworker: Oh, yeah, they do be smellin' weird.

The Wait-Chill Factor

2007-01-29T18:34:00.000-05:00

My earlier formless grumblings about the TTC have led me to a eureka moment: the wait-chill factor! The longer you wait, the colder it feels. I swear it must have been about -18 with the wait-chill factor today.

I'm a genius!

2007-01-29T13:18:00.000-05:00

1. Carr's Assorted Biscuits for Cheese
2. The TTC
3. AWK

1. I was entertaining recently and bought a big box of Carr's biscuits. (There was so much food in the house that three times in a row I forgot to feed people the cheese and crackers, with the result that I have a selection of refined cheeses hanging around in my fridge uneaten. If any of my five readers would like to claim a)a currant-vodka cheddar, b) a mild blue or c) some raw-milk Oka, please let me know. Cheese free to a good home.) As I was sampling the crackers today, I had two thoughts about them. One was that, given a limited number of ingredients (flour, oil, water, salt), a discernable range of crackers is still possible. There are the very pale, flaky ones that probably contain mostly fat; the "standard" cracker, a round, toasty affair; a large, almost malty tasting whole-wheat variety, etc. The other thought was that Assorted Biscuits for Cheese can be abbreviated to ABC and I feel certain that it has, somewhere in the world, currency as an upperclass shorthand, i.e. "We need to pick up some Carr's ABCs, darling."

2. I had an appointment at St. Clair and Avenue Rd. today and it took me almost an hour to get back here (Dupont and Bathurst) on the TTC, in minus ass degrees weather. (Minus 7 C, really.) That's 1.7 miles, people, or 2.7 kms. Is it me, am I becoming more impatient in my bicycle-riding old age, or is the TTC getting worse? Because this is not an isolated incident. Every time I take the TTC, I'm pretty much guaranteed to feel pissed off.

3. I used to help out at a health-care clinic at reception and there was one patient who I got along with quite well; she's a PhD student in philosophy and funny and smart, and one day we recklessly exchanged phone numbers. But then her phone number just sat there on my desk and I'd look at it and think, when am I ever going to call (let's pretend her name is) Estee? It seemed too much of a leap to go from receptionist/client banter to one-on-one cafe talk. If I'd had a party, I could have invited her, but I never have parties. The longer I didn't call, the more I hoped I'd never see her again at the clinic, because then we'd both have to make mealy-mouthed excuses for not calling, and then the pressure would be doubly on. But at the same time I was afraid she'd think I didn't like her, which wasn't true. It was all more stressful than any non-friendship has a right to be. Then, last week, I was walking Awesome Dog in the freezing cold and she was wearing her boots and coat and I was trudging along listening to my iPod and a woman in a long coat with a beagle was walking towards AD and I. AD doesn't care for other dogs and she just kept walking and so did I, no offence intended to the woman, who, as I began to pass her, I realized was speaking and also realized was Estee. But I kept walking because the whole phone number exchange thing was weighing on me so heavily and I thought that if we had to stop and talk it woud only highlight the fact that we got along well and would prompt another exchange of sentiments about how we should get together and I couldn't bear entering into that whole cycle again. I felt bad as I kept walking and I could hear her saying something like "Oh, alright then," in a snubbed way. I felt bad, but I also felt neurotic.

Then today as I was waiting for the bus, Estee came up to the stop and she looked at me and she looked right through me. And I was studying her face because I was so certain that if it were Estee she would have said something that I just couldn't quite believe it WAS her because she looked at me like total stranger. When we got on the bus we ended up standing quite close to each other, maybe two feet apart, and I looked her in the eye and started to say her name but she just started me down with an impersonally angry look on her face and I was so confused -- still thinking maybe it wasn't her? -- that I lost my words and she looked away and I crept back to the front of the bus and now I am so hoping I never, EVER see her again.

URGENT: This just in: Pushing the funny/terrifying envelope

2007-01-25T12:25:00.000-05:00

Remember way back when I mentioned KKK hair scrunchies?

My friend Reitzel just forwarded me an even more funny/terrifying link. Watch this now: http://www.eveningservice.com/Video

No, it's not a spoof. I also found this link on his website. Cole Porter? Elton John? Who knew? (Ravi Shankar? No, really -- who knew?)

Warmology

2007-01-25T11:29:00.000-05:00

Well, it's sure cold out. As most of my readers know, I am perpetually cold. But, at the age of 30, I began to understand the basics of keeping warm. I had to teach myself since I grew up in a family of warm people who always said "Just throw on a sweater!", which didn't change anything. I mean, you have to picture me clawing off my socks as soon as I got home from school and putting my feet on the hot-air register, examining them for the telltale silvery spots of frostbite.

I feel so proud of my discoveries in the field of body-warmth retention that I think I should be hired out as a consultant. Maybe I could create program for immigrants who are coming from warmer places. I would say that there are a few golden rules, but the most important is

WEAR AN UNDERSHIRT. Yes, the humble undershirt. It has to be the old-school kind, the kind that you can really tuck in. Because the tucking-in is key here. Never let your lower back get drafty.

Also important are:
THE ROOMY, STEEL-TOED BOOTS. Steel-toed is optional. A lot of people grimace at the thought of their feet being encased by steel in the winter but what it does is create a chamber in which the heat from your toes can circulate. It really works! Especially in conjunction with

WOOL-BLEND SOCKS!

Also, ALWAYS HAVE EARS COVERED.

Finally, make sure your coat -- which is down-filled -- COVERS YOUR ASS (I wouldn't be allowed to say "ass" in my pamphlet for the immigrants though). (Well, the pamphlet would be printed in 8 languages anyway.)

So, I put this into practice this morning on my dog walk, and I admit to one problem: by the end of the half-hour walk, the fronts of my thighs were beginning to feel painfully cold. I suspect the solution to this may lie in wearing tights. Future R & D will tell.

And now, to warm your heart: Stupid Yoga Quote #2: "Inhale all that sweet cherry nectar."

Windmills of My Mind

2007-01-24T11:19:00.000-05:00

Windmills give me the creeps.

The Radiant Radish and Other Flotsam

2007-01-22T20:55:00.000-05:00

OK, let it be known: I am trying to write an article and as a result I am probably going to be filling this blog with the random flotsam that pollutes my brain, suddenly clamouring for my attention when I try to fix it on one important task.

But really... could there be anything as joyously weird in the world as the Beach Boys' song "She's Goin' Bald"? It's like some fragment of a dream: you have the perfect Beach Boys harmonies, combined with lyrics that could have been written by Frank Zappa. "Silken hair, more silken hair /Fell on her face and no wind was blowin' (She's goin' bald)/ Silken hair, more silken hair/ Lay near her pillbox down at her feet (She'd been on a trip)"

And then this, a spoken-word break:
"She drew her comb across her scalp
And brushed what she had left
I tried to salvage what I could
And threw it in a sack
She made a bee-line to her room
And grabbed all kinds o' juice
She started pourin' it on her head
And thought it'd grow it back

Ah ha haaaaaa

You're too late mama
Ain't nothin' upside your head
No more no more no more no more"

Deliciously wrong.

Another song on the album, "Vegetables," a paean to, uh, vegetables, features Paul McCartney. McCartney's contribution is to keep time by chewing rythmically on a carrot. Around this time (1967) Brian Wilson was running a health food store in Hollywood called "The Radiant Radish."

Awesome Dog's Iron Gut

2007-01-22T18:49:00.000-05:00

These are things that my dog enjoys:
Figs
Canteloupe
Tangerine segments
Grapes
Broccoli
Carrots (raw or cooked)
Spicy foods such as chili
Breakfast cereal
Coffee or tea with sugar and milk
Meats, cheeses.

In fact, it is quicker to say what she won't eat: salad greens, raw chicken, brussels sprouts, walnuts, anise-flavoured hard candies.

One day when she was feeling stressed out she stole and ate from my friend's pantry a 2 X 4 in. piece of white chocolate brittle; a bag of chocolate-covered caramels (w/ wrappers); and a few lemon hard candies. (She left the anise-flavoured candy.) She had just tucked into a bag of jelly beans when we walked in to the room.

This binge had no discernable lasting effects on her health or behaviour.

A Word on Ella Fitzgerald

2007-01-20T18:12:00.000-05:00

I listen to jazz. That statement, which should be a simple statement of opinion (if there ever is such a thing) feels loaded with subtexts: jazz seems like an impossibly adult genre to enjoy, and at the same time brings to mind a smug, cozy Starbucksian aesthetic, a bourgeois pleasure whose bourgeoisness is made all the more obvious by the divide that exists between those who originally played and listened to jazz, and those who later appropriated it to enjoy with their half-sweet soy Tazo™ chai latte (this is actually the drink I order when I go to Starbucks – and yes, I occasionally go there). But this is not a contrived pleasure of mine, and it predates Starbucks – I started listening to jazz when I was in my early teens. Nothing too crazy: Miles Davis and John Coltrane and, of course, Ella Fitzgerald. Specifically the Cole Porter songbook. I wanted to be a swell like Cole Porter. I subscribed, apparently, to an antiquated notion of sophistication. (“You’re the National Gallery, you’re Garbo’s salary, you’re cellophane,” goes the song “You’re the Top.”) But actually, it’s true: they don’t make swells like Porter any more. That whole ascerbic urbane Dorothy Parker schtick. (Come on – “the tin-pantithesis of melody”? Now there’s a lyric.)

Anyway, this isn’t about Cole Porter. This is about Miss Fitzgerald. I don’t know anyone who gets passionate about Ella Fitzgerald. She never had a hook. But her singing is the purest singing I’ve ever heard. If Billie Holiday is a glass of rough red wine, and Sarah Vaughan an over-sweet honey-drenched Middle Eastern dessert, Ella is just a nice big glass of milk. If I may continue with metaphors, listening to her voice gives me the simple pleasure had by a child listening to her kindergarden teacher. She looks like a kindergarden teacher too, actually. I think that’s one of the reasons why she’s considered a stand-by, because there was nothing sensational about her: she never had tumultuous marriages or drug habits, never dripped with sex appeal, never seemed eccentric. She was just a big, sweet, simple-seeming woman. There is a danger in her singing that nothing human comes forth, but then listen to the version of “Mack the Knife” she did for a live audience in Berlin – forgetting all but the first verse, she makes up the rest, laughing at herself all the way through. But never once does she let the audience down – like some progenitor of contemporary rappers, she never misses a beat or a rhyme. (My favourite line is where she’s supposed to be saying, “Didja hear about Louis Miller? He disappeared, babe, after drawing out all his hard-earned cash,” and she just says, “Miller, Louis Miller… Ahhh, something about cash.”) I don’t know how she does it, I really don’t.

So, Miss Fitzgerald, I raise my nice big glass of milk in a toast to you.

Last Night's Dream Brought to You by the Landsberg-Lewis Foundation!

2007-01-20T09:57:00.000-05:00

I dreamed that I was running a unionized bakery that employed immigrant and refugee women.

I shit you not.

Sick = Bored

2007-01-19T19:14:00.000-05:00

Bored = writing in this here blog more than once a day.

But all I have to write about is how sick I am. Look: my sinuses are so fuck-fuck-fuckidy-fucking congested, it's making me mental. As soon as I have to breathe through my mouth, I feel like I lose a bunch of IQ points. Not "I feel like I look like," mind you -- I really feel stupider. As long as I am doing some sort of physical activity, sinus function ameliorates. I can breathe through at least one nostril, even if the air going into my sinus causes a raw, searing sensation (which it does). But as soon as I sit, or, worse, lie down, I feel like my sinuses fill with spray foam insulation. I can feel them becoming chubby, dense with impossibly immovable catarrh. This in turn makes me feel panicky. Sleep becomes difficult. Tongue dries out, assumes revolting texture. My left sinus is more prone to draining, which means that with any luck, when lying on my right side, I get passage of air in the left nostril. However, sleeping in my parents' lumpy bed has caused my right hip to ache when I lie on it. Thus, the neck-straining posish of lying on my back, head rotated to the right, to sleep. I read two novels while trying to get to sleep last night. I think a third, by Turgenev, finally proved too much and I dropped off.

And don't even get me get started on the issue of sub-nasal chafage.

In other news, my laptop seems to have crashed.

At least the dog looks extremely cute in her salt-proof booties. Something's gotta get you through the day. And I have no scuba-diving cat to do it for me.

Image courtesy of juveniley entertaining site, Rude Food.

Pee Cola [Ghana]? Fart bar [Poland]? I'm there.

Celebrity Dream Time

2007-01-19T11:28:00.000-05:00

Last night's dream featured Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra. I had to wash her turbans. Meanwhile, Michael Jackson was running around the building looking for her.

Had to breathe through my mouth while I slept last night. Woke up and my tongue was dried out. It's an interesting and vaguely repulsive feeling. Own tongue as foreign object, suddenly.

2007-01-18T17:30:00.000-05:00

I've been illin' the past couple of days... a boring old flu. Sick, single 'n' self-pitying, that about sums it up.

Anyway, for some time I've been meaning to catalogue all the stupid statements I hear in the course of doing yoga. Most past comments I've let go in one ear and out the other like so much drivel, so the comments will only be updated as I hear them. However, there was one comment made by yoga teacher Kathryn Beet in a class I took several months ago that was so flaky as to be literally enraging. I almost walked out of her class. The scene: We are lying on our mats at the beginning of class and she's walking around and among us, speaking in her mesmeric, hyp-mo-tizing voice (v. similar to the "poetry-reciting" voice I heard so much of in my tenure as a Creative Writing student), and she says: "I want you... to feel... as grounded... as an elephant. Elephants... are so grounded... they can communicate with each other... through the vibrations... in their hooves."

*photo by Kendall Gelner

I Am the News

2007-01-15T22:48:00.000-05:00

I was just offered a sweet dealio (dealio? where did that come from? Too much watching of "The Office" [UK]) by Big Media. Soon -- if I did not fail the copyediting test, which featured a three-page snorefest of an article about Bombardier -- I will be controlling your media. I am the big floating green face behind the screen. Mwah ha ha. They lured me with promises of fun and benefits. Benefits! For the first time in six years I can have my teeth looked after and BUY NEW GLASSES (I have a real complex about my present glasses, which are losing all their anti-glare coating. When seen at a certain angle to the light, the glasses become totally opaque. I'm always afraid people will see it as an ominous sign, like the mad glint in the eye of a born killer). But it is bittersweet. I will miss the airy, colourful offices of the Immoderately Popular Women's Magazine, and the girly repartee. Instead, Big Media's offices seemed designed to keep you from knowing about things like time and weather. I.e., total dearth of windows. Also the decor is grubby and half the staff consists of etiolated older men. But how can I complain? They are even talking about letting me write for them! My name, delivered to your doorstep -- and yours, and yours, and yours...

The Six Horsemen of the Apocalypse

2007-01-12T15:46:00.000-05:00

1. Toast
2. The clothes women in my building wear to work
3. Important job prospects
4. My former Peace Child "co-stars"
5. Ideocy
6. Sleepy harmonica and Beatles' covers.

1. I'm getting the easiest one out of the way. How can people eat bread that has not been properly toasted? It's so, so, so, icky. Hot, spongey, moist bread. Not at all the same thing as delicious, browned, assertively crispy toast.

2. Looking at the rear ends of the women who work in my building -- which I do, albeit in a disinterested, habitual way -- I feel vaguely saddened. Not by their rear ends so much as the way they dress them. I feel the same, slumpingly defeated way when I look at mediocre "office-lady" clothes like the stuff at Fairweather or Lady Reitmans or Suzy Shier. I just have this sense that these women don't really care about their bodies at all, that their bodies are just some sad vehicle that transports them from home to the GO train to the office. There is a profound transmission of apathy in the visible panty lines & ill-fitting trousers. I feel far sadder about the whole thing than the women themselves probably do.

3. I am being wooed by an Important Media Outlet that wants to take me away from my job at the Ginormously Circulating Women's Magazine. It's very flattering to be wanted by IMO! Especially since I was certain my interview there was a big, fat failure, an opinion that was only confirmed by their not ever returning my phone calls. In fact, I was convinced that they thought I was a flake. I imagined myself as Annie Hall meets Sigourney Weaver in Working Girl. Now suddenly they want me -- urgently. But I am so comfortable here at GCWM. I like the people I work with! Some of them speak openly of smoking pot! We make jokes about yams! Would that happen at IMO? Also here my versatility as a writer, editor, proofreader and fact-checker is exploited -- I mean, in a good way. Before I got the job I feared the office would be a hive of dowdiness, but it's fun. But IMO is offering me a part-time position that, if I choose to follow it to its full-time conclusion, will pay me three times what I got in my first job in publishing. A salary to rival my parents'! Well, maybe not quite. But a lot anyway. But still, for me, happiness really is more important than money. Even though I dream of being able to afford to fly to LA to visit long-lost friends -- which brings me to

4. I got an e-mail from my old friend Thessaly, who toured the Soviet Union with me in the musical "Peace Child" when we were teenagers. When I first met her she impressed me because she was from San Fran and went to Wavy Gravy's circus camp. Now she is living in LA, shooting for fame as a gay icon. She calls herself "The UkuLady" and plays '80s songs and original hits on her ukulele. We immediately re-bonded over how hideously thuggish the K-Fed/Spears firstborn is. She told me that she recently saw another former Peace Child, who is apparently living really close to Thess in LA, and is gaining fame as a minor indie star. It surprised me that our teenage exhibitionism actually masked genuine talent. I immediately Googled said minor indie star and one-time friend and, through reading interviews with her, have concluded that she is a little bit insane. I mean literally. This is a quote from her: "I encourage singing out loud. It is a great source of pleasure. I think it is absurd for a person to consider themselves or anyone else a bad singer. That is like calling someone a ‘bad breather.’ We don’t commonly think of sound as matter, but it is — and I think that it is our understanding of ourselves as finite that is coming to an end when we talk of apocalypse. The apocalypse is the end of limited consciousness. That is what we are experiencing right now. So do not be afraid of your own infinite nature." Insane. In one interview it says she comes from Providence, RI; in another she's described as hailing from the Midwest. But I went to stay with her and her mother for a while a year after we toured the USSR & she lived alone with her absolutely insane mother in a quite squalorous house in the exurbs of DC. I was impressed because it was like the only house I had ever been in that was as disorganized and dirty as my parents' house. Her mother was a strange combination of hard-core stage mom (my friend had a gig as a host of a kids' news show and after it aired, her mom would shut off the TV and do a post-mortem) and flaked-out oddball who told me how a friend of hers couldn't lactate after she gave birth until she had her first post-birth orgasm and also told me, as we were driving back from the beach, that she was a narcoleptic but she never told the insurance companies, but she always got sleepy when her kids fell asleep. When she told me this, my friend and her sis were sound asleep beside me. I always got the feeling that my friend was on the cusp -- she seemed to have a sense of humour about her life and her crazy mother, but at the same time her mother was everything to her. So now I can see which way she fell. Sometimes I wonder -- she is SO crazy-sounding -- if this isn't her way of masking her true weirdness, by exaggerating it so it becomes a "quirky stage persona." Does she really believe all that stuff about radiating love and filtering courage the way the trees filter carbon dioxide another quote)?

I listened to her songs on her myspace page, on which she addresses her fans as "Children of Peace" (hmmmm... an unconscious homage to our humble musical?) and talks about buying a magic wand which she feels bad about because it was made by child slaves, and it (the music) was interesting and spooky. All the more so because I knew the whole back story.

5. Why I Am an Ideot. I had to copyedit a really tedious book in which all the characters spoke in heavy dialect, so on the style sheet I created a category called "Idiosyncracies" to distinguish certain, well, idiosyncracies of speech -- only I spelled it "Ideosyncracies." That plus making a rather large number of arbitrary calls on preferred spellings of words -- I decided to keep "rock-and-roll" hyphenated throughout, for no defensible reason -- makes me think my unconscious is sabotaging my freelancing work. I told my boss at GCWM about it and she said "You must feel like an ideot." Heh heh!

6. On 91.1 FM, the jazz station, they seem to have a mandate to play at least one song featuring sleepy jazz harmonica and at least one jazz Beatles' cover every day. Who enjoys this "music"? They sound like anthems for suicide.

2007-01-09T18:03:00.000-05:00

Last night, in my boredom I watched three hour-long British medical documentaries, back-to-back, on a show called "Bodyshock." This proved to be a mistake. I was first tantalized by an incredible videoclip (not on "Bodyshock") of these bicephalic conjoined twins from Minnesota, Abby and Brittany, who share a body but have two heads. Twin A can only feel sensation on one side of her body and same for Twin B, yet they can clap. I had to think about that for a moment before it's incredibleness hit me. How could they co-ordinate it? I don't know. They can also drive and -- get this -- type. AIIII! You know what's really weird is how normal, in a sense, they look. Part of that has to do with their remarkably well-adjusted attitude. But aesthetically -- I mean it's like if you or I designed a two-headed person -- it's that straightforward. There is something so conceivable about it. Yet at the same time so totally odd, you can't stop looking. I think it's what they call boggling. My mind doesn't boggle easily, but staring at them, my mind boggled.

So somehow I got from this to a video about a kid in Egypt who was born with a parastic semi-head attached to her own head (craniopagus parasiticus is the evocative medical term). This is when I should have turned off the computer -- look away! Look away! But noooo, I only wanted to look more. So, get this, there is this head sprouting a head, and the secondary head has a face. It has a face! And the secondary face is soooo almost normal, so slightly distorted in a Photoshoppy kind of way, and it's attached to a kind of neck that is its whole body, you can see in the X-ray that this neck/body has a tiny little spine. It reminds me of when my rubber plant, maybe through lack of water, or being pressed too close to the wall, grows a slightly curly and misshapen leaf. As the baby ages, the secondary head learns to suck and blink, but basically looks spaced out and froths at the mouth a lot. Because the saliva clearly has nowhere to go -- there are no organs in its tiny body/neck/stump thing. OK. This is very deeply disturbing, but I keep watching. It doesn't help that the Egyptian press is all over this operation and even has a camera installed in the operating theatre when they finally decide to seperate the heads, and they show the footage on "Bodyshock," of course, 'cause how else could it earn the "shock" part of its name? Oh and you get to see the dead, detached secondary head lying on some green piece of felt before its burial.

Well, on from this to "The Half Ton Man," which I think might not be so bad -- it's just very fat people, right? And Richard Simmons, as it turns out. He featured prominently in this documentary, giving Brits the wrong idea about how much influence he wields over here. But ohhhhh, "just fat people," eh? Just people who are naked, soiled by their own feces and literally ripping at their own seams, stretching the skin so much that it begins to give and weep liquids. This is not fat. This is something else, something horrible having to do with brain chemistry and compulsion and an insanely enabling wife who, even after his stomach is stapled up to "the size of a thumb" (his doctor's words) feeds him KFC and peanut M&Ms. It's fascinating, I won't deny it, to see so much flesh unbroken by definable features. His head was like some small outgrowth, a knobby mole, on the vast expanse of his body. When they rolled him over, he had been on his stomach so long that his fat retained a semi-rigid shape, like a candle that had melted flat and then hardened. Wow! Time to turn off the TV, right? No, but gosh, there's only one more "Bodyshock" and even though it's 10:30 pm I guess I'll just...

"The 80 Year Old Children"! Well! I'm sure that won't be harrowing! It was about these Indian kids who have "progeria," which inflicts them with geriatric ailments and also distorts their features so they end up with very protruberant eyes and recessed chins and look like claymation characters. If I watched more cartoons/animations I would probably be able to name exactly which characters. Draw a long, thin rectangle. Now add great big, circular eyes that blink from the bottom and top simultaneously, and a mouth jampacked with dozens of teeth, layered three deep. That's it. They are also bald. I am dissatisfied with this description but their features are so distorted that there is no template in my brain to hang their features on, so I can almost not really picture them. And hospital tests reveal that not only are these kids fated to be ostrasized for their looks, but they don't live long, because their glass-brittle bones are being reabsorbed by their bodies, are literally dissolving, so that their collarbones are nearly non-existant and their ribs are no longer attached to their spines.

And then, OK, lights out! Time for bed!

I suspect that I am sounding frat-boyishly callous and normative, but I can't deny that there was something so different, for want of a better word, about these kids' physicality that it was hard at first to see them as human. It feels weird writing that because you're not supposed to say it about anyone. But it's true! And it turns out that there is something just proundly unsettling about looking at deformities: I imagine it's a combination of being constantly inundated with media images of preternaturally beautiful people and some evolutionarily adaptive mechanism. Watching them right before bed, when the unconscious is glimmering just below the surface, is purely hazardous. My mind was literally aflood with images of the cringing, hollow head, the strange, frog-like faces of the progeria family, the strainingly fat limbs of the morbidly obese. I had to read about half of my stunningly boring book by Vikram Seth before I could feel anything like normal.

Never again. Never after dark, anyway. Too much material for my overvisual, overstimulated dream-factory brain.

Ug.

2006-11-27T19:20:00.000-05:00

Would people please stop wearing Uggs?

They were novel at first because they make your calves look lardy and that would seem to be the antithesis of what one wants from a boot. But this is the important thing to remember: they make your calves look lardy. If you wish to cross the Siberian steppes, please wear the Uggs! You will fit right in with the stolid, overfed babushkas that proliferate there. They will not recognize that your footwear is ironic. Their ankles already look that way, with no help from crafty Australian marketers. Otherwise, please remember -- your boots enrage me. If I have to jump out of a moving bus onto you to make my point, I will.

A Sad Day for Tongans Everywhere... Even in Cyberspace

2006-09-14T13:42:00.000-04:00

The King of Tonga, at one time the world's heaviest monarch at 444 lbs, and the unofficial ruler of this very blog, has passed on to the big diner in the sky. O Large One, may your celestial road be paved with pork chops; may taro sprout at your feet.

Above, his daughter, Princess Pilolevu, follows his (literally) king-sized hearse. To the right, a portrait by Jeffery Vallance (whoever that is). (Nice portrait though, no?)

Cook Islands Cookin'

2006-04-24T15:49:00.000-04:00

Wednesday, inshallah, I will be en route for the Cook Islands.

This is how the islanders used to look before the killjoy missionaries came and asked them to cut their hair, remove the knives from their ears, stop taking multiple wives/husbands, eating people and chewing kava.

Maretu (b. 1802), an islander who became a missionary, tells in his somewhat boring book, Cannibals and Converts, how, as a child, he once stole the head of a cooked human that was by rights his father's, and secreted it away so he wouldn't have to share.

Now they do a brisk business in tourism and have rousing church services.

What Do Princess Leia, a Four-Pound Nut, and a Styrofoam Peanut Have in Common?

2006-04-17T23:25:00.000-04:00

They are all for sale on E-Bay.

See, E-Bay has this category, "Everything Else>Weird Stuff>Really Weird." Actually, most of it is disappointingly unweird. Much of it is of the lame, "If this is really wacky enough, maybe I'll make it into the Ananova Quirkies like that lady who had a potato chip with Mary on it" variety. I think there's potential to narrow down the categories further though, as in "Dadaist": the guy (girl?) who is selling the Princess and the Nut to raise money for breast cancer research. "Zen": The solitary styrofoam packing peanut (current bid: $2.00). "Freudian": The world's smallest Slim Jim. "The Ultimate in Marketing": Your own vagina. I'm not kidding. "Now you can own your own vagina," says the tagline. Well, maybe it's aimed at guys.

Touch Me... in Whimsy

2006-03-24T13:19:00.000-05:00

What is there really to say about this?

For more amazing delights, check out

this link.
(Thanks to Suzanne Somers for the title of this post. From her collection of poetry entitled "Touch Me".)

Something That No One I Know Has Ever Tried

2006-03-16T11:11:00.000-05:00

Pretzel salad recipe with strawberries, gelatin, and other ingredients.

INGREDIENTS:
2 cups crushed hard pretzels
3/4 cup melted butter or margarine
3 tablespoons sugar
1 package (8 oz) cream cheese
2 cups whipped cream or whipped topping
1 package (6 oz) strawberry gelatin
1 package (10 oz) frozen strawberries, thawed
2 cups boiling water
1 cup sugar

I'm not going to tell you what to do with the ingredients. Half the fun of this recipe is in guessing how to make it. The other half is in making it. Zero percent of the fun is in the eating of it.

Barbara Kingsolver

2006-03-16T10:06:00.000-05:00

I forgot to mention her in my list of things that everyone likes except me.

I haven't even read anything by her. But I just know. I know.

People have been recommending her to me since first-year university. At that time, the big book was "The Bean Trees." More recently the big book was "The Poisonwood Bible."

Is it the ethnican design of her book covers? The titles? ("The Bean Trees" -- pisses me off.) Her author photo? Ms. Kingsolver, I am sorry. You're probably a perfectly nice person and you're right in having a huge fan base of my peers. You're probably very skilled and intelligent. It's just that I hate you.

Things That Everyone Likes

2006-03-12T20:31:00.000-05:00

... Except Me.

The other day Thor and I were trying to think of things that all our friends liked (or people in our peer group, to be more precise) but we hated. I had a short list, but since so many things make me cranky, it's just a matter of time before it grows.

1. Sex in the City. I just don't get it. It's like a Disney fairy tale for grown-up girls, with sex. And if you're still going "So?", I have nothing to say to you.
2. Coldplay. Whiny white guys.
3. The Spanish language. I'm learning it 'cause it's useful, but inexplicably, it gives me the creeps. Why couldn't Italians have colonized half the world instead? That's a great language!

In the interests of being positive, something I'm really really trying to do more these days (Disney comments notwithstanding), I could start a counter-list,
Things That Everyone Likes, Including Me.

1. Ikea
2. No Logo, Naomi Klein
3. Yoga
ZZzzz. This is so predicable, it hurts.

So let's try
Things I Like that Nobody in My Peer Group Likes

1. America's Next Top Model. OK, so some people I know like this show. Well, I'm mentioning it anyway because it needs more exposure. Watch this show. It RULES. I so want to be on it as, like, their plus-age model. I would be so fierce.
2. Sacred steel gospel music. This shit's so funky, you could remove wallpaper with it. Also, Aretha's Amazing Grace album. AAARRGHH!
3. Paul Theroux. Although I've never really talked about him with anyone.

Great Things That Defy Categorization

1. Singing along to a favourite album at the top of one's lungs
2. May
3. Bicycling on residential streets at night in the summer
4. Any dessert involving coffee and chocolate
5. Dogs
6. Nicholson Baker
7. The BBC, and their accents
8. 1950s advertising
9. The rug I bought six years ago
10. Sleep

Instant Karma ... Just Add Porn.

2006-02-08T17:09:00.000-05:00

The other day I was looking for photos of ice hotels (let’s just get past that) and I have no idea how, steered by what kind of fuzzy internet logic, but I was linked to a site featuring nothing but “inspirational stories.” Well, first of all, I didn’t even know it was a genre – I mean, it doesn’t come as any surprise, I just tend to veer away from the word “inspirational,” as in “inspirational speaker” – which is exactly the kind of inspirational it is. But anyway, print addict that I am, I started reading it. And as I was reading it – and it was pretty horrible, but more on that later -- I kept thinking, why is this so familiar? Wherever would I have read this kind of prose before? Wooden, stilted, with perfunctory dialogue, and an utterly -- comfortingly, almost -- predictable storyline. And then it hit me: porn stories. The internet is, of course, a repository for all the sexual flotsam that doesn’t pass easily through our social filters, and so there is no shortage of “erotic fiction” online, and I can’t say I haven’t dipped into that flotsam, so to speak, on occasion. Although I have to say that “erotic” is misleading, since much of this stuff is bluntly singleminded in its approach, far more suiting the word “porn” (which for some reason brings to mind the word “dork” – it’s about that elegant – and of course they both are four-letter words with “or” in the middle, but there is also another level on which they intersect; I think it’s the fact that “porn” + “dork” = “pork,” and “pork” is a smutty kind of word, in fact a horrible word, I would say, for copulation. And also: Deliverance). And of course bluntly singleminded is exactly what the inspirational stories were too. The whole story, in both genres, is a kind of sloppy construction that is supposed to allow the inevitable climax to seem like a natural, perhaps unanticipated, event.

Perhaps you would like to know more about what is contained within these inspirational stories before I go any further. Of course you do. You’re crouching at the peephole; I can hear your heavy breathing. Okay. The plot of the very story I was first linked to is this: There is a slow-witted, shall we say retarded, busboy working at a roadside diner. He is a really hard worker and earnest, but his good qualities are outshone by his appearance and demeanor. One day a whole group of bikers – bear with me here, I didn’t read it very closely and I’m not sure I committed all the salient details to memory – anyway, this group of bikers swings by. At the end of the day there’s an envelope at the till with the retarded boy’s name on it – let’s call him Johnny – and the waitress turns it over in her hands, wondering what it could be. When she opens it (I don’t know why he doesn’t open it himself) she finds $10,000, all of it for Johnny. Don’t worry, she gives it to him.

Another story: a woman in a Mercedes is stranded at the roadside. A poor man in a beat-up Pontiac comes to her aid. His name is Joe. After he gets her car started again, she tries to give him money, but he refuses, saying something like “Tell you what. You just do a good deed for someone else, okay?” Okay. So she’s motoring along and she decides to stop by a roadside café (!) to have pie and coffee. She notices the waitress (!!) is weary and pregnant but serves her with good cheer and never complains (!!!), so when Mercedes lady pays up, she leaves a $100 bill and slips out before getting change (!!!!). She leaves a note saying something to the effect of, Someone did me a good deed today, and I’m doing this for him. The pregnant lady is touched. When she gets home that night her hubby’s in bed, all tuckered out from his hard day at work. And the pregnant lady touches his cheek and says “Goodnight, Joe,” or words to that effect.

See? Both types of storytelling (porn/inspirational) end with the money shot. And of course, sexual ecstasy and spiritual ecstasy are not so removed from one another (I believe Leonard Cohen exists to illustrate this fact) but neither is achieved easily and without complications. However, in this fantasy realm, simultaneous orgasm and instant karma happen as easily as slipping on ice (who falls off logs these days?).

But the inspirational stories offend me more. They aren’t inherently more offensive – they’re no more offensive than anyone’s simple recipes for happiness. But when I ask myself which epiphanic moment seems more honest and less sickly, porn or inspirational, I have to vote for porn. Sex is already tawdry and furtive, with a goodly portion of selfishness, and so selfish little fantasies about it are not surprising. But the selfish little fantasies about instant karma (and they are selfish – the thrust of these stories is, Humility and hard work sees its rewards, so keep working, because – this is the important part -- it could happen to you and you want that money, don’t you?) seem to contradict the very point they’re illustrating. The best way to get a lot of money, these stories suggest, is to be the kind of person you aren’t -- someone uninterested in money. But you can pretend. Which is, in itself, in utter contradiction to the kind of moralism you’re subscribing to. Frankly, few things revolt me more than self-denial masquerading as high-mindedness. One thing you can say for sex: it rarely presents itself in the guise of virtue.

Now: look at the woman in the photo. Does she seem more like a porn star or an adherent of instant karma? No, she can’t be both. You can’t tell, can you? Well, read on.

That’s Kelly Foxton! Oh no, you probably know her pet better: the World’s Most Photographed Squirrel, Sugar Bush Squirrel! If you would like to experience the heady sensation of laughing at something that simultaneously terrifies you, visit the site! You will be positively a-tingle with fear and amusement, I promise you.

(After seeing the site there’s no question in your mind which side she falls on, is there?)

While I’m on the topic of terrifying/funny, the KKK has a line of merchandise you can see if you have the stomach, or balls, or guts, or whatever it takes, to visit their website. Confederate-flag hair scrunchies and necklace pendants (because teens are always so hard to buy for), a cross-burning mouse pad, KKK drink coasters (because even hate-mongerers worry about rings on their coffee table), a Confederate-flag dog collar. The banality of evil, indeed.

Mexico: Come for the Sand and Surf, Stay Because You Can't Leave Your Bedroom!

2006-01-11T18:44:00.000-05:00

Thanks are due to The Hot Librarian for that lovely photo, and the following sentence.

I am far from the Land of Walruses and Respect right now. I don't know what Mexico qualifies as. I can't think of any good, imaginative names for it because right now, for me, Mexico is the Land of Purging. The Land of barf, billow, disgorge, exhale, expand, gag, groan, huff, keck, palpitate, pant, puff, puke, retch, rise, sign, sob, spew, spit up, surge, suspire, swell, throb, throw up, upchuck, vomit. Oh but not only that. (Squeamish, turn back now. Well, I guess if you made it past that photo you're probably good to go.) It is also the Land of Endless Watery Explosive Diarrhea. It is the Land of Soiling Ones Own Pants in Bed in the Misguided Belief that One Was About to Merely Fart. It is the Land of Throwing Out Ones Own Underwear as a Result. (But not before attempting to wash said pants and underwear together with similarly soiled pyjamas only to find that the whole "clean" load of laundry now smelled altogether vaguely of shit.) It's the Land of the Very Far Bathroom and consequently the Land of Shitting in a Bucket that is Kept Outside the Bedroom Door. It is the Land of Throwing Up in a Different Bucket! Oh, all those buckets. All that puke and shit. It was like my very own little World War I, where I got to play both the troops and the medical personnel. My favourite part was when I'd hauled my shit bucket down to the Very Far Bathroom with the intention of cleaning it out. I thought I would fill it partway with water and then toss the resulting sludge in the toilet. Only, in the middle of this episode, I faltered; no more a nurse but a weak soldier was I, overcome with weakness and fumes, and the sludge poured all over the toilet seat before it met its target, the bowl.

Good times.

On the third day of this (no more vomiting but a pain like an inflating balloon under my sternum; and the diarrhea, which as I mentioned before, was endless) I finally got myself to a clinic and got medicated. Now I'm on a course of antibiotics that make my stomach feel weird in a different way, painful and burpy, but no diarrhea!!!

Come to Mexico for the sun and sea, stay because you can't leave your bedroom! I have not been out of the house (except to visit the clinic) in four days! Well, I suppose it gives me time to write lots of good material for this here blog. And to rediscover the pleasures of food. In three days, I ate half a bagel, one bowl of rice and a dozen soda crackers. After taking my first antibiotics, I began to have extravagant visions of foods I wished to consume: mainly, I was haunted by the thought of Indian chick-pea stew. With a sprinkling of cilantro and perhaps a squirt of lime. But the doctor said: no chili, no fat, no nothin'. (She didn't say no beans, but you don't have to be a doctor to know the tried and true wisdom concerning beans and bowels.) So, once I could eat again, it was more bagel halves and soda crackers. When I finally broke down and ate a tiny piece of forbidden cheese, I thought of that Zen-in-a-Raisin guy, the one who believes that if we took the time to fully appreciate every mouthful, there would be no obesity problems. As a guided exercise (I can't believe I know this) he talks a room full of people through eating a raisin.

Pause to enjoy, raisin-like, that image in your mind.

He claims you can taste heaven in a raisin, if you put your mind to it. And I'm here to tell you that four days of white flour will do the same thing. No raisins, thank goodness, since I think they're fiendish things. But I tasted heaven in a grain of cheese. Apple juice was sweeter than Honey of the Bees (as it's called in Spanish -- "Miel de Abejas" just so you won't confuse it with that other honey, honey of the rhinoceri, or whatever). And not having to run to the bathroom to immediately expel said morsel of cheese? Priceless.

Concerning Your Front Bottom

2005-12-18T16:25:00.000-05:00

Ladies, think how lucky we are to be living in the nowadays when a clean vagina is just a quick and painless step away! Because according to this little ad, in the 1930s, doctors were suggesting women douche with Lysol. As you can see, it fixed this woman's marriage. Now her weasel-faced husband shows no fear in having his once-rank wife sit on his lap -- whew! Never mind that his trouser-snake probably doesn't smell like a spring day in the Alps.

But let's talk about the illustrious Vagina Institute where I found that lovely link. Is this a site for men who like their porn served with an equal dose of scientific content? "None of that sloppy naked-lady-wearing-a-stethoscope stuff: I want statistics, dammit! I want facts!" But then why do they have the "How well does my vagina measure up" quiz? (In which you are required to take a ruler, T-square, level and god knows what else to your most sensitive bits in the pursuit of knowledge. Just stay away from those laser-levels.) Why can you also read it in Spanish? (I don't know, but Estudios Vaginales sounds like a really classy condo in Barcelona.)

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And now, onto the Critter of the Day! The Critter of the Day is the humble chicken. Why? Because chickens are edible, versatile, lovable, can grow human faces, and live without a head for 18 months! Who needs GMO?

The Burning Question

2005-12-17T20:10:00.000-05:00

I ask myself this question at least once a day.

S. Rock Homes and Watu-son

2005-12-16T18:08:00.000-05:00

Tonight I was eating rye crackers and hummos in a quixotic mood, and I referred to it as "homes." "Like Sherlock?" said my boyfriend. "No, like whassup, homes?" "There is a connection though." he said. Then: "S. Rock Homes and Watu-son."

The Science of the Sexiness of Mayonnaise

2005-12-15T22:07:00.000-05:00

I was just watching a McDonalds ad. The fact that it was McD's doesn't really matter, it could've been any fast food restaurant, but McD' s has the money for the high production values. The point is, there was a close-up shot of mayonnaise being squeezed on to the bottom of a hamburger. Imagine, they probably shot a dozen takes of mayonnaise being squeezed on a burger, and they had to choose one, the sexiest one, the one with the "most personality". Well, in the middle of the take, the mayo looped in on itself, which is probably as sexy as it gets in the mayo world. And I thought, there is a guy (or gal) out there whose job it is to comb through slo-mo shots of lettuce and onion falling sproingily on a burger, tomato slices slicing through the air, chicken breasts being slowly, lovingly flipped on a grill... all in the service of a giant, unmercilessly grotesque corporation.

Ai yi yi.

Summers in Rangoon, Luge Lessons

2005-12-15T16:29:00.000-05:00

Europeans. They can be so dark, so complex, so tortured...

Take Henk van Rensbergen, a Belgian who flies Dutch charter planes and spends all his free time sneaking into abandoned buildings and taking artful black-and-white photos for his own amusement. He has his own wonderfully pseudo-Gothic website called http://www.abandoned-places.com.

Just while I'm on the topic of compelling abandoned places.

Motor City

2005-12-15T15:50:00.000-05:00

I'm fucking obsessed with Detroit. I was only there once but the place is burned indelibly in my mind. There's this windswept modernized downtown corridor with all these new skyscrapers and no one walking around. It doesn't look deserted, it looks uninhabited. There's not one little friendly sign of human life. Like if you were walking around University and Dundas at 5 in the morning on Sunday, you could tell people had been there in the not-too-distant past. But in Detroit, fuggetaboutit! There never was anyone here! "We just built an entire city core without checking to see if anyone ever wanted to use it -- and guess what -- they don't!" But that's not all. We visited this street that was the ne plus ultra of divey streets. The name escapes me. But it was hopping. It was like a four-lane street flanked by one-story furniture stores and bars, but you couldn't even see the interiors of any of these places because they seemed to built on the concept of impenetrability rather than marketability, so they were either windowless to begin with, or the windows were boarded up. But people were "shopping" there. One of these windowless bunkers claimed to be a health-food store. I don't think it was the hippie kind, but I'm not sure what other kinds there are. One that sells all kinds of scary body-bulking products that feature giant sweaty meaty man-torsos on the label and silver lettering cut by lightning bolts, I guess.

If you wish to see pictures of the real Detroit, please look at http://www.seedetroit.com. "Seed" is the operative term here.

How could I have forgotten to mention the Detroit train station? I'm in love with the photo above, which is from the train station circa 1930. Doesn't it reek of glamour? Aren't you positive everyone is smoking in the train station and saying things like "Swell, kid"?

Now look at the colour photo (darn it! I have no control over the placement of these photos!). Some people would contest that it has a glamour of its own. I would amend that to mystery. In a way it is kind of cool. I mean, even if they did restore the station, it would be full of annoyingly anachronistic people in Phat Farm caps. At least the way it is now, you can populate it with imaginary 1930s characters, women carrying hat boxes, etc.

The Difference of International Feeling

2005-12-14T17:23:00.000-05:00

I'm creating a blog.

This is going to be a repository for all those obsessions of mine that I think everyone should know about but which I have no intention of foisting upon them. You read this by your own choosing, and I don't have to see your, or anyone's, eyes glaze over if it all becomes too much.

Right. To begin, cuteness, of the animal variety: http://stuffonmycat.com

Actually, as cuteness goes, it's fairly standard. To see something a little more rarified, you should look at Yuebing (formerly Oolong) the Bunny's website. Yuebing is a bunny from Hokkaido, Japan, whose owner likes to take photos of his bunny with things balanced on his (her?) head. I would like to offer you a little quote from the bunnies' owner: "Oolong is so calm and patient -- he never gets angry when I take pictures of him. When I put various objects on his head, he stays still for a minute.This is just a result of an intimate relationship between me and Oolong.The main theme of my site is not to show these 'headperformance' links, and it's not my hope to propagandize nothing but the strangeness of his headperformance over the world. Oolong's headperformance-- many foreigners seem to feel it 'crazy', but Japanese people feel it just cute and funny.It is the difference of international feeling."
Unfortunately, the site is mostly in Japanese and thus a little tough to navigate, so I'll supply you with this multimedia rabbit haiku: http://www.h6.dion.ne.jp/~yuebing/041121/041121-2.htm

I could have called this website "Headperformance," easily.

Thanks to http://beedogs.com for the links.