27

Nov. ’12

You Got Me Dickmatized

I got 99 problems but a dick ain’t one.

I’m going to be solving some of YOUR problems further down this post but first bear with me, I want to talk about “Liz and Dick” which I watched on Sunday with ardent interest. I simultaneously read the tsunami of barf on Twitter but I really don’t think it was all that bad, so sue me, and I will argue that Lindsay Lohan was the perfect choice to play Elizabeth Taylor.  Liz was as hot a mess as La Lohan back in her heyday, so it was like a film within a film, wrapped in crazy. Real Liz stole husbands and turned into a fat, sloppy caftan wearing drunk coaster.  As an actress, she wasn’t really all that by today’s standards.  She was either breathy or shrill and over-acted like she was in a high school play.  She wasn’t even that hot, she wore a fuckton of makeup and for Godsake, people, her eyes were not violet, they were blue with flecks of brown. It’s a trick, I tell you.

I don’t know why I had always been under a rock when it came to anything to do with Liz Taylor, I guess I was too cool at the time to be interested in her “iconic” movies like National Velvet. I hate horses, I’m not afraid to rub my own vagina. Her kind of glamour was tacky to me. Diamonds and all that shit make my eyes glaze over in boredom, even to this day. By the time I was old enough to care about all things Hollywood, she was getting married to that mullet dude, Larry Fortensky,which was a supposed scandal because he way younger than her and Cougar Movement hadn’t really been invented yet.  I guess she should win my respect because she was a pioneer for the likes of moi, giving old bitches hope for fresh bone. She was also an awesome fag hag, and a truly great humanitarian that will become a whole other biopic, starring Madonna, duh.

It’s not just Liz, it’s Dick who I am really grooving to. My only knowledge of their story together was basic: They met making “Cleopatra,” they got married, divorced, and then remarried.  How romantic.  Oh, and he bought her lots of jewelry, including this honking ring bling:

That was her “everyday” ring, the Krupps diamond, that she wore to glue on her false eyelashes and toss back the cocktails.  The Taylor-Burton diamond was a pear shaped Cartier diamond that she wore as a necklace that cost him over a million dollars. Jelly?  Don’t be. Red flag.

Never trust a dude who buys you a million dollar diamond.  Think about it.  Do you think a normal guy cares about accessories?  Aside from an engagement ring that he supposedly spent 3 months salary on but didn’t really because he got it at Costco and the same Marquise cut (yuck) diamond would cost five as much at Tiffany’s so be happy, bitch, he might buy you a present now and again. Perhaps a pair of opal studs for your birthday, a charm for your bracelet on your anniversary, or if he is away on a European business trip, he might pick up a pearl necklace at the airport duty-free because he feels slightly guilty that he went to that massage “spa” in the hotel lobby and paid the extra 20 euros for the cabeza.  All these are good reasons for giving you jewelry but he if, out of the blue, feels the need to buy you the biggest motherfucking diamond in the world, then it’s not about you, it’s about him and the headlines it’s going to make. Classic narcissist.

Narcissists are very charming, good-looking, charismatic, and when they set their sights on their prey, they will do anything to get it.  That was Dick when he was starring with Liz in “Cleopatra.”  And she dumped Eddie Fisher (seriously, Liz, what the fuck marrying him in the first place?) and he dumped his long-suffering wife who was the mother to his daughters, so that they could bask in the glory and beauty of their love, blah blah blah, drunkity ever after.  Insults, jealous rage, blow ups, and hot make up sex. Good times.  Oh, and they lived on a yacht for some reason.  Taxes or something, make a note of that, maybe the taxman can’t swim.

They both got bloated, somebody fell and got paralyzed, I’m not sure who because I was reading the Twitter feed, but I think it was Dick’s brother (who was his father figure and Voice of Reason) and they divorced and remarried.  That’s the thing about narcissists, they get under your skin like ticks.  So Liz took him back, even though he was a big embarrassing baby about losing two Oscars, but he gave good jewelry which must have made her feel important. It’s sad really.

But at the end of all that mess, I thought if I were to get a diamond ring, I would like one that didn’t rip pantyhose or get mangled in a toilet paper wipe down, maybe something kind of Asscher cut in a deco setting…anyway, just saying.  On to your problems.

Thank you for writing to me and giving some blog fodder!  Remember, I am not a therapist, marriage counselor, or child-rearing expert, so take my advice with a grain of salt and a shot of tequila:

My wife and I are both in our early 40’s and have been married for 7 years, our son is 5, and I the last time we had sex was 4 years ago. He was born in 2005, and I think we had sex maybe 3 or 4 times afterward. It was short and quick each time where as before the baby we would make love everywhere and all the time. It just stopped one day, she said she had a yeast infection on our anniversary when we got her parents to babysit our son for the weekend when we went to Niagra Falls.   A week turned into a month, and now the months have been turning into years, four years!  What should I do? I am at the end of my rope.

Oh, the proverbial rope! With it’s frayed edges and slippery grip. It’s so hard to hold on especially with all those itches to scratch.  All those numbers! You’re making me do math, luckily I am more Aspergery than you.  If you are in your early forties, married for 7 years, it means you got married in your mid-thirties. Hasn’t anyone ever told you about 35 year old women?  Some science journal and a Time cover has deemed it that their 35-year-old eggs are still considered reasonably farm fresh and it is a fast train to Barren City after that.  Fact. If they have baby fever, they will marry any thing with a front fly in order to reproduce.  Of course you boned like rabbits before the baby, she was trying to get pregnant.  Those 3 quickies you had after the baby was born were called mercy fucks to keep you in a holding pattern.  Good news:  Since it’s been 4 years since your last encounter, your sperm donor duties are probably not in demand.  Let go of the rope, bro!  And get ye to the nearest oyster bar!

I hope I am not being too harsh but I’ve seen it this before, time and again. People are just taking to long to procreate because they have careers and such that they need to nurture first, that’s why you are chosen over the hot bartender she used to bone in college and probably should have had his baby in the first place because his masculine badassness was probably better for evolution and the sake of humanity in the long run. Swing that desparate rope in any direction and it will inevitably land on the head of the nearest dumbass whose dick is pointing due north. And yet! still a better love story than Twilight.

I’m still obsessing over Liz and Dick. They had the sense not to procreate. Here’s a classic scene from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf:

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21

Nov. ’12

The Sinner’s Guide to Successful Modern Living

 

I am Sinner, hear me roar.

This week I am on one of my boring austerity programs where I don’t drink.  It’s just like Juiceless January but only a week long. It’s not a “cleanse.”  Please, this lady is clean as a whistle. Don’t hate me because I am so boring.  I just like to torture myself once in a while with depravation because I am a card-carrying Glutton and I need reign it in once awhile otherwise I will go off-balance and miss out on my other favourite sins.  I will be too fat to fuck and too drunk to follow the plot of this season’s American Horror Story Asylum.  Let me explain.

As you know, the Seven Deadly Sins are: Gluttony, Sloth, Lust, Envy, Pride, Greed, and Wrath.  Whoever made this up was not thinking of a progressive society.  Supposedly these are all traits than can lead to the degradation of humanity, blah, blah, blah….According to lore, each of these sins has an opposing “virtue”  which are in order from the above: Temperance, Diligence, Chastity, Kindness, Humility, Charity, and Patience. They all sound like trippy hippy names. Most of these so-called virtues are self-imposed righteousness, and at least one of them is not worth having, and you know which one I mean.

I do not personally grapple with any of the so-called “Seven Deadly Sins.”  I think they are best when performed in tandem for the most effective results.  For example, I am never more content and in tune with myself when I am practicing the art of sloth and gluttony, or “sluttony” as I like to call it.

Sometimes one sin can lead to a chain reaction of sins and virtue which can be hilariously tragic:  I have this Facebook friend who is rocking his 50’s as a retired rich bastard.  Every day he diligently posts pictures of different women who hanging out at his house, drinking wine without their tops on, wearing only thong underpants.  The chicks are all half his age!  And he is so proud, just like a peacock!  So we click the “like” on the photo of the Asian girl with the face of a 300 year old vampire who is sitting uncomfortably on one bony ass-cheek on top of his piano, not because she is hot, but because we are kind…and jealous as fuck that he can afford a hooker every night of the week!  All that outside validation must make him perform like a boss, even though he probably most definitely has erectile dysfunction. It is all so awesome.

Gluttony vs. Temperance:  I have so much praise for Gluttons, I don’t know where to begin. Gluttons are more fun, hands down. If you win an all-inclusive vacay, you want to take a glutton with you because they will show you a good time. Gluttons are troopers who will never say no to ice cream, even if they are lactose intolerant:  Oui, c’est moi. I love the word “gluttony” because it sounds like “glug” which makes me think of beer. Beer is a beautiful beverage, and if you are going to be a glutton, an ale cleanse is the way to go to freshen everything up, hangover prevention and cure all in one.  Gluttony also sounds like “gluten.” If you are someone who is full of temperance, you are probably on a gluten-free diet because you think it makes you bloated.  It doesn’t.  You are bloated because you are a gas bag.  GTFO and deflate outside.

Sloth vs. Diligence:  Modern day sloth is synonymous with tv watching.  You really think should be doing something else but have you seen what’s on HBO?  The last decade has produced some pretty awesome shows and if you are one of those people that says: “I don’t watch tv,” you are a fucking liar and/or a loser.  “I’m so busy, I don’t have time.”  More lies.  It’s always those “I’m-so-busy” people who claim to not watch tv, who are the ones who know the names of every Real Housewife in any given city. If Anderson Cooper has time to watch Honey BooBoo, then you have time to watch American Horror Story Asylum, preferably with me so we can talk about it afterwards. Did you know you can multi-task while you watch tv, Busy Bee? That is why God invented ironing boards.

Lust vs. Chastity:  Okay, lust can lead to a lot of stupid things like a wardrobe full of leopard print, stained furniture, miscommunication and a few sessions with a therapist who has to explain to you, ad nauseam, the difference between lust and love.  I still don’t get it, but whatevs, maybe one day I will have an epiphany…until then I’ll be clearing the pipes with battery operated devices. It still counts. Dry spells scare me so much that I think I am going to shrivel up, close over and die re-virginized. What would be the point of revering Chastity? Tits on a bull.  Even Chastity became Chaz.

Envy vs. Kindness:  If I wasn’t so jealous all the time, I would be dead.  Seriously, jealousy is what keeps me my breathing reflex functioning. The seething green vapours keep the air passages clear.  Envy provides motivation. Sometimes I stumble upon another person’s blog, and it’s so good that I get all my hackles up that I want to make mine better. Whenever I have crush on someone, it inevitably turns out he is married or has some hooker fetish.  The level venomous jealousy that surges through my system could kill cancer cells.  This is just natural instinct that people need to have, not sin per se, in order to progress and propagate. Kindness is for pussies. Darwin’s law goes like this: See, want, turn green, kill that bitch in the way, and get.

Pride vs.Humility:  This is a no brainer, it should be the other way around! Modern day people celebrate pride in colourful parades like Gay, St. Patrick’s, and  Caribana.  Even that one at Easter, not the bunny one, but the one where they re-enact Jesus carrying the cross has bling, hunks, and dancing girls.  The one year I saw it, Pectoral Jesus was wearing his red velour robe open and he had been clearly working the gym and the tanning salon.  And why would you want to get all sad sack and dour about it? Mass pride is a good thing, it creates solidarity even for the outsiders.  Even if you are not gay, you are gay for the day (or the whole weekend)!  Kiss me, I’m Irish (no, I’m not, I’m just drunk)!  Let your light shine, ignite the jealousy in others so you can inspire them to rise above mediocrity.  Just don’t be so smug about it or you are in danger of the truly serious sin of Douchebaggery, I’m looking at you, Bieber.

Greed vs. Charity: This one sin versus virtue where the latter wins. Donald Trump is greedy.  Ellen DeGeneres is charitable.  If I’m going to lay on the couch like a sloth with my hands down my pants, I would rather watch Ellen than Celebrity Apprentice. That is all.

Wrath vs. Patience:  If jealousy is the pilot light that ignites ambition, then wrath is the fire that burns it into fruition.  Angry people get things done, not the so-called “diligent” busy bees who don’t watch tv. They are too busy blowing the smoke up their own asses.  If you want results, ask a pissed off person with a bee in their bonnet.  They will make the earth move. Patience only leads to deeper frustration and unless you enjoy living a life of limp limbo, then sit there like a Buddha.  Pro tip:  Wrath and Lust make excellent bedfellows.

And speaking of sloth and Ellen, this little video never gets old:

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07

Nov. ’12

A Hooker’s Guide to Riding a Buck

I don’t have a single pair of goddamn socks that match and the ones I am currently wearing have a hole in the big toe. I have to ask myself, would I rather spend 12 bucks on a trio pack of MacGregor anklets or a bottle of wine? Duh. I am a poor bitch, I have priorities.  I will let things go because I don’t want to spend the money. Come over to my house and check out my decrepid tiles in my pink and brown (!) bathroom and the spot above my stove where I had a leaky roof last year.  This is why I need a man.  I would totally be a handyman’s best hooker if he had drywalling skills.  I have lots to offer so if you know one, send him over. I give scalp massages and I have recently mastered the fine art of fried chicken (pssst:  the secret is BRINE, Martha Stewart was right as usual).

No one really looks at your socks, seriously why have Sponge Bob on them?  A couple of weeks ago, my family had one of those big dinner birthday parties for my dad up in Newmarket, and a quick shout out to the best Chinese food around:  Cynthia’s, link here,  crispy and greasy, that is divinity in any kind of cuisine as far as I am concerned.  Anyway, on our epic drive back my nephew had to swing by his place to change his socks.  He was wearing some funky striped pair that would not go with his suit that he had to wear to work that night:  “I will be fired for sure!”  If I didn’t have all the patience in the world for this boy, I would have stopped at a dollar store and bought him some plain black socks. Then came my realization: Every sock you own should be all the same, no exceptions…if you lose a sock or one gets a hole, you have a match somewhere in your drawer.  In fact, there should just be only one universal sock that everyone owns. And no one should be fired for wearing striped socks because they shouldn’t exist in the first place.  

I’m too cheap to buy new socks so the holes will have to rule.  Mostly I am a happy camper at the dregs of the 99% and I am committed to poverty so I will write a book.  I need to be poor and riddled with anxiety in order to be creative. If I was rich and happy, all I would do is yoga, shop, and get massages.  But as a poho, there are things I can happily cut back on to save a few bucks that I will share with you:

1. Bras and Underwear:  Sure, I used do the Victoria Secret thing, matchy poo pink half shelf decollete push up bra with pink tap shorts.  I truly believed that God was in the details and even what couldn’t be seen was divine until I realized that no, it was Satan messing with the lingerie. Don’t bother trying to match these things up. Aside from the fact that no one cares, you are only setting yourself up for failure. While your lilac bra sits in the drawer, your lilac panties are in the dirty laundry, you are poned.  Where is your leopard bra?   It’s in your gym locker, and its matching thong got caught on the stick shift of some dude’s tractor in the summer when you went on that winery tour.

From the bottom up, I wear cotton underwear from Aerie,it’s always on sale!  And most importantly, they are as absorbent as a thin Tena pad as I am little leaky when I put a key in the door, and no, that is not some innuendo. My bladder is an evil troll, it holds everything in for hours then bursts when it is 10 feet from a toilet. So annoying.  Moving on up: Lately all my plain black bras are on the last hook so until they snap, I don’t care, I fucking hate buying bras, it’s the worst expense ever!  Some of them cost $150!  I am just getting those kind from a box when there is a 3 for 1 Bay Day sale. Besides, no one is looking at my tits 😦 because everyone is so annoyingly politically correct these days.  Dumb asses, stop looking at my face,there’s errant chin hairs I sometimes forget to pluck, you’re just making me paranoid…I do not hoist these sweater puppies up in itchy lace and skin stabbing whale bone for my health. Sigh.

2. I cut my own hair!  My hairdresser doesn’t read this so I can say it:  I have been trimming my own bangs!  It’s not hard, you have to angle the scissors vertically and snip away.  It’s best to do it while you are drunk, ironically. because it’s the sober precision that makes it look unprofessional.  Also I dyed my own hair last month.  Fuck, I know, that is some poor shit but whatever. I covered up the side silvers and created a diversionary path of bleached highlights along the temple and then dumped a box of Garnier Nutrisse Intense in the reddest shade they had over the whole thing.  And no, I am not paid endorse this product, I really like it and it doesn’t smell bad and it makes my hair super shiny and it is now my crowning glory as long as you insist on looking at my face, dummy.

3.  I troll the grocery stores.  This is tricky business.  I am not a couponner,by any means.

It is annoying and boring for some people, but for me, it is the thrill of the hunt. I know the price of everything and stock up when there is a sale. The key is to not get carried away and end up with some blind ambition to “eat better” and then you end up with odd Dr. Oz endorsed miracle food items that you have no idea how to incorporate into your regular menu.  Fucking coconut oil taking up valuable counter space, chia seeds = mouse food. And slightly off topic:  Have you ever actually bought bananas for the purpose of them to rot so you can make banana bread and that is the time when your family and various interlopers devour them before you get a chance?  First world problems, ho, I got ’em!

4. I put garbage on my face. Dear Lord, my favourite thing to smear on my face at night  is Elizabeth Arden’s Prevage.  It looks like melted silly putty and smells like old money and feels like the jizz of a sweet prince and when you put it on at night, you wake up and your skin feels all smooth like buttah and you just want keep touching it and you can’t believe it is your face. It costs $200 for the pump bottle.  That is just crazy.  Every so often if I am playing smart hockey, I collect enough points on my Optimum card and I get that bitch for free at Shoppers but if I run out, I am stuck. Luckily, I am girl’s girl and I will talk the shit out of a cosmetic sales ho and they will give me handfuls of free samples.  Although it makes me feel a little sick inside as I have bomb shelter war hoarding mentality, I take a break and use household garbage instead: rotting avocados, rancid yogurt, I even smeared the guts of the Halloween pumpkin on my face last week. It is what they do in Europe, I say to myself.  You can convince yourself to do anything if you believe Europeans are doing it on purpose.  Don’t worry, I rinse it off and it’s as good a glow as I’m going to get.

Some things I will never skimp on.  I need pedicures, wild boar bacon, and HBO.  I am a hedonist, gluttonous sloth like that and that is a whole other future blog post.

Until then, here’s an entertaining clip from Russ Meyer’s “Eve and the Handyman,” I’m serious if you know one, hook me up:

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25

Oct. ’12

The Enlightened Old Bat and the F-Bomb

There is an upside to all these candles, there has to be.  I’m telling you as a “Lady of a Certain Age” on the slippery sleigh ride into Old Batdom, that the key to successful modern living is to practise the fine art of detachment. It is one of the principals of Buddhism. To not give a shit is a tangible entity. The path of enlightenment is paved with zero fucks.

Forget about “aging gracefully” the older you get the more you fall. There is nothing graceful about taking out the garbage in the morning and slipping on wet leaves and falling on your ass and landing in the dog poop area of your front lawn only to have your hot neighbour help you up and you are wearing a coffee stained Old Navy Tshirt and your weekend bra pops open as he pulls you up by the armpits.  Oh yeah,and afterwards you realize your pyjama pants have blood on the crotch and you have to console yourself with the thought:  “At least he knows I still get my period!”  True story and one ugly anecdote.

Wisdom is over-rated.  I only know all this shit about life because I have been slapped around the block a few times and I troll the internet 8 hours a day.  I would have been perfectly happy living to a hundred not knowing that a dude will actually lie and think nothing of treating your heart like a urinal mint. All that time wasted I could have just pleasantly masturbated to reruns of Gunsmoke.  Life would also be golden if I didn’t google up “goatse” and “tub girl-” why must I need to know everything?

And fuck Cameron Diaz.  Here she is in Esquire:

Here is what she says:  “For the first time in my life I’m content. I’m so excited. Getting older is the best part of life. Like, I know more than I’ve ever known. I have gratitude. I know myself better. I feel more capable than ever. And as far as the physicality of it — I feel better at 40 than I did at 25.”

Shut. Up. Turning 40 was the worst thing I ever did.  I will explain it all with this graph that took me two hours to make from a template on a children’s website.  Growing older doesn’t make you good at the internet, by the way, in spite of all the time spent on it:

The bottom numbers are age, and the number at the side represent “Fucks Given per year” which by my definition means how many days a year your ego gets the better of you.  And Cameron here is demonstrating how your undergarments reflect the state of your fat-ass evil ego.  Let me explain.

At Age 10, zero fucks are given because who cares?  You are 10, you walk out of the house wearing mismatched socks.  You think nothing of stuffing an entire pack of gum in your mouth while walking down the street singing at the top of your lungs. Your hair is a mess and you got lice on purpose, it’s hilarious! You get to miss school! You do not need a bra and your mother buys your Hello Kitty cotton underwear.

By Age 20, you don’t have to give a fuck because all the free fucks are given to you.  You can walk out of the house wearing your period underwear and some creeper will ask for your number because he smells fresh meat. Your ego is not yet fully formed because you are invincible. You also cut your own hair and it looks fantastic. Maybe once a month or so you will get a zit and feel bloated and you will cry because the last dude you gave your number to won’t call in a timely manner but that mood won’t last longer than a day, so maybe you will give only about 12 fucks a year, tops.

At Age 30, things are slipping a little.  The metabolic shift that your older sister predicted has fully kicked in and you have to worry about muffin tops.  At this age you are probably wearing matching bra and underwear because you think he thinks it is sexy.  Pro tip: Absolutely no one cares, Victoria Secret, especially the dude you are banging. But sometimes you need Spanx because that “bloat” is actually a flesh belt…remember when you were twenty and all you had to do was drink a pot of tea and you lost five pounds?  You worry about all this on a weekly basis.  Also you are plucking your chin hairs routinely with a magnifying mirror. Why did this happen?  It’s super sexy testosterone building up for your forties!  Hold on to your hooters, sister, because you’re in for a bumpy ride.

Aaaaand you are 40….it’s subtle at first but things are really starting to go tits up (or down, technically)…Everything needs to be pushed up, sucked in, and smoothed out.  Your hair has become a full time job.  You need professionals from around the world for every different type of follicle, not just on your head, but your brows need a Russian woman, your pubes need a Brazilian, and your Korean pedicurist waxes your toe hairs, and oh, how she laughs. And notice on the graph how the 40 year old woman gives a fuck 24/7, 365 days of the year?

40-something women are consumed with themselves.  They walk out of the house with their tits pushed up, and their leggings as pants.  They don’t need actual underwear!  The 40 year old woman is twice as likely to have sex at the gym than any other demographic so they would just get in the way.  The 40 year old woman has a mojo like a teenage boy.  She gives so many fucks that she will easily give one away if you ask her, go ahead ask her.

Trust me, this way of life is exhausting.  But relief is on its way (at least I am hoping).  And this is where the art of detachment comes into play.  Listen up, because the magazines won’t tell you this little secret:  The older you get, the less you care.

There is a rapid decline of fuck giving at the age of 50.  All that unbridled mojo is getting a bit embarrassing, isn’t it, Demi Moore?  The phantom ovulator or the full moon will pull you back in once a month and will only give a fuck because you are hornier than a Hoover. You will match your black bra with black Spanx and some sluttier sisters will wear a thong with those jeggings.  You are now dyeing your own hair because Botox costs $11 a unit and you need 30 to get rid of that bitter expression that is keeping the boys away.  Trust me, a few squirts of poison in your forehead every 3 or 4 months and you can still charm your way out of a traffic ticket.  So worth it.

At 60, you give zero fucks again, not like when you were ten, you would never put an entire pack of gum in your mouth but! You would think nothing of dropping $8,000 on a set of veneers. Who gives a fuck, YOLO?  Sometimes you don’t even bother with a bra, Susan Sarandon lets hers off-leash so why not?  And fuck Spanx, they ride up the ass, those boxer briefs the cabana boy left will do just fine.  Snap!

Hopefully as you go further on the chart, you have your health and you mind, and you will get a cake full of candles that you can light your cig off of…I will wash mine down with bourbon, and wear my bra on my head like a party chapeau.  And I will yell:

I am bat, hear me roar!

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17

Oct. ’12

In Praise of Sluts

It must be tiring to be a self-appointed conscience of the universe.  Judging the world from such lofty heights must take a toll.  So to those post-mortem critics of Amanda Todd’s tragic story, you have my permission to get off your high horses now.  Careful getting down, horses spook easily so if you get hoofed upside the head, consider it part of the hazards of your job, Judge Dickface McCuntington.  I’m specifically looking at you, Justin Hastings, but all you others can take a break and go back scrolling through 9gag.

I’m not an expert on bullying or suicide but I do know what it is like to be a teenager.  We didn’t have the internet back in my day but we had sluts and assholes and everything in between.

There was a girl, let’s just call her Sally, in my high school who was part of the crowd I hung out with.  She was ruthless. As soon as you let it be known that you had a crush on someone, this bitch would magically swoop in and pussy-block you.  And even before you could uncap the concealer stick to cover up the zit cluster on your chin, she would be holding hands in the hallway with your beloved, wearing his plaid lumber shirt like it was the yellow jacket in the Tour de France.

I’d say that I don’t know how she did it, but I do.  She had a massive sense of self-esteem which was unusual in a teenager.  She thought she was all that and a bag of chips, washed down with a can of Pepsi.  It was that kind of delusional thinking that made her go out and pursue a career in modelling.

“But you are only 5 feet tall!”  I exclaimed when she announced that she signed with an agency.

“You can be petite and be a model,” she scoffed at me. Petite!  She was a stump!  If she was 5 feet tall, half of her height consisted of her oddly formed banana-shaped head.  People go on about Sarah Jessica Parker’s horsey face but her equine sister was living a parallel life and going to high school in Quebec. In spite of her weird proportions, she walked like she owned the planet.  Having taken ballet in kindergarten, she maintained the posture and the stride, holding up her carriage as though her A-cup inverted (yes! they poked inward!) nipples were something to behold.

Of course nothing came of her modelling career because attitude like that doesn’t come across in 2-dimensions.  But those sort of set-backs never seemed to get her down.  She even starred in one of the most embarrassing moments from the history high school.

In Grade 9 during lunch hour one Spring day, we were all sitting outside by the moat, which was a hill in front of the school with a muddy stream running through it.  Some cute older boy was teasing her and pulled off one of her shoes in a tousle match that was just too nauseating to watch so we pretended we didn’t see so we couldn’t help her as they slid down the hill, entwined and giggling:  “Help me!”  Seriously we were hoping she’d just end up in the mud.  However, while she was making her descent downward, she was sliding on her ass, trying to get her shoe back.  As she slid, a big white blob started coming out on the back of her pants.  It soon became clear it was a gigantic-assed spent Kotex pad, the kind that required a belt that only an obese bedridden woman would have worn.  Oh how we laughed, and I don’t care, I am still laughing 30 years later.  So what?  It was my crush she made out with in front of my locker every day for three weeks.

Anyway, after she retrieved her shoe, one of us (not me!) took our sweet time telling her that her pad was hanging out, the bitch just dusted herself off and tied a jean jacket around her waist and strutted into the washroom.  And that guy who wrestled her down the moat asked her out, of course.  Just like Cinderella.

Her home life was so strange that if I described it to you, you’d think I was making it up.  She was the middle of 7 kids.  Her mom was obese which was not all that common back in those days.  She would fashion sarongs out of bedsheets and lay on the couch, supposedly “studying for her masters” while she barked orders at Sally in particular:  “Clean the main floor!” Maybe that’s why we had compassion for her, we saw her as some kind of real-life Cinderella and we didn’t completely hate her for snatching our menfolk. Although we all harboured a grudge with her at some point, we were still her friends.

Sometimes her mom would get dressed and waddle out of the house and hitch a ride on the school bus and make him drop her off at the mall.  Of course this was mortifying to Sally but she would staunchly defend her mother, “She lost twenty pounds on the banana diet!”  How can you tell?  She can tie her sheet up in a second knot.

Her father was the true horror of the family.  They had a female cat that they refused to get spayed and she would get pregnant twice a year.  Sometimes Sally would come to school with scratches on her arm, “Missy had her kittens!  Come over and play with them!”  You’d have to make sure you got there within two weeks, otherwise Papa Kittenkiller would have already bagged them up and dumped in the river.  This was normal to them.

But Sally painted her family life as something entirely different from what it actually was.  We saw her parents as villainous, macabre characters from a fairy tale, she portrayed them as a successful engineer and an intellect with European flare.  It was sad really and the fact that she commit patricide and/or matricide was a testimony to her fortitude.

This is probably how she got away with fucking our boyfriends behind our backs.

Unlike the girls in Amanda Todd’s life, we didn’t gang up on her and beat her up. Boys didn’t call her a slut either. Are some people prone to bullying?  Maybe they possess a kind of vulnerability that threatens us so much that we have to hate them because it is something we don’t want to see in ourselves.

And by the way, why is it that when a man (or a boy in Amanda’s case) cheats, it is the woman who gets vilified?  Here’s what I have to say you, little sisters:  Get used to it.

“Cheating” seems to be an innate sense of entitlement that men are born with, as the Jay McInerney writes in The Good Life:  “..all men need four things: food, shelter, pussy and strange pussy.”

Personally as a 40-something woman, I’d much rather be strange pussy than the regular pussy.  A friend, who is my age, said the other day, “If it weren’t for married men, I would never get laid!” It seems to me that most modern people get married just to placate their fear of being alone. Maybe women need to take a page from Jackie Kennedy’s book and learn to practice the art of Buddhist detachment.  I don’t know, I’m just telling you what I see. I like to say that all the men my age have died in the war, hence my penchant for 25 year olds.

Oh, and back in high school, I got called a slut because they couldn’t figure me out. I did wild things like strip in the orchard and run through the bonfire. If I had the internet back then, I would have been one of those gone wild girls on reddit.com.  I’d streak, I’d moon, I once even answered the door to a pizza man stark naked when I was 15!  I can tell you, I didn’t do it for validation. I felt empowered, the opposite of vulnerable.  I am a naked beast, and like Amanda Todd, I need to be loved.  But fuck off if you can’t take a joke.

I am slut, hear me roar!

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03

Oct. ’12

Why This Little Piggy Quit The Market

My parents wanted to move in the Spring.  They just hired a new real estate duo after having listed their house with a feckless wanker for 90 days who begrudgingly took some time out of his fapping schedule to take down his sign and come and get his lockbox and say he was sorry in a passive aggressive way:  “I guess everybody is blaming the market on me.”  Shut. The. Front. Door.

Real estate isn’t rocket science but it’s tricky. It’s a lot of smoke and mirrors and spinning the headlines that the newspapers spout out daily about “The Market” in a way that can get things rolling.  The new agents that they hired seem to have the system down and their game plan tight. When I met them, I didn’t tell them I used to be an agent, but they guessed pretty quickly.  It’s like a secret society.  The truth is that most agents are actually cool and if you see one with his or her picture on a bus shelter, feel free to draw a dick on the side of their faces, they love a good joke.

When my kids were really young and before I got smart and joined a gym that had kickass daycare that I could leave them in for two glorious hours everyday, I hung out at the Williamson Road Rec Centre 3 mornings a week.  There was a room upstairs, hosted by an ancient lady named Alma and we, the hapless beach mothers, would dump our kids with her, throw a toonie in her teacup and head to the gymnasium for an old fashioned aerobics class.  Alma was frail and in first stages of dementia but none of us cared. It was a whole hour for us to shimmy around with out a sticky little cling-on sucking on our tits.

I made fast friends with a woman named Heather who was obsessed with local real estate.  She got me right into it. It was just Before the Internet (B.I.) and we would get all excited for every second Tuesday when the Beach Metro News would come out and the local realtors (who were like celebrities to us) would advertise their latest listings.  We’d go to open houses on weekends and we’d convene on Monday in the line up to get into the rec centre.  We’d come extra early to get a limited spot because lazy old Alma could only handle a half tonne of shitty diapers in a sitting.

“Did you see the house on Willow?  What a dump! I can’t believe what they’re asking!”

“Is that Natasha von Beaverstein’s listing?  (note: names have been changed!)  God, she’s scary in person!  Honestly, I thought she was a vampire, I actually gasped when she opened the door!”

Heather and I both joined the Mayfair on the same day. She had the brilliant idea to enroll our kids in afternoon kindergarten so we could put them in the gym daycare in the mornings and then while they were in school, we could troll houses.  It turned out all the real estate agents were members and would work out in the mornings.  The 9:30 step class was like a red carpet event for us. Real estate agents all had the same kind of look:  Coiffed hair and thong (!) leotards over top of leggings. This was Before Lululemon (B.L.) and it was the hot look, don’t judge. Heather and I wore oversized tshirts and cycling shorts because you can’t take the rec centre out of the girl.

We befriended Dawn in the locker room.  Dawn was a sassy agent with Prudential, she was sexy and glamourous with bountiful hair and boobs to match. She was also desperately trying to get pregnant with her super hot husband. She was interested in us because we had kids, and we adored her because she was an agent. In my mind, her life was perfect but she had her share of problems.  The main one was that she was sick of fucking her husband.

“Ladies, can I ask you a question?” She asked us one day as we were changing into our gym gear.

“Of course!” I love a question.  Seriously, ask me anything.

“Do you still give your husbands blow jobs?” She sighed forlornly as she snapped her thong into place.

Heather roared:  “God no!  I have all the furniture I need!”

Oh how we laughed for a year after that. “Furniture” became our euphemism for all things sexual: “I’m going in the whirlpool to rub out an ottoman,” “That new trainer is cute, I’d like to straddle his Chesterfield,” etc…

As the time passed, Dawn finally became pregnant (and got the worst hair cut ever!) and Heather went off to get her real estate license and stopped coming to the gym altogether. I got a personal trainer and my mojo became an untamed monster, definitely fodder for a future blog post after a few slugs of Bourbon, you’ll want to stay tuned for that.

One day in the locker room, a couple of months after Dawn had her baby and her hair had miraculously grown back to its former glory, she strutted naked in front of me and said, “Well, I got my body back!  Let’s go get our belly buttons pierced this afternoon.”

Alrighty.  There’s pretty much nothing I won’t do if someone asks.  So we got our belly buttons pierced and afterwards, in my mind, it was time for a pint but she said, “Well, it’s back to work!”

“What is it that you do?”  It’s one o’clock in the afternoon, cocktail hour for the moms of the world.  Don’t real estate agents have the same kind of schedule?

“Get your real estate license already!”  she said, buttoning up her Burberry trenchcoat with her acrylic French manicured fingernails. And her hair.  It was blond and shiny, and when she flung it out from under her collar it landed all straight and smooth without those wispy flyaways.  Something snapped in my brain:  “OKAY I WILL!”

So that was the day my real estate career was conceived. By the time I got my license, the internet was a happening thing and I joined Prudential just as Dawn was leaving.  Get this:  Dawn’s super hot husband got dot-com mega-wealthy in the internet porn industry!  They moved to the Bahamas! She had another baby!  The only bad thing I can say about her is that her belly button got infected after the piercing and she had to take the ring out! Bitch!

I learned quickly that the real estate industry is not as easy as it looks.  When we first bought a house, the agents had daily books where they looked up listings and took you to see houses by appointment.  The internet was changing everything, now the old timey agents were sitting in the bull pens playing Solitaire on the computer while the young ‘uns were interwebbing on the go with their Blackberrys.  It was a whole new ball game.

I didn’t know where to begin so I pretended it was like the good old days when Heather and I went poking into open houses and making fake appointments from the newspaper ads. I got some clients advertising other people’s listings in one of those real estate rags that are distributed in the boxes on street corners.  It was how I met the amazing late Shelagh Gordon whose obituary was a beautiful feature story in the Toronto Star earlier this year.  She sold ad space and also played part-time life coach to disgruntled real estate agents throughout the GTA.

“I don’t know how to word these ads!’  I complained to her over the phone.  Back when Heather and I were amateurs, the houses we visited were all lived-in hoarding messes.  You’d walk into an open house, and people were cooking their dinners or a teenager would still be asleep in his room. Houses were homes. We could refer to them by how they smelled:  “The Gangrene House” in East York (where the diabetic alcoholic husband refused medical attention while both his feet rotted) was one of our very favourites!  Everyone was starting to “stage’ their houses to sell and they all looked alike and they all smelled like Glade plug-ins.

“Try and evoke an emotion using words like “cozy and charming,”‘ she suggested.

“If I see another living room painted the colour of a paper bag with two matching Barcelona chairs framing the window, I am going to take a shit in the punchy pomegranate powder room and NOT flush the toilet!  Rage is the only emotion I can come up with!”

“I sooo get what you are saying, it’s like those agents say:  Let’s put some lipstick on this pig and take it town!” she laughed, and it was the first time I heard that expression and it stuck.

And that’s pretty much how I thought of my whole real estate career over the next 5 years, only I was the pig in lipstick.

I did have some good times and really great clients but something wasn’t jiving. The only reason I got into the business was because I loved going into people’s homes and checking out how they lived, I fancied myself a modern anthropologist. There were stories in them there walls.  And I loved the buyers who also had their own stories to tell while I drove them around. They had visions of how they wanted their homes to be.  But as the houses for sale were all looking indistinguishable from each other, the buyers had lost all imagination, they all wanted the same open concept, granite counter tops, and pot lights.  This blueprint made successful real estate agents even more successful and the rest fall by the wayside.

So I quit. I’ve got enough stories in my head to entertain you for a while.

I lost track of Heather because she moved to a fancier neighbourhood and doesn’t have Facebook but I found out through her old neighbour that she had also quit real estate.  She works in the designer district on King Street and of all things, she sells FURNITURE!  True story.

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25

Sep. ’12

What Would Patrick Swayze Do?

I have plantar fasciitis which when you tell some people, they back away because it sounds ugly and contagious.  It’s just inflammation of the connective tissues on the sole of the foot. It’s a common ailment amongst runners and fat people which is hilariously poetic because in order to treat it, you either have to stop running or lose weight.  Runners gotta run and eaters gotta eat so plantar fasciitis better heal itself or else you might have to go out and buy $800 orthotics.

My condition came about last month walking the lumpy roads of Rome in flip-flops for over a week and when I got home, I could walk no more.  Now when I get out of bed, a searing pain shoots up my heel and I’d have to tip-toe to the toilet.  I’ve had this before after I pronated my way through a marathon 14 years ago and I know how long it takes to heal…months!  And as they in Game of Thrones, winter is coming.  I’m going to have to wear real shoes soon.  I have ignore it, just shoot me if you see me wearing Uggs this year.

“Mother, you need to go to a doctor!” says my daughter as I hobble around the house.

“No!  Doctors don’t fix anything!  They shuffle you around to “specialists” and you will always end up getting a parking ticket just to find out all you need is an ice pack!”

“Then put on an ice pack!”

“Ugh, I can’t be bothered.”  The Internet says to roll a ball or a bottle under the sole the foot to massage it.  There are half a dozen tennis balls under any given piece of furniture in my house and yet I also can’t be bothered to do that.

What doesn’t kill me only makes me stoic.  Am I a self-imposed martyr?

When I was a teenager and in my early twenties, for some reason I would only get my period once a year in the summer time. When I did get it, it would last two weeks and I would be double over in pain, like there was a burning ball of fire somewhere in my reproductive system. And let’s not even talk about the gushing flow because I know how you hate gruesome bodily fluids.  No doctor could figure it out.  Finally when I was 21, one genius medical practitioner came up with an obvious solution.

“Go on birth control pills, it will fun,” they said.  It would regulate my cycle and I would become a real woman instead of a vessel for some Satanic spawn.  I lasted three months and I became a monster, as though all the estrogen I had been lacking came on at once and you certainly wouldn’t have wanted to be there when it did.

Anyway, flash further back to the summer when I was 18 and working at my dad’s company in an office full of menfolk, I got my annual period in the morning.  I ended up stuck in the washroom, doubled over with horrific cramps. My dad had to drive me home.  He thought I was faking it or being a total wimp or something. “This is not normal,” he kept saying, “You don’t go home for something like this.” No this is just really embarrassing, so I ignored the cramps the next day and sucked back the Midol. My dad fought in World War 2 for God sake.

Pain:  Deal with it.

Even though I had a wacky menstrual schedule that no doctor could explain, I was able to conceive much to everyone’s shock and my horror. Of course now that I am old and my eggs are rotten, my uterine lining sheds regularly with every waning moon…hilarious joke, troll ovaries.   Anyway, my  pregnancy went smoothly and my lazy-ass lady parts actually got its act together and created a baby without any glitches.  I did go through the birthing process without any pain management because the roving, moronic intern at St. Michael’s Hospital was an asshole.  Long story short:  He assumed because of the dodgy neighbourhood the hospital in that I was a crack whore and my baby would be born severely underweight and needing methadone. I would have rather experience endless hours of fiery ball-of-hell contractions than have that douchebag in the room.  After I told him to fuck off, he craned his head into the room, “Do you want an epidural?” he asked before my actual doctor arrived to catch the 8 pound butterball that took her sweet time sliding out.  NO EPIDURAL!!!  

Pain: Please stop,  I will pay you.

Fast forward 10 years later to 2003, I’m in East General Hospital having my wrist X-rayed.  Two weeks earlier I had fallen off my bike, trying to get on it after having a few tequila shots at a beach party.  I landed on my ass, and used my right hand to break the fall. I heard a loud crack. I hobbled home, bike in tow and I think nothing of it the next day.  I have to learn how to drive standard because I had just leased a Mini Cooper and I am taking my real estate courses and my Phase 2 exam is in 3 weeks.  It hurts my wrist to shift gears and I keep stalling the car, I can’t find the sweet spot and I am a big mess.

“I think I might have broken my wrist,”  I say this out loud in the ladies locker room at my gym.  It’s a week after I fell off my bike.  My wrist is swollen.  And not to mention what happened to my tailbone, I have to hang my ass 6 inches off the back of Spinning bike seat otherwise I feel like I am being sodomized by a bulldozer.

“If you broke your wrist, you would know it,” one woman says.  Another genius….yes, a light goes off when you break a bone and tells you that you need to go to the hospital.  Pro tip: Never listen to advice from a naked bitch with a towel turban on her head.

When things just got worse, I went to the hospital and got an X-ray.

“You know,” said the orthopaedic surgeon to the daft cow,”you could have saved yourself a whole lot of trouble if you had come in right after the accident, we could have set it in a cast then.  Now we have to operate and reset the bone, otherwise you’ll be in for some very painful arthritis in the future.”

Pain:  Sometimes it knows best, let it speak.

And I didn’t even have the guts to say anything about my aching tailbone, that bitch is just going to have to shut up and behave. My wrist injury actually thrills me.  An operation!  How exciting!

After the operation, and then getting the cast off, I started taking Hatha yoga classes and later Bikram yoga to become more mindful about my body and learn how to heal itself.

A couple of years later, I saw Bikram Choudhury speak in one of those hotel convention halls downtown and teach one of his classes.  During Q and A, some woman, maybe it was me, asked him, “How long does it take for the pain to go away?”  He just looked at her like she was a frog on the highway and said, “When you are dead!”  Oh how I laughed, and then cried.

Pain: Seriously?

Today I hobbled to the gym.  Since I got back from Italy, I have missed all my favourite classes and come in at a different times so I don’t have to see anyone.  I haul myself in the whirlpool and put my foot on the jets.  It hurts so much!!!! I hate being a baby about this. One guy I knew used to whimper and moan about every canker sore and hang nail he had, like he was going to die any minute.  Once he had a splinter that he let fester in his foot and he hobbled around for a month before he would let someone pull it out for him. Dude, I have gravel still stuck in my elbow from when I scraped the pavement on my bike (again with the bikes!) in grade 8.  Grow some balls, I said to myself.

So I got dressed in my gym gear and made my way to the battlefield where I ran into Douglas, my very favourite gym buddy.  Douglas is a octogenarian who routinely plays two hours of tennis after a spin class.  Every day.

“Where have you been, Freddy?” (that’s my gym moniker).

“Oh, I have plantar fasciitis,” I explain, “I’m taking it easy.”

“I had that twice, on both feet. I got it playing squash.  There’s nothing you can do about it, you just have to keep going,” he says.

“But it hurts!”  There is not enough wool in the world to pull over his eyes.

“Suck it up, Freddy!”  he laughs maniacally and saunters away.  Pro tip:  Always listen to an 80-something year old man who can Zumba in the front of the class without missing a beat. So I carry on.  It is what Patrick Swayze would do.

Pain:  You are my bitch. Tomorrow, we spin!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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23

Sep. ’12

Let She Without Noxious Gas Cast The First Grande Latte

Fuck yeah, Honey Boo Boo!

I love the show Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, so sue me.  Last week, TLC was showing a bunch of back-to-back episodes for two hours so  I made someone (who shall remain anonymous) watch it with me.  With his eyes rolled back in his head and his forefinger pressed into his temple, he plopped his arse on the couch, promising “just one episode.”

Three episodes later, not having moved from the couch, he says:  “That Mama June…I thought she was going to be a daft cow, but she is a really good mother.”

You need to see if for yourself without your hipster judgey-wudgey glasses on, I think more urban haute-bourgeoisie mothers need to take a page out of Mama June’s book.

The plot of the each episode is meaningless.  Mostly the family goes about their mundane business of buying donuts at the Friday auction(!), jumping in mud puddles, participating in child beauty pageants, etc.  Every activity is punctuated with someone having something either exploding or oozing out of a random orifice…and don’t wince and get all high horse over the white trash redneck fart gags.  You laughed at the group diarrhea scene in Bridesmaids, don’t lie.

That’s the thing about families, if you can’t fart in front of them, then who can you fart in front of?  The Honey Boo Boo clan don’t give a shit, they do it on national tv.  That is what makes them superstars.  Which is why this show is on The “Learning” Channel, because we should all learn to clear the snot from our nose and embrace each other for our foibles and follies.  Jesus Hillbilly Christ.

When my daughter was a toddler and I was pregnant with Freddy, I didn’t really know what I was doing parenting-wise because there was no internet back then!  A Starbucks opened up on the bottom of our street so a gang of mothers would park their Peg Peregos on the patio and plunk their Pilates asses on the couch configuration in the mornings after the office worker crowd had left. Their spawn ranged in age from newborn to preschool toddler-types and the topic of conversation was about their children, super boring details about potty training and diaper rashes that at the time were fascinating because I was going through it.  They called themselves “The Yummy Mommies” because they thought they were so hot and their placenta tasted like foie gras.

The YM’s there didn’t really like me much.  Once I ordered a hot chocolate and when I sat  down to the circle jerk, I popped the lid off my cup and spilled a bit on my lap.  But I had to blame someone else because that is what a Yummy Mommy would do.

“Stupid barista over-filled this,” I said.

One of the women scowled at me and said: “We don’t say that word here.”

“What word?”  I’m thinking “barista”…is that like saying “stewardess” instead of “flight attendant?”  Did I miss the memo?

“The “S” word,”  she said.

“I didn’t say shit!  I said “barista!”

“No….,” she put her hand over her mouth and whispered, “Stupid…we don’t say stupid.”  And she petted her child’s ears as though to protect him from the evils of the world. “Words have power” was what they said as they shamed me.

Oh for fucksake, if I weren’t so lonely, I would have left and never come back.  But I had to, or I would have committed murder.

I hung out with those stupid twats during the winter when Evangeline was in her terrible twos.  That was when she refused to wear a winter coat or boots.  I’d put her in the stroller and we’d walk down Waverley Road in the middle of January while she peeled off her coat and kicked off her boots, screaming at the very top of her lungs:  “NO COAT ON!!! NO BOOTS ON!!!!”

The truth was that I didn’t really give a shit if she didn’t want to wear a coat or boots in freezing cold but I had to pretend to care.  Otherwise I would be a bad mother.  I’d stop the stroller and say calmly and firmly (and loudly in case anyone was listening), “Please put your coat, Evangeline, you will freeze!”  I would bundle her up as she squirmed and arched her back.

“NO COAT ON!!!!!!!” 

She ripped her coat off like a Hulk-baby and there would be just no way I could win.  I’d keep it hovered over her so no one would call Child Services.

This sort of fuckery would occur in various forms with her for 8 years. Epic tantrums that would end with me taking her (and later Freddy, who was always so quiet and happy) for a drive in the country as I would fantasize about dumping her on the side of the road and living a peaceful life.  Okay, I did actually dump her once at the dead end street with the ravine in back of Corpus Christi school and drove half a block while she just stood there dumbfounded.  And I will confess to you, it was the greatest feeling in the world, even if it only lasted 20 seconds before I turned around.  Damn guilt.

I could not tell you how many times I pulled out the Yellow Pages and turned to “Adoption Agencies.”  I would say to her, calmly and rationally:  “I will find you another home if you hate it here so much.” And she would be all like, “Right, mom.”  Then as the last resort, I would start to cry and pull out the guilt card and say, “You don’t love me anymore, I’m so disappointed!  Boo hoo!” For some reason, it would kill her to think that I would be “disappointed” and she get all sorry and sweet and hug me.  But that ploy only worked for a short time.  She knew my crying was fake and she woud say:  “Stop with the cock-a-dillo tears, mom!”  She couldn’t pronounce “crocodile.”

The final tantrum occurred one late afternoon in January.  Evangeline, age 8, was obsessed with Harry Potter and found out through the school grapevine that The Nutty Chocolatier on Queen Street was selling magic jellybeans from the movie, the ones that tasted like barf and coconuts.  But it was getting dark and Freddy was already in his jammies and refused to go.

“We’ll go tomorrow,” I said, “let’s clean up the living room.” (not the best diversionary tactic)

Screaming tantrum ensued.  I ignored it and waited for it to pass, which was the current strategy.  And it eventually did. Something good was on tv.  I had won the battle without any effort at all.

A few moments later, the doorbell rang.

Aaaand it was two police officers.

“Ma’am,” one of them said, “There’s been a report.  Someone called and said that a child was being harmed.”

“No, no, no, that was just my daughter having a fit.  She wanted to go to a candy store and get some magic jellybeans.  She wasn’t getting her way so she started yelling,”  I tried to explain but story sounded ridiculous.

“Someone heard it from the bus stop and said they saw you hitting the child,” One of the officers said sternly.  Cops are the scariest people on the planet. You always feel guilty around them even if you are not.

“I can assure you, I didn’t hit her!”  The one time I was actually completely calm and rational is when I get busted.

“Well we are going to have to check for marks.  Both kids,” they said, entering the house.

Of course the house was a giant mess of toys and laundry.  The police took both Freddy and Evangeline in the dining room and closed the door while they checked them over.  I knew they wouldn’t find anything but that was the worst feeling of shame and humiliation ever.  Having cops come to your house to check your kids for welts is not a chapter in any of the “What To Expect”  books.

But as it turned out, the one who felt the most shame and humiliation was Evangeline.  From that day forward, she never had another tantrum or fit again.

She turned into the Golden Child with the most even temper of anyone I know.  But I can’t help but think that if I wasn’t so worried about looking like the perfect mother for the Starbucks circle jerk that I could have saved myself years of grief.

Mama June would let Honey Boo Boo walk barefoot in the snow if they had it in Georgia.  And she wouldn’t be caught dead in Starbucks.  She is that cool.

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16

Sep. ’12

The Crazy Lady of Box Land

The other day I decided to go to Walmart to see if the commercials were true and everything is cheaper. I like to support local businesses but sometimes I wake up with my hair in sideways beehive, a giant pillow crease on my face, and my tits falling out of the sides of the ahh-bra and I just want to go incognito to Box Land and push a cart through the aisles while I sing to myself and just generally blend in.

I went to the one up in Scarborough and used the back roads to get there. It’s a sunny Saturday morning and I am anxious to get a bunch of crap that I am listing off in my head:  Pop tarts, sardines, canned Coke, etc.

On my way,driving through the streets of suburbia which I love by the way, I admire the little post war bungalows.  Back in the day when I was a real estate agent, I would troll those houses that were for sale and imagine myself living in one, blissfully alone.  You know how people in this town think all that fugly gumwood trim is so “classy?” Well I hate it! I would paint it all out in Benjamin Moore cloud white and the walls Tiffany blue and decorate with 1960s Danish teak furniture from Atomic Age.  My little bungalow would be so sweet and I would be so very happy and complete.

I still have the same fantasy, except with a practical touch!  I would find one with a self-contained basement apartment that I would rent to some young man from a foreign country like Serbia who had a temporary work visa.  In our Bungalow of Utopia, he would fix things around the house.  On hot summer days, I would make him lemonade and we would sit on the back deck that he built with that new kind of environmentally-friendly pressure treated wood from Rona.  He would take off his sweaty shirt and he would be all muscly and tanned, and we would sit in awkward silence, fraught with sexual tension.  He would speak very little English but I would patiently teach him and by the end of the summer, we would have entire conversations.  He would even get my jokes.

Later in the fall, while shopping at Home Depot, on a whim we would decide to buy a hot tub in time for winter! I’m not really community hot tub person, although I *do* take the jets in my gym whirlpool seriously. The ones that people have in their backyard are lame but it is kind of fun to be outside in hot tub in the middle of the winter and rolling in the snow and getting back in all numb and tingly. Milos (that’s his name, by the way) tells me  about the hot tub he had in his childhood growing up in Montenegro and I have to give in, as his face looks like a pleading puppy.  So cute I can hardly stand it.

I always have the longest build ups to any given sex daydream which is what a car ride to the suburbs is all about.  But just as I am about to pull into the Walmart parking lot and finish off this fantasy that get super-hot in the hot tub and then ultimately ends in Milos being deported back to Serbia, I see this woman walking on the street, barefoot.

As I get closer, I can see she is bat shit crazy.  Her hair is sticking out in the back, her pants are rolled up, and she is talking to herself.  Actually, there’s not a whole lot of difference between her and me except I am wearing flip flops and I am in a car.  Seriously, not only was I talking out loud to fictional Milos, I’m actually blogging about it.  That is certifiable.

I blame my neighbours!  It’s because of them and their do-gooding ways that have rubbed off on me that I can’t ignore this woman. They are always helping people in need, especially me, that I have to pay it forward. I am going to miss them when I move into my Box Land bungalow.

So I stop the car and open the passenger window and call out to Crazy, “Do you need any help?”

She is speaking in tongues or in some other language.  She completely ignores me!  But she is wearing no shoes and I feel bad for her so I take off my flip flops and run out of the car and wave them at her.

She stops,looks at me blankly and takes the flip flops and puts them on her feet.

“They are too fucking big!  I can’t walk in these!”  She kicks them off and stomps away, resuming her monologue of gibberish.

Aaaal-righty, then.  I tried.

And at Walmart, a tin of sardines is 97 cents and at Loblaws $1.39.  Pop tarts are also a whole dollar cheaper per box. And I score an awesome deal on Colgate toothpaste and Great Lash mascara so I am ahead of the game.   So really, it was worth the drive to Box Land.  On the way back, Milos and I argue over the radio station.  I do not like hip hop! But I let him have his way because compromise is the cornerstone of every successful relationship.

And speaking of box, from my In-Box,I got another e-mail asking for advice…I love this!  Keep them coming:

I went through my husband’s browsing history and found all these filthy porn sites!  I am freaked out, I feel like he is cheating on me.  I confronted him and he got all defensive and he said he would stop but I think he is lying because he erases his history.  This is not how I was brought up, I don’t know what to do.

I don’t think anyone was “brought up” on internet porn, it’s something you find for yourself, a private exploration.  Men are visual sex pigs and if it wasn’t for internet porn, they would be out on the streets, trolling the malls, going up and down the escalators with mirrors in their hands.  Don’t feel he is cheating on you and most of all, don’t feel you have to compete with these interweb hos.  Typically men do not marry their porn so you don’t really have a chance anyway.  He is googling up the opposite of you. Instead, check out some of it yourself. You can google all the fetish-type stuff you want and you wouldn’t have to waste so much time reading 50 Shades of Grey garbage.  Women read that shit in public! That slays me. As a woman, I enjoy internet porn because sometimes I am too exhausted creating these elaborate Terrence Malick-feature length sex fantasies in my head and I can just get to the juicy bits and maybe learn a trick or two. And if it really bothers you so much, dump him. And send him to my house.  I’ll let him live in the basement.

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06

Sep. ’12

Why You Should Dump Your Blackberry: A Cautionary Tale

My daughter has a friend named Marta who is 19 going on 35.  She is one of those girls’ girls who you want to hang out with and watch “Say Yes to the Dress” while doing your nails.  In fact, I have pilfered her as my own pal.  She is fun and laughs at my jokes.

She is also man-crazed which is refreshing because most women my age are casualties of love and have been dumped every which way and sideways,  They are bitter and jaded as they manically farm their match dot com profiles like the Daters’ Almanac is predicting a drought. They are not out banging for the joy of it.  They want to land a marriage contract.  The so-called lucky ones who have been married for twenty years are also bitter and jaded. To them, men are feckless fucktards and need to live in their own compounds, as far away from book clubs and yoga classes as possible.  I am divorced and my ex-husband is a good guy so I’m not so bitter.  But in the past, my heart has been through the meat grinder by more than one gentleman and used as an emotional diaper genie by one particular baby-man, I still can’t get a hate-on for all the mens.  I have hope!  I may not believe in love but I believe my next great fuck is just around the corner, the 8-ball says:  YOU MAY RELY ON IT.  The Magic 8-Ball has been my trusted life coach since I downloaded the app on my i-Phone.

Marta has been fluffing my wilting mojo all summer  She saw “Magic Mike” on opening day and then had to go to a male strip club in real life.  She and Kasey went to Remingtons on Yonge Street to check it out.  It was nothing less than spectacular.

“Kristin!” she squealed,”They put their pee pees right in your face and they even let you put it in your mouth!”

Now don’t get the wrong idea:  She did not pop one in her mouth (although I wasn’t there…??? Only Kasey knows for sure) but it was her enthusiasm over the fact that you could if you wanted to that made me laugh. As though it would be an honour and privilege, like holding the Olympic torch.  So cute!

When Marta rides in my car, she rolls down the windows and hollers at the boys on the street.  They wave back and howl, roar, and cock-a-doodle-doo.  They are hot, even when they are not.  Her attention shines their inner light.  To Marta, men are prey and she is the hunter.  A shameless hunter, too, she does not wear camouflage.  She is a hot Latina with hair and boobs.  And when the occasion calls for it, more hair and more boobs.  “I have a flat ass!” she complains, as though anyone would ever notice.  And if that was the case, it’s only fair.  “Do not hog all the mojo, Marta,” said the gods as they distributed the body parts, spanking her on the way out of the warehouse.

All men are targets.  Young, old, hairy, bald, fat, thin….She is the United Nations Ambassador of Penis.  “Cute Asian guy is working at Starbucks!” she texts as a head line, “Sikh guy is on the bus!  I tried to take his picture but just got the back of his turban!”

I took her to my manly butcher shop and she giggled until she stopped breathing, “Oh My God, Kristin, that butcher was so hot!  I almost died!”  Not embarrassing at all.

About my 16 year-old son Freddy:  “When he’s older, I can marry him, three years won’t make a difference when he’s 30…LOL!”

Marta and her mom went away for Labour Day weekend.  They left Friday and came back Monday.  Something bad happened with the wonky upstairs toilet and the entire house was flooded.

Even in a serious disaster, when life gives you lemons, Marta can make man-juice out of it.  The work crew that came to clean up the house had a couple of “hotties” on the team.  If something like this happened to me I’d be all like “Fuck!  My Fluevogs! My acid drawings! The Polaroids! ” (I knew that was a bad idea, making baby albums with a Polaroid camera).

But not Marta. No fretting about wet stuff.   Marta made a Facebook friend out of a Persian dude, while subtly flirting with Pakistani hottie on the first day.

“Kristin, dilemma!  The Persian is cute but I think I like the other one better.  He’s really tall and I’m pretty sure there was chemistry…but the Persian asked for my number…Oh God…what do I do?”  She brought a bag of flood soaked laundry to my house.  She is basically homeless.  And this is her concern.

“I don’t know…tomorrow is another day,” I said, loading up the washer,”By the way, you know I never use a dryer, I hang everything.”

“Oh, my God, Kristin, I hang dry everything too!”  We are laundry sisters and penis-loving soul mates.

The next day, Marta went back to her house, where the workers were pulling up carpet and taking down walls.  Pretty much the entire house was wrecked!

But:

“The Pakistani guy added me on BBM!”

Apparently while she was pretending to retrieve something from the basement where he was tending to the flood, he leaned over and asked her for her code. That is a significant step in social media mating rituals and only Blackberry people understand it. There was definitely chemistry, he’s 25, single, going to school and has a job…in other words, the Holy Grail of young men.

“You have to see his BBM profile, I’m coming over!” she texted.

It’s a twenty-minute bus ride.  When she arrived at my house, she was not happy.

“He deleted me from BBM!  He added ME!  And then he deleted me some time between when I left the house and got off the bus!  What.The. Fuck????”

Evangeline was reading the Hunger Games and did not even attempt to answer, she put her face into the book and completely ignored the following two hours.

Me:  Maybe he accidentally pressed a delete button…

Marta: You can’t do that by accident!  It’s step-by-step process!

Me: Maybe there was a glitch in the system.  Sometimes Twitter has glitches and you unwittingly unfollow someone…

Marta:  There are no Blackberry glitches!  I’ve never had a glitch! The fucking douche deleted me!  He added ME first!

Me:  Calm down…I am Googling and there are entire forums dealing with people who accidentally delete BBM contacts so it probably happens all the time….

Marta:  Those people on forums are mentally unstable!  Unless you are sleep walking you don’t “accidentally” delete people!

And so, like two dogs devouring a bone, we picked apart every detail and analyzed every nuance until our eyes started to roll into the back of our heads.  I am so down with that kind of thing, I never get bored. I can come up with a plausible scenario for every douche move that any dude can ever pull.  It’s actually a curse.  Normal people say:  Dump his ass!  But I say:  Maybe he had a bad childhood.  And then I will make up an entire biography from birth up until the time the toilet overflowed.

I conclude this is why you shouldn’t have a Blackberry. As if Facebook isn’t enough of a scourge to our modern communication, worrying about friend requests, liking statuses, deleting friendships, it’s all so terrifying.  BBM is a mystery world to me, like a secret underground social network of Masons….it can only lead to bad things. And Blackberry doesn’t have a Magic 8 Ball app so how are you supposed to manage your life effectively?  Best to dump that thing and switch to an iPhone or Android where all you do to waste time is play games.

And Marta is Marta and she has already moved on, of course.  Hunters gotta hunt.  And that is why I love her so.

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