13

Oct. ’11

Another One Bites The Dust

“Two legs!  Check!”  Keep the captions coming.

And here we have another marriage for Sir Paul McCartney.  This one is to some heiress who looks like a Jewish version of Kate Middleton, it all happened so secretly and “classy” this time around.  Money goes a long way when you need to keep things smooth.  She has two lovely legs.  I don’t know her name, you probably don’t either, and there’s no point learning it because chances are something more interesting will come up and Brad and Angelina will finally tie the knot and that will be the quintessential marriage made in heaven.  Apparently, they will get married when everyone can get married, especially the gays.   When Brad and Angelina get married, that means the whole world order will become pure and true.  And when the whole world order becomes pure and true, I am going to marry John Stamos.  Even though he could be gay.  And if that is the case, I will strap it on.

But backtrack to Sir Paul McCartney and Kate Middlestein.  Apparently they had a low-key wedding at the same place he married his first wife Linda.  So it wasn’t cursed.  But what is up with this whole charade?  Why does this marriage even have to happen?  Clearly he is a serial husband, which is the sad sack pussy whipped version of a Bridezilla.  Let’s just call him a Groom-Gimp.  Lock him in a box in the basement and wake him up when the wedding starts.  Don’t feel sorry for him, he likes it like that.  He wrote all the bad sappy Beatles songs that I fast forwarded on the old 8-track.

Those two lovebirds aside, it seems that everyone I know is getting married or hooking up.  This whole marriage thing is more like a death really.  Now you are stuck basically in one spot even though you think you are on some magnificent journey with someone.  Noah’s Ark is boarding for its voyage to the land of deluded, and there’s me in my lawn chair with a blanket on my lap watching y’all trip and hump your way on board.  Let me open up a wine cooler and give you a heads up.  Ladies:  Did you know he is marrying because there is something about you that reminds him of his mother?  And did you know how easily you can be replaced?  If you died, he’d bag your younger doppleganger in months and everyone around it would justify it by saying that your angel spirit guided him to his next bitch.  “She wouldn’t want him to be alone!”  They’d gossip amongst themselves at their Botox parties.    And Men:  She married you because her clock was ticking and her primordial urge to have a baby was inflicted up on you because you looked like you could swing a golf club.  She wants you out of the house more than she wants you in it.  Do you notice how your snoring has moved you into another bedroom?  She actually hates you and every hair on your back but she enjoys talking about you and your perfect life to her friends, especially the one you are having the affair with.  She knows but she doesn’t care.  You kid yourself when you try to hide it but even you know that she knows that you know.  If you died, she’d laugh her way to the bank and buy herself a yacht. 

Stop the pretense!

Fuck the Ark.  Let’s Dance!

Posted by . Categories: an inconvenient truth. Tags: , , , . Leave a comment

08

Oct. ’11

RIP Steve Jobs, Patron Saint of LOL Cats

“Don’t kid yourselves. Steve Jobs is in Lol Cat purgatory,” @Bitchwalla via Twitter
People, get a grip. Steve Jobs’ death was not like John Lennon’s or Princess Diana’s. It’s like comparing an apple to a couple of oranges. Steve had pancreatic cancer, and because he was a such a Big Mac Kahuna, he had the luxury of prolonging his life for a couple of more years thanks to a liver transplant. You and I would probably rot before we could get an organ donor, that’s a fact. Still death for him was imminent, pancreatic cancer is one of the tough ones. John and Diana, on the other hand, were minding their own businesses in the prime of their lives and on their way to do something, when suddenly they got the Big Crash. Way different stories, way more shock factor. And way different legacies lost.
Yes, Steve Jobs touched lives and was a great visionary. Again, let’s not get carried away. He was a weird cat with a sketchy past. I’m not going into the details, you can go on his Wiki page and check it out for yourselves. I will just make mention that he claimed to be a Buddhist. Apart from his austere uniform of a black turtleneck with Levi’s (which he copied from Andy Warhol), he didn’t really apply any of the principles to his own life. He was a man who re-invented the wheel. He stole from and quoted everyone else from Wayne Gretzky to Picasso, and in the process made stuff that everyone wants. I have some of his opiates (an iPhone and an iPod) and let me tell you something, I wish they had never been invented. No joke.
Do I enjoy music more now than I did when I was a kid with an 8 track tape player? I think not. Yes, it was annoying when the songs actually cut out when the tape changed. What half-wit invented that? It was the late 70s so probably somebody brain damaged from too much acid. But you know what? I listened to the whole tape, every song that was on the album. Same thing when cassettes and CD’s came out. It’s how I know every lyric on Hatful of Hollow. Now I have an iPod, I don’t even know what the albums are called and I get impatient and skip ahead to other songs, other artists, then I end up watching the first episode of Madmen for the millionth time. No question that it is convenient to have everything on one thing that is smaller than a deck of cards. More shelf room for your books! But even those are being read on the iPad. More shelf room for your liquor then.
My iPhone is a whole other horror. I’m addicted to it. When I’m not near it, I get anxious. I used to chew my nails. Now I swirl, sweep, tap, plunk, and probe my screen like it was my labia, in public no less. I had the first generation iPhone and it didn’t take long for it to get all glitchy. In fact, the speaker stopped working and I couldn’t hear out of it. It took me two months to take it to the Apple store because I had long forgotten it was a phone. I was using it as a toy basically. You have to be careful with it because water gets into it and then it becomes toast. Do not stuff it in your bra when you are working out, for example. I could do that with my Nokia and it lasted for years. So far, I have had 5 iPhones including an upgrade. I have clocked in countless of hours in the Apple store when things have gone wrong. The pomme- tekkies go through a zillion fancy motions trying to revive your iBaby when it is sick but in the end, they just open up a drawer behind the counter and hand you a brand new one. Part of the hype is that when the latest product comes out, people line up and the iThing in question sells out even before the store opens, they are that precious. The truth is, there is enough iCrap for every living being on the planet to drop in the toilet and replace 5 times over. All this from a Buddhist.
According to the media, Steve Jobs touched everyone’s lives. Not so much. My parents don’t even have a computer but they do talk on the thing that Alexander Graham Bell invented. Through the Facebook, I have childhood friends and school mates available to me on my phone which is never more than 6 inches away from one of my appendages, and yet when news happens, guess who gets it first? Not my newsfeed, that’s for sure. My mother! And why? Because people love to talk to her. She has never had a text message or email exchange that led to misinterpreted innuendo that inevitably turned into a falling out. Her tone is always friendly. When you talk to her, she is cute and funny and interested in what you have to say. People go out of their way to visit my parents and I can say that Steve Jobs and his vision had nothing to do with it.
Steve Jobs did, however, turn me to an insomniac, social media freak, LOL Cat fanatic, blogging monster, with an adult acne problem. You know have to clean the screen once in awhile. You don’t want to know where my fingers have been, or do you?
And I leave you with some of the best of LOL Cats:
Posted by . Categories: This Charming Man. Tags: , , , , , . 1 Comment

05

Oct. ’11

Martha and Me: Team Scratch

People give Joan Crawford a bad rap. I hate wire hangers just as much as she did, maybe even more. Thankfully, they never come into my house because I never go to the dry cleaner. Once when I was helping a friend sort out her closet, she had wire hangers mixed in with puffy ones. I don’t know which was worse.

“Your puffy hangers are taking up too much room and I can’t even touch these wire ones. You must throw these all away and let’s go to Ikea and get the wooden ones,” I stated.

“But my mother made these ones,” she protested, holding up one of the puffy hangers. It was then I realized they were just wire hangers dressed up in a peach satin outfit. They even had bows that only a mad housewife would think to put on as a finishing touch. I remember my best friend had a “teddy bear” her grandma made that was basically a wine bottle with crocheted cosy for a body and a pom-pom for a head. She called it Cuddles. The head could come off, and another bottle could be put inside. Form and function. This is my kind of craft. Get with the program, ladies.

I didn’t hit her over the head with those fug-assed wire peach puffs or anything like that, but I did convince her that a full closet with all the same kind of wooden hangers would be a good thing. And she lit up a blunt and concurred.

Speaking of a “good thing,” Martha Stewart’s daughter just put out a “Mommie Dearest” style book about her. Now one thing you might not know about me is that I worship Martha Stewart. I think we are both misunderstood in many ways. Some think Martha is a heinous Type A beeyutch-slash-criminal but I find her inspiring. She is all about labour intensive domestic chores because it is the journey not the destination that makes the story. Time consuming chores keep the fingers nimble. I, too, dabble in domestic artistry. Sometimes this shocks people who know me. I remember running into a colleague at Loblaws and he had that WTF look on his face like he just saw a frog on the highway.

“I wouldn’t think to see you here, Peterson, I thought you would have someone to do this sort of thing for you,” he said with geniune surprise. Yes, I cook. I also have the crafting gene. I can knit, sew, and weave bacon. I have followed my mentor and made pumpkin pie, not from a can, but from the gourd placenta that I roasted in the oven and then mashed it up with my bare hands. I made Christmas twig balls, Valentine”s cards, and mayonnaise. Doing laundry is my porn. I am more systematic about it than you are when you troll all the NSFW sites on your laptop at Starbucks. My washing machine is my bitch. I use the cold setting, boost with Borax, and hang dry everything on a rack in my bedroom. This is what keeps my skin moist by the way. I have not used a dryer in years. I am sure that Martha would be proud and bestow upon me a gold star made out of shortbread from Amish butter for a job well done.

I was happy to hear that Martha’s take on her daughter’s book was that it was all in fun and “irreverent” with really great pictures. The “bad things” include: Martha pees with the door open. I pee on the porch when I open the door! Same, same! Every thing must be from scratch. I must scratch everything! She likes to dig in the dirt. I like to dig for dirt! We are sistahs! Except for one thing. Halloween. I love Halloween, it is the High Holy Day in my family. I decorate the house and make costumes. Then I sit on the porch, turn on the smoke machine, drink cheap wine, and give out candy to all the kids Apparently Martha and her daughter thought it was great fun to turn off the lights and pretend not to be home. Perhaps this is where she went too far with her control freakery. There is no way she would buy a pre-packaged Oh Henry bar when she can make her own nougat, peanut and caramel dipped in chocolate creation with a possible razor blade embedded inside. This is the one time you cannot do scratch. Stupid media propaganda. I bet there was never a razor blade in any candy. It was just something Nestle made up so that you had to buy their product.

Which is why she probably sits it out. Or so I’m telling myself. Either that or she hates children. But I’m not crazy for them either. Wait scratch that, it’s not children I hate, it’s those parents who talk loudly in the third person so everyone can hear their stellar parenting: “Now Piper, Mommy wants you to get in the Lexus so we can go to Kumon to pick up your twin brothers, Finn and Cooper. Later on we can go to the park and then when Daddy gets home he can braid your hair.” Modern daddies do all the crappy crafting nowadays, they are pussy whipped by their feckless wives who think it’s cute that they can’t even make toast. You know the type. I’m not sure what their MO is but I think they just want to keep their husbands extra-busy so they don’t have time to fuck around with their extracurricular activities. Bitches!

Martha and I have no time to enslave our men, we are too busy folding sheets:

Posted by . Categories: go girl, Handy Hints. Tags: , , . 1 Comment

30

Sep. ’11

Drive: The Satin Jacket Rules

This isn’t a film review *per se* so don’t get anxious, I will turn this off into a tangent that we can all enjoy. But I did see “Drive” and I am obsessing over it. I’m not going to give stuff away even though you probably will never see it and if you saw it, you scratched your head and said: “Meh! It wasn’t all that!” Or if you were like my friend, Sean, you tweeted out into the universe: “#Drive was shit!” But I loved this movie in an “anchovy way”, and I will explain this metaphor. There was weirdness, it was awkward in parts, and clichéd with all the obvious character archetypes, but it had style, heart, and a mission. The heist-gone-awry genre never gets old. It can be comedic or film-noir. This movie was a bit of the latter and completely mirthless. Normally I hate dour films: Black Swan, Blechhh-erinas. But Drive stars Ryan Gosling: The Panty Creamer of the Decade, maybe even the millennium. He is different in everything he does but he always oozes coolness. EVEN WHEN HE IS WEARING A WHITE SATIN QUILTED BOMBER JACKET WITH A SCORPION EMBROIDERED ON THE BACK! What was up with that? And when was the last time you went to a movie and said to yourself: “Why is the font on the credits so inappropriate?” THE FONT! You shouldn’t really be noticing font. But it was pink, girly 80s style (see movie poster above), as was the bomber jacket. And so was the soundtrack. If it weren’t for the cars and the cellphones, I would have thought it was a period piece and Eddie Murphy would appear. The retro vibe of this movie was almost too distracting, but who am I to judge? I am right now wearing a dolman sleeve sweater with rhinestones on the front. The fact that the white satin scorpion jacket kept getting bloody and clean again made me start thinking that it was more a symbol, a hero costume of sorts. At one point, Driver brings up the tale of the scorpion and the frog but doesn’t elaborate because he is mostly mute and barely strings two sentences together. Aesop Fable Wiki recap: The scorpion negotiates a ride on the frog’s back to get him across the stream but stings him half-way, putting both their lives in peril. “Why did you do that?” asks the frog, and the scorpion replies, “Because it is in my nature.” Is Ryan Gosling the scorpion with the stinging nature or do we take it literally and he is the frog with the scorpion on his back? I THOUGHT ABOUT THIS ALL THE WAY HOME!

So many things about this movie bothered me that I had an epiphany. Why do we have to “like” things? And why does everything have to be so pleasant? Do our lives just have LOL along without conflict? When I first time I had an anchovy, all bare naked out of a tin, I thought it was out-of-this world disgusting but it had such an impact on me that I thought about it long after I ate it. The strange hairy texture, the extreme saltiness, and how it was dry and oily at the same time, I had to have it again. In the right context, on a Pizza Neapolitan sunk into a bed of mozzarella with some black olives on the side, an anchovy is a two thumbs up. Anchovies are bacon of the sea. You can quote me.

I thought more about the anchovy theory and how it applies to relationships. The other day, a friend told me I should try on-line dating with a certain dating site that we might as well call “eNo-Anchovies-Please.” eNAP, for short. If you have been following this blog, you might know I am part dog and only interested in the sense of smell (not just the anus!) when picking a mate. But my friend said: “No, eNAP is different, is based on compatibility and they match you with people with the same traits and values!”

“So it’s a Sure Thing?’ I asked.

“Pretty much. They ask you a bunch of questions, and through the magic of science, they send you only people who are suitable,” she explained. This is how she met the dude is seeing right now (it’s been 2 years!) and even though she has a job where she meets hundreds of people a month, her sense of smell didn’t do the trick. She seems happy with this guy but she is one of those women that anyone would want to be around. In fact, I love spending time with her, that I would be more than thrilled to be her anchovy. It might be too salty at first, but we’d get used to it.

I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I had already tried eNAP last year, when they had a free Labour Day weekend (eNap costs money, which makes it more legit than the free dating sites). My matchups were really uninteresting to me. It was a depressing reflection of myself, perhaps. If I wanted compatibility, why not just stand in front of the mirror, eat a Pizza Neapolitan, and then do that secret thing I like to do with my ears when I’m alone? Do I want sameness? Or do I want someone who irks me enough to say “Why are you wearing that stupid satin jacket?” I think I’d rather be part of a scenario that was not so contrived, and more incongruous, like maybe a frog with a scorpion on its shoulders windsurfing on an anchovy’s back. In any case, it’s all about getting out of your comfort zone, I guess.

Enough of my ruminations…just go see “Drive!” Let me know what you think!

Posted by . Categories: Get out of your comfort zone, Uncategorized. Tags: , , , , , . 2 Comments

22

Sep. ’11

The Wind in The Gym: Tales of The Bunny and The Rat

You know that stupid Lululemon bag with all the affirmations written over it: “Friends are more important than money,” “Breathe Deeply,” “Dance, Sing, Floss, and Travel,” et cetera? You probably have it, or just like the rat adage, you are no more than twenty feet away from one. It’s a real life urban meme, your cleaning lady carries one as does your lawyer, pot dealer, and girl guide cookie distributor. Mine is hanging in my office. And yes, I do have an office, which is more like an orifice, a black hole filled with bomb shelter material and also where the washing machine lives and the window to the back deck where I keep track of the weather. The bag hangs on one of those Ikea metal shelves and we mock each other daily. “Get off your fat ass and go to the gym,” The bag greets me in the morning. I don’t even have to look up at it, I’ve memorized its repertoire, “Do one thing a day that scares you?” I sneer, “Why don’t you haul yourself over the deck and go dance in the wind, American Beauty?” In fact, Bag and I are like that married couple in that movie. Remember the one with Annette Bening and Kevin Spacey? The wife is a rigid and righteous real estate agent (LOL) and the husband becomes the pot-smoking, pedo-bear. He is the awesome one. He decides he is in love with a teenage cheerleader and gets all buff to impress her. Things go awry in a tragedy of errors, proving my theory that Karma is a fat cat on the Khardashian payroll. Neither here nor there, I am Kevin Spacey. Bag is my bitch and I’m not going to let her tell me what to do but! I will go to the gym! I can put all my sweaty stuff in Bag and make her useful.

I am no stranger to the gym. In fact, mine is my second home. It’s more like a club because it has a fitness area, tennis and squash courts, a spa, a restaurant, and a parking lot. I’ve been a member for 14 years and started going when Freddy was a toddler-type. Before that I was going to a rec center and doing cavewoman aerobics 3 times a week. When I joined my gym, it was like I had died and gone to heaven! I went 7 days a week the first month, they had daycare! Kids could go in a room for two hours while mama could play! And I did: I spun, did step class, learned to use machines, and I was there for two weeks before I even realized they had showers! And a sauna! And a hot tub! What a bumpkin I was. Six weeks went by, and it was mid-September, and before I knew it, I had lost 15 pounds. In turn, I gained a monster. That was when my mojo came back. It was a force I couldn’t control. It was an insatiable creature, filled with sexual hallucinations, with eyes in back of its head and a hole in its heart. And I became a gym bunny. Slash predator.

What’s the difference between a gym bunny and a gym rat? They both run in packs but they have different agendas. The bunny is social and can be found in fitness classes. The rat works out on his own, on a treadmill or in the iron room. The bunny looks around and notices what people are doing, wearing, and talking about. The rat doesn’t have to look around, he can smell camel toe. Watch out for that rat, bunny! His teeth are sharp and he talks out of his ass! I wish I could tell my younger self. Bunnies will turn into sloths, rats keep moving and upgrading their cars. The proof is in the parking lot. And that’s where all the real gym action takes place.

So yes, September has come, and like it or not, it’s a new start. And my mojo rests under a “layer of gelatinous complacency,” that’s what I’m calling fat now, it’s more accurate. Mama wants her mojo back! Not the crazy monster one but a tamed, refined, wiser version. The tail is in there somewhere, I can feel it burrowed, tickling my fourth eye chokra, that one that no one taps in yoga class but we all know is there. The only way to get it out, is to go back to the gym where it was born the first time. And why don’t I rename this blog The Mojo Whisperer? Anyway, I’ve been going every day more or less and spinning and even found an old-style step class which was hard! How did I ever put 3 risers underneath that thing? (that’s what she said!) What doesn’t kill you, hasn’t killed you yet. Put that slogan on your bag, Bag. Go dance like no one is watching:

Posted by . Categories: Get out of your comfort zone, go girl. Tags: , , , , , , , , . 1 Comment

14

Sep. ’11

Dear TIFF

Dear Madonna: A hydrangea by any other name would smell like your spent panty liner. Don’t kid yourself. You simply stink.

It’s TIFF (Toronto International Film Festival) week in my fair city. Nobody loves the hobby of celebrity watching more than me, I won’t lie. They are not so easy to spot as they are shrinky-dink versions of what you think they might be because you normally see them in a confirmed and designated spot where they take up the entire confined space that is your tv set or cinema screen. They are ENORMOUS in there. And luminous. But in real life, they don’t stand out that much. A few years back a friend and I went to Yorkville to “starwatch”, and as soon as we got to prime territory, I spotted one. She wasn’t wearing makeup but she had an “entourage” with her, all of whom were laughing at what appeared her witty rapport. Her wingspan was possibly a half a block wide.

“We just passed Maggie whatshername,” I nudged her as we were walking west along Bloor Street.

“Who?” She whipped her head around.

“Maggie Gyllen-something, she was in that movie where she was a perverted secretary and she has that brother, Jake, with eyes too close together, in that movie with Jennifer Aniston where he killed himself, ugh, I forget the last name…” Bear in mind, I am trying to explain this pre-Brokeback Mountain.

“No way, that’s not her,” she says.

“Yes, it’s her! It’s the Film Festival, we are in front Holt Renfrew, why wouldn’t it be her?” Seriously, it’s not like I told her I saw the Easter Bunny. Maggie Gyllenhaal, as though she appears from vapours on special command by a sorcerer from Planet Prada. Celebrities are not regular folk, let’s just say it right now. Maggie G-Hole`s shit doesn’t stink and I will tell you why: I have learnt to spell her last name since that day. I do not know how to spell my own mother’s maiden name, true story, because there is an “i before e” scenario that I never remember is part of a rule or the exception. Later that day, we both concurred that we did indeed see Nick Nolte and he was drunk. We gave him a toonie for a cup of coffee, he looked like he could use one.

I`ve become less enthralled by this whole TIFF thing as the years go by, only because it’s become so popular. I’m a star-ho but I’m also a snob because I went to film school. It`s all pompous semantics. Movies versus Films. What’s the difference? You “rent” a movie but you “watch” a film. Let’s make a metaphor: The first is a hooker, the second your neighbour’s wife. Movies are disposable, films are coveted. One plays every second weekend on Peachtree, the other you saw only once, one Tuesday afternoon at a film festival, like the TIFF. And you are lucky if you ever come across it again. Never on Netflix, which is run by the Taliban, so you are left with only foggy film memories. I’ve got a whole archive of cinematic favourites stored in my otherwise dimly-lit theatre of grey matter. As a film buff, I have these fan letters:

Dear TIFF: Keep on trucking and keep your eyes on the road. This isn’t Hollywood.

Dear George Clooney: Shave the “beard.” We all know the truth.

Dear Brad Pitt: It’s okay, we all make mistakes. Add some Borax to your bathwater and it will wash off. Just go home. To Oklahoma! Love you!

Dear Ryan Gosling: Call me!

Posted by . Categories: Hanging Around. Tags: , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

11

Sep. ’11

Pro Tennis Strike!

Relax, just jokes, there is no “pro tennis strike.”  But that is my name, Kristin Peterson,  in an anagram.  Cool, huh?  I figured that out using some loose Scrabble tiles when I had no one to play with.  My family and I were once big on Scrabble, we played all the time.  I don’t play any “board” Scrabble anymore, just the mutated on-line version called “Lexulous”  featured on Facebook.  Talk about upping one’s game.   If you make up a word, it won`t let you put it down.  There is an on-line dictionary of all the finest words known to humanity, including the English Sowpods version of the word `jiz`with one zed or zee.  When I (and my Scrabblemaster Goddess sister, Sue) started playing this a few years ago, the rest of the family began to look like nitwits.  One Christmas, our normally brilliant graduate student nephew challenged us on words like “qi,”  “xu,” and “za.”  “These are not words!”  He protested, more than once.  “Yes, they are words, we have learnt them on the internet and we are better than you at this game,”  I said, trying to be patient.  When at one point he put down “Iran” and everyone let it go because we are easy-going Petersons, I had to put my foot down.  “IRAN IS NOT A WORD, IT’S  PROPER NAME OF A COUNTRY!   I CANNOT POSSIBLY PLAY WITH YOU PEOPLE ANYMORE!”  It was too painful, I would rather play X’s and O’s with a small child.  I think that was the end of that family nonsense.   I look at a Scrabble board with no sense of nostalgia whatsoever.  I am in a much better place, I can play Lex on my i-Phone!  Anytime!  With strangers even!

I write this while the US Open is on.  Watching tennis is my porn.  I can spend a nice sunny day sitting inside, happily watching a match during any given Grand Slam.  The US Open is the show pony of the tennis season, for sure.  Certain smug players have worn sequins and tuxedo shorts during their matches.  I have seen real life tennis and I have watched it on tv and I will pick the latter every time.  The camera picks up everything that you can’t see and then some.   I’m talking about the stands.  They love to shoot the players’ girlfriends if they are super hot, which they always are, all blond with their Versace sunglasses and stoney expressions on their vapid, chiseled faces.  The US Open always has a celebrity or two in the midst.  Famous people sitting in an audience of anything is just such a weird juxtaposition, like seeing your teacher in the grocery store and you look in her basket to see what she is buying  and suddenly she is the most fascinating person ever with her haul of  celery, Triscuits, and Laughing Cow cheese.  Today, the enigmatic Stanley Tucci put his bald head on the blimp’s radar and the who-the-hell-does-he-know-to-get-such-great-seats on everyone’s minds.  Such an elitist sport.

What I love about tennis is that while I might plunk my English Sowpods arse on the couch and start cheering for a certain player, I will inevitably end up all adrenal red in the face, yelling at the tv, because I am now on the other player’s side.  I realize it is the excellence of the sport that  I am cheering.  And even a lesser player can show a unique style and elegance that can be celebrated.    These odd players make the greater ones up their game.  When the top seeds are shining it seems like it will last forever.  And in a way, it does. They become legends.   Bjorn Borg?  I’d still hit it.  Call me!

Posted by . Categories: Hanging Around, This Charming Man. Tags: , , , , , . Leave a comment

07

Sep. ’11

Fresh Frosh Meat

How come when I went to University, there was no such thing as Frosh Week?  Or did it exist and I was just too cool for school?  If I had a Frosh Week, I might not have had a nervous breakdown mid-semester because I would have adjusted better, having met new people early.  If I didn’t have a nervous breakdown, I probably wouldn’t have developed agoraphobia.  Not that thing where you are afraid of spiders…please, anyone who has rides my car knows that Charlotte is my co-pilot…Agoraphobia:  You are afraid to leave the house.  I barely left my tiny, perfect, one room apartment for 3 months.  But!  If I didn’t develop agoraphobia, I would have totally missed Luke and Laura’s wedding on General Hospital.  Things happen for a reason, that’s for sure.  Destiny!  Fate!   Blah!  Blah!  There are no false moves, only that tramp Destiny and her lesser known alter-ego, that slacker Shmestiny, making waves with that dashing leading man, Fate, and each of those ho’s have an agenda.  Oh, it’s all Destiny spooning Fate when Luke and Laura fall in love and get married, it’s meant to be!   But when  Shmestiny and Fate dry-hump on a futon, suddenly you have to drop a course because of your poor attendance record.  And having to go to summer school is a fate worse than all the Labour Day weekends lined up in a row of 80 years.  You know how I hate Labour Day.   Yes, Freud, obviously this metaphoric mess is all about what happened in Kindergarten.

Baaah!  Daughter Evangeline has some issues (but not mine) and yesterday she attended her first day of Frosh Week at her campus at the University of Toronto.  She is much much smarter than her mother and deserves the great academic success that she had in high school.  I dropped her off on Labour Day Monday at her campus, no traffic, smooth ride with a bag of nerves, “I’m going to barf, ” she said.  “Come home when you want, you don’t need to stay the whole day,” I said.  “Drop me off around the corner,” she said as we pulled in.  Turned out every mother, father, chihuahua, were also dropping off a froshlet right in front of the building.  “You’ll meet some people, don’t worry,”  I said as I parked, out of the way.  We sat in the car in silence for a few minutes.  Down the way, the engineering student were dressed in yellow hard hats and bellowing at the top of their lungs.

“I don’t want to do those cheers!”  she said.

“As if!  You don’t have to cheer.  That’s when you can stand out of the way and find someone else who will mock the rest of the lot and then you can bond!”  I said.

She got out of the  car reluctantly but didn’t come back til midnight.  She met some new friends in the first hour, and one of them is “billeting” at our house, that’s “sleeping over” in university speak.  All is good with Destiny!  And as for Fate, her frosh kit included a condom so it’s all left up to what path she chooses.  She knows her way.  Godspeed, my baby.

 

 

 

 

 

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04

Sep. ’11

Singing The Labour Day Blues

I hate this weekend. Every second that passes fills me with dread. It’s like death spread over three days. Labour Day weekend. I can’t even say it out loud. In fact, it’s so quiet out that the cicadas, those bugs that `sing`with that constant white noise, are fading, the buzz is no longer long and shrill but short and abrupt. For them, it’s last call at Squirrely McMaggot”s. The cold is coming, so it`s time to drop some eggs and squirt some juice or whatever it is an insect will do to keep next year’s Bugapoolaza a happening event. Finish your concert and take a short flight off that tree you’ve squatted on for 3 months. Jackie Frost is making his way to town. His fat ass is white and fluffy, charming and delightful at first but after a few weeks, he becomes mean and slushy. We hate him. And when he comes, it means we have to wear socks. And when you wear socks, you are also going to have to wear proper shoes. And when you wear proper shoes, you might as well just sign your organ donor card. You know it’s over when the fat wasp can’t even make it into the beer can to drown. Sadness. I love summer so. And flip flops.

But you know what? I’m not going to get all bummed out or ruin your weekend because while summer is great, autumn has its perks. It’s a new start, a chance to reinvent yourself. I remember in Grade 8 was my turning point year of taking the new school year on by the short and curlies. I was a gawky, awkward nerd in Grade 7. But after that summer, I had a new haircut. Short and sassy. A peasant top tucked into a pair of high-waisted white washed super flared jeans. Some kind of leather twine necklace that some boy gave me that summer in Cape Cod. If I could only remember his name, I would be all over his Facebook. Oh you know me too well…of course I remember his name: Brian Bohane from Boston, there’s more than one and I am sure I am just another one his disposable “cicadas.” He was 16, I was 14, and it was my first romance. Ish. And when I say “ish,” I mean he would stare at me at the tuck shop and I would look back, and he would look down at his feet. I would look away, and look back, and he would be looking. When he caught me looking back, he would look away. I would look away. Then when I looked back, he would be looking away. Then when I looked away, and looked back, he would be looking.. This safety dance led to one make-out session on the eve of the end of the vacation that included a one-way genital grope, not mine because earlier that day he saw me at the tuck shop buy a box of Tampax. My first! Tampon! Ever! A bone in the hand is worth a ‘pon in the bush` became my motto. That gave me the power to trot through the hallways in September. It`s all about what you wear, inside and out.

So fall will always be about wardrobe planning. A pair of Frye boots might not make me a different person but it make trudging through the snow a far more powerful beast. So will the cashmere sweaters and the Burberry scarf.

Cicadas, shut your pie holes. Your shrilling vocal text messages disturbs my television watching. And the rest of you bugs and birds, take your business down south via the I-95. Make your needs known down there with the snakes and lizards because it’s over in this neck of the woods. The mice and the raccoons have their own pension plan up here in the north but that`s okay. I got some traps and poison.

And I leave you with this:

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31

Aug. ’11

The Good Cougar

The other day I pulled out of my DVD collection the  movie “Alfie,” the 2004 version with Jude Law and Susan Sarandon.  This is one of my new classic Christmas-time movies but I had just seen, on natural television, the other Susan Sarandon cougar movie, “White Palace” with a young, fresh James Spader as her cub.  I know a lot of women take offense to the term “cougar” but I do not.  A cougar, by my specific definition is a Lady of a Certain Age who seeks the company of a man who she could have given birth to even if  she was in Grade 7.  The basic math is her age minus his age should be equal to or greater than the age of her first visit from Aunt Flo.  Both these movies are kind of tragic but I am inspired by my elder cougar mentors.  They blaze through the mountains, with their high heels and Chanel lipstick, and I follow along, eagerly, in my Birkenstocks, smacking my lips with Cherry Chapstick (STILL!).

Without a doubt, Susan Sarandon is the reigning Cougar Queen of Hollywood.   She is a predator though, and while I admire her, I don’t emulate her.  She is a cougar by design but I am a cougar by default.  I would like to date in my age range, but available men in my demographic don’t want to play in my sand box.  Don’t feel sorry for me because I don’t really care.  If a man is single in his forties, he is usually some other woman’s spent piece and he comes with not just baggage but a garage load of odds and sods resembling broken down farm equipment.  The stuff in his “baggage” is moth-eaten, is mismatched and has skid marks.  This is proverbial talk of course.  Like I care about a skid mark.  With the right man, I would find a skid mark down right charming, a little accent of humanity in an otherwise overbleached, Lysoled world.  People are always trying to cover up their smells.  Anyway, those lost dudes end up cleaning themselves real fine and they buy a fancy car and “move on” seeking the company of a younger ho or being a part of the modern and rapidly more ubiquitous coupling:  White guy, Asian gal. This is not something that needs to be fought.  It’s like math sequencing that you learned in elementary school:  40, 20, 50, 25, 60, 30, 70,35, 80…..can you guess the next number?  It’s 40!  Which means, by the force of nature,  I need to date an octagarian!  Or find a niche market and go with it.  Do you know what turns my head?  A Sikh man in some kind of uniform.  My neighbourhood UPS man is a vision of smoldering brown hotness from turban to toe.  And the cop directing traffic this morning on Woodbine had an OPP turban on that matched his uniform nearly made me crash my car.  That stupid movie, The English Patient, started me on this.  It’s all the mystery of the forbidden fruit of conflicting cultures.  But in realty, they have the same skid marks as your balding husband in his Jockeys underneath his Dockers.  And again, just like my dolty douchebag demographic, I wave at them, but they never wave back.

So I have learned a lady has to go where the bone is.  There is no point in fighting City Hall.  Go with the flow.  As it turns out, the only men that ever paid me any mind in the last 6 years, I could have definitely given birth to and had their little brothers, too.  It borders on creepy, for sure.  Like that dude on a skateboard I met on the street a couple of months ago who liked my Velvet Underground tshirt, he turned out to be in high school.  Don’t judge me, I didn’t start it.   6 years ago, when I separated from my same-age ex-husband and moved into this house, I needed a handyman to assemble some Ikea furniture.  Of course I could have done it myself, but there are two types of people:  those who read instructions and those who won’t.  I am the latter.  So I went outside and I flagged the first person I saw walking on the street.  Serendipity.  He was a university student, age 19, and because it was during a July heatwave, he wasn’t wearing a shirt and he all ripped and ready.  He accepted my offer of fifty bucks to assemble 2 dressers for my bedroom.  I know you’re probably thinking I am making this up and have watched one too many Vivid feature films on Friday night Showcase.  But no, it wasn’t intended like that, he assembled the drawers, I gave him money and a beer, and he gave me his number in case I needed him again, for anything, any time.  I put him in my phone as “Handy Luke” so I would remember what he did.  “Handy” being the operative word.  That summer he came by my house a few times, on his own, and always without a shirt.  We sat on my porch and had beers and who would tell me about his girlfriend, who was also 19.  She was really nice and pretty but she wouldn’t do things that he wanted.  According to him, she was worried about how she looked, so she kept her bra on and wrapped up in a sheet.  The paradox of youth, when you have it, you hide it and then you wish you had it back when you are old but by then it’s too late.  Lucky for me, I was never like that.  I will go naked any where, any time.  It’s my claim to fame.

After the summer of  Handy Luke, he went back to school, out of town, and soon out of mind.  Strangely enough, I thought about him last week when I caught of whiff of someone’s soap in a crowded elevator.  He had a definite odour and when I smelled it from a random stranger, I got a wave nostalgia.  Where is he now?  Has he shagged his way to proper manhood?  He’d be 25 now.  He was really handsome.  Sigh.  Cougar purr.  And then yesterday, when I was waiting in line at the butcher, my phone made that nerve jangling glass-ping sound, alerting me to a text message.  Now you’d think I would be a texting-type person but I am not.  That sound fills me with dread.  I’d sooner communicate by Morse code than a text message, it’s just so passsive aggresive.  Anyway, much to my complete surprise, it was a message from Handy Luke.  Isn’t that weird how that always seems to happen?  You think of someone randomly and then they show up out of the blue.  Anyway, as I’m waiting for my chicken to be chopped up in a million pieces, this is how the exchange went:

HANDY LUKE:  How are you?

ME:  I’m good!  This is so weird, I was just thinking of you the other day, how are you?

HANDY LUKE:  I forget what your boobs look like. 

(and then seconds later):  I hope you’re not mad.  lol.

ME:  As if.  They’re still hanging in there.

HANDY LUKE:  Can you shoot me a pic?

And so I hightailed out of the shop with my bag of dismembered chicken parts, a spicy salami, and a new lease on life.  When I got home, I went to my bedroom and and whipped the bra off and assumed position on the bed.  Now I am no stranger to this sort of photography and pretty much by trial and error, I know the right angles and propping to make the boobs seem appetizing.  I snapped a shot from my phone then checked the image.  Oh dear.  The flash had gone off so my rack looked like an all-terrain surreal landscape.  The left boob slipped mostly out of frame except for the squiggly blue vein on the top, it looked like a raging river plunging into a valley of patchy dirt.  THIS IS WHY WE MUST USE SPF99 ON OUR DECOLLETE!  On the base of the second mountain, aka. the right boob, is a giant spider bite that looks like a volcano ready to erupt.  Further on up, another messy waterway of veins and to the top, a jaggedy pink rock that looks could fall over any minute.  That is the nipple with the scar, the one that got bit by a certain 3 year old who shall remain nameless but wanted to try again because her baby brother seemed to like it so much.  I deleted this photo, so don’t you be asking me for it.  Instead I texted him back:

ME:  Where are you now?

HANDY LUKE:  I’m in the hospital

ME:  What happened???

HANDY LUKE:  My girlfriend just got a boob job!  I’m in the waiting room while they take the bandages off. I wanted to see what real ones looked like 😉

ME:  Just close your eyes and think of two Dairy Queen soft serve cones, melting in the sun. 

HANDY LUKE:  LOL!  I’m glad you’re still a funny lady. 

And there you go.  A cougar tale.  And another happy cub with a fond memory.  I just may sit on the porch and wait for another one to come by.  Yawn.

Posted by . Categories: LOCAs gone wild, This Charming Man. Tags: , , , , , , . 2 Comments