“This won’t last,” is what the weather whisperers have been saying all day. A little amuse-bouche of Spring has been served up and at the perfect time. It’s a long weekend here in Ontario and it’s called “Family Day.” It’s a pretty controversial holiday for a number of reasons: Can we afford it? If I park my car in Queen Street, will I get a ticket? Is the LCBO closed? etc. I do not know the answer to any of these questions but to the third one, I will advise: stock up just in case. For me, the problem is actually calling it “Family Day.” Some of us don’t have families, and some of us who do, will not be spending any time with them. Don’t get lost in semantics, let’s just call it “Mental Health Day.” The day that in the middle of February we are allowed to fuck the dog (so to speak), sleep in, eat bacon, make prank phone calls, cut our own hair, and wear our pyjamas the entire day.
This is the landscape we must contend with:
It’s called a “snirt,” a dirty pile of snow. Inside snirt mountain, is garbage from Starbucks, melting poopsicles, and the dead serial killer from “Lovely Bones.” Of course we need a mental health day. For a complete list of what’s closed on “Family Day”, click here, don’t worry it’s the government website.
I was blissfully unaware that Valentine’s Day was coming up until this morning when I went on my Facebook that I have kind of neglecting recently because Twitter is where it’s at these days. People on Twitter are self absorbed, narcissistic whiners and braggarts with very little to say because they only have 140 characters in which to tweet. I love them so. Don’t get me wrong, I still *like* my Facebook, and all my “friends” but sometimes people’s status updates are truly horrific. Today, for example, one of my friends had this to say:
“Find a guy who calls you beautiful instead of hot, who calls you back when you hang up on him, who will lie under the stars and listen to your heartbeat, or will stay awake just to watch you sleep… who wants to show you off to the world when you are in sweats, who holds your hand in front of his friends. One who is constantly reminding you of how much he cares and how lucky he is to have YOU…“
Seriously, a man posted this. Furthermore he got 6 thumbs up for it and one woman commented: `Where do I find this man? I`ve been looking all my life…LOL!` So I counter-commented something like: `He`s the new talking Ken doll from Mattel, he retails for $39.95.` She ignored me and wrote another comment: “ Oh, (Facebook User), I wish I had a man like you, your wife is so lucky! LOL!” Yes “LOL” is right! Is it just me or can you see the subtext in this guy’s status? I think Dr.Phil would have a field day on the hot seat with this dude. Let’s analyze it sentence by sentence:
“He calls you beautiful instead of hot”: This means he is probably having sex somewhere else. A sunset, a BLT, a covered bridge in Madison County are beautiful, too, and he is not boning either of these things.
“…who calls you back when you hang up on him, ” : Why did you hang up on him in the first place? Go with your instincts. Oprah will tell you that.
“…who will lie under the stars and listen to your heartbeat.” Creepy.
“…who will stay awake just to watch you sleep”: Yeah, so he can sneak downstairs and make a phone call.
“…wants to show you off to the world when you are in sweats”: Red flag! Red flag! This is the most dangerous of them all! You realize, you, in sweats, are not hot. He doesn’t think so either and nor does he want anyone else to. Control freak.
“…holds hands in front of his friends.”: That one is sort of cute but caution to all PDA, it is often just for show or like marking territory.
“…Constantly reminding you how much he care for you and how lucky he is to have YOU.” Constantly? Who is he really trying to remind?
I’m not tying to be a big Valentine’s Scrooge but let’s just say I have your back. If he seems to good to be true, you probably made him up in your head. I’m not too worried my “friend” is going to read my post, he’s probably too busy rubbing petroleum jelly on his wife’s feet so she slips in the shower later on. Here is the new talking Ken Doll, by the way:
Rosedale School of the Arts, the scene of the crime
Last week, when Egypt went into upheaval and government blocked the internet including Facebook and Twitter, Charlie Sheen got sent to rehab. At the same time, somewhere in the middle of these two events (closer to Charlie Sheen), my son Freddy had his iPhone stolen from his pants pocket while he was in gym class. I know what you’re thinking, what’s a grade niner doing with an iPhone? When I was in high school, we used to communicate with Morse Code and looseleaf. While I was in English class, I used to tap on the wall to my buddy Paul, who was on the other side of the partition snoring his way through Physics, we’d pass notes, play hangman and gossip and draw pictures of our teachers in their underwear…now that I think about, I must have been in love with him, and if I could remember his last name, I’ll look him up on Facebook. Which brings me to my point, we are a society addicted to social media, our cellphones are our lifeline. Stealing a little dude’s cellphone is the equivalent of stealing another man’s horse in the wild west. Freddy’s iPhone was my old 3G when I upgraded to the 4 last summer. Oh how we love(d) our phones, Freddy would play Angry Birds and I would just be stroking and scrolling through all my apps. Righteous Teenage Daughter would bust us: “Look at the two of you! You’re not even watching that!” She would be pointing to the t.v. and we would look up at her in defiance. She had a point for sure. There is something uncontrollably addictive about the iPhone and I know I’m in trouble because not only do I Facebook, I tweet also. And I have the app called Foursquare, the one where you check into every place you go in order to unlock badges and obtain mayorships. I’m not joking, adults are doing this. The worst part is that there is an app called HootSuite that tweets, updates your Facebook status, and reports your Foursquare location all at the same time!! It is like a social media speedball and although I have it, I have yet to do it, I`m scared I will unleash a monster that tweets and poops at the same time. I might not be the Charlie Sheen of iPhone addicts yet but I confess I have an app that pops pimples and paints cats. It`s a federation of craziness. And I have been trying to curb my iPhone fondling while at home with Freddy, who now has a Nokia something or other, out of respect and sympathy. The other day on Twitter, my beloved Dr. Drew (Celebrity Rehab) tweeted out something about people who think they beat their addictions, `your disease is always in the next room doing push ups.` Mine is in its charger, I`m calling it rehab and I`m putting it on silent but keeping it on vibrate, a LOCA`s got to be in touch somehow.
Last year I had my first Botox injection: 30 units pumped straight into the trenches of my forehead. I grappled with the decision for years before actually getting it. I have wacky vision and I furrow my brows alot and on top of it all, I have a macabre scar that runs between my two eyebrows from jumping on my bed and faceplanting on the headboard. I was four, my oldest sister dumped me in the bathtub and let me bleed furiously while she watched “Love of Life” until my mother came home. I am grateful she didn’t try and stitch me up because things could have been worse. So with the horizontal scar and the vertical furrow lines, my forehead was a multi-purpose gameboard, you could play tic tac toe, hangman, or harvest some crops if you couldn’t log into Farmville. When I was a teenager I used to tape my forehead at night so things wouldn’t get worse. But the creases deepened and by the time I was in my twenties, people thought I was angry all the time. Random men would say: “Why are you so mad? Smile!” STFU, I would grit my teeth. Bangs were the answer. Then Botox came on the scene and I knew I wanted it. But it seemed really scary and anytime I would chirp about it, someone would inevitably say: “Don’t you know that it’s poison, POISON!!! It’s made out of botulinum toxin, you will die a slow death!! And look like a duck while you’re doing it!” First of all, I am going to die a slow death without Botox and look angry while doing it, and secondly, and most importantly, Botox does not make you look like a duck, the fillers do. Botox just relaxes the muscles, okay, paralyzes the muscles and then they gradually over time go into atrophy, the same as your ass does when you watch too many soap operas. My only fear was that the injection would affect my ajna chokra, you know the third eye that is the centre of your intuition. What if I lost all instincts and started dating men who advertised on Craigslist? Nurse D assured not only would my chokra be intact, it would be running on overdrive, all that furrowing was actually blocking it. Nurse D also said she could fix my one eyebrow that arches too much, but I said no, it is what makes me look clever. So the needle went in and I never looked back. A year later, the verticle lines have softened, I don’t squint anymore when I read {less headaches!)…seriously this shit should be on OHIP. So last week, wagjag had an offer for 20 units of Botox for $79 from Skin Vitality at 11 Yorkville. I jumped on it, a little nervous about discount Botox but it turned out great, my brow muscle is losing its furious furrow but you can still tell when I am truly pissed at something, which is good because I don’t want to be perceived as a pushover. Just don’t try and upsell me on the fillers…yet.
Gladstone’s 5th Anniversary Party as an “art hotel.”
On Friday, the Gladstone Hotel had a big party to celebrate its 5 years of being so hip it hurts. It’s the oldest hotel in Toronto, built in 1889, and named after Prime Minister William Gladstone (who knew?). 5 years ago, it transformed into an art hotel, “a social and cultural incubator for art, culture, community, and cuisine.” It’s also in the west end, where hipsters tend to run rampant, waving their freak flags ironically. Most westerners don’t know anything about Toronto’s east habitat so when you meet one, you can make stuff up like we still have Pop Shoppes in our strip malls. Anyway my friend Diana at Flohaus invited me to this gala and I gleefully went because it sounded like fun and! free booze. I know what you’re thinking if you’ve been reading this blog this month, isn’t she on a Hooch-free January? Yes, but there is a loop-hole the austerity rule and that is free booze doesn’t count as booze, it is a gift and it is rude not to accept it. So what fun we had. There was music, women dressed as drag queens performing burlesque….meaning I thought they were men dressed as women but they weren’t, they were actual ladies, very confusing until out came the pasties, then again they could have been mighty moobs. The highlight was the hotel had some of their rooms open for viewing. Each of the 37 guest rooms are decorated in themes by local artists. Check the website here for details. I had a few favourites, one room was a 1970s teen dream with collages of the Tiger Beat regulars like Rob Lowe, Rick Springfield, Kristy MacNichol. I should not have mixed the red and the white together (literally) because my pictures turned out badly but oh well, it was really fun!
Shower in the Blue Line Room
Hipsters “chillaxing”
An interactive installation of light and colour for weirdos to express themselves
A lady ordering a drink…or is it? Is it a man dressed as a lady? or a lady dressed as a man dressed as a lady?
We are half way into Hooch-free January. For me, at least, it’s been an interesting fortnight. I’ve been having strange and vivid dreams which I probably always used to have but were diffused by a wine soaked fog. The Beach Alliance Theatre at Queen and Kingston Road which is down the street from me, has gotten its act together and is showing non-Disney movies for a change so I’ve been catching up on my film-going now that there is a surplus in my entertainment budget. On the weekend I finally saw Black Swan. I’ve been avoiding it because for some reason I had the preconceived notion that it was science fiction, a genre I hate because I can’t follow the plots. My dreams are more cohesive than that mess from that summer with the title that’s impossible to remember and I’m dead sober. Inception! I had to google it. Anyway for Black Swan, I saw a clip where Natalie Portman is sprouting feathers. I thought it was going to be like The Fly meets Fame but it was more like Rosemary’s Baby meets My Strange Addiction. I classify as a horror teetering on comedy. The common elements of this hybrid genre: mean mother, bitchy locker fights, Winona Ryder in a cameo, evil sexy man (Vincent Cassel looking less reptilian than usual, I’d hit it) lesbian sex scene, and morphing body parts. I was too scared to laugh though but had I have been drinking I probably would have found parts of it funny indeed. But I won’t give it away if you have seen it, although I will warn you: Natalie Portman’s character is an obsessive compulsive skin picker and it turns out to be contagious. I’ve been scratching my right shoulder-blade like her ever since I saw this movie.
All that scratching made my shoulder look like this. Freaky….or I just forgot it was there:
It’s one week into the New Year and do you know what your colon looks like right now? I wasn’t so sure until I met this lady in the locker room at the gym who told me that I may have “little living organisms inside.” According to her, these little beings make you crave sugar. She explained her theory to me as she undressed and at one point she grabbed her massive gelatinous belly (she won’t read this) and twisted it around and said in despair: ” And they won’t die! I’ve stopped feeding them wheat and dairy and they still keep growing!” I didn’t know whether to laugh or be horrified and worry about my own innards. I pictured the organisms to be like those Sea Monkeys in the back of the comics. Only my Sea Monkeys weren’t like the ones sitting around playing cards, mine were drunk and angry, they probably looked something like this:
I’m not so sure I want to kill them as they are so cute but maybe I can work them, not feed them so much booze, clear out the white carbs, give them some green tea and antioxidants. Austerity is not so hard when you are focused on a goal. As a diversion from all this colon housekeeping, I made an appointment to get my teeth bleached at Glow Tanning Bar & Body Lounge at 9 Isabella. They use a system called wavelight, check it out here, which is cheaper than the dentist and only took 40 minutes. Basically you lay under a blue lamp with a mouthguard full of bleaching gel. Here I am in full meditation mode:
The results vary depending on your enamel, mine came out Benajamin Moore “Cloud White” which is good enough. Best of all I got this session though dealfind.com for 40 bucks. In case you are not in the know, dealfind.com sends you a deal of the day and it goes up for grabs for a certain time period. Check out Living Social, and wagjag for similar deals. Stay tuned next week for discount Botox! In the meantime, keep up with your resolutions, stay fierce!!! And speaking of “fierce”, please check out my righteous teenage daughter’s band Nikki Fierce on myspace…their new song is called “City Water”, click here for the link
Last year my New Years Resolution was to eat more pastries, no joke, I wanted to be more European and support the French Patisserie, Zane’s, down the street. But I failed. I think I ate two croissants in January and a kiwi tart in September. 2011 is the Year of the Rabbit according to the Chinese calendar, although it officially starts in February, so why not become a gym bunny like every other rat on the planet? Except I am always a gym bunny, or maybe more of a gym manatee since you can pretty much always find me in the hot tub. On Monday when I went to the gym (Mayfair Lakeshore Racquet Club), it was so packed, all I could find was a mat to lay and watch all the newbies and bush-leaguers flailing on the equipment. I’m just teasing with my disdain, the more the merrier. I like fresh meat at the gym, you just never know what might come through the turnstile, hold the door! It could be Mr. Right! Now I’m just being a sarcastic old broad. In fact I’m getting so old, I’m too tired to beat myself up, so yesterday I high-tailed out of the gym and went up to Evergreen Brickworks at 550 Bayview. It’s a fantastic place, in fact I wrote about it on the Core Realty Blog which you should check out here.
Every year, without fail, I am duped into thinking: Summer=Good, Winter=Bad. It’s so stupid, I’m allergic to every flora and fauna out there. Hot weather is a beauty hazard, the heat makes my capillaries scream RED ALERT! Then they pop. I am too cheap and environmentally righteous to put on air conditioning and I sweat. Then bloat in retaliation. But in winter, everything changes. The cold makes me tingle, the snow makes me feel warm. Early dark days makes me want to hibernate which suits me fine. In January, I can embrace austerity with vim and vigor. My ancestors prowled and mated on icy fjords and survived on animal blubber, it is in my blood. I am a winter Goddess, the outdoors is my gym. And check out the hot dude I met on the trails of the Evergreen Brick Works:
Her girth squeezed into a festive garland necklace, Betty lords over the couch during Orgy Week
It’s Orgy Week, that week celebrated by international bon vivants everywhere which begins on Boxing Day and ends on New Year`s Day. Eat. Drink. Be Merry. Two Four Seven. Hedonism for that long with such intensity isn`t for everyone, dishes need to be done, laundry washed, the fat dog walked. I do my best though. Wednesday, being Hump Day during orgy week, I have been focusing on doing some Amish chores that I have been putting off for months, but as a twist, I have been doing them laying down. I organized my cell phone contacts, in bed while watching The View. Then I did some sewing (ie. inserting an elastic in a pair of sweat pants) while perusing my favourite celebrity websites. Look up “debauchery” in the dictionary and find my picture knitting up a poncho on a couch with a fat dog on my lap. I drank some eggnog spiked with Appleton Estate Rum early in the week but it makes fuzz on the upper lip that I keep having to lick off so now I am chapped. I am now drinking booze from a straw which makes it go down quicker and faster. I am pretty much ready for a detox to retox, as they say at Body Blitz Spa. Otherwise known as “the waters,” this is a women’s only spa modeled after bath houses in Europe and has a large salt water pool with waterfalls, sauna, steam, green tea bath, and an ice-cold plunge. You can book extra body treatments like massages, scrubs, check out their website here. You have the choice to be naked or wear a bathing suit. I’ve done both. Ironically I wear a bathing suit when I’m feeling all hot MILF-y but forget about it when I’m GWM (Great White Manatee), then I can’t be confined in the stretchiest fabric. I am a proper water nymph, so European, I tell myself. Body Blitz is the perfect place to go in the middle of Orgy Week, it takes the jangle out of your nerves and makes your skin soft and then you sleep like a baby, only not so innocent.
One thing about my Orgy Week that has remained a constant for 20 years is that I start it off by watching Whit Stillman’s “Metropolitan.” In fact the term “Orgy Week” is defined here. It’s from 1990 and a pretty obscure film but I have seen it more than 20 times and it`s my mission to help make it as popular a holiday movie as Ìt`s A Wonderful Life. PBS used to play it on Boxing Day and then I had to find my own VHS copy and then more recently a DVD which has all the commentary. It’s Jane Austen and Brian the Dog from Family Guy wrote a screenplay, this is what you might get:
Tom Berenger in Platoon is like the hangover doula: Take the pain!
Santa has a list so he can remember who’s been good and who’s been naughty. The reason why he gives most of his presents to kids is because they don’t have a tendency to get drunk and act like idiots at Christmas parties. That is naughty. Tis the season to have a jolly good time and some bad behaviour, that’s what Jesus would do. I’m always amused by how magazines, newspapers, and talk shows feature ways to stay “good” during the holidays. Today, Kelly told Regis that in order not to overeat at parties, you *pretend* you’ve already eaten: “It works!” This is where it pays to be blond. I’m going to *pretend* I didn’t hear that and get back to business on the melted Brie wheel. And then there are always tips on how to prevent a hangover. Prevention is for amateurs, I say. A hangover is part and parcel of a rocking good time. Take the pain. Embrace your hangover, and then feed it.
Yesterday I had a bad hangover because I had a rocking good time at my neighbours’ Christmas party. I woke up and my knees couldn’t bend. This was probably because I was wearing 4 inch high heels (good) and bush squatting (bad). The list of other wretchedness included: dehydration, starvation, headache, disorientation, and missing sequins. I had neglected all the prevention tips, like drinking water and sticking to one type of beverage, liquor before beer, never fear, etc. I know every hangover has a personality and has to be dealt with some sort of grease chaser and yesterday my hankering was dim sum. Problem is that dim sum is a group activity and I was in no condition to carry on a conversation. If I was civilized, I would have gone to Dynasty, which is dim sum heaven, they opened up a new location in Yorkville on Saturday. Check out their website here. Instead, I went to T & T Supermarket on Cherry, south of Commissioners, and got two plates of takeout dim sum. One for me and another for me in case things went awry. But all went well, washed down with an icy cold Coca Cola, each dumpling slid down like a slippery sleigh ride down colon mountain. The perfect hangover, I`m sure Santa would approve.
The Boys of Spring are back, bring ’em on!
art of modern living 