How I Am.

Every morning I wake up with butterflies; I've become unpredictable even to myself.

It's exhilarating, really, to feel like you've been reinvented, like you've changed in some fundamental way. It also makes me nervous to not know what each day will bring, not know what exactly I am capable of, but pushing myself to test those boundaries, feeling excited because anything can happen. Anything.

I've had moments. I had one at the club the other night - standing half naked outside at 2am, waiting for a cab when some guy peels the shirt right off my breast (it was soaked with beer and came away slowly, reluctantly) just to see if I was cold - and you know what I did? I laughed at him. I laughed right in his face, because really, who is this girl, what life am I living? Is this even real? Shouldn't it be illegal to have this much fun?

Have you ever woken up with a hickey and not really known who gave it to you, or if it was even a girl or a guy?

Yeah, me too.

The Race Against Toronto

At the same time that Jason and I were split up but trying not to be, we also took up running. Perhaps I should have read more into the symbolic meaning of it than I did at the time, but I was probably too busy trying to outrun my own shadow to notice. When I would visit his crappy place out in the suburbs, we'd run past people's perfectly clipped lawns and their yappy little dogs, and the tricycles left outside, and the newspapers unretrieved at the end of driveways and cars parked crookedly alongside curbs. When he would visit my crappy place in the city, suddenly running wasn't just a way to be done working out faster than if I'd walked, it was fun. It was interesting. It was addictive.

It has led me to confirm a longstanding suspicion: the best part about Toronto is the sidewalks.

I'm not a fast runner. I'm not a graceful runner. There is nothing easy or effortless about it. I am awkward, and panty, and my feet look funny in running shoes as opposed to high heels, but damn if I don't get some crazy satisfaction out of it anyway.

I love weaving through the morning rush, the expensive people swinging their expensive briefcases, juggling their expensive lattés while trying not to scuff their expensive tassled loafers.

I love the gritty feel of the pockmarked concrete slabs; I love evading the wads of still-sticky gum; I love the stupid, gutsy pigeons who don't have the good sense to fly away when something comes careening towards them; I love the splatter of a ketchup packet that has already exploded under someone else's heel.

I love the blank stares of the people who are sitting on stools on the other side of the Starbucks' window, clutching at their morning caffeine with equal amounts of hope and disgust.

I love Albert, the homeless guy who sits on a milk crate cajoling coins out of pockets by offering a belated play-by-play of last night's game.

I love darting around the obstacles: the graffiti-ed mailbox, expired parking metres, signs begging me to come in for a perm and half off foil highlights, window shoppers transfixed by the nudes hanging in the gallery, street vendors and their questionable wares, strange-smelling hot dog carts, jittery wild-eyed junkies looking for their next fix, bored looking people on cell phones waiting for their dogs to find the ideal spot to take a leak.

I love the sound of impatient horns and cabbies rolling down their windows to shout invectives, the familiar strumming of the guy who earns his paycheque one dollar at a time deposited directly into his guitar case instead of his bank account, the blaring honk of the bully buses, the kind beeping of pedestrian crosswalk, the weird hum of a thousand ipods singing into two thousand ears, the scrape of reluctant feet dragging sleepy bodies closer toward office buildings.

I love winking at people as I pass them by. I love the people who smile at me. I love the people who raise their eyebrows in greeting. I love when people half-wave from the other side of the street, because the blur of my purple stretch capris looks a little too much like their friends', and then their sheepish smile when they realize that I am just another stranger out for a jaunt.

I love waiting at the corner for the red hand to turn into the white walking man who tells me it's safe to cross, even though in Toronto it's never safe to cross. I love the dedicated runners who don't wait idly, but hop from one foot to another or jog sillily in place, doing anything to keep that heart rate up. I love that you can always tell a serious runner by their backwards fanny pack, as if running makes fanny packs acceptable (it doesn't).

I love choosing a marker that's a few meters away, and closing my eyes, and running towards it blindly. I love it when I make it there unscathed, and I run extra hard to celebrate. I love it when I overestimate or underestimate my mark and I run extra hard to make up for it. I love it when I smack right into someone, and I giggle but don't stop as I yell my insincere apology while running extra hard to get away from my embarrassment.

I love seeing the same people as I saw yesterday. I love seeing new people that I have never seen before and never will again. I love the achy feeling in my thighs and the sexy bulge of my calves. I love the bobbing of my ponytail and the way my breath sounds inside my head. I love stretching in the elevator on my way down and gasping for breath as I run the last 6 flights up.

I love having an excuse to buy those cute little ankle socks. I love ordering poutine without a side of guilt because I had a damn good run this morning. I love breaking a sweat before 9am. I love taking up a new hobby that is so unJaylike that even I am completely baffled. I love the feel of Toronto as it unfolds in front of me, and behind me. I love how people part when they hear me coming, how they shuffle to the side and nod slightly as I glide past. I love you best, Toronto, when we're both going full tilt at an impressive pace.

What, you don't like veal?

This is what he asked me, straight-faced.

What, you don't like veal?

He seemed almost incredulous that I might be turning down such a fine delicacy. The veal he was referring to was of course himself, he being a young pup who didn't mind pointing it out to this old bitch.

Veal.

Yes, I have reached that stage in my life. I'm not a sexy heifer anymore. I'm an old cow. An udderlicious cow, but still.

Moooo.

Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy

If weekends had themes, that would be mine.



I love how on Friday afternoon, I'm sitting at my desk at work smugly thinking about what a good girl I'm going to be this weekend, how I'm going to be productive for once, not sleep half the day and then party all night, but actually catch up on the laundry and stock the fridge with leafy green things and finally crack open that scrapbook that I got for Christmas 2003.



And that fantasy lasts until the clock strikes 5, and I'm out the door and hopping into the back of someone's pick up, headed for trouble instead of for home. I get half baked, then fully baked, and then everything goes to hell, straight to hell, not even a stopover in slightly-naughty-but-still redeemable land. Damn.

You have to take an awful lot of cubicle-naps to atone for all the sleep-debt accrued during wild & crazy weekends, but the thing about the work week is, it's so fucking short! No matter how many times you manage to curl up under your desk, you're never fully recovered from the last weekend before the next one hits you square in kisser! I know that people don't often argue on this side of the fence, but from where I'm sitting, it seems to be true.

I love Mondays, but the truth is, when you're sitting there with your forehead resting on a pile of paperwork, one eye mercifully closed while the other one watches the clock (and it's not quite 10am), and your head pounds from the remnants of the juiced-up-techno version of a song that was never quite good to begin with but still got an awful lot of play at the bar on Saturday night and you're picking at the rub-on not-so-temporary tattoo from the grog-fuelled pirate party you attended on Sunday but you're already planning Thursday night's drunk run while not quite ruling out the possibility of Monday night festivities because honest to blog, if you survive this day, you'll deserve a drink or 8 - well, that's when you know that something along the way got effed up.

The 5 day work week is just not natural, and the idea of a mere 2-day weekend is just absurd. Weekends are so laughably abbreviated that you absolutely must do your best to squeeze every last drop of potential fun out of them (sometimes to your own detriment, and certainly to your liver's), which leaves you with no time at all for the resting, which is the key to not dying, so I'm told. By the time Monday rolls around, I'm thankful to go to work for 8 solid hours of not-partying, even if I have to chug several "breakfasts of champions" (Special K and Redbull) to get me there.

Oh, I bitch, but the truth is, once I get over the initial shock that fluorescent lighting and water coolers inevitably give, I start to get in the zone pretty quickly, and by 2pm on Monday, my knee starts jiggling under my desk, bopping around, looking for a beat that it's just not getting from my coworker's top-40 radio habit. And this week, god bless it, is even worse (or better, depending how dehydrated you are) than usual: Monday is St Pat's, so of course there will be going-outage, and since we're off on Friday for some vague Jesusy reason, Thursday night becomes the default "fuck yeah we're done work!" night, leaving only 3 hangover-hazy days in the middle for gossip, scheming, and of course - dialysis.

Oh, I like to complain, but obviously I'm enjoying myself. Like, really enjoying myself. 2008, after all, is to be Year of Me. And after the suckage that was 2007, at least for the most part (otherwise known as Year of Complete Horseshit), I think I deserve it.

Rum and coke tastes an awful lot like freedom.
Ahhhhhhhhhh.

Things I learned in the storm.

1. It's surprisingly possible to declare a pajama day at your local seedy bar.

2. When drinking rye and coke by the pitcherful, the glass is totally negligible if you have 2 straws.

3. Inappropriate and wildly imaginative conversation should only be interrupted to belt out classic rock lyrics that may or may not be playing in the background at the time.

4. It is not compulsory to kiss members of the same sex while flirting with members of both sexes, but it's pretty damn fun.

5. While sitting on the public pot, it is totally acceptable to open the door while your pants are still around your ankles if (and only if) there is a nipple ring on display. Points off for breaking the seal.

6. Boys do not forget an offer of three-way sex no matter how drunk they (or you) were.

7. After being accused of being "a retarded amount of fun", you will of course feel compelled to repeat the performance again the next night, regardless of the severe weather warning issued by Environment Canada.

8. There is no excuse for wearing sling back heels (no socks, obviously) on a night when over 50 cm of snow is expected.

9. No matter how much hash you smoke, your toes will still be cold. However, the fact that your friend appears to be wearing an umbrella-hat is happily distracting.

10. No matter how many times you hear "only an idiot would go out in this weather", the enticement of a crowded dancefloor and a bad Britney Spears remix will prove impossible to resist.

11. Cabbies, on the other hand, will heed the warning, and taxis will be completely unavailable.

12. Indeed, when you decide to hoof it for lack of better options, the city streets will be deserted (from what you can tell, anyway, it being "white out conditions" out there). No cabs, no public transportation, no cars whatsoever, aside from the ones sitting crookedly in ditches, or buried under several feet of hard-packed snow.

13. No matter how close to the yellow line in the middle of the road you walk, the snow drifts will still be up to your crotch.

14. Luckily, sex on the beach cures all.

15. I mentioned about the menage a trois, right? Turns out, it still buys you drinks the next day.

16. As implausible as it sounds, a one-man acoustic version of Billy Jean is pretty damn rockin.

17. There comes a point, a line gets crossed, when you just know that on Monday morning you won't be able to look at these people in quite the same way, but what the hell, life is fun, and this is what it's all about.

Doncha wish your blog was hot like mine?

It was the post that almost was.

The post that definitely was, but then disappeared.

The post that I wrote, and that was amazing, truly brilliant, would have had you nodding sagely at times, misty-eyed at others, and enlightened in the end.

You know that post? That post that you would have posted if only the blog monster hadn't eaten it? The kind of post that keeps you posting, that inspires postage in others, that ranks among the posts hall of fame, the post that other posts hold up as god of all posts for worship, admiration, and envy. Lots and lots of envy.

Oh the post, what a post it was. It never dithered. It was witty. It used peppery language that had us all cracking those half-smiles that we feel foolish for flashing at our computer screens. It was sweet, not sentimental, but with an edge. An edge like Hunter S. Thompson but with a dollop of Saul Bellow on top. And Maya Angelou sprinkles. And a side of David Sedaris, with 2 spoons for sharing.

And now it's gone, and you'll have to take my word for its luminescence. It was a post fit for a goat, but now it's floating around in the internet, unclaimed and unloved, like a lost mitten that will live a hauntingly useless life in a lost and found box, never to warm fingers again.

Now you'll never know the stellar week I've had, or the shady characters I met on a slippery sidewalk while waiting for the light to turn green, or why my driveway has suddenly turned into a meat market. You'll never know the stunning conclusion I've come to in the great "should I\could I fuck a younger (!) man" debate, or how I got those funny bruises on the backs of my knees, or how I really feel about white belts. And how will you sleep at night never knowing where that mysterious itch came from, or how I came to celebrate "Sausage Fest 2008" on an ordinary Wednesday just like any other, or whether I am likely to find a dozen pirate hats in time (in time for what?!).

Yup. It's rough. I wouldn't want to be in your shoes right now. There's been an awful lot of exceedingly interesting things happening around here, and now you'll never know....but you can always guess. :)

Stream-of-Mostly-Consciousness

Baby, you're drunk, and acting tough.

I'm not drunk. I'm happy.

Oh?

Happy. You know, that feeling you get when you've been dancing beside the speaker all night, and the only sense you have left is the sight of your own blonde tresses as they swish on by, even the pain from your slut shoes defleshing your heels is dim, the music is good, no the music is better than good because at least five times you've clapped with glee and squealed Ooooh, my favourite, and you're high on the sugar from your rum and cokes like this whole night is just for you, like maybe everyone in the bar came out just so that you could smile your smile and do your thing, and maybe it's not true but maybe it doesn't even matter because you're out there enjoying it all, lost in the twinkling coloured lights, taking the phone numbers to avoid the argument but dismissing them all with a saucy wink because you already know who you want to go home with tonight and your secret smile is because you're wearing the perfect panties underneath and he'll be pleased, but for now you're on the floor feeling the beat, touching yourself, basking in the heat, letting other bodies brush your own and sparking from all the electricity that surrounds you like the energy is communal tonight and everyone is sharing more than a dance, and you can feel their desires almost as palpably as you can feel the pendant around your neck, swaying like you do, catching in your cleavage, and the universe narrows to just this sweaty space, nothing else matters, tonight is the night.

And the fact that you've been bleeding in your shoes for the past 4 hours?

Details. Just details.
Now slam my back against the wall and kiss me like you mean it.

Bleeding Blue.

Mats Sundin, hockey player extraordinaire and incomparable captain of the Maple Leafs, has very little in common with me. He's 6'5, and I'm not. He's a gold-medal Olympian, and I'm not. He's Swedish, and I'm not. But the one thing we both share is a love for our adopted city, Toronto.

I know why I love Toronto. I love the sidewalk art, and the smell of the harbour, and the excellent people-gazing on street cars, and the fact that someone actually eats the stuff that's been floating around in tepid wiener water for perhaps days on end.

Why Mats loves Toronto is a little more mysterious. The truth is, Toronto is not always as generous or as grateful to Mats as he deserves. He's carried the team on his shoulders this season. He's not just the best player on the team, he IS the team, if a team could be as humble and unassuming as Sundin has remained throughout his stellar career.

Recently there has been a lot of talk about a trade - and this after Mats has given 13 years to the team, captained for a decade, and scored more than 400 goals while wearing the number 13. With a no-trade clause to his contract, Mats has said repeatedly that he wants to finish his career in the city he has come to think of as his home. He has the skill and prestige to lead another team to a Stanley Cup if he allowed such a trade, but he chooses instead to stay on a team that is slowly being rebuilt, still experiencing growing pains, and unlikely to become very winning any time soon. He's not in it for the trophies, or the glory, or the attention. Clearly, he's in it for the love of the game.

This sentiment of his is so rare that people don't know what to make of it. He's been mistakenly (and stupidly) labelled 'selfish' because people have forgotten what 'loyalty' looks like.

This, my friends, is being true to your team.

Sure, it might make good business sense to make the trade, but hockey is not a business, or not just a business at any rate. Yes, people try to make absurd amounts of money off it, but at the end of the day, hockey is a game. Hockey is about fire and passion. You have to love it. You have to want it. You can manage it all you want, but at the end of the day, if you rip the heart out of the team, you don't have much of a team.

No, Toronto doesn't deserve Sundin, but we sure are lucky to have him.

A friend of mine, a fan of the game, a fan of the Leafs, and above all a fan of Mats Sundin, said to me that if Mats were to leave, it would break her heart into 13 pieces.

I cannot begin to equal her zeal, but I do know a good thing when I see it, and I see it in Mats.
I just wish the rest of Toronto could see it too.

As long as old men sit and talk about the weather.

I love old men.

I don't love them in the little-blue-pill sense of the word (I prefer my Viagra to be used recreationally, in a cocktail of vodka and redbull, instead of taken furtively, with a swallow of tap water and a prayer to the baby Jesus, if Jesus is indeed in charge of boners).

I just find them rather cute.

My grandpa takes cute to the next level.

It's so sweet how he has "indoor slippers" and "driving slippers", and how he walks around looking constantly sheepish, and how his suspenders curve around his pot belly, and how he likes to tell us "stories", which are actually off-colour jokes, sometimes so off-colour that my grandmother blushes and hits him.

And I love how he has one solid memory per person. It's like he's purging his memory bank, culling nearly 80 years worth of material, and distilling it to just one essential fact about everyone he knows. He always recalls how my mother once dumped a pot of caramel over her head. That's what he chooses to remember about her, out of all of her accomplishments, of all the things she's done, the obstacles she's overcome, her most passionate pursuits....and he just chuckles about the way she licked herself clean. About me he likes to tell how he and I would two-step together in his foyer when I was a very little girl. Actually, I still like to tap my toes in there, because it has a resonating echo that just can't be beat.

Thinking about the danciest foyer I've ever clicked my heels in reminds me of other family gatherings, where the grownups would sit around the table, playing cards and gambling for coin. My grandfather would dip into his earnings to give us each a penny to get a gumball out of the machine downstairs. He also had a peanut machine, but that one didn't require money, you just pulled the lever and out came a handful of lovely saltiness.

I'm pretty sure that damn peanut machine made me fat.

It also made me better at math. I would sort my peanuts obsessively before eating them. The ones that came out unscathed, one side still clinging mightily to the other, I would cherish and sweep aside, saving them for last. The ones that were sadly unmatched I would count, and then divide into groups and munch quickly, indiscriminately. Notice how OCD was hardly ever diagnosed back in the 80s.

I believed that peanut butter was invented some time around 1985.
I believed that tiny babies were housed inside traffic lights and controlled the green, amber, and red.
I believed that jelly bracelets went well with everything.
I believed that my budgie and my great-grandmother were keeping each other company in heaven, even though Polly was buried in our garden and Granny was not.

Maybe things were just easier to believe in back then. The 80s are not normally known for their naivete, and I hope I am not either, but everyone comes from a simpler time, a time when your thermos is reliably filled with zoodles and your underwear has the days of the week printed on them, and someone else does the towelling when you step out of the bath.

But I hope that those days are not irretrievably behind me. I think that they are not, just as long as I still dance for the heck of it.
As long as my mother still craves her caramel.
As long as old men sit and talk about the weather.
As long as old women sit and talk about old men.

What's Love Got To Do With It?

The government of Ontario decided that us overworked fools deserved an additional stat holiday, by which I mean that we, the voters, have been throwing hissy fits about this for a decade now and somebody finally (foolishly) made it an election promise, and kinda sorta followed through on it, eventually.

So here we are. Family Day, it says on our calendars. Hangover Monday might be a more accurate description. Or:

• Small Reward For Freezing Your Nuts Off Day
• Staying in Bed and Eating Oreos for Lunch Without Worrying About Trans-Fats or Crummies Day
• Gutless Pandering to the Electorate Day
• "Fuck you, Walmart, you have to close 9 times a year now, bitch!" Day.

Of course, if we were actually obligated to spend time with our families on this day, we'd have to call it Dysfunctional Family Day. I mean, not all of us are singing-around-the-campfire, playing-catch-with-dad, wholesome-conversation-over-spaghetti, go-out-in-public-together-without-consuming-hard-liquor kind of people. There certainly hasn't been any rousing boys vs girls pond hockey followed by cookies still warm from the oven and hot chocolate and matching sweaters knit my grandma for me.

Not that I'm complaining.

Poncho! Poncho! Poncho!

Ah, the intoxicating scent of hand sanitizer.
Is there anything else quite like it?
The sign on my doctor's office asks me politely (but in bold) to douse my hands in the stuff before entering the building.
I'm either flattered that she's looking out for my health, or insulted that she thinks I'm dirty.
Either way, I am now permitted to enter the building, but am waylaid in the foyer. Another, bolder sign ordering rather than asking me to remove my shoes, or, if I will not stoop quite so low (or believe that the probability of another patient stealing my Uggs is high), to at least encase my outdoor shoes in paper booties, supplied at no extra cost by my bleeding-heart doctor.

Finally I am fit to tread upon the hallowed carpets leading to the surly receptionist. She deigns to pass me the almighty clipboard where I will jot down the same information I jotted down last time, which she apparently threw out before the ink even dried because she sits in the ergonomic chair behind the desk and I am but the mere peon who perches uncomfortably with the unwashed masses in the plastic moulded chairs scattered unimaginately in the designated waiting area.

My doctor's taste in receptionists is questionable, but I adore how solicitous she is of me. She realizes that I am busy, that life is hectic, so she takes care of me by allowing me an extended, 70-minute rest among similarly harried people. Goodness knows I would never take the day off work and treat myself to kicking back in a pair of paper booties and indulging in a Reader's Digest from last century on my own. It was nice to have some random Tuesday me-time. Well, me and a dozen other people. People with coughs and upsetting medicinal smells who make odd honking noises and use the bathroom more times in 70 minutes than normal people should. When I'm done perusing the fascinating tale of courage in the face of adversity that every single Digest from the past 54 years contains by default (no worries, they always survive), I am delighted to entertain myself with a rousing round of "Guess the Disease".

The man across from me with the boulbous nose, mismatched argyle socks and a wheeze that would put an asthmatic donkey to shame probably has something intestinal, I'm guessing. The sweaty woman with the blotchy complexion and the runs in her nylons probably has a nasty rash hidden somewhere under all that rayon. As for the dude with the tube sock pinned around his neck, his moaning and eye-rolling make the game all too easy, but before I can render a diagnosis, a miracle happens and my name is mispronounced, but done loudly enough that I recognize the gurgling as vaguely resembling the noise my mother called me when I came ripping out of her belly.

Don't cry for me - the fun didn't stop there. In fact, once I shed my clothes and donned not the dreaded paper gown but something entirely new and even more horrendous - the paper poncho.

It had a head hole, and that was it.
Not even a belt to cinch in the waist.
Imagine the fun every time I walked over a heating vent! It would fly straight up over my face, like an inverted umbrella in the wind, except all my dangly bits were, well, dangling.
At least the poncho matched the booties.

But wait! There's more.
If you're feeling interactive, you can go to your kitchen right now, and fashion a poncho for yourself out of paper towels. But first run the paper towels under the tap.
How's it going for you? Are you comfortable in your moist paper poncho from hell? Warm? Feeling confident enough to stroll down the hallway filled with non-ponchoed people or flirt with the uber-handsome doctor (who is also wearing clothes that aren't see through or quickly disintegrating)?
Hint: ultrasound gel is much like tap water, in that it also compromises the integrity of a paper garment.
Hint: there is no way to accessorize a paper poncho.
Hint: I still look cuter than asthmatic donkey guy. Ponchoes really don't flatter the man boobs.

I never thought I'd see the day that had me missing the good old paper gown, but it turns out that arm holes are essential for not looking like a moron. But a poncho? Come on! I'm worried that next time I go, they'll have nothing but a paper sash, or a paper fig leaf, or just a paper hat.

Try not to picture that.

Operation Love Letter

If you've lately been over to The Quickie Book Review, then you know that the book most recently on my nightstand has been Four Letter Word, a work of original love letters by some of my (and probably your) favourite authors.


You might be thinking that a book of love letters is a suitable read for February, the month of looooooooove, and you'd be right, but you'd also be wrong. It's not filled with candy-heart cliches, the i's are not dotted with little red hearts, it's certainly not vomit-inducing "romance." Some of it inspires murder. Some of it inspires regret. Some of it inspires longing. Some of it just inspires. It's lovely.


The book was conceived of presumably because the art of the love letter is slowly dying. Curse you, email and texting, for taking away the whimsy and the pleasure of the good old-fashioned, pen-to-paper love letter. It got me thinking:


1. 41 authors contributed love letters to this anthology, and none of them are me. I may not be an expert on love, but I think I've had my moments.


2. On the other hand, I might be too, erm, lascivious, for love letters of the old-fashioned variety. The standard fare should not contain the words "throbbing", "juicy", or "from behind", as mine invariably do.


I've felt compelled to resurrect my love-lettering, the results of which I will be posting over at the Novel-less Novelist for the month of February. There is something quite gratifying about writing a love letter. They can be selfless or selfish, prim or evocative. They can reignite old flames or lay ashes to rest. It depends on who is writing, and also, on who is being written to.


Sending a love letter is exhilarating, and sometimes makes you want to barf.


Receiving a love letter is surprising, and sometimes makes you want to rip your clothes off.


Who can resist?


Not I. Restraint has never been my forte.


So, I'm asking you this, dear readers. To not just be the reader today. To also be the writer.


Send me your love letters.


Ask for my post office box, and you shall receive. I want them all -


the scented notepaper, your best calligraphy, the stationary you horde all year, your sweetest words and best cupid doodles and heart-shaped stamps -


send them to me. Make an old goat happy.


They don't even have to be to me (of course, there's no time like the present for showering me with love or unburdening yourself of your secret desires). You could send fictional love letters, or copies of old letters that you've received, or theoretical letters that you might mean but you'd sure as hell never send (except to me, because I'm special), or an anonymous note with the Dear part left blank, or rhyming cornball couplets that make you queasy just to write them.


But do send them, won't you?

Mother Nature's on the Rag.

Today the windows rattle with Mother Nature's wrath. Literally. The icy wind is pounding at the panes, insisting to be let in, and frankly, the panes aren't doing nearly enough to keep it out.

The roads are slick with ice, the dangerous kind, the kind you can't see until it's too late.

It's days like this that I surmise that ankles are ridiculous things. Why should the smallest part of your leg bear all the weight and flex? So much is expected of these dainty creatures. On a day like today, they cry to themselves, implore the feet to stay the hell indoors. It's dangerous out there for an ankle.

I haven't taken a major spill yet this year, which means I'm due.

A klutz on a good day, winter tends to throw hazards by the dozens in my way. It's inevitable that I will fall, especially since I refuse to wear "appropriate" footwear. If I'm going to take a tumble, you bet it will be in my black patent leather heels. The ER doctor might be cute, and snow boots have never turned anyone on.

Now that the butt-bruises have faded, I can look back on my winter falls with fondness. A couple of years ago I took an Olympic-sized fall when we were stopped on the side of the road and I was scraping the windshield from the freezing rain that was stubbornly building up. Huge flakes of snow were blinding me, the snow banks were nearly hip-deep, and I don't remember what caused my feet to shoot out from under me, but suddenly I was rolling downhill into a soggy ditch. A few years before that, I was scurrying across the pedestrian crossing in front of Tabaret Hall at my University. I got safely across only to find a sneaky patch of ice that led to my undoing. That was the winter I decided to start wearing underwear again, or at the very least, longer skirts.

I know what's coming. I just don't know when, or how spectacular. It could be wrist-shattering, or tailbone-swelling, or black-eye inducing if I repeat an earlier performance of falling while holding a shovel.

This is an ugly time of year, and not just because of the potential injuries. The skin gets dry and scaly, and though my day looks like this: shea butter, shea butter, shea butter...it never seems to keep the dryness totally at bay. And the wind chaps your lips, unfairly so, because it's a real bitch to apply lip balm while wearing mittens. Mismatched mittens, at that. In October, we've all got mittens that match our scarves and toques. But mittens are like socks. They disappear not in pairs, but one at a time, leaving a lonely single behind. By the end of January if we're wearing one green nylon ski glove and one pink and grey fuzzy mitten, we're counting ourselves lucky, because at least we're still (relatively) warm. Our winter footwear is scarred with salt stains and our coats have been marred with ski-lift tickets and dribbles of drive-thru Tim Hortons. Our hands bear calluses from shovelling, our noses are running, and our bodies are pasty white (while often our faces are golden brown, except around the eyes, where ski goggles have induced the inverse-raccoon effect), and we're all carrying that extra bit of fat that just screams EXTRA BOWL OF STEW!

And that's just what we look like outdoors. Inside, we're all running around in our underwear. Obviously, the walk from the car to the front door means your pants are dragging in the 6 inches of snow that have fallen since the last time you shovelled (about half an hour ago, it seems), and so you throw your pants in the dryer to stave off influenza, or whatever it was that your mother always warned you about, and you put your mittens out to dry on the heater (and pray they don't catch fire), and then in your panties, you mop up the puddles that your boots have made, and you throw your jacket on the floor of the closet because that's where it's going to end up anyways seeing how no hanger has been designed to hold the heaviness that is a Canadian winter coat. Then you try to put your scarf away, but you discover that the last 8 feet or so got caught in the door. The car door. Because you know what? A scarf has to be long up here in the great white north. It has to be long enough to wrap around your forehead, your cheeks, and then around your neck several times, and then end up criss-crossed over your chest under your coat so the whole thing doesn't unravel at the first gust of wind. The crime rate could theoretically sky-rocket during the winter months because scarves are a perfect disguise. You can't recognize your own mother under all that scarfage, even if you hand-knitted her scarf yourself. But crime rates don't jump at all, because nothing is tempting enough to risk freezing your balls off.

January is nearly over with, and we're praying that it will take winter along with it. But it won't. February is going to hit us hard because we just haven't suffered enough yet. Sorry, but it's true. January was mild. Oh, it was always well below freezing, and we kept impressive amounts of snow on the ground, and down our backs, and over our groaning roofs, and god yes, piled high in our driveways.

But did our basement flood yet? (barely)
Did ice snap the power lines? (not since December)
Was a state of emergency declared? (not in 2008)
Did they close the roads and tell people to stay in their homes? (just the once this month)

Winter is not over yet. In fact, I fear the worst is yet to come.
But you know, we're resilient people. We've got boardgames in the closet, flashlight batteries in the kitchen drawer, and a mean chili recipe that will warm the coldest of souls. And truth be told, there's also an old fashioned toboggan that's all greased up and ready to go careening down the steepest, most ice-slicked hill, and while you can't see much around the folds in my scarf, you'll probably detect at least a hint of winter gleam in my eye.

Where the mind wanders...

I think possibly my days of going braless are are behind me. A whole cup size behind me. It's a shame too, since I have the perfect halter dress hanging in my closet, just begging to go out and scar some kid celebrating his first legal birthday at the bar. I hate to let a dress like that go to waste.



I think probably the dogs will not die from having discovered my astroglide and found it good enough to eat. Still, I'm not looking forward to slippery piles of puppy poop.

I think possibly the caps lock key is more hindrance than help. I use the shift key to capitalize the random words that come up at the beginnings of sentences, and words I think are important, like Vodka and Vagina. I never turn the cap locks key on. Well, I never turn it on intentionally. But dozens of times my pinky taps it surreptitiously and suddenly I'M SCREAMING LIKE A MANIAC. Screaming like a maniac rarely comes up in my day to day life (believe it or not), but it manages to bug the hell out of me on a regular basis nonetheless.

I think there's a very good chance that I am a total hypocrite since I expect a guy to like my lazy ass whether my legs are smooth or prickly....but when someone asks me to deliberately stop shaving for him, it grosses me out. Way out.

I think it's also safe to say that I am an idiot. All day long I've seen the headline on my homepage - GTA IV fever strikes - and all day long I've clucked at whichever poor Toronto hospital is making its patients sick via intravenous. I mean, it's better than bird flu. It's probably even better than the superbug that was going around, but still. But then, when I finally clicked on the article to find out which hospital in the Greater Toronto Area had been struck, I realized that in fact, it's Grand Theft Auto #4 that is causing the "fever", and that I should be put down. Immediately.

Truth? Dare? Shoot me now?

I did an inadvisable thing recently.

I drank margaritas with family members.

And then we played truth or dare. Without the dares.

I know, I know, I know: what were we thinking????????

Actually, I know what we were thinking. We were thinking Please god, do not make me play that horrid Howie Mandel game that poses those awkward questions like - Would you rather put Tabasco sauce in your eye, or rub a steak knife across your gums? - ever, ever again.

We should have stuck with Howie.

The first question out of the gate was: what is the most you ever weighed?

Very quickly we established a new rule: no ask backs. You can totally tell it was one of us fatties who made that one up.

Now I know you're thinking - jeez, if you've already wandered into that kind of territory, what's left?

Think on it....

think on it....

think on it......

There you go.

Yup, we went there.

In fact, we went everywhere. We went places no relatives should ever go, and certainly not together.

I won't tell you which one of us once asked a teacher what "fellatio" meant.

(His response, by the way, was to blush, and to scribble "BJ" on a piece of paper.)

I won't tell you which one of us once cautioned her 14 year old sister against said blow jobs.

(Her justification, by the way, was that they "taste like chunky beer.")

I won't tell you that this very same 14 year old sister then grew up to NOT take the advice, as it turns out.

Yeah, it was that kind of night.

It was the kind of night where certain someones had to remove their socks to tally up certain exploits.

It was the kind of night where my mother was heard to utter "I shouldn't be hearing this" dozens of times.

It was the kind of night that made me unquestionably happy that my grandmother had gone home early.

Losing My Religion

I believe in god. I do not believe in religion.

I believe in learning. I'm not sure I believe in education.

I believe in fate. I also, at the same time, do not believe in fate.


I don't believe in belts that don't hold anything up, or in giving high-5s (unless the recipient is mentally challenged), or in pennies.

I don't believe in bagels that aren't pre-sliced.

I believe that black people are more highly evolved, and that my freckles are trying to tell me something.

I believe that libraries are more sacred than churches.

I believe that people who spray me with perfume samples at the mall should be shot in the head.

I have an inkling of a belief that I might be slightly over-reactionary.

I believe that John Cusack has indeed made life harder for all men, but I do not believe that any woman should settle for less than her perfect boom-box moment.

I believe in Sex. I would like to believe in Love. I'm not sure how.

I don't believe in regrets.

I do believe in moisturizer.

I believe in hard work, I just don't want to.

I don't believe in sweet-flavoured toothpaste, smoked meats, or flannel sheets.

I believe that Elvis is dead, and so is disco. I also believe in ghosts.

I believe in the goodness of laughter, and tongue kisses, and red wine.

I don't believe in magic. I don't believe in sin. I do believe in karma.

I believe in a thing called Soul.

What do you believe?

Words to Live By

It's been 2008 for 21 solid hours now, and yes, I've been up for every one of them (and more than that besides). I've used the time wisely (well, I did floss at some point, so that counts) and have already crafted my motto for the new year. In fact, I've had to whip it out more than once today alone, and I predict it will quickly become one of my all-time favourite excuses:


It's not my fault. It was tropical drink night.

A General Indictment of the Romance "Genre"

Up until a month ago, I would have considered myself completely unqualified to attack the evil that is the romance novel, not having had any exposure to such "writing" since I outgrew Danielle Steel's turgid members and milky-white bosoms at the age of 11 (not that this would have stopped me). However, the universe colluded against me this past month, teasing me with a big sudsy bath and only Jean Chretien to keep me company.


Nothing against Prime Minister Poutine, but a political memoir is not exactly suitable material for relaxing with a glass of wine, some candlelight and bubbles up to my ears. So I raided my sister's supply in order to find a good "tub book" and lo and behold, her shelf boasted only books with glittery, pastel covers featuring such winning titles as Annie, Get Your Groom, and Code Name: Bikini.

Don't let the titles throw you off, though. There's only one romance book, and that one story is recycled over and over, occasionally renaming characters (Chase becomes Thatcher), or changing hair colours (strawberry blonde becomes dirty blonde). I hate to ruin it for you, but here's the way it goes: a guy with great pecs meets a girl with large breasts and at first they kind of hate each other because they're so damn different (like, she's really rich, and he's really really rich), but then they find each other undeniably attractive (his jaw is chiseled, and did I mention she has great tits?), and then there's about 100 pages of sexual tension and will-they-or-won't-they (even-though-they-always-do) and usually there's some kind of mini-crisis that makes us fear that they won't get together (hint: they do), then even though he's a bad boy who's not the marrying kind, by the end of the book the ache in his loins inspires him to make a lifelong commitment and crave babies and domesticity and soft kisses.


So I know all of this going in, I'm totally prepared for how incredibly and predictably bad these books are, and still I manage to find myself cringing in the bathtub when in the current year of 2007, the premise of my tub book is thus:

Man meets woman...on a train....like, a boxcar....cause, they're like, riding the rails. Illegally. They're hobos. And the girl hobo really brings out the protector in the boy hobo. Because she has a baby with her, and conveniently the boy hobo is recently a widower and grieving his kids, and is looking for a replacement family, and he's inspired to give up drinking. But then the girl hobo collapses and needs to be saved, so thankfully, the boy hobo is actually a multi-millionaire so he literally brings in a helicopter to whisk them all away.

I mean, even for a romance novel that's pretty improbable. They were hobos! Hobos! But sexy hobos. A boy hobo in need of a good woman to save him, and a girl hobo in need of money to save her back. So it all ends up nicely.


And this isn't even the worst offender. In my mother's household, there is a book that is passed around that is referred to only as "the smutty book." The smutty book doesn't even bother with the laughably implausible plot lines. If there are occasionally a few transitional paragraphs between the coupling of her tight, wet, hot... self, and his hard, needy, throbbing...self and the second, even more quiverful coupling of said genitals, I find that my sisters are simply flipping pages straight to the good stuff, as it were. If there's a literary equivalent to the money shot, they're fast forwarding to the main event.

Let's not kid ourselves. "Romance" is a nice way of saying "soft core porn for girls". But it's not just the soft coreness that makes me roll my eyes. It's the formula, the predictability. In fact, it cannot even be classified as a romance by the publisher if it doesn't have a happy\rosy\optimistic outcome. The insistence that some minuscule "obstacle" keeps them superficially apart, although they always grudgingly find each other desirable because only really hot people fall in love. I have no idea what ugly people do, or heck, even what ordinary people do, because no one has ever written about them. Well, ordinary people contract illnesses, or hitchhike across the country, or across the galaxy, or they work in coal mines or they keep bees, but they don't fall madly in love. Romances are only about people who have bodies that can be described as "rock hard" or "pneumatic".

Romances never involve stretch marks or receding hair lines or Honda Civics or guys named Roy. It makes me think that it must be a bunch of stringy-haired, badly-complected, knobby-kneed wallflowers who write these novels, and live vicariously through them. But you'll never catch me saying that out loud. Oh no. When I dared to voice my unfavourable opinion of science fiction, those sex-starved kiddies who call themselves fans got on their bikes and threw eggs at my neighbour's house (woops!). But then I called their moms, who threatened to start charging them rent on their basement lairs if they didn't come home right away, so I guess I didn't quite learn that lesson.

Maybe, for the good of fiction, we should take all those romance authors who just need a good lay, and pair them up with all the science fiction authors who've never seen a woman naked, and just see what happens.

Or maybe we could just take away all their pens instead?

Or maybe I should just stop reading this crap, or at least have the decency to pretend that I don't. Or learn to keep my trap shut.

Hah. Fat chance.
Damn I crack myself up.

Or maybe you should just visit the Quickie Book Review to read about what books I do like (surprising, I know, that something occasionally passes muster).

Or maybe you have a soft core hobo fetish, which I imagine is an itch that's hard to scratch, and therefore I can only counsel you to read away. Just don't say I didn't warn you.



P.S. The sex scene on page 214 is pretty hot, once they take care of the lice. You're welcome.

Obligatory Holiday Post

So first you gotta get your ass to the Home Depot and buy the biggest, most ridiculous, most overtly-won't-fit-through-your-doorway-no-matter-how-hard-you-ram-it tree you can find (and no, that was not a euphemism).






Then you strap it to the car using nothing but odds and ends of free twine and some misplaced optimism, and hope for the best.

Then you stop every 3km and reattach until you get home (because yes, an 80 foot tree does go careening off the roof of your stupid slippery car every time you hit the gas, or the break, or sneeze), losing limbs (tree limbs, not human limbs....well, not ideally) and needles along the way.


Then you get home, curse the fact that you brought home a tree that's twice the size of your house, spend the next 7 hours sawing it down to the point where it no longer looks like something Paul Bunyan would have brought home, then make a quick trip to the ER to get some stitches and a tetanus shot because that slicing yourself with a rusty handsaw is a Christmas tradition, goddammit.

Then you get into the rum balls. And I mean, you fucking lay into the rum balls like there's no tomorrow. Because first of all, now that the tree is in the house, it's making strange noises like maybe, just maybe, there's a rabid squirrel (or two) in there, and also because now is the time where you have to decorate it using a mishmash of "sentimental" (also known as "tacky") ornaments that the family has been collecting since polyester and aquanet were considered to be in taste.

Then you try not to cringe as you dig out some gems such as: a styrofoam ball spray painted cold and "decorated" with toothpicks, several A&W RootBears, some threadbare Bugs Bunny balls, circa 1979, something shiny and distinctly phallic, and let's not forget this little gem, a piece of construction paper older than Hillary Duff, lovingly hand-crafted (using crayons and glitter, liberally, by the looks of it) by yours truly, when I was 18. Or so.

Then make a totally out of the blue phone call to make sure your insurance policy is up to date, and includes fire, and all that good stuff. Because that blinky, somewhat faulty, somewhat monstrously hot bulb is dangerously close to that brittle, dried out piece of kindling - er, ornament, I mean.

Then check the batteries in the smoke detectors just to be safe.

Then hang the stockings with care. Or you know, alternatively, hang them haphazardly on the stair banister when a mantel is lacking; that'll do too. Then take a moment to consider how fucking old you must be when your stocking is starting to grow mould. Mould! Right on Frosty's ball.

Then drink to console yourself. Eggnog is nasty, but brandy is dandy. If you drink enough, you'll forget that you're allergic to tree sap and cranberries make you gag and grandma still wants to know why you aren't pregnant yet. In fact, if you drink enough, your cheeks will turn rosy and your giggle will be enough to convince others that you're "in the spirit" when really you've just been "into the spirits." And if you drink even more, you'll find a naughty button around and instead of thinking oh, how inappropriate, you think, I'm drinking for free tonight!

Then find a karaoke bar where the people are unironically wearing santa hats and the bartender is unabashedly pouring hot toddies and let the good times roll. And by "good times roll", I of course mean get ogled by anything with a penis, and make eye contact with no one, not even the chicks, and get very prompt service at the bar.


Then continue to celebrate in a similar fashion for several nights in a row. Don't be afraid to occasionally overdose on cashews, pop the cork on half a case of champagne, very occasionally lick a candy cane in a suggestive manner, sing "alternative" lyrics to the Christmas carols you hate the most, indulge in a snowball fight (Mexican fighting rules apply), raise the heat and lose the clothes, and only extremely occasionally mind you, don some footie pajamas and curl up on the couch with someone to watch cheesy Tim Allen movies that secretly make you cry.

Merry Christmas.

Industrial Cream Puff Accident Maims 1, Shocks All.

Tits McGee
Kill the Goat News
December 19, 2007 2:30 am EST

Eastern Ontario - The tragic accident that left dozens of puff pastry treats empty and aching for their custard filling has devastated an entire staff room of ornery elementary school teachers looking to soothe their frayed nerves with a chocolatey sugar fix and raised awareness for the plight of the custardless among the shaken but indomitable community.

The site of the accident, an ordinary residential kitchen, still smelled delightfully of vanilla and was lightly dusted with flour, a somewhat whimsical setting for what would ultimately become a grizzly, nightmarish scene.

A woman who can only be identified as "Jay" under the Suffer the Fools Protection Act, had been baking furiously for about an hour before the accident, which occurred at approximately 1:15am. The empty pastry shells of what were to become eclairs could be seen cooling on wire racks behind police tape. Alone and unsupervised, Jay was apparently gently folding whipped cream into a vanilla-based mixture while listening to The Kinks when a large mixing bowl, described as blue and plastic, which contained said mixture suddenly and inexplicably went from sitting politely on the counter to upturned and on the floor.

About 12 cups of not-quite-custard splashed an area including but not limited to the lace curtains, an oven that had just recently been cleaned, the counter top, the sink, the floor, the cupboard doors, the crack between the counter and the oven that's a real bitch to clean, and of course, Jay herself. The ensuing sticky puddle was so enormous that an innocent bystander named Max Keeping quite literally had to doggy-paddle through it in order not to drown.

Another resident of the home was the first respondent to the scene and described it variously as "fucking hilarious" and "still pretty delicious". Other four-legged witnesses didn't even bother invoking the golden 10-second rule, and were happy to lap up the evidence of an epic spill.

According to pastry-police Sergeant A. LaMode, the culprit, also known as Madame LaDropski, was probably mixing at excessive speeds and had been tempting fate by cracking eggs two-handedly and had not even replaced the cap on a very expensive bottle of pure vanilla extract. "People need to know that baking recklessly is a serious offense with serious consequences, as we can see here tonight. This needless accident could have been avoided if only she'd been using proper stirring technique and had not been under the influence of that damned rock and roll music."

Jay, who was treated at the scene for shock and stickiness, gave no comment except for an under-the-breath refrain of "My argyle, my poor argyle."

Meanwhile, clean-up crews dispatched to the scene were delighted to see the floor being eagerly licked clean. Damage to the remaining kitchen was extensive however, and was estimated in the range of 3-4 buckets of hot soapy water and at least one raging backache in the morning. Witnesses were visibly shaken by the carnage - crumbs were scattered haphazardly about the scene, and dozens of tiny eclair-corpses were piled into the garbage bin.

One woman, described as hungry and pre-menstrual, tearfully lamented the loss. "I know you can't make eclairs without the cream filling, but it just tears me up inside knowing that perfectly good pastry and devilishly sweet chocolate ganache are going to waste because of one bad decision. It's just not fair! Who's going to explain this injustice to my poor, exploding ovaries? They just won't understand."

Indeed, this reporter finds it difficult to understand what kind of God would allow such a heart-rending and grievous act of iniquity.