Hipsters Are Boring

Feeling Your Shitty Feelings

2012-02-01T22:51:00.002-05:00

Last weekend, I was part of Pressgang Theater's storytelling night, "Narcotics Synonymous." The night centered around tales of drugging and drinking, and since of all of us were in our twenties, it was far less depressing than it could have been. I told the story of my very first bad hangover, and it was captured for posterity by Liz, who apologies profusely for both letting the camera wander and sitting too close to her guffawing husband.

My boyfriend pointed out that the story was basically just a blog post, live-styles. In that spirit, I present it to you.

I feel ambivalent about how I look (I have one chin too many, and the lights washed me out something fierce), but I'm grateful for the chance to be part of something like this. Blogging is personal, and rarely performed, so it was challenging and refreshing to do something with immediate, visceral feedback. Thank you to those in the audience who laughed, and if you laugh at home, bless you. I thought there was nothing lonelier than a blog entry without comments; as it turns out, it's a joke where nobody laughs.

Blah-scar Nominations

2012-01-24T18:22:00.000-05:00

When I was younger, the Academy Awards were the living end: the pinnacle of glamour, the acme of accomplishment, the very height of American can-do attitude with a healthy dose of beaded gowns. The red carpet, the shots of an audience in stitches - when I first started watching, the show was hosted by Billy Crystal, who was irascibly, harmlessly funny - the tearful speeches, the interminable running time: it felt so big, like everyone who mattered was in that room that night, and they were all dressed to impress.

Seen through the eyes of a child - a child slightly obsessed with old Hollywood, who, in the sixth grade, wrote a report on the Fatty Arbuckle scandal - the Oscars represented the untouchable loveliness of Hollywood. 1994 was the first year I watched, and the show was both a tease (those clips! Of Pulp Fiction and The Shawshank Redemption!) and a barge (it lasted for hours: it was literally the longest show I had ever watched). In more recent years, the Academy has done away with some of the stateliness, and the clips are a little less enticing, but it's still basically celebrating the best of cinemasphere.

Or is it?

Yesterday, the nominees for 2012 were announced, and, like every year, there's backlash. "Where's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo? What's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close doing in there? Do I spy Transformers 3: Dark Side of the Moon on that list?" Lists like this are always contentious, because film, like all other art forms, is subjective. The Academy has always revelled in a certain filmic elitism: comedies never get nominated, animated features have been ghettoized, and the movies that actually get seen by regular civilians are nowhere to be found.

Example: Tin-Tin was a marvellous movie, full of action and comedy and excellent performances. The Academy, though, is slow to adapt to changing technologies like motion- and performance capture, so movies like Tin-Tin, that use emerging techniques in order to make some truly stellar movie moments, get ignored. Don't believe me? Do you honestly believe that Puss in Boots, a Shrek spin-off that was pretty much greeted with "Did we really need this?" deserves an Oscar more than the beautifully choreographed chase through Morocco?

Or the question of motion capture, period: Andy Serkis, who has made his living playing characters that aren't quite human (Gollum, Cesar in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the animated Captain Haddock in Tin-Tin). He does beautiful, subtle work. But he often does it in a motion-capture suit, and the character's is filled in around him in post-production. Serkis doesn't look like George Clooney or Brad Pitt, but his characters are creations that straddle the line between "human" and "other," and after this summer's Rise, there was a motion from fans to recognize good work.

The Academy ignored that work completely.

As I get older, I realize that the Oscars aren't really about celebrating what's truly great, even though that does sometimes happen: The Artist is nominated this year, and it should win. The other nominees were divisive: Tree of Life, The Help and Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close split the critics, and flicks like War Horse are such transparent Oscar-bait that I avoid them out of a sense of duty. But mostly, the Best Picture nods always take themselves so seriously: so many dramas and period pieces, so many dying kids and dying moms and failing husbands and injured animals - it's all too much.

Part of it is growing up, and becoming less enamoured with Hollywood - the old-time glamour is gone. The machinery of the industry is much more in-your-face. Box office get discussed around water coolers. Comedies get ignored at awards shows. I've aged out of the demographic that will take in every last thing Hollywood says as gospel: the cacophony of awards and critics isn't silenced by the Oscars, only frothed up further. I wonder if my kids will crouch by the TV on the night of the Oscars, breathlessly watching the Hollywood elite celebrate each other's work. I somehow doubt it. Part of me doubts that I'll be there, either.

Your Mommyblog Doesn't Wear Combat Boots

2012-01-22T11:05:00.003-05:00

Last year, mommyblogs were all the rage, and Mormon mommyblogs were especially au courant. Slate published a shamefaced essay, written by a self-proclaimed feminist who couldn't tear herself away from all the shiny, happy young women who were photoblogging and writing love notes to their impossibly handsome husbands. Emily Matchar, the author of the Slate article, wrote about her cringe-y, self-judging relationship with these blogs: as a young feminist,she wasn't really looking to become a young stay-at-home wife and mother, making pom-pom garlands and jellies. But Matchar talked about craving the other side of the post-feminist discourse, the one that doesn't focus on BPA in the baby bottles, episiotomies, and work-life-balance fraught terror of screwing up your kids while your kid, in turn, ruins your own professional and personal life.

When these sprightly blogs cross my path,I fall on them like wolves on sheep. I want to read every entry of each blog, but as I go through and look at wedding pictures (the dresses are all sacks, the bride and groom are undergrads), I feel a creeping queasiness. I'm jealous...and also angry...and then glad they're not me...and then jealous again.

The Mormon mommyblogs seem so simple: gratitude flows from each entry. They're the polar opposite of most young people's personal blog. I've always had more glass-half-empty stuff to say, and online, it become very easy for a blog to become a litany of moody song lyrics, YouTube videos that will somehow express how I feel, links to bummer news stories, and Instagram posts of half-done crosswords, half-eaten meals, and half-drank pints. We're kind of a downer, at least on the internet. Compared to the mommyblogs, which feature sweeping images of the Utah mountainscape (so gorgeous I would consider converting just to live there [Not really. --Ed.]), my life is blah, boring. Their sun shines constantly.

One of my high school teachers once asked me what I wanted to do after I graduated. I shrugged and said, "I dunno, what are the qualifications for becoming a mom?" I've never actually had huge biological clock urges - even now I feel worried about things like baby weight and whether or not it's okay to let your infant just sleep on the floor (on a mat! I suspect the answer is still no, though). But there's something very primal and instinctual about becoming a parent. These young women have become more than parents, though. I would say that they're super-moms, but I don't mean that their parenting skills are any better than mine would be. They just seem to have their shit together, in a way that I am very far away from.

Part of the appeal of blogging, as Matchar points out, is that not everything you do, say, or think needs to make an appearance. My own blog, through sprawling in its scope, doesn't touch on everything, and the Mormon mommybloggers keep it even tinier. There are lovely photos of their young children and of large family parties. There are posts about pregnancy, and dinners with friends. There are video montages about Christmas. But their professional lives don't get mentioned - it's easy to imagine that these women spend all their time grooming their toddlers and choosing the perfect red lipstick, and that jobs are something for husbands and fathers, not for them. Larger social issues almost never get raised - these girls will never post about Mitt Romney or fiscal responsibility, not when their kids are doing something adorable.

The effect of these willful blind spots is that these writers seem to be transmitting from inside a snow globe - their lives are so beautiful, so magically perfect, that it's impossible to see if they work at the magic, and if they do, how hard. None of the seams show, but that also means there's no crack for me to sneak through. It's life, in a vacuum, with the perfect shade of red lipstick.

300 Hipsters, No Porn

2012-01-19T16:26:00.004-05:00

The number one thing that brings people to this site isn't me.

Oh sure, I randomly get Facebook shoutouts from people who are all like, "I love your blog!" which is great, because most of the time, I feel like I'm writing in a vacuum. Not an actual vacuum, mind you, because, though I am fairly small, my curves would prevent me from bending myself into a neat enough package to shimmy inside the canister of your family's Dyson Rollerball. Just, like, it can be lonely out here in the blogosphere. I'm not well-versed enough in self-promotion to have the thousands of hits that other (louder, better) bloggers have. I'm not especially well connected, and I tend, because I am dumb, to burn bridges almost as fast as I can build them - perusing the masthead of a local newspaper that I am a fan of (and would like to someday write for) revealed the name of a man with whom I had recently had some lousy email back-and-forth. (There's another place to which I'm now too self-concious to submit! Good one, Kaitlyn!) There've been girls who approach me at parties and say, "I read your blog," and I love that, because it makes me feel micro-famous, and then we coo at each other over what great tops we're all wearing. I love that too.

I've learned things from writing here. I've learned how hard it is to be consistently good, twice a week: "good" meaning "good writing", but also punctual, well-edited, factual, and respectful of my sources. I've learned not to write when I'm angry, because the cooling-off period is crucial in not sounding like an ill-informed pot-banging troll. I've learned that I need to disguise the identities of the scumbags in my life, even though they don't deserve it. I've learned that social media like Twitter and Facebook can be instrumental in expanding my readers from a few dozen to a few hundred, and that walking the tightrope between personal and public can be daunting but exhilarating: writing about surgery, for example, netted me plenty of well-wishers on Facebook, and it also let me say just how scared and lonely I felt in my situation.

But the number one thing that draws people here? Is this.

In 2010, I wrote an entry with the fateful phrase "hipster porn" embedded somewhere in the code. Since then, hundreds of perverts come each week, from all over the world, and discover that, much to their dismay, there are no photos of tattooed baristas, bike mechanics, photobloggers, and vegans doing unspeakable things to each other while smoking/drinking/attending concerts/whatever it is hipsters do. Instead: hello! Kaitlyn here!

It makes me laugh that "hipster porn" is my main draw, because I actually work damned hard at this little blog. I've parlayed it into a couple non-paying writing gigs, like my Beginner's Guides over at HuffPo and an internship at Spacing. I've also snagged a real, live, paying blogjob over at XOXO Amore, where, aptly enough, the focus is all about sex. Over the years, I've done writing for free, for experience and training, for exposure, for cash. It's all been some kind of work, but its also all been for me. I'm greedy like that.

I love writing. Folks have told me I'm good at it - my mom and girls at parties at parties, yes. Strangers too. That's gratifying, but I've never designed this site to be anything more than the place I come when I need to write - and baby, you better believe that's a need. You don't write 300 thousand-word blog entries because you're sort of interested in writing - you do it because you're a writer, and writers have to write. It's what we do.

There's that rule: 10,000 hours to get from good to great. By those standards, I'm years - and hundreds of blog posts - away from true mastery. These last 300 posts have given me great entries that may never be read again, and terrible ones that someone out there just loves. It gives me a safe place to play - to write haikus and talk about horror movies. I might not always write here, on this blog, on this internet. But writing is just a no-brainer: I need it. I always will. Hipster porn or no.

Even MORE Five Things

2012-01-14T19:15:00.006-05:00

Five more things? 'kay. Sure.

1. My musical firsts are kind of embarrassing. First concert? Swollen Members. First CD purchase? The Clueless soundtrack. The Clueless soundtrack actually had a bunch of decent bands on it - Beastie Boys, Radiohead, and Supergrass, what? - but the main reason I bought it was so that I could listen to Jill Sobule's "Supermodel" on repeat. I'm not proud of that.

I bought it at Victoria's A&B Sound, a slightly seedy three-story CD store that was totally amazing to a pre-teen. It was stuffed to the rafters with bands I had never heard of, and just flipping through the racks while my parents made serious faces at the Springsteen section gave me a thrilled, liberated feeling: there were so many different people I could be! I was young enough to buy whole-heartedly into the notion that I could define myself by the music I listened to, and pop-culturally savvy enough to start understanding that there were definitely bands that liking - or even being aware of - had cachet. And so, that knowledge in hand, I plunked down $17.99 and made my first formal venture into music fandom. Thanks, Jill Sobule. You were there.

2. I once quit a job after 20 minutes because my boss told me I couldn't drink water on the job. Because, as she explained, "if you're thinking about your thirst, you're not thinking about my business." Shocked, I left.

3. Even though I have an English degree, I struggle mightily with novels. Magazine articles, essays, and short stories are totally my bag, though. It's shameful to admit that I've stopped keeping up with new books, and that even if I know that something noteworthy's been published lately, I likely won't read it. But I feel bad about that! To make up for it, I tell anyone who will listen about that article I read this morning, which endears me to my friends and alienates receptionists.

4. I put The Commodores' "Brick House" on every single mix tape I made in high school. I'm not even sure why I loved that song, but I'm pretty sure it stems from That '70s Show, starring my boy Topher Grace, who, as Eric, told a date-ready Donna (Laura Prepon) that she was "really...brick house" when he meant she was really hot. I liked that show so much, and was definitely charmed by Eric and his skinny portrayer. I've always wanted someone to tell me I was really brick house.

5. My fears include deep water, deep space, fainting in public (especially on the subway), that my eye is twitching when I talk to strangers, that I'll die alone, that I'll die in a fire, drowning, electron-microscope photographs, being too hot, spiders, tarantulas, spiders in my hair, spiders in the bathroom, giant spiders as surprise plot points in movies (what? It happens - have you seen Lord of the Rings?), and gaining weight. Feel free to use any of those to make fun of me, except for the spider thing - I will cut you for real if you tease me with a rubber spider.

Five More Things

2012-01-09T19:49:00.005-05:00

Last week, I started getting a little more intimate. Not in that "let me slip into something more comfortable, like a marabou stiletto and a satin shortie bathrobe" kind of way. More like, "let me make self-conscious eye contact in my therapist's office while I systematically shred several Kleenex over the course of a fifty-minute hour" sort of way. Or even more like, "let's get drunk together and talk slurrily about all the boys we've kissed before throwing our arms up in the air and screaming 'Wooo!' when our right-now favourite song comes on the jukebox" sort of way.

1. I like to bake, but I rarely branch out past the standard chocolate-chip banana muffins or oatmeal-chocolate chip cookies. (I seem to used baking as a vector for chocolate.) Like most of my culinary adventures, baking is less an adventure and more a meditation. Some of those recipes, I've made so often that I've got 'em memorized, and making up a batch of muffins is a forty-minute exercise in sifting and mixing and measuring that allows me to reach, stretch, twirl, and turn my brain off. It's nice.

2. When I argue, I argue less about being right - I'm rarely right, and I'm not a jerk when I realize I'm not - but more about being heard. For someone to say, "I acknowledge your viewpoint" is what allows for my peaceable resolution.

When I was younger, my sister and I fought like animals, and she is the queen deluxe of pushing my buttons. But the moment I learned how to say, "I'll talk about this with you when we're both less angry," was the moment our relationship became more open. It meant that she could admit, hey, she has been jonesing for a fight. It meant she could say that she thought I was wrong without me turning all red and glassy-eyed. And it meant we talked about the stuff that was actually happening (I'm tired, I had a fight with my boyfriend, I spent all day at work, I'm lonely, I'm afraid) rather than all the stuff that was masquerading as The Issue (I'm going to straight-up MURDERIZE YOU if you don't unload the dishwasher and I MEAN IT, etc.).

Most of the time, these days, I start a fight/allow a fight to continue because I'm feeling like my feelings are being pooped on. I give the cold shoulder, I use pathetic straw man arguments, I start yelling - all desperate ploys to trick the other person into saying, "Hey man, I see where you're coming from. That must really suck." There doesn't even need to be an apology - hell, if you're not sorry, don't give that "Pfft, I'm sorry" that really means "I'm sorry you're so stupid," because I can see through that and it activates my all rage nodes. Just a little bit of empathy works wonders with me. Barring that, time. Barring that, gift baskets - the kind with the fancy jams and pretzel sticks. Nothing says, "I'm sorry you're so stupid and wrong, but that's okay because we're still generally on the same page about everything except the ethics of small businesses vs. big box stores" like pretzel sticks.

3. The only mega-series I've read has been The Dark Tower by Stephen King. I was about two years too old to get into Harry Potter - my sister was enthralled, but I stopped reading after the third book - and while I've attempted the Lord of the Rings cycle at least twice, I just can't get into it. I have no beef with long books, having read Infinite Jest, The Stand and a few other 1000+ page books (books that long can only really be described as "tomes," right?), but if someone said to me, "Oh, you like epics? Have you read Twilight?" I would laugh so hard my nose would bleed. It's not about quality, because King and Stephanie Meyers are probably on about the same page, writing-wise, and Rowling and Tolkien are miles above them both. It's about reading a yarn that's mine - some of us like magic with walking trees, some like sparkly-ass vampires, and others like broomstick rugby. Those just aren't my jam.

4. I get obsessed with places. Last year, after reading a foodie profile of Copenhagen, I wanted to go to Denmark so bad. That grew to mean Scandinavia in general, because of Robyn and ski sweaters and a general feeling that the countries were a lot like Canada, except nicer. Canada-plus. Right now, it's Utah. I've been reading all these ridiculous Mormom mommyblogs and their family vacations always have them spending their quarters in the Beehive State. Utah seems demographically crazy (I'm not a Mormon by any means), but there's something to be said about a state that looks like this. And this. And this. I think the general wanderlust can be attributed to getting bored in same-old-same-old Toronto - I love this place, but my shoes aren't nailed to my front steps, you know? There's only so many days in a row I can orient myself to the CN tower.

5. For the first time in my life, I've managed to keep plants alive for longer than 6 months. Hell, the cacti under my care (sorry, "care") have been thriving! I don't know if this is some sort of metaphor for finally being well enough to care for something else, or a metaphor for accepting the things you're good at, but in either case, it's awesome.

Five Things

2012-01-07T22:13:00.004-05:00

It was trendy, for a while, to make lists of 25 or 50 or 3,000 things that one felt one should share with one's Facebook friends (and is it just me, or is "one" one of the more pretentious pronouns out there?), which would lead to people "tagging" other folks whose lists they wanted to see, and there would be cascades of lists happening everywhere, itemized tidbits of information raining down on unsuspecting Facebook compadres.

This is my 297th post. This blog has given me a chance to spout all kind of opinions on the interwebs, and I've loved writing it, but there's only so much you can glean from a person based on how much he or she resents Margaret Atwood (in my case? Plenty. Sorry Maggie. If it makes you feel any better, I liked what you had to say about Toronto's libraries this year). I figured, hey, why not do a litter series of stuff for whoever reads this to get to know me better.

1. I've never liked my name. Kaitlyn is a 1980s name, and has always reminded me of other people rather than me. I think my mom had some regrets, too: despite it being spelled with a "y" on my birth certificate, she spelled it Kaitlin for most of my childhood, and told me much later that the reason for the switch was that Kaitlyn had a trendy vibe that the "i" undercut (somehow?). I found out in high school and switched it back, leading to all kinds of mix-ups on attendance forms that I used to my advantage. Either way, the name is silly. My friend Mark and uncle Kevin call me Kate, a short-form that delights me because it makes me feel even less like myself, and my friend Liz calls me Kaiko, which I love.

My brother and sister have classic, albeit very white-person, names, and I like to think that my parents learned that naming their kids after characters in Paul Newman movies isn't a good life decision for anyone.

2. I am totally addicted to Coke Zero, but rarely finish the last couple sips. If Coke made a 330 mL can, that would be perfect. Instead, I just leave tantalizing droplets in all the fifty thousand cans I leave littered through my life and infuriate everyone.

3. I'm 28 years old, and I still sleep with my baby blanket. When I left for university, my parents told me that people would laugh at me if I brought it, but people were awed when they found out my blanket had made the trip to higher education. They all said variations on the same thing: "My parents told me people would laugh, so I left it behind." They usually said it with a wistful, envious look on their faces as they ran their fingers along the sateen binding of my battered and much-loved blanket.

4. I have pretty wicked social anxiety. For years, I dealt with that by drinking until I felt loosey-goosey enough to talk to people, but that's not really a long-term solution, liver-wise. Social anxiety, for me at least, is a constant feeling of being looked at, judged, and found lacking, and the fear of screwing up in front of all those judges. It's based on nothing in reality, but can be really hard to shake - in my case, it's led to panic attacks at work and in uncomfortable social situations. Talking to sales people and receptionists is the worst, along with waiting in lines.

Talking about social anxiety has been something I've only started to do recently. There are a few people with whom I feel truly comfortable, like my immediate family, my close friends, and my boyfriend - almost every other interaction I have is tinged with a bit of panic. It usually goes something along the lines of "What if you fainted right now?" and that little thought becomes a roar so loud, I can't hear anything else. I become convinced I'm too hot, or that I'm dizzy, or that I'm going to faint from hunger if I haven't eaten in more than a couple hours. Let me say again that I know these aren't rational thoughts, but irrational thoughts are pretty tough to dismiss when they're causing a physical stress reaction.

I don't know why these things happen. I know how they happen, and when (work settings are a particularly intense trigger, because hello, work is stressful, and because my last job was such a gong show), but the why is a tricky one. I know I'm not alone - a lot of my family and some of my friends are under the spell of mild to moderate social anxiety, and we've commiserated about the challenges and frustrations of feeling totally tweaked when everyone seems relaxed and, you know, normal.

5. The only kind of pants I really wear are sweats and capris. Jeans? I always feel weird in jeans, and I rarely wear them. My boyfriend is sighs wistfully and saying, "But your ass? In jeans? Damn," but I can barely go ten minutes without hitching them up or scrunching them down. Jeans are not my friend, but linen capris than make me look 63 are totally my jam.

How Much Is That Diamond Dog Brooch In The Window?

2012-01-04T09:24:00.000-05:00

I have sadly developed a new interest this year, one that, if taken to its logical conclusion, will end up costing me lots and lots of money. No, I haven't taken up designer drugs or overpriced yoga wear - I've started browsing online for jewelry.

I was never really a jewelry person. My friend Rachel is - she has a wall of bangles and barrettes, of feathered hairpieces and bauble necklaces. She buys from thrift stores and local boutiques, and has such an array of choices that she can, and will, create a look that is literally like something you might see in the pages of a magazine. Aside from her irrational attachment to the colour mustard, Rachel is one of my most stylish friends, and a lot what she does to finish her looks is all in the way she accessorizes.

I have my standard choices that affect my look from day to day, like my stretched-out earlobes that offer a peek at the landscape behind me, but are small enough not to scare the children. Those earrings give me an ever-so-slightly edgy look, which I forget about all the time because I've worn them for so long. When I worked at a bakery five years ago, I had to take them out for health and safety reasons - a ridiculous notion, because the earrings literally screwed into my earlobes. My bosses insisted, which definitely contributed to my general malaise at that job - that, and all the ambient flour, leading to a dryness level in the bake shop that led to nosebleeds.

Ahem. I digress. In high school, I had stretched ears, but my look was a lot more day-glo raver girl, a look that was, in hindsight, very stupid. I also dyed my hair pink and wore orange eyeshadow, so, like, you know - not a style icon, I was. Thank god I didn't wear a ton of jewelry, or I would have probably ended up looking like one of classmates, who wore a hemp necklace threaded with jawbreaker-sized wooden beads. (Let's just all agree right now that the intersection of late-1990s fashion trends and the reasoning power of a 16-year-girl's mind led to very bad decisions regarding accessories and leave it at that.)

I never really follow trends when it comes to jewelry, mostly because I can't afford to follow trends in jewelry. The upper style eschelon always seems to be suggesting that women dangle beads from their head or wear enormous hats, looks that work best for women who spend most of their time in front of cameras or donating money, and rotating between bangles and brooches and rings and all the others is damned expensive. For the plebes, most women only have a few pieces of fine jewelry throughout their lives - engagement rings, maybe a nice bracelet for an anniversary, or a gift to one's own self once the divorce is finalized.

So my new interest in jewelry is a little unsettling, because I just can't afford to love anything I see - it costs me in either heartbreak or cash, and neither is fun. There are a couple things baby investments I've made in the last couple months, like Catbird's dreamy little memory ring. (Catbird is my jewelry spirit animal - I covet so many of their little gems, because their jewelry combines subtlety and beauty in a way that a lot of modern designers skips.) I've got a little cache of bike-themed pendants, and friends and family spoil me with more. But I troll online for rings and pendants, and I'm not sure why.

I think part of it stems from being set up in life - I've got an apartment, a job, a closet full of not unstylish clothes, and so I'm not wanting for anything. At the same time, I can't afford the frivolities in life, so nice jewelry is out of the question. It becomes part of the window-shopping landscape - things that are theoretically in reach, but that actually purchasing them would make me very hungry indeed. They're the things that make life prettier, lovelier, but not necessarily worth the dip in quality of life they would cost me.

But maybe one day, I'll treat myself to a quail egg on a string and smile at myself in the mirror.

Into The 2012

2011-12-31T14:27:00.002-05:00

New Years resolutions are the worst. I always resolve to be a totally different person by February. I want to lose 20 pounds, become more professional in demeanor (not sleeping until noon every weekend!) and appearance (getting a salon haircut more than once a decade!), quit drinking, take up yoga and running, give up all the carcinogenic things I love - Coke Zero, cheap food, and nail polish - and be a better daughter, girlfriend, friend, lover, sister, employee and gym member.

For two days after these edicts come down from my brain, I am transformed. I get up early, I watch what I eat, and I pledge that I am never doing...something...again. And I am earnest! But then the next weekend hits, and it's January, which isn't a very inspiring month, weather-wise, and all I want to do is eat takeout food and half-watch episodes of Breaking Bad with my boyfriend while I read Chew. And then I feel guilty, and then I feel rebellious, and then I realize that my heartrate hasn't been raised in a few weeks, and then I decide to take a nice, long, world-avoiding bath, in which I stare morosely at my undefined waist and pledge, again, to lose 20 pounds and all the other crap.

So I'm not going to do that. I've already started a new gym routine, in preparation for bridesmaids duties in the late spring, so that's firmly underway. If that ends up with some more defined abs, that's great; if not, I'll take solace at the chocolate fountain and wear a forgiving dress.

I'm going to try to give up swearing. My boyfriend claims to like my pottymouth, but I live in fear of accidentally dropping an f-bomb in front of my boss. I've said it to my parents a couple times, in the heat of the story-telling moment, and every time, they graciously, if awkwardly, ignore it.

I'm going to try to eat healthier. Not undertake some sort of crash diet that ends up with my hound-dog style outside a cupcakeria, but a rational, body-conscious way of eating that makes me feel full, fed and tasty without being restrictive or weird. I know wheat sometimes does crazy things to my body - 2011 was the year I said "so long" to beer - and I should eat less gooey (but delicious!) cheeses, but the quest for delicious foods also means experimenting with new ingredients, smaller portions, and healthy sources.

There are a bunch of things I want to work on in the internal side - friendships that have soured that need reassessing, some anxities that need to be massaged, some fears that need to be confronted - but most of that is interesting only to me, so I'll leave them be. I'll work on forgiveness and competitiveness, two of my less endearing personality flaws that have gotten me into trouble.

I'll renew my pledge to love my boyfriend so very hard. I sometimes get caught up in wedding-want, but I'm so happy with my romantic life right now. I need to remember that focusing on galloping ahead means missing out on the sweetness of right now, and right now it's all very sweet indeed.

But mostly, I just want to take it easy. Living a good life doesn't mean banking crazy money or becoming wildly famous. It means, to me at least, that I wake up in the morning liking the person I am and the choices I've made, loving the people with whom I've chosen to surround myself, and learning from the weird moments when things go awry.
Happy 2012, everyone!

2011: Back To Front

2011-12-26T11:49:00.003-05:00

Oh my god, dudes! I have totally fallen down on the blog lately. I know only a few folks read this, but it's less about my supposed readership and more about the practice of writing, often, and well. Anyway, I could blame it on being mega busy, or too full to type (my fingers are too fat and I keep making typos!), or I could just own up and say, sometimes there are times when I have less to say. But it's the time of year for the highlights reel to roll, so let's take a journey back to some moments I'm especially proud of.

First of all, I totally quit my job. Not the job I have now - I like that job, it's my jam - but the horrible, no-good job I was working at for the first six months of this year. I knew I was going to quit when I called my mom during a weekend shift from the Toronto Public Library's payphone, after one of my coworkers told me a vicious piece of gossip involving our supervisor and her allegations that the receptionist of the company couldn't, and I quote, "keep her legs shut" for the head of the business. I was agog, totally flabbergasted at the meanness and callousness of that tidbit, and the casualness with which it was tossed off. I called my mom to tell her the story and that I was quitting, and she cheered. That superisor still works there; the receptionist found out about that gossip a couple weeks later and walked out the door. The company, despite my not liking its staff very much, still does good work, but I could not be more grateful that it's out of my life.

Then there was the camping trip. Oh man. So, this was an 8-day venture into the wilds with my boyfriends and a group of people I knew only passingly well. There was shoe-sucking muck; spiders the size of five-dollar bills; rain; sunburns; crashing into rocks in a canoe; crashing into someones hand in a canoe; cold sores; fights; crying; running out of food; flat tires, and other adventures. Do not assume that I hated it, but it was definitely a challenge. I will probably do it again, for the same reasons mothers have more than one kid.

What else? There were concerts. Standouts include a sparsely attended by energetic performance by World Inferno/Friendship Society, and a raucous show by The Born Ruffians. I saw Weird Al at Massey Hall (I know!), Cancer Bats in a Parkdale basement, and Paul Simon in the worst concert crowd I've ever seen. I usually went with my boyfriend, but sometimes I ventured out with friends, and either way, music is such a good way to mark the time.

There were wedding-related things. Oh, keep your shirts on; not me. I went to my first non-secret wedding this year, which was pretty and gave me a taste of what's possible when you take radical matrimonial steps like inviting your parents (elopements 4 life!) - for example, an open bar. Closer to my heart, one of my girlfriends asked me to be a bridesmaid, so I get to go to gym and buy a blue dress, and I'm hella looking forward to it. We were talking last night at dinner about weddings - I asked my parents what their "rules" are: like, do we have to invite all the relatives? They were basically like, "We don't care, you don't even have to invite us," which made my sister pout and say that any relative of hers who got married without at least telling her would be on my sister's shit-list for a long time. It's slowly coming to light that weddings are a complicated thing.

We went to New York, this year, my boyfriend and I, and it was the first time I had really traveled without the company of a family member. He and I had an uproarious time, full of the big time touristy things and the smaller, less famous NYC stuff. It's whetted my appetite for more traveling, maybe something overseas.

And there was other stuff, too. Bad stuff, good stuff, meh stuff. My roommates were annoying and the bathroom was usually filthy. I ran out of money. I dropped my groceries all over Bloor Street, had panic attacks, fought with friends and lovers and family members, and sometimes cried. But there were also a thousand tiny victories - watering plants, getting a new job, laughing together with the man I love, making art, writing, reaching out, going dancing, having sleepovers, talking on the phone for hours, finally finishing The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and so many other moments. Sometimes, I fall down on writing about them, but I always appreciate 'em.

Why I Ring My Bell

2011-12-21T15:58:00.002-05:00

I ring my bell because, now, in the darker, longer, colder, icier days of the year, drivers aren't used to cyclists on the roads. We catch them by surprise: I can see their eyes widen as their headlights sweep across my bike, and they jam on the brakes and stutter to a stop in a panic that speaks to the fact that they weren't expecting anyone to be where I am. Now is the time of year when I'm super-vigilant about lights, but the bell acts as a friendly - or not-so-friendly - reminder that yes, we're still out here, slogging through the bite of the wind, in the dark.

I ring my bell because I ride with quickness. Cars in the city spend long minutes idly in traffic, but I can, and do, squeak by on the edge of the road. Often, those cars aren't sitting mindlessly - passengers are getting in and out, drivers are pulling back into traffic - and when I ride by, I can be faster than they think. City biking is an efficient way to move through the world, but motorists seem to think they have a monopoly on speed. I ring my bell to remind them that I am a body in motion.

I ring my bell because I am often mistaken for an entire population when I ride. "You cyclists are all the same," people snarl. "You run red lights, you never signal, and you all ride without lights. You deserve to get hit." This mindset scares me. Drivers share the roads with all kinds of other vehicles - scooters, big trucks, other cars, motorcycles - but for some reason, cyclists ride with a target on our backs. Ringing my bell might do nothing to change the minds of people who resent our presence out there. On the other hand, a bit of eye contact and a friendly smile are the first step in reminding other road users that, behind the wheel/handlebars, there's always a person.

I ring my bell because it's my bike's horn. I do my best to follow traffic laws - like anyone out there on the road, sometimes I don't come to a complete stop, or signal - but when other people are counting on me to give them the information they need to keep me safe, I do it. Some people choose to ignore my safety in favour of inching ahead in traffic, or roaring past me, or even just scaring me for sport. I give an indignant ding of the bell when that happens, because I don't have the luxury of a deep, foghorn bellow.

I ring my bell because, when I ride in a group, sometimes the sheer joy of riding together overwhelms us. It's not the prettiest symphony (cycling bells are designed to be strident and attention-grabbing, so "melodious" falls pretty far down on their list of priorities), but the sound of a herd of bikers clanging together down the road, often with whooping and hollering, is fun and joyful. There's no explanation, no rhyme or reason. We're our own parade.

Office Party Politics

2011-12-16T07:49:00.005-05:00

I'm relatively new to the office scene. Sure, my last gig was at an office, and there were perks there - for example, every two weeks, there was a mandatory two-hour lunch meeting, during which I, as the most junior staff person, was required to take notes. The upside? Those lunches generally featured some sort of free, delivered food (sushi! burgers! and so on), which helped offset the stomach-roiling anxiety of sitting in a room with all my coworkers. If I worked a weekend session, there would be pizza for lunch. Somehow, the little perks of that job, like free food, weren't enough to undo all the thousand little other despotic, horrible things about that place, though.

I'm at a new job now, and loving it. I also happened to join the company at a very opportune time - three weeks before Christmas. This means that I've been invited to join both the company party and the office party.

"What?" I can hear you saying (Not really, all I can hear is my roommate slamming her door for NO REASON, MICHELLE), "two Christmas parties?" Yep. Explanation: My office is in a fairly progressive workhub that features over 100 different organization, most of which focus on some sort of socially transformative mandate. There are web developers, farmers' market administrators, courier services, magazines, social media experts, and more. Most of them are fairly small companies, ranging from one to let's say seven people, and while interaction between folks is highly encouraged at this place, they also employ people to help lubricate the process of settling in and working there. Hence, the office party, which was organized by "community animators" and featured, among other treats, a cookie contest and a cocktail shakedown.

The night before, my boss had treated her staff to a lovely dinner out - a smaller, more upscale event that left me feeling grateful and full. My boyfriend and I walked around the neighbourhood, enjoying the unseasonably warm weather - raindrops! In December! - and after dinner, I felt grown-up and like I was a part of something. It was a feeling I realized I had missed in my last job, despite the generosity with food in meetings.

I've worked at places with an end-of-season shindig before. One of my favourite work memories was going to the Owen Sound drive-in with my summer coworkers in 2005, eating piles of baked goods and watching Grind. There are many, many terrible movies out there. Grind is totally one of them. It reinforced that, for me at least, the possibility that work and jobs are infinitely more tolerable if you surround yourself with amazing people. That job was tough - I worked counter service at a french fry stand on the beach, where people would walk up and order funnel cakes, hot dogs, and fries. I had to wear a collared shirt. It was not air-conditioned. After sundown, the place was frequented by drunk college students. One time, someone put poop in the vending machine. I went home every shift smelling like grease. It wasn't amazing. But my boss had the foresight to staff it with people who got along, who could see the humour in situations and who bonded together over the late-afternoon hot-dog rush. At the end of the summer, a blowing-off-steam party was a right. We needed to cut loose, even for just a night, even if it was at the drive-in.

The same principle applies to the Christmas party. It's a natural way to mark the end of the year, to celebrate all the work done in the past twelve months. At mine, since I'm such a new addition to the team, I sort of slunk around, stuffing brownies into my mouth and avoiding the women wearing novelty hats. For the people who have worked together for years, it can be a test - are we friends, or just co-workers? - but I mostly got to observe. The folks at this party seemed to like each other - there was a healthy amount of cookie-related smacktalk - but it was also unfussy and generous and nice just to be there.

Both the office party and the company party made me feel connected to my worklife. At my last job, my mom observed that I often seemed to be having an out-of-body experience when I was working: my brain was just watching my fingers type, screaming "Why are you doing this?" silently for hours. Here? Not so much. Usually we celebrate rebirth around Easter, but this year, at least, Christmas is my time to feel good.

Troy (And Abed) Around The Clock

2011-12-09T11:15:00.005-05:00

I'm on a Donald Glover kick right now, and friends, it is wonderful. He's the mastermind behind Childish Gambino, he's a righteously funny stand-up comic, and he plays Troy Barnes on NBC's Community. He's also incredibly foxy, which, you know: bonus!

I cam late to the game on Community. It was half-way through the second season before I tuned in, and it took a couple episodes to really get the hang of the humour. Originally, Troy was supposed to be paired with Chevy Chase's character Pierce, and the two of them - grumpy old man and dumb/smart jock - were going to act as the salt in the sugar shaker. Fortunately, the chemistry between Troy and Abed, the autistic-y film buff played by Danny Pudi, outshone the odd-couple Troy/Pierce matchup. Troy and Abed have become this weird spin-off-inside-the-show: they have pretend breakfast television shows, they build elaborate blanket forts, and they have one of the most homosocial relationships ever depicted on TV. Chandler and Joey were friends; Troy and Abed are best friends. They elevate the normal friendships that we all have, which are equal parts gossip, in-jokes and rants - and which are totally necessary to live - and just, like, puts in on TV.

Childish Gambino and Glover's stand-up act are a different animal. His rap rhymes are thoughtful, personal and often hilarious, and he addresses race, loneliness, sex, relationships and all the other personal juggernauts the way "the only black kid at a Sufjan concert" really can. Listening to his new album, Camp, makes me laugh, because some of it is really funny. It also makes me a little sad - there's naked emotion in some of the rhymes: "I miss the sex when we kiss whenever we're done," gets to me, because it's not that he misses sex (dude is an exceptionally fine-looking man, I'm sure he gets laid on the daily), but he misses intimacy. What?! And then he talks about in public? Double what?!! This isn't an album about guns and drugs and fine-looking bitches; it's about growing up a little poor, having parents who worked hard, being black in an otherwise all-white school. In other words, feeling weird even if you're normal. Who can't relate to that?

In other times, Troy Barnes would have been the token black character, in the mix to give street cred to the other white-bread characters. One of Community's strengths is that it takes its diversity for granted. These people are sort of losers, having washed up at a fourth-tier community college, but nobody's a bigger loser because they're old, a woman, or a minority. Joel McHale is the sole straight white dude in the principal cast, and he's matched beat for comedic beat by everyone else. Troy and Abed have become scene-stealing imps, and the show's off-beat comedy is strange and addictive, like salted caramel chocolates. And if sitcoms aren't your thing, try the stand-up. If the comedy leaves you wanting, try the album. And if you can't into any of it, then take a seat - I'll be with you when NBC returns Community to the airwaves.

Breaking You Off

2011-12-07T23:04:00.004-05:00

Now that I'm back at work - and can we all just take a moment to sigh along with me, in relief that I've found something that seems to suit me and that, once I get past the stage fright of meeting new folks and learning new things, will allow me to thrive? AHHHHH....that felt good - I remember the thrill of the weekend.

I've written before about the special joys of the long weekend, and about how having a short weekend can ruin one's life. I was chatting with a girlfriend tonight, and she said that having two days off in a row is a terrible thing for her. She just lazes all day the first day, and rushes joylessly around on the second day. She doesn't really enjoy either. Me, I need a proper weekend, but everyone's different. Some people need a two-day workweek. Some folks need ten minutes to gulp down a cup of coffee and check in with their nanny. We call those people ER doctors, and we don't pay them nearly enough money.

Work psychologists encourage people to take mini-breaks during the day. Stare out the window for a minute, walk around the office, take a brisk walk at lunch. It can be so easy to forget to take those moments in the business of work, and I often put them off when I'm deep into the expense reports. But those mini-vacations are help us function. They relieve eyestrain, stretch out tight muscles, and get a dose of vitamin D. They also keep the brain alert: mistake to stand up when things are viewed with a fresh pair of eyes, and they keep frustration at bay. I'm not saying that y'all should spend our work hours staring out the window, but stand up for yourself: breaks are important.

My old boss was stingy with break time. Lunch hours were carefully monitored, and employees were instructed to sign in and out very day. There were no coffee breaks. The expectation was 100% work, 100% of the time. Coupled with that six-day work week, my life became threaded with work, and it was impossible to de-escalate the stress I felt at the constant demands. That's never a good sign. Bosses might give breaks grudgingly or generously, but they should give them.

I've slipped back into a high level of productivity at work, which is terrific. In my off-the-clock hours, I sometimes forget to breathe. I'm feeling the pressure of DOING THINGS on the weekend. I've got girls' brunch on Sunday, an ushering gig at night, a movie party on Friday, and a friend date during the day. Every last moment is scheduled! I love my friends, but it turns out that my downtime is precious. Like gold. Sometimes, I need to take breaks from my highly scheduled life - take a break from having plans all the time, take a break from heading from the gym to the movies to the doctor's to my bed. Downtime is so good for me - it lets me have my creative time, to take long showers, to sleep in those extra ten minutes. And then when I step into my work, or hang out with my friends, I feel recharged and enlivened, ready to take on gym, doctor's expense reports, brunch, drinks, movies, and more.

The Secret Life Of The 25-Year-Old Girl

2011-12-03T12:36:00.006-05:00

I don't read Toronto Life, because it's rarely relevant to my life: despite living in Toronto, and loving it deeply, I don't move in the rarefied circles of charcuterie gastropubs and $500 purses. Their beat is to cover the lifestyle habits of the upwardly mobile and aspirational Torontonians, and they do it thoroughly and well. TL's major faux pas isn't that their topics are narrow in scope, but that there's a first-person smugness ingrained in their articles. The writers aren't encouraged to draw a larger picture for the reader, so I wonder about the relevance of a story about, say, controversy about a fight at a Toronto private school that might otherwise draw me in.

With their recent cover story, "The Secret Lives of 13-Year-Old Girls," TL lays bare Alexandra Molotkow's cybersexual coming-of-age story. Reading certain sections, I found myself nodding, because I could identify with the longings of young teenage girls. We desperately want to know about sex - more than just body parts, but feelings and experiences. At the same time, 13-year-olds are too young to have any meaningful mastery of their interiour sex lives, and the ones who are sexually experienced at that age often seem damaged later on. The internet provided a safe barrier to explore and express sexuality, without the danger of engaging in real, hands-on, consequence-y sex.

I remember exchanging emails with a boy from summer camp, trading stories about what we would do to each other next summer vacation. These were pornographic short stories, and my parents stumbled across them, which led to a major screaming match over what would have happened if my younger brother (who was six years old at the time) had found them. My parents weren't actually worried about my grade-school brother; they were worried that I was somehow going to end up a victim of a sexual predator, even though, in those X-rated emails, I was definitely the more crocodilian of the two of us.

I find, when I talk to my girlfriends now, a common, obsessive theme in our early high school years: we were fascinated by sex, and completely unable to express our fascination. Fearful of being branded a pervert, or worse, I kept my interest carefully hidden away, but I wondered what it would be like to kiss, to touch. Online, where I was a far better writer, I could express some of those desires without the burning shameface that broke out if I even thought about saying my feelings out loud. Molotkow graduated from online chatrooms to early social networking sites, inadvertently becoming a schoolmate's cyberstalker. She finds solace online: it's an escape from the unrelenting shittiness of high school. Going online makes her feel less alone, reassuring her that there are others like her out there, even if they don't go to her school, or are her age.

She shrugs off the alleged dangers of the anonymous internet by flashing her bullshit detector: "I suppose I should have been afraid of meeting strange, older men from the Internet....[b]ut these men passed online background checks: they were friends of online friends, and their 'netiquette' was okay." It was a common trope in the 1990s for news media to report that your children were at risk if they surfed the internet alone - that unsupervised kids were being lured into online chats with old perverts pretending to be frisky young teens. In reality, more than 95% of adults engaging teens in chats owned up to their age, and they were also forthright with their sexual intentions. Without exception, the victims were older than 13 - the same age that Molotkow was when she started cybersexing. To top it off, studies have shown "there is some evidence that adolescents who visit chatrooms are more likely to have problems with their parents, to suffer from sadness, loneliness, or depression, to have histories of sexual abuse, and to engage in risky behavior than those who do not go to chatrooms." In her article, Molotkow admits to three of those four risk indicators - it seems like, more than anything, her prodigious smarts saved her from some potential abuse, and she was luckier than she was smart. Trusting your gut on the internet seems less safe than your average blind date, but there are actually very few incidences of straight-up molestation. In the most recent stats I could find, internet-related events account for about 7% of statutory rape cases in America. It's a tiny minority that garnered huge media attention, because the internet, at that time, was new, and the rules were unwritten.

It's the same story with sexting now. Molotkow poo-poohs the idea that sexting is worth getting riled up over, dismissing it as a younger generation's chatroom, and hey - at least the kids are doing it to each other and not anonymous Russian human traffickers. Unfortunately, she undercuts her position by recounting the dramatic tale of "Jessi Slaughter:"

I’m disturbed by the antics of kids today: take Jessica Leonhardt, an 11-year-old Floridian known as “Jessi Slaughter.” Last year, on a teen message board called StickyDrama, she was accused of sleeping with a musician popular among 11-year-olds. She posted a video of herself to YouTube refuting the claim and threatening her haters: “I’ll pop a Glock in your mouth and make a brain slushy.” [...] In yet another online video, her father yelled at the attackers, saying he knew who they were and invoking the “cyber police.” Unfortunately, there is no such thing as cyber police. In Leonhardt’s last missive, she claimed to be in foster care; her dad passed away of a heart attack this summer.

There are issues with the article - the passages describing her early masturbatory successes were uncomfortable, to say the least - but what's most frustrating is that Molotkow's experience is normal without being representative. The inability to capture the salient issue is Toronto Life's biggest stumbling block, and again, they made me wonder about how this woman's emerging online sexuality had any bearing, other than squicky feelings of retrograde voyeurism, on my life.

Writing an article about what technology means to teenagers is one thing, but this was a more personal (and dated) narrative. She didn't bother talking to any current thirteen year old girls about their technologically enhanced dating/erotic/sexual adventures. She didn't even speak to other women, now in their 20s, who would have been the same age and having the same experiences. Molotkow is a funny, quick-witted writer with an instinct to overshare, and it eats up words that could be used to widen the scope of the article. Like all nostalgia pieces, it's most interesting to those who were there when it happened, and it's likely that a thirteen-year-old girl reading the piece would have no idea what she was talking about: the technology has changed, the rules have changed, even as teenaged girls and their animal need to know their own sexuality remains constant.

Happy 29th Birthday, Future Me.

2011-11-29T23:40:00.003-05:00

Birthday! Cake! Ice cream! Fresca! Yoga! Cuddling! Walking in the November rain! Mexican food! Yay! In the spirit of the new year - it's my birthday tomorrow, and I'm going to be turning 28, which makes me feel simultaneously unformed and totally old - here are my New Year's Resolutions for The Age Of Twenty-Eight:

to get smart about money. I have vague notions about where my money goes - rent, food, Coke Zero, second-hand CDs from Sonic Boom - but it tends to move through my bank account like it's acting of its own accord. Grown ups don't live like that. I mean, some grown ups do, but I want to be one of those responsible-style people who pays off student loans and shit. I have aspirations for myself that involve money, and it's likely that the banker (who, for some reason, is wearing a monocle and those old-timey armbands in my head) will take a careful look at my bank statements and say, "You spend roughly a third of your paltry income on Coke Zero. You can't buy a house. You can't even buy a tent. Get out!" and then I'll have to cry on the sidewalk looking very miserable indeed.
to be nice to my body. I finally kicked that ED habit last year, but I've also gained some weight, and I want to look and feel my best. As previously discussed, trips to the gym will definitely help with that.
to start thinking of myself as a real writer. I got a sweet gig as a producer's assistant, a ten-month contract that ends next September, and I'm inordinately pleased with myself for getting that job. But, at the same time, I want to take a page from my pal Kelli's book. During her last 9-to-5 contract, she started building her writing network, and landed a weekly page at the Globe and Mail and a full-time spot at Torontoist. That is what's known as "awesome" in my book. I don't do the same kind of writing as Kelli, but there's no reason I can follow the same kind of path. I imagine that it's lined with incredibly awkward white-wine-fueled small talk at magazine launch parties, but hey: that's why God invented Xanax.
to be kind to myself. This is really the big one, and feels very ashram/flowing yoga pants on paper, but I spend so much time being hard on myself. When my boyfriend and I fight, it's tough not to immediately jump to "He hates me and we're breaking up!" When I gain a couple pounds, I can see myself ballooning up past Dress Barn sizing and ending up in one of those outfits that is less outfit and more wearable tent. When I don't land a writing gig (curse you, Hairpin! Your articles make me laugh and I want to join your club!), I start self-talking myself down in a pit of talentlessness and self-loathing. And so on. I want 28 to be the year I knock that shit off. It's okay to have a bad day, to have a fight, to take a swing at a job and miss. That's called "being a human being." After spending years of my life hating myself every time I made a mistake, this is the year of getting over myself and taking my lumps without a lump in my throat.

So, check back in with me in a year. Will I have gotten paid for my words? Will I be svelte? Will I be sort of muscular with enormous hooters, which is pretty much the most likely scenario? Will I still be spending boatloads of money on Coca-Cola products? I'll see you in 2012 with the answers. Safe money is definitely on Coke Zero, though.

Gym Math

2011-11-25T11:10:00.002-05:00

Every few years, I go through the urge to totally revamp my body. I have friends who have become aerobics instructors, who have run half-marathons, who have taken up yoga and who have transformed themselves, through the power of Youtube workout videos, into more toned, svelter versions of themselves. My roommate has stunk up our hallway with her in-room workout B.O. for the last few months, but I can't deny the end result. She looks terrific. Her skin is clearer and she's lost weight, which makes all the times I had to see her doing jumping jacks in a bra and cotton panties worthwhile. For her.

I do not generally enjoy exercise. It's not that I hate being active, but there's a mental block about going to the gym - it's far, I'm cold, I don't have the right clothes, I don't have the right playlist, I don't have enough time, I'm already too fat for a forty-minute workout to change anything, I'm hungry, I don't want to leave the house, and so on, ad nauseum, forever. I equate going to the gym with unpleasant tasks like getting my teeth cleaned: it's good for me, but I don't enjoy it.

But here's the thing: one of my friends is getting married in six months, and she is a bona fide babe. It's borders on ridiculous: she's got this face and nice hair and a smokin' hot bod. She's also smart and funny, which is generally my territory, since I don't have "pretty" on 100% lock. I have to bring my A-game to this wedding. You can't tell if someone is smart or funny in photos - you can, on the other hand, definitely tell how many chins they have. I've made a pact with myself to be my funny, smart and generally awesome self while doing my bridesmaid duties, but since this is going to be a photo-heavy event...to look good doing it.

So: the gym. When I get there, I usually have a good time. I like the crosstrainer and the rowing machine, both of which are mindless and fun. The last time I was there, I was listening to the new Childish Gambino album, and I almost launched myself off the crosstrainer with laughter at some of his more risque lines. The time before that, I attended a Pilates class; I got the giggles and just could not stop. Despite my not loving commute trip there, it turns out that being at the gym makes me laugh. It also gives me a chance to catch up on my reading - although reading a magazine is actually kind of tough on the more aerobic machines, it's perfect for the stationary bike.

My fears about looking stupid are also kind of off-base. I do look stupid, but not outside the bell curve of stupid-looking gym rats. For every lipgloss-wearing 22-year-old in all-black workout gear and a high, shiny ponytail, there are thirteen middle-aged men in fleece tracksuits with sweat pouring off them, trying not to expire on the treadmill. There are six old men with enormous guts and spindly little legs doing bicep curls in the middle of the room. There are three school-aged children furiously peddling on excerbikes they won't be big enough to use for at least another three years. And that's only in the gym room - there are whole dance studios and pools full of uncoordinated, old, fat, unfashionable people for me to just blend right into.

The other side of the coin is that, no matter what I eat, I seem to be bloated, gassy and generally smelly. My boyfriend can attest to this - I burped in his face (by accident!) the other day and he was like, "What is WRONG with you? What have you been eating?" He was right to be put out. I am not a good little digestor. I think I can trace it back to a nasty bout with whooping cough in the ninth grade, and the subsequent run of nuclear-grade antibiotics that were prescribed to knock the retro disease out of my system. Antibiotics, as it turns out, kill all bacteria, even the good ones in your gut. They don't just come back, either - Wired points out that, even two years after a course of antibiotics, gut flora just isn't as diverse. A lack of diversity in gut bacteria can lead to obesity, which in turns flattens the diversity further. And so on, forever, until we all become those big fat blobbos like in Wall-E.

My dirty little secret is that I'm a pretty healthy eater. Maybe my portions are too big, but I eat a varied diet of leafy greens, orange fruits and vegetables, and low-fat proteins. I don't eat that much dairy, or bread, and I don't gorge on pasta. So it's infuriating that I'm past the high end of the healthy BMI range, and I'm active and smart about diet. Like, what do I have to do to lose weight? Do some bloodletting? Cut my hair? What? I'll do it - I don't want to be the fat bridesmaid in my pretty friend's pictures. You know, the one that looks like the hot air balloon with legs.

Obviously, the secret is going to be more gym and less food. Not much less food, because I love snacks - seriously, yogurt with almonds and blueberries are my jam - but there's always room for 10% less food and 50% more gym. That means feeling 60% hotter on a day that is 100% not about me, and that is going to be awesome.

Scmecks Ed

2011-11-21T09:51:00.003-05:00

This weekend, the New York Times Magazine ran an interesting and reader-provoking article called "Teaching Good Sex." Focusing on a private school in Philly's approach to sexual education, the article raises the interesting question: what if we actually taught kids about sex? Not just abstinence, contraceptives, or disease prevention, but actual pleasure and intimacy?

The article is quite sweet, which isn't surprising. In 2009, the magazine ran a charming piece on the perils and triumphs of coming out in middle school. That author spoke to several young men and women about their experiences, including one boy who realized at the age of eleven that he didn't want to live a lie. In the midst of It Gets Better messaging, the writers focused on children for whom it had already gotten better. The article didn't gloss over some of the negative parts of being out at such a young age - the naysayers who crow "It's all a phase," or the specter (and reality) of bullying, especially in the smaller schools and towns - but overall, things looked bright for these kids.

However, both articles exist in sort of an alternate universe. American public policy has largely been divided over sex ed for kids - from 1996 to 2010, about half of American states offered truncated and morally judgmental courses in their public schools through funding from a policy called Title V. In order to get that funding, school boards had to commit to teaching things like "abstinence from sexual activity outside marriage as the expected standard for all school-age children" and "that sexual activity outside of the context of marriage is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects." Support for the program came from parents and social conservatives, who felt that any mention of contraceptive use diluted the message that sex = married, monogamous sex.

As a Canadian, I was exposed to a variety of sex education throughout the years. In the fifth grade, I labelled parts of the penis and vagina. I somehow missed the canonical demonstration of condom use - roll it down over a banana, girls! - but I ended up with a fairly thorough understanding of what diseases might erupt or what a penis looked like. We talked about rape and sexual harassment, and about sexual orientation, but I don't remember any conversations about pleasure, intimacy, or the importance of communication. Sex is about so many things - procreation, intimacy, power relations, gender politics. It's about reclamation, like the girls who participated in SlutWalks after being told that rapes were a result of too-sexy clothes. It's about commitment, sometimes. Other times it's about joy. But running through it all, sex should be about pleasure.

With all the worry about gay kids, pregnant teenagers, and chlamydia outbreaks in the rest home, we so rarely touch on the basics. Sex is fun (mostly), but it comes with its own communication skill set. Just as marriage isn't a natural state of being (even if the conservatives tell you it totally is and that you're a freak if you're not in holy matrimony), talking about sex isn't something that just comes naturally to adults. It's like long division or good grammar: it needs to be taught, the younger the better. It's not like your husband slides a wedding ring on your finger and you're DTF with mad skillz.

The gap between "aware of sex" and "ready to have sex" isn't huge. All the better to fill it some positive, communication-heavy theories, then. Not talking about sex doesn't mean it doesn't happen. People are engaging in unsafe behaviours because they can't talk safely or openly about their experiences. Disrespect never gets called out. You might feel kind of gross when your boyfriend takes your heads and not-so-subtly steers it towards his erection, but if someone doesn't cock an eyebrow and validate your squicky emotions, the shame and weirdness of that moment can act as a barrier from bringing it into the light. Worse, if you mention it to your girlfriends and they all know exactly what you're talking about, it can perpetuate the normality of not-okay behaviours.

Teaching about something and giving permission to do it isn't the same thing. Students learn about space launches and the Holocaust, but nobody's telling them to get out there and reenact 'em. Sex education for kids and teenagers falls under the same ideology. It's important to have authority figures who are comfortable addressing the vagaries of the human experience from all angles. Sex isn't just about penis-in-vagina; it's about being open with your partners and being comfortable. The article talked about one student who had been the target of a nasty Facebook post implying that she was giving oral sex at parties; the incident came up during the sex ed classes as an example of "things that are not okay."

I don't know what the future holds for American students. The program profiled in this article was offered at a private school, and many of the online commentors expressed the sentiment that teaching sex ed was what was holding America back from being an Old Testament utopia/a math-and-science powerhouse/free of teen moms/whatever. I like to think that the graduates of that class have much better skills to work with in the soft science of sex, and even if they choose never to have sex with anyone, the ability to talk through a tough situation. Sex is hard. Love is hard. That's why they should teach it in schools.

Community Service

2011-11-19T12:30:00.004-05:00

Community fans have been up in arms about NBC's recent decision to put the cult-inspiring sitcom on the shelf. The fear has come out in many forms (tweets, blog posts and soothing insider reports from New York magazine and others) that the show won't return, or will return in a truncated, rag-doll version of itself in the desolate summer months. The fear isn't totally unfounded, since Community pulls in fewer viewers each week than the almost universally reviled Whitney, but NBC has remained with underperforming shows in the past.

We all have our favourite under-the-radar choices. My boyfriend got me into Community, and he rolls his eyes every time I get overly excited about it, because, as he points out, he was into it first. I retort with Fever Ray. He comes back with E.T. (my childhood had some pretty serious pop-culture gaps in it), I point out the Crumpler bag he bought after I dragged him into their store, and then we just devolve into our reptile selves and slither around for a while, dragging our pop culture discoveries hideously behind us. We all do this. I crowed for months about King Of Kong, the amazing documentary about the world of arcade video record setting: "I showed you that!" I would cackle every thing it was mentioned. It's not pretty.

Mister Boyfriend was the one who first exposed me to Community, through their second-season zombie Halloween episode. I showed up half-way through and was completely flummoxed. Watching Community requires a basic understanding of who's who: the group dynamics aren't complicated, but you need to know that Jeff Winger is a bit of a juicebox, for instance, or that there's love quandrangle stuff between Britta, Annie, Jeff and Troy, and then the jokes will start flowing. Watching a few episodes of the first season is basically all anyone really needs to understand what's going on at Greendale, but it's not like Friends: viewers who benefit most from the sitcom's delights are the ones who pay attention and watch each episode multiple times. Casual viewers are likely not to enjoy it quite as much. For a drama like 24 or Lost, networks are comfortable allowing storylines to develop week-to-week and leave late-arriving viewers out of their loop, but sitcoms are expected to be accessible to even the most unaware viewer.

The show, in the last season, has started departing from its original premise of "mismatched friend group" and started looking more at the mechanics of storytelling. It started with the genre episodes, which collected cliches from action movies, zombie flicks and spaghetti westerns and spun them out into great, glorious 22-minute mindfucks that exist, somehow simultaneously, as spoof, homage, commentary and A+ example. Characters who were still wholly themselves found themselves transposed onto other types: sweet, high-strung Annie, for example, can exist as herself, but also become a leather-shorted paintball outlaw with a heart of gold in the western episode and, a few episodes later, be a cracked-out production assistant on a commercial shoot gone horribly wrong.

I want to talk for a second about the last episode NBC aired before yanking Community from its slot. Last week focused on Dean Pelton's attempt to update his college's recruitment commercial - what starts as a simple one-day shoot turns into Heart Of Darkness. Like, literally. Abed, who barely appears onscreen in this episode, films the school's descent into madness, which involves unzipped hoodies with no undershirt, a possum, a Chinese man wearing a blond wig under a baldcap, forced hugging, mo-cap suits, and Luis Guzman. The Dean's attempt to elevate a school he barely believes in to perfection drives him insane, and Abed's camera is there to capture it.

Last week's episode was one of the most interesting things I've ever seen on TV. The Dean's character, who is usually a punchline, was awarded a gravitas that didn't feel forced - he's a lunatic, sure, but usually he's a benignity. Give the man some power (something, interestingly, he doesn't get in his role of head of the school) and his drive to make the most of it creates some very weird moments. It was so over the top, but...thinking about the Dean over the last two seasons...it's possible to see the seeds from which this madness would sprout. His perfect costumes? His excitable nature? His upbeat yet despairing attitude towards what his school can do for its students? Those are all there since day one. The Dean's craziness in this episode is what happens when you take the Dean to extremes. Not any other character. Annie's craziness looks different. So does Troy's. The writers are good to their characters, and the actors respond with performances that had me literally on the edge of my seat. I kept turning to Mister Boyfriend with my mouth agape, like, can you even believe they'd put this on TV?

I don't know what the future holds for Community. Part of me wants the show to end next season - four years of school, four years of amazing, game-changing show. Donald Glover's rap career will take off, Dan Harmon can move to Shocase to start producing whatever new craziness his brain is going to dream up, and the show can live forever on DVD. Part of me wants what Troy and Abed treat as a mantra for Cougartown - "six seasons and a movie!" Most of me just hopes that the show comes back from its hiatus refreshed and invigorated. Abed's cocked eyebrow closes the last episode; we'll be waiting, Abed, spreading the word, forcing our friends and families to watch this weird, wonderful gem. I won't even say, "I watched this first."

Font-ain Of You

2011-11-16T11:46:00.005-05:00

Good design aways freezes me cold. Nothing showy: I'm talking about the ubiquitous, IKEA-brand design that everyone has, the stuff that just sort of quietly exists in the world without call attention to itself. I loathe lucite chairs and mirrored dining room tables, just as I've grown weary of the kitschy, Mary Englebreit-looking design. Things that scream "Look at me!" give me the willies - it's the same reason I rolled my eyes at Agyness Dean and generally find the Kardashians to be a total mystery, fame-wise.

I just watched Helvetica, Gary Hustwit's debut documentary about the iconic font that's used everywhere from the New York City subway system to American Apparel signage. The doc discusses the font's visual impact - it looks so clean and modern, it inspired a whole slew of corporations in the mid-1950s and 1960s to move away from the swirly, comic-sans, exclamatory advertising style they had been working with and re-brand themselves as sleek, transparent, modern companies, in large part because the font could convey that they were sleek and modern. It sparked a movement towards clear, clean design that some designers would decry as soulless and oppressive - but we see Helvetica on the daily, because that sense of crisp professional trust is still embedded in its lines.

Font love is the natural resting place of the object fetishization that has dominated design for decades. It's hard not to get drawn in when designers talk about their favourite fonts - comic sans and papyrus seem universally reviled, but to the untrained eye, there's nothing inherently offensive in them. They might be less gorgeous than some of the more widely-used fonts, but folks also seem to love using them. Design snobs make me lose my mind, because they judge people who legitimately don't have a preference between Arial and Helvetica to be rubes, when the reality is that most untrained people a) can't tell the difference and b) don't care at all.

The design saying "form follows function" took me a long time to wrap my head around - like, form does the what now? But I finally started to get it when I read the New York Times Magazine article a few years ago called "The Road to Clarity," an insider's look at the ins and outs of designing highways signs. The author was swept up in the minutiae of the font choices, because in that case, it can be a matter of life and death: how heavy the letters are, how far apart they sit on the sign, how readable the final product really is, can all impinge on how quickly drivers can comprehend the information contained therein, and, obviously, make choices about what to do next. The function of the sign - conveying information - dictates the form of the font - being as legible as possible.

Bu why, then, isn't there just one or two fonts? After all, the information's going to come at us anyway, so why not just standardize the whole world? Make it all crisp and clear! Helvetica forever!

Looking around my room, I can see lots of fonts: the label on the Campari on the windowsill, for instance, features elegant serifs rimmed in gold and set against a navy background. The effect is one of casual, retro opulence - nothing too fancy, but especially when set against the bright ruby colour of the liqueur itself, it reads in my mind's eye as vibrantly upscale. The Coke Zero bottle beside me features a wealth of fonts and symbols: the classic swoopy font is set in red against the black background, and the bottle itself is a voluptuous curve; together, the elements work to create an image that's both trustworthy - that classic logo! - and modern. The choices that are made in product design may not save lives the same way highway signs might, but they all matter to someone. Just look at Coca-Cola's bottom line: you know those guys aren't messing with that look without some serious head-scratching.

I take a little bit of umbrage at the over-the-top opinions expressed by the designers interviewed in Helvetica - not because it's not important, but because they're such dicks about it. In the past, we were much less savvy consumers, because the products were much less intelligent in their marketing. We look at vintage buzzwords and laugh at how naked and needy they seem, and it strikes us as preposterous that anyone would fall for those snake-oil jobs. Now, though, we need to work through several layers of meaning in a design moment: images, products, packaging, and signage have all thoroughly and insidiously infiltrated our world.

There's a great shot in the movie of poster proofs hanging on a lightbox behind a designer's talking-head interview: it's the same image (crowded skateboarding park, big dusky sky, oversaturated purples, navies and electric yellows), and the time/date/place information done over and over, each proof using a different font. And each poster feels slightly different: the fatter, statelier fonts giving an ironic gravitas to the event, the electro fonts making it feel energetic, and so on. It wordlessly illustrates how important design can be, and how good design creates something you may not even be aware is orchestrated: it just leaves you feeling like you've learned something new.

Grateful Scott

2011-11-12T11:12:00.003-05:00

I'm feeling sort of hungover from an art closing party/dance marathon last night, so I'm going to take it slow this morning. I've said before that list entries are the refuge of the lazy, but when the seasons change, and my parents have been especially kind lately, sometimes it's good for the soul to take stock of what I'm grateful for.

Which include...

...DMX. Yeah, I said it. He was never an amazing MC, and what I remember most about DMX was my bestie Rachel, in high school, being sort ironically/not ironically at all obsessed with "Party Up," his indisputably catchy anthem. There's something for everyone, including a call-and-response for everyone to meet him outside, but she was fond of spitting the song's hilarious dis "I love my baby mama, I never let her go," like, fifty times a day. Mister Boyfriend and I went to New York a few weeks ago, and after a trip to the Tenement Museum, we stopped into a hole-in-the-wall Southern barbecue joint for pulled pork sandwiches. The guys in the kitchen were blaring DMX's greatest hits. And you know what? It was all sorts of perfect.

...Yo, Is This Racist?, a new blog where people write in and ask the anonymous blogger/guru if something is racist. It's amazing: hilarious, thought-provoking, not claiming to be at any level of special expertise beyond "human being who is paying attention," and it also exposed me to the adorable video of the infant who loves Biggie Smalls. I'm sure the whole thing will either collapse in on the meta questions of racist/not-racist at some point, but for now, it's a super-fun read. Also, the swears make things really funny.

...my parents. Those two people are just outrageous: they give pep talks, they give action plans, they listen, they treat me nice with dinners out, my mom makes amazing granola and banana breakfasts, my dad brought me super thoughtful gifts from his trip to Australia, in generally they are two of the nicest, most generous, most hilarious people I could ask for in my life, and it's a marvel that I get to know them. Parents! Man!

...this bootie trend that Toronto girls are all over right now. I've been seeing all these wedge bootie-heels on girls all over town, and just drooling. The other girls all have booties made from ostrich skin and mine are felt. I don't even care. I feel fashionable. I got myself a pair of thirty-dollar heels in one of those cheap mall stores where people just try on the dresses over their sweaters because, like, whatever: the dress costs about six dollars and if it doesn't fit, you can just put it out on the side of the road for some other girl to pick up.

...my boyfriend. One of my girlfriends and I were chatting and she said, "I'm not a good communicator - I think or feel something, and then think that, if someone loves me and I drop subtle hints, they should be able to read my mind. And when that doesn't happen, I get disappointed and doubt that they love me." I was like GIRL WHAT YES VIGOROUS NODDING. Last night, two of my girls were like, "I'm moving in with my boyfriend!" and while I am super-happy for them, it's tough to avoid playing the comparison game with my own relationship, which is nowhere near being ready for cohabitation. But I love him, and when I get down on myself for not "being there yet," he's quick (and right) to point out that our time is not their time. Most of the time, he's not even a dick about it, which would be easy.

...cacti. Unless normal plants, these fuckers thrive under my half-hearted care. Makes me feel good.

Scrubbing The Community Out Of Your Mother's Office

2011-11-09T23:31:00.006-05:00

I'll admit it: I get way too involved in TV people's lives. When Michael Scott left The Office, I was like, I'll cry at that. Hell, when Jim and Pam got married in their crappy Niagara falls romp where it seemed like the only people they knew were from their workplace (which they're ambivalent towards) and Pam had bridesmaids we'd never seen before, and she was pregnant and Dwight, I think, punched one of those bridesmaid in the face by accident? I cried. I won't even pretend I didn't cry, and to make it worse, I totally watched it at the university library, standing up at a kiosk, as other non-internet chumps sighed and shifted from foot to foot. That damned Chris Brown song? Oh, brothers and sisters, I bawled.

I mean, I know what my limits are: I never asked for The Rachel, and I don't follow fictional people on Twitter. That's just weird. But I do overanalyze certain TV shows - The Office, Community, Walking Dead, How I Met Your Mother - because, hell, if I'm going to spend half an hour a week with those people for years, I might as well invest. That's more time than I spend with a lot of my friends.

My mom's the same way: she cried when Michael Scott left the office. My sister? Totally teary when Rachel got off the plane to be all, "I love you, Ross!" at the end of Friends. I am fully aware that if and when Ted Mosby finally ever meets his blasted wife, that show had better recognize that there's a mondo emotional payoff in the works. I'm talking about one of those only on TV, Kardashian-style weddings that totally undercuts Ted's profession as either an architect or a professor (why give your leading man one dorky-yet-sexy job when you can give him two?) when they marry Ted off in a gazebo at the edge of space. Let's face it, by the time young master Mosby actually finds, courts, proposes to, has the inevitable sitcom staple of cold feet regarding, and marries the mother, those kids he's talking to in the episode intros are going to be toddlers. (Actually, how awesome would that be: "Psych! I'm not your real dad! Now go get me a beer." Future Ted might be sort of a jerk.)

In the past, people had to set their VCRs and record their shows if they made real-world plans with their real-world friends. Now, with the invention of the PVR and streaming/downloading online, we can tap into any episode from any season pretty much instantaneously. Classic moments can be revisited, Halloween costumes can be impeccably replicated, and lines can be quoted from here until the end of time. If I want to binge on a particular show, I just buy the DVDs and sloth around my apartment for a few days. After a while, it's not a long shot to say that I'm emotionally invested in those character's lives. After a particularly awful few days in the summer, my boyfriend went out and bought Scrubs - like, a lot of Scrubs - which sort of helped distract and ease the pain.

In the time of the instant, constant access, I sometimes need to remember to see my real friends. Usually, when I don't see a friend for a couple weeks, it's a scheduling thing - folks are busy! We wake up at noon! Sometimes, we don't leave our neighbourhoods for months at a time. But nobody's busy 24/7, and sometimes I want a night in to get caught up with favourite characters - ones that might be called friends if they were real. Studies have shown that watching a favourite TV show often triggers the same neurochemical reaction that hanging out with real friends does: relaxation, good dopamine levels, good cheer. I'm definitely not saying that you should go out and replace your Thursday night knitting circle with a shelf full of DVDs. But the next time someone blows me off to catch up on a show, I'm going to give them a knowing smile.

Comforting Food

2011-11-05T19:46:00.004-04:00

When the weather turns cooler and the sweaters become less a fashionable choice and more a necessity for getting through a life lived in skirts, I find myself fantasizing about hearty soups, grainy breads, homemade preserves and thick, spreadable cheeses. I start buying more meat - tonight, I roasted a pork loin and threw thin slices into an Japanese-inspired noodle soup (it was delicious). A bite of ginger cookie or pumpkin hummus and I become completely undone.

Fall brings out my desire for heartiness in food. A slurpable noodle is a necessity, as is a gourmet sausage. I look forward to winter citrus and spiced Christmas cookies. Summer cooking is mostly an avoidance game - how many meals can I assemble without turning on the stove? - but in fall, I dive back into baking and cooking multi-part meals. I like turning to other cultures for inspiration; our recent trip to New York left me with a hankering for Tex-Mex and barrio-inspired dishes, up to and including fish tacos (yuk it up, you dirty minds).

Summer has a reputation as an eat-a-thon: grilled skewers and frosty brews, made roughly a thousand times better for the fact that we're eating it all outside. Canadian summers vary wildly, but Toronto runs absurdly hot in July and August, and the unrelenting heatwaves can usually only be assuaged by chilled melons, pilsners, avocado and brie sandwiches, and iced coffees. We get up early and go to bed late, and small snacks fuel the summer citizen's need for energy without greasy faces or heavy bellies.

But once that mercury drops, man, we love to just stuff ourselves silly. The kickoff is Thanksgiving - held in October, thanks, and just as full of tryptophan-laced foods like turkey and wine as its American counterpart. We do the seven-layer nacho dip, the pumpkin pie and the turkeys, but this year, we ate dinner outside on a deck overlooking Lake Huron. That's just not possible in November. This year I also attended a chosen-family dinner, with delicious green beans and carmelized root vegetables, and a bread pudding/caramel sauce combo that was so delicious that all the men in attendance, and some of the women, declared publicly that they wanted, and I'm paraphrasing here, to make respectful and tasteful love to their desserts. A few months later, we'll get Christmas, which usually incorporates multiple rounds of family visits and dinners, and the corresponding metric ton of food. Vegetarians, lock up your morals, because tonight, we eat ham.

Comfort food can be many things to many people: some folks get the warm-and-fuzzies from Kraft Dinner with tuna and tomatoes; others long for mom's trademark nachos. Depending on your background and where you grew up, you crave different things in your hour of emotional need. My dad claims to remember something called "milk soup" from his childhood, a dish of dubious authenticity. I love Japanese candies and cookies: long plane rides between Japan and Canada as a toddler left me with a strong association between Koala's March chocolate-stuffed cookies and airport adventures. If your parents are immigrants, you might have eaten goulash or tamales while your grade-school friends chowed down on broccoli or the aforementioned KD; you might have been a picky eater, so white toast and peanut butter were your self-imposed preferences.

I turn to comfort food like banana muffins or a great cookie recipe when I want to feel accomplished. I've made those recipes so many times I know them by heart. I try recreating my mom and dad's dishes when I want to feel close to them - we were a family that ate every dinner together, and often weekend breakfasts, so making up a hash of potatoes, peppers and onions in a pan brings me right back to sitting at the kitchen counter while my dad wore a yukata and a pair of moccasin slippers, unselfconsciously showcasing his globe-trotting as he made brunch for his kids and wife. There's a direct link between those moments and the weekend breakfasts I love making for me and my boyfriend. Pancakes, sausages, bacon, fresh fruit, cheese and yogurt, fried eggs and elaborate omelets all benefit from the two of us working together: he slices melons and flips omelets, I work the toaster and slice up veggies. Our harmony is something I associate with the very finest of love, since it comes from taking care of each other and ourselves. What's more comforting than that?

Day Of The Dead

2011-10-31T23:58:00.003-04:00

Dia de los muertos is happening now. The marigolds are being strewn on the graves of dead friends and family, along with their favourite sweets and drinks, as people visit cemeteries to honor their dead. Although, never having been to Mexico, it's likely that I'm making this up from details gleaned from children's television programming, tattoo art, and generally not knowing what I'm talking about. In North America, this past weekend we celebrated Halloween - a time for candy, jack-o-lanterns, and college girls dressed up as sexy versions of blue-collar professions.

As the days get shorter and colder, we're inexorably edging towards winter. The trees this fall have been outstandingly colourful, with brisk, sunny days. Sweaters have been put back into rotation, heavy tights have been pulled on, and our flip flops have been retired in favour of boots and sneakers. It's a time of cozying up, of final patio beers, of moving parties from the porch inside to the kitchen. Picnics turn into potlucks, beach days turn into game nights, and instead of spiking our ginger beer with buffalo-grass vodka (trust me), we're stirring creme de menth into our hot chocolates (again, trust me).

Spring has rebirth symbols like whoa. The birds come back, the buds on the trees burst into fresh green leaves, and the days get longer. It also holds the most important Christian holiday, Easter, which is literally about the resurrection of Christ. If you're into that sort of thing, it's a potent idea, resonating with images about life after death and the cycles of the natural world.

But I think we also need a way to talk about death, proper-styles. Not that if-you-are-of-me-you-shalt-be-reborn stuff Christianity offers; we are, culturally, not terrific at handling the idea of death, and the reality of death in our lives. Halloween is a perversion, but not in a Christian-right sort of way; I'm not offended that we use the day to transform ourselves into scary monsters, or elements of our personalities that usually remain hidden (ergo, "the day of id," and I'm looking at you, frat boys in drag). That's pretty harmless.

Samhain, a Gaelic predecessor to Halloween, originated as a way to mark the end of harvest season, and the costumes we associate now with Halloween were used to confuse the dead as they walked the earth with us. Over time, the holiday shifted from its agrarian roots into a children's festival centering on candy and UNICEF boxes. Parents deck out front lawns with spooky accessories: ghosts hung from trees, skeletal hands wrenching out of the ground, witches, goblins, cauldrons, headstones, giant spiders, giant rats, and gourds. All the hallmarks of a haunting are there, and the entertainment industry usually puts out a scary movie or two, or at least a Halloween episode of our favourite shows, to get in on the action. Halloween is small potatoes compared to a shopping mega-festival like Christmas, but the candy windfall is an enjoyable blood-sugar spike in a rapidly darkening fall afternoon.

That shift, though, towards making it a children's holiday, has meant that the dead the day originally honoured have been swept aside. We're a more medically advanced society than the medieval Celts, but I doubt that we know any more about what goes on On The Other Side than they did. Our fascination with the undead is longstanding, but we can never quite reconcile the idea that our dead - family members and friends who have passed on - are one of the spooky Halloween Dead, out to mischief-make while the door between this world and the next is ajar.

Which brings me back to Mexico. While it sucks that they set aside only one or two days out of the year to honour the dead, it beats the hell out of our zero. Fresh mourning means that folks go through phases of honouring and ignoring their recently-passed loved ones: sometimes, you want to hang their picture, light some candles, and talk to them, even if it gives you the craziest feeling of knowing you're that talking to someone who can't hear you and hoping against hope that they're hearing you anyway. Other times? Not so much. Much like the bible's commandment to honour your parents, honouring our dead doesn't mean that there isn't resentment, anger, sadness, relief or any other complicated feelings under the veneer of love. And those feelings sometimes mellow with age, but they never go away completely.

I've seen a lot of Day of the Dead-inspired Halloween costumes this year; maybe I'm just keyed in, because that was my costume, but there were a few of us floating around. I wish there was a way to incorporate that system into our lives up here, to honour and celebrate those we've lost throughout the ages. Let's take Halloween back from the kids and invite everyone, living and dead, to the party.

The Naked Lohan

2011-10-29T11:04:00.003-04:00

A few years ago, Vanity Fair ran their famous "It's Totally Raining Teens!" cover story, where they posed a myriad of up-and-coming young actresses - including, among others, the Olsen twins and Mandy Moore- on their slick pages. The cover girls were decked out in frilly, shiny, sparkly pink outfits, with lots of strappy metallic high heels and size-00 pants. The overall effect was one high-end cotton candy, sitting on our collective palate for a moment and then disappearing.

In July of 2003, I was 19, on the tail end of these girls, most of whom would have still been in high school had they not been professional working actresses. They were making me think weird, uncomfortable things about beauty and bodies: this was right around the time of Mary-Kate Olsen's extremely well-publicized eating disorder, and it was clear to the young women of North America that being "a girl," which was what this cover story was all about, was to be young, white, skinny, straight-haired, pretty, non-threatening, lightly comedic and highly conscious of one's image.

For the most part, the shoot inside carried the same visual aesthetic: Alexa Vega cavorted in bubbles; Kaley Cuoco, in a bikini, in a faux-tug-of-rope tableau; Solange - Beyonce's little sister - posed in a weird graffiti shot that makes it clear that VF thinks Black youth is composed primarily of hip-hop and scariness. It's all glossy and highly produced, and the colour scheme ranges from pink to magenta to fuchsia. Lots of bikinis and high heels, lots of movement and energy. The magazine highlighted a few entertainers with more serious shots: Alexis Bledel and Mandy Moore, both constructed in the accompanying interview to be more serious members of an otherwise forgettable cohort, got sultrier poses and actual dresses instead of mesh shirts and feather skirts.

Buried among the other actresses is a young Lindsay Lohan. She was redheaded, still seventeen and looking it, with a full body and a silly, endearing grin. This was before the terrific Mean Girls catapulted her into the upper echelon of young actresses, so Lohan was riding a goodwill wave from Disney remakes of The Parent Trap and the then-unreleased Freaky Friday. She doesn't even make the main cover; she's the last girl on the fold-out spread, tucked onto the very edge. Inside, she's in a flurry of feathers, casualties from a stylized pillow fight with Hilary Duff, and she's wearing a a demure tank top and PJ pants.

In the years since, she's nabbed two solo VF covers, one famously purporting an eating disorder that she vehemently denied, both styling her like a latter-day Monroe. One featured artful nudity.

For those who are unfamiliar, in the eight or so years Lohan's been on the scene, she dated Wilmer "Fez from That '70 Show" Valderrama and Samantha Ronson; she launched a line of leggings and almost killed the fashion house Ungaro; she's crashed her car more than once, been arrested more than once, been accused of doing drugs on film (!); been accused of stealing; been to rehab; been to AA; watched her divorced parents reconcile and then split again; had a much-discussed weight roller coaster ride; watched her younger sister do the same; and professionally gone from a well-respected young actress who could open a movie, to being stunt-cast as a stripper, a gun-toting vigilante nun, and a fake-pregnant administrative assistant. Lohan's ongoing legal troubles have meant that producers can't insure her, and her last starring role was in 2008. She's remained, through her probation violations, plastic surgery allegations and widely-accepted-as-true drug rumours, a tabloid fixture, but the complicated fallout from her years-long downward spiral has left us all flummoxed, and it's much easier to move on to Real Housewives, Teen Moms and other, newer, less depressing pop-culture narratives.

I still find her fascinating, because in an industry where image is everything, she's the alpha and omega of former child stars. For a while, it seemed like the Olsens were going to take that title, but MK's put on some weight and their fashion house is hella successful; meanwhile, Lohan has lost her touch. Her most recent cover story won't be for the genteel Vanity Fair, but for Playboy.

It's been a long time since Playboy represented anything more than T 'n' A, and although they have a history of running interesting journalism - "I read it for the articles, really!" - in the age of internet porn, their curated raunch is quaintly middle-America-goes-to-Vegas. In a way, Playboy represents a natural nadir for the nymphets profiled in VF so many years ago: they both utilize the same high-gloss brand of femininity, the same carefully edited image-making, the same emphasis on bodies rather than bodies of work, and the same understanding that there is precious little art involved in this star-machine.

Nudity isn't necessarily a roadblock to greatness, and actresses as diverse as Kirsten Dunst and Nicole Kidman have bared it all for a role. But Lohan's foray into porn isn't artful, no matter how coyly it's shot - it's a strictly commercial transaction, one where she's selling one of the only things she has left to offer. Lohan is likely rationalizing the decision based on what her role model Marilyn has already done. Monroe, however, posed nude in her hungry days, and while she went onto become a star not fully in charge of her own image or her own mental health, Monroe's decision to pose for Playboy launched her as a sexy but bankable young ingenue. Lohan, eight long years into the game, is just trying to stay culturally relevant. Girlfriend doesn't need a cover shoot with anyone at this point - she needs a nap, a walk in the woods, time away from the pressures of a Hollywood lifestyle that, largely because of her excesses, is no longer seen as enviable by the tabloid-reading masses. Her decision to go nude exposes nothing but the naked desire to remain a star. That ship that sailed once this actress stopped being able to book acting parts; now, she's just going to show us her private parts. Lo

Take The Cab

2011-10-23T13:08:00.002-04:00

When people ask me why I ride my bike, I always think of an episode of the British TV show Top Gear. The challenge was to get from one side of London to the other, and the guys were using a bicycle, an SUV, public transit, and a speedboat along the Thames. Through some serious huffing and puffing, the bike arrived first, followed by then speedboat, then transit, trailed by the SUV. The car was a distant fourth, an embarrassment of stops and starts and wrong turns and congestion, but a recent article in Harper's suggests that London's transit system needs a serious look as well: patrons have been forced to walk along the tracks between stations in some instances, and they estimated that transit delays added an extra three days to the constant battle of getting to and from work.

On Saturday, it took me an hour and a half to travel the 7 kilometers from Queen and Broadview to Dupont and Spadina in Toronto. Google suggests I could have walked there in the same amout of time, but, since it was late and I was tired and didn't want to walk through the crowds of last-call hooligans infesting the entertainment district on a Saturday night, I chose transit.

It was a mess from beginning to end. The streetcar was on a short turn, which meant that they weren't coming to the stop I was waiting at - they were picking folks up on the other side of the intersection. Two streetcars had gone by before I twigged to the fact that a location change might solve the problem, but by then it was too late: I had missed the last subway. I walked over to the nearest north-south route at Spadina, going alone through the gangs of young men who were coming north from the club district, only to find a sizable crowd waiting for the streetcar. I started walking north, making almost all the way home before a streetcar came up behind me and carried me to the station. Of course, it was another 15 minute walk home after that, and by that time, I was both exhausted and enraged.

There's a game that people play that goes something like, "Well, who will pay for it?" and "Why do we need it in the first place?" when we start talking about Toronto transit. Let's do the second question first, mkay?

We need a transit system that works because people need to get around. Some folks choose to drive or bike or walk, and these are all fine options. On the other hand, biking and walking, which are totally feasible in June, become less attractive in January. Or during a summer monsoon. Or at four in the morning. There are risks involved based on season and time of day, and as a young woman with experience in the matter, I can tell you that walking home through Parkdale is very different at 5:15 PM after a day at the office, than it is at 3:45 AM when I've just shut down the bar.

There's also a part of me that wants a world-class transit system because I believe that Canada is a world-class country and Toronto is a world-class city. Great cities and countries give their citizens choices on how best to move through them, and our corner of the world lacks some very basic infrastructure. We do some things right: Greyhound and the GO system are remarkably good at getting people to places, often for relatively cheap. On the other hand, ViaRail is expensive, frequently late, and tends to seize altogether in inclement weather. And the TTC, along with myriad other local transit systems, is a disaster any time other than rush our. Canadians and Torontonians accept that we aren't going to see improvement, because we've gotten so used to the decline. What is that?

I look at countries like the Netherlands and wish that we could have their bike lanes, and places like Bogota, where the buses work. Toronto, as much as I love it, suffers from a real lack of vision when we plan our urban spaces, and we voters haven't bullied the transit providers into providing workable solutions to ongoing problems. We deal with congestion? Make people pay if they want to drive downtown. We need better transit? Accept the provincial and federal funding, make the system fair to users by installing peak-hour fares, and run it on time. Put a cap on cab fare. Install transit to the most populous areas: Brampton, Aurora and Vaughan are only going to get bigger. Make it easier to get from Hamilton to Montreal by getting a high-speed rail corridor. Reduced the airport levies at Pearson, currently the highest in the world. And so on.

Nothing I'm saying is brand-new stuff, but for some reason, our discussion around transit is never about what we need, but what we can afford. I would challenge the people who make these decisions on a daily basis to use Toronto's systems to get home one night. There are thousands of people who work and play in the post-1:56 hours of the day, and the TTC needs to step up their game. Get 'em home safe. For god's sake, at least don't embarrass yourselves by making walking a faster alternative.

Ikea: A Guided Meditation

2011-10-21T17:27:00.003-04:00

Ikea! Or, if you're pedantic about capitalization (and in these times of internet grammarian smackdowns, who isn't?), IKEA! I like to say it with a Swedish accent for added authenticity, but it really makes no difference. I also like reenact their commercials by barking "You feel sad for the lamp? DON'T!" at unsuspecting family members from time to time. But actually shopping at Ikea? Ay carumba.

For those of you who have never been, Ikea is a wonderland. It's also a hellhole. Let's go together, yes?

Enter the gigantic blue building through double doors. To your right? A child playground, where the kids are wearing numbered jerseys and being half-heartedly cared for. They are likely chucking ball-pit balls at each other or crying in the middle of the room. Don't worry! This is normal. Little Number Seven is only crying because there's a five-foot-long stuffed ant hanging from the ceiling (the theme of this childcare is "forest") and it will haunt his dreams forever. You can check them in there while you shop! When they've exhausted themselves through playing/hiding from the ant, you'll be able to pick them up and take them to the cafeteria. Make sure they are crying by then, or else they'll feel left out.

Wander upstairs. Grab a cart. Feel your sense of optimism - look at all these storage solutions! Be charmed by the faux-Swedish names of things. Oh, a Borgnine convertible sofa. Adorable. A chaise lounge woven from wicker and bamboo. Sustainable. A loft bed that will safe space and also sway like a drunken pirate when you attempt to make love in it. Remarkable. Feel a creeping sense of despair that the Ikea showrooms are nicer than anything you've ever owned. Hang on to that feeling - you'll be needing it when you attempt to put your new dresser together using only allen keys and curse words.

As you pass through the displays, note that the stylish display clothes are bolted to the walls and the display books are all in Swedish. Idly pick up a book as your family members debate the merits of the Svang chair when compared to the Jagerstruedel rocker for 57 minutes. Note that "idiot" in Swedish is "idiot." This will come in handy in the checkout lines.

Coming to the bedroom section, look around you at the children's rooms. Wonder if Swedes have a notion that childhood should be as Seussian as possible. Become irrationally attached to the bed canopy that gives the appearance of a covered wagon. Fall deeply in love with the small-spaces display - a daybed! A kitchen with little sink dividers! Fantasize about becoming an interior designer who specializes in treehouses and cruise ship cabins. Reject this fantasy when you realize how much school will be involved for what is probably a fairly specific market. Hate your day job.

Realize that you haven't seen a window to the outdoors in three hours. Or a bathroom. Realize none of the fake bathrooms have toilets.

Head downstairs to the small-items and pick-up zone. Pick up thirteen different styles of vase. Reject six. Reject nine. Carry around four vases until you find your shopping partner, who will have been staring at knives for ten minutes with a vacant expression on his face. Force him to carry the vases, and the tea-towels, and the gingerbread men cookie cutters, and the 100-pack of candles, plus plates, plus a seventeen-pack of shitty off-brand Tupperware. You will be dragging a rug behind you like an animal carcass; you can't carry the vases. Your hands are full.

Arrive at the warehouse. Consult the list you've compiled of items you want: dressers and beds and tables and entire kitchens, nay, entire apartments. You will see "aisles" and "bins" in your scrawling handwriting. Make sure you have been accurate! The warehouse is about the size of metropolitan Detroit and twice as depressing. The aisles and bin contain your choices. If you change your mind about colour, know that your alternate choice will be in another bin, in another aisle. Why? Because the warehouse has been designed by an algorithm written by a computer. Human beings would never do this to one another. The Geneva convention would not allow it.

Once you've piled your new furniture onto your cart - or what is probably your new furniture, because things here are labelled with codes, not names, not the the names would even help - go the checkout. If you've come on a weekend, you are a fool. Wait in line for 45 minutes. Weep softly, if no one is watching. On the other side of the cashier, there is a commissary, with 75-cent hotdogs and pasta in the shape of caribou. Coffee and fountain pop will never be as sweet as it is today. Over and over, pick up and set down the same candle holder with the absentminded grace of a sedated nun.

The rest is challenging, but you can go at your own pace: loading your hatchback with heavy boxes and stuffing the empty spaces with vases; frantically trying to get onto the freeway with zero rear visibility and weighing an extra 700 pounds; setting up your new belongings, which will take three hours longer and require, in addition to the allen key Ikea has sent home with you, a cordless drill, a stud finder, a hammer, a square-head screwdriver, and the help of your least stupid family member. Know that what you have made can never be unmade, because disassembling Ikea furniture is a mission for only the foolhardiest of movers. It's easier to chuck it out and start again.

On the plus side, we can all agree that Ikea's 99-cent chocolate bars are second to none, and they sell lingonberry soda, which will lead to much quoting of The Big Lebowski if your companions are the least bit human. Maybe you can watch The Big Lebowski tonight, as you sit on your new couch and idly wonder if the whole thing is going to collapse.

Barbie's Dream Job

2011-10-17T22:57:00.003-04:00

Last week I wrote about Dream Jobs - god, how evocative is that phrase, even? Don't you feel like Dream Jobs have Katrina and the Waves playing in the background all the time, and the commute is you, in a convertible, on a freeway beside the ocean? And your office, even if you're a grunt who's on some no-health-benefits one-year contract, is massive and decorated with healthy plants. Oh! And there's another cute new-job person, and he's got a chin-dimple and clear eyes and is fun and easy to talk to? Dream Jobs! So good!

My last Dream Job was at a Toronto non-profit that specializes in housing. Given that I was fresh out of school and riding a three-year wave of enthusiasm for, and interest, in co-op and alternative housing options, I was so stoked. It was a real office job, with my own email account and a phone extension and everything. In hindsight, I should have picked up the fact that things were not totally right when 1/3 of the hiring committee was late to my interview: the company president showed up half-way through my Xanax-enabled babbling about agency and community and punctuality, and yet I still managed to get the gig.

Six months into that job, I was having anxiety-induced hallucinations. I had to get the hell out of there. My boss was rude and the hours stank, and the small company that I had admired on paper turned out to treat its employees like garbage. It's hard for me to buy into the idea that offices that ignore despicable behaviour - and this was a place that rewarded one particularly awful manager by giving her a spot on their board - can be places that really understand how to effectively implement social change. You know how charity is supposed to begin at home? It's my opinion that, for social-justice organizations, compassion begins at the office.

My Dream Job, when I was 18, was waitressing at a popular downtown noodle house. I loved it. I made a ton of money, got a name for myself as a cute local girl, was flirted with and tipped well. I was also working for a boss who, when I fell carrying a full armload of plates during a jam-packed Friday night rush, coldly told me to quit fucking around and get back to work. He was a man who was widely regarded as a jag-off and a meanie, generous one moment and enraged the next. I was nervous every time a table sat down - dealing with the public, despite a decade of practice, is still not something I really enjoy. And after a summer of Dream Job, I was burned out. I was working with a crew that focused on getting drunk and chasing girls, and since I rarely (at that time) drank, and I rarely (even now!) chase girls, I was lonely.

I've had a variety of idiosyncratic bosses and weird working environments - I had a boss who insisted that employees show up fifteen minutes before their shift started, but screamingly refused to pay for the extra quarter-hour. During the the blackout in 2003 that paralyzed the Eastern seaboard, we worked until it was too dark to see the gas fryers in front of us. While I heard stories later that friends of mine had enjoyed the blackout in various outdoor pools and states of drunkenness, we held off zombie-like hordes of folks angrily demanding french fries from the only open restaurant within a thousand miles. I've worked as a factory two blocks away burned to the ground, the heat from the fire strong enough to be felt inside our building. I've held jobs where we were required to evict drunk transients from student housing, where we found violent Japanese pornography, where we found a laptop bagged stuffed with fake penises.

But in those other jobs, I've felt a sense of cameraderie with the people I work with. Some were friends, some were just laid-back co-workers, but they always made me feel safe and secure. There was no loneliness in my workday, only the satisfaction of doing a hard job well. My Dream Jobs, despite the fact that they held the promise of new and interesting work, never made me feel like mistakes were acceptable. I lived in fear of screwing up.

My Dream Jobs now are a little vaguer: I love writing, but I also feel deeply satisfied when I tie on an apron and make meals in my kitchen. This fall, cupcakes and cookies have been pouring out of my oven with a regularity that borders on diabetes-inducing, but it's proving to be therapeutic to follow recipes and explore new cuisines. My reluctance towards returning to an office is tied directly to my last Dream Job, where I was so stressed out that my brain chemistry was changing. Safety, security, compassion: as it turns out, some basic things to consider when entering into a new workplace.

I hope to God that I find work soon. I don't need a Dream Job. I just need a job I like doing, one that isn't going to ruin every single day or make me anxious and crazy. I need Katrina and the Waves, I need sunshine, I need agency and punctuality. I need compassion.

Gridizens of Toronto

2011-10-14T10:51:00.004-04:00

You used to be able to tell the kind of people you hung out with by the free Toronto weekly paper they picked up. There are two major competitors in this fine city, and a host of other, more niche-market options to supplement your transit-time reading. Since I'm not a gay man or a person of South Asian descent, and I rarely find myself in the market for a new automobile or apartment, I tend mostly to stick to the big two: NOW and The Grid, formerly known as Eye Weekly. With The Onion's recent entry into the Toronto market, there might be a third horse in the race, but for now, it rests with The Big Two.

In previous times, Eye Weekly was a distant second to NOW, which boasts the Savage Love, and a thorough selection of globe-trotting pleasure women - Tatiana from Russia! Svetlana from Sweden! Like a cadre of slutty Carmen Sandiegoes! Also, the concert listings. I'm a nerd and so I'll include the NOW weekly crossword, which is one of the better crosswords out there. NOW has the restaurant reviews, movie listings, and a naked, photoshopped Rob Ford. NOW also, unfortunately, sometimes seems a little chintzy: their cover stories, often musicians or actors, are frequently interviewed at open press scrums and their cover images are culled from non-exclusive sources, which can lead to a sense of deja-vu while one gets their Ryan Gosling fix.

Eye Weekly was its sickly second-place competitor. When I bothered to pick up a copy, I was always impressed with the layout, which was clean and interesting - it reminded me of IKEA catalogs, but I mean that in a good way. But the covers were uninspired, and they always seemed so slender. I rarely grabbed a copy in the first place. NOW seemed to cover all my bases, and Eye Weekly wasn't going to tell me anything new about being a Torontonian.

In recent months, though, there's been a shift. Reading through NOW doesn't actually take that long. Readers with a political bent use it as a forum to decry Toronto's devolution under the pinko bike-riding vegans who want us all to pay 110% of our income in taxes/under the fascist warlords who bring want to rip out the TTC and start charging 120% of our income for private schools and flu shots. Under Rob Ford, the tone became shrill and strident, and a little alienating to those of us who live somewhere in the middle of the extremes. NOW still offers top-notch reviews and a rigorous approach to concert listings, which my boyfriend pores over with Talmudic intensity each week. But like I said: the content? Not so much. Puff pieces on actors and bands, festival guides and eco-advice, and cover stories that don't leave me feeling satisfied.

Enter The Grid. Despite it's semi-unfortunate name, it's done something that leaves NOW in its dust: it produces actual, readable, entertaining content each week, every week.

For instance, recent cover stories have been a celebration of the city's young fashionable risk-takers and one woman's chronicles of her box-bike experience. It also, unfortunately, ran a story about how hard it is to find an apartment downtown, which read like "Yuppie Like Me: one white, under-30, $100K+/yr couple's struggle to find a cool apartment for under $1500/mo while illogically refusing to put a totally manageable down payment on a house," which made me, and everyone I know, want to scream. Generally, though, The Grid manages to put out cool issues from week to week. They spend money on their cover shoots, and it pays off. They have an informal, bloggy aesthetic that's a breath of fresh air from NOW's text-block crunch. They brought back lots of man-on-the-street interviews, which makes it feel like Toronto is participating in The Grid's experiment, and their editorial tone is sophisticated, urban, and inclusive.

Obviously, with free weekly newspapers, I'm welcome to pick up both and read them with pleasure and any degree of completion. NOW still blows The Grid out of the water in terms of concerts and reviews, and that's okay: to fill up The Grid with that kind of content would mean edging out their more interesting and original pieces. Readers should, and do, take a hybrid approach: each weekly offers something for everyone, even if neither offers everything.

But The Grid should be congratulated for trying something new, like a redesign of their visual brand and a re-conception of their editorial focus. It's paid off handsomely. I, and many of my friends, have become Gridizens - people who look forward to each new issue. Even if the crossword is sort of second-rate, they have a kick-ass Sudoku.

Cherry Pie Don't Come For Free

2011-10-11T22:36:00.004-04:00

Last week I wrote about the joys of home cooking, and then, in my Thanksgiving-induced food coma, I promptly forgot to add a second entry. Sorry, loyal fans! (Also: LOLZ.)

Over the last few week, I've been thinking more and more about What I'm Going To Do With My Life. Dad, I know that you're clutching your laptop in one hand and your chest with the other, shouting, "Just get a job, dammit! Temp agencies! Call one!" and if you were Jewish, you'd tack on a hearty "oy vey" and a headshake or two. Because you are Polish, you will likely just sigh and reap your crops, and by that I mean mow the lawn. And I'm working on it! Job hunting is one of the worst jobs to do, because it's all work and no feedback. You know those cartoon jobs of endless cubicle farms and beige phones? The ones where all the workers are the same, and that sameness makes them crazy? (You know this cliche. Scott Adams built an empire on it.) That is job hunting. It sucks at your soul.

Naturally, between applying for jobs, I've been daydreaming about My Perfect Job. I love writing, and, despite a missed self-imposed deadline or two over the years, I've been pretty good at updating and maintaining this blog, which has led directly to a 2009 internship at Spacing and to a more recent twice-monthly gig at the Huffington Post Canada, both nice feathers in my cap. But, as of yet, I haven't sold an actual piece of writing to an actual publication. This has proven to be somewhat of a stumbling block in considering myself a writer, psychologically speaking.

Ariel Gore, in her excellent book How To Become A Famous Writer Before You're Dead, recommends that writers create alter egos to tackle the less amazing parts of being a writer. Your alter ego is in charge of the beggy follow-up emails, of reading contracts, of money stuff, of rejections, and of all the less-than-ethereal aspects of being A Person Who Writes.

I'm likely going to have to develop a split personality, since I tend to go into a tailspin when something gets rejected, and my authoress self has yet to make an appearance due to a deficit of any real authoring. On Gore's advice, I'm going to call my bad-ass version Cherry Pie: she'll grapple with the crappy feelings brought on by extremely cheerful and supportive rejection correspondence from The Hairpin, and I will be in charge of the women's writing circle-themed erotica and pitching short stories to Canadian small presses. Should I have any degree of success, I will honor Ms. Pie by dying a chunk of my hair fire-engine red: that's how you'll know I've sold something.

I like to think that there's an alter ego for my alter ego: the Person Who Writes, who wears flowy linen pants and has great, wild, creative-person hair. If Cherry Pie is like Rosie the Riveter, only with more tattoos and a really terrific phone voice, then my creative side is a woman named Roshonda: a woman who smokes vanilla cigarillos and who owns a large, well-trained dog. Both Roshonda and Cherry Pie have their benefits and drawbacks: Cherry's a big-hearted den mother, but she's got no self-control when it comes to vegan cheesecake and will eventually get happily fat; Roshonda's got the creative chops, but she's a terrible sleeper and will steal your pillows from between your knees.

There's been a recent mini-media storm about young people and our allegedly slutty creative ways. We're just giving it away for free on the street corner, apparently, with our free blogs and our Huffington Post contributions. This is irking more established writers, like Russell Smith who argued that new writers are somehow devaluing the creative industry standards that older writers worked so hard to implement.

To this I say: Russell! You have a job. A writing job! A rare, published, marketable writing job! Smith is tough to defend, since it's been a long-ass time since he's been hungry for a job. In my mind, a blog is like a photographer's portfolio or a designer's sketchbook: examples of what a client might get if she paid for it. Some of my writer friends make a point of never working for free, but almost all of us have personal blogs. Ain't nothing wrong with giving it away for free, selling some work and not others, or working exclusively for the paycheck.

Where is Kaitlyn in all of this; where am I? Well, did I mention the job hunting? The blogging? The feeling not-quite-there-yet in terms of writing? I'm still figuring out a way to not get teary-eyed when someone says, "No thanks, this isn't quite right!" both in the traditional professional settings - I am a basket case before job interviews, no question about it - and in these new creative attempts. It'll take time. Smith and Topping might scoff at my free internet writing, but those guys can blow it out their ears: I have Roshonda and Cherry Pie on my side.

Cook, Good, Food

2011-10-04T23:30:00.003-04:00

When I really want to unwind and let loose, I used to crack open a bottle of Jack Daniels and grab a funnel from the kitchen drawer. These days, I use a slightly less liver-destroying method of cooling my sheeze down. I still have a soft spot for the bourbon, but now it's the loveliness of a single glass, an ounce and a quarter of the good stuff, and three ice cubes. Other methods include hot baths, sitcom television, and re-reading McSweeney's guide to '80s bands, which can make me laugh so hard I wheeze. But over the last few months, I've developed a real affinity for what may be my most relaxing pastime yet: cooking.

Back when I would have wine for, not with, dinner, I was a bit of a foodie. My first boyfriend was a chef, and my first jobs were all in the food service industry, so an interest in high-end food came naturally. There's an exoticism to fine dining. You get a little dressed up, people take you to your table and fawn over you with hunks of bread and little piles of food. An amuse-bouche? Okay! Some sort of prix-fixe menu that delivers artful towers of prawns or scallops or veal cheeks? Homemade ice cream? Deceptively tiny servings ("This is like, five mouthfuls for forty-five dollars! I'm going to eat eight slices of this really nice bread to make up for it."), and bucketload of booze. It's a very appealing, albeit expensive, way to live one's life. When the whole, 360 experience is taken into consideration (the room, the service, the view, the waiter's designer outfit), it feels glamorous. It can be a little bit addictive.

When we were younger, my mom was definitely the family dinner-maker. We used to pray for unadulterated Kraft Dinner, but she usually wouldn't cave to our high-pitched begging. I remember salmon cakes and steamed vegetables, or breakfast cereal-encrusted chicken, or spaghetti with olives and shredded carrots. These sound like culinary forerunner to taste experiments like nitrogen-frozen cherries, but my mom is an excellent cook (even if she did ruin KD by putting tuna in it). My dad made more "manly" foods - meat, grilled; meat, roasted; deli meat, fried. She usually cooked during the week, and they did a kitchen pas de deux on the weekends.

While there are entire magazines and cookbook sections devoted to getting dinner pumped out seven nights a week, I actually find cooking very relaxing. (This is probably due to the lack of hungry, shrieking children in my household.) I move fast in the kitchen, and have a slowly-growing repertoire of good, fast, tasty meals I can whip up ranging from breakfast burritos to vegan shepherds pie to banana-chocolate chip muffins. Sometimes I follow a recipe; other times, I improvise. With the exception of the chef boyfriend, I've been tapped in for KP on almost every relationship. I remember the first time I cooked for my Big Ex - we had been hanging out for, like, 36 hours straight. I was ravenous. We were both too broke for take-out, so I whipped up an udon-and-eggplant stir-fry. He looked at me with stars in his eyes. I love that feeling.

These days, I'm experimenting more. I buy the bacon marmalade and the kimchee. I make breakfasts with pickled beets. I want to try more advanced stuff, like whole chicken or yeast breads. Some of my friends will whip up salsas and make their own yogurt on the fly, but I'm not there. Years of denying the pleasure of food - unless it was really fancy food - have left me hesitant to explore my own kitchen. Islands of safety, like eggplant-and-udon stirfries, need to give way to oceans of new experiences.

Rings On His Fingers

2011-10-01T08:57:00.006-04:00

Once in a while, when we want to convey in the same breath that something is both contemptible and hilarious, my boyfriend and I will cackle, "rings on his fingers," while waggling our fingers at each other and generally behaving like morons. It's from High Fidelity, the movie that introduced me to John Cusack (heresy! It should've been Say Anything, I know), and is about Ray, the tai chi-doing, pony-tail-wearing, tantric-sex-having horror that shacks up with Cusack's ex-girlfriend. The rings are just one example of Ray's yuckiness; he also produces "horrible cooking smells" and is one of those guys that, while telling Rob that Laura's descision to leave Rob and come share his bed wasn't easy for Laura and she needs to be respected, will reach out and firmly grasp the other man's shoulder in a manner that can only be understood as a hate-crime.

The problem with men's jewelery is that it can pretty much only be awful. Women, in addition to having centuries of socialized adornment behind them, also frequently have a wide range of tastes and styles to choose from. Last season's bib necklace is cousins with the lavaliere, the pendant, the big ropy chain, the delicate little chain, pearl necklaces (oh, behave), leather chokers, and a myriad other selections, ranging in price from "that store at the mall that gives you a free pair of earrings with every ear piercing" to "mortgage your house." But men? Despite attempts at blingy options in the last few years, the reality is, if a guy comes at me with a lot of metal, my first instinct is to avert my gaze. It demonstrates a level of conspicuous consumption and vanity that is wildly unappealing. Frankly, in both genders, if your choice in jewelry overshadows anything else in the first impression, you're probably doing it rather tastelessly.

Let's do a stereotype rundown, shall we? Let's see: if you wear an earring, you're either gay in 1994 or Harrison Ford. If you wear a chain, you're an Italian-American high school student, with tearaway Diadora pants and a professionally groomed set of eyebrows that are a source of both pride and shame. If you have facial piercing and are under 25, you are deliberately annoying your parents; over 25, and you attend drum circles and are considered "underemployed" by the government. Got a lot of rings? Ick. Bracelet? You're likely wearing an ID bracelet, an invention I have never seen outside a Stephen King book. (Or a hemp bracelet, in which case, carry on, former camp counselor.) Anklet? Have fun geting strip-searched coming back through the Vietnamese border, you hippie tourist. Have we missed any?

If you're among the jewelry-wearing masses, don't despair. I'm only one woman, and if you like your rings and anklets and headpieces, go right ahead and wear them. There are always exceptions to the rules. When I first moved to Toronto, I was struck by the number of regular guys who wear rings. I can't pin it to a specific culture or age group; dudes in the city just seem more okay with wearing jewelry than their country-mouse counterparts. Leather bracelet cuffs are prevalent and sufficiently dudely, although their moment of ubiquity seems to have passed. Some guys wear a crucifix on a chain, ranging in subtlety from "big honkin' cross on a string" to something a little more subtle. It can be tough, though, navigating the waters of personal bling: like cologne or sports cars or Jagermeister, a little goes an awfully long way.

Men don't get the same fashion breadth as women. We get purses, shoes, hosiery, make-up, hairdos and jewelry; they get to let loose with a really wild pair of socks. I'm sure it's not keeping most men up at night, since they make loads more money and have lots more power, but when your major accessory choice in the A.M. comes down to the brown belt or the black belt, chances are, you have a penis.

Obviously, the major exception to the jewelery rules is the wedding ring. Stalwart and true, the band would seem to be a no-brainer. But, again, we've come a long way since they would just hand you a gold band when you signed your marriage license (they never did, but that would have been dope). Now men (and women) are expected to embody themselves in their ring choices. I myself love a classic gold band - I love gold rings, because I'm an aspiring fancy person - but I've seen rings that have ranged from turquoise hunks - amazing! - to pieces that look like lug nuts - not amazing! Utilitarian-type guys seem to think they need a big freakin' ring, as though that might showcase their handy side, or be useful in case they get a flat. Wedding rings are supposed to be gifts from one beloved to the other, but it's handy to know if your future husband is a plain-band guy or if he might like something more ornate.

When we visited Brooklyn last weekend, I picked myself up a memory ring. It's a teeny gold band that usually rests on the pinkie, but when I have to remember something, it goes on the first knuckle of a larger finger. I love it: delicate, useful, and unexpected. I feel slightly bad that my boyfriend will never know the joy of a fun jewelry purchase. If he gets married, he's said that he'll likely wear a ring, but the fun of a pendant or an interesting earring isn't in his sartorial vocabulary. Honestly, though? I am mostly relieved. As we learned in High Fidelity, rings on his fingers only leads to ponytails, and you might get smashed in the face with an air conditioning unit. Better stick with funky socks.

No Sleep Til Williamsburg

2011-09-27T12:27:00.005-04:00

Coming home to Toronto from New York City reminds me of that line in The Big Lebowski where The Dude wistfully says, "How you gonna keep 'em down on the farm once they've seen Karl Hungus?" I've always loved that line, because as our experiences expand, places and things that once seemed oh-so-important start to wither next to the grandiosity of our new explorations. (Plus, The Dude is my bathrobe-wearing, cream-sniffing ersatz life coach.) I'm not going to play the "Toronto isn't good enough" game that well-traveled folks often do. I love my city. It's safe and friendly, it's interesting and fun, it's arty, cosmopolitan and youthful enough to still be figuring itself out. Comparing New York City and Toronto are like comparing Yoko Ono to Katie Stelmanis - both accomplished and inspiring in their own right, but who knows if Stelmanis will have the longevity, the adaptability or the tragic and playful stateliness of Ono in 25 years? Only time will tell.

It's true that New York, being older and larger, has amenities that Toronto can only envy from afar. Take, for example, their metro: an all-night, far-flung subway system with a universal user interface (everyone gets a metrocard! All the stations take it! Oh, plus the buses!), stations that are simultaneously classically beautiful and falling apart in a very appealing way (although probably not for the people who ride it daily), and a long and storied history. It's hard not to ride the TTC and feel, for a moment, that we got into the transit game during an ugly-looking era, and that efforts to expand it will constantly be truncated by whining about expense. Meanwhile, the suburbs and the downtown stay part of two different Toronto experiences, and New York City enfolds its outer boroughs.

I'm not sure if Toronto has "hipster" neighbourhoods the same way New York City does. I know Stratford sure doesn't: Stratford has "the cool coffeeshop" or "the indie video rental place," because it's made up of five or six neighbourhoods, one of which is called "downtown." Coming from a small town into a larger city like Toronto can be a bit of a mind-blower. What do you mean there's more than one cool coffee shop? How can that be? How do people know where to get expensive, artful lattes?

On the other hand, Toronto definitely has "cool" neighbourhoods, like both East and West Queen Street, but we rarely sustain them. Yorkville, our former hippie enclave, has been transformed in the last few decades in a showy and expensive neighbourhood catering to the Rosedale crowd. I guess we'll see, in the coming years, if Parkdale and Leslieville and the Junction can retain their indie vibe, or they, too, will get GapKids and exorbitant rents. In New York, Brooklyn has suffered from its successes: rents have risen and the influx of new residents have most been young, white, and employed in "careers" like barista and web designer. The diversity in ages, lifestyles and backgrounds is slowly getting lost.

I don't mean to sound spiteful. I love Brooklyn, because in addition to Brooklyn Heights and its plethora of hipsters, it's also home to places like Bed-Stuy and its sizable, and creative, Black population; plus, Crown Heights and the Hasidic Jews who call it home. It's huge, bigger than Manhattan in both population and area, but it suffers from the same inferiority complex that Toronto often seems to. Hipsters will stuff themselves into an area of a supposedly dowdy place (like Toronto or Brooklyn) in order to maximize their cool points and to find others like them. Hep cats in cities like Montreal or San Fransisco don't need to congregate into tiny little areas. Those cities spread their fun out to all compass points. Besides, have you ever been to Haight-Ashbury? The damned place is just tourists and drug dealers, and any semblance of genuine counterculture has been neatly erased with the opening of another soup-and-sammie joint. Spread the wealth, you know? As a Torontonian, my city definitely has cool and uncool pockets, and it can be exhausting to navigate them. Not to mention that, when I try, it leaves me feeling like I'm paddling in awfully shallow waters.

The long and the short of it? I refuse to believe that Toronto is a B-team city. We have our shortcomings, it's true. But I've been places - New York City, Chicago, Montreal, not to mention Halifax and Savannah - and Toronto is still very much in its learning, building stages. We're so young compared to a lot of these places. We can make something of ourselves. Frustratingly, we also seem to suffer from a lack of leadership - a monorail and a ferris wheel do not a world-class city make. We need green spaces, integrated transit, a thriving theatre and gallery scene, one-of-a-kind shopping, and a sense that each neighbourhood has something new and different to offer.

Look, NYC has a 200-year head start, and it took some wrong turns - remember the 1980s? Seedy Times Square and a soaring crime rate? There's no reason we can't get there too. We need visionaries: leaders and critics who aren't following some other city's plans, but who can put Toronto on the map on our own merits. Expand the subways, open the waterfront, fund the arts, and give out-of-towners - and ourselves - a reason to ooh and ahh over us. We'll finish fulfilling our destiny as the New York/Paris/Hollywood of the North, and then ditch that mantle to finally, gloriously, be Toronto.

Dating Yourself

2011-09-22T08:58:00.003-04:00

I'm no expert, it's true, but dating is something I've done, and actually done well. It's different from having a boyfriend or girlfriend - it's the preamble, when you're getting to know each other and deciding if maybe, one day, y'all want to be exclusive. Confusingly, if you do eventually make it a one-on-one thing, that's also known as "dating," so for my purposes here today, that'll be known as Dating, or DATING if things get really serious.

If Generic Teen Girl Magazine approached me to write their dating advice column, where generic teen girls wrote in and basically asked me to read their crush's mind re: does he like me?, I would shrug and say yes, but only because I like generic teen girls. I always wanted to shout, "Teen letter writer! Quit being such a wet noodle and just talk to the guy! Stop writing in to magazines!" But I also understood the letter writer's dilemma: how do you conceal your vulnerable heart long enough to have a mundane getting-to-know-you conversation?

I do, however, have some dating experience. People can hit it off from the very first moment, and the first time a future couple hangs out might be a laff riot, culminating in a whisky-soaked conversation at 5 a.m. about favourite bands. On the other end of the spectrum, one party might set their hair on fire half-way through the date (ME. I have done this). In my twenties, a lot of my friends got embedded in LTRs, but I got a different education. I missed the master lessons on "how to not throttle your partner when you come home and the garbage is still a festering mess and that was the ONE THING you asked her to do this morning," but I got the community-college equivalent in "how to feign interest in someone's exquisitely boring hobbies just so you can get through the end of this glass of wine and then fake an emergency and leave."

So! Dates! Man, dates are fun. That's actually the whole point of a date: for you to go out and have some fun with a person whose genitals you might want to see later on (confidential to my mom: way, way later on. Sometime after you have your first child together). In this regard, don't shortchange yourself. For some reason, people have decided that "date" = "dinner." Dinner is boring! Take your date to the dog park and look at the puppies. (Aww.) Take your date on a brewery tour. Rent a paddleboat, browse in bookstores, get a vegan cupcake, watch a fire dancer. Fight the urge to drink loads to avoid awkwardness. Do stuff that interests you, and your potential suitors will be forced to a) bring their A-game and b) bust out the stuff that interests them on date #2. What sounds more enticing: dinner and a movie, or, "Hey, do you want to get falafel sandwiches and then go bowl a few frames? I know this bowling alley that serves crazy strong drinks." The subtext there is, "...because I am awesome."

There are some no-nos as well. I once had a date who drunkenly came home with me, made a failed pass, and then fell asleep on my couch. At some point, he sprinkled a thin layer of his belongings all over my apartment, in a crafty attempt to have a reason for another meet-up: a magazine, a book, and an expensive watch. We had an incredibly awkward second date, where he was supplicating and I was resentful, and we never saw each other again. Don't be that guy. This is also the safe-date PSA time: if you're meeting someone new, tell a friend where you're going and how to get in touch, and maybe offer a soothing check-in phone call if your friend watches a lot of sex-crime procedural shows. Most people are fine, especially if you're diligent in your douchebag filtering, but it never hurts to have a safety net.

Let's say you've introduced each other to your favourite dive bars, you've maybe had a sleepover or two, ran into some friends on the street and been totally awkward about status ("This is Eddie, my uh....This is Eddie."). Terrific. But maybe things aren't going 100% awesome, or maybe things are going better with Kyle than they are with Eddie - one of the perks of dating is that you're not exclusive until you say you are - and you need a conversation. This can be so stressful, because the are-we-aren't-we nature of going on dates. Look, you can't just drop out of someone's life, so call them up (it's fine to do it on the phone if things aren't serious/long-term) and say, "Thank you for the time we've had together lately, but I don't think we're clicking as well as we could, and I don't think we should hang out any more."

Memorize this. Tattoo it your arm, Memento-style. Let it wrap itself around your soul, if you're a hippie. My friend Suzanne recently pointed out that people will often date someone because the other person likes them, not because they like that person. Being liked is cool, and super-exciting, but if you don't dig what the other person is bringing to your table, you're not, like, contractually obligated to date them. There's no crime in realizing that you're not clicking with someone you're seeing, liking someone else better, or being bored. I have girlfriends who go back to the same guys, not because they're so in love, but because they're afraid of being alone, don't like ending it, or think the dude will change into something more desirable. Cut your losses, be the bad guy for a day or two, and move on.

One final thing: you may have to go on dozens of dates, but if you want an actual boyfriend or girlfriend, this is your tempering process, making you stronger and more knowledgeable about what you do/don't like. Pay attention! There'll be variations in age, body type, income, parent and marital status, gender, sexuality, kink, weight, height, location, and agenda. Follow your heart (barf!) and think critically about the things you want. You may discover a secret weakness for bears, or that you can't date a non-smoker, or that baristas are pretty boring when they're not feeding you coffee. Shrug. Cool. It's all part of the education.

Mini-Me

2011-09-20T13:23:00.005-04:00

Hipster parents are all over the damned place these days, and it's starting to make me a little crazy. Not because my own biological imperative is counting down - it sort of is, but not with any real urgency - but because all these parents are, like, my age. If not a little younger. It's like all the hipster babes are having hipster babies. The cycle continues, and hipsters, if nothing else, are a little boring.

The same way I take umbrage at the now-passe "Storm, the genderless baby" debacle, the idea of hipster children is both fascinating and a little repulsive. Where you fall on that continuum can likely be predicted by where you live, how old you are, and how big your dress-up box is. Babies are among the most helpless creatures in the animal kingdom, requiring constant care and attention; as a result, they rely on their parents for everything from changing their faux-denim diapers to spoon-feeding them organic homemade vindaloo sweet potato puree. Besides, in theory, there's nothing wrong with swaddling your kids in Hanna Andersson and riding them around on the Zapp. One doesn't need Dora the Explorer emblazoned on an article of clothing to make it child-friendly.

Is dressing your kids like a short version of yourself a good thing? The adorableness runs high for toddlers clad in Sonic Youth teeshirts (oh, irony!), or little girls in Nine Inch Nails onesies, for sure. Better yet, hipsters didn't even invent the kids-as-adults fashion; they're just following a retro trend. Children were often clothed in the fashions of their parents: think of those grim-faced children posing a hundred years ago. They're not wearing rompers and Disney tee shirts - they look like tiny versions of the grim-faced adults propping them up.

Then came the 1950s, when kids started having their own TV shows, merchandise, concerts and movies. Em Oh You Ess Ee, right? When we were kids, it was Sesame Street, Ninja Turtles and the Planeeters, plastered on duotangs and lunchboxes and party plates. It was easy to see what was for kids, and there was serious industry in selling me that branded merchandise. The same way that today's children get Cars backpacks, and their parents get to buy them.

But as we grew up and had some kids, the lines were suddenly blurred. Because we're still wearing our Ninja Turtles tee shirts. We're listening to Florence and the Machine and the babies are loving it, and there are dance playlists by kids, and American Apparel has infant's clothes (even as they reluctantly branch out into the plus sizes). It's become easier and easier to just scale down our tastes when we shop for the babies. And businesses are happy to oblige: most fashion houses have pint-sized versions of their lines, and others cater exclusively to the stroller cabal.

Only time will tell if I'll have hipster babies. My "aesthetic," if I can be assy enough to say that I have one, is pretty second-hand and DIY, but not to the point where I preserve my own beets or anything. If someone gave me a Beastie Boys toddler shirt, though, I would lose my mind (and blame the pregnancy hormones) and promptly dress my chilluns in the clothes of my choosing. When they're of outfit-picking age, I'm sure they'll be excited about branding and I'll roll my eyes at their choices, but banning the little moppets from picking something they like? That's not very hip, is it?

Gym Bo Ree

2011-09-16T00:28:00.001-04:00

I'm not a gym bunny. Up until recently, my Lululemon sweats were my "eating ice cream and watching TV" outfits, not for yogic flying or striding around Yorkville wearing mirrored sunglasses and looking scrawny. My running shoes were pristine, practically out of the box, and my hand weights gathered dust next to my TV. I despaired, as the lazy often to, about my expanding waistline and inability to touch my toes, but did I do anything about this? I did not.

With my new two-week free membership to the West End YMCA, however, I've stepped on a new treadmill. As an added bonus, the gym is a great place to get over things like the desire, or even ability, to dress stylishly.

Work-out gear is not, by any definition, en vogue. It might be flattering, or comfortable, or stretchy. It might breathe well. It might have little pockets for earphones, or a built-in pedometer, but it is not designed to be worn outside the gym with any degree of style. All the companies that market fashionable gym wear are lying to you: no such thing exists. If you've spent enough time at the gym to confidently pour yourself into leggings, you are well aware that most people exercise in ratty tee-shirts with the necks stretched out, basketball shorts from 1996, and fleecy jackets. That's because most people at the gym, including myself, are shlubby messes who are just trying to look and feel a little better. The idea that everyone there is wearing sleek black Matrix-inspired getups while they sweatlessly tone is a lie perpetuated by prime-time dramedies. I myself wear electric-yellow running shorts.

There is "designer" gym clothes, but that costs hundreds of dollars and was never designed for actual movement in an actual gym. That was made for wearing with expensive complicated sneakers and sitting in uncomfortable chairs on small patios, drinking coffee out of comically small/large cups and talking about how training your dog is going. It's for wearing home from the Botox clinic. It's for day-walking through Machu Piccu on your 18th wedding anniversary trip. It's not for wearing while you slog on the treadmill for 35 minutes. It is for lattes and picking your stepkids up from circus camp. Do not be fooled. The women who wear these outfits are the same people who own driving shoes and expensive single-use detergent. Do not be like them.

Once we've dressed ourselves horribly and warmed up with some half-hearted stretching, we can enter the actual gym. Not being a person who wears running shoes every day, I always feel especially bouncy when I step into the exercise area, but that soon passes. I use my time on the machines to do the following: obsessively monitor my pulse for evidence that my heart is going to explode; stare vacantly at the name of the company that makes the machine ("Fitness Forever!"); count calories burned, strides, time, and distance traveled; and silently judge others based on clothes and hairdo.

Ladies who get really into the gym thing freak me out. I know they're getting older and maybe aren't as taut as they once were, but frankly, that's kind of a good thing. It's cool to gain some weight as you age. Not a ton - I'm not saying y'all should make friends with a bucket of fried chicken - but too-skinny is freaky on the young and unflattering on the old. But it is cool to be a gym lady. Get some muscles! Lift some weights! Get your stretch on! Understand that you will be wearing a technical fabric that will make you look like a background extra in a training montage! Accept your fate! Young women who use the gym awe me with their early-life dedication to health, plus they always seem to have voluptuous bodies and shiny hair. They're also likely to dress in black and wear eyeliner, which intimidates me and my yellow shorts and grade-school french braids.

The whole point of wearing the gym clothes, and putting yourself through the pain of the gym (and the hideousness of the outfits) is so that when you put on your civilian clothes, you feel and look better. Muscles are a great feeling, losing weight is a great feeling, setting goals and reaching them is a great feeling. The gym clothes aren't so much a great feeling, but, like with the exploding heart, they're a rung on the ladder to feeling good. So, in one way, my electric yellow shorts will never go out of style.

Issues With Friends With Kids

2011-09-13T09:39:00.006-04:00

Friends With Kids! Oh my god! This movie has woken up a maelstrom of feelings I wasn't even aware human beings could feel! It was all rage-related Lamaze-breathing and flashbacks to Kissing Jessica Stein! Maya Rudolph was there! That was nice! And ever more ludicrously gorgeous and affordable Manhattan/Brooklyn apartments!

Okay, seriously: Friends With Kids. Can we please talk about this? It premiered at TIFF last week, but it hasn't been picked up yet, so let's just talk about vanity projects, thesis statements and hating on Brooklyn.

For the 95% of the population who is not aware of this movie, let me set up the conceit: a New York City social circle in their 30s starts hitting that life-cycle milestone, the child, with differing degrees of success. Maya Rudolph and Chris "The Irish cop from Bridesmaids" O'Dowd couple up and have some kids: she turns into a screaming, nagging shrew who publicly criticizes the me-time her hoodie-wearing husband takes on the john. Jon Hamm and Kristen Wiig play a couple who are slowly driven apart by his half-hearted participation in parenting, and their joint affinity for red wine. And finally, Jennifer Westfeldt and Adam Scott play long-time friends who, after watching their friends' post-childbirth relationship with horror, decide to have a kid together, but without all that couple-y stuff. Their unusual set-up allows them to keep the focus on staying in the dating game and eventually landing their hotter life partners, and side-steps the degeneration of romance that their friends have suffered.

The concept is a little smug. But hey - we can live with smug! But as the film gets going, it becomes clear that Westfeldt, who does not have children, is convinced that two friends could baby-share. There's a rant by Jon Hamm that asks the questions the audience must have wondered: what do you a tell a kid who knows his parents were never in love? How can you have the hubris to think your parenting styles and needs will overlap without talking it out in advance? How do you justify gambling with someone's life, and their understanding of what it means to love and commit, when you demonstrate that having a child together takes a backseat to finding a super-hot sexual playmate?

The super-hot sexual playmate, played by Megan Fox, obviously doesn't want kids. Kids, she says, tie you down, make you slow and fat, and limit your ability to implausibly star in a Broadway musical. Fox's role in this movie is to play the hedonistic slut: she can put her legs behind her head! She's hot. But she she won't touch him when he's sprayed nostrils-to-nipples with baby diarrhea, all but strangles a toddler in a bistro, and Scott is duty-bound to break up with her. She's not The One after all. (But! Legs! Behind her head!) By assigning Fox the childless role, the choice to remain childless is dismissed by the film as an indulgence of selfish and young people, a decision that would be impossible to sustain into your thirties.

Despite their separate, rocky dating scenes, Westfeldt and Scott are totally united and on par in their parenting abilities. There's no resentment when she calls him at 3 AM to rock their colicky offspring. He's able to make the little bastard instantly stop crying after she's been dealing with the screaming for an hour, a move that would have me questioning my sanity. They agree to split everything, time included, down the middle, so they can keep dating and having their own, non-parenting lives. Obviously, this is insane, but Westfeldt is firm in her conviction that friends really would be better than couples at raising children. Her characters demonstrate an unworldly geniality to childrearing. Even the most mellow parents occasionally feel like they're going to freak out: these parents never do. The gender parity is taken for granted, despite the fact that in the other two couples - like most couples - the woman is charge of the screaming, the cleaning, the silent crying and the feedings.

The movie relies heavily on Westfeldt's talents: she wrote, produced, directed and starred in thie film, a power play that means her fingerprints are on every frame of the film. I'm not going to lie - I disliked her. Westfeldt is blonde, about 95 pounds, and talks in a breathy Minnie Mouse voice. The movie runs a little blue - the seduction line is "I'm going to fuck the shit out of you," (also said by: date rapists everywhere!), and it's jarring to hear her utter it in an oopsy-cutesy voice. Scott is slightly miscast - he looks like a grim Eagle Scout when he's mad, and Megan Fox is way out of his league. But Westfeldt is, by far, the biggest dud... but, you know, this was clearly designed to be a breakout role for her. It's her show.

The supporting cast is great: Hamm convincingly plays a louche dad and Wiig, his long-suffering wife. Despite their friction, the relationship between O'Dowd's and Rudolph's characters is solid and enviable, and O'Dowd is affable and charming - I would date that guy, for sure. When Jon Hamm has his drunken what-are-you-thinking rant, the characters all freeze in horror, but Rudolph and O'Dowd make sure they clutch hands first. I loved that. (Meanly, I would guess Westfeldt had nothing to do with that moment, either.) I feel like this movie was trying to teach me something about being a woman, or a mother, or a New Yorker, or something. Like, it's fine to be a mom, as long as you're hot? Or, like, your husband will grow to hate you, so you might as well fray his last nerve and be done with it? Kids are sweet? Romance is needed in childrearing? Love is extraneous? Baby poop will get on you? Brooklyn is a wasteland? WHAT IS IT?! Jon Hamm always plays a jerk? TELL ME! Because, while Maya Rudolph is my movie-star girlfriend right now, and New York is awesome, this movie is NOT GOOD in a way that I have very strong feelings about. Don't see it. Or do see it, once it's in wide release, and then we can talk about it in loud voices on the bus.

The Breast Of All

2011-09-10T10:11:00.004-04:00

As I was leafing through Entertainment Weekly a few days ago, I was struck my a collage of images from the upcoming fall television season. Nothing special going on: a few waitresses transposed over someone posing with a handgun: the usual pappy "look at us!" kind of schtick that ensures that, by the time the pilot is aired, we're all vaguely aware of what we're going to be looking at here. Waitresses? Yeah, I'd watch that.

But one of those waitresses is the luscious Kat Denning, and guys? She has boobs.

I know most woman of reproductive age have 'em, but let's face it: there isn't a lot of diversity amongst the TV breasts. They're usually high and small, with a little bit of jiggle if you jog (and a little bit of pointiness if you're watching a Friends rerun - they must have kept that set at, like, six degrees), but a lot of the time, the "cleavage" is about as sexy and voluptuous as a frying pan. If you're a little older, or not quite in the bell curve, you could adjust them: either "naturally" through over-exercise, which gives you that alluringly bony sternum, or go discreetly under the knife to pump up your basketballs. Young women, as they're represented in the TV demographic, aren't as likely to be weird-skinny. Their assets just haven't really had time to be anything other than perfect, but their coltish figures take very well to a regimen of baby carrots and elliptical machines if they don't quite conform.

I check out women...constantly. As my (very patient and and slightly amused) boyfriend pointed out today, if I was a dude, I would be one of those construction workers who sexually harass attractive women. I'm a fan of legs: long, lean gams where the short-shorts are short and the thighs don't touch. At 5'1", my legs are muscular, well-shaped, toned and strong. I love my legs, but I don't think of them as luscious, and they certainly aren't long. The same can't be said about my chest: I am very well endowed there. I get a classic hourglass shape when I'm working out, so it ends up being very va-va-voom. Lots of deep v-necks in my wardrobe.

The thing about large breasts is that they don't often work in the real world. I'll give you a for-instance: I hate being warm, so tank tops are de rigeur in my wardrobe. With big boobs, "tank top" equals "revealing." Culturally, large breasts are understood to be sexy, sometimes over-sexed. They're seen as relatively low-class. They're often the hallmark of an ethnicity that white people think of as "other," like Latina. Revealing small breasts is artful; revealing large breasts is pornographic. Think about Dolly Parton and Pamela Anderson. Now think about Gwyneth Paltrow and Natalie Portman.

In my quest for body acceptance, I'm trying to come up with some role models I can turn to when I start feeling like I never see myself on the screen. Kat Dennings is totally foxy: she's got an pre-anorexia Angelina thing going on, which I like very much, and her face belongs on billboards. But is she a stick? Nah. She's got curves, man. It's nice to see curves on TV. Just like, when Maw Whitman shows up in Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, she's got a shadow of a double chin. Because, you know, she's a human. Doesn't mean she can't kick some serious ass.

Please note that I'm not talking about the carefully curated curves of Jessica Biel or ScarJo: those women, though undoubtedly beautiful, aren't regular humans. Or the "large breasts" of Megan Fox, who, in her newest movie, is the thinnest woman I've ever seen onscreen. Seriously: look at this woman's midsection. Where is it? I recently read an article about why No Doubt didn't put out more music. Between her kids, her fashion line, and her workout routine, she explain, Gwen Stefani just didn't have the time to record new music. The day my workout becomes my actual job is the day that I crawl into bed with a tub of cream cheese icing in order to spend some serious time realigning my priorities. Some exercise is good and it's a great feeling to be fit, active and healthy.

But coming to terms with that shadow of double chin, or absentmindedly rubbing your belly while you wait for the bus, can be a powerful moment. Knowing that other women are out there doing the same thing, even women in an industry that has powerful forces demanding that the chin and the belly shrink away, is reassuring and empowering. I don't know if the Dennings's new sitcom is going to be any good; it's just nice to know that her "normal" body isn't holding her back.

Gevinson Me A Break

2011-09-06T10:24:00.003-04:00

It's weird to wake up one morning and realize, at the age of 27, that I'm over the hill. Tavi Gevinson, who came to the public eye as a prepubescent style blogger, has grown boobs and launched a new website. As a result, I'm feeling a bit irrelevant. (Taking it personally is kind of my thing.) She's getting major coverage for her new venture - New York is blowing up over it.

I'm fond of Gevinson in a distant way - she's become an unlikely minor style icon, and while I believe that civilians shouldn't have access to designer clothes until they can vote, she clearly started out with a child's fanaticism for the dress-up box. Now, she's got her mitts on some of the designer clothes she gushed about in her more youthful projects, and she's a bona fide influence. Her aesthetic is often the gauzy look of an Instagram photo crossed with the obsessive love of the girls who make shrines to fictional characters. Her love affair with The Virgin Suicides, and J.D. Salinger books is endemic in teenaged girls across the continent (maybe, you know, I was one of those girls?) and she knows how to pose.

Gevinson's focus is apparently going to incorporate some nostalgia pieces, specifically for the 1990s. This is...what's that word? Dispiriting? Infuriating? Am I old enough to remember years that teenage girls now long for as "a simpler time"? Are Empire Records and Hole albums legitimate cultural touchstones? Woe is me. Full disclosure: when I was in high school, roughly the time Gevinson was born, I was making elaborate collages of 1980s pop culture touchstones, obsessively watching Back to the Future, and listening to the Romy and Michelle soundtrack. In short, I was just as annoying.

Call me old fashioned, but I'm not ready for '90s nostalgia. The frumpy silhouettes alone are going to kill me - dudes, have you seen first-season Dana Scully lately? It's all belted/pleated/pegged in there. Or Friends? God, does this mean high schoolers are going to start getting The Rachel? The hairdos of the '90s, which were sleek to the point of self-parody, did not allow my self-dreading curls to thrive. Grunge, which is the early-90s alternative to the CK One thing, flatters no-one: plaids upon plaids and boxy jackets. I'm going to cry. I know the best vintage-inspired looks update "the look" without returning to the crappy parts, but that doesn't leave a lot left to be inspired by.

Plus, there's a weird part of me that wants the 90s resurgence to just not happen. You know what I wore on my first day of high school, in 1996? Green jeans, a blue sweater and Sketchers with a sole as thick as a dictionary. I'm oddly protective of that particular brand of ugly: the spaghetti strap prom dresses, the platform mary-janes, the Gap. Style cycles have sped up to an insane degree in the last couple decades - the 1930s influenced stylish women in the 1970s, and some dudes in the 1980s updated the '50s greaser look with leather jackets and sneers. But the early 2000s reached for the 1980s, and now, barely into the 2010s, we're looking at mid-1990s for clues on how to live stylishly. In fifteen years, we'll be living in a state of everything being fashionable and no new influences. See you in 2026! Please, let there be a silver jumpsuit waiting in my government-issued pod.

I'm willing to chalk this '90s thing up to the intersection of teenage girls and their elaborately constructed sense of misplaced nostalgia. I did it. A lot of the women I know who got their start as fashion-conscious little weirdos have done it. Gevinson, with an admittedly larger audience and wielding much more influence, is doing it. It can be comforting to think that "before my time" really means simpler or purer, but as the world speeds along and 15-years-olds become culture magnates, what we really pine for is a childhood - innocence of our world, and a chance to play dress-up in adult clothing.

Short Story

2011-09-01T23:25:00.003-04:00

I'll admit it: my attention span is not great. I don't blame the internet, even though it's basically designed to amp up my already spazzy brainwaves. A bespoke befrazzling, if you will. (Please don't.) I actually blame the Babysitter's Cub novels I read as a child, because the second and third chapters were always the same - introduce the characters, introduce the club - and I trained myself to skip right over them. It wasn't like, in chapter two, Ann M. Martin was going to drop some serious knowledge on her readers. "Oh, by the way? Kristy? Totally queer. Just so's you all know."

As a result of my lazy childhood reading habits, I am no longer able to make my brain pay attention to large stories. My sister, who is way more of an internet generation than I am, has nonetheless plowed through a bunch of epic stories (Harry Potter, His Dark Materials, that one about the ring, and so on), but I barely got through three Potter books before throwing my hands in the air and muttering darkly about thirteen year olds riding broomsticks. I read the entirety of the Dark Tower series, but that barely counts - you can skip whole paragraphs in a Stephen King novel and still get the gist. NB: if you live anywhere in Maine, you will eventually encounter a) a giant spider, b) a vampire, c) bullying that goes way past "it gets better" into "why don't these kids call the cops, because clearly those bullies are going to straight up kill them."

Anyway, even though I can read long stories, my eyes get tired, my brain gets bored, and I eventually just curl up into the fetal position for the course of a long weekend and doze through entire chapters. I read 60% of Infinite Jest this way. That book contains, as far as I know, a hilarious fake game called Eshcaton based on tennis and world domination, and roughly three billion footnotes. I still recommend it to friends. I love reading in bed, but mostly because I can read, fall asleep, wake up, and keep reading without missing a beat. Books that require concentration and attention to details - like Dune's plot, for instance - tend to glaze me over, because I really do best when things are a big ol' mess. Enter Infinite Jest.

Even on the internet, the urge to wander off is overwhelming. Right now I have 21 different tabs open. I'm job hunting! I'm blogging! I'm on Facebook! (Honestly, I'm always on Facebook.) I'm reading Cracked.com articles about why old people's brains are faster and that makes them cranky! I'm looking at Google maps listing locations of famous movie shots in New York! I'm doing it all! It's basically like a Virginia Sims ad up in here, only instead of a skinny cigarette and a can-do attitude, I'm wearing sweatpants and haven't talked to anyone in hours. Living. The. Dream.

Being internet savvy has definitely messed with our collective ability to focus. We like things short- to medium-length: enough to get our feet wet, not enough to really go swimming. Anything much longer is likely to result us tabbing over and compulsively checking Facebook. But outside the screen, we should be able to focus, right? Well, my dad and I both tend to fall asleep with books draped over our faces, and I get the aforementioned literary narcolepsy on just about any story longer than 100 pages. Ironically, this has created a boon for people who create lots and lots of shorter media: think about the rise of the TV show on DVD, where once can watch 700 minutes of a story broken up into 43-minute chunks. I've received several messages from readers who have compulsively gone through my archives for hours; it's easy to do.

My gratitude for magazines, short stories, and essay collections knows no bounds. I subscribe to Harper's because it always has something to teach me in 3,000 words or less (including the memorable three weeks I convinced myself I becoming psychotic because they had run an article on women in prodromal psychosis and I, like most women, fit some of the symptoms). Dave Eggers, though he makes me howl, does a great job with the 826 Valencia kids and the Best American Non-Required Reading series, and the Best American is generally a great tool to use if you love reading but hate losing the plot. Short story collections are the spine of literary body, and I use them to audition new authors and to try out new subject matter. Anthologies are also great for this.

We're changing the way we read, which happens all the time - Hemingway and Faulkner shooed away purple Victorian prose with their styles, and we now rarely encounter sentences that begin with "O my pains are the cause of my utmost weariness," because that shit is annoying. We love our epics, but now they're being broken up into shorter stories (that Twilight nonsense, for example). And we still read magazines, even though the push is for us to consume them, not at the newsstand, but though our tablets. But we read: in bed, online, in short and long forms. Even if we get up at each chapter break to check our Facebooks, we read.

Dust To Dust

2011-08-31T11:40:00.002-04:00

It's counterintuitive, but last month's camping trip got me caught up on my reading. You'd think that all the portaging and spider-killing would have left no room for books, but the nine of us passed around The Hunger Games and a few lefty magazines with an obsession bordering on Talmudic. In my tent, hopefully away from the spiders, I hoarded Michael Chabon's Maps and Legends, which turned to be a kind of literary to-do list for when I got out of the canoe and back to a bookstore. Chabon went nuts for His Dark Materials, a trilogy from 1995 through 2000 by Philip Pullman. It was marketed in the same vein as The Chronicles of Narnia or the Harry Potter septilogy - a fantastical children's epic - but the truth is, it's not really a story for children. Lyra, the main character in the first novel, and her buddy Will, introduced in volume two, are both pre-teens, but the thematic juice in the books is God, death of. With all due respect to the Potterites and the Narnians, Pullman's books go places kid's lit usually doesn't: deep into the bowels of purgatory, for example.

The books are plot-heavy, for sure: with a cast of thousand (hot air balloonist? Okay!) and geographically stretching over at least four different worlds, there's a lot of territory to be covered. They start with an evil plot to separate children from their daemons, the animal familiars that are the outwards embodiment of a person's soul (Chabon rightly points out that a major draw for readers is daydreaming about what one's own daemon might be), and ends up with God, the Authority himself, climbing out of his crystal travois, gibbering some nonsense at Will and Lyra, and dying. The relief the aged, insane deity feels at this final goodbye is palpable.

Pullman's books feature all kinds of magical elements - talking animal familiars, polar bears in iron armour, witches on broomsticks, shamans, and a knife that cuts through the fabric of the word - but the most wondrous and prevalent is Dust. It pervades the books from beginning to end, and is a mystery throughout. It's attracted to adults but indifferent to children. It seems to be tied to the natural world (it helps fertilize trees and erupts from the aurora borealis), but is only visible under certain scientific instruments. It reacts to human consciousness, but humans seem unaware of it. It's weird. The man does a beautiful job of making his readers wonder what, exactly, this ethereal substance is.

Since he was publishing at the same time as the wildly popular Potter series, Pullman's would-be detractors focused a lot of their energies on Harry and his ilk's witchy ways. But Pullman was far more subversive. He was often overtly critical of the Church, and of the blind adulation for authority he thinks the religious have. He literally goes ahead and kills God, and two main characters perish into a bottomless void with God's proxy, a thundering angel called Metatron. Potter's world contained a lot of good v. evil stuff, but J.K. Rowling never murdered a deity.

At the end of the books, a shadowy underworld that hitherto had been populated by vicious harpies is transformed into a place where dead folks go to tell their stories. They're guided by the reformed bird women to a place of great beauty, where their corporeal form transforms into golden particles, recycled into the natural world for all eternity. Heaven, which had been a rolling warship in the sky, is destroyed in a battle, and with no God and no Metatron to build it up again, it seems lost forever. The source of Dust - which turns out to be the physical manifestation of knowledge and experience - is renewed constantly with the dead. Even God, upon dying, turns into Dust - no more above or below anyone else, but part of the natural order of everything.

The books are confusing to read if, like me, you were brought up in a psuedoreligious household that had a vague understanding of God = good. It stands to reason, then, that the lack of God, the death of God, would be a tough break. But Pullman paints the church in a different light: in his books, the church campaigns against knowledge and understanding, since it was eating the fruit of knowledge that got us all into this clothed, dying mess in the first place. They see Dust as the manifestation of sin - which, you know, going back to that apple, it is. But not in a bad way.

Which is why I doubt that kids reading these books, if there are many, are getting the whole metaphysical dynamic. Truth be told, I had a hard time understanding a lot of what was going on. I studied the Bible in university and went to church as a kid, but the battle between good and evil, where Bad is the church - not evil church offshoots, but the legit main pillars - and Good is the upstart rebels campaigning for more information - is kind of a mind-blower. Say what you want about Harry Potter (and I lost interest around the time the book that was all about quidditch was released), but it was always clear who to root for.

That's the appeal of Pullman's so-called children's books. Usually, we like our books to have a stern and stately moral compass. But Pullman? He leaves us a little adrift, so we need to figure out what, exactly, we're rooting for here. Some of the Church-affiliated characters are sympathetic, while others are jerks; some rebel characters are huge egotistical nightmares, while others are people you'd want to drink bourbon with. He leaves it up to us. And God's death isn't the end - his particles are everywhere, in all worlds, just everyone else's. It's one of the more ambiguous books I've read in a long time, but it's a challenging and interesting one. Pullman's push for knowledge, for the Dust to settle on us all, is a lovely, weird, frightening story.

To Blatchford

2011-08-26T11:41:00.002-04:00

Christie Blatchford has always had somewhat of a mean streak in her. When she wrote for the Globe and Mail, she focused her energy on the high-profile crimes, the war overseas, and got a reputation somewhere in the last 20 years for being a "hard hitting reporter" on her good days and "a total shrewish bitch" on her bad days.

She may have reached a new low when, earlier this week, she wrote a scathing article about Jack Layton mere hours after he died. She pummeled him for his politician's nature, for the outpouring of grief that came on the news of his death, for the so-called "Dianaization" of his death when Canadians, moved to action in their loss, memorialed him the man in Nathan Phillips Square. She scoffed at the news coverage and at his thoughtful deathbed letter.

Blatchford has often seemed to pride herself on her contrarian nature, but the commentary on her article has proved that perhaps the people whom she prides herself on speaking for aren't going to back her on this one. There are lots of people who have reacted with a "You tell 'em, Christie!" but many, many more who decried her as being thoughtless, for focusing on superficial elements rather than the larger issues - she scoffs at Layton's "energy retrofitted house," as though somehow living out one's political values is ridiculous - and fails to mention that Jack Layton, in recent months, had become something of a folk hero to Canadians. He had taken on the nation-imperiling Bloc and won, he had swept aside personal and political scandals as non-starters, he had led his party to unprecedented heights and genuinely had the support of Canadians behind him.

When he died, he released a letter that Blatchford dismissed as vainglorious pap; it was a letter that made me cry. Layton was a politician, and the letter was a political move. But it was also a thoughtful expression of his love for his life's work. He loved being a politician: leading people, changing their minds, engaging them in the political process. He was very good at it. Her dismissal of Layton's urging Canadians to work together and have faith in their country was callous and cold.

If you find yourself on Blatchford's side of things in this narrative, imagine for a moment that her article wasn't about Layton. Imagine that she was memorializing, in this dismissive, repulsive way, a favourite pastor of yours. A brother-in-law. A admired employer. Or even someone you met once and liked, because he was affable and likeable, even though part of you knew he was working on you - a politician, in other words. Now her reaction to his death looks even more appalling.

In the tradition of Dan Savage, who took Rick Santorum's name and make it into a filthy noun (Google "santorum" if you're scatologically bent), my friend Liz proposed that we take Blatchford's name and similarly defile it. Refashion her moniker into a work that means something vile, because on a sad day, she was vile. I would guess that, over time, "she's a real blatchford" might come to mean some heinous blend of callousness, "too-soon?" collar-tugging, self-aggrandizement, and plain old meanness. "To blatch" might mean to misread the tone of an event so supremely as to become a lightning rod for rage. I'm not calling for her head or her job, but I do think she should be embarrassed, and that The National Post might want to reconsider her high-profile writing, as it seems to piss off a majority of their readers.

I doubt she would, but I hope C.Blatch feels a pang of shame when she realized that Layton wasn't the smarmy a-hole she had painted him as; the tributes to him from regular, non-Post-affiliated folks attests to that. What kind of memorial will you inspire, Christie?

The Man, The Mustache: Jack Layton, 1950-2011

2011-08-22T10:23:00.003-04:00

When I called my sister this morning to tell her of Jack Layton's death, I unexpectedly started to cry. I always thought the only public figure whose death would inspire tears would be Paul Simon (what? You listen to Graceland on every childhood roadtrip and see if it doesn't do something to you), but apparently, Mr. Layton was also on that list.

Even if the NDP isn't your cup of tea, Layton was an interesting figure on the Canadian political landscape. He was deeply committed to his lefty roots, but managed to translate that into a populist platform that converted suspicious Quebecois voters into people who could support a national party. He had a bad-ass mustache. He was confident. He spoke well. He led.

Charmingly, Layton never really struck me as desperate. The current crop of Canadian "leaders" always seem to have election day on their mind - it's a very American way to lead, because the focus isn't on what's right or what's needed, but what is going to keep a person or a party in power when the polls open. Layton, maybe because, until recently, his party maintained a third-place standing, was free to focus on what he considered big issues. Personal finances, health care, climate change, and multi-party solidarity: all considerations he weighed in trying to do right by Canadians. On his website, he tells us that he "won't stop until the job's done," a sentiment that now brings tears to my eyes.

I met Jack Layton once, when a guy I was seeing took me to his Christmas party. I was a little star-struck, but when he started singing "Bohemian Rhapsody" in an off-key voice, I had to laugh. The guy had very little vanity, which is appealing in a politician. He was also charming and was able to able to switch seamlessly from talking shop with his work buddies - city hall gossip was rampant at this shindig - to horsing around with his daughter's friends. He looked comfortable in his own skin, the way Obama did when he was campaigning, the way Trudeau looked when he dared the nation to "just watch me."

Whatever your politics, I hope we can agree that Layton's grace and energy in the face of cancer was enormously inspiring. It's a damned shame that someone so young, with so many recent victories, couldn't be around to celebrate them as fully as he lived the rest of his life.

Rewards Of Love

2011-08-20T11:06:00.005-04:00

There's a cactus sitting on my windowsill, one of those classic-looking numbers that would not be out of place in a Roadrunner cartoon. It's obviously much smaller than that, but through my lackadaisical attentions, it's managed to spout a furry little tuft at its top. It's growing. This is somewhat of a victory for me, because I kill most of the plants I bring home. After you get sober, you're supposed to get a plant. If you can keep the plant alive for a year, you can get a pet. If the pet thrives for a year, you're officially allowed to be in a relationship. I've done all that shit backwards - boyfriend, whoopsy-daisy dog adventure, then plants. And the plants, at least, are thriving.

I went to a wedding last night, and, inexplicably, it made me feel blue. I know that weddings aren't supposed to be sad - "happiest day of your life," blah blah blah. "Celebration of love," et cetera. The couple was terrific: they had been together for six years, and so sure in their vows to each other they had eschewed the gold bands in favour of ring-finger tattoos. As they danced and ate and were feted by their families, I realized that, through every fault of my own, I've never had that kind of love.

My closest friends complain that I don't open up very often, and when I do, I get self-conscious about it and clam right back up. I can be difficult to love. My boyfriend, who is patient and who cares for me, has told me more than once that I'm hard to read, and he's right: I've put a lot of energy into protecting those around me from my thorny, horrible insides. I lie about how I feel when I feel sad. Systemic, long-term self-loathing makes it very hard to believe that anyone would care about me enough to listen, let alone love me. But, given the very presence of the boyfriend and the friends in my life, my brain is obviously whispering these mal mots because it's insane.

I have unwittingly sabotaged relationships of all kinds by being inflexible and suspicious. I'm bossy. I'm jealous. I'm easily hurt by being stood up or not invited. I feel unattractive most of the time. Like everyone, I have more likeable points as well: I'm smart, and I can usually see both sides. I like taking care of people. But the reason I felt sad last night was because the couple, who was so in love that they took the plunge and made it official, showed me things that I lack in my own life. Not the relationship - I have that, and even though it's hard work, I'm so grateful for it - but the evolution from dipshit teenager into fully-grown adult. The bride, at the ripe old age of 24, runs her own fashion design house, while her husband is a professional photographer. Their relationship has changed, too. At one point, the bride obliquely thanked her new husband for helping her get over some body-image issues, and I'll admit it. I got teary. That's some love right there, the kind that's borne of trusting the other person to take care of your shitty-feeling parts as well as your appealing parts.

I guess I still feel like I'm going to scare people off if I say, "Hey, I'm sad, or annoyed, or tired." I need to trust that my bossy, clamped-shut self can relax, just a little. And the rewards of deeper friendship and deeper love are worth every challenging moment of that. My spindly cacti are proof that effort brings growth.

Famous For Fifteen Seasons

2011-08-17T17:41:00.001-04:00

I feel bad for the kids of today, because their first exposure to Jennifer Aniston will be through her movies, like that one with Adam Sandler last year, and this summer's Horrible Bosses. There, she's playing Jennifer Aniston, Movie Star: her hair is shiny and her voice is perky and she's outrageous and winky. But back when she played Rachel Green on a little TV show called Friends, she was actually - and I know this is shocking - pretty funny.

All my dude friends just groaned, because while some of them think she's hot (and the majority think she's unappealingly shrill), almost none of them think she's hilarious. But if you watch old episodes of Friends, after they tone down her character's daffy rich-girl-striking-out-on-her-own storyline of the first few seasons and actually made her into a person (or as much of a person as characters are allowed to be on sitcoms), she's really funny. She's got timing, she's got the balanced beauty of someone who conceivably live in your apartment building, she lets other people be funny, and she works really well with her material.

The kids of today, of course, know her as Jennifer Aniston: Movie Star and Jennifer Aniston: Tabloid Fixture, and the kids of ten years ago knew her as Jennifer Aniston: Wife Of Hot, Hot Movie Star. Much the same way that Ryan Reynolds has gone from Sitcom Goof to Hot-Bodied Action Hero, and Scarlett Johansenn went from Blank-Eyed Indie Girl to Sultry Pin-Up, the early days of today's mega stars have been steamrolled by their publicists, stylists, agents, and other team members and imagineers into basically not existing.

Obviously, I have my own celebrity blind spots. Jason Bateman, who was on Silver Spoons and then Arrested Development, only came to my attention post-AD, when he played the potential adoptive father in Juno. Bateman's public persona was a many-layered thing: he was a former child star, the center of a cultishly popular sitcom and the brother of Justine Bateman, who was famous for a many of the same things. I was, at the time, ignorant of this history; I just thought his Juno character was a jerk. Likewise, my first encounter with Zach Braff was Garden State, which was sad-sack and featured a grating Natalie Portman. Braff didn't have a bunch of goodwill with me, because I had never seen his delightfully weird sitcom Scrubs. I just thought he was a loser.

It's hard for me to predict which of today's TV stars are going to make the jump into movies. Evangeline Lilly, the perpetually dirty-hot Kate from Lost, will be featured in this fall's Real Steel, a movie that, as far as I can tell, is based on Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots. The upcoming Muppet movie stars Jason Segel, who is best known for How I Met Your Mother (although anyone who hasn't seen Forgetting Sarah Marshall, the only movie that featured both full-frontal male nudity and puppets, really should), but HIMYM has been on for for roughly one thousand seasons and my dad still hasn't seen it. It's not ubiquitous in the way that Friends, Seinfeld, The Drew Carey Show, and any number of mid-1990s, TBS-syndicated, juggernaut sitcoms were.

I'm not all that concerned with Jennifer Aniston's legacy per se, because she's going to be just fine. Even if her movies don't stand the test of time, her Elizabeth Taylor-level of tabloid fame should secure her in the public's memory. What I think is interesting is that the way she became famous to me, by being a legitimately funny actress on a hugely successful TV show, is no longer the primary reason she's famous. The same way that Nicole Richie is now a "jewellery designer" instead of "noted anorexic," you know? I guess it sort speaks to the sitcom's loss of primacy in most network's programming (although it does seem to be creeping back), but it also seems hard to market a celebrity after they've won on Survivor, The Bachelor, or whatever reality TV is gobbling the airwaves this season. I like celebrities to have an embarrassing horror movie credit to their name before they hit it big. I like sitcom stars that turn into movie stars. I like movie stars who turn into tabloid fodder. But that doesn't seem to be the life cycle of the average celebrity any more.

At the risk of sounding old fashioned, I miss when people were famous for a reason. All the people I see in the rags now got their start on shows like 16 and Pregnant, which seems repugnant. I know who the Kardashians are. That seems insane! They don't do anything! At least Aniston and her sitcom-bred cohort did stuff (acting) to merit their ink. Even if I didn't recognize Braff and Bateman when I went to their movies, I can now. Fame, like anything else, should be merit-based, and I miss the days when folks earned their way to the top. Rachel Green, I salute you.

The Exercise Room

2011-08-10T23:29:00.004-04:00

I've pledged in the past to get active. "I'm going to be a triathlete!" I've crowed, "I'm going to take up marathons!" This usually goes hand in hand with a silent vow to lose 30 pounds and become one of those flat-stomached women who have ropy arm veins and assassin's eyes. I've always wanted to have that kind of determination, but usually I end up on the couch with chocolate drool on my pajama pants and the DVD menu music looping endlessly as I doze.

This past year, I had surgery, skated dangerously close to abject poverty (and the ice is getting thinner as we speak), recovered from an eating disorder, watched my parent's relationship reconfigure itself into something new and unexplored, worked a miserable job, quit that miserable job, and continue to deal with the deaths of people close to me and close to those around me. It's been a stressful 12 months. I've also sighed some big sighs as I've watched myself go from looking pretty normal, to post-surgery skinny, to stress-induced fat. This has coincided with that moment in one's late twenties when it takes more than 20 minutes of jogging to get into shape: my metabolism has slowed down, you guys.

I've never had a really normal body experience. When I was a child, I was normal/skinny, but when I hit puberty, everything ballooned: my hair, my breasts, my skin, and my body. I was unprepared for boobs. I was unprepared for acne. When I was thirteen, I caught whooping cough, an antique disease that made me cough so hard I would barf. Then came over a decade of craziness ("Chapter 9: Eating and Barfing"). I'm not going to get into that, mostly because it's private and painful, and also because I don't want to be one of those "tsk-tsk-instructions!" people. Every year or so, the teen magazines run their concerned article about eating disorders, which, if you're damaged and desperate, can read like a how-to manual. That's not my scene. Suffice it to say that I was nuts, it was bad, and I only really stopped because it occurred to me that, if I kept it up, I was going to die.

Lighthearted! Anyway, this isn't really about that - it's about why, at the age of 27, I'm finally trying to develop a "normal" relationship with my body. In the past, I've exercised so that I can loathe my body a little less: if I'm two pounds lighter on Friday than I was on Monday, I'm obviously a better person. This, apparently, isn't really how things work. Most people exercise to feel good, to lose weight, to get strong, or to tone up. I was using it as a shield, as an attempt to fend off the self-loathing. I mean, damn, for a while I looked awesome. But, like any disorder, I couldn't sustain it.

I just got back from an 8-day canoe trip, which was difficult in a number of ways. It was definitely physically demanding. After the first day, I was exhausted and my arms were sore - I can only imagine how my boyfriend, who was steering and paddling, was feeling. But by the eighth day, we were able to keep pace with the other canoes, and my arms weren't achy at the end of the day. We were eating lighter meals than I usually do in the city, and I felt healthy and fit. Again, I vowed to get in shape, and I would use those eight days as the kick-start to a healthier lifestyle.

It's tough, though, for me not to fold that into some weird, controlling behaviour. I want to just be normal: to have a range of pants, from "skinny" to "premenstrual bloat," that I can wear without judging myself. I'd like to be fit. That means I can use (and see) my muscles, but I'm not telling myself, "I'm only worthwhile if I'm losing weight." Learning to accept my womanly curves - seriously, if my breasts were real estate, they would be a sprawling country farm - and recognize that I'm not going to be movie-star skinny. I mean, at least not without some serious backsliding into some pretty creepy territory.

Anyway. I guess this post, which started out as more of a light-hearted romp into the exercise room, has evolved into some group-therapy business. That's fine. For the first time in my life, I see the value of getting fit for the sake of my body, rather than trying to appease that voice in my head that says "People only like you when you're small." And that it's taken me a really long time to get here, and it feels a little like a mountain ledge, but I seem to have developed a knack for dealing with hard things (or trying to deal with them, anyway - some things are harder than others), so I want to use that talent. Bodies are weird, and exercise is boring and hard, and I appreciate my gym buddies and my encouraging friends. And now that you, dear reader, know the full scoop, you can join the ranks of the gym buddies and encouraging friends, or you can keep your mouths shut when I flex my underdeveloped shoulder muscles at you and crow "Aren't I coming along nicely?" Because the answer is yes, we're all coming along nicely.

Reading A-List

2011-08-09T10:54:00.006-04:00

I love a good reading list. I know I'm not alone on this one - the popularity of features like Amazon.com's Listmania! and the scores of end-of-year must-read lists demonstrates that most of us like a curated experience when it comes to reading. That's not to say that I don't enjoy wandering through bookstores. The pleasures there are of the unexpected and hidden finds - a reissue of a book your dad once recommended, or a new book by a favourite author. Once you get past the tables of prominently displayed best-sellers and into the meatier, denser shelves, there are literally hundred of thousands of titles to pick up, mull over, and maybe even read.

Back during my interminable undergraduate degree, one of my favourite pleasures used to be, in the first class of the term, receiving the syllabus for the course. The book list always felt like it held such promise; as an English major, I trafficked mostly in novels, so each syllabus would usually contain a few critical texts and then a stack of fiction books that I might enjoy as a civilian, or that might be an academic slog through page upon page of Olde Englishe lunacy.

Early on, I rejected the stale canonical babblings of dead white guys, and instead enrolled in every genre class I could find. I pored over detective fiction from the 1920s, Caribbean bildungsromans, a truly dreadful science fiction book that should have had an editor's scythe through some (nay, most) of its 800+ pages, and Daisy Miller. I read comic books and Jewish fiction - lots of overlap there - Thomas Pynchon and Shelley Jackson. The books piled up around me, making built-in shelving a requirement for any new living space I moved into. Some of them went ignored and unread. I was a student more interested in the idea of learning than the actual legwork, and usually six weeks into the term, I was too distracted by my own latent meltdowns to focus on The Fairie Queene.

I just finished Michael Chabon's Maps and Legends, in which he dissects the works that most influenced him, both as a writer and as a human, and then talks about his own creative methods. Some of the stories that he loves include Sherlock Holmes adventures, His Dark Materials, the myth of The Golem of Prague, and pulpy mid-1980s comics books. It was assembled, it seems, as a sort of reader's map to his wildly successful 2000 book The Amazing Adeventures of Kavalier and Clay, but it also includes an extensive and thoughtful index of his influences, an index that also functions as a de facto reading list.

As a lazy sort of writer myself, I wonder what my Maps and Legends would be about. Working from childhood, I would be a dirty liar if I didn't own up to my soft spot for The Babysitter's Club - but maybe that fontanelle helped me side-step that embarrassing wasteland known as chick-lit. I love Stephen King novels, but I've recognized that his writing is often dreadful; people read him because they want a good yarn, not a masterful literary voice. I've picked up dozens of comic books, essay collection, and short story anthologies because I love the challenges and beauties of short-form writing. It's not likely that I'll ever pull a Chabon and write a gorgeous, multi-layered epic like Kavalier and Clay, but I've written hundred of essays on this website. The high-brow literary classics I was taught in school rarely got under my skin the way science fiction, horror and fantasy did; in university, it was a struggle to read things like Shamela, because I knew there were other, more relevant books for me out there, just waiting to be read.

On my desk right now, I have a to-do list that includes some mid- to macro-level items: nestled among "make a doctor's appointment" and "laundry" is "make a summer reading list," a task that I've put off because I don't want to have that bit of pleasure come to an end. I know it'll include some Chabon-recommended books, but also delightful books I bought months ago that got lost in the job-stress black hole, gifts from my boyfriend, loaners from friends, magazine articles, re-reads, and false starts. I want to order it so that there are breaks - my re-read of The Crying of Lot 49 isn't immediately after my false-started The Pale King because, while I like both books, there's only so much experimental fiction one's brain can really take.

But mostly, I'm trying to capture some of that promise - the idea that every book has the potential to teach me something, whether it's how to write better, how to live better, or just how to scare the everliving fuck out of myself at 12:30 AM on a Thursday night.

My Toronto Has Everything

2011-07-30T09:20:00.000-04:00

When I ride my bike around the city, there are two things I notice about downtown Toronto: the transit system and the nice-ass cars. My hometown of Stratford has three bus lines and most of the cars are homegrown Dodges and Chevrolets; it's middle-ground transportation for a small, mostly middle-class city. There are a few Audis parked in front of the large homes, and the buses are packed during the high-school commute rush hour, but most of the time, the transit system runs empty routes and the cars are mid-range sedans.

In Toronto, there are tons of fancy, high-end cars: Mercedes, Audis, Porches, and even a few Lambos here and there. I live downtown, in a wealthier part of the city, but this isn't unique to the Annex. At the same time, the subways, buses and streetcars are usually pretty full. Not just rush-hour, either. Last week, during the heat wave, I rode the subway all day (what? It was air-conditioned. Don't be judgey) and was never alone in the car.

This week marked the longest municipal city council meeting ever held in Toronto, as literally hundreds of Torontonians came out to speak out against Rob Ford's proposed funding cuts to almost every area of city operations. Libraries? Pools? Parks? Housing? Day cares? Elder care? Transit? Nothing was safe. Ford's council has frozen taxes, and has to make up the difference by cutting spending elsewhere. In a way, I feel for Ford - his campaign promised no taxes/no service cuts, and he's delivered half of that and then gotten stuck. His council has said that everything is on the table, and people have come out of the woodwork to put their name on record to say they feel squiffy about this.

Rob Ford was voted in on a platform that appealed to the suburbs - giving people a break when they buy houses and drive, which lots of people in the 905 do. The downtown core was firmly against Ford, but in a sprawling, amalgamated city, Ford's conservative vision was popular. Now, however, Ford's popularity is faltering. He's had a series of missteps, like blowing off Pride and allegedly flipping the bird to a woman driving alongside him. This review of core services was a disaster; instead of pledging to bring better service to Torontonians, he raised the specter of privatizing some services, hacking away at others, and shutting some down completely. Almost every city citizen would be affected in some way by the proposed cuts: less police funding means less of a presence on the street and more bureaucracy; library costs might go up, putting its poorer user groups at risk; transit fares might be hiked through the roof; and so on, and so on.

Which brings me back to the transit/Audi thing. In Stratford, a small city, we don't have very many amenities. The pool is run by the YMCA, and there's one undercover cop car (bristling with antennae and driven by a uniformed officer, natch). Almost everyone exists on the same playing field: white, middle-aged, doing well enough to have a car, but not a really nice car. In Toronto, folks diverge wildly. Some get a bus pass and use the library for internet access, while others live in Forest Hill and hire live-in nannies as their child care. The distance between the haves and the haves-not is greater.

People come and live in this city because they don't have to be ultra-rich - hell, they don't even have to be middle-class - to get by and feel comfortable. They have access to amenities that help align them with folks who Have It, and those amenities are often provided by the city. Those amenities help newcomers integrate into Canadian society, help green the city, help folks recycle, help people find jobs, housing, and medical help, help people feel safe, help children get to school, and basically give almost everyone a reason to live in Toronto. If you start carving away at that, what do you get? Empty transit, hordes of same-same people, and people who move away to cities who can offer vibrancy, community, and accessibility.

Rob Ford, you're on notice. Threaten my Toronto, and you'll get a ranty blog post. But threaten everyone's Toronto, and you'll be in real trouble.

Canoe You

2011-07-27T11:43:00.000-04:00

I'm going camping next week, so my life has been reduced to a series of lists. Things to do before I go. Things to bring. Stuff to buy. Stuff to make sure I put in the freezer lest I come home to a sludgy mass of what used to be bananas on my kitchen counter. Stuff like that.

I've never really done the whole camping thing; I like activities that allow me to sleep on a mattress at the end of the day. Two summers ago, we did a bike trip to Guelph which, while challenging, started in the 416 and ended in the 519 a few hours later. This is an 8-day canoe trip - which means we're canoeing from site to site nearly every day. No convenient stops at a Best Buy or a Bulk Barn along the way for more water and Freezie Pops. Most people on the trip are bringing one change of clothes. I'm, of course, bringing a dress.

When I was a kid, I used to pore over nature-survival guides, fantasizing about being a pioneer and living off the land. I think this carried over into my young adulthood, where I've spent hours debating various urban siege tactics and zombie survival methods. (The recent realization that, even if I survived hand-to-hand combat with the undead, I would be dead within a month because I have no gardening skills, was demoralizing.) I don't have a lot of experience with that whole "living off the land" thing because, like I said: I read about it. I didn't actually put any of those knot-tying, fruit-drying and bird-call-identifying tips to any use.

I like the idea of the wilderness living. Something about that level of self-sufficiency is so attractive to me, where someone - not me, obviously, but some virile young man or bonneted young woman - could construct a shelter, catch their dinner, and birth a litter of babies all before the crops come in. Margaret Atwood has had a field day with the Canadian fascination with the wilderness; in her eyes, it's a thing we're usually cowed by. Canadians! Such victims! Snooze. The wilderness can be a scary place, I'll give her that much (begrudgingly, but still), but I doubt that most Canadians have had a really meaningful interaction with the Great Forest Spirit. We're an urban nation now, struggling to move past our white settler roots into a more cosmopolitan existence. This is my chance to reconnect with what would have been my Canadian roots if, 70 years ago, my grandparents weren't going AWOL from the Russian Army and being indentured servants on Ontario farms. As it is, it'll just be a trip into the wild. Just.

This is my chance. I've got my list of stuff to bring (on which I've written the word "book," not an actual title), and one of those enormous European camping backpacks with more straps that I have hairs on my head. I now own things like a headlamp, and a carabiner looped with cutlery, and a drybag. I've never owned these things before, because frankly my idea of wilderness is a horrible bog filled with spiders, man-eating coyotes and tents that collapse in the middle of the night and give their inhabitants a coronary. But 2011 is the year of trying new things, being brave, being on my own side, and getting past what I - or Margaret Atwood - assume about a thing before I actually do it. Plus, as a Canadian, I'm obligated to tip a canoe at some point in my life, so it might as well be soon, right?

Back In The Saddle

2011-07-23T23:22:00.005-04:00

I recently quit my job. I once read an anecdote about Walt Disney, who was apparently a bit of a hard-ass. When he would descend on the peons who animated his films, the whisper would come through the office: "Man is in the forest," a riff on Disney's own Bambi. It was like that in my office. When my managers came in to work, the rest of the staff would shrivel in their wake. It was almost supernatural. I developed a panicky demeanor whenever my manager came near me: lightheaded to the point of feeling faint, shaky, stomach in knots, skin breaking out. The day I quit my job, I handed in my notice and then stood in the elevator lobby taking deep whooping breaths. It was as though all the air I couldn't breathe over the last six months came at me all at once.

Walking away from my horrible workplace was the right decision. Despite my former co-workers assurances that not all offices are like that, my time at that company has left me feeling deeply mistrustful of the office vibe. I got dinged constantly: for letting a bra strap slip, for stapling incorrectly, for spending too much time on the internet despite having no actual assignments, for getting sick, for taking time off when it had already been approved, and so on. The general consensus seemed to be that I couldn't do a damned thing right, which is demoralizing at best. Not to mention false: in the areas that actually mattered, like client support and their subsequent feedback, I got great reviews.

I've always kind of been a late bloomer. Although, uh, not in the puberty area, so much? Because I was eleven when my chest started to bud, and it was pretty rough there for a little while. But in a lot of other ways, I've been at the back of the pack. I lost my virginity late, I first fell in love well after my 20th birthday - no passionate high school romances for this girl! - I graduated long after most of my friends, and, as I close in on my 28th birthday I'm still only really eligible for entry-level jobs. As I watch my "normal" friends have successful long-term relationships and celebrate promotions at work, I applaud then with a certain wistfulness: when am I going to figure my own life out?

I just erased 300 words that were basically me trying to avoid the awful, naked, needy truth: I like to write, but I am afraid. I'm afraid I'm not as good as I think I am. I'm afraid of writing to fancy magazine editors and having them laugh at my poorly designed pitch letters, or, worse, ignore them completely. I'm afraid of trying something and failing, which is the story of my life, and which is tediously tied to self-esteem, perfectionism, and fears of success. But I also really, really love doing this. I think about it all the time. I want to do it. But right now, taking a leap of faith after working in an atmosphere that subtly told me every day that having faith in myself was having faith in a loser, I'm a little gun shy.

I need a boost, a little rocket pack to get me out of these doubts. Just because my former boss made me feel like shit doesn't mean all bosses do - I've had plenty of terrific managers. And happens if I become own boss? I need to pat myself on the back for getting out of there at all, let alone with a sense of integrity still intact, and focus on trying new things. New job, new focus, new love of what I do.

Movin' On In

2011-07-19T09:28:00.007-04:00

It's always fascinating to me to watch other couples figure their ish out. I'm one of those people who flips though gossip rags on my way through the grocery check-out, so I'm in love with following other people's stories, although, it should be noted in my defense, that I don't stoop as low as afternoon soap operas. If I wanted to watch people wearing too much eyeliner over-emote and drink in the afternoon, I would just head over to Queen and Ossington and while the day away.

Anyway, one of my favourite things to parse is people's living arrangements. I myself have never lived with a boyfriend, but I have lived with upwards of fifteen people in a house with one kitchen. I've also lived by myself. My friends have lived in apartments, condos, houses, by themselves, with partners, with roommates, with partners and roommates, with various siblings, cats, reptiles, houseplants and people they were originally neutral about but grew to hate with a passion. But the ones I'm most interested in are the romantic pairings, because the will-they-won't-they tension is dynamic in the way that a couple pals deciding to get a place together so they can spend more student loan money on beer and guacamole fixins isn't.

Most of my friends who decided to live with their partners did it as a spur-of-the-moment sort of endeavor. Two different couples I know began as roommates and started dating shortly thereafter, thus setting a land-speed record for living in sin. One of my best girls asked her now-husband to move in with her (and the aforementioned 15 people) about ten weeks after they started dating. My group moves fast. There are also friends of mine who have never lived with their boyfriends or girlfriends, even though they've passed the half-decade mark in their relationship. After all, living together is a pretty big deal.

Interestingly, even though a lot of my friends cohabit, the vast majority haven't made it legal. Studies have shown that couples who live together before they're married are more likely to divorce later on; there's a mentality (not for every couple, but for lots of 'em) that the living-together stage is a test, or a convenience, or both. Those couples are more likely to slip into a quasi-roommate existence, even if they do get married eventually. I can see why: when the unionizing step of your relationship isn't actually focused on affirming the relationship itself (like, say, a wedding is), but about your physical space together, then it might be tough down the road to remember that you love each other when you're busy playing chicken about who's emptying the green-bin.

Some couples, usually for religious reasons, don't live together until after they tie the knot, which isn't a choice I would make - there's too much likelihood of rushing into a marriage just so they can start having sex. But I understand that choice. Frankly, premarital sex is sort of a given in this day and age, but I understand the desire to honour the relationship by intertwining the house, the love, the marriage and the sex into one big honking night.

It sounds like I'm down on the common-law experience, which I'm not. People make all kinds of decisions about their partners based on all kinds of criteria. Some of my friends have decided not to get married at all. They still have a strong commitment to each other, to their lives together, and to moving into the future ("like, with jetpacks?") with each other. Just because I'm a girl who might one day want to get married doesn't mean that the folks who eschew that life path are weird. But I still am fascinated about why people make their choices and decisions. For me, living together is like marriage the same way frozen yogurt is like ice cream: they're both deliciously cold and tasty, but they're not really the same.

My sister said that she would want to be engaged before she shacked up with a boyfriend. I think she's on to something. There's enough of a commitment to say "Yep, this is moving forward and I am loving it," but if something goes really wrong - if there's a fundamental difference in lifestyle that had hitherto escaped both parties - there's still time to put the full-on, forever-type commitment on hold while y'all figure out how to fix it. But the thing is, in any good relationship, the honesty and openness should be there all along. People. Please. Play your kink cards early, mention the mentally-ill PMS soon, and try to work together to figure out to manage the craziness before you merge your CD collections.

In any case, I'm not planning to live with anyone any time soon, at least not romantically. I'd rather hold out and make sure the time is right; not having done this before, I'm nervous. My current squeeze is terrific, and has talked me off several let's-shack-up ledges. Right now, practicing on housemates and family members is preparing me for tedious conversations about chores, bills, schedules and messes, but I'd like to think that living with a lover is different. Hopefully much better, if we can get it right. And no matter what form it takes, or why we decide to move in, I know that love will be a big part of it. Cheesy? Oh, you betcha. But also true.

Elizabeth and Jessica: The Lost Years

2011-07-15T10:17:00.003-04:00

It's been a while since I slagged on hipsters, because I've sort of given up caring. Who gives a shit about your love of New Order, your glasses frames, your parents' divorce, or your recipe for organic muesli? It's been a Real World sort of month in the Kochany household - not the show, or the Klostermanian ironic love of the show, but the actual living experience - and it's been a little tough to focus on the vagaries of urban mid-twenties neurotics.

My friend Jess was in town the other day, and we were wandering around upper-class Yorkville, looking at the over-tanned and -blonded citizens of that neighbourhood. As we walked through the perfectly maintained throngs of women, I realized the "why" of the hipster. It was like a vision, only more annoying.

If you're like me, you probably spent some time in middle school reading YA fiction and Sweet Valley High books. The SVH books are generally inoffensive rot, but they set up a dichotomy in my young, impressionable brain that there are two kinds of people in the world: the Wakefields and their friends, who were fit, blonde, wore lavalier necklaces (whatever the hell those were), had money, drove convertibles, were sexy without having actual sex, and were basically hugely desirable on all fronts...and then there was everyone else. Because they were twins, one could be street-smart, while the other was book smart. One was slightly nerdy, but they never strayed too far into the realm of actual dorkiness - they were too pretty for that.

Their world was populated by jocks, fashion fiends, plus a B-team of frizzy-haired friends, smart boys, and girls who were quietly eating disordered. The books and characters were, by their nature, one-dimensional, but the world was complete unto itself: they had after-school hangouts, disastrous house parties, and newspaper internships. Archetypes who were deemed uninteresting simply weren't written in to the books: there were precious few characters of colour, and all the girls were contractually required to either have a boyfriend or be pining over a dude who didn't want them. Riot grrls would have given Jessica Wakefield hives. Ostensibly, the twins and their friends might have been "strong female characters," but as junior romance novels tend to be, the spotlight was often tightly focused on what made women desirable to men - prettiness, an ability to hide talents or interests that might put a guy off, or, if a girl was pursuing her own interests, she would be saddled with a dud like journalist Elizabeth's dullard boyfriend Todd.

The decline of the Wakefield twins actually dovetailed with the rise of hipster culture. Oh, I'm sorry - "culture." As the blonde twins lost their juggernaut grip on the hearts and minds of middle-schoolers, there was a spike in indie culture and the DIY aesthetic. Suddenly, it wasn't just the pretty kids who were interesting. If you knew about music, or had an encyclopedic knowledge of a cool TV show like The Simpson, or had picked up a couple issues of Sassy, you could see a way out of having to be pretty to be impressive. In high school, this would translate into 'zines and mixtapes and vintage clothing sourced from the local Sally Ann, not to mention terrible bands and hideous poetry. Girl-punk and indie rock style, and the media storm it inspired, was the anti-Wakefield. I remember the Sassy cover with Courtney and Kurt, sloppily all over each other, and something in me was both repulsed and fascinated. Everything that had been bottled up in Sweet Valley came roaring to the surface.

Fifteen years later, that messiness has largely disappeared from the hipster scene, and it's as codified and antiseptic as the Wakefield's world was. Interestingly, there's a sequel of sorts to the SVH books out now: a grown-up novel set in the twin's late twenties, dealing with their sordid but I'm sure exceedingly fashionable lives. It'll be interesting to see what kind of of fan reaction the book gets, because I think most of the girls who grew up reading (and coveting) the Wakefield scene have moved on.

To wit: the gift the post-SVH hipsters have given to women and girls is that it's okay to be a little "ugly." After all, if it's a radical act to not be blonde, fit and have a heart-shaped face, almost any other beauty paradigm will do. Girls with glasses, or who wear '70s housedresses or band tee-shirts. Girls who have ardently defended their position on 1980s radio-rock. Girls who are open with their sexuality, whether they're slutty, kinky, or virginal. Women who eat meat. People who write, play in a band, or do movie recaps, or make pitchers of sangria for picnics. Girls who are mouthy and smart, and who cultivate their intellect the way Jessica Wakefield would have curated her closet. Women who know what their beauty is, and who aren't going to let a pair sixteen-year-old twins with effing lavaliere necklaces tell them what to do.

Hot Time, Summer In The City

2011-07-13T18:56:00.000-04:00

"I am just over summer!" my friend Emily said earlier this week. Frankly, she and I were on the page there. It was at the height of one 38-degree day, when our hobbies had transformed from "reading" and "cooking" to "lying on cool tile floors" and "complaining." We also agreed that, for whatever reason, the hot months are also weirdly prone to be a season of bad news. Statistically, the crap should be spread like a thin layer over each calendar page, but it often feels like there's a steaming turd right in the middle of the egg-fryingly hot sidewalk.

Look, I'll just come right out and say it: I do not thrive in the summer months. Not only is it a time of heat, it has been, in my family, a time of shittiness. My sister's cancer diagnosis came in late June, as did my last fuck-me breakup. The emotional ripples come down the wire every damned year. Last year was a lead-up to having a tumour (and bonus ovary!) removed, and the ensuing stress and recovery from that lovely hospital trip. This year has been no different so far, with recent deaths creating new emotional craters.

Even when nobody's actively on the ward, the heat does unpleasant things. Sleep dwindles down to a scant few hours. I dislike the sunshine, because sunscreen gives people a gross body-builder's sheen and going without gives me skin damage and sunstroke-induced nausea. I hate air conditioning, because the drying coolness is a tease, and there isn't really anything pleasant about the chill. While some of my friends like the pool, I have a deeply ingrained fear of displaying my nearly-naked body to strangers. The best outfits I can come up with for beating the heat? Skimpy shorts, tube tops and long, cleavagey dresses. Nothing about those is appropriate for the office.

There are things I like about the summer time, like the usual few weeks of unemployment I get before getting a job - I love my downtime, what can I say? I like being able to walk out the door without getting all bundled up. I like the nighttimes, when people walk in the fragrance of the night blooms, sit on patios and drink beers. I love the lushness of the city, with the blooms of urban nature poking through our matted lawn and the Annex's shade trees providing us all with a bit of relief. I love the long days, even though that usually means less sleep. I love falling in love in the summer, because often, even though there's a backlog of emotions, summer is a great time to realize that you like-like someone.

And this summer hasn't been terrible. There's been a lot - more than average, I would say - of stress, in both the personal and professional spheres, but that's been offset by lots of really splendid moments (is it just me, or is the phrase "splendid moments" so Anne Shirley as to be kind of funny?). I've swam in a pool - a personal triumph regarding those body-image issues - and made tabbouleh, banana muffins and coleslaw. I've eaten lots of burgers and seen some fun movies. A friend-of-a-friend dropped off a trove of smutty books, so I've been reading a lot of sentences that refer to vaginas as flowers. I've seen some out of town friends.

In my youth, summer didn't seem like a magnet for all the bad things in the world...but it does now. I'm beginning to dread the launch of the hot season, and its thunderclap of bad news. Next year, I firmly expect that I will impale myself on a cacti, get arrested, get bitten by a large dog/small child, and hear the news that Coke Zero is linked to -nay, creates - fatness. I'd gladly take on those burdens if it means sparing my family and The Boyfriend more turmoil in the summer, because frankly, I feel like they've had all they really can take on in the last few years.

Me, I thrive in October: the leaves are still on the trees, but the air has cooled and the tights have reappeared from the back of my closet. Folks can sleep. We all know the gray horror of winter is coming - it never fails, but in October, we can secretly hope to ourselves that it might skip us this year. Winter is a shared Canadian hell, where summer is each of privately suffering in our own unique miseries. Guess which one I prefer?

On Grief

2011-07-08T09:43:00.004-04:00

All great movies are based on shock: the surprise of the unexpected thing. Some movies go overt with this more than others, like when, in The Big Lebowski, the Dude mush-mouths, "New shit has come to light, man!" but most movies have the premise of normal-normal-something wacky-deal with it-climax-return to normal, albeit with a wink at the fact that everything's changed. Consider The Royal Tenenbaums, wherein Royal's return to his estranged family is the something-wacky, and the the movie spends its remainder dealing with it and trying to put that family back together. Or Shaun of the Dead, where most of the movie is also dealing with the zombies infesting suburban London, and the winking return to "normal" is punctuated slyly with a plus-ca-change atmosphere of post-apocalyptic triumph.

But movies aren't real life, and a shock to the system on screen (entertainment!) is often a painful few weeks in real life. When Something Big happens, it's a lot of work to pick up the pieces, and it's unfortunately not wrapped up in a neat 121 minute package, complete with theme song. Which is a bummer, really. No montage sequence for us: we have to sweat out those 15 pounds in three months, or try on twenty-three actual different bridesmaids dresses, all of which look terrible. Or we have to go through the really painful parts: the breakups, the diagnoses, the deaths.

I'm sorry, I know I should be all wisdom and flowing goddess gowns right now, offering up platitudes like One Day At A Time and It Gets Better and Serenity Now and other meaningless things that are designed to make us sound less like assholes with no words in our mouths when something bad happens. God knows I could try. But life ain't like the movies, where a thoughtful platitude makes Julia Roberts square her shoulders and get on with things.

So here's the truth: I'm sad you're sad. I'm sad you've lost someone you love. I love you, and I know your strength, your firm sense of family, and I hope those things help carry you. I would do anything to make this easier for you, because I can see on your face how hard this is. Please remember to breath.

For Mike, Jamie and John.

The Big Sleep

2011-07-05T09:45:00.010-04:00

When I wake up in the morning, my first reaction is usually something along the lines of, "Ughhhh, it's early." Thanks to that whole sleep-rhythm thing that humans have managed to utterly destroy in the last century or so, my body, which has not gotten the memo that 8 hours is a good start (and anything less will make me into a blood-shot-eyed crazy woman), I wake up when the sun starts graying through the blinds, and then fall back asleep for a dream-filled 90 minutes. By the time my day actually starts, I've had more wakefulness than I really want, and I'm ready for a nap.

When I first started my job back in January, the days were short and I was unaccustomed to waking up before 8 AM, so the adjustment to the new hours were a bracing, unpleasant shock. In the longer, warmer days of summer, I'm happy to get up before the sun starts to heat my third-floor room up to an oven-adjacent degree. As one of those people who needs a heavy duvet to sleep, the morning temperature spike corresponds to a brutal, sweaty awakening that's best avoided if I get up before, say, noon.

I'm not what you might consider "a morning person." My lovely boyfriend regularly gets out the door before 8 AM for work, but I'm decidedly less enthused about starting my day that early. I like a stretch, a lie-in, a good breakfast, maybe a little emailing, and then I'll think about putting on pants. As a result, I tend to do everything the night before: shower, make lunch, and lay out my clothes like I'm a good little school child, which prolongs the waking-up and shortens the mad dash for the door.

There's a family legend about the time my mom almost called the cops due to my love of the lie-in. I was in bed on a school day, having resolutely ignored the alarm and slept past the homeroom bell. Then, as now, the way I sleep was to roll myself up in the blankets and become almost invisible: a little sowbug tucked away. Maybe a few hairs were sticking out the top of my sleep-burrito. In any case, my mom came in, glanced at the messy but seemingly-empty bed, deposited a full basket of laundry on it (on me), and then pursed her lips and panicked. "Kaitlyn didn't come home last night!" I heard her say on the kitchen phone, and I had to make the hard decision to either come clean about my truancy, or have the blue-and-reds come blaring up the street in a few minutes. I trundled downstairs, took the ensuing lecture while I ate my breakfast, and then went to the school.

It's not laziness. If I was lazy, I wouldn't put so much effort into lazing around. I would skip breakfast and maybe even lunch, wear sweats to work, and take transit both ways. I don't do those things. But I love the drawn-out morning wake-up - made better by waking up next to someone I love, their warmth in the sheets and mussy hair making them look like they're about ten years old. Eating breakfast at the kitchen table - a hardboiled egg, a banana, and cereal with milk, every weekday for the past six months - gives me an anchor in my day the way squawking and dashing out the door with one arm in my jacket just doesn't. I firmly believe that humans are designed to have way more leisure time than we currently give ourselves, and that the supposed "downtime" we have is eaten up by things like maintaining our overlarge houses, commuting because we live far from our jobs, and shopping for the food we'll eventually throw away. If we had more genuine leisure time, we would be less stressed, more focused, and easier to be around.

Hence my adoration for the slow morning. Even though it's actually part of the work day, the time before I leave feels like it's firmly my own. I don't have to wear a shirt if I don't want to, and I can snooze for an extra 15 minutes knowing that my lunch is made and all I have to do is make vague waving motions at my hair for a minute to groom myself. It gives the illusion that the time I'm spending getting ready for work isn't somehow related to the workday, but about me and my love for my bed. Sadly, this isn't really the case.

No Justice, No Peace: Penny Bethke 1950-2011

2011-06-25T13:47:00.004-04:00

Penny Bethke was, in the words of former CCRI president Emmett Ferguson, "a grand old dame of co-op." She was feisty, and would go to the mattresses on all kinds of issues. She was smart as a whip, and was never afraid to talk someone's ear off until their own personal little light bulb went on. She considered herself a teacher, was proud to be a pain in the ass, and was an expert on community-driven initiatives like credit unions and co-operative housing, having immersed herself in that world for decades.

Penny passed away a few weeks ago, and I miss her. I find myself looking at people who look like she did on the street, and I wonder for a second how she's doing.

My first experience with Penny was through my co-op's board of directors. Primarily made of students, the board offers two of their twelve seats to alumni members - people who had lived in the co-op and then moved on. Penny had been a resident in the 1970s, and had worked for the co-op as the summer rentals girl. The co-op's always been a little bit rough around the edges, and in the summers, that loosey-goosey attitude goes through the roof. I can imagine that the co-op, with its proximity to the hippies in Yorkville and the bikers in Rochdale, was a crash-pad for the young, disenfranchised and drug-addled. In other words, not a job for the faint of heart.

When she returned as an alumni director, she was in her 50s and was able to bring scads of financial and social expertise to our often-inexperienced group. When I first met her, I was coming in to talk to the board about my dissatisfaction with the food services the co-op was providing. It had been an eleventh-hour agenda item, one that I was asking for a decision on, and Penny was irritated. "Something like this should be on the table well before a meeting," she pointed out acidly, "so we can have time to review its merits...or lack thereof."

I pushed on - I needed an answer now, dammit, because my housemates were filing their teeth into points and looking murderously at one another, and I couldn't wait another month for the board to reconvene with all the details and fooferaw at hand. Inside, I died. I had been roundly chastised by a woman I barely knew, in front the directors, some of whom were my friends, and I deserved it. I got the motion passed, I went back and told my housemates we would have more freedom to decide on how we spent our food money, and I mentally noted the importance of planning ahead.

Now, seven years later, I sit on that board, and Penny had become our General Manager. Folks will regularly show up, making all kinds of demands with minimal notice, and we sigh and send them away to write something up, check on our policies, and work with staff members. It's annoying when people just appear out of the blue and make demands, a phenomenon that occurs with tiring regularity in cooperatives. I learned from Penny that when you push people to work for what they believe is a birthright - a free pass, an exception to a rule, a change in the system - the lazy and faint of heart will often disappear to gnash their teeth and complain. The people worth working for, and with, will come back with a better proposal, a more complete outline, and a good attitude about the changes that you ask them to make.

I learned that volunteering is a great way to spend my time and get experience. I was never a student-government person, and the kind of activism that really raises my hackles often involves an entitled white person, identity politics, and a trip to some underfunded area filled with poor brown people. But I think it's important to be involved in one's own community, and the easiest place for me to start was with my housing co-op. Getting to know Penny over the last few years was rewarding, because she thought along the same lines. She also stressed the importance of a learning curve - new things are hard! - and once told me that it was okay to be intense. She was well aware of her own intensity, and used to to cow the people she disdained and elevate the people she admired.

It's a trite thing to say, but sometimes when we lose a friend, triteness has a fresh gravity: her spirit will live on. She was respected and admired by her community, and she influenced and taught the next generation of co-op leaders what they were doing, and moreover, why they should do it. While I'll miss her, I know that her voice will carry through the years because she has influenced hundreds of people. She will continue to inspire.

Scott Pilgrim Vs. My Brain

2011-06-23T23:14:00.006-04:00

When I first read Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World, I was in my mid-20s, sort of floating around, working crappy jobs and half-heartedly entangling myself with mildly disresputable young men in an attempt to work through some of the heartache my Big Ex had landed on me in the midst of our fraught breakup . In other words, I was the prime-time demographic for this graphic novel, and the blend of Toronto city landmarks, sarcasm, video-game tropes and weirdo 20s love was intoxicating.

I wasn't first on the scene - the books started coming out in 2004, the series wrapped up to huge fanfare last summer, and I started reading sometime around volume 4. Scott and his romance with the mysterious Ramona Flowers was progressing about as well as you'd expect: he was living (and sharing a bed) with his gay roomie, not working and mooning over Ramona, while she zipped around, delivering Amazon.ca packages, dying her hair, and alternately making Scott miserable and terrifically happy. In other words, it was the perfect encapsulation of what most of Canadian slacker-types go through in our mid-twenties. We grow up, albeit dragging our heels and moaning about it the whole damned time.

I love Scott Pilgrim. I love Ramona Flowers. I love all the weird side characters, like Joseph, the incredibly bitchy dude who engineers Scott's band's horrible album. I love Kim Pine, the drummer of that horrible band, because she wears a warm-up jacket in every panel and can be friends with Scott while simultaneously knowing he's a moron. We all have friends like that - people we know are idiots, whom we hold dear because they're funny, or play bass passably well, or because the people we're friends with between the ages of 17 and 26 are often bonded to us in a way that brings to mind shamans and blood-brother ceremonies.

The movie, which was released last year to great critical success and indifferent audiences, captured some of the comic's delights. The supporting cast was superb, but Scott was whiny and Romana never once cracked a smile. It was hard to imagine why the two of them would even date, let along battle seven of Ramona's evil exes in order to be together. The comic, with its meandering storyline and jokey asides, allowed for the readers to get a glimpse of Scott's neuroses outside of Ramona: the absentee parents, the recalcitrance about getting a job. It also showcased Ramona as Awesome Girlfriend. She was funny, sweet, caring, and genuinely seems to dig Mr. Pilgrim despite, and maybe because of, his flaws. It becomes much easier to see what works about that pairing when we're allowed to sit back and watch the relationship take form.

While the spotlight tends to be trained on Ramona's evil exes, Scott also needed to work out his romantic shizz. Cue Knives Chau, the hilariously obsessed 17 year old Scott ditches for Ramona, who gets her own story arc. The awkwardness of hanging out with a teenager when you're in your early twenties is so well-done in some scenes that I cringed. That dynamic can be so tense - we all like to pretend that we're so much smarter than people five years our junior, but the things I've learned since I was 23 include "check the pasta sauce for mold," and "you can't wear monthly contacts for 56 days in a row." Knives would appeal to an underachiever like Scott, but as Scott grows up, girls become less appealing than women. Knives, with all her excitable fervor and devotion, is a girl.

Likewise, Kim Pine is also a Pilgrim ex, and the relationship they've created, based on music and pretending that their romance never happened, isn't exactly a foreign concept. We all have people we adore as friends who were auditioned for the girlfriend/boyfriend role - maybe even understudied - but never quite made it to opening night. Scott, gratifyingly, works through some of it. Some of it stay unresolved, because Brian Lee O'Malley is smart, and his comics, though they feature video game-inspired fights, are pretty honest.

I don't know if the comics are going to be timeless, or if they'll become a time capsule of early millennial Canadian urban angst. Maybe both. Re-reading the comics recently, I was struck by how funny they are. The characters make fun of each other, fall down, aren't perfect. Scott's comebacks are often "You...something....mean words!" which is pretty much exactly how most people's brains work when faced with surprising meanness. The characters go to shows, come out of the closet, go off to university and have wilderness sabbaticals. They also make terrible music, have fights with their ex-boyfriends, and get kicked out of their apartments. They keep trying. Scott and his buddies are some of the most perfect 20-somethings ever created, because they radiate that indomitable spirit of the young adult: anything is possible, nothing can't be conquered, and flying, fanged ex-boyfriends are nothing compared to the ass-kicking getting a job will give you. Oh, and falling in love with the right person? Worth fighting for, both with your fists and your heart.

Two Hundred And Five Oh!

2011-06-18T18:32:00.003-04:00

This being my 250th post, I thought I might do something special: throw a coat of paint over here, frame the posters that have been rolled up in the corner since 2009, or at least change the sheets. But nope. I'm just not that technically adept, so instead of packing up and moving over to Wordpress, or at least changing that blasted dotty background, I'll just ruminate on the last 250 essays.

I don't often do things 250 times. I think I've done 250 sit-ups in my life - a cumulative figure, of course, starting when I hit puberty and started to expand like a star going nova. I've definitely read 250 books, but a lot of those were Sweet Valley High novels where Jessica steals Elizabeth's identity in order to impress a cute college TA who turns out to be a date-rape-y jerk; in other words, it's unlikely I've read 250 good books. I haven't kissed 250 people (I can hear you sigh from here, mom), I haven't washed my sheets 250 times...or my hair, for that matter. I am kind of gross, kind of lazy, and kind of ill-read.

But I have written 250 blog posts. They're a smorgasbord: Chuck Klosterman, aging gracefully, breaking up, horrible office politics, an ill-conceived series on women I like that turned out to be kind of boring, horror movies, the now-defunct Cookie magazine, and zombies. My brain is a dense bramble of things: empty Coke Zero cans, anxieties about my body and my career (whoops, I'm sorry - "career"), useless tidbits of celebrity gossip, half-remembered jokes somebody else once made, and a mild yet long-lasting obsession with the best brownies in Toronto. The blog posts, all 250 of them, are my way of working out my little frustrations, celebrating the victories, and asking "What's up with that?" hopefully in a way that's funny, or readable, or at least passingly interesting.

When I was in high school, I enrolled in Writer's Craft, a course that tried to teach 17-year-olds how to write well, or at least better. We read Alice Munro stories and wrote long final projects, which we then read aloud to each other in the semester's final weeks. I remember some of them: Mike Gilson wrote a character who gets beaten with a bag full of oranges, and my classmate Cynthia (who was pretty, skinny, and sort of mean) wrote a great story about climbing a cliff and bad influences, and it was really gratifying to find out the whole thing had sort of been an allegory for her born-again faith, because, for some reason, that made it less incandescent to me. I wrote about hip-hop.

My future kids are going to be embarrassed to find out their mother once listened to hip-hop. Living in a small Ontario town meant I didn't have access to a lot of emerging artists, but I willed myself into finding out more. This was right before the internet was A Thing, so a lot of it was Swedish message boards about train arts and haphazardly posted videos of breakdancers. I read oral histories of the early days of MCs in New York City, and of DJs in Manchester. Because bored, alienated teenagers have more in common with each other than they do with any other person alive, I felt I could project myself into their world. This is, of course, hubris of the grandest scale.

When it came time to read my final project aloud, I was nervous. I hadn't followed a strictly linear narrative like most of my classmates; I had instead opted for little vignettes, linked thematically. One was about a breakdancer with a mentally ill brother, I remember that much, and a dialogue that had a lot of swearing in it. What I do remember is the hush that gradually fell over the class as I read. I am not particularly beautiful, or smart, or nice, or gracious. I slunk through most of high school with several close friends, a couple crushes, and the burning desire to both stand out and become totally invisible. But when I read those stories out loud, my voice ringing off the blackboards and into the thick late-June air, my classmates turned and listened. When I finished reading, there a pause, and then loud, enthusiastic applause.

It was amazing. I think that people who crave that kind of attention who are pretty enough become actresses, while us civilian shlubs learn how to write, or be good at cocktail parties. It was one of the first times I had done something to elicit a response. It wasn't based on how I looked, how old I was, or who my friends were: it was a feeling, heavy in the room, of people being impressed with writing. With words! Amazing!

Since then, I've been an addict. Writing is my way of interacting with the world, of processing and giving back. I write when I'm sad, or lonely, or bored, or upset. I write with elation and joy and grace and forgiveness. I write to celebrate my own minor victories, or the accomplishments of those I hold dear. I write to pick fights, to call bullshit on those who are unfairly lauded for mediocrity. I write because if I did not write, I would die.

As I spend more time not-writing, I spend more time being deeply unhappy with not-writing. Trying to stay away, to quell the need to write, is like trying to live without vitamin C. At first, you don't even notice anything's missing, but by the end, you're a shipwreck of a human with your teeth falling out. I mean, who needs that? Instead, let me just try to write more, as often as I can, with hilarity and clarity and, um, parity? Whatever. Bring on the next two years, the next 250 posts.

And if you'll excuse me, I'm going to wash my hair and change the sheets.

Block Head

2011-06-15T15:50:00.003-04:00

Writer's block suuuuucks.

It's not just writer's block: it's life block. You know when you go Harvey's and you get a hamburger, and it's tasty, but over the next few hours you start feeling all woozy and nauseous - the more excitable among us might spend some time convinced that we are pregnant - and then later, you have the kind of horrible poops that make you wish you were the kind of person who hung around outside of dive bars on a Tuesday afternoon, because then you would have a hook-up to some Demerol? Like that.

Or, you know when you go shopping, and on a whim, you decide to try on a bathing suit, even though you're all bloated from your bad-decision Harvey's burger, and you're four sizes bigger than the last time you shopped for a suit, and the lighting highlights every wrinkle and glob of cellulite, which seems to be multiplying under your skin as we speak, and the results of trying on said bathing suit are two glasses of wine and 45 minutes of pep-talking by your less mentally-ill girlfriends? Like that.

It's wrong numbers and missed calls, it's spiders in the shower, it's too-cold A/C at the office and scratched glasses lenses. It's just the pitfalls of modern life. Boo fuckin' hoo, right?

In any case, I'm still around. I wrote a bang-up couple of posts this month, so if you haven't read those yet, feel free. I re-organized the front room in my house, watched half of Inglourious Basterds, had a cuddle-fest with my boyfriend, and shopped around a resume. But right now, I feel distracted, bored, cold - it's like, 12 degrees in my office - fat, lonely, and sort of pointless.

And writer's block is a total symptom of that. That little voice in your ear, whispering, "Nobody gives a shit if you write or not," trying to tempt me into putting my face in a bag of Sunchips and not surfacing until I've eaten them all. I don't want to give in - I won't give in - but it's hard to write when all I want to do is complain. It's not helped when my long-distance girl-crush is getting written up for her communal-living, chicken-harbouring ways. Sigh. Hippie glamour.

Anyway. Just checking in. Holler at me if you've got any ideas for posts; I'm happy to work on commission. I've been re-reading Scott Pilgrim, so I might write about that soon. But, like, you know....don't give up, right? I love writing and I love blogging, so I'm sure this is a little pit stop to rest, pee, maybe pump up the air pressure in the tires, and then I'll keep rumbling along, content to blather into the abyss about maxi dresses, Tarantino movies, and c0-op housing. See you all along the way.

Breaking Up Is Hard To Do

2011-06-09T18:18:00.004-04:00

The etiquette of the breakup is one of those things that people will comment on but never really unpack. "Never on the phone" is said with the solemn tones of one incanting a rite against loneliness, "always in person." As someone who once left a voicemail saying "Um, hi, it's me! I don't think we should see each other any more!" I clearly have little respect for the so-called rules. But now that I'm in a relationship - one that I like and care about very much, with a dude I like and care about very much - I've recently given more thought to breakups. It sounds counter-intuitive - why examine what I hope will never be? But should a separation occur, what would I want done to ease the pain? What would I do and say to make things easier?

Like most urban, mid-twenties folks, I'm a dedicated Savage Love reader, and he often has a lot to say on the topics of breakups. As the writer behind "DTMFA", Savage clearly understands that, for most relationships, endgame is part of the package. We almost never enter into a relationship with the intention of ending it - most of us want forward movement in our lives, and that often takes the form of dating/cohabitation/marriage/kids. But hello, I'm not married to my first boyfriend, and chances are, neither are you. In a world where Facebook relationship statuses have serious emotional weight, and more people are willing to consider a flexible or open marriage, some new relationship continents have been discovered. Time to map them.

But as we move past legitimate reasons to leave a relationship and into the hows of actually doing it, I'm going to pause for a moment and say: yo. Breakups suck. I've never met anyone who really enjoys sitting someone down to have the "I no longer want to know you" talk. Like everyone, I've been dumped, the way you dump a murder victim on the side of the road - hard, by a dude still makes me want to slash his tires when I think about him. One of my friends threw a celebratory DTMFA brunch when she finally broke it off with her former fella. The demise of that relationship was excruciating: it took months for her to work up the ovaries to kick him out, he still owes her money, and oh, by the way, he left his kid behind. Classy, non?

The zen master in me wants to put on a soothing voice and say that everything happens for a reason, that we learn from our pasts, and that pain can be a teacher. But we all know that guy is an asshole. So there are ways of doing it classily, that make it hurt less and leave the door open to friendship. Maybe not right away, but eventually.

Rule #1: always do it on neutral territory. I got Big Dumped in my kitchen, which sucked. I would have been embarrassed if I had started sobbing on the Starbucks patio, but at least I wouldn't have gone downstairs the next morning and been like, "Here are my eggs, my Cheerios, the place I was emotionally eviscerated...I'm not hungry anymore..." I'm not saying that you have to end it on a busy streetcorner with a busker providing the soundtrack. Go somewhere you've never been, and will likely never go again. Do not break up with anyone in a bedroom.

Rule #2: Cliches are your friend. It's not you, it's me. I need space. I'm going to figure myself out. That said, only use cliches that actually apply. If you don't want to be friends, don't say, "Maybe someday we can be friends." Don't say, "Maybe someday we can get back together" if you already have your eye on someone else. Know that the person you're breaking up with will likely examine everything you say with a microscope, so don't say anything you don't mean, even if you're saying it in the tritest way possible.

Rule #3: Be nice! If you're breaking up with someone, you're already rejecting them pretty hard. One of my exes, mid-dump (gross!) told me I "wasn't inspiring," a comment that drove me batty for years. It was unnecessary! Moreover, it was designed to hurt, and in a breakup scenario, that's uncalled for. So BE NICE. Don't be that guy. Be complimentary. "You're going to be fine," you'll say, "you're so smart and pretty and fashionable and well-read that guys will be falling down to date you. But I need to find myself? And so, um, we should see other people."

#4: But be honest. If there's someone else, or there's going to be someone else, give your new ex a heads-up. You may want to choose different words than "there's someone else" or "I have the hots for Emily from work," but the sentiment remains the same. If at all possible, try to make sure your romances are more like pearls on a string than Venn diagrams, but if that ship has sailed, be courteous. Facebook pictures will show up of the two of you smooching, and your ex may not be a fan of finding out via the internet that you've been groping new people.

#5: Be respectful. This is the biggest one, maybe the only real rule. It obviously applies during the relationship, but the post-breakup temptation to be spiteful and malicious can be overwhelming. If you're the dumped party (table for one - zing!), you're entitled to your Lost Summer: the six weeks following a major breakup when you drink too much, smoke too much pot, make out with some regrettable people, and call your ex at five AM after a bender just to be a dick. But that's it: 45 days of breakup-induced craziness, and then you have to come back to reality. Oh, sure, you'll likely look like a grizzled old mountain man when you do, but that's fine. It's expected!

If you're the dumper (again, gross), you have to grin and bear it. If they want to talk, let 'em. If they don't want to see you, that's just fine. You, mister or miss relationship-ender, are not allowed to touch them (not even hugs), tell them about your sex life (if there is one), or allow them to buy you things. The friendship status is wholly up to the person you just split with. Some folks will turn out to be great friends, but others may call you in the middle of the night to slur obscenities in your ear. Forty-five days, and then you call the cops.

The trick about breakups is the long view. There's no-one I've dated that I think about wistfully and say, "You know, we really had something there." Two of my exes are married or engaged, which is great: they found their Big Love, and it wasn't me. Breaking up was a necessary step to getting them there. One of my exes, shortly after we split, became an insufferable hipster, someone I would pay money not to hang out with. But I'm rid of him, which is fab, and with someone I really dig on. They suck, they hurt, they make you drink too much and shake your fist at happy couples on the street, but in the end, breakups are like ipecac for the soul: getting rid of what's not good for you, in the most painful way possible.

The Ghost Of Crush-Mas Past

2011-06-04T18:41:00.001-04:00

Years ago, when I still read Vice magazine (is that still a thing? I feel like its moment in the sun has passed a long time ago, but like with Teen Vogue, just because I move out of something's sphere of influence or interest doesn't mean it just, like, ceases to be), they published a great piece called "The VICE guide to being Totally Crushed Out!!!" I just re-read it, and while the whole dirtbag/cocaine thing is totally played out, they raise some great points. For example, cunnilingus? Terrific! Telling all your friends about your silly crush? Golden! Dammit, Vice, sometimes you get it right. But I'm still mad at you for teaching my generation of women that the best we could do for boyfriends were bassists with questionable hygiene who would eventually cheat on us, and that stability, respect, and not living in a flophouse was somehow for losers.

But crushes, man. I wasn't very awesome at high school - I made the mistake of loving every single boy except for the ones who were a) nice to me or b) into me, so I spent a lot of time crushing on unattainable dudes. They were unattainable for a number of reasons - no common friends, no common hobbies, no interest in dating a shy, squirrely weirdo like myself. I ruled at having crushes - thinking about them all the time, imagining talking to them, imagining dating them. None of this ever came to any kind of fruition: I was shy and weird and so unconfident that I was basically radioactive. I had to watch as my crushes dated other girls, girls that I still think were badly matched to these guys, but seventeen year old boys are easily seduced by pretty girls, even if they're dumb or mean or both. Some forty-seven year old guys are like that too, but thankfully, most men grow out of it.

I eventually grew my shyness and started talking to boys, and to my everlasting surprise, they talked back. I've dated, seduced, been seduced, and had boyfriends. I'm happy to admit that, even though we've been dating for months, I'm still totally crushing on my boyfriend. Even though I like him, and love him, there's a small corner of feeling that is reserved for what's commonly known as SQUEEEE! The excitable part of my brain that lights up at sugar and videos of kitties on the internet also goes bananas for my boyfriend. Go figure.

I recently saw one of my high school crushes, and by "saw", I don't mean the grown-up usage where you chat idly for a few minutes and then say how nice it was to see each other and move on. I mean "saw" as in, I saw him through the plate-glass window of my favourite burrito joint, but did not work up the emotional stones to even say hi. I stayed outside, fussing unnecessarily with my bike, and watched as he jotted down some notes in a Moleskin (pretentious!) and waited for his dinner. He was wearing wire-rimmed glasses and a wedding ring, and when I lurched inside to pick up my burrito, it was as though I was a teenage kid and all my confidence was gone.

I felt ridiculous as I pedaled away, but the truth is, I wasn't a confident young person at all, and sometimes, ghosts can be too weird to process, especially in the moment. I had no idea he even lived in Toronto, let alone had some proximity to my lifestyle. Oh god, what if my burrito joint is his burrito joint? Horrors. I would want to be all smooth - oh, so you're married? How's that going? He dated pretty, skinny, fragile-looking, artsy girls in high school, and part of me wants to know if he married some thick-ankled farm girl from Manitoba who could hoist him above her head without even unraveling her braids. I know he didn't.

Now that we're older, wiser (?) and definitely some of us are married, "the crush" has taken on a more fraught meaning. Does the presence of both a partner and a crush mean that one negates the other? Can we have crushes on people we're not involved with? Isn't that, like, cheating? Or doesn't it necessarily lead to cheating?

No. Idiot. Crushes are normal and healthy - it's not like I expected my boyfriend to quit talking to females when we started dating, and there are interesting, magnetic women out there. Fantasy is a normal thing - we do it when we're dating (what if we move in together someday?) and when we're settled (what's the story with the barista with all the tattoos?) Crushes allow us to examine things we like about our partner - for example, most of my crushes are into music, and it turns out I like music too - and what we wish we had. Crushes on marathon runners speak to a desire for your girlfriend to be dedicated; crushes on comic book inkers highlights a wish that your boyfriend was more creative. But real, grown-up love accepts our girlfriends, boyfriends, husbands and wives for the people they are, and also acknowledges that crushes are idealized. I can crush on the bearded, burly bike mechanic because hey, I'll never have to see him after he's downed nine shots and thrown up in a cab, or when he's been petty with a waiter. I'll never have to break it off or fall out of crush with him - I'll just be distracted by a new crush.

We all grow out of our crushes - either because we start dating them and that crush becomes filtered through other emotions (love is basically 100-proof crush, right?), or we get to know them and find out they're unbearable wankers, or we befriend them and their dorky human nature outshines the imaginary weddings we've planned in our crazy heads. Seeing old, stale crushes is like trying on clothes that used to fit you, years ago, but that aren't really your style any more. They're slightly unpleasant, because they can bring back that taste in your mouth; the taste of being young, shy, nervous and lonely. Who needs it? Crushes are best served fresh. Some of them might stick to your ribs, but they're usually the romantic equivalent of fast food: cheap, easy and best quickly forgotten.

Con-GRAD-ulations!

2011-06-02T16:54:00.004-04:00

About a year ago, I was publicly snarking on my parents and their insistence I attend my grad ceremonies. How passe, I intoned. How overdone. How symbolic of a culture that SNORE whatever, moving on.

However. Like in many things, I was wrong. Grad ceremonies are kind of bad-ass. My sister graduated from Queen's University, a school whose reputation for academic excellence is matched only by its reputation for being fancily Caucasian. She now proudly wears an iron ring, a symbol of engineers, and her peers are diligently working on sucking all the remaining oil from Alberta's crust. My sister, because she is crazy, doubled up her engineering degree with an art history degree, leaving no question about who the smart daughter turned out to be - it's her. With a bullet.

Graduations are important because they mark the last time that getting up at noon requires setting an alarm...unless you plan on becoming an indolent writer-person. (Ahem.) They're important because they mark the first time you'll feel sort of like a loser when you say, "I'm an English major," because not anymore, you're not. They're important because they mark a time in your life when you've actually worked hard, gotten passing marks, and earned your way. I went to my high school graduation, which was great because I after I left Stratford I dyed my hair brown, lost twenty pounds and learned how to drink; I was unrecognizable. At my university graduation, I was fat, blonde, and relatively sober. Who wants to celebrate that?

No, I'm kidding. I didn't go to mine because it would have been fake. I limped towards my degree, which, I think, happens to a lot of people in their early twenties for whom their education is sort of secondary to tying to get their Shit Sorted Out. In my last year of university, I wasn't sitting thoughtfully in lecture halls, taking notes on Joseph Andrews and offering witticisms that relied on punning a 17th-century euphemism for penis. I was sitting in a room in CAMH, talking about how big a serving size is (smaller than you think) and how much I was drinking (more than I should have). I was getting my Shit Worked Out. And that took so much mental energy that I couldn't really get my act together to hand in essays about Shamela. Sorry. But as it turned out, going group therapy sessions allowed me to survive my final year, so I feel like the emphasis on all the academic stuff was sort of...well, there's always an excuse, right?

But my sister! Oh man. Okay, so: she not only got sick and had to take time off school, she switched programs, fell in love, and she fuckin' aced it. Sure, there were bumps along the way. But she's a smart cookie and a tough gal, and she came roaring back to the school she loved and the program she felt proud to be a part of, and she sailed over the finish line like she was racing a yacht.

So, dear sister: congratulations on your graduation, on your impending freak out about "what does it all mean?" a la Rob Gordon/High Fidelity, and I know that you charm, dedication, stick-to-it-iveness and talent will bring you success in your professional life - or your academic life, should there be a sequel (Queens II: The Iron Schwing!, also known as "getting your masters"). I love you dearly, and not only because I'll be asking off-topic questions about, like, the construction of bridges and if they're sturdy. But because you inspire me: you've shown me what a little hard work and dedication can do, which is a whole damned lot.

The Cramps

2011-05-27T16:23:00.003-04:00

I've recently become obsessed with this website, The Hairpin, which posts the best articles. They have the Ask A series, which features an anonymous, rotating panel of experts: Dude, Married Dude, Clean Person, Queer Chick. They suggest ways you can fritter your paycheck away. They gave an online tutorial on how to install feather extensions. In short, if The Hairpin was an actual living woman, it that friend of yours that always seems to be up on awesome shit: the broad who was rocking a glitter eyeliner in middle school; who smoked cloves until she realized that smoking is boring, who went and did a degree in urban planning or web-based journalism three years before anyone else got the memo, and who also knows just what to do when one of her besties knocks a tooth out during a tequila-fueled tumble off her road bike.

While the writing is usually conspiratorially casual - there are posted entitles "Why I am an abortion provider" and they offer tips on surviving Jamaican dance clubs - sometimes they totally knock it out of the park. They recently posted a piece on one woman's period, written as though the period was a bullying fremeny who coerced the hapless menstruater into sucking down caloric Orange Julius and buying insane sequined hot pants.

I loooove this idea. My period makes me cry at commercials and throw a total hairy eyeball at my boyfriend, often without me even knowing it's the hormones. I hate the sneak-attack element of menses. My period turns me into a nut: I once cried because I ate half a freezer pizza in one sitting. I will pick fights about stupid shit ("You know I only like the yogurt with 18 grams of protein! The other stuff is for weenies!"). I cry. I bloat. I refuse to brush my hair (okay, that's normal). I will throw tantrums and become a demanding asshole who could kill Howdy Doody's will to live. Then I get the flow, and I snap right out of it. Sure, I'm crampy and sore, but at least I stop hating myself and everyone around me.

That I even get a period is a bit of a miracle, given that some of my lady parts were lost in a fire (kidding! I had an ovary surgically removed last summer), but it's one of those miracles I resent. I feel like a lot of pregnant ladies who don't necessarily buy into the whole earth-mama, Birkies-and-flowy skirts, expensive-stroller ethos of modern childbearing might feel about their pregnancies the way I do about about my menstrual cycle: it's fine, but like...do I have to twirl around in a field to do it? Like, have you seen tampon commercials? I know I'm required by Woman Law to wear white pants and have a rictus-grin on face for those magical five to seven days, but hot damn, I don't feel like it.

What I actually feel like doing is crouching like a feral dog in the food court of the Eaton's Center, murdering overly peppy H&M employees and eating honey-garlic chicken wings. I want to sit in a pair of dirty overalls and drink cheap beer and belch a lot. I want to make post-feminist punk music, where the bass player is a robot and the audience listens with their hands over their ears. I want rage. I want defiance. I feel positively mutinous when I menstruate, and it's only made worse by the fact that my period is like Ke$ha after her morning ablutions crossed with Courtney Love.

Why can't I just get gnarly when I get my period? Oh, sure, the hormonal tide often skews towards the sadder side, but I'm so over the idea of feeling like I have to hide it. "I'm crampy" is one of those man-repeller phrases like "I'm really into crystal healing" and "I love collecting Gund stuffed animals" that make people go, "Whoa." But it's a gross process: messy, squishy, smelly (like pennies!), and pretending it's some wellspring of womanly awesomeness is a little like pretending testicles are adorable, or that knuckle hair is sexy: sometimes, bodies do unappealing, weird-ass shit. In the case of women, our bodies do that stuff every month.

I think the next time my period shows up at my door, I'll indulge her a little. We''ll get day-drunk and go bake banana bread in a tube top, and then watch The Iron Giant and cry unattractively for twenty minutes. We'll try yoga for ten minutes and then get bored and switch to watching makeup tutorials on YouTube. We'll make out with our boyfriends, despite the fact that the boob tenderness is really out of control. We'll take a hot bath and put all our hair on top of our head in a lazy-girl approximation of a ballerina bun that will make us look as though we were styled by a deranged person. And the running thread, throughout this whole experiment, will be radical self-acceptance: loving the whole gross, bloated, sobbing mess.

And Toblerone. Obviously.

Storm Clouds

2011-05-23T17:32:00.003-04:00

If you think your parents are wacko, count your blessings that you aren't Storm, the genderless baby being raised by a Toronto family. Storm isn't intersexed or two-spirited; Storm is an infant whose parents have not shared his/her gender with the world. Keeping mum on the subject - only a few people immediate family members know - has enraged some, befuddled others, and thrilled and confused from coast to coast.

I had a long conversation with some girlfriends on Friday night about Storm, and parenting, and gender politics, and I have to say, maybe it was the beers or maybe I'm just close-minded, but I don't think I fared very well. Being a good little liberal-arts grad, I understand that gender is constructed. I know that by giving a girl a pink pony, you're telling her how girls act, and are supposed to act, and how she had better act if she wants to be like other little girls. I also know two brothers whose parents, in the anti-violent, dolls-for-boys late 1980s, confiscated their play firearms. The boys, in a fit of creative desperation, chewed their toast into the shape of guns and continued on undeterred.

The article that prompted the debate originally ran in the Toronto Star, whose editorial tone was somewhat ambivalent. Storm is clearly being raised by thoughtful and engaged parents, but the writers made the point that by being, not boy, not girl, nor "or," but "none of the above," the parents were creating a hitherto unknown category they referred to as "other than other." "Other than other" seems like dangerous waters for a society that decriminalized homosexuality not so long ago, and that struggles, still, with a myriad of differences. God forbid Storm is a fat, awkward, mixed-raced shy kid with glasses, horrible teeth and no gender. That kid is fucked. Within the closed familial loop, most people are free to be something other than their gender - a great painter; a fan, as the family's eldest boy is, of pink feather boas; a weeping mess at bathtime, or some other permutation of the self that isn't penis/vagina.

But outside the family/friends circle, gender is indisputably one of the markers we use to identify people. Much like race, age, and accent, gender comes to us without thinking about it critically. It's only when we're faced with a little uncertainty that we get nervous. If someone is mixed-race, like my fabulous friend Kelli, they often get pegged as one or the other; her recent musings about trying to be multi in a world that often prefers you to check one box was an insightful look at passing, and resenting the pass that comes at the expense of her more honest and interesting background. Likewise, Storm, at least as a baby, will be able to pass as one of two genders, but eventually, kindergarten will happen, and bathroom breaks, and changing for swim club. Genderlessness is a gift given to the very young and will eventually erode as the child makes choices.

Do I applaud Storm's family? Well, as my friend Suzanne pointed out, it expands the realm of the possible in exciting ways. She said, "You just know some other family is thinking about doing the same thing now, because they know it can be done." Which is true: the debate about whether or not it should be done comes because, like it or not, it is being done.

But I said on Friday, and will stand by it, that parenting in this way is an activist, political act that isn't about the child, but rather about the parents. I dislike parenting as activism; if Storm's parents wanted to explore what it's like to live without gender, they should have done that experiment on themselves, not on their young child. This is the same part of my brain that shudders at vegan children and elementary school kids who attend anti-abortion rallies. Even though I understand that this education strives for more openness and examination of what is possible, the reality is that it's happening to someone young and presumably without the critical thinking skills that would benefit, say, someone who attended university for equity studies. Being told "You have no gender unless you choose one" takes away a certain type of self-definition that children often learn through.

Their older son wrote a book about "The Gender Explorer," presumably because the parents needed to address the gender questions for their long-haired, pink-loving boy. But this baby doesn't need to be some kind of science experience for social-norm spelunkers. There's a very real chance that Storm will resent his or her early-years ambiguity, even though it saved on a heap of pink or blue baby accessories. Who wants to grow up to be "that baby whose parents were all, 'this baby has no gender!'?"I have no beef with Storm's parents and siblings teaching the kid that gender can be, and should be, fluid - that it's okay to love horsies, pink, dump trucks or climbing trees no matter what you were born as, or grow up to be however femme or butch you want - but opting out of the system entirely seems like it may cause more grief than it's worth.

Part of me hopes Storm becomes the very definition of gender normativity - a little girl who can't get enough dolls, or a boy who loves karate and catching frogs. I wonder if Storm's gender-exploring parents would be as excited about a child who refused to participate in the gender debate, who loved his or her pink-wearing brother without wanting to follow him down that particular yellow brick road. Parents everywhere will intone that as long as the child is healthy and happy, it doesn't matter how their kids express their gender. The Witterick-Stocker family are devoted to their children, and to raising them in an nurturing and supportive environment. But teaching them that "gender" is an option, rather than "my gender" is a choice, walks an unpalatable line between reality, and a constructed world that applies only to this family.

Why The Long-Weekend Face?

2011-05-21T12:36:00.003-04:00

The Globe's Focus piece this weekend was about the so-called leisure gap between how much we should work - not much, given how much technology we have at our disposal - and how much we do work - all the time. It made the case for the standard three-day weekend, a luxury that had me breaking out in goosebumps: since starting my job a few months ago, I've been asked to give up two Saturdays a month in the name of work. It's a sacrifice that shouldn't be that big a deal, but instead has turned me into a enraged, stressed-out asshole. One-day weekends are just horrible. But three-day weekends! They're amazing.

The article, which seems to run under different guises in national newspapers every few months as "breaking news" but in reality is one of the hoariest old saws in a journalist's notebook, is how technological and societal advances should be leaving us with more leisure time. Time for the kids, time for the stack of novels on my bedside table yet to be cracked. More time for home-cooked meals and gardening. More time for working on hobbies, making art, making the world a better place. Less time has to be spent running around in cars, staring at a computer screen, picking up meals-in-a-bowl to snarf during the lunch (half-)hour, and commuting.

The articles always argue that, by cutting the workweek down, people are healthier, more in tuned with their families, less stressed, and more productive when they are at their desks. Even doing 40 hours in four days - working nine to seven, say - gives people more time. It's hard to argue with that; if I'm commuting 45 minutes each way on transit or on the highway, cutting one day of commuting out gives me an hour and a half each week to do other it things. Not to mention that whole other day of not working. It gives me a day to go to the doctor, or talk to my landlord, or attend volunteer meetings, or cook for the week.

At this point, I am like, obsessed with the idea of a part-time job. I'm not really a frugal person - I spend too much on frozen yogurt and second-hand clothes for that kind of thing - but I'm also not terribly expensive in my tastes. I want a nice little 25/30 hour a week gig; somewhere were I still I have a desk, but I'm not chained to it. I don't want to make tacos or make beggy phonecalls to patrons of the Harbourfront Festival or fold clothes at American Apparel, but I thrive when I'm in a professional situation that allows for freedom. Like most people, I chafe under too much work and too many demands, and I can only imagine that, as I get older and my responsibilities increase, I'll be even more horrible if I also have to hold down a full-time gig. Some people like to work. They claim to go a little nuts without it. I'm the opposite. Without metric tons of down time, I become a twitchy, bitchy bag of neuroses, temper tantrums and meaningless fights with my boyfriend (sorry, baby!).

In any case. The Victoria Day long weekend is stuffed with barbeques and bike rides, a few rainy bursts, and a chance to scrub my apartment from top to bottom. I've also read a book, done my laundry, and eaten a grape leaf sandwich. In other words, it has afforded me with leisure time that is remarkable only it its uninterrupted amount. Next weekend promises a Saturday of work and then a Sunday for alltheotherstuffIneedtodo, so this three-day block of time is a luxury of time and happiness that knows few bounds. I feel refreshed, recharged, and ready for another full week of - sigh - work.

Work Attire(d)

2011-05-19T09:11:00.010-04:00

Since starting work in an office, I've become hyperaware of what "conservative dress" really means. Let me tell you: this is a minefield. "Business casual" seems to mean different things to different people: one person's slutty tank top is another's Thursday morning outfit. The dudes have it easy. All they have to do is throw on a sweater that isn't covered in reindeer, pants that aren't dungarees, and get a half-way decent haircut, and they look professional. Women, on the other hand, have a range of styles to befuddle us. Pants? Skirts? Tights? Bare legs? Cover the shoulders? Are tee shirts okay? Cleavage? Accessories? And what about hairdos? Princess Leia buns, a staple of my civilian hair repertoire, tends to get disapproving looks from my supervisors. What is a girl to do?!

I can't vouch for any of y'all, but I never thought I'd fuck it up so badly. Oh, sure, I jam the photocopier on the regular and make idiotic mistakes with people's files, but I never feel quite as bad as when I get dinged for dressing inappropriately. During my first couple weeks on the job, I was pulled aside and told to bring my look up to a corporate standard; my boss acknowledged that I was fresh out of school and therefore might not have a wealth of office-ready clothes to fall back on, but it made me feel like I had been slapped. Criticisms of clothes, like comments on body or age, feel deeply personal. I felt as though she had dismissed me entirely based on the way I looked, not how I was doing my job or settling into the company.

Since then, I've tried to be more careful. I wear opaque tights and skirts to the knee, flats shoes and shirts than cover the elbow. If there was ever a staff meeting in an Orthodox shul, I could waltz right in and take my place without feeling stupid (I mean, aside from the fact that I've never been inside a synagogue and would, knowing me, knock over the torah or accidentally fall in the mikveh). But I still want to let loose a little. I feel like "business funky" is a look I strive for, like gallery owners and women who run children's clothing shops. Which is ridiculous - it means I'm modeling my style after middle aged gallery owners. Dudes. I am 27 years old. I have a slammin' bod and great hair. There is no reason to hide my light under a pashmina and arty glasses.

But the office mood is one of grave professionalism, so I cover up. My coworkers and I are a pretty bleak bunch; we all gravitate towards gray and black and navy, with nary a sequin in sight. I'm not saying that the business should be conducted in Caribana outfits, but the emphasis on looking professional rather than being professional is a little, well, weird. There is one chica who tries to spice it up, but her bralessness and miniskirts comes off as less "fun!" and more, like, "WTF?" There's a wide gulf between a fun tank top and letting your tatas hang out in the workplace, right? Besides, I'm sure she could work in the nude and still get her job done.

I understand the reason behind office gear: it makes things look clean and nice, even when they're actually harried and hectic. It takes some of the guesswork out of dressing in the a.m. - a suit is almost always appropriate, and women have whole departments dedicated to the art of professional dressing. But when it's used as just one more way to deny employees any sense of fun in the workplace, as another disciplinary measure used to instill a sense of bad-dog shame in the people in the company, then maybe it's time to bust out the protest feathers and sequins and get our work done with some style.

Love Tokens

2011-05-14T15:46:00.001-04:00

It always astounds me that, in relationships, there's such a breadth of experience. No two couples are the same: some are homebodies, some go ziplining. Some bond over veganism, while others could chat for hours about the Western novels of Cormac McCarthy. Some folks are closest in the bedroom, while others are best as a dynamic political powerhouse. As a woman, but also a human, I'm fascinated by other people's experience in their coupling and uncoupling. I've been with my fella for about six months, a length of time that is, startlingly for a 27-year-old, one of my longest relationships. Most of my friends, on the other hand, have been paired with their significant other for about five years - a half decade of experience that I won't get until my thirties have started. I've been privy to their stories, though, and I've been taking notes.

One of my favourite things about being with someone is the chance to do something nice for someone you care about. I remember when I was going through my Horrible First Break-Up, I biked down to Cherry Beach with a girlfriend and she asked me what, exactly, was so great about being with this guy; what did I miss? I answered truthfully that I would miss being sweet to someone, being sweet to him, specifically. Because isn't that part of what love is? Being nice and taking care of someone, trying to make their days and nights a little more fun?

Which brings me to the topic of gifts. I have been blessed with some truly splendid love tokens: mix CDs so perfectly assembled I listened to them on repeat for months, and books that opened me up to new ways of feeling. I recently got David Foster Wallace's new book from my boyfriend before it was even released, a coup that landed him big-time love from me for both the sweet thought and the knowledge of a thing I like. My Big Ex was a great gift-giver, but ultimately a lousy boyfriend, and frankly? I'd rather have a good boyfriend who muffs it on the gifts but gets it everywhere else, than a scumbag who once bought me a really great hoodie. I seem to have hit the jackpot, though: my now-boyfriend is generous and pays attention, resulting in gifts that range from books to music to concert tickets to burritos made just the way I like 'em.

Women everywhere - and men, too - can identify with the longing for great gifts from their partner. Gifts speak to an understanding of who the other person is: some folks really want a custom-made fork for their fixie, while others jones for jewelry, and yet other are most enthralled by audiobooks. It's the reason gift guides exist, and magazines and websites put together elaborate guides to purchasing that "perfect gift" for the other person.

The going theory is that getting a gift "right" sets in motion a mutual understanding of each other's cores and souls, or something. This wedding blog I read (confidential to boyfriend: for no reason) regularly addresses ring angst: fiancees freaking out about engagement rings that are too expensive, big, tacky, small, or just not to a bride's taste. If he can't get the ring right, they fret, how will we ever work as a couple? Cue the dramatic flinging of one's self onto one's duvet and sobbing while the hapless groom stands to one side, helplessly. Consider the birthday gift - how to say, "I love you despite the fact that we are getting older and more decrepit, and your natal anniversary reminds me of my own aging process, jerk?" Or the anniversary gift, conveniently laid out in terms of gift requirements, but leaving open the dangerous possibility that some clueless girl will get for her honey a can of peas one year to celebrate their love.

When I was younger, I used to feel such stress when it came time for my birthday or Christmas - not because I hated getting gifts, but because I felt (and still feel) like dropping hints about wanting specific things is tacky, and therefore worried about not getting stuff I liked and having to fake pleasure. I always got at least one thing I loved, like nature books, and one thing I didn't really care for, like Land's End sweatshirts. In my old age, I've come to terms with the fact that sometimes, people nail it (like when my sister brought me sequined Minnie Mouse ears from Disneyworld a few months ago), and sometimes, they don't. I love them anyway.

Boyfriends get the same pass. Sometimes, the burrito gets too much hot sauce or the dress is in the wrong size, but it's the thoughtful gesture that counts more. There's nothing wrong with a little hint-dropping, and nothing wrong with graciously accepting a token of someone's affection even if the token makes you look like a lumpy elementary school teacher. In the end, the thoughtful gift is less about the money you spend or the occasion you're celebrating, but the understanding that love, friendship, and respect are actually kind of the best gifts of all.

It's The Femme'd Of The World

2011-05-13T13:13:00.004-04:00

I'm not what you might call a girly-girl. I don't read Cosmopolitan or Vogue, I feel like an impostor in lipstick, I can barely walk in heels, and I haven't read Eat Pray Love or Pride and Predjudice. I've never owned a Jewel album. I don't diet. I just bought a pair of mechanic's coveralls and am in love with them. I own, and know how to use, an extensive tool kit. I prefer a juicy burger to a veggie wrap, don't wear anything pink, hate fruit smoothies, and have no concept of how to blowdry my hair straight.

And yet. My USB stick is sparkly. I live in skirts. I ride a cruiser instead of a hipster road bike, and get my cleavage out at every opportunity. I love dance music about ex-girlfriends. I am the master of the smoky eye. I have enormous, glorious hair that was the bane of my existence in high school, but is now an unbrushed, wild-woman lioness' mane that will get into a knife fight with flat-haired girls and win.

When I was a little girl, I used to dread going to dance classes, because I was so tortured by my sturdy little legs and my protruding belly. Ballerinas and modern dancers were supposed to be supple, long-limbed, graceful and skinny: I was short, curvaceous, and moved with the elegance of an overweight wildebeest. I quit after a few years, because the shame of not getting it right - not being girly enough, in either movement or appearance - outweighed any pleasure I might have felt in moving my body or dancing in my world. I sort of regret that, although when I think back to dancing to "It's Raining Men" in a neon-yellow satin raincoat and whore's makeup, I'm not totally sure that "jazz dancing" was the best fit for my tastes. But, and even though I can't tell if it's a lack of talent or a fear of trying, the graceful-lady dance look is well beyond my grasp.

There's this weird gray area between butch and femme that I just love: Japanese anime characters with enormous guns and little-girl eyes. Rosie the Riveter. When it gets too gray - lady bodybuilders, for instance - there be dragons...but for the most part, there's nothing that feminizes an aesthetic more than adding a touch of hardness to it. Lara Croft got it right. So did the babes from Suckerpunch. Even though that movie was pure dreck, the look of it - huge swords nestled against a thigh clad in a school-skirt - was very appealing. So much of traditional femininity is trite and predictable - the pink, the short skirts, the submissive attitude or the one that's supplanted it, the bitch/diva/goddess persona that has somehow transformed getting a brazilian wax into an act of empowerment. The butch femme complicates that by taking elements of masculine looks and sounds - gunshots, dirt, track and field events, high technology, blood, gore, drums, bass, and a dash of ballsiness that's unmatched by a subscription to Elle.

Lest you think I'm hating on the ladies (which, like, no), I think that masculinity is more interesting when it's threaded with elements of "feminine" behaviour. Vulnerability, honesty, and emotional self-awareness are all "girl" traits, but let's be honest: they make for better humans. By the same token, "manly" traits like self-reliance, assertiveness and a get-'er-done attitude can help transform a girl into a woman.

In any case, I'm into the whole tough-girl look/feeling. Makes me feel good, like a woman who knows what she wants, even part of me is still that self-conscious failed ballerina. What's the expression? Fake 'til you make it? Fake nails and real blood in this case.

I Heart Maxi Dresses

2011-05-07T17:00:00.002-04:00

Spring fashion is not traditionally a thing I give a shit about, but this year's glut of maxi dresses, urban safari looks and wide-legged pants has me all excited about spending money. I went into the Gap today and sussed out a weird, Japanese-looking dress that got my heart all a flutter. I love silhouettes that remind me of experimental Asian fashion from the 1980s, and this piece was a primo example of such a phenomenon. Bring on the square dresses and the headscarves! I love them!

Spring fashion also allows for a certain amount of sartorial rebirth - the unswaddling of the winter layers means that my butterfly is emerging, and this year, the butterfly is all about the legging/Blundstone/long tank combo. It also allows for fashion patterns to come to light: for the last three years, I've gone out and gotten my hands on a pair of egregiously unflattering capri pants and then worn then daily until the snow flies. This year's iteration has pleats and pegged ankles; they're just off-the-charts disgusting. I adore them. They are hideous. And next year, I'll likely be getting a pair that make my unsheddable winter weight even more prominent that these bad boys! I can hardly wait.

I wear basically the same thing every day in the winter: black tights, a skirt, some kind of tank top and then a sweater. Summer allows a little more freedom. Some light scarves, or cute-but-confounding tank top/dress thingies? Sold. A maxi skirt with flip-flops and a shawl? I look like the mother of the bride at a California hippie wedding, but also: YES. A tube top and linen capris that make me look like a pottery teacher in 1984? OBVIOUSLY. Give me more!

Dressing my age has never been my strong suit - I either look twelve or sixty-five - and I've yet to master the shoe (I would wear fashion runners with everything, given half a chance), but damn, I know what I like when it comes to fashion. I feel like, along with planning weddings and raising kids, everyone has highly defined logic behind the way they choose to dress, if only someone would ask them. One of my pals defines her aesthetic as "lesbian gym teacher," a look that involves a lot of technical fabrics and cycling safety gear, while her husband might be best described as "highly, unquestionably, undeniably Canadian," featuring plaids upon plaids, toques and jeans. My boyfriend wears band tees and tight jeans 100% of the time, which I find sexy and he finds practical, since he owns pretty much every band tee every produced.

Others hew to a more fashionable line, following trends in hemlines and patterns, but keeping it personal when it comes to silhouettes and colours. Even though they seem to be everywhere this summer, one of my gal-pals flat-out refuses to attempt a maxi dress - given that they add weight to non-lithe frames, I should avoid them too, but I don't really care. I balance my long skirts with booty shorts and tube tops; I end up varying wildly between looking like a sex worker and looking like an Orthodox Jew. It's madness, but so satisfying.

In any case, the best thing about the spring shop is getting all the little pieces together for the upcoming heat, assembling tiny scraps of fabric that will become outfits fit for heat waves, putting together more substantial ensembles for rainy days and Mondays. Office wear needs to be considered, since some buildings overcompensate for the shimmering sidewalks outside to a point where you need a cardigan or you'll shiver. Cycling commuters need to take mid-afternoon thunderstorms into account, and we all need transitions from the schwarma joint to the CD store to beers on the patio to the dancefloor. The spring shop is essential to reset the mind from winter to summer, from bare trees to leaves, from shoveling the walk to mowing the lawn. Fashion is all about what's between your ears instead of what's going on below your collarbone, and spring is such a fun time to think critically about the way we clothe ourselves. Have fun in the boutiques, and don't forget to accessorize!

Vote Mob

2011-05-02T20:25:00.002-04:00

It's Election Day! Are you wearing your special election bonnet? Mine has purple ribbons all over it, which gives me a jaunty non-partisan air as I approach the polling stations tonight. I'm also carrying my special election ID (the only ID I have with my current address on it, a hospital card from when I had the grapefruit removed) and eating my special election snack (just kidding, it's an apple, regular-styles). I'm excited!

Actually, smarminess aside, I am pretty excited about this election. Maybe it's the orange wave or the non-starter massage "scandal," but Jumpin' Jack has been swinging a big stick this campaign, and it's fun to watch. I voted Green - hey, I live in Olivia Chow's riding, and it'll be a cakewalk for her, so I figure I'll throw some funding over to a party that believes in solar farms instead of prisons. I'm sure my grandpa is rolling his eyes at my youthful stupidity, but hey...what's that saying? If you're not young and liberal, you're hard-hearted, and if you're old without being conservative, you're soft-headed? Anyway, I'm part of the much-discussed youth vote (am I still a youth at 27? I hope so!) and as such, can vote as far left as I want.

Elections aren't exactly fun, per se, but voting gives me that satisfied citizen feeling that you can also get by shopping at organic grocery stores, but for free. I enjoy snarking on the candidates, watching my Facebook feed blow up with exhortations to vote, and get interested as the results come in. I feel Canadian when I vote - I can just show up and they let me pick! Unlike in other, more contested parts of the world, my country has decent elections that are fair and transparent. We are lucky! And that deserves respect, best shown by taking advantage of the opportunity to vote and doing it.

I'm not going to spoil this entry by telling folks how to vote - the Globe and Mail already lost a large part of my respect when they officially endorsed Harper's Conservatives, a party that has almost nothing in common with the way I live my life. Other papers have picked other parties, a practice I'm perplexed by. I'll just say that I hope you find a party or a representative who aligns with the way you prioritize your life: money, family, jobs, the environment, civic duty, transportation, foreign aid, urban development, rural funding, education, health care, food, human rights, taxes, death, and all the other glorious moving parts that make up this country. And if you can't find a party who can do all that, at least you have the option of voting for a man who will eventually get into the Mustache Hall of Fame.

Vote early, vote often, and vote well, friends: the next few months of this country depends on it.

The Short Weekend

2011-04-30T22:01:00.004-04:00

This is my sixth day of work in a row, and I'm tirrrred. I know that I deserve zero sympathy - after all, there are jobs like forest fire spotter and nursing that require you to basically be on call around the clock, and I get a nice cushy evening window in which to unwind from my job. But the one-day weekend is basically the psychic opposite of the long weekend: rushed, emotionally cramped, and tiring. I need a nap, y'all.

There's a difference between good-tired and bad-tired. Good-tired stems from a job well done: a weekend camping trip, a hectic night of dancing, a great run, a game of frisbee with the kids. Or a mentally taxing day, like when you're able to sit down and strike out that last item on your to-do list? That's a satisfying feeling. But bad-tired is when you're up late drinking, or there are too many work days in a row, or you get a bad sunburn, not to mention some wicked blisters, when you're out biking and woefully unprepared for your new case of heatstroke. Good-tired makes you sleep well, whereas bad-tired makes you wake up in the middle of the night, freaking out about the day ahead.

I guess what it boils down to is stress. Human being like stress, to a certain point. We like roller coasters and having interesting high-pressure jobs (some of us: I feel like if I was an air traffic controller or a Bay Street chick, my hair would start falling out in clumps about halfway through my first shift), and we often choose to put ourselves in those positions. But there are other, less pleasurable kinds of stress; the exhaustion of new parents springs to mind, or the worries that come from a scary diagnosis, or the chronic anxiety of a really crappy job. Those kinds of stressors aren't manageable without the help of some Ativan or a really reliable shrink. Less roller coaster, more "stress leave brought on by years of callous, callow treatment at the hands of co-workers/bosses."

The necessity of downtime can't really be overstated. I know some people are like, "I only sleep four hours a night, and I run the Boston Marathon for fun, and I'm showing at MOCCA next month, plus I just delivered twins!" and they look perky and can make whole entire sentences without using the words "Oh God help me" even once. But like the rest of us civilians, I need some time off. Sometimes I use my time productively, to read or cook, or hang with my friends. Other times, I'm too zonked to do anything but lie on the floor and count the dust bunnies under my couch. Sometimes hanging with the dust bunnies is good for the soul.

The moral of this story, besides "weekends are baller" is that it's important to know when your particular stress wave is riding a little too high. My friend Liz hooked me up with an awesome document based around the idea of "moral distress" - when a situation makes us feel stressed or uncomfortable, but we somehow lack the ability to act immediately. When faced with these stressful situations, there's a method to assess the risks of acting (and not acting). This handy information is starting to shape how I feel about the stressors in my life - work, relationships, money - and what the emotional carrying cost of the status quo really is.

So I guess the real moral story is, when your stress can't be undone by your weekend, either because your weekend is too short or your stress is too intense? It's time to make some changes.

Best of Women: Brava!

2011-04-26T17:26:00.000-04:00

Achievement in History: Everyone
The time has come, the walrus said, to talk of many things....of shoes and shirts, and bikini wax, and sandwiches with wings. Obviously, the walrus was also a bit of a mental patient, but at the end of a three week, six-post series about awesome women, I'm a little tuckered out. Sorry about the mini-vacay from the blog - I had to get my head on straight again, and frankly? I was tired.

Honestly, the concept of "women" isn't all that interesting. I love my sister, mom, aunts and grandmothers, because I know them. Their stories about engineering school and sweet potato casseroles are interesting, if slightly bewildering, because I love them. Likewise, my friends are a bunch of marauding chickies who are destined to either run the world or at least report on it. But. And there is a but. The generalized celebration of women, at this point, feels a little odd. Each of those entries felt a touch forced - not because I don't genuinely admire Helen Mirren or the creative team at Rodarte, but because I think those ladies don't really need my admiration and support. A bunch of white ladies doing well for themselves isn't exactly an anomaly at this point in history. Maybe fifty years ago, it would be an OMG moment for the world to have a lesbian leading Iceland...but as the commercials say, we've come a long way, babies.

There's been on-going debate in the feminist movement about the role of power in the rise of women. Obviously, despite ongoing concerns like wage disparity and Sex and the City, us North American women do okay for ourselves; it's time, some activists say, to widen the focus of the feminist charge to include women in second- and third-world countries. Women who don't have the same freedom to vote, or access to reproductive health care, or really any health care, and who could use us fancy folks agitating on their behalf.

Not so, snorts their opposition. Those ladies don't need our culturally insensitive support. Like, who do we think we are, charging in and being all colonialist in our politics? That's kind the dude's job, right? Maybe women living in circumstances we don't live in ourselves have found their own ways to be feminists - through worship or work, through activism and art. You can wear a burka and still be awesome, yo: don't think that having shiny hair and stirrup pants will save you from abuse or drudgery.

Anyway. What the hell was I talking about? Oh right: women. We're boring. That's not to say that women, in comparison to men, are particularly dull or sparkling. If I had dedicated a whole bunch of posts to terrific men, I'd probably be a little bored of them, too. It's like writing a series on redheads I admire, or tall people, or Nigerians. It's not like being a woman is like overcoming a handicap or obstacle. It's just a facet of who we are, the same way I have comically large breasts and hair that doesn't lie flat. Some girls really need female role models, and it's nice to be able to look out over the crowd and see faces like mine looking back. Especially when we're forming ourselves and our communities, a strong female presence goes a long way in perpetuating the But like I said - celebrating women in this rah-rah kind of way undermines the fact that we're doing just fine.

The caveat to all this is, obviously, I'm riding the crest of fourth-wave feminism where I basically take all the lady-love for granted. I am certainly not shitting on all the trailblazers who came before, clearing the path for today's generations of annoyingly successful ladies. Without Coco Chanel, we probably would never have had the Mulleavies. We needed them. Thank you. Their place in the herstory books is cemented and we'll love them forever. And what's cool is now, we don't all need to be super geniuses to succeed. I'm not going to be Jane Jacobs or Emma Goldman, or Coco, or Indira Gandhi, or Clara Bow, or any of the ladies on my list. I don't have to. I can be own imperfect self, and own that. That's why it's important to have the role models; so we can dance in their footsteps.

Best of Women: See You In The Internets

2011-04-16T15:42:00.000-04:00

Achievement in Comedy - The Internet
So when I started this feminiseries, I had envisioned a landscape of frolicking women, all gently menstruating in unison while we voted and braided each other's hair. It would be like a hipper tampon commercial; if the Diva Cup started running ads on TV, we could all star together - Helen Mirren, Robyn, the Prime Minister of Iceland, and me.

But this land of women would be silent of one thing - laughter. Because, as we all know, women aren't funny. It's been widely documented that comediennes and funny girls are a once-in-a-generation sort of thing. Now that Tina Fey has cemented herself as the top of the pile for hilarity in the 2010s, the rest of us can go back to babbling about relationships, clothes, or the best way to get booze-vomit stains off the wall (sidenote: ew). Because there just isn't enough funny to go around.

SNORE. I am so tired of all the girls-aren't-funny bullcorn that gets tossed around like it's scientific fact. Every few years, we get a new crop of funny dudes (I feel like most recently, it's been the Judd Apatow comedy factory, featuring the Rogen/Segel/Baruchel/etc. bunch, but I'm kind of not really following the scene anymore), but in that whole field of funny, there's usually only one or two female voices. I know that men are awesome, and funny, but the Y chromosome isn't the gene for humour.

A few months ago, Leah McLaren wrote this infuriating column about how women aren't funny because we're the primary child rearers - as such, we spend all our talking time discussing chapped nipples and baby kaka, and forget to crack wise about non-child-related things (is there even such a thing? Please!). McLaren claims that we basically just leak all our funniness when we become mothers - not parents, since daddies are still allowed to be funny! - as though maybe hilarity is leached out through breast milk.

My response to this was basically BITCH PLEASE. While it's possible that, McLaren, as an insufferable cocktail of pretension and attention whoring, has gathered unto her bosom a girl gang made up of acolytes and the kind of girly-girl that wore a tiara to prom and posts ultrasound pictures of her unborn child on Facebook. As the rest of know, these women actually aren't funny. It's hard to have a sense of humour when you're fretting about how big your jean size, or if your boyfriend is cheating/proposing. Wise women have given up on all that, and are basically leaning back in their chairs made of ice cream, smoking fat cigars. And we're cracking jokes. Because that shit does not matter, and there's nothing less funny than worrying about stuff that doesn't compute.

In addition to pornography and procrastination, the internet has transformed the way women are funny. Previously, we had to attempt to break into what was inarguably a boy's club: stand-up comedians and sitcom developers seem to be overwhelmingly male, and they get lots of airtime for being funny on TV and in the movies, where funny women are often relegated to bimbo or slut roles. However, online, girls can skip all that nonsense and just spit out some funny business to the masses directly. What we end up with is sites like Go Fug Yourself and The Hairpin, which are totally femme in their voices...but also hilarious. Sites like mine, with an admittedly low readership, still get good feedback for being funny, and Twitter bon mots are as likely to spring from a mouth ringed in lipstick as one wreathed in a beard.

As in most things, what happens on the internet may not be reality in the rest of the world, but it proves that lazy columns like McLaren's simply aren't true. Our voices may not be heard from network television, but it's absolutely impossible to ignore funny women in all the places we pop up online. I search out great female voices on the internet - not because I'm a feminazi, but because I like relating to what I read and consume. When I get my news from a source that privileges the feminine voice, I do it for the same reason I pop over to BlogTO: because it comes from a place I know. And when I can read funny shit on the internet from a girl's point of view (and not, like, a blog about breastfeeding, Leah), it just all the better.

Best of Women: Look In A Mirren

2011-04-13T18:44:00.006-04:00

Achievement in Sex-Ed: Helen Mirren
Okay, so what's the deal with Helen Mirren? I mean, clearly she's a stone cold fox, as evidenced by her being cast as The Sexy Co-star in a number of recent movies. And she's funny, as showcased by the not-so-funny-looking trailers for Arthur (in her, and Russel Brand's, defense: I would guess the source material about a billionaire man-baby comes off as a little lame in a post-economic meltdown world, but whatevs, points for trying). She has a banging bod, cheekily on display in bikinis and sundry gowns and eventwear. It's well-established at this point that Helen Mirren is an a-okay kind of gal. So, my question is: Helen Mirren, where have you been all my life? Her first film credit is from 1966, a time when my mom was in elementary school, so she's like O.L.D. for real. Her IMDB page seems to list mostly filmed BBC productions and about 57 variations on Prime Suspect, but that paints only a partial picture of a one-woman zeitgeist.

Every few years, people remember that older female acting gigs are sort of tough to come by. By "older," I mean older than 30, maybe 34. It was especially bad a few years ago, when the Olsen twins, Linsday Lohan and their ilk were involved in a Vanity Fair-led minifreakout about little girl actresses and What That Meant. VF ill-advisedly spent an issue fawning over the young'uns, which was less "Wheee! Fun with peers!" and more of a combination of "Oh my god, when can we get back to writing ceaselessly about the Kennedies?" and "creepy uncle who breathes too hard at the kiddie table." Starlets like the ones on the cover of VF do very well for a few years, then they have a series of ill-advised marriages and/or stints in rehab, while actresses wait quietly for HBO to write them a showcase show and go on to win a slew of Emmy awards. Very few women come to prominence as an older actress - most start as a nubile young things, all tank tops and magazine covers, and then go on to become Sigourney Weaver.

So it's cool that Helen Mirren seems different. She hasn't had her breakthrough North American role - I guess she first got noticed in The Queen in 2006, but her flicks like Red could best be described as popcorn movies. She garnered mixed reviews as Prospera in Julie Taymor's The Tempest, a role that took the iconic grizzled wizard role and shaped into a distinctly feminine anger. Still, she hasn't had her defining role yet; I suppose Brits would say that she is Jane Tennison, but I, like 97% of North America, haven't seen it, so I don't know.

I hope that Mirren's pop culture success can be translated into a more varied role market for older actresses. I'm tired of seeing roles like Jane Fonda's in Monster-In-Law, a catty exercise in inter-generational jealousy. TV has upped the ante with roles like Nurse Jackie and The Big C, but as audiences age, they'll want to see themselves on the big screen, too. Mirren is ahead of the curve, but I predict that the actresses who were working in both 1979 and 2011 won't be hurting in fifteen years. And it's cool that this particular job market still seems to have openings for the new(ish) folks.

I hope Mirren, and her status as sex symbol, is a harbinger of thing to come. I, for one, would be comfortable with seeing female sensuality expressed more often and with more age diversity. Seeing ladies like Mirren, and other older/still-sexy broads, teaches us that sexiness comes in all forms. I know Helen Mirren doesn't wake up in the morning and say to herself, "Today I'm going to be a role model," but we consume so many images of youth as equaling beauty; there's something subversive and wonderful about Mirren's decision to market herself as an object of sexual desire, despite the fact that she's past retirement age.

Women are sexy - not just young women, mind you, but women with kids. Women with wrinkles. Women who have gained and lost weight since they were twenty-seven. Women who have gray hair. Women who get a little nip/tuck done, and women who don't. Women who choose to wearing the plunging necklines into retirement, and those who dress more modestly. There are tons of ways to be sexy, and Helen Mirren's version, at 65 and still shakin' her tatas in Kristen Wiig's face, is pretty cool.