If You Can Read This, The Bitch Has Been Eaten By The Undead

In event that zombies rise up and take over the world (slow, shuffling rising, naturally), best to have a plan. My friend Raza sent me this list of zombie contingency plans, which are okay. (Most of them seem to rely on the basic premise of feeding your grandmother to zombie hordes.) But they lack a certain...finesse. A certain je-ne-sais-quoi. They fail to take into account that I, upon zombie uprising, will not transform into a ripped action heroine capable of dismantling the undead with my machete. I will still be the same basic nerdette, albeit with a crippling case of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

This zombocalypse will require a cool, collected head. Someone with working knowledge of firearms and the back roads of Canada, along with the ability to create a fire by giving kindling a tough look. Unfortunately, my gang tends to be a pretty high-strung bunch. If zombie-fighting skills included "smoking cigarettes" and "flirting with strangers" and "writing webpages" then yes, we would prosper. But I kind of doubt it.

However, for the sake of argument, I'll outline my zombie plans. These are all reliant on not falling prey to step 0.5: become a zombie.

Step 1: Recognize, fool! Zombies, unless actively covered in gore, are not easily spotted. They could be escaped mental patients, or people under sedation, or having a seizure. I'm not hating on those demographics, but seriously: red herring much? So, make sure I'm vigilant about when the transformation happens. Spot 'em quick.

Step 2: Load up on supplies. I'm thinking a couple weeks worth of food, a whole bunch of water, Diet Coke (it's an addiction), "lady products," candles, camping stove, walkie-talkie, crossbow (not that I'll know how to use it...right away), warm clothes, bike gear, batteries, flashlight, a tent, sleep gear, trashy magazines, and maps. Anything else I can pick up on the road, but that food and water is the kicker: I'm holing up in my place for a while, at least at first.

Step 3: Hole up in my place. Invite non-zombified friends over to play Boggle and get used to not having the internet. Learn how to shoot the crossbow. Get really tired of eating food from a can. Get really scared every time we hear gunfire outside. My place is decently big; maybe a half-dozen or so people can hang out. They have to bring their own crap, though. I'm not a damned post-apocalypse Zellers. I figure safety in numbers, safety on the top floor of a house, and safety in not going fucking insane all by yourself.

Step 4: Hit the road. After a while, Toronto's grocery stores will be trashed and my non-zombified friends will be tired of sharing a bathroom. I'll be travelling by bike. Yeah, I know: wimpy, right? But bikes are easier to fix than cars, I won't have to worry about gas, and they're super quiet. You pilot a tank down Yonge Street and people notice that shit. We'll head east, and then once the border gets a little easier to cross, south. Obviously, at some point during this journey, we'll have to remove someone's appendix with, like, a Bowie knife and dental floss, and start having insane dreams. Naturally.

Step 5: Find a safe space. I'm thinking maybe a quiet island, but one that has plenty of arable land and is accessible by one (!) bridge. Zombies are stupid and can't work boats. But I, likewise, will probably die if I try to live outside in Canada during the winter. Fighting the undead will continue, we'll all be incredibly fit, I'll be in charge of running the still and my friends will be in charge of repopulating the earth.

So there you have it. From zombie insanity to utopian saloon in five easy steps. Couldn't be simpler.

Hip-Hop Hooray

I know that's it's generally considered lame to be say such-and-such album "changed my life," but in this case, it's true. Let me set the scene: I am thirteen. I have two younger siblings. I have my very first job. And in the process of working at my first job, I meet this crazy redhead who goes to raves and swears and is skinny as hell and just impresses my thirteen-year-old ass to death. At the end of the summer, she hands me a cassette tape and tells me to check it out.

On one side, Belle and Sebastian was wienering out, with some Elliot Smith and Elvis Costello thrown in for good measure. On the flip side, like a message from the gods, was my beloved Jurassic 5.

For those of you who are from parts of the world that hate fun, J5 is a Southern California sextet made up of four MCs and two DJs (one of whom played the science teacher in Juno!). Lots of Islam and basketball and an MC with the deepest voice I've ever heard. The album I was listening to, over and over, every day, was their debut LP, which changed my life.

Before you're all like, "But how could this raucous hip-hop have affected you, Canadian girl loser and freshman in high school?" let me remind you: two younger siblings. My brother is eight years younger than me, which means that when I was 13, he was five years old. When I was starting high school, we were still listening to Raffi and Sharon Lois and Bram. Oh, and this little number called Unplucked!, which made me want to hurl myself right out of our minivan every time it was played. Which it was. Daily.

Furthermore, we lived in a teeny tiny town, with Ottawa (read: shitty) radio stations that played Billy Joel's song "River of Dreams" every fifteen minutes. There was zero access to good music. My parents liked Leonard Cohen, who, to a twelve-year-old, sounds like a sex-obsessed brontosaurus, and my first CD was Dance Mix '95.

You can see that I'm starting from pretty rough scratch here.

In any case, J5 was the tape I played all the freaking time. I dug out my walkman and listening on my way to school. I played that thing as I was falling asleep. Strangely, at no time did I ever wonder if there were other like-minded music acts out there; not until later in high school, when my classmate Graham put together a tape for me, did I encounter Mr. Lif and Aesop Rock. When I went out and did my own research, there was a wealth of shit out there (all of which, it should be noted, drove my mother crazy). I'm not going to name-drop everyone I've ever listened to; suffice it say there was a period of time when I was fucking obsessed with it.

The Hip-Hop Years (1999-2003) were some of the most fun I've ever had as a music fan. I still listen to hip-hop. I still love dancing around in my underwear, fully knowing how strange I look, not caring. For example, the new K'naan is freaking my shit out. Seriously: go buy it. Buy it. It's incredible that I can trace a decade-long interest back to a single source. From that initial tape to a entire world of music? Pretty awesome. One might even say life changing.

Map[Quest for Fire]fox

Last week, I got fed up with never being able to answer the geography questions in crosswords, broke down, and bought an atlas. Honestly, this may be the best thing I've ever done for myself. University and living on my own are okay, I guess, but knowing where Aruba is? Amazing.

Seriously, I am a map geek. Transit maps are my one true love, which has led, in the past, to purchases like this book, which I found at the MTA's Transit Museum. (Mecca!) That book, with its complete compendium of subway maps and unabashed cartographic nerdery, is like soul food. But nerd cannot live on transit map alone: I have happily perused city street maps in the Yellow Pages as a way to kill time, and I've had a blast looking at bike maps, highway maps, Mapquest, and the You Are Here signs in malls. I'm not picky. I'm incredibly dorky, but picky I'm not.

Even if that journey is only navigating from my house to the Costco on the Queensway, maps are an incredibly succinct and well-designed infomation tool. Instead of all that "head east, turn right, blah blah blah" nonsense that infects giving directions, maps are all, "Here, just follow this line. I'll get you there. Don't sweat it." Very reassuring. And as a person who will forget whose number I've dialled as the phone is ringing, verbal directions tend run a swift course: in one ear...you know the rest.

Besides, we've all seen that map where people have plotted where they've gone, or where they've moved from. It's delightful; I feel like I know so much more about a person if I know that they spend time in Amsterdam. Or Israel. Or Brazil. That's ridiculous, of course, but it's the same phenomenon that makes a guy go from average to scorching hot as soon as he reveals an accent. We love stories, and studding your map with I've-been-here pins implies you've got a bunch.

I'm looking forward to the day when I get to add some pins to my own map. I was relatively well-travelled as a small child: trips to Japan and Hong Kong aren't totally common in the 5-to-7 year old category. Since then, though, I've stuck to North America, and it's a shame. I've never seen the Eiffel Tower, or Nile Delta in full desert bloom, or the Andes. But I'd like to.

So, yeah: maps are a promise, too, not just a tool. (Ha: tool.) And by the way, without even having to refer back to the atlas? Aruba's just north of Venezuela. Apparently, it's owned by The Netherlands. Yeah, I'm that good. Suck on that, Matt Jones.

I'm So Hungry I Could Eat A Horse

If it wasn't for the sheer tastiness of aged cheddar, steak, yogurt, honey, ribs, poutine, sushi, shui mai, goat cheese, pork chops, lasagna, calamari, milk chocolate, and Kraft Dinner (what? It's delicious), I could totally be a vegan.

But, seeing as how I enjoy eating all those things, I really don't think veganism is in the cards. Now, I'm not like my friend Dan, who eats one vegetable (peas) and otherwise survives on pepperoni pizza, pepperettes, potatoes, and pasta. It's actually just dawned on me that Dan might be playing an elaborate joke on the rest of us by claiming not to eat vegetables. The truth is, he doesn't eat foods that don't being with the letter P. Huh. Tricky, Dan! Very tricky! I'll bring you a plum or a pear and test my theory.

Okay, enough of that sidebar; back to the vegans. I am all for harm reduction and conscious eating. This is the same reason I don't eat cat-kebabs: I'm conscious of the fact that it's gross. By the same token, so is pea soup. And Clamato. See? It's possible to say, "I choose not to eat things based on the fact that I think they're yucky, and not as some part of some elaborate lecture to the rest of you." It's easy. If someone made me pea soup, however, I would eat it. I'm polite. If someone made me a cat-kebab, I would...question my relationship with that person. But I think my point has been made.

Vegan feels like a scold and a fad. It seems to be one of those early-twenties tricks that the whole going-to-India demographic pulls, like, you know, going to India or wwoofing. Snore. I prefer to have my self-consciousness raised in a way that doesn't insult the hostess as I systematically reject the entire dinner-party menu. "Is there butter in that? Because I can't really eat butter and HYUCK!," that last part being where I use my fighting skills to render them incapable of speech and further douchebaggery. (Special move? Spatula attack.)

Vegans: you can, in fact, eat butter. You can also eat sushi, and pork chops, and delicious Kraft Dinner. You choose not to. So when someone is cooking for you, don't be a prick. Eat the damned soup, even if it's made with chicken broth. Will you die if you eat an egg? If you won't up and die, just eat the damn egg. Stop telling me how good Fresh is (it's not, seriously). Knock it off with the lectures about reducing impact and footprints as you jangle your car keys at me. Or, worse, wave your Air India boarding pass in my face. I hate hypocrisy, especially coupled with the earnest humorlessness that hippies, wwoofers, and vegans often specialize in.

I'm not going to feed you cheese or honey or chicken breast. In fact, I'm not going to feed you at all. It stresses me out too much to be that focused on food. Vegans are often hospitable and lovely to be around, but seriously, dudes, I can't have The Vegan Talk anymore. So let's just call it a day with that, okay? Fellas? Ladies? No more talking about Nayonaise or factory farms. Let's keep the kitchen out of the living room from now on.

Parley Usted Englais?

I've noticed a disturbing trend in the last half-dozen or so books I've read. No, it's not anything Flowers In The Attic-y or anything. I've been bumping up against a bunch of Spanish in these books (Blood Meridian and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, specifically), and have left these tomes epically confused.

I speak passable French. By "passable" I mean I can order hot dogs by asking for "les chiens chauds" instead of "les hot dogs," but philosophical discussions or punning is beyond my grasp. But Spanish is totally Fifth-Dimension to my white-girl ears. It has been helpful to me in the recent past, as my apartment is infested with raccoons who are (allegedly) afraid of foreign languages, so I've been yelling Bolivian place names at the skittery walls, but conversationally, I am 100% Spanish busted.

So finding important dialogue being conducted in, you know, a foreign language, was a little disconcerting. It wasn't a sprinkling of words here and there, either; it was the more difficult-to-Google words like "bitchslap" and entire chunks of dialogue that exposited the action for the next ten pages. No footnotes. No glossary. No nothin'. Totally left in the cold.

The whole thing made me wonder about how I would fare in a foreign land (ooh...Puerto Rico!), and by extension, how the recently arrived cope here. For all our "multiculturalism," the official language of Toronto seems to be English, with a large Mandarin epicenter. We don't get exposed to tons of Hindi, or Arabic, or Spanish, or even French, that "official" Canadian language of ours. We have pockets of people who can talk gorgeously to each other and brokenly to bank tellers, and not a lot of overlap.

Reading these books gave me a tiny, safe taste of what that would be like: scared that I'm missing something important, but also thrilled at the snippets that I do comprehend. It also made me wonder about how fast I could grab at a new language; how fast any of us could, really. Scarily, it's probably not as fast we would like, chiens-chauds notwithstanding.

I have to give a shoutout to Junot Diaz, however, who is a) a fantastic scribe and b) taught me me, through his book, how to tell people they're goddammed drunks ("Usted es una maldita borracha!" or something like that), which is sure to come in handy in Cancun. Thanks, Junot; we should run away to deepest Quebec together, practicing our French as we go. The same can be said for Cormac McCarthy, although his book is much heavier on the "terrifying violence" and I feel that he would be more useful doing a play-by-play of último combatiente tournaments. To each his own, I guess. Or, "los perros ladran, la caravana pasa, conjeturo."

Dude Hair

I'm not going to lie: a good head of hair is important to women. Not our own - although, Jesus, if Cosmo has taught me anything, a woman's hair is second only to nuclear war in the category of "Things that can really ruin your day" - but men's hair.

Some women prefer the long, flowing locks of Fabio but these women are insane. Long hair on men is unequivocally gross. Anything past the ears is too long. I recognize that trips to the barber are a chore, but dude hair that is unkempt and scraggly is just so gross. Also terrible is the coiffed long-haired dude. You know: the guy who goes to a salon and wears "product," has "movement" and makes me "want to die."

Real women know that a shorter 'do is best. Not the skinhead thing; it's a rare guy who works that. GQ points out it's mostly just a beacon that says "I AM LOSING MY HAIR" louder than any horseshoe shape ever would. Besides, if you have hair, and you're going bald...why rush it? You'll get there soon enough. (Sucker.)

So, not too long, not too short...and then there's the greatest stumbling block of all.

Facial hair. God, I love beards. There are as many ways to wear facial hair as there are men, but so many (SO MANY!) men fuck it up. I will dispense with the point-by-point breakdown of what's good and what's stupid. Let me just say this: if you have created this monstrosity for yourself, you need professional help. Not just with your beard, either. You need help with your whole damned life.

Myself, I'm a big fan of the indie beard. A little kept, well past pubescent, not overly sculpted, and definitely not hanging down into a sweater. No wax or pomade necessary. Just regular, standard-issue Beard. Rocking a solo mustache is for dads (Hi Dad!) and the goatee is tricky unless you're playing baseball for the Mariners. Beards are the Alpha and Omega of facial hair. Respect must be given. No weird scraggly bits or elaborate hair-cliffs that jut out from the face. Just straight, 100%, unadulterated Beard.

Oh, and a note to those who are graying: if you aren't regularly waking up behind a 7-11 with angel dust all down the front of your shirt, your youthful under-40 face will offset the gray. It makes a man seem distinguished; for those who are barely into their adult years, they add an air of worldliness that can be invaluable in women-dating and job-getting. Embrace it! And don't try to offset your new manliness by growing a mustache that wraps around your nipples.

I can't believe someone actually did that. Clearly, not enough people are reading this thing.

Inky and the Brain

A few years ago, I came up with The Ultimate Tattoo design (a skull, with a snake [barfing a rose] coming out of its eye socket, on fire, with a knife through it) but decided it might be construed as "aggressive" in today's economy. Various other designs have been considered, but what I really want is, like, a fucking gigantic tattoo. The walls of Jericho down my arm, or a pirate fight scene across my shoulders, or a a diagram of a cell. I'm not super interested in pretty, "girl" tattoos. I don't want a line of stars, or a line drawing of some lithe girl. Tattoos are mutilations; I want one that reflects that.

It's weird to think about tats as scarifications; it's like being freaked out by earrings. But it's true. And some ink is ugly. Ironic or joke tattoos are for assholes - you're going to have that jack-off ink until you die, bonehead. Ink that wasn't thought out makes people wonder if you're a moron (you picked that salamander out the book? How original). You shouldn't have to tell some epic saga when someone asks why you got one, but you should have a story, or a reason, or a clue.

The old-school really appeals to me: the stars on the elbows, for example. Classic! Anchors, pin-up girls, Death Before Dishonor, etc.: all good choices. Words also work. I'm a reader and a writer, and quotes (never names!) make sense. I love the colour and the aesthetic of a really beautiful piece of work, one with an old-timey feel to it. Tattoos should feel like maybe you acquired it during your stint in the merchant marines, not as the culmination of some drunken weekend with your sorority sisters. Oh, and they should be big: goofy little Kanji characters on the inside of your wrist isn't going to cut it, sister.

On the other hand, I feel like there's a lifestyle associated with the kind of tattoos I want. It's a punk-rock thing. I'm not a punk. I already wear a lot of black and have gauged ears. People already think I'm hard. (These people have never spoken to me; in reality, I'm goofy and kind of nervous.) I don't want to misrepresent myself, or seem like I'm part of culture that I'm not. It wouldn't be posing, because I genuinely like the look, but it could be construed that way.

But you know what? I don't really care. I'm not curing cancer, or defining myself by the way I change my look. It's not about that. I want an investment in something beautiful and tough.