Fun and Winter Games

Tonight we ventured forth into the freezing night to attend the somethingth-annual Icycle event at the beautiful Dufferin Grove Park. Icycle, for the uninformed, is an event where tough bike men and bike women ride their bikes on a hockey rink, racing for bragging rights and augemented toughness skills.

The event itself doesn't sounds like it's all that amazing. I mean, ice rinks aren't really all that sexy, and winter biking tends to be the domain of the spandexed or the crusty. However, when I saw those dudes whipping around a corner that is by definition pure ice, at speeds faster than I would travel on a dry May day, I'm impressed. The bikes are kitted out with studded tires, enabling a higher grippiness than can usually be tapped by a bike tire, but the skill is evident.

The highlight of the event was the so-called "rubber race," which is done on street bikes sans studded tires. Two of the competitors bravely stripped down to their skivvies and raced in the nearly altogether. Did they crash? Oh yes they did. To be fair, everyone crashed, including the racer we dubbed L'apostrophe: the unbelievably cute and bearded cyclist whose bent-over posture and skintight black racing suit made him look like a wiggly comma. Sigh.

At one point, I turned to my friend Liz and told her that small towns could eat it: cities are where it's at. She looked at me strangely but agreed that cities do offer the chance to raise your kids in a place with events that sort of defy the imagination. There were little kids in attendance, despite the high number of probably-drunk and definitely less-than-fully-toothed spectators in attendance. I think that's nice. Exposing your kids to wackjobs in a fun, safe environment is a cornerstone of good parenting.

The event provided a nice contrast to the Olympics that are currently dominating the airwaves/columns/national imagination. I will totally cop to the fact that watching the opening ceremonies last night made me feel very rah-rah Canada. I watched them in a bar, surrounded with friends and other Canucks, with the sound off and the Talking Heads blasting. It was the best way to watch 'em, really. Even though we're hosting the games, though, the Olympics aren't really about sports; rather, they're about watching sports on TV, which isn't really an activity I indulge in, like, ever. I liked seeing how we think of ourselves translated into song, dance, graphics and atmosphere, and was pleased to note that the program didn't focus exclusively on Native culture and the Canadian Shield. In fact, spoken word artist Shane Koyczan capped off the pageant with a bombastic poem while an urban nightscape shimmered around him. That was cool, and felt very honestly Canadian.

We'll see how much my friends and I end up watching; I'll probably check out some of the bigger moments, like hockey and figure skating. I tend to identify more with events like Icycle: accessible, a little irreverent, thrillingly athletic and definitely not for the faint of heart.

Travel Time

As I was sitting in class tonight, listening to my adorable and probably-gay professor act out religious discourses from Joseph Andrews, drifting between rapt attention and total space-cadet mindlessness, it occurred to me that I will never be a great adventurer.

My godfather is the type of person who will jaunt off to, like, the DRC at the drop of a hat, whereas I can barely muster the moral fortitude to venture outside when it's cold. I like to think of myself as devotedly Canadian, but I've seen far less of the country than some folks, and I definitely haven't approached the wilder and woollier parts of this great nation. Am I a total wiener? Moreover, is my lack of enthusiasm for great, worldly travel some sort of personal failing?

I would have made a lousy Puritan. Not only are those shoe buckles outrageously ugly, but crossing an entire ocean in order to strike out on my own, with only my dour husband and malnourished children to keep me company? No thanks. I totally would have become a courtesan, because even being pimped out sounds good if you're trading sex for the privilege of not being a Puritanical jerkwad.

I am distinctly urban. Oh, sure, I love the beach and the prairies and the mountains and all that, but the truth is, I needs me some community. That's hard to come by in the most remote regions of the world. Sure, the view from Everest is probably pretty breathtaking - literally - but who's up there with you? A bunch of American tourists and some National Geographic staffers? Thanks, but I'll take my surly baristas and my goofy cycling events and the chance to be hit on by strangers at bars. I like the creature comforts that come with a familiar city.

For example, every time I go to Montreal, I feel totally lost. That isn't some great meta statement about the world and my place in it: I literally cannot figure out where I am. Ever. There I am, in a firmly established and totally cosmopolitan city, complete with subway system and a freakin' navigational landmark, and I'm all, "Where am I? Where's Mordechai Richler? Is that a bagel? Who speaks English here? Let me talk to them." I can only imagine how well I'd do in, like, Thailand. As an Echo Boomer, I'm legally obligated to travel there at least once in my 20s, but let me tell you: I'm not looking forward to it.

But let's confabulate for a moment. Imagine that we had been born a scant century earlier. Back when they sold tapeworms as diet aids, before the rise of the car. Back when travel by ocean liner wasn't the sole property of wealthy Baby Boomers who want to see the Caribbean without leaving the buffet option at the Mandarin, but the most legitimate option for crossing the Atlantic. Would some dormant adventurous side of my soul awake? Would I yearn for the glories of the Western plains, the Amazonian thrill of discoveries, the delights of the capes? Or would I be the crankiest potato farmer in Polish history, constantly whining about the cold and the invasions? Honestly, I'm leaning towards the latter.

I wish I was the type of person who just jets off wherever, whenever. Even on a stricter budget, I rarely bus myself anywhere exotic (like, say, Windsor), just the sake of seeing something new. I got homesick in Ann Arbor, for crying out loud. It's a totally sweet college town less than 500 clicks away, and I was freaked out. I guess I should consider myself lucky to have found a town that fits me so well, so I don't have to jaunt around the globe in a fit of uncomfortable pique, waiting to find the places that will settle me down.

Wintertime, And The Living is Queasy

Writer's block. Is there a more painful thing for a scribe to encounter? Oh sure, the obvious answer is kidney stones - those are a sumbitch on the nether regions, from what I understand - but I am having a total whiteout moment over here, and it's killing me.

It's not just writer's block. Looking back over the blog, there's been no real theme (okay, yes, "myself" is a theme, but it's not one I'm necessarily proud of. Let's hear it for narcissism!); I don't focus on fashion, or music, or TV, food and drink, or the peculiar proclivities of 13-year-old fashion bloggers. Not having a specific niche is nice. I do get to enjoy both ragging on Chuck Klosterman - my inaugural blog post! - and giggling over high school theatre stars. On the other hand, it sort of makes it tough, because no real theme means I can write about anything. Sometimes, freedom from choice isn't all that awesome.

Anyway, I'm still in the middle of a run of serious winter blues, and had two (two!) weird let's-feel-faint episodes this weekend, so physically, I'm a little thousand-yard-stare these days. I'm having a hard time concentrating - especially on school, which is a bummer for a student with one semester left. All I really want to do is hole up in my apartment, order takeout and take baths, but I have obligations. School? Pshaw. Family? They live far! Friends? Meh.

See? Not a happy girl.

Please forgive my lack of awesomeness in this post, since there's a definite reason (writer's block, January blahs, orange-alert level probable dehydration...take your pick), and send positive vibes my way. Or, feel free to suggest topics, since I do love a Lois Lane-style assignment or two. And if you're out there feeling lonely and wintry and altogether like you've been dealt an unjustly low hand, take solace in the fact that I'm right there with you. And take solace that things can only really get better from here. The days are getting longer, you can buy sasparilla in your local corner store, and reading week is right around the corner. C'mon, babies: let's feel awesome together!

Go Look It Up

While I admittedly have a soft spot for atlases - the hours of fun perusing places I'll never visit, like Vienna or Wisconsin - I also have a fondness for the atlas's verbose twin, the dictionary. Reading Infinite Jest this summer taught me to have one finger on the page and another frantically leafing through my shoddy "student dictionary" which, shockingly, failed to define "erumpent." What a crock.

While my crush on A.J. Jacobs was definitely solidified by his hilariously literal attempt to live the Bible's rules, he really caught my attention when he wrote about reading the Encyclopedia. Lo, that multi-volumed set was a real spine-masher, but he read the sucker. In the process, he irritated his wife, learned that Charles Darwin married his cousin, and got a book deal. I'm not nearly as hardcore about my information acquisition; I prefer to leaf through the dictionary when I'm reduced to trolling for crossword answers, a habit I feel is morally better than just Googling the answer. Full disclosure: my sister and I also have a weekly phone date, where we help each other out with the Globe and Mail's puzzle. We are unrepentant cheaters.

Be it an atlas, an encyclopedia or a dictionary, the fact is, human beings love to fussbudget around with information. I just read an article on the revision of the Oxford English Dictionary, that old flag-bearer and the former home for defintions like the one for "prothodaw," which you can pull out at your next family reunion: it means "a prime simpleton, a noodle of the first rank." Now there's an insult! Apparently the OED is revising, and to make room for nonsense words like "Google," they're tightening up "prothodaw," which is now a businesslike "complete idiot." Nice, but it doesn't sing the way that other one does.

What happens to us when the dictionary changes? I feel a sense of loss for words that no longer make the cut, because we lose tiny bits of our collective past. Editing is good: it keeps us tight, keeps the prose lean and the story sharp. But it also relieves us of moments of precision, or even worse, erudition. Words are fun! Let's keep them around!

My personal favourite is The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce, noted he-man-woman-hater and satirist of the first rank. Written in 1911, Bierce is not exactly a thigh-slapper of the most recent vintage, but still rates a smirk from this university student when he defines a "lecturer" as "one with his hand in your pocket, his tongue in your ear and his faith in your patience." There are other non-canonical dictionaries out there (the Urban one maybe the most notable for our timeslice), but Bierce's is my favourite because it both introduces me to new words (encomiast, anyone?) and makes me smile at contemporary ones ("radicalism: the conservatism of tomorrow injected in the affairs of today.")

Dictionaries are fun to leaf through, because they're organized in such a way that "amanuensis" and "alter ego" are nestled in but good. They're a primo spot for nerdette kids like me to hang out. Dictionaries are all about uncontextualized information, crap that you can spout out at some later date, impressing some (a treasured few), and leaving you, the reader, with a gee-whiz sense of wonder at just how filigreed and amazing something like language can actually be. They work the same way atlases do: creating worlds other than our tiny own, acting as a kaleidescope for the possibilities.

As sources of information, yeah, sure, meh: now we have the internet, so we've built our grand dictionary out of zeroes and ones. On the other hand, the physical act of looking something up in a book has become such a radical throwback that it's almost necessary to luxuriate in the act inself. Taking in the words hidden in our search for information allows us to learn things we didn't know we wanted to learn. In that, the dictionary is far superiour than some johnny-come-lately internet, which faithfully feeds us only what we wanted to know. Dictionaries, in addition to teaching us information, also teach us curiosity. Nice work for a collection of words that don't even tell a story.

Must-See DVD

I read something when I was in my teens (oh, those halcyon salad days of youth!) that basically posed the question, why is it that people are supposed to respect you when you're well-read, but they're supposed to look down on you when you've watched a bunch of TV? Why is there no such thing as "well-viewed"?

Which, after a couple weeks of getting caught up with Weeds and getting to know Californication, and talking about Lost, is a timely question. There's a sense of televisual urgency at my address. My mom got my dad season one of The Wire for his birthday. I've been reccommended by at least two people in the last two weeks that Dexter is must-see TV. I finished off the rest of Glee and read the recaps of Freaks and Geeks on Television Without Pity, the incomparably excellent source for amazing retellings of episodes - imagine your pithiest friends telling you watch you missed when you went to go visit your sick aunt in the hospital (you idiot) and missed the finale of Chuck because you were busy being a human, with emotions.

Remember "Must-See TV," the Thursday-night lineup on NBC? It had Seinfeld and Friends, which are now almost quaint in their straightforward approach. They're still excellent shows, but in the face of those rowdy cable channels, the networks just can't compete. The TV on the upper channels is so good: fresh writing, interesting actors, and multiple storylines that don't treat the audience like we're morons who can't follow an episode of Starsky & Hutch without getting confused. Television's always been entertaining; now it's got a certain amount of critical and artistic heft to it as well. I'd guess it started when The Sopranos made HBO, just, like, a major player (although that might just be my perception. HBO's been around for a long time, and The Sopranos began when I was in my early teens and just starting to pay attention to this kind of thing. However, I do feel that HBO used to a synonym for "boxing matches and soft-core porn"); it also has to do with DVDs and renting things by the season instead of waiting around at home like a jerk every week. I will gladly give up a couple days in order to power through a season of Big Love, because it's fun and funny and feels like a movie instead of a TV show.

I think that's the appeal in this new generation of TV: it feels like a movie. I don't really watch all that many movies, because movie theatre seats are supremely uncomfortable and I can't lie down, plus 120 minutes is just a little bit outside my attention span but anything less and I feel ripped off. TV, on the other hand, gives people both more and less: shorter little bumps of TV, but longer overall storyline. The episodic nature of TV is what makes it appealing, because you don't have to commit to a whole nine hour block - you can do it in 22-minute chunks.

TV used to be gauche, this lowest-common denominator experience that both united the masses and made us feel stupid. With this fractured explosion of cable channels, however, network TV is over: they're littered with identical procedural shows (CSI: What?, etc.) and dumb-ass reality tripe. But the real action is just starting. This is a new generation of whip-smart and sexy TV, TV that swears and fornicates and shows some T and A and brings us great actors and great writers and over-the-top set design and lush family drama: this is must-see TV.

The Winter Of My Discontent

Right now, I have a bunch of tulips sitting in a vase on a side table. They look rough - obviously, they're dead, with the tips of the leaves all dried up and the petals on the floor. And that's sort of how I'm feeling today.

Even though the weather has been amazing and warm, I'm still getting all winter-blah feeling up in here. It's awards season in Hollywood, and while they're off wearing gowns and being tanned, I'm marooned in my house with only my sweatpants and a freezer full of Rolo ice cream to keep me company. I guess it's better than last winter, when my walls were infested with raccoons and they kept having passionate, soap-opera sex and domestic disputes that were clearly audible through the plaster and lathe. Audible, and frightening when they started screaming at each other at three in the morning and it sounded like a horror movie was happening on the other side of the (thin!) wall and it was dark and I was roused from my pre-slumber drifting with icy-cold hands of fear throttling my gut. That was fun.

Winter is just a blah time for some people. That whole Seasonal Affective Disorder - which I don't suffer from, thank god, or else I would be permanently parked under on of those embarassing UV lights that are supposed to "cure" or "fix" your winter blues by bombarding you with vitamin D, or whatever folderol voodoo science it does - is very relatable. I'm less interested in doing things like riding my bike. My metabolism suffers. Everything just sort of winds down. In the summer, people are excited! To be out! Of the house! But come January, most folks hunker down and wait it out.

It's not helping that I've gone out twice in the last two days. Alcohol is a depressant, and while it may get the party started in the evening, it totally bums me out the next day. All I've done so far today is watch episodes of Glee and take a bath. That's not productive. It's not exactly a hangover - I'm not wrapped around the toilet or sweating out vodka or anything - but it's a subtle unbalancing of the day. It's like walking on a big ship. You know something's a little unsteady, but everything looks normal, so it feels extra weird when the looks and the feeling of reality don't quite overlap.

Booze or winter blues, the feeling's the same. There's a frustrated urge to sleep through most of the day, to spend all my time wrapped in a duvet and sighing. That's what I'm doing right now, actually. It's not helped by moaning about it, either. Unlike spats with friends or trouble at work, the feeling of discontent that happens in the short winter days isn't one that can be talked out. We just have to wait. Wait until the buds are on the trees, the grimy snow finally melts away, the clocks have been adjusted, and the parkas have been stashed in the closet for the season. Winter is a waiting game, and unfortunately, today I feel like I'm losing.

The Boyfriend Brigade

Last weekend, I was out with a friend, decompressing from a dinner with friends, when I started whining. "I want a boyfriend, I want a boyfriend," I snivelled. This girl-move is so attractive that several young men immediately leapt before me and prostrated themselves on the dirty Bistro patio, shouting, "Pick me! Pick me!" Ladies magazines of the world, take note. Steepling my fingers and raising one eyebrow, I performed a visual inspection of the candidates and chose according to height, weight, depth, presumed overlapping interest in music, a caring soul (which can be detected by pore size, for the underinformed) and the ability to carry on semi-coherent conversation with my parents. Having made my selection, we celebrated with grilled cheese sandwiches and are now engaged to be wed.

Oof. No. When am I going to learn that saying something doesn't make it so? Remember that whole "I'm going to be a triathlete" fiasco? Yeah, saying that led to jack squat. I can't even raise one eyebrow.

But this is an interesting moment for me, because it's been a long while since I've felt like dating anyone. A quick primer in My So-Called Dating Life: three ex-boyfriends, one monster heartbreak 2.5 years ago, much kissing, and loads of squeamishness re: commitment. That monster heartbreak shook me like an Etch-A-Sketch, leaving me, as the French say, totally fucked vis-a-vis the love. It's taken me a long-ass time to come back into the fold; not only was I skittish about having a boyfriend, I was peevish about not having one. That's a lot of ish to deal with.

I'm not going to turn this into an advertisement for myself - if I was desperate, I would take out one of those back-page ads in the NOW magazine - but just the realization that I even wanted to hang out with someone, partner-wise, was kind of a big one. I'm not going to be jumping on the next man's shadow I see, but feeling like the vise around the part of the heart that governs romance (is that the ventricle? Probably not) has loosed is one of great relief.

So. Now I face a quandary. I feel picklish about wanting a boyfriend, because I feel like one of those characters in a rom-com that gazes wistfully out a rain-streaked window while dreaming of something - someone - that may never come. I mean, at the ripe old age of 26, is weird to feel like a romantic washout?

Not to get all Sex And The City on people, what with the stupid rhetorical questions and so on, but how does this work? Dating is complicated (and understatements are fun!), and unfortunately, I'm actually getting old enough that a statistically significant number of "the good ones" are shacked up with loves of their own. And, like, more power to them - the good ones get snagged so early precisely because they're good guys. I used to believe one of those crazy corollaries. You know the tune, so sing along: because I hadn't been snapped up like this morning's fish, I was somehow riddled with flaws and 100% unloveable. Sigh.

The truth is, I might be overly picky and kind of neurotic, but I'm not an asshole. I was holding out on dating because, for whatever reason, I wasn't ready. Maybe it was the heartbreak. Maybe I was too young to really commit to someone. Maybe I needed to get a little more grounded. Maybe I needed to work the phrase "pitching woo" into my dating vocabulary. (I totally said "pitching woo" tonight and felt awesomely retro.) Maybe it's a melange, a blend of all these things and more. Whatever it was, I feel like I'm over it. Bring on the boyfriends: I'm ready for you.