If my morning commute was a Broadway show (and really, who's isn't?), then these chuckleheads would be in the chorus, singing off-key, making me crazy.
Dear Lincoln Navigator drivers,
Once upon a time, you drove Miatas and Honda Civics, and it was good times. Those autos sit low to the groung, hugging the curves. They felt sporty in your hands, no? You felt racy and silky, like the road was scant inches away from your upwardly-mobile ass. It was: if you dropped, say, a can of Pepsi Free out the window, you could have retrieved it simply by opening the door and leaning a slight lean down. No more than, like, 20 degrees.
Times have changes, amigos! Now you're driving what basically amounts to a tank, and it sits way too high, and frankly, I'm afraid of you. You remind me of nothing more than those pictures of overloaded bikes National Geographic is always running in an effort to be all like, "Those foreign people are so crazy!" The top of the car swings crazily over to one side or the other when you make a turn, and it seriously looks like you're driving on two wheels. If you dropped a Coke Zero out the window of one of these bad boys, you've have to disembark altogether.
Adding insult to injury in a smoggy and congested downtown, you also seem to be incapable of sharing a ride with anyone. Or getting off your cell phone. So there you sit in traffic: alone, wired to the gills with both caffeine and cellular technology, the top of your car narrowly missing overpasses, and giving me a coronary every time you make a right-hand turn.
Please remember that when you got your second-to-last raise and decided "What the hell, I like the way they look," you forgot to take into account the fact that this car handles way differently that a coupe, and to adjust your driving style accordingly. Please do that now.
Dear TTC and its attached Bus Drivers,
I totally respect your job and the way you do: driving public transit is a tough job. One small complaint. Why do you consistently show up on routes where I know - I've been on them - there are subway cars running underground?
In Toronto, there's something called the diamond lane, which is pretty much reserved for three vehicles: bike, cab, and bus. I'm not sure which PhD candidate thought it would be a smart idea to combine the most vulnerable, the most erratic and the highest tonnage into one lane, but dude? It's terrifying.
So it's always kind of luxurious to be able to bike in tandem with public transit without it getting all up in my grill the way streetcar tracks do. It's especially nice to walk or bike the Bloor Street Viaduct when a train is rumbling below - just feeling the connect, you know? So to see a bus roar into the bike lane when I know there's a subway car doing its job right below...sort of raises the hackles a bit.
Dear Dude I See Riding an e-Bike Nearly Every Day,
I swear to God, if I see you in the bike lane one more time, I will rip that faux-woodgrain ironic hipster helmet off your shaggy head and punch you right in the smirk.
Dear Practically Every Driver On the Road,
Yes, I signalled.
Dear Harley-Riding Men From Last Week,
I will totally cop to the fact that beating you in traffic made me feel good. I know it wasn't really me - seriously, biking is the fastest way to get through tough traffic. On the other hand, I was wearing a dress and a little sun hat and was riding a huge candy-coloured one-speed cruiser, and y'all were sporting leather vests and hair that hadn't been cut since Woodstock.
Obviously, I get weirdly competitive about and protective of biking as a viable urban transportation option, but this was just too funny to politicize. It was like if Little Bo Peep had beaten Andrew WK in an arm wrestle.
Dear Other Cyclists,
If you pass me (usually looking smug) only to slow down and slow me down, I won't hit you with that e-bike guy's helmet...but I'll definitely be thinking about it.
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
Saturday, August 1, 2009
To Infinity and Beyond
I've been completely sucked into Infinite Jest. I'm sleeping with the Incandenzas - literally, since the book is super heavy and makes a housemate-irritating "thunk" when I heave it onto the floor. (It's too big to fit on my bedside table.) Instead, I opt to just keep it beside me in bed. That way, when I wake up, I can just resume reading it without all the hassle of having to put any feet on the floor.
I know I've rhapsodized about David Foster Wallace before, but at that point, I was kind of a babe-in-the-woods type when it came to how seriously, intensely nuts his writing is. The vocab lesson alone is melting some of my more candy-assed brain cells: seriously, ephebic? erumpent? My dictionary is not up to snuff.
[As a side note, I seriously enjoy reference matierals in a way that I'm coming to suspect might be a little obsessive. Maps and atlases, dictionaries and encyclopedias: I want these items in my house. I understand that the internet is, like, a fairly wealthy source of all this information, but there's something so satisfying about flipping to a page in a book on a mad quest for the definition of sedulous. I don't have photographic memory, but I rely heavily on where chunks of information are on a page, and where that page is in a book. Web pages are hard to flip to on a whim. I like holding information in my hand.]
So to find a book that makes me reach out to other books - multiple books, since Wallace has cast his net onto topics as disparate as Canadian separatists sects, junior competitive tennis, Bostonian AA members, and complex and not-easy-to-follow chemical descriptions of Dexedrine and ratio formulae - boggles the mind. Some of these things, I'm totally rapt with attention. Some...I'm reading, but I'm not enthralled.
But such is life, right? Some parts are totally, eye-glazingly dull (for example, even though I'm a Canadian who was cognizant during that whole Oui-Non debate of 1995, the segments dealing with the violent PQ folks are decisively boring). Other parts are hilarious: the tennis-and-world-domination game Eschaton, played by 13-year-old tennis wonks, ending in an unexpected bloodbath, is so finely crafted and laugh-out-loud funny that I can't help but think Wallace was 100% insane to have written it. In the best way possible, of course.
The part that gave me a distinct feeling of icy fingers along my spine was the AA stats. What really freaked me out was the phrase "tecato gusano," which is definitely hard to Google. What I found were a bunch of references to Infinite Jest itself, and then a little piece about Chicano heroin addicts that makes it clear that Wallace wasn't just making shit up. The tecato gusano is "the worm that cannot be sated", the metaphor for the constant craving for junk that burrows through the gut and mind and soul.
And then the books trips merrily along to other narcotic substances and other mental foofaraws, not to mention fake memoirs, probably-invented street drugs, and an ass-numbing breakdown of how tennis really works, as a construct. It's a freaky read. It's like everything, all the technical and emotional, all the unbelievably complicated and the staggeringly simple, all the young and old and addicted and sober and past and present and future: it's all happening at the same time, and has an equal amount of weight and importance assigned to it.
That's a bowl-me-over type of realization, right there: we're all the stars of our own little movies. Which, like, duh, but that's not often represented in fiction. The books has about ninety thousand speaking parts, and since Wallace is scrupulous in making sure the reader gets to go right inside each person's head, each page brings a new chunk of the human condition to light. Even the small-time Quebecois drug dealers get a whole emotional universe assigned to them, as though they were just as important as Hal Incandenza, the ostensible main character. Which, of course, they are. To themselves.
No wonder the thing is, like, eleven hundred pages long. Even though it's mystically "unreadable" (lies), actually reading it is bringing all this new shit to light, man. I'm nearing the half-way mark, and I have to say, I'm going to be really bummed when it ends.
I know I've rhapsodized about David Foster Wallace before, but at that point, I was kind of a babe-in-the-woods type when it came to how seriously, intensely nuts his writing is. The vocab lesson alone is melting some of my more candy-assed brain cells: seriously, ephebic? erumpent? My dictionary is not up to snuff.
[As a side note, I seriously enjoy reference matierals in a way that I'm coming to suspect might be a little obsessive. Maps and atlases, dictionaries and encyclopedias: I want these items in my house. I understand that the internet is, like, a fairly wealthy source of all this information, but there's something so satisfying about flipping to a page in a book on a mad quest for the definition of sedulous. I don't have photographic memory, but I rely heavily on where chunks of information are on a page, and where that page is in a book. Web pages are hard to flip to on a whim. I like holding information in my hand.]
So to find a book that makes me reach out to other books - multiple books, since Wallace has cast his net onto topics as disparate as Canadian separatists sects, junior competitive tennis, Bostonian AA members, and complex and not-easy-to-follow chemical descriptions of Dexedrine and ratio formulae - boggles the mind. Some of these things, I'm totally rapt with attention. Some...I'm reading, but I'm not enthralled.
But such is life, right? Some parts are totally, eye-glazingly dull (for example, even though I'm a Canadian who was cognizant during that whole Oui-Non debate of 1995, the segments dealing with the violent PQ folks are decisively boring). Other parts are hilarious: the tennis-and-world-domination game Eschaton, played by 13-year-old tennis wonks, ending in an unexpected bloodbath, is so finely crafted and laugh-out-loud funny that I can't help but think Wallace was 100% insane to have written it. In the best way possible, of course.
The part that gave me a distinct feeling of icy fingers along my spine was the AA stats. What really freaked me out was the phrase "tecato gusano," which is definitely hard to Google. What I found were a bunch of references to Infinite Jest itself, and then a little piece about Chicano heroin addicts that makes it clear that Wallace wasn't just making shit up. The tecato gusano is "the worm that cannot be sated", the metaphor for the constant craving for junk that burrows through the gut and mind and soul.
And then the books trips merrily along to other narcotic substances and other mental foofaraws, not to mention fake memoirs, probably-invented street drugs, and an ass-numbing breakdown of how tennis really works, as a construct. It's a freaky read. It's like everything, all the technical and emotional, all the unbelievably complicated and the staggeringly simple, all the young and old and addicted and sober and past and present and future: it's all happening at the same time, and has an equal amount of weight and importance assigned to it.
That's a bowl-me-over type of realization, right there: we're all the stars of our own little movies. Which, like, duh, but that's not often represented in fiction. The books has about ninety thousand speaking parts, and since Wallace is scrupulous in making sure the reader gets to go right inside each person's head, each page brings a new chunk of the human condition to light. Even the small-time Quebecois drug dealers get a whole emotional universe assigned to them, as though they were just as important as Hal Incandenza, the ostensible main character. Which, of course, they are. To themselves.
No wonder the thing is, like, eleven hundred pages long. Even though it's mystically "unreadable" (lies), actually reading it is bringing all this new shit to light, man. I'm nearing the half-way mark, and I have to say, I'm going to be really bummed when it ends.
Friday, July 31, 2009
Simcoe Says Relax
I passed on writing a fist-raising Canada Day post, mostly because it seemed obvious. However - in the spirit of the upcoming long weekend, I'll totaly give props to this country, not least because some of us will be celebrating Simcoe Day on Monday, and the rest of us will be lazing around on the straightforwardly-named "Civic Holiday." Apparently, the whole point of the dopily named but in-practice dope day off is to "not work." Which is terrific.
Frankly, this whole multiple-named day tickles me pink. I love the day off in summer. I love the constellation of local names for it. Show those colours, Guelph! Or, conversely, Oshawa! (John Galt Day and McLaughlin Day, respectively. Guelph's John Galt is apparently not the Objectivist jerk-off, however. He seems to be the author behind such page-turners as "Ringan Gilhaize" and epics like "The Wandering Jew," a classic somewhere, I'm sure. ) I'd like to have Kochany Day, the hard-to-pronounce but awesome day of "not working" that occurs weekly, on Wednesdays.
Canada's not ultra-commited to leisure the way those frisky Europeans are, but we do okay. We have that mostly-useless "Family Day" in February, where people can sit, cabin-fevered, in their dark, cold home and think about how much they love their family. We have Civic Holiday. Thankgsiving is nice, especially since it's not linked with some obnoxious sporting ritual like it is Down There. I also enjoy the vast amounts of time off I receive as student: Reading Week? Okay!
Where was I? Oh, right: vacations are awesome. Summer vacations are the best. Remember back to when you were a kid, and summer break seemed like a freaking lifetime? I always secretly worried that I wouldn't recognize my classmates when I went back to school. Summer months seemed like huge blocks of time. I got to spend childhood summers in a cottage town - no phone, no internet, no television. Instead, it was glory days of swimming, running around like a maniac, and begging my parents to take us down to the trampolines. It was a great big beach and one of the Great Lakes, it was Christian day camp and trips to the library. It was so nice.
I seriously think one of the greatest gifts a Canadian parent can give to his/her offspring is that of the Canadian summer. After toughing out a brutal winter - and seriously, no matter where you live in Canada, winters are big, sucky messes - Canada is a supermodel, tossing off all that freahwater and flirting with heat waves. Even if you're city bound, most places have at least one decent park: Stanley, High, Mount Royal, or Point Pleasant, not to mention all the zoos, beaches, trails, rivers, and campsites that extend into suburbia and beyond. Even if you're landlocked in Edmonton, you can still enjoy dragging your children around one the historical sites that litter the nation.
It would be a travesty to not enjoy the natural and urban splendors that we have such ready access to, especially on one of those precious vacation days. So get out there! Grab the Subaru or the CCM and play outside! Lord Simcoe would be pleased.
Frankly, this whole multiple-named day tickles me pink. I love the day off in summer. I love the constellation of local names for it. Show those colours, Guelph! Or, conversely, Oshawa! (John Galt Day and McLaughlin Day, respectively. Guelph's John Galt is apparently not the Objectivist jerk-off, however. He seems to be the author behind such page-turners as "Ringan Gilhaize" and epics like "The Wandering Jew," a classic somewhere, I'm sure. ) I'd like to have Kochany Day, the hard-to-pronounce but awesome day of "not working" that occurs weekly, on Wednesdays.
Canada's not ultra-commited to leisure the way those frisky Europeans are, but we do okay. We have that mostly-useless "Family Day" in February, where people can sit, cabin-fevered, in their dark, cold home and think about how much they love their family. We have Civic Holiday. Thankgsiving is nice, especially since it's not linked with some obnoxious sporting ritual like it is Down There. I also enjoy the vast amounts of time off I receive as student: Reading Week? Okay!
Where was I? Oh, right: vacations are awesome. Summer vacations are the best. Remember back to when you were a kid, and summer break seemed like a freaking lifetime? I always secretly worried that I wouldn't recognize my classmates when I went back to school. Summer months seemed like huge blocks of time. I got to spend childhood summers in a cottage town - no phone, no internet, no television. Instead, it was glory days of swimming, running around like a maniac, and begging my parents to take us down to the trampolines. It was a great big beach and one of the Great Lakes, it was Christian day camp and trips to the library. It was so nice.
I seriously think one of the greatest gifts a Canadian parent can give to his/her offspring is that of the Canadian summer. After toughing out a brutal winter - and seriously, no matter where you live in Canada, winters are big, sucky messes - Canada is a supermodel, tossing off all that freahwater and flirting with heat waves. Even if you're city bound, most places have at least one decent park: Stanley, High, Mount Royal, or Point Pleasant, not to mention all the zoos, beaches, trails, rivers, and campsites that extend into suburbia and beyond. Even if you're landlocked in Edmonton, you can still enjoy dragging your children around one the historical sites that litter the nation.
It would be a travesty to not enjoy the natural and urban splendors that we have such ready access to, especially on one of those precious vacation days. So get out there! Grab the Subaru or the CCM and play outside! Lord Simcoe would be pleased.
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Canadian Tire Loves Your Family
I know the old journalistic saw is that "three is a trend" but I'm going to jump the gun just a little and declare a definite pattern. At two. It's a pattern of two. It doesn't quite have the same gut-oomph as a trio, but I'm not sure I care. With that caveat out of the way, can I be like Seinfeld and ask what's the deal with Ovaltine? No, wait, sorry: what's the deal with Canadian Tire's newest product...which is, um, life insurance? No, I'm not kidding: the same people who will sell you a variety of potentially deadly products will also sell you insurance should your canoe/mitre saw/bicycle get out of control and make orphans of your children. It seems a little conflict-of-interest-y, no?
Remember back in the day, when President's Choice decided to offer financial services? "And lo, there was a great guffawing from coast-to-coast." (Memories of Eden, 4:7) Now those little silver bank cards are everywhere. It turned out to be a surprisingly prescient move for PC to sell banking services along with salsa and cheese.
As a sidebar: how is PC so freaking savvy? I feel like they can practically read minds. I'll lie in bed one morning, thinking to myself how much I like ice cream/pad thai/meatless burgers. The next time I go to a store that sells PC goods, bam: there's my baby, and with a 70% chance of being totally delicious. How do they do that? I suspect there's some sort of soul-selling going on.
Anyway, this trend of offering bank services along with tennis rackets is starting to freaking me out. When I was a kid, I remember going to places like Price Club or Costco, thinking how weird it was you could buy eyeglasses and a hot tub from the same store. I guess this two-at-a-time thing started being a phenomenon when drugstores started developing your film for you, as though asthma has something to do photos of your honeymoon. Doubling up is fine: tire centers should have free air for cyclists, and it makes sense for bookstores to sell magazines and fancy stationary. But offering financial services with goods like fruit baskets or socket wrenches sort of boggles the mind.
So, what to do? I guess there's no good reason for Canadian Tire and Presidents' Choice to quit it with the abstract services, especially if people use them. But what's the logical conclusion? Will Dairy Queen start offering health insurance? (God, if that's the case, sign me up. There's something delightful about the very idea.) I'm not sure I'm entirely comfortable with this. It sort of smells weird...maybe like a body that's been found beside a nail gun, holding a life insurance premium...both sold at Canadian Tire. Dun dun dun! I would have made such a bad-ass Agatha Christie if she wasn't already filling that role nicely.
Saturday, July 25, 2009
What Do You Think This Is, A Restaurant?
Back in my salad days of waitressing, I came across a curious specimen time and time again. No, it wasn't rats scurrying around behind the chest freezer, and it wasn't black tar heroin in the basement. (I only encountered heroin the one time, notable as it was.) It was a type of woman, usually in her forties, who had recently decided to be allergic to just about everything, thus making my job as the person taking her food order a bloody nightmare.
I understand food allergies. I have dear friends who are allergic to a variety of comestibles. One of my pals gets what he describes as a "buzzing" in the middle of his forehead if he eats shellfish - usually right before he throws up. Lactose intolerance, nut allergies, reactions to sulphites and red dye number six...there's a variety of foods that are untouchable. Allergies are fairly straightforward: you eat it, and your body goes into hyper-vigilant G.I. Joe mode against enzymes and proteins in the food, creating a battle zone that can be hard to, you know, survive. Food goes in, bad stuff goes down.
There's another breed of folks, however, and their numbers are swelling. These are ladies who need stevia for their coffee because sugar makes them bloat. Women who can't eat a cupcake but will guzzle soy sauce by the gallon. The women - and for some reason, they are usually women - who have developed some sort of finicky food thing and need to be taken care of in a highly intricate way.
Now, I'm not doubting that these people have food sensitivities, and I'm not even questioning their suspect belief that the foods they've been eating all their lives, ingredients that are in everything, have given them deep physical and (probably) psychological damage. Guts get hurt. Furthermore, not every sensitivity is apparent or even present in childhood. For example, I avoid wheat in large amounts. Why? Because when I was fourteen, I took nuclear-grade antibiotics to wipe out whooping cough and completely stripped my gut of healthy bacteria. Now when I eat foods that are difficult to digest, they end up riping me apart.
So, there's a lot unnecessary of information. Sorry. My point is, I understand some of the special requests that happens. My usual rule of thumb is, if it needs an EpiPen, it's the real deal. People who have that level of allergy are pretty good at not freaking out the wait staff: if you're allergic to peanuts, chance are you don't hang out in a lot of Thai restaurants.
However. The other people - the "I don't eat wheat, so can I get the sandwich as a soup?" people - need to stop dining out. Menus are there for a reason. The kitchen is a busy place, and if I go back to my ESL line cook during a Sunday brunch rush and tell him that I need a grilled cheese with substitutions for the cheese and the bread (the butter can stay), the best I'm going to get is a blank look.
If a person knows they can't eat dairy, why order the crème brulee? Many menu items are not created from scratch as customers order them - sorry, but we didn't just whip up the risotto as you were sitting down. It becomes next to impossible to substitute, and irate glares when I say that the hamburger has meat in it aren't helping. You want vegetarian fare, go eat at Vegetarian Haven.
This goes hand in hand with my deeply ingrained suspicion of fake food. Not junk food, per se. I have a deep appreciation for the intense pleasure only a Big Mac can create. The kind of food that is masquerading as something else. Faux-mayonnaise, fake meat, artificial crab, Kraft Dinner without wheat or dairy, and salt without salt in it. That ain't right. It's the kind of chicanery that is often lauded in vegetarian and hippie-dippy joints: "Their chickpea patty with melted asparagus on sprouted spelt bread tasted so much like a cheeseburger!"
Amazing. You know what else tastes like a cheeseburger? A fucking cheeseburger.
The replacement food is never as delicious as the item its pretending to be. It's like a slow child attempting chaos theory: points for trying, but it's not the same. My policy is this: if there is something that you want to eat, then eat it. If it's going to kill you or make you have the runs for a week, then don't eat it. If there's a way to make it as tasty without the problematic ingredient, then by all means, go for it. There are plenty of exceptional flourless brownies in the world. On the other hand, if you're consuming a food that is not as tasty, or comes stuffed with gross chemicals, it might be time to retire it altogether. Have you ever investigated what fake chicken is made of? Real chicken has one ingredient. It's made of chicken.
People shouldn't be so wrapped up in food, but we are. Instead of making it about feng shui or science or whatever, it would be nice if we enjoyed what we eat. Vegetarian? I hope it's because you really, really love vegetables. Avoid wheat? Me too! I generally don't meet folks for bagels. Deathly allergic to scallops? Okay, first of all, that's awful because scallops are delicious. And you might want to give the waitress a heads-up: she can tell you that the soup stock is made from shellfish and avoid that pesky 911 call. Trying to patronize Big Tony's House of Lobster, on the other hand, is just not making good choices.
There is a psychological aspect to dining in a 'straunt. People want to feel cared for. Sometimes, people want to feel coddled and hand-fed. Unfortunately, tasty food means lots of customers, and servers don't always have time to build your meal from scratch. Apologies all around. Ladies: start drinking your coffee with sugar in it. Or...don't order coffee? I know I'm just a lowly waitress, and the Customer Is Always Right, but in this case, you're being a right pain in my butt.
I understand food allergies. I have dear friends who are allergic to a variety of comestibles. One of my pals gets what he describes as a "buzzing" in the middle of his forehead if he eats shellfish - usually right before he throws up. Lactose intolerance, nut allergies, reactions to sulphites and red dye number six...there's a variety of foods that are untouchable. Allergies are fairly straightforward: you eat it, and your body goes into hyper-vigilant G.I. Joe mode against enzymes and proteins in the food, creating a battle zone that can be hard to, you know, survive. Food goes in, bad stuff goes down.
There's another breed of folks, however, and their numbers are swelling. These are ladies who need stevia for their coffee because sugar makes them bloat. Women who can't eat a cupcake but will guzzle soy sauce by the gallon. The women - and for some reason, they are usually women - who have developed some sort of finicky food thing and need to be taken care of in a highly intricate way.
Now, I'm not doubting that these people have food sensitivities, and I'm not even questioning their suspect belief that the foods they've been eating all their lives, ingredients that are in everything, have given them deep physical and (probably) psychological damage. Guts get hurt. Furthermore, not every sensitivity is apparent or even present in childhood. For example, I avoid wheat in large amounts. Why? Because when I was fourteen, I took nuclear-grade antibiotics to wipe out whooping cough and completely stripped my gut of healthy bacteria. Now when I eat foods that are difficult to digest, they end up riping me apart.
So, there's a lot unnecessary of information. Sorry. My point is, I understand some of the special requests that happens. My usual rule of thumb is, if it needs an EpiPen, it's the real deal. People who have that level of allergy are pretty good at not freaking out the wait staff: if you're allergic to peanuts, chance are you don't hang out in a lot of Thai restaurants.
However. The other people - the "I don't eat wheat, so can I get the sandwich as a soup?" people - need to stop dining out. Menus are there for a reason. The kitchen is a busy place, and if I go back to my ESL line cook during a Sunday brunch rush and tell him that I need a grilled cheese with substitutions for the cheese and the bread (the butter can stay), the best I'm going to get is a blank look.
If a person knows they can't eat dairy, why order the crème brulee? Many menu items are not created from scratch as customers order them - sorry, but we didn't just whip up the risotto as you were sitting down. It becomes next to impossible to substitute, and irate glares when I say that the hamburger has meat in it aren't helping. You want vegetarian fare, go eat at Vegetarian Haven.
This goes hand in hand with my deeply ingrained suspicion of fake food. Not junk food, per se. I have a deep appreciation for the intense pleasure only a Big Mac can create. The kind of food that is masquerading as something else. Faux-mayonnaise, fake meat, artificial crab, Kraft Dinner without wheat or dairy, and salt without salt in it. That ain't right. It's the kind of chicanery that is often lauded in vegetarian and hippie-dippy joints: "Their chickpea patty with melted asparagus on sprouted spelt bread tasted so much like a cheeseburger!"
Amazing. You know what else tastes like a cheeseburger? A fucking cheeseburger.
The replacement food is never as delicious as the item its pretending to be. It's like a slow child attempting chaos theory: points for trying, but it's not the same. My policy is this: if there is something that you want to eat, then eat it. If it's going to kill you or make you have the runs for a week, then don't eat it. If there's a way to make it as tasty without the problematic ingredient, then by all means, go for it. There are plenty of exceptional flourless brownies in the world. On the other hand, if you're consuming a food that is not as tasty, or comes stuffed with gross chemicals, it might be time to retire it altogether. Have you ever investigated what fake chicken is made of? Real chicken has one ingredient. It's made of chicken.
People shouldn't be so wrapped up in food, but we are. Instead of making it about feng shui or science or whatever, it would be nice if we enjoyed what we eat. Vegetarian? I hope it's because you really, really love vegetables. Avoid wheat? Me too! I generally don't meet folks for bagels. Deathly allergic to scallops? Okay, first of all, that's awful because scallops are delicious. And you might want to give the waitress a heads-up: she can tell you that the soup stock is made from shellfish and avoid that pesky 911 call. Trying to patronize Big Tony's House of Lobster, on the other hand, is just not making good choices.
There is a psychological aspect to dining in a 'straunt. People want to feel cared for. Sometimes, people want to feel coddled and hand-fed. Unfortunately, tasty food means lots of customers, and servers don't always have time to build your meal from scratch. Apologies all around. Ladies: start drinking your coffee with sugar in it. Or...don't order coffee? I know I'm just a lowly waitress, and the Customer Is Always Right, but in this case, you're being a right pain in my butt.
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
One Night In The Suburbs Of Paris, Ontario
Riddle me this, Batman: if I was to list the following characteristics, who might I be referring to?
1. Dirty rotten plastic hair?
2. Questionable bathing suits worn as outerwear?
3. A direct gaze made unsettling by a wonky eye?
4. Tippy, cross-one-leg-over-the-other-and-learn-waaaay-back poses?
5. Legendary slutting around?
Ghandi. I'd be talking about Ghandi, you dopes. Who else could I possibly be referring to?
Sigh. Paris Hilton. Thankfully, your star seems to be waning: DListed hasn't mentioned you in, like, a month. Unlike K-Fed, who was repulsive and cheery, you were repulsive and horrible. You never made me laugh. Your sexual escapades were tawdry and, unfortunately, everywhere. You got more famous when you went to jail. (You, along with Nicole Richie, actually have really pretty mug shots, but the fact that you have a mug shot at all is troubling.) You got more famous for making friends, which, in the style of the toddler you truly are at heart, were probably imaginary.
Paris Hilton, who shot to stardom after a pointless 2000 Vanity Fair article, was once renowned for taking the barometric pressure of America's relationship with the seamy side of things: arrested for DWI, producer of her own pornography, and legendary for dressing up in basically what amounts to lingerie at black tie events. It was like she got to live out all of our middle-school fantasies. As in, "Wouldn't in be awesome if we drank this whole bottle of fruit wine and then listened to music really loud! Maybe we can dance on the couch, too! Whoaaao!" As the daughter a fancy-pants hotelier and a sibling of a (sigh) handbag designer, she's one of those gals who, if she wants a pony, she's getting a pony.
But P. Hilt has become irrelevant. I'm not sure when it happened, but slowly, other pointless celebs started making inroads in her carefully promoted persona. Maybe it was the recession - she's been pretty quiet since the Big Holy Shit Thing of 2008. Paris's place in the collective consciousness relies on our willingness to consume things. She produced a mind-boggling array of products, including perfume, clothes, a book (who knew she could read?), an album, the aforementioned fake hair, and a maddeningly ungrammatical catchphrase. But buying those things, and buying into her party-all-the-time pose, required gobs of cash.
In a way, her hedonism was just part of what we do. Flashy celebrities have a long and inglorious history in our culture - just look at Loni Anderson. Hell, look at Elizabeth Taylor. She was all different kinds of messy, starting with the child-star label and ending with the with multiple marriages. Weirdly, Liz Taylor was once joined in holy matrimony with...wait for it...Nicky Hilton. No, not Paris's sister, smart guy - her great-uncle. But while Liz Taylor went on to win Oscars, Paris Hilton went on to star in films like The Hottie & The Nottie.
Maybe I'm a little behind the times in proclaiming her flame to be extinguished. After all, it's not like there are millions of people who wake up every morning wondering what the star of Pledge This! has been up to lately. Still, I'll mark this momentous non-occasion in my own special way. I'm thinking fake hair and a bite to eat.
1. Dirty rotten plastic hair?
2. Questionable bathing suits worn as outerwear?
3. A direct gaze made unsettling by a wonky eye?
4. Tippy, cross-one-leg-over-the-other-and-learn-waaaay-back poses?
5. Legendary slutting around?
Ghandi. I'd be talking about Ghandi, you dopes. Who else could I possibly be referring to?
Sigh. Paris Hilton. Thankfully, your star seems to be waning: DListed hasn't mentioned you in, like, a month. Unlike K-Fed, who was repulsive and cheery, you were repulsive and horrible. You never made me laugh. Your sexual escapades were tawdry and, unfortunately, everywhere. You got more famous when you went to jail. (You, along with Nicole Richie, actually have really pretty mug shots, but the fact that you have a mug shot at all is troubling.) You got more famous for making friends, which, in the style of the toddler you truly are at heart, were probably imaginary.
Paris Hilton, who shot to stardom after a pointless 2000 Vanity Fair article, was once renowned for taking the barometric pressure of America's relationship with the seamy side of things: arrested for DWI, producer of her own pornography, and legendary for dressing up in basically what amounts to lingerie at black tie events. It was like she got to live out all of our middle-school fantasies. As in, "Wouldn't in be awesome if we drank this whole bottle of fruit wine and then listened to music really loud! Maybe we can dance on the couch, too! Whoaaao!" As the daughter a fancy-pants hotelier and a sibling of a (sigh) handbag designer, she's one of those gals who, if she wants a pony, she's getting a pony.
But P. Hilt has become irrelevant. I'm not sure when it happened, but slowly, other pointless celebs started making inroads in her carefully promoted persona. Maybe it was the recession - she's been pretty quiet since the Big Holy Shit Thing of 2008. Paris's place in the collective consciousness relies on our willingness to consume things. She produced a mind-boggling array of products, including perfume, clothes, a book (who knew she could read?), an album, the aforementioned fake hair, and a maddeningly ungrammatical catchphrase. But buying those things, and buying into her party-all-the-time pose, required gobs of cash.
In a way, her hedonism was just part of what we do. Flashy celebrities have a long and inglorious history in our culture - just look at Loni Anderson. Hell, look at Elizabeth Taylor. She was all different kinds of messy, starting with the child-star label and ending with the with multiple marriages. Weirdly, Liz Taylor was once joined in holy matrimony with...wait for it...Nicky Hilton. No, not Paris's sister, smart guy - her great-uncle. But while Liz Taylor went on to win Oscars, Paris Hilton went on to star in films like The Hottie & The Nottie.
Maybe I'm a little behind the times in proclaiming her flame to be extinguished. After all, it's not like there are millions of people who wake up every morning wondering what the star of Pledge This! has been up to lately. Still, I'll mark this momentous non-occasion in my own special way. I'm thinking fake hair and a bite to eat.
Monday, July 20, 2009
You Have To Be Jesting
Have you ever woken up one day and realized, apropos of nothing in particular, you've managed to accidentally jump on some obscure cultural bandwagon? Like, after years of living for fixed gear bikes, you stumble across Urban Outfitter's new venture: very pretty fixies that probably won't even kill you. Remember when Stitch 'n' Bitch started heating up yarn shops all over the place? I bet that really chapped the hides of many a nana who had been purling away for years. It's like, every time a burrito joint opens up down the street, you get eighty millions people who are, like, "so into Mission-style." Bitch, please.
Which leads me to Infinite Summer, the national group read of D.F. Wallace's Infinite Jest. According to John Barber of the Globe and Mail, "reading Infinite Jest is like trying to swallow a goat and discovering it is the most stimulating experience imaginable." Preposterous. Infinite Jest is many things, but I can think of something a little kinder to say than, "it's like trying to swallow a goat." Anne Lamott wrote about the phenomenon particular to writers who read: writing like whomever happens to be on our bedside table. Barber, whose prose in the Wallace article verged on hysterical, might be just a tad too immersed in the I.J.
As another 20th-century writer said, so it goes. Infinite Jest is notorious. It's ultra-long, ultra-dense, narratively modeled on (of all things) a fractal: it's not exactly a Dan Brown novel, one of which you can blitz through in about four hours (I find it helps if you're slightly drunk). Inexplicably, it's #2 on Amazon.com right now: right behind something that's designed to look like a Cape Cod weekend, and two ahead of Barney Stinson's Bro Code.
Barber alleges that Infinite Jest is so perfect that the reason Wallace hung himself last September was because he was failing to follow it up in a suitably incandescent manner. To this I say: John Barber, you're kind of a douche. Maybe he, at page 316, knows something that I, at a measly 73 pages, do not. (I do know that, since I was reading it for the pleasure of reading it, not hipster bragging rights, I've totally botched the schedule.)
So far, I can tell you this: it's confusing. The end notes are annoying - flipping 1.2 kilos worth of book back and forth is kind of a bitch. So far, it seems to sort of be about tennis, with a deep snowdrift of street drugs settling over the whole scene.
But I'll also tell you this. As I was reading through footnote 24 ("James O. Incandenza: a Filmography"), the phrase "Untitled. Unfinished. UNRELEASED." cropped up about a half-dozen times.
Thought experiment, nothing too strenuous: try repeating that phrase to yourself. Try thinking about all the things you've left untitled, unfinished, and unreleased. Think about the psyche that makes those three words feel resonant, even if they began as a cliche. That was the moment I started to really fall for the book. Underneath all the technical jargon and fractalized story, there's a real heart.
I'm not mad at the Infinite Summer kids. I like Wallace, and when I got the book a few weeks ago, I was genuinely nervous and exhilarated to read - not an emotion prompted by much fiction. Even though it's nice to feel supported during a massive literary undertaking (and, in the interest of full disclosure, I totally read some of the online discussion about The Dark Tower as I was ripping through those monstrous books), I think I'll leave the conversation on the internet. Even though, as one Jester put it on a forum, “all the cool people are doing it," I'll be swallowing this particular goat alone this summer.
Which leads me to Infinite Summer, the national group read of D.F. Wallace's Infinite Jest. According to John Barber of the Globe and Mail, "reading Infinite Jest is like trying to swallow a goat and discovering it is the most stimulating experience imaginable." Preposterous. Infinite Jest is many things, but I can think of something a little kinder to say than, "it's like trying to swallow a goat." Anne Lamott wrote about the phenomenon particular to writers who read: writing like whomever happens to be on our bedside table. Barber, whose prose in the Wallace article verged on hysterical, might be just a tad too immersed in the I.J.
As another 20th-century writer said, so it goes. Infinite Jest is notorious. It's ultra-long, ultra-dense, narratively modeled on (of all things) a fractal: it's not exactly a Dan Brown novel, one of which you can blitz through in about four hours (I find it helps if you're slightly drunk). Inexplicably, it's #2 on Amazon.com right now: right behind something that's designed to look like a Cape Cod weekend, and two ahead of Barney Stinson's Bro Code.
Barber alleges that Infinite Jest is so perfect that the reason Wallace hung himself last September was because he was failing to follow it up in a suitably incandescent manner. To this I say: John Barber, you're kind of a douche. Maybe he, at page 316, knows something that I, at a measly 73 pages, do not. (I do know that, since I was reading it for the pleasure of reading it, not hipster bragging rights, I've totally botched the schedule.)
So far, I can tell you this: it's confusing. The end notes are annoying - flipping 1.2 kilos worth of book back and forth is kind of a bitch. So far, it seems to sort of be about tennis, with a deep snowdrift of street drugs settling over the whole scene.
But I'll also tell you this. As I was reading through footnote 24 ("James O. Incandenza: a Filmography"), the phrase "Untitled. Unfinished. UNRELEASED." cropped up about a half-dozen times.
Thought experiment, nothing too strenuous: try repeating that phrase to yourself. Try thinking about all the things you've left untitled, unfinished, and unreleased. Think about the psyche that makes those three words feel resonant, even if they began as a cliche. That was the moment I started to really fall for the book. Underneath all the technical jargon and fractalized story, there's a real heart.
I'm not mad at the Infinite Summer kids. I like Wallace, and when I got the book a few weeks ago, I was genuinely nervous and exhilarated to read - not an emotion prompted by much fiction. Even though it's nice to feel supported during a massive literary undertaking (and, in the interest of full disclosure, I totally read some of the online discussion about The Dark Tower as I was ripping through those monstrous books), I think I'll leave the conversation on the internet. Even though, as one Jester put it on a forum, “all the cool people are doing it," I'll be swallowing this particular goat alone this summer.
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