Tight One On

When he was much, much younger, my now-handsomely adult brother used to give my mom tights. Every Christmas and birthday, he would proudly hand over a new pair or two, the rest of us would grouse about the predictability of it all, and she would graciously thank her toddler child, who was probably attracted to the bright colours and knew that, as a small child, legs were the most promininent feature of the visual field.

If I was a creepier older sister, I would crack wise about a nascent lingerie fetish, but that's so far offside that I wouldn't be able to see the side any more. Since, for once, I'm erring on the non-disgusting side of the mind - that would be the left side, probably - let's talk tights.

Much like cruiser-style bikes and fingerless gloves, tights are the perfect seasonal bridge. With cruiser bikes, you can coast into winter knowing you're upright and your brakes aren't quite as likely to crap out on you mid-yellow light. With the fingerless gloves, you retain your beer-bottle-opening dexterity and warmth into the chilly season. And tights provide the perfect way to showcase both your summer miniskirts and the leftover thigh muscles you earned through the aforementioned bicycling. They're all throwbacks and promises: remember when things were nice? Think they'll ever be nice again? God, I hope so.

On the especially chilly winter days, I like to layer up with two pairs of tights: one solid, one fishnet, for added warmth. Yeah, I know that's like putting on my finest mesh parka and claiming to be "totally toasty," but the teensy bit of added fabric makes a huge difference. I hate wearing pants (I'm the author of the permanently hiatused comic book"A Jihad Against Pants"), and prefer almost any other option. Short shorts? Bring 'em on. Summer dress? Obviously. Snow pants? I do make an exception there, since snowpants are inherently funny and totally awesome during urban blizzards, if only for the quizzical looks from the sushi resto staff. But tights + skirts + winter is usually a winning combination, of nothing more than it keeps me out of pants.

Despite American Apparel's attempt to sex up tights even more - Dov, they're skintight sheer pants with built in socks; the fetish is already there - by making an assless version, tights have a noble and lengthy history of being for the horsey, poncey set. They also have a variety of sordid cousings, like leggings, which are pretty much the sole domain of Professional Tragedy Lindsay Lohan. I'll be sticking with a nice, classy tight. Sure, the fishnet might add a little sass to the mix, but it's not like my ass is hanging out of my pantyhose. (Sheesh.)

Tights are just one of those little things, those seemingly unimportant details that make both a day and an outfit that much better. In the winter, when the days are short and the wind is just a-howlin', sexy miniskirts bring the mind to summer. Maybe my tot-sized bro, who was gifting my Scorpio mother during her personal high holidays, recognized the shot-in-the-arm value of a brightly coloured pick-me-up during the year's least skirt-friendly months. Or maybe he just really like legs. Either way, I'm feeling it.

A Toronaissance

I've been sort of up in the air lately, what with the impending graduation from university/getting of a real life that's hanging, Damocles-like, over my head. At first I was like, "I'll do grad school!" but, what with my terrible grades and questionable work ethic, I think grad school is going to have to wait until I have some modicum of self-discipline. Then I was like, "Maybe I'll go out West!" but, like with the '49ers, the rush for gold that may not be there isn't that stable. And by "gold," I mean, obviously, "cash money." Then I was like, "I'll go to Africa!" but it took me about 45 seconds to regain my senses and remember that I'm not that adventurous; volunteerism is awesome, obviously, but I'm not into getting eaten to death by the wildlife.

So, where does that leave me? It leaves me where I am now. It leaves me in Toronto, working towards a career in housing (if I have my way) or writing (if my mom can wrestle me into co-operation), or being a professional bum and money-ower (I'm amateur right now, what with OSAP and all). It leaves me having a tiny love affair with Toronto these days.

Oh, sure, the other day I was railing against the winter - we were in the middle of a cold snap that made me question my allegiance to Canada - but generally speaking, there's no other city I'd rather live in. Toronto is urban without being totally insane, with decent transit, great neighbourhoods, an active municipal government, a bitchin' park on the lake, tasty eats, great shopping, the foremost in current fake penis sculptures, good jobs, a variety of loud-'n'-proud scenes (bike, queer, sports, whatever), and

I know Toronto isn't perfect: the architecture can be terrible, the winters are grey and lame, and apartments are expensive. Even if I get into a housing co-op (oh yeah, living the dream!), it's still pretty pricey to live and work in the downtown core. However, there's nowhere else I want to be. Where else am I supposed to live? Milton? Oakville? Jeez Louise, that seems terrible. I love urban living, especially in Toronto, where core-dwellers still have access to things like groceries not bought from a bodega. The energy, the very Canadianess of the place, is so fun to be in. Whenever I go my parent's place, the small-town vibe is almost oppressively quaint; granted, my hometown is designed to be charming, and the encroaching seediness from outlying parts of town is especially disconcerting given that Stratford gives every impression of having some secret social eugenics program designed to obscure and weed out anyone not attractive/rich enough to mug for the limelight.

So, leaving the small town and coming to the Big Smoke was a good move, eventually, though the culture shock was actually fairly acute. After a while, though, adjustments were made and I got used to living in a bustling, vibrant place (which took a surprisingly long time, actually); I found friends and a passion, favourite places to be, libraries, restaurants, magazine shops and patios...all the hallmarks of a cosmopolitan city. Not to mention the chance to get outside of that small-town vibe, to create my own priority list. I have access to things that just don't exist the same way in other places: the Leslie Street Spit, for example, or co-op housing, or bikes. My love affair continues unabashedly.

Winter Tired

Last night, as I was trying frantically to right myself before ultimately sprawling off my bike and into some particularly hand-shredding road ice, I thought to myself, "Maybe I shouldn't bike through the winter." I biked last winter, to the consternation of my parents, who were convinced I was going to die, and occasionally myself, when I was slushed by a Mac truck going around Spadina Crescent.

In fact, I went on to think as my lobster-red hands grasped at a frozen-solid bike frame in a lengthy attempt to pick myself up off the frozen street, "Maybe I shouldn't leave the house until Victoria Day, a scant six months away, and the next time I can look forward to sweating in public."

I am no fan of the winter. Everyone in Toronto is marvelling at the lack of snow this year; we've had one piddly little drop that went hand-in-hand with the aforementioned iciness/hand pain. All my "extreme" friends are whining about how this is going to really mess with the ski season, while all my reasonable friends are whining that this is really going to mess with their regimen of sledding, drinking hot chocolate, and cuddling with their partners. I am more down with the idea of lying on the beach, drinking icy-cold diet colas, and holding hands. I'm not a winter gal.

"But surely there are good things about winter!" I can hear you exclaiming. There are: those things include Toblerone bars and...I've actually been staring at the computer for the past five minutes, trying to suss out a second awesome thing about wintertime. Fail. Sigh.

I'm not a skier; maybe if I was , I'd be more into the whole season. But, I'm a cyclist. Christmas bums me out (too much anticipation, which always spoils the pay-off), the weather is a total drag, my boots get about five times heavier, and patio season is but a distant memory. With other seasons, I can convince myself that it's not such a drag, that 40 degree weather is fun, that I love rain, that the sounds of dead leaves rattling against my third-floor window isn't a creepshow. But winter is 100% dreaded at my house. Nothing delicious is in season, it's cold, and hauling myself around the city is purely annoying.

America gets to have it both ways: they have both Alaska, which is has places named Skagway (hilarious!) and is cold; they also have Hawai'i, which have places named Honolulu (hard to spell!) and is hot as hell. Canada didn't think things through. Oh, sure, we have the North Pole - that's ours, right? - but where is our tropical getaway? If Trudeau was half the genius people thought he was, he would have annexed Cuba and I would be a happier girl today.

The Fantastic Misters

Over at the Fug Nation HQ, the girls have been dilligently monitoring George Clooney's progress from smirking, terrible Batman to fox. How apropos that the Cloons, who is known by the people who know these things, as a foxy kind of guy, is now playing a real fox. Even better, he's doing it in a Wes Anderson-directed adaptation of Roald Dahl's book The Fantastic Mr. Fox, thus bringing together three of my favourite pop-culture creating men. Clooney, Anderson, Dahl: The CAD! Wait, that sounds weird. We'll figure out their sassy acronym later.

Let's take them one at a time, shall we? Clooney, being the biggest star for the older-than-twelve set (Dahl being the biggest star in the under-twelve set, of course), used to annoy the living daylights out of me. Remember when ER was huge and George Clooney was starring in those dippy romantic comedies that aren't really all that funny? Yeah, that was annoying, wasn't it? Right around the time of Three Kings, though, something switched. El Clooneria has made an interesting late-career choice to go funny and political, and that movie was the first flick of his that won me over. Since then, he's gone on to star in several Coen productions - generally a win, in my books - and usually plays disgruntled soldiers, bank robbers, or other unsavories. In fact, looking over Clooney's resume since the mid-'90s, there have been few straight shooters; he loves a loopy morality. Maybe playing Batman did something to him after all.

Wes Anderson can also be sort of a hit-or-miss enterprise. His films are generally precious, sometimes working and sometimes not so much. I loved The Royal Tenenbaums, because it's required by law for people under thirty to love it and identify fiercely with one or more of it's characters. (I'm a Margot, thanks for asking, although I aspire to one day be an Etheline.) Same with Rushmore, which perfectly captured the insecurities and arrogance of high school love. Some of Anderson's later works have been...uneven, especially the oddly paced and highly affected Life Aquatic, which wasn't all that good. But I do admire his aesthetic sense, because everything onscreen seems to have a story. His liveliest movies are practically three-dimensional; his flimsiest can barely muster one.

And then we have Roald Dahl. I'll be honest - those illustrations used to scare the crap out of me. Especially those for The Witches, which I read on vacation (in a cottage with strange closets) and which terrified me. His books balance whimsy with sheer pant-shitting scariness, often with bright children fighting off awful adults. I read a piece in the Globe recently about how Dahl wooed children's imaginations by writing about their suspicions that adults are nothing more than overgrown, beastly children, more like than not imbued with power and strength they use only for evil. As a current adult, it's not a flattering portrait, but hey - he called 'em like he see'd 'em. The best adults in Dahl's worlds are crafty, caring and educational: they teach their young charges that the world is going to try to mess with them, and the best ways to mess with the world right back.

So. To combine these three incandescent people into one project, the recently-released Fantastic Mr. Fox, which is plus animation and a lovely warm colour scheme, and which is a children's movie, which I also enjoy (yeah, I know), and those whole thing just seems ripe with the fruits of potential amazingness. I'm not going to oversell it to myself - I learned my lesson with the heartbreakingly mediocre Life Aquatic, thanks - but I do want to see it. Movies that inspire, books that move mountains, children who grow up to be George Clooney...it's a serious case of the warm 'n' fuzzies over here.

Bus Stopped

Disclaimer: in no way am I saying that the people who live, work, make sexy times and raise families in the following places are bad people. I am credulous of their eyesight, but the residents of these places are, I'm sure, fine people with some sort of mass ocular disorder that prevents them from seeing the truth.

Which is: Kitchener is a total dump.

Oh, there are lovely pockets of the town. Whatever this is happens to be kind of pretty, in a what's-your-point sort of way. But vast stretches of the landscape are both really unattractive and vaguely offensive, as though the municipal government has thrown its hands in the air and said, "The hell with it, we're moving to Cambridge."

Take, for example, the bus station. It's totally groady, with the filthiest escalator I've ever seen. Think it's weird that I noticed a dirty escalator? This thing is disgusting. The whole building gives me the heeby-jeebies. Bus stations, as a rule, aren't known for their glorious architecture, but Kitchener's seems disreputable; if the building was a person, it would be seedily hanging around on a corner, trying to sell you watches from the lining of its coat. It's ingrained right down to its commuter bar ("Transfers," natch) and the fact that you have to buy Greyhound tickets on the platforms, as in not with the standard issue ticket-counter set up that is, you know, official looking. They keep the tickets in one of those Thermos lunch bags, as though the tickets need some sort of heat engineering. The whole thing seems unorthodox, and possibly illegal.

Taking the bus through Kitchener is one of those OMG-what-is-this-place deals. All the restaurants located in strip malls; the entire city seems to be housed in car dealerships. If aliens landed in beautiful downtown Kitchener, they would assume that humanity is powered, not by the sun, but by painful fluoresent tubes and pad thai. Across the street from the bus station, there is a tattoo parlour - nay, a former tattoo parlour, since it appaears to have gone out of business some time ago - named "Stray Katz." That's terrible.

This type of endemic ugliness isn't native to Kitchener's soil. It infects all kinds of small cities - Kitchener, along with Saskatoon and Burnaby, is home to about 200,000 people - especially places with an impverished downtown core and seeping sprawl along the outer rim. The downtown kind of looks like one of those "flea markets" that sell Confederate-flag bandanas and bootleg DVDs, and the sprawl is filled with big-box stores and Galactus-sized movie theatres.

I'm not demanding that Kitchener suddenly thrust a fat wad of cash into its downtown. It could start small - like the bus station, which is the pits, and unfortunately one of the transit hubs (and therefor public faces) of the city. Maybe small cities need to be more aware of their zoning outlook. Sure, Costco et al brings jobs into the area...but what kind of jobs? Low-paying, vest-wearing jobs that people need to drive to. It's kind of a losing situation all around.

Anyway, I'm just venting. I'll continue to travel through Kitchener, since it's a spoke on my wheel o' travel. I just wish the time spent there was just a little prettier to see.

Procrastination Is A...Wait For It....

End-of-term anxiety is a tough monster to beat. I, of course, am a total procrastinator, and as such, consistently ruin my own life every four months. I think this is one of the curses of the smart kids - I was going to be modest, but at this late hour, why bother? - because we're told for a number of years that we're awesome. And then we get farted out into a university system that doesn't care about our awesome sparkly specialness. It's demoralizing. I'm demoralized. I'm bummed.

In high school, at least your teachers talk to each other. This can be a drag for that one kid who started a garbage can fire in the first week of grade nine, and is now branded (probably not unreasonably) "a troublemaker." For the rest of us non-pyromaniacal peeps, however, the interteacher convos can be kind of nice: teachers know what's up. In university, I've had to go, sick as a dog, to a bunch of classes to explain why my feverish flush is not the result of some hot-for-teacher crush but a medically terrible day. Or explain that, since I've just returned from a funeral, my mind had wandered off the upcoming assignment. Things like that - things that make me feel like a jerk who's somehow let them down.

Even more frustrating is the sense that, since I'm paying gobsmacking amounts of cash to be there, the more prickly teachers are such pricks. I've had debates about whether or not post-secondary should be free. As a current student, and one who is interested in not graduating with an assload of debt, I'm firmly on the "yup" side of that debate. Making it free would also sort of justify the jerkiness of the system as a whole: at least when I'm peeved about a lousy mark that I worked for, at least I'm not also annoyed that said lousy mark cost me a couple hundred bucks to earn.

To be fair, most of my lousy marks don't come from some stray teacher holding a bullet with my name on it; they're a result of my deeply ingrained tendency to procrastinate. I'm not lazy (well, I'm not really lazy), but I am a perfectionist. I tend to rationalize my procrastination by saying, "Well, if I had really put in the effort, I'd have done a bang-up job...but this is good enough, since I did all my work for the term in seven hours. Now, let's all drink a beer." It's not so good for the soul. Or, actually, the liver. But I would say mostly the soul.

Even if I know why I procrastinate, it doesn't make it any easier to stop doing it. I resent when people tell me to man up and get to work, because that's about as effective as commanding my hair to stop growing. It's just a part of who am I. Unfortunately, I haven't figured out a system that allows me to thrive with the procrastination/perfectionism dyad that wrecks me so hard...especially since all my I'm-smart confidence goes right out the window once I'm deeply into a late, sure-to-be-horrible project.

Fortunately, as the song suggests, big wheels keep on turning (turnin'!), and this Proud Mary keeps on burning (burnin'!), and the second hand keeps making its sweeps. What I'm trying to say is that time heals all procrastination wounds, since the work either gets done by the due date or it...doesn't. It usually does, and while I'm not averse to handing things in late, I like to at least offset the chance of bad lazy-work grades by getting the suckers in on time.

Still. It's hard on the soul. Not to mention the distressing trend in some of my classes to base marks on things like attendance and vocabulary terms instead of things like essays and comprehension. Because comprehension doesn't need me to actually go and spend three hours in an uncomfortable chair, listening to the deranging clickettes of a hundred laptops being typed on. I rarely write essays that are truly terrible, and I resent being told that I have to sit still and listen in order to avoid doing so in the future. Procrastination, I see you. What I need is some anticrastination. Do they make that?

Secret Pleasures

Living alone has its benefits, not least of which is the chance to be as naked as possible as frequently as possible. (Another is peeing with the bathroom door open, but this really isn't going to be about bodily functions, I swear. But it is nice.) But the best thing about living alone is the chance to indulge in all the secret pleasures that otherwise would need to be smothered in the interest of, you know, living in polite society.

For example: I enjoy stand-up comedy. A lot. I mean, I have seen my fair share of Just For Laughs, the seminal and usually hilarious Canadian comedy showcase out of Montreal and rerun 84 hours a week on the Comedy Network. I'll rent stand-up comedy specials by comics that other people are bored by: Jim Gaffigan, he of the Hot Pockets jokes and blinding whiteness, or Russel Peters, the it's-okay-I'm-racist-'cause-I'm-brown comic. I know these people are celebrities, but in a very particular, nerdy way. I am clearly a member of the Nerd Tribe, however, and indulge myself as such.

Anther secret pleasure I can only really enjoy alone is my huge number of baths. I am a bather. Showers? Meh, and I'm sure my friends can attest to my high score on the stinkiness battles. (Those battles are disgusting, FYI.) But baths? - baths are ridiculous. I take, like, nine a week. I think it combines some of my favourite things: hot tub-like spaces, reading, and being naked. Win-win-win.

Secret pleasures don't have to be a strictly house-bound game. One of my personal joys is dining out - or in, since the person who developed the take-out container is, in my opinion, worthy of at least a Nobel prize. Magazines are another delight, as is playing solitaire on my iPod, and playing Bad Outfit with friends while in line for the bathroom at bars. I love sequined shirts, short-shorts, graffiti, duvets, the smell of new books, really cold Coke Zeroes, petty thievery when drunk, and scoping out bikes on the street.

The thing about keeping a personal blog is, some of those secret pleasures aren't so secret any more. I write a lot about myself and my interests - hey, as your high school English teacher probably taught, write what you know (they probably also taught you about Freytag's Pyramid, which you heard about 95 times in fours years of high school, never knowing the name, until it was reintroduced amongst great internal groaning in your totally horrible Fantasy and Horror class in university and you were docked marks for forgetting the name of the Pyramid, which, frankly, never seemed all that important until said marks were docked, provoking a great gnashing of teeth and rumpusing of spirit, because seriously, that class was frustrating and gave you the first C- you had recieved in, like, three years, which is totally stupid because you're practially a professional English major at this point. Maybe this didn't happen to you specifically. Maybe another secret pleasure I have is hyperbole. There are a lot of hypotheticals going on here), and what I know is myself. If I knew a lot about ancient Egypt, say, or animal husbandry, I'd write about those. As it stands, I'm not totally clear on what animal husbandry is. I'm pretty sure it's not dressing up livestock in formalwear, but that's what I think of. Every time.

While the people who fought in World War Two are known, not without their own sense of the hyperbolic, as "The Greatest Generation," I would posit that people who are currently living and breathing and, for the most part, not fighting off the Red Commies or what-have-you, might be known as "The Indulgent Generation." Oh, I'm not indicting anyone but myself. The Craig Kielburgers of the world aside, my peers and I are a pretty self-obsessed. I might make the argument that our technologies have allowed us to monitor ourselves with ever-increasing levels of mania, but that's more of a symptom than a disease. We love to talk about ourselves.

Okay, maybe not as much as the alleged Me Generation, whose pop-culture legacy, despite having great sports apparel and hilarious moustaches, consists pretty much of Classic Rock and the invention of cocaine - sometimes both at once. Or Generation X, which incorporated the medicalization of every known personality failure into their self-obsession. People who are jerks do not have "Oppositional Defiant Disorder." They're just jerks. My generation loves to blab: we twitter, update our statuses, and overshare to the max. We're so good at telling each other way too much that "TMI" has become a standard phrase, like NASA, or DTMFA.

Our secret pleasures? Not so secret. I propose a thought exercise: search your brainpan for one thing you've never told anyone you enjoy. Masturbating outdoors? Dipping your fingers into barrels of dried beans? Vintage slides starring your parents in their awkward honeymoon phase? Paper-mache? The feeling of fresh, fluffy towels? Dusting your television set? Static electricity? Whatever it is, think on. Turn it over in your head. The word "mull" is appropriate for the activity I'm describing. Now, take that secret pleasure and never tell anyone. Save it; make it just for you. Don't update anything or take a picture. Preserve a little something that makes you happy in a weird, fleeting way. Your secret pleasures may change through the years, but the ability to keep something secret should last a lifetime.