Iceland: Part Two

Continued from "Iceland: Part One."

After Reykjavik, we headed up to Akureyri, Iceland's second most populous city with a whopping 18,000 residents. Honestly, I don't think we were expecting much, but the town was so.fricking.beautiful. Akureyri is at the bottom of a fjord, with giant hills - okay, mountains - overlooking the town. Our cabin was half-way up the mountain facing the town, so we had a view of basically....everything. The cabin was a dollhouse-sized little number with a teensy stove and a big-ass hot tub.

Pictured: everything.

Naturally, the much-anticipated hot tub refused to work. After pressing every button on the control panel roughly one thousand times, we ascertained that the tub wasn't full enough - a fact that, had we been using our common sense and sense of sight, we would have figured out right away. In a panic (if there's such a thing as a hot-tub emergency, we were having one), we called the brother-in-law of our AirBnB host. The brother-in-law, Flosi (yes, pronounced like a pony's name), arrived after a stilted phone conversation, took one look at the hot tub, and then started a bucket brigade. An hour later, the tub was full; the next morning, it was hot.

Not pictured: the coconut ice cream we ate in the hot tub like total bosses.

After poking around the town, we headed up to Grimsey, a teeny island that has the distinction of being bisected by the Arctic Circle. Dudes, we bundled up: hats, tights under jeans, big coats, mittens. And, while it was cold when we were on the ferry (cold and seasick), Grimsey itself was warm. Warm enough that we basically molted clothes as we walked, shedding layers of long-sleeved shirts and jackets. The island, which is home to about 90 people, is also where birds live: puffins, which are adorable and exotically pretty, and also arctic terns, which dive-bombed us as we walked.

Not pictured: kamikaze death terns.

The next day, we continued our streak of slightly unsettling natural adventures by heading to Dimmuborgir, a lava field formed by steam vents during an ancient volcanic eruption. The landscape there is beautiful, with tiny succulents and lichens growing on the rocks, and paths that required a well-developed ability to clamber. It felt like a velociraptor might come lunging out at us at any moment, but it was also beautiful.

Heading to Dettifoss was a different story. Outside the car, it was sterile rocks and grit as far as the eye could see. As we pulled off the main highway, I remarked, "Hey, it's sort of...smoggy out?" which was mysterious because we were not anywhere near a major city. The "smog" grew denser, and within minutes, we were in a full-fledged Icelandic sandstorm. The moon-like landscape and the roaring storm, coupled with the fact that we were heading towards Europe's most powerful waterfall, made me feel like we might have accidentally wandered into one of those sci-fi movies where Mars turns out to be haunted by angry ghosts. At Dettifoss's edge (because, again, all that was holding us back was a dinky little golf fence), I actually got kind of choked up. It's rare that we're confronted with such unmitigated natural power, and being so close was an intense experience. I left feeling like my soul had been scoured with Borax.

Not pictured: Darude

The rest of the time there was spent goofing around in bookstores, buying Icelandic sweaters, and eating fish. There's an excellent curry take-away joint, and we ate burgers and made stir-frys and drank Icelandic beers in the hot tub. Akureyri, to me, was the most "Icelandic" of the places we landed: cultural but not pretentious, friendly, and undeniably gorgeous. I want to go back there, and I want to take everyone I like with me so we can hang out on Grimsey and get hilariously unexpected sunburns.

Next week: glacier walks, seafood pizza, and the library that turns into a bar.

Iceland: Part One

Okay! Let's talk Iceland!

There was a free Of Monsters And Men show the day we landed, which was astoundingly good luck. That band, which has gotten pretty buzzy in the US and Canada, was giving a "we're so grateful to you all!" concert in Reykjavik's main park. It was advertised as a family event, and seeing many, many children at an event that went, daylit, until 11 PM, sort of drove home the message that this place is weird and special. They also had a jungle gym that was teeming with children 100% of the concert's duration, and people brought their dogs. It was pretty great. Later, we found out that 18,000 people had been there. I would estimate that about 16,000 of them were wearing sweaters like these:

That sweater is mad popular in Iceland.

Everyone there speaks English, but they all sound like elves. It's enchanting. (Okay, in fairness, if someone was like, "Canadians all speak English, but they all sound like rodeo clowns," I'd be pissed. Suffice it to say that the accent is charming, and their fluency is impressive. It is way better than, say, Alabama.)

The local Subway restaurant had a flavour called "Reggae Reggae," but it wasn't jerk chicken. I don't know what it was supposed to taste like.

"Kryddaðu tilveruna" translate to "spicy life!" HELPFUL.

Not having any real nighttime is simultaneous not super-weird and the weirdest thing ever. I kept anticipating that tonight would be the night when things got really dark, and that night never came. There is a period of about three or four hours between 11 PM and 3 AM when the sky gets pinky-orange and the sun dips below the horizon, but it isn't even what you could call "twilight." The sun takes about five hours to set and then pops right back up again.

In Reykjavik, there's a Big Lebowski-themed bar, where they serve 18 different versions of a white russian, and the minimum price is 1,700 krona, which converts into approximately 14 bucks. I found their currency to be totally confounding - it's as if everything is priced in pennies. After a few days I sort of relaxed and went with it, but it takes some getting used to. This is especially true in grocery stores, where prices seem totally absurd (1100 krona for a hunk of cheese?!) until you get to the candy aisle, where most things are between 60 and 150 krona and you feel like Willie Wonka has just handed you a wad of Golden Tickets. (Unfortunately, most of their candy seems to be anise-flavoured). Anyway, The Lebowski Bar was a shameless tourist rip-off, but I'm also super glad we went.

This is me, giving myself a high five.

We visited Gullfoss, which this crazy waterfall, and Geysir, which is a hot spring that shoots 100-degree water in the air every ten minutes or so. Both of these places had minimal approaches to safety. The most they really offered were these dinky little fences that came up to your knees and were made of rope; a tripping hazard, in other words. In Geysir, we went slightly off the path and discovered another, unfenced hot spring that was literally boiling. Attempts to touch it were followed by everyone jerking their hands away and hissing, "That's hot!" It was refreshing that the big natural-formation tourist attractions didn't assume that you were an imbecile that was going to touch the hot spring/get too close to the waterfall's edge, even though we totally did both those things.

The mid-level and cafe food food in Reykjavik wasn't really much to write home about, although I do want to give a shout-out to Cafe Loki's skyr cake. Skyr is a dairy product that's technically a cheese, but it tastes like Greek yogurt mixed with sour cream. Making a cake with it, plus rhubarb jam, plus whipped cream? Icelanders are geniuses. They also like smoked fish, eggs, and dense breads, all of which are things I like very much. Also, there are so many Thai places in Reykjavik.

Next week: misadventures in the hot tub, sunburns in the Arctic circle, and Icelandic sandstorms.

2007-2012: Five Years Later

I've been thinking a lot about that summer, five years ago, when everything fell apart. It was a four-week paradigm shift from a relatively happy girl to one who felt like her bones were made of glass. During those four weeks, my sister was diagnosed with cancer, my best friend eloped and moved away, and my boyfriend broke up with me. Choppy waters.

The dream starts with a variation on the waitress dream: I am alone, in a restaurant that is suddenly filled with people, and there are no clean glasses and the kitchen is a flight of stairs below me. I am feeling hectic and rushed, and the people, while nice, are becoming impatient.


That's when my boss decides to bring in some backup to help out. As they come behind the bar, I spy a once-familiar green hoodie.


It is my ex-boyfriend.

The cancer diagnosis isn't my story to tell - it's my sister's, and I hope one day she will tell it in a way that makes her feel okay. You're not supposed to get cancer when you've just turned 20 and you're in university. You're supposed to get hangovers and food poisoning and STIs: the health problems of the under-30 set are largely self-inflicted. At 20, the choice you make about eating that burrito you left on the counter overnight is supposed to be your hardest health lesson, not the one about needles and drugs and egg storage and chemical burns and wigs.

I imagine that the shame of your body letting you down is enormous. Her disease was wildly unfair. I remember my mom sobbing, "I wonder if this is because I sprayed Raid in our hotel room in Hawaii when she was a baby." I wondered if the smell of cigarettes that clung to my clothes in high school played a part. There is no word to convey the level of fear and worry that descended on our family that summer: the closest we might come would be howling, like a wolf. We cried, and swam through the new reality - the cancer reality - like we were underwater.

So, my wish for her, five years later, is that she can find or invent the language that makes her feel okay about what happened to her. And while I don't want her to dwell on it, it's a part of her story, and talking is good. Not speaking feels so lonely.

I tell my boss I'm going to leave. She laughs a little and say, "No, you're no," and I tell her that, if he's staying, I'm going. It's a classic line.

My best friend moving away is also her story to tell, but basically her visa didn't come through, she panicked, and got married. The wedding was lovely, but very small, and real grown-ups were definitely an underrepresented demographic. They declined to tell their parents. A few weeks later, they tried to move to America; she went, but he was stopped at the border and not allowed entry.

This was, obviously, devastating for them. As a friend, it was tough to watch them try to negotiate the bureaucratic nightmare that is the immigration process. And I was heartbroken, because it felt like a corner of my emotional foundation had up and moved to Maryland. Selfish? Oh yeah. But I was too depressed to give a shit.

She hauls us both outside, which seems to be on the roof of a parking garage. He is jovial, whereas I am furious. "I despise you, I despise you, I despise you," pours out of my mouth. I feel like I have no control, like I am vomiting words. they keep coming, louder, as if by sheer repetition I can get him to understand the scale of my loathing. "You suck, I hate you, I HATE YOU."

And then there is the break-up. I can still remember the gut-punched feeling, the moment of swimming grey vision. It took hours to talk it out, in my home and his and in the park, both of us crying. I gave him back jewellery and he refused; I left it in the grass for some kid to find during a summer playdate.

The reasons were many. We hadn't been getting along - not fighting, but allowing sadness and distance to grow between us until words alone couldn't bridge the gap. We had stopped having sex. He told me, as he dumped me, that I was uninspiring; words that, to this day, still feel like a stab wound. In the days after my sister's diagnosis, I had been a cyclone of terror and tears, and he was taken aback by the intensity of my sadness and anger. And, most importantly, he just didn't want to be my boyfriend any more.

He tries to be funny and conciliatory, but it comes off as invasive: sitting too close, standing in front of me while I'm sitting so that I am eye-level with his crotch. At some point, his jeans transform into ugly shorts -  maybe they're swim trunks - but the hoodie remains. He is wearing fur-lined loafers in the dream.

We spend some time together, after the initial break-up. We saw some movies and went for a couple walks. He had told me that he wanted to stay friends, and I had no idea what that meant.

In a moment of desperation, I went to him and offered to just, you know, sleep with him. We didn't have to be friendly, or like each other. We could just have fun! But, in addition to not wanting to be my boyfriend anymore, he was also sleeping with someone else. During that horrible, humiliating conversation, which happened days after our breakup (and that breakup had happened days after cancer verdict), he told me they had had sex on the steps of a church, and that it was the best he ever had.

I went home and vomited in the sink. I cried on the front steps. I didn't eat. I slept by staring at the ceiling. All the love I had for him - still, even weeks after the initial conversation - turned sour in a heartbeat. I could not be around him. I couldn't stand knowing he lived around the corner from me, that he still had a job, that he had the audacity to feel shitty about breaking up with me. I couldn't stand knowing that someone was comforting him, that he had friends, that he had fooled anyone into liking him.

A group of his friends are there, watching. I refuse, still, to work with him. I ignore his entreaties of friendship and recoil when he slings his arm around my shoulder in a friendly, brothers-in-arms gesture. See? We're buddies, he says. I am physically revulsed.

My exboyfriend had a pattern: he meets girls, often while still in a relationship, and begins whirlwind romances with them. We are enchanted: we connect on many levels. We decide that we must be together, and he begins the task of breaking it off with his current partner. There are months, maybe years, of happiness. And then something happens, and he meets someone, and she is enchanted. Wash, rinse, repeat. It's possible he still has this pattern.

He was with someone when I met him. He was with me when he met his next girlfriend. I have no idea how many girls he's daisy-chained along. He is not dating for sport. He feels bad when he breaks their hearts. But he still breaks them. I'm not sure why: maybe he is afraid of deeper commitment, or easily bored. Maybe he enjoys courting women more than the daily grind of actually being their boyfriends. I'm not sure. I don' t really care.

What happened to me has happened to others. With my ex-boyfriend, yes, but also with other men. What we learn, when we are treated with such vigorous and thorough shittiness, is that men aren't to be trusted. That heartbreak is a given. That we have to always wait for the other shoe to drop. It's the kind of lesson you don't learn from mutual, amicable break-ups. It's the kind of lesson you learn from getting turned back at the border, when the doctor comes into the room and says, "I'm afraid we have some bad news."

Other things are said, lost in the haze of dreaming. At one point, I spit on his foot and grin maniacally as he tries to play it off like I meant it in jest. My boss is there still, pleading for us both to  come back inside, to wait on tables, to pretend everything is normal. At one point, the exboyfriend, surrounded by his friends and his boss, moves in for a hug. I throw him off and he falls down the flight of concrete stairs. It looks to be about as humiliating as Bill Murray's fall down the stairs at the end of The Life Aquatic. One of his silly loafers comes off. His friends are standing there, ignoring me, discussing the end of his current relationship (Quote, from my dream: "When I went to bed last night they had six mutual friends on Facebook, and now they only have four." "Oh my god...").

My story has a happy ending. My sister is in good health, a robust 25-year-old with a huge laugh. My best friend found a way to move back. She and her husband are still married. And I stumbled into the arms of someone who has suffered his own losses, and who knows better than to drop something so fragile. We have a good love, something strong that stretches into the future. I love being with him, and I feel, finally, like I can start to relax. That the jewellery he gives me won't be left in the grass one summer, when my eyes are already red from crying. I love them all so much, and I'm so grateful that we all found our way to each other.

In the end, I sit on the concrete edge of the parking garage and stare at his back as he limps away. I feel euphoric, elated. Like a triumph. When I wake up, I am laughing.

Sandstorm

Some days, it's tough going. There's a rift in the way we talk to each other, in the way our gaze meets. It's never perfect, ever, because nothing ever is, but some days, it's harder. Tectonic plates shift, the sky opens up, the forest burns. We get sad and quiet and mean.

I love him so much.

There are snapshots of us together, cuddling or making faces. There are pictures of him, taken by me, of me, taken by him, of us in our most vulnerable places: bed, at the dinner table, sleeping. He comes with me to parties. We hold hands. We put our heads on each other shoulders. We cuddle on the train, or the bus, sharing headphones or simply just being, together. He brings me water when I'm thirsty, and I love him.

When there are storms, they are terrible. Brief though they may be, they cast a pall over the rest of our day together, and I can feel my brow furrow with the need to be right, the need to make him understand.

We fall into these traps, which aren't like storms: they're like quicksand, invisible to the naked eye. To climb out of them is exhausting, and you never move forward. You just lie on the sides, panting, trying not to die.

I love waking up beside him.

I love his voice, and especially his laugh.

I love his eagerness to share his day.

I love his triumphs.

I love his willingness to work on our quicksand moments, to acknowledge them and lend a hand.

I love his smile, and his eyes.

I love his vanity, that he likes to look good (and he does -  he is a stone cold fox).

I love that, while he himself does not make things, he is agile and able to find out the best new things and be a bringer of light to his friends.

I love that he always has an opinion.

I love that he does the stuff he's interested in, instead of just talking about it.

I love that he's caring.

I love his tidiness and his need for order.

I love that he plays with the cat even though he is allergic to her.

I love that he complains about the duvet not covering his feet.

I love that he is kind.

I love that he buys me books, and that he reads.

I love that he cares enough about me that I can hurt him.

I love caring enough about him that he can hurt me.

I love that he knows my secrets.

I love his touch.

I love that he doesn't celebrate Valentine's Day, but he sort of will, for me.

I love him, without an asterisk, without a question mark.

There's so much good between us, and yet sometimes, all I can think about is the sand between my toes. I don't want that. I want all the other stuff to shine more than the crummy moments. I need to remember all these reasons, and a thousand other ones, when I'm skirting the edges of the quicksand.

Princess of Moonrise Kingdom

Wes Anderson is the current reigning king of weird childhood moments: alienation, ennui, and balls-to-the-wall eyeliner.  Watching Moonrise Kingdom last night reminded  me of why Anderson's movies are so lovely.

The story: there is a youthful love affair, an escape from scout camp, a search, a night spent alone, a discovery, an adoption, and a great storm. There are overtones of Vietnam, which aren't inappropriate for a movie set in 1965. There are maps, tiny canoes, a kitten in a basket: the proper accessories for kids on the run. It's not a big movie, but that's just fine: the movie's stars are the kids, and everything is scaled to fit them.

Anderson gets terrific stuff when he directs children. Although his dialogue sometimes feels stilted, most pre-teens are little weirdos, and so giving them weird things to say is totally natural. The roles he gives his child actors are some of the most interesting in the oeuvre, and that's saying a lot for a man who wrote the Tenenbaum family into existence.

However, Anderson's greatest, indisputable gift has always been his knack for look. Each scene is in this movie is so carefully composed and art-directed that it feels like the cover of a children's book come to life. The film stock feels retro and touchable, giving it a warm, accessible quality. And, of course, Anderson's great talent for art direction and set design means that Moonrise Kingdom is  instantly recognizable as a Wes Anderson production. Characters wear impeccable knee-socks and raccoon-eye make-up, live in overlarge shabby houses, and run away from home carrying suitcases full of books. Everything in the frame has been considered. While I sometimes miss the looser-feeling energy of Anderson's earlier films, the well-behaved look of his more recent productions are undeniably beautiful.

It's no wonder that Anderson's movies inspire a rabid fan following, often with young women in their late teens and early 20s set. That's a demographic who feel great ambivalence about leaving their own childhoods behind. In Anderson's world, a little bit of female instability often becomes a fascinating personality facet, and Suzy, the rage-prone mini-heroine of Moonrise Kingdom, is no exception. No wonder, then, that fans might be convinced that, if they had a portable record player and an armful full of french pop songs, they would be easier to love. The characters's outfits are easy to replicate, and because so much of Anderson's mood is created through look rather than dialogue, it seems plausible that, given enough Fendi fur and eyeliner, you could transform yourself into Margot Tenenbaum.

Anderson, like graphic novelist Ben Katchor and musician Tom Waits, has a gift for creating worlds filled with the unusual and beautiful. Characters are travelling Bible salesmen, pickle purveyors, top-hatted hustlers with pet doves and knuckle tattoos. They are firmly middle-brow, firmly American, not overinvested in things like "home" or "jobs": the type of characters who think nothing of escorting a woman in a raw-silk dress to a vaudeville revival show one night and hopping on a boxcar the next morning. They have money, but it runs out. They have affectations, like corn-cob pipes and red toques. They often sleep in tents. They are attractive because they do what they want (often suffering in the process: see every Bill Murray character in every Wes Anderson movie), and in the end, most people usually  come around.

Despite missteps like The Darjeeling Limited, I always look forward to the next Wes Anderson outing. When he is good—and Moonrise Kingdom is very good—it's possible to lose yourself in his world. I hope I never grow out of that wistful moment at the end of the film when I wish I could visit that world in person.

Bridal Party

I had the privilege of being a bridesmaid for my friend Jessica last weekend, and it was dope as hell. She was gorgeous - this is a woman who could totally rock a pair of burlap shorts on three hours sleep, so having her hairs and make-up did and a tailored gown certainly didn't hurt. More importantly, it was clear that she and her husband are best friends who also have hot (married!) sex. She was relaxed, danced up a storm, and indulged all the glasses-clinkers with plenty of smooching at the reception. Instead of seeming nervous, she seemed happy. Really, truly, beautifully, genuinely happy.

(Oh, she also let the bridesmaids pick their own outfits. Girlfriend, we are cool for life for that one decision.)

Although I was never a little girl who "played wedding," with a lace tablecloth and my little sister roped into flower girl duties, I was a flower at my uncle's wedding. That wee pink dress was immediately relegated to the dress-up box, where its most frequent wearer turned out to be my little brother Sam. Blame his sisters, though: he was too young to dispute being swaddled in pink satin, and we thought it was the last word in comedy. Being a bridesmaid came with more stress (mostly about falling out of my tall high heels), but it also came with the absolute pleasure of being friends with the bride, and being asked to be in her special day was an honour.

My peers have mostly taken a haphazard approach towards building a household. I've been to very few weddings. No engagement parties, one bridal shower - the biggest commitment ceremonies we have are housewarming shindigs when we move in together.

The first wedding I attended as a legit adult was a city hall affair attended by slightly dazed and definitely hungover group of friends who had found out about the nuptials roughly 36 hours before. One of the guests wore glare-cutting ski goggles as sunglasses to cut the August glare; my brother, in another wedding-related sartorial misstep, wore basketball shorts. It was special nonetheless. It takes real cojones to elope.

English majors and liberal studies grads aren't really known for their flashy lifestyles, and maybe that includes aesthetic objections to a big wedding; what's more likely is that we can't afford one on our intern's/freelancer's/back in school/underemployed budget. Or maybe, as we get older and more settled into our cohabitation habits, the point of marriage (love, commitment, etc.) is made hazy by the fact that the lease has been signed and we co-own pets together. What would a wedding change?

My boyfriend's group is pretty different: most of the couples are married, often before they turned 25. They know about things like engagement rings, and caterers, and down payments on houses. They took honeymoons. They have RRSPs or freelance successfully enough to not default on their mortgages. They are, in short, Real Adults. Obviously, marriage doesn't automatically give you a secret key into the Real Adult lounge at the airport (they serve the good bourbon there!), but I do think that solidifying your commitment to your romantic partner makes it easier to consider taking on other commitments, be they financial, professional, or personal. When I asked my dad why he and my mom had gotten married after seven years of dating, he said, "We wanted to deepen the commitment." You never know how deep your love can go until you dive in.

Maybe one day, I'll be planning my own wedding - maybe in a church, maybe down at city hall, maybe on the beach with no shoes. But I do know that the strength of my friends, both married and not, will be a huge part of how I got there. These past few months were a crash course in wedding planning, and in etiquette, and a glimpse at the first steps of Real Adulthood by a person I used to choreograph impromptu weekend dance routines with, and who still makes me laugh so hard I pee a little. Being a bridesmaid was an unexpected joy, a chance to stand up beside a person I like very much and help celebrate her love. It was fun - I now understand why people say yes when they're asked to do these things! - but beyond that, it was an honour. I hope that the dive into those deep waters of commitment goes smoothly for my friend, and for all the friends who decide to take the plunge.

Cut the Waist

Rob Ford and I have a lot in common. We've both undertaken ambitious, radical weight-loss goals, often telling the people around us, "I'm going to get fit and lose a whole pile of weight! Hundreds of pounds! By next week!" We start strong: exercise, trips to the gym, cutting down at meal times, preening in our underwear. But as the weeks stretch on, we lose focus. The gym becomes very far away. Morale swings low. It's a cycle that most dieters are familiar with.

Ford is carrying about 315 pounds on a 5'10" frame, which ballparks his BMI at about 45. Folks should generally aim to be about 19 - 25, and more than 45 is considered "super obese" and a cause for medical concern. He's red-faced in media shots, his second chin hanging down over his shirt collar. He looks like a keg: short, squat, and and like there might potentially dangerous consequences if you shake him up too much.

The Cut the Waist challenge was supposed to be an easy, feel-good victory, one over which he would have complete control. If he happened to raise a few bucks for charity, hey - bonus! It would give some structure to media events, hopefully smoothing some ragged edges between him and, say, The Toronto Star (I doubt that Ford himself gives a flying fuck about media relations, but hopefully some savvy, well-positioned council friend does). It would give him a chance to be seen as a do-gooder, a man who can keep a promise, a man who can cut the gravy at home like he does at work. People would stop saying "John Candy" in sotto voice as he entered the room.

In the last week, there's been a lot of back and forth on if Ford will finish the challenge, which aimed to have him shedding 50 pounds by mid-June. On Sunday's radio show, he told listeners that he was done with it - "I'm not even dieting any more" - but by Monday night, he and his brother Doug were spreading the word that the challenge was still on, but the media events were officially cancelled. Rob was going to finish the diet without overwhelming scrutiny from the press. Things seem to have settled into "I'll finished, but you can't watch," so, you know...par for the course with Mayor Ford.

Meaningful weight loss is often a team effort. Psychologists encourage folks to have gym buddies and to try smaller, healthier meals in a group setting: it's easier when the strange (diet and exercise? Ew) becomes your peer group's "new normal." It takes discipline. Doug, Rob's brother, also signed up for the Cut the Waist challenge, but Doug's shaming, bullying approach to his brother's (non-)participation is damaging at worst and disheartening at best.

Ford (as much as he would have hated it) should have had photo-ops at the gym and hosted fresh-'n'-healthy luncheons for his staff. He should have gotten doctors on board, taken a lunch at a public high school cafeteria, glad-handed for community 5K walks. He should have shown public commitment to his self-imposted goals, and, like any good politician/middle-schooler, shown his work. Most people know how hard it is to take off unwanted weight, and a well-managed public effort to do just that by one of the city's heaviest political heavyweights would have helped in elevating Ford's string of baser moments. Instead, Ford withdrew, and his diet (and his attitude towards his own challenge) became erratic and unpredictable.

It's not hard to see the Cut the Waist challenge as a metaphor for Ford's mayoralty so far. Team efforts have fractured. Media events have become an chance to hide. It turns out that cutting the gravy is actually pretty tough, both in council meetings and on the dinner plate. Missed opportunities abounded. Losing weight, like running a city, is difficult to well; it becomes nearly impossible if you don't have a team of people working with you, cheering you when you're succeeding and helping you redirect around your failures.

Ford's public persona is shifting, from a blustering city councillor who listened to his constituents and got stuff done, to a man who looks more red-faced, both politically and personally, by the day.