Resos

You know, I never did get around to figuring out my new year's resolutions, and almost two weeks into  January, I'm not even sure if we're still doing them or not. Are we? Can someone let me know? I would hate to lose out on a really good opportunity to feel bad about my choices.

To me, NYRs are a to-do list all dressed up: I'm going to quit smoking, lose 20 pounds, write more letters, actually email people back, and be nicer to strangers on the streetcar. and yet, by February 1, I'm on the couch eating Reese's Peanut Butter Cups in my muscle tee (not pictured: actual muscles), trying to google which season I am instead of job hunting. I know that people who publicize their resolutions are more likely to both succeed and continue to succeed six months down the line, and I'm certainly not so hubristic that I'm going to say "I'm perfect!" on the internet (not pictured: anyone perfect). But I also desperately wanted to get off the hate-my-body treadmill that NYRs often seems to inspire.

So BIRT, as the board-director kids say:

• Find and attend a Nia class I love. Nia is a dance/exercise form that combines martial arts, free-dance, mind/body integration, and the chance to throw my elbows around to Enya's mid-tempo beat. I love it. I am too inflexible for yoga, I'm a slow and plodding runner (not that that stops me from getting out there - I actually have fallen in love with running with M, which is nice), but Nia's emphasis on good body feelings is right up my alley. My mom got me into it, and while there are great Nia instructors in Stratford, Toronto seems to have a dearth.

• Continue and re-commit to the paleo diet. I've cut wayyyy down on grains for the last six months, and dudes, it has changed me. I am lighter. My poops are better. I sleep better. My acne has basically cleared itself up. I feel awesome. But there are things that simply can't be replaced with zucchini noodles, like delicious, chewy ramen, and red-velvet cupcakes with cream cheese frosting. And so I face a choice: either learn to live without, or figure out the replacements that make me just as happy. Sure, there's no ramen in the paleo diet...but there's a million pounds of kimchi. There are no cupcakes, but the occasional meringue or six isn't going to break the bank.

• My work contract is up in a few weeks, and I feel...stressed. Not quite panicked, but you know that rictus grin you put on in moments of hold-it-together-and-cry-later-in-the-bathroom? That's me! So I resolve to stay calm. Things will work out. They don't even have debtor's prisons anymore...right? (Don't answer that!)

• Make more things with my hands. I love crafting and knitting, but instead of doing them, I spend hours glued to little screens. Crafting means an actual step back, a physical shake-off of routine, until the act itself becomes routine. But I recently made a hat, and you know what? I felt damned proud of myself. It felt good. But knit hats - and time for knitting hats - don't just fall out of the sky. 

• Be more open. I wrote recently about struggling with envy and jealousy, especially with my female friends and acquaintances. That post did wonders to help me see past the feelings and actually connect mentally with those women - to see them as humans with their own foibles and internal messes - and as much work as that is, it does seem worth it. I'd also like to figure out how to approach close friend who are weirding me out, because there are a couple backburner issues that seem close to boiling over, and it makes me nervous and sad. 

• Write more! I'm starting a writer's group and attending another, and writing for a bunch of different places, which feels good. But I would love, as always, more. I'm greedy that way. 

Marriage and Mothers: The HIMYM Wedding Blues

How I Met Your Mother has always felt, to me, like it was a runner-up to Must See TV. It's funny, it's got charm, the wit is free-flowing and the characters have become, over the years, genuine pop-culture touchstones (Barney Stinson's bro-isms have, in particular, really taken off), but it's never been "appointment TV". I came late to the game, watching the first two seasons on DVD and then catching the rest on-air (or, let's face it, on-hard drive), and have been as invested as I get in a TV program: binge-y weekends, followed by months of ascetic ignorance. Wash, rinse, repeat. But unlike, say, Louie or Community, whose brilliance demands timely viewing, HIMYM holds a second-tier spot. I catch up on long train rides, or when I'm home sick with the flu.

For those who have never watched an episode, the premise is simple: Ted Mosby is telling his future children about how he met their mother. Bob Saget plays Future Ted in voiceover, laying his hindsight over the show's present-day action. Ted is friends with married couple Marshall and Lily, bachelor Barney and career girl Robyn, and they do most of their socializing in a bar. The show plays heavily with timeline, and there are dozens of flashforwards and flashbacks sprinkled throughout each season. In the past seven seasons, Ted has dated a whole bunch of women, but none have turned out to be the Mother.

The show is remarkably plot-heavy for a sitcom - if you miss a few episodes, you're left out in the cold. Characters meet, get engaged and break up in a few short months, and marriages unravel inside of a season. The Russian nesting doll-timeline can also make it extraordinarily difficult to pin down where, exactly, we are in the story.

But I kept up with Mosby 'n' friends because I could identify with them. The show was always careful to balance each character's personal and professional story arcs: characters often had to give up some of their dreams and struggled to find their workday joy. As a 20-something, I knew how the gradual narrowing of professional options feels, and it was refreshing to see it reflected back to me.

And as far as the relationships went, I dug that. In the first few seasons, Ted Mosby is an unrepentant romantic, convinced that his future wife will be coming around the corner aaaaany second now. But it's tough to keep that buoyant hope alive in the face of multiple failed relationships, and Mosby slumps in the later seasons. Of course, we know that he eventually finds love - hello, it's right there in the title - and so we half-heartedly keep rooting for him even as he falters.

So I have no problem with the premise of the show. Romance, sure. Comedy, sure. (Time-warping? Love that!) But in recent seasons, the show has been serving the premise that Marriage Is Always the Way, and it's to the detriment of the characters and the show.

Take, for example, season seven's framing device: Barney Stinson's wedding. As the season opens, it's the future, and Barney the bachelor is getting hitched, but we're not sure to whom. S7 marches Barney through no less than three relationships - Barney: who has always wolfishly played the field, whose pre-nups insultingly specify that his fiancee not gain any weight, who has a heart but thinks caring is as sexy as a pap smear. If the show was being true to the character, Barney and his bride would have settled into a mutually open co-habitatation set-up: Barney, the wolf who now has a den.

The show treats marriage as a salve for relationship woes, and when marriages fall apart, it's not because of conflict, but because someone falls out of love (Ted's paramour Zoe), or the love isn't there in the first place (Ted's parents). While we see plenty of mopey sadness when relationships fail, there's rarely anger. Two of the show's best scenes involve characters screaming in rage at (or about) their exes - death threats, irrational paranoia,  crossing boundaries, it's all in there, and it's great and honest. But those are mere moments in a sea of wishy-washy emotions. And then a few seasons later, the feels are back under the rug and marriage is proposed and everyone is so happy!

The Shakespearean trope of identifying a story as a "comedy" by whether or not it ends in a marriage doesn't mean that all your characters need to get hitched. Late-season Friends also fell victim to this (remember when Phoebe got married? Remember how little anyone cared?), but HIMYM is the worst for it. We know that eventually, Ted will get married. Why shove your other, more commitment-averse characters into the same little box? What purpose does it serve? And wouldn't this tightly wrapped show feel so much more diverse if everyone wasn't slowly converging on the altar like it was the nexus of the universe?

Look, I'm a fan of marriage - some of my best friends are married! - but when you're writing a television show, your story must serve your characters. Barney's been gradually transformed from a suit-wearing feelings-free douchebag to a schmoe with a nice wardrobe and some daddy issue, and that's not okay. Sure, give him an emotional back story. Give him a yen for a stable woman! Give him that woman, but don't force him down the aisle, and don't make it seem like his life will be lame if he doesn't get married. Just let him be. 

Green-Eyed Monster

I suffer from jealousy. This isn't an attractive trait - unlike "perfectionism," which is often offered as one of those eye-rolling humblebrags at job interviews, jealousy is a seething, complicated, stomach-churning feeling. It creates distance, ruins burgeoning friendships, and makes me feel lousy.

My jealousy isn't centred around my boyfriend - I trust him, and despite occasional Weird Feelings about late-night drink-a-thons at fun bars when I'm out of town, I generally keep a lid on that kind of thing. The jealousy I feel is often directed at other women, and it's a dirty, soul-yuckifying emotion that serves nobody. (I'll sidebar to parse jealousy from mistrust: jealousy is wanting what another person has, while being suspicious of your partner's out-on-the-town behaviours is another, but equally gross-feeling, phenomenon. If my special roommate went out and rollicked around with a bunch of fun-sounding ladies, I would probably be jealous of his experience, but not necessarily of the women, since he, presumably, at some point, came home to tell me all about it. Jealousy, on the other hand, might arise when I hear all about their hot-looking leather dresses and their book deals with Random House.)

There's no real way for me to dump this on the table without feeling supremely weird about seeming to name names, so I'll speak in generalities. Forthwith, there are three specific areas that inspire my jealousy: bodies, romances, and professional success.

"Bodies" is simple - they're mostly hotter, skinnier, more interesting to look at, better dressed, have more manageable skin/hair/teeth, or lack those things but exude a confidence that renders them magnetically interesting no matter what their appearance. "Bodies" is also incredibly complicated - I didn't suffer from an eating disorder for a decade+ because fashion models inspired wistful longing. There is a hard, radioactive nugget of fear inside me, that one day I'll wake up and and find that I've become totally hideous; there's another part of me that is convinced that day has already come. So women who seem comfortable in their own skin remind me of how much more road I have to walk before I can even approach that feeling. The women who seem comfortable and can pull off a crop-top just made my spirit feel broken, because even if/when I get there, that's still a ballsy move.

"Romance" is a little more complicated, because it has nothing to do with the reality of my own (lovely, healthy, much-appreciated) love life, and more with feeling behind. I didn't marry my high school or college sweetheart, setting me apart from a lot of my social circle. My own parents met when my mom was 17 years old, and 35 years later, they're still together. I didn't date in high school - I was several people's "secret make-out companion," a role that, at the time, I had convinced myself was romantic (or at least proved that I was sexy enough to kiss); in retrospect, I can see that it served my dude friends with a way to get their rocks off without ever having to acknowledge, in public, that they might have been attracted to me, or that I was a romantic option.

I didn't have a boyfriend until my early 20s, and that went down in such spectacular flames that all my subsequent relationships have been coloured by the expectation that somewhere, there's another shoe waiting to drop (trust issues! So fun!). And as I watched my friends date, and meet their loves, and be successful long-term, I felt a sour-belly jealousy working through my system. To this day, I feel like I "should" be married, be planning a family, be committed. I can get a little crazy with my boyfriend, constantly asking for reassurance that those things will happen someday for us, which is tiresome and not really the point of being in love. But when I look the couple around me, I feel like I'm working on someone else's schedule, and brother, I am late.

The professional jealousy is pretty self-explanatory, and again stems from the idea that I "should" be at some career milestone at this point. I'm especially vexed by the talented squadron of younger writer-types that run in my social circle; young women who have been published in national magazines, who pay their rent with their words, and who could, if they bothered to go, be cool at their high-school reunions. And while I genuinely like my job, I feel the tug of writing almost daily. It's tough to balance your creative calling with your credit card statement, and the folks who can make me feel crazy.

The real problem with this sick little list is that I don't really know the women who make me feel jealous. When you get to know someone - really understand their foibles and their flaws, along with their strengths and successes - they become actual human beings. I perceive the girls who make me see green as cartoon characters - not that they are shallow, but that my relationships with them are shallow. I don't see the crippling weeks of paralyzed first drafts; I see the magazine by-line. I don't see the screaming late-night argument; I see the wedding ring. I don't see the careful mathematics of dieting; I see the flat stomach. And unless I can get to know these women better, that might be all I see.

The salvation are the women in my life who might have provoked jealousy, but who have instead turned it into inspiration. My friends - not all of them are besties, either - who have let me in. They are funny, mean, sarcastic, generous, self-deprecating, and honest. They talk about their life-work - how hard they work to achieve all that they do, which makes me realize, over and over, how much of a process everything really is. They feel their own jealousies, celebrate their successes and lament their failures. In doing so, they open a space for me to do the same.

Sick Of It All

Oh my God! I have seriously fallen down on this poor blog. I want to tuck this little blog into bed, brush its hair back from its furrowed brow, and coo, "Oh, sweetie, I'm sorry I haven't been around much lately...I promise it won't happen again."

In my defense, I've been sick. A sore throat last week, food poisoning this weekend, and a general sense of feeling run down and defenseless against sneaky germ attacks. I've been holed up on the couch, watching a lot of Freaks and Geeks (unimpeachably good TV) and How I Met Your Mother (I am starting to feel bad for TV recappers who are contractually obliged to watch that show - the seventh season was unambiguously bad); obviously, I lean pretty hard on the TV dramedy of Mr. Jason Segel when I'm feeling under the weather.

Being sick is the worst. The nausea that accompanied my food poisoning was disgusting - thirteen hours of panting and sweating, anyone? This recent back-to-back bout of illness has left me wondering if there's something wrong with my systems - have I somehow contracted malaria? Or am I allergic to my carpets? Of course, given my family's history, it's also impossible not to wonder if something darker is brewing, but for now, I'm going to assume that my weakened immune system is the result of funky yogurt and bad luck and wait for things to pass.

I've been lucky enough that I have a boyfriend who rolls his eyes only occasionally, and mostly when I boss him around ("Bring me another popsicle!"). I wear the same filthy sweatpants for three days in a row - last night, I got into bed with toothpaste all down the front of my tank top, provoking a laff riot from the BF (I deserved it, and joined in). Being sick means a "big outing" is going to Shopper's Drug Mart for more popsicles. It ruins me.

And it's especially grim in these short little days, when I see the sun for, like, five minutes every day. I feel like I'm living in a cave - albeit one carpeted with used Kleenex - and I forage for chicken noodle soup, and cough syrup to knock me out. Being sick in the summer is brutal, especially when your fever and the 40-degree weather create this compounded heat effect that will knock you out if you're not careful, but in the winter, it can feel like you are never ever going to get better.

I remember one Christmas when I had the flu, like, on December 25, and all I could do was lie on the floor and try not throw up on my sister's new dollhouse (it was actually a 4'x4' board, representing the future dollhouse that would be forthcoming once my parents got it together enough to build it...which took, as I recall, four years). No special turkey dinner, no stocking-stuffer Toblerone, no fat juicy orange was enough to knock the ailment out of my system - I had to suffer through it.

Which is really the way it still is. No matter how much cough syrup and Halls I suck back, the only cure is time.

Dammit.

Chronic Age-Related Fashionitis

I'm feeling a little boxed-in lately, at least in the fashion corner of my brain. I think part of it has to do with getting older and feeling more settled (one might say stuck; one could say that) in general, but I think part of it has more to do with self-expression: what I can, and can't, do and say, and where.

For example: there was a time in my life when I would dye my hair. Random chunks of pink and blue, terrible and homemade, would make appearances and then disappear a few weeks later. I wasn't invested in upkeep; I just liked having some little difference. I would wear 1970s neon-yellow maxi dresses with pink underwear underneath. I would do Big Daytime Eye Makeup, just for funsies, or dress in a Canadian approximation of a chola's outfit while studying. Just trying on different personas, you know?

Now, I feel like I've missed the boat. My office and my boss are both far from conservative, but my professionalism isn't usually the first thing people notice when my hair is dyed the colour of a Skittle. The women there with candy-coloured hair are that Funky Older Type: one is a beer sommelier with purple streaks in her gray, one has pink highlights in her salt-and-pepper, both wear Doc Martens, have small dogs, and carry custom-made laptop bags. Nothing wrong there, but not really my style, you know? As always, I want something a little more post-apocalyptic farm girl. Sleeker, more flattering and thought-provoking, less self-concious.

Maybe I'm complaining about aging out of my style; I'm increasingly aware of being "too old" for former go-to looks. Most of my friends are a few years younger than me, so they can still get away with looking like Hopie from Love and Rockets, or having semi-dreads or a pedophilic movember 'stache. Those who are my age usually work in creative fields - nobody cares if you're braless in a tank top when you're crunching out your third blog post of the day - and so I feel marooned on my island of Office Appropriate Clothing, trying to figure out if I can wear booty shorts to the office party or if I should stick with a pencil skirt.

Don't mistake this for wanting to dress in an outre style. I can (usually) tell what occasion demands which level of formality, and will try to be appropriate. I'm not going to show up at your wedding in a mini-dress, and I won't wear flip-flops to a job interview. This holds no matter what age I am, although I do tend to try harder to nail it than I did in my early 20s.

But it's the transition that's tripping me up. I feel like this is the reason so many women panic and cut off all their hair when they have kids: it's easy, but it also instantly identifies you as a mom. (How many older women do you know who have hair past their earlobes? It's an growing-up rite of passage.) I do not want to do this: I want to feel like my indomitable self even as I move into my 30s and beyond.

So I ask you: How can I reconcile my interest in weirdo club-inspired fetish fashions with a day job? Where can I wear bright blue wedge heels? Do I need to take out my gauged earrings and find some sedate studs? Where can I put the colour, if not in my hair? I know that, as I get older and my "job" turns into a "career," making bad clothing choices will affect me adversely; I also know that I don't want to bore myself into dressing like a substitute teacher every day until I retire. Where is the middle ground? And once I get there, what do I wear?

Happy Birthday to Me!

I'm just going to come right out and say it: I'm having a great day.

It's my birthday - I'm turning 29, and it's one of those milestone-lite days (I am nearly 30! Who is that in the mirror? I am so old, snore, blah blah blah, whatever), and it's been one of the nicest days in recent memory, period, and one of the best birthdays ever.

My life is pretty great - I have a family who loves me (I woke up to texts from both my parents, and got to have lunch with my sister and mom), a boyfriend who jumped on me at 7:15 this morning to snuggle me and whisper "happy birthday!" into my sleepy ears, a boss who gave me a bottle of champers, and a load of friends who are coming to a potluck at my place tonight.

I live in a city where the mayor can be chucked out of office, despite the pundits swearing up it down it would never happen, on bad governance. Where I can go dancing tomorrow night in an industrial club and next week at the AGO. Where I can waltz into a teeny shop in Kensington and emerge with fancy-ass dresses that fit my curvy body like a glove. I can get any number of fancy ridiculous-person sodas in the stores, and there are cats on the streets.

Two years ago, my birthday was spent stressing about a job interview the next morning; last year, I was starting a new job the next morning (2011 was a crummy work year, guys). And while both were spent with friends and loves, I didn't feel so good - I felt like I was trying to live up the Platonic ideal of The Perfect Birthday, and came up short each year. I've been plagued with this feeling since childhood, like birthdays are somehow a failure if that aren't the very best day of the year. And now that I've let myself off the hook for that, I can feel like today really is my special day.

My plants are healthy. My apartment is clean. I feel amazing, in a real, soulful way. I feel, for lack of a better word, totally blessed.

Thanks, everyone. You're all the best.

Hysterical

Hysteria opens with a montage — Victorian ladies from old to young are complaining to an unseen doctor about their troubles, ranging from uncontrollable sobbing to a vague complaint of “feelings.” It’s the 1880s, and hysteria is an epidemic among the women of London. We’re introduced introduced to a richly textured world of horse-drawn carriages and classist social morals. It’s a time when a woman riding a bicycle is shocking, and you could lose your home over a 200 dollar debt.

Hugh Dancy plays Dr. Mortimer Granville, a handsome young doctor whose revolutionary ideas (germ theory!) and straightforward manner get him kicked out of most of London’s hospitals. He eventually lands at Dr. Robert Dalrymple’s practice. The good Dr. Dalrymple is an expert in vulvar massage — the treatment relieves those annoying thoughts and mood swings associated with hysteria. The doctors naively assume that the stimulation provides no pleasure (pleasure is, of course, only possible through penetrative sex), and a half-hour under Dr. Dalrymple’s twirling index finger brings a “paroxysm” (read: orgasm) that brings the uterus back into normal alignment and cures the woman… at least until next week.

Maggie Gyllenhaal explodes onto the screen, railing about the incipient women’s revolution and being the Dalrymple family’s embarrassing black sheep: she works at a settlement house, helping poor women and children get their lives together. She’s hands-on and feisty, apologizing for nothing. Her father will offer no financial support until she settles down and gets married. Felicity Jones plays Emily Dalrymple, Charlotte’s sister, and Jones has the unenviable job of playing Granville’s safe crush: the doctor’s daughter, steeped in social niceties and a believer in the debunked science of phrenology. Compared to Gyllenhaal, Jones sort of fades (for those who want to see her shine in a more modern love story, check out Like Crazy, in which she sparkles). Emily represents the past; Charlotte, though brash and overwhelming at times, is moving towards the future. Dr. Granville is stuck between what he should do, and what he feels obliged towards.

It becomes apparent that Dr. Granville is quite accomplished at vulvar massage, and the practice is booming. But the magic touch doesn’t come without a price: Granville develops a painful spasm in his hand that interferes with his ability to treat his clients. After failing to satisfy an influential patient, the young doctor is accused of besmirching the Dalrymple practice and is dismissed. He retreats back to his friend and benefactor Edmund, and begins to soothe himself with Edmund’s new invention: a vibrating, rotating feather duster. As Granville handles the tool, he notices the similarity between his clinical work and the tool’s effects. Eureka! The electric vibrator is born.

The movie springs forward with an engagement and a trial, several on-screen orgasms and a heartfelt speech. The vibrator is a success, of course, but Charlotte is in financial trouble and Dr. Granville has a tough romantic decision to make. The movie is sprightly and light on its feet: the characters are likeable and the dialogue is heavy on sexy-sounding puns. Hysteria trips up a little when it delves into politics — Charlotte is liberal even by today’s standards, but her vision of a clean, safe place for women and their children is unimpeachable. The acting is solid across the board, and although the film could have easily become a trifle, the politics keep it grounded and meaningful. It’s the stuff of romantic comedy, to be sure, but the vibrator is one of the best inventions of the last 150 years — a tool that allows women to take control of their sexual pleasure — and this looks at its invention is a solid little gem.