October 6th, 2009
Cheer!
I promise this is the last time I mention it (for a while) but the new Journey Prize anthology is out today, and maybe you’ll like it (close to) as much as I do!!
And, if you don’t care about that, penguins in sweaters!
I’m not going away
RR
September 18th, 2009
Smart does not equal serious
Here the thing, er, things:
This blog is pink.
I wear glitter to celebrate.
If you say something especially witty or interesting, I might clap (without irony).
I have strong thoughts on Sean Kingston (angry thoughts, but still).
I bake a lot of muffins.
I saw *I Love You Man* and didn’t regret it.
I eat things that fall on the floor.
Until recently, I owned a grape-scented Barbie doll, and when I gave away said doll, it was with a great deal of careful consideration.
I’m afraid of bats, cabdrivers, having too many items in the express lane, and people thinking I’m dumb.
I’m not dumb! Not according to my last IQ test, anyway, although that was in grade 7. Whatever. My CGPA was high! Well, pretty high! I can do math in my head…sometimes.
Ok, sure: sometimes I like dumb things. Sometimes I like smart things, sometimes I like things that you can’t intellectually assess (like gum!) Sometimes I *do* dumb things, like thinking I can make my own pastry bag. Sometimes I do smart things, like optimizing my bus route, or writing a good short story. Really, it happens.
I worry sometimes that no matter how carefully considered my thoughts on Thomas Hardy are, people are going to dismiss them because I am wearing rose-patterned tights during the conversation. Sometimes I think that I should be actively cultivating an image, and that image should involve sarcasm and clove cigarettes, or at least fewer hugs and less gum.
But then I have a bad day or someone says something mean or I get a headache, and I think that life is difficult, and we must find comfort where we can. And I for example, am immensely comforted by kittens. Their existance, their fluffiness, amusing pictures and videos thereof.
Friday I discovered I can haz cheeseburger and the LOLcats and it did my tender little tough-day heart a world of good. But I have picked the toughest, dark-angst-ridden artist LOLcats to share with you–see?
Tell me you aren’t happier than you were a second ago?
RR
July 6th, 2009
Professional Interviews: Mary, assistant manager in a tack shop
Interview #3 in this series, if you are keeping track, still taking advantage of my friends’ patience as I am as yet too timid to interview strangers. For urban readers, a tack shop is a saddlery, a place that sells equipment for horseriders, competitive and recreational, and for the horses themselves.
What is your job? I’m in sales, shipping, and I’m assistant manager, 2nd within the chain of command.
How did you get that job? By chance. I was laid off for the winter from the nursery [plants, not babies] that I was working at and my friend who owns a horse farm needed some help because her dad, who usually helped her out in the barn, was having bypass surgery. So while he recuperated she needed a hand and I needed something to do. I worked for her through the winter and summer while looking for another job (I had decided not to go back to the nursery when they asked since they weren’t going to give me back my management position).
A typical shift for me: I get there are 8:45, unlock, turn off alarms, turn on lights (and fans, if it’s summer, turn on the Open sign, take sale or feature items out to the porch. And water my plants! Load computers, count change in the till, count out bills to add to the till…then, if no customers have come in, I’ll answer any emails that need answers and print off any online orders that need to be filled, check the fax machine for fax orders, check the log book for phone and other orders have come in [since my last shift]. I’ll go get the required items from around the store to fill the orders. If large quantities or a large item is require, I’ll fax a request to the company warehouse and have them check their stock since it’s easier for them (but if they don’t have what’s needed, I’ll pull it from the store). If no one has it, I call the customer to suggest something else. Once an order is filled, I got omy till, look up the customer (or add the info, if they aren’t in the system) and run their credit card through. If all goes well, I put the order into shipping and receiving for my boss to take to the warehouse.
I also answer the phone, I set up meetings with suppliers, I sit in on those meetings, take stock of items required to fill the store, and help any customers that need me. But the mail-order takes up the majority of my day.
What makes you good at your job? Knowledge of horses and livestock and the fact that I ride all the time. People don’t want and don’t trust advice from someone who has no contact with horses. I have very good customer service skills and excellent phone manners. And I know what’s going on in the horse world, since I got to shows, know rules and regulations, things like that. Even rodeos.
What sort of person would hate your job? Someone who doesn’t know the horse world; they wouldn’t be able to give good advice. Someone who doesn’t like helping people; there’s a lot of 1-on-1. You can’t have issues with people who come into the store.
Favourite item in the store? A brand-new Billy Cook barrel saddle, the new design. It has a natural coloured rawhide-wrapped horn and cantle… As opposed to the natural light colour, it’s a chestnut. Even the roughout leather on the fenders and jockey skirt are a chestnut colour. It’s very comfortable to sit in. It makes me debate whether to trade in my current saddle. But I don’t think I will.
Final statement: To ride a horse is to fly without wings!
June 30th, 2009
Life is unfair
Another line I love but had to kill:
“…his mother with her stiff vegetarian hair, worrying about her chickens back in Austin tended by a neighbour child with a lisp and a nosering.”
RR
January 24th, 2009
All Over the Place
Some of my favourite bloggers have been sneaking off to other places and being brilliant all over again, and I’ve gotten a bit behind.
Kerry usually writes about books at Pickle Me This but this month she also wrote about books that are a little or a lot ripped from the headlines in This Magazine.
Julie usually writes about readers on Seen Reading, but last weekend she wrote about readers experiencing the miracle of text in transit in the Globe and Mail.
And Dani usually photographs animal effigies around town for Animal Effigy, but today her office banana chicken is on Cute with Chris.
Anything else I’ve missed?
Oliver James / washed in the rain / no longer
RR
July 16th, 2008
On nostalgia
For my birthday, my friend Shannon gave me Listography, a workbook compiled by Lisa Nola so you can make up an autobiography in lists, cued by prompts in the book (or on the website. Obviously, fun for those of us who like lists, and possibly a little OCD for those who do not. I’m ok with that, and appreciate Shannon’s endorsement of my fetish.
Still, not every list is magic–the one I made of every address I’ve ever had was depressing, mainly because I can’t remember the apartment number of a place I live in seven years ago, which is frustrating for my obsession. I probably can’t remember every toy and game I ever played with, either, but that toy-and-game list *is* magic, because there are plenty of them I *do* remember, and those toys are far enough in the past that I feel a pleasant burst of oh-I-remember thinking of them, whereas I still have most of the same furniture from the apartment of no-particular-number.
Oh, kid nostalgia! It’s been making the rounds lately, must be seeing all the water-fights in the park. Kerry and I were pleased to find we both desired a Power Wheel and never got one. I was mentioning to a less-astute friend that I still think Power Wheels are cool, and he said, “Uh, don’t you have a driver’s license now?” As if that makes it any better! Driving acar is totally not the point.
Nevertheless, my parents weren’t stupid–they knew that kids that could make an afternoon out of playing with a toad and drinking from the hose (my friend Nancy reminded me of that long-lost glee!) didn’t need to drive around the backyard. I don’t mean to paint my youth as quite the countryside idyll of Laura Ingalls or anything–we were as obsessed with Nintendo as any kids anywhere, we just also had the toads and the fields and spring run-off, etc.
And then eventually, you get into high-school and either start trying to be cool or actually are, and either way there’s a lot less time to waste on playing–what are toys and games but ways to occupy people who don’t have anything else to do.
I wrote a story once about hanging on to kid games when you’re in high school, about not feeling up to growing up–it’s called Grade Nine Flight. I always forget about that one, because it was written ages ago, though it later appeared on The Danforth Review, that wonderful online journal of (mainly) the short story. Someone reminded me of it recently, because it’s the only actual story that comes up when you google me (TDR archives all their stuff). She read it wanting to know what my work is like, and there’s a kind of double-nostalgia here, because that story is in a very different vein than my work these days. I’m not only nostalgic for childhood, I’m nostalgic for three years ago.
I’ll go back to that sort of story one of these days, I’m sure. On Monday night, in High Park, I saw a toad.
When Johnny saw the numbers he lied
RR
June 28th, 2008
Internet Abundance
There’s been much action on the interweb while I was away–yall just wait for me leave, don’t you? Or, actually, some of this stuff has been up a while, I’m just slow. But now I am alerting you! If you, you know, care about any of this.
–The last ever installment of rob mclennan’s “12 or 20 Questions” series–with rob himself. So interesting. I was shocked at the lack of enthusiasm for pears! Also involving mr. mclennan, witness via YouTube the intense run-up to the Throw-down in O-Town last night, vs. Nathaniel G. Moore. It’s too bad they couldn’t have had one here (or I couldn’t have posted about this earlier for the Ottawa reader(s) out there) but the videos are pretty amusing.
–In further bookishness, the always insightful Kerry Clare, writes movingly about the books we read again, on Descant Blog. I can’t quite nail down the metaphor here–if the past is a foreign country, books are open tickets…? Oh, she says it much better–go read.
–Toronto poet Dani Couture has started a photo blog called Animal Effigy in order to document the ways the urban environment is haunted by images–effigies–of the animals we have shut out. The pictures are often funny and sometimes sad, and you can contribute if you have a similar eye for this sort of thing.
Enjoy!
Your soul impedes on mine
RR
January 30th, 2008
Walking down the street, warm and misty out
Me (coughing): I’m a little sick.
B: You are.
Me (coughing)
B: You are a little ho(a)rse.
Me: Heh.
B: You remember that, that joke? Horse-hoarse?
Me: Yeah, heh. Baaaah.
B: …
Me: Neeeigh.
B: You’re a little strange.
Me: Heh.
B: Heh.
Me: Was that part of it?
B: Part of…?
Me: Was that a joke? Part of the joke?
B: Well, yeah. Because I said you were a little horse and you said “baaah” and then you said “neigh,” so I said you were a little strange for doing that.
Me: Oh, ok, that’s funny.
B: Yeah, you just needed some context.
Me: Yeah.
B: Only, you actually had context to start with, since you were there.
Me: Yeah.
B: Huh.
Me: It wasn’t like I was just working my way around the barnyard, though.
B: ???
Me: Like, I made a mistake, making the sheep noise, but then I corrected myself and made the horse noise. I wasn’t just doing all the animals, I wasn’t going to say moo next.
B: Ah.
Me: It wasn’t “baah comma neigh,” it was “baah cut off with dash neigh.”
B: I retract my earlier comment.
Me: The stenographer that we pull along behind us in a little red wagon will strike it from the record.
B: You aren’t strange at all.
Me: Duly noted.
Always one full on the ground
RR
January 29th, 2008
Free Associative
So I have a cold, which is making me insane! It’s a pretty minor cold, as these things go, I’m sure, but since I’m rarely ill, I have poor coping skills. My eyes have been itchy, even in my sleep. The other night, I dreamed I went to the bathroom mirror to see if I had an eyelash or something in there. In the dream, the pink bit of the corner of my eye had tiny plastic snowflakes in it, and I couldn’t get them out. It was weird, and icky, and then I woke up.
Yesterday, in real-life (I think), I was leaving work when a very sleepy fat raccoon lumbered out of the bushes. Its tail had been mainly lopped off somehow, and it was very very puffy and fat–it looked like an animate dust-bunny. It was headed drunkenly for the road (aren’t raccoons supposed to be hibernating in winter?) I am scared of raccoons, ever since one tried to crawl up my skirt while I was eating on the rooftop patio at Hemingway’s, but I didn’t want to see this one squished by a car. I yelled, “Bad raccoon!” to no avail. Even though it was like 5:04 right outside my office, I was mysteriously alone outside.
“Bad raccoon! No road!” I yelled, and then I found a stick on the ground and tried to chase the raccoon away. Only, the raccoon would not be chased and *ran towards me*. I panicked, and threw the stick at the raccoon, who very wearily, like a teenaged babysitter consenting to a game of Boggle, turned and went back into the bushes. “Yeah! And stay there!” I told it, and the greyish snowy dark beside the road.
I think I have a low-grade fever.
The eventual downfall / is just the bill from the restaurant
RR
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