May 30th, 2008

Excitement all around

I am actually not feeling very excited about anything at the moment, suffering as I am from a new variety of headache that I have never encountered before, which is shooting little lightning bolts of pain across my cheekbones for some reason, despite the best efforts of generic-brand painkillers. Nevertheless, there is much that is good in the world, so I will try not to let my enthusiasm be *too* dampened by semi-agony.

Some good: last night’s launch of IV Nights, which was super-fun and very well-organized (mental note: Tranzac=awesome reading space).

Also very good, except for my nerves–my own reading tomrrow, in celebration of the UofT spring reunion (see link at right). The headliner will be Elizabeth Hay, and the moderator Rosemary Sullivan, so if you are an alum, you may well want to come (you have to register via the aforementioned link). And/or the reading prior to ours, featuring the wise and witty Barry Callaghan and my esteemed classmate, Lauren Kirshner. And then, if no one falls off the stage and it turns out that I am not having a mini-aneurysm right now (!!), we will go out for Chinese food.

So, other than the library recalling The Book of Negroes before I could read it, all is serene. But, headache!!!!!!!

Argh.

She was box-car-hopping
RR

May 15th, 2008

Spring Fever

I am ill. Ill! Not anything anyone should be concerned about, just sniffling and coughing and swollen lymph nodes that make neck feel it’s about to sprout ridges like an iguana. But still. It’s spring! Lilacs are out, and crabapple (proofreading note: I originally wrote “cranapple” there and below–apparently, I have been thoroughly indoctrinated by the Ocean Spray people) blossoms and magnolias and forsythia. On Monday the road that runs by my office smelled *so good* on the walk home because of crabapple blossoms, but today I can no longer smell it. Bah!

(Possibly, one could note here that I should stop wandering around outside trying to smell things, grocery shopping in the rain, leaving the house with wet hair, etc., if I do not wish to be sick. But no, I think I’d rather continue to do those things, and complain.)

It’s so ridiculous / I can barely stop
RR

April 14th, 2008

Compassion

I have extremely weak eyes. Aside from being some godawful prescription that renders me unable to go to the beach with people whose hands I feel uncomfortable asking to hold, my eyes also water at almost anything. Pepper, bright reflections, laughter: all render me teary. Wind is the worst–it totally reproduces the effects of tragedy on me. In addition to streaming tears, wind actually turns my eyes red; even the edges of my nose. If I have to walk very far on a windy day, I look like my heart is broken.

Which never used to matter, until I became a pedestrian in chill and populous cities. Now long walks are one of my principal means of locomotion, and I can’t stay home because it’s gusty. Thus, I find myself the recipient of many compassionate stares as I stroll through Toronto, bouncing to my iPod, carrying my groceries, looking like I’m about to throw myself on the casket. People offer tight-lipped smiles, encouraging nods, nervous stares. Bus drivers look horrified, possibly worried I will look to them as authority figures to solve whatever problem I am having (many, it seems, do).

I can’t explain, because no one ever asks. Not once in all my watery years in Toronto has anyone asked the question I see itching behind their own eyes: “Are you ok?” Compassionate people, Torontonians, but even compassion has its limits.

A little boy under a table with cake is his hair
RR

March 21st, 2008

Circadian Reading

Though I don’t know too much about the science of it, I put a lot of faith in personal circadian rhythms, the cycles by which an individual organism reacts to light, dark, and other stimulus to determine when and how much we sleep. Obviously, humans are diurnal, and want mainly to be asleep when it’s dark and awake when it’s light, but most believe that there are fairly wide variations in exactly what hours a given human will not only prefer but biologically be more able to be conscious. I have to believe that, otherwise I’m just a giant loser that prefers to be in bed by 10:30, maybe 10. Call me at 6 am, though; then we can chat. But you won’t, because your circadian clock is different than mine, as it is with most people. Ah, the majesty of human difference.

I have been wondering recently if the body *and* the mind have an innate preference for doing *everything* at certain hours. Obviously, we are flexible, can do things on schedules that accommodate our jobs and loved ones and the hours that busses are running, and also maybe there is no ideal hour to reprogramme the heat levels on the microwave (perhaps the ideal is never.) But really, on a lazy weekend day (ie. today) on which I am not expected anywhere and have no particular tasks to do, I find the day orders itself into it’s ideal form, which involves several hours of reading starting just past dawn.

I prefer to read in the morning–I’m better able to focus, to sit still, to immerse myself in the book for longer periods. I don’t of course, usually get three hours in the morning to read, being employed as I am, but I do get 45 minutes or so to read while doing cardio at the gym at dawn, and I really love that, too. And I read on the bus *to* work with much more concentration than on the bus home.

I wonder if there is something in that, some sort of perceptive nozzle that is switched higher in the earlier part of the day than later… I wonder if there is a good time to do everything–I write best in the evenings, I know, and I’m more charming to talk to before 9pm. Perhaps there is a laundry hour, a speechifying hour, a pancake flipping hour. Perhaps there’s some minute of the day when, for the first time in the seven years of our relationship, it would become intuitable to me how, or even why, one would want to alter the heat levels on the microwave.

This is just yammering, of course, since there’s no way I’m going to look beyond the already slightly esoteric Wikipedia article to find out more about this subject. But it is worth, as always, playing to one’s strengths.

Seven drops of blood fall
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

November 30th, 2007

Tapping out

What’s really been bothering me lately is the expression “tapped out.” Where does it come from? I always assumed that it came from wrestling: when a man is pinned and gives up unpinning himself, he taps the other wrestler to indicate his surrender. But then, when you come to the end of a long grey day and realize that you haven’t the strength for even one more useful task, shouldn’t you say, “I’ve tapped out,” or “I’m tapping out,” as opposed to what one does say, which is “I’m tapped out.”

That grammar would indicate that the etymology (can you have etymology of a phrase?) is rooted in a beer keg. When you pour beer from a keg you tap it, and when it’s empty it’s tapped out, right? (obviously, I’m way out of my depth here) Then the conjugation makes sense, because when you say “I’m tapped out” you are just substituting yourself for the beer keg, you being empty of energy, not beer.

But three dictionaries neither confirm nor deny this hypothesis (including Canadian Oxford!) and the definition of an expression is distressingly hard to Google. Now I’m worried I’ve made the whole thing up, and in fact no one says “tap out” in any context, ever, except me!

You know, I think I am. Tapped out, I mean. It’s been a really long week. Perhaps I’ll leave this question for better minds than mine, and go do something fun.

Can you bring me back a cardinal from Kentucky?
RR

PS–My orthodonist unexpectedly announced this morning that I don’t have to wear my retainer during the day anymore. Unexpectedly because he’d said before that it would be maybe as much as six months before I’d have this luxury. I think he gave me the worst case scenario because he knows I don’t take disappointment too well, but I take unexpected good news very well. Despite my exhaustion, I am ebullient. I went right to the dep and bought gum, Raspberry Extra, which is repulsive, but which I am chewing right now for the lack of anything else. On my way to the fun, I’ll buy something better.

October 31st, 2007

Hallowe’en

Ok, I’m not exactly the vampire that I planned to be when I realized that I was getting my braces off the week before Hallowe’en. Yesterday I went back to the orthodontist’s to pick up my retainer and they informed me that it is not just for at night, it’s for all the time unless I am eating, brushing my teeth or doing something very very important and enunciation intensive and brief, like my wedding vows or something. I will have to give up grazing on snacks, chewing gum (I whined for a few hours about this as if I were dying. I realized later what a wanker I was being!) and speaking clearly. On the upside, the retainer is in fact nearly invisible. Everyone always *said* the braces were invisible, but they were lying.

I suppose I could’ve invoked some sort wedding-status for the office wide costume constest that just took place, but I was over the wankery by that point, and just dolled myself up in purple glitter cape, purple eyeshadow, purple glitter false eyelashes, black lipstick, with splashes of glitter blood all over my chin, throat and sternum, and went as an orthontically challenged vampire, with my retainer firmly in place and my fangs in the retainer case. My prize (participant!) is a sack of Hallowe’en candy, if anybody needs any candy.

You might have noticed around Rose-coloured many mentions of my lovely friend and blogger, Kerry Clare. It would most likely be Kerry who introduced the very useful word “wanker” to my vocabularly (see above) and, even better, has a new story “The New Peppermint” in the fall issue of The New Quarterly and even though my issue has not arrived yet (me and Canada Post, it’s a love/hate thing) I know it’s brilliant.

What are you dressed as?

Trapped and well-concealed
RR

October 19th, 2007

Zero Days!

I don’t have braces! I am a person without braces!!! I am a normal adult (HA! I *look* like a normal adult!)

Smile smile smile smile smile.

My teeth are so smoooooth! I had heard teeth can get scarred when you have braces on for a long time, but it turns out not usually, unless you don’t brush or have a bad orthodontist.

I brush! I have a good orthodontist! I have beautiful shiny ridiculously straight teeth!

Smile smile smile smile!!!!

The receptionist at the ortho’s said she’d never seen anyone so excited to have her braces off. I am mystified–doesn’t everybody want their braces off? Stupid disaffected teens. And that was actually somewhat subdued excitement by the end of the visit when I got her to take my (first) “after” picture. Subdued because the appointment was 2.5 hours long, and fairly painful, in that with enamel braces they sort of have to snap them off and the shock reverberates through your skull. And then they get out this vibrating thing and file the glue off, which is also not very fun.

But it’s the sort of thing one forgets immediately when everyone crowds your desk at work to look at your mouth approvingly, and to give you candy and gum! I am chewing Juicy Fruit right now, and it’s the best thing ever. Apparently, while I was away from the land of gum, they reinvented it as a capsule. Sweeetttt!

Smile smile smile smile.

I can*not* stop licking my teeth, even with the gum in. I should really go home.

Happy Friday!!!!!

When you’re beautiful
RR

October 16th, 2007

Minor things going wrong

Yesterday I got chocolate pudding on my desk dictionary, which is embarrassing because not everyone who sits in my section has one, so mine is often borrowed and I do not want to get the reputation as one who cannot keep her afternoon snack on the spoon. This was the only major hitch yesterday; otherwise it was a productive and pleasant day. Which causes me to wonder why I spent most of last night dreaming about the apocolypse… Surely the pudding spill couldn’t cause an anxiety dream by itself…perhaps I should examine my subconscious a bit more closely.

I do not dream often of the end of the world, but it does seem to recur more frequently in my dreamworld than, say, taking exams unprepared or in the nude or what have you. Though I was deeply upset by my dream when I awoke, I have to admit that this one, when examined in the cold light of day, bore more than a passing ressemblance to the very-good film, Last Night. I loved that movie, but it is both sad and lame that my subconscious is too lazy to come up with original material with which to terrorize me.

*Last Night* stars the very funny Don Mckellar whose twisted world on the tv show Twitch City so coloured my impressions of what it would be like to live in big bad Toronto. When I moved here a few years later, I found that while his vision is accurate re: a certain variant of Toronto life, it doesn’t *have* to be that way. I guess it helps that I have no roommate, or cat.

Well, maybe I’ll give up pudding once my brace-free lifestyle allows for more crunchy snacking options. Really, though, a fair number of those are open to me now, but I’ve gotten sort of addicted to mush. And blogging. There are worse addictions to have, really.

In your endless summer night / I’ll be on your other side
RR

October 15th, 2007

4 More Days!

Another thing I’ve gotten behind on is reporting my count-down to the Great Becky Brace-Off, which is on *Friday* if you can believe it. Though you haven’t been seeing it here, I’ve most definitely been thinking about it, to the point at which my lunchmates are surely sick of me looking enviously at their handheld fruits and telling of my plans to have my own soon. Perhaps you are sick if it, too. Other things I am looking forward to include:
–the end of the teeny elastic bands that I must use to wire shut my mouth every night. Those things, in addition to being hard to apply when one is very tired, *hurt*, as well as look stupid and make it very hard to talk, post-application.
–ease of applying lipstick increased by the fact that I will soon be able to press my lips flat over my teeth, and press hard with a lipliner. I use lipliner about twice a year, and for costumes at that, but this incidence may go up for the sheer pleasure of being able to do it.

More to come!

Asleep or dead?
RR