January 13th, 2008

Weekends Are for Wonderful

I have to say that the Free Biscuit performances Friday night were nothing short of astounding! To say nothing of the fact that Steph and Mark built a *stage* with *footlights* in their living room. To say nothing of the delicious food, the collapsable flying disk printed with sex-ed websites that Matthew brought me, to say nothing of the absolutely brilliant performances. Oh, wait, I already did say something about that. For my own part, I managed not to fall off the aforementioned stage, forget (m)any lines or, you know, die, which if you are one of those unlucky enough to have listened to much of the fretting I was doing about this performance, seemed like a possibility for a while. I’m really sorry about all that fretting, guys–I’m pleased to say that not only was it not horrible, I’m positively delighted I didn’t fake a stroke in order to stay home (also a possibility at one point).

The wonders slowed down slightly yesterday, consisting mainly of the discovery that Penny is right about whipped cream being better than CoolWhip, and that strawberry shortcake can (sorta) be created in January, if all concerned have enough patience and active imaginations. Also the joyous revelation that a first draft of a story that I thought might never be done is in fact nearly done. The thing about me and my dire predictions is that I have such a wide margin in which to be pleasantly surprised.

More pleasant surprises: gentle giants of my university years, the band Pigeon Hole has seemed defunct of late (hence the lack of hyperlink there), have a four-song artist page on CBC3 (search the song “Similar Promises”). This is handy for the vast majority of earthlings who do not own a copy of the chom 97.7 L’esprit 2000 cd, which is where I get my Pigeon Hole fix! Enjoy!

And so, when you wonder about the *next* draft of that story, the mysterious angry muscle in my back, the piercing hour of fire alarm that almost made me cry yesterday (I react really badly to loud noises) (it’s really hard to make me cry otherwise) (don’t try), or any of a dozen other scary things that I have do, we can really do little but be grateful for weekends.

Gloria / I think they got your number
RR

January 1st, 2008

Be It Resolved That, in 2008 I Will

1. Floss everyday. I’ve come too far, oral-health-wise, to go down for laziness.
2. Stop eating gelatin.
3. Stop reading things I don’t like just because I think I should. This applies to books and periodicals, even *The New Yorker*.
4. Investigate the condo market and make some sort of real estate plan.
5. Write something longer than 20 000 words that has a beginning, middle and end.
6. Resume my usual healthy eating habits that mysteriously disappeared in the latter part of 2007.
7. Attend more readings and other litsy events, but not indiscriminately.
8. Get the tv fixed and get a decent phone plan.
ADDED: 9. Buy local and non-corporate…as often as possible? Certainly more!
10. Go back to running, and try for a serious 10K.

My resolutions never include amorphous goals like, “be less tense” or “assume the best until proven otherwise” because those can’t be exactly acheived. But I certainly do mean to both those things, and many other amorphous things besides. This is going to be a very exciting 2008, doncha think?

Stop acting like a mama’s boy / instead of your father’s son
RR

December 30th, 2007

This Year in Review–the 2007 Resolutions

1. Health vigilance

Basically, I wanted to not die in surgery in January, and to recover from it with reasonable alacrity. And I did, so this one’s a win. The fact that I haven’t gotten the plague or fallen down a flight of stairs in the months since is simply bonus.

2. Apply for grants.

Did it.

3. Devote an hour a week to current events.

Failure. Utter and complete failure. I may be a bad person.

4. Get a real job.

Got one.

5. Read lots and read joyfully.

Um, this isn’t a real resolution, of course I read. A few books I dragged myself through when I probably should’ve just stopped. Perhaps more work on the joy next time.

6. Make a blog.

Hey, whadaya know!

7. Travel!

New York and Ottawa, huzzah. Maybe I’ll dream a little bigger next year!

8. Practice gratitude.

Um, this one seems in retrospect a bit airy-fairy. Hard to tell how I’m really doing on it. I think ok.

9. Write a book.

Hey, I did that one too.

Whoo, 7.5/9, perhaps my best year ever. Am I softballing myself, should I try for greater things? Stay tunned for the 2008 resolutions–maybe I’m going to climb the side of a building or something!!

You be 1948 / I’ll be 1981
RR

December 4th, 2007

1000 Things in 2002

If you read the comments here at Rose-coloured, you might have noticed a while back that Fred mentioned a doing a 5-year anniversary edition of 1000 Things We Like. This is clearly the best idea in the world, and though Fred is now somewhere on the European continent finding new things to like, I thought I’d get the ball rolling with some sentimental memories.

For those who have no idea what I’m talking about: in the summer of 2002, I read a novel which, while being otherwise rather good, was principally about adults, and the 12-year-old girls in the background were treated dismissively, especially when they started working on a list of 1000 things they liked. I *hate* it when adults are shown to be intrinsically more interesting than kids (which is why I hate The Gilmore Girls and I like positive endeavours and I wanted to make such a list with my friends, though we were adults.

Fred agreed with her characteristic enthusiasm, and so did countless others of our shared and separate circles. We began in late October and finished well before Christmas. Reading over the old list the past few days, I have been positively misty over the passage of time, the tenacity of friends and the no-end of goodness that there is in the world. I thought of putting the whole list up here, but that would probably break blogger, so below is just a random sampling, for inspiration. I’ll start the new list in the next post, and from then on, please feel free to add to it in the comments or by email. Even though we’re starting way later this time, perhaps we could still do it by Christmas??? Come back, Fred!!!!

All of New York City misses you
RR

585) kittens when they are so young their eyes are still blue
586) the Christmas displays at Pottery Barn
587) remembering an obscure tv programme with someone else who loved it once, too
588) the dreidel song
589) craisins
590) when you don’t understand and don’t understand and suddenly, like a flash, you do
591) how cheap long distance is these days
592) good complexion days
593) thick cotton tights
594) purging your closet down to only stuff you actually like
595) baking cookies for no reason other than enjoying the process of baking
596) very complicated notes to yourself that only you can understand
597) spearmint Trident
598) when the SNL cast loses concentration and giggles

November 28th, 2007

Milk Subjectivity

My thwarted attempt at laziness last night was to skip the grocery store in favour of picking up expensive milk at the convenience store. Thwarted because I wound up going to *four* convenience stores looking for skim milk. Granted, I was looking for the four-litre size, due to my terror of osteoporosis, but that didn’t seem like *that* unreasonable of a request.

As I stomped about in the wind and snow (but who wears a thin jersey dress in November just because some part of her brain declared Tuesday “cute tights day”), I thought about how much I loathe milk with fat in it. Even diluted by coffee I can still feel the thickness catch in my throat. And, oh my goodness, we are embarking on the season of egg nog. It’s so…viscous. I like the *flavour* of nog–I’ll eat one of those yellow candy canes quite happily. But, ew, no, the “liquid” form is the consistency of…well. Thin milk 4-eva!

I have lived long enough to know that there is no “good” kind of milk–most people just like whatever they drank growing up and find everything else disgusting (which sucks especially for those who grew up on farms drinking unpasteurized milk, which is now illegal to sell in Ontario for reasons that…make no sense). Milk is totally subjective–and unless you drink table cream by the glass, I think it’s all pretty good for you. I think *all* the percentages should be available in stores, naturally, but I don’t really think there’s an argument available to be won.

My point, sorta, is about how I think I’m getting more mature, because I’m able to extend that sort of relativism (such a dirty word, but some things *are* relative) to things I used to be quite strident about. Fiction, for example–more and more I find myself able to recognize quality prose when I actually don’t personally enjoy it. And I’ll also *read* it, which is a big step for me. Not that I think it’s somehow virtuous of me to drag myself through tomes I hate, but there’s lots to be learned outside of the narrow spectrum of the tried and true. I get to the end and say, “Wow, that was an impressive thing to write, I could never write that. I would never want to write that, but I do wish I could do certain things that this author did.” But not out loud of course, because I’m usually reading on the bus.

Of course, there are things that are objectively bad–sour milk, prose by the light of the moon, those sorts of things. Not everything is relative.

November 22nd, 2007

Rose-coloured Police Blotter

Item #1 — Next-door neighbour bitten (on ass) by vicious dog in Mac’s Milk. Dog was supervised only by small child, who cried at the sight of blood. Neighbour gave up on recrimination, went to get tetanus shot.

Item #2 — Car spun out on the street in front of my building, crashed into the front door of the house next to us. Fire engines blocked traffic, police traffic director unsympathetic to pedestrians.

Item #3 — Colleague’s expensive high-heeled shoe (1) lost/stolen at gym. Colleague angry, sad.

Item #4 — The meeting I came in early for has been cancelled.

What a world in which we live.

Now I know I had plenty of time
RR

November 20th, 2007

Charity Begins in the Head

As the season of goodwill towards mankind begins, there are of course more charitable appeals in the air, the mail, email, street. While in general I’m pretty sloppy about donations–I always *mean* to give more than I do–I can usually get it together in December, at least a little. My whole rationelle for being a Jew who loves Christmas is probably another blog post, but I think it should suffice to say that people *do* try to be extra nice around this time of year, and remember what they have in common with others, less fortunate or not.

I’ve been thinking about giving along a couple of lines, and the suggestions I’ve gotten have shown me that it’s not just cellphones and video games that are moving ahead by leaps and bounds unbeknowst to me. One possibility suggested as a gift to people who are anti-gift, and the Gifts of Hope. It’s a website where you can donate $$ for a specific purpose in a specific purpose–literacy in Ghana, farm animals in Ethiopa—they’ve got it priced right down to the goat, so you know that your money does not go into a pool where it is diluted by other people’s donations, you bucks go purely to one family that is the recipient of *your* goat. This is a new and, to me, somewhat humourous invention, but it’s cool and makes a cute card, and will certainly drum up investment in what is it bottom a deeply humane program to try to help people help themselves.

What’s funny about it though is that everyone wants to be *involved* it seems. Just a cheque, to assign decision-making and responsibility to the administrators of the charity is becoming passe. The Christmas drive that I’m involved in this year, as many years in the past, is not a cash one, or even just a big box of canned goods and unwrapped toys. We have been assigned families in the nearby community who are in dire straights (I’m sorry, I would normally post a link here for your interest, but it’s a corporate giving program and there isn’t one of the public) and our donations are to be specific items on their wish-list, specific to their unique needs, purchased by the donators ourselves.

The profiles we receive are incredibly detailed. We get names and ages, clothing and shoe sizes, personal preferences, and a hierarchy of needs from toys and games to sweatpants and sanitary napkins. To me, it seems dreadfully invasive and undignified. The kidstuff is fun to shop for, but I feel like it’s not fair to the parents to take away the joy in picking out the pretty toys for the kids. And the grownup stuff–knowing that mom Sandy takes three sizes different between top and bottom, knowing what basic household items are missing, is really too much for me.

I made these complaints to a colleague–it all seemed to be a bit of bourgeois mistrust, an update on “You can’t give a panhandler loose change because he’ll just spend it on booze. Better to give money to an agency, that’ll make sure it goes towards food, clothes and a sensible job-training program.” Only now, tales of misappropriation and scandal lurking in our heads (“I can’t remember when, or which one, but one of them there charities was spending like *ninety* percent of the revenue on ‘administration’, and we know what that is!”)–if you want to make sure your donation doesn’t evapourate directly into ethanol, better make sure it’s in concrete form of something practical (“Blue jeans, a teddy bear and four cans of baked beans!”) with a name and address gift card attached.

My colleague pointed out the system isn’t really all that cynical–many of these are single parent homes, and shopping with the kids, or finding time to do it at all for a working parent, might be an issue. Plus they’d signed up for the program, so they clearly either lacked my qualms or found their need to be greater them.

Fair enough. She made good points, and vehemently, clearly concerned that she not let my potential aid to these families disappear due to some semi-imagined PCness. It was good of her, and I shut up and returned to reading my list.

And quickly got sucked in. There are several toys on the list that I loved as a wee one, and I’d like to go see the updates. And there were a couple requests for “teen novels,” a category that I have very strong opinions on, and then of course there’s the vegetarian baked beans. So I made my own shopping list and that’s when I realized the genius of the thing. If I buy everything that twigged my interest, and I probably will, I’ll wind up spending sizeably more than what would strike me as a “decent donation” in cash. That’s what all these details are really about–it’s easier to give more to people you relate to as in some way just like you. And in reading the list, I found that connexion, as I suspect most people did. Everybody needs sweatpants, warm socks and novels. We’re all human, after all.

Went upstairs and had a smoke
RR

November 16th, 2007

Hey Day

I keep forgetting about it, because I’m not actually going to be there, but today is my graduation day. Huzzah! I may have said it before, perhaps when I completed my thesis, when I submitted my thesis, and/or when I defended my thesis, but this time, absolutely for sure, I am a Mistress of the Arts…as of slightly after 2pm, I suppose.

Raise your heavy eyes
RR

October 15th, 2007

Juvenalia

We’re running a week behind at Rose-coloured, because I still haven’t told you about the least-exciting part of my Thanksgiving weekend: looking through my writings from years past and chucking out most of it, I don’t need every piece of creativity-oriented paper I’ve ever had, and storing it there is crowding my parents’ ever-expanding wardrobes. So I spent all the lulls of the weekend (and there are many in LTH) sorting juvenalia, and yes, I called it that, to anyone who would listen, a la Adrian Mole (“Well, it’s a good thing I lost at Scrabble by 200 points in 45 minutes–I have to get on sorting my juvenalia!”)

I only looked at high school, skipping those ever-portenous grade-school diaries, and in fact all diaries, since I was undisciplined back then (and now?) and only wrote in diaries when I was sad, so I know those books would be litanies of complaints with five-month silences. I also didn’t look at university days, when I think I might have actually written some good stuff. One thing at a time (yes, I am calling university juvenalia–I mean, who would I be kidding?)

Anyways, reading over the high school stuff, I did not find many of the diamonds in the rough that I had been hoping for–some of it sounded, well, like it was written by a teenager. Depressing, but not really surprising. I’ve never been an early bloomer (despite the name). What was gratifying was to find that there was so much work–apparently I wrote constantly as a kid, which I totally don’t remember doing. This too makes sense, though: see above-mentioned lulls in LTH.

So after I winnowed out Kiwanis drama festival assessments (“that busines with Becky and the chair doesn’t help at all”), every note my lab partners ever sent me (“M. is now wearing her purse *all the time*, in case she has to flee the building or something. It’s a new level of annoyingness. What’s the thesis of your English essay?”) I have a big stack of stories to read in more detail at my leisure (plus all the grade school/uni stuff still to sort…Christmas?)

What I’ve gone through so far is fascinating, because it proves that, in rudimentary ways, I was *always* obsessed with the same stuff. I’ve found stories from the late nineties that seem to be very loose, very bad first drafts of things I’ve written this year, except I *don’t remember writing* those earlier stories, and thought I was making everything up fresh. I dunno, do you find that creepy? It’s like I’m stealing from my younger self.) On the up-side even the not-good bulk of it shows what style I was, and still am, aiming for. I can’t find much that I feel super proud of, but for the sake of full disclosure, this, an excerpt from “In the Time of the Radio Gods,” my OAC Writer’s Craft project. Oh, remember OACs? Those were the *days*!

“Trying to stop thinking, that afternoon Tyler went to the beach. The water was too cool yet for swimming, and too polluted anyway. Still, he liked being able to sit in the sand in his shorts and t-shirt, read the paper and listen to his radio play staticky Beatles. He needed a tan.

“Noel sat down suddenly in the sand on his right and hugged him warmly, just as he always had. Without thinking, Tyler kissed his brother lightly on the cheek. His face did not feel waxy or icy. It was warm, toasted by the sun that would turn it burnt-blush red.”

Noel is, of course, dead–it seems like everything I wrote that year was a ghost story, a pattern I certainly didn’t notice at the time. It’s a good thing I save these things, so that my mature self can ferret out what was really going on. I’m actually already starting to regret I didn’t keep those chem notes.

Oh the boys /on the radio / they crash and burn
RR

October 8th, 2007

Meme answers

1. First car you drove and where you went.

Ford Taurus, and technically the first time I drove I went in a small circle in a parking lot at ignition speed. The first time I drove alone as a licenced driver, I went to the county line, because I could.

2. Favourite name for a boy.

Jacob

3. What are the basic components of lasagna, according to you?

Noodles, ricotta cheese, tomatoy-oniony sauce, spinach!!

4. What could make you move, this month, to another country?

Very very hard for me to imagine. Some sort of constellation of money and love, I guess: I’d have to be able to afford to do it, and I’d have to be going with someone I liked enough to know I wouldn’t hate the new place.

5. Farthest you’ve ever gone on foot?

From the Danforth to midtown.

6. I would never have a bird for a pet because a bird in the house is bad luck.

7. Favourite kind of gum / reason why you hate all gum.

Extra Bubblemint (that I know of–there are yet flavours undiscovered!)

8. Favourite name for a girl.

Emma? Sarah? Rebecca? I like “a” names.

9. Worst tv show you’ve ever liked (that you’ll admit to).

Pigsty? Ned and Stacy?

10. What’s your best party trick?

Shoulder stands, double-jointed toes, the subjunctive.

11. Gun to your head: get a non-ear piercing—where?

Nose. I’ve always thought those are cute, actually–I just worry about job intereviews. And snot.

12. What’s your strength you always brag about in job interviews?

Takes direction well. And enthusiasm!!!!

13. What song is in your head? Dead by My Chemical Romance

14. Why do you live in the place you live?

It was a very convenient commute two jobs ago, and then not so much for the last two years, and then good again for this one. Finally, inertia pays off.

15. Expensive useless item you’d be embarrassed to own, yet sorta wish you did?

Lululemon Groove apns

16. Last charity you gave to?

United Way.

17. After you take your laundry out of the drier, what do you do with it?

Throw it on the couch in wrinkle-minimizing formation until it starts to bother me, or someone comes over, or I wear everything.

18. What was the last conversation you had about?

Borges.

These last ones are oldies from past surveys, but I always want to know and, hey, we’re all evolving.
19. What’s the best thing you can cook?

Still egg curry. I guess I’m actually not evolving. (note to those who didn’t read previous memes: this egg curry has nothing to do with the real one that people eat in India, or anywhere other than my appartment. I invented it in 1999 when I read Jhumpra Lahiri’s “Third and Final Continent” and some of those characters ate egg curry. It was an amazing story, and egg curry sounded really delicious. I had no recipe, so I just thought really hard about it, and invented one. Later I got a recipe and I was very very wrong, but I can’t switch–too addicted to my wrongness.)

20. What are you wearing right now?

Um, this is bad, I just came from the gym: white sockettes, blue basketball shorts, purple t-shirt that I got in 1991, yellow terry headband that I got in 1989, glasses, earrings, braces. This is about as bad as i could possibly look without some sort of disease, I think.

I gave you blood blood / gallons of the stuff