September 13th, 2008

Upshots

Thanks for all your advice, guys–I really appreciate it. In case you were wondering how it all turned out:

1) I couldn’t get the book Fred recommended from the library, but the search brought up something similar sounded, which I have ordered. I’m sure whatever I end up with will be disturbing, as it should be, but maybe I’m hoping for…manageable disturbance? So I can still fall asleep?

2) I love the booklet that Kerry lent me on recycling. You *can* mix paper and plastic and metal. You should put cut tin lids *in* the tins and then pinch them shut so the recycling collectors don’t stabbed. You can recycle those round cardboard canisters that cocoa and disinfectant come in, but not the plastic lids. Amazing. There’s even a picture. The booklet provides a link which leads to a much more confusing bunch of information. Try to get the booklet if you can.

3) Since the age of my olives was indeterminate but at least 8 months, I took the advice of Naya and Scott and almost everybody and tossed them. I miss them, they were a part of my life for so long that I notice the blank spot when I open the fridge. I miss them even though I don’t actually like olives all that much, which is what cause of the problem in the first.

4) I bought a knee-length, non-black, non-constrictive new dress yesterday, but it is only good for a specific season (fall) and since we seem to be having all of them in alternation, I’m still not sure what I’ll actually be wearing on Monday. But I am excited. And to get into waaayy too much information, the trial run on my hair didn’t go so well. I now must take the bus looking like I’ve just received a mild electrical shock. Learning, learning.

As cool as I am / I thought you knew that already
RR

September 10th, 2008

Please advise

A few things I could use some help with, if you happen to know…

1) Can anyone recommend a fairly accessible book on the KKK? For obvious reasons, I’m reluctant to do a blind web search on this sort of things, and also obviously, I don’t know anyone with first-hand experiences.

2) Can anyone explain to me what’s going on with Toronto recycling? (I believe it’s different from city to city, so out-of-town advice I guess doesn’t count.) Can you mix paper and plastic now? What about shopping bags? I don’t understand the new labels on the bins in the subways, nor the (different) ones on the bins in my appartment building. I’m worried I’m not being as helpful to the planet as I mean to be. Standing in the alleyway trying not to get hit by a car or a pigeon, I’m not at my best trying to figure this stuff out, and so far no one else seems to know either (comforting in solidarity, but unhelpful).

3) How long can you keep olives in the fridge once the jar has been opened?

4) What should I wear to my book launch? I am *sure* it doesn’t matter to the audience (since I’ve been the audience up until now, and have no memory of what any author has ever worn at a launch/reading/anything) but this is the current thing my mind has perched on to worry about.

If you can weigh on this stuff, that’d be awesome. And, hey, feel free to give me some good advice on an unrelated matter you think I need help with–I take direction well.

I’m listening to the low moan of the dial tone again
RR

August 31st, 2008

News

You know how kids construct their image of the outside world from scraps of cartoons and fragments of school assignments, and the rest from imagination? So they get lots of stuff wrong–sewer grates are to keep the alligators out of the streets, whatever day is garbage day on your street is garbage day for the whole world–and growing up is the process of idly mentioning these incorrect suppositions and getting them straightened out by the older and the wiser.

Except, some of these suppositions are so irrelevant and minor that you never bring them up, and they don’t get mentioned in a class or conversation for years and years. And then you’re thirty, and you are somewhat crushed to find out over Mexican food that no space program–not Canada’s or the US’s or anyone’s–is working towards the goal of building a glass or possibly Pyrex dome on the moon filled with a breathable atmosphere so that people can live there full-time.

!!!

I can’t even begin to explain why I thought that was true, or why I am now so sad that it isn’t. It’s not like I wanted to spend my retirement on the moon…I just thought I’d have the option.

I’ll keep drivin’ / you keep sleepin’
RR

PS–But the good news is that I’ve had new horoscopes for the past two days–hooray! Of course, today’s includes the line, “This is a powerful move that will make you feel powerful…”

August 26th, 2008

There was a Bill Murray movie like this

My email homepage provides a horoscope, so while I’m not wildly into astrology, I’ve taken to checking it every day with mild curiosity. Even though these things are just vague enough to suit everybody, they are also filled with very vague good advice that it would do no one any harm to follow. Like this:

Gemini
You’ll be working with a lot more energy than the people around you will have today, so you need to be prepared to wait for them — a lot. This is not good news if you’re dependent on others for your own progress, but you won’t be able to speed anyone up — so don’t waste your time trying. Even though patience doesn’t always come easy for you, you’ll find that as the day goes on, you’ll get more and more comfortable cooling your heels while other people try to catch up.

Be patient–sure, why not? It’s usually something cheerful and zen like that, something that makes me feel better heading into the day. Unforutnately, the system at the website use seems to have broken down, and the above has been my horoscope for the past week now. I’m beginning to feel that this is affecting reality, thatI am in fact living the same day over and over again. I’m TIRED of being patient. I want to move ON. Is that too much to ask??

Um, there may have been other problems recently that the random zodiac machine at excite.com had nothing to do with. Either way, this is bad for morale.

Love love love
RR

August 22nd, 2008

True and amazing

1) Getting off a crowded bus today, I emerged into an equally crowded busstop, with a long thick line of humanity snaking into the distance. There was about a busful of people there waiting, give or take a few. I walked away along the line and in the thicket of it, I passed a boy of about twenty, engineer cap and diamond stud, but cheerful open blue eyes. He was supporting a red chrome low-rider bicycle with wide silver handlebars. I glance at the baleful crowd ahead of him and behind and thought, “How’s that going to work out?” Then I drew parallel to him and glanced again at his face, and he looked right into my eyes and shrugged.

2) Once got a starred review in the Quill and Quire this month. People have been telling me this all week, but I finally got a copy today and there it was.

It’s true, I swear.

Your hair twists / in miniature mobius strips
RR

August 11th, 2008

Warnings

1) If you are taking a bubble bath, do *not* put your head under if you are easily upset by loud noises. Upon re-emerging, your ears will be filled with bubbles that will pop, creating the sound of a forest fire burning a path directly to your brain. Very upsetting.
2) $13 is enough to pay a hair-dresser to obtain a tidy, competent haircut, but it is NOT enough to pay a hair-dresser to try to dissaude you from your own bad ideas. If you say anxiously, “Do you think that would work for me?” a salon-type will say, “Sweetie, maybe you need to rethink this,” but a barber-shop type will say, “Please sit back in the chair.”
3) The air tastes like fall.

I think it’s coming and it comes so fast
RR

August 8th, 2008

Help

Eating lunch with a big table of friends. L. sits between J. and S. Everybody talking. J. nudges L., points at S.: “Oh, she has something in her hair. Can you help her?” L. reaches over, removes small piece of pineapple from S.’s long shiny hair.

Now that we’re done / I’m so sorry
RR

August 4th, 2008

Studies Have Shown

Me: It’s not like your life is so much harder than everyone else’s.
B: Actually, it is.
Me: Really?
B: Other people have it much easier. Studies have shown.
Me: Really? What studies?
B: Studies that I have conducted.
Me: Describe.
B: Everyone I meet, I ask them how they are and they all say “Fine.”

If you really loved me you’d buy me a beautiful pearl
RR

July 30th, 2008

Beautiful

I’ve been noticing a certain intensity of bad days amongst my circles these days. Not sure if it’s epidemic yet, but here’s some things I’ve been saving for a tough day:

–walking down the street in the rain, no umbrella, I pass a big hotel with a big set of stairs recesses into the building. I’m almost right in front before I can see on to the steps, where there are perhaps a dozen junior high rhythm gymnasts, each in an emerald green leotard with a warm-up jacket overtop, hair scraped back from faces, placidly watching the rain. In their hands, each girl clutches a glittering gold hoop.
–at the dentist, it suddenly occurs to me that you don’t see those white jacket-and-pants sets in stores. I asked the hygienist where they come from, and she explains to me about dental conventions, where there’s a wide range of styles and price ranges to choose from. She continues working on my mouth while she speaks, then pauses and looks away for a second. “My mother was a seamstress. When she was alive, then I had some interesting uniforms.”
–I climb some steep stairs with a two-year-old, who has only recently learned to operate herself on steps. She loses all nervousness for the ascent though, in her anxiety that I not be lost somewhere behind her. Yelling, “Becky? Becky?” over her shoulder, she reaches the second floor unaided for the first time ever.

Whoa-oh working together
Rr

July 25th, 2008

Blog stars

I wonder why everybody being extra-interesting on Wednesday? And yet they so were:

“It all comes down to the slippery definition of “friendship,” a definition that is rendered ambiguous by the Internet’s systemic blurring of the divide between the personal and the private. A person can be, in Niedzviecki’s definition, “disengaged” by virtue of a computer monitor, yet still feel a personal connection with an online figure, whether that person be someone met in a chat room, through the comments section of a blog, or via an online gaming community.”
–from With Friends Like These by Steven @ That Shakespeherian Rag

“I can be a morbid person. Especially around this grocery store, where people with canes but young bodies, and hunchbacks, and disappointed and wild eyes, inevitably attract my attention for reasons I’ve never been fully able to understand. So when I saw this bride, I was already on edge in a way. My first thought was, Oh my God, she is going to jump off the roof.”
–from “Bride on a Pawnshop Roof” by Lauren

“Poets, I’d supposed, knowing better than the rest of us the careful constructs upon which ideas are built, of “just words” after all, and how those words and those ideas can’t be bent and twisted into anything, and that anything is everything, and that nothing can be sure. The difference of a line break, a comma; how fragile is simply everything, including life itself.”
–from “Of Poetry and War Crimes” by Kerry @ Pickle Me This

Maybe Wednesdays are better than I thought!

What will become of us / oblivion
RR