October 21st, 2007

Snapshot of a Portrait

As I ran through the jewel-toned ravine this morning, a lot of people were out being idyllic (well, me too, I guess, except sweatier). Dogs fetched, couples clung, children raced and shrieked. From a distance, as spotted a toddler half-buried in a pile of ruby leaves, his parents crouching near, his older brother dumping more orange and red on his head. Perfect. As I approached, though, I saw the camera, the zoom lens, the waiting tripod. The brother was not goofing around with the leaves, he was *arranging* them, at the directives of his squinting, head-tilted mother.

Was this an “oh dear” moment? Well, it would’ve been, except that the younger boy, the one in the leaves, was having a ball. He’s 18 months old, he didn’t know he was participating in the manufacture of an idyllic moment to show the neighbours. He was cawing and flapping his arms and attempting chuck leaves back at his bro, who also seemed to be having a pretty good time stage-managing the event. I bet they were getting some great shots.

But were they real or weren’t they?

This was a very thematic run, as I have been reading and thinking and writing very much lately about the trifurcation lines of truth, fiction and lies. I know these are not exactly discrete categories, but they fall along generally accepted lines: If I tell you an anecdote from my life, like the one above, you accept that it is more or less what actually was, through my own unique rose-coloured vision. If you’d been there, you might have noticed different details or had a different take, but the same events would be universally acknowledged. If I tell you a story made up out of my head, you enjoy it or not based on its aesthetic qualities, moral qualities, entertainment value, whatever–but you know you can’t check the facts, you don’t attempt to go there.

The third is the second masquerading as the first. You think I have told you a participatory anecedote, but when you try to get inside it the tent collapses: when you invite me running I have no wind after half a km, when you go to the ravine it is barren of trees. If you’d just known it was fiction, you would’ve read it entirely differently, learned something entirely else.

But exactly is the line? That family might never have played in the tree-fall if they hadn’t wanted the shot, or maybe they’d been about to set off to play when it occured to someone to bring the camera. The picture will show a smile that will be genunine, so that picture will be true, the one in the frame. Maybe the picture I’m arguing with is not the one they took but the one I saw, jogging nearer, thinking the parents were playing with their kids, which they weren’t doing. But who told me to look, who invited me into the frame (to totally destroy my own metaphor)? This story wasn’t being told to me.

Clearly I think too much, and the stories I’m actually supposed to be writing aren’t going too well. I think I’ll take a shower and walk around in the sunshine go see the Free Biscuit-eers–there’s always inspiration around here somewhere.

I took a shadow and I looked inside
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 18th, 2007

Morning report

Is it pathetic that one of the most interesting things I do in any given day is go to the gym? There’s just stuff there that I don’t experience at the various desks I inhabit the other 90% of the time. Moving vigorously for one. Also, the sorts of conversations people have there. It’s all chix (note:I go there because it’s nearest and cheapest–I have no major qualms about men seeing me sweat).

I like to watch personal training sessions while I’m working out. I figure I’m not going to pay $50 per hour for clever fitness tips, but I might learn something for free by eavesdropping. You might know that I live in an extremely ritzy neighbourhood–one of the wealthiest ridings in Canada, I read somewhere. I myself live in an average appartment-building on the main thoroughfare, for what I think is a fairly average rent. But go a block north or south, you are into million-dollar houses. It makes for a safe walk home late at night, and a lot of nearby gelato places I cannot afford to get too comfortable in.

So, for many people nearby the fee isn’t prohibitive. The PT clients in the predawn hours seem to divide into two main categories: well-groomed professionals taking “me time” away from family and career to achieve toned upper arms; heavyset middle-agers there on doctors’ orders to stave off heart disease. The trainers, on the other hand, are mainly extremely young, and of course extremely fit. Most are attractive, too, but in a way that suggests that the attractiveness is an accidental byproduct of the fitness, and not the other way around. Their first priority is to be able to scoop up their whole pilates class and carry them to safety, should the studio catch fire…perhaps I exaggerate.

Also, I gather from my eavesdropping that most of the trainers are part-time, either while they are students or as they pursue other less lucrative careers like dance. Thus, there is a conversational chasm that must be bridged to pass the time in an hourlong workout. They pass the weights back and forth and talk about the exercises, but that leaves lots of time left over to talk about real life. As with hairdressers and manicurists, there is a distinct difference between the lives lived by those on the service-provider and service-recipient sides of the equation. Age, class, cash, day-structure, you name it. Like hairdressers, though, the trainers seem more than versed in navigating these difficult conversational waters. They’ll talk on glibly at 6:07 while, say, a bobbed and extremely efficient looking executive type struggles and staggers under the barbel.

It was that pairing that I was listening to today, a tall alpine-looking trainer of twenty-five (she announced this in an earlier anecedote) and the aforementioned 45-ish exec. I’ll reproduce the story here as near as I can to verbatim–you don’t think that’s copyright infringement, do you?

“So I’m at the gym last night, not here, at my own gym, and I’ve got this hour-long run to do. So I’m on the treadmill, and you know how it is when you run, sometimes your intestines get jiggled and joggled around, right? [no sign of assent from the client, who is wobbling and breathing heavily] So I let out this little squeaker of a fart, right? Just small. And the guy next to me, he totally heard it and he gave me the *dirtiest* look. Like, he was just disgusted to hear that from a *girl.* It was totally hilarious, but the thing was none of my roommates were there to laugh with me, and it was so funny. SO funny. *He* didn’t think it was funny though.”

Our lady completed her set and grimly put down the weight. She didn’t think it was funny either. The trainer didn’t notice, and made her get down on the floor in plank position. I waited until I got to the cardio area to laugh.

I swear, that’s all that’s going on today.

Burn and fade so slow
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

Name Dropping

And *another* thing that I’m behind on is shout-outs to the various people I know doing amazing things, to the extent that I’ve missed calling attention to things you probably would’ve liked to know about, or maybe did anyway, like Idle Tigers at Sneaky Dee’s last night, which I missed but heard was wild and cosmic (and cosmetic) or the the launch of the Descant Fashion Issue last Wednesday at the Gladstone. The Fashion Issue is double-cool, both because I love clothes and because it contained the work of talented Rose-coloured amiga, Lindsay Zier-Vogel. In fact, it *still* contains said poems and you should really go and get yourself a copy, because the thing is enormous and filled with wild and wildly diverse takes on fashion. Something for everyone, I’m sure.

Something else I did not completely miss the boat on is the wonders of Ms Kerry Clare now sharing additional brilliance on the Descant Blog on her favourite and best subjects, literature and life. Kerry was kind enough to invite me to accompany her and her husband Stewart (hmm, don’t think he has a web presence I can link to, so you’ll have to take my word that he’s delightful) to the launch, which was nice because it made me feel *in the know*, plus Stewart and Kerry are good company.

One last thing (that I can think of) if you feel like continuing to embrace the cultural scene with people I know, is the fundraiser this Saturday at the Now Lounge for Curtis Saretske’s debut feature film, Gun In the Woods. There will be music, raffles and probably a lot of other people whose names would be worth dropping. Also, Curtis’s movie!!! The tag line is: “It’s about love. It’s about jealousy. It’s about murder.” Deets below.

Sat. Oct. 20, 2007. 8pm
Now Lounge, 189 Church St., Toronto
$15 at the door

With friends like these, I don’t need to accomplish anything myself, really, do I?

They crash and burn / they burn and fade so slow
RR

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

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 12th, 2007

Specificity and Purpose

I remember in grade eleven being asked to write a little treatise on my favourite word, and I wrote mine on idiosyncratic because that is the sort of thing that appeals at 16–multisyllabic, subjective adjectives that would set me up as an alienated intellectual. Yum.

I still think that’s a nice word, as multisyllabic, subjective adjectives go: it’s got that dipthong thing going and it’s all Greek-y, but I’ve moved on. A writing teacher of mine was devoutly enthused with getting people to use material from their real lives, not necessarily love affairs and fights with parents, because everyone has those, but the quirks of employment and obsessions that are unique, nay, idiosyncratic, that come with a rarefied vocabulary that people from outside do not possess. These words are new to most readers and using them conveys a wealth of detail about the character who would choose these words, in a way that subjective adjectives cannot. Who is analytical? Who is grumpy or fey or trivia? Hard to say.

A person who uses words like folio, pass, bleed, crop, query, tighten, ligature, and cold read is very likely a person who works in publishing production. Coming back to the industry after some time away, I’m appreciating the technical vocabulary perhaps for the first time. The words aren’t gorgeous, but they useful and specific and mine to make use of. I like them. I thought I’d share here my two very favourite publishing words with you, in case you like them too. They aren’t really my favourite words in the language–there’s too many to choose, and world enough and time to use them all–but they are quite good.

kerning (n.) — in a typeset text, the spacing between letters on a line
ledding (n.) — in a typeset text, the spacing between lines on a page

I always knew about those spaces, and that they could be tightened or loosened, and I sensed (maybe?) that a page with optimal spacing was a greater pleasure to read, but I didn’t know those words. Then one day I was able to put concept into letters, exactly the right way, and in a small way, was better for it.

If I crash on the couch / Can I sleep in my clothes?
RR

On writing and artifice

All that I have to say is to tell you that the lantern is the moon, I the man i’th moon, this thorn bush my thorn bus, and this dog my dog.”

A Midsummer Night’s Dream v.i 251-253

October 9th, 2007

Gratitude

Thanksgiving is always a good time to be thankful for various sorts of food, and various forms of family, and believe me, I adore both, and spent a weekend rife with them. I also spent a lot of time absorbing bits of culture, which I have time right now only to ennumerate but not describe. Will it suffice to say that everything below is very very good?

When I Was Young and in My Primeby Alayna Munce — lyric novel

30 Rock — tv show

Across the Universe — film

Those are all worth experiencing, as are the other highlights of my weekend, but M and L’s house, my mother’s apple pie, and the experience of applying black lipstick in a housewares store while T holds up a pot lid to reflect your face, are sadly not linkable.

These are days you’ll remember
RR