September 11th, 2012

1000 Things, 3rd edition: so many things!

These are from Amy, an excellent human with whom I once talked for pretty much three days and she was fascinating the entire time. Happy to have her likes on the list:

382) road trips
383) roller coasters
384) slurpees
385) being underwater
386) group singalongs
387) bears
388) buffy the vampire slayer
389) lake superior
390) dog cuddles
391) beards (RR says: Yes! So underappreciated!)
392) frozen grapes

And these are from Mark, who is also awesome, and the first male contributer to this list. And married to me!

393) That cobalt colour the sky gets right before the dawn
394) David Francey’s music.
395) Really good gym workouts.
396) Fresh tomatoes.
397) A good novel, especially one that you know will be good right from the first few pages.
398) Getting married (RR says: yep!)
399) Flying home for Christmas and meeting delightful weirdos at the Fionn MacCool’s in Pearson T2 while waiting for your plane.
400) The first day of a new season, any season
401) Parties where disparate groups of one’s friends meet and all get along splendidly (esp. at our wedding)
402) Anthony Burgess
403) Wes Anderson movies
404) avocado
405) Thanksgiving
406) back rubs
407) Victoria-by-the-Sea, PEI.
408) Hugs from nieces
409) Seeing your name in print

August 7th, 2010

Rose-coloured reviews *The Book of Awesome*

I got The Book of Awesome as a gift, but I was already aware of it because Fred pointed it out as very similar to our penta-annual (that’s the word, right?) listing of 1000 Things We Like. I was happy to read the book to help fill the time until Fall 2012, when we do the third thousand!

Neil Pasricha’s book is based on his blog, which is very close to our concept except a) it’s all one guy, not a collective liking team (as far as I can tell), and b) he writes little blurbs about how the good thing works or, often, the bad thing that is avoided/thwarted by the good thing.

This is a happy-making project and it works: I smiled a lot remembering simple pleasures like the unsafe playground equipment of my youth, the chip crumbs in the bottom of the bag, and the cool side of the pillow. I was also fascinated by pleasures I’ve yet to experience: guess who’s going to be staying up for a while trying to catch someone laughing in their sleep?) Pasricha has a frat-boy prose style you don’t read very often (at least, I don’t), and it’s charming although repetitive and I don’t *really* think he had to manipulate each entry to end with the word AWESOME (yes, in caps!)

In truth, I probably went at this book wrong–I think it’s some sort of coffee-table or occasional book, something you are supposed to dip into, scan, flip around in. I did try to do this, sorta: I kept it by my bedside and tried to read one awesome thing before I went to sleep each night. This was actually an excellent idea, a really good way to go to sleep cheerful, though perhaps a little terrified of all the things that can be done with fast-food. But I am not a dip-in reader, and I would sometimes crack out and read 15 or 20 awesome things in a row, and get to a giggly hyper place not at all condusive to sleep. Finally I just gave up and started reading it on the bus, my ideal reading environment. Which led to it being my second-ever bus book conversation (the other was Special Topics in Calamity Physics).

So I wound up reading it pretty much straight through, and getting a little obsessive about stylistic quirks that probably should have been ignored. Like, Pasricha clearly has a persona of a goofy suburban everydude who likes to eat and commutes to an office job in a car. This comes out in his voice, and the things he chooses to write about: cars and food and childhood and…there’s a lot about food (which made me happy; I like food too and am actually eating curry while I type this). But someone (an editor?) seems to have made a rule that the book be for everyone, and that Pasricha not use too many examples from his personal life.

So all the entries are written in the second person (“You’re lovin it lots!”) and the gender of pronouns often flips back and forth within a paragraph, which made the author seem not inclusive but MPD. And even though he was clearly mocking those who relish finding the last of a particular item in their size at a clothing store and much more sincere in his love of the Man Couch (apparently, a couch in mall stores where women can leave their pouty partners while they shop), he keeps on trying to be all things to all people. There’s even an entry on getting into clean sheets with freshly shaved legs–yes, that is actually an amazing sensation, but how would *he* know?

The best of these entries are actually the most personal. There’s a really really really sweet one about halftime orange slices when you are a kid playing soccer, which isn’t about orange slices at all but about his awesome mom. I’m pretty sure it would be worth the purchase price to just photocopy this entry and give it to your mom for Mother’s Day. And an entry towards the end about a friend who had passed away sort of anchored the book and made clearer its purpose.

Of course, it goes without saying there are no intellectual pleasures on this list, not even ones like, “When a frustrated crossword doer mutters a clue out loud and you happen to know the answer.” This is about more basic, visceral stuff than that–when you get the nacho with the most toppings, when the batteries in the remote control work a little longer than they should, when someone gives you a really solid hug. Those things deserve to be celebrated, and the inclusiveness of this list does show how similar we all are in the end. And that made me feel pretty AWESOME!

December 4th, 2007

1000 Things in 2007

So here’s how it works–everything is valid, even if there is dissent–as long as someone likes it enough to contribute to the list, it counts. Except for sneaky negatives–no fair putting “people who don’t steal my parking space.”

The following are courtesy of my lovely colleagues over lunch, Penny and Ian over dinner, and myself at intervals. Read, enjoy, and *add*!!!

1) empathy
2) oranges
3) puppies
4) fur in general
5) oxygen
6) nitrogen
7) the moon
8) the game Apples to Apples
9) the police (civil servants)
10) The Police (band)
11) firemen and -women
12) good grammar
13) em-dashes
14) apple pie
15) pecan pie
16) the Loch Ness Monster
17) sharks
18) Shark Week on the Discovery Channel
19) cephalopods
20) cafeterias that don’t mind giving you a free fork
21) fresh-baked croissants
22) found money in last year’s coat
23) Winona Ryder
24) juice boxes
25) carrots
26) the Festive Special at Swiss Chalet
27) stockings
28) stalking (friendly)
29) Christmas
30) Bon Jovi
31) big movie popcorn sizes
32) the sun
33) Martha Stewart
34) crafts
35) yoghurt cake
36) non-bill mail
37) festive stamps
38) pennies
39) foreign mail
40) intercontinental travel
41) unlimited long-distance
42) extra bacon
43) pizza
44) when strangers share their umbrellas
45) lip balm
46) cake in general
47) snowflakes
48) the beach
49) ski chalets
50) sports
51) the Olympics
52) friends
53) teamwork
54) goldfish (cracker)
55) goldfish (pet)
56) cottages
57) pistachios
58) Scrabble
59) toasted marshmallows
60) recliners
61) finding something you want on sale
62) argyle
63) 4:45 in the afternoon
64) finding a subway token
65) running into friends
66) shoes
67) chocolate milk
68) popsicles
69) babies in hats
70) America’s Funniest Home Videos
71) cereal box prizes
72) typography/fonts
73) crunching through fresh snow
74) falling unexpectedly (w/o pain)
75) Coke Zero
76) Extra Bubblemint
77) Ice skating
78) snowboarding
79) getting your braces off
80) biting dental wax
81) picking glue off your hands
82) butter-pecan flavoured coffee
83) glitter
84) playing hooky
85) Tim Hortons
86) Smile Cookies
87) the universe
88) Across the Universe (film)
89) stars
90) needing a smaller size of clothes
91) freckles
92) glasses
93) shiny hair
94) socks
95) laughing until gasping
96) waking up before the alarm
97) playing fetch
98) the plough position (yoga)
99) little girl ballerinas
100) slippers (all varieties)
101) kisses (all varieties)
102) watching a penguin fall down
103) whale watching
104) dolphins
105) porpoises
106) home
107) redecorating
108) photographs
109) parasailing
110) paintball
111) big tails
112) free gift with purchase
113) napkin origami
114) maps
115) naps
116) sleeping in
117) Nintendo Wii
118) sailing
119) databases
120) shopping
121) leaving early
122) babies’ feet
123) call display
124) call waiting
125) iPods
126) scarves
127) grass
128) hide-n-seek
129) swings
130) sand
131) airports
132) Love Actually (film)
133) sticky flags
134) Ferris wheels
135) people with perfect pitch
136) cello
137) Douglas Adams
138) kittens
139) Secret Optimum Points Day
140) Red Lobster
141) birthdays
142) balloons
143) hockey
144) fireworks
145) Splenda
146) dinner theatre
147) dinner parties
148) concerts
149) good health
150) Visa Dividend
151) after dinner mints
152) crab legs
153) Clinique Bonus Time
154) crafting
155) Mom’s cooking
156) sweet potatoes
157) nieces and nephews
158) nanaimo bars
159) bear claw ice-cream
160) blackberries
161) picking blackberries
162) silk
163) cashmere
164) lying on the floor
165) bubble baths
166) pottery
167) getting jokes
168) visiting with friends
169) CBC3
170) Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts by Bob Dylan

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

January 2nd, 2018

Resolving: 2018

I didn’t ever write the 2017 in review post. I wrote some drafts in December and they were all rather grim and hysterical, because it was a legitimately hard year but also probably because I was exhausted. Then I went on vacation for two weeks and, for the first time since I graduated from undergrad, didn’t do anything. No fooling: I had time off from work but I didn’t travel by plane or train or even car beyond a few km radius, I didn’t do freelance or personal projects or school assignments, try to pack for a move or reorganize my life. I just slept 9 or 10 hours a night, hung out with my husband and cats a lot, occasionally went out to see a friend or a movie, and ate some nice food. I built a little fort on my couch out of pillows and blankets (my apartment is cold) and read books in it, dozing off when I was tired, bringing food in there when I was hungry (my fort was full of crumbs). I saw the Dior exhibit at the ROM. I cooked a bit and had a NYE party. That’s it.

Now I’m a lot less grim and hysterical. 2017 is never going to glow with good times in my memory, but when I’ve had enough sleep it need not seem worse than it was. Instead of enumerating everything that was wrong with the previous year, here’s my resolutions for the next one, which do in fact kind of elucidate what I’m seeking to fix about my life (I’m still not in the sunniest frame of mind–it’s going down to -22C this week).

1) Ballet class: I signed up in December for the most introductory of introductions at the National Ballet School and it cost enough that I think I’ll actually show up. I’ve taken some drop-in ballet classes before and know that though they’re beyond my comfort zone I enjoy them if no one makes me feel bad about my lack of skill (including myself; mainly myself). Exercise, new people, and a reason to leave the house in winter: this seems like something I can use.

2) Mindfulness: This is not so much a resolution as something assigned to me by my neurologist. Part of why 2017 was such crap for me was that I was often ill. I have appropriate drugs for my migraines now, but I often don’t know when to take them or which ones to take–taking migraine medication too late in the game is often worse than taking none, because it has no affect and causes side effects that it wouldn’t normally have if taken at the right time. Then you’re really sick AND you have crazy side effects. Vertigo played a role in my autumn. According to the doctors, I’m not in good enough communication with my body to know what meds to take when, and mindfulness can teach me that. So I’m going to download an app and hope the app can help me, because I’m otherwise pretty much at sea. [Edit: I got Headspace and did the first session. It seemed ok. I liked the coach’s British accent.]

3) Take my blood pressure twice a week and record results: The many fun medications I’m on could cause my blood pressure to spike, so I’m supposed to be tracking this, but I’ve been lax. No more!

4) Say less on social media and listen more: I get a lot out of posting little thoughts, jokes, snippets of dialogue, requests for info, book-related announcements and general ephemera on social media. Most people are so supportive and wonderful, and the fun chatter helps me get through the day. AND YET–is that the most social media can do for me? I am so good at ducking hard news, and now here is yet another medium where I have completely blinkered myself from sadness. Well, not completely–it creeps in, and it should, especially the state of the world being what it is. In 2017 I started deliberately following folks on Twitter who made me uncomfortable, mainly activists for various forms of social justice, and I’m going to keep on doing that as much as my comfort-loving mind can stand. Another, more selfish side of this is that despite the overwhelming positivity of my FB feed, I do get a bit of snark now and then, and I can NOT take it. It’s not even bad, just someone scrolling quickly and saying the first thing that comes to mind. I simply don’t have 623 good friends, and expecting all those vague acquaintances to care about my feelings isn’t reasonable. If I say less, people will snark less back at me, and I’ll have room in my head for weightier issues than “did she really mean to make fun of my cat?”

5) Get rid of stuff I don’t actually use or want; organize stuff I want to keep in a reasonable manner: I would like to actually move house in 2018, but that’s not a resolution but a plan. In service of that, though, I’d like to start the decluttering and organizing now. Rubbermaid tubs figure prominently in my future. I love Rubbermaid tubs.

6) Finish the 3rd 1000 things we like. I can do this!

***

I think that’s all the resolutions I’m going to make for now, though there’s certainly more I could: about exercise and diet (who couldn’t?), about writing and reading (but those are my career–I feel like accountants and engineers don’t make resolutions to work hard at their jobs), about all kinds of stuff I could stand to improve on. But this is a good start.

PS–If you know someone challenging and wise to follow on Twitter, I would be happy to hear about it. Or a cheap and plentiful source of Rubbermaid tubs, for that matter.

December 10th, 2017

Lists and one more reading

Lists: I’m a huge fan of inclusive and exhaustive lists like, say 1000 Things We Like (which somehow got away from me this year but is coming BACK in 2018, I swear). I love including, adding, having lots, inviting everyone in. I’m less cool with the actual main function of lists, which is to both include and exclude. Witness those horrible grade 3 lists of “cool girls,” which my having gone to a tiny country school with only two other girls in my grade did not allow me to dodge. Who was on those lists? I do not know; not me.

So I’m slightly uncomfortable with lists, overall. They are as subjective as anything else–one man’s #1 is another man’s #754345–but in a context like reviews, the subjective at least gets limited to the matter at hand. Oh, I don’t know–I’m viewing things rather darkly these days. I keep trying to write a year-end post but crying so I never finish it, so this is what you get instead. Lucky you.

Which is all a rather confusing way of saying, So Much Love made the Globe 100 best books of 2017 list and that’s lovely. It’s actually on the Quill and Quire list as well, though that’s not online at the moment.

I also contributed to a list! The very smart Stacey May Fowles asked contributors to the Open Book Best Books of the Year list to define best however we liked, and I defined it as the tough, wise, and beautiful short stories in Cynthia Flood’s new collection from Biblioasis What Can You Do.

Needless to say, there’s tonnes of other great stuff I had nothing to do with on all three lists and you should read them all and probably pick a bunch of books to read from there. BUT in the meantime, I’m doing my last reading of 2017 tomorrow night, so maybe you should also come to that! It’s The Common Reading Series 8pm December 11 at the Belljar Cafe. I’ll be reading with the lovely and talented Mark Sampson and Cornelia Hoogland.

Following that, I do have a couple other literary irons in the fire that I could work on until the end of the year. I might even finish that year-end post sans weeping. I might just bake things and read. I’ll keep you posted as the situation develops.

September 13th, 2012

Reading in Ottawa

We briefly interrupt the 1000 Things We Like listing to bring you this shameless self-promotion. Well, promotion for lots of others, too, but if you click on this poster to make it big enough to read (why do you thwart me, WordPress image sizing?) and look way down, you’ll see I’m doing the last reading of the fall at the Ottawa Public Library on November 24. Tremendously looking forward to it! If you’re in town, please consider it (or any of the others)! Note, online signup required (here’s the link)

April 30th, 2010

Good/bad

Fred just reminded me of our every-five-years-or-so project, 1000 Things We Like (I guess since we’ve done it twice now, it’s thus far 2000 Things We Like and Counting). If you want in on the action, meet me back here in 2012, but in the meantime, this list reflects that today is a fairly well-balanced day, but I wish it were more 1000 Thingsy:

Good: Kashi Raspberry Chocolate Granola Bars

Bad: Realizing the fridge you’ve been storing your lunch in does not work, and is basically a well-sealed cupboard.

Good: Catsitting, and ensuing cheerfully one-sided conversations about weather, snacks, and people who are jerks.

Bad: Looking down during yoga class and realizing your black pants are covered in white kitty fur.

Good: Nice weather.

Bad: Short attention span.

Good: Gorgeous fountain pen in the mail.

Bad: Attempting to listen to instructions on how to fill fountain pen over the phone, shortly followed by realization that one is soon to be covered in ink and/or very embarrassed at a high-end stationers.

Good: K’s birthday.

Bad: K far away in England, unavailable for celebration/cake/hug. In fact, all of the most ardent supports of 1000 Things are unavailable for hugging or any close-at-hand celebrations.

Good: Literary Salon at the glammy-glam Spoke club on Tuesday night.

Bad: Being too old to go out during the week without being sad the next morning.

Good: The Salmon of Doubt by Douglas Adams

Bad: Adams still dead.

Good: When I get home, cat will be there.

Bad: Now worry constantly when I am out that cat will eat plants and get sick.

Good: Internet for random useless but friendly and entertaining yammer.

Bad: Useless URLs.

Good: Well, it’d be better with a “b”, in my opinion…

RR

January 16th, 2008

What to Hate

As the “1000 Things We Like” project winds up, I have been planning a silly little “10 Things I Hate” post, mainly about grammatical errors, bad behaviour on TTC and at potlucks, etc. It was going to be a pretty funny post, but now it seems in poor taste, since the death of John O’Keefe by a stray bullet last Friday night. That’s such a weird sentence for a Torontonian that I can only really process it by thinking of it like a meteor strike or a tsumami–totally random and unpreventable. But it’s not, because apparently people sometimes have guns in their pockets as they stroll around Yonge and Bloor, which is not something I knew before, and is certainly not unpreventable.

So that’s what I hate. I’ll bitch about comma splices some other time.

RR

January 5th, 2008

What You Could Read

I know everyone adores playing “1000 Things We Like,” but I thought I’d post about something else for a change. Like some things that I have been reading that you might like.

For example, I would suggest reading Prism International. If you live in Ontario, this will be very hard, as they did not send our province any fall issues for some reason, but that’s the issue I’m recommending you order it because contains the beautiful story “Some Light Down” by S. Kennedy Sobol. It was my privilege to read that story in very early form, and it was heart-stopping then, and it’s thrilling to me now to see it having evolved so far. Of course, this means S. Kennedy and I know each other, but we didn’t when I first read the story, so you should take my word when I say it’s brilliant.

Another recommendation I have for the literary-minded is Jim Munroe’s mega website, No Media Kings. If you move in Toronto indie circles, you may have heard the name Jim Munroe before even if you’ve never read his books or comics, seen his movies, been to his shows or readings, or played his video games. I once had a strange job wherein (a) I often had no work, (b) I was not allowed to read books or magazines, (c) I was not permitted to surf the internet unless the sites pertained to books. These rules made no sense, but I got around them in large part thanks to Mr. Munroe, who bills his site as an “indie culture site.” Basically, if you work in one of the above media and don’t want to let your get caught up in corporate R&D, promotion, editing, distribution, etc., Jim will tell you how to do it yourself. Even if you are willing to go a little corporate, there’s still useful reading on the site–for authors, there’s stuff on grant-writing, touring, etc. that’s very practical, friendly, and go-go-go. There’s stuff on there that’s not at all practical unless you are the dynamo that is Jim Munroe–book tour via bicycle, for example—but it’s very entertaining.

Of course, all this partically obscures the reason I was curious enough about the guy to google him in the first place, which is that he is a pretty good novelist. I read his first book, Flyboy Action Figure Comes with Gasmask when I was a kid and got hooked. That was his first book, published with HarperCollins Canada, the experience that so annoyed him that he declared himself the anti-Rupert Murdoch, or, I guess The King of No Media (heh). He went on to write a number of novels: *Angry Young Spaceman, Everyone in Silico, Roommate from Hell* (all available at the above link) and to publish and distribute them himself. No small feat, though it helped I’m sure that the novels were good (if you like semi-sci-fi and silliness, and PCness–I do). Still the sheer number of hours, and the force of will to overcome not only self-doubt but the logistical nightmares… Impressive.

I interviewed Jim Munroe in the summer of 2003 for a school project (would that that transcript still existed–stupid dead hard-drive). He did it because I emailed him and said if he talked to me I’d buy him lunch. He wrote write back and said ok, showed up when he said he would, and tried to pay for his own sandwich, so obviously I was more than a little impressed. I guess there’s bias all over this post, really, but still, these are reccommendations worth checking out–it’s not my fault I’ve met so many talented people.

Smoking the same damn cigarettes
RR