Surly Thursday: To the Friend of a Friend Who Was Bitchy to Me on Facebook

Contrary to what the post title seems to indicate, this is not actually a letter to the person in question. This exchange happened a few weeks ago so I'm enjoying blowing on the cooled embers of my righteous fury.

So someone had posted a recipe for something that called for almond milk. I had just bought my very first carton of almond milk to make banana-applesauce cookies, so it piqued my interest that someone posted on her recipe: "But almond milk is bad, don't use it."

I replied "almond milk is bad?" to her comment, hoping she would elaborate. Instead she replied "Yep." Uh, thanks, very illuminating. I said that I was asking for clarification. SHE said "best you look it up yourself. Google saves time and lives, I always say." This was followed by a smiley emoticon.

Hold up, sister. Did you just go all "Let me Google that for you" on my ass?

I tend to think the "Let Me Google That For You" response is appropriate, if ever, for questions like "how late is the Bank on Whatever Street open?" or "who won the 83 World Series?" To be fair, although I have never said it to anyone, I have pointed out its relevance in posts like this one, so I did ponder for a second whether her use of it was warranted.

I don't believe it was. I had, in fact, Googled it quickly between asking her for clarification and her response. Googling brought up several results on the health benefits of almond milk, and one article expressing reservations about the carageenan in it. There certainly weren't any clear-cut "almond milk is bad" results. When you express a negative opinion about something that a lot of people think is positive - voting in elections, say, or the long-form census, or vaccines - you might want to give some supporting information to avoid sounding like a strident yahoo, in my humble opinion. By asking for clarification, I was giving her a chance to do this - for all I knew she was a dietitian, or had just read a revealing article and had information that I didn't.

And then the scalding insult of the smiley face. Don't get me started (ha! just kidding, it's clearly way too late to not get me started) on the off-the-charts passive-aggressive cowishness of saying something bitchy and pretending you're not being bitchy. It smacks of those concern trolls who comment on articles something like "well, I'm terribly sorry to say it, but by feeding your baby formula you're practically guaranteeing that he'll grow up smoking pot and liking Justin Bieber - best wishes!" Or the people who write to Richard Dawkins "you're a fucking gay stupid faggot and you're going to burn in hell for all eternity - God bless!" If you're going to be stubborn and opinionated and refuse to substantiate your assertions, just own it already.

I didn't engage on the Facebook thread. I don't know her, I don't know if she's always like this, I didn't want to make my friend uncomfortable (on the off chance that she's reading this - sorry, but where else can I air my petty grievances with all humanity but on my blog?), and as hard as it might be to believe, I do try to uphold a modicum of classiness on social media.

But this is the response I gave in my head: "Fair enough. You don't know me, so I guess you had no particular reason to provide a response that was kind or helpful. I, of course, had no way of knowing that you're the kind of person that needs a particular reason to be those things."

Perfect mix of classy and snotty, don't you think?

Mondays on the Margins Postponed Because Someone Pissed Me Off

How do you feel when someone says "I hate kids"? I just read a review on Goodreads, and admittedly I'm not predisposed to adore this reviewer because she's kind of arrogant and seems to really fancy herself as a force to be reckoned with, and her sycophantic followers just feed into this. She said she hates kids used as plot devices, which is fine, but the whole statement is "I hate kids, and I hate kids used as plot devices."

Would you say "I hate Chinese people" or "I hate short people" the same way? Why is it acceptable for anyone to dismiss an entire segment of the population this way? It's not like kids can help the fact that they're kids. If we didn't keep making them, there would be no damned people left. I get that there can be a divide between parents and child-free people. I think it's valid for child-free people to express their opinions and concerns on how children behave in public spaces. But "I hate kids?" All kids? All the time? You HATE them?

It's not that I think everybody should love kids. It's not that I'm thinking 'oh, if you'd met mine you wouldn't say that.' Sometimes my kids ARE annoying. It's entirely possible that someone could meet them and not be completely enchanted. But hate them? Just because they're kids?

I guess it doesn't really matter. I'm probably being oversensitive. I've just seen this exact statement made a few times in the past few months, and I keep writing bitchy Facebook statuses about it and then erasing them. It's her review, I guess she can say whatever she wants, which is why I haven't responded there. But I'm kind of angry. I guess I don't like people who say they hate kids.

Surly Tuesday: I'll Complain About the Snow if I Bloody Well Feel Like It

To everyone on Facebook saying "quit whining about the snow, it happens every year, you should be ready for it by now" - FUCK OFF. Unless you're someone I know and like, because I haven't bothered to go back and check who actually said it. If I know and like you - sod off (I'm sufficiently fired up that you still get some kind of expletive containing an 'off' directed at you, but we're still friends).

A lot of things happen every year. We get colds. We get stomach bugs. I get seasonal depression. I have a snow brush in my car that has the head on the wrong way - perpendicular to the handle instead of parallel, like a toothbrush, which means that it's been designed by some disciple of Satan to pull snow down on me instead of brushing it away anywhere useful, WHY WOULD ANYONE EVEN MAKE THIS KIND OF SNOW BRUSH AND OFFER IT FOR SALE??? I claim my right to complain about all of these in a timely and spirited fashion (just ask my husband, the hapless buyer of the aforementioned FUSB (Fucking Useless Snow Brush).

Complaining is one of the pleasures and comforts of life. Everybody has shit going on. Just because somebody else's shit isn't the particular kind of shit that gets to you doesn't mean you get to tell them to shut up about it (without being considered a big jerk). In certain very specific cases - say, someone very very rich is on their yacht being waited on hand and foot, with their loving and faithful spouse by their side, surrounded by their four beautiful children whom they had no trouble conceiving, and they complain that their gold lamé bikini is chafing? Maybe, MAYBE, you should tell them to take a breath and re-evaluate. Otherwise? Cork it.

I think of complaining as vaguely akin to perspiring when it's hot. You perspire, and then a breeze or a fan blows on the perspiration and cools you off so you don't die of spontaneous combustion or something. Similarly, something crappy happens, you complain, friends offer sympathy and commiseration and you don't explode or sink into a boggy mire of despondence. It's a time-honoured tradition.

I get that it's not cool if someone does nothing but complain, especially if there are things they could do to improve their situation. I get that perspective is sometimes useful and that other people often have it much worse. But in the full flush of that cold, or stomach bug, or seasonal depression, or first day driving in the snow with clenched fists and knotted stomach, how much of a percentage of a fuck do I give about perspective? A VERY, VERY LOW FUCK PERCENTAGE.

Moving to Hawaii isn't a viable option for many people who live in places with long, cold winters. Our jobs and families are here. Some of us look really bad in bikinis. And we love where we live, despite the fact that for a good chunk of the year it feels like the outside is trying to kill us (come ON, that thing where Mother Nature drifts down a gorgeous soft white fleecy blanket of snow, and then drops the temperature fifteen degrees so everything turns sharp and chunky and if you slip and fall you might stab yourself in the jugular? That is a HOSTILE ENVIRONMENT) . So we stay, and occasionally we complain. Lord help you if you try to stop us.

Qualms and Quandaries

My friend Collette and I took our kids (her three, my two) to see Ender’s Game on Tuesday evening. Collette and I and her two boys, both avid readers, had read the book and all placed it in our top ten list of all time. A few months ago, I was talking to Collette and since she had once said she would never pay money to see another Mel Gibson movie, I asked how she felt about paying money to see a movie based on a book by Orson Scott Card, to which she replied “huh?”. After I filled her in, she added something like, “did you have to tell me that, you bitch?”

It’s a funny thing, the artist verses the art thing. Works of the most heart-stopping beauty and magnificence can come from the most reprehensible of human beings. I find it mystifying that writing that to me has always seemed suffused with the utmost kindness and generosity of spirit, comes from an intelligence that believes wholeheartedly that homosexuality is the gravest of sins.

Another friend consoled us with the fact that Card had made all his money off the movie up front, and that ticket sales wouldn’t put anything extra into his pocket. He also said that he has no difficulty divorcing the art from the artist, so he would have experienced no moral dilemma either way.

I’m honestly not entirely sure where I stand on the matter (I’m sure that comes as a great shock to everyone). If I buy a book by Orson Scott Card, I’m endorsing his writing, not his views on sexuality, right? Should I boycott every author who holds an opinion I find objectionable? Every movie starring an actor who’s gotten drunk and spouted racist slurs? I did publicly state that I would never eat at Chick fil a – by the preceding logic shouldn’t I be saying that if the chicken was good enough I would eat it even though the place was owned by bigots?

On the whole, I would say it does make a difference, however unquantifiable. I can’t say I won’t ever buy a book by Orson Scott Card again. I don’t want to refuse to read or see anything made by people I disagree with, because that furthers no one’s growth. I guess I need to think about this some more.

As for the movie, it wasn’t blow-your-mind wonderful, but it wasn’t as big a disappointment as it could have been. Some of the exposition was pretty ham-handed, which was partly regrettable and partly understandable, given the time constraints. The two boys who read the book and the boy and two girls who hadn’t all said they really liked it. Harrison Ford was good, Asa Butterfield was really good, and Angus and Eve and I couldn’t get over the fact that Bonzo Madrid was played by Rico from Hannah Montana. 

Mondays on the Margins: Bad Things Come in Threes

So I'm still in a strange reading frame of mind. I'm all too ready to watch an episode of Buffy on my ipad when I crawl into bed instead of reaching for a book (I love my husband so much for giving me the ipad except when I think it might be the kiss of death for my intellectual life). I still read every night, but not always for the hours I usually do. And it's been a while since anything really sucked me in. I've recently accepted that I might as well just get used to living with really poorly controlled anxiety and depression, and sometimes some of that drips onto the reading experience, so I acknowledge that it's not (always) the books that are to blame.

I also have this annoying habit that I can't seem to break, where I go to the library and pick up my holds, and then instead of going straight to the checkout, which I SHOULD BE doing, because IN NO WAY do I require more books to pile onto my.... pile. I have towers and turrets and elaborate mazes of books that I own or have borrowed that sit there day after day crying out to be consumed, so why do I keep putting this buffer of books-with-an-expiry-date between me and those books? In case of a zombie apocalypse, shouldn't I be laying in canned fruit and bottled water, not science fiction and classic literature?

Last week after getting my holds, I went over to the science fiction shelf. There were two books that I had looked at on past visits but not taken that I decided to take this time. This one I haven't read yet, but the premise is interesting. On the week-end I read Pure, by Julianna Baggott.

The plot synopsis from Goodreads: We know you are here, our brothers and sisters . . . 
Pressia barely remembers the Detonations or much about life during the Before. In her sleeping cabinet behind the rubble of an old barbershop where she lives with her grandfather, she thinks about what is lost-how the world went from amusement parks, movie theaters, birthday parties, fathers and mothers . . . to ash and dust, scars, permanent burns, and fused, damaged bodies. And now, at an age when everyone is required to turn themselves over to the militia to either be trained as a soldier or, if they are too damaged and weak, to be used as live targets, Pressia can no longer pretend to be small. Pressia is on the run.

Burn a Pure and Breathe the Ash . . . 
There are those who escaped the apocalypse unmarked. Pures. They are tucked safely inside the Dome that protects their healthy, superior bodies. Yet Partridge, whose father is one of the most influential men in the Dome, feels isolated and lonely. Different. He thinks about loss-maybe just because his family is broken; his father is emotionally distant; his brother killed himself; and his mother never made it inside their shelter. Or maybe it's his claustrophobia: his feeling that this Dome has become a swaddling of intensely rigid order. So when a slipped phrase suggests his mother might still be alive, Partridge risks his life to leave the Dome to find her. 

When Pressia meets Partridge, their worlds shatter all over again.

It started out well - as fresh a take as possible on a post-apocalyptic world. The singlemost striking conceit, I think, are the fused people; when the Detonations occurred, nanoparticles in the blast caused people to be fused with whatever they were closest to. So Pressia, the main female character, has a doll head for a hand; her grandfather has a small fan embedded in his throat. And Bradwell, Pressia's love interest, has live birds trapped in the flesh of his back. The characters themselves are also well-drawn and believably flawed (Pressia reminds me a bit of Katniss from The Hunger Games, in a good way - she knows she shouldn't allow herself to be co-opted by the luxuries offered by the Dome, but at the same time she is tempted by the promise of a normal life). 

About halfway through the book, inspired by nothing in particular, I suddenly had an unpleasant thought. I flipped to the last page, and sure enough - *insert melodramatic minor chord* - there were the fateful words END OF BOOK ONE.

Why? WHY? I've sort of resigned myself to every goddamned Young Adult fiction book that takes my

fancy turning out to be the first in a trilogy. I didn't think this "scourge of the literary world", as Marilyn so rightly calls it, had infection adult literature as well. Well, okay, it was in the science fiction and fantasy section, so I guess maybe it should have occurred to me - but it didn't have that look that trilogy books usually have, by which I don't even know exactly what I mean, but look! Look at it! It's a nice, attractive hardcover with high production values. It looked like a nice, normal, standalone novel that just happened to have subject matter that relegated it to this section. And this brings me to my next point: If a book is the first in a trilogy, the publisher should have to be upfront about it. BOOK ONE OF WHATEVER should be on the front damned cover in large print. I'm going to have to start interrogating books before I read them: "Are you or have you ever been part of a trilogy?"

I'm joking, mostly. I should, by now, be in the habit of checking whether a book suffers from trilogyitis before I start reading it. Do the publishers actually hope that people won't notice until they're hooked by the first book? My tendency is definitely not to read Book One of any given series until I know I can get the next books quickly, because my memory just doesn't hold up over the intervening year I have to wait otherwise, and I like to reserve my rereading time for more weighty books. Presumably this doesn't fall in line with the publishers' preferences, since they're not getting their hardcover price from me for each successive book. 

And what IS with the whole trilogy thing? Is there really something fitting in the elegant tripartite structure that lends itself to the medium? Is it a phenomenon that reflects a resonant archetype, or just a crass cash grab? 

I think it's probably a bit of both. When it's done properly, it can really work. A beginning book to set out the principal conflict and lay the groundwork of character. A middle book to show character growth and flesh out the action. A concluding book to, well, conclude things. But when it doesn't work, it's so much worse than just a single bad book.

Last night I started reading this. I have some things to say about it. But I'm fairly sure that the end will really be the end, so at least there's that. 

On How I Like to Think I'm Open-Minded, but I'm Really Not At All

The other day I was on Twitter and someone was talking about how her daughter was eating broccoli and she was extremely pleased. The hashtag was #babyledsolids.

And I thought, WTF? Baby-led solids? How does the baby lead with the solids? Do you make the baby mix up its own cereal? Do you carry the baby around the kitchen while it points out the ingredients for pheasant under glass? The baby doesn't lead! WE lead! Isn't our function as far as babies and solids to sort of lead the babies up to the kinds of solid foods that won't, you know, cause them to die? Babies aren't that bright, folks. A baby will try to eat a TV remote. They don't know that they can't eat celery and pretzels and marbles or hot dogs that we haven't cut in half because our mothers have informed us forty thousand goddamned times that a hot dog is the exact size of a baby's windpipe - it's up to US to provide the leadership in that regard.  And I stormed around muttering about ridiculous hippy-dippy airy-fairy notions of parenting. Baby-led solids! Jesus Christ!

Then today I was driving home from a restorative day of tulip-looking and jerk-chicken eating with Pam and I heard Kathleen Petty on CBC interviewing Kathy Buckworth, the author of I Am So the Boss of You: An 8-Step Guide to Giving Your Family the Business. I haven't read the book and didn't even listen to all of the interview (just to be clear about the fact that I'm not bothering to make sure this is based on complete information or anything), but the part I heard was Kathy Buckworth saying parents have to be in charge and make the rules and you are allowed to say "because I said so". And then she said she was making baked bean casserole, "which is as nasty as it sounds", and her friend said she wished her kids would eat that, and Kathy Buckworth said "well, make them" and the friend said she couldn't, and Kathy Buckworth said something like "listen, my goal isn't that they like it - my goal is that I have them fed something nutritious, on time, under budget, so that I can feel successful".

And I thought, WTF? First of all, TOTALLY goes back to that thing where if you say you wouldn't tolerate a picky eater you just didn't have one. Second of all, fine, someone has to be nominally in charge, but I do actually subscribe to the "I didn't ask to be born" theory of parenting - you made the children, so I don't really see how them asking to be fed something they don't find revolting is all that importunate. Third of all, of all the reasons (and there are some good ones) for making a kid TRY something, let alone eat all of it, "so I can feel successful" is pretty far down the list in my books (well, okay, maybe not THAT far down the list in MY books, but I kind of think it should be in your book, if you actually write one). So then I stormed around putting away my groceries and muttering about people who think they can run a family like a business and how going back to the fifties and "children should be seen and not heard" is not so much a new idea as, well, like I just said, a REALLY OLD ONE!

So yes, one might quite rightfully inquire when my book on parenting and nutrition is coming out. The one where I hold forth on letting my son play soccer with a chicken ball before eating it, and feeding Eve coconut yogurt and broccoli five nights running.

Parenting is hard. Judging is fun and easy.

Mondays on the Margins: Rape Culture - We're All Soaking In It

I don't want to talk about it. I don't know what to say about it. People are sick of hearing about it. I feel small and cowardly when I don't talk about it. Some people I know have already said things about it. Hannah did a good from the heart post. Bon did a good from the brain post, which I like to think of as the "it's not that we don't see your side, it's just that your side is whiny and entitled and suckholish - here's why" post. Rehtaeh Parson's father did a post that will rip your heart out, and a while before, this post by Hannah's friend Carol about Amanda Todd really made an impression on me.

I'm going to come at this through books, since that's kind of what I do. In 2010, I read a book called I Don't: A Contrarian History of Marriage by Susan Squire. Reading it was one of those a-ha moments that you have about something where you've kind of been peripherally aware of something but suddenly it hits home with an unpleasant burning thud. I had much the same sensation when reading Betraying Spinoza by Rebecca Goldstein - in that case it was how naive I had been and how incomplete my knowledge was about how far back and how wide-ranging the persecution of Jewish people went and was. With Susan Squire's book, it was a similar realization that really, as far back as the beginning of civilization, it's impossible to escape the conclusion that men as a gender are really deeply and strangely and almost morbidly suspicious of and sort of frightened and disgusted by women. I've been meaning to buy a copy, and to read some of her suggested sources, but the notes I took are enough to remind me of how the whole book made assertions and conclusions that were disturbing and yet oddly recognizable: how men preferred to keep marriage and sexual desire separate; how men, particularly religious men, viewed lust as something shameful but excusable in themselves, and shameful and unforgivable in women; how the thought of women gaining any kind of power made men hysterically and violently afraid. Do I have to clarify that when I say "men" I don't mean "all men", but rather "a monolithic block of male people who had the power and made the laws and formed the interdependent structures of culture, religion and tradition that kept women as a gender subjugated and disenfranchised"? Perhaps it's best if I do. 

 A few days ago I read a book by an author who I've enjoyed in the past. She writes the kind of mysteries that I try to confine my mystery-reading to these days - mysteries with complex characters and intelligent, insightful writing. Most of her books are stand-alones, but as it happens, I read a book that was a sequel to this one and only then realized that there was one that took place before. For that reason, I know that the female police officer in this book and the male detective do become a couple in the subsequent book. 

In this book, the female police constable has a history of an abusive childhood and homelessness. She is working to address a systemic problem of frequent, brutal and unprosecuted gang rapes in black neighbourhoods in her area of England. She talks passionately about rape victims thinking of the rape as killing the person they were, so that a different person is left afterwards.

The male police detective treats her with unreserved hostility for their first few meetings. He says things to her like "You certainly scrub up well" and "Shut up - most women in your position would be scared shitless. How come you're not?"

Then there's this passage:  “I was still wearing high-heeled shoes, so when the hand grabbed the back of my hair I was thrown completely off balance. There was nothing to brace myself against, no way to fight back, as I was pulled down the last two steps and into the shadow beneath. A weight I hadn’t a hope of resisting pushed me forward until my face was up against the wood of my front door. I felt something cold and hard press against my neck and knew there was a knife at my throat.     ‘This is how easy it is,’ said a voice in my ear. ‘This is the last thing Geraldine felt.’     ….Taking a deep breath, I turned round slowly.     Mark Joesbury was shaking his head at me, like I was something forced into his way but far beneath his notice. In his right hand he held his car keys. It had been a key, not a knife, at my throat.     “Are you out of your fucking mind?” he said, in a voice that would have carried easily up to the street.”

So he demonstrates his concern that she's in danger of being attacked by.... attacking her. After she falls in the river while pursuing a suspect and almost dies, he drags her back to the river and forces her to go on a boat, as some kind of 'therapy'. When she says she's not comfortable and asks to go back to the car, he says, "Do I strike you as someone who gives up easily?"

Finally, in her hospital room he makes sexual advances. She tells him he's been a complete bastard and he acknowledges that he has, and says "Dana thinks I fancy you rotten and I’m taking the time-honoured male path of venting sexual frustration through unreasonable aggression.”

I don't know if I would have felt the same disbelieving squirminess reading this if I'd read it before the events of the past year or so. So here is an author that I respect, an author who spends half the book writing sensitively about the effects of rape and the related problem of an indifferent justice system, and the other half  of the book outlining a romance in which the man uses his superior physical strength against the woman, verbally abuses her, and then excuses it in the name of 'fancying her rotten'.

Something's rotten, that's for sure. There's also a scene in which the policewoman's female superior directs the man to drive her home. When the policewoman exhibits a clear reluctance to get in the car with him, instead of asking why or letting her get a cab as she suggests, her superior snaps "Oh for God's sake, he doesn't bite". So there we go - a female figure of authority delivering her neatly into a situation where she's forced to be alone with a man who's menaced her. Complicity - sometimes it's an ugly word, isn't it?

See, the thing is, I don't want to read in this manner. I don't want to view everything through a wary and defensive lens. Few people do, although rape culture apologists thing that we take some kind of self-satisfied pleasure in it. Are these the choices we have now? Either reading or listening and watching and walking and living in a state of humourless, joyless hypervigilance, or risking being the next Amanda Todd or Rehtaeh Parsons, or being her mother, or the mother of one of her rapists or tormentors? 

I don't know. Things have to change, it doesn't feel like anything can change. I don't really know what to say, I don't feel like I've said it properly, too many people aren't listening, but being silent doesn't help. We can't go on, we'll go on. 

Surly Thursday or a Reasonable Facsimile

Yeah, I'm faking it because you can't be authentically surly when you're dead inside, but Clara was looking forward to surliness and I adore Clara and I'm stalled in this assignment until my husband gets home and shows me how to make a concept map in Powerpoint.

Things that would make me surly if I still had feelings:

When the Rideau Canal was still open, Alan Neal was talking on CBC about the no-pickup-hockey-games rule that the National Capital Commission instituted. The reasons given were 1) it's dangerous and disruptive with so many people skating and, more importantly 2)the kind of 'static weight' generated by these games, as opposed to the 'moving weight' of people simply skating could cause the ice to sink and result in dangerous skating conditions. Neal concluded the piece with "what do you think"?

What do they think? Who gives a crap what they think? Are you going to ask them what they think about the rule about not knocking over liquor stores too? It's been determined that this is something that could shorten the canal skating season or result in injury, but let's all vote? Stuff a beaver tail in it, Alan Neal.

It's silly to get surly over a column in the newspaper, right? I always kind of know even while reading and feeling pissy that this writer needed to fill their column inches for the week, there's a good chance they're exaggerating or even just making stuff up, and that it's likely that my outrage is, in fact, the intended effect. And yet....

There was a column in the paper this week or last bitching about people bitching about winter. You know, we're soft, we're whiny, we should suck it up and embrace the chill, celebrate the upper-body-workout given by shovelling a foot and a half of snow, etc. etc.

Suck it, Pollyanna. Complaining about winter is a Canadian birthright. Sometimes I wonder what it's like living somewhere without winter. Are people always happy? What do you lament about in January if it's sunny and warm and you can leave the house without girding your loins in gore tex and sorels? I don't expect to ever find out. I live here, and it's unlikely that I'm ever leaving. I'm partial to many aspects of it. But right now, backing out of my driveway is an act of blind faith. The main intersection at the end of my street only has one lane clear, so if someone is coming around the corner as I pull up I have to drive up onto the snowbank in order not to get scraped by the other vehicle. My skin is raw, and Vaseline Intensive Rescue lotion has suddenly started smelling like something unpleasantly male and biological to me. Sure, there have been a handful of days where I've gotten out and frolicked in the snow or enjoyed the bracing frigidity, but mostly it's a slog. It's not tragic, and it's not insurmountable, but it's wearing and it's my winter and I'll complain if I want to.

The other column was about how people shouldn't sneer at ereaders or the people who love them. Which is a fair point, except when people with ereaders are snotty and sneer at people who are still reading those laughably antiquated things called books. The columnist says she still wants to own beloved books or first editions, but for a flimsy paperback she'll just download it onto her ereader for a few bucks. Uh, yeah, I don't own all the flimsy paperbacks I read either - I get them from the library, for free (fuck off, this is NOT the place to ask how much I pay in overdue fees). Other people have written about how giddy they are about getting rid of all their books and then replacing them on their ereader. Uh yeah, okay, so you've now paid for the books twice but now yay! Your collection is now portable. And invisible. Clearly this confers some kind of superiority. I didn't particularly love the Kindle I had for a few weeks before I gave it to my mother, but I could completely see their appeal and understand why people liked them. Douchebags who think their way is the only way? Turns out I'm still against them. Maybe I'll write a column about it.

Surly Thursday - The Ashes of Irony, or why David Denby can Suck It

A while back, before Christmas, I listened to Terry O'Reilly on CBC interviewing Christy Wampole about her New York Times essay called How to Live Without Irony. Something about what she was saying really struck a chord with me, because, as I've mentioned, I do have certain deeply entrenched smartass tendencies which I realize are a form of irony. I realize this because I took a seminar on irony for one full semester in grad school (and at the end of it I STILL wasn't entirely sure I had a firm grasp on the concept). I had a male friend in university who once observed that when we were talking or writing letters to each other, whenever I found myself getting into deep emotional waters I had a habit of employing some kind of technique to puncture the airiness of the moment and bring it back to earth, sometimes with a resounding thud. I thought about it, and responded that maybe it was because I lived in a residence where the overwhelming majority of people were science and engineering students - it was more than  your life was worth to go around being poetic or profound.

Was that it? I remember when I was a child or even a young teenager feeling excruciatingly sensitive, frequently peeled raw by the world and other people. Maybe I would have started using irony defensively no matter where or with whom I lived in university. And I absolutely do get that it's a defensive move - as Wampole says, "(irony) signals a deep aversion to risk". If you never express or display anything with complete honesty, you're shielded to some extent from the scorn of anyone who might take issue with your thoughts or feelings. You give yourself the automatic safety of a fallback position - "I didn't mean it. I didn't give you access to what I REALLY thought. I was joking." It's maybe a little dangerous, though, to get out of the habit of saying anything serious. Saying what we really think and letting people fling their arrows as they may would be a sad thing to lose.

Over the Christmas holidays I took Eve and my mom to see Les Misérables. I've seen the stage play three times and loved it and I wasn't sure how I would feel about the movie, but my mom asked me to take her since my dad hates watching movies in the theatre, and I knew Eve would be into seeing anything musical.

I loved the movie. The music that I loved from the play was there, and the camera being directly on the actors as they sang gave the experience an immediacy that I hadn't had watching from the second balcony. I don't remember ever crying at the play, just feeling giddy and breathless with admiration. In the movie? I bawled. I flung great sheets of tears off my cheeks. I had to bite my lip to prevent myself from sobbing audibly. The funny part was that I could see how another person watching would find the extreme close-ups on singing actors cheesy. I found it heart-wrenching and transporting.

On Facebook, Nan drew my attention to this review of the movie by David Denby in the New Yorker. Wow, did David Denby ever not like the movie. That's cool. Different strokes for different folks, right? Oh wait, but David Denby thinks that if you did, by chance, like the movie, love it even, that you are in desperate need of help, that you are tasteless and troubled and in need of a guiding hand. He critiques the movie in a way that is meant to show us poor cretins the light. I agree with one commenter that his review is 'pompous, snarky and mean', but I also think it's kind of dumb. I get really annoyed by movie reviewers who don't review movies based on their own merits - what they are clearly trying to do, and whether or not they succeed. The Ottawa Citizen has one reviewer who has actually criticized kids' movies for being juvenile. "Those talking cars are just creepy". WTF? Yes, movie reviewers are basically paid to judge, but could you judge in a halfway intelligent manner?

"Didn't any of my neighbours notice how absurdly gloomy and dolorous the story was?", David Denby asks. Well, it was about the 1832 rebellion. And a bunch of grindingly poor and oppressed people. Which, you know, actually existed in real life. Were you under the impression you were supposed to be at a screening of H.M.S. Pinafore? Maybe read your ticket more carefully next time.

"Russell Crowe as Javert, his implacable pursuer, stands on parapets overlooking all of Paris and dolefully sings of his duty to the law. Then he does it again. Everything is repeated, emphasized, doubled, as if to congratulate us on emotions we’ve already had". Well, no. See, the first time he does it he is supremely confident in his incorruptible faith. The second time he does it he is racked by an ultimately fatal doubt. It's a thematic repetition that I think is actually quite clever, but even if you don't agree, it's hard to see how you would argue that both scenes are meant to elicit the same emotion.

Fantine is "a pure victim who never asserts herself". Dude, she was a woman in 1830s France who had a baby out of wedlock and then loses her job. How, precisely, would you suggest she assert herself? She does what she can to support her child, selling the only thing she has left - her own body. I call unfair (and douchey) assertion on your part, David Denby.

"The story doesn't connect to our world". No, not remotely. There are no groups of people living in substandard conditions, hoping by protest to change the government in our world. Very astute.

"Every emotion in the movie is elemental. There’s no normal range, no offhand or incidental moments—it’s all injustice, love, heartbreak, cruelty, self-sacrifice, nobility, baseness". Well, David Denby, it's a musical, not Seinfeld. Ever seen an opera? Big, sweeping emotions are kind of what this genre tends to deal with.

I had a friend who went to the movie (because her daughter wanted to see it, in all fairness, obviating my being able to say "pro tip - if you don't like uplifting or depressing songs, maybe avoid musicals in future".) She hated it. Knowing this, I admitted that I loved it, that it made me cry. She called me sappy. Honestly, it hurt my feelings a tiny bit, but she was just expressing an honest opinion. You don't like the movie? Fine. You don't like the movie David Denby-style? You can suck it - it's not my problem you're too tone-deaf to hear the people sing.

Anyone still with me? Man, being unironic seems to occasion a lot of words. The next thing that happened was that I saw, in a retweet, (if I had been following this dude, I wouldn't be now), someone saying something to the effect of 'is Zadie Smith actually crying out for our help?' about this essay in the New York Review of Books (man, what is with New York and the discursive politics of irony?).

I read the essay. I thought it was quite lovely. I went back to Twitter and followed the discussion a little further. Someone else agreed with the first man, and said they refused to believe the essay was written without irony.

What do you think? Do we need an irony intervention? Do we need to go on an irony fast? And by saying 'we', am I still being defensive? Do I need a 'thirty days to an irony-free you' program?

I don't know. But I'm thinking about it. Unironically.

(Embracing the) Surly Thursdays

I am not a good person. Oh, I'm generally nice and polite to everyone, but this is only because I suffer from an unfortunate surfeit of empathy, and if I was mean or rude to anyone I would just have to experience the tiresome effect of being able to vividly imagine how that made them feel, and it's just not worth the effort. And sure, I adore my family and friends and I would do anything to help them out or make them feel better, within reason, right after The Vampire Diaries, but I'd throw them all over for a guaranteed extra two or three good hair days a month.

But I'm not a good person. When I'm alone and driving around, I'm filled with rage and hatred for all the stupid drivers who don't have the good sense to just get the fuck out of my way. And man, there are a lot of stupid drivers. The ones who won't pull up far enough when they're stopped at a red light to let the right-turning people turn right (see, I always pull up far enough, because otherwise I just have to vicariously experience the vein-throbbing head-explosiveness going on in the car behind me). The ones who gaily swerve from lane to lane because look! A rainbow! A cow! The ones who come to a full and complete stop, which hey, I respect, because I've been doing the full and complete stop ever since this post, BUT then after they've stopped, they don't just go. They inch cautiously forward into the intersection as if some purple-motorcycled freak is going to appear out of nowhere and plow into them. Because yes, I do mean when the intersection is COMPLETELY EMPTY.

I had to pick my Dad up at the hospital after his cataract surgery on Monday. I know this is a tired subject but why, oh why, do they make the place you have to go when you're sick, already ill at ease in the world, and prone to disorientation and confusion, so completely baffling and forbidding? I mean, in this situation there was no dire illness or fear of death, and I STILL came out of it feeling like I'd run a marathon through a forest fire.

Tuesday I went to the mall because Wednesday was Angus's grade 6 leaving ceremony (isn't that a weird thing to call it? I respect that they want to get away from the 'graduating from everything' wave, but it makes me think of those science fiction stories where everybody on the planet has to die at the age of sixty or something. If they started putting wreaths of flowers on their heads I was grabbing my kid and getting the eff out of there) and we realized on Monday that, although he had a number of nice, presentable shirts and a roughly equal number of nice, presentable pairs of of shorts, none of said nice, presentable items looked remotely un-idiotic when put together.

I hate the mall. By the time I left there were (I can hardly type it)..... sweat marks on the back of my shirt.

Wednesday was the leaving ceremony. More on that later.

Last night I was reading the paper. There's a column in our paper written by Craig and Mark Kielberger (I'm not googling anything about this for spelling or accuracy, read with extreme skepticism), who have been activists for world peace and justice and clean water in Africa and stuff like that since the age of three or something. For all my snark, we must all agree that these are good, good people. So people write in and ask them stuff about activism and social causes. The letter I read last night was asking if edgy campaigns such as the "I love boobies" bracelets (one of which my son got for his birthday - not from me - and wears proudly_ and the "fuck cancer" t-shirts are effective, or if they put people off. Craig and Mark talked a little bit, in a fairly measured way, about the woman who started the fuck cancer t-shirt campaign. But at the end of their column they said they thought 'messages of hope and inspiration' were the best way to go for social causes.

And now I want to bitch-slap Craig and Mark Kielberger.

Not a good person.

Surly Thursdays: grocery store edition

Dear Loblaws:

Just wanted to thank you for another thrill-filled adventure at the self check-out station today. I know, I know - it's my own fault. Every time I go there I tell myself I will never, under any circumstances, use the self check-out station again because saving a few minutes is not worth the resultant blood pressure spike/rage-induced headache/visions of death and destruction. But then the next time, there are barely any cashiers on (why would there be, when you have these marvels of technology to replace them?) and long lineups of cranky people, and, well, it's kind of like childbirth or aerobics; I forget the magnitude of the pain, and I think 'maybe it won't be so bad this time'. Because I'm a fucking moron.

It tells me to put my re-usable bags on the platform, so I do. It says press DONE when I'm, you know, done, so I do. Then it tells me that the large item I'm trying to scan needs to be scanned by the cashier. Except I didn't try to scan a large item. The cashier comes over and says maybe my bags on the platform set off the scale. You know, the bags the disembodied robotic bitch just told me to put there.

Anyway. I proceed with scanning items. There's the usual bullshit with the disembodied robotic bitch telling me to remove the last item placed in the bag and scan it when I ALREADY BLOODY SCANNED IT, and the disembodied robotic bitch taking her sweet damned time scanning stuff, like she's off deciding what colour she'd paint her robotic fingernails if she had a body, and then the out-of-the-blue, Kafkaesque demand to 'see the attendant'. The attendant - who stand at the center of the bank of self-checkout stations, ostensibly to monitor things and help out as needed - is, of course, busy chatting with two other cashiers, who I have clearly been mistakenly feeling sympathy for, being replaced by those evil machines and everything, because here they still are. So I push the button that says "Call Attendant". And the Attendant immediately fixes me with a vicious stare and hollers "Don't EVER push that button! All it does it jam everything up!"

Huh?

Right. Of course. I'M the asshole for pushing a button that says CALL ATTENDANT, in order to... um.... call the attendant. I make questioning noises. She says "Well I don't know! I'm not a software engineer. They make a lot more money than I do." I suggest that maybe she could make a nice low-tech sign that says 'don't use CALL ATTENDANT button to call attendant, because if they don't make a sign and the button stays there, people will probably keep pressing it when they want to call the attendant. People can be douchey like that.

I've worked a lot of retail. I've dealt with a lot of bitchy customers. Normally I'm not one of the bitchy customers. I'm nice. I'm sympathetic. I'm ready to be on your side. If she had said "I know. They're idiotic. I hate them", she and I would have been TOTALLY COOL. We could have high-fived and gone out for margaritas. But no - she's drunk disembodied robotic bitch's kool-aid. She's one of THEM now.

And yes, I do realize I started this out as a snarky letter and that device kind of fell apart halfway through. I should have just gone with this:

Dear Allison: Don't ever ever use the self-checkout station again. It's worse than childbirth. And you can't even use stories of the pain to guilt it into bringing you cupcakes later on.

Mondays on the Margins have been postponed due to my post-traumatic field-trip disorder

Eve's class has been going to the community pool for the last three Mondays to learn 'life-saving skills'. It was great. She's been a very slow starter in swimming; she loved being in the water, but she wouldn't jump in, didn't like going under water, and needed water wings well after the other kids her age were eeling around without flotation devices. This was fine until she went to summer camp last year and couldn't pass the swimming test and ended up having to hang around in the shallow end with little boys in life jackets. So I put her in a private swimming class, and she's made enormous progress. Over March Break, my friend and I took the kids swimming and she passed the swimming test easily, even though it was a long swim in water over her head. She got a little nervous before the first Monday, but passed the test again, didn't have to wear a lifejacket, somersaulted into the water and jumped off the diving board for the first time ever. She was loving it. She was loving it so much she asked if I would come watch at the last class yesterday. Which also meant supervising the girls changing in the locker room.

The class has fourteen girls and six boys.

The proper life-saving technique would have been to say NO FUCKING WAY. But I said sure, why not? Because I'm stupid like that.

The thing with the girls at this age -- tell me you've noticed this -- is, even the ones that are sweet and nice and funny and obedient on their own turn into little turds when they're in a group. On a bus? They lose their everloving shit in five seconds flat. Trying to open windows. Trying to close windows. Flinging their bags of stuff up on the racks. Trying to get the same stuff down from the racks. Sitting backwards. Sitting upside down. Arguing over which guy in the Hunger Games is better and saying "My name is Slim Shady" over and over. There are rows of empty seats and nine kids squished into the very last ones, because ya know, having a quarter of a butt cheek on the last seat, that makes you cool.

Then we're in the locker room. All they have to do is take off their clothes, put their stuff in a locker, put on their bathing suits and get their towels out.

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I think it would have been easier to build a time machine. And I am not mechanically inclined.

Some of them took minutes just to pick out the perfect locker. Some of them collapsed on the bench and their stuff was immediately scattered in a five-metre radius. Some of them were so preoccupied with not being naked that it took them twice as long to get changed, and the rest took all their clothes off and looked around vacantly, as if they couldn't remember the next step. This tiny, cute-as-a-button blonde girl took out a plastic ziploc bag with her epi-pen, inhaler, and brush in it and looked at it and went 'oh my gosh!' and I said 'what? What?' in a total panic, thinking she was missing something vital and about to have some kind of medical crisis. She opened the bag, took out the brush and said "THAT'S not medicine!" and put it on the bench.

Then my head exploded, so that took a few more seconds.

Then we went out on the pool deck. It was raining, and there were some leaking pipes, so you can imagine, the "OH MY GOD, IT'S LEAKING, IT'S A FLOOD, WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE OH MY GOD, Selena can you sit beside me on the bus on the way home?" They were all supposed to sit down and wait for the instructors, which they did for about half a second, then they were up and changing seats, and inching along the wet ledge in front of the seats trying really hard to fall and crack their heads on the concrete until I snarled at them that they were all horrible, wretched little ingrates and if they didn't park their little butts in a seat and stay there, they would shortly be in need of some REAL life-saving. Because I'm good with kids like that.

Then they had the actual lesson, and that was cool. I just sat there sweating, had a brief conversation with another mom about how if we were teachers we would both be raging alcoholics, and Eve went off the HIGH DIVING BOARD! Then she wouldn't shut up about how it hurt her leg and she had a headache, and I told her I'd never met anyone who could ruin a magical moment as effectively, and she said "well then welcome to your first time!"

Then we had to get them changed back into their clothes. So, the first part in reverse, but much, much worse. Because now they were wet, and there were hair issues, and more pieces of clothing had to go ON their bodies, and oh god, the humanity.

Two girls disappeared into one of the private change rooms and every time I looked at their four little feet, they seemed distressingly still and not moving around in a putting-on-clothes-type manner AT ALL. The little blonde girl kept saying "Where's my Epi-pen?", which, okay, fine, you should know where your epi-pen is, but I'd told her EVERY TIME that I had put it back in her backpack, and I'm pretty sure it was for food allergies and WE WEREN'T EATING ANYTHING. Naked little girls were combing their tangles out with excrutiating slowness - I swear, they were staring at me challengingly at the same time. Did I mention there was a bus waiting for us, and we were edging up on school dismissal time? And that if we got out to the parking lot a bit early I might be able to score some meth or something to dull the pain?

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One girl put on her dress and then couldn't find her pink leggings. She searched along the piles of stuff on the bench and found them. The little blonde girl had a dress on and winter boots, but her legs were still bare. I said sweetie, don't you have something for your legs? She said 'oh yeah', and looked at the bench and picked up HER UNDERWEAR, which apparently was hitherto considered optional, and then said "where are my leggings?" And yes, you've got it, girl number one had put on girl number two's pink leggings. I grabbed the pink leggings girl number one found in her bag, thrust them at girl number two and ordered her to put them on and said they could trade back tomorrow (you know, the day when I would be hiding in my house lest I spy an 8-or-9-year old child and have a screaming flashback). 

Everybody was heading towards the door except me and the little blonde girl. Eve had gathered up my purse, her bag of wet stuff and my sweater. She said consolingly "all you have to do is grab your water bottle, Mom". Blessed child. I think she sensed that the next time blonde girl asked "where's my epi-pen?" my answer was going to be "in my neck". 

Surly Thursdays

In truth, I am not the least bit surly today. I got up and got the kids off, went for a lovely walk in the sun, got a few groceries, put some pictures in frames, and finished my exam. Matt gets home tonight and I'm going to a book launch tomorrow night with Pam and Denise. I also don't feel like the world is an inescapable vortex of cruelty and pain at the moment - it's a little thing, but it's a nice thing.

However, for you, dear readers, imaginary though you may be, I will happily recall some random surlinesses of the past few days? What was it that Wordsworth said? Something about extreme, eye-stabbing, ball-hoofing bitchiness recollected in tranquility? (I'm probably paraphrasing). I've been saving up my pet peeves for one of the Scintilla posts I missed anyway. Hence:

1. My exam. Specifically, my utter inability to grasp the inner workings of the Dewey Decimal System no matter HOW HARD I try. I took a first pass at it yesterday, then fed the kids supper, and when I went back less than an hour later I was already incapable of figuring out how I got the answers the first time. It's literally as if my mind gets wiped every time I look away from it. In one case, I got all excited thinking I'd figured out the way to get to a particularly complex number, which I had; however, when I looked at the answer I'd written, I realized I had ALREADY found that same complicated technique, TWO HOURS EARLIER.

Seriously. I'm like a monkey trying to make baked alaska.

2. My fingernails. They're weirdly shaped so they don't grow nicely, they turn into these ugly widely-splayed shovel-type things, and I can never cut them properly so when I can't sleep or when I'm reading I'm constantly feeling these weird edges and I can't stop rubbing the next finger on them or they catch on my clothes and it's EXTREMELY VEXING.

3. The number of things on my body that rest on other parts of my body. It's unsettling.

4. My head felt like it was in a vise all day Tuesday. My shoulder is acting up (old bookstore injury). I'm still doing physio for my patellar tendonitis. Head, shoulder, knee.... expecting a catastrophic toe injury any day now.

5. Water in my ear. My Dad always told me to stand on one foot, tip my head over and jump up and down to get it out. See number 3 - I'm worried that my house isn't structurally sound enough to withstand this kind of action on my part.

6. E-mail scams. Not on my own behalf. I just find it amusing when get emails that are purportedly from my child's Irish dance teacher or a long-lost relative or a Nigerian prince asking for money. And those tear-jerker ones that ask you to forward them on because some little cancer-stricken waif or brave soul with terminal Eyelash Disease will get money for every forward? Well, I know those are fake. Unfortunately, my daughter and her tender-hearted, soft-headed little e-mail demon friends don't. And when my daughter, as I'm trying to tuck her into bed, suddenly starts sobbing about some poor little girl from Texas whose arms and face got burnt off while she was in Wal-Mart with her brother who was buying her a birthday present, and I have to explain to her what snopes.com is, and how if somebody lost their little girl in Wal-Mart during a fire they would PROBABLY check all the area hospitals and not wait until 'the hospital called them two days later because they found the little girl's name and address in her purse', well, I get a TAD IRATE. Whatever asshole thinks it's fun to send these little pieces of idiocy out into the world like some twenty-first-century stupid-ass version of a message in a bottle is in serious need of a new hobby.

7. Titanic hysteria. Fine, commemorate the anniversary. With some respect and decorum, maybe? As one of my Twitter friends said, "it's not a romantic story - a shitload of people died". My daughter, who is nine, put it pretty well: "I got this book about a little boy who had this stuffed bear on the Titanic. It's a true story. There are a lot of true stories about the Titanic. Well, but, there are a lot of lovey-dovey stories that aren't true. It's called historical FICTION, people!" (Too bad she's not as discerning about maudlin email stories).

There. Surly enough for you? Surely?

Value Meals

I just saw another article advising people about what they should order at restaurants to get the best value for their money. I've been told by people who work at restaurants never to order pasta, because pasta has the biggest mark-up. This kind of advice always makes me scratch my head (shut UP, I do NOT have lice). Granted, I'm not the cheapest person I know, but even the cheap people I go out to eat with don't tend to scan a menu and pick out what to order based solely on how they can best stick it to the restaurant in the value department.

When I go out to eat, the VALUE for me is in someone else cooking my food, serving it to me, and cleaning up afterwards. And I LIKE pasta. If I feel like having pasta, am I really going to not have it just because the restaurant might make too much money on my order? It would be different if I ate out at restaurants a lot, but I don't. So when I do, I'm generally going to order what I feel like eating, not what I think is expensive enough for the restaurant to buy and prepare that I'm not getting hosed. Besides, if I really feel like I got ripped off I can always steal the candleholder or something.

Yes, clearly I'm really stretching trying to get a whole post out of this. Oh, while we're on the subject, I also hate those articles that tell you how to eat healthy at fast food restaurants. Um, yeah, we all know - eat the side salad or suck on a napkin. I'm not trying to eat healthy today, THAT'S WHY I'M AT BURGER KING.


cartoon from here

Letter to my Optometrist

Dear Dr. N.:

On the off chance that you're curious why neither I nor my children are any longer frequenting your office, I've decided to share my reasons with you.

As you know, I've been a patient of yours for twelve years, since I first moved to Ottawa. I have never had the slightest issue with your friendliness or professionalism. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for your front counter staff, particularly the one older woman (I'm sure you know who I mean). I'm not sure why I put up with the customer service I've received here for as long as I have - I suspect it's a combination of laziness and the fact that I only come here two or three times a year.

I've worked retail myself, and I do realize that it's a bit much to expect staff to invariably act like 'the customer is always right'. However, it is a somewhat baffling customer service model I've experienced here, one which seems to dictate that 'the customer is a blithering idiot and not deserving of the slightest courtesy or respect'.

This individual has made several mistakes such as calling my house to confirm an appointment for my mother (same last name, different address and phone number), obviously having confused two patients. However, it's more the fact that she acts like I am an intrusion and an annoyance every time I call to make an appointment that I find more vexing, as well as curious; did she not know when she took the job that patients would have to call to make appointments to see their eye doctors?

I would probably still be subjecting myself to this sort of treatment, if not for the incident which occurred in July of this year. I started bringing my children to your office when they were old enough to require eye exams, even though the office is twenty minutes away from where I live, because I have been satisfied with your services as an optometrist and I believe in customer loyalty (I know - how charmingly misguided). A few weeks ago I booked eye exams for my children and wrote the appointments down on the calendar for Wednesday July 6 at 1:00. However, when I received my confirmation call, the individual in question clearly stated that she was calling to confirm appointments for Thursday, July 7 at 1:00. I was a bit confused, and I considered calling to clarify, but then I thought that presumably she had the appointment calendar in front of her while she was calling, and that perhaps I had thought our calendar week started on Saturday instead of Sunday and wrote it down wrong.

At any rate, I showed up in the office on the Thursday. When I gave her my children's names, she couldn't find them. I said that I hoped she hadn't made a mistake when she called, since the appointment I had originally written down was on the Wednesday. She checked, said "yes, it was yesterday. And I don't have anything for today," very brusquely, then looked down dismissively and moved her chair over. I said rather tartly that it would be nice if she would be a little bit more careful about her reminder calls, and asked to make another appointment (because why wouldn't I want to keep coming back for this kind of treatment?). She made it, with fairly bad grace - when I asked if I could look at a calendar she simply said 'no'. When it was done, before leaving, I said it would be nice if she would make some sort of expression of regret for a mistake that had caused me to drag my kids out of the sandbox on a summer afternoon, dress them up and drive them half an hour for an appointment that now had to be rescheduled. She remarked somewhat incomprehensibly that "we always call and say the date and the time", whereupon I said "that's what I'm telling you -- you said the WRONG ONE". She retorted "well I didn't do it", which is really not the point (although it was, in fact, her - she has a very distinctive voice). Totally bemused, I asked her if she WAS at all sorry that we drove out here for nothing because of a mistake on her end, and naturally she said "I don't know that we made a mistake." Really? Really? All she had to say was "if a mistake was made, I'm sorry." That's in the COMPLETE IDIOTS guide to customer service. She was so clearly more concerned with being right than being polite or the least bit professional, I would have been amused if I wasn't livid. I had the impression that she knew she had made a mistake and just wanted to get rid of me as soon as possible. She turned what should have been a minor inconvenience into a deeply unpleasant experience for both me and my children.

I believe that by leaving this individual on the front line of your business, you are doing it a disservice; however, after delivering this letter I don't intend to commit any further headspace to the matter. On the drive back to Barrhaven I came to the obvious yet incredibly liberating conclusion that I don't actually have to drive twenty minutes out of my way and pay good money to put up with -- and be treated like -- total garbage.

Very Sincerely,

Allison McCaskill

How do you solve an asshat like Maria

I think I first saw Maria Bello in an episode of Nowhere Man (a show I happened upon late at night a few years ago, about a photojournalist whose life gets erased by some mysterious 'organization' and he travels around trying to expose the conspiracy and get his life back - just the thing for someone with neurotic and paranoid tendencies). I thought she was really pretty - I love blonde hair with brown eyes. I was glad in a sort of remote, back-of-the-mind way, when she showed up in more shows, then got a spot on E.R., than made it big in the movies.

My asshat of a boss at the audio publisher where I worked for a while once told me a story about Margaret Atwood that reminded me strongly of the saying "if you want to keep your heroes, never meet them". I think I'd have to expand that to "don't read interviews with them either". There was a short piece about Maria Bello in my local paper where she tells her son "I'm a different kind of Mommy...that's why I'm not a soccer Mom...why I'm off to Haiti again...why I smoke."

WTF? Okay, admittedly I can't even define, in any logical, articulate manner, why that pisses me off so much, so feel free to call me on it. It just seems to encompass such an elitist, narcissistic, IDIOTIC sensibility. So...soccer moms never travel? So...it's a law that movie stars have to smoke? Poor Maria, having to explain to her child why she's so special and different from the common folk.

I'm not even that cranky today. Seriously. Even though I'm going out tonight and it's raining and my hair's going to be a goofiness orgy of frizz. But Maria Bello is totally not on my list of movie stars I want to be BFFs with anymore. That's right - I'm dealing her a crushing blow in my fantasy life.

I'm also reading Freedom by Jonathan Franzen. I love The Corrections. Admittedly, I can't stop reading Freedom either, but it's not with the same admiration. Leaving aside, for the moment, the issue of confusing the narrator with the author, I'm getting the distinct impression that Franzen doesn't like women much - or at least has some kind of issue that makes him delight in creating fairly repulsive examples of the gender in his books. Thinking back on some of his female characters in The Corrections, sadly, isn't doing anything to attenuate this feeling, which sucks because it's retroactively casting a shadow on a really great reading experience. I remember reading the Travis McGee series, which some writer I really admire had recommended highly, and suddenly stumbling into the same thing. There were interesting female characters, but all of the characters with true nobility and integrity seemed to be men. What put a definite end to my continuing with the series was a rape scene, followed by the woman killing herself, and the male character concluding that it was because she had experienced sexual pleasure during the rape and therefore couldn't live with herself. Really? REALLY?

Anyway, I have a book club meeting tonight where we eat and drink and formulate the book list for next year. We each usually bring two or three choices and decide on one based on the rest of the list. One of the books I'm bringing is The Razor's Edge by Somerset Maughaum, partly because I like to visit or revisit classics under the aegis of book club because then I know I'll read them carefully, and partly because it was the Favourite Book of All Time of my asshat audio publisher boss (hey look, a kind of circularity in a post that I thought was ping-ponging around like a coked up rat in a maze), and when I read it, guess what? A definite whiff of Misogynists R Us. I'm interested in seeing if the other people in my book club think the same thing.

Suck it Up, Ya Pussies

In a recent episode of Modern Family (the awesomeness, oh the awesomeness), the flamboyant gay character Cam is directing the play at the school attended by two of the extended family's children. When his partner Mitchell suggests that perhaps Cam's directing ambitions are a little steep for an elementary school play, Cam indignantly says "Why do you always have a to throw a wet blanket on my dreams? You do it all the time and do you know what I end up with? Wet dreams -- I heard it as soon as I said it; just leave it alone."

I'm using this as a humorous example of a curious phenomenon. Some people do indeed hear the words that come out of their own mouths - other people? Not so much. Once I was standing around in Halfway Lake Provincial Park with my junior ranger boyfriend and some of his friends. One of them asked me why I kept ripping leaves off the bush and tearing them up into little pieces, and I said "I don't know, I like to have something to do with my hands", and before it was even out of my mouth I knew it was a mistake (see how I followed one possibly dirty statement with another one there?). On the other hand, I had a friend who once walked up to a guy in a parking lot and said "could you please jump me?" when her car was dead and couldn't figure out why everyone was laughing.

Our city council recently had to impose an ban on outside water use for most of the summer in parts of Ottawa, including the part where I live. This is due to a faulty water main, which means we'll be getting our water for the next few months through a much smaller pipe. If we overuse water, the system will become depressurized or dry, which results in bacteria growth which in turn could result in indoor water being unsafe to drink without boiling. In order to mitigate the inconvenience, the city is offering water trucks to top up pools and hot tubs and rebates on rain barrels.

Okay, it's not ideal. Our summers are hot, and few images are more evocative of summer than kids running through a sprinkler. I enjoy gardening, and looking at other people's gardens when I walk around the neighbourhood. But some of the reactions I've read and heard in the past few days seem, to say the least, out of proportion, and I keep thinking "do you seriously not HEAR yourself? Because if you did, how can you say that with a straight face?" It's "ridiculous" -- which part? That a water pipe was faulty? That we have to conserve water in order to maintain its safety for drinking? That we have to not do a few things that, honestly, are kind of dumbass anyway (like watering grass that serves absolutely no practical purpose)? Let's not forget -- they're topping up HOT TUBS -- this isn't exactly the pinnacle of hardship and deprivation. Someone the paper interviewed said "rain barrels? Come on, this is getting out of hand - it's like the green bins in the recycling program". You'd think we'd been asked to boil our children rather than gather rainwater and compost food. And then there's my favourite so far -- "this isn't a third-world country!" Um, yeah -- that's why our worst problem at the moment is dusty cars and brown lawns rather than inadequate food, medicine or shelter.

I get it. It sucks. We're used to our modern conveniences being on-hand and uninterrupted. If I had young children who were in love with their turtle pool, or had just moved into a house that didn't have a lawn yet, I'd be annoyed. ANNOYED. Not enraged or livid or apoplectic. Government makes a lot of decisions that are shortsighted, wrongheaded, and just plain stupid. This doesn't appear to be one of them, and no matter how many times people stamp their feet and say it's 'unacceptable', it doesn't change the fact that it appears to be necessary. Of course, a lot of people are taking the measured approach - like one woman in the schoolyard said "we're still better off than 98% of the planet". That's someone who hears what she says. Unlike these people.

Can I Be Downgraded Back to the One that Works Please?

Why do upgrades almost always SUCK? My computer recently interrupted my work to blip and beep its way through an 'upgrade'. When it was done, everything was slower and I couldn't get a new post window in blogger. I can if I use Google Chrome, but then when I try to read other blogs I can't close just their blog window without closing everything, which I keep forgetting, so then I keep accidentally closing everything and having to log in to my own blog again, which SUCKS. Our PVR recently turned itself off and when it came back on it professed itself to be in 'standalone mode', an 'advanced service' which means it can play back shows without a cable hookup - not so much a bonus for us since we don't tend to carry our PVR around on our shoulders. The new improved PVR cable box wouldn't let us actually watch our tv, but this was just part of the great new 'advanced service'. Which SUCKS.

Every time I figured out how to use the Loblaws Photolab website they would 'improve' it to the point where I couldn't use it any more. Once I fired off a pissed-off email in which I decried the constant need to upgrade and improve everything instead of leaving well enough alone and said various other stuff that made me sound like a cranky eighty-year-old (I avoided the terms 'newfangled' and 'the good old days' at least). Then I figured out that it actually was possible to access the former version of the uploader. I restrained myself from replying to their polite letter which said as much with 'Fine. Shut up. I hate you.' but I totally said it in my head.

I'm a little foggy. My husband's in Italy and I only let the kids sleep with me Saturday night when I could sleep in. Sunday night I put them to bed in their own rooms, changed my bed, took a shower and came out into my lovely private space, read for a while, then laid awake for most of the night in complete peace. Sigh. Yesterday I was kind of grumpy. At one point I yelled 'Jesus Christ, do you have to make such a racket? Settle down already!' Fortunately, it was at a pot of boiling eggs on the stove and the kids were still at school. You'd think a little water on the burner was a federal case, though - I'm sure all that hissing and spitting wasn't really necessary.

So I'm not exactly sure what Anonymous meant by the comment on my last post saying I should add a Twitter button. I don't do Twitter and I'm not sure why I would want a Twitter button. Sounds suspiciously like an upgrade, or perhaps an advanced service. In which case, count me out.

Narcissistic is the New Insightful: Cranky Book Review

OH MY GOD I'M SO SICK. On the whole I still feel better than I did on Saturday. But having turfed the inhaler that was making me nauseous, I have had a few coughing attacks that have bordered on the truly frightening -- blood vessels bursting in my eyes, feeling like my jaw is going to dislocate, unable to keep my balance. My voice sounds like this. My kids are kind of freaked out, which also means they're being very sweet and helpful (but they're freaked out. Angus passed me last night in the kitchen bent over the sink in case I coughed until I projectile-vomited again and went upstairs, and then Eve came down and said 'Angus said I shouldn't come down. He said you were coughing a lot and I should wait and see you upstairs.')

So I'm going to do a book review, because I haven't been doing enough book reviews, and I'm not sure it's fair to do it cranky, because the book already made me a little cranky, but what the hell, I've never made any pretenses to objectivity.

The book is called Orange is the New Black: My Year in a Women's Prison by Piper Kerman, a pretty blonde New Yorker who found herself at loose ends after college and ended up dabbling in money laundering for a West African heroin operation. She fell into this through her lesbian affair with Nora, a woman who was higher up in the operation, and she got out of it fairly quickly. She then went on to meet and become engaged to a man and went on with her life until ten years or so later her actions caught up with her and she ended up serving thirteen months in a minimum security prison for money laundering and drug trafficking. This book is about her year (or so) behind bars.
First of all, the year thing immediately flags the book for me as one of those "my year doing (insert kooky madcap stunt that shows my whimsical, creative, one-of-a-kind nature) in order to get a book deal" books. I've read a few of these, and liked them (Not Buying it by Judith Levine, springs to mind as a thoughtful, well-written example), but it's gotten a bit ridiculous -- living Biblically, obeying Oprah, having sex every day, etc. etc. I can't even make up one, like "I'm going to only live on what I can buy with Canadian Tire money for one year" or "for one year I'm going to do everything backwards" because I'm afraid I'll open the paper and find it there, like today when I read about a man who's going to open a fortune cookie and live by the fortune every day for... you guessed it.

It's really not fair to lump Kerman's book in with these, because presumably she would have avoided going to jail for a year if she could, and the book deal probably fell right in her lap, and I'm sure the poor woman had legal bills. But write the book she did, and clearly the title shows that neither she nor her publisher are averse to capitalizing on the trend, so have at it I will.

There were a couple ways this could have gone. If Kerman was a fantastic writer, she could have produced a vivid rendering of what it's like to have your freedom taken away, to have someone tell you when and what you get to eat, when you get to bathe and sleep. There's a little of this, but it doesn't go very deep. If she was the crusading type, she could have made it her mission to examine what happens to imprisoned women who aren't white and middle class, and see what she could do to change it. She's not the crusading type. She makes some noises about how she understands that she had it easier than most because of her colour and class and the fact that she had people outside sending her a constant stream of money and books. She is pleasantly surprised about how many of the other women are nurturing and helpful rather than out to rape and beat her, (and when one of the other women makes appreciative remarks about her breasts, Kerman finds this flattering rather than threatening), but she doesn't really seem to get the vast mantle of privilege that separates her from them, or she doesn't want to examine it too closely -- which, to be fair, is probably the exact way I would react if I was in the same situation. Kerman had a supportive fiancé, an unconditionally loving family and even a job waiting for her at the end of her sentence -- a 'generous friend' had started his own company and created a position for her. Most of the other women presumably had lives of the same poverty and lack of opportunity that drove them to commit the offences that landed them in jail in the first place waiting for them.

I'm not sure the fact that she was in a minimum security facility is emphasized enough. It wasn't a five-star resort by any means, but Kerman was adequately fed, sheltered and never feared for her health or safety -- in fact, the less-than-appetizing fare and the running track to which she had frequent access led visitors to repeatedly tell her how fantastic she looked (maybe her next book will be called The Jailhouse Diet - thirteen months to a completely reformed shape). I don't know if I was expecting Oz with women, but this was pretty tame. Not that I'm dying to go to jail or anything, but you know what they say, if you can't do the time, don't be a douche.

She doesn't follow up on any of the women she was incarcerated with. The book ends when she's released and runs into her fiancé's arms. As a jailhouse diary, it's perfectly adequate, but it doesn't amount to much more than low-level voyeurism; I was hoping for something a little more substantial.

The Naked Truth

I've done everything possible to avoid blogging for the last couple of days, from cleaning the kitchen to sorting obsessively through old photos, from sleeping eighteen hours to cutting out twenty-three paper hearts for Eve's valentines. There's a pair of boys' cargo pants sitting on the dresser by the front door that we bought at Wal-Mart before the cruise because Angus had no lightweight pants for formal night, so we went to Wal-Mart the night before we left even though I hate Wal-Mart and hate it even more now that they have groceries, and bought two pairs of pants in two different sizes so we could return the one that didn't fit, and then I washed the ones that fit before we left and left them in the dryer and forgot to pack them anyway (fuck) and now the pair that didn't fit is on top of the dresser and I keep opening the top drawer to verify that I have the receipt but I still keep not taking them back because, well, I HATE Wal-Mart, and I'm not sure the wretched Wal-Mart experience is actually worth the eleven dollars, and this just seems like a giant stupid metaphor for my life right now, because I'm just so almighty buggerfucking tired, and I sleep too much and drag myself around to get the bare minimum done, and looking at all the stuff left over after the bare minimum makes me feel horrible and guilty, which just makes me more tired.....

...and this is perhaps why I've been avoiding blogging, because once you uncork the sludge in my brain it's a most unsavoury stream of bleck that comes flooding out. 

So I read a couple of blog posts this week about naked people. Specifically, blog posts that objected to people being unashamedly naked in the gym change room. Actually, one blog post finished up by concluding that she probably shouldn't be objecting to the naked person -- the other one was unapologetically against the naked person being naked, even though the person in question was nice and helpful. 

Now I'm not trying to take a stand against either of these bloggers -- one of them I really like and one I don't even know, and in any case both posts were clearly meant to be funny, not hurtful, because the people in question would be highly unlikely to see them. It's just that they reminded me of a couple of things. One was a few years ago when Jamie Lee Curtis posed in her underwear, in all her fifty-ish un-surgically-enhanced, slightly saggy glory. The other one was a picture of an old woman, about seventy, naked, taken from the side. She was not 'well-preserved', 'fantastic-looking for her age', and bore no resemblance to Sophia Loren or Catherine Deneuve. Life, childbirth and gravity had clearly taken their toll. Both of these photos generated letters that were very surprising to me in their disgust and vocal objections to having these photos printed. There were phrases like "I have no interest in seeing something like that" and "that is not something that should ever be photographed" and "oh god, my eyes, my eyes" (okay, I'm paraphrasing, but the implication was there). The comments on these posts were similar -- the tenor of the conversation was, if you MUST change clothes at the gym, then go ahead, but please spend as little time with exposed skin as possible, and for the love of god, don't go wandering around where someone else might accidentally see you and be struck blind or something. 

And it sort of makes me think, what the hell? If somebody is comfortable enough in their own skin to stroll around the gym changing room, put on makeup or skin lotion, be photographed for a magazine, and this makes you cringe, is it at all possible that you're the one with the problem, and not the naked person? There's enough talk about how our society is obsessed with looks and youth and perfection that one might think we'd be applauding someone who's clearly not too hysterically repressed to let it all hang out (in the women's changing room, remember -- it's not like they were strolling down the median of the 417 or something). 

I don't like how I look naked. I don't like how things bulge out and hang down where I'd rather they didn't. But I didn't like how I looked naked when I was younger and firmer and pre-stuffed-with-baby and all the issues that came along with that either. The female body is a freaking marvel, when you think about it. It can grow a whole other person, and withstand great pain in order to put this other person into the world. It can generate food for its young. And when people see it in its natural state, what they really want to say is "cover that thing up"? I'm not comfortable being naked around other people. But I definitely recognize that as my hang-up. If someone else doesn't have that hang-up, more power to them. And now, because I feel like that ending was kind of lame, I will conclude with the first thing that popped up when I googled 'naked jokes': 

Sunbathing in the Buff:  A man was sunbathing in the buff at the beach. For the sake of civility, and to keep it from getting sunburned, he had a hat over his private parts. A woman walks past and says, snickering, "If you were a gentleman you'd lift your hat." He raised an eyebrow and replied, "If you weren't so ugly it would lift itself".