Odds and Ends. Mostly Odds.

I'm tired. I have a headache. I'm irredeemably blogcked (blog blocked -- has someone already made up that word? It seems to me like that word should have been made up a long time ago, but I've been told I don't exactly run on the same operating system as a lot of people that, if you want to be all conventional, you might call 'normal', so I can't be sure. I guess I could google it. What do you think a time-traveller from a hundred years ago would find weirder about today -- that we exercise for fun, or that we talk about 'googling' things several times a day?) It's February 18th. Crap, I was supposed to put clothing donations out for the Canadian Diabetes Association before eight o'clock this morning. I guess if they show up now I'll just grab the nearest pile of junk, shove it in a garbage bag and send them on their merry diabetic way. I will now dispense 18 random thoughts, because clearly today is not the day to try to achieve coherency.

1. From where I'm sitting I can see a three-day-old piece of pizza and a twelve-day-old cupcake. How have I allowed us to live like this?

2. I sort of want a dog. Up until a few months ago I still wanted another baby, and I still kind of do, but I'm clearly too old and broken for another baby, so I've transferred my longing to a puppy. Of course, if I have to teach something where to pee and poop and it's going to wake me up several times a night and I have to walk it twice a day whether i feel like walking or not and I can't go away for the week-end...

3. I want a cactus.

4. I don't really understand why someone who's won a gold medal comes back to the next Olympics and tries to win another gold medal. Geez man, you did it -- you achieved the pinnacle of success in your sport. Why spend another four years trying not to get any worse, so you can come back and either do the exact same thing in which case yippee again, or do worse, in which case, won't you kind of feel like a big dork? Dude -- move on.

5. Would eating a twelve-day-old cupcake kill you?

6. Why do I go to Chapters and think I'll be able to remember all the titles of the books I want to get from the library without writing them down? Is it the same reason I think that eating dessert at every meal including breakfast won't keep me from losing weight?

7. Did you know that there's a journal called Emergency Librarian?

8. Do you think the creators of Law and Order and CSI knew that their major accomplishment would be putting the phrase 'vaginal contribution' into the vernacular?

9. How is it possible that marshmallows are classified as food?

10. My daughter used to call marshmallows 'smushmallows'. When we were at the cottage with my sister and her kids, my niece laughed at this until Eve refused to say 'smushmallow' ever again. When I think about this, I still get slightly pissed at my niece. I try not to think about it.

11. I like polka dots.

12. I have never had so many black bananas and so little desire to make banana bread.

13. When I take a nap I always sleep upside down (with my head at the foot of the bed) so I'll know that it's not morning when I wake up. Otherwise it's too confusing.

14. If I wake up with my head at the foot of the bed and it's morning, this is not a good thing.

15. Plum sauce is mostly pumpkin purée. Why do the marketing gurus think that plum sauce is more appealing than pumpkin sauce? Okay, now that I type that out, never mind.

16. Now I want egg rolls.

17. Perhaps I should move my laptop out of the kitchen.

18. Stay in school. Just say no. Slippery when wet. Some restrictions may apply.

Under Where?

My sister called me this morning. In the course of conversation she mentioned that she was on the Indigo website ordering a book for her daughter when this book suddenly popped up in her sidebar. She couldn't remember precisely why she had intended to read it, but she ordered it anyway, and then she remembered that I had recommended it. This prompted me to look back in my posts for my review.

And I couldn't find it.

Agh!

Full disclosure: I know the author, Ilana Stanger-Ross. Not intimately or since childhood or to pop over for tea (I wish), but she's good friends with my sister-in-law, and intimately tangled up in the genesis of this very blog (gasp!). It's true -- look at my very first post ever to verify.

If you're thinking that the fact that I know her and like her makes me more likely to give the book a good review, you are so flat-out back-assward blind-drunk cousin-wed WRONG, that...well, refer back to my very first post ever again. Ilana's the first person I've ever really known that got a book published. The phrase "gnawed to the bone by a million rabid rats of envy" springs to mind (doesn't precisely roll off the tongue, though). If there had been the tiniest of flaws, the most nearly imperceptible of errors, I would have percepted the hell out of it. In my tiny, shriveled, petty, unlovely heart of hearts, I wanted to hate this book.
Imagine my crankiness. For any book, it's great. For a first novel it's fucking brilliant, damn it. I didn't even have to skim it again to remember the whole story, which almost never happens. It's not the kind of book where you pore over sentences and pull out quotes. It's the kind of writing that creates a world so real that it sucks you right in and impresses itself on you so that you can see the mark of the bra strap on your shoulder when you stop reading. The characters are so real you can hear their voices as you read their remarks. I'm not Jewish, except reading this book? I was Jewish. And old, and seething with resentment and regret and self-admonishment and rage and yearning (yeah, all that wasn't as much of a stretch for me).

Sima is a wonderful character. She's strong but flawed, intelligent but deeply unhappy. Timna, the beautiful and exotic stranger who enters her life and changes it forever, is a real character in her own right as well as being a catalyst. There's something so quotidian and so beautiful about the bra shop, women congregating around something that hinges on the body, on vulnerability and nakedness and sexuality, on something that can be a basic garment of support or an accessory meant to reveal, to engender desire, which is a shimmering thread running through the novel.

I suspect I didn't write the review as soon as I read the book because I felt like I couldn't do it justice and Ilana might read it and unfriend me on Facebook or something. Either that or I just forgot. I hope it wasn't the whole bitter and corroded with envy thing. Nah. I forget stuff all the time. Last week I went to pick Eve up off the school bus and she wasn't there because she'd gone home with her friend Laura which I knew, but forgot. Happily, the police were pretty understanding.

Clearly publishing a stunningly fabulous work of literature wasn't good enough for Ilana, since now she's a midwife. Don't you hate her? Come on, you kind of hate her. Don't worry -- I have it on good authority that she underwent some wacky government experiment which means that now she never sleeps. That's not really true of course, but thinking it is like balm on my acidly envious soul.

Way to go, Ilana. You bitch.

Not Fair or Sporting in Any Way

I'm sad. And angry. And sincerely bewildered.

It doesn't take a genius to look around at the world and realize that wealth and resources, luxury and leisure, and something as basic and intangible as old-fashioned good luck, are distributed with a wild and baffling inequality over the face of the earth. Logically, a large number of geographical, geo-political and historical forces are in play, but often the image of a large, simple child scattering gold with an unsteady hand flashes into my mind. What is it that makes it so that people who already have to scrounge for the most basic necessities of life are also situated in areas where earthquakes and tsunamis occur with disproportionate frequency? I love my children, and I appreciate more than I can say the fact that I am able to provide them with nutrition, shelter, and multiple other things that are more luxuries than necessities, but all the money I give to World Vision or the Red Cross or Doctors Without Borders doesn't come close to redressing the balance.

Photo by fauxto_digit

And then people who live here, much closer to me, in this rich and fortunate area of the world. People who come looking for a better life and end up in a hand-to-mouth minimum-wage cycle with the added hardship of winter cold. People who are born into poverty and can't find a way to break out of it. Babies who are born into childhoods of abuse or neglect. And good people, like my friend Patti, who somehow, through no fault of their own, end up walking and working for most of their lives through a karmic shitstorm of unknown origin. The intermittent but unrelenting rain of crap has included: parents divorcing, leaving mother with four kids, including one severely disabled (but really cute and funny -- she called me a pisshead on more then one occasion) daughter: increased responsibility on Patti as the oldest child, through which she still managed to maintain high grades and high performance in a variety of sports: two of the most colicky babies I have ever seen EVER, one with a life-threatening peanut allergy: a rocking cool nurse aunt being killed by a careless transport driver: multiple structural and flooding problems with her house: bed bugs: and her awesome, full-of-life, more-physically-fit-than-the-average-Olympic-athlete husband Oli being levelled by peri-myocarditis, resulting in permanent heart damage, an inability to work for a time, and a likelihood that he will never be able to achieve his previous and desired level of physical activity.

Patti recently wrote about her mother (who I know and agree is all kinds of amazing) and said she hates being called a saint. I wouldn't call Patti a saint. I would call her a fucking marvel. It's not that she's not bitter -- who the hell wouldn't be bitter except the most lobotomized, martyr-wanna-be, professional victim asshat? It's that she's bitter in a suck-it-up-and-get-on-with-it way, a funny, foul-mouthed, bomb-the-bed-bugs and pound the shit out of the driveway with a cement-breaker-thingy, make a pot of soup and open a bottle of wine kind of way. A way that lets us joke about how bad her luck is and makes me wonder sometimes why she still lets me be her friend, because things are not even. I don't live what normal people would call a charmed life -- I'm not super-beautiful or super-rich or super-talented. But my babies were textbook babies, my basement has never flooded, my roof has never leaked, my parents are together and my husband is healthy (so far). And I'd like to say, sincerely, that I'll take the next one -- the next catastrophe, the next bout of malaria, the next structural collapse, the next blow out of left field -- so she can rest for a while. Of course it doesn't work that way, and if it did, it wouldn't be truly sincere, because everybody feels like their own life is hard enough, even when we know it's not, and I don't really want the shit to shift its focus from her to me, because I am cowardly and weak. I just want the shit to go away.

Patti emailed me today to tell me that a newspaper story in our city paper for the last few days about a man who was killed in a snowmobiling accident is actually about her husband's brother.

I am now mentally composing an open letter to a God that I may or may not believe in, that goes something like "Dear God who may or may not exist: Regarding my friend Patti -- may I ask what, in the name of all that is good and holy, is your FUCKING DAMAGE?"

A Vicious Campaign of Abuse and Neglect

Eve had a great birthday party on Saturday (more on that later). On Sunday (her actual birthday) the little girl from next door (who had come to the birthday party an hour early at noon and went home at 9:30 p.m. on Saturday) came over again and they played with birthday presents for hours, rejecting all offers of food and completely ignoring or shooing away all the adults in their general vicinity. Then, around eight o'clock, Eve came into the family room, looked at Matt and said reproachfully, "you know Daddy, I think only three people said happy birthday to me today. And none of them were you."

Angus went to a 'At Home on My Own' course on Saturday (to spare him the shrieky giggly joy of thirteen little girls painting aprons and baking monkey bread). They taught him a lot of logical, fairly obvious things that we probably had already told him, but somehow learning them in a classroom makes them seem more official. He came home with a certificate that Matt says he's pretty sure is 'legal permission to abandon our kid'. Angus's favourite thing was a list of things it said to answer yes or no to, such as "if you have a house key, you should keep it out in the open," "If you lose your house key you should make sure to tell everyone that it's lost", and "you should print your address on your house key in case you forget it". Angus was lunging around yelling "hey everyone, I lost my house key -- if you find it, make sure to go break into my house, the address is right on it!".

When Angus got home, he took one look at the remaining little girls and decided to retreat to my Mom and Dad's house for a sleepover. To give you a sense of how stringent the rules are at my Mom and Dad's house are, once I asked him if he wanted me to pack any toys or games as he was headed over there and he said, "Nah, I'm just gonna watch TV and eat stuff." When Matt went to pick him up, my Mom asked if he ever eats dinner when he comes home from her place. Matt said yes, he eats a full dinner. My Mom said 'well, the way he eats here, you'd think you never feed him', and Angus said 'that's right, they don't!' Matt made a disbelieving face at him, and Angus retorted, 'all you ever feed me is breakfast, lunch and dinner!'

I don't know how we've managed not to have them removed from our care. Such as it is.

Dream a (Weird) Little Dream

I'm currently up to my ass in birthday-party prep, so I'll just share Eve's dream from last night. She's been having a lot of nightmares lately, which often makes her afraid to go to sleep, and also lands her quite often in my bed at four a.m., so the fact that she had a funny dream was welcome news:

"First I dreamed that I was in a world made of Lego, and I was made of Lego too! Then I dreamed that I was back in Madame Waterfall's class and... this is embarrassing and I don't want to say it... but I will because it's so funny...(whispering) we were studying on butts! (pause for long, breathless belly-laugh). And Madame Waterfall said there's never been anyone in the world who had a butt that was bigger than them. And then we went on a field trip -- to China!!! And we saw someone whose butt was bigger than them! And Madame Waterfall said 'I guess I stand corrected'."

Sleep on that, friends.

I'm SO sorry, Girl who was doing my pedicure!

Photo by Tambako the Jaguar

There are certain things I've always been fastidious about. Some would say borderline obsessive-compulsive, and they wouldn't necessarily be wrong, but I prefer to think of it as being fastidious. Actually I don't love the word fastidious. Actually the more I type it and think it, the more I dislike it. The t and the d are too close together, and there's something unseemly about those two i's. So let's call it... meticulous? ANYWAY... I've always washed my face several times a day, especially when I'm wearing glasses instead of contacts, because I hate feeling like my face is oily and my glasses are sliding down my nose. I take a shower in the morning and usually a quick one at night, sometimes to regulate my wonky body temperature before going to bed, sometimes just to rinse off the day. When I had Angus and was exhausted and insane for the first few weeks, I thought that might break the bedtime shower habit. It didn't. Sometimes I even got up and combed my hair and brushed my teeth before breastfeeding at 2 a.m. And 3 a.m. And 5:30 a.m. Yeah, okay, even I can see that that doesn't so much put me in the non-crazy column. The point is, even though I have two kids and no memory now, even though I'm often depressed and lacking in drive and unlacking in ass, I generally took enough time to make sure I still looked presentable. True, this may have taken the form of looking in every mirror in every room I passed just to ascertain that my chin was too fat and my eyebrows were too thick and my forehead was somehow just too THERE, or taking down and putting up my hair six times, sitting on the floor crying and then wondering where the last forty-six minutes went and why my scalp was a little warm, but everybody defines 'taking pride in your appearance' differently, okay?

Over the past few weeks, though, something weird has been happening. I run errands, pick Eve up from school, take her home, wait for Angus to show up and get homework and dinner started. Normally I would have to wash my face, change my clothes and maybe even shower again. Now sometimes I don't get back to my mirror until bedtime. Sometimes I look okay. Sometimes I look bad. Whatever.

And then today, I was getting a pedicure with my friend Pam and I rolled up my pant legs and looked down and almost died of embarrassment.......... the hair on my legs was like FOUR INCHES LONG!!!!! And I don't think I've ever gone more than a day or two without shaving my legs. When girls in my residence would joke about only shaving once a week or not shaving until exams were over or even just not shaving as a matter of principle I would smile insincerely and wonder what on EARTH was WRONG with them (hey, I have principles. I just prefer them not to snag on my tights). And now even when I concentrate, I... I... I can't remember the last time I shaved my legs. (whimper)

I honestly don't know if I should be glad that I'm getting less obsessive, or sad that, clearly, I've finally decided to just let myself go.

On the bright side, the other afternoon I dropped in on Pam and she had jam in her hair.

(Sorry Pammy, if I'm going down, I'm takin' everyone I can with me!)

Yes, I do get rather passionate about my tinned fruit

I've totally run dry. Empty. Echoing, with a little layer of dust in the bottom. I feel like I'm doing everything half-assed this week, with the one bright spot being that, for the most part, I'm at least still trying to do it. I dragged myself to the gym Monday and today. Today, amusingly enough, almost everybody I saw come into the gym looked half asleep. My friend Pam was on the treadmill next to me, in a similar state of brain-lock, and at one point she tried to say 'if you live in an apartment' but instead she said 'if you live in a hot tub', which resulted in twin bouts of hysterical laughter that earned us a few dirty looks and almost sent us flying off our treadmills.

Photo by Andrew Sardone

Monday after working out I went down to get groceries. The plan was to work out, get what I needed for meals for the week and for Eve's birthday party on Saturday, go home and shower and go into the school library for the afternoon. And I needed canned peaches. Do you think I could find canned peaches? I walked up and down every aisle, then I looked at all the signs hanging from the ceiling. I saw canned vegetables. Canned fish. Snack fruit, but no canned fruit. I asked one grocery store employee. She sent me to the snack fruit aisle. There was no canned fruit. I asked another one. She sent me to the canned vegetable aisle. Canned peas and asparagus (shudder), but no canned fruit. Finally someone looked at the floor plan and sent me to aisle 6. The sign hanging above aisle 6 listed canned fish, crackers and bread sticks. Crackers AND bread sticks. They couldn't forego listing bread sticks in order to list canned fruit?

This extra ten to fifteen minutes of increasingly frustrating and futile canned-peach-seeking totally pushed me over the line from Monday morning foggy-but-functioning to Monday morning ready-to-stuff-myself-in-a-corner-and-sing-songs-from-Moulin-Rouge-in-a-sad-little-voice-ing. And the thing about the library is that Bonnie's out for surgery and it was a substitute, and Bonnie said go ahead and come in still, but really, why would I go put away books for someone who's getting paid to be there for two weeks and that's practically all she has to do? And all the stuff I had to do for Eve's party was spinning around in my head because I'm wacky that way, and I still had to go into Eve's classroom to do the math bags before the library and...

then it occurred to me. I'm a volunteer.

Sometimes I'm really good at missing the obvious. At least now I know where Loblaws keeps the freaking canned peaches.

Yeah, this post? Half-assed, like everything else this week. If you lived in a hot tub, you'd get it.