Okay, as an experiment it lacks a certain grandeur...

A few days ago I was at Farm Boy and they had a bunch of maple smoked salmon, which I love, so I picked up a package even though it didn't fit anywhere on the menu for the next few days, and I try not to buy things that don't have an immediate use, so they don't go bad and get wasted. I stuck it in the refrigerator. A couple of days later I was getting something out of the fridge and I happened to glance at the package and saw, in teeny-tiny letters, the admonition to "keep frozen".

Agh!

I looked at it. It was vacuum-sealed! I was under the impression that you could vacuum-seal things for hundreds of years and open them after nuclear winter had passed and they would be fresh as a veritable daisy. It must still be good. It didn't look bad. I couldn't quite bring myself to crack it open, though. Rotten fish smell, plus the admission that I had bought something without having a clear idea of when and with what nutritious side dish it was going to be served.... the horror! the horror!

So I can't bring myself to open it, and I can't bring myself to throw it out. There it sits, neither definitively good nor bad.

photo credit
Creative Commons License

Schrodinger's Salmon is alive and well (or not) and living (or being dead)

 in my refrigerator.

Yep -- slow news day.

How do you run a marathon without stopping to pee?

photo credit
Creative Commons License

I often don't feel like I fit in. Okay, I almost never feel like I fit in. I've heard that this is not uncommon, so possibly if I got together with all the people who don't feel like they fit in, I'd fit in with them, but I suspect not. When I was little I was a weird kid who read too much. The one or two times my mother tried sending me to summer camp were not pretty. Usually she would pick one that my sister was the right age for, so I was a little too old, too uncoordinated for sports and too shy for games. On the upside, the counsellors felt comfortable cursing around me since I was the oldest camper. Eventually my mother let me stay home and read.

High school wasn't wretched, but it wasn't great. I was sort of on the fringe of the second-tier popular people, which meant the in-crowd sort of treated us like mascots or pets (upon reflection, total outcast might have been preferable). University was great, actually -- suddenly being a bit flaky and reading a lot was completely acceptable. Near the end of undergrad was when my brain chemicals started really not working and playing well with each other, though, and grad school was a lot of really great people and interesting course work mixed with periods of intense self-loathing and the conviction that everyone everywhere was staring at me with pity and/or disgust. There was also a few months of a staph infection that ate up my face, when people were, in actual fact, staring at me with pity and/or disgust, so that didn't help.

All this is by awkward and lengthy way of saying that I shouldn't be surprised that I seem to be the only one I know that hasn't been able to experience a glorious, breakthrough, middle-aged running epiphany.

Seriously. I thought running had been put back in its proper place -- you know, for scrawny intense fanatics, or for when something's chasing you. Suddenly my best friend, my neighbour, half my book club, it's all stopwatches and microfibres and 10 ks -- what the hell? I went from nice companionable side-by-side treadmill walks with my friend, discussing weighty world affairs while watching Entertainment Tonight to walking in resentful silence while ducking flying sweat drops from her side while she trained for the Run For Something-or-other. Hmmph. So after numerous testimonials -- "It's like discovering a whole new facet of yourself"; "I never thought I could do it and now I can't live without it!"; "I've found that when I run fast, my children can't catch me" -- I thought heck, might as well see what all the fuss is about.

It's a short, boring story. I did like it much more than I expected to (and not just because of the obvious favourable ratio of ass-lard burning to time spent exercising). Then my knee got buggered and it became an experience slightly akin to ramming a rusty spike up my shinbone into my kneecap repeatedly. My husband stuck ice packs on me and sent me back out (I guess figuring I should try to shrink my ass a bit more before possibly being crippled for life). The guy at the Running Room offered this incisive assessment of the situation: "yeah, that's probably not good".

creative commons license

I rested and gave it a couple more tries. Same thing. So I'm back to lifting my little weights, walking (which feels really slow now), exercise biking and resisting the urge to stick out my foot whenever someone runs by. Not that I'm bitter.

More incoherent musings

So is it more lame that

a) my husband gave me an ergonomic snow scoop for Valentine's                                photo credit

 Day
OR

b) I freakin' LOVE it?

I have a faint suspicion that my book addiction may have been transmitted to my son -- something about the way his pupils burst into flame as he grabbed my shirt, lifted me a foot off the floor and snarled "we are going to Chapters to get volume two of Diary of a Wimpy Kid RIGHT NOW!"

I feel fat today. I also feel stupid for worrying about being fat -- it's the gift that keeps on giving. I keep wondering when and where all this stupidity got started. Can you imagine that first cavewoman turning to her husband and saying "Hey Ug, does this tiger skin make my ass look big?"

We walked into First Choice at that golden moment today -- it was empty, and right after my kids' butts hit the haircutting chairs a bunch of people walked in (I did manage not to thumb my nose at them and go nah-nah-nah. I'm all class). After the nice Asian man finished cutting her bangs and flipped them under with the brush, Eve looked in the mirror and said in tones of the greatest disgust, "oh great! I look like my MOTHER again!"

So there you have it. I've turned my son into a drooling book maniac, I'm fat and uninspired and I have bad bangs. But I have a kickass snow shovel.

Also, I returned some overdue library books!

photo credit
I've been feeling a bit constrained by the daily routine lately, so we used this long week-end to shake things up a bit. A very little bit. Friday I took Angus to pick up his first pair of glasses which are so freaking adorable I just want to squish him every time I see them, which is fine with him because he agrees that he looks smashing. Then I took the kids to see Coraline (not too taxing, but I did have to brush my hair and wear a bra, which is how I measure degree of difficulty for most tasks). Then we let Angus sleep over at his friend Jon's house and skip hockey at 6:30 on Saturday morning (well, I did, and accepted the attendant fall-out). Saturday we went out to Smiths Falls to visit the great-grandparents for Valentine's Day and Eve's and Great-Nana's birthdays, and there was much making of merriment and Wii-playing by all ages and little pink cupcakes and musing over the in-laws that drink and the in-laws that don't (or worse, drink only one -- one! It's the loneliest number!) and discussion of politics and bank executives (it was a veritable inter-generational think tank. With scotch).
Sunday we moved crap from one floor to another for a few hours and called it cleaning. Then we went to crash our friends' kid's birthday party with some tequila. This resulted in the mind-blowing synchronicity of some guy in New Brunswick who rents cottages calling at ten o'clock at night and finding the very four families he needed to talk to all drunk in the same kitchen. I had a Finnish friend who once finished off a night of vodka-drinking by booking a ticket on the Trans-Siberian Railway, so this wasn't quite that, but still...

photo credit

Yesterday we packed up our kids and my parents and went Winterluding - ice sculptures, skating, beaver tails, twinkly lights, non-residents tilting madly and bravely all over the canal. On the way home Angus asked if there was anywhere closer to home where we could get Beaver Tails. My Mom got mad at my Dad for not dressing warm enough. Eve loved the Cinderella's carriage out of ice, but thought we didn't bring enough food and the hot chocolate was too hot. The whole experience renewed my desire to stay at the ice hotel, although        unfortunately it would have to be with someone else's husband...

Today I'm dying to get back to my boring week-day routine. Things have been shaken just enough. The kids hardly got to watch ANY tv for four whole days! One night I was too drunk to read before bed! Time to take the insanity down a notch.
And no, I'm not wearing a bra.

He also drinks scotch very ably.

Eve just informed me that she measured herself at school and she's nine feet tall. At least I won't need the stool to reach stuff on the top shelf any more. She has also determined that the number one thing her father is best at is farting, and the number two thing is sleeping. Respect and unconditional love -- nothing like it.
As we were leaving for the movie theatre yesterday, I told the kids to grab their DSes since we were going to go early because it was a PD day and I thought it might be crowded (it wasn't). Angus said "do you want me to bring Brain Age for you?". I said "Why? Do I seem particularly stupid lately?" and he said, "well, you haven't been playing it much lately. Just saying." Humph.
I've discovered something quite useful. When Matt tells me he has to go away again (next week, for example), if I mope and list all the things that I have to do and all the reasons everything's going to be SO much more complicated now, and that the hockey practice is at 6:30 a.m. and I'll have to make Angus come to ballet etc, he feels kind of bad. On the other hand, if I say "that's okay, better that than getting laid off" and smile and suck it up, then he feels REALLY bad. Like, really-good-present, week-end-away-with-the-girls bad.
I'm thinking this will prove highly useful.
We just got back from my husband's grandparents' place, where we go in February to celebrate Eve's and Nana's birthdays, which are eight days apart. Eve was born the week before Nana turned eighty, so we gave Eve Nana's name (Pauline) as a middle name. This made her very, very happy and they've always been very close, and it's very cool having pictures of my six-year-old blowing out birthday candles with her eighty-six-year-old great-grandmother, and if you ask Eve her name she says "Evie Puh-LEEN Adams". Also, we always know how old Nana is, because it's Eve plus eighty. 
So that's good.

Random Thoughts Plus Two Book Reviews: Real Life and Brick Lane

Valentine's Day. The higher grades were allowed to bring change and buy Hershey's kisses a few days ago. They addressed them however they wanted, and then they were delivered today. Angus gave all his to all his female teachers, past and present (that's my boy). Then he came home today and said "some sixth-grade guy named Dawson sent me a Hershey's kiss. I wonder why." ...?
Apparently a lot of the local schools are going to have different start and end times next year for some reason (something to do with the buses, or saving money, or saving money on the buses). Considering the furor that was generated earlier this year when our school had to close one afternoon senior kindergarten class and move fifteen students to the morning, I'm anticipating a backlash of epic proportions. Personally, I'm girding my loins for an exhausting round of hiding my head in the sand, missing all the public meetings, waiting until it's a done deal and then complaining loudly and bitterly. It's a strategy that's served me well in the past. I imagine it will be particularly useful when my kids start dating.
I need a reset book. My bedside pile could probably take me out with an injury at this point, and nothing's really grabbing me. I'm reading one mystery that's kind of flat, two science fiction books by M.John Harrison that are making me feel slow and obtuse, Claire's Head by Catherine Bush which, even though I loved her last book, is not really engaging me. Clearly it's them, not me, right? But every now and then, I start reading a book and really like it, and then stop reading it. It's not like I make a conscious decision, I just suddenly look up seven books later and realize I put that one down and never finished it. I think maybe it's so I'll have something when I need to escape from this weird, uncomfortable, not-fitting feeling. That's what I'm going with, anyway. I'll see if it works.
You know what would be really refreshing? If someone in a tv show experienced a traumatic event and then afterwards when someone asked how they were they said "how the hell do you think? I'm totally f***ed up. Don't expect me to do my job or be any kind of a husband or anything for the next six to twelve weeks. I probably really need some kind of intensive counselling, man." Wouldn't that be great? I think there should be a blanket policy that when anyone in that situation starts with that "I'm fine" bullshit they should be cold-cocked, thrown into a panel van and taken away for a nice long rest.
Real Life
by Sharon Butala
I grabbed this off the shelf in the library on a whim, because I'd been meaning to read her for a while. She always comes across as quite prickly and unlikeable in any interview I've ever heard her in, but I've heard she writes passionately about nature and western Canada. These were all slice-of-life stories about women who mostly inhabit rural areas (maybe all of them do, but I'm not getting paid for this so I'm not going to check). They're not bad, but none of them really moved me. There's one where an artist meets a former lover or husband at her exhibition and they reminisce about another couple with whom they swapped partners, and how this eventually resulted in the other woman killing herself. A little melodramatic, as if deep dark secrets are necessary to give added depth to memory. In another story, a woman with an autistic son is living apart from her husband because he wants the boy to be put in an institution. She's a teacher, and takes on a night class which is taught in a monastery, where she's strongly affected by the serenity and quiet of the monastic lifestyle. Okay, but a little obvious and it doesn't go any further than that. One features a woman in a farm community who suspects a young wife and mother is being abused by her husband and tries to help. The one I probably liked the most was about a woman teaching in an isolated community where most of the population attends a local church. The pastor informs the congregation that the world will end next Saturday at six o'clock, and the teacher is faced with trying to comfort terrified children without offending their devout parents. Her backstory is that her husband died and she came to this town to get away from everything in her old life, but strange phone calls make her think that someone from that life is trying to reconnect with her.

I don't know if these weren't fabulous stories, or they were fabulous stories that I just didn't love. I'm having a reader response crisis. It seemed to me that she was trying very hard not to give to much away, to be spare and illuminate by that spareness. This may have misfired slightly.

Brick Lane
by Monica Ali
I had heard of this book but not read it, and I took it out with a few others for my Mom when she asked me to pick out some books for her. When she gave it back to me I decided to read a few pages before bed to see if I wanted to read it before returning it. I ended up reading over half of it in a drug-like haze and staying up way too late. It's about a young Bangladeshi woman who comes to London in an arranged marriage to a much older man. It's the story of a life, and it does make you think a lot about the immigrant experience but chiefly it's the characters that made it so irresistible for me. Nazneen, the woman, is so determined to be a dutiful and devout wife and mother, but naturally the events of her life change her beyond what she thought possible. The description of her claustrophobic days in the apartment of the housing estate when she first arrives are so effective I almost felt physically uncomfortable. Chanu, her husband, is not cruel or malicious, but he is a dreamer with an inflated opinion of his own intelligence and prospects; again, the descriptions of him eating messily while holding forth about English literature or his library scheme, usually massaging his stomach, are viscerally discomfiting. Then there is Karim, a young Bangladeshi man who fancies himself an activist and becomes Nazneen's lover, although there are a great many similarities between him and Chanu. Nazneen's friends, the ones who remain traditional and those who become westernized, are also unforgettable characters. I always think real writing talent means being able to create an utterly believable world, where readers feel like they're witnessing real lives of people they care about. I would say that Monica Ali has real writing talent.

I'm probably just under the Polly Pocket Super Mall

I'm feeling a little lost in my life. Sometimes I feel like I know exactly who I am and what I'm doing (whether or not I feel like I'm doing it well is another story). Sometimes I wake up feeling like I've been partially erased during the night. My outlines are all blurry. These are the times when I think hey! I need to train for a marathon! or hey! I need to buy a two-hundred-dollar glass bead making kit (and then hide it under the spare bed for the next five years) or hey! I need to get a job! And I run off in seven different directions as if complicating the hell out of everything is the answer, when in reality I should just clean out my laundry room or give away the eighty percent of Angus's closet that he hasn't worn for three years or play my poor neglected piano which gets even less action than my husband.
And the stuff. What's with all the stuff? I don't think of myself as particularly materialistic. Our cars are old and crappy, our couch cushions have holes in them that are almost the exact size and shape of my kids' butts, and I don't enjoy shopping. So where the hell does all this crap come from? Did somebody forget to tell me that babies are born with little stuff-generating kits? Because I blame the children, obviously. Okay, I have a lot of books, but those fall under the heading of basic necessities, right? Don't you find that in houses with no books the air is just a little thinner? (Seriously? Is it just me?) I'm not the one that requires that glitter glue, pipe cleaners and seven different colours of yarn be available at a moment's notice. That avalanche of stuffed animals I started yesterday while cleaning up for the cleaning lady -- not mine. And the bins of fake musical instruments, random puzzle pieces, wind-up creatures that don't exist in nature, tiny plastic darts?
Okay, I'm being unfair. I have a serious problem with not being able to throw things out. It was bad before I had kids -- now it borders on the pathological. I try really hard; I go up to their rooms with garbage bags and roll up my sleeves and turn on loud, angry music and get ready to be ruthless. Then it all goes horribly wrong. I can't remember the dates of any important wars, I can never remember when Bernini was born, I don't think I can name a single cabinet minister, but I remember when every ball, yellow chicken and scrap of paper was given to my children, and what they looked like playing with it, and I feel like it shreds my soul to get rid of any of it. Also, I always feel like if I get rid of any of those odd-shaped pieces of plastic that the very next day one of the kids will go "where did that silver octagonal widget that is the very key to making my very favourite car/princess chariot/robot work properly go?" (like I can't lie to my kids convincingly? Cripes, we just convinced them last night that 'you put your weed in there' was a gardening reference).
And I buy them too much stuff. Not everything they see or everything they ask for, but when I see something I know they'll love and it's not too expensive I often buy it and put it away for a special occasion, like when Matt's away and they've been really good, or ... Tuesday. I start buying stuff for Christmas in July and by December I have so much stuff that I can't actually give it all to them and still show my face in public, so I give it to Toy Mountain, or save it until they're three years older than the maximum recommended age for whatever it is. I try to keep reminding myself and them that just because something is new doesn't mean it's any better than what you already have, and sooner or later it will be old and boring too (once, after this type of speech, we left Mrs. Tiggy Winkles and Angus, who was four, said "I understand what you're saying, but it's just that all that stuff looked excited"). They don't whine and throw tantrums when I say we're not getting something, and they're always very sweet and grateful when we give them stuff; this should NOT make me want to give them even more stuff, right? They're both sweet, compassionate, creative kids, and I'm just going to stifle that if I keep adding to the commercial, plastic, made-in-China clutter.
My chief theory is that there are just too many damned shopping hours. As a rule, if you don't see stuff, you don't want it. Now that we can go shopping at night and on Sundays, it's too easy to do it recreationally, whether you actually need anything or not. Add that to the fact that you can buy Bratz dolls and little pets with absurdly large eyes at Loblaws, and clearly we're all overmatched. Add that to the fact that I'm a moronically emotional pack-rat, and clearly I'm screwed.
Yes. This must stop. Sentimentality is bunk. I'm suffocating
under all this stuff. Or maybe it's just that I need more books...