Whining: A Way of Life

Whining is a very important part of my general existence. If I couldn't complain about every little thing in my life that goes wrong, I don't know what I'd do. I might take all that extra time on my hands and invent something truly awful, like a line of soaps that smelled like your favourite dinner. Surely there is a niche market for soaps that smell like garlic butter or turkey gravy, but I don't know if I want to be associated with those people.

The long and short of it is, complaining is important to me--important to the point that I will actually rearrange my daily schedule in order to fit complaining in. For instance, this morning, the first thing I thought of when I woke up was my need to complain to someone about what an awful sleep I'd had. It was actually the reason I got up; I could have slept in for a good hour more, but I was afraid that my parents would have left by then, and there's no satisfaction in complaining to the cats. I decided that I had enough time to brush my teeth before going to complain, but not enough time to make my bed. This caused me a twinge of anguish, because I generally can't leave my room happily unless my bed has been made. But today, I had been woken up at 4 o'clock in the morning by a friend who had gotten her Amys mixed up, and people needed to know about this*.

I went downstairs. The parents were both still in the dining room. Excellent. I had time to make myself breakfast, but I would have to go for cold cereal; making toast was too much of an involved process, and Mum and Dad could leave at any minute. Hurriedly I filled my cereal bowl, went back into the dining room, and sat down. I waited for a lull in the conversation. Then I began to complain. I had even planned an opening hook--"Julia got her Amys mixed up last night"--to trick my parents into thinking this was the beginning of an interesting story, instead of just a whining session.

Unfortunately, I had picked the wrong generation of people to complain to. One of the crucial differences between my parents' generation and my own is the likelihood that their cellphones will be on at any point in time. The only time when it's okay for a member of the Millenial generation to have his or her cellphone turned off is if they are at work. If he/she is sleeping, eating, showering, at a funeral, getting married, making passionate love to someone, or is otherwise busy, they probably have their phone on silent. Ergo, of course my cellphone would be on at 4am, and, unfortunately, since the ringer is automatically on Loud when it's plugged in to charge, the damned thing rang and woke me up.

I don't think Generation X has this problem, though. At least, Dad doesn't. After my whining was ended, he informed me that I should have just turned my cellphone off, and he had very little sympathy for me. Damn. I should have played up the "i'm still sick" angle of things. I should have explained that I had to leave my phone on because I was coughing so badly I was afraid I would have to call an ambulance to come pick me up, and I should have added that Julia woke me up a mere 2 hours before I finally managed to fall asleep after a long battle with a frustratingly plugged up nose. At least half of that explanation would be true. I hadn't fully prepared myself before commencing the complaining! I had complaint-blocked myself.

Thoroughly unsatisfied, I retreated my room, to write a blog post complaining about my failed attempt at complaining.


*I was THEN awoken again at 9 am by someone who wanted to discuss the sexual practices of elephants with me, but I couldn't whine about that because 9 is a perfectly reasonable time to text someone, and also I had started that conversation in the first place.

A new sort of bedroom makeover

Today, I move back to my old house. I'm not sure how I feel about this.

It's not that I really mind moving back with my parents*. For some inexplicable reason, I am included in the very small minority of 20-somethings who still get along fairly well with their parents. And while it cuts me to the quick to have to live in a house for free when I could instead live in a poorly ventilated room somewhere in the neighbourhood for $400/month, I can't complain about it too much. I don't even really dread returning to a house occupied by two of the largest, hairiest, smelliest cats known to man; as it is, I've spent the last few days living in a cloud of sparkles, so living in a cloud of cat hair won't be that different.

It's my bedroom itself that I'm avoiding. My bedroom and I have been at odds for many years. I vaguely remember a time when we managed to fit not only me but my sister as well into this postage-stamp-sized room (with a minimal amount of bruising). Either the amount of random crap I have to fit into the room has grown exponentially over the years, or the fact that I'm 2 and a half feet taller now is causing more problems to my general space requirement than I had at first thought. One would think that a 5 and a half foot woman could occupy the same amount of space as two 3-foot tall girls would be able to fill. In fact, said woman should have more room than two small girls would. Not so. As the years rolled on, I got larger, the room got smaller, and the room and I stopped agreeing with eachother on most issues.

Every few months, I do something new to it. I rearrange the furniture, buy a new mattress, paint the walls, glue potato chip bags to the ceiling, copy out a soliloquy from Hamlet in marker behind the closet. None of these things have managed to make the room larger, however.

Not only have I failed in making the room large enough to fit me, I've actually succeeded in making it smaller. For some reason, adding an excessively tall closet, a desk, and a nightstand to the mix have done nothing to increase the amount of space I have (even if I do shove half my clothes under the bed now). These editions were part of a project I undertook last year, when I was under the misguided impression that it wouldn't matter if nothing in my room fit, if only most of the things would at least match.

Now I will return to my room with a purple desk chair I nabbed from an office that was being renovated; a coffee maker (also free) that I was very excited about and used to an unhealthy degree for at least 2 weeks; a blender that, being free, I couldn't help but take, even if I knew that I only had a month left living on my own and then I would move back in with my parents and their own blender (which is, ironically, the same model, and is also missing the lid stopper, just like this one)**. I simply won't be able to fit in the place any more.

Which is why I have begun to plan out the hostile takeover of my brother's room. My brother, as I said, occupies the east half of the top floor of our house. I occupy only a quarter of the top floor, leaving another quarter of room for the sewing room (the bathroom, being the size of a closet, takes up negligible space). Now, I unfortunately gave away my fully-functioning, real live sword to my brother several years ago, leaving me virtually weaponless. Although Ben took that sword and traded it to a fellow swordsman in exchange for the return of his signature pirate hat, that was by no means his only weapon of defense. Walking into Ben's room is like walking into an armory. His collection of throwing knives, short swords, halbards, archery supplies, and ornamental daggers is as dazzling as it is baffling (considering that he is a 20-year-old Mennonite boy living in a residential area of a frigid Canadian city, and not a young Earl preparing for a civil war in 12th-century England). In comparison, my biggest weapon would be the 2 foot long ornamental walking stick that spends most of its time leaning in one corner or the other of my room. No, I won't be able to take him by force.

It will have to be a sneak attack. The key to the plan is Cleaning Days.
On Cleaning Days, willing participants rove around our house picking up the out-of-place piles of unwilling participants' belongings and shoving these belongings into the unwilling participants' rooms. The unwilling participant generally ignores the pile of stuff that has been placed in the middle of his or her floor until it is tall enough to trip over (or if there is something useful sticking out of it), at which point the pile is either shoved to the side, or dismantled and spread out over a number of shelves, desks, and chairs in the bedroom.

On every cleaning day, I shall begin placing Ben's belongings in my room, creating a pile of my own belongings in the middle of Ben's bedroom floor. By the time Ben realizes what I am doing, all of his most important possessions will be in my bedroom; all of mine will be in his, and then it's just a matter of luring him out and shutting the door on him, and the room will be mine. And luckily, since he never ventures onto the hallowed pages of this blog, he will be taken completely by surprise.



*the jury is out on whether my parents really mind me moving back in with them, of course. However, as long as my incredibly useful younger brother continues to carry out virtual military onslaughts from the top East bedroom, and continues to take up the garage, back street, front street, and neighbours' garage with his many cars, I feel only minimally guilty about continuing to live with them. After all, if they must live with one grown-up offspring of theirs, surely living with two of us can't make much difference.

Sidewalk Rage: The Gateway Rage

First, I would like to explain the etiquette of law-breaking. If you're going to break the law, be as polite as possible while doing it. For instance, if you're going to ride your adult-sized bicycle on the sidewalk, bear in mind that this is highly illegal, and that any passing cop could ticket you for it. Be polite and allow the pedestrians (the rightful owners of the sidewalk) to have the right-of-way.

If you are cycling down a sidewalk highly frequented by pedestrians, onto which many sweaty, caffeine-high students often appear unexpectedly from any number of doors branching off from the University gym and cafe next door, don't assume that the pedestrians are going to respect your misguided assumption that this sidewalk doubles as the superway for your highly impractical non-winterized single-speed roadbike with idiotically smooth tires the size of my pinky-finger. You won't survive.

I was minding my own business, wandering down the sidewalk, struggling to support the weight of the backpack that was slung impractically (BUT PERFECTLY LEGALLY!) over one shoulder when I was struck full-force on the elbow by an overzealous cyclist. This cyclist then politely asked me to "choose one side of the sidewalk or the other, you fucker"*. I had just consumed an impractically large (BUT PERFECTLY LEGAL) mocha latté. Tensions were high. So I shouted back -- incredibly impolitely (BUT PERFECTLY LEGALLY) -- "get off the sidewalk, you fucker!" I then rolled up my sleeves and prepared to engage in fisticuffs (which may or may not have been legal). Unsurprisingly this cowardly law-breaker chose to continue slip-sliding down the snowy sidewalk while shouting obscenities and erroneous statements such as "I can ******* drive wherever I ******* want you stupid **** ****! ****!!!" Then, he fell over into a snowdrift*.

Moral of this story: don't ride on the sidewalk. You'll end up in a snowdrift. Also I'll hate you forever.

*I might add that I know (from illegal but INCREDIBLY POLITE) experience that the sidewalk is nowhere for a bike to be in the winter. Unlike roads, sidewalks are frequently unplowed, unsalted, and unsanded, not to mention populated with excessive amounts of unpredictable pedestrians going at much slower rates than the average cyclist wishes to travel at anyway. On the road, there's always the danger of getting hit by a car but on the road cars are also watching out for cyclists (hopefully) because they're expected to be there (supposedly) whereas cars are not watching out for cyclists crossing at stop signs and are actually more likely to run them over if they appear out of nowhere crossing from one sidewalk to the other. Also, I've watched a cop sit in an alleyway and hand out tickets to every sidewalk cyclist like a PETA supporter handing out pictures of mutilated factory farm pigs to unsuspecting passersby. Just don't do it.

Subject: Kali. Species: Cat (successfully verified--finally)

There are three animals that live in this house: two humans, and a small, furry creature that has seven sets of claws and meows a lot. At first glance, I thought Kali was a cat. But soon my conviction gave way to doubt. She didn't behave like any cat I had met before. I could sit in her favourite chair for hours and she wouldn't
a) sit on my lap, thus sharing the chair with me
b) stand on my lap with her head and/or tail in my face, thus encouraging me to vacate the premises
c) sit on the back of the chair with her claws in my hair until I left the room.
Similarly, if I was sitting at the table with a pile of papers spread out around me, she wouldn't come and sit on the most crucial document that I was reading.
If I was wearing a white shirt, she wouldn't immediately come up to me and demand to be picked up in order to leave a cloud of black and tan cat hairs clinging to my new outfit.
She didn't insist on jumping on the counters, table, and any other place that was cat-forbidden.
While she did enjoy lying on my white duvet cover, she somehow managed to do this without shedding all over it*.
She didn't even scratch the furniture.
Other than wandering around and meowing incessantly, she wasn't very cat-like at all.

All this changed when DB (human roommate) brought out The Chair.
The Chair used to be in DB's room. It is of a beautiful puke-coloured fabric covered in vaguely floral designs in brown, green, and gold, of a style popularized in the Home Decor Dark Ages of the 1970's. It is so attractive that DB insists on keeping it covered in a sheet of brown cloth at all times.

For some reason, this chair brings out the cat in Kali. She cannot resist sneaking up behind the chair and raking it with her claws. I have a theory that if anyone ever felt inclined to sit on the chair, Kali would sit on this person's lap, face, and head all at the same time--this is how cattish Kali is around the chair.

I thought that Kali's feline tendencies began and ended with the chair. Not so. Apparently the chair was just the beginning. The chair was inspiration. The chair infected Kali like a disease. Which is why, today, I came into my room to find this once unfeline cat lazing on my white comforter in a cloud of dark cat hair, spread out in such a manner so as to cover my laptop, my binder, and my cellphone simultaneously, purring with that self-satisfied catlike rapture that only comes from knowing one has successfully made onesself a complete and utter nuisance. Kali is now officially a cat.



*As most people know, cats have such precise control over their individual hair follicles that they can choose exactly how many hairs to release and from which body part at what time. For example, if there is a black cat lying on a black-and-white striped shirt, the cat will only shed from parts of his body that are touching the white stripes of the shirt.

Failures in Communication

English 4000-Level Courses, the website said. Below it was a list of four courses. ENGL 4102: Topics in Young People’s Texts and Cultures—Ecocritical and Zoocritical Approaches.
ENGL 4103: Topics in Young People’s Texts and Cultures—The Child and the City

The reluctant cab driver and some basic fraud

When I slung on my impractically thin fall jacket and dashed down the street to Safeway in pursuit of some starchy supper, I had no idea I was about to be embroiled in a complex interweaving of reluctant cab drivers and questionable-looking would-be passengers.

It began when I was halfway through the Safeway doors. A very cheerful man with a very thick Jamaican accent was laboriously rolling his wheelchair out the exit doors as I was coming in. He yelled across to me to go out and hold his cab for him. I ran outside, to find that his cab already had someone in it. The cab-driver drove off. I turned around to see the man (Leonard) rolling down the slope of the Safeway parking lot, thanks to someone who had given him a slightly too helpful push. I ran out, caught him, and rolled him to the next available cab.

My ability to understand English spoken in accents other than my own is embarrassingly low. I could not understand Leonard, and apparently neither could the cab driver. While the cab driver was trying to understand where Leonard was trying to go, a very drunk woman staggered up to the driver's window and began speaking loudly in a voice that was even more difficult to understand than Leonard's. The driver, now accosted by two apparently unintelligible passengers, rolled up his window and waited for the next able-bodied, sober person who needed a lift home.

We all went back in to Safeway. By now I had begun to get the gist of Leonard's accent. He'd been at Safeway since the morning, trying to get a cab. Phoning hadn't worked out for him (unfortunate but unsurprising, judging from my inability to understand him in person), and he couldn't get from the store to a cab fast enough to snag one before another passenger did. Think you've got trouble getting a cab in this city? Waiting out in the cold for one was out of the question; he didn't even have gloves. We went through the phonebook together. Every single taxi in the city was busy. Just then, who should show up but Leonard's three children! Problem solved. One of the women ran off to get her car and I went off to get my carb fix.

I was almost out the doors when I was accosted by the inebriated Geraldine--the woman from before. She waved me over and tried to converse with me in speech that I found incomprehensible. After my third "Hmm sorry? You want a cab to where?" I began to feel quite idiotic. Leonard and his family were still standing by the doors, waiting for their car to arrive. I began wondering what they would think of me. Who is this strange girl running around trying to get cabs for people? Why can't she understand that woman? Why is she only buying chocolate bars and pierogi? Call that a supper? Did she just call that woman her grandmother? What is she playing at?

Figuring that Geraldine's problem was partially due to her slurred speech and partially due to the drivers' hesitance to pick up a single, drunk, old woman dressed in tatty clothes who was clutching nothing but a quarter and a dime in her hands (this was misleading; she did in fact have money for cab-fare in her pocket. It just looked like she only had 35 cents to her name, but the cabbies were fooled), I decided to use my charismatic charm to convince a cabbie to at least roll down the window for us. I waved one down, and after I explained that my poor grandmother was feeling unsteady on her feet and needed a ride home, he was happy to let her in.

Whew.

Trees for Everyone!

I've upgraded from buying Christmas cards to making my own (partially for creativity's sake, but mostly because a box of 10 Christmas cards can cost $25 whereas a bag of glitter costs $1).

My original plan was to decorate each card with a different and unexpected holiday symbol. There would be the Christmas Rat, since Jesus came to earth for all creatures, not just humans; there would be the Christmas Unicorn, in remembrance of that fallen species that perished in the Great Floods; there would be the Christmas Little Red Riding Hood and Wolf, to show that even these feuding characters can lay aside their differences to open presents together in celebration of Jesus' birth; there would be the Christmas Mermaid, because mermaids have just as much to do with Christmas as elves or men in bright red furry suits do (or unicorns or rats or little red riding hood, for that matter)--also, mermaids are pretty. And there would be angels to give out to the people who are likely to be offended and/or perplexed by Christmas Mermaids and Christmas Unicorns.

I did make all of those cards, too. But then, just for fun, I made a Christmas Tree card, too. I discovered how fun it is to draw Christmas Trees. As long as it's narrow at the top, wide at the base, and has a gold star at its pinnacle, it can generally be confirmed to be a Christmas tree. Fun and simple, and pretty, and colourful! I got really excited about the Christmas trees. So excited that I had to call my roommate into our glitter-infested living room to show them to her. I made green trees with blue lights and magenta trees with gold lights and purple trees with green lights and blue trees with silver lights. It was a multicoloured treestravaganza!

This brings me to my Christmas Symbol Theory. I have often heard laments from certain members of my church that the most popular holiday symbols--such as trees, presents, stockings, etc--don't have all that much to do with the 'true meaning of Christmas'. In fact, they have more to do with presents--things to put presents under, wrap presents in, and stuff presents into. Very consumer-based. Maybe so. But they're also just so darned simple to draw. It's far more likely that your average human being can produce a glittery card of a stocking hung by the chimney with care than a recognizeable depiction of the Three Wise Men on their camels. Unless you're willing to put it in an excessive amount of effort per card, you'll end up with cards that look like they were drawn by a cross-eyed first-grader.* So maybe it's not that Christmas has become a consumer-driven holiday so much as we're lazy and lacking in artistic skills.


*Alright, maybe I'm grossly underestimating everyone else's artistic talents. But I can speak for myself.

Types of customers

I've worked in many different bakeries over the years, and, generally speaking, there are very few rude customers at bakeries. Something about being surrounded by sugar and chocolate tends to put people in a good mood, I guess. However, there are still several types or really annoying customers I've come across over the years. They come in when you're ridiculously busy, and stand in the middle of the bakery, dumbstruck by the sheer variety of food on display. All logic and reason escapes them. They become customers like these:









When I come across customers like these, I always vow to never become one myself. I assume that surely, when I go into a store, I will manage to keep my wits about me. Surely I will be able to grasp basic concepts of math, reading, and visual observation. Sadly, this is not so. Being a customer is like having a disease. No matter how witty, bright, intelligent, and helpful I was before I entered the store, as soon as I pass through the front doors of a shop, I am reduced to a useless, slobbering mass of confusion and indecision.

Christmas Cards Frenzy!!

For the first 21 years of my life, I didn't really get cards. Don't get me wrong, I received them. I received a lot of them. But I didn't understand the point of them. Or at least, I didn't understand why some people couldn't conceive of an occasion when they would give someone a gift without including a card. Cards are something you read, take the money out of, and then throw away--or, if they're pretty, you put them on your dresser and then they eventually fall behind it and you find them three years later and THEN you throw them away*. Alright, so maybe I put them in a box somewhere and look at them every once in a while and they make me happy. Point is, I was not a card-giver until recently. I blame The Paper Umbrella (if ever you're in Regina, you should go). There were some pretty amazing cards there. There was a card there for when you want to invite your secret lover for a weekend getaway to a charming village somewhere. It was great. I began to see the merit of cards. Cards are actually kind of awesome.

This is how I ended up in Desart, being seduced by anything with gold sparkles on it. I ended up purchasing a box of the most bizarre Christmas cards I had ever seen. You know, the sort of cards that have 8-foot-tall winged reindeer on them, in an unironic, totally in earnest, very whimsical sort of way. Their designer had clearly been on an acid trip when he/she was creating these cards. I took them home and began excitedly filling them out. Then I realized that I still don't understand how to do cards. For Christmas cards, a normal person would probably write something like this: "Merry Christmas! Wish you were here! I'll be spending Christmas getting drunk while wearing a funny hat! Love, Alex." See? Something to do with the holidays. But when I fill out a card, I can't seem to write about anything except the card. So my cards look more like this: "Hi Alex! You may be wondering why I sent you this weird Christmas card. Don't worry, I'm being ironic! I couldn't resist purchasing something so warped! The person who made it was clearly on drugs! Love, Amy."** What a lovely Christmas card.

After I filled out each card with a variation of the above drug-trip message, I suddenly got really paranoid that the recipients were going to compare cards. What if they all realized that I wrote the same un-christmassy thing inside of each of their cards? The card would lose what few shreds of meaning it had. I was mass-producing my endearing quirkiness! (This dilemma remains unresolved. But anyway.)

I've been bit by the card-giving bug, now. I plan on getting more (and less drug-induced, Christmas-hallucination-themed) cards this very evening. Maybe I'll get generic ones this time, though, to save myself some writing. They will say things like "Look! There's a snowflake on this card!" or "Ironically, this card is made of a tree and ALSO has a tree on it!" or "SPARKLES!!!". Maybe if I write enough of them I'll eventually get the hang of writing "Merry Christmas! All the best! Love Amy" instead.

*unless of course it's an awesome card that contains, say, a comic strip explaining why I don't have a backbone, in which case I cherish it always. Or if it has a heartfelt message written inside. Or if the card is complementing me on that time I looked fabulous while getting the mail, and has rhinestones on it.

**I do this with postcards, too. If I send you a card with a picture of a sheep on the front of it, it's far more likely that my card will be telling you about the sheep in the picture than that it will be telling you about my adventures in Ireland.

CellPhone: The Triumphant Return

For those of you who are wondering what happened to my cellphone, it is in good hands: namely, my own. Apparently it fell out of my jeans pocket when I was lugging 20-kg bags of icing sugar from point A (the pile of sugar bags) to point B (the mixing bowl). It slid beneath a prep table. It was set to vibrate. It had landed in a pile of icing sugar, which muffled the already-subtle sounds of a vibrating cellphone. Every time I tried to phone it to pinpoint its location, it vibrated itself a bit further under the table. I spent 2 days cellphoneless, during which I discovered that payphones cost 50 cents per call, and no one in the mall will give you change for a Toonie. One of my wonderful co-workers found the phone, and it was eventually returned to me.

While we're on the subject of cellphones, remember that time I started a private war with Virgin Mobile? And how in the end they promise my cheque was in the mail and would be on my doorstep by the end of September? Yeah, it's still not here. Erg. I dread calling them again.

Aspirations: An Evolution

When I was very young, my career aspirations changed on a weekly basis. One week I wanted to be a horsetrainer, the next I wanted to be a ballet dancer, and then I wanted to be a horse-trainer by day and a ballet dancer by night. As I grew older, though, my goals became much more specific.

When I was 11, my dream was to be a veterinarian. But not just any veterinarian. I would be a veterinarian who lived on an abandoned schoolbus in a Walmart parking lot. My reasoning here was that I would save so much money on living costs that I would be ridiculously rich. I didn't have any plans on what to do with this money. I supposed I would eventually set up my own vet clinic ON the bus.

When I was 12, I yearned for adventure. My dream was to drive away some day without telling anyone where I was going. No one would ever be able to find me! I could do whatever I wanted! I could become a vet and live secretly on a bus and then take all the money I saved and go rock climbing in Colorado during the summers like in Vertical Limit (but, since I would be climbing alone, I wouldn't have to risk being devastated by watching members of my family fall to their dooms). I don't know why being untraceable was such an important part of my plan, but for some reason it was. I didn't realize that this plan could possibly be upsetting to any of my loved ones until the day I waxed poetic about my Disappearing off the Face of the Earth plan to my sister and she became inexplicably upset by this and told me to please warn her before I vanished. In fact, she didn't want me to vanish at all! I was confused, but sincerely promised (with my fingers crosed behind my back) to not disappear as soon as I graduated from highschool. Clearly she did not understand the point of that adventure. I'm not sure I understand the point of it anymore either, actually.

When I was 17, my plans took a turn for the plain and fairly normative. I found out that Yale, Harvard, and Princeton are all needs-blind schools. This means that if your family makes under a certain income, they cover the costs of your schooling. In some cases they even pay for you to fly down to visit your family every few months. I wanted in on this sweet all-expenses-paid action. So my dream became to attend an Ivy League. We all know how THAT turned out*.

When I went to Dal, my goal was to become a cultured, contributing member of society, who went out to art shows and attended protests all the time. I would become a member of the vibrant Halifax music scene. I was even going to be part of a hypothetical underground band called the 50% Off Toasters***. I spent the next two years eating low-quality, high-starch foods, fighting over whose responsibility it was to recycle the tuna cans, and procrastinating from writing essays on Romantic Poetry. My greatest aspiration became to stay out of the rain as much as possible.

Now, my career goals are much more realistic. All I want is to be an award-winning children's book author who owns a farm that is part dog-sanctuary and part cupcake-war grounds (you know, like a paintball range, except with cupcakes). You know that myth that parents are supposed to tell their children when they have to have the dog put down, the one where the dog is actually being sent to a great big farm somewhere where the dog will be far happier and will be able to spend the rest of his days running around chasing rabbits and having his belly scratched by the farmers' loving children? My farm will make that a reality (the belly-scratching children are optional)! And I will support my dog sanctuary with a combination of my book sales and admission sales to the cupcake-war shooting range. It's gonna be great.****

*interesting side-story: after I was rejected by all three universities, had gotten over my disappointment and stopped caring, I met a particularly heinous breed of aspiring Ivy-Leaguer at a birthday party. I did not like that man. He flirted with me until he found out I had applied to, been rejected by, and then given up on the Ivy Leagues. Butwhy? Why would you give up on your goal? He wondered, to which I shrugged. Meh. He immediately turned his attention to the girl sitting next to me (who was, unfortunately, a good friend of mine), and ended up dating her for an excessively long amount of time instead. By the time he ran off to Harvard, I was in the middle of constructing some sort of liquification-ray gun in order to dispose of him with ease**. If my target hadn't transferred countries, I could have submitted my new (and proven to be fully working) invention to Harvard (or maybe MIT). I would have been a shoo-in! But then I would have ended up being stuck in a class with an even more excessive amount of similar Ivy League snobs. Dodged a major bullet on that one.

**I kid, I kid. Disposing of a liquified human being is surprisingly difficult, actually.

***The posters for our shows would look like fliers for kitchen appliance sales. Only our loyal fans would be able to interpret these posters and actually track us down. We were gonna be so underground.

****I actually know someone whose sister has a cow sanctuary. No joke. She adopts old cows and takes care of them so they can die a peaceful, natural death on her farm. And she supports her endeavour by selling miniature houses called Possum Huts and Cowches: Couches in the shapes of cows (and with each Cowch is included a free hand-made rat!!!). If she can support cows through the sales of $500 life-sized cow pillows, I can support adandoned dogs through cupcake war sales.

Apocalypse? Now?

I have officially lost my cellphone*. I am very concerned.

I am concerned for several reasons. The first reason is that I spent most of my very frustrating Friday doing my best to sign away my soul to the holiday retail industry, and on every application form, my preferred form of contact is 'by phone'. While the chances that someone would hire me at this late date are fairly slim, so long as my phone is gone I will be convinced that there are messages on it from Toys R Us, HMV, and Walmart, all offering me unrealistically high wages to help them stack boxes into colourful pyramids for the month of December (that's what happens in the retail industry, right?).

The second reason I am worried about my cellphone disappearing is that, as I now live in a place where there is no landline, I really have few options when it comes to phoning people, or having people phone me, and I am sure that this week will be a vitally important phone-call week for me, for some reason**.

Third is the very perplexing circumstances under which my cellphone disappeared. I know I had it on the way to work. I was in Shoppers Drugmart buying a variety of items meant to keep the bakery bleach water from peeling the skin off my hands, and I took my phone out to check the time and it said 6:54 on it. So I know that at 6:54 this morning, I still had my phone. Then, things get hazy. Somewhere between paying for hand lotion and turning on the oven at work, my phone just disappeared.

What is even more confusing is that I have reason to believe I was sleep-text-message-reading last night. The details of this are far too long and confusing to get into here***, but I am convinced that my subconscious mind was playing some fun tricks on me last night. Ergo, I cannot trust my early-morning memory, meaning I'm not actually entirely certain if I checked the time on my phone this morning. I could have hallucinated it. Maybe my brain already knew my phone was gone and was so concerned about it that I day-dreamed that I still had it! And checked the time! And also read a few text-messages that were new but had somehow already been mysteriously opened.

Seeing as how I no longer trust my own brain, I can't rule out the possibility that I left my phone under my bed (checked) in the fridge (checked), in a snowbank (like in Fargo. Did not check, unlike that confused lady who thought Fargo was real), in the oven (please, no), in a cupcake (I would like to thank my roommate for that suggestion), in the hands of a greedy Shoppers employee (checked. twice. should have looked more closely for shifty eyes), hidden amongst the packages of rubber gloves in Shoppers' Aisle 2, or really anywhere else in Winnipeg by now. Now I'm not going to get a job over the holidays. Instead I will be forced to sit in an armchair inventing bizarre Christmas-themed drinks using ingredients my roommate left lying around carelessly--like vanilla or diet coke or organic shampoo--and watching pirated Christmas movies on my laptop. All because of this stupid phone. Oh dear what shall I do?

*as opposed to three days ago when I 'lost my phone' and it was hiding in a fold of my duvet the entire time.

**Wow. That's all one sentence.

***really, it involves an argument that I thought was with one person but was actually with another, an apology text-message, a cat, and a dream about me being an award-winning poet with a collection of 2-foot-tall Disney Princess dolls.

Winter sweats.

Winter has finally struck Winnipeg. I view winter as generally a nice thing, provided that I am inside admiring it and not outside trudging through it to get from point A to point B. From afar it's beautiful. When I'm walking through it, it causes a body-centred paradox, in which I feel both freezing and too warm at the same time. My body reacts to this by shaking and sweating profusely as I walk (also my airways close up but that's besides the point). When I arrive at work, I am drenched in icy sweat. I feel like I am standing in an igloo. An igloo that happens to contain an industrial sized oven in it. After an hour I change from being frigidly cold to steamily hot, and I spend the rest of the day in a sauna steam suit of my salty sweat*.

When I'm at winter-school**, I attempt to fix the sweat-soaked dilemma by stuffing toilet paper into my armpits. The idea is that the toilet paper will be a nice, dry, protective barrier between my skin and the worst of the sweat, and sometimes it even works, but then it begins to travel. At the end of the day I end up with interestingly shaved toilet-paper lumps that have lodged themselves somewhere between my abdomen and my hips, like very papery misplaced lovehandles. I often consider inventing some sort of sweat-absorbing device***, something like an inverted cotton shoulderpad that I could stuff down my sleeves and snap in place to keep me relatively comfortable at all times of the school day.

Anyway. My point is that it's been snowing all weekend and it's beautiful!


*alliteration!
**as in, school that is taking place in the winter. The properties of winter-school are rather different from normal-school. The abrupt and bizarre temperature changes that occur as I travel from room to room make for a very odd learning environment.
***Like a change of clothes? Of course not!

sugary sweet back pain relief since 1986

A man comes into the bakery and stands in the middle of it, dumbstruck. He admires the rows of colourful cakes. He studies the racks of wedding food magazines. He admires the posters of cupcakes on the walls. He says "I think I'm in the wrong place?"
I ask him what place he is looking for. "The chiropractor. Is this the chiropractor?"
No, sir. No it is not.

Your Saltines Are MINE!!!!

For several months, there has been a package of saltine crackers sitting in the fridge at my place of work. Why anyone would put crackers in the fridge is beyond me. I mean, how could anyone leave a package of saltine crackers uneaten for so long that they would need to be refridgerated to keep them from going bad?

Generally, when there are strange things in the fridge, I assume that my boss put them there. For instance, there's a pre-packaged salad, still in its vacuum-sealed wrapping, slowly liquifying in the corner; there is one random beer that's been sitting in the back of the fridge for over a year now; and there's a thing that I can only assume is pea soup. I assume that all of these items are Rodney's, and he has decided to add it to his fun study in food decay, and that I should leave it there until it turns all sorts of fun colours. For some reason, though, this package of crackers struck me as an un-Rodneyish item to put in the fridge. He just doesn't seem like the saltine type of guy. I had also on several occasions seen my manager, Melissa, eating saltines, so I always assumed they were hers. And so these saltines stayed in the back of the fridge. And I lusted after them.

Then, the most magnificent thing happened. Melissa quit*. Melissa quit, and she left her crackers behind. This being the first day I worked at the store since Melissa quit, I was very excited to see those saltines were still sitting in the fridge. I managed to restrain myself for the first 9 hours of my shift. Eventually, the need to secretly consume my ex-manager's food overcame my desire to maintain my professional bearing in the workplace. I devoured half of the package, just like that.

As soon as I began eating the crackers, I was overcome with fear that these hadn't actually been Melissa's crackers. What if they had been Rodney's crackers? Would he ever actually notice they were missing? What if they were Sierra's? Or Alex's? I was stealing someone else's food. That is a major work-place sin! How would the owner of the saltines retalliate? Would this result in a workplace war? I was afraid. Would this war involve an all-out cupcake-flinging fight**? My fear was quickly replaced with excitement. How many of these crackers would I have to eat in order to provoke their owner into starting a bakery food fight with me? I finished the package. And then, just as I placed the last delicious saltine cracker in my mouth, I noticed some felt-pen writing on the bottom of the package. It said "Melissa". And just like that, my sudden intense dream of having a cupcake war had to be downsized to the original, smaller dream of eating all of Melissa's saltine crackers.



*Understand that Melissa was the glue that held this store together. One of her most impressive feats was the way she transformed the bakery office from something resembling the space beneath your average fratboy's couch cushions, to something actually resembling an office. There is only one reason why Melissa quitting would be exciting, and that is the reason outlined in this post.

**If I am allowed to go on a multi-topic monologue for long enough, I will always eventually end it with my dream of having a cupcake war. For some reason, I have never been able to articulate the idea of the cupcake war well enough to get my listeners anywhere near as interested in it as I am. It's like the time I was allowed to play with the 100-pound box of sparkles and could only talk about sparkles for days afterwards and no one cared. Who doesn't get excited about sparkles? Who doesn't get excited about having tiny balls of cake coated in colourful icings flung at them? Picture La Tomatina, except with cupcakes instead of tomatoes: a blur of beautiful, rainbow icings and chunks of chocolate cake. People coated head to foot in cocoa powder and sprinkles. People swimming in puddles of melting vanilla icing. Why are you not excited about this?

Easter: God's Greatest Comedy

"Jesus is a comic hero. I mean, no offense." my professor is standing at the head of the class, looking slightly worried. She really and truly is afraid of offending someone, unlike the guy last week who made references to "Christian Mythology" and I frowned at him, in that moment forgetting the countless times I've made reference to "Cree mythology" and "Greek mythology" and "Hindu mythology", and then I wasn't sure who to be angry with, me or him or both or whoever created the word 'mythology' and started tacking it on to peoples' belief systems in the first place.

But this is interesting. Jesus is a comic hero.
Last week I had reflected a lot on the idea of book-writing. If, according to our mythology, God created everything, then he must've written all the books too. So why do we go around thinking the Bible is the only book God is trying to communicate with us through? Or maybe that's just me. It's fun to picture it, though. Like, what was God thinking when he got together with Chuck Palahniuk* and wrote Fight Club?

We often split literature into two main genres: the tragic and the comic. Tragedy is not just about people sleeping with their mothers and killing themselves, and comedy is not just a string of jokes about various bodily functions. Anything that begins happily and ends badly is tragic; anything that starts badly and ends well is comedic.

Take the creation myth: now that's a tragedy. It begins with God cheerfully shaping a world out of blank space and putting all sorts of beautiful creatures upon it. Then he fumbles it all and creates humans. A tragedy for God. And for us, what begins as a (presumably) happy marriage between Adam and Eve ends with them being booted out of paradise and sentenced to a lifetime of quarreling, painful births, and the general frustration of being stuck with the same person for all eternity (there weren't many places to find new friends back then). The birth of our ancestors was a great tragedy.

Take the Easter myth: The land lies in ruins. The ancient laws have been completely misconstrued. People in power are using God's word to abuse their lesser beings. There is only one man who can set it all right. He can comfort grieving widows, he has the power to protect adulteresses, and he really knows how to stretch meals. And then he is killed in an extremely brutal fashion. Tragic? But death is only the beginning. Three days later, the man is walking around again and making fun of everyone who had thought he was dead. There it is: Jesus is a comic figure, transcending death at the last minute. Easter: God's greatest comedy.


*You know I spelled his name correctly on the first try? Five points for Amy!

Inexplicable and Pointless Daily Trends

There is always a strange and inexplicable daily trend 'rhythm' to the bakery*. I mean, customer-wise. I can usually pick up on the rhythm an hour or two into my shift. There will be a day when everyone is really excited about vanilla cupcakes with mocha icing. Each person who comes in will buy at least two vanilla-mocha cupcakes, which is weird, because they're generally not that popular. Or it will be Chocolate Lemon day, which is even weirder. Call me crazy, but chocolate and lemon have never really struck me as a winning combination**. Or it will be the day when everyone wants to place an order for mini cupcakes with blue icing. Today is 'customers asking for 6 cupcakes and then only ordering 5 and not being able to count and then being surprised when I tell them they have to choose a sixth one, and then making me choose it for them' day.

The most annoying daily trend was a couple weeks ago, when every other customer who phoned us asked me point-blank if our cake was made from a mix. Maybe non-bakery people don't realize how rude that question is. It's like asking someone if their breasts are fake. Even if you think there's no possible way that anything that full and perfectly round could be natural, you don't just come right out and ask if they're fake. You give the person the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they were just blessed with a better leavening agent than you! Then you get to experience a sad feeling of inadequacy because your sad little cakes will never compare to ours.

I do wonder what causes these trends, though. It must be some sort of sinister conspiracy. But who is behind this mistifying criminal plan?


*Blah blah blah if you want to find a pattern, you'll always find one blah blah blah I know.

**though the Espresso-Lemon Roulades at my old bakery job were even stranger. Lemon and coffee. Lemon and coffee? I never tried one, so I guess I can't judge. But I think I will anyway. Lemon and coffee. Really?

Regina, The Sequel: Bermuda Triangle Solved

After about two hours alone in the Vortex Bed and Breakfast, I solved the mystery. It turns out they were all in the hot-tub. The husband thought his wife had let me in, the wife thought her husband had let me in, and so they both decided to give me some privacy and let me settle in on my own. When they found out I'd been wandering around, lost in their enchanting little home, they were very apologetic and gave me an extensive tour of the premises (and free chocolate).

It really is a lovely bed and breakfast; if any of you are ever in Regina, I would definitely recommend it. Their Artichoke and Asiago Omelettes are delicious.

Regina: The Bermuda's Triangle of the Prairies

At 1 am on Friday morning I discovered that I was going to Regina for the weekend. I slept fitfully that night, thinking of all the wonderful, magical things that I could do in Regina, like sit in my car and cry, or drive around and around in circles, or yell choice expletives at traffic lights. I was pretty excited. I packed my suitcase with far more clothes than I could possibly need for a weekend in the prairies, stocked up my food stores with food from my mother’s kitchen, and was on the road by 1 pm.

The first 7 hours of the journey went fine. They went brilliantly, in fact. Driving in a straight line on flat, open land is surprisingly easy, even if you did have the misguided notion of doing it in high-heel suede boots. I reached the city in surprisingly good time: two hours before the appointed time. I got all excited because this meant I could shave my legs and take a nap and stretch and do my make-up, and then I would look calm and cool and sophisticated when my friend showed up looking all frazzled after her 8-hour drive in from Alberta, and then she would be jealous.**

It was a classic case of counting my eggs before they hatched. I spent the next hour and half searching for the bed and breakfast we had booked*. The map had been simple enough when I memorized it off of my computer screen that morning. However, construction had created a slight detour that turned this city into a swirling vortex of random crossroads and disappearing intersections. After the third time retracing my steps and the fourth wrong turn, I was ready to cross Regina off of my mental roadmap and drive back to Winnipeg claiming that I couldnt stay there because the whole city had been bulldozed.

At last, I found the street the B&B was on. Or so I thought. Turns out I was on the crescent of the street of my B&B. I went in a lovely spiral that spat me out onto a highway that took me to the edge of town and told me I was going back to Winnipeg. This had been exactly what I’d wanted 5 minutes earlier, but now I was indignant that Regina thought it could get rid of me so easily. At this point I was sullenly glaring at any driver who was not driving at the same speed as me, and loudly cursing any streetlight that misbehaved, and I was absolutely done with anything that was called an Avenue.

Finally, I stumbled upon the Dragon’s Nest Bed and Breakfast. A charming place. Serena had told them to expect us at 8. It was 7:30. I knocked on the door. No answer. I saw that there was a number posted on the door, that I should call to gain access to the building. I phoned. No answer. I looked up the other number to the building, which I had written on my wrist that morning, for convenience sake. I called it. After 10 rings, one of the guests answered, assured me that the Dragon’s Nest was a lovely place to stay, and bid me adieu. I knocked again. Then, I just walked in.

It really was a lovely place, especially for anyone who is a fan of dragons (like me). There were charming little dragons everywhere. Dragons on the lampshades, dragons hanging out on the coffee table, dragons dangling from the hanging plants, dragons on the bookshelves. However, there were no Bed and Breakfast owners, as far as I could tell. Perhaps they had been sucked into the swirling black hole of Regina’s street system. I called ‘hello?’ in a half-hearted, hoarse* voice. No answer. Serena had told me we were in the ‘Wisdom’ room. So, feeling more than a bit like a cat burglar, I took my bags and went off in search of my room.

Found it I did. And it was a thoroughly enchanting room. There was only one dragon here, but there was a large painting of a horse on my wall. Up until the age of 13 or so, my two main obsessions had been dragons and horses. I was standing in a very classy version of my pre-teen self’s dream room.

I explored. There were fluffy, waffle-weave bathrobes for two, some packets of Ruffles All-Dressed Chips and bottled water, and a desk stocked with wisdom-enhancing paraphernalia. There were candles. There was what I believed to be a Taoist statue of some sort. There was a book by the Dalai Lama. There was a wall-hanging that said ‘Vision’ on it. There was a prayer bowl. There were no people.

It was one of the more awkward situations I had ever been in***. I considered becoming a burglar right then and there. Maybe I would just swipe The Dalai Lama’s Book of Inner Peace and a dragon or two and leave.

I have been here for 40 minutes now. I can hear muffled voices coming from above me (presumably from the upstairs, and not from the mystical nether-realm), but there is no discernible way for me to gain access to these voices. Every 5 minutes or so, the phone rings, and no one answers it. I’ve stepped into the twilight zone. Will I survive? Who knows...


*alliteration!

**Or, at least, I would look half as good as she did. Serena looks effortlessly sophisticated at all times--even when we wrap her up in brightly coloured party streamers at the end of dorm-room birthday parties.

***Oh, that is a lie. I have at least one encounter this awkward every week. Last week I had 5. And no, you don’t get to hear about them.

NaNoWriMo

First: Happy Halloween. For this momentous event, I dressed up as a Girl Reading Life of Pi*. Not many people saw my costume, but I can assure you it was a good one. I didn't really understand why everyone loved that book so much until I got to the ending. Those last 10 pages are quite interesting.

Now, on to November. On Thursday, I was sitting in the library reading a copy of the campus newspaper when it came to my attention that November is National Novel Writing Month (aka NaNoWriMo). Every year, someone sends me a link to NaNoWriMo and I say, "no thanks". But this year, I suddenly see the merit of it**. NaNoWriMo is the month-long novel-writing contest where the goal is quantity, not quality, and the only requirement to win the contest is to reach the 50,000 word-mark before midnight on November 30th (and your novel can't consist of the same word written 50,000 times). There are many winners, and the only prizes are bragging rights, and having a fairly crappy novel under your belt. I love bragging rights, and feel I haven't had enough of them lately. So: challenge accepted. This month (I mean starting tomorrow), I will write a novel.

In order to achieve this feat I'll have to produce approximately 1,700 words/day, according to the newspaper article. I don't think I'll have time to write every day, though, so my own goal will be to write 2,500 words every week day***. Totally doable, right? Considering November is also National End of Term Essays month, and National Your Manager Quit and Your Boss is Giving You More Hours month, I'm dubious as to whether the task can actually be completed. But you never know.

So, I'm writing a novel this November. Who's joining me?


*To clarify: I stayed home and read a book for class.
**This might have something to do with the fact that this year it was my own idea and not someone else's. I believe I mentioned that I was arrogant last week already. No need to say it again, right?
***I know, I know, this math doesn't add up. We English Majors are above such things as mental math or calculators. We prefer to guess wildly and creatively.

Amy and the Postmodern Election Forum

As far as sharing my opinion about the upcoming election goes, I tend to do it in quiet, controlled ways. The idea of putting a Vote For sign on my lawn makes me cringe. "Vote for Judy!" Is that an order? Piss off.

I don't like to be told what to do. I don't like telling other people what to do. Most specifically, I don't like putting up large, brightly coloured signs that issue orders to any stranger who happens to be walking by my house/facebook page/left shirt lapel. Not to mention, I'm pretty arrogant. If I vote for someone, I want to think it was my own idea, and not the idea of a plastic sign. Having said that, I now present you with my opinion, one of many, about the upcoming election.

Part One: Mayoral Candidates

Rhetoric lead-up: Two years ago, I was enrolled in a highly influential class on Rhetoric**. It was in this class that I began to internalize the popular theory that it's not really what you say so much as how you say it. We did a lot of work on the topic of Hot-Buttons: finding the issues that your audience cares about and putting those issues at the forefront. Essentially, learning where your audience's buttons are (the good buttons, I mean) and pushing them.

Post-Modern View: Can we rely on the narrative voices of those who describe our Mayoral Candidates? What is truth? Is anything in these candidates' platforms factual, or are we, the readers, governed by feelings, but conflicting viewpoints, and multiple truths? How can we make weighty political decisions when the reliability of our multiple narrators is constantly called into question? Am I one of those narrators? Am I questioning myself? Is this version of the Mayoral Candidates Forum that I am about to present to you true, or is it one of many conflicting truths?

Say what you will about elections, but a candidate's success does ride, to a great extent, on his or her ability to hit the right 'buttons' for voters, and, more importantly, hitting them in the correct order, at the right frequency, and in the right way. Popularity has a lot to do with being connected to your voters and being able to pick up on what they want you to say (regardless of whether you really believe what you're saying).

Take the On-Campus Mayoral Candidates Forum I went to today. Not being much for politics, I was surprised to discover that we do, in fact, have 4 candidates running for office. Let's see how they measured up.

Brad Gross: A man very passionate about real-estate and taxes, Brad treated us like Boston Tea Party rioters; slamming the government for 'excessive taxation' seemed to be the only plot point of his platform, which begs the question, how stupid does he think we are? Or, conversely, do I really know that little about taxes?***

From what I understand, we're already running a deficit here, and basically any promised programs the government presents us with rely on some sort of funds that have to come from somewhere (read: taxpayer's pockets). So, when Mr. Gross lists the city's taxed services as if they are crimes against humanity, promises tax rebates for virtually every student and their grandmothers, and then goes on to promise 24-hour daycare programs for all single parent families, I begin to question the validity of his statements. How exactly will he be funding 24-hour daycare? Or any other initiative, for that matter?

Rav Gill: Oddly enough, I can't actually remember a whole lot of what Rav said. Shall we blame this failure on me and my wandering mind, or the fact that I'm already fairly biased in Judy's favour? Of course. However, if you want someone to vote for you, you should be able to hold their interests somewhat. What I mostly remember about Rav is that he is young and from the inner city and so am I, and that, of the candidates I saw, he had the majority of responses that were lambasting the other candidates outright (ironic, seeing as how the Rav Gill For Mayor site celebrates his platform as 'not anti-Katz or anti-Judy, but pro-Winnipeg.')

Judy Wasylycia-Leis: Judy's ability to pick up on the issues that were actually near and dear to the audience makes her the star of this Forum. Of course, I was biased towards her. I was biased from the moment I saw her taking the stage, dressed in a bright purple blouse, with a purple flower at her lapel****.

Amy, are you really basing your vote on a woman's wardrobe choices? Well, whether by accident or design, Wasylycia-Leis was the only candidate lucky enough to fit in with the crowd of purple-attired university students. Yes, today is the day where everyone who is against homophobic bullying is supposed to show solidarity by wearing purple. So, whether she opened up her facebook page this morning and saw the reminder (as I did), or got a tip-off from her son, or just happened to pick something purple out of her closet, Judy immediately stood out as someone who knew what was going on at the University. Whether or not she actually cares about homophobic bullying is, of course, open to debate, but she cares enough about our opinions of her to present herself as such, and, measured against other attendees (or, more importantly, absentees (see below)), that's worth something.

I will also give her props for not actually calling attention to the colour of her shirt (which makes it seem less like a grab at popularity), for bringing up the Veolia debacle, for appealing to student's eco-conscious attitudes, for discussing Winnipeg as a whole (rather than as a taxation project), and for in general talking to the students like she actually knew what the students were about, and for telling Rav Gill to actually answer the questions and stop harassing her.

Sam Katz: I will have to give Katz bonus points for being the only candidate arrogant enough to not show up at all. Is that 5 Forums he's missed, or does this make it number 6? The thing is, in order to make voters think you care about them, you have to actually show up and make it appear as though you do. Judy was criticized today for 'throwing a hipster dance party' for young voters (Get Your Vote On). What do dance parties have to do with voting? About as much as On-Campus Mayoral Candidate Forums do to Mr. Katz, it would appear.



**You know, the class where I managed to demonstrate my complete inability to maintain my dignity in front of my professor (read: the infamous locker room incident, the Rush Limbaugh incident, the imposter professor incident, and others that are, mercifully, not available for public viewing).

***well...yes...

****Okay, so my bias actually begins in grade 11, when she came to discuss feminism and politics, and is compounded by the fact that she is the only politician who I've actually met on more than one occasion (which is, of course, helped by the fact that her son was the grade below mine and we share a few of mutual friends).

Do you ever have one of those days where your ecocriticism assigned readings comparing animal slaughter to rape and abuse of women to the eating of meat makes you so distressed you have to cap off the evening by spending over an hour on Cute Overload watching the same corgi doing a belly-flop into a lake over and over again to numb your mind to the sad facts of reality? I have...

daily dose of irony

in Ecocriticism, discussing Al Gore's erroneous insistence that 100% of ecologists are in agreement about the global warming crisis:

female student*: "I mean, it's not like we need to have irrefutable proof that the world is going to end to convince us to start worrying about how our habits are detrimental to the environment. Just because I don't know for sure that putting a whole bunch of chemicals in my hair is going to destroy the earth, doesn't mean I'll assume there's no point in buying organic hair products or something." flips turquoise hair over her shoulder. "he's got to give us some credit."

thus spake the girl who loaded herself up with blue hair dye again this weekend. It was only after I had left the classroom that I realized my hypocrisy. No, apparently he doesn't have to give me credit.


*a.k.a the author of this post, a.k.a me.

kids use Axe Bodyspray to set themselves on fire

check it out: finally, a use for Axe that I can approve of. (but I would argue against the Seattle news team's editorial staff. Who's to say that using body spray to set onesself on fire is 'less sexy' than using body spray to attract women? Personally, I'd rather have a guy try to attract me by setting himself on fire than by coating himself in noxious-smelling chemicals just to 'smell better'.)

Showering: the Final Frontier. But first, some acerbic and pointless commentaries on people who care more about the Earth than I do.

A few years ago I was flipping through a pompous eco-concious magazine where people who thought they were better than all us gas-guzzling Gaia killers could write in about the ways in which they were being nicer to the Earth than we were*.

First, I came across a letter from a misinformed do-gooder who suggested that if we could all turn off our engines for the 5 minutes it takes to roll through a fast-food drive-thru, the earth could breathe easier. He included a diagram of a gigantic ramp (patent pending. No seriously) that began at the order station, at which point the drivers would shut off their engines and roll on down the line to collect their grease-laden treats.

The problem with this being that it is likely you'd be burning more gas restarting your engine at the end of the line than you'd be saving by rolling through the drive-thru. Other problem being that fast food chains are one of the many culprits of the ecopocalypse anyway. If he'd sent in a diagram of a laser beam programmed to destroy fast-food chains and fast-food chains only (patent pending), I would have been liable to respect him more. Also it would have been a nice thing to photocopy and paste to my bedroom wall, and then I could have felt like I was being eco-conscious too!

Next, I came across a letter from someone who said her family was trying to conserve water by 'showering' using a bucket and ladle. She claimed she wanted to write in to inspire us all to do the same, but I knew that the bitch was really just trying to overshadow us with her more impressive eco-conscious action-plans. The suggestion water-conservation websites give out to concerned individuals is to shower shorter, and maybe less often. And here this woman cared enough to stop showering completely. I also knew that this woman was probably bald, or at least had a very thin head of hair. No way would I be able to sufficiently wash my full and glorious mane with a dinky ladlefull of water.

The years passed, I graduated from highschool, embarked on an unemployable yet fascinating and highly informative path of educational studies, and then, one day, I found myself crouching in the bathtub with an icecream pail, an old margarine container, and a bottle of Vegan 96% Organic!! Shampoo. Guess how much water the average 7-minute shower uses? 35 gallons. Guess how much water is actually needed to fully cleanse a 5-foot-6, 150-pound woman with a very full head of shoulder-length hair? Less than a gallon. Oh yes, people, I've become One of Them.


*Okay,maybe it was just an old copy of AdBusters. And maybe they were actually trying to convince us that average people really can make a difference! But I preferred to read it as a thinly veiled attempt at a senseless world-wide guilt-trip.

Putting my degree to good use...

What's that you say? You want me to forgo my usual blog post about the bizarre antics I got up to this week, and instead treat you to an excessively long commentary on literary fairy tale tropes? And here I thought you had no interest in what I do. Well, if you insist...

In reading The Pleasures of Children's Literature (Nodelman and Reimer) for one of my classes, I came across some interesting ideas on fairytales. Nodelman and Reimer observe that there are 9 fairytales that most university students polled know by heart:

Cinderella
Snow White
Beauty and the Beast
The Three Little Pigs
Goldilocks and the Three Bears
Hansel and Gretel
Jack and the Beanstalk
Little Red Riding Hood
and Sleeping Beauty

Of these tales, Disney has commandeered and re-written most of them (either as feature-length films, or as small episodes starring Mickey Mouse). Disney is so pervasive in our culture, that generally, the versions of fairytales that we know are, in fact, the Disney versions, and not the original folktales, most of which originated in the 1700's. Now, many of these fairytales (especially the ones involving princesses) have often been criticized for their inaccurate portrayal of romance and relationships*.

From the tender age of 3 or so, children are taught that every girl is a beautiful princess and every man is a handsome prince who must dash into a lady's life at some point in time and sweep her off her feet. Thus, children, girls especially, are easily instilled with highly unrealistic expectations for their romantic lives, and are encouraged to pander to the gender and class stereotyping that they will live out for the rest of their lives. And so on.

In this scenario, we must assume that children are incapable of telling fantasy from reality. Well, let's give them a bit more credit than that. On the one hand, one might not believe something is true just because a storybook portrays it as such. But what if you read 2 dozen storybooks that all seem to preach the same thing? These poor misinformed children grow up to be delusional romantic hopefuls, fighting to preserve gender lines, waiting either to be swept off their feet by a handsome, oddly silent young prince much taken by the lady's looks, or to find beautiful, sweet young ladies who will swoon for the first person who cuts through a thorn bush for them. Also, that there isn't much more to life than this interaction.

I once worked with a woman who had been so badly victimized by this delusion that she had to spend most of my lunch hour explaining to me that fairy tales don't come true and there are no stars to wish on, etcetera. Being witness to (though not the direct victim of) some very nasty relationships, and having heard about many more, I had, in fact, deduced that fairy tales aren't really true:
that there isn't necessarily someone for everyone,
that men are human too and will not spend the rest of their lives throwing roses at you,
that some men do happen to be horrific assholes,
that even the most loveable of men are not necessarily knights in shining armour,
that the people who love you most are also the ones who can hurt you the most,
that anyone--absolutely anyone--is capable of cheating on their beloved, given the right circumstances,
that the man who will sweep you off your feet solely based on the redness of your lips is the type of man who may also paste 2-foot blow-ups of your face to his ceiling and follow after you picking up your used tissues in the hopes of cloning you, or, in the very least, the type of man who will dump you when he figures out that those red lips rub off at the end of the day because they come out of a tube of compressed animal fat and dye
and, most importantly, that there is life before, during, after, and outside of the pursuit for prince charming.**

The long and short of my comment here is that those damned fairytales are the culprits behind the pained disillusionment of our nation. Or are they?

First of all, as Nodelman and Reimer point out, the values that most people associate with fairytales--and even the idea of a fairytale ending--were manufactured by Disney and reflect the values of upper-middle-class American culture of the 1930's and 40's. They were also marketed towards children. In actuality, the original folktales were meant to be enjoyed by everyone, and were often rather gruesome. One of the original versions of Sleeping Beauty has our good old prince charming raping the sleeping lady, who is impregnated and gives birth to twins. It is only when one of the twins climbs over the bedclothes and sucks the spindle splinter out of the princess's finger that Sleeping Beauty wakes up, to find herself an abandoned single mother of twins. It is unlikely that anyone reading this story would be tricked into thinking that all men are well-behaved knights in shining armour.

Similarly, most 'child-friendly' versions of Cinderella skip the part where the ugly stepsisters cut off their toes and heels to try to fit the slipper. Now, there are a lot of things going on here and I'm going to do the bad thing and oversimplify it all: we could easily take this imagery as a commentary on the painful (and fruitless) lengths that women go to in order to get a man. It might also be a commentary on early plastic surgery. Who knows.

Oh, and another thing: you know those evil step mothers who marry rich and screw up sweet young princess's lives? In the original tales, those weren't step mothers. They were birth-mothers. When the Grimm brothers started transcribing folktales, they were thoroughly disturbed at the idea of a real mother enslaving her daughter, or throwing her daughter out of the house to go find a house made of gingerbread, or sending an old woodcutter to cut her daughter's heart out to prove that she was dead. So the original stories addressed the fact that not all families are big, happy families. Some families are royally screwed up. Some mothers just don't have those motherly instincts. Etcetera.

So next time you want to blame your misguided notion of a cliche fairytale ending for your latest romantic let-down, don't blame the folkstories. Go for the more current cliche, and blame Disney. Always blame Disney.


*of course, the problems with the Disney Princess tales reach much deeper than the difficulties North Americans have with dating expectations, but I'll keep this light and fairly sweet for now.

**I have, on several occasions, tried to explain to people that I don't assume I'm going to get married. Until the moment when you actually are, in fact, married, there's always a chance that you never will be. You may never find someone worth dating. If you find someone worth dating, you might not find him/her worth marrying. If you do find him/her worth marrying, he/she might not feel the same way about you. And even if you do feel the same way, there's the off chance one of you will get hit by a bus on the way to the altar. In which case, I will buy myself a nice big house and fill it with cats and very brightly painted furniture, and open a charming little bookstore cafe called Patchwork--or maybe The Silver Spoon-- which will be open at the strangest of times and sell the most interesting of pastries and caffeinated beverages, and I will lead a fascinatingly eccentric life, and finance it with the books I will have been getting published during the whole frustrating dating/courtship/engagement/roadkill romance (of course, one might hope that I would do all this even with a husband in tow). Even after explaining all this, most people I talk to about it come away from the conversation with the assumption that I don't want to get married. Or, conversely, that my self-esteem is so low that I think no one wants me. Now, is that what I said? Is it?

The past 7 days: brought to you by Satan Days 5 and 6.

Here is the next installation of the increasingly inaccurately titled 7 Days of Hell. It would seem that only Wednesdays are actually hell for me. I'm writing this on a Wednesday, and thinking about what happened last Wednesday, and forget that the days in the middle were only so-so and involved nothing worse than hopeless church initiatives and tourquoise hair dye. But here it is!

Sunday. Sunday, people found out my dog died and were mad I hadn't told them earlier and then I was mad at them for being mad at me and I may have slapped someone. It was only on the thigh, though, so it barely counts. I am now part of the Visioning Board at church, which means that all the organizational problems that the church has that I usually laugh quietly to myself about are now suddenly my problem. For instance, the problem that the two areas that the church identified as most important are Christian Education and outreach programs. Guess which areas are the ones no one has time to volunteer for? That's right. CE had the Dickens of the time getting teachers for its classes, and now our great Thanksgiving Banquet outreach is probably getting canned because no one wants to coordinate it.

I first became aware of all these problems on Wednesday, 7 hours after Kaitie died, and had been hard-put not to explain to our pastor that there really is no hope and we should give up trying to coordinate anything because, while everyone likes to experience our programs and celebrate the fact that we have them, no one wants to run them, and the people who can be guilted into running them do 80% of the church work already. On Sunday I met up with the pastor and told him we should do Thanksgiving in January. He accepted it as a fall-back plan. I decided that my work here was done. It wasn't. But that's enough church business for one post.

Sunday I got several urgent phone calls from my boss asking me to go to the store and unlock it so that someone could come pick up their wedding order. I was going past a shopper's drug mart on the way to the store when I realized the only thing worth accomplishing today was to change the colour of my hair. I did my bakery duty and spent the rest of the day making random patches of my hair turquoise. Immediately afterwards, I remembered that I actually rather like having my hair be a normal colour. Though turquoise does make me happy. I am divided

Which is worse: having to try to comfort someone, or having to accept comfort from someone else? When someone's pet dies, you apologize for it, because that's the right thing to do, even though it was clearly not your fault. What does the aggrieved individual say to that? Have some free kibble? I phone around to see who wants Kaitie's old dog food, and end up getting to spend some time with the two most precocious little girls I have ever met (as well as their mother). They have a pomeranian who eats Kaitie's brand of food. We talked about racism and Shakespeare and dry British humour, and the misconceptions that people hold about pomeranians. I got a free meal and some chocolate cake out of the bargain, too.

Monday, I used my hair to turn several white towels green, then signed up for Judo classes, paid for them, and realized I am always busy in the evenings, and will never go to them. I went home and played with melted chocolate instead, and tried to write something coherent for Creative Writing. I had to read something aloud in class last week. It was meaningless gobbledegook that was supposed to emulate Cormick McCarthy's writing style. I was told I sound wittily ironic, which I appreciated. Unfortunately, being witty and ironic does not help me think up any actual story line. I can be witty and ironic for several pages without saying anything at all. And our first assignment is due next week. Yikes.

The past 7 days: brought to you by Satan Days 3 and 4

Friday. Alright, Friday wasn't bad. I got a call from the bank saying they believed I was in school and I could try to get the proof of enrolment to them next week. I worked and work is work and people are people and most people are pretty happy when they're in a bakery, unless of course they didn't get ribbon on their cupcakes and want your manager to be there so they can put her through the wringer but instead all they have is you and so they decide to defy the stereotypes of customers being pure evil, and are quite reasonable instead. Things were so-so.

In fact, Friday was kind of amusing. I went to the gym in the afternoon, something I generally detest because afternoons mean hoardes of fairly buff people in the 20-something Male category, and that's intimidating. I prefer early mornings, when most of the people there are only just awak enough to concentrate on keeping their heart rates in a certain zone and maybe watch the morning news. But on this particular Friday, I discovered the joys of eavesdropping on desperate men trying to hit on athletic women. This guy spent most of his workout telling a 90-pound asian woman what it was like to be a kickboxing instructor with arms so strong that people hurt their legs when they try to kick you and you block them. When she remained unimpressed, he started trying to make her feel bad for being unable to bench press more than 120 pounds. No one should ever feel bad for being unable to lift more than they weigh. I started following them around the weight lifting room, doing whatever excercise was 2 machines over from them so that I could surreptitiously listen to the man make a fool of himself.

Saturday. I had managed to snap my bike chain while biking down Osborne the week before, and Dad had very kindly fixed it for me Saturday morning. When I hopped on the bike to ride it to work, I found that the chain guard was coming off, and was at such an angle that the bike made an impressivly loud chainsaw-like sound when I pedalled. The pedals also vibrated, which was actually quite pleasant. I felt like I was getting a foot massage on the way to work. Work was work. When I biked home, the chain guard became quite unruly and finally exploded off of the bike, doing its best to stab a street kid in the foot as it went out in a blaze of evil junkyard bike glory. I then managed to get bike chain grease all over my hands, and had to wipe them on the only piece of paper in my purse. It happened to be my proof of enrolment request form that I still had not managed to get through Student Central. No matter, that form wasn't going to see its destination for several days anyway.

That evening, I met up with some of my friends and discovered that Wednesday had been a particularly awful day for most people. This is a public service announcement. Watch out for Wednesdays.

The past 7 days: brought to you by Satan

The past 7 days: Brought to you by Satan 

 Hello everyone! Get ready for the next Series: several rants on how awful the last 7 days have been. Here are days 1 and 2.

It began last Wednesday morning, when I awoke to find my dog in the process of dying by the back door. Details are sad and unnecessary, but she looked in pretty rough shape. It was my day off, and I was up at 7am mostly because I had to do the Community Garden Food Bank delivery. I was severely uninterested in leaving poor Kaitie to drive out to St. Boniface to deliver an 50 pink tomatoes and 12 rubbery carrots to a foodbank that was about to receive a tidal wave of leftovers from Winnipeg Harvest anyway, but Karen had been doing it every single week of the summer so I couldn’t exactly cop out on the one day she asked me to do it for her.

I arrived at the church, unlocked the door, and realized that the alarm pass code I had previously memorized had readily evaporated into the oblivion of my subconscious mind. I hurriedly began to phone everyone in my phone book who might know the code, but half a minute later the alarm began to blare. I went and sat on the basement floor and cried angrily to myself until the alarm stopped sounding, then phoned the alarm company. I’ve done this several times, but seeing as I don’t actually have a security code, there’s nothing the company itself can actually do for me. So I had to start phoning trustees. I only remembered who 2 of them were, and one was already gone to work. I finally got it sorted out, and went and deposited the vegetables of little consequence in the basement of the food bank.

Traffic was a nightmare. When I got home, Kaitie was clearly about to die. I phoned the vet to see if I could move her appointment up. I could not. In the spirit of a university student who has forgotten what school is like, I had chosen to leave all my homework to do on my day off. So I sat there stroking my corpse-like pet and tried to finish reading The Dangerous Book for Boys**. I got about halfway through it, and the vet called to say I could bring Kaitie in early. I ran down the street to enlist the help of my friend in loading Kaitie into the car.

By the time we got Kaitie onto the vet’s table, she was barely breathing and seemingly unaware of anything going on around her. I expected the vet to come in, take one look at her, and tell me she wasn’t going to make it. Instead, he examined her for about 15 minutes, and then told me he didn’t think she was going to make it. While he was explaining this to me, she stopped breathing entirely. Surprise! The vet became horribly awkward and kept on apologizing for my loss and telling me how much everything would be.

I know that nothing is free in this town, and I don’t expect it to be, but I still found it rather amusing that I was charged $60 for a check-up that ended in diagnosing my dog as dead. Had I chosen not to move her appointment up at all, she would have died on our kitchen floor before I got her to her appointment and I could have done the diagnosis myself.  But I’m being uncharitable. The vet did a good job, and I was just glad I didn’t have to decide to euthanize her.

Anyways. I went home, logged on to the university Blackboard site, and found out that my sadistic ecocriticism professor had assigned us 125 pages of literary criticism to read. And 33 pages of it was written by John Locke. Have you ever tried to read John Locke? Dear God.

I wasn’t much in the mood to read it, so I did that fun thing where you read the first sentence of every paragraph and go to school and are still the only one who can comment on any of the reading because none of your classmates have done it either.

Then there was Thursday. The only bad thing that happened with Thursday was I found a letter at the bottom of our letter basket that I had chosen not to open when it arrived several weeks before. The letter told me that I owed the bank $10,000 and had until September 15 to prove I was still in school or they’d start charging interest. It was September 16. By the time I found the letter, the bank was closed. I knew there was no way I was going to get a proof of enrolment to them before October because the university has decided it would be a great idea to require proof of enrolment forms be handled by Student Central, which handles all the business of new university students and has an hour-long waiting line for most of September, and is also only open from 8 until 4. All I had to do was hand in that damn form and give them 7.50 and I had to stand in line for an hour? Every time I asked them if there was an alternative, they gave me a new and equally unhelpful answer. So I phoned the bank and left them a message promising I was still in school. Then I made curried carrot soup with the food bank carrots I had deemed too ugly to give to charity. I decided the soup was a tribute to Kaitie. Eating soup can be an emotional affair.

**a book that gets away with being remarkably sexist and heteronormative by being designed to look like it was made in the 1940’s, so’s no one will realize it was written in 2006 by men who should know better, and published by a company that should know EVEN better. All the same, there are some pretty wicked paper planes in this book. And it tells you how to make batteries. I am divided on how I feel about this book.

Eyes in a potatoe!

Thursday, I had my first Children's Literature class, and the professor was showing us pictures so we could discuss how we knew they were related to childhood or children. She showed us this picture that someone from her friend's grade one class drew. I have fallen in love with this picture, it is such a strange, hilarious, insane thing. I copied it down, and I have recreated it here, word for word, potato-claws and all, for your viewing pleasure:

The repercussions of war

Remember how I got really angry at Virgin Mobile and attacked them with hate mail, hate blog posts, hate facebook messages, and hate phone messages? Well, that's very surprising, since I haven't publicized how far-reaching my attack on Virgin Mobile was. However, I did do all those things--I wrote them emails, I posted my criticisms in a variety of online locations, and I ranted about it so much, my dad ended up phoning them and sitting on hold for 20 minutes just so he could tell them how disappointed I was with their company.

Broadcasting an enraged diatribe on the shortcomings of a multinational company is all fun and games up until about a week after the heated outburst, when my emotions have leveled off and I've forgotten why I was angry in the first place and I would prefer to forget that I had a Mr. Hyde moment with my ex-telephone company. The fun ended there with Virgin Mobile, because it was at this point--when I was in this level-headed, Dr. Jekel state, feeling as placid as a mirror-like pond of still water, that Virgin Mobile chose to respond to my email tirades.

Of course, having forgotten why I was angry in the first place, I could not understand what Virgin Mobile could possibly be apologizing for, so I quietly hid their email in a corner of my inbox and continued to pretend that I've always been as calm and collected as I am now.

The end result of all this is that
1) I now know that someone actually reads my rants
2) I know that this reader is in fact the company the rant is aimed at
and therefore,
3) I now must live with two constant fears: the fear that someone from Virgin Mobile will recognize me as That Girl*, and that my uncontrollable ranting will some day burst fourth against another, equally helpless customer service representative from another organization.

This is why it took me 57 minutes to find wall hooks at Canadian Tire on Tuesday. After 15 minutes of searching for the wall hooks and finding broom hooks, industrial-strength metal pulleys, bike hooks, and gate hooks instead, I was frustrated and tempted to ask one of the extremely busy shop people for help. But then I was suddenly afraid. What if I'm secretly not finished being angry and large corporations yet? What if I am unwittingly gearing up to pour fourth a tirade of criticisms on the next Canadian Tire employee whom I come across? What if I inexplicably tell that woman with the nametag over there that she's dressed up to look like a drug dealer and her company doesn't respect her at all? What will happen then?

I spent 42 minutes wandering around the store, trying to decide whether I could get away with hanging my house coat on a broom clip instead. By the time I had someone direct me to the wall hook aisle, I had convinced myself that broom clips were too useful to pass up, which is why all of my hairbrushes now clip onto my wall. I'm actually rather ecstatic about this. The moral of this story is that paranoia breeds inspiration.

*Virgin Mobile has set up camp at my school, so I spend a lot of time counting the floor tiles and humming to myself when I walk through the halls, as if my rant was so infamous that it was picked out of the sea of Virgin Mobile hate mail and pinned to a great wall map of Winnipeg beside my facebook photo with the words Watch Out For This Girl scrawled in red beneath the image. I'm nothing if not self-absorbed.

Curmudgeon in training

Sometimes I think about those in-training tshirts. You know, the ones that are adorned with horrifying phrases that do not bode well for the future. Things like "MILF in training" or "Diva in training" or "Cougar in training" or "Zombie in training". Some day, there will be a Diva MILF Cougar Zombie army running around the streets and we'll only have ourselves to blame for it--they did give us ample warning that they were training for it, after all. But this is all besides the point. The point is, it's high time that someone makes a "Heinous Old Curmudgeon in Training" t-shirt, so that I would have something to wear.

People often mistake me for a nice person because I only swear at them quietly to myself, only use phrases like "If you don't stop talking I will kick a puppy in the face" in the privacy of my own mind, and even when I am at my surliest, I am still easily tricked into bending to the whims of young children.

Miranda and Clementine are two little girls who live down my street. They adore me, and therefore I cannot stand them. The only person they adore more than me is my dog. They get me and my dog mixed up frequently, which is unsurprising, since Kaitie and I are similar in many ways: We both eat random crap we find on the ground and on ourselves*, we both wander around the house pretending to be from another species**, and we both view Miranda and Clementine with an equal amount of indifference bordering on disdain.

My average interaction with the girls will go like this:
Clementine: Hi Kaitie!
Me: I'm Amy.
Clementine: Kaitie Kaitie Kaitie!
Miranda: Can I walk your dog?
Me: Not today.
Clementine: I'm touching Amy's tail!
Miranda: Can I go with you?
Me: No.
Clementine: Hi Kaitie!
Miranda: My mom says its okay.
Me: No she doesn't.
Miranda: I asked her.
Me: She's not even here.
Clementine: poop!
Miranda: I'm going with you.
Me: Goodbye.

At this point I ignore both of them and walk around the corner of the building, never to be seen again. However, yesterday, Miranda and Clementine were determined to join me on my walk. So I went the other way. Unfortunately, the other way lead to the park, which the girls interpreted as me offering to take them to the park. They were overjoyed and told me we were going on the swings. I told them I was not going to the park, I was going around the park and coming right back. By this time we had crossed the street and were in the park grounds, and I noticed that Clementine was barefoot and had clearly wet herself earlier that day.

Somehow, I was cajoled into walking Clementine back to her house, waiting for her to put on shoes and fight with her sister about whether or not she would put on new pants, come out wearing the same pants and her older sister's shoes, walk her back into the park holding hands. And Miranda got to walk Kaitie. I looked like Mother Theresa.

The next thing I know, I'm running around the park pushing Miranda on the swing and keeping Clementine from shoving Kaitie into the garbage cans and the girls are having the time of their lives and I am realizing I'm actually annoyed that Kaitie is along because she's tired and in pain (arthritis) and wants to go home and I haven't gotten to do under-ducks with Miranda yet.

Do you know how hard it is to get two little girls out of a park and back into their front yard again? Of course you do. It's impossible. I believe that there is some alternate dimension where we're all still stuck on jungle gyms, alternating between waiting for little children to stop building castles on the slide so we can go home, and being children ourselves and hiding beneath the slide making icecream cones. Every time someone manages to drag a child out of a sandbox, there's a rift in the space-time continuum***.

So we 'went home'. By that I mean we rolled down the hill 4 times, then rolled down the hill 'for the last time' 4 more times, then Clementine played dead on the ground so I had to zombify her and make her walk home like she was my puppet, and then we had to call over Miranda's best friend Wren to visit Kaitie, and then we stuck dandylions and dead leaves through Kaitie's collar to make a crown for her, and then Clementine had to walk Kaitie, and then Miranda had to walk Kaitie, and then Wren had to walk Kaitie, and then Clementine lay down on the ground again because she couldn't walk Kaitie, and I decided she was being sleeping beauty and Kaitie had to wake her up with a big sloppy dog kiss, and then Clementine had to be carried across the street and then I had to go into their yard with them and spin them on their own plastic merry-go-round until Miranda and Clementine couldn't ignore their mother yelling at them from the kitchen to come inside, and I went home and Dad told me I was such a good person, and reminded me that he'd written down all the spelling mistakes from my earlier blog posts and pasted them to the front door for me.

So now I have to make this t-shirt...


*today I ate a fluff that looked like a chunk of chocolate off of the floor, and licked an unidentified white sauce off of my hand. It was hand lotion.

**I meow frequently, and the vet calls Kaitie the Pig Dog, due to that endearing little snuffling noise she makes all the time.

***Can you tell how little I know about physics here?