Talk About the Weather

When the most exciting thing happening to me is the weather and homework assignments*, I usually don't bother putting it on the internet. Who wants to read 2 weeks of posts in the vein of "oh God it's cold it's... cold it's cold... oh it's not too bad today...Wow it is GORGEOUS out today...no, now it's cold. Now it's FREEZING. Oh, my poor wind-burned skin. Here, I'll show you pictures"?

But anyways. On to the weather. Wow it is GORGEOUS out today. Or at least it was, at 8 o'clock this morning, when I was meandering home from the gym, carefully picking my way through icy puddles and treacherous ice islands. As I was making a particularly extravagant leap across several puddles, my strong footing gave way and I found myself doing the notably ungraceful splits right in the middle of a mixture of sand, car oil, and icewater run-off, in the middle of Sargeant Ave. I picked myself up off the street, boots and jacket-sleeves filling with water, and looked around for the lucky bystanders, sure that my misfortune had been someone else joy, expecting some applause or at least a smirk of acknowledgement from a considerably dryer passer-by. However, the other pedestrians continued on their way as though nothing at all had happened. What is the world coming to?


*I'm not being sarcastic here. You should hear about my Gertrude Stein end-of-term project. If I actually manage to figure out how to make a book squirt water (and/or ink, if I'm feeling sadistic) at unsuspecting readers, you'll be treated to several posts entirely about homework, I'm sure.

A rant you should steer clear of if you are at all uncomfortable with male anatomy (just like everyone at my university apparently)

First of all, I should say that me and my Children's Lit class don't always get along. Not just because I find myself making huge generalizations about a large percentage of the population (children) in order to answer any question in the class straightforwardly, but because I clearly come from a very different place than most of my classmates. I come from the ghetto. I come from a field of study where gender-bending literature is kind of the norm. I come from a Mennonite church. I come from a family of missionaries and ex-missionaries. Hell, I don't know where it comes from, but I come from a place where we don't constantly deny that penises exist.

Second of all, I would like to say something about penises. About half of the world's population has them. A large percentage of the other half of the population has had one inside of them at least once. They are referred to in a variety of ways every day: on the radio, in books, in movies, in t.v. shows. They are spray-painted on buildings. Any rod-like object has been likened to one at some point in time. Anyone who has seen the cinematic gem Superbad will have seen a variety of fascinating artistic interpretations of the penis and all that it stands for. Penises are real and they're everywhere, damn it!*

And yet today I found myself seated in a classroom full of 20-somethings who could not handle the mere suggestion of the word 'penis'. It was the discussion on puberty in literature. We divided into groups** and examined the classic 'growing body'-type texts that crop up in households when someone realizes that the only alternative is the dreaded Puberty Talk. Then we had to discuss whether or not these books were appropriate for children.

A girl held up a text aimed at adolescent boys and showed us a page with drawings that were 'really inappropriate'. She waved it around. Someone gasped. From my vantage point I could not make out what exactly had shocked them, so I asked what it was. There arose a surprising amount of giggling for a university classroom. The girl would not, could not, say what was on the page. She had to pass the book to me. People stared. People giggled. Someone handed me the book. I tried to open it so that the person across from me could see it, thinking she might actually want to join the class discussion, but she shook her head violently. I began to feel like quite the perverted creep, wanting to see this horrible thing that children should not read about. Nevertheless, I persevered in my misguided quest for the truth. I opened the book to the offending page.

The page was titled 'every boy is different'. It was a set of cartoon drawings of penises. Professionally flaccid penises. Penises of all shapes and sizes. Big penises, small penises, fat penises, thin penises, one that I would have thought was a bulbous nose if it weren't accompanied by two testicles. Ah. There it was, the shocking thing. Drawings of penises. In a book about male anatomy. The horror. And I was being either pitifully naive or very creepy for requesting to see this book about anatomy. In a class about anatomy.

These are the things I probably should have said:
"Where's the inappropriate drawing? All I see are drawings of penises in a book about penises."
Or
"Oh is it because all these penises clearly belong to white boys? This book is racist!" (hey, maybe that WAS why everyone was embarrassed)
Or
"If it's inappropriate for adolescent boys to see eachother's penises how come you're not protesting the open-air locker rooms a the YMCA?

In fact, I've decided to change the ending of this story. I looked at the page of penises. Then I said, "Yeah it's pretty offensive to see pictures of penises that aren't the size and length of my forearm. Thank God there's enough ads for internet porn that all these boys have probably seen what a proper penis looks like by now."
Everyone was shocked by my ability to use the word 'penis' in a sentence. They were aghast at my charmingly dirty sarcasm. Then they saw my point. They all nodded at my words of wisdom. Thus liberated from their body-shaming mindset, we decided that we should make our own book in response. We spent the rest of the class designing it. It is pop-up. It will be on bookstore shelves by May. Enjoy!

*What is more, they're pretty important. Where would we be without them? Half of the DNA that created each one of us came out of one. And think about urinals! If half of North America's population couldn't pee standing up, think how many more bathroom stalls we would need! Penises are space-savers. They can also be time-savers. Think how many more bathroom breaks would have to happen on car trips if certain members couldn't pee out the window (I kid. I can't think of any good that has come from a jet of urine shooting out of a car traveling at 100 km/hr).

**and I can give you a second (and much longer) rant on how much I hate group-work, so I was biased from the start. If I apologize enough for being judgmental no one can judge me, right?

Wow. There's really nothing going on in my life right now.

I got my hand stuck in the fridge today. Not in the fridge door, not in some terrifying and trap-like contraption inside the fridge, not behind the fridge or under the fridge or in the inner workings of the fridge, but inside the large, airy compartment of the Fridge Proper.

I had been in my bedroom, procrastinating busily and getting paint all over the bedclothes, when I suddenly became desperately, ravenously hungry. I had to make myself some dinner immediately, and so I went downstairs.

My only excuse, then, is that I must have been so faint with hunger that all of my capacity for logical thought was momentarily eclipsed by my need for sustenance. I had already prepared myself a tasty meal of starches and was replacing the large tupperware container of rice back in the fridge when I noticed that right behind the rice was a container of strawberry yogurt. My food was in the microwave and would take at least another 40 seconds to heat up, and I decided I couldn’t wait that long. Reaching over the container of rice, which was now firmly inside the fridge, I grabbed the yogurt and attempted to quickly whisk it out over the rice container’s lid.

Unfortunately, I had overestimated the amount of space available for yogurt container whisking. My yogurt-filled hand was suddenly wedged between the rice container and the light installed on the fridge’s ceiling. I panicked. There were at least 27 more seconds left on the microwave; I couldn’t relinquish my yogurt. More importantly, I actually couldn’t let go of the yogurt; my knuckles were compressed in such a way that I was unable to move my hand. I was going to be stuck there in the kitchen, one hand holding a yogurt container I could not access and the other hand a good two feet away from the microwave that held my dinner. It was maddening. I tried the age-old technique of pulling harder on my trapped hand, but to no avail. The microwave was about to beep and I suddenly was incapable of reaching it! I wrenched still harder at my imprisoned hand. Suddenlymy hand was free!

I spent the next 10 minutes eating yogurt off of various things in the fridge.

Stein 101

After all the confusion at the end of last semester, I ended up in this dizzying course on Gertrude Stein. We couldn't have a more perfect professor to teach the course. Half my notes are actually about her, and not the author at all. I haven't decided if this will be a problem or not.

"Who would like to hear me sing Gertrude Stein's favourite song? I don't know the tune but I thought I'd improvise."

"Who here knits? Raise your hands! I knit sometimes. When the Gulf War started I was so mad, so mad that a war like that could start in my lifetime that I just had to knit, and the only thing I could knit was a scarf so it ended up being very long . I wore it on the bus once but I had to wrap it around my neck so many times I started to strangle in it. So I gave it to the girl who lived next door and she turned it into a lovely dress!"

"There is no exam in this class! No quizzes! The quiz is the puzzlement of being together in her presence. If you'd like to form an orchestra, please do so."

"This is a lovely secretion you have made!" (in response to what I wrote for our in-class assignment)

"If we had some drums in here it would be helpful."

I want to be the sort of person who wants to go to poetry readings

"There should be a word for the things we do not because we want to but because we want to be the sort of people who want to" --e horne and j comeau

Ah, poetry readings. They're one of those things cultured people claim to enjoy. It's right up there with jazz4--or opera or classical music, or visiting art museums, or wine tastings where there isn't an open bar.

I want to be the sort of person who enjoys poetry readings. I should be; I'm a creative writer and ergo want to be the sort of person who wants to be involved in the local creative writing scene. In actuality, all I want is to get published. Unfortunately this would be greatly helped if I really did enjoy the local creative writing scene, because then when I went to open mic nights my heart would be in it, and I would probably try to make friends with the other participants instead of sitting in a corner without making eye-contact so that I can think up really nasty ways of criticising anyone who has the guts to (read: is self-important enough to) actually go up there and read something out loud, and eventually I could make good connections with people who know publishers and also can maybe give me tips on how to actually write a novel that doesn't suck. But I digress.

On the first Tuesday of every month, Aqua Books has an event called Speaking Crow. It is an open mic night, the sort of night where anyone who thinks they are anyone (regardless of who they actually are) is allowed to go up and perform their original pieces of poetry, provided it is under 3 minutes*. Some of the poetry is rather good. Some of it is notably bad. Aqua books always schedules a Feature reader**, presumably to guarantee that there will be one reader with at least professional-grade material, if not actually enjoyable material. But I'm being uncharitable. I must direct your attention back to the middle of this paragraph, where I conceded that some of the poetry was 'rather good'. Even this description must come with a disclaimer, though, which is this: when it comes to poetry, I am rather bad at enjoying it.

Appreciating poetry is either a skill I have not acquired or a gift I was not born with. When a poem begins, my mind begins to float in and out of consciousness. It can generally be found squatting in an alleyway on the other side of town when the most beautiful of poems reaches its crescendo. If I list a poem as 'one of my favourites', this means I regained awareness of my physical surroundings at a time when one profound line of poetry was being read, and I clung to that, spawning an appreciation for the entire poem from that one little scrap of poetry. "But my mother's voice was rain rich with lilacs, her look a field of brown oats, soft bearded."1 "and the days are not long enough, and the nights are not long enough, and life creeps by like a fieldmouse, barely shaking the grass" 2***

The fact of the matter is that I was at Speaking Crow this Tuesday, not because I wanted to be but because I wanted to want to be. The parts of it that I enjoyed I did not enjoy because I wanted to be the sort of person who enjoyed them****, but the parts I turned my nose up at I definitely scorned because I am NOT the sort of person who actually wants to be at poetry readings. The thing with poems is they generally occupy more than one line, and my mind can't often handle more than one or two. Ergo, I managed to catch about 20 little lines of poetry, ranging from "The heart is not a beating thing for you" (by Robert Hays) to "will you be part of the generation who turned the water black" (by Gag Me With a Spoon and Hypocrite).

Ergo, a poetry reading for me is one fairly brief poem with three-minute pauses between sentences:


Poetry is all about punishing people.
His eyebrows are white. His hair is black. He is 15 years old.
When you need something from him, you'll remember his name;
the heart is not a beating thing for you.

The pavement will grow no softer if you jump on it,
and the Earth produces a disaster to scratch at every irritation
will you be part of the generation who turned the water black?
When I looked at the sky, I saw clouds forming chains,
but we keep the heart to a perfect sound.


*And if you have ever had to sit through an open mic night where the limit was 10 minutes, you will appreciate how mercifully short Speaking Crow is.

**This week's feature reader was Jonathan Ball, who read from Ex Machina--a book of poetry arranged like a choose-your-own-adventure novel where if you actually follow the page directions the book will never end and you'll never read all of the poems inside it. He followed this with a few excerpts from Clockfire, a collection of plays that are impossible to perform. Personally, I would say Ex Machina is notable for the idea behind it though not for most of the poems within it, whilst Clockfire is actually worth reading (though I've been warned that the excerpts he read that were hilarious become terrifying if you read them to yourself)

***these were of course drawn from vague memory and I cannot guarantee accuracy.

****Or, put more plainly, I actually did enjoy them

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.