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.