Maybe it'll hook me up with Cher

So I discovered Chatroulette - the online equivalent of all the crazy people who accost you on the bus, train or in the park. Someone was brilliant enough to glean from anthropological observation that humans will voluntarily hook their webcams up with random people on the internet who also have webcams.

A webcam is apparently enough in common to start a conversation, which you or the other person can abort by pressing "next". The equivalent of disappearing from that guy next to you in the subway.

The Globe and Mail article I read was title "Naked Guy, click, Naked Guy," but I found more variety.

I was talking to my dietitian friend on skype and turned my webcam around so she could watch the people popping up on my screen - shirtless young man who looks drugged, four middle-eastern-looking men with stupid grins on a sunny couch, man wearing a fucking balaclava, fat man with mustache who looks pissed off that he can see his own picture staring back at him. Click, click, click.

While this is one of the dumbest things yet to be invented for the Internet, I know it'll be a highlight of future parties. I'm just not sure I'm ready for the other side to see me.

Swine, meet cow.

You've reached a weird stage in life when your professor lends you his wife's car so you can drive two hours to interview a farmer about cows.

With keys in ignition I stared at a crumpled poppy on the floor wondering how much was invested in this story. I refused to let this car be the collateral damage for a story about mini cows. Would not let that happen.

So I was cautious. But the car maxed out at 90 on the 417.

I heard my prof snickering while I watched my reflection in the rims of passing cars. I was the mini cow of the road, and the big cows would not be forgiving.

Where are you fellow mini cows?

An hour later, the sun was gone. It was 4:30 and I had no landmarks to tell me how far away I was from this farm. The farm was located on a road that did not exist on Google Maps and I'd lost the directions given to me by my interviewee.

I got to a juncture of a familiar road and called my subject. She said to turn left and that the road naturally curves to the right.

My car slid across the hardened mud road.

Suddenly I was driving through a forest. One lane, zero visibility, road speckled with stones that looked as sharp as the studs on a police speed belt.

Where the hell did these people live?

Picture a cow's intestines. Now consider taking a city car through one. That was this road.

I was afraid I was going to run over someone's goat or get shot by a hunter, but the prospect of turning around scared me even more. The forest had the ominousness of the forest in DiCaprio's The Beach where they would let people go septic and die.

I got to a dead end, cried bullshit in vain because none appeared, then inched back and forth in my bright yellow buggy and replayed the trip down in reverse.

Naturally curves to the right ... except where it doesn't.

No headlights will suffice.

I arrived in pitch darkness with the stupid optimism only journalism students can sustain. No tripod, shitty flash, and 'hey!' you've got a wonderful rustic farm! I love the no lights everywhere!

I traipsed into the cow pen with my interviewee and her grand daughter.

Fellow mini moos! I cried. Hello! Mwah mwah mwah . . .

They darted sideways like I've never seen cows do. An ability unknown to my car. They stared at me like I'd barged into the meeting of five pregnant women at the church gossip club - with an aloof cold suspicion.

I've never seen one like that, I thought I heard one of them say. What the hell is that?

I slowly drew my camera up to my eyes, causing them to wince from the multiple flash required to focus in the darkness. I could barely see what I was shooting, and could never be sure when the camera would snap.

Most of my photos look like I was mauled by a cow: A sideways photo of cow's cloudy eye, a hoof, the side of my interviewee's head and a cow's flank.

"They're very docile" my interviewee said. "But the bull's a bull." She laughed. "You can never trust them."

The bull stared at me and I felt it taking apart my limbs into all the cuts of beef it would eventually become.

Dexters are small - they eat half as much as a regular cow, and are only about 3-4 feet tall, but we're still talking 300-pounds of animal - most of which was pregnant.

I decided to try to get some photos near the barn where there were a couple incandescent bulbs. My interviewee and her grand daughter went inside as it was getting cold.

"Watch out for the electric fence," she said. "See that orange ribbon?"
"No."
"Just don't touch anything."

With little surprise, the cows were not more welcoming to me when I was alone. I was beginning to think they were plotting my death via heart attack. All they needed to do was charge towards me and Finito Laura.

An electric fence on one side. Four angry cows on the other.

I hid behind the gate and pried opened the chicken coop hoping there was room. A peacock said something snobby that I didn't quite catch.

Suddenly there was mooing. All I could hear was the reverberations of the cow closest to me.

I drove two hours for you cow! I will get your cute little noggin in my camera NOW.

Was it the lingering H1N1 that they didn't like?

I looked up at the side of the barn and saw it. These cows weren't just docile and smart.

"Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy" I thought I read on the side of the barn.

What followed was a blur. We may have re-enacted Animal Farm.

The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

Despite the lingering cough, the swine has not got me yet. I swear.

Only the swine can make me blog again...

Two months ago I decided to quit blogging for a while.

Now the swine has got me and my throat feels like the War of 1812.

So instead of talking, I'm going to blog. I'm going to be a swiny blog douche who will refer people to my blog when they ask me how I am.

I've spent the last 10 minutes in the kitchen stalking as though in withdrawal for a huge serated knife. Damn those neo citron packages. Child proof is apparently equal to the stabbing yourself in the arm.

I feel like now would be the perfect time to be the star in one of those Canadian Heritage Moments where someone is laying on a bed with Scarlet fever. Or H1N1 as it were.

Everything about it has been about the countdown. Countdown to vaccine, countdown to you being able to get the vaccine, countdown to getting it, and now counting the hours to it becoming hellish and making me want to crawl into a coffin.

My friend sent me this lovely article titled "what to expect when you're expecting swine flu" which was great and annoying at the same time, because writing up a chronology of swine flu symptoms to serve humanity was the only coherent plan I've had since rolling into fetal position.

The article promised me more cheer to come, including "your friends will abandon you."

I've been one-upped on the article but it also made me start to doubt whether I had the swine. I mean, I most definitely have the flu - but this hasn't been worse than my last flu when I was actually convinced death had come.

Sore throat of death? no way. Sure I slept for 35 hours straight - but that was yesterday! so over that.

I started watching Breaking Bad - about a guy who has lung cancer who in the first episode poisons a couple guys with Phosphane gas.

I realized that my coughing began to sound eerily similar to both the cancer guy and the dude who manages to survive the gas.

This is what the article says about the sore throat:

It will make you ask yourself questions like, "If I knew I would have this sore throat for the rest of my life, would I choose to go on living?" And the answer will be, "No." It's every kind of sore throat (scratchy, itchy, stinging, burning, dry, sharp) all rolled into one."

Fantastic. I can feel it coming on and I'm hoping I can just collapse. There's no way that I'm recording my voice this week for any reporting assignments. I will sound like a poor defeated sheep caught in a snowstorm (intermittently blasted with furnace air as this apartment would have it).

Why do I keep sweating?

The bridge looks smaller downstream

While blasting down the highway on the outskirts of the city, lightning flickering like a hairlight on the horizon, I noticed my deflated dinghy in the bed of the truck bobbing up and down.

It was barely tied down. Rather, it was secured with the verve of a sleepwalker tying his shoe, the yellow rope halfheartedly draped over the 30-pound inflatable boat.

I was afraid first that it might fly out and cause an accident - but then my fears turned to a police officer pulling me over for my East German rope and attitude. In the GDR, this rope would have been the only available rope, these knots the only allowable knots, and my resourceful attitude commended. Lifting up the boat, the cop would have discovered my shirt and bra -- likely still drenched and smelling like North Saskatchewan river mud.

And I would explain this is how I run my life. I leave muggy clothing under a dinghy in the flatbed of a truck for a week.

A perfectly acceptable situation. Like fresh muffins from the oven.

The bra and shirt had served a purpose. On the dinghy, they were the mermaid sculpture on the bow, trying vainly to keep dry, where nothing could safely stay dry.

The water world journey had started with great promise. We had lifejackets. We had wine. We had time. We heckled old men fishers at the shoreline.

The problem was I'd decided to be an optimist. I chose to see the world through rose coloured wine and that led us downstream to a fantasia island of mud, the current beating us back, and back, and back.

I ditched all top garments in favour of just the lifejacket. My two friends also abandoned the idea of staying dry. After running and sliding in the mud for a while, and then letting the mud swallow us like quicksand so we had to fight to get out, we decided to row back.

With my pink bra at the bow, we set off. This dingy was powered by female vitality. And the brawn of three girls nudging a dinghy against the current like crocs nuzzling a zodiac.

Push the sun down past the horizon and spin the clock forward. Three hours later, we looked more like rugged wanna-be boat hands in Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

I also had no shirt. Or bra. And was forced to borrow clothes too small for me so that I had to wear a shirt as a skirt. Together with my thick button-up coat, I looked a lot like a beggar from 19th-century Russia.

In our new garments, we headed to the small-town bar, ordered massive amounts of fries and chicken fingers and learned about how Van Gogh painted over earlier paintings from the flat screen TV.

And didn't talk. Every muscle was crying like an infant. Saying even "beer" exerted energy none of us wanted to spend.

We briefly considered staying the night at the bar/hotel, before hopping into our respective vehicles.

My one friend said she washed her clothes today, and got her non-river clothes dirty after washing them all together.

I've avoided taking that road, hoping rain water will wash them out first.

Life as a white nehiyaw

It was moments after the 80-year-old harmonica player had accepted his lime green snorkel that I heard our director calling us.

"Nehiyawak!"

Hearing the round-up call past the fiery stage of the talent show, some neuropathway in our brains lit up. Nehiyawak. It was an identity now ingrained, and we scampered across like rabbits to show what good Nehiyawak we truly were.

She led us to the woodpile. Motors revved, and the car lights blazing in the distance backlit the timber and our walking paths so all we could see were one another's silhouettes.

"Take some wood and put it in the truck."

We had crashed the party hours earlier, so we assumed this was a logical finalee.

We four 20-something girls, white as plaster, dipped our hands into the woodpile. We'd learned the word for firewood - it was different from a living tree, as one was animate and the other inanimate, but at that moment I could not remember.

I wrapped the logs in my blanket and pushed them under the truck's tarp, dusting off my hands, and taking in the last few moments of our glory at the reserve's annual culture camp, not far from where were camping.

First prize at the talent show.

Ok, one of our people was judging the talent show, and he awarded everyone a five out of five - jingle dancers, drummers, karaoke singers, jiggers - and our posse, the so-called language group, who will happily count to 10 on command. Some participants were awarded larger prizes, likely collected from forgotten piles meant to be returned and now long past the exchange date.

The cowboy-hat MC went around the fire pit yelling: Gold Medals! Gold medals for all! It's all tied up!

Some participants were laced with I Love Soccer keychain necklaces. The 80-year-old harmonica player waited patiently at the end of the line.

The MCs wife was speaking quickly: "We can't give that to him!"
"We have to give it to him!" The MC said, as though ordering a last charge at battle. "We have to give it to him! It's the only thing left!"

The MC placed the brand-new lime green snorkel into the shaking hands of the old man and began explaining what it was.

Our judge was laughing hysterically.

It seemed the joke wasn't just on us.

Before darkness fell, but as cold was setting in, our troupe had regaled the crowd, and the ring of spectators had fallen silent. The fire had continued to swagger in the wind.

Manoya. White person. Not I.

One by one, we negated our white pasts, white tastes, white urban sensibilities. We shed them like chains thrown over our heads with the force of our teeth. Wah! Kaya! With balletic pantomimes of Czars welcoming foreign royalty, we addressed the crowd in Cree.

eh-kasi-kway-an, eh-kasi-kway-in, eh-kasi-kway-ak...

The stars must have swirled in glee to hear our sparkling Cree. Firebugs must have exploded, and flowers pushed up through the earth, bending their ears to the ground.

On the ride home, I reflected on our show.

Guys, do have any idea what we sounded like to the people who understood Cree?
Um. What do you mean?
Let me paint you a picture.

Rewind: A bouquet of white girls amble into the show ring sporting exaggerated mannerisms, looking as though they are trying to describe overweight carry-on items to clerks who speak only Kurdish.

Our director sets up the show by explaining our talent and the fact we hail from all over the province. Obviously we are a cosmopolitan crew of prodigies, aged 11 to 30.

One by one, we bedazzle the crowd with our overweight baggage charade.

"I wash my face!" (pause for dramatic effect)
"You wash YOUR face!" (check for applause)
"We all wash our faces!" (scan for appreciative laughter)

One by one, we proved our Cree-ness. We were nehiyawak. We knew how to wake-up, run, and eat. We could name the colour of the sky, the grass, and the teepees. We could count to 10, at least in theory.

Why was no one laughing?

Maybe the crowd wasn't appalled, like I imagined. Maybe their jaws were shocked into a hyperactive state of glee. It's unclear. In the ring, I was focused on saying my five conjugations correctly, and miming so that any mistake would be covered by an accidental slap in the face. I suspect I may have said the same conjugations twice, as though really insisting that I was washing my face. My comrades played along, since we were a chorus line, each conjugation echoed in solidarity of purpose.

We would wash our faces. We would eat, and drink, and pray, and smoke. And so would you. And so would all of us.

There are times when learning a language when you wake up to what you are saying.

For me, it was after being gifted my Indian name: Kanita Masonayaget. We had gone around the circle that day, dubbing each of us non-Crees with names like "Running cat" "Plant woman" and "The one who likes to play with balls."

I think something was lost in translation in the last one about loving soccer.

As our instructors discussed each of our names, they mulled over some of the descriptive ones that fell flat when said in Cree: Plant foot, foot woman, beaver box.

I couldn't remember my name correctly. It came out more like Kanita Masochistic, which often felt true.

One of my instructors was determined to exorcize my pronunciatory demons. He positioned himself on one side in a running-back stance, yelling into one ear.

"KA-NI-TA!"
Kanita?
"KA-NI-TA!"
Kanita?

Times that by 54.

MASO-NAYA-GET
Masonayaget?
MASO-NAYA-GET
Masonayaget?

Times that by 105

KANITA MASONAYAGET!
Kanita Masonayaget?
KANITA MASONAYAGET!
Kanita Masonayaget?
KANITA MASONAYAGET!

I realized, after a few repetitions, that he was instructing me to believe in what I was saying: the one who writes well.

It feels weird to write about my writing confidence level, but let's say that it often feels somewhere between failing to shoot stationary deer targets and sewing ball gowns.

I AM THE ONE WHO WRITES WELL!
I am the one who writes well?
I AM THE ONE WHO WRITES WELL!
I am the one who writes well?

Eventually I got it. And while I continued to feel weird introducing myself in such a forward way, maybe it boosted my confidence a little. The Cree elders certainly appreciated my saying it in Cree.

And maybe it offered a small excuse as to why my speaking was so bad. I swear, my writing is good.

Turning, turning

I can't sleep and the sleeping potion bought in Germany has made my body tingly. The instructions were written only in German, and my German is bad. I guess my time in Germany was better spent drinking Jaeg at Turkish bistros and tippling through art shows and soccer games. Stories not meant to be revealed here.

There's a moth scuttling across my screen. Now it's hopping. I'm chasing it with the mouse.

Tomorrow I drive three hours to do Master's research. I'm in suspended disbelief and can't get my thoughts to shut up. My brain is an ever-turning search light of a ship anchored at sea, the light trying to sweep across some buoy of comforting logic.

Maybe I should take off now -- get there at 5 a.m. eyes like saucers, breath spritzed with a hint of German sleeping potion tasting suspiciously like Jaegermeister.

My eyes are always tired-looking these days. I need botox if I hope for anyone to ID me again. I read about employees of one company in the U.S. who were laid off and got a special severance: botox injections.

I hear it numbs emotions. Good call, company.

I must find my mic stand, and phone numbers, and make business cards. And start caring about my appearance.

Everything that will promote me to a cushy anchor job.

How the West was fun

We knew we were in cowboy country when we passed an electric wheelchair with vanity plates.

"Drive it like you stole it" it read. The scooter was strapped to the back of a pickup.

We had driven eight hours, stopping first in Vanscoy where I found a magazine called Cowboys & Indians. It taught me how to wear turquoise jewelry and to tell apart different styles of cowboy hats. Its cover story on John Wayne proved interesting only for as long as we could figure out how to hook up the iPod port to the car stereo. The prospect of ordering a year's worth of the mag for our Calgary friend was tempting, but they minted them in the Yanky West and charged $20 to Canadians, likely for transport via chuckwagon, fuelled by yeehaws.

Our car on the other hand was fuelled by the looks of disgust and appalled glances of Huckleberry as I documented the drive via my digital voice recorder.

"Dear diary . . . " I breathed into my recorder. "We are now on highway number seven, flat and unexpressive . . ."

In Drumheller, we toured dim galleries of dinosaur bones and fossils encased in 4-inch gold picture frames. It was like viewing a private collection at a mansion where each room had a special name: The fossil "libry" The bone "gaaalery" The sea atrium. I got a picture of Huckleberry with his head in the maws of a Piranha skeleton the size of a cot. He can check that off his life to-do list.

After a hall of Darwin's sketches, we walked into a tunnel with a glass floor. Under our feet were the manifestations of pictures drawn by 3-year-olds. Organisms familiar if it weren't for the teeth, or the extra legs, or the odd shape. We were surrounded by mutant water insects and some were our ancestors. I imagined photoshopping some of my forebearers (who likely had the capability to self-spawn and eat simultaneously) into our latest family photos for Christmas cards.

I marveled at how far we've come in evolution as I sipped my Starbucks on the wooden walkway overlooking the badlands and the museum. Coffee . . . mmm . . . thank you dinosaurs for giving us oil . . . so we can make Starbucks.

I was confronted with my own limited evolution when we arrived in Calgary with no idea where to find the Stampede. Our local friend didn't know and Internet was on the lam. He called his brother for advice. We followed him like three ashamed sheep to the Park & Ride.

"You get off when all the stupid cowboys get off," he said.

We did our best to fit in: being fake was part of the ditty. The only real cowboys were behind the corral. For us, it was button-up plaid, cowboy hats and cigars.

The C-train took about 30 minutes, and I witnessed the two-minute half-life of a tram headed to the Stampede. Each stop doubled the number of hyped-up cowboys and girls filing onto the train who prevented fresh air from circulating.

Virtually everyone was paying some small homage to the west, whether with a hat, boots, plaid, or all the above.

Just inside the gates was a faux western town circling a treed picnic area. We stood by the blacksmith shop and watched a clown cowboy on stilts angle through the crowd. He had a braided whip in one hand and snapped it like a firecracker. That answered my question of potential heavyweights taking him down.

Hasslers, just like animals rights protesters, will never take down the cowboy clown.

Even though the Stampede is somewhat clownish and precarious, PETA protesters have had no luck shutting down any of the events.

Partly it's tradition, and partly it's the claim that animals injuries are rare. For more info, GOOGLE.

As we sat and watched the rodeo events, I tried to feign indifference to the cow's plight (Think Frau Farbissina listening to Dr. Evil and Scott argue after they meet).

Between the three of us, we encompassed all possible attitudes towards the Stampede: horror; appallment; excitement; indifference; glee.

The MC upped the tension by announcing the various ailments of cowboys as they mounted the bucking horse or bull.

"And this next cowboy, from Texas, who's all here from Texas? he's got a broken back! A slipped disc. Let's have a round of applause!"

In the large TV monitor, we could watch the cowboy's expression as he slid his hand under the bull's riding strap or get a good grip on the horse's rope.

It was an expression not of fear, per se, but his muscles knowing instinctively what would happen when he nodded his head and the gate flew open. His body tensed, teeth clenched like those of human remains found buried in Pompeii lava, contorted in pain.

I bet they were sweating like a volcano too. One guy fell off his bull, but in his effort to remain on, ended up under the 2000 pound animal as it bucked and stamped its feet in a high stakes game of Dance Dance Revolution.

He scampered away with his neck craning back at the bull, then he fell onto his knees, hands folded in prayer to the sky.

He is not the first to brush injury. For 100 years, the Calgary Stampede has brought the lore of western ranchers into the competitive ring. Wild horses needed to be tamed on the frontier, and cowboys needed to teach them not to buck. Some horses naturally buck more than others, though, and since half the points allotted to the cowboy go to the horse's performance, it's important the horse buck well. Most rodeos ban the use of any equipment that harms or discomforts the horse, and cowboys testify to horses not performing well if they are in pain. The bucking horses simply don't like anyone riding them. They're bred to buck off whoever mounts.

Clench those teeth, cowboy.

As Huckleberry looked appalled at the calf roping event (another skill from ranching days) my SK ex-pat friend was underdoing a gradual chemical change. His skin was becoming as red as chafed cowboy thighs. The sweat dripped down his face. I had no idea three hours had gone by until I saw how burned Ex-pat was.

It looked as though he had dipped both arms in red dye up to his T-shirt sleeve line.

That basically ended the day. On our way to the train we got stuck in the equivalent of a cattle run - hundreds of people trying to funnel through a narrow passage like sand in an hour glass. We were the sand that refused to funnel.

The tram ride home was virtually silent, and very empty. Stampede had demanded energy we no longer could afford until we found some heavy duty aloe vera. Preferably in a "run through the sprinklers" format.

Ex-pat friend descended into his basement suite and refused to come out for the rest of our visit. Huckleberry and I bought some industrial strength sunburn anesthetic.

It was our parting gift.

The German Smorgasbord was worth it

Bea and I pushed our noses against the faux waterfall.

Electronic drops illuminated our cheeks with blue light.

"I have a good feeling we are going to leave here ruined," I said.

It was the lights and sounds that reminded me of Disneyland. Boops, beeps, and chimes... a conference hall of games themed with The Little Mermaid, Inca Adventures, and the Wild West.

The child in me perked up.

The ceiling was not a ceiling at all, but a volcanic wasteland tipped upside-down. Craters and pustules shone above the dings and blinking of the machines.

I was here to surf Bea's free tickets to the Canadian Open golf tourney at a brand new course 30 minutes outside the city. It came with a $10 voucher to the casino - the only attractive part of this whole idea.

The golf had been unexciting. We were the only spectators, and had no idea who anyone was, so after whispering for a while about our options, we decided to trail a set of golfers across a lawn that had the texture of renegade underarm hair - potentially comfortable in a bed of nails kind of way.

After giving my cheeks and hands a nice exfoliation on the green, I scampered to catch up with our herd.

They were literally beating around a bush for a lost ball.

Having never golfed myself, nor having much knowledge of the game, I delighted in the opportunity to help.

I spotted the white ball that was the key to my belonging in the herd and presented it to one of the golfers.

"Is this it?" I said, anticipating the yell to the other hunters that the hunt was over.
"No. If you see a golf ball DO NOT pick it up."
"Oh. Sorry. I... I..."

I put it back. Only golfers would think it fitting to replace a golf ball into the middle of a bush.

I discovered that whispering outside is not my forte. I felt like I had to take on the psyche of a gopher: forced to freeze in my tracks if a golfer was preparing to swing, lest I distract him.

"Are you as crazy as you look?" one of the golfers asked me, a father caddying for his son.

At least 15 reasons why golf is a ridiculous game jumped around inside my head.

"I guess so!"

The golfers took their shots, and my slow-reaction time meant I never followed the ball's flight path. I was too fixated on the golfers themselves. Who were these strange creatures? What was their agenda? I hoped none of them was out to change the world. Never do I want a golfer prophet to bring grace to the land.

"Tremble not! Thou shalt take thy caddy to thy birthplace and there will come a star that will lead you to the promised land of Astroturf and khakis!"

In this case, it led us to the casino.

The illumination from casino games is not flattering on anyone's face. Because the players sit on tall stools, the light beams up like a flashlight under the face, sketching dark rings under each eye, outlining the gravity lines from the nose to the bottom of the chin.

I felt no more at home here than I did on the golf course, and there were probably as many people staring at us. Bea and I ambled through the rows of games, and I read the titles out loud:

Uncle Jess's Shootout Galley! PollyPocket's Dollhouse Teaparty . . . A Squaw's Revenge . . . Wolf Hunt . . .

Each machine operated the same way -- you filled it with your bills and a button blinked inviting you to push it, triggering the wheel.

It required about as much skill as plugging a parking meter, and its payoff was about the same.

Bea and I decided to play $10. We each put our first $5 in a $1 slot machine.

I turned the crank. My stomach leapt! Lines from Percy Shelley mingled with the beeps and bops of the surrounding slot machines.

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,

Pestilence-stricken multitudes!

I lost, but giggled and squealed for effect.

Bea was winning. $1, $1.50, 30 cents . . . the more she won the quicker her hand slammed down on the blinking button.

I reached for the crank to try another hand.

"Why isn't it working?" I asked.

We both stared at it. An older man sitting next to Bea glanced at us uncomfortably.

"I think that's actually a $5 machine . . ." he said.

Ouuuuuu.

Well then.

I think I'm moving on.

Bea used up her $10 while I hummed and hawed over my next conquest.

Would it be Wolf Hunt or Lucky Larry's Lobster Mania?

The Lobster one looked more friendly than the machine with a growling wolf on it. It's hard to make starfish and lighthouses look foreboding.

This time I got luckier. I won 2 free turns, then 5, then 250!

250 turns times 5 cents . . .

I cashed out and looked at my money voucher: $13.80

Karma had redeemed me.

I promised Karma that I would name my next hamster after it, alongside a hamster called Irony, and walked out $4 richer.

Coming out ahead meant I had to celebrate with a 3-course meal and beer.

The joy of gambling probably put me in the hole -- and not in the golfing kind of way.

But as Shelley would say, if winter comes, can spring be far behind?

J'adore

Welcome to J'adore -- formerly Laura's Page of Plenty. I got sick of the old name. This page is all about things I love and I thought J'adore is a nice way to incorporate my love of pretentious French accents.

I haven't yet done any Sarkozy impersonation interviews, but I feel equipped after watching Saturday Night Live Bill Hader's impression of Keith Morrison:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBeI-A8PHWc&feature=related

Unfortunately, the funnier skit is not available on Youtube yet.

The Wild Moose Hunt

I've joked about how my job is sometimes a wild goose hunt. Yesterday, it was a wild moose hunt.

Somehow, a bull moose (up to 1500 pounds, 7 ft) regaled itself in the city without anyone noticing. Until it laid down in a woman's garden in a central area of the city.

This is the 3rd moose in a week.

How did it go unnoticed? It probably wandered in at night. I don't kid myself that this is a party town, but come on, really? A moose, and nobody awake to notice?

We may as well fax terrorist ninjas for a coup, since they'll be able to completely surround and inhabit the city before anybody wakes up. We need our precious zzz in this province, and damn anyone trying to disturb them.

That's my attitude anyway. I wasn't up to see the moose. But I also don't live in that area.

I found out from the police where the moose had showed up in a garden and headed to that block. I had no idea whose garden it was, but I had a good feeling about this hunt.

I even found a trail of blood.

But I also talked to a lot of people who looked at me and laughed. It's not often you knock on someone's door and the first thing you say is, Did you happen to see a moose? Some people asked whether I'd lost mine.

A couple guys were in their back-alley garage building something with wood. They invited me over for moose burgers later.

I finally found the woman. She led me out back and showed me where the moose had laid in her garden. The rhubarb was partially flattened and moose tracks everywhere! This reporter had uncovered the best photo op of the day, and had absolutely no camera.

I wanted to lay down in the rhubarb, feel what that moose had felt, its flanks heaving in and out, scared shitless of this uneven treeless labyrinth. But then I saw the trail of blood. It wasn't drops because the moose obviously had been running. They were spatters, the kind you might see in an abstract painting.

They continued down the entire block, and were even on a woman's car.

Poor moose.

I forgot to mention that by this point, I knew the moose had been tranquilized. It wasn't the moose I was after, so much as the people, cars, and fences it had laid waste to in its path.

The woman who had found it in her garden at 6 a.m. told me she had gone back to reading the paper. "What can you do?" she said. Indeed.

This city never has moose. And now it's had three moose in a week.

One woman thinks it's the dryness. It hasn't rained enough to make the ground wet in about 2 months.

The moose may have been trying to find some food. It probably injured itself in its frantic gallop through the city. What made him choose that woman's house? No fences on the side. A welcoming yellow bungalow.

At least it didn't do what a cop said happened once with a deer: the deer plunged into someone's living room and started running around inside.

I can't imagine a deer ever feeling at home in a living room.

Moose used to be my favourite animals. I often forget this fact until I see my collection of moose plush toys and printed-out emails from mooses_are_cute@yahoo.com. I still think they are cute, but am glad I can sleuth in the safety of knowing the creature is sound asleep in its favourite bog.

Or desert plains, as it were.

Where is the damn rain? My gin-inspired rain dances have not been working.

Cranks for the cranky

You may have seen me at the side of the road today. I apologize for thrusting an ethical dilemma of whether to stop for me into your life. I guess a girl in high heels on her cell phone with her arm thrust out like a heil next to bumper to bumper traffic in rush hour is less appealing an image than it's made out to be.

And sorry, cops who drove by, I realize hitchhiking may be illegal. Maybe that's why no one stopped. Or was it the manic look in my eyes as I tried to dial a cab with my cell phone and accidentally called a friend instead?

Yes! Oh God, thank God you picked up! I need a cab right away in front of the Mendel.
. . . Um, I think you dialed wrong.

I hung up to see "Friend from Shakespeare class" blinking at me. Shit. I just cold called a guy I haven't talked to in months, who probably would have been happy to hear from me if I hadn't just tried to order a cab from him.

I eventually sidled up to a woman in a huge white SUV waiting to turn, and she offered me a ride in the same direction she was going in.

*Faith in humanity semi-restored*

And there was still the possibility of making 20 minutes of my 30 minute massage. I realize the irony of throwing myself in front of a car in order to get to a massage. What some would call stupid, I call "perseverance to succeed."

I had left my truck lights on all day, ultimately because the squirrels need to see what they're doing in the bush. I'm practically PETA. I would appreciate at least a hand-crank like in the old days when the radiator started overflowing (does that happen?) and they just threw open the hood and cranked 'er up. That would have been useful on my cellphone too, when it died yesterday and I couldn't find my friend.

Cranks! It's a back-up plan every device should have... so Sony, Mazda, Telus, NASA take heed. Cranks are the future, because in the future, people will rely more and more on technology, and less and less on their real memories. I consider myself ahead of my time.

R-ice weddings in May

This morning as I drove to work, I saw white chrysalids sliding towards earth, exploding on the ground.

Saskatchewan is special this way. We don't have a flurry of flower petals that fall from the heavens in springtime. We have ice pellets that explode on our windshields as they fall from the elms.

I thought about taking a rowing course in May, but I would have ended up taking out a boat called Louis "ice-breaker" Riel, slapping the ice with a paddle like a beaver's tail while wobbling in my sliver of a boat.

My friend's baby niece said "snow" for the first time this week.

I think farmers were probably saying a few choice words before "snow" which the baby will probably learn soon.

If only airline policies extended to other inconveniences

Canada's airlines have downed the ante.

They've come up with their own bill of passenger rights to counter the one proposed by an MP. This is the equivalent of making up my own punishment as a kid when I did something bad, hoping that my somber tone and profligate use of sighs and adjectives would trick my mother into thinking that I really thought my self-imposed punishment was harsh.

But the airlines have some right to complain. The private members' bill could impose fines of $500 an hour on airlines who delay flights, and require them to provide food after 2 hours and shelter for overnight delays.

This sounds great, until you realize that most delays are caused by mechanical problems, not the whims of extravagant heiress' who send their chihuahuas on private flights to Cancun.

"Mais non! I will nat allow zat flight to Winnipeg! Gingerbread cakes wants to visit Iqualuit. Where is my silk moomoo?"

Once this legislation is passed, airlines will basically have incentives to
a) fly despite mechanical errors and/or rush the job
b) crash, thereby killing all the passengers they could owe thousands upon thousands of dollars to, depending on the size of the flight.
c) shaft all small flights, since the incentive would be to avoid paying gigantic fines.

Frankly, I have had more than my fair share of airline fuck-ups. But I've discovered one Canadian airline's secret - something they don't publicize, but honour without fail.

When I ask, the flight attendant gives me a noble nod. It's a code word not many people know. A word that inspires both joy and fear in the hearts of flight attendants around the globe. A word that I wield like a sword every time the airline asks me to sit on the tarmac for 3 hours, after delaying the flight 5 hours before that.

The word is gin.

They will provide it free of charge.

Not many people know the airline's current "Code of Ethics" but this is one chapter verse that I know: thou shalt provide pitiful passengers with free booze in the hopes they shall lay dormant for the rest of the flight.

And it works. On me at least. Half that little bottle of Beefeater and I am drooling on a stranger's shoulder, mumbling the words to La Cucaracha.

Imagine, on the other hand, if this were the policy with other inconveniences.

Bus late? Have a transfer and a Caesar.
Your library book recalled? Take a gin and aspirin.
Children screaming while you wait somewhere in line? Have this pitcher of wine.

Of course, you might really start to like inconveniences, but when they're inevitable, why not enjoy them?

That's what they said at Christmas.

How I got here

I've been in a coma from reality. I barely made my plane yesterday after spending all afternoon lounging on a hill next to Parliament, flashing the nation's capital every time I forgot to adjust my skirt. It was a favour. Parliament hasn't had much action since December.

Jack and Jill (that's me) sat under the statue of Champlain, trying to avoid slipping lest we roll down the steep grassy hill and reach the bottom prickling with used syringes with cigarette butts in our hair. Quebec was looking as dour as a Charles Dickens novel, no doubt to piss off Canada. The 80-foot smoke stack was quite obviously giving the Library of Parliament the finger, while the other buildings were doing their best to be rusty, windowless, and grey.

I probably flashed them too at some point. They deserve something in the passive-aggressive defiance category.

I felt I could be generous, since things seemed to be working out in my favour. Sometimes the world decides to knight you, and doesn't slip and fall and accidentally behead you.

My cabbie was a jester knight sent to my aid, though I contend he wasn't a real cabbie. He was there to offset the bad karma brought to me by my prof who's given me another extension on an assignment originally due in March. The 14th extension now? It's what journalism school would be like in hell - the same, but with never-ending extensions that prevent you from handing stuff in.

So God sent the cabbie into Shawarma King, and there he met a young woman and man, and even though he had not eaten in days, his sense of goodwill overcame him and he invited them into his wagon.

As the young man got out, the cabbie used his spiritual powers to roll down the window so they could say goodbye.

"Do not be sad, behold the galloping horse on the pay-o-meter how it speeds and slows with the rolling of the car."

The girl was overcome with laughter and tears simultaneously.

End of psalm 1

Begin Modern English version

When we got to the airport he bitch parked in the wheelchair zone, grabbed a cart and hucked my half dozen bags onto a cart. He raced inside, leaving the cab trunk wide open, me chasing after him. Inside was an enormous line-up, at least an hour wait. Just follow me, he said, and I followed him into the empty Executive Class queue. He was going to make up for more bad Karma than I thought.

"Have you done this before?" I asked.

"Executive class deserves executive service," he said, winking. The galloping horse wasn't the only thing running on diesel.

We were ushered to the next attendant, and before the lady could ask for my name, he was already throwing my bags onto the belt and waving his palm at the woman, saying, "it's ok, now, it's ok."

Then he bowed out, leaving me to deal with the no-bullshit attendant whose lecture I accepted with puppy eyes.

The passenger at the attendant next to mine overheard my situation - and where I was headed, and helped me pull old tags off my bags.

"Not you, ma'am!" my airline rep snapped, but the woman tore away.

Who were these people?

The woman caught me by the arm as I pulled away and asked if I'd take a piece of carry-on for her.
"What is it?" I asked, as though her answer were the deciding factor.
"Roller-blades."
I did a little head bobble at my existing carry-on load and apologized.
"Why don't you wear them?"

So I'm back on the prairies, and have already written a story about canola. Just ask how many excess tons of canola SK produces each year, and prepare to be shocked and amazed. More trivia coming your way, as I catch up on the past week's absent blog posts.

Bodies are like Light Brights

I've been worried about my memory and general stupidity lately.
"Lately" may include the past three years. Episodes like the tropical
bird gouging me in the eye after I tried taking a photo with it in its
cage was one. Missing flights, another. Never fixing my bedroom light
so every time I unscrew my light by hand, I burn off some of the
feeling in my finger tips. That probably counts.

I've never been one for supplements, but I've always been curious. I mean, Viagra is a supplement. It works. Maybe there is a drug that can make me stop boiling water and leaving the house.

Like a good Gen Y-er I strolled through the supplement aisle to fix me a batch of smarty pants.

Erring on the side of safety, I chose the Children's Learning Formula.
I was hoping it would help me learn about other people's favourite
colours and keep track of how many sleeps till Christmas.

I've been downing Children's Learning Formula and B100 Complex
for a week.

Conclusions:

- Children's Learning Formula: like eating a handful of bath beads.
Friends think it makes me manic; I think it makes me happy. Possibly too much hassle for a placebo effect.

- B100 Complex: Inspired by the "Be 100% Complex," a mental disorder
characterized by the desire to be at 100% mental and physical capability at all times. Users may occasionally think of supplements downed with beer as a meal.

-The conclusion that I may have wasted $17 but at least I'll be arguing from experience now.

But no effects are better than bad effects, am I right? You will after you read this. (Credit to Dave for the link.)

Chantix is one of the more disturbing drugs. Side effects include
"sleep disturbances" which may manifest as horrible life-like dreams.

The doctor probably didn't go too in depth on that one. If he had, he
would have said, "Hey this drug will help you stop smoking. Now watch
this David Cronenberg film to learn about the side-effects."

Darkness, demons, inanimate objects coming alive, you know, typical common side effects for this line of drugs. Those things won't make you want to smoke will they?

Guest Post by Carmen Sandiego

I wrote a whole post about how I was paid in coupons to visit a strip club, knowing that I could never publish it. The Internet is not about being stalked, but about creating the paranoia that you're being stalked. And I fully embrace that paranoia, especially when it comes to people who currently or futuristically employ me.

Yes, some people employe me in the future. And some people write employ with an e.

I probably haven't met these employers yet, so your guess is as good as mine as to who they are. I'm really hoping it's the tornado chasing branch of National Geographic that gets paid in coupons because its employees are being laid off left and right.

Stay tuned for more unsubtle hints about said missing post!

Segue!

I remember thinking how great it would be to meet my future husband as a 10-year-old. I didn't mean become a child wife. I just meant meet the other 10-year-old I would eventually buy a house with.

This was a very romantic idea, because of its plausibility. Maybe I had met that boy. Maybe it was that kid throwing potatoes at the dumpster when we went through the car wash.

[Cue part of Laura's brain responsible for delusions/Cue Laura's brain]

It was obviously a boy who had been to space and loved building forts out of kleenex boxes. Or moccassins. (Note: parents may pretend to enjoy moccasins made out of empty kleenex boxes, but they will eventually wean you from their preening. I suggest a large kleenex box fort to keep reality at bay).

Blah Blah

The right words gahhh809

Thinking is frustrating. So is writing. And so is logic come to think of it. Which is why there are so many non fucking sequiturs in this blog post and many others.

A man disappears for a decade. Police put out large reward now. Won't explain why.

This is a story I happened to *read* while at work. Admitttedly, I also wrote it. FUCK.

Anonymity is so hard on the internet. I feel cornered.

What would you do if a normal day was your superior telling you you need to drive to an international border town an hour away, question its residents Carmen Sandiego style about missing man, and you ended up in a strip club?

Be glad they can't take away what they've already given you? ie) 2 for 1 coupons you are hoping to pawn for bus tickets?

Someone disappears a decade ago, and their friends are in the same bar today. My official position is they're drinking the same beer.

The spot the missing man used to sit in? Have a seat. That was his view. Coffee?

Who serves coffee in a strip bar?

I say strip bar, because this ain't no club. It's more like a whatchamacallit... small-town bar with girls in bikinis. The lights are so dim it's got that classic bunker feel. A beach-themed bunker minus the sand. Complete with intrigue, and a "boss" upstairs who says he's coming down and never does.

But all this happened to me a long time ago. I was just reminded of it recently when I was sent down to a small down on the border with an hour to do my job, the only guidance being that it was a small town. Someone ought to know him.

This is a new holiday destinations for all you Carmen Sandiegos. I'll let you know when I come out with the 2009 best-kept secrets version, rated in number of geese. The book of wild goose hunts turned Who unstrapped my bra?

Come to think of it, that sounds like a trip to my basement.

Except instead of geese it is all the spiders I caught and released all winter. And all the jagged nails hooking onto my clothing without saying hello.

Not a Carmen Sandiego moment, despite my flowing red hair and yellow fedora. I figure I'm not big-city sleuth until I figure out how to make people trust me even when I look ridiculous.

"Tell me your feee-lings!"

(I stop to bite my pen and bobble my head - no bra!)

That sounds like I'm trying to hypnotize people. I do too much interviewing over the phone, and trust me it's difficult to avoid the dial tone of failure when you take the vow of silence and commence the bra-less seance.

But that's all laughs! HARDEY HAR HAR!

You didn't even read this...

Dr. Evil's Transit Pod

A new verb may find its way into the dictionary: schweebing.

And... it isn't another social networking site!

Probably the best thing about the Shweeb is that you power it yourself, despite it running on a track. It might be hard for groceries, but maybe they'll come out with a hatchback version soon. It's brought to you by the Kiwis, which shouldn't be surprising if you know about Zorbing.

The creators are marketing it as the future of public transportation. I'm not sure how collisions are avoided, but the idea is to put these pods on a set of interconnected monorails.

And zero carbon emissions! Just the emissions from the food you ate to fuel your pedalling.

Playing the Fiddle as Rome Burns

source: photobucket

We had already been sitting at the pub for an hour when a skinny guy in a loose leather jacket ambled up to the end of our table and started talking. I couldn't understand him at first, and figured he knew someone else.

"You need to dance to the fiddle," he told us, leaning in. "You only have so many chances to dance to the fiddle."

The live band was playing at the front of the bar, and there was some space in front of them where the crowd had given up milling.

My friend said she was enjoying the fiddle where she was sitting just fine. Dancing wouldn't add anything. She didn't mention the unfortunate blender foot injury she had acquired earlier in the day, but I got her drift. I wasn't about to ditch the group to fiddle dance with a guy whose agenda was unclear.

He persisted and then went away for a few songs. He returned with a friend, a tall unshaven man with cowlicked hair.

"You only have so many times when you can dance to the fiddle," he continued. "And this is one of them! You're just going to waste it?"

He dropped an arm onto the wobbly table making the beer slosh.

His speech was full of platitudes - the kind of tough love a boxing coach might give to an athlete one punch from a KO.

"That girl is playing her heart out. And you're just sitting there, not even clapping. All you need to do is get up. Get up and dance and forget about everything else."

My friend with the blender injury told him she had gotten her undergrad in fiddle appreciation and so the dancing was unecessary.

"You only remember half the things you do anyway," she said.

He eventually ceded. "You're good! Fine. If you ladies want to let this slip by, that's your perogative."

There's a myth about Nero playing the fiddle as Rome burned. Flames licked the sky, buildings crumbled. I didn't want to be Rome burning.

But by then the fiddle was over.

His gusto, his bravado, I thought. He would make an excellent life coach.

I need someone to rally behind me at the grocery store when I'm picking out veggies or deciding on yogourt.

But without the fiddle music, the guy left.

1000 accordions is not enough

Years ago, while spending time in my Grandparents' suburban house in B.C., I bumped into my musical heritage. I uncovered it in closets, behind dressers, in boxes. A slew of oboes, tubas, cellos, violins, sitars, organs, pianos, and gongs, lined up on the carpet. I passed a lot of time prodding instruments that were beautiful, but obviously impossible to play.

Then one day my Grandma sat down and strummed a song. Her eyes darted back and forth; her foot tapped the ground. And her head swayed like a Bollywood dancer. Then she rushed to set down the cello/accordion/sitar and explain she hadn't touched it in years.

It was infuriating how well the instruments listened to her, when I was obviously offering them all the love.

"She keeps you in the walk-in!" I whispered hoarsely.

My Grandma had two accordions and taught me how to play Amazing Grace, Take Me Out to the Ball Game, and Edelweiss, ie) The same four chords. Eventually she gave me one of the accordions, and I watched my Dad grumble as he packed this box under a van seat with all my other boxes.

I felt she had invited me into a mythical family tree - one I imagined being dotted with flouting Minstrels and hide-drumming Vikings. I was next. And it wouldn't be through monotonous piano lessons my Grandma had tried to give me when I was younger. No. It would be through the accordion - the most challenging instrument I knew.

Sure accordions are loud and obnoxious, and I am neither loud nor obnoxious. But accordionists are also loners, and I've always felt an affinity to outcasts. Remember that scene in the animated Peter Pan with the sailor in the crow's nest playing the squeeze box?

Captain Hook shot him.

I hated that scene.

It's part of my emerging into adulthood (still ongoing please God) that I've sought out my heritage by irrational obsessions like learning German and lugging my accordion to parties.

Is it any wonder then, this deep desire to go where the accordions roam, where polkas run on tap all night, and felt hats and lederhosen waltz in mountain air?

I was thinking about all the aspiring journalists getting high-profile internships this summer and flying to Indonesia and meeting celebrities.

And then I thought, if I go to Kathmandu, I'll miss the world's largest accordion festival with my Grandma and her RV.

I realize that my image of "accordion festival" is probably a little off. I was picturing a hallucinatory music fest with former hippies dressed like Chestchire cats smoking fat cigars on their trailer steps in the desert.

It's Kimberley B.C. after all with accordion players over 60. I don't want to be the only one on drugs, ending my news reports with,

"This is Laura Keil, dispatching from the edge of sanity WAAAAAAANH" (=sound of accordion)

Fun, yes, but not in that collective way you expect at a summer fest.

All-night polkas. World Records for accordions played at the same time (1000). It sounds like the perfect week in July. The perfect way to skirt reality, and follow my lineage.
.

New Master's Research Project?

I'm starting to think that Christians should take a cue from Muslims in trying a little less hard to see their prophet.

I apparently can't even visit a vending machine without being accosted by hallucinations. If you fast forward to 4:00 in the video, you'll listen to a man pronounce that a mutated Cheeto will be known as Cheesus.

As an atheist, I'd appreciate if Christians weren't themselves blasphemous. It lessens the role of atheists.

I'm also a little concerned by the lack of differentiation between "image of Jesus" and "Jesus."

Would Jesus approve? Or is Jesus a frying pan?

It's a little odd that most of the Jesus images turn up in food. It makes me wonder whether there was a reason I always felt hungry in church.

If I hadn't been so hungry, maybe I would have been able to pay better attention. Still, a sentence like this would have alerted me:

"A cinnamon roll, toast, a danish, pancakes, fish sticks, and now a cat."

Sigh.

I'm afraid to go for an eye exam in any state where two thirds of rear-view mirrors have dangling Virgin Mary's.

I'd like to inform you that that is not a T. That is the Lord.

Health is a funnel of gin in your ear

My roommate's girlfriend told me something tonight that changed my perspective on my favourite bar drink, the gin and tonic.

Think of it as the moment Marie-France used fireplace bellows and realized that the rips in the side created music: Voila, accordion.

Also pretend in this metaphor that the accordion can cure physical ailments... which I contend it can, but no one will ever let me finish the cure.

I'm just getting over a cold and my left ear is plugged, so everytime I blow my nose it feels as though I'm reaching 30,000 feet. That would make sense if I were drunk (1 drink = 5,000 ft). That's science. But I'm not drunk. And when sober I believe in science.

What my roommate's girlfriend told me was this. She had a friend who accidentally poured a gin and tonic in his ear when he had an ear infection.

Don't ask me how that works. Inner ear causes lack of balance, penchant for frat parties?

It cured him. So the next time he got an ear infection, he did it again.

Again, cured.

And not because he went into a coma and woke up five days later.

So I was prepared to go out tonight to the bar to test this theory. I feel an ear infection coming on. Maybe it's just my cold, but why in just one ear? I'd swagger up, show the bar man two fingers, and point to one ear. He would probably frown, thinking I'm deaf, and mouth "ten dollars." Then I would shoot back one drink, grab nearest friend/colleague, place my head on the table and say: Pour it in! For goodness sake! Do it!

But then my eyes began to lose focus, and I didn't want to hear the cure for that.

Osama? Obama? Enunciate please

My cell is my robotic secretary of state. Whatever state I'm in (right now it feels as though I'm bleeding internally from a nasty cold) I can dial anyone in the world just by saying their name.

Introducing, from my 2006 cellphone, Driving Mode. A great way to amuse yourself and others on the bus or in the Library and Archives Canada ladies' room.

I was collecting toilet paper today to nurse my one eye that hasn't stopped leaking in the past 20 hours, when suddenly a perky woman who I will describe as a fem bot, announced from my bag, "New message from (beep)" and then a man's voice said, "fucker."

I happen to have a friend with a similar name.

There was a snicker from the stall next to mine.

I often rummage through my bag, accidentally hit the driving mode button, and then say fuck. My secretary in a phone will ask politely "Did you say Laura?" Replace 'Laura' with any of the random numbers I keep in my cell phone strictly for journalistic purposes: mental health lines, motels in small-town Saskatchewan and Quebec, editors of newspapers, the U of O psych department. Don't ask me why. Don't ask me why my phone asks me if I'm trying to call a shrink when I yell fuck into my damn handbag.

But there's a bright side. I can tell my phone to call Obama, and it will find names in my contact list to suggest.

That's a snazzy way to wait in line at a club or the psych dept.

That'll be 10 dollars ma'am
(I hold up a finger as I dig through my bag. Five minutes later, after I've retrieved my phone, I sensually hit the side button in front of the bouncer)
"Please enter a command."
Contacts, I say, keeping eye contact with the bouncer.
(bouncer rolls eyes)
"Please enter a name."
Osama Bin Laden
"Did you say... Osama Bin Laden?"
"Yesss."
"Calling."

I can programme numbers under different names. I often get calls from Hillary Clinton and Josh Groban.

Even better is when my phone sets itself to Driving Mode without my knowledge and announces the caller. Trust me, entering endearingly profane names for friends is a surefire way to change your profs' opinions of you in the middle of a class on Spreadsheets.

What is this? Some kind of practical joke? Who put this phone in my handbag. Ha... ha... Her name's not [enter Bond villainess here]. It mispronounced it.

I can't wait for the robotic age.

The Dépanneur Bar

It's called The Whip.

No menu or kitchen. A quebecoise Judi Dench will point to a frigo where a jar sits pregnant with eggs and vinegar. Brigades of Molsen EX are packed into four fridges, dépanneur-style.

The other patrons dutifully knock on VLTs. There is no indication of why the place is called the Whip; we draw our own conclusions.

Judi Dench brings us the Whip's oeuvre: wine bottle-sized beers with thimble glasses that might be used to allot prune juice in a senior's home.

We've brought a game of Connect Four and play a speed round robin. The loser nails back ice-cold beer, burning her eye sockets. Pours another thimble.

The room is clean, bare, no place marked vomitorium - even with the eggs, which remind me of clues to a medical history exhibit. No one ever needs to see a severed foot in fermeldihyde nor boiled eggs ogling in brine.

We skip the eggs. They ogle without our notice.

This is unfamiliar territory and we're an omnium gatherum, hodgepodge of drinkers huddled around the campfire of a Depanneur cooler beefed with bottles of beer that say "ex" as though we're here to mourn lost love over VLTs and pickled eggs.

Panic will come later. For now, responsibilities are sloughed like snow from our coats.

We're in the whip and we'll lick the lion tomorrow.

Life-size Fussball and a Caribou Martini

He offers me the red cane he holds with three fingers, his smile uneven like an orange peel. The smell rises up from the red stick like holy incense, Hail... Hail... why haven't I seen this altar boy before? the only thing to do is to grab it and drink. It is like drinking out of a flute, all the keys shut. You stop when you sputter. Amen.

I had wandered into a tent that might have been better suited as a 1950s make-shift nuclear town. Faux brick panelling, paintings, and plants furbished the inside of a tarp that was delightfully free of children. Behind me, six middle-aged middle-grown women slouched in sofas as though reserving spots in an opium den.

Our surroundings wooed us to refill the hollow cane umpteen times with Caribou. We had learnt that nothing says Carnaval more than a bison hat and a 23% sludge of red port, Cognac and maple syrup, hot as coffee. The more you drink Caribou, the more you're convinced that you're the Bonhomme Carnaval. I guess this is because you become both manically happy and scary to children.

We were getting jolly - but our French wasn't improving. I sat down on the coffee table with the cane between my knees and the carpet in the Old Man Winter pose, mulling how alcohol consumption and children could go so well together.

A life-size Fussball game was going on outside, children and adults playing together. As a friend suggested, the only thing that would improve the game is if people controlled the players from the side. Instead the teams are simply lashed to the bars. Unfortunately for spectators, they aren't flipped around.

Not coin-operated

Here on the historic Plaines d'Abraham where General Wolff had perished under an English flag and French General Montcalm had received his fatal wound, snow bathers romped with the Bonhomme; adults pulled tiny sleds laden with unconscious children, their little arms spread, welcoming the sky in one-piece snow suits. The parents didn't even glance back as the sleighs hit planters and fences, grazing around them.

The Caribou was making me meditative. Now outside, I took another swig from the cane, the alcohol rushing from the end, red liquid crashing against my face like an ocean wave and drizzling down my chin. I let out a cough of satisfaction and eyed the Olympic Torch under a Coca Cola marquee. The torch was attached to a podium. Not easily freed. But isn't that what they told King Arthur about the sword?

The Caribou had given me strength, and I felt ready to use it.

But I'm afraid of getting arrested, and even more scared of being chased by Bonhomme-suited security guards wielding batons, so I settled for getting a photo with a snow sculpture of Old Man Winter holding a candle between his legs. I wish I could have gone up close, gone between his hands and helped him light the candle, but once again someone would have paged security. It meant I had to go back to drinking excessively in predetermined nuclear towns, buying 7$ shots of bailey's in glasses made out of ice and throwing the glasses onto a heap of used glasses behind some imported potted spruce.

Everything makeshift. Fake. But the Caribou was real - the label on the bottle made me believe I was tapping a maple under the northern lights in 1616, tap the trunk, do the rights, holy incense and drink the cane. It almost gave me the courage to take part in the snow bathing competition, but I have less guts than this old man:

Drinking Caribou is simply not as warm as wearing it.

What do you mean I have a flair for boredom?

Let's talk about my voice.

For most of my life, I could blissfully ignore my teenager way of turning every phrase into a question and the way I sometimes sound like a tight rope on estrogen.

But in radio, I have to broadcast this 1980s jukebox to other people. While being taped for eternity, and posterity, so my grandchildren can know why they sound like teenage boys when they're 23-year-old women.

My newscast went great. Until it was time to say my name.

I looked in horror through the glass where the producer and my classmates smiled at me and I heard the click of the intercom.

"Say your name again, please."

I don't usually aim to sound like I'm wearing a loin cloth and leaping from vine to vine.

"And the food bank is having trouble during the transit strike.

LaurAHE-AHE-AHHH,

Radio News."

Oh my God. It sounds like my voice box is in a wrestling match with Jonathan Taylor Thomas. How the hell did he get in there? Fucking Tom and Huck. I should never have memorized the script to that film.

I fudge my name all the time in writing - but that's because cursive is all disorientating. I have to concentrate. Visa understands that Laura and Laara and Larua are all the same person.

Just as Laura and LaurAHE-AHE-AHHH are one and the same.

But spoken word is different. I can't say my own name into a microphone?

Later on, while practising my script, I was told by my radio mentor to brighten up my voice.

"You just have one of those voices that sounds naturally bored all the time."

That's just great.

I prefer sarcastic. Or deadpan. I do not want to be known as Margaret Atwood. There is a woman who sounds bored all the time. She can barely lift her gums to say "hell no."

But maybe Margaret understand why kids always thought I was making fun of them in elementary school. I'd say something nice, and they'd throw sand. They probably didn't even hear what I said. They were being lambasted by the sound of boredom. Poor kids.

Because of my self-consciousness, I'll be compensating for weeks, smiling while I talk, and making everyone wonder why I'm showing off my teeth and not blinking. As long as I can keep my voice steady while I'm saying my own name.

This isn't the first time I've had to compensate with my expression. There was that time my hairdresser chopped my bangs an inch above my eyebrows and I was forced to look surprised for weeks so others wouldn't notice. I'm sure everyone wondered what kind of lobotomy the hairdresser had given me behind the bangs.

The crazy smiling? It's so I don't insult you, prematurely. When the smile comes down - so does the guillotine. I have a weapon to wield and it's about to ruin the mood.

Wall-E the energetic rodent

The mice are starting to freak me out.

They are in my walls. And they let me know they are there.

I feel like a schizophrenic. While chatting on Skype I jerk my head to the right every 20 seconds to make sure the squeaking and rustling is not coming from somewhere on my floor or behind my window blind.

Either there's a Lilliputian rubbing flint together, or a fucking mouse.

One of the joys of living with roommates is that you find out they have different strategies for dealing with the mice. My strategy has been largely one of non-intervention. I am Switzerland, and they leave me mainly alone, except for taking residency in my walls.

Much like Bush did during the Iraq war, there are rivalling points of view at how aggressive we should be in our defense, based on what the terror threat is. Orange? Yellow? Red?

Earlier today, my roommate opened up the pantry. A mouse trap exploded in his face, fell onto the floor, and he yelled as the rest of us stared and smiled.

The same thing happened to me last week.

Note to roommates: Putting mouse traps in deep baking shelves = not a great idea.

I hate the rodents too. But I also enjoy having my fingers intact.

Apparently the mice have been eating the food off the traps and then leaving the traps behind for unsuspecting bakers.

We're becoming experts in our mouse residents' palettes:

"They like the peanut butter more than the almond butter."
"They didn't touch the cheese - until I put maple syrup on it."
"They didn't like the almond butter? Sure they did."
"No. They prefer peanut butter."

I'm thinking of buying a farm cat. If my landlord comes by and tells us we're not allowed pets, I'll say it's not a pet. It got in through the giant hole in the side of the house we've been asking you to fix. The same hole the mice have probably been getting in.

I think the mice could be having sex. Why squeal rummage around so much? It would suit this house very much to have a whole colony of rodent offspring. It would be very much in character.

All I can say is, in this war, thank God for walls.

Blades of Sorry

The perils of shinny

In many ways playing shinny is a lot like playing hockey circa 1850. Nobody wears pads, 14 people can play at once, penalties, bluelines and face-offs don't exist, and snow is constantly interfering with the puck. There is the constant threat of getting hit in the shins, and as one guy found out, having your skates fall apart.

Quote: "I was just skating along and it exploded underneath me."

I was there. I can't attest to any explosiveness, but I can attest to it being a game-stopping moment. I don't think any of us had seen that happen before.

Odd things happen when you play shinny. It is the rugby of hockey. I have a deep cut on one finger and two gashes on my feet, not to mention myriad bruises on my shins.

I've played numerous times in the past few weeks. As the only girl, I feel as though I'm representing femaledom, but I'm afraid personal tics will reflect on the rest of my sex. For instance:

1) I apologize a lot. I have to stop this. Last week, while reaching to say sorry, I accidentally patted one guy's ass. Was that a sorry he was looking for? Probably not. But maybe it helped ease the sting of me whacking him with my stick.

Sore shins? Here's a slap on the ass.

2) I'm the only one who talks to myself on the ice. Everyone else is eerily quiet. Some are plugged into their ipods. But my talk is more into the ether, than to myself. Most of it could easily be transplanted into a Batman comic.

Kaplouie! Yikes! Splat!

It's an additional service I provide, adding a soundtrack for blind fans.

3) While I know not all women would deal with this, when I take off my toque, I create a stand-off between my hands and the sweaty hockey hair mess that's worse than vines blocking Incan ruins. For the record, I'm not trying to give the game insinuations of a Harlequin romance. Whipping my glistening hair around and running my hands through it is my version of squirting water into my face.

There are some girl skaters, but none I've seen play hockey (other than a classmate). Most of them are on the skating oval two zamboni lengths away from the hockey rinks.

Yesterday, there were actual speedskaters there for a competition.




But I got no pictures. All I got were these men smoking and watching the zamboni as though it were an enemy tank.

Speed skaters are winter clowns. You want to laugh when you see them, but then you feel sorry for their ridiculous outfits and movements.

They can't stop like hockey players so they slow down and then hop as though on coals. I feel embarassed watching them, and I blame this for not having taken any photos.

I'm sorry speed skaters. Your spandex body suits are a little too real, and this flask is not deep enough.

I thought it would be fun to hang out at the oval in a bear suit. You know, distracting the skaters or yelling bits of encouragement. Possibly conducting some interviews. I think I need to help them feel less self-conscious, and it will require going the whole way.

Obviously a Canadian

Ordinary bacon is delicious, but boring. It doesn't help you fill 4 hours of a languid Saturday.

That's how Bacon Man came into existence.

You don't have to eat anything else all day, if you make an entire package of bacon. You will have enough energy to take on the day after drinking too much Canadian whisky the night before. You will have enough energy to take on a 2-hour shinny game with strangers on the rink behind your house.*

(*you will be an invinsible Canadian)

My purse - the Pacific Ocean purse in which I constantly lose things - it's like putting my head into Hurricane Katrina - was the bacon receptacle. I met a girl last week who has the identical purse - same colour and everything. She keeps full-sized cheesecakes in hers.

I could probably fit all the ingredients to a cheesecake and a ham in my purse, but I'm trying to diminish the gasps and pity every time I get a massage. After this morning's appointment I feel exceptionally greasy - almost as though I've been smothered in bacon fat. My masseuse was from Mexico, so I don't think she has malicious plans yet to smother someone else in bacon fat. But maybe that's what lured her to Ottawa. That's a normal Canadian sentiment right? Right after wanting to throw up Canadian whisky in the snow and cover it with more snow?

Every blog post feels like my life. 3/4 of the way through each day and each post, I have to ask myself how the hell I got here.

But reflection is futile when you have a bacon man!

(As an addendum, I'm torn between the soundtrack of Do you hear the people sing? from Les Miz, or whatever song it is that goes along with Mel Gibson's "freedom" in Braveheart. You may think that suggestion is irreverent, but just stare at the bacon man. He has lots and lots of heart.)

Harbinger of pine

I came home yesterday to find a Christmas tree in our living room. The room was transformed into a homey oasis.

Wow! I said to my roommate. Where did you get it?
A place down the street...
(I picture bundled trees on a store lot)
... they had dumped it by their trash.

The Hopewell house is indeed one of resurrection. The tree still looks marvelous, albeit a little dry. My roommate said he was planning to hunt down another tree to replace this one, likely for Ukrainian Christmas, which is already upon us. Sure we're mixing traditions. But that's what we Gen Xers do, and definitely Hopewellers.

My plan for Ukrainian Christmas is to cook up a pot of buttery Varenyky and curse the Russians. And possibly shut off the furnace.

Speaking of cursing the Russians, my cursing worked on Saturday in the World Juniors when Canada barely won aganist Russia. It's the secret Rasputin curse. Deadly. Watch hockey with me and you'll understand.

Now, with Canada against the Swedes, I'm going to have to come up with a Swedish curse. How about Svenson? It's supposed to refer to a goodie-two shoes person who has a perfect life? Your perfection will malign you, Swedes! Svenson!

I considered wearing a Viking hat, with a sauna towel around my lower half, while talking in Sveedish on my cellphone, Ja.

But then I thought that would be impractical for the riots afterwards. Ah, riots.

No such riots will be possible at the championship next year, so we better get it out of our systems now. The World Juniors are in Saskatoon and Regina next year, where it is currently -217^*#

Those symbols are what you add to temperatures that are worthy to curse at. Not even the Swedish or Russian players understand that, at least not the southern ones who were interviewed. Little do they know what it means to breathe in air that chokes you like a crossbar to the neck.

Svenson! Rasputin! If I hang out by their buses next year, maybe I'll learn some real curses.

*Happy to be back in Ottawa's balmy clime*

I want flying sparks!

Tobogganing is the best way to learn you're a geriatric.

Halfway up: Boy this is great exercise! I can feel my lungs really expanding!
The top of the hill, 20 mins later: Why (puff) is there (puff) no fucking rope toe? (stop to bend over and dry heave)

I watch my friend battle his crazy carpet like a blind woman beating a rug, before laying it awkwardly on the ground, sitting down with his legs straight out and doggy paddling.

I am convinced you need a running start (isn't that what the teenagers next to us are doing?) and so I run towards the hill preparing my move, which I've laid out in this how-to:

1 -Run as best you can in 4 layers of pants and coats - may resemble waddling.
2 -Keep one boot on the crazy carpet
3 -Do a belly flop
4 -Scream a muffled scream until you realize you're not actually moving
5 -Doggy paddle away from moguls

The teens next to us have their technique mastered - but I chalk this up to their better sleighs and teenage disregard for life. Watching them is like watching a personified curling game. Regardless of initial aim and curve, they all end up in the same 3 sq foot area at the bottom of the hill, often displacing each other with the same rock-hard thud you'd hear at the Briar.

Their gusto is breathtaking. It makes me lose my breath all over again. Or maybe it's the altitude.

The hill, lovingly dubbed "pest hill" (after the children who climb up the wrong part of the hill I imagine) is right next to the highway bridge. At night, it's very pretty: the semis blare past a safe distance away, lights twinkle, the river is inky dark... and the hill itself is pitch black and backlit, giving the impression I'm surrounded by faceless screaming zombies. Sigh.

For some reason, in my Grandma ways, I get the idea that my crazy carpet is called a slip n' slide. Slip n' slide is a great metaphor for what happens on the hill: when you slip, you don't stop. Your ass keeps sliding down sideways until it love bumps against the mogul and slows to a grinding halt due to the friction emitted by your screams.

I see sparks fly from underneath the teenagers' sleds. My friend is not as impressed by this as I am. I want sparks under my speeding ass cheeks! And pictures too.

Alas, no pictures.

My friend tells me he has just removed the bandage from his back for the first time since undergoing back surgery a month ago. I watch each of his descents as he hits moguls and wipes out halfway down.

Come on! I yell from the bottom of the hill. I'm still moving!

He is not.

I am afraid I'll end up calling an ambulance by the end of the night, but it turns out we know when to call it quits. Approx. 20 mins in.

Sledding is fun, but trying to keep up the youngins will maim you.

My next crazy carpet is one I'll embroider by the fire.

Red Rover... we call Gate 141 over

I made friends with a robot while we waited on the tarmac until 2:30 a.m. The robot was outside my window de-icing the plane with the same warm liquid goo that brought Austin Powers out of his cryogenic freezing.

There's a beer garden at Pearson airport that is de facto entertaining when your flight has been canceled. Beer Gardens = a place you can find drunks since 1807

This is not, however, where my problems began.

I was about to buy a candy apple covered in pecans and reached into the pacific ocean that is my purse, flipping through the usual detritus: newspaper,notebook, collated receipts, and unused napkins. Nothing. The purse-within-a-purse was gone like magic. Ok, fine, I thought. Bring back my purse! I commanded to my bag and rummaged through it again, as though flipping through a book to find a hidden bill.

I tried this experiment several times with the same result. This is why I hated scientific method in high school.

I immediately concluded it had been stolen, a conclusion I'm happy about, since it shows I have some self-esteem. No one as young and thoughtful as myself would be daft enough to leave my purse in a busy place!

Somewhere, in some dark room full of blinking screens, a security tape was proving me wrong.

Airport security officials would have a lot to laugh about if they compared notes. Remember Calgary? My driver's license ran off with a spoon. Not to mention the army of mannequins that could be dressed in sets of mitts, hats, scarves and sunglasses once in my possession.

It's ok, though. I'm very zen about it. See the glass as broken right? (by glass, I'm referring here to my mind, not lost stuff)

I was standing in an irritatingly human customer service line: it went straight out, single file, blocking the entire hall in an apathetic - yet surprisingly effective - Red Rover. Two calm airport officials, one woman, one man sat at the extreme ends of a bureau built for six. The folks at the front of the line had the camped-out look of movie ticket squatters - their bags heaped on the ground while they lifted each foot in turn, arms crossed.

I joined the melee. A pregnant teen and her boyfriend joined the line behind me, bizarrely bubbly for being at the end.

"Not until I have the BA-by!" she said, alerting me to how annoying a woman - especially a too-young woman - is while pregnant. Probably she has no inkling of her future.

"Did you mean to get pregnant?" I wanted to ask. "How old are you?"

Yes, I, the 23-year-old matron, who can't keep her purse in sight.

I was in the middle of the line that was creeping like a vine through a sidewalk. Everyone trying to break through our Red Rover was targeting me. I thought maybe the Grim Reaper bags under my eyes might deter them. It apparently had the opposite effect.

Suddenly the intercom clicked on. There was a pause, then a woman's voice announced my name very clearly, asking me to come to Gate 141 to collect my "article."

Here I was faced with the embarrassing need to leave the line without making it clear to everyone around me that I was the crazy lady. Such a thing can be done by looking angry or bored or pretending to answer your phone. I went for the angry/bored technique, furiously picking my bag off the floor and then staring hard at the departures board for 10 seconds.

Oh, I tricked them.

By the time I'd walked down the neverending hallway glutted like the sugar in my veins they'd paged me again, this time specifying I was from Saskatoon.

When I got to the gate, the lady at the counter shoved the purse at me with a pitying stare, as though to say, "I'm sorry for your early dementia."

Dyb is sorry he won't be able to send me a purse in addition to the named-engraved binder he sent me on my birthday to replace the one I lost on the Montreal subway. The purse, he said, would be "bedazzled" with my name so that not only would finders know whose it was, but would also be deterred from keeping it.

I skirted around to my gate and eyed the rows to see whether I knew anyone on my flight who would have heard the announcement. I saw no one... until a little later when I saw a guy from high school who lives on my street. Fuck.

Fun Fact: as I left my previous flight, a young bearded man with a potbelly was coaxing a suitcase out of the overhead bin as his 2-year-old daughter regaled the carpet with tales of the outside world.
"Jesus!" the man said, as he gripped the overhead bin and leaned forward to let us by.
"Jesus' birthday!" I wanted to correct him.

Fast forward to me entering, then exiting my plane as everyone was evacuated due to a maintenance issue. Our flight was delayed until 12:05, as they called a new plane and moved us to a new gate.

I found the only bar that was open, moved a dirty glass to a dirtier table, and sat down to be entertained by a table of drunks.

It was then that I realized I was in a veritable beer garden, or as I like to call it, a drunk pen. Metal bars. But jovial. People happy to be imprisoned in glee, their mouths forced open in giddy laughter. It was a much different scene from the stuffy cabin and the pool of uptight passengers with their sarcastic remarks. I couldn't understand why everyone was so grim. I, for one, was relieved to get off that rustbucket plane.

It was its relative newness, though, that was the problem, as our pilot so diligently and gratuitously explained. When the system is electric - I think those were his words - one part down means the whole thing's down. I'd watched from my window as they'd attached an umbilical cord to the side of the plane, a floppy black thing joined to a Ghost Busters' truck. The whole thing was very Ghost Busters and it made me worry that maybe we had a ghost and that was what they weren't telling us.

But Bill Murray did not wave to me from the tarmac as I'd hoped.

According to the pilot, they were attempting to stoke the fire as it were, by blowing air into the engine. I'm not sure what kind of plane these people thought they were dealing with, but I'm pretty sure reverse-vacuuming the inside when a whole system is on the fritz is not the same as blowing on kindling.

The pilot wasn't helping with his in-depth account, dumbed down to terms like "whole system" and "blow air into it" and "reboot - like a computer." Each of his trembly-voiced updates conjured images of the plane's fuselage tumbling mid-flight or the power cutting out (as it frequently did during their re-boot attempts), forcing us into a gliding then precipitous descent somewhere north of Windsor.

In the airport's waiting lounge, we were told it wouldn't be long that "the plane will be here shortly." Most passengers fell asleep on their nearest loved one. I stared in longing at the empty massage chairs half-heartedly covered with a tarp, and wondered how much trouble I would get in for crawling underneath to doze. I made a mental note for later.

Fun Fact: In 1969, Jimi Hendrix was arrested at Pearson airport not for crawling onto massage chairs but for having hashish and heroin. He was acquitted after he argued that a fan had slipped it into his bag without him knowing. I doubt that defense works anymore.

The drunks were still going strong at 1:00 when we finally boarded the plane. I wanted to try asking for free booze once we boarded based on the premise that it's worked before. To make a point though, I would wait until the flight attendant handed me my mini bottle of gin and if she demanded payment, click my pin and scribble IOU 1! on the back of a receipt. She'd hopefully get the joke, and I'd lay back knowing poetic justice, at least, had been done.

After an hour of idling, I was beginning to think that "shortly" was a code word for "never" or "maybe in 40 minutes we'll start thinking about it." The flight attendants had probably taken the advice of one of the passengers and fucked off. They were nowhere to be seen or heard for our entire stint on the tarmac.

All of a sudden, with no provocation, the plane started moving. No one clapped. All was quiet. We were like a herd of sheep that had been tasered too many times.

The lights suddenly flickered on, then shut off, then flickered on again.

"They're mashing the wrong buttons," I told the teenage guy next to me.

Fun Fact: How does a plane get enough traction to take 0ff in a foot of snow? (that's more of a fun question, than a fact.)

Arrival time? 5 a.m. - 16 hours after leaving my house and shortly before NORAD began tracking Santa's journey around the globe. We almost had a chance to pass him in the air (he is, technically, a Canadian citizen). He could have given us our presents early - a giant shovel for the tarmac and a bone to pick with Air Canada.

I got my gin and took a cue from my neighbours - passed out.

From then on, it was a happy flight.

Grandma got run over by a squirrel and what?

It may be apparent by now that I have a thing for advent calendars. I guess it's the German in me that loves miniature doors and daily rituals. Hey, Tin Drum? Hey, OCD?

From wine bottles dressed like Christmas trees with water-marks denoting the day, to giant advent calendars comprising whole buildings, there is nothing I won't try.

But when it comes down to the good old fashioned kind - the $1 cardboard calendars you buy at Sobey's or the Independant Grocer, I have a little chicane of my own.

These are "holiday" calendars, to be sure. They are non-denominational Christmas joys, and that's not my problem.

Here's my beef: On the 16th of December I opened up the little box to find...

You tell me. What the bloody hell is this?

................................................. Is it a Gremlin?

On the 17th I found a squirrel holding a dildo. On the 20th, I found a dead Santa crushed by his sleigh. Yesterday it was a giant spotted mushroom.

Merry Christmas! Five days left, and we're here to remind you that destruction and death have never been more unpredictable.

The squirrel holding the dildo reminded me of the time I applied to be a sex-toy writer. I found the ad on the university message board. The deal was they would send me sex toys and I would review them.

I never heard back.

But that is neither here nor there.

These little chocolate wafers that are driving me crazy with their cryptic, unintelligible pictures.

We're up to three fucking squirrels now. How many squirrels are related to Christmas in a normal person's life?

I stress normal person's, because squirrels have been weirdly prominent in my life lately, but not in a festive way unless you count red and green food scraps as festive.

As for the blotch, maybe it's an iceberg. Hey kids! Guess what? Santa's gonna drown soon! Remember the North Pole's melting? You can thank all those oil-derived plastic toys of yours.

My reaction to this squirrel (a scary and delicious food item) is on par with Janet Leigh.

Motel Livin'

Today is me and my motel room's two-week anniversary. You may ask me if we're doing something special, to which I'll say, we're a stay-at-home couple into drinking strong beer and vegging out in front of the TV. I don't think either of us is planning anything. Probably go to bed early. My mini fridge lets out a bang and a wheeze every half hour - that'll be all the romancin.

I really want to talk about bikers. But I'm afraid they'll come and hurt me.

So instead, I'll wait until I'm out of swinging range (I like to kid myself) and then regale you with my tales of danger lust.

The post will be titled Laura Posts her own Wanted Sign on the Internet. Read it here first.

I can't wait to get out of this charming, charming town.

Radio-Canada - will you fit in my stocking?

Even if you don't understand French, I think this film will still make you laugh.

Ahhh, Sarkozy, mon amour. (Given my recent Charest post, I should qualify that. Sarkozy, mon amour fou et violent!).

The gist: A Quebecois news anchor interviews Sarkozy about his upcoming visit to Quebec for the Francophonie conference (which happened a month ago).

It begins:

Anchor: I now have the great honour of conversing with the President of France from Paris - Nicolas Sarkozy!

Sarkozy: Yes, ok, listen up, I demand the immediate release without condition of all the French hostages being retained in your country.

Anchor: Listen here, there are plenty of French people here that we'd love to send home to France. Ha ha.

Sarkozy: I beg your pardon?

Anchor: We don't have hostages, hein? I want to talk about your visit to Quebec next week.

Sarkozy: Visit? ah! of course! excuse me. It's fatigue... it's jet lag...

Anchor: It's because you're in Paris

Sarkozy: Ah, fair enough, I'm not in habit of finding myself in France. Voila!

... (Later, After the Anchor accuses Sarkozy of not caring about Quebec)

Sarkozy: I like it, I like it, I like it more than ANYTHING!

Anchor: What is it that you like about Quebec?

Sakozy: But, everything! The St. Laurence, the Rockies, Michaëlle Jean, the whales... I love it all! Everything, everything, everything!

Sarkozy, your joie de vivre makes us all long for senility.

High Caliber Shopping

Bet you wished you brought an extra bag.

According to an article printed in the Montreal Gazette Wednesday, a car dealership in Repentigny will throw in a $17,500 2009 Dodge Caliber for free if you buy a Dodge Ram, Dodge Durango, Chrysler Aspen or Jeep Commander.

The dealership's rationale? To get the gas guzzlers off the lot.

People supposedly consume less during crappy economic times, until they realize they can get twice the merchandise for the same price as before.

I can save $17,000!
But you're spending $17,000.
That's a 50% discount... or is 100%? Did you see that Cold War Bunker?
No.
They're selling it off for $500,000!

I hate to admit it, but I'm the same way. Last night I peered into a discount shop and saw a little 3-drawer wicker dresser for $4. I spent the rest of the walk home envisioning it in that giant plastic bag they gave me at the textile warehouse (where I bought multiple $1 toilet covers and a pillow) so I can lug it to Ottawa on Greyhound.

Right now I have a multicoloured plastic kid's dresser. I feel sheepish keeping any belongings in something that should contain crayons, paper, and Barbies.

The main problem is I have acquired a strangely huge assortment of meds, most of which I've thrown in there to keep them out of sight. Seriously. Name a symptom and I will cure you.

Despite being a mild hypochondriac, I am wary of taking pills. The result is that I have dozens of unopened bottles sent to me by my parents, and many more that rattle around in my purse and make me feel like a geriatric.

But all of this aside, getting a 2 for 1 vehicle is a pretty sweet deal. If you're buying a Durango anyway, why not wrap one under the Christmas tree for your bro or sis? You may need a lot more trees to offset emissions, but gas prices are at an environment-ignorable level, anyway.

When gas goes up to $1.30/L saving the coral reefs will come back into vogue.

But that probably won't happen until summer.

The victory music was weird

I was sitting in Jean Charest's hotel conference room, a media pass around my neck, staring at a 12-foot screen broadcasting various female reporters (I saw no male TV reporters the entire evening). I was plotting the moment I'd join the jostling scrum around Charest and brush against that dark silky suit - a moment that began 12 years ago.

As the night wore on, the 120 minutes of sleep I had carved out for myself the night before began to seem like not enough. My body temperature was dropping, and putting on my coat was like crawling into a sleeping bag. The scaffolding of lights above became a comforting mobile - the world spun and I cooed.

My comprehension was shot. I heard my savant colleague say "I hate winter! The gold. The giant goats. It's awful! I HATE it."

Election day was the coldest day of winter so far in Sherbrooke: -28 with wind chill. It was a humid cold that made leaving the building feel like walking through a cloud of caustic lye. That may have been why voting turnout was 20 per cent lower than last time.

I was sliding down my media chair, focussing on avoiding drool, when I roused myself. As much as I was a basket-case, I couldn't miss my big moment with Charest. No, this was the pinnacle of a long courting. When I was in grade six, his campaign office sent me a package of campaign materials for a school assignment.

I'm not sure who thought an 11-year-old girl Backstreet Boys fan would want a 5-foot poster headshot of Charest. Are those his pores? Eww. This was 1997, when Charest was the leader of the Progressive Conservatives, and thus getting used to people scrutinizing him in detail. But still.

Anyway, I thought the poster was funny and put it up on my wall. This may be one of the reasons I had few friends that year. Out of the four girls in my class, at least two of them saw my poster of Charest, which I would introduce to house guests as a good friend. Here is my good friend, Charest. He's a poster boy. Look at his grey curly locks... you want to know which lock of hair is my favourite?

It was the beginning of my fascination with Charest's dual-sided nature - the egotistical leader vs. the shy and uncomfortable man.

He finally arrived at the hotel, elected for the 3rd consecutive time. I watched the TV cameras beam his entrance onto the screens - he was surrounded by a crowd that filled only half of the ballroom. I felt bad for him. A third of the attendees were media. I stood up on the media platform with one foot on a chair, but still could see nothing. The crowd morphed and ebbed like a cat stuck in a burlap sack. The cat was Charest. Let me out, he surely screamed to deaf ears. Let me in! I yelled on the fringes.

I thought about This Hour Has 22 Minutes comedian Geri Hall and her press conference hijinks with Stephen Harper that landed her a one-on-one interview. "I love you!" she screamed, as she was escorted out. "I want to love you!"

Yes, little did Charest's campaign office know that 12 years later, that girl would be at his campaign HQ with a media pass and veiled intentions.

Unfortunately for me, I didn't have any huge pieces of TV equipment to bully my way through the scrum. I watched in admiration as those with cameras shoved their way in like hogs at a watering hole.

Laissez-faire, I said, giving up for the moment. Laissez-faire. (What I should have said what laisse-faire, not the economic plan that Charest has been using to gain popularity. But I thought his ears might perk up).

I sat down and folded my hands. Charest will come to me, I decided.

After his speech, he walked over and stood next to the media pen for a live beaming to Montreal. The cameras were practically on the ground so he had to look down, exacerbating his double chin, and causing me grief. My savant colleague grabbed my camera and commanded I stand in line with Charest. Move back! she said.

Could this photo be any more beautiful? Charest's hands are blurred because he was signing "I love you" to me peripherally.

If only I still had that poster. What part of his face would he have signed?

Saturday Night

This evening I am spending in the bathroom deciding what to do with $40 worth of monk cheese.

I spent the afternoon with a newspaper colleague and her friend on nauseatingly curvaceous roads only Mordecai Richler would find attractive. We drove through Austin, a four-way-stop town, and my colleague pointed out the restaurant where Mordecai Richler used to drink before his death. It wasn’t the kind of place I would have expected for him, though it is the kind of place I’d expect in these New England hills – a gingerbread style house with a steep shingled roof flopped over like bangs, and multicoloured lights in the windows.

Richler was a python to the press. My colleague once interviewed his neighbour who said he used to hear Richler clacking away on his typewriter in the middle of the night. The area may be sparsely rural, but it is also quiet.

Three kilometers down the road from the restaurant was another unexpected sight: a castle built in 1994.

The new-grey siding gave it the appearance of painted foam, like those 3D puzzles my family was obsessed with when we lived in a leaky bungalow in Richmond, B.C. ten years ago. My parents were clearly urging me to dream big. Just because we lived in that one-floor house with rusty white guardrails in front didn’t mean I shouldn’t dream of Styrofoam castles.

I hiccupped a small catharsis, then followed my companions inside St. Benoit du Lac Monastery.

Inside, the walls, floor and ceiling were a mosaic of red, blue, and yellow brick, as though someone had rolled up the path to Never Never Land and re-plastered it here for a nominal fee of eternal life instead of eternal youth.

The place was clearly a tourist site, punctuated with garbage cans, no smoking signs, and male-female bathrooms.

The end of the hallway was the real gem – the cathedral.

It's difficult to describe, but basically if you crossed Haida totem poles with mandolins, artisanal blacksmithery and glass blowing, and Leonardo Divinci was on the architectural team, you could have something resembling the real thing.

The most impressive detail was the baptismal sundial which refracts the dawn sunlight that enters the front of the cathedral, illuminating the back wall in a brilliant display of angels, Jesus, and cheese.

Sorry, that’s actually the basement I’m thinking of, where tourists can graze the religious-trinket store, bookstore, and delicacy shop.

All the consumables and metal handcrafts are made by the 24 monks upstairs or by the monks at their “brother” monastery a few hills away. All the cheese, chocolates, ice cream, and jams have little cartoons of oafish monks on them, which makes them a perfect holiday gift for saints and sinners alike.

Say Cheese

As a rule though, I don’t buy cylinders of cheese that weigh more than my laptop. My mini motel fridge is only so big. Like laptops, these blocks of cheese will give you carpal tunnel. Like laptops, you want to keep turning them over in your hands to feel the smooth edges. Unlike laptops, they won’t make you infertile if you keep them on your lap. They will just make you stinky.

A better use for the giant cheese cylinders relates to the German Easter Wheel tradition I have been trying to get to catch on here. The public nuisance violations are starting to pile up, and you know how great it would feel to push a burning wooden wheel stuffed with hay down a hill during Easter, right? Burning bush to monk cheese – we’re probably moving away from blasphemy.

I wish we could have been there for Vespers, since these are Benedictine monks ie) monks who do the chants. “Do the chants” sounds a bit Valley-Girl. As though they’re cheerleading God with tassles, or something, like, totally, You go girl, Mary.

Speaking of Mary, while the monastery is a little Lichtenstein, the nunnery is like the Lichtenstein’s barn – behind some trees, barn-shaped, with white wooden siding... think Road to Avonlea. It makes me regret not being a man, because both places offer low-rent stays in their “hotelleries” the kind of self-imposed exile I’ve been dreaming about since the house-sitting fiasco this summer (Don’t remember that as clearly as I do? Allow me to refresh your memory). I could use a nice quiet getaway in the same hills Richler once blessed with his own literary curses.

We said goodbye to the Freres Jacques my colleague had interviewed when they won Best Cheese in Canada. For some reason, each monk she interviewed was called Frere Jacques. She quipped that she knows the answer to the rhyme. Dormez-Vous? No. They never sleep.

“They wanted us to interview them at 7:30 in the morning! That’s madness. I’m never up that early.”

On the way back we ate squeeky cheese curds and my colleague let her friend drive.

“I can’t eat cheese curds and drive at the same time,” she announced splitting open the bag with a Swiss Army Knife and handing it to me in the back seat.

Seconds later I was prying open one of three jars of apple sauce I had bought, and almost sprained my hand. A lot of spiritual force went into closing those jars, and sadly I have little. Thus the lasting hand cramps. But the pain was worth it: sucking apple sauce straight out of a jar on Backgammon roads requires talent. Oh, sweet apple sauce. Never have I made-out so good in the backseat of a Neon. Mm.

We curved around Lac Memphré where the Memphré monster supposedly lives. Then we swerved behind an abandoned building, through a sliding chain-link gate, down a gravel yard modeled on a mogul ski run and joined half a dozen parked cars in front of an enormous brick warehouse. The windows were broken in the shape of arrowheads. We walked up the path beside a mammoth rusted garbage shoot. It felt like we were sneaking up on a 19th century prison.

Inside, the ceiling was no more than ten feet high. “Textiles” I soon learned meant rugs, sheets, duvets, pillows, toilet covers, and towels – all discounted to prices even an itinerant like me couldn’t ignore. The maniacal shopper emerged and soon I was texting friends messages like “Need duvet or toilet cover? In discount store amazing prices!!”

It took me a few minutes to realize what was wrong with this idea. First of all, I was spamming friends. Secondly, I had little intention of buying for others once I saw how much I was already carrying.

After a few minutes it dawned on me where I was. The concrete pillars with white stenciled numbers, the low ceiling and concrete floor... it was the former underground parking for the factory.

The store had unintentionally produced the most efficient way for parents with erring children to recover them.

“Wait, hunny! Where’s Julipe? Where did we lay her down to change her diaper before seeing that 50% off sign? The purple fabric? Purple fabric is D80. We’re in D40. Head North!”

By the time we left the store at 4 p.m. it was almost dark. It’s great to have an hour time difference between here and Saskatoon when I call my parents, but looking at a map of Canada will tell you why the difference makes little sense. Why are so many people in favour of the sun setting at 4 p.m.?

I got back to my motel and started a bath. Last night was my first bath in six years. I can’t remember the last one except that it was during high school, and well, that was over six years ago.

But last night I had an Einstein moment. Hot bath + tired bones = !!!

Three Memphre sea monsters.

I rummaged through my bag to find the bath bomb I bought today. Under the infra-red light of my bathroom, I almost threw the puck of monk cheese into the bath instead.

That would not have fizzled the way it was supposed to, unless God was telling me his thoughts about my destruction of his cheese.

The red light is confusing; I‘d never seen one before this motel room. I kept turning it on expecting a bathroom fan but a darkroom light appearing instead.

My savant colleague knew was I was talking about right away.

“You know, the little lights they have above fast food to keep it warm, or the lights they have in chicken coops to warm the eggs.”

I appreciated the news, despite my bathing body being compared to idling fast food or factory-farmed chicken eggs.

Which leaves me at the point where I began: how to gift-out all this cheese by Christmas. For now, though, I leave you for the red glow of my bath.

In Labour

Our new furnace has had a difficult birth. It woke us up this morning at 7:45. The sound of crows segued to the beeping of a reversing truck to the sound of chainsaws. I looked behind my blinds and saw my neighbour and three yellow-vested men staring at something on our front lawn, which I couldn't see from my window.

WTF I thought and said several times just to be sure I was awake.

Wait, was I drunk last night? Was I drunken-accordioning last night. Shit. SHIIIIT. What other disasters occurred?

I threw on clothes and marched down the stairs with a little military flair, thundering down, ready to evict whatever illicit construction gang-bang had pooled on my lawn.

I opened the door, stepped down, and almost toppled into a grave-sized hole.

Two meters from my head was a Caterpillar shovel balancing a wedge of our former entrance path like a piece of raw pork on a butcher's scale.

*Screams*

That was my beautiful patio. And by patio, I mean the concrete path that I never shovelled. Miraculously, in the centre of this metal-dirt-snow disaster my pot of shrivelled chrysanthemums was still intact.

I shut the door and my roommate brushed past me whistling.

Roommate: It's the gas company! They're finally here to install the gas line for the new furnace.
Me: What the hell are they doing here at such an ungodly hour?
*Roommate glowers.*

I gazed in longing at our current state of heating - dozens of space heaters and their cords curled ominously around every piece of furniture in the living room. Suddenly I was ok with the space-heaters.

It is now 3:00 p.m. this afternoon. I am sitting at my desk and my curling iron is inching off of my glass-topped desk from the vibrations.

I just had a conversation with my friend about the house.

me: the house is vibrating again
Dave: under normal circumstances that'd be exciting, but I've seen your house
it might dislodge some stucco from the side of the house
me: or the house might collapse. One or the other
Dave: no, I think it would take an act of god and satan working together to finally topple your house . It's the building that refuses to die so long as carleton students seek near-campus housing
me: by god and satan you mean a burning crucifix that happens to fall on the house?
Dave: er, you haven't had that happen, have you?I put nothing past your party-hosting skills
me: It wasn't a burning man themed party
Dave: I meant more like god and satan shaking hands and saying, "We've had our differences since the dawn of creation, but let's agree to disagree and bring this mother down."
also, satan is played by gary oldman
me: who would play God?
Dave: Barack Obama
or rather, god would play Barack Obama
if Barack Obama personally condemned your home, wouldn't that be super cool?

Even Barack Obama could not make this situation better. Just as the devil could not make it worse.

If God and the devil are willing to make a pact, I'm willing to collapse-proof my stuff and then get the hell out of here for December.

Lennoxville here I come.

Dependent Claus

Fig.1 Where's the damn #17?

This is a picture of my current living room. In the spirit of Christmas, I was going to make an advent calendar, but I figured that instead of building some sort of cardboard-wood contraption and fill it with candy, I'd up the ante with the new and improved...

Booze calendar 1000.

For each day leading up to Christmas, you will feel more angst and frustration that a) The government is in a shambles and I can't take it anymore B) The mall seems like a good idea until you get there C) The holiday season will inevitably go by before you manage to listen to the bible on the internet and write that play you've been wanting to for a year now.

In order to counter these negative feelings and curb binge eating, I have devised a new tool to cure Christmas angst. It's called, the Booze Advent Calendar, and much like the house advent calendars I talked about in a former post, it is a new way to think about the countdown.

I will guide you through the process of setting up your own.

a) Buy shots of rye, gin, port, scotch, and vodka.

b) Empty each shot/bottle into a festive holiday container

c) Rummage through your recycling bin for empty boxes, and cut squares out of the boxes. On one side glue a picture of something christmasy, on the other side, write a number from 1-24

d) Hide the liquor with a number somewhere in the house, or better yet, get your roommate to do it for you.

e) Wait until midnight. Find #1 and in the name of baby Jesus, chug it down.

You can't get any simpler, gentle reader, but afterwards feel free to crawl underneath your Christmas tree and inhale.

INHALE DEEPLY.

See? The holidays aren't so bad.

I swear I'm not obsessed with his medals

I woke up this morning a blank slate. It's a beautiful thing, but makes me worry I'm getting dementia.

It took me about five minutes to figure out what day it was. As I lay there, the memory of me on a raft ride with Michael Phelps and a classmate slunk through my sedated brain.

Apparently this classmate has a fantasy of riding Phelps while wearing all eight of his medals so that they clang together. Somehow she has access to my dream state, though thankfully this scene did not occur while I watched.

I was not drunk last night, but I ate a lot of roast beef and butternut pie right before going to bed. My roommate suggested the reason why I felt like I'd been clanged over the head with Phelps' medals is because I was NOT drunk as he handed me a blueberry tea - a mix of Amaretto, Earl Grey, and Cointreau. I accepted gratefully, spilling it on my wrist as I drank and staring at him like a hatchling fed for the first time.

While my life may feel as though it's divinely routed, ThePeach put it the best today as we sat at joined computers and she blogged about how we're not lesbians while she countered another classmate's assertion that her life is divinely inspired.

"That's alcohol; not God."

The season premier of 30 Rock brings up a key point in my life.

Tina Fey: What are you going to do?
Alec Baldwin: I'm going to give Kathy the full soap opera while you trick a lady with a head injury. We may not be the best people...
Tina Fey: But we're not the worst!
(In emphatic unison) Graduate students are the worst!

I'm starting to believe it, at least about myself.

Potential employers, please disregard.

My landlord has a lying lazy eye

He brought over space heaters the other day because we had to shut down the furnace, which was leaking carbon monoxide. My roommate asked him whether he was going to help us with the electricity bill now that we'll be running an arsenal of space heaters 24/7.

Suddenly his left eye shot out to the side. "I'll give you money for the leftover oil in the furnace. That'll be plenty."

Hey, landlord, thanks for making us feel like beggars. Did I mention that every time I open my window finger-length icicles break off and thump onto the floor?

As you can imagine this house has had a high turnover, and it's relatively easy to find previous tenants. A friend of mine was talking to one the other day. I guess a former tenant sub-letted her room to a cocaine dealer. That room was my room. Hence the three holes and large dent above and below my doorknob - where he had installed a deadbolt. Can't have just anyone interrupting the party.

They called it the "slanty shanty" and that's pretty apt.

It's makes me a bit dizzy to lie on my bed and stare at the ceiling, because my mind expects right corners.

I'm hoping we get the furnace replaced before it gets really cold. Already, I feel as though I'm wading through a shallow icey pool if I stand in the kitchen too long (the kitchen is the lowest point of our house and thus the coldest).

Our landlord also owes us $200 for cleaning the carpets, which he now says he wants a receipt for.

Given that a cocaine dealer lived here, I should have saved the vacuum bag.

The sky is on fire

A woman gave birth in a plane yesterday.

She delivered the baby over Kazakhstan on a flight from Bangkok to Helsinki.

This is the second time since August that a baby has come into the world at cloud-level. The August birth is more amusing, though. It's not so much the event as the story.

Is "jet-lagged" really the best descriptor for someone who just squeezed out a baby in a 30,000 ft high airplane bathroom?

I must have missed that on the nausea tabs:

Take 1-2 capsules every six hours if feeling drowsy, nauseous, or post-partum. Ie) you just shat out your kid in the airplane bathroom. Holy fuck. Treat yourself to some drugs.

What actually happened on that plane is a mystery, as this excerpt suggests:

"An Adelaide doctor who, along with three other medical practitioners, helped deliver the baby, said it was a smooth, 'fun' birth."

It's perplexing. You can't just say it was a fun birth and not elaborate. I'm pretty sure fun birth is an oxymoron and definitely not short-hand for anything I know.

While we're on the subject of birthing, I'm reminded of something a friend of mine was saying today about some Japanese believing that spawning a child under the Northern Lights will increase their baby's IQ. Tourists flock to the Yukon and North-West Territories to copulate in glass-ceiling hotel rooms under the flickering of the magnetic field.

Unfortunately, I think the glass-ceiling hotel rooms are only in Finland, since I could find no evidence of such a hotel in Canada.

I hope some babies were conceived in the prairies yesterday under the meteorite that crashed after dazzling the night's sky with a streak of white, yellow and red. Some called it a fireball. Others called it a weather balloon. Yes, a weather balloon; they look so much like flaming meteorites headed towards earth.

Some comments from the Vancouver Sun's comment page:

IMHO
Fri, Nov 21, 08 at 10:31 AM
I'm sorry I missed it!! Shoot!!!
Julie
Fri, Nov 21, 08 at 10:32 AM
i was driving past macklin sk and i saw the sky light up so bright then turned to look at what was going on and all i see is a fire ball shooting towards the ground. it looked not to far away from where i was. it was pretty intense.
Garry
Fri, Nov 21, 08 at 10:33 AM
I got a chance to ride this bad boy Meteor to earth' what an amazing planet you earthlings have here ' keep it clean and keep it real.

I want these people in the same observation room.

Now the hunt is on for the meteorite's remains. I guess a similar meteorite landed up north six years ago, and the guy who found it was paid $200,000.

Here is one guy's advice for meteor hunters:

"Look for charcoal like rocks, don't touch it to contaminate it, put it in plastic and freeze it right away. sounds obvious, but if there is snow, it will look like a pile of black rocks scattered everywhere on the snow."

Like, duh, everyone knows what to do when they're trying to preserve a meteorite. All those elementary school drills with ziplock bags and dry ice.

I would be down for a reconnaissance mission. Think about what kind of baby I'd birth after conceiving on top of the meteorite? Hopefully a kid that can distinguish between a meteorite and a weather balloon, the word 'fun' and 'this oxygen mask is really... friggin.. oxygen... lots... I'm the doctor... this is fun...'

And one who doesn't use exclamation marks as emoticons for meteorites: Shoot!!!!

Opus Hokus

Picture courtesy of the Internet. Thanks Internet.

Yesterday I was drinking a Smiling Jerry with two classmates and one of our profs at a bar on Bank St, when St. Nick walked in, and Ian whispered something to me and smiled.

It was one of those moments when suddenly nothing made sense anymore. The drink's name, the owner's secrecy about the name, and his father who reminded me of a Cabane a Sucre worker who once scared the shit out of me when I was four. I have the photo.

The night progressed into delirium (the Smiling Jerry lives up to its name) and here I am now with a media law presentation tomorrow morning. In addition to feeling more and more like Marla Singer from Fight Club I also have no clue what the hell is going on with public interest defenses for defamation... something... pizza?

I find that this is a trend in my life - the absurd takes over. But it's comforting that other people also spend their days wanting to ridicule the world. Take for instance, A Softer World's spin-off project Overqualified, where the author writes fake cover letters and applies to real jobs. Here's a snippet:

Thank you for taking the time to review my resume. In addition, I have attached transcriptions of some of my most recent games on Yahoo Chess. I believe that my ability and skill as an analyst and strategist in the games section of Yahoo.com will demonstrate that I'm perfect fit with your company. It is worth noting, before you check the transcripts, that I lost every game I played. The real strategy lies in the chat transcripts that accompany each game.

There are funnier ones, but less suitable for republication.

Do visit the site. Do tell me to get back to work. Do apply for a job with my company basing your cover letter on your overqualifications.

Oh yeah, and...

My roommate, who's been in Peru for a month, bought a carbon monoxide detector since she was feeling tired and tingly Saturday. She had to take out the batteries, because it won't stop beeping.

My roommate called the fire department. They told her not to call 911 since she already aired out the house so the reading won't be as sexy as before. Let me emphasize that: his best advice is to wait for the levels to rise again so the fire dept. can rate their job satisfaction higher. Perfect, just great.

Here's what the alarm user's guide says:

WARNING: Activation of the CO Alarm indicates the presence of Carbon Monoxide which can kill you. Immediately move to fresh air - outdoors or by an open door/window. Do a head count to check that all persons are accounted for. Do not re-enter the premises nor move away from the open door-window until the emergency services responders have arrived, the premises have been aired out, and your alarm remains in its normal condition ... never ignore the sound of the alarm!

Thank God I'm a fresh-air coveter and often keep my window open. Carbon monoxide builds up in your system, causing you to feel more nauseous, headachey and dizzy as time goes on. It may have been in our house for a month now, ever since we turned on the furnace on that fateful October day.

Maybe it's a good thing I spent the weekend tracking down futile story leads out of the house.

I'm not leaving the house this afternoon, though I threw open my window. I have an essay presentation in two hours and the works cited is going to include my forgetfulness caused by CO inhalation which caused me to forget my binder in the Montreal Metro yesterday (it's plausible isn't it? Makes me feel better). As an aside, I called the Metro lost and found today, and they told me to call back this afternoon to see if anything turns up then.

I'm going to go treat this headache now.

I need to start carrying all my shit in self-addressed envelopes

I was having a moment alone outside the Montreal bus station, smoking a cigarette with the hand that should have had a death clutch on the binder with my research; a binder no doubt sailing under Montreal's streets on a subway car.

Flashback to me sitting in the cafeteria at 2:15 this afternoon, writing my parents a letter to include with the confirmation of enrolment so I can continue to send massage receipts like the one I sent today. Free health care: it works until you're 25.

The stress is caused by these extravagant trips to Montreal every Sunday, and today I learned the massages are causing stress too. You see, if I'd left the envelope with the massage receipt and confirmation in my binder, whoever picked up the errant zip-clipboard that is destroying my life would have had two addresses to send it to, or even just a name. But I mailed it. I mailed the fucking letter. Some guy at the Tabagie was kind enough to give me tape so I could re-glue the flap.

It's the second time in two weeks I've abandoned that binder without knowing it. I need to start carrying it around in a self-addressed envelope, postage paid. And consider never having children.

The reason for taking the subway in the first place was to see Synechdoche, New York, the new Charlie Kaufman film which is apt to tear your soul apart. It's why losing my binder wasn't so bad at the time. The film is the most depressing thing since Requiem for a Dream, and I would have felt like an asshole for walking out of that theatre with my life intact.

Lo, I'm the fucked up star of my own play and I play me best.

Philip Seymour Hoffman deserves an Oscar for his performance. I didn't know how true his existential words were about each person being alone and the star of their own destiny until I patted my lap and swept the floor with my shoe and tried tapping into the solitary confinement holding cell that was my brain today.

This film's rating? One out of one lost binder.

Kaufman, who wrote and directed the film, is lonelier than I'll ever be, and I could have been robbed of my wallet and clothes and still felt luckier than Kaufman's alter-ego in the film.

That is the revelation of my smokey moment alone as my hands turned red with cold and I dug out my Visa to pay for another ticket home.

My presentation tomorrow will include a timeline of today's events, a graph of y=possession of binder and x= ability ot make this presentation interesting. The ending will be a Venn diagram showing how my essay is encompassed by the loss of my binder in a meta-fictional way that they'll only be able to understand by watching Philip Seymour Hoffman, almost having a heart attack, running through the metro, almost puking, and then filling their lungs with cancer.

The interactive part of this presentation, which I like to call a simulation or synechdoche, will begin now.

I hope they didn't publicize this

114 kg of heroin, one tonne of poppies, and 10 tonnes of hashish in an open field in Afghanistan.

The governor of Kandahar holding a match and a litre of gasoline to torch the drugs that have "burned his country."

= The perfect foggy night to go star watching in Kandahar with your address written on your arm for when you wake up in your neighbour's manure heap.

story here

I wonder what happened to those plans

When I was 10, I designed on paper a Swiss Family Robinson-style house that was completely underground and included water slides, a dungeon, and hammocks. If you ever played Sim Ant, think those same ant tunnels times Never-Never-Land.

Imagine my excitement when I came across this story about train car offices. What gets me most is how hauling old subway cars onto buildings is the least expensive option for office space in London.

I may have designed extravagant hideaways in my youth, but I never kidded myself about their practicality.

But it's what I've been waiting for: the grown-up version of The Caboose Who Got Loose. I think Bill Peet deserves some credit here.

And think about it, you could turn train cars into just about anything if you perched them on top of buildings in a major city: how about a sauna bath complex? movie theatre? subway-themed restaurant/bar?

The bar cowboy hat is been there done that: I want the sexy railroad cap and twirly moustache.

Imagine when people realize that attaching subway cars to their houses is the cheapest way to renovate: goodbye classic London, enter London that thinks a sock is a hat.

Personally, I see no problem with this. I don't care if London looks silly. I want this fad to come to Canada, and Via Rail tells me to go to hell when I ask for a caboose.

Don't ask why I was looking up rice videos

All you need is the right pot, your finger, the rice, the faucet, and a demonic smile! It's that easy.

I have the impression this is what a Sarah Palin rice video would be like. Also, her voice wave graph is worse than the stock market's fluctuations.

"All those famous New Orlean’s dishes: red BEANS! GUMbo! étouffée! chicken sauce picANTE..."

"Then we BRING the pot to a FULL, ROLLING BOIL."

I suspect this isn't the first time her job title has included "fluffer." It gets me a little frustrated.

It happens most days

To get there, it takes 40 mins.

To get back?

4 hours, 18 minutes.

Including waiting 63 minutes at the Queensway.

I had already started writing this post when I realized I had used a.m. instead of p.m.

As my journalist classmate would say, reporting FAIL.

Remembrance Day 2008 at the National Military Cemetery in Ottawa

This man celebrated his 20th birthday with a bottle of Cognac in the trenches of France during WWII. He lost many friends, including one who was shot a day after the war ended. He is a great-grandfather and has been married 59 years.

Soldiers wait inside a truck before the ceremony.

Ice Capades

Fig1. Think this dude but faster, higher, and slightly more gutsy


Monday is public skating at Carleton's ice house.

It's been Ian's and my routine to go there and spice things up a little with our hijinks like synchronized out-of-control skating. But today was different.

While sitting on the ground, my legs straight out in front of me as Ian gracefully pulled me around in a circle, I spotted her. The lone figure-skate wearer of the rink. She was taking off her coat - then she undid her ponytail so as she breezed along the boards her blond hair flew back like motion streaks. In Ian's words, she was a librarian fantasy on ice.

In my usual MO, I glided beside her and asked for her advice. She patiently guided my steps as I learned the waltz jump, a trick that has nothing to do with dancing the waltz and everything to do with not falling down.

Fantasy-on-ice demonstrated the jump for me, and I copied it with the to-do of a preschooler fingerpainting Emily Carr.

Suddenly Ian appeared out of nowhere headed backwards at a terrifying speed. He launched off the ice, spun around like Elvis Stojko, and landed perfectly on one skate.

"You're not jumping," he informed me. "You have to push off."

Apparently Ian can do waltz jumps with poise and elegance he lacks in his encouragement.

Fantasy-in-ice was not as critical as my roommate who I suddenly realized would star in my next film - journalists on ice.

I'll make up for my lack of excellence in skating by my excellent camera work and uploading to Youtube.

My obsession

Revised essay proposal

Here is how my essay proposal for Candian Studies should have read:

I propose to analyze a newspaper not available online, and only available in two places - Montreal or Sept-Iles.

Given that Sept-Iles is 12 hours away, I propose that I buy a $50 ticket to Montreal on the weekend and brave the Sunday archive crowds to stare at microfilm and feel my head pound.

I propose that I will have gotten 6 hours of cumulative sleep the two previous nights.

I propose that I will run into bureaucratic loops, where each library employee has a different concept of the rules over library cards, and not be able to get a library card because I'm not a damn resident of Quebec. Is looking at your newspapers in-library too much to ask?

I propose that I will not be able to complete my research and repeat the aforementioned steps next weekend.

I propose that I take up drinking, smoking, yoga, and jogging to combat the stress, and busk along the street to pay for my transportation.

I suggest selling artifacts that I make or find to pay for expensive relaxation habits mentioned above.

Finally, through a theoretical framework, I will analyze why I become Grendel's mother when around large hoards of people and slacking employees and people behind me in line who keep bumping into me.

WTF.

Works Cited:

- Shitty Greyhound cafeteria sandwich
- good conversation with Montreal friend
- flattened ass from sitting all day
- panic

I am a carved-out pumpkin full of melted wax

After last night's Halloween blitz, getting work done today was not made easier by futile internet searches.

I shouldn't say futile. They were incomplete. I was halfway done reading a Google Books article online, when I realized that this sentence supposedly stood on its own:

"By contrast, in the two weeks before the election, the Liberal media had"

Lo, the book sample was missing pages, and I had already skipped several, without knowing - does that reflect poorly on me or the authors? I would be writing a reading response on a chapter of this book minus pages 231, 233, 236-237, 242 and 250.

In between those pages were a lot of charts and polls; I wanted to assume I could glean the gist of the quantitative results myself, but with my concentration level, sadly no. As usual, my studying was peppered with frequent visits to YouTube to refresh the stimulating Yann Tiersen background music that I was convinced would awaken the mind I'd foreclosed on last night.

You see I stopped making payments on my mind weeks ago - vitamins? Is that Latin for something? REM? Is that something in a computer?

As for my diet, my stomach actually churns when I consume anything with high water content and coloured like a rainbow bright character.

You say you can't live off champagne, darling? Pour yourself another.

I did buy sparkling wine to complete my arrogant rich woman costume. I bought the wine from a little man at my door who sounded exactly like David Sedaris hyped on amphetamines. I had called him an hour earlier with my order for gin and Anders wine, promising myself in a footnote that I'd never run for office, lest my hijinks become public.

"My opponent, here, says she supports the bill to lengthen hours of liquor sales. Is that because she has more than once called a liquor delivery service and then shamelessly tried to trade empties to pay for them?"

(Mostly empties left by the previous tenants, generous as they were).

The man at my door was probably impressed by the strung-up skeleton that descended from the ceiling when I opened the door. It was Ian's ingenious mechanism to scare the living crap out of me when I came home for lunch Friday with other things on my mind.

Print off cover letter... eat something eggy on bread... check email... SKELETON ON MY HEAD.

The kids who came trick or treating didn't seem as impressed as me or their parents. The adults made lots of ooooos and ahhhhs; the kids looked at me skeptically and demanded to know why I was trying to scare them.

Two things baffle me on Halloween: kids who don't understand Halloween is supposed to be scary and people who don't believe in Halloween.

I asked my neighbour who suffers from arthritis whether she wanted me to help her hang a pumpkin on her porch. She said she didn't want to upset her husband. I later saw him on the street and asked whether any trick or treaters had come by. He glanced at me and scanned the street. "I don't believe in that stuff," he said.

I can see not believing in Santa. But what is there not to believe in Halloween? Is anyone really connected to Halloween's roots anymore? Isn't that why children are confused when we try to scare them? Let's face it together, Halloween is not sinister.

That being said, Halloween parties can up the ante, and surely have the greatest potential to cross the cute wire with the demonic. Conversation runs easily, everyone has two personalities, and often someone wields fake blood. Because everyone can pretend it's their alterego talking, they'll say stuff like, "Give me the fuckin glow in the dark sword, Commie," or "For conservative women, Belinda is definitely hotter than Palin, but I'd do them both."

Plus in Ottawa, you never know who will show up at your door.

I'm sure 24 Sussex got its share of MP and ambassador kids. Good on Laureen Harper for carving 200 pumpkins at 24 Sussex. Is that why I couldn't find a damn pumpkin at Sobeys Thursday or Friday? So you and the PM opened the Beauty and the Beast style gates of your property for Halloween, I'm guessing. More importantly, did you let anything out?

Anyway, if the PM and his wife have some pumpkin leftovers, I think pumpkin is a vegetable and well, you know, I 'm trying to recover those enzymes.

The only thing keeping me warm is this inefficient lightbulb

It snowed last night and I have no idea how to program our furnace. My roommate bought a programmable thermostat and banging away at its buttons for the last half hour has done nothing.

My roommate is in Peru, as she migrated with the sun. Our house is an ice-box and she's sitting in a tropical forest somewhere, smug in the knowledge she's saving us energy.

I have purposely not changed my lightbulbs to fluorescent, because they're the only thing besides body heat keeping my room at a liveable temperature.

I've also renamed our toaster "space heater" and our stove "sauna bath." The only difference between our stove and a sauna bath is there's no luscious German man swatting the steam around with the same towel he ties around his waist.

Where are you now, sauna man? I'm huddled over a toaster.

Tale of two bus systems

Fig. 1

Is Fig. 1:
a) A representation of my mind and body today
b) Papier Mache for my Halloween costume
c) An evil spirit
d) A lung after experiencing hypothermia
e) OC Transpo and STO times the weather times lost directions minus an umbrella

All are applicable.

In a situation of pain like today's you might have said, hey, why don't you flip open the yellow pages and find a relaxing spa, or a place that sells sweaters or call rent-a-wife, so someone else will make you stew and carry it to you while you rest in front of a fire.

But after perusing the yellow pages, I discover the most likely solution to all my problems is Pizza Pizza. Not only does it promise to be "Hot and Fresh" but it also promises to help me with my massage equipment needs, Magnetic Field Therapy, fur, traffic defense and much more.

I'm not sure how much Pizza Pizza paid for their ads to be on virtually every page of the phone book, but guess what, Pizza Pizza, you've created a fool-proof method for people out of their mind to reach your number.

Kudos.

In good taste, though, I think you deserve to be prank-called for being under 'Shelter - Human Emergency' and 'Bankruptcy Consultants.'

I'd also love it if you came to clean out my ducts. They are scarier than a haunted house.

I'm hoping that I'm taking this too literally, and that my eating the pizza will somehow help me with massage equipment, Magnetic Field Therapy, fur, and traffic defense. After today, I'm down in all of those areas.

Light Switch? Paleeze

I'm been living in my charming home for a month now and have proven that adaptation is sometimes my downfall.

The sole light in my room is a lightbulb that sticks out of the wall above my bed. There is a chain on it, but the chain doesn't work, so I have to screw or unscrew the bulb to turn on my light.

Mostly, this is fine. But occasionally, when I've been home all afternoon, and the bulb is idling like a sizzling carburator, I singe my fingers.

A little here, a little there... now my right pointer finger has partially lost its feeling. Adaptation yes, to a potential consequence-free life in crime.

"Sergeant, the fingertips are... blank."
"We've got a real devoted one on our hands."

Devoted yes, to not getting my light fixed. I'm thinking that the less I need to turn on my light (to do work) the more I'll probably need to depend on crime to make a living. So... that doesn't make any sense.

Bottom line: support my 2 km run to the hardware store. Donate now and receive this postcard from Ottawa that I really meant to send sooner.

Sexy GPS

On our way to the courts today for a field trip, the person driving used her GPS. It was a negotiably British or North American accent, which made phrases like "Turn right" sound like Turn. Riiiiiight. Like we'll turn, but we're skeptical about turning.

My classmate who owned the vehicle lamented there is no male voice option. I lamented that not only are there no male voices, but there are also no Sarah Palin voices or sexy Joe-six-pack voices.

As an aside: what is America's political elite's obsession with Joe? I love plumbers with six packs too, but if you're running for public office, take it easy.

Here's my suggestion: A sexy GPS system that will keep you guessing ALL the way there. Doesn't that turn you on?

Go left, baby, no right, no left, yes, right, oh yeeeeah.

Some parts would obviously be a bit awkward coming from a machine. "Recalculating position" isn't dripping romance. But you could argue it's all in the voice.

Whatever voice it is, I don't want it to be the voice of the court clerk today, whose voice sounded like she'd smoked five packs a day for 40 years and was trying her best to scare away little children. Yes, I swear on the bible! Please, just don't suck out my blood.

I'm only saying that because if I had a voice like that, I'd use it to full advantage: making sure no one lies under oath. And/or marketing myself as the Patty-Selma court clerk who wants to see you next Tuesday. Don't miss it. Line-ups around the block, no recorders please.

Back to this steamy GPS again. Here are some more phrases for you to read in your sexy plumber voice of choice:

Please insert your long-range destination.
Drive forward.
Keep going.
Use the underpass
Now the overpass
Slow down.
Speed up.
Lean on the horn.
Honk the horn.
You have come to your desired end.

I hope to come out with a prototype soon: an all-Canadian sexy GPS. There will be one available for canoes and possibly for Greyhound buses.

Bloc Party

Canada's day of democratic chutzpah left me standing in a pack of Bloquistes, the lone anglo nervously chanting to a slogan I couldn't make out.

I was among fifty Bloc supporters at a pub in Hull watching election results roll in. By 10:30, TV cameras beaming spotlights troved the dark pub like sharks, barely missing the Ottawa Citizen reporter who feared she'd appear on TV clapping to cries of "Dery! Dery!" for the 25-year-old Bloc candidate for Hull-Aylmer.

Really, I had no choice. Where I was standing everyone could see me, and when Mr. Dery came in and the pub rocked with clapping and yells, there's only so much I could pretend to write down to avoid looking like an anglo plant.

For me, Mr. Dery's entrance was anti-climactic. When I arrived at the barely-lit pub around 8 p.m., a man was on a low make-shift stage introducing himself as Dery and laughing, thanking the empty bar room for their support. He was young, but I had learned the candidate was only 25. There were no election signs up yet, and none that I could see on the street.

I interviewed him about his views, and phoned in quotes to the Citizen. They were surpised to hear the candidate was already there.

Then I started to wonder why he was being so casual, and why he was helping fix electrical problems in the bar.

The man I interviewed was not Dery. It was the bar's owner.

I visualized any career with the Citizen fall into the Sedan crater, then get slammed with another meteor.

I cancelled the quotes right away, of course, and they told me they hadn't gone online. The owner wasn't even a member of the Bloc. I felt like my body was under radiation levels of stress. My voice was unsteady for the rest of the evening.

When Mr. Dery arrived, the bar broke out in cheers and yells, despite Dery's loss. When Dery reached the front, his voice trembled as he thanked supporters. He looked exhausted and nodded tiredly when someone heckled against the Conservatives or Liberals. He held up his hand, voice cracking, and seemed ill at ease when the room erupted in clapping as he finished.

Since his riding was created in 1914, a Liberal has continuously held that seat, so good on Mr. Dery to come within 8000 votes of the winner.

The other parties fared worse. A few blocks down on the same street, the NDP candidate for the riding, who gained even fewer votes, conducted his post-campaign rally in a hall that looked more like a room from the MoMa than an NDP headquarters. Dozens of light bulbs on long cords dangled from the ceiling in a room devoid of shape and colour. I closed my eyes and saw dozens of tiny dots that slowly faded.

Much like each glimmer of hope for the NDP in most provinces.

In contrast, Bloc supporters were gathered at Le Petit Chicago, a pub named after Hull's former nickname when Rue de Portage was crammed with bawdy houses and booze cans. The pub existed back then under a different name. Now it's a heritage bar ordained by the past through old trumpets, glass cabinets, and one old piano in the corner. The bar's stained wood and burgundy upholstery give it a poor, drinking artist feel.

The Bloc won 50 seats in all: Quebeckers seem quite happy to vote for a party they know won't win. As one Bloc member at the rally put it, "The Bloc is not a solution. It is a tool. A way to give a message loud and clear. To get respect."

I hand it to the Independentistes for their poetic arguments. It melts my eyes a bit (soon they'll be as romantically piercing as Duceppe's).

The bar's owner (NOT Dery), explained to me why sovereigntist emotions will never die: it's because - don't lose me here - they're like the yeast in beer, which never die. They may go to sleep for a while (the emotions/yeast) but they never die (be placated/strained out).

I didn't point out that the yeast probably die when they're consumed. That may have been insulting. But whose metaphor is this anyway.

I'll have to admit that I find Quebec nationalism a little romantic, and not in the soap opera "I got you pregnant, so now you want to go on a date" romantic. I understand why Margaret Atwood says she would have no choice but to vote Bloc if she lived in Quebec. It's the survivalist dream.

On this point, I did manage to interview a good number of people. Some of the younger ones felt uncomfortable talking to me - an anglophone from the Citizen. I don't blame them. But I didn't let them off the hook either. Some of them asked me how I "talked like them" if I'm from Saskatchewan. I said it's because there's a Quebec sovereigntist area of Saskatchewan that wants to separate with Quebec - my homeland.

Well, that's what I'll say next time I'm at a Bloc campaign. Or forget that, next time I'm at Le Petit Chicago. Friends and enemies revisited, this Friday.

Be polite when you're escorted out

Our rabbit-eared TV distorted the image of the French roundtable leaders' debate tonight. The TV made Harper look as though he had a blob of green algae hanging off his right temple; Dion had a pink face, and Duceppe had red eyes. When he and Harper were in the same frame, it was like Battle of Laser Eyes. Elizabeth May's jewelry was not due to TV distortion. She was wearing some kind of sea urchin, presumably because she was swimming with dolphins prior to the broadcast.

I didn't watch much of it, and have few comments, but for a funny (and I would argue accurate) take on the leaders, check out this video from Rick Mercer.

Next time someone at the door catches me in my pyjamas I'm going to take to heart the advice of a retired neighbour of mine who believes you're not a good journalist unless you've been sued, and tell the person I lost everything, including all my clothes. This may elicit pity from said door-knocker until they realize I'm their tenant.

It almost happened today!

Being in journalism is like getting training to be a detective, and most days are spent learning about how trespassing isn't usually trespassing, and how even if you're asked to leave, you can be a ninny, and snap pictures as you back out of the room.

Take that, cops! You can't take my photos! Well, not unless you arrest me. That's not what you're doing, is it?

French Learning Cassette Parody

You may enjoy this if,

-you have a crush on a French-speaking celebrity
-you love to swear and drive at the same time!
-you want vocabulary for joining a French revolutionary movement

I made this recording in February. Because it was originally a cassette, and I transfered it manually to the computer, the quality isn't the best. Once I get an agent, we'll re-record. It's ten minutes! Ecoutez!

French%20Learning%20Parody.wma

My Hurricane is better than yours

While the news of my arrival in Ottawa has been delayed, it's finally on the agenda.

Hurricane Keil hits East Coast.

Okay, fine, tropical storm. I've been drinking lots of guava juice lately, and it mellows me out.

I finally got my desk from the furniture hell room. Do you know that new inspirational book called 'Who stole my cheese?' This is the version where you buy a desk and then try to recover it in a cross-country, corporate merger, phone-tag maze of hellfire.

I won't bore you with the details. Suffice to say, don't ever buy something in one city and plan to pick it up in the next, unless you're the employee who's going to transfer the funds and make sure the desk is there for you, and you have a way to pick it up for a month after you arrive in case you run into incompetents.

On the bright side, I've made everyone in my house envious of my gorgeous waterfalls-crossed-with-rock-hard-muscles desk. Mm.

And I can comfortably stare out my window at the neighbours from my new luscious desk.

Friday, I was standing on Bank in front of Quinn's pub, and an older man carried a young boy, maybe three years old, out from the patio. The boy was adorable, and the older man - his grandfather? - was smiling and making him laugh. I was staring at them and smiling, but didn't realize it until the man looked right at me and scowled. I was surprised to have been caught doing what I always do - freeloading tender moments with children. You see, I have no desire for tender moments with children myself - but I'll be a voyeur til the day I die.

My apologies to the man for the creepiness.

Also apologies to the OHL hockey player I accosted after Friday's game. I was only trying to touch you in the good fun of a bet. You didn't mind did you? You smiled, so I don't think it bothered you. I mean, I know your team lost and all, but I wasn't being sarcastic; it was a good game. It's my beer-drinking, Row A opinion, that the 67s should have won. I'm sorry, was it the heckling? Should I have toned down my cries of "take it off"?

As a hurricane, I don't discriminate. So take it easy, and maybe close your windows tonight.

Blogs are gateways to more blogs

Check out the blog for my house:

http://hopewellharangue.blogspot.com/

One tilting house. One dirty mouse. One crumbling chimney about to implode.

We call ourselves The Hopewells.

The 100th Post: The Blow-up Doll

The anti-septic kleenexes I rubbed my eyes with before I knew

It's like Alanis Morissette has a grasp on the way we see the world, according to this CTV story. How should I frame this humdrum lottery story, reporter asks himself. Open Jagged Little Pill at random. Catholic school girls? no. Hands in pockets? no. Old men dying as they (or their kin) win the lottery? yes.

I'm sick and my eyes and nose run constantly. My room gives visitors the impression they've entered a hamster's safe zone. The more shredded kleenex the better.

Last weekend my cousin and I did an assignment for her social deviance class where we performed a deviant act (something lawful that went against social norms). Some examples given by her prof were sitting down next to a stranger and striking up a conversation; wearing underwear over our pants; and reading porn in a public location.

We settled on a blow-up doll. After inflating her under some trees and giving her a black dress, we carried her around the mall for several hours, asking whether stores would have clothes to fit her, or whether a certain eye shadow went with her complection. As we descended the elevator to the food court, a group of older men were laughing, and one of them yelled, "Hey! That's my girlfriend!"

Before we had dressed her in the park, from a distance, two young men thought she was a corpse.

My cousin and I acted as though she was nothing more than a purse. In the Tim Horton's line, I held her sideways and swatted the man in line behind me with her toe-less legs. Then we sat down, a small Tim's coffee in front of our friend who was supposed to resemble Jenna Jameson. An older couple struck up conversation with us, and the woman told her husband she wanted to buy one of these dolls for someone named April.

Guess she thought the mouth was there for realism.

Afterwards, my cousin went alone into the Chateau Laurier with Jenna. I followed slightly behind, pretending not to know her so I could watch reactions. When she entered the lobby, the people erupted into screams and squeals of laughter, as though we had walked onto a stage, prepared to deliver scintillating comedy. The gold-trimmed plaster mouldings, white pillars, and burgundy curved furniture were one indication that we had entered a higher realm of the social faux pas. My cousin asked whether a room would be available for her and the doll, and then we left the building, laughter still trailing us. We walked past Parliament hill, past several police officers who merely stared and smiled, before finally deflating her into a backpack.

Big Bang Collision Strangely Underwhelming

Some people threw "end of the world" parties today, but unfortunately for them, they're going to have to live with the hangover tomorrow. The Swiss particle accelerator did not open any black holes to my knowledge, and it's sort of hard to hide a thing like that. Don't look in the dresser -- noooooo!

I acquired a dresser today. I didn't steal it, but "acquired" sounds more sophisticated than simply, I bought it for $10 at a garage sale from a cranky heavyset woman who added a surcharge to the price her husband offered. Is there like a fuel tax now? I'm the one carrying it home. But who argues with ten dollars? (That's rhetorical. I know people too).

My cousin who is visiting right now helped my carry stuff home. With a kiddie filing cabinet balanced on a desk chair, her line of sight was on par with the horizon. She is fond of what she calls the Armadillo - going into the fetal position and then when the coast is clear, springing out. I'm happy she didn't need to do this while carrying my belongings in the middle of the street. However, it may have come in handy yesterday for comedian Geri Hall, when she was escorted out of a press conference by the RCMP after heckling romanticisms at Stephen Harper. She said she represented the single female voter, and as police hauled her out of the room, yelled, "I love you! I want to love you!"

Lucky for her, her membership on the cast of This Hour has 22 Minutes landed her a one-on-one interview with Harper minutes later.

Guerilla reporting. It works under the guise of comedy.

In unrelated matters, if you're into post-apocalyptic photography check out the exhibit by Robert and Shanna Parkeharrison: http://www2.oakland.edu/shatteringearth/artists.cfm?Art=37. I saw it at the National Gallery today. Scroll down on their webpage.

Poussez sur la mur!

While sitting along the canal this afternoon, my feet dangling from the Hartwell concrete lockers that adjust the water levels, a yacht floated up below my feet. The husband was trying to pull a two-point turn in a space scarcely larger than his leather upholstered boat.  "Poussez sur la mur," the husband yelled to his wife, as she lanced the wall with a metal pole. 

I was sitting with my classmates in the shade of a tree, savouring a hot dog, when I spilled mustard on my pants. I was compelled to wear pants today, despite the 30 degree heat. I asked Ian to pass me a napkin, but as he did he said, "Guess we should have thought twice about the free food."

Maple Leaf Foods, the napkin said. Food taint scandals: the greatest time to bargain mass food orders.

The couple was now headed directly towards the concrete wall, the boat wedged horizontally in the vertical canal.

I'm hoping the boat isn't a metaphor for my future as a TA. Having students was never something I longed to have. They've happened by accident, and I don't know how to break it to them. You see, kids, nine months ago, the papa of my programme offered me several thousand dollars. That's how you came to be.

According to a fortune cookie today, which bore twin fortunes, the outlook is good. One said I should share my insight with others, and the other said I had charm and good sense. I think this is a case of positive thinking, but hey, I do what I have to.

Don't ask what we're paying

We arrived at the house Saturday while the former tenants were still cleaning out. They looked at us with skeptical, pitying eyes, the kind of look you might get from someone who comes out of a brutal final exam that you're next to write.

Sue, our street-watch neighbour across the street, yelled over to us, "I wouldn't rent that house if I were you!"

"Why not?"

"No good. Kitchen fell from the second floor to the first. Furnace is ready to blow up. It's a fire trap."

After taking a brief tour of the place, we went outside to verify we had the right house - 200 Hopewell; this was it. The funhouse floors upstairs, the mildewy tiki bar in the basement, the miniature battalions of booze bottles, home brew, and beer cans - it was all ours. The crater in the front lawn became part of a new mythos of the new residence -the 1 meter deep hole a wishing well where hope ran together like a rat-infested sewer. Hope was the only thing keeping this house's walls from collapsing.

After a visit from Bill Rye the House Guy, another helpful neighbour, who happened to be a civil engineer, we all felt better about the house, minus the smell, the missing screens, and the tonnes and tonnes of garbage. He kept telling us things could be so much worse, comparing it to the Queen's student slum.

Isn't that a poor comparison, seeing how bad the Queen's slum is?
At least you don't have rats!
We have mice.
At least you've got half your cupboard doors.

Half of us slept in the house last night whilst the other half took off for the welcoming arms of some obscure relation.

Who knows how many rental houses have brought extended families together? I, on the other hand, opted for throwing open the windows and sleeping on an air mattress in the hope that maybe Bill is right. The house won't drop one floor to the one below, and with sonar contraptions the mice will hate our warm, moist habitat for the next year.

We'll fill in the Hope Well in the front yard, and ask our neighbours to pray (On our street we have a chaplain, two ministers, and the head of Divinity at Carleton) or else perform an exorcism on the spirits which have not been friendly to us yet.

I don't want to go

When I was 10, I started a list of items I would take on car trips and taped it to the back of my door. I got to 60 items easily by including each object separately - socks, underwear, toothbrush, etc. but eventually I had to think extremely hard to find new items - binoculars, folding chair, maps, string, etc. The list grew and grew until I was at 300 items. I would close my door and stare at the list for an hour, trying to think of something new. In my mind, I was a pioneer heading out on the plains for a 3-month trek, and I would need all the tape, glue, and sparkles I could find. My bags were crammed with enough useless materials to recreate every episode of Inspector Gadget with authenticity.

I never used everything I brought, but I felt compelled by some force , some sense of creative survival, to lug all those objects. Just in case Leonardo da Vinci sprung into my mind with a new invention, I needed to be prepared. I needed mirrors, in case I felt like writing mirrored style. I needed 14 different kinds of pencils for sketching. But it was also for a fantasy of packing up with everything I owned and in that nest of ideas, that familiar context, seeing the world anew. I had to have everything I owned with me, just in case I found a new picture of the world and could rid myself of the old immediately.

Things have changed. Instead of the trip, I'm now moving. Bringing everything that matters to me makes a little more sense. And I'm sure my list exceeded 300 items (not included: binoculars, string, sparkles).

I made a sign for the back of our mini van, the back tires of which are already half deflated from all the weight. The sign reads, Just Moved.

May we have a happy moving.

Crack raisins

I realized the extent of my addiction to Shopper's Drug Mart chocolate covered raisins today, when I rounded the corner of aisle 4 to find chocolate covered almonds and chocolate covered peanuts flanking a very empty row where my chocolate covered raisins should have been. This isn't possible, I thought, they must have some in the back. When I asked the young woman at the counter to check for me, her attitude was not, "Yes, miss, I shall check this instant" but rather, "who is this lady, and why do her chocolate raisins mean so much to her that she must have them right away?"

I was asking myself the same question.

I was asking myself, Laura, if you met yourself right now, what would you think of yourself? Do you realize that you spend as much money on chocolate covered raisins as some people spend on cigarettes? A pack a day my friends, that is what it's come to.

Chilling self-reflection aside, I did not get my raisins, and was forced to stop at Extra Foods, whose chocolate raisins are cheaper, but not as good. I am a connoisseur. Neither Safeway, nor Extra Foods, nor the organics brand, are as good as my Life brand chocolate raisins. Nothing will compare, so don't even try to convince me. It's like trying to convince someone addicted to Players to try Gauloise.

But I am willing to share - if you're a friend. Although before I pass the bag to you, I may pop a couple handfuls into my mouth and let them dissolve into a sugary mess while you do the talking. I want to feel the sugar buzz relaxing my nerves before we get any further.

I would go to bed but I'm still shivering, WAM!

I arrived at Diefenbaker park at 4 pm. The wind was so cold, the guy beside me in the literary tent was making the table wobble with his elbow. Put on your hood! I scolded, as I shoved my hands further into my armpits.

Yann told us to do a writing exercise and then left the tent to stand in the sun with his arms held into the air like a prophet hailing the creator.

Nine hours later, and I'm wondering what my ancestors did. Did they stay by the fire the whole time? I suppose their clothing was better. They probably wore mitts. Nevermind that it's August. They were more prepared than I.

I find that eating high-fat foods is not as efficient as burning high-fat foods and warming your hands against them. Not that I did this, but frankly I should have. I was security! Who was going to stop me!

Well, the cops, presumably. Or the "commissionaires," 90-year-old men they dropped off at 11 pm presumably as traffic obstacles. How else would they tame the fray?

Horse Races at Marquis were well underway by the time I started directing traffic at the festival entrance. Directing traffic was fun, as I got to re-direct those heading to the race track and give them uninformed advice on who to bet on. Everyone bowed to my authority. Besides that I got to make lots of hand movements, and ask cops for their license and registration. I would have asked them to please step out and walk this line if they hadn't blazed past me so fast. Those cops!

Tomorrow is supposed to be warm, but I'm bringing a toque. Despite the warmth, I'll need it as I nurse a fledgling case of pneumonia.

Concession

Dear Yann Martel,

I understand you didn't pick my story in the WAM fiction contest. I just wanted to let you know that I feel okay about it and am not going to hang myself like I said I would.

Laura

When your little brother throws a party...

Rope some steers!

Montage

On Friday the smoke alarm woke my brother and I up at three in the morning. Even the deaf dog heard it. It seemed to be telling us something.

"Go watch the opening games, you sleepy fools! Go!"

I felt like I had just recovered from a KO in a boxing match, and there was no question of staying awake. "What if it's Carbon Monoxide?" My sleepy hypochondriac brain screamed as I hugged my sheets. "Maybe it is..." my sleep-loving brain mused as I fell once again into dreamland. At 5 a.m. the smoke alarm went off again, this time alerting us to what he didn't know at the time - that Georgia had sent tanks into South Ossetia and hundreds were about to die.

We ignored it and returned to bed, crossing our fingers it would not go off any more.

But my sleep has continued to be disturbed by other things. Last night, I dreamt I was being chased by a man with a knife who I knew was going to kill me once he caught me. There were no "ifs" - I knew it was only a matter of time. According to a Google search, being-chased dreams (which are very common, I might add) point to unresolved conflicts and overall anxiety. Reading over the passages I wrote for The Book, I realized that the protagonist's thoughts are suspiciously like my own. Hmmm. Although I haven't exactly been feeling like an orphan with super-powers trapped in an oasis garden and given Martial Arts training. Or have I?

I've finished my 10,000 words of the book. It's frightening how quickly you can write 20 pages when you write two pages a day (Did you do the math? I just did.)

Now the battle is to make the book seem as though one person wrote it (which will take more than martial arts, let me tell you). We have to come up with a name for this combined author too. A compilation of our names won't make the cut, although I'll continue to fight for it. As my colleague Brennan suggested, Seaura Frattichgraw, anyone?

Back to the present, Diet Coke and beer does not make a bad combination.

Did I mention this post was a montage?

Montage is another way of saying: hey folks, my brain's a mess. Here's a painting I made.

2.5 weeks until I deliver this mess to Ottawa. Not in the delivering a baby sense - although according to one website about chase dreams, the dream is an episode hailing back to your own birth.

I'm pretty sure I was doped up when I was born, so that might make sense. The doctor probably WAS a monster with a knife. It all makes so much sense.

One of the triggers of this nightmare (other than the anxiety) was probably a story I read by Yann Martel called, "Manners of Dying." The story is a series of form letters from the warden of a prison to the mother of a young man executed by hanging. Each letter is slightly different, but each describes the last 12 hours of the young man, as though the warden was trying to figure out which version would give the mother the most closure and peace.

The trigger may have also been Buffy the Vampire slayer. They were trying to kill me with something that could have been a wooden stake.

So apparently Diet Coke will separate when added to beer. I've been drinking in the dark you see.

I've forgotten everything else I wanted to say.

Snake eyes

The Saskatoon Forestry Farm calls all bounty hunters.

They have a partial license plate and a missing Royal Python.

Somebody stole the snake. Though the snake is tame and probably not dangerous, which is too bad in terms of leveling Karma.

I hope it wasn't the homeless kids I chatted with down by the river the other day. I can't imagine roast Cobra being any good. The wishbone will be the venom sac, and sleepy time fullness will be eternal.

Who knows how many people in Saskatchewan are determined to make their properties oases for ex-southern hemisphere animals. The Touracos were not the extent of it, it's sad to realize. I just hope the robbers know that releasing the snake to pasture has an expiry date rolling in fast. Winters here are not any snake's dream. Unless, of course, the snake is being fed live crickets or gopher carcasses in a heated barn.

Note to readers: stealing snakes is not a good afternoon activity!

How long will it last?

I had some gin yesterday for the first time in a few weeks. I was immediately transported to the last time I uncapped the bottle: I was removing a tick from the dog.

Wonderful. Now I associate my favourite beverage with a bloated orange tick. I wonder how long it will last.

I should have used scotch. I hate scotch. But that's why I didn't have any around. It's a if-you're-a-man-born-in-the-forties drink. This is why I probably sold more scotch tonight than I made in wages at the 50th wedding anniversary I worked. There is nothing more disgusting than a double scotch on the rocks.

I wouldn't have minded pouring it so much if I'd at least made some tips. There were no tips to be had; everyone paid with tickets.

Later, I got yelled at for not doing, and then doing the identical task by different supervisers. I really wished they talked to each other.

One superviser sided up to me later in a genial way and told me a story about a Swiss-German woman who didn't know the word for getting old in French so she made up a new word. He thought this was a great joke that would mend any hard feelings between us. The problem was instead of laughing I looked at him dumbly and asked him to repeat the word she had made up. "What does that mean?" He stopped chuckling. "I means nothing at all!"

I was dumbfounded and forgave him for his erratic behaviour.

I have not forgiven the tick, though. But I better get busy with re-association.

Day 5 of the 2-week novel

Day five

I have left Lilliput and Brobdinag, and cut out all the useless marinary exposition of the voyage up until now. I have taken stock of my supplies and realize that my progress has been much hampered by the curious worlds that I have been stuck in the last 5 days. I must get to the world of my job soon, or face persecution back home. My fellow explorers have been cruising at a much faster velocity than I, and I must forge ahead. I am only at 3000 W-ords out of 10,000 W-ords. For posterity, a W-ord, is a unit of suffering based on the number of hours spent idling on the boat deck divided by the number of mangoes a person eats, times the efficiency of paddling, divided by tangent boat trips to cute little islands.

I see an island coming up soon - I think this may be the island of novelisk, whose main centre of commerce, Chapterisk, I shall visit soon to see if I can trade my empty candy bags and scraps of paper for a conversation with their queen. They have probably never seen such things before, and I shall chuckle as they are awed by my trinkets.

Notes from work

The complimentary bar during a 50th wedding anniversary - we are like a receiving line for people entering the ballroom - except their hands fly out not to be received warmly in mine but to clutch a freezing gin or caesar.

At the end of the speeches, the couple whose anniversary it is goes up to the mic. After the wife finishes thanking people the husband puts both arms on the podium and says, "I really have nothing to add that hasn't been said already. But I've been thinking of how we got here today. It was because fifty years ago, I pulled a boner."

The voice is uncanny

Is his opening not a little too biblical?

I love the fake roses with thorns

When I got to the photo studio, the lady behind the country took $10 from me, cloaked me in a shirt and robe, and left me in the lobby next to a styrofoam faux castle front. Would this be a background option? My photographer was a skinny pregnant woman who had to shake the camera to get it to work, and spoke to me like I speak to the birds sometimes - go like this - yuh! and this - yuh! move back - yuh!

She positioned me into all the unwanted positions of a political opportunist, a sleazy banker, a baseball player up to bat, except instead of a bat, I gripped a bundle of roses - why was I leaning forward like this? If university had done anything to me, it had permanently mutated my posture. Now, when I graduate, they attach me to a rack. "Little smile!" said my mousy photographer. "Now say money!"

It occurred to me for the first time today that I have a bachelor of English and I'm employed in my field. For the benefit of all people who sounded sincerely sympathetic when asking me about my degree, "Ugh huh, and what are you going to do with that?" I want to say to them,

never condescend to a writer.

Some of you familiar with my job may counter, but Laura, this is a contract job that isn't even full time. Do you suppose you'll keep landing contract book jobs the rest of your life?

I have already thought of that. The book will obviously turn into a franchise, and I am numero uno yes-woman for selling trinkets from our fictional world. Not only that, but I'm going to contact Pepsi, to see if they're interested in a product placement in exchange for letting us have our meetings in Hawaii. Fair is fair.

Think of it: "As Cody toyed with the idea launching his revenge, he remembered that he had something in his back pocket - a Pepsi. Sweat dripped down his arms and face as he splashed the liquid bliss into his parched mouth. Yum."

Tai chi twister, GMO ninja fish, martial arts kid slot-machines - the possibilities are endless. Journals of Wu fake newsletters to encourage kids to keep reading. Can you see how I am bursting with altruism with the thought of all those bouncy spent-thrift children? It makes me never want to sleep.

Working on the farm isn't all bad

Canada Day.

The Touracos elaborate meals I like to call Sundaes.

The work of Cole, when I'm not home.

Asparagus!

The evil bird.

Return of the Jetter

(Photos now posted below)

So the computer on the acreage doesn't have a place where I can plug in my camera, so the before-and-after photos of the bird mauling will have to wait a day.

Unfortunately.

I called McMaster's to re-book my grad photo appointment, and told the girl that part of the reason was that I had bird-claw scratches on my face. She thought that was very funny.

Well, probably my relatives aren't going to want photos that look like I was clawing myself in frustration during my last year of school. It's true, but not everyone wants the truth.

My guests and I spent Canada Day evening lying in ambush behind the tomato plants in the garden. I came out to tell two of my guests that dinner was ready and was greeted with a SHHHHH! and saw Jason doing a military elbow crawl between the asparagus while covered in a blanket. The bird was perched on the fence next to the shed. It had been hanging around all day, terrorizing the cockatiels, flying around the yard, and eating stawberries from the garden - whole strawberries. Julia and I had cornered it in the garden at one point, hoping to throw a rug-heavy blanket on top of it to immobilize it. Another time Moni almost grabbed it with her bare hands. Moni is courageous. She grabs birds with claws all the time at the zoo.

We eventually gave up and went inside. We were all extremely tired after the chasing.

This morning, I went to collect eggs from the chickens and guess who was in one of the empty cages that I left open?

Mr. I-don't-like-family-life.

The trick now is to convince him to go into a little cage so that I can move him into his home cage. So far no luck, but at least he's right next door. I guess he wants shared custody and some visiting hours.

Before

After

My eye is a delicacy

I blame it on my vanity. I stuck my head into one of the Touraco cages, hoping to get a photo of me and my bird friend who likes to stalk me through its cage. I got one photo of us both but you couldn't see the bird's head, and I didn't like what I looked like. So I tried again. That's when the photo shoot became more like an Alfred Hitchcock film. The bird gouged my eye as though rehearsing King Lear, then bounced onto the lawn while I yelled Agh! Agh! Agh! like a bad horror movie actress.

Rewind now to the owners imparting advice before they left. I could hear their voices now, saying, "And if a bird escapes, just..." and that's when the fallacy began. If a bird escapes it's never 'just' anything. This bird wanted vengeance. Why? I've fed you, talked to you, loved you... and here you are tearing the heads off pansies while I stalk you at a distance with a wire grate over my face. My eye... oh god, it stings. Is it bleeding? I don't want to touch it; my hands are so dirty.

Rewind again now to last night as I fell asleep. Wouldn't it be great to get a photo of myself with a bird? Man, that would make me look so tropical! If only I could open the cage somehow. HA HA HA, boy am I silly. The bird would fly right out! I better not do anything stupid. I should have an extra cage outside in case it tries to escape.

Back to the present moment, I watched the Touraco and wondered if it had evolved much since pre-historic times. Probably not. It did not seem any tamer than a pterodactyl, a name given to it by a friend of mine after I tried to describe what it was like. It's a goddamn pterodactyl. It's trying to maim me. I didn't cause the mass extinction that killed your buddies. Lay off the vengeance.

But Laura, why did you choose to take a photo with the most aggressive Touracos, the ones that have chicks?

Well, my friend, I am addicted to unsuccessful risk-taking. I love to barely have my life together. Everything must be pulling at the seams.

For this particular assault on reason, I now look like Scar from the Lion King. Soon, I'll get to say things like Be Prepared with authority and foreboding.

The bird had flown into a tree. I found a large cloth of some very soft material, about a metre wide and 8 metres long. The escaped bird seemed to be trying to attack my feet, and it forced me to dance a jig as I positioned the ill-shaped catching-cloth to bag it. I almost had it under the cloth. It went crazy! Like a struggling salmon in an eagle's grasp, the bird's claws tore at the fabric.

And then it escaped.

It flew back on top of its cage. Its partner scolded it, and told it to come back inside. It wouldn't listen. It needed space, it said. The kids, the home-life, it's too much. I'm leaving.

Perfect. Now I have to mediate a domestic dispute. Where did this go wrong?

Let me see. Probably when I was like WEEE I'm a ditzy girl! I want a picture with the birdies! That picture isn't perty enough. I want another one. OWWWW ! MY EYE!

I'm so afraid of that pterodactyl that the only way I'm going to get near it again is if I wear Lacrosse goalie equipment with a net-stick. That sounds great.

The bird is gone. It's doing its early fatherhood crisis manly golf-fishing trip to reconcile pre-chick life with post-chick life.

I'll be reconciling pre-eyelid-scar life with post-eyelid-scar life as I send out this post.

PHOTOS

This panel comes from Bigfoot: I not dead. I saw the author, Graham Roumieu, interviewed on Q a couple weeks ago. They're stories written from the perspective of a very self-conscious and depressed Big Foot who has been forgotten by the world. Makes me want to smoke a cigarette too, but also buy the books.

The New Empire

Some of you may be wondering why I'm on an acreage, babysitting tropical animals and pooping chickens (have you ever seen a chicken poop? It's AMAZING!). Well, my vet-med friend Moni has connections that I can only dream of. The couple needed someone while they were on vacation for 4 weeks, and during one of my woe-is-me-I'm-never-going-to-find-a-summer-job-this-summer moments, she suggested this house-sitting gig, since she did not want to be tied down with it herself. Voila. It didn't matter I had no experience feeding animals. My willingness was enough.

Back to the chickens. Their poop is seriously sterling silver. It sparkles in the sunlight like hunks of raw silver. What have they been eating? Wedding rings?

One of my farm-girl jobs is to collect the chickens' eggs. Some of the eggs are warped and so huge they don't fit in the carton. Cracking one of these is like cracking an ostrich egg - it fills up the entire pan. On the other side of the barn-yard are the cockatiels, parrot-like birds that lay eggs the size of a thumbnail. I collect these too so that they don't rot, and I plan to make a Liliputian omelette demonstration video soon.

As for work, the Inn has begun its summer schedule which includes comatose weekdays and acid-frantic weekends. In other words, I only work the weekends now because that's when all the weddings are. My other job, the book-writing job, is picking up speed and filling in the gap left by not enough running around with coffee silexes. By the end of the summer our team of writers will have completed a novel about duh.. duh.. duh.. good and evil and the martial arts. I perform enough mental aikido in my customer service jobs to keep me primed for writing about it in the other.

I am thirst quencher!

I think that if I had a super-hero personality in my serving job, I would be The Thirst-Quencher! Dry throat? Is evil villain Stuffy accosting you in the corner? HAVE SOME ICE-WATER! DRINK! DRINK IT UP! I HAVE PLENTY MORE! I AM THIRST-QUENCHER!

Some days, I really do believe that the guests believe I have super-human powers. They ask me to do super-human things in super-human amounts of time. I must live up to their expectations by rustling my cummerbund cape and saying YES! I shall do it for you!

Hello, Chickens.

Imagine a person's panic after arriving at an acreage under the terms of a house swap, possibly having signed it in a drunken flail in South Africa last summer, to find a menagerie of chickens, birds, and rabbits who are not only plentiful and time-consuming but also very picky in their grand cuisine. They, of course, would argue, that 'picky' is a judgment call, that they prefer the word 'discriminating' when it comes to foodstuffs. House-sitting isn't easy when I've got 35 companions, but the more acute realization of the past week is that birds are more irritable and impatient than any dinner guest I've served in my other serving job. The two jobs blur when I find myself weighing chopped boiled carrot on a tiny scale into 7 individual dishes, carrying them out on a cookie pan to the bird highnesses like some disenfranchised Maitre D'. 'I hope you like my cooking' I yell at the birds. As I distribute din-din, I whistle my way through the two dozen cages, not merrily, but to appease the birds that still think I'm the creature from the lost lagoon. Their chirps sound almost like human screams as they batter one another to escape to the outdoor flight as I enter the shed. My first day I was wearing a skirt and high heels, something, I now know, they do not particularly enjoy. There's enough racket as it is, I guess.

A couple of birds are nesting, and in one nest you can see the grey chicks and their ridiculous beaks moving constantly, as though longing to suckle something. But birds don't suckle, they regurgitate, and so Mama bird takes the lovingly-chopped apple and banana bits to them in her own way. And I never see this happen. If I try to look at the nest by standing on the stool, Mama jumps across the entire 5-foot cage to glare at me 6 inches from my face, and caw at me in her peculiar way while spreading her wings to reveal red inner feathers. It's a beautiful display, and I love when she does this, and so her ploy backfires.

On Tuesday, I found a touraco dead in its cage. The owners of this quasi-farm told me not to worry if a bird died. It happens, they said. This bird had been sick for a while, anyway, I knew. Still, I was not pleased to find this bird collapsed like a feather-duster. Its mate was nowhere to be seen; I guess it had said its goodbyes. Cawing Mama bird raced back and forth as I pried the dead bird out of the opposite cage with a plastic bag and a sieve. The bird was surprisingly light, like a handful of banana peels. Finding the basement fridge, I placed it between the frozen pie crusts and ice cream. Good bye, little bird, I said, slamming the fridge-freezer. It felt a little irreverent not to have said any final words. I could have at least crossed myself, even though I'm not Catholic. But I had never done a freezing funeral before. Does a person throw snow on the sarcophagus?

And so I remain for another 2.5 weeks at my cottage in the country, with my harem of birds, chickens, and rabbits. As soon as I find my camera, I'll post some photos.

When you're sick you watch cartoons right?

While lying in bed last night after assuring myself it was okay to take nighttime cold medication two hours after taking daytime medication, I started picturing myself in some other dimension lamenting a problem in valiant yet stoic fashion, when someone else in the imagined room said, "I'll do it." I saw myself throw up my arms and yell, "We have a hero," galloping around the room to the racy part of the William Tell Overture on an invisible horse until I reared up at the he-ro. I was in love with my spontaneous energy, convinced that I would bank this scene and re-enact it someday soon. In my vision, I heard someone in the room say, What are you on? And my proclaiming, NOTHING! with a voice Noah might have used to hearken God's dove from the new land.

I was disappointed to realize a minute later that I was hopped up on xtra strength cold meds that were making me feel as happy as an olive branch.

That didn't stop the song from continuing to loop through my head as I fell into a slobbery coma, only to awaken on the brink of the soporific abyss to wonder whether I was going to die during the night. More importantly, would this ridiculous song be the last song I heard as my soul parted from my body? I'd always hoped it would be more along the lines of Beethoven's 5th symphony, or at the very least Michael Jackson's Beat It.

As for the cartoon, Mickey Mouse's evil face is prima. I feel bad for Donald Duck, and can't help feeling that he was my younger brother in our childhood games. Yes, that made me the conductor-dictator. Sorry bout that, Josh. I think we've come to terms since.

In earlier days.

Kitchen Rebuttal

Dave's response to my Beethoven video (see post "For Those Who Hate Cleaning the Bathroom")

Mwah! As the Italians do.

Männertag

Watch the old-timer in Khaki

I was perusing a 126-item list titled "You know you're German when..." slowly realizing that perhaps I don't have an ancestral umbilical cord to the heimland, when I read the following entry:

32. We are used to men getting drunk every Ascsenion Day (Himmelfahrt or rather "Männertag")

As it turns out, "Männertag" is the German equivalent of father's day, a celebration that occurs the same day that the church acknowledges Jesus' ascension into heaven - also known as Ascension Day.

The undated video didn't help much in explaining why fathers guzzle bier that day. To find out more, I called local German club and talked to a woman who said to call Sigrid, that she would know everything.

Old lady Sigrid picked up the phone. With a delightful German accent, this is what she told me:

"It's not a family day like here. But the men get together and use their walking sticks and they put some branches on and put some flowers on their head and go from pub to pub."

That could explain why they are in the middle of a forested road with backpacks: going from pub to pub could be difficult in a rural setting I guess if each pub is in a different town. Sigrid also told me that she hadn't heard of men getting drunk, even though it's possible some might.

"I don't know. In my family, my father and my grandfather, they never did that tradition. My mother cooked a special dinner, and we went for a walk. And because it's Himmelfahrt we might have went to church."

It does seem a bit irreverent for fathers to be playing the accordion and drinking beer on the one day a year reserved for Jesus ascending to heaven. Does that make it less awesome? No, indeed.

I'm still not sure what the song is that they play, but I'm determined that be the next song I learn on the accordion. Pah pah! Get your branches and flowers, and let's take a walk.

Gleaning the Glib

Ever wonder what kind of game show your job would be if your employers ran a game show? Would it be the kind of pageant from the 60s with string flags along the bottom of a portable stage and the host dressed in glitter? Or would it be the kind of game show that involves people getting hurt while others laugh? Is it the kind of show where your bosses get you to believe the stakes are high when they're really not? Does it seem like chance decides the daily double of praise? Are the cords visible and the cameras sometimes get in your line of vision? Is it a call-in show of just you, or a studio audience of 1000, and most important of all, do you have to answer every remark with a question, lest you be disqualified? (All people working in customer service fall into this category).

Speaking of studios, do you know what's the hardest part of finding an apartment in a new city? Trying to figure out where the hell its neighbourhood is. Also annoying: neighbourhoods called the Glebe. It just tempts a person to extend the e to be Gleeeebe. I live in the Gleeeebe. Or just Glib. I live in Glib. At which, if I said it, no one would blink an eye.

On a more exciting front (literal front, eh Gatineau? You fought hard for the north side of the river), on this front we have Nuclear Inferno Town, Mechanicsville, and Lebreton Flats. Allow me to illustrate: (Click for better image)

Fig.1 My apologies to whoever's garish graphic this is, one for it being garish and two for my stealing it.

As you can see, Nuclear Inferno Town does not exist. It is innocuously known as Ottawa West. But as we can see from this clever map of clues, Ottawa West actually has nuclear mushroom clouds! It's like scabies for that neighbourhood, it just can't get rid of them no matter how many times it washes its linen.

Now you will understand why, between Ottawa West and Mechanicsville, we have Tunney's Pasture. Kids, this is your first lesson in euphemisms: Tunney's is clearly a wasteland, begotten by a tumultuous love between nuclear arms and robots. The robots have recently given up, hence why they are pointed towards Lebreton flats, where God has recently awarded them life by touching their metal pincers with his finger.

Either that, or the Hulk is grabbing the overhead-projector-bot by its neck. But I prefer the whole 'spark of life' dealie, even if it involves AI.

I'm actually looking forward to AI, and hope that I've gleaned a representational portrait of this neighbourhood. I'm frankly looking forward to my best friends being my fridge and my toilet. Who doesn't need motivation in every aspect of his or her life?

After all, not every job is a game show.

For those who hate cleaning the bathroom

This video was inspired by several things:
- The film "The Fall" which plays this soundtrack (Awesome film, by the way)
- Joblessness
- Beethoven and his ability to remain in my head for weeks on end

Joblessness is no longer an issue. Today, a banquet guest asked me what time I got off. Yes, people still think that's a funny line. It's so unfunny that I told him what time I got off. Beat... that...

I heard that the mayor of Windsor is encouraging his citizens to move to the prairies. I would like to add to his emphasis: The Saskatoon Inn is hiring. Now. Today. Please apply, so I don't have to work with people who think 24 hours of OT in a week is low.

Fortunately, I've gotten another job writing children's books based on martial arts. What's that you say? I have no experience in the martial arts? And?

The key component to the writing job is that it requires sitting. For several hours on end. Did I mention that my feet hurt?

Here's the trailer for The Fall, whose action scenes were filmed mainly in India and Namibia.

The workin gal

While perusing through *my brother's* contractual employment documents, I started daydreaming about other things, like how I would describe the interesting people I work with in future vignettes (my fancier, classier term for blog posts) when I came to section 3: confidentiality.

This post is NOT going to be what you think it's going to be. Unless you are psychic, in which case I'd like to hire you. Aside from the whole "is it ethical to break your contract by writing about it on your blog" I was more freaked out by the summary of the confidentiality chapter. It runs roughly so:

GENERAL
4.1 The agreement will continue to kick your ass even when you leave and are no longer working for this company.
4.2 The Employee realizes that the Employee is employed solely by the Employer and that this Agreement does not create a relationship of employment between the Employee and this company. (Sorry about the caps. Lawyer folk are all of wanna-be German heritage and capitalize their nouns. My theory on German capitalization = every word was defined at the beginning of each story, a preface which eventually became the dictionary!)
4.3 This Agreement will be governed by the laws of the province of British Columbia. (Recall I live in Saskatchewan).
4.4 Something something
4.5 BLAA
4.6 Don't friggin take this document unless someone gives it to you.
4.7 Time is of the essence
4.8 You are advised to seek legal advice before signing this Agreement.

Okay, I've paraphrased here, but 4.7 is exactly how it appeared between two two-line memos rife with capital letters. "Time is of the essence." What exactly is this trying to tell me? That I'm going to die someday and what the hell am I doing reading through most of the policy guide when I should be out seizing diems (is that a type of bird? Why do people always say that?) or making love or feeling more existential angst. 4.7 is making the point that time is always of the essence when it comes to shhhhhhhhh.

Also, why is my contract governed by the laws of British Columbia? According to the internet, that means I could get thrown in jail for killing a Saskwatch. That was invented before they had comprehensive laws for murder. Now it's illegal to kill anyone, including people from Saskatchewan.

I have no choice but to sign it, and try to vaguely conceal what I've done. I mean, what my brother did, what he totally did. I mean, I'm writing from his character, you see how I slipped into his character part way through? It's called skillful narration.

Pan-Cakes

Are pan-cakes merely globs of cake batter fried in a pan?

Dave and I conducted an experiment by making pancakes with vanilla cake batter.

The result: delicious pancakes that don't even need syrup because they're already slightly sweetened.

Sex and the City

While I don't claim the objectivity of a wolf child recently rescued from the forest (Truffaut's L'Enfant Sauvage?), I have had very little exposure to Sex and the City considering I am a 22-year-old female who occasionally enjoys What Not To Wear. Why then, you ask, am I going to Sex and the City the film, which I've already enjoyed ridiculing through sundry biting reviews? The reason is this: the movie is a post-modern masterpiece; through its very existence, it fosters the same girls-night-out mentality among girlfriends who want a good night on the town, possibly away from men and the testosterone-driven films that will no doubt echo from adjoining theatres. The film has infiltrated women's social circles, and mine is no exception.

I am also going for the interest of anthropological observation. I'm slightly worried that a lot of women will be rushing to Shopper's tonight for tampons after being in proxy of all the estrogen in the room. I'm wondering if I should bring tampons to plug my ears, just in case I decide that watching it on mute is more bearable.

But let me say this: I'm always disappointed when I go to see a chick-flick - a disparaging term, admittedly - and the film turns out not to be a chick flick but a cliched, sexist, or simply dead and un-resuscitable romantic comedy. In some of these films, the women have lines only in response to male characters, their personalities are based not on real-life women but actresses in similarly phony films, and I leave the theatre only with a greater appreciation for the male psyche. "I have no trouble understanding the male part of men because I've seen so many films that play out their fantasies," a friend once told me.

Which is why I still have some hope that this film will be a genuine chick-flick that hails from a genuinely female perspective. Even though it was directed by a man, Michael Patrick King, the show was, after all, based on books by Candace Bushnell, and according to reviews on IMDb, the average liking for my demographic was a 7.8 /10 based on 1300 votes. Not bad for a film which Globe and Mail reviewer Rick Groen said is "uniquely bad; this one is a threshold-breaker with a different sound, the crack of rock-bottom giving way to a whole deeper layer of magma."

Groen, a man, differs from me also because he is familiar with the TV show and enjoys watching it. His review, however, crackles with the Schadenfreude reserved only for the truly and deservingly bad.

According to Groen, "there is no script, at least nothing recognizable as such to any sentient being with a room-temperature IQ."

Interestingly, twice as many men as women voted on IMDb, with 2900 men granting it a stunning 3.0.

On the G & M website, a woman responded to Groen's review by saying in matronly fashion,

"Regarding Rick Groen's review of Sex and the City (In This Case, Ladies, Bigger Is Far From Better - Review, May 30), I have some advice for the entertainment editor: Don't send a man to do a woman's job. "

Midnight Update

I dressed up a little, knowing at least about the show's bent for sartorial vogue. When I got to the theatre and met my street-clothed friends, however, I then felt over-dressed. That is until the movie started, at which point I felt completely vindicated for the money currently hot-tubbing on my Visa, money that feels more hot and lethargic every day, and has no intention of getting out of the hot tub regardless of any money trying to get in there with it. Besides, the money's in there because it doesn't need clothes; it needs to clothe me in chichi apparel. Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte, and Miranda understand this.

Apart from my personal biases towards the film (love in NYC, writing career, love of over-the-top fashion), I think it helped, at least in my case, that I wasn't familiar with the tv show. If my expectations had been too high, or I had been hoping for a great new twist, then I can see how I could have been disappointed. But because I was new to it all, I found it refreshing. And I beg to differ with Mr. Groen about there being no plot. There is definitely a plot. It may even inspire me to watch an episode or two of the tv show. Who knows what terrible things may start to occur.

If what my friend Moni says is true - that I like only about 1% of the movies that I watch - then I applaud Sex and the City for at the very least lowering my expectations about it - or should I thank Rick Groen?

Diving from sea and sky

I was listening to a procrastination tape the other day, a tape that was supposed to help me overcome my aversion to starting and completing tasks. Ignoring the fact that it may as well have been sleepy-time hypnosis the way I reacted to it, I did retain one important part. The tape's speaker Brian S. Tracy assured me that he would procrastinate too if it weren't for his good habits. He follows 7 steps (which I retrieve now).

1)Make clear objectives
2)Write it down
3)Make a deadline
4)Write down all tasks needed for completion
5)Prioritize your tasks
6)Take action on your plan immediately
7)Do something every day

Now imagine that you're a 64-year-old retired French army parachutist. You've already taken 5000 jumps out of an airplane and frankly, it's getting a little old. But so are you. You need to take action if you're ever to achieve the goal you started thinking about 20 years ago - to jump out of an air balloon 25 miles up (5 times as high as Mount Everest), experience weightlessness, and break the sound barrier.

The parachutist, Michel Fournier, must have worked long and hard on his quest to see the curvature of the earth. In fact, he sold his house and most of his possessions. After step 3, I really think there should be a step called "Raise the Stakes." In other words, make the consequences of failing so dire that you have to continue on your mission. Fournier, check. One of his tasks included finding someplace to carry out his jump. After being barred from performing the experiment in France because of safety concerns (ex. From that high up, who knows where he'll land) he decided to come to less-densely-populated Saskatchewan to "eat his frog" as motivator Brian Tracy would say; the Frenchman is used to eating frogs it would seem.

The name of his experiment "Le Grant Saut" or The Great Leap, is reminiscent of the economic reform plan undertaken by China in the 50s. Mao had introduced the Great Leap Forward with the phrase "it is possible to accomplish any task whatsoever."

But like that plan, many things could go awry. If his suit malfunctions above 12 miles, his blood will likely boil.

Definiteness of purpose, the knowledge of what one wants, and the burning desire to achieve it: These, I hardly doubt Michel Fournier lacks.

But this morning, Fournier's plan stalled again. It wasn't procrastination that doomed it. His amniotic-sac-like balloon simply floated away before they could even get up in the air. According to Fournier's website, two hours later they found it in a field somewhere, learning their first lesson about the Saskatchewan prairie: it will fuck with you.

There are many unknowns: no one knows what happens when a person breaks the sound barrier in merely a suit. Also unknown: what the hell the sound barrier is. Anyone?

Fournier is brave, and possibly arrogant. But at least he has guts.

After this weekend, I'm convinced I have no guts whatsoever. Sunday I went tubing in river rapids with no education and a life jacket that looked like it had been salvaged from the Titanic. The expression "baptism by fire" would apply if it hadn't been so wet and cold.

While Fournier assembled his 40 person team near North Battleford for jump preparations, I assembled my sanity in the back of a beat-up camp bus hauling tractor tubes on the highway along Esopus Creek, NY. The tube-company owner and operator was a beefy bald man with a NY accent who wore a baseball cap that squeezed the back of his bald head. As I remembered them afterwards, his instructions went something like this:

"OK, so when you get in the water you're going to want to get onto the right side, otherwise you'll get stuck, then stay on the right, but go to he left after about a mile, then to the right again, at the bridge stay to the left, then just enjoy yourself, get out about a mile before the second bridge where it says OUT, oh, but watch out for the huge drop at the beginning, if you survive that, you'll survive anything."

I really need to work on my memory. Tube rental guy didn't get out of the bus, just said bye in that growly voice of his, and probably thought to himself good riddance, squeamish kids. On the embankment, we pushed off shore like a bunch of hatchlings leaving the nest for the first time. About half our group got stuck on tree branches.

Oh, what's that Brian? A major reason for procrastination and lack of motivation is vagueness, confusion, and fuzzy-mindedness about what you are supposed to do, in what order, and for what reason?

Guess what, Brian, procrastination doesn't work on a river. There's something in the water that makes it flow in one direction, usually towards rocks.

My shrieks were exaggerated and cartoonish as though I were rehearsing for some Disney voice-over. I was never sure whether other people were smiling and laughing at me because of my bad luck for getting stuck on top of rocks in the middle of the river or because of my penchant for Goofy hiccup-wails.

And it wasn't funny when fishermen on shore would yell "I'm gonna catch ya!" as I spun by.

It concerned me that there were fish in this river, the water being only about two to three feet deep. The shallow water didn't mean I could just stand up and walk to shore, but it did mean that the rocks and whatever the hell kind of fish lived in the river could easily bump against the wooden seat of my inner tube and/or against my dangling legs.

We eventually saw two bridges, and the rock with OUT painted in white spray paint. Two people were on the shore, and about a dozen had overshot the landing. Having made it to shore, we tried to remember whether the tube man had given us directions about what to do now. He hadn't so we started walking. A woman watering her patio plants yelled congratulations, and told us we were brave for tubing on Memorial Day weekend. The irony of Memorial Day commemorating much braver souls than we aside, it was nice to feel as though we were adventurous.

We did the river a second time, and this time we were the only two on the river. I was tired of avoiding the rapids all the time and confident about not tipping, so this time I simply headed towards the rocks, wrapped my legs around them and spun away. It was like an awkward video game, one where your hands are zapped with icey water every time you want to steer. Dave fell out of his tube which freaked out me more than him, I think. I was busy making Goofy sounds and kicking up my legs with the rapids and letting the current carry me backwards.

Go Michel Fournier!

Michel's homepage with frequent updates

NY Times Article about Michel's jump (login required, but free)

The Awkward Meltdown

Soup: I'm in favour!

When a waiter says, "Soup?" I say, "Yes, please!"

Zee animal ah hear?

This morning I woke up in a cabin on a lake to the sound not of wind through chimes or of loons hallowing the first morning rays, but to what sounded like stones being thrown at my window. It wasn't my aunt being cheeky, but a Robin that was taking out its morning irritation on its reflection in my window. A bird feeder hung just outside my window (which I later learned had been put up as a deterrent) but instead of doing something reasonable like, you know, eating, it did the backstroke mid-air and then banged its head on the glass. It did this several times before flying away. I thought about the absurdity of its actions, and the futility. It looked painful, and it was interfering with my sleep. Yes, I had done the same thing last week at 7:30 in the morning at the mirror while studying for Shakespeare - but was this poor bird going to fail its exam? In my half-awoken state I pulled up the blinds and it vanished like a streak of light: its reflection just got scarier.

As gorgeous as the cabin is - perched right over the lake, counter to recent environmental standards - it is owned by animals who feel a sense of ownership that would make a communist bang her head. The dock now belongs to two geese who have in their monogamous courtship agreed to nest on one of the planters on the dock. As much as I was tempted to try eating a goose egg - literally, not a figurative 'goose egg' since I've already tried that - I wouldn't want to disturb their little domestic arrangement. The male would occasionally reach out backwards with one leg - ballerina style - and hold it out in a position I've seen held by many gymnasts as they check themselves out in the full-length mirror - in this case the lake. It would say in a baritone Austrian voice, "Ja, check out my burly quad." The goose leg was as thin as a marshmallow roaster, and so I think it was a case of delusion.

The patch of grass at the end of the dock belongs to a different family of geese which is actually two families combined. Again, I wouldn't want to prove my suspicion that goslings are soft since it would include a mauling by papa goose. Another thing not on my life to-do list.

The mountains around the lake still have snow on them. A man living across the lake has two boxcars next to his house - delightful, and probably full of mice. As close to civilization as this is (there is no break between town and here), the animals here are not effete.

Beowulf: the first record of foreign aid?

Laura's sparksnotes version of Beowulf:

-Beowulf lands in the Danish territory where a terrible monster has been terrorizing the Scyldings in the king's mead hall for 12 years.
-Beowulf and his loyal band of followers are welcomed by the king and sleep that night in the mead-hall waiting for the ugly beast.
-He arrives. His name is Grendel. After fierce hand-to-hand combat, Beowulf tears off his arm, and the monster limps back to the fens where he dies.
-They celebrate, Beowulf gets lots of precious gifts and the king's accolades.
-But their celebration comes too soon. Grendel's mother then terrorizes the hall, killing one of the king's best comrades. Beowulf follows her to the ocean where sea monsters writhe and the dead man's head is found. Beowulf dives into the ocean with his armor and kills the evil sea witch with a sword. He brings back Grendel's head.
-The King honours him with unbelievable riches, and he returns home (and it continues).

Beowulf is what the UN aspires to be, but what it fails at. The UN will never be as effective a foreign aid agency as Beowulf: it doesn't have a loyal band of followers, and it certainly does not have a fearless leader. Furthermore, few people in it are willing to literally or figuratively sacrifice their "lifdaegs" to slaughter the hideous hag and her terrible son who terrorize the land. "Honour" is an obsolete word, and no one cares about gold hoards these days (although I beg to differ)

What Beowulf and present aid/development agencies have in common is this:
-They both seek out adventure and praise from tackling problems of foreign lands.
-They have come to settle old debts and gain the trust and praise of the inhabitants.
- They believe their biggest resources are bravery, strength, and good-faith.

I say, some progress is better than none. The UN should not aspire to be like Beowulf; and besides, Beowulf probably never existed.

While a catchy new slogan for the UN might be, "UN - ripping the arms off giants descended from Cain," it would be hard to take literally. Especially since the UN's approach to Grendel would be interviewing hundreds of witnesses, bringing in scientists and other specialists, spending at least a year displacing the community to another land, filing hundreds of reports, hiring short-term project managers, discussing and persuading China to get on board, looking at gruesome photos and reports, going to the mead-hall and talking some more about it, looking at the fen-lands where the monster lives and taking measurements, throwing sand over their shoulders for good luck, ringing bells, writing lots of rune-stones as warnings, shooting off their mouths again, and finally, when everyone in that region is either gone or dead, building a memorial.

Beowulf would be drastically different if it has been called UN-wulf. Instead of talking about what makes a good king (protecting the people), we would talk about what makes a good President or dictator. A good President would richly reward aid agencies that help his/her citizens. A good President would offer plenty of mail-coats and beer and gold rings. The President as ring-giver would offer treasure for truly brave warriors.

I'll fax this to the UN right away.

Will there ever be a better satire?