Not Well Planned

Merely Adequate

2005-03-11T09:54:00.000-05:00

I was walking in a crappy little strip plaza yesterday and noticed the sign below, in front of an equally crappy furniture store:

I'm loving the sign. At least they're honest. They're not trying to bullshit people. They've got perfectly decent furniture - not high end stuff, not shit - and they want you to know it. Perhaps Leon's or the Brick could take notes from these guys.

And oh how the Chinchilla and my brother mocked me for getting the camera phone. Who's laughing NOW bitches???? Between this and the Felcher Park sign, this camera's paid off in spades.

In other news, the Chinchilla is officially trying to kill me. He INVITED HIS MOTHER FOR AN OVERNIGHT STAY. Why he did this is beyond me. HE doesn't even like his mother. I'll have to make sure the fridge is stocked with trashy white zinfandel and copious amounts of ground beef. And I'm SO leaving the guest room door open so the cat shits on her bed. Hopefully twice. Jen is coming the very next night to stay, and in will be sleeping in said bed. I promise I will steam clean the sheets to remove all traces of evil. And cat shit.

Oh. I try so hard to be nice. But sometimes it's damn near impossible.

-A

CORRECTION - The Chinchilla read this (gasp!) this morning and called me to tell me that he did NOT invite his mother over. She invited herself over and he "couldn't think of a good excuse to say no" so he just said yes. Couldn't think of a good excuse???? You can think of excuses to get out of EVERY family gathering I have!! So I'll give you two excuses. Perhaps you can call her back with them:
Excuse #1 - "I'm sorry Mom, we'll be getting high and watching Chappelle Show DVDs that night. It just isn't a good time. Come back in a couple of years when this phase has worn off."
Excuse #2 - "I'm sorry Mom, we don't allow the Devil incarnate in our home on Saturdays. Also, my wife hates your guts and we're never going to give you grandchildren. Suck it."

2 more things:

2005-03-10T09:09:00.000-05:00

#1 - Can anyone else truly understand how much I hate Lenny Kravitz? Not just because he does commercials for the Gap, not just because he's horribly cheesy, but mainly because he has a song with the phrase "she's a super lady" in it.

#2 - Are the people who run the ads for Mod Club trying to get me to kill someone? Because they're tempting me. OH HOW THEY'RE TEMPTING ME to show up at the Mod Club on their dumb Thursday night "British Night" by playing Inspiral Carpets in the background of the radio ad, perhaps knowing full well that I have a GENETIC NEED to dance to Commerical Rain when I hear it. But then I'm going to get there and they are going to drop bubbles from the ceiling and that asshole from Platinum Blonde is going to come onstage in his soccer jersey and shout in a fake british accent and if I witness that one more time I will go insane.

Ugliness Timeline

2005-03-10T08:08:00.000-05:00

My mother thrust a package in my hands the other day and when I got home I realized it was a "montage" of pictures that she made of me - roughly from grades 2-8. Before I hide these DEEP DEEP DEEP in the back of my closet, I thought I'd pull a few of the better ones out and create something to share with my nearest and dearest -an Ugliness Timeline, if you will.

Here we go:

I was a super cute kid until age 7. At age 7, I got a little fat, my mother cut my hair into the ragged attempt at a bowl-cut that you see below, and I grew GIANT FUCKING FRONT TEETH.

Soon after that I got a Retainer (to be followed by a head gear, neck gear and braces - AT POINTS ALL AT ONCE), and my mother decided that she was going to start home-perming my hair. I still remember smell of the paint-thinning chemical solution that came with the Toni Home Perming Set that burned - oh god HOW IT BURNED - your scalp before you passed out from the noxious fumes.

But what is a bad perm and retainer without the beginnings of a mullet? Not much. So my mom cut my hair into the abomination you see below (in order from left to right - Grades 2, 3, 4 &5). By the time I got to Grade 4, when I wasn't wearing pink most people thought I was a boy. And when I look at that third picture below I could swear my name was Craig Johnson and I like soccer, frogs, and kicking girls.

At this point I also wore the same pair of Jordache jeans every day and spent the majority of my lunch hour running around pretending that I was a horse. I also ran like a horse for gym class and in the ParticipAction day races. If any of you have kids here's a little tip:

Genetically Geeky Kid + Obsession with Horses + Buck Teeth + Bad Hair = Not Very Popular Child

Before we go any further let's pause on the gem below. This is me with my Guinea Pig, Blossom. I got Blossom for Christmas and felt badly that she lived in her boring cage all day. I would routinely bundle her up in a tea towel, gather all 4 corners together and wildly swing the bundle around the room. One day a corner sprang from my grasp and Blossom flew across the room and hit the brick fireplace. I still remember the squeals. The next day I woke up and Blossom was gone. I got a bike instead, which I named Sapphire. Which went well with the tree outside my house that I named Icicle ("Icy" for short) who I kept a journal about, FOR A YEAR. I don't know why my parents kept me alive. If I had a kid who kept a journal ABOUT A TREE I would smother them in the basement.

I can't find any pictures of Grade 6 so we're going to flash forward to the horror show that is Grade 7. I enter Stouffville Christian School, for no good reason, as my parents were not religious. This is also the year that I got glasses. Please. Click on the picture below to get it at larger size. You can't believe how bad it is. Here's another equation:

Kinda Fat Kid + OVERSIZED PINK GLASSES = DISASTER

Things didn't get any better in Grade 8. One of the things about having an unbearably unfashionable mother when you are a child, is that you think your mom is the HEIGHT of fashion, and start dressing like her. Which is the only reason I can possibly think of to explain why I was apparently channeling Sally Jesse Raphael with my WINDSHIELD-SIZED RED FRAMED GLASSES in this three-picture montage below. And NICE FUCKING HATS, eh?:

Thankfully, this is the age that the "montage" stops. But, rest assured, the Awkward Stage lasted until Grade 12, when I began to crack out of the Ugly Shell and made some progress from Hideous Beast to Somewhat Normal.

So I beg of you. Join me! Post your ugly pictures on your blogs! It's like therapy. Only cheaper. And far more humiliating.

-A

Two Quotes & A Declaration of Love

2005-03-09T08:17:00.000-05:00

Why the Chinchilla Makes Me Laugh:
Me (last night in bed, in my sexy voice trying to be all tantalizing and all playful-like): "So.... how badly do you want me to touch your penis?"
Chinchilla (stopping abruptly and looking offended): "Well... pretty badly, but it's not like I'm gonna sell my soul for it."
Wrong answer, Fancy. We are NEVER going to be movie-star sexy.

Why I Can Work With My Mother:
Because she says shit like this (regarding a co-worker who had just made a catty remark about us) - "Well that BITCH can comment all she wants, but she still fucked [Joe Smith], with his scary fucking glow-in-the-dark teeth, and that's why WE WILL ALWAYS BE BETTER THAN HER."

My luuurve is like a red red rose:
Oh Boston Rob & Amber. I fucking love you guys. Seriously. Scheming. At Every Turn. You are awesome. And the longer you are on the Amazing Race, the more times the Chinchilla will turn to me and say "I LOVE YOU AMBAHHHH" in that voice that sounds like a cross between Boston Rob and Mayor Quimby. And I will laugh and laugh and laugh.

-A

My little guy is all grown up.

2005-03-08T09:10:00.000-05:00

My brother has been talking about moving out of our basement apartment ever since he moved in. The rent's cheap and the apartment is half decent/close to the subway/free internet and cable, but the problem with the arrangement is my brother is about 6'4/6'5 and the height of the ceiling in the basement is approximately 6'1.

So although he's been TALKING about moving for ages, he hasn't actually done anything... until now.

You see my brother, the social recluse (it runs in the family), has been out TWO TIMES with a girl, and is embarrassed to bring her back to a place that he can't stand up straight in. And apparently some wang dang sweet poontang is a FAR BETTER motivator than his back pain - and he's become intent on moving NOW. (Speaking of the Nuge, I've been hearing A LOT of Nuge lately as I have a wicked cat scratch down the length of my arm, courtesy of the Snake, and the Chinchilla thinks that ANY TIME is a good time to start loudly singing the Cat Scratch Fever chorus in an eardrum-piercing falsetto)

The problem is that I don't WANT my brother to move out. Not only do I LOVE having him live here, I hate the thought that he is going to end up in one of the filthy, infested apartments that we went to see yesterday. And although I have lived in those roach/mouse/rat filled apartments, he hasn't, and I want to spare him - oh, how I want to spare him - the indignity of having his underwear eaten by mice, that horrible feeling when you turn on your kitchen lights and you see roaches scuttling all over the place back to their hiding spots, or the shitiness of opening your back door and having to step over the insanely large, rotting body of a dead rat that no one is going to remove.

Oh Stevie, don't move. Stay. I just want you to be my 28 year old little brother forever, always nearby, ready to share smokes, a glass of wine, and mean jokes about our parents at a moment's notice. Especially in the summer when we sit in the backyard until late at night, smoking and talking. I'm sorry about the time you heard me & Nicole auctioning you off to Christa (she really DID want to sleep with you), I'm sorry for the non-stop BeeGees in the mornings. But the rest of it has been good, hasn't it?

I'm going to miss having you here so much.

-A

Why I Love My Job

2005-03-07T07:13:00.000-05:00

...Because you end up working with SO MANY different people, from SO many different places, that you hear CRAZY shit that makes you feel SOOOO much better about yourself. And then you can at look yourself in the mirror and know, to the depths of your soul, that although at times you have have been heavily psychotherapized, heavily medicated, and were convinced you had major fucking problems, you have have never:

1. Flown to Romania to bribe Romanian Army officials to sell you human blood, from the army's supply, to supplement your mother's medical treatment.
2. Been a 54 year old man (and I know he's 54 because he told me about 8 times) who routinely cruises open houses in Markham in an attempt to pick up chicks. He doesn't remember that he's met you before. And he doesn't remember that he's tried to pick up both YOU AND YOUR MOTHER before. But he sure likes to tell both of you that he's just separating from his wife, he owns a Donut Franchise, he's 54 and very virile, but not to worry, he doesn't want to have any more children, just an "active relationship".
3. Kept a boyfriend for 3 years, who is married and living in a different city with two kids, WHO YOU DON'T EVEN LIKE, with the rationale "I need my computer and he fixes it for me. It's easier than calling tech support." And with the explanation "You know, it's like when you need a new car, or a new job, you just keep the other one, even though you hate it, until you secure the better one."

This is all shit clients or potential customers said to me this weekend. I can't make this stuff up.

-A

This one's for the teenagers...

2005-03-04T17:16:00.000-05:00

Just in case anyone under the age of 18 ever comes across this blog, I want to put this message out there. Because I would have like to have heard this:

You're miserable now because you don't have control over your situation. And it's shit, but the people who DO have control may be a bunch of fucking lunatics. As soon as you get out on your own, you start to gain a little more control. You never have full control. But you have a hell of a lot more than you do now. And little by little you will use that control to build yourself a life that fits the type of person you are. If you have mental tics, like me, you can still build a good life. It just has to be a different life.

And one day, after going through a lot of wrong turns and making a lot of small steps forward, you will be in your kitchen, just fucking around, and you'll happen to be listening to a record you loved when you were a teenager (for me - Lemonheads "It's A Shame About Ray").

And it will suddenly strike you how, with those small baby steps, you have brought yourself to such a COMPLETELY different place than you were in when you were listening to this same record 5, 10, 13 years ago. And for a few minutes you will just stand there with the sun streaming in the window, looking around, and you will just vibrate with happiness about where you are, and who you're with, and the person you've become, and all that life has to offer you.

It's not profound, and it's totally cheesy, but it's also completely true. The shit of today is worth it in the end. I promise. Just don't be afraid to make choices that make no sense to anyone but you, and more importantly, know that a happy life does exist. It really really really does. And it's so fucking great when you get there that you won't even believe it. It'll keep comin' round and smacking you in the ass with its fantastic-ness over and over and over again.

-A

PS - HEY CHINCHILLA - It DID all start in the kitchen!!!!

Unfocused Link-O-Rama

2005-03-04T09:01:00.004-05:00

So last night could have been one of the best nights ever what with being home at a reasonable hour, and going a WHOLE EVENING without doing any work, and the really good sex, and the red wine, and the Survivor, and the fantastic dinner, and the even-better-than-the-dinner trashy chocolate cake that I made (and iced!).

It was one of those nights that reminds you of how quietly well you work as a couple. The only downside was the SPERM in the EYE which HURT and made it difficult for me to read the trashy chocolate cake baking instructions - the vision was bleary so I had to keep one eye scrunched shut while baking (which, of course, made for some great Pirate jokes - "AAAAARRRG, Matey... Your sperms a'stingin'!!"). But this cake - which involved instant cake mix & pudding mix and would make professional bakers such as our friend Grumpypants squirm with utter revulsion - FUCKING ROCKS.

Anyway, not much to say for today. You should go visit Sarah Brown's pictures of her brother which I saw this morning and cannot stop looking at and laughing. I've never seen a kid look so alternately crazy/already 40 years old and addicted to Miller Genuine Draft/Nascar. I'm in the process of moving my site over to Moveable Type (thanks to Michael from prete.ntio.us who is spearheading this!!!) and am going to make a little masthead, and I am considering writing Sarah Brown a letter and offering my first born* if she lets me use the picture of her brother and his friend in the Kung Fu poses.

*This, of course, is a snakey trade, as I don't plan on HAVING any first borns and thus will get the picture SCOTT FREE!!! (insert evil laugh here) If she goes after the cat in lieu of the first born there will be problems.

Today is shaping up to be a BANNER day. I don't think I'm going to have to go to work. I will do some work from home, and tidy the house for our dinner guests tonight. Our friends Beaker** and husband are coming over and we are going to do Old Person things that make us happy. Like play Trivial Pursuit. Or Euchre. Or Beaker, Beaker's Husband, and I will get drunk and watch What Not To Wear and the Chinchilla will sit alone in the kitchen and stare at us with a level of scorn unequalled anywhere else in the universe.

** I am calling this friend "Beaker" in this public forum from now on. Beaker has an Important! Public! Governmental Post! and I shouldn't be identifying her by name as her husband does many things that spouses of Important! Government! People! should not do. Plus it'll make her crazy that I'm calling her Beaker. She's super nerdy and starts to squeak just like "Beaker" from the Muppets when she gets excited. But part of the fun of Beaker's friend is making fun of her. And sitting around with her husband and the Chinchilla (all 3 of us coming from CRAZY long-ago- split-up families) and making fun of Beaker's parents recent SPECTACULAR divorce and the subsequent "new spouse/naked pictures/watching-your-formerly-normal-parent completely-lose-it" fallout that comes after a divorce.

Ahhhh good friends. If you can't mock each other to the point of tears, why would you even want to hang out?
-A

Pubes & Cars & Jerks.

2005-03-03T10:14:00.000-05:00

So I got quotes on two things yesterday:

#1 - Another quote on a car from the nice man* at the car dealership.
#2 - A quote on laser hair removal in an effort to stop the kinda-scary growth spurt of my... ahem... bikini line.

Comments on Quote #1:

The nice man at the car dealership asked me to slow down and "not take the corners so fast" during our test drive. He then gripped the dashboard and sighed heavily.
The nice man at the car dealership seemed quite perplexed that I brought a CD with me on the test drive so I could check out the stock sound system.
The nice man at the car dealership quite snarkily told me that I shouldn't be pumping the breaks in time to the music at stop lights. Not even to Bjork.
The nice man at the car dealership had the audacity to tell me that upgrading to leather seats would probably "be too expensive for you". When I asked how much it was he told me it would be $1500. At that point I was seriously tempted to inform him that I am 99% positive I make a hell of a lot more than he does, but I refrained. Because I am a LADY.**
Now I am quite torn. I would like to buy this car from that dealership because it would be easiest for me to get it serviced there. But half of me doesn't want to buy it from him because he's such a jerk. And the other half of me wants to buy it from him to show him that young (oh, I'm flattering myself) women can be serious customers and we deserve the same amount of respect he would give to a 40 year old man wearing dockers and some insanely boring shirt with a bored wife and a wailing 2 year old by his side.

*He wasn't really a nice man. He was a complete fucking asshole but I'm trying to be positive here. ** Not really, but I clean up nice and can pretend to be one.

Comments on quote #2:

WOW. That's a lot of money for a hairless snatch!***
But maybe it's worth it. I'm tired of shaving and I'm really quite horrified at the places hair is growing where it never grew before. I'd like to continue wearing bathing suit, and not the old-fashioned kind of bathing suits that go down to your knees. Even if I did wear the old fashioned type of bathing suits, at this rate I think my pubic hair might reach my fucking ankles by next summer if I don't take action soon.
And don't you ladies just sigh and think of how disgusting I am for talking about this. BECAUSE I KNOW IT'S HAPPENING TO YOU TOO. I've quizzed all my friends. Repeatedly. And for all you women who plan on breeding, word is that it gets EVEN WORSE when you're pregnant.

***Not totally hairless. I'm just talking severly reducing the sides so I don't end up like that really gross camp counselor I had at Glenbrook Daycamp who wore short shorts and you could see little wispy dark pubes snaking down her thighs. EW. EW. EW!! I was like, 8 years old, and along with finding a dead cat in the barn, this counselor's pubic hair is pretty much the only thing I remember about camp.

So I am still undetermined about the laser hair removal. I don't know if I can afford it. It seems like a crazily frivolous thing to spend money on. But I don't want a hippy snatch. And I've seen my mother naked and I know the depths of bushiness to which I am rapidly heading, and it is NOT a place I want to be.

Ach. Time to work on my taxes. I will think of hippy snatches no more.

-A

Things that would make me very happy

2005-03-02T08:37:00.000-05:00

If the LCBO would start selling cigarettes, drink mix and desserts (I'm telling you, they're missing out on MILLIONS in sales per year). It's bad enough I have to go to the LCBO for my booze - can't you shorten the number of stops I have to make? All I want is some wine, duMauriers and some flourless chocolate cake!
Speaking of flourless chocolate cake - has anyone tasted those President's Choice Molten Chocolate Cakes? HOLY SHIT ARE THEY EVER GOOD. I was introduced to these by Stoner Matt, who is so skinny he can eat them with regularity. But I, unfortunately, am not, so we finished one box of them and I have not bought them again. I just think about them longingly. Like every fucking day. So the thing that would make me very happy is if they were good for me. Like celery. Chocolatey, gooey, warm, melt-in-your-mouth celery.
If Leah McLaren was not a fixture on the Toronto media scene. She was on CBC's 50 Canadian Tracks yesterday morning blathering on about how the list should be comprised of best-selling Canadian artists, and not just be an open forum on Canadian music. Leah represents everything that's wrong with popular culture. If we followed her suggestion and mindlessly embraced everything that the unwashed masses love, we'd have... well we'd have the big pile of shit that is popular culture today. She got totally dissed by the other panelists. I especially loved when they critiqed her choice of Alanis Morisette's "You Oughta Know" as an anthem of girl power with statements like "What's so empowering about giving blow jobs in a theatre"? Because I can answer that. There is NOTHING empowering about giving blow jobs in a theatre. Nothing. At. All.
If this strange string of injuries would stop. Yesterday I went to kiss a client's dog (I do that. I kiss dogs. And cats. And birds.) AND IT BIT ME. HARD. Fucking hell. I'm falling apart and this HAS TO STOP. Thank god I had my hands on the dogs head as I gave it a kiss and it bit my hand not my face.

If there's anything that would make you happy, I'd love to hear about it...

Why I want to marry my acupuncturist

2005-03-01T10:00:00.000-05:00

The best part about having a back injury? (aside from smoking copious amounts of pot and watching shit like Ghostbusters without a HINT of guilt) Not having to shovel the stupid amount of snow that is coming down right now. I can lay inside, drink tea, and bat my eyelashes at the manly Chinchilla who had to get up and shovel this shit for half an hour this morning. Promises of blow jobs abounded. So between the ones promised this morning and the ones promised for the Most Brilliant Shelf EVER that was installed in my bathroom this past weekend, I'll be busy for quite some time.

I'm feeling much better today because... (drumroll please) THE SACRUM HAS BEEN PUSHED BACK INTO PLACE! I repeat - THE SACRUM IS BACK IN PLACE!! The new love of my life, my super-geeky acupuncturist, worked his geeky magic on my back yesterday and I now have a range of movement I thought would never return. I still have to lay down as much as possible, take my stinky chinese pills and use my beloved heating pad in 20 minute intervals, but man - does it ever feel better. I'm going to have a WHOLE DAY out of the house today, and I can't tell you how much I'm looking forward to it.

In other news, big up props (or whatever the kids say) to one Jennifer Whiteford who had the funniest quote I've heard in a very very long time, that had the Chinchilla and I laughing until long after we went to bed last night, with this comment about the Oscars:

Perhaps the part that you thought you hallucinated was the performance by your ex-obsession Adam Duritz, where he had the most fucking BIZARRE hair that I have ever seen in my life. He looked like a fat helicopter in a bad shiny suit.

Then here is the picture I received via an email shortly after the comment was posted, along with a love note, ostensibly from the aforementioned Fat Helicopter.

That's the thing about being friends with people you knew in high school. Especially ones that never smoked drugs. THEY REMEMBER EVERYTHING. So now I have to admit that, for some reason that I can no longer understand, I was obsessed with this man for a short period of time in high school. I went to the concert in Toronto, met him and gave him a book of Yeats poetry to show him we were soulmates. Yeah. I know. I also dressed like THIS in high school (I'm 2nd from the left, and nice overalls, Jen!!), wore a bonnet around to proudly show my solidarity with Laura Ingalls, and frequently ate my lunch in the bathroom - so there's a lot of things I did in high school that I don't completely understand. But not only did Jen's description make me howl aloud laughing, it was also completely accurate. Look at the picture above - DOES HE NOT LOOK LIKE A FAT HELICOPTER? I'm planning on taking the Chinchilla on a helicopter ride when we go to Hawaii for our 10th anniversary - perhaps I'll give old Adam a call and see if he does tropical tours.

And finally, speaking of high school, it is with great sadness that I learned that the Buy The Pound at Adelaide & Jarvis is closing this month. The end of another era! Oh, the days I spent in there, along with the gloved and masked Buy The Pound staff, picking through bin after bin of clothing in search of the next oh-so-retro-item that would surely make me look JUST LIKE MY HERO COURTNEY LOVE.

As I said. I don't always understand my actions.

-A

...but my boobs are still okay*

2005-02-28T11:12:00.000-05:00

What could be better than a hot heating pad on your ass? Trick question. Nothing. Nothing is better than a hot heating pad on the spasming base of your spine/ass. After (foolishly) working in a sitting position for half an hour this morning, I am back to the horizontal position, with just my head propped up, and typing by FEEL ALONE**, and DAMN this heating pad feels fine. I am preparing for 5 o'clock this evening, when the acupuncturist/osteopath will attempt to push that bitch of a sacrum back into its natural position. Good Fucking Times.

It was an incredibly humbling weekend, what with all the enforced bed rest. I spent more time at home with the Chinchilla than I have in about a year, as he bravely stayed by my side, feeding me tea and fresh croissants, calming me down when my brother decided to play an entire Eminem album at FULL FUCKING BLAST downstairs in the middle of my nap, and renting more movies.

Having had enough of the Duty Weed, we watched non-stoner movies yesterday afternoon***, and last night, for the first time in forever**** I watched a portion of the Academy Awards. They're so horrible. At one point something happened (I can't remember what it was*****) and the Chinchilla turned to me and said "I think we both just hallucinated that. That was so unbelievably fucking awful it couldn't have been real."

And the sound and the lighting! They have rehearsals. Can't they perfect the sound balance so the TV audience can hear what the announcer is saying? And, as someone who has only a little bit of experience with TV lighting, IF YOU HAVE BLACK PEOPLE AND WHITE PEOPLE ON THE SAME STAGE, ONE AFTER ANOTHER - ADJUST THE FUCKING LIGHTING. Renee Zellewiger (sp?) looked like Olive Oyl, but with a super creepy virgin-mary kind of glow. And I think Mike Myers is channeling Jack White, what with the thinned out hair, the dyed-darker colour, and the pasty white complexion. And I decided that I hate Natalie Portman. She should just STOP LOOKING LIKE THAT. With her stupid mouth partly open and her stupid smile. And I love Tim Robbins and everything but dude, a peace tie? Come ON.

Anyway, I either fell asleep or was induced into a fucking coma by that Carlos Santana/yowling Latino performance of the song from the Motorcycle Diaries (which was GOOD in the movie, but HORRIBLE during the electrified performance) so I can't comment any further, as I missed the rest of the evening. Unless I sustain another bed-rest inducing injury next year, I will not be wasting 2 hours of my life again on that shit. I'm still bitter from that feel-good-barf-fest of a movie Forrest Gump winning all those awards years ago. Now I sound old.

Time to go gobble more back spasmy pills!

-A

* title inspired by Daymented's comment.
** Thank you, oh femme-mustached Miss Eby, at Stouffville Christian School, for those typing lessons I thought were useless at the time.
*** The Motorcycle Diaries (It was alright, nothing spectacular, except for the million jokes the Chinchilla and I made about passionate latinos who speak in metaphors, and also the supreme hotness of Gael Garcia Bernal), and My Architect (pretty good, a little self-indulgent perhaps - this coming from someone who writes a blog - but the director/protagonist really bugged me and that kind of overshadowed the movie for me [as I'm sure it also did for the Chinchilla who had to sit through the movie with me piping up every two seconds with a variation of: "I HATE THIS GUY", "THIS GUY IS CREEPY", "I HATE HIM BECAUSE HE'S SHORT", or "I HATE HIM BECAUSE HE ROLLERBLADES. Look at him, rollerblading and thinking he's all cool - ONLY LOSERS ROLLERBLADE!" the whole time])
**** And I only watched it because it was I was all movied out and I couldn't leave the couch.
***** Because at that point I was fucking baked.

My God, the PAIN

2005-02-27T09:06:00.000-05:00

So Friday morning, just after I posted, I was plunged into the world of agony that is a back injury. Having never had one before I was completely floored by the fucking PAIN. It happened quickly and the pain was instantaneous. I had NEVER felt pain like that before. Like pain that makes you want to either scream or pass out.

Not knowing what to do, but knowing I happened to have an appointment with my acupuncturist later that day, I drove up to Markham, fucking BAWLING the whole time, and laid on my mother's living room floor, NON-STOP BAWLING, until my 2 PM appointment. I called my friend Kate to cancel our plans for the evening and BAWLED into her answering machine about the PAIN, HOLY FUCKING SHIT, THE PAIN. At one point my body could no longer sob and I just laid there making these freaky moaning noises while water flowed out of my eyes.

Then while laying on the floor at my mom's, I convinced myself that I had about 12 different medical conditions, including a fast moving cancer, a ruptured disk that would require instantaneous spinal surgery, the beginning of a form of paralysis... so you see where I am going...

Long story short, apparently I have "sheared a ligament off my sacrum" and now the sacrum is tilted. Which will heal. And I won't be paralyzed/have surgery, nor do I have cancer. I just have to remain essentially motionless on my back for a few days. Which is surprisingly difficult for someone who is generally operating at like, level "FRANTIC", most of the time. And certainly never watches TV during the day. But the chinese herbs I am taking for the back spasms are making me insanely sleepy, so it makes it a bit easier.

What also makes it easier is the decision I came to that if you are ordered to lay on your couch for a few days, it is your DUTY to humankind to get completely BAKED and watch movies ALL DAY LONG. So far it's been Ghostbusters, Story of the Weeping Camel, and last night Christa & Nicole brought over PeeWee's Big Adventure. They also attempted to eat chips with Cool-Whip on them - but that's another story all together (Nicole's reaction to the taste: "OH... this is... WEIRD... I think I'm gonna barf...).

But alas, I have remained in a non-flat-on-my-back position for too long now, semi-propped up on my couch with my lap top. And I must go back to a completely horizontal position, Coronation Street, and my heating pad.

Later: More on how much I now value back health, my newly-admitted attraction to Bill Murray, the new shelf in my bathroom that makes me want to give the Chinchilla a thousand blow-jobs, and how I may need to get a new cleaning lady because 2 of her staff now refuse to come here because of my mentally ill cat.

-A

2005-02-25T08:08:00.000-05:00

Morning appointments today so no time to post right now. Besides, seeing as my stats went through the roof yesterday, I don't know what I would do to top myself (Note to self: write about your boobs more often). I will however, just say quickly that buying a new car is FUN. Like REALLY REALLY FUN. Except I am very bad at bargaining. In fact, so bad that I came away with an offer from the dealership of FULL PRICE and no add-ons. This offer was from a woman wearing FAKE LEATHER PANTS and the worst pink lipstick I have EVER seen. Like the colour of those old "Wet'n'Wild" lipsticks you had in grade 6. Will have to bring the Chinchilla back to the dealership to be the nasty one. And I'm kind of freaked out that I want the blue car. My parents ALWAYS had blue cars. Oh god, maybe I'm turning into them. I guess if I start alternately talking to dead people/stripping the pets of their sense of self-worth then I know I'm on my way...

Just Me, Myself & My Stripper Tits

2005-02-24T08:02:00.000-05:00

So, after a morning temper tantrum yesterday when I couldn't find a bra (this is because, in an effort to keep the bedroom clean, all my clothes that were previously on the floor have simply been shoved in the closet behind the porn mirror doors) I broke down and admitted to myself that I needed to go buy some new bras.

One of the fallouts about being involved with someone who does not give a SHIT about lingerie ("I just wanna see you naked!" he says) is that you end up owning three bras - one of which is held together by safety pins (strategically positioned so as not to prick me), one of which used to be white but is now grey from repeated accidental washings in the dark load, and the last was a regular old white bra that I made some wild, scissor-wielding adjustments to so that I could have a bra with those cool clear straps that are so good for tank tops. So I needed new bras.

And to speak frankly, the ONLY good thing about gaining 20 pounds is the huge fucking breasts I have developed after years of being a B-cup/C-cup. Last summer I went to a fancy bra store to buy a bra, asked for a C cup and the woman laughed at me. She put me in a changeroom and started bringing me Double-D Battleship-type bras that could take your fucking eye out if we moved closely together at a high speed. I don't know if it was purely the weight gain, or if it was a hormonal surge at age 29, but I've now got breasts that could rival ANY of the chicks in the live sex shows at the Zanzibar.

And I'm not saying this to be like "oh-look-at-me-and-my-gigantic-gongas". Because I'd rather be 20 lbs lighter and have my old ones (and I WILL be, just give me time). I'm saying this so I can express my fucking HORROR at the type of bras available to girls with big boobs. Have you ever SEEN the type of bras offered to anyone over a D-cup? Especially in WHITE? First of all, they only make them like, FULL FUCKING COVERAGE, with BIG MOTHERFUCKING STRAPS. And they make them out of THICK, no-hint-of-translucency-or-lace material. A white bra in a double-D looks like a fucking helmet for a giant, or a full-body shield, coming RIGHT AT YOU. You see one of those white bras and you have an almost instinctual urge to yell "DUCK!" and deek behind the nearest display. These bras are, to use some lingo from back in the day, true "don't touch my daughter" bras. Just bigger, scarier versions of the bras my mother decided to buy me when she found out I was having sex.

I ended up buying three of them. One of them I didn't even try on, it just looked so Nurse Ratchett-like that I had to buy it. I'm going to put it on tonight and try and force-feed the Chinchilla some Advil. The other two are made by a company called "Triumph", which also made me laugh because as I type this I am fully expecting (hoping) that my new bra will start barking horrible insults at my breasts in a heavy Hungarian accent. One of the "Triumph" bras has a subtitle - "Dangerous Curves". Which provided hours (okay, minutes) of entertainment last night as I lunged around the bedroom, shoving my boobs in the Chinchilla's face and yelling "WATCH OUT!! They're DANGEROUS!!!"

Anyway, next time any of you see me, if you want to announce my arrival in a cheesy DJ voice like "LADIES & GENTLEMENT, one hand clapping against the other makes a VERY NICE SOUND for A.P. and her fat-boobs!!!", please go ahead. I'm going to enjoy them while I have them.

-A

2005-02-23T08:14:00.000-05:00

Do you see this hair, people? DO YOU SEE THIS HAIR??? Do you know what this is? THIS IS AWESOME HAIR!! Like KICK-ASS MARCIA CROSS RED WITH SUBLIME GOLDEN HUES hair. AND IT'S MY HAIR, Bitchez! MY! HAIR!

Let's just pause for a moment now and reflect on how fucking great my hair colour is, shall we? Now let's reflect for a moment about how unbelievably self absorbed I must be to A) Have a blog, and B) Have a blog in which I go on at length about my hair.

In other news. Can anyone else out there relate to how happy THIS makes me? (the part about NOT joining, not the part about how Frank McKenna still says we are).

And how great is THIS photo of the Queen? It looks like she's someone's dementia-addled grandmother who just peed behind the curtains. (I copied this jpeg of the Star website and their saved name for it was "Queen Peering", which makes me wonder what other types of photos of the Queen they have - "Queen Waving", "Queen Raging", "Queen Bitch-Slapping Charles"...)

And finally... BLOW UP IS CLOSING!! I know that I am the last person in Toronto to know about this, but oh, how this strikes to the depths of my very soul! (sigh) Blow-up. Oh the drunken nights I have spent with you. Oh the times that I have been dancing to the Beatles or the Who or Question Mark and the Mysterions and thought that this is one of my favourite places in the whole wide world because it was dank and it was dirty, it played the GREATEST music and they openly mocked me for ordering Malibu (NOTE - I am talking about Lemondrop, ElMo, & Lees Palace days - not the pretty "Swallow Lounge" they hold it in now). I've been humiliated in front of ex-boyfriends there, barfed in the alleyway outside there, lost my shoes and my dignity there - in short, I had some really great times there. I will miss you, my precious little Blow-up. Godspeed.

-A

PS - Question of the day - we have no breakfast foods in the house. Should I, or should I not, eat chocolate cake with raspberry filling for breakfast???

Maybe you had to be there...

2005-02-22T20:24:00.000-05:00

So I was talking with my friend Colin on the phone yesterday and he was lamenting the fact that he recently got together with an old group of friends, and all they could talk about was the "old times".

I'm pretty glad that, although I have known most of my friends for 10+ years and have lived in pretty close quarters with most of them, we are still able to create new memories with each other that make us laugh as much as the old memories do.

I'm still guilty for rambling on about things that happened years ago that still make me laugh out loud when I think about them. So here's a list of my top 5 favourite memories that my friends are probably all sick of, that I can always talk about, always make myself laugh with, and they never get old:

#1 - The time that Colin Tattersall was driving home from my house dressed in short shorts, a child-sized Michael Jackson T-shirt and a sombero, got pulled over by the cops, and was questioned wearing that outfit.

#2 - The time a strange man pointed out that the Chinchilla's penis was peeking out of the little opening at the front of his flannel pyjama pants at the Loblaw's Meat Counter. I'm laughing so hard as I type that sentence there are tears coming to the corners of my eyes.

#3 - When we went looking for apartments at a time of like 0% vacancy in Toronto, were desperately sweet-talking prospective landlords and Nicole said "Do you have a pool? My cat likes to swim."

#4 - Last year at Brad's 30th birthday party, when all the stoner non-lawyers were banished to the basement under the guise of "yeah, we'll all be coming down there soon", because we had led a rather vigorous discussion outside about Colin's recreational Viagara use ("Can I tell you something? Don't take it when you're sleeping with someone for the first time. You just come off as a FUCKING INSATIABLE PERVERT"), and we were promised CHIPS AND POP. When we got downstairs one cat came down, barfed on the floor, and another promptly came down and ate it. Perhaps this doesn't sound funny to you but I have had to stop three times while writing to put my head down and laugh.

#5 - When my old roommate Denise, who is now a born again Christian reporter on 100 Huntley Street (I'm not kidding), who was (lovably) socially inept in every way, shape, and form, decided to get revenge on us for laughing at the death of her rabbit. Denise thought that her revenge was HILARIOUS, and she got her revenge by joyously and openly speculating AT GREAT LENGTH about the imminent death of Amy's grandmother's beloved cat, in front of Amy's increasingly horrified grandmother. (Okay, so I know that didn't come out funny, but trust me, when Denise proceeded to compare Amy to Hitler, it was a laugh a minute. And Heather will be laughing as she reads this).

Runner Up #1:
The time I found Heather passed out on the bathroom floor, covered in her own vomit, and I had to spongebath her and all she was concerned about was that I didn't see her oversized breasts. Then I had to go have lunch with my mom and her new boyfriend, who she introduced as her "lover" and who she ordered some "very special videos" with to "increase their intimacy". I still don't know what was worse, gently picking out chunks of vomit from Heather's hair, or hearing about my mom's "lover".

Runner Up #2: The story about Jay, and I will not give any more information about him except to tell you that he is now STUDYING TO BE A PRIEST, and how he was watching a video some guy gave him of "COPS - Uncensored" in his sister's room, and there was a scene in a brothel with naked women wandering around that "piqued" his teenaged interest. He started masturbating to the brothel scene and then the video cut out - with a copy of "Faces of Death" immediately following the COPS episode. Not able to stop, Jay shut his eyes and continued, playing the brothel scene over and over in his head until HIS MOTHER BURST THROUGH THE DOOR TO SEE HER SON MASTURBATING TO "FACES OF DEATH". IN HIS SISTER'S ROOM.

Perhaps it wasn't for you - but this was the most fun I've had typing a post. Gotta go to work.

-A

2005-02-21T10:00:00.000-05:00

I just shovelled the walk in my pink bathrobe and rubber boots. Seemed like a good idea at the time. Don't do it.

Revised morning post

2005-02-21T09:10:00.000-05:00

There is SO MUCH SNOW out there this morning. Do you see this snow??? Although it is a pain in the ass to drive in when you have the world's shittest snow-driving car, I am quite pleased with it all. I am fantasizing about NEXT winter, when the lease on the shitty car is done and I am in my new car, which will be a 4 wheel drive because I drive so fucking much in bad weather (but will not be an SUV, rest assured, my pretties), and will either be this or this. Yes. I admit it. I am a horrible yuppie prick.

I arrived home last night to find the Chinchilla had cleaned, cooked, bought flowers, and made the house smell fantastic. We drank an obscenely good bottle of wine (1999 Brunello di Montalcino - ohhhh) and then went to bed and made sweet rapturous love. By "sweet rapturous love" I mean that I rolled over and passed out within 5 minutes and the Chinchilla watched Seinfeld reruns until what seemed like 5 o'clock this morning.

On the topic of aphorisms (if that is the right word, I'm not sure) I'd like to share one that my friend Mel and I came up with a few months ago (after I got accidentally drunk while handing out Halloween candy, became belligerent with children who were not wearing costumes, and passed out at 8PM). It's for when you are at home on a regular weekday night and you drink too much and pass out on the couch WAY too early for you to fob it off as just being "tired". We now say "Then I had a glass of wine, took a bath and relaxed". This makes us feel slightly more grown up, less "on the verge of an addiction problem", and confirms to each other in a secret code that we are still relying on substances to take the edge off after a long night.*

Bought the Scissor Sisters (cheesy, I know) album on Friday night and was profoundly disappointed. Two good songs and the rest are HIGHLY irritating. But oh, that one song, Laura? It's like he's 70's era Elton John. And I LOVE 70's era Elton John, and not because I wear glasses with pink rhinestones embedded in them, but because I'm a sucker for piano and theatrics. And raging homosexuals. Anyway, although the album sucked I will admit to playing that one song OVER AND OVER AND OVER in the car this weekend and doing some serious car dancing EVERY SINGLE TIME.

Right. Must get my ass in gear and SHOVEL THE SNOW before the bands of roving children in the neighbourhood trample it and make it too hard to shovel, and before the neighbourhood Nannies descend on the streets pulling their horrible little charges behind them in sleds and let the horrible charges make snide remarks on my shovelling abilities.

-A

*Some might say that Melanie has a reason to drink, working in an ER and treating horribly injured people, the dying, etc., but I think I have just as much reason to drink, as I counsel horribly dysfunctional families, mediate divorces, etc.

Addition to the morning post:

I just read that Hunter S Thompson shot himself last night. I really really liked him. I read all his stuff - it wasn't all things I agreed with but it was so vivid and he was such an engaging individual in print. He pioneered my favourite type of journalism. I feel strangely quite sad.

Why we get along so well:

2005-02-19T08:03:00.000-05:00

Last night at dinner:

Me: Did I tell you I had a facial today?

Chin: (SNORT! almost spits out his coke, because he's laughing) "Facial? You had a FACIAL!!!"

Me: (sighing, pretending to be exhasperated) "Yeah, it was a Christmas present from my mom. It wasn't fun. All the poking and the squeezing and the rubbing."

Chin: (Grinning) "Oh. Facials are always good times!"

Me: "You're having a good time with this, aren't you?"

Chin: "I was driving the other day and I saw a big sign that said 'FACIALS! $40!' And I laughed, and I laughed, and I laughed."

(silence)

Chin: (sigh) "I LOVE talking about facials."

And I pretended to be all annoyed at his juvenile sense of humour, but inside I had been laughing all day about having a facial.

PS - Why is it when a guy tells you that oh, he loves a certain song, and then later it comes out that the song reminds him of you, it makes you feel like it's still the first second that you got together and your stomach is swirling and you can't stop smiling and you feel all crazy in love?

Friday night is SEX NIGHT!!

2005-02-18T08:50:00.000-05:00

Oh. I'm getting SO OLD. And I'm not even thirty.

So, all week the Chinchilla and I have been putting each other off for sex.

Apparently on Monday, I made an off-hand comment on me becoming a "sex goddess" on Tuesday and making all of the Chinchilla's dreams come true. I do not remember making this comment, but quite frequently my brain shuts off but my mouth just keeps going (and going and going), so it's not out of the realm of possibility.

Tuesday rolled around and I had an upset stomach. We went to bed, I went to switch off the light, and the Chinchilla started making his romantic Chinchilla mating behaviour. After quickly putting a stop to it, I began to feel kinda bad. Like I wasn't doing my wifely duties or something, so the following conversation ensued: (Warning, I sound like a gap-toothed prostitute in the following conversation. I hope my mother never reads this blog.)

Me: "(sigh) Okay, you have two choices: Do you want a hand job or do you want to fuck my tits?"
Chinchilla: (brightening considerably) "Ooohh! Ummm... let's think... what do I want... Ohh! The choices..."
Me: (reconsidering my offer because the positions entailed in putting penis betwixt breasts would not make my tummy feel any better, and I didn't think I could hold in the rapidly increasing gas for the length of a hand job) "No! I changed my mind! No! Offers are off! No sex! Nothing!"
Chinchilla: (Glares at me and rolls over, mumbling something about sex goddesses and how he spent all that time cleaning the bedroom on the weekend)

Wednesday I told him if he came home from work early we would do it before I went out for dinner with Kate. But then he came home early and I was lying in bed with jeans and a turtleneck on, holding a heating pad to my stomach and moaning. "Sexy!" he said. No sex there.

Last night I got home from work late. He had a migraine. No sex there.

Tonight we have scheduled sex between my ETA home of 6PM, and our "date" for Chinese food and record shopping that will start around 8PM. And there's nothing that's gonna hold me back. If anyone has any tips on being a sex goddess I'm all ears...

Enough with the hockey

2005-02-17T08:24:00.000-05:00

Heard while scanning the radio yesterday and briefly stopping on bad rock station 97.7:

"Well, we may not have hockey - but we've still got ALICE IN CHAINS..."

Waaa? After briefly pausing in horror, I laughed and laughed and laughed. And then they played some Gob. (so I left it on the channel because I've got a soft spot for that "I hear you calling" song)

Aside: Please. Enough with the hockey. Please stop. I don't care. I don't want to hear any more. I hate hockey. I'm glad the season's done. That means I don't have to drive behind SUV driving jerks waving Leafs flags out their windows all spring. And maybe, just maybe, people in this country will learn to find a national identity which doesn't involve a bunch of louts slamming each other into boards, or beer. Oh, let the hate mail begin.

Best Quote of the Night: Chinchilla to me as I snuggled with him on the couch - "Your hair smells like cat urine."

2005-02-16T16:40:00.000-05:00

It's 4:30! Are my taxes prepared? No! Did I even think about working on my taxes today? Kinda, but instead I:

Watched an episode of The Baby Story on TLC with the world's most annoying couple, but got a tear in my eye when the dad cried during the birth
Made five million pots of tea
Debated, with a very patient Chinchilla, the pros and cons of renaming the Snake - leading contender is "Ice Cold"
Called the Chinchilla back to talk about buying the bird an old timey phone (a favourite topic of conversation lately)
Made the Snake a fort to hide in. Took pictures. Then felt bad because I've been told I'm going a little crazy with the cat stuff lately and I'm becoming one of THOSE people.
Waited for the snow to melt off my car so I didn't have to scrape it
Went to the mall (errrrg!) to buy a birthday present for my mother after I realized that her birthday is tomorrow.
Convinced Kate to come up to Bloor St. for dinner tonight so I didn't have to go too far (Yay! Goldfish! Curried Beet Ravioli!!)
Did various administrative things around the house that made me feel extremely efficient
Did some yoga in front of the porn mirrors (I think my postures are improving!)
Talked on the phone
Did the dishes & some serious kitchen dancing to the Franz Ferdinand album (complete with wooden spoon microphone singing)
Tried to make a photo montage of last weekend's Donna Mill's makeup pictures in Photoshop and failed miserably
Went outside and stared at the general area of the outside wall where the basement leak came in - at one point talking to the concrete parging in my best urban accent "i.e. "Why you gotta be like dat, parging?" - until I noticed my old Portugese neighbour, Maria, was looking at me over the fence
Thought a little bit more about why I hate Usher
Read that they've cancelled Star Trek and felt insanely pleased

Now I'm going to go take a nap before I go meet Kate for dinner, who will continue to fill me in on all the backstories going on on Desperate Housewives so I'm COMPELTELY up to date.

All in all, I think it's a day well spent.

Penises, basement leaks & family rage

2005-02-16T08:03:00.000-05:00

I'm "working from home" today (I REALLY need to get my taxes in order for the accountant) so no doubt there may be multiple postings as the mood strikes. Here's a few to get you going:

#1 - Learn from my mistakes: If you happen to be dating a man with the biggest penis you have EVER SEEN, don't tell your friends, neighbours, etc. Because you may, in fact, end up long term cohabitatating/marrying your neighbour. And then he will have heard, back in the day, all about THE BIGGEST PENIS YOU'VE EVER SEEN that belongs to your ex-boyfriend. And he will NEVER LET YOU FORGET IT and bring it up on a regular basis EIGHT YEARS LATER. Oh yeah, it's all jokes, but holy fuck does it ever get tiresome.

#2 - Reason number one million and three that it's nice to have a partner around the house: Because when your basement decides to spring a torrential leak at midnight on a Tuesday and your brother (who lives in the basement apt) calls to wake you and inform you of such leak, your partner will feel it's the "manly" thing to do to get up and take care of it. And you will curse a little bit, decide there's no point in staying awake and worrying (thank! You! Therapy!), roll over and go back to sleep. (Matt - who did you guys use for your leak, can you pls let me know?)

#3 - Take solace in the litte things: Every morning I work for a few hours in my main floor office. My brother's basement apt bathroom is RIGHT under the office and there is very little in the way of insulation between the floors so I can hear EVERYTHING that goes on down there (thank god he isn't given to loudly masturbating in the shower). Anyway, the one thing I DO hear on a daily basis is my brother's UNRELENTING RAGE. I've never told him I can hear everything, so I'm pretty sure he doesn't know I can hear him SCREAMING at us, telling us to FUCK OFF! GODDAMN YOU FUCKING JERKS! etc. etc. in the morning when he's in the shower and one of us runs the water upstairs. It makes me happy, and brings me a lot of solace, to know that perhaps the seething rage that consumes me is genetic, or at the very least a result of our upbringing.

Donna Mills + Red Wine + Crimping Iron = Heaven

2005-02-15T09:06:00.000-05:00

If I can only offer you one piece of advice in this life, it is to stop what you're doing, click over to eBay or Amazon, and purchase Donna Mill's 1986 Classic "Donna Mills: The Eyes Have It."

Then I suggest you invite 5 or 6 of your nearest and dearest over, have a couple of glasses of wine or smoke a wee bit of contraband (whatever your pleasure), assemble your curling irons, crimpers, and pastel coloured makeup, and Watch That Video.

There will be howling laughter, there will be screams (especially during the cucumber scene - she takes a WHOLE CUCUMBER, grips it, AND RUBS THE END ALL OVER HER FACE WHILE SIGHING), and there will be scripting you cannot quite believe. But- guaranteed - this will be one of the funniest fucking nights of your life.

Then do the makeup as suggested. But as Donna says, "Don't make the makeup too harsh. Nobody likes a hard woman." (She also says we have a responsibility to wear makeup because "everybody likes to see a pretty face."

Pictures to follow. And if anyone knows how to burn the contents of a VHS tape to DVD, let me know and I can make the dream happen for anyone who requests.

Love & OCD

2005-02-14T08:34:00.000-05:00

Sunday mornings when I drive to work I always listen to the History of New Music archived programs on 102.1. I know, I know, it's a shitty station, but yesterday they were doing a program on "the Science of Music" and it was quite amusing. They explained a bit about music & memory - which was interesting to me because I can't remember what I had for lunch yesterday, but I can sing you every word of the Debbie Gibson, Paula Abdul, & Tiffany singles that were popular in grade school.

They also said that people who have repeated problems getting songs stuck in their head tend to have OCD related issues. Oh how that rings true! The times when I have been closest to going mad I have ALWAYS had a song in my head for extended periods of time. The last time was at the tail end of my insomnia years, when I would get that Jay Z track H to the Izzo (you know, "that's the anthem, get ya damn hands up!") in my head EVERY NIGHT as I lay there sleepless, praying for death. The time before that I had that Coolio song "Fantastic Voyage" in my head for 6 MONTHS. If that's not hell, I don't know what is.

Anyway, as it's Valentine's day, I thought I would copy Jen's idea and post my 5 (but I had to extend it a bit because I couldn't decide) most romantic songs. We don't celebrate Valentines, because I think it is a pile of shit (I'm a Valentine's Day hater, as Fickle Feline would say), but I will take any opportunity to get all sentimental about my fantastic boy. If anyone wants to comment - I would love to know your top five!

Yo la Tengo - The Crying of Lot G (just so you know, it's me in the fury, not the Chin)
Ben Folds - The Luckiest (he's cheesy, I know, but oh I AM the luckiest!)
Cowboy Junkies - Anniversary Song (Even cheesier, I know, but it's the verses closer to the end I love)
Jonathan Richman - Everyday Clothes
The Beatles - Two of Us
The Postal Service - Such Great Heights

Honorable mentions:
Cub - My Chinchilla
Rufus Wainwright - April Fools (not because of the lyrics, although I do love the lines about "wondering if there's clouds & stuff/ in hell", but because to me this song SOUNDS like what being in love feels like)

Womanhood - I have failed you.

2005-02-12T08:55:00.000-05:00

Ladies,

As I sit here eating my delicious Vector cereal, getting ready to go to work, I have a horrible, horrible, admission to make. An admission that makes me question the status of my feminist ideals and belief system:

I like "What Not To Wear".

And I like "Desperate Housewives".

Now I have only seen 2 episodes of Desperate Housewives - so I reserve the right to stop liking it at any given moment should I change my mind after watching future episodes - but right now I LOVE IT. It has just the right amount of nastiness to engage me, and IT LOOKS LIKE MELROSE PLACE AND IT HAS MARCIA CROSS IN IT!! I have been in love with Marcia Cross ever since she played Kimberly on Melrose and she provided hours of entertainment for me and my shrieking roommates to imitate her pulling off her wig, talking to her alter ego in the mirror, or running someone down outside the hospital. Plus, she has really great red hair.

I didn't WANT to like this show. I wanted to HATE the show - I flipped to the first episode I saw and was making fun of it in my head for the first 5 minutes, but then Bree told off her husband while he was in the hospital and I was HOOKED. And I had to start making excuses to myself for why I was no longer flipping channels.

And about "What Not To Wear"? Stacey is so likeable and she has such shiny hair. And it's cheesy, I know. It's horribly cheesy. But for the rare moments that I am alone at home and letting myself do absolutely NOTHING it has become my dream definition of easy television and I CAN'T STOP WATCHING IT.

(Moan)

I'm sorry, ladies. I'm a failure. I've let down the sisterhood, I know. Does it make it any better that I still hate Sex In The City, women's magazines, and most shows on TLC?

Shamefully yours,
AP

PS - This morning I was lying in bed and the Snake jumped up on the bed, trotted over to my night table... and ate a chunk of cat hair that I had pulled out of her brush the night before. Nice.

PPS - The Chinchilla just got up and is wandering around the house singing that "No Time Left For You" song by the Guess Who. I think he's trying to kill me.

My mind is impenetrable.

2005-02-11T09:08:00.000-05:00

So, the evening after I got back from Florida I went for my long-awaited appointment with "Toronto's best" (and most fucking expensive) hypnotherapist to see if she could help me tame the rage that eats my soul.

I went to therapy for a long time and the rage is still there - so I thought I'd try something different. I have a pretty open mind when it comes to "alternative" therapies and "different" shit - I was raised by a woman who suggests playing euchre when there's only 3 people sitting around a table because she sees a "fourth" - a dead man who has joined us - so I'm cool with the freaky stuff.

But I digress. Back to the hypnotherapy.

WHAT. HORSESHIT.

First of all the appointment was an hour and a half. And it was $150. But I thought - hey, if this makes me stop wanting to rip someone's head off and feast upon their entrails whenever I am tired, frustrated, hungry, thirsty, sad... whatever... it's worth it.

She got me all comfortable and then started the "hypnotherapy" process. Which is really and truly like "you're getting reeeeeelaaaaaxxed. dddddeeeeeeply reeeelaaaaaaxed. I'm going to ask you quueeestions, raise your right index finger for "Yeeeees" and your left for "nooooo". And then within - literally about a minute - she was asking me to remember being in my mother's womb ("remember what it feeeeeels like. the beating of your mother's heeeeart") and asking me if I felt the rage!!!

Waaa? Do other people slip into a state of hypnosis as soon as they shut their eyes? She seemed to assume I was hypnotised. And I didn't want to tell her that I TOTALLY WASN'T - I was sitting there getting angry thinking what a CROCK OF SHIT I had paid for.

But, being a good little non-confrontational girl, I let her do her thing. And you're not supposed to talk, and she seemed so into it I didn't want to interrupt her little new-agey reverie by screaming out "I'M NOT HYPNOTISED!!!" I made some faces so maybe she'd pick up that I was "struggling" with this. But she didn't. And she carried on for a good half hour before I could no longer handle the horseshit and just announced "Uhh. I'm having difficulty with this".

After trying a few more things she let me know that she would need to find a "more intense" way to hypnotise me, as I didn't respond to conventional methods. And she would have to try that in our "Next visit". Yeah.

Then, in an attempt to make my paying for this pile of shit seem less painful, she pulled out some Grade 7 Psychology on me and asked me to "visualize my rage", "put a funny song to it", "make it a pink rubber ball". Uhhh. Yeah, that's the EXACT same shit the therapist that my PARENTS sent me to tried - way back in the day. AND IT DIDN'T FUCKING WORK.

So, I am now $150 poorer and still full of rage. I think I may just accept it. We all have our lot in life. Maybe mine is the seething flames of hell that consume my mind. Could be worse.

-A

PS - As an aside, the Chinchilla came downstairs the other morning and grabbed one of the "Space" reference books off the shelf, flipped through, then shouted "I KNEW IT!"

"What?" I said. "Oh," he said, "last night in bed I was trying to remember the distance between the earth and the sun and other planets and I just wanted to double check my figures were correct."

And I thought - is this what other people think about when they're just sitting there? Space? Planets? Stars? 'Cause I think about shit like cats wearing dinosaur outfits. Or the lyrics to Laura Branigan's "Gloria". Or ways that I could glue fake birds to my shoes and not look like such an asshole.

I'm really hoping most people are on my side of the fence.

a couple of other random notes...

2005-02-10T11:03:00.000-05:00

# 1 - I installed Firefox on my laptop. Holy shit - it's fucking AWESOME. How come anyone uses IE anymore? Anyone who, like me, is not too computer literate but is sick of explorer, go to Mozilla and get it - it's fast, simple and doesn't constantly run errors and shut down when you're in the middle of doing incredibly important things.

#2 - I was catching up on blog entries written while I was away and laughed and laughed and LAUGHED at the "Story Time" part of serenaluchang's most recent entry. Why can't I have a sister who does things like this? My sister just wears shirts with cartoon characters and speaks really slowly on her incredibly detailed answering machine message.

#3 - This coming Saturday night looks to be one of the most promising in a while. Inspired by the birthday present I gave Christa - the made-in-the-height-of-the-eighties Makeup Lesson video by Donna Mills - "The Eyes Have It", we will be having our own Makeup & Hair Party, and Staying In, Eating Bread And Cheese And Drinking Wine While Following Along To Donna Mill's Video Instructions On How To Make Yourself "The Best That You Can Be". I'm tired of emailing invites, so if you want to come, email me and I'll send you the directions. Ladies and Gay Males only!

Vacation Photos!

2005-02-10T10:33:00.000-05:00

This was the first thing we saw when we walked out of the airport in Florida - there were three of them, in cowboy hats, cowboy boots and matching jackets that read "Professional Bull Riders - 2004 World Finals Contestant" - and they wore them proudly.

I think every second car had one of these. And most cars were American made - hasn't anyone down there figured out foreign cars are better?

Sing it with me: "It costs a heeeefty fhuckin' fee... But if you don't throw in your buck 'o five, who will?"

The higher class accommodation in Clearwater.

My new best friend that I met driving north up the coast on my little motorbike. Matt (aka - Dream Killer), you can shit your pants RIGHT NOW.

Speaking of shitting your pants. I got THIS CLOSE to this beautiful owl at the bird rescue sanctuary. I had tears in my eyes she was so lovely.

Me, attempting to take a picture of myself in my shiny bike helmet during my solo ride up the coast.

The Chinchilla looking vaguely thuggish one night on the beach.

Our fancy-ass hotel pool. Note the pool is completely cleared out as the Chinchilla conducts his own personal underwater handstand contest for the 100th time that day.

Sunburnt & happy, 5 minutes before we had to leave. Check out the food stuck between my teeth - nice!

Thanks to Jen & Kat for the "how to post multiple photos" lessons!

My Winter Vacation

2005-02-09T10:18:00.000-05:00

Ahhh, America... where do I even start?

Should I start with how much I love that you offer seat covers in your public washrooms? How much I love the fact that your straws come in little sealed packages? How much I love the fact that our cab driver couldn't remember the name of "the guy who ran against Bush"? Or should it be how much I loved being seated at the International House Of Pancakes (aka - IHOP) between one family where the father wore a pirate style eyepatch and a Batman necklace, and another family whose children wailed as their mother yelled "Yu're NOT havin' chicken fingers for breakfast 'cause you've eaten nuthin' but chicken fingers FOR 5 DAYS STRAIGHT!" And then they got the chicken fingers.

It really was a fun trip. Last time I was in the States I was with born'n'bred Midwesterners so I had no one to elbow, gawk, or slow down & take pictures with. This time I was in the heart of Pastel Country with the Chinchilla - and OH how the jokes flowed...

We flew through Atlanta (we had the choice to transfer in Washington DC - pain in the ass, or Atlanta - a reason for us to do countless imitations of that ancient SNL sketch "You have to CHANGE in ATLANTA) and two things were immediately apparent. #1 - is that the racial divide is clearer than anything I've ever seen. Canada has a lot of problems too, but why isn't the US administration REALLY doing something about that? And #2 - Atlanta has an EVEN HIGHER percentage than Florida of people wearing oddly flamboyant patriotic clothing. I guess, in the homophobic US, wearing sequined red, white & blue caps or shirts doesn't make you gay, it makes you a good American.

We stayed in Clearwater, Florida, which is a fucking dump, but was ENDLESSLY entertaining. It's a town not unlike Niagara Falls - and I don't mean Niagara on the Lake - I mean wax museum, burnt-out-neon-signed, crappy restaurant, waitresses with heavily stained uniforms, Niagara Falls. And I'm not shitting on waitresses with stained uniforms - as I have been one, nor am I shitting on America - because you could do the same type of comments on Canada, it's just a strange place to visit, that's all.

The beach and pool at our hotel were lovely, and as we were only there for 4 days, it's really all we wanted. The Chinchilla commandeered the shallow end of the pool from all the kids for his endless attempts at underwater handstands and some strange thrashing about in the water that he called the "Spinning Log". I only managed to burn the shit out of 3 body parts - lips, chest, and upper thighs. This of course made for some really HOT vacation sex, Me: "OKAY. We can do it. But you can't touch my lips, boobs, or thighs. OOOW! Do it fast!"

The pool was staffed entirely by teenaged boys who looked & sounded like the guy from Office Space who says "If things go well I might be showin' her my O Face", & creepy slightly older guys with stringy mustaches and unbelievable American accents who forced me to go through their maddening 5 minute attempt at flirting every morning while I tried to get a couple of beach towels from their kiosk (eventually I started bringing the Chinchilla down with me and, surprisingly, they had the beach towels out for me before I even reached the counter!)

Since I'm a WEE BIT high strung and not so great at just laying around, on Sunday the Chinchilla and I rented a small motorbike and drove down the coast of the Key we were on to a bird rescue sanctuary, which was fucking unbelievable (pictures of my 2 new best friends, the owl and the pelican, coming soon!). But the best part was that afternoon, when the Chinchilla's work friends arrived and he went to go watch the Superbowl with them.

Since I refuse to watch, understand, or care about football, I did not accompany them, but instead spent 20 minutes in the parking lot teaching myself to ride the motorbike and then rode North up the coast of the the Key.

And RIDING MOTORBIKES IS FUCKING AWESOME!

I am SO getting my motorcycle licence. And I am SO getting a small bike. Maybe a good scooter, I don't know. All I know is that riding in the sun on a motorbike is one of the BEST things in the WHOLE WIDE WORLD and I can't believe it's taken me almost 30 years to figure this out.

Okay - should go to work. Tomorrow, Florida Part 2 - Pictures, and the diner where the waitress called me "Babydoll" and they played Johnny Cash.

-A

Later 'Gators

2005-02-03T21:15:00.000-05:00

Ahhhh. 9:15 PM and I am, blissfully, ALONE. For the first time in what seems like months! The Chinchilla isn't home, I can't hear my brother blasting Rammenstein in the basement, I've turned off my cell phone and given away my pager, I don't have any music on. All there is is the hum of the computer, the gentle growling of the snake and... silence... How sweet it is.

I had the most awesome dinner at Indian Rice Factory tonight. I have been meaning to go there for years and it was all that I expected. The butter chicken was so unbelievably sweet and tender, the channa masala so spicy and complex, and the naan. Oh god, THE NAAN!!

Now I'm going to go upstairs, pack capri pants and summer dresses and cute wedge sandals, paint my toenails, take a long hot shower, and then curl up in bed and read. Then tomorrow I pop several tranquilizers and fly somewhere warm - even if it's just for 4 days! The Chinchilla's company has given him the whole time off now, so he doesn't even have to work down there - and they're STILL paying for it. So we're going to drive to the Everglades to see a swamp and go on a fan boat. Then the Chinchilla has promised me he's gonna wrestle me a 'gator. Oh, this should be good.

See You Next Tuesday! (that was for you Marlene & Asspants)

-A

I gots GMAIL, BITCHEZ!

2005-02-03T17:03:00.000-05:00

A million & one thanks to Kim from Bacon and Eh's for so kindly, generously, wonderfully donating a GMAIL account to yours truly. Now I can send & receive artwork 'cause I gots a big-ass space! WOO! Thanks Kim! Note the new address everyone, including Avatar who wants me to print transfers for her. A perfect end to my last day of work before vacation...

Letter to my Uterus

2005-02-03T06:23:00.000-05:00

Dear Uterus,

Are you trying to kill me?

I don't understand what I did to deserve this. I've always been good to you. I've never stretched you out with a baby, and I've even had you cleaned out, just for good measure.

Why are you being so mean to me? Why the cramping, Uterus? Why the lower-back spasms? Why the shooting pain? I know for a fact that not every Uterus is this mean to their girl.

Is it just you doing this, or are you and Hormones in cahoots?

Not only am I doubled over in pain, abnormally hungry, and more than a little tired, I also flat out BAWLED on the way to work yesterday morning when they had a woman from the US Gay & Lesbian Task Force on the CBC talking about how she recently married in Vancouver after 28 years with her partner. Then, 10 minutes later when someone cancelled a showing and "forgot" to call me, the words "I Hope You Die" ALMOST escaped my lips.

I went to work yesterday wearing BAGGY PANTS and a BAGGY SWEATER that didn't even match, Uterus, with NO THOUGHT to how I looked. When the secretaries asked me if I was okay I answered with "I know I look like shit but I don't have it in me to care."

And then this morning around 4, when I woke up to the sound of the cat vomiting on the end of our bed, I couldn't get back to sleep because of the PAIN, Uterus, THE PAIN!! Just give me a fucking break, okay? Please?

Sincerely,
-A

5 Things That Make Me Question The Chinchilla's Sexuality

2005-02-02T09:02:00.000-05:00

#5 - He told me he would have sex with Hayden Christenson if Hayden wore the Darth Vader costume.

#4 - He REALLY loves that song "It's Raining Men". Like, he likes it so much he knows all the words and gets all excited if it comes on the radio.

#3 - He uses fancier hair products than me and spends WAY more on his hair per year than I do.

#2 - He gets insanely angry when his clothes get wrinkled or dirty. Especially his lavender tie.

#1 - When I came home last night he was making chocolate mousse and blasting Frankie Goes To Hollywood's "Relax". I'm not kidding.

2005-02-01T17:29:00.000-05:00

I refrain from posting pictures of my pets on this sight because I am bordering on crazy cat lady as it is and that would just put me over the edge. If my cat HAPPENS to show up in a picture (like sitting on the printer box) that's pure coincidence.

Imagine my surprise to surf over to Matt's site and see her lovely, snakey face glaring out at me. In her fetching red turtleneck sweater. Whenever we put the sweater on her she sits on a bag of coins. Last time we did it she shit on our bed. But she shits on our bed a lot, so that could be coincidence... Go check out my Snake!

Random Junk

2005-02-01T08:28:00.000-05:00

It's a terrible thing to realize you have committed yourself to a man that takes perverse delight in injecting horrible songs into your subconscious first thing in the morning. This morning I was laying in bed, still half asleep, when I heard the Chinchilla making fairly loud noises as he rustled around the room. I grabbed my glasses, looked up, and he was standing at the end of the bed, wearing only the most tattered underwear he owns (what is it with guys not wanting to give up their old underwear?), waiting for me to wake up. When he saw I was looking at him he proceeded to burst into a rousing rendition of "Here I Go Again On My Own", by Whitesnake.

Now it is all I can think about. You know, goin' down the only road I've ever known... like a drifter I was born to walk alone... But I've made up my mind.... I ain't wastin' no more time... I also keep thinking about the video with that chick doing (in my mind, anyway) very unseemly acrobatics on the hood of a car.

And yes, apparently I DO know all the words.

...In other news... I'm learning to be assertive!! Staples delivered my brand new, big ass colour printer yesterday (see picture below) , but not without a fight. They had scheduled delivery of the printer, conveniently, "between 9 and 5" yesterday. So I had to stay home and wait for the delivery.

Around 2PM I started to get a funny feeling that something was up and called the store, only to be told that "whoops! Delivery isn't going to happen today. We can deliver on Wednesday between 9 and 5!".

Uhhh. No, that's NOT going to happen, so I gathered up all my courage and, very nicely, raised hell. AND I GOT IT COURIERD TO ME WITHIN 2 HOURS!! Now that I've acquired this skill I'm gonna be FUCKING UNSTOPPABLE. Just watch me. I'm thinking of tackling world peace next. Just nicely, but firmly, tell the countries of the world that you've SPENT A LOT OF MONEY ON THEM AND YOU AREN'T GOING TO BE VERY HAPPY IF THEY DON'T DO WHAT YOU SAY. Works on Staples!

This joint purchase between me and my partners, the kickass colour laser printer, is living at my house under the guise of "I am the most computer literate". Which is a complete fucking joke because I am laughably computer UN-literate and every time I want to do something on this blog I have to email Kat from Fickle Feline and beg her to do it for me or teach me how to do it, under the promise of feeding her lots of wine when we actually meet. The reason I REALLY want the colour printer at my house is... COLOUR TRANSFER T-SHIRTS FOR EVERYONE! First design? Pictures of Nicole's dead step-father Lar, shirtless, with "Turn the pain into laffs" written underneath. Anyone want one? Email me!

-A

oh snakey, you shine with an evil light...

Welcome home Mel and Matt!

2005-01-31T13:50:00.000-05:00

Note the look of abject horror on Mel's face as her eyes focus in on her boyfriend flashing gang signs at her brother's wedding.

Ladies, how many times have you given that kind of hopeless "oh, holy fuuuuuck" look at your partner? For me it's pretty much every day. This is my favorite picture, like, EVER, and I've been waiting for an excuse to post it. They just came back from a month-long trip to India - so what better reason?

Why you shouldn't give me a microphone when I'm drunk...

2005-01-30T11:02:00.000-05:00

...Because I will, when heckled onstage at kareoke about my habit of not wearing underwear, halfway through my set of My Boyfriend's Back and Don't Go Breaking My Heart, feel compelled to vigorously defend myself by shouting into the mike "Oh YEAH? Well I AM SO wearing underwear, but ONLY BECAUSE I HAVE A REALLY BAD YEAST INFECTION!!" Thus grossing out the entire place.

-A

PS - New word of the night: "Hamiltoe" - When you are in Hamilton, Ontario, and you see a woman with a severe case of camel toe. i.e. "Dude, I think the Algoma plant just exploded. Omigod look! Hamiltoe at 6 o'clock."

A few more things to add to the list:

2005-01-29T10:34:00.000-05:00

Premenstrual cramping? CHECK!
Unbearably sore breasts? CHECK!
A BLISTERING yeast infection that sprang up overnight? CHECK!

There's nothing like walking around all day showing condos with a BURNING, HOLY-SHIT-I-THINK-IT'S-ON-FIRE vag. I wonder if anyone will notice if I periodically stop and scoop snow off the ground to ease the pain.

A plague of frogs did not descend from the sky yesterday, but I'm guessing it's gonna happen today. I'm ready.

-A

PS - NOW they can call this a blogging equivalent of a chick flick - YEAST INFECTION! YEAST INFECTION! YEAST INFECTION!

Is this the beginning of the end?

2005-01-28T09:02:00.000-05:00

I have been up since 5 AM - that's FIVE O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING, just for emphasis - because my fucking cat decided that 5AM was the perfect time to sit at the bottom of the stairs and yowl at the top of her little cat lungs (amplified by an additional 20 pounds of cat fat).

This woke me up, and because I have seen one too many of those "animal miracle" shows, I assumed that the cat was yowling for a VERY SPECIAL REASON, likely:

a) There was a killer walking around the house - and she knew it was a killer and was trying to warn us
b) The house was on fire - and she was trying to warn us
c) The bird was dead - and she was mourning

Highly distressed at any of these possibilites, I had to get up, check the house (armed with a butcher knife, because I am a loser), check that the bird was still breathing (I really can never have a baby, I would just sit there with a mirror over its mouth 24x7), and then I couldn't go back to sleep.

So I went downstairs, checked my email, etc, and discovered I have been reviewed by the weblog review, and labelled "the blog equivalent of a chick flick." Erg.

On my way to the kitchen to make some tea, I stepped on a piece of glass (left over from the other morning when I managed to break 2 plant pots and one glass plate on my way out the door), and spent a tearful minute pulling the shard out of my boat-like foot.

Fortunately, I have lots of peroxide on hand because yesterday, while talking to a client at their front door, I put my hand out and leaned left, meaning to lean on the brick column beside the door. But I missed the brick column, fell out of sight and hit a brick wall. Bleeding profusely from my left hand, I had to go to the drugstore and buy a plethora of first aid products to tend to my scraped & bloody hand. Unfortunately the peroxide could do nothing later in the afternoon when my mother shut the car door ON THE SAME HAND.

So now I'm tired, grumpy and sore, and my left hand is like, practically double the size of my right. I feel like I'm at the beginning of my own personal apolocypse. If it starts raining frogs today, I'll just head for a bridge.

2005-01-27T19:15:00.000-05:00

I just spent 15 minutes dancing in my basement to "Return of the Mac" with my brother & the Chinchilla.

I arrived home today to find this package in the mailbox (a surprise from my beloved).

Shit, life is so good.

Please don't make me go to this park...

2005-01-27T17:17:00.000-05:00

I was showing houses in Ballantrae last night, drove by this sign and had to pull over because I was laughing so hard.

Don't go to this park. For the love of god, don't take your kids to this park. If you must FELCH, do it at home.

Ode to my ex-IT guys

2005-01-27T08:24:00.000-05:00

The worst thing about working from home? Not having an IT guy that I can just call and whine at when my computer develops some weird habit of refusing to allow me to create PDFs (I prefer to think my computer has the same moods, whims and flights of fancy that I do) and keeps deciding to shut off for no good reason.

Oh Eric! Oh crazy Nigel with the 18 hole docs and the circa 1986 Michael Jackson haircut! Oh nameless contracting services! I didn't know how good I had it, when I had you. Like that 80's hairband Cinderella said, You Don't Know What You've Got, Till It's Gone. You were my angels of mercy, my knights in shining armour, except I didn't refer to you as that back then, I generally referred to you as "that FUCKING Eric", or "that FUCKING Nigel"! I didn't mean it baby, I'm sorry, can't we just start all over???

I'm gonna have to fix this problem myself. And I don't even know where to start.

Drunken Blog #1

2005-01-26T23:53:00.000-05:00

Three best things from tonight that won't make anyone laugh but me, and I'm wide awake and no one else is so I'm writing it here...

#1 -Nicole, yelling "IF HE WOULD JUST LOVE ME I WOULDN'T NEED BABIES BECAUSE I WOULD HAVE A FUCKING CAT, ON MY FUCKING NECK!!" at the shocked restaurant patrons
#2 - Discussing singing Heart's "All I Wanna Do Is Make Love To You" at upcoming kareoke night on Saturday - "Best part of the song? DUDE'S NOT WEARING A COAT" (i.e. "no umbreeelllla, no cooooat...")
#3 - The screams of "HOT DOGS! HOT DOGS!" coming from the car that just dropped me off, as it sped away.

God, I SO love my friends...

Does anyone else think that Stephen Harper is the most evil man, like, EVER? But Liberals? How are you doing such a BAD FUCKING JOB??? When Ontario goes back to the Conservatives I'm TOTALLY BLAMING YOU.

Oh god, I think my leg's asleep. I can't feel my left foot. How'm I gonna get to bed? Maybe I'll hop.

Please help me

2005-01-26T11:28:00.000-05:00

Early this morning I had one of those weird morning dreams. I find that morning dreams are usually the most vivid, and the most strange...

...like my dream this morning where I WAS HAVING SEX WITH ROBERT PLANT! (cue the "eeeeeewww" chorus here)

It was the young Robert Plant, not the old Robert Plant, not that that makes it any better because he still has that scary wormy-penis-under-the-jeans thing going on, and (consciously) I don't find him attractive in ANY WAY, SHAPE OR FORM. (I'm still looking for a good picture to show what I mean by "wormy penis under the jeans" but I only have so much time and I do have to go to work).

It's really freaked me out because we were REALLY GOING AT IT in the dream. Like CRAZY, breaking-lamps-type of sex. And then after we had sex I found out I was pregnant and he gave a long speech about looking forward to having "Sprogs".

I don't know what brought this on. Maybe it's because they were (say this in booming announcer voice) "Gettin' the Led Out" on Q107 on my way home last night. Or maybe it's because I've been reading My Boyfriend Is A Twat and she talks about sprogs. But whatever it is, I hope it goes away soon because I don't think I can handle the mental aftermath that comes from another crazy-sex-with-robert-plant dream.

Has anybody else had weird sex dreams with famous people to whom they are completely unattracted to?? I mean, I know once the Chinchilla had a dream (seriously, I am not making this up) where he was having sex from behind with Michelle Pfieffer and she turned around and all of a sudden her face was replaced with Beavis from Beavis & Butthead, but other than that? Anyone? Help me feel normal? Someone please comment????

Life Lesson #3 (or #4, I can't remember)

2005-01-25T10:25:00.000-05:00

When you purchase a "hot waxing" kit in an attempt to more permanently tame the wild shrubberies that are your eyebrows, READ THE INSTRUCTIONS FIRST.

Do not, under any circumstances, just microwave on "high" for a couple of minutes, take the hot wax upstairs, stick a little wooden stir-thingy in, and slap a glob of SCALDING, OH HOLY FUCK, HOT AS HELL wax onto the tender skin just below your eyebrows.

First you will scream. You will shriek like someone has JUST POURED CRAZY HOT FUCKING WAX ONTO YOUR RIGHT EYE. Because you HAVE just poured crazy hot fucking wax onto your right eye. Because you are an idiot.

Then, involuntarily, your hands will fly up to your face, you will scrunch up your eyes and the wax will get into your eyelashes and all over your hands. This wax is sticky and your sticky eyelashes will mix in with the sticky peeling skin that is now bubbling off of your right eyelid.

You will spend a moment or two sitting on the toilet and sobbing, then recover enough to use the blue oily stuff they give you to get the wax off your hands, out of your eyelashes and hair, and off your rapidly swelling right eyelid.

Your eyelid will THROB AND BURN (ooooh, good Google search on THAT phrase!) for the rest of the evening, and you will whine and complain non-stop, to the point where your boyfriend is clawing at his face every time you let out a sniffling whimper followed by a completely pathetic "mmmyyyy eyeeeeee" moan.

The next day your right eyelid will be noticeably swollen, blistered, and red, and before noon a total of THREE people will ask you if you are okay, with a weird, kind of sympathetic look on their faces.

-A

PS - This happened a couple of days ago. Update - the blister has turned into a scab. The Chinchilla has taken to calling me "Old Scabby Eye", and with the scabby eye, the three glowing zits, and the hair colour that has recently faded from tangerine to more of a salmon colour, I'm lookin' FINE.

Apparently not EVERYTHING moves real slow when it's 40 below...

2005-01-24T08:26:00.000-05:00

...Like me & my car, speeding into TWO ACCIDENTS in ONE DAY...

Despite what numerous people say about my driving, I think I am a perfectly good driver. I pride myself particularly on my winter driving. I think it's fun. Saturday, during the (cue echo effect) STORM OF THE CENTURY, I took a break between appointments, drove to a parking lot and spent half an hour doing donuts in the snow, whooping and listening to ZZ Top the entire time.

I have only ever been in one accident, and it had nothing to do with snow. It had to do with me completely not paying attention to the road and switching the music in the car in an attempt to impress the boy in the passenger seat who I had a HUGE crush on because he told me he had a giant tattoo on his back of a rooster holding a machine gun. We ended up crashing into another car. This was a fitting start to the yearlong relationship that ensued, that ended in me burning his clothes on the end of a stick in my backyard, but that's another story...

Anyway, for some reason the snow got the best of me on Saturday and I managed to (Accident #1) smash into the concrete wall of the on-ramp to the 404 at the 407. Strangely, the car kept on running, but I hit it pretty fucking hard and managed to sustain a good amount of cosmetic damage and the car now wobbles crazily when driven.

Because the car kept going, and I was in a bit of a shock over what to do, I scraped the car off the concrete wall and kept driving south onto the 404. Around Steeles, another car spun out beside me and (Accident #2) I swerved to avoid the spinning car and spun out myself, first hitting a median and then plowing into the Worlds Largest Snowdrift, sustaining significantly more damage to the car, but at least landing in the best possible spot. I sat there laughing at the weirdness of it all until a towtruck came (they were prowling the 404) and rescued me. This morning I will find out what all of this will cost me. Hopefully insurance covers dumb-ass driving mistakes. At least no one but my poor, tender, aching little neck was hurt.

The rest of the weekend was spent working, so I really have nothing else of note to report. The three gigantic fucking zits that sprung up on my face may be somewhat newsworthy, but only because of the impossible symmetry of their placement - two spaced evenly between my eyebrows, and one perched right on the TIP of my nose. I really love the fact that they are the underground kind. The kind that glow with a red so intense that no amount of expensive Lancome foundation can cover. It's really a toss-up between the zits and the car accidents for the best part of this past weekend. Maybe you can help me decide.

-A

PS - As for the best part of this morning? Right now I've got to say that it's the Chinchilla, who called in "late" to work under the guise of a dental appointment, watching the NFL CHANNEL AT FULL FUCKING BLAST while loudly eating Shreddies. Brilliant, Chinchilla. Fucking Brilliant.

2005-01-24T08:02:00.000-05:00

I forgot...

Happy birthday today to NEEECOLE, CHRISTA and MY SISTER. If there was ever an argument against astrology, you three ladies are it.

'Cause everything moves real slow when it's forty below...

2005-01-22T10:01:00.000-05:00

I'm not into quoting Sam Roberts regularly but I do like that song, and it's so appropriate for a buried-in-snow day like today. If it's gonna be cold, at least it can snow. Bring it on! Bring more! I only wish I didn't have to go to work today...

I'm concentrating on my breath, and counting to 10

2005-01-21T12:02:00.000-05:00

Due to my complete inability to remember to take my birth control pills, I now have cramps and intense lower back pain for the second time this month (necessitating the use of the SuperSize tampons referred to in an earlier post). With my sporadic use of birth control it's a fucking wonder that I don't have a litter of children. I can only assume that the Chinchilla's copious pot smoking has rendered his sperm completely useless, perhaps they prefer to stop swimming upstream and simply chill out halfway to my uterus, spending their time snacking voraciously and making dumb stoner jokes rather than relentlessly attempting to impregnate me. Yet another fantastic use for this miracle drug - (aside from pain killing and general self-medicating) - birth control.

This is not a banner beginning to the day. Yesterday was just... annoying. Everything just gave me a total rage-on. In attempt to address the anger, as per my new years resolutions, I have made an appointment with a hippy-dippy hypnotherapist to see if we can "address" the situation. It's increasingly becoming intolerable. I made this decision after attending a MIND NUMBING lunch yesterday with my grandmother (known as "Nanny"), her boyfriend (Stefan) and my mother, which drove me to such depths of fury I thought I may never recover.

Don't get me wrong, I love my Nanny, she is German and about 4 foot 5, and SO HARD CORE. She is always threatening to "schpank" people or give people "A GOUT KICK TO ZE HEAD!" (yell that with a hard German accent and you will get the general idea). But her boyfriend is FUCKING CRAZY, and she refuses to wear her much-needed hearing aid, which results in dozens of half-heard, misunderstood conversations and drives her boyfriend even more insane. It's like a fucking sitcom - with the yelling and the repeating - it's so unbelievably stereotypical that if I were not witnessing it I don't know if I would believe it:

My mom: "Did you hear, there was a fire at June's house?"
Nanny: (yelling) "A WHAT??" (pronounced "VAT" with the German accent)
Stefan: (yelling) "A FIRE! SHE SAID THERE WAS A FIRE! AT JUNE'S HOUSE!!"
Nanny: (incredulous) "A FIRE??
My mom: "Yes! A Fire! June put some shirts in the dryer and went to bed. The dryer caught on fire."
Nanny: (yelling) "SHOES? VHY VOULD SHE PUT SHOES IN ZE DRYER??"
Stefan: (yelling) "SHIRTS! SHIRTS! SHE PUT SHIRTS IN THE DRYER!"
Nanny: (yelling) "SKIRTS?? JUST SKIRTS IN ZE DRYER??"
Stefan: (yelling) "NO, SHIRTS! SHIRTS!"
Nanny: (yelling) "AHHHH! SHIRTS!"

And so on. And so on. It was TWO HOURS of that because old people are SLOW FUCKING EATERS THAT DRINK WAY TOO MANY CUPS OF COFFEE. Oh, I know I will probably regret writing about this when my Nanny dies, it's not that I don't love her. It's just old people in general.

And now as I write this I can hear through the vent in my office (my house is old and poorly built) the Hot Water Heater Installation Guys that are currently downstairs repeatedly calling their co-workers and asking for instructions on how to correctly install the new Hot Water Heater that we were forced to get. Fantastic.

Looks like today's anger quotient may be filled quicker than I ever thought.

-A

2005-01-21T09:50:00.000-05:00

Yeah, THIS seems like a smart idea...

I'm not the "ideal" date...

2005-01-20T08:40:00.000-05:00

So last night the Chinchilla decided to class me up and take me to the Symphony. Unthinkingly (is that a word?), I thwarted the "classy" evening by regaling him all the way downtown with a story about a friend of mine... we'll call her "Peather Harliament"... who gave a hand-job to this guy (way back in our first year of university) who:

a) squeaked out "oh! here she comes!" just before HE came, and
b) scuttled off like a little bug to the corner afterwards to clean himself, all ashamed.

For the life of me I couldn't remember who the guy was, and I knew he was someone who had a story to him, so I ended up having to call "Peather" to get the dirt. Sometimes I wonder why people stay friends with me when they frequently get phone calls like "Hey, it's me. Quick! Who was the guy you gave a hand-job to, in first year, who ran to the corner of the room when he was done?"

Anyway, I then proceeded to impress the shit of the Chinchilla by spilling my red wine all over the white tablecloth at dinner at La Fenice, by spending the majority of dinner practicing my East Coast and West Coast gang signs (I know, it's sooo '90s), and by peppering the dinner conversation with questions like "So, do you think Prince Harry's getting a lot of pussy?". Thankfully, the Chinchilla just sat there laughing at me in between pointing out stains on my clothing (there were many) and possible bird shit remnants on my glasses (there was one possible remnant. Highly possible).

The symphony was great. One of the good things about meeting your parter relatively young (age 21) is that you get to experience so many "first things" together. Especially him, because we came from such different backgrounds, so many things that are pretty de rigeur to me he has never done (i.e. travelling, swimming in the ocean, seeing/hiking actual mountains, trying Devon cream, so many different types of music & film). Last night was the first time he'd been to a symphony and he had tears in his eyes at several points. It makes me so happy to be able to be a part of all these good things. That's my happy little thought for the day.

Now I've got to go take a shit.

-A

My Country, 'Tis Fucking Cold

2005-01-19T11:49:00.000-05:00

I'm almost (I said ALMOST) embarrassed to write this because it seems every Canadian I know (and even Canadians I don't know) are writing about the weather on their blog, but HOLY SHIT is it ever fucking cold!

I try, I really do, to embrace this weather, because it looks like I'm stuck with it. I love Canada - we have our problems, yes, but my home is here, my friends & family are here, my career is here, my partner refuses to move somewhere where there isn't a winter - so it looks like I'm here for a while. But I'm really having issues with the weather. I don't have an office job where I am inside all day. I am outside a lot - which is great 3 seasons of the year - and shitty for 1 - but oh, how long and dreary that one season is. I feel like it's slowly sucking my will to live. It's not so bad today - just snowy and blustery - but yesterday it was MINUS 35 WITH THE WINDCHILL. (insert whimper here)

The only good thing about this weather is watching the Weather Network News anchor Cheryl Plouffe (if there is another last name that sounds more like a fart, I would like to hear it) on mute with the Chinchilla and making up fake news casts about weather chaos or offensive banter between the co-anchors, a la Anchorman: The Legend Of Ron Burgundy.

In other news... the Fatal! Stabbing! that was all over the Toronto news last night happened RIGHT ACROSS THE STREET FROM ME. It happened around noon yesterday and I am glad I wasn't home. I would be supremely creeped out to know someone was getting killed within 50 feet of me. And it was his SON who did it! I just read that over and realize that it reads as though I am extremely callous... well... I am... so I guess there's not much more to say about that. I feel sorry for the family, really, I do.

And FINALLY! I read in The Star on Sunday that Andre 3000 is filming in Toronto, and is a regular customer at the Juice For Life on Bloor. Oh, I am SO GOING TO START HANGING OUT THERE. I can just picture it now. He will walk in... our eyes will lock... he will say... "Where did you get such a fabulous coat? I admire your jackass look"... then he will sweep me off my feet and we will make incredibly stylish babies together, which I will then give away because I do not want the babies, but would like to have many hours of sex with Andre 3000... even though he is part of a scene that I have many ideological problems with... but godDAMN he is fashionable... and now I'm just rambling... incoherently... ohh, my Andre....

-AP

PS - Speaking of The Star, I saw This headline in there today for a court fight I wouldn't mind seeing. Just ignore the subhead.

8 years later and the lovin's still RED HOT!

2005-01-18T07:37:00.000-05:00

So, I got home from work at a decent hour last night so the Chinchilla and I could have dinner together, and a little wine flowed. As 9 o'clock rolled around, I leaned over to him and whispered sweet nothings in his ear, with the general message being something along the lines of "upstairs", "bedroom", "hot lovin", etc. and this was the response I got"

Chinchilla - "Uhhhh...."

Me (snapping out of amorous reverie) - "WHAT?"

Chinchilla - "Uhhhh... I don't suppose there is a chance that we could do it at 10, could we?"

Me (now angry) - "WHY?"

Chinchilla (now knowing he should NEVER have started this conversation and proceeding with EXTREME caution) - "...'Cause Monster....Garage... is on?"

Me - (stomp upstairs)

Now, this is almost as good as the time last year when I suggested we should have some sex and he said he needed to FIND HIS BASEBALL GLOVE. Thank god this doesn't happen too often, my fragile ego couldn't take it. As I explained to (shouted at) the Chinchilla last night, it isn't the negative response that irks me - everyone's entitled to not be in the mood - but DON'T TELL ME YOU'D RATHER BE WATCHING MONSTER GARAGE. Hmmmm - now that I write that, I see a whole new bumper sticker market.

Anyway, I was out of bed at the ungodly hour of 7 this morning so that I could get a shower (very little hot water in the house) before... get this... a mandatory SALES MEETING at my office at 9AM. Oh shit. Those of you who know me know that group activities are not my forte. And a Rah! Rah! sales meeting? I'd rather be rejected in favour of Monster Garage ten times over. This is going to take some serious inner strength.

-AP

PS - Just a little bit more about the rejection last night. When the Chinchilla raced after me trying to calm the angry beast, he mentioned this in passing "....and you're going to write about this on your blog and I am going to look like SUCH AN ASSHOLE!!" Not an asshole, darling, just a foolish, foolish man to pass up this sweet piece of action.

Jive Talkin'

2005-01-17T11:07:00.000-05:00

Yay! I'm no longer dry heaving into the recycle box under my desk! And I didn't even drink!

Saturday afternoon, after a delightful morning puttering around St. Lawrence Market, buying lovely things like white stilton & fresh baguettes, I was just about to go to work when suddenly wave upon wave of paralyzing nausea came upon me, followed by a crushing headache and sore throat. This rendered me pretty much useless for the rest of the weekend, save for working. I had to cancel my Saturday night plans (which was to be Test #2 in Not Drinking Excessively) and spent the rest of my night drifting in and out of consciousness on the couch listening to music.

Luckily the Chinchilla and I had gone music shopping on Friday night so I was Ripe! With! Musical! Choices! I bought that new Arcade Fire CD that everyone keeps yowling about, and I've listened to it about 5 times now (I was driving a lot yesterday for work) and it's quite enjoyable - that combination of high drama and pop music. I like it when people sing like they're on the edge of losing their sanity and Arcade Fire have that sound.

The Chinchilla replaced the Franz Ferdinand CD that went missing in the Vacuous Hole That Is My Car (the most recent CD that has gone missing is my new Ted Leo CD, which has led to me wandering the house growling in accusatory tones about WHO TOOK MY CD??, when deep down I know I probably just carelessly flung it somewhere). I was so wrong about Franz Ferdinand. I assumed I would hate them when I first head about them - you know, they dress alike, they had that annoying art-band air about them. But OH. That's a great fucking album. I heard an interview with one of the guys in the band the other day and, aside from having a panty-removing Scottish accent, he made some great points about how pop music shouldn't be looked upon as such a dirty, cheap industry because it churns out so much crap. There can be great pop music too. And that's how I feel about this album. It embodies so much of what I love about brit-pop. When I hear that Take Me Out single I want to put on too-big heels and clomp around the house, making satisfying stomping noises in time to the music. The rest of the album reminds me of all the reasons I occasionally love to go put on a push-up bra, drink excessively, and dance like an idiot at Lee's Palace.

But by far the most exciting purchase was... THE BEEGEE'S #1 HITS COMPILATION!!! I know, I'm a total asshole, and I can't help it. But hooo-boy have I gotten a lot of joy out of this album this past weekend. Aside from Jive Talkin', You Should Be Dancin' and Too Much Heaven, this album ALSO has "How Deep Is Your Love", which I made the Chinchilla slow dance with me to - Grade 5 style (you know, arms straight out ahead of you) - several times on Saturday morning. Most giggle-inducing was the track "I Started A Joke", which was a mainstay on the tapes Jen and I used to make in high school, made up solely of songs we ABSOLUTELY hated. On this track the BeeGees sing like a bunch of goats, and every time we played it my father would appear out of nowhere, announce "This song is about Jesus, you know" and then disappear, back to figuring out new ways to destroy his kids' self esteem, or self-medicate, or whatever the fuck he did in his spare time...

Anyway, the morning is growing to a close. I should make my way out into the world, armed with several packs of zinc lozenges for my throat and metal alb pellets for my still-slightly-dicky-tummy, face the public, and try to recover some of my sales that were smashed to pieces last week. At least I have some good soundtracks to do it to.

-AP

2005-01-15T14:17:00.000-05:00

If you called me right now and said "So, what are you doing?" I could, in all honesty, answer you with "Ohh... sharpening knives..."

2005-01-14T18:01:00.000-05:00

Ach. I'm going to sound like a salesperson here but ALL MY DEALS FELL THROUGH TODAY !! So, all my work, all week, every night 'til late late late is all for naught.

But, I'm using the years of therapy and looking on the bright side, and embracing the little things - like tonight the Chinchilla and I are going to get to do our Friday night ritual for the first time in well over a month. Chinese food! Record shopping! Chappelle Show! Making jokes all night, cuddled on the couch! AND the Canadian version of Antiques Roadshow debuts! (yeah, yeah, I know I'm pathetic)

Knowing that this is what lies ahead of me tonight - instead of sitting up until 2AM, calming nervous clients - it just takes the sting off of what otherwise would have been a really bad day. Shit, I'm lucky!

When did I turn into the kind of yuppie bitch I hate?

2005-01-14T08:42:00.000-05:00

I'll tell you.

It was last night, at approximately 11PM, as I stopped at IGA on my way home from work to pick up a shitload of cleaning supplies.

The clerk said to me, "Wow! SOMEONE'S going on a cleaning binge!"

And I said, without even thinking, "Yeah, the cleaning lady's coming REALLY early tomorrow morning."

That clerk looked at me like she wanted to take a pick-axe to my face. And I KNEW, at that moment, what a stupid jerk I sounded like, but there was nothing I could say at that point to not make me sound like a spoiled twat.

HERE I AM... being rocked... like a hurricane

2005-01-13T15:27:00.000-05:00

So it no longer matters that the Chinchilla thinks I look "really really fat" in my favourite sweater because I got a new boyfriend today. Someone who appreciates me for my true spirit.

It's BEAUTIFUL here today (this is where you can tell I'm Canadian because I'm raving about this weather - "Grey? Drizzly? 12 degrees? Fucking BRILLIANT!!"). It seems the whole city was determined to enjoy this one NOT freezing day. Everyone was driving around with their window down and the music cranked - including me.

I was cruising down Yonge St. to an appointment shrieking 2 Live Crew's "We Want Some Pussy" at the top of my lungs ("JUST NIBBLE ON MY DICK LIKE A RAT DOES CHEESE!!!!") when it occurred to me that I might be making a spectacle of myself. Sure enough, I turn to my right and the two guys in the car next to me where doubled over with laughter. I'm laughed at (not with) on a regular basis so when the lights changed and a new song started, I slipped back into my own little world and began a rather... enthusiastic... performance of the Scorpions' "Rock You Like A Hurricane", complete with vigorous hand pumping and lip pursing (you've got to love the mixed CDs Nicole makes me). As I was stopped a few lights later, I heard someone screaming. It was the two guys in the car again, but this time one of them was screaming that he loved me.

SEE, Chinchilla? SOMEONE APPRECIATES ME! TAKE THAT!

As an aside - is there anything better than driving around with your music blaring? I really don't think so. And you know, I listen to brit pop, and indie music, and all that, but I think deep down I'm a rocker at heart. I was so wound up after blasting a Led Zeppelin CD today... I simply don't feel that way after a Stone Roses album (as much as I love them). Drums rock. Guitars rock. LOUD FUCKING GUITARS.

Your headbanging friend,
-AP

R-O-M-A-N-C-E

2005-01-13T09:30:00.000-05:00

Last night, the Chinchilla is in bed, I am getting undressed to get into bed. This conversation ensues:

Chinchilla - "You know that sweater you were wearing today?"
Me - "Yeah."
Chinchilla - "I'm trying to think of how to put this delicately..."
Me - "Delicate is good. WHAT??"
Chinchilla - "It makes you look really, really fat."

He used TWO "really"'s!! He then proceeded to try and initiate sex. Oh, I picked a good one.

-AP

Thoughts from my drive home tonight

2005-01-12T21:54:00.000-05:00

#1 - Is there any band that makes me want to stick forks in my eyes more than Maroon Five? No, I think not.

#2 - I was scanning the radio and I listened to that WHOLE George Michael version of Elton John's "Don't Let The Sun Go Down On Me" just for the moment when George Michael yells "LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, MISTER ELTON JOHN!!!!" Was it worth it? TOTALLY.

#3 - You know that ZZ Top song "Tush"? I fucking LOVE that song.

Who would have thought...

2005-01-12T11:30:00.000-05:00

... that at age 29, my criteria for "favourite sweater" would be based solely on the pattern that is least likely to show bird shit?

Del Boca Vista, here I come!

2005-01-12T09:54:00.000-05:00

Pull out the knee-length shorts and pastel golf shirts - I'M GOING TO FLORIDA!!

Woo!

So when the second Bush administration was elected I annoyingly rambled at length to the Chinchilla about how we would NOT BE TRAVELING TO THE STATES until the Republicans were out of office and it was Our Duty to object in this small way, yada, yada yada.

But I already had tickets to go see Karen in Illinois. So I sucked it up and went to Illinois, and watched my principles fly out the window when offered CHEAP AMERICAN BOOZE (!!) and OVER THE COUNTER PAINKILLERS NOT AVAILABLE IN CANADA (!!!) at Sam's Club.

I'm now seeing that these principles are also easily tossed aside at the promise of some much needed warmth, quality ocean time, and all-you-can-eat buffet steaks at 4PM. I guess they're not even "principles" anymore, more like "rough guidelines" or "good intentions."

Somehow the Chinchilla's company has not realized that they have employed The Biggest Fucking Stoner In The World and seem to want to send him on business trips across the States to Represent The Company. This time they're sending him on a trip to some conference HERE, and they have graciously (thank you Raj, oh god I love you Raj) offered to send me along. Who am I to deny a free holiday? And the best part is that the Chinchilla will be working so I will have long periods of the day ALONE to sit in the shade (I'm sickeningly pale and want to stay that way) and read.

Did I mention I can be ALONE most of the day? Like - meaning I don't have to hang out with anybody but myself? Like, not have to talk to ANYONE? Just sit there and read books and eat bon bons between periodic frolics in the surf? SOLITARY FROLICS IN THE SURF???

I'm so excited I could shit my pants. February 4th just can't come fast enough. In the meantime I get to spend the next 3 weeks fretting about squeezing myself into my bathing suit (the same bathing suit that the Chinchilla said "That looks like a bathing suit your mother would buy" the first time he saw it). Thank god I bought the "matching sarong". It's for classy people who like to maintain a sense of dignity while strolling the beach.

Or fat people.

Either one.

-AP

I KNEW it was bad!

2005-01-11T23:35:00.000-05:00

At the post office today, I'm standing by the envelope rack.

A man comes in and asks the clerk where the envelopes are.

"Over there" he says, "Right by the lady with the tangerine hair."

Oh god, it's TANGERINE...

Oh god, he called me a LADY.

Things I Hate - Part 1

2005-01-11T08:49:00.000-05:00

Since I'm firmly convinced that my tastes are better than everyone elses (something that my friends constantly deride me for), I decided that this site will host a Things I Hate and a Things I Love continuing series.

This, my friends, is Things I Hate Part 1.

U2.

I hate that fucking band. Back when they released the Joshua Tree I liked them, and that album was a soundtrack for a lot of good traveling memories for me. Then there was Achtung! Baby, and I liked a lot of the stuff on that album too, like that line in 'You're So Cruel' where he talks about hanging on to watch his partner drown - I've been there, and I like that line. A lot.

But Bono. Fuck, that guy needs a good cockpunching. Everybody knows he wears those coloured glasses TO HIDE THE LINES AROUND HIS EYES. COME ON. They're not "in" anymore - they went out with fucking frosted tipped skater cuts. Only OLD PEOPLE wear coloured glasses, like that woman who writes the gossip column in The Star and every time I see her and her stupid blue glasses I fight the urge to kick her right in the ovary.

But I digress. When Bono travels he decks himself out in full Castro/Che Guevara gear and HE'S NOT FOOLING ANYONE. He can try and dress as socialist/communist as he wants but we all know he bathes himself in cash money (god I love saying "cash money") and lives the entirety of his off-stage-life in leather pants.

Yes, he's trying to do some good things with his "celebrity" powers. But being a celebrity is supposed to be about whores and drugs (RIP Old Dirty Bastard), hampsters in your anus (I didn't care about the hampsters, Elton, but please get a better haircut), and getting caught having anonymous dirty sex in park bathrooms (I love you George Michael, I FUCKING LOVE YOU), isn't it?

If he wants to use his powers for good, he's got enough money. Can't he just pack the music thing in, devote his life to AIDS prevention, or third world debt, or any of those other causes, and at the same time do the industrialized world a favour and not force me to hear yet another album of crappy commercialized pap and soaring anthemic ballads? And yes, I know I'm not FORCED to listen to it, but it's on all these fucking commercials and web pop-ups, and it just seems to pop out at me from every corner.

So that's it for Things I Hate Part 1.

Get ready for Things I Hate Part 2 - Usher.

Holy shit. Do I ever hate Usher.

-AP

Monday, Monday

2005-01-10T10:33:00.000-05:00

I totally tried to write an entry last night, I really did, but my brain wasn't working.

I spent Saturday night in the basement of the Cannington (population: in the three digits) Legion celebrating the 30th birthday of one of my best friends, and former roommate, Heather Parliament. Parliament and I met when we arrived at Carleton University to discover we were roommates. We proceeded to live together for a total of 4 years, but not without rocky beginnings.

I know I've told this story a million times but I'll tell it again because I love it. I was from Markham, but thought I was from Toronto, I also thought I was Courtney Love, and oh-so-cool, and all my friends (all 3 of them) and I had jokes that I was going to end up with some hick roommate, fresh off the farm, who listened to country music.

Parliament, fresh off the farm, told her mother on the way up to Carleton that if she got some "chick with freak-coloured hair" for a roommate she was going to beat that chick up. I had bright pink hair. The only girl in Carlton Residence with "freak coloured hair". Parliament walked into the room and saw me, said hello, walked out of the room and burst into tears. When she returned later, she put up a big poster that was a black and white montage of country music stars. I think Shania Twain and Billy Ray Cyrus were featured prominently.

Anyway, we didn't speak for 2 months. Apparently she had a contest with me (unbeknownst to me) over who brought more phone numbers home from the bars. I hated frosh week and didn't attend much of it, Parliament was an active participant. Someone told me she was really funny, that she threw up in her backpack on an OC Transpo bus because she didn't know you could pull the string to get off. I didn't believe them.

We existed in silence until one night I stayed up late doing laundry and she said to me, "You know, I could kill someone and get away with it. I'd just hide the body on my parents' farm. No one would know."

After that moment we were inseparable, annoyingly so, and after the subsequent 4 years of living together, Parliament is more like a sister than a friend. We exist best when we are lying on the couch, watching TV, and insulting each other - which we do enviably well.

Parliament's boyfriend organized a surprise 30th birthday party for her on Saturday in her hometown. A bunch of my university friends went and, with the exception of Kate, we had a fucking good time. But Kate being completely miserable was indeed part of the fun. There's very little that is more entertaining than mocking and torturing a classic Type A Personality. When I attempted last night to recount the BIZARRE things we witnessed, I couldn't even get started, so let's just leave it at this:

Parliament, you have great hair at age 30, and your tits aren't so bad either
Your brothers are a bunch of perverts
Your father is too
I think the inspiration for Matthew McConaughey's character in Dazed and Confused is from Cannington, and I hung out with him on Saturday night
Actually, I watched that "inspiration" simulate homosexual sex with another "inspiration" that arrived at the party, by way of greeting
Colin Tattersall, you're turning into Hugh Grant, except less moist, and maybe a little meaner
The Budget Inn on the side of the Highway in Beaverton (actual address 3 BEAVER AVE.!!!!) is a shithole

And last but not least, I did make it through the evening without drinking, so there IS hope. And I only smoked one joint. A "new me" indeed!

-AP

How to throw up out of a cab door, all the way home

2005-01-08T15:06:00.000-05:00

As a companion piece to last year's "How to throw up on yourself in a bar", here's a new installment, called "How to throw up out of a cab door, all the way home", inspired by my pathetic experience last night:

1. Go to a party, even though you are not good at parties because large crowds of people make you nervous.
2. Get fed free drinks at party. Specifically, free red wine, which is good red wine because Andy has good taste in wines. Temporarily forget that you have an incredibly weak stomach and that red wine can easily make you sick.
3. Make an ass out of yourself in conversations such as:

Maria - "Oh my god, I didn't tell you, Patti's son almost died in a car accident. They had to take out his spleen!"
Me - (snort)
Marlene - "Excuse me, but did you just CHUCKLE?"
Me - (realizing how bad that sounded) "Yeah, but only because I think spleens are funny. I don't understand what they do, is it really so bad not to have a spleen?"
Maria - "Spleens purify your blood. You need a spleen."
Me - "Purify, schmurify! Who needs their blood cleaned? Booze is a disinfectant!"

4. Forget to eat.
5. Smoke cigarettes like crazy.
6. Look through purse for lighter, accidentally dump contents of purse all over floor, spilling out the 900 tampons that you put in there earlier. When everyone looks at you, hold up one such tampon and announce "I bought the SuperSize ones because I think I have a really big vagina." See how everyone looks vaguely uncomfortable.
7. Decide early that it's time to go home, remember it's 10PM and I am now hungry. Happily buzz around Yonge St. looking for Amatos and buy a slice of pizza. Hail a cab.
8. Get in cab and start to eat pizza. Oh. The street lights are starting to move. Oh. Can't. Focus. Feeling. Nauseous.
9. Mumble through mouth full of vomit that you need the cab to pull over and puke out the side of the door. Apologize profusely to the cab driver. Repeat 3 more times, the last time in front of your neighbourhood Baskin Robbins where you can hear people walking along Bloor St. saying things like "Oh my GOD LOOK AT THAT!!"
10. Get home, give the cab driver an obscenely large tip and stumble in the house to come face to face with boyfriend, who simply rolls his eyes and brings a bucket to the side of your bed. Spend the rest of the night alternately hugging the toilet bowl and lying on the bathroom floor with your towels smushed up for a pillow.

This is going to stop. I am almost thirty and I am still regularly sleeping with a bucket beside my bed on Friday and Saturday nights. I hate sleeping on the bathroom floor. It hurts my hips.

Today marks the start of a new me. No more puking. No more excessive drinking. I am so hungover today I can barely HEAR. I have to go to a party tonight (and I can't get out of it, long story) so tonight's my big test. I am going to socialize WITHOUT THE AID OF ALCOHOL.

Again. Pray for me.

-AP

Caught!

2005-01-07T08:39:00.000-05:00

The Chinchilla thinks he caught me last night touching myself whilst looking at a picture of Yanni that he left on my pillow.

IT WAS COLD IN THE ROOM. YOUR PUBIC AREA IS WARM.

I WAS WARMING MY HAND!! My hands are ALWAYS cold, I SWEAR!!

On an aside, can anyone tell me how Yanni can manage to fill the Air Canada Centre? He's playing there February 5th.

I think I'm going to go down to the area that night and just watch the people going to the Yanni concert. See if they act different from normal people, or if they have two heads, or are aliens, or SOMETHING that explains why they they are paying at least $60 to see Yanni...

WE'VE GOT HEAT, BITCHEZ!!!

2005-01-06T17:31:00.000-05:00

Isn't it beautiful? (sigh)

I'm so proud of this thing I feel like I birthed the motherfucker. I made doe eyes at the repairmen and brought them copious amounts of tea and cookies. They got me a furnace.

I'm a happy happy lady. A broke lady. But a happy one.

-AP

2005-01-06T16:03:00.000-05:00

FUCK, I love owls.

This is my life...

2005-01-06T13:40:00.000-05:00

I'm cold and waiting for the furnace people to tell me there's a chance we'll get heat today.

I don't have any food in my house so I ate croutons for breakfast because it's snowing sleet and ice pellets and I don't want to walk to the store.

Then I got REALLY hungry and found some chicken fingers in the freezer. I ate them. They tasted like freezerburn. So I put more Diana sauce on them to cover up the freezer burn taste.

I think I'm going to be sick.

Great News!

2005-01-06T10:57:00.000-05:00

They're NOT putting my furnace in today!
Because I have a "chimney oddity" that only happens once in every 200 houses!
And building codes have changed since they last put my ancient furnace in!
And I now need to buy the most expensive furnace they have!
And I can no longer use my water heater because it's now "illegal"!
So I have to pay for a new water heater!
And they're most likely ripping me off!
But I've already signed a contract!
And they have to remove the brick from the front of my house and pipe the furnace and the water heater out the front of my house!
Several pipes coming out the front of your house is attractive and great for re-sale value!
And they won't be able to get the more expensive furnace today!
And I will have to wait without heat for at least another day!
And take another day off work to wait for the chimney people!
I'm just waiting for noon when it's okay to uncork a bottle of wine!
And trying to figure out when my life became this pathetic!

Dirty Words!

2005-01-06T10:07:00.000-05:00

I'm home for the day because they're putting in MY! NEW! FURNACE! (which could also be called "My Trip To New York" because that's where THAT money went) so I'm fucking around on the computer and you HAVE to check this thing out on The Sneeze, where the computer says dirty words. Oh I am so immature, but it's true, the computer voice saying the plural word for Vagina has me in hysterics.

There's nothing like...

2005-01-05T16:06:00.000-05:00

... your mother telling you in a "kindly" voice that you really ought to "spruce yourself up", to make you want to punch her in the vagina.

-AP

Life Lesson #3

2005-01-04T19:09:00.000-05:00

Do not think you're going to be all responsible and get Enbridge Gas to come and "service" your furnace, even though the furnace is working fine. You just think you should "maintain" your furnace because that is what grown-up people do.

You will forget about the appointment, and you will be across the city and they will show up just as your boyfriend is leaving for the airport, and they will announce that your furnace is COMPLETELY unsafe and they will SHUT YOUR FURNACE DOWN AND CUT OFF THE GAS EVEN THOUGH IT IS FREEZING OUTSIDE, and then they will FORCE YOU TO BUY A NEW FURNACE.

Oh, by the way, your heating system doesn't work with new furnaces so they will have to DIG OUT HALF OF YOUR FUCKING HOUSE TO PUT A NEW CHIMNEY IN before they can put in a new furnace. And no, they don't do that for free. They don't even do that for blow jobs.

I'm not complaining. I'm not, really. When half a world away people have lost everything and everyone they love, I can see this is absolutely nothing to complain about. I'm just venting.

And I AM looking on the positive side - like I am SO, SO, glad I have a bottle and a half of wine at home while I wait all by my lonesome for the Furnace Salesman to show up "sometime tonight" and no doubt sell me the most expensive furnace he can find because all he can see is a drunk woman wearing several layers of clothing under a pink bathrobe and a wool hat with flowers stapled to it, who CLEARLY knows precious little about furnaces.

Pray for me.

-AP

In My Head...

2005-01-04T16:46:00.000-05:00

... "The Next Time I Fall In Love" by Peter Cetera and Amy Grant.

Holy mother of christ, how did I get this fucking song in my head?

Holy mother of christ, how the fuck do I get it OUT???

BEST PRODUCT SO FAR OF 2005

2005-01-04T10:04:00.000-05:00

Mmmmmm... Beef Stick!

This came in the gift basket we received from the Chinchilla's company yesterday. It has made for HOURS of fun:

* "Let me introduce you to my MASSIVE BEEF STICK!"

* "Quite honestly, I'm finding your Beef Stick a little intimidating."

* "Can you handle my massive Beef Stick?"

* " My Beef Stick is irresistable when covered in mustard!"

* "My Beef Stick is warm and somewhat turgid."

* "I don't know if I'm ready for your Beef Stick! I'm not that... experienced..."

Oh, the good times...

Two Things I've Learned In 2005

2005-01-03T17:17:00.000-05:00

#1. Cleaning out your kitchen cupboards can have more positive outcomes than you ever thought - I organized like a muthafuckin' FIEND yesterday and I found NINE - COUNT 'EM - NINE, prescription Tylenol 3's stashed in an Advil bottle. NINE TYLENOL THREES!! That's like, four and a half more times I can decide not to deal with a situation and just take pills and feel all floaty and warm INSTEAD! I am SO going to organize my cupboards on a regular basis from now on.

#2. Don't NOT eat breakfast and then decide to have French Onion Soup for lunch - You will fart. Oh sweet holy christ, you will fart like nothing you have ever seen, heard or IMAGINED. You will fart possibly more than the time you promised you wouldn't fart, then cooked garlic chicken, and then farted all night despite your promise. But this time it will be so much worse because you will have become the world's most disgusting, gaseous individual in front of your "I have no sense of humour", short, suburban clients.

I'll be passing on 2005's other life lessons as they rear their ugly head.

-AP

The Final Three

2005-01-02T13:30:00.000-05:00

I used to not believe in New Years Resolutions. But now I see how I'm just letting things all go to hell so this year I figure I better make a few. After careful deliberation, here's my final three:

#1 - Cut Meat-Eating Down To "Cannot-Live-Without-It" Essentials
When I worked at an advertising agency, my co-worker Marlene and I once sent an All-Staff Memo, ostensibly from this 4 foot 9 inch, size "zero", quiet mouse of a woman, about how much she loved bacon.

Looking back, this opus about bacon, which was in large part lifted from Esquire magazine, is essentially how I feel about bacon.

I fucking love it.

Bacon, along with French Onion Soup and smoked salmon, is the reason that I can never become fully vegetarian, despite my all-consuming guilt about the meat industry. If I could marry Bacon, I would. I would marry Bacon and I would also marry Boots (as an entire footwear category) and we would live together in a bigamist salty/foxy paradise where I sat around all day looking fabulous in varying degrees of heeled and flat boots, feasting on tender yet crispy pig flesh. This year, I vow to cut back on the non-essential meat products so I can enjoy my true love and feel somewhat less guilt-ridden about it.

#2- Organize My Cupboards
I frequently ask (whine at) the Chinchilla about when we are going to start living like grown-ups. The thing that prompts me to ask this (scream this) the most is SHIT FALLING OUT OF MY FUCKING CUPBOARDS.

This morning I opened the pantry door and an OPEN BAG OF ICING SUGAR FELL OUT AND EXPLODED ALL OVER THE KITCHEN. The other day it took me 15 minutes to find the saran wrap. I was practically weeping with anger by the time I found it. Last week I opened up the "appliance cupboard" and the MIXER FELL OUT AND HIT MY TOE. I believe that learning to organize my cupboards and not just throw-shit-in-and-shut-the-door-quick will help me greatly with my third and final resolution.

#3 - Cut Back On the Rage
I stopped going to therapy once I stopped wanting to throw myself in front of a bus. However I think maybe this year I'm going to go back and learn not to be so fucking angry all of the time. I don't know where it comes from, but it's like I can be in a PERFECTLY good mood, and then without a moment's notice, something happens and I turn into this uber-bitch, looking for my next person to take out. Today I started making a list of things that spark that "anger" feeling. It's currently 1:28, I only got up at 10:30, and so far I have a list of over 20 things. One of which is my sister's answering machine message. HOLY SHIT, CHRISTINE, PEOPLE KNOW HOW TO USE A FUCKING ANSWERING MACHINE. YOU DON'T NEED TO EXPLAIN IT IN PAINFUL. FUCKING. DETAIL., IN THE SLOWEST. VOICE. EVER.

See? This has gotta stop.

My best wishes to all of you in keeping your individual resolutions. Hopefully we all have some semblance of success in 2005!

-AP

Tasteful Discretion Is The Name of My Game

2005-01-01T13:33:00.000-05:00

2005 got off to a spectacular start this morning with the following conversation while lying in bed.

Me - "So what changes are you going to make in your life this year?"

Chinchilla - "Nothing. I am what I am."

Me - "And what is that?"

Chinchilla - "I'M A MAN!" [thinks] "...who likes to rub his penis... against you..."

Me - "Would you be mad if I farted on your leg?"
____

2005 has not continued in such a brilliant fashion as there are now many large burly men in my house watching college football, arm jostling, and hooting in the most undignified manner. Soon they will all gather around the stove and cook a large piece of meat known as a "brisket" and will feast on it like hungry animals.

I am fleeing this situation by riding my bike to Nicole's for tea, crafts, and unscrupulous plotting.

Happy New Year!

Yet another sign Canadian Tire are a bunch of perverts...

2004-12-31T17:30:00.000-05:00

In addition to my Canadian Tire bought christmas lights, which contain a label stating they can be "plugged at both ends", I just saw the new commercial with my favourite creepy guy where he says "Come on son, we've got a lot of drillin' to do..."

The Year In Review

2004-12-31T14:37:00.000-05:00

Well I've been reading other people's blogs this morning and it looks like I should be doing an obligatory "end of year" post. So here goes:

Good things from 2004 (in no particular order and by no means a complete list)

Bought a house
Got a DISHWASHER (!!!!!) in which I wash EVERYTHING with reckless abandon, whether it is dishwasher safe or not!! (Except the Rosenthal Plate)
Discovered that I don't hate the outdoors if I am outfitted properly
Solidified good career change
Made significant progress in Not Being Crazy
Managed to get through confrontation with best friend without deciding I would just hate friend, like I usually do
Peeled an onion by sticking it on the leg of a table tied to the top of my car and driving around with Nicole screaming out the words to the Verve's On Your Own until the onion was completely peeled
Grew a vegetable garden for the first time and got to see my own vegetables grow and shriek with excitement every time something was ready to be picked
For the first time in 6 years had a backyard to sit in and read in the sun
Awesome cottage vacation
Bought huge collection of Sweet Valley High books on eBay
Won bet with Nicole over who sang "Cherry Pie" (It was Warrant, by the way)
Amazing weekend away in Ottawa with the Chinchilla which was the most fun EVER
Read two of my favourite books to date: The Romantic and Bearing Life
My wicked-awesome Rosenthal Plate came into my life
The Snake got even fatter
My brother moved into my basement, which may sound strange, but I love it because I actually know my brother now and this way I can ensure he is eating and is warm
I saw "Flashdance" for the first time
Went to Heather's cottage for a weekend and got my finger bitten by a spider/crazy bug which caused it to swell up like you wouldn't believe and cut off the circulation, which led to the funniest 4 hours I have ever spent in a hospital with Heather (and I have spent time in the hospital with Heather on several occasions, all of which had points where I was crying with laughter) and hours of good story-telling after
Watched the Chinchilla go through the somewhat hysterical process of figuring out why his nipples are so itchy (Goat's Milk Soap)
Started making plans with Christa & Neeecole to open a crafty store - plans have not gone very far but as soon as we can corral Christa into quitting her job to run the place we will be RIGHT back on track
Discovered the vegetarian Momos at Little Tibet
Got in touch with best-friend-in-high-school Jen, which led to many funny emails, three funny visits, and eventually, this blog
Started blog which turned out to be strangely addictive
After months of deliberation, bought $50 comfy pants, which turned out to be the BEST INVESTMENT EVER
Got accepted into the Big Sister's program and will be matched with a kid any day now!

Bad things from 2004

Gained weight
Let snakeycat fall by the wayside (crafty side business)
Leased the WORST CAR EVER
I can't seem to be able to KEEP MY BLOGS SHORT, which I know I need to do it's just that I can't stop talking...

So it looks like overall, 2004 has been a pretty damn good year. Although I won't be sad to see it go because my life just seems to get better as I get older. Not to make anyone sick with that cheesy statement, but honestly, I can't quite believe it myself but it does.

Hope everyone has a great New Year's Eve.

-AP

PS - Happy Birthday Chinchilla!

RIP Jerry Orbach

2004-12-30T16:46:00.000-05:00

You were part of two of my most favourite things. Dirty Dancing and Law & Order.

Nobody puts Baby in a corner, Jake Houseman. Nobody.

All I want for Christmas is a tapeworm...

2004-12-30T11:06:00.000-05:00

Oh. Ooooooohhhhh. The food.

So last night I had a few people over to watch Anchorman: The Legend Of Ron Burgundy, which will henceforth be known as THE GREATEST MOVIE EVER MADE. I loved that movie the first two times, but after seeing the "unrated version" I now love it even more. I love that movie in the same way that I love seeing one big dog and one little dog walking down the street together - and there is VERY LITTLE that I love THAT MUCH - so please take a moment now to appreciate JUST HOW MUCH I LOVE THIS MOVIE.

The Chinchilla did not stay and watch the movie with us, because that would require him to socialize and there were STRANGERS in the house and that is scary for a Chinchilla, but he did comment on the amount on the amount of food I had laid out on the coffee table and all over the kitchen for my stoner friends, saying "Is that not a crazy amount of food for like, 8 people?"

Apparently not, as we proceeded to devour 2 tables and a kitchen-counter's worth of food (which, in my defence, did contain a lot of vegetables, and was all vegetarian except for the prosciutto & melon which Christa seemed to pounce on with considerable wop vigour. It was almost like she had special prosciutto-seeking-laser-beam eyes, the way she managed to spot the plate within 30 seconds of coming into the house).

Anyway, as I lay in bed this morning, moaning, still full from last night. I reflected on all the amazing food I have eaten over the last couple of weeks, and how I have either two choices to make it out of this holiday without gaining weight.

The first is to get a tapeworm. I don't know how to get a tapeworm, but I know my mom had one once and she lost A LOT of weight. But she got the tapeworm from living in a refugee camp, so that option is pretty much shot to hell. The other option is far more horrible than the tapeworm option, but I think it's my only choice...

I will have to exercise.

So today, I am picking my fleece jogging (or, as they say in Anchorman, "yogging") jacket off the floor of the craft room, where it still sits covered in the Snake's Vomit (yeah, I know I'm disgusting), washing the vomit off, and beginning the annual pathetic "Adrianne attempts to exercise" saga, where it's all I can think about and talk about, until I give it all up approximately two months from now, if that.

In the meantime I am dragging the world's most ancient treadmill (I'm not kidding - it's made out of wood and it is unmotorized) to my house from my mother's garage, so perhaps I can do some of this exercising while watching Little House On The Prairie reruns or those "emergency medical" shows that feature people coming into the ER with knives stuck in their brain or other horrible accidents that I find strangely calming.

I'm gonna do it.

Pray for me.

-AP

PS - During the movie last night I was delighted to see that at one point Ron Burgundy calls Veronica his little "Chinchilla". I was not aware of this before but I now see that WILL FERREL AND I ARE CLEARLY SOUL MATES WHO ARE MEANT TO BE TOGETHER FOREVER AND NEVER EVER PART. Oh Will, it is only a matter of time, my love, only a matter of time...

A Christmas Miracle!!!

2004-12-29T09:59:00.000-05:00

The mother-in-law has cancelled her Christmas Visit. I repeat. The MOTHER-IN-LAW HAS CANCELLED HER CHRISTMAS VISIT.

This is better than the Rosenthal Plate! This is better than the pink bathrobe and the rooster cutting board combined! This is better than the soon-to-be-bought jewelry! This is TRULY a Christmas Miracle!!!

Now I have to go work for a few hours for the first time in what seems like weeks. I don't wanna go. I will attempt to do a real blog later on, perhaps about the movie I saw last night, The Life Aquatic (Good!), or the first annual debauchery-fuelled Anchorman: Ron Burgundy screening that is to take place at my house tonight (Great!), or the disturbing new trend of my brother's to play Rammenstein (sp) at full blast in his basement apartment starting around 7 in the morning accompanied by hours of mysterious banging sounds (Scary!).

-AP

All is well once more...

2004-12-26T19:01:00.000-05:00

Just so you don't think I'm a TOTAL fucking grinch, Day 2 of the Christmas Holiday is going swimmingly back in my happy little home. I am cooking a WICKED dinner (pasta with sweet sausage), I have a santa hat on the Snake (AND I took pictures but am refraining myself from posting them), I'm ensconced in comfy pants and my new pink fleece robe, I'm one glass into a bottle of red, and I survived my annual trek to the Big Music Stores on Boxing Day.

All year I try to buy at small music stores but on Boxing Day I just give up and go to the big stores (HMV & Sams) to get the buy 3 get one free deals. I rationalize this by thinking that SOMEONE has to buy some smaller acts at the big stores sometimes or the big stores won't carry them.

I realize that perhaps it isn't necessary to rationalize this but you have to understand that I over-analyze and rationalize everything to the point that it is excruciating just to listen to me. Just ask the Chinchilla. ("WHY can't ANYTHING be EASY for you?" He always whines. "Can't you do anything without thinking about it first???" No, I can't. And I feel I must yammer on endlessly about each AGONIZING detail as I make my way through the mental process. Let's start about why we will not be going to an all-inclusive resort this year, are you ready??)

Anyway, I came home from my shopping trip with:

Things We Lost In The Fire CD by Low
The new Ted Leo CD
Pink Floyd - The Wall (wore out my cassette copy years ago and let me tell you how great it was to drive home yelling "VEEEEERA! VEEEERRAAA! What has become of you??????") this afternoon
A Roy Orbison greatest hits CD (I looooove Roy Orbison)
A Weezer CD that was on sale for $3.99. (Hey, I like a couple of Weezer songs. As long as I don't have to listen to that Buddy Holly song we're all good.)
A Perfectly Serviceable Pair of Real Estate Pants. (I can't wear pink rubber boots, rolled up jeans, and my orange Eskimo coat every day, sometimes I need to look classy and boring. For these occasions, my new Perfectly Serviceable Pair of Real Estate Pants will do just fine. If I wear high heeled boots with them, I might fool people into thinking I know what I am doing.)

I had a bunch of funny phone conversations with various friends today about their Dec 25th experiences, the best quote so far coming from Marlene who said "You know, I feel... shellshocked... like I just came back from the war" when describing her visit to her mother's. So therefore I am feeling a mite better about causing a bit of a scene at my sister's yesterday (even though the Chinchilla said "You acted like a crazy, unmedicated person." Note to Chinchilla - NEVER SAY THAT TO ME AGAIN OR YOU WILL NEVER. EVER. TOUCH. MY. BOOBS. EVER. AGAIN.).

I think I'm all talked out today so I'm gonna go watch a movie or two on the couch, in full-on vacation mode. Then tomorrow the Chinchilla is taking me out To! Buy! Jewelry! which, in conjunction with my Rosenthal plate, is my Christmas present.

Okay, this is what Christmas is all about (insert happy sigh here).

-AP

All hail the Queen...

2004-12-26T09:36:00.000-05:00

Okay, so I was sulking on the couch last night around 11, cuddled in my new bathrobe, complaining about my Christmas Day when I got a call from the lovely Neeecole.

"Pussy" she said, "You would not BELIEVE what happened today."

And she proceeded to tell me the funniest, craziest, most dysfunctional story about her Christmas at her mother's. I went from sulking to weeping with hysterical laughter as she added horrific detail upon horrific detail.

It's not like my friends and I have contests or anything, but a good portion of us happen to have crazy stories coming from family gatherings that we tend to recount loudly and increasingly giddily, when fuelled by a bit of booze at a Lady Night.

Ladies, we might as well stop right now. Kate, even your mom with the legwarmers and naked pictures incident; Mel, even the Pied Piper complex and the open hostilities; Marlene, even the puking on oneself and the repeated "Hot Legs" dancing interludes; Ramona, even... well... where do I even start with YOUR mother? - Nicole's won it.

Hands fucking down.

All hail the Queen.

-AP

Recipe for A Not Well Planned Family Christmas

2004-12-25T20:36:00.000-05:00

Ingredients

1 Alcoholic Sister
1 Brother With A Drug Problem
1 Mother Who Regularly Sees Dead People And Talks To Them
1 Nephew with ADD and Other Assorted Behavioral Problems
1 Chinchilla Who Hates Family Gatherings and Is Feeling a Little Flu-ey
1 Grandma's Boyfriend Who Won't Stop Talking About How The Russians Kidnapped His Sister And Made Her Work In The Mines
1 Grandma Who Has Adopted a Weird New "Punching" Thing And Keeps Asking Me If I've Gained Weight (she punched me REALLY hard in the hip)
1 Sister With Anger Issues (me)

Mix together. Add a long car ride to and from the destination (2 hours each way), an insane amount of festering resentment between Mother Who Sees Dead People and Alcoholic Sister, a screaming fight between Brother With Drug Problem and Sister With Anger Issues and a resulting Battle of Wills between Brother With Drug Problem and Sister With Anger Issues, and a point in the day where the Chinchilla yells "GOD BLESS US, EVERY ONE OF US!!!" over the aforementioned screaming fight. Stir in a heaping afternoon-full of guilt. Top with the NFL airing games on CHRISTMAS DAY. Overcook to the point where everything is burning and tastes like shit.

Serve steaming fucking hot.

Enjoy.

-AP

PS - The ONLY good part of today was when we taught my nephew to say "Eat my shit" in German.

Note to lady that accused me of hitting her SUV at Whole Foods

2004-12-24T13:13:00.000-05:00

Okay, so maybe yelling "OH, I'LL KILL YA, BITCH!!!" was not an appropriate and/or Christmassy response but I didn't drive into your SUV, that was someone else, probably some other blonde yummy mummy driving another ridiculously large and unnecessary vehicle. Sorry I yelled, though. Whole Foods makes me crazy angry. I can't help it.

Merry Christmas.

-AP

Why do they tell you the best years of your life are when you're a kid?

2004-12-24T10:49:00.000-05:00

My Christmas Eve plans? My brother, the Chinchilla and I, a big joint (or two), Spadina Gardens for dinner, then back home for Scrabble or cards and lots of good music, and later some midnight tobogganing at the Pits.

Hooray for being a grown-up!!!

-AP

Open Letter

2004-12-23T10:26:00.000-05:00

To the little girl who was laying down on a sled, pulled by her Philippina nanny though the HEAVY FUCKING SLUSH that I was shovelling this morning, who yelled "COMING THROUGH NOW, MOVE AWAY!!!" and then "YOU MISSED SOME SNOW!!!" to me as they passed:

Hey, you cheeky little bitch. You like that ride? It's pretty sweet, huh? Well enjoy it while it fucking lasts, sister, because one day you're gonna wake up and you're gonna be SO HUNGOVER you can barely MOVE, but know that if you don't tackle that fucking disaster of a driveway and sidewalk it's going to be WAAAAAY worse later, and because you constantly harp on about the inequity of gender roles to your partner you feel you have some responsibility to take part in the outside maintenance of your poorly insulated home, so you'll push yourself to go do it now, only to realize it's pissing freezing rain outside and you don't own any waterproof coats, hats or gloves, so you end up outside, soaking wet and shivering, shovelling this goddamn fucking sludge because you ended up with a guy who REFUSES to move somewhere where there are not 4 distinct seasons (seriously, when choosing a partner, ask that question, you'll save yourself a lot of bitching in the end), and as you sweat and heave like a groaning hog you're going to realize that weird things are starting to happen to your body as you near thirty - like you can't drink as much anymore, can't eat as much anymore, you grow more pubic hair, a night of smoking cigarettes will make you feel like you put your mouth over the city of Hamilton and sucked off the smokestacks of Stelco, Algoma and Dofasco combined, and hangovers now hit you so hard it is next to impossible to perform ANY physical activity (i.e. shovelling one million pound heavy freezing rain snow) whilst in the midst of a hangover - and then you will realize that it is two days before Christmas and you still have to go Christmas shopping and you have left it to what the VISA poll says (courtesy of the LOUD TV REPORT THAT THE CHINCHILLA BLARED WHILE I WAS TRYING TO SLEEP THIS MORNING) is the busiest shopping day of the entire season and that you have a myriad of social anxieties so you can't possibly go to a mall today, which means you must trudge through the shit weather to small individual stores because it's better than having a complete fucking breakdown because of the crowds (oh god the CROWDS), and all you really want to do is run back inside and eat Piller's German Salami by the handful because it is meaty and salty and oh so good.

As I said, enjoy it, 'cause if your future is anything like my present, it's gonna be anything but pretty.

-AP

PS - Ohh, the rage. Oh, how it burns.

This just in...

2004-12-22T18:46:00.000-05:00

I was just sitting here, minding my own business, reading kottke.org and my fucking cat just jumped up on the desk and SHOT HER ANAL GLAND CONTENTS ALL OVER MY FUCKING FLAT-SCREEN COMPUTER MONITOR.

Seriously. I swear to fucking god.

-AP

Waaa??

2004-12-22T09:34:00.000-05:00

Chinchilla - "So, what are your plans for tonight?"

Me - "I'm going to a party at Christa's, what about you?"

Chinchilla - "I'm ordering KFC and listening to Guns'n'Roses."

Me - (Start quiet weeping)

THANK GOD WE'RE NOT LEGALLY MARRIED.

-AP

Dilemma

2004-12-22T07:21:00.000-05:00

So the Snake gave me a pretty impressive sratch down the side of my arm as I wrestled her off the bed in the middle of the night. Now that scratch is red, swollen, and puffy and it FUCKING HURTS.

I can't decide what's worse:

This suffering in agonizing silence not able to whine or complain at will?
Or enduring the hours of Ted Nugent "Cat Scratch Fever" jokes I am bound to be subjected to if I mention it to the Chinchilla.

-AP

PS - Just in case you're wondering, the Chinchilla will not find out about it from this blog because he announced the other day that he no longer READS my blog because I talk about shitting and farting too much. Fucker. I'm upping the shitting and farting quotient at home tenfold.

But you're makin' me feel so right...

2004-12-21T11:13:00.000-05:00

YAY! for Robbie Williams, who is announcing on some British radio station that "some of the best times of my life happened under the influence of drugs" and that he only gave them up because they were making him fat.

You speak the truth, my darling, and will never become really and truly famous in the US because of it. Not that I really WANT Robbie Williams to become famous, because I find him repulsive and the majority of his songs are S-H-I-T-E, but he did sing Rock DJ. And as most people who know me will tell you:

Adrianne + Bottle of Malibu Rum + Nearby Stereo or Computer = Endless performances of Rock DJ

And if someone is passing me cigarettes as the Rock DJ performance goes on, I will inevitably extend the performance to include Sophie Ellis Bextor's Murder On The Dancefloor, Kylie Minogue's In Your Eyes, and George Michael's Kissing A Fool. I am one attractive and classy girl, let me tell you.

-AP

PS - Two more things that I wanted to add to my "Things That Bring Me Insane Amounts of Joy" list:

#1 - Bowling Alleys that let you put up your own names on the screen. A couple of weeks ago we went bowling with friends (aka The Greatest Night of the Chinchilla's Life) and the Chinchilla was "Dr. Tits Fong" and I was "Vag Davis". There's nothing like seeing "Dr. Tits Fong" flashing over and over and over on the screen to inspire you to bowl like you've never bowled before.

#2 - Hearing my mom swear. I get my terrible potty mouth from my mother, who is SO ladylike yet curses like a drunken fucking sailor when she doesn't think anyone is listening. Yesterday we went shopping at the Bay at Yorkdale (more on that another time - uggh, I hate malls) and we made this deal that every time we accidentally wandered into a Petites section my mother would say "PETITES?? Fuck those Bitches!" And she did it, ALL AFTERNOON LONG, and I laughed and I laughed and I laughed...

These Are A Few Of My Favourite Things...

2004-12-19T14:03:00.000-05:00

Ahh... just went for a fantastic breakfast at Aunties and Uncles. Awesome food, and a great server who refrained from playing Cinnamon Girl because I told him it made me want to kill people. A good breakfast that you don't have to make or clean up is one of life's finest things, I think.

It is SO COLD and SO SUNNY outside today, and as we drove home up Bathurst in our warm car, chatting about my night last night (including Nicole's reenactment of the entire Pet Shop Boys "Domino Dancing" video) and the Chinchilla's Family Christmas adventures, I was just so... content... to be where I was at that exact moment.

Part of my "Learning Not To Be Crazy" program has been recognizing the significance of finding happiness in little everyday things. I realize I talk a lot on this blog about things that make me happy, or things that make me laugh, but it's only because over the past few years I have really seen that learning to find happiness in stupid little things can actually make you feel good most of the time! And that is such a huge departure from my natural state of mind that I can't help but embrace it fully.

So anyway, on this lovely winter day, I thought I'd share a few things that bring me intense joy:

My Friday Night Ritual
There's very little that makes me happier than a Friday night when the stars align so that the Chinchilla and I are both free, and we are able to perform the Friday Night Ritual:

Go record shopping
Go to Spadina Gardens for dinner
Go home and watch bad TV, a movie, or the Chappelle show if it's on.

First of all, record shopping is always fun, and there is very few other things you can spend $15 on and feel so satisfied. You have a new record to listen to all week, a new CD cover to pore over and read lyrics, and new songs to howl as you drive around the city. Second of all, Spadina Gardens is SO FUCKING GOOD that it consistently blows my mind (in a way the Heating and Air Conditioning Guy never could). And at dinner with just the two of us we have a chance to catch up on our week and have weirdly romantic conversations in this horribly decorated, flourescently lit, all-green restaurant. Thirdly, I love bad TV - it gives you a great excuse to cuddle on the couch and make jokes all night. Which leads me to the next Thing That Brings Me Intense Joy.

Bad TV
It doesn't ALWAYS have to be bad TV, but something like SNL or Kids In The Hall which is mediocre enough to have some bad moments to make fun of, plus good moments to make you howl. The Chinchilla and I have deep roots in Bad TV and much of our early relationship was based around quoting old SNL sketches and the like.

In fact, I think the moment I fell for the Chinchilla was when he sang me the words to the "Girl, You Are So Wicked-Awesome" sketch with Mike Myers, Adam Sandler and Jason Priestly from early '90s SNL, (or it also could have been when he danced naked, singing Ace of Base's "I Saw The Sign", wearing only a Cat-In-The-Hat top hat, yanking on the chain from the bare lightbulb on the ceiling for a strobe-light effect, but it's debatable).

The Snake
I love my fucking cat. There. I said it. I'M A CAT LOSER.

I want to publish a million pictures of my cat on this site but I don't let myself because I don't want to be one of those horrible Cat People - but the terrifying thing is that I know that not-so-deep-down-inside, I ALREADY AM.

The Snake makes me crazy with delight. I make her wear top hats and I take pictures of her. I bought her a turtleneck and when I force her into it I know I'm gonna laugh hysterically for a good ten minutes. She growls and hisses at everyone but the Chinchilla and I.

I am SO FUCKING SAD. But I'm SO OKAY WITH THAT.

The Cast of Characters
It's too long to get into here, but there is a steady cast of characters of people in Toronto that the Chinchilla and I are obsessed with (actually, it's just me, but the Chinchilla goes along with it somewhat enthusiastically) . I will mention two of the Cast of Characters here because we happened to see both them on Friday night when we drove by our old apartment AND IT WAS AWESOME...

The Fern - Lived below us at our old apartment. About 37 years old. Sells concrete for a living. Resembles a cross between Shooter McGavin from Happy Gilmore and the creepy guy from the Canadian Tire commercials. Plays a lot of golf and has a large portrait of himself, naked to the waist, in his bedroom. When Joey Ramone died he built a Ramones shrine on his mantle.
AND WE DROVE BY OUR OLD HOUSE ON FRIDAY NIGHT AND SAW HIM WASHING DISHES WEARING A CHE GUEVARA SHIRT!!!

Pretty Fly - White, twenty-something, high school dropout that still lived with his dad next door to our old apartment. Bore a striking resemblance to the character in the "Pretty Fly For A White Guy" video. Spent every cent he owned on his car, which was a baby blue low rider Cadillac with hydraulics. Formed the "South Side Ridaz" club for other low-rider owners, which he advertised in gothic lettering on the back window of his car. We could never figure out why it was the South Side Ridaz club when we lived North of Bloor. AND WE SAW HIM DRIVING AN AUDI WHEN WE DROVE BY THE PLACE ON FRIDAY NIGHT!!! Clearly there are some illegal dealings going on with Pretty Fly... the intrigue continues...

Some other Cast of Characters include Old Man Scott, a crazy guy who walks around the neighbourhood that looks like an older, crazier version of my old therapist in the WILDEST clothing I have ever seen, and Fancy Pants, the ponciest, fanciest man I have ever seen who we used to see when the Chinchilla drove me to my advertising job every morning, as he walked his two identical champagne coloured poodles. But they're for another day...

China/Porcelain
As a result of a part-time job I had in high school at Ko's in Markville Mall, I have a decidedly sad-ass-middle-aged-suburban-woman obsession with china, porcelain and other lovely things. I have had a hard on for Rosenthal china since I was 17 AND THIS YEAR THE CHINCHILLA BOUGHT ME ROSENTHAL!!!! It's a single serving plate, and it's pink and it has butterflies, lady bugs and flowers on it and it's the most beautiful thing I have ever owned and every time I look at it I want to wet my fucking pants. He gave me the plate on Friday night and managed to get a picture of me kissing it a little later on. Ohhh. My Rosenthal plate.

That's it for now. I don't have to work today so I'm going to go curl up in bed and read, and then maybe go to Heather's later.

I hope you all have stupid things that bring you intense joy too, 'cause it's really, really, really fucking great.

-AP

The Anger Has Subsided

2004-12-18T16:10:00.000-05:00

WOO! I'm DONE! I had my exam today and will NOT be getting up before 7AM for the REMAINDER OF THE YEAR!

I will never have to sit next to Cat Food Man again, never have to listen to Obnoxious White Guy Who Wears Insanely Bad Glasses constantly debate the instructor, never have to hear the Scary Iranian/Russian Baroness constantly question why her numbers don't calculate to the same number of decimals as the rest of the class ('CAUSE YOU BOUGHT THE WRONG CALCULATOR BITCH, SHUT THE FUCK UP)!

The real upside of the exam today was that I missed out on my father-in-law's Family Christmas day, which is located in the small town where the Chinchilla was born, and his ENTIRE FAMILY (divorced parents, younger twin brothers) still lives.

I was not too torn about missing the Family Christmas because it mainly consists of sitting, in painful silence, at a table laden with sickening amounts of meat and bad white wine, until my father-in-law starts giving a weird speech about how much he loves all of us, or my brothers-in-law start talking about:

Who has a new truck
Who's been arrested lately for driving drunk or drunken behavior*
Who's recently gotten fat, and how fat this guy named Pasquale** is
Who has a new ATV
Who recently wrecked their snowmobile by driving it across concrete

Also, I don't think I've seen the Chinchilla's dad since he freaked out while building the Closet Of Pain*** and took off, leaving us to finish renovating our house BY OURSELVES in one week, with no idea what the fuck we were doing. I really don't need to rehash those events with the old man.

So now, I've got the house to myself and I'm gonna do a little bloggin', take a little nap (because I loooooove napping) and later on I will head to my darling Neeeecole's for dinner and then we may go dancing or we may stay in and talk all night while drinking copious amounts of booze. Either way, I'm bringing out my new Dancing Boots (see picture below, oh god I love you Dancing Boots) and wearing them over.

My Dancing Boots remind me of these pants I had a few years ago, the Music Pants, which were plaid and awesome and I wore them even though they made my ass look the size of fucking Kansas.

I didn't care though, I heard music in my head when I put on those pants. Oh how I loved having my own swingin' soundtrack as I walked around town in my wicked Music Pants.

I know. I'm a total loser.

Whatever.

-AP

* Last time it was one of my brothers-in-law. Public Drunkeness, and because he verbally abused the cop he spent the night in jail.

** Pasquale is a guy that the Chinchilla was friends with in high school, but of course in a small town everyone still knows everyone else. So his brothers like to update us on JUST HOW FAT this guy is getting, and can talk for extended periods of time about how his present fatness differs from his previous fatness.
We saw Pasquale at a wedding a few years ago. He was indeed very fat, and wore a short sleeved button shirt with a very ugly tie. He sweated profusely throughout the evening, and it wasn't because the reception venue was hot - BECAUSE IT WAS AN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL GYMNASIUM (sorry, had to get that out of my system) - it was because he was exceedingly fat. His girlfriend, and I am not kidding, was missing teeth.
I spent the majority of the evening drinking in the parking lot and using the disposable cameras provided on the tables to take pictures up my skirt.

*** We built this huge closet in our bedroom when we moved in, and it was surprisingly difficult because we found gas lines in the walls, and had to rewire, etc. In the middle of building the closet, the Chinchilla's dad - who had promised us that he would come down and teach us how to renovate the house and do the renovations with us - had a mental breakdown and started screaming and yelling and crying, and freaking out, eventually taking a hammer and bashing in the drywall we had just put up. He then packed up and left. Their relationship has never been the same and the closet is now known as the Closet of Pain.

2004-12-18T15:47:00.000-05:00

Pink leopard print rubber boots with stars on them. Life simply doesn'y get any better than this. Note The Snake staring off into the distance looking for the next place to barf.

If I could actually snarl, I'd be doing it.

2004-12-16T13:13:00.000-05:00

I skipped outta my class this afternoon because I COULDN'T TAKE IT ANYMORE.

The guy behind tried to hit on me. Among other things, he came over and told me that he was "in heating and air conditioning" and he had, and I quote, done some systems recently that would BLOW MY MIND!!! He actually said that the systems would blow my mind. One of those systems was for a basketball player, he added, and then sat back and waited for the accolades to roll in.

What the fuck am I supposed to say to that? What I really WANTED was to comment on his choice in women. He really should have chosen someone who perhaps had showered that day, who was not wearing the same makeup as the day before (a little extra foundation under the eyes and you're good to go!), and didn't have BAD FLOURESCENT STREAKS IN HER HAIR. Perhaps Dumb Blonde Girl, who sits next to Cute Guy With Dreads, could fit the bill. He probably sees she's out of his league, though. So he thought he'd go for the second tier...

The class is packed so there are no spare seats. The man beside me smells like cat food so bad. I mean, the smell is fairly mild, but it's so constant, and it builds, you know? It builds to the point where I am fairly sure I am going to barf if I don't bolt into the hallway for fresh air.

Speaking of cat food, barfing, and hallways, I'd like to take this opportunity to just send another message to The Snake:

Thanks Snake, for the pile of barf you left in the front hallway. It kind of balances out the two piles of shit you left on our bed last week. The downstairs floor was getting jealous of the upstairs floor, but you took care of that, didn't you? You truly are a blessing in our lives, you sweet little cat.

Ach. I think I will go. I feel a rage coming on, seriously, and I might as well use that energy to clean out the car. Maybe I'll pop into the office and do some scowling.

This computer isn't working right. I hate it.

Your chemically unbalanced friend,
Adrianne