I went for a run the day before yesterday and there was puke on the track. Now THAT is exercise.
And at the grocery store I was buying a box of banana bread mix and the cashier told me about a woman who had come looking desperately for boxes of the stuff because she had enchanted all the tenants of her apartment building with the smell while neglecting to tell them she got it out of a box. There's some essential truth here about complicated webs of lies but I can't quite figure it out.
Tuesday, June 13, 2006
Saturday, June 10, 2006
A Wedding Story
When I lived in Gage Towers at UBC (which, if you mention to people and slur your words together, makes people think you are saying you got engaged) my 5 roommates all liked to watch a show on the Life Network called Wedding Story.
Every afternoon when I would come home to make my lunch, they'd all be hunkered down around our tiny TV as the theme music swelled and the title "A Wedding Story" was etched in white cursive over a female hand opening a giant picture album upholstered in white satin and lace. The half-hour shows were ultimately all the same. A mildly unattractive couple gets suited up in wedding clothes that look stiff and awful, the bride gets a stiff and awful hairdo and some stiff and awful makeup, there's a ceremony in which the bride and/or groom cry tears of snotty joy and the music swells again and the female hand comes back and closes the satiny album. Ahhh, another two people safetly bound in wedlock. Then there'd be another episode right after. My roommates watched this show pretty much every day. I started eating my lunch in my room.
That's where I got the idea that weddings are dumb and kind of horrific.
I went to my friend Katie's wedding a couple of weeks ago and it was neither dumb nor horrific. It was, in fact, quite lovely, and low key, full of things that just kind of happened, lovely things, and everyone looking around and smiling at each other.
I haven't really gone to a good friend's wedding before, so it was an odd feeling. The week before I helped Katie make some little paper decoration things with ribbon and it could have been 1995 and high school as we drank weird tea and CBC Two played and we sat at the kitchen table making stuff. But no, it is 2006 and we both have much better haircuts and a lot more post-graduate education.
Katie got married on Galliano Island, which is also the name of a liquoer that goes in The World's Best Drink: the Harvey Wallbanger. She had done a med school practicum there and so could be somewhat considered an islander. Galliano is one of the Gulf Islands, a grouping of small pieces of land in the Georgia Strait between the mainland of British Columbia and Vancouver Island. They are small spots of unspeakable paradise.
I went over on Friday with her dad on BC Ferries, feeling so grateful, as I always do, that I know longer work for that company. It was pouring rain and beautiful. Her mom and lots of family friends were already out at the resort, set up in the little cabins among small lakes and sheep. I helped tie up wedding favours in little cloth bags as Katie and Brendan cooked their wedding cake. Then I had a nap. It was very quiet and there were big juicy ants inside the cabins.
When I woke up I was doozy and all Katie's female friends were arriving for the wedding eve Girls' Night (which is such a sophomoric name for it, but there it is. Did we braid each other's hair and hang around in our underwear? Not telling.) It is a pleasant feeling when your friend has such good taste in friends that you like all of her friends almost immediately, especially if all of you are trying to use a tiny kitchen to reheat food. I can't help liking people who can cooperate in a small kitchen. There were some delightfully embarrassing stories of Katie told (Katie has the good fortune to be both a very serious and determined person and a very silly person at the same time. It makes for great stories.)
I bunked with Katie downstairs and said goodnight to Dr. Katie Longworth, who only the day before had been just Katie Longworth and the next day would turn into Dr. Katie McAleer.
Then I woke up about 5 a.m. and felt peculiar. Then I went to the bathroom and went totally deaf for a minute. Then I barfed a lot. Then I thought about how really cold the floor tiles where and how nice they felt on my forehead. Then Dr. Katie knocked on the door with a mug of water and my toothbrush and diagnosed me with classic food poisoning. Later there was more barfing with rests in between. When I woke up at 10 Katie was in the front room getting her hair done by a fabulous hairdresser who was threatening to give her 80s bangs. I sacked up, had a shower, ate three crackers and drank some tea, looked out the window at the rain and was ready to hike down the trail with the rest of female footsoldiers of wedding attendance at 11.
Nothing like a walk in a wet forest for a quivering stomach. Two people had the wedding dress in a plastic garment bag that they carried over their heads through the wet bushes on the trail. We had sandwiches and I guess someone must have been carrying the tents. We were all wearing raincoats and muddy boots. We found a firebelly newt on the trail and held it for a while. It got clearer and clearer as we walked. When we got the ocean it was mildly sunny. Some people went to go set up the tents for Katie and Brendan to change in. Some of the other guests started coming down the trail. People sat on logs on the beach and looked at the ocean. Kids ran around.
When it was time we went out on the to point of land and bunched up in a ring and made sure no one stepped in the sinkhole and then Katie came walking up in her wedding dress with her parents and sister and it is a shock to see someone who used to wear red waffleknit one-piece long underwear with jeanshorts with paint on them to school, someone who you have aided and abetted in dying one half of the hair on their head bright red and the other half bright blue, only to shave it all off for them at the end of the summer, someone who used to get another ear piercing for every December we spent in Victoria walk up in a totally pretty dress looking so wonderfully shining and pretty it's like she finally looks like herself.
And the sun came out and lovely things were said and people cried and we all sang a song and then they were married and the photographer was getting pictures of them and everyone stood around looking at the ocean and enjoying the sunshine. Later people started walking back. I was supposed to take the one tent on the beach down with a couple people and we did but then we got distracted by the rock formations that looked like humpback whales and we started finding crabs and urchins in the tidal pools and Sarah slipped and got one boot all wet.
That night during dinner many of the relatives, including those from Ireland stood up and spoke. There was a little man named Patrick O'Shea who looked like a garden gnome taking polaroids of everyone. "There we go," he'd say, getting a nice-looking young couple to sit down on a bench. "This is for Play-boy". There was a triple rainbow during dessert.
After dinner no one wanted to dance, which was deeply disappointing, because why else do you go to weddings but to dance? I had five noble comrades in this belief and we danced as everyone wandered back to their cabins at 11:30. We had a wine bottle each to sustain us, and periodic visits from the Huskiest Huskey in the World, who waddled bashfully in and out of the room through the night. A number of polaroid pictures can prove this. At 2:30 two Champions of the Party wandered down the trail to the ocean (in their dresses!) to go swimming in the phosphorescence.
The next day dawned painful, but if you've never ridden a ferry hungover then you can't rightly call yourself a westcoaster. Riding home in the backseat of someone else's car with the window down and the radio up and dirty feet under my socks, I decided to recind my earlier prejudice and decree that weddings could steer safely around the treacherous coasts of horror and dumbness and actually end up being pretty darn genuine.
Every afternoon when I would come home to make my lunch, they'd all be hunkered down around our tiny TV as the theme music swelled and the title "A Wedding Story" was etched in white cursive over a female hand opening a giant picture album upholstered in white satin and lace. The half-hour shows were ultimately all the same. A mildly unattractive couple gets suited up in wedding clothes that look stiff and awful, the bride gets a stiff and awful hairdo and some stiff and awful makeup, there's a ceremony in which the bride and/or groom cry tears of snotty joy and the music swells again and the female hand comes back and closes the satiny album. Ahhh, another two people safetly bound in wedlock. Then there'd be another episode right after. My roommates watched this show pretty much every day. I started eating my lunch in my room.
That's where I got the idea that weddings are dumb and kind of horrific.
I went to my friend Katie's wedding a couple of weeks ago and it was neither dumb nor horrific. It was, in fact, quite lovely, and low key, full of things that just kind of happened, lovely things, and everyone looking around and smiling at each other.
I haven't really gone to a good friend's wedding before, so it was an odd feeling. The week before I helped Katie make some little paper decoration things with ribbon and it could have been 1995 and high school as we drank weird tea and CBC Two played and we sat at the kitchen table making stuff. But no, it is 2006 and we both have much better haircuts and a lot more post-graduate education.
Katie got married on Galliano Island, which is also the name of a liquoer that goes in The World's Best Drink: the Harvey Wallbanger. She had done a med school practicum there and so could be somewhat considered an islander. Galliano is one of the Gulf Islands, a grouping of small pieces of land in the Georgia Strait between the mainland of British Columbia and Vancouver Island. They are small spots of unspeakable paradise.
I went over on Friday with her dad on BC Ferries, feeling so grateful, as I always do, that I know longer work for that company. It was pouring rain and beautiful. Her mom and lots of family friends were already out at the resort, set up in the little cabins among small lakes and sheep. I helped tie up wedding favours in little cloth bags as Katie and Brendan cooked their wedding cake. Then I had a nap. It was very quiet and there were big juicy ants inside the cabins.
When I woke up I was doozy and all Katie's female friends were arriving for the wedding eve Girls' Night (which is such a sophomoric name for it, but there it is. Did we braid each other's hair and hang around in our underwear? Not telling.) It is a pleasant feeling when your friend has such good taste in friends that you like all of her friends almost immediately, especially if all of you are trying to use a tiny kitchen to reheat food. I can't help liking people who can cooperate in a small kitchen. There were some delightfully embarrassing stories of Katie told (Katie has the good fortune to be both a very serious and determined person and a very silly person at the same time. It makes for great stories.)
I bunked with Katie downstairs and said goodnight to Dr. Katie Longworth, who only the day before had been just Katie Longworth and the next day would turn into Dr. Katie McAleer.
Then I woke up about 5 a.m. and felt peculiar. Then I went to the bathroom and went totally deaf for a minute. Then I barfed a lot. Then I thought about how really cold the floor tiles where and how nice they felt on my forehead. Then Dr. Katie knocked on the door with a mug of water and my toothbrush and diagnosed me with classic food poisoning. Later there was more barfing with rests in between. When I woke up at 10 Katie was in the front room getting her hair done by a fabulous hairdresser who was threatening to give her 80s bangs. I sacked up, had a shower, ate three crackers and drank some tea, looked out the window at the rain and was ready to hike down the trail with the rest of female footsoldiers of wedding attendance at 11.
Nothing like a walk in a wet forest for a quivering stomach. Two people had the wedding dress in a plastic garment bag that they carried over their heads through the wet bushes on the trail. We had sandwiches and I guess someone must have been carrying the tents. We were all wearing raincoats and muddy boots. We found a firebelly newt on the trail and held it for a while. It got clearer and clearer as we walked. When we got the ocean it was mildly sunny. Some people went to go set up the tents for Katie and Brendan to change in. Some of the other guests started coming down the trail. People sat on logs on the beach and looked at the ocean. Kids ran around.
When it was time we went out on the to point of land and bunched up in a ring and made sure no one stepped in the sinkhole and then Katie came walking up in her wedding dress with her parents and sister and it is a shock to see someone who used to wear red waffleknit one-piece long underwear with jeanshorts with paint on them to school, someone who you have aided and abetted in dying one half of the hair on their head bright red and the other half bright blue, only to shave it all off for them at the end of the summer, someone who used to get another ear piercing for every December we spent in Victoria walk up in a totally pretty dress looking so wonderfully shining and pretty it's like she finally looks like herself.
And the sun came out and lovely things were said and people cried and we all sang a song and then they were married and the photographer was getting pictures of them and everyone stood around looking at the ocean and enjoying the sunshine. Later people started walking back. I was supposed to take the one tent on the beach down with a couple people and we did but then we got distracted by the rock formations that looked like humpback whales and we started finding crabs and urchins in the tidal pools and Sarah slipped and got one boot all wet.
That night during dinner many of the relatives, including those from Ireland stood up and spoke. There was a little man named Patrick O'Shea who looked like a garden gnome taking polaroids of everyone. "There we go," he'd say, getting a nice-looking young couple to sit down on a bench. "This is for Play-boy". There was a triple rainbow during dessert.
After dinner no one wanted to dance, which was deeply disappointing, because why else do you go to weddings but to dance? I had five noble comrades in this belief and we danced as everyone wandered back to their cabins at 11:30. We had a wine bottle each to sustain us, and periodic visits from the Huskiest Huskey in the World, who waddled bashfully in and out of the room through the night. A number of polaroid pictures can prove this. At 2:30 two Champions of the Party wandered down the trail to the ocean (in their dresses!) to go swimming in the phosphorescence.
The next day dawned painful, but if you've never ridden a ferry hungover then you can't rightly call yourself a westcoaster. Riding home in the backseat of someone else's car with the window down and the radio up and dirty feet under my socks, I decided to recind my earlier prejudice and decree that weddings could steer safely around the treacherous coasts of horror and dumbness and actually end up being pretty darn genuine.
Sunday, June 04, 2006
By Air
Today's flight from Vancouver to LA was a great parable of how fucked up flying has gotten now that the airline industry keeps, uh, crashing. I flew up on Alaska, but then was supposed to be on United to come back down, but then that got shifted to Air Canada, and there was a moment at check-in where the woman was visibly getting prepped to tell me that I didn't have a booking when whoops! there it is! Gate-switching for departure, delay, and even gate shifting for arrival, in which we taxi up to the gate and then get informed (in English and French- ah how I miss Canada) that we're going to toodle on over to another gate after all.
And the man sitting behind me on the flight was troubled by my seatback being so waaaaay far back, but instead of just asking me to move it forward he made guttural sounds of frustration and bumped against the seat back a lot and even briefly put his open laptop on the top of the seatback. Awesome. Then he complained to the flight attendant. Then I punched him in the face.
When they separate girls and boys for PE in middle school the boys should have to do a unit called "Your Feelings: You Can Actually Talk About Them!". Sorry. Just saying.
No, actually, sleepiness seemed to couch all of travel hecticness in a soft bubble of dozy fleece, perhaps something akin to what post-partum might feel like (as described by my friend's wife)(who has a baby)(and is younger than me).
After Vancouver in May, which is, uh, heaven? (even the rain is like Miltonic dew) I wasn't really looking forward to LA heat and dirt. Actually, I really wasn't looking forward to it. I was trying not to think about it. But then, today, something about the cracked sidewalk as I walked to the apartment seemed very much exactly what I know and also where I want to be.
(Also, to be truthful, sometimes the Vancouver May rain is more like Miltonic hellfire but wet, and it seeps up through the cracks in your shoes)
And the man sitting behind me on the flight was troubled by my seatback being so waaaaay far back, but instead of just asking me to move it forward he made guttural sounds of frustration and bumped against the seat back a lot and even briefly put his open laptop on the top of the seatback. Awesome. Then he complained to the flight attendant. Then I punched him in the face.
When they separate girls and boys for PE in middle school the boys should have to do a unit called "Your Feelings: You Can Actually Talk About Them!". Sorry. Just saying.
No, actually, sleepiness seemed to couch all of travel hecticness in a soft bubble of dozy fleece, perhaps something akin to what post-partum might feel like (as described by my friend's wife)(who has a baby)(and is younger than me).
After Vancouver in May, which is, uh, heaven? (even the rain is like Miltonic dew) I wasn't really looking forward to LA heat and dirt. Actually, I really wasn't looking forward to it. I was trying not to think about it. But then, today, something about the cracked sidewalk as I walked to the apartment seemed very much exactly what I know and also where I want to be.
(Also, to be truthful, sometimes the Vancouver May rain is more like Miltonic hellfire but wet, and it seeps up through the cracks in your shoes)
Wednesday, May 24, 2006
A Doff of the Cap to the Cap'n of the Jack-A-Roe
So the other day I'm with my dad looking for small brass hinges for my friends' wedding present that he is building (and I am apprentice-sanding and staining) and we go to this shop, this fantastic shop, it's called Martin Marine and it's so nautical I can't even believe it. First of all, it's down by the shipyards, and I'm not talking bout no fucking yachtclub pleasurejaunt mooring area, I mean the shipyards: giant rusted hulks of boats in eternal drydock under giant rusted shedroofs and rusted metal crap lying around everywhere and shipshape little tugs bobbing out beyond and that knarly old oily salt dock smell making your sealegs ache. Nautical.
There's a hole in the glass sign like someone once threw a rock through it. Inside, the shelves stretch back over a grey-painted floor that's in need of a swabbing. The floor is uneven and the shelves ride the crests and troughs under fluorescent lights. I walk back there and whoa lordy, if there ain't holes in the floor patched with giant, sagging swaths of plywood that bows as I walk across it. Come to think of it, these aren't so much holes as large rectangles, bigger than the front door. What's below? Kegs of grog, no doubt. Sacks of limes.
My dad and I look for hinges in complicated rows of little cardboard bins. There's a hinge or a hook or a screw taped to the outside of the each box that would seem to indicate its contents, but upon inspection the boxes contain something close to the taped sample, but not exactly what you are looking for. The propetier joins us in the back and when the phone rings all the way at the front of the store, he whips a handset from a hidden pocket and answers it.
I wander off and consider borrowing twenty bucks for the navvy blue cap with an English flag flowing across the front with the bold caption: "ENGLAND EXPECTS..."
My dad finds not only the right hinges but three of them and matching screws that sit delightfully flush with the hinge when shut. Clever dad.
We get back in the car; I salute as we pull away.
THEN, not a DAY LATER, I get an email from the desk of one Henry Lebo, father of one Sarah Holmes Lebo. It contained one thing and one thing only. The pictue below, with the note "for Robyn".
Dads. They just know.
There's a hole in the glass sign like someone once threw a rock through it. Inside, the shelves stretch back over a grey-painted floor that's in need of a swabbing. The floor is uneven and the shelves ride the crests and troughs under fluorescent lights. I walk back there and whoa lordy, if there ain't holes in the floor patched with giant, sagging swaths of plywood that bows as I walk across it. Come to think of it, these aren't so much holes as large rectangles, bigger than the front door. What's below? Kegs of grog, no doubt. Sacks of limes.
My dad and I look for hinges in complicated rows of little cardboard bins. There's a hinge or a hook or a screw taped to the outside of the each box that would seem to indicate its contents, but upon inspection the boxes contain something close to the taped sample, but not exactly what you are looking for. The propetier joins us in the back and when the phone rings all the way at the front of the store, he whips a handset from a hidden pocket and answers it.
I wander off and consider borrowing twenty bucks for the navvy blue cap with an English flag flowing across the front with the bold caption: "ENGLAND EXPECTS..."
My dad finds not only the right hinges but three of them and matching screws that sit delightfully flush with the hinge when shut. Clever dad.
We get back in the car; I salute as we pull away.
THEN, not a DAY LATER, I get an email from the desk of one Henry Lebo, father of one Sarah Holmes Lebo. It contained one thing and one thing only. The pictue below, with the note "for Robyn".
Dads. They just know.
Thursday, May 11, 2006
O Transition
Aside from telling you all about my Tyler Durden-esque, start-a-fight-with-a-stranger episode in Starbucks, in which my well-honed understanding of how to spot an insane, beyond-logic customer and neutralize them with a single zinger brought me to a higher plane sheer joy (holyshittylerdurdenwastotallyright),
I will tell you that: the film I've been working on producing has kinda sorta folded, given that our Production Designer went crazy and quit and our director's car got totalled, All In One Day (which makes me think that maybe he should making a movie about that instead of about, uh, what the movie is actually about), so I'm packing it in and flying north to the green shores of my homeland.
Impromptu (about two weeks before I was supposed to go) and exciting.
Also, tonight my lovely new MacBook Pro has decided work quite well and connect to the internet, so I'm in the process of transfering my files from the old giant box of viruses onto this slim and smooth machine of wonders via Rajeev's ipod. Brillo. It takes 25 minutes to download something from my old PC and 2 minutes to upload it to the new computer.
Fare well, old PC. We had some good times. You got me through the final draft of my thesis, and I'll never forget you for that. Thanks Aniz for building that computer (and the one before that). I'm now a Mac person. Adieu! Adieu! Adieu!
I will tell you that: the film I've been working on producing has kinda sorta folded, given that our Production Designer went crazy and quit and our director's car got totalled, All In One Day (which makes me think that maybe he should making a movie about that instead of about, uh, what the movie is actually about), so I'm packing it in and flying north to the green shores of my homeland.
Impromptu (about two weeks before I was supposed to go) and exciting.
Also, tonight my lovely new MacBook Pro has decided work quite well and connect to the internet, so I'm in the process of transfering my files from the old giant box of viruses onto this slim and smooth machine of wonders via Rajeev's ipod. Brillo. It takes 25 minutes to download something from my old PC and 2 minutes to upload it to the new computer.
Fare well, old PC. We had some good times. You got me through the final draft of my thesis, and I'll never forget you for that. Thanks Aniz for building that computer (and the one before that). I'm now a Mac person. Adieu! Adieu! Adieu!
Thursday, May 04, 2006
007 Vocab Intensive
During my James Bond final exam last night, here is a list of words that students in the class put their hand up and asked, out loud in front of everyone, for the TA to define:
1) Paradoxical
2) Obsequious
3) Cad
To the SAT people: it's obviously not working.
1) Paradoxical
2) Obsequious
3) Cad
To the SAT people: it's obviously not working.
Monday, May 01, 2006
Toilets, Windows and Floors with Jan Wong
Jan Wong is a writer best known for her series of columns in The Globe and Mail called Lunch With Jan Wong. While these columns ran, they were justification for buying the weekend paper, and my roommates and I often read them aloud to each other and cackled. As it sounds, Lunch With Jan Wong involves Jan Wong having lunch with someone famous, and then writing about it. Writing about what they ordered, how they ate it, how much salt they put on their food, how they treated the server, basically all these things that we, or at least I, most want to know about people. And then she would ask them the most audacious questions. Seemingly with the intent to piss them off. Most people got brutally skewered by her combination of observation, juxtaposition of facts, and straight-up rudeness. The only people she liked were the genuinely sweet people (the guy involved in the Walkerton, Ontario E.coli thing) and the trashmasters (a matriach of a Canadian wrestling dynasty, a disgraced beauty queen).
You can read more about her here.
Lunch With Jan Wong ended because, presumably, no one would eat lunch with her ever again. I think part of the indignation of her interviewees has to do with her being female and asian and also a ballsy reporter. Wow! What an unexpected combination!
Anyway, Jan Wong has just completed a series in the Globe called Maid for a Month in which she spends a month living an approximation of the lifestyle of the single parent making minimum wage in Canada. It's some good reporting. Check it out.
I love her, even though she would totally tear me a new one if we ever had lunch.
You can read more about her here.
Lunch With Jan Wong ended because, presumably, no one would eat lunch with her ever again. I think part of the indignation of her interviewees has to do with her being female and asian and also a ballsy reporter. Wow! What an unexpected combination!
Anyway, Jan Wong has just completed a series in the Globe called Maid for a Month in which she spends a month living an approximation of the lifestyle of the single parent making minimum wage in Canada. It's some good reporting. Check it out.
I love her, even though she would totally tear me a new one if we ever had lunch.
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