Crazy-Johnny

Just saw my favourite local homeless guy again, Ciaran and I have taken to calling him Crazy Johnny, which is sort of a blanket-term for crazy men that we know from around our neighbourhood. Similarly, we call the homeless women Crazy Mary. Man, that sounds super mean. It's really not! It's said in more of an endearing way. I swear. Anyway, I love Crazy Johnny not necessarily because of what he says, but how he says things.

Today, yelling in the middle of the intersection:

"My forward progress is stopped by an invisible man!"


Awesome...and I would even say, poetic? Yes.

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McBabies

Ciaran and I went out to visit my brother and his wife out in St. Thomas. On our way out of the city, we stopped to pee at a Highway 401 McDonald's. What a creepy logo for the change-table, huh? Plus the soap in the bathroom said, "McDonald's Anti-Microbial Handwash". Did you know that McDonald's makes hand wash? It's a similar recipe to their special sauce...now made with 100% "real" soap!

In other news...we went to this great Mexican restaurant when we were visiting, but I kept laughing at the menu because one of the items was "Fish Tacos". Anyway, they had excellent mojitos at this restaurant, which was kind of funny because it's hard to get a good mojito in the city and we find one out in tiny St. Thomas, Ontario. And yes, it is a tiny town. Doubt its ruralness? A photo I took of a man in the local grocery store.

Any "If you can't run with the big dogs..." tee-shirts make me cringe. Almost as much as No Fear bumper stickers. Or those bumper stickers that show Calvin (from Calvin and Hobbes) pissing on a Ford logo. There were lots of those on cars at my high school. Side note: I used to read Calvin and Hobbes when I was really young and I thought his names was pronounced "Hobb-ees". Again, I was a bright child.

Later last night at my brother's place, Ciaran and Ann had gone to sleep and we were watching this show about people with super abilities, like this blind artist and this guy who didn't feel cold, and people with synesthesia, which are people who can see sounds as colour and taste sounds too. It was crazy shit! There was this one woman who could taste music, like certain notes would create certain tastes (bitter, sweet, etc.) on her tongue. Anyway, during the show she met another synesthesist who could also taste sounds, but he could taste words, not music. So they met and the guy was weird, like all over-eye-contact-y and he was TOTALLY hitting on her! He was all, "tell me your name so I can taste it", it was really creepy and my brother and I were killing ourselves laughing. Later in the program he told her she tasted like like chocolate. It was really gross.

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Eleanor Rigby

An old Beatles cartoon that further explains what the song Eleanor Rigby is about. What a strange and hilarious video.



My favourite part is when the mask of social injustice and unhappiness falls from her face and smashes on the ground.

Happy weekend everyone!

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My Cheetah Purse

Isn't this ridiculous? It's the window display for Holt Renfrew here in Toronto. It's soooooo beautiful! What with the graceful cheetah (is it a cheetah?) sipping from the fountain whilst covered in handbags made of his own matching fur pattern.

In other news...it must be said. MEN, when you are in the subway and standing in front of a sitting lady (crotch towards her), do NOT lean in towards her thus pushing your crotch towards her face. You need to be more aware of this men...or perhaps some of you are...

Oh....

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Turkish Delight: A History

My personal stash.

Turkish delight is one of my very favourite candies (and I'm a candy girl, do what you will with that information). However, many people doubt its delicious-ness. Fools! It's so gooey and sugary and diabetes-enticing, what's not to like? Plus, um, named after a country? C'mon! All we've got in terms of a confectonary cultural comparison are Beaver Tails. (Side note: perhaps we should rename poutine "Canadian delight"?)

Here are some facts about Turkish delight (thanks Wikipedia!):

- not to be confused with Turkish Taffy (originally sold in stores in large sheets which were broken off with hammers at the counter and sold by weight).

- It used to be called "lumps of delight" (again, do what you will with that information).

- Turkish Delight is the addictive confection to which Edmund succumbs to in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.

- Real Turkish Delight is not to be confused with the chocolate bar Big Turk — they are nothing alike.

Informative, no?

In other news...I was marking a students paper tonight, an ESL student, not that I'm trying to be racist, it's just that, well, they're often make the most challenging papers to mark. Anyway, she wrote this little essay about working for LA Weight Loss and said that the companies "brand advisor was Whoopi Goldbery". At first I was like, "what's a brand advisor?" and then I relized she meant "brand ambassador" and then I was like, "who is Whoopi Goldbery?" and realized that she meant Whoopi GoldBERG. There was that and the other part of the piece where she refers to someone's grandma as "the old lady who raised her in home".

In other news...I just NOW watched Jon Stewart's interview with Jim Cramer, which I had recorded earlier in the week. Freeeeking brilliant. It's here in a condensed version if you please.

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Washing the Blue Ball

My mom visited today. She brought my exercise ball, which has been at their place for way too long. Anyway, it needed a wash, and it looked so silly in the bathtub, I thought I'd take a photo. It was weird soaping that sucker up and washing it down. Not easy by any means. Anyway, I've already decided that when Ciaran gets back from his business trip I'm going to sneak it into the tub late at night so that when he goes to shower the next day, in a sleepy haze, he'll pull back the curtain and see a ridiculous blue ball in the tub.

It's just one example of what I do to keep things spicy in our relationship.

In other news...I was just outside, walking in the beautiful mild rain, and I saw one of my favourite local homeless guys.

Homeless guy: I want to have a bicycle built for four so I don't have to do any work.
Me: That's a good idea!
Homeless guy: Yep. Yep. Yep. (shuffling away)

How great a statement is that!? So bizarre and brilliant at the same time.

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"Honey"

Just a quick note: If you actually read the ingredients in things (like I do), you'd be interested to know that Knott's Berry Farm Honey contains "grade A honey and a blend of U.S. and Mexican honey", that latter of which one can only assume is anything but "grade A".

What makes honey less than grade A? Is it produced by crack-addicted bees or is it that the chemicals outweigh the actual honey nectar, therefore diluting its grade A-ness? And if it isn't grade A honey, what grade is it? Because there's a big difference between B and F.

HA! Grade B honey. Get it?

Shoddy food products. Hi-larity.

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Signs

God I hope this isn't true...and yet, sometimes I wonder. You don't have to pass an IQ test to live somewhere after all. Imagine if you DID! Wait, wasn't there a TV show about people who lived in a town but only if they were like, Mensa smart? Does anyone know what I'm talking about or am I losing my mind?

In other news...I just got back from the gym and I was on the treadmill and the woman on the treadmill beside me was walking really weird, sort of with a limp, but she didn't actually HAVE a limp, she was just walking weird, which would have been fine but it made this really weird thud sound on every second step on the machine because she was all uneven and shit in her stride. I did my very best not to be annoyed by it. I really did. But she was just sort of generally annoying. She smelled horrible and was shaped like an Easter egg. She had a tee-shirt that said "CHILLIN' IN JAMAICA" on the front of it and it was like, seven sizes too big for her and she kept using it as a towel for her forehead, thus exposing her soft white belly when she did. And she kept laughing at what she was watching on TV, which was Restaurant Makeover. Not a particularly funny show. Now, these things individually in a person are easy enough to forgive, but when they are grouped together and when you're already under the strain of being on a treadmill yourself, a person's quirks become super annoying. So there I was, beside this woman flashing me her big white tummy, laughing at times hysterically to a stupid show, walking all wonky like and thump-thump-thumping along and then I remembered the photo (above) that I took in the subway the other day.

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Ottbama

WOW! I just returned from my very favourite city, Ottawa, which is apparently still, uh, celebrating (read: exploiting) Obama's recent visit. The Obama cookies (above) just don't make sense. They're just cookies that say Canada on them. Did Obama buy some of these? Is this why? I don't know. But I made Ciaran pose beside the picture, much to his displeasure. Creepier still was the cardboard cut-out of Obama holding a Canada keychain. And the Jones Soda Orange "You Glad For Change" Cola. Weird, right? Still the trip to Ottawa was fantastic. It made me want to move there.

In other news...I just finished reading Ken Follet's World Without End, the sequel to The Pillars of the Earth. Medieval hangings! Corrupt gay monks! The plague! Secrets! Lies! And oh so much raping and pillaging. So enjoyable. However while I was reading it I was annoyed by how many times Follet uses the term "tucking in" or "tucked in" in reference to someone starting to eat. I HATE this term in reference to eating. And it's really really popular recently, popping up in a lot of fiction. Whatever happened to "digging in" or just plain "eating"? How does one tuck into something? I don't know. I just imagine someone eating with their hands in a sort of gross manner when I read it. Or tucking in their food as they would an innocent child about to go to sleep....ew.

As always, I welcome your criticisms and comments. However, if they disagree with my opinions, I should tell you know how wrong you are.

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Smoke Hole

These fancy new garbage cans have been showing up in my neighbourhood, and I can't help but wonder how long it will take until they are covered in graffiti, vomit, gum and dog urine. The one great thing about these new trash cans is the bar that you can step on that opens the flaps, so you no longer have to touch the graffiti/vomit/gum/dog urine covered flaps. Fantastically simple! But then of course the cynic in me says how long until the bar is broken by some jacked-up homeless man? Because I don't think the city will make fixing the bar a priority. And they've already covered their asses, in a way, in case the bars do get broken. Not sure if you can read the little black and white sign across the top? It says, "PUSH PEDAL OR FLAPS TO OPEN." Meaning that if something might happen to the pedal (which it will), you can always just push the flaps. Back to square one. I don't even want to know how much the fucking cans cost....

The other crazy thing about these cans are they have smoke holes....which would be really awesome if smokers actually gave a shit where their cigarette stubs ended up (p.s. the answer to that question is a two-parter: on the ground and/or in the belly of a pigeon).


In other news... a short bit of self-promotion. I sent a photo of my final outline for my book to this weird website in the states called Hit and Run Magazine. They posted it just the other day, so if you want to take a look at the kind of crazy CRAZY notes you make when you write a book, check it out here.

In other news... I was in No Frills the other day and there was a woman in front of me buying a giant bag of peanuts...which I took a picture of, on the sly. Why did she need so many peanuts? I had to wonder. Then for some reason I imagined that maybe she had an elephant, but then realized that I was basing that information on a misinformed premise that elephants actually like to eat peanuts. Then I wondered, do elephants actually like to eat peanuts? And THEN I remembered someone telling me that elephants liked peanuts when I was a kid and I spent a long time wondering how they managed to get them out of the shells. Of course I never asked anyone this question, because I believe some part of me realized that it was stupid. And yet...here I am admitting it to you all now.

Anyway, for the record? The Center for Elephant Conservation says, "it is untrue that elephants love to eat peanuts."

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Nobody Give Them a Swiss Army Knife

His eyes say "I'm soft at heart" but his teeth! They do not lie. There is gum showing. It is almost spring and he is ready to play.

Raccoons. Walking garbage bags. That is to say, there is literally a lot of junk in their trunk. HUGE beasts of the urban wilderness. Less cautionary then their stinky brother the skunk, more obvious than the common rat. Lover of banana peels, creature of the night.

Ugh.

It's strange because raccoons up north? They don't bother me. Except for that time Ciaran hit one with our car on the way to the cottage and I literally heard its neck crack into a million pieces. That kinda bothered me. Because up north you don't see a raccoon until it's too late. That is to say they are more modest in the north country. But city raccoons? They are arrogant fuckers.

Last summer we were gone for a couple of days and one got into our green garbage outside. They ate random stuff and left other gross bits around. But gross of all? They ate TISSUES. Which means they ate my snot. Now that...that's just a problem. Anyway, we had to pick up all the scattered remains of green garbage, which is kind of unpredictable, because you don't know just how bad something smells until you actually pick it up AND subsequently you don't know if you pick something up whether or not it will structurally stay together long enough for you to get it into the bag without collapsing into the fourth and final stage of decomposition.

Fucking raccoons. They're hooligans! Last night I heard a distinct noise near the back door of our apartment. I was reading and I gasped and Ciaran sat straight up (the poor man was asleep) and I thought someone was trying to break into our place. We listened. There was no sound. We went through the apartment. We saw nothing.

This morning Ciaran called me and told me the garbage cans were all askew in the back. But we're smart. We now bungee the green garbage because the little shits know how to get into the lock on the green garbage (not that it's complex or anything). But a bungee! It's brilliant. It must infuriate them. Their little claws unable to figure out the sheer simplicity of elasticity. It gives me great joy to think of their plight.

But I shouldn't get too cocky. No. For they are always watching.

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Rang-er-boom

A strange weekend indeed.

We went out on Friday night and got sort of drunk, which might not be strange for some people, but I don't really drink that much anymore, and this was the first time I was "drunk" in a long time.

Anyway, we took the subway (aka. vomit comet) home, but strangely? I felt fine. However, there were these two really strange guys on the train. I don't mean strange in the usual big-city strange (a guy pissing himself in the corner while drinking a mickey of gin), these guys were just....bizarre. They both wore sunglasses (it was almost 2 am) had stark white skin and dark hair. Neither had any expression on their face. Both were listening to music on headphones, even though they were together, and both wore dark long coats. The only difference between them was that one of them had a briefcase and the other was sporting a black beret. It was a sort of Rushmore meets the Matrix meets a Nazi kind of look. But although they looked sort of strange, they acted even stranger (thus calling attention to how they looked even more). They kept moving around the train, switching seats, standing up, never saying a word to each other. It was as though it was rehearsed. I was fully expecting the briefcase to explode at any second.

But instead one of the guys spontaneously started dancing and sort of let out a whoop sound and the other guy (still not smiling) just bobbed his head in approval.

It was one of the strangest things I've ever seen on the TTC, and that's saying a lot. And because I was drunk, I decided I was invisible and did my best to take a discreet photo of them on my iPhone. (Although Ciaran's knee is the most prominent thing in the shot).

The next morning we were hurting, and really? We should have known better—at 28 and 30 years old— than to drink shots and wine/beer all in the same night. It felt like my brain was trying to escape out of my eyebrows.

So, we grabbed a greasy breakfast and decided to head to the park to try out Ciaran's boomerangs that he brought back from Australia.

It was a brilliantly sunny day, still cold, but I had a tea-to-go and my sunglasses so I wasn't worried....that is until we got to the partially defrosted field. The grassy areas were absolutely COVERED in goose shit, something I should have anticipated (as a good Canadian should). Fucking geese! They are seriously gross. They shit as often as American's eat fast food. For those who aren't familiar with goose shit, it sort of looks like little pieces of stick when you first see it, but then you realize, "WOW! These twigs are EVERYWHERE!!" and sort of figure it out that they're not twigs (especially in a field where there are no trees around).

I wore my running shoes, thinking it was a great day to transition out of my boots, so I was walking through this field doing my best to avoid the goose shit that was everywhere and I wanted to give up, but Ciaran was so excited about trying his boomerangs...so I stuck it out.

We found a spot and Ciaran decided to try a first throw with the fancier of the two boomerangs. He angled his body and tossed it, and it flew through the air and even started to curve back towards us but suddenly lost momentum and began to tumble towards the earth....fast. It hit the (still frozen) field with a CRAAACCK sound and we saw it break into three pieces. Ciaran went over to get it and sure enough, brought it back in three pieces.

Me: Maybe the ground's too hard...
Ciaran: Maybe...but still!
Me: Yeah....that sucks.
He decided, despite my advice, to try the other boomerang. It broke too. He was pissed.

Me: Don't worry, we'll get you a Nerf one. It's impossible to break Nerf.
Ciaran: I wanted a real one.
Me: (sighing) I know...

I felt really bad for him, but was also secretly relieved that I wouldn't have to stand in the goose shit field anymore.

Instead we got on the subway and walked around downtown. We stopped in a MEC, I think because both of us wanted to feel like we were doing something active without actually doing something active.

At MEC the climbing wall was open and we watched really little kids climbing and swinging. It was hilarious. Most of them were like fearless monkeys, but the odd kid was just plain scared.

I also saw this really cool mural in MEC made of different colours of rope, but it had a really strangely worded sign underneath it.



Hasten its demise? Wow.

Sunday was quiet. We went to the gym and cleaned the house and then watched back to back to back episodes of Dexter....which I find very scary and yet continue to watch even though it fucks with my sleep.

Last night I was dreaming of trains. I was the conductor, and all I wanted to do was drive the friggin' train but this other conductor with a really annoying laugh kept beating me to the conductor seat.

This morning when I woke up I looked up the meaning of trains on an online dream dictionary. Afterall, I had absolutly no reason to be dreaming about trains. I hadn't been on a train recently, I hadn't watched a TV show or movie with a train in it, or read a book with a train in it. No trains in my waking life. So I was intrigued. One dream dictionary said, "To dream that you are on a train, symbolizes your life's journey. It suggests that you are on the right track in life and headed in the right direction. Alternatively, you have a tendency to worry needlessly over a situation that will prove to work out in the end. To dream that you are the engineer, signifies that you are in complete control of a particular situation in your waking life."

Good to know.

This morning I also realized that they're doing construction on my street and the water will be shut off for four hours. When did I figure this out? When I stripped down and tried to take a shower. I called my landlord, did she know anything about this? No. But there was a lot of construction noise coming from across the street. So I got on my coat, fully expecting a yelling match between myself and some construction worker, but when I went outside I saw a single piece of paper in my mailbox (even though it was empty the night before) informing me that the water would be off for four hours between 9:30 and 1:30.

WOW! Thanks for letting me know! You mean I should have had a shower at 8:30 when I woke up? Then I'd be nice and clean? WOW. I guess if I would have checked my mailbox the minute I woke up I would have realized that. SILLY . ME.

I was so pissed, so I tried to call the water company. Of course I was put on hold. Forever.

I have this theory, which I think some of you will agree with. You see, as I was on hold there was music playing, but the music was incredibly static-y, like a radio that's not quite in tune. I have noticed this while waiting to speak with someone/some company over the phone before. So why, we should ask, would they have such poor quality music? Because they WANT us to hang up. The static is enough to drive a person into giving up, and that's what they ultimately want. That and every five seconds a voice came on and said, "Please stay on the line, an agent will be with you shortly."

So. Here's what it was like....

Music: Daniel is traveling [static] tonight on [static] plane
I can see the red [static] Spain
[static] see Daniel waving [static]
God it looks like Daniel, [static] my eyes

[static]pretty though I've never [static]

Woman's voice: Please stay on the line, an agent will be with you shortly.

Music: Oh and [static] he's been there enough
Lord I miss Daniel, [static] so much

Daniel my brother you are older than me
Do you still feel [static] that won't heal
Your eyes have died but you see more than I

Woman's voice: Please stay on the line, an agent will be with you shortly.

Music: Daniel is traveling tonight [static]


Eventually I couldn't take it anymore. I hung up. You've won this round, Toronto Water. But next time I'll be better prepared.

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