MonkeyPants

Saturday Confessions

I was busy on Friday. E had some kind of stomach bug and was a delightful dehydrating mess. He’s on the mend now and I no longer have my ears cocked for gastrointestinal rumbles.

I hope everyone has had a relaxing holiday season. That’s my first confession: I’ve been under the radar, and it has been utter, utter bliss.

I haven’t bought Bo or Carol’s presents yet. They’re only getting here on New Year’s Eve, though.

Even though I have money worries, I did manage to buy myself two sweaters.

I will probably never read the book E’s parents got me for Christmas. I feel guilty about it, but not guilty enough to read it. That seems to be the case with a few of my gifts. No one actually knows what I like. I hope I know what they like.

E is convalescing on the couch, and I am dreaming of all the food I can’t eat in front of him. He gets toast for now.

How was the holiday for the rest of you?

Change is Scary.

So I’m sitting here watching Pleasantville and reflecting on the conversation I had with my aunt today. Strangely, these two situations have quite a lot in common.

Today’s conversation with my aunt went as every one of them has gone for approximately five years now. We exchange pleasantries, she tells me what to do, and proceeds to rail against how Vancouver/BC/Canada/the world is changing.

The way I see it, the world is getting smaller. There are more people and there’s only the same little blue-green planet to house us. This means that populations are growing. What my aunt doesn’t seem to understand is that Vancouver’s burgeoning population and changing ethnic makeup are not a sleight against her, personally.

She misses the nineteen fifties. Or she thinks she does. What she misses is the idealized little malt shoppe-and-whitewall tire pictures she sees in her brain. She’s forgotten the endemic racism in Vancouver in the 1950s against the Japanese and Chinese Canadians. She’s forgotten residential schools. She’s forgotten that there was a time, in this city, when you couldn’t even buy a pizza, because there were almost no Italians here! Her 1950’s dream is a flawed fragment.

In Pleasantville, after the kids all start turning colours and Jeff Daniels paints the sexy mural of Joan Allen, the bigwigs in town print up a list of ‘How To Get Along’ or some such stuff. Essentially, it’s a list of how the people who have turned colours have to conform to the pre-existing society of black-and-white-and greys.

Of course it doesn’t work, but that’s what my aunt wants for this city, this province, this country. She wants us freeze-framed into an idealized picture of the world, and that’s just not happening.

I do see her point. I don’t like some of the changes, such as housing prices, rising rents, homelessness, and gang violence. But I don’t think the solution is to legislate a stasis in the 1950s.

I’d miss the pizza.

Jesus Is On My Side!

Someone stuck signs all over local lampposts:

A big picture of Jesus looking all glowy and forgiving, and underneath, someone has written, “BUY LESS. LIVE MORE.”

I would like to kiss the person who put up those posters.

How Kevin Saved Christmas Eve.

When I got to The Fringe on Christmas Eve, there was a big problem. We had an extreme case of drunk Australians. They were fresh off the plane, jet lagged, and belligerent. But the girls were cute, so Tom, our zoo keeper for the evening, was being too lenient.

This situation was a difficult one to bear. We regulars wanted to hoist a glass and toast the absent, remember the year, and laugh, but we kept on being interrupted by a couple of the Aussies, brothers, who insisted on that kind of brawling/wrestling/ yowling at one another that signifies an excess of testosterone and alcohol.

These brothers then turned their attention to Kevin. He looks like a biker, except he’s not. Of course, our Aussie brothers only saw a bald guy with a lot of tattoos, and started calling him a lot of offensive names. They would not be distracted, like terriers after a rat. It was actually rather grotesque.

None of us had any roofies on us, and we were at a loss. We feared for Kevin’s sanity and the Aussies’ safety. But Kevin took the matter into his own hands.

He walked those belligerent brothers behind a building…and smoked them up with some of BC’s finest.

They were utterly incapacitated. Paralytic. Wasted. Nobody grows pot like BC does. I felt a surge of Provincial pride as I watched the Aussies twitch and mumble.

Christmas Eve went on as scheduled, and I even got a reprise in my role of Word’s Worst Cocktail Waitress. It was awesome.

Merry Christmas!

Even the last-last minute stuff is done. Well, except for the stuff I am deliberately letting slide until I can be bothered. And then when I came home, my composter was here!

In a moment, I’m going to the park next to us for candlelit carol singing. After that, the traditional drinks with friends.

Merry Christmas, one and all.

Holiday Mood Disorder Strikes Again!

Of course. It’s December. I’m weepy. At everything.

Jackie Chan! He always does the right thing! (cue tears)

My dad can now walk about a mile! (cue tears)

Emma’s poor little cat! It’s insane! (cue tears)

The house down the street! All lit up! With the kids playing in the yard! (cue tears)

Carol singing! At Tatlow Park! On Christmas Eve! Neighbourhood Togetherness! (cue tears)

If I were to sit down and watch any Christmas specials, I would probably dehydrate, I’d cry so hard at their maudlin messages. I’m watching my fluid levels as it is. It’s a dangerous time.

Friday Confessions.

It’s been a long time since I was so busy I’ve had to parcel my days into half-hour increments to get everything done, but this week was like that.

I got all my students’ boxes of goodies all wrapped up in the nick of time, and then promptly forgot to bring them to tutoring. I have a brain made of fog in the morning, I tell you.

I feel the need to bake…and bake…and bake. Seriously. I have ample goodies. But for some reason I think that more butter tarts will somehow make me feel less stressed. Why? I won’t eat them. We are not entertaining. I am not sending them to children in the Third World. So why do I need them?

My hair looks like it did in 1989: No discernible style, pulled back from my face by a clip on top of my head. I am in danger of becoming one of those women who look like they think they’re about twenty years younger than they are. But I don’t care enough to go get a haircut.

I am supposed to teach The Red Badge of Courage at work. But the class will last an hour and the book will take longer than that to read. I am seriously contemplating finding an online summary and winging it.

Oh, and I am a communist grinch when it comes to buying Christmas presents. Seriously. China might rethink its environmental policies if we all just stopped buying random plastic crap out of some pointless sense of obligation!

...And breathe. Anyone else feeling a little overwrought?

Seven Random Things

Via Stephanie at the SuperSecretVault (Arwen, please may I have a linking lesson? I probably shouldn’t even have internet access, I am so bad at remembering stuff like this), here’s a meme: Seven random things about me.

1) I have a bruise on my ribcage right now. I slipped while wearing socks and fell on the microwave. No alcohol was involved. It sort of looks like a sloppy hickey.

2) I talk to fishing boats when I cross the Burrard Street Bridge. I see who’s moored in False Creek and say hi. Sometimes I do it out loud by accident.

3) When I was a little girl, I wanted to be the whale feeder at the aquarium.

4) I don’t like the new, energy-efficient Christmas lights. They vibrate in my field of vision and seem aggressive and manic, like meth users made of light. Not festive.

5) I look good in hats. Every hat I’ve ever put on my head. This is not vanity. Once I stuck a colander on my head in a bid to prove my idiocy. It was nauseatingly cute.

6) Yesterday I joined a ‘Photo-A-Day’ group for 2008. I am naively optimistic that I’ll be able to manage that, and that I’ll figure out how to post photos here.

7) I love making people laugh. It lets me see who they really are.

I’m tagging no one. But if you want to, post your seven things.

Lost My Bus Pass

So, really, I got half a free bus pass from Translink for December.

It’s my own fault. I should have put it into the jacket pocket, but instead, I thought it would be OK in my back pocket. Poof, it’s gone.

Maybe I’ll be less of a lazy schlub now that I can’t just hop a bus whenever. Maybe.

News Flash: I Am Not For Sale.

So last night, Kat and I went down to the Yale to see her dad play. While that might seem lame as hell, her dad plays New Orleans style blues and Zydeco music, which overpowers the dad factor by about plus one million.

We danced our butts off and had a great time, but I did have a wakeup call. I was dancing with this one guy. He was fifty years old, and looked like money. We got to talking and I mentioned E. That brought everything to a grinding halt.

“You have a boyfriend?”

“Of course I have a boyfriend! Look at me!” Admittedly, I could have been less of an asshole at this point, but he looked so surprised it just kind of slipped out.

“Well, where is he?”

“He’s at home, He worked all day.”

And then the guy threw a strop and left angry.

There are so many reasons why this is wrong. First, grown men shouldn’t get into little pissy fits. But the fact that I had a boyfriend was what set him off? That pissed me off. Did he think he could buy me for the evening, that I was going to follow him home for the price of some wine? Unbelievable.

Also, why did he assume that because I was out dancing, I was single? Should I have been home darning E’s socks? That is some fucked up thinking. Because I was out in public unaccompanied, he considered me fair game.

And that’s what I was. Game. I was out at a bar, dancing. Therefore I would sleep with him if he figured out how to make that happen.

I’d like to think that this is an isolated incident with an isolated guy. But I know it’s not, and even on the brink of 2008, there are actually people who see me as a commodity, and believe that I shouldn’t be let into the filly pool because I should be Home With My Man, and not out there tempting guys into salacious thoughts.

I will keep fighting, but I grow weary.