Singing and scattering pamphlets all the way

This Saturday, M and I went and fulfilled our civic duty by voting in the New Westminster municipal election.

There is something about voting that just feels good.

For me, it’s a mixture of excitement, appreciation, pride, nerves, and just a pinch of je ne sais quoi – it’s a time to ponder the unknown, the possible, perhaps even the regrettable, but any way you slice it, it’s an opportunity for a fresh start.

I also can’t help but wonder what it would be like to be one of those names on that ballot.  I mull over what it would be like to put my job security on the line, nay into the hands of others, having to convince complete strangers that I would be the darn best individual to represent both them and their interests.

That seems pretty scary, pretty bold, pretty cocky and a HECK of a lot of work.

After we cast our ballots, we went for a long walk down to the quay, checking out the different artisanal shops that have opened up in the market.  For a mid-winter afternoon, the weather was just about as exquisite as it could get.

As we were walking, I got to thinking about all the different “things” I have wanted to be.  To put it mildly, there have been many.  Since, well, since I was aware that one day I was going to have to be “something,” so it would probably be a good idea to think about what it was I wanted.

Below is a list of just a few of the things “things” I have contemplated “being” during my relatively short time here on this great big ball of blue and green, formally known planet oiyth (in Bugs Bunny speak, if you will).

1. Age 4.  Veterinarian.  This didn’t last for very long.  I went to a Charlotte Diamond concert with my kindergarten class and Charlotte, that old battle-axe, asked kids in the audience to volunteer what they wanted to be when they grew up.  Being the total team player that I was, I raised my hand, ready to let everyone know just how committed I was to our fury little four-legged friends.  But when she called on me, I suddenly got super nervous and had a hard time choking out “veterinarian” so I just yelled out “vet” instead.  Well, what with the concert taking place in a tent that could accommodate upwards of 500 people, the acoustics were a little lacking.  C.D. misheard what I said and proceeded to make fun of me in front of the entire gosh darn group.

“A CAT!?” she laughed.  “Young lady!  You can’t be a cat when you grow up! AHAHAHAHA…” (And of course the entire tent well followed suit.)

Boy did that ever chap my ass.  I seriously wanted to jump up and yell “Hey Charlie!  NO SHIT I can’t be a cat!  What do you take me for?  Some kind of Bolshevik cretin!?  THANKS TIPS.” (Only, in you know – 4-year old speak.)

It was that moment right there that killed that aspiration.

I should have just said “Je suis un pizza” and called it a life.

2. Age 8.  Model/Singer.  I discovered my sister’s YM magazine.  All the girls in it were stunning and looked as though they were having the BEST. TIME. EVER.  I practiced signing songs from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat on my neighbors trampoline when they weren’t at home.  One day their teenage son snuck up on me and scared the ever living daylights out of me.  My mortification knew no bounds and I immediately burst into tears.  As he tried to calm me down, I couldn’t help but notice that he kind of looked like that guy in the “some people say I eat too many chocolate bars” acne cream commercial.

To this day that advertisement both makes me laugh and breaks my heart.

That incident on the trampoline, combined with my rapidly developing, all consuming love for sports made for a quick  end to my YM dreams.

I still know all the words to Go-Go-Go-Joseph though.

3. Age 14. Sports Medicine Doctor.  This dream had a long shelf life until the first time I sustained a serious injury playing badminton and I found out that bodies = disgusting.

NEXT!

4. Age 18. English Professor.  Growing up I wasn’t exposed to much literature outside of the classical English canon.  I loved all of Austen, Montgomery, Alcott and Bronte; read Dickens and Homer and Wilde and Elliot and Stoker and Shelley and Coleridge and, well, pick up any English lit. anthology and I’ve read it and loved it.  And not knowing anything else, I thought that I would enter university and continue along that path.

That was until halfway through first year when I picked up Dostoevsky’s “Devils” and had my mind blown so hard that, eight years later, I’m still picking up the pieces.

English professor?  No siree Bob.  I have every genre, time period and country to explore – if I tried to pick just one I would probably end up pulling a Raskolnikov, and I have no intention of introducing an Inspector Porfiry to the already packed group of kooky characters that populate my life.

5. Age 20+. Too many to count!  Or simply just: ?  The possibilities are endless!  Although bearing witness to just how amazing my kitty-cat’s life is makes me think this whole thing just might have come full circle.  I would be lying if I said I have never fantasized about switching places with her because, simply put, her life is ridiculously awesome.  Plus look how pretty she is:

I don’t know about singer, but she could definitely, most definitely be a model.

Go, go, go go!

This ain’t no orinoco flow

Hey Kids,

It’s time for another installment of the Friday Fry-up.  Today on the docket is this super weird ad from Evian:

What is it exactly that they are trying to tell me?  That drinking their water will make me younger?  That it will give me more energy?  That it will give me hair that looks as though I’m in front of an ever-present wind machine?

Or is it trying to tell me that drinking Evian will ensure that I lose the ability to talk and walk and leave me without control over my bowels and/or urinary tract?

Seriously, I’m calling shenanigans on this Benjamin Button crap.

How does this even make sense?  Especially due to the fact that they chose a model who is what – nineteen, maybe twenty years old?  Yeesh.  You know you are living life a little too fast and fancy free (aka no sleep and rampant drug use) if the year you graduate out of your “teens,” you are pining for the simpler days of yore, when you wore Babar onesies and cried all the time.  I really hope that this was not the message the campaign directors wanted to get across in this ad.

I doubt it – but then again, you never know.

I mean really, why not have a majorly old dude sporting a hot young piece of man flesh on his t-shirt?  That way we could move beyond the ever-present and hugely boring notion that aging as a woman IS SERIOUSLY THE SCARIEST THING IN THE ENTIRE WORLD EVEN SCARIER THAN ZOMIBES OMG GUYS GET ME SOME NIGHT TIME ANTI-WRINKLE CREAM STAT.  It would turn this conceit on its head, and make for a pretty interesting, funny, and aesthetically pleasing campaign.

Because seriously, if the ad is geared towards women (which I’m assuming it is – I don’t think there any many dudes out there who date women for their “inner baby” – and if there are, well, that’s a whole other can of worms I am not interested in opening) let’s give them something awesome.

Something different.

Is there no one out there that can come up with an idea that is thought-provoking, and most importantly, NEW?

As my mother used to ask, “AM I TALKING TO A BRICK WALL?”

Otherwise, it’s just boring, lazy and stupid.  Hey Evian, did you hear that?  Your water is Two and a Half Men – BOTTLED!!

P.S. Do babies even drink water!?  I don’t think they ingest much of anything besides breast milk or formula.

So sorry Evian – it’s a fail on all fronts.

…

On a completely different, totally awesome note: It snowed yesterday!

Now I no longer feel so silly about how quickly my excitement has been ramping up for the holiday season.  There is so much about this time of year that brings out the nostalgia big time.

Catch me at my desk today and you’ll probably hear me humming that age old tune:

“Oh the weather outside is weather…”

This swinging hot spot

Is it just me or is Wednesday the absolute worst day of the week?

Seriously.

I mean, Monday is a complete write off.  You know what you’re getting into when you wake up on a Monday – just getting through the day feels like some awe-inspiring accomplishment.  Tuesday is great because, well, it’s not Monday. Thursday is fab because it is the lead-in to Friday, and hell, Friday is the awesome appetizer to a wonderful and exciting entree called “The Weekend.”

But Wednesday?  Blah.  It’s uninspired.  It spreads itself so thin it’s practically a recommended serving size of peanut butter.  Even a Wednesday full of meetings doesn’t make the time go by.  Instead, the day still drags, and at the same time still gives me anxiety about all the stuff I have yet to get done.

Overall, a pretty bleak experience.  So, in order to combat the evil Wednesday, I have developed certain coping mechanisms to get me through the day: going for an hour long walk at lunch time if the weather is nice; trying on all the beautifulbut painfully expensive clothing at BCBG if the weather is crap; eating all the leftover baby shower cake; etc.

The most important step though, to surviving a Wednesday, is the way I start my morning.  In the ten minutes I have between getting off of the skytrain and turning my computer on in my office, I stop by the Second Cup coffee shop underneath Bentall 4, make small talk with the lovely baristas who work there, and order a small, non-fat, vanilla bean latte.

These drinks are lifesavers – I never used to drink coffee before I started my new job, but now that I am Ms. Tired McTiredmeister all the live-long day, I rely on this magical combination of espresso, steamed milk and vanilla extract to wake me the heck up in the a.m.

This morning I was flipping through the The Province (investigative journalism at its finest), waiting for my drink, when I came across a story about a young skunk named “Bubbles” who had recently undergone surgery at the Burnaby Wildlife Rescue Association because she had become ensnared in a bubble tea lid.

Well folks, reading this story, on a Wednesday, without having ingested my daily nectar-of-the-gods NEARLY DID ME IN.

I was enraged.

That poor baby skunk.  How scary that must have been for her.  How utterly helpless she must have felt to be trapped in something so foreign, so toxic and so destructive.

Seriously, I cannot stand people who don’t properly dispose of their crap.  I mean, how hard is it to carry that drink cup for what, five more minutes until you come across the correct receptacle for disposal?  YOU ARE KILLING BABY SKUNKS YOU HUMAN PARAQUAT.

People are so bloody spoiled, ignorant and complacent about these things.  And hearing about the plight of young Bubbles only destroys me even more.  I have so much respect and admiration for the people working for organizations such as Wildlife Rescue because I don’t think I could ever handle a job like that.  I think my heart would break over and over again and that I would either 1) go completely mad and turn into an incensed, insane wildlife protection vigilante or 2) run away to become a hermit who lived in the wilds of the Yukon before being eaten by my pet bears (and inevitably have a film made about my life narrated by Werner Herzog.)

When I was living in England two years ago, I was walking home from campus one night and the fellow in front of me stuffed his Subway garbage in one of the university’s hedges.  I grabbed the plastic bag out of the hedge and sped up my gait, hoping to catch up with him and publicly shame him.  He happened to see me retrieve the garbage, and noticing my enraged approach, quickly took of up the hill at what was pretty much a run.  Not to be outdone, I took off too, matching his pace.  When we reached the top, he paused for breath and I yelled out, “YOU CANNOT JUST STUFF YOUR GARBAGE IN A BUSH!”

Shocked that I had actually ended up saying something, he looked over at me and muttered with derision, “Bloody American.”  The he took off again.

I was so shocked that he would try to use my (perceived) nationality as a comeback, all I could think of for a reply was, “I AM CANADIAN!!!”

To anyone who witnessed this, I must have looked quite a sight – just blithely yelling out my nationality to an empty street, what with the hedge garbager having escaped into the night.

So let this serve as a warning: while I may not be at option 1 (see above) status yet, I have no problem outing those who don’t treat Mother Nature, and her lovely animal friends with respect.  TRUST.

…

On a more positive note, here are some of the lovely animal friends my husband and I met whilst in the U.K.:

This is Saffi, a rescue dog with a big smile and a bushy tail.  M and I met her whilst walking along one of the canals that connect Warwick with Leamington Spa.  The canal network throughout England is really something to behold.  You can walk all the way from Birmingham to London along these waterways.

This is the swan that stepped on M’s foot while nipping at his fingers because the bread wasn’t coming fast or furious enough.  Kensington Gardens was beautiful that day.  Its vast, but inviting green space was speckled by frost and snow; whispers of tourists blown to its far corners, drinking hot chocolate to stave off the cold.  M and I fed the swan until our sandwiches were gone; as hard as he tried, the taste of our fingers were just not to our web-footed friend’s liking.

These are three of the sheep friends I made on a day trip out to Baddesly Clinton, a medieval manor house in Warwickshire.  When I think about this day, all I can think about is how vibrantly beautiful it was.  I felt as though I was living inside of a prism.

                                                          …

Hold on to your butts

So a couple of weeks ago I wrote about an ad in the women’s change room of my gym – an ad that was giving me so much grief that every so often I felt as though I was going to have a panic attack on the treadmill.

A few days after I published that post, I finally reached my breaking point – the time for action was nigh.

In the parlance of our times: it was do or die.

I’m proud to say that instead of taking a sharpie and writing “HEY GROSSO! YOUR STRETCHMARKS MAKE YOU SUBHUMAN, SO GIVE UP AND JUST EAT THAT BURGER WE ALL KNOW YOU SO DESPERATELY WANT!” in an attempt to force them to take down the ad (due to my subversive measures) I decided to take the high road and speak with the young lady who works at the front desk.

In all honesty, I was actually pretty nervous as I approached the counter-cum-smoothie bar.  I knew that I wasn’t being unreasonable bringing up the ad, but I couldn’t quite shake the feeling that I was going to come off as unreasonable.

However the thing that I am most ashamed to admit, is that more than anything, I was afraid.  I was afraid that she was going to judge me as an overly sensitive and insecure about my body.

I was afraid that she would tell me that the ads themselves weren’t the problem – I was.

Which definitely made me pause and question whether or not these fears had any merit – not in so far as I actually believed that this young lady would resent me, or formulate conclusions on my self-esteems based on a  two-minute interaction, but rather if this fear of a perceived lack of confidence existed outside of this made-up scenario.

Simply put: did these ads make me insecure about my body?  Or do I feel insecure about my body whether or not these ads exist?

I don’t have a simple, clear-cut answer.  It’s something that I’ve given a great deal of thought to, and will continue to do so over the next little while.

I can tell you that my conversation with the girl at the front desk was short and extremely positive.  She seemed surprised that I was bringing up the ad, letting me know that she had never really given them much of a glance herself.  I don’t know if this is true or not, but she readily agreed that a more body/self-positive message would probably better fit the whole gym ethos.

Overall, it was a darn positive experience.

And the best part?  The next time I went in the ad had been changed!  Now I get to stare at this as I change into my gym strip:

E to the D is making the world a better place – one step at a time!

…

As an addendum to this post, can we all agree on the overall greatness that is Jurassic Park – both the book and film?

This evening my husband and I were waxing eloquent on the impact these two works had on us as young things in the early 90’s, and seriously, I think I’m going to find a used copy of the book so I may relive the memories.

But let’s just get one thing straight – no one is EVER going to survive 10,000 volts. Right?  I mean, come on.  Dinosaurs from mosquito DNA I can handle, but human BBQ from a T-Rex enclosure?  Not. A. Chance.

Also, anybody hear that? It’s a, um… It’s an impact tremor, that’s what it is.  I’m fairly alarmed here.  

Though poppies grow

Sometimes you wondered, “What the heck I am I doing here?  I don’t have to be here…going through this.  And then you liberated a village and these people came out from – I don’t know where.  They came out and then you knew why you were there.”

Today I remembered.

“I was scared.  I was really, really scared.  But you just had to keep moving forward.”

Both my grandfather and my husband’s grandfather served in World War II.  M’s grandfather enlisted when he was sixteen, and fought for six years in North Africa as a member of the British Army.  My grandfather was eighteen when he joined up with his three best friends, and stormed Juno beach on June 6, 1944.

“You either grew up right then.  Or you didn’t grow up at all.”

Today I remembered our grandfathers.

I remembered the men and women who have given their lives fighting so others could live.  I remembered the civilians who have died, and who continue to die, in armed conflicts, the world over.  I remembered all those who have been persecuted and punished, or who have perished for no reason, save for the fact they were the wrong race, wrong religion, wrong sex.  I remembered those who have died because they loved the wrong person.  Those who were killed because they had the wrong mental and physical abilities.

“We stand for two minutes.  What do the dead stand for?”

I remembered that remembrance should be inclusive and not divisive.  I remembered that although the world’s processes and organizations are constructed and legitimized by absolutes, binaries and ideologies, and that we must work to move past these if we are ever to contemplate, let alone achieve, peace.

I remembered that it is these constructs that allow us to strip a person of their humanity, to strip an entire nation of the same.

Complacency may not equal acceptance, let alone action, but can it equal complicity?  How quickly are these conceits internalized?  Does internalization equate acceptance?  And how quickly does this manifest into action, conscious or not?

“The two things you needed to stay alive where your shovel and your blanket.  As long as you had those two things, you might live to see the next day.”

Today I remembered that there are those today, who join the military because they believe it is an avenue to help others.

They enlist because they remember, what we remember, on the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

I think people sometimes forget this.  I do.

Today I remembered Vimy.  Passchendaele. Le Somme.  Ypres.

I remembered the war to end all wars.

“We got to live.  We got to come home and have families.  They didn’t.  There were some people who didn’t even make it off of the boat.  They were dead when we got there.  How many people stop to think about them?  How many remember?”

Today we remembered.

But it is easy to forgot.

And continue to forget.

Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote: “Every ant knows the formula of its ant-hill, every bee knows the formula of its beehive. They know it in their own way, not in our way. Only humankind does not know its own formula.”

And if we did, would we remember?