Sometimes I hear a song and I am overcome by a sense of nostalgia so strong that I feel as though I might never recover.
I know this can read a little dramatic (and hyperbolic) – but it’s true.
I’ve been listening to Spoon’s new album quite a bit, and every time I get to the last track “New York Kiss”, it’s like an electric current of memories (memories of which I cannot even remember living) shooting straight from my brain to the deepest recesses of my heart.
This in turn produces two very unique and separate reactions: I am overcome by both a manic, academic urgency, and a mellow, practical satisfaction.
The competition between these dichotomies is stiff.
My first inclination is to press pause on this hyper, whirling world of ours and take stock of all of the ideas, dreams, and goals currently percolating inside the depths of my brain.
My immediate urge to write, to run, to play dress-up with every outfit hanging in my closet, to phone up every loved one (not only current but also long-lost) and tell them how much of an impact they have made on my life is only bested by my paralyzing and chest-clenching fear that I am not doing enough with my life.
I SHOULD BE DOING MORE (I say to myself.)
On the other hand, hearing these songs make me want to snuggle up and hunker down. I want slowly read through the dusty, tea-spattered pages of my life’s chronicle, feel the curled edges of each aging page and smell the faint traces of sunshine, grass, gravel, and rain that have helped make up the thoughts and words for each entry and each day.
I just want to sit and re-live. To feel. To breathe in the years and marvel at all the miraculous things I have done with my body and mind.
But most of all to feel all of the love that I have given and all the love that I have received, and allow my heart to beat just that little bit faster at the thought of all the love that has yet to be.
The year I turned sixteen was, for lack of a more poetic descriptor, a bit of a garbage heap.
My parents split up.
My Nana died.
I spent the entirety of my grade ten year trying to eat as little as I could, and exercising as much as possible.
The acne on my forehead, chest, and back mutated from a small community garden patch, into a GMO-modified super crop. Equal parts horrified and embarrassed, I spent as much time spackling concealer onto my shoulders as I did my face. (Thankfully, for my birthday I was gifted a prescription for Accutane, and therefore also a new lease on my teenage dermatological life.)
I had braces and was in total denial about my (very real) need for glasses. I can never be sure I didn’t cause permanent damage to my eyes, what with the amount of squinting I performed every day at school.
I had extensive surgery which saw the breaking of both of my jaws and the reconstruction of my mouth. The end result was a complete restructuring of my facial composition and profile – although this never became apparent until approximately three months post-breakage, what with the amount of swelling that I had to live down.
During this time, I ate so much instant oatmeal I couldn’t even look at Quaker package for almost six years post-recovery.
That summer, I enrolled myself in Camp Potlatch’s “Leadership in Training” course, the completion of which would certify me to work as a camp counsellor.
Unfortunately, my Nana died two days before I was to start the camp and I missed the first three days as I had to fly down to Nova Scotia for her funeral and wake.
I remember feeling so utterly discombobulated flying back home by myself. I was jet-lagged and flu-ridden from the back-to-back, cross-country plane rides and the ensuing whirlwind of familial gatherings, churches and burials.
I was also livid that my parents still expected me to attend the camp. I hadn’t even had the chance to properly grieve, and here I was flying right back home, packing up my bags and pretending like nothing had happened.
I’ll never forget the car ride to the camp’s boat launch just outside of Squamish – my entire body seething with teenage rage, hurt, and indignation.
Any time my dad said anything I just ignored him while screaming, “SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP” inside my head.
Unfortunately, once I arrive at the camp things didn’t get much better.
My first three hours were spent in the frigid waters of Howe Sound, learning how to right a capsized canoe.
I also somehow lost my retainers (negating much of my happiness from having just gotten my braces off in the first place!) and then almost fainted, as I was too embarrassed to tell anyone that I was very hungry and hadn’t consumed anything since leaving Halifax the day before.
I was also subjected to the advances of the world’s worst flirter – a seventeen year-old boy named Christian, who was my partner in our canoe-training exercise.
Christian was about six foot four, weighed approximately one hundred and fifty pounds, and had a shock of white-blond hair that stood a good six inches straight up from his head.
He liked to sing to me, in particular the lyrics from Dennis Leary’s seminal work “I’m An Asshole.”
As you can imagine, I was immediately smitten.
Walking up from the waterfront, soaked from head to foot, lugging the front end of our very wet, and very heavy canoe, I felt the first prickle of a tear in my eye.
Trying my best to air on the side of positivity, I whispered to myself that “there was no way this could get any worse.”
And then it started to rain.
I immediately began to plot my escape: I would tell the director that my mourning was too great! I would “accidentally” break a limb!
No doubt reacting to my increasingly pallid complexion and demoralized demeanor, my counsellor Julie came up to me, put her arms around my shoulders and gave them a squeeze.
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s go get warmed up.”
As we walked up to the showers, she and Amanda (another counsellor in-training) let me know how happy they were to have another girl in their ranks.
“I really, realy didn’t want it to be just me and five guys,” smiled Amanda.
Looking quickly back at Christian and his rag-tag group of compatriots, I silently agreed. I too wouldn’t have wanted Amanda to weather the incoming storm on her own.
As we walked into the washroom, and I saw both Julie and Amanda begin to undress, I felt a wave of panic rise inside of me.
I didn’t want to get naked in front of these two strangers.
I didn’t want anyone to see my body.
For a second I was completely paralyzed, unable to even breathe.
But then I saw how completely unmoved both of them were by the scenario; how completely at ease they were in their skin.
And in that moment, I wanted this more than anything I had ever wanted anything before. More than I wanted my parents to get back together, more than I wanted my Nana to be alive, more than I wanted clear skin, and skinny legs.
I just wanted to be warm, and bare, and happy.
So I took off my clothes and under the stream of the second shower from the left, I felt some of that happiness and strength.
And in that moment I forgot about my retainers. About my parents. About death, and acne, and my body.
I just felt the water warm me – all of me.
The following three weeks were impacting, and transforming, and utterly brilliant. That time spent in the bush canoeing, hiking, kayaking, building fires, cooking camp food, swimming, fending off Christian’s advances, and sleeping under the stars was exactly what I needed to get over the trauma and drama of being sixteen years-old.
Every time I see a lipstick I get a little bit excited.
Every time I see a lipstick I want to buy it.
I want to open it up and smear it all over my stupid face.
I’ve got great lips, and lipstick looks AMAZING smeared over my stupid face.
I prefer a good matte finish (just get out of here with your useless, disgusting gloss-soaked wands) and I’ll never pay more than $9.99 for a tube of the stuff, but that is because I am both a cheap bastard, and because I am apt to conclude that there cannot be THAT big of a difference between my Joe Fresh collection and what’s being shipped out of the Chanel Institute.
I mean, how could you possible justify charging (least of all PAYING!) fifty dollars for a shade of red that exists in perpetuity in every drug store the wide world over?
I SEE YOU SEPHORA.
When I left my last position I was gifted with a very generous gift certificate to a downtown shopping mall and with these funds I purchased a forty dollar Tarte lip pencil. And while this product is darn fantastic and makes me lips tingle and taste of minty freshness, I would never again purchase this piece of maquillage because forty dollars is basically two to three days’ worth of groceries and I’m only ever eating that pencil if and when things get really dire.
Anyway, no matter how much or little I pay, lipstick makes me feel like an absolute super hero.
I put it on five minutes before leaving work and I am immediately transformed from Grouchy Eye Bag McGrimmeister into Kick-Ass She-Warrior McHyphenate.
Sure, maybe I was born with it, but holy hell if this shade of pink doesn’t crank it up a notch:
That’s right.
Those are your nuts in my vice grip.
ENJOY IT.
I never understanding people who say to me, “I wish I could wear lipstick like you!”
And then when I inform them that there isn’t a single thing prohibiting them from taking part in the universal fun that is lipstick, they respond with, “Oh no, I could never do that!”
And to this, I always just want to yell into their faces – WHY!?
Why in the heck would you think that, you weirdo!?
Unless born lipless (and what a tragedy to befall anyone!), everyone is 100% capable of wearing lipstick.
And I urge you, and everyone to try it.
I’ll hold your hand and everything.
But it’ll cost you fifty dollars in Chanel product.
And your nuts.
Part 2.
I don’t like Mark Messier.
In fact, Mark Messier is like the anti-lipstick.
I don’t get excited when I see him.
I don’t want to smear him all over my face.
I wouldn’t spend ANY money on him, and he doesn’t make me feel unstoppable.
And much to my chagrin, he’s EVERYWHERE.
The dude is all over Youtube like some terrifying, leather-clad social media STI.
Every time he pops up, Marc (my husband) asks, “Is this a Cialis ad?”
AND IT TOTALLY IS.
I don’t know why Mr. Messier grinds my gears to the extent that he does.
Perhaps it’s the ghost of my hard core emotional hangover from the summer of 1994 (combined with the broken heart I suffered in 2011.)
Perhaps it’s the memory of his crappy Lays potato chip ads.
Perhaps it’s because the NHL is such a ridiculous bush league, run by bums, dullards, and hacks, that any reminder of this organization and the garbage it stands for makes me want to ralph.
Basically folks, it could be a whole myriad of things.
But all I really want to say is that NO ONE IS ASKING YOU ANYTHING MARK MESSIER.
You and lip gloss can just get the heck out of here.
Part 3.
Yesterday I bought a homeless person a hot chocolate.
I try to do these things as often as I can, although it can be hard. Living my own busy, silly little life can leave me so caught up in getting from A to B (or achieving A to Z) that I don’t often see the different humanities co-existing right in front of my eyes.
Sometimes I feel like I don’t spend enough of my life with my eyes wide open. That I should be feeling more, doing more – affecting more positive change within my day to day activities.
But then I know I am being too hard on myself. That I work very hard to ensure that I am engaged and making a difference every day, both personally and professionally.
I cannot do everything for everyone, every day and all of the time.
Sometimes when I am riding skytrain into work, and I am feeling particularly Dostoevskian, I am apt to conclude that life is just one ceaseless and ever-growing French fry craving.
This is grim.
(And McDostoevskian.)
But it is also completely symptomatic of what it’s like to be navigating the throes of my personal, and very inconsistent existential life crisis.
One day I’m just fine.
And the next, I’m expecting Inspector Porfiry Petrovich to board the train at Joyce-Collingwood and arrest me in front of all the other semi-dazed travellers, proclaiming me to be a student and murderer in equal succession.
(I think some people just call this melodramatic malaise “being in their late twenties.”)
Plus my arrest would probably be for fare evasion.
Or maybe, anti-social behaviour.
I’m no ax-murderer.
To combat this insanity (inanity?) I have been listening to a lot of ridiculously fantastic music.
I know I just wrote a post about movies that highlighted a few of the different films that have impacted my life, but I’ve really been thinking quite a bit of late about all the things that up until this point, have made me, well, “me.”
During the summer between first and second year of my undergrad, I lived in Halifax and hung out quite a bit with a fabulous lass named Kathleen.
Kathleen had a touch of the nihilism in her (as are wont all twenty year-old self-styled academics), but she was also greatly distressed by the thought of all of the books she would never read, all of the movies she would never watch, and all of the songs that she would forget about and never hear again.
So in an effort to ensure she would remember as many of these things as possible, she would carry about a small notebook and write the names of anything and everything artistic that she would encounter throughout her daily meanderings.
Her scribblings were to her, a sort of literary, musical, and cinematic catch-all.
Of late, I too have begun to employ this system.
For the past few months, I haven’t been able to leave the house without the small pink notebook that is now chock-a-block of semi-flushed out blog post ideas, daily to-do lists, and half-cocked philosophical musings.
I just hope that nobody murders me and this is the first thing that CTV finds on my rapidly cooling body.
Nobody wants to be remembered by their inability to remember to purchase both dish detergent AND QTips.
(Why can’t I remember QTips!?)
But it’s also been super helpful.
Because sometimes inspiration strikes, or you hear a tune so brilliant that it’s everything you can do not to bust a move right then and there in front of Save-on-Food’s overpriced and under-stocked egg selection, or you see a character so desperate and strange that you can only assume that they fell out of a wormhole connecting our universe with whatever bizarro world exists out past the recesses of our equally wacky solar system.
You know.
The usual.
But to get back to the music of which I earlier wrote – there is so much stuff that I wish to share with you all.
The first being my latest obsession: Jungle.
A modern soul collective based out of London, UK, they are so absolutely groovetastic it boggles the mind.
I’ve been listening to their songs on continuous repeat for the past two days.
Check them out:
They are coming to Vancouver on October 14th and I cannot wait to get my epic dance on. For this night (and never this night only) I will be the dancing queen.
Young and sweet.
Next, another British band of whom I am completely enamoured: Bastille.
Every so often I like a band so much that I will break my “no music EVER whilst training” oath, and stick in ye olde earbuds as I tie up my running shoes.
I have broken this pledge many times over the past month because of this band.
Every song of their feels as though they are speaking directly to me, and by speak, I mean mailing an emotionally resonant and personally impactful treatise express-post straight into my soul.
They are SO GOOD.
Finally, new Spoon.
(For those neophytes out there, the band is just called “Spoon” not “new Spoon.” They just have released their latest EP.)
And for lack of a more poetic descriptor, it is bloody fantastic.
I don’t think this band is even capable of releasing a crap album, because everything they release is delicious.
And inspired.
So there you are.
For all of you who are also currently conquering your own existential demons (or at least riding out the “what does it all mean!?” wave), I suggest you put on your dancing shoes and break it down.
We are approximately three days away from the beginning of the Autumnal season.
I am twenty-nine years of age.
You are whatever age you currently are.
This is where I am sitting:
Everything is both beautiful and terrible. Everything is both unadulterated brilliance and unmitigated bonkerness.
Everything just is.
Sometimes, whenever I start to get really down by all of the fuckery that seems to dominate our world’s discourse (not to mention actions!), I just really try and focus on all the amazing, beautiful, and breathtaking things and events of which I am privileged enough to both behold and partake.
And sometimes, I just think about the quiet world of my early morning, pre-work runs.
When the sky is a mottled blend of purples, pinks, greens, and blues.
When the sky is the most beautiful bruise.
I run down along the boardwalk with my heart in my throat, and my tears in my eyes. My legs feel as though they are six miles long, and my arms pump, just like my blood pumps, and everything feels right and strong.
And I know that I am flying.
Sometimes I feel silly and trite writing again and again what it feels like to run. How propelling myself forward as hard and as fast as I possibly can brings on such infinite joy.
But I can’t.
Just like running itself, I cannot stop.
I cannot swallow these words.
They are a compulsion.
They are a joy
…
Work has been a little batty of late (50+ hour weeks), spent zipping about like zipping things (zippers!!).
However, seeing as though my fellow colleagues are gentlewomen and squires of the highest order, I cannot bring myself to complain.
The fact that I am passionate beyond a thought about my job and the work that I do is, of course, another boon.
However, this is not to say that we can’t have a great laugh at our own expense, especially in the lead-up to a very large event, of which we have been working on since March.
March!
Case in point:
I, like we all, have the capacity to be a grumpy cat.
Hence, I am actually grumpy cat.
…
Remember movies?
I do, but barely.
And this leaves me feeling a little melancholy.
Because movies used to mean so much. They used to mean so much to me.
I recall the first movie that I ever saw in a theatre.
Beauty and the Beast was everything a movie should be (in my very discerning six year old mind). It was funny and scary. There was a beautiful, brilliant, strong female lead who loved to read and who wouldn’t take crap from all the ridiculous idiots who populated her “provincial town.” She, rightly, loathed Gaston, and held her own when it came to The Beast’s infantile temper tantrums.
In truth, it’s probably the only Disney princess flick I’ll ever be okay showing my future kidlets (but that’s another post for another time.)
I am fairly certain it was my nanny Suzanne who took me to the movie, and it was her gift to me on my sixth birthday. We went to the old (and now sadly demolished) Capital Six, back when Granville Street was in its full grunge-tastic glory.
Memories!
The first “grown-up” movie I ever watched in theatres was when Shona Langmuir, Patricia Beckerman (aka “The Girls”), and I went and saw The First Wives Club when we were in grade five.
Note: please let me emphasize the term “theatres” in the above sentence. My family were rather lax when it came to flicks seen by us kids, and we were viewing adult movies at a very, very early age. I remember watching the Fugitive on Easter Monday in grade two.
Nothing like collecting a bunch of chocolate eggs and then sitting down as a family to watch Harrison Ford clear his name!
Good grief.
But I digress. Holy damn did I ever dig The First Wives Club. Sure I didn’t get a lot of the jokes, and the scene where Brenda eats dinner by herself absolutely destroyed me. But it didn’t matter. It was three women who loved each other, out in the world, kicking ass and taking names.
Too this day I re-watch it at least once a year.
You don’t own me!
Looking at both this film and Beauty and the Beast would you say that there seems to be a pattern emerging as to the type of movie that really resonated with my younger self?
Oh to be that wide-eyed, bushy-tailed, newly emerging feminist!
There are so many more movies that, collectively, with the thousands of books, songs, and other miscellaneous artistic detritus that I’ve encountered and loved along the way, have helped inform who I am as a young woman today.
For instance: I LOVE Forrest Gump.
Next time you see me, ask me to quote the entire movie. I will do this for you.
I also love Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and A Fish Called Wanda, and I will always adore Hugh Grant in Four Weddings and a Funeral.
I saw Amelie in grade eleven with my first boyfriend and spent the entire summer pretending to be her.
I adore Kieślowski’s Three Colours trilogy. My favourite of the three films being the darkest and most brilliant black comedy of all time, “Blanc.”
I will go to my death extolling the cinematic virtues of The Big Lebowski. For me, nothing will ever be funnier than this brilliant pieces of the Coen Brothers subconscious. I quote it all of the time and there are total parts of my and Marc’s vernacular made up solely by movie lines. I can also never look at a bowling alley the same way again.
It’s weird.
I love dramatic films as much as I do comedy, however I just am never one to really revisit these masterpieces, and as such they don’t influence my life to the degree as my favourite comedies.
And it’s not as though these two genres cannot exist simultaneously. In no uncertain terms are they are not mutually exclusive concepts.
It just takes one hell of a filmmaker to pull this off.
(Like the Coen Brothers.)
But isn’t movie watching also so much about the experience? The memory of that time spent in the theater? Where you were? Who you were with? Where you were in your life?
Probably one of my most cherished movie related memories is from the first few months of Marc’s and my courtship. Only four months into what is now an eleven year love affair, the two of us went to see Love Actually on a dark, went and very cold Vancouver November afternoon.
I had spent the night at his place and, because I was in my weird “only skirts, no pants” phase, I was wearing a pair of his cords because I didn’t have a clean pair of tights. They were absolutely huge, and I looked a bit of a sight. We had spent the morning at a community theatre on the Westside where I auditioned for a part in an upcoming play (spoiler: I didn’t get the part!), and then had bussed downtown. Arriving at the theatre (also the Capital Six!), we ran up the escalator so we wouldn’t be late for the previews.
I so wish I could properly communicate how much I felt watching that movie, sitting next to the man (the boy!) for whom I felt so, so, so strongly.
My body completely electric as I held his hand, I laughed at Bill Nighy’s amazing portrayal of Billy Mac and felt my heart break and break and break for Emma Thompson.
I just loved it.
I hate that I am even typing this, but for me, at that moment in my life, love truly was all around.
(I’m sorry!)
But it’s true.
And that’s why movies matter.
And why, despite the fact that I never go to the theatre anymore, and I only use my Netflix to watch old episodes of QI and MI5, I’ll never let them go.
Rant and Roll 