Those Pants Go Nicely With the Couch Cushions

I haven’t been very active for a while. I went and got myself into a lovely relationship and all my intentions to exercise got wrapped up in another hug and a 3^rd slice of pizza. The last time I broke a sweat I had forgotten the heater in the car was on. Getting groceries to my car might as well be carrying the caber at the highland games. Speaking of my car, now I have one. And every sense of patience, humility and oxen like stamina has disappeared. I can’t go back. Waiting at a bus stop, adding extra time to my travels, CARRYING my belongings on one arm like a hobo, that is the old me. I now get to have on demand transport. And if I’m running behind, it’s a little pressure on the old dominant leg and I’m back on schedule. Try doing that with a busted skytrain.

This will be my downfall though. I’m fairly certain just as moving to a full time desk job caused me to become squishy, a car to carry me there means I’m one ill fitting sweater away from being mistaken for a cinnabon. My thighs, which used to be shapely pillars of support, are now columns of cream cheese held together through the binding agents in French fry grease. My arms, maybe were never the sticks wielded by Michelle Obama, but they were certainly never the flapping caped bones they have become. I tried pumping myself up yesterday by listening to Enrique Iglesias and pinching my lumps in the mirror, unshockingly this was not the motivation I require. I tried to do a wall sit, 5 seconds in I was doubting that I could get back up if I let it continue any longer. Sliding ungracefully down the wall into the fetal position would be the undoing of my fragile drive. I tried instead to tone down my beastly urges and just go for a simple movement that wouldn’t shatter my ego. At my most fit, probably when I was 18 and both dancing and playing softball, I could do 20 pushups – the guy kind. And now, for the first time in my personal history. I can’t make it. I can do 3. Maybe 4. I’m a wimp. I’m a saggy, wrinkly old hump of tissue and I can’t bring myself off the floor. Soft is an understatement, I’ve gone chinchilla.

I have visions of myself getting a personal trainer. Them, kicking my ass as I crossfit my way across a jungle gym, their bulging neck veins as they yell at me, my meaty arms propelling me over the kettleballs, clearly I have no idea how cross fit works but the point is that while some people fantasize about the powerball, I fantazise that I would have the courage to get a personal trainer and even show my face on the gym floor. Sadly, the array of machinery presented to me at a gym might as well be a poison laced tank of fire snakes in terms of stress levels present.

There are those who get ‘gym culture’ and those who do not. My boyfriend pops off to the gym every day after work, protein shaker in hand and sleeveless tank on, completely unironically. I, on the other hand, can’t carry a water bottle or put on a sports bra without fear that someone is going to yell from across the mirror paneled room what a phony I am. I’m wracked with anxiety thinking about how to operate a certain machine. “Everyone is watching, what if I mess up pulling out the bar that separates the weight. What if I touch it, it wiggles but then gets stuck and I pull it out halfway but I’ve been touching it for too long and then I panic and let go of it. I can’t try to use it with that amount of weight, that’s too hard. I can’t try to fiddle with it again, no I already did that for the proper length of time. I better just let go and move to a different machine. Fuck, but I really wanted that one. Better circle back again. No wait, no one else has used it yet. Dammit the bar is still the same, veer off course so no one knows you were even headed that way’ – my internal monologue every time I’m attempting to gym.

I really do need to make the effort though. A few months ago my life flashed before my eyes while I was snowboarding. I had about as much control through my legs as Donald Trump has over his mouth at a Quinceanera. If I want to live into my 30’s without the assistance of a mobile scooter while I’m having breakfast at Denny’s, I need to step my game up. Unfortunately, we’re 3 pizza points away from a free Papa Johns ….

Can We Talk About How Gorgeous Here Is?

Sometimes I take my life for granted. I can put on my sweater, grab a tea and have my feet on the beach in under 3 minutes.

There is no reason I have to be unhappy for an extended period of time. The beauty of this city and the privilege to live here should be enough to put everything into perspective.

Halfway to Genius: The Tale of a 1st Degree Burn

I like cookies. I think more than half the people surveyed on a beach would like cookies. I’m going to go ahead and assume that everyone agrees cookies are the shit. And homemade ones, those are even better. Making them is a relaxing, math based activity where you get to rue the day you lost your 3/4 measure and have to do extra dishes for the 1/2 and 1/4. Plus the house starts to smell warm, loving and inviting unlike the cold take out container and Michelina’s lasagna smell that usually permeates.

So I’m diving into some premium peanut butter cookie making goodness when I see under my cabinet is a shiny, brand-spanking-new Lagostina, non stick baking sheet with vulcanized rubber grips. Label still on. Mint. This is like hitting the pastry chef lottery. I think we were given this as a gift for Christmas and clearly I’d been riding out the holiday treat train until this point and hadn’t been looking for supplies to bake again. But now I have the chance. This is going to be awesome.

So I make my little sweeties into the appropriate sized balls and place them lovingly on the tray, chocolate chips face up. Then I approach the oven, reach down to slide them in … and they don’t fit.

The tray, the Escalade of baking products, is not going to fit easily into my compact apartment sized oven because the protrusions meant to hold the wire racks in, narrowed the opening. So this is where my ‘brilliant genius idea’ takes over. I was going to give up and move the cookies to another tray, spray that one and do more dishes yet again, however I decided to persevere and find a way! My strategy was the same one applied to moving furniture – if it didn’t fit head on, just tilt it sideways until it did. That way, I could go over the narrower edges to the back of the oven where there was more space.

So I did just that and felt mighty pleased at my ingenuity. Until the timer rang. I grabbed my oven mitt and prepared for battle when I realized I hadn’t thought my plan through. It was perfectly ok to manipulate and adjust a cold tray with dough stuck to it, but a searing hot pan, a 350 degree oven and a clumsy mitt were not the items I needed to make a successful exit.

The pan needed to be lifted, tilted and pulled all while the hot, not yet set, cookie material slipped all around the once praised Teflon coating. The rubber grips that were so useful in my initial placement now became my nemesis as they held fast to the sides when I pulled. This whole thing was genius is one direction and idiocy in the other.

Inevitably, after wielding the heavy tray around and maneuvering it like I was playing real life Operation, I touched the sides with a sizzle. That audible scorch of my hand on the wire rack of the oven was the signal of my defeat. You win oven. You win pan. I will never again try to combine the two of you into magical cookie wonderment. I’ll go back to using the burnt, crusted cookie sheet from 2004.

 

1 year today

I wrote my first blog post this time last year. I hadn’t been taking it seriously until the past little while but writing has always been a way for me to sort out my thoughts. Strangely this collection of my year makes me proud of myself for having written it. Of course I remember some of the posts but I’ve also forgotten some and it’s re reading those and laughing makes me smile.

The Games We Play

Being in a relationship is like playing minesweeper. You know that game where you try to uncover where the little bombs are located using numbers to tell you what’s around you.

It’s a perfect metaphor. In the beginning of the game and the relationship you’re all smiles as you run free through the game field hitting 4,5,6’s and tons of ones. There is no danger and there is no stress.
But midway into the relationship things get tricky. You start to notice where you should be marking some flags. Points of contention come up and make it impossible to ignore that become a sore spot in the partnership.
As empty space dwindles on the game board it becomes more and more imperative that you navigate the tension. You and your significant other start to see the uneasy trend towards a possible blow up. There are no more easy 4’s or 1’s to be found. You have to proceed with caution at every step.
It’s a this point where the relationship can take a turn. You either successfully circumvent all the mines, flag those fuckers and vow never to let those issues come between you and you let that little smiley face designate a successful long term relationship, or you hit a bomb. Slowly or immediately the relationship will crumble leaving a mess of broken squares where every flag was. When one issue gets triggered they all follow suit and you’re left with a broken field you can’t frolic through again.

No Name, No Shame

Being recently departed from my parents vast collection of condiments, Costco bulk essentials and basic household supplies, I have been building up my own repertoire  of home necessities. Again, as a 23 yr old my income isn’t staggering so my purchasing power is minimal. I’m trying to do the best I can with what I have and learning the lesson of Name Brand vs Store Brand.

As a convenient reference guide for those starting out and in case I somehow forget, I am going to chart my findings of either passable generic or definitely land the brand. 

 

Dairy and Eggs – No Name.

If milk and cheese get slated as possible for human consumption I’m not going to argue about which set of cows the milk came from. Basically, it’s the same bunch. And for eggs, seriously, how would one begin to tell the difference between the chickens. Ah yes I’ll take this one laid by Carly Poulet Jepsen and you can fuck off and take the one laid by Louise. An egg is an egg is my point.

 

Containers, Plastic Bags, Plastic Cling Film and other assorted food containment devices – Brand Name.

In a world full of justice, left over pizza would never dry out, spaghetti sauce would never leak and people could feel confident taking salad dressing to work for lunch without taking the whole bottle. But such are the trials of our purses and lunch kits. The best way to minimize the damage is to trust no one but Ziplock. Even if it costs 3 whole dollars more than President’s choice sandwich bags, a wallet full of bills is not impervious to spills.

 

Pop – Are you Thirsty? Brand name. Are you Getting drunk? Generic.

The best thing about pop is that it is alcohol’s main bro. Soda is the little black dress of being hammered. So when it’s 88 cents for a no name brand you throw down at that fizz fest. The only time to step it up and get fancy is when you mean to enjoy it meal side, virgin style. Because if cheap has a taste, it’s diet cola.

 

Condiments (ketchup, mustard, soya sauce etc.) – No Name unless you are someone who’s into ‘eating mindfully’

I can’t remember the last time I organized a taste test of my favourite dinner time condiments. That’s probably because I plan to never do it. I can almost be certain it would ruin my enjoyment of less expensive options simply due to a side by side comparison revealing to me the truth about the recipes and ingredients. So as long as I never remind myself of the shortcomings of no name ketchup, I can continue to douse all applicable products in the deliciously cheaper alternative. **Note about mindful eating, I religiously eat while doing something else (tv, computer, phone, taking pictures of my food) so I don’t pay the best attention to my meals. So if you’re someone who centers themselves and values the flavours while eating, don’t trust me.

 

Medicine – No Name.

I think it’s common knowledge that Ibuprofen is Advil but just in case you don’t know, know you know (n-word). And we all know big pharmaceutical America is corrupt and just trying to push brands or something. I think I saw it in that movie ‘Love and Other Drugs’ or maybe it was just Jake Gyllenhaal’s ass I’m remembering, anyways point is Acetaminophen is Tylenol and Finkle is Einhorn so save some money. 

 

Soup, Macaroni, Frozen Pizza, essentially all prepackaged foods – Name Brand.

Go big or go home here folks. There’s a reason Kraft, Campbell, McCain’s, Lipton and Knorr are recognizable names. If you’re going for refined sugars, saturated fats and factory made foods with little to no nutritional value, why deny yourself the best. No doubt you know you can get cancer from highlighter yellow #5 in macaroni, but dammit you should get cancer from the best quality ingredients not the cardboard pasta and less than generous sized flavour packet the generic will give you. Long story short, if you want to eat a pizza pop, Pillsbury’s got your back. Don’t waste your 260 calories and 12gs of fat on a ‘pizza style pastry’. 

See you at the grocery store.

 

 

 

Thinker’s Block

I can never remember the times I’m being creative. But they aren’t the times when I’m playing candy crush or watching Arrested Development. They usually happen on my walks to work, or maybe on the bus, the shower, the car, the apartment in my solitude but it’s never the same. Not every walk leads to a brilliant idea and not every shower ends in defiant life changing epiphanies.

 

I wish creativity and spirit could be called on in moments when you are next to a laptop, or had a moment to stop. I feel like on the bus, carrying 900 lbs of groceries, vodka and empty lunch tupperware I can’t compose the thoughts I’m having on paper. But if someone was to capture them, they always come out written instead of thought. I wish I could hear other people’s thoughts. I wish I could compare what I say when I mean ‘I wrote my thought’ versus ‘I just thought that thought’ or the distinctive ‘that thought was in hashtag form’. What I don’t mean is the brevity or the structure or the description of what I mean. I think what I’m really getting at is the audience.

 

All my thoughts come out with an audience in mind. This fictitious entity that I must entertain with my wit and clever phrasing doesn’t take to mundane efforts at explanation. It’s a hungry mass designed to reward the delivery of the thought. If I say it plainly, it doesn’t pass. If I can turn the vocab up with double entendre for bonus points, the imaginary audience rewards me with illusions of praise. So sometimes when I’m writing it isn’t about writing at all. It’s about appeasing the voracious audience that expects the best from me. My head can be a tough crowd.

Spit Take

Recently, I moved into my very first grown up apartment, with my name on the lease and everything. Which means I’m on the hook for hundreds of dollars in rent per month but that is just the kind of thinking I get to disregard while I relax, sit on my ocean-view balcony drinking tea and watching the sunset. Come summer I’ll definitely be swapping the Earl Grey for a margarita and in fact may be leaning towards making the switch a little earlier than expected. It may still be the, see your breath and double up on socks, kind of January out there but this incident I had while downing some delicious Tazo has made me rethink my affinity for the leaves.

Let’s begin with the backstory to the move. My boyfriend, who’s life experiences in relationships are like a Tolstoy to my Stephanie Meyer, has moved out before. And in doing so has accrued a wealth of household goodies from which we would build our small appliances and glassware empire. So with that being said we were able to start living in relative comfort right away. These items included but were not limited to, a microwave, plates, a panini press and a tea kettle.

Now the focus of our story falls on the tea kettle in question. An opaque, white electric device with a pouring spout that shrieks at you when the contents are boiling. It’s hardly a high tech piece of equipment but for my purposes it was perfect.

So 2 notes as we progress into the recounting of the story. One, this was a old kettle that had been carried around in previous moves with many loving owners in the past although recently had been left in storage to wait for the latest move (I am aware this is not the Velveteen Rabbit but it develops the character of the kettle) and two, this was a seriously non see through piece of machinery.

Fast forward to me on my first evening in the apartment, I’m draped casually around the couch cushions looking intently out the window, no that’s a lie I was staring at the phone. The telus internet installation guy was going to come hook us up that night and I needed to be prepared to grab him from downstairs when he called because our buzzer had yet to be installed. This building would never have been the set of a romance novel. I digress, I was waiting and looking and pacing because we didn’t have wi-fi and I’m a privileged white girl who has no other way of amusing herself without reddit. Again, moving forward with the story, I decided to make tea. It’s practically the first and only food item I’d purchased. There may have also been ketchup.

So I boiled a big old kettle of water. Filled it up nice and good. I drank one cup and decided to go back for a second. Before I knew it I had played candy crush (it runs independently of wi-fi) enough times to warrant having consumed 3 cups of a peppermint and green tea blend. Mr DotCom hadn’t arrived yet so I was preparing to pour my final mug of tea when I noticed the kettle was empty. Perfect amount of water for four cups, I went for one last tilt of the kettle and the biggest, hairiest, most legged, huge winged, beady eyed, fucking fly I have ever seen, flopped it’s dead carcass out of there like I was coffin tipping at a funeral.

I have never in my life gagged like that. Every sitcom that uses the fly in the food or the ‘lets remind you what I slipped in your drink as a joke so that you feel the need to vomit” as a punchline was not kidding folks. You feel the texture of your bile come riding back up your throat pro surfer style and you wish that you could take back the deceased fly bath water you just guzzled down for the last hour. And when you realize you don’t know how many legs it does, or should have and you audibly scream, you finally understand all those actors you’ve seen play this out in front of you for years. The terror is real.

And that is how I learned to stare into and shake everything that has ever been in storage.

 

 

The Job Search

Rapidly approaching, perhaps too rapidly for my ravaged bank account, is my moving date. The day where I put my world in boxes, beg my parents to borrow the car, purchase my first vacuum and declare myself an adult. But, before that day can arrive I need to pump up my cash flow like BP in the Gulf Coast. So, to do this I must supplement my meager income with another part time job.

Three things I have come to learn about job hunting. The first is that I suck on paper. All humans that carry any shred of sparkling charismatic charm are lifeless drones when put to text. Can a smile be adequately conveyed via document? Can quick wit and effortless customer service voice be printed out on an 8×11? No. So when I’m asked to fill out the boxes of name, previous employer and education I feel like I’m already losing.

Next, is that job hunting takes forever. From the day you decide to start looking, to the emails sent, the updated resume print outs, the ‘I’ll get back to you’s’, the scheduling an interview, the second interview, the ‘I’ll get back to you AGAIN’, you’re weeks deep there sunshine. So the best thing to do is hit the job market a month before. And after heeding my own advice and starting in October…. I failed to follow through after resume prep and delayed this until November. Dammit.

Lastly, I’ve realized that job hunting is all about failure. Being rejected right to your face multiple times. It’s like asking out the cheerleader in a 90’s teen movie (or in today’s references the hot hipster?) and being told you’re a dweeb, in an hour long montage of disgrace. You have to have such a tough skin to do this to yourself. And it doesn’t even help to use technology and cower online behind your 13′ retina display because the people getting the jobs aren’t being picked from the online email pool. Those are the ones that sound as good as dry toast when the HR representative gives them the obligatory 8-12 second glance. In order to get the job you have to go in person, hope they don’t send you away immediately and use your one shot to wow them like they’ve just stared into Katy Perry’s cleavage.

And it’s tough being rejected especially when you know you could have done that job better than half the idiots they have in there now. I distinctly remember getting turned down by Toys R Us. Twice. Seriously? Do you doubt my abilities at stocking, lifting and counting so much that I can’t be relied on, as a university student, to carry out those tasks properly? Thanks a lot Giraffe, who’s name is an alliteration which may or may not be Gary, there are other places I can go and buy my Harry Potter Scene It.

But I digress, and now with this job hunting time successfully wasted, I have to get back at it. This money is not going to make itself. And if hourly employment isn’t working out, there’s always stripping.

Principles of Distraction

Getting inspired to write is a tricky task. At times, my most brilliant well crafted sentences come to me while I’m sitting, laptop at hand with a word document on and up, those are obviously ideal. But like most great eurekas, they come when we’re dripping wet and an electronic hazard or barreling down a hwy with a thousand tones of metal under our jean clad thighs. Such is the case with my most recent stroke of genius.
I was riding dirty down highway 1 as I am wont to do, drake ft drake blasting, arm out the window like I’m a big deal when I was struck with the most pleasant arrangement of words. I scrambled to repeat them to myself about 5837 times as to fasten them to my hippocampus like a burr in the woods to a knee high sock. Right in the middle of the repetition akin to a Hail Mary this dump truck had the audacity to have its open dumb flap come flying out and charge through my reverie with a flaming distain for my memorization goals. And not only did it distract from the absorption and transition to long term memory that I was going for, it decided to imprint itself in place of my intended recipient of that memory drawer. It did this by slamming the back door of the truck against the windshield of the adjacent car with all the finesse and grace of a rhino on the lookout for a toaster at a Black Friday sale. The resulting damage looked like Carolina Crusher was winning a day at the Tacoma Dome. The windshield was broken and twisted like Pheneuf had taken a shoulder to the glass and the crackle pattern glistened in hairlines to all 4 corners of the window. Speedy Glass had their work cut out for them with this beauty.
Then there was the appearance of the driver that made me cognizant of the wardrobe I choose when I elect to operate a motor vehicle. No one expects to have to get out of their car at times like drive thrus, picking up a friend, even just going for a drive and as such sometimes thought does not go into ones outfit. This was the case with the driver in our scenario. Tearaway pants from 1999 plus a dirty tshirt that was undoubtedly found behind his washing machine instead of in it. Anyways he certainly only went out to pass thru whatever low quality meat party establishment appeals to him most and did not intend on leaving his vehicle. Or maybe he did and I’m a judgmental asshole.
Point of the story. I lost my idea! I had a great sentence handcrafted like the Belgian chocolate of language with a drizzle of verbs over a creamy noun center with just a hint of sarcastic finish. It was beautiful. And now lost forever to the wilds of the highway.