Weighing In

Reason #647 I love being a girl:

Last night, after a late night movie with a friend, I walked into my apartment, tossed down my keys, and grabbed the one remaining chocolate cupcake I had wrapped up in tinfoil on my counter.

Then, as any slightly weight-conscious woman would do, I proceeded to my bathroom scale. As I munched away, waiting for the verdict to flash its digital confirmation, a large wad of Duncan Hines creamy vanilla icing fell and landed squarely on my big toe.

What I weigh will remain between me, my scale and the cupcake. But let's suffice to say I need to stay away from anything chocolate for a while.

Rob & I

Graduation

My youngest brother graduated from high school last night. Family members are invited to the hotel for cocktails and mingling, which was when this photo was taken.

Being in a relatively crowded room with 100+ teenagers is not usually something I would embrace with open arms, but last night was different. There seems to have been a shift in mentality, in the perception of self on behalf of young people. I remember my high school graduation, eight years ago (insert shudder here), and how all my friends and I nervously tugged at our dresses, twirled our hair on fingers, slouched our shoulders, and plastered band-aids to feet entirely unaccustomed to high-heeled shoes. But the kids graduating last night carried themselves with a such a supreme level of confidence, something I don't think I've even achieved in my mid-twenties.

We hear so much about the challenges with 'kids today,' teenagers that have grown up with the internet and all its negative implications, kids with absentee parents and attitudes that make their teacher's heads spin. But to have seen these kids, these young women and men, as they leave their high school years behind them, full of hope and belief in themselves, I thought to myself, 'for today, for tonight, there are no problems with kids today. These kids are alright.'

The Trouble with Traffic Reports

Does anyone else take issue with the way traffic reports are delivered? I would never knock the CBC, it has kept me in great company on many occasions, but their traffic reports truly leave something to be desired.

'...and OF COURSE we have that stall over on Saint-Croix.'

Why should Montreal drivers be forced to anticipate, or even expect stalled cars that block up highways for hours on end? It kind of makes you feel naïve for even entertaining the idea of getting to work on time.

Insert an exclaimed 'like!' here

Although I am admittedly new to this entire realm of blogging, I just have to say this: The amount of sheer, self-indulgent tripe out there is decidedly depressing. Sites filled with, 'Oh my God, like, he's totally not into me, but like, what should I DO?' run rampant. Do we not have more important things to discuss than that?

Where the Constant Convene

Sometimes, there is no better place in the world to be, than sitting on a hard wooden chair at a kitchen table, surrounced by your closest friends.

Last night, as I sipped my vodka cranberry and munched on baguette and brie, listening to the stories being traded back and forth across the table, some funny, some heart-breakingly sad, I was transported back to all the Sunday night dinners I had at this table, with my friend's family, when I was a kid. They have since made many renovations to their home, gutted basements, replaced windows, added a sun porch. But this warm, wooden kitchen table has remained with them always and I love it. There was the time I spilled an entire glass of milk, soaking her older brother's napkin, the time her dad patiently tried to teach me to play poker. The night I decided I would never eat another green been so long as I lived, and the night I had three pieces of pie for dessert and no one batted an eye.

We aren't kids anymore, but every time I sit down to this table, with it's well-worn lines and slightly off-kilter chairs, I feel like I am. Like I'm back in sixth grade and it's Sunday night and there's no place on earth I would rather be than right here, at a kitchen table with a good, great friend.

Mad about Martha

'I wish, I wish, I wish I had been born a man.
So I could learn how to stand.
Up for myself.
Like those guys with guitars
I've been watching in bars
Stamping their feet
To a different beat.'

Yup. It's official. Martha Wainwright and I could have been separated at birth.

What the Grocer Saw

I walked into a grocery store yesterday afternoon to buy one of the little potted plants they had on sale next to the garden swings and lawn fertilizer. I was standing in line behind a man buying pitted olives and avocados, who was immediately preceded by a rather frazzled looking woman. I should mention that this is not my regular grocery store –I happened to pop into this one after a doctor’s appointment I just had in the area. This particular store is in a fairly affluent neighborhood, reminiscent of the 50’s era, where husbands leave for work by 7 a.m. and return by 6, to freshly-scrubbed children and a hot dinner on the table. The woman in line was also buying plants, hanging basket ones, as well as several food items. She was shopping alone, but the few extra pounds she was carrying hinted at a recent birth, and the wedding ring firmly stuck on her left hand confirmed her status for anyone who happened to be standing in her proximity with access to sunlight.

As the cashier rang up and bagged her items, the woman grabbed up the hanging plants and put them in her shopping cart and started to walk away. The man immediately in front of me in line called out to tell her she forgot all the bags with the food in them. She turned around, reached for the bags, and replied to the man, ‘oh, wow. My husband would have been sooo mad.’

Her reaction left me feeling dejected. Since when do women view themselves, their successes, their failures, their wins, losses, trip-ups and forgotten groceries, in terms of the inevitable male response? Or maybe the right question is, did they, did we, ever stop?

I walked out of the store with my plant. Just as my left foot hit the pavement on the other side of the electric door, I heard a ‘excuse me, miss.’ I turned around to face a smiling older gentleman, who was holding a twenty-dollar bill that had escaped my wallet and fluttered to the ground. ‘You dropped this,’ he said, extending his wrinkled, veined hand. As I reached for it and smiled my thank you, I tucked the bill back into my purse and thought to myself how strange it must be to be in a position where the loss of twenty dollars would immediately turn into a fear of male repercussion. And how liberating it is to know that the only person to be angry or frustrated with my mistakes and oversights, is me.

Friendly Files

"Do this with a friend!" the instructions read.

At this moment, Eileen is sitting on the floor of my new apartment. She looks disproportionately small, in her khaki shorts, surrounded by the planks of wood, nails, screws and brackets that will hopefully, some time this evening, be converted into a wall unit. I’m suddenly incredibly grateful to have a friend the instructions that came in the box claim are crucial to the wall unit building process. But it begs the question: What if you don’t happen to have a friend willing to spend four hours on a Tuesday night putting together pieces of cheap wood to house the television you will hardly ever watch anyway?

Our society organizes itself around needing other people. This isn’t to say we can’t go it alone, many of us try, and to some degree we succeed. But the need for connection, to reach out, to have somebody take you by the theoretical hand and say, ‘I want to go there with you,’ well, the overpowering fulfillment that sense of bonding provides can be toxic. And perhaps this is why we time and time again, enter into new relationships and friendships, full of renewed hope, despite or in spite of, our past failures.

Are we justified in ever counting on, ever truly relying on another person? Can we ever feel totally comfortable believing our well-being is entrusted to someone other than ourselves? I’m not sure. I remember having a friend in my life a few years back who said to me, "at the end of the day, anyone is capable of walking away and leaving you. Even me." And, true to his word, he did. Not exactly a romantic vision, but a realistic one. Are we ever safe in letting ourselves go, in letting our guards down, in exhaling the pressure and forging ahead while saying to ourselves, ‘I’m not alone, I have someone to share this with me." Again, I’m not sure.

What I do know, is that I now have a wall unit, standing in all its upright glory, in my living room. And that, I could not have done alone.

The Picture the Pumpkin Painted

I’m on a picture theme. This may, or may not be because I only tend to develop photos once or twice a year despite my tendency to drag a camera along nearly everywhere I go, and so when I finally rip open the package in eager anticipation to flip through the colourful chronicle of my life for the past six months, those pictures tend to make me feel a little nostalgic for some of those memories.
In this picture, Steve is standing beside a huge, towering pumpkin The vegetable is so big that its organgeness takes on an ominous feel in the photo. Steve is 52, fast approaching 53, and suffers from an intellectual handicap. When I was in school I took on a part-time job as a facilitator and he was my ‘client.’ I don’t work with Steve anymore, but he has remained a big part of my life, and a gentle, but solid reminder that the things I take for granted, like being able to balance a cheque book or strike up a conversation with a stranger, aren’t so easy for everyone. They aren’t easy for Steve.
On the day the pumpkin picture was taken, Steve and I had gone to pick apples. We do this every year, and even though the entire event takes only about an hour at the most, he looks forward to it with a magnitude of anticipation a young woman would reserve for her wedding day. As we were walking into the farm to pay for our apples, Steve shouted to me about how big the pumpkin standing outside the building was. Glances from blond-haired little girls whose grips tightened on their mother’s hands shot our way, paces were picked up once those same mothers took in his stain-splattered clothing, his wild grey hair sticking up in a hundred directions, each one fighting for dominance. Unaware, Steve made his way over to the pumpkin and I took out my camera and took two pictures of him standing in front of it. I had almost completely forgotten about this day, until, a few weeks ago, in my twice annual ritual, I ripped open the photos (in a box this time, there were so many) and there was Steve, standing beside his pumpkin. No one else is in the photo, the mother daughter duos had scurried away by this point. The sky is grey, and Steve is not smiling. It’s just him, and the pumpkin and as I took in his sad expression and the mud-splattered vegetable, I realized that the things I fit into my day planner in between gym visits and dinners with friends, are the only things in the day planners of people like Steve. That although underneath the photo of Steve were about 200 other pictures of me laughing with my girlfriends, me in Sweden, me in Boston, me in Vancouver. But for some people, a picture with a pumpkin, a really, really big pumpkin, is a highlight. It’s a memory.

The power of a smile

There is a picture on the bulletin board in my office. Often, when people come in and glance up at it, they ask why I have it up there, because it looks almost like an accidental photo. It isn’t well framed, neither of the girls in the picture are looking at the camera; they likely weren’t even aware the photo was being taken. But I kept this photo because in it, two of my closest friends, the girls I laughed with, whose hair I braided, who I had tea parties with and sleepovers where we'd eat so much we'd then lie on our sleeping bags and marvel at how much capacity our stomachs had to expand, the girls who went on to become the women who held me when my heart was broken, who packed up all my clothes in garbage bags when my longterm relationship ended and all I could do was stand helplessly by and cry, the girls who cheered me on when I graduated from university and when I got my first real job, these girls are in the picture and they’re laughing so hard there are tears welling in their eyes, and when I look up at this photo, I know, I believe, that I will be ok, that everything will be alright, because they are in my life. There is a power in friendship between women that surpasses all others. And we are so rich for it.