Whippets

Whippets are one of my favorite cookies, beaten out only narrowly by oreos. What makes them so special? It is a complicated convergence of a hard chocolate outer crust, which needs to be cracked and peeled to reveal a soft fluffy marshmallow centre sitting atop a not too sweet, but satisfyingly firm and crunchy graham cracker foundation.  I was shown recently the "proper technique" for cracking the outer layer, through a surprise attack whack on the forehead of your unsuspecting whippet eating companion.  

The forehead whacking guy is a new lover who likes to tell me how refreshingly normal I am. I think he means, not crazy, or not overly dramatic. I think he means resilient and balanced and independent.  I think he means rational. How normal these traits are, I don't know, but I know he means it as a compliment.   I keep warning him that he has just not seen my crazy yet. I am only half joking. People rarely see my crazy, unless they bump into it on day 22 of my cycle. I tend to hide it under a hard sweet layer of chocolate  exposing  it only semi anonymously in under- read blogs.

I do have a squishy marshmallow centre though. I noticed it today when I had to wrap a broken winged pigeon in a tea towel in front of my daughter and next door neighbors. They looked at me in awe a bit, as I calmly called for a shoe box and held the bird gently and firmly in the palms of my hands. They were relieved I was doing something, releasing them from obligation.

I knew he would die. I took him to the vet .  I asked them  to pretend they were going to save it in front of my kid, all the while aware that they were just going to euthanize him. Only once my daughter was safely plugged into some commercial free kid animation did I go out back,  curl up fetally in my hammock, and become intensely sad. I had had a client today, she had had some past trauma which was unspeakable, and she kept sitting bolt upright on my table with the same look in her eye that the pigeon had. She wouldn't speak either, except to say over and over again that she was sorry. I felt quite helpless, and the bird brought it all flooding in. 

The thing is there was a moment when I saw the bird plummet from the balcony upstairs, that I paused. I thought should I do something? Do I leave it to my cats to finish the job? Do I go into the house and close the door and pretend that this insignificant creature was not writhing in pain under my neighbor's porch? I really wanted to pretend it wasn't there. My solid, semi sweet graham cracker foundation would not allow me to walk away. It shored up the marshmallow and forced me into action. My client is coming back at the end of the week to try again. On the inside I am dreading it, wanting to refer her elsewhere. I keep seeing the bird. 

Ok so next blog will be a raunchy account of a threesome with two African Americans as illustrated through a racist oreo metaphor .. it will be so much more entertaining. (just joking, it will actually be about pirate cookies)

Evil

I just spent the last eight months of my life rehearsing a play about super villains in grad school. We did our 6 night run last week. It's all done and I feel like I should write about it. Not sure that I really want to write about it, which is  ironically mirroring my feelings about the play.

I don't want to be an actor when I grow up. I have decided. I always had a sneaking suspicion that I might, but it turns out I was wrong. Don't misunderstand me, I liked the people, I liked the script and I loved my costume. I just didn't like the INTENSE self doubt. I don't generally doubt myself. At least not with any real conviction, anyways.  I would almost say it was a flaw, my inherent lack of self doubt. Perhaps I should have more of it. Luckily I got a healthy dose last week.  I have taught classes, given speeches and pranced around on a stage in skin tight shiny silver pants, but memorizing lines I did not write was somehow different.

I think it is because I don't play well with others. I am the "i" in team. The wrong vowel. I got too wrapped up in when was MY next line, did I say it right, would the other actor be able to say theirs? Will I look like an idiot cause my fuck up, fucks up someone else. I like to take full responsibility for my fuck ups. If someone else's is riding on it, it makes me nervous. I personally, can accept failure, but being the weakest link in a group, freaks me the hell out.

Plus I knew the universe was mocking me again when my handy menstrual cycle app predicted a frowny faced PMS emoticon on opening night and little red period triangles on the rest of the run. One of my final lines in the play was, "That doesn't make any sense. Are you trying to say that when chicks get their periods they can't do shit?" To which my fellow actor responds, "Precisely!"  My role was that of an Uber-feminist with super strong hands, overblown intelligence and a complex about her lower class henchman family heritage. Really, I couldn't make up better irony, as I downed iron pills and belly breathed my way through hormonally inspired waves of nausea and back pain.

 This is not to say that I embarrassed myself. I mean, obviously I did... a little. Some nights more than others, and some nights not at all. I held my own most of the time. I even had a couple of really enjoyable performances. I liked the camaraderie, or whatever the fuck you call it when 12 people decide to jump on the same crazy bandwagon. But in truth, I am happy it is over. 

I wrote a joke in the play though. It got a laugh most nights. Strangely enough I never forgot those particular lines. I want my girl guide badge for acting now. Sew it on my sash and move on to the next challenge. Do they have a badge in Standup? What the hell is wrong with me? (mmm self doubt)

Show me Your Teeth

So i have decided to leave the soul searching neurosis this time to just go on a silly rant about the dentist. This year my teeth decided to stop putting up with my night clenching and shoddy flossing habits. They opted to fall apart..en mass. Six fillings, two root canals and several deep cleanings later I have formed a special relationship with my dentist.


My dentist is lovely. I would totally marry her. She is blond and sweet and she charges me way less then she should. She hates making me cry. And I do cry. Mostly because I have to deal with the bills and student dental insurance is.. well.. meager. Though you would be surprised how much pain can be had for 60% of $1500.00.


I feel for my dentist. People hate coming, she makes it as nice as she can. She has a lovely wall sized photo of a Costa Rican rope bridge to a lush island in front of the chair so you can pretend you are not there. They give you sunglasses. I am not sure if that is more for her than for me. They hide the tears. Still, I end up wearing a bright blue paper bib listening to soft jazz muzak waiting to be injected in the  palate  They couldn't design better humiliation and torture in a Chinese political prison, and no pair of sunglasses or escapist photographic scenery can change that fact. And you get to pay through the nose for the privilege.


I caught myself lying to my daughter today. She has to get a tooth pulled this weekend. She has shark teeth, baby ones who refuse to leave and big ones growing in behind. I told her , it's cool, the novocaine. It doesn't hurt and it makes you drool. I told her the story about how once I had work done on both sides of my mouth, so I was completely frozen. I could barely speak, like Dudley More in "10". I was walking home when I saw an elderly woman collapse in front of me. There was a traffic cop, right in the middle of the road and I yelled, "officer" but it came out drooly and slurred.. "othflicfluer, othflicfluer," I spat out like a stroke victim, gesticulating wildly at the sidewalk where the woman had fallen. The policeman ignored me, thinking I was some mentally challenged or ill person he just did not want to deal with. Fortunately some upstanding non, post op citizen got the cop's attention. It would be a funnier story if the cop hadn't been such an obvious dink.


How do I conclude this? By going to the bathroom and flossing, I guess. Then to bed with my sexy mouth guard so I can rest at  ease knowing if I take a punch to the face while sleeping, I won't get a concussion.

Metaphorical Dust Bunnies

My kid was not invited to a party last week and I emotionally imploded.  It turns out I am still 8 years old. In grade school. And miserable. Ok demons.. let's confront you.

When I was  kid I was very smart  and pudgy. I wasn't type II diabetes American obesity epidemic fat, I was 70s, boobies too early and chubby cheeked fat. I had a pair of jeans called Husky. I hate the word husky. There was this girl. She was a mean girl. I was her target for two years. I used to hide in the back of the library with Judy Blume so that I wouldn't have to deal with it, but she usually found me somewhere everyday and made my cry. I read a lot.

Years later I was working at my local pool and this girl, now an adult, showed up to swim. She recognized me instantly and her whole face transformed. She looked upset and remorseful and began to apologize. She told me it had haunted her, the way she treated me. Her parents were going through a nasty divorce and both her and her brother were assholes at the time. I told her it was all fine. I was fine. I had survived and it had honed my razor sharp wit and deep love of teenage novels. It did not kill me or scar me. At least not as badly as it seemed to scar her. That's what I thought at the time.

My daughter is in grade 2. She asked me if we could invite a friend swimming, so I called her mother. The mother said, oh. she is going to a birthday party. My kid overheard and her face crumpled. Everyone is going to x's party but me. X is one of my kid's closest friends. My heart stopped. What? Why weren't you invited? I felt tears burning, heart pounding, and I was instantly transported. I called this girl's mother. I couldn't stop myself. Why isn't she invited? The answer is simple. Because they are 8 year old girls and they use birthday parties as weapons...in the end she was invited and had a great time. This is not the point of my story.

The point of my story happened in my head as I tossed and turned in my bed that night. I imagined the next two years of my daughters life, feeling rejected and humiliated. I put my childhood on her and it broke my heart harder than I felt when it happened to me. I realized she was going to have to go through shit. Not exactly the same shit, but shit none the less. There was nothing I could do about it. There was nothing I should do about it.  It is an inevitable right of passage.

I could go off an a rant here about today's parenting and their hamster-ball like over protection of their future anxiety disordered children, but I wont. Mostly because I fell prey, prey to trying to smooth my daughter's road. Of trying to screw with the hurdles she should have to leap. Of using terrible metaphors. The thing is, my childhood made me who I am, resilient, funny, adaptable and a reader and writer. Would I wish it on her? There are scars that make you beautiful. Not all do though.

Food for Thought

I don't know if is is the kinda cold dismal spring we have been having or some iron deficiency inspired by my peri menopausal hemorrhaging, but the last month or so I have been feeling quite uninspired. Spring is in the air though and I went trolling for stories.

 One great story came from a client whose family is Greek. It's not really a story, it is more a description. She was talking about her childhood, her dad and animals. They were poor immigrants and lived in a tiny apartment. There were always all kinds of animals in her house, most of which ended up in a pot of some kind. We talked about eating lambs heads and eyeballs and how she came home to snapping crabs in her tub. Once her brother came in with a live chicken he found, this is in urban montreal in the 80s, not some rural village, and how her mum killed and cooked it.

She said she liked eating everything, everything except quail. I asked her why not quail? She said because it reminded her of pigeons. Especially her pet pigeon. Which her mum cooked and fed to her one day after it had croaked.

 Strangely enough, this was a funny story, a touching story. Both us us were tearing up laughing when she told me about it. It was a story about how her dad was a macho Greek man and her mum was a superwoman who watched over neighborhood kids to make ends meet and fed her family on nothing. It was a story of living without much money but with life all around you. And it was a fucked up story about being made to eat your pet. She was so poor she had to eat her pet. Seriously funny.

 I have been bitching and stressing about poverty this winter. It has stolen my sense of humour and quite possibly a portion of my sex drive. Spending an hour with this woman and having this conversation put things into focus for me. It sparked me back up. I do often wonder how I will make rent, but I got to see my kid ride her bike with total confidence and no training wheels today, then she read me a book. On Saturday I get to dress up like a unicorn and perform an awesome number on stage with girls dressed as dudes. I am in a play where I am a super-villain graduate student with fists of steel and I am currently pinned under a shit eating dog and two cats. I get to walk on the mountain on Thursday mornings and I do actually love my job.

 Oh..and I am getting a tax return, so I will not yet have to feed my daughter her dog.
Life is all around me too.

Stone Cold Fox

I seem to be reverting back to death. I am surrounded by it. Most people would say that is dark, and sad and scary, but I choose to have it all around me. I work with the group of grievers. Every Thursday morning we go for a walk on the mountain. It is a support group of sorts, the people come to be with each other and spend some time in one of the most lovely urban parks I have ever been in. A forest at the top of a mountain with the view of the city island. A big red fox lives there. He visits us sometimes, making us point and grin and notice a real live moment. He appears like Aslan's sarcastic brother, giving us a knowing and amused look. Life still exists it says, don't forget about magic.

I love this group. They are mostly men, which if you know anything about support groups you will understand how weird that is. There is a gentle giant ex pro football player, who is trying to recover from a broken heart at the death of his mum. There are some widows and widowers and a lovely urban hermit who has opted to come out into the world after loosing both parents in the space of two weeks. And there is one widow in particular, who I tend to mention, whose grace and humour and intelligence make me want to behave more accordingly.

Sometimes we talk about the weather, or a movie or a crying jag. We have coffee and the football player likes to bring sweet stuff treats, continually sliding pieces in front of me. Eat he says. Death has an effect. It makes people sad. It makes them ache. It makes them cry because it is irreversible. It takes time to learn to live with the absence. They come to us quite broken, and over the weeks we see them brighten, bit by bit. For some the group is the thing that lightens them, the new friendships, strangely enough, the laughter, the leaves, the trees, my shit eating dog. He comes with us and the men like to take his leash. Though they all get smiles when I let him run free as he dolphins thorough the snow.

I have a new love in my life and he has also been surrounded by death. But not by morbid choice like me. He is sweet. He thinks of things like what flowers he should grow in his garden for his mother who was recently diagnosed with cancer. Purple is a the colour of recovery he tells me. His thought to plant lambs ears so she could have something soft to touch melted my heart. He has a grandmother who is entering palliative care this week, and a dead father, and nephew, and the list goes on. He is American and we woo electronically. I want him to walk with us. I want somehow to show him the fox. There is still magic and beauty. A space is left when someone you love dies, it feels cavernous at first, but then it fills. It fills with people you would never have met otherwise. If you let it.

Good Girl

I signed the last of my divorce papers the other day. Now all I have to do is wait and see if a judge who looks at them in my absence agrees that its ok for me to be officially single again. The lawyer's assistant at legal aide says that they will and on April 8th I will be legally divorced.

It was a bizarre encounter, my last trip to legal aide. They are very nice, and they divorced me for free, so it seems there are advantages to being poor. The time before the last time, I sat in in the windowless meeting room staring at the 4 page document that outlined our irreconcilability, our ownership of nothing and our 50/50 split on everything including our daughter . It was very short, very concise and rather unimpressive for a piece of paper that was borne of years of angst and struggle and hurt feelings. I didn't really feel anything. Until. Until the sweet, well meaning Romanian legal secretary looked at me with such empathy and asked me if I was alright. I was. Then I wasn't. Eyes burning, I okayed the document and thanked her and left. As I got to the elevator I started to cry. No thoughts really, just an unstoppable cry. I got a text from a boy at that instant asking me how I was, so I texted back, that I was fine, but sad because of where I had just been.. in his cute French/English he returns, good, so you now are marriable. It made me laugh.

A week later I get a call from the lawyer. She is the third that has been assigned to me because they don't last long at legal aide, and here you have to wait a year for the divorce to come through. She told me the court date was set for the 14th, but that we should not go. We just had to sign some papers and the court would make the decision without us since everything was agreed to in the 4 page summary encasing the end of my marriage. So you mean I DON'T have to go get divorced on Valentine's Day? I asked. Because there is nothing I would rather do than witness the death of my relationship on such holiest of holidays. We both started to laugh.. and she commiserated that the choice of date was less than ideal. Personally I thought it was perfect. I applaud the universes endless capacity to sarcastically poke fun at my failed relationships.

So there I was, two weeks after signing the agreed upon paper back in that same windowless room. So that's it? I asked the Romanian sweet girl. Yes, she smiled. Unless the court decides to say something, but they won't. And this is where I felt it get bizarre. The girl thanked me and said, you were such a great couple to work with, so easy and polite. Your ex too, she said, he asked good questions, was polite and nice, you two were great to divorce. So amicable, she remarked. I wish more clients were like you two. I found myself accepting the compliment, on behalf of myself and my ex, quizzically smiling. How do I feel about being great at getting divorced? A heretofore undiscovered talent of amicable pretense. Well, I said, you need to be a grown up right?

So it is done, and I did it well I guess. So did he so I give him that. Am I now marriable? I don't fucking think so.