5 Bad Things about North America

Now, before you get all offended, let me say that I don’t think North America is a bad place. In fact, I think it compares favourably to most of the world. A similar list made for other world regions is likely to include items like Famine, War, and Mysterious Incurable Tropical Diseases that Make You Itch All Over the Place and Then Die. Makes the list below seem kind of appealing. However, North America has its share of irritating annoyances. So here are my top five, along with the ways I cope with them. If you have better solutions – share with me, I wanna know!

When Overprotected Children Grow Up

Have you ever found yourself sitting on a bus and grinning ear-to-ear: “Hey, look at me, I’m in a bus all by myself, going someplace on my own!” If you have, you were perhaps ten or thirteen at the time. Unless, like me, you had overprotective parents, which may very well mean that you still delight in riding the bus unaccompanied. At twenty six. Thirty five. Sixty nine.

Finish the Sentence

A nice way to kill a little time:

1. My uncle once: was a officer cadet, but quit almost right away.
2. Never in my life: had I put on make-up.
3. When I was five: my family moved into a cool new place.
4. High school was: a bit lonely, but not bad.
5. I will never forget: many things I wish I could forget.

 

Why Drinking Strong Black Tea Before Bed is a Bad Idea

This is categorized as humour, but maybe it shouldn’t be, because this is all true story. Unfortunately. The meeting (see below) is in two hours, and you can just imagine just how creative and eloquent I’m going to be.

23:15 – Drink a nice big cup of nice strong black tea. With cheesecake. Mmmm….

00:00 – Think that it is time to go to bed because I have an important meeting tomorrow afternoon.

01:12 – No, really!

01:46 – Go to bed. Alarm set for 08:00.

02:11 – Hmm, it’s taking me longer than usual to fall asleep tonight.

02:13 – Okay, sleep already.

02:16 – SLEEP!!!!

02:58 – I relax my muslces one by one… I am perfectly relaxed… My arms and legs are getting heavy and warm… My torso is getting heavy and warm… My whole body is heavy and warm… I am going to sleep…. sleep…. sleeeeeeeep…… sleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep…..

03:17 – Okay, that didn’t work.

03:22 – I once read about people with an extremely rare disorder. Their brain suddenly decides that one of their body part is not theirs. They actually wake up in the morning and feel someone’s leg is in their bed. They get terrified, try to throw it out and end up following it to the floor. Then, to their utter shock, they discover that this foreign strange leg is actually attached to them! I think I’m close to feeling that. I’m hyperaware of all my body parts and their tiniest movements, and they feel like jiggelty-jiggling rainbow-coloured creepy-crawlies shifting quanticary waves through the paradygmuses of omnipermeating zephyrous marshmallows. Aka extremely weird.

03:23 – I am also hyperaware of all the squeaks and creaks in the house. *startled* Was that a burglar?! *listen intently*

03:33 – No, I think it’s not a burglar.

03:52 – “ZzzzZzzzZZZzzzz…..” “ZZZZzzzzzZzzzzzZZz…” “ZzzzzzZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzZZZZzz… No, that’s not my snoring (I wish). That’s my boyfriend’s. It’s not very loud, but since the tiniest noise puts me in full alert mode (the opposite of shut-eye mode), it really bothers me. *give bf a good shove to get him to stop snoring*

03:53 -*another shove*

03:54 – *another shove*

03:55 – *another shove* Bf wakes up and asks me wtf I’m doing.

04:00 – Bf kindly goes away to sleep on a couch downstairs. Awww, he’s so considerate. Maybe this will help me fall asleep?

04:11 – Nope. Twist and turn. Reset alarm for 09:00.

04:17 – *chirp* *chirp* *chirpity-chirp-chirp-chirp!* Blasted blimey birds! There are a lot of them in that huge tree outside, and they are obnoxiously loud. And apparently 04:17 is their idea of “time to get up”. This neighbourhood needs more cats.

04:18 – Pull pillow over head to drown out bird noises. The noises disappear but this is a kinda uncomfortable position.

04:19 – Assume another position. It is comfortable, but bird noises leak through. Revert to the 04:18 position.

05:00 – Come on, by this time my worst insomnias usually tire me out enough to make me sleepy!

05:15 – Get up. Heck, I’m not even sleepy! Work to prepare for the important afternoon meeting.

06:58 – The meeting preparation is complete and I am feeling just a leeeltle bit drowsy. Let’s try this whole bed thing again. Reset alarm for 10:00.

07:07 – Come on!

07:28:53 – Yes… yes, I can feel it. Oh, yeah, baby! I’m coming! I’m com… AHEM! I mean, I’m falling asleep! My legs and arms do start feeling kind of heavy and relaxed! I’m drifting off… drifting off… In five seconds I will be entering the blissful realm of Morpheus!

07:28:57 – “Hey there! Get up. Your mom’s here!” Argh! Yes, she was coming over this morning since our place is on her way to work (don’t ask).

07:31 – “Hey daughter! Why are you still in bed? You told me you would be up by 7:30!” *grumble something back and turn away*

07:58 – The voices downstairs die down. Door slams. Bye, mommy.

08:19 – Who are these people in my bedroom? And why am I so worried about a high school algebra exam in the afternoon? I am not even in school anymore… Oh, wait! I’m asleep! ASLEEP! That’s awesome! At least I’ll get a couple of hours of snoozing in. Better than nothing.

08:24 – “Hey! Aren’t you getting up?! I thought you had important things to do today!” My boyfriend knows I tend to oversleep sometimes. How kind of him to make sure I don’t miss my meeting. *grump!*

08:55 – I think the people are back in my bedroom. I must be asleep again. Good night.

10:00 – *ring!* *ring!* And good morning! Go pour myself some black tea to fully wake up and face the day!

Ole! Ole-ole-ole!

Ever have trouble finding the first sentence for your blog post or some other piece of writing? I’m having this problem today, so I’ll cheat and start with a sentence right off a glossy tourist brochure: “Toronto is a very diverse and multicultural city.” Now let’s just hope they don’t nail me for plagiarism.

These brochures, by the way, typically contain nothing but most blatant sugar-coated lies. In fact, I’m convinced the tourism industry only survives because locals typically don’t read tourist-oriented stuff about their own region. Otherwise they’d end up so impressed with the place they live that they would really question the point of ever going anywhere else, especially in the wake of the oil prices, and hence travel costs, shooting through the roof lately.

But the statement I chose to start my today’s post with is, surprisingly, very true. I’d be hard-pressed to name an ethnicity that doesn’t have a few representatives living in our city. One (very welcome) side effect of this is the diversity of our local restaurant scene. Another is a huge fan base for the world and European soccer cups. Just wrap your head around this: when Toronto Raptors made the playoffs last year, I could barely find a pub that would show the series with sound on. But walk the downtown streets now that Euro 2008 is in progress, and every drinking establishment is packed with folks cheering for 22 guys from across the ocean chasing a round object across a lawn.

If you think that this post is about to spin into a rant about how North Americans should watch more basketball and less soccer, you guessed wrong. Cause I just happen to be a part of this huge fan base, rooting, of course, for the amazing Russian team. (Vperyod, Rossiya!!!) No, the rant is going to be about something completely different. Namely about what the fact that if you missed watching a game live, you have zero hope of remaining ignorant of the result. Which just ruins any attempt to enjoy watching the game recorded.

You see, I have to go to work. I don’t know what all those lazy underemployed bums are doing watching TV on a Saturday afternoon and why they’re not working like me. But twice already on the way from work I witnessed flocks of fans waving flags and cars with flags attached honking their horn, which spoiled all the suspense by making it quite clear who the winner was. So this Thursday I’m doing the only sensible thing – calling in sick and heading to a pub to watch Russia take on Spain in the semifinal. And if the Russians win, look for me on College Street – I’ll be waving the flag. Ole ole!

Pasta Cracks Me Up

A country’s cuisine can often offer revealing insights into the national character. Decadent French food could only have been created by the pleasure-loving sensual French. But take one bite out of anything an English family serves for supper, and you’ll know that here you have a nation of self-denying stoics who don’t heat their houses in winter for the purpose of building character and whack their school children with rulers. I won’t say anything about American cuisine here; firstly for the fear of offending the largest chunk of my readership, and secondly because “American cuisine” does not exist, since what Americans choose to put through their digestive systems every day does not qualify as a “cuisine” anyway. Instead, I’ll pick on Italians. (Doesn’t everyone love to pick on Italians?)

I’ve always wondered what their cuisine – and more precisely its linguistic aspect – says about them. We are supposed to marvel at the fact that Eskimos have several hundreds of words for snow (which apparently isn’t even a fact at all). But we are not at all surprised when a nation has a comparable number of words to describe what’s essentially the same dish.

Consider a tomato. If I choose to cut it into slices I make it into a sliced tomato. If I cut it up into little cubes, it’s a chopped tomato. If a fifth grader slips it into his teacher’s chair when the teacher isn’t looking, in all likelihood it soon becomes a squished tomato (and if we’re in England the fifth grader gets whacked by a ruler). However in every instances we recognize that a tomato is a tomato is a tomato.

Now consider a sheet of pasta dough. If an Italian mamma cuts it into long flat strips about 0.4 inches wide, it becomes tagliatelle. If she chooses to make the strips 0.3 inches wide instead, she gets fettuccine. If she wants to do a real intricate precision job and go all the way down to 0.15 inches, then little Giuseppe is having linguine for supper tonight. And of course if she’s feeling kinda lazy – to hell with all the cutting! Just stack those sheets up, and you’re treating the family with a completely different dish! Lasagna! And don’t even get me started on what happens when she decides to get all fancy and roll it into balls, twist it into spirals, twirl it into cylinders, and otherwise deform it in a myriad of different ways.

If you are a spaghetti eater of any nationality and hold a special affinity for pasta dishes, you might be tempted to argue that this linguinistic phenomenon is a tribute to Italian creativity and poetic soul. Those who dislike pasta might hold a diametrically opposed view: that Italians ultimately lack creativity to come up with more than one dish, and they attempt to disguise this embarrassing fact by calling this one dish 350 different names. I think it’s just clever marketing.

As anyone in marketing will tell you knows but will never admit to you, people love to have an appearance of a choice. Whether they actually have a choice is irrelevant as long as you manipulate them into thinking they do (which is much easier than actually coming up with a variety of choices that serve consumers’ true needs). Example: fill the market with hideous squishy sandals in a billion different colours, and suddenly the customer is debating “fuchsia vs. canvas pantone” rather than “hideous squishy sandals vs. reasonable footwear”. At this point I would elaborate on how this applies to pasta, but I am rather hungry, so I’ll wrap this post up in a hurry and go make me some pappardelle. Or am I more in the mood for gnocchettoni zitoni tonight?..

Dogs Are to Cats Like Internet is to TV

There are two types of people in the world: the dog people and the cat people. I mean, of course there are also people who don’t care for pets at all, and people whose affection is split equally between the canines and the felines. But the former ones are evil and the latter ones are statistical aberrations, so we’ll ignore them in this discourse.

Ever since I was a teeny tot, I knew that I was definitely a dog person. Unfortunately this meant that for a long time I suffered from a “dog person inferiority complex”. It tends to be caused by the theory (developed and perpetuated primarily by the cat people, no doubt) that those who prefer pooches to pussies are social rejects secretly craving world domination. Thus the qualities they’re looking for in their pet are unreserved admiration and slave-like obedience, rather than self-respect and independence. Anybody who’s actually ever spent any time around dogs knows that the rumours of their “slave-like obedience” are mucho exaggerated. (Ditto for cats and “independence”.) However, since I was indeed a geeky social outcast from kindergarten through university, I actually subscribed to this offensive theory and felt bad about myself.

But don’t worry, dog people! That theory is wrong. I realized today, as I was watching TV and loathing the process, that it’s not “obedience” and “blind admiration” that I’m looking for in a pet. It is basic interactivity. A dog listens and responds to your voice and gestures. A cat pretty much stares blankly right through you. They just forgot to build that feature into cats. Oops.

Sure, you can get a cat to interact with you. Attempting to wash a cat, for example, would probably result in more interaction than you are ready to handle. But is this the kind of interaction you’re looking for? It’s like trying to interact with a TV by pounding it with a hammer. Sure, things would happen, and they would be a direct result of your actions. But that’s hardly a reason to call TV an interactive medium.

But with dogs, my friend, your input (words and actions) produces output – both immediate and long-term. And the output is not necessarily slave-like obedience – at all. Different actions produce different reactions in different dogs. Every dog is like an exciting computer game that you have to figure out. What makes its tail wag? How can I teach it not to pee on the floor? What strategy do I need to employ to avoid being jerked around by the leash? How do earn its trust and get it to love me (awww)?

So all you cat people who tried to belittle me for my canine addiction, I have a theory to throw right back at ya. You are just lazy bums who sit on the couch all day and waste your life watching stuff, be it TV or cat. And we puppy lovers are active minds that need mental stimulation. Just like our favourite pets… ’cause while you’re figuring out a way to train Fido to sit on command, he’s figuring out a way to train you to feed him treats on a sit. That’s why he likes you so much, by the way – he enjoys the basic interactivity in his pet too. *wink*

What Are You Looking For?

Do you get your browser to save all the little snippets you type into various fields? Things like URLs and search strings. I do. And if you ever manage to get a hold of my laptop and start typing anything into the Google search bar, you’ll be pretty amused with some of the drop-down search suggestions. Heck, I am constantly pretty amused at them, as in “Gee, why on earth was I looking for THAT?” So I decided to conduct a little experiment by typing in each letter of the alphabet, checking out all my Google searches that started with that letter, and picking out the ones with the biggest WTF? factor. I find the results random enough to share them with the rest of the blogosphere. Just the kind of quirky goodness I love to stumble upon on other people’s blogs:

a annual physical useless Someone’s obviously not very excited about going for check-ups…

b bacterial abscess …even when one seems to be very much in order.

c chop them down to size YEAH!

d do squids feel pain A burning question someone just had to ask, right? I was quite surprised to learn, actually, how little is known about pain as experienced by animals, especially when the animals in questions are not mammals.

e ecocab Cool things – check ‘em out.

f five minute miles Not likely… NOT likely. Unless it’s cycling we’re talking about and not running.

g genital piercing No, I’m not contemplating getting any!

h huge bumblebee hovering near my house Terrifying, isn’t it?

i i am a pilot afraid of flying Gee… a career change might be in order?

j jogging minutes per km No, come on, whom are you kidding? You ain’t gonna take up jogging… Getting yourself out of bed is a great achievement as it is.

k kitty hawk Was it the supercarrier or the town I was looking up? No clue.

l latitude and longitude Don’t laugh at me here, be honest: you confuse them all the time too, doncha?

m making money on the internet Ahahahaha… Mua ha ha ha ha… *slaps knee* Like, DUDE! Get real.

n nether This word is inappropriate. :-P

o out of breath while eating Are you still trying to convince yourself that the annual medical is useless?

p penis Short and sweet. Actually, I don’t know if “short” is a good adjective to use with that noun.

q quad There was only one starting with a q.

r razor bumps Ouch.

s sucks a big one Sure does.

t types of departure Hanging yourself is one way…

u umpty That’s A LOT.

v video granny crossing the road Have you seen that one? I got a good chuckle out of it.

w why did i get married If you have to ask… it was probably for a wrong reason.

x No searches starting with x! Disappointing! I thought everyone searched for xxx videos, at least.

y yqa atis Do you ever search for random strings of alphanumeric characters just for fun?…

z No searches staring with z either. I need to get more addicted to search engines

If you want to see what the rest of the world is looking for, this blogger has kindly provided a summary.

Mirrors Are Scary

No, it’s nothing to do with fat or wrinkles.

When I was a little kid, making scary faces in the mirror was part of my morning routine. The opposite of an early riser, I needed a jolt to wake me up, and I was, you see, too young to start a caffeine addiction. So halfway through my tooth-brushing session I’d open my foaming mouth, make my fingers into claws, and would start approaching the bathroom mirror while staring intently at my reflection and producing a soft but menacing howl. About a quarter of an inch away from the mirror my nerves would give out, and I would run screaming from the bathroom to finish my tooth-brushing in the kitchen (no mirrors there). Then I would be awake enough to face the day.

Somewhere around my early teenage years the mirrors lost their mysterious terror and turned into mostly benign objects (with the exception of making my nose look decidedly too big). Lately, though, the suspense has been making a comeback. There is something very spooky about those smooth reflective glassy planes.

Check it out for yourself today, or better yet tonight. Go to your bathroom and start looking into the mirror. At first your thoughts might run along the lines of “I need to go to the gym more often” or “Shit, did I really walk around all day with lipstick smeared all over my cheek and not a single freaking bastard had the decency to point it out to me?” Shhh… Relax. Just look. Just keep looking.

It will start as a mild unease. You’ll brush it off with a little, not-even-nervous-yet smile that your mirror twin will flash right back at you. But as you keep looking, the sense of unease will become more pronounced. You know it’s only your own reflection. But the way it’s staring at you starts sending shivers down your spine. And as if that wasn’t spooky enough, as you keep staring into those unblinking eyes in the mirror, you notice something in the depth of the reflected room… some almost imperceptible movement… light and darkness playing tricks with your mind… You shift your gaze to look just over and past your twin’s shoulder… and you notice that your twin is nervously peering over yours as if something was creeping up behind you..

And then you say “Enough of this nonsense!” (you’re too grown up and not scared enough to scream), slam the bathroom’s door, march into the kitchen, splash two fingers’ worth of scotch into a glass and flip the TV on. And when it’s time to go to bed you convince yourself that you’re too tired to brush your teeth tonight. And the next day you wake up, smile at yourself in the mirror, and post on your blog that mirrors actually aren’t scary at all and some people let their imaginations run way too wild over nothing.

Good night. :-)

How to Get 100 Bucks for Nothing. Or Not.

If you are an American, or have close American relatives (in dead or alive condition), read on – this could make you rich. Not likely (wink), but it’s worth a try. Do you know that there over 32 billion dollars of unclaimed money in the U.S. that’s lying around and just waiting to be claimed by rightful owners? Statistically, that’s a bit over a hundred bucks per one American citizen. The best part? You can search for your name for free.

Of course out of curiosity I simply had to type in my boyfriend’s name (he is a expatriate yankee currently residing in Canuckistan). Apparently among this vast 32-billion mountain is a tiny heap of cash (right around a 100 bucks, though they would not give an exact figure) that belonged to his now deceased mother and which is now supposed to be rightfully his. If only now he assembles a thick wad of supporting materials to prove that this woman was indeed his mother and he was indeed supposed to inherit all her dough, he can expect a hundred bucks minus the cost of postage stamps.

Canucks can search here, though our country holds a puny $200 million in unclaimed funds… that’s under ten bucks per person. That’s because Canadian unclaimed accounts eventually expire, unlike American ones that are kept indefinitely. No fair.