Domestic Sunday: The Month of Pumpkin Beer Begins

There are three ways of finding out whether it's the fall or not - check the calendar, look at the leaves, or see if a multitude of pumpkin beers have overtaken the liquor stores. I never heard of pumpkin beer until I moved to Montreal, and then all the talk was about the St-Ambroise Citrouille. And that beer felt like it was an urban legend, selling out within days and never ending up in my belly. Now there are so many pumpkins beers available, that I could try one a week and still have bottles leftover by October 31st.

So let's get things started with Mill Street's Nightmare on Mill Street. This is a wheat beer, brewed with pumpkin puree, pie spices and vanilla extract. The vanilla can be smelled as soon as the bottle is opened, but doesn't come through as aggressively on the taste. It's almost all spice, with some pumpkin knocking about. I would like it to feel a little heavier on the tongue - take away the flavour, and it sits as lightly as a soda pop. I would like my pumpkin beers to be a little more robust than that, if they're going to take me through the fall and right into winter.

Book Pile for September 29

1. Rageful Reading: Days of Destruction Days of Revolt, Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco
2. Nobel-Certified Novel: The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing
3. The Anti-Downton Abbey: Some Do Not... and No More Parades, Ford Madox Ford
4. Essays from My New Heroine: Beginning to See the Light, Ellen Willis

The Frankly Creepy Truth About Charlie: The Stoker Trailer

Having just watched Shadow of a Doubt, the trailer for Stoker felt intriguingly familiar. The uncle is just as sinister, but the incest is more textual, and Nicole Kidman's mad mom is a neat perversion of the apple-pie perfection of the family in Hitchcock's film. In addition to the content, the talent behind Stoker might be worth the ticket. The director is Park Chan-wook. His Oldboy may be one of the most operatic, beautiful and straight-out looney tunes films ever shown, which is already good news. And the script is written by Wentworth Miller. Prison Break Wentworth Miller. He may have never been one of my top celebrity crushes, but I can recognize his attractiveness on an intellectual level. And now that he's made his (surely) beautiful (and well-manicured) fingers type out a screenplay, I can't decide whether I'm impressed or jealous. On the one hand, he didn't have to. On the other, it's all a little bit greedy.

Post-Rush Daze

I... live!!

Barely. 

But still, here I am. Not completely bald, at least not yet, but very, very tired. And more than a little hateful of humanity. I used to pride myself on my excellent sense of customer service. Although I may have been confused or stressed out by customers and their needs, I would always remember that we were all just people, paddling the good boat Life through some rocky, rocky waters. 

Fuck that. Ready the missiles, and point them at the battleship Life. It's full of horrible people, and must be brought to the bottom of the ocean. Alright, I'm not completely homicidal. But after 12-14 hour work days where you don't even take a lunch, things continue to go wrong, every Quebec vendor is a separatist about sending you your damn books, and some students are completely helpless, you start to get snappish. Which is why I'm sitting in a cafe right now, instead of logging more time at the job. There were tons of little things around the store I could have done, from following up with certain professors, to re-organizing our used book storage, but it all probably would have ended with me chucking a textbook at somebody's head. 

And so I'm taking a day off to remember what it was like to read, knit, and watch X-Men on Netflix. Long live the weekend.

The Baldening

Readers, a confession: I AM BALDING. My friends and family insist that it's nothing but the product of my Woody Allen-esque levels of anxiety, but whatever.  What do they know? I've googled "female thinning hair," so I'm an expert. Clearly. But between the assurances of my family, and the fear mongering of the internet, it levels out into a sense of dread every time I look in a mirror. My hair used to be many things- mostly frizzy, unmanageable, occasionally achieving a state of curly perfection - but it was never thin. The bathtub was clogged within weeks when I moved to my last place, and I've broken off comb teeth in my hair.

Where did it all go? Let's say it was a combination of work stress and... lupus (thanks, Internet!), moving on to figuring out what to do when the final hair falls from my head. Comic books have taught me that an exciting career in super villainy is open to me. Perhaps Lex Luthor wasn't born bad, he just went bald. Though I guess Professor X is a positive role model. I'm trying to think of any bald female comic book characters, and I'm mostly thinking of aliens. In movies, there are plenty of bald ladies, but they're also sick bald ladies, destined to improve the lives of others before they pass on in a most videogenic way. I won't be one of them. I don't have a deadly disease, and even if I did, I would like to spend my final days drunkenly berating everyone who ever wronged me. Pop culture has left me adrift. What should I do, readers? Charge fifty cents a rub?