iBuy It

Tomorrow is the first day of the rest of my life. Because tomorrow is the day I will finally break down and buy a smartphone. Soon I will be Instagram-ing photos of all of my meals and using the word "app" as if it was a form of punctuation. Or whatever it is that kids do these days - I have been so steadfast in my self-imposed technological dungeon, where I get lost traveling to new places, never know a restaurant's Yelp rating, and can't resolve simple trivia questions, to really know what people do with these things. I'm sure they're awesome. I'm sure eventually my hand will grow around my iPhone, and it will sense my every urge, and then tweet it. But before I forget what my life was like pre-iPhone, let us take a moment to mourn my life B.P. Yes, it was filled with hours of tedium and confusion, but also the pleasures of getting lost along the way to a bike store, scurrying across a Victoria highway, and running into a pair of quail bobbing along the road.

Coming Out (Musically)

Back when I toiled in the pits of porno-doom, everybody at the office was convinced that I was an out and proud lesbian. As a lazy heterosexual, who didn't want to end up like Tom Cruise - protesting a little too much - it took a while to deny the reports. And I didn't help myself by reading Patricia Highsmith in the break room. Memories of the saddest twentysomething flirtation with lesbianism ever - all of the labels, none of the sex - came rushing back today.

Back then, I made the mistake of mentioning to my deskmate Will, the hero of my life and the only legitimately gay guy there, that the night before had featured a kd lang binge. He immediately set to cackling. "You're not helping yourself," he chortled. Well, if not helping myself means denying kd, I'll march in your damn parade. I've always felt like music snobs look down on her for some reason. Which is ridiculous. Vocally she's a ringer for Patsy Cline, and her Hymns from the 49th Parallel is a 11-song defense of the cover as art form. That's where you'll find the song I've been playing all day, her take on Joni Mitchell's "A Case of You." So let go of your pretensions, and give in to a Sunday morning of perfectly wrought melancholy. You can have happy brunches next week.

In the Cards

A few days ago, this landed in my inbox:

Subject: It's Time for Your Tarot Reading

$20 is all it takes to get a reading by UofT's renowned tarot reader. (Really! Look…Proof that I'm renowned! http://www.hrandequity.utoronto.ca/new/otc2/otcwdk.htm)

As always, 100% of the proceeds are in support of UTM's United Way campaign.

My first reaction was something along the lines of "Ah! Spammers!" Then I realized it was coming from the university listserv, at which point my reaction was something like "Ah! Foucauldian spammers!"

Once I realized it was on the level though, I was intrigued. In spite of my skeptical nature and schoolgirl crush on science, I own a tarot deck. Then again, if you were ever an awkward girl in high school, who had rented The Craft on VHS, you probably own a tarot deck too. It was the reader's endearing profile that eventually tipped me into asking for an appointment. If I couldn't spend time with a comic book-loving knitter and write the whole thing off as charitable giving, what the heck is the point of being alive? And, on that note, my life is/was a big hot mess, so maybe the cards would have the answers.

On the man front: I probably won't have a serious relationship in the next year, and I tend to focus on unattainable men. This last fact was indicated by the three of cups, which depicts a man gazing fixedly on a cup's mirage, ignoring the two decent ones at his feet. This, of course, was hardly news to me. In fact, the cup-o-vision has a name, which I won't share. I've also been neglecting my health. And the bad news didn't stop there. The cards also revealed that A FRIEND WOULD BETRAY ME. Will it be one of you? If it's not, and I get married and get in shape during the coming year, I am totally demanding a $20 refund from the United Way.

Bus Love

In the interests of my own emotional survival, I've cultivated a bus crush. If I take the bus to work at a certain time, or back eight hours later, I'll see him. Pale, bearded, probably undernourished, he'll be reading a book. I'll open mine in sympathy.

After six weeks, that's the level of intimacy we've achieved.

And I'm fine with that.

If I actually had to talk to him, and find out what he was reading, it could ruin everything. He could be gay, married, gay and married, or worst of all, be in the middle of reading a terrible book. My love is strong and true, but probably not strong enough to survive Atlas Shrugged. I would also have to confront the fact that my passion is one of convenience. Ever since I slung books at my university bookstore, I've nurtured crushes on coworkers, as a patch whenever the work, or even the paycheque, was not enough. Unfortunately, this didn't work out so well in Victoria, where I had no office options, few local options, and probably ended up fixated on a longboarder because of all that. I have a similar problem with my current job, but the Commuting Reader seems to be the solution.

I just pray he never buys a car.

Domestic Thursday: Black Creek Pumpkin Ale

Photo by Ally

My fridge is still looking festive, thanks to more pumpkin beer and a particularly spoooooky dessicated swiss chard. Woooooo. 

That should probably be thrown out, though I will hold on to Black Creek Historic Brewery's Pumpkin Ale. You may remember Black Creek from my December outing. As a brewery headquartered in a historical village, it's dedicated to preserving the brewing traditions of the 19th century - for ales produced on-site, at least. LCBO-sourced bottles like this one are made in a commercial space, to meet demand... and because sticking on labels using Ye Olde Flour Paste would have been tedious. 

Unlike Mill Street's entry, this one is strictly barley-based. My fellow beer questers, Aleks and Ally, tried both. Aleks found Mill Street's to be very fizzy and a little more bitter, while she tasted citrus in Black Creek's, and liked it better. I would agree. The spices seemed better balanced in this brew, and I even thought there was something woodsy about it, before the beer kicked in and reminded me that I was being unbearably pretentious. As Aleks pointed out, neither tastes all that much like pumpkin, though both smell like a fresh-baked pie. Thirty days later, I hope to figure out if that's because pumpkin is such a subtle taste to infuse, or if the spices overwhelm everything else. Cheers to research. 

In Which My Toe Gets Bitten Off in Shallow Water...

This past weekend I was in the throes of the "afternoon drunks," and decided to start an online dating profile.

It was a decision I regretted within an hour.

That was how long it took for some dude, high on male privilege and/or life, to message me an analysis of my personality based on my dating profile, ending with "How can you be more idealistic than you look if you don't even have a picture up lol" First, I didn't have time to put one up, second, I'm not very photogenic, third FUCK YOU and fourth lol, YOU ASSHOLE.

Anyway, I kept my profile up, lol, in spite of this small setback. Pinball Mike from 3030 met his current girlfriend through a dating site, and Pinball Mike is pretty great. Maybe I could meet the generic, Mr. Pibbs-version of Pinball Mike! So I felt somewhat optimistic when I got a message from another potential suitor. The hat was questionable, but at least it was clear that he had taken the time to read my profile. Before messaging him back I thought I would read it too. Bam. Married, and in an open relationship.

I will die alone.

No one will mourn my passing.

Except maybe the cats.

But all is not lost. When I texted my conclusions to my friend S, we agreed to die alone... together.

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.