Pillow Blog: 5 CBC Personalities I Thought Would Go Down Before Evan Solomon

In the tradition of the Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book, here's a Pillow Blog: an observational list on some subject or another. In this case, five CBC personalities I thought would go down before Evan Solomon, with their absurd potential malfeasance:

• Ian Hanomansing for stealing all that maple syrup that went missing in Quebec
• Rex Murphy for drug smuggling
• Peter Mansbridge for running a fight club behind his Stratford home
• Wendy Mesley for importing knockoff designer bags
• IdeaswithPaulKennedy for stealing copper wire from the recording studio

And yet, somehow, it's Evan Solomon for making art deals on the side. The code names are a fun touch though, "the Guv" for Mark Carney, and "Anka" for Jim Balsillie. If I ever buy art from a CBC host, I want my code name to be "El Camino" and the host to be either Steven or Chris, but not both. Anyway, this whole affair is doing a great deal to restore my interest in Evan Solomon, an interest formerly drained by nearly every episode of Power and Politics I ever tried to watch.

Hot Takes: My Job Application to become a Globe and Mail Columnist

Margaret Wente and I have reached an understanding. I avoid reading her columns and pretend that she doesn't exist; she doesn't care to know that I exist. In this way, we have achieved harmony, balance, and a meaningful reduction in the number of times I cry blood while reading her column. 

But sometimes, in spite of myself, I read it. Usually because she's said something so outrageous that my friends will complain about it, and they'll ask me if I've read it too. I tell them about the understanding, but even as I say that I won't be giving the Globe and Mail the pleasure of my clicks, I inevitably click on her column. 

Before the blood tears come, there's at least one thing that always gives me satisfaction. As a young women with a university degree in the humanities, I'm used to being somewhere in the third quartile of Canada's societal power rankings. Jobs are scarce, good pay almost extinct; I occupy so little space in the public consciousness that many Torontonians will try to walk right through me on a sidewalk and are shocked when my shoulder checks them. However, in Wente-land, this is not the case. There, I am part of a dangerous cabal plotting to rule over a ruined Canada with not one but two iron fists. One is poised over a Rape Culture Alert button, while the other repeatedly checks the "sociology" field instead of "petroleum engineering" on every university application. 

Margaret Wente had us, or at least a particular segment of us, in her sights again last Tuesday. She managed to build a whole column around the presentations at this year's Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities without attending any of them. This is the columnist's equivalent of giving a book report without having done the required reading. The offences she found at Congress included daring to critically study video games (an industry worth an insignificant 25 PLUS BILLION DOLLARS) and making "the virtues of everything indigenous" a theme (a particularly galling statement since the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was wrapping up in Ottawa at the same time as Congress was happening). I suppose gender is never explicitly mentioned in her column, but notice what's in the titles of the presentations she mentions by name ("breasts", "female sex tourism", "lesbians") and check who is presenting them. Add in the context of Wente's previous column on the gender wage gap, and... the subtext is practically text. 

Oh, what could I say to Wente about this column if we ever stared each other down in an elevator? That people who worked hard to research and prepare for their presentation deserve more than a glib dismissal by a known plagiarist? That it doesn't make sense to complain about scholars focusing too little on Northrop Frye and Jane Austen when they are hardly "practical studies that will pay off in a good career" like she praises the "aspirational children of new Canadians" for pursuing? That SHUT UP, WENTE, YOU HACK??? No, cathartic as the latter might be, I'm not going to beat her. I'm going to join her!

Because if she can make a living wage with her contrarian word spew (eruptions occur twice a week), I want the same deal. It's only fair. We both have English degrees, so she knows I am fit for nothing else. Here are the three writing samples I'll be sending to the Globe:

Column Preview #1

Column Title: Young Women: What Is to Be Done?

Synopsis: I don't trust young women. They're asking to be treated like real people, and one of them was mean to me once. It's okay, I can say this stuff because I am also a young woman. 

Hot Take: Young women have it easy, it's young white men who have it hard. 

Sample Sentence: "The woman--more of a girl, really--hit me with her tote bag as she left, and I knew there was a  Feminist Geographies of Public Space class somewhere on her transcript."

Column Preview #2

Column Title: I Read a Book

Synopsis: I read a Book about Something. I will then condense the author's arguments, use them to make my argument for me, and apply no criticism to their work.

Hot Take: Everything you thought about a thing was WRONG because I read a Book that said so. 

Sample Sentence: "Global warming, it turns out, will be barely warm enough to steep a proper cup of tea, as Book Author points out in the Book whose product description I read most of on Amazon."

Column Preview #3

Column Title: True Patriot Love and Hook-Ups: My Canadian Election

Synopsis: I discuss the upcoming election entirely on the terms of an extended and increasingly tortured Tinder metaphor. Because I am a young woman, and we like apps. 

Hot Take: I'm not going to swipe right on anyone, because I need to learn to love myself first--and so does Canada. 

Sample Sentence: "Mulcair's beard is rich and his baritone is practically platinum, but you know he would just endlessly debate you about Bill C-51 via chat before you even had a first date at Terroni."

Salary-wise, I want whatever Wente's getting. And if the Globe adds another grand, I'll even wear a low-cut shirt when my columnist photo is taken. 

TMI: The Less than Incredible Journey, or a Return Trip to My Ovaries

You probably thought you were safe. A few weeks had gone by, and I had never once mentioned the words "transvaginal" or "ovary" on this blog. You probably thought I would never again invite you take a trip inside my lady business. 

WELL, YOU WERE WRONG. 

And you were wrong because I had a followup ultrasound a few weeks ago, and I want you to share in my misery. So sit back, relax, and take a deeply, deeply unsexy trip between my legs. 

I was a little slow in making my second ultrasound appointment appointment, both because I wasn't eager to relive the minutes I spent as a human joystick, and because my menstrual cycle didn't want to cooperate. Of course, all this misery started when that cycle decided to behave like a spoiled reality show star (i.e., it does what I wants!), so that was hardly a surprise. Eventually things settled down and I went in. The procedure was the same; the technician different, but still Eastern European. After it was all over, I was told that it would probably take 3-5 business days for my doctor to receive the results.

So, I was surprised when my doctor's office called me just two days later to schedule an appointment. "Uh, doesn't she want to wait for the ultrasound results?" I asked the administrative assistant. "Oh, we have them. That's why I'm calling. Can you come in tomorrow?" she replied "The doctor wants to discuss the results with you." This was... not the most comforting way to have a medical appointment made for you. I feigned indifference to my colleagues, but I was mentally preparing for whatever terrible news was surely headed my way. My most coherent plans were, first, not to cry in the doctor's office; and, secondly, to keep this from my work and my parents for as long as humanly possible.

Of course, the actual news was not so grim. "Don't worry!" was pretty much the first thing my doctor said. She probably realized that some assurance was required; I must have seemed ready to watch Terms of Endearment while taking notes. "The large cyst is gone. But they noticed several other cysts..." as she started to read from the notes the... sonographer? scientician? had sent her. The scientician's conclusion? I had "bulky ovaries" consistent with polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS). EVEN MY OVARIES CAN'T LIVE UP TO SOCIETY'S IMPOSSIBLE BEAUTY STANDARDS.

RIP Cysquo, we hardly knew ye; and for that I am very glad indeed. To have PCOS, though, you need to have more than chunky ovaries. You also need to show at least one of the two related symptoms. My answers to these questions were less conclusive than the ultrasound: Excessive hair growth? ("I'm Ukrainian and Scottish, so it's hard to tell.") Irregular periods? ("Not before the birth control.") So, no official diagnosis yet. But... I feel like if it's an inconvenience, I'm sure to have it. Even with PCOS though, I'm still healthy. Dubiously fertile, but healthy. It's a state whose worth I should have appreciated; whose fragility I also finally understand.

Image: PCOS from Wikimedia Commons. 

Howl! A Musical, Starring Marvin

Various men have caused me trouble in my life, from unrequited crushes to condescending blowhards at parties, and yet my most consistent source of trouble is the male I call Marvin.

He's small, he's ginger, and he's a cat.

It's been about a year since I moved in with Dan, which means it's been about a year of regular howling from Marvin and equally consistent crying episodes from me. I tried the hormone spray, the hormone collar, and the hormone diffuser. I let him go outside, briefly, before forcing him back inside before a truck could turn him into an orange pancake, because his favourite outdoor pursuit was sunbathing on the road. Finally, there was the calming cat food and an endless parade of ever more expensive cat toys until I just turned to medication.

The first dosage level worked for a whole month.

But after the 3:30 am wakeup screeches resumed, I decided things had to change. I told my old roommate (she's responsible for my ownership of the cat, through a tale that's telenovela-complicated) that I was going to surrender him. She said she was sure that her cousin would take him in a week. The day before he was supposed to leave, the cousin backed out. Then, Marvin's previous owner was supposed to call me so he could go on a one-week trial with her. She never did. Finally, my friend's cousin expressed some interest, before cancelling the day she was supposed to visit him. I haven't heard from her since, and I have now resigned myself to the fact that we'll never be separated. I'll be dead in the cold, hard ground, while Marvin naps on my grave in the afternoon sun.

I still have the surrender forms I printed off the Toronto Humane Society website, and I fill parts out during idle moments at work. But I probably won't send them in. Though he still spends most of the day making sounds that are like the wail of a banshee crossed with the blare of a car alarm, he sleeps through the night. That's enough. And it only took one simple trick.

I doubled his medication dosage.

Pillow Blog: Thoughts I Had While Watching Avengers 2: The Age of Ultron

In the tradition of the Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book, here's a Pillow Blog: an observational list on some subject or another. In this case, the thoughts I had while watching The Age of Ultron. Mild spoilers follow.

• "Remember when they used to hand the 3D glasses to you when they ripped your ticket? That was nice. It was almost as if you mattered, instead of having to root around in some battered cardboard boxes like a GARBAGE ANIMAL."
• "That freeze frame with all of the team members in action? Dumb. So very dumb."
• "Were movies always this loud?"
• "The next time Tony Stark makes a quip, I hope another character just walks up to him, swiftly kicks him in the nuts, and then walk away WITHOUT SAYING A WORD."
• "Hey, it's Linda Cardellini! Girl, you're everywhere this year!!"
• "This scene between Black Widow and the Hulk would be a lot more touching if the dialogue hadn't just implied that she was a monster because she was infertile. Guess the more birth control pills I take, the closer I tap dance over to the dark side."
• "I'm really concerned about all of these people in this African city that Iron Man and the Hulk are tearing apart, but I guess we can count on Tony to throw some money at the problem. Why did they ever give this guy a super suit? His most useful superpower is just great gobs of cash."
• "I'm sleepy. I want a nap."
• "Hawkeye is totally Giles and the Scarlet Witch is definitely a Buffy/Willow hybrid in this moment."
• "I hope I die like that, making a glib quip about my violent and impending death."
• "Won't the thousands of people displaced when Ultron turned their Eastern European city into a flying saucer need to be housed somewhere? Maybe one of the Avengers could superheroically monitor the water quality at the refugee camp??"
• "Ugh, I hope Vision saving Scarlet Witch doesn't mean we'll get a retread of their nutty love story from the comics in film form. Magic robot babies, and so on."
• "Can I still make the last train? No."

My Month-us Horribilis on the Bicycle

In happier times...

This winter felt like an endless concrete wasteland, with the exception of any time spent on the TTC, and then it was briefly a stinking jungle of sweat and GoreTex. So, you can imagine how happy I was to get my bike back a month or so ago. Bike freedom! The wind in my hair! Personal space! Being insulted by random drivers! Alright, the last one isn't so pleasant, but still. On the balance, cycling is better than transiting, and don't let a streetcar-themed hat or subway-printed tote bag fool you.

And then the universe decided to pop a squat on my happiness. First of all, I was horribly out of shape after a winter where my most active hobby was eating my feelings. My first ride was uphill, which quickly became a walk uphill. After a week of wondering if I was the slowest cyclist in Toronto (non-folding bike edition) I decided it needed a spring tuneup. 

But everyone else had decided the same thing, and so the bike spent a week in the shop. After I retrieved it, I had a glorious day and a half with my love. Everything was running perfectly, and the choir at the local Anglican church even burst into song as I pedalled by on my way to a friend's party via the Russell Hill bike path. I told Dan that, between the bicycle and the choral music, it was just like the opening of an Inspector Morse episode, and I half expected to turn up dead. 

Instead, on Monday, I had to solve The Mystery of Why the HELL Do I Have TWO Flat Tires? Because I live in Toronto, and I cycle, and the Sun and Star love publishing articles about the Menace II Society this makes me, my sense of persecution is overdeveloped. I called sabotage. Dan was less dramatic. His idea was that the shop just overfilled the tires.

We wheeled it to the local shop (a different one). There, three nice, young, and probably stoned men got really excited by my situation. "Double flaaaaaaaats" they drawled to each other. "Double fllaaaaats!" Twenty minutes later they were both fixed, the culprit identified as a piece of glass. From then on, I vowed never to call this shop "That Shifty Place", as I had done before, but "The Place that Looks Shifty, But Isn't."

A week later, I was texting my friend that I was late, but on my way, and should be there soon. "All hail the power of the bicycle!" I wrote, before I jumped on the bicycle and... nothing much happened. My chain was off, as another cyclist helpfully yelled out as he pedalled by. The chain guard, so helpful most days, wasn't being all that conducive to a roadside fix, which didn't stop me from trying. Instead, I gave up, walked it and my greasy hands to the closest bike shop (this would be yet another one) and threw myself on their mercy.

The heroes fixed it for free. "I'm not a hero," the guy insisted, "just a guy who works in a shop." Nope, he was a hero to me, and anyone else so inept with mechanics that they should probably just buy a car that's under warranty, and give up this cycling thing entirely. Oh well. There's always May. 

Pillow Blog: Paired Pros and Cons of Cohabitation

In the tradition of the Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book, here's a Pillow Blog: an observational list on some subject or another. 

Dan and I have been living together for about nine months, and Marvin has still not stopped bitching about it. Like my extremely annoying but rather cute cat, cohabitation has been a mixed experience. In no particular order, here are some of the pros and cons of living together I've experienced so far:

• Dan works from home, so I can get him to pick up my holds at the library
• I have basically recreated my parents' relationship dynamics, which is weird and gross
• I now have access to Dan's impressive collection of DVDs and Blu-Rays
• My living room now has a shelf that functions as a shrine to dying technology, and I would really like to put an armchair there instead
• Regular warm body to cuddle up next to
• Regular obstacle to complete bed domination during sleep
• Dan's feelings towards the cat have improved
• Marvin's feelings towards us have worsened, and he now believes Dan and I have banded together to annoy him
• I now have a deep fryer, microwave, and popcorn popper
• Our kitchen isn't big enough for all of our kitchen crap
• Someone to talk to
• Someone who tries to kiss me when I'm trying to think
• Shared living costs
• Financial decisions must now also be shared
• Someone to watch Mad Men with
• Someone who refuses to watch Game of Thrones with me
• We can team up to make doughnuts together on a Sunday morning
• ... 
• ...
• There's no cons for that one

Overall, the pros are somewhat stronger than the cons, though the cat would beg to disagree.

The TMI Post: My Unreliable Body

I have never really trusted my body, but at least I felt like I knew it. That knowledge sometimes seemed like a collection of limitations, where I catalogued the things I couldn't reach, the dance moves I couldn't do, and the many yoga poses my body refused to hold. But there was something reliable about its many quirks and failings. I rarely thought about what was below my skin, but when I did, it was along the lines of a classroom anatomical model; the cutaway kind, where you can take the organs out and snap them back in again. Though the skin itself was idiosyncratic (a classy way of saying imperfect), I figured that the organs beneath were ideally shaped, all in their place, and practically made of plastic.

So it was disconcerting to find out last Monday that part of this system had gone rogue.

But let's start a few days before that, when you would find me on my back in a windowless basement room. An efficient Eastern European technician is in the middle of jimmying a rod back and forth in my vagina. I feel like a human joystick; the indignity of having to wear one of those stupid backless hospital robes compounded by the fact that I have to do so while an ultrasound wand is shoved up my hoo-ha. I am somewhat convinced that there will be a fire alarm, and I will have to waddle out into the street with the equipment in situ. This doesn't make any sense, of course, but that irrational fear is soon eclipsed when Magda the Impaler lets out an "hmmm."

A hmm when you're getting an ultrasound is never a comforting sound. Perhaps the technician can't get the ultrasound to work, or she's letting her mind wander towards dinner, but there's one word you start to think of when she grunts, and that word is cancer. "You're being irrational," you think, "it's far more likely just to be fibroids, or cysts, so stop being a drama queen- OH MY GOD, I did wait too long to write that novel."

But I won't hear that from Magda. Instead, the analysis will come from my family doctor a few days after, when I'm trying to shop for groceries on my lunch break. And the news is good! They don't think it's cancer at all. Trying to compare prices on tomato paste while fielding this call didn't seem so foolish when I heard that. But then the news turns good-ish, quickly. There's an it, and it's a cyst that's about 4-5cm in size. I foolishly tell myself that's really not that large--we're not talking 4-5 inches here--until I actually take out a ruler back at the office, and realize that 4-5cm is bigger than any mystery growth in my body has any right to be.

With the knowledge of my >4cm hop-on ("you're gonna get some hop-ons"), I've started to wonder what else my body could hide. For the first few days after that call, I had trouble sleeping. I would imagine the cyst industriously growing as I rested, and my body started to seem alien, like somebody had sewn a Lovecraftian horror into a people suit. Or perhaps I was just feeling alienated. This sac made me confront how little I really knew about my body, though I lived in it and operated it. My mind suddenly felt like a guest.

Since then, my conversations with other folks have assured me that large cysts or even multiple cysts are not uncommon. Some are even functional. I have another one of those invasive ultrasounds scheduled a few weeks from now, and I'm sure that after they'll either decide to excise my hop-on or leave it in peace. What should be comforting is that it's not what that I first thought when the technician went "hmm." My plans and goals, although a little fuzzy, still require the use of a body that's fairly healthy. I still have that, at least for now. I thought of a proverb when I left the medical imaging centre: "Man plans, God laughs." But more applicable to me then was a small edit: "Man plans, cells divide."

Domestic Sunday: Beer and Cookies

I've decided to spare you all another knitting post, since the blue baby sweater has already been yanked out once, so progress on that front is sadly minimal.

Instead, here are some cookies. I've been stringing Dan along with the promise of more of these maple pecan buttons, after I had made some for an office cookie exchange in December. Thursday I finally made good on that promise, and here they are:

The recipe is delicious, simple, and yet somewhat tedious, which is probably why I delayed making them. However, if you have the time, to make the dough, chill it, roll it into balls, bake those, cool them a little bit, roll the balls around in icing sugar, cool them completely, and then roll those suckers around in icing sugar again; well, you can find the recipe in Regan Daley's In the Sweet Kitchen. I had typed up a condensed version yesterday, but then Blogger ate my post, and I'm too bitter to try again. The book isn't out of print, like I once thought; Amazon has some paperback copies available, so you should really buy one now.

But if anyone asks nicely, I'll try to send the recipe via email.

This week's beer is actually from last Tuesday. I had no commitments that night (except to the cat), so I decided to stop by Thirsty and Miserable on my way home. There's a short list of bars I keep that are free from pretension, without falling over the line into crusty. Thirsty and Miserable is on that list; so are Hole in the Wall, Wise Bar, and Dave's. These are the sort of places where you can read a book at the bar, as I did with a pint of Kensington Brewing Company's Hops & The Grain Merchant. I really liked this beer, and if it's still on draught somewhere near you, give it a try. It has a hoppy profile, but the rye and dark malts keep it complex and quite drinkable. There's a danger in that though. I'm not sure what the ABV is, but I do know I was feeling pretty good when I left the bar, and this was just after one pint.

Big City Blues

I never really stuck to one dream job in my youth, but my ultimate goal was constant: get the hell out of Guelph and live in a big city. That Guelph was, comparatively, not all that small or boring was a discovery I was not prepared to make. It wouldn't have fit into the narrative I was attempting to write for myself, of a provincial, lumpy girl about to transform into a sleek and extremely cosmopolitan woman.

This meant going to school in Montreal and eventually moving to Toronto, though I've remained ever-lumpen throughout all of those moves. And yet, with my three year anniversary of Toronto residence having come and gone, I can confidently say that I've achieved my goal.

AND, OH DEAR GOD, I NEED TO LEAVE.

Why? Because Toronto is making me into a bad person. Or rather, Toronto is stripping away the veneer of sweetness I built up in smaller spaces, to reveal the angry hosebeast within.

Almost everything I experience in the city seems to go into my ledger of disrespect. People who walk two abreast and expect me to press myself against parked cars just so that they can pass. People who block the doors on subways. People who sit on the outside seat of public transit so their purse can have a window view, even during rush hour. TTC people who are rude. In fact, let's just say that the entire TTC experience is generally a giant checkmark in the "Go to Hell" column.

Because I'm young, female, and evidently unwealthy, I'm easy to ignore. However, because of most of those things I am also not actively avoided, and so the daily friction of interaction in this city is starting to take its toll. I've even found myself preparing to be irritated by someone, taking a certain gleeful joy in the thought that this time--THIS TIME--I am going to assert myself and stand up for my right to occupy space in this city! And then I'm actually disappointed when they step aside, and hold the door open for me, or even say sorry.

I started to reflect on my fermenting rage-ahol last Thursday, after an encounter with a TTC employee. I was trying to get to an appointment, was told my one TTC employee to use one gate only to get yelled out by another. While I would like to say that I responded with both kindness and yet an unwavering sense of self-respect, I did not. Instead, I was rather rude and snippy. 

And then the rest of my ride was filled with guilt.

See, the issue is that I have all of the rage inside me, but not quite enough self-confidence to keep the flames a-burning. Instead, I'm tossed between resentment and regret. "Oh! That person thought I could just be bodychecked off the sidewalk! OH! But now they think I'm mean because I glared at them. There's a stranger that thinks poorly of me. WHATEVER SHALL I DO?" What I should do: move to a smaller town. I'll have wide open spaces, homes I could potentially afford, and neighbours who express their aggression with savage gossip instead of face-to-face confrontation. Hooray!