No Really – It\’s Just My Face

November 2-4

So today happens to be someone’s birthday. You may know this someone, as she’s mentioned in nearly every post I write, cuz she’s pretty much by my side 24/7.

Yes…….it’s Emerald‘s 24th!! Go wish her a good one. Tell her Talea sent you.

Mwa! Lub you Em!!!! You’re like, sweet and junk. And by the way, did you know you share your birthday with Ted Bundy? What a fun little fact, jes?

Happy Birthday Emerald!

Winter?! I can’t hear you, la la la.

So I went to Texas, I came back, and life carries on.

Winter appears to now be official. We all know how much I love winter. As in, every year I wonder why the hell I still live in this cold damned country. The older I get, the less I can handle this shit.

Though I’m trying to deny it’s existence, I know winter is here.

I have stopped wearing my work shoes to work. Because walking on the ice in heels is dumb. And cold. My shoes now live at work, and my hardcore winter boots get me to and from work.

It now takes me 5 minutes to get dressed to go outside. By the time I’m on the last layer and then finally, the toque, I’m sweating like a monster. Of course, this sweat freezes the second I make it outside, causing me to curse.

I continue to curse at the icy sidewalks and the bastards who don’t shovel them, you know, until my bloody jaw freezes. When it gets really cold, I cannot speak. I sound like a total drunk, slurring my words and not able to control my face.

I know winter is here because I can no longer shower in the mornings. If I do, when I go outside, my hair freezes into semi-permanent dreads. Little chunks of ice hanging from my head. This is not cool, so during the winter, I shower at night.

I have seen my first ice-slip victim. She slipped this evening coming out of a corner store. I laughed at her. Then I wanted to cry, cuz I knew that the first slip and fall is the true signal of winter’s arrival.

I’m unable to go out without a scarf and a toque and I’m seriously wondering where the hell my gloves are.

Christmas shit is up. Lights are on the houses and everything is green and red.

The Christmas drinks are here at Second Cup and Starbucks. This is the only good thing about winter if you ask me.

I’ve started to freak out about Christmas gifts. I’m the worst gift-buyer in the world, the whole season is very stressful to me.

And by the way, after last year’s drama over choosing whether or not to go home for Christmas, I made the decision early this year. I’m not going. I have finally learned from 8 years of going back home and hating my decision once I get there. This time, I’m just not going to go and I’m going to spend Christmas with those who I love. Not to say that I don’t love my family, cuz that is not the case. However, my immediate family and I are on permanently shaky ground and my friends are a much bigger part of my life and I would rather spend the time with them this year.

I still don’t have my ice-legs back yet. This is proving to be a problem and I hope to recover them quickly. For those of you not living above the 49th parallel or directly underneath, you may not know what ice-legs are. Well. They are what you must use in order to walk in the winter. You need to learn how to tighten up your legs and ass in a way so that you don’t slip when transferring weight from one foot to the other. It’s very tricky. The first few times you need to pull the walk back out, you’ll feel it the next morning. However, if you walk unabashedly like you normally would, you will find your ass on the cold cold ground quicker than you can say, ‘I fucking hate you winter!’ It involves a lot of fine hamstring finesse, I find.

Half of my wardrobe is now useless. I will not see my arms for the next five months because I will only be wearing long-sleeved sweaters from now until May. Goodbye elbows. See you next year.

I’m not sure how I’m going to make it through this winter. I suspect with the aid of alcohol and by not looking or going outside. And, not to be underestimated, by laughing at those who fall on their asses when I do have to go out. Noobs.

If you’re Canadian, don’t even try to tell me you haven’t found a sweet spot and watched people turf it for a few minutes. Cuz you’re lying to me. And yes, after months of cabin fever, it really IS that funny.

The Rundown on Texas.

Okay, so here’s my trip update, as I’m sure you’re all dying to hear. It’s in point form, cuz I’m lazy.

• First off, I’m disappointed in the lack of Texas here. Nobody has said yee-haw. I have yet to see a cowboy hat, cowboy boots, antlers on the front of someone’s truck or a shirt saying, “I ate 96 oz’s of steak at ____ bar and got this t-shirt’
• I love twang. The twangy accent works for me.
• I get American fatness. Their bags of chips are bigger, their chocolate bars are bigger, finding diet pop is impossible, their milk cream is creamier, everything is fried and the portions are gigantic. Also, food is stupidly cheap, making it easy to gorge. I’m pretty sure I’ve put on weight in 3 days here.
• I have been dubbed ‘Canada’. People here are fascinated with me and the fact that I live up there. However, the ignorance of Americans never fails to astonish, anger and offend me (present company excluded……….maybe). I have answered ‘where’s Toronto again?’ so many times I can’t even tell you. We have one major city. It’s in the middle of the fucking country. How hard is it to know where it is? I think I’ve figured it out. American geography lessons must go like this: They look at a globe or a map. There is one chunk of land, called ‘USA’ and then, fucktons of ocean. That’s it. That’s all they know, it’s all they see. I had one chick here argue with me that Saskatchewan was in New York. When I told her she’s a moron, she argued with me and then said, ‘Well, it’s obviously a native AMERICAN word’. Yeah. Cuz those native americans really respected the boundary between USA and Canada before the two countries existed and we surely could not have had any native americans in Canada. Plus, it’s SASKATCHEWAN you retard. Like there’s two of them. Bitch, please.
• I have a surprise for you all. I want to tell you so bad, but I took a picture of it and don’t have my cable here to upload it, so I’m going to wait til I get home to tell you and show you.
• My training here is stupid. Mostly because it goes like this: “Blah blah blah, this form…….oh, it doesn’t apply to Canada…….blah blah blah this process, though I don’t think Canada does it this way……….yada yada yada follow this procedure, but it doesn’t work like that in Canada.” Wow. Glad I came.
• Everybody here is shockingly nice. Seriously. Not stereotypically rude in any way, shape or form. It is a very pleasant surprise.
• I got to go to VICTORIA’S SECRET for the very first time in my life. OH MY GOD. I was in Heaven. We told the manager we don’t have them in Canada and that we’d never been and intended to spend a lot of money. She quickly became our best friend. We spent an hour and a half there. I spent waaaaaaaaaaaay too much. But, I don’t care. I have been waiting, wishing, hoping, needing to go to Victoria’s Secret for 25 years and goddammit, I was going to buy whatever I wanted! We’re talking a few hundred bucks here. Like, a lot. And I couldn’t be more pleased. I have popped my Victoria’s Secret cherry and it was a damn good time. If you’re in Dallas, go to the Galleria Mall and tell Dee the Manager that the Canadian girls sent you. She’ll look after ya.
• I sudden want to start saying y’all. And fixin’. Fantastic.
• The hotel room is N I C E. This place is sweet.

I think that’s all I want to say about it now. I’m exhausted and not quite sure what time it is (who knew Dallas was in a different time zone? Not me), so I’m now going to sleep.

Night Y’all!!

Leaving on a jet plane

I’m leaving in a few hours to go to Tex-Ass.

My fear of flying is well documented on the pages of this here blog. On my last flight to see the boyfriend, I discovered that this fear is diminished greatly by the consumption of copious amounts of alcohol.

When I realized this, the world opened up to me. Literally. I can fly now! I just have to be slightly messed up, so that turbulence is more ‘wheeeee!’ than ‘Oh my God, we’re going down! ohmygodohmygodohmygod, I can’t breathe, I’m about to hurdle 20,000 feet to my death in a giant metal tube that I knew I shouldn’t have gotten onto in the first place. Oh god….did I leave my stove on?? AHHHHHHHHH’

Flying is kind of like that for me. Never fun. And I have taken dozens of types of drugs to knock me out on a plane, but my fear overpowers them all. Hahaha! Take THAT pharmaceutical industry!

So for my trip to Tex-ass (SO don’t want to go), that was my plan of attack. Board the plane in an inebriated state. But since I was so against acknowledging this trip, I only checked the time of my flight last night. I take off at 2 PM. That means that I’d have to start drinking far too early to get drunk enough to be on a 3 hour plane ride.

I’m fucked.

I’m taking my knitting with me. God help those sons of bitches if they won’t let me on the plane with sharp pointy sticks. Oh, the knitting may be the only thing that will keep me calm.

Come to think of it, maybe not being able to drink isn’t a terrible thing. Drinking + knitting = WTF was I doing?? Each time I’ve attempted that, I’ve woken up the next morning with no respect for the knitting beside me. Ha. It is hideous, misshapen and out of pattern.

Anyways, blah blah blah, I’m awake at 9 FUCKING AM on a Sunday for this bloody trip.

This does not bode well. Stay tuned for updates from the Uuuuuuuunited States of America (said with a twangy American accent). I’m sure I’ll have a bunch of time to update y’all (see? I’m in the spirit of the south already) while I’m down there.

Send good plane vibes please!!!

On Friendship.

Friendship is a scary thing if you think about it.

You open yourself up to someone and tell them things that nobody else is allowed to know. Tell them things that you shouldn’t. Things you’ve done, thought, almost done, said, shouldn’t have said, places you went, places you shouldn’t have gone, places you should have. Dreams you’ve had, dreams you’ve achieved, dreams you’ve let go of. Failures, successes and all the complicated messes that make up the inbetween.

It can come back to you tenfold. Hopefully it won’t, and it’s a risk we all take for the sake of companionship and unconditional love. We need our friends, just like they need us.

Each friendship has a unique dynamic…….inexplicable, but there all the same. It’s just ‘known’ between the two who’s better at what, who’s responsibility it is to do certain things, to clean up certain messes, to deal with certain sticky situations. Who’s the stronger one in each case. In a real friendship, this is obvious from the get-go. It just IS. It always will be with a true friend, since you are being genuinely you and they are being genuinely them.

There is a woman in my life who’s friendship means the world to me. The world plus all the planets……..even Pluto, the little planet that couldn’t.

I’ve rarely mentioned her on here, but when I have I’ve referred to her as my Guardian Angel. She is that. She was put into my life at a time where I needed serious help. Her help, her listening, her support, her wisdom, her ability to never judge and to never expect and to never ask for anything……..she’s truly incredible. Without her, I do not know where I would be. And that includes wondering if I would even be alive.

In our relationship, the dynamic is that she’s the strong one. She’s the listener. She’s the one who knows what to do, who has the experience, who leads the way. She is 25 years my senior and in some ways, my mentor.

I got a call from her today, with bad news.

I listened to her break down. I listened to her deepest thoughts, her hidden secrets, the truths she’s now willing to acknowledge.

It killed me.

The worst thing, the thing that killed me the most…….I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what to say. I knew that anything I said would pale in comparison to what she was going through. Anything I said wasn’t going to matter. But I had to say something. So I stuttered and stumbled around words that just didn’t cut it. I laid out the cliche sayings that you do when you’re at a loss. I felt awful.

What do you do when the dynamic is flipped so suddenly and so completely? When you are suddenly trying to help and give advice to the one who is always so strong? I can’t give advice to a woman who knows so much more than me.

All I can do is listen. I can’t help. It’s awful.

And since, for once, I couldn’t go to her with my worries, I place them here. To get them out of my head, so it is clear for her when she needs me. So that hopefully I have space in there that I can use to think of how I can make this easier for her.

I hate feeling helpless. I hate feeling useless. I feel both of those things right now. I cannot even offer her a simple hug or a cup of tea, she is two hours away from me.

And as a cruel joke from the cosmos, I was knitting her Christmas present when the phone rang, thinking of how amazing she is to me. Thinking of how lucky I am to have her. And now? I feel like I failed her. Le sigh.

Thanks for letting me vent.

You know me…the happy, smiley one!

So I’ve been absent again. I toy around with the idea of abandoning this blog every once in a while, and I was thinking about it again, cuz lately I haven’t had much to write about.

Then a day or two ago, I realized why.

Because dudes, I have been in a GREAT FUCKING MOOD for like, two months straight. I feel like I’m on E, 24/7. If I knew what that felt like, that is. Everything’s great, everything’s wonderful, life is beautiful, blah blah blah.

I sit at work and just smile like a fool. ME! My previous benchmark of ‘retardedly good mood’ has now become the norm. The standard. I mean, except when I lost my shit on that client a while back and went and got tanked on a work night and then bought half of 7-11. But whatevs. Shit happens, right?

And I use this blog to vent a lot, hence the lack of material recently.

But here’s a few quick snippets:

– I was bestowed with the honour of taking out Crafty Friend’s two wee ones trick or treating last Friday (with her and Em, naturally). It was my first trick or treating experience that didn’t involve waddling through snowbanks in suits 3 sizes too big in order to accomodate my full body parka and ski pants. It was a blast, full of hilarity, candy and great convo’s. It was followed by copious amounts of pizza and even more disgusting amounts of Creamy Garlic dipping sauce. Mmmmmm, dipping sauce.

– So we all remember my nightmare of getting a driver’s license. Well. Turns out it’s a helluva lot easier to get a passport than a license. Go figure. Welcome to Canada, here, have a passport! (whoah Talea, keep the politics offline!). But in my passport photo, I resemble a very bloated….somebody. Not me. This was of course after the passport photo guy fiasco. I may have been in mid scowl, maybe that’s why I look so….abnormal.

– Now that I have that passport, I am begrudgingly going to Texas next week. Please. Kill me now. I do not travel well. I don’t sleep in hotels. I don’t like new people. I don’t like big groups (this is training, it’s a big group). I don’t like being out of my element. Plus, who KNOWS what kinds of shenanigans my ghost will get into when I’m gone?

– It was my mom’s bday recently. I didn’t call her. I can’t decide how I feel about that, but it was very much a conscious decision.

– Work has finally, mercifully, miraculously seemed to slow down. For the first time in a year, it seems (knock on wood) that the remnants of our buyout and my previous manager have settled down. It’s been so lovely, I can’t even tell you.

– I’ve been in such a great mood that the daylight savings ‘fall back’ hasn’t even gotten me down. I’m all, ‘oh, the darkness is so nice and lovely. It’s so relaxing and calming’.

I cannot for the life of me figure out what is going on with my mood. Like, WTF. Who am I??

I have a theory though. I feel it’s a fairly large coincidence and therefore I’m labelling it, ‘the cause’ to my happy lovely times.

A few months back, I was too lazy to go to the doctor’s office to renew my prescription for the pill. Yes. That pill. I hate doctors, I didn’t want to go. So….I didn’t. And I still haven’t. Pretty much right after that, my mood skyrocketed. I shit you not.

Do I know why that happened? No, I’m not well versed enough in the biochemistry of it and of me and of my other meds and shit. Do I care why it happened? No. What I do know is that I will never ever pop one of those pills ever again.

Crazy hormones, I’m done with you!

Was that TMI? Me hopes not. Oh well. If you’ve not yet been offended by my blog, it’s about damned time anyways.

Ghostly Shiznat, Part II

So the ghostly encounters continue around here.

I was innocently sitting around a few nights ago, doing my thing.

I’m ghetto-fab, so I have a fancy-assed DVD player, with no remote control. Consequently (and obviously), this means that I have to get up off my rear end, go to the DVD player, crouch down and physically push buttons to make it do anything.

So as I’m sitting around, watching my one TV channel, I heard a weird ‘whirring’ sound. I looked around and couldn’t figure out where the sound was coming from. Then. THEN. Then I looked under the TV, home of the DVD player.

IT. WAS. ON. It was on, and it was playing. I could see the time ticking in the little display window.

*Insert me shitting my pants here*

I eyed it nervously, worked up my nerve and decided that if Ghosty McGee was going to try to talk to me via DVD’s, I wanted none of it and I was going to turn the damn thing off.

I got up to turn the stupid thing off (keep in mind, no remote….I couldn’t have turned it on, and I couldn’t turn it off without getting up).

I take a step, then two. Then. THEN!! My fucking TV starts SWITCHING CHANNELS. On its own, folks.

It went from 8, to 7, to 6, to 5. It stayed on 5. I punched the damn thing off, turned off the DVD player and shortly thereafter decided that the only rational thing to do was go to bed, shut my door and sleep with my back to the wall, so nothing could sneak up on me.

Still though, I don’t ‘feel’ that my apartment is haunted. Oh, and the white powdery traces? One more on the kitchen counter today, along with what looks to be paint on my previously pristine stainless steel kitchen faucet.

Go figure that one out. Maybe I’m painting in my sleep. But where the hell am I getting the paint?!