No more life coaches, please

Jeopardy*

*Apologies to Dan Mangan for appropriating his song title & format

Alright, what should I do next? Should I just go to bed? Is this why I’m so tired all the time? How am I going to do my yoga daily like I planned if I am always so tired? What should I make my son for lunch tomorrow? Is he going to be able to eat that entire panini bun or should I just send half? Am I sending in too much food or too little? Is it healthy enough? What are other parents sending in? How can I get my son to eat more vegetables? Is threatening to withhold dessert an effective technique or teaching him that what I’m serving him is so vile he deserves a reward for eating it? When am I going to finish the three books I am currently reading? When am I going to read the five books on hold at the library? When are the books I currently have on loan due back? Whatever happened to reading just one book until the very end and then starting another one? Has motherhood completely decimated my ability to concentrate? Why is planning a trip to Vegas so stressful? Why can’t we pick a damn Cirque show already? Why are there so many Cirque shows? Do we go with O or Ka? Why is O so expensive? Is it worth it? Do we spring for the best seats in the house or the we’re-already-broke-enough seats way up at the back? How are we going to afford this trip? Why are we going on a trip we know is going to cost us more than we should be willing to spend? What if we get sick before we go? What if our son gets sick? What if his grandparents have a tough time keeping up with him for five days? Am I going to regret taking two weeks away from work? Why did I eat that yogurt parfait if I wasn’t actually hungry? Am I becoming a hypochondriac? Is the Internet a blessing or a curse? Why can I never remember to call the vet for the cat’s annual checkup? What am I going to do about parking next month? Did I make the right decision about my tattoo? Oh god, what if I don’t like what the artist comes up with? Is it too much of a cliché? Will it end up causing me issues? Will I regret it in 10 years? How about 20? What if I focus on living my life now instead of 20 years from now? Why is it so hard to get to my yoga? Why do I always call it “my” yoga”? How can I get a flatter stomach? Why do I still feel fat even though I am at my lowest weight ever? Is that a really shallow thought or a legitimate concern? Why am I paying for a membership at the Y when, when I do work out, it’s at home? Do I want to go to the Springsteen concert? Is it more trouble than it’s worth? Am I ever going to start drawing again? Am I ever going to start blogging on a regular basis? Does it even matter if no one reads it? Why am I so bothered that someone said my Twitter picture looked like it was on a dating profile? Why do I care what anyone thinks if I think it’s just a nice picture and I typically have a hard time finding a picture of myself that I like? Why do I read so much into what I think people think? Do I look my age? Do I act my age? Should I act my age? How did my life get so busy? Can I manage? Why can I never get around to the little things I need to do? Why is my memory so flaky? Why does it seem like everyone else my age has it way more together than I do? Why do I always feel like everyone else my age is judging me? Does that mean I am unique or a screw-up? Does that matter, as long as I am happy? Am I prepared for people to realize just how neurotic I am when I post this? So, I mean, is winning the lottery really out of the question? Seriously, how can I get my kid to eat more vegetables?

Just say no to Comic Sans

 

This is the stamp the GOVERNMENT OF CANADA uses to cancel a passport. Yes: that is Comic Sans, the most reviled font on the planet. But so friendly, right? Your passport is cancelled*… but we don’t want you to feel too bad about it.

(*It was an expired passport. I’m not that dangerous.)

I’m a health nut.

Counting ONLY the treats I have eaten at work, this is what I’ve consumed over the past couple weeks:

• layered peppermint fudge (<— I made that one!)
• peanut-butter cookies
• homemade Turtles
• peanut-butter ball
• chip fudge (<— that is just what it sounds like: fudge with chips in it)
• chocolate-dipped shortbread
• chocolate-chip cheesecake
• chocolate-dipped red velvet cake ball
• lemon cake
• dolly squares
• Bailey’s chocolates
• Lindt chocolates (assorted)
• Ovation chocolate mint sticks
• marzipan chocolates
• if you count the desserts at our team Christmas lunch, then add in tiramisu cake, lemon pie and a bite of mediocre chocolate cheesecake
• also I had some pistachios today

Yeah. I’m going to have to call my mom and tell her to up the size on all my Christmas gifts.

Also, if anyone is considering buying me a present, I may have some suggestions.

Red wine in the snow

Even though I was only introduced to it last year, this is my favourite Christmas song, by far. It’s beautiful and funny and meaningful and truthful and just gets everything right. I’ve yet to listen to it without getting just a little teary-eyed.*

(*It’s cute how I understate things, isn’t it?)

It pretty well sums up Christmas, for me.

Well. Maybe change just a couple of details…

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White Wine In The Sun
by Tim Minchin
(lyrics stolen from here)

I really like Christmas
It’s sentimental, I know, but I just really like it
I am hardly religious
I’d rather break bread with Dawkins than Desmond Tutu, to be honest

And yes, I have all of the usual objections
To consumerism, the commercialization of an ancient religion
To the westernization of a dead Palestinian
Press-ganged into selling Playstations and beer
But I still really like it

I’m looking forward to Christmas
Though I’m not expecting a visit from Jesus

I’ll be seeing my dad
My brother and sisters, my gran and my mum
They’ll be drinking white wine in the sun
I’ll be seeing my dad
My brother and sisters, my gran and my mum
They’ll be drinking white wine in the sun

I don’t go in for ancient wisdom
I don’t believe just ’cause ideas are tenacious it means that they’re worthy
I get freaked out by churches
Some of the hymns that they sing have nice chords but the lyrics are dodgy

And yes I have all of the usual objections
To the miseducation of children who, in tax-exempt institutions,
Are taught to externalize blame
And to feel ashamed and to judge things as plain right or wrong
But I quite like the songs

I’m not expecting big presents
The old combination of socks, jocks and chocolate is just fine by me

‘Cause I’ll be seeing my dad
My brother and sisters, my gran and my mum
They’ll be drinking white wine in the sun
I’ll be seeing my dad
My brother and sisters, my gran and my mum
They’ll be drinking white wine in the sun

And you, my baby girl
My jetlagged infant daughter
You’ll be handed round the room
Like a puppy at a primary school
And you won’t understand
But you will learn someday
That wherever you are and whatever you face
These are the people who’ll make you feel safe in this world
My sweet blue-eyed girl

And if, my baby girl
When you’re twenty-one or thirty-one
And Christmas comes around
And you find yourself nine thousand miles from home
You’ll know what ever comes
Your brothers and sisters and me and your mum
Will be waiting for you in the sun
Whenever you come
Your brothers and sisters, your aunts and your uncles
Your grandparents, cousins and me and your mum
We’ll be waiting for you in the sun
Drinking white wine in the sun
Darling, when Christmas comes
We’ll be waiting for you in the sun
Drinking white wine in the sun
Waiting for you in the sun
Waiting for you…
Waiting…

I really like Christmas
It’s sentimental, I know…

This is why you can’t take me anywhere nice.

Last week we managed to score tickets to a fancypants gala that serves as a major fundraiser for the ballet theatre in town. It’s a high-society, $150-a-head version of dinner-and-a-show: everyone dresses up to watch the dancers perform at a beautiful old theatre, then the crowd traipses across the street in their high heels and bow ties to a nice hotel for a la-dee-da dinner involving “coulis” and chairs wrapped up in scads of fabric like they were gifts or maybe royal wedding guests.

Hey wait is that our local MP or perhaps a respected partner in that prestigious law firm? HA HA just kidding, it's that girl who plays with colours all day to make things look nice.

I managed to make myself look at least partially blend-in-able amongst all the politicians and doctors and lawyers who were there and tried not to look too awkward, which was made much more difficult by the fact the early start time prevented us from arriving in time for pre-show wine.

The performance itself was impressive (ballet dancers are crazy talented!) and the dinner was delicious, though from the size of the portions I think maybe they thought we were all ballet dancers. Hey, since I don’t have to appear onstage in my underwear anytime soon, could you maybe spare a second quinoa-stuffed pepper?

Dessert was a ridiculously vast array of chocolate and pastries artfully displayed on tables in the reception area, from which we were invited to help ourselves. And, given that that second pepper had not in fact been forthcoming, I was anxious to do just that.

I zeroed in on an elaborate creampuff in the form of a swan (because of the Black Swan, GET IT?!). Being that I was also handling a filled wine glass (finally), a napkin, and my purse, and was also possibly weak with hunger, I’m not sure why I thought it was a good idea to tackle an unwieldy pastry while walking around being fancy amongst other fancy people, but I never said sound decisions were my forté. So I take my best attempt at a delicate bite out of this dessert-art and—of course—when I bite down the cream filling delicately pops out the back of the swan and delicately sails all the way down to the floor, making a delicate pit stop on my dress along the way. And—of course—when this happens, my first reaction is to delicately shout, “Oh $&^#!”

Now my task is to maintain my poise while I nonchalantly wipe up gobs of whipped cream from both my dress and the carpeted floor of the hotel, while the jazz trio bravely plays on and the upper crust look on in horror*.

(*I may or may not be exaggerating slightly for effect.)

In my valiant cleanup efforts, I manage to get whipped cream on the side of my wine glass (put it down, what are you, MAD?), so now I’m trying to look elegant while I smear cream down my glass as I wipe it off, rocking the blasé “yeah, I totally meant to do that” look that I’ve perfected over the years.

(Hint: if I look like I actually meant to do something, it means I in no way meant to do it.)

After all that? Well, I gracefully took my exit to prevent further incident.

HA! No, I didn’t. I scarfed down another half dozen pastries, and may have even licked my fingers at one point. (What? Marzipan is STICKY.)

Yes: if you ask nicely, I WILL accompany you to your next fancy-dress function.

If there are pastries.

Zombie pug

My dog, auditioning for a role in The Walking Dead.

Not. Creepy. At. All.

Seven is not my lucky number.

I have no sweet clue how old I was here, but I'm guessing "young."

When I was four years old, my mother decided I was ready to start Kindergarten.

She says she knew I was ready—more than ready, if you believe her stories of three-year-old me writing out C-A-T and P-I-G in the sandbox.

As she was a stay-at-home mom for most of my childhood, I’m not entirely convinced it wasn’t at least partially motivated by the strong desire to make someone else share the responsibility of dealing with my holy terror self… but her version makes me seem way smarter, so let’s go with that.

Either way, she wanted me in school. Only problem with this plan was that I needed to be five in Kindergarten, or at least turning five by the end of October.

My birthday is in March: long past the cutoff. I’d have to wait another year.

Except that: (a) my mom was seriously convinced I was ready, and (b) my mother does not take no for an answer.

So, she did what any caring mother would do when trying to ensure her daughter the best possible education: she forged my birth certificate and made me a year older.

(And that, right there, tells you pretty much everything you need to know about my mother.)

In Quebec, up until not too long ago, your birth certificate was often the same as your baptism certificate, issued by your church. These certificates weren’t exactly state-of-the-art in their security measures: they were basically glorified church letterhead, filled in by typewriter. Easy for enterprising mothers to fudge.

So it really wasn’t that difficult for my mom to end up with a perfect replica of my birth certificate… identical except that my birth year was one lighter than it should have been.

Phony certificate in hand, she registered me in Kindergarten and I was all set.

Of course, being that I was only four, my mom wasn’t sure how to explain all this to me, and it was important that I kept up appearances. I needed to answer “five” whenever anyone asked how old I was, and she didn’t trust my little mind to be able to keep up with the lie.

Anyone else note the irony that my mom thought I was smart enough to start school a year early, but not to say “five” instead of “four”? Well, Mom likes to cover her bases.

So, part two in her Outsmart the School System plan was to throw me a fake birthday party in August to convince me I actually was five.

That's me, at the head of the table, super-excited to be turning five.

Turns out kids don’t have such a great grasp of time! Even though I’d celebrated my real birthday not six months earlier, I saw no problem with this second birthday. Hey, it was a party for me; why would I be suspicious? I do distinctly remember thinking it was odd that my birthdays were usually in the winter and here we were celebrating outdoors in the sun… but, look, presents! And cake!

I wonder if the other parents who were in on my mother’s scheme—mostly relatives and close friends—were irritated that they had to buy me two sets of birthday gifts that year.

So, I turned “five” and was fully psyched to start school. My mom’s instincts about me being ready were right, it turns out: on the first day of Kindergarten—you know, when parents are allowed to hang around with their kids, who are really just running around and playing games and being kids—I was completely unimpressed with how disappointing this whole “school” thing had turned out to be. I tugged on my mom’s sleeve and asked in a whisper when we were going to start learning, which I’d been promised was the whole point of going to school.

(And that, right there, pretty much tells you everything you need to know about me.)

I turned fake-six that year on my real birthday in March (more presents and cake!) and fake-seven the year after (hey, how come my birthday seemed to take so long to get here this year?). In grade 2, as I was about to turn fake-eight, my mother sat me down at the top of the stairs at home and told me we needed to have A Talk. She told me what she’d done in order for me to start school early. And she told me that, on my upcoming birthday, I wasn’t turning eight. I was turning seven.

Well, once you hit your 20s, getting older starts to lose its appeal very quickly. But when you’re a kid, getting older is everything… not to mention that the years pass so much more slowly when you’ve only lived through a handful of them.

Needless to say, this news was not greeted enthusiastically by me. At all. Not even a little bit.

I had to be seven again? I’d already spent a whole entire year being seven! I wanted to be EIGHT!

Next time you watch Almost Famous (which you know you should be doing on a regular basis, right?), watch for that scene early on where William finds out his mother pulled the same sort of scam and he’s really 11 instead of 12. Yup. That was me.

The year I finally did turn eight was the most relief I’ve ever felt at a birthday.

Fast forward a couple of years. When I was finishing up grade 4, my teacher approached my mother and said the school would like to skip me ahead to grade 6. “Um, no thank you,” my mother told her.

“But she’s very bright. We’re sure she could handle it.”

Academically? Possibly. Socially? It was already tough enough being a year younger than my classmates. (It’s not like I was the picture of popularity, anyway; remember, I was the kid who wanted to “learn” in Kindergarten.) My mother knew being two years behind everyone else would just be asking for trouble. So, she ‘fessed up. By then the school was well acquainted with my mother and I don’t think anyone was surprised.

Years later, when I was 18, I needed my birth certificate to get my driver’s license. Digging through the files, I found it and went off to the service bureau. And, yup, as luck would have it, I’d picked up the wrong one. I was a year older again, at least in the eyes of the government. (And I wasn’t even gaining any privileges with my official fake ID: the drinking age in Quebec is 18.)

For all my mom’s scheming, I really can’t believe she overlooked the ultimate opportunity in all this. Just imagine she’d kept up the charade until I was about to turn fake-30, and then told me: “Guess what? You’re really only turning 29!”

Now that would have been the best birthday gift ever.

---

Epilogue: this would make for a much better story if I eventually went on to be the youngest surgeon to ever come out of Montreal or write a best-seller at the age of 21 or something. Nope. Nothing even close. It’s almost like I peaked at age 4.

---

(If any Quebec officials of any sort are reading this: Ha! Ha! Totally just kidding, you guys!)

…wherein I rave about Dan Mangan…

I love music to an extent that is, frankly, embarrassing, and probably unbecoming for someone of my age (that age not ending in “-teen”). But you can’t fight what you like and I’m a big believer in not denying what truly makes you happy, so I indulge my musical obsessions, even while acknowledging that most people think I’m a little over-the-top in my enjoyment of it.

That confession is really just setting the scene so I can rave in context about the recent Dan Mangan show in Sackville, NB.

I’ve been a fan of Dan’s ever since I heard his gravelly voice dropping a Leonard Cohen reference (“…ring the bells that still can ring…”) in the middle of his catchy-yet-unusually-brilliant song (brilliance that’s unusual for such a catchy song, that is), Robots. After falling in love with that song, I checked out Nice, Nice, Very Nice, his second album, and was blown away. His lyrics are clever, insightful, funny, poignant and honest; his melodies are beautiful; his singing is heartfelt and emotional. That’s pretty much everything I look for in an artist.

It was all over for me: I became hooked.

There are moments, in some of his songs, that are so utterly perfect that I can’t believe the rest of the world hasn’t yet caught on.

Remember when I said I was over-the-top?

Yeah.

Dan recently released his third album, Oh Fortune, and was coming through Sackville, NB, a little over a half hour away from where I live, on his cross-country tour. As fortune would have it (see what I did there?), it was a Friday night, and I had two friends willing and able to accompany me (both of whom, incidentally, became Dan Mangan fans thanks to me; just keeping track, Dan, in case a half-dozen conversions earns me an autographed t-shirt).

My friend Chris showed up at the venue (a movie theatre, of all places) at a ridiculously early hour and managed to secure us front-row seats. Because there was no stage– the equipment was set up directly in front of the first row– this meant we were all of a couple feet away from Dan and the band. I’ve never been that close to a performer before and it gave the whole show an intimate feeling– I’ve never felt so connected (though, at first, so awkward).

The show was phenomenal. Dan was engaging, charming and funny– and, most importantly, sang his heart out. His band gave it their all and created a flurry of sound– organized sonic chaos to surround Dan’s vocals.

At one point, I remember thinking, “This is it: one of those moments when everything is life is exactly perfect. I need to remember this feeling.” I haven’t felt that way in a long time. I needed it.
Any singer who’s worried about messing up a song should check out how Dan recovered after skipping over the second verse of The Indie Queens Are Waiting: he was so charmingly self-effacing and down-to-earth about it that it became one of my favourite performances of the night. (It’s the first in this two-song clip.)

My only complaint is a small one: during what Dan called a “band meeting,” the guitarist, Gordon Grdina, suggested playing the song Fair Verona, which happens to be my favourite Mangan tune– and one I had not expected to hear at all. He was shot down by the others and they went on to play something else… my hopes raised and dashed all in the span of one minute. Sigh. Okay, just a little sigh. Barely audible.

The final song was something I’ve never experienced at a show before, and something I’ll never forget. Dan and the band came out into the middle of the theatre– Dan balanced precariously on the arms of the seats in the middle of the crowd– and performed a heartbreakingly gorgeous rendition of So Much For Everyone, with the entire audience providing backup vocals and handclaps. I still get chills thinking about it. Though I know it was probably rehearsed, it felt spontaneous and electrifying and emotional. The perfect ending to the night.

Post-show, Dan came out to chat with fans and do the obligatory sign-and-smile-for-the-camera. Well, maybe not so obligatory: I know lots of artists who don’t do that. I really appreciate getting a chance to meet an artist and say thanks for the show, and Dan was very gracious about it, even in the face of my inane small talk.

The best part? My friend Chris filmed the entire show (apart from the opening song) on his iPhone, so whenever I want to relive it, it’s there for my (and your) YouTube pleasure. (Yes: after scoring front-row seats and filming the whole thing, Chris is my new favourite person ever, and hereby my now and future concert buddy.)

Here’s the amazing encore of Robots– including an added shout-out to the Irving Big Stop– and even though when Dan moves into the audience at the end it becomes too dark to see, keep listening to hear the incredible version of So Much For Everyone; it’s worth it. (Also, that YouTube freeze-frame is of me. I AM TOTALLY FAMOUS NOW, YOU GUYS.)

And now begins the long wait until I can see Dan perform again…. sigh. A little louder this time. Definitely audible.

(See my photos from the show here.)

Meowy Night

I just stumbled across a series of Flash animations I did in 2005, including a Christmas card that consisted of cartoon versions of my cats meowing Silent Night, as this screenshot shows:

Hey, 2005 version of me: I hope you enjoyed all your free time.