What's he on about now?

In case the articles, essays and opinions throughtout this site just weren't enough for you, here's my online diary (a.k.a. 'blog'). It's as close as you'll come to the inside of my head, so don't say I didn't warn you
(and remember, you can always e-mail me if you love or loathe anything you're about to read)...


   Wednesday, December 25, 2002

ANOTHER OLD-FASHIONED FAMILY CHRISTMAS

This is the first time I get to try out the "world-wide" part of this World-Wide-Web Blogger site. Okay, I'm writing from Hamilton, Ontario, so it's not that exciting but I'm grateful I can keep this up even here.

We're about to leave for my step-aunt's place just down the street for Christmas dinner. My stepbrother Peter and I were told this morning that Diane is suddenly sick with a "diarrea virus." "Oh, there's a great idea," laughs Pete, "Let's go have dinner there!" "We can eat off her cutlery!" I add. "She can kiss us!" Pete yells, making a big slurpy sound. Stepmom Josie makes a fed-up face and says, "Alright you two, knock it off. What's the big deal about going over there?" "You're the one who used the phrase 'diarrea virus'," we tell her. She nods -- point taken.

Last night was another family Christmas scene -- dinner at my aunt's, playing cards while the little kids shriek and their respective parents shriek at them to stop shrieking. Gets old real fast, let me tell you. After that, my parents, me and my tension headache all head back to our place so they can get ready for midnight mass. I, the heathen, sensibly stay home and watch a movie about young hustlers in Las Vegas called "Speedway Junky." Not a very good movie but more heartwarming than midnight mass in my book.

MY SELF-ESTEEM THERMOMETER

On the way home from the pub about an hour ago, I briefly fancied ducking into the dance bar up the street to see who might be there but realized my self-esteem thermometer was too low. Okay, I'll explain...

After a good night's sleep and a leisurely breakfast, I was feeling warm and happy before beginning a double-shift at the record store and the pub that left me drained. After all that, I knew that an evening-gone-wrong at the club might be too much for me, so I gave the idea up.

mmmm....SOY.....

I think it was about a decade ago that we all discovered oat bran, wasn't it? Some study came along that showed a link between oat bran and lower cholesterol rates and, suddenly, it seemed every food product on the market had oat bran in it (leaving only Crystal Pepsi, and we still don't know what the hell was in that). Now it's soy protein, which I can eat every morning in my Vector cereal after pouring Soy Good "organic beverage" over it.

While postponing dinner for Christmas shopping this evening, I stopped at a potato chip rack where I spotted a bag of new Glenny's Low Fat Onion & Garlic Soy Crisps. Not having to say all that out loud saved me some time as I decided to risk a bag. Any snack food that lists organic broccoli as an ingredient deserves a chance, no? They look unique -- brown discs with white bubbles of rice and green speckles -- but the sea salt prevents them from being nearly flavourless (onion and garlic, my ass!), reminding me that trade wars were once fought over salt with good reason.

At $1.99 for a tiny 37g bag, I won't be leaping to buy them again but I was pleased that, according to the bag, I was getting 20% percent of my daily iron intake, 10g of that precious soy protein and a whopping 40g of soy isoflavones. I'd be more impressed if that last bit didn't sound like something out of 'Star Trek' ("We can neutralize the Borg virus with 40g of soy isoflavones, Captain!").

With those criminally-fatty potato chips less than half the price but still delicious, I hope the mysterious Glenny and friends can get their healthy snacks into more stores for less cost. And, assuming that is the very cool Maurice Vellekoop illustrating their way-happy website, I'm ready to cheer them on -- provided they bump up the garlic.

As a weird postscript, I poked my head into a Gateway store to compare the size of a bag of potato chips. The man behind the counter -- a shorter, rounder Zero Mostel lookalike -- grunted something at me and, almost as an Eaton Centre reflex, I said, "Just looking, thanks." "What are you looking for?" he barked, so I tried to be cute and said, "No, it's okay, I was seeing if anything yelled 'eat me!'" After the silence, I added, "You know." One look at his face told me he didn't know. "You need a vibrator," he said, "That would schleeze you." I could feel my entire forehead scrunch up like an accordian, as I lamely said, "I'm sorry, what?" "You need a vibrator," he repeated, "That would schleeze you." Alrighty, I thought, he did indeed say all that. Not knowing what to say or why, I felt back on my old motto: when in doubt, be blunt. "That's a very odd thing to say," I told him. He just looked at me, with no discernable expression on his face. And then my second old motto: when blunt doesn't work, get the hell out. I turned, walked off and resumed my Christmas shopping, making a mental note to check if 'schleeze' is in the dictionary.

NEVER CAN SAY GOODBYE

The trouble with this whole online diary business is that I can only go on about myself. I don't feel comfortable including too much detail about my friends and family, especially if it's at all negative. This is no place to be airing dirty laundry. This rule of mine makes it very difficult to discuss breaking up with Darcy. While I had my reasons for leaving, I certainly can't go into them here.

I can say, however, that I've missed him terribly this past week and I wish things between us were different. He came by the pub tonight and said he wished he could take me home. I wanted that too but knew I couldn't say so. It wouldn't change anything, for this was a scene we'd played out exactly the same after I'd left him back in June.

When tonight's shift was over, I thought I might cheer myself up by popping into the club down the street for its last hour of dancing. After paying the cover, I walked in to find the place nearly empty and Darcy walking towards me. He was heading out as I was heading in and the timing was unnerving. I'm glad I don't believe in fate.

We chatted outside with a fair bit of awkwardness, since we both knew that -- literally and figuratively -- we were headed in different directions. He gave me a gentle invitation back to his place anyway but I gave him a goodnight kiss and went home solo. This would all be easier if he were a terrible person but he's not. All I do know -- after a year of trying to make us fit -- is that he's not the one for me. I'll have to keep reminding myself of that while I still want him back so badly.

Labels: oh l'amour

THE EVIL OF BANALITY

Not thrilled about still more gaps in my supposedly daily entries here but, as musician Robyn Hitchcock writes in his own Slate Diary this week, "most of my life is too intimate or too banal to describe." For me, that would currently be my break-up with Darcy last week and my daily shifts at the record store and the pub. I'll have to stay quiet about both for the time being, while I search for topics less intimate and less banal.

Otherwise, I think my excuse for not writing more is still a solid one -- in a week of scheduling-gone-bad, I've just finished my fourth double-shift in a row. I need sleep like a junkie needs heroin but, as a hamster discovers, it's hard to stop that big wheel once you're running in it. I can deal with it -- this is the life I've currently chosen for myself, after all -- but I admit I'm still bristling over an encounter with an old acquanitance last week.

Running into me right after The Talk with Darcy, he could see that I was unhappy and frustrated. He decided to give me a pep talk but, when it began with "What happened to all those plans you used to have?", I knew I was in trouble. My well-intentioned hero let me know that working at the pub was not the best thing for me and that I have to "get out there" and "make things happen" for myself, because it's all just that easy and had never occurred to me before.
Ass.

In Hollywood movies, people frequently get "one chance" to win the game, get the girl, beat the bad guy, whatever. In Hollywood movies, they usually succeed. But what if you live in the real world and that "one chance" never comes? Or if it does and you fail? Or -- perhaps worst of all -- if it does and you don't recognize it? What becomes of you then? Do you just "get out there" and whip up another? And do you deserve to be abandoned if you can't?

I'm angry at this guy because he's right, of course -- I know success won't come along without any effort from me -- but I refuse to be lectured about laziness when I'm working fifteen hours a day on little sleep. Obviously, I need to be working smarter rather than more -- doing less for more pay -- but how? If it's so damn easy to "make things happen", why are so many of us barely getting by? Obviously, I should have finished my woefully-expensive and essentially-useless Psychology degree -- grinding myself further, further into debt -- but does not doing so mean I've doomed myself to a life of labour-class living? Time to get out there...

Labels: oh l'amour

LUSH LIFE

Public drunkenness...destruction of property...
is this what we think of when we think of the Irish?
-- legendary news anchorman Kent Brockman

A shame to my race is what I am. Two work Christmas parties -- one last night, one two Mondays ago -- and I drank badly at both. Badly, as in not well. If an ability to drink is like working a muscle, then I'm still putting on my gym shoes. While everyone last night got truly hammered, I cautiously accepted a pair of shooters while buying a single pint of Kilkenny (mmm, Kilkenny...). I could tell that I was viewed with suspicion. "Oh," their eyes seemed to say, "he's one of those non-drinkers." I felt -- as I often have before -- like Frasier Crane at Cheers.

What the record store gang last night didn't realize is that my caution was well-earned: at the pub Christmas party two weeks ago, the hooch flowed like water and, in chugging along with a hard-drinkin' crowd, I ended up hugging a toilet bowl at midnight with my pants around my ankles.

Not my finest hour.

I felt like I was 19 again, back when I hung out in Hamilton with an athletic high-school boy whose motto was, "Drinking kills brain cells...but only the weak ones!" At least once a week, we'd get shredded with alcohol, stumble back to his place, pass out and nurse each other's hangovers the next day. His parents thought I was a bad influence, which I thought was hilarious since I was merely trying to keep up with their son's secret ability to pound the drinks back like a trucker with two days off. Fortunately, my liver was spared when -- terrified that I might be falling in love with him -- I shakingly told him that I was gay and he never looked me in the eye again. I considered him like a brother to me but he knew the score better than I did and got out of harm's way.

Hard drinking never seemed quite as much fun after that -- even in university -- and, these days, I find that I do better without. In the same way a repressed "nice guy" finds his inner bastard when he drinks, alcohol and drugs bring out all the suppressed qualities in myself I dislike -- passivity, dullness, paranoia and clumsiness. Oh yeah, and usually the contents of my stomach, too. While I'm oddly grateful to have experienced the nastiness of a "Cement Mixer" (Baileys and lime cordial, congealed in the mouth), I think I'll have an iced tea now, thanks.