Birthday Bash: Extended Play

We don't live in the most economically upward neighbourhood. I may have mentioned this before in my rants about rental properties. It's not quite inner city (that's a few kilometers south of us), but the neighbourhood is colourful enough. On the plus side, it is culturally vibrant with festivals happening all through the year, dozens of mom and pop groceries and restaurants as ethnically diverse as Colombian, Ethiopian, East African, Indian, Chinese, Caribbean, Portuguese and more. Of all the neighbourhoods I've lived in in this city, I like this one the best.

Certainly, we are never short on entertainment. The community centre where Bubba and I had our birthday party on Friday night is right on the Avenue. As we sat around singing, talking, eating and drinking, we watched a john pick up a hooker, a drug deal, and gangs of crack-addicted youths troop past on their way to wherever they go to score. Not exactly a typical suburban experience, but no shots were fired and the local constabulary maintain a very vusible presence on the Ave., so it was all good. It's colourful without being particularly dangerous: I have, for example, never felt afraid to walk in my neighbourhood after dark.

Anyway, the bash was a great success. The karaoke was a much bigger hit than I was expecting (I, for one, never sing publically, but did that night, oh boy), and the company was delightful as always. The entertainment inside the community centre was just as compelling as that without, but without all the illegality and exploitation. Thanks to everyone who brought their talent, enthusiasm, humour and best wishes.

And the Scotch. Don't forget the Scotch.

It was also a pleasure to meet some of Bubba and Nuwayrah's friends: I don't remember all of their names as I was well into my cups, but Jody and her husband were very lovely, and it is always a great joy to see Sarah, Shahenda, and RedSauce. By the way, RedSauce, I'll bet you can rock Adele big time!

I do, however, have ONE criticism of an event that occurred that night: Bubba, if you read this, I want you to know this is in no way a criticism of you. If I wake up one morning and find poo on my doorstep, I will know I have done this wrong. I feel really badly for you that your buddy decided to drink too much and start swinging his fists around in your direction. It was selfish, childish and completely unnecessary (and kinda stupid: I mean, dude, you ARE the Mammoth Behemoth!). I deeply resented the drama, and I hope Buddy felt really shitty the next day. He owes you a huge apology and I hope you get it. Someone needs to grow the fuck up.

Hats off to Nuwayrah who had the unenviable task of babysitting. You don't get paid enough, girlfriend. Let's all have sushi soon.

One of the highlights of the evening, though, was that Nuwayrah and the Little Hunneydoo and several members of her bellydance class gave us a sneak preview of what I can expect to see at the L.Hdoo's dance recital next weekend. It was AWESOME!!! Anyone local who wants to see some kickass bellydance and munch on some Middle Eastern nibblies next Sunday should contact The School of Raq for tickets! L. Hdoo is in four different numbers, so you KNOW it's gonna raq the casbah!

But now my rock garden needs weeding, so I'm off to be all domestic and shit.

The Birthday In Brief

It was my birthday this week. I celebrated by taking Friday as a holiday, an act I am certain I will pay for on Monday morning when the work is piled on my desk in dishearteningy large heaps.

In the evening, there was a bang up party at our local community centre. I share my birthday with our friend, Bubba, so we made it a combined event, inviting our respective friends, renting a karaoke machine, ordering a keg...well, Bubba and his lovely partner, Nuwayrah, did all that. I just showed up, drank beer with Clamato juice and sang karaoke until three o'clock in the morning when my voice finally crapped out.

One of Bubba's friends brought his little boy along. At first, I was dismayed to find a child in our midst at what was supposed to be an adult party. But the little guy--about eight or nine--was behaved so beautifully that in short order, I didn't mind him being there at all. He was pretty cute and amused himself by chasing my dogs around the building. I appreciated this, as a tired dog is a good dog.

Anyway, at one point, he joined the Little Hunneydoo and I sitting on the couch in the main room, where the karaoke was about to kick off to Bucks Fizz's "You're A Crazy Bitch (But You Fuck So Good)". The little boy looked at us and said, "Are you guys sisters?"

And I said,

"We are close.
"We are nice.
"Some people think that we're just friends,
"But actually, we're lesbians."

He nodded like he understood, but he didn't, and a few minutes later, he left the building and ran up the street, because kids are random like that.

I was just thrilled to have the opportunity to use the rhyme in conversation.

Tomorrow, I'll try to give a better description of the whole night.

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel: A Movie Review

When I saw the cast for this film, I thought, "Oh, this is just too good to be true: Dames Judi Dench and Maggie Smith? Together? Again? Like in A Room With View? It seems too good to be true."

And I can reassure you, this film is very, very good. The writing is excellent: compassionate without descending into sentimentality, showcasing a variety of personalities without caricature, in turns witty, insightful and elegant. Each of the performances are honestly and genuinely delivered: as with real, fully-realized people, the viewer likes some more than others, but they each stand out as individuals and not personas.

It is filmed beautifully also: India emerges as a tumult of noise and colour and furious life as well as a sacred and silent place. The only aspect missing is the smell.

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is a story of seven British seniors who, for various personal reasons, leave Britain to take up residence in a hotel catering to "the elderly and the beautiful." They arrive to find the establishment, like themselves, a little ragged at the edges and not as pristine as advertised. Time and the elements have taken their toll on everyone, but each of the characters finds, if not what they were looking for, at least what they need. They, and the hotel, find new life and purpose.

It is a gentle and optimistic film. The sedate story-line (i.e. no guns or explosions) may fail to connect with a younger audience, but one leaves the theatre feeling as if one just experienced something authentic. I don't know about you, but I don't ever see guns and I'd flip if anything exploded nearby. On the other hand, I struggle constantly with a growing awareness of the finite time I have left on this earth and what "living" really means.

The only criticisms I have of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel are very minor. For one, I felt that Maggie Smith's character, revealed in the early part of the film as a racist, managed to overcome her long held prejudices rather easily. In my experience, it takes a long time to get past that, and the older one is, the more resistant one is to change. That's not to say it can't happen, though.

The other criticism I had was one I also had of The Help, a film whose subtitle might have been "Aren't White People Great?" Early on in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, one of the characters breathlessly reads in the brochure that the hotel offers an experience of the elegance and propserity of the Raj.

"Is that good?" another character asks.

Well, it certainly was a wonderful time for the British in India: it was a less delightful time for the Indians. And this film, told from the perspective of the British seniors, perpetuates the sterotype of the hapless, disorganized but good-hearted Indian (the hotel's proprietor) who only needs the guidance of the sage, civilized British to succeed. It is mildly patronizing, but given that the story is told with insight and humour, it is a minor criticism indeed.

See it. At best, you'll want to examine what you want to do with the time that remains to you. At the very least, you'll crave a curry afterwards!

I Smell the Smelly Smell of Something That Smells

Switching back to work again, people, although it's really just variations on a theme at this point. Nothing new or fresh, just my on-going fascination and stupefaction at people's attention needs and the lengths to which they will go to meet them.

We have blissfully been spared the annoying presence of Teeth partially (get it? Teeth=partial? Yeah?), as on Thursday morning, she bundled her child off to stay with her aunt while Teeth is meeting someone (probably a driver) in Saskatchewan for a hook up. She was not exactly explicit about this being a fuckcation, but she didn't bother denying it when I wished her a good time on her weekend of depravity. Although, come to think of it, she may have been thrown off by the complexity of the word "depravity". I maybe should have just said, "Have good fucking" and stuck with that.

Anyway, there's a burr under every saddle, and this week, it's been Eeyore. You may recall that last week, she bolted from the office when she smelled some kind of solvent and took the rest of the week off as a result. (And by the way, have I mentioned that Eeyore smokes? How can someone that sensitive to smells smoke and still survive?) Now, to be fair, unlike Yvette, Eeyore takes her computer with her and works from home. It's when she comes back to the office that the circus begins.

The office was painted last weekend, on Friday night. And it wasn't the whole place, just the ladies washroom and a couple of the manager's offices. Eeyore, learning of this in advance, took her computer home and didn't return until Wednesday morning. And I can tell you that there was no smell of paint on Monday when I got to work.

But perhaps I am just insensitive (!!!say it aint so!!!), because when Eeyore walked in the door on Wednesday, she paused at the reception desk, and, as Princess Anne looked on in disbelief, sniffed the air tentatively. She then continued to her desk.

Alas, Eeyore's return to work was premature, because she spent the rest of the day snivelling and sighing extravagantly. On Thursday, she shuffled into the staff room where Jacques and I were discussing the relative merits of bagels.

"'Ow are you?" he asked her.

"Crappy, thanks for asking," she replied and returned to her desk.

Jacques looked at me and said, "I tell you, being married to a woman like dat..." and he held his fingers to his temple in imitation of a pistol and pulled the trigger.

But he should try sitting in her pod. At one point, Eeyore was sitting with her head in her hands, her hair cascading over her face. When asked if she was alright, her dramatic response was, "My entire body is shutting down."

Insert rolling of eyes here. Bitch, please. You are overstating the case. For you to claim that your body is shutting down is akin to me finding bacon stips in my underpants and telling everyone that I shat the house. Seriously: exaggeration is for comedians and caricaturists: anyone else is a drama queen.

Anyway, I'm starting to think that Eeyore is a hypochondriac, because today at my desk, she got Princess Anne to feel her forehead.

"Are you feverish?" I asked.

She nodded.

"Well, maybe you should go home," said Princess Anne. "Technically, if you're feverish, you're contagious."

"No," said Eeyore, gloomily. "I have an infection."

And then she intimated that the infection is in her hoohaw.

Head/desk. Repeat as necessary.

Moby Dick

As I write, Mohammed is helping Abdully move out of the basement across the street. This is the first time I've seen Abdully in weeks, but I'm pleased to see him go. I got really tired of him dumping the garbage from his car on the street in front of my place and having his various cars sit for weeks without moving. I don't know where the BMW is, but maybe he is, like the Jeffersons, movin' on up.

The only problem with losing the devil you know, of course, is that the devil you don't know invariably replaces him. Sometimes, this is a positive change, as is the case with the house from which Abdully is moving (and where Mohammed also used to live). When we moved into our place three years ago, it as pretty obvious that the house was occupied by drug dealers: one chick, two dopey guys and two pit bulls who frequently got out and wandered the streets. The dogs were a lot less aggressive than the people, who were in and out at odd times, had asshole friends and were generally douchey. Finally, they got kicked out and the current occupant (who I believe is the owner) moved in. He replaced the front door and the walk, painted the wrought iron fence and moved his Asian girlfriend and her little boy in with him. They rock, aside from the fact that they rent their basement out to dicks like Mohammed and Abdully.

But sometimes, the change is just as bad or worse. Like the rental property directly south of Former Drug Den. The people in there before were this woman and her infant and her boyfriend/husband (I'm not sure which). He had a motorcycle and a trailer and he could occasionally be found on the sidewalk playing with a remote control car. Despite being of a certain age, he was also prone to wearing brightly patterned shirts featuring dragons enwrapt in blue flames: you know, the kind of shirts that are better suited to very young men who haven't learned what not to wear yet. And I didn't get the feeling that this man wore the shirts out a deeply-developed sense of irony, as one might do with a bowling shirt. And no offense to my several friends who collect comic books, but I suspect he had a bunch. Maybe Archie or something, I dunno. Anyway, I think the woman got tired of trying to raise two children, though, because she disappeared and left him to sort of gradually fade away in her absence.

Unfortunately, their replacement is a lot less easy to ignore. Enter Moby Dick. Moby Dick is a short shit of a man, balding, and drives a bright red sports car with a gigantic whale tail spoiler. Hence the name Moby Dick. His girlfriend I call Moby Chick. Moby Dick doesn't live there, but he's over often enough to be a pain in the ass, gunning his engine and spitting every 30 seconds or so. He's also a miserable bastard: I watched him once, pull up to the curb and throw a bunch of crap out onto the grass in front of our neighbour's place. He didn't bother getting out of the car. He just pulled up, opened the passenger side door and started throwing shit out. Then he tore off, leaving it in a heap. I was about to go out and pick it all up when Moby Chick wandered ito view and began collcting what turned out to be her belongings, boots, clothes, etc.

Moby Chick is a stocky, heavily tattoo'ed broad who smokes copiously, drinks shitty beer and sprays her crappy kid with the garden hose to make him scream. It makes me want to spray her back with a little bit of hydrochloric acid. I can just see this kid in about ten years, reeking of Axe, baseball cap (with an unbilled visor) worn at a jaunty angle, wearing distressed jeans four sizes too big for his skinny ass, mutilating kittens in the back alley.

Anyway, they moved in in the late winter, and I can hardly wait for the summer party season to come, when Moby Dick will show up sans shirt in track pants (which must *surely* be worn with irony), spitting all over the yards. And Moby Chick, her pendulous mammaries barely contained by her stretched-almost-to-transparency tube top (emblazoned PINK), unable to keep those double Fs from swaying ever closer to her hips, themselves forced into a pair of shorts so tight that the flunge of flab sagging over the waistband gives her the appearance of a grotesque mushroom. Yes, too many Bud Light with Lime's will be drunk, someone will disparage someone's favourite heavy metal band and IT WILL BE ON, BITCH, for the whole neighbourhood to hear.

Because these are the Douches In My Neighbourhood.

My Epiphany

A Letter To Baba Ganesh:

Jai, Ganapati! Ohm, and all that. Thanks for listening.

So, for a year and almost-a-half now, I have been at this boring job with people who make me insane for an insulting wage, given my obvious brilliance and better-than-average skills. And despite a valiant effort, I cannot seem to find suitable employment elsewhere, which leads me to think that there must be some cosmic, karmic lesson in this experience for me. Now, they tell me that You, Baba Ganesh, are the removal of obstacles. What isn't so widely publicized is that You are also prone to placing obstacles, in order for us to learn things we need to know. And so, I've been wondering what You, in your cryptic and inscrutable Hindu way, have been trying to teach me.

Because, as You've noticed, this insight has eluded me. What could I possibly be meant to learn from working with a bunch of socially arrested, emotionally infantile twatwaffles? (Sorry if that's offensive, by the way. After all, they're YOUR socially arrested, emotionally infantile twatwaffles. In fact, if the Vedas are to be believed--and I'm working on it--they ARE You, as every single thing in Creation is an expression of God or All That Is).

So what is it You're trying to show me? Is it that the human experience is vastly diverse? Yes, I get that. No problem. Am I supposed to absorb the lesson "Patience, Grasshopper"? I think I've shown superhuman forbearance, given the provocations You've provided. I've tried really hard to be a positive role model and voice of reason.

For example, this morning when Princess Anne and Stretch had another argument. I realize there has been tension between the two of them for the past week, and part of that has been because Princess Anne felt invalidated and her feeling ignored by Stretch in some recent decisions. So today, Stretch sent her an email, indicating that he felt she was angry and invited her to talk to him. Instead of taking him up on this offer (which he is not required to do, as a member of management and she the receptionist), she sends ME an outraged email, complaining that she doesn't think she can be civil, etc. And my response, Sri Ganesh, was to encourage her to talk to him, to state her peace calmly but honestly, because Stretch was doing the right thing. Since when, O Divine One, have I been the reasonable, calm, cool and collected one, dispensing wisdom?

Am I really supposed to be learning how to babysit adults? Cuz somehow I had hoped for more. If these people were homeless or disabled or in some other way diminished, I would get it. But they're just young and/or selfish and/or stupid. Seriously: how else would You describe someone who complains that a guy has trampled on her feelings and then get even more pissed off when he invites her to talk about them? Like, wtf, God?

And, what exactly am I supposed to take away from having to listen to Teeth describe in torturous, explicit detail all the various aspects of her relationship? Incuding the sex part. Because it has happened almost every day this week, Sir. I don't really see it as my place to correct her, and I further wonder how it is she doesn't realize how grossly inappropriate her behaviour is.

And then it occurred to me: the epiphany I've been searching for. I know this blog comes across as a little smug and judgy sometimes (all the time? You're right), but the fact of the matter is that, deep down, I know I am in no position to judge. God knows I've behaved in ways that are scarcely wise or laudatory or even kind. I'm sure that, while I have blissfully blocked out the details of my early twenties, I have behaved in douchey ways that strongly resemble the behaviours I catalogue here. I've been self-indulgent, insecure, lazy and inappropriate. I'd like to think that I am less inclined that way these days, but I am scarcely an objective observer.

So while I hate to make this all about me, I think the point You're trying to make here is that I must be mindful of my own behaviour, that I mustn't fall into the trap of feeling superior when comparing myself to the Women of WalMart, just because their path is different from mine. Because I confess: when I look at Yvette and her relationships and her life, I feel an enormous relief that that's not me. And I feel the same way when I examine Teeth or Princess Anne. And it goes a ittle bit deeper than being mindful of Your gifts. It's personal.

So, is that what You want me to know? And having learned it, may I please work somewhere else?

Or is this what You want to say?

"Just as the defined edges of your future are beyond you, so too are the boundaries of your past behind. Where you came from is not relevant here, only the person you have become. There are insights and answers inside you for questions that may never be asked. Mysteries that may never be unlocked. Lessons that need not be understood. My love for you is ever present. You shall not walk alone. As the sun rises, I will shine for you. As it sets, I am your lantern. Your heart knows the way home."

What's That Smell? It's DRAMA!

This morning, Teeth announced repeatedly and at high volume that she was leaving the office around 9:00 a.m. for a "personal appointment." She and the Asshole Boyfriend were attending couples counselling, and when she returned around noon, she brought with her buckets of deeply personal information that no-one except Yvette wanted to hear.

I turned my hearing aid off and blissfully heard none of it.

Then, later in the afternoon, Hitler said, "What's that smell?", covered her nose and bolted for the front door. She remained outside the building for ten minutes and was ultimately sent home early. (She's one of these sensitive to smells women.) Apparently, someone had opened a can of solvent or something. I never caught a whiff, even though I share a pod with Hitler (now there's a sentence you don't read everyday--"I share a pod with Hitler").

Ultimately, Teeth consulted with one of the managers and we were all sent home about an hour early (Yvette was out the door within five minutes of Teeth making the announcement, which means she was shagging the dog already or didn't finish her end of day reports in her mad scramble for the door.)

Honest to Christ, I have never seen so much drama over a smell (that didn't come from me).

I've been thinking I should change Hitler's name to something more suitable. She isn't really Hitler-esque, she's much more like Eeyore. I mean, I like her (I'm one of the few), but she's one of those people who complains about her circumstances, but when you suggest ways for her to change things, she's got excuses as to why she can't. So her life is just one long valley of shadows and a veil of tears. But she obviously likes it like that.