My husband's so mean...

"Just rip it out!!  Please," I begged.

"Oh, love, I can't," said David.

"Yes, yes, you can!  Just take a spoon, or your thumb, or a FREAKING NAIL FILE, and pop out my eye.  Scramble it if you have to, but get it out!!!  Any of those will hurt less than the invisible railroad spike that is presently stabbing through my eye socket."

"I can't do that.  But I can get you a cold pack to put on your neck.  Did you take your drugs?"

"I took my drugs," I whimpered, pushing the heel of my hand into the cavity below my right eyebrow, desperately trying to remove the pressure.  "I took as many drugs as I can without damaging my liver.  They haven't kicked in yet.  Why haven't they kicked in yet??  Could you just knock me out please?  Just coldcock me upside the head and..."

"I'm not going to knock you out," David, holding my hand under the blankets.

"How about sawing my head off?  That'd do it..."

"Nope, not going to happen."

"WHY NOT?!?"

"Because I like your head.  And I like your eye.  Sure, you'd rock an eye patch for a while, but talking to one-eyed pirate version of you would get old pretty fast."  He gently squeezed my hand as I quietly sobbed.

Trepanation, by Herbert List 1944

"How about you drill a hole, just a small hole, in my head and we put in a wee pressure valve thingie??  You know, bring back the ancient art of trepanation," I suggested in a sultry tone, but I couldn't be too flirty with this appeal on account of the fact that I couldn't even open my eyes, because even the light from the night light was too bright, and my seduction really comes from my eyes.  And my boobs.  I arched my back a bit, hoping that the boobs might do the job on their own.

"No."

"You know how they have tornado sirens?  Maybe they could develop an early-warning system for barometric pressure shifts.  Like 20 minutes before it happens, the weather service could send out emergency emails to all those migraine sufferers who want to kill themselves when it shifts from extreme high pressure to extreme low pressure.  Then we could all dope ourselves up with our maximum drug dosage, before the pain has us suicidal.  Can we start a petition for that?"

"That, I will do for you."

And good morning to you...

Ggggggggggrowl...  grumble... grumble... grumble...  "Stupid yoga pants!  Stupid bra! My boobs don't belong in a bra yet!"  grumble... grumble... grumble...

Stomp. Stomp. Stomp.  "Stupid stairs."

Trip. Slip.  "Stupid cat toy!"

grumble... grumble... grumble... "Stupid morning."

"Still sleepy, huh?"  Rissa comes over, enveloping me in a purple terry cloth hug.

grumble... grumble... grumble...  "Not awake yet..."

"You need a warm beverage," David says.  "The kettle's already on."

sigh.  whimper.  "Stupid kettle...  Sorry.  I'm tired."

"Yes you are."  Rissa pats me on the arm.

Collapse.

"Need to be on the floor, huh?"

"Yes."

"Comfy down there?"

"No... it's cold."  grumble... grumble... grumble...

David helps me up.  "Sit."

"I don't want to."

"Fine, don't sit.  Rissa, do you want 1/2 a banana?"

whimper...  tears... 

"Do you want 1/2 a banana?"

"Yes.  But then I'd be taking food out of my own child's moooouuuuth!"  Bigger tears.

"Okay.  You sit.  Here is a banana.  You going to be good to go in five minutes?"

sniffle... sniffle... "I don't want to go outside."

"I'll drive.  You just have to drive back.  You can do that right?  You'll be awake by then?"

"I DON'T KNOOOOOOW!!!"

David and Rissa share a commiserative look.

"I'M A BABY BEAR!!!! " grumble... grumble... grumble...

"Yes you are."  Pat. Pat. Pat.

"My eyebrows don't work."

"No, they haven't woken up yet either."

"I haven't even peed yet!'

"Well, you'd better go do that then."

***

Washing my hands... sniff... sniff... sniff... "This is disproportionate emotional response."

"Yes it is.  Come on." David hands me my decaf.  "This might help.  I'll drive.  You can even lie back and sleep for the 10 minutes."

***

whinge... whinge... whinge... "I can't lie back AND drink coffee!  Now I have coffee all over my coat..."

"You weren't supposed to be drinking the coffee, you were supposed to be sleeping."

"Which is it?? Do you want me to be awake enough to drive back or do you want me COMATOSE?!?  Sorry... sorry..."  tears

This is me, when woken in the middle of a sleep cycle and then being forced to drive.  I apparently need a sign: DISTURB AT YOUR OWN PERIL.

Hot flashes and flatulence.

I fell off the wagon last week - again.  I answered the siren call of caffeine and gluten. We've got one of those single serve Keurig coffee machines at the office and I'm always jealous because there are all these snazzy, olfactorily orgasmic caffeinated flavours, wafting their way through the office air.  Flavours that people who can drink caffeine willy-nilly, carry around in their mugs, making disgusting yummy noises.

I caved.  Twice.  The Hazelnut Cappuccino and the Southern Pecan seduced me.  I'm a whore for sweet coffees.  I freely admit it.  Perhaps others will learn from my mistakes. I dropped my loonies in the peanut butter jar that we use as a "CONTRIBUTE TO THE COFFEE FUND" receptacle and picked up the caffeine crack pipe.  Plus I might have had a french vanilla latte from Tim Hortons.  Then, oh DEAR GOD, I had a chocolate mint black tea at home, because my body was now jonesing for the caffeine. 

So there was all this caffeine RAGING through my blood stream, bouncing around like a hamster in dryer, that had to come out.  How does it exit my body?  Through my torso.  Hot flashes that could power the eastern seaboard.  I was waking up stinking of sweat because I'd been flashing all through the night.  My usually sweet-smelling arm pits reeked of wrestler...  from sleeping.  Pajamas on, pajamas off.  Hair matted to my skull from head sweat.  David woke up one morning and let out a panicked shriek until he realized it was actually me in bed with him.

Then there was the gluten.  If you're going to fall off the wagon, you might as well just throw yourself under the wheels and allow your severed body to land in the ditch, right?  We had an office meeting (which is where the first hit of caffeine came in, the sinful hazelnut cappuccino).  Timbits were at the meeting.  Timbits are from the Devil.  I never have them because the combined gluten and sugar puts me into a near sugar coma.  I stopped counting at 10.  And then, later in the week, when we had an off-site meeting, with more Timbits, I had another... we'll call it 10.  And I had pizza that night.  I ate my thin-crust pizza, moaning my way through the crusts.  And then I ate David's crusts, from his rising-crust pizza, dipping them in ranch dressing, synapses in my brain over-firing from the delicious gluten.  The flatulence happened shortly thereafter and was SPECTACULAR.  From the reek of me, you'd have thought that I'd eaten a small cow who'd been fed a steady diet of garlic for its short life.

Nice girl, shame about the flatulence.

So this week I am starting over.  No caffeine - no matter how good it smells.  Decaf all the way.  Wait!  I can get flavour shots!  I could line up bottles and bottles of flavour shots by my desk and turn my sad decaf into giddy, flavourful, pseudo-sex drinks!  Plus having those bottles would be incredibly festive, you know since we're in the holiday season and all.  And I picked up a gluten-free pizza crust at the No-Frills on Saturday so we're set there.  When life hands you flatulence...

THIS is R-rated?!?

WARNING - THIS POST IS RATED R FOR LANGUAGE.

Rissa saw her first R rated film when she was probably 10.  Yep, we were those parents.  The movie was Love Actually.  You know the one... Richard Curtis's quintessential feel-good Christmas film?  Probably one of the sweetest holiday movies ever?  The one where even the most manly of men will be crying when the kid jumps into Liam Neeson's arms?  That one.  It was rated 14A in Canada and rated R in the States for language, sexual situations and nudity.   And yes, Bill Nighy had some colourful language and there were some comical positioning of nearly nude bodies as body doubles, but it was pretty freaking tame.

Richard Curtis's latest film, About Time, also got an R-rating in the States.  We'd been looking up reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, found out it was rated R and suddenly we felt we had to develop a strategy for sneaking Rissa in.  Turns out we didn't have to worry for two reasons: 1) the movie is rated 14A in Canada and Rissa looks like she's 18 already, and 2)  in researching the MPAA rating system, we realized that David and I can take Rissa into any R rated movie we want to because we are, in fact, her parents/guardians.  Did you know that?  We could take her to see the next graphic slasher film - in the theatre - WE'RE NOT GOING TO, but we could.   

         MPAA Ratings

• Rated G: General Audiences – All Ages Admitted.
• Rated PG: Parental Guidance Suggested – Some Material May Not be Suitable for Children.
• Rated PG-13: Parents Strongly Cautioned – Some Material May be Inappropriate for Children Under 13.
• Rated R: Restricted – Under 17 Requires Accompanying Parent or Adult Guardian.
• Rated NC-17: No Children Under 17 Admitted.
  
  Canadian Motion Picture Ratings

• G - General Audience - Suitable for all ages.
• PG - Parental Guidance - Parental guidance advised. There is no age restriction but some material may not be suitable for all children.
• 14A - 14 Accompaniment - Persons under 14 years of age must be accompanied by an adult.
• 18A - 18 Accompaniment - Persons under 18 years of age must be accompanied by an adult. In the Maritimes & Manitoba, children under the age of 14 are prohibited from viewing the film.
• R - Restricted - Admittance restricted to people 18 years of age or older.

After viewing About Time, we were mystified as to what could garner an R rating for the film.  No gun violence.  Yeah, there'd been some language, but David and I found it all pretty mild.  In the ratings systems in both Canada and the US apparently you get ONE FREE FUCK in the script without having to up your ratings.

According to the MPAA "A motion picture’s single use of one of the harsher sexually-derived words, though only as an expletive, initially requires at least a PG-13 rating. More than one such expletive requires an R rating, as must even one of those words used in a sexual context.4 or more utterances of 'hard language' gets you an automatic R rating."  Which I'm thinking means that if you're using fuck as an adjective and not sexually, you can get 4 before you get your R rating.  But if you say you want to fuck someone then it's automatically an R rating.  Because fucking, folks, we all know is bad.

As to the language in the film... There were a few haphazard fucks in the script, but I double checked with Rissa and apparently the fucks really start flying in the school yard at around the age of 11, so the brief use of language of its ilk in the film for our 13 year old daughter doesn't freak me out because she will literally hear worse at school.  There wasn't any nudity in the film apart from arty photographic shots of Kate Moss at a gallery in the film.  We figured that the rating had to come down to the joking mention of  oral sex and actually uttering the word 'cunnilingus.' So  About Time gets its R rating in the States for alluding to pleasing a woman orally and using technical language to describe that act... in a joke.  Although I guess I shouldn't really be surprised, Rob Ford crassly mentioned having "more than enough to eat at home" and the gasps could be heard around the world.

And yet... AND YET... violence in PG13 movies in the States has been ramping up and up and up for decades, but that's okay.  God no, don't even allude to consensual sex, but showing rampant gun violence?  Not a problem.  Snapping people's necks?  Shooting them?  Completely fine.  ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME?!? They just did this study that's catching a lot of air time this week: GUN VIOLENCE TRENDS IN MOVIES.  Well worth a read.  And perhaps a re-examination of the ratings system, and how 'bout while we're at it,  a re-examination of what really is okay for our kids to be exposed to in film?  Cause here's the thing: I would love, love to share the Kill Bill films with Rissa for their strong portrayal of women and the brilliant visual stylization of Tarantino's film-making, but Rissa will not see those until she's at least 16 because of the extreme violence in them.  Not the language.  I really don't give two fucks about the language - the language isn't going to hurt her, isn't going to scar her.  Violent images, however, just might.  She's my kid, I've got to to look out for her.

I've been HIT!!!

BANG! 

Even on this windy, windy November's day, the sound ricocheted off buildings.

"What the hell was that?" David asked.

I looked around wildly.  "I don't know, I don't know!"  My shoulder ached a bit.

"Are you okay?  Were you hit?"  David  gave me the once over, checking for blood.

"I think maybe...  I don't know what it... what the... WHAT THE?!?"  There, on my right shoulder was the bullet.  Green, about 2 inches long by 1/2 inch wide. Shot from the ass of a Canada Goose, still wending its navigationally-challenged way north-west, hundreds of feet above me.  The winged beast was honking in elation  "SUCKER!  SUCKER! SUCKER!!"

"Oh God!  GOD!  I've been hit!  I've been HIT!!! It was a fly-by!"  I felt faint, but I didn't want to move my head too much in case I got goose shit in my eye.

"Hold on, hold on," David said.  "You're okay... it's okay."  Chivalrously, he reached down and grabbed some freshly fallen maple leaves, using them to wipe the goosey bomb off me.  The turd actually made a thumping noise when it hit the ground.  We both jumped back, examining it.

"That's some shit."

"Yep."

"That's not like a little seagull turd."

"Nope."

"They say that getting bird poop on you is good luck."

"I'm feeling pretty lucky that it didn't hit me in the head.  I'd be dead now."

"TURD TERMINAL VELOCITY."

"Har-dee-freaking-har..."

"Seriously though, you're okay?"  He was looking me over, all concerned for my well-being.

"Yes, yes  I'm... HOLY FUCK!!!   MOTHER OF... MY EYE!"  In the wind, a maple leaf had apparently decided to commit hari kari on my face.

"Was that a leaf?"

"YES.  STEM. DIRECTLY IN MY EYE. IS THERE BLOOD?  IS THE EYE STILL IN ITS SOCKET?"

For the rest of the walk I was like an informant, waiting to be taken out.  Things always come in threes... That third thing was there, lying in wait... It had to be coming...

Oh yeah, I'm HIP... *

Oh yeah, I'm on the cutting edge...

On my way home yesterday, it became apparent that I could never be one of those kids who wears his pants half-way down his ass.  As I was cutting through the Via Rail parking lot, I could feel the waistband of my tights begin to give.  I've had these tights for probably a decade - it's understandable that they might be giving up the ghost.

By the time I was over the tracks making my way down George Street, the crotch of my tights had descended by at least 3 inches - I could feel the air gap under my hooha getting wider... and wider.  Another half a block and I could now feel my underwear, in apparent solidarity, beginning to give up its tenacious hold on my hips and slide downward.  My skirt was a scant inch below my coat and even though I tried my best to surreptitiously hitch up the tights on my upper thighs, I knew I couldn't get them up high enough without showing my wares to the public.  Fuck it!  I thought, glancing around the vacant street, and hiked everything up.  There!  Good to go.  Only 5 blocks and I'd be home.

Nope, the tights were apparently dead.  The closer I came to the main road and actual people, the more my waistband lolled around like a llama in a coma.  I crossed the next intersection and could feel air, ice cold Canadian air, on my ass crack... and then seconds later, as my underwear fell, I could feel that same ice cold Canadian air, underneath the shelf of my ass.  I was now striding like a bow-legged cowboy, thighs wide apart, praying that the tights and underwear wouldn't get to my knees before I made it home.  Laughing maniacally the entire way - wondering how it is that all those near-pantless kids in high school can stand it.  How do they not just go into hysterics every time they leave the house?  I almost fell 12 times and I was walking 5 blocks.

As soon as I closed my front door, those tights came off.  I held them before me like the Olympic torch and walked majestically towards the kitchen.

"You have served me well opaque black tights.  Thank you for your years of service.  But this, my friend, shall be a one-time anecdote - you shall not betray me again.  Adieu." 

I have to say though, it was pretty invigorating, having -17 degree air whistling through my nethers.  Perhaps on one of those 'hard to wake up' mornings, I just won't wear underwear to work.

*This post used to be entitled, Oh yes, I'm 'GANGSTA'...  It was brought to my attention last week that the word 'gangsta' can have racial overtones.  Please, let me know your thoughts on the 'G' word and whether its common cultural use today causes you offense.

How bad days become brilliant.

Last Saturday we were having a house showing. Our house isn't even on the market, but our former real estate agent will send city folks to see our place every now and again if they want a massive century home that takes 4 hours to clean. Prepping one's house for a showing has to be amongst the things I despise most in life. David always states: "We will not do anything special, the house isn't on the market, they'll just have to cut us some slack."

I just can't. It has to be more than clean, more than just tidy. It has to look pretty. It has to be inviting.  It has to say "Look, aren't I a beautiful home? Wouldn't you want to live here?" I can't 'haphazard' it before a house showing - I CAN'T!  I 'touch-up paint' the freaking kitchen cupboards, I fold my visible sweaters in the walk-in closet, if putting a sprig of parsley in the kitty litter was a sign of clean kitty litter, I'd do that. Having a house showing stresses me the fuck out.

Which is why, when I was tidying our bedroom and noticed that David's t-shirt drawer in the dresser wouldn't close, it made me mental. With slumping shoulders I pulled the drawer out to look inside the dresser to see if there were internal reasons why the sucker wouldn't close.  I looked at the back of the drawer and saw that the floral drawer liner paper that I'd placed in it years ago was askew and was bunching out the back of the drawer.  I tugged on it once and the freaking drawer fell apart on me!  Its antique bottom fell completely out. Panicking, I clutched the drawer's contents to my chest. Thousands of t-shirts against my bosom with no fucking clue as to how to just shove them back into the drawer and then cram said drawer in the dresser and pretend that nothing had happened, because stupid-ass strangers were going to be coming to our house in mere fucking minutes!! Rage welled within me; angry tears on the periphery.  I dropped the drawer onto the floor and began adjusting those fucking t-shirts.

A glint of something caught my eye. A silver chain. Its appearance caused me to literally catch my breath. There, amidst the well-worn cottons of my spouse, was part of my broken heart. A coloured glass pendant on a chain, my most treasured gift from my late friend Shannon. Strike that. Not 'late.'  Dead.  Shannon is dead and although she was often 'late' in life (a fact she, herself, would freely admit), calling her 'late' in death seems to homogenize her dying.  Sugar-coating it doesn't help, she is dead.  Missing her is a part of my life.

I had been searching for the pendant for months when I had assumed our cat Lola had stolen it (I think I might have to report my cat to Interpol). Lola must have pushed it off the dresser into the slightly open drawer beneath. The pendant's reappearance, at any time would have been a happy discovery, but at this particular moment, it was miraculous. My impending tears of rage did a complete 180 and I found myself laughing and crying in complete and utter joy.  I fastened that chain around my neck, feeling the weight of the pendant against my chest, and recognizing that a piece of my heart, missing for months, was now once again present.

My craptastic morning turned ecstatic in an instant. Me... so stressed and anal about tidying up the house, so worried about shit that nobody cares about... If I hadn't cared, that pendant would still be in that drawer, lying in wait until we eventually moved from this house and David had to finally go through those t-shirts. And although I would have greeted his discovery of the pendant, probably years from now, with spectacular joy, I'm glad that I found it myself, and I'm glad that I found it in juxtaposition of doing stupid-ass tidying up. Little things can and do mean a lot. I have definitive proof.