Category Archives: Ponderings

When you’re a kid, having plans gets you high. You use a marker (which also gets you a little high) to put the date on the unicorns & rainbows calendar you got for christmas. Then you also mark all the days between now and then as they sloooowly go by. Embellishing the marked day a little more all the time — circling it, and adding a few multi-coloured stars-of-importance.

As an adult, it’s a lot more likely that no plans is what’ll make me insanely, off-my-nut, happy. Like, hypothetically, if my morning meeting at one end of the city gets canceled, followed by my afternoon meeting at the other end of the city calling in sick. Making it the Greatest Day Ever as I look at a totally blank, zero tokens, day — which I can then fill up with all the things I have to do. Yayes!

(No really, YAYES!)

It’s always been an uphill battle to preserve wetlands. But Audubon didn’t realize how much deep-seated childhood swamp anxiety they’d have to overcome. Sure, we all want to save the ducks. But did you not see:

1. The Phantom Tollbooth. Where a swamp of half-visible dripping candlewax boogers make you think they’re looking out for you, then they yell at you for laughing, and then they try to kill you. After they steal your car. Fortunately a stray dog comes along just in time and saves you. (Even if he does look a like a flabby, beige, four-legged Grinch.) Whew. Freaky-ness, over. Except that your new BFF doggie friend has an alarm clock which he accesses by RIPPING HIS BELLY OPEN. Moral lesson or no, I say: “Gah.”

2. If that doesn’t kick your Protestant work ethic into overdrive (you’re in like, Grade 5, and you have to know J.S. Mill, Einstein’s theory of relativity, 15*86, and deoxyribonucleic acid in order to escape), and keep you out of bogs forever, there’s poor Artax’s untimely demise in the Swamp of Sadness. Oh Neverending Story, I wish you had neverstarted. (Oh. Snap.)

What’s that Atreyu? You thought because you were a child they’d let you keep your little horsie companion? Your one friend in the world? Your buddy, your pal?

WRONG!

Artax is the unnamed Star Trek ensign on your away team, and he’s going to get whacked only moments after he’s introduced. Humanely you hope? Nope. There’s no ASPCA in Fantasia. Artax’s pattern is not going to get lost in the buffer, he’s going to DIE FROM DESPAIR. Because he can’t think of anything happy, your horse will get pulled down into the marsh WHILE YOU WATCH. In fact, you’ll be holding the reigns as it happens. So you’re going to feel every inch as his big soon-to-be-dead body gets slowly sucked into the swamp.

And you thought it was bad when Mr. Wigglytail bit it.

I wonder…

Does the calm and clarity that some people associate with smoking, actually come from the mild asphyxiation?

Some sort of vestigial, primal survival mechanism?  Wherein your body is like “woah, we’re not getting enough air, so let’s prioritize.  Okay brain, what do we need to get done, because we’re operating on a clock here.”

Except instead of that energy being focused on: getting away from the brush fire; or out from under the wooly mammoth — we use it to refine powerpoint presentations?

Just a thought 😉

You know you’re all growed up…

…when you send your mortgage broker a Christmas card.  And she sends one right back.

Wow, television is crap.

I know, in my head I can hear David Rakoff saying “Well, I enjoy Nova.”.

EH and I have never had cable at home. For a while we had bunny ears on our set, and would pull in what I thought of as a good selection of what was out there: CBC, Radio Canada, 17, 19, City, maybe one or two others. But basically I just watched CBC and City.

When we moved, it took a little while to excavate the antenna. And the day I went to hook it up it gave me some trouble. So that I was pulling in a weak signal intermittently, and was having trouble getting it to play nice with the receiver. And I realized that just the flashes of TV I was seeing as I toggled were depressing me. Just… depressing. Melancholy and low-energy and blech.

So I unhooked it again. Put the bunnies back in the box, and decided to see what it was like to not have any TV.

And… it’s awesome. I love it. It’s changed my life. I didn’t think I had watched that much TV before, but you always watch more TV than you think. TV sux0rs you in. At the same time as it takes your energy away, it gives you something you can do with low energy. Big black box of self-perpetuating time loss.

Tonight I happen to be somewhere that has TV. And not basic TV either, but the whole untasty smörgåsbord. So I thought I’d sprawl out on the bed and indulge a little.

It turns out that it’s no longer an indulgence. TV’s depressing. The only things I’m flipping past that I’d want to watch are things I’ve already seen (a la Simpsons). I find myself flipping back to the menu to see if I can find something else to watch instead of the repeat, and end up drifting over to another repeat that’s caught my eye. Hours pass in this endless, fragmented, unfulfilling entertainment.

That’s really the rub. It’s not entertaining me. I was listening to a comedian on my iPod the other night that had me laughing so hard, EH asked me if I could switch tracks because the violent shaking as I laughed was keeping him awake.

In a few hours of flipping around on TV though, I don’t think I’ve laughed once. I’ve seen a looooooot of cop/forensics nonsense that all look the same. Sitcoms where it takes 10 seconds of watching to be able to predict the next joke (and the next, and the next…). Reality TV that looks absofrickinlutely nothing like reality. The same commercials over and over and over and over again (omg, this alone is maddening). Lots of Gordon Ramsey being “hard”. Arrrrr Gordon, arrr.

And I say boo. The story of Ira Glass singing along to the OC theme song I both identify with and find funny, but it’s just not me anymore. I’ll sing along to “California” when it comes up in my playlist, but not because of Seth and Summer (or Ryan and Marissa). Jon Stewart FTW, but in clips I find on… cough… other media.

Not watching TV allows you to cherrypick. Or let other people cherrypick for you. “Did you see… omg, I’ll send it to you.” Trawling for something, anything, good yourself is exhausting. There’s just so much mediocre flotsam to get through. My mental muscles are exhausted from the search.

Speaking of exhaustion — if I’m gonna be low energy and just lying about, I’ll devote my whole self to it. Really apply myself to my sedantating. Stare at a wall, sip some tea, let my own sleepy thoughts ramble. It’s okay TV, I’ve got it covered.

I’m a feminist, but I skirt around the outside of most feminists-only discourse. Mostly because I have no stomach for the closed-minded, rabid bulldog-like sense of absolutism and righteousness I keep bumping into. Nitpicking also drives me apeshit, especially when doing so alienates people who are in your corner.

An eye for an eye just ends in a room full of blind people, and gets nobody nowhere.

Le sigh.

Anyways, along those lines, I found this quote off Photoshop Disasters extremely funny:

By renormalizing the model’s waistline, Maxim Mexico takes a bold socio-political stance in the ongoing battle of the politics of representation, clearly referencing the oppressive reification of male-gaze heteronormative modes of synthesis in a semiotic blancmange of post-structural teakettle barbecue hatstand fishmonger.