The Great Duckling Rescue of 2010

I didn't participate in last year's Great Duckling Rescue, because my shoulder was an awful mess and I didn't want to aggravate it. Workmate Dave did the honours in 2009.

This year I dived back into the bushes and it was Dave's turn to stand and laugh (and also to stop me from breaking my neck after an ill-advised jump on the stairs). After the problems of past rescues this one went pretty smoothly.

First, the preliminaries: after four years of this ritual, mama duck no longer considers us a threat, and when it's time for the babies to leave their impossible nest she actually comes to the front door of the office and quacks. Then she takes an enormous, smelly dump on the steps (presumably because she's been holding it in during the last few days of intense nesting action).

This year, though, she retreated back to the nest by the time I got out there, and she absolutely REFUSED to let me near the babies. Maybe she realized that one of them wasn't ready to go yet. I made a few half-hearted attempts to approach her, only to have her hiss ominously, which is pretty spooky when you're wedged face to face with her among the gridlocked shrubbery.

Half an hour later she was back out and down on the lawn, quacking for her cheeping babies to come down. Time for us to get to work.

I've discovered a good technique for trapping ducklings in our work planter: I push myself deep into the torturous foliage, with my hands free to scoop the huddled birds out of their nesting corner, and with my left foot against the wall to block their escape. Any ducklings that got past me were ably trapped by workmate Mark, who participated for the first time and probably managed to totally destroy his office casual attire.

Our other innovation was a stiff recyclable grocery bag, which we could put on top of the bushes and drop ducklings into as we caught them. Previously we had to climb partway out of the planter and drop them one-by-one work workmate Aurora far below, which allowed the remaining ducklings to reassemble in a more remote spot and also resulted in more than one baby falling beak-over-tailfeathers into the flowers on the front lawn.

We got eleven of them out and the mother walked toward the creek with her entourage, but one poor duckling was unable to keep up; maybe he was a runt, or maybe he was damaged or deformed, but he seemed to have trouble walking quickly. It was absolutely HEARTBREAKING to watch that poor little baby trying EVERYTHING to catch the herd, occasionally falling helplessly on its back and peeping terribly.

Amidst the usual unhelpful and pointless comments from passing coworkers -- "Nature's cruel!" "Natural selection!" "Let them die!" -- I wondered whether I could adopt this bird. But I've got a cat who LOVES to eat cute little things, and you can't housebreak a duck, and I've got enough things to worry about in my life as it is. So instead I picked him up and helped him along whenever I could, and when he finally got into the water he seemed able to swim well enough to his mother, so maybe he'll live.

It's inevitable that every year a few ducks will hatch several hours later, requiring us to catch them and take them down to the creek until we find the mother. This year, though, it was just a single bird that hatched late...and the parents actually came back for it! I don't know what they'd done with the rest of the brood -- probably left it with an aunt or something -- but after we dropped the latecomer down the three of them waddled back to the water. This is the first time I've seen the mother come back, and the ONLY time I've EVER seen the deadbeat father get involved.

Maybe he's off the booze and is trying to make a second go at family life?

A Cigar for the Battered Husband

The P. Lorillard Company advertised these "little cigars" with an amusing ad campaign. While the name "Between the Acts" suggested a person who wanted a quick smoke during a theater intermission, the advertisements focused on more entertaining moments when the protagonist had very little time to spare.

I can't remember any of the previous ones right now, but I get a kick out of this one from May 17, 1930. There are so many cute symbols involved. I'm not sure why he has a feather in his tophat, but he's obviously the drunk husband coming home and trying to sneak into the apartment without his wife seeing him. He's holding his shoes in his hand so he can move silently, and because he's smoking a "Between the Acts" cigar we know he only has a few seconds before his wife clobbers him with her rolling pin.

I particularly like the way she's rolling up her sleeve in the background, and the fact that you can't see her face. This is such a fun, ominous, and perfectly-designed image!

PS: When will people stop recognizing the rolling pin as a weapon wielded by disgruntled housewives? I'm not even sure how *I* recognize it, except that it was probably a staple of cartoons throughout the '40s and '50s. Like so many symbols of the times, the cartoons serve as an unintended method of feeding the public consciousness. Someday children will only recognize trees because they saw them in Merrie Melodies.

PPS: Who was the mysterious artist "F.G.C."? I'm unable to find out. I've certainly seen his/her work elsewhere in the magazine, and you can find a few references to his advertising copy online, but other than that...

The Littlest Scammer

Some people seem like they're born to scam, even if they don't have to. It's like there's some part of the human brain devoted to "getting something for nothing," and in some people that brain-part has gotten cancerous and absorbed everything else in their skulls except for the little reptile nub that controls breathing.

For the last year I've been noticing a girl at the local Tim Horton's coffee shop. She's short and chubby and unpretty, and every time I see her she is trying to get something for free. Whether it's asking me endlessly if I have a spare cigarette, or concocting some ridiculous story about how she got the wrong order that morning and now she'd like a replacement coffee, or walking from table to table and canvassing for change...I never see this girl have an interaction that does not involve a scam.

Her performance on Friday took the cake. She walked into the store just as two university students were walking out, and she yelled "Hey, you're Judy, right? Hey Judy, wait!" as the students kept saying "What? No, we're not Judy, no..." and frantically trying to escape the girl's clutches. I can only assume this was the prelude to a scam that didn't work.

Anyway, she walked in and -- as usual -- started asking the patrons for cigarettes. Then she made a big show of counting her change and going "Oh no! Damn! I hate that!" When nobody responded, she got into line -- pushing in front of the last person -- and kept counting her change. "Oh no! Damn!"

As she got closer to the front of the line she became more and more demonstrative, trying to engage the people around her in The Scam. "Damn! I hate this, you know? Hey, you know?" Finally, with nobody biting, she actually yelled across the store at two men who were about to leave.

"Hey guys! You know how when you only have $1.50, and you want to get a coffee AND a Coke, you know how annoying that is?"

"No," said one of the men, baffled.

"I hate that!" she shouted. "I've only got $1.50 and I need $3.00 to get a coffee AND a Coke! I hate when this happens!"

"Yeah," said the men, and they scurried out the door.

The scammer eventually just bought the coffee, presumably because the rest of us are accustomed to her performances. It must be hard to carry on a racket -- even one so small -- in the same store over and over again. It must be PARTICULARLY hard when you have an unpleasant demeanor, as she does. Successful scammers need more than brute persistence, they also need charm.

Yes, The Littlest Scammer annoys me.

Requesting Songs of an Orchestra?

Something just occurred to me: how did people transmit their musical requests to orchestras?

Think of it: You're at a swank supper club in the 1920s, and you decide you want to hear "The Kashmiri Love Song." Whether you're dancing on the floor or eating at your table, how would you convey your request to the orchestra's conductor?

Even though you often hear about people in such situations MAKING requests, you rarely hear HOW. Did they politely mention the request to their waiter or a passing busboy? Did they shout it out while applauding? Did they approach the musicians during a break? Did they leave notes on the stage? Was there an established job of standing at the edge of the stage and taking requests?

My guess is that the waiter or busboy was the go-between, but I have no proof and I'm very curious.

Eena, Deina, Pitera, Pimp

I'm reading "Lost Country Life" by Dorothy Hartley, based around Thomas Tusser's famous 16th century farming calendar.

Being totally unsourced and written in a know-it-all tone, some of the book seems a tad dubious; you wonder if, being 87 herself when the book was written, she held more stock than she should have in her own intuition, memories, and the homey parables of her mysterious gardener.

But at the very least the book is full of beefy (if scattered) information about the smallest tasks of the medieval farmers. If this isn't really how it was, then it is how it SHOULD have been.

Many of her insights provoke interesting questions, even if you don't exactly believe her answers. For instance: how did people with no education manage to separate a specific number of animals -- say twenty -- from a herd? With "shepherd counts," apparently, regionally-specific "four-finger" counts that used words instead of numbers. "Eena, deena, dina, das; catiler, weena, winer, was," you'd say in the West Riding, or -- if you were in Rochdale -- "Eena, deina, pitera, pimp."

She also explains how all those beautiful British hedgerows were built, and the crazy methods for making rennet, and the various uses of both cows and oxen.

It's taken me a week to actually start enjoying this book (due to its informal and poorly-organized preface), but now I'm learning all sorts of things I've always wondered. I'll never USE these tips for plowing a strip of land or washing a sheep, but it's fascinating to learn how medieval mind explained the mysteries of land and animal, and how they slowly began to innovate.

Solicitations!

Ever since I've moved away from my parent's house, I've lived either in grotty student housing, behind a controlled-access entryway, or on the other side of an inconspicuous doorway. I have rarely suffered the onslaught of door-to-door solicitation.

That just changed.

On Monday I got the "chocolate bars for kids" hard sell from a gang of precocious pre-teens. I was so entertained by their pushy ring-leader -- a little girl who yelled "SHUT UP!" at the boy who tried to muscle in on her sales pitch -- that I happily gave them my money.

Today was the "sponsor a third-world child" routine, pushed by the best salesman I've ever had the dubious fortune to meet. This is how he started:

"Hey, you're wondering why I'm standing at your front door. I'll give you $50 to punch me in the face! Seriously! No, I'm just kidding, only some guy down the street threatened to punch me in the face. Really! No, no, I'm only joking, that's not true. Anyway..."

When -- in response to a question -- I confessed that I don't watch television, he asked me who my favourite author was. "William T. Vollmann" came to mind first, and that's what I said, but by suspecting (correctly) that I had gone all highbrow capital-L Literature on him, he came back by saying:

"I'm a big fan of Vonnegut myself. Have you read any?"

"Oh...just 'Slaughterhouse Five' and 'Galapagos,' I'm reading some Nabokov right now--"

"Yeah, Vladimir! Great stuff! Anyway..."

This guy did such a fabulous tap-dance that it almost hurt to say no. But that's the thing about good salespeople...they're like fortune-tellers, instantly able to switch tracks and gloss over the subject they suspect you're most interested in. I'm sure that if I said I watched a lot of sports, he'd have been able to come up with a list of pretty obscure players.

Still, not many people can throw "Vladimir" at you.

Anyway, this makes me realize that -- for the first time -- my door will be a target for Hallowe'en trick-or-treaters. Small communities of anonymous condos must be GOLDEN for kids on Hallowe'en. But I've never handed candy out before and something about it...well...scares me.

I like the fact that I can't conveniently curl up and ignore the world in my house, but am I ready to face dozens of children? Do I know what to say to them? Do I know how much candy I'll need?

Right now I'm torn between "Hand out candy" and "Turn off the lights and read in the basement." I'm sure I'll waffle between decisions for a long time to come...

The REAL Hallowe'en Horror

When I prepare for Hallowe'en I'm not worried about some kid in a Harry Potter mask stealing my soul...I'm just worried about what I'm going to wear. And that's a big worry.

For most of my life I didn't care about Hallowe'en. I couldn't think of any "good ideas" and I was far too insecure to be comfortable executing them anyway. It wasn't until young adulthood that I started thinking "Hey, this Hallowe'en thing is pretty fun!"

So for many years I planned out costumes that meant something to ME -- Ann Miller from "On The Town," a lion tamer, "Zev" from the TV series "Lexx," Naag ki Devi, Melody Valentine from "Josie and the Pussycats," and the bounty hunter from "Guitar Wolf" -- but in almost every case my costume was either incomprehensible to others or simply looked at as the sort of thing I wear anyway. And I learned by painting myself blue that I have a lot more skin than I'd thought I had.

This year I decided, to hell with it, I'd go out in a strikingly-obvious costume. But I don't feel like spending a ton of money on something I'm not passionate about, and the cheap pre-made costumes always LOOK cheap (and you're bound to run into three other people wearing exactly the same thing). Besides, off-the-rack is CHEATING.

I'd much rather just not wear ANY costume and simply go as me, but since people bar-hop on that particular night to show off their elaborate Transformer outfits, I always meet lots of new people, and they think that my being in drag IS a costume, which is annoying.

The Curse of the Recurring Canine

I live in a duplex, and over the past few years I have had three sets of neighbours: the girls who exercised, the family of wrestlers, and the smooth-playing horn-man.

These neighbours have NOTHING in common except for one bizarre trait: they all decide to adopt dogs halfway through their tenancy.

Why? I don't know. If I were to use my neighbours as a representative sample I'd have to assume that everybody in the world owns a dog.

Singing Accent

When I was in grade three I noticed that the children around me sang with a subtle British accent. This was strange because none of us had British accents otherwise, but somehow, when we sang in music class, our vowels would warp until we became distinctly...British.

I was probably sensitized to this because I was listening to Pink Floyd's "The Wall" at the time, which contains that "Hey teacher" children's chorus on "Another Brick in the Wall." THOSE kids sounded British too, but they actually WERE British, and I'd somehow picked up on the fact that when WE sang, WE sounded like THEM.

Around this time my father started insisting that us Southern Ontario people didn't HAVE accents; he believed -- and still believes -- that we have become the lowest common denominator of English speech, a mix of all possible accents together until we don't HAVE one anymore. He justifies this by claiming that when people sing they always sound like US, and therefore singing must somehow REMOVE accents, resulting (I suppose) in some sort of pure, undiluted English.

As a child I could never put my objections to this theory into words, but now I suspect that my father was analyzing a certain subset of music, probably bands subsequent to the British Invasion. And it's true, when you listen to bands from England during that period -- Led Zeppelin, say -- many of them DON'T sound British.

But something I realized while listening to my classmates sing was that singing is not something "pure" that releases us from our speech patterns...at the very least it is just another type of affectation. If Julie Andrews could sing in a Cockney accent during "My Fair Lady" even though she wasn't actually British, it's obvious that a British singer could sound North American in exactly the same way...which stands to reason, considering many of those British Invasion bands were emulating American blues and skiffle musicians, and many of them craved acceptance on the Billboard charts.

If you listen to a British band that is NOT trying to be self-consciously American, however, you hear a very thick accent. It might not sound EXACTLY regional -- because, as I said, singing involves affectation and imitation just as much as any other activity does -- but a band like "The Pipettes" certainly doesn't sound like they come from Southern Ontario, that's for sure.

None of this explains why us little Canadian kids sounded British when we sang, however, but I've noticed that it isn't just children who do this...a subset of Canadian artists sound self-consciously British when they sing. Maybe, as kids, we were imitating British new wave bands? Maybe it just seemed like the best way to sing? Or maybe there's some germ of British inflection that comes out when we let our guard down?

Canada Day at the Pool

What do you do when it's Canada Day and the sun is shining? I'll tell you: when Tracey invites you to the public pool to sunbathe and go swimming, YOU ACCEPT.

Granted, I haven't been in a public pool since I was a kid so the experience was a little foreign to me. I was surprised when we separated at the entrance to go through doors marked "BOYS" and "GIRLS." I was even more surprised when I saw signs demanding that I take a shower before entering the pool area, but everybody walked right past the showers and ignored the signs. It would have been annoying, showering with a pack of strange pre-teen boys.

The public pool is terrific for people-watching. You see all types of bodies, backgrounds, and motivations. I really do appreciate the spectacle of horny highschool students being "cool" around their girlfriends.

There was a steel band.

We lay down and oiled up and rested in the sun. Eventually I screwed up my courage and entered the pool itself, where Tracey's son taught me to breast stroke. Small children were clinging to styrofoam floats. The sky was cloudless. The water was cool. It was easy to forget that none of us had bathed.

Sometimes the lazy, chatty days are the best.

How to Stop a Habit

I'm no stranger to semi-voluntary habits. As a child I was such a bundle of twitches, shakes, and clenchings that it's a wonder they ever got a clear school picture of me.

My tendency to twitch is entirely related to stress. In periods of relative calm I find that I never twitch at all, but when I have a lot of things on my mind I begin to give occasional shakes and twitches, and when I'm in that state and I start to do something that REALLY stresses me out -- like write a letter about squirrels to my landlord, or prepare to go on stage at a drag show, or come up with a blog entry -- I begin to jitter like an electrified tumbleweed.

I usually find myself twitching a part of my face, and this is the most involuntary of the habits. I'm good at making sure that I don't do this where anybody can see, but I'm still convinced that it gives me wrinkles, and I don't need any help when it comes to THAT.

If I can stop the facial twitches they usually move into my hands. I had hand spasms throughout my entire five years of working at Tim Horton's, and I used to mentally berate myself, thinking it was terribly obvious to everybody I worked with. It probably wasn't.

When hand spasms don't do the trick I sometimes clench my stomach, which leads to general abdominal problems. Stomach-clenching was my habit of choice as a child, and I like to think it causes more permanent damage than all of the other habits combined.

Finally -- and this is one that I've only noticed in the last five years or so -- I tend to tightly clench my toes, usually while sitting at a computer or while taking a bath. This didn't seem to be a problem in my old apartment, where everything was carpeted, but now it seems to be having a negative impact on my joints...or maybe I just have rheumatism. If it persists I'll need to see a doctor.

Anyway, I've found a way to stop these habits, and I'm sharing it with you. "They" say that habit-stopping must involve the transference of "bad" habits into a similarly stress-relieving "good" habit -- like squeezing a stress ball for example -- but I've found that I can just stop ALL the habits with this simple method:

At work -- where most of the twitching occurs, probably because I'm stuck in one spot where I can do all the face, hand, stomach, and toe-clenching that I desire -- I write "Twitch" on a post-it note and stick it to my monitor.

Each morning I write today's date, and every time I clench-up -- even the slightest bit -- I draw a tick-mark under that date. When I go out for lunch I count up an estimated number of clenches and add them when I get back to my desk. Clenches which occur at home are not counted.

The very act of acknowledging the sheer number of habits per day is enough shameful mental reinforcement to eliminate the tics and clenches. The first day always has the most clenches -- somewhere in the area of 30 usually -- and then all subsequent days show a decline. After two weeks the clenches number only one or two per day, and even those are so minor that they may have been reflexive as opposed to actual habits.

I leave the post-it note affixed to my monitor, but I remain habit-free for weeks, if not months, until the next big wave of stress arrives.

This may not work for you -- I think its effectiveness involves the amount of personal shame you can heap onto yourself without feeling overwhelmed -- but it has certainly been effective for me. I am, after all, a bottomless reservoir of shame!

And hey, if you feel like sharing your own spasm-stories, please do! I'm always curious to hear how other people deal with such "secret problems."

A Christmas Thought

My feelings about Christmas are complex, confused, and mostly personal, but I can't help wondering: does anybody actually LIKE the song "The Twelve Days of Christmas?"

In terms of awful holiday songs, it is second only to Paul McCartney's "Wonderful Christmastime."

A Very Bernardy Christmas

To balance the whiny post below, here's wishing everybody a Merry Christmas! I also hope you have a cat to keep you warm (and covered with loose hair).



Love, Zsa Zsa & Muffy.

Golf Sweaters, Plus New Yorker Racism

Hmmm. There are a few things to be said about this June 30, 1928 advertisement from The New Yorker.
First, there was simply no escaping this black caricature in the '20s press. The cartoons always showed these big-eyed, slope-headed, huge-lipped creatures, usually scuttling in the background and carrying somebody's bags. Even when the cartoon's joke did NOT involve the servile black character (and it rarely did), he was invariably drawn in this way.

At first I was shocked, but after three years of New Yorker cartoons I'm gradually realizing that the cartoonists of the time -- whatever their own beliefs -- were largely drawing in an accepted style, the same way that all chorus girls were distinct in their comparative bustiness, all businessmen were fat, and all Jewish characters had big curly beards and glasses.

So in this illustration featuring the dignified golfer and the servile caddy, the black character has the additional indignity of wearing the offensive golf shirt. Peck & Peck tell us that the days of "bold, bad checks and Chuck Connor stripes" are gone, and that "good taste" is now the order of the day. That was 1928, mind you.

The question (other than "who was Chuck Connor?") is...why do people continue to wear ugly golf sweaters, eighty years later. Are some just taking an awful long time to transition? Much like the "ugly car salesman suit," the "ugly golf sweater" is a long-standing joke with more than a kernel of truth.

Is this because the stereotypical dedicated golfer -- like the stereotypical car salesman -- is clueless and reactionary, meaning that they're forever out of style? I wonder how this fashion trend started, what defines it, and why it continues today. Since I have never actually golfed I'm afraid the answer eludes me.

Parades

Kitchener/Waterloo had its Santa Claus parade this morning, which got me somewhat sentimental about parades past.

I don't remember ever LIKING parades very much. They were always cold and there weren't any warm diabetic drinks for children, and even if there WAS a warm drink you wouldn't be able to pee until the parade was over. If you moved to the front of the crowd, clowns and other entertainers would try to interact with you, but if you moved to the back you couldn't see anything. The marching bands were fun, and I always liked the majorettes and the fire engines, but at the end was the Santa Claus who I didn't believe in, and gosh my feet were cold.

My primary childhood memories of parades are the smell of coffee and exhaust fumes and other people's cloudy breath, the press and squish of puffy outerwear, the sight of legs in front of me, the never-ending jingle of xylophones, and the fear that I'd somehow get separated from my parents if I moved too far away.

Much later, for three years I lived in a house that was just behind the parade starting line, where all the floats and performers would assemble at 8am and start tootling their horns. I was working night shifts at the time so the last thing I wanted to see were a bunch of tipsy Shriners under my bedroom window.

But despite my desire to generally AVOID parades, I still see goodness in them, like many other activities that I avoid. And today, walking along beside the route, I felt affection for the volunteers who danced around to make the children happy, and the freezing parents who feigned awe at the spectacle in order to charm the youngsters, and I was most impressed by the Bethany Church group who do some sort of Christmas reenactment (involving mounted Roman soldiers, a camel, and a swaddled-up baby Jesus).

Sure it's mainly about advertising for the companies involved -- every float had a corporate sign, all the local radio stations had their slickest announcers out -- but seeing kids go "YAY!" at something they loved was a positive thing. It's ritual, socialization, and a bit of "let loose" for us repressed Canadians.

Like most winter activities, I'm glad they happen. Just don't expect me to shiver with you.

The Evolving Human/Feline Morning Ritual

When the alarm goes off, Zsa Zsa is already waiting at my bedside, sitting down and staring at me. If I get up, she will run to the top of the stairs in anticipation of being fed; otherwise she will alternate between “yowling” and “running away/coming back” behaviour until I finally get up.

Next, when I leave the bedroom to go into the bathroom, Zsa Zsa is waiting at the top of the stairs. When I subsequently walk out of the bathroom, she runs excitedly down the stairs with what can only be described as a “prance” or a “trot.”

Downstairs, in the kitchen, she meows until I put fresh food and water in her dishes. She sniffs the dishes to make sure all is well, then walks into the living room without actually eating anything, as though all along she just wanted to be reassured that I wouldn’t FORGET to feed her this morning.

With my own breakfast prepared I walk past her and go upstairs into the computer room. I sit and eat my breakfast while reading The New Yorker. At some point she joins me and sits at a respectful distance, snooping around and keeping an eye on me. She is feigning nonchalance.

When my spoon hits the bottom of the bowl, she begins to approach. Sometimes she meows, but not usually. I put the bowl on the floor and tilt it so the last spoonful of sweet milk is puddled up, and she gingerly tests its quality before lapping it up. This is her second favourite time of the morning.

I return to the bathroom and bedroom to groom and dress. Meanwhile Zsa Zsa descends the stairs again, this time in a calm and leisurely way. She is preparing herself for the Morning Petting Ritual.

At last ready to leave, I turn off the upstairs lights and go down into the living room. As soon as I turn the corner and enter the room, Zsa Zsa collapses onto the carpet and lets out an outrageous squeak, the sound of a meow expelled by a forcible flop to the floor. I have to put my stuff down and get onto the carpet to pet her as she kicks her feet wildly, rolling, squeaking, occasionally drooling. If I pat her bum she gets REALLY excited. Needless to say this is the morning's REAL highlight for her.

After a few minutes I stand up, and that’s her cue to stop being cute. We both go into the kitchen, where I put on my shoes and whatever outerwear is necessary. She wanders to her food dish and begins to eat, though sometimes she’ll politely request a treat, which I’ll refuse unless she opens the cupboard and gets the treats out herself, which she occasionally does.

When I’m walking out the door she’ll stand in the middle of the kitchen and watch me. I’ll say “bye!” and she’ll just stare. I never know if she’s sad to see me go or if she’s planning a huge cat party once I’m gone.

Sandwich Chore Routine

Few chores can be worked into my life unless they can be paired with something that ISN’T a chore, or unless they are absolutely essential. For instance, I can move objects between rooms because I often walk between the rooms anyway, and if I designate an “ingoing” and “outgoing” spot in each room, and if I can motivate myself to put objects in those spots, I find myself eventually moving books to bookshelves and moving cans to the recycling bin. And since I walk past the grocery store on my way home from work I can buy groceries with a minimum of pain.

There are some things that I can’t find a routine for, generally because they cannot be “paired” with neutral or pleasurable actions. On a good day I can clean up the apartment by listening to music, or wash dishes while lending half an ear to a dull DVD commentary, or hand-wash clothes while listening to an old-time radio program…but I can’t find a pleasurable way to vacuum, clean the litterbox, or do laundry. These are things I only do when it becomes necessary, or when I’m in such a good mood that even HOUSEKEEPING becomes fun.

Which brings me to sandwiches. I have nothing against sandwiches and they’re a cheap lunch option, but bringing them to work implies making them in advance, which I find unpleasant. Plus you can only make so many of them, otherwise they get soggy waiting for you to eat them.

Recently I was bemoaning my inability to find time for nail-care, and Vanilla tactfully pointed out that I could do my nails while watching a movie…and glory of glories, I CAN! What’s more, I’ve been experimenting with MAKING SANDWICHES while watching movies, which is the perfect way to distract yourself if you’re trying to finish watching “Performance,” something you yourself may have dealt with in the past.

I’ve managed to make four sandwiches this way and I’ve enjoyed every single one of them. But I know from experience that it’s easy for me to eventually drop these chores, either due to time constraints or the approach of a Characteristically Bad Blue Funk.

Which brings me to a final problem: I have never gotten the hang of buying sandwich supplies at a deli. I feel strange talking to people at delis and I can never remember how many grams I should buy. People, at various times, have reminded me how many grams equals how many slices of meat or cheese, but when I’m IN the deli I forget this information, and I’m afraid that if I get it wrong I will look foolish and autistic.

My conclusion: there should be a "grams-to-slices" sign for new sandwich-supply-purchasers, and every chore should be pairable with an anti-chore.

Spanish Children's Songs

It's definitely worth going over to The Mind Wobbles and checking out her personal translation of Spanish children's songs. These sorts of songs tend to be ridiculous, but since we grew up with our own batch of them we view them with gentle sentimentality (or hatred). So reading the children's songs from another culture is a bit of a shake up...do OUR beloved childhood songs sound as silly as:

I have a milk cow
It isn’t just a regular cow.
She gives me condensed milk
Oh what a sassy cow!
Tolon, tolon.
Tolon, tolon.

Probably yes.

While I remember so many songs that we had to sing in "music class," I don't remember actually singing them. I was too shy, so I perfected the art of opening my mouth and PRETENDING to sing "Oh Canada," without actually making a sound.

Lip syncing even then.

Stepmother

After finishing "Moby Dick" I needed a quick and easy book to relax with. I would never recommend Robert Coover's novels as "quick and easy" reads, but his novella-sized "Stepmother" (illustrated by Michael Kupperman) can be finished in a day, with very little pain done to the reader. Unless it hurts you to read about women who are married to the hedgehog king.

First off, what a gorgeous book. McSweeney's is a publisher who REALLY CARES about presentation. It looks like a sturdy collection of children's fairytales, complete with a hard fabric cover and a recessed picture. It's not a book you want to prop up a sofa with, that's for sure.

Secondly, fairytales are a shoe-in for Coover. Disregarding his books that are overt fairytales to begin with ("Briar Rose," "Pinnochio in Venice"), most of his characters are already subverted archetypes who repeat stereotypical behaviours from beginning to end. "Ghost Town" had its doomed schoolmarm, its cowboy, and even its sentient train. "The Babysitter," his best-known story, features compressed variations on all the archetypal babysitters, all their boyfriends, all the parents, and all their children. Oh yeah, and a suffocating girdle full of butter.

In "Stepmother," these elements aren't disguised...they're the entire point. The small cast of characters are distilled from Brother's Grimm: The Old Soldier, The Reaper, The Stepmother, The Ogress (Stepmother's name for the "holy female" character who tells victims to accept their suffering as grace), the king and his three princes.

What's more, the characters are doomed to repeat their small set of character traits. The Old Soldier, always discharged with nothing but a crust of bread, has an arsenal of magic items that he uses frivolously. The Stepmother must help the unfortunate and punish the fortunate -- which is difficult, since by helping the unfortunates she turns them into people she must subsequently punish. There are always three princes: the older two must betray the youngest, who -- of course -- is a simpleton.

In typical Coover fashion, the protagonist -- Stepmother -- refuses to accept the constraints of her world and is tantilized by ways to break the pattern...ways that end up being part of the pattern itself. If we can take one thing from Robert Coover's writing, I think it's the idea that escaping the system is simply another part of the system, and the only people who are truly at peace are those who just relax and "let it happen." His characters are never more at pain than when they discover that yet another door leads back to the same old courtyard.

I've already read far too many fairytale deconstructions, but Coover approaches his characters so naturally -- and with such humour in every piece of predestined, cliche'd dialogue -- that I loved "Stepmother" from beginning to end. It's particularly fun when it's nasty, revealing the undercurrents that Brother's Grimm never spelled out explicitly:

She had a stepsister who was a snotty little saint who got up our noses at every opportunity with her sanctimonious wheedling and rehearsed meekness and dead mother worship, suckered by the Ogress as she was, and so as not to strangle the simpering twit in a fit of impatient rage or mark up her irritatingly pretty little face, I would send her on impossible errands just to get her out from underfoot. So one day I sent her to pick strawberries in the snow and she came back, not only wth strawberries but also coughing up gold pieces whenever she spoke. At home of course the smug little vixen clammed up, wouldn't burp a farthing, just gazed upon us all with a fat-faced beatific smile.

Things that Bother Me (But Shouldn't)

Morgan James just emailed me this link -- a sort of "photo caption" contest for people who engage in baby-slash-cat talk -- and yes...it's terrifying. I first ran across these people many years ago (via Portal Of Evil) and while I'm unable to track down an official name for them I refer to them by one of their more commonly-used words: "Meowmies."

The Meowmies own cats and appear to live vicariously through them, which I think is sort of sad. They meet in forums and chat rooms -- pretending to be their cats -- and socialize in a formalized "cat speak" that closely resembles baby talk. I quote an example from this site:

I luff my meowmie, she pampers me to da max.
Anyting I want or need, I don't efen havf to ask!
She rescued me frum da wild place when I was small, helpless & alone.
Gavf me luff, food, shelter & toys, It's sure a wonderfur home!

When I look at that Meowmie's Day Poem, my blood boils with absolute revulsion. First of all I think baby talk is 100% awful, and I am particularly disturbed when adults "baby" non-infants. I'm not just talking about Adult Babies -- who I also find highly disturbing -- but also about couples who cootchie-coo and poodgie-woo with each other. I want to lock such couples in a room without food and water and see just how long their babying will last, maybe after sawing off their arms.

Secondly, I just can't see how people can perceive cats as baby-like. They're selfish, vicious predators who -- at best -- relate to humans on a more-or-less equal basis. I'll never forget my father telling me that cats have small heads so they can squeeze them inside ribcages. Such animals don't call people "Meowmie," they call them "encased offal."

In a fit of pique I once crashed a Meowmie forum, pretending to be a stray cat with mange and a clot of feces tangled around its butt. I said things like "Yeow, effur time I breafe, my lungs is cut by da sharp chicken bone I ate!" and "dees pinworms makin' me always HUNNNGRY!" I did this for a few days, and when my trolling got no response I started asking pointed questions like "who ARE you people?" and "why are you doing this?"

One man emailed a plain-English response to me. He said he didn't expect me to understand their intense personalizing of their cats, but HE wondered why I had bothered to seek out a group of harmless people just to insult them. He thought that behaviour was much sadder than gentle baby-talk with a bunch of friends, and I realized...wow, he was right. I'd been a total jerk. For some reason I'd gotten so ANGRY about the Meowmies that I'd become the kind of person I otherwise condemn.

Whenever somebody gives me grief about doing drag -- especially in an online situation -- I try to remember the Meowmies, and all those people who are just doing their thing. I'll still make fun of such people if they're otherwise jerks (or if they are really BAD at their "thing" but think they're super-great), but otherwise...truce!