Yes Please!

Saw this and lost it

(via Incidental Comics)

This unexpectedly made my day

August in Instagram Photos

A new purchase

I never thought I'd need a graphing calculator in my life, but I bought one yesterday. I'm looking at this thing earlier thinking about how it's probably going to be harder for me to learn how to use this thing than the actual end goal of remembering how to do calculus. Which I've done. Without a graphing calculator. 

Ugh I'm old. Although not old enough for the clerk at Bureau en Gros (Staples for us Quebecers) to not mistakenly ask Jean, whom he thought was my father, if he was buying it for me for my eleventh grade math class. Which I did fourteen years ago. Without a graphing calculator, I might add.

Anyway, my college calculus credits, which are almost as old as the age I'd be if I were actually in the eleventh grade, are apparently too old to be considered as pre-requisites for the program I'm applying to this winter. I highly doubt that math has changed very much in the last decade, but that's what the head honchos at my potential future school have decided. So now I'm trying to relearn it so that I can take the equivalency exam in December.

Amazing how something as boring as how to do calculus can just disappear from your brain without a trace, like it was never there before. I wish I could put my memory banishing powers to better use, but no. Apparently I only forget things that are useful to me.

Real Women

Wise words from Hanne Blank:

"Excuse me while I throw this down, I’m old and cranky and tired of hearing the idiocy repeated by people who ought to know better. 

Real women do not have curves.   Real women do not look like just one thing.

Real women have curves, and not.   They are tall, and not.  They are brown-skinned, and olive-skinned, and not.  They have small breasts, and big ones, and no breasts whatsoever.

Real women start their lives as baby girls.  And as baby boys.  And as babies of indeterminate biological sex whose bodies terrify their doctors and families into making all kinds of very sudden decisions.

Real women have big hands and small hands and long elegant fingers and short stubby fingers and manicures and broken nails with dirt under them.

Real women have armpit hair and leg hair and pubic hair and facial hair and chest hair and sexy moustaches and full, luxuriant beards.  Real women have none of these things, spontaneously or as the result of intentional change.  Real women are bald as eggs, by chance and by choice and by chemo.  Real women have hair so long they can sit on it.  Real women wear wigs and weaves and extensions and kufi and do-rags and hairnets and hijab and headscarves and hats and yarmulkes and textured rubber swim caps with the plastic flowers on the sides.

Real women wear high heels and skirts.  Or not.

Real women are feminine and smell good and they are masculine and smell good and they are androgynous and smell good, except when they don’t smell so good, but that can be changed if desired because real women change stuff when they want to.

Real women have ovaries.  Unless they don’t, and sometimes they don’t because they were born that way and sometimes they don’t because they had to have their ovaries removed.  Real women have uteruses, unless they don’t, see above.  Real women have vaginas and clitorises and XX sex chromosomes and high estrogen levels, they ovulate and menstruate and can get pregnant and have babies. Except sometimes not, for a rather spectacular array of reasons both spontaneous and induced.

Real women are fat.  And thin.  And both, and neither, and otherwise.  Doesn’t make them any less real.

There is a phrase I wish I could engrave upon the hearts of every single person, everywhere in the world, and it is this sentence which comes from the genius lips of the grand and eloquent Mr. Glenn Marla:

There is no wrong way to have a body.

I’m going to say it again because it’s important: There is no wrong way to have a body.

And if your moral compass points in any way, shape, or form to equality, you need to get this through your thick skull and stop with the “real women are like such-and-so” crap.

You are not the authority on what “real” human beings are, and who qualifies as “real” and on what basis.  All human beings are real.

Yes, I know you’re tired of feeling disenfranchised.  It is a tiresome and loathsome thing to be and to feel.  But the tit-for-tat disenfranchisement of others is not going to solve that problem.  Solidarity has to start somewhere and it might as well be with you and me."

E-mail Between Lovers

Rock the Casbah by Myself

I woke up this morning with an awkward medley of Rock the Casbah and All By Myself stuck in my head. A hilarious creation of my nocturnal subconscious and lingering evidence that something weird went down in dreamland last night.

I've always had incredibly vivid and strange dreams, but these days they escape my memory minutes after I've opened my eyes. This makes me sad because I love the amused look on Jean's face when I tell him the latest.

As I was walking to the office this morning, I saw a man in a suit on his knees in the mall, picking up a dozen Timbits in different flavours scattered all over the ground, the empty Tim Hortons box he'd dropped lying on it's side not too far away. It's really insignificant on the scale of bad things that can happen to someone, but it damn near made me cry. I'm such a sucker for these kinds of "sad" situations, I don't know why the hell I'm such a jellyfish for this type of thing, but I always have been and forever will be.

It's nice to have a garden...

... and a boyfriend with a green thumb.

One thing I never learned about as a silly city girl is the art of gardening, and the wonder of having fresh vegetables and herbs at your disposable. At the beginning of the summer, we planted three varieties of tomatoes, cucumbers, carrots, onions, beets, parsnips, and a whole array of fresh herbs (among other things), and we're finally starting to enjoy the fruits of our (his) labour.

As a descendant of farmers on both sides of the family, I guess it's pretty sad that it takes me tremendous effort to keep even the most low-maintenance house plants alive. But such is life.

Dinner was a freebie tonight... we just chopped up some tomatoes and herbs we picked from the garden, tossed them with linguine and gobbled it down with a dollop of ricotta. 

It was. SO. GOOD.

I mean, it makes me kind of mad. Because when I go to the grocery store to pick up these types of ingredients, I end up with watery tasteless tomatoes and herbs packaged in so much plastic. Would you believe that I never even really knew what a real tomato tasted like? That I actually thought that I didn't like tomatoes? The flavour in the stuff picked from the garden is nothing at all like what you buy, unless you go to a farmer's market - which I do sometimes, but I don't live close enough to do it regularly. Even the taste of our arugula is incomparable. I pulled a leaf off the plant and it had such a strong peppery flavour that it almost burned my tongue. In a good way, of course...

I have so many plans for the other things we have growing. SO. MANY. PLANS.

Can't wait for those beets to be ready.

This.

This.

This is how I feel right now.

I'm not super elated or excited. I'm not bursting at the seams. I'm just...

My job has been getting me down in the last few months, but I won't write about it here because I'm terrified of the powers that be that will strike me down if I do. My company has an internet policy that reads like a novel, and I'm forced to accept it every time I open my browser at work.

So I'll avoid that topic for now (and perhaps forever) and instead say that I did two 30km rides this week on my bike, and a few shorter ones, and in the last two weeks since I've started riding my bike more often, I've been feeling really:

July in Instagram Photos

  

Maturity in Our Thirties

Me: I "reformatted" in the last couple days
Me: Wiped out my iPhoto and iTunes library, starting from scratch
Me: Ended up going with Aperture
VW: I didn't have a pref
VW: Just thought that long term wise, I'd rather go with Adobe than Apple for editing photos
Me: Yeah... I went Aperture cause I thought it might play nicer with my Mac... I don't know...

VW: NON
VW: LIGHTROOM 4 EVA
Me: SHUTUP
VW: UR PIX SUX
Me: UR FACE SUX
VW: OMGZ UR SO DED
Me: U GONNA KILL ME WITH LIGHTROOM?
VW: GONNA KUT UR FACE WITH MY MACBOOK AIR
Me: Hahahaha  

Baby Steps

It can be easily inferred from my last few posts that I’ve been spending a lot of time with Netflix these days.

My routine (or lack thereof) is easily governed by the weather. Last week and the week before that were oppressively hot and humid (or sunny and beautiful, as an optimist might say), and in a direct betrayal to the centuries of tropical-climate-inhabiting genetics on my mother’s side, I do not handle heat very well. Thanks to my lovely father, I have the constitution of a pasty Welshman, and in extreme heat situations, I get heat stroke and sunburns and have an undeniable desire to retreat into a cool dark place and... well... watch Netflix, I guess.

The weeks preceding the dog days of summer were rainy and grey – conditions even more conducive to becoming a recluse. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that in about five weeks, Jean and I have blown through entire series’ of House of Cards, Lilyhammer, Breaking Bad and Orange is the New Black.

Saturday morning, the inevitable happened. I had an “I’m bored” breakdown. (As a side note, I just can’t read or even think about the phrase “I’m bored” without hearing the voice of Louis CK’s television daughter). We had just stirred awake and were kind of joking around in bed, and during a lull in conversation, I looked at the perfectly blue sky and thought OH MY GOD. What in the fucking fuck have we been doing?!

The first step, as always, is acknowledging you have a problem. That step was easy, because the cabin fever induced depression had already bubbled to the surface. “We’re depressing”, Jean declared. To which I agreed. God, he’s depressed about this Netflix situation, and he spent the entire first week of his time off from work landscaping... a.k.a. chillin’ outside and being productive. If he’s feeling depressed, what should I be feeling?

So... we went for a bike ride. It wasn’t really a huge leap forward, but at least it was a nudge in the forward direction. He lives in what we call the “country”, which isn’t really the “country” as you might imagine it, but it’s definitely quiet, on the rural side and is punctuated with farmland. There’s a back road through the cornfields where we rode through a gentle breeze as the sun was setting and believe it or not, I didn’t miss Netflix. Not one bit. (And, I should mention, it was about ten thousand times less terrifying than riding my bike around my place in the city, where I’m always in a state of constant sweaty panicky fear for my life.)

We almost managed to avoid getting stuck in front of a screen for the rest of the weekend, but Mother Nature was cranky last night and there was a succession of angry thunder storms that ultimately kept us indoors.

Tonight... well, we’ll see. I’m optimistic.

Tomorrow's Friday

A glass of wine and some good cheese was waiting for me when I got home from work today, and I've got to say, it did wonders in quelling the intense envy I've been feeling toward my boyfriend for having taken two weeks off work. Dragging myself out of bed every morning when he's sound asleep and looking like the picture of pure bliss and comfort in a pile of blankets and pillows has not been easy.

We've been talking about taking off for ten days in October and have been weighing our options. Nothing official yet, but seclusion, relaxation and amazing scenery are high on our list of criteria. I've been looking at private house rentals in Portugal with patios overlooking the sea, and it looks so alluring that I just want to teleport there NOW and not have to do any planning or counting down the weeks.

Some beef brochettes just went on the grill and they smell so fucking good. I don't love cooking, but damn, I love to eat!

Oh, hey!

Phew. Rough fucking day. Could have done without it, but things don't always go the way we want them to.

I spent the afternoon finishing up Orange is the New Black on Netflix. It's been so hot and humid lately that I've been spending all my free time under a spell of lethargy that has had me stuck within the frigid, miserable confines of my air conditioned apartment. The entire week, actually.

God, I hope I never go to prison. I am not cut out for that kind of environment. Not even a minimum security facility. I'm the type of person to feel emprisoned by roommates. I have this irrational fear that I'll end up being wrongly identified in a criminal case, get sent to jail and never have privacy or alone time ever again. Among other unpleasantries, of course.

I'd love to go to sleep right now, I really would!

But I'm too exhausted.

On relaxing

The train lulls me to sleep most mornings, if it's quiet enough. I love the train, it's the best form of public transportation. It's clean, always on time, dependable and best of all, there's a silent understanding among most passengers that the train is a quiet place. Unlike buses, trains are not at the mercy of traffic, and unlike the metro, trains are well ventilated and air conditioned and I can stare out of the window at the passing scenery and daydream.

There's a stretch of green between two stations that's my favourite. I often see deer there, which always makes me excited. I've lived my entire life in the city and you don't see deer in the city. Raccoons, skunks, rabbits, maybe. But not deer. Ever. Not long ago, I saw a fawn standing, bewildered next to the tracks. I hope it went back into the green and into safety.

I've got to learn how to relax more. I'm not a busy person by any stretch of the imagine, but I suffer from two debilitating affections: not being able to shut my brain off, and anxiety-based procrastination. Two separate issues that occasionally get tangled. At least only the latter is self-destructive. A friend suggested I take a "relaxing bath", so I said, "yes, dear friend, I shall try that". Except I ran the water, sank into the steamy bubbles and only lasted about two minutes before thinking "I'm bored and pruny" and wanted to get out.

But... I have my quiet morning train rides, so there's that.

Happy Canada Day!

Hoping everyone is enjoying this fine long Canada Day weekend as much as I am <3