eggI prolly shouldn’t be telling you this, but my friend made my day with this little anecdote.  The friend, who shall remain anonymous, recounted how a car, trying to make a left-hand turn into a driveway, and too impatient to wait for traffic to pass, opted to make the turn too soon, driving up over the sidewalk to avoid traffic and very nearly killing my friend.  There were no apologies, no repentant shrug, and my friend, shook up from proximity to death or injury, proceeded with indignation to his destination where he asked his hostess for an egg.  “An egg?” she said thoughtfully, “I only have this one that’s way past its expiry date…”

Egg in hand, the two of them walked down to the offending driveway and launched their weapon, watching it explode in messy liquescence over the driver’s rear window.  Instead of fleeing the scene immediately after, they opted for a casual walk-away since they both have asthma.  Besides, as my friend reasoned, they didn’t look like likely egging suspects, both of them well-dressed professionals in their thirties.  With asthma.  Who would point them out as vandals?

“But, oh, Jessica!” he mooned, his tone rich with emotion and even - could it be? – nostalgia, “I have never, never, felt so alive!”

Day 3 of NaNoWriMo.  This is fun!  I missed Day 1, so I had to play catch-up yesterday.  I sat down and churned out 4000 of the most abominably written words I have ever produced in my adult life.  And I couldn’t be happier about it.  The gun is aimed right at my head, the clock is ticking… I know I can produce the sheer quantity of words required – I turn on the tap and nonsense just pours out of the tips of my fingers the way theological rhetoric pours out of crazy people’s mouths, it’s one of the main reasons my blogs are always SO BORING – what my hopes are really pinned to is the anticipation of seeing what’s going to come of it.  50,000 words later, is my protagonist really going to end up at the end of the path I’ve charted for her?  Or will she still, as I fear, be trapped in the opening scene, “Bad Day at the Office”, mired helplessly in 50,000 words’ worth of exposition and bad internal monologues?

Meanwhile, inspiration is being thrown at me from every turn.  As I say, I went to some lengths to think this story through before I began to commit it to WordPerfect (although I can already tell that it’s going off the rails), so it’s not like I am trying to make anything fit.  It’s just ALL HAPPENING ON ITS OWN!  Yahweh wants this book to be written.  The Universe is sending me a clear message, and that message is “More Chick Lit!”  “Is genre fiction legitimate?” is the new “Is it pornography or is it art?”

chicklit-chart

Chart courtesy of GalleyCat

Five years ago I was driving home on November 1st - a long multi-city commute from an artless, corporate job – feeling very left-brain, the way business life will make you, and there, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a sparkling and unexpected jewel of human creativity and ingenuity.  It was night-time, but Roncesvalles Village’s Sorauren Park was winking like a diamond; flickering like a burning pumpkin patch.  Its winding dogwalker’s paths were lined with all of the previous night’s Halloween pumpkins, laid out on display and glowing cheerfully.  I had my camera with me and I snapped dozens of photos of all the funny and interesting carvings with tremendous delight.  There were no signs, no ads, no organization.  Somehow, at some point, the local residents just started bringing their pumpkins over to the park and lining them up for all to see.  I bet they didn’t even have to have a meeting to discuss efficiencies.  It seemed so spontaneous, so bright and joyful.  Don’t you just love it when humanity gets up to fun things without being told they have to do it for either money or status?

Now I try to remember to go every year, meandering along with my wool-clad neighbours, and taking pictures between sips of hot chocolate.  It’s become quite the tradition for all the Roncie crowd, judging by the growth of both contributions and spectators.  It strikes me as some kind of modern, paganistic ritual; hollowing out gourds and burning candles in them through the long, dark night.  It heralds my favourite season of them all: that busy and expensive run from Halloween up to Christmas.  That dark time of year when we light candles, light up store windows, light up Christmas trees, light up porches and streetlamps.  When we will not go gently (until January, when, every year, we give up).

Here are some of last night’s highlights.  See if you can find everybody’s favourite – REX MURPHY!

crewneck_sweatshirt_bgOn Tuesday it was my birthday and I am 33.

Renewing my driver’s license on the big day, I checked the MTO website and was advised that I would need additional ID. I tried to hunt down my passport, but it wasn’t there. I only found the old, expired one. (The new one, it turns out, was not in my special “ID” place, but in my jacket pocket, where it has been sitting since April’s trip to Paris. Way to keep that identity safe… although if some illegal alien wants to take on my debt and my outstanding taxes along with my identity, well, be my guest.) So I find the old passport and open it up to my 23 year-old self, and it seems so poignant, you know, on my birthday. Ten years later. There I am a whole ten years ago: chubby cheeks and severely chopped hair bounding cheerfully off my head in any and all directions. I felt so old then. 23! And I see now that I really was young.

Funny the things you can never understand, no matter what your mother tells you. The way you can never see yourself clearly. Under my short-cropped mahogany-coloured hair, and my thin, wire-framed glasses, I am wearing a woolly Eddie Bauer sweater in earthy, natural colours, like browns and greens. I know that underneath that I am probably wearing a knee-length, black polyester skirt, black tights and a pair of black combat boots. This was my favourite outfit. I thought it made me look interesting. It probably didn’t make me look nearly as interesting as the full top-and-bottom washed-out blue scrubs I used to wear to high school almost every day – with an XL orange jumper with reflective safety tape over top of it if it was cold out. I probably looked like a walking museum piece: blue-collar uniforms of the 20th century. When I was eleven – ELEVEN! – I went through a “sexy dressing” phase. I chopped up old ballet leotards into crop tops and hot pants and splattered them with paint; I wore these hand-crafted pieces under the sweat suits my mother provided me with in bulk, and stripped down to them when I arrived at school. Surprising that my teacher never said anything. That must’ve made me look interesting, too. Picture it if you can: miniature body, enormous head, fluffy hair, rabbit teeth, “fly girl” outfit. Sex on reeboks.

Now I’m 33. I work from home in discarded workout clothes and recently ordered a free Snuggy by mail through a promotional offer. What’s next?

It doesn’t look good for 43.  

snuggy

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(My life in fashion here.)

jerriblankOh, Jerri Blank*.  You came into my life when there was a dearth of comedy, and were so comedically-progressive (coining it right now: prog-com) that I wasn’t even sure I liked you at first.  Your racism gave me the don’t-laugh feeling.  Your outfits were a little toooo ugly.  But once the genius of it started to sink in, I could never go back.  Jerri Blank was pivotal to the development of my own sense of humour!  In fact, when my then-roommate and I went through an intense phase of watching Strangers with Candy, I was imitating her so much that some of her mannerisms have permanently slipped into rotation with me.  Which (if you watch the show you know) is kind of a bad thing, actually.

Anyway, I was thinking of her today because of this trademark phrase of hers, “I got something to say!”  I’m at a crucial point in my career in terms of deciding exactly what it is I want do.  I’m writing a lot, which I always thought was the singular goal, but something is missing.  I always thought I wanted to write for writing’s sake, but I realize now that it’s the communication aspect of writing that appeals to me.  I want to write for conversation’s sake.  As it turns out, I got something to say.

Gen Y and new media are all about this “conversation”, this exchange of ideas.  I joined Brazen Careerist – a kind of LinkedIn vehicle, but with more of a social media-type interface to encourage discussion and communication.  And I’m blogging my little heart out.

With NaNoWriMo right around the corner, of course, I’m about to go into a month-long period of writing only for the NaNoWriMo word counters.  The prospect isn’t very motivating, but luckily I’ve joined a writing group to help boost me through.  Makes me wonder, though, how novelists do it.  Are you a writer?  I would love to hear your thoughts on writing for yourself vs. writing for others.

*That link could be to amysedaris.com (my heart skipped in my chest when I found this site), but I can tell Andrea Harner’s fandom is in line with me, and that deserves linkage.

Some people, who are not me, are so smart.

Bright Eyes flow chart

There’s a war being waged on the streets of Toronto between cyclists and drivers. We leave the battle behind with our bikes and our cars when we step onto the sidewalk, but for many of us, once in mechanical motion, it’s on. It’s particularly heightened for those of us who manoeuvre around the city streets every day. You’ve seen it before. If you’ve ever been in a car with a driver who muttered “Damn cyclists!” or heard a cyclist swear at a thoughtless door-opener, you’ve witnessed the daily slinging of bullets that is the commuter’s war.

When Darcy Allan Sheppard flew off Michael Bryant’s car, this conflict really came to light in Toronto. I, myself, had only really begun to think of this tension in battle terms the year before, when I tore a strip off a sweet-looking older lady who’d – oops! – decided to skirt around stalled traffic by squeezing her car into the bike lane. She narrowly missed my boyfriend on his bike by about one inch, who artfully swerved around her, but I was less graceful; I pounded on the side of her car as hard as I could with my open palm, colourfully critiquing her driving abilities in a way that made implications about her overall worth.

Now, Mama didn’t raise me up to talk to old ladies like that, but broken and bruised as I was from a run-in I had had with a pick-up truck the month before, I found I was a bit, oh, wound up on the road. What should have been an issue with one aggressive pick-up truck driver, (well two, counting a previous hit-and-run incident), had become an issue with all cars. I felt incredibly guilty for being rude (to an old lady!) but that anger, that fear, is very hard to control. It’s not a question of impolitely cutting someone off. On the road, lives are at stake. On my bike, my life is at stake.

It may be frustrating for cars to negotiate their way around the increasing number of cyclists on the road, but the fact is, it is ridiculously dangerous to ride a bike on the streets of Toronto. Cars are not endangered by bikes, and car drivers are very rarely being killed by cyclists. There’s nothing like feeling the wind in your hair, avoiding traffic jams and keeping your twoonies in your pocket. The only downside is that you will occasionally be hit by a car and may die. Probably nine-tenths of the riders you see on the road have been involved in a collision of some sort. Does that risk make cycling ridiculous, or the city infrastructure?

The municipal government has dedicated so much web space to talking about what they’re doing to promote cycling and protect cyclists that the idea of advocacy almost seems redundant, and yet Toronto’s cyclists continue to get plowed down like unwitting pins in a game of urban bowling. If the City of Toronto is already planning on increasing the number of bikeways from about 166 km to 1000 km in 2011 (without actually remaining on target), encouraging businesses to take the Bike Pledge, and funding safety education programs and collision response protocols (without actually specifying what those are), then why does Toronto have more cyclist collisions than any other major Canadian city? Why do cyclists get hit and killed in Toronto, without anybody being charged with even the mildest infraction?

History was never my strong subject, but even I know that when you have two segments of the population pitted against each other, with lives at stake, you have a brewing civic problem.

My friends, on our two feet, we are all pedestrians; brothers in ambulation.  But once you get on your four wheels and I get on my two, I hope you’ll forgive me a swear word or two.

Seriously!

Here’s what I’ve written about today so far:

- Residue Management
- Farmville (I signed up for Farmville in order to write about it and now I am COMPLETELY HOOKED!  My work productivity has increased, though, since I imposed a rule that I can only play as a reward after completing tasks)
- Agriculture Month in Saskatchewan
- Dealing with Frost-Damaged Corn
- Agricultural Tax Rebates
- Manure
- Alberta’s Animal Health Act
- Dating Sites for Farmers

And now fertilizers and Biogas.  Crazy.

I have essays due in all my classes.  And NaNoWriMo hasn’t even begun.

Remember 1988?  Here’s a trip down Memory Lane…

In the meantime, I am churning out well over 2000 words a day and don’t have time for my word count/creativity exercises here.  A valid excuse!  But once I get my time management issues sorted out… I’ll be riiiight back.

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