Raindrops on roses, yo.

( print by Tender Beasts on Etsy )

 
I'm good, I'm good.

See: I've cycled through my woman-time and the six (seven?) levels of grief regarding the bad news (still a secret, though I've told like 18 people now) and I've perked up like my partially-dehydrated houseplants when I remember to water them. Which, by the way, is rarely. But, now my metaphor doesn't work. I'm usually perky. Much UNlike my houseplants. Gah. (Trying not to delete and rewrite. Must. Keep. Writing.)

This sole houseplant is surviving/thriving (somehow). Much like me. (Stop)

I'm bouncing around like myself in new shoes today. These:

But if you were aware of my "Buy Nothing Month" pact with Alex (well, now you are), don't worry: they were purchased last week and just arrived in the mail. Segue: We bought a couch. I could say that we needed one, but not in the way you need, say, water. Or air. But in the same way I need a new winter scarf: the old one is tattered and sorta embarrassing. It was the black spot/sheep in our decor transformation (4 years of on-a-dime DIY blood-n'-sweat). We didn't have the money but it was 70% off and we couldn't wait. Alas, to justify it, we are currently suffering through self-imposed "Buy Nothing Month". Toilet paper and TTC tokens and groceries are exempt. We're even allowing movie rentals, in the event that we watch everything worth watching on Netflix (we have).

Inhale.

I hold my breath while typing.

So, I can't shop, but it's not preventing me from looking. And maybe filling my virtual shopping cart. And maybe hovering a shaky hand over my wallet. But no. We need to pull up our socks. I have baby fever and I told Alex that I want to be preggers in less than 2 years (my mother is, at this very moment, jumping around and popping corks and buying a crib). Whoa.

My sister says that the best part of my blog is that I can never stay on topic. Happy, Jill-mu?

OK, back on track. Yes. I started a "3 Things" theme a while back and planned weekly posts of my top three loves of the week. Flaked out. Then I figured I'd re-brand it as a "Favourite Things" (Sound of Music-themed) weekly post, because being bound to finding exactly 3 things was stifling. I bailed on that too. But maybe a loosely bi-weekly/when-I-feel-like-it schedule will work for me.

Today, I feel like it.

Here are a few of my brand-new very favourite things!

1. DIY Muppets!

Whaaaaaaat? THIS IS THE BEST THING. EVER. OF ALL TIME. Alex is grumpy about it because he can't get a beard AND hair on the same Muppet. But he should suck it up because THIS IS THE BEST THING EVER. Also, he loves Muppets as much as I do. Which is a lot.

2. Dog Print Leggings (and pretty much everything in the Qoo Qoo Etsy shop)

I obviously need these. I am obviously not crazy enough about my dogs. Your dogs. Any dogs, really. I bought a locket last week. It has two slots for photos. Alex didn't make the cut. DOGS IN BOTH SIDES! Everything by Qoo Qoo is so bloody cute. "Buy Nothing Month", you are my arch nemesis. 

3. Ryan Gosling/Polygamy

 

We saw Drive last night. (Another exemption: it was our anniversary. GET OFF MY BACK!). While the film wasn't totally my thing (Art House meets Slasher. Meh.), it was beautifully shot and is TWO HOURS OF DREAMY! Oh, Ryan Gosling. Stop being so damn melt-y. I'll even give up Jason Schwartzman AND Adrian Brody AND James McEvoy for you.

Not since my chest-pain inducing crush on every member of NKOTB (except Danny) some 20 years ago have I felt so utterly heart-smashed over a perfect stranger. And I'm married. Inappropriate, what!? But somehow, as every hetero woman in the world can attest: it's unavoidable. Disclaimer: this is clearly Wonderland and has no impact on my real-life man-crush/house-husband. Though, I have contemplated polygamy-friendly states for our next move. 

I fear for the safety of his next GF. Selena Gomez, much? Ravenous 30-somethings are perhaps more dangerous that their pre-teen counterparts.

4. Dogs jumping rope!

No. I stand corrected. THIS IS THE BEST THING EVER. Maybe I can buy the Qoo Qoo leggings and teach my dogs to jump rope with me and we jump rope together (avec leggings)? Maybe Qoo Qoo will make me custom leggings with the head of "Mayonnaise", the world-record rope-jumping dog (complete with pink/blue ears) as a repeating pattern? Maybe they can make matching leggings for my jump-roping dogs? Maybe Alex will leave me and I will become the dog equivalent to the crazy cat lady. (Don't leave me)

[ Photos via: Pinterest, FAO Schwartz, Guinness World Records, Etsy, Qoo Qoo, Aldo, Tender Beasts, Urban Home, Me ]

Pralines N' Cream or Chocolate Mint?

I've always been bad at making decisions. I used to write pro/con lists in my high-school diary to compare boys that I was crushing on. There were at least three at any given time. 

 [ Me and Jill with our cousin David, centre. Boy on the right was a fleeting crush. Ah, to be 15. ]

I decided, for the purpose of evidence of my indecisiveness, to dig out one of my old journals and scan a page, sure that I would find a reasonable example. I didn't have to look past page 1 of my 10th Grade diary. I managed to talk about FOUR boys, and it was only the first day of school. *sigh* 

I was about to scan it when I noticed that boy #4 was none other than MY HUSBAND! What?!? Did I have so many crushes that year that I completely forgot that Alex was one of them (briefly)?! By page 2 I was already beginning what would be a year of obsessing over and quasi-dating one boy/loser in particular, that I apparently completely forgot about my page-1 crushes. 

I always told Alex, after (re-)meeting him in 2006, that I never thought about him "that way" in high school. Lies. (If you didn't already know, he had a decade-long crush on me) It's too bad that Mr. Loser distracted me from what was obviously my best choice on page/day 1. It obviously all worked out in the end. I only had to date 100,000 losers (and a few nice but horribly ill-matched guys) over the course of 13 years to get there. We never would have made it, I think, if we had hooked up back then. I needed a basis for comparison, maybe.

Here's the page:

Notes:

- Boy names were blacked out for obvious reasons (hello, world-wide-web!)

- This is incredibly humiliating - don't judge. I was 15.

- Yes, I wrote entirely in all-caps for years, thanks to my Grade 8 shop teacher

I think I might also scan pages from my diaries more often. They are amusing (for you), even if they're mortifying (for me).

 [ if Angela Chase taught us anything, it's that being a teenager is, like, so hard (via nypost.com) ]

The point of this post was SUPPOSED to be about a current conundrum that has left me muddled and indecisive. I ended up a little off-track, hey?

OK, so yeah, I can't make decisions. Shoe colour, ice cream flavour, films. And, uh, what the heck I'm doing with my life. I know the long-term goal - my own pet boutique. But what-oh-WHAT do I do in the meantime. I've been offered a job (the little secret I can't tell you), but there's a catch. 

Here's where I'm at:

Option A: Take above-mentioned position which is WAY-WAY awesome, but doesn't pay a ton and would potentially be pretty demanding time-wise. Pros: It's a pretty amazing opportunity to do something i love...and get paid for it! Cons: It's not really in my ultimate desired field (although it's something I've always had a strong interest in), it doesn't leave me much time to work towards my little business idea, and doesn't help me save that much money.

Option B: Stay on EI, spending my time working on my business and looking for a job in corporate retail. Pros: More time for my business now, better money and applicability to my business when I do find one. Cons: I may never find a job (I've been interviewing and applying like crazy to no avail). Or, I may find a job that makes me miserable and ends up being more demanding than I anticipated.

Either way, I am in no position to open shop for another year or two, and sadly Alex's rock-star salary isn't going to carry us through, so I need to find work fast. Gotta say, I am leaning towards Option A. It's a really great gig, despite it's downfalls, and it's an ACTUAL offer. Saying no would mean I'm back to being officially unemployed. And my EI isn't going to last forever. 

Arggghhhh! 

---

Rayanne: You wanna have sex with him.
Angela: Who?
Rayanne: Who. Jordan. Catalano. Come on, I'm not gonna tell anyone, just admit it.
Angela: I just like how he's always leaning. Against stuff. He leans great. Well, either sex or a conversation. Ideally both.

RIP My So Called Life 1994-1995

WeekEND!

Thank goodness for moms who borrow your apartment and leave large bags of potato chips in your cupboard. Am i right?! Y'know, when you're falling in love with James McEvoy on TV 'cause your husband is outta town? And you need to eat your feelings? We've all been there. Right? 

Just re-watched Penelope (so good) while devouring next day pizza and half a bottle of wine. It's times like these, especially after the day I've had, that I could use my fuzzy husband. But potato chips are a close second. 

Brunch tomorrow with my girls, and then a full week of productivity (hopefully)! I just hope I can drag myself out of my "what's my place in this world" slump (I'm waxing existential). 

I still haven't had the heart to check my camera today, after I (probably) ruined it after dousing it in a bottle of air-freshener. Purse-content-fail. It's just too depressing to fathom at this point. Luckily, I think that my seriously expensive lens is OK. Egad! What a week!

On the bright side, Alex and I had an hour Skype-fest tonight and  he actually had a working webcam. I got a little verklempt when I saw his face. He noticed. I hoped that crappy-web-cam pixelation would cover my teary-ness. Not so.

Off to bed now. Will substitute dog-snuggling for the human variety. Poor things. G'night! XO

(There is literally no point whatsoever in writing this blog. Self-pity? Narcissism? I guess that's what blogs are for anyway, right?)

Crush.

[ she kissed a girl...er, her grandmother. photo via: mrpoplife ]

I've been doing alot of girl-crushing lately, haven't I? Hannah (NOT Montana. Ugh did you see her crotch-shots?) Georgas. Lady Gaga. Katy Perry. Sia.

Lately though, I have a non-music crush: Kate Carraway. She writes for Eye Weekly. I think I might want to make out with her just a little itty-bit. (Don't worry, Alex, I just say that for fun/attention/exaggeration. I only have lips for you. And if I didn't, I'd probably ruin my first girl-on-girl moment by giggling.) Anyway, maybe I won't be kissing her, but I do enjoy her weekly self-deprecating and balls-out rants. I would be too self-conscious to use the term "dry-raped" in a widely read paper that, say, my mother could read (uh, bad example). Correction: a paper that my grandmother could read. I've read enough of her material to know that she has a decent relationship with her parents, and I can probably assume that they read/clip her editorials with pride. Still, she says "dry-raped" and writes articles like this one. Hero?

[ via http://katecarraway.blogspot.com ]

Maybe I want to use the p-word sometime, too. But maybe I'll just save it for $3.99 martini Wednesdays. I am all too aware that moms are reading this blog. And it's not my own that I'm worried about.

I'm always drawn to people who don't self-edit. Maybe because I do. And I hate it. I can't even blog properly (heavily editing and formatting as I write). And Alex says I over-censor my Facebook photos. Zit? Un-tag. Unflattering angle? Un-tag. Whatever. It's not that I'm not being myself. No, it's just maybe a more polished version of it. I'll just keep up the lady-facade while I inwardly cheer/relate/"amen-sista" every time Kate says things like:

(To guys)"That deadened feeling you get when a posse of women is talking about the first season of Gossip Girl is the same way most of us feel about videogames. Don’t play videogames in front of girls. It assaults our eyeballs and brains and having-sex-with-you potential." 

or 

"Since forever, I’ve felt the clenching (and sometimes the wind-knocking ghost-punch) somewhere in my womb when the right point of my hormonal cycle meets up with a non-screaming baby in the aisle at the grocery store. The impulse is easy biology: the babyless and mommy-aged female getting weird around small children is more evolutionarily obvious than boners."

But I won't write these things myself. Instead, I'll lay it all out in a verbal eruption in the hot tub at girls' weekend (NEXT WEEK! YEAH!), after saving it up all year. 

Surrounding myself with girls who dress up all pretty, play mommy, and hold down real jobs most of the time can make for some excellent letting-loose possibilities. I think maybe we're all dying to shout the c-word and the p-word quickly in repeated succession. In the subway. At work. Or in a popular weekly newspaper. But we're "ladies" most of the time, or we pretend to be. Otherwise, guys get all squirmy. Alex knows the truth and seems to be ga-ga for me anyway. So, I married him.

While I masquerade as a "journalist" via my BlogTO gig, I feel like an imposter. But it's getting more comfortable. Anyway, it's nice to be inspired. Even though I'm too bottom-of-the-totem-pole to get away with anything remotely as shocking.

---

BlogTO post in the works: Toronto's Best Spinning Studios. It's times like this where I wish I had more journalistic freedom. The crotch-agony associated with 9 straight days of Spinning is curse-worthy. %$&*#

SIA!

[ <3 ]

Role reversal!

In an unusual twist of events, Alex spent Wednesday night lying low with a movie while I went on a musical outing. Wednesday is usually rehearsal night for him, but it was canceled this week. And I had plans! Sheila and I pre-ordered tickets to see Sia at the Phoenix and we were both anticipating our second-ever solo date (we usually roll in a brunch-y girl-gang).

I had been looking forward to seeing Sia live since I met her in LA (not realizing who exactly I was meeting at the time). I was already digging her songs, but didn't make the connection when we shook hands. She was recording her newest album in the studio next to Sweet Thing. I played with her dogs - Lick Lick Science and Pantera Marvelous - and we chatted about nail colour. She told me that we must have been sisters in a past life. It wasn't until I returned to Toronto that I realized who she was. ARG!

[ hanging out with Sia's pup, Pantera - LA 2009 ]

Her latest album - due for release in June - is much more upbeat and dance-pop than her older  down-tempo sound. I love love love it. Her die-hard-with-a-vengance fans are on the fence. While there are those who have been throwing around terms like "sold out", I think the new sound is smart, fun and still very, very Sia. She managed to explore a new genre while being totally true to herself. I hear she is (was?) dating JD Samson from Le Tigre, so maybe there's the influence? I actually think the new pop-infused sound is a better fit for her effervescent cute/weirdness (think Lady Gaga meets Sesame Street, maybe). The infectious Clap Your Hands has to be a hit, it just HAS to.

[ Sia @ the Phoenix, Toronto 2010 ]

Her live show was quirky, in true Sia style. She was funny, full of giggles and props, and sang against a backdrop of crocheted afghans and pom-poms. Pom-poms! See? See, I was right! Puffs and Poufs and Pom-poms are totally hot. Of course, I haven't started making my headpiece - yet another lonely abandoned project - but I'm really jazzed to get started.

[ Pom-poms!!! ]

Openers Dance Yourself to Death were decent, and I was totally digging White Bed and We Are All Made of Stone. They even threw in a Fine Young Cannibals (if memory serves...) cover, circa 1991. Sheila and I seemed surrounded by people who were born in 1991, so our enthusiasm was not entirely shared.

 [ Jen, DYTD ]

Despite vowing never to return to the Phoenix after being subjected to manhandling and triple-ID'ing at Alex's show, great artists just keep playing there! Location aside, it really was the perfect night out!

 [ We Are Born drops June 2010 ]

p.s. The only downside: I was cat-called by degenerates more than once en route to the show, and felt icky all over. To my horror, I was getting "She's asking for it" looks from passers-by. Or maybe I'm just being sensitive. Note to self: the short tulip skirt/fuschia tights/3" wedge combo will not be repeated. I am typically ignored by salivating drunks on the prowl and would like to keep it that way thank-you-very-much.

p.p.s F*&%k! I missed Kate Nash - she played The Mod Club last Monday.

---

"I am a dash and you are a dot
When will you see that I am all that you've got

I'm a binary code that you cracked long ago
But to you I'm just a novel that you wish you'd never wrote
I'm greater than x and lesser than y, so why is it
That I still can't catch your eye?"

-Sia (feat. Beck), Academia

Sweet, Sweet Things!

Only two days left until the official radio release of the boys' first single, Dance Mother! The moment of truth, perhaps? Apparently, it works like this: their label shops them around to appropriate stations across Canada (in this case, rock radio), providing a set release date (April 12th), then stations can choose to air the song (or not). It could get zero radio play altogether, or just a couple of weeks on off-peak rotation, OR this could be IT. I am impatient; this is lip-biting agony. But, I have faith. In Toronto, the Edge seems to already be behind the band, and I suspect that the song will get decent exposure. As for the rest of Canada, we'll have to wait until Monday... 

In other exciting Sweet Thing news, the Dance Mother music video is complete! Post-production wrapped up only yesterday, and Alex and I screened the final version this morning while still in housecoats. Bandwife perks, you see.

I am also privy to some other top-secret info. I can't share details just yet, but I will say that a pretty substantial tour is in the works, with tentative dates already planned for the Western provinces. Of course, things in this business change altogether too often for my liking and I won't be planning a road trip just yet. But Tabor, clear your schedule in early June; our Thelma and Louise moment is imminent!

The Good, The Bad, and The Oh-So-Handsome!

[ swoon! mm hmm, that's my hubby! ]

Bad news first: the mini West coast tour is canceled. Bye bye road trip. However, I still plan to hit to open road to see three great shows next week in Ottawa, Montreal and Toronto. Plus, the boys' manager has promised "at least one" cross-Canada tour before the album release date (which has been pushed back AGAIN to July). Miss T: I guarantee you that you'll get a personal tour of the Canadian Prairies before the summer is here!

The good news: you can now own one of the tracks from the album! Free! The wait is over! A pre-album listening party of sorts with some of my best girlfriends put this single, Dance Mother, on top. They must have played it sixty times. In a row. It's also going to be Sweet Thing's first radio single, and their first video which is currently in post.

Sweet!

Click here to get the single.

Tim Burton at the MOMA: NYC Part 2

I am all at once inspired and flooded with a feeling of inadequacy. 

I spent a Saturday afternoon in NYC becoming very intimate with one of my favourite directors. But to label him merely "director" is somewhat an insult. He is all at once artist, filmmaker, illustrator, animator, scupltor, story teller, costume designer and genius. OK, maybe he's a little insane and twisted, but what overtly creative person isn't? And, those are some of my favourite personalities.

The exhibit contained works spanning all of his creative abilities, including props and costumes from some of his films (I became a little veklempt when I saw the Edward Scissorhands costume) and illustrations dating back to his childhood. Sadly, Saturday was the worst day to go - I missed many pieces due to the crowds, and couldn't get close enough to others. I highly recommend this exhibit. On a Tuesday.

 

  

 

Despite the crowds, it was one of the best collections I've seen. I am inspired to paint again, although also lacking confidence in my abilities. I think success in art is highly attributable to productivity - if you are always creating and experimenting, you eventually get something right, and you're always improving. My problem is that I am not picking up a brush often enough. Hopefully, a little inspiration (thanks to Mr. Burton) and a lot of time on my hands (thanks to being jobless) will change that.

Photography was prohibited, but I managed to sneak in a few: