RUDENESS

Don't start kissing someone 20 minutes before your guest's ETA. Because even though your house is really close, you know your house is really close and so your make-out brain will whisper "there is lots of time" so as to prolong the kissing and put off the leaving.

And then you will feel like a schmuck for pulling someone really lovely out of their neighbourhood into yours for no good reason, other than the fact that you are, indeed, a schmuck.

Later: Just so no one worries, we just missed each other. So the hint here is to reconfirm time and address before having tea with someone who's never been to your house before. Though I will almost always recommend starting the kissing sooner, no matter the situation.

Well, we just ran into our first bit of New York rudeness.

We've been hanging out at the Tea Lounge a lot. It's my kind of cafe (and Greg, you would love it here) with once overstuffed couches sprouting white tufts, long low coffee tables with peeling veneer, and shadegrownfairtradeorganic coffee made by cute hipster boys and girls.

Shelley just came back to our seat. Her fancy tea put my fancy coffee to shame, since my fancy coffee did not come on its own board.

She put it on the table and sat down. "The guy behind me - that guy - he just called me a homemaker!"
"What? A homemaker? Why? What did he say?"
"I called this a smorgasbord - get it? board? funny. i know. - and he said 'Oh. The homemaker speaks.'"
"Well, that's just rude. Rude! Why would he say that?"
"I know. I don't know. Cause he thinks I'm as old as his mom?"
"You don't look old. Can I blog it?"
"Just as long as you make sure to write that I don't look like a homemaker today."

I take a survey - converse, dark skinny jeans, black hoody, black tuque.

"You look more likely to rob a house than make one."
"Yeah! Write that too."

By and large, we've been raving, as we always do, about how nice people are here.

Saturday night we ventured over to Manhattan for our traditional Feast of Delicious at Da Andrea. Our two trips before, we've been staying just a quick walk around the corner. This time, it was us and the crazy subway system.

Theoretically, this should have been easy. We're a block and a half away from the F line on the Brooklyn side, Da Andrea is 5 blocks away from the F line on the Manhattan side. We got to the station, figured out the ticket machine, navigated the gates, went down the stairs. The platform was mostly empty, just two nattily dressed guys and us. And a bunch of posters all over the place that we hadn't bothered to read.

One of the guys turned to us. "You know what's going on here?" He gestured at the sign. It said something about Coney Island, getting to local Brooklyn stops, and, fuck, disruptions to F line service. For three days, the three days we'd be taking the train.

We all gathered round, offered up myriad interpretations. Most of it didn't make sense if you didn't already know the system. We helped them, they helped us, together we parsed out a way for them to get to their local stop in Brooklyn, us to make it to our fancy dinner. They were from Guatemala, but one of them had lived in Montreal for a while. We sat across the way from each other on the mostly empty subway car, chatting a bit back and forth.

When we got off the train, Shelley and I, I assumed that our sweet Guatemalan friends were behind us. They weren't. We didn't get a chance to say goodbye.

Coming back was going to be a breeze though, right?, because it was just the opposite of what we'd done. Not so. After our delicious dinner, we had a drink and didn't make it to the station until nearly midnight. When the service all changed around and the D train wasn't running to where we thought it was going to run, and there were loud announcements that we couldn't decipher and still didn't make any sense if you didn't already know the system.

Because this is what you do in New York, we turned away from each other and just asked "So, how do we get back to Brooklyn?" into the air around us. Two people answered. The woman, coarse wavy black hair down to her shoulders in a triangle, wiry gray through it, round horn rimmed glasses, perfect Bronx accent, "Oh, you wanna take the R train." at the same time that the man, neat grey flannel pants, navy windbreaker, close cropped hair with a curl of white at the front, broad face, forehead thinner than jowls, a softly lilting deep voice with no corners or edges, a warm voice you could just lean into and rest on, said "I'm going that way. Just stick with me."

We stuck with him. Sitting on the train, a questioning look in his direction as the next stop was announced, a slight shake of the head for 3 stops, then the nod. We waited for the shuttle with him. "I'm hearing an accent," he said to us. "Maybe European?"

We laughed. "Sort of. We're from Canada."
"What part?"
"I'm from Ontario. I'm from Nova Scotia."
This satisfies most New Yorkers. If they ask further, it usually has to do with Toronto. It's rare that I describe Ottawa as being close to Toronto, but I have here, a couple times.

He was a calypso player, had toured Canada, knew Toronto, Montreal, had played Jazzfest in Ottawa. Was a limo driver for 18 years, would never go back to the long boring waits for people. Loved taking transit.

The wind was chill, all of us hunched in. A bus came, not the shuttle, and we got in a dither over whether we should take it. He thought we should. We ran over, too rushed for a proper goodbye. By the time the bus passed the corner where we'd all been standing, our calypso player was gone, crossed the street, and we didn't get a chance to wave goodbye.

See, the reading in Toronto last night was packed. Fucking packed. There were probably more than a hundred people there, so I figure this had better be a killer post for when they all search me out.

Julia and I were running a little late, having lost track of time over rice and vegetables and shrimp and tofu and kimchi.* When we got there, we could hardly get in the door. My hands started shaking and I offered a prayer up into the universe that they would stop by the time I started and wished that I'd had time to put Eric's suggestion of less flappy paper into play. Luckily my prayers were answered and less shaky paper wasn't needed.

It was amazing to read with Julia. She is a fucking smart cookie and we had a really nice day hanging out. Funnily enough, we talked more about birds and fish** than about gender or her book. I had questions, and the book is thoroughly engaging, but to me, asking those questions would have felt too much to me like the cissexual cross-examining the transsexual.

I have had the luxury - the privilege - of not having to think very deeply about my own gender. Not to say I haven't put some thought into it, and I have thought a fair bit about my experience of going from straight to sorta-butch to sorta-femme, but honestly, it's something I can put away if I want. Whipping Girl provides a framework for thinking about gender and gender expression and sex and the relationship between them that allows for a much more thorough and nuanced examination than has so far gone on in my head. I don't think I've figured out enough about my own relationship to my own sex and gender to keep up a decent conversation on that with someone who has.

It was an honour to read with her.

But I'm a dolt when it comes to promo. I left some chapbooks up at the front of the bookstore, and then thought "Wait, I can't collect the money because I'm leaving for the bus station before Julia's done," and collected them on my way out. Because right, those chapbooks are far more valuable to me sitting in my desk drawer waiting to be paid for than given out free and actually read by people. Sheesh. Also, no email list for people to sign up to. Also, a blog name that is difficult to spell, pronounce and remember. I will go far, it's a sure bet. But hey! Pressure's off.

In other news, pride was fucking great. We got about 350 people out to the dyke march, and there were tons at the parade. I loved being in the middle of all those women marching, and was very happy that I was walking next to someone who laughed when I said "Where?" after reading the sign saying "dyke's rock." Even funnier, from our perspective, it was beside the sign that said "talk nerdy to me." Done and done.

It's great how community-oriented the parade in Ottawa still is. The last couple years I was in Toronto, the parade had gotten so big that you had to get there an hour in advance to see anything, and it felt like most of the floats were booze and make-up and there were big metal barriers to prevent you from you know, being proud if you felt like it for a few minutes. Bah. Ottawa is still mostly community groups - with the odd radio station thrown in. No metal barriers.

I nearly didn't make it to the parade though. I had one or two too many pints of beer the night before, and though I felt okay when I decided that yes, I would go out for breakfast with a group of people, it became very obvious to everyone that I was in no actual shape to be there. I sat beside Christine at the reading that night and she said "How are you? You looked a little green this morning. We could see you fading." So my hard work at keeping it under cover was for naught. Apparently, it's going to be a bit longer before my stomach settles down after the Halifax stomach flu. At least I no longer feel barfy after every time I eat.

And finally, if you want to get in my bad books on a long bus trip, you should alternate digging your knees into the back of my seat with putting your socked feet on the window ledge beside my arm rest and end that delicious set with repeatedly punching the back of my seat at 2 am after your seat mate has gotten off the bus and you have turned to stretch your legs out into his seat. You should also keep doing all of these things after I have turned my 180 degrees as if possessed by the demon of knee-digging-hatred and given you a dirty dirty look. Also, you should try to use your purse with the metal handles on it as a pillow between your head and the window and when you find it strangely uncomfortable, it being a purse full of odd-shaped objects and not actually a pillow full of soft fibres, you should reposition it 10 times and clank the metal handles very loudly against the window each time. Make sure you wait until 1:45 am to do this. And then I will write you up in my bad books. Because you know I have them.

*Apparently, kimchi is my new obsession. When I saw it on the list of things that I could put on my rice, I was really more excited than fermented cabbage warrants.
**The kribensis in Eric's tank have had fry and they're fascinating to watch. I spend far more time than I would have expected sitting in front of his tank, waiting to see what they'll do next. They've cowed the three giant fish in the tank, often herding them into a small corner and even then, the angel fish is in tatters from being nipped. They also herd the fry - if one strays from the school, one of the parents will search it out, scoop the fry up in its mouth and then spit it out with the rest of the fry. It's fascinating enough that I've started looking around my apartment to see if I can fit in a tank.

Normally, I can drink 2.5 pints of beer without particularly ill effect. But this morning, holy fuck. I was so hung over I couldn't remember words and I thought I was going to throw up.

It's probably not a smart idea to go to a sweaty yoga class, sweat out the very little bit of water you drank that day, drink a couple more smallish glasses of water with a salty dinner when you get home and then bike out to Westboro to have a very excellently fun time drinking beer with Jennifer while you listen to Dave Jackson spin tunes. We laughed a lot. And didn't drink water with our Beau's.

Oog.

But now the oog is mostly gone, and I'm sitting at my desk at work working on the high middle secret project and luckily I've had such a good 24 hours of my people (I dropped Jennifer off at her house, checked my email to find a lovely missive from my paramour, stumbled to bed and was only just falling asleep when Shelley came in. Then today, a lazy chat in bed with Shelley during which we figured out everything, a lazy breakfast with Eric during which I managed not to throw up but did keep rubbing my head.) that the HMS Project is actually not bringing me down too much or making me rail against the rudeness. Maybe I've just become inured to the project's contents.

Either way, I'm listening to Wolf Parade really loud, I'm cutting and taping and liquid papering and printing and looking forward to the ACO party tonight, for which I have a fabulous outfit, and where I will get to hang out with Shelley, Tracey, Jennifer, the Man of Science, Eric, and Aurèle. And about 295 other people looking to have a good time. I'm sure we'll find it somewhere, though for me, it will probably not be at the bottom of a pint glass.

Jesus. I'm all kerflummoxed.

I want to write about going to Montreal this past weekend, seeing my sister and having a beautiful walk in the fluffy snow to get delicious bread, and then how I hated the snow because Montreal doesn't like snowplows and I almost cried in front of people I don't know very well because I was so stressed out about the driving.

But I'm angry because I got stood up. I want to write about being angry about being stood up, and being left a telephone message AT MY HOUSE instead of getting a response to either of the TWO EMAILS I sent about the meeting, but I can't do it without excessive vitriol and way more capital letters.

I would love to write more about the nature of relationships and how great it is to have a nice little bit of superhot niceness to talk to, look at and make out with. But my vitriol meter is in the red.

So, my first real post after the longest gap I've left in several months is kind of crappy. I have a date with my laundry and then some exhaustive negotiations that will hopefully involve a severe lack of clothing.

PS (Feb 21)- I just want to make it very clear that it was not my paramour who stood me up. Just, you know, for the record. He would have emailed me because he knows I'm an email maven. Rather, he was the one involved in the pantsless negotiations.