ottawa fun

Warning: Extreme sappiness ahead.

Here in Ottawa we're rolling into the third annual Gaga Weekend. Last year's was an excellent time. So excellent, in fact, that I eschewed all the Westfest stuff - I was either at Gaga events or too tired out by them to head west at all.

There was rocking, there was rolling. It was the birthplace of Fashion Crimes Bingo. It also gave me a two day hangover I nursed with more beer.

It was crazy fun. I loved how DIY it was, I liked how well organized it was. I marvelled that they were able to merge those two things so successfully: that is one fine line to walk. I loved how many women were both on the stage and in the audience.*

Jennifer was my consistent companion, though Steve and I believe perhaps Mitch joined us Saturday for the big show, and d.jack was my date that night. Or, at any rate, I wrangled him home with me,** which is close enough to a date in my books.

So this week I've been making arrangements. Who's going to be at what show, when should we meet, should I bring my bingo card, etc. etc.

And then I thought, that's right, when I got there last year, to Yogi's, to the afternoon show, the matinee, if you will, d.jack was all happy to see me. And I thought, huh, that's right, this time last year, we had just started dating. And then I thought, jesus, this time last year. how did that happen so fast? when the winter seemed so long? And then I thought, how did that happen at all, that i'm dating someone for more than one year and am *happy*? And then I thought and *content*! And then I thought, holy shit. this really could not have turned out any better.

And then I stopped thinking because I didn't want to jinx it.

But then my heart got all swelled up anyhow and I wished he was there so I could wrap my arms all the way around him and squeeze him with the biggest squeeze ever and put my lips on his lips and breathe.

*Other weekend festivals will go nearly unmentioned. Though, to be fair, this year's line up was the most lady-tastic ever.
**And then wrangled him some more, lar lar.

+1+

That thing where you put your envelope when you're putting a cheque in the bank machine? Yeah, I always called it the deposit slot too.

Shelley and I were running errands on Saturday, one of which was stopping at the TD for her to put a cheque in the bank. She was punching numbers and sticking envelopes; I was leaning against the glass, enjoying the contact warmth.

She beckoned me over. "I think of you every time I put anything in the bank," she said. "Look at this." She pointed at the screen.

Please insert your envelope into the depository slot.

I started giggling uncontrollably.

"Like how you always say 'cellular telephone,' right?"

I just nodded, unable to do anything else. Depository! Unnecessary syllables! Haw haw haw!

Except I just looked it up, and in fact, the TD Bank actually does know what it's talking about. A place where things are deposited or stored is called a depository.

Ergo, the slot you use to put your things in there is called a depository slot.

But I still can't read that without dissolving into some kind of puddle of 12 year old laughter. It (gasp) says (gasp) slot!

+2+

I really should stop saying things like "ergo" in public. Am I still 10 and trying to impress the teachers with my vocabulary? Come on, Butcher.

The problem is that a joint got passed around at a party I was at. I don't partake (it makes me paranoid and/or panicked), and I wasn't drinking, so I will blame the hot-boxed living room for getting me a little fuzzy and thus ending the last story of the night, before we all headed out for dancing fun, with a lusty "ERGO" that rang out into a sudden silence and sea of nonplussed faces.

Everybody laughed at me good-naturedly, with teasing sweetness, and trundled either up the stairs to pee or down the stairs to wait.

I know, I know, we're way past tomorrow for the second half of that crotch story. I will get to it, that I promise.

In news that doesn't make me feel like a liar, I'm reading tomorrow night!

Tara Michelle Ziniuk is the headliner, and Shelley kindly asked would I warm up the crowd. So come on out and let me warm you.

I'll be reading a selection from a story I just submitted for consideration in Best Bondage Erotica 2011.

Thursday, April 8, 2010
8:00pm - 9:30pm
Venus Envy Ottawa
320 Lisgar Street
PWYC

Last weekend was insanely busy.

'Puter Learnin'

I'm halfway through a Web Designer certificate at the 'Gonk, which means a lot of weekend classes. Some are useful - who knew my HTML and CSS coding was so inelegant? - and some are beyond useless - Flash course, I'm looking at you and your rabidly offensive teacher.

Last weekend was Photoshop. It was a well paced course and I learned a lot. The teacher was pretty good, very patient.

Though if she'd stopped just clicking through stuff and then saying "See! There!" while we were all simultaneously trying to look at our screens and the big screen at the front, she might not have had to exercise said patience. But anyway.

It was totally worth doing, even though it meant basically not being at home for the second weekend in a row, but for reasons that are not nearly as nice as your lover's body.

Dammit! I Missed the Queers! Well, Mostly

And then, weeks after I booked the Photoshop course and my work nicely paid for it, the Radical Queer Weekend was announced. For the same weekend. It looked fucking awesome and, by all accounts, was.

I was busy all day Saturday, and too tired for Sunday night, but I did manage to make the Friday night kick-off, where the homos they bounced and the singer she shouted.

Secret Trial Five played a very short but fun hardcore set. I'd seen them in the movie Tawqacore - the only musicians in the film who were women, I believe.

If my ears did not deceive me, one song had a chorus comprised of this line: "We are not Tawqacore." I kinda wanted to stick around and ask them about it, ask them about the movie. Did they like the movie? What did they think of the movement? How was it being on the bus with all those guys?

But I hadn't had coffee for most of the day, which meant I'd spent the day in some severe withdrawal, which meant that I was going to spend Saturday trying to learn software with a mostly decaffeinated brain, since I wasn't going to have a real full coffee till Saturday night.

So the band announced the last song and I started making my way through the - very cute, as noted by Luna - crowd.

There is something perfect about standing in a crowd of slowly getting tipsy drunk dykes. To be woo, it feeds places in me that nothing else can touch. Or, put another way: dykes are fucking rad. And cute.

Okay. So What's This About a Camera?

And why was I not drinking coffee, you say? Is it that you just hate yourself that much?

Before I get to the camera part, just let me say that I was shocked by my reaction to the lack of caffeine. I knew it made me grumpy and headachey, but I didn't know it was going to make me fucking sick. By 8 pm on Friday night, 32 hours after my last dose of coffee, my head was stuffed too full of cotton, I was irritable, and I had started to sweat and shake. It made me thoroughly thoroughly grateful that my drug of choice is not only legal, but easily available.

I can sit my shaking ass down at a table in the Rideau Centre and down a shitty lukewarm coffee in big gulps, rather than having to having to scour the market for an even decently clean bathroom to get my fix and I don't have to worry about people harassing me. Heroin is, obviously, very different from caffeine, but I wonder how much of that difference comes from the way it's treated. Lots of it, I think I can say fairly safely. All of it? I don't know. I wonder if it isn't an issue of magnitude. Alcohol, par example, takes a far greater toll on the health and well being of pretty much any given population than does heroin.

That, at any rate, is what I thought about while sitting at the shitty stand of tables near the Solo shop at the Rideau Centre as the first webs of cotton melted from my brain. I will never go for that long without caffeine again.

In fact, I am starting to stockpile it for the End Times. Because lord knows you don't want to have cotton head during the apocalypse.

But the camera, yes.

The reason I went off coffee is because I volunteered to be part of a study called, verbatim, and take a deep breath now, "The Role of Early, Negative Experiences, Fear and Aversion, Couple Functioning, and Sexual Self View in Sexual Disorders Involving Pain."

The researchers needed both women who experience pain during "sexual activity and vaginal penetration" and women who do not. I'm in the latter camp - another thing to be grateful for - and it's always good to have something to blog about.

Except it's late and I'm tired and this is already too long, so more tomorrow, my pets.

The weekend did include some lowlights.

The overtime working?
I did look longingly out at the beautiful Saturday afternoon, but really it was fine.

The sore throat getting worse?
Not great, but it wasn't really bad until early early this morning.*

Spending over an hour sorting the overcooked beans into chili worthy, dip worthy and detritus?
Not the most fun I've ever had. The thrill of categorization wears off quickly, I am here to tell you.

But the rest of it was full of the following great things in no particular order:

- The Plan 99 reading series with Jennifer. We were lucky enough to run into a couple of the Irregulars (we got to watch the Erratic Genius build a house of coasters!), and so talk camera talk, talk blogging talk, talk Ottawa talk and eat good food.** Later on we got to talk writing talk and music talk with Dave O'Meara, who is brilliant at both poetry and table wrangling. And one of the suddenly millions of Daves I know.

- Friday night Grace said "Why does Henry's head smell like chocolate?" and I said "Because I was rubbing my lips on it." And she just said "Oh" like that was an entirely reasonable answer, before I even explained to her about the lipbalm. Henry is their very adorable new baby, by the way. His head is very soft and he smells really good even without a crazy auntie rubbing her lipbalmed lips on him.

- Impromptu date!

- Sunday I did a crazy amount of grocery shopping. Anyone who's been to my house before knows that my fridge is like the main street of a Western just before the villain meets the hero at high noon. It actually makes that Morricone whistling sound sometimes when you open the door and then the cat food tin tumbles into your hand. The massive amount of shopping then lead to a massive amount of cooking. Which lead to the bean incident, but we've already talked about that.

*I feel fine other than the throbbing tonsil, thank you for asking, and I have a doctors appointment tomorrow afternoon.

**Though another thing I am here to tell you is that the Manx menu has suddenly gotten very The-Butcher-Unfriendly. I don't eat wheat and I don't eat dairy and I didn't feel like pork tenderloin or either of the (altered) tofu mains. So. I had the fish tacos*** and just sucked it up when the fish came breaded. Figuratively and literally. It was really tasty.

***Heh. Heh heh. Heh heh.

Looking at my house this morning, one could only assume that I'd had a very busy and very good weekend.

My favourite pair of heels had been abandonded in front of the closet, one of them tipped over after I tripped on it rushing out the next morning. The bed was pushed over about 6 inches and there was a pile of [redacted] that had ended up on top of my dressing table after being moved around in a clump from flat surface to flat surface. There were clothes hanging to dry in the spare room, there were piles of dirty clothes on the floor in every room. There were clothes hanging on the doorknob in the bathroom.

The main floor fared no better. A big pile of dishes, pepitas left in the oven after roasting. Clean clothes hanging in the bathroom. Dirty yoga clothes in a pile on the stairs. Bulk food still sitting in bags on the counter after being bought Saturday morning.

One would be right.

It was a very busy and very good, and in some ways very hard, weekend. The very good included a Sunday night friendly friend potluck, a Friday night puttering by myself (2 loads of laundry! 2 episodes of Top Chef! 1 giant bowl of soup! 2 beers!), a shit hot Saturday night with D.Jack, which can be further subdivided into three categories of overlapping fun, including live music at Raw Sugar and nice drinks and food at the Moon Room and a whole pile of [redacted] at my house.

The bulk of my days, however, was taken up with hours worth of yoga anatomy instruction. It was crazy useful (who knew the foot has three arches!) but fucking hard. It's hard for me to sit for 5 hours straight, no matter where I am or what I'm doing. Add a second-day bleeding backache to that, add a few hours in stilettos to that, add some brutally hard concentrated yoga to that, and by Sunday at 2 pm I was severely uncomfortable.

And then we started on the shoulder work.

It's hard for me to do shoulder work no matter, since my shoulders are square but not strong. But add to that a possibly sadistic teacher who had us do said shoulder work with the soles of our feet pressed together and brought as close to our crotches as we could and by about 8 minutes in I was crying, because that is what happens when I spread my legs and externally rotate my femurs.

I'm pretty down with that. I've been therapized up the yin-yang, and I'm not so sure I've got much else to say to a kind person who is listening without stake to my babbles. At some point you need to just let the fuck go of what you learned to hold onto. What I am holding onto, I am holding somewhere in my hips and hamstrings.

I'm good with doing that in yoga, I'm good at managing its public manifestations. But add to that a sore back, add to that various floods of cyclical hormones, add to that sore legs, add to that the swirls of nausea that sometimes accompany the leak of tears, add to that a room full of strangers who didn't want to partner with the weird tattooed girl with the hairy armpits and oh, oh, I was hollowed out, leaving the potluck in the first wave, crawling into sheets that still smelled like d.jack and falling hard enough asleep that the firecrackers didn't wake me up.

It's true, I'm still around. I think this is the longest I've gone without posting for possibly ever. And considering the past week and the next couple of days ahead of me, I should probably be sleeping.

See, this year, Pride has coincided with the end of a funding contract at work. Which means I'm working long hours to bust out the deliverables, and hosting stuff and picking up PAs and working bars and drinking drinks and practising to take my clothes off in front of 200 people and actually taking my clothes off in front of 200 people. And going on dates, because I actually prefer to take my clothes off in front of one person.

So. Not much in the tank tonight. I'll take a bath, take a nap, drink some coffee, pick up a dj, set up a PA, have some fun, tear down the PA, get some sleep, maybe do an interview, march around a bit, listen to some music, and then type on the deliverables for the rest of the weekend.

The contract ends Monday, which is the same day that I'm getting a layoff notice. It's not hugely likely to go through, but it does give one pause.

Monday will be a sucky day on top of a moderately sucky weekend on top of a very fun but very tiring week. Luckily, there was already anyway a d.jack date in the plan for that night, so when I get stressed out about all this, I picture myself at the Imperial, eating green things and drinking beer and laughing.

Presented by Agitate! Ottawa...

OutWrite!
Queer / Two Spirit / Trans Writers of Colour and Indigenous Writers refuse to be written out!

Readings by Nalo Hopkinson, Trish Salah, Kalyani Pandya, Rob Friday.

This event will also be a fundraising effort for the Migrants' Trade Union (MTU) in South Korea.

August 20, doors @ 6.30
Montgomery Legion Hall
330 Kent Street, near Somerset (wheelchair accessible)
Tickets at the door: $10-20 sliding scale.

For more info, visit Agitate's website.

Really, all it takes is a nice email. Munira Ravji sent me one a couple of weeks ago, asking me to cover this band I'd never heard of: LAL. I'm not entirely sure how she found me, since I don't really do music journalism here, so much as I gush about shows that I love and bitchily trash those I don't.

But I've just popped their myspace page on, and you know, it's pretty nice. I'm enjoying it. The singer's got a good voice. The music is, indeed, "threaded together with dub poetry, soul, folk, roots, jazz and a definitive dance-floor aesthetic."

My guess it that it'd be by and large a laid back show, with some nice energetic pieces and a good vibe all around. Even if their album Deportation is puported to be "a personal treatise on migration and movement, a challenge to militarism, dangerous love, and the stories of those silenced by (il)legality."

That sounds way heavier than what is coming out of my speakers.

I don't know that it's so much my kind of music that I'll go myself. But still. It was a nice email and I like to help nice people. So go see them.

++
August 2, 2009
10 pm
Mercury Lounge w/ dj Rise Ashen
56 Byward Market
MySpace
++

PS. And no, it certainly doesn't hurt if you're emailing me about bands that have a very cute girl in them.

About 6 weeks ago, I lost my sunglasses.

It was shitty, because prescription sunglasses are expensive. But they were well and truly gone, and I am too old to be squinting my increasingly creasing face up into the sun. So I got new ones, and they're very cute. I picked them up, pronounced myself happy to the nice glasses lady, and went back outside to hop on my bike and head back home.

I put my helmet on my head, and the back doohickey pressed into the ends of the arms and nearly popped my expensive new glasses off my face and onto the ground. I fussed and fiddled and I managed to find a decent balance, but it didn't last long and I spent the 10 minute ride pushing my sunglasses uselessly up my face.

Not so happy, maybe.

I've been kind of making do since then, wearing glasses/no helmet mostly, occasionally trying both and getting too irritated every time.

Today was really a day for both, but I could not stomach the thought of worrying my glasses back up my nose every 30 seconds, or worse, having them fall off my face and having to buy new ones.

But it was bright, I was heading out on Shelley's fast bike and I was gonna be out for a while. I didn't want to miss it. The afternoon was perfect for me. Not too hot, just enough humidity to raise the fecund smells up out of the grass and off the river.

I weighed the pros and cons of no-helmet vs. no-glasses. Could I do no helmet? Yes, but. Could I do no glasses? I didn't actually know. In the end, I decided that I didn't really need to see all that well to bike for 45 minutes, and I would wear my cheapie sunglasses that fit better under my helmet.

Ahem.

Considering that I almost fell down the Primrose steps as I was carrying the bike down and then actually ran into someone (their fault, but I didn't see it coming) on the way back, I would say that it was a bad idea.

Not a terrible idea, since the worst thing that happened was that I cursed at an old lady, but goddamn, I almost really needed that helmet.