ottawa fun

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.

You know, I'm not even the hugest hard core post-punk garage rock three chord music fan. I like it, sure thing, some of it I love. My go-to music, though, is moodier and more angular.

I didn't have grand hopes for The Gaga Weekend. I thought it was cool that it was going on, and I liked the bands on the bill that I'd seen enough to make me want to see more. Just how much fun it was kind of sideswiped me. Fun enough that I did enough and drank enough that the thought of going to Westfest tonight went completely out of my mind.

It was amazing not so much for the music, or even the company. Though there was Jennifer, of course, who makes music more fun just by being there. There was Steve and Maggy, who danced with us too. Earlier and later, too, there was d.jack. There were some excellent bands, which Jennifer ably described, and some pretty good bands, and even a couple I really didn't like.

The sense of community, though, was amazing.

I loved how those two girls that I'd never talked to before yesterday lost their shit during The Balconies. I loved how about three songs into The Statues, the audience climbed on stage and took over singing from the singer. And how at another point, Davey did the same by himself and then forgot the words. And the jumping and the joy and the people I haven't seen in years who I thought wouldn't be happy to see me but were. And the keyboards sometimes! And all the girls in those bands! And the sloppy fuck you DIY feel of the whole thing. And the sheer force of the volume. It's one of my favourite highs, ever.

It was awful at the St Barnabas garage sale.

I got some good stuff, don't get me wrong. There was the owl mug for Safety Cat, the blue duffel for Shelley. Also something I have taken to calling the Temperature Compensator (emphasis on the second syllable). But I had a big bag on me, and so did everyone else, and it was hot, and people kept banging into me and/or blocking my way when really all I wanted was to get my owl mug and Get. Out.

Loaded down with more glassware than anyone with a cupboard full of unused glassware had any right to have on her, I headed home. James Street though, was a treasure trove of more junk.

Being grumpy and sweaty and already loaded down, I mostly just scanned. Bought a couple jars, admired a kettle, chatted a bit about an overpriced typewriter, scan: nothing, scan: nothing, scan-

My face.

The sight jerked me to a stop, so fast my bags kept going and the glasses rattled.

It was a mounted copy of the Capital Xtra cover I was on so many moons ago. And unless there are hordes of people out there laminating my face, there are only two of them extant. One of them is on Shelley's desk at work. The other.

There it was, on the window sill of this woman's house. This woman, who has a lot of garage sales, and has some really great stuff, and some really shitty stuff, some of it highly overpriced, some of it crazy cheap. She's nuts, always talking really loud to people and oversharing, with a warbly voice honed from years of needless worrying.

I walked across the yard and put my bags down. I stared at myself. I stared back.

Oh, I hoped I was wrong. Maybe there were hordes of people out there laminating my face.

The woman came out of the house.

"Where did you get this?" I aksed her. Now, I expected that she would look at me, and look at the poster and get what was going on. No dice.

"Oh, I manage some apartments, and one of the tenants just moved out. I took what he left behind."

"Was that at [redacted]? Top floor?"

She looked suprised.

"Yes! Wait. How did you..."

"That," I pointed, "is me. It was at my ex-boyfriend's house."

There were four of five other people standing around. Though none of them were looking, the cringe worked its way in a wave through them.

"Well! Really! That's you! No. Is it?"

I grabbed the poster and held it up under my face.

"Oh! It is!"

"Can I have it?" I asked her. And I meant that, literally.

"Well," she said. "How about a dollar? Will you give me a dollar for it?"

A dollar? For my own face? That she had scavenged from an apartment where it had been forgotten? She must be-

The look o her face said otherwise. She was entirely not kidding.

At that moment the only thing I could think of worse than paying 1 dollar for my face was arguing about how much my face was worth. And so I fished in my wallet for a loonie, dropped it in her hand.

She accepted gracefully.

"You know, you put some things out and you think, 'There's no way!' I put that out this morning and thought I'd never sell it. But here you are!"

Yes, indeed. There I was. Holding a picture of myself on some crazy lady's front lawn, remembering acutely how much it hurts to have your heart rolled flat.

The unofficial theme of last night's Certain Sort was cleavage.

As themes go, I have to say, it's one of my favourites.

Though I instigated it, I had no intention of participating. I had shoes to wear, people, hot high-heeled hot pink sexy hot foot-flattering shoes. And the clothes I had to go with them were not cleavage clothes.

"Whaddaya mean you're not wearing cleavage?" Shelley asked when she called for a fashion consult. "It was your suggestion!"

"But my shoes!" I said. "I'll be all leg, does that count?"

"Oh, well then."

The second unofficial theme was Holy Fuck, It's Spring.

Blood was running quick, I'd have to say. As one of the organizers, I was driving our DJ, CPI home, so I was sober the whole night, watching the running as it whirled faster and faster as the evening progressed.

Just the feeling, no fireworks, a slow start, no one big rush of people, the room filling steadily. Relaxed standing, some drinking, some dancing and the energy, getting bigger and looser and more elastic.

Maybe it was the porn we were screening? Maybe we were just all frantically shedding our winter skin.

This has been a very full week. I've had something fun planned for every night. Last night, as Jennifer so nicely described, was the Found reading at Raw Sugar.

Though if you have the choice of sitting on an organ bench to watch an hour plus long reading, I suggest you don't. At the Moon Room for a post-reading drink, it took D.Jack (aka the Guybrarian) and I several minutes to describe the many almost-back-saving coping strategies we'd developed.

I've only been to the Moon Room twice now, but it's a great little spot. Small, cozy, good beer, good wine, good food, lovely wait staff. A very good place for a date, if you're in the market for one of those.

Though I think it may be Little Italy's Manx, so if you don't want to have a very awkward internal moment of "Should we sit with our friends? Or should we tell them we're on a date? Or wait, is it a date? I mean, I think it's a date, I shaved my legs, but I dunno, maybe he doesn't think it's a date. Though he did Facebook flirt with me. No, it must be a date. It would be really rude to say no? And then how weird would it be to be sitting like, one table ov- Christ, Butcher. Shut it." magnified into an even more awkward external moment when all you can say in answer to the question is "Don't make me answer that question," because your brain is giving you not no answers to the question but both.

Don't say I didn't warn you. About something. I think.

Tomorrow night is Rock and Roll Friday with Jennifer and Megan: New Hair Edition. I totally copied J. and booked a hair appointment for just a few hours after hers, so we'll both be perfectly styled with radically new heads. We don't really know much about the bands, except that I think we might both like the last one, and one of the other ones I think I might be able to tolerate and I think she will hate, but ach. If that's the case, we'll go powder our noses and compliment our hairdresser behind her back.