Moot Point

I don’t usually do two posts a day, but can I just say: Thanks, TTC workers! I really wanted an extra day off work. I don’t like money. I mean, sure, I could have walked. It would have taken two hours, on Bloor St, in 30-degree weather, but good thing I had that alternate transportation. Oh wait. I didn’t! That monthly pass I bought? Totally apparently not a guarantee of transit. Sigh.

It just seems like such a dumb move for the workers to pull. I’m reasonably sympathetic to the whole night-shift scheduling issue, but hey, shutting down transit with NO WARNING on a smog day which hit a HEAT RECORD? Not really the way to make the public more pro-union.

It’s Memorial Day in the US, which is where we do most of the business, so I just called in to make sure someone was there and begged off. Alex (stuck at my house) and I got iced coffees and hung out in Dufferin Grove before it got too hot.

I had a pretty wicked weekend. For people like Alex and me (ie, those who wander around the city looking at stuff), Doors Open Toronto is like Christmas. Saturday, we wanted to go to the Cadbury chocolate factory on Gladstone, but it was lined up for like, two blocks, so we just went to St. Anne’s across the street, which was gorgeous. It’s a Byzantine-style Anglican church, with murals done by Group of Seven members.

Then we walked along Dundas, bought some Vietnamese subs, and went to OCAD.

Next, the new bio building at U of T. The one with the indoor bamboo grove.

Oh yeah, and we saw a giant Falun Gong protest/parade, that involved a truck illustrating how Falun Gong members get their organs stolen. There were like, six women dressed in scrubs, holding prop syringes, with bloody arms, and then this guy standing at the end holding up some money. I was impressed.

(Edited: Alex pointed me to this great photo of the surgery living diorama thing.)

Also, with the escalators at the Mars Research place.

Sunday we did the Carlu, the Arts & Letters Club, Commerce Court, and the TD Centre, where they let you see the 54th floor boardroom, including a giant table that they can’t move and had to be lifted in in five pieces.

Highlights:

The Good News Train has been pulling into my station in a big way these days. In the last week or so I have:

• received my tax refund, which is possibly the biggest single amount of money I have ever deposited into the bank at one time
• bought the aforementioned adorable shoes — which were 10% off, because I happened to go to the store on John Fluevog’s birthday, and they gave me a cookie!
• gotten an email with my TA assignments for next year (!!)
• touched a MacBook, which I’m most likely going to buy soon
• gone to see Lady Vengeance
• eaten ice cream for breakfast — I made Alex get dressed and run down to the ice cream truck* that serendipitously was parked right in front of my house; he got to the sidewalk before he realized he didn’t know what size or kind of dip cone I wanted, so he shouted back up to me, who was sitting in my bathrobe at the window
• made strawberry pancakes for dinner

However, it’s not all roses. For one, it looks like Taylor (aka Michael McDonald II) is going to win American Idol. I shouldn’t care, but he makes me so irrationally mad. He’s clearly like, 40 years old in every way. And he “woo”s for himself.

Furthermore, I just heard like my neighbourhood rep theatre the Paradise is shutting down, along with the Royal and the others. This makes me sad, as I was hoping I could go there to hide from my sauna-like apartment this summer.

We’ll always have the night I went to see La Dolce Vita by myself and then walked home at midnight in the snow. That’s what the movies is all about.

*I should point out that ice cream trucks in Toronto are different from the ice cream trucks we had in Calgary. Back home, an “ice cream truck” was a refrigerated van full of ready-made ice cream bars and popsicles — most in kind of grotesque colours that I didn’t really dig even as a child. Last summer I realized that “ice cream trucks” in Toronto are basically mobile Dairy Queens — they have soft serve and a plethora of ice cream options, made to order. This resulted in me getting ice cream basically weekly, which resulted in me gaining weight, which is not helped by genius moves like eating pancakes for dinner.

Lately I seem to have a knack for being in the same place as local celebrities. A couple of weeks ago we saw Sarah Polley in the lobby of the Cumberland, last weekend it was not one but two of the regulars on Video on Trial chatting on a bench on Eglinton west (because, of course, they’re friends in real life), and don’t even get me started on Mark McKinney.

So I really wasn’t surprised when we had to wait for Ron Sexsmith to finish using the ATM in the the 7-11 by Clafouti — where we had gotten to the counter and realized we had no money — only to see him rush back to the laundromat.

Me: “…It’s just so weird to see him this week because he’s been getting so much press.”

Alex: “…It’s weird that he doesn’t have a washing machine.”

Me: “Didn’t his album come out this week? Shouldn’t he be promoting it? I mean, he’s a nationally known musician.”

Alex: “If I ever get national press, I hope I’ll have a washing machine in my house.”

Once we’d settled down to our sandwiches, Alex looked out the window and saw a familiar haircut. “Richard Crouse’s hair really does always look like that, doesn’t it?”

Last night I skipped the Idol final three to see a Bogart double bill at the theatre down the street: The Big Sleep and The Maltese Falcon. Alex hadn’t seen either, and I figured that if he’s going to live with me, he has to have seen some film noir basics.

Now, The Maltese Falcon is absolutely one of my favourite movies of all time. It’s one of the earliest noirs, and it was a career-maker for Bogart. Up until this, he’d pretty much always played heavies, but Falcon turned him into a leading man. But more than that, I love it. It’s so mean and pared-down. At the time, it was really raw for a studio movie — it seems quaint now, but Spade is so unlikeable and totally sexy at the same time. There’s really just not a sour note in the whole thing.

I’ve seen it many many times — chalk it up to the amount of time I spent skulking around watching old movies in high school (which is why I have so many opinions on Fred & Ginger) — and I’d obviously caught the gay subtext. It’s frankly close to text as subtext could be in 1941: the perfumed, accented, overdressed Peter Lorre as Joel Cairo (with the tiny gun) and to a lesser degree the oddness of the relationship between Sidney Greenstreet’s effete Gutman and his gunsel, who really doesn’t like having his big guns taken away by another man.

The thing, though, is that all these characters? Are the villains of the piece. Between that and the female lead, who can’t tell the truth to save her life and isn’t even a particularly good liar, it becomes the story of the big virile private eye beat putting one over on the pansies and the dame. Spade’s so confident he doesn’t even need to carry a gun. But then, you realize that no one really comes off very well (except the apparently asexual secretary Effie): Ward Bond’s police detective is a straight as an arrow, Sam’s partner Miles is kind of a slimeball, his widow was cheating on him anyway, and Spade, well, he changes the lettering on the door awful fast, you know? So what I’m saying, it’s not so much misogynist as it is misanthropic. (I mean, it is about asserting masculinity, but it’s not like masculinity is the force for good, it’s just…the least bad.)

The Big Sleep ages better, I think, mainly because Lauren Bacall’s character is actually a match for Bogart’s Marlowe. He’s so much more relaxed in it, even though he seems to have more at stake — because he’s playing a character who actually likes people.

On Thursday, I’m getting ready for work and I glance outside to make sure they haven’t picked up the recycling yet. I do some running around, gather my cell phone, iPod and subway book, then look out again to make sure it hasn’t come in the interim. That’s when I saw this:

It had a cherry picker. I love cherry pickers.

“I’m going to get to see something awesome up close,” I thought as I grabbed my camera. I hurried to get my coat and shoes — and recycling — to take downstairs. When I got outside, the truck was gone.

I looked up and down the street, but the big yellow truck was nowhere in sight.

Tonight I went to Labyrinth for $3.50 martinis for the first time in about 1,000 years. I had a drink called the “Slowly Screwed,” which I ordered entirely based on the name. It contained: vodka, Southern Comfort, sloe gin and orange juice. It tasted like magic.

On the “remember when I actually cared about my blog?” front, I added a sitemeter today, so I have something to obsessively check.

I have decided that I will buy shoes with a small percentage of my tax return and the rest will go responsibly into savings.

I’m loving the Laurelai.

Total perfect Sunday:

Hors D’Oeuvres:

Main Course:

Dessert:

We were planning on getting figs and trying to eat them, since we’d seen pints of them for sale in every street market a few days earlier, but apparently between Thursday and Sunday, all the figs disappeared. This was a disappointment, but we took it in stride.

Add a few dashes of Arrested Development Season 1 and a new Grey’s Anatomy.

Saturday we ran errands. The shoe-repair guy near my house basically told Alex his shoes suck and that he should just get different shoes. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone rejected by a somone selling a service before.

Our “getting our pants hemmed” — as we have to do with all pants, because we’re short — venture was much more successful, as was our “getting donairs” venture, not to mention our “checking out Type, that new bookstore on Queen” venture. (The latter resulted in my buying George and Rue, which is the debut novel of one of my English profs. So far (12 pages in) it’s good.)

I don’t normally breathlessly link video that everyone’s linking to, but: this is kind of amazing. Stephen Colbert at the White House Correspondants’ Dinner.

It’s awesome because it gets more and more awkward the more it goes on. He’s in top form. Colbert can be kind of one-note, because he’s mocking pundits and that’s his schtick, but oh man, that line about the photo ops? I wish it had cut to Bush more. I would have loved to have seen his face.

It’s just so weird that Stephen Colbert was speaking at the White House Correspondants’ Dinner to begin with though. I know The Daily Show’s been around for a while, but the reason it and Colbert are doing so well these days is that at least in part that the Bush administration has done such a fucking terrible job of everything and that the press seems so complacent about calling them on their shit. So not only is there a desperate desperate need for this kind of satire, but one of the best-known mockers of the media and the president is important enough that he gets invited to speak to a room full of media and the president. Like, if he has so much power and is the voice of so many people, why didn’t these people, I dunno, vote Democrat?

The USA is such a weird country.

Though I’m not typically a particularly optimistic person, things really have been lining up in the “glass half full” column lately. The forecast is rosy. Everything’s coming up Brenda. Mixed metaphors, etc.

For one, my tax refund is going to be somewhat heftier than anticipated. Now, I just get my dad to do my taxes for me, because, well, he’s an accountant, so convincing the government that they owe you money is like, his whole job*, so I can’t tell you why they want to give me money, but whatever, I’m not fighting the gift horse.

Basically what this means is my moving-to-Vancouver nest egg is going to be much bigger than I originally hoped, which is nice, because it means Alex and I aren’t going to be setting up house in actual abject poverty. The other reason I’m feeling financially upbeat, besides my realization that the cost of living in Vancouver is actually lower than in Toronto is that my credit card is getting close to being paid off.

Since I don’t have any school debt (besides to my parents, who thankfully haven’t started billing me for monthly interest yet) this basically means that after this month, whatever doesn’t go to rent and food and stuff will go straight into savings, which will pay for things like shipping and apartment deposits. (And a laptop. There’s no way I’m taking my noisy, hulking Frankenstein PC across the bloody country.)

In other, less dry news, I was the first person to buy the new Final Fantasy album at Soundscapes. They apparently put it on sale early; it’s apparently not supposed to be out yet, so I feel like I know a secret, like when The OC used to air here a couple of days before the American airing. And people still cared about The OC. I’ve listened to it a couple of times and I predictably like it, but I would be the world’s worst music critic so I can’t elaborate; if you liked Has A Good Home, it’s like that, only more so and with more instruments.

Also, it’s spring, my all-too-short favourite season. Everyone in Toronto complains about how we don’t have spring, but in Calgary we really didn’t have spring. At all. Like, it’s cold, it’s cold, it’s cold, oh wait, it’s summer. I have said this before, but it snowed in every month of the year in Calgary.** In the eighteen years I lived there. Toronto’s spring is short and sunny and bloomy; but there’s a definite line between spring and summer. That line is known around my house as “when it becomes totally unpleasant to do anything but sit near the fan and eat freezies and try not to sweat too hard.”

But the point I was trying to come to before I started bitching about the weather: This hasn’t been the most exciting of years — I’m working a dead-end (if decently-paying, flexibly-houred) job, I don’t have the most sparklingly active social life, I haven’t had the chance to travel at all, unless you count a family member’s wedding in Ottawa, which I don’t — but really, things are going okay. If you asked me five or even ten years ago where I wanted to be when I was 23, getting ready to go to grad school, living downtown in a city I love, and having a boyfriend who digs me enough to move across the country with me would sound pretty damn good.

That sounds really, like, lame and self-satisfied, especially since my life right now involves working as an office assistant and watching What Not To Wear, but I’m trying to accentuate the positive these days.

*Except that he’s actually a veep of some kind in the corporate world and I’m pretty sure he just uses Quicktax or something for the family’s personal taxes, but whatevs.

**I should clarify that it didn’t snow at least once per month in every year, but I can recall snowfalls occurring in every month at least one time in my life, generally more.