A World Away

I have been one bad, bad, BAD blogger of late and instead have been devoting all my waking hours to deciphering convoluted readings from my political science course packs or trying to make sense of the Millennium Development Goal tracking websites (both enterprises are futile I do not recommend attempting either). So I apologize that I allowed such silly diversions to distract me from my beloved blog. I mean, it's just school right? Right.

And wrong. This semester I'm getting to enjoy something I like to call "school+" like school on steroids.

One of my professors this semester is the somewhat famous Stephen Lewis. He runs the ... wait for it, Stephen Lewis Foundation in Africa that tries to combat the spread of HIV and provide services to those infected and the orphans that AIDS has left behind. He was Canada's envoy to the UN for a while, he sat in the provincial legislature in Ontario etc etc etc. All in all he's a well-informed, international humanitarian BADASS!

This past Monday Mr. Lewis was not present at the beginning of lecture. Why was this you may wonder. Is Stephen in a manicure appointment? Hungover? (no wait, that's my excuse) Watching back episodes of Jersey Shore?

Oh no, these are human type excuses. Super people, like Stephen Lewis, have super human excuses for missing things. In this case Stephen Lewis was flying back to Canada from the Democratic Republic of the Congo where he was present at the opening celebrations for the 'City of Joy' a housing community for survivors of the vicious rape campaign that has been waged in the DRC for a number of years. This is of course what I did with my weekend too, I just took an earlier flight.

Lewis shows up about twenty minutes late. He comes straight from the airport with cumbersome wheeled luggage in tow as evidence. He has been travelling for the last 30 hours plus but didn't go home to nap he came to class and when he stepped up to the podium he didn't miss a beat.

This new city of Joy has been built next to something called the Pansy Hospital, this is home to the only doctor in DRC capable of repairing the horrific damage done by the brutally violent rapes committed in the ongoing civil conflict. Lewis told us about women having entire clips of ammunition fired into their vaginas. And another woman whose brother was killed in front of her after he refused to have sex with her, her three children were killed also and she was gang raped. It's almost impossible to put the horror into words, it's even hard to write about them now.

But the opening of the city of Joy was anything but sorrowful. There was singing, dancing, a performance of the Vagina Monologues in French. The opening of the city of Joy was joyful.

And sitting in this giant lecture hall in the belching urban core of downtown Toronto I am lucky enough to get the tiniest taste of that joy. It makes you realize we're not just lucky here in Canada, we're STUPID LUCKY!

Those assignments that are due next week? Important but not life threatening. Stressing about how my ass looks in my jeans when they're fresh out of the dryer? Understandable but really quite silly. The Canadian passport that sits in a basket on my desk? Absolutely friggin' priceless. Having a charming-maverick-humanitarian-badass as a professor? One of the greatest gifts I can imagine.

On a lighter note the view below is from the rooftop lounge at the Thompson Hotel. I was enjoying a couple of beverages in their downstairs lounge with some hot lady friends of mine a couple of weeks ago. We were ready to move on to another spot so we asked the desk people if they could recommend a nice martini/wine bar nearby.

"Is it just the three of you?" She asked, trying to suss out if there were any masculine clingers using us a bait to gain entree.

"Yes."

She had a couple of words with the steroid-inflated goon wearing an earpiece who was guarding the elevators with his equally goon-ish partner and - whisk! - there we are strutting around a dead-sexy low-lit lounge with this spectacular view of the city.

Sometimes it's nice to be VIP, even if it's only for one night.

Wiki-what-the-f*ck

The year still feels freshly minted in these first few weeks of January and in the spirit of confession, turning over new leaves etc. I am going to reveal something that, once I thought about it, I was somewhat ashamed of. Despite being a curious person and the fact that I'm studying JOURNALISM of all things, I have never visited the Wikileaks website. Until yesterday that is.

Of course I've been getting the highlight reel on the six o'clock news like the rest of the world and I would smirk in righteous satisfaction at all the "diplomatic embarrassment" these leaked cables and reports caused in the hushed hallways of power. But for some reason (and please don't ask me why) I was content to allow the news to filter and emphasize whatever aspects of this phenomena it decided to cover in its broadcasts or print on its pages.

In Canada it seemed the majority of the media scrutiny levelled at the Wikileak cables was focused on the mild trash-talking Canada received from American diplomats. Apparently we're "insecure" or something (insert sarcasm here). And if it wasn't our fleeting national embarrassment at the realization that the global community doesn't consider us a superpower *gasp* the media focus was on the allegations of sexual misconduct facing Julian Assange in Sweden. Precious little else made the news that I saw.

However after visiting the Wikileaks website I realized what has American DOD lawyers scrambling to find a loophole to lasso Assange with so they can drag him off to Gitmo and throw away the key.

Linked on the Wikileaks homepage is the video 'Collateral Murder' that was originally posted in April 2010. At the time of its release I was probably sweating through an iyengar yoga class somewhere in northern India. If this video made waves when it was released to the public it certainly didn't cause a ripple in South Asia. If this was splattered all over the front pages and was being blared from banks of TVs on every street corner please correct my ignorance.

But I was absolutely shocked that I'd never heard this revealing video referenced in any paper or newscast in the months since.

I watched the shortened version of the video with nothing short of horror.

The video shows two Apache gunships firing on a group of Iraqis in a Baghdadi suburb. It's true some of them look like they could be carrying guns but they're not shooting anyone or acting suspiciously, they in fact, appear to be simply hanging out. The Apaches open fire on the group and huge clouds of dust immediately obscure the scene from view. When it clears the devastation is total, even with the grainy quality of the film the blood splatters on the pavement are clearly visible.

One of the Apache gunners spots the sole surviving Iraqi attempting to crawl away. The man's progress is painfully slow and it is clear that he has been severely wounded.

Minutes later a van pulls up and several men attempt to move the wounded man inside. The gunners, pilots and ground command explode in a frenzy of chatter. "They are trying to retrieve the weapons!" they shout back and forth though no one on the ground takes a step towards the corpses scattered in the street several metres away.

The rescuers succeed in getting the wounded man into the vehicle but as they attempt to drive away the gunners receive authorization to fire. Dust engulfs the van and it crashes into a wall.

When ground troops arrive they discover that there are two children in the van, both wounded and one near death. The soldier who discovers them requests they be evacuated to a U.S. military hospital, shortly after his request is turned down. The children are to be taken to a nearby Iraqi hospital where the quality of care is sure to be lower.

Despite that it is heart-wrenching to watch a clearly wounded man and his rescuers be mowed down by heavy fire from above these events would probably have been forgotten. And they were forgotten.

Until Reuters started asking what had happened to their cameramen. It turns out that two of the men in that apparently menacing group of Iraqis were journalists and were carrying not guns, but cameras.

The wounded man inching his way along the pavement after the initial attack was Saeed Chamagh a Reuters photographer. His Reuters colleague, Namir Noor-Eldeen, was killed in the initial assault. As ground troops arrived on scene to secure the area one of their Humvees drove over Namir's body as it lay in the dust.

The internal U.S. military report on the incident named all the Iraqis killed as insurgents.

Now I'm not suggesting that Wikileaks is perfect, nothing is. They editorialize and their bias is very clear. But if you strip away the commentary and look at the hard images you're left with a chilling portrait of a war. The war in Iraq was founded on Colin Powell's deceptive report to the U.N. about the presence of WMDs and on fabricated ties between the Iraq and al-Qaeda. It begs the question, where does the deception end? And with unprovoked acts of violence such as the one depicted in 'Collateral Murder,' will the paranoid imaginings of the U.S. Department of Defence become a tragic self-fulfilling prophecy?

The release of the 'Collateral Murder' video changes nothing in the grand scheme of things but I would rather know than not know the truth, no matter how ugly and confusing it turns out to be.



On a lighter note, due to my abject poverty I've encountered another one of life's magical firsts; my first time visiting a food bank, yay! The university runs a community food room and I've included a picture of the haul I'm allowed to take home on a weekly basis. Due to the over-representation of soup and soup-like products in the food bank my salt intake (and no doubt my blood pressure) has gone through the roof. And since canned/packaged goods tend to be somewhat lacking in flavour it forces you to get a bit creative. Below is my version of egg-drop Mr. Noodles soup with peas. Sodium-licious!

My not so Masterful Cleanse

When I look back at 2010 I feel like the year tossed me around like a rag doll. The highs were high, but the lows were crushingly low. So to start the new year I've decided to do something I swore I never would. Something that I used to mock people for because it's so masochistic and unnatural ... I'M GOING ON A CLEANSE.

And not just any cleanse, the Master Cleanse! *ooooohhh* *aaaaaaaahhhh*

So the way this breaks down is that for 10 days, essentially, you don't eat. Every morning (or when I wake up) I mix a teaspoon of sea salt into a litre of hot water and drink her down. Over the course of the day I am allowed to drink a "lemonade" made of fresh squeezed lemon juice, organic maple syrup and cayenne pepper. And as a special treat before bed, organic peppermint tea.

I know that you're all salivating like junkyard dogs as you read my sumptuous menu for the next ten days. And I'm with you, this whole thing is absolutely absurd. I love food, I love the way it tastes, the texture, the preparation, hell, I even love grocery shopping.

So why am I doing this? After all the drama of the past year I want to put my best foot forward into this one. Discipline and patience have never been my strong suits but who is to say they cannot be learned; that we can't age like wine, that is become deeper and more complex.

So here we go!

DAY 1

Didn't really feel hungry all day like I expected to, though that might have something to do with the big family dinner the night before (and oh I hit that cheese tray hard!) and the enormous salad I scarfed down at 10 p.m. in a last minute sprint to empty my fridge. All my relatives winced when I told them about the salt water part but it's actually not that bad. If I close my eyes it almost tastes like bullion.

The "lemonade" however is almost cloyingly sweet and I had to chase it down with equal amounts of water. After drinking two litres of the stuff, it's just gross. I also put double the amount of cayenne in my tea today ... whoops! It gave me a bit of a kick that's for sure

I felt a bit headachy all day but otherwise not bad, but then again it's only day one.


DAY 2

Slept terribly with horrible vivid dreams of being robbed by junkies. In my dream I wander around with my empty wallet in my hand repeating "this can't be happening." Then I'm in an open cockpit helicopter trying to steer it through electrical wires and tree branches as it skims over a road crawling with traffic. There I am hauling on a joystick for dear life when I realize that someone else is steering. After I wake I still have the slight headache of the night before.

All the Master Cleanse websites promise that I will be "bursting with energy I never knew I had" after I complete my stint of 10 days without solid food. But the cleanse itself creates an almost paralytic lethargy.

I was feeling alright today until I walked to the library to grab some movies (when you're poor, you do what you have to). And even though it's only a few blocks I was absolutely exhausted when I returned home. I haven't gone to bed at 9:30 since I was in grade school.


DAY 3

Again with the bad dreams, this time it was a work nightmare. Anyone who has worked in food service knows that serving nightmares are highly traumatic. There was so much yelling, chaos, people coming and going without paying, no sections, no manager and then I forgot someone's pizza order!!! Bah, horrible. I keep sleeping longer and longer into the afternoon as well, not good since I have to get back on a "normal" schedule next week when classes restart.

I spent the day puttering around the house but since I've been sitting so much in the last three days (due to lack of energy) my lower back has begun to ache. With determination clenched between my teeth I managed to finally tackle the dishes which have been sitting, stacked, on my counter for four days waiting to be done.

Towards the late afternoon my blood sugar started to dip so I poured myself a pint glass of the Master Cleanse "lemonade." The liquid was so sweet that my tongue felt like it had been stung and I could feel that a fuzzy coating of sugar had coated my teeth.

Now I don't have a sweet tooth to start with. If I'm having an expensive, fancy-dancy meal out on the town (on someone else's dime obviously) when dessert rolls around I will always forgo the tiramisu and port - I'm a cheese plate and whiskey kind of girl.

The idea of drinking nothing but this stupidly sweet nectar for the next week was too much. And waking up every morning feeling like a tubercular invalid when really I'm in the prime of my life wasn't worth it. For what? To lose a few pounds and flush out the toxins from my already healthy and vegetarian diet? I don't THINK SO!

So I poured the rest of my tea down the drain and took myself out to a movie - WITH POPCORN. And as the glorious joyful feeling of being alive returned to me it became clear to me that life is punishing enough without creating false obstacles and hardship for myself. And anything which unnecessarily takes away my joie de vivre for a single day isn't worth it.

In the words of the Beatles; "Life I love you, all is groovy."

Cheers to a beautiful New Year!

If Cuba were a Feeling

The first thing that struck me as the plane descended through the fluffy whipped-cream clouds was the barrenness of the country below. Most of the land has been cleared for agriculture but lies fallow spreading out in acre after acre of monotonous grassland. Driving into Havana for the first time the buildings and streets are eerily empty. There are people, of course, but everything feels sparse. It's vaguely reminiscent of one of those zombie apocalypse movies where the protagonist wakes up out of a coma to find a shell of a world, with buildings and infrastructure, but no people. We pass a large stone structure built in a classical style with corinthian columns flanking the grand entrance, 'Hospital Central' is etched above the door. But as we drive by I see that the windows have no glass, they are dark lidless eyes into emptiness.




In the heart of the old city there are more Cubans, drawn by the scent of tourist dollars. Everywhere you turn is a salsa, rhumba or folk band serenading you (whether you will it or not) and passing around the hat. There is all kind of ridiculous Che Guevara paraphernalia for sale, wood carvings of sensuous female figures, maracas and poorly made fridge magnets. Shopkeepers half-heartedly call you to look at their wares as they sit in their door-frames, hardly stirring.

During all my time there I couldn't shake the feeling that there was an underlying sadness, or resignation, permeating the country. The small bursts of vibrancy that I saw were all staged for the benefit of the tourists, "LOOK! Look at our cheerful people, so full of life. They live for music and dancing! And they are so, SO happy you see YOU!!!"

The town of Remedios offered, what I felt, was a genuine look into the true nature of Cuba. The town is tiny with almost no tourist infrastructure and is off the well-worn path trod by the all-inclusive resort crowd. Every December 24th they have the festival of las Parrandas, the town divides into competing neighbourhoods who each build their own float over the course of the year and on the appointed day their efforts are set up in the central plaza. At night they will be lit up with hundreds of coloured lights and the barrios will battle by shooting off hundreds of firecrackers.



Naturally there were a few tourists there but this was a distinctly Cuban affair. And it bore no resemblance to the happy-go-lucky routine portrayed by those living off the scraps from the tourist table in Old Havana. There were no "authentically dressed" wandering bands of musicians, there were no women clad in the all white garb of Santaria offering to tell your fortune. The street vendors at las Parrandas fell into three categories; meat-on-a-bun (or plate), booze and assortments of trinkets that are hardly novel to any North American, things like hair elastics and cheap plastic toys.

I think it's safe to say that on festival days we all celebrate that which we cherish or desire most. As I live only blocks away from Toronto's Eaton Centre I feel confident saying that Canadian Christmas is an elevated celebration of "stuff." It's our culture. However in Cuba there is not the option to buy bushels of unnecessary gifts and an overabundance of cookies and/or chocolate.

As I sat smoking a cigarillo on a bench in Remedios' central plaza I watched the people around me. Families, groups of friends and overly amorous young couples talked and laughed. Almost everyone I saw was well on their way to getting completely and utterly WASTED! Now I know New Years in North America isn't any different but at las Parrandas there wasn't that bacchanalian rowdiness that characterizes our drinking holidays (St. Paddy's anyone?) it felt more ... serious. Like everyone was on a mission. If someone didn't have a double tall can of Bucanero Fuerte beer in their hands it was likely because there was a 26er of Havana Club hiding by their feet. Yes, yes, everyone was having a good time but there was this strange drive underlying it all, this need to for one day (via alcohol) forget.

The morning after las Parrandas I walked to the main plaza again to find a taxi. The side streets leading to the square were awash in human shit. Evidence that late into the night inhibition flew the coup.

I don't mean to sound down on Cuba. The generosity of spirit and voluntary kindness of some of those I met was overwhelming. Coming back from the beach on Christmas day my taxi driver wordlessly pulls over at the side of the road. He returns with a bulging bag of oranges and with a shy smile he offered me one.

Cuban art explodes with emotion and dynamism that is sorely absent on the streets of its cities and towns.

Cuba feels like a country that, many years ago, bravely toppled their tyrannical government and then heroically stood up to a nation that could have crushed it with a militaristic flick of the wrist. It is a country that now identifies itself so strongly with those acts and that time that evolution as a society has been impossible.

Over breakfast one morning, Damayi, the hostess of my casa in Old Havana spoke of how there is no opportunity for the young people, no motivation. She pursed her lips slightly as she spoke about her own son and that he moved to Mexico to make a better life. In her entire apartment there is only one picture, it's of her son, and as I scarfed down my morning eggs she brought the picture to the table for me to admire.

On the one hand I didn't see a single advertisement the entire time I was in Cuba, not one. But on the other hand, I also didn't see a single internet cafe, or even a computer for that matter that wasn't running on DOS (for those who remember what that is). It's true that Cuba is free from corporate meddling but how is that price being paid?

I found Cuba to be a country of beautiful, idealistic, sadness. The revolution served a great purpose but a purpose that is no longer there.

Underwhelming Gastronomic Adventures in Cuba

If you ask anyone who's ever been to Cuba what they remember most about their trip the answers will usually fall into the same three categories; the music, the beaches and the architecture/old cars. But no one, NO ONE, ever says "oh, you know, I had the most AMAZING plate of rice and beans. I mean, what a great way to get your complete protein!" Yes everyone loves the rum and the cigars but why is every other consumable in Cuba so mediocre? If you can bear to be cynically honest with yourself you notice that most middle-aged Cubans are quite plump. Not hyper-obese, not "I ride my Rascal down the middle of the road to the Walmart to buy 4 litre tubs of ice cream" fat, but people of a certain age are ... THICK! So obviously people are eating something and it must taste okay, otherwise Cuba's number one export would be supermodels and not cohibas (though both provide a pleasant oral experience, I'm sure).

So.

Despite my vegetarian disability working against me I set out to discover what it is Cubans eat, and eat so plentifully.

After an exhausting afternoon of queueing up at immigration, security scans, baggage check, customs and the currency exchange by the time my bag was deposited at the casa particular (Cubans rent out rooms to tourists as a black market method of making a buck) I was mother friggin' STARVING! Thank god only 200 feet away, located in a pleasant cobbled plaza, is Havana's only brew pub. After explaining to the waiter my disability he offered to 'do what he could' and I was tired enough to leave it at that. Before dinner arrived I had already sucked back a frothy mug of their absolutely delicious amber ale, the right balance of bitterness and body with a delicate lashing of sweetness on the back of the palate. Dinner, by comparison, was a horrible disappointment. The rice and stewed vegetables with a side of sliced raw cabbage bespoke of the most depressing institutional fare, the kind made famous in the workhouses and orphanages of Dickensian England. Thank god the precious and well crafted brew was there to fill the hunger gap, but Cuba and I were off to a bad start.

The next day delivered below my already lowered expectations. You know you're in a country that truly doesn't understand vegetarianism when you are forced to eat the exact same meal for both lunch and dinner because of the simple fact that there's NOTHING ELSE YOU CAN EAT! Of course there's always salad! This is a picture of my dinner at the extremely expensive (for Cuba) Tropicana nightclub which has been in operation since 1939 back when Cuba was a tropical version of Las Vegas. This storied institution had only one item on their menu I could eat, a cheese sandwich. Granted there is a lot of cheese there, enough to put a bull elephant into a fat coma. And if you're wondering what that delightful red condiment is which lines the lower edge of my top bun, it is ketchup. Yes, a cheese and ketchup sandwich. Just like the one I'd eaten for lunch at another tourist-death-trap of a restaurant. Though liberal doses of rum negated my despondency over the lack of victual variety I held out little hope for the days to come.

Day three in Cuba dawned with a warm and sultry greeting, sunshine dusted the cobblestones with gold and children screamed in their raffish way in the park across from the casa. A long and peaceful walk along the Malecon, or seawall, brought me to another of Cuba's landmarks from the good old, bad old days when gangsters and rich Americans used Cuba as their off-shore grotto for bad behaviour; la Hotel Nacional de Cuba. Absolutely everyone has stayed here from Al Capone and Frank Sinatra to Benicio del Toro and Steven Spielberg, even Jean Chretien stayed here (that wily frenchman!). The beautiful old building is a testament to "how things used to be made" and the lobby spanks of the glamourous days when art deco ruled supreme. The hotel sits on a small promontory overlooking the sea. What with the luxurious surroundings, the vitamin-D giving sunlight and the pleasant salty breeze, it seemed like a good place to have lunch. Of course I ate salad (ensalada de estacion, they call it) and rice and beans washed down with a crisp Cuban lager. It may have been the location or the framed photo of Will Smith which gazed on me as I ate, or it could have been the litre of rendered pork fat the beans were cooked in, but these were the best goddamn rice and beans I've ever tasted. So again, little in the way of surprises, but the execution was perfection.

Most of the best meals I had while in Cuba were the massive breakfasts prepared by the senora of the casa, Damayi.

The great thing about these epic meals was that aside from the standard bread and egg component you get to chow down on a massive plate of salad and then an equally massive plate of fruit. You feel like such a glutton because of the sheer volume of food but it's all ultra healthy so NO GUILT! As I worked through these morning feasts Damayi would stand at the stove making pot after pot of sweet strong Cuban coffee and gossiping about the ongoing drama of her extended family.

In Santa Clara I stayed at another casa particular, an old colonial building in the centre of the town with windows onto the adjacent Parqeo Vidal.

This feast was prepared by the wife and mother of our host, Miguel, who hovered constantly at my elbow wearing one of his many fedoras and nagging me to recommend him to my friends in Canada. The bean soup had been slow simmered with fatty pieces of pork for many hours which made the broth hearty with a great depth of flavour.

The plantain were perfectly fried with a crispy outer shell and a creamy centre. More eggs, of course, and rice with salad. But everything was so lovingly prepared that it was truly fabulous.

This sight truly tempted my vegetarian convictions. The caramel coloured skin of a well roasted pig sets off some kind of primal device in my brain, I begin to salivate and clench my toes, my pupils dilate and an overwhelming desire for pork floods my being. All over the tiny town of Remedios there are street vendors all selling slabs of whole roast pig on white buns. As a sidebar, Cubans almost exclusively eat their bread in bun form, it is almost impossible to find sliced bread.

These vendors are set up to cater to the crowds who attend the annual festival of las Parrandas. The entire population of Remedios and the surrounding area appear to have three goals on the day of las Parrandas; blow shit up, eat lots of pork-on-a-bun and get stupid, stumbling, blindingly drunk on rum. At around noon I saw dozens of people swanning around the main plaza with nearly empty 26ers of rum in their hands. And why not? It's Christmas.

Back in Havana I made a pilgrimage to the bar El Floridita, where the world's first daiquiri was allegedly made. Ernest Hemingway spent so much time here that there is a bronze statue of him in the corner, leaning against the bar. The room was decorated in plush red velvet drapes ornamented with oversized candy canes. A plate of salty plantain chips appeared on the table almost immediately, the drinks were strong and tuxedoed waiters moved with professional efficiency. This is a bar where it would be very easy to get comfortable a la Hemingway who allegedly once drank 13 double daiquiris in one sitting. But at 6 convertible pesos per daiquiri maybe it's good not to get TOO comfortable.

Cuba certainly was no culinary wonderland but what it lacked on the plate it made up for it in so many other ways; the warmth of its people, the music which emanated from every home and plaza and the ethereal otherworldliness of place stuck in time and an ideal which are fading away before my eyes.

So it's with an authentic daiquiri in my hand and a Cuban cigarillo between my lips that I bid adios to Cuba. Mucho gusto!

Battle Royale

If love is a battlefield, then my life is love-ly.

This week I feel besieged from all sides, nothing can be taken for granted and even life's more mundane elements are in revolt.

Anyone who has been reading my blog knows that there is a long-standing duel between my inflatable bed and me. When I moved here in the summer it seemed cheap and practical. And for a time it served me well, inching me closer to my ceiling fan during the sweaty nights of the humid Toronto summer. However, we are allies no more.



Granted I expected the queen-size air mattress to be punctured eventually. When the sad day arrived I used one of the patches that came with it and moved on. But our relationship was never the same. The bed became temperamental, she wouldn't stay inflated for as long as she used to and deep down I knew that we no longer trusted each other. Another puncture, another patch. Then, mid-exam week, the situation turned nuclear. TWO PUNCTURES! And one on the bed's fuzzy upper surface. At first I lamely tried to cover the hole with masking tape which would sometimes hold long enough for me to get to sleep. But more and more as I would settle down for my slumber the pressure of my body would cause air to whine most insolently through the perforation.



(By the way, your eyes are not deceiving you. That oblong gash in my sheets is exactly what it looks like. A vagina. No. I'm kidding. That's where my threadbare sheets have actually ripped down the middle. Am I classy or what?)

I went to Canadian Tire and bought more patches. But these never stood a chance. My bed hated me now and was determined to undermine my comfort (and strain my neck). In desperation I tried to remove the fuzz from the bed's vinyl surface with my razor. But my razor was too sharp and her skin too thin. I would apply a new patch every night, praying that it would hold, but to no avail. I must now reconcile myself to the fact that my bed doesn't want me anymore. This morning I pumped her up at 9 a.m. when the door buzzer woke me at noon I was lying flat on the floor.



It's over between us. And so tonight I'll try to fortify my yoga mat with some additional blankets to make a poor facsimile of the bed I used to know and love.

Winter weather has descended on Toronto so that every exposed area of skin becomes numb and feels like some kind of dead organism coating your body. I knew it was coming and I dislike it just as much as I thought I would.

Every day I walk over to the campus gym only 10 minutes away from my apartment. Unfortunately the Chuck Taylor knockoffs I bought at Payless Shoes do little to protect my feet from the elements. Which is absolutely shocking considering the shoes consist of "sturdy canvas" and a "full half inch of rubber sole." When I yank them off in the change room I usually have lost all circulation in the bottom of my feet. Because there's no blood making it through my capillaries my skin becomes yellow, character-on-the-Simpson's yellow. It takes a good fifteen minutes of grunting exertions on the elliptical trainer for my extremities to tingle back to life.

When I'm done punishing my body I throw my winter wear on over top of my gym gear for the walk home. It seems silly to squeeze my sweaty ass back into my jeans for such a short walk.

On Monday I left the gym just as the early pre-solistice dusk was falling. Fine particles of snow blew into my eyes at a 45 degree angle and my cheeks stung like well-used pincushions. At last I was home. Now, just to put the key in the door and waltz into the heated loveliness of the foyer.



But my key stuck only a quarter of the way in. I tried again. I jiggled. I rammed. I cajoled. I took a deep breath. I jiggled again. Nothing. My key wouldn't slide into the lock. A warmly dressed couple stared at me through the foggy window of the adjacent poutine shop where they chewed their hot grease bomb with bovine placidity. My post-gym flush was beginning to fade and tendrils of icy wind wound themselves up my legs and caressed my upper thighs.

FUCK!!!

I dug around in the bottom of my gym bag for my cell phone and called my landlord. She called one of my neighbours who came to let me in. Though I'd probably been outside the building for only 15 minutes or so it felt like ages. The temperature that day, with the wind chill, was -23 degrees.

It turns out some water had gotten into the lock and frozen solid. The next morning my landlord shows up at my apartment door with a mini can of WD40.

"I already put so much in there the door is working now, but don't leave the apartment without it!"

After the front-door-not-opening debacle I had a hot HOT shower and settled down for a quiet evening. But a strange gnawing sound began to issue from the kitchen.



I had seen a mouse once before so I wasn't exactly surprised. There are still plastic garbage bags full of packing peanuts littering my kitchen so assumed that Mr. Mouse was commandeering some material for building his nest. It's not that I'm afraid of mine per say but where there's mice, there's mouse shit. Mouse shit is bad business. Also where there are mice there are mouse teeth, mouse teeth can bite you. A mouse bite means a tetanus shot, a shot (of any kind) is bad business.

So I decided to go on the offensive. Walking loudly into the kitchen I gave the pile of syrofoam peanut bags a tentative kick with my slippered foot. Nothing. A more aggressive kick.

Then I almost feel over backwards. A morbidly obese mouse leapt out of my Ikea garbage can, clearing the rim with inches to spare, and skittered away out of sight.

After my heartbeat returned to normal I took out the garbage and stored the organic scraps from the preparation of my evening meal in a bag in the refrigerator. Subsequently Mr. Mouse has taken his business elsewhere.

The ongoing saga of the bed aside, I have been largely successful in rebuffing the attacks levelled at me by life during the past week. The WD40 never leaves my purse and I have a rotting bag of vegetable scraps in my fridge but I'd say that's a small price to pay for victory.

Look! My salad is Christmas colour coordinated.

No Rush

The last semester of my late return to higher learning is almost at an end. I've managed to survive living in the Bermuda triangle of grease (that being Pizza Hut, Ho Lee Chow and the downstairs poutine shop) without turning into a whale. Despite my rusty intellect which, until recently, was more attuned to eyeballing the correct amount of Crown Royal for 12 'King Kong' shots than to writing a critical compare/contrast essay on 'The Tempest,' I jumpstarted my brain function back to life. I was pleased to find that underneath the encrustation of rust there's still a blade with a bit of an edge on it.

When I think about the process of going back to school I feel deeply humbled.



I've learned how to make my own refried beans because those fancy canned ones are now too expensive for my meagre budget.

When my air mattress sprang multiple leaks I did my best to repair them with scotch tape, which worked very well for all of 20 minutes. So a couple of times a night I roll onto the floor to switch on the pump and reflate. Though the mornings seem colder when I wake up in a trough in the middle of my saggy bed, my ass touching the floor, and the mounds of my useless bed enclosing me like a fort.

I sit in class with people almost a decade younger than me and I marvel at their focus, their seriousness, their (for lack of a better word) 'adultish-ness.'

Visions of my 19-year-old self confront me when I look at them. I was dreadlocked, pierced, stoned (sometimes) and with a chip on my shoulder the size of a Buick, it's more like a teenage film cliche than who I used to be.



But the humility and admiration I have for my classmates has a vein of reservation running through it. In our print media classroom we all sit in front of our own massive flatscreen monitor. People also bring in their own laptops, cameras and smart phones. So many devices designed for something called "communication" which mostly serve to draw our eyes away from the faces directly in front of us and into the online, social media, blog, vlog universe. Which is somehow more valid because those cute witty updates and comments we make are enshrined for all to see. We can preen and revisit our cleverness, link it on our twitter feed, and make sure everyone knows how damn witty we are.

It is such an honour to sit in a class and talk about ethics and story. Now I'm no saint and probably check my facebook account more than a normal person should. However, after serving the drunk and ungrateful masses for the past five years something about the whole situation makes me want to scream.

"These are the best goddamn days of your life people!!!! Let's go to the pub. Let's talk. Let's be YOUNG!"

Today, outside my window, snow is lightly falling. Each flake is doing a dizzy, eccentric dance as it resists its journey to earth.

I relate. Once you hit the ground life is stationary, so why not prolong the dance as much as possible? Why ever stop dancing?