June 12, 2006

The Bad Art Group

This is my favorite:

Also a contender:

Kinda scary but heartwarming. Swimming towards you one distended belly-bulb at a time.

Join the flickr group and be at our next sparkle/ glitter/mutant orgy.

It's like socializing for people who genuinely preferred the arts and crafts table over the playground in kindergarten.

May 31, 2006

I had my first stained glass workshop last night and I think I may have found a new passion.

I forgot how relaxing and at home I feel making art in a common studio space. It's fucking fun people. It doesn't hurt that there's this really nice and eminently genuine french (from france) young lady instructor with the hands of a ninety-year-old gendarme to help me and to make fun of me when I ask for a band-aid.

"C'est le verre Miriam, tu va etre blesser tout le temps. Tu peut pas avoir une band-aid chaque fois!"

There are three other people in the class and we all listened to the french jazz radio station and learned to score and tear glass and then how to trace cartoons for the learners window we will be producing.

Tearing glass is really interesting. You first score the glass with a little wheeled cutter, then it' s not really like breaking the glass into two peices, the closest analogy is tearing. You grip the glass on either side of the score between your thumb and your curved index finger and then just pull out swiftly. At first I couldn't do it, because I wasn't putting the right pressure on the motion or something, so I could sweat and struggle and my glass stayed as solid as could be. Then suddenly by acident I pulled the right way (quickly and without much effort), and the glass broke along the score like it was made of spun suger. What I had forgotten about learning to use your body a certain way is that once you discover a way to do something, it becomes hardwired really quickly, it's not so cerebral as other types of learning.

Of course we are practising now with clear window glass which is very simple to tear and to score. Coloured glasses all have different tempers because they are a mix of minerals, and dyes and all that. So once I have moved up in the class I will probably become more frustrated.

All in all though, in comparison to my driving lessons the stained glass course was a complete success.

May 26, 2006

So I've long had this funny theory about Quebecois french and naming. Okay it's not a theory it's more like a running internal joke.

For example when I talk to Benoit and he says; "You could sell that on he-bay". I immediately picture a giant online marketplace for your cast-off husbands and lovers. Like online personals meets the free-market but for real.

Intending no disrespect to my francophone friends, who I am so incredbly jealous of anyways because most of you can speak both english and french without sounding like a total stupid idiot in your non-native language (Did I ever tell you about the time I told a co-worker that I had gone to get a monkey-test? Yeah I meant blood test. Sang, singe big difference.). Unless of course you are a total stupid idiot and then bilingualism isn't going to help much anyways.

Anyways, this is all rather beside the point. My point is that Lola and I met this curly haired ginger poodle today in the park and when the dogs' owner arrived, he was all like " Vien Shadow, vien ici." And I was like; "Dude, no offense your poodle is no more a 'Shadow' than my Lola is a 'Killer'."

But then I thought, maybe we name our dogs after our dream dogs. So this guys archtypal canine friend is a long lean herd dog from the anscestral plains, but since his wife actually went to the pet store, and came home with her archtypal dog (Who's real archtypal name is choufleur) we end up with Shadow the dog who looks like a friendly potscrubber.

Then again, if I hadn't given Lola her archtypal name, I'd be saying stuff like; "Hey Dorkus stop licking ants off the road and get over here."

April 3, 2006

I don't even feel like writing really I just want everyone in the loop. Lola is going blind. She tried to chase a garbage bag up a tree today. Or do what amounts to a chase for her now, since her two back legs seem to have given up the ghost. Oh yeah, and she has a bladder infection which may indicate something called Cushings disease.

The last time we spoke to the vet he actually sat down to talk to us. I am taking that as a bad sign.

I went to the bank to figure out why they had frozen all my bank accounts (it had to do with getting all my money from clients outside Quebec..) At some point during the conversation with Giselle Mangemesculottes the manager who refused to unfreeze even the Ontario cheques so I could pay for the dogs multiple blood tests and also eat, I believe I started to cry and then said in godawful french: "En fait mon chien est malade, j'ai trop sure mon carte de credit pour payer le veterinaire, en plus je peut pas acheter les nouriture! Qu'est ce que vous vont faire pour moi?"

I think the tears disarmed them and the manager left and came back and handed me three hundred dollars in cash, as if they were giving me an allowance. I told them I wasn't used to begging for my own money and biked up to the TD bank where an incredibly friendly investment counsellor named Nektarios gave me a cappucinno and agreed that the least they could of done was offer me a kleenex.

I almost wanted to date Nektarios. He laughed at all my jokes, made me feel safe and secure and had very nice hands. He also finally explained the mystery of GIC/mutual funds/ stocks and also your basic mortgage amount in about 15 minutes. I realize that this is all a ploy to get me to invest with TD, but hey, as Stevie Nicks would sing: " Tell me lies tell me sweet little lies... " Oh yeah did I mention he got me coffee.. I am such an easy touch.

At some point in our conversation, I distinctly remember saying "You are talking about people who feel like they have power over their money. I think I belong in the opposite group." He laughed really hard at that.

update

In "Everything is Illuminated" the Ukrainian tour guide Alex writes :

Mother is a humble woman. Very very humble. She toils at a small cafe one hour distance from our home. She presents food and drink to customers there, and says to me," I mount the autobus for an hour to work all day doing things I hate. You want to know why? It is for you, Alexi-stop-spleening-me! One day you will do things for me that you hate. That it what it means to be a family."

I would like to amend that quote to include. One day you will receive email forwards with pictures of puppies or boring knock-knock jokes which you hate, but you will read them anyways, that is what it means to be a family.

If my dad or my aunt read this I am totally getting disowned.

November 30, 2005

I was in the park yesterday with the dog after a strangely fulfilling day, not that I got anything done mind you, it just felt good all day, even the bad news felt good.

Anyways, who knows what that was about. But I was out in the falling dark with the crazy mutt and I noticed one of the houses facing the park had gone seasonal decoration crazy.

There were these spastic blinking lights on the staircase and an 8 foot tall inflatable santa bobbing his gas-filled head. It was all kind of demonic and disco, and not terribly festive at all. I think the arhymthmic fairy lights put me in a trance because I stood there staring for about 10 minutes.

I managed to break the spell and continued up the park where I ran into nancy, "Hey Nancy," I said "check out the house down the street - it's gone christmas light crazy!" Which is when I noticed that not less then 7 other houses facing the park had also decided that christmas spelled fairy light frenzy. It was madness and also competitive, which is weird. I don't personally view christmas as a season to "whup thy neighours ass at decorating" but then again, I am Jewish, what do I know.

My favorite dwelling on the park offered a turner-esque welter of lights in no specific form or pattern, an expressionist thing I think,a nd an aesthetic slap in the face to those kitcshy reindeer shaped light holders.

But my real favorite was a house I found on my very own street that had an oddly sexual cardboard santa pasted in the front window backed by a giant red disco blinking spotlight. This santa had his thumbs tucked saucily in his big black belt and was thrusting his pelvis forward with a naughty gleam in his little button eyes. ho ho ho.

September 16, 2005

That last phrase is in reference to something I misheard over dinner. Actually what Francois said was; "applying for a grant to go *fox-hunting* in australia, but the top forty playing at the restaurant was too loud and I didn't get it.

Score one for my incredible conversationals skills, I replied "what, a kangaroo?"

I took the dog for a walk in the rain - yuck. The darkside of dog ownership becomes more apparent every day.

Got the cat to come inside finally and she hid under the bathtub. then I decided to take shower, left the door open because if I go anywhere and the dog can't follow it turns into a whine-war, and I am always the loser.

Once I was in shower, dog discovers cat under tub and all hell breaks loose. Why the dog can't understand that the cat wishes she were dead is beyond me, the cat has certainly made it clear enough. I think I beaned the dog on the head with a loofah while yelling "get out get out !! go into my room you big dumb putz!!" The cat turned into a furry white ninja and went for the dogs eyes, while hissing; "may your idiot wagging tail freeze and drop off fiend." The dog just wagged it's tail and let love pour from her big brown eyes. It's really shocking how misunderstood her affection is by all of us here.

Dogs are either optimistic or completely stupid or both. Stanky (the cat) and I are neither optimistic, nor stupid.

I think actually that the dog is like a two year old version of me, witless affectionate, terribly needy and sneaky in that 2 year old way. She sleeps on my bed whenever I am not in my house, but not when I am.. so how do you punish that? Since she has no idea what I am talking about when I say "If you sleep on my bed again i shall garrot you. forsooth."

Her memory is about a minute long so unless I catch her on the bed pin her and do some weird fake alpha dog punishment thing this behaviour could last for years. Come to think of it, it has lasted for years.

The dog has no power - zilch. She can't even take care of her own bowels I have to take her out at least twice a day.

The cat however, is like me when I was an aloof teenager. She gets her way all the time, just because she doesn't give a shit. When the dog arrived, she left for three days, making me frantic with worry, and forcing me to leave random bowls of cat food all over the apartment building just in case she got hungry. Now I am trying to win her love back by acting all obseqious and gentle, like the parent of the angry teen who trys to get all chummy and buys their kid weed to keep them off the hard stuff.

bah.. the only one with no power here is me, how did this happen. I feel about 5% percent of what a single parent must feel, I don't know how they do it.

Oh yeah and I just got all sorts of work, and in the same moment my credit card statement arrived so if i am not around its because I am working off some serious summer debt.

**addendum***

Because my cat is like a ninja-saint. She has actually decided to enter the study where I am working and the dog is sleeping on the floor. She is sitting on the desk next to the moniter and I have put an offering of food in a bowl in front of her, and it looks - although it is porbably too early to tell - like we have acheived some positively harmonious entente. If the dog stays on the floor and the cat stays on the high places, and I keep working so we can all be kept in expensive cat- dog and people food, then weveryone is happy.

August 22, 2005

So I have a story I would like to tell before I get on with the business of trying to rescue my cranky desktop computer. I forgot its birthday. Deskie turned 3 (to me anyways) this week, and I didn't buy it a cake.

I was hanging with my semi-redundant, grief counsellor today. I only call her semi-redundant because I am no longer grieving in the same way, so we are going to have redefine the terms of my therapeutic process. But that's not germane to this story so whatever.

My grief therapist is a tiny little Jewish lady who looks like the moms my true-Jew friends had when I was growing up. This is in contrast to my own mother who had weird spiky black hair and started dressing like Elvira after a while.

My counsellor wears really nice patterned things and good shoes and always has a matched purse but the colours are very, sort of loud. Oh yeah and she smokes like a chimney and has a gravelly voice and calls me sweetpea. Which is funny because I consider myself more of a sweet-truck.

Got the picture? So we're sitting on a park bench having our appointment and I am eating a giant sandwich, and there's this music coming coming from a distance. Therapist says;

"Where's that coming from?"

"A house somewhere maybe? someone's playing music really loud with the doors open? I do that sometimes, when I clean the house."

"yeah, me too, only I do it in the country where no-one can hear me."

"mm.." eating sandwich, silent assertion, ah yes the country where no-one can hear you blasting the Neil Diamond.

"Actually you know what?"

"What? "

"My son left one of his mix cds in my car the other day, and it has this song on it. It's called something like; motherfuckin PIMP. It's disgusting, the lyrics are so filthy, but I fuckin love it...it's like; 'I drive a cadilac wear a perm and I'm a g/I'm a motherfuckin P-I-M-P.' It's crap, but it's like driving music, you know?"

"yeah totally." Do I know?! Do I know?... uh...You are a four foot tall Jewish grief counsellor who lives in Point st-Luc and has a closet fetish for gangsta rap. How could I not know...

Therapist hunkers down on the park bench and puts her hands out in the 'we cool' gesture, bobs her head just a tiny bit in a hip-hop rhythm;

"...You know, driving music. Except that I can't have anyone know that I am listening to it, so if I come to a stoplight with the windows down, I always point to the car next to me as if they're the ones with the problem.

Apparently we are both fans of 50 cent.

August 16, 2005

Oh yeah, and since I did say I was going to blog about it....

Maya took us to her incredibly bling-bling (but so understated and lovely) steakhouse for dinner last night as a good-bye thing. I had steak medallions Diane, which were dressd in a cognac/mushroom/shallot cream sauce..It was heavenly and I mean it, and it was the best thing that had hooves once upon a time that I have ever eaten.

And Mk told the best story of the night when she talked about her first boyfriend joey giamarco (?? right) in grade one, who used to play on the swings with her, and talk about how they were going to space together one day. I quote;

"We would draw these space pictures together and he would just scribble black on his piece of paper, and he would stick his tongue out the whole time he was scribbling like a maniac, and go "BRBRBRBTHHTBRBTH" and spit would fly out his mouth and he always had these chapped lips, and one day I kissed him, and then he never talked about going to space with me again..."

And Allison wouldn't let us order the Chilean Sea bass because it was listed as endangered on her wallet sized Fish Watch list.

(You can take a second to imagine us sitting in a five star restaurant drinking G&T's while Alison looks at a small folding list of endangered species with a picture of a fish on the front and the words FISH WATCH in big letters if you wish, the waiter is a friendly if bemused gentleman namaed Antoine.)

Changing the system, one endangered fish watch list at a time.

XOXOXOX to my filles sans fils, it's not going to be the same around here without you.

August 9, 2005

I was going to write a pithy little post about how my favorite art critic Matthew Collings seems to have hit a bit of a rough patch with his recent writing in Modern Painter...But it 's too hot to get all up in the face of someone who doesn't know I exist.

I will say very briefly, that his new decision to tell everyone that being post-history in art is nihilistic garbage and we should all harken back to out good old modern roots and our "history" is weirdly reactionary and old-fogey-ish. Also his decision to write like a lazy person at a tele-type machine isn't helping matters either.

Wow, it sure feels good to get that off my chest. Now if Ned and Lauren would just give me back all my decent art crit books...

Unordered Summer List

Went to see Bing for math help today. She answered the door of her tiny little apartment wearing a white slip witha red bra underneath and some sandals. It was like the implausible premise for a blockbuster math porn. 'Hot asian tutor counsels sweaty Jewish girl'.

This week-end I went swimming on the roof of the Sky Pub Club. Except the pool was the size of a large-ish dinner table (a poolette?). what did I learn, downing a gin and tonic and then do a bunch of underwater somersaults in quick succession is not as much fun as it was back in highchool, but it's stil pretty fun.

The Sky patio is drastically underlit, and has many different levels, so not only was the poolette a dramatically underlit experience. So there was the aded bonus of watching all sorts of people in muscle shirts taking gainers every ten minutes, it went something like this;

"Hoy!.." a tallish man, arm raised in greeting, headed towards a table in the indeterminate distance, on who knows what patio.."Hoy, Jean - mar.. ouph shit le merde, colis!" who know how many times, it stopped being funny when we tried to find a table and had to do it ourselves.

The next plan of attack for the poolette is to go in the afternoon and bring some beauty products and have a little ghetto spa.

Went walking out to normal sized outdoor pool in st henri, and noticed tha the entire back-alley smelled of hot -dog, specifically the steamayed kind (note the movable type phontic french accent yo's). And then wondered if in fact, I had over-heated and begun to steamay myself.

On sunday went to le piqnique electronique again. I wish someone would post some decent pictures of that event, it is so much fun, and all the little kiddie techno dancers are *adorable*. I saw one bad-dad dancing on the blue fake grass with his 3 year old daughter on his shoulders. I think that's a definite sign of urban adulthood. I like going to family oriented raves, more than I ever liked night clubbing.

August 4, 2005

I am back in my hometown, talking french to the local convenience store clerk, and sweating in the muggy 30 degree heat. I love it here.

Last night I sat on the stoop with some of my dearest friends and shot the moon. We got really raucous over stories about chickens and their laying cycles. (Ask me what blowing out ones final egg means) and explaining the Kim Mitchell phenom to the only American ex-pat in the group. There were stories on top of stories going from person to person at a dizzying clip.

I feel asleep cradled in the feeling of being back where, after 8 years, I have a place where I really belong.

All that to say, you have to leave a place to really love it enough.

June 13, 2005

I have new comment spam from Xango Mypedro. I am going to legally change my name Xango Mypedro, its such a better name than mine.

I wasn't going to write again today, but THE F*****NG GAZETTE CALLED AGAIN!

...and I figured why not use this blog to keep a record of the most dedicated relationship in tele-marketing history. Then later when I go postal I will call them every day and read my entries to their floor manager or something.

This time the conversation went like this;

me: Hello
guy: Hello may I speak with ms. theFlink (apparently they have managed to make note of my relationship status, but not the fact that I don't want to subscribe to their fucking paper)
me: y..eesss
guy: I am calling from the Gazette../( thats sthe motion of his wordflow being cut off abruptly.)
me: (deep sigh, the sigh of the millenium) Okay look... I am not angry at you in any way but this is like the 8th time you guys have called me.....

This time guy at least said; "well I guess it is a little aggressive.."

Thank god for small miracles. he'll probably get fired for having given an inch.

Ned has this theory that if you act like a complete idiot that makes them go away but I refuse to stoop to their level.

I am listening to a fabulous mix cd that Lainie made me for my birthday. Word up Sophie Tucker is a great singer for a hot day.

My friend Jeff is here for a visit. He's actually here for the gaming and gambling association (GAGA) conference.

Okay I lied, that's not really the acronym, but that's what I thought it was, and I fully intended to tease him mercilessly about it.

note: Jeff just showed me pictures of me from about 7years ago that he has on his laptop..I had the worst hair I have ever seen and was wearing an overlarge plaid shirt. ... a pox on nostalgia.

It is so freaking hot in my apartment though, and i only have one big fan, and I think he almost cried when I took it to my room when i wanted to go to sleep. I know I felt like a total Jap (sorry so un-pc of me).

It's like 40 degrees with a breeze in the living room and I unplug the fan at 11:30pm leaving Jeff to finish his presentation and sweat into his asscrack. Poor guy. That's okay he's moving to sweden and I am not, so he can suffer a little. Also I just transferred my brillinat though un-used domain procrastibation.com to him so he totally totally owes me one.

So what else? Oh yeah I thought of the four questions* for montreal summers.

*(a little context, the four questions are what jews ask themselves on a certain spring holiday, it's like spiritual sleuthing or something, why are we doing this? what does it mean? etc..)

So the montreal four questions for summer;

1/ Is this a festival or contruction?

2/ Am i going to have to walk my bike or make some immense detour in order to stay on my bike?

3/Are the people attending this festival/contruction site of the appropriate sexual orientation/intellectual capability for me to be checking them out?

These questions occurred to me as I accidentally tried to bicyce down St Catherine street during indy 500 week-end most definitely *not* checking out the hot rod dudes and their breastful girlfriends. (Who were all carrying teddy bears or small dogs and apparently don't believe in looking both ways when crossing the street).

alright lunch-breaks over, back to work.

oh yeah, informal theflink poll;

How many people out there got one of those nasty under the nose zits this week-end just because of the heat and humidity?

I am way too old to be looking like that kid from silver spoons (ricky schroeder) after he hit puberty and got all ugly.