a sea black with ink

A few days ago, I came home one afternoon to find that my puppy had eaten the tv's remote control. (Of course, in the real world I would call this device a "channel selector", just as I would use said-channel selector while laying on a "chesterfield" in my "family room", but since I've been told multiple times in the past that the Bank family's domestic vocabulary is totally archaic and British, I have decided to censor myself here in blog world.) So. The remote control had been reduced to tiny grey plastic shards scattered across the floor. My panic (that my dog had eaten the entire thing, batteries and all, and was heading to swift death) was soon replaced with sheer anger (upon finding the chewed remains of the rest of the remote hidden under the couch).

In the end, I didn't kill the dog. In the end, I resolved to start watching tv like an attention deficit 8 year old might: sitting cross-legged on the ground, head tilted up to screen, flinching every ten seconds or so to change the channel. Thank god we only have basic cable. I don't think my patience could handle any longer a range.

There's been at least one good side effect of my dog's demonic behaviour. Today was the first day in a number of days straight that saw me actually sit down to pleasure-read, quietly and without fidgeting, for more than an hour. Ever since I moved home from school for this four-month-long transition period between schools and degrees, I have avoided picking up any fiction. I couldn't tell you why. I don't even know why. Maybe the previous school year-- all those ridiculous lit classes I took, all those pointless lecture hours and badly-written chapters I can't take back-- scarred me more than I realized. I don't know. Don't even know. But now I'm here, with a stack of books I'd love to read teetering on my desk, and public library late fines looming, and librarians bitching at me for not paying my existing late fines, and a two-seater porch swing taken from my previous front steps in London and transplanted into my back garden here in Mississauga, and all the time in the world (ninety days, give or take).

I've got a two-seater, but there's only me. I guess I'll just have to live with that.

tabernac!

Rene-Charles really needs to get his roots did, soon.

"This food ain't fit for us dogs!"

I think I can smell a summer project brewing...
Better watch your back, Jasper. You too, Digby.

giving us Bank(s) a bad name

Seeing as lately I have been at once without job and with total lethargy (plus with a big tv!), I've been watching a lot of crap. And that means that mostly I've been watching a lot of Tyra. She's had some real gems on her talk show front over the past few weeks, but since I've started watching it daily PLUS the weekly dose of Top Model, I've quickly come to realize that Tyra is obsessed with race and weight exclusively. She's obsessed with herself. She's obsessed with being an "overweight" non-white woman. Sometimes this doesn't yield the greatest results: see Whitney, the newest crowned top model who claims to have been tormented as a child because of her weight issues and who cries when she gets her dreams of being on the cover of Seventeen come true because she hopes this will inspire all those young fat girls out there to start thinking that fat is actually as fierce as Tyra always says it is. And Tyra cheers, and Whitney cries mascara tears, and it all seems well and pleasant and good...until year-old pictures of a substantially skinnier Whitney materialize on the interweb and blow the whole charade to bits.


Hey Whitney-- where'd that juicy booty of yours get to?

But sometimes, every once in a while, Tyra's indulgent weight preoccupation results in some of the most entertaining TV ever to grace the hour between 10 and 11 am (eastern time). Please enjoy "Fat Woman on Tyra":

For ol' Olmec

My grandparents used to own a winter retreat in a retirement community in Bradenton, Florida. It was a sunny, well-groomed place where old people speeding around in golf carts used to angrily shake their fists at my brother and I as we rollerbladed around the streets and tried to avoid running into slow-moving alligators that were about as old as the people. We drove down every March break, usually taking about 24 hours to cover the straight line that ran from Toronto to the Orange State. My dad would bring books-on-tape with him from the public library, and he'd listen to these while the rest of us slept in our seats as the car rumbled through New England. On one particularly gruesome trip I can recall waking up in darkness to the sounds of Kathy Bates reading "The Silence of The Lambs". Once we got there, we swam in the old person's pool, shopped in the old person's outlet mall, and lounged on the old person's beach. But mostly we just watched American TV. There was nothing, nothing better than American TV.

We watched Road Rules marathons on MTV, and caught the earliest episodes of Buffy on the WB, and Talk Soup on E! when it was still hosted by John Henson and was still hilarious. But mostly I lived inside Nickelodeon. I may have been a Canadian, but we spent so many March Breaks down south that I considered myself an honorary Nick kid.

So now be nostalgic with me and let's watch an episode of Legends of the Hidden Temple! Please?

pretty sad.

For an eerie, unsettling, almost embarrassing glimpse into my potential (post MFA) life some fifteen years from now, go watch The Savages and try to picture Laura Linney's character with red curly hair instead of brown.

It's pretty. But sad. You know.