Absolutely Flabulous

"It's bad."
"It's not bad, is it?"
"It is."
"No, no. Bad suggests that, you know, it's evil or something. You know it's not.. It's poor. It's rubbish. It's shit. It's a shitcom!"
"It's a shitcom? Well, we've sorted that out then."

Who is this skinny lad with the heavily lined lids and the cellophane-d hair? Trust me, it's not hard :


Still not sure? :

Much better.

you'll know, you'll know

I think I have a serious problem with the eHarmony.com couple. You know exactly who I'm talking about--"go with the flow" Anne Marie and "not so much" Lee. These folks right here:


My problem isn't with the watered-down soulful background music, or with the slow motion scene of him spinning her in the street cribbed straight from Love Story. I don't mind the excessive footage of Anne Marie's hair bouncing to prove her carefree nature (look how shiny!), or the obligatory bits of heterosexual machismo (soccer! bowling!). I can't even find fault with the weird sound of Lee's voice-- it's almost endearing.

My problem is that this commercial doesn't feel at all like a commercial. These people aren't playing their parts. They aren't pumping out phony tears to ensure cash in hand at the end of the day. No, miraculously, somehow, these are real tears. I'm sure eHarmony.com is a total sham, but I truly do believe that these two overly-groomed people are actually in love. And that's a problem because every time Anne Marie and Lee materialize on my tv screen (once a commercial break, a million times a day), I'm reminded of the fact that my own flesh-and-blood boyfriend is currently 7 hours away. A province away, an entire language away. Anne Marie and Lee are holding hands every ten minutes, but he and I aren't even connected by tv signals: even if he were watching the same commercial as me at the same time, it would still be in French. Something something lost in translation...



Every time I time I turn the tv on it makes me miss you more. I miss you to pieces. At least we didn't meet on a dating website, though. That would just be embarrassing.

Also good:

Potentially Bad Things That End Up Being Good, Somehow -Vol. 1

This shitty movie:

Despite my well-known love of romantic comedies (their bones, not always the final packaging), lately I've been finding myself universally unimpressed by what Hollywood has been handing me. I mean, 27 Dresses?? 27 Dresses was practically unwatchable. They attempted to turn Katherine Heigl into the dowdy uggo sister simply through a brunette dye job and some cardigans. I mean, really. I just couldn't suspend my romcom disbelief.

I was prepared to dislike this movie for that reason above, but also based on the presence of Abigail Breslin (where's Dakota when you need her? Answer: deep inside puberty). But, by the end, I had to concede that it actually was pretty good. It didn't get too laggy or maudlin, and it ran a steady race. The legs held up. The bones were pretty strong. Plus, any movie that celebrates irritatingly sassy redheads earns an automatic extra half-star in my books.


This godawful tv show:


Yeah, it's The Bachelorette. Shut up. Shut your face. I'm fully aware of how overly-edited and cloying and rehearsed these shows can be (lord knows I've watched enough to judge [my reality tv binge is going on eight years and strong!!]). Still, the one thing that can make a reality show great rather than terrible is the "casting", and this season of this terrible show has really benefited from fantastic casting. Her final two dudes include the one in that photo above, who is a mildly unattractive pro snowboarder, and a guy who has about thirty pounds of baggage (a three year old son, to be exact). And, if that isn't great enough, one of her other guys looked a hell of a lot like a dumpy Jason Bateman:

Don't you agree?

and
this disgusting craphole: The flea market in the basement of the Dixie Outlet Mall

A wonderful labyrinth of thrift junk that I happily wandered one afternoon, right up until the point when the mean old hag who runs Rosemary's Antiques...Rosemary, I think her name was...until Rosemary yelled at me to stop touching her precious gaudy baubles before I knocked them all over the floor. Thanks for the warning, Rosemary. You're right. I am five years old.

i keep faith

There's a big, mostly unused ski hill sitting in the middle of Centennial Park. To get to this park when running, I need to cut through the woods behind my house and then follow an unpaved pathway along a creek, over a bridge, and around a construction site, all the while praying to god I'm not seconds away from being mauled by any of the (sub)urban coyotes and wildlife in the area. Did I mention that I only run at night? I only run at night. I run with ipod on full blast and only scattered (sub)urban moonlight to guide me. I like it, though. I tend to run faster when I'm fearing for my life.

So this hill. Tonight I veered in the middle of my normal route and decided to run up to its top, where I had a complete view of the bright lights of downtown (and some of the gta's less bright spots). It's a beautiful thing. And then in the distance I saw this weird honey-coloured light in the shape of a half circle. And I stared at for a long time, trying to figure out what exactly this light was and why it was located so high up in the black sky: maybe a splatter of far-away glare from the cn tower? maybe an electrical station? maybe a new sign for a Texaco station? It took me roughly five minutes to figure out what I was staring at.

It was the moon. My sparkling gas station in the sky was actually just the moon. I ran home fast down that hill.

And in other disturbing full moon news (be forewarned), this man now qualifies as one of the hottest bachelors in the world:
You were warned.

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.