Throwback to the 80's.

This pretty much made my day today. I enjoy a good flow chart and 80's love ballads are my favourite.

Total Eclipse of the Heart is now stuck in my head. I'm sure my cubicle neighbour will be sorry she sent this to me as I randomly belt out the tune every so often. This is the pinnacle of flow charts, hands down the best one I've ever seen. Kudos to the genius who created it.

I'm fairly certain that my love of the 80's stems from having a sister who is 7 years older than me. I wanted to do everything and be everything that she was. For example, when I was in grade three I printed a huge Poison banner (Poison was a pretty heavy rock group who used a skull and bones wearing a top hat as their logo). My teacher was concerned and the other kids thought it was weird. I didn't care though, I thought Poison was the coolest band in the world because my sister listened to them. I also knew all the words to all the AC/DC songs ever written and I would bring my cassette to class and dominate the ghetto blaster during lunch hour. Can you picture an 8 year old girl with missing front teeth and a mushroom cut belting out "You...shook me all night long!". There's also a home video of me somewhere lip syncing to "Like a Prayer" by Madonna when I was about 6 years old. When I find it I promise to post it.

I also had a pretty great wardrobe. Awesome hand-me-downs from the 70's and 80's ensured that I was a cool kid. Hairspray, polkadot sweaters, Keds, black gummie bracelets, LA Gear, jean shorts and even the occasional body suit. I also used to wear this fantastic leather bomber jacket that my dad gave to me. There was a Tom Cat patch sewn on the sleeve. How I miss that jacket.

I went through many styles and phases growing up but I always returned to the 80's. To this day I have to control myself when I go shopping. I'll get really excited when I find something I want to buy but when I show it to my shopping buddy I usually get a laugh and a "that's hideous". I play it off like my suggestion was a joke but in actuality I really like it because it's sparkly and colourful. I bought a sweater in my second year of university that was brown with little pink polkadots on it and turquoise hearts sewn along the neckline. My friend laughed at me when I bought it but I wore it all the time and I pulled it off with style. I recently bought a romper (one piece shorts and tube top) and wore it while bike-riding in central park. I own a Ralph Lauren original 80's shirt...it's pink with green stripes. I have bright blue tights, an original red and white Adidas winter pom-pom beret and I have more than one shirt in my closet that has sequins or sparkles all over it. I'm wearing sparkly green nail polish right now.

My music collection consists of, among others, Tina Turner, Guns N' Roses, Def Leopard, Queen, Chris de Burgh...love that Lady in Red! Embarassing? Sometimes, especially when I have friends over. But whatever. I'm old enough to know what I like and I can't deny it. I'm actually hoping to get a bit more bold with my style in the new year. I feel a shopping spree coming on and this time I'm not holding back. My wardrobe's gonna be bitchin'.

I need to get a karaoke machine to appease the 'Total Eclipse of the Heart' diva that's raging in me. It's either that or nothing, and 'nothing' simply won't do.

My Third Annual 26th Birthday.

Remember when you turned a certain age and you were completely blown away by how quickly time had flown?

That happened to me this morning. I turned 28 today but I like to call it my Third Annual 26th Birthday. Usually I don't have this extremely profound feeling of crazy time travel on my birthday, but this morning I did. I mean, I really felt it. Perhaps it's because by this age I had hoped to have a child with two legs as opposed to having two children with four legs. Perhaps I had hoped to be an artist or to be living somewhere in the tropics. Who knows why I got the feeling. I woke up this morning another year older, actually feeling the rush of life and the quickness of it all, for the very first time.

I woke up and zombied my way upstairs to get Swagger's collar and leash on, made a cup of coffee, got my toque, boots, winter coat and mitts on and off I went into the pitch black morning. There wasn't a soul around. This is actually my favorite time of day, it's when I do most of my thinking and most of my big decision making. While walking through the open field with the cold wind on my face, I felt very, very bizarre. I got the sweeping feeling that my time here on Earth doesn't even compare to a mere grain of sand on a beach. I'm one person, and the planet doesn't need me here at all. I felt insignificant, irrelevant, my being was trivial.

Well...what a crock! I could go on and on about life being short so "live every day like it's your last, dance like no one is watching"...blah blah blah barf. I woke up feeling funny, walked through the park for a bit feeling funny, and then the eerie, BS thoughts and feelings were quickly disolved when I noticed Swagger was eating something rancid again. I ran across the field yelling "OFF! SWAGGER OFF! LEAVE IT! SIT! OFF! SIT!", breaking the morning peace with my shrill voice (which Swagger pays absolutely no attention to).

I finally reached him and discovered he was gnawing on a crab apple. Thank the lord (the time I caught him eating a baby deer carcass almost sent me over the edge and I was nearly blinded by the stench). I burst out laughing and I rolled around with my pup on the frosty grass for a good ten minutes. Then everything became less heavy again. Life is short alright, and there really is no rhyme or reason for my existence. I pretty much think that humans were a mistake anyway. Am I supposed to mope around thinking about how fleeting life really is? Nope, I shall enjoy every day as it comes, taking pleasure in the little things: my cat's paws, a bright orange maple leaf, catching someone's eye on the subway, wine with a best friend, tobogganing, avocados, my sister's laugh...there's just so much. And plus, I'll want to check-out at some point anyway, so leaving this place a happy human being is important.

Lucky to be alive I say!

Band of Broads.

About 11 months ago I started taking djembe drumming classes. They were every Friday evening for 2 hours and it was one of the most entertaining and fun things I've ever taken part in. I don't look like the typical djembe playing person...I don't have dreads, I'm not a hippie and I don't have any African roots. I just love the sound of a bunch of djembe drums being played, the rumbling beat that moves through the ground and the happiness that everyone feels while listening to them. I figured I would give it a whirl, and I was right. I loved it.

I was the only girl in the circle with 9 guys. Ha! High five to me, I looked pretty awesome and courageous coming in for my first lesson with a bunch of people that had been there before. I was extremely nervous and the fact that the teacher is a beautiful, tall, beautiful, black, beautiful man from Guinea didn't help. He was intense too...no kidding around, although he did crack up when I told him I was in fact a diabetic wearing an insulin pump and not some kind of new cell phone as he thought. I did as he instructed, followed along as best I could, made my place in the circle and learned a hell of a lot. The sound of us all in unison gave me goosebumps and I was grinning ear to ear while tapping away on my drum. This went on for a few weeks and then I got a puppy. My friday night drumming lessons have been put on hold ever since.

While in the lunch room at work today, my little friend S told me that she was starting ukulele lessons. She's small and ukulele's are small, so I think it will be a match made in heaven. This got me thinking about my love of the djembe. I've decided that I'm going to pick it up again, and maybe even buy myself my own drum. I'm sure my roommate and neighbours will be thrilled. I'm going to get back into drumming and I'm going to get good at it. Good enough to join a drumming circle.

My friend S and I are then going to start a ukulele/djembe band. Oh, and her friend plays an instument too, so it will be a trio. Her friend is Korean and plays the electric guitar, my friend S is Jamaican and will be playing the ukulele, and I'm a plain Jane whitey who will be banging on the djembe. Maybe I'll wear some big beaded jewelry or some awesome, flowing, colourful clothing to make myself look a little more exotic, to fit in with the group and all. Don't worry, I won't be braiding my hair.

We're going to be the most eclectic music group around. It's pretty amazing when you decide to step forward and take part in something you've always been interested in but never had the courage to try. A brand new beautifully hand-crafted djembe will be my Christmas present to me. Cheers to trying something new!

Holy Crap! Is That Edible!?

This completely blows my mind.

After my mind is blown, I'm totally thrown over a cliff when I read this:
"Don’t worry vegetarians, Baconnaise Lite is 100% Vegetarian and certified Kosher."

Please explain to me when and where we went so wrong? I don't have the most perfect diet, but to mix vegetarian bacon with mayonnaise, and then to make it "lite" on top of that...it's just so wrong. If you're a vegetarian, do yourself a favour and don't eat fake bacon mixed with mayonnaise. You may wake up in the morning with a third eye, or some other unwanted body part like a tail, or maybe even an extra set of teeth. If you aren't a vegetarian, then make yourself some good old fashioned bacon in a frying pan or the microwave if you must, and then lather on the mayonnaise afterwards. You can even purchase organic, local bacon these days, so go for it!

While on this topic, let's look at a few other items that throw me through a loop and make me question my existence as a human being.

Marshmallows are weird enough as it is, but this? 

Fluff. Otherwise known as "spreadable marshmallow substance". This terrifies me. What the heck is marshmallow made out of anyway? I'm too afraid to look up the ingredients. I enjoy a marshmallow about once a year but I make sure it's sandwiched with chocolate between a pair of graham crackers. This way, my taste buds are so overjoyed that I'm unable to think about what I'm actually ingesting.

I believe that this bad boy is the culprit of quicky food creation. The one that started it all.

Did you know that SPAM was born in 1937? That's quite a while ago for such nouveau age canned quickness. Are ya hungry kids? Shhhloppppp...the SPAM comes out of the can, cut off a few slices, fry er' up and there's dinner.  Anything to make life easier and more convenient! I just realized that all of the above items (SPAM, Fluff and Baconnaise) can be spread onto a lovely slice of white fluffy:

Wonder Bread! Who doesn't love Wonder Bread!? All this talk of delicious healthy wholesome food is making me crazy! We have come so far...who in the world needs to plant a potato anymore? Potatos come from a bag and now they're called chips! Chicken? It comes from the grocery store, silly. Where did you think it came from!? Orange juice? It comes from a box..obviously. All I have to say is watch out kids, your parents might take advantage of this convenient life and you might just get picked on in school:

Poor souls, they never saw it coming.

My Nemesis Tula.

If you've never had an encounter with a tarantula, congratulations. You've managed to avoid a most unpleasant experience, the kind that makes your toes curl and your skin prickle. When I was living in Roatan I had a faceoff with a tarantula. Because I picture my tarantula to have been a bitchy, fat, spiteful, female spider, I will refer to her as Tula.

After having watched the entirety of Garth Brooks live in concert on DVD with my mom, I was exhausted and ready to hit the hay. It was a balmy evening as usual and I was already a bit jumpy and nervous about stepping on a random living creature because the crab migration had begun. I was tired and walking to my bedroom when right in front of my foot sat big fat momma Tula. I didn't notice her there until the last second. To this day I thank my lucky stars that I did because either my foot would have been eaten or I would have smushed the hairiest most plump spider in the universe. If I had actually squished Tula, I'm sure I would have some weird OCD obsession with wearing a sock on that foot every minute of every day for the rest of my life.

Tula was about 7 inches in diameter and I could see every one of her eyes staring back at me. If I moved a foot to the right, she would shuffle and readjust her body to look at me. Two feet to the left...shuffle shuffle shuffle...there she was, staring at me. I almost threw up from fear that she would pounce on my face at any moment. I was too scared to jump over her because I knew she would jump 4 feet in the air and cling onto my pajamas, catching a free ride into my bed with me.

I screamed for my mom and she came running over with a broom and a bucket. Mom and I were both at the end of the broomstick trying to gently nudge Tula into the bucket without causing her to sprint towards us. She wouldn't budge. I'm sure that if we had put some real force into it we could have moved her but we didn't want to take the risk of her darting towards us or walking up the handle to where our hands were. This would have resulted in one or both of us fainting, and then Tula would have had a free for all with our limp bodies. After several failed attempts of trying to get her into the bucket, we stopped to rethink our strategy.

We wanted nothing more to do with Tula. We especially didn't want to anger her to the point where she would feel cornered. Our idea was to call my sister's boyfriend at the time, who was a local Honduran guy that knew what was what. He came over half an hour later, walked into the house, up the stairs to my room, picked up Tula by a leg, walked back downstairs, out the door and across the lawn. He put fat Tula in the grass and she just slowly walked off into the night. Great, I thought. She would just do a lap around the garden and then come back to guard my bedroom door again.

Tula returned to me, but only in my dreams. In the end she always pounces on my face. My experience living in Honduras was filled with Tula-like stories. There was the time when I woke up in the middle of the night for a glass of water and upon my return to bed I found a rather large centipede in the fold of my sheet. There was also the time (and this will sound like some kind of urban legend) when I got out of the shower and dried my face with a crunchy towel. It turns out there was a scorpion clinging onto my fluffy fresh towel, and I had just exfoliated my face with its body.

A tarantula saw into my soul that day so many years ago. The result of this is that my biggest fear and archenemy remains the spider. Scorpion, centipede, bat, iguana, crab, barracuda. None of these measure up to Tula.

This is why they scare me.

Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow.

Once again, I've just cut all of my hair off. This is a pattern with me. I get to a point in my turbulent life when I need a change and the first thing I turn to is my hair. I'm a wanderlust changing paths from day to day and my hairstyle follows my mood, wherever it may go.

I had a mushroom cut until the age of about 6 years old. I can still remember the day when a kindergarten classmate asked me if I was a boy or a girl. As you can imagine this was quite a traumatizing experience for me so I freaked out on my haircut and wanted nothing more to do with mushroom shaped hairdo's. My mom took me to the hairdresser as a result of this boy/girl comment, and it was just a few days before I was going to see Phantom of the Opera with my class. The mushroom cut turned into a hideous pixie cut that made me look even more like an androgynous little being. I was so upset that I convinced myself that the Phantom from the play would be looking into the crowd while onstage, spot me due to the hair, and burst out laughing while pointing directly at me. I cried myself to sleep that night. I've blocked the rest of my childhood haircut experiences out of my memory.

The teenage years were filled with angst and rebellion. I went through short hair, long hair, green hair, red hair, yellow hair, purple hair and attempted dreads. When I was 19 I got extensions. My hair was about 2.5 feet long, and it was all braided with added-in fake hair. It weighed about 30lbs, but it was cool. I used to wear it up in a massive bun and strut down the street like I was some kind of awesome exotic person from another country. I really just looked like some white Canadian girl wanting to have an excess amount of hair. I found a picture of myself the other day with this mass of braids on my head and it truly looked ridiculous. It took about 10 hours to get the braids done, cost me over $200, and it lasted for about 2 months before I actually started to have neck pain from the weight of it all. I took them out and I was free once again.

In my second year of university I started to date a guy who broke up with me after two months. My reaction was to break up with my hair. I went into my room after the boyfriend talk, looked in the mirror, took the scissors out and chopped off my ponytail. Two hours later I was in the salon being tisk tisked by my hairdresser. She fixed it and made it look awesome. The next day I had a class with the ex boyfriend and he got to take a good long hard look at the new me. Ha!

In 2008 I went to Iceland on a little trip and I immediately fell in love with the platinum hair blue eyed look that all the ladies were sporting. They are a stunningly beautiful people and if I couldn't have the blue eyes I was going to get that hair. I got back to Toronto 3 weeks later, went to the hairdresser, got my hair coloured platinum blonde and cut it just below my chin. I did this without warning anyone, including my boyfriend at the time. There it was! That beautiful platinum colour! I loved it...for about 3 months. Then my roots started to grow and my hair started to break and I started to want to shave my head. I killed my hair with chemicals, it was dead. I sucked the life right out of it and the maintenance was overwhelming. I dyed it back to brown and until two days ago I hadn't cut it in a year. Completely unacceptable.

Two days ago I was ashamed to take my hair out of the elastic it had been hiding in for a year. Two days ago I was growing it and it was well passed my shoulders. Two days ago my hairdresser pulled the elastic out and gasped at how damaged my hair was. She gave me a sharp bob with a little fringe, and I love it. It gave me back the pep in my step and I've actually booked my next hair appointment already. The next time I go I'm cutting it boy short and dying it blonde again.

Sometimes I think the life of my hair is almost more exciting than my actual life. Then I remember that it's a bizarre reflection of the life that I lead. Right now my hair is looking pretty darn good.

It's fun being a girl with guts.

Growing Young.

For some reason, I've started going backwards in my life. There are things that I missed out on when I was younger, and I don't mean fun things like learning how to ride a bike or getting your first Nintendo. I mean things that you should do when growing up so that you don't have to face them when you're older.

Let me start with getting my licence. If you've read my older post called A Long Time Coming, you know that I'm working tirelessly to be able to drive a car one day. I have yet to get the road test done. It would have been much better for me to have started driving lessons at the age of 16, but I was dropped off in boarding school for my teenage life so the driving thing never came up.

The other really important thing I neglected to do was math. I've always struggled with that subject, and I passed grade 9 math (the second time around) by the skin of my teeth. Actually, I'm positive I failed it the second time but my math teacher Mr. MacDonald took pity on me and gave me a 64%. Since grade 9 math was a complete disaster I was only permitted to go into low grade 10 and 11 math. I took the art stream and I much preferred finger painting anyway. When would I ever need math?

Well, now that I'm in my late 20's and I do that 'pondering life' thing a lot, I've decided that being a vet would be splendid. What am I passionate about? Animals. I love them, I understand them and I want to know more about them. Apparently you need to be a superstar in the science and math world to even attempt vet school applications. I enrolled for grade 9 math with the Toronto District School Board at the beginning of October. Twice a week from 6 until 10pm, for 4 months.

A lot of free time would be taken up with this endeavour and my dog would probably resent me for the rest of my life but it had to be done. I had to face my math demons and conquer the fear of possibly being called upon in class and not knowing the answer. I was so nervous but excited to know that I would finally pass math with flying colours and not have to be ashamed that I don't really know my times tables anymore. Everyone would be in the same boat, right? I was sure that the other students would be people like myself looking to further their education. Turns out I was wrong about that and the whole experience was a massive disaster.

1) My teacher's name was Mr. I4rf??savx12387#$5, and he was from Sri Lanka. I couldn't understand him...could't even make out his name. I was more focused on trying to make out the words and numbers he was saying and I completely missed ALL of the math concepts.

2) When the principal came in to introduce herself and explain the school policy and rules, she stopped after the 'no hats' rule and looked at one of the young students. He was wearing a hat, and he was peeved. What followed was an 11 minute argument with him not wanting to take off his hat and her threatening to expell him. Really? Did we just waste 11 minutes on this? Where the hell am I?

3) My calculator stopped working mid-class.

4) At least 80% of the class was in the 17 year old range. I was mistaken when I believed most people would be in my age bracket. All of them were there because they had messed around in math the previous semester and now they were messing around in adult ed. Great. Chatter in the back of the class, giggles to my left, some kid sleeping to my right, and there I was squinting my eyes and straining my ears so much trying to discern what the heck the teacher was going on about. I got a beast of a headache as a result of over-squinting/straining.

5) I lost all motivation and hope for success. I never went back to night school and now I'm waiting for my math book in the mail after registering for grade 9 math online. It cost me an arm and a leg, but I would rather suffer from a financial amputation than have to go back to that classroom. If my child ever wants to be an artist, he/she will also be a math genius. Never will I make anyone go to math class as an adult because it's plain wretched.

The last thing I missed out on as a teen was getting my teeth fixed. I had a few retainers here and there, but I didn't wear them often enough so my parents just figured I didn't want to put the effort in to having perfect teeth. The last orthodontics step was skipped, and I never got braces. My teeth aren't horrifying, but they aren't straight either. January is around the corner, and that's when the braces are coming. I want straight teeth so now I have to pay for it and have the train tracks put on my face for 2 years. My roommate is getting braces at the same time as I am. We shall live in metal harmony, complaining together, cleaning our teeth together and cursing our youth together.

I'm doing everything backwards. When I complete these tasks I shall give myself a big pat on the back and throw a glorious coming of age party. I'll let you know how the next few years go.