July = Frugal Talea

I spent a lot of money in May and June. I am about to spend a lot of money in August. Turns out, I’m not made of money. I know, I too was shocked.

This July is also one of those fabulous months where I manage to get 3 pay days, instead of the normal 2. I love when that happens.

So I’m officially turning July into my Month of Frugality. No excessive spending. This will mean:

- No new yarn. Even though I am OUT of sock yarn (May, did you hear that?) and I desperately want more. I will not buy it. Sigh. I’m…okay….with that. Yes.
- I will not continue to support Starbucks in their quest for world domination and title of Universal Superpower. In the name of frugality, I shall make every effort to avoid ordering a 5 dollar grande soy non-fat toffee nut latte. I will drink the shitty free coffee at work.
- No takeout. No delivery. I will make my own food and take lunch to work. Thank goodness for Grocery Gateway. No way would I do that if I had to haul groceries back from the store on my own, like a sucker.
- No buying booze.
- No really. I mean it. I can survive without alcohol. I think. I mean….probably. If I have to.
- No using my Visa. I had it all but down to $0 owing and then I went and racked up the damn thing again.

What did I buy??

Oh.

You know.

A wedding dress.

For reals. I did.

In true Talea style, I went to the one store where the manager swore as much as me and told them I wanted to try on one particular dress I’d seen in the window. I didn’t ask them their opinion or look around. No, no.

I put that baby on, decided I looked ABSOLUTELY FUCKING FANTASTIC and that was that. One dress. Done deal. No fuss, no muss.

Apparently I’m getting married. It’s expensive. Please send me money, so I can drink and knit in the meantime. Thanks.

Stop Jiggling! And what is on your head?!?!

This commercial makes me unreasonably mad. Like, outright angry. It hits some part of my brain that makes me want to punch people.

I hate these damned caramel….drips. I hate their ugly spandex and their floppy weird hats. And their asexualness. And their stupid facial expressions. And the jiggling.

GAH! It seriously pisses me off!!

I’ll have to send Caramilk all my receipts for the shit I’ll break whenever this bloody commercial assaults me from the TV.

Somewhere along the way, they changed what ‘it’ was.

In a few short days, June 21, 2009, it will be exactly 10 years since I met the fiance. Ten. Years. TEN YEARS.

TEN???

Whoah.

Take a moment. Process that. That’s fucking ridonkulous. I remember it oh-so-very-clearly too. That’s the scariest part. I remember it. I’m old enough to have crystal clear memories which occurred a decade ago.

Naturally, after realizing that, I had a mini existential crisis and then I realized that being old would make for good blog fodder, so here I am.

Until recently (read: two nights ago), I thought of myself as still very young. But I’m starting to think otherwise. Oh, I’m not waxing poetic about middle age and I’m not about to go into menopause, but I’m not a little kid anymore. This is a rather ironic reality, as I’ve never really felt younger than I currently do, whereas people no longer see me as a kid.

How do I know this? Let me tell you.

-First of all, I have no fucking idea who these Jonas Brothers kids are. They could walk up to me and punch me in the face and I wouldn’t recognize them. I have no idea what their names are. Jim, Bob and Jim-Bob, for all I care. What’s the big deal with them? I don’t get it.
-Second, I haven’t read the Twilight books. I haven’t seen the Twilight movies. I have seen Robert Whatshisface in person, though I didn’t realize it at the time. When I was in Texas, he was visiting a mall I was shopping in and I couldn’t understand who he was.
- Three, when I wake up in the mornings I usually think ‘Ow, my [insert random body part here, though chances are it will be my neck and/or back]‘
- Four, when I walk by groups of high school boys, nobody catcalls me. Unless they’re particularly obnoxious. But this makes me feel very old, very relieved, cuz really, I hate catcalls, but old nonetheless.
- Five, I talked to a FINANCIAL ADVISOR the other day, to discuss my MUTUAL FUNDS. What. The. Hell.
- Six, I still like CD’s. I don’t download music. I don’t like these kids with their ipods blaring on the train. Keep that noise down, you rascals!
- Seven, I care about the economic meltdown. I do. It frightens me. You know why? Cuz I have bills to pay, dammit! Like an old person.
- Eight, I thank my lucky stars every day that I don’t go to high school nowadays. Can you imagine having to go through that hell all day long, and then have it continue at night on facebook and twitter? Uh. No thanks.
- Nine, I remember PHONING people. I remember NOT HAVING an email account. I remember having to go to the library to look things up. I remember using a phone book. I do not remember how I survived in those clearly archaic times.
- Ten, I am closer to 30 than I am to 20. I’m not okay with that.
- Eleven, everyone around me is having babies. Since when did my generation become the one that’s procreating? Weren’t we just sitting around playing Super Nintendo while wearing our gimp bracelets?
- Twelve, I don’t understand hip hop. I don’t. I don’t know why kids now refuse to speak in proper English. I don’t know why kids wear such wacky stuff. They’re strange human beings, from another land it seems. I feel like how old people used to feel about me.
- Thirteen, I am still appalled by the fact that children who don’t have their licenses have cell phones.
- Fourteen, I have become my parents. I am stuck believing that the best music EVER made was from my teenage years. Just like every old person does. Dammit.

I AM the old people.

I have turned into Grandpa Simpson. I find myself walking along, thinking, “I don’t like the looks of those teenagers”

It's only a matter of time before I too start yelling at clouds.

“I used to be ‘with it’, but then they changed what ‘it’ was. Now what I’m with isn’t ‘it’, and what’s ‘it’ seems weird and scary.”

My Small Town Adventure

So as all of you rabid fans know, I recently ventured outside of my beloved Toronto into the great unknown. It was scary, but I survived.

First off, I had to rent a car. So I did. When I got there, I was informed that I was being provided with a PT Cruiser. I hate PT Cruisers. But I took my PT Cruiser and hit the wide open road. I forgot how much I enjoy driving sometimes…but quickly remembered that driving in the city is NOT enjoyable and I was only experiencing the glee of empty highway driving.

After four hours, I got to where I was going. A town with a supposed population of 5,000. I say supposed, because I do NOT believe that number to be true in the slightest. Maybe 1,000. Maybe. I found the B&B and the fiance, both of which were very lovely. We asked the B&B owners where to get food, and they recommended a new pub (note: this ‘new’ pub was approximately 2 years old. In Toronto, new means like, opened last week). It was alright. But, since it was one of the only places in town that hadn’t shut down, we ate there 7 times in 5 days. It was kind of embarassing. They knew us.

Anyhee.

Small town stereotypes aside, this place SHUT DOWN after 7 o’clock. We would take the dog for a walk around the town (which was easily traversed by foot, I might add) and see not a soul. Not one.

Every house we walked by, if it wasn’t abandoned, had no lights on. None. But they ALL had the warm blue glow of the television coming out of the living room window. Everyone in the town was very fond of TV watching in the dark. It was a strange phenomenon.

There was a train that would go by every few minutes, and the horn would cut the creepy, motionless silence. But, we never SAW the train. It was like, a creepy ghost train. Coming from nowhere, passing through nowhere, going nowhere, and nobody around to see it.

At night, it was like walking around a movie set of  really good horror movie. It was legitimately frightening. First, you’re isolated. Nobody else was around. There were no lights on, just strange blue glows coming out of every house. About a third of the houses were abandoned, adding to the scariness. Everyone knows that psychos like abandoned houses.

We walked past many a weird sight, which I will detail here. One night, we walked past a house that had a strange door between the house and the garage. Said door was open, swinging back and forth, creaking on its hinges, opening into darkness. Nobody was there, but the door just opened and closed, opened and closed.

Another house had a vintage teddy bear perched on the windowsill, and it was backlit by the TV glow. It was facing out onto the street, watching the nothingness and listening to the ghost train. Fucking thing creeped me out.

Another house looked JUST like any mansion you’ve ever seen in a horror movie. Big and old, not lit up except for one light at the top of a turret. And the window of the turret was open, and the white lace curtains were flapping around outside of it in the wind. At that point, the fiance turned to me and said all creepy-like, ‘Helloooooo Mother’, a la Psycho. I hit him. It wasn’t funny.

It looked IDENTICAL to this! I was waiting for the shadow of the creepy mother to show up.

So much of the town was abandoned that it was sad when you stopped to think about it. But mostly, it was just odd and horror-movie-ish. Everything had a dark connotation and feel to it, I don’t know why:

They made ice cream scary

And then all over town, there were random objects where there shouldn’t have been. Abandoned tricycles, abandoned swing sets…….but we never saw any children. Fucking strange. And this, a perfectly placed, uprooted shrub. Note the lack of dirt around it. It was like it was just dropped there from space. I’d think if you dragged a shrub to place on one’s front sidewalk, there’d be a trail of dirt and broken branches, but apparently not:

You know, just a shrub on the front sidewalk. Roots out, naturally.

Despite the fact that we never ever saw anybody, everyone had a perfectly manicured lawn. I guess the nightly ghost train brought some nightly ghost landscapers, I dont know.

There was one intersection that had the traffic lights out. They were stuck on flashing yellow. For the entire week I was there. Everyone just kind of drove through. What the hell? Isn’t someone around to reset the damn things? Why do you insist on having a blinking yellow light going on all the time! How come nobody’s fixing this? If that happened here, they’d have someone on it in 5 minutes, right after they heard about the string of accidents.

All in all, the town was just bloody weird. The people were weird and had backwoods Southern accents (how they managed that in Northern Ontario is beyond me). The entire main strip was almost completely shut down. The one business that WAS still alive? Why, the exotic lounge of course! My question is….who goes to a strip club in a small town? Don’t you know everyone? Isn’t Becky the Dancer your part time babysitter? Your next door neighbour? Your coworkers daughter? What the hell? I don’t want to know the strippers…..how awkward.

There was nowhere to get a decent coffee. I literally had to drive one town over, in my douchebaggy PT Cruiser. I found a store that was called So and So’s Fine Food and Coffee Emporium. Okay. So I ambled in, and really wanted a damn latte or something with espresso. Not seeing any menu at all (ugh), I asked (as only a City Asshole would), “What kind of espresso based drinks do you have?” The blank stare that I got was priceless. The answer hurt me a bit……”Oh…expresso? Uh, I think a few blocks down they’ve got that.” Expresso? Oh. My wounded coffee loving soul. It’s eSpresso. With an S. My gawd.

There were good points. One, I wasn’t at work. Two, I totally didn’t give a shit about work. Three, I couldn’t get online, so I couldn’t get my work emails. Four, fuck you work. Five, I had CABLE! Six, I got a lot of knitting done. Seven, I got to see the fiance. Eight, I did a lot of drinking. Nine, no work. And ten, we were really close to a small town that my family stopped in for two seconds, generations ago, when they came to Canada and worked their way to Saskatchewan.

I’m a HUUUUGE family history buff. So we went to go check out the small town and find the gravestone of my great great great grandparents. I had no idea where they were buried, but we scoured several graveyards and tried to decode dozens of faded headstones and I managed to find them:

Shook. Not my last name. I found this amongst hundreds of graves in the rain, it was amazing!

I went, I saw, I missed my coffee. I missed my subway and my rude cityfolk. I enjoyed the time off, but damn, I’m now a city snob through and through and was SO happy to come back.

Signing off…temporarily

I’m going out of town for five days. My laptop screen is very wonky and goes black with the slighest jiggle, so travelling with it is not an option.

This means that I will be completely offline for six days. SIX. DAYS.

Can I do that? Really?

I live on the internet. I don’t know how I’m going to handle this. By the end of the week, it is quite likely I’ll be rocking back and forth in a crumpled heap in a corner somewhere, muttering, ‘Google, google, facebook, google’

It won’t be pretty.

Wish me luck.

I’m about to lose contact with the world…..I’m falling into a black, unconnected abyss.

When was the last time this happened to me? What, like, Grade 10? That was 11 years ago! Eleven years? Holy hell…..I’m so old! Oh god, I’m old AND about to fall off the internet!

I have to go now and breathe into a paper bag.

OMG, TMI, WTF?

Ladies,

Way back in the day, this woman named Eve ate an apple she shouldn’t have. She screwed us all over and now we all have monthly cycles. Periods. The rag. The worst thing ever. Whatever.

And we all get it (for the sake of argument, I don’t mean to start any debate about those who aren’t fertile, that is SO not my blog). Every month, give or take, we have to deal with it. It’s part of life. And it comes with a lot of downsides. I can’t think of any upsides to it, in fact. Nothing positive comes to mind.

We all deal with it. It sucks. We move on.

Except for that small portion of women who insist on sharing with other women exactly where they are in their ‘beautiful, natural menstrual cycle’. They will inform you of the daily position of their eggs, the activities of their uterus, the fact that they are just about to start on their rag, blah blah blah. They will inform you as to the level of bloat they are currently experiencing. Their ratio of cravings, in terms of salty and sweet. They will complain about how cranky they are, how none of their clothes fit, their back hurts, blah blah blah. They’ll come up to you and ask for a ‘product’ then loudly whisper that ‘they’re on their period’. No shit, really? I thought you just really liked collecting linty tampons from the bottom of my purse. You idiot.

What IS it with these women?

“Oh my god, I SO need chocolate…….(in a stage whisper), I’m sooooo PMSing” Um, wtf. I don’t care. Keep your menses to yourself. I don’t need to know the schedule of your innards, thanks though.

How are you supposed to react? They seem to think that this allows them instant bonding privileges with you, seeing as you both go through the same thing. Yeah…..alright. So I should bond with everyone who has feet too? Am I supposed to jump up and down and congratulate them on not getting themselves knocked up this month? Or start a parade dedicated to their wasted fertility? I DON’T UNDERSTAND.

If you really want me to be aware of when you’ll be PMSing, then actually on the rag, then in the clear, please just give me a damn calendar. I can throw it away and we’ll never have to speak of it again.

And dudes, when I wrote ‘please just give me a damn calendar’, I had actually written bloody instead of damn. Ha. Bad pun. Glad I caught that one, that would have been an editing fail.

What was I saying? Oh yeah. Leave me out of your uterus’ schedule. I don’t need to know about it. Just cuz we both have one, doesn’t mean we’re friends. Thanks. Bye.

The Jig is Up! Stop it!

I’m a realist. Most people would argue with me and call me a full-blown pessimist, but they suck, and you should just ignore them. I’m a realist.

In my mind, things are the way they are. Some stuff is good. Some stuff is bad. I try very hard to just let stuff go. If you’ve read my blog for some time, you’re probably thinking I’m full of crap, since I rant about everything. But it’s all in a joking tone and more often than not, I find it funny. You do too. YOU DO TOO, dammit.

Ahem.

I’m not a fan of lying. I don’t pretend to like people I don’t like. I don’t pretend to like things I don’t like. I don’t do what I don’t want to do, just because it’s what most people think it’s what I should. I ams what I ams. I don’t lie, I don’t pretend.

So of course, here come my list of ‘Most Annoying Things To Lie About and/or Pretend’.  Cuz, you’re not fooling anybody! The jig is up! Here we go:

- “No really, it’s my hair.”
Please. PLEASE. Please, stop pretending you are not bald. Or balding. Everybody knows you’re wearing a rug. The jig is up. It’s okay, I assure you. I’d much rather stare at a tiny patch of reflective scalp than spend all day trying to avert my gaze from the painfully obvious lines where your toupee is welded to your skull.

It’s just hair. We understand that men lose it. We’re cool with that. Don’t pretend you have some when you don’t, cuz then it’s gonna get real awkward later on when it flies away in the wind. Nobody wants you to look like Donald Trump, so just don’t.

 

 

 

 

 

- “I’m a girl, so I can wear high heeled shoes”
Okay. No. Just because you were born with more estrogen than testosterone, it doesn’t mean you can walk in heels. If you can’t walk in heels, STOP PRETENDING like you can.

 hate walking behind you, watching you teeter around like a drunk, limping monkey. There’s cute flats out there, go buy some of those. You’re not fooling anybody. Just because you haven’t fallen down doesn’t mean we’re buying the act. You aren’t even straightening your knees and your ankles are about to break. Quit it. You can’t walk in heels. Accept it, stop pretending you can, and buy a damn pair of sneakers. GAWD.

- “Yeah, so you like my Louis Vuitton bag?”
I don’t understand knockoffs. I don’t. Why are you pretending that you have money when you don’t? I can tell that your garishly coloured, vinyl bag is clearly NOT a Louis Vuitton or a Coach bag…..the Coach bags have C’s on them, NOT O’s! And even if you do manage to score a good knockoff, I know you’re pretending, because nobody with a real Louis Vuitton bag is riding the bus beside me, with bags full of no-name Cheerios from the local discount grocery store. You fail. Give up the lie. It’s okay. Buy a nice bag with the money that you do have, it’s alright.

-”All I eat is salad!”
Uh huh. Right. I don’t know how many people with more fat rolls than limbs have tried to pretend this one. Dude, you’re fat. It’s okay. Truly, it is. I don’t care what you shove into your mouth, honestly. Just stop pretending that all you eat is celery and salad, because clearly that isn’t the case. Look, I binge on Ben & Jerry’s too, I’m just saying.

- “I no understand!”
Okay, so I have spoken to you several times. We’ve conversed pleasantly while I was talking to you as my client, or while I was ordering something from you at the coffee place. But all of a freaking sudden, when I have a problem or a question that you don’t like, your accent becomes a lot stronger and you don’t understand what I’m saying. I call bullshit, you assmonkey. Just because you’re bilingual doesn’t mean you can avoid my English wrath. Ohhhh no, it doesn’t work like that. Stop lying to me. You don’t think I’ll learn a nasty phrase in your language? Oh my friend, how you underestimate me.

- “You should really be on this conference call, it’s tres important”
HA! You expect me to believe that? Nice try. I’ll hop on the call, but trust you me, I’m not paying any attention. I’m more than likely knitting and/or mocking you incessantly while I pray that my ‘mute’ button isn’t broken. An important conference call. What an oxymoron. Lies! Liiiies! If it’s really important and I don’t do it, you’ll yell at me. At that point, I’ll start doing it.

And oh yeah, sorry about the lack of posting. Work has lately put me into an extraordinarily bad/suicidal/homicidal mood and by the time I get home, I have no interest in amusing others on the internet. Sorry about that…..

Warm Summer Nights

Today was freakishingly warm for this neck of the woods…..27 and beee-autiful. Accordingly, tonight is freakishly warm and very reminiscent of a gorgeous warm summer night.

I was walking home from the gym and remembered just how much I LOVE these nights.  The temperature is perfect, you’re in no hurry at all and everything seems absolutely possible and never out of reach.

I feel so alive and human in warm weather and specifically warm nights. Living in a cold climate for a good chunk of the year, you don’t take tolerable temperatures forgranted. Personally, I don’t feel very human-like when trudging through calf-deep snow, getting pelted by angry snowflakes and having your eyelashes freeze shut. Something about that just puts a damper on life, you know?

Warm nights have so much freedom to me. I remember spilling many a secret on a warm summer night, feeling unusually comfortable and sure of things in the dark and the heat. There’s just no rush, to get in before it’s cold, or before your extremities go numb. Time stands still. I love it.

Years and years ago, one of the first times the boyfriend came out to Saskatchewan with me, we drove out to the middle of nowhere. We climbed onto the roof of the car and just lied there, talking for hours, staring at the stars. And it was EXACTLY the temp that it is tonight, I swear.

It reminds me of camping as a kid, when we were allowed to stay up late with the grownups and poke at the fire. It reminds me of entire months where there was no school, no dance class, no alarms, no homework. It reminds me of grade 8, where I walked around the block with my first serious crush at the school play afterparty. It reminds me of drunken nights spent on Toronto patios. It reminds me of silence for some reason, which I love. It reminds me of the countless trips my family made across the prairies, zooming along in the dark coming home from the grandparents, with the windows wide open…..my dad called it 4×100 air conditioning….open all 4 windows, drive 100 km/hr. It reminds me of the stillness right before a wicked thunderstorm. It reminds me of knitting on the porch, forging new friendships a few years back.

It calms me down and makes me believe anything is possible.

It apparently makes me very emo. Meh. It’s my blog, I’ll emo it up if I want to.

And on that note, I have a walk to nowhere that I have to sneak in before bedtime. Mother Nature is going to clue in to the fact that we weren’t supposed to get this weather for a good month and a half or so pretty soon, and I’m going to take advantage of as much of it as I can. Hell, I’m even wearing a skirt! It MUST be affecting me!

Subway Fail.

Did you ever hear the one about the Amish guy, the subway train at rush hour and the hordes of angry Torontonians? No?! Well, let me fill ya in.

Yesterday as Emerald and I were beginning our journey home, we were sharing our subway car with the usual mix. An unusual addition to the mix though was a group of three Amish folk. Two of them were sitting in the seats, one was meandering around inside the car. He got bored as we waited to go (it was the end of the line, the train stops for a bit) and wandered out onto the platform.

As he is toodling around outside, doing nothing in particular that I could discern, the train gets ready to leave. To move on down the track and out of the station, so that all the other trains on that line could continue moving efficiently and get everyone home nice and smooth-like. You know, like trains do.

Now, I don’t expect people who don’t live in a city with a subway train to know how they work, to be familiar with the system, the protocol. And neither did the people who designed the trains for the TTC. If you ride the train long enough, you learn to recognize the sounds that indicate you’re about to move. Of course, not everyone has this well-trained transit ear. So, we make it easy for you…..

When the train is about to shut the doors and leave, BRIGHT ORANGE LIGHTS FLASH OVER EVERY SINGLE DOOR AT THE SAME TIME THAT A LOUD OBNOXIOUS ‘DING DONG DING’ GOES OFF OUTSIDE AND INSIDE THE TRAIN.

This way, if you are hearing impaired, you can see the lights as an indication to get your ass on or off the train. Alternatively, if you are vision impaired, you can hear that the doors are about to shut. Easy, right?

Apparently not for our restless Amish traveller. He wasn’t alerted or alarmed in any way to the flashing lights and dinging noises three feet away from him. Oh no. Unphased.

So imagine his surprise and disbelief when the doors started closing, seperating him from his two friends smart enough to sit their asses down and wait to go.

He panicked, and bolted towards the closing doors. He squeezed his body, minus his right arm and the suitcase he was hanging onto with his hand, into the train. Lacking the strength to push the doors back open and faced with the prospect of losing his arm in a tunnel, he released the suitcase and pulled his arm into the train.

Now. For a guy who didn’t understand how to get on or off the subway, I was amazed at the speed of what he did next. Without skipping a beat, he smashed the Passenger Safety Alarm. I don’t  know how he even located the damn thing, read the instructions, thought it through and decided to hit it all so fast.

Don't press, unless you want to be a total douchebag

He. Hit. The. Safety. Alarm. The train came to a screeching halt and immediately we were accosted by a high pitched, constant whining tone. The doors of the train were locked shut and we had nothing to do but wait until the emergency personnel arrived. Nothing to do that is, except for yell at our moronic travelling companion. And yell we all did. The entire train car groaned in unison. Swears were thrown out with no abandon.

He looked astonished that we weren’t all breathing a sigh of relief, for now he could get his damned blue suitcase back. He posed a question to the entire car, “Why can’t I open the door? How do I open the door??”

To which Emerald, bless her heart, blunty and loudly stated, “You can’t! You hit the EMERGENCY alarm! The train is stopped, you’ve locked it down and now we probably have to wait for an ambulance and the TTC officials to show up! GAWD!”

We all sat there, passively fuming in our oh-so-Canadian way (getting mad without getting mad…….it’s a thing we do) for a few minutes while people gathering on the platform stared at us as though we were animals in a zoo. We stared back.

The TTC personnel arrived and the one worker became very agitated when he realized there was no emergency, only stupidity.

Upon entering the train, and thrusting the blue suitcase in front of him, he loudly asked, ‘Who the FUCK threw this onto the platform???’ (Ah, I love this city).

Amish guy claimed it, chuckling and stuttering and trying to explain the situation. What was most amazing is that he seemed genuinely clueless about what he had done, how he had stopped the entire subway line, how everybody was giving him the cut-eye for messing with their commute and forcing them to listen to a high pitched buzz for the last few minutes. It didn’t strike him as strange at all to ask a city of 5 million to fall at his knees.

We then continued on with our trip, uninterrupted.

Now, here’s the thing. It was obvious due to this person’s background that this may have been one of a handful of times in his life that he was on the subway. That’s cool. I’m alright with that. I will gladly give people directions on the subway. But I dont feel that that was a valid excuse in this case.

Hundreds of newbies ride the TTC every single day. I’m willing to bet a good half of them don’t speak english, and that a good half of them have never or have rarely taken a subway. But, they all manage to figure out the drill. Wait for subway. Get on subway. Ride. If they forget the protocol, remember, we’ve made it simple for them with the FLASHING ORANGE LIGHTS AND DINGING prior to departure of the station. It’s a stimulus. People respond. Monkeys respond to noises and bright lights. This guy didn’t.

It pisses me off that I had to have my commute wrecked by a guy less reactive than a monkey. I don’t want to be there the day a car is sliding on the ice, honking and flashing his lights to alert the guy to move his ass out of the way. He’d probably smile and wave.

I hope he got fined. Oh, and in case you’re wondering…….the correct answer would have been to ride to the next subway stop, get onto the train going BACK to the original stop, and get your suitcase. Stupid does not equal emergency. Thanks for playing.

Rants, with a bit of an ode to one special guy.

I have blogging performance anxiety. I don’t know what to write about after my extended and inexcusable absence.

So, I will do what I seem to do best…..write rants. I have recently adopted the habit of saying, ‘Dear xxxxx’, then listing what I hate about them, then ending with ‘Luuuuuuuv, Talea’. Sometimes, I come out with some pretty good ones, I’m not going to lie. In the spirit of that, I will ease myself back into blogging by returning to the familiar…….Angry Talea.

Dear Particular Client Who Shall Remain Unnamed, So I Don’t Lose My Job:
Please understand that I do not wake up each morning and think to myself, ‘Gee, how can I go about fucking up Xxxxx’s life, so that they will yell and curse at me, accusing me of things I didn’t do. Hmmmmm.’ You don’t seem to realize this. I hate you. Please stop yelling at me for doing my job. Luv, Talea.

Dear Shopper’s Drug Mart:
Damn you! Damn you all to hell! Damn your marketing people and the people who design your stores and all of your retail psychologists. I routinely walk in to pick up one thing. I routinely walk out $50-$80 poorer. I have like, 4 bottles of shampoo right now. Why? Because I CAN’T SAY NO TO YOU! The way you display things, and light them, and offer me free points and have rotating sales on everything I don’t need! Dammit!

Dear Guy Who Took That Plane Hostage in Jamaica Yesterday:
Um, first off, I hope you get what’s coming to you. Second, your timing was very poor. I was in fact ON A PLANE, 35,000 feet above the ground where I was absent mindedly surfing through the channels on my wee personal TV, when I saw two stations covering your little debacle. For a person with a serious flying phobia, this was NOT cool. I about shit my pants, imagining that I was next. Seriously. Not cool.

Dear Vin Diesel:
Mmmmmmmmm. Thank you for being so pretty.

Ahem.

Woo.

I’m back. I promise. Yeah, I know….that wasn’t a rant. But what the hell right? It’s my blog and I’ll post conveniently cropped pictures of my Vin if I want to.

Dear Right Armpit:
What the hell-ass? Why are you so itchy lately? I can’t be going around, itching my armpits without drawing comparisons to a monkey and providing people with amusing mental images that I’d rather not inspire. Please stop it.

Dear Sweaty McSweaterson:
Dude, I know we’re at the gym. I get it, we’re supposed to sweat. But when the back of your shirt looks like you went through your neighbour’s Slip and Slide on your back, you need to see someone about that shit. Really. They have meds for that. I’m sure your cardiologist would be very proud, but I don’t want to look at that. It’s 2009….no excuses, take care of your embarassing medical ailments.

Dear Primus:
Your service sucks and your inability to read my emails stating my desire to cancel service is unbelievable. Also, go ahead, keep charging my credit card. I’ll keep reversing it. And by the way, suck my balls.

Dear Ottawa:
It was Sunday afternoon, 3 PM. So why the hell did we have to go to three restaurants to find one that was open? You call yourself a city? You won’t even serve me nachos! Boo to you, Ottawa. Boo. To. You.

Dear Hostesses at Restaurants Lately:
When I come into your establishment with my chosen dining partner/s, it is your job as a hostess to greet me and welcome me. You all seem to have that down pat. Until recently, you would follow it up by doing some quick math in your head, then stating the number of my party participants and repeating it back to me in a question. As in, ‘For two?’ This was to ensure you seated us at a table with the appropriate number of seats in order for us to dine comfortably, and to confirm that we weren’t expecting other attendants. It was a good system. It worked.
Recently though, you all seem to be forgetting this. You say hello. Then…silence. I am obviously there to eat. Do not stare at me and expect me to tell you what I’m there for. I’m not the one at work. Please do your job. Thanks.

Dear Brain:
Please come up with some blogging ideas soon. This post sort of sucks. Thanks.