blogthecat

Envy

Do you ever look at someone and go, “I want to trade?” Like, “I want to look like that person and have everything they have. It looks so easy and nice. I want to shed all my crappy bits and forget I ever had them.” That sort of thing? I do sometimes, and I did today at, surprise, Meinhardt’s, that den of inequity and upturned noses I go to every day because I'm lazy (it's around the corner).

I saw this woman, about my age, with her daughter, about seven, waiting at the deli just like me and Oliver. They were basically wearing matching outfits, which sounds like loserville, but at that moment it wasn’t. Poofy short black skirts, tanks, and thin cream cardigans, all of the finest material. Willowy frames. Clothes hanging just so. Expensive gladiator sandals. Mom with black toe polish, girl with red. Perfectly messed but elegant ponytails. Delicate, refined faces only kissed by the sun.

Awed and impressed, I blurted out: “Did you guys just get your toes done today?”

It was probably only a second before the mom responded, but it felt like an eternity, maybe because of the coolness of her gaze. “No, it’s been a while.” It wasn’t mean, but it wasn’t kindly either. She might have been having a bad day. Maybe "guys" was the wrong word.

I do know that I didn’t want to be her anymore. I looked down at my always slightly disheveled self and then further at Oliver’s complete messiness (at all times at least one of: crazy hair, belly popping out, drool strands, food debris, or boogers) and I knew we made people smile. People talk to us constantly. People laugh with us, they open doors for us, and they pick up after us when we drop our belongings everywhere. They might not want to be us, but we’ll take what we've got. It’s a lot.

Who are you? Who who, who who?

Today I walked into our neighborhood coffee shop, Phoscao, a little lighter than usual. It was a nanny day, and for once I didn’t have Oliver strapped to me or in the stroller in front of me. I anticipated owners Kin and Kam’s disappointed reaction upon seeing me so unencumbered, but they still managed a smile. While they made my coffee, I scanned the shop to see if anyone I knew was there, and sure enough a couple of moms I talk to at the playground had taken over the back bench with their babes.

“Hi Chandra! Hi Amy!” I said, approaching their table and dodging their little ones who were scrambling about on the floor.

Blank stares.

I stepped closer, imagining there must be sun in their eyes or that I was too far away. Nope—nothing.

For some reason, I adopted a querying tone: “I’m Oliver’s mom? Kiley?”

Bright smiles of comprehension: “Oh yes, yes! Kiley! Kiley, how's it going? Where's Oliver?”

From then on, the conversation was smooth. But it was a bit stunning to not be recognized by people you chat with a couple of times a week—sometimes about quite personal things. I realized, not for the first time, but more viscerally than I had before, that I am incomplete, even a stranger, without Oliver to these moms. Our babies are our shorthand, our reason for speaking at all.

Later in the day I headed over to the park with Oliver and saw Chandra again. She smiled widely this time.

“Hi Oliver! How are you?" she asked, bending down to his eye level.

“Fine!” I answered for him. And that was that. And it’s okay, it really is … I do it, too, I’m sure … but it’s still weird.

Etymological concerns

OMG it hurts when your baby bites your nipple! I’ve been waiting for Oliver to do it, having heard other mothers talk about it, but nothing prepares you for the clamping down of two razor-like teeth on intensely sensitive skin. Thankfully, I had read about what not to do: scream bloody murder at the top of your lungs and whack baby’s head until he lets go—which is precisely what it feels like you must do to stop the blinding pain. No, there is a better option: draw baby’s head in until your boob surrounds his nostrils and he must release to breathe. I don’t know if I can say I so much drew Oliver’s head in as buried it deep, fast, and with feeling into my boob.

He did release. Then he did it again. This time after I smothered him, he actually looked up at me and grinned. A new game. Oh no!

p.s. Is that where the word "nip" comes from? I don't doubt the action could have prompted a new word.

An unfortunate encounter

You know when you bump into someone you are wholly, massively, totally unprepared to bump into? When your mouth gums up, your brain freezes, and a thick, whooshing vibration invades your ears, blocking out all relevant sound? When your interior dialogue drowns out the conversation you’re supposed to be having?

It happened to me last week. The context: a much-deserved appointment with my hairdresser, Kelli. My hair was a bushy, frayed, SOS-pad of blond mixed with dull brown and grey at the roots and it was time to take action. I showed up to the salon without thinking twice about my ensemble since I knew I would be mercifully covered in the same salon robe every other client would be wearing. As a result, my outfit could only be described as soccer-mom meets lady-who-feeds-the-pigeons-in-the-park: bright, white running shoes, slouchy, stretchy, long black shorts, shapeless t-shirt with traces of hastily wiped-off spitup, and the piece de résistance … plastic Safeway bag to hold my wallet since I couldn’t find my purse in the wreck of my baby-bombed apartment.

Not ten minutes into the soothing sounds of Kelli’s scissors, I heard her exclaim: “Jeff!” I passed a quick hand over my mouth to wipe away possible drool and squinted into the mirror. There stood Jeff. Not any Jeff. Jeff, my good friend from my life pre-Oliver. Seriously pre-Oliver … I knew Jeff in a period of my life when I went to the gym, smoked more than I ate, got my eyebrows waxed, and wore only uncomfortable shoes that tore into the skin on my feet. We partied hard and we looked good, and that was about all that mattered for a while.

Now—six years since I had last seen him—stood Jeff, not two feet away from me. Two feet away from the bright white trainers poking out under my robe. Two feet away from my post-partum dumpling of a bum. Two feet away from the plastic bag tucked under Kelli’s station. Two feet too close for my state of dishevelment.

After big hugs, Jeff sat down in the chair right beside me and we began to catch up. Except I couldn’t hear him. The mouth on his handsome face was obviously forming words, and I was nodding furiously to show my grasp of these words, but I was taking nothing in. All I could think was:

“Jeff here. Plastic bag under chair. Must give back robe before leaving premises. Will be me leaving before Jeff. Jeff will see me leave. Oh God, Jeff will see me leave.”

At a certain point, Jeff must have caught on that I wasn’t listening. He asked mischievously, “You like that sort of thing?” in reference to his description of his current job. I mumbled, “Yes, well yes, I like the industry.” I knew he was in the pharmaceutical field so I thought there was a slim chance I had responded in some way appropriately. Later I was able to piece together what he had actually said … something about his role helping doctors use defibrillators on urgent cardiac arrest patients. “I like the industry.” Nice.

Then sadly, Kelli declared my hair done. I murmured my approval, concurred with Jeff that I’d see him when I came back from the changing room, then slunk away from the chair. I saw a back-door exit and contemplated making a run for it. I didn’t. But neither did I trot back to Kelli’s chair to say a real goodbye to Jeff. I snuck quietly to the front desk, paid, then ran like the wind to the door, humming madly to block the sound of the plastic bag crinkling and crackling beside me. The horror.

Breaking news

The toilet seat has fallen right off. Yep, it slid right over and let go. While I was on it. THE END.

Down the drain

Because I know you are dying to know, our toilet saga continues, with a few new developments. Our landlord came over with the plumber last week, and this time, Craig was home—good because I can’t speak to the landlord just now. This is because she called me a few days ago to (a) ban me from painting green accents I had had my heart set on in the LD's alcove (interfering mightily with my nesting impulses), and (b) ask me whether I thought our friend who visited us last month had savaged the toilet during his stay. Okay, she didn’t say “savaged” but it was close. The call came in the middle of a work meeting, too. Cartoonish smoke spirals and swear words streamed out my ears, and it was all I could do to remain professional.

So I shut myself in my office when she came over with the plumber. Craig stood guard while they dismantled the toilet. After a few minutes, I heard some commotion—they had evidently found the source of the evils. Good, I thought—proof that there WAS something wrong with the GD pipes. The door to the office opened. Craig stepped in with a sort of sick, green expression on his face, and asked quietly, “Have you dropped a necklace down the toilet recently?”

As anyone who has ever been pregnant knows, there is a lot of peeing that goes on at night. A. Lot. Especially in the first trimester. You are peeing so often that when you rise in the morning, you feel like your night has been spent as much on the pot as much as in bed. So about four months ago, during pee #22, at about 4 a.m., I hardly blinked when I felt my chain and pendant slide off my neck, down my body, and into the dark abyss of the toilet water. Sitting there with no light on, tired as tired can be, it took me but a moment’s contemplation before I flushed the toilet and hoped for the best.

Was it wrong? It was. In my defense, it was the first trimester. Enough said.

I met Craig’s eyes and nodded. “Yes, I did drop a necklace down there. Have they found it?”

“Yes.”

“Did you recognize it as mine?”

“Yes.”

“Did you tell them you recognized it?”

“No. If it had had a big K-I-L-E-Y pendant hanging off it, I wouldn’t have claimed it,” he said. “Not with the looks I was getting in there.”

He bravely made his way out of the office, back into the bathroom to thank the landlord and plumber for their mysterious discovery. They left with the necklace.

It is now five days later. The toilet makes more noise than ever.

One of those days

We have a screwy toilet. It’ll be fine for a couple of months, dormant really, and then like a monster it wakes up, grumpy as all hell. It been up for a couple of weeks now and making threatening noises, gurgling and choking during the last throes of the flush. We’ve taken to standing over it—transfixed in a mixture of fear and morbid curiosity—to see if it will make good on its promises and really explode.

Only today did we snap out of it and call the landlord. By the time she could come over, I was alone; Craig was on his way to the airport for a ski trip. It was up to me to explain our way to better plumbing.

We faced the toilet. I articulated the problem. She flushed it. Hardly a sound. Cool, clear water filled up gently and quickly to the necessary level. I laughed nervously, and mumbled the age-old truism about bringing a broken car to the mechanic only to have it purr like new in the shop. She ignored me, and flushed again. If possible, it was quieter. I didn’t say anything. “Again?” she asked, darting a smug look over at me. “Why not?” I said, and endured the third perfectly normal, obedient flush.

We backed out of the bathroom, but I couldn’t leave it there. I was feeling dumb and vengeful (a horrible combination) and needing to assert my tenant’s rights somehow. I led her to the bedroom, where there’s a light fixture near the end of one of our alcoves (the one that will become the baby’s room) that we’ve never been able to turn on. I suggested it might be faulty wiring. Over she marched to the light. Reached her hand up to the back of it, grasped a little chain, and pulled it softly. On went the light.

She left. We didn’t exchange many pleasantries. I went to take a pee. Flushed the toilet. Listened stonefaced as the water struggled noisily though the dirty rotten pipes.   

Branders, shmanders

Some of the work Craig and I do is what’s called branding and positioning: we help clients identify and communicate their most compelling strengths and stories and make a positive impression in the marketplace. It can be neat work, because part of it involves activating the sincere values and beliefs at the core of a company. It's not just a matter of pretty language and graphics. Good brands tap into the personality—and people—of a company.

When we brainstormed our own company website, we definitely wanted to practice what we preach. We wanted a website that conveyed both our professional offerings and a sense of who we are—since our brand is not just about “strategy, marketing, communications” but also Kiley and Craig. For the most part, we’re happy with the result. But for one glaring problem—which we just discovered.

We plopped a quote we thought was pretty cool and representative of our brand up on our homepage:

The value of an idea lies in the using of it.
Thomas Edison

In other words, hire us to help you develop your ideas and turn them into real things—don’t waste them.

So far so good on the branding front. Thank you, Thomas Edison.

Craig broke bad news to me tonight at dinner. He was listening to CBC radio today and it came up that Edison’s brilliance came at a cost. Seems he routinely sent bored schoolchildren into the neighbourhood to gather up cats (and dogs) that he would then electrocute in a public square to prove the deadliness of a competitor’s electrical invention.

As you know, I am close to insane in my adoration of cats. Like, there's-going-to-be-something-on-my-tombstone-about-cats kind of adoration. Okay, not that bad, but really close.

So the cat-electrocuting Edison in the place of honour on our homepage? Ungood. Distinctly ungood.

I would fire us.

Time for a new quote.

p.s. Edison didn't stop at cats, as you'll see from the link above.
p.p.s. Did you know about this? Craig's Uncle Wayne sent us an email about it a few months back, but we thought he was just quipping (he's a witty guy) and we didn't look into it. A mistake.

Husband gone wrong (or, not all films with women in them are chick flicks)

I am about to beat my husband to an unrecognizable pulp, and then blow him to smithereens. Okay, I’m not, but I would if I acted on my emotions the way people do in the action movies he so loves. Craig’s fatal flaw today is lumping any movie with a prominent female character in it and a narrative touching on love or relationships into the unfortunate category “chick flick.”

If I ignore its terrible misuse of the adjective “stereotypical,” I mostly agree with Wikipedia’s definition of chick flick as “slang for a movie, usually a romantic, contrived comedy, that appeals to the stereotypical tastes of the female gender.” In other words, chick flicks are generally bad movies. I don’t like bad movies. I do like movies that explore realistic problems in fresh, well-constructed narratives, whether they’re led by male or female protagonists. If there’s some emotion along the way, I can deal—it doesn’t feel mushy to me unless it’s ham-handedly done.

Hugh Dancy, one of the male actors in this season’s “The Jane Austen Book Club,” responded as follows to the accusation of his involvement in a chick flick: “A ‘chick flick’ implies a kind of frothiness, a surface quality and not really, in a way, related to life. These [‘Book Club’ characters] are people living real lives and facing real challenges. I don’t think of the film that way. I think about it as a script and a story.”

Couldn't agree more.

The film’s female director, Robin Swicord, asserts, "I think that it's only women who are told that their movies are in a separate category, as if the other categories of film were the real categories."

I wouldn’t go so far as Swicord: I wouldn’t dispute that there is a category appropriately called “chick flicks.” I simply say that the category should be considered much smaller than it is by my dumb-dumb husband and others of his ilk. It should be limited to films like “The Holiday” or “The Wedding Planner” or most Sandra Bullock films. Chick flicks should be thought of as “bad films directed at women.”

What are not chick flicks?

•    Dirty Dancing
•    Ghost
•    Pretty Woman
•    Thelma and Louise
•    and yes, Terms of Endearment

Why? Because they are great films that only neanderthalesque men should be incapable of enjoying. They are rich, beautiful films with smart dialogue and great acting that make us think about life and all its complications and wonders. Tell me, men, what is so icky about that?

Do you not feel?

Do you not love?

So many questions I could ask, but I must go down to the living room and bounce on Craig's head in all my pregnant heaviness until he agrees to watch “Evening” with me. And like it.

The L-Spot

Into all our lives fall days of reckoning. Today was one of them for me. Scrambling out the door on my way to a doctor’s appointment, I chanced a glance down upon my outfit, and what I saw I could not quite believe. Toe to neck: Merrill slipper-like pullons, meant only for indoor, private use; pale pink Calvin Klein socks; six-year-old stretchy low-rise Levis made before they realized the back HAS to be higher than the front; a seven-year-old Club Monaco t-shirt with a little hole covered by a pale yellow, cabled v-neck pullover of same origin date by Tommy Hillfiger (you can see its sleeve in the picture).

You might be most offended by the sloppiness of my ensemble. Or by the ubiquitous brands or age of each item. Not I. It's the pale pink socks with the pale yellow sweater. Easter egg colours. Coordinated pastels. I am only 36. I have entered Loserville.

Did I change my outfit? No. I did not have time. I went out like that. To my appointment, to the vet, and even to a lunch on trendy Fourth Avenue where I might have bumped into anyone from my past or present.

I was really, really rushed. Still, there should be some innate instinct that steers your hand clear of choosing pale pink and pale yellow simultaneously. My fashion sense has never been strong, but today I stepped into another realm altogether. All I can say is I recognize the problem. And that's supposed to be the first step, right?

Last week I watched TV on a Friday night for the first time in about twenty years. I caught Friday Night Lights, a football drama I liked very much. I vowed to catch it this week. And next week, too. I made a plan to be a regular Friday-night-TV-watcher. But now, steeped in the shame of today's outfit selection, I know I must not be that person. Not yet. I cannot schedule a TV show on a Friday night as if it were a party. It's a slippery slope, a slippery, slippery slope.