blogthecat

Driving Guru

I am that 40-year-old loser in the Larry’s Driving School car. The one driving with the instructor beside her, the one trying to ignore the gleeful teens giving her ironic thumbs-up and catcalling from the sidewalk. The one who never really, desperately needed her license until now, and who now really, desperately does.

To get into this car, I had to endure two heinous bootcamp weekends in a Larry’s Driving School classroom last year listening to a chainsmoking, hungover teacher explain the rules of the road to me alongside a dozen sullen, stinky high-school students (also hungover) and a couple of veteran lawbreakers forced to show up. So I am relatively happy to be the loser in the car because it means I have graduated from being the loser in the classroom, and because my hours in this car may make it possible for me to finally … drive. Legally. Unassisted. Like a big girl. With two kids. Yeesh.

Anyhoo. My mortification is not the intended subject of this post. What is is the salve for it: my Yoda-esque driving instructor, Param. Param, a bearded 70-year-old former helicopter pilot (in his native India) with a pulse rate of about 20, didn’t blink when I ran a stop sign on our first outing, when I threatened to speed through a busy intersection on my second, and when I nearly stole the right-of-way of a motorized wheelchair on a turn just a few days ago. During these episodes he smiles patiently and calls them my “learning,” noting serenely that “knowledge is power.”

Param is a philosopher as much as he is a driving instructor. Driving well, he tells me, is “an effort of body, mind, and soul.” When I point out a tailgater, he says, “This is not your problem. It is not your blood pressure shooting through the roof. You are calm. They are not. This is too bad for them.” He does, however, applaud my desire for greater space between cars. In fact, he says, we need greater space in all things: “When we have space we have time to reflect. We do not act emotionally. We have the distance to act in our best interests.”

To my complaint that it feels like we’re driving like slugs in a residential area (speed limit 40 km/h), Param says, “More time to enjoy yourself and the scenery.” When a car in front of me blocks my way and there's a chance for me to go around him, he wonders, “Do you really care about ten seconds so much? Will it make a difference to your day?”

When I asked Param how he got so Zen, he told me that he was born this way. “My mother asked the doctors to keep checking on me when I was in the hospital because I was so calm she didn’t believe I was really alive.”

Though he may be quiet, Param has lots to say. As you will have gathered, our driving lessons are as much contemplations of life as they are rote lessons about parallel parking and safe following distances. Our last session together is a perfect example.

I was rattled, and Param knew it the minute I dropped into the driver’s seat. It took about half an hour and about five egregious mistakes before I apologized, explaining a little about the stresses on my mind, including my dying cat and the sheer cumulative exhaustion of my year post-spinal-cord-injury avec newborn and toddler. It was a bit heavy for a chat with your typical driving instructor, but Param hardly fits this description. True to form, he came back with a response that required me to intensify my grip on the wheel and my sense of my surroundings, so taken was I with his words.

“None of us escapes in life,” he said. “Every one of us receives a piece of suffering; some more than others, but each one of us nonetheless.”

“Life will have its way with us, and to a certain degree, there is nothing we can do about it,” he continued. “But there is always something within our control. One of the most important things we can do in life is to understand what is in our control and what is not, what power we have to change things. Some people instinctively know this, and others learn it. The unfortunate never do understand this truth and are always in the position of victim.”

Param then gently advised me to get some rest and let up a bit on myself. Then, as he always does, he drew back from his life philosophizing and applied it to the task at hand: driving. To be precise, defensive driving (all drivers have a certain amount of power to protect themselves against others’ mistakes). His segue brought me back to the road—and to the hell task of lane changing—a little less jumpy and fearful.

You never know when you’re going to meet someone extraordinary, or how.

Oasis in a busy day

Ricocheting between errands yesterday, Craig and I fell into a convenience store on Broadway to grab some sustenance, yammering inanely as we so often do. Our thoughts were on our various missions involving setting up the baby’s room (okay, alcove) in some fashion befitting his infant self. Soon, we would be braving the “soul-destroying” (Craig) IKEA experience, and we were already a little hysterical at the prospect.

I loaded our purchases onto the countertop, hardly looking at the man who was serving us, so distracted was I at the time. Gum, juice, and a Cadbury Thins chocolate bar. I was already beginning to turn toward the exit when the storekeeper spoke. He was East Asian and very calm and poised. He looked me in the eyes, then quietly but clearly said, “I wish you good luck. God bless.” Then he glanced down for the briefest second at my tummy, which is now proudly announcing the imminent being within.

I am not religious, but I felt blessed. The man was reverential, polite, and honest. He halted me in my tracks, both physically and in my mind. I looked up at Craig, whose eyes had gone as soft as mine, and … let’s just say we had a moment.

The kindness of strangers. It can be transformative.

Bringing up baby

A couple of months ago, Craig and I found out that the science experiment currently underway in my belly will eventually be a little boy. Now, despite the fact that it could have gone only one of two ways—girl or boy—I have to say we were slightly surprised. Turns out my idea of “baby” was essentially a caricature: think cuddly, cooing, pink-swaddled, and with soft tufts of hair just aching to be gently combed into adorable ornaments.

Pathetic, yes, but true nonetheless.

Of course, it didn’t take long to adjust my vision. A lot less pink, a little less hair, and a need for me to brush up on my understanding of outer space, superheroes, Star Wars, and (gasp!) trucks and trains. I figure that not every one of these stereotypes will turn up in little dude (aka the LD), but that if I prepare for all of them, I’ll stand a fighting chance of keeping up and not being a drip of a mom.

Plus, I secretly know, just know, that the LD will be a voracious reader and nature-lover, and be uncommonly mellow for one of his gender. He might even let me grow his hair a little long and allow the odd accent of pink into his dapper wee wardrobe. We will sing songs together and play sweetly with Lego, with all his stuffed animals looking on beatifically.

And he will not be beaten black and blue in the schoolyard.

I cling to these things.

So it was with horror that I read Kate Fillion’s January 9 article in Macleans, How to Fix Boys. In it, she interviews child development expert Leonard Sax, who asserts the following:

• The brain of the five-year-old boy—in terms of maturity, particularly in the language area—is at about the same place as the brain of a three-and-a-half-year-old girl.
• There are huge differences in the ability of the average six-year-old girl and boy to sit still and be quiet.
• Boys develop a notion in kindergarten that doing what the teacher wants and being good is unmasculine.
• You should never ask a five-year-old, especially not a boy, to sit down and stay quiet.
• Boys often find school so prohibitive to their natural impulses that they vent by spending hours sitting in front of their video-game consoles, banging away on the game controller.
• Online pornography has displaced the pursuit of real girls for a significant number of boys.

OH MY GOD! I don’t know how else to put it. Anyone know of a good home schooling link?

An end to the dominion of the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed?

It was with great delight that I read a few weeks ago of a group that's started to defend the rights of "owls"—people who can't string two thoughts together before noon but who ramp right up when "larks" are petering out for the day. Larks, aka early risers, have always enjoyed the general social consensus that "early bird gets the worm," while owls get tarred with the notion that we are lazy and maladjusted. But now we have B-Society, which is agitating for our equal rights with those annoying crack-of-dawn keeners.

I guess it’s apparent that I’m a hard-core owl—have been since I was a child. The most common way for me to fall asleep at night is with my reading light blazing in my face. I get fidgety when Craig casts us into darkness when he’s ready to drop off (which usually takes him two maddening seconds, even when I’m yammering into his ear with all my finally fully formed ideas). When the sun comes streaming through our skylight and side window in the morning, I hit my optimum sleep zone—that delicious, groggy period where everything is slow and dulled, muscles are heavy and seemingly resistant to anything but sinking into an even more comfortable position, and waking life seems like a TV show I can watch later on at my leisure.

So I am thrilled to see B-Society working so hard for my cause. The group bases its argument on science (it claims owls have a different circadian rhythm than larks) and the idea that it’s dumb to organize entire populations according to a schedule designed for the Industrial Revolution given we’re now in a fluid, globalized, many-time-zoned economic order.

• Do you love quiet mornings and active evenings?
• Do you feel life is too short for traffic jams?
• Are you at your most productive after 10 a.m.?

Then according to the website, you might be a B-Person (the group claims 10–15% of the population is).

There may be hope for us yet!

Funny chicks

Christopher Hitchens penned a typically controversial article for Vanity Fair early this year called, "Why Women Aren't Funny." It’s a great read, guaranteed to cause a reaction (the letters to the editor as a result of the article in the subsequent VF issue were just as entertaining).

Hitchens asserts that women are “backward in generating [humour]” compared to men and hypothesizes that the reason is that we just don’t have to be as funny as men do. He calls on Darwin for this claim, attesting that women are already appealing to men without having to make them laugh. His basic equation: being funny is to a man what being pretty and nurturing is to a woman.

Before you scream in protest, read the article through—Hitchens does make some interesting points, such as that women do have a sense of humour—it’s just more selective than men’s is. And, he speculates that it may be that men don’t want women to be funny—preferring us in the role of audience.

With these last ideas, I have experience. I don’t know how many times I’ve sat in front of a man while he tells a bad joke, trying desperately to look amused and figure out when the punch line is happening. And then fake laughing (which I am terrible at). Why do I bother? Because I don’t want them to feel bad, and because I've been socialized to be polite in such benign circumstances.

Women don’t try as hard to be funny as men do, again in my experience. But when they are funny, boy can they be funny (who didn’t love Elaine on Seinfeld? Or our very own Heather Mallick, a Canadian scribe). Not always in as ribald or explicit a way as men, but reaching at least as high on the funny scale.

In honour of funny chicks everywhere, today’s post spotlights Gill Partington, a woman who sounds impossible not to like. I found out about her in Elizabeth Renzetti’s Globe article last Saturday, "Evil Meets the Stove.” Ms. Partington not only wrote her PhD thesis on the dissemination of conspiracy theories (so cool!) but has just come out with "The Axis of Evil Cookbook.”

Partington says the “ridiculousness of the book,” which compiles recipes from North Korea, Libya, Syria, and Cuba, “draws attention to the ridiculousness of the concept [the Axis of Evil] in the first place." Renzetti (who does a great job with this article) quotes a few of Partington’s recipe introductions in the book, including that for Korean Dog Stew:

“For vegetarians or those who are just too busy to cook a whole dog, quorn pieces make an acceptable substitute.”

When she flubs the Iranian omelette she’s making in front of Renzetti, breaking it into three pieces, she is at first horrified, then quips:

“Actually, look at it. It’s a map of the Axis of Evil. It’s not as bad as we thought—or maybe it’s much worse.”

Partington seems both goofy and intelligent as all hell. You get the sense that she couldn’t care less whether you “get” her or what she’s trying to do—she would have done it anyway. And that’s just how I like my funny, whether it's from a man or from a woman.

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 power of the underdog

“There is no excellent beauty that has not some strangeness in the proportion.”

—Francis Bacon

Bacon’s assertion is spare, eloquent, and bang-on. I saw proof of his claim today when I tuned into a summer phenomenon that I somehow missed: Paul Potts on Britain’s Got Talent. My mom told me about Potts last night, explaining that she and her colleagues have been watching his performances on YouTube at the office around a communal box of Kleenex. Now, my mom is not a reality TV person, and neither am I, so I decided her account of Potts’s effect was worth checking out. This is the video I watched on YouTube (Potts’s audition for the show):

I just regained normal breathing functions a minute ago after watching this for the fourth time. As much as I still want to jump on an airplane and hug the unlikely hero Potts for his stunning courage, tenacity, and talent, I am also able now to be a little objective about what reduced me to a pile of blubbering jelly on the carpet below my desk. It’s the way the clip highlights the complete improbability that Potts will be successful, while at the same time hinting that his success is exactly what we’re about to watch.

From the beginning, we’re made aware of Potts’s strangeness through shots of him pacing nervously in the waiting room and delivering a moving but far-from-leading-man introduction of himself to the show’s interviewers. We gulp a little when at the start of his audition, Potts tells the judges that he “wants to sing opera”—this, on a show that regularly rewards Celine Dion-like balladeers and other cheese. We witness his distress as the camera pans among the show’s skeptical judges, who look as though they’ve just smelled something unspeakably foul. And we feel his pain via several segments showcasing his confidence problems, which occur at the same time we know the judges are pondering his fate. Especially effective is the shot of Potts standing on the stage in hell as he awaits the verdict. When Simon Cowell tells Potts to go ahead, the expression on the notoriously callous judge’s face is closed and ungenerous; classic narrative tension is at an apex: all odds are against the underdog.

Now, who doesn’t love an underdog? Who hasn’t felt bullied and trodden on and swallowed by the world? Who doesn’t want Potts to wipe that dour look off Simon’s face and vindicate us all?

Within ten seconds of Potts’s performance, we know we are watching something phenomenal. Through crooked teeth, with eyes ablaze, Potts unleashes a voice powerful and pitch-perfect, a voice strengthened by the humiliations its owner has suffered over the years. It’s a voice everyone in the audience is desperate to hear; it is a salve, proof that there is justice in the world. It is a story of redemption.

The clip’s producers capture the universal, emotional response to this story by alternating between Potts, audience members shaking their heads and wiping their eyes, and the judges, whose skepticism visibly melts into willing submission and gratitude. The YouTube clip masterfully conveys the unexpected ferocity of Potts’s beauty. Potts’s voice is a marvel, but it’s the story that makes us weep.

Je ne sais quoi

For me, sexy often isn't sexy when it's deliberate, when you are knocked over the head with it and informed that you are now its lucky witness (à la MTV music video, or so much American entertainment). Sexy happens, often despite itself. If it isn't accidental, it's mysterious and edgy (the "je ne sais quoi" we often associate with hot French women), even unsettling. It defies capture in a word like "sexy."

Which brings me to the current PETA ad campaign featuring Alicia Silverstone. Introducing the ad is this text (bolded bits mine):

"Alicia Silverstone’s Sexy Veggie PSA: Sexy Hollywood star Alicia Silverstone bares all in PETA’s first-ever naked veggie testimonial PSA. Watch Alicia’s sexy video, directed by acclaimed director Dave Meyers ..."

Barforama. As for the video itself, I cringed watching it. I can see why PETA would want to get away from an earnest "save the animals" type of message in favor of a more provocative, daring device ... so why didn't they do something provocative and daring? Instead, I think they got trapped in just what they were trying to avoid: earnestness.

In the video, Zamphiresque world music (ominous already) underlies Alicia pulling herself out of water, all dripping and slow-motioned (so novel!), so she can deliver the profound message that vegetarianism is "amazing." Boy oh boy. Check it out and see what you think.

Alicia Silverstone’s Sexy Veggie PSA
Order a FREE vegetarian starter kit at GoVeg.com

Writing that sounds like speaking

Last night I went through all my blog posts and replaced hyphens—which are the default dash in so many applications—with my beloved em-dash. The hyphens have been tormenting me since I started writing blogthecat entries, but I wasn’t sure how to change them. A quick hunt for HTML codes yesterday ended my misery, and I can’t tell you how merry—delirious, even—I was as I pasted the long, elegant line over each ill-placed and unsatisfying hyphen.

The em-dash is one of my favourite punctuation marks. I try not to be its slave, since it can certainly be overused, and anything overused is ugly and distracting. Employed sparingly, however, and to proper effect, it can dramatically punch up a piece of writing. It can also add to the sense that the author is speaking her writing right to you. I think there are two reasons for this:

1. Em-dashes can be used to begin and end an interruption or aside in a sentence. Consequently, em-dash-fragmented sentences mirror how most of us actually think. We don’t think in one pure burst of linear thought most of the time. We make room for the odd tangent or revelation brought on by a previous thought. Consider the following along these lines:

“He refused to tell anyone—least of all his wife—about that embarrassing moment during the medical exam.”

Without that em-dashed clarification, the sentence would be less interesting. Even if the clarification were kept, but surrounded with commas instead of em-dashes (as it certainly could be), it would lose power:

“He refused to tell anyone, least of all his wife, about that embarrassing moment during the medical exam.”

2. The ineffectiveness of the comma substitution above attests to the second way the em-dash makes writing feel like it's being spoken: via its visual impact. It provides a nice, long break between thoughts, so the reader’s eye can have a little rest to get ready for the next piece of information. It provides rhythm, and an uneven one at that. Who among us speaks in perfectly spaced-out verbal bursts? When you listen to someone speak, often it’s their pauses, their hesitation, their lingering, etc., as much as what they’re actually saying that’s so compelling. The em-dash may be the best punctuation mark at approximating this unpredictability.

Of course, it’s hard to get away from conventional wisdom that we should always consider other marks (the comma, the semi-colon, and the period—for different reasons) before using the em-dash. I keep this in mind, and I do change the odd em-dash into another mark. But not often. And with a sigh.