Gian Ghomeshi turned me into a 10-year-old

My cousin used to have this husband who used to play songs he'd like over and over again. I remember once, during a ride back home from babysitting his son, he had Eric Clapton's "Tears From Heaven" (I think that's the title) on a loop. We must have heard that song fifteen times in a row.

Okay, my uncle had recently died and the guy was obviously bereaved, but c'mon. I always thought that practice was unusual and, frankly, a tad dramatic. I knew a lot of people doing it ... when they were 10.

Now I found myself doing the same with "Your Ex-Lover is Dead" by Stars the other day. I heard it on The National Playlist on CBC Radio and I was gobsmacked.

What is my attraction to the song? Is it that the lyrics are something I can relate to as I'm empathising with my sister and the on-going divorce hassles she's experiencing? Is it the odd arrangement? Is it because I'm PMSing?

Yet Another Grey Hair

Maybe I was tempting fate.

When I pick the kids up from school, most times, I let Middle Child (always out first) play in the front of the school while I chit chat with the other parents as I wait for Daughter (always one of the last kids to leave).

Today, I went to my friend's house with Baby Boy. She lives around the corner from the school so she suggested that I leave Baby Boy with her and I would go get all our kids and bring them back. When I got there, Middle Child's class was the first to be dismissed.

"Where's (Baby Boy)?" Middle Child asked.

I told him and then added we would all walk to my friend's house together with her boys, whom Middle Child thinks the sun rises and sets upon.

"Can I play outside?" he asked and, of course, I said he could, thinking he'd remember my rule of "be sure my eyes can see your eyes."

Yeah, right.

He was there one minute. The next, he was gone. Thankfully, the three remaining kids met me right at that moment, so we went looking for him. "Oh, he probably just went to my house," sluffed off the younger of my friend's children.

And he was right.

Needless to say, Middle Child has been punished.

Needless to say, I'm rethinking my allowance of letting him leave my side.

Just Pricing Really Big Bats For Now

Wanna hear smooth?

Daughter sits near this boy in class. On Friday, he asked if this boy she always plays with is her boyfriend.

"No!" she laughed. "We're too young for that stuff!" (Ah, good! She listens!)

"Well, when you are old enough, can I be first in line?"

He phoned today and asked if Daughter wanted to have a playdate Sunday. I told her he could come to our house instead.

I picked up the kids from school and was met by my friend Slowplum.

"Did you read your emails yet?"

Turns out A Million Little Pieces may not be entirely memoirific. The Smoking Gun went looking for some mug shots of the author for their large collection when, ho ho, they couldn't find much. The one they did get looks like James Frey was a little hungover but that's about it: just some preppy who smoked a little pot and drank a bit too much Rolling Rock, not some freakazoid crackhead, oozing toxic crap out of every orafice. But, whatever, looks can be deceiving.

A few things in the book had me wondering about its veritability, but they weren't the things that were picked on by The Smoking Gun. No, I questioned how a boy from the suburbs from a nice family, who was loved, could get into the shit as far as he said he did. I questioned how someone who was so fucked up from the tons of different drugs he was purportedly doing could graduate from university.

Real, fake or somewhere in-between, A Million Little Pieces is still a great read. One could question the written tales of ancient history too. I'm not one to poo-poo the author with possibly taking liberties with facts. Rather, I'm more discouraged because the author took liberties with basic rules of punctuation.

It's like grammar karma!

And the cover is gorgeous!

If you're a comment-reading person, you ought to know that my friend Slowplum was true to her word. She brought me some peppermint bath salts. She labelled the container "Bath Candy" and Middle Child confessed that he took a piece. "That was the worst candy I've ever tasted!"

She also lent me a book: A Million Little Pieces by James Frey.

I devoured it in the course of an evening and into the night, getting into bed at 2.

The book is a memoir of Frey's experiences in rehab (Hazeldon, I would deduce). It was gut-cringing, eye-blinding and even foul-smelling. The guy must have sat down at his computer and just let it flow. You can tell it's coming from a deep, dark place of the soul.

Unlike William S. Burroughs accounts of his drug-soaked past, or that 60s era diary-esque Go Ask Alice which was required reading when I was a girl, I don't think Frey intended to scare or to gross anyone out. His account of the pain he endured getting caps and root canal without anethesia was detailed enough to put you in the chair with him but not with a mirror as well. The part of him pulling out his toenail, on the other hand, I'd rather not discuss. I'm someone who can stand the sight, sound, and smell of vomit, but that was when I put the book down and got myself a glass of water.

Being a stickler for punctuation, however, I was distracted by his complete disregard for quotation marks, commas and question marks. Ditto the freedom to capitalize just about anything (someone's House, they had Kids, my Room, the Dealer). But then again, I don't think James Joyce really got away with it either.

However, I really enjoyed it. I just went to look online to find out more about the author; see what else he has written about. Well, wouldn't you know it, it was chosen for Oprah's Book Club. Yeah, I could just see someone like Husband's suburban aunt reading about vomiting up chunks of stomach.

Someone found the food colouring

and gave it to Baby Boy.

Mmmm! Cheddar!

I'll be a little lighter today.

If you're an old gal like me, you'll remember Christopher Ward doing the yearly "Fromage" show in Much Music's early days. We were discussing it over New Year's dinner with deep sighs of respect and our lament of its passing. Frankly, Ed the Sock just doesn't have it quite like Chris did.

So, if you enjoy cheese like I do, please watch this video, put out in the 80s by the Calgary Flames.

And I can't stand Brett Hull so it makes it that much sweeter.

I am woman. Hear me meow.

Husband goes back to work tomorrow after having over a week off. I can't say I've seen much of him. Our Christmas is all travel. We hit my grandmother's, his grandmother's and my parents' all in two days and there are a LOT of people at these homes. So, no, I can't say I'm by his side the whole time. And when we've been home, he's holed himself with the XBox playing Madden.

Usually, I don't mind him doing his thing. Particularly after work, I know the guy needs to wind down a bit. He never brings crap home and, after his "alone time" he is always easy-going, helpful and generally in a good mood.

But I had my mother-in-law this week. And Husband had me doing all of the entertaining.

It started off okay. She didn't really want to do much, so I just made sure the kids didn't knock her out or annoy her too much. I cooked nice meals, made sure she had her bagels, cream cheese, soy milk and a never ending supply of coffee. I kept my bathrooms spotless and Pine-Sol fresh. We had a previous engagement at my cousin's where she was hosting a big family party for her son's 16th birthday, so she came to that. I guess she was fine (I told Husband to keep her company because I was expected to help out). There was a great spread. But then she broke a tooth off her third pastizzi. Even that didn't annoy her that much.

She was in pretty good spirits, if you don't count the bitching about her mom and siblings, but that's par for the course. She brought out her fortune telling cards, for lack of a better term. I'm not into that. I don't even read my horoscope. But I played along (unlike Husband who chuffed it off, calling it "bullhooey" or something like that). Middle Child loved the illustrations and I fostered his new interest by getting him a half-price calendar of "fantasy" illustrations (fairies, dragons, wizards, mermaids, etc).

We had a kid-friendly New Year's Eve party with friends and their children. I fast-forwarded the clocks by three hours so the kids could count down midnight at what really was 9 pm. The kids had a great time, allowing us moms to be more relaxed than usual (I had five or six drinks). The dads and my mother-in-law spent most of the three hours playing Scrabble, which is MIL's favourite game ever. My friend even said she enjoyed her company out on the porch for smoke breaks.

They left and, it's a blur how it started but, as we were tidying up, MIL got on the subject of Catholic education. She couldn't understand how intelligent people like my friends and I would subject our children to such archaic, expoitative and harmful teachings. "Frankly, it's a little hypocritical of you to call yourselves feminists and then support such a hurtful organization that may very well damage your precious children."

And it got better than that. Oh yes. She cut down just about everything I believed in and stood for. She mocked my opinions. She questioned my intelligence. She refuted my culture. She even, at one point, went on a litany of, essentially, what a shitty weak-assed woman I was. For example, she insisted that I wasn't at all close to nature and that would be my downfall. "I'm the champion recycler on my block," I argued. "I turn off the lights when I leave the room. The house is cooler than it could be in winter and warmer than it could be in summer. I walk my kids to school. I buy organic and locally when possible. Why do you say I'm not close to nature? Because I don't enjoy camping? Because I don't live near mountains and an ocean? I do the best I can with what I can."

Oh, but I fraternize with the masculine too much. Okay, I admit it. I love men. So, I disagreed with her. Women are not better than men. I was raised to believe that I was any man's equal. No, but, you see, I'm just not in tune enough with my feminine side. Huh? I'm a mother. I'm a wife. I'm a daughter, a granddaughter, a sister, an aunt, a neice. Go further. I'm creative. I'm intuitive. I'm fucking sensitive, or else I would have put my hands over my ears and walked away when she went on her rampage, just like Husband did. Don't tell me what I am and what I'm not. That was truly insulting, especially to a near 40-year-old. I'm not a child. I've had experiences and, like anyone else's, they have value. From my experiences, I have opinions which hold as much water as anyone else's.

The arguement or debate or whatever it was stemmed from the topic of organized religion, which is something I hate to discuss. I live in a community where it's nothing to blab about your church, and I find that weird and intrusive. Spirituality is a personal thing. To me, it's like telling me how you like to wipe your ass. I just don't want to know. Flip that around and I can also say I don't like to discuss my beliefs, thank you. How can I go to church and be pro-choice? Gee, I guess the same way you can protest government cutbacks to environmental issues and smoke at the same time.

She kept pressing but I wouldn't budge. All I would say is that, true, organized religion has had its moments of unholiness for certain, but billions of people in the past and present have found grace from it. For some, it gives them a set of guidelines on how to stand upright. "But that's common sense," she argued. "But some people need to be told. Not everyone is as intelligent as you are," I responded.

In the end, we saw that our feminism enacts in different ways. She wants to single-handedly change the world. And I just want to go through life doing no harm, teach that to my kids, and hope other people are doing the same. My wish is that she respects my decision as I respect and do my best to support hers. It's the womanly thing to do.