The Peanut Gallery

Sitting next to my favourite dog.

Canada's Wonderland today was great. Good friends, fun rides, and the Peanuts characters roaming the park.

I spent a childhood reading Charlie Brown. My brother and I were devoted readers. Our favourites were Garfield and Peanuts. To this day it's our one true shared passion in life.

Peanuts' continued popularity fills me with joy. It's kind of fascinating that such a sad and often bleak little comic strip could bring people so much happiness, but it does. They never win a ball game, Snoopy never gets past "It was a dark and stormy night" in his terrible novel, Schroeder never reciprocates Lucy's feelings, Linus never reciprocates Sally's love, Linus is bullied by Lucy all his life, the Great Pumpkin never comes and Charlie Brown never kicks the football, among other of life's small ongoing failures.

It's a total projection of feeling like you're not good enough, never appreciated and isolated from others. No wonder it was so successful. Everyone feels that way.

But these deep emotions that I feel for Peanuts weren't what came out in me today when I ran to the characters and hugged them and got my photo taken (Oh yes I did). No, what came out in me was glee from my not-at-all recessed inner child. I felt like a kid again in the best possible way.

My friends humoured me, like good friends do. (In fact McPal rode the Snoopy ferris wheel with me. We had to borrow a family to be allowed on. Yeah, we went there.)

List of Summer Fun

The Dude and I have planned a summer of fun. Lat summer was this total reactionary blurb of nothing as we looked around for a new apartment, saved for the move, packed and generally ignored the season. We went to Casa Loma once. And there was a horseshoe tournament on the lake at his father's. That about covers things.

This summer is going to be different. I really want to enjoy this summer as much as possible. Last year's wasted months gave me the creeps as I felt my life slog by me with no memories to show for it.

So weird how fast time flies now.
So here is the list of awesomeness:

Canada's Wonderland
Toronto Zoo
AGO
Science Centre
ROM
Host summer party
See a theatre performance
Evening in Little Italy
Evening in the Danforth
Evening in the Beaches
CN Tower dinner

The dinner at the CN Tower is going to be what caps off our summer. The Wonderland trip is already planned. We have to complete our list by September 21, the official end of summer.

Something I've realized is that if you don't plan your fun, you can't expect it to just happen.

Roughly a Dozen

Ah, 2:30 a.m., the best time to be on the Internet instead of bed. No, not really. But here we are. Well, here I am. I'm going to assume anyone who reads this gets into bed at a reasonable hour, unlike myself.

I went to my very first concert this weekend, Lady Gaga. The lady knows how to put on a show. Unfortunately for the four of us who went, we were in the nosebleed section. And that's with $100 tickets. I really wouldn't have spent any more than that, not being a concert person to begin with. But this was different. And it was great to be out with women. Lately I've been realizing I socialize a lot more with men.

And it's nice. Men are fun, good times and good companions in life. But I ache for female friendships. It's just that my male friends live here and my female friends keep moving away, or moving farther away, or have been far away to begin with.

I don't make new friends very easily. I never have. I don't know why. I can't see myself nearly as objectively as I'd need to in order to figure that one out. But it always hits me that I have a harder time than most.

Like in belly dance I overhear women I've been dancing with for 6-12 months talk to each other. We're on a friendly class-type acquaintance basis, but the women I overheard are in contact outside of class and have each other's cell numbers. The same sort of thing happened in my drop-in improv class a few years ago. I really learned to come out of my shell, but it was other people who connected and made plans outside of class, not me. No one ever wants my contact information to hang out. I never see the openings to ask for theirs.

I don't think I'm bad company. I actually get pretty good feedback from my friends, who tell me what their friends have said about me after meeting. Usually good things, someone's taken a shine to me, or loves the way I express myself, or that I'm really cute. But it's almost as if I'm a walking standup act or a living performance exhibit. Not that I myself am being inauthentic, but more that people enjoy me in the present but don't wish to connect with me beyond that.

And I don't really know why. I do know that there are roughly about a dozen people I've met in my entire life that I've really sparked with, not counting those I've always known because they're in a class of their own. I never forget them or how they made me feel, which is pretty much feeling like a person.

I have the knack of making an impression. I'm rarely forgotten. I can make people laugh. I'm good at that. I can turn a phrase, tell a story and mingle. I just can't make friends. It's always like some force I have nothing to do with when a new friend enters my life. I let people go very rarely because they're so rare.

I wish that was different about me. I'm 27 years old and I don't know this fundamental aspect of being a fully realized person. It makes me feel lonely.

Frankly, My Dear, I Don't Give a Dress

Today is the sort of day where you get up in the morning and eat croissants. And in the absence of croissants, it's the sort of day your boyfriend goes out in search of some.

It's also a day to browse dresses that currently you cannot afford to buy.

This is my current dream dress.
I quite literally ache for it.

I would love to wear this to a wedding.
Though that's the only place I could see wearing it. But still.

This would be one of those practical buys
that I could wear pretty much everywhere.
Love those polka dots.


And this is obviously not a dress,
but right now I have this adoration for wearing watches as necklaces.

When I was visiting my friend in my hometown last week she asked me how many dresses I owned. Offhand I figured about 15. When I got home I counted them up. 22. 22 dresses. And yet I still feel the need fore more.

I haven't bought a dress from a mainstream store in about a year. It's taken that long to accumulate a unique wardrobe and develop my own look. Growing my hair out has been a part of that, and it's also been a year in the making, at least. Last summer I had decided I was going to make the change and the effort to alter my appearance in this way. It's been a slow, organic process.

Kind of a What Not To Wear sort of change, only less abrupt and on my own dime. But the idea is the same. Love your body by loving how you present it to the world.

I count the days till I can order the red dress. Oh man, how I desire it.

Central Air

The Dude and I suffered through the first wave of heat minus air conditioning. Why? Our neighbours. It became painfully clear through the winter that having say over the central air was somehow in direct proportion to who pays what, not who needs what.

They pay 70%, we pay 30%. That's the lease agreement. So in the winter we managed about 18 degrees Celsius on a good day, and sometimes as low as 14 on a bad day. Why? Because for some reason they'd turn off the heat before leaving the house, even though they were aware I work at home and would be here. Eventually we caught on to them. But yet they'd still do it.

So we had to get a space heater. In order to save literally a few bucks on the gas bill, they had to pay a whopping electric bill since we kept that bad boy plugged in all the time. Fuck man, we were cold.

So when summer rolled around early in its blazing glory and we mentioned the A/C, well, we were informed it gets very cold for them when it's turned on. Ah. And since we can't turn it on without their cooperation, the windows needing to be shut and all that, well, we were screwed. No cool air for us.

Then the extreme heat warning came into effect. Humidity, smog, high temperature, all working together to make life no longer worth living. So I talked to the more reasonable neighbour as soon as she got home from work (also just in from the overwhelming heat) and the A/C went on. Life was good. It would take awhile to cool the place down, but it was on. Even cheap people have their limits.

But then around 11:30 that night we realized we were sweltering. It came on so slowly that it was a hazy realization. Heat, after all, can make you think slow and feel stupid. I crept down to check the central air controls.

The cooling was off. The fan was on, but the cooling was off. Heat rises. They were blowing their hot air up into our apartment. Our windows were closed.

Sometimes you're so mad and so flabbergasted you don't know what to do with yourself. First I laughed and cried in a little ball. Then I wrote what I hoped was a polite letter explaining just what they had done to us. I pleaded for my health, which can't sustain this constant level of heat and humidity, which I can't leave. I asked for an open dialogue about turning the controls on and off. I explained the temperature rises up to 35 degrees in here without the A/C. So far so good.

But it's unsettling living in these uncertain ways with your neighbours.

Smokey's been hanging out by the air vents, sucking up the cool air, just like Jerry used to hang out in the heat vents in the winter. Poor old bastard.

My So-Called Quarterlife

So I've been re-watching old episodes of My So-Called Life. Man, I was 12 when that show came on the air, and sadly only 13 when it was cancelled. I was in grade seven. It kind of defined for me a burgeoning teenage existence. I was too young to long for the independence and excitement that Angela wanted, but I was close.

It hit me around the same time, my grade 10 year. I felt stuck in a rut, like I didn't belong with my current friends and like my look and personality and the way everyone saw me all revolved around some bland and equally off-putting image that I couldn't break out of. I fantasized about changing schools or starting over in another city.

Since I didn't have the balls for that, I changed my hair. I chopped it all off, and for good measure I had huge blond chunks highlighted in the front and only the front. It was very punky and nothing anyone would have expected from me.

I also got new friends, and one in particular I could get in trouble with, the kind of trouble you want as a teenager: alcohol, sneaking out, secret parties, and all kinds of drama. So in a way, you could say I followed the My So-Called Life, well, life. I found my own Rayanne, so to speak, left my old friends and radically altered my appearance. Only my old friends I don't think noticed I left and there was no tears shed over my leaving.

I remember feeling like life was really happening. When I watch the show now I feel a nostalgia, not for the show, but the fact so much of that teenage drama and angst was real. Sadly, I also now relate to the adults who think Angela is being difficult or unreasonable. I didn't see it at the time.

I wish there was a show on now about this era of life. There have been a few stabs at it. I guess Friends counts. But it was hardly an attempt at realism, and even when I watch the first season now when we're supposedly the same age, they still look damn old to me. Then there was the failed Quarterlife show, cancelled after one episode.

I can't recall any others, none that really are about being in your 20s and the transition period of life. Where some of your friends are finishing school, others are getting their first jobs, some are buying homes while you still rent, and some are married and even have kids. It's a time in your life you can still feel like a kid while shouldering adult responsibilities and looking over said shoulder at others becoming full-fledged adults while you stay behind.

It's not like when you're a teen in high school and everyone is more or less in the same boat. It's not like early 20s where the differences aren't so great yet. The mid to late 20s is when everyone's life choices all come into focus and you can't help but compare.

There has always been and will always be shows about high school. I think that's probably because that short stint in our lives scars us all a little and we can't help but revisit it in various ways. I wonder why no one talks about what comes after that, after high school, and after college, but before your 30s (and the spouse, the kids, the house, the whatever).

I think there are stories to tell. Things happen to us before we go down the aisle and procreate.

Happy as a Pig in Soup

Today I got back from a trip to my hometown to see a close friend of mine. We did a lot of everything and a lot of nothing, which makes for a good trip.

Much time was spent outdoors, and unfortunately, just a tad too much of it out in the sun. And when you're fair-skinned like the two of us are, you get burned like ass. She got the worst of it. My arms suffered some rough times, but her chest lobsterized.

We left her house around 9:30 in the morning, shopping downtown commenced around 10:30, we went to a crafts fair at 12:30, and near collapsed into a patio around 2:30. Thing is I was ready for a nap. Sweet murdering bathmats was I ready for a nap. I discussed the possibility of one at the patio, and heard general agreement about taking it easy. I started living for a siesta around 3:00. It was about the only thing that was keeping me going.

But then we stopped in the market and the sun was beating down and I felt faint and crispy, so I sat down in the merciful shade nearby while my friend and a new acquaintance browsed. It was pleasant and I spritzed my face with a spray my friend had tossed my way. Then a smelly sexually ambiguous person sat down next to me and lit a cigarette, so I cut my losses and headed back out into the glare of the unforgiving sun.

We went back to a store to pick up a print she had wanted to buy and had set aside. I looked around for the print I had decided I couldn't live without and sadly found it had been sold.

We still had to go to the store for spinach and feta for a quiche we were somehow going to make at her place. There we ran into her boyfriend who invited us to a BBQ. My friend told me I literally looked terrified at the offer.

When we got back to her place I promptly fell asleep in a way that couldn't be stopped. It was like a baby who had no choice but to sleep, or like someone dying whose time had come, thank god. I was out like a light. My friend received calls all night to get us to come out to this BBQ, but we stayed in, made the quiche and generally vegetated while we recuperated from our afternoon.

Maybe this sounds like a bad day, but it wasn't. With the right company, these mishaps aren't problems, they're shenanigans and are fun and enjoyable. With a good friend, a sort of camaraderie occurs. It's too bad we don't live closer. She's probably my favourite friend to have a crazy day with.

Here is the print she bought. If it doesn't make you happy, you're nuts.

This pig's expression fills me with glee.