Montreal

baby I'm a pro at letting go

I went with Karen to Montreal over the May long weekend.  It was perfectly parallel because we became friends five years ago when we went to Montreal for a class trip in the first month of the university program we were both in. Back then I was a stressy wreck from moving across the country and living on my own for the first time, and what? They wanted me to go to another province - an entire different province than the one I was in now, which was already an unfamiliar place - and learn some shit about community gardens? As if!

But Karen said I should take kava and I did and it helped. When graduated, she moved to Montreal for a couple of years to work, before moving back to Toronto last year. And we were going to go back to visit. My friend J’s boyfriend was turning his apartment into an Airbnb, and he let us stay there for free over the weekend.  I’d been to Montreal once before the class trip, so this was my third time, but every single time I’m awed by the buildings, how they’re all the same perfect height and have the cutest staircases, and are all designed a little bit differently but still fit together seamlessly. Everywhere you walk it feels like the streets are exactly as they should be, no empty gaps or ugly sections. Just parkettes and street art and local shops and trees.

We got there on Saturday, wandered, went out with a bunch of people, ate. One of the women’s boyfriends was from France, and I asked if they spoke French at home.

“Yes,” he said. “We try to at dinner, while we are enjoying the pleasures of the table.”

Jesus, everyone said, because there’s French and then there’s Paris French.

The woman went out with us after, once everyone had left, and said that her boyfriend had once got upset with her and said, “Do you know it’s been five days since we made love and three days since we have kissed?”

She said no, she didn’t keep track. Maybe romance is best saved for the dinner table.

--

On Sunday, we met up with some women and went to Bota Bota, which is a spa right on the harbour looking out over old Montreal. It’s got huge outdoor hot tubs, indoor steam rooms and saunas, and ice baths in wood barrels to dunk in between each station. I thought it was going to be bored (you just wander from station to station for hours), but by the time we were done, I was more related than I’ve ever been before. 

No one else would go in the ice baths, but those were my favorite. If you get past the shock, there are a few moments before the cold starts grating on your bones where your whole body wakes up. I was so warm when I got out afterward, but not warm like the claustrophobic cave of a steam room, warm like it was coming from inside me.  It would almost be worth the drive just to go there again. And again. Just to go there every weekend. I want to live there now.

That evening, we met up with J and some other people at Dieu du Ciel. I asked Karen what it meant. She learned Swiss German after working in Switzerland as an au pair 15 years ago, but she never learned Montreal French. She said she thought it meant two sons, but it turns out it means something about the sky being god.  Good beer and bad food that was trying to be good food.

I was exhausted after a full weekend of meeting new people. I’m basically a black belt at small talk, but newness drains me like a sieve.  I was at a table with Karen, J and another guy that I’d met a few times, but I was just too tired to talk. I always wonder if it’s the same way for shy people who don’t generally talk a lot, but when I’m not talking, I’m not engaged. I especially notice it all the times that I have gotten laryngitis and been literally unable to speak - without a voice I feel like I’m standing on the other side of a river with no bridge between me and everyone else. Do quiet people feel that way constantly, or are they just better able to feel connected without actively contributing to the conversation?

I showed everyone the OKCupid message I’d just got (basically “you seem cool, we should meet in person so you can prove you’re not a dude pretending to be a woman.”)  and laughed about it. J asked what I was looking for and I didn’t know how to answer. Nothing, really. I like being around people who are in relationships but I don’t know that I actually want to be in one myself.

Eventually more people showed up until there were more people that I didn’t know than people I did.   J texted me from across the table and asked if I wanted to go somewhere else. I did, and the two of us left the group and went to a queer karaoke bar. It was bigger than it looked from the front window and had a bowling alley that was used for the stage.

J’s the perfect person to go to karaoke with because she wanted to sing even less than I did, and let me tell you - I did not want to sing in front of anyone. Instead we held up the wall and made fun of everyone from the corner of the room.

A woman with long, curly curly black hair sang Piece of My Heart and rocked it. Like, maybe she hadn’t just swallowed a fistful of nails so she wasn’t full on Joplin, but she was incredible.

An overeager ginger kid went up after her. It seemed like Baby’s First Trip to a Gay Bar and he was giddy with excitement.  He sang All By Myself terribly, like even at top volume he couldn’t fully express his level of exhilaration. Everyone still applauded wildly while he walked around with diva hips, squawking.  I could imagine him imagining what the night would be like. How he’d be free and open and out. He’d come with an older woman, who I imagined was straight but had been in love with a gay man when she was young, and knew the right place to take the kid.  He probably thought it was going to be like on Glee, him getting on the stage, blowing everyone away with his voice. Attracting the attention of someone in the crowd. He bounced from table to table after he finished singing, and eventually his friend gathered him up and took him home. I think he’ll remember the way people clapped for him.

Two women tried and failed to rap The Real Slim Shady. The host of the bar butchered Scream and Shout, but he stripped down to only his underwear (his jeans caught around his ankles, where he was still wearing shoes) and had a surprisingly good body.  The amazing woman came back absolutely destroy None of Your Business. She even did the outro like exactly how it sounds on the CD.  J and I stopped making fun of the group of guys who were obnoxiously standing right in front of us to sing along with her.  It was a good night, it was really, really good.

J’s boyfriend worked as a bartender at a lesbian bar, and that Sunday night they were having a private event.  By the time we wandered by, ready to meet up with Karen again, it was 2 am. Most of the people from the event were gone but there was still $1,000 on the tab, so he invited us in to drink for free. 

I was already a little tipsy, and I knew I had to drive 6+ hours the next day so I took it easy, but “easy” was still shots and drinks and sangria and more shots.  At one point we got Amaretto Sours that had cherries with stems and I asked if anyone knew how to tie them into a knot in their mouths.

“No,” J and Karen said.  “Can you?”

“Yeah.”  I showed them and tried to teach them how to do it themselves, but they couldn’t.  I kept added knotted cherry stems to the pile in front of me.

“Laura,” J said when I pulled another knot out of my mouth. “You’re in marketing, you should be marketing yourself much better.”

“Just go around with a jar of cherries at all times, like, hey, look at what I can do,” Karen said. 

It’s just about getting the little knob at the end of the stem between your teeth.  Me and the ginger kid are lucky to have friends who want the world to see how awesome we are, even if maybe we’re not actually as awesome as our friends think.

--

Karen was probably still drunk when we drove back home on Monday.

At one point she mumbled, “Stinging Nettle.”

I looked at her.

“Oh,” she said.  “I was trying to see what plants I could identify in that field. I accidentally said that outloud.” She stuffed a handful of Nibs in her mouth. “Do you want me to take over driving for a bit?”

“I’m good,” I said.

i love it when they come and go

rough patch

I had this dream on March 18th and I wrote it down but decided not to post it until I felt happy again.

I dreamt I was getting ready for my wedding day. I was back at my parents’ house on the west coast, getting dressed and trying to herd everyone out the house because the limo was waiting.  As I walked to the limo, I realized that I was wearing a black dress, buttoned up the front and belted. I thought that I would rather be wearing white, but it was obviously too late to find another dress.

The wedding was outside, and there were only a handful of chairs set up. Random people from high school were sitting down and I thought, of course they were, because I was back west, who else would come? But then Karen walked by.   It was briefly a relief to see her, but now it was time for me to walk up to the alter. I realized that it was Tyler waiting for me, like Tyler and Elizabeth, my best married friends. I picked out her wedding dress two summers ago and then I zipped her into it and blew bubbles when she and Tyler walked down the aisle. In the dream I saw him, and I thought, no, he’s Elizabeth’s, and then suddenly she was there, nodding at me, and I understood it was something they were doing for me as a favor for a friend. I wasn’t marrying him, he was just standing with me; I was there alone.

It was a sunny afternoon, beautiful green grass and moss covered stone closing us in, and it was meant to be a celebration but I was wearing black. It wasn’t a wedding. It was a funeral. Everyone was there to observe that I was always going to be alone.

--

I’m an oily person. Is there a grosser way of saying that? I run moist.  I don’t run dry but in the winters I get patches of dry skin in between my fingers that blister up and peel away in patches.

Karen and I met at the Eaton Center. She bought shoes, I bought nothing, and then we headed over to the distillery district.  We ordered chicken wings and a ploughman’s dinner and I told her about the dream.

“So that’s pretty obvious,” she said.

“My subconscious isn’t even trying to be subtle.”

We got a taster flight and also tasted each other’s beer. I said that I’d been sad, but that night it felt further and further away. The walls were a painted brick, the back of the booth black wood panels. I told her about going to Elle’s party with all the couples.  I rubbed over my knuckles and then gave my hand to Karen to show her the peeling skin.

“Oh, your rough patch.”  Karen looked up at me.  “You’re going through a rough patch.”

--

The gym I've joined has a pool, and sometimes I go swimming. I like doing things alone, but I don’t want to eat or exercise where someone can see me. The pool closes at 6:30 and one Sunday I went for 5:30 when I thought everyone would be eating dinner. There was a man swimming laps, but he left before I did, and for half an hour I had the pool to myself. We hadn’t had daylight savings yet, and the sun was just starting the set behind one of the other apartment buildings but for a brief moment it was right over the roof of the building. The last of the sunlight ignited over the surface of the water. I stood in the middle of the pool, my hands floating, and watched the brilliant shards of light flash in the water. The pool was silent and it felt like a baptism.

--

One Saturday in April, I had to work, so I drove straight to Tyler and Elizabeth’s place and stayed the night so I could still drink.

He grilled up these fish burgers they bought at the St. Lawrence Market and steamed artichokes which we ate with garlic butter. We were meant to watch Homeland, but we stayed up until 2 talking instead.

I said I didn’t understand guys who would live with a woman but not want to marry her (particularly this one couple that we’d all grown up with).

Elizabeth said that it was different to be married because you had a joint bank account. That it wasn’t both people contributing equally: all money was ‘our’ money.  She’s been working while Tyler finishes law school and everything she earned was for both of them.

Tyler said yes, but that it was more so the idea that you’re planning a life sixty years in the future with someone. An entire life together. That it was different to live together (split the rent) than to plan to make every decision for the rest of your life with another person.

When I was younger, I hated being the third wheel, but now I love my couple friends.  Tyler and Elizabeth are like my yuppie mom and dad. I slept on a mattress in their living room and in the morning they made waffles while I cleaned the rest of the dishes.  I’d found the perfect space to park my car and walking over to it in the morning, and then driving home, the city felt smaller than usual. More manageable.

--

I went to New York with my actual parents.

--

I started another writing class. One woman (probably the weakest writer in the class) keeps talking about how she wants to make a career out of doing this. I still don’t understand how anyone can admit to wanting to be a writer, but this time around, I’ve actually been telling people that I’m taking the class. I’ve shown a few people the stuff I’ve been writing, and when someone asks what I’m working on, I can mostly tell them without freezing up and having to awkwardly change the subject.  I’ve spent so many years guarding various selves that it’s almost comical how safe it feels just to be honest.

--

Two days ago, on Friday night, Tyler and Elizabeth came over for dinner. I made fajitas (kinda) with shredded chicken, refried beans, canned corn, avocado slices, and a homemade salsa of sorts that Tyler put together while I put everything else into bowls.

We finally got through the last three episodes of Homeland and high fived in celebration.

“You both have such soft palms,” I said.  “I really enjoyed that.”

--

Yesterday, Karen came over in the morning.  We got ready to go to the pool, and I fussed that because it was coming on noon, there might be other people in the pool, like children, but she said never mind that.  We walked over in flip flops, me in a blue striped summer dress, her in a floral onesie, both of us in open winter jackets.

Her bathing suit looked like baby’s first swim suit: strapless with a ruffle around the waist and pink and white stripes.  There were two other women in the pool, but no children.  We splashed around getting used to the water, cooler than the heated deck, and I started lunging around.

“Oh,” Karen said, laughing. “You’re a water baby. I didn’t realize.”

“What’s that?”

“People react two ways when they get in water. You’re like --” and then she shimmied around in demonstration.

“Yeah, I love it,” I said. “Now I’ve proven my island cred.”  We both grew up on Vancouver Island.

Before we settled into swimming laps, we had handstand contests (Okay, do a handstand and then spread your legs. Scissor kicks. A somersault into a handstand).  We pretended to be boats and sculled across the pool with one leg bent in the air.  We took turns carrying each other like babies from one end of the pool to the other, chatting, “Baywatch, Baywatch, Baywatch.”

We looked over at the other ladies and Karen said, “So we’re the children you were afraid would be in the pool.”

--

After swimming we walked to brunch and finally ate around 2:30 - the first time that day for me. We had a couple drinks as well and by the time we were finished the meal, I was done.

“You’re already napping, aren’t you?” Karen said as we walked back to my place.

“I really am.”

She put her still-wet swimsuit in the empty bag the tortilla shells came in last night and headed out, and I lay down for a nap. A couple hours later, my alarm clock went off at 7 when I was meant to get ready to head out, but it took me several tries to actually get out of bed.

I texted Casey to say I was going to be late: Had an apocalyptic nap.

When I finally showed up, meeting her, her boyfriend, and her other friend so we could go to a concert, she asked if I’d eaten, and then gave me a bowl of soup (mushroom, broccoli, chickpea, with coconut milk), toast and butter.  If we hadn’t already bought tickets to the show, there’s no way I would have made it out of my house, but it was a little easier now that someone was taking care of me.

Once I was sat down at the table, she put a can of beer in front of me.

“Casey. This is an embarrassment of riches,” I said.

It was still hard to make it out of the house and I trailed behind on the walk to the subway. Lee’s Palace was small and crowded, and the opening acts were good but the crowd was inexplicably full of old men with beautiful young women.  A 40+ man, shorter than me, in a blue fleece jacket, stood right in front of me and kept leaning back as he drunkenly pet at a twenty something young woman. Even though we were both standing, it felt like he was sitting in my lap.

Finally Casey said, “Come here,” and then she and her boyfriend stepped backward to make room for me to stand in front of them. It was like having neutral mom and dad standing behind me, and I felt comfortable in the crowd.

July Talk was the main act, and the crowd was rowdy, not fully a mosh pit but a couple drunk guys trying to turn it into one. In between the songs, Leah Fay said, “How are we all doing?  Is everyone feeling safe? Anyone getting touched inappropriately? What’s happening at the front here? It’s okay if you dance, but you can’t crush these little girls against the front of the stage.”

As I get older, I feel so drawn to women who can look after things.  I loved that she was minding the crowd.  It was an amazing show.

--

Today, R came to my house and we walked to the Farmhouse Tavern for lunch.  It was supposed to rain all weekend, but this afternoon the sun was coming out in that May way, where it’s slightly overcast but still bright. It was warm enough that I almost didn’t need a jacket, and it was the first time that it’s actually felt like spring.

behave

I went through the car wash over the weekend.  During the week, when I’m running errands at lunch, I walked past my car three times, end up circling the parking lot.  It doesn’t look like it’s mine when it’s shiny.

--

There’s a blizzard in the middle of March. My car crusts over. It’s easy to find in a parking lot.

--

I don’t go out on Friday night, and then wake up at 8 on Saturday morning and am at the pool by 8:30.

“I would feel smug,” Casey says at 1:15 when we finally meet up for brunch. (“Brunch.”) “All day long, I’d be like, ha, I went swimming before nine.”

“I guess,” I said. “Mostly I’m just like what am I going to do for the rest of the day?”

I get bored and it’s the end of the world. I’m empty and my life is empty. It’s always been empty. It’s always going to be empty. I’m alone. All the days are the same. I start looking at volunteer postings. Maybe I should mentor a teenager.

I join a new gym. I start eating breakfast every day and always bringing lunches to work. I make dinner each night. It’s tiring and eventually I’m bored of that as well but I’ve managed every day for the past three weeks. It just takes one or two bad things to make me loathe myself but I need a whole lot of good behaviour if I’m going to justify myself to… myself.   I wake up in the morning and think I can’t get up; I was sad last night, but it was every night and there's never a reason to be sad.

At work, my boss is away for a week. I run a meeting with various consultants to start up a project. They’re all 15-30 years older than me, but they have to listen to me because my company pays them. I feel feintly accomplished, relieved to finally have something to talk about with my parents.  When I tell them,  they just ask when I`m going to start applying for a new job. They want me to move back to the west coast. They want me in another industry.

After brunch, one of my university friends, Elle, texts me that she’s having an early St. Patrick’s Day party. I won’t know anyone there, but I also don’t have any other plans, so I go.  She’s close enough to walk, but it’s bitterly cold and I take the subway. On autopilot, I get on the eastbound train, only realizing a few stops down that I’m meant to be going west.

When I finally get there, it’s me, Elle and her husband, and seven other couples.  One of the couples is twisted together on a loveseat and they don’t untangle at all through the night.

I end up in the kitchen with Elle and most of the other women. They’re skinny and beautiful, like actors the Toronto recast of The OC.  I’m drunk enough that I can still act sober: two rum and cokes at home while I get ready, an entire bottle of wine and an Irish bomb (Guinness and a shot of Baileys: delicious). I smoke up when I get home at the end of the night and write most of this blog post.

I’m really good with normal people. That’s how Karen puts it. She says it’s because I have straight hair and wear mascara. I do wear a lot of mascara, but sometimes I curl my hair with an iron.  I think it’s just that I’m good at making small talk.

They start talking about how this girl’s boyfriend hasn’t realized he’s gay yet.

“The guy with grey hair?” I ask.

Yeah.

It’s funny because everyone thought Elle’s now-husband was gay when we were in university. She’s taller than him.  One time the two of them came over to my place when we were heading to meet other people at a club and he talked about how his red scarf cost over $200. I think his parents are rich. I think her parents are rich. I think they’re happy together.

I get off the subway and walk all the way down the platform in the wrong direction because I’m used to taking the other train.  At home, I step into the elevator and press the button. I do a double take because it seems  I’ve pressed nine. Why the fuck did I press nine?  I live on the sixth floor.  I follow the line of numbers up. Four and then five and then nine….it was just that someone turned the six upside down. I pressed the right button. I get off on the right floor.  My dinner dishes are still on the table. I need to change the cat’s litter. There’s dirty laundry at the foot of my bed. I’m lazy and slobby and lonely. It’s going to be Monday soon. The weeks move faster than the days.

you're not coming by

Park Guy stopped texted. He was busy at work and we hadn’t been seeing each other a ton but we got together, it was fun, and then he stopped texting. Eventually I touched base to make sure he was still alive. He was, and he was busy at work, and he didn’t apologize for the radio silence or say anything about getting together later, so, okay, that’s done. It was easy, because he was a stranger and none of my friends had met him and I still wasn’t sure that I liked him most days, but it was out of nowhere and when people asked about him, I’d have to say, “No, it’s done, he’s gone.”

“Oh no, what happened?”

“I don’t know, he stopped texting.”

Everyone said I was meant to sent him an angry text or voicemail to chew him out for how badly he handled it, but I was embarrassed and that seemed like that would make it worse. I was too embarrassed to even admit how embarrassed I was for the first week. Shame’s funny because it feels impossible to talk about, but admitting it is the only thing that makes it go away. I spent a lot of time thinking about it. Was I really never going to hear from him again? Maybe he’d met someone new. (Better.) He’d said nice things about me; those must have been lies. Four months is short in the objective passing of time but it’s long to end without a single word. I felt lonely. I used to always feel lonely, but it’s not as often anymore. I felt lonely again.

Karen and I met for brunch the Sunday before last. She’d lived in the neighbourhood of the restaurant when we were going to school and then moved to Montreal for work before moving back again. She talked about the old house constantly. I remember her being unhappy in the house, not necessarily because of the house, though it did have rats and the cat food got maggots if she left it out too long, but because the house didn’t cure any other stresses. It was beautiful, though. I felt like a kid sitting under the magnolia tree and then I felt like a grown up.

She had to rent in a hurry and ended up with a basement suite that doesn’t have an stove, just a hot plate. It only has as many windows as basement apartments ever have. She bought a blue light lamp and said it’s helping a little. She was fired from her job a couple of weeks ago and is looking for new work. Her plans are always: find a new job, get the old house back.

“Or another one,” I said. “There are other beautiful houses. You just need to get out of your current place.”

“I want that house,” she said. “It has to be that house.”

I said, “See, that’s the thing with this breakup, or whatever. It’s not that I miss that house. It’s just that I don’t want to go back to living in the basement.”

We got day drunk on $14 cocktails.

--

On Saturday, Karen went downtown to pick up supplies for the terrariums. I was going to go to the optometrist and meet her down there, but early afternoon I realized that I’d already invited two university friends over for dinner and completely got the week wrong, so Karen was going to have to come straight to my house instead.

I went to the optometrist and told the doctor that I’d seen a weird sparkly blind spot on Wednesday. She said she was going to dilate my eyes to check it out.

“Can I still drive home?”

“Is it close? Yes, that should be fine. You just won’t be able to see things up close and you’ll be more sensitive to light. And everything will be blurry.”

But totally fine to drive.

I waited in the main part of the store for my eyes to dilate and got to actively experience the worsening of vision. I couldn’t see anything near, especially when I was wearing my glasses. When I had to pay for the appointment, I took off my glasses and pressed my face to the Visa machine.

The optometrist said I had excellent ocular health and sent me on my way. It was a bit like being stoned, because everything looked weird and I was focused so hard on acting normal. I went to the butcher for meat, Shoppers for coke and chips. Drove myself home. It’s funny how little vision you need to drive a familiar route.

Karen came over first, then R and E - all three I’d met in university - as well as Casey, who I’ve been friends with for 15 years. I made chicken, quinoa, roast sweet potatoes and garlic, a salad with spinach, tomatoes, roast squash, feta and pumpkin seeds. Casey’s a vegetarian so I hard boiled eggs for her. I don’t think it seemed like I’d forgotten I invited everyone over, but the meal was almost entirely scrounged from my cupboards. E brought a homemade vegan apple tart, Karen bought a pie, and Casey pastries from the coffee shop she works at. There was a lot of food.

My pupils were still dilated when everyone got there. I tried to pour a drink and missed the glass.

“How much have you had already?” Karen laughed.

“No, it’s my eyes, I can’t see.”

She looked at me and said, “It looks like you’re massively high on E. Just like normal before a dinner party - take some E, turn on the oven.”

After we ate, I said that it was over with Park Guy.

R said that it sucked, but it didn’t seem like I was that into him anyway.

I never know how to explain that it doesn’t matter how little I like someone, everyone is still meant to like me. I already knew that I was going to have to end it eventually (he didn’t like my cat; he was obsessive about cleanliness and only ate take out - I am a slob who loves to cook; he demonstrated absolutely no awareness that females are capable of having orgasms) but that didn’t make it any easier that he ended it sooner. I was meant to use him to practice communicating about things that bother me.

Karen slept over. He left a pair of his underwear at my house and Karen wanted to see them because I’d told her that he always left his underwear on during sex and she thought that was the funniest thing she’d ever heard. I showed her because I felt mean.

I’d already washed them and it felt weird to me to touch them, but Karen picked them up immediately. “Neutral Fruit of the Loom,” she said after a thoughtful inspection. “Means he never got out of the cage.”

In the morning we heated the leftover pastries from last night and she helped me wash the dishes. It seems so appealing to have a house full of leftovers, but I never manage it properly because with just one person, it all goes bad too quickly. I had different friends over last weekend and they left carrot cake. I managed two pieces, forgot about it, and now it’s a week-old soggy mess that I have to clean out of my fridge. Except that this weekend Karen was there, so we finished all the pastries that morning before they went stale. We ate the rest of the hard boiled eggs. I wasn’t one person alone.

We pulled out all the supplies: plastic animals, rocks, liquid to make ponds, dried Irish moss, two families of tiny people that won’t stand unless you glue them to something. Fake plastic trees. Five live air plants.

Halfway through we realized that we don’t have enough plants or rocks or vases, and drove to IKEA. Park Guy lives a couple kilometers directly south of me and as we drove past it, I pointed out his townhouse to Karen.

“Is it weird that he’s so close?” she asked.

“Just that I’m worried I’ll bump into him. I was at the butcher and he said he goes there sometimes.” I pulled onto the highway. “I bet he doesn’t go that often though; he never cooked. And I probably wouldn’t see him even if he was there. I’m so blind.”

That’s the cliche. Never saw it coming.

hateship friendship courtship loveship marriage

Last month I met a guy when I was walking in the park, and we texted for a while, and it was fine enough that I met up with him in person again. We met for lunch and drank all afternoon until I had to meet up with friends at 8, and it was fine enough to meet him for a second date. It was always fine enough but I was only seeing him because I thought I probably should, and it seemed like an easy enough script to follow. He said a lot of nice things about me and I wanted to feel pleased about that, but mostly I just couldn't understand how he liked me so much when I just felt like he was a stranger.

Except that on the third date, I said something and he looked at me like he was actually looking at me and said, "Holy fuck you're smart," and suddenly I thought maybe I could like him.

Yesterday, I told my friend that over brunch and she said, "Yeah, because anyone can be pretty. Pretty's a trap. Eventually that's going to run out."

I went out with him again on Friday, which was the fourth date. He ordered a beer and when the can came to the table, it said it was a raspberry wheat ale.

"Did you mean to order that?" I asked him.

"No," he said.

"I'll trade with you," I said, and he said it was okay, but pushed the beer across the table for me to try.

"It's good," I said.

"Right? It's not too strongly raspberry."

"You did mean to order it."

"Yeah," he admitted.

"I thought you'd be better at lying."

"You're just better at catching me than anyone else I've ever met."

He's a lawyer and he said that he wanted to be caught and that he liked that I still party like an 18 year old and that his friends always said he would never be happy until he met someone who challenged him and that day to day he never even knew if I liked him but he was into that. And that he wished that he met me years ago.

He said that a lot, every time we got together: "I wish I'd met you years ago."

I wouldn't have even gone on a first date with him back then, and on Friday I said, "You wouldn't have been able to pin me down years ago."

"I might not be able to pin you down now," he said.

We went back to his house and I asked who his favorite band was. He said Nine Inch Nails, so I stayed the night. Almost stayed the night - I was wide awake by six with my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth and the early morning threat of a hangover. I woke him to say I was leaving but he feel immediately back to sleep, which was such a relief because I didn't want him to walk me to the door. The night before I'd put my contact lenses in spoons and filled them with water, but in the morning I realized how stupid that was and washed the lenses down the drain.

The sun was rising but in that winter way where it's just a thin grey glow, no bright streaks of light or pretty colours in the sky. There were people on runs passing me and I wondered how obvious it was that I was still awake from the night before. Morning people are mysterious to me and it seemed blatant that I was an outsider walking through their world. They seem like the kind of people who would want to wake up the same place they fell asleep the night before.

I made it home and in one of those glorious moments of friendship ESP, knew that Karen, who I was meeting for brunch, would be up already and that we could go straight there. I texted her and she phoned me back immediately.

"You're not allowed to shower first," Karen said after I'd said I'd come get her in the car. "I want to see the bedhead."

When I first met her, working on five years ago, she said that she had a few friends for life. That once someone was in, they were in. But that most people never got in.

Over brunch, Karen was making fun of the guy she was dating and I said, "You're always mean about him."

"Yeah."

"You're never mean about your friends. You're never mean to me."

And she said, without a moment's pause, "Yeah, because you're in."

new couch

Hung out last night with my long term bff,  Casey, who I've been friends with since grade eight (which was four provinces away from where we are now).

I got a new couch today, so we were taking my old love seat over to her place, a tiny bachelor which is one subway stop away from mine, on a trolly I stole from work. The love seat was the first Big Thing I ever bought all by myself, without asking for anyone else's opinion, when I first moved and was living in my own even tinier bachelor apartment.

After we'd got it into her place, I was stripped to my tank top (it is hot work moving things) while my friend shaved her armpits, in compensation for how sweaty she'd gotten, before heading out. I looked at the music on her keyboard and asked if she was actually playing that, because it looked hard.

"It is hard," Casey said. "If you notice, the left hand is in eighth notes while the right is doing triplets."

We both started clapping and chanting, but even with one of us doing eigths and the other triplets, we couldn't pull of the rhythm.

"I could do this, I used to be able to do this" I said. "I spent all of high school being able to do this, and easily."

"I know," she said. "We have lost some things."

She picked up a red miniskirt that genuinely had the amount of fabric normally required for a moderately generously sized toque. It fit, and she wore it with a loose black t-shirt and cardigan, and her black Bloodstones and looked like the much coveted, and difficult to actually pull off, Sexy Nerd Next Door.



The party was at the house of an actor, a graphic designer, a writer, and an animator. I went last year and it was wretched because they made everyone stay quiet for a spelling bee. This year, they focused more on alcohol, so I guess that shows some personal growth.

This girl I'd just met, who does marketing (we were talking about how neither of us studied it in school, but it's easy to figure out.

"No one knows about marketing," she said.

I say, "It's really just about knowing how to --

"Write," we both say at the same time.), Casey and I were talking, when Casey's exboyfriend came over and started trying to join the conversation.

We were talking about the punch and the holidays and how much alcohol there was on the table and how punch at holiday parties is a good thing, when he said, "That doesn't matter, anyway. You don't want to be happy, you just want to be numb."

The three of us went quiet and surprised and awkward and he continued to natter on, oblivious. The one girl turned away, and my friend and I filled up our cups again with punch before leaving the kitchen.



A big guy with three children came up to explain how everyone has squiggly antennas above their heads, and when you move your head around while you talk, the antenna wiggle, frantically trying to communicate. He gave us a long monologue about his personal beliefs on art and shock value and overt sexuality and how there's a context and maybe you shouldn't go topless on the street but it's stupid to get upset about breastfeeding -- though every woman he's ever talked to has said it's the most intensely intimate experience of his life. He talked about seeing the birth of his children, and how now there's nothing frightening about the vagina, he's seen it all. It's the same one man monologue that I've heard a thousand times before from drunk guys at parties, but his was actually interesting.



Waiting in the upstairs kitchen for the bathroom, we started talking again about those goddamn eighth notes and triplets and the indignity of it all.

"We are over the hill," I said to Casey. "We're ruined now."

A woman with a bleached blonde pixie cut and an accent that genuinely sounds like someone doing a parody for a snooty British person (but apparently is her authentic New Zealander accent), whose name was - I am not even joking with you -- ZooZoo, asked suspiciously, "How old are you?"

"How old do you think we are?" Casey asked.

"I am too drunk to care to guess," she said.

"I'm 26," Casey said. "She's 25."

"I'm 26," I corrected.

"Oh, yeah, just," she said.

"Not just."

She was counting down how long it had been since my birthday, when,

"Young women," Zoozoo interrupted, holding a martini glass, "you don't know anything. When you're thirty, you can do everything with everyone." And then she turned to the man that she had brought with her and told him they were going downstairs for another drink.

Did she bring that martini glass with her? The rest of us were drinking out of plastic red cups.

"Cinnamon bun," one of the guys who lives in the house said, tapping on his thighs in time with the syllables. "Cinnamon bun. For eighths and triplets."

"Is that actually it?"

And then he separated it out and did one hand at a time and it was it.

"Thirty-one is great," he said.

"So it's going to get better?" I asked. "We've got something to look forward to?"

"No, your late twenties suck, but then, you turn thirty and --

"You give up," I said.

"Well. Yeah." He started tapping on his thighs again. Cinnamon bun. Cinnamon bun.

I took the bus home because the subway was closed, sat down and said to Casey, "I have to get my apartment cleaned in the next seven hours, christ."

The kid sitting in front of us turned around and said, "I didn't mean to eavesdrop, but I just had to tell you, you don't have to clean your place."

"I do," I tell him. "They're bringing me a couch and they can't put it down on top of all the popcorn on my floor.'

"They could." He laughed, "Is there a lot of popcorn?"

"Yes."

"You can't clean when you're stoned," he said.

"I certainly already know that," I assured him. "You think it's going to be a good idea but then--"

"You start thinking, I wonder what's happening with all the food?"

"Yes," I said. "And then you have even more popcorn on the floor."

The kid had one of those black metal-punk type jackets and a sweet face and he was very drunk and giggled a lot.

"Sometimes I have to clean my room," he said.



The couch came this morning, and is perfect except for this little run on the seat, like the fabric has a scar. It's not noticeable, and you can turn over the cushion to hide it completely, but I emailed the company anyway:

There is a defect in the fabric. Please advise.

Texts from last night

I was running behind because my afternoon nap with the cat ran long, but finally I was on the bus to head out for the evening, when Tony texts, Laura you're killing us, we've totally peaked! Get here like yesterday.

Karen’s the one I went travelling with last summer. She spent the summer in Switzerland, running away from her failing relationship with Tony and in the fall they broke up, only to get back together this spring. I hate Tony because I’ve spent two years hearing about everything he’s ever done wrong. I get home from shopping at seven to a text from Tony telling me to hurry to and get over there -- even though Karen told me the barbecue was starting at eight. He wants me to bring over beer but I say I’ve already got too much to carry. Eventually I am convinced to go to the liquor store and pick up vodka.

When he bitches about how long I am taking, I remind him that I’m late because I was in the liquor store for half an hour. I imagine slapping him in the face with the mickey of Polar Ice.

Karen must realize that he’s texting me, because she sends, Ignore daddy -- he’s being a goof lol.



We call Tony, “daddy.” Like when we were shopping at IKEA, and Karen told me not to mention that she was shopping with me (I had told facebook that I was going to IKEA. Some things need to be celebrated), and while we were at the store, Tony texted me and asked, Does that mean you’re going to Ikea to get a pull out couch so Karen can take refuge in your AC haven?

“Daddy knows you’re here,” I hissed at Karen from across the aisle. “How does he know you’re here?”

“It’s daddy,” Erin said, shaking her head and pushing the cart over to bedding.

“But how did he know?” I asked, following after her.



I get off the bus onto a streetcar, and Tony texts, Lol - it's all good Laura Mark keeps asking me when you're getting here and whether you're single :)

What the fuck is happening? I ask Karen, and she says it’s just the four of them -- her, Tony, Mark and Jessica. She stops replying to my texts. Tony keeps texting me.

I show up, text all four of them, and still wait outside for five minutes before someone comes to the door. Karen tells me I get a present to open before I have to go outside and deal with all of the idiots. "It's a weird evening," she warns. They’ve already barbecued, and she smells sharply of smoke.

She's got me card, I found this little book and although you have figured out so much on your own, a little cheat-sheet wouldn't hurt, and the book Stuff Every Woman Should Know by Alanna Kalb in celebration of me getting a job/buying a car/that adulthood thing I've been marching towards. It's incredibly thoughtful of her, and I tuck the book into my purse and feel guilty.

We walk through the house to the back patio and when I step outside, Mark says, "Are we allowed to touch the exulted one?"

Jessica pushes past him and clings to me. "I'm sooooo glad to see you." She's wearing a strapless patchwork cloth dress from Cuba. I can't ever remember hugging her before, but surely I must have.

"You're glowing," Mark tells me. "From employment."

I say, "Okay, were you guys talking about this before I got here? Maybe we shouldn't talk about that anymore."

“Did I say anything bad last night?” Mark asks. He called me at 12:30 am.

“I don’t know,” I say. “You didn’t say anything awkward but there were some weird silences.”

“I wasn’t masturbating,” he exclaims. “I didn’t go into the garage to call you and start masturbating.”

Karen puts hotdogs on the grill and Jessica mixes a rum and Coke for me. She pours it free hand but the proportions are good and it tastes like a Coke slurpee.

Marks tells us, “I have an excellent penis,” and then there’s some discussion about whether it’s bigger than the hotdog I am eating. “Almost,” he says proudly.

“I spend a lot of time watching internet porn,” Mark says. He’s been drunk for over twenty-four hours at this point.

He asks me what I did today (woke up at six am to get my little brother into a cab so he can fly back after his summer here, took the cat to the vet at eleven, napped, went shopping, got groceries, got booze, came over) and tells me that he woke up still drunk, grabbed another beer, and masturbated in his bed.

“Masturbation is a selfish orgasm,” he says.

A guy I’ve never met shows up, one of Jessica’s pile of boys. She ended a four-year relationship in the winter and has since developed Veela powers in attracting boys. I don’t even know how many guys she’s dated in the last six months, but I don’t think there’s been even one guy around who hasn’t been trying to get with her. It’s uncanny. Karen gets asked, often more than once a night, “So, your roommate...”

The guy’s got a weird name, and very shortly we’re calling him Douchefuck -- DF to his face. He asks how we all know each other and Tony says that he’s dating, “her roommate.”

Cumberdouche is like, “Wait, what?”

“Tony and Karen are dating. Karen and Jessica are roommates,” I say.

“I know that,” he snaps and starts walking into the house before I’ve finished speaking.

I glare at Cumberdouche’s retreating back and say, “Excuse you!” I look at Tony: “He asked.”

Cumberdouche -- who’s real name is Cumbersomethingelse -- claims to be an architect, but says he’s looking for work with a marketing company. He knows the title of every Woody Allen movie and says that French-made romantic comedies are more highbrow than Hollywood ones, so they’re a decent guilty pleasure.

(At the end of the night, I ask Jessica is she’s planning to have sex with Cumberdouche, and she says, “Yeah, maybe.” “Tonight?” “No!” she exclaims, giggling. I ask her why she likes him, and she says that they’ve got a really intense connection. “The first night we met, he read me poetry,” she says. “Wow,” I say.)

Mark wanders between the patio and the house, grabbing beer after beer from the fridge and playing songs from the laptop.

He puts on Mr. Jones and takes off his shirt.

“I’ve got moves,” he says. He circles his hand at his hip before raising his hand, folding his fingers into the shape of a gun and pointing it at me. “One of these,” he says, pretending to put his hand back into his pocket, “and the girl is gone. Right from across the bar.”

“Put your fucking shirt back on,” Jessica says. “What the fuck are you doing?”

He points his gun at her and winks.

“Are you going to start swearing at each other in French again?” Karen asks. “It’s funnier when it’s in French.”

“Jesus Murphy Christ,” Mark says and walks back to the laptop. He rests his hands against the table, arches his back and shakes his ass at us.

Karin barbecues the food that Cumberdouche brought with him -- a single hamburger patty and two sausages. Tony’s already drunk, and leaves the vodka I brought in the freezer. Mark puts on Lay Lady Lay and walks out of the house wearing only his boxers. He sits down on the other side of the couch and pulls the material higher up on his thighs.

“This is what I’ve got,” he says. “This is what it’s all about.” He cups himself over his boxers.

Karen goes for the camera.

“I’ll put it on Facebook tomorrow; it’s the only way he’ll learn.”

Cumberdouche rants. Seeing a little thigh is too much for him.

Jessica says, “Put your fucking shorts back on, what the fuck. You fucking asshole.”

"Yeah?" Mark says, indignant. "Well, sometimes my nipples get hard, but that doesn't mean I'm going to make lemonade in the sunshine."

He goes back in the house, hiking up his boxers at he goes.

“He really should have worked at the gay bar,” Karen says.

I say, “Oh, yeah. Didn’t that really happen?”

“They didn’t hire him,” Karen says, laughing. Mark’s boxers are pulled up as far as he can get them, a make-shift lumpy thong that also looks like an adult diaper. He circles his hips around, pausing occasionally to shoot his gun at one of us. He comes back out of the house and we make him pull his boxers out of his asscrack before sitting down on the couch.

Cumberdouche has brought strawberries and bananas to grill on the barbecue. Tony bitches that Karen keeps blowing smoke at him, as she stands over the little grill, waving a fan to keep the flames going. She tries to take the strawberry-banana skewers off, but Cumberdouche says they’re not cooked enough.

Somewhere in there, Tony leaves. Someone hands me a place with charred strawberries and bananas covered in chocolate ice cream. I hate cooked strawberries.

Another of Jessica’s boys shows up: someone who did the same program I did but hasn’t graduated yet. Mark greats him, his boxers rolled to expose three-quarters of his ass.

“Wasn’t expecting that,” the guy, Brian, says. He’s twenty-eight, but he looks younger to me, maybe because I know he’s still in school.

“It’s okay,” Karin says. “He doesn’t have a job. He’s blowing off steam.”

“Jesus Murphy Christ,” Mark exclaims from inside the house.

“How long has he been unemployed for? So that I can gauge my own progress, “ Cumberdouche says.

I don’t believe that Cumberdouche has ever worked as an architect.

Karen disappears into the house for a while, and when she comes back, I ask, "Is daddy mad?"

"Daddy's in bed," she says. "It's okay."

It's like 10:30. Tony’s thirty-seven years old, going to medical school, and stressed out beyond belief. Given what I know from watching Grey’s Anatomy, he doesn’t do as much work as I would expect.

“Put that fucking beer down,” Jessica tells Mark.

“If you call me an alcoholic one more time, I’m going to take my boxers off,” he says, and walks back to the laptop.

I’ll be sitting when the evening comes. Watching the ships come in and then I’ll watch them roll away again.

Karen sits down beside me and I say, "I feel like I was somewhere else in this completely different place, and now I'm here and it's also like I've been here forever."

"I know," Karen says. "It kind of feels like it's always been this night."

“I don’t think I really knew what was going on in this house,” I say.

Karen spent the last two months applying to a job in another province, and this morning she finally realized that it probably wasn’t going to happen.

“It’s been... yeah,” she says.

Jessica’s moving out next weekend, back in with her family. Her dad’s in the process of dying of cancer and she doesn’t have money to pay rent anymore. Before I leave, she hands me a pile of stuff that she does’t want to move -- an astrology kit for Scorpios in a little box, a Sephora’s bag filled with origami cubes.

Mark’s still standing in front of the computer, gyrating. He’s a good dancer; he would have done well working in a gay club. He's got a body like William Beckett, with the legs that stretch on for miles and an easy curve in his waist.

“I can’t believe you went to school with this guy,” Cumberdouche laments.

Jessica and Brian leave, come back with a new package of cigarettes and the box goes around the group. Jessica pulls out a tiny joint that's rolled too tightly to smoke. Brian unwraps it, cuts a cigarette open for more filler, and rolls another joint. "Is this really all the weed we've got?" he asks over and over again.

Jessica and Cumberdouche lean in closer and closer on the couch.

"You're going really well with everything," Jessica tells him, glaring at Mark.

"I drank 1.5 litres of wine," he says, pleased with himself.

I had wondered who had brought the monster bottle of wine. What a douche.

Mark yells from inside the house, “Hey Laura!” circles his hand and points his finger gun at me.

“Thanks,” I says.

“Hey Jessica!” Mark yells, and she doesn’t look up as she lights the cigarette.

Mark pulls his boxers further up the crease of his ass and Cumberdouche says, “This is why people are driven to smoke,” dramatically turning his head away as Mark spreads his legs and thrusts along with the music.

“We were already smoking before Mark started stripping,” I say.

The flap in Mark’s boxers is gaping and sometimes when he rolls his hips, there’s a shadow of skin.

Brian asks, “Is he hurting?” and Karin nods.

Mark’s girlfriend dumped him in April. She’s going to grad school in Chicago next year, and he was going to move to the States to be with her.

“You need to get laid, my friend,” Brian says.

“I’m not some cheap... I am not a one night stand,” Mark says with great dignity, holding his junk in one hand. “Your dick is probably infected with fucking herpes.”

“It’s not,” Brian says, calmly. He broke up with his girlfriend of eight years this summer and has been fucking around ever since.

“Oh my god,” Cumberdouche says, and Mark walks out of the house. He’s completely naked, but it takes me a moment to realize. He’s got a long smooth body and there’s nothing shocking about his nudity.

Cumberdouche seems genuinely concerned that the slight is going to make him throw up. “This is why people pick up smoking habits,” he says once again.



This morning Karin texts, I am silently at brunch with a grumpy daddy an a exausted me. The house is a bomb. She says, I think Mark walked in on Tony and I having sex. Omg. Just to top it off.



Mark calls me just before I am finished writing this post. “Did I get completely naked?”

“Yes,” I say. “You were completely naked.”

“I’ve given up on finding a job,” he says. “I’m just... fuck it.”

He says he’s going ease up with the drinking Tuesday, but right now his body is feeling fantastic. It’s called hair of the dog for a reason.

“Was it just me, or was that guy from last night the biggest douche that’s ever existed?”

“No, he definitely was the worst person in the world,” I confirm.

“I woke up this morning, and he and Jessica were fucking naked in bed together,” Mark says. “They totally fucked. She has the worst taste in men.”

“She really does.”

“Okay, I’ve got to go. Last night was okay, right?”

"It was funny," I say. "You put on good music."

And then, on his tenth beer of the day (“Which is better, because I had twenty yesterday.” “It’s only 3:30 in the afternoon.” “... Yeah. And I’m also stoned.”) Mark went back to work on the deck he’s been building.