Heath Ledger?
Really?
Seriously?
I’ve loved that dude since Roar. He’s like my teenage crush number 2 (number 1 was Christian Bale - so just imagine how excited I was to see him star alongside Batman as Joker - and now it’s just going to be creepy).
And he was an amazing actor to boot - he turned even teenybopper flicks into something interesting and inherently watchable (10 Things I Hate About You for example - and A Knights’s Tale too).
Poor dude had a baby girl.
I mean, hollywood actors implode from time to time, but when’s the last time anyone of actual worth died and left behind a little helpless baby.
Pretty much never.
Can we get Hollywood off of drugs now, please? Damn things are destroying my favourite actors, and acting’s something I actually used to enjoy and respect at one point in time.
My birthday is coming up in less than a month.
Since my birthday is in one of the more depressing months of the year (February - the only good thing about it is that it’s short) I’ve never really made a big deal about it.
For my sweet sixteen, I actually moved my party to June. For reals.
I’ve been trying to figure out some useful way of celebrating it this year. I was thinking of getting a new bike - a nice, old-fashioned, european-style thing, with a chain guard and fenders and a little wicker basket. Something to get to the beach in, or for going to get a few groceries. Something pretty, and girly, but quite functional for an urban neighborhood (such as the one I live in).
I would also like to go away for a weekend sometime soon. After being together for five years Liam and I have NEVER been away together alone (other than camping, and vacations with my whole family). So a little trip to Montreal (I’ve never been) or New York (Liam’s never been) would be ideal.
Both of those things are still options at some point in the future, I think, but I have a new more practical idea.
I want a food box.
Glamourous and exotic of me, I know.
I want a organic food box delivered once a week filled with all kinds of healthy and wonderful and seasonal and local things.
We haven’t been able to afford much in the way of organic foods as of yet, and less than worrying about the environmental cost of buying apples from New Zealand, I want to enjoy the intense flavors and unique varietals offered by organic, local, and heirloom farming. I have a pretty refined palette and I know that Organic food, in season, tastes better. It just does.
Specifically, I am falling in love with Foodshare’s Good Food Box, and their rather handsome political stances on poverty and food distribution (the essays on their website practically made me cry). They basically subsidize the food in an economically responsible way so that everyone (from the highest to the lowest income bracket) can afford to eat more veggies - even organic ones. Sounds right up my alley.
But I am worried: if I live in a co-op, wear a black beret, travel by bike and get my organic food delivered in a box - am I dangerously and perilously close to becoming a dirty, pink-o, commie?
I really, totally, completely meant to post a few pictures of my holiday decorating before the holidays, but well, this was a particularly hectic holiday. On top of that it seemed like there was a snow storm every single weekend leading up to it, which didn’t exactly make me want to get out there and go do Christmassy things.
I mean, I broke my arm and had to spend Christmas Eve in Emerg, and then we actually ended up leaving my parents house on Christmas day and flying to Thunderbay to visit Liam’s parents for a week. It was all a bit of a whirlwind.
So, in lieu of correctly timed photos, here are some belated ones. As an added bonus you also get a sneak peak at the progress of my living room so far.
Even those of you who know me may be suprised to find someone as curmudgeonly as me loves Christmas. But I do.
In fact, people who hate Christmas are one of my pet peeves. Don’t get me wrong, cliches and sappiness still make me gag (which is why you’ll find very few commercial decorations in my house - no dancing santas, no singing snowmen) but hating Christmas is like hating babies and bunnies and marshmallows and sunshine. It’s weird. There has to be something wrong with you. You can hate what it’s become, maybe, but I think that’s something you as an individual are totally in control of (and it’s often as simple as avoiding shopping malls for a month or two).
For example: most of my decorations are handmade, and cheaply procured. I add a little more every year, and when I look back at all the things I’ve accumulated I’m reminded of the last five years, and all the Christmases me and Liam have spent together.
In fact, all my decorations are still up, and I’ve even added to them a little since these pictures were taken (I found a beautiful plain white velvet tree skirt in the grocery store on sale - along with a neon red mini tree and I found an adorable Holt Howard, fifties-era, tree-shaped candy-dish at a Thunder Bay thrift shop).
I suppose it should come down sometime soon (I’m not one of those crazy people who leave them up for months or anything). But they look so pretty, I’m having a bit of trouble contemplating it.
Ok, so I don’t normally talk about this sorta thing here but:
a) She might belong to a cult, but did Katie Holmes not look smokingly gorgeous here? Yes. I believe she did.
b) Would I not (with my admittedly chunkier build, but exact same texture and colour of hair) look similarly smokingly gorgeous in a similar haircut? Yes, I think so too.
It’s raining here, and I’m at my desk staring out at it from my little alcove in my little gabled attic/studio. I think it could fall under the classification of “garret” if I was living in it. There are kitties running around, batting balls. Every once and a while, they stop playing and come up on my desk and stare at my typing. I would describe the scene as being serene.
I’ll always remember, when I was about 16 I was a semi-finalist in an Ikea design contest. It was for teenagers to design their dream room, and I knew how to rock an application (instead of just describing my dream room, I drew it).
BUT.
But.
At the meet and greet where they decided on the 4 finalists who got to design a room and have it sit in the store (they each would win 500 dollars - the ultimate winner won the contents of the room and 1000 dollars, or something like that) there was this girl.
She kept going on and on about how she wanted to be an artist living in a garret in Paris at the turn of the century, and how her room was based on that.
Vomit.
I mean, yeah we’ve all seen an American in Paris, we’ve all seen Amelie. We get it, you’re sixteen, you want to be Van Gogh (without the icky ear cutting thing), you’ve got a poster of Sunflowers on your wall, whoopedeedoo for you.
Imagine Rory Gilmore, but where Rory is sweet and smart, This girl was insufferable and precocious.
Where I wanted to actually do creative things to the room like paint the furniture bright colours, she wanted to stick an easel in it (I can’t sum it up any better than that).
And of course she got chosen as a finalist.
And of course the room was ugly, bare and unimaginative when we went to see it.
But she impressed the judges spouting her prep school, bourgeois pretensions.
Thankfully, she’s probably living in the suburbs somewhere working as an account, or at best some faux loft, while I actually am an artist who’s got her own garret (if not in Paris - sigh - although I will go there someday with the boy I love, and it will be all the more wonderful since it won’t just be a high school field trip).
Funny how things work out.