Category: Uncategorized

With my other plans falling through (or postponed would be a better word), I managed to go and see Wedding Crashers last night with some friends. The movie takes Old School to a whole new level, manages to be bawdy without necessarily being puerile, and captures the whole stereotypical boy-loves-girls, boy-meets-the-girl within an uproarious and deliciously funny premise of two ladies men who crash weddings for kicks. One hell of a funny movie, and one hell of a way to spend a lovely Friday night trapped in the over-heated city with a brand-new hair cut. I would absolutely agree with giving this movie both an A- and a ‘thumbs up’. Heh.

The idea of going home from work before 8 or 9 PM before I got fired from The Boss From Hell was almost unheard of. Now, at my new job, I’ve got this wonderful thing called Summer Hours. We work extra during the week and then have Friday afternoon off—all summer long. It’s a blessing.

Today on my totally free Friday afternoon I went and got my hair done (hello summery highlights!), am blogging at a completely reasonable hour, and will be going to see Wedding Crashers, because I’m in love with Vince Vaughn. Have been for years. But now that he’s so cool and not making silly movies with Anne Heche (that I, ahem, paid full price to see IN THE THEATRE), I don’t feel like such a girlie geek going on opening day.

So, sit back, enjoy the sunshine and the wonderful, beautiful, blessed concept of summer hours. What was I thinking staying at that other, awful, horrible place for so long?

Last night while my RRBF was off working late so he can take time off to tour this fall, I watched We Don’t Live Here Anymore. Having just procured a subscription to Zip.ca, and actually kind of enjoying the random nature of the whole online movie renting thing, it’s nice to have a selection of movies on hand that you actually want to watch.

Annnywaaay. I’m wondering why so many movies about mature relationships end up depicting the bad ones. Emotionally challenging films like Closer and now this one, that seem to want to honestly portray a slice of modern married life almost always end up with characters either acting deplorably or saying some of the meanest things one could imagine coming out of the mouth of the opposite sex.

It seems to me that Hollywood has a two-fold approach to life, love and marriage: either people are miserable or they’re sickly and sweetly happy. Maybe it’s a response to the silly sitcom, the Everybody Loves Raymond approach to the world, not that I should be using that show as an example having honestly to say that I’ve never watched an episode of that show. Maybe it’s the need for films inspired by literature to be deep, intellectual and, well, Russian-literature-esque existential. Who knows? The film is well acted, well directed and extremely well written. My favourite line would have to be toward the end when Naomi Watts says to Peter Krause: “I’m not leaving because you were unfaithful. I’m leaving because I was unfaithful.”

Well, the rejection letter from The Fiddlehead arrived on Monday. Today, I tried to decode it, but gave up and thought about where I should send the set of poems next (link via Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind). Apparently, the editor wanted more imagery in my poems, but considering I’m not what you’d call an image-rich writer, that might be hard.

I felt sad and defeated, a little upset about the state of my non-writing career, having heard that a self-defined arch-nemesis of mine from grad school has a book coming out soon. She’s the kind of girl who’s nice to you when it suits her, but then pretends not to know you when she sees you walking on the street. But, whatever, life’s not a race, right?

Of all the crazy-ass sh*t that I’ve read over the last little while, the news report on yahoo.com today about how unborn babies carry pollutants perhaps freaked me out the most. It wasn’t the news story per se, which is upsetting and traumatic regardless, but the fact that yahoo had (I’m assuming) inadvertently dropped a big box ad for health and/or life insurance beside it. The ad’s image was of a towheaded tyke being tossed happily in the air by his model parent, and the copy advised people to think wisely about the lives of their kids.

The whole hand-in-glove relationship between the media and the advertisers has never been so glaringly apparent. So, mothers are poisoning their kids in the womb, but not to fear, once they’re born you can buy life and/or health insurance for their safety. Ah, the non-genius of subtle advertising. Where’s Janet’s boob when you need it to really dispel what’s important in America?

I’m as addicted to sugar as I am to this freaking web site. These days, I can’t seem to stop reading it and laughing. Oh, and this one too—it’s almost embarrassing to admit how often I check these two sites. Well, GoFugYourself is totally acceptable because it’s hilarious and totally catty, and that’s just awesome.

Ahem, um, when will I grow out of my strange obsession these days with the cult of celebrity? Loving movies is one thing, but absolutely having to see how skinny Lindsay Lohan is this week is completely another. What’s missing from my life? Am I that bored with the hot weather and the complete lack of good television (with the exception of Entourage, oh Jeremy Piven, how do I love thee, let me hug out the ways)?

On my usual blogosphere rounds this morning, I read about yet another poor, suffering blogger who got fired from his/her job for complaining about it on the web. Yet, for the first time, Beatrice.com author Ron Hogan had the common sense to state:

Here’s a hint: If there’s something you don’t want prospective employers to know, like how you got fired for publicly badmouthing your bosses, don’t mention it on your blog, especially not in ways that clearly underline how you blame them for your own mistakes. And what were you doing accessing your blog on your work computer, anyhow?

Exactly. This is a lesson we’ve all learned the hard way. In terms of my own life, it’s not so much the blogging that could be the problem, but the use of company email (in my last job) for anything not related to work. Case in point, we complained so excessively and so frequently about my co-managers and/or my boss from hell on email that even if they didn’t officially fire me for it, they were certainly thinking about it. It’s hard because the expectation of privacy is there somewhat, and when you’re typing that email to your co-worker about how hard your week is or complaining on your blog about how ridiculous your manager’s behaviour is (because it’s your life), you’re not thinking about who might end up reading it, you’re simply venting. It’s hard not to want to contextualize it all the time—especially when you’re in a bad situation. Especially when that bad situation just seems to get worse and you’re all miserable together. There’s something in us that just wants to get it all out, hence the badly timed, “My boss is such a farking asshole she needs to die” sorts of emails we ended up sending for months before I got fired.

Now, I learned my lesson. But, in this case, I’m still pissed, especially considering the contents of my emails were supposed to remain confidential (according to my settlement), only to learn that the entire department has files up files of my personal correspondence that they’re using as evidence against other people who might still be there, which is seriously annoying and insulting at the same time. I’ll never, ever, ever use a company email for personal correspondence again. Praise be to the free yahoo.com account that I use for all of my day-to-day conversations with my friends.

But it begs the question, where does privacy really stop? How much of your free time can your employer really control? Granted, this woman shouldn’t have been such a knucklehead and blogged at work, but she was still making an assumption that she had some level of privacy. It’s frustrating that it takes us all deep into Fahrenheit 411 or 1984 territory, but it also shows how pervasive technology has become in our lives. No one would ever think twice about sitting down and typing up a memo trashing his/her manager, but they’d not think twice about sending an email. It’s a good example of how technology has out-paced the work environment in some way, and how we all need to catch up in terms of how far we’re willing to put our necks on the line—is free speech really worth losing your job?

Anyway, I do talk about my new job in passing here sometimes, but only to say I’ve been at this conference or that conference. But in the end, it’s just not that important. What I want on these pages is what’s important to me, and while I’m enjoying my new job and love the people I work with, the whole point of My Tragic Right Hip is to write more, read more and be more of myself. I almost lost myself for five years when I worked my fingers to the bone and gave myself back the disease from the stress of my last job. Now I feel like writing back to them here gives me a little bit of control over the awful situation, and who cares really, because I’ve already been fired. It’s not like they can fire me twice, you know?

The one thing being at the cottage away from a working television and/or any other digital, ahem, diversions, is the time it gives you for reading and writing. So, here are three more books I’ve finished in the last couple days. The whole mystery trend continues, with the exception of one title:

1. Morality for Beautiful Girls by Alexander McCall Smith

The third book in the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series finds Mma Ramotswe investigating her own life when her fiance starts to suffer from depression. My love for this series continues strong through this third book where its message is about how hard it is to be truly moral; how being a detective is more about helping people with their lives vs. solving a traditional murder; and how delightfully different life in Botswana is from life in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

2. Latitudes of Melt by Joan Clark

Oh my, Clark is one hell of a writer. The story of a young baby girl cast away on an ice floe when the Titanic sinks, her mystic life, and the wonders of a family living, loving and growing old in pre-Joey Smallwood Newfoundland is one of the best books I’ve read all year. Honestly and truly, I think that Clark is a hidden gem of Canadian fiction, and I can’t wait to read her book coming out this summer called An Audience of Chairs. Highly, highly recommended reading, for anyone who loves a good, solid story and an even greater sense of individual and unique characters who still possess a charming sense of normality.

3. Case Histories by Kate Atkinson

I picked up this book on account of the Litblog Co-op. I started it on Sunday morning and finished it by Sunday evening, with a 3 hour car ride in between…that’s how easily the book sucks you in and refuses to spit you back out again. The story of a wily private detective in Cambridge (with the awesome name of Jackson Brodie) who solves three very different and, at first glance, unrelated mysteries that have taken place over the years. The characters are fresh, and even though Brodie himself could be read as the most stereotypical (divorced cop, used to be in the army, very masculine, gets into fights), each one brings something new and enlightening to the tale making it addictive as each page reveals itself to be something magical yet simple in terms of the story. All in all, a fabulous read.

Now the only question remains: what do I read next?

We left early on Friday to avoid the traffic. But in a city that’s more sprawl than anything else, that’s getting increasingly hard to do. Driving along back roads that used to be simply farm land, with nothing around but fields and the faint smell of “natural” fertilizer, and seeing complex after complex of cookie cutter houses and depressing strip malls made me want to escape the gerbil tendencies of this modern life forever.

All tolled, it took us about five hours to complete the trip. Considering it’s only about 2.5 hours to get up north, I was tired, frustrated and sad when I got there. My grandmother’s cottage was full of mouse poo, and we immediately started vacuuming, washing and washing some more.

After a good night’s sleep, we got up and I started to tackle other things that needed cleaning. Cobwebs on the outside boards, cobwebs inside on the windows, cleaning up the bedrooms, vacuuming some more. Then, my RRBF and my brother patched the roof where it was leaking. There’s something utterly fulfilling in a day of hard work where you feel good about cleaning up the mouse house in the dresser drawer. Feel like the building appreciates it when you wash out the floors with bleach and get rid of the dusty mould from a long winter of closed windows. And it makes me think that modern life caters too much to people having time for careers building on nothing more than virtual jobs in a virtual world.

The weather was luscious. A perfect mixture of sunshine and crisp wind. A wonderful combination of heat and cool breeze. There was a lot to do, and I’m glad we got a good start.

Then, by the time we got home I had broken out in some sort of strange rash. Who knows what it is, maybe poison ivy, but considering I’ve never had that in my life, and grew up at the cottage, I’ve got no idea what it actually is. Sigh. Can nothing in life be in balance?

…more tomorrow after work.