Creampuff Revolution

Creampuff Avoids Facebook Like It's Aliens Brandishing the Anal Probe

Facebook. I do not care for it.

I do not have a good reason, like I did when I refused to get a Myspace page. I think we can all agree that Myspace is horrible. It's more like in elementary school, when everyone else in my class, EVEN THE BOYS, begged and pleaded with their parents to buy them Cabbage Patch dolls and I didn't want one. Because they were uggo.

In the face of increasing and nearly daily pressure to join, I sat down to try and think of some legitimate reasons why I am so violently opposed to joining Facebook. Here's what I came up with.

1. I just don't want to.
   
2. I'm already in touch with most of the people I actually like from elementary, junior high, high school, university and beyond. How do I know? I know because they're all inviting me to become their friends on Facebook.
   
3. This weekend, I received the following email:
   
   Roro -
   I was talking to [name withheld] (also a fan and an acquaintance of yours from Edmonton) and we cyberstalked you to find an e-mail address [emphasis added].  I hope you don't mind the intrusion.  You don't know me, but we're both from Edmonton and I've seen you in a few
   plays.
   
   Years ago you wrote a play that was performed at the Citadel (possibly by [name withheld]?  [name withheld]? Someone who was a girl?  I can't recall) that was notable for many reasons, not the least of which was
   that it included over 50 synonyms for vomit.  Very notable as it has come up in conversation at least once a year since I saw the play read.
   
   It goes on. But my point is that someone I hardly know had NO TROUBLE tracking me down to ask about some play I wrote when I was 17 and I didn't need to be on Facebook for them to do it.
    
4. I love tiny updates and disconnected minutae as much as the next gal, but if I want those, I'll watch Entertainment Tonight. What I want from my friends is actual NARRATIVE. I want to hear your stories. So basically what I'm saying is that I'd like everyone I know on Facebook to just have a fucking blog like a normal person.
   
5. Unlike my beaverancée, I feel that I do not need to be on this thing "for work" just yet, although she has pointed out, fairly convincingly, that this may not be the case. I believe her words were, "a presence is better than an absence". Hmph.
   
6. Everyone I know who's on Facebook laughs (or cries) over how obsessed they are with it. Updating their status. Leaving notes on friends' walls. I believe them and am afraid. I spend too much time in front of the computer already. The last thing I need is some other reason to stay up late hitting "refresh". Seriously.
   
7. A lot of people I know, love and miss are on Facebook and let's be honest - we're shit at keeping in touch. On the other hand, alot of other people are on Facebook too. People I dislike and wouldn't ordinarily have to deal with. People I've been avoiding since elementary school, junior high school, high school and university. People who chap my ass. 

I know I'm being ridiculous. It feels pretty good. Ultimately, though, I feel that my "no likee" position on the mighty Facebook is untenable. It comes down to two possibilities: Will I continue to childishly hold out until Katr just joins and impersonates me to potentially save my career? Or will I ultimately cave independently of her because Gina Torres invites me to become her Friend on Facebook? History will decide.

Creampuff is . . . Unwell

Oh my god, you guys. I am sick as a

I didn't want to believe it. At first, I was simply feeling a little dull and uninspired. Then I was a little scratchy throated and had a headache. I hit the ColdFX and hit it hard. I bought some anticipatory Dayquil - you know, just in case things went south. They did. They went south like an eager lover. I am now out of Dayquil. I just spent the last half hour lying on the bed thinking up country song titles that describe how I'm feeling.

I Feel Like Ten Kinds of Ass

If Only I Could Find The Cat That Shat In My Mouth

Thank the Good Lord for the Sweet Sweet Ice Maker in Our Fridge

Jesus, Take the Wheel and Head to the Drugstore For Me

If I Bring That Up One More Time We'll Have to Vote on It

I Feel Like Twelve Kinds of Ass, 'Cause I Thought of Two More

Oh Chicken Soup, I Wish I Could Taste You Tonight

My Woman Up and Left, Was It My Ricola Breath?

It's true - young Katr left this afternoon for a week-long biznass trip. On the one hand, I miss her tender love. On the other hand, we're not gay married yet and do I really want to let her know the extent of my potential for horkaciousness before we tie the knot? I don't think so either.

I hope you all have wonderful disease-free weekends. And I mean that. Me, I'm looking forward to some fine whine and possibly some easy knitting. Although on second thought, maybe just the whining. One more harsh sneeze while holding knitting needles and I might put out my eye.

**UPDATE** I can't believe I forgot to include "Noseminer's Daughter". Damn.

Bucolic Creampuff

As everyone knows, I love being outside. And by "love", I mean "LOVE". And by "outside", I mean "indoors".

So it was a big surprise to me when we moved to Vancouver and I suddenly started to enjoy being in Nature. Not "prefer", mind you. I'm not some hippy freak. But "enjoy".

In the hopes of furthering that enjoyment (and getting more out of our second balcony, the door to which we generally keep closed so that dust doesn't blow in and fucker up our glorious t.v.), I got it into my head that I'd like to do some balcony gardening. My parents had a beautiful garden in the backyard while I was growing up and at the time, I fought like hell to avoid leaving the cool refuge of the basement. But now, in my dotage, I remember these pots and plants with great fondness. So while they were here visiting last weekend, I took my parents to Home Depot and they gots me some plants. And then I PUT MY HANDS IN DIRT. I really felt Gaia's power as I plunged my hands deep into the potting soil. Then I smelled Gaia. I'm not going to lie to you. She was a little ripe.

Beautiful faux-cotta pots. Jealous?

Shhh . . . the periwinkle is sleeping.

I'm taking your "part sun, part shade" handle seriously here, bougainvillea. Don't screw me.

It was raining when I started my gardening efforts but when it ended, the sun came out to reward me! I took some photos of the finished faux-cotta with the evening sunshine bright upon me.

As a first time gardener, I am nervous about my new vegetation and have been watching the pots quite closely over the last few days. So you can imagine my distress when I came home and saw this out my window.

"Oh my GOD," I thought, "my plants turning gray and dying RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME!!" I rushed out onto the balcony to inspect the pot and was momentarily startled by a dangling rope being slowly drawn up the building past our balcony. Clearly, the window washers had been. And they left me a little gift.

Dear Birds:

I can only hope you weren't actually hanging out in this nest when the window washers knocked it from its perch onto our balcony. If you would like your nest returned, please visit the eastern-most faux-cotta to retrieve it. Know that I am tempted to simply throw it away, but I don't want to touch it in case you have bird flu and Katr won't let me use the BBQ tongs.

Regards,

Roro

I was so incensed by the random unloading of crap onto our balcony by the window washers that I retaliated the only way I knew how. During a pause in the rope removal procedure, I reached out and stuck the gum I'd been chewing onto the passing rope. Because one gift deserves another. And few things register gift dissatisfaction more efficaciously than used Hubba Bubba.

Oh, hey, speaking of gifts, Katr, intrepid online marketer that she is, posted a challenge the other night to Sears' campaign to have customers vote on the cover for their annual Christmas wish book. In a nutshell, Katr thought their campaign blew (that's marketing jargon, so don't be alarmed if you don't really understand it) and she thought she'd start her own Wishbook Cover campaign! You know, to show Sears how it could have been done. So if you've got a photo that YOU think should grace the front of Sears' holiday catelogue (but never will), head on over to Flickr and upload your photo to the faux-Wishbook group. Here's mine:

Lookin' good, Darth Tater. Lookin' good.

Creampuff Interview - Mother's Day Edition

First of all, to my mom: Happy Mother's Day! Thank you for giving me birth, for keeping me happy and alive through childhood, for supporting my endeavours and my choices in life and for being fucking hilarious. I hope you enjoy the trip to the spa we're setting up for you! I'm not saying which spa here, because I don't want you to be harassed by blog-reading riff-raff. Riff-raff - you know who you are.

Second of all, to hopeful mothers-to-be Whozat & Shrike: I WILL get to those memes. I PROMISE.

Third of all, to wenders' mom: You questions are answered below. Also, Happy Mother's Day!!

A little background - wenders was playing this interview game on her blog and ended up interviewing her mom, KnittingPainterWoman. I joked on PainterWoman's blog that I thought wenders' questions for her were quite restrained and that if I had been interviewing MY mother, I probably would have asked a bunch of accusatory questions like "why did you ground me so much?" PainterWoman, like my mother, is a therapist - perhaps she sensed that I needed "talk a few things out". So she sent me the following awesome questions:

What question would you most like your mother to answer, and what do you think that answer would be?

The truth is that I don't remember ever actually being grounded. It wasn't that I didn't get in trouble, mind you, but a stern talking-to, followed by extra chores or perhaps docking of allowance were generally the punishments of choice. In fact, I was quite proud that, unlike most of my friends, I never got grounded. I asked my mom once why she was against it. If I recall correctly, she said something like: "Well, sweetie, if you've done something that made me so angry that I wanted to ground you, the last thing I'd want is you hanging around here all day and reminding me that I'm pissed off." Which I think makes all kinds of sense.

As for what question I would CURRENTLY like my mother to answer, that's a tough one. I COULD ask her something like "How'd you get to be so cool?" or "Would you rather a wrist corsage or a pin-on deal for our big gay wedding?" But the reality is that I'm not a person who asks a lot of questions. I prefer to make things up. Also, I've been watching alot of Alias lately, so I suppose that my fantasy question for my mom would be "All those years that you were an elementary school librarian, bringing home the most awesome books ever and patiently, lovingly teaching us to read . . . were you also, by any chance, secretly a space cowgirl, fighting for interstellar justice, backed by an anonymous billionaire?" And I imagine her answer would be: "That's right. Between working full time and having two kids three years apart, I was also saving the universe, darling. One space-hog at a time." And then I would say "I KNEW it!!" and then she would show me her space boots.

If you got to pick an "alternate life" how would it be the same/different from the one you have now?

I'm kind of a lazy dilettante. I've dabbled in many artistic and athletic pursuits in my life, but whenever anything started to require actual work (like reading a manual or learning music theory or drinking fewer milkshakes before dance class), I would lose interest. This is an ongoing problem for me, actually, and may require some kind of Ritalin derivative. Or hypnosis. I'm open to suggestions, people. Anyway, I suppose that if I were to pick an alternate life, I would be interested to see what would have happened if I'd actually been driven to pursue any of these things in a serious way. Perhaps I would have been a champion weightlifter who wrote opera! Or a professional cat's cradle instructor! Damn.

What invention do you wish someone would invent?

I would like to skip this whole "hybrid vehicle", "alternative fuel", "carbon offsets" thing altogether and get someone to invent a teleportation device. The device would run on the blood of the innocent. Hahahahaaa! Just kidding. It would run on any kind of blood, regardless of innocence.

What accomplishment (if any) must you achieve to know that your life has meaning?

Winning NASCAR. It's like my white whale. Mainly because when I show up at the track, they keep trying to sell me bullshit like "You need to have a license" and "You're heavier than the actual racecar".

To what fictional place would you be willing to relocate?

I know you're all thinking I'd pick the world of Anne of Green Gables, but the truth is those people had to work hard and shit outdoors.  Forget it. After due consideration, I must conclude that no fiction has stirred my imagination quite like Jasper Fforde's tales of Literary Detective Thursday Next. I would like to live in the world of Thursday Next, where literature replaces religion and I could have a pet dodo. I would also have a funny name, like "Fonda Squirrel". And I would work with Thursday at Jurisfiction, where I could leap in and out of any book ever written! I could spend a day at Hogwarts or tell Raskalnikov to get over himself! I could stop in for a plate of fried green tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café! And before long, alert readers would notice Anne Shirley suddenly finding herself attracted to "the stout girl with the nut-brown hair, Grecian nose and blue-grey eyes who uses slang and scratches herself." Sign me up!

Speaking of signing up, here are the rules of the interview post. Participate - IF YOU DARE.

So, you wanna play along?
Leave me a comment saying, “Interview me, please.”
I will respond by emailing you five questions of my choosing.
You must update your blog with the answers to the questions. Whether you like them or not.
You have to include this explanation, and an offer to interview someone else in the same post.
When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.
So, there you go. Cheers.

Creampuff Commute

It's been a long time since I had a really epic commute to get to work. For a few months many years ago, I was working as an off-the-books office manager for a meglomaniacal buttnut way up in the north end of Toronto and had an hour-long, three-transfer public transit ride to get up there. 

The subway part was fine (I was younger then and hated people less) but the part with the bus . . . sometimes I still hear the screaming. The bus was stuffed with teens every morning and they all disembarked at the stop AFTER mine, so I had to be in a certain spot if I wanted to get off . . . the bus. Thus, the most exciting moments of the morning occurred when I would engage in a battle of the wills at the bus depot with a little person, who wanted the same seat as I did. Some days, I would deke her out; other days, she would flash past me like tiny, bitchy lightning and smirk triumphantly at me for most of the ride. I've often thought about tracking that woman down and doing a TLC special on her. Check your local listings! 8 p.m.: Little People, Big World. 9:00 p.m.: Tiny, Bitchy Lightning.

Nowadays, my commute is pretty short and is generally accomplished in bare feet. But I got to relive some of that tasty commuter fun last week when Katr and I were in Toronto briefly for work. Of course, we were taking the GO Train against traffic and our hotel was right across from Union Station, so it was more like commuter-tourism than commuting. Like going on commuter safari, but with laptop bags instead of those big hats. We marvelled at the herds of people arriving into the city. We were trod upon by wingtips. I hummed that Carly Simon song from Working Girl.

On our first morning at Union, I found the "on-the-go" spirit of the commuters infectious and insisted that Katr and I both have smoothies for breakfast, because they are "healthy" and make me feel very efficient and no-nonsense. Also, I figured there would be less chance of dribbling on my "nice shirt" (which I subsequently dribbled on at lunch). This worked well for our first morning, but on the second day, it turned out we were hungrier. We both slammed our smoothies just before getting on the train and were sitting there discussing how we probably should have gotten something with bacon instead when another passenger joined us on the train. It was a man.

A man with a bag of McMuffins.

We were instantly riveted.

I know that McMuffins are wrong. But sometimes they feel so right. I was cursing myself for not acquiring our own McLardWads and heaving a heavy sigh of resignation when the strangest thing happened. This McMuffin man settled in a seat close to ours and then he got up, LEFT THE MCMUFFINS ON HIS SEAT and walked by us, in search of a paper. Katr and I cast sidelong glances at this man's abandoned breakfast. How could he just LEAVE them there, delicious and unattended? Words passed between us as we eyed the food.

Me: (barely a whisper) It's like BAIT.

Katr: (nodding vigorously, also barely whispering) Creampuff bait.

We teetered on the edge of indecision. Would we just leave the breakfast sandwiches alone and pretend that they weren't calling our names? Or would we teach this guy a lesson and have him return to find two creampuffs making sweet, sweet love to the lonely McMuffins?

Our hesitation cost us the prize. Just as I was about to make my move (and just as Katr whipped out her camera to capture the liberation of the McMuffs), the guy strode back to his seat, opened the bag and started to chow down. I may have shed a little tear. Thank goodness there were Timbits when we got to the office or the whole day might have been a wash. 

On our last evening in town, Katr took off to see her hairdresser (as she has yet to find one in Vancouver - part of our ongoing "failing to commit to our new city" issues, like how I still have a Toronto cell phone) and I took the train back alone. I had actually brought some editing work with me and was feeling quite fancy and just like the other commuters, on their laptops and Blackberries. I snapped my gum importantly as I circled formatting errors and scribbled notes in the margins.

By the time the train arrived at Union, my gum was stale and as I exited the train, amid a sea of commuters, I looked for a place to deposit it. I saw a garbage can and, in an uncharacteristic move, I decided to lean over and spit my gum out, instead of using my hands. Just as I leaned and spit, I was mightily jostled by a small woman with a large shopping bag and, in a glistening arc, my gum went flying into some lady's open purse.

I froze.

I've been known to perpetrate a social gaffe from time to time, but it's a rare day that I'll hawk into someone's purse. I had no idea what to do. Reach in and retrieve it? Apologize? Let the wave of commuters carry me away? My fight or flight response kicked into gear when the lady's friend said in a loud voice:

"Did she just . . . SPIT IN YOUR PURSE?"

Suddenly, everything was in slow motion. The lady bent her head to look into her purse as her friend raised her hand to point her manicured nails in my direction. I turned and, like a fat gazelle, leapt over some guy's briefcase and dodged a pair of Mormons. I made for the escalators, head down, heart racing, waiting for a claw-like hand to clamp down on my shoulder and rub my gum into my hair. I was almost at the hotel when I realized that I'd escaped.

I breathed a sigh of relief. Then I popped another stick of gum. And then I started laughing so hard, I choked on my gum.

So, purse lady, if you're out there - I'm sorry I spit my gum into your purse. I hope it didn't ruin anything (other than your day). And as for you, McMuffin Man - keep those sandwiches close. You might not be so lucky next time.

Creampuff Culpa

First of all, holy shit, it's MAY. I know, I know - my mind is like a steel trap. I was in denial about it being fuckin' MAY until I got this email from Ron Hudson over at 2sides2ron:

Dear friends of the International Carnival of Pozitivities (ICP),

The 11th edition of the ICP is now available at Living in the Bonus Round.  Please visit this edition and leave feedback for the wonderful participants and host.  I will be grateful to you if you can post a note on your blogs or websites to direct your readers to this edition and to the homepage of the ICP. 

Our next edition will be accepting submissions until 2 June.  I hope you will consider sending in your work to help us spread the word that HIV/AIDS still needs all of our involvement. In the meantime, peace to you all.

I got this note from the lovely Ron and thought 'Geez, Ron . . . jumping the gun a little here, aren't we? I mean, you're posting about the May edition and it's only  . . . BLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARG."

I managed to post a whopping FIVE TIMES in April, which I suppose is a testament to my:

a) ability to pretend that time isn't actually happening to ME

b) being in work mode; and

c) hermit-like behaviour here in Vancouver, City of Mystery Because We Haven't Really Had Time to Explore it. 

Sadly, while I feel that I did do a good deal of work, I actually accomplished sweet tweet. Fortunately, I got to see alot of these online when I "took breaks":

 

Ah, sweet Frita. You are my canine muse.

Anyway - go check out the International Carnival of Pozitivities!! And when you have finished, I promise that Frita will have sparked a post or two more than last month. Because April showers . . . clean bird shit off your balcony.