UT sushi outing

Got together with Allison and Jodi last night. We went out for sushi and then to Starbucks. We discussed our playlist for our Relay For Life gig on June 7th (see the Canadian Cancer Society for details on this charity event). So far, our VERY tentative playlist includes the Hockey Monkey song, Neurotic Love Song, Cuz He's A Guy, Another Story, Alien Jellyfish, Seventies Song, Friendship Song, and Library Boy, with the possible addition of May It Be and Twinkle In His Eye. We've been tentatively slated for the 8:15-9 pm slot, but this may change.

We talked about our concert playlist and songwriting workshop for Conchord in California (August 2nd-4th), where we're Guests of Honor this year.

SPAM OF THE DAY:

Hey, I got an e-mail saying that I could become a legally ordained minister within 48 hours! The spam claims (with lots of exclamation marks) that I can do weddings!! Funerals!! Baptisms!! Forgive sins!! And EVEN START MY OWN CHURCH!!!!!

For $29.95, I basically get a certificate ("CERTIFICATE IS PROFESSIONALLY PRINTED BY AN INK PRESS") that "proves" that I'm an ordained minister.

I had no idea it was so easy.

Today's Blatherphoto is of me at FKO. It was taken by and is the property of Jim Leonard,
who kindly gave me permission to reprint it here.

asian eyes

Today's entry is part of an On Display collaboration project. Our assignment: to write about a body part.

Most of my childhood was spent in the suburbs of Toronto, where I was the only Asian in all my classes through elementary and high school. None of my childhood friends were Asian.

Because I was constantly surrounded by a sea of mostly Caucasian faces (there was very little ethnic diversity out in the suburbs back then), I think that I subconsciously figured I blended in with everyone else, that I wasn't really that different.

I didn't want to be different.





From time to time, however, I'd be reminded that I was different, whether I liked it or not. I'd be glancing over a class photo, for example, and be struck by how much my own features stood out from the others. I'd catch a glimpse of myself in the girls' locker room mirror, my jet black hair amidst all the blondes and browns and reds.

Sometimes I'd be reminded through comments from other children, sometimes innocent, sometimes not-so-innocent. I remember when a friend pooh-poohed my high marks in school, saying that it wasn't fair, that it was a fact that all Japanese people were smarter. A compliment (that I was smarter) and an insult (that I didn't have to work for my marks) at the same time.





I've been called Jap, Japanee, Chink, Slanty-Eyes, Geisha-Girl, but always by other little kids. Though obviously meant as an insult, neither the name-caller nor I fully understood the implications and history behind the terms.

I've always found it baffling how the lack of or addition of a fold in the eyelid (or a difference in skin colour, hair colour, or whatever) can change so much how some people can perceive you. ("Ah, she's Japanese. That must mean she's good at math, is inscrutable and takes a lot of photographs!")

Er.

Okay, so maybe the part about the photographs is true. :-)

As a child, I had always wanted to fit in. As I grew older, I learned the value of being different. I'm not talking about just physical differences, but all other aspects as well.





It freaks me out to hear about some Asians would actually have plastic surgery to look more Western. Okay, perhaps these people don't explicitly say they want to look more Western. As this page about blepharoplasty seems to indicate, they want to look "less tired" and "more youthful" (implying, of course, that all Asians look tired and old!).

I like my eyes. They may not see all that well without glasses, may have wrinkles (sorry, that should be "laugh lines") starting around the corners, may not be the "look into my gaze and drown yourself in unbridled passion" eyes on the faces of gorgeous magazine cover models. But they're all me. :-)

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Today's Blatherpics:

	I took this and the other photos on this page during my run along Harbourfront late yesterday afternoon.
	The roof of an outdoor metal gazebo-like structure in the Toronto Music Garden. I didn't even know there WAS a Toronto Music Garden until yesterday afternoon! Each section of the garden has a musical name, like "Prelude" or "Gavotte".
	Yay, was glad to see that these flowers survived the recent snow. :-)
	I took this photo from the Toronto Music Garden, looking toward the CN tower. The building in the photo is a condo complex.
	My eye. :-)

survey monkey

My 5-year-old niece Annie drew today's Blatherpic (says her proud aunt).

And YAY, we just found out that our friend Christine's MRI came back normal!! :-) :-)

Thanks to those who posted or e-mailed about the Mamma Mia plot. Russell Martin had link to a pretty good synopsis. I'm still somewhat at a loss at how to explain to Sara (who is 7) about why the heroine doesn't know who her father is. Any suggestions (particularly from you parents out there) welcome!

I'm experimenting with a service called Survey Monkey (thanks to Jeff for telling me about it). I'd be grateful if some of you could try out one or both of the following brief surveys and let me know what you think.

Be warned, however, that if you have your cookies disabled, you might be sent into an endless redirection loop! (Thanks to Keris for pointing this out)

-- General Blatherings Survey

-- Terence Chua Domicile Survey

Great to hear from Martin Gordon-Kerr in Blatherchat. I didn't get a chance to properly say good-bye to Andy and Martin at FKO:

--

Just catching up with everyone again - we had a great time in Canada! Nice to meet the people we had met before, and a good time to meet new people - I spent most of the first day of FKO tying email addresses to faces!

Just catching up on Blatherings - good luck with the guinea pigs. Just don't let them out of the run too much - we've only had to chase the rabbit round the garden two or three times, but one was 11am on the Friday of the UK Filkcon, where we were bringing the tech kit and the con was three hours drive away. Andy chased Scrumpy round the garden with a carrot while I turned the run into Castle Colditz 2 and muttered recipes for rabbit stew under my breath...

Just looking back at yesterday's blatherings - I'll agree with Dave. You are definitely insane! However, having had just a few days in the Algonquin National Park when we were in Canada (staying at a place called Bear Trail near Whitney) I am jealous of just about everything else apart from the swim! The scenery is absolutely gorgeous, and it was definitely the highlight of the trip. We tried cross-country falling (sorry, skiing) and had fun, even if we only covered a few miles, and hiked a couple of the trails off the road.

The first one went OK, but on the second one the snow was getting deeper, and the ice under the snow was getting steeper. And then we discovered the sheer cliff edge near by. At about the time we realised that we hadn't seen a waymark for a while. And that all the park rangers were on strike, so we weren't going to get any help for a while!

Fortunately, retracing your steps in snow is a fairly easy business. Annoying, because we must have been three-quarters of the way round. But if the alternative was slipping off the cliff into the lake, which would either have caused concussion or hypothermia (unless you are Debbie!) depending on the state of the ice, then I think going back was probably intelligent.

Wonderful area. We have been saying we will have to go back sometime. May well be a long way off, but it WILL happen.

All the best

Martin GK

--

Thanks to Gary McGath for pointing out Mark Mandel's guinea pig filk.

And some predictions from Sherman, prompted by the Inkspot pens he received as a prize in the Oscar Poll...

--
Debbie,

Thank you so much for the pens! They arrived yesterday, and it's definitely given me the motivation to go out and make more predictions. A sample:

1. Jean-Marie Le Pen will be defeated in France and move to Quebec. He will be arrested for speaking the wrong type of French, becoming one of the immigrant criminals he fears.

2. The Montreal Expos will win the World Series before a crowd of 3,416, counting the guinea pig in the pocket of Marie Floue, a 9-year-old who left home that day to attend her first curling match (before her dad took a wrong turn). The guinea pig is a Yankees fan.

3. The winner of the foreign-language film Oscar next year will be "Sartre in Toronto," about a confused amateur play and its leading actor who dies from too much Starbucks coffee in a tragic evening filled with miscommunication about the meaning of life and the TTC (he forgot to get off at the Sherboune station and later said in his caffeine-induced reverie that there was a sign there reading "No Exit"). The fact that it's in English is apparently no impediment to the Oscar, as the members of the Academy don't speak the language.

4. George W. Bush will land in Ottawa in late 2002, declaring "Ich bin ein Towotan," confusing everyone.

Sherman
--

fluffy and stripe

So Jeff and I finally got to meet Sara's and Annie's new guinea pigs last night, Fluffy and Stripe. They were very small (and young).

I've never had a guinea pig as a pet before, so hadn't realized how placid they were. They genuinely seemed content to just be held. Sara showed me how to gently scratch Fluffy behind the ears ("she likes that a lot").

Sara and Annie are very gentle with their new pets. I shudder to think of what happens when their more rambunctious classmates come over to visit. I guess Fluffy and Stripe will just have to learn to adjust.





Sadly, both Fluffy and Stripe have distinctive markings, and Stripe definitely seems to know Annie's voice already. So much for my plan to find emergency replacements for either of them if tragedy strikes while they are in Jeff's and my babysitting care!

Both Sara and Annie have started guinea pig diaries. Sara's is elaborately annotated with daily events, drawings, and photos.





Before dinner, Sara and Annie put on a Mamma Mia mini-performance for me. Sara and I are going to see Mamma Mia at the Royal Alex in June; we are both VERY hyped about this. I gave Sara the CD soundtrack for her birthday, and she has already memorized the lyrics to six of the songs.

Sara is starting to ask me what some of the songs mean. Uh-oh.

I've been trying to find a good synopsis of the musical online. The official Mamma Mia site gives the following unhelpful information under their "Synopsis" page: "MAMMA MIA! is ABBA's greatest hits woven into 3 wonderful love stories: A young girl about to be married; her mother about to confront the past; and the best love story of all - the audience about to jump out of their seats with joy!"

Guess I should start listening to the CD soundtrack more myself, though I still think I'm going to have a hard time trying to explain why poor Sophie is trying to figure out who her Daddy is in the story...





Jeff and I put the girls to bed last night. Usually this consists of Jeff reading them a couple stories while I try desperately not to fall asleep on the bed beside them. Sara and Annie are so used to this by now that they bring their noisemakers with them to bed for the story reading, in case they see me dozing off.

Sometimes I can see their little faces eagerly watching me (instead of listening to Jeff's story), waiting for my eyelids to droop so they can start shaking their noisemakers and banging their plastic cups and pots together (from the kitchen set). They'll get impatient waiting sometimes, and Annie will lean over to me and whisper, "Auntie Debbie, you can fall asleep now."

Last night, Annie got distracted by the plastic cup she was holding, finding that she could make her voice sound funny if she talked while pressing the cup hard against her mouth.

"My Preciousssssssssssssssssss," she'd whisper over and over again while I tried not to giggle at her Gollum impression.

Jeff was very patient. :-)

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Today's Blatherpics:

	Sara holding Fluffy.
	Annie holding Stripe.
	A page from Sara's diary (which Ruth says she started on her own). "Day 4 - Friday, April 14, 2002. Boo got eye sicknes. I cryed a lot. We had to returne her after dinner. But I got a new Guinea pig and named it Fluffy." Ruth said that Sara was crying when she wrote this entry.
	Another page from Sara's diary. This drawing is of Ruth trying to get one of the guinea pigs out of the cage so they can clean the cage.
	Sara's plasticine model of E.T. and the flowerpot.

cora's adventure

Cora, as I've mentioned in an earlier Blathering, is The Lamest Happy Meal Toy Ever (TLHMTE), and was acquired on a foolhardy expedition to MacDonald's on the way to the cottage. Cora is an extraordinarily ugly doll, with her lips pursed and dotted with pseudo-lipstick, white plastic panties, her plastic hat permanently affixed to her misaligned curls. I usually give my Happy Meal toys to Sara and Annie, but I don't want to inflict Cora on them.

Here's the picture of Cora on the ice that I included in an earlier Blathering.

I decided to take a photo of Cora at the cottage after ice-out, so perched her on the deck railing (see photo at top of this Blathering). Moments after taking the picture, however, a malicious gust of wind whipped Cora off the railing and into the icy waters of Canoe Lake.

Jeff (my hero) leaped to the rescue and took the canoe out to retrieve poor Cora just as she began to sink.





It took several tries, but Cora was successfully rescued from a watery death (she spent longer in the water than I did yesterday). Thankfully, she has not lost any of her horror-movie charm, though her jaunty curls are not quite as jaunty. (See her just-rescued photo at the bottom of today's Blathering)

As a child, my favourite doll was Casey, Barbie's tomboy cousin. She had bendable arms and legs, and a chic blonde crewcut. In a fit of rage, my sister had drawn on one of Casey's legs with a permanent marker...a thick, angry slash that never came off. I was furious, though I'm sure I had given Ruth ample cause for this act of vandalism; I was a horribly cruel big sister at times (I recall that Jim and I used to hang Ruth's dolls and teddybears).

My favourite comfort toy was John the Teddy Bear. I adored John, even when he got very old and fragile and his stuffing started to come out.

One of favourite adult comfort stuffed toys is my fuzzy dog Mendelssohn. My friend Michelle gave him to me when Jeff and I split up once and I spent hours crying on her shoulder. I took Mendelssohn to Philadelphia with me.

Jeff let me take his own childhood comfort toy Flatmouse with me to Philly, too. Annie and Sara are fascinated with Flatmouse; Annie has asked Jeff if a truck had run over it to make it that flat.





I also love a fuzzy green frog that Scott and Amanda sent to me when I was in Philadelphia. I found their package after coming home after a particularly bad day at work. It was basically a comfort package, with funny toys, noisemakers, a homemade pedicure kit, and the fuzzy frog. I started crying as I pulled stuff out of the package, and hugged the frog for a long time.





Cora (TLHMTE) isn't that kind of comfort toy, but I do find that I've grown somewhat fond of her in a pitying "how can anything be that lame" sort of way.

Don't be surprised if she makes appearances in future Blatherings. :-)