The Dinner Party

Norma arrives an hour ahead of time. “You’re early” I try not to shout. I'm wearing holey pants and a sweatshirt that looks a bit like one of Jackson Pollock’s drip works if he had used tomato sauce and pesto instead of paint. To keep her entertained over the next hour while I finish cooking, vacuum, have a shower, set the table, wash a large hillock of dishes, feed the cats and try to dissuade them from shedding all over the recently vacuumed furniture, I make Norma a chocolate martini. And one for myself.

Half an hour later I ask if she wants a chai berry martini. She does. I make one for her, and one for myself. Shortly before 7 I ask Norma if she’s ready to try what the wine wench has labelled “a really, really good shiraz.” She is, so I pour her a glass. And one for myself. Then there’s some activity at the door. I go and greet Teresa and Daniel. “You’re right on time” I say loudly, to ensure Norma hears me. There’s a lot of hugging, hellos, more martini mixing, and after a bit Heather, Marcy and Sylvain arrive. (Fashionably late, I point out to Norma.) More hugs, more hellos, more martinis. At this point I’m thinking we don’t even need dinner. I consider pulling out the Canada Food Guide to prove my point. The vodka is made from potatoes, which covers the carbohydrate and vegetable groups. Double whammy. The chai liqueur has cream in it: protein and dairy. Another double whammy. The wine covers the fruit group. Why weigh ourselves down with green and black olive crostini-white bean hummus with sage, roasted garlic, pine nuts-carmelized onions and sherry-roasted tomato and ginger chutney-roasted red pepper and goat cheese-olives with sundried tomatos and capers-lasagna Rio Grande made with asiago and jack cheeses, ricotta, cilantro pesto, chard, roasted peppers and zucchini, smoky tomato sauce-mixed greens with avocado and pepitas in a sesame oil lime vinaigrette? Why not just float like balloons through the room? Or swirl and dance all night? But everyone seems preoccupied with thoughts of food. It’s the last time I invite this crowd over for dinner. I mentally diagnose them all as having obsessive-compulsive disorder and pour more wine.

Somehow the meal makes it onto the table in a chaotic but delicious fashion. The conversation is equally chaotic but delicious, covering curling, crumhorns, cats, Cranium (the new version, where you get to manipulate people like puppets), 3:10 to Yuma (which probably left on time, I note for Norma's benefit), Burundi, brownies, girl guides, scouts, Cesar Evoria, and yoga for better sex (we can't get into our usual bawdy talk over this last one, owing to Marcy's presence).

Wisely, Norma realizes that she probably shouldn't drive to where she was supposed to be staying, and asks if she can sleep at my place. I assure her that's fine, and surreptitiously try to re-distribute the chaos (of the non-delicious sort) that has broken out in the guest room from all the books, magazines, knick-knacks, clothes and cats that I piled in there as a way of cleaning up for the dinner party. Fortunately the light bulb chooses to die at that point, so I figure Norma won't be able to see what the room is harbouring.

In the morning Norma and I chat over coffees. I briefly consider putting Bailey's in them, but then realize that because of the dinner party the night before, and the leisurely morning conversation, I have assumed it's the weekend. But it's actually Monday. Norma looks at her watch and gasps. “I've got to get going. I'm supposed to be there at 8:30.” “You're going to be late,” I remark helpfully.

Later I return from work to find no Norma. She's left a note instead. I'm disappointed. Since she moved to Hamilton we don't get to see her that much anymore. I've left early (underlined twice) so that I'll miss the freezing rain, she writes. That woman's timing is always off, I announce to the deliciously chaotic remains of the dinner party.

A History of Music for Dum-Dums

I went to a History of Music for Dum-Dums concert on Saturday night where we participated in composing an aleatoric piece; learned how to make a renaissance crumhorn using a straw from McDonalds; were told that “fa-la-la” in madrigals is the musical equivalent of writing #(*$&@#(&$#@; and the choir sang this.

Trousers Lake

When I think of Trousers Lake my mind travels back to the mudflats. I'm at the bottom of soaring canyon walls that twist and turn in endless directions, so that hide-and-seek stretches for hours. There's an undercurrent of fearful excitement: will I run head-on into the seeker around the next bend? Or a Tyrannosaurus rex, whose ancestors - having survived whatever disaster befell the rest of the dinosaurs - have roamed the mudflats for millions of years, their presence hidden from disbelieving eyes? In my childhood memory my family and my best friend’s family spent whole summers at Trousers Lake for years on end, but of course my adult brain tells me it was probably 2 or 3 weeks, and 2 or 3 years at the most. But it was that blissful period when time was never in a hurry, before the hormonal rumblings that warn of impending adulthood.

The cottages at Trousers Lake were owned by a man who yelled a lot. He had a black dog that was scared and scarred. Perhaps clothing hid the abuses his kids suffered, or maybe he was selective as to where he directed his anger. One year one of his sons claimed that his pet alligator had gotten too big for the bathtub, so he had let it go in the lake. Jody and I refused to go swimming that summer and were terrified of approaching the shore, lest reptilian eyes were silently assessing which of us would make the better meal. And Trousers Lake was where I first learned of the dangers of drinking and motorized vehicles and adolescence. A drunken teenager being towed by a drunken boatload of teenagers waterskied into a cliff, breaking her pelvis and both legs. It also brought me face-to-face with death and its aftermath, when a woman was dragged up on shore during a bonfire. A child younger than me was later taken away in the back of a police car.

In writing this, I realize that Trousers Lake wasn’t the idyllic spot I first remembered it to be. The mudflats loom so largely in my memory that they overshadow all the shadows that were also there. Sometimes I think it would be fun to go back to see the mudflats, but maybe it isn’t such a good idea. They will probably seem so much smaller, so much more ordinary, than I remember them.

The End

Life doesn't always go on. Many of us don't like thinking about that, to the point that we even avoid mentioning death directly, preferring euphemisms like “passed away”, “kicked the bucket”, or “went to the undying land.” Buddhists, on the other hand, seem to think about death a lot. This is so that when it does come, they won't be flustered and spend their last moments wringing their hands instead of waving goodbye. The Buddhist practice of meditating on death is sort of similar to what Inspector Clouseau was doing by having Kato jump him at unexpected times, so that he would be prepared when a real assassin attacked. And just like Kato, death can come charging when you're about to kiss Maria Gambrelli by the fountain. It can accompany the Japanese waitress as she brings you a fortune cookie. It can swoop down from the chandelier, or sneak up on you as you're fumbling around in your leopard-skin bed, bubbles and Come to Me swirling through the air. It can strike as you're starting up the car after a morning spent Christmas shopping, leaving others bewildered at so many things, including the intended recipients of the contents of all the bags and boxes in the back of the car.

If you don't want to think about death too much, the next best thing is to eat, drink and be merry, for when death knocks at the door tomorrow (or, if it's running late, barges in) at least you won't leave this world feeling like a dissatisfied customer. You won't whine and try and get your money back from the being ferrying you across the waters. Their job is probably stressful enough, what with passengers soon to realize they've been Eric the Redded: they're not going to greener, undying pastures, but to a land of icy death.

Understandably, death usually brings sadness. It doesn't really have a good sense of humour. Not someone I would want to spend a lot of time with. But one day I won't have a choice in the matter. So I want something comical to mark my ending, like the parking meter with “Time expired” on it that some nephew got for his aunt's grave. To make it easier for me, and others, to laugh in the face of death.

Hardship Pay

Some time ago I heard that diplomats who are posted to Ottawa get hardship pay. Apparently, of all the places where a diplomat can be sent, Ottawa has the second-lowest average winter temperature (the coldest city presumably being in Russia somewhere). It's true Ottawa can get quite cold, but on the other hand, where else can you skate to work and stop on the way for a beavertail and coffee? Instead of receiving hardship pay, diplomats should have to pay some sort of bribe (or in bureaucratese, a preferred posting premium) for the opportunity to live in one of the few places on earth where one can dine on a beavertail.

To my mind, having to work with statisticians is what truly merits hardship pay. They refuse to ever give a definite answer. (An interesting statistic would be the proportion of statisticians who overcome this inability to commit and get married.) Maybe it's because, like meteorologists who state the forecast in terms of probabilities, this means the probability they will ever be wrong is 0%. If you go to a statistician and ask: “What test should I use to analyze these data?” – a seemingly straightforward question – you will never get the straightforward answer you seek. Instead, you will be presented with a maze of options, usually accompanied by a stack of articles to read. In fact, I'm beginning to suspect that not even statisticians fully understand statistics. I don't blame them. Trying to decipher an article on statistics is like dealing with an algebraic system that has been off its medication for too long, or alternatively, has been taking steroids. Instead of just having to cope with the familiar faces of x and y and the occasional z, all sorts of letters will be randomly distributed throughout the text, sometimes with disturbing symbols beside them. By the time the article gets around to explaining what g and g' are, you've forgotten what a symbolizes. No wonder statistical errors were found in more than 50% of articles published in the British Medical Journal.

To “help” with an analysis I was working on recently, a statistician sent me an article titled Smearing estimate: A nonparametric retransformation method, which sounds like the Frankensteinish offspring of gynaecology and statistics. Here is an excerpt from the article:

Assume (i) the retransformation h is continuously differentiable, (ii) X contains the intercept, (iii) XtXIn+ I:positive definite, and (iv) the expectation (4.5)is finite for all M > 0. Then the smearing estimate (3.1)is weakly consistent. For most popular transformations, the supremum in(4.5) can be evaluated at the endpoints. For example, if I h' I is monotonic, the moment condition (iv) in Theorem 1 can then be replaced by (v') E [ht(c + €)I2 < +a for all c, which is usually easy to check under hypothesized true error distribution. For example, for the power transformations q = g(y) = Y", a # 0, the desired moment condition is that E(c + E)~[('/")- l1 < +w for all c, which is satisfied for the normal error distribution if 0 < ci < 1. For the logarithmic transformation q = log( Y), Y = exp(q), the desired moment condition reduces to E exp(2~)< +m, which is satisfied for the normal error distribution.

Can I rest my case? (This requires only a yes or no answer, like you’re supposed to give when you’re being examined in a court of law. Maybe not having become a lawyer was a mistake. Although I suppose a statistician could end up taking the stand, in which case they would no doubt alienate the jury with their evasive manner and tendency to hand out articles in response to every question.)

Maybe I should write the foreign service exam. What are the chances that I would end up being posted to the coldest place on earth? Maybe I’ll ask a statistician about this. Whatever answer I don’t get from them, at least I know that if I am sent there, I’ll be entitled to some hardship pay.

Today's forecast: Sunny

The weather gods are finally smiling, as am I. It looks like tulips are emerging in the back garden. I'm going to tiptoe, or maybe frolic - they're waking up anyways - through them.

Today`s forecast: Rain

At the risk of sounding like Goldilocks in her whiny phase, today it's too rainy.

Make that a surly Goldilocks in her whiny phase: it's too fucking rainy.

Today's forecast: High 2 degrees, sunny with cloudy periods

Winter is joyless without snow. The warm weather has melted most of it, but my magnolia tree remains interred under a lingering pile in the front yard. It's not so much a tree as a stick, like something Charlie Brown would bring home. It lives in a rough neighbourhood—close to the neighbour's driveway, and she's an avid shoveller. The weeping maple I planted there died, its beauty too fragile to withstand the heavy snows. The weeping cypress survives though, an elegy for Bella.

This sorrowful landscape needs some sun.

Today’s forecast: WINDY!

Gusts up to 90 km/h. I should have put more clothes pegs on my sheets, which by now are probably silent banshees haunting the neighbourhood. If I had an umbrella, I could have Mary Poppinsated my way to work this morning. Instead, I had to make an effort even on the downhill stretches.

Opening Lines

Why is “It was a dark and stormy night” considered such a bad opening line? So bad, in fact, that it spawned the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, in which entrants submit the worst opening line for a novel. Like these:

The notes blatted skyward as the sun rose over the Canada geese, feathered rumps mooning the day, webbed appendages frantically peddling unseen bicycles in their search for sustenance, driven by Nature's maxim, "Ya wanna eat, ya gotta work," and at last I knew Pittsburgh.
--Sheila B. Richter, Minneapolis, Minnesota (1987 Winner)

Like an expensive sports car, fine-tuned and well-built, Portia was sleek, shapely, and gorgeous, her red jumpsuit molding her body, which was as warm as the seatcovers in July, her hair as dark as new tires, her eyes flashing like bright hubcaps, and her lips as dewy as the beads of fresh rain on the hood; she was a woman driven--fueled by a single accelerant--and she needed a man, a man who wouldn't shift from his views, a man to steer her along the right road, a man like Alf Romeo.
--Rachel E. Sheeley, Williamsburg, Indiana (1988 Winner)

As the newest Lady Turnpot descended into the kitchen wrapped only in her celery-green dressing gown, her creamy bosom rising and falling like a temperamental souffle, her tart mouth pursed in distaste, the sous-chef whispered to the scullery boy, "I don't know what to make of her."
--Laurel Fortuner, Montendre, France (1992 Winner)

On reflection, Angela perceived that her relationship with Tom had always been rocky, not quite a roller-coaster ride but more like when the toilet-paper roll gets a little squashed so it hangs crooked and every time you pull some off you can hear the rest going bumpity-bumpity in its holder until you go nuts and push it back into shape, a degree of annoyance that Angela had now almost attained.
Rephah Berg, Oakland CA (2002 Winner)

As her quivering lips met his, and her eyelashes fluttered softly on his sweating cheek, Dr Robbins reflected, "I didn't realize she had upper dentures . . . in fact, her slippery plastic palate reminds me of going down a waterslide that hasn't been properly chlorinated, as evidenced by the distinct nitrous and sulfurous emanations, or could it be sinus trouble?"
Philip Bateman
Kenilworth, South Africa

What a pity Dave was too young to have seen "2001: A Space Odyssey," for he might have been able to predict what would happen next, when the ape standing next to the big black slab picked up the tapir bone.
Ann Medlock
Lenah Valley, TAS, Australia

A rather youthful Billy Joel was fascinated when he entered the Green Room at the Tonight Show and saw a group of matronly nuns hastily applying hair color to the noggin of the show's next guest, Neil Young, whose agent offered an explanation from the corner of the room: "Only the good dye Young."
Joe Wyatt
Amarillo, TX

My favourite one, which I can't find on their website but was how I first heard about the contest, was a sentence along the lines of stratus fractonimbus clouds condensing in the troposphere as a hydrogen-helium star with a spectral class of G2V slowly descended below the locus of points which have an altitude of zero degrees and so on and so on and so on, followed by a semicolon and “in other words, it was a dark and stormy night.”

It's probably particularly egregious if a Canadian writes an opening line about the weather. So predictable. Sometimes it's all we talk about. But who can blame us? Last Thursday it was –27 degrees and the car wouldn’t start. Today it's going to be 12 and the car was slinging up a hammock as I left for work on my bike. While work and relationships stagnate, the weather is full of surprises. But I guess it doesn't make for riveting literature. (Although weather events like hurricanes and ice storms do bring to mind that Chinese curse "May you live in interesting times.")

So if you come across an opening line that contains references to the weather, don't bother reading the rest of the story. It's going to be a waste of your time. For while you can't judge a book by its cover, you can by its opening line.

A Happy Shade of Yellow

A few years ago I thought I would write a book called A Happy Shade of Yellow. I had a hard time coming up with a plot and characters though. At one point I thought I would write a story in which one of my nephews dies. The yellow would refer to a sweater I had bought him for Christmas, but he dies before I have a chance to give it to him. I discover it at the back of my closet years later. This plot had several drawbacks. First, it seemed more like an unhappy shade of yellow. Second, it was too sketchy and contrived. And third, when I told my nephews about it, their first question was: “Which one of us is going to die?”

Uh-oh. This was a variation on the question that parents dread: “Which one of us do you love more?” The truth will not always set you free. If you say “I like your brother better because he's not a whiny little shit like you,” you are condemning yourself to years of expensive therapy bills, and some therapist to years of having to listen to your whiny little shit of a child whining about how his or her parents love his or her brother more. So instead, parents say something like: “We love you both equally, but in different ways. Not better, not worse, just different.” This is similar to what Gilles Duceppe said when explaining why the Bloc Québecois wants to separate: “I don't believe that Québec is any better than the rest of Canada, nor is it any worse; it's just different.” While you know he's thinking that Québec is way better than the rest of the riff-raff that is Canada, where the height of culture is having a beer apératif (drunk from the bottle, possibly opened using the teeth) accompanied by Doritos and cheese dip (which, when the label is scrutinized, turns out to be classified as an edible-oil product containing no dairy products whatsoever). And just as politicians are not known for speaking the truth, so too should children suspect their parents when they get the “not better, not worse, just different” line.

I did briefly consider making them twins so it wouldn't be obvious which one of them I was doing in. Or a murder-gone-wrong thing, so they both end up dead. Liam kills Kiernan to get money to buy the latest Terry Pratchett novel. As he's dying, Kiernan grabs his saber and stabs Liam through some vital organ. The motive at least isn't so far-fetched. If bank accounts could be compared to the stages of pregnancy, Kiernan's would be the sixth month. Past the morning sickness stage, before the bloated balloon stage, the hormonal cocktail imbueing the hair, skin and mood with a lustrous glow. Liam's would be more like a man and woman discussing the idea of getting pregnant, then deciding it's just not the right time. When they were younger, Liam spent a good deal of the time trying to convince Kiernan that “they” “needed” such-and-such, and that since “they” needed it it should be a “joint” purchase made using the money in Kiernan's bank account. Fortunately, Kiernan is as wily as he is monetarily astute, and most of his bank account remained intact.

I ended up not writing anything. The truth is, I am superstitious and didn't want to kill off either of my nephews in a book, lest life really does imitate art (the latter word in my case meaning the Doritos-and-edible-oil-cheese-dip version of what the French would consider real art). I don't want them to die in any way, shape or form. Either of them. They are both equally precious to me, but in different ways. And that's the truth.