Fun stuff

Some funny things I heard on the radio last week that made me forget about spilt paint and the fact that the flooring people didn't show up on Saturday to fix their botched job of three weeks ago because they couldn't find the bamboo they re-ordered.

An immersion journalist (a genre of journalism of which I was woefully ignorant until now) outsourced his life for a year to an Indian company that does a lot of work for American banks. He got them to read bedtime stories to his kids, do his shopping, argue with his wife. I don't think he actually got the company to go to work in his place, or maybe he did. This is the kind of kooky dream assignment you get when you're the editor of Esquire, or maybe when you're screwing the editor of Esquire in a most delightful way.

An interview with the person who decided that Mr. Darcy and zombies make good bookfellows. I forget what genre this type of writing falls under, but it was also something of which I was heretofore woefully ignorant. Since Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was published the creator has been inundated with ideas for re-writing other classics whose copyright has expired, including a slasher horror called A Farewell to Arms and Legs. In the meantime, I await the film version of Price and Prejudice and Zombies starring Colin Firth lurching in Spandex.

The Samoan government, for some reason of which I am woefully ignorant, decided that the populace should start driving on the other side of the road. They went to great expense to implement this change, only to realize that no one had thought to switch the doors on the buses, so now they open into traffic. A 12 year old was hit recently. (That part didn't make me laugh.) I wonder if people getting killed whilst getting on and off the bus will overtake falling coconuts as the leading cause of death on Samoa*?

Source: Trivial Pursuit

Spilt paint

Today at 11 am, after about three hours of prep work, I picked up the can of paint – a gallon, half full – and started walking towards the paint tray. I tripped. The paint splattered my bed the walls the phone the answering machine various pieces of furniture a stunning piece of amethyst and drenched a sarong I had bought in Indonesia and my newly installed bamboo floor. It took one and a half hours to clean everything up, and one sheet and possibly the answering machine suffered a premature death.

I know someone will tell me that in the larger scheme of things this was trivial. But in my Shirley Valentine-sized life it took on greater significance. I know someone will tell me it could have been worse. It could have. I could have slipped in the paint, fallen down the stairwell (which for the past month has been without any sort of guardrail) and possibly suffered a premature death, or met the dire fate a friend keeps warning me about whereby someone she knows fell off his deck because it didn’t have a railing and is now a paraplegic. An asteroid could have hit the house. I know someone will tell me a story about paint that will make mine seem laughable. But you someones, and you know who you are, don't you dare. At the moment, even though it's of no use, I want to cry over spilt paint.

Marking the passage of time

Three years ago, during the last visit my nephews made to my mother's house in Tamworth before she moved, we decided to bury a time capsule that we planned to dig up three years later. It was a dark and stormy night when we buried it. Really. The power had gone out, so we used the ugly solar lantern that resembled a shitzu from my mother's garden as our seeing eye dog. By the dim light at midnight, we dug a hole just outside my mother's yard on county property, placed inside the hole a mason jar into which we had all written what we thought each others' lives would be like in three years, refilled the hole with earth, and placed a rock over the spot.

In mid-August, during the last visit my nephews made to Kingston this summer, we drove up to Tamworth to disinter the time capsule. My mother had called Susan, the woman who bought her house, to let her know that she shouldn't be alarmed if she saw four people foraging close to her property. When informed of the purpose of the foraging Susan told my mother that she had slightly enlarged the garden around where we wanted to dig, and would we mind not disturbing it. Maybe it was because the deed had been done in the mostly dark; we hadn't thought to record in writing exactly where we had buried it (I thought it was right by the fence post, Liam thought it was 10 feet closer to the road, Kiernan thought it was some place completely different); there seemed to be oodles of rocks, who knew which one the time capsule was under?; or because my mother kept screeching at us to be careful every time we got close to Susan's garden (even though it was now encroaching on public property) -- for whatever combination of the preceding, we did not find the time capsule. At least two of us were very disappointed.

At the end of our first summer at the cottage we put messages to ourselves in a Ziploc bag, put the bag in a plastic container, loaded it with rocks, and placed it in the water at the end of a chain that ran from the dock to a submerged rock. The dock was in pretty bad shape that year. If too many people stood on it it probably looked like we were walking on water to passing boaters. When we returned the following summer the dock had been replaced and we could not locate the time capsule. At least three of us were very disappointed.

At the end of our second year at the cottage each of us wrote what we imagined would be the first line of Georgia O'Keeffe's biography and put the slips of paper in a plastic container, which I placed in the hollow of a dead tree where it would be easy to find the following year. It was so easy to find that Sharon, the owner of the cottage, spotted it. Here is what she read when she opened it:

She sat by the side of the road and it occurred to her that, rather than risk her father's wrath and condemnation by making love to a woman, it would be preferable to paint pictures of women's labia and disguise them as flowers.

Even her still lifes were flamboyently restless.

The first time I met Georgia O'Keeffe she was naked and in bed with my wife.

I sense a storm coming so don't you dare drop that mackerel, you ninny, warned my crotchety Uncle Oswald.

Georgia O'Keeffe killed her first man when she was 12, and from then on she had a taste... for murder.

Sharon may have been very disappointed.

This summer my nephews, mother and I created yet another time capsule. We wrote down one memory from the summer. When I recorded the memory I couldn't capture the humour of it, so I won't try here. Suffice it to say that it involves three older women in line at the cash at Loblaws who were rather crotchety and not afraid to make that known, one middle-aged woman who could not stop giggling hysterically at the crotchety old women's behaviour, one bewildered adolescent male cashier who will probably cower every time he sees any woman over 40 approaching him for the rest of his life, and one embarrassed nephew who vowed never to go shopping with us again.

We also wrote down something we wonder about. We put the slips of paper in a plastic container and buried it in my backyard, where it will be easy to find but only by us. We're not going to wait three years to open it. My mother is 79 and looking increasingly frail, and my older nephew, who was rarely at the cottage this summer because he's in love and can't bear to be parted from her for too long (oh, to experience that intensity of feeling again!) is on the verge of leaving the nest. I hope he doesn't end up like one of those broken little corpses one occasionally sees on the sidewalk or under a tree.

I wonder if we will all be here to open this time capsule in 2010?