Frivolous (But At the Same Time Vitally Important) Question

Okay, here goes:

Denim harem jogging pants with high tops, yay or nay?

I think I'm gonna go for it.  We'll see how this shakes down.

I recently splurged on my first grown-up lady powder blush and it has CHANGED. MY. LIFE.  My go-to Benefit Benetint is good, but it kind of dries out my skin, somehow, and sometimes the flush was a little subtle.  I went with Nars blush in Torrid, which is a darker, deeper pink with a little less glittery bits than their all-star product, Orgasm, which is the blush that's supposed to look good on everyone.  It did look good on me, but this deeper tone works better with my darker skin.

I also scored the score of life!

This coat retails for $420 at J. Crew and I nabbed it (in excellent used condition) for $100!  It's such a lady coat.  I love it.  I was on the fence for a bit because I wasn't sure the sandstone colour would suit my skin tone and I was kind of heartset on a grey, but this looks and feels so luxe.  I'm obsessed.  You know I loves me a deal.  Combine a grown-up lady coat with my addiction to the thrill of second hand clothing finds, and this is a big, big score.  It looks so good with my skinnies and runners!  Obsessed.

Dr. Rei gave me a gold, Nars eyeshadow pencil thing and all in all, I've been really feeling myself lately.

I'm very loved up on my network of people at the moment.  Friday was my day off and I had brunch with my new friend, N, who is a brilliant, beautiful, woman of colour doing interesting research and has amazing style to boot.  Then, I had a massage and my RMT went to a book launch and Chester Brown was there and we both had a moment of being all "ewwww, he's so gross!!!" and she made a crack about how, if she ever saw Seth, she'd knock that porkpie hat right off his head and I felt SO GLAD that I know someone who knows/appreciates/can make that joke.  I so want to meet Chester Brown so I can ask him if he knows he's gross.  That's very important to me.  It's really hard to tell from his work.  He's very honest about the the gross things he does and the gross ways he does them, but there's a certain flatness in the delivery and a lack of self-reflection that also makes it seem like he doesn't know he's gross?  Like, if you were gross the way Chester Brown is gross, shouldn't you be contextualizing/feeling guilt/wanting to ameliorate your grossness?

To wit, I recently read his comic, Paying For It which is about a period when he became a client john, during this tumultuous time in his life when he was still technically the significant other of Sook-Yin Lee, and was living with her, but she was pursuing a relationship with this drummer (!) and eventually moved that drummer into their apartment (!) and effectively ceased to be Chester Brown's partner.  But he still lived there for a while.  Anyway, as with The Playboy, I appreciated Brown's honesty, but that doesn't make his dealings with the prostitutes and his editorializing any less gross (he's very superficial when describing the prostitutes).  I get we're all superficial, and he's entitled to that (maybe?), but at the end of the comic there's a big position paper on how he feels prostitution should be legalized, but nothing about his own sexism and grossness and situating that in any critical, self-reflexive, trying-to-be-a-better-person way.  It was just icky.

Related, we started watching this show, The Girlfriend Experience, which is tangentially related to the Steven Soderbergh movie of the same name.  It's shot in Toronto (but isn't set in Toronto) and it features Riley Keough as this law school student who takes a demanding internship and becomes an escort.  It's shot in a very dark, dim, moody, Soderbergh-y way and has that same, voyeuristic, detached tone.  It's not hugely compelling but the episodes are only half an hour and at this point, we're mildly interested.

Last night, as we readied for bed, the Dotytron was reading Paying for It and I was reading my own thing and I suddenly had the thought that guys secretly might want the escort type experience...like they really just want to see themselves pandered to, and have this blank slate woman to reflect themselves back, so I decided to try.  This is not going anywhere sexxxay, don't worry.  I mean, so much of the time I feel like we barely even listen to each other (I mean, we do, but not about mundane shiz).  So I thought it might be a good way to focus and really pay attention to my partner if I adopted the persona of someone who is basically being paid to listen to you.

The character in the Girlfriend Experience always has this blandly interested expression on her face and speaks in a coolly detached, neutral voice (again, very Soderbergh-y) so I affected that and turned over to face the Dotytron, and the exchange went like this,

Me: *Adopts a cool, demur, low tone* "You're reading the Chester Brown?"
Dotytron, reading, "Yeah,"
Me: "What do you think about it?"
Dotytron: "I don't know!"
Me, soldiering on, still with the low voice, "You can tell me anything, you know"
Dotytron: "AGH! WHAT?!!? WILL YOU SHUT UP!?!?"

LMAO.  At that point, I told him what I had been trying to accomplish and we both laughed at what a colossal fail it was.

Not very scientific though.

A narrow house me and Merrick came across on a walk

Black sesame steamed milk!!!

Two babes, now with babes, a little older, a little wiser, a little babe-ier

 I'd be remiss talking about how loved I am on my peeps if I didn't mention as always, the inimitable Dr. Rei.  We went to see Rihanna on Wednesday and had the best time of life.  A long walk, Banh Mi Boys, followed by black sesame steamed milk, then Travis Scott and Riri giving the best show ever - so many medleys and so many hits!  I love her.  She's such an open and real performer.  I love how imperfect she is and how she owns that.  It was such a fun night of dancing and women being amazing.  Love!

We went to visit my sister this weekend and it was filled with the usual: Cracker Barrel, Delmonico's, playing in their backyard, picking up all the goodies, cousin shenanigans:

Little Little Cuz put on these fake glasses and went around claiming he was an "old man." The old man's name?  Timothy, of course.

I bought Twin A a pair of tights because he's obsessed with mine.  Anytime I wear tights, he comes up to me and touches my leg, "These your tights, mama?" and our caregiver told us that he likes to pull his socks up as high as possible.  I got him these and he loved them so much.

These are the perfect high-tops for a short legged person like myself.  Wahhhh - they were too big!!!  They come in men's sizes so I put my considerable research skills to use and tracked down a pair in my size.  Can't wait til these are on my feet! The style is the Vans Sk8-Hi Slim.  Pretty ubiquitous, but the colour is hard to find.  It's a cream colour which is easier to wear than the more readily available bright white.  They're sold out everywhere!

 Good hair. Solar flare. 

Nature is the bomb.

Sister selfies. This is AFTER Twin A barfed on me at Brian's USA Diner. Sorry Brian, we owe you one.

This is a picture of how Twin A sleeps.  He's hardcore into the sleeping with his eyes open in the creepiest way imaginable, tip.

Cousins gonna cuz.

Back at home on Sunday night...Twin B being a maniac.  I was trying to capture him knocking himself on the head like Donkey Kong while making those grunting noises, but then it turned into him doing that disgusting stuff with the food because he's a nutjob.

Snapchat fun.

Last Monday was one of those epic comic working mom days.  Our caregiver was going to be late, so I had planned to stay home an hour to drop off the Big Yam at school, and then meet her back at our place for a twin hand off. Running late, I was upstairs trying to throw on some clothes and brush my teeth when I heard Twin A shout, "HE BARFED!!! LINDSAY BARFED ON THE CARPET!!!" and while, like most witnesses, he was a little unreliable when it came to the details, he got the gist right.  But I had to get the Big Yam to school, so I bundled everyone up, and shoved them all in Eddie VAN Halen, and then listened helplessly as Twin B barfed AGAIN.  Then, because we were late, I had to hustle all three out with me and carry the barfy Twin B in my arms to the office for a late slip, before delivering the Big Yam to his classroom.  At that point, I called it a day and took the rest of the day off so our caregiver wouldn't have to bring the twins with her to pick up the Big Yam from school.

Of course, as I'm learning about Twin B, he needed to barf the sickness out of his system, pass out for a solid, deep 2 hour nap, and then he woke up from said nap and behaved like usual.  It's a very intense, odd, methodology his immune system has, but it's pretty consistent.

Then, that night, bedtime, we hear a thump from our bedroom and then Twin A starts wailing...but that's par for the course, until he ran out and we saw that he had blood streaming down his face and had a small 1.5" cut on his forehead.  So I had to take him to the ER, which was a s**tshow (it is true what they say about ER's being the busiest between 6pm and midnight).  We were triaged and then I think the nurse didn't believe me when I said there were no signs of a concussion or loss of consciousness, because she sent us to the waiting room of the damned.  By the time we got to the WROTD, we had already been in the hospital for 2 hours.  Some people in the WROTD had been there for 3 hours at that point and still hadn't been called.  Finally, because I am nothing if not a good advocate for my own health care, I was like, "the last time we were here we were taken to another area where they do stitches and fractures?  Can I go there?" Which got us fast-tracked to that waiting room, but I had the misfortune of dealing with a doctor bro who told me he was in the middle of switching over with another doctor, who would be there in "5 minutes" and since the freezing agent takes 20 minutes to set in, and new doctor is the one doing the stitches, that I should just wait.  Well, cut to 45 minutes later, and I finally said to bro doc, "Uhh, if the freezing agent takes 20 minutes to set in, can we at least start the process?"  

Then, when new doc finally showed up, she was pushing for the glue for Twin A and I had to say, "Nuh-uh, last time he picked that out the next day," and push for stitches, which Twin A slept through, because my kids are champions at the doctors.  Twin A slept through the stitches, but even better, slept through them injecting a needle full of freezing agent into his forehead.  It was pretty gross.

The upside is, the stitches lasted all of 2 days before he picked those out, too.

Oy.

Fin.

The Scatterbrained Booky

I think I fulfilled my non fiction quota for the next five years by reading this book.  Coates won the National Book Award for this, deservedly so.  This is the most powerful writing I've read in a long time.  Written in the spirit of James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time (which I haven't read), this is a powerful treatise on being black in America, written by one of the foremost writers on the topic today.  The book takes the form of a letter to Coates' teenage son, and it is deeply personal and universal, the writing dense and rich and so intimate, that it automatically posits the reader as an outsider, regardless of your racial identification.  It is a brilliant structural device to tackle these issues.  Coates reflects on his youth growing up in Baltimore, his awakening at Howard University, and how the American state, upheld by "those who think themselves white," brutalizes and systematically destroys black bodies, regardless of class.  Coates realization that not even class can protect black bodies was a sucker punch.  He talks about his classmate, Prince getting shot in a case of mistaken identity.  He talks about how these bodies represent so many hours of investment and love and hope - so many hours spent driving back and forth to soccer practice, supervising sleepovers.  That line just wrecked me.  You'd think this book is hopeless, and yet, somehow, the very act of writing means that it's not.  It's a warning, a parenting memoir, a treatise on race, all rolled up into one.  I can't recommend this enough. 

 went on a bit of a tear for a bit, and my brain was all the better for it.  I can't believe I slept on Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay.  This collection of essays from a self-proclaimed "bad feminist" is everything.  You can see her Ted Talk below.  Gay is a relatable, self-critical, pop-culture-savvy, conflicted feminist, which means that we are kindred spirits.  She is smart, and funny, and while I don't agree with everything she says, I like that she's thinking about these things.  Her essay on being a competitive Scrabble player is quite possibly my favorite in the whole collection.  I love her, I love her Twitter presence, and I can't wait to read her forthcoming book about being fat.

From there, I flipped to Rebecca Solnit's Men Explain Things to Me (I told you I was on a tear). Solnit is known for coining the term "mansplaining" which, let's be real gyals, we've ALL experienced.  I've had to call the Dotytron on it, when he does that.  There were times when we'd be talking about smoking (food), and he'd jump in and start talking about the process like he was the one who smoked the meat in our house and I'd have to jump in and shut it down.  Anyway, this series of essays was rage-inducing.  The essay on sexual assault, in particular.  When she talks about how much money the government is willing to expend to combat terrorism but how we do nothing to fix sexual assault but put the burden on women...I was so mad!  Reading Bad Feminist and Men Explain Things to Me back to back lead to many arguments in the Dotytron-Lagerfeld household.  I had my hackles locked in the UP position.

My book club picked Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts as a read, two reads ago.  This is a semi-autobiographical loose collection about Nelson's relationship with trans artist Harry Dodge.  The book opens with him f**king her from behind, bent over something concrete, if I recall.  I'm not familiar with Nelson's work but I know she's popular amongst the intelligentsia.  She's a poet?  Anyway, to me, the book read kind of smugly progressive.  Like, "look how cool I am in how this is so not an issue."  Which, look, I totally get!  I'm on board!  But I she just seems kind of humble-braggy about it?  I don't know how else to put it.  I kind of wanted to know more about Dodge, and his perspective.  There's one point when Dodge makes a statement that he's not "on his way anywhere" in reaction to the term "transitioning."  I only really felt like I was getting at the "real" Nelson when she was talking about being pregnant and giving birth to her child with Dodge - all the affectations and airs seemed to fall away as she gloried in this embodiment, which is at odds, whether conscious or not, with the tone of the rest of the book.  I'm glad I read it, because this is a buzzy, in-the-moment book, but I didn't love it.

So this gets me slightly back on track, even though I have like, thirty more books to review.  

This was your International Women's Day-themed book review compendium.

Fin.

No, YOU'RE spamming ME.

OK.  For real, I'm back this time.  I came back from my work trip and things were mental with my timelines and extra commitments but I just submitted the thing that's been consuming me for the past three weeks and I'm free for the time being.

It has been a SLOG.  Travelling for work involved grueling days - up at 6am, in meetings all day from 8am to 5pm, then packing up, going to the airport, hopping on our tiny charter plane and then going to the next destination, checking into the hotel around 8pm.  I didn't really get the hang of how to travel with this group until mid-week, at which point, after consecutive nights of indigestion from eating dinner at 9pm, I came up with a quasi-solution that involved wolfing down my lunch in 15 minutes, then going for a walk so that I might grab something I could eat on the plane and then have a reasonable digestion window before going to bed.  Travelling with my clients meant that I had to be on all day, every day, and even though my threshold for being "on" is high - I am, after all, master of the inane questions-based small talk - being in anonymous hotel rooms without the benefit or "your" stuff or "your" people wears on you.

I did get to do some fun things.  Like:

Win $20 at blackjack at the casino in Windsor.  UGH! Gambling is so FUN!  Why is it so fun?!?  My heart was racing and I had to make a decided effort not to spend my whole night there. 

  Marvel at how Robo-Cop-y Detroit looked across the river.

Order $20 worth of Johnny Rockets and eat it in my bed in my pajamas uninterrupted.

I wanted to try this restaurant called the Hoito in Thunder Bay - it's the oldest restaurant in Thunder Bay and sells Finnish pancakes.  My colleague told me to "just call an Uber," there were "so many" when he was in "Tiny Tom," Ontario (in retrospect, totally a made up, place!)  so I woke up at 6am, got ready, and opened the Uber app on my phone.  Radio silence.  I called a cab and misunderstood the distance AND cab rates in Northern Ontario.  I ended up paying $30 EACH WAY for this $10 breakfast.  It was good, but not $70 good.  I was a proper city-girl n00b and I deserved the taxi fare pwnage I received.

Northern Ontario is a mess.  After sitting through a bunch of deputations, I totally get why everyone hates Toronto and the Greater Golden Horseshoe.  The discrepancies between infrastructure funding up there versus down here are appalling.  First Nations communities who are the potato in the hot potato game between the various levels of government, high unemployment, high addiction and homelessness issues, sectors with razor thin margins that are being pushed beyond the limit.  I felt for these companies and industries, who are trying to create jobs, being squeezed by pressures from well-intentioned labour and environmental policies.  It's really a conundrum - there are no easy answers at all.  But I do think it's important to at least attempt to view things through a rural/Northern lens when we're developing public policy.  In the same way that I think it's important for urban advocates to understand and journey to the outer reaches of our city (and don't give me the whole, "I don't travel north of Bloor" parsimony) before they go ahead and propose policies that work against people who can't bike to work and don't want to.  This myopic tendency is a thing, and it's a thing that we have to work against, in order to build and nurture the relationships that are going to create the impetus for change.

After my eye-opening week abroad (I also got into green smoothies while I was away - so for real: travel does change you), I came back to work and have just been in head-down, beast mode trying to summarize over 300 oral and written submissions and then turn that into a draft report, after two days of local hearings.  It's been a sedentary marathon.  My butt's been glued to my desk chair and my muscles have definitely atrophied, but my deadline is insane and this is just what you gotta do to facilitate the democratic process, 'naw mean?

In the midst of all this I was contending with that fundraiser family dance I'm organizing (done this past weekend - YES!), and my parent council commitments, and dealing with static from weirdoes in the service of my parent council commitments.  Like, people are cray.  There's no way around it.  I'm the "volunteer coordinator" which means that I signed up for this new role and got no direction.  Fine, I can deal with that.  I set up this spreadsheet and aggregated volunteer names but the list isn't robust because at the Big Yam's school, parents in charge of certain activities are very proprietary about "their" lists of volunteers.  Which is weird, but okay, I can deal with that, too, I guess?

Anyway, someone wanted me to send out an email to ask for volunteers.  I do, with a nice italicized message underneath my name saying that if you don't want to be on the list, just email me.  This broad emails me and tells me she never asked to be on the list and that according to Canada's new anti-spam legislation I can't email people who haven't asked to be emailed, blah blah blah and then she links the Anti-Spam FAQ in the email. Da fuuuuuuuuq?!?  I research for a living, you b!  Don't test me!  So I fire back an email and say, no problem, I'll remove you from the list, sorry for the inconvenience,  I don't think that calling for volunteers constitutes the "commercial activity" the legislation is referencing.  Warm regards, me. Then she WRITES BACK.  BECAUSE PEOPLE ARE CRAY (remember how I told you that?  Still true.)  "Regardless of what the legislation says I still don't want to be on the list."  Oooookay.  I didn't respond to that email (BECAUSE I'M NOT A PSYCHO).  THEN!  Four days later, she emails me AGAIN!  She forwards me this thing and says, "I checked and you're right, requests for volunteers aren't considered spam. I still don't think anyone should be on this email list unless they requested it." (Italics mine).  At this point, I'm like, YOU'RE spamming ME!  Why can't you just shut up?!  Why do you care about having the last word with the volunteer coordinator for our kids' school?  Are you seriously so inept that you don't know how to ignore and/or delete the one email a month (at most) you're getting from me?!?!  I DON'T HAVE TIME FOR THIS BULL!

I just can't.

Leftover picture from when we went to Lolly's farm over the holidays.

Sick Twin B

Throughout this time I've gone through my usual whirlwind of micro-obsessions.  I have many many thoughts on Beyoncé's Formation video.  The Big Yam has started saying, "Excuse-me moi" to preface his points and it is amazing.

So we watched the movie Dope on the weekend, which is a fun, awesome movie that speaks to everything I'm into.  I'm super into teen caper movies (teen comes into ill begotten gains, uses it to their own advantage to shine on some adults, hilarity/wisecracking ensues) which I'm convinced is a genre, but when pressed by the Dotytron, I couldn't think of any other examples (The Secret of My Success)?  I'm almost positive this is a thing.  I'm totally obsessed with all the style in the film, but particularly, Diggy's (the girl on the right, above).  Her outfits were amazing and if I were 20 years younger, I would totally go for it.  The costume designer went for an overtly 90s aesthetic, so if I were 20 years younger, I would have been period-appropriate, though I don't think I had the style sense or body confidence to put things together with half as much panache.  The movie is like Attack the Block - teens, of a very particular type (in this case, geeks, in Attack the Block they were chavs), get in over their heads and meet some characters as they hustle.  I loved it.

THIS. BOOK. OBSESSED.  Remember Rainbow Rowell's Fangirl?  In that book, the protagonist wrote fanfic (that was peppered throughout the novel) about these two characters, Simon (a mage) and Baz (a vampire and mage), who were from this Harry Potter-like series written by a fictional author in the Fangirl world.  Well, Rainbow Rowell, being the amazing creature that she is, took those characters and wrote a book about them, in her own voice, and it was SO FREAKIN' GOOD.  I squee'd my way through the whole thing, savouring pages with gay romance and kissing and quips, and then as soon as I finished it, picked it up and read it right through again.  A book that should have taken me 2 nights to read, I stretched over a week (twice!) because I loved it so.  The characters were fully-realized and the dynamic between Simon and Baz is the perfect antagonistic stuff of teen-beat dreams.  It's like Buffy and Spike, Riggins and Layla, Veronica Mars and Logan Echolls.  There's a strong female friend, Penelope, who is even better than Hermione because she's got more of a sense of humour and is more overtly misanthropic.  People have dismissed the world of Carry On as Harry Potter fanfic, but I disagree.  It's its own thing, which is what makes it so addictive.  The story is self-contained and the narrative is compelling - it falls a part a bit near the end - I'm not clear on what we're supposed to think of the principle villain, but notwithstanding my love of British magician boarding school tales (and make no mistake: Rowell knows what makes for good British magician boarding school tales [read: she includes a lot of food descriptions]), I would have read a single volume for each year of Simon Snow at Watford (their Hogwart's).  The modern world is acknowledged (they have cell phones), and all in all, the romance was delightful and the supporting characters are fantastic and feel real.

I've read a few gay romances and they never did anything for me, and I was beginning to worry that I was too heteronormative to handle it, but based on the HOURS I spent looking up Simon and Baz fan art and additional fanfic, I can report that I was just waiting for the right story and the right characters and Rainbow Rowell served them up to me on a platter.  I can't recommend this enough.  One of my top books of 2015/16 (it was released in 2015) for sure.

Dead. Seriously. So hot.

I can't even.  Thank you, teenage girls everywhere for pouring all your frothing, hormonal, tentative sexual energies into making Simon and Baz fanart/fanfic.  You are treasures, the lot of you.  

I went from reading that (twice!) to tackling Jonathan Franzen's Purity (for academic book club, obviously) and seriously?  Like, what is this?  Is this white privilege in book form?  Because that's how it feels to me.  I can't even (in the bad way).  Now I'm at the 20% mark and am somewhat committed to seeing it through.  UGH.

After a long week and a weekend that felt even longer, I warmed up a coconut bun and put it on the dining room table.  I went to supervise the Big Yam practicing piano for about 1 minute, and when I came back to retrieve my treat, I saw that Twin A had stuffed the ENTIRE thing into his mouth.  He looked up at me, and through a mouth full of ill begotten gains, said, "I ate it all."  This is kind of what it sounded like, but his cute, soft voice was even cuter muffled through a coconut bun filter.

Here's what we've been eating for dinner, lately:

Bi bim bap.  I bought the thinly sliced ribeye that's in the freezer section of Chinese grocery stores (for hot pot) and mixed it with purchased kalbi marinade, stir fried it, and then added thinly sliced carrots, mushrooms, and snowpeas with a touch more marinade and piled this on top of rice.  Topped with a fried egg and sesame seeds, this was a very budget-friendly weeknight dinner (total cost was about $20!)

More budget weeknight dinners - French onion soup and croque hermaphrodites (ham and swiss with a fried egg on top)

Sunday supper a few weeks ago was meatloaf - sauteed brussels sprouts (which Twin B strangely loves), and a sweet potato-cauliflower-yukon gold mash.  Things my kids hate: mashed potatoes.  I don't get it.  

Another budget weeknight meal - sausage and peppers (sear Italian sausages, then bake on a tray with sliced peppers, onions, drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with oregano and chili flakes) served up with soft mascarpone polenta (done in the slow cooker), and sauteed rapini.  My kids hated this meal, but I loved it.

Lately I've been craving retro 90s, 2000s desserts like creme brulee and molten chocolate cakes.  I don't know why molten chocolate cakes fell out of favour, but there's really no reason why?  Who doesn't like an underbaked, warm, gooey brownie topped with ice cream and salted caramel sauce?  Clearly not me, judging by my nightly consumption of one such dessert.

Budget weeknight dinners: Hawaii edition.  Steamed rice, topped with fried spam, a fried egg, with canned gravy on top = moco loco.  Hawaiian people are geniuses.

I was all inspired by my Discerning Coyote friend so I pulled my 9 year old (!) sourdough starter out of the freezer where it's been for 3 years (!) and brought it back to life.  I made two ugly loaves that tasted pretty good, all things considered (all things being: I was rushed, I subbed wheat bran for wheat germ, my starter is sluggish, I didn't have a razor blade to cut the tops, and I was rushing like whoa).

Yesterday was pancake Tuesday, so we had Swedish pancakes with lingonberry preserves and maple syrup and bacon from the Mennonites, which is the very best bacon in the world.

Fin.

Reading Rainbow

My grey matter has been hyperactive, of late.  I've been getting a lot of mental inspiration from stuff I've been reading/seeing/thinking about and my pistons are firing (in case you couldn't tell from the last post).

Further to that, I was at a dinner party last weekend and when the talk about white people being racist came up, a smug white person (is there any other kind?) of the mansplaining variety said, "but aren't we all racist?" and I was like, okay, yeah, fine.  And then this other mansplainer jumped in, and to his credit, talked about racism being a structural thing, so everyone is bigoted (or can be), but not all people possess the structural power to exclude others.  He said something along the lines of, "I'm sure there might be some cultures where whiteness isn't dominant" at which point I was just about to interject that I don't believe that to be true, when my dear friend gave an example of "racism" when she was singled out and treated differently when she was a white woman living in Japan for a year.

Keep in mind: I was the only person of colour at the table.  The Dotytron had left for another engagement.  In that context, among those people, I consider the Dotytron a person of colour, because he's really the closest thing to it.  He's considered "black-ish" by his colleagues at school.  I tried to make a point that Japanese men fetishizing her whiteness is still a privileging of white skin (although a twisted articulation of it), but it got swallowed up in the din of whiteness and mansplaining (a lethal combination).

It was very difficult to sit at that table and listen to that conversation unspool as it did.  I didn't speak up because I'm not very deft when it comes to doing that.  I would have gone full-bore FRANZ FANON this! and bell hooks THAT! And probably gone berserk with post-colonial, can-the-subaltern-speak talk.

Here's the thing: some of those people are wannabe public policy wanksters.  They're not, because they're the kind of oily political staffers that I see prancing around my work, in shrunken suits, who don't actually know how to do anything but play the "game" of politics, but the point is: they FANCY themselves to be the "right" people to make those decisions.

You've heard me go on and on about the myopic nature of the left and how entrenched positions never yield fruitful conversations.  This was a table full of that.  Big voices from people who don't know anything beyond their own narrow slice of urban smugness.

I'm sorry, but you don't have to go very far to get a sense of the discourse on white privilege and racism.  Like, it got played out in the Taylor Swift-Nicki Minaj beef on Twitter.  It's on Scandal, like, every 5th episode.  It's kind of everywhere?  IF you take a minute to step outside the narrow confines of a limited peer group.  It's weird how rarefied your world can become.  I'm sometimes shocked by how much otherwise intelligent, smart, thinking people I know don't know about stuff.  Maybe this is what happens when you only get a CBC/NPR view of the world?  What is that world even like?

Thankfully, I'll never have to know.

Edit: I love my best friend because I have been working on this post all week and then we went to lunch and basically hashed out all of the above.  She's a glorious, brilliant, magical, inspiring creature who makes me a better person.

This week I saw Jillian and Mariko Tamaki do a talk organized by my friend JT.  It was awesome.  Yes, please smart Asian-Canadian women who are feminists and think about girlhood and coming-of-age, and narrative reliability and are kick-a** illustrators.  Yes, please.

This One Summer is their latest work (they also write independently of each other, although Jillian does illustration whereas Mariko doesn't).  This won a Prinz and a Caldecott, kind of a big deal.  It's covers a summer spent at the cottage with two friends, Windy and Rose, both who are on the cusp of early-adulthood, and who are experiencing that transition and the shifting of their identities in different ways that strain and balance their friendship.  There are confusing things afoot with the adults in their lives, and with the townie teenagers the two spy on.  I love Jillian Tamaki's illustration style.  I just love it.  I couldn't love it more.  It is the perfect balance between clear and expressive and referencing traditional cartooning.  The story is fragmented and the telling of the narrative evokes summer itself - how some days are long and languid and some seem to flash by in a blur.  There is a lot that isn't said through text, leaning all the more on Jillian Tamaki's wondrous illustrations to add the nuance and shading and subtext.  It perfectly captured the confusing miasma of fraught female friendships at a tumultuous time.  

This was OBVIOUSLY an Academic Book Club pick.  I don't know from Ann-Marie MacDonald.  I didn't read The Way the Crow Flies or Fall On Your Knees because I suspected white lady problems and I wasn't up for it then, and I'm rarely up for it now.  This is about a character, not-Ann-Marie who lives a very similar life to Ann-Marie but isn't her, okay?  Even though they are both lesbians living in the Annex with similar professions for their spouses and raising kids and blah blah blah.  I didn't finish reading this to be honest because it was about how she was feeling suffocated by stifling domesticity.  It's a Talking Heads, is this my beautiful wife? Is this my beautiful car? type of book and I'm sorry, but from rich white ladies who are all, "how do I find myself here?" I'm like, figure it out! I don't care!  I couldn't get into her "problems" and I didn't want to try.

The Girl on the Train was last year's answer to Gone Girl but not as good and without the feminism.  An alcoholic woman named Rachel pieces together a mystery from the glimpses of a house she passes by on her train commute every day.  Secrets abound, blah blah.  It's a page turner but I didn't really like any of the characters and the writing wasn't all that great and the twist ending wasn't all that surprising, so the end result is that it was perfect for that time in my life (I read this over a year ago...I think when the twins were quite wee and my life was punctuated with tandem breastfeeds every 3 hours).

All YA books are set up to be like, "The next Fault in Our Stars" or "The next Eleanor and Park."  This was marketed like this but it's quite different.  It's about a Hasidic Jewish girl and a West Indian boy who cross over their respective communities' boundaries in Brooklyn and meet in a hospital elevator during a hurricane.  Their families disapprove, their burgeoning relationship must be kept a secret.  For the most part, the book defies easy stereotypes - Jaxon, the boy, is a high-achieving nerdy student and the book ends with melodramatic elements, but a more realistic ending than most.  I liked this book - it was sweetly touching.

Saga.  You guys.  Brian K. Vaughan is obviously a hero in the comics world.  I love his writing.  But Fiona Staples?!?  Where have you BEEN all my comic-reading life?  Look at those drawings!  The drawings are incredible.  This is about two members of alien races, at war for generations, who fall in love and defect to raise their child, on the run from bounty hunters and government forces.  Brian K. Vaughan's writing is always slyly political, but funny, and very wry.  I love this and can't wait for the next installments.  Again, the illustrations, guys!  The worlds that are created!  

SMcKay recently questioned me because I got midnight screening tickets (thanks, Bruce Wayne!) for the new Star Wars: Force Awakens film.  I was like, dude, I'm a nerd.  And she said, "I'm a nerd, too..." and I was like, whoa whoa whoa.  I am a real, deal nerd.  Like, an old skool 90s alt-Asian girl nerd.  I like Star Trek: TNG, Star Wars, comics, Voltron, Ghost in the Shell, Autechre, Aphex Twin, all the rest of that stuff.  You want to talk Brian K. Vaughan?  Let's talk Brian K. Vaughan.  This is real comics, not the Seth/Adrian Tomine, graphic novel stuff.  It is a brilliant series though...you have to take my word for it.  

Allie Brosh's web comics (and maybe some original material?  I'm not sure) were collected in this book, Hyperbole and a Half.  There is something about her naive (but assuredly time-consuming) MS Paint illustrations that are the best.  In particular, her series on her own depression and wanting to die, is one of the things that has best crystallized for me, what it must be like for someone to be going through those mental health issues.  It's strange, but her writing on her depression is one of the first times I've actually understood what it must be like.  It made that expression of mental illness accessible in a way that it hadn't before, and in so doing, made me able to empathize with people with mental illness on a much more intuitive level.  

I mean really, isn't this like, me all the damn time?!

I know, I'm so behind on book reviews that you read and digested and loaned this to your friend already.  Allow me to join the chorus of voices who loved Amy Poehler's book.  I love this woman.  I was told by people that some of her reactions to situations as detailed in the book reminded them of me, and by that I mean I think Amy Poehler and I share the propensity to be small, smart women who are cocksure and as a general rule, DON'T TAKE S**T LYING DOWN.  I am generally honoured by the comparison.  

I loved this book.  The essays were by turns funny, true, heartening, and revealing.  This is the kind of book that as a woman, you sometimes clutch it to your breast and just breath, "yes."  I get that.  This woman gets me.  Women getting other women is a magical gift and is not to be trifled with.  I enjoyed this more than Bossypants because as a whole, I find Poehler less guarded.  Tina Fey comes off very cerebral and her smart can be distancing, whereas Poehler allows you in a bit more.  Whatever, they're both brilliant, funny, amazing women and there is room for both of them and a whole lot more.

I suggested this for Academic Book Club.  It generated a s**t tonne of discussion but I had major issues with this book.  I think Lena Dunham is a creative, gifted, incredibly accomplished woman who has her heart in the right place.  I think the video advice series that she developed to promote the book was brilliant and funny and I loved it.  The actual book however, I do have notes about.  She's...just not that great a writer, guys.  She's a voracious reader and she's been around a highly educated, artistic milieu her whole life (what comes through loud and clear in this book is how much she idolizes her artist parents), and I've heard her speak and she's articulate and insightful...but it doesn't translate as much to the written word.  

I've subscribed to her Lenny newsletter that she does with Jenni Konner and I'd say the same thing.  She's not a great interviewer and the writing just doesn't equal the sum of the inputs.  She is an oversharer with some things, but then when the time comes to discuss her relationship with Jack Antonoff, she gets weirdly shy and reticent and all, "that's private!" and obviously I get that everyone gets to choose what's private for them, but it just seemed incongruous and kind of juvenile.  There are ways to talk about your boyfriend/partner/significant other, whathaveyou, without giving it all away and feeling like you sold yourself (see: Amy Poehler above).  It was worthwhile reading because this book generated a lot of mainstream interest and was zeitgeisty, and as we all know, even though I'm a nerd, I stay on top of the zeitgeist like it's my full time job.

That's it for book reviews today.  Stay tuned for Halloween wrap-up, more musings on parenthood, what I've made for dinner lately, and more!

Fin.