oh, little bird!

Behold the Black & White!

A little about New York and Hoboken...

My gosh, was it nice to be back in NYC if even for a couple of days! I no longer have that lumpish twist in my stomach, the one that took up a whole bunch of space while I was living there, until finally I realized that I just wanted to go home! Talk about a realization as relief! Anyway, now I can just go, catch up with my fabulous girlfriends, who just by laughing with and at me manage to throw things into a better perspective.

I can even say I miss New York, and Hoboken, too, even though it is totally wack expensive. Take the Garden of Eden specialty food stores (the one on Washington Avenue in Hoboken featured here). My friends and I decided that their new marketing scheme should be something along the lines of "The Garden of Eden - Our Prices are the Original Sin" or "Go on - you know you want to spent $4.00 on that petit-four." I came close to spending $5.00 on a small container of pita crackers and another $4.00 for hummous when I started to shake, and hightailed it to Quidoba for an enormous veggie burrito, which I did not need to eat in one sitting, but did.

My friend Paulette - wonderful, funny, smart, creative Paulette! - said, "Hey, what happened to Oh, Little Bird!"? And I didn't have a good answer - I was just touched and happy that somebody cared. Somewhere along the line I stopped feeling like I had anything interesting to say, I guess. This is a shame because I really started this thing for me as an exercise in creativity and as a means of forcing myself to put my ideas and thoughts out there, even if nobody else read it - that wasn't the point! (Actually, I was for the longest time hoping that nobody did read it, lest I censor myself too much). That said, I love writing, and I love taking pictures, so why wasn't I a bloggin'?

But these are new times...a new president, a fresh layer of snow outside after a crazy-wack snowstorm all yesterday and last night, I'm showered and clean and even did a load of laundry. Things are really good on this end.

Because of that, and for no good reason, I will share with you today and over the next few days - though not this weekend because I'm in Quebec City!!!!! - my photos of New York and Hoboken.

Et voila....

 

 

It's Autumnish, when my thoughts naturally turn to teeth whitening.

So the other night I affixed a set of Whitestrips to my teeth. It had been a long day - a long couple of weeks actually, but I felt that there was no time like the present to embark upon my dream of a whiter, more beautiful smile.

Before I get to the point of this story, and there is a point...I think, anyway this teeth whitening thing reminded me that I am sometimes slow to take up new things. Just this summer I bought a tiny iPod Shuffle and OMG! now I think everyone should buy one. I mean, up until about three years ago I was running with a Discman, and more recently a small radio clumsily strapped to my arm. This iPod thing lets me play all the good/crappy music I want, and in any order. And it weighs about half an ounce!! Who else knew about this, I wonder, and for how long...

And about a year and a half ago, I got glasses.  People have been wearing these for centuries. (Benjamin Franklin, for instance, or Jeeves the Butler, who wears only half is glasses because the other fell in his master's soup). For so long have I associated myself with perfect vision, it took about 4 months of reading and watching TV with one eye closed before it dawned on me that maybe that wasn't normal, not good. And so I had my eyes checked.

Back to the Whitestrips...it just never occurred to me until it did that I might benefit from them.
I just kept thinking that maybe my teeth, which have always been one of my better features, weren't as white as they used to be. It didn't occur to me that all those TV and dentist ads might apply to me, until it did.

So I put them on the other night - the strips - and thought nothing could be more uncomfortable. The box liner said that some may not want to use both the bottom and top strips at the same time, and I thought, "well, yeah, this is uncomfortable. I can understand why." But when I pulled them off, I thought that maybe my teeth looked a little whiter. Holy cow! It wasn't until the next morning, as I came to put another set on, that I realized that maybe the gooey part of the strip was the part with the gel - that is the part that works, and not the part to throw away. The night before I had tried to stick and fold the clear plastic base part of the strips, and I managed to hold them in place by keeping my mouth closed. In retrospect this is pretty impressive.  I just kept thinking that they were awkward, and uncomfortable, and that the technology probably just wasn't there yet, which was curious, but oh well...someday we'll look back on them and think "Funny we used those!"

I'll let you know how it goes with the rest of the box.

Pop-O-Matic Trouble!

  I know that my fondness for things like this Pop-O-Matic Trouble game will date me - date me as old, or semi-old at any rate. Semi-old, yet pressing the clear thingy in the middle with the strength of 10 Grinches, or at least someone half my age.

So I was at the home of a longtime friend this week, and lo and behold I saw this Pop-O-Matic Trouble game, which was flippin' great. It reminded me that it is usually the simplest games - the slight resistance of the dome before it audibly pops and flips the dice inside, in this case - that made for the best games. Ahhh, the Kiddle Kolognes, the Ballerina doll that pirouetted when you pushed down the tiara on its blonde head (blonde, always blonde!!), and those marble knocker things that were outlawed due to the fact that when the two balls at the end of the strings finally clanged together really hard they exploded!

I now understand why my parents didn't buy me one of those knocker-things, though a few more punching balls and a life-sized rocking Bozo clown would have been greatfully accepted in their stead. Oh, and a Sno-Cone maker, which according to the TV ads made you the most popular kid on the street.

I'm Confused.

Yesterday I was flipping through the latest edition of Cosmopolitan magazine and it's left me a little depressed. The last memorable encounter I had with Cosmo was when I was a kid and one of my sisters left the "Cosmo Bedside Astrologer" paperback lying around the house. As you might imagine, this made for some hilarious reading: it was predicted that I, a Sagitarius, would  be making love at some point in 1971 on horseback. (Grown-ups are so weird!!!).

But yesterday's brush with the "liberated" Cosmo girl was, quite simply, saddening. Yes, there are a couple of token articles about how to take care of yourself - don't hike alone for instance, or you might (literally) lose your head like that pretty co-ed from Georgia, or achieving your own whopper orgasm - but the overhwelming gist of the magazine was what to say/do in bed to: (fill in blank) deliver unto him an enormous orgasm, make him yell "you go, cowgirl!", decode his body language, what new position to practice.

What is bringing me down here is not the focus on enjoying sex - enjoy away! - but the endless concentration on the actions a woman should take to please and understand her man. I don't know, but doesn't decoding a man's body language, in and out of bed, sound like a helluva lot of work? I get tired and confused just thinking about it If I thought there was even the hint of a solid center here - specifically the woman's - I wouldn't care. But to equate hot f***ing as the sole path to enlightened emancipation, at a time when young women (Cosmo's demographic) are so otherwise bombarded with physical "to do" lists for obtaining perfection is irresponsible. And I don't know if I'm depressed because I was surprised at how positively shitty the magazine content was, or that  I should be surprised at all. Am I that old?

I encounter so many women who are at best sheepish about parts of their body; their soft, aging underarms, disappearing bums, saddlebags, large calves (OK, that's me) and it reminds me that, for most of us, developing a sense of peace about ourselves is truly a life-long jprocess. How do we tune out the constant  bloody, debilitating noise that tells us - at every juncture in our lives - how we should look? How we should be (as a housekeeper, a single woman, a mother, as a wife?). And increasingly early on, how to please sexually.

Go ahead and have sex, sex isn't the issue. Just make sure there's a you in place before you start wondering how to please everyone else (which, as I've learned, Sweet Jesus, Mary and Joseph isn't actually possible). No, really have sex and enjoy it, because - if the recent spate of TV ads featuring 30-something women are any indication - you might just end up orgasming over a bloody truffle. Personally - and much as I love chocolate -  I can only imagine this happening if someone were to invent a chocolate vibrator. And that's a lot coming from me.

Top, Cosmo Cowgirl                                        Below, Ghirardelli nirvana.

And just in case you forgot what last winter looked like...

Westmount Park in Summer

I made quite a fuss this past year over the length, intensity, and at times beauty, of our winter. Swe Jesus, Mary and Joseph it went on forevah! So the other day I decided to give summer equal time, and snapped some photos of the park in the full bloom and sunshine. The benches above, you may or may not recall, were photographed in the bleakest, deepest snow about six months ago...

We are experiencing an, er, unsettled summer. It seems like every other day - or more - is semi-cloudy, stormy, stormy-followed-by-sunshine-followed-by-rain, followed by sunshine sparkling on wet grass. Yesterday we received some major downpours, and though I was forced to dash through showers to make it to the nearest metro station, I did at least make it home on my bike that morning but minutes before the sky opened up.

Look, I just want this summer to go long...long into September, and maybe even October. Last winter changed me - I'm still trying to nudge my brain chemistry back to normal following near-record snowfall. I'm only human, and for the first time if this human had the means to travel and stay south from February to April, she would.

Winter, take your time this fall...no rush whatsoever.

There are a lot of sad things happening in the world,

and among the saddest must be the sight of an ice cream shop, shuttered to the outside world.

I saw today an ice cream shop with a banner that advertised about 30 flavours to choose from - but alas the lights were off and equipment all askew, shoved willy-nilly in places where ice cream could conveniently be made. I didn't have my camera, though, so I stole this image from a site called Kiddley.com, because it conveys the simple joy that beholding an ice cream cone can evoke, leading one to ponder the ominous tragedy befalling anyone who has said cone taken away.

In my phrygian bonnet, with all the cockades upon it...

 Leave it to the French to really work an accessory; I speak of course of the phyrgian bonnet, which we see here worn on the noggin of Marianne, the embodiment of the French Republic. Pictured also are the three  kings in bonnets, as well as contemporary French revellers.

The bonnet was first worn during the Roman Empire by slaves who had been freed by their masters, making their descendents bonafide citizens of the Empire. This symbol of freedom no doubt made for a perfect symbol for the French Revolutionaries, who not only depicted fiery gal-types leading the charge in them, but plopped them on their own hotheads.

So next time you see an image of some sans-culottes storming the Bastille, look for the little droopy bonnet on their heads, and tell whoever'll listen that it's phrygian bonnet - they'll be impressed!

Montreal Jazz Festival 2008, Closing Night July 6