Wednesday, March 30, 2016

The Weather and My Brain

It’s Wednesday morning, 11:04 am – naptime. I’m listening to Brahms and Leisure Cruise and drinking coffee. The house is completely quiet and I have my bedroom window open – it’s plus 3! With a 30% chance of rain! 

I love it. 

People always complain when weather is the topic of conversation, don’t they? 

“All we ever talk about is the weather; I hate small talk.” 

“She mentions the weather all the time. We know it’s cloudy, we have windows.” 

“I live in Scotland; I do not care what the weather’s like in Saskatchewan.” 

But the thing is: if I’m telling you it’s cloudy, rainy, and above zero, what I’m actually telling you is that I feel very comfortable, cozy, happy, optimistic, content, like today is going to be good and fun and magical, like anything sad is only sad in a movie-type, romantic way, not in a reality-type, tragic way, and like my head is clear enough to write stuff down instead of sitting here stewing over a blank page.  

That’s not small talk at all, now is it?  

You don’t even want to know what it means when I tell you that it’s -40 and snowing. 

Anyway, I can tell you stuff that isn’t weather related, if you want. I’ll tell you a story about my brain. 
Last week, Dr. Coffee (a cool little coffee shop downtown with a play area for kids) celebrated World Poetry Day by offering a Pay With a Poem option. I went with Robyn, and used a little poem I’d written about an empty coffee cup. 

It’s funny; as I was walking out the door that morning, I had a moment of nothing-induced panic. This is not unusual – my brain likes to get all worked up over silly things. What if, I thought, some TV station wants to talk about this Poetry Day thing on the news tonight? What if they come to Dr. Coffee right when we’re there and ask us to read our poems for the camera?

I hate public speaking, so I started worrying about that, and about my poem and about my unwashed hair and about how my voice sounds on TV – all stuff that most people don’t generally worry about when they’re going for coffee with a friend. But welcome to my brain. This is how my brain works. It makes up a hypothetical situation, presents it to itself as something that is ABSOLUTELY GOING TO HAPPEN, and then starts losing its mind over it. My friends are always tell me to stop doing this, but I can’t. Partially because these hypothetical situations keep coming true.

I arrived at Dr. Coffee, said my poem to the barista, and sat down with Robyn. We’d been there for maybe 10 minutes when the CBC news crew pulled up. They came in and talked to the barista for a minute and she pointed at us and they came over and asked us to read our poems for the camera. My suspicions were confirmed: everything I worry about in life WILL happen.  

I’m starting to wonder if I have a special kind of brain that remembers the future instead of the past (please hum the Twilight Zone theme song to yourself here). 

Thankfully, Robyn had enough calm and confidence for both of us, and I had to admit, afterward, that it was fun and not actually all that scary. This is, possibly, also a good thing to keep in mind when worrying over hypothetical-but-will-probably-happen situations. We listened to ourselves reading our poems in their entirety on The Afternoon Edition later that day and texted each other excitedly and it was like that scene in That Thing You Do when The Oneders first hear their song on the radio and freak out. It was exactly like that. 

Friday, March 25, 2016

Makeup

I haven’t blogged in a long time because I’ve been very, very busy. 

One of the things I’ve been busy with is wondering why, at the blisteringly ancient age of 28, I still don’t know how to do makeup on my face. I look around me and see that most of the women know how to do makeup. Even the women who are 12. This is humiliating to me. The only thing I can do is paint my lashes. 

I went so far one day as to decide that I would learn about it. I went to YouTube, because everyone on YouTube wears makeup. I asked it, the Youtube, “How to wear makeup.” I was presented with a video of a really beautiful girl with a perfect face, and I thought, “Great. Show me how to make my face look like that girl’s.” I pushed play.

The beautiful girl frowned into the camera, pointing out that she was not yet wearing makeup. Oh, I thought. I’d figured that this was the after face, but apparently she just looks like that. 

“Let’s get started,” said the beautiful girl.  

She put on some stuff, everywhere, and I thought, Yeah, that looks doable. I could do that for sure.

But then she put on some other stuff, and only in certain places. I was confused. “Brown stuff here and bronze stuff here and red stuff here and highlighting stuff here,” she said, more or less, drawing all over herself in streaks and triangles.  

“This brush is good for this makeup,” she said. 

Never use that brush for this technique,” she said. 

“This product is kind of expensive, something like $58 a bottle, but you shouldn’t need to buy it more than twice a week,” she said. 

“This tutorial is for when you’re in a hurry,” she added about 38 minutes in, “I’m just doing the basics.”

I blacked out for, like, an hour, and when I came to the girl looked perfect. No different than how she’d looked before, though. I have got to learn how to do that! I thought. 

I’ve since decided that I’ll probably just pretend like I have the option to do makeup or not and have actually chosen the latter. I don’t have the money, I don’t have the time, and, most importantly, I still don’t know how. Besides, what if I’m walking down the street one day and a bird flies into my face and gets stuck there? 

So, anyway, that’s why I didn’t blog that one night. More excuses forthcoming. 

Thursday, March 03, 2016

Eavesdropping

“That’s such a good movie though. It’s hilarious. It, you know, I can’t remember how it starts but then this one woman gets killed and then another person gets killed and then because of that they have to off another person and then, you know, another one, and another one… And that’s how it ends – you know, everyone’s dead. The camera pulls back, and everyone’s dead. It’s hilarious. The Simpsons did one like that. At least, I think it was the Simpsons… Great movie. Real neat concept.”

This man comes into the coffee shop with his girlfriend every Wednesday and they sit at the table directly beside me no matter what. This coffee shop has two rooms. It’s long and narrow. There are tables over there, and over there, and over there. And yet, this man, without fail, sits here. He seems nice enough, but his voice is the kind that carries over land and sea. If you’ve ever had a quiet moment to yourself to sit and think and found the silence broken by the sound of a guy's voice yammering on in the distance, it was probably him. 

They like to talk about politics, and movies, and things happening in the city. Sometimes they even talk about me. As though I cannot hear them across the one-foot chasm between our tables.  

“I like her laptop case,” says the woman, reaching out and touching it. 

“Yeah,” says the man. “It’s real bright.”

(It’s yellow. It is, for sure, real bright.) 

“I don’t know where to get one like that,” says the woman. I smile at her, unsure as to whether this is a question directed at me or not.

Decidedly, though, it’s not. She doesn’t look at me and my smile pings off the side of her head and hits the barista. 

“Sears, probably,” says the man, mistakenly. “They’re probably selling like hotcakes over there. I bet they’re all on sale.” 

“Yeah,” says the woman.  

I open my mouth and close it again. Am I eavesdropping right now? I feel like I’m eavesdropping. If someone comes over and yells stuff in your ear and it’s about you but not directed to you, are you eavesdropping? 

I need to know for next Wednesday