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When in doubt, just spray shit gold and other lessons I learned planning a wedding.

March 24, 2018 By in Humour, Life, Toronto Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment
When in doubt, just spray shit gold and other lessons I learned planning a wedding.

Guys, it happened. I.got.hitched…

… Not entirely by myself, Dan was there too but whatever, mere trivial details.

It’s been nearly a year since the partner and I decided to senselessly tie our lives together for all eternity, so that means we’ve had almost enough time to slowly collect the lost pieces of our souls and pay off those soaring Visa bills.

We’re also at least 80% recovered from that terrifying bout of wedding planning PTSD. I am happy to say that we can now look back on whole experience with warmth, a smile, and only the occasional shudder.

You learn a lot in the year leading up to your wedding – about yourself, your partner, your relationship, and just how long it takes until one of you completely and wholly implodes from the stress of it all.

So first things first: what did Dan and I learn about each other’s coping mechanisms?

We learned that Dan likes to internalize his stress, bury it deep in the far reserves of his psyche, plaster a smile on his face and act like everything is perfect, all the while suffering from bouts of dangerously high blood pressure.

I, on the other hand, I prefer to release stress slowly, over the course of many months in the form of passive aggressive comments and mature declarations like, “Why did you make me do this?!” and, “Fuck the fucking wedding industry and everyone associated with it.”

So now that I’ve made it clear how unqualified we are to offer advice, gather around and listen to all this advice!

Here’s a not-so brief compilation of the things we learned planning a wedding:

1. Smile and nod at everyone’s opinion and then completely ignore their advice and do whatever the hell you want to do.

I don’t know why a throwing a wedding is open-season for people to offer unsolicited advice on literally everything but OH IS IT EVER.

But guess what? None of those people are the two of you. If you’re signing up to get completely financially rinsed all in the name of one perfect day, then that day should reflect the two of you in exactly the way you want to be reflected. The day will not be made or broken by your entree choice or where you source your flowers.

Stand firm. Eat what you want to eat. Smell the goddamn flowers you want to smell.

Your grandmother had her time.

NO ONE WANTS POT ROAST ANYMORE NANNA.

2. No one cares about your décor but you.

Ok this may be a bit of an exaggeration. I have been to weddings where I’ve heard people critiquing the décor, but here’s a little secret: everyone really hates those people and how did they even get invited to your wedding in the first place?

I think if you surround yourself with good humans, they may remember that it looked “nice” or felt, “warm.”

BUT if anyone you know actually spends his or her time getting into the nitty gritty of your table arrangements or colour scheme, then those people are lame and shouldn’t get to go to fun parties.

I think what people remember most is the feeling in the room, and I guarantee that feeling is going to be a hell of a lot more positive if you didn’t just blow $5000 on candles.

Which leads me to my next 2 points:

3. If you think you’re above IKEA, you’re not. And closely related:

4. If you think you’re above Dollerama, you’re definitely not.

I made Dollerama, HomeSense, Michaels and IKEA my bitch on a regular basis leading up to the wedding.

If you took a gander at the absurd Visa statement I mentioned earlier it’s just those four stores, on repeat, for three months. I can’t imagine what our wedding tab would have looked like if I didn’t opt for the DIY ghetto-chic décor options. But again, no one cares if your candles are made by the wax of purebred bees, or if your linens are 7000 thread count.

And it begs repeating: those people who do care, really suck.

5. Things to cheap out on: midnight food. Things to not cheap out on: a photographer and a live band.

It’s very important to note for all future event expenses that drunk people will eat literally anything that’s put in front of them.

I’ve awoken the day after a night out to realize at 3am the night before I just poured Sriracha on plain rice crackers and went to town.

Cold corn straight from the can? Yep.

Makeshift nachos comprised of just goldfish crackers and melted cheese? Check.

So don’t spend your money on artisanal pizza or fancy midnight sliders, as I guarantee the same person dancing shirtless on the floor is not going to appreciate the tang of red pepper relish on their delightfully tiny burger.

HOWEVER, a solid live band or DJ is pivotal to success and good party vibes. Are people going to be soaking in sweat rocking out to Counting Crows or are they going to be sitting at the table rolling their eyes while that one Uncle dances the Macarena?

Is it actually fun to stay at the Y.M.C.A?

N.O.P.E.

Also, spend the extra dough on a good photographer/videographer. I’ve had friends spend so much time and energy and money planning their weddings only to be disappointed in their pictures.

That day is a goddamn whirlwind that has you spinning in circles, too over-stimulated to really absorb any one thing. I promise when you blackout for 7 hours and come to at 2am sitting on the floor of your hotel eating a bag of Doritos still in your wedding dress, (No? Just me?) you’re going to want to rest easy knowing someone properly recorded all your memories for you.

6. Make a budget. Then tear up that budget while cackling evilly like everyone else in the wedding industry who is just out to slowly and methodically castrate your bank account.

You know the rule for converting Celsius to Fahrenheit? No? Me either. But Google tells me you double the temperature then add 30.

…Yea, wedding budgets are a lot like that. It’s a daily punch in the vagina/nuts so just make sure to wrap your head around that before you dive in.

I don’t know if people in the wedding industry are assholes, geniuses, or some combination of both. All I know is at some point in the planning process you too will find yourself getting inexplicably attached to a certain type of stupidly adorable dessert or table runner, lose all sense of logic and pay triple what you should for it out of some completely misguided sense of “need.”

You think you won’t. You think you’re above it.

So did I.

But then I went and spent $120 on 24 of these because Pinterest told me I should:

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No one is above it. 

7. Outsource as much as you can.

I know this contradicts the part where I said the wedding industry is a sadistic motherfucker, but the only thing worse than getting help is taking it all on yourself.

Case in point: me.

I decided early on that to save money I would try to do as much as I possibly could on my own. This meant dealing with vendors and throwing linens on tables and yes, crouching on my balcony in 5-degree weather spraying everything I could find gold.

Beer bottles or vases? You tell me.

FullSizeRender (3)

And I don’t know, maybe I saved some money, I couldn’t really tell you.

But I can tell you it made me a goddamn nightmare to be around.

Because if I’m being completely honest, taking the reigns had less to do with saving money and more to do with one of my more charming, delightful qualities: being a bit of a control freak who insists on doing everything herself, rejects all offers of help, and then complains she’s doing everything alone.

Remember that time someone shackled himself to me for the rest of his life?

What.a.sucker.

8. IF you relent and give the future husband a to-do list, include supporting photographs, a carefully laid out Google map, weblinks, a firm timeline and pre-programmed daily reminders.

Don’t get me wrong, I found myself one exceptionally good dude. It’s just that whereas my timeline is very much, “Now. Immediately. Today. This minute” his is much more, “As long as it’s done before we’re walking down the aisle, I have been tremendously successful.”

So perhaps I should have trusted that his to-do list would have gotten done without my near constant harassment and enraged/frustrated sighs…

…But we’ll never know.

Because I didn’t become a passive aggressive control freak over night, I’ve had years of practice perfecting it!

I’m also not sure he’s come to terms with the fact that even if the end result is flawless, if he doesn’t do it precisely my way I consider it a swift and mighty failure, so that’s also fun.

BUT to be fair, Dan has a tendency to be incredibly self-congratulatory and sort saunter around without an ounce of humility when he does accomplish the one small task I’ve been stalking him to do for three weeks, so I like to think we’re equally infuriating.

That’s why we’re married guys! A crippling fear that no one else could stand us.

9. Once the day starts, try to just roll with the chaos.

It really is the most tired of clichés but the whole day does just fly by. So look up once and awhile, and try to accept this day for what it is: literally the last time you will ever be one-half of the centre of attention ever again.

After this it’s usually kids and frankly once that happens no one will notice or care if you’re in the room ever again.

Breathe. Get a respectable amount of drunk. And enjoy the damn spotlight.

E.

The Couple’s Travelling Rules

January 11, 2017 By in Humour Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment
The Couple’s Travelling Rules

Once upon a time I wrote the Couple’s Cohabitation Rules. Because you know, at that point Dan and I had lived together for a whole year, making me the obvious choice as expert on cohabitation, and like, relationships in general.

Just kidding, we’re literally flying by the seat of our pants every.single.day.

But, with 2.5 years of condo living under us, I do feel like we’ve got the living together down. A lot of our success can to attributed not to our personalities or deep maturity and superior conflict resolution but instead to:

  1. Being on completely opposite schedules so we only really “live” together three days a week and,
  2. Having four of Dan’s best friends live within a two-block radius which makes our 800 sq. ft. condo seem like a normal sized human living arrangement, not one built for tiny Toronto hobbits who are comfortable with zero personal space.

Point is, we’ve worked it out. We know each other’s ticks and buttons and only exploit and poke at these once every 8 to 10 days.

But travelling together? That, my friends is a WHOLE other ballgame.

And to be clear, I’m not talking about some all-inclusive resort vacation where a gentleman named José serves you your 7th mojito of the day while you lather on the SPF 80 and talk about how “dry” the heat is down south.

On these trips, you spend the bulk of your time discussing what a beautiful country Mexico is despite only seeing one stretch of private beach, and your only interaction with a local is knowing they make a really dope towel swan.

Get yourself a resort vacay, and the worst you’ll have to worry about is boredom, and what on earth you’re possibly going to have to talk about at your 3rd a la carte meal of the day.

If that’s your bag, all the power to you; I get the draw – it’s easy and you don’t have to plan/think about anything.

It’s just not my thing. Trips like that make me lazy, and prone to pick fights over stupid stuff that doesn’t matter, like where José is with my 8th goddamn mojito.

No, I’m talking travelling. The kind where you have to move from point-to-point, and therefore deal with planes and boats and delays and uncomfortable amounts of back sweat and an overall lack of Wi-Fi to distract you from each other.

Dan and I just got back from Belize, so again, that whole seven days of traipsing about together makes me the obvious choice as expert on couple’s travelling.

Man you guys are SO lucky I’m here.

So here I present to you, my guide:

THE COUPLE’S TRAVELLING RULES

AKA a step-by-step guide to avoid committing spousal murder in a foreign country 

1. Force your significant other do things they hate so when you get in a fight at least you have an excuse.

Listen, Dan is very laid back, and there’s not much he doesn’t like. But HIGH on the short list of things that give him the heebie-jeebies are:

  1. Planes
  2. Sharks

So obviously on our trip to Belize I made sure we flew in a tiny 10-person plane and went snorkeling with sharks.

It’s very rare I get to see Dan freak out, and I find it extremely comedic when he does.

So for the 30-minutes we spent riding a baby plane over open water while he stared directly into the aisle and I soothed him with such calming, reassuring words as, “Dan, look out the window, look how high we are, look at how deep the water is, isn’t this plane SO SMALL?” I was extremely happy and amused.

Similarly, listening to your 6’4” significant other scream bloody murder into their snorkeling tube when their foot accidentally touches a stingray makes for some serious entertainment value.

Try it sometime, comedic gold I promise.

In turn, Dan made me… do absolutely nothing I hate. Because what is he INSANE?

Plus I don’t have any obvious fears other than organized sports so as long as he didn’t try to get me to join a Belizean softball team we probably would have been ok.

2. Don’t compare your current trip to places you’ve been without the other person as this makes you an obnoxious show-off.

Ya, about two days in I started to say “Oh man this road really reminds me of…” and Dan exasperatingly cut me off to exclaim, “Let me guess, Cayman?!” and I realized I was being THAT person.

So referring to the above point 1, I of course just kept doing it until he lost his mind.

No I didn’t!…

… But I thought about doing it, because if it’s one thing I think we can all agree on, it’s that sometimes I am an intentional asshole.

3. Get those #whitepeopleproblems out of the way REAL quick.

The beginning of our trip got off to a, “rough start.” And by this I mean,

  1. We didn’t get to the airport early enough to get coffee, and
  2. For approximately 13 seconds I thought WestJet was out of cheese trays.

As easy-going a unit as I like to think Dan and I are, if you wake us (me) up at 5am and deny us (me) of our (my) coffee and snacks and you would have thought our worlds (my world) was ending.

By the time you actually get to another country and have successfully changed into a bathing suit and flip-flops all those little things seem so silly and ridiculously dramatic.

… mostly because, as it turns out, the plane had both cheese AND coffee. Phew.

4. Invest in Air Conditioning.

There was a time in my life where I thought roughing it was fun, and that I could get by with just a mattress on a floor and a fan.

And I did! …Get by that is. Somehow all without contracting a flesh eating disease or bed bugs. I mean, when travelling abroad, I lived in some hovel-like conditions.

Very crack-den chic.

Turns out that’s all I need when travelling alone and only having my only personality to deal with in the morning. I mean, back then, who cared if I woke up haggard and hating everything? I could take as much time as I wanted to face the general population.

This is NOT what you want to do when you have to sleep next to another human.

Especially when said human is a giant, sweaty man-furnace who actually wants to interact with you within three hours of waking up.

We learned that lesson circa 2014 in Costa Rica when I made Dan stay in a very sketchy hostel that lacked many basic human amenities, like water pressure, linens, or any type of airflow.

Sleeping with a mattress spring jabbing him in the back the entire night was not the key to a successful romantic vacation.

Although again, did provide me with some serious amusement. It wasn’t my back after all.

5. Talk to other people.

Like, a lot. You’re on a trip together for sure, but I wouldn’t suggest going about it in a #nonewfriends kind of way.

I don’t care how in love with someone you are; 24-hours a day for seven days in a row with one other person is a lot. You need some human buffers. Mix it up, mingle, and take a two-hour break to lie alone in a dark, quiet hotel room so you don’t daydream about “accidentally” drowning each other on that sunset cruise you thought was a great idea when you booked it five weeks ago.

You know, the usual, healthy relationship kind of stuff.

6. Try not to feel that bizarre vacation relationship pressure to be completely different people. 

It’s this weird idea we all have that trips are supposed to bring out the perfect versions of us. This relationship ideal that as soon as we cross international waters we immediately revert back to first date status – just a couple of horny teenagers experiencing moment after moment of unfiltered romantic bliss.

Like when we get home and people ask what we did on our trip we’re all supposed to sigh, smile and say, “Oh us, I can’t even remember the activities, we were just busy loving each other.”

Screwwwwwww that.

Yes, I absolutely agree that it’s easy to be happy and easygoing when you remove all of life’s everyday schedules and complications. But it’s not as though you get to another country, look around and think, “Ok…palm trees, check. Sun, check. Let’s just throw on some R-Kelly and slow dance for a week.”

Or I don’t know, maybe some people are exactly like that; I’m just not one of them.

I instead, really love to completely self-destruct under moments that feel like they “should be” romantic.

The night of New Years Eve in Belize, we were standing on the beach as fireworks went off. Dan put his arm around me for what must have amounted to a tenth of a second, and the whole thing just felt so overwhelmingly cheesy I immediately went into Robot-mode and had to disengage.

I always have these out-of-body experiences in those moments where I end up way too aware of just how much we must resemble a 1990’s Made-for-TV movie.

And why do I care you ask?

To that I say, I have absolutely no idea, but I’m sure my future therapist will have a TIME digging into that mess.

Throw me into a spontaneous situation where I say, watch my boyfriend attempt to hoist his large body onto a very small inner tube unsuccessfully for a 3-minutes, leaving me in a puddle of my own hysterics and BOOM! Instant romantic moment I will forever remember.

I love him so much in those moments it’s silly.

But should he try to lie beside me and stare at the stars while I don’t know, the ocean makes bloody ocean sounds around us, and I will go so inside my own head about how ridiculously, “A Walk to Remember” we look and definitely find a way to ruin that moment.

… In a mature, adult fashion of course – i.e., by loudly proclaiming “EWW!” and then barrel rolling away from him.

Really nice stuff here; Good luck to you, future doctor of my brain.

6. Drink Drink Drink Drink Drink Drink (set to Rihanna’s Work)

The only thing that ensures you’ll black out and fall asleep before you go and ruin romantic moments?

Cheap tequila.

After all, what’s more romantic than a slurring corpse?

On that pleasant note, happy romance and future travels together kids!

E.

My friend is raising twins and I can’t even find the remote control

April 2, 2016 By in Life Tags: , , , , , , 2 Comments
My friend is raising twins and I can’t even find the remote control

I spent this past Easter Monday staring at the one-week-old faces of identical twin boys, incubated and birthed by one of my best friends Melanie.

That’s right. To all you young people out there currently considering having kids, let’s take a minute to really absorb that…

…You can have TWO of them. AT THE SAME TIME.

So I’m sitting there, watching these two tiny humans form neural connections and learn and develop before my very eyes and all I could think was:

  1. All newborns really look like shrunken old men, and
  2. Oh man, this is SUCH real life.

If you’ve read anything I’ve written in the past, you know I’ve spent a huge bulk of the last two years attending bridal showers, bachelorette parties and weddings.

So you’d think I would have already comprehended that this “real life” started long ago and that I’m sitting smack dab in the middle of it.

But although I love a good wedding (friends celebrating friend’s love and whatnot), unless all my friends find themselves immune to those, “Global Statistics” the unfortunate truth is, some of those relationships will last and some won’t.

And before you say anything, get off my back; I’m not being a pessimistic downer. Because for the MOST part (aside from a little emotional turmoil and the mass drinking of one’s problems away) people are capable of picking themselves up and moving on.

Marriages and the relationships that comprise them are as permanent as you actively choose and fight for them to be.

But now, the babies have started; those living, breathing, miniature mirrors into your own human abilities and inadequacies.

And babies are FOREVER.

The time has come for getting knocked up. When people get to sit back in their new-parent smugness only mildly haunted by that tiny voice in the back of their minds that they can REALLY screw these little people up.

Now don’t be fooled by my rejection of certain traditional life events – I want myself some babies.

I want them in that weird biological-clock-ticking-feel-it-in-my-gut-constantly-trying-to-hold-strangers-babies-on-the-street kind-of way I thought was completely made up by men and projected on women as a way to keep them from becoming CEOs and taking over the world.

However, the idea of someone’s entire emotional and physical existence being reliant on me? Me – the person who crumbles under the pressure of deciding between crunchy and smooth peanut butter?

That’s some scaryyyyyyy stuff.

Aside from paralyzing fear, here are some of my thoughts on having kids:

  1. Pregnancy is SO WEIRD.

When I say this verbatim to friends, most of them laugh awkwardly and change the subject. Because you know, as mammals the process of being pregnant and giving birth has been firming ingrained in us as natural since the moment we stopped believing those stork stories.

So the fact that as a fairly educated woman who is not 5-years-old, I still can’t wrap my mind around the whole baby-making process is considered a little off-putting to some. BUT COME ON – we take 3/4’s of a year to grow another human in a giant sack full of fluid, letting it feed off our innards and then spend 20+ hours of excruciating pain excavating that now-grown bundle of cells from our bodies and BAM! – Instant life commitment.

That’s.friggin.weird.

2. Not all babies are created equally cute, but it’s amazing how if they are even vaguely related to you you’ll be signing up for baby model agencies before they’ve learned to control their neck.

My nieces are goddamn adorable, but both have gone through a definite “Rob Ford” phase (all chins and lesbian-chic blonde hair sticking in every direction), all of which we can look back and laugh at now, but one that not a single family member seemed to notice at the time.

Similarly, when I joke around about my extended awkward phase that lasted 11+ years my father STILL actively refuses to admit that this was a thing and continues to say I was always beautiful.

… I assure you when I was rocking inch-thick glasses and trimming my own bangs into sporadic projectiles from my head I definitely wasn’t landing any beauty pageants.

So what I’m saying is, if I have a weird looking kid, keep that shit to yourself. Hormones are going to trick me into thinking they’re cute as fuck and every kid deserves to have their parents look at them through rose-colored glasses.

My parent’s unrelenting belief in my beauty meant when I was called a four-eyed midget for two torturous years in junior high I was able to let it role off me rather than have it absorbed into my fragile pre-teen psyche. Kids need to grow up strong, and this strength comes first from their parent’s blind support and encouragement.

  1. I plan on taking full advantage of the nine months I’m pregnant to be a full damn nightmare. 

I spend most of my life trying to maintain a personality one can describe as “laid-back” or even “aloof.” But I still don’t understand why pregnant women don’t spend more time having full-fledged tantrums in the aisles of Loblaws if they don’t carry the exact right brand and flavor of ice cream.

For nine full months women have the ultimate excuse to shift between Zen and crazy-bitch and only have to utter a simple, “It’s for the baby”

Who needs to be passive-aggressive when you can just be aggressive?

No one wants to let you have a seat on the bus? Dump hot coffee on them. Restaurant accidentally puts bean sprouts in your Pad Thai? Launch a formal class action lawsuit. Your baby daddy doesn’t anticipate every want and desire at least 12 hours in advance? Have a suitcase constantly packed and ready by the door with threats of, “Never seeing his child again.”

SO MUCH FUN. Screw trying to be casual and low-maintenance in some attempt to not succumb to the crazy girl stereotype.

After all, it’s for the baby.

4. How do people plan for kids?

I’m a planner. Sure life demands a certain amount of spontaneity and if anyone wants to invite me on a private jet anywhere in the next 20 minutes SIGN ME UP.

But kids demand a certain amount of pre-thought. I need to understand what I’m getting myself into. The whole, “As human beings we are evolutionarily programmed to know how to raise a child” is a GIANT amount of horseshit.

Our ancestors never had to plan for death-by-peanut allergy or trying to save for college tuition in a city where affording a 12-pack of Timbits feels like a luxury.

I don’t think my human heritage means I’m innately prepared to know how to raise a kid in a high-rise condo. When our ancestors had to send their kids out to learn how to forage for food did they have to teach them how to take an elevator to the park?

No, they just had to worry about little things like dysentery, starvation and animal attacks. You know…the easy stuff.

At least the forest has great square footage.

5. Kids make everything immediately scary because you don’t want to be the first one to break your child.

Kids are going to fall down, and hit their heads, and end up with black eyes and bruises and lumps. I had a permanent soft spot on my forehead as a kid I ran into so many things (probably a clue I needed those inch-thick glasses early on).

But you always hope someone else is the first one to let your kid fall down, or drop him or her. You know, so you can sigh and act very superior and forgiving, all the while wholly relieved someone else got it out of the way first.

At my friend’s house Monday I was holding one of her sons and she went to walk down a set of stairs and I was like, “Nope, I’ll be staying put up here.” If she hadn’t been there to assist me I probably would have:

  1. Remained on the second floor and lived off food scraps until someone more qualified to jointly manage breakable babies and stairs came along, or
  1. Wrapped said baby in some impenetrable cocoon of pillows and blankets to ensure that should I slip and fall, he would be so fully encased in feathers he would bounce ever-so-gently to the first floor.

Similarly, my boyfriend recently caused a line at Starbucks to form behind him as he diligently examined the physics of pushing his niece in a stroller down ONE STAIR, assuming doing so would cause her to launch headfirst out of the stroller like a little human rocket (despite her being securely clipped and harnessed into said stroller).

When you have kids every crack in the sidewalk is a possible broken leg, every pebble means choking and every fruit fly and mosquito a transporter of death and disease.

On that pleasant note, if anyone wants to volunteer to babysit my future child really early on and scuff ‘em up a little so I can maintain that classic motherly moral superiority that would be fantastic.

Come on guys, it’s for the baby.

E.

 

Girl shows up late to the New Years Party

January 9, 2016 By in Humour Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment
Girl shows up late to the New Years Party

Ah the ol’ New Years post, she’s a popular little minx. Since we’re already more than a week into 2016, it’s clear I considered, opted out, and then reconsidered whether or not to write something.

But alas I think January 9th still falls into the realm of, “New Year” so I’m going for it!

A new year brings with it many things – new beginnings, new ambitions, new dreams, new lessons to be learned, and new tired clichés of all of the former in script writing all over Instagram.

I’ve never been one for resolutions. And that’s not to say I don’t get why people do it. It’s easy to look back on the year prior and cringe at something you wish you didn’t do, or something you wish you had done better. You hurt someone or you ignored all the red flags and got dumped; you made all the mistakes and then ate your feelings. You continued to treat your treadmill with the kind of suspicion usually reserved for passing tall strangers in dark alleys.

So BAM! January 1st hits at it’s all, “This is going to be MY year.” We’re all going to eat less chips and more spinach, drink more green juice and less wine. We’re going to climb a mountain, volunteer our time, run a marathon, save a gimpy 3-legged dog from a fire, learn the ancient language of Latin, and stop annoyingly re-posting Instagram photos from @thefatjewish because EVERYONE has already seen them and knows you’re unoriginal. We’re going to make more time for family and spend less time worrying about work.

Then January 15th hits, we trade in the bottle of juice, pick up a bottle of wine, and we’re all left as failures, stewing in our self-created disappointment.

Until now, my resolutions- if I’ve bothered to make any- have always been very vague and, intentionally, rather easily achieved. Things like:

  1. Don’t die this year
  2. Try to occasionally act your age
  3. Consume something green in color at least 4 times a week (apple Jolly Ranchers obviously count)
  4. Stop making sweet sweet love to Pizza at 3am every.single.time.you.drink.

Sure, it makes it really easy to be successful (still alive and eating kale like a smug little champ), but it doesn’t give you much to measure this success against.

So this year, I’m going to Bucket List the shit out of 2016. And watch out kids, because things are about to get SPECIFIC.

1. Branch out and follow a recipe every once and awhile. 

It is a known fact (because my parents told me so) that in elementary school I ate a white kaiser bun with cream cheese for lunch every day for an entire school year. I like a lot of different types of food, but I’ve always been able to eat the same thing on repeat for days at a time. So yes, now I don’t have the metabolism of an 8-year-old and have swapped bread and cheese for salad and tofu, but I can go weeks without switching up my lunch choices.

Also courtesy of my parents I have 26 recipe books lining my top shelf (You know, the shelf I intentionally can’t reach) all in MINT condition. Although none of them are my desired, “Recipes you can cook in 5 minutes or less using a maximum of 6 ingredients and one pot” I still plan on diversifying a little this year. To like…2 pots.

Talk about progress!

2. Take more photos

I love photos; sometimes I’m even an adult and throw them in trendy rustic wooden frames. But I also have to be in the right state of mind to actually want to be IN photos (see: slightly drunk with freshly washed hair). Not this year kids. Life moves fast and I’m starting to have a terrible damn memory, so photos it is, greasy hair and all.

3. Purchase new PJs

Sure I know my boyfriend likes me and still occasionally find me attractive, but I’m not doing myself any favors when I come to bed wearing my brother’s old 1987 t-shirt with a massive picture of Daffy Duck playing baseball on the back and XL sweat pants. No one wants to have sex with that. I’m never going to be some silk or lace girl, but I think I can definitely aim to sleep in something my size and from this decade.

4. Refrain from getting to know take-out delivery men on a first name basis

In 2016, I’m going to try and hold onto some of the deep-seeded shame I felt with the same Hurrier delivery guy came to my house twice over the course of 5 hours. I’m programmed to love people who give me food, but this year I need to remind myself that the 19-year-old delivering Mexican at 1am is not my best friend, even if I loudly and forcefully declare him to be.

5. Watch every 2016 Oscar nominated best movie

This is an easy one to bang out before the first quarter of the year is even done. I never get around to watching all the films, and there are always about 3 that I cast aside as being too bleak or too obscure. My movie brain needs some bells and whistles. So every year I watch the Oscars and say things like, “Helen Mirren was in HOW MANY movies this year?!” and “This show requires more Zac Efron.” Not this year folks! I’ve already sat through 3 hours of walking and grunting courtesy of Leo and The Revenant (which I can only assume will be nominated), so I’m on my way to Oscar gold!

6. Replace all of your glassware with copper mugs

No reason for this, it just bound to look fucking cool.

7. Buy some new workout gear

Sure, there’s something to be said for not looking like you care too much at the gym (i.e. Everyone on King West), but when my wardrobe consists of what would now be considered the LuLu Lemon Vintage line and Puma running shoes from whenever they actually still made Puma running shoes (I’m ball-parking somewhere around 2001), then something’s gotta change.

8. Stop feeling tempted to get into impassioned debates with people on the Internet

Good GOD there are some idiots out there, just trolling the internet, saying idiotic ignorant things, trying to pick fights. And sometimes I almost want to feed into it (The Starbucks red cup debate is one example of when I just couldn’t keep my mouth shut). But responding to these idiots actually gives their arguments more validity, and all they do is scream the same nonsense louder, most likely all in caps and with little proper punctuation or adherence to proper grammar..

So this year, I’m just going to chalk them up to the vocal minority and social media as the evil tooth that gives their ignorance a platform. I will remember that they are most likely inbred, enjoy the company of clowns, are cruel to small animals, ask their Yoda bobble heads for real life advice, and dress in Avatar outfits on Tuesday’s “just for fun.”

9. Taste things before you slather them entirely in hot sauce

I don’t think I know what food tastes like anymore, but I assume some foods have a flavor that can be described as something other than “heat” or “fire.”

10. Buy more mason jars

I already have a shit ton, so why not buy more. I’m going to put them everywhere. I’ll drink from some of them, paint others and use them as vases, use others to store my black Hipster soul, put string lights in others and BAM, homemade perma-candles. Mason jars are trendy, cheap ways to tell people “Welcome to my home, I like Pinterest, Urban Outfitters, man buns and wearing toques and scarves indoors.” Sorry guys, you’re going to be super jealous of my strong container game.

11. Live life offline once and awhile

For this new gig I’ve been working on at a tech company, I had to do some research on millennials and their relationship with technology. Blah blah yadda yadda, point is, in doing so I stumbled across an Entrepreneur article that stated that millennials check their phone on average, 43 times a day. And I remember first thinking, “Huh, that actually seems pretty low” and then thinking, “You have become a sick sick human Emma Gillies.”

We treat our phones like extensions of ourselves- like limbs- and I am no exception. So I’m not going to do anything too dramatic like delete Instagram or remove myself from Facebook (how would I ever find out when people’s birthday’s are?) but I do plan on making a valiant effort to not have checking my phone be the knee-jerk reaction every time I am bored or lonely. Like really Emma, put that thing away and chill.the.fuck,out.

12. Stop saying the following things to your boyfriend:

“You haven’t posted a photo of the two of us in like 3 weeks. Is something wrong?”

“Is that seriously how you chew?”

“I’m going to light that **insert novelty sweater, hat, tank top, ratty housecoat** on fire if you wear in one more time.”

“Those are definitely not the song lyrics. Literally not even a little bit close.”

“Are you watching Braveheart/The Bourne Identity AGAIN?”

13. Make more time for friends

I’d like to think my post on “Hopes for my friends” made is clear how much I love and value my friendships. But last year was a real lesson in self-improvement, then self-pity, then self-realization, a little more self-pity, then finally somewhere in there, self-satisfaction. The point is I spent a whole chunk of 2015 concentrating on me.

So friends, this year get ready for some intense smothering. I’m going to text you at all hours, send you Britney Spears wisdom gifs to keep you motivated, tell your significant others they don’t deserve you, crawl into your beds while you sleep so you can wake up to my smiling face, buy you kittens you don’t want but are forced to raise and house for 14 years, and surprise you while you’re in the shower with a Justin Bieber karaoke sing-along.

2016 is going to be so cute. BFFS4LIFE

14. Wherever you travel this year, find an infinity pool and take a picture in it

Sure I’m going to pretend to look out spontaneously over the horizon like I don’t know someone is taking a picture of my back, and you’re going to know I’m full of shit, but you’re going to like it anyway, because infinity pools are the copper mugs of water bodies – everyone just loves them.

15. Empty the recycling bin every once and awhile

I probably won’t actually succeed in doing this because for whatever reason my body seems to reject the movement of glass and cardboard from one location to another. But I can at least try to not overload the recycling bin and then break into long, loud boats of laughter when my boyfriend opens the cupboard and everything spills onto the floor.

Baby steps people.

 

Happy New Year everyone! Wishing you all a year of happiness, laughter, copper appliances and pools with wicked views. Cheers!

Love lessons you won’t find on an Inspirational Quote of the Day website

July 2, 2015 By in Life Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment
Love lessons you won’t find on an Inspirational Quote of the Day website

I spent a couple of Sunday’s ago at one of my high school girlfriend’s wedding showers. And although wedding showers usually make me want to get day drunk and give an offiside speech to all the grandmothers about how the bride lost her virginity just to liven things up, the time other women spent making miniature wedding cakes out of Playdough did allow me to reflect on this period of our lives.

Three of my good friends are getting married this year, but they’re all these bizarre species of female who have been in relationship with their fiancés for 7+ years. I treat them like strange little aliens they are.

For the rest of us who find ourselves in stable relationships however, it comes from years of navigating the highs and lows of love, joy, chaos, destruction and heartbreak. For those of us who didn’t find our life partner at 15, we have spent the bulk of the last decade dating, falling in love, falling out of love and watching our partners fall in and out of love with us.

So I sat there, looking at these girls I’ve known for 17 years, reflecting on what it is about us now. What it is about these guys, this moment, and this time that has us all functioning in relationships where others have failed.

It would be too simplistic to reduce it to just the two people in the relationship. We are a product of so much more than just a He + She equation.

It’s more like: He + She + Environment + Age + Timing + Friends + Current Ed Sheeran song playing.

I may not be some 80-year-old woman full of sage wisdom with an entire lifetime of experience under my belt. But in my handful of experience, here is what I have learned about love:

 

  1. Love is NOT all you need

We get it Lennon, you were a damn talented man, but you were also so wholly full of shit. I’m sure when hopped up on acid and hallucinating cartoon submarines all of the world’s negativity really did melt away from you. I’m sure in those moments it did seem like life is easy and humans are intrinsically good and as long as you love one another everything is going to be OK.

But I’ve been in love with people, and been lucky enough that most of those people have loved me back. I’ve watched my friends be in love and watched other people love them.

And I’ve watched it all fall apart.

And yes, sometimes life does operate in black and white and you get to reduce this falling apart to one person just really fucking up. But most of the time relationships function in the many shades of grey; we don’t live in an easily polarized world of Hero vs. Villain, Prince vs. Witch, Princess vs. Jackass.

Because most of the time you love the hell out of one another and still have it not work out. Life would be a lot easier if we could just draw out a map or list of where it all went wrong. But perhaps one of the most poignant and adult conclusions you sometimes have to come to is, Just because nothing is wrong, doesn’t make it right.

At the end of the day, the Beatles can say what they want but it’s not all about love. You have to be able to communicate; you have to like each others families. You have to coexist in each others worlds and friendships. You have to be able to battle and scream and fight and then move on without building resentments or holding onto old grudges.

You have to like the way someone chews their food, the way they act when their drunk, the way they travel and they way they behave when nothing is going their way. You have to learn to like each other even when you hate each other.

It may not make for the same catchy love song lyrics, but in this many shades of grey world we live in, love is but one essential factor in a successful relationship.

 

 

  1. You have no idea how you fall in love I assure you, so don’t limit yourself

Very early on in my life I had this idea of how I fell in love. I mean, I only had a few instances on which to build my opinion but it had always happened in this real storybook ideal way:

Girl meets boy; girl is instantly attracted; girl pines; boy shows interest; girl pretends she never actually liked him in the first place; boy says screw it and starts to pull away; girl panics and draws that poor sap in at the last second.

…You know, a real goddamn Cinderella story.

But it turns out; I didn’t really know myself that well at all.

We spend so long and expend so much effort in trying to know ourselves. We start to see patterns in our own behavior and create lists of what we like and don’t like, characteristics in others we value versus those we could do without.

And then we start judging compatibility based on the presence or absence of these traits.

The problem is, when we do this it becomes very easy to reject or dismiss people because we can’t fit them into our preconceived patterns. We develop rules and limitations for ourselves – we will never date someone younger, someone shorter, or someone who works in finance; we will never meet someone in a bar. We will never date one of our friends, or even a friend of a friend. We hold onto the notion that attraction can’t be built, it’s either there or its not.

The most illogical part of all of this is of course that we reject people because they don’t fit the mold, failing to realize that the mold is what hasn’t been working in the first place.

Sometimes life and love is most beautiful in the unexpected. That feeling of being absolutely sideswiped by someone we never gave any consideration to in the first place. Sometimes chemistry isn’t being struck by lightning but is instead akin to a slow storm brewing.

Sometimes that person in the background you swore you’d never date becomes the only person you ever want to.

Rules are for sports and prison. When it comes to relationships, be a bit of a rebel.

 

 

  1. Regardless of the nature of a breakup, watching someone move on is a terrible fucking experience.

There’s this widely drawn conclusion that in the war of Dumpee vs. Dumper, there exists this huge power imbalance, and the person doing the dumping naturally gets the better end of the deal and moves on faster.

But here’s the thing about humans. We may have opposable thumbs and consider ourselves the mightiest of all the species, but we are also so full of massive contradictions, flaws and paradoxes. No where is this more obvious than in the sentence popularized by pre-teens and adults alike:

“Just because I don’t want him/here anymore, doesn’t mean I want anyone else to have him/her.”

We are all such horribly prideful people. Sure we enjoy loving someone, but we also get off on someone else loving us.

So the hardest conclusion to come to is that we are completely and totally replaceable. That, as much as we’d like to believe it, our significant others sun does not rise and fall based on our existence.

Human beings are made to withstand loss and heartache. It doesn’t matter how much we cared about someone or how much they cared about us – They will move on, they will forget, and they will replace old memories with new ones.

They will have new favorite songs that make them think of new people, they will change and grow and breathe and laugh and they will do all of these things without you.

And you know what makes it worse: SOCIAL MEDIA! The first time I broke up with a boy I found out he was dating someone else weeks after the relationship started, over a phone call with one of my friends. And that was it. It hurt knowing he had found someone else, but the news was confined to one conversation – one large but quick ripping off of the breakup Band-Aid.

Now you get to find out someone has moved on in small increments, all playing out its course in public forums. You get to see photos and posts and tweets. There is no quick ripping off of the Band-Aid. Instead it’s like a slow death by heart shaped, kissy-faced emoticons aimed at new people.

We bear witness to our own replacement, and to put things simply, it really bloody sucks.

 

 

  1. Loving someone doesn’t just happen, it’s a choice you make every.damn.day.

Ok so maybe I actually did take this one from a Quote of the Day website.

Most of those websites make me want to vomit butterflies (unless of course I’m going through a breakup, in which case, like everyone else, I throw on a 2001 Dashboard Confessional album and ugly cry to, “Love like you’ve never been hurt before”).

But once and awhile one of those bad boys really resonates with me. In this case, a little gem by Sherman Alexie that goes:

“He loved her, of course, but better than that he chose her, day after day. Choice, that was the thing.”

All of my relationships have ended because I wasn’t prepared to fight for anything. I was too young and too egotistical to think I couldn’t find something or someone else. I was a wandering soul and I wanted to soak up as many experiences and human connections as I could. I didn’t want to fight. I wanted to run.

I am not a firm believer in this whole marriage thing people keep pitching me on, but that has nothing to do with the example that has been set for me by my parents.

I have zero comprehension of what it must take to make a 37-year marriage last, but I do think it must mean that when you stand up on that alter and say, “I Do” you’d better not just be concentrating on the, “For better” part.

Let’s be honest, for most of us in our twenties and early 30s, we have yet to really have to fight for anything. Sure some of us have worked our asses off in school and continue to do so in our careers, but the real fights haven’t started yet.

Life is hard and relationships don’t always make it easier. Think of how much you’ve changed in the last decade. Now think of how much you’ll probably change in the next decade, and the decade after that.

You’re going to change dramatically and so is that other person and there are no guarantees you’re going to change in the same ways or in the same time scale. You’re going to grow at different rates and sometimes you’re going to grow apart. You’re going to be busier than you ever thought you could be and more tired than you even thought possible. You’re going to have all the romance and desire stripped away from your relationship at times, and you’ll have to wade through the muck to get back to it.

The beautiful end game is that if you last, if you choose each other over and over again, if you don’t get lost in the muck, then what you’re left with is an actual partner; a human extension of yourself. This other person who sees you for all your flaws and idiosyncrasies and late-night eating habits and still chooses you over all the other humans.

But if you’re not prepared for the worst- if you just love and don’t choose- life’s going to seem a whole lots longer and a whole lot harder than you’re probably prepared for.

 

 

  1. If you set someone free, they’re probably not going to come back to you, but that’s no excuse not to do it.

It is one of life’s greatest truisms that we are at times ruled by fear. In relationships this presents itself as an all-consuming idea that if we walk away from someone, they will move on, fall out of love and find someone else.

We let this rule us to the point that we keep strings attached, text when we shouldn’t text, late night booty call when we definitely shouldn’t late night booty call, post quotes and update our Facebook statuses in ways that are clearly aimed at that person.

We drop crumbs like Hansel and send out these small, almost invisible fishing lures trying to keep that person close enough that they find it impossible to move on.

It is cruel for both parties, and love at its most selfish and immature. It extends breakups and builds resentments. In the process you probably drag other well-meaning people into your bullshit. You break and squash and burn each other until there is nothing left to go back to – just an overall numbness where tenderness used to be.

Growing up comes with recognition that there are different kinds of love. The selfish kind of love is when you decide you only love someone when they are yours, when they “belong” to you. This is the kind of love that needs lures and breadcrumbs, because you feel like that love doesn’t exist unless they are near you.

If you can get past this point, you can let yourself delve into the real kind of love. Love at its most kind and selfless is the idea that you love this human regardless of time, of where they are and who they are with. An idea that you love them for everything they brought to your life and everything they are leaving you with. The idea that you may never see or know that person again, but a part of you will always love them just for what they meant to you once. This is the kind of love that doesn’t begin and end with a title.

If you can learn to offer love like that, if you can concentrate on the lesson and not the hurt, then all that fear just disappears.

Because maybe, just maybe, that’s the way that other person loved us too. And that, when we lie our heads down at night, there’s someone, somewhere, wishing us the very best.

 

E.

 

An ode to Toronto

May 24, 2015 By in Toronto Tags: , 1 Comment
An ode to Toronto

You have been called many things: Hogtown, Toronto the Good, Hollywood North, T.O., the T-dot, and most recently some no-name rapper from Degrassi nicknamed you, “The 6”

But I have only ever called you one thing: Home.

Toronto, you are my city. Born and raised midway between the Annex and Little Italy, I have worn down footpaths on your streets for 30 years. I have watched as you have changed and morphed and developed into the bustling metropolis you are now.

You are definitely not a town; you are not even a city. You have long since surpassed that to something that can only be described as a huge fucking megalopolis, absorbing other communities into your population as your boundaries have grown.

Scarborough? Mississauga? Etobicoke?

NOPE. Sorry, ALL TORONTO now people.

Toronto, I don’t see you through rose-colored glasses. I am all too aware of your imperfections. They are many and they are mighty but I adore you despite them.

Your waterfront, never particularly gorgeous to begin with now seems to exist purely for the breeze it provides one of the 200-condo towers that line it.

You tear down everything old and beautiful and build up 60 floors of glass and metal.

Your people are often referred to as the most pretentious of Canadians. They are called stuck up, self-absorbed, cold; and hey, as a local girl myself I can’t say I always disagree. Blame technology, blame the increase in population, but sometimes I try and see this city from an outsiders perspective and realize we are at times teetering on the edge of going the way of New York – where people are so plugged in and driven to move from point A to point B that no one really looks up and enjoys the ride anymore.

But a boring city you are not. Maybe your residents think they’re the center of the free world, but that’s only because, well damn, life is good here.

Tell me why you hate this city and I’ll tell you why you’re wrong.

Toronto, you have heart. Your people may love spin class, matcha tea and Instagramming morning coffee, but they also senselessly devote themselves to a hockey team who hasn’t given them anything to look forward to for almost 50 years.

You are a city of artists, poets, entrepreneurs, comedians, food lovers and musicians where creativity isn’t just accepted but welcomed and nurtured. Sure, you are a city with renowned Universities that turn students into doctors and lawyers, but you are also a place where bartenders can hone their talent and move on to open their own restaurants in the city.

You take creative minds and allow them to be entrepreneurs. You are a city of large corporations but also small businesses, where your neighborhoods rally around local coffee shops and revival movie theatres. You take high school garage bands and put them on stage.

You don’t just attract talented people; you breed talent.

Toronto, you don’t take a night off. You have the combined energy of the near three million people populate your buildings. Walk across Queen or King west on any given Thursday night at 3am and it still buzzes with the noise of financial district employees already regretting that night’s decisions, with servers just getting off shift who still need to unwind, with people from the surrounding Etobicoke, Mississauga and Scarborough all trying to figure out which vomit soaked blue-line bus will get them home.

And somewhere behind this hum of alcohol and hormones is the music.

This may be a bias from someone with a personal infatuation with live music, but Toronto THANK YOU. You make me feel lucky to live in one of the few Canadian cities that artists from abroad choose to play shows at. Do you know what a rarity it is to live in a place where that much talent will come to you?

You have venues with history, where the beers and concerts of the past literally soak the walls. The Horseshoe, the Dakota Tavern, Massey Hall, the Phoenix, the Opera House and Lee’s Palace are all venues that are extraordinary to hear live music at simply because of the history that reverberates through its walls.

And sure you have 9-month long winters where freshly fallen snow turns to black slush within a half hour. Your ski hills look like the premature inbred cousins of Whistlers and Banff’s. I can honestly say I have never even set foot on a hill and the only reason I have felt lacking is because of the top notch handsome dude factor that accompanies the sport.

No, your people don’t relish the winters. We don’t dance in the snowfalls because we know it only means ridiculous traffic and TTC delays. Maybe we toboggan on a sunny day, maybe a whisky-infused night might end in a disfigured snow angel, but mostly we deal with winters in the only way we have learned how to: complain about fucking EVERYTHING.

But Toronto, your summers make up for it. Do you see what happens to your people when the weather goes above 10 degrees? When they venture out, are kind to one another again, when your streets are lined with patios, people take long lazy lunches and beer flows quickly and without guilt.

You are a summer city. Your people suffer through your winters because they know summer means art festivals and people watching in Trinity Bellwoods Park. Summer means rare instances of hiking and the Queen East beaches being more than just a horrific wind tunnel of despair. It means farmers markets and taking the ferry to Wards Island. It means group BBQs on condo rooftops and trying to sneak into other people’s condo pools. It means lawn seats at the Molson Amphitheatre and nosebleed Jays tickets when the dome opens.

And you may not be as friendly as Halifax. And let’s be honest, NO ONE is as friendly as St. John’s. And unlike Vancouver, your residents don’t wake up every morning with an ocean view and mountains as their backyard. And Torontonians definitely don’t cure hangovers with ginger Kombucha and an early morning 10K hike.

No, in Toronto we couch, we self-loathe and then we eat some Goddamn magnificent brunch. No one loves brunch more than a Torontonian.

WE.BRUNCH.SO.HARD.

And you don’t have Banff’s glacier water, and Toronto kids are too delicate to handle a weeks worth of Calgary’s Stampede. And when it comes to Winnipeg….

…I’ve got nothing; you have everything Winnipeg does.

I have travelled often and fallen in love with many cities for many reasons. Toronto may not be the most scenic or its people the most welcoming. We may all get early onset asthma from the smog and raise our kids on the 40th floor of a condo building because we’d have to sell said children to another country to afford a house with a backyard.

Yet still, I have never wanted to live anywhere else. Toronto you are many things – manic, busy, stressful, vibrant, diverse, dazzlingly beautiful, monstrous and a constant assault on the senses.

But still, you are simply put, home.

E.

An open letter to my future self

April 26, 2015 By in Life Tags: , , Leave a comment
An open letter to my future self

This week’s been an emotional one. My 94-year-old grandma is in hospital for the first time, after fracturing her hip falling in her apartment. She’s the toughest of the tough old birds – still rocking life solo in her own apartment, doing her own grocery shopping and with a better memory for things that happened 40 years ago than I have for what happened yesterday.

She’s an absolute force.

And although every Christmas for the last two decades she has vehemently declared that, “You’d better not buy me gifts this year, I may not be around to enjoy them” I think in the back of my mind I thought she was some impenetrable conglomeration of cells and neurons, constructed before food allergies and air pollution could take their toll.

I mean she lived through Prohibition for god sakes! I thought she was unbreakable.

Seeing her lying in the hospital, I was faced with the idea of mortality for the first time in years. Lying there, having to be taken care of for arguably the first time in her life, I know she’s not thinking about the bills she didn’t pay on time or how much of her pension she’s spent.

All that matters are the people in the waiting room.

Isn’t that all we can really hope for after all? To have someone to tell our stories? To be missed when we leave?

So being stuck at home all week with a bad bout of the flu, I have had nothing but time think about what I want my future to look like. We all have these all-encompassing goals – get a career, find a partner, have a couple of kids, and try to live without killing one another. But when we picture these things growing up, the goal careers are often hazy and lofty ideals, the future partners might as well be heavily pixelated faces set atop bodies that we move from life event to life event.

So rather than these over-arching goals, I thought I’d take it down to the specifics. What do I really want my life to look like? Who do I want to become? Who will come along for the ride?

Here I present to you, a letter to the future me.

 

Dear old Emma,

How’s it going you wrinkled, saggy little lady?

As I write this, I’m trying to picture what you might look like as you read it; are you holed up in a Toronto apartment in the middle of winter, drinking your 6th coffee of the day? Or perhaps sitting in a hammock somewhere in a different time zone, warm and sun-kissed, letting a tan cover up the stretch marks from that year you accidentally forgot to go the gym?

Have you found any of that elusive perspective yet? Is life beginning to make sense in retrospect? As you’re reading this, are you able to look back and pinpoint one or two big decisions you made that set life on a different course, or does it all just look like a series of small decisions, seemingly inconsequential at the time, that you laid down like cobblestones, building a path through life.

Has life reached some plateau of stability? Or are you still a wanderer: seeking, imagining, free falling?

I hope you never let yourself be pressured into a job you didn’t love. As I write this, even after just 4 months of trying to live the free-spirited, “damn-the-man” lifestyle, I sometimes wake up with the weight of everyone else’s expectations squeezing the breath from my chest. It’s impossible to not compare yourself to those people who have check marked all the boxes in their life list and seem to float around with this blissful air of contentment.

I hope you’ve continued to remind yourself as you’ve aged that you are not these people; that you’ve never wanted to be.

Do you still wake up every morning an hour earlier than you have to, just to have coffee alone, give yourself an extra 20 minutes to sit in front of the mirror and reflect on what’s to come? Do you still smile at the life you lead? Or do you wake up feeling rushed, discombobulated, squeeze yourself into an uncomfortable pencil skirt and run off to some job that you, “Don’t completely hate and it pays the bills?”

If it’s the latter, you’ve failed me woman. You swore you’d never do that again. So comfort be damned. Unzip the pencil skirt, strip off the button-down, and run.

I hope at some point you learned the art of aging gracefully. There is something so intrinsically beautiful about women who can do that. And it’s an art that at 30 I still have yet to master. There’s that forehead wrinkle I cover with bangs, that patch of skin on my stomach I’ve tried for years to cardio away. Are you comfortable in your own skin yet? Have you learned to love your thighs?

Just remember that all the women you love most are those that unabashedly appreciate the beauty of youth. Those that laugh loudly, radiate sass and tell young women how fantastic they look. The ones who are jealous of youth, or worse cling to it in a perpetual state of discontentment and envy are the people you swore you’d never become. Remember how negative their energy is.

Now go out and tell a 25-year-old girl how god damn pretty they look.

Have you popped out a couple of kids yet? Do you love those little life-sucking vampires more than anything you ever thought imaginable?

I think you’ve always known that even in your most unsure of states, when everything seems up in the air, that kids are in the cards for you; even when you’ve had no idea about anything, you know you’d be a good mom. I mean fuck, at age 30 I still pick worms off the sidewalk after it rains and collect humans like stray cats. I have a sentimental attachment to a bag of Skittles someone got me when I had the flu 15 years ago and full conversations with flies when I attempt to catch them with a cup and a piece of paper.

I hope you still value life, and remain aware of your own ridiculousness. The world is full of hard things, but loving your kids… that should always be easy.

I hope you’ve kept your sense of humor and that at some point you learned to drive you weird city girl. I hope you call your parents twice a week, and that you and your brother have really gotten to know one another.

I hope you’ve had serious debates with your niece about the hottest Disney princes, and continue to unashamedly defend your long-standing crush on teenage Simba.

I hope you still go to live music shows and haven’t once complained about it being too loud. But I also hope you’ve grown enough of a pair to walk up to those people in the front row who talk through the entire set and tell them to fuck right off.

I hope you’ve gotten rid of some of your acquaintances and spent more time on the people you value. Life is pretty easy right now, and I bet from where you’re sitting, you’ll laugh and say I actually had no comprehension of just how good I had it.

Growing up comes with an awareness that for some, marriages will turn into divorces, and friends will start losing loved ones. I hope you haven’t watched these things happen from a distance, or merely offered a polite hand and empty offers of, “If you need anything, let me know.”

No, when your people have hurt I hope you have crawled with them through the war trenches of pain. I hope you have sat in the dark with them, cried with them and opened too many bottles of wine with them. I hope you’ve never made excuses of being, “Too busy” to do this. I hope you’ve managed to be better than that.

I hope you’ve been a good daughter to your parents. I hope you’ve continued to love them for all of their faults, idiosyncrasies, successes, strengths and failures. I mean, how could you not? You learned how to love first from them, and this is always how they have loved you.

And then there’s him. THE guy. This live-in life partner that I adore so much. At the moment, when I think about my future, he’s the one thing I try not to think too much about. Like just the act of planning or imagining a future will make it untrue. If you don’t make plans then the plans can’t fail right?

But here is what I know, without having to think about it too much. Right now, the biggest arguments consist of who ate the last of the goldfish crackers (him), whose turn it is to Swiffer (his) and who forgot to turn off the lamp (ALWAYS him). And you deal with these arguments in a health, mature fashion – by blaming him until he exasperatingly caves and leaves in a huff to go buy more goldfish crackers/Swiffer sheets.

This weird little bubble of relationship bliss is bound to pop at some point. The big fights haven’t even started yet; I know this. The ones that last weeks and leave you feeling emotionally numb; the ones that feel like physical pain.

In the past I’ve been a cut-and-run person. I’ve told myself, “It shouldn’t be this hard this soon.” I hope when it came to him, you chose not to run. I hope at some point you decided to dig your heels in, plant your feet and resolve that what you have is worth fighting for.

I hope when you’ve had the big fights, you’ve managed to remember that this is the meat-and-potato eating Scotsman whose grocery list now consists of quinoa bars and vegan protein powder. A guy whose previous mattress was lovingly titled, “The Taco” by all his friends because it was so soft it folded up on both sides, but who now sleeps on bed comparable to a concrete slab because of your bad lower back.

Remember that for every time you want to smother him with a pillow for snoring so loud, there is a time he has brought your grandmother flowers on Easter or huffed his way through a hot yoga class just to hang out with you.

And sure he talks ad nauseam for two months about needing a spring jacket only to never buy a spring jacket, and complains twice a week about needing a pair of brown shoes only to never buy a pair of brown shoes. But remember that he patiently chased you through the woods for 6 hours that time you thought it a wise idea to do a handful of mushrooms at a cottage. He didn’t even try to correct you when you made him lie with you on the gravel because you were wholly convinced it was made of human teeth.

And I’m sure as we get older, he’ll still have two white dress shirts he interchangeably puts on, then takes off, then puts the other on, then asks which one looks better even though he knows you can’t tell the difference. I’m sure he’ll still put his face way too close to yours when you’re sleeping, so you wake up feeling like someone is attempt to suck your soul through your nose. But he puts up with you being a she-devil at least twice a week, pretends almost convincingly to care about throw pillows and area rugs, and ALWAYS leaves the last bit of milk for you to put in your coffee in the morning.

I hope you’ve remembered these things as you’ve gotten older. I hope you continue to realize that all the things you roll your eyes at are the things you’d miss most about him if he left.

I hope you both chose to stay.

I hope you’ve traveled, and slept in hostels long past the age you’re supposed to sleep in hostels. I hope you’ve been so uncomfortable in foreign places it has made you scream in frustration, because that’s when you know you are truly present. I hope you still look homeless people in the eye when they speak to you, and never bring out your phone on dinner dates with friends. I hope you’ve held onto old photographs, but let go of old grudges. I hope you’ve managed to afford an espresso machine, because that’s going to make everyone’s life easier.

I hope you smile at the life you lead, because it really is just such a crazy, messed-up, awesome adventure.

I hope you’ve done all of this, and along the way, I hope you’ve written it all down.

E.

 

Love Apptually Part 2: Clowns and Pirates and Fishermen oh my!

April 7, 2015 By in Humour Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

In Febraury I shared an emotionally crippling tale (cue the dramatics) about my own embarrassing incident with Tinder. But save a 20-minute involvement that turned me off dating apps forever, my experience with any sort of technologically assisted dating has been sporadic and always secondhand.

This doesn’t mean its existence and effect on human relationships doesn’t continuously intrigue me however (this is “Part 2” for a reason).

I majored in Psychology and Criminology in University, so the social sciences have always been my bag. Living in this crazy online world where face-to-face human interaction is becoming more of a choice than a necessity, it’s hard to ignore that little Freudian voice in the back of my mind that wonders what is becoming of the world and what inevitable impact technology will have on the way we relate to one another.

I remember being 19 the first time I encountered the wonder that is Internet dating. Working a summer office gig at the time, I had a 31-year-old male colleague who regaled me with tales of his experiences with Lavalife (for the youth, Lavalife is a washed-up attempt at adult dating that I now believe is entirely reserved for low-end escorts and gigolos who don’t want to advertise in the back of NOW Magazine).

At 19, I was but a wee nugget fresh out of high school and also recently out of her first relationship. The idea of going on a date with someone I didn’t have at least a 2-year personal resume for and 20 mutual friends who could vouch for his character was unfathomable to me.

The notion of meeting said person through a computer was absurd. At at the time it took me at least two hours bi-weekly to come up with a sassy and hilarious new MSN name, and here was someone telling me to put up an entire profile? For other people to actually see?!?

I quickly shelved Lavalife to the back of my brain as reserved for the very old and highly desperate.

Fast-forward 11 years and everyone and their grandmothers are partaking in online dating of some kind. There is a dating website for every genre and sub-genre of human.

Pirate looking for love? Sure, there’s a website for that.

Fisherman in search of a Fisherlady? Check.

And in case you’re looking, these also exist:

  • Equestrian Cupid: For those passionate cowboys just looking for someone to ride bareback with.
  • Amish Dating: Perfect for those who value hard work and candlelit dinners.
  • Clown Dating: If you’re down for being constantly fucking TERRIFIED because why clowns WHY!?!
  • Gluten-free Singles: So you can tell each other every single day that you don’t eat wheat and leave the rest of us out of it.
  • Hot Sauce Passions: I cannot tell you enough how into this I am.

So it was only a matter of time until someone thought, “Gee how can we take this huge industry and make it faster, way less personal, completely unauthentic, and ideal for absolute perverts?”

Enter TINDER. We are now at the point where people consider the hour-long eHarmony questionnaire too much of a time dedication to find a partner. I mean, why consider frivolous character attributes like family values, religion and interests when you can cover WAY more ground by swiping left or right based solely on a bikini photo and some strong eyebrow game?

It would be naïve, therefore, to think that this method of romantically relating wouldn’t filter into out expectations and desires in a relationship. We live in a society that respects and values quantity over quality; we are judged by how MUCH of something we have. Online dating in general and Tinder specifically appeals to this propensity; it makes the quantity of potential relationships exponentially higher. And with this it necessarily makes it near impossible for someone to invest any real time or energy into just one relationship.

Quantity up = quality down. It’s called a CORRELATION people. First year stats whaddup?!

And I know what you’re going to say: “Well that’s stupidly naïve Emma. People on Tinder aren’t interested in dating; it’s a hook-up App and who says a healthy sexual appetite is a bad thing?”

It’s not of course. Have an insatiable appetite for hook-ups you little minxes, and more power to you. I just don’t believe that every user on Tinder is there for the same reasons or with the same zero-expectations. I think many of them are there trying to wade through all the sexual innuendos and terrible examples of humanity in search for an authentic connection.

I have never witnessed a world that makes it more possible and feasible to connect with other people socially and yet is paradoxically making us all antisocial, starving us of quality human interaction.

We are not a generation of need but a generation of want. And with this comes the refusal to wait or fight for anything.

No one seems willing to dedicate the time to actively wooing anymore, or to being wooed. We have all become such easily distracted individuals, constantly drawn to the next shiny object with nice abs and a tight ass.

And, as one would expect, this propensity naturally filters into our face-to-face interactions and our expectations for said romantic meetings. I have a guy friend who takes home a lot of females. I mean, a warrants-his-own-personal-STD-PSA amount. And sure, he’s a good-looking dude with adequate sex appeal, but he’s not particularly suave. His method of picking up amounts to a series of grunts and a reliance on spending his limited amount of energy on a girl with just the right ratio of alcohol consumption to daddy issues.

Ladies, I am all for being a strong independent female who wants to get theirs, truly. Go forth into the night you self-assured, beautiful, toned ladies and give your nether regions a good meal at the 3am buffet! But at least make the guy utter enough full sentences to ensure he is both English speaking and has an IQ above borderline deficiency. Don’t let this weird technological world force you to forget that you are worth some goddamn full sentences!

And don’t mistake this for some feminist rant. Yes I think a woman should demand to be pursued. But similarly, I think men should want to have to fight for her a little. I mean gentleman, do you really want the foundation of your relationship to be a series of vodka-infused six-word conversations that only confirm you two are equipped with the right anatomy to roll around together for an evening?

…. Ugh, I KNOW!… the answer to that question is always a resounding YES.

I really don’t have an issue with online dating or even Tinder. Treat it as entertainment, or as a distraction so you don’t drunk-text your ex, but don’t treat it as a true microcosm of the dating world.

Mostly because in the unfortunate circumstance that I ever find myself single again, I can’t accept that a 5’4” 24-year old accountant intern who offers to slap me with an avocado as his go-to pick-up line is all the dating world has to offer.

And fellas, the next time you get a female’s number, do the unexpected and actually CALL her. Don’t text, don’t Facebook, and definitely don’t send her a direct message on Instagram (I just found out this was a thing).

A phone call. I swear she’ll be so shocked her pants may literally just fall off.

You’re welcome.

E.

Eternal sunshine of the jobless mind

March 22, 2015 By in Humour Tags: , , , 1 Comment
Eternal sunshine of the jobless mind

So here I am, 11 weeks into this little social experiment – this pursuit of the “rad life” as I deemed it on day one.

80 days in and I suppose if I had to really Coles Notes the whole experience, I’d opt for describing it as, “startlingly positive.”

I’ve finally been able to begin this little passion project of a blog of mine, and through doing so, I’ve realized that maybe there is still a little creative energy left swirling somewhere in the deep abyss of my mind. Somewhere, below grocery lists and appointments, hidden under layers of small talk and daily articulations on the weather, there still exists some small part of me that can have a semi-original thought.

That is, as long as I’m not hungover, overly tired or under-caffeinated, the air isn’t too humid or too dry, there’s a crescent moon AND I have uninhibited access to a 90’s slowjam playlist. But give me some Boyz II Men and a latte and the creative juices are a flowin’!

I have also experienced the support of old acquaintances, friends and well-meaning strangers set on letting me know that I am not alone in eternal feelings of discontent. I now know for sure what I have always suspected: that we are a world of hunters and wanderers and that very few of us really have anything figured out.

Sure we like to give the appearance of knowing what we’re doing; we have entire social media outlets dedicated to giving the impression that we are #flawless. Photos and posts and tweets, filtered and edited and carefully timed to tell the outside world, “Hey look at me, I’m on a beach, life is so blissful and easy” or, “Look over here at this new car I just bought, it’s so shiny and exciting, just like my life” and most often, “Check out this nauseatingly cute photo of me and my boyfriend/girlfriend/life partner that makes it look like we never fight and have sex eight times a day.”

Yet dig just a little under the surface, get rid of a little bit of the Valencia sheen and you’re left with a world of beautiful messes, all secretly waiting for someone else to exclaim “Me! Here! Look! I’m a disaster too!”

I’ve received a multitude of messages from other people who feel like their quicksanding through their careers, all with the common theme of, “Thank God I’m not the only one who’s considered hurling themselves down a flight of stairs to avoid going to work.”

On any given day I teeter somewhere between the two worlds. Some days I wake up just reveling in the messiness of it all. There are days I absolutely believe that if tomorrow, someone handed me my perfect career on a silver platter and I was left holding a tray complete with a great relationship AND was financially stable AND had a job I skipped to in the morning, that I would probably just crumble and self-destruct in its perfection.

It’s like the old saying goes: “Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day, teach a man to fish and he’ll eat for life; give a man free-roaming access to all the fish in the world and all he’ll want is a steak.”

We’re not supposed to get everything we want all at once. It’s too easy; too boring. If it’s one thing we can all learn from women’s attraction to bad boys or men’s pursuit of aloof women it’s that we all love a challenge; if it comes to easily it’s probably not worth it and we probably won’t fight to keep it.

But then there’s days, waking up after a long night shift working in a bar, puffy-eyed and horse-voiced from 10-hours of small talk, that the idea of normalcy seems fairly ideal. At 30, my body isn’t cut out for walking on concrete floors in heels anymore. I don’t have the same patience for people I once did, and expending all my energy outward to strangers on a daily basis has meant I have had less energy to expend on the people in my life that actually matter.

In the last couple of weeks, the overall throbbing in my knees has left me leaning once again toward life outside the restaurant industry.

So although I haven’t written a blog entry in over three weeks, I have been writing. I’ve been writing all kinds: Cover letters and making minute edits to my resume in hopes of tailoring it to the specifications of a particular job. I’ve been spending entire afternoons trying to work “key words” into job applications in hopes of tricking the computer program that is filtering out resumes before actual humans even see them.

And I will tell you one thing: Job-hunting has to be one of life’s most horribly disenchanting experiences.

I loathe it.

I believe LinkedIn was a website created by soulless robots with the goal of making you seem horribly inadequate in all facets of life.

Job requirements in postings are akin to the dating profile of a high-maintenance girl with unrealistic expectations. The girl who wants a neurosurgeon with a 6-pack who can play guitar, who owns a Maserati and nurses abandoned three-legged kittens back to health between brain surgeries.

All job listings read like this to me: Oh for that entry level associate job you want 10-years prior experience, a Masters in sign-language, the ability to type 120 words per minute while in a handstand position, a proficiency in horse-whispering and an in-depth knowledge of the sport of cricket? No problem!

You’d like me to work 14 hour days fueled on a single banana, read Good Night Moon to clients in a David Attenborough accent, breathe my soul into a mason jar and store it on my desk every day, and give you my first born child to use as adorable office décor? Of course! Oh and you’d like me to do all that AND only pay me $45,000 a year? Why wouldn’t I? Who needs basic human sustenance like clothing and shelter? I’m just happy to be part of the team!

It looks like my uncanny road trip playlist-making abilities and unlimited supply of sarcastic zingers aren’t going to get me as far in life as I would have liked.

Listen, if we’re applying for a job in anything but computer programming, we’re all going to claim to have excellent communication skills and a completely made-up proficiency in Excel. Having worked in the 9 – 5 job market for a couple of years, these are not the things that get you through the daily trials and tribulations of office life. You can Google how to use Excel but you can’t Google how to survive spending eight hours a day shoved into a room with people who may rank close to zero on the likability scale. Is there a class somewhere on how to hold your tongue when every neuron in your body is itching to tell your boss he’s full of shit? Because THAT my friends, is an actual skill.

So if I had the opportunity to write my resume filled in with the qualities of mine I think are ACTUALLY important to career maintenance, it would look like this:

SUMMARY OF QUALIFICATIONS

  • Proficient in media monitoring; can provide a detailed daily summary of all recently posted BuzzFeed articles and most hilarious video clips.
  • Up-to-date knowledge of important current events including in-depth expertise on recent male celebrity beards and female celebrities in bikinis.
  • A highly motivated self-starter provided there is an unlimited supply of caffeinated beverages within a 5-minute walk of the office.
  • On a related note, will literally lick the face of anyone who brings me coffee in the morning, i.e. skilled at cultivating relationships with other staff members.
  • Excellent aptitude for elevator small talk.
  • Ability to stay neutral in all office-related relationship drama; has in the past been referred to as the “Switzerland” of the office environment.
  • Talented at getting the perfect amount of tipsy at work-related functions; has never been referred to as “THAT girl.”
  • Gifted at making grammar and punctuation my bitch on a regular basis.
  • Places great importance on elevating the self-esteem of my work colleagues. My horse-like laugh often accompanied by snorting makes those around me feel better for not sharing these qualities.
  • Has a very genuine looking fake smile and therefore capable of making even the most antagonistic and sociopathic clients feel liked and appreciated.
  • Multi-tasker who can simultaneously read, write, and pretend to care about your child’s birthday party/baby’s first tooth/that dog wedding you attended over the weekend
  • Excellent writing skills; highly gifted at responding to texts from your potential dates/boyfriends/girlfriends when you are stuck for ideas or in serious trouble.
  • A team player that places great value on the happiness of others; can offer many pieces of poignant advice to staff that are unknowingly just quotes of Taylor Swift lyrics (e.g. “Shake it off”; “Don’t be afraid, we’ll make it out of this mess”; “I’ve found that time can heal most anything. And you just might just who you’re supposed to be.”)
  • A superior sense of direction. You want a midday burrito? I definitely do too and know where to find the closest one.

Point is, a lot of the most talented, humorous, enjoyable people I know aren’t the ones that look that necessarily look that great on paper. It’s hard to slip in pieces of your personality between your experiences with Photoshop and how much you love spreadsheets.

Sending your resume out over LinkedIn or on a third-party job posting site often feels like throwing the garbage down my condo’s chute. Who sees it? Did I even throw it down the right chute? Does anyone REALLY know where it’s going? I picture the receiving end just being some R2-D2 type robot that scans my resume and then lights it on fire for overuse of semicolons or not employing the proper subset of Helvetica.

I learned about a month into my last job that whole, “It’s not what you know it’s who you know” isn’t just some toss away proverb; it’s how this city functions.

So on that note, if you know someone, let’s get them trapped in an elevator with just me, a Tassimo machine and a copy of Good Night Moon and get this girl a career!

Hunt on my little messed-up wanderers.

E.

Love Apptually: A Tinderella Story

February 24, 2015 By in Humour Tags: , , , , , , 1 Comment
Love Apptually: A Tinderella Story

Once upon a time in a land far far away, sat a princess in her castle, carefully setting up the timer app on her iPhone camera. Once considered the fairest in all the land, long ago a fairy, fed up with the princess’ new-age vanity, cursed her with the inability to take a good selfie.

Banished to the land of poor lighting and double chin angles, only by finding true love (despite many an #instagramfail) could the curse be broken.

And so she sat, in the highest tower, of the tallest castle, on the largest hill in all the land, methodically swiping right on Tinder, hoping and wishing that her Prince Charming would see through her crossed eyes and duck face, and that he too, would swipe right….

…Ok, so a little dramatic sure, but tell me that isn’t a little bit more relatable than leaving behind a glass slipper or having to let down your long golden hair?

Dating in 2015 is a strange little monster isn’t it? In my last post I covered how I think the dating scene changes as you move from your 20s to 30s. But regardless of age, technology has entirely changed the way in which we find, forge and maintain relationships.

For obvious reasons I’m not on Tinder myself, nor have I ever been; I imagine my relationship would be a little less stable if I were constantly on my phone perusing half-naked bathroom mirror selfies of bachelors within a 2km radius of me.

Ok, part of that was a lie.

I was on Tinder once.

For 20 minutes.

And it scarred me emotionally.

It was two years ago, when Tinder was but a wee babe fresh out of the Silicon Valley womb. It was one of those, “let’s go out for one drink” kind-of evenings with a girlfriend that had quickly morphed into 3 hours and 2.5 bottles of wine.

Following numerous in-depth conversations on world news, Canadian politics and the state of Syria, our conversation pivoted to men.

Translation: we had been talking about men since glass one.

After a lengthy summary of her most recent escapades and a synopsis of my at-the-time battle with deciding whether to opt for monogamy or singlehood, she starts telling me about this hilarious new dating application that is, in her words, “Essentially a combination of Hot or Not, but with a location based component.”

I mean, how could I not be curious enough to check it out?

So I download Tinder, and her and I sat beside each other shadowing each others right and left swipes, until we ended up in a conversation with the same two guys, laughing as they fed us both the exact same cheesy pick-up lines.

For those who don’t know, part of the joy of Tinder is depending on how close a location parameter you set, you know if who you’re talking to is within a 10km radius of you, a 5km, a 2km, etc. It took about 6 minutes for both guys to begin vying for an in-person meet and greet with both of us, having no idea we knew each other.

That was about the time that the red wine buzz started to wear off, I became acutely aware that I was speaking to real humans somewhere within a 2km radius of me, both of whom I had mutual friends with on Facebook. I immediately deleted the application, curiosity satisfied and only mildly creeped out by the entire system.

Fast forward a mere TWO DAYS after said interaction, and I am with one of my best guy friends, watching a concert at the Rivoli. I turn and look at the door, and Tinder Guy #1 walks through…

…Followed directly by Tinder Guy #2.

Let me repeat, the only two people I have ever spoken to on Tinder, walk into the incredibly small, packed bar TOGETHER.

Now, despite only having had engaged in a 10-minute discourse with both of them, and having none of these messages include even the mildest undertones of the sexting or inappropriateness, I FREAKED OUT.

Looking back, I assume anyone who saw my next movements must have assumed I had lost complete control of my limbs, or was suffering an epileptic seizure.

Upon seeing both these men, I hurled my entire body down under the crowd, and crouched on the floor with my hands over my head mumbling various obscenities and threats to God.

My friend, standing beside me, was of course generally confused by my insane person behavior. I barely had time to hear him say, “What the balls are you doing?” because I was too busy forward crab walking, still below the crowd, to the bar’s washroom.

There I sat alone in a stall for 10 minutes, texting the friend who introduced me to Tinder various overly dramatic rants about how I will never EVER drink red wine again, how I plan on lighting my phone on fire and how I can now understand the plight of people who live in war-torn countries because isn’t this basically the same thing?

Her supportive reaction of course, “This is the best story ever, I want to marry your current situation and have its babies” and an equally supportive, “Well good luck, let me know how it works out. I remember the brunette being hotter if that helps.”

Some would call my frantic ground crawl and bathroom stall stay an irrational overreaction; others would call it a ridiculously irrational overreaction.

In retrospect, of course I realize it all sounds very illogical and over-the-top; like someone caught me white girl dancing to Alanis Morissette so I threw myself in front of a car. But as I said, I grew up in this city. My world already feels so exponentially small and I do everything I can to not to make it feel smaller.

And this made it so small I felt like I was wearing a parka in a phone booth.

I felt like I had just rolled over first thing in the morning, faced not with just one but two bad decisions from the night before lying beside me, and I wanted to chew my arm off rather than wake the beasts.

In short, Tinder made me feel like I had been part of a threesome gone wrong and I was traumatized.

Let’s also remember that Tinder was still so new at this point. There was no cushion of, “Well everyone’s doing it.” Walking back through that crowd, forced to make eye contact with my two Tinder BFs, I could only assume they were thinking, “Oh, how nice of her to leave the comfort of her home, her collection of stamps and 42 cats to come out for an evening.”

It didn’t matter that to know I was on Tinder they had to also be on Tinder. My brain at the time was not processing basic reason and deduction.

In short, I am chalk full of vanity and was just hugely embarrassed.

As it turns out, I think way too highly of myself, or the memorability of said 20-minute interaction because when I walked through the crowd- in what I imagined to be slow motion- the theme song to The Walking Dead playing on loop in my brain, they looked up, took me in, paused for about three-tenths of a second, and then turned back to each other and continued their conversation with ZERO semblance of recognition.

That’s right… I was the member of the threesome that no one even remembered being in the room.

It looks like they weren’t on Tinder some good banter and solid use of puns. Colour me shocked.

And although I was momentarily so outraged at my text game not making a lasting impact that I thought about walking up, licking both their faces and saying “How’s THAT for a right swipe?!” I realized the value of anonymity was too good and rare to pass up.

APOCALYPSE AVOIDED.

I know this is a relatively PG story. I’m sure reading the title you thought you were going to get a way more risqué tale, like, I don’t know, an actual threesome.

But I never really got to delve into the full gamut of what I hear Tinder has to offer. No one has ever offered to drink my bath water, told me about the toy hat that fits on his penis, or inquired about my desire to have them sit on my face. I’ve never gone on a Tinder “date” at 3am or had to stumble across the profiles of all of my exes on a particularly lonely night at home.

But for one brief moment in time, I got to be Tinderella in a not-so-Prince Charming sandwich.

To those still fighting the good fight, swiping right in the hopes of finding someone you’d gladly have sit on your face, I wish you a most sincere Appily Ever After.

The End

E.