Category Archives: Pop Cult-ure

Reality TV, or Signs of the Apocalypse

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I frequently think that nothing is more indicative to the downfall of society as reality television.  I’m always, always startled to think that these shows are being watched by someone.  For example, it has come to my attention that there is a new show coming out featuring people who, among other things, like to eat toilet paper and taste dish soap.  Really.  Wasn’t the concept of putting people in a house together to fight and hot tub and copulate and compete for a spouse who would never actually turn out to be a spouse bad enough?  Now there are shows about people with dramatically peculiar eating habits?  This is the reason I like Jeopardy.  Virtually everything else on television is a scary indictor of the apocalypse.  Plus I like to fantasize that I’m actually on Jeopardy.  I like to think about what I would wear if I was a contestant (probably a black sweater).  I like to imagine myself saying “I’m going to make this a true Daily Double, Alex.”  Alas, I would probably never win at Jeopardy given my poor knowledge of US history and presidents. 
Another indication that the four horses are going to come riding in at any minute is the proliferation of drivel-like magazines lining the checkout counter at Wal-Mart.  Yesterday the kids were back at school and so I dropped them off to go pick up light bulbs, Kleenex, and dish soap (that I am not tempted to taste in the least.  Who are these people, anyway?).  Hilariously, I ran into several other moms who were shopping for similar items, proving once again that we stay-at-home moms are a glamourous people, we who upon shaking off the shackles of child care immediately head towards the allure of the roll-back.  In the lineup, I saw the following headlines: 1) Someone named Heidi is having more plastic surgery, 2) Dr. Oz has a “#1 Fat Cure”, and 3) No matter what they say, Oprah and Gayle are totally lesbians.  My reaction?  1) Who is this Heidi?, 2) “Fat CURE”?  Does the word “cure” seem strange to anyone else?  3) Why is it relevant in any way to anyone if Oprah and Gayle are, in fact, lovers?  WHO CARES? 
So I stood there in line feeling like my brain cells were rapidly disintegrating, a feeling that seemed to be confirmed soon after when I smiled to myself at the abandoned items that were grouped together at the next till.  Really, one should not laugh, but I found myself laughing on the inside at the still-life grouping of a Heavy Duty Rubber Sheet, a box of Extra-Large Depends, and a gigantic container of Sour Patch Kids. 
Maybe I need my own reality show.  Real Housewives of Calgary Who Like Jeopardy and Laugh at Stupid Things at Wal-Mart.

I WIN!

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I have been having a very stressful and emotional week, and that was even before it became apparent that my stressful and emotional week was exacerbated by the fact that it was coinciding with my monthly stressful and emotional week.  You can imagine the tears and chocolate eating that have been going on around here.  And this is where I make a public service announcement: if you decide to stock up on the new Peppermint Lindor with the intention of passing them out to people in a Santa-like and also join-my-cult-like way, and that stocking up coincides with an emotional and stressful week, you can be assured that you will not pass along any of those Peppermint Lindors but instead you will attempt to consume them all yourself until you resemble Santa in a physical, rather than a metaphorical way. 

That’s how my week was going, so you can imagine my excitement when Kimberly from Make Mommy Go Something Something gave me this:

It’s an award!!  I’ve never received a blog award before!  I feel IRRESISTABLE!  Thanks Kimberly!

It’s Friday, and I’m all T to the G.I.Friday.  I need some laughs, so I stole the idea of “Funny Friday” from my friend Allison over at Bibliomama.  Hey, Allison, you’re irresistable too!  I’m passing that award along to you.

I wish I had the kind of witty, dry, British humour that people tend to associate with intelligence and higher breeding, but unfortunately for me I am Scottish-Norweigan and my sense of humour tends to the low-brow or gutter variety.  Which is to say, this is one of my all-time favourite movie scenes.  That whole movie is filled with many enjoyable moments and lines, such as “We’re going streaking!  Bring your green hat, let’s go!” or “Denver!  The Sunshine State.”  Last weekend I watched You Don’t Mess With The Zohan and, while it wasn’t as funny as one might think a movie about an Israeli commando-turned-hairdresser might be, it did have some good visuals, such as the scene where he goes clubbing wearing cut-off shorts and a silky shirt.  I tried to find that picture but all I found was this:

photo from RottenTomatoes.com

If you have a dog, you may really appreciate this post on moving with two less-than-gifted dogs.  I really could identify with the dog who magically made his own food.  Good times. 

So, if you share my kind of humour, enjoy those links and have a good laugh this Friday! 

I Don’t Have Bieber Fever

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This week saw the culmination of all my book fair coordination efforts.  I have been living and breathing the book fair.  My life has been consumed by the book fair.  I was even, unbelievably, dreaming about the book fair.  Now the book fair is over and I feel empty inside.
Actually I just feel exhausted.  I’m used to my life of leisure, and this week took a surprising amount of effort.  I would like to give a shout-out to working mothers everywhere, because this simple week of volunteer work left me exhausted and overwhelmed by such things as the laundry and making dinner. 
Nonetheless I very much enjoyed it, not the least because I feel like a minor celebrity, known around the school as “The Book Fair Lady”, as opposed to my previous title of “Mark/Jake’s Mom”.  When I walk down the hall I get students excitedly waving to me and bombarding me with questions about the availability or otherwise of the latest Diary of a Wimpy Kid, and if we have any of those UV Light Pens left.  Those crappy pens became the bane of my existence.  Kids kept coming back with defective pens and buyer’s remorse.  
Adding to my feeling of general fatigue is the fact that it is bitterly cold and snowing, and getting the boys to get their gigantic layers of snow pants, winter coats, hats, neck warmers, mittens and boots on in a semi-timely fashion and getting out the door several times a day is tiring.  My kids come home for their fifty-five minute lunch hour, and the scramble to get them home, fed, and back is seriously trying what is left of my sanity.  Given that Mark takes a solid ten minutes to actually get out of his classroom with his many, many layers on, by the time we get home and peel off the layers they have approximately ten minutes to eat before starting the whole process over again.  It’s enough to make me eye the bottle of wine on the counter longingly.  (NOTE: I only eye the bottle.  I am a very responsible, non-drinking-before-bedtime kind of mother.  Don’t want to give the wrong impression here.)
Speaking of trying my sanity, the book fair was stocked with piles of books about Justin Bieber, posters of Justin Bieber, and even stickers proclaiming “I have Bieber Fever” and “I am Justin Bieber’s Favourite Girl”.  Frankly, I don’t get the appeal.  When I was the age of the girls who were excitedly pawing through the various Bieber merchandise, my pretend boyfriend was this guy:
I can still rock out to his music.  Justin Bieber, on the other hand…
I don’t like to be negative, but seriously?  What is with his HAIR?  Hoo boy, I just realized that made me sound like my father.  It’s not enough that I’ve inherited his prematurely grey hair, now I’m critiquing tween pop culture?  Sigh.

Talk me down, baby.

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So it seems like a LOT of us like the Canadian boys! This is a point of national pride! Thanks for all the comments, I absolutely loved them. They reminded me of the many, many crushes I had in my long-vanquished youth: Judd Nelson, Michael Hutchence, Mark Wahlberg, Han Solo. Check, check, check, CHECK. Speaking of Michael Hutchence, in my days as an INXS fan, I would listen to Need You Tonight incessantly, and my mother was always completely repelled by it. “For God’s sake, Nicole,” she would say as I would rewind the cassette in the car, “What kind of PERSON says ‘You make me sweat’? That’s disgusting.” “Oh MOTHER” I would reply impatiently, “You just don’t GET IT.” This I would say while tightly rolling up my acid washed jeans and tossing my spiral permed hair, just to solidify my position as a sophisticated woman of the world.

So how was your weekend? Please tell me you did something exciting, because this was the highlight of mine: getting the carpets cleaned. Last week I was in despair about our filthy and disgusting carpet, and I just could not live another minute with our filthy and disgusting carpet, and so the carpet cleaner came and our carpet does not look significantly different, leaving me to the disheartening conclusion that our carpet’s life is at its end. We have lived in this house for ten years and have done many, many renovations. When we purchased this house it had a) a main floor that had been painted Pepto Bismol pink, which clashed jarringly with the rust coloured rock fireplace, b) trim and doors that had been painted a shiny, dark forest green, c) a kitchen with five different patterns of wallpaper and homemade cupboards that were constantly getting stuck and jammed, and d) a bathroom with dark brown fixtures. Classy! So we have done a lot of renovations, and now it looks like we are going to get rid of our carpet altogether and I am NOT looking forward to the upheaval. I become horribly crabby when the house is in more chaos than usual. I’m tense just thinking about it. I AM looking forward to not having filthy, disgusting carpet, however, so I’m trying to look at the big picture, rather than the (hopefully) 48 hour picture.

The filthy, disgusting carpet is not being helped by the fact that it’s raining and cold, again, and the dog is lending a lovely wet-dog aroma to the house in addition to his wet paw prints. Last January, when I was feeling particularly down, I came up with the brilliant idea to paint our living room blue! And the kitchen orange! Such happy colours, no one could be sad with a blue and orange house! My husband was fairly silent on the subject, cognizant of my distaste for chaos and confident that I would eventually come to the conclusion that I would rather live with taupe and butter yellow than tape up the cupboards, cover all the furniture, wash the walls, and paint. He was right. But with all the rain right now I’m starting to feel like blue might not be such a bad idea…no. NO. Someone talk me down off my rainy weather ledge, please, before I do something drastic. Like paint my kitchen orange.

Hey, did you hear Michael Jackson died?

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I know. Shocking isn’t it?

Kidding, of course, I’m not THAT out of touch – you’re out of touch, I’m out of time, but I’m out of my head when you’re not around – but I do find it very difficult to relate to people I saw interviewed on the anniversary of his death, whenever that was. I saw tearful people confessing that they had a hard time accepting it, that they had to move on but sometimes it’s just hard to get out of bed, and I thought, really? I just cannot relate to that at all. I mean, perhaps if someone very close to me had died, but Michael Jackson? I mean, I like to car dance to Billie Jean as much as the next person, but I cannot really say that celebrity deaths affect me in a particularly emotional way. Or any way, really. Usually, when I hear a celebrity died I either immediately assume it’s due to a drug overdose, or I am confused because I thought that person already passed away (i.e., my thoughts on Dennis Hopper’s death).

However, MJ’s death (can I call him MJ? I’m not even really a fan) did mean that there is one less celebrity alive who I actually recognize. I was at the hair salon today, getting my inch of grey roots covered (“The hair is actually white, not grey” my stylist informed me) and of course I read that hair salon staple, People magazine. I would guess that at least ninety percent of the people in People are, at best, vaguely recognized by me. The other ten percent comprise people I recognize, but somewhat wish I didn’t, i.e. Mel Gibson. How’s THAT for a nutjob? I heard the transcript from one of his infamous phone calls on the news and I could barely understand it, so bleeped out was the conversation. It was like watching an episode of Hell’s Kitchen, the bleeps so numerous I actually was not able to get the gist of the conversation, such as it was, except that it rated pretty high in the crazy and angry category.

Speaking of celebrities: apparently there’s a baseball player named Corey Hart? When I saw that, at first I was confused: are people listening to Corey Hart again? Perhaps I should look out my Boy in the Box record. Ah, but it’s someone else. Not the Corey Hart whose glossy face lined my rosebud papered bedroom in the eighties. Canadian girls who were teenagers in the eighties: I just heard that Corey Hart married Mitsou! Remember her? I thought he was supposed to marry me. Along with Corey, I also had well-within-wedlock fantasies about Tom Hooper from the Grapes of Wrath and, just to round out the musical Canadiana, Jim Cuddy!

Alert! Gratuitous photo of me and Jim Cuddy, twenty years after crush was first established.


If you are thinking that you’ve seen this photo before and that maybe I should give it a rest: join the club founded and chaired by my husband.

Another crush of my youth, strangely enough, was the long-dead Jim Morrison. Remember Denis Leary’s bit about the Doors movie? “I’m drunk, I’m nobody, I’m drunk, I’m famous, I’m drunk, I’m f***ing dead. Big fat dead guy in the bathtub, there’s your title.” Thank goodness I got over my thing for troubled, alcoholic, tortured artists, in order to marry my non-alcoholic, non-tortured, although long-suffering husband. It’s MAGICAL being married to me!

So here’s the question for you: who did you have a crush on in your youth? Do you still find said crushes attractive?

DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, or What I Did On My Summer Vacations

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So the other shoe dropped.

The weather suddenly turned, the sky grey and the wind chilly, and I felt like perhaps this was my own doing; like I had expressed passionate emotions to an indifferent date; I was like “Let’s spend our lives together, I love you, baby” and the weather really just wanted to be friends, saying, “You’re a nice girl and all, but I’m not really ready for commitment right now.”

Then the kids. Holy smokes, the kids. By Friday I was vacillating between thinking that I was possibly the Worst Mother Ever or, alternately, that I had given birth to the Worst Children Ever. Looking back on it, I am pretty sure that it was not them, it was me. We were all having an off day but hoo boy! I was bitchy. I was bitchy and completely despondent and overwhelmed about things that are not really overwhelming or despondency-inducing. Like folding laundry. Or packing for our overnight trip to my parents’ cottage. Packing a small amount of clothes and toiletries – for one night! – was pushing me over the edge. I was also slightly enraged that I Am Always The Person Who Packs, this rage despite the fact that I would never, never allow my husband to pack anything other than his own personal effects.

Fortunately Saturday found me in a non-bitchy state of mind and we had a very fun time at my parents’ cottage. THIS is my idea of camping: plumbing, hot showers, and a kitchen, with a fridge full of delicious things and also coolers. Their cottage is very close to the Lutheran Bible camp I went to as a child, and you can hear the bells ringing, calling the children to meals, chapel, and vespers. The bells, along with the cool weather and the late-night sunsets, really take me back to those days of lanyards and campfires and swimming in the icy cold lake. One year I memorized the lyrics to Parents Just Don’t Understand at that camp; I still get it stuck in my head when I hear someone say “Here’s the situation.” (“My parents went away on a week’s vacation and they left the keys to their brand new Porsche! Would they mind? Mmm. Well. Of course not.”)

Speaking of pop culture from when I was thirteen, I read today that Darryl Hannah had turned down the role of Vivian in Pretty Woman because she thought the movie was “degrading for the whole of womankind. They sold it as a romantic fairytale when in fact it’s a story about a prostitute who becomes a lady by being kept by a rich and powerful man.” And here come some words I never thought I would say: Darryl Hannah, you’re my hero. That is EXACTLY how I have always felt about that movie. Even at thirteen, I found that movie offensive and terrible. I could go on and on how Pretty Woman epitomizes everything that is wrong with society, but I will spare you the diatribe, as I’m still fairly relaxed from my night away, despite the fact that I Am Always The Person Who Unpacks. But that’s a whole other story.

Randomness: Jeopardy, Miss USA, and Brahmin Widowhood

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During the season, my husband golfs. A lot. Frequently he golfs in the evening, and I take advantage of such time by indulging in such activities as watching seasons 1-4 NYPD Blue on DVD, or Jeopardy, during which I tersely and quickly phrase answers in the form of questions, out loud, naturally. Secretly I prefer Celebrity Jeopardy so I can run the categories and also berate the celebrities for answering Montreal instead of Vancouver, or some such transgression. The past few days, however, have showcased the Tournament of Champions with the corresponding very difficult questions. One of the contestants going into the final is a video game tester and I feel that there is so much to be said about video game tester as a career choice, but I don’t know where to start so I shall leave my commentary unsaid.

Doesn’t it sound like it would be awesome to live with me? Put the kids to bed, crack open a bottle of wine, and watch Jeopardy with intense scrutiny and seriousness, only to fall asleep at 9:00. I’m a barrel of fun! I was chatting with a group of fellow early morning yogis, and my lovely, lovely teacher was telling a story, the punchline of which was “Well, it would be better than phoning at 9:00 and waking everyone up” to which we all nodded gravely. 9:00! It’s like the middle of the night! My people! I love you all, you crazy early birds.

But Sunday evening my husband was golfing, and sadly, Sunday evenings are Jeopardy-free, so I curled up on the couch with the excellent book about life for a Brahmin woman in turn-of-the-century India, “Toss of a Lemon”. Just as I reached the part about her attaining widowhood at age eighteen, after eight years of marriage, and her subsequent head shaving and state of purity that dictated she be out of public view and essentially untouchable during daylight hours, I reached for my glass of wine and noticed what was on television: the Miss USA pageant. I looked from my book to the TV and back again, somewhat taken aback by the contrast.

I am secretly a bit fascinated with beauty pageants. The Miss USA pageant, in particular, is absolutely mesmerizing. For one thing, the contestants all wear the same clothes for much of the pageant, and despite variations in hair and skin colour, they all look disconcertingly the same. They could be essentially split up into two physical categories: those who have had breast implants, and those who have not.

What I really like about the pageants are the shots of the girls all hanging out and doing various activities all together. “They went shopping at Vegas’ newest hotel!”, “Then they cooled off in the pool!”, “They had a sweet time at the cupcake shop” (although I would have liked to see some of them eating those cupcakes, I very much doubt if any did). I always imagine these to be a total cat-fest, but a veiled one, because no one wants to be TOO bitchy, but damn, that Miss Maine had some bad split ends. Although that may be unfair of me to say that, since the only pageant contestant I have ever known personally was a former colleague’s wife, who was runner-up to Miss Nebraska. This woman, in addition to being stunningly, All-Americanly beautiful, was also one of the sweetest, most generous people I have known. In the end, the woman who won was an MBA with a concentration in economics! My people! Kind of.