Sex and the City and refried beans

I remember five years ago when my best friend popped by my apartment for a visit.
I’ve always been messy – (but it’s an organized mess) and I never know where anything is (I would, my husband and my mother tell me, if I’d just put things back in their proper place) - but I’d sunk to a new low.
I’d become a prisoner on my own couch. In a semicircle surrounding me were 10, 15, maybe 20 cans of opened refried beans with a fork stuck in them. Yes, I’d been eating the beans out of the cans. I’d washed the beans back with a case or two of Diet Coke. I’d eaten myself into a corner.
“Oh, Sarah,” my friend said, surprised, shocked, saddened at what my life had become.
A few weeks earlier, my live-in boyfriend had left our “love nest” and me. About half a day later he had a new girlfriend. The one-two punch gutted me. The days that followed were about survival. Wake up. Shower. Go to work. Come home from work. Cry. Eat dinner. (The only thing I could eat that didn’t make me throw up was refried beans and Diet Coke.) Cry. Go to sleep.
My friend lovingly scolded me and told me it was time to pick myself up and get outside and do something.
“Yes!” I told her.
“I’m going to go do something!”
After she left my home, I had an epiphany: I had nowhere to go and nothing to do.
I lost myself in that relationship. I did what too many girls do: I made myself all about my relationship and I’d become one-dimensional.
I did really need something to do – but what? When I wasn’t working, I’d been a girlfriend and now that I wasn’t a girlfriend, I had nothing to do when I wasn’t working.
I stood on my apartment balcony and looked out at Kingston. The sky was licorice black that night and the stars were sparkling. And in that night sky, I saw it. I saw a sign. It was a sign from the heavens.
OK, it was actually a sign from Blockbuster.
I lived just a few steps from the downtown video store on Queen Street. It was there I found something to pick myself up. It was there I found four new friends. It was there I found Sex and the City on DVD.
I didn’t get HBO so I’d only seen bits and pieces of the cable show when I was visiting my parents’ house but every time I turned it on there, one of the show’s star’s breasts were on display and I didn’t want my parents to think I was into porn, so I always quickly turned the show off.
Here, in the comfort of my own pigsty, I could watch the sordid adventures/affairs of Carrie, Miranda, Samantha and Charlotte without feeling guilty. In fact, I could watch the episodes over and over and over again.
Soon, my routine changed. For the better. Wake up. Shower. Go to work. Come home from work. Watch Sex and the City. Eat dinner. (I started buying my dinners at Blockbuster when I picked up the DVDs – convenient or what? – so I was now on to nacho chips and the bright orange plastic cheese nacho cheese dip and Diet Coke.) Watch Sex and the City. Go to sleep.
Truly, I credit the show for pulling me out of my slump.
These four friends did cool things: Charlotte hung out in art galleries. Miranda ran a marathon. Samantha did yoga. Carrie wrote newspaper columns – for a living.
Like millions of women, I’m dying to reunite with my girls now that Sex and the City: The Movie is in theatres.
Carrie and company always celebrated with Cosmopolitans.
I’ll have a Diet Coke and maybe some nachos.
For old times’ sake.

(This column appeared in the May 31 edition of The Ticket, inside The Kingston Whig-Standard)

And here is the rest of it.

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See the little turds all floating around Pt. 2 (aka, poo in the sink)

To understand this moment of sheer barfiness, one must first read 'See the little turds all floating around' below. Then you may read on to enjoy this moment of groddy-ness.

So, last night, The Husband is in our den, which is on the main floor of our house. I'm upstairs, cleaning up, when all of a sudden, I start to shriek: "Oh my god! Oh my god! Oh my god!"

"What's wrong?" he screams up at me.

"There's poo in the bathroom sink!" I cry inbetween gags.

I can hear him bounding downstairs into the laundry room. He assumes that we've had another backup and the feces have backed up so far that now they're exploding up through our sinks.

But that's not actually what happened.

I had picked up a dirty diaper from my son's room.

When I tossed it (a little too hard, a little too fast) into the garbage can in the bathroom, a pancake-shaped doo-doo slipped out of the diaper and landed in the sink.

Bleh!

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'See the little turds all floating around'

Saturday morning of the long weekend, and I am standing in my laundry room with my new best friend Justin. Justin, you see, is the man who was supposed to make all my problems disappear.
What Justin has to say is serious business. I watch as my husband and Justin talk, each nodding their head knowingly about the situation at hand and what we have to do to fix it. I shake my head knowingly, too, pretending to be interested in the conversation. But truth be told, I’m daydreaming about a Girl Guide camp I went to when I was 12 years old. It was there, in our tent, late at night, that I learned something dirty, something so disgusting my mother banned me from repeating it in our house for many years. But here, in my own laundry room, the song danced around my head, like the doo doos that were bobbing up and down on my laundry room floor in a flood of black water.
“Sam. Sam. The laboratory man. Chief inspector of the outhouse can. Toilet paper, toilet paper, paper towels, listen to the rumble of the human bowels.
“Deep down, under the ground, see the little turds all floating around. Sam. Sam. The laboratory man. Scooping up the poopies with his bare, bare hands. Yah!”
Our home, it seems, was experiencing a main line backup. When Justin The Plumber first got to our house that morning, he thought our problem was a minor blockage in the sewer pipe. An hour later, the situation has been upgraded to what my two-year-old son would call an “uh-oh.”
Justin feeds a black-and-white camera down our main line through our “cleanout,” which looks like a portal to another world (it’s really just a hole in our floor) to see what is causing the problem.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” he says, as he stares at what looked like blobs to me.
(Apparently sometimes you can see rats crawling toward you, so I’m happy I see only blobs.)
As he feeds the camera through our line, he points out one, two, three, four massive tree roots that have grown into our line. The roots, he says, are acting as barriers, so things – food, toilet paper, other non-mentionables that go down the toilet – can’t pass.
“Man, really, I’ve never seen anything like this. Your line also looks deformed!”
Really, truly, I’m so glad my pipes are so screwed up we could be a training academy for apprenticing plumbers, but it has to be pointed out that the, ahem, Number 2s are still doing the backstroke around my laundry room floor.
Now, this is really awful, but I truly want to go up to Justin and gently explain that those little swimmers aren’t mine. I don’t know whose they are – maybe a neighbour’s? a sewer rat’s? – but they aren’t mine.
After much discussion about how we were going to solve this stinky situation, Justin The Plumber recommends he doesn’t clean our main line. He’d pushed through a blockage that was causing the problem but he says our pipe is too fragile and too deformed to be cleaned and the whole thing could crumble – which would cause more of a backup. His advice is to get the whole pipe, tree roots and all, dug out and replaced.
Then Justin The Plumber says something I’ll never forget: “I hate to give good people bad news, but these things can run as high as $8,000, $10,000.”
I think back to my laundry room floor.
Maybe I’ll take a gamble. I did, after all, get hitched in Vegas last year.
“How long will our pipe last if we don’t fix it?” I ask.
Justin The Plumber says our pipe may last a few months.
Or, our very next flush could be our last.
So, what he was saying is: It’s a crapshoot.

[This column appeared today in the Ticket, the magazine I edit that appears every Saturday inside the Kingston Whig-Standard, my day job. Starting this week, I'll post my Whig column here regularly.]

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That's My Boy

So, I'm a full dancing addict.
When I was five years old, I took tap and jazz lessons at a little studio. (I remember being so young that I couldn't figure out why our dance teacher didn't look like all us little girls – but realized that if I sucked in my tummy really hard, I, too, could have boobies. It was actually my rib cage sticking out, but at five, I thought I'd given myself a chest. Anyway.)
One year later, doctors discovered that I had a benign tumour in my knee. But the countless doctor visits/diagnosis/operation at Sick Kids in Toronto/recuperation time totally killed my dream of dancing for a good year. By the time I got back into it, I'd missed a couple of years and all of a sudden there were competitive dancers in my grade and me. I just wanted to dance. I didn't want to take a ballet class, a tap class and a jazz class. I just wanted to do jazz. (Jazz hands!) But the place I went did something awful to me: They made a "competitive" class and a regular class for everyone else, which had people 12 to 60 years old in it. I hated dancing with the old farts and I quit soon after. One of the biggest mistakes in my life; I just didn't have the sophistication/understanding/maturity to suggest to my parents that I go somewhere else to dance or take a different class.
Every time there was a high school dance, I'd beg my friends to go. I never cared if I looked silly, I just wanted to dance.
I remember in university, on the stage at AJs, dancing to Grease. Coming through the crowd at me was my uni crush, Scott. I looked at my roommate, grabbed her hand, stared in the face and ordered: "Dance! Dance like you've never danced before!!!"
We never hooked up but we did dance a few times together and had a slow dance together at our graduating prom.
I don't have a lot of time to dance now, but I still love it. (My only regret about my December wedding is that we didn't dance. There were 11 of us in Las Vegas, so not enough to have our own party and the Hubbie and I were too exhausted/overwhelmed/silly to go on a hunt in the city for an appropriate club.)
Now, I get on my dance thang two ways: My son, who's almost two, and I have dance parties in our kitchen. I also watch dance TV - Dancing With the Stars, and So You Think You Can Dance.
It would horrify most men, but I've taught my son to point his toe and tap it to the music.
But best of all, the other night, Dancing With the Stars came on, and just as Cheryl Burke and Christian de la Fuente were about to dance, my son tugged on arm and said, "Momma! Momma! I das. I das!"
Maybe in a decade or so, he'll be able to show me how to booty shake. It's my goal in life right now.
Seriously.
I'm not kidding.
Any booty shaking tips appreciated.

Here's my favourite dance video. If my hubby ever ditches me, I'm finding this guy, stealing him from his wife, and marrying him. Now this is a groom.

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The hiatus is over

So, here's the thing.
Going back to work, having a toddler, trying to keep fit, and have a mini life pretty much sucks all the energy out of you. OK, truthfully, going back to work fulltime sucks all the energy out of you.
That's why I haven't written here in, um, ages.
BUT I am going to do my darndest to give you a little somethin' somethin' frequently.
There is much history to cover, my friends.
Like, did you know I got married in December? In Vegas. Tis true.
Here's a wedding pic.
Click below to see it. It is tasty, I promise.

It's a pic of a salad one of our family members ate before the wedding.
What? You thought you were going to get a dress pic?
Tomorrow. Or the day after. We'll see.

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