I hate shaving my legs.

I hate that in order to be perceived as pretty and feminine, I have to shave my legs.

I would like to wear shorter skirts, but those scraggly little black hairs stop me.

I hate everything about shaving my legs.

I hate razors.

I hate shaving cream.

I hate soap.

I hate the first shave after a long time.

I hate having to shave my legs twice in one week.

I hate shaving my legs in the shower, and all the soap runs off before you can get anything done.

I hate shaving my legs in the sink, standing on one leg and lunging like some sort of over-compensating rocker.

I hate twisting myself into a pretzel in the bathtub, trying to reach that elusive bit on the back of my upper calf, only to have my heel (which is braced on the soap shelf) slip at the last second, sending me spinning in this horrid, luke-warm soapy bathwater like Alan Moore did in his grave after seeing the movie of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

I hate shaving my legs.

On a related note, I hate waxing my legs.

But ask me sometime about the time Tyne and I tried waxing Chad's chest.

I rather liked that.

YOU FREAK OF NATURE!

So my mother called today, as she often does on a Sunday, and we started talking about DEATH.

(You have to say it like that, DEATH, with wide serious eyes.)

(DEATH.)

So we started talking about DEATH. My roommate's mother is dying, and her father died a couple of years ago (at almost the same age as my dad is now), and my parents' neighbour just died, and their other neighbour is not long for this world.

We were also talking about DEATH because a couple of days ago my parents phone was off the hook....ALL DAY. Now, as the child of now officially elderly parents, I had a little bit of a freak out and called their (still alive) neighbours to go make sure they weren't dead.

They weren't dead. Their phone was though.

(They made fun of me a lot. With their caps lock on and lots of exclamation points. Elderly jerks.)

And we started talking about my dad's folks, who died Way Back in the Day. His dad died in his sixties, and his mom in her forties.

The conversation then took this turn:

"Well, you know honey, your dad should be dead right now. His parents both died young. By all accounts he should be dead by now--WHY THE HELL ARE YOU STILL ALIVE YOU FREAK OF NATURE?!"

To which I could hear my father distantly chortle: "....hurrhurrhurrhurrhurrr..."

At which point my mother politely told me she needed to go because her friend was singing in a choir and goodness look at the time...

In which I completely fail at being a wife

So there I am, on the train, heading down to meet Kevin and Tracy so we can go to the bar. Because we're going out, 'on the town' as the kids say, I'm dressed up really pretty. Lips, eyes, stockings, the full deal.

So on the train. I'm sitting right up front, because seeing things from the very front is still a novelty to me, and this fellow sitting near by leans into my field of vision and says:

"How's it going?"

"What?" I say.

"How's it going?" he repeats.

"Oh, good," I say.

Small talk goes on like this for a few minutes. I find out his name is Dana ("Like Dada, but with a N."), he's from Tanzania, and studied law in England (though you wouldn't be able to tell by the level of his English), but wasn't practicing in Canada. He finds out I'm off to visit friends and I'm from a small interior town.

"So what's in that town?" he asks, angling. "Family? Parents? Boyfriend? Husband?"

"My parents live there," I say evasively. I know what he's getting at.

 "You are very pretty," he says, reaching out and almost touching me. "And clean," he adds, approvingly, and withdraws his hand. "I like a woman like that."

"....thank you," I say.

"Husband? Boyfriend?" he asks again.

I smile a little and look at him sideways. "That's none of your business."

"Awww, come now!" he says.

"Nope," I say.

"But I need to find a good woman! I want to have babies!" he exclaims with despair.

"Well," I say reasonably, "have you tried internet dating?"

"Oh, no, I don't do internet dating," he says, and leans in conspiratorally. "They're all SERIAL killers."

"...women you meet on the internet are serial killers?" I ask.

"Yes! They meet you and then they kill you, and then they plead insanity and spend two years in a mental hospital! Then they go free, and I'm still dead!"

"I seeeeee..."

"I need to have babies..."

~

In other news, I made baguettes!

And by 'I made baguettes' I really mean 'I completely failed to make baguettes'.

Note to self:

When making bread, do not get distracted.

For a whole day.

That would probably help next time.

Anyway, I decided it was Dwarven Fighting Bread. It was certainly hard enough to be so. I ate some of the soft bits out of the middle and it was actually quite tasty, but yeah. Hard. It would have been a good bread to drop in soup.

As it was, I dropped it in the garbage.

So...yeah. Never gonna be a French housewife.

Sorry, Dana.

What will I put in my gin?!

"I threw out your lemon," said Gareth.

"You threw out my lemon?" I asked.

"Yes," he said, "because it was moldy."

"...no it wasn't," I said.

"Yes it was," he said.

"No it wasn't."

"Yes it was."

"No it wasn't. I just used it."

"You just used it? In the scones that I'm eating?!"

"Yes," I said. "And it wasn't moldy."

"Then why was it covered in white powdery stuff?!"

"Because I just zested it," I tell him.

"Oh," says Gareth. "So anyway, I threw out your perfectly good lemon."


~Rosemart.

So hard his pelvis breaks.

At the bar with Steph, flipping through karaoke books.

Robbie Williams. We both take a moment to appreciate mental images of Robbie Williams.

"I would SO do Robbie Williams," says Steph, wistfully.

"Me too," I agree. "I would touch him so hard he would have an innie."

Pause. Steph looks at me with growing horror.

"...THAT WOULD BE BAD, ROSIE," she says. "WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT?"

I grin, shrug. "I would then help him fix it?"

She looks at me with squinty eyes. "Whatever," she says. "I'm going first."

And now a picture of Cinny, casually sitting on the fridge. Where the cat treats are.

Holy shit!

So I'm walking down the street with Brian today, and he was telling me about stuff.

"--so as I was walking here," he was saying, "I was just telling myself to breath. In with the good, out with the bad. Release all the negetivity, release all the bad stuff, release everything..."

"So," I said, "what you're saying is...you shit your pants?"

"Well..." he said. "Yes."

I laughed, and then I told him about this graffiti I'd just seen while I was waiting for him.

If you can't read the scrawl, it says: "You are going to outlive your dog. Love it while its still alive ASAP."

"It's a good point," I said. "Love while you can."

Brian was silent for a moment. Thoughtful, I thought.

"But seriously," he said after a minute. "I'm gonna need new pants."

And that was my day.

Perfect Advertising

I found the most perfect piece of advertising ever made.
 

I am sorry to say I did not buy any popcorn, because we were headed towards a ferry. But I seriously considered it.

No bullshit advertising. I like it.

The Wisdom of G

Driving back from the SCA event this weekend, discussing some of the many and colourful people we had met, when Gareth utters this gem of wisdom:

"Sometimes," he said rather thoughtfully, "you just need a guy to shut the fuck up."

Amen, brother Gareth. Amen.

"Never" trust a "bitch"

 "--you know," my buddy Brian says. "She was the one with the boobs."

I nod, vaguely, then pause.

"...boobs?" I ask.

"Yeah," he says. "When we walked into the house, she was the one with no shirt on."

Another pause.

"...there was a woman with no shirt on?"

"Yeah!" Brian says, staring at me with something akin to amused horror. "You were talking to her! She had her boobs all...just...THERE. NAKED. BOOBS."

I stared at him.

"I totally didn't notice."

Brian sighed and put his hand on my shoulder. "Rosemart," he said. "You are SO heterosexual."



On that note, I found this fabulous piece of graffiti.

I would dearly like to know what the quotation marks are trying to imply.

Trust "no" bitch, my friend.

Words to live by.

Never trust a man with a gingerbread house and no shoes.

I feel like this needs to be an addendum to my previous post, as it happened during the same day.

So it's late. Night has fallen. I have hung around with Lester until the mall closed, then rode a million miles of transit back to my neck of the woods. To save some pennies I'd ridden my bike to the station, and so here I was, at 10pm, riding the long sloping uphill ride home.

When out of the bushes extends an arm.

And on the end of that arm, a hand, and on that hand, a gingerbread house.

"HOLY SHIT A GINGERBREAD HOUSE," I declared with elegance and style, breaking rather suddenly.

"Yes," says the man to whom the arm belongs. "...you wanna piece?"

I pedal slowly past the gingerbread house.

My mother always said: Never trust a man with a gingerbread house and no shoes.

And sure enough, this man was not wearing any shoes (though the rest of him was mercifully clothed).

"No," I said, with some regret because I do enjoy a good gingerbread. "I think I'm okay. But thanks."

"Are you sure?" the man says, smiling invitingly and waggling the gingerbread house invitingly. "It's full of LSD."

"Ah," I say. "Yes. I see. That's probably a good reason for me to NOT have any."

He just shrugged, completely apathetic, as I pedalled faster. "Alright," he said with a cheerful wave of his free hand. "Have a nice night!"

Yes. Have a nice night, my LSD gingerbread toting friend.


~The Destroyer.

Never trust a man who starts a conversation with: "Shit, there's a lot of cops around."

So Vancouver is awesome. I feel like I need to start my post by saying that. I've had watermelon on the beach and soaked my pants in the ocean, seen Singing in the Rain on the big screen (with a row of gay men who appreciated Gene Kelly's firm dancing thighs just as much as I did), eaten at Japadog, tried four new beers and two new gins, shot arrows at a hundred yards and been interviewed by Global Television about the olympics (to which I mouthed off incoherently about hockey and generally made a mess of things).

Which leads me to today.

Never mind how, because the lead-up is boring exposition, but let it be known that Rosemart the Destroyer does NOT like jostling crowds, and Metrotown is little more than one massive jostling crowd.

So that is why I found myself in a little perfectly manicured park, a couple blocks from the mall, stretched out on my belly in the moss, listening to my iPod and enjoying (read 'enjoying') a rousing game of IS. IT. FOOOOOOOOD?! with items I'd picked up in the Asian market.

And it was there, as I was gazing through the trees and thinking about life, the universe, and everything, that a hobo burst through the rhododendron bushes and flopped down next to me without so much as a how-do-you-do.

"Shit," he says, glancing over his shoulder. "There's a lot of a cops around."

THAT DOESN'T SET OFF ANY ALARMS BELLS AT ALL.

"I guess," I say, super casual. It now occurs to me that my purse is awfully close to him, I am wearing neither shoes nor socks, and I don't want to be rude. My internals Mother's Voice is giving me a very rapid lecture on Homeless People are People Too.

So I stay. And I put my headphones back in.

He says something.

I take my headphones out. "Sorry, what?"

"I said I didn't mean to interrupt you."

"Oh," I say. "It's okay."

And I put my headphones back in.

He says something.

I take my headphones out. "Sorry, what?"

"I said don't let me bother you."

"Oh," I say. "Okay. It's okay."

I put my headphones back in.

He says something.

I take my headphones out. "Sorry, what?"

"I said don't stop for my sake."

I sigh and wrap up my iPod. I start slowly assembling the remnants of my picnic. I don't want to be rude and bolt, but I don't particularly want to continue this rivetting conversation.

"Where you from?" he asks. His fingers are drumming on his thigh. He's not super twitched out like he's on something, but he's certainly not entirely there.

"I just moved from Calgary," I say, sliding my socks back on.

"Oh yeah?" he says. "Me too! I come from Forest Lawn*. Do you come from Forest Lawn?"

"No," I say. "I lived in Brentwood**."

"Oh," he says without much recognition, and is silent for a moment. "Hey, do you have a pen I could borrow?"

"Yeah," I say. "I think so." A quick search of my backpack turns up a pen I bought in England for writing letters. I pass it over and start putting on my shoes and tying them up.

And then I notice he's disassembling my pen. He's inscrewing the top and pulling out the inside and putting the pieces on the perfectly manicured lawn.

Half of me wants to say: "What the hell, man. Are you disassembling my pen?!" and half of me wants to flee screaming into the hills.

But I've got that very firm Mother's Voice in my head, continuing the lecture on Human Beings and Tolerance and What Have You. And there's nothing wrong with disassembling a pen, right?

RIGHT?

He takes the inner piece of the pen and reaches down to his sock.

"Is he trying to scratch something?" I think.

And then I notice the crack pipe in his sock.

He's cleaning his crack pipe.

He's cleaning his sock-crack-pipe with my pen.

And suddenly that Mother's Voice stops lecturing and switches to, "CRACK PIPE?! GTFO! GTFO! GTFO!"

And yea, I snatched up my bags and ran screaming into the hills.

 Happy Thursday everybody!


~The Destroyer.



* Forest Lawn. Look it up. A couple friends of mine like living there because they say that police response time is very prompt.

** Brentwood. Seriously. Look it up and compare the two, and you'll know what I mean. The police are a little more casual in Brentwood, because chances are, nobody's got a gun.