i just realized

that everyone i know in london is married or in a long-term living together relationship.

i miss nyc more than ever!

birthdays

on the occasion of my birth, i like to reminisce about birthdays past. it's very cool that i'm celebrating with j.m. and m.r. this year because j.m. figures prominently in one of my best birthday memories.

j.m. and i met while we lived in residence at ubc. her room was next to mine. i roomed with a weirdo (in a bad way) and she roomed with a weirdo (in a good way). we became fast friends and frequently when my weird roommate was being particularly awful to me, i'd crash on j.m.'s (and her roommate f.w.'s) floor.

2 months into first year comes my birthday. it was the first time i had a birthday not at home in g.p. a bit strange. i didn't make a big deal out of it. little did i know that a big deal was about to be made. that evening was like every other. i was sitting around in baggy jeans and an oversized calgary winter olympics sweatshirt when one of the guys in the residence told me we were going to mcdonald's in his car to avoid eating in the caf. i believe him. he asked me if i wanted to change; i said no. we get in his car and drive downtown. we've gone past the mcdonald's i thought we were going to, and asked him where he was going. he said that we should go to mcdonald's downtown. i shrugged. still believing him that my birthday dinner was going to be a filet o' fish at mcdonalds. and actually being okay with that.

anyway, we get out of the car and we walk towards a hotel. the hotel vancouver, in fact. i can't remember what he said when i asked him why we were going there, but he made something up. maybe he had to use the phone or the bathroom. so we walk into the hotel vancouver (which was, at this point in my life, the fanciest hotel i'd ever been inside). the hotel has a restaurant called griffin's. my friend (and i think it was d.s., but i admit i've blanked on whether it was really him or not) and i walk into griffin's. i'm very confused.

but then! i see a huge table with loads of people from residence!! everyone is all dressed up and i'm wearing baggy jeans and a sweatshirt! j.m. had thrown me an amazing surprise party / dinner!! it was amazing! i hadn't expected anybody to do anything for my birthday. j.m. -- bestest ever -- had covertly done all this planning and inviting and no one had leaked the news to me. even now when i think about it, i can't believe how gullible i was.

yay.

today's my brother's birthday and he wrote to me yesterday and we started reminiscing about how when we were kids, we used to have our birthday party together with one giant cake and my parents would invite all the indian people of g.p. and then my brother and i would invite our friends from the neighbourhood and from school and what a strange and motley crew that made.

ah birthdays. good times.
i can't believe that i'm 34 now. but i really can't believe that my brother's 30!

but i have to say, i like being in my 30s. i like feeling sure of myself (even if i am in a career mini-crisis) and i like who i've become (and am becoming) more and more each year. and even if all those things i told myself i'd accomplish (hello, first novel!! haha) are not checked off the mythical list, all told, things are very good.

bookshops

26.10.2009

Work was absolutely dead today (now yesterday). None of the three other people I share my four desk cubicle with were in and it made me ridiculously unmotivated to do anything. Instead, I worked on finding a job. Not exactly a real fun thing to do with my lack of supervision, but necessary – oh so necessary.

I’m starting to freak out about the course I’m teaching in January. Seriously freak out. I decided to go find a couple of texts that might help me understand what I’m teaching at a legal bookstore near the Inns of Court. Another awesome thing about the location of work is it’s proximity to Chancery Lane and the Inns of Court. There are four: Gray’s Inn, Lincoln’s Inn, the Inner Temple and the Middle Temple (how very Indiana Jones-ish!). All barristers & judges who were barristers in England and Wales must belong to an Inn.

Hammick’s Legal Bookshop is on Fleet Street, quite near the Inns. How convenient. It was a heady experience to be in the presence of all those (mighty expensive) law books. And that should tell you something about how much of a geek I am. The international law section (while not as great as the law bookshop in The Hague devoted solely to international law) was quite comprehensive. I wished I had the moolah (and room in my suitcase) to buy so many books. I could spend hours at Hammick’s. I found two books that are useful to my cause.

Next stop: the London Review of Books Bookshop & Cake Shop! Tucked away on Bury Place, a short walk from Hammick’s, this place was amazing. It was not as big as I imagined, but well-stocked. The Cake Shop was packed to the gills. I got a seat and had a delicious latte (made with Monmouth coffee – the gimme coffee of London perhaps?) and a piece of passion cake. Delicious. Two cute boys from somewhere else in Europe were sitting beside me. It’s too bad I couldn’t hang out longer, but I was afraid that if I stayed, I’d spend more money. Sad, sad, sad. It took all my willpower not to buy any books at the LRB bookshop. I had to pull myself away.

After the LRB bookshop, I went to Muji in Covent Garden, where I bought a 2010 calendar (which also had the months of Oct, Nov & Dec 2009 in it – those calendars are hard to find.) At least now I am not relying on a system of post-it notes and paranoia about whether I have somewhere to be. I can put all sorts of things on my new calendar, like going to NY!! Yay!

Wish me luck with preparing for this course.

sondre lerche & lail arad @ the slaughtered lamb

on 18.10.09, i went to see a show at the slaughtered lamb in clerkenwell with k.l. sondre lerche was headlining his own show while on tour with the fray. amazing. k.l. and i bought tickets online, which was lucky cause the show sold out. of course the show sold out, it was sondre lerche! has there ever been a more adorable, cuter, funnier, wittier, better guitar playing norwegian person ever before in the history of the norse? i doubt it.

the show was fantastic. the venue was fantastic. upstairs it's a regular pub, with decent food & drink and the usual post-work pubbing crowd. downstairs is a cosy venue with couches and a very sitting around in your parents' basement feeling but your parents' basement isn't a dive or made to look like a bar mitzvah barfed all over it. in short, it's perfect. not that i have anything against bar mitzvahs or dives, mind you. its just that after being in far too many venues that require having to bring your own hand sanitizer along, it's nice to stand somewhere and not wonder what that sticky feeling under your [insert body part here] is.

k.l. was the perfect lady to attend the show with because she's giddy for sondre like me. and we could be groupies together with no shame. the opening act -- lail arad -- was fantabulastic. she's putting an album out soon, so keep an ear out for it. she has an adorable voice, wonderful stage presence, witty repartee and sings the truth, people. she sings the truth. or perhaps i've become lail's biggest fan because she sings like me: made up in the moment type spontaneous songs, but unlike me, her songs are good, clearly had time and effort go into them, are thoughtful and she can actually sing. go lail!! please please please go find lail's music -- and PAY FOR IT mofos -- because i don't want to have to say "i told you so" when i have tickets to her shows and you have to stay at home.

lail was the perfect opener to sondre lerche. the downside was that lail's too modest. she mentioned her name only once or twice during her gig and i barely heard it. it sounded like it could be spelled lyle or lille or lil' or lily and it took me some heavy internet stalkings to find her webescence. oh, but i did.

so, apart from sondre lerche playing fabulous song after fabulous song with amazing guitar move after amazing guitar move looking and acting increasingly more adorable, he also moved me into a fit of the giggles. man alive, that man is funny! he even took the piss out of the british for their fascination with has-been popstar / reality tv "star" (see an earlier post about reality tv "stardom" for my opinion on the phenomenon) peter andre.

i could go on and on gushing about the night, but i will end by telling you that as k.l. and i snaked our way to the exit / merch table, sondre lerche had already parked himself near the exit bidding a friendly (and very un-affected non-williamsburg adieu) to his fans. as i mulled over which size of man's tshirt to get, k.l. offered to take pictures for people waiting to have their photo taken with him. as a result, we also got our photo taken with sondre lerche. and k.l., being the darling that she is, let me stand next to him and i didn't even have to fight her for it.

yes yes yes!!!! k.l. and i got our photo taken with sondre lerche!!!! i won't post the picture up here to protect the innocent, but i will tell you that in the photo, he looks like he's lunging out into the camera and k.l. and i, by comparison, look like we're standing in the next time zone. he looks huge! it's quite hilarious actually.

someday i'll show you, after i've stopped drooling all over the picture, that is.

here are some other pictures of the show though.

polytechnique :: spoiler alert

25.10.09

the BFI london film festival has been on since oct. 14th and i have been meaning to see a film ever since i saw the posters advertising it on my commute. a lot of the bigger name films have already sold out. yet i could easily blow much of my weekly necessaries budget on tickets to the film festival. i have to be very discerning about what i went to see. at GBP 12 a pop (for evening and weekend shows) (equivalent of about US $20), i have to be very, very, very discerning. but i did want to see one canadian film at the very least.

i chose "polytechnique", a 2009 film directed by denis villeneuve (he also directed maelstrom) and booked a ticket for tonight.

i can't remember the last time images moved me like this.

"polytechnique" tells the story of the "montreal massacre" of dec. 6, 1989 at the ecole polytechnique (an engineering school, part of university of montreal) through the eyes of two witnesses: valerie (a woman who was in the classroom that the gunman first entered and who survived the massacre) and jean-francoise (a classmate of valerie's who was one of the male students removed from the classroom; he too survived the massacre but then took his own life). fourteen female engineering students were shot dead in a 45 minute rampage that ended when marc lepine -- the gunman, who is never identified by name in the film (even in the credits he is identified only as "the killer" -- took his own life.

the film is shot in black and white, the imagery so potent -- a cold, cold montreal day, naked branches and floating snowflakes. the building, that 70s architecture we know so well -- it could be anywhere. ubc, carleton, uvic.

i remember watching the news with my parents on cbc on dec. 6, 1989. we watched "the national" and "the journal" together every night from 10-11pm -- i remember knowlton nash was the news anchor on "the national" that night even though he had been replaced by peter mansbridge by that point. my dad sometimes had to work a night-shift and then we'd watch the national without him, but i am pretty sure he had a day-shift and we all watched it together that evening. when i realized that marc lepine killed 14 women and injured many others because he hated women, i felt like i had been punched in the stomach.

this movie took me back to that feeling. stark. blunt. haunting. for 77 minutes, were were all transfixed. quietly awed, my stomach clenched, my eyes -- wide -- glued to the screen. when the massacre happened, i was 14 and in grade 10. i had a lot of things i wanted to do in my life and i was impatient, just as i am now. on dec. 6, 1989, i was angry. it was a frustrated anger -- the kind of anger that often turns into tears of powerlessness, the salty taste of tears on a pillow. i remember thinking: how dare he take those girls' lives away like that? what gives him the power to do that? why didn't someone stop him?

today, when i left the movie, i felt that anger again, but muted. instead i felt something else. something lonely. there was no one beside me to turn to, no one to say "did you see that" to. i knew that no matter how lax and lazy i'd been about posting to this blog lately, i had to write tonight, even if what i wrote sounded overblown and self-important. i had to write because if i didn't, i wasn't sure where this angry, lonely feeling would take me.

the audience sat in silence while the credits rolled. no one got up until the curtain fell on the screen. the spontaneous burst of applause at the end seemed garish and sounded tinny, somehow. i passively let the escalator carry me down the several flights to ground level. neither i was rushing, nor was anyone quick-stepping around me. at the ground floor, we were directed to exit a particular set of doors. i stumbled out of the theatre and into a melee.

apparently, another film was premiering and the star of that film was attending. there were paparazzi and tourists snapping cell phones photos, shouting over one another and craning their necks. children sat on parents' shoulders. all this -- right outside the exit.

my quietude was shattered. i felt disoriented and pained and i couldn't move fast enough. i broke through the crowd and huffed away. outside, i felt even more alone than inside the theatre when i looked beside me in vain to find someone familiar to share my experience with. i had planned to head home right after the movie to do some work, but as i walked towards charing cross station, i felt not myself. i felt removed. instead, i decided to wander around the dark city.

as i walked away from the national gallery, i was stopped by a belgian couple. they were hopelessly lost. they had to be back at their hotel by 7 pm (it was now about 6:40) and their map covered only a short perimeter around their hotel. i looked up where they needed to be in my a to zed and we realized that they had wandered very far from where they needed to be. they thanked me and, as they walked away to hail a cab, the woman said to me: "it is so big here."

it put a hole in my heart, her saying that. i've realized over the last several weeks that london is the perfect lonely city: it's big, mostly unknown to me, but not foreign. it's streets wind and wend, taking me to places i've never been or back again to places i've just seen. i lose myself in these meanderings and i feel alone in a way i haven't experienced in a long while.

lest you (and by you, i really mean j.m. and m.r. who might think that they are neglecting me somehow and that i'm seriously becoming cracked as a result) think this is a cry for help, i have to admit this alone-ness is sort of a compelling feeling: i am indulging it and seem in no hurry to shrug it off.

funny, while i started typing this out to be a movie review, it's kind of turned into a life review.

things are pretty good all-told. i give it 5 stars. and the movie too.

marathons

i just read an article in the NY times online about how marathon runners are bemoaning the fact that slower runners are entering marathons and crapping on the cache of having "run a marathon", that slower runners have "disrespected the distance" and have "ruined the marathon's mystique."

oh come on.

if your worried that people won't take you for the serious runner that you are and mistake you for some fat-blob who recently decided to don a horrible fashion statement and pant and gasp for 20 some-odd miles, do not worry. we (normal people) can tell that you are serious about your running simply by your body mass index and the high percentage of spandex you are wearing. sure, anyone can buy fancy running gear, but no one carries it off with a marathoners panache. we won't misidentify you, i promise.

we'll also be able to tell who you are because you'll be the first person we see coming off the marathon course, stretching your muscles and carefully heeding the gym teacher's advice of "walk it off" while we sit on a patio scarfing down a marathon of pancakes. you'll be the person that started at the crack of dawn and finished at the slightly larger crack of dawn. we, who never run marathons or half-marathons or even 1/8th marathons (the most i run is for the buss and even that less often than not) have respect for people who train by running for hours and hours and miles and miles, hitting walls and then keep on running.

but what harm is it to the world if not-so-fast runners participate? it certainly doesn't take anything away from the fast runners' time. your less than one minute mile stands strong. plus, not-so-fast runners pay good money to buy gear and join running clinics, keeping those businesses in ... well, business. not everyone has sponsorship from gatorade.

the main consideration shouldn't be the speed of the runner, but whether they will pass out and die on the course. i shouldn't run a marathon because i might just keel over and die in a pool of my own vomit.

the only legitimate concern i see for having slower runners in a marathon is the cost to the organizers of keeping the course open longer. organizers have to pay all sorts of costs to the city for security, etc. not to mention that 20 some-odd miles can be a huge swath of the city to take over for a day. so maybe there could be a generous cut off time after which point the organizers of the marathon are no longer responsible for the runners safety. before you sign up to run, the organizers could let you know that after 7 hours (or so), the marathon will be over and that roads will re-open etc. at that point, slow runners will already have their t-shirts and might have to forfeit a medal of participation [or maybe you can go pick it up from marathon HQ the next day if you can prove that at some point in time you did finish the marathon]. i can't say for sure, but i believe that only a small number of slow marathon runners are doing it for the medal. most people i know who run marathons (but aren't ready for the olympics quite yet) do it as a personal challenge.

we lazy, good-for-nothings have the marathon rammed in our faces - bus re-routings, road closures, sweaty people wearing spandex hanging out in coffee-shops and restaurants after the marathon -- we suffer -- why not let the more ambitious of our class pant and gasp and clutch their sides with the best of you?

what, are you scared we might win?

for a limited time only!

ACT NOW!! DO NOT DELAY!! THIS IS A ONCE-IN-A-WHILE OPPORTUNITY!!

I WILL BE IN NYC FROM NOV 12-NOV 22!!

(yay, can't wait!)