Tuesday, June 20, 2006
The ridiculous things on my to-do list
Are as follows:
1) Now that the Bro is definitely alive, ensure he pays me back the $400 or so CDN I loaned him in France. Aren't I a great sister after all? Who else loans money to an unemployed and relatively uneducated 18-year old student, without an embarrassing loan application and at 0% interest?
2) Take said money and buy ridiculous quantities of cds I can't afford. In particular, Nelly Furtado's latest effort, and whatever Kinnie Starr's put together recently. I'm going to her concert on the 27th -- she's opening for....wait for it....BUCK 65!! That guy is my absolute hero. He rocks my world. I can't wait. And I'm going with my pal Jon, who just may be my new favourite person. More on him later.
3) Fix my Zen player so it no longer sounds like I'm perpetually in a tunnel. Fucking electronics.
4) Actually go to the bookstore and see my old pals, minus the Bossi. 5) Throw all my ugly clothes out. Try to consign my nice clothes, and kick myself that Cait's not in town so I can give her the rad clothes that I never wear. [I saw someone who looked a lot like Cait at the beach yesterday, albeit much less pretty and very far away, whilst I was squinting into the sun. But it made me miss her nonetheless.] Hayley was horrified by the state of my closet the other day. She said "how on earth do you find anything??" and I replied, "well, funny you should ask. Actually I don't. If it's not at the top of the pile, it basically no longer exists."
6) Call about a zillion people and actually hook up with them. I am forcing my anti-social days into a permanent end. ...bah. Too much to do, too much laziness to accomplish it all. By the way, I think this little myspace band The Perfects, in addition to having a rad and truly scary photo posted, are rather awesome in a retroey kind of way. That, and this Blake Havard guy is rather excellent as well. When Myspace Music is bad, it blows long and hard, but when it's good it can be borderline amazing.
So, my pal Jon. Let's tell you about him. Jon is what those in the know, or those like me who are rather good at faking it and happen to have watched Transamerica once or twice refer to as an FTM. He's a boy, but not a biological one. The word we're supposed to use to describe this radical process of change is "transitioning," which is really a rather pretty word that makes me think of weaning babies onto solid foods, or moving from a road bike to a mountain trekker, not the kind of extreme transformation involved in changing your body from female to male. But that's neither here nor there.
What is here and there is that Jon is one of the coolest individuals I've met in a long time. He rooted for me and Hayley long before either of us got it together enough to actually start dating, and he continues to be firmly in our cheering section, which I love. He's got fantastic taste in music, having introduced me to Goldfrapp, Skunk Anansie, Badly Drawn Boy (though truth be told I rather liked him already), and a lot of other excellent British acts. He used to live in England, and somehow has worked about a million semi-professional occupations despite being a year younger than me. He would make me feel like a huge slacker, but he never gloats about his professional capabilities. Currently, he works with autistic kids and facilitates a website for disabled children and their parents.
So, he's a total star. And in addition to that, he's a funny, sweet, adorable character, who pretty much dispels any of the stereotypes I ever perhaps even secretly harboured about transgendered people. He's just a boy who happens to have been born in girls' clothing.
I went to the beach with him yesterday, after walking through the West End and eating my first sushi since I got back. Yummy! In the course of a couple of hours, we both ran into a whole bunch of people we knew, which is pretty hilarious. Sophie's always talking about how the so-called lesbian community is very small, but this was ridiculous. It sort of hammered home for me the necessity of treating everyone I have any sort of relationship with really, really well, because word gets around in this city like a forest fire. You break a single heart and within an hour it's all over the airwaves, on the internet, and circulating through the clubs in a series of dirty looks and "OMIGOD, did you HEAR what that girl did to so-and-so? I heard she's SUCH a bitch!" You've pretty much never seen or heard cattiness like this, not in three seasons of The L-Word, and certainly not among any other potentially mutinous pirate crew.
Example of this small-world phenonmenon: I ran into my friend Donna yesterday and her new girlfriend, who I knew absolutely nothing about except that her and Donna had gone from being strangers to pretty much inseparable over the course of about two weeks a few months ago. That's not uncommon either. I asked Donna if she was coming to the drag show this Saturday, and she visibly bristled.
"Uh, no," she said (somewhat testily, I thought).
"I haven't been to a bar or club in almost" (here she looked to the girlfriend for confirmation) "three, four months?" (avec upspeak, as if this was the longest absence ever heard of from the so-called scene).
"Oh," I replied, "well, that's too bad. I think it'll be fun."
She recommended I come to some other dry-as-a-bone event on the Eastside on Saturday, to which I expressed my out-of-the-loopness in a desperate attempt to make everyone laugh, and said maybe I'd stop by.
Jon and I walked away, me shaking my head at their clearly anti-social behaviour. But of course, Jon was in the know, and told me that they hadn't been to a bar in ages because Donna's girlfriend was a recovering alcoholic and drug addict, and still going to AA. Boy was my face red. "How the hell do you KNOW that?" I asked Jon, and he shrugged. "Word gets around," he answered. It sure does.
I need to start writing my novel soon, before my ideas gets stale. I think I shall start at the beginning....
This is too long.
Sorrrryy, Jag...I know you hate long posts. -N
p.s. by the way, if you're noticing an unhealthy reliance on Wikipedia in this post, and in general, it's just because him and I are in love and terribly co-dependent.
