Seating for the elderly

Last night my favourite band in all the world made it's way through Toronto. Tragically, Muse had signed on to play at The Docks. For those who do not know, it's the Toronto venue/club that recently had its liquor licence revoked due to noise complaints and is also known for being the most terrible rock venue known to mankind. It's a long, skinny building that, I swear, slopes uphill towards the stage.

This configuration makes it really easy fort things to get claustrophobic really quickly. I've noticed that as I've gotten older my already low tolerance for being touched, grazed or jostled by strangers at rock shows has basically faded into nothingness. I have no patience for it and it's something that slowly drives me insane over the course of the evening. I know I shouldn't let it bother me, but it ultimately ends up ruining any concert experience I'm trying to enjoy.

Like last night, there was this one kid beside me wearing possibly the cheapest polo shirt I have ever encountered. The fabric of this thing was like a brillo pad? How do I know this? Because he was wedged right up against me and was constantly in contact with my arm. He was also perpetually in motion. Even though the show hadn't started, he was moving. I had no personal space and any time someone tried to push their way up to the front, I was knocked completely off balance and had to cling to M just to stay upright. It was hot, cramped, I appeared to be surrounded by people who were all at least 6'3" and I was being chaffed by a hyperactive teen wearing a shirt made of burlap.

And I paid for this experience?

M and I had to get out of there, so we set a meeting place to find Chris and Tash at the end of the show and starting pushing our way back to find some kind of free space in the building. And where did we find it? By the bar. Sure, the band was really, really far away and the sound was sadly distorted, but I could hear and mostly see the show and get the horrifying thoughts of the Whitesnake club fire out of my head.

Which was handy, because I needed that space in my head to enjoy yet another superlative Muse performance. And even though The Docks sucks donkey ass it's good that we went. "Why?" you ask? Well it seems that the next time Muse will be playing in the great city of Toronto will be during the Virgin Mobile V-Cast Festival on Toronto Island. It's a two day festival featuring bands like Zero 7, Gnarls Barkley and one of my top-five-and-I've-never-seen-them-live bands, Massive Attack. So it's a two day show that I would be pretty keen on attending. Another Muse show outdoors and finally seeing Massive Attack. Oh, but when is the show? September 9? Oh, that's funny. Really funny.

Ahh well, I can only assume that if Muse is in town on my wedding day that I can expect an acoustic set at the reception.

Today's sing-a-long song: "Far Away" by Muse

HRH

Biting my tounge

It's almost too hot to exist, yet I retain the ability to be catty. I was going to write this whole post of what I imagined Avril Lavinge's wedding vows might have sounded like ("So like, I really, like, like Derryk..."), but then got scodled by M who asked "why are we judging the wedding vows of people we don't even know!" and what I should have answered with "Cause it's fun and because if a magazine basically pays for your wedding because you're a celebrity, then you're putting yourself out there for a little mocking." But I didn't say that and I'm not going to mock Avril. Mostly because I haven't written my own vows yet and I have been known to pepper by lines with the sporadic "like" and "you know." And girls in white dresses shouldn't throw blueberries.

Today's sing-a-long song: "Thank you for the venom" by My Chemical Romance

HRH

A little less OCD, a little more colourful

I like to do little things to challenge myself. Like really, tiny minute things. I enjoy creating boundaries, patterns, preferences and routines. Some are normal, some are problematic. So I challenge small aspects of them. That way I feel like I'm testing myself enough and I can stave off the necessity of fixing the greater issue.

An example. Every day I strive to leave the house in such a way that I wake up to it clean. In a perfect world, I would wake up to a home where the dishes are all done and put away, the laundry basket empty, clothes ironed and put away, the floors vacuumed... You get the idea. When I used to live by myself, I would often stay up until the wee hours of the morning cleaning my apartment to this state of perfection. Yes, even my neuroses are uncool. Anyway, that kind of behaviour isn't the picture of mental health, so I've gotten to a state where I can leave dishes out to dry, leave ironing for days at a time and just go to bed and accept the place I wake up to (I still can't handle the fact that M leaves his clothes out every night. It drives me fucking bonkers, but what doesn't kill me, makes me stronger and this is clearly an indulgence of being in a pretty good place in life if something like that is what troubles me).

So the larger problem of being an obsessive cleaner... Still there, but it's tempered with bouts of doing normal things like leaving the ironing to sit for awhile.

My neurotic behaviour extends far beyond cleaning. It's part of everything. Beyond my food allergies, there are some things I just won't eat. Don't even get me started on how fear-inducing trying new food is. And while I'm good with colour and makeup, there are colours I just will not wear, like yellow. My skin has a yellow undertone and when you put a yellow shirt on top of that it looks like I've become jaundiced.

None of this is crippling. It's just the way I deal with stress and create my comfort zone. If I feel like I'm not in control of my life then all my fixations seem terribly important. This last week I've felt a little like I'm about to ride off the rails and have been fine form. The highlight of which involved M lying down on the bed, refusing to move while I pleaded with him to just let me make the bed after I'd put clean sheets on it. Sure it was 11 p.m. and he was about to get into it, but that didn't stop me. No sir.

So to create some kind of OCD-related balance I wore a yellow shirt today. A tiny victory for normal and hopefully no one will wonder if I have malaria or casually suggest that I have my liver function checked.

Today's sing-a-long song: "Sick" by The Sneaker Pimps.

HRH

Revlon: Lash Fantasy

It is commonly known that I love mascara. I don't believe in a daytime look, but at the same time, I don't believe in looking like there are spiders bursting forth from your eyes. Lashes should be long, pretty and full, all the time. Yes. All the time.

I've been a long-time devotee to Lancôme's Hypnôse mascara. So much so that I am the first hit that comes up when you google it. The stuff is the goods. A makeup artist friend of mine says this is the only product that she will justify spending a lot of money on. Cause it's awesome.

So I feel some pity for any mascara that tries to woo me away from Hypnôse, but I still have to give them a shot. So I recently tried Revlon's Lash Fantasy just to see if you can, infact, get five times the impact.

Lash fantasy is one of those new-fangled mascaras with a primer. It's white and it's really hard to get it on. You have to coat and coat and coat just to see it. Then once you have a good base of it, you apply the mascara. I did get some good results, my lashes were not dramatically fuller, but they were longer. It also took me about five times as long as it takes me to apply Hypnôse just to get an acceptable effect.

If you're in a pinch Lash Fantasy is acceptable, but if you want to get the most lash for your cash, put it towards the Hypnôse. Save your time and keep your lashes light. This is truly a case where the extra money is worth it.

HRH

A new definition for child abuse

So M and I are watching the Home Run Derby for the All-Star game (proving that we will watch any sport on TV) and a baseball player is sitting in with the commentators offering erudite perspectives on the art of the home run. This is nothing strange, though the nicknames they all use for eachother sure are. This baseball player, no doubt reinforcing the marketing message that baseball is a family game, has his exceptionally well behaved infant daughter on his lap. She's cute. Very cute. She's somewhere between 6 and 10 months. And how do I know that she is, in fact, a she?

It's true that it can be hard to tell the gender of a baby just by looking at its face. I suppose that's why colour coding them in pink and blue saves everyone potential embarrassment. "Oh what a cute little boy! I mean girl!" Anyway, she's wearing a very cute little red dress and using a dash of deductive reasoning (this is baseball and it's still a "man's" sport, the baby would have been decked out in an infant baseball uniform had it been a boy) I know she's a girl.

But apparently that's not enough clues. Maybe I'm smarter than your average bear. So just in case someone doesn't get that this baby girl is, in fact, a baby girl, someone (I can only assume this child's mother) did the unthinkable. She put one of those ridiculous headbands on her.

You know the ones I'm talking about. All lacy and frilly, usually with a bow or flower that almost rivals the size of the infant's actual head. It just screams to me "I know my baby doesn't have enough hair for everyone to be positive she's a girl, so I'm going to put a headband with a satin flower bigger than the moon on her head just to be safe. Okay!"

I'm positive there are people out there who think the baby-girl headband is the most adorable thing in the world. I think it is cruel and unusual. It also looks terribble. I suspect that the headband loving crowd are the same people who have, and enjoy, wedding videos. Someone has to like these things because they keep getting made.

What people do as adults, it's really their own business and if it makes them happy, all good. But to inflict such a horrible thing upon an otherwise innocent and pure being... A darling baby girl. Oh the humanity. Quelle horreur!

HRH

Insomniac thoughts

When you're awake late at night and there's nothing on TV but Comic View on BET. You watch it and feel like a traveler in a different land. Sure they're using words you recognize, but it doesn't make any sense. People are laughing. No, not just laughing. They are losing their shit laughing and you just have no idea what is going on. And you wonder if you've ever found anything that funny in your whole entire life and you sit there feeling really boring and uptight. You wonder if laughing that hard hurts or if it burns calories. Sure looks like a lot of work.

HRH

Maybe a little manic

I don't want to make it seem like wedding planning is all that I do, but when you look back at what I've done in the last 48 hours, it's hard to argue the contrary. What have I done you ask? Well, I've purchased the favours, purchased the major component of the table centerpieces, attended the wildly successful fitting of Natasha's bridesmaid's dress, found and purchased shoes, procured the wedding licence, set up meetings with the wedding site coordinator, florist, photographer and cupcake maker, created a shot list and headshot cheat sheet for the photographer, changed my mind and decided on the flowers about four times and set up the first fitting for my wedding dress.

Gotta say it's pretty fun.

HRH

Pick up the rock and the bugs come out

With the two month mark not far away it has come time for me to, once again, dive into the scary world of wedding supply company Web sites. I've been really lucky so far in that a lot of my contacts for products and services have come to me by word-of-mouth, so I haven't had to subject my eyes to all this terrible Web design to find the things that I need.

What alarms me more than the bad vendor sites that I've come across in my plunge into the wedding Web are the individual wedding preparation sites. I must be working on a different wavelength then the rest of the world. I thought that mentioning the wedding more than once a week on my blog was being way too blaby about the whole thing. Turns out there are people out there with 20 page Web sites dedicated to their wedding planning, with links and plugs for vendors, quizzes about how well people know the bride and groom (what is Cyndy's favourite colour?) and a schedule for the wedding weekend (just in case anyone with access to the Internet wants to crash).

Yes, I made a Web site to accompany our invitation. A mind boggling three page site with info on directions and accommodations. I thought it was maybe a little much... Clearly not. I had no idea what insane proportions I could blow this whole thing into.

Then I discovered a bunch of online bridal forums and I walked through a door into a world of bridal insanity. Some of them were full of honest and earnest questions about weddings (my favourite forum topic so far "Chocolate fountain - Should I?"), some comforting universalities (like how it's a frustrating and confidence shaking experience for everyone who is waiting for RSVPs to come back, *ahem*)and many useful tidbits of information (though the section on flowers almost made my brain explode - why can I only be sure of what I don't want!). However, there were a lot of photos that involved dry ice. Dry ice!!!

And then I got to the dress section of the forum and saw the worst thing yet... A girl who had purchased the same dress as I have for her wedding in April... And it did not look like I think it looks in my head. Eeek! Just when I thought I'd gotten over all my dress-stress I see this! Gah! A week before the first fitting too! Maybe it didn't fit her like it fits me, but man, it sucks to see stuff like that.

From this point on, I do my looking for wedding related products in person.

HRH