God bless you Janet, God bless you. You heeded my cry of Tina Turner torture and brought me the ultimate gift, a sack full of cassettes. And no, not just any cassettes, amazing ones, including the Trainspotting soundtrack!! Only my favourite movie of all time. I was greeted with the warm, floating, dream-like song and immediately placed it as Ewan swimming through the worst toilet is Scotland to retrieve his heroine he had had shoved up his arse earlier. I used to know the movie line for line. I once spit out so many lines from the movie, word for word, that a a young man from the Isle of Skye Scotland asked me to marry him. I questioned his level of commitment. I have been a super fan for a long time. When I lived in Scotland I even went to the shop where Ewan gives Spud a pep talk about trying hard to get the job he is about to be interviewed for but not trying too hard or else he might get it. It’s just the best movie ever. Back to Janet! Thank you for bringing a bit of heroine class to my auto Janet, you rock my world!  

I had an old moment yesterday. Like I am definitely getting old. I took the kid I work with to get winter boots at Bayshore. She chose these ankle high gangster carpenter boots that looked retarded to me. (Timberlands?) I sat there saying they were the most impractical winter boots I had ever seen! Was she new to Canada? Had she seen how deep the snow gets? Are these boot even waterproof? Were they even meant for cold weather? And at the last harassing question, I realized, not only was I making a scene in Foot Locker and embarrassing my kid, but I had just turned into my Dad. I had flashbacks to all the cute boots I ever wanted even though they were impractical, stupid and possibly not waterproof. The difference was, I lost those arguments. I went home with knee high, most chunky, practical, built-for-a-yeti lined boots that tended to match my neon purple coat *shakes head in shame*. Needless to say, I decided to back off my kid and let her learn her own lessons. Like when she loses both feet to hypothermia and she can no longer walk, she can’t tell me I didn’t warn her.  

On the way home I told my kid we were going to learn about local, successful women on our next outing. She needed to see independent women doing it for themselves. Ya feminism! She looked totally shocked to hear that word. She said she wasn’t a feminist. I looked at her and stole the lines from the Caitlin Moran book “How to be a Woman,” 

a) Do you have a vagina? and

b) Do you want to be in charge of it?

If you said ‘yes’ to both, then congratulations! You’re a feminist.” 

As soon as she got home, she announced to the house she was now a feminist. I felt like I changed the world that night. Let feminism no longer be a bad word with our youth! Lady power! We also decided instead of saying vagina we would change it to “bergina” a la Family Guy episode where Meg visits a discount gyno and that’s what he calls it. Good times! Bringing comedy to feminism! 

So, believe it or not, there seem to be some down sides to losing weight. I have spent years searching high and low finding amazing and outrageous big clothes and am pretty proud of my finds. The problem is, I can no longer wear them. They now look like bedsheets on me, which is not cool. Secondly, I caught myself in the mirror yesterday with the oddest shaped breasts I had ever seen. What the? And I realized my bra was imploding due to lack of boob. Now this is especially not cool. I specifically had a pep talk with my body before this all started, I said the chins can go, also the hips and ass, but please, for the love of god, Betty and Veronica can stay. I have grown quite attached to them and we are a happy family. Please let them stay. The only plus side to seeing Betty and Veronica shrink is that it just happened to coincide with the new Victoria Secret opening in Ottawa. Oh darn I guess I will have to check it out.  

Omg I found out what Victoria’s Secret it!! I went in because my bra was way to big for me and went up a cup size! Their secret is to make you think you have bigger boobs then you do! Well played Victoria, well played.

Is everyone excited? It’s almost the season!! The season to make jokes out of our credit card bills and fret over money…the reason for the season….debt! We are starting on a particularly precarious note this year, after buying an old car that needed some work, Hennie starting school and then having the audacity to have a tooth removed! Hennie, I think that was your Christmas present. Fentanol and Percocets are all you are getting for Xmas this year. You are not getting your two front teeth for Christmas this year, you lost an expensive, infected molar. Merry Christmas! I must reign in my spending this year!! I say that every year but for some reason I lose all control at Christmas. I go over our set family budgets, I buy multiple things for people even though I have finished their gifts, I then give it to other family members to give to those people because I have bought too much. I get commercialism amnesia, capitalism dependence issues, shopping impulse control problems. And on top of that, I stress out over all of that and then turn to my good old friend, retail therapy to get me through. I literally could write a whole DSM (Diagnostic and Statistics Manual of Mental Disorders) based on what I deal with just around Christmas. Except I would make them all fun like when my Grandma says OCDC for OCD or FibroMalaysia for Fibromyalgia. Anyways, the point of this rant. This year, I must perma talk myself down from my spending ledge and stay focussed. I will constantly repeat to myself how I should not be supporting such a commercial holiday to the extreme, how I should not be a crazy capitalist consumer and how my family deserves cheap presents, ha ha just kidding on that last one. 

Back to the Trainspotting soundtrack, Lou Reed’s Perfect Day now feels like the saddest song ever. I mean it was always a bit surreal and dark but now it’s sad! RIP Lou. You are wonderful.

Underworld’s Born Slippy might just be the most fun song ever. It has been one of my fave songs for as long as I can remember. My favourite memory of it is when I lived in on the Cornish coast of England, in a trailer, surrounded by all my trailer living fellow travelers. A diverse mix of Aussies, South Africans, Canadian and Brits that ended up on the hippie coast of England and it was, by far, the most fun summer ever. Parties, drinking, shitty cars, living in trailers, debauchery (I’m just going to stop there)…it coincidentally coincided with going to the hospital for my alcohol poisoning debacle! Silly teenager. Anyways, we decided to do a field trip to the surfer, hippie town of New Quay to go out clubbing. We got to the club, waited for the inspiration to dance and mingle to take over and just as we entered the dance floor that song starts. It feels like a warm blanket of a techno enveloping me in a foreign country. It felt like all my time researching traveling to the UK was paying off at that exact moment. Like I was at the exact right spot to be at the time in my life. It was the craziest feeling ever, it may have been helped by the amount we had consumed, but it was still amazing. I have never had that feeling again. Anyways, we spent the rest of the night dancing like there was no tomorrow. Argh but there ended up being a tomorrow and it felt yucky! 

Hennie’s 5 year anniversary of being in Canada is today!! 5 years!! We got married, have not got divorced, have been to South Africa twice and have no kids….winning! And Hennie can apply for his Citizenship soon too! Hazaa!