Just Say Mew

First of all:

הראל סקעת פה

It’s called giving the people what they want, since yesterday my hits from Israel outnumbered all but my hits from the States and the trend continues somewhat today. Clearly, they’re not looking for Surly Snobby. This is weird, since I’m Canadian but I’m certainly not complaining. I’ll accept all the attention I can get.

And now for something completely different. As the temperature creeps up into the high 20s – practically arctic for Toronto and the end of July/beginning of August (sigh what happened to our summer?) – I set up my improvised air conditioner. Now, as soon as you see the words “improvised air conditioner”, you should immediately know that you’re about to read another story about Noudnic the Cat.

I realize that I write about him a lot. It’s not that I’m a weird cat person, a topic Maktaaq deals with (along with a set of intriguing notions on the differences between men and women). It’s just that he’s far more interesting than TV, believe it or not. Remember, Noudnic is a creature that cannot get enough of chasing the reflection off my watch face up the walls and around the floors. This, believe me, is far more gripping than watching “Trading Spouses“, for example, a show that should never have been allowed to exist. If only I had a time machine and the ability to bend all of Southern California to my will.

I’m rather bored today. No temp or freelance work has appeared this week and the check for some other freelence I did months ago that I was supposed to receive two weeks ago has yet to appear. My entertainment options are therefore rather limited right now. I don’t feel like doing my “serious” writing since and I really should be cleaning my place for a guest I’ll be receiving tomorrow. And, as I’ve already explained, TV is no option. So to amuse myself my mind travels back in time, the closest I can get to that machine I’d hoped for in the previous paragraph, to my late teens when I was still living in Winnipeg and with my friend Happier-not-Teaching whom I’ve known since I was a foetus.

One thing that Happier-not-Teaching, whose name back then was either The Lizard Queen or The Magnificent Colourer of Milk, and I definitely did not do when we were bored was smoke a lot of pot. Oh no, cool and open-minded parents who, on a totally, completely undeniably unrelated topic, used to be hippies! Of course we filled our down time with studies and fervent prayer. Never ever, ever in ten million zillion thousand years would it ever have crossed our pure little minds, all fresh with the glory of G-d, to smoke so much pot that we would turn into hysterical giggle machines, reduced to exploding with laughter at what we perceived to be hilarious faces or strange-sounding words in the English language (Basmati! Rutabaga!). In fact, one evening we didn’t smoke so much while watching “The Exorcist” that we spent a sleepless night warding off imaginary pea soup-spewing demons with rotting skin and milky eyes. That never happened. Ever.

Well, at my advanced age of way-to-close-to-my-mid-30s I couldn’t smoke pot even if I wanted to. The last time I tried (I swear I didn’t inhale), it turned me into a stuttering, paranoid zombie, which is even less fun than it sounds. And so to finally get the story around to Noudnic, I decided that the most entertaining thing for me to do was push drugs to my cat. All I have to do is open the cupboard that contains his catnip and he sings like Mariah, but with more restraint as well as the ability to respect the natural phrasing of the music as well as the ear drums of the music.

I used to have a cat named Robin whom catnip would transform into a little calico blur zooming through the air at just below the speed of sound. But not Noudnic. This valiant hunter stares out the window, ambles about the apartment, purring with his tail straight up, and every once in a while gives me a little look through squinty eyes and chirps the kitty version of “Dude, I am so stoned!” before passing out with his head in one of my shoes. Smart, Noudnic. You’re the poster cat for an anti-drug campaign if I’ve ever seen one. Just say “mew”.

I told you I’d fit Noudnic into that overly-verbose mess somehow.

A Star is Born

My tenth future husband, הראל סקעת , has won the semi finals of כוכב נולד and Surly has been inundated with visits from now-disappointed Israelis searching for him. Apparently Surly rates higher on the search engines than his does. As flattering as that is, and as tempted as I may be to wax philosophically on the virtues of romantic destiny, I say this instead: הראל סקעת fans, אני מיצטער , and welcome to קנדה . Go פה instead.

Nope. Can’t be destiny.

The Storm That Passion Did Begin

Sent to me by my friend, Sexy Librarian, who is much too smart for her own good, is this poetry mood matcher. Here is my result – I have no comment as to the accuracy or lack thereof of the conclusion drawn by this cyber-robot/database other than to say, “Oh great. A love poem”:

Amoretti VIII

More than most fair, full of the living fire,
Kindled above unto the maker near:
No eyes but joys, in which all powers conspire,
That to the world naught else be counted dear.

Through your bright beams doth not the blinded guest,
Shoot out his darts to base affections wound:
But Angels come to lead frail minds to rest
In chaste desires on heavenly beauty bound.

You frame my thoughts and fashion me within,
You stop my tongue, and teach my heart to speak,
You calm the storm that passion did begin,
Strong through your cause, but by your virtue weak.

Dark is the world, where your light shined never;
Well is he born, that may behold you ever.

Edmund Spenser (1552 – 1559)

Let the robot tell you how you feel today.

Un bon petit repas

Entrée
Entrée in French gastronomical terms means “appetizer” and not “main course” as it has come to mean to English-speaking North Americans (and maybe English speakers elsewhere too; I don’t know) for some reason I’ve never managed to understand. It literally means “entrance”.

In any case, check out my fancy new pointer (not available with Mozilla, apparently). Oooooo! Swish! And it only takes a few seconds to get annoying. But oh! the fun you can have on those few seconds. Try spinning it in circles and racing it as rapidly as possible across your monitor. This is my pretty way of saying that I need a new life.

Premier service
My major trip home – rather more appropriately “Home I”, Winnipeg, as opposed to, Montréal, “Home II (The Return of Home! It’s not just back! It’s back with a vengeance!)” – I watch too much TV – for the High Holidays is booked and confirmed. I could almost hear my father telephonically fall off his chair when I agreed to go to shul with him. And I’ll fast bigger’n'better than the rest of them all on Yom Kippur too (in a contrite and observant manner, of course).

Deuxième service
Despite yesterday’s bloggie, I am not starving to death. What’s more, many of my socks are darnable and those that aren’t are damnable (buddum-chhhhhhhhhhhhh). Plus, I actually can afford to buy a pair or two every so often. I simply wanted to use an image that most people would be able to relate to and have a reaction to without reaching for the melodrama of, say, a top-hatted landlord twirling his moustache as he plans to tie me to the train tracks because I can’t pay rent. Manipulative imagery. Your sign of a Quality Blog®.

Of course, that way a Mountie, played by the first of my ten (so far) future husbands, model and Bollywood actor Ajay would ride up on his trusty steed, pop the evil landlord in the kisser and untie me from the tracks. We would gaze at each other as we rode off into the sunset, hoping that the horse knew where he was going since we were gazing at each other. And that’s my desert.

If I Were a Rich Man

When I was a kid I wanted to have a pet dinosaur. This was completely impractical, of course, simply because my parents would have never had enough money to feed a dinosaur. Children don’t worry about such practicalities. They just imagine what they imagine and although the big bad world starts ripping apart their dreams at birth, the effects aren’t noticeable until near the end of adolescence.

After years of adult pragmatism, I certainly have enjoyed being impractical. Now, however, I don’t want to face the fact that all my socks have holes and my savings are almost drained, my writer’s salary (the oxymoron, sign of a quality bloggie) allowing me to buy only one single sock once every six months. Good thing almost all of my nine future husbands are rich.

Speaking of which, I now have a tenth. His name is Harel Skaat ( הראל סקעת ) and he one of the finalists in the Israeli version of those horrid “we’ll turn you into a one hit wonder” vocal pyrotechnics shows, imaginatively called “A Star Is Born” (כוכב נולד). He’s a little younger than most of the men I regularly marry, but he’s legal.

One day I’m going to have to enumerate all my future husbands before there are too many of them.

Cats Are Stupid

Stupid Week is drawing to a close, thank God. Let us now recap what we have learned during this momentous week. We have learned that while people are stupid as a group (well, we already knew that), men as a subgroup may or may not be stupid. If one happens to be a man who hypothesizes that men may indeed not be stupid, one must be prepared to see one’s daily hits immediately cut themselves almost in half.

One must also be prepared to wake up one morning to read outraged, indignant emails while savouring one’s morning coffee. Since I’d already covered people being stupid in yesterday’s entry, and for a much more pointed reason, I simply clicked my heels in glee. I must really be a writer! I get hate mail now! Not my first, mind you, or at least not my first blog-related hate mail. This inspired that. Without realizing it, people who write to me expressing a strong opinion are treating me like the editor of a publication that has published an article that has struck a chord. Their hatred of me legitimizes my writing credientials. Huzzah! I’m like Dan Savage! What else could a bitchy aspiring writer wish for (aside from a little more money)?

Perhaps it’s true, however, that I occasionally go a little overboard in my scathing reviews of humanity. After all, this is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, which – according to that book I reviewed so scathingly and am now beginning to enjoy very much (mmm . . . my words are delicious although the writing still sucks) – is the dawning of humanity’s search for truth after the Age of Pisces which apparently was the Age of Being Bossed Around.

It may be true that humanity may be committing slow, painful suicide by poisoning its home and by cutting its nose off to spite its face. Humanity my be so bound by its own and various sets of ideologies and dogma that it cannot even begin to contemplate the truth, no matter how minor, of another point of view. It may willing to shout loud and even murder to stamp out any opposition to unconsidered dogma. Finally, humanity may have begun my day for me by sending me an email that began, “Dear f—face! [ed. note: "dear"?] You hate women!” but I still loves it . . . despite its stupidity.

And speaking of stupid, cats are stupid. My cat, in particular is stupid. Thus far I have painted him as a clown, as a predatory teacher, and as an interior decorator but let’s face it, he’s pretty dumb. Now before I get another tsunami of indignant emails (I love that I get to write that now!), starting, “Dear f—face! You hate cats!” let it be known that I love Noudnic with ever fibre of my being. When it’s his time, because if all goes well in my life I really should outlive him, I will be devastated and writing about for months. However, we are discussing a creature whose favourite game is to fish out crumpled pieces paper from the recycling bin and tear them to shreds, and whose second favourite game is to be tossed, purring with tail straight up in excitement, onto my bed and to scamper back to me, mewing for more. May we move on now?

That aside, Noudnic is stupid and here is the proof. After a very late start, Toronto is finally having the kind of summer to which it is accustomed. The mercury is busting out of the thermometers and people are crawling down the street, swooning under a humid layer of car fumes. I have no air conditioner, because I am morally opposed to them (as in, I don’t have enough money for one; they are therefore evil) and so I set up quite an ingenious system, if I so say so myself, system that actually had the desired effect.

I closed all the windows in my apartment to let none of my anticipated cold air out. I then filled my bathtub with cold water, which lowered the temperature in the bathroom by several degrees (both Centigrade and Fahrenheit). I then set up a series of strategically placed fans all over the apartment end voilà!, a cool breeze circulating through the entire place. As I said, men aren’t stupid.

Those who have already picked up on the keywords, “cat”, “stupid”, “fill”, and “bathtub” get a gold star and don’t have to read any more of this entry if they have other things they need to do.

There I was, sitting comfortably at my computer, a cool breeze blowing though where my hair once was, sipping on a nice, cold iced tea, chuckling over the apparently deliberate stylistic choices of yet another vexed gender divide-related email (“When will you learn that women are not your jokes to make?”), when I heard scratch! scratch! scratchscratchscratch! SPLASH! splishsplashsplishsplash! Mew! Mew! Mew!. Half a split second later a pathetic, water-logged creature scuttled across the living room and into the kitchen where he promptly began to chase his tail. I suppose he didn’t recognize it as his own because it was so wet; since he was on edge, he decided that the tail would have to pay). Round and round and round he went without noticing that his little silver kitty maelstrom was sliding directly towards his food dish and boom!, little nuggets of cat food flew into the air as tornado collided with bowl. This was too much for his poor nerves. He hissed at his scattered sustenance and darted under the desk where he cowered, his ear flattened.

After I’d picked myself off the floor and the laughter cramps had subsided somewhat, I coaxed him out from his refuge and brushed him until he was only damp. He spent the rest of the afternoon purring at my feet, staring at nothing. But I think even he would admit that he was cool, even if he didn’t know why. Stupid cat.

That was pretty funny, eh? Even though we may all hate each other with blind, murderous rage, there is still room for humour and, dare I say it, love. Happy Stupid Week, folks! Go for a walk in the park and throw bread at the pigeons.

People Are Stupid

Video Shows 9/11 Security Check

Have a look at how easy it is for both genders to be reduced to ashes. This is the world we’re giving to our children. With the arrogant and dehumanizing justification of brutal violence on all sides of our poor world’s latest pissing matches, those of us who aren’t killed by invasion or blown up on our way to work will know someone who will be. All our differences will by smoothed away by the worms, our opinions carried away on the rising smoke.

Men Aren’t Stupid

I’m not quite sure why I was surprised that no one rushed to defend men after my last entry, entitled in my usual delicate manner “Men Are Stupid”. After all, had I written something called “Women Are Stupid”, or even “Gals Are Vain, Insincere Flowers Who Need Our Guidance”, there’s a distinct possibility that I would have been pilloried, my blog burnt in effigy (what would that effigy be, I wonder) with my mother, bless her heart, leading the ravenous, blood-lusty pack. Before the lynching begins, please note that I do not believe that, I was just trying to make a point. That point is that while humour that pokes fun at women is sexist and evil, humour that pokes fun at men is politically correct and completely acceptable in all segments of society.

Now before someone brings up the point that I myself am the one who scribbled an entry entitled “Men Are Stupid”, let me be the first to say that, in certain contexts, off-colour humour can be quite funny. I do enjoy the odd Jewish joke – I’m not talking about the Wise Men of Chelm here – and it doesn’t even have to be told by another Jew. But the context must be right.

The wrong context was last week when Médecin-sans-frontières and I were at a bar chatting with a bartender with whom we are acquainted. The bartender’s description of demanding customer was that he was “a typical J.A.P.” and the only thing he could back it up with was the statement that he wasn’t referring to me (a point that doesn’t seem to obvious to me), indicating that he might truly believe that such a description is an accurate one. The context was also wrong because he doesn’t know me very well and should therefore save his delicate humour for his friends.

But I was referring to men. I have another example. When I was still in university, when dinosaurs ruled the Earth and God hadn’t yet invented grass or flowers, I took a seminar course led by a female prof with eight or nine female co-conspirators. Male jokes were told with glee and when I would speak on matters related to the actual course, I was often dismissed as I “thought that” just because I was a man. It was a linguistics course, which is mostly math, believe it or not, and therefore has no business in the Mars-Venus divide. At first I took it good-naturedly. But as the semester continued I began to feel increasingly uncomfortable. When I finally stood up for myself, I was told that now I “knew how it felt”.

Well, I grew up the butt of practically every joke at school until I reached high school where, for some reason I never understood but was very happy for, I suddenly became cool and popular. Unlike most people, I quite enjoyed high school, but maybe it’s because I was relieved. So I think I already had a fair idea of what it’s like to be dismissed in inane grounds. The statement that it was OK to treat me any way because of my gender was along the lines of saying to a woman, “Gosh! You gals are so cute when you try to use your little brains!” If it was indeed simply humour, which I’m not convinced it was, the context was inappropriate due to the fact that it was a seminar class and that this “humour” did not take into account any of the myriad of factors and past experiences that show us all to be human beings, not penises or vaginas with legs.

Now, back to “Men Are Stupid”. Since it was clear that I am a man and that I obviously don’t believe that men are stupid any more than I believe that women are wispy, simple beings, I suppose there was no need to rush to the defence of men or our brainpower although it would have been fun if someone had. So I guess, like most of what I write, there was no need for this entry. Now go back to work!

Men Are Stupid

I should not at all be surprised at how superficial men can be. After all, I am a man and it therefore must follow that I occasionally suffer from the same debilitating lack of judgment, my brain cells impaired by that pesky y-chromosome, my neurons puttputting along in a valiant attempt to fire off and allow me to make sense of my environment. D’uuuuh . . . shiny!

The circumstance that has brought these thoughts to the forefront of my testosterone-addled brain – true intellect is always lurking back there somewhere in the fogs of pornography and . . . um, well nothing else, if truth be told . . . that pass as thought processes in my noggin – is the amount of male attention I have received since yesterday morning. I used to have no problem whatsoever with male attention. In fact, I enjoyed it when it was welcome and I had absolutely no difficulties sending unwanted gentleman callers on their merry way. I suffer some terrible stage fright, which was a problem when I was a musician, but I would enjoy walking down Church Street, noticing the heads are swivelling my way and remaining there. But aside from my Cabbagetown adventure, I hadn’t been experiencing so much of it recently. Until yesterday morning at approximately 10:17AM, that is.

10:17AM is approximately the time when the clippers starting mowing off my gorgeous, ever-expanding locks, leaving me with 1mm on the sides and back and 1.5mm on the top. The greenhouse on my head was just too much for my poor delicate composition. Now I look exactly like the handsome young gentleman to the left of these words. Why is it that I keep finding pictures of myself on Swedish soccer sites? I’m no soccer star.

OK, I don’t really look like Olof Malleberg (thanks SparkleMpls for bringing him to my attention, by the way). I look more like I’ve just joined the Israeli army (I cannot imagine myself joining any army, by the way). But the lack of distracting tresses all every which way on and around my head shows – and it grieves me to write this stereotype – my nose to be somewhat more prominent than I had remembered. Plus, the sun has managed to break through the layers of sunscreen I slather onto every square nanometre of my exposed skin and my summer colouring does indeed appear to point to some ancient Middle Eastern origin.

In any case, I digress as usual. My walk to the Starfucks’s after my Samson impression was an eye-opening one. Men whose gaze used to go right through me when I had a nice early-70s moptop going now observed me predatorily. Little did they know that I was impervious to their powers of trash and smut. Months as an ugly duckling have reminded me that there is attention and then there is attention. Those who found me undesirable when my hair didn’t fit an unwritten Queer Eye norm do not become more attractive to me simply because I pass evening gown contest in a silly beauty contast, all because my hair is now acceptable for a gay man. It’s just hair.

Only one day later and I find it inconceivable that I, a strong-willed, independent person such as I am, should have ever regretted lack of attention from these self-centred bozos. But I wonder how many intriguing guys I’ve glossed over simply because I didn’t like their hair or clothes. Stupid y-chromosome. D’uuuuuuh . . . pretty!

Scrumptious Éclairs

Yesterday I went to see a mediocre yet well-intentioned film called “La Finestra di fronte” with occasional lurker, Sexy Librarian. It appeared at first as if it were going to be about an elderly Jewish gay concentration camp survivor with Alzheimer’s who returns to Rome sixty years after the Nazis swept through that city and sent the entire Jewish Ghetto to the camps. He returns, lost and confused, to face the demons of his past, including that horrible night (obviously) and searching for the boyfriend he’d abandoned that night in an effort save fellow the very Ghetto residents who had scorned him his entire adult life because of his homosexuality. Now that would have been an interesting movie! Instead, it turned out to be about a woman who tries to save her marriage to one of my future husbands by having an affair with another of my future husbands and then by becoming a pastry chef. Incongruous? That’s what I thought as they tried to draw the various themes together towards the end.

As you may have noticed, I got myself a whole bunch of future husbands in this movie. There was Massimo Poggio and Billo Thiernothian who appear so shy in my presence that they have posted no pictures of themselves on the net. Then there was Ivan Bacchi who spent far too little time onscreen and far too much time wearing clothing. And then there was butch mechanic with a soft and squishy heart, Filippo Nigro; I’d save my marriage to him by becoming a pastry chef too, preparing for him the most scrumptious éclairs ever. Finally, there was Raoul Bova whom I’d admired since I first began stalking him after seeing him on a commercial for “Under the Tuscan Sun“. After I’d seen the movie just for him (and believe me, he was definitely the only reason to see that drivelly piece of fluff), I still wasn’t sure if he liked me “like that”. Now, however, I know that he does like me in that way and I greatly look forward to our blissful life together.

Now speaking of “Under the Tuscan Sun”, the most entertaining part of the entire movie, aside from Raoul of course, was listening to the people in front of me buy their tickets. They strode up to the wicket, slapped down the forty trillion zillion dollars and seventeen cents it costs to see a movie these days, and proudly asked for two tickets to – I am not making this up – “Under the Tucson Sun”. Both the nice woman selling tickets and I managed to maintain our composure until I asked for a ticket to “Under the Albuquerque Sun” (yes, I know they’re in different states). She told me I’d made her day. Hmmm . . . maybe you had to be there, but it was really, really funny!

But back to the real Italian movie I’d been talking about. Sexy Librarian, who’d liked the movie slightly less than I did, still found it pertinent to scold me for all my husband-hunting throughout, unjustly accusing me of superficiality. But as the movie was so much less than it could have been – the two separate storylines never gelled and, in fact, detracted from one another – I was forced to look elsewhere for the movie’s strong point: a whole buncha really hot men to towering twenty feet above me as I sat in the darkened theatre. Always look on the bright side.

But the movie did get me thinking a little. In North America for the past year or so the media has been diverting much of our attention from the fact that we maybe blown up at any second or arrested or invaded for not agreeing with a certain government on how to deal with the fact that we may be blown up at any second to the issue of same-sex marriage (for an interesting discussion on the recent failure of Bush’s failed Constitutional ban of same-sex marriage chez my neighbour to the south on Hot Abercrombie Chick. Then check out my brilliant, thoroughly under-appreciated comment on the post – it was the wrong audience for me). Much of the discussion has revolved around the view that the sole purpose of marriage is procreation. This seems simple-minded to me, but then again I have never procreated nor, I suppose, will I ever. This certainly does explain, however, loveless arranged marriages (whose actual purpose was to create alliances between clans and amass wealth) and it does not address right of married couples who cannot or chose not to reproduce their little devil DNA mergers, running to and fro terrorizing cats and eating bugs. It seems to me that marriage is really about stable and loving companionship and sharing throughout the course of one’s life.

One scene in the movie demonstrating this beautifully was towards the beginning when the elderly gentleman has a little breakdown in front of a store closed for the night, crying to be let in, that we later discover was owned by the boyfriend he hadn’t seen since 1943. No one wants to be that man, having lived a full life yet ultimately alone. The fact that I am almost 34 and just found last week a white pubic hair (I enjoy the gradual silvering of my temples but it is completely unnecessary for the rest of my body to age as rapidly) leads me to believe that I may indeed be that man in forty years. Now before you say, “No way, Surly. You’re brilliant and witty and kind and, like, totally hot! Any guy would be lucky to snag you!” let me say thanks but a) you don’t know that for certain, especially since gay men are generally much less forgiving than women are of the slow disintegration of others’ beauty due to age, b) I will never be ultimately alone since I have very many excellent friends and a pretty cool family to boot, and c) that’s not really what I’m writing about.

What I really mean to say is that most humans want companionship and even the most antisocial of us emerge blinking from out lairs every once in a while. The basis of this loving institution is love, not “The Brood“. We all want companionship and because humans are social creatures and basically insecure, we all want out companionship to be recognized by those around us. This is one reason why civil union is not enough and why just living your life with someone isn’t enough either. Straight couple may choose common law, and it’s their choice. They can have their wedding or they can choose not to have their wedding. In most of the world gay men and women do not have this choice in most of the world. Gay men and women merit the consideration of the rest of the world and the recognition that our relationships are based on the same emotions and the same dreams and desires as straight relationships. All . . . um, how many are there now? . . . nine of my fantasy future husbands agree and my real fantasy future husband – Taye Diggs’ gay, Cabbagetown-dwelling doppelganger perhaps? – agrees as well. So all in all, I guess it was a pretty good movie.