Monthly Archives: October 2008

If You Lost your Job is the Monday Meme


Leah McLaren is probably one of my favorite columnists. She writes for the Globe and Mail, and I envy the hell out of her job. I would love to be paid to have an opinion as opposed to just having one for free like I do here. She wrote a piece about long distance relationships back in August ago citing her own rather steady diet of them as the basis for her authority.

It seems that Ms. McLaren has always chosen her career over her relationship of the moment because she was not of the mindset that putting one’s relationship ahead of one’s chosen profession was the proper way to go about things. She felt that those who went in the opposite direction did so because they hated their jobs.

And that’s key.

Career versus job.

She makes the mistake that all people with careers do. They assume that the majority of the world works at something they deem a career rather than simply having a job that affords them (more likely not) with the means to live their lives. Most people I know have jobs. Jobs they would walk away from without a second thought if they won the powerball or someone offered to sugar-daddy them. Jobs can be great. They can be fun and stimulating and all those things that a career is – but they aren’t the core of who a person is. Not in my opinion.

I loved teaching. Lots of stuff about it I still miss. But it wasn’t my core. It didn’t fill me up. Or make me stupid enough to confuse work with life or value it above friends and family.

Very waspy way to look at things for a Canadian, I thought when I read her piece.

But I think many people have confused what is really important in this life. After all, if civilization as we know it ground to a halt in the next few years – and don’t think it couldn’t – what would you have going for you? If the job/career was gone? If you had to start with just the possessions in your possession right now and with the people who share your life right now. What then?

What does a life outside the model we have been conditioned to believe in look like?

The Hunchback of Fort Saskatchewan


I cannot remember my Grandma R., my mother’s mother without recalling her rounded shoulders. She had what they used to call a “dowager’s hump”. Mom used to say that if anything about growing old could be avoided, she truly hoped acquiring a hump was one of them. However, she believed the hunchback look was hereditary (and judging by many of my cousins perhaps she is right) and that she would one day be as afflicted as her own mother.

Of course her fears turned out to be nonsense. The tendency to severe rounding of the shoulders might be inherited but it isn’t destiny. Not according to my yoga instructor and my massage therapist, both of whom harp at me constantly to “stop hunching!” A refrain my mother practiced as well as she preached incidentally.

But I write therefore I hunch. Read Full Article

My Hollywood Wifestyle


It occurred to me not long ago that I had become the kind of woman that as a single working girl, and then a married working mom, I had scoffed at. My day was punctuated by the odd chore between the pursuit of totally hedonistic self-gratification. I was even hearing myself say,

“Perhaps I should get a part time job for fulfillment rather than actual need of a paycheck.”

Okay, I didn’t say it exactly like that, but it was the subtext. And when your own mother thinks that having a job would “get you out of the house a bit”, which is code for “you need a real life” as opposed to the fantasy life of a writer, then perhaps you do live in La-La Land and it’s time to re-evaluate.

When I ran my theory past my husband, that my life was…..well…..all about me…. in a way it hadn’t been since I was in university, he agreed.

“You are practically one of those Hollywood wives,” he told me.

“No! I am not,” I protested.

But I am. I could totally be Posh Beckham, if only my best friend would marry a questionably balanced Scientologist and agree to split dinner salads with me when we do lunch. Seriously, that’s all that is holding me back at this point. That and a BMI in the double digits. And laugh lines. If only I could get past that irrational fear of botulism injections. In my face. Read Full Article