drag

I somewhat recently had an opportunity to dress in drag for the first time in, like, forever. An interesting opportunity it was. Having been graciously loaned a rather smart, grey, pin-striped suit, jaunty hat and slick shoes by a male friend my size, I tried to do it justice by doing proper drag. None of this still hot but boxier version of femme stuff for me. Boobs were bound, hair was tucked. I could have done more with make-up and faux facial hair, but it was like-hell degrees out and I couldn’t be arsed to go that far.

I was surprised to find that I as weirded out by the new, me in a suit with a weird shape. Like, really weirded out. Last time I’d done drag was shortly after my eldest was born when I didn’t feel very shapely anyway. I was still carrying a lot of post-partum pounds, so the effect was much less drastic. This time? I felt self-conscious. Seriously self-conscious for about 20 minutes as I padded around my friend’s home, trying to get ready, but going back to the mirror every few minutes to look again. I even thought about taking it all off, undoing the binding and making a sexier, curve-wrapping thing to wear out of the binding fabric I’d brought instead. Then I thought “WWFKD?” (what would Frida Kahlo do?), sucked it up, got over myself, did it anyway and had a blast.

Needless to say, the experience has had me thinking a lot. I think about our relationships with our bodies, what kind of power we assign them, what kind of power others assign them, and so on. In the last year and a bit of Big Life Changes ™, I’ve had to rethink and renegotiate my relationship with my body and how I project that. Singlehood does that because it drastically changes everyone else’s relationship with it. The single body gets uniquely different attention (and sometimes a lot more of it) than the taken body. Just as I’d got comfy, the sudden removal of that comfort of knowing how to dress every knook and cranny of the self in the face of what the tribe expects had me feeling very vulnerable.

My mind immediately juxtaposed this with the exposure I have to the raging hormones and the challenges of the ever-changing self-perceptions of the gaggle of teenagers that are in and out of my home on a regular basis. All of the donned bravado, the trying on for size of clothing, makeup, behaviours and language in the face of that vulnerability becomes very real and very explicable when you’re forced to feel it again. They do an awful lot of sucking it up, getting over themselves, doing it anyway and having a blast (or not, as the case may be), no? Probably a metric fuck ton of that on a daily basis.

It was a great exercise in the shaking up of self-perception.

It was a fantastic parenting lesson.

I look forward to doing it again in September.

Peace,

m

zomg! adoraballz!!!

…as the kids say.

Even though this puggle follows me to the washroom and whimpers whenever I leave the room, the man-child is Vizzini’s go-to for playtime:

That last pic is ‘Zzini’s ‘I von zee bone, but lost mah friend!’* look. Dude idolizes that kid.

*The dog speaks with an unidentifiable accent. What do you expect from a dog named Vizzini?

kids with guns

More specifically, my kids with guns as they’re out skeet shooting with my father as I type.

I know, right? MY kids. I have a hard time reconciling it with my wet, liberal sentimentalities too.

My dad and I simply don’t talk gun politics anymore. We’ve reached the point where we get that our views are what they are and are diametrically opposed and, quite frankly, that makes for really crap debates. Bo-ring.

I was raised with guns. I shot skeet and trap and handgun and compound bow. And I liked it. And I turned out ok, right? So, even though I worry about what the recoil will do to their tender little shoulders, or them taking the butt to the chin, or A FREAK ACCIDENT RESULTING IN ONE OF THEM RETURNING WITH NO FACE!…I’m ok with it because I know they’ve got the best teacher in the world. A teacher who has been doing it for a lifetime and who will help them develop a healthy respect (and, dare I say, fear) for firearms and what they can do.

Update: kids have returned and no faces were lost, but they were fed cappuccinos and are bouncing off the walls. Apparently the son shot about 40/100 and the daughter gave up because she was scared by the recoil/the gun was too long/it was more fun to press the button that makes the pigeons flee the trap house.

Dotey dote dote

Last night we had the pleasure of bearing witness to the daughter’s second rock performance.  Her school has the fortune of having a teacher on staff so completely dedicated to steeping the lives of children in music and so completely insane to put together a rock band made up of 8-12 year olds.  The music was 100% original, written and performed by the students.  They even came up with a cheeky name for the band which played up on the insane teacher’s last name’s etymological proximity to the word ‘ass’.  They done good.

The ramp up to it was a funny thing to bear witness to as well; the daughter getting up super early yesterday morning to prepare and look the part, hunting around for anything RED she could find.  She needed RED!  Some reds just weren’t red enough.  Her brother busted her chops all morning with things like ‘you’re only wearing 5 red things.  You’re clearly not red enough’ then ‘your reds are clashing’.  Not being able to take a joke under the circumstances, these comments would throw her into another mad hunt for REDDER that RED things, muttering the lyrics to the songs all through it.  Her brother is so supportive.

I felt excited and nervous for her all day.  I suffer terrible stage fright and just can’t imagine what it takes for her to get up on stage, belt out some tunes and play an instrument she just learned 2 months ago.  Luckily she escaped that gene somehow and, though she admits to being nervous, she gets up there and makes it all look effortless.  She’s one of those kids who compensate for the the ones just going through the motions with her stamina & commitment to rockin’ out.

This means so many other things too.  One of her fellow vocalists is very trained, very talented, and very competitive.  She’s also one of the daughter’s best friends.  That my kid could get up there and give her friend a run for her money kinda blows my mind.

And she wrote a song!  This is something she kept to herself as a surprise for performance night.  It was a really intelligent song about being imagined in this King Crimson-meets-The Flaming Lips kind of style.  My kids writes my music.  Crazy.

My thoughts since the show have been swamped with thoughts of holding her as a baby and wondering what she would grow up to be and that now, at almost 5’8″ and borrowing my clothes, she’s simply the best her she possibly could be.  Which means I done good too.

new home + friends don’t let friends do Spitz ™

Huzzah!  I did it.  There’s, like, stuff & junk living at cushti.ca now.  Not much beyond the blog but i’m pretty proud of that for the moment.  Welcome to the new home.

I decided to maintain the blog through wordpress to ease the learning curve a little.  I knew that I wouldn’t get anything done if I had too much new going on and the fact that the new job has a learning curve of about 377 degrees I thought I’d err on the side of caution for the personal stuff.

I have to give special thanks to Nelson at hostpapa support who was not only apologetic but also extremely helpful in dealing with some of the glitches I’d come up against in their month of losing admin staff and server issues.  More props need to go out to bytesforall for creating an amazing, highly configurable theme & this dude who developed a lovely little twitter widget which slipped right into said theme like butter allowing me to dispense of the unsightly rss feed which was doing its job on the .com platform.  Oh, and to the mister, of course, for providing me with web hosting.  I’m also thankful to have had excuses to indulge my not-so-inner brush and font junkie.  Last night I dreamt of finding a way to administer them intra-venously.  For real.

So the other thing I have to talk to you about is poop.

Or a lack there of, as it were.  I’m playing hookie today in order to also play nurse to my still-stoned son who thought it apt to wolf down almost an entire bag of hot & spicy spitz sunflower seeds, shells & all.  This lead to an impacted bowel and a late-night trip to the emergency ward of the hospital for manual removal of the blockage with the help of a lot of morphine.  Needless to say a certain someone won’t be eating sunflower seeds any time soon.  Aren’t you glad I’m blogging again?

what’s with today, today?

This is not the Saturday I envisioned.  I was going to get ambitious & grab some groceries, put together some casseroley things for the freezer, meet my self-imposed deadline of getting my website up & running & then indulge in some hardcore chilling out with the newly aquired Springsteen tunes for Guitar Hero.  So far none of that seems to be on the cards.  I received a call earlier from the baby daddy letting me know that he’s made a doctor’s  appointment for the eldest sprog for first thing tomorrow morning as the chest thing he’s been battling has escalated.

On one hand I’m cheering on the inside as this is the first time in the 8 years the ex & I have been separated that he’s taken the initiative & made the appointment without my hand forcing it.  It’s not a judgement call as such; his intentions have always been logical & empathetic & I do appreciate the spirit in which his actions (or lack thereof) are intended, but the hand-holding became tired quickly.  On the other hand I really resent not being the parent doing the care giving & being in the position of fretting at arm’s length.  I worry that his fever will spike as it’s wont to do.  I worry that he’s not getting enough liquids.  I worry that tomorrow morning isn’t soon enough.  I worry about stupid shit even though I know that papa is well equipped with the skills to deal with this & my inability to let it go has thrown my day off completely.

I’ve been sort of good, though.  I’ve only made one phone call to assess the whole fever thing & insist he be given something to keep it from spiking.  The kid’s notorious for going from normal to 187 degrees in 2.2 seconds flat so I’m ok with nagging on that score.  I still somehow feel like a horrid mum for not being there for him.  I’m a bundle of nerves & distraction…so much so that I almost went across the street to purchase some paper towels after walking by the package of 678 rolls stood in the middle of the kitchen floor 4938 times.  Parenthood is not fair.

In an (futile) effort to keep my mind off all of this I’ve been oggling Alexander McQueen’s fall line.  Though I admit the emotional rawness I’m feeling at the moment may have something to do with me weeping at it’s brilliance, I think I’d still do it under different circumstances.  Check this out:

Love those organic lines & tailored details.

She’s like some haute nomad ready to take her leave of the steppes.

And then there’s my favourite because it’s like McQueen took Fantômas…

…or Arsène Lupin…

…& reversed their gender then breathed Erté’s dying breath into the lot of it to produce this:

Fabulous & brilliant, non?

I completely forgot that Corine tagged in her post about what was learned in Ohate.  I suck.  Yes I do.

It’s kind of an overwhelming topic at this juncture as ’08 has brought many changes in circumstances my way after having quit my job as a corporate whore in late ’07, settling in to living with the mister, a child going into his teens and developing an intimate relationship with Sick Kids Hospital as the result of an injury my daughter sustained.  I also have that annoying habit of learning from other people’s experience.  I learned a lot, but I’ll try to keep this short and sweet.

– You know that whole me being lucky with money thing that you’re all giving me the gears for?  Yeah, I learned that’s pretty much true.

– It’s really healthier for all of humanity to keep my standards non-negotiable.

– I’ve got an amazingly supportive group of friends.

– I can’t be friends with everyone.

– I relearned how to let shit go.

– Leaving a bad job is like leaving a bad relationship.  All those steps of grieving and everything.  True story.

– My kids have picked up a lot of my bad habits but some good ones too.

– I’m sensitive and I’d like to stay that way.

– Walking around with your heart on one sleeve and your vulnerabilities on the other can be exhausting but so worth it.

– My sense of reciprocity is skewed.

– I really am a quick study.

– I will never grow out of the desire to take on my children’s pain.

– Canada has been wearing blinders for far too long and we were not prepared for the shock of reintroduction to daylight.

– I finally got that damned shoe-tying thing down too.

they win

I’ve long maintained that the tree shouldn’t be set up until the 15th of December at the earliest.  What can I say?  I like a saturated Christmas.  This year the kids convinced me to do it earlier.  Today was the day.

I have to say it was fun to get out and dust off the baubles and trinkets which adorn our tree.

Most are handmade or have a story.

We rather luckily have a glassblowing friend who gifts us with these lovelies.

That’s a beaded one I made a lifetime ago.

That’s a kitschy, besparkled and bedazzled bit.  The product of a drunken craft night chez nous.

Everyone helped.

Taste testing the tree is always important.

Keen supervision is important too.

Some were confused.

I love our little tree and that everyone has a part to play in making it happen.  The mister does the lights.  I make the branches look pretty and add the ribbons.  The sprogs put on the ornaments and everything comes together beautifully.  Of course Ypsilon, being the new kitty, is going to be a huge big jerk and claim it all for herself, but it’s all in the name of a month of fun and merriment.  I’m for that.

weekend redux

I know, I know.  I exploit the son far too much, but he’s such a willing model and this scarf looks so good on him.

This weekend has been lovely so far.  Yesterday was our last day at market which is nice but sad to think about.  After hounding her for months the farmer’s market co-ordinator has still not given us an answer as to whether or not there’s space there for us through the winter, which is a shame because that’s sort of where we need to be.  I think we’ll just show up and be persistent and give her puppy dog eyes until she succumbs.  I’ll even bring the puggle if I need to.

Yesterday was also the Arts in the Park event put on by the PAU.  It was great to actually meet the lovely, talented and rather foxy Jen of Almost Famous and Lucky Jackson even if she wouldn’t tell me where her blog lives lest I stalk it.  I also finally got to shake hands with Victoria of the Victory Art Supplies duo.  If you’re an artist and are reading this and need supplies, please visit their shop.  It smells like art even before you enter the door and their massive amounts of stock is so well organized for the creative mind it makes me weep.  You can’t get that at Michael’s.  I was stalked through the day by the delightful and oh-so-pregnant Miz K (yeah, I noticed.)  Happily so as I’m rather opportunistically hoping she has fun pics of ‘Zzini & Gracie playing.

It makes me happy that we have such events in our fair city and it was great to so many more than the usual faces represented.  Today won’t be quite as exciting – it’s all cleaning the kids’ rooms (which are complete disaster zones) and making spaghetti sauce.  For real.  Without the assistance of my mum or sister.  And it’s going to NOT suck, dammit.

caveat emptor

Originally uploaded by melanieiscushti

See him? That’s my 13 year old son. The hula skirt was his idea, I didn’t even have to pay him to get into it. In fact, he insisted on a coconut bra to go with it but we weren’t able to procure such an item on such short notice. He looks fun, doesn’t he? Fun & sensible & tactful & all of those other things one wishes most 13 year olds were and which I get compliments on with regard to his behaviour all the time. All of those things – until it comes to his social life, at which point all logic & common sense fly out the window and are replaced by hormones & hair gel. This is what happens when one turns 13. I know this because all of his friends engage in the same behaviours.

So today he received a third party invitation to a little soiree amongst classmates to mourn the end of summer & the beginning of the school year. The invite was third party because that’s what 13 year olds do – the young lady holding the party invited all of the girls personally and contacted the one boy from the class she has known since they were both knee-high to grasshoppers because their parents were neighbours to spread the news amongst the Y chromes. The party starts at 5pm. They’re going to the movies. Everything ends at 10pm. She lives somewhere on the north end of a street 2 blocks west of us which runs parallel to ours. End communication. That’s it, that’s all.

Holy fuck! When he went to parties when he was 12 we got cute little invitations on dollar store cards which cited where the party was, what hours it ran from, the phone number of the abode at which it would take place, the names of parents, and by god almighty, there was even an address written in there! Today it seriously, for reals, took from 11:03am, when he received the initial phone call, 3rd party invite, until 5:26pm when he left & 289,356 phone calls (if you do the math that ads up to a lot more than the minutes I get for ‘free’ on a monthly basis) in between to get all of the relevant details a parent needs to know in order to not have a coronary while her eldest, but still green behind the ears, child is out & about town. Holy fuck! I swear I’ve acquired that popping vein in my forehead my high school shop teacher had.