Free girl in Paris

Hello sports fans. It's been a weird morning. Just now, the girls at work started talking about American Idol.

Of course I watched it last night.

I am slowly starting to sprout Idol gills, I am living, breathing, feeling it everyday. The pit of my stomach is a torrent of waves, My Brain is permanently locked on THAT moment...the one coming. I will stand in front of judges and they get to tell me if I'm good or not. No pressure, right? Only been more than twenty years of dreams built up, singing myself to sleep, walking with a determined gait and thinking that someday, maybe...

This is getting cheesy. It's fear that's making me think this way. I have to try and remember what James Taylor's brother said (he's a teacher in performance at an American University and of course I can't remember his name...the drawbacks of having your brother be James Taylor, I guess)...He said performance fear can be quelled if you realise as a performer that you are there to ENTERTAIN OTHERS. Yah, course, it helps that you do it for yourself..artistic integrity and all that..but you can't forget the audience...They are the ones that matter. Your fear is personal...tied up in fear of being inadequate.

Frankly, the fear dissipates a little when I think of it this way. Just gotta go and let them tell me whether or not I should bother with this singing thing. I'll probably always do it...But I'd really like to know whether my dream is a sac of shit that I'm carrying around as a crutch...something else I can be angry at if I don't succeed. I hope not. That's all I can do. Hope and try and do my best.


You think this is bad folks...the Idol obsession has JUST begun...



(When should I tell the girls at work?)

Hats Off

At first you said, "It's just a hat", when you could tell I was upset on the phone. I was. I was standing on a frozen street corner half a block away from my kickboxing lesson, tears welling up in my eyes, my throat full of brambles, trying to explain that the metro employee wouldn't help me. He just gazed at me, eyes half-mast, as if I'd woken him from a nap and shoved a piece of paper at me through the half-moon window with a number on it for the Lost and Found.

I'd remembered. I had even some recollection of something; perhaps that same colour, that burgundy, that wine colour falling off my lap as I scrambled to get off the crowded metro car. I went to see the metro employee right away after.

I remembered.

"It's just a hat," you said a second time now sounding more annoyed at me, probably because you think I'm a child and crying compounds that.

The Winter Olympics are taking place in Turin, Italy and today I went shopping at The Bay ( a department store recently bought by an American company)to purchase a warm sheepskin hat with the word CANADA embroidered in red across the front. The tag lets me know a part of the money I'm spending goes to Canadian athletes.

You haven't taken the hat off. You said you might sleep in it. But then the hats were mistaken.

I honestly didn't associate the two hats - for one thing you hadn't worn the hat I'd lost for over a year. It was a forgotten hat. I just thought, since you kept commenting on how nice the hats were in The Bay commercials that maybe I'd get you one. Actually, no. When I left this afternoon to go to my kickboxing class I said I'd stop by The Bay for the new coffee machine we wanted and you said to buy you the hat. I was allowed to have my card today to pay for it because I have been a good girl. Because I have not run off with my paycheck to a bar - to drink and drown, to drink and drown...

I like the hat on you. It looks good - better than I thought it would. It looks nice on you and I tell you so. You say nothing.

We watch a movie after I've made a simple dinner and I cry because the movie is sad, it's about racism and perception and love and hate and tears and hope. You ask me why I'm crying because it's only a movie and you think I'm foolish.

I try and tell you a story about one of the actors when the movie is over and it comes out all wrong and jumbled because I can tell you're not listening. I am distracted by the fact that you never look at me, that the air is heavy with your waiting imaptiently for me to finish and I can't contiue, I fall over my words and then nothing comes out and you say "Uh huh." as if I've ordered a Happy Meal. I want to scream but I decide to storm off and go to bed leaving a "you're welcome for the hat" in the room behind me.

You are standing in front of me, five minutes later, arms crossed and weight on one leg, saying "Why did you buy me the hat, M? Why?". I try to figure out what you are getting at because I know you are trying to make a point but I'm not sure what it is...And then you spit it out.


"Feeling guilty about losing my hat!?"


All the air came out of me like I was stuck with a knitting needle. I hadn't felt guilty! I felt bad that I lost your hat of course - that's why I said I was sorry...But that new hat, the one you were ready to sleep in, was not bought out of guilt. Not at all.

You think you are right. You think it's a guilty hat, a guilty girlfriend. But you are wrong and I'll just sit here crying because you think so little of me. Poor little me.

That's why you didn't say thank you. You thought you were owed this hat. Somebody owed you...even if it was just a hat.

Why'd you have to go and make me feel old?

The other day I got an email from an old friend.

Besides the supreme surprise of the email being so eloquent and moving, I was struck dumb by how much one seemingly silly thing really meant to me. He sold his car.

Not just any car...the most beautiful behemouth machine that man has ever made...the '63 Chevy Impala. As the email went on, its writer getting increasingly more drunk, as he explained that the Impala was destined for some dillhole who wanted to put hydraulics and a continental kit on her smokin body. Blasphemy! My friend says he thinks he is doing something smart, something responsible for the first time in his life.

My relationship with Bruce consisted partly of late night phone calls and me yelling at him for being such a grease monkey polluter and getting scared for my safety when he and Chad did burnouts or went snow bank hunting in winter. Of course there was other stuff... There was the fact that he was the only person who would listen to me in high school. When it came to nasty rumours and me losing old friends that I had known since elementary school because of heresay, he was the only one who told me they were jerks, the only one who made me forget the Heathers for a while. I owe him any residual sanity I had left after high school. I'm not sure if he even knows that.

I hated most of his girlfriends, one strawberry blond hair flipping bimbo in particular from a local private school made my blood boil. I also never really got over the fact that I was never invited out to his cottage with him and the boyzzz (and I know it wasn't always boys). And even though Chad lent me probably every HotRod magazine published since 1982 I was still a million miles away from being mechanically helpful to that car. I never drove her, I never fulfilled any weird fantasies of his by washing his car in Daisy Dukes...But I love that car and I loved that boy.

I think we even sort of tried to "date" once which lasted about an hour because we fought like cats and dogs. We ended up laughing it off, saying we should leave well enough alone. The granola and the grease-monkey weren't meant for each other after all.

I wish I could say something to comfort him about his baby being gone. Apparently the dillhole is picking it up today and I am reticent to call him in case I say the wrong thing. I can't muster the words to explain how much that car, how much he meant to me. I'm not sure there are any words.

My mother's high school boyfriend had a '63 Chevy Impala. And if the slighlty creepy crush my mother had on Bruce could get any more nostalgic, it did when he'd pull up in that machine.

Alas, it is a time gone by and me and life are much changed entities now. But, in some sort of ghostly fashion, I will always remember that car.

And I will never forget that boy.