What Weekend?
Topic: WC - Daily Practice
Sunday 8July07

I never did make it out of the house yesterday. I got a little caught up with the Tour de France and Live Earth and napping.

I caught three shows again today at the Fringe: Jem rolls up, Kiwi Joker; and Caberlesque. Carberlesque is by far the best show I've watched thus far. It's a combination of Caberet and Burlesque. The girls are really talented and very funny. The songs are risque but not too much swearing considering.

Overall it's been a fun if quick weekend. I'm catching the replay of stage 1 of the Tour de France then climbing into bed for a new work week. Dusk Dances is also this week, which is a bunch of dance performances in a park. I caught it last year and it was awesome so Goldfish and I will be meeting up and checking that out again.

Not too much to say. I realize that seeing three shows is my maximum. Maybe if I luck out and catch all great shows, one after the other, I'd have more stamina but alas, so far I haven't

EY

Mercury my friend
Oh and Mercury Retrograde ends on the 9th. It'll take to the 14th (the new moon) before everything feels back to normal. Does that mean I lose all the weird men and their advances? Yeppers baby!

It's morning already?
Topic: WC - Daily Practice
Saturday 9:15am
I went to bed just after midnight and my eyes didn't open again until 7:11am. I was lying in bed surrounded by cats and most groggy. Thought the Tour de France was starting at 8:30am and had a major cuss session when it didn't start. Are you kidding me, Canada isn't showing the Tour de France?

It's what got me up and out of the house to buy the Toronto Star for the Television schedule. All is fine. It starts at 9:30am. Well at least I'm up.

My feet are so sore this morning that I've decided that I will have to eat a massive breakfast in order to take my arthritis pill. I never take them because they can cause internal bleeding but they come in handy when I know I have a big day and I want to ensure that I'm totally pain free. So to make sure I don't get caught on the internal bleeding side of the scale, I eat way too much so that the food will absorb it.

I've started off with a quarter of the whole watermelon I just bought while getting the Toronto Star and am about to prepare some Pillsbury crescent rolls, steak and eggs. Yup, your girl can eat!

Switching and flipping around to catch some of the Live Earth concerts. It's hard to catch these things when the weather is so nice and I want to be outside and it's Tour de France season.

I'm off to the Tarragon today since I have a choice between the mainspace and the extra space so if I can't get the show I want to see, I can still see a show. Plus it's too far to me to walk to during the week after work. I highlighted the Fringe program and checked out all the locations so I could plan to go to the further theatres on the weekend when I have all day. And go to the closer theatres during the week so I can catch at least two shows. It's scary how organized I can be.

Anyway my Tour de France (or Tour DES France, as one of the commentators always says, much to my chagrin) is about to start. It's the individual time trial. We've got a year without a Tour champion with all the doping scandals going back over the years. Ivan Basso is out, Jan Ulrich is out. And Floyd Landis... blah blah blah! (Although they say that we'll find out for sure in a few days whether or not he's found innocent) I still love it. Of course I don't have any names to hold on to but we'll see who I fall in love with this year. Remember last year my converter died during the Tour and I ended up following the coverage by reading about it? haha! Not this year dammit, not this year!

Oh and Congratulations for all the 7/7/7 crazies that are getting married today. Congrats to Billy and Aruna and all the best in your magnificent future.

Hmm! Maybe I'll get married on 12/12/12! ha ha! How old will I be then? Does that give me enough time to find the man of dreams? Or the man I can live with? Or the man I still want to talk to and have something to talk about with... that is the big question.
What-ev-er!

I feel great. I got a shitload of stuff to do and the weather is be-you-tee-full!

EY

Fringe Bingeing
Topic: WC - Daily Practice
Friday 10:51pm

I just got in from starting my foray into the Fringe Festival. I decided that I would choose a theatre and catch as many plays as I could stand. I dropped my 90 bucks for my 14 play pass and got prepared.

I watched three plays. The first play Wedding Belles was about four women and their set of issues while preparing to be part of one of the women's sisters wedding party. I still don't get why the wedding was going to be in the woods. Over all the acting was pretty bad. All their voices came across as trying to sound like actors rather than like normal people. The yoga girl gave a really great performance in one scene when she admits to feeling guilty for her boyfriend dying in a plane crash after she got him the flying lessons. She almost brought me to tears between her expression and her acting.
Some of the scenes were juvenile and cliche.

I went back outside to get my ticket for the 2nd play and didn't I run into one of my old bosses from both the Pantages theatre and the North York Performing Arts Centre? He was planning to see the same play as me so we sat together and caught up on all things theatre and personal.

The 2nd play was, A Streetcar named Gerrard. What an offensive piece of shit. Basically it was a politician of all affiliations talking to the masses about the poor just before they demolish a housing project.

I pulled out my steno and started writing notes when he compared studying the poor for his master's thesis to Diane Fosse studying the Gorillas for years. I actually said out loud, "Oh No!"
The poor were depicted first as these sistas talking stupidness one chain smoking and the other one pregnant (they were played by white girls). Then the same white girls imitated the poor men and talked with a black street vernacular. The girls wore t-shirts that said BEER across them so somehow they were a combination of white trash and stereotypical ghetto blacks.

At one point the politician talks about moving the "normal" middle class into to live with the poor to teach them. "They'll learn how to speak English, they'll learn what a condom is."

Then the girls portray the white poor: Andrea, the intellectual (She had a grade 9 education) and Phyllis, the chain smoker and I quote, " Phyllis is 4th of 16 children. Her parents think contraception is praying."
Fuck! It was the longest hour of my life!

The songs came the closest to being clever if they weren't so fucking offensive. I get that the playwright was trying to make a statement with the play but it just ended up being so fucking offensive I'm surprised that I sat through it.

And everytime the Politician would call his wife over to hand him his fucking bullhorn which he said each time, "the white rolled up cardboard acting as a bullhorn," (if he said it one more time I was going to slit my wrists) he'd fondle her or slap her ass.
Okay! Can I just say? HATED IT!

The final play that my ex boss and I saw together was The Africans. It was actually quite good. When you're in the position where you are trying to talk to people who don't speak your language and you don't speak their language. There was more to the play than that but I'll just leave it at that. The main criticism was that it was hard to catch everything that was said because of the actor's placement on the stage. And the ending was a bit of a cop out but overall out of the three plays it was by far enjoyable.

Before the Africans came out on stage, I was actually scared that they'd be either portrayed by white actors pretending to be black or there would be stuffed animals placed as the Africans. ha ha. A streetcar named Gerrard was the cause of my worry. But thankfully they were actual black actors and African, I think!

Okay, enough said... more plays tomorrow.

EY

The Morning Breeze
Topic: WC - Daily Practice
Friday 4:20am 6July07

"The morning breeze has secrets to tell you, don't go back to sleep" Rumi

I woke up at 3:25 this morning. I woke up out of a pretty deep sleep and my eyes were begging me to lie back down and wait for my alarm to go off in an hour. Somehow that Rumi quote flitted through my head and solidified my getting up. The cats looked a little bitter, "Hey? Where you going?"

My thoughts have been haunting me again which translates into me worrying about something. So it's time to get up and reframe my thoughts, look at the facts, look at what I can solve and let all the other garbage that I can't control fall by the wayside. The biggest thing that I can control is how I think about things. I have to be conscious about that.
There was a nice quote that I picked up from Elizabeth Edwards on Oprah the other day, "There's no reason to give up hope unless you have to."

So I'm focusing on that. Which really is the opposite of worrying, isn't it?

My last dream before I woke up was about my mom. She was getting married and driving us to the reception. Don't quite know where her husband was though. I often dream about my mother when my mind is attacking me too much. So that's always a bit of a relief although I wish that I would remember in my dreamworld that she is dead so that I can turn the dream around and talk to her. I'm going to have to get back into a proper dream practice of meditating and dream journaling and the like.

It's funny though that I would dream of her getting married. Ado and I were talking about bridezillas yesterday. Bridezilla was his new word for the day. I told him all the reasons why I could never be a bridezilla. I've never been focused since childhood on some special perfect day. I don't care about a huge spectacle with table linen and doves being let out of a cage and flying away in unison. I said, "I'd be so happy to have met the person that I loved and who loved me back so much that we wanted to marry eachother that that would be enough."

Quite frankly I'd be happy with getting married on the beach or in someone's backyard or eloping. The only thing that I would like to have in my wedding, if there ever were to be one, would be jumping the broom.

Anyway, I'm up and ready to start my day and remember that there's no reason to give up hope unless I have to and get some writing done before I leave for work.

EY