Leaves and Petals

Despite the fact that more and more people are finally seeing the light and are realizing that cars are stinky, obnoxious, and unnecessary within a city, we still live in a society obsessed with the personalized motor vehicle. Everyone above the age of 16 is expected to have a driver’s license, and even in situations that have absolutely nothing to do with driving, or as we encountered last night, in situations where people should absolutely be encouraged to NOT drive and leave the car at home, the almighty driver’s license still sets the standard.

We arrived at the Drinks Show and were asked for ID. Being almost 40, this was flattering, but yes, the rule. I pulled out my Nova Scotia age of majority card; Greg, his Ontario health card.

“I need to see a driver’s license,” barked the security woman.

“This is all I have,” said Greg, “I don’t have a license.” She looked at him like he had two heads. “I’m not supposed to take this.” “It’s the only photo ID I’ve got,” he replied.

Then she turned to me. “What’s this?”

“Age of majority card for Nova Scotia.” I rolled my eyes, because I’ve gone through this so many times before. I expect it in Buffalo, or San Fransisco where they’re not familiar with, you know, provinces, but in Ontario, I expect someone checking ID to be at least vaguely familiar with forms of identification from other areas of the country.

“You don’t have a driver’s license either?”

“No. I choose not to drive. And I don’t believe that a driver’s license should be the only acceptable form of photo ID. This is a government-issued document, created for the sole purpose of notifying you that I’m old enough to drink – it should be more than acceptable.” I’m ready at this point to throw a hissy fit and yell for the organizers.

She’s not happy about the whole thing, but lets us in anyway. But I’m still cranky.

See, way back in the 80s, Nova Scotia driver’s licenses didn’t have photos. When you hit 19, the rite of passage for a Nova Scotian’s 19th birthday was to head to the LC (Liquor Commission) to get yourself an age of majority card. 3 pieces of ID that included a date of birth, signature and address were all you needed to score a nifty plastic card with your mug on it, and freedom to wreak havoc on the streets of downtown Halifax.

I moved to Ontario about a month before I turned 19. I’d show up at clubs in Toronto, hand over my Nova Scotia driver’s license when asked, and have doormen go “What the fuck is this?” because it lacked a photo. I looked into getting an Ontario age of majority card, but unlike Nova Scotia where you just showed up at the LC, in Ontario, you needed to fill out a form, submit photos by mail, and more confusing, have the document signed by a person of high standing who had known you for a minimum amount of time (usually a couple of years!). I had been here a month when I turned 19 – I didn’t know a doctor, dentist, judge or notary public – I had no one to sign my stupid document.

I actually ended up going back to Nova Scotia for a visit about six months after moving to Toronto, in part to go to the LC and get myself some damned photo ID. To this date, it’s the only photo ID I have. I never enjoyed driving, was incredibly bad at it, and living and working in Kensington Market, I didn’t need to drive anywhere, and would have been terrified to do so anyway. So I let my driver’s license expire, because as long as I had my age of majority card, there should be no problem getting into bars.

Yet at events like the Drinks Show last night, I still get hassled. Picking up packages at the post office, the clerks are confused by my lack of a driver’s license and don’t know what information to take from my age of majority photo ID.

And that really pisses me off. Why is the driver’s license the ID standard? Who says? And why can’t we train personnel whose job it is to take ID to learn that there is actually more than one kind? People from other countries or provinces aren’t going to have a stupid Ontario driver’s license. What happens to them when they try to attend an event like this? Driving should have nothing to do with drinking. At an event where the purpose is to drink alcoholic beverages, not having a driver’s license should mean that I’m one less person they have to worry about when I leave.

I’ve got government-issued photo ID that proves I’m of legal drinking age. That it’s not an Ontario driver’s license is not my problem – it’s the problem of the person checking ID to be familiar with the various acceptable documents out there.

We moved into an apartment building totally paranoid about sharing our space with the usual suspects – that is, roaches and bed bugs. We have neither. What we do have is an ongoing gnawing inside the wall under the windowsill in our office, and the occasional sighting of small grey mice in our kitchen.

Having come from an old turn-of-the-century house, we were accustomed to mice. And roaches and one particularly bad infestation of moths. So Mr. Mouse and his family aren’t finding much to eat in my kitchen where food is always stored in containers and never left out.

Before Spook died of cancer in March, the two cats would do regular kitchen stake-outs, and would catch the occasional mouse. One night Bowie joined in and proved that dogs are actually better mousers than cats. But since then, our remaining cat Mollie hasn’t had much interest.

Until this morning when she seemed convinced that Ceiling Cat was behind the file cabinet in the office. And was still sitting there 45 minutes later. So I lifted the cabinet, and sure enough – Mr. Mouse. Who was not terribly impressed.

Then somehow, the cat and both dogs wandered off, and Mr. Mouse came out and hide behind a ream of paper on the bookshelf. I tried to catch him a couple of times, but he sat there shaking, and when he took off behind the bookshelf, I didn’t bother to try and dig him out.

I know it’s probably freaky and unsanitary to not try to catch and kill Mr. Mouse, but he’s not getting into our food and I’ve never seen droppings anywhere, even under the fridge or stove, where he mostly hangs out.

Funny that I’ll kill the odd cockroach when they appear every six months or so, but can’t bring myself to off Mr. Mouse. He’s lucky he’s cute.

There was a post the other day on Shapely Prose, a kickass fat acceptance blog, that included a heart-breaking letter from a 13-year-old girl who was considering suicide because of pressure from her classmates and her family. As of this writing there are over 150 responses, the majority of which seek to reassure the girl of how it all gets better because thirteen sucks so heartily for everyone.

The letter caused a lot of upset, sending almost all readers back into the depths of their own pasts to recall being thirteen.

For anyone who has been fat, heavy, plump, etc., their whole life, thirteen was likely a pretty shitty year. I know it was for me. I wasn’t actually the heaviest kid in my class, but as the other heavy kids were athletic in some way, and appeared on the surface to have a higher sense of self-esteem, I was the lucky pariah of the class who got picked on. Constantly.

Add to the fat a pair of ugly glasses (because I was apparently too young to wear contact lenses), and the futile attempts to perm my poker-straight hair, and it’s easy to figure out why I hate having my photo taken – to this day. And why the kids teased me.

I was under pressure from family members and a PE teacher (who was friends with my father and who reported back on my lack of progress in gym class) to lose weight, so there was no familial support system I could turn to when the other kids harassed me. Teachers were no help either.

I don’t know if thirteen was the point where something broke in my brain and made me want to deviate from the status quo, or if there was always a grain of “weird” deep down inside me, but the overwhelming desire to fit in kind of backfired.

I spent that summer babysitting my little brother. And it was boring. I spent the summers completely cut off from the kids at school, which was, in many ways, a blessing. To alleviate this boredom, my brother and I would get on a bus and go into downtown Halifax to explore museums, libraries and parks. Little brother also got dragged into vintage clothing shops, indie record shops, and although I never had the guts to go in there at that point, we would stand across the street and watch the mohawked punks going in and out of Backstreet Amusements, which was to become such an important part of the rest of my youth, and to a lesser extent, little brother’s as well.

My friend Sharon, who I came to know through Backstreets, related her own issues of teenage angst to me once, and I’ve carried it with me for 20 years. “If they want to call me ugly, I’ll show them ugly,” she once said, describing her own torture and insecurity at not fitting in with the cool kids, and explaining her fascination with the styles of the punk/alternative scene of the early 80s.

Looking weird and embracing the underground music scene of the time allowed the lot of misfits who found their way to Backstreets to flip the bird at the status quo, and the way we were all “supposed” to look and be. Yeah, the place had drama – it was full of people who were emotionally wounded – but it was also accepting. I never once witnessed anyone be dissed for how they looked. Fat, skinny, brown, white (like translucent, yo), we were all freaks, and had a camaraderie because of it. I wonder now how many of us that place saved.

Obviously, “go be punk” is not reasonable advice to give a confused 13-year-old kid, who, by their own admission, just wants to fit in. She’s got to NOT want to fit in to make her remaining teenage years enjoyable. Once she realizes that the status quo followers are not worth the effort, that they’ll grow up to be plain and boring and conservative and fucking tedious, only then can she embrace the potential she has inside her. Hopefully she’ll come to realize that being fat – and unique – is more interesting than being normal.

Loving the body you’re given isn’t easy. Society constantly tells fat people (especially fat women) that they should be thin to be considered pretty… or popular. But I truly don’t want to be thin. I know that probably shocks people. Scares them maybe. But being fat is part of what makes me unique. It gives me a sense of presence. It makes me strong. It makes people pay attention to me. And while it might start out as bad attention, the person foolish enough to fuck with me and harass me because of the way I look soon learns the meaning of ferocious.

And being fat doesn’t mean being ugly. At an event the other night, another woman came up to me and complimented me on how great I looked in my retro polka dot dress and sparkly glasses. (Incidentally, fuck, I wish women would compliment each other more. Not just friends, but strangers. We all like knowing that we look good. Getting a friendly polite compliment from a stranger can be a great thrill!) My friend Sharon went on to become a famous burlesque dancer, and is making fantastic progress in showing the world that fat chicks can be smokin’ hot. Other fat women have become role models; singer Beth Ditto, actress Joy Nash, to name but two (although there needs to be many, many more).

Being fat also doesn’t mean not being successful or living a fabulous, interesting life. If I hadn’t been pushed away by the normal, popular kids because I was “a fat loser”, I’d have never lived the awesome life I’ve had so far. I’d probably have stayed in Halifax, working at a boring office job, living in a house in the suburbs. Instead, I got to run a record label, cook for rock stars, run my own design company and now write about food as a career. I’ve got a fantastic husband who loves and respects me and supports me in all of the creative pursuits I seek out.

I don’t know that little 13-year-old girl. I’ll never meet her. Probably none of us will know if she takes any of the myriad advice she’s received to heart. I hope she finds some strength inside of herself that gives her the courage to say “fuck all y’all” to the people who are bringing her down and making her hate herself. I hope she finds an outlet for some other interests where she can fit in and people can see that she’s a good interesting person regardless of her size. I hope she kicks it out and goes on to do some fabulous thing with her life that makes the assholes who tease her seethe with envy.

Thirteen is indeed, a shitty, shitty year for most people. Moreso if you don’t fit it. It was horrible, painful, lonely, scary and fucked up. But it made me the person I am today, so I have to look back at thirteen now and declare that I wouldn’t change a thing about it. That which doesn’t kill me can only make me stronger. Fuck you, thirteen, and fuck all you shithead asswipes who made my life hell. Who’s having the last laugh now, fuckers?

As an urbanite who understand the issues regarding urban sprawl, I realize that we’ve got no choice but to accept the presence and growth of condo developments in the downtown core. Better that we create density in an area where people don’t need cars than to continue to force people out to the burbs where their ugly houses destroy valuable farmland and their hour-long commutes create pollution.

That doesn’t mean I have to like the whole “lifestyle marketing” scheme that comes with so many condo projects.

Today in the mail, I received a postcard for something called Kormann House (note – bullshit Flash website – click at your own risk!). This is a historic 19th century building at Queen Street East and Sherbourne that is in the process of having an ugly glass tower perched atop it. These types of buildings are accepted and encouraged because the facade at street level remains virtually unchanged, but the overall structure often comes off looking like two very disaparate buildings mushed together.

My gripe in this case is not the building itself, though, but the really, truly, awful marketing campaign the developer is using.

In the late 19th century, Toronto’s lower east side was home to thriving businesses, Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford films for a nickel and the stunning Moss park.

I won’t even get into the grammatical disaster of this sentence, but instead, let’s look at the details. Mary Pickford was born in 1892, her film career began in 1908. The first permanent movie house designed exclusively for showing motion pictures opened in 1902 in Los Angeles. So the whole mess is factually incorrect; if the copy had said early 20th century, I’d have believed it, but the sell here comes from the fact that the building is 19th century. If you want me to harken back to olden tymes, so that I feel all like “part of history” or something, howsabout getting that history correct?

Also, Toronto doesn’t have a “lower east side”. The neighbourhood is known as “Old York” based on the fact that it’s where the earliest buildings of the city were erected. The tactic of condo developers to make allusions in the marketing copy to cities that are far more interesting or glamorous than Toronto (New York in particular, also Miami) is so pathetic it’s laughable. Even more distressing is that people buy into it, somehow figuring that living in the “lower east side” will make them feel like cool and sophisticated New Yorkers.

I know developers need to sell units, and I know everyone is running scared in fear that the US housing crisis will hit Canada, so desperate times call for desperate measures, but I am so really tired of lifestyle marketing where the “sell” has absolutely nothing to do with the product at hand, but with a play on the purchaser’s ego and self-esteem. How about just, “We have a nice building, we think it’s a great place to live. Please come check it out”??