Something incontinental

 

I like this photo.  It looks like an artsy advertisement for my backpack.  The highlighting of the brand name, Zuolunduo, looks intentionally framed to draw attention to it. Colour balancing, lighting = exquisite.  If taking an excellent image to advertise the brand name of my backpack was the purpose, then I would say I nailed it.  Stamp of approval.

 But that was not why I took this picture.  The truth is much more embarrassing. The fact was that I was walking down the street and was trying to surreptitiously take a picture of my butt in order to assess for water damage. Let me explain.

 The 'water damage' was not intentional, indeed I suspect very rarely people try to wet their pants in such a way that it looks like they have incontinence.  But I had gotten only about four hours of sleep the night before, and I had gotten off work early.  I had somewhere else I needed to be nearby in about an hour so it was a waste to go home, but I didn't want to spend money. It was also about a gazillion degrees out.  To prevent myself from feeling birdcaged within the four walls of my office I vowed to myself to brave the urban jungle and find a small shaded piece of grass somewhere near the canal where I could rest my weary bones.

Imagine my bliss when I found the perfect patch of grass.  Compared to scorching reflection of hot pavement, the cool shaded strip of lawn was temperature perfection.  As I settled onto the grass, grateful for a respite in which I could recline, I became aware of my first miscalculation: the grass was a little bit wet. Oh right, it had rained the night before.  Had it really been possible in the scorching temperatures of the day that this ground hadn't quite already dried out?

 Incredible. I was too tired to care in the moment about the wet grass.  I had an hour to rest and the place was cool.  I set up my backpack as a pillow and did my best napping impression, letting the whole of my body relax into the soft, cool, green, slightly damp blanket beneath me. 

My second miscalculation became evident when I stood up.  The pants I had chosen to wear that day, as you can tell in the picture, were a light golden brown, and as I bowed my head to take stock of the parts of my pantleg that had touched the ground I could see a dark brown wet spot.  It was bold.  It was pronounced.  It was unforgiving.  I reached back to touch the part of my butt that I couldn't crane my head around to see.  "Wet," my hand said back to me through the neural tactile pathways to my brain.  Crap.  Here I was, a respectable self-employed business woman, psychotherapist in mental health practice, about to walk around in public, to church, looking like she had wet herself.

 There was only one thing I could do: radical acceptance.  Accept the loss to my pride.  

And so I set out towards the church, trying as much as I could to use my backpack and lunchbag for cover, all the while knowing that neither could actually cover the problem without bringing more attention to it.  The embarrassment ate at me.  I felt like I had to know how bad the damage was.  So after a minute of brainstorming I figured out how I could put the camera in my hand to prevent it from being so obvious to the passing cars that I was taking a targeted photo of my butt. Bring up the camera function, flip the phone case closed, while you are walking swing your arms in a slightly exaggerated fashion behind you, press the down volume button to take the photo and voila! 

It worked, kind of.  Butt, as you can see.... no water stains.  To my great and immediate relief, the laws of thermodynamics came through for me.  What a divine boon that it was actually hot enough outside to evaporate all the evidence of 'water damage' in the one minute it took me to figure out how to use my camera!

  

Something ... brain... no words...

Have you ever had your brain implode?

I'm talking about that stop in your tracks, do not pass go, do not collect $200, can't put words together into sentences type of mental implosion.  The kind that if you try to back your car down the driveway you would run into a fence because you can't handle the mental load of shoulder checking over two shoulders at the same time?

Yeah, I probably shouldn't have tried to back the car down the driveway last night.

I knew something was off with my brain as soon as my last client left the office for the day and I couldn't remember what my goals for the evening had been and also could care less that I couldn't remember.  A small semi-lucid part of me observed this phenomenon and thought it was quite interesting; after all for the past couple of days my brain hadn't been able to shut up about the to-do list that I had to get done in preparation for moving into the my new condo in August.  I've been struggling the last few days to eat and sleep and do recreation properly, and it was like that part of my brain had finally worked itself into exhaustion, like a kid who falls asleep during dinner with their face in the plate and then their parents take embarrassing photos to commemorate the moment.

Despite the lack of mental cohesion I couldn't miss the 7 foot tall corner cupboard occupying the passenger space next to me and entire back of my car after I had finally stumbled down from the office to go home.  Right, that had been on my list of things to do - get shelf into garage.  No consideration about whether this was wise to attempt when a person has absolutely no brain power in their mental tank, there was only autopilot.  Hence backing the car down the driveway, managing to avoid the brick wall to the right, directly into the fence on the left. The fence survived (hooray).  My tail light did not.

 

It's semi-repaired.  Kind-of.

There wasn't enough brain power to be upset at the situation, no rewind, just facts.  I simply unloaded the cabinet and moved on to the next reasonable thing to do.  Which was to go get superglue and sit on the asphalt of the driveway in my dress and proceed to glue my fingers together for the next 30 minutes. 

.......It may not have been my best or brightest moment.....  

My one successful intelligence check of the night was that it finally occurred to me that maybe this wasn't a task to be attempting when my brain couldn't think enough to tell my fingers what to do.  We'll consider it a graceful surrender.

Something('s) cooking

I'm pretty sure that my host family in Quebec thinks that I'm trying to burn their house down.  In my defense I want to say that it's not that I am doing it on purpose! It's just that every time I cook lately it seems to result in an ungodly amount of smoke and other burning things.  And it's not that I'm a bad cook either.  ... ... ...  Okay, so I'm not a great cook, but I can get by all right.  When I started travelling more I determined that I would start doing right by my body and stop eating popcorn and nachos for supper.  Like a proper adult I determined to start applying the fundamentals of healthy cuisine. It's amazing how many different ways you can use onion, pepper, rice, eggs, broccoli, and a bit of cheese.

No, the problem with my cooking is not my cooking.  The problem, I've determined, is trying to speak French and cook at the same time!  This is because the process of trying to speak French at a beginner's level is not all sunshine, roses and pamplemousse.  It requires patience, dedication, a constant technological lifeline, a ridiculous amount of repeating words over and over again, and absolute focus.  Focus, which cannot be spent on such trivial things as making sure the food that you are cooking doesn't catch on fire.

The first "incident" happened, incidentally, on the night of my birthday.  I had bought a 2 pound bag of carrots from the grocery store because it was on sale and seemed like a good idea at the time.  As I stood there contemplating what to make for dinner, however, I had to acknowledge the fact that I am actually not a person who eats a lot of carrots.  That probably would have been a good thought to have while I was at the grocery store. 

I knew that I  would have to come up with a strategy for consuming said carrots, or my very limited fridge space (which the carrots were commanding a majority of) would be perpetually lost forever.  I looked at my almost-completed dinner and decided that I really should try to include a generous helping of boiled carrots.  I peeled and chopped the carrots and put them on the stove, then sat down to eat my dinner with the rest of the family.

And we started talking, in French.  The French which, if you remember, requires absolute focus.  This time I was able to multi-task enough to remember to eat the dinner that was in front of me.  Unfortunately, I was not able to remember that there were, in-fact, carrots cooking on the stove.  Nope, I did not remember this until my female host Helene left the table, effectively pausing the conversation for a moment.  My brain thus freed up to think about other things than French, I suddenly recalled the carrots I had been cooking and turned around to see a cloud of smoke billowing out of a pot on the stove like someone had just let off a nuclear bomb.  Yikes!  I dashed over to the stove to try and stop the disaster in progress, madly turning on fans while the male host, Franck, ran over to the sliding glass door to vent the smoke into the freezing elements outside.

It was then, when I holding the smoking pot of carrots in my hand that Helene returned to the room with a birthday cake full of lit candles ready to burst into song.  I was caught: orange and black-handed.  For the record, it is probably the most awkward thing in the world to be in the process of burning your dinner while someone else is trying to sing to you Happy Birthday.

I wish I could say that this was the only time that I had nearly set off the smoke alarm in home here, but the sad fact it that within the first month of being in Quebec it has happened, oh, four, or five, or six, or seven, or eight times.  In fact, it's been so regular that Franck finally declared (in English) last week while I in the middle of diffusing another such incident: "When you are cooking, it's English time!"

"Yes sir!"

Even French immersion must yield to the force of nature that is me in a kitchen.

Proof that I can cook a decent meal when it has my full attention!