The InsomniYak

Wish List

Thu, 29 Nov 2007 20:35:37 GMT

Sarah's Christmas Plans:

1)Watch BattleStar Gallactica S.3
2)spend (a minimum) 48 uninterrupted hours in my pjs
3)Bake several batches of spelt-cookies
4)Drink lotso eggnog
5)Ski on Mount Royal every day for a solid week
6)Buffy Season 7
7)Rewatch My So Called Life, which I will hopefully be receiving for an Xmas gift - at LEAST twice through
8)Go to NYC and eat at fabulous restaurants with my plethora of relatives
9)Not leave my apartment for an entire week
10)Learn level-two ear training
11)Jam EVery Day
12)Go to every single effin christmas concert, Christmas Mass, and sing-along Messiah concert in Montreal
13)Go carolling!!!!

Wed, 05 Sep 2007 02:31:53 GMT

Oh, NOW I feel home...sort of...my clothes finally unpacked back into my little bedroom in the back of the flat. All three roommates finally home for the first time all week. The smell of tempura wafting from Maiko, wiffs of rugeleh dough being prepared for tomorrow morning at Cheskie's. Roommate Emma puttering towards the bathroom with her towel. Debbie pouring her glass of lemon water.
Whatever else these little signs mean, they are signs of MY home.

And it's Fall Again

Tue, 04 Sep 2007 23:23:22 GMT

So back in Canada...and there is no mistaking it. Labour Day has passed, and while it's still sandal-weather, it is Fall. The early twilight sunlight casts a warm gold on the green and yellow leaves of Mile End. Corn is selling for cheap in barrels on Parc av, the tomatoes in the grocery stands blush with harvest colours. The sun is warm, but the air is crisp. The sticky, sultry humidity of July and August has left. Rosh Hashana's in a week. Pomegranates are appearing in market stands.

I lose a little piece of my heart everytime I leave California. When I went to LA two summers ago, in 2006, I felt like I never really snapped out of the trance it put me in. Now it's a year later, and it's been one week since leaving the Coast and I feel like I'm a million miles away - I want to be here, in the present moment, in this beautiful Montreal Fall, but I'm elsewhere...

So I do what I can to feel grounded. De-clutter the back storage space. Rearrange furniture. Buy lots of groceries and make a big soup. This evening I made a fresh corn chowder with chickpeas, mango, red pepper, zucchini and fresh cilantro. Debbie came home just as it was ready, so I thankfully had someone to share the meal with. Labour Day Tuesday...everyone's a bit stunned, no one's quite sure what routines to expect.

The Jewish New Year's in a week, and my birthday's in two. Two opportunities to take stock of what's around me, praise what I have to be proud of, and ask myself what needs to change.

Update

Thu, 30 Aug 2007 21:17:18 GMT

1) I just got back from California
2) I had an amazing, beautiful magnificent time in California and didn't want to leave
3) I'm okay with being home, cuz things are going good for me here too
4) Was working at a drama camp in Cali and met some incredible people, made some incredible art, feel soul-restored
5) Am wondering where my heart truly belongs, and if it's possible to really live in different places, love different people across the globe, and feel a genuine sense of home in any one place.
6) Am asking the universe to facilitate my spending as much time as possible in Cali in the future. Like, uh, getting transfered there with the company I've just started teaching for. Anyhoo. Yeah.

A flower in your hair...!

Thu, 26 Jul 2007 13:16:06 GMT

Hey world!
I'm going to San Francisco in a couple of weeks!!! Any suggestions on what to do whilst there? Anyone mysteriously have a couch they can offer me?
I apologize for the lameness of this post. I realize that with every unthoughtfully crafted post, I help erode the overall quality of LJ to the level of a less-viewed Craiglist.
Thing is, I'm busy writing and editing a blog that people actually read.

But yeah..San Francisco. I've got a week's free time there, and unsure as to how to fill the time.

Possibly the Greatest Moment of my Life

Tue, 17 Jul 2007 20:42:39 GMT

I took a long sunny walk today towards my favorite Greek bakery to fetch a loaf of corn bread. On the way home, a little old lady stopped me and, rather frantically, asked me if I spoke Yiddish - in Yiddish.

I guiltily replied "nein," but nevertheless, between sign language and my hebraic intuitions, managed to successfully give her the directions she needed.

I was so flattered she'd even asked.

More Tales from Anatevka...

Fri, 01 Jun 2007 16:13:13 GMT

When "Chaimie" hasn't called in four days, and has not returned my page this morning to see if I'm indeed working my regular Friday afternoon shift, I have to wonder...am I fired?

Or has my Hassidic boss assumed the role of Emotionally Unavailable Male, who says he'll call but doesn't, and who leaves me frantically trying to read his mind?

I just wish I knew where I'd be scoring this Shabbas' challah...can I trust this man to stock my table?

Tales from Anatevka

Wed, 30 May 2007 02:47:29 GMT

So this bakery job keeps getting better and better. I often feel like I'm watching myself play out some scene, probably from some delightful eighties feel-good flick set in the lower-east side. I can't believe how hilarious my life is. One year ago I would have been mortified to be working at a bakery under the table, being verbally abused by hassidic moms, dads and know-it-all yeshiva boys, when I have this fancy degree from this illustrious university or someth'n. Now I just think it's a hoot.

Thing is, I have no work schedule. None. My boss - let's just call him Chaimie for now, to protect this post from being googled - calls me at random times of day. "Seeh-rah," he grunts in his hoarse yiddish-accent, "How are you?"
"Fine fine, Chaimie, how are you?"
"Baruch hashem, I'm fine. Listen, are you available?"
"Uh, well when did you want me?"
"Uh, can you come in right now?"
"Uh, no Chaimie, I'm sorry, I can't. I'm in the middle of something."
"Okay, fine fine, no problem - listen, page me tomorrow, maybe I'll have you work in the afternoon."
"Okay, great, talk to you tomorrow!"

I've learned, for the most part, to stand my ground. If I didn't, I'd be living like a heart surgeon, constantly on call. I tell you, if I didn't already have an almost-full time writing career that more or less keeps me a afloat, the unpredictability of the hours be a serious problem.

But this job is more like a hobby. At the very least, it's giving me enough material to write a frickin' feature-length screenplay.

So, this Sunday morning I was asleep at my parents' house, having stayed up uber-late the night before. I seem to recall doing cartwheels on the streets of Outremont at 1am Saturday night, after having done a number on a bottle of bacardi and a carton of guava juice. In any case, I had made it back to the homestead, and had fallen into a deep and restful sleep.

At 9:30am my phone buzzes beside my slumbering head. Jolted awake, I stumble for the phone with my hand and, without checking who it is, and still three-quarters asleep, answer.
"Hello?" Squeek I through the guava-flavoured mucus of my sleep.
"Seh-rah, can you come in today?"
"Uggh...hi Chaimie...urgh, uh when do you uh need me?"
"As soon as possible!"
"Oh, okay uh...well I'm at my parents' house, so I have to bike over and get dressed first...so I can be there in an hour and a half."
"If I pay for a cab can you get here sooner?"
"Urgh, uh yeah I guess."
"Okay, take a cab over and I'll pay for it."

So ten minutes later I'm in a cab, off to Hassidic Land. Let me be clear: I am religious about mornings. I have a rouTINE. And it involves about twenty minutes of solitary dream-writing, a mandatory drainage of a tea pot, the token skimmage of headlines. It involves a freshly made pot of oatmeal, an email check or two, and about twenty minutes of outfit-choosing. I do not rush mornings.

What can I say? Hassidic Jews wrote the book on pushy. He's a tough dude to say no to.

So I spent my hang-over Sunday in a surreal universe of weighing rugeleh, slicing rye breads and restocking trays of cinnamon babkeh. A surreal universe where French takes an ass-kicked back-seat to the two OTHER official languages, Yiddish and English. Where the women are wigged, the girls are smug, the boys are jerks and the men always act busier then they really are.

But I'm starting to fall in love with this enchantingly bizarre community. Sure, the Hassidim are big weirdos. There's no question. Those fur hats are sooo nineteenth century. And the women really have to experiment with colour. But in the end, these are good people who love their kids. I can accept that they don't trust me to cut their sponge cakes. Like any big freak in the playground, they assume I think they're weird. And I do. But I love them regardless.

An observation

Thu, 24 May 2007 01:59:51 GMT

This past winter I gave up both refined sugar and facebook. And I felt free. Now it's summer-ish, I can't go more than an hour without either.

Meh?

Mon, 14 May 2007 03:28:40 GMT

I am rereading back entries of this bloggy-blog blog, and marvel that I once was able to string a sentence together. Five months of writing contracts has slackened my muscle for emotional rhetoric. Typing has become work of the dreary - I save my verbal brilliance for conversations with other humans.

So, before I start to hate this post and everything that comes with typing it, allow me to make a quick update: beCAUSE I've been doing nothing but writing contracts for a (meager) living the past few months, i decided to take on a frivolous summer job, one that would get me away from the comp and interacting with the occasional homo erecti. Behold, I am working - under the table, mind you - at a Hassidic Bakery in my new neighbourhood, selling rugeleh to wigged stroller moms, yeshiva boys, and hipsters.

Talk about honest hard work. This is tougher than my restaurant job years back - tougher than waitressing, and about a quarter of the pay. I make about a third an hour of what I make doing writing jobs. Try dealing with the pre-shabbas lineup around the corner of impatient Hassidim, try mentally tracking the orders of 2 - "no, make it 3 pounds of cinnamon danishes - no, make it a mix of cinnamon and vanilla," seventeen challas, a box of cheese crowns and four chocolate babkehs, while physically trying to balance all these fucking challas, babkehs, rugelehs, and cheese crowns in a narrow space, squeezing kosher eclaires into a plastic box while shoving hot-from-the-oven chocolate cake into a plastic bag ("It's still too hot to cut." "Well, try it anyways, I need two pounds of it. No, I don't like that one, it has too much chocolate in it.") Oy fuckin' vey.

This is truly the tree-planting of retail jobs. But you know what? It's utterly delightful. This is good old fashioned work, real shtetl labour. I'm getting to know a hilariously colourful community of people - from the yente who counts her change seven times to the sixteen-year-old boy who won't look me in the face. I'm getting to know how to judge a pound of sponge cake, cheese square, knish and chocolate rugeleh. I'm learning to make a mean tuna sandwhich on rye. And after the shabbos rush, when everyone has bought their challas and they're all either running off to daven or running home to lay the table, that's when I really get what it's all about. "Good shabbas," my boss tells me as he slips me a whole-wheat challah, a cinnamon babkeh and an envelope of cash. I go home - around the corner - light candles with my roommate, say our blessings, and eat. And THAT's the pay-off of honest hard work.

Sun, 06 May 2007 09:26:57 GMT

I am awake. The sun is rising. The birds are chirping. Sleep, where art thou?

In other news, I love biking home at 3am. Ish.

Procrastafternoon, part trois

Thu, 26 Apr 2007 20:17:25 GMT

I now have 400 facebook friends. take THAT, lonely saturday nights!!

What Day Is It??

Tue, 17 Apr 2007 14:19:31 GMT

FREE CONE DAY!!!!!

(at ben and jerry's, for those not raised in NDG, where BJ's Free Cone Day is a Statutory Holiday.)

(Then why the fuck is it snowing?)

The Zen of Ambidexterity

Thu, 29 Mar 2007 13:15:39 GMT

If you're wondering where I've been, I'll tell you: two weeks ago I fractured my wrist falling off my bike, and have since foregone the use of my right (dominant) hand. And what began as a miserable nightmare - picture weeping tantrums of "I'm such a HAND-person!!" - has turned into the most illuminating experience.

I shall give the abridged version, as typing one-handed is a rotten pain. When they first put the cast on, I panicked. First off, you never realize how much your body is used to a particular kind of balance. With part of a limb now out of commission, my entire centre of gravity shifted, not only making me bump into things constantly, but making me feel like a stranger in my own body. From that alone I had a very emotional response. But furthermore, I became conscious for the first time at how much my lifestyle depends on the use of my right hand. I also became conscious of how much I identify myself by this lifestyle. I exclaimed to friends, family, foes: "I have a LIFESTYLE. I bike, I ski, I do yoga every day, I cook at least one meal a day from scratch, I journal CONstantly, first thing in the morning and last thing at night. I write for a living. I play piano, I play guitar. This is who I am. There is no room for compromise."

But after a weekend of tantrumming, I was forced into the zen-perspective. I am discovering who I am WITHOUT those things. Granted, I'm getting much more adept at one-handed typing, and I can perform a garlic-chopping stunt that rivals Cirque de Soleil. But the other things...well, I'm learning that life goes on even when I can't journal my dreams the second I regain consciousness. That while I'm missing out on early spring biking, I get a whole other joy from daily walks on the mountain. That there are other routes to serenity besides yoga. That when I write with my left hand, the output is so painfully slow and elementary that it makes me feel completely unintelligent, suggesting perhaps that I measure my wisdom by the words I produce perhaps a little more than I'd like.

A big thing we talk about in yoga is the release of expectations. Or, as the Vogue-editor from Sex and the City puts it so succinctly, "Stop expecting things to be the way you thought they would be." In other words, maybe "who I am" is not so set in stone as I've thought. You find things you love, like biking, writing, piano, and you take them as clues into who you really are. But...take care, lest we get so attached to those things, and miss out on other depths of our selves that we cease to explore.

So in the spirit of reducing word-production and gazing inward to a different kind of wisdom, I shall end this here. I've got to get ready (read: put contacts in one-handed) for my x-ray appointment at the Vic. Based on the outcome, I could have the cast off today, or it could be another six weeks. One or the other.

At this point, I really wouldn't mind either way.

In other news...

Wed, 14 Mar 2007 17:12:47 GMT

Spring is here
I'm so cool
I'm so cool
Spring is here

Overheard at Hip Mile End Café

Wed, 14 Mar 2007 17:11:38 GMT

"If you wanna know what God thinks of money, look at who he gave it to."

My heart goes out to this macbook-toting thirty-something male who uttered this gift of an overheard sentence.

My Pact With Hashem:

Fri, 02 Mar 2007 15:41:02 GMT

It's official.

I've given up Facebook for Lent.

It's Been Ten Days...

Wed, 28 Feb 2007 21:35:03 GMT

...since I last logged into Facebook. I'm terrified of ever going back. Minutes ago I typed in a URL that began www.f... and the facebook-address popped up, and like an AA-Grad with a glass of Jack Daniels thrust in hand, I panicked, closed the entire browser, and tried to breathe.

In other news, I've been doing some high school presentations this week with an environmental education NGO, where we perform little skits about water and energy conservation. One of the schools was my old high school. I tells y'all, nothing brings back ye ol' mems like the smells of the theatre where you spent about 97% of your high school education...

In more news, the sun rocks. Yay for sunshine. Montreal winter...what a ringer. I'm surviving it, and guess what? I don't hate this place. I actually fuckin' love it.

I Am Aglow

Thu, 15 Feb 2007 23:39:43 GMT

I live in a rather yuppy, unneighbourly-neighbourhood. There's no fair-trade, boho-haven café down the street from me (athough there is Chapters...). As someone who's always lived in stroller-friendly, artist-flocking leafy-tree kinda hoods, this is a bit of a burn.

How EVER.

I live a five minute walk away from the mountain.

Which means I've been cross-country skiing at every chance I get.

There is really nothing quite like an hour-long zip through the trees on skis to put you back in touch with the pace of nature. Skiing is the most graceful, most elegant winter-sport I can think of. Skating comes a close second, but you can't travel through the woods on skates. A few minutes on skis and you quickly fall into a rythm of breathing and gliding. You can travel noiselessly across all kinds of snow-cloaked terrain, so silent in fact that foxes, cardinals and chipmunks don't dissappear before you pass them on the trail. And you don't need a gas-guzzling, cranky old chair-lift to carry you up some poor treeless mountain.

I hate the fuck out of winter. I just hate being cold. I hate schlepping through the city in boots and twelve-hundred layers of clothes. I hate hiding my face from the wind, and cancelling plans to do fun things because I'd rather not trudge through the stingingly miserable night air.

How EVER.

I love to ski. And the hour-or-so of skiing I can slip into my day is enough to keep me in touch with what's really going on. For beneath the surface of Urban Winter Woe, there is serious elemental thrust going on. The snow ushers in rest for hibernating animals, germination for biennial bulbs, and frustrated percolation for us cabin-fevered humans. Today I went skiing, following the biggest dump of snow this city has had in weeks, possibly all season. The drifts were so deep I was losing my poles in them. The winds were so mightily strong that it was all I could do to stay upright in the open-air parts. As I was approaching a steep downhill from atop an exposed part of the mountain, overlooking the chalet and Beaver lake, I was struck with a new awareness. I suddenly realized how overwhelmingly WHITE everything was. The snow was gusting in my face like a sand-storm, and I was all but fighting my way through a wall of wind. The trees were waving frantically. The city-sounds were muffled against the powerful wails, which were so loud I could barely hear my own breath. But everything was white. Mother Nature was up to some kinda spell, that was for sure. But if all this white was any indication, it was a redemptive spell, and it cast a purity - angelic-ness even - to the frantic, flailing snow-storm raging on.

In short, I got on the rest of my day, working against deadlines and doing my puttery little research, baked some cookies and vaccumed the apartment. But since my ski, I've felt a little bit more in touch with the seeming-inconvenience of this much-hated season. I feel like I learned something today about winter.

That mountain has been teaching me since I was born. It's a huge part of my childhood, and a touchstone in my life. Aparently it has a high concentration of chrystal in its geological composition. According to a healing-stone-hippy acquaintance of mine, it's a magic mountain.

If that's the case, I'm happy as heck to live where I live.

Number One Wife, right here.

Fri, 09 Feb 2007 21:53:17 GMT

Okay, not to brag, but I may just have created the most amazing cookies this earth has ever seen. So basically, it's rice flour (the dude I'm bakin' em for is gluten-intolerant, wtf), a bit of spelt-bran, a handful of oats, TONS of cinnamon, TONS of nutmeg, two ground cardammon pods, a teaspoon of minced ginger, a cup of grated coconut and a whack-load of chocolate chips. Oh, and sugar. Mix all that up with: canola oil, rice milk, a tablespoon of tahini and one egg.

The result? It's like all of India exploded in your mouth. That is, if India tasted like chocolate.

Something about the rice-flour...it gets more soggy, hence moister, more succulent cookies.

Don't ask me how I do it folks. Just love me for it.

House/Queer/Buff/Oh-my

Fri, 09 Feb 2007 13:55:49 GMT

Is it a sign of February, or a sign of being a loser, that the most important people in my life right now are Gregory House, Doctor Chase, Brian Kinney, and Spike?

Boo.

Yay! I have stomach flu!

Tue, 06 Feb 2007 00:12:05 GMT

It's kinda fun that I could just hop in a cab last night and throw my sick self on my parents' doorstep, ready to have them drizzle ginger-ale down my open throat.

Although it's only a twenty-four hour thing, I think. I'm already feel wayz bets.

Cardammon (I bought it in bulk a few days ago, and it's cool.)

Sat, 03 Feb 2007 13:13:29 GMT

.....is my newly discovered spice, and my favoured Pod of Choice. Crush a bit into chocolate-banana chip cookie batter and the cookies turn all Indian on you. Slip a pod or two a pot of plain-ole orange pekoe, and *poof* you've got yourself homemade chai.

As far as spicing goes, it's fun dealing in pods. It seems like such a natural measuring system, versus the constructed "teaspoon" conventions.

With the introduction of a new spice in my life comes a new idea for a cookie recipe: a variation on my famed spelt-oat -cinnamon-banana-chocolate-coconut dairy-free morsels of heaven, this one will cut the banana and replace it with fresh ginger, crushed cardammon, nutmeg and a spoonful of cocoa. Oy vey. Oy frikkin' vey.

And now: to the Saturday Globe. Possibly with a pot of makeshift chai. And oatmeal. Ooooo weekends. Oooooo bloody great weekends. Me so laaaaazy.

Montreal Winter

Wed, 31 Jan 2007 22:07:13 GMT

Anyone who's ever lived with me knows: I hate mice. I hate the fuckin' crap out of them.

And yet ... I was cross-country skiing through the glittering pines of Mount Royal last weekend, when I was stopped by an enchanting sight: a tiny field mouse, about the size of my thumb, was darting across the trail. I stopped, breathless with delight, to watch this little creature scurry its way into the silent woods. Its ears were perked, pink and adorable. Precious.

This, I thought, is mice as they should be: quaint English fairy-tale mice, the kind that befriend poor orphans locked in towered dungeons, who dress in petticoats and have Christmas teas. Beatrix-Potter mice. I waited until the little feller had disappeared into the woods beyond to resume my ski, rather pleased with the momentary peace I’d just made with all mouse-kind.

So, what does this tell us? That Mount Royal is magic. I've been skiing up there almost every day, and few things make me happier. Even mice are okay.

Inconvenient Truth My Ass

Thu, 25 Jan 2007 19:59:44 GMT

Ummm, HELL-lo Global Warming? Where the fuck have YOU been while I've been freezing my nosehairs off in this minus-20-something misery?