February - New Beginnings

   Hello there faithful Ottawa This Weekend readers. It's been awhile, eh? Where have you been getting your weekend news? You've been over at Apartment 613, haven't you? HAVEN'T YOU? It's been three months since the last post; who could blame you for straying?

   The past 91 days haven't even been particularly busy.

   In early December, I worked at a car dealership for seven days calling customers to let them know that their vehicle had been recalled:

   For seven days.

   By day three, I would sit down to make these calls, affix the incredibly sexy and not humiliating at all headset to my face-head area, and think of all the different ways I could get out of working for them:

   On a Tuesday, I called my representative and said I wouldn't be returning to that job and that I was sorry for being such a flake; good luck in the future, lady.

   I spent 45 minutes on the phone trying to explain why I didn't want to work there anymore. The list of reasons included:

• “it's making me sad”
• “I feel empty when I'm there”
• “I think I'm incapable of doing the job correctly”
• “my heart hurts when I think about going back”

  

... to my employment-representative. I'm an idiot.

   The good thing I did take away from my time there is some solid information about the man who hit me in the ass with his car in 2011 (just kidding, if that's illegal).

Around the same time, a wish of mine came true: 

   #TeamMiggie is together at last. Here's a post from PugBurger about her introduction/dynamic. She sleeps next to me now which is HEART EXPLODINGLY nice. 

   Biggie hates her guts :

   To fill my weekends and to leave this fur-covered hell I call a home I've started working at a yoga centre. I love it there. Beautiful people in yoga pants, walking around without shoes on, and (as with any customer service job) there's always a handful of weirdos — it's pretty perfect.

   However, it is a part-time gig so I've been begging different retail places and restaurants to give me a job to no avail. I don't know why the retail stores are being so uppity (I'm a motherfucking customer service guru) but I feel like the restaurants can just tell that I'm a taste-testing plate-dropper. How do they know? I can't promise that I won't steal someone's french-fry but I can promise to try really hard not to drop anything. Restaurants aren't in the game of chances, are they?

   So I've been Googling how to sell worn-underwear online. It seems the worn-underwear game is for people who don't quit their steady employment because their hearts hurt from lack of job-love.

It's a cold, competitive scene in the underthings-selling game; you really have to have a mind for marketing — plus, I call them 'underthings'.

   This has all lead me back to Ottawa This Weekend. I love it here and I've been feeling guilty about my lack of diligence in updating. Ottawa This Weekend is going to be done a little differently from now on, though. The general talk-around-town is that, with the exception of my father/number 1 fan (who lives 500 km outside of Ottawa), nobody likes to read about the upcoming events. Even though they're hilarious and I put a lot of consideration and time into how best you'd like to read about upcoming events, you ungrateful pack of swines, they are tedious and not nearly as much fun to write as the reviews. Ottawa This Weekend will, from now on, be stories, reviews, and memories from around Ottawa (and maybe a few that aren't about/from Ottawa at all). I'm super excited about it, you're super excited about it, and I'm sorry, Dad.

October 27 & 28 Review

    I was sick this past weekend. I reached out for support and was offered every home-remedy ranging from rest and tea to Nyquil and beer. I decided to beat the shit out of the sickness with the unbridled power of yoga:

    Regular bodily functions are a terrible thing to have in spandex among ten fit strangers; gassiness, coughing, and having an unstoppable itch are all natural things that are amplified in a quiet and zen room. Having a case of plugged-sinuses made me feel incredibly self-conscious and justifiably gross:

  

   After sleevin' it for the rest of the class, I was relieved to unwind in the least judgemental place on Earth — the city bus.

   A year ago, my friend taught me how to crochet. I vaguely remember her becoming frustrated with my slow learning progress and threatening me with physical violence. She can't hold a candle to this crochet-shaming bus-monster:

   This lady noticed my craft and confided that she too knows how to crochet.

   “Do you know how to make a chain?” she asked sweetly/menacingly.

   “I think so,” said I with trust and foolishness.

   “Here,” she said while taking my yarn and stick away from me.

  I didn't realise I had been crocheting all wrong. This is how I crochet:

when I should be crocheting like:

   There's this hand-contortion that you're supposed to do to make the process look effortless. It's something like:

and I just couldn't get my hand to stay folded in that position. If left unsupervised, the hand would unfurl and go back to groping and mishandling the yarn.

   The lady kept taking the crochet from me to demonstrate. Each time, she would walk me through the steps, hand the yarn back, and look around the bus to make eye contact with someone so she could shrug and shake her head like “Can you believe this girl?”

can you believe she actually said that?

  But really, the lady was incredibly adorable during the entire bus ride and, as a bonus, we used the impromptu lesson to ignore the drunk, dishevelled vagrant who was yelling to us.

Aug 4&5 Review

   The weekend started the way every weekend should — by putting your ass perilously close to a stranger's face and body.

   The Rama Lotus Yoga Centre is the best place in the world to do yoga (you heard it here first, folks).

   It's an inclusive, comfortable place to practice and be still and demonstrate extreme compassion and maturity.

   After packing up and apologising profusely, I made my way to the Busker's Festival to meet Elliott. (On the way, I was propositioned by this man:

I was more offended that someone paired silver and gold in the same outfit.

   This was my first time visiting the Busker's Fest and I learned something very important; buskers are people who can't pass the criminal record check to work at the circus. (probably).

   An unbelievably charming man in tights stopped near the end of his act to tell us that buskers don't have salaries but rely very much on crowd-donations. Ten dollars would be great. Twenty dollars is better. Fifty or a hundred, whatever! But anything less than ten dollars is insulting. Don't bother with small change. He went on to remind us that he had heard laughing and, therefore, had done his job and would we do a job for free?

   Oh, certainly not, vagrant.

   This incredibly awkward and blatant requisition went on for so long that people actually started to crouch low to the pavement and sort of crab-scuttle away.

   Some time later, on our way home, we finally got to see what every person who is forced to take public-transit hopes to see...

            a bus fight.

The short one lost by way of neck-wringing but the tall one was ejected so... lose-lose, I guess.

   This is why bus-etiquette is so important. If the short one had heeded the unspoken law of exiting through the back door of the bus he never would have been strangled. Some people gotta learn the hard way.

   On the holiday Monday, I went to The Works on Bank to meet up with some friends.

There isn't even an anecdote to go with this; their burger was just so damn good.

Props to their staff for demonstrating incredible patience.

May 12 & 13 Weekend

   I didn’t go to a structured event this weekend.
    It was Mother’s Day weekend. That special time of year when you reflect on all the spiteful and inexplicably mean shit you did to your mother as an emotionally stunted miniature psychopath with creepily high hormone levels and a G1 license.

   It’s also the weekend where you bust your ass trying to make up for all that nonsense with apologies cleverly disguised as thoughtful gifts.

   I live pretty far away from my mommy and feel a bit inadequate when this day rolls around. The past two years, I ordered flowers to be delivered from local shops in Orillia (because I was vying for Most Uninspired Gift, obviously) and the flower places ended up calling my mom to come pick up her own flowers, anyway. They suck at surprises.

   Earlier in April, I decided that this Mother’s Day was going to be awesome. Two days before the big day I still had no idea what to do and it was too late to order the dregs of flowers left behind by more organized people (plus I had already rage-burned all my Orillia-florist bridges). 

Armed only with a camera and desperation, I started recording the Mother’s Day That Could Have Been. Have a look-see:

    You’ll notice the sewing bit goes on a little long. It took a pathetic two hours to produce two acceptable teabags — I couldn’t look at the footage objectively in editing and agonized over every frame no matter how insignificant. 

    What you don’t see is the clueless attempts at producing cinematic magic resulting in a miffed cashier, a near-miss car-to-bike accident, and the hair at my temples being ripped out (pause at 2:26 in the video for explanation).