Prattle on
Friday, December 30, 2005
 
So, it’s been a successful trip home for the holidays. I did plenty of eating, I successfully switched my mother’s home coffee supply from crap to the good stuff and this morning, before I leave my mom will teach me to make bread. Well, she was all keen on it the other day and now she coping and attitude. Suddenly the mother-daughter bonding moment that she was so thrilled about will have to take a back seat to some cheesy drama staring Billy Ray Cyrus as a country doctor now practicing in the big city (at least I think that’s what it’s about). Imagine, she is supposed to teach me her secrets of bread making and I have set the yeast and everything but now she’s all “I’ll be there in a minute” like I am putting her out. When it comes to cooking, my mother is sneaky, the kind of cook who leaves an ingredient out when passing on a recipe. Now I am paranoid and convinced that she is letting the ready to use yeast sit for a reason, but wont tell me what it is.

There is a good chance that mom just wants to get the last few minutes of the Billy Ray Cyrus show in. I can hear it in the other room. After Billy Ray preformed an eye transplant on some patient he coached the guy’s son’s baseball team and taught the kid a lesson about not goofing off in practice (well, I think that’s what it is about, the voice-over and the piano music is confusing me).

Tonight I head back to Montreal for New Years Eve. GRC and a couple other friends are coming with me. Someone should warn the authorities. Hey, if you are out and about in Montreal on New Years Eve and you run into 5 screaming 30-year-old women, that will be me and my friends. I am the quite one.
Sunday, December 25, 2005
 
So, it’s 2:00Am on Christmas Eve. But I guess that means it is Christmas day. Obviously, I can’t sleep. It’s funny because normally on the night before Christmas my sister gets it into her head that she needs to make part of a gift for every member of the family. Then, she enlists my help with the project that predictably keeps us both up until about 3:30AM armed with paints, or bits of wood or miniature plant pots. It is always a nice idea, but it always gets put into motion way too late. Anyway, this is the first year in a long time when I actually got to bed at a reasonable hour. But, my sister came walking into the room twice. Both times I was at critical points on my journey to dreamland and that last time caused a detour in my route, a little detour called insomnia. It’s unfair. She is sleeping soundly in the other room and I have to power up my laptop to take care of some errant thoughts running through my brain.

I hate not being able to sleep. And I feel betrayed by my body, mainly because, for a good part of the evening I felt as if I could have dropped off to sleep at any given moment. But, I couldn’t because my sister dragged me around this picturesque suburb to run this errand and that. Now that I am in a comfortable bed and ready to fall asleep I have finally attained the level of awakedness necessary to operate heavy machinery, balance a cheque book or perform minor day surgery. How is this fair?

Tomorrow, when I get thrown into the lion’s of noise, I will no doubt want to curl up and sleep but there will be no rest when surrounded by 25 of my closest screaming relatives.

Perhaps my body isn’t betraying me at all. Perhaps that it is used to this once-a-year marathon of semi-consciousness and in an hour (at the 3:30AM mark) I will finally be able to close my eyes and drift soundly. Perhaps not.

Anyway, I think I’m gonna read The new Yorker. I picked it up the other day because I was attracted by the short story by Nabokov in it. I read it yesterday and I almost sent the editor of the magazine an e-mail that goes like this “Fuck, I love Nabokov”, but I suspect he’s hear that before.

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