Booty Call

In the past few days, I've had a number of conversations with people -- conversations that they initiated, I might add -- about sex.

Those who are having it, want more of it or want it with someone else. Those who aren't having it, are hoping to have it.

I blame spring. I saw my first (non-copulating) robin the other day, so the change of seasons is definitely upon us.

Spring demands that we shed our layers. So, while we're at it, you might as well go right down to the epidermis. And while we're here, how about a little rutting for good measure? We are animals, after all.

God, even my cat seems to be a little more affectionate than normal.

I wish I could have casual consensual sex. It would make things so much easier. But the truth is that I'm not very good at it.

David Sedaris once remarked that what keeps him together with his boyfriend, Hugh, is a mutual fear of non-monogamy.

I get this.

It seems that in tenth grade when Sister Rosemary Carroll hit me on the head with a stack of test papers when I laughed at Tammy Osbourne for failing her test on the Ten Commandments, she knocked my morality gene loose.

I can only really enjoy sex in a mutually exclusive monogamous relationship. So sue me.

While I've tested the boundaries of casual sex over the years, the truth is that I have neither the energy or inclination for multiple partners. One's enough, thank you very much.

And I shudder at the thought of the booty call with someone I don't know very well. It's cringe-worth, like the "After the Final Rose" show on The Bachelor.

Anyway, I'm not judging other people's behaviour. Only observing...like a documentary on the National Geographic Channel.

In honour of this topic, I present you with this. A squirrel threesome.

It's Time to Lip Sync For Your Life

One of my guiltiest pleasures of the winter season is Ru Paul's Drag Race.

If you haven't seen it, do yourself a favour and catch up online before next Sunday's season finale.

There's no pleasure more intense than watching nine drag queens claw it out for a rather paltry prize package that includes a spread in a magazine no one's ever heard of, an Absolut Vodka ad, and $20,000 in cash.

And just so you know, I'm in Nina Flower's camp. That girl can dance.

That Scottish Play

No man or woman born can kill MacBeth, as the story goes.

But in one of the greatest plot twists in literature, we discover, along with MacBeth, the secret to the witches riddle: "Macduff was from his mother's womb untimely ripped."

I hope I didn't give too much away for you there. I figure you've had a couple of hundred years to catch the original.

It's just that I'm thinking about MacBeth this morning, because one of my Slipper friends and I are planning a summer weekend in Stratford.

She's my remarkably organized friend, so everything will be bought, done and paid for months in advance. Someone should just give her the economy and she'll have it all sorted and settled before 3:30 this afternoon.

Anyway, as part of my undergraduate degree, I read nearly every one of the plays in Shakespeare's canon. It was a joyful romp. Even the Tragedies.

And, even though I went to uni a billion years ago, I can still do all of Marc Antony's speech from Julius Caesar. You can test me. It's a party trick.

From my head to yours

I can't get this song from Wicked out of my head. So I'll do the honourable thing and share it with you. You can thank me later.

Time off for good behaviour

I've been feeling, of late, that I don't have much to say in my morning postings.

This is a fact that I'm largely attributing to over-work. I need some time off to open up my synapses. This past weekend away, while great, wasn't enough to fill up the tank.

I had a great conversation with someone about the subject of time off on Saturday night. This someone has a big job. Bigger than mine will ever be. He's the executive director of an international NGO with projects in developing countries around the world -- many of them in war zones.

His agency responds to emergencies -- natural disasters and the annoying ones created by humans -- and also works in longer term projects. He's the buck-stops-here guy for 70 staff at HQ and 3,000 in the field.

Like I said...big job.

He has five weeks of annual leave and he takes it all. More than that, he insists that the people who work for him take all their time off, too.

"You're no good to me if you're burned out," he says. "You'll be smarter, quicker and make better decisions if you've had the time to relax and unwind."

What a great example to set.

My boss recently took three weeks in a row off. A well-deserved rest.

This is almost unheard of in agency land. She needed to get a special papal dispensation to do it, and probably felt some angst in being away that long.

Imagine.

Heaven forbid that the world be without advertising for five minutes.

So, today I salute my vacation. Coming in May, to a theatre near you. And pray for the perspective a that I know comes from time off.

Home

I just spent the weekend with many good, old friends in Ottawa.

It looks like you can go home again. Or home is one of those transportable things that moves where your friends do.

This morning I'm feeling a little post-friend loneliness.

This just in

Another inspirational quote from our friend Desmond Tutu.

Nothing is too much trouble for love.

I guess he's never asked someone to get him a drink when they're in the kitchen.

Another Charmed St. Patrick's Day

See, I told you.

Although lifelong fans, we had cheap seats for the Fleetwood Mac concert last night. My BFF and I got the tickets for just 25 bucks a pop. A real steal, even though we were up in the nosebleeds.

We got to the arena early, grabbed a coffee, and went up to the 300 level.

"These aren't that bad," I said, enthusiastically. "At least we're looking directly at the stage."

No sooner were the words out of my mouth, then someone who worked at the arena came by and said, "Hey, do you guys want to get upgraded?"

"Are you kidding?" we said.

Apparently not. Along with the couple behind us, we were moved to the 100 level, directly facing the stage!

We were ecstatic!

The concert was incredible. I cried when Stevie sang "Landslide" and swooned when Lindsay buried his head in Stevie's neck after Sara.

For a band with a decidedly complex emotional history, my reaction to them is anything but. Simply bliss.

March 17th

I know that in advertising punning is the lowest form of humour, but I can't help but laugh at the new Alexander Keith's radio ads. Keith me, I'm Irish. It's infantile, but I can't stop giggling.

St. Patrick's Day has always held a lot of significance for me, and not because I'm prone to hanging out in pubs drinking green beer.

It's the date I moved to Japan, oh so many moons ago. And it's the date, two years later, that I moved back to Canada.

It's also the date I started working at my current job, three years ago. It was the day last year that I moved into my brand new house.

If I think long and hard, there are probably other significant events that have occurred on this date.

Or maybe they're just more memorable because I've got a holiday that reminds me what I was doing the year previously.

Tonight I'm going to see Fleetwood Mac in concert, which ought to make this St. Paddy's Day another one for the record books.

Having a ball

Some pleasures are guiltier than others. Like my unashamed love for seventies pop music.

I picked up Season One of The Partridge Family while shopping at a big box this weekend.

Talk about hours of fun. Like this number from the pilot, introduced by Johnny Cash. Click the title, jack up your speakers, and dance around in front of your computer.

Bad Boyfriends

Fame whore alert.

Don't date someone really, really famous, and then complain that no one is interested in who you are as a person. Especially since who you are as a person is someone who follows around really, really famous people!

Paul H-O, ex public access TV host who made a career of making fun of other people's art and ex-boyfriend of Cindy Sherman, presented Guest of Cindy Sherman at Doc Soup last night.

The doc, though a little too long, was pretty interesting -- unprecedented access into Sherman's process, work and life -- but it was also a self-indulgent romp into what makes Paul tick. And what makes him tick, also makes him talk. A lot. In the Q and A after the movie, I thought I was literally going to squirm out of my skin listening to his painfully neurotic monologue.

I started to wonder, about 15 minutes in, what would make someone like Sherman -- a clearly beautiful, articulate and talented woman -- stay with a self-absorbed jerk like Paul?

The trouble with kids today

I came across this the other day:

The world is passing through troubling times. The young people of today think of nothing but themselves. They have no reverence for parents or old age. They are impatient of all restraint. They talk as if they knew everything, and what passes for wisdom with us is foolishness with them. As for the girls, they are forward, immodest and unladylike in speech, behavior and dress.

Sound familiar?

It was written by some dude named Peter the Hermit back in the year 700. Apparently Petey boy stopped being a hermit long enough to emerge from his lair, take one look at the skate boarders of the day, and throw up his hands in disgust. Peter the Hermit was probably the old, smelly guy who told the kids to get off his lawn.

The point is that every generation thinks they've got it worse than the generation before. Look, maybe we do. We certainly seem to be dreaming up new and increasingly more effective ways to exterminate the entire hu man race.

But the truth is that every successive generation seems to struggle with exactly the same basic issues when it comes to shaping the next generation.

I'm going to a three year old's birthday party on Sunday (I know, Saints preserve us) and as I was buying the birthday girl her very own Groovy Girl and plastic sushi set, it kind of struck me.

One hundred years from now, everyone alive on the planet today will already be dead.

Someone may well unearth the sushi set and hold it up as an example of the days when kids used to mind their elders.

Put on your Tutu

Not only did Barb return my boss to me yesterday, she also kindly sent along a beautiful and inspirational tome entitled: Believe: The words and inspiration of Desmond Tutu.

It'll be blog fodder for a long time to come.

It's a pocket-sized reader, packed with quotes, sound bites and extracts from some of his speeches.

This morning I opened to this:

I'm coming to believe more and more in the truth that everything we do has consequences. A good deed doesn't just evaporate and disappear.

I find this really interesting for a couple of reasons. One is that the idea of karma has come, somewhat erroneously, to mean only that no bad deed will go unpunished.

It's payback for something we've done wrong or, said with more satisfaction, payback for something someone else has done wrong!

But Tutu points out the other side of karma.

That goodness, even when no one is looking, also has its rewards. It doesn't just go into a huge void, only to be forgotten.

People who take their jobs really seriously

Every time I fly out of my home town airport, I'm amused by how seriously the security agents take their jobs . They're the school-crossing guards of the flying world.

To start with, there are 5 full-time security agents for an airport whose largest aircraft seats 32 passengers. With those kind of odds, you need to be seriously inventive if you want to make your job interesting.

Every time...and I mean EVERY TIME...I fly out of there, they've dreamed up some new indignity to subject the passengers to.

Yesterday, I was asked to endure a full-body search. More amusing, since I was wearing skin-tight lycra yoga pants and a body-skimming knit top.

The female security agent told me that, if I chose, I could experience my check in the back room -- which sounded a little too much like porn for my liking.

Then, getting ready for the full-on pat down, she asked me if I had any pain in any part of my body. "Well," I ventured, "Not yet...."

She let me through. But I knew what she was thinking. Next time, cavity search.

It's Boss Returning Eve!

Happy, happy, joy joy. The conga line of meetings will soon endeth and I'll return to my usual over-work, not the ridiculous over-work of the past three weeks.

Here's the promise of more good blog entries to come.

Winning Life's Lottery

As the Team Play Captain for our office lottery pool, I'm often party to conversations about what the contributor will do if he or she wins.

A lot of times, the conversations are around how, depending upon the number of participants and the size of the lottery pool, the prize would be either too big or not big enough for what the winner wants to do with it.

This often leads to talk about how even a prize of $50,000, or some other equally divine amount, wouldn't nearly be enough to retire on, and hence not even worth winning.

This always makes me laugh -- how we, as humans, are so controlling that we try to control our luck. And how, even before we've won, we've already decided that whatever we're going to get isn't enough. We don't even have the prize in hand, and already we're sure that it's going to be disappointing.

I ripped a page out of my Zen Day by Day calendar the other day and posted it on my fridge.

It says: If you're not happy now, you never will be.

How true is that?

If I continue to wait for all my meticulously devised external conditions to be met before I allow myself a glimmer of happiness, well...you can see where this is going.

It's true, as Abraham Lincoln said, that most folks are as happy as they make up their minds to be.

So today, I choose happy.

My Gratitude List

Today I am Queen of the Busy People, but I thought I'd share some things I'm grateful for:


1) The sharp smack of arctic air on a wintery morning reminding me that, despite the shiver, I am very much alive.
2) The overwhelming sense that, no matter what my troubles, that everything is going to be alright.
3) That yesterday I had the good sense to raise a white flag and ask for help on a project, and received it.
4) For my creative, sensitive, big-hearted, team, whom I love like my heart is going to burst.
5) For being the winningest member of all the participants in the office Roll Up the Rim to Win tracker -- a fact largely attributed to excessive coffee consumption while my boss is away.

In an instant

Quite by accident, while reading one of my morning fundraising blogs, I came across some sobering news. One of my esteemed colleagues, who was a young pioneer in Face to Face fundraising, passed away suddenly while on holiday in Australia.

James founded Public Outreach, and he touched the lives of everyone who circled his orbit.

I'm in shock.