Kindred feeling with local TV stars - the Canadian Experience?

Last week I was at a local community pool with my daughter, and saw someone there who looked familiar - but I didn't know from where. Riffling through the inventory of places I've frequented, I couldn't place her in any of them. Grad school? No. A fellow mommy from K's daycare? No.

Then it hit me: she had been on two different CBC shows I'd watched - and very much liked - over the past couple years. Since they're Canadian shows, the people in them tend to reappear in other Canadian shows - a different orbit than the Hollywood types.

Is that why she felt so familiar? It was as though I'd reconnected with an old friend when I figured out from where I knew her. Her name is Paula Boudreau, and she starred in the fun hockey pseudo-reality show The Tournament, and also guested on the excellent This is Wonderland (both shows cancelled, two other brilliant moves by the CBC that seemed to fly in the face of the reception both shows got from viewers).

It was great to chat briefly with Paula and her lovely son; she was very helpful and kind to my daughter, too. And it was intriguing to feel such a sense of familiarity with someone I've never met. When I told a good friend about this, she said it was the quintessential Canadian experience.

Indeed, was it because I already felt familiar with the characters she'd played, so authentic in their Canadian-ness that they felt kindred? Do such characters mirror us as Canadians back to ourselves? (I try not to think this is possible with the Trailer Park Boys, however, despite that the director of the show is actually part of my extended family by marriage...LOL).

Or, is it the Canadian experience to have a relatively smaller pool of known talent, and therefore to feel that sense of familiarity with the faces that appear so often in our homegrown shows? Think Rebecca Jenkins, Sheila McCarthy, Maury Chaykin, Cara Pifko, Kate Trotter, Elias Koteas, Sonja Smits...they're the Al Waxman and Bruno Gerussi of my generation.

And now I can add Paula Boudreau to this list of "kin". I hope we meet up again sometime!

Branded feet

Okay, all you academics and overthinkers out there (and we know who we are)...this post contains endnotes for all of us who need to get our overanalytical ya yas out. =;->

You'll see them *surrounded by asterisks*

The Brandish Invasion, via bas-relief sock traction

I've just completed a week of holiday, spent with my 3-year-old. So naturally, my thoughts (i.e., rants) turn once more to the Brandish Invasion as it relates to kids' supplies.*See endnote 1*

Does anyone who has kids get annoyed, as I clearly do, about the way it's almost impossible to avoid having your children "branded" by their clothing? I've lately come to see that I unwittingly advertise for the companies - to whom I already give my money - that make the garments my child wears.

Take her socks. We have slippery floors where our daughter hangs out most often. So even though she's three, we still have her in those socks that come with rubberized slip guards. Designed to get the kid some traction, they slow down the more contortionistic positions your child might otherwise end up in, should she slip while running.

The slip guards are often shaped like cute shapes, such as stars, pawprints or butterflies. However, I've found very few pairs that had only these shapes; the rest also, or only, displayed the name of the socks' sellers as well. *Endnote 2*

The Brandish Bas-Relief of the subtitle, those brand names are almost reverse brands. The one we most readily think of is that which a cow would receive. That is burned into the animal's skin. But with K's socks, the name sticks out rather than being burned in.

Let's just say I'm looking forward to not needing the embossed socks anymore. And I won't even start on the Disney/Pixar/Nick Jr. monopoly on the design of my favourite brand of diapers. I've got her wearing the blue, boy's cut ones at present, because she likes the cars, and I detest the princesses on the pink ones. I'm starting to think switching to generic is not such a bad idea, cardboardy texture and all...*Endnote 3*

But once again, thankfully, K will outgrow those soon, too.

Will blog more soon - pooped from keeping up with that li'l fireball all week! (Best job in the world, tho')Thanks for checking in.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
And now for those *Annoying Endnotes*...

*Endnote 1*
I'd started to write "kids' gear", but changed to the more generic "kids' supplies" when I thought of how pretentious that other word sounded. Funny how even what we call something has its own connotations, containing judgments about the speaker behind the word.

*Endnote 2*
Again on word choice, I'd started to write "the socks' makers", but then remembered that The Gap is not likely the name of the company that actually made my daughter's socks.

*Endnote 3*
I have tried the generics, but have just found the known brands to be better and more comfy for K. I'm just so pleased we can now recycle diapers in Richmond Hill now!

Out in the soil, but still feeling invaded

I’m back in the garden this week, getting the last of my seeds in and continuing to marvel at nature’s powerful language.

It makes sense that another post would come from our backyard, since I use this space to yammer about messages from around me. I’d like this to extend more concretely to ‘us’ someday, but for now we’re pretty much in Michelle’s World at present (until I see some more comments – yes this means you!).

At this time of year, I often benefit from being a home-based worker by spending the first half hour of the morning out among the fronds. It’s the best time to poke around the plants, see what new colour has appeared, and give some help to the droopers (Contrasted with those joyous flowers of last post, droopy ones communicate their own form of pathos with the downward curve and nondescript paleness, as if their petals had been sheathed under transparent tissue paper, then had the texture blown out of them).

Today I heard Bill Carroll on CFRB 1010 AM talking about his Rule of the Backyard. It goes that when you and your neighbour are both in the backyard, you should each do your best to act as though the other was not there. His logic is that in one’s backyard, one often is seeking solitude and privacy. So, even if the fence between you yields a peek or more, you should act as though there’s an invisible shield that keeps you from seeing one another. At the front of the house, on the other hand, it’s okay to approach your neighbour and chat.


An old proverb that still holds true

It’s true that good fences – imaginary or otherwise – make for good neighbours. I had heard a few years back that it’s an expression that translates into more different languages than most. And on further research I found a short piece on this very subject, called "Good fences make good neighbours": history and significance of an ambiguous proverb online – which spoke to the dark side of this saying. I also learned that the expression had been used ironically by Robert Frost in his storied poem, Mending Wall. (Check out the brief entry in Wikipedia about Mending Wall)

I often wish my fences were about two feet higher all around, so that so much cellophane and plastic packaging wouldn’t blow into my garden from others’ waste bins and the schoolyard behind us. My rule in the garden is, “If it’s not natural, it cannot be in my soil.” So I’m seen daily extricating cigarette butts, pieces of newspaper, receipts, shopping bags – you name it – from their former wedged position.

The Brandish Invasion revisited, via the composter

I guess that by removing packaging from the garden, I’m also eliminating brand presence. If you read my series on the Dora phenomenon, you know how I try to keep boundaries between brands and my private space. And I, too, consider the backyard as sacred.

So imagine my annoyance when I emptied my composter last week, and had to spend about ½ hour picking all those little produce stickers out of my fresh yield (“Ah,” says reader, “now I get the choice of photo”), along with doing a second sweep through the garden after dumping compost to ensure I hadn’t missed any. It’d likely be okay if they were pure paper, but many are plasticized in some way, I guess to keep them flexible to stick on uneven and rounded surfaces (think avocado).

I guess it’s better than starting to put all fruit and vegetables into packages in order to identify their source. But what a pain in the a**. Certainly, food more than anything else needs its source properly identified, if for no other reason than to know who to go after if you get sick after eating it. But imagine all the labels that got missed by other faithful composters. And imagine how many hours are spent at municipal waste management centres, peeling those little stickers off the contents of our green bins so that they can be properly fed back into the earth.

I went to an outdoor education camp as a teenager, and at the time I also smoked. I remember we went on a nighthike, and the leader telling us that if we absolutely had to smoke, we should pocket our butts afterwards. Evidently, it takes decades for the artificial material in the filters to even begin to biodegrade.

I wonder how long those stickers take to start decomposing. Maybe the next person to own our house will get turned onto Turbana bananas, too, while digging up our garden.

The lesson? Peel those puppies off as soon as you take the produce out to eat, and put them in the trash where they belong. The critical view? Labels find their way everywhere, even where you don’t expect them to.

Floral expression

If you've been here, you've seen me zip in a few directions lately, as I notice the way different things around us communicate.

Today, I will leave the roadway and explore the natural world - again reflecting where I've spent time lately - to look at what the garden says to us.

If you have one, or enjoy foliage in others' yards, you're seeing lots of action if you live above the Equator. Areas where only a week ago hopeful tufts of green poked out are now replaced by countless shades of green, often dotted with the brilliant blasts of colour from bulb flowers and early-blooming perennials.

I can never look at flowers without ascribing personalities and 'souls' to them, so I'm almost anthropomorphic in describing them. Bear with me - I have a point related to communication, however tenuous you might find it.

Consider the tulips in the photo here. Don't they seem to say "Here we are! Hello, world! How can you not love us!?" And doesn't this evoke the same feelings of hope and renewal in many of us when we see them? Along with the simple joy the colours transmit, bulbs and perennials always inspire me to cope better with whatever's going on in my head. Because, after all, if these li'l plants can come back each year, seemingly out of nowhere, then I can 'come back' from whatever's dogging me.

Garden supply catalogue writers would probably be lost without descriptors like 'cheery', 'shy' or even 'flirty.' Maybe they're referring to the way those species make us feel when we look at them. But I think they, too, look at flowers as having personalities.

Think of the tiny Johnny Jump-up, as it pokes through the even tinier crack between two patio stones to put its delicate, fragile 'face' out to the world; or the Forget-me-not blooms that seem to find their way metres away from where their first seeds were planted - and can set root into places flowers don't seem to belong. In later summer, we are greeted by those Sunflower faces that peer down at us from 9-foot-tall stalks, and purple coneflowers, their petals thrust back from their centres like hair blown back by the wind.

I have a huge, climbing Golden Clematis plant that, when it goes to seed, looks like a bunch of fuzzy-haired Dr. Suess characters. I've always called these "the Whos from Whoville" in homage to those optimistic Grinch story villagers. A teacher friend who's also passionate about gardening made the very same comparison one day, when she visited my garden.

Then, by extension, we see the out-and-out glee among the bees and other bugs who pile on as soon as those blooms appear. You only need to see a honeybee with its legs and stomach covered in bright yellow dust, its flight slowed and uneven as it tries to fly weighted down by all that pollen, to see what I mean. Even so weighed down, the bee seems thrilled. And then again, the trilling of birdsong in the background doesn't hurt the joyful, lovefesty mood.

Either I'm onto something in articulating how flowers communicate - or I should get out of my garden and back into the 'real world' of technology distractions and cellphone jockeys on the road...

If you're out there, use the Submit a Comment link to have your say.

Vehicular communication and more intellectual overload

Digression into intellectual property - and kiddieland yet again!
In my last post, I said we'd left kiddieland. But I couldn't help but first think of the Disney/Pixar movie, Cars, as I wrote the above title.

But of course if you've been reading, you know by now I'm not likely to post a photo of any of the movie's characters - that would infringe upon copyright. But, if I took a photo of a line drawing that my daughter had coloured in, which was from a book bearing said copyrighted photos on the front, would that infringe on copyright?

What do you think? Remember, there's possibly $50 worth of book shopping in it for you if you post a comment this month...

OK, now here's the topic already - messages drivers send each other
Once while on a Girls' Roadtrip, one of my travelling companions said, "You know, I find it amazing how all the cars just blink their lights, and we respond by moving over. It's such a neat way that we communicate!"

I want to write today about how vehicles - and of course, the people controlling them - communicate while on the road. But I'm referring to the other things we do with our vehicles outside of conventional signals that communicate things about us (especially since so many people don't bother to signal anyway - grrrr).

I was thinking about this on the way to drop my daughter at daycare this morning. It's only about a km from our house, and I usually take her there along the residential sidestreets.

On one of the streets along our route, there are a couple of enormous houses being built. In fact, they've been being built for more than a year now. And now that it's spring, the projects have picked up steam again. That means lots of cars and trucks on either side of the street in front of the two houses.

So now, traffic is limited to about 1.3 lanes, on a street built to comfortably hold one lane each way, with maybe one lane to squeeze onstreet parking. That was before one knew what SUV stood for (though our suburb probably saw its share of farm and dirt trucks when the road was built).

This narrowing has resulted in an ongoing game of "chicken" between drivers approaching from either direction - a game in which I admit to participating myself. It goes like this: I see an approaching vehicle; I assume that driver sees me. I then size up the vehicle. Is it a Honda or a Hummer? Is the driver slowing down? How far over are they moving?

I'm usually driving either our li'l 2002 Jetta, or a slightly larger Passat. So my question is always the same: "Should I speed up and zip through the space before they do, and will they wait for me to? And would we both fit if we went through together?" Essentially, if possible, I want to get where I'm going without stopping too often (yah, I'm a bit of a Type-A driver). And I assume most others feel that way, too.

Already, I'm looking for a bunch of different signals about what the other person plans to do. And, you could say that in this jockeying for position, I'm revealing some things about my personality as well. I'm also looking for messages about other people's personalities based on whether they speed up or slow down.

And, I'm making judgments about what they'll do based on the vehicle they have: not only whether our cars would physically fit through the gap together, but also about that person's level of aggression and sense of entitlement based on their choice of vehicle. The Honda driver would likely seem to me less likely to charge (unless outfitted with a 4-inch-wide dual-pipe exhaust) than would the one with the Hummer.

Another message drivers send - at least in my book - is through their choice to talk on the phone, put on makeup, listen to their iPods or read the paper while driving. To me, they all communicate the same thing: "I am very busy and must do this other thing now, even though it might compromise my driving. Therefore, my time is more important than my or someone else's safety."

Do I come off as just ranting and being judgmental about other drivers? Perhaps. And I'm certain other drivers have not liked being behind me, either. But I've formed those opinions based on the messages I've received from others while sharing the road with them.

Overload on the road
More research results are starting to support my opinion about what happens to people's attention span when they're driving and doing something else at the same time.

That "something else" has been the subject of many a chortling highway cop's news appearance on the Monday news; anyone who's grown up in Ontario has seen them - those segments on the completely whacked out things people have been caught doing while on the way home from the cottage: eating a super-mega plate of nachos, rolling a cigarette, balancing a beer on one's head while driving with his knees...the stories are legion!

But, seriously, this is another example of how we are cognitively impaired when we try to do too many tasks at the same time. Our brains only have so much RAM to go on (and you probably all know someone who you think functions on much less capacity than most!)

And, you probably have all experienced being behind a driver who is obviously having a brain lapse, as they drive 20km/hour in a 60 zone, and the silhouette of their head looks like it has a hand and a phone attached.

I'm not usually one to get behind a "corporate" cause, but if you're interested in what's been found on the subject in Canada, check out the cellphone study posted on the Insurance Bureau of Canada's Click On This site. Or, Google "distracted driving" to see what else has been learned on the subject. I know it makes me stop and think before taking that call while commuting home.