Cadence

No, I haven't met some drag queen named Cadence...relatively bearable though most of my week was, it would have been far more interesting if I had.

I had my first acting lesson of the new year this afternoon. For the better part of the past year and a half I've been taking private acting instruction once a week. My coach is a gentleman to whom, despite the fact that I've nothing but the most effusively complimentary words for him, I shall refer as Coach K for blog purposes. If you combined the directorial skill of the late Sir John Gielgud, the triple-threat grace and presence of Gene Kelly, and the airy amiability of Douglas Hodge, and put the lot into the person of a fellow with pleasant facial features not unlike those of a young John Ritter, Coach K would be the result.

Since it's one-to-one instruction, we generally work on monologues, and for most of the lessons I've tended toward classical (namely Shakespearean) monologues/soliloquys. This is partly my own doing (as most of the plays I own in print form are works of Shakespeare) and partly Coach K's (he seems to think I have a knack with classical text). 

I love Shakespeare. What I don't love is having to work with iambic pentameter.

For those of you who didn't pay attention in English or Music class, iambic pentameter is a metrical line commonly used in traditional verse. Iambic, in the case of the English speaker, simply means an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable, as found in words like before, trapeze, and destroy; pentameter means five pairs of iambic syllables per line. Each pair of iambic syllables is called a foot. When I work with iambic pentameter (that bitch), I'm working with stuff like these lines from Helena's monologue in A Midsummer Night's Dream (Act III, Scene 2), wherein she accuses Hermia of conspiring with Demetrius and Lysander to mock her:
Lo, she is one of this confederacy!
Now I perceive they have conjoin'd all three
To fashion this false sport in spite of me.
Notice how the stress is on every second syllable, so in Shakespearean terms, you're supposed to wind up with a rising inflection at the end of every line. This is where it poses a problem for me. When a line ends with a period or an exclamation point, in my mind that means it's probably a statement. When speaking a line that I determine to be a statement -- e.g. the first and third lines of that verse -- even when I stress the syllable itself, my natural modus is to end the line with a falling inflection. This is known as cadencing, and it's a habit that gives me no end of fucking grief during my lessons with Coach K. I swear that man has the patience of a saint, because I cadence at least twice during every goddamn attempt.

So at this point, you're probably wondering what the joke is here, or if there is one at all. Well, there is. I decided to look back over the scripts I kept from the three Shakespeare plays I've acted in (two before I started lessons, one since). Here's what I found:

Comedy of Errors (2007)
Role: Townsfolk
Line Status: None/Improvised. Townsfolk were essentially sound effects and human scenery. (Trivia: This is, however, where I learned how to spin plates.)

Much Ado About Nothing (2008)
Role: Ursula
Line Status: Speaks 19 times, all lines are in prose.

Love's Labour's Lost (2010)
Role: Jaquenetta
Line Status: Speaks 13 times, all one-liners.

The great cosmic joke here is that I haven't even had a role yet where my character's lines were written in iambic pentameter. And IF by some miracle I actually get the role I'm hankering after this year, I won't be using it then either. 
For players of the bit variety,
This structure's moot, a right nonentity.

Why I Love T. Rex's "Electric Warrior" Album Like Little Old Ladies Love Hard Candy



#1: I will offer it to anyone who comes to my house.



Little old ladies always seem to have at least one dish full of hard candy hanging around their homes and will quite insistently offer it to any visitor. In the same vein, my copy of "Electric Warrior" is always out and ready to play for anyone and everyone who visits my lair.

#2: I carry it around with me 24/7.


Little old ladies' purses/handbags are possibly the world's richest source of hard candy. Try going through your nan's purse sometime when she's in the john, I guarantee you'll find at least three individually-wrapped Werther's or a half roll of LifeSavers.

Whereas hard candy travels everywhere with little old ladies in their purses, "Electric Warrior" is always with me in the form of MP3 files. I bring my MP3 player with me everywhere I go in case I feel like doing hip slides to "Mambo Sun" in the cat food aisle at Sobeys.

#3: It's a potent cure-all.



Little old ladies are known for proffering hard candy as the answer to every problem. Feeling blue? Have a piece of hard candy! Tired from shopping? Oh, a butterscotch will perk ya right up! Fussy youngster? Give him a LifeSaver! Heart attack? Suck this peppermint while you give them CPR!

"Electric Warrior" has similar curative properties for me. If I'm crooked, tired, or otherwise Not Cool, spinning the album fixes that in a snap. If I were dead, I'm pretty sure it could reanimate me.

Now, if only there were something that could do the same for Marc Bolan...


Hollandaise sauce pairs very well with political correctness.

 If you've ever been told that you worry too much, chances are you know where I'm coming from with this. I've been having worry-spasms all day over (of all things) a night out downtown during which I remained stone cold sober.

That's not the joke. This is something that has actually been happening in my biology for the last 18 or so hours since I got out of the taxi and walked into my house. 

I went to a club downtown last night for the first time in almost three years, and the reason it was the first time in almost three years was because the last time I went downtown I had a major anxiety episode and wandered around the streets for over an hour without knowing I was even doing it. Now I know why. First of all, I had on an outfit that I thought was neat when I left the house, but I didn't grok just how horrible and stupid it was until I got home and looked in the mirror again. I mean, rhinestoned leggings with a Latin-cut glitter-trimmed little black dress and glittery peep-toe flats? And this dead cold winter? Fuck you, Vannie, and fuck your learning-disabled fashion sense.

Now, the main reason anybody really goes downtown is to drink liquor. I can't drink anymore because I'm not supposed to consume alcohol while I'm on my medication. I only went there because the club was having an '80s/'90s themed night and a lot of my friends were supposed to go. Only two people I know showed up at all, about two hours after I arrived, and I couldn't find them for most of the night. I had put my coat in coat-check when I arrived, but I had to get it out shortly thereafter because the place was cold enough to freeze all of Keith Richards' warts off. While I was sitting at a booth/table thing near the entrance by myself, a group of folks about my age, two girls and three guys, came over and asked if I minded them sitting there as well. We all ended up talking and eventually dancing together; I even allowed myself to freak and be freaked on by one of the fellows when the DJ played "U Can't Touch This", and later to dance in a circle with all three of the guys to "Love Shack." I settled an argument about Placebo at the bar when I went to get a soda; two barely-legal rocker kids couldn't figure out whether or not there were two versions of"Burger Queen"*. When the DJs started getting creative (read: mixing "Just Dance" and "Don't Stop Believin'" together with the most obnoxious goddamned drum beat possible) and I got tired of waiting for them to play the Placebo song I'd requested, I buggered off, thinking I'd had a time. 

I was starvacious by this point, and in no mood to eat vendor-cart hotdogs (a.k.a. street meat) while standing on the sidewalk in an inch of slush with peep-toe shoes on, so I hightailed it over to the Celtic Hearth. While I was looking at the menu, I swear I caught the unmistakable whiff of hollandaise sauce from a couple tables away.

Anyone who's been out to breakfast with me knows how much I hate hollandaise sauce. I don't like cream sauces in general (no one hates Béchamel sauce as much as I do), but hollandaise is its own special hell. I attempted to try Eggs Benedict at Blue a few months back, flush with the small yet artfully-spooned rivulets of sauce in cookbook and menu photos. They served it with damn near a pint of tepid frikking hollandaise all over it. Since then I  haven't been able to even look at the stuff. But I digress. 

When the waiter came back to take my order, I'd decided to have a breakfast called the Hungry Human. Despite the relatively pleasing alliteration of this breakfast title, I couldn't help but be a little annoyed at it because it reminded me of a discussion I'd had with my French class at the beginning of summer. The Guv'nor, where we had our end-of-session breakfast, carried a plate called the "Hungry Person's Brunch." It was obvious that this dish had once been called the Hungry Man's Brunch and, terrible feminists that we are, Ashley and I thought that it was a silly thing to change. "Hungry Man's Brunch" is just far more pleasing to the ear than "Hungry Person's Brunch", which is just awkward. I wondered if the Hungry Human was along the same lines. With the Hungry Person's Brunch, it wasn't only the obvious politically-correct influence that bugged me; it was the hypocrisy. I live in an area where words like "retarded", "squaw", and "cripple" are still in common use even when no offense is intended. Until people around here can be educated that these words are no longer acceptable, there's no sense in local restaurants putting clunkity-ass names on their breakfast dishes in some cack-handed attempt to appear progressive. Swanson's have never done it with their Hungry-Man TV dinners, so why this from some restaurant managers in frikking St. John's, Newfoundland? That isn't how social change works, b'ys.

Either way, I ordered this Hungry Human breakfast. I chose it because with the regular breakfast, you get your choice of ham, bacon, sausage, or bologna, but with this Hungry Human one, I saw by the menu that it contained ham, bacon, and sausage, and I was quite in the mood for breakfast meats. Now, in my experience, when you go to a breakfast restaurant for a similar meal, you get a small serving of each meat, usually a half slice of ham and two each of bacon strips and little brekkie sausages. That's plenty for me usually. At Celtic Hearth, that is not the case. My plate was frikking towering. In addition to the usual eggs, toast, and potatoes, there were five strips of bacon, three sizeable breakfast sausages, and a great thick slice of grilled ham. Thinking to myself, "Oh well, I'll have whatever's left boxed up", I tucked in.

As I was having my scoff, I began going over the night's previous events in my head, and while I was gobbling a piece of toast with strawberry jam, it hit me like a ton of bricks: I had behaved in an absolutely abominable manner. I'd sat by myself like a creepy, socially-inept loser. I'd talked to strangers. I'd insinuated myself into their group. I'd danced with strange men and allowed myself to freak and be freaked on. I'd even done stupid shoulder shimmies to show off my stupid ugly south-of-the-border shoulder fringe. In short, despite being stone cold sober, I'd behaved like a far, far bigger douchebag than any of the club patrons who were completely ossified. And there were people there with cameras! And camera phones! They may have caught me in their photos, which they will upload to their computers, and now evidence of my douchebaggery is going to be all over fucking Facebook for the world to see. FAN-BLOODY-TASTIC. At this point, I decided that I was not fit to ever engage in social situations and vowed never to go out in public again except to find/go to a job. I was sitting at a restaurant table and I was inwardly going batshit fucking insane with worry. I figured I'd better call for the bill and get my ass in a cab before I made a further spectacle of myself. I looked down at my plate.

In the midst of all the hollandaise sauce reek, misplaced political correctness, and crippling (there's that word again!) social anxiety...

I had eaten the entire Hungry Human Breakfast.

I then amended my vow: "I will never go out in public again, except to find/go to a job...or to go to the gym!"


*For the record, there are two versions: "Burger Queen", and "Burger Queen Français", which, as the title suggests, is in French.

New eyeballs are expensive.

I've been quite late getting to bed lately. This is because I'm newly redundant, which means two things:

1. No pressure to get up at a civilised hour (i.e. while the sun is out); and
2. Nothing to occupy my brain for 7.5 hours a day, which means I have more time and mental energy to focus on imagining and worrying about things that would not even register on normal people.

So my bedtime routine usually goes like this:

10:30 p.m. - Look at clock on laptop and resolve to get to bed in an hour. The closing credits of Golden Girls will be my signal. Continue Internetting.

11:29 p.m. - Hear end theme to Golden Girls and realise that an hour has passed...but I'm right in the middle of a forum post/writing experiment/rant/YouTube episode of My Little Pony Tales! Resolve to go to bed when finished doing whatever.

11:47 p.m. - Finished whatever, but look! A troll is getting the smackdown from the mods/I just came up with a bitchin' metaphor/I'm pissed off about the bus strike/There's a link to Strawberry Shortcake Meets the Berrykins! And Toms/Ceci/Stripes/Haylz/Krissi/Fairy Godmom just got on Facebook Chat!

2:04 a.m. - Last available (sober) friend signs off, ostensibly to go to bed like a human being. Turn off computer, reminding self that most of my friends are in bed and therefore unlikely to post anything legendary on Facebook before sunup.

2:05 a.m. - Loo, brush teeth, get drink, plug in BlackBerry, etc.

2:15 a.m. - In bed.

2:30 a.m. - Check Facebook on BlackBerry (conveniently kept on windowsill) because Drunk Wanker is probably still up asking shit like "settle a bet byzzzz was anyone ever actullay charged in the kennedy assasination" and I, being a veritable Hoover Dam of useless information, often have the answers he requests.

2:40 a.m. - Put BlackBerry back on windowsill, close eyes, attempt to sleep.

3:10 a.m. - Still awake because while trying to sleep I started thinking about the episode of All in the Family where Archie goes on a diet for his blood pressure and, through progression of hating myself for being such a big fat lazy stinking hog and remembering that my blood pressure was slightly high when I was a kid, am now worrying that if I eat chips twice in one day my blood pressure will skyrocket higher than any other human's, ever, and my eyeballs will blow up and burst right out of my head in the middle of the night, despite the fact that I eat chips two, three times a week at MOST.

3:25 a.m. - Notice Forrest Gump on television! And it's playing on a Canadian station, so they won't edit out the swears!

4:12 a.m. (approx.) - Fall asleep while watching TV worrying about my mother lambasting me for being a lazy bitch when I don't get up before noon tomorrow.

So I was in between the penultimate and final phases of my bedtime routine last night. Quarter to four in the morning, and on the very PRECIPICE of sleep, when I heard, from the next room, my brother's snoring lapse into a terrifying spate of hacks and gags. It sounded as if he was chucking-up with the intention of turning himself inside out.

Just as I made the decision that yes, I should get the fuck out of bed and go see if he needed an ambulance, the death-sounds subsided and the normal (for him) snoring resumed. I rolled over and attempted sleep again, accustomed to the sinal symphony on the other side of the wall...

...only to be yanked off the ledge AGAIN, several minutes later, by noise from the mouth of hell. This time, however, it was vocal. I couldn't make out the words, but from the tone of his babbling it sounded like he was talking to our cat. This too passed within a few seconds and was replaced with snoring. Once more I attempted sleep, rather cross by now.
I couldn't have been asleep more than two minutes before a familiar yet psychotic-rage-inducing BUZZ pulled me awake for a third fucking time! My mother had, either accidentally or for some stupid reason she later forgot about or abandoned, set her alarm for 4:00 a.m. It was then that I decided that living in this house is equivalent to being on the receiving end of a lobotomy that never, ever ends. Fuck. That. Noise. Until I get work, I will wake up whenever I bloody well please, and Alarm Clock Psycho Harpy can suck 37 dicks.

Either way, I sign up for the gym tomorrow. I'm holding out hope that physical exhaustion will help me sleep and therefore keep civilised hours regardless of my mental energy reserves. Perhaps it will also have a beneficial effect in that I won't feel the need to worry about my blood pressure anymore. Let's hope, anyway. They've not yet invented Blind Mag-style digital eyeballs.

Devil child, Satan's spawn

I bought a Bettie Page calendar on sale at Chapters (yay Boxing Day), but I didn't dare put it up before today. Call me superstitious, but if it's bad luck to change a calendar page early, it must be damn near catastrophic to put up a calendar before the year's officially begun. Anyway, I put it up, and holy jones. Bettie is lookin' damn spiffy up there with my frieze of Gil Elvgren Gil pin-ups I cut from my '08 calendar and the paper frame I made out of one of the Anne Taintor pictures from my '10 calendar. I swear there's more eye candy in my room than in the combined lockers of a whole infantry.

Happy New Year from Vannie.