She's An Artist, She Don't Look Back

I quite enjoy listening to Avril Lavigne. Partly it's because of the way she spells her last name, but mostly it's because her songs are rollicking great fun to listen to. But that they aren't exactly poetry, I think we can all agree. For instance this morning on my way to work I was listening to her recent single Girlfriend. Somewhere between the "Hey hey"s and the "No way"s were the spectacularly wooden lines

She's like so whatever
You can do so much better

That made me daydream wistfully about Joan Baez, an altogether superior songwriter with a voice of liquid gold. If you've listened to Diamonds and Rust, and I mean really listened, you know what I'm talking about. And if you have not, then I invite you to linger on scene she described when she wrote

Now I see you standing
With brown leaves falling around
And snow in your hair
Now you're smiling out the window
Of that crummy hotel
Over Washington Square
Our breath comes out white clouds
Mingles and hangs in the air

There is something very wistful about the image of a solo songstress. It represents what I'd like to believe the sixties were like. Under a greasy crust of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, I picture a dreamy nether-world of flower children living unfettered in peace. Noone conjures up the image better than Led Zeppelin in Going to California

Someone told me there's a girl out there
With love in her eyes and flowers in her hair
:
:
They say she plays guitar and cries, and sings


Appropriately enough, that song was inspired by Joni Mitchell, who was one of the most acclaimed musicians of the sixties. And who ironically missed the Woodstock festival because her dingbat manager thought it was more important for her to make a television appearance on The Dick Cavett Show than to "sit around in a field with 500 people". Don't ask me, I'd never heard of Dick Cavett either. As it turned out, Woodstock was attended not by 500, but by 500 thousand people. Joni Mitchell cried as she watched the Woodstock concert on television. And then in a further ironic twist, she listened to her boyfriend describe the event and went on to write Woodstock, the definitive song about the festival:

I'm going to join in a rock n roll band
I'm going to camp out on the land
I'm going to try and get my soul free
We are stardust
We are golden
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden

Years later, she would inspire Sarah MacLachlan, who in turn influenced her fellow Canadian Alanis Morissette, who was an influence on yet another Canadian singer .... Avril Lavigne. So maybe there is hope yet.

One Candle

The big day is here folks - today is the day that Living On A Jet Plane turns one. I hope someone other than me cares. The past couple of posts have drawn a depressingly low number of comments from readers. Specifically, none so far. Lurks, take the hint. Leave a mark, please.

Anyway, as you might imagine this is a date I had looked forward to with some anticipation. And of course I considered a bunch of different topics for this anniversary post. Such as how I started this blog with no clear idea of what it would turn into. Well, I still have no idea. I also considered writing about what the past year has been like, or what I have learned from the other bloggers who have slowly but steadily made an imprint on me. But then I thought, who gives a s#!t?

So instead of wasting everyone's time in some navel-gazing indulgence I decided it would be so much better to celebrate the utter pointlessness of Caitlin Myers' professional life. She's an economist(!) who has conducted extensive research to show that coffee shops in the Boston area discriminate against women by serving them more slowly than men. In fact, the scumbags make their female customers wait an extra 20 seconds!

That's right, folks. Savour the thought. In a world where it takes 20 seconds just to place your order, several minutes to be served, and possible another half an hour or so as you slowly sip your coffee down to the bottom of it's styrofoam haven, some people are robbed off 20 seconds of their lives by sexist baristas. I'm outraged, and I hope you are too. I bet the good people of Massachusetts will now organize a Boston Coffee Party where they will throw into the harbour assorted baristas, economists and short lattes.

Inevitably I started wondering about all the things that a person can do in 20 seconds. If you are Michael Johnson you can run 200 metres, set a world record, and have time left over for a quick wave to the crowd. But for the rest of us, more mundane options must suffice. Such as watching the YouTube video of Michael Johnson setting a world record. I should point out that one of the less-appreciated things that you can do in 20 seconds is throw a sheep at someone on Facebook.

In fact Facebook opens many 20-second object-throwing options. There's sheep-throwing, cow-throwing and now that Christmas is merely six weeks away there is also turkey-throwing. I hear that on St. Patrick's Day they plan to introduce dwarf-tossing.

But back to the subject of coffee, gender bias and irrelevant academics, let me honour Ms Myers with a sonnet (for no better reason than that earlier today I tried and failed to find a copy of Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate, a brilliant novel/poem written entirely in sonnets).

The Ballad Of The Slow Roast

I left home before the sky turned blue
To go to work to earn my bread
I had no time at home to brew
So at Starbucks I'll make a stop instead

It's cold and dreary this winter's day
I woke chirpy; that mood's gone away
But the smell of beans is cheering me up
Oh how I long to hold my own cup

Damn! The barista's torn my temper in tatters
By serving an ugly guy in horn-rimmed specs
In the same time as me, minus 20 secs
I must calm down, focus on what really matters

Like remembering to congratulate Mahog
I know! I'll leave a comment on his blog!

Could I possibly be less subtle? :-)

What In Blazes Is Periwinkle?

I really should stop taking vacations. They're too bloody exhausting. I've spent the past two days messing around the house from morning till late at night. And I'll be doing more of the same all the rest of the week. Taking a week off to redecorate my home no longer seems such a great idea.

Still, I must admit that I feel better for the work that I have put in so far. My house does not look particularly different from the way it was last week. But I do feel as if somehow order is slowly being established in my home. It is becoming my castle again. Soon I hope to get planning permission to build a moat.

But seriously, tired as I am, I'm quite enjoying myself. I've always thought of myself as being verbal rather than visual. (As you might have noticed, this is a blog rather than a cartoon strip). My own self-assessment was reinforced by my third-grade art teacher who hated me with a passion. Mind you, as the bearer of the rather unfortunate name Sweety Bhalla, she probably hated the whole world with equal passion. Nevertheless on the matter of my artistic skills we were unanimous: they did not exist.

So years later, when we moved to Singapore and I took charge of decorating our first apartment, I knew there was a serious risk that I would spawn something out of an Andy Warhol nightmare. Imagine my pleasure (and shock) when friends came over to the apartment and said it looked great. Imagine my consternation when they assumed I had nothing to do with it, that it had all been put together by the Significant Other. A pox on all sexist stereotypes!

In fact in some ways men are better equipped than women to be interior decorators. Take colour-matching, for instance. Most women can name at least seventeen shades of blue, and can probably visually identify another twenty-eight or so. So if they have to colour-coordinate furnishings, they are faced with a challenge that is so complex that if a man even tried to imagine it, he'd blow his circuits faster than you could say "Saturday night football". In contrast (pun intended!), colour coordination is much simpler for a man. All he needs to do is to find a light blue curtain to put in the same room as the dark blue sofa, and then it's off to the pub for a couple of beers.

There's a theory that women are better at colour recognition because of evolutionary reasons; in a hunting/gathering society the gathering was done mostly by women, and good colour recognition helped them differentiate fruits from foliage. Men, on the other hand, were hunters, so they did not need the same colour sense. What they did need was the ability to identify a moving object by shape, and track it in motion.

That is why, to this day, a man can spot an attractive girl in a crowd from across a football field. And from then on he can locate her to within a radius of three feet at all times. But ask him about the colour of her eyes and he will draw a blank even after he closes in to a distance of six inches.

Which is a very roundabout way for me to confess that the prospects for my current redecoration project are very dim indeed. Luckily I have a backup plan in case the result turns out to be a total disaster. I'll simply put up a painting of a dark blue sofa in front of a light blue curtain. Then I'll go down to the pub for a couple of beers.

What a To-do About What To Do

Greetings, y'all. I've just released myself from a self-imposed Internet lockdown. For the past few days I had barred myself from blogging or from any but the most minimal life-support activity on Facebook. Why, you ask? Well it has to do with how I've spent the past week. Which is mostly by eating Oreos and not making a list.

A word on the Oreos: I hadn't eaten them since I was about eight years old, and I recently rediscovered their delights. It's brilliant how they make Oreos so that they are tasty and great fun to eat. I just love the whole process of completely separating the cream filling from the cookies on either side and eating them separately, slowly, a little at a time. I can write freely about this, since I've already outed myself as a food deviant in an earlier post.

Unfortunately while I was regressing into my childhood, I was neglecting to plan my project. Which is to redecorate my home. Which I need to start doing tomorrow. Because I have taken a week off from work for precisely that purpose. I finally got round to making my to-do list late on Sunday night. Now all I need to do is actually do everything on my list.

Of course once I had finally made my list I could lift my internet ban. Naturally, the very next thing I did was log on to Blogger. And through sheer serendipity I read about a blogger who collects to-do lists and has just released a book featuring 100 to-do lists and the stories behind them. I sampled a few. The oddest was one which featured (in this order):
Check linens, put clothes away, dry cleaning/laundry, bills, breakfast, dishes, rent make-up check, divorce, picnic basket.

Huh? It seems there is at least one person in this world who either
a) Can get divorced in the brief interval between doing the dishes and making up a picnic basket.
b) Thinks that making a picnic basket is a great way to get over a divorce.
c) Thinks that checking the linens is more urgent than getting a divorce
d) Is checking the linens to kill time and put off the divorce for just a little bit longer.
d) All of the above.

That one was the oddest, but my favorite list was one in which the last item was 'Become whole'. Become whole? Sure that is a worthwhile objective but it's hardly the sort of thing you'd put on a to-do list. Unless of course you are a Miss Universe contestant. In that case it would be only natural to want to: Check linens, end world hunger, become whole, establish world peace, and eat a salad for lunch.

No, I'm being unnecessarily rude to Miss Universe. After all, there are many others who might put "Become whole" on their list. Such as Jack (the one who fell down and who broke his crown), the three blind mice who had their tails cut off, and poor old Humpty Dumpty.

So now that I am feeling charitable again I think I will contribute one more list to the cyberverse:

My list of the top 5 things that could go wrong while I attempt to redecorate my home:
5. I run out of Oreos and all work has to be halted until I can restock.
4. My dog disapproves of the changes and decides to 'express herself'.
3. My TV gets busted. I know this has nothing to do with redecorating. It's just that I have a constant terror of my TV getting busted.
2. I am so engrossed in redecorating that I forget to become whole.

And the number one thing that could go wrong is...
1. I buy a spanking new drill only to find out days later that I know someone who has a drill with even more attachments than mine.

Me Hunt. And Renovate. Oog oog.

The writing is on the wall. The Significant Other is battening down the hatches. She knows that A Project is about to begin.

About every eighteen months, I feel an urge to start A Project. This is a natural hormonal surge that all males experience. The Significant Other is unfortunate in that the male she is married to sometimes succumbs to these biochemical spikes. This time around, the neurotransmitters in my brain (a.k.a. the voices in my head) are telling me that it is time to do up the house.

Not that there is anything wrong with our house as it stands today. As far as I can tell, it is unlikely to fall down around our ears. But it's been ages since I had to buy a new tool. I could really do with an excuse to buy a drill. A nice big heavy drill with a sombre Black & Decker logo running down the side. And about sixty-seven different kinds of attachments that could be interchangeably attached to the drill to make different kinds of holes.

(I really need to buy a drill. An orange drill. Don't ask me why it has to be orange. That's like asking why I paid an extra twenty dollars to get a red hard drive instead of a black one. Her name is Rowen, by the way. I haven't yet decided what to name the drill. If I had, that would be bad luck, wouldn't it?)

Not all the fun in A Project lies in buying new stuff; a lot of it is in getting rid of old stuff. I was quite pleased that once The Project had formally begun at about five this evening, within an hour I had gotten rid of my first piece of furniture. That's much better than how my last Project fared. That one had a rocky beginning. I tried to give away some of my stuff to the Salvation Army but they refused to take it! Apparently my furniture was not good enough to be given away for free to the underprivileged in Singapore, That really made me feel good about myself.

Coming back to the present, this time round things are looking good. I've gotten rid of my evil sofa. I have started planning all the holes that I am going to drill. And I have a bunch of holidays coming up in which I will alternate between pottering around the house with a measuring tape, and slobbering through the aisles of the nearest DIY store. All in all, The Project looks like heading to a glorious conclusion.

It must be said that the Significant Other is more cautious in her enthusiasm. So far she has deftly batted away hopeful suggestions such as "How about if we just put in a new kitchen in place of the old one?" or "Should we knock down a couple of walls?" Apparently these ideas do not fall within my mandate, which is to accomplish a minor makeover of the house while not doing anything that would be a permanent monument to my poor taste.

It promises to be an entertaining fortnight ahead.