The Glamour/or/er!

I don’t write about my Mom much here, except to complain when she’s driving me batshit about something or other, and that’s a pity. In point of fact, my Mom—Elva Mai Hoover, former Mrs Edison on The Edison Twins, once nominated for a Genie as Betty Fox in the original Terry Fox Story, etc.—is a fascinating lady, beautiful and stylish and self-educated, with a far wider range of interests than almost anybody I know (aside from, say, me). She meditates, decoupages stuff for fun, collects monkey-centric netsuke, reads books on Bible Studies and World Mythology, gets intermittently obsessed with tracking down all the works of a particular mystery writer (this month it’s Elizabeth George)…and although she almost never listens to music while she’s at home, because she can’t concentrate if it’s on, she also likes going to the opera, alone.

In aid of this hobby, she bought season tickets for the 2007 Metro Toronto Opera, which apparently set her back $600. But she just as often (or oftener) goes down to the newly-renamed Scotiabank Tower Cinema (the Paramount, that was), where—for $17.00 a pop—they sometimes broadcast performances from the New York Met. Which is why yesterday, she spent most of the day doing something she calls "Opera-palooza": Catching half of I Puritani at the Scotiabank (she’d thought it would be Eugene Onegin), then eating, then whipping down to the real-time opera to watch Lady Macbeth of Mtinsk.

As she explains, the former was definitely the better bargain, even though she’d already seen it before; for example, it came with hilarious between-scenes commentary by Beverly Sills, who cheerfully admitted that although I Puritani is a gorgeous score that offers its leading lady not one, not two but three spectacular crazy-mad-person arias, it doesn’t make a damn lick of sense plot-wise. "I’d be trying to work it all out—‘okay, this guy’s finally getting married to the girl he’s been struggling to marry for a whole act, and he suddenly decides he can’t right at the altar, because he has to go rescue Charles I’s widow?’—and my coach would say ‘just put your hands down, Beverly, get in the middle of the stage, and SING.’"

Lady Macbeth, OTOH…well, it’s Shostakovich, for a start: Heavy underscoring, shrieky atonal vocals. And the first surtitle is: "I’M…SO…BOOOOOORED." And when the main character cuckolds her impotent factory-owner husband by starting a mad affair with a sexy factory-worker, she sings: "Kiss me ‘til my lips bleed, and the ikons fall off the walls!" (Still, I realize I’m probably making it sound far more fun than it was, because Mom left at the first intermission.)

Exciting, huh? Whereas my big jolt for yesterday was doing BodyFlow, and somehow managing to hold a left-hand eagle-pose for the full count of twelve while extending my arms and "hanging" above it, Christ-style (I’ve been practicing). Later, I reorganized the fridge.

So yeah, it’s been a fairly useless week for me, or at least it certainly felt like one. In my heart I know it really wasn’t, not absolutely; I sealed a deal (which came with an insane deadline that requires me to turn in 250 of something by the 19th), wrote two reviews for Rue Morgue, saw Hannibal Rising. Got yet another tooth fixed (and when the dentist took out what felt like half of the one he was working on, he found another tiny fucking cavity just lurking in between, where it wouldn’t show up on the x-ray. Christ! At least he just went ahead and buffed it away, while he was in there.). Found out we had a bit more money than we thought, but also more bills pending, none dealt with yet. Cal’s got his usual winter cold. Steve’s getting it. Guess who’s next?

But since the next two weeks are going to be mainly checking and marking at school, I’m going to step up the program and just pour it fucking on: The thing I’m getting paid for, plus the things I’m not. At least I’m fairly up-to-standard with exercise, if nothing else. Final count for the week re "Speed of Pain" and "Strange Weight" goes thus—

"Speed"
New words: 1,528
Sections completed: Four
Words total: 5,487

"Weight"
New words: 2,695
Sections completed: Five
Words total: 6,809

—so yes, some forward motion, at last. But not nearly enough, given everything else.

Then again, if I really wanted to increase my output, maybe I should stop doing chores entirely; God knows, I’m already pretty tired of being the only one doing them on anything like a regular basis. Three or four hours of this shit, every day, because apparently nobody else can multi-task—ie, do the little things like checking whether or not the dishes are done, then drying them and putting them away right then and there, just for kicks, while simultaneously cooking, folding laundry or even putting IT away (and managing to remember where somebody else’s clothes go!).

Let’s see exactly how long it takes Steve to figure out that the reason his feet hurt is that the rug is covered in toys, or that the source of that particular lingering yet unidentifiable smell just might be A) the piled-up garbage bags in the kitchen, B) the sink full of dishes nobody bothered to put in the machine because they assumed it was already full or C) the teetering skyscraper of mouldy-wet laundry next to the unused machine. Or, indeed, if it ever does…

All right: Way too much verbiage, given the content. I’m off to do something real.