Let’s flip a coin. (part 2)

So don’t tell Sage, but though she thinks she got the last laugh the night I went out to see Napoleon Dynamite, it isn’t entirely the case. In fact, I think it was nothing but a good thing that I found a terrible movie to watch Sunday night. Had I chosen something good like Control Room (which I actually saw on Friday night) I would have stayed in the theatre and missed what turned out to be an absolutely wonderful night.

Of course Sage is right, the first part of it started out positively horrendously (as one-person movie date nights go). After arriving for the movie, I headed for the popcorn counter and ordered a medium popcorn which appeared to be about the size of a bag of microwave popcorn. Instead, though, the new server (I know he’s new because he was being trained in the cappucino bar on Friday) charged me for a medium but brought me a bag of popcorn about the size of my two cupped hands. I should have taken this as a sign – a sort of covert message that said “They’re making me wear this Napoleon Dynamite T-Shirt but I’ve seen it – you’ll only stay long enough to eat this much popcorn.”

If that wasn’t message enough, I got the picture when I walked in the door. I found the room filled with irritating alterna-teens. The kind who pretend to be social outcasts but have just managed to create another social group to make others feel cast out from. The remainder of the audience were characters destined for a Russell Smith novel had they not been so irritating that he couldn’t bear to put pen to paper while thinking of them. Fortunately I arrived late enough that all I had time to listen to was someone admiring someone else’s stretched-piercing before the lights dimmed and the movie started.

The movie, sadly, doesn’t deserve a plot summary as that would imply a plot. Still, it didn’t stop people from laughing at parts of the movie I totally failed to see any humour in. I couldn’t even understand it academically lilke I could the few bits of “Dumb and Dumber” I saw. After 25 minutes I gave up on it. I was not going to waste another hour waiting for something funny or interesting to happen.

Anyway – I packed my bag and headed out the door and headed south on Yonge street. Within the minutes I found the world to be far more interesting than I ever expected the movie to be.

As I walked past the adult theatre just north of Dundas (the one across from the head shop) I watched a conservative-looking couple walk up to the theatre, and start checking out the posters obviously deciding what movie to see. I guess I never imagined any couple – let alone a conservative one going to an adult theatre. Aren’t the only patrons 50-70 year old men? Oh, and Paul Reubens, I suppose. As far as I’m concerned any choice they made would be a better one than the movie choice I had made earlier that evening.

Farther down the block, I came to a 50-something homeless woman who asked me for some change. Despite my obvious desire to give her something (I reached in my pocket as soon as I saw the people ahead of me turn her down), she still made something of a pitch – she was living in a shelter, she wanted a coffee and a muffin, and her mom was dying. It wasn’t until later that I thought that I really need to slow down a bit when it comes to the homeless people. I generally try to give my money and move as fast as I can. What I originally took as a “sales pitch” trying to convince me that I should part with my money could just as easily have been an attempt to find someone to listen. I also thought afterwards that it would have been interesting to have stopped and chatted a bit. And a less charitable part of me thought that recording an “interview” in my palm pilot would make for an interesting addition to the site.

By the time I got to Dundas Square it was getting fairly late – almost 8:00. Whatever event had been held there earlier in the day was ending. Cars were pulled up and sellers were packing them with their wares – jewelery, african art, henna tattoo supplies. Meanwhile, nearer Yonge street, by the splash pad (a series of fountains designed to allow people to cool off in their spray), a group of men in their early 20’s laughing and speaking Portuguese tried to wrestle each other into the spray.

South of Dundas the buildings get bigger. The appearance, however, is different. It really seems as if the buildings remain the same size while the street goes further into the earth. By the time I got to King street, it was nearly dark at the street level while the tops of the buildings were turning orange with the sunset. As if knowing that night was coming, the traffic thinned out enough that a particularly reckless rollerblader could slalom from one side to the street to the other – all the time with his headphones on.

Before long the streetcar arrived and I climbed aboard to head for Chinatown East. More filming was planned near there for the weekend and I was curious to see the set and props. By the time I got to the bridge over the Don River, the sun was almost down. The river itself was still as glass and reflected the sky back at me. By the time I thought to get off and take a picture, though, it was too late – we were too far away and I’d miss the sunset. At Queen and Broadview I only quickly looked down the street and didn’t see any sign of filming. I’m sorry I didn’t look harder since as we later found out, and as Sage will likely tell about in another entry what we found there was quite something.

Arriving in Chinatown I headed immediately for the Cambodian restaurant that I’d walked past a few weeks ago after having had a disappointing meal somewhere else. Even at 8:45, they were still open though I ended up being the only customer. I don’t know whether it was the late hour, the dim lighting, or the fact that the owners were watching Alien vs. Predator on the TV but it felt almost too intimate – like I was a guest in their house that they felt obligated to take in but that they’d much rather be left alone. That said, it still felt cozy and comfortable in a way I can’t quite describe.

After a dinner of ginger tofu and rice – nothing to write home about but still quite tasty – I hopped on a streetcar and headed, in a very roundabout way, for home. The streetcar took me along Gerrard through little India where people where the streets were still quite busy with shoppers, people out for evening walks, and vendors selling everything from roasted corn (with chili & lime) to Pani Puri to cookware. The air, as I rode through, smelled green and summery much like the air in the Ozarks smelled this time of year. The difference, though, was that the air was also filled with the cooking smells of several different countries as we went by different houses.

Finally the streetcar arrived at the subway station. I put my walkman back on and boarded the subway. As the subway accellerated towards home, a somewhat beery smelling father and son sat across from me. Dad was in his early 70’s, and his son was in his late 40’s or early 50’s. The son wore a jacket that said “The Duke of York – Darts 1994 – 1995″. Neither of them spoke but there seemed to be a closeness between them. The dad leaned against the son while the son had his arm around his dad though he tried to look as if he had it on the back of the seat. As I watched them, I thought about how quickly the past 33 years have passed – and how quickly the tables will turn – where we’re taking care of and feeling protective of Paul now, there will come a time when that relationship will reverse. It wasn’t so difficult to imagine myself 40 years from now riding the subwary with Paul in much the same way.

So the trip was not in vain, Napoleon Dynamite was a great movie to have gone to see. It has me somewhat inspired to go to see a terrible movie every Sunday night if only for the experience of what comes after. Maybe I’ll save my
$10.00 though and just go for a walk.

I didn’t really have a leg to stand on.

I think one of the difficulties with doing infrequent entries is that I feel obligated to have something really exciting or poignant to say because, after all, I’ve had a whole month or more to mull it over. But the truth of the matter is that mostly I don’t have anything earth-shattering to say. So I wait longer and longer before writing and then feel that the entry, when it does come, should be more and more interesting. This results in my being unable to just talk about a simple quiet weekend. Today, though, Sage isn’t feeling inspired about writing an entry and so I am given the opportunity to just write an entry about what, other than the civic holiday [Sage's note: pretty much a made up holiday because people in Toronto wanted a nice day off during August], is pretty much representative of a normal weekend for us.

Saturday morning Sage, Paul, and I actually managed to get up and ready to leave the house before 9:00 – certainly a noteworthy event if you know us. We then went off to an animation workshop. The workshops are fairly short and consist of watching a short animated film followed by a short project. This time we did a claymation movie of a Caribana float. I love seeing what Paul comes up with when he works with clay. It was tainted, though only slightly, by my listening to a woman sitting next to us telling her five year old son what he was to make, what colour he was to make it, and prompting him to answer the workshop leaders’ questions to the group. Please, lady, it is a kids’ workshop, not a contest. Give the kid five waking minutes in which he doesn’t have to perform for someone.

After we did that we headed towards home but Paul decided he wanted to stop at what had to be the world’s worst Subway franchise. He seemed to enjoy his sandwich but I found mine rather anemic and tasteless and Sage couldn’t stand the smell of the restaurant (which, IMO, smelled like every other Subway ever but I agree – that doesn’t mean it is a good smell.)

After lunch we all headed home where Paul and I played for much of the afternoon, experimenting with a helium balloon he was given at the workshop. After a few games of trying to keep it from reaching the ceiling, sort of the opposite from the usual keep an air-filled balloon afloat, we connected paper clips to it so that we could equalize the lift from the helium with the weight. Once weighted down like this we used it to ferry messages to each other and to investigate the air currents both naturally in the apartment and created by our running and walking by it. After a few hours spent this way I was restless and ready to go back out in the world so Paul and I decided to investigate the local Whole Foods. I really had high hopes for this store. The one in Albuquerque was fantastic if not a bit pricey. I expected the same of this one, what with it being next door to a Rolls Royce dealer in the middle of Yorkville, to be on par. Unfortunately, though, it turned out to be rather dismal, nearly empty of people, poorly lit, and with a disappointing selection. While I knew academically that I wouldn’t be able to get red or green chile there, I was disappointed to find that the best salsa that they had was Mrs. Renfro’s. That wasn’t totally disppointing, though, as we were quite fond of it when we lived at the yurt. The difference is that in the Ozarks it is one of the cheap grocery store brands while here it was one of the more expensive brands. Even with the exchange rate, $4.39 was a bit much to pay for something that cost only $2.39 in the Ozarks – and that was when it wasn’t available at the grocery salvage.

Still, Paul, and I did get a bit of shopping done and loaded both our packs to the breaking point and started walking back to the subway along Yorkville ave which was almost painfully trendy with limousines, european cars and people clad in designer clothes on both sides of the street. Sage jokes, only half-seriously, that I probably walked past like eight celebrities but am so bad at recognizing them that I would never have known. After all, there are a bunch of movies being filmed here as we speak. Within about a block of the subway, though, it wouldn’t have mattered if I could recognize them or not as I was beginning to get a visual aura telling me that a migraine was on the way. Paul and I headed for the subway where Paul read and chatted a bit. He’s beginning to get interested in hypothetical discussions – stuff like “What was the world like half way in the past?” which when I asked for clarification meant “what do you think the earth was like before there was life?” We were both getting fairly sleepy and by the time we got home we were both ready for bed.

Sunday got a rocky start. We were all up and ready fairly quickly just like Saturday but hadn’t really figured out who was going where. Sage had planned since the day before to go out on a photo-gathering trip. Paul had planned since the day before to go to a store and pick up this stone skull at the science centre that he’d been wanting for some time. The skull came with a hammer and chisel and had various “pirate treasures” embedded within. I, not being wise enough to plan anything for my day, felt a bit crabby that I was going to be at everyone else’s mercy as to where I went for the day. Looking at the sunny day starting outside I began to resent the fact that my day was looking like it would be spent sitting inside watching Paul chip away at his skull while the day went on outsied without me. A day in which, I’d just learned, there was a Hot & Spicy Food Festival happening.

So Sage and I crabbed a bit at each other in which I really didn’t have a leg to stand on since everyone else had their plans and I didn’t have any until about fifteen minutes before. Finally we figured out a plan that we could all live with. We’d go get the skull for Paul, Sage would go out on her own, and then Paul and I would go to the zoo. This plan worked well for a few minutes. Until the skull was in Paul’s backpack at which point he wanted to go home and work with it. And I thought then that Paul had been waiting literally since there was snow on the ground to get this thing and of course he wanted to use it right away. And so I happily got back on the bus with Paul and Sage and headed home where Paul and I got off and left Sage to go about her day.

What a great idea it was to go home. Paul and I had a bunch of fun for several hours chipping away at the skull. And after a couple hours, Sage decided it was too hot (it was, after all, above 22 degrees outside) and came home. After about an hour of us all being together at home I decided to head out and check out the food festival after all. All told, it was a disappointment. I think mostly it was disappointing because I’ve lived here as long as I had. Sure there were hot and spicy foods, but nothing particularly exotic, spicy, or that I couldn’t get at almost any festival. Indian food, Jamaican patties, and roasted corn are all very yummy but I was expecting extremely hot food with lots of vegetarian options. No luck, though. So after making the rounds for a few more minutes I headed out. Sage then called and reminded me that there was a movie I wanted to see on the other side of town at a theatre I had never been to. So I hopped on a streetcar and headed over. Unfortunately I was up against two challenges. The first was that I had 20 minutes to get to the theatre, and the second was that I had no specific idea where the theatre was (and Sage was at the playground so there was no way she could find out the street address). I finally got to Ossington station about the time I was meant to walk into the theatre. Thinking the most likely place the theatre was was towards downtown I began to walk only to find that my
instincts were wrong. (What happened to my innate sense of direction which allowed me at one time to find an amusement park in Rhode Island knowing only that it was an amusement park on the coast?) At the same time I was getting really hungry. Lucky me, though, as on the block I was on there were three Ethiopian restaurants. For some inexplicable reason, Sage will never go out for Ethiopian food. No matter that it is spicy, vegetarian friendly, and delicious, she thinks she won’t like it. So I found one, “Kokeb Restaurant” and wandered in. Being about 4:30 in the afternoon, I was the only person there other than the people who worked there. The menu, written both in english and in Ethiopic Script, a beautiful way of writing I had never seen before moving here, was fantastic. Several vegetarian options, the most expensive of which was about $7.00. I chose that dish, the vegetarian combination platter and within a few minutes was presented with a plate almost a foot and a half in diameter covered with Injera – a soft, flat bread with small scoops of five different dishes and green salad in the middle. A second, folded piece of injera was provided on the side. The food was so delicious but for the first time in a long time I was served a meal so big I couldn’t eat it all. This meal would have been better suited for two people than one, and ended the meal with fresh-roasted (as in a minute before I drank it) strong, thick, ethiopian coffee that hours later after everyone was asleep and I was wide awake I’d regret having had.

After the meal (total $9.50 – too cheap for all I had), I decided to wander and ended up walking for about an hour before feeling lonely and about to be swallowed up by the anonymity of the city and I headed for the subway again. After all I crabbed that morning about not having time to myself, it only took a few hours before I was really done being by myself.

Today, we’re somewhat at loose ends as to what to do. We might go out but today it is meant to be really hot [Sage's note: a humidex of 38C!] so Sage will likely stay home, Paul, too, might stay home as the heat aggravates his runny eye. We could end up each going out for short forays into the outside world before returning to the air conditioning again.