I feel like I have a food hangover!

There was a song I learned in kindergarten. It was about this boy whose gluttonish friend was coming over for tea.

It went like this:

The hungriest boy that I ever did see

He goes by the name of Timothy Lee

And this is the day he is coming to tea,

Hi Ho! Timothy Lee.

I’ll go to the cook and the news I will break

Some muffins and crumpets I’ll ask her to bake

Some strawberry tarts and a chocolate cake

Hi Ho! Chocolate cake!

Right now I feel like Timothy Lee after eating all that stuff!

But I’ve never had a crumpet. Saw them in the bakery section of the store and they looked like pancakes that hadn’t been flipped over with all the burst bubbles in them. Not very appetizing.

I do like english muffins though! Mmm.

And strawberry tarts!

And when I found my recipe for chocolate cake I felt as though the Timothy Lee song had come full circle in my life!

Weird huh?

I’m actually getting sick of all the yummy rich food already. Saturday’s my side of the family’s party and then I can go back to normal!

Phew!

Can’t wait.

As for that Ramadan feeling, I must say that it’s pretty much gone.

I thought it would have lasted longer.

But maybe it’s just on hiatus for a little, while I’m so busy preparing for Saturday.

Well, it’s off to bed. Tomorrow I have about sixty pineapple tarts to make and some custard/vanilla pudding for trifle and the broth for chicken pilau and I have to marinate the chicken for the barbecue on Saturday.

Hopefully I can get my Afghan son in law to actually do the barbecuing. He’s a real sweetie!

And in the mean time, my updated and thoroughly mangled version of that kindergarten song:

The hungriest folks that I ever did see

They happen to be Pak-is-tan-i

On Saturday they will be coming to tea

Hi Ho Pakistani!

Being the cook I decided to make

Some chicken pilau and a trifle with cake

Some pineapple tarts and a cherry cheesecake

Hi Ho! Cherry cheesecake!

Oh pardon the cheesiness!

It’s the food, I swear.

I’m not myself…really.

*Hic*

After the gruelling week I had, I was looking forward to it.

Eager beaver that I am, I got to the venue an hour early, tried to take a nap for half an hour in the car, but just couldn’t.

I was presenting in a really nice auditorium at the top floor of the high school that was attached to the library. It was a kind of complex that also included the headquarters of the school board that runs Kitchener.

I had been there before, and I liked the auditorium with it’s angled seats and everything.

I had everything set up and then the audience–some grade seven kids arrived. They were snickering and quite riled up and I wondered if they’d be a challenge.

In the past I would have thought they were laughing at me. My spirits would have sunk and I would have dreaded trying to get the kids engaged.

But with time and experience under my belt, this time I just thought maybe something had happened.

Yup.

Something happened.

Even when I had been schlepping my stuff up the many stairs to get to the auditorium I’d had to navigate through some hulky seventeen year olds working out  to some music in the hallway.

Well apparently one of them got it into his jock-addled brain to drop his drawers in front of the twelve and thirteen year olds that were coming to see me, as they walked by.

I’m not sure what he was wearing, whether he mooned them or flashed them, but it was enough to get the kids snickering and riled up.

There’s a lesson in here for anyone who wants to present to children.

If they start laughing, it’s usually not about you. (Unless you’ve done something really dumb!)

I’ve been in sessions where I’ve been at the height of a poignant moment and some of the kids have started snickering. Usually what’s happened is that one of them has farted and the others were giving him space and holding their noses.

Those are pretty easy to figure out.

The frozen expression on the guilty flatulent culprit gives it away.

The only way I found out about the exhibitionist in the hallway was because the vice principal of the high school, a petite little dynamo-looking lady, brought the guilty party into my session at the end of it and made him apologize to everyone in the auditorium.

I resisted the urge to laugh till I was with the other librarians and we could chuckle about it.

Poor kid–or perhaps not so poor kid. Not only did he have to apologize for his misdemeanor to all of us, own up to it and confess that it did not represent the behaviour that was encouraged at the school, he had to sit in the office and miss his lunch period, he had to call his mom and explain why, and the vice principal was going to keep him there on the Thursday evening before an extra long Easter weekend, till she was good and ready to leave at 6 pm that night!

I doubt he’ll ever do that again!

The first time I’d ever heard of mooning was when a former childhood friend of mine did it in my grade seven classroom while the teacher was gone.

It just seemed the oddest thing in the world to pull down your pants like that and bare your bottom!

The second time I’d ever heard of it was when I was watching the movie Grease.

Then I realized it seems to be a cultural phenomenon peculiar to the West.

But why do they have to call it mooning?

I mean, the moon is such a lustrous orb! In so many cultures it’s held up as a pinnacle of beauty.

And then when you try to translate a perfectly nice simile like ‘her face was as beautiful as the moon’, into English instead you get images of bare buttocks flashing across your imagination! And it ruins it!

It’s just one of the ways that phrases in other cultures have hurdles to jump in translation.

But getting back to my presentation–afterwards despite all the inappropriate excitement, a teacher came up to me and said my presentation was ‘phenomenal’!

Alhamdu lillah, I get a lot of ‘fantastic’ and ‘wonderful’ comments but this may have been the first time I’ve gotten ‘phenomenal’.

It fills my heart like the rays of the luminous moon in its fullness, shining down from the … oh never mind!

I watched and watched and finally got to that scene and looked for the snot running down, and it just wasn’t there. Not sure where I remembered it from, unless maybe it was a spoof or something.

So, just thought I’d clear that up.

Couldn’t watch the whole movie (Sixth Sense). It creeps me out because it just rings too true on too many levels, only I don’t believe in ghosts, I believe in creatures called jinn.

I’ve been filling the artistic well with a lot of literature and movies lately, some high brow literature like Rohinton  Mistry’s A Fine Balance and Family Matters. Well written but sad, oh so sad!

I guess I have so many favourites that people would consider high brow, but that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy something more down to earth.

I also watched and really enjoyed Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. Both are set in England, the first is a zombie flick, I wouldn’t call it a spoof, although it has an air of campiness to it. The second is similar in that it feels like a spoof of action movies.

Never ever thought I’d like a zombie movie! My son insisted I watch it. There’s a moment in the movie that’s even a bit touching! It was quite surprising to me.

And the premise of Hot Fuzz is just hilarious in and of itself. It’s about a London copy who’s so good that he makes the other policemen look bad, so they transfer him to a small town that has the least crime in England.

Also saw Edge of Darkness, Mel Gibson’s new flick. He was definitely trying too hard.

I felt sorry for him.

This was one too many older guy avenging daughter’s murder, type of movies. The scene at the beginning where he’s dealing with his daughter’s death is painful to watch for all the wrong reasons. Mel looks like he’s relying on that scene in Lethal Weapon, was it two or three, where the South African love interest is murdered?

I don’t know. Need something fresh and different. Seen it already.

When I first started writing, a teacher once said that you can often learn more from badly written stories than from well written stories, and that’s true to a point. It’s easy to find what’s wrong with the badly written stories, whereas if something works, it just works. And you can’t always pinpoint why.

I try to immerse myself in all kinds of art, both high and low brow. The thing they all have in common is that they should ‘work’ on some level.

Art comes in all forms, and I just don’t believe in intellectual snobbery.

I did get two chapters revised today. Perhaps that should show that I was not completely unproductive.

I also got the laundry folded and made chicken chow mein for supper.

I even wrote up some notes for my talk at tomorrow’s York university mini-conference.

But I didn’t get to walk on the treadmill for an hour, and I’ve spent three hours at one sitting just now, playing Spider Solitaire and Freecell.

You know you’re addicted when you keep on playing even when it’s been ten games without a win!

I checked my win percentage and it’s a paltry 13%!

In freecell it’s 98%. 370 out of 374 or 5 games, I can’t remember, but doesn’t that 2% just drive me crazy! And that’s only 375 games since I last cleared the statistics! And I cleared them because I came across a game I couldn’t win and it spoiled my 500 games, 100% win rate.

Well, now before I decided to post here, I went onto the list of file/games and saw an option for ‘hide this game’.

Hmm. Maybe I’m not the only one with this addiction.

So I hid both games! And techno klutz that I am, I know I can’t figure out how to make them reappear.

Let them stay gone.

My dealer has left town–literally.

My right arm is already tingling and I think I feel stiffness in my left shoulder. I think I quit just in time.

I wonder if they have rehab for spider solitaire junkies.

Mind you, once it’s off my desktop, I really don’t have a problem with it. There’s a bit of withdrawal.

I’ll be watching Oprah or Dr. Phil and my fingers will twitch like they’re itching to play, but it only lasts a day or so.

And then I’m perfectly fine.

Really I am.

I’m not in denial.

I can lick this any time. And you can bet I will NOT be hitting the help icon, that little paperclip thingie and asking it how to find the games.

They’re probably still there.

If they’re hidden it means they’re not deleted right?

Oh dear.

I must not think such things.

I will be strong. I will.

I have more IMPORTANT things to do!

I’m not like those pathetic kids of friends and relatives that come over. You know the kind who sit there twitching because they’re not plugged into a video game? You can’t even have a conversation with those kids! They they look at you like you’re not even there.

(Come to think of it, it was a little like that when I was hooked on Tetris. I’d be talking to people and see the little shape thingies coming down my mind’s inner screen.

But not any more! I haven’t played Tetris for at least a decade. I stopped when I hit high score. Got to the jets, or was it the olympics and they were coming down so fast! I licked that game real good!)

But that was long ago. I’ve never gone back to it.

Nope. Those kids are really hooked!

Not me!

That was one of the first ‘sayings’ in a little chap book I purchased, I think it was in the souvenir shop at the home of Stephen Leacock.

It was many years ago, on one of our many family outings.

He used to have an estate up in Orillia and they’ve turned it into a museum of sorts.

It’s neat to see where he lived. He was such a disciplined writer. I think maybe he didn’t take his success as a writer for granted.

Whenever I think of that little chap book, I seem to associate it with his well-manicured lawns, a gravel drive and shrubs near the house.

The lawns sloped down towards the lake.

I’ve read a number of his stories. I remember the first one, was as a kid. The teacher was reading it to us and cracking up in the process though, at the time, I couldn’t figure out what was so funny.

The story was a mock pirate adventure, where the buccaneers swooped across the bow brandishing banana peels.

Later on, the captain told the first mate or someone, that the ship was sinking at a rate of one quarter inch per week and they had to abandon ship. So the two of them end up on a raft floating upon the ocean.

Things got desperate so they drew lots as to who would eat whom. It was all done in a very civilised manner. There was a picture in the book of a man in ragged captain’s clothing (or was it first mate’s clothing?) sucking on a long bone (it looked like a femur).

I can laugh at it now, as an adult, but the humour was lost on me as a kid.

It was the same with another story the teacher read us, The Sinking of the Mariposa Belle.

I think Stephen Leacock and Mark Twain were contemporaries.

There’s a similar bent to their type of humour. A dry wit an irony that, as an adult, I can really appreciate.

It’s the same kind of humour that Twain used when he wrote his book Puddinhead Wilson. The way Puddinhead got his name was when he first got to town there was an annoying dog doing something annoying and Mr. Wilson said something like, “If I owned half that dog, I’d shoot it.” The townsfolk thought that was the most idiotic thing to say. Who’d ever own half a dog? So they took to calling him Puddinhead because only a ‘pudding-head’ would say such a stupid thing.

I don’t think I’ve ever heard scholars talk much about Puddinhead Wilson. It’s definitely one of Twain’s least known books. Everybody raves about Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer.

I made the mistake of reading Huckleberry Finn first. It was so exceptional that it spoiled me for Tom Sawyer. Tom wasn’t nearly as interesting as Huck! And yet several scenes in Huckleberry Finn also hearken back to that dry sort of humour.

When Huck deals with the King and the Duke, and when Tom wants to make Jim’s conditions in the prison cabin worse, are all pretty funny, now that I think of it. But when I read it as a child the humour was lost on me.

Come to think of it, I may have emulated Leacock and Twain’s style when I wrote my book, Silly Chicken. Hey, if you’re going to copy, copy from the best!

I made up a little quotation myself. I’m not sure if it’s as witty as “Forgive your enemies, there’s nothing that annoys them more.” But I think it’s pretty apt.

My saying is: “Always give your best advice. Your friends will appreciate it, and if they hate you enough, your enemies won’t take it.”

At least that’s been my experience with my enemies.

Plus, by always giving my best advice, my conscience is clear.

The twins burst out laughing. Even as young girls, they caught exactly  how corny a line that was!

The problem with such a statement is that it conjures up the ridiculous image of literally taking someone’ s head off their shoulders, and sticking it in your heart.

Now of course that’s not what the character meant, but in order to avoid cheesy writing, purple prose, you have to avoid any kind of statement, even if it’s a common expression, that conjures up a ridiculous image.

A while ago I used to frequent a writer’s chat room. And there was one guy who called himself Silenteye and claimed to be a household name but wouldn’t reveal who he was. I think it might have been William Goldman.

Anyway, whenever someone would type ‘so and so rolled their eyes’, he would reply, “Silenteye rolled them back.”

I learned not to ‘roll’ my eyes. And everytime I come across that expression I think of Silenteye. Even though it’s a common expression, it still has a disorienting aspect to it.

Same with the statement ‘his eyes wandered all over her…’. I read an article or book or something about writing tips, and one of the best tips I’ll always remember was the one to beware the disembodied eyes. Basically, eyes coming out of their sockets and travelling on their own, at least in words.

You can say his gaze wandered over her, or he measured her with his gaze, but don’t talk about eyes going anywhere except within their sockets.

Long after the hype of any movie, the dialogue and story lives on. The words the characters say, if the movie’s any good, should hold up over time and not cause later generations to giggle.

That’s the mark of a true classic.

The dialogue in Gone with the Wind still rings true even after decades. The acting might be a little cheesy for today’s standards, but close your eyes and you can hear the truth of what Rhett is saying to Scarlett and vice versa.

On the other hand,  the two movies I was watching back and forth the other night are two examples to whom time has not been so kind.

The first Ben Hur has dialogue that is every bit as giggle-worthy as Mary’s line about holding someone’s head in her heart. (The Ten Commandments is even worse–but that’s fodder for another post!)

The other movie I was watching is actually just as bad, and yet it’s only fourteen years old. I’m talking about Titanic.

I never did see it in the cinemas. I tend to like to watch blockbusters after the hype has died down somewhat.

I think it’s because I always listen to a movie more than I watch it.

I think I’m a very auditory person, but even I didn’t catch what was really bothering me about Titanic right away.

It was my friend Sydell who said that boy, the dialogue needed editing! She’d said how she’d have liked to take a blue pencil to all the ‘Jack’s’ and ‘Rose’s’.

Sample (pardon any inaccuracies). The scene where Jack Dawson (Leonardo Di Caprio’s character) is handcuffed to the pipe in the lower regions of the ship. The ship is starting to sink.

Kate Winslet: Jack! I found you!

Leonardo Di Caprio: Rose! You came! How did you know?

Kate: I didn’t.

Leo: The ship is sinking, Rose. Go. Go get help.

Kate: Okay, Jack.

She comes back with an axe.

Leo: You found an axe Rose!

Kate: Yes, Jack!

Leo: Okay Rose, take a few practice hits.

Kate: Like this Jack?

GROAN.

You get the picture!

Honestly, I’ve always thought the star of that movie was the shipwreck. And for Ben Hur the star is definitely the chariot race.

Notice in both those scenes there is very little dialogue!

A couple of days ago I started Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier, for the fifth or sixth time. It’s a longish book, a real classic, and it’s funny how I keep envisioning scenes from the Alfred Hitchcock movie.

That almost never happens! Books almost always trump movies, and yet key moments like when they’re on the cliff above Monte Carlo, when the protagonist first meets with Mrs. Danvers, they’re all intruding upon my experience.

The language is exquisite! It weaves a spell.

It really is her best. After first reading Rebecca, I scrounged up all the titles I could find of Daphne Du Maurier’s. The only one I never finished was My Cousin Rachel and I think it was because it was too much like Rebecca.

The Parasites was interesting, but the viewpoint is so cynical, almost acidic. Jamaica Inn was a rip-roaring adventure. And I’ll always remember the moment with the priest. Also a very cynical take on life.

Maybe I like Rebecca best because I can identify so thoroughly with the self-conscious protagonist.

It’s ‘comfort’ food. Like re-reading Watership Down or The Blue Castle.

And yet, there is one more image that sometimes rears unbidden into my imagination. Carol Burnett did a spoof on the story ages ago. You can find it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PTaIezXYuQ

Oh, to be spoofed!

Maybe one day…