The Tragically Unhip

a blog with three fingers on the pulse of uncoolness.

(Fixed) Gears of War March 19, 2009

Filed under: City Living,Health,Musings,Transit — Brooke D. @ 12:45 am

 

I’m a little new to the whole “riding a bike” thing, but so far am pretty sold on the idea.  I’ve always lived in cities with decent mass transit  (except that 5-year stint in LA when I spent more on parking tickets than I did at Trader Joe’s) and never really got into bikes. If you live in LA and ride a bike it means you’re either seriously broke or all those D.U.I’s finally caught up with you. Nobody rides a bike, ever.  We drive Mercedes and HUMMERS, thank you very much. I think one summer a friend decided to start a super sweet “bike gang” but we only got as far as the matching hoodies and then kind of gave up. Maybe we rode to the neighborhood bar like, twice.  People are lazy in LA and it’s kind of hilly and spread out and we like our polluted skyline just the way it is because the haze truly makes for some “amazing sunsets.”  Plus, what would we have to talk about if there was less traffic? I also spent some time in Seoul and New York, and the subways always treated me just fine.  I swear I love the sweaty cattle car feeling and getting smushed up against strangers who think other people really must love their open-mouth-gum-chewing-spitty-bubble-blowing-smack-cracking sounds first thing in the morning (obviously a pet peeve of mine).

 

 

So a couple years ago I sold my car, started traveling, and up until now thought that I’d been doing just fine on foot/by bus/metro.  Until last fall, upon my arrival in Montreal, when I was given, quite generously, a bicycle which I’m convinced possesses magical powers.  Not only do I never have to wait for the bus or go underground ever again, but anything (that isn’t booze) which gets me not only out of the house but across town is like a damn miracle.  I’ve been riding everyday since Spring kicked in and I now look for any excuse to throw on my fuzzy slippers and bike to the market, the dep, the post office, or the SAQ with my bathrobe flapping freely in the wind.

 

Just kidding; I wear pants if I have to.

 

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m kind of a wuss when it comes to traffic, patches of ice, puddles, hills, potholes and basically everything else that isn’t a clear, wide open and completely flat bicycle lane. I don’t know all the fancy names for the gears and parts and crap, and I’m more the “basket and bell” kind of girl, but I finally understand why people are so into their bicycles.  It’s been pretty wonderful and I actually feel fairly, almost, something close to… healthy? I like going fast. I like the way the sunshine reflects off my handlebars, I like the wind in my hair.  I love the sights, sounds, and smells you just don’t get from riding the bus. I love riding by people’s houses and looking in their windows. Haha. Plus dudes think it’s cute when girls ride bikes.

All images by Brooke D.

 

When I got started, a friend in Minneapolis wrote asking if I rode a fixed gear because, in his opinion, “If it ain’t fixed its broken.” And I was like, “Well, my brakes are kind of shot and really only use one gear anyway… does that count? Ooh!! And did I mention it’s pink!?”  Now, dear reader, don’t judge.  I’ve been around the block once or twice, the whole world even, and yes, I know what a fixed gear is.  I just don’t necessarily get the thing about them.  I’m pretty sure I understand that they don’t have brakes and make you… cool? Well, not so much according to this guy:

 

free-fixie

 

I like bikes, I like riding bikes, but I have no idea what this guy is talking about.  Four things I was actually able to decode from this little rant:

  • First: This guy’s messenger bag is way older than yours and ISN’T from Australia.
  • Second: Riding a fixed gear will only make you cool if you are him.
  • Third: He was the first person to do anything ever.
  • Fourth: He hates your pants. (Don’t worry, guy, I hate pants too.)

 

Nothing like some weirdo elitism to take something Super Fun and make it a Pointless Pissing Contest!  So now I’m a little confused: is riding a fixed gear really cool or really really uncool?  Is my busted up generic junker better than your Bianchi because it’s not as trendy?  Are there some kind of style guidelines I’m not aware of?  Why does this guy care if I wash my hair and what does that have to do with his bike? Are certain people just not allowed to ride bikes at all? Gee. There sure is a lot of stigma, social stratification and fashion involved in foregoing public transit, being healthy, and falling in love with your city via two wheels. I had no idea! Better start reading up to see if I’m doing this right; wouldn’t want to break any of the rules in this town. Ohwait!! I don’t give shit and I should be outside practicing my sweet wheelies, bunnyhops and gear shifting skills….

 

Baby, It’s Cold Outside January 27, 2009

Filed under: Body,Health,Musings — Kimberly Senf @ 11:12 pm

Montreal is a very chilly city—where the temperature hits thermometer bottom for about a third of the year and every January I wonder why I put up with the slushy streets and freezing rain that turns puddles into ice sheets, and leaving the house becomes an altogether uninviting option.

 

Don’t even get me started on the lack of sunshine, ’cause I could go on for many grey days. With the lack of Vitamin D and outdoor extra-curriculars (only truly insane people go cross-country skiing in -20°C weather) I sometimes find myself staring off into the white nothingness, dreaming of sunny beaches and hot sand. Or I sit at home and try to send myself into oblivion by the insane amount of random televisions shows I can consume in a four-hour period. (And yes, I still wonder why I get nothing done.)

 

Winter is supposed to be about hibernation and time spent by roaring fireplaces and drinking hot toddies with loved ones. But what if I can’t even be bothered to get out of bed to find the wine that I should be mulling? The sun is done for the day by 3 p.m. and all too many people I know cannot be bothered to leave their house when the mercury tells them what they don’t want to learn. Add a little SAD to the equation, and it’s just a regular winter in Canada. Sad but true, Seasonal Affective Disorder is the fancy-schmancy term for the winter blues that take root in my bones until April heats up the streets and everyone comes out to play again. Woe is me and my unfulfilled wishes of warm country days.

 

Due to the lack of sunshine in my life (I am born on the darkest day of the year, thank you parents), I have actually sought therapy for said winter blues. I’ve downed bottles of Vitamin D in a quick-fix phase, but soon realized that if I wanted lasting results, I would have to pull out the big guns, otherwise known as the SAD lamp. They’re nifty and oh-so-bright, but the catch is that they’re also easily $200. And then I wonder, do I have to sit in front of it for a half hour a day to get the maximum benefit, or can I just read Jane Eyre while the lamp shines on? In the end, I decided that my clumsy nature would likely result in my SAD lamp becoming a sad mess of broken parts, and I would be out $200 and even more depressed. So instead I opted for the tried and very well-tested method of coping through chocolate. That was pre-detox, though. This winter, I’ll have to wing it with some white tea and almond butter, fingers crossed that I’ll have the willpower to keep the chocolate hidden in my freezer until the spring thaw.

 

(Or, alternately, I could sit at home and listen to “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” on vinyl and use my nifty camcorder to record the record spinning round and round. But I think I’ll take my chances with the white tea and try to forget exactly how cold it is outside.)

 

 

Reader, I Digest January 20, 2009

Filed under: Body,Food,Health — Kimberly Senf @ 12:15 am

With the New Year come the resolutions that are quickly tossed to the side amidst the vices of life (chocolate and anything else involving the wonders of white sugar, to name my favourites). As I’m normally one of those who needs no excuse to dig into my second slice of lemon cake, I thought I’d take a different angle this year. Rather than simply depriving myself of all edible delights for mere days before I my willpower dissolves due to lack of resolve, I decided to start 2009 off with a firm and healthy handshake – otherwise known as a detox.

 

To be specific, it’s Joshi’s Holistic Detox that leaves me without: red meat, dairy, fruit (except the trusty banana), wheat, gluten & yeast, alcohol (oh, how I long for my Moskovskaya), sugar, sugar, sugar, coffee and artificial anything. I read the book cover to cover and couldn’t wait to get started with deprivation. But like any sane person, I waited until the 1st of January to get my detox on.

 

To be frank, I’m a bacon, chicken and fish almost-vegetarian for the most part anyways, so kicking Babe off my diet was not hard in the least. I also haven’t had a glass of icy cold cow’s milk in years and since I’m addicted to the wonders of soy and rice milk, I was able to tick this box off easier than it probably should have been (Joshi does let me have my plain bio yogurt though – oh the joy!).

 

Bananas are allowed because of their slow-releasing sugars, which is pretty much the only sugar I’m getting anyways – unless you count the minute amount of cane juice in my soy milk—which frankly, I don’t count for anything besides keeping me just a little bit saner throughout the detox. Just imagine a life without sugar (wait, don’t cry yet), and now imagine it without sugar and bread. Now you can shed a tear.

 

Overnight, I’ve turned into a spelt bread type of girl who checks ingredient lists for the unwanted gluten, wheat, and forbidden crystals of sugar that crop up just about everywhere. Once you start to pay attention to what you eat, it’s all too easy for it to become an obsession. The people that serve me at restaurants have been rather lackluster and unimpressed with my newfound attitude towards everything I ingest. They take issue with the fact that I need to know exactly what’s in the vinaigrette and that I ask for carrot juice with a little beet thrown in. A girl’s got to get her vegetable sweetness somewhere!

 

Now you might say that sugar, alcohol and coffee are what make the world go round and get about 45% of the world out of bed in the morning. I would have to agree with you there because I used to be a tried and true member of the java club. But somehow I’ve found the will to insert a green tea bag where there was once a beautiful shot of espresso. At least I’m still allowed to smell the coffee beans, which makes up for about 2% of the pain.

 

So far it’s been 19 days and I’ve only got three more to go (one make-up day for the numerous vodka sodas I’ve consumed while pining away for the chocolate that’s in my freezer). I think I’ve lost a few pounds—but that might only be from all the dishes I’ve been doing and all the calories I’ve been burning up in the kitchen as I hand-blend my chick peas into a state of hummus and make more soup than your grandmother can shake a spoon at.

 

The best part of putting myself through the nutritional ringer is that I actually feel pretty decent. Better than I have in months: no cold, no flu, and no problems besides figuring out exactly how many Tupperware containers I can fit into my purse without looking like I’m trying to sell them door-to-door. These days I drink my hot water with lemon and face the day head-on without the blur of a caffeine fix fogging up the glass. The view’s pretty much the same, but maybe it’s just that my vantage point is a little bit to the left of where I started from, somewhere between the kale and the rice milk.

 

Beauty and the Beast December 21, 2008

Filed under: Fashion,Health,Money,Musings,Shopping,Things We Have Love/Hate Relationships With — MP*erron @ 10:15 pm

OK. I’ll admit it. Despite being way too intelligent for this shit, I am a bona fide shopaholic. My trusty Wikipedia tells me that this condition is called Oniomania (naw, that’s not just code for onion-chowing lunatics), and “can have devastating consequences”. Thanks, Wiki.

 

If shopping is an addiction, my drug is something like cocaine – I can’t afford the really fine stuff, but I’m not smoking crack down at Zellers either. I’m hovering somewhere in between, in a world where $300 dollar handbags and Modern American Poetry (that’s a 300-level class at Concordia) see eye to eye.

 

When I was in University I used to pay about $280 for rent and roughly $300 per 3 credits. That’s how my MPT (maximum purchase total) came to be raised to 3-0-0, give or take $45 for tax. You see, anything that I wanted badly enough to pout over got compared to those torturous 200-level requisite courses, like Intro to Lit. Theory with Dr. D. O’Leary.

 

Now that I’ve graduated, and bring in the (slightly) bigger bucks, I can afford the $500 rent I pay for my well-situated, much too small, paper-thin walls. As a result, my MPT has risen accordingly. Because, hell, if my landlady deserves my hard-earned cash, then I deserve that Mackage.

 

So, what’s the point of this piece? To confess that I’m in trouble. Since working with my therapist to curb my other obsessions, shopping has come to play an increasingly bigger role in my so-called life. The result? A bank account that’s constantly on empty, and a wardrobe that is too fabulous to keep behind doors. This would all be fine if I was your average Betty, but truth be told, I suffer from enough conscience to know my behavior is sick, given the condition of our wilting planet. This leaves me feeling a lot like a rotten tooth – pretty on the outside, but oh so deteriorated inside.

 

And hence, my New Year’s resolution! Yes. To quit shopping cold turkey. Because really, how many pounds of silver does one little doe need? With you as my witnesses, I move forward into the year of thrift! Luckily, this won’t require any drastic purification rituals like clothes burning, or jewelry hawking. And I’ve got enough Nars hydrating moisture cream to last me through the winter. 

 

Obsessive, Compulsive, Neurotic November 22, 2008

Filed under: Health,Musings — Kimberly Senf @ 1:18 am

Some things make me absolutely crazy, and because of my tendency to over-examine these problematic areas, I’ve self-diagnosed myself with OCD. It’s a term that’s been tossed around a lot over the past decade and has become part of our everyday vernacular, but for some people (yours truly included), it’s an altogether irritating aspect of everyday life that makes it impossible to do something as simple as start a task until the entire desktop has been cleared and everything is in its proper place.

 

Turns out I’m picky about the things that I’ll obsess over—primarily doors being locked and stoves being turned off. I’ll psychoanalyze myself here and reason that the door-lockage and the need to ensure that the stove elements are turned off stems from too many Rescue 911 and Unsolved Mysteries episodes in my childhood that traumatized me about home invasion and houses consumed by fire.

 

Friends that have seen me go through the ordeal of locking my door no longer sigh impatiently as I go back for the third or fourth time—they’ve learned that this will just make me have to return to count it out all over again. I’m sure that if I knew any doctors who could come over to watch me lock my door, they’d be signing over a prescription in no time.

 

Now my obsessive tendencies have been chronicled on the website below for all other neurotics to see. So far it seems that I’m not alone, which helps me feel just a little bit saner—only a little, but that little bit helps.

 

picture-14

 

How Not To Eat Persimmons November 19, 2008

Filed under: Food,Health,How-To — MP*erron @ 11:30 pm

 

Courtesy of Wikipedia

Courtesy of Wikipedia

 

 

 

 

I was delighted when I found the funky orange fruit for 99 cents down at the neighborhood PA. It seemed so novel and exotic, even to my jaded eyes. So I picked one up, brought it home, and left it atop the microwave to ripen.

 

When at last the fruit was soft, I realized I had no idea how to eat it. So I Wikied it. Peel and eat like an apple. Seemed easy enough. Persimmons are yummy. They don’t have much flavor, but they’re a juicy plump consistency, and super sweet.

 

I gobbled mine up in about 30 seconds. Once I was done I paused long enough to notice a strange, tingling sensation in my mouth. I waited for it to subside, but it only increased. Before long my entire mouth was prickly, sandy, and swollen. I could feel my throat starting to tingle as it does when I’m having an allergy.

 

Freaked, I dashed to my roommate (a training nurse) for assistance. Her cure? One Benadryl and lights out for kitty. I mean, goodnight.

 

How To Cure The Common Cold November 10, 2008

Filed under: Food,Health,How-To — Kimberly Senf @ 11:14 pm

Now I’m not even sure if I have the common cold, but I do know that I have something scratching away at the back of my throat—and I would like to evict my uninvited guest. I trust that I’m not alone in my miserable state, so I thought I’d share my bacteria-fighting beverage with everyone.

 

As trusty as Canadian-made NeoCitran is, nothing beats a runny nose and itchy throat like some good old-fashioned kitchen remedies. My personal favourite is a concoction that consists of: half a grapefruit, a clove of garlic, a pinch of cayenne pepper and a teaspoon of olive oil. Give it all a whirl with your trusty hand-blender and chug away. Please don’t sip it daintily like I tried to, or you might not be able to stomach more than a few sips. Not only will the garlic pave the way to better health, but it will also allow you some alone time to get some rest!

 

(Repeat twice daily and don’t be cheap on the garlic for maximized results.)