The Tragically Unhip

a blog with three fingers on the pulse of uncoolness.

A View From The Bridge April 23, 2009

Filed under: City Living, Culture & Society, Home, Money, Neighbourhood, Photography, Signage — Genevieve D. Markle @ 9:52 am
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But would Arthur Miller live here? (All photos by Genevieve D. Markle)

 

My living situations have always been a little, er, unique. I was born and raised in the Montreal ghetto of Verdun; lived for three years in a Mile End slum; and spent a combined year and a half in New York City staying in various untraditional housing arrangements, including a residence run by nuns, a flophouse on the Bowery with cell walls that didn’t even reach the ceiling, and various borrowed floors and sofas. If nothing more, these crazy, less-than-ideal housing situations proved that I am not as high maintenance as my preceding reputation would have you believe, as well as provided me with seemingly endless blog fodder with which to entertain you, dear Unhipsters.

 

And now? I live in Manhattan’s highly sought-after, highly gentrified Lower East Side. My rent is laughably affordable and I am within walking distance from everything I could ever need: 24-hour subways and drugstores, hip nightspots, great restaurants, cheap drycleaning and wash-and-fold laundry services, and my favourite museum, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. My window offers a breathtaking view of the Williamsburg Bridge and there’s a branch of the New York Public Library just around the corner. Sounds like a dream, right? It is, but there’s a slight catch: my new apartment is in the projects.

 

Yes, the projects. Thanks to rappers like Jay-Z and Mobb Deep waxing lyrical about the housing projects that reared them (Marcy and Queensbridge, respectively), even the whitest-bread, most upper-middle-class North American suburban kid has at least a faint idea of what the projects are all about. My particular projects consist of twelve thirteen-floor high-rises that occupy a four-by-four block radius south of Avenue D and Houston, but were gratefully not gangsta enough to have made it into Unkut.com’s “Guide to Hip Hop’s Most Notorious Housing Projects“.

 

My building features all your typical project staples—an elevator that is permanently out of service, graffiti-adorned stairwells that smell like pee, and a non-existent recycling program (which I’m currently working on initiating)—while my immediate neighbourhood features all the things so commonly associated with low-income neighbourhoods: a check-cashing joint instead of a bank branch, a completely bulletproof glass-enclosed liquor store, and a dirty, no-name grocery store that I’ve been made to swear never to shop in by my well-meaning roommates. Despite all this, I can’t help but find beauty among the grittiness, so I decided to take some pictures to share with you, kind of like what Brooke did in this photo essay about her neighbourhood in Parc Extension, Montreal.

 

This is my ‘hood:

 

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Sometimes Your Words Just Hypnotize Me March 30, 2009

Filed under: Body, Books & Mags, Food, Health, Money, Musings — Genevieve D. Markle @ 6:48 pm

I have a pack-a-day habit. No, not cigarettes—gum. A pack of spearmint Stride a day, to be precise. If my mouth isn’t being used for talking or eating, you can bet it’s compulsively chewing gum. And when I run out of gum, I start chewing on the inside of my lower lip. I think I have a problem.

 

Halfway through Walter Kirn’s Thumbsucker, a lightbulb went off in my head. “Holy shit,” I thought, “I’m an oral obsessive!” A quick trip to Wikipedia ”confirmed“ my self-diagnosis, while simultaneously creeping me out with all that Freudian psychosexual stuff. But the more I think about it, the more I think I’m on to something here and that this isn’t just a kind of psychoanalytical hypochondria. The proof is in the pudding: I sucked my thumb until I was 11; I smoked cigarettes from 13 to 20; and I became a bona fide glutton at age 21, stuffing my face with food long past the point of fullness and being completely unable to say no. Do I dare add addictive personality to the mix?

 

The reason this is becoming a concern of mine all of a sudden is because I don’t know how much longer I can maintain my girlish figure if I keep this up. All of my oral fixations to date have had some sort of negative side effect: sucking my thumb for eleven years caused me to have buck teeth, which resulted in my parents hemorrhaging money to pay for my orthodontic work, while smoking for seven years was just plain gross and bad for my health. So now that being a face-stuffing pig is threatening to come between me and my beloved collection of overpriced jeans—which are beginning to look a little too tight these days—what am I left to do? I obviously have no self-control and can’t psych myself into portion control, so how to cure my overeating? Do I replace one oral addiction with another, like pill popping, beer guzzling, or sucking on lollipops? Does that mean I’m off to a good start with this gum chewing business?

 

But then it came: the sign that was like a beacon of hope in my inbox. Two days ago I received an email from the lady who hypnotized me two years ago. I must still be on her mailing list, long after I had dismissed our $300+ session as a frivolous folly that failed miserably at curing me of my chronic anxiety. It turns out you have to have regular hypnotherapy, and not just one hypnosis session, in order to get over actual issues. Whoops. But somehow I think that needing to keep my mouth busy at all times, for whatever psychological reason or traumatic childhood experience, would be a little bit easier to remedy than my mean reds. And besides, hypnosis is what cured the Thumbsucker!

 

So should I give hypnosis another go? Not that I have the cash for another visit to the Tribeca Hypnosis Institute, but now that I think about it, maybe that’s the solution to my problem: When you have no money, you can’t buy food (or cigarettes, or beer, or uppers, for that matter), just gum and lollipops. The solution to my problem may very well be in maintaining my starving artist status. Thus, it is in the name of my skinny jeans that I implore you not to hire me or take me out to dinner until I learn a little self-restraint.

 

Don't worry, Shakira. You're not the only one.

Don't worry, Shakira. You're not the only one.

 

Data Enter At Your Own Risk March 13, 2009

Filed under: Language, Manifesto, Money, Neighbourhood, Technology, Work — Genevieve D. Markle @ 7:02 pm

I came back to Montreal this month for my mother’s birthday and to pack up my shiz for my imminent move to Queens at the beginning of April. Leaving Mile End for the heavily Greek and Italian enclave of Astoria, NY was a logical move in the never-ending roller coaster that is my life, and I look forward to exploring my new ‘hood and discovering all its hidden gems, like the authentic espresso joints and little mom-and-pop bakeries. I might even develop a relationship with the counterperson at my local souvlaki place, as I did with Angie of Arahova and wrote about in this highly debated post. So since I’m in Montreal, I decided to make the most of my pre-Queens time by doing various temp assignments for companies who have not yet been affected by the recession and can thus afford to pay me mad bills for doing the kind of work a chimp could do. So far, this has consisted of one mind-numbingly dull reception gig and one skull-crushingly dull data entry gig.

 

But you’d be surprised to learn all the interesting things one can ascertain from doing data entry, however, and using the information to draw your own conclusions can actually be a lot of fun. While I’m sure the data I was entering into an Excel spreadsheet will eventually be tabulated using all kinds of crazy formulae to determine such boring statistics as spending habits per gender and age and gross annual income, those aren’t the kinds of stats that interest me. Rather, I like data that permits me to make fun of people. So here, for your reading pleasure, are some completely unfounded generalizations that I have concluded based on 20 hours of data entry work, compiled using no scientific methods whatsoever:

 

- Men have messier handwriting than women and are more likely to want to be spammed added to a mailing list.

- People who live in the 450 are more likely to attend lame exhibitions at Place Bonaventure.

- A high percentage of Quebecers are still using Hotmail and Yahoo.ca as their email hosts. Even my mother has migrated over to Gmail, people.

- An alarming number of said email users have not yet graduated to using mature, name-based email handles. As far as I’m concerned, people should be forbidden from using any of the following bad email themes:

1) Numbers are hard to remember, so adding 69, 666, 669 (combining the two—clever!), or 007 is just silly. Using your birth year as a suffix is the only acceptable exception to this rule, but still, try to avoid it.

2) Creating a handle that is too unprofessional to include on a resume is a waste of everybody’s time.  Some examples I encountered are baby_phat, miss_azn_party, crocodile_grr, sw3tnymph, and the mother of all terrible email handles: hotlikefiremaudite.

3) You might think that naming yourself after your favourite food is cute, but I think it makes you sound rather piggish. Some of the email addresses I entered this week include applepie, jujube, pringles (a brand name; yay for product placement), and pop_corn.

4) Anything misspelled (honney, offpring, virinia) or that can be misread is a bad idea. My favourite? The judo therapist I misread as Judo, the rapist.

 

In conclusion, I don’t think data entry is for me. And if I have to type out the eponymous, abnormally long and hyphenated city names of Ste-Marthe-sur-le-Lac or St-Jean-sur-Richelieu ever again, I think my brain is going to implode.

 

Recessionista Fashion January 25, 2009

Filed under: Books & Mags, Culture & Society, Fashion, Language, Money, Musings, Shopping — Marianne Perron @ 6:31 pm

A true word I read in this month’s edition of Vogue, recessionista, captures everything the modern woman should be—or does it? The article in question was yet another piece about a modern day trend I don’t understand: the clothing swap. Maybe it’s because all my has-been threads get demoted to gym wear status or donated to charity, and, being an oniomaniac, I keep my closet stocked with pieces I love, but the swap party fails to appeal to me. Add to that the fact that, at size 12 (thank you Club Monaco), I rarely fit into the petite fashions being auctioned, so you can see why I’ve been known to choose dinner with grandma over the swap scene.

 

courtesy of NeimanMarcus.com

Photo courtesy of NeimanMarcus.com

That said, I did enjoy the article. It’s entertaining, if nothing else, to muse about what swap parties are like among the dolce vita set, the Kate Spade/Louboutin-sporting women it’s aimed at. Honey, if I owned a Dior handbag, I would not be trading it in, I’d be clinging to it for dear life among the debris that is our current economic flow.

 

After I’d put down the magazine and trudged home in the January snow, I got to thinking. Recessionista, a bug that had snagged my eye upon first read, came back and lodged itself in my mind. Normally, I’m crazy about linguistic acrobatics. Anyone who’s read my poetry knows I invent words and coin phrases like it’s nobody’s business. Recessionista. I even like the way it sounds. Sort of chic and regal, not at all financial crisis.

 

The more I thought about it though, the more the word made me feel sick. Don’t get me wrong—I love fashion. I love fashion and I have a shopping problem. Still, the idea of taking something very serious and turning it into a light amuse-gueule made me ponder the kind of thinking that got us into the mess to begin with. I think “recessionista” says it all: trying to plaster a fake face on a rotten corpse and keep the good times coming. While I do think today’s fashion vixen should be more economically minded, and it’s only smart to promote thrift in times of recession, the word seems to signify something beyond itself. It hints at the flawed state of American thinking—that although the ship is sinking, the pageant will go on. 

 

Things We Would Do If We Were Cool January 22, 2009

Filed under: City Living, Food, Money, Things We Would Do If We Were Cool — Genevieve D. Markle @ 1:37 am

If I were cool, in NYC, I would:

 

- learn Fahrenheit. (Whatever, it’s still cold.)

 

- adopt one of the new first names people have mistakenly been calling me since I got here: Gena, Gemma, Geneva, and—my all-time favourite—Genovese.

 

city- stop supporting The Corporation by no longer buying my smoothies at Jamba Juice. Instead, I would travel the 45 minutes and three subway lines necessary to go buy a Punk Rock Smoothie from Vox Pop on the Bowery. (The “David Byrne” is made with strawberries, mango, peaches, and orange juice. Yum!)

 

- not have allowed those porn websites I reviewed to steal my credit card info, causing my bank account to become frozen, resulting in me having no access to my own money and having to live off of Clif and Luna bars because I can’t afford real food.

 

- not have stolen the following items from a hotel room at the W: mini post-its, W stationery, a pen, two serviettes, and the latest issue of City magazine.

 

 

That is all, for now.

 

Will Hang You Out to Dry January 17, 2009

Filed under: City Living, Money, Musings, Neighbourhood — Meagan Burbidge @ 2:39 pm

I don’t know if it’s just me, with my simple Midwestern features and misleading mannerisms that indicate to many that I should be engaged in all their trials and tribulations, but it really seems as though it is nearly impossible to so much as stand in line to buy chapstick and ballpoint pens without someone exclaiming, “Do you know how bad the economy is right now?”

 

I usually just smile and nod politely while scream-humming Arab on Radar in my head.  For me, so long as I can afford a pack of cigarettes and a place to rest my increasingly-worn shoes, I’m all right.  Sure, I miss dining on fancy cheese with Tiffany silver and wiping my ass with Egyptian cotton toilet napkins, but I’ve really embraced falling on tough times.

 

In all seriousness, I haven’t really felt the cold sting of an ungracious economy.  In college, I was too busy drinking 2 for $10 bottles of foul Shiraz and nursing my preternatural angst to apply for valid internships or look for relevant, resume-filling work opportunities. Chances are, regardless of the state of the union, I would be doing exactly what I am now.  That being: working jobs that are painstakingly underwhelming and sitting in my apartment thinking about how much easier it would be if someone would just deliver me a grownup kit, complete with tie and glasses, and I’d start work in the morning.

 

Perhaps I was just worn out from the constant flood of nay-say that came my way upon my decision to move to New York.  People would apply witty catchphrases to conversation, such as: “When you shake someone’s hand in New York, check to make sure you still have all five fingers!”, which merited my response of: “People shake hands in New York?” Most would continue on to say that what with the “hustle and bustle” and the “Angry New Yorker” persona (which I’ve only experienced with visitors, but take care—that will come later, I am sure of it): “You’ll be destitute! Do you know how expensive it is there? Do you?!”

 

Truthfully, the only thing that I’ve noticed a difference in price with is the cost of cigarettes, and frankly, they’re worth every penny. Other than that, I can understand the “cost of real estate” argument (location, location and all that), but if you subtract insurance, gas, tires, oil changes, and the will to live that it costs to drive around that suburb collectively known as America every day, and you will probably even out.  If you can wrap your brain around not dining at Jean-Georges four times a month, then you’re set, as far as Manhattan is concerned.

 

All this reasoning, of course, came before I walked into the abomination of the Way of Things and Natural Order: I am of course speaking of your local Brooklyn laundromat. I came prepared with your expected laundromat staples (water, trail mix, Vogue, detergent, and a roll of quarters), but when I arrived, everything went horribly wrong.

 

Apparently, modern washing machines are too sophisticated for the average American quarter; don’t insult it.  These days, they only accept a specific magnetic strip card—never to be misinterpreted for the sub-standard credit card—which you are required to pay 99¢ simply to obtain from a machine that is also anti-coin, pro-paper bills, and anti-reason, rationale, and general convenience. Once you’ve signed away your rights as a citizen to get the magnetic strip card, you have to pay $4.00 per load for the average single-person load, or $2.00 per load to use the smaller machine: a real bargain if you happen to be one who only washes a single washcloth and perhaps a pair of underpants (but you may not want to overdo it; nobody likes a glutton).  After that, it’s a mere 30¢ per 8 minutes to of dryer time. Fifteen-minute intervals would be menacing.  Be serious.

 

I’ve wanted to move to New York for as long as I can remember: the shoes, the music, the films, the grime, the practice of being in the midst of millions of people and still having the advantage of being entirely unto yourself.  I couldn’t resist and thus made a very hasty decision, one that had bright-burning warning signs that read “ARE YOU FUCKING CRAZY? DO NOT DO THIS!” This decision involved moving into the living room of a single, 45-year-old (legally 60) female owner of three bastard sons of The Renegade Angel Lucifer (her “babies”, better known as “cats”) on the Upper West Side. Decent rent, fantastic neighborhood, bat shit insanity.  It’s an epic and convoluted tale that has so scarred my psyche that I don’t ever imagine being able to cleverly adapt it into a satirical greeting card or miniseries.  (Those of you who are intrigued, know that it involved cats shitting where I slept; statements like “Well, since I’ve gotten through menopause…” followed by “…but that wasn’t until after I stopped using cocaine”; and awakening to find her watching me as I slept.)  Needless to say, there was an in-building laundry room, sympathetically priced at $1.25 a load, and I was blissfully unaware of how good I really had it, in laundering terms.

 

This is The Man: weighing me down, cuh-cuh-cuh-crushin’ me.

 

How to Be a Dog Walker in New York City January 14, 2009

Filed under: City Living, How-To, Money, Work — Genevieve D. Markle @ 2:38 pm
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Eight is great! (Photo by Genevieve D. Markle)

 

Today’s catcaller was a professional dog walker. (Does that make him a dogcaller, then?) Despite the fact that he was being yanked up West End Avenue by four huge dogs of different breeds—all on designer leashes and wearing typical Upper West Side winter dogjackets—he was still able to check me out sufficiently and deem me attractive enough to merit a “Hi, sweetie.”

 

I giggled at the thought of what our first date would be like had I responded favourably to his advance—getting to know each other better over coffee: me, him, and his four borrowed dogs. Then I remembered that I’d actually applied for such a position once. Two years ago, when I was living in Chelsea and working part-time as an accountant, I felt the pinch and decided I needed a second job. I found a dog-walking ad in the ETC. section of Craigslist and decided that the job would be the perfect marriage of two of my favourite things: taking long walks and being around doggies.

 

You’d think they were screening for infant care specialists, though, with all the prerequisites and questions they asked me with just my initial application. I was asked to explain why I would be a good candidate for the position, and also to please supply a personal story about a special experience I’d once had with a dog. Now, I hadn’t yet tapped in to my lean, mean blog-writing skills back then, but I like to think that I’d composed a pretty heartfelt and true story about how much I loved my neighbour’s dog growing up.

 

His name was Mikita and he was a Golden Retriever. I used to spend hours over at my friend’s house, doing all the things my parents would never let me do (like watch cable or play with Barbies), and often I would just sit on the floor and rub his belly while watching Saved By the Bell. Some of the fur on his underside looked like it had been crimped with a crimping iron, and he had these big, soft, floppy ears that were just perfect for petting. That dog loved me, and I loved him. I used to volunteer to walk him and even pick up his poo, which was a very big deal for a budding germophobe like myself. When I heard, at age thirteen, that Mikita had been put to sleep, I sobbed hysterically and was unable to go to school the next day. So you’d think that they would have called me for an interview, right? Wrong. While I was competent enough to handle a small company’s accounts receivable and payable, somehow I wasn’t qualified to be a dog walker.

 

Here is an example of the kind of ad that professional dog walking companies are posting on Craigslist these days:

 

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Bitch (female dog), please. I can land an interview for an Executive Assistant to the CEO position with fewer hoops to jump through than that. Shall I fetch you a stick, while I’m at it? Come to think of it, I could really use a good bone right about now…

 

Beauty and the Beast December 21, 2008

Filed under: Fashion, Health, Money, Musings, Shopping, Things We Have Love/Hate Relationships With — Marianne Perron @ 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. 

 

Trading Up December 5, 2008

Filed under: City Living, Home, Money — Celeste Parr @ 12:02 pm

As a screenwriter, I frequently travel to what arrogant people call the industry cities: Toronto, Vancouver, New York, Los Angeles. As a young cosmopolitan woman (why did the magazine have to destroy that word?), I also love to travel whenever and wherever I can afford to. And “afford” is the key word here.

 

I was recently interviewed about a home exchange I did in Toronto during TIFF ‘08. The journalist was interested in “industry folk” who had opted for a swap rather than a hotel, and wanted to know why. Well, isn’t it obvious? No check-in times. No continental breakfasts. No pint-sized accommodations. And it allows one to stay comfortably in virtually any city one would want to visit… for free. Or for almost-free.

 

The price of membership at HomeExchange.com starts as low as $75 USD per year. For that price, you can, 1) spend one night at the Days Inn in Plattsburgh, NY (and I have), or 2) for one year, stay anywhere your heart desires, so long as your own apartment is tempting to someone in return. Thanks to HomeExchange.com (drifting into infomercial, here), I’ve stayed in a beautiful 1-bedroom flat in Montmartre, and during TIFF we stayed in a spacious and newly-renovated apartment in Bloor West Village. Recently, I was in contact with a fellow screenwriter who spends most of the year in Alaska, and who’s agreed to have open non-simultaneous exchanges: my Outremont 2-bedroom for his drop-dead gorgeous 1-bedroom beachfront condo in Santa Monica. This doesn’t include the many offers I’ve received from San Francisco, Valencia and Ibiza.

 

So really. Don’t hold that atrocious Cameron Diaz/Jude Law movie against the many eager home-swapping globetrotters at HomeExchange.com—it would be your loss.

 

Smooth (Phone Sex) Operator November 18, 2008

Filed under: Money, Musings, Sex, Work — Genevieve D. Markle @ 2:37 am

How can I have so many jobs and still be broke? I write paid restaurant reviews, tutor ESL students, and work four days a week at a yoga studio, yet somehow my bank account is still in the negatives. Royal Bank called me today (I didn’t answer), and unless it was my ex-boyfriend who works there trying to get back together with me, chances are they were calling to try and sell me overdraft protection or to send my credit card to Collections.

 

My desperation for cash has led me to the McGill Classifieds, where I’ve found listings for all kinds of paid studies within the various PhD departments, which I’ve resorted to participating in. Most of them have been language studies. One of them tested my knowledge of French pronunciation and the difference between words like que and queue, while the other one would flash an English word on the computer screen and ask me to select whether it was a real or nonsense word. I had a particularly tough time with the word “liger.”

 

I’ve also been known to peruse the Etc. Jobs section of Craigslist, and last week I found an ad to work as a phone sex operator for an international, British-based sex line. I figured it couldn’t hurt to apply—that it would be easy money and permit me to work from home during evenings and on my days off, talking on the phone and typing away on my computer, which is all I ever do anyway. Now, it’s not secret that I used to work at a porno theatre, so I am definitely not a prude, but as the cashier I was never actually watching (let alone describing) the onscreen sex. All I did was sell entrance tickets and DVD’s; the toughest part of my job was trying not to giggle when I had to write up bills for customers who bought films with such titles as MILF Hunters #7 and ATM Ca$h Machines. (And no, I am not going to tell you what these acronyms stand for.) So being a phone sex operator would definitely be new territory for me.

 

Much to my surprise, the phone sex company actually wrote back to me—offering me a job. A contract was included in their email, as was a document entitled “Work Manual,” which included all of their policies and instructions for how to handle clients. Here is a sample of their brilliant advice, copied and pasted verbatim:

First impressions count!!  When a call first comes through introduce yourself in a friendly, sexy open manner with a smile on your face! Make sure you ask for his name and age and ask open-ended questions to get him engaged in a chat right away.

You need to have great listening skills and find out from the customer what sort of thing he likes to talk about.

Don’t expect men to talk about sex straight off…some can be very shy and may just want to hear a friendly voice, so take the lead from them and stay in control of the conversation.

If you have any suspicions that the caller is underage then you must hang up on them.

If you get a ‘silent’ caller then just encourage them to chat with you, and keep them on the line. Don’t talk sex until they have started to speak and initiated it.

Your objective is to make the customer feel relaxed with you and for him to be able to express his desires comfortably to you, and for you to make the call last as long as possible. We want to give the customers a top-quality call so that they will remember us and come back for more, time and time again.

You need to be very descriptive and imaginative to build up a scenario for the customer and keep him interested. Roleplays are a great way to achieve this.

 

Wow. I will be paid 15 pence per minute and an additional £1 for every call that lasts longer than fifteen minutes, once a month via PayPal. That’s actually pretty good when you do the exchange into Canadian dollars. I am also expected to come up with a “profile” for myself and include such information as hair and eye colour, hobbies and interests, star sign, and dress size. Should I create a sexy, voluptuous alter ego for myself, a Sophia Loren look-alike with a thick Italian accent? Or should I be a tiny, flat-chested Canadian girl, which wouldn’t be a stretch at all?

 

Readers (with the exception of my parents, who will undoubtedly disapprove), please advise! Should I become a part-time phone sex operator? I’m leaning more towards no, but I suppose I could be convinced.

 

Is Print Dead? November 12, 2008

Filed under: Books & Mags, Culture & Society, Money — Genevieve D. Markle @ 2:00 am

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The issue that brought Radar back from the dead, its THIRD incarnation.

 

R.I.P. Radar. The envelope-pushing publication and my one-time favourite magazine—billed as “Pop Culture for Smart People”—folded three weeks ago. Today my father emailed me this link to an article on AdWeek’s homepage, which reports that Time Inc. is offering to buy out over 80 employees from the various publications they manage. Basically, employees will have the opportunity to volunteer to quit their job for a nicer severance package than if they were to risk the gamble and wait to see if they are chosen for this round of layoffs.

 

The folks over at Condé Nast have been making mad cuts too; Men’s Vogue has been scaled down from ten to two issues per year, while regular Vogue has also been suffering, with ad sales down by 100 pages. Hearst just killed off CosmoGirl! and O at Home and even announced that it will be canceling its holiday party this year. The buzz is that Entertainment Weekly and Harpers’s Bazaar also are in trouble, as indicated by an intense round of cutbacks. Newspaper circulation is gravely on the decline. Some internet-news outlets like the Huffington Post and the Daily Beast are doing just fine, while others, like Valleywag and the Consumerist, are closing up shop. Were we smart to start a blog?

 

Blame the recession, and pray that Obama can make it better. Also pray that the trend doesn’t make its way up to Canada. As much as I have my issues with Montreal-based Maisonneuve magazine, I’d rather have that than nothing at all.

 

The Zit Remedy November 6, 2008

Filed under: Body, Money, Musings — Genevieve D. Markle @ 4:36 pm
Photo courtesy of pucesandco.fr

Photo courtesy of Pucesandco.fr

 

One of my girlfriends works for a dermatological reasearch company. She knew that I was short on cash and somewhat willing to offer myself as a guinea pig in the name of scientific advancement (or something), so she suggested that I sign up to participate in their new study on acne creams. “You mean, they want to give me free zit cream, give me flawless, beautiful skin, and then pay me 300 bucks when it’s all over?!” It was a no-brainer. Sign me up!

 

So yesterday morning I got up at 6 a.m. and made the trek out to the east end for my 7 o’clock appointment. I was ushered into a sterile doctor’s office, wherein I was made to sign a consent form. But before I could get to all the scary parts about the potential side effects of the acne cream I would be slathering on my face every night before bed, a very friendly nurse came in and announced that she was there to count my pimples. “Um, excuse me?” Apparently, this had to be done in order to determine whether I even qualified to participate in their study.

 

Karine, my nurse, whipped out a pocket flashlight and told me to sit very still and stare straight ahead. She buzzed around my head with her little light while I died inside, poking at my face and taking a count for each of the four facial regions of forehead, chin and cheeks. She then tallied up her numbers—my total number of pimples—and declared, “I’m sorry, but you are seven to ten pimples short for eligibility in this study.”

 

I was stunned. I’d dragged my sorry, broke ass all the way to the east end of Montreal at seven in the morning just to be told that I didn’t have enough pimples? My dreams of clear skin and an extra $300 quickly evaporated. I tried to haggle with her: “But, you see, this is just a good day! I’m normally much worse that this.” But Karine wasn’t buying it. Crushed, I gathered my belongings to leave, when she proposed a last-minute alternative. She had another study in mind that would require only the day’s visit and then she would pay me on my way out. Nice save! I allowed myself to get excited again, when all of a sudden, a male nurse appeared in the doorway with a frown and a stipulation. “This acne study is for francophones only. Were your grandparents born in Quebec?” I replied, “Er, one of them was.” “We need all four of your grandparents to have been born in Quebec. I’m afraid you are not eligible for this study either.”

 

(Now, how anglophone and francophone acne differs is a little unclear to me, but I’ll just take this as yet more evidence of prejudice against English people in Quebec, and use it to further reinforce why I must leave this god-forsaken province as soon as possible.)

 

Dejected, rejected, and quite possibly discriminated against, I got up to leave, with only the consolatory free samples of La Roche-Posay that Karine managed to smuggle to me in her guilt. And back to the drawing board I go.

 

The Starving Artist Diet November 1, 2008

Filed under: Body, Food, Health, How-To, Money — Genevieve D. Markle @ 9:00 pm

Disclaimer: The Tragically Unhip does not endorse starvation. If you have money, please eat. Preferably in a high-end Italian restaurant with a hot date.


All this talk about potatoes and booze and chubsters has got me thinking about food—or lack thereof. As a writer and part-time ESL instructor, I am not exactly rolling in the dough (literally or figuratively), and as a result, I cannot afford to eat as well as I’d like to. The only good thing to come out of my starving artist status is that I have managed to more or less maintain the same body weight I’ve had since my early 20’s, permitting me to still fit into the overpriced designer jeans I’d purchased back when I actually had money. Here are my tips for staying in shape with as little financial expenditure as possible.

 

 

Underused, dented, rusted bicycle.

1) DO: Exercise.

 

What broke artist can afford a gym membership? Or car insurance and gas? Or even a monthly transit pass, for that matter? The key to getting free exercise can be found right outside your front door, in the form of a sidewalk. Bide your time correctly, and you can walk to and from your destination, or at least to the closest subway station. Try and take a different route every time so that you can truly discover your city and appreciate its architecture and parks. Dress sensibly, in warm outerwear and smart kicks, and don your iPod, pre-loaded with the energizing tunes of one of our very own, custom-made Tragically Unhip hipster playlists. Biking or kick-scooting is also highly recommended, but make sure you wear a fashionable helmet to protect your noggin, as Unhipster Celeste Parr recommends in this post.

 

 

2) DON’T: Cook.

 

As a starving artist, I do not always have the means with which to purchase all the ingredients necessary to make most my favourite dishes. But if you look hard enough, you will find that there are many affordable and healthy pre-made meals in your local supermarket that aren’t frozen or preservative-laden. I’m a big fan of Fontaine Santé’s line of rice, bean, and pasta salads, and I love buying various fresh-cooked dishes from Whole Foods’ pay-by-weight, self-serve buffet. Eating straight from the container—ideally standing up beside the fridge or leaning against your counter—will also help you eat less because you will be so uncomfortable that you won’t want to do it for long.

 

 

Photos by Genevieve D. Markle

3) DON’T: Eat out.

Eating in restaurants is usually a pleasant experience (especially if accompanied by the aforementioned hot date), but can prove to be a very costly and weight gain-inducing habit if done too frequently. Most restaurants serve dishes that are heaping with much more food than is necessary or that you would be likely to consume if you were eating at home. Many of us, since childhood, were taught by our parents to eat everything on our plate, so the restaurants’ generous serving sizes always pose a bit of a problem. Plus, most of us are tempted to eat the starter bread in order to feel like we’re getting our money’s worth, so once you add up the tax, tip, and any extras like wine or dessert, you’ll realize that you’ve just spent a lot of money on more food than you need, likely causing you to waddle out of the restaurant with a noticeably heavier belly and a significantly lighter wallet. If you must eat out, however, might I recommend one of these affordable Montreal dining establishments? (Shameless plug: I wrote the article.)

 

Cheap Thrills – The Price of Milk October 20, 2008

Filed under: Etiquette, Food, Money — Kimberly Senf @ 2:19 am

Maybe I’ve spent too many of my hard-earned pennies feeding my shopping habit lately, but the encounter I had at Nocochi yesterday left me wanting—some of my money back, that is.

 

I ordered my standard fare of an allongé with warm milk on the side, not seeing an extra price indicated on the menu for the milk, nor did my server mention anything when she took my order. When my steaming Illy espresso was placed on the table in front of me, I was too enthralled by the lush crema to notice that the little steamer of hot milk that came along with my coffee was less than a third full. I didn’t mind, seeing as this obviously meant that the milk was complimentary and not going to be added to my bill, which made this poor girl pretty content.

 

Yet when I made my way over to the cash to pay I noticed that I was charged for what I thought was the price of a double espresso. I only had a single espresso, so I immediately corrected the cashier. This is when she informed me that it was in fact that right price, because the warm milk added an extra dollar to the price of my coffee. A full dollar for an inch of warm milk? I do not think so. Like my father always says, it’s highway robbery—and for once I can say that I actually agree with him.

 

Rent Control September 19, 2008

Filed under: City Living, Home, Money, Musings — Marianne Perron @ 2:17 pm

What’s harder than catching a whiff of celebrity at TIFF? Finding affordable housing just about anywhere. Oh, Montreal! Once the city of cheap housing, untapped musical genius, and vintage frocks—but no more! Everyone knows Montreal has changed, and most natives will give you an earful if asked who’s to blame: hipster culture, American frat boys, and the yuppie-go-luckies slurping up condos across the city. Everyone’s got their own version of the latest G (for gentrification) spot: Parc Ex, St. Henri, HoMa. But not everyone’s paying through the nose for their patch of green. 

 

Yes, I know you’re out there—the few, the proud—settled into comfortable Mile End 3 1/2’s before the youthquake, gathered round the (silver) radiator with fond memories of before Esperanza became Cagibi. I once was one of you; and now, scouring Craigslist at 3 a.m. for 3 1/2’s in the city’s most remote nooks, I stop and ask myself, “Why, why, why did I ever give up that little place on Clark?” And then I remember: syringes in the flower bed, crackwhores in the alley, mould-related allergies, termites in the floorboards, and St. Laurent between April and December.

 

Once known as the House of Slack, my little shack bellow St. Cuthbert became home to generations of unmotivated, malnourished artist types. Anyone who moved into its rooms was doomed, it would seem, to a life of low-income, pot-smoking bliss. The price to be paid for the dirt-cheap rent was the hell that became the Plateau. I got out while I still could, with my rickety typewriter, mustering what little inspiration I had left.

 

I may not regret passing 3845 Clark on to the new generation, but I am envious of all those with rent-controlled apartments in Montreal 2008. And I beg of you, oh kindhearted readers, if you or anyone you know has a much coveted lease that you’re ready to pass on, contact me.

 

Wanderlust September 10, 2008

Filed under: Money, Musings, Work — Marianne Perron @ 2:12 pm

Where Barbies Come From

 

I spend my days listening to wealthy people talk about their travels and escapades, and dutifully trekking on and off the island of Montreal. Besides my daily trips to the city of Brossard, I haven’t left the island in years. Currently, several of my close friends are living their lives abroad. I can’t even scrimp together enough money to visit Ottawa, and I owe the government more money than I will make in the next two years. Yet, despite my sedentary life, a small demon has been growing in my belly for some time. It is an irrepressible desire to flee this (dead-end) city while the going is good. In fact, were it not for my perpetual financial distress, I do believe I would have been long gone moons ago. I even dream about epic journeys across exotic lands. Friends try to entice me with promises of guided tours and free accommodations. As if my urge to skip town weren’t incentive enough. No, I have no shortage of motivation; it’s my wallet that keeps me down. I’m certain that one day my wanderlust will be satisfied. Until then I’ve got my trusty Opus card, and a smattering of places to stay. 

 

How To Get Wasted For Ten Dollars or Less September 7, 2008

Filed under: Booze, How-To, Money, Neighbourhood, Shopping — Ryan Marlboro @ 11:34 pm

I don’t want the fact that I was born and raised in Verdun to define me, but when Gen called and asked me to write this article, I think we both knew that my borough-folk and I are real experts when it comes to getting completely annihilated for as little financial expenditure as possible. Verduners like to drink a lot—usually outside on the balcony or, if you’re from neighbouring Pointe Ste. Charles, out on the front stoop with your legs stretching into the sidewalk. Regardless of neighbourhood, however, there are numerous ways for you to get wasted for ten dollars or less, but it’s quite obvious when I say this that hard liquor and bars are pretty much out of the question.

 

One great way to get your buzz going is to find a non-franchised dépanneur that advertises selling beer for the “lowest price permissible by law.” I’ve seen a few joints on Wellington doing this. Most stores will carry brands like Pabst Blue Ribbon or Old Milwaukee (not to be confused with Milwaukee’s Best or Milwaukee’s Best Dry), and these beers go for about a dollar a can. A bottle of beer contains 341ml of liquid while a can contains 355ml, so you do the math. With ten dollars, you should be able to pick up eight of either, providing you with a good buzz for the night. A 355ml can of beer with a 6.1% alcohol content for a dollar sounds like a real steal, doesn’t it? Oh yeah, except the beer tastes like crap.

 

This one worked well a few years ago, but I haven’t tried it recently. While Colt .45 is cheaper, a 40oz bottle of Big 10 (Black Label 10%) has a higher alcohol content and less social stigma attached to it. Big 10 tastes even worse than the Pabst and Old Milwaukee beers, but sometimes sacrifices must be made in order to drown your sorrows and/or escape reality. This stuff is bottom of the barrel, but it’s cheap! A forty of Big 10 goes for about $4.50 a pop, so why not go all out for the evening and buy two? You could even leave the dep owner a one dollar tip. Expect a night of blurred vision, horrible-tasting mouth, and probably vomiting.

 

If you live in Montreal, Foufounes Électriques has $5 pitchers on Tuesday nights, but tips for your bartender and the 3$ cover charge must be factored in to your night’s total spending. Throw in a few games of pool and maybe a drink for the hottie you want to take home with you, and already you’ve gone over budget. But unless you are an alcoholic, most people want to get hammered in the company of other people anyway, so you can always rally up a group of your friends to go to the dive bar of your choice on Cheap Beer Night and have everyone chip in to a communal pool to help fund the intoxication. If you’re money-savvy enough, you and your friends should be able to spend a drunken evening in an enjoyable social setting, which sure as hell beats drinking on the sidewalk.

 

The Foot Fetishist’s Guide to Generosity August 21, 2008

Filed under: Body, Etiquette, Manifesto, Money — Genevieve D. Markle @ 12:11 pm

 

These ladies work hard. Tip accordingly. (Photo by Genevieve D. Markle)

Last week, I went to May’s Nails on W. 14th. May’s claim to fame is that she once served Gwen Stefani when Gwen was in the neighbourhood with a nail emergency that absolutely had to be fixed immediately, and May has the photograph of the two of them on the wall behind her station to prove it. I always treat myself to a mani-pedi whenever I’m in town because I simply can’t afford to get my nails done in Montreal. Back home, the double procedure will set you back a minimum of $45, plus tax, plus tip. If you go to May’s between Monday and Wednesday, you can have both beauty treatments for $20 flat. It’s a steal.

 

New York’s spa and nail industry is booming. Over 50% of New York women say they get their nails done at least once a month. Salons exist on nearly every corner and are providing plenty of jobs for immigrant women with a limited knowledge of English who would otherwise have a hard time finding employment. But with New York City’s notoriously exorbitant rents, how can these salons afford to charge so little for beauty procedures and yet still make enough money to cover their overhead costs? The answer is simple: The manicurists are often treated like dirt.

 

I read an eye-opening exposé in New York magazine last year that explained just how poor the working conditions can be in some spas and nail salons, not excluding those in even the wealthier neighbourhoods of the city. The manicurists often work ten-hour shifts with no breaks—not even to eat. A manicurist would be lucky to receive compensation for her overtime hours, and compounded with that fact that she is often paid less than the minimum wage, she depends on her tips to make up the difference. Manicurists sit for hours in the same painful position, hunched over our hands and feet like pious worshippers. If you bothered to look, you’d probably see that many of them have eczema on their hands and forearms as a result of dunking their arms in and out of a basin of soapy water all day.  Yes, the work they do is pretty unpleasant—manhandling assorted gross feet all day, filing dead skin off calloused heels, clipping off fungus-y toenails, etc.—yet some customers still scold and and command them as if these ladies were our servants. Have you ever sat beside someone who was getting the $2-extra razor treatment? I always watch in horror as the stone-faced manicurist literally shaves the callouses off the undersides of feet and sides of toes, pieces of dried skin flying everywhere, including onto her clothes. The salon employee is probably exhausted, sore, and covered in other people’s flesh by the time she gets home at night.

 

Yet the manicurist doesn’t bat an eyelash when she’s handed two measly singles as her tip for an hour’s hard labour. The nature of her work is more difficult than a cab driver’s and easily grosser than a server’s, but we always tip those workers generously. Why should a salon employee be treated any differently? The minimum tip for your manicurist should be at least $5—no matter what neighbourhood you live in. Here at The Tragically Unhip, we may not be cool, but at least we’re good tipsters.

 

And You Thought Your Apartment Was Bad? July 26, 2008

Filed under: City Living, Home, Money, Neighbourhood — Genevieve D. Markle @ 3:42 am
Gen Di Napoli, Gen DiNapoli

I'll tell ya where all the junkies have gone! They got pushed out by all the damn hipsters! (Photo by Genevieve D. Markle)

 

I live at the corner of Parc Avenue and Hell. I pay a reasonable rent to live in a small 2-bedroom apartment in Montreal’s hippest neighbourhood at its most convenient intersection. After failed co-habitation attempts with an ex-boyfriend and a spoiled daddy’s girl who mistook my garbage bag of clean laundry for trash—thus leaving my designer duds on the curb to be taken to the garbage dump—I now live alone. I never have to yell at anyone for peeing on the toilet seat or for leaving their toenail clippings beside the remote. All told, this should be an ideal, enviable living situation, right? Wrong.

 

My slumlord landlord, Monsieur C—, is a very nice man, but he is not the slightest bit discriminating when it comes to selecting tenants. I truly believe he would rent to a giant drug-dealing rat if he had enough money to cover the first month’s rent. M. C— is slowly getting annoyed with me because although I keep the cleanest, most tastefully decorated apartment in the entire complex and I always pay my rent on time, I am slowly driving him crazy by calling him at least twice a week to complain about something new re: the building. And with good reason.

 

My main problem is with the neighours. Some are of the human variety, others not. Let us begin with My Bitterest Enemies and Neighbours Across the Courtyard, Part I. This first set of enemies is the pigeons. They roost under an overhang on the roof and they paint the would-be-charming red bricks with the white streaks of their poo. The poop collects in mountains on the fire escape beneath them, measuring as high as five inches in some places. When I look out my window and across to the neighbouring building, all I see is crap. The biggest insult of all came when I returned home from work one evening after having left my patio doors open seven inches or so sans screen, only to find that the pigeons had paid me a house call; my living room was graced with multiple splatters of bird droppings. The next day I made the building handyman clean it up, and he actually showed up with gyno gloves and a paint scraper with which to remove the solidified shit from my carpet.

 

Part II involves the neighbours who live directly across the courtyard from me and one floor down. They are even grosser than the pigeons, but similarly vermin. Their sparsely furnished apartment is littered with beer bottles and drug paraphernalia, and their windows do not have curtains, only pasted-up newspaper to give them privacy. They are loud and disgusting and throw loud and disgusting parties on weeknights and keep me awake when I have to be up early the next day. The worst altercation occurred in November, when after a night of hard partying, the scariest one of all climbed up the fire escape and proceeded to bang on my windows and threaten my life, all because I’d been so audacious as to ask him to please be quiet when he was drunkenly banging on his own window and hollering to his roommate to “let [him] in! [He] forgot [his] keys!”

 

So you know how most apartment buildings have locked front entrance doors and you need your tenant friend to buzz you in whenever you come visit? Yeah, well, my apartment doesn’t have that. Installing an intercom and buzzer system would be an investment—clearly something my landlord has no interest in. As such, the doors leading to the street are constantly left unlocked, often resulting in certain non-tenants and other undesirables having unlimited access to our stairwell. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve come home late after a party or left early to head to work and come across a homeless man sleeping on my landing. I went from calling the cops to personally throwing them out, like the stairway vigilante who know all the perpetrators by their first name. The final straw for a girlfriend of mine—who has since moved out—came when she exited her apartment one morning to find a used condom and its wrapper on her welcome mat. When people are doing it in your hallway, kids, you know you’ve got a problem.

 

Thanks to Michael Moore, the image that the general American public has of Canada is one of an idyllic, gun-free haven of polite folks and free health care. In his film Bowling for Columbine, he shows us an example of a typical Canadian housing project, which is clean and inviting, differing significantly from the towering brown-brick behemoths that have been erected in poverty-stricken districts of the United States since the 1950’s. Not to say that his representation is completely inaccurate, but I find it important to clarify that Canada is home to many a slum. I know this because I live in one.

 

Maybe the Village Voice had a point when they asked via billboard at the corner of Bowery and Delancey in New York City: “Where have all the junkies gone?” We, the young people of limited means, whether we be artists, activists, or students, will likely forever complain about the gentrifiers moving into our neighbourhoods and consequently rendering the cost of living unaffordable. Yet here I am complaining about the ghetto-ness of my inexpensive apartment building, one of the remaining few in my area. Perhaps the only way to guarantee myself an affordable living situation is by having to tolerate sex in the stairwell and pigeons on my patio. And that, my friends, may very well be the lesser of the two evils.