This Side of West

So, a while back I was called in by the up-and-coming ambitious names of the writing future to help out and write a few random things for their literary journal, This Side of West. Yeah, me in a journal. Who'd a thunk? Nevertheless, I raked something marginally respectable together for them to publish. The book is now available for the low, low price of $12.95 (I think?) or - if you use my guest bathroom - you can read my copy for free on the can.

*****

I’ve always liked to imagine that I’m worldly. It makes me feel good, you know? Sitting around my buddy’s ash covered table, twirling a peeled beer bottle, I’ll whip out references to my foreign friends like they’re some kind of celebrity.

“Oh, you know my friend Eduarrrdo,” I’ll say, rolling the “r” to accentuate his exoticness, “was just telling me he might meet me in Prague.” Propping my feet on the adjacent plastic chair, I’ll switch the topic, asking someone about their friend from work because, you know, I wouldn’t want to rub in just how traveled I am. Not outright, anyway.

It takes that special sort of occasion to let myself indulge in full-on, egocentric story telling. I’ll slur my way through a recounting of that one time, in Schwitscherland, when I smoked pot on the train and went to see bears in a pit. And the crowds will ooh and they’ll ahh and they’ll proclaim a new round of Beer Pong in my honour, and I’ll feel awesome.

Then, someone will lean on my shoulder, spilling cheap rum down my cleavage, and suggest I write a story about it.

“Oh, well, the, ah, keyboard could never do such a story, um, justice,” I’ll say, waving down their protests and insisting that my travels are almost too epic to be written down. Then, I’ll retreat behind the plastic cup-covered table, and turn my attention to the crooked projectiles of a friend’s ping-pong ball and away from my ineptitudes as a writer. At home later, I’ll look wistfully at my laptop, before I stumble and decide it’s time to sprawl on top of my covers.

When morning and the hangover comes, I will be no more able to type the story than the night before, regardless of how much more accurately I’d hit the keys. Really, all I’d done was get high and look at bears. Of course they were Swiss bears and it was European pot, but that’s nothing more to write about. Anyone six shots deep would have thought I’d been to the moon, seen a dragon – without a helmet – and lived to tell the tale.

So I leave my laptop out of it, forget that I fail to find inspiration in the setting sun of Schwitscherland, and pick up another Canadian.

“Did I ever tell you that Froweeen wants to visit when I’m in Egypt?”

Do Me Financially

I had never really thought about it before. Money, that is. At least not until last Christmas, when I received what I tacked up to be a second rate gift from parents out of ideas. Unwrapping a thin, rectangular object that I was secretly hoping would turn into my own personal Cabana Boy (or other such entertainment), I pulled out a book entitled “Making More Dough”. Great. Thanks ‘rents. It’s not likely I would ever be raking in much cash at any rate with a Bachelor of Fine Arts, so what was there to increase?

Still, curiosity finally pushed me to crack the book and suddenly I was nose deep in a chapter explaining how to cut bank fees and loving every word. Had I actually been spending at least three whole dollars every time I withdrew from a street corner ATM? Appalling! Could I really make ten bucks a month in interest on my savings account? Certainly! Revelling in what was sure to be new found affluence; I would walk into the mall, coffee shop, or the local grocery store with just that much more confidence. I would buy that half price tomato sauce and be able to afford it, goddamn it!

Turns out my new book was just as satisfying as the Cabana boy I had been dreaming of in the end (not that I’m about to let any willing candidates know that). Hell, I was even feeling hotter at the bar; money is sexy, after all. I could keep myself well hydrated without having to rely on the guys that sidle my way and offer to buy me whatever I was feeling that night — not that this was generally an issue, considering how long I’ve been perfecting my approach to pre-drinking and normally had a bottle of wine safely emptied at home. Being able to strut around in thriftily acquired designer jeans, brand new heels and picking up not the ten dollar, but the sixteen dollar wine left me feeling self-reliant, in control and with more assurance than is healthy for someone who already makes a career out of her confidence.

Nonetheless, when I accepted a tequila shot from a rather nondescript young man a few weeks into my new fiscal plan, I couldn’t help but wonder why there was something about his swank that had piqued my interest and had me suddenly giving him the once-over. I remembered, though, an encounter I’d had with a guy who I’d chalked up as my type only to have him spend three quarters of our (very brief) chat drunkenly boasting about how he had barely been able to afford cover that night, when it came to me that it was their show of financial security (or lack thereof) that had caught my attention.

Dad the ecologist would explain this away as my biological inclinations to find a well established man, but I’m sure it can be broken down to the simple fact that money is hot. Hell, if I feel like the meagre dollar or two I’ll be putting into my savings makes me powerful enough to control my fiscal future, what kind of statement are the shots bought for me and my four girlfriends making? After all, if he’s financially comfortable enough to drop some of his hard earned cash on me, instincts tell me he’s in control and has it together (no matter how disastrous he might turn out to be), and that’s fucking sexy – despite my book’s enthralling money saving tips.

Untamed Directions

The other day I discovered that my hair first thing in the morning vaguely reminds my roommate of how complicated travel plans can become. The mirror before my morning coffee regularly reflects a mess of different choices and different directions I could take. Would it be best to head east, like the strand at the very back of my scalp? Or perhaps a trip, imitating the curl above my left ear, to Costa Rica and back would be the best way to go? In the end, most people would just sigh, wash out the tangles and do their hair exactly as they would any other morning. I, on the other hand, am left to struggle with the sort hereditarily stubborn hair that refuses to settle into any sort of decent direction and accept that I simply have to go with it; I simply have to take the course plotted by the rooster’s crest I awake to.

My compulsion to get up and leave has proven itself to be, like my hair, something I find uniquely difficult to tame. The very idea that I am stuck in one town for the next three years to do something as inconsequential as “graduate” strikes me as the sort of tragedy books are written on; or rather aren’t, considering the lack of inspirational new terrains or languages left to conquer in Victoria. Instead, I’ve taken it upon myself to scrape my already liver-drained bank account empty and go anywhere at any time the student life will let me.

The itch to follow the kinks in my early morning tresses began to really bite early last year and I started soliciting friends to follow me to Mexico; mundane and touristy but something I had yet to get a taste of (besides, who wouldn’t love to spend a solid week tequila soaked on a beach?). And did I ever fucking solicit; you could have probably seen the knee high boots and neon belly tops on Google Earth. Of course, I got plenty of offers; a little nudge from one friend proclaiming how much they’ve always wanted to visit Mexico, another saying they’d long dreamed of spending spring break on a beach and yet one more who nearly drooled as much as I did at the idea of unlimited drinks. But, somehow, whenever it came time for me to walk into the travel agency’s office and take a stab at my credit, the friend mysteriously came down with an inability to pull their shit together.

So I sat myself in front of a pitcher. Hey, if I couldn’t drown myself in tequila for spring break, I planned on spending plenty of time with the Canadian alternative. Dejectedly sprawled in a booth at my local pub and drawing borders in the foam at the bottom of my pint, it came to me that this was not the first time I had been forced to curb my wanderlust after a partner in crime had come to their senses. Other people had incomes they couldn’t put on hold, a second half they couldn’t peel from their hips, or, you know, shit to get done.

And yet none of this seems to have even the slightest effect on how I wake up every day. I still can’t get that cowlick to sit smoothly on my neck, deny myself an opportunity to be anywhere unfamiliar, or come close to comprehending why so many people can’t push themselves outside of their home circle. Why bother with all the wistful sighs and talk of packing up your suitcase if you can’t even bring yourself to get a passport? Then again, that leaves the untold stories, untamed hair and uncharted men for me.

Tried, Tested and Truant

I still clearly remember the first time I skipped. My best friend of the week and I had ditched our eighth grade Health class to spend the 45 minutes rebelliously hiding out in the girls’ room, complaining about our monstrous parents and counting the paper towels stuck to the ceiling. It was glorious and it was the start of a long love affair with truancy.

At that age, though, just about everything I did was driven by a pubescent desire to stick it to the man; and, man, what was cooler than skipping? I could be both completely unproductive and have the time to be as catty as every fourteen year old girl needs to be. The basement bathroom became our lair; we would sit there for the period, trying to avoid both teachers and leaky toilets while discussing the more important things in life. Who had yet to develop a new set of womanly goods, who was slutty enough to French kiss a boy and how grossly inappropriate the Gym teacher was.

It wasn’t until I left for my exchange year in Switzerland that I discovered how much more of the world was open to me when I wasn’t confined to the classroom. I could easily spend my time visiting my friend the town over, on a shopping spree or, better yet, seeking out apples to hollow out for later use. By the end of the year, I decided to go back to a Français class I had been systematically avoiding, only to have the teacher exclaim that she had believed I had left the country a couple of months prior. Either way, it wasn’t like my time would have been better spent learning literature or chemistry in a language I barely understood.

Of course, I didn’t spend any of my time bothering to learn chemistry once I got back to my home soil anyway (after all, it’s not like knowing the melting temperature of iron is going to help me on my path to literary infamy), and my teachers quickly made a habit of congratulating me when I made it to class on time, if I managed at all. My homeroom teacher, however, had the misfortune of being both anally retentive and responsible for my attendance, and my love of truancy can be faulted for several of his panic attacks. At one point, my mother was called in to discuss my perpetual ditching, to which I kindly informed her that if I could maintain the sort of grades that would land me in any university I wanted, my attendance record could go stuff itself. What followed was the greatest maternal reprimand of my life.

“You are an asshole, Tanysia,” she told me over dinner that night, “and nobody is going to like you.” She was, of course, referring to the apparent lack of respect my absenteeism shows to both my teachers and classmates, but it was nonetheless one of the best and most inspiring quotes of all time. It was at that moment that I decided to prove my mother wrong. I would continue to spend as little time as possible in my classes, run in panting half way through a lecture and still somehow have friends.

So far, so good. As a matter of fact, I have yet to be called an asshole by any of my professors, nor by any of my friends; other than, perhaps, the time or two that I’ve directly insulted them (but that’s beside the point). The last couple of years at UVic have allowed me to determine I can avoid both class and being called an asshole. Take that, Mom.

Notebooking Nothing

A couple of weeks ago, I managed to lose my notebook. Not an everyday notebook full of class notes, phone numbers or the mundane notions of everyday people, but my own personal notebook. The one with all of my essential memos, the daily “To Do” lists that never get done and the scribbles of erratic ideas that strike me throughout the day. In essence; my soul.

The odd thing about losing my soul, though, was that I didn’t even notice for the first couple of hours; there was no spontaneous combustion, bleeding from the ears, or even loss of consciousness- all of which would have made for a much better story. Instead, I simply went on with my trip, passing by entertaining advertisements whose slogans escape me and giggling at old ladies whose mannerisms I can no longer recall. Boring as the reality of my loss may seem though, it’s the escape of the creative inspiration that could have otherwise marked the remaining pages of my tattered book that strikes me as the deepest tragedy. What if the one story that would have rocketed me to fame and changed the face of humanity as we know it was just beginning to bud in a notebook that I will never see again? There, on the ferry, I had simply abandoned my hopes at renown.

It wasn’t until after I had left the ship and had begun to actively eavesdrop on a couple of entertainingly drunk men riding the bus that it hit me; I had nowhere to scrawl ideas and idiotic quotations. Nowhere to jot down the exact words of their discussion pertaining to diaphragms and whether they were drawn best in pencil or pen and nowhere to make note of a friend’s proclamation that she had put her cat on antidepressants. Where was I supposed to get my inspiration now? After all, a childhood of television had long since disfigured my imagination, so coming up with my own ideas was out of the question.

In desperation, I even called BC ferry’s lost and found to beg the lady on the other end to look for a small, ragged journal that contained my life. From the way she said “Your life then, eh?” I could tell she had lost her eyebrows in her hairline and was wondering how two-dimensional my existence was that it could be restricted to a notebook. How on earth was I supposed to describe the sort of chicken scratch that was so vital to my survival? I almost pity the ordinary person that must have found my notebook full of scribbles, in which the only comprehensible statements were those about “reproductive abilities” or my developed dislike of dryhumping in between mangled Spanish notes about calling my mom. Or that I’m in need of alfalfa. Who the fuck needs alfalfa and what does that even say about me?

Needless to say, it was left to the operator to tell me that no, my soul had not been recovered and, despite her kind words about a call back, the implication that I must be a lonely being to put that much of myself into bound scraps of paper still stung. There I was, left with a ten by twelve void in my heart, and I would have to get over it. I would need to abandon my hopes of ever remembering the kooky words of the bus passenger on acid that evening, or the observations I would make the next day on accents and the scent of piss by East Hastings. So, now a simple shell of my former self, I picked up a little green book I had lying around and began to muse the commencement of a life without the memories of old ideas, ignoring the butch chick reading over my shoulder to make sense of scribbles about “never again seen souls” and “piss perfumed breezes.”

A Guide to Playing and Laying

Edited October 2008; pre-Martlet.

Being the class act that I am, I chose the very delicate topic of rugby and sex for my main feature. Writing class is definately fun as fuck.

Mud, blood and glory has only taken me so far, really. It can usually get me that tackle, the team’s respect and about as much as a high five from the guy that I would have hoped to secure by the night’s end. While the glory may be all well and good for potential conquests, it’s the mud, blood and rugby that tend to off my evening game. Try as I might, it seems to be quite impossible to score off the field when that sexy skirt only serves to highlight the bruises and rake marks left by my female competition on the pitch.

Don’t get me wrong; being seen as more than an average woman with a waist and a pair of melons can be more gratifying than the game-saving hit, but it leaves an impression that doesn’t lend itself towards the femininity needed in certain male-female interactions. Sure being introduced as a rugby player may instantly win me eye-to-eye respect, but when shaking hands with a man of exemplary muscle, I can’t be confident I wouldn’t rather be faced eye-to-chest instead. Unfortunately, it appears that being seen as one of the guys often puts me in a category that pretty firmly supersedes sex; if anything, shouldn’t my ability to keep up with the guys generally apply to my libido too? One gentleman I had been chatting up at a party heard that I played the game and punched me in the arm, saying “Shit son, that’s cool.” Not necessarily the reaction I had been hoping for.

Convinced I couldn’t be the only one whose sex life was compromised thanks to the game I play, I seized the opportunity to reassure my ego at one of my UVic team’s pre-practice stretch circles. Flopping down on an edge of the grassy ring, I mentioned my ongoing lack of action to Sarah, one of the many girls who contended regularly with bruise patterns and had long since forgone the preposterous idea of wearing skirts. After first trying to tell me that she had not, in fact, had any sort of trouble, she finally conceded to having primarily dated other rugby players. Her small town home Port Alberni has all of one rugby club with mixed genders; a cocktail of players who love the game and don’t mind having to watch out for the accumulation of bruises and scrapes while in the midst of action.

Hearing our conversation, a couple of the other girls piped up and, much to the relief of my sensitive pride, informed me that playing rugby and getting laid are polar opposites for estrogen endowed players. “Leave the lights off!” shouted Thalia, one of our forwards, shaking her head at my apparent ignorance. “Can’t show off your bruises ‘till later, T.” Apparently there were rules to the late night game and my beloved war wounds were a trademark no-no; after all, why wouldn’t I have shown off the trophies I collect on the pitch?

“Bruises aren’t sexy,” confessed my friend Neil, cringing like he had just been forced to tell me that Santa isn’t real. And according to the guys I had gathered for the sake of explaining away my recent failures, neither are biceps or ripped legs, which is something they just know would be overdeveloped in a female rugby player. Damn it. In the name of thorough research, though, I decided to even out the playing field by getting my eager volunteers to choose between two equally sexy women- one of which played my sport. Ultimately, the five or six guys who wandered in and out of the room unanimously snuck in their votes for the one who didn’t play; a choice most of them couldn’t explain. The exception, mind you, was left to my classiest gentleman friend who, upon throwing in his two cents, shrugged and explained that the rugby player was probably gay, leaving the choice obvious. It seems our reputation as players precedes us.

Despite the decided unattractiveness of trained muscles, however, it was determined that a rugby girl could still make for a good evening; a good “Vegas story.” There is apparently a little something in that swagger we get as we walk off the field that announces not only our arrival, but our inherent dominance. It has to be the right sort of evening, though, for one of the guys to be interested in submitting themselves; being out-muscled by their female partner is generally not something that makes them feel appropriately effective where it counts. Consequently, Jeff, an ex-player himself, declared that “rugby girls scare the shit out of me.”

None of this was very surprising according to my loving father and sexual selection expert, the good doctor Petr. After having survived the usual string of questions about laundry and grades when I called home, my mom ventured into “when are you bringing home a boyfriend?” territory and I mentioned my recent attempt to unravel the mysteries of my sex life. Hastily avoiding the correlation to my ability to score, I began by relating some of the reactions I had gotten from my male friends around campus and was answered by the scholarly, but unfortunate, response of “That actually sounds about right.” Leave it to dad to shut down my plans on winning the female game.

According to my father and the bearer of bad news, sexual selection dictates that the most attractive attributes of either sex are signs of vitality and vigour; clear skin, a straight walk, shiny hair- cleat rakes and fingerprint bruises excluded. Mammalian males, he says, are on average larger than their female counterparts and biologically designed for combat and protection, leaving a man with a beefy woman feeling about as useful as a deflated rugby ball. While we, the women of rugby, may pride ourselves in our ability to outflex the competition and come off covered in the glory of a fair fight, it’s, them, the men of our affections, that aren’t falling for the looming threat of being beaten by their fair maidens. And although it may sting the ego to discover, it does explain why I’ve never managed to score on evenings when I’ve had to explain why only one eye is shadowed purple.

Being introduced as a rugby player also serves to mark me as an aggressive woman which, for a man who (despite what he thinks) is innately seeking a partner to raise his young, is a key sign that I would not focus all my attention on the survival of our young; even if I would gladly focus on the production of them. “Why do you think some cultures keep their women at home?” dad says, explaining that the male is instinctively seeking out a female who will not be distracted by competition or be able to undermine their status in male social circles. I suppose it might be time I stopped showing off my biceps and my capacity to drink rum like water. On second thought, it might also help if I didn’t spend most of my night out dancing on speakers with all limbs flailing.

As enlightening as my dad’s biological insight was, it only served to further confirm that the best way to win the game is to pretend you don’t play it. The trick, it appears, is to maintain an un-muddied, un-bloodied female image until after the guy has been assured that he is not hooking up with a “ham beast.” It might be time I reconnected with my femininity. Then again, what determines that a passion for playing the game, any game, isn’t sexy in itself?