Katniss Everdeen to Anne Frank: “We would have been friends.”

I arrived on the scene atrociously early, due to my hardened distrust of OC Transpo.  I had cobbled together a route to the suburban cinema mega-plex using the syndicated Travel Planner, but I knew it for what it was: a well-documented shrug of indifference.   The wind must have been just right, though, because I got there with time to spare, shipwrecked in a sea of teenage girls.  They clustered together in airtight, conspiratorial groups, wearing midriffy handmade t-shirts blaring their loyalties to the Hunger Games heartthrobs (with “Team Gale” clearly in the lead).

At 7:30, the line-up for the nine o’clock show was already threading from one end of the colossal hallway to the other.  The place felt like an airport lounge: kids sprawled all over the floor, leaning on backpacks and walls and each other, playing cards and dissolving into giggles and sneaking jealous up-and-down glances at each other.  When my friend Tam arrived, towing her eleven-year-old daughter and her daughter’s friend, I could have crushed them under the weight of my relief.  I saw them before they saw me, and called out, which was the wrong thing to do – Tam didn’t hear, but the groups flanking either side of me did, and I was subject to the scrutiny of two-dozen Smashbox stares as I hauled my rear off the floor and went flouncing after her.

The outing was ostensibly for the sake of our underage charges, though Tam and I were the only ones who had read the book.  The kids were our foil: their zany hyperspeed talking and unselfconscious antics, revved by bags of candy folded inside their purses, both exposed our transplantation into that adolescent world, and eased it.  The four of us sat in our own little circle on the floor, amid the dozens and dozens of other social planets.  I looked over at Tam.  I recognized the look on her face; her smile was vintage Tammy, one of total classic contentment, one that said, “This is exactly where I want to be right now.”  It had a tonic effect on me, like Xanax administered at exactly the right moment.  I had forgotten why were even there, and now, suddenly, it returned to me: to see a movie I’d been looking forward to for ages.

Despite (or because of) my latent PTSD re. adolescence, I have a perverse and enduring love of any entertainment that features teenagers.  I sponge it up like a cactus in the desert.  I’m not sure if it’s because my own high school years were so fraught and underwhelming, or because there are so many balls-to-the-walls writers and producers making art about the Abercrombie generation, but I simply love all that is YA media and I don’t think a life without it would be much of a life at all.  Teenage angst is my lifeblood, and the only two things I need most in order to manufacture a 24hr pleasure coma are vintage Degrassi DVDs and an unstructured weekend.

So I was completely ready for this movie.  What’s great about the Hunger Games is that you get all of that delicious teenage angst PLUS a terrifying dystopia (as if being sixteen isn’t terrifying enough already).  It makes for good entertainment.  I think this will always be true: take an examination of timeless human behaviour and transpose it over a violent landscape of almost impossible odds and you’ve got a narrative people will love to the end of time.  Just think of Anne Frank.  We don’t keep reading her diary because we’re not sure what the Holocaust was like (as Kate Winslet’s Extras character famously said: “We get it.  It was grim.”).  We keep reading her because she is a teenager who has a crush on a boy, is fed up with her parents, and is desperate for a bit of independence.  The extraordinary circumstances in which she lives shock and appall us, but it’s her ordinariness that really sticks to our bones.  We recognize it.  And to recognize ourselves in such foreign and dangerous milieu is both thrilling and wildly unsettling.  It says, Reader Beware: This Could Have Been You.

In this way, the Hunger Games is a feast of unsettling familiarity.  The whole plot revolves around a teenage crush (or, at least, the ruse of one – and when you’re a teenager, what’s the difference?).  Hormones become as scary as the circumstances into which they are thrust.  Almost as entertaining as the movie, though, was the experience of watching it in a packed theatre on opening night.  When the cinema staff moved aside the gate and opened the theatre doors, there was a stampede.  I am not kidding.  Hundreds of teen girls (and the odd teen boyfriend), docile if a little testy until then, suddenly surged like a coastal tide towards the doors, sacrificing each other in their race to the goal.  Let’s just pause for a moment to draw the obvious parallel: in the Hunger Games, the ordeal of twenty-four teenage “tributes” chosen to fight in a public arena begins the moment that a barrier lifts and they must sprint for their lives.  Cut to Tam and I quickening our steps, surging with the rest of them, throwing ourselves like linebackers into side-by-side theatre seats while the crowd scatters around us.  Our charges sit several rows behind us, testing the limits of their independence.  When we turn around and stare up in the stadium vastness we can just make them out, and they wave to us like goofballs.  They send us text messages.  When two of the movie’s stars kiss for the first time, we wonder if we can hear their screeches amid the feverish, swooning noises that rise from the theatre all around us.  It is amazing: no one reacts audibly when characters are hacked to pieces and thrown to the wolves, but as soon as two pairs of lips hover threateningly close to each other, the din is deafening.

When the movie ends, we’re pointing out all the differences between it and the novel before we’ve even brushed the popcorn from our laps.  The overall effect was a good one, though; we can agree on that.  We wind our way through clots of teenagers, shoulders rounded in that skinny-girl way that sixteen-year-olds have, talking coolly about the movie and waiting for their parents to pick them up.  We find our own two munchkins hovering over an arcade game, talking a thousand words a minute.  When one pauses to breathe, the other takes over.  It’s hilarious.  They have such an infinite capacity for it.  We all take the same bus but Tam and the kids get off before it leaves the burbs; I still have a long ride to downtown Ottawa.  The bus feels cavernous and whisper-quiet compared to the cacophony of the last few hours.  In true Megan style, I already miss the heady close quarters of the theatre’s hallway where we’d lounged, waiting for the movie to start.  It’s always like that, where adolescence is concerned: what makes you feel a few degrees west of normal one minute makes you nostalgic and regretful the next.

Around the country, hundreds of thousands of people saw the Hunger Games that night.  There was something remarkable about knowing, thanks to Tam, that I was one of them.  Even if I didn’t screech at the sight of a kiss.

Men in Disguise

Photo by the author in April 2011

There were seventeen of them, if she included Mr. Henry.  He was as likely to disappear as the students.  For a moment she thought he had, until she spotted him across the garden, gazing up at the back of the cathedral.  The morning’s sunlight did not have the improving effect on him that she had hoped for.

Sixteen students—Ms. Castle counted again—spread their jackets on an island of damp grass behind Notre Dame de Paris and sat down, arranging sketchbooks on their laps.  She handed out pencils which she had sharpened thirteen days earlier.  “Don’t fuss over the details,” she said.

They obeyed in silence.  It was still only 3 a.m. in Canada, far too early to call.  She wondered if these students shared a telepathic bond with their families.  Across the ocean, were the mothers of sixteen ninth graders sitting upright in bed, shaking their husbands awake?

She counted again.  This was meant to be Mr. Henry’s trip.  He had planned the itinerary, made the bookings, and bought small paper flags which they handed out to their tour guides and bus drivers.  She was only there because the school required one adult for every eight students, and the intriguing Mr. Henry had asked her one morning in the staff room, after finally introducing himself.  His handshake had been warm and just right.  He left a tower of guidebooks on her desk in the Canadian History office, with a yellow sticky note that she had trouble deciphering: Canada is our country, but Paris will be our hometown.

She had kept that note inside the back cover of her passport.  Early that morning, when she had finally returned to her hotel room, the note was the first clear thing she saw, like a yellow feather left behind in the disarray.

First she told the concierge, then a policeman with a baffling accent, who smoothed his moustache under his index finger and handed her a telephone.  Don’t tell them you left your room unlocked, Mr. Henry whispered to her as she waited for the embassy to pick up.  Sixteen students sat on top of suitcases behind them, still half asleep.  Say you were in your room, but you were having a shower, Mr. Henry said.  You didn’t hear anyone come in.  His breath smelled fecal.

I’ll tell them the truth, she said, but in the end she didn’t.

Outside the cathedral Ms. Castle counted again, tapping the air.  Fifteen.  Her heart contracted.  On the departure flight, Mr. Henry had laughed over a magazine article about safe traveling.  Look, he said.  It says that some men push empty baby carriages to appear harmless.  It’s their disguise.  What an absurd idea, Ms. Castle said, but when he fell asleep she read the whole thing.  Collect the passports of any young people traveling with you and keep them in a safe place, it advised.  Well, she thought, that sounds sensible enough.

At last she spotted number sixteen, who had crawled away from the group for a different view of the cathedral.  A man with a baby carriage paused behind the student, looking down at the sketchbook on her knees.  Non!  Excusez-moi! shouted Ms. Castle.  She flapped her hands at the man.  Number sixteen picked up her things and returned to the group.  The other students shuffled aside to create a spot for her.

They had planned to visit the cathedral at the beginning of the trip, but in those early days of exuberance they had found everything so alluring, even under Paris’s low, wet sky, that they had all but abandoned their itinerary.  Well, that’s something, Mr. Henry had said that morning, after they called off the airport shuttle and marched instead towards the metro station.  It’s really quite an important place, you know.  It really is a good thing we’re seeing it after all.  Ms. Castle did not reply.  Until that morning, the smell of urine hanging in the hot underground tunnels had not bothered her.

The cathedral tower rose like a fang from the center of sixteen drawings.  Back home, after she hung these sketches in the school hallway, someone would use a black marker to add testicles and she would have to take them down again.  For a moment, Ms. Castle felt encouraged.

Mr. Henry approached, hands in his pockets.  His slouch gave him a diminished look.    The night before, when she’d dropped by his hotel room to check the next day’s departure time, she had noticed a journal lying open on the bedside table with a fountain pen nested in its spine.  His handwriting was awkward and loping, not the sort she could decipher at a glance, but the sudden idea of her name belonging in those pages thrilled her.  He poured two glasses of wine.  We’ve given the students a lovely time, Ms. Castle.  Can’t you tell?  Sit down, Ms. Castle.  No, not there.  Here, beside me.  That’s better.  Why not?

She hadn’t expected him to behave that way.  But then, he likely would’ve said the same for her.

At the cathedral, he stopped next to her and stared up at the sky.  You have not looked at me all morning, he said, very quietly.  There’s a lot to think about, Ms. Castle replied.  The embassy expects us at eleven, remember.

He touched the crown of his head, where his hair splayed as though still pressed on the white pillow.  I don’t know why, he said.  We’re both adults.

This is not the time, Ms. Castle told him.

The night before, she had been surprised to discover a Velcro pouch below his shirt, damp from perspiration, holding his passport inside.  I like to keep my papers close, he had told her.  It’s just silly paranoia.  He slipped it from around his neck and hung it on a bedpost. I didn’t know that, she said.  She thought of the seventeen passports she’d placed in the top drawer of her bedside table, and felt a prick of betrayal.

An airplane appeared far above the cathedral, tracing a thin white line across the sky.  Sixteen students stared after it.  We’re all in the same boat, said Mr. Henry to the group.

Except for you, said Ms. Castle.

He cleared his throat and Ms. Castle felt a surge of potent distaste for all of his habits.  One day not too long from now, he told the students, you will be home again, and you will wish you were here.

Oh shut up, said Ms. Castle.

The students studied their drawings.

Ms. Castle, said Mr. Henry, and touched her arm.  Even in the darkness of his hotel room, his touch had not electrified her.  She had only wanted a celebration.  She had wanted what other people wanted in dark hotel rooms above Paris.

We’re all in this together, Mr. Henry declared, turning to the students.

You keep saying that, said Ms. Castle, but you know it isn’t true.

He stood very still for a moment.  Then he lifted both hands and began to unbutton his shirt.  The students looked at Ms. Castle in a panic.  Not far away, on a bridge over the river, someone began to play an accordion.  Stop, said Ms. Castle.

He parted the shirt over his pale torso and removed the cord from around his neck.  The Velcro pouch swung from his fist as he walked away.  The students did not move until Ms. Castle nodded, and then they stood and shook out their coats and closed their sketchbooks.  They followed Mr. Henry through a gate and across the street to the bridge.  The accordion player watched them and carried on with his song.  Before Ms. Castle reached Mr. Henry’s side he flung the Velcro pouch like a Frisbee.  The students rushed to the railing and looked down.

What amazed Ms. Castle was the tenderness that fell through her.  Not for Mr. Henry, but for all of them, leaning out like passengers on a departing ship.  For a moment, she saw how they might be at home one day, wishing they were here, watching the pouch disappear below the river’s scaly surface.

- M.F.

Practice.

Ever since spending the weekend with a Frenchman, my head has been filled with francophile thrills.  Like turning on the bathroom tap while simultaneously picturing the word “robinet”.    Or taking my time between the grocery store and the apartment while contemplating the word flâneur.  There are just some things that are more fun in French than in English, and flanning is one of them.  So is staying up late for a pop quiz on irregular past participles, which is what we did on Sunday.  If you thought life under the Findlay moon was appealing, wait’ll you see me now: I KNOW HOW TO CONJUGATE .

I fell asleep in the middle of writing the paragraph above.  I awoke to the familiar sound of Derek chortling over some mischief.  Exhibit A:

I need to find a way to get more rest.

The Heart of March Madness

Before I collapse in a lifeless pile, I must tell you this: today’s blog post is brought to you by the people who crawled into my brain and took everything I stand for and turned it into a blog which is now my reason for living.

So I guess I’m not a totally lifeless pile, after all.

Not yet a ponch of Tycho proportions, but very nearly (#foodcoma)

This was a spectacular weekend, complete with an overdue and much-anticipated reunion; a film that surprised and moved me in tectonic ways; a breakthrough in my fleeting ability to live in the moment; and, above all, a constant, incredible smorgasbord of ridiculously awesome food, prepared by and for the people that I love.  Needless to say, the detox program has crashed and burned in a tower of smoking, still-warm debris.  And GOOD RIDDANCE.  (Although I could use a primer on the symptoms of scurvy, because this weekend was enough to wash every last useful nutrient from my system and replace them with industrial-grade carbs).

Time to get what little sleep I can before Monday comes barreling into the station.  Only six minutes left to take care of today’s lent post.  I miss writing big, meaty posts as part of this challenge; hopefully that can resume this week, before another weekend of (30th birthday) insanity begins.

This weekend I was witness to Theo's first sip of canadian wine, first bowl of poutine, and, most deliciously, first beaver tail. Like a true European, he chose one of the chocolate variety.

Instapaper and Me

Yesterday I drove past a park that I had never seen before.  I was not meant to be driving.  And because I was driving, I was not meant to be looking at parks. But there I was, in a KIA Soul painted fire-engine red, with Jian Ghomeshi’s ten a.m. arms wrapped around me, driving out to Old Chelsea. There were several scrappy freeway parks edged between the highway’s concrete shoulders and the Ottawa River, holding the city together.  Balding grass, a play structure or two, and low prospects.  One of them in particular caught my eye: a bench, a fountain frothing towards the heavens, and a lone bird, surveying the landscape like demure royalty.  I filed that park away in my brain under “Explore.”  I will go back there when I have my bike and some time to spend, because it looked like a lost, forgotten place.  The kind of place that is desperately magnetic.  It looked like the outdoor rec version of the gothy girl from The Breakfast Club: neglected and interesting.

That mental filing system, whereby I catalogue things I have seen or read or tasted or felt in order to revisit them later, lives in a dimension apart from – but parallel to – reality.  I can’t call upon it at will; instead, it calls upon me.  A casual word or a scent in the air or a certain slant to the afternoon light will plunge me into those mismanaged files, emerging with a memory clutched in my fist: yesterday’s park by the Ottawa freeway, or the grade three book fair from which I stole a heart-shaped pencil sharpener, or the dim, chemical smell of Dundalk’s pioneering hair salon.   I try to keep a written record of these impressions as I travel in and out of them all day long, because reading them is just as much fun as having them sneak up on me:

Kristen Burrows

I felt like a marine.

Mall Madness!!! [ed. note: this one deserves a link]

Century Gothic 10pt: happiness.

Autochtones.

Blueberry pancakes – Stockholm??

“She went to the pantry in the hall where the cleaning supplies here kept.” 

Part of me remains under the illusion that because I am constantly traveling through this ephemera, I must be a very special and introspective person.  I must be a writer!  Absolutely!  Look at me go!  Because pressing one’s nose against the window of the past is a hobby that I, alone, invented!  Obviously.

But then someone designed an iPhone app that operates on a similar principle and I realized, in one desperate weekend afternoon while listening to this, that there is nothing unique about bookmarking worthwhile experiences in order to savour them later.  And thus began my rabid addiction to Instapaper.

I am not a gadget-y kind of person. I am probably only using about 2% of my iPhone’s potential.  The only reason I have any apps at all is because my friend’s four-year-old son installed them for me.  But I heard about this Instapaper thing on NPR, and in a fit of procrastination I threw it onto my phone.  The word “paper” was the selling point.  If it has something to do with reading, then GIMME!  But five minutes of fiddling around were not enough to understand what it was for, so I gave up in typical fashion.  The lonely “I” sat at the end of my app list, as forlorn and neglected as the freeway park/breakfast club girl, dreaming of a television career that would never come.

Then: I got fed up.  The app, which I saw every time I opened my phone, came to symbolize all of the maddening half-starts in my life.  Opportunities lost through a lack of perseverance.  It taunted me.  It said, you will never get these five dollars back.  You are impulsive.  You are impatient.  And therefor, you are doomed to be forever missing out.

I finally got it working while bouncing around at the back of the 85 bus on my way to work, and the triumphant feeling, while disproportionate to the actual event, is with me still.  Here’s how it works: you put a little bookmark called “read later” in your browser’s toolbar, or in the bookmark menu on your mobile Safari.  When you come across an article or blog or news item online that you don’t have time to read, you send it to Instapaper using that bookmark, where it waits for you like a loyal dog.  From Instapaper, you can read it whether you’re online or not.  It’s the simplest thing in the app world, and also one of the most amazing.  I am so pleased with myself at having unlocked its potential that I actually go looking for extra long, meaty web content that I can tag for Instapaper, just because it’s so satisfying to see it working properly.  Now I have more content saved than I could ever read in my lifetime, but isn’t that the way?  My brain stores more memories and impressions then I will ever have time to revisit, which is both sad and encouraging at the same time.  I could walk out the door right now and get blindsided by a memory that I don’t yet know exists.

In fact, that’s just what I’m about to do.

She awoke on Monday morning. Five minutes later, Friday night arrived.

It was a zany week.  I must sleep now so that tomorrow I can resume speaking in full sentences.

Until then, this koala has been dispatched to entertain you.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=3wvVegFwrYE

And suddenly it was 2008 all over again

Not much time for blogging today due to the arrival of one of France’s greatest exports: my wickedly awesome friend Theo, here for a limited time only.  The year I was in Lille, he was just finishing prépa (think academia meets the US Marine Corps).  I was crazy with loneliness and cultural re-calibration, and he was crazy with homework, and somehow that fused us together as lifelong friends.  In his prépa residence, curfew was at 10pm or thereabouts.  The doors would be locked and students were meant to bend their heads over their textbooks and study until their brains turned the colour of genius.  After curfew, just for the hell of it, Theo would write long letters to me and drop them out of his third-floor window.  I would collect them from the grass below, free from curfew because, technically and in a rare show of poor judgment on their part, the school considered me a “teacher” and thus granted me amnesty.

Theo, it does the soul such good to see you again after all this time.  Please please please: never leave.

December, 2008. I have no idea why I was under the table here, but I think it had something to do with the discount cake that Theo is cutting, and the Santa hat on my head. Also possibly the empty bottle of local French wine that is just outside of frame.

Day Fourteen

I am now fourteen days into my post-a-day lent resolution.  Like a New Years’ resolution, but with more Jesus.  And I am exhausted.  Not because of blogging, but because LIFE IS EXHAUSTING. And brilliant. Today’s brilliance culminated in two hours of side-splitting laughter alongside my friend Steve.

Hi, Steve!

This was followed by a serene walk home in the springtime city, which led to a discovery: when you stop and close your eyes in the middle of the wooden passageway built at Gladstone and Kent, the world smells like summer camp.  Woodsy, muskoky, and full of promise.

Using a “hate list” to review Jennifer Brown’s “Hate List”

See the publisher’s listing for this YA novel here.

In high school, I hated…

1.  Being unable to diagnose my own chronic lack of cool.  Of course, now I understand completely: I dyed my hair blonde, wore Hawaiian shirts, and didn’t spend enough time with an eyebrow tweezer.

Exhibit ‘A’:

This is a major contributing factor to my out-of-control love of YA fiction.  It lets me roll around in the mud with all the other unhappy teenagers.  Which is glorious, because even once you leave those years behind, you’ve still got the urge to go back and edit them, right?  Make yourself less lonely.  Less dependent on others.  YA fiction lets you do that by parachuting its heroes into a similarly tormented state, and letting them fight their way out of it.  You identify, and therefore you, too, triumph in the end.

In Brown’s novel, the heroine, Valerie, faces torment in the extreme.  Her boyfriend Nick has just taken a gun into their school cafeteria and shot several of his peers before killing himself.  The twist, and the bit of plot that just barely rescues this from being an ambulance-chaser sort of book, is that he fires the gun at specific students who are named in a list that Valeria has helped to curate.  It is a list of all the people who shoved and teased and alienated the misfit couple.  To Valerie, the Hate List, which lives in a spiral-bound notebook, was just a way to let off steam and earn the admiration of her magnetic, seductively troubled new boyfriend.  To Nick, of course, it had a darker purpose.

3. Having a boyfriend. There are many elements to this book that I think are done more convincingly elsewhere.  Lauren Oliver’s Before I Fall is a more three-dimensional portrayal of bullying and its consequences – even though, in Oliver’s book, the consequences are not as fatal in the extreme as they are here.  And Douglas Coupland’s Hey Nostradamus! is a more steady-handed and dramatic study of a school shooting.  But in Jennifer Brown’s hands, the portrayal of a teenage girl falling into infatuation with her first-ever boyfriend is pure authenticity.

Looking over my adolescence with the eye of a disapproving maternal type, I can’t believe how much time I wasted on my useless high school bf.  Of course, it was not really a waste, because it brought me to where I am today, etc. etc.  Still, all he had to do was offer me a cheese doodle and I would covet him like a god.  The truth was, he had no idea how to be in a relationship, and neither did I.  In high school’s moral lexicon of romance, this left us two choices: either handle our scary new feelings by staging a badly misinterpreted Shakespearean romance in the halls of our school, or pretend to be near-strangers who, in the strictest terms of recess bureaucracy, were officially “going out” but not much more.  The former required interlocked fingers at all times, unsanitary levels of PDA whenever possible, frequent and emphatic declarations of love (the more witnesses the better), and knowing all the lyrics to ‘N Sync ballads so they could be whispered into one another’s hair during school dances.  The latter just involved sharing a cafeteria bench and occasionally watching bad TV while a parent or two hovered in the next room.  Guess which version I was blessed with.

Valerie and Nick, of course, belong to the former category, and Brown does this very well.  When crime scene investigators confront her with an email exchange between her and Nick, you can just feel the anxiety and recklessness bleeding from her every type-written word.  She wants to win his admiration and trust so badly that she forgives a thousand tiny misdeeds which should have been her cue to leave him.  Maybe she loved him; maybe, and more likely, she loved having a boyfriend as insulation against the lonely world.  It’s a prize that is worth almost any sacrifice when you’re a teen, and that is potent enough to blind you against the obvious.

4. The reality at home.  For me, this is only true of the last year or two of high school, when everything went sideways for my parents and when all four of us – my sister, my mom, my dad, and I – wound up, the year I started university, scattering to very separate and well-insulated parts of the province.  For a while, transactions of love between and among us were often taxing and unreliable, like the engine in an old, neglected car.  This is especially true of my dad and I.  There were plenty of good times (refer again to Exhibit ‘A,’ above), but I can’t write honestly about what I hated in high school without bringing this up, especially in the context of this review.  Valerie’s family cracks and splinters, just like mine did, and it’s her relationship with her dad that ferments to near-toxic levels before slouching towards a resolution at the novel’s end.  The strain of this father-daughter relationship is palpable through those final chapters.  I felt it, deeply.

5.  Nickelback.  I consider it a point of pride that I understood Nickelback’s total lack of cool right from the beginning, even when everyone I knew was belting “How You Remind Me” every five seconds.  This is the only moment of musical acumen I can possibly brag about from those years, considering I spent all of grade nine humming the theme of Degrassi and listening to the Titanic soundtrack on repeat.  Be that as it may, this forces me to contend with the fact that Jennifer Brown cites Nickelback as her chief inspiration for this novel: “I’d been tossing and turning all night with the Nickelback song ‘If Everyone Cared’ stuck in my head… Overnight, my brain had somehow latched on to Valerie as the character in that Nickelback song” (from an author interview in the back of my book edition).  I understand the snobbery of this single interjection, but still: ew.

If you can get past the Nickelback reference, though, this is good, solid YA with an amped-up emotional quotient.  Read it when you have time to go a few hours without stopping, because it won’t want to let you go.