The Back-to-School Edition

Eleven years ago this week, I dropped XUP Jr. off for her first day of school. She was almost 6 years old. The rule in Nova Scotia is that the child has to be 5 by October something in order to start school and her birthday is in December so she’ll always be a bit older than her peers. But that’s okay because she wasn’t really ready for school until she was almost 6.

As a youngster she was thoughtful and curious and bright and intelligent and independent and eager to learn anything and everything. If I’d had a choice I probably would have home-schooled her until she was a bit older. Because it wasn’t long until the school system drained most of the curiosity and brightness and independence and eagerness out of her.

She’s still her own person and still pulls off good marks and everything, but I don’t think she’s actually learning anything anymore – hasn’t for quite a few years now — and doesn’t seem to care all that much about it. Once she learned to read, write, add and subtract, things sort of leveled out.

Teachers get a program they have to follow. There are certain milestones the school has to prove it has achieved every year. School boards have to report back to the province. It’s all about numbers. And numbers can be fudged. Kids get an ”A” for mediocre work because the class/school/board needs a certain level to maintain its funding.

There are provincialstandardized tests every few years, but kids are coached and primed to within an inch of their lives for a couple of days before the tests, so they produce inflated results.

A lot of teachers just seem bored or under too much pressure from their principal or school board to actually teach anymore. Teachers in Ontario have a starting salary of about $40,000 and go to over $90,000 after about 12 years. (High School teachers earn slightly more).

That’s not bad, though there are schools where I’m sure they’re earning every penny. But I can’t say I’ve been really excited about a lot of the teachers my daughter has had. Worse, she has not been very excited by many of her teachers. In fact, some of them just seem to go through the motions and it’s been like pulling teeth to have to sit through hours of listening to them drone on every week.

I don’t entirely blame the teachers. Most of their incentive and creativity has been stifled as well. There’s very little room/time/funding for individuality or different styles of learning/teaching. There’s just a set amount of stuff to be gotten through in a certain amount of time. Kids  (and teachers) have to conform to the institution if they don’t want to get by.

No one fails. Failure is no longer allowed in schools. Everyone just gets pushed through like a grommet on an assembly line.

Students are graduating high school with 99% averages yet universities report that “most of their students demonstrated a lack of the basic skills necessary for university” and that 42% of Canadians are semi-illiterate.

We have one of the highest post-secondary enrollments in the world, (approximately 10% of our population has a university degree) but we aren’t able to compete on an international level, especially in the science, mathematics and technology sectors.

These functions are being outsourced at ever increasing levels. Canadian-based companies cannot find the expertise locally to compete on the world stage.  The trend-watchers are advising parents to encourage their children toward futures in the arts and humanities sectors.

I know it’s really easy for us oldies to look back and say we knew so much more than kids today, but I still have some essays I wrote in high school and although they somehow look a lot more literate and intelligent than the stuff my daughter is turning in and she’s getting much better marks. Not that she’s unintelligent or illiterate. Once upon a time, she used to put a lot of effort into her school work and into meeting deadlines, but she’d end up with the same marks as people who handed in crap and handed it in weeks late. (Teachers are no longer allowed to deduct marks for lateness, apparantly). So now she just does the bare minimum and her marks are still very good.

I don’t think Canada has fully realized the value of giving our kids a good education. They get shuffled through elementary and high school. If they can find a way to pay for an increasingly costly post-secondary education, fine, they go on to “higher” education. If not, they’re go find a minimum wage or factory job or something. Which is a shame, because there might be some very bright people out there who simply can’t manage tuition fees. At least in the US they have state colleges.

When we watch the Jeopardy Teen Tournament, my poor child is totally lost. Ya, I know these kids are the cream of the crop, but XUP Jr. doesn’t even understand the question half the time. And she’s an “A” and “B” student.

Sometimes we watch Reach for the Top (the Canadian School Egghead Competition) and the questions are ridiculously easy by comparison.

Thank goodness neither I nor the kid have any aspirations for her to be the second coming of Einstein and that she’s been all about visual arts since she first picked up a crayon. Because we do the arts pretty good in Canada. The kid is going to an arts high school. We have some excellent arts colleges and universities. The country has produced some outstanding painters, writers, visual artists, actors, comedians, photographers. Musicians, film-makers, designers, dancers, etc.

Maybe we should stick to that and really put a lot of funding into producing the world’s best artsies?

Still, it would be nice if they knew the capital city of France or how many centimeters in a meter or what a zygote is.

Dear Melanie

To:  Melanie Griffith,  Cirque Lodge Rehabilitation Facility, Utah, USA

My Dearest Melanie,

So, I hear you’re back in re-hab because your man (Antonio Banderas) is threatening to divorce you if you don’t get your shit together. That sucks.

I say, who is he (Antonio Banderas) to tell you what to do anyway? Come on Mel (May I call you Mel? Melly?). If a big movie star woman like you (who just celebrated her 52^nd birthday — not that that’s old or anything) isn’t allowed to enjoy a drink now and then, I say to hell with the hubby (Antonio Banderas). Right? Are you with me?

Sure you are, Mel. Come on! It’s important to take some time every day to unwind with a G&T or two, or three. You have a lot of stress. You haven’t made a decent movie since Working Girl in 1988 and even that was pretty much schlock. Ya, you got a little nod for RKO281 in 1999, but that was TV and 10 years ago now. Wow, eh? Where does the time go? Ha ha.

And, by golly if you want everything around you to be yellow and only yellow, why shouldn’t you have everything yellow? And if you scare your kids a little with your cuckoo-nuttiness and get a little wacky in public now and then, who has the right to tell you that’s not okay? Not Antonio Banderas, that’s for sure!

Pfft.  Come one! he (Antonio Banderas) has got to be the Number One reason you’re back in the booby-hatch in the first place. Who’d want to be married to him (Antonio Banderas) ? How much pressure would that be? I mean, look at him! (Antonio Banderas)

He (Antonio Banderas) is only a couple of years younger than you and look at the two of you.

You are sooooo out of your league and you know it. Sure, it would be okay if he were at least dumb and arrogant or something, but noooOOOooooOOOoooooOOooo…turns out he’s smart, too. And talented. And funny. And modest. And kind.

What a shit!

How are you expected to put up with that day in and day out? There he is out in the world directing and acting in one hit movie after another with young hot movie starlets. And he’s only getting better and better the older he gets. And you?

 

Not so much. Oh, I know you’ve tried to keep up by getting the nose done and the chin and the eyes and the lips and the boobs and god knows what else done, but it’s really just turning you into a freak isn’t it? That’s gotta hurt. (Go ahead and get another drink, I’ll wait)

 

Ya. Look how cute you used to be before you went all silicone? If only you’d left well-enough alone. You’d still look 52, but at least you’d look more human. Look at your mom, Tippi Hedren. She’s gonna be 80 in a few months and she looks great.

Oh well, water under the bridge now. Personally, I think you’d save yourself a lot of sleepless nights if you just went back to Don Johnson.  You guys were a match made in Hollywood Heaven. You were happily married to him twice already, why not give it one more shot? I’m sure he’d jump at the chance. He never really recovered from that Miami Vice thing, did he?

See, he’s nice and ordinary-looking. Plus, he’s dumb as a post, has no career and is a bit of a jerk. You‘d be the smart, beautiful god in the household. Think about it.

Okay, so Mel, I’m only telling you all this for your own good. I want you to be happy, I really do and let’s face it – you’re never going to be happy with Antonio (Banderas) . Just look at him (Antonio Banderas).

 

 No really look.

See? How could any woman be happy with that? (For more than…oh say…2 or 3 hours a day, twice a week?)

The writing’s on the wall, Mel. He (Antonio Banderas) is being all demanding about you not drinking and doing cocaine and buying all those yellow things. Threatening stuff. Being all macho. Who needs that, am I right? Not you Mel. For sure, not you.

So, why not stand up for yourself and dump him (Antonio Banderas) before he (Antonio Banderas) dumps you (Melanie Griffith)? ‘Cuz we all know he will sooner or later.  Won’t you Antonio Banderas?

Go on. Kick him (Antonio Banderas) to the curb.

 

That’ll teach him to try and boss you around.

(Psssst…Antonio? Feel free to contact me at urbanpedestrian@gmail.com and I can arrange for you to be picked up off the curb and be thoroughly and fully consoled)

___________________________________________________________

NB:  It is precisely this sort of cattiness and sabotaging of our sisters’ relationships, successes and mental health that has kept women oppressed even decades after the women’s movement fought so hard for our equality. There are plenty of men to go around. We do not need to play stupid games in order to get or keep one. We do not need to mutilate ourselves in order to get or keep one. We do not need to punish ourselves for getting old. We do not need to step on or cast aside our sisters to be successful in life or in love.

Whoa! Didn’t see that one coming, did you?

PPS: None of the above applies in the case of Antonio Banderas. Thank you.

Have We Come a Long Way, Baby?

Yesterday, through my Possibly Related Posts section I clicked onto a blog written by a young, sophisticated professional (her words) woman from Boston. She had some first date tips:

It’s proper protocol for a man to initiate the first date. A good man will know where he wants to take a woman; it should be well-thought out based on previous conversations and research…… A man should be willing to pick you up from wherever you are, that’s if you want him to.

At first I was pretty surprised, but then I realized that my daughter’s circle of friends operates within these 1950s boundaries as well. Even with all the stuff  that goes on in high schools these days, the girls still wait to be asked out by the guys.

I often wonder exactly what our sisters in the 1960s accomplished. I’m not quite old enough to remember life for women prior to “women’s liberation”, so maybe there’s a whole bunch of stuff we just take for granted. But I have to wonder sometimes how it is we burned our soft cotton bras four decades ago and have ended up with upholstered, wired, polyester ones instead. (metaphor).

The feminist movement opened up professional and blue collar jobs that used to be held only by men. This was supposed to give women options. I’m thinking we got a little screwed here. Because now we have to work, we don’t really have an option. We have to work because before women hit the workforce full-on, housing cost one week’s salary. Now, it costs two weeks’ salary, which means we need two salaries to cover the same expenses we used to be able to cover with one.

Women also need to work, it seems, to define themselves. Those who can manage to be stay-at-home moms are seen as somehow not quite as valuable as women who are out there in the workforce. The stay-at-home moms themselves seem to feel inadequate because they’re not bringing money into the household. This is crazy, in my opinion. Did feminism intend to disparage a job as important as raising children and keeping a home?

And, although most women do hold down a full-time job outside the home, they are still the primary care givers and homemakers. Everyone still gets all excited when a man knows how to cook or when the wife comes home and hubby has vacuumed. He stands beaming in the middle of the living room waiting for copious praise.

Also:

• Men still have almost all the high-powered jobs – there are very few women politicians, CEOs. Women still do almost all the service jobs – secretaries (oh, excuse me…administrative assistants), social workers, nurses, hospitality industry workers, etc., etc.
• Women still make 20% less than their male counterparts.
• Crimes against women are still mostly punished as misdemeanors, often receiving less severe sentences than property crimes.
• Women are still responsible for children. Men can spawn children and shrug off the responsibility of raising them pretty easily. It can take decades for the molasses-slow system to try and enforce any child support orders. Dead beat dads have all sorts of legal “outs’ to avoid supporting their kids. Most never have to. At least in the 1950s men had to join the Foreign Legion or something to get out of supporting their children.
• And, single mothers are looked at askance. Of course, 40 years ago I would have been stoned to death or something, but even today, when doctors or teachers find out I’m a single mom, they suddenly become extra-patronizing. Social workers are called every time my child sustains an injury. People assume I have no money and am borderline retarded.
• There are still women all over the world who are legally considered chattel, who have no rights, who are treated like unpaid servants, who are abused, mutilated and killed with no repercussion.
• There are still women in countries like the US who are not allowed to decide whether or not they wish to get pregnant or carry a fetus to term and give birth.
• Women’s lives still revolve around getting a man, keeping a man, looking good for their man, making their man happy. A quick look at the women’s magazines, television programs, movies, shopping centres, cosmetic surgeon’s offices, etc., will confirm this.
• And, “feminism” is some sort of dirty word these days. What happened to that whole movement? We’re not exactly done yet, are we?

I know, I know…men have lots of problems too. They are shut out of employment equity opportunities. They are always portrayed as blithering idiots by the media. Their testicles are vulnerable, blah, blah. But this post is about women, okay?

12 Things I Don’t Like About Restaurants

One of the best things about a big city is its variety of restaurants, so of course, before my recent jaunt I prepared a list of all the places I wanted to go eat. At the top of the list was an upscale vegan place with the unfortunate moniker, Fressen. In Germanic languages the word means “to devour feed like an animal.” I suppose they had their reasons for the name so I didn’t let the name put me off because Fressen has been named as one of the hippest vegetarian eateries in North America by VegNews.

 The menu looks enticing. The reviews, however,  are all over the place,  from gushing to “I’ll never set foot in the place again”.  I’ve never been to a place that advertises itself as a gourmet vegan restaurant, so I had to go regardless.

As I hinted yesterday, the whole experience was a disaster from start to finish. When I go to a place where an evening of dining for two adults (with appetizers, wine and dessert) will run close to $100, I have certain expectations. Fressen is an excellent example of everything I dislike in a restaurant — which is why I decided to blog it. It’s not so much a review as a list of things a lot of restaurants do that are extremely annoying. If it’s a sports bar, I take a deep breath and put up with stuff, but not at a place that pretends to be chi-chi.

We had reservations, of course, and were prompt, but there was no one to greet us as we came in. As I mentioned yesterday it was really, really dark with the only light coming from a few tea candles on random tables. And the music was nightclub-loud. We stood there looking stupid for about 5 minutes before some young chippy trotted over and said, “Oh!”

So,  here are some things that restaurants should think about, in my opinion.

1. When a customer asks you not once, but twice to turn down the music, you should probably do it, even if you can’t really hear what they’re asking you over the bass.
2. Servers should be properly and hygienically dressed. Unless it’s Hooters, bare midriff at face level is kind of an appetite killer, whether it’s the smooth tanned midriff of a 20-something woman or the taut, furry midriff of a 20-something man.
3. Although we were aware that Fressen makes “everything from scratch” some indication from the servers as to how many hours this entails would have been good.
4. I really don’t like it when the server handles my glass of wine by the bowl, so when they deal with the challenge of bringing a bottle of wine and several glasses to a table by tucking the bottle under the armpit, that’s seriously off-putting.
5. And, though I know all the great products one can add to dishwashers to disinfect and remove unsightly spots are great, they leave a residue. They smell and taste funny. When you stick your nose in a wine glass and all you smell is chorine, this is not good. Rinse the glass, please. Don’t make me ask.
6. When bringing a bowl or plate to a table, servers should find a way to do it that doesn’t involve sticking their fingers in your bowl or on the top of your plate. Licking their fingers after putting down the bowl/plate is a really big no-no.
7. Servers having loud arguments with the hostess about “that table of 8” and why on earth she allowed them to sit there when a party of 12 has reservations for that table in less than an hour, should maybe be conducted in the kitchen and out of earshot of the customers.
8. Making people wait, 50 minutes between courses is ridiculous. It’s vegetables, people. No vegetable or anything else, takes that long to prepare. Hire a few more prep staff.
9.  Servers should check back with the customer once in a while to see if they’re still breathing or would like some more booze or bread or something to gnaw on while they’re waiting for their very elaborate broccoli to appear.
10. It’s very haute cuisine to have signature sauces, but that doesn’t mean you have to drown everything in them. It’s one thing not to be able to see the food, but you should at least be able to taste it and/or find it at the bottomless pool of sauce.
11. It’s probably very chic to serve everything in a gigantic bowl or other similar artistic vessel, but you should take into account that the person trying to eat the thing in the bowl needs to somehow divide it into bite-sized bits. It’s hard to cut things in a bowl.
12. Oh ya, the food? Meh… who knows. I was so fed up with everything else I just wanted to snarf it down and get the hell out of there. I will never set foot in that place again.

Sadie’s Diner, (of the fabulous veggie bacon) on the other hand, was more than perfect. Friendly staff without  being overly familiar, lovely decor, (which you could see on account of the windows weren’t all blacked out and some lights were on), home-made, yet prompt service, soft background tunes. And did I mention the amazing veggie bacon??

Oh ya, and although I know it’s de rigeur for English-speaking wait staff the world over to say “youze”, it’s still really, really aggravating. So, just stop it, okay?

Where Have I Been?

I’ve been on a little jaunt for a few days. Did some stuff. Saw some things. Visited some family. Reconnected with people I haven’t seen in ages.  Here are some things I found out:

• Seeing a one-armed man wearing a Pac-Man t-shirt that says “Eat Me” is the most hilarious thing XUP Jr. has ever seen.
•  Some gourmet restaurants think that having no lights, really loud music and making customers waiting 80 minutes for their food makes them special. They learned that having no lights, really loud music and making customers wait 80 minutes for their food, makes “certain” customers really…um… “assertive”.
•  Seeing people one hasn’t seen in decades can be both creepy and fun.
•  Sometimes the thing you dread most can turn out to be great.
•  When I’m away from home for a few days I really miss my cat and I hate myself for it.
•  I don’t like living out of a suitcase. At all. Even for a short time.
•  One baby screeching at the top of its lungs for almost two hours can turn a train-load of perfectly lovely people really ugly.
•  There exists, in this very world,  veggie bacon that defies the laws of veggie-ism. 
•  There are a lot of really, really nice people in Toronto despite their reputation to the contrary.
•  XUP Jr. knows way too much about booze.

Who Lives in Your House?

Whenever I visit my mum, I always have something like a little panic attack when I look around her house. It’s crammed to the rafters with stuff. My dad was a natural born thrower-outer and never held on to anything unless he was absolutely sure he would be using it in the next week or so. My mum is exactly the opposite. Nothing has been thrown away since my dad died 25 years ago.

I’m not even kidding. I wish I was. Because I roam around her home and start worrying about the day she dies or has to move. And I reckon it’s going to take me about 5 years to clear out the place.

Whenever I visit I try, slying, to suggest I “help her have a little clear-out” Then she narrows her eyes and accuses me of wanting to throw out all her stuff just like my dad used to do.

I’d say at least 60% of her home is just for storage. Maybe more. I would also say that from what I’ve seen, a lot of people live in homes that are largely occupied by stuff, rather than people.

I’ve mentioned before that the average home these days is double, if not triple the size it was 50 years ago. Yet our families are smaller.

People buy bigger and bigger houses because they need all the space for their stuff. They need 3-car garages, not for their cars, but to store stuff. The basements are crammed full of stuff. The spare rooms are impenetrable. (Overnight visitors are put up in nearby hotels.) Stuff is jam-packed in the voluminous closets, cupboards and storage areas. And then there’s all the stuff that occupies the actual “living areas”.

The people who pay through the nose for these big houses have to shuffle around in narrow gaps between their stuff. They try not to spend too much time at home because it’s not very comfortable.

There’s too much stuff in the kitchen to be able to cook properly, so they go to restaurants. There’s no room to entertain properly and the place always looks messy, so you go out to meet friends. The kids can’t do their homework properly because their rooms have too many distractions. You have to keep buying more stuff because the stuff you already have is too deeply buried under other stuff for you to find anything. You’re not even sure if you have pets anymore.

How crazy are we to carry a huge mortgage and to keep maintaining a giant house just so we have a place for our stuff? Why don’t we just get a nice small home and get rid of all this stuff?

Or, if we must maintain a long-term relationship with our stuff, why not get our stuff a real home of its own in a nice, climate controlled (and much cheaper) self-storage facility? Then you you can go and visit your stuff when you really, really want to see it instead of living with it day in and day out, tripping over it, resenting its intrusion in your life and causing no end of damage to the relationship you have with your stuff?

First Impressions

So yesterday, the Deep Friar, posted one of his usual “whiney list” posts. (ha ha…I kid… they’re very clever and funny…really) Anyhow, this one happened to be about job interviews and the many ways they are designed to defeat the interviewee. But, some of  the resulting discussion veered off into a “don’t judge a book by its cover” discussion and my comments started getting too long, so I figured I’d just carry on with a blog post of my own on the topic. The Friar and I have completely different readers, so that’s okay, right?

The question therefore is whether or not it’s okay to judge people on appearance/first impressions. I maintain that for most of life’s situations we only have a very short window of time in which to make a decision about a person, so the only thing we really can judge them on is that first impression.

This is true for everything from job interviews to first dates to hiring a plumber to choosing a dentist to letting someone cut your hair to meeting someone at a party. Yes, in most cases you’ll also have some sort of frame of reference for them, but your real judgment will be made when you first meet them.

How a person chooses to present themselves to the world says a lot about a person and not necessarily what they are actually trying to tell the world about themselves.

It may be unfair but we humans like other humans who are attractive.  We are programmed to believe that someone attractive on the outside will be attractive on the inside. Studies with young children, who have no deeply ingrained prejudices, show that even children are drawn to and respond more positively to attractive people.

Of course “attractive” is a subjective thing.  And can encompass more than just being pretty and slim and well-dressed.  An air of confidence and comfort with one’s self goes a long, long way in making a person seem attractive who may not necessarily be a great beauty. And, some features are more important to some people than to others, but in general, attractive means someone who carries themselves well and looks like they have respect for themselves. Someone who looks after themselves and has made some sort of effort to look their best before putting themselves out into the world. Someone with a pleasant countenance.

We’re not looking for perfection. In fact, perfection can be off-putting because we tend to assume that really, really beautiful people are lacking in most other areas. We think they are probably arrogant, vain, self-absorbed and unintelligent. And we are very often right;  which is why we keep believing it.

When we judge someone on their appearance, we are also judging them on decisions they’ve made about how they choose to present themselves.  You make a decision to spend tens of thousands of dollars in surgery and cosmetic products to perfect your features, your hair, your physique and more money to clad yourself in only the finest designer duds – well then don’t complain if people liken you to Paris Hilton.

You make a decision to tattoo your face and shave one side of your head, dye the other side blue and wear orange garbage bags duct-taped to your body. Don’t complain if people think you’re a nut and won’t give you a job.

If you show up on a date dressed like a hooker, don’t complain that your date wasn’t at all interested in your mind.

If you’re 40 years old attend a fairly formal Christmas party in a Megadeath t-shirt and ball cap, don’t complain that all the chicks at the party were stuck up.

Underneath it all, these might all be very nice, caring, intelligent people, but how are we supposed to know that? We meet lots of people at parties, job interviews and in the general course of our lives. There’s no way we can spend weeks really getting to know all these people. So, we choose who we want to get to know or hire based on their appearance.

And, by the way, I also always judge a book by its cover for exactly the same reasons. Experts put a lot of time and effort into making book covers that express what we should expect from the book. There are millions of books on the shelves. So I choose ones that do not have Regency-era women in ripped bodices on the cover. I don’t choose books that are pink or bright blue or lurid black and red. I do not choose books whose covers are cleverly cut out to show a glimpse of something shocking underneath.

And, like with the people I meet, I am almost always right in my first impressions.

Fun With Idioms

I can’t for the life of me remember which blog I read this on, but there was a bit of a discussion about art and one commenter noted that the expression “something costing an arm and a leg” was originally an artistic term. It seems portrait painters back in the day used to charge for portraits by the number of body parts they had to paint. So, just a head and shoulders portrait wouldn’t cost too much while a full body (complete with visible arms and legs) would cost a fortune.

I love finding out stuff like that!

The English language has over 4,000 established idioms and idiomatic phrases. A good percentage of them come from Shakespeare, sailor talk or pub talk. You can work out what most of them mean with a little thought. For instance: You can’t have your cake and eat it, too. To make a little more sense it should go, you can’t eat your cake and have it, too – meaning if you snarf down your damn cake, it’s gone, so don’t come whining to me that you have no cake.

The idioms I find interesting, however, are the ones that don’t make obvious sense – like the arm and leg one. Or these:

• Kick the bucket.  In old timey slaughter-houses, the wood frame used to hang animals up by their feet for slaughter was called a “bucket”. Even in those days, before rampant vegetarianism,  animals didn’t like getting slaughtered so they’d struggle and spasm before and after death, causing them to often “kick the bucket.” It was very annoying and very noisy.
• Cat got your tongue. If you’ve ever worked on an English sailing ship, you’d know that punishments for all sorts of crimes and misdemeanors was a good whipping with the cat-o-nine-tails.  Sailors were always afraid of doing or saying something wrong and getting a whipping, so they generally kept themselves to themselves (until shore leave). Consequently, being circumspect came to be related with fear of the “cat” having silenced your tongue. 
• Raining cats and dogs. In nasty 17^th and 18^th century England, there was no sanitation department or much thought to hygiene in general. Garbage, sewage and other waste would just be tossed in the streets.  Dead animals would be tossed out in the open, too, so when it rained heavily, the water flowing down the streets would bring with it all sorts of debris including dead cats and dogs. 
• Flying by the seat of your pants. The first airplanes didn’t have navigation equipment so pilots had to balance the plane by feeling air movements in the seat of the plane. Much like riding a motorcycle, the pilot would have to shift his weight in the seat accordingly, in order to fly straight, ergo…flying by the seat of his pants. 
• Born with a silver spoon in your mouth. Back in the days of plagues and garbage in the streets, there were, unfortunately also no reliable antibacterials/antibiotics. However, people knew that silver had excellent anti-bacterial properties.  Sailors would put silver coins in their drinking-water barrels to help prevent illness. And, those who could afford silverware, would give their babies and children silver spoons to suck on to keep them healthy. (You can still buy colloidal silver to use as an anti-bacterial agent). 
• Once in a blue moon. A blue moon is the second full moon of a month. It doesn’t happen very often. On average, there are only about 40 months every 100 years that have two full moons. So, once in a blue moon happens once every two-and-a-half years. 
• Sweating like a pig is kind of a backwards idiom because pigs don’t sweat. They have no sweat glands. So, sweating like a pig, used to mean doing absolutely nothing – not breaking a sweat. 
• Jumping on the bandwagon. When the circus came to town there would always be a circus parade down the main street to attract the public. Politicians soon stole the idea and started parading a decorated “bandwagon” of their own down the main streets of towns to garner the public’s interest and votes when campaigning for office. 
• Bob’s your uncle. It usually means something really easily accomplished and originally referred to nepotism.  Victorian Prime Minister (Robert Cecil) Salisbury once appointed his completely unqualified nephew to a succession of posts. The British public noted that it seemed that having Bob as your uncle was all you needed for political success these days. 
• Paying through the nose.   When the Danes invaded Britain back in the 9^th century they brought with them a quirky little tax law. They levied what they called “nose taxes” on the Irish, which just meant that if they didn’t pay up on time they’d have their noses slit open and would know better next time.

Those are some of my favourites anyway. And not all of the explanations of their origins are necessarily absolute fact — for some idioms there are various possible explanations, some better than others.

Idioms are one of the things that make learning new languages fun. It’s always interesting to see non-native English speakers sprinkling their conversation with what they believe to be the correct context and/or phrasing of English idioms.

If you’ve got any good idiom stories, I’m sure we’d all love to hear them!

Letting Go

Candice was a hard-luck cliche. She had had a crappy childhood with parents that weren’t quite abusive enough to be considered criminals (at least not in the days when she was young) but certainly abusive enough to make for a miserable childhood.

Candice’s family lived in a fairly decent neighbourhood in Candice’s grandparents’ house. The grandparents were long dead, so they lived there practically for free. But Candice’s parents both drank a lot and worked only sporadically so there was never enough money for anything. No cool clothes. No vacations. No music lessons. No summer camp. No fun.

Candice didn’t fit in with any of the more affluent kids at school. She thought they were stuck-up and mean. They mocked her until that got boring and then they pretty much ignored her.

Candice was a mediocre student with no real hopes of being able to go to college and no real desire for any kind of career. After high school she got herself a job at Tim Hortons because she saw a sign in the window one day that said they were hiring.

The Tim Horton’s closed down after a year and three months, so Candice was out of a job. Her parents wanted her out of the house, so she took what money she had been able to save and moved to a larger city.

In the new city she immediately got a job at a Starbucks. She found herself a little studio apartment, was able to buy a few pretty things for herself and felt almost happy for the first time in her life. She made friends at work and eventually met a man 10 years her senior who fell in love with her and “captured her heart”, as Candice liked to put it.

They had nothing in common, but that seemed to draw them together all the more. He, Aaron had grown up wealthy and now practiced law in his family’s firm. Aaron’s parents didn’t like Candice, but Aaron was a 30-year-old man and lived his own life.

Candice and Aaron were married after a short courtship. The marriage lasted almost 8 years until, predictably, Aaron grew tired of the wife with whom he had next to nothing in common. Aaron had affairs. Candice forced herself not to realize it until he announced he was leaving her for someone else. He left her with a nice house, a new car, a very healthy bank account and a monthly cheque.

Candice went into therapy.

Twenty years later Candice is still in therapy working through the pain of her childhood and the betrayal of the only man she ever loved. She’s had dozens of lovers since; has tried and failed at various jobs; and has a number of chronic health issues to add to her overall misery.

Most of her friends got fed up some time ago with Candice’s incessant resentments and don’t spend much time with her anymore. Their neglect only adds fuel to Candice’s raging bitterness.

“People suck,” Candice declares often.

“No,” said her friend Sharon. “You suck. You’re hanging on to the anger and pain of shitty stuff that’s been over for a long time. You feed the anger and pain. You nurture it like a child. You bring it out to show your friends, like you’re a proud mother. You’ve filled your entire life with so much shit that there’s no room for anything good or positive anymore. That sucks.”

Candice stopped speaking to Sharon because she, like everyone else had no appreciation for the true horror of Candice’s life.

Unspoken Truths

Back in 2004, Frank Warren, a small businessman (as in the business was small, not Frank himself) printed up 3,000 postcards and dropped them in public places asking people to share a secret that they’d never told anyone, write it on the postcard and send it back to him.

He not only got all the postcards back, but people started making their own postcards and sending them in. He started a blog to display the thousands of postcards he was getting every week. His blog has had over 250 million hits. He’s written 5 books. He’s established a fundraising foundation for suicide prevention. And now he he’s creating an art project to pay tribute to all the people who’ve shared their good, bad and ugly secrets with him.

And the very coolest thing is that the only thing he has commercialized (e.g.: made any money on) is his books.

The main reason this struck me as interesting was that for a while now I’ve been thinking it would be fun to do an interactive post about “messages not sent” where people could share a little message to someone dead or someone they’ll never meet or never meet again. Something they wish they’d said, but never got a chance to. Or messages to people still around that you know you’ll never deliver.

Dear Jim: I know you’re probably old, fat and bald now, but for 2 weeks, when I was 20, you were a god.

Dear Mom: All those years you kept telling me and everyone else that I was the only kid you knew who’d never needed a mom from day one, it might have been nice if you’d still sort of made yourself available just in case.

Dear Miss Davis: You were a psychopath, but you certainly managed to instill the fear of bad spelling and bad grammar in me forever. Yay for phonics and The Strap!

Your turn!