Thursday, May 19, 2011

Three Years Off

It turns out I never did become a Vancougar.

Although Sahti (with whom I spent the intervening unblogged months and will spend many more to come) is quite a chunk of years younger than me, you have to be at least eight years older than your consort and at least forty years old yourself before you can be considered a cougar. I don't remember where I heard this or read it but after the initial disappointment at the fact the title of this blog was rendered invalid, I felt rather relieved.

Although I still spent a lot of money on anti wrinkle moisturiser just so my face can keep up with how much she makes me laugh without making me look as crinkled as Rumpelstiltskin before too long.

Jeans: Acceptable Cleaning Wear? Even When They Are Cutting Off Your Circulation?

Well I totally lied abut being back soon. It's finally spring (it started yesterday; while England has been lavished with sun this springtime Vancouver had the rainiest April on record, apparently).

You know what they say, a happy blogger is a boring blogger, so I busied myself with other things. Not that I am writing now due to unhappiness, but with a mere two months left in the land of hockey and hiking, this is really my last chance to complain about some important things.

For example, about how no one in my fake family over here seem able to open or close the fridge unless their hands are completely covered in yoghurt. Every time I walk passed I see fresh white smears all over the stainless steel fridge door handles that I wiped clean five minutes ago.

Also, for completely selfish reasons, I need to get back into the swing of writing since my domestic internment is coming to an end. I will be searching for a real job where I work with other grown ups. Ones who know that Pakistan is a country. I plan to not wear jeans every day to work. I might even wear high heels!

Speaking of wearing jeans, long ago, in my head, was a post entitled Why I Do The Cleaning In My J Brand Jeans. For the uninitiated, J Brand jeans are fancy jeans from LA that the folk in People magazine are always wearing. I had a pair that gave my already not bad bum a complete lift and took it to new unforseen heights of perkiness. I loved them and I swanned round LA in them before arriving to Van and beginning my term of indentured servitude.

Although I was initially surprised at how much time I spent on my hands and knees cleaning and vacuuming various floors and rugs and carpets and underneath and behind a large array of furniture, I refused to let the general lack of style in Vancouver take me prisoner. I would not resort to wearing tatty leggings all day just because I had inadvertently become a domestic slave.

I felt supercilious and jaunty as I spent day after day bending down and standing up again in my snug J brands, without ever having to sacrifice style for practicality.

Until the day the zip broke. I almost cried. It was unmendable. I was forced to admit that my gorgeous jeans were not in fact appropriate apparel for such tasks as scrubbing behind the loo.

Either that, or it was the constant diet of Mars Caramels that got me through the first few months of living here that caused my waste to expand and my jeans to pop. Even though I kicked the Mars dependency some months ago, I have developed a social ice cream/milkshake habit. Like adolescents from the 50s, the ice cream social is one of mine and Sahti's favourite weekend activities.

Due to the upping of my frozen/blended cream consumption, all the crappy J Brand substitutes I have been wearing to clean since the demise of that zip have become uncomfortably tight. Yesterday I was forced to abandon them all in favour of my beautiful, as yet unworn soft grey Citizens of Humanity jeans. CoH don't even post the price of their jeans on the website, so you know what that means.....they are a bit nicer than the $11 pair I got from H&M.

I put them on, and, swathed in beautifully tailored kitten-soft denim, felt instantly more grown up. I luxuriated in this feeling of effortless sophistication, achieved in the 2.5 seconds it took to pull the jeans on. Then I remembered I still had to finish cleaning the bathroom floor.

So there I was again, this time carefully laying a tea towel under the knees of my CoHs and taking care not to spray the vile vinegar water that suffices for cleaning product in this house all over me.

After all, I didn't want to go on my milkshake date smelling like a chippie.

p.s dear North Americans, a chippie is a place that sells chips aka fries (fat ones not skinny ones). There is no equivalent place in your whole continent, but don't feel bad, you have the illustrious diner at your disposal. I am about to move home and there will be an entire ocean between me and all the authentic diners of the world.