Kate of Late

Another tip: Lay off the garlic

“WHO says married sex can’t be hot?” asked a recent news release that wound up chez moi.

I always look around my one-person office when I get e-mails like this, which raise provocative questions that I’ve never thought to pose to myself.

“Who indeed?” I asked the air indignantly.

Answer came there none, but the missive had grabbed my attention. I read on, expecting startling revelations about the extreme hotness endemic to the connubial state.

That’s when I discovered that the cited authority on married folks’ majestic heat was novelist C.J. Ellisson, whose third book, Big Game, has just been published. It turns out that married sex is mainly hot when one of you is a vampire and the other one isn’t.

Ellisson said she wrote the book because she was sick of reading vampire lit that featured blood-sucking sleazebags. She deplored “the main characters’ lack of relationship and constant bed-hopping.”

That kind of stuff-and-nonsense might be fine for readers in their 20s, Ellisson continued, ignoring the fact that the vampire protagonists themselves always seem to be a well-preserved 300-plus. As a mature reader, she said, “it gets annoying that your favorite genre completely overlooks the difficulty and challenges of keeping a relationship strong and sexually healthy as the years go on.…Why can’t the heroine save the world, solve the crime, and journey to unknown lands with a strong man by her side supporting her?”

I’ll tell you why, C.J. Ellisson -- in any marriage, somebody has to do the laundry. It takes a truly special guy to spend all day coaxing bloodstains out of his wife’s filmy chemises, then rise to the challenge of a rambunctious round of slap and tickle.

At my house, after the first 200 years, we concluded that renouncing vampirism -- along with world-saving, crime-solving and journeying to unknown lands -- was the most romantic course of action, and we began hosting the odd dinner party. It took a while for us to get out of the mindset of inviting only guests with long necks and ruddy complexions and focus instead on their conversational skills, but we got to that point eventually, and are the better for it. Why, the other night we had quite a rousing discussion of wind-generated energy production on P.E.I. over pad thai and goong noon hae. Neither of us stared at our friend’s jugular once.

By the way, I know people are curious about vampire wedlock, and completely obsessed with vamp/non-vamp liaisons (witness the popularity of the series Twilight). In my own marriage, I don’t like to say which one of us used to be the more ardent vampire because I don’t want our children’s friends’ parents to stop letting them come over. I will, however, discreetly point out to you that it’s Stanley who still orders his restaurant steaks “as rare as the law will allow.”

Anyhoo, to my mind, there isn’t enough verisimilitude in vampire book writing -- not that I’ve ever read a vampire book, but I have skimmed the afore-mentioned news release. It told me that in Big Game, the vampire protagonist’s name is Vivian and she owns an Alaska resort for the undead. What do the undead need with a resort? Their entire lives are vacations from reality if you ask me. When did one of these spectres ever put in a full day’s work? And what are the undead going to do at a resort -- exfoliate? Ice fish? Mob the hot tub?

Not much, it seems. Apparently Vivian discovers a corpse in a locked guestroom (always a faux pas in undead circles -- if you’re undead, don’t die, for God’s sake) just before the arrival of a new set of guests. You’d think these old-comers would have the savoir faire to smile ghoulishly and hail the deceased as dinner, but apparently Vivian and her mortal husband Rafe feel it’s necessary to hide the evidence and catch the culprit.

Evidently, they find that “juggling the demands of their customers while tracking a killer isn’t easy.” I can only imagine. You would not believe the level of room service these former people expect -- nothing sticks to their ribs, so their food orders come non-stop.

Toss Rafe and Vivian’s insatiable desires into the mix -- presumably he adores doing laundry -- and, it seems, you have a recipe for outstanding curricular coitus. I’ll never read Big Game, since the release warns of “very explicit sex scenes.” I’m not much of a one for watching pasty people knockin’ boots, even in my mind. I keep thinking they’ll faint and fall off the balcony.

As a recovering vampire -- and you oughtta get a load of our 12-step program -- I find the whens, wheres, whys and hows of dead-undead coupling tedious. If you don’t, by all means swoop off to a local bookstore this spring and pick up Big Game.

 

 

 

 

And now, a word from our dearly departed

A cheerful news release recently arrived in my in-box, announcing an opportunity to speak from beyond the grave.

If you or I sign up for something called MyObitList.com, it said, we can write up to 200 messages that will be promptly sent to our friends and relations after we die. The service is aimed at seniors and baby boomers, but I’m sure anybody’s welcome to shell out for it.

“With MyObitList.com, your ultimate thoughts will not go unexpressed. Your last words will not go unsaid!” the release pointed out.

A video link told me all I needed to know. “What would happen if you died today?” its narrator began in a mellow tone of voice, instantly making me regret that my last lunch had been bean-based. “Outside of your close family and friends, who would tell all of your online friends of your passing?”

Frankly, I doubt my “online friends” could care any less, but in the video, a cartoonish figure is seen smoking a pipe and wondering sadly “Whatever happened to Jim?”

The narrator informed me that if I sign up at MyObitList.com, I can write private messages that will be stored –- at a one-time cost of less than $100 -- until I shuffle off to Buffalo or Beelzebub or wherever. At that point, anybody I have chosen, including my lawyer, can simply press “send” to deliver my last words.

Over the course of a lifetime, the video posits optimistically, I will have earned myself many buddies, acquaintances and business contacts. Without MyObitList.com, they might remain sadly ignorant of the fact that Kate Zimmerman of the North Shore News and the City of North Vancouver, formerly of the Calgary Herald, Lisgar Collegiate Institute and Elmwood School for Girls, not to mention Crichton Street School and Camp Otterdale, had made her big exeunt. Wouldn’t it be better if I wrote notes to all my associates now and said everything I had to say, so they could be alerted -- and, possibly, insulted -- posthaste?

The answer to that, of course, was a resounding “Yes!” I instantly realized that I couldn’t die with myself if I didn’t tell Dean Kekanovich I was sorry I’d rudely turned down his wedding proposal in Grade One, and I hoped he’d gotten over it and moved on to a better pair of eyeglasses.

As I contemplated all I might have to say to these fictitious cling-ons, mourners and admirers of mine, I quickly decided to focus on old boyfriends. Imagine how they’d feel hearing from me after I’m defunct -- talk about making an impact. (Just try not remembering me now, Shane Spencer, who dated me for three weeks when we were 15, before summer school cramped our style!) And easy-to-do? I dashed off the following gem practically in my sleep.

“Dear Colin Firth, I’m sorry I looked away every time you stared out of the screen at me while I watched the Pride and Prejudice series, the Bridget Jones movies, and What a Girl Wants, where you wore those leather pants. I was discombobulated by your evident passion and concerned that returning your blazing gaze might result in the ruination of my family and, more importantly, your career. Now I’m gone so we are both out of danger. Cheers!”

I guess you aren’t really supposed to use MyObitList.com to settle old scores, but that would also be tempting. You’re likely meant to leave your pals words of wisdom or tender anecdotes that will stir their hearts and, Glen Campbell style, keep you ever gentle on their minds. Alternatively, this is probably the place to tell your old partner Skeezer where you buried the gold bullion. Your privacy is guaranteed, so go for it.

This is clearly the venue for those deathbed confessionals that people used to gasp out in the bad old days, and especially in the bad old movies. “Your sister … is … really … your … brother” can be clearly expressed in a posthumous e-mail, with pertinent evidence attached. And this way, the recipient of your revelation won’t be left wondering if it’s just the morphine talking.

Best of all, with MyObitList.com, we can update our comments as often as we wish. We can even post important snippets on a daily basis, right up until some attendant pries our laptop out of our stiffening claws. In other words, I can write “Not feeling great today, just waiting for you to call, as usual” -- until the day when this mortal coil unfriends me. Think of the guilt I’ll be able to inflict! Now, that’s power.

Skeptical about the value of MyObitList.com? You can test drive it for free for 14 days. The down side is that somebody will have to kill you to prove it works.

 

The true purpose of school, revealed

 

FAILURE Week is now over. I sure hope you celebrated as I did, by burning meals, getting parking tickets, and neglecting to prepare your sweetheart for a disappointing Valentine’s Day.

I was delighted to discover that a top British girls’ high school called Wimbledon had initiated a Failure Week in order to show students how to “embrace risk, build resilience and learn from their mistakes,” according to BBC News. This was my kind of celebration! The adults in these performance-oriented girls’ lives planned to share their own tales of failure, encouraging the young women to recognize that screw-ups are perfectly normal.

I don’t know why, or how, any teenaged girl would be unaware of this, much less an English teenaged girl. The British press in particular loves nothing better than aiming its laser beam at a flop, so if these young ladies have done any reading at all, they’re aware that the Beckhams’ marriage, for instance, has had as many ups and downs as both spouses’ hemlines. Of all the ego-pricking cultures extant, Britain’s White Anglo-Saxon Protestants’ is the most acute. This group’s fashion choices may be dubious and its Bakewell Tarts horrific, but its members never miss a chance to point out your shortcomings. I’ve seen enough episodes of Doc Martin and read enough books by P.D. James to know that -- actual residency is not required. 

As a result, when I think of Failure Week at Wimbledon High, I picture a girl dashing down a hallway, almost late for class. All long legs and ugly shoes, she gets deliberately tripped by the gym teacher, then told with a yellowing smile, “We can’t all be graceful, Charmaine.”

And so we can’t, and the sooner these students understand that failure will be a persistent theme in their lives, the better. Girls quickly learn from women’s magazines that they will always fall short in their efforts to be their ideal weight and fitness level, perfectly stylish, high achievers, accomplished cooks, terrific friends, and sexy wives and beloved mummies, in that order.  They might as well embrace failure at 13 and get on with it.

“What lessons can we all learn from failure?” asks Wimbledon’s school newsletter online. I wonder what mark you get if you fail to learn anything from Failure Week -- but, lazy lummox that I am, I don’t wonder too long.

Luckily, the Wimbledon girls won’t just have to listen to elders they know. What could be more tedious than pretending to be riveted as one tutor after another confesses, cheeks ablaze, that she once confused the word “palindrome” with “paladin,” or drank too many shandies to graduate from Oxford? Never fear, actual celebrities will appear on video to discourage the girls from beating themselves up over their gaffes. They’ll talk about opportunities that they themselves have blown.

 

I can see it now, Gwyneth Paltrow nasally gushing about the time she burst into tears because she missed a bus, and how ironic it is that she now travels by chauffeured Bentley. Hugh Grant will confess, “I was absolute bollocks at sums but now I have four good, strikingly well-dressed fellows who do my addition for me full-time.” Bono will admit with a grin that he once foolishly wore platform shoes for heightening purposes, not just because he liked the look of them.

The other day Daniel Radcliffe, the guy who played Harry Potter in the film series, told some news reporter that he used to show up hung-over on set. Maybe he’ll be in Wimbledon High’s Loser Line-up, too, but then, that might give the girls unsavoury ideas. It’s better form to fail on your own, without the assistance of alcohol or other performance inhibitors.

I do have to wonder how the school will proceed after it officially throws its support behind failing. Surely the most blithe underperformers will still get called into the headmistress’s office. Maybe she’ll quote the 1960 movie Please Don’t Eat the Daisies: “There are interesting failures. There are prestige failures, and there are financial failures, but this is the sort of failure that gives failures a bad name.”

In 2005, London Business School evolutionary psychologist Nigel Nicholson was quoted in a BBC article called The art of failure. He recommended one trick practiced by Wall Street traders whose false steps can have massive repercussions. The idea is to “separate your identity from your performance.” That’s a grand scheme, I think, as long as you also separate your identity from your performance when you excel. Otherwise, the ruse is transparently self-serving. And if your identity has nothing to do with how you perform as a worker, a leader, a sportsperson, an artist, a friend, a mate or a parent, then where do you form your identity in the first place?

Nicholson believes the value of failure is that you learn the lesson that you did the wrong thing. I prefer to endorse the view of comedy writer Robert Orben. “Don’t think of it as failure. Think of it as time-released success.”

 

 

 

A Calgarian's lonely experience in Vancouver

http://swervecalgary.com/2012/02/03/lonely-town/

Raising and training your teenager

TO understand the mind of a teenager, one must first understand the mind of a dog.

Like a teenager, any self-respecting dog will try to get away with whatever it can. Its needs are simple: food, drink, play, and opportunities to indulge its burgeoning interest in romance, from which it’s best for the owner to avert his or her eyes.  

What we owners/parents crave is personal connection, which is where my analogy concerning dogs must end. In that arena, the mind of a teenager is more like that of a cat. Now, I know little about cats, and I want to know even less. But what I have observed over the years, as numerous felines mercifully made a beeline for another room after I appeared, is that cats are particular about whom they snuggle up to, and whom they tolerate. The same is true of teenagers. They will tolerate their siblings, and stick like glue to their peers. And they’ll avoid their parents like cats avoid bathtubs.

If teenagers could, they’d hide in closets and dive under beds whenever their elders appeared. They would lock themselves in the bathroom with their smartphones for a month, if only pizza could be delivered there.

The hard part for us parents is understanding, and accepting, that this animosity is inevitable, especially when it comes to the most primal of animal and teenage behaviours – questioning authority. Challenging parents is the teenager’s natural impulse, just as a young dog disputes the dominance of its pack’s leader. The child who once wailed non-stop when we left him or her with a babysitter for a couple of hours now looks at us in much the same manner as suave Mitt Romney regards absurd Newt Gingrich. Who is this frumpy has-been who’s trying to pin me down and cramp my style? Why doesn’t he or she just get out of my way?

It’s unpleasant! Let’s admit that here and now. We keep trying to rope in this dear individual who can’t get out from under us fast enough. The ascendance of Twitter is proof. The Globe and Mail ran a wire story last week about how teens are abandoning Facebook for the comparative privacy of Twitter. Why? Because their parents, their parents’ buddies and their grandparents insisted on being their Facebook friends, offering them unwelcome input and other reminders that they aren’t entitled to their own dynamic, independent lives on Teen Island.

In reality, as opposed to the world of social media, it’s a parent’s natural, countervailing instinct to offer guidance and suggestions, no matter how brusquely they’re rejected. We may think we’re the personification of tact when we ask our teenagers whether they’re “aware of” something, or “realize” something else, but all they hear is the sound of a choke-chain being attached to their necks and then clamped to a stake in the ground. As far as they’re concerned, we’re obsessed with curtailing their freedom and raining on their parade.

Thus, the common refrain whenever I try to give advice to my children is a sarcastic “Thanks, Tips!” or “No kidding, Captain Obvious.” It’s sadly true that common sense is not my forte, but even my language skills are perceived as gratuitous.

It’s weird that as parents, our role is to produce and nurture fine human beings so they can go on to reject as many things about us as they possibly can. But that’s the way it goes. By the time they reach their thirties, it dawns on some of them that we aren’t that bad. I guess that’s why we parents like to say that patience is a virtue – we’re really trying to persuade ourselves.

I’d like to point out, however, that it was never my ambition to be the world’s worst mother. Among my own countless gaffes: while driving a carful of Grade 8 boys to a high school dance, I asked what I thought was an innocent question. “So, do you think there will be any slow dances tonight?” Complete silence. So, of course, I threw in a follow-up. “Do you guys know how to slow dance?” I had no idea all four of them would be paralyzed with embarrassment. Afterward, I mentioned their “odd” reaction to Stanley, who instantly recalled what it was like to be an adolescent boy. He was horrified.

My most recent transgression, after listening to a little bit of guitar being played for my benefit, was to praise the performance, then suggest mildly that the guitar might need to be tuned. I might as well have said to Mitt Romney at a televised debate that I’d discovered he was a member of a Satanic cult of commies for the reception that attended this helpful hint.

The message here, mums and dads? Provide the car. Pay the allowance. Make the food. Feed the friends. Offer the praise, which may or may not be accepted. Otherwise, zip it. Too bad I rarely take my own advice.