Goliath

I went to the Sex and the City movie with the girls Tuesday night.

(I rarely say "the girls," but that's really the only description -- friends all wearing fantastic outfits and, yes, we giggled. Well, through the opening credits at least. Then the movie started and I think it's safe to say most of us were sort of stumped.)

I could tear into the movie -- its highs, its lows, its name brand labels. The fact there was far more shrieking and name-dropping than you might find in a whole season. Or at least less irony.

But I'm moving on quickly to books, specifically Timothy Findley's The Wars.

The connection? One of the previews shown Tuesday was for Passchendaele, a Canadian Paul Gross flick all about the First World War.

While I'm sure the movie will endeavour to tell the tale of Canadians at war, I have a feeling that for every long look exchanged by the leads, every woeful kiss, a piece of the horror and grime of the war will be missing.

This is what sets Findley's work apart from so many others.... Everything about war is awful and dirty and monstrous and insane. Findley illustrates this by showing the war inside Robert Ross. The main character's attempts to maintain his humanity -- to reach inside himself for something good, anything -- amid the horror and utter violence is a true reflection of the Canadian experience. A better reflection, I have a feeling, than Gross's movie will be able to hit upon.

What I love about Findley's work is his absolutely stark and vivid prose. I know this is an oldy for many, probably read in school by some. But it is beautiful and awful at once, one of the best arguments for pacifism I've ever read.

"All you get in this war, is one little David against another.... Just a bunch of stone throwers." (p. 35)

my terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day

I have to tell you I'm reading Timothy Findley's The Wars. I have to tell you this because it is all I really have to say about books today. I'm awed by Findley's circuitous, romantic storytelling. His heavy-handed foreshadowing.

(As I continue to read the works of Important Male Authors, I'm struck by my repetitive use of "heavy-handed" as a description of narrative style. Perhaps this is something that sets men and women writers apart. Women want to show you, while men are just letting you know. Or maybe not. Unless is a rather blatant essay on feminism, isn't it?)

I'm talking in circles. It wasn't a very good day. Please excuse my awful grammar. (See? I am a woman, and I can foreshadow in a heavy-handed way.)

There have been much worse days than mine. The Romanovs, for example, had much worse days. Also, a friend of mine is getting increasingly pregnant. Thus, she is getting increasingly hormonal and cranky. I have to say, while the end-product of a pregnancy is pretty awesome (Exhibit 1: my friends' eight-month-old daughter, who can now stand on her own), the interim sounds like it sucks. Did you know you can't eat sushi? This might not be true, I've never discussed it with a doctor or anything, but my pregnant friends avoid the stuff. And it's good stuff. Sad.

In other worse days, another friend was returning from a trip to Florida when her flight was laid over. For, like, a million years. She spent a night sleeping at an airport in Chicago, because in the United States flights never actually end. Or maybe planes just don't take off? It took 24 hours to get back to Edmonton. She still doesn't have her luggage.

So really, my day was not so bad. And it ends with me sitting on my couch and drinking a glass of white wine and listening to Billie Holiday. This is quite soothing. Outside, it's raining. Not too hard, or anything. At least it's not snowing.

The thing is, my apartment smells funky. I think it smells like wet copper. But more accurately, it smells like broken pipes because my upstairs neighbours' fan coil did something crazy. Like explode or something, I'm not sure. Whatever it did, it sent water spraying everywhere in their apartment. Which I'm sure super sucks, since they were not home at all today. (Don't worry too much, the building manager went into their place and mopped up as much of the wet as he could.) Thankfully I was home, just in time for everything to smell bad and discover a leak coming through both my closet and the ceiling above my bathtub. Most of my clothes are soaked through, but key things like my books and bed are safe.

This wasn't really the worst part of my day. That had to do with the office. Some of it was my fault -- after a midnight shift, I dragged my sorry self back to work at 9:30 a.m., all bleary, and didn't escape until noon, when I discovered Leak 2008 -- and some of it was not. Then Starbucks ran out of lemonade. I know this is a really ridiculous complaint, but you know when you start to let things get to you, and then you can't stop? And maybe then you get all teary-eyed because you notice the front of your pants split at work, and you don't have a sewing kit, but thank goodness you're wearing a long top and maybe no one will notice?

It really was just a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. And I'm such a whiner! So I bid you good night, folks. Tomorrow will be a better day, right? Fiddle-dee-dee?