Mongoose to Stink Beetle

Martin, boyfriend/best friend/general partner in crime, signed me up for a flying lesson. Next Sunday afternoon, weather permitting, you might hear a banshee shrieking through the heavens, as my Cessna (that's pilot talk for "small plane") spirals out of control over downtown Toronto.

I can't drive a car very well. I can't even run very fast, or I trip over my own feet. I have literally been in about six car accidents, all my fault but one. The only thing I do worse than take lead on transportation is let someone else do something fun while I wait. Even if it's something that might make me actually shit my pants, I'm pretty much going to be the most annoying, sulky person in the world if you do something fun and I don't.

Marty is totally bad-ass. I know him from high school, but I was a junior back in the day and he was a senior, and a boy three years older than you in high school may as well be your grendpeppy. He came to my high school for final year, with his bleached blonde spiky hair on a shiny new skateboard (prerequisite if you want to survive as a boy in late 90's high school) and slightly grungy plaid. He lived across the street from my best friend, Steph, whose garage was The Place to hang out when we were 14. We had hit The Jackpot. He smoked cigarettes AND drove a beat up Golf... in red, ladies.

I'm just going to take a quick second to tell you about Steph so you can grasp the kind of kids that we were. Both of us were Baby Geniuses and would correct teachers all the time if they made grammatical, spelling, or general historical errors. But we wanted to be awesome and did whatever it took, which in high school, means pretending to not be Baby Geniuses. It meant that whenever we walked to the principal's office for whatever reason, like dropping off the attendance sheet, we would hang our heads down low to look like we were about to get suspended. Or better yet, if we were called to the principal's office (over the entire school intercom!) we would roll our eyes and say "again?!" when really, my mom just wanted to let me know that she just checked the juice boxes and they had expired. OKAY, MOM! GAWD!!! Moving on.

Knowing him now, I feel terrible for Young Martin. He'll do anything for people, even if it makes him look like a total douchebag, which we did (obviously). I would walk the ten minutes over to Steph's house every morning, so we could coerce him to drive us to school together, even though taking the bus would have taken me less than 10 minutes. Strength in numbers! Being far too nice, Young Martin would relent after only making a few excuses (we would need at least 10 before we would even consider stopping our dual "Aw, come on..." harmonization).

Back then, I didn't give a shit. We would get to school and girls would ask us things like, "what's the new guy like?" and we could casually toss our hair back and say," Oh, Martin? He's cool." (Long, dramatic pause to show reluctance about divulging a secret. Lower voice to whisper.) "He's from Germany, you know, so he's just adjusting, meeting cool people. Poor guy, must be hard to leave all your friends like that."

He's not even from Germany!!! He was from like two hours away. But it's not like they were getting rides to school from him so they would never know what was what. Anyways, the year came and left with no major developments, and eventually, Steph and I got into witchcraft (No. Just no. I'm not ready.) and Marty graduated and moved out East.

Fast forward to a number of years later.

In short, I befriended the very friends Marty had back in high school, he moves back, I think his ears are cute, we go out a couple of times, I move indefinitely to Nicaragua, we miss, he shows up in Nicaragua when my indefinite plan becomes a definitely not happening plan, we hang out a bit there, we hitchhike across Costa Rica, the weather sucks, we come back to Ottawa, move to Toronto due to boredom and now here we are. There's a lot more romance and adventure in our relationship but I'll leave it at that. <3

Another cool thing that happened over the weekend was my amazing friend Cat got these passes to a high end makeup convention and got me an entirely new makeup collection. All MAC, thank you very much. Now, when she told me she was going, I put in my order for some beautiful, neutral, societally-acceptable colours. Makeup is extremely exciting to me; the higher end, the moreso. When she gets back with literally thousands of dollars of makeup, we lose our minds together. The fact that they are the discontinued colours, and all in bright pink, greens and reds makes no difference, although it would have been a bit nice to know before I threw out my entire makeup collection in anticipation. I went to Costco on Sunday in complete Clown Whore get-up and didn't even care because I was such a fancy lady with all my new MAC makeup. Like seriously, green liquid liner to pick up bulk paper towels.

Cat is one of Those Girls. Tall, blonde, becomes friends with everybody and gets you the best every single thing. These are the best kind of girls to align yourself with. She is but one of the best friends I have in the Those Girls category.

The first is Lisa. When Lisa met up with me in Amsterdam back in the day, the first thing she said to me, having not seen me for a very long time, was "Dude, what the fuck happened to your face?" I had broken out in a terrible, terrible (MON DIEU, QUE TERRIBLE!!) rash all over my face and nowhere else. It meant she would have to work extra hard, which isn't that hard when you are 6 feet tall and always look like you just stepped off a Parisian runway.

But the real testing starts when I lose my contacts (I lose everything) and I have to wear coke bottle glasses for the duration of our adventure.

And then my sandals snap and I'm stuck limping behind her long and graceful gazelle-like strides like some science experiment gone horrifically wrong. Just picture it, it's awful.

T'were I alone, my experience in Europe would have consisted of a lot of sitting around in hostels, pretending to be interested in futbal and scheming up ways to trick people into hanging out with me. Instead, we got guest list into every club, all sorts of freebies, and I had the best trip ever. Thanks, Lisa <3