Weather: Sunny and warm
Listening to: Tori Amos, "Caught a Lite Sneeze"

Summer of Sin

I don't know if it was magic or what, but this was the setlist for Tori's concert at the Molson Amphitheatre on Saturday night:

Original Sinsuality
Icicle
Blood Roses
Here. In My Head
General Joy
Mother
Crazy

If You Could Read My Mind (Gordon Lightfoot cover)
Both Sides Now (Joni Mitchell cover)

Cars And Guitars
Northern Lad
Spark
Taxi Ride
The Beekeeper

1st Encore

Jamaica Inn
Cloud On My Tongue

2nd Encore

Putting The Damage On
Baker Baker

I think that, from the moment I heard the opening strains of Icicle trickling out over the audience, I knew that it was going to be my night. I couldn't have wished for a better setlist. I simply couldn't believe my ears in the second encore...she might have been reading my mind...two songs that I have always wanted to hear live, back to back. I've heard her do Cloud on my Tongue live once before, but that song is so beautiful I could sit and listen to her do it live all day. Glad for the chance to hear her do Mother, as well. And the covers were stunning. Couldn't believe it when she started into "Both Sides Now". Tori Amos covering Joni Mitchell live! It doesn't get any better for me, folks, it really doesn't.
All in all there weren't any bad notes for me all night. Blood Roses, General Joy and Spark were very intense, and actually Tori can be quite scary. She moves from freaky-demonic-possessed to cute-sweet-playful like it's nothing. It's impressive. (She also moved effortlessly between her Bösendorfer piano, the two Hammond organs, and the other synthesizer/organ thing I can't quite identify, sometimes playing two of them at once -- her trademark.)
It is a little surprising that she only opted to play five songs from the new CD, and not even the single at that. Also -- no Cornflake Girl, Crucify, or Precious Things! Very unusual. But, from the looks of things, that ratio of new-to-old material and the lack of old favourites seems to be typical of this tour. Maybe she's trying not to overexpose her new stuff, and maybe she's trying to bring some of her old gems (like Mother) back to the forefront of everyone's consciousness...but whatever it is, it certainly made my night.

Oh -- and the nightly CNE fireworks started up right towards the end of Baker Baker. Perfect timing. Magic, I swear.

~SQ

Weather: So pretty. Sunny, blue sky, nice breeze. Is there somewhere where it's like this all the time?
Listening to: Goldfinger, "Counting the Days"

All those brilliant things I should have said

Call it the Rudeness Files:

Saturday, August 20, 2005, some ungodly hour of the night
Location: Outside some downtown club
Situation: We have a man who clearly believes that being employed as a bouncer by a club is akin to demi-god status. First of all, as we are walking down the street, he comes out of nowhere to stand in our way and makes a pitch for why we should come into his club. His attitude and stance border on threatening. When we wind up back at the same club later in the evening for reasons too complex to explain, he singles out the Asian girl in our party (Indonesian) and says to her something along the lines of "Oh, you definitely should go in -- there's tons of SARS in there already! It's just full of SARS!" I suppose he was trying to say that there were a lot of Asian people there. Catching the look on her face, he says "Oh, it's okay, I'm Chinese, I can say that" (he was black). I did not hear this exchange first-hand. He gives the girls free access passes, but the guys would still have had to pay cover, and we were with some monumentally picky people, so we allowed them to go check out the club first to see if they wanted to stay so that the guys wouldn't have to waste their money. When he realizes that we haven't all gone in, he demands the free access passes back, because "that wasn't part of the deal" (as far as I know, there was no deal).
My response: informing him vociferously that we didn't have a deal, saying a few other things after I learned about the SARS comment.
In retrospect: should probably not have called him an "asshole".
Further commentary: He might have been within his rights to demand the access passes back -- barely -- but I don't appreciated having my space invaded, and the SARS comment was just totally out of line. I stand by my original character judgement, although it definitely shouldn't have come out of my mouth in quite that way.

Wednesday, August 24, 2005, 9:45 am
Location: IKEA restaurant
Situation: Related to me by my mother. She is getting cappucino for herself and tea for my father at the self-serve beverage machines. The man behind her yells out to her, "Hurry up, you, I haven't got all day!" My mother turns around and informs him that she is working as fast as she can, telling him to calm down or else he won't enjoy his breakfast. His daughter says to him, purposefully loudly so that my mother can hear, "She's a cheeky bitch, isn't she?" Her father responds, equally loudly, "Well, she's a bitch, anyway." My mother asks them to repeat themselves, which they do, and a third party (a friend of the father-daughter team) comes over to say "I just want you to know that the whole restaurant thinks you're a bitch, too" (presumably because of her "relax" comment). This brings the grand total of the number of times that my mother has been called a "bitch" up to a whopping three, so she is understandably upset.
My response: On hearing this story, my father and I opt to have a small chat with the charming couple, so we go over to find their table. The third friend is nowhere to be found, although I have a thing or two to say to her (such as why she seems never to have graduated from third grade). We inquire as to the source of their nerve ("how DARE you") and engage in a fairly loud crash course in basic social niceties (such as not using hurtful epithets against perfect strangers in polite company). At one point I'm afraid that my dad and the guy are going to come to blows. My father's parting shot is "You're a disgrace to Scotland" (the man had a scottish accent). My parting shot is "Your behaviour is disgusting, both of you". Whew.
In retrospect: Should maybe have demanded an apology somewhere in there.
Further commentary: Not too much more to say on this one. It's a toughie. I'm not sure whether it would have been better to let it go or not. I think the time to let it go would have been back after the guy had said "Hurry up, I don't have all day". If Mom had let it go there, that would have been one thing. But, I mean, once you've called my mother a bitch...what am I supposed to do? Buy you flowers?
The family at the table beside ours applauded us on our return, and shared stories of similar encounters with crude and badly-bred strangers, so that makes me think that what we did wasn't completely unacceptable.

Wednesday, August 24, 2005, 2:15 pm
Location: Second Cup, Bloor and Royal York
Situation: A man asks my friend and I for change for the subway. Neither of us are forthcoming. He yells at us to go fuck ourselves, and leaves.
My response: In this case it is clear that the man is not fully mentally competent, so, nothing. This doesn't really count as an example of rudeness, per se, except to contrast it with the previous two incidents. This is the most extreme verbal lashing of the three, and the only one directed at me personally, but because of the guy's obvious state, I automatically let it go. I should probably be better at looking for such underlying sources of rudeness in others.

It should be said that 1. I am not really a confrontation-seeking individual and 2. I have a lot of work do on my assertiveness. It is difficult, in the extreme, to stand up for yourself and those around you without turning into a rude person yourself. I clearly need to work on this. I need to be able to be assertive without feeling bad later, which means I need to do it in a way I can be proud of. Not there yet, but I'm working on it. I already feel better about the IKEA confrontation than I did about the club confrontation. Still some work to do, though.

One I want to try sometime, from the Fabulous Girls' Guide to Decorum, by Kim Izzo and Ceri Marsh: A new method [of dealing with rude people], still in the testing stages, has been suggested recently. When confonted with a breach in etiquette, simply remark upon it: "Wow! You are being so rude. How do you do that?" Hee.

~SQ

Weather: Hot hot hot hot, muggy, buggy, sweaty, summer
Listening to: Sarah Slean, "Lucky Me"

Unsettling Coincidence Of The Moment

You know that plane that crashed/burned at Pearson on Tuesday? Air France, Paris to Toronto, flight #358?

That was Boyfriend's flight -- same flight # and everything -- a week and a half ago.

In terms of "Close-To-Home Events Of The Summer", this comes in a definite second to Andrea's oh-my-god-the-London-attacks-happened-at-our-school-and-on-our-subway-lines-and-on-my-street-and-oh-my-god experience. But...still...unsettling. And even if it weren't all that unsettling, I'll take any little thing as an excuse to go off on a mental bender about life and perception and what-have-you. So this is only tangentially related to the unsettlingness of Tuesday's event.

Weird how big a role timing plays in everything. Maybe that's why I like movies like Sliding Doors and Run Lola Run: minor changes in timing, little tiny coincidences, small seconds' worth of decisions lead to radically altered outcomes. I don't think about life this way a lot. As a matter of general operation, I tend to act as if there is one path along which everything occurs, instead of a huge web of possible paths. Also I tend to assume that the important, life-changing moments are the obvious ones; or rather, that any moment that drastically changes a life will be obvious by definition. But important moments slip by, under the radar, unnoticed by my clumsy macroscopic life-processing infrastructure. There was the moment, a week ago, when I spontaneously decided to walk along Yonge street instead of along Bay street, and ran into Chloe, who I hadn't seen in many months but have been thinking about a lot lately. How many other things in my life owe their flourishing, or their perishing, to similar insignificant decisions?
By the same token, how many fates do we avoid without even realizing it? At some point in planning his trip, Boyfriend picked a return date...any particular reason why he didn't stay a week and a half longer with his relatives? Any particular reason why he didn't spend longer in Europe? (Any particular reason why he took Air France flight #358 at all, instead of some other carrier, thus providing me with this weird coincidence to use as an excuse to go on said mental bender?)

*shrugs* I have no answers, and I'm not trying to postulate divine intervention in any of this or anything. It's just shocking to realize periodically that the lives we think of as being relatively solid, planned and predictable are made of a gossamer of moments we don't even remember.

From "Patty Hearst", by Douglas Coupland:
Brent said, "Hey -- you're always interpreting your dreams. Here's an idea -- why not try something else. Why not interpret your everyday life as though it were a dream, instead. Say to yourself, 'A plane's flying overhead now -- What does this mean?' Say to yourself, 'It's raining so much lately -- What does this mean?' Say to yourself, 'Today I thought I had rediscovered [a loved one] -- but it turned out it was someone else instead. What does this mean?' I think this makes life an easier thing. I really do."

~SQ