Angry Robot

Leslieville

If there were a scene in which the line “forget it, Jake, it’s Leslieville” were uttered, it would take place in front of a cupcake bakery, with a smokestack in the far background. We moved here five years ago when we bought our house, when it was one of two reasonably walkable neighbourhoods in Toronto that first-time buyers could afford (now, there are none). Originally one of Toronto’s streetcar suburbs, at the time we moved in, Leslieville had a lot of hype (NY Times article comparing it to Brooklyn and shit!), that left this city kid a little disappointed.

I grew up around Bathurst and Bloor, and post-college lived in apartments a little west of there. That area has plenty of bars and restaurants but also markets, supermarkets, flower stores and  stationery stores. It’s dense, and there’s a mix of uses (jobs as well as houses). In short, it’s a well-functioning, diverse urban environment. Leslieville five years ago seemed a little short of that. It had lots of pricey restaurants, mid-century modern antique stores, and cupcake bakeries, but no markets to speak of save for the massive, car-centered Loblaws along Lakeshore. Stores tended to be closed at odd hours. Weekday nights were deadsville. It was cupcake urbanism, more of a recreational destination for nearby neighbourhoods (I’m convinced half the patrons in Leslieville restos are actually from the Beach) than a functioning liveable hood.

That’s changed for the better since then. Condos have sprung up along Carlaw and elsewhere, and rental prices further west have gotten out of hand. The net result is more millenials moving in, which has helped the neighbourhood get denser and more lively. There are more options for smaller walkable markets now (and there not even all super-expensive!). Leslieville still doesn’t have enough jobs, which means fewer people here during the day, which makes it harder for local businesses to sustain themselves. But the studios along Eastern have been busier with the slide of the Canadian peso.

And there’s something nice about the concept of the streetcar suburb, a walkable area that is nonetheless less dense than the city core. There are several parks within walking distance of my house, and the beach a quick bike ride away. During these cold winter days I think longingly of the cycle tracks along Lakeshore. 

Editor’s note: I hummed and hawwed about this post because I don’t love it. It’s true, what it says, but it leaves too much out. Leslieville has a lot of interesting history, for example! Also, shitty ending. But, I’m doing a post a day, so gotta ship it out anyway! Sorry

US Primaries 2016

This the most entertaining and terrifying US election I remember. It’s fascinating from a Canadian POV. Bernie Sanders could be a middle-of-the-road member of two of our major parties (he’s pushing for single-payer health care, not nationalizing any industries – other than health care I guess!), and I feel like policy-wise he’s closest to what I want. But is he electable? Conventional wisdom would say the dems need a centrist, and a Clinton-Trump matchup seems to favour Clinton, whereas Trump vs Sanders scares me. But maybe the emerging Democratic majority has finally emerged, and it’s possible an avowed social democrat (democratic socialist?) can win…? Question mark? It still seems like that sentence needed a question mark.

On the republican side, it’s especially entertaining and terrifying. Part of me thinks Trump can’t call Mexicans rapists and win the election (if Republicans can’t win over Latinos, they can’t win Florida, which basically means they can’t win). So in some ways I want him to be the candidate. But having a crypto-fascist making it all the way to the general election is very scary. And most of his competitors are equally scary, especially “melting goblin” Ted Cruz (I did not invent that slur nor do I remember where I saw it – somewhere on Twitter – and I don’t like making fun of people’s looks, and that’s not why he’s scary, but it’s kinda funny – man this is an absurd parenthetical).

It just feels unpredictable, which is exciting. And terrifying.

Bittmanity

If I were going to join a religion it would have to be something dedicated to the chef Mark Bittman. I’ve always wanted to be good at cooking but it didn’t seem to be in my nature. I was too slavishly devoted to the recipe. All I could do was follow it word for word. If I was missing one thing I didn’t know how to substitute and would wind up messing up. It wasn’t a resilient way to cook, but worse, it wasn’t any fun. And so I’d cook the handful of recipes I knew really well, and rarely try much else.

Bittman’s How to Cook Everything, in iPad form, changed all that. The way he presents recipes just clicked with my brain. He gives you a recipe in its most stripped-down form, and then presents a handful of variations. His stripped-down chili non carne, for example, not only omits the meat but also the tomatoes and almost everything other than spice and pinto beans. The variations add them back in and give you an option for “white chili” which I really need to try. It doesn’t hurt that he is a clear, concise and personable writer, but the proof is ultimately in the chili: I have gotten great results nearly every time with his recipes. And the whole approach has hammered into my mind that I can change any recipe I want to anything else. This has been a wonderful, life-transforming thing, no joke. Now I enjoy cooking. It’s not a grim word-for-word recitation, it’s a chance to explore.

The How to Cook Everything app is a little long in the tooth now (never got the iOS 7 makeover), but I still use it all the time. It’s also available in book form and it is ENORMOUS. It’s best thought of as a modern-day Joy of Cooking. He’s got other books, like Kitchen Matrix which takes his variations to their logical extreme. Come. Join me in the Church of Bittman.

Fairly skippable blog post here

Motherfucker I’m running behind here. Didn’t get a post done yesterday, nothing yet today. I was sick yesterday and EXTREMELY low energy. I have this excercise app that I got a few days ago and generally it is THRILLED with me. It’s all about the health benefits of a half hour of low impact exercise (walking) per day. Turns out I get a half hour just dropping the kid off at school and coming in to work. So this thing was logging me at 60, 90 minutes a day. I am ranked like #8 in the region! It’s hard to imagine it being hard to get a half hour of walking in – until you are sick in bed all day. I got like 10 minutes exercise. Not great. Today I drove so I’m only at 17. If you want to get a half hour of walking in DON’T DRIVE! So anyway the app keeps on sending these notifications, “maybe take a walk?” “Walk around the block?” “Time to stretch your legs”. Nag nag nag.

While sick I logged a lot of Jessica Jones. It’s a good show. I wasn’t hugely taken by Daredevil but JJ is more my speed. Writing and acting are higher quality, and it has that quality I love in imaginative stories – the fantastic as an attention-getting metaphor for very real, very human, very mundane stories. In this case a strong woman can’t come to terms with how an abusive partner was able to override her feelings and make her do things she didn’t want to do. JJ super power is physical strength, but not endurance; she can lift cars but still get shot, she can jump high but could break her legs on landing. Her nemesis is Killgrave, who can make people do whatever he wants. He’s the ultimate entitled white guy character. JJ is essentially a PTSD sufferer and is rendered accurately, movingly: drinking problem, fits of rage, overactive defense systems.

So that’s all the time we have for today – a jumbled piece of diarist crap that nonetheless fulfills my self-imposed quota!

Playing Daughter

She says to me, “want to play daughter”? Of course I do.

This means I will play the daughter and she will play the “momma”. So she gets to make all the rules, which is the whole point of the operation – a carnivalesque flip of the power dynamic.

She orders me to get into bed (the couch); she pulls a blanket over me.

“Read to me,” I say. I play my part by saying things she would say.

“No,” she says. “I won’t read to you because you didn’t listen to me.”

“I need a hug and kiss.”

“Hug but no kiss.”

She’ll enforce the pretend sleeping – if I open my eyes I find her standing over me, vigilant, ready to threaten the suspension of dessert prospects, or milk rights. But after a spell, after she’s put the pretend puppy to bed and she’s pretend slept herself, she wakes me up, and offers dinner. It’s really a plastic turkey on a plastic saucer, but that’s not how she spins it.

“Here, it’s pepperoni and cheese and watermelon and peanut pizza but I have to take off the peanuts because I’m allergic.”

After dinner we have to drive to a picnic. I sit on the floor and she straps me into the child seat with the sash from a bathrobe. She sits on a wood box, mimics the steering wheel, and makes maybe the cutest driving sound I have ever heard.

It’s all warped and distorted, but it’s clearly a portrait of her world. Little chores, duties, orders given. Punishments and rewards. Do we really seem this stern to her? Does she really think we’d serve her peanuts?

The journey takes about half a second. We get out and we go to the store to get food for the picnic. “Come with me!” she says, and opens the fridge. She starts looking for food.

Real food, I note.

I come out of character and insist certain things aren’t taken out of the fridge. It’s starting to look like the pretend picnic is morphing into real eating, as we’re playing to kill time while her mom makes dinner and she’s starting to get real hungry.

We negotiate, and settle on a handful of blueberries. I get four spoons as ordered, and a bowl. Pretty soon real dinner happens, and play stops. She’s not the boss anymore.

For now.