A funny thing happened when I went to look at my list, though. I felt uneasy about removing a person from it. Not because I cared about their feelings, but more because I cared that I was severing that connection, one that would have to be re-attached before I could get in contact with that person. Despite the fact that I haven’t said a word to this person since I added them to Facebook, indeed, some of these people, the only real contact was the very act of friending them on Facebook in the first place, I find myself not wanting to sever that connection. Why?

There are political and social reasons for not removing someone from your Facebook friends, of course. Sometimes that offensive, racist, vulgar miss-speller just so happens to be your Uncle Ned as well. Or your best friend posts ridiculous inspirational phrases that are often mis-quoted. Those are a simple matter to deal with–you can unsubscribe from their status updates and they’ll never know. But to actually remove someone from your friends list means, at least to me, that you are no longer desirous of having any contact with this person at all.

Recently friends of my boyfriend began adding me to Facebook. The ones whom I’ve met and enjoyed talking to and hanging out with I added back eagerly, knowing that I’d likely see them again soon and I’ll probably be sharing content that’s relevant to them. But along with those friends came people who I met briefly, know very little about and often have to ask the Fool what their connection to him is. Should I add them? What benefit do I get from that connection, other than another voyeur on my life and relationship?

I don’t know why I suddenly became interested in being more selective with my Facebook friends. I think it’s a general feeling that I’ve taken up in this new year, a general selectiveness of what I do, who I hang out with, where I go. I spent a lot of time trying to do everything last year and I feel now that I have to pick and choose because there just isn’t enough time in the world for it all and if I want to remain happy and sane (and still get enough hours of sleep in the night) then I have to be more selective.

Maybe it’s true what they say about what happens on New Years–how you spend it, is how you’ll spend the new year. I spent it in a relatively sober state. It wasn’t terribly exciting. Homey, even. But I enjoyed it. I think I kind of exhausted myself from all the partying last year and I’m kind of in the mood to just take it easy this year. I want this year to be one in which I work toward gigging regularly and I can’t do that if I’m constantly partying. I love going out and having a good time, but the time I spend doing that is time I’m not putting towards my goal. I can’t say that this will actually be a sober year. I am a musician after all. But it feels like I’m honing in my focus onto the track I want to follow, and I feel like giving up some distractions, like people on Facebook who I barely speak to or have spoken to, is one good way of doing that.

Author Deanna Raybourn posted this on Facebook this afternoon, asking the following:

Not sure about the sizing. The middle looks more like an 8 and the right more like a 0-2, no?

It set off a debate about women’s clothing sizes. We all had to share what size we wear and how none of these women look like us. Sizing charts are all over the map and it drives me bonkers (as it does any woman who likes to wear, you know, clothing). What I hate most about this image is that it exists in the first place. The website it comes from is someone’s long-standing tumblr full of this type of imagery. It’s supposedly her inspiration board, but what it shows me is that she’s deeply affected by her struggle with her own physical and emotional weight.

I can’t claim to be an advocate for anything, least of all body acceptance. I get down on myself. I smoke and drink far too much and I don’t floss often enough.  I have awful chin hair and sometimes I wear heels that leave my toes feeling numb. My belly and ass could both be used to screen drive-in movies. Simultaneously!  But I still don’t think anyone should be vested enough in their own body image to post imagery like this as inspiration. Ladies, love yourselves, no matter what size you are. Even if you are trying to slim down. By all means, go for it. But still, love yourself because at the end of the day, you will truly never look as good as you do now. After all, you ain’t getting any younger!

No subject is terrible if the story is true, if the prose is clean and honest, and if it affirms courage and grace under pressure.

- Ernest Hemingway (Corey Stoll), Midnight in Paris

Ah, this movie! This movie gave me something that I haven’t felt in awhile–hope for the written word. Not that I’ve ever lost hope in the written word. More like my own meagre scrawlings. Perhaps it’s because I’m a penmonkey by day and night, but I’ve felt dry, utterly dry, when it comes to my own thoughts and how they shape into words. Over the summer I fancied that I had a novel brewing inside of my imagination. I took copious notes on my iPhone, subsequently lost in the robbery in September, but not mourned. (The iPhone was mourned, but the notes, oddly enough, weren’t.) Earlier, in August on a visit with my parents, I brought the laptop with me, thinking that I’d be like Francis Poulenc and retire to the country where I could finally unleash prose. Instead I reveled in my family’s company, drank and ate far too much, and read more than I wrote.

Very recently I began writing for an online fashion magazine, a well-respected one at that. My enthusiasm for writing serious pieces knows no bounds, but it seems my creativity has been stuck at the border with a phony visa. Deadlines confound me and the process of thinking up and pitching ideas is exhausting. How do people do this for a living? Yet, they do, and I’m going to continue writing for this magazine because, for some inexplicable reason, they’re letting me and I’m not one to look a gift horse in the mouth. If you’ll indulge me, the last piece I wrote was my favourite.

Somehow I’ve persevered. Well, I have to if I’m a penmonkey; that copy ain’t going to write itself. But regardless of that, I still manage to find little ekes of creativity left at the end of the day to form something for myself and so I have hope. Hope that was reaffirmed tonight by Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris. It’s really the belief in one’s own writing that gives it strength. So I’m going to keep plucking away at this keyboard, one piece at a time, be it essay, blog post, poem or God, maybe even a piece of fiction.

And, even if I don’t mourn the loss of them, I’ll back up my notes on my phone from now on. Lesson learned!

Last evening I spent the fifth night in a row with my new boyfriend, the Fool on the Hill. I say that as though he’s one in a long string of boyfriends (hence the application of new to that sentence), but I haven’t had one in a very long time. As my mind shifts over the time spent together in the last month and a half, I look back further to try and find any sort of comparison and I don’t have one. In the past three years, I haven’t gone on more than two dates with the same person.

You never do forget what it’s like to be in a relationship. It’s sort of like taking a stroll through a neighborhood across town. The landmarks look familiar, but because I haven’t been here in awhile things don’t look quite the same anymore. Nothing stays the same forever and things have been built up/torn down since my last visit. I’m glad that I let go of my heart a little bit enough to give him permission to claim it, but it scares me, knowing where my last stroll led me. I suppose knowing those pitfalls from my last relationship gives me the girl scout skills to avoid those areas, or rather, when I inevitably stumble into them at three o’clock in the morning, drunk and broke, I’ll know better how to handle them. I just hope I do!

The Domaine de Belair

Indeed, it was the first time I had truly organized myself to study one particular style of music outside of my adolescent influences, the Nine Inch Nails, the Sarah McLachlans, the trashy Euro trance that fills my iPod even to this day. It could just as very well have been opera or folk music but no, I chose jazz.

Recently, a fellow attendee of last year’s workshop dredged up my memories of the event. First he announced via Facebook he was off to the Loire Valley once again which sent a twinge of longing through my being, then he posted his photographs of this year’s on Facebook. I creeped them shamelessly, eager to see if I recognized anyone. Happily and sadly, it was only a few.

As I was browsing the album, I thought about the people I didn’t know and what it was like for them. Did they have as much fun as we did last year? What was the group dynamic like? Were the late nights as late as ours? Did the group study as hard as we did? What sort of connections did these people make with each other?

I think about my own life and what sort of progress I’ve made since that eventful trip. The first obvious change was that my musical education began in earnest after my return. From attending weekly Wednesday night open mics where I’d be lucky to sing one or two songs the band knew, I turned my attention to theory. I built on the education that the Loire Music School merely introduced me to in that short week. I hired a tutor who patiently introduced me to the potential of music theory. (“That’s why it’s called theory, because they can’t call it the rules.”) I fumbled through identifying chords on my keyboard and I worked on my repertoire and I began to listen in earnest.

My music collection has increased tenfold since that week, mostly in the vein of jazz. I now own albums of Ella, Chet, Django, Duke, Nina Simone, Dinah Washington (the first jazz singer I took my inspiration from), Brad Mehldau, Melody Gardot, Amy Winehouse. These are just some of musicians I turn my attention to gain inspiration from. And I’m constantly seeking more.

What’s the next step to take in this path? Go to music school? Some would say so. But when I think about all the things I want to learn in music school I can’t help but feel like I’m already well on my way to learning all of those things, and I didn’t have to pay a huge tuition to get them. My next “step” is taking a seven-week piano course from the Royal Conservatory of Music, so I can actually learn to play the piano decently. It’s inexpensive and it would be foolish of me not to capitalize on the facilities I have available to me for practicing.

And then? What after that? I suppose I could entertain the idea of taking that walk down the garden path towards higher education. But I’d just as rather see if I can move to London and find work as a musician there. So I suppose that means the future is open, which makes me uneasy, but as I’ve proven in the past, that’s not an uncommon feeling in my life.

Now that I’ve written all of this out, though, I feel much more like I can move confidently down this unknown path. I mean, it’s not really unknown to me; I’ve spelled it out for myself in plain English through my keyboard. It’s rather exciting now.

Pisces, Leo, it don’t make a difference,
If I can predict it, I’d much rather know
Whether it’s a good day, or if I’ll have a bad day
My life would be much simpler
if I could write it out.

Happy to live with what comes my way?
Nah, I’d rather not.
’cause if I can’t predict it, and I don’t think I planned it,
I might get hurt and that’s too much to bear.

NSFW: Not suitable/safe for work (NSFW), not work-suitable/safe (NWS), or not school-suitable (NSS) is Internet slang or shorthand.

Do I even need to define that?

That acronym tends to keep me away from most of the weird shit online, but when it’s not attached to the headline/tweet/random link I come across I find that my discretion level tends to fall by the way-side. I mean, if I KNEW I was going to see some titty, I would never knowingly click on it. But headlines need to be sexy to encourage the virality of an article. I subtitle this blog post Top Five Reasons To Get Checked For an STD Today for this reason.

And that’s when I find myself in questionable territory.

I succumbed to the urge to read 5 Hot Men Who Also Happen to be Insane Murderers on Thought Catalog this week. Thought Catalog appears to be just that—a compendium of really random stuff written by a variety of bloggers, mostly from the American Eastern seaboard. From the avatars of the three or four that I creeped awhile ago, they err on the side of hipster, too. However, that’s irrelevant. What is relevant is the fact that these people are willing to consider Paul Bernardo as sexy and fully admit this on the internet. Having this link in my Internet history is like a full-fledged admission that I wrote the damn article myself (nope, not true) or that, at the very least, I’m culpable.

Thought Catalog is not the only place where I have to second guess my clicking. Anytime I stop by Jezebel on my lunch break I wage a battle of wills with myself on whether I want IT to find How to Sleep Off a Hangover at Work in my Internet history the day they take me away. Jezebel’s good lunch-munching content. Short, gossipy and it makes me forget that I’ve been eating the same pasta sauce for three days straight now, good lord. And it seriously has the best headline writers this side of the Huffington Post. (e.g. #2: Awful Man Returns To The Bachelorette, Is Awful; Here’s That James Franco Music Video You Didn’t Ask For).

My point is that there a lot of sexy headlines on the Internet and I’m usually really good at staying away from the temptation. If NSFW is the giant poison label on a bottle of Drain-O, a sexy headline is just the warning label on a pack of smokes. I get a little thrill when I see the cancerous picture as I reach for another one.

I found the Bixi station at Lower Jarvis and the Esplanade relatively easily. This was the closest one to my office, so the most obvious of choices. Renting a bike was mostly painless. I followed the instructions on the machine and received a print-out. I was a little perplexed that it only asked for the last seven digits of my phone number, but I suppose having an area code as part of your full phone number might only be a southern Ontario thing and Bixi isn’t aware of that. Or, I gave them a fake phone number. Regardless, not including my area code did not prevent me from renting a bike.

Actually pulling a bike out of the rack was another question entirely. It took me two tries to pull it out during the little window of opportunity. Thank goodness the number you’re given doesn’t expire after one use, otherwise I would have felt severely cheated.

After that came the bike riding portion. I must have looked confused looking at the much-too-high seat because a stranger actually stopped to help me figure it out. Thanks, sir! You were very kind. Then as I got on I was stopped once again by an older Italian fellow on his own bike, who exclaimed at my shiny wheels. I had to explain what Bixi was. What follows next was one of the most exhilarating experiences of my life.

Now, as a casual bike-rider, I can definitely say I’ve never ridden through Thursday afternoon traffic in downtown Toronto. My bike-riding up until that point was reserved for quiet tree-lined streets in the suburbs of Scarborough. Quite a bit different from dodging the masses and vehicles on Front St in a pair of heels, juggling a handbag.

Probably not the smartest way to ride a bike for the first time downtown. I must have looked like a right fool–I certainly felt like one–but it was wonderfully liberating. I zoomed past pedestrians, weaved by vehicles, and felt a sense of camaraderie with my fellow bike-riders (although, I’m sure regular riders felt somewhat scornful towards my ridiculous riding–who am I kidding? I would have.)

And it got the job done! I arrived unscathed to my destination and met up with a friend. Granted, I could have found a closer station to our meet-up spot, but that’s simply a lack of knowledge on my part. Simply put, you need to know where the Bixi stations are. Yes, there’s an app for that, but I wasn’t going to pull out my phone in the middle of the street to go looking for it. I mapped out my route in my head beforehand and off I went.

So what do I think? I think it’s a great idea. Dangerous, though. People like me are a menace during rush hour. We’re not meant to be on bicycles, yet we’re going to try it anyway. Hopefully, God-willing, it doesn’t result in any casualties, but I can already see the criticism if/when an accident occurs: “Bixi promotes unsafe cycling by uneducated idiots.” I don’t necessarily agree with that, despite being an uneducated idiot, I just think we casual bike-riders must be extremely careful on the roads. So give Bixi a try; just, for heaven’s sake, be careful you boob! Safety starts with your own person.

I have never been a particularly big cyclist. As a child, I loved it. I would spend hours on my bike riding up and down the streets of my neighborhood, often singing a made-up song at the top of my lungs. Since I grew out of that phase some ten odd years ago I haven’t biked a whole lot. In fact, my sister recently threw out my old bike, which had been given to my niece. Old and rusty, and slightly too big for her for this year, they opted to buy her something that’s at least in working shape.

I came over once when they had all of the bikes out and I had an opportunity to take my old two-pedal for a spin. I had forgotten how fun it was to bike.

Since that day I’ve been entertaining the notion of using a bike in the city. Coincidentally, this spring the Bixi program is rolling out. I was amazed at the number of stations that have been installed in the last few days. There are sixty in all! And that’s just the initial roll-out. Seeing so many of these little red dots gives me a thrill. If this program actually works, there could be Bixi stations all across the city (maybe even as far flung as the Beaches? One can only hope.)

I must admit: I was skeptical when the announcement of the program first came in the wintertime of last year. They had to scrape together 1,000 memberships before it was approved, so it felt like every single person counted. And of course, being the apathetic wench late-adopter that I am, I didn’t buy a membership then.

After seeing the program in action on the streets of Paris last year, I have to say that I’m curious. My habits as a consumer skew towards having something to immediately see and touch (that’s why I rarely shop online). Now that they’re here, I’m going to give the bikes a test-drive.