I saw these posters on almost every lamppost and telephone pole on Queen Street West on Boxing Day:
The Chinese glyph in the poster is for the word “love”.
“Asian Speed Dating in a Bubble Tea Cafe” sounds like a good title for an album or a novel, doesn’t it?
This Tuesday’s Carnival of the Canucks will be hosted at Jim “BlogsCanada” Elve’s blog, Officially Unofficial. If you have any suggestions for what should go in, be sure to drop him a line!
For more details about what the Carnival, see this entry.
Richard at Just a Gwai Lo linked to my earlier entry about what makes a date a date and linked to an entry in the blog Oblivio which the author goes on a date only to discover that it isn’t a date.
Sometimes the opposite happens, and I offer this story as proof.
(I’ve also been told by a number of people that my Worst Date Ever stories have given them hope. If hope can spring from a train wreck, this story should inspire you to pick up the phone/fire up the instant messenger software and ask that guy or girl out.)
The scene: A cold clear night in November 1992 at Cafe Max, Kingston, Ontario, Canada. Our protagonist is easing quite nicely into his second year in his second incarnation as an undergrad at Crazy Go Nuts University.
This was a friendly date. I’d asked to kiss her after the Hallowe’en party, but she had to politely decline. She had a boyfriend who went to another university and wanted to maintain the relationship despite the fact that he was all the way over there, I was right here, and probably smarter, more charming, better-looking and Crazy Go Nuts University’s best damn DJ, ever. In spite of this, she’d agreed to go out on a getting-to-know-you kind of dinner outing.
I paid for everything and expected nothing but pleasant conversation and a goodbye hug at her door at the end of the evening, which makes me either an old-fashioned gentleman, a complete sucker, or possibly both. I decided to take a pragmatic view of the whole affair:
Things were going quite well. The “your back story first, then mine” conversation flowed freely with no uncomfortable silences and the food was excellent. If this were a real date, I thought, this would be the best date I’ve ever had..
After dinner, we took a nice long walk through Kingston’s quiet but quaint streets back to campus, where we descended into the basement pub known as Alfie’s to catch the Rheostatics show. We sat near the back, drinking in each performance and saving any conversation for lulls between numbers.
A few numbers into the first set, she leaned in and whispered into my ear: “I thought I should tell you that I’ve changed my mind. This isn’t a platonic date.”
It took a couple of seconds for this to register, and when it did, it was like a Bruce Lee kick to the head. In a good way, that is, if such a thing is possible.
Well, I’ll have to invite her to my birthday party, I thought, followed by Wait…birthday…what time is it?
I looked at my watch. 12:03 a.m.. November 5th.
“Hey,” I said. “I just turned twenty-five.”
“Happy birthday.”
She leaned in, and we had our first kiss.
Sometimes it turns around.
It reads like something straight out of John Hughes’ teen coming-of-age movies from the 80s: unpopular geek gets voted valedictorian as a joke and uses the opportunity to chastise his class.
From one high school nerd to another: Nicely done!
Found via this MetaFilter post: In Defense of Scrooge, in which poor Ebenezer is viewed in a sympathetic, almost heroic, light: facing off againts freeloaders, advocate of population control, and victim of a home invasion — nay, terrorists! — from the spirit world. Funny stuff, and Canadian Content to boot!
My favourite part of the article is are this little aside about the difference between right and left:
During the night, our Mr Scrooge is taken hostage by three kitchen-poster terrorists (admittedly dead terrorists, but cutbacks are upon us and we all must make do, &tc). Two of them look suspiciously well-fed. Perennially Indignant Cappuccino Crusaders have been, it seems, always with us, which leads me to paraphrase a conversation between P.J O’Rourke and another journalist:
“How come whenever something upsets the Left you see immediate marches and parades and rallies with signs already printed and rhyming slogans already composed, whereas when something upsets the Right you see three letters in the National Post?
“We have jobs.”
“It’s funny,” as the mobsters on The Simpsons would say, “because it’s true.”
Equally amusing is this bit from the comments, in which a blog entry of a WTO protester is quoted. It mirrors the complaints that some of the liberal arts students at Crazy Go Nuts University, who saw themselves as progressives (especially those at the main paper, the Queen’s Journal had with the engineers, whom they saw as dangerous conservatives making serious inroads with student government, organizations and conferences:
that is a problem with the left, that while we have meeting after meeting to decide what we are going to meet about, the right wakes up, decides to screw over a bunch of poor people, does it, then goes to sizzler.
My two-year-old nephew Aidan is a genius at identifying the various engines and train cars from the television show Thomas the Tank Engine, but sometimes misidentifies people from their photographs. Recently, he saw a picture of financial bigwig Sherry Cooper (Executive Vice President of the BMO Financial Group and Chief Economist for BMO Nesbitt Burns) and exclaimed “Yoya!”. “Yoya” is the way he pronounces “Lola”, which is the Filipino word for “Grandma”. Ms. Cooper and Mom look nothing alike, but they have very similar hairdos.
Last week, Aidan’s nanny Marvie was reading the paper when he walked up to her, pointed to a picture and yelled “Joey!”. Thanks to the accordion, my appearance in the paper is hardly an unexpected event. Marvie turned over the paper, expecting to see a photo of me playing the accordion at a club or on the street but instead saw a photo of Uday Hussein.
Yeesh.
I think he automatically associates facial hair with me. Of any family members in Canada, immediate and extended, only Dad and I are capable of growing a decent beard, and Dad prefers to keep clean-shaven.
For the record, I have never assisted an Iraqi dictator, I have never tortured any Iraqis, and I look like this:
On the evening of Christmas Day, after my sister and brother-in-law had taken their kids home and I’d finished helping Mom clean up the dining room and kitchen, I left my parents’ house in the ‘burbs and returned downtown to attend a gathering at Deenster’s and Chris’ place. Among the attendees was my friend (and former OpenCola coworker) Kate, and I was telling her about The Redhead’s upcoming visit.
Me: The night she visits, we’re going to Kalendar and then go catch a movie.
Kate: Which one?
Me: I think we’ll go see Big Fish. We’re both interested in seeing it, and it looks promising.
Kate: Tim Burton’s usually a pretty good bet. Dinner and a movie, wow!
Me: Maybe even a cocktail at Lobby afterwards. At any rate, it’ll be a proper date. Even though nobody seems to actually date anymore, I’m still a big fan. I remember reading an article about how “hanging out” or “hooking up” has replaced dating, but I like dating better.
Kate: So do I.
Rich: So what makes a date a date, say rather than going out with a bunch of friends?
Kate: You have to call it a date.
Me: Yeah, I think you actually have to say “I would like to go out with you on a date.”
Rich: So it’s the declaration that makes it a date?
Kate: Yes. It’s like the military. You have to declare a war, otherwise it’s just a police action.