It's the end of the world as we know it

Even though I was 99.9% sure that the Mayan Apocalypse wasn't going to happen, I was still a bit anxious for December 21st to come and go this year. I knew the world was going to still be there on the morning of the 22nd, but I just wanted to get to that point. I remember the summer I was 9, some other kid at a summer day camp I was attending told me that the world was going to end the next day at 3 pm. It was so specific, which made it even scarier, and perhaps explains why I was quick to believe him. Or maybe I was just gullible. Regardless, I kept thinking about it the next day, which was a Saturday. But then my mom took me to a movie at the Capitol Movie Theatre on Yonge Street near our house (which is now an event theatre that hosts weddings & other fancy events). I don't remember what movie we saw but I know that it engrossed me enough to completely forget about the imminent end of the world. When we left the Capitol and started walking home, I realized it was past 3 pm and the world was still there, seemingly the same as always. I felt great relief.

From the ages of 14 to about 19, Armageddon was my favourite movie. From ages 14- to maybe 16 I even had a Ben Affleck poster on my wall which I purchased at the Rogers video store on Yonge Street just north of Davisville station. L. had told me about it (she had one too) and where to buy it so one day after school I got off the subway a stop early, bought the poster and that night went to sleep with Ben Affleck staring down at me. When I was 14/15 I was obsessed with Gwyneth Paltrow and Ben Affleck (who dated for a while! my Hollywood dream match at the time) and I wonder if it's because I liked them so much back in 1998/1999 and am now really embarrassed about it that I don't particularly like either of them now.

Ben Affleck and Gwyneth Paltrow

It wasn't this exact poster but somewhat similar.

 Although it's probably not my favourite movie anymore, I still love Armageddon. I just watched a few clips of it on youtube (the final 8 minutes and the scene where Bruce Willis tells Liv Tyler he's staying behind on the asteroid) and I cried. Every time I have watched it, I've cried. I think Liv Tyler is really beautiful and I think she and Ben Affleck made a good couple. I particularly like the scenes where they show people around the world coping with the fact that the world is going to end (I remember they show Paris/the Eiffel Tower) and then celebrating at the end when the world doesn't end. That connection with the rest of the world - at quite possibly the end of the world - always seemed really important.

I find end of the world scenarios generally pretty terrifying. I worry sometimes about what would happen if something awful happened - be it a natural disaster, an asteroid from outer space, or a hostile government take over/beginning of a terrible dictatorship - and what I would do. I feel certain the first thing that would happen if the world were in chaos would be that the internet would be shut down and there'd be no phone service and I wouldn't know what to do if that happened. I'd mostly just want to be at my house in Toronto, but what if I couldn't get there? K. jokes that she'd take her dad's guns and go live in the woods in BC. That sounds like a good plan for her but so implausible for me. I just hope I never have to confront these things.

Last January, a few days after my birthday, D. and I watched the movie Melancholia. Big spoiler alert coming up in case you still want to watch it and want to be surprised. I found it quite disturbing and while I would recommend it, it's not a movie I want to see again. I kept thinking about it for quite a while after I saw it and the ending just haunted me. In the movie a planet called Melancholia is on course to collide with the earth. Charlotte Gainsbourg, her husband Kiefer Sutherland, her sister Kirsten Dunst and her son are all at her large, somewhat isolated castle like house in the countryside somewhere. Kiefer Sutherland is an amateur astronomer and spends a good part of the movie trying to convince his wife and son that Melancholia will definitely not hit the earth. When it becomes clear that he was wrong and that Melancholia is going to hit the earth, he takes poison and kills himself. He doesn't bother saying goodbye to his wife or son and his wife finds him dead in the barn with their horses. What most struck - and disturbed - me was their isolation. It seemed like the 4 (and then 3) of them were the only people left on earth. They never turned on the TV or listened to the radio or tried to connect with anyone else. Kirsten Dunst - who is really depressed throughout the movie - was the most accepting of the world ending. Charlotte Gainsbourg, when she first realized the end was imminent and that her husband was dead - grabbed her kid and tried to drive into town but then realized it was futile and gave up, returning to their isolated fortress. I knew that in the face of the world ending I'd react a lot like her and her panic really scared me.

Looking at Melancholia

In the end, the three of them just sat outside in a circle and talked and waited for Melancholia to hit the earth. Even though I know they are very different movies, I kept thinking about how Armageddon showed all those scenes of the world being united in fear and hope. Here, we never saw how the rest of the world was handling this. Their isolation at the end affected me so much. It just seemed so bleak and frightening. If the world were to end I would much rather be in a city and near other people, than out there alone.

On The Other Side

 
I read this memoir a few years ago called The Sisters Antipodes by a woman named Jane Alison. Jane was born in Canberra, Australia but spent most of her childhood living in different parts of the world because her dad was a diplomat. At some point when she was under 10, her family (mom, dad, older sister, Jane) were back in Australia and became really good friends with an American family whose dad was also a diplomat (mom, dad, two daughters). The parents ended up switching partners, and the daughters ended up losing dads as Jane and her sister moved to the US with their new stepfather and their mom, and the two other girls stayed in Australia with their mom and Jane's dad. Read it - it's really good! (The amount of similarities between the families are very strange. Both women/moms end up getting pregnant again and both had sons born within a few days of each other.) But why this whole story is related to this post is because Jane returns to Australia a couple of different times during the book and she always talks about the plane rides and drawing maps of the voyages and trying to cross off all the time zones she was travelling through on the back of the Qantas napkin. I loved those parts of the book. I wish I had my copy of the book here (it's in Toronto) to give the exact quote but she wrote this line I just loved about always wishing she knew or could tell the exact moment the plane crossed the equator, so that she could know when she was back on the other side.

It wasn't until I was in Santiago that I realized the word (and country) "Ecuador" means equator in Spanish. C. visited Ecuador once and told me how the equator passes right through the country. She even went to a place where you can stand with one foot on one side of the equator and one foot of the other. So cool! It's like when you can stand on a state/province line and have your feet in two different places at once. A long time ago when we were at school together, N. told me how in Basel, Switzerland, France, Germany and Switzerland all meet. He showed me a picture of himself standing in the exact spot the three countries meet. When I did my exchange to France in the winter/spring of 1999, my dad came to visit me at one point and we went to Switzerland. At N.'s recommendation I made us visit Basel and I also have a picture of me (wish I remembered where it is) of me standing at the place where the three countries meet.  Going back to Ecuador, I really want to visit the country, and specifically the equator one day.

In Paris, I knew this guy named P. who was from Bogotá. His sister J. came to visit during the summer and I hung out with them both a few times. I was telling them how much I loved the long long days and she told me that in Bogotá, because it's so close to the equator, it gets dark around 6 pm (give or take) the whole year. She said the dark would make her tired, and that sometimes she'd go to bed at 6:30 pm and sleep 12 hours until it got light again the next morning. It was so interesting to me that for her, being in Paris in May, June and July was not only an adjustment for the language, etc. etc. but also for the long long days when she was used to darkness by early evening. Having long days in the summer and short days in the winter is so engrained in my mind I don't think I could ever get used to the length of day and night being more or less the same the whole year through.

I like how Jane Alison called the Northern Hemisphere "the other side." It does sort of seem like the two hemispheres are other sides. At the end of our semester in Santiago, Chile, C. and I took a 2 week long trip to Argentina, with a 3 day side trip to Uruguay. While in Montevideo, we went to this museum about an Uruguyan artist named Joaquín Torres García. In the gift shop there was this amazing poster (see picture below this paragraph) of an upside down (to me, but not to some people from South America) map of South America. You can't see it in this picture but there was a quote on the map that said "nuestro norte es el sur" (our north is the south). I've always liked that because it shifts the accepted centres of power and says that just because people in the Northern Hemisphere believe something does not mean those in the Southern Hemisphere necessarily believe it too.

I have new found affection for the Southern Hemisphere. I think my dislike of Chile in 2005 caused me to not like the Southern Hemisphere in general that much, mostly because I pretty much only knew Chile in the Southern Hemisphere and because June was such a dark, cold and awful month in Santiago, so different from June in the Northern Hemisphere. But now I like the Southern Hemisphere so much more. I've realized that just because I don't like Chile, I love Argentina (especially Buenos Aires) and it is also in the Southern Hemisphere. I've been there in its winter (July) and I still loved it. I also really liked New Zealand and it is also 'on the other side.' I'm glad to discover the great things about the Southern Hemisphere. I think it's so fascinating that the globe does have these two sides that are opposites of each other. And I still really want to go to Ecuador (and Bogotá, and look below in Uganda too!) and see the middle.

Stickers for Everyone!

I was a great sticker collector as a kid. I had multiple sticker albums, their whereabouts I wish I knew now. It would be so fun to find them, and to see how much (or how little) stickers have changed between now and then. I don’t remember them that well but I do know that I liked to organize them by fuzzy stickers and shiny stickers. I think I liked the fuzzies better, which is interesting because now I think I prefer shinies. I used to bring my sticker albums to school and would sometimes make trades with friends.

From about aged 10 through age 23, I used stickers occasionally, but definitely not regularly. Then, one day in the fall of 2007 I was in a Target in Austin and saw some Disney Princess stickers and knew I just had to buy them. Thus my love of stickers was reignited. To my delight, I discovered in the early spring of 2010 that the Sandylion sticker company had a factory store in Markham, Ontario a two minute drive (almost directly across the street) from the Seneca campus in Markham where I worked. On the day of my students’ final in April, I went to Seneca early so that I could go to the Sandylion store. Almost three years later I feel in some ways that I have barely made a dent in the stickers I bought that day. Well, that’s not totally true. I bought some Princess Tiana stickers which I used up pretty quickly and a few other Disney stickers but those ones were in sheets. I made the mistake of buying entire rolls of stickers (though to be fair that was what was for sale) and those take a long time to get through.

I’m not surprised I bought so many that day though since I am always on the look out for stickers. The Japanese make awesome stickers, which is not surprising since as I wrote about before, Tokyo has the best stationery store I have ever seen. That store had lots of cool stickers including some of a Japanese version of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (which I of course bought.) In retrospect, I should have bought more stickers but it had been less than a month since I had gone to the Sandylion factory store and so I knew I really didn’t need that many more. In June 2011, I went to New York City to hang out primarily with L. and J. The first day I was there though, I spent a really fun day with N. (who was in town for the week) doing lots of things including going to this Japanese stationery/book store and buying stickers. I bought two packs of stickers – one exclusively of panda bears (really cute!) and the other a mixture of animals. Even though I am not a huge animal lover in real life, I love animal stickers. They are so cute! I have some fuzzy green frog ones I bought at the Sandylion store that I really like too.
 

In addition to animal stickers, I also like flower stickers, especially roses. Fruit stickers are really great, especially strawberry stickers. I even stuck one on my laptop. I also have lots of heart stickers which I really enjoy too. Then of course, the most ubiquitous stickers in my current collection (no more albums for me; now they stay on their sheets or rolls until I use them) are Disney Princesses. I have both sheets with only one princess – like Snow White stickers (which will include the dwarves and the prince), Ariel stickers (which always include Flounder but actually, interestingly, never include Prince Eric) – and sheets with all the princesses.  

Prince Eric

What I have come to appreciate over the past five years in which I have continually been buying and using stickers is that stickers are absolutely not just for kids. One time when I was at Central Market in Austin, the cashier’s nametag was all decorated with stickers. I told her I really liked it and she told me that she had had to decorate her nametag cause she didn’t know what else to do with her stickers! So while stickers are definitely liked by adults and kids, I think adults have a harder time finding use for their stickers. I almost exclusively use my stickers to decorate envelopes (and occasionally postcards although I’ll usually only just put one or max two) when I send letters. I like to think that the post people find my envelopes very cheerful. I love decorating envelopes and lots of people I’ve sent sticker covered mail too have told me how much they like them. Just looking through my current sticker collection always makes very cheerful. If you haven’t used stickers in a while, go buy some. I feel confident they will add some cheer to your life too.

Christmas Decoration Ennui

As a little girl I was always so so excited for Christmas. Like most kids, I remember having difficulty falling asleep on Christmas Eve and waking up super early on Christmas morning. I loved going down the stairs to the living room where my mom had laid out all my presents. Over the past maybe 10 even 15 years, I’ve gotten less and less into Christmas. I still like it in a general way – because it’s a break, because I usually go on a holiday somewhere warm (I remember when I was little always finding it so odd that the hotels we’d visit in the Caribbean would have Christmas trees. Warm tropical weather and Christmas trees just did not go together in my mind. All the Christmas carols about winter wonderlands had permanently ingrained in my mind the idea that Christmas trees belong in cold snowy environs), because Christmas lights are very pretty – and particularly I love seeing my aunt and uncle who drive to Toronto from Annapolis just before Christmas every year. My mom also makes the most delicious and amazing linzer torte (using her secret Hungarian recipe) every year. But to be honest, I don’t have any desire to participate in Christmas decorations, trees, etc. 

I actually feel guilty for not liking Christmas more because it is important to my mom, and because in a lot of ways it’s a very nice holiday. But at the same time, I feel no attachment to trees or decorations. Over the month of December, it seemed every store or restaurant I visited in Montreal had put up Christmas decorations. D. and I were eating at Burger de Ville (such good burgers! And vanilla milkshakes! If you’re in Montreal and like those things, go there! And thanks to H. for the recommendation!) recently and as we were putting on our coats to leave, I noticed with surprise that there were Christmas decorations. I remarked on this to D. and he replied along the lines of “what do you expect?/of course they do! It’s almost Christmas!” Not only was D. right, but I had to admit that the decorations were a nice touch. I think I have to accept that I am someone who has zero desire to put up Christmas decorations, yet enjoys admiring them.

To people who love Christmas what I am about to say probably sounds awful, but while I think Christmas trees are very pretty (especially with coloured lights and lots of ornaments) I don’t think I would mind if I didn’t have one. Maybe it’s just that right now I haven’t had to actually face a Christmas without a tree because my parents always get one. Hmmm, maybe I should take back my earlier statement. Maybe I would mind if we didn’t have one. When I eventually have my own house, then I will get a tree but for now, I am content with just occasionally seeing the tree and noting its prettiness without giving it much more thought. 

I’m the same with Halloween. No desire to put up decorations or dress up and I can’t remember the last time I was involved with carving a pumpkin. Although I do still distinctly remember and actually kind of like the smell and feel of pumpkin seeds being pulled out of the pumpkin. It’s not that I don’t like holidays or celebrating – I love Valentine’s Day because I love hearts, the colours pink and red, and heart shaped cookies with pink icing. I also love birthdays! I want to celebrate my own and all my friends’ birthdays every year. So I am into holidays, I’m just not into putting up decorations.

Regardless of my opinions on trees and decorations, I agree that the December holiday season is a wonderful time of year. Whether you are into Christmas decorations or not (or even celebrate Christmas), I hope you have a very happy holiday season!

Thoughts on Book Clubs

When I moved to Montreal at the end of August 2010, I was sad that I wasn't going to get to join A's book club. A. had just joined one when I left and it sounded really good. There were about 6-7 women and they met every 6 weeks to two months at a different person's house to discuss whatever book they had picked. A. has told me some of the books they've read and a lot of them have been books I've either read or have wanted to read. When I eventually do move back to Toronto, if that book club still exists, I am looking forward to joining it.

I have never been in a book club, and I am very curious about them. I wonder how much I would like them? I know I would like them if I could choose who exactly would be in it, but I am more hesitant about being in a book club with strangers. Suppose I don't get along with some of the people in it? Or find them annoying? (My desire to try one out outweighs my hesitation however, and so I will join A's if I am still invited.) I wish so much that 1. all of my favourite people and best friends lived in the same place and 2. that we could be in a book club together :)

I already do kind of have quasi-book clubs going on. For a while (and I guess it still exists but we haven't read a book in a really long time) I was in a celebrity book club with M. and E. We read really bad (but fun to read books) like Tori Spelling's So noTORIous and MommyWood. Then we'd go for Indian food and talk about the books. Hmmm, once I move back to Toronto we definitely need to get that book club back in full swing too. Once I received a letter from N. in which she expressed how much she liked "our informal book club." That made me so happy because I hadn't thought to label it like that but we do have a sort of informal book club going on! Every year I give N. a book for her birthday (which is soon, December 14th and I still haven't chosen which book I am going to give her this year!) and she usually gives me one for mine. I always try to read the book she gave me relatively soon after my birthday and then I love discussing it with her. In January 2006 I read the first of many books I've read by Haruki Murakami - Norwegian Wood - and to my delight later that spring I found out that N. was a big Murakami fan. I remember very clearly one bright sunny June day in the last June I spent in Berkeley meeting up with N. and going for a walk over all northside, including to the Berkeley Rose Garden, and having a long and wonderful conversation with her about Murakami.

Finally, S. and I really and truly have book ESP! I finished Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (which is one of my very favourite books) in early June 2007. I told S. about it the next time we talked on the phone, and was going to urge her to read it soon when she told me she had actually read it a few months earlier. The same thing happened this summer when I read Ann Patchett's latest book State of Wonder and wanted S. to read it too so we could discuss, only for her to tell me (again) that she already had earlier in the summer. I know the same thing has happened a few other times too. How cool! The best part is we can then discuss the book right away without having to wait for one of us to read it.

 

Another cool idea is what my friend H.'s sister N. did: she had a virtual book club where she and two friends would meet for bi-monthly gchats about a book they'd all read. That is a very good idea and something I might actually try to get going one day.

When I was in high school, I really liked Oprah's Book Club. In fact, in grade 12 I wrote a whole essay comparing different books from Oprah's Book Club, discussing which themes were present in all, etc. Sometimes when I would tell people I liked Oprah's Book Club picks or read articles about it, there was this underlying current of disdain. Some people (mostly male) dismissed Oprah's Book Club as having only lightweight books or books that only women would like (as opposed to the really serious and important books that men like to read). That kind of thinking still makes me angry! Especially because it couldn't be farther from the truth. I still think Jonathan Franzen is an arrogant and obnoxious person for criticizing Oprah's Book Club when his novel The Corrections was an Oprah pick. For reasons I can't fathom now I actually read The Corrections and for what it's worth, although I read it over 10 years ago, I can't remember a single thing about the book (which is not the case for plenty of other of books I read 10 years ago or longer.) Jonathan Franzen's dismay at being   associated with Oprah's Book Club just struck me as so ridiculous. A. (a different one than above) is a huge Oprah fan and told me about the interview Jonathan Franzen finally did give to Oprah a few years ago when (for whatever reason... Oprah is too nice!) Oprah chose his novel Freedom as a pick in her book club. A. told me that Jonathan Franzen had a good excuse for his behaviour (the excuse unfortunately now escapes me) and he and Oprah got along well. I still hold a grudge though (Oprah: why are you hugging him in the picture below?!?), and have zero desire to ever read Freedom.

 

The bottom line is that I love reading and I love discussing books with other people. And whether I am in a book club or not, I am always going to keep reading books and wanting to discuss them with others.

The best part about fridges? The magnets!

 While I think new modern kitchens are great, I find fridges without magnets so sad. The stainless steel fridges I've seen close up are always big and very nice and exude this clean, sleek look. But I really can't imagine ever having a kitchen with one. (Although check out this website -  it gives tips on how to get around the whole stainless steel no magnets thing.) I am just too attached to my magnets. I don't understand what the company who made the first stainless steel non-magnetic fridges was thinking. Wasn't there anybody there who stood up for magnets? Fridges without them are just too bare.

I'm not sure when my obsession with magnets started but it really is a full-blown obsession (although to be fair it has perhaps cooled a bit over the past year). I have so many magnets! They make kitchens seem cheerful and are also very fun to look at.  I like to buy them when I go on trips and so I have a cool collection from all over the world. I have also searched sites like Etsy and other random sites for magnets and have ordered them off the internet on multiple occasions. In addition to magnets with place names or pictures of the places I've visited and really liked, I also like magnets that mean something. For example, I have this cheesy magnet of a piece sign made out of flowers which I really like. S. gave me one while we were at Berkeley which is a picture of a woman and says "Talk to me..." I love that one! I have another one that says "Hearst College" which is the fictional university Veronica Mars attended. Unsurprisingly, I ordered that one online. From the same site, I ordered a black magnet that says "Louisiana is for Vampires" a shout out to Charlaine Harris and the wonderful vampires of Bon Temps, Louisiana. I also ordered magnets with pictures of Disney Princesses from someone on Etsy; and one of my favourite magnets is of Michelle Obama which I bought at the DC airport.

I have very mixed feelings about my current apt. The bathroom and kitchen are sooo small - like so small that I whenever I open the fridge I hit the pots that are hanging on a pot rack. I have gotten very very used to the sound of clanging pots and pans. My fridge is not too small but it's definitely smaller than all the fridges I've had in any other apt I've ever lived in (except Paris... which makes sense because I do think my apt is quite European. From the moment I found it it reminded me of apts I saw in Paris, except sadly not as nice :( ). All my magnets and pictures and all the things I had on the fridge in my old apt didn't even fit on this one, and what's worse is that because of how cramped the kitchen is D. (and sometimes me but to a much lesser extent) knocks magnets off the fridge and on to the floor. My poor magnets do not like it.

They, like I, dream about a gorgeous kitchen with huge windows letting in lots of light, a double sink with a window behind it so I can always look outside while doing the dishes, an island in the middle which I could use alternatively as extra counter space while cooking or as an extra table while eating, a double stove so I could be baking two different things at the same time, a breakfast nook right by the window with a table and comfortable chairs, and a big glorious fridge covered with magnets. One day...

Yeah I know you warned me but this is too important

One evening in Cheney Hall, my dorm first year at Berkeley, in the early spring of 2003, S. and I ended up in these two guys - E. and F. - on our floor's room playing that game UNO. Anyway, E. was playing The Strokes' album Is This It. Other than "Last Nite" I hadn't heard any Strokes songs and hadn't been that interested in the band. That all changed that fateful night. The music was so good! E. kindly agreed to burn me a copy of the cd and for the next 7 months, I listened to that cd non-stop. I remember so distinctly walking across campus to class one day in April 2003 listening to Is This It on my discman (oh yeah!) and realizing how happy I was. It was a great feeling and one I realized I had really really missed feeling my entire last year of high school. It was a gorgeous day - really sunny and Berkeley's campus was super green - and the Strokes were awesome and I was so glad I was done with UTS and happily living my life on the other side of the continent.

In September 2003, L. and I started hanging out all the time. So naturally I asked her if she wanted to go see The Strokes with me when they came to San Francisco in October. Despite not really knowing their music that well, she agreed.We went along with 3 other girls (including S.) on October 21, 2003. The show was at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium (really just this big room more than an auditorium) and Regina Spektor and then Kings of Leon were the opening acts (which is funny because L & I became huge Kings of Leon fans 2 years later but that night we just wanted them to finish so the Strokes would come on). That was the best show I had ever attended at that point in my life and definitely still among the top 3 best shows I've ever been to (the other two being Broken Social Scene in DC in November 2006 and Kings of Leon in Paris in June 2007). Usually I would be shy at shows and just kind of stand there (I still usually do that now... :) ) but that show was different. We were really packed in, we were close to the front and to the Strokes, we were all dancing and singing along to the songs we knew - it was so fun!! It also solidified L and I's friendship because after that show we became even closer.

For the next week both L and I listened to Is This It on repeat and then on October 28th the Strokes' second album (which they played most of the songs on at the show) Room on Fire came out. Room on Fire will always always always be my favourite Strokes album and one of my favourite albums in general. I played it constantly and could still probably tell you every word on it, despite not listening to it much recently. If I were to be stranded on a desert island and could only take 5 albums, it would be on the list. If I could only take one, I'd probably take it just because I know I don't get sick of it and because even 9 years later, I still think it's really great.

That album was also the soundtrack to a particularly intense period of my life. I was 19, almost 20, and finally felt like I knew and understood something about life and intense romantic feelings (super cheesy but true!). The title of this blog post comes from the third song on Room on Fire Automatic Stop. I always felt, even at the time, like B., right from the start, warned me things didn't have the same meaning for him but that I couldn't help feeling those things anyway because to me, all these new and exciting feelings, just felt too important. And even 9 years later, that time in my life is still important to me and I still think that line applies really well. 

In my last semester at Berkeley in spring 2006, the Strokes' 3rd album - First Impressions of Earth - came out. I used to listen to it (now on my ipod) every day as I walked from my apt to North Gate and then across campus to my Portuguese class. I liked it but it didn't have anywhere near the same appeal or instant obsession to it as Is This It or Room on Fire had. L. and I went to see them again in San Francisco in March 2006 but I remember more about walking to BART and then walking home to my apt once we got back to Berkeley in the rain more than I remember the actual show... And so while I still considered the Strokes one of my favourite bands by summer 2006, I had stopped actively listening to them. 

In late 2009, Julian Casablancas released a solo album. There was an article about him in the NY Times at the time, which I read with interest and even forwarded to L., but for some reason which is beyond me I didn't even think to buy his cd. I think if it had been a Strokes cd I would have definitely bought it but even though Julian Casablancas was - and always will be - my favourite Stroke, I just wasn't that interested in buying it. That all changed in the summer of 2010, though, when M. gave me a bunch of music, his solo album included. I loved it - especially the first three songs which I listened to over and over. I instantly felt remorse that I hadn't supported Julian enough in the fall and I remember spending one summer evening in my living room reading article after article about him (and getting more and more intrigued) as the light faded outside. 

In March 2011, the Strokes released their first album in 5 years. I like it a lot. I didn't listen to it anywhere near as much as I listened to any of their other albums but it definitely had that distinctive Strokes sound which I had missed the last 5 years. I listened to it a lot at first but I don't often listen to it now and I rarely listen to the whole thing through (I like the first 5 songs way better than the last 5) but the worst part is that L. (although her little brother bought her the cd, how sweet!) didn't really like it that much. That was the worst part because it made it clear that the period in our lives when the Strokes was both of our favourite band was really and truly over.

Sometimes it seems sad my obsession with them is over but what's sadder in a way is that L. and I don't have that obsession together anymore. It makes sense though because I don't get as intense about bands in the way I did when I was 19 and 20. I think that's just part of growing up. And while L. and I may not be discussing and/or listening to the Strokes non-stop anymore, we're a) discussing other things and b) will always have that time in our lives to be happy about.

Before I end, just for fun, here is a list of my top 6 (I couldn't pick just 5) favourite Strokes songs (in no particular order and this was so hard, I pretty much like every song on Is This It and Room on Fire) 1. Reptilia 2. What Ever Happened? 3.  The End Has No End 4. Is This It 5.  Hard to Explain and 6. Automatic Stop
Happy Listening!!