My sister's big guns

My oldest sister, the light-eyed blonde of the family, has legs up to her neck. She's the only one of us to ever have abs (or boobs, really), and she can make you beg for mercy in a matter of seconds, regardless of your gender. That's the power of her honed-to-perfection one-handed, joint-crushing finger-squeeze.

Hate her with me: She's a tall, slender mother-of-one enjoying the simple life in a beautiful home on an unspoiled lake in Nova Scotia with her handsome husband and lovable 14-year-old son, with whom she makes regular trips to Mexico.

When I call from my modest apartment in Montreal to tell her I'll be squatting a slice of her waterfront property soon, she laughs at me. Either she doesn't know I'm serious, or she knows she can run me off with the threat of her one-handed, joint-crushing finger-squeeze. Or, her gun. Oh yeah. Her gun.

Mrs. Leggy-Blonde-Scrapbooking-Tupperware-Momma is a dead shot. She fly-fishes, hunts wildfowl and deer (and did so while pregnant), and once pulled her own tooth because it was more convenient than driving to Halifax for emergency dental surgery. "Besides," she said, "it was the weekend and they would've overcharged". Not only does my sister know how to save a buck, she swings an axe with grace, can pluck a duck, and does Mensa puzzles for fun. If you beat her at Boggle, she'll whip up some shortbread as your reward.

Are you a well-read survivalist thinking my sister might be the perfect woman? Well, let me confirm that for you: she also brews her own beer.

There you have it. Nature clearly trumps nurture. Perhaps the only thing we share in common (aside from our love of Mexico and wanting to live on her property) is our sense of humour, which is the only reason I think I can get away with writing about her here (Hi Ninner!). That, and the fact that I still totally look up to her.

Better than fuzzity, way better

So what if she wears ass-pancaking beige capris with white socks and puts her make-up on in the dark? I like her. This woman was ahead of me in line at Videotron, renting Sandra Bullock's entire filmography (which I'm willing to overlook in this context only), when she took a few selfless moments to make my day.

Lately, I've been feeling invisible, as though I exist only to field non-stop, unvarying questions about what is apparently, by neighbourhood consensus, "the-cutest-puppy-in-the-world". I've been fostering her thanks to a local assistance-canine training program.

People are drawn to her like crazed, moronic zombies. They stumble toward us, their arms extended forward and hands grabbing at air, babbling unintelligibly. All I can make out are words like "toutou-ou-ou" and "fuzzity-wuzzity" and "puppy-wuppy". It's so disturbing, I started taking less-populated side streets.

My puppy's been stalked and fondled by many a Montrealer this past month (including members of most Montreal bands you know), mentioned in "Missed Connections" on Craigslist, even serenaded by the schizophrenic busker outside our neighbourhood budget grocery store. More than anything, people wanted to know her name, but never mine. Twice, I was asked for her phone number, for dog dates. Truer than ever before (and I have significant experience with the phenomenon), I'm the pretty girl's best friend. She gets all the attention, even though she's a bitch.

So, when the woman in the unflattering pants at the video store overlooked my puppy and asked me if my "gorgeous hair" was natural, or, to please tell her where I'd gotten it done, I was willing to overlook her poor taste in clothes and movies, take her compliment and run.

"So there," I said to my puppy on the walk home, with a sneer. "My hair is way better than fuzzity-wuzzity."

Trashing my neighbour

My neighbour, while fairly cute, is a procrastinator. Or maybe he's lazy. Or standard-issue stupid. I think I'll stick with stupid, because he's really pissing me off right now, and the only way I can excuse him is to think that he just doesn't realize that the bag of trash he left in the hallway outside his door isn't going to take itself to the curb.

I wouldn't be so passive-aggressive if this was his first offence, but it's not, and his sack of crap's been ripening there for five days now, which happens to be the exact number required to awaken the beast within me - the passive-aggressive ogre I lulled into a coma at the end of my last long-term relationship.

The silver lining is that it's not full of cat litter this time, that and he's not my boyfriend, but I still have to deal with his garbage. Deposited en route from my door to the building's main exit, the trash wafts its gnarly fumes into my nostrils several times daily. While I want it gone, there is no way in the hell that is paper-thin-walls-apartment-living, that I am going to get rid of it for him, because if he came to expect that from me, then I might have to kill him.

I don't want to risk starting a feud, and I despise confrontation, so I've decided to send an anonymous message that I'm not pleased with his contribution to our shared space, without outing myself as one of the building's few Anglophones. So, yesterday, under the cover of night, I drew a sad face on a piece of printer paper, and taped it to the bag. That'll teach him, I thought.

Honestly, I'd expected for him to take the hint and politely throw the bag out this morning, not push it to the center of the hallway, the sad face greeting me first thing today, which I read to mean, "It's on." So, this post is my unofficial, indirect, passive-aggressive warning to my jerk neighbour that, if the trash isn't gone by the end of today, I'll be taping an angry face to the bag tonight. Oh yeah.

Better bedtimes to come, surely

There's a bull penis in my bed and it smells awful. That's my situation.

My friend Mike would say I'm telling you this because I'm from a small town - just like the one he's from, but a few miles down the coast of Nova Scotia and minus several thousand people. Since the fishery died, not much happens outside of lobster season, so living there, we learned to self-entertain by perverting the mundane into pseudo-events worth talking about, though worthiness is debatable. Leaving out just the right important details, a skill passed from generation to generation of Maritimer, is something we do if only to force you to say, "What!?", so we can keep talking.

Now I live in Montreal - an overwhelmingly magnificent city with a population literally 10,000 times that of my hometown - where real scandals happen all the time. I could tell you about any of them, but old habits die hard and I just want to prattle on about the crusty old bull penis in my bed. The dog jumped up to chew it there. Arguably once the ultimate symbol of male fertility, it's now a dried up stick of rawhide, and it stinks.

At the pet store yesterday, I was reading its list of ingredients at the cash and got as far as, "All-natural, free-range, organic..." before the clerk cut in to say, "...bull penis. Trust me, you'll want to double-bag that sucker."

Now my dog has penis breath, and for the official record that is everlasting web archives, my bed has seen better days.

My lease, my money, and my what?

My spray-tanned building manager isn't mad at me anymore, or so he says. That's great news, because what it would've taken to make him happy, I'm really not into, and I'll need him as a reference later.

He's wished me dead since December, but I hadn't spoken to him for months and didn't know, so I was confused when he formally forgave me just this week.

"I want you to know, I'm not mad at you anymore," he announced, and paused, allowing me a chance to apologize, to redeem myself to him. Instinctively, since I was in his office asking him for a favour, I thought it best to play along. "I'm sorry," I said. But it didn't feel right, and I wasn't convincing because I had no idea for what.

"When you didn't call me back, I was really hurt," he went on, the air was viscous with melodrama, bitter with cologne. "I called you twice, and nothing. Nothing."

I had a flashback: It was winter and I'd just returned from Belize, where I'd unexpectedly extended my stay. I was there assisting a moderately renowned artist / Rastafari-turned-Freemason / alcoholic sociopath with customer relations, to beef up my resume while on the road. My building manager helped stave off the rent-hungry landlord until I got back. Having deflected all flack for the delay, I thought he deserved a little Belizean treat, and since the only thing I enjoyed about the country was the food, I brought him satchels of dry rub seasonings.

Before arriving in his office that snowy day in December, we'd never met. I'd never seen his portly frame dressed in fuchsia, his seemingly polished, hairless egg of a head, or his series of chins. Still, I somehow managed to bring him the perfect gift, because thanks to divine coincidence, he's a foodie. Enthralled, he kept the conversation rolling for an hour, until I impressed him by talking red wine, which is when he made his pitch.

"I'm going to take you to Laval's best kept secret, an incredible French bistro," he declared. It wasn't a question or an invitation so much as an obligation. It was an awkward moment I hadn't seen coming, and I knew, with every centimeter of my being, driving to the suburbs alone with my middle-aged building manager would be even more risky and unpleasant than going back to Belize.

"Ooooh, that sounds nice, thanks," I lied, "but I am going to Nova Scotia for the holidays." I sighed, using the sound of my relief to have a legitimate excuse, to help fake disappointment. A few days later, before I made my escape, he left me voicemail, "I have something for you. Call me."

From that moment, until I caught my plane to the safe, remote village that is my hometown, the ring of my phone was an air raid siren. Whenever it sounded, I'd cover my head and, filled with anxiety and dread, pray for it to end. That was back in December, and I'd forgotten all about the incident, but my building manager hadn't.

"I bought you a nice bottle of wine," he said, "but you never called me back, so I drank it."

This man manages tens of large buildings with hundreds of tenants, and yet he bought me, little old late-cheque-sending me, a present. Surely his intentions weren't pure, but still, this man will be my primary reference when I apply to rent a new apartment, so I need to handle his pride with care. I trapped him into admitting he enjoyed drinking the wine without me, and then heckled him a little for bothering to call me, when he is so clearly out of my league. It's all about angle.

Thinking I'd won and could leave, our respective pride and virtue intact, I thanked him for his time.

"Maybe we could still share a bottle of red sometime," he blurted. I had nothing left. No defence. No possibility of witty evasion. The air in his office so thick, we were stuck. Ten full seconds, or heartbeats, or swallows passed before we each, simultaneously, drew out a long uncomfortable, "Ooooooooooo-kay."

I turned the knob, pulled the door open and left, not sure which of us was responsible for allowing that final, terrible moment to happen, and praying there won't be another air raid any time soon.