Poor Stephen Harper

I just felt really bad for him, you know, at that summit with Mr. Hip Vincente Fox and Mr. Cool George W. And there he was, the nerdy cousin, with the inappropriate cargo vest.

The film footage is sad, too, because you can see he is right in W's face the whole time. He TOTALLY wants to be best friends with him, but George is all, I am sorry brother, but I already have a best friend and his name is Tony Blair.

Great! Like how in the hell is Stephen Harper, cammo vest wearer from Canada ever going to hope to compete with Tony G-dam Blair, with the cool English accent. Are you trying to tell me that W. is not a Bond fan?! Because I won't believe it if you are. And Vincente and George are talking about quesadillas and salsa and Stephen Harper tries to chime in with something about how strong Canadian beer is, but no one really cares because they are tired of Canadians playing the "strong beer" card.

So then, to shup Stephen up, Vincente (and let's face it, he's kinda rubbing it in, with his closeness to George) says something about clubbing a baby seal over the head and all of a sudden it gets real quiet.

But still, I just feel bad for him though because his suitcase was probably filled with bottles of maple syrup and hockey trading cards and maybe a Hudson's Bay blanket and most people just aren't that impressed with that stuff. (They would rather have liquor and cigarettes from the duty free, I say that, if you're a traveller, just so you know.) Especially the leader of the free world. Like he's seen a lot of this stuff already. Maple syrup is no big whoop to him at all.

Stephen will keep on trying though. Count on that.

I am even awkward on the internet

Doesn't it seem like everyone on the internet knows each other?

Case in point:
You read someone's Blog post, and the comments always seem so familiar. Despite the seeming familiarity and out of a desperate need to "fit in", I chime in with my "witty" comment and then hit post and read it and surrounded by everyone else's funny and appropriate comments, mine, which seemed really funny at the time I wrote it in the typepad box, now seems not very funny and weirdly inappropriate. And I imagine the other commenters who really are all friends are reading it thinking "who is this suburby chick and why does she leave such weird comments?"

Plus what is it with being taken off someone's blogroll!

That has happened to me a lot. And I will tell you this -- it feeds right into my Imposter Syndrome problem. RIGHT INTO IT.

I have been taken off more Blogrolls than I have been put on.

Thanks a lot, Al Gore. Thank you very much.

Last Book Club was Chez Moi (that means 'at my house'. Well, why didn't you just say 'at my house' then?)

Please allow me to set the scene.

Me, your heroine, on death's doorstep as a result of what the doctor called a "fairly nasty looking sore throat". FAIRLY nasty. The prescription I had for an antibiotic did not stop me from fulfilling my obligations as Book Club hostess. Nor did it stop me from loading my fat ass into my small SUV (4 cylinder--not a gas pig!) to drive to M&M to buy food for the Book Club ingrates.

I will start by telling you that the book we reviewed was "A Million Little Pieces" by Mr. Street Cred according to his Mom, James Frey. The dude is almost as Street as Carson Daly.

I will tell you what I told the book club ladies. I liked the book a lot for the first 3/4 of it. Then I started to notice the phoniness and the uni-dimensionality of the supporting cast. And I admitted it took me until I was three-quarters of the way through to notice this!

I said I'd have the same problems with the characters if the book were sold as a novel.

The ladies all disagreed with me...they all loved it and argued that they didn't expect any actual truth from a memoir. What they expected was "his truth as he remembered it" "His version of the events". Just FYI, in my memoir I am going to remember I was Mrs. Johnny Depp and I created Linux.

What about truth on a book tour, where he's talking about all these things happening to him as having actually happened in interviews? Where journalists ask him what was it like to be in jail, etc. And he said stuff like "Oh man, jail is hard!" (Like he'd know!)

Their answer? Silence. Then 10 minutes later they start talking about how they haven't seen me be so bitchy before. Apparently holding a different point of view and expressing said p.o.v. and thinking that the truth matters makes one bitchy.

(Didn't anyone else have those great arguments in university that would go on and on over bottles of wine and people would be disagreeing like crazy and even yelling, but it was okay to have a different point of view, it was even kinda good to...anyone remember that?)

and then...

one bad, bad woman who I really don't know well, but that didn't seem to stop her from scarfing down my hot hors d'oeuvres said, smugly...

"Well, I'd like to know what you thought of the book BEFORE you heard that Oprah didn't like it".

And then, in my mind, I quit the book club. But not before I grabbed those goddam cream cheese and sundried tomato puffs out of her fat little hand. (also in my mind).

Agree with me, or the baby seal gets it!

As a Canadian you really have to keep your eye on me. I could start clubbing baby seals at any time.

I hate the seal hunt, but did you see Larry King last night? I didn't. The whole topic upsets me so much. But I did flip past a couple of times, forgetting it was on, and at one point I flipped past just as Larry was asking "Why do they have to club them?"

Fucked if I know!

Besides the absolute unmitigated fucking HORROR of the whole thing, it really makes Canadians look like sickos. It's like we are the crazy serial killer neighbour who always attended the summer block party and seemed so nice with his kids and his homemade donuts, then it turns out he's been doing horrible things in his basement for years and you didn't know about it until he was 5/O'd on t.v.

By goddam Paul McCartney of all people! Who, some people tell me was in a band before Wings.