burning up the blogosphere right now is the hotly-contested issue of haute couture in men’s fashion.  the key issue seems to be the “recent” re-introduction of men’s tights as a fashion statement in the 21st century.

my esteemed friend seems to feel that tights for men would be the worst thing since pictures of post-pregnancy britney spears, but i say different.  there are many fashionable men who have been able to pull of the tights-only look, and i for one would be proud to follow in their footsteps - men like nureyev, or baryshnikov, or this handsome fellow.

the biggest concern seems to come from women, who are concerned i think that tights for men would denegrate men or make them less appealing somehow.  that may be true. but what about the rest of us who slave away in the gym five days a week, or who have had years of ballet training, with plies and jettes and all sort of thigh- and calf-enhancing exercises “under our belts” so to speak.  why should i be deprived of the joy that women have of wearing something tight and revealing and then scoffing at the way women are staring at my body?

i think the REAL issue here is one of a sexual balance of power.  women have earned the right to be the objects of desire and attraction through an endless history of having been hounded, abused, terrorized and otherwise subjugated for being that very object of desire.  it’s fairly wrong, in my mind at least, for a man to seek to usurp a woman’s control over the domaination of men’s thoughts by seeking to turn the tables.  men are best understood as creatures of lust and consumate hunger and less well-understood as objects of desire.  i think. 

of course, i don’t really believe any of this.  i think the biggest problem is the “battle of the bulge”.  it seems "gross" in our traditional view of the male aesthetic.  but this betrays an obvious double-standard of the sexes where women are perpetually judged on the state of their “bulges” and men seek continuously to leave their own a mystery.  maybe it’s time in the evolution of sexuality to “level” the playing field in this regard.  if only there were shoes that a man could wear with tights that would not give the impression of being lost in neverland.

- g

ps.  i should cancel this post, rather than allowing it to see the light of day!

growing up in edmonton where almost all of the streets and avenues are sequentially numbered has left me with virtually no innate sense of direction and navigation. anytime i try and get anywhere in a city with named streets, i immediately get lost - my intuition gets confounded, i instinctively turn in exactly the wrong direction, and i end up taking three times longer to get anywhere than i should. last tuesday, i was trying to get to islington and queensway, which should have been a very easy place to get to, since i have driven there several times on my own. however, i thought that i could take a different path than the normal one (since we just received our first dose of real snow and ice in toronto last week) and i ended up in completely the wrong place. however, i was surprised to find myself in a kind of time-warped, historical version of toronto where the streets were tidily, logically, and most importantly sequentially numbered! first street was followed very predictably by second street, and by the time i reached twenty-sixth street, i knew i had no hope of getting to islington and queensway and i had to backtrack almost all the way home (making me half-an-hour late for my meeting with my friend) - but i knew i had to come back and explore this interesting place! my friend informed me that this was old toronto, properly old new toronto, and that it was full of colourful characteristics and stories.

logical guy that i am, i wanted to start my adventure at first street, work my way west along lakeshore boulevard, and see what the district had in store from there. but before i even got out of my car near first street, something caught my eye that i had not seen before. campbell’s soup has a factory here with a weird chimney/smokestack painted up like a can of their soup! this was so marvellously kitschy, it could not possibly have been done within the past 30 years!

as i wandered back across lakeshore to second street, something bright and shiny caught my eye from up the road. i followed along and quickly discovered lake ontario and the prince of wales park which overlooks the lake and has a pretty view of the downtown as well. i guess it was around this time that i realized that the reason lakeshore doesn’t get to queensway is that lakeshore diverges from the road to which i always thought it ran parallel - the gardiner expressway, and follows the lake southwesterly (hence, the clever name “lakeshore”). the proximity to the lake, the numbered streets, and all of the cutie brick houses, and the ease of commuting along the lakeshore all made me seriously consider moving out to this area. i thought of it, but then i was reminded of the stories my friend had told me about comic book stores that were fronts for the sale of LSD or pot or even worse drugs (back in the 60s). i like my nice safe neighbourhood where no one does anything bad.

and now begins the educational part of our program... working my way westward (although i thought i was going northward at the time, even though that would have been impossible given the streets i was crossing), i came across the new toronto fire station, #435. originally built in 1929, the firehall served new toronto, etobicoke (which absorbed new toronto in 1967, and now the city of toronto (which amalgamated etobicoke in 1998).

across the street from the fire station were these crazy row apartments that seemed to go on into infinity (but really just went on five or six sets). they reminded me of these rundown brick apartments back home near the methadone rehab clinics that people should be afraid to walk past (although these ones looked quite habitable).

new toronto’s primary industry was manufacturing - and its principal manufacturer was goodyear tire & rubber (which is ironic because i JUST looked up vulcanization the other day...having forgotten exactly what it was... which goodyear is reported to have patented). while the plant is gone today, in its place are a number of co-operative residences that were initiated by a group who were interested in reclaiming the brown space and making affordable housing in toronto - i am almost POSTIVE that i heard about this in a contemporary design course where urban design was the lecture topic. the residences are colourful and well constructed to provide a safe and neighbourhood-y feel. i felt somehow that these buildings were interesting and important - but it wasn’t until i got home and started doing more research that i discovered why.

my next stop through old new toronto was humber college. they have a lakeshore campus that is situated on a huge plot of land with an enormous park front (this is where i turned my car around last week to try and regain my bearings). the campus appears to be composed of a dozen or so historic schoolhouses that must be about a hundred years old, given that they all remind me of my old high school in alberta that is over a hundred years itself. the funny thing about all of these ancient brick schoolhouses is how many of the windows and doors were boarded up - i wonder about this whole humber college and whether it's really just a front for some kind of money-laundering scam.

this is also the site of another historical building, cumberland house, which is a historical victorian house that currently serves the purpose of a residential treatment centre for women with substance abuse problems. the house is magnificent with its glorious turret and elegant architecture - it literally drew me across a field just to have a better look at it.

there was a lot of architectural history in this area, a lot of which describes the lamentable state of our appreciation of important buildings. i passed a magnificent 50s building, reminding me of buildings that were the peaks of achievement in their day - now reduced to a humiliating state of disrepair to serve the beggared purpose of hosting a bargain store selling goods produced in off-shore slave-labour nations. a few tiles, some structural work, and a decent purpose would make such buildings priceless, but sometimes, like people, buildings are just in the wrong place and make the wrong choices of whom to consort with.

these adventures are frankly taking up a huge amount of time these days. maybe not as much as the actual adventures themselves, but almost as much. it’s dawned upon me that in this entire blog, no one has seen a good picture of me. so, for my parent’s sake, here’s a picture of me, in my (winter) adventuring get-up. it’s not quite indiana jones, but it’s served on these cold days in ottawa or toronto.
the other thing that struck me was that i had walked across half of etobicoke and all the way to mississauga by the end of my trek!! i mean, before this excursion, i barely understood where mississauga was!
another really amazing fact is that i went home afterwards and cycled 16km and ran another 5.7km. as i finish this blog entry, i realize that logged almost 30 self-propelled kilometers of trekking. i think i’ve earned a martini and a solid night’s sleep.

- g

adventure cost:
breakfast @ the philosopher : $7.75 + $2.25 gratuity
snack @ 7-11 (water & powerbar): $4.07
PCI-NIC to replace the one i thought i blew out on thursday changing fuses- $22.79

the evening started out at Marinela’s the Wedge, located conveniently across the street from imason.  when i arrived, half of the group was already there and thomas was already in good form, having had four drinks by the time my first martini arrived.  we were all there to celebrate the departure of one of the most talented and well-respected (and youngest) members of our imason family, nariman haghighi, who is taking a sabbatical from work to travel to south america and do humanitarian work.

last week’s adventure was profound and bore deep personal significance.  i think that i had implied that there were certain things that i thought were not “adventure worthy” - like shopping or clubbing.  the fact of the matter is that i’ve not been nightclubbing since my earlier university days.  yikes - to think about it, barring weddings and going out on dates, i’ve not just gone out with a bunch of friends for drinks and dancing for almost 14 years - a terrifying thought to count how many years i’ve been a “grown-up”.  last night was a significant moment in my history as a torontonian though, so that and my inaugural mass-party on the town makes it worthy of account i think - that and the fact that i dropped like $200 in a single night and probably can’t afford another adventure this weekend!!

after four martinis at the wedge (the tab was picked up by imason - making imason one of the best places i’ve ever worked!), it was time to move onto more nourishing fare.  the 24 or so of us headed over to the fat belgian on john and adelaide for a bite to eat.  but not before a cognac and another martini (that brings the drink count to 6 by 8pm). people flowed around the three big tables we occupied to mix and mingle and converse smoothly throughout the evening, and it was less like a company dinner and more like a family gathering - everyone sharing stories and laughing and joking.  oh, and there was food too - mussels, pasta, steak, chicken, salads, calamari, filo-wrapped-cheese, more mussels and everyone was exceedingly satisfied.

goncalo gave a toast of a sort to nariman and we all had shots to cheer him on to his new, extremely enviable adventure.  as a non-designated non-driver, i was elected by my table to consume the shots for those who were driving (drink count: 14 by 10pm) which started to dampen my ability to recollect specific episodes and conversations throughout the evening.  but there is one in particular that sticks out.  thomas (again with thomas) had decided while he was getting dressed in the morning that he would wear a zip-up tracksuit top to work.  there was some controversy about whether he had elected to wear a t-shirt underneath it, and much effort was spent throughout the evening to verify that he had not.  at one point, three or four imasons were engaged in wrestling thomas to unzip the mystery suit - but to his credit, thomas fended them all off, leaving the mystery of whether korean men have chest hair or not still unresolved.

around 10, it became clear that we were all becoming too gregarious for a classy dining establishment to contain - so it was off to the next and main event for the evening - the club.  we arrived at therapy lounge on richmond to find it virtually empty.  if our group were not still about 15-people strong, it would have been disheartening.  but we moved in to the main bar and took it over ordering what seemed to be endless round after round of jägermeister shots.  happily, i didn’t have to drink anyone else’s shots this time, so the drink count by 11 only climbed by another 6 or so to 20.

one really admirable quality of our company’s staff is their innate sense of rhythm and ability to dance to just about everything (although unlike back home, the dj never got around to playing cadillac ranch, so i was unable to determine whether line dancing was in their repertoire).  dancing dancing and more dancing... talking about running, travelling, dating... dancing dancing and more dancing.  i think that the pictures say it all.

i recall the first time i met nariman - it was during my second (the technical) interview with imason.  he was obviously a fiercely intelligent man with an incisive intellect and unparalleled capability to craft conversation that i’ve never seen before.  his whole presentation makes one rather believe in the evolution and mankind and the eminence of an intellectual elite - i am sure in a former life, he would have been a prince or a lord and he carries himself even in his drunken frivelous moments with regal dignity.  meeting him in the context of our interview - it was clear that his objective was to discover any weaknesses in my experience and abilities and discover how i responded to having them exposed to me.  this is a fairly common approach for screening resources, and i thought that i was prepared for it having gone through it so many times with clients.  however, his unrelenting barrage of queries and redirections was so unbalancing that by the end of the interview, i was convinced that i was the worst information technologist this world had ever seen.  i remember the exact moment - following a series of combination punch-questions - my will just shut down and i couldn’t even respond to questions to which i knew i knew the answer!  i had to admit, i had been bested!!  i liked the spirit of the company and their corporate policy to lead and guide clients, rather than just take orders and install products, so it was disheartening to think that this one terrible interview would keep me from learning more about them.  it was (one of) the most surprising turn of events in my recent life to learn that they wanted to make me an offer of employment!  and each day since, i’ve been grateful!  whether the offer on the recommendation of nariman or in spite of it, i don’t really want or need to know - but i will ever be grateful to him for shaking up my sense of humility and putting it back on the top shelf of my ego.

after many many drinks and dances, the last 10 of us or so went out for chinese food.  more conversation - less dancing, but the adventure was not yet over.  thomas had finally had enough of partying and abruptly got up to go home... without thinking (probably die to a 26+ drink count over the course of the evening), i rushed out to escort him to queen street without my coat - he was not fit to walk home alone!  fortunately, it was only about 5 - 6 city blocks and i have yet to be cold in toronto.  so i made sure he got home safely and then high-tailed it back to the restaurant in case the group left and abandoned all my stuff at the restaurant.

at the end of our late night dinner, i looked around the table one last time (since another of our beloved staff earlier in the evening had her cash from her wallet stolen at the club!!  can you believe it!?!?) to see if anyone had missed anything.  i found a little knapsack with an imason logo on it under an empty chair and asked bob if it was his.  we looked through it and ... lol ... nariman had left his bag behind in the restaurant with his passport and papers.  he would have a hard time getting to venezuela without them!!   so we called him, had him return to the restaurant and retrieve his stuff, and the evening came to a close after a cab ride home.

- g

ps. i'm still not really sure how i really feel about clubbing, but i know that my new friends are quality people and i would gladly go out any time and go out of my way for them. they have radically redefined my whole perception of what torontonians are like. this has been a tremendous gift from the company that employs me.

pps. in continuation of this weekend's "bright lights big city"-esque adventure, jim, han and i went out saturday night to the devil's martini in adelaide and portland street. the main room looked as big as a football field and must have had about 6 bars in it. after having to wait almost an hour to get in (an hour that reminded me of many of the reasons that i don't like clubbing - the arbitrary judgments and rulings of who should be allowed to enter, the shallow lookist pretension that almost everyone adopts as soon as they enter this environment, the angry and predatory attitudes of many of the patrons, etc. etc) the place was packed to the rafters with drunken undulating bodies.

at one point, trying to cross the bar to where some friends were, several young ladies started following me and passing through the wake - grabbing my back and shoulders as we made our way through the walls of bodies, and i thought, “well, it IS easy to meet women in this kind of crowd!”  but then there’s that new years resolution -  “get what you need, leave what you don’t.” so we all parted ways nicely (as evidenced by jim asking me, “what happened to those girls, they said you were nice?”) and i got down to the business of getting myself a drink.

i wish i had brought my camera (or that my camera phone was better) - it had been so long since i’ve been in a place like that it would have been nice to have a picture.  stunningly handsome guys, bottle-blonde girls, smokin-hot martini-shaking bartenderesses (?) - even for an outsider, it’s not hard to see why people flock to such a place.

but the music was mediocre and the potential for meaningful interactions with new people was utterly decimated by the overpowering volume of music everywhere and the fact that my voice was already shot from the night before.  i should probably have a rule about not going out two consecutive nights.  so in the end, the group of us went to pizza pizza for a snack and i drove home.  i’ll probably go again some time, and arrive at an uncool hour like 9:30 - 10 so that i don’t freeze my nipples off like i did last night!

- g