a day in the life

WELCOME BACK. WE'VE BEEN EXPECTING YOU.

From TORONTO
August 8th, 2009

What happens when I get off one gig and have very little to do until the next? That's right, Faithful Reader: I masturbate. A lot. But also.....random weird thoughts that have been jiggling around in my very large brain get a chance to rise to the surface. I've been home from beautiful Gananoque for a month now, my head empty of the creative struggle, my couch dented with a large ass print, the contents of my liquor cabinet in a constant busy rotation......which means that you now get:

AIMLESS MUSINGS FROM THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF NORTON.

WhOOOOOOOO!!! (I just like to say that. Typing it is pretty good, too.)

I think I often make the mistake, when working out of town, of thinking that as soon as I get back things are going to be some kind of exciting nonstop party all day and night, with no effort on my part. Like I'm going to be lifted up and put on a float the second I arrive and led through screaming throngs of Torontonians on some kind of Back From Gananoque V-Day Parade. To be sure, there's more going on here than there was there......okay, there's a LOT more going on than there was there, and friends to see, and sex to be had.....but I also get to do wonderful things like sort receipts and organize my closet. Maybe I should do mushrooms and then sort receipts and clean my closet. Actually, that sounds terrifying.

Speaking of sorted receipts, I've now paid my 6000 dollar debt in back GST. Just 7000 bucks in back taxes to go + whatever horrors remain on my credit cards! Donations toward my worthy cause may be made to girlyoullbeawomansoon@paypal.com . And oh, I will be free!!!

My television blew up the very day that I arrived back in Toronto. While that's never much of a distraction for me - my timewasters are more often of the intertubing wormhole/show-spider-solitaire-who's-boss variety - I do like watching DVDs. Now that I have an inability to do that (except on my angry old laptop, which makes a constant sound like a family of four all blowdrying their hair, and so is, oh, slightly distracting) there's more time for staring at the wall and into my own head.

You will be interested to know that as I turned the TV on - hoping to settle in with West Side Story and a pizza or two - it made a terrifying, loud, PchOOOOOOoooooo sound (go ahead, try it) that scared the hell out of me. And a bright flash of light left me legally blind for the next ten minutes. It was exciting. Obviously an attempt at contact by the aliens who live in my TV set.

To even out the technology balance, I did get my stupid fridge replaced, so I now have a working freezer for the first time since I moved into this apartment. What's to complain about when I can sit here, chewing happily on ice cubes hour after hour and stuffing ice packs down my pants to make up for two lost years of coldness? I know, it's no West Side Story.

And now, A Glass Half Full Moment: I suppose this crappy, crappy summer means a little less melanoma for everyone. Thanks, Crappy Summer!

I fear I have a homicidal streak. I really enjoy murdering fruit flies. And every winter I derive great pleasure from seeing the mounting tally I keep on a pad on my fridge of all the mice I've electrocuted in my little zappy trap. I bought the trap on a Home Depot trip with my mom; on the way home in the car, I got all excited and said, "I can't wait to get home and start killing mice." She turned to me and said, "That might just be the strangest thing you've ever said."

I suppose the word "homicidal" only applies to killing humans, though, and I've never done that yet. I'm just flyicidal and mousicidal. (And centipedacidal - those things are fucking disgusting.) I envy my boyfriend for his flying bug killer. The spray I have kind of leaves the fruit flies writhing around on the counter, whispering "Kill me." His has "instant knockdown" - you spray them and they drop right out of the sky, which is super fun.

The mouse thing perplexes me, since I once had a pet mouse, and loved him like the son I'll never have. His name was Nick. I bought him at the Humane Society for four dollars, though his cage cost thirty. They make you buy one on the spot, which reassures them that you're not just taking the mouse home to feed to your pet snake, though I'm not sure why they care.

Nick lived in a cage in the kitchen of my bachelor apartment and each night I would hear him try to get his hamster wheel going and then give up. He didn't weigh enough to keep it going all the way around. After months of rooting for him, I finally heard the thing spinning, and snuck in to watch, proud tears in my eyes. He'd been pumping iron or something, I don't know. From then on I had to keep his cage behind the closed bathroom door each night because the annoying wheel sound kept me awake.

Sometimes I took Nick out of his cage and let him run around on the carpet, making little barriers around him out of towels and things. Invariably he would make a break for the space under the futon and I would just catch him before he could disappear forever, my heart pounding like crazy. Late one night he died in my hand. I put him in a little Chinese lacquered jewelry box that someone had given me for Christmas and went out and buried him in the Don Valley in the middle of the night, digging in the dirt with a spoon, crying the whole time. Rest in peace, Nick. Forgive me for electrocuting your family.

While I was away this summer, a new neighbour with a yappy little dog moved in next door. This is to replace the neighbours directly below me and their yappy dog, who have moved out.

The day I got back to town, still shaken by the PchOOOOOooo sound and the lack of West Side Story, I went to bed and was woken at 1am by the new little rat-dog-thing, which barked until 2:30. Then at 7:30 am the bone-shakingly loud construction on Roncesvalles began; they're tearing up the road, for water main work, or streetcar tracks, or maybe just for fun. That week the landlords started destruction on my building's courtyard, and knocking down the walls of the empty apartment below mine. You would not believe how loud it was. Unless maybe you lived in Baghdad circa 2003. No wonder I enjoy killing flies.....The power! The absolute power!

A couple of times a month, I board a train or a plane and go to Montreal, where I take the metro to Papineau station, walk up the street, enter a brick building, climb two sets of stairs and go into a little room behind some glass and pretend to be a bird for a couple of hours. Then I go back home. I'm trying to decide whether my work doing cartoon voices is more or less strange than my usual work as a stage actor. Making funny voices to entertain children versus putting on funny clothes to entertain adults. Mind you, just about any job is pretty weird when you really break it down, except maybe if you're a farmer or a surgeon or a prostitute. Anyone remember this?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7pijrAOLdg

Another weird gig I have is doing audio recordings used to train TD Bank employees. Once a month or so, our agency sends along some of the best stage actors you'll ever see (a veritable who's that of Canadian Theatre, as my cousin Adrian would say) to pretend to be TD VISA bill collectors or disgruntled bank customers. The whole thing takes about two hours, sometimes only ten minutes or so of that in studio, the rest in the boardroom eating Timbits. For this we are paid more than we would get for an entire week of performing a play.

One day it occurred to me that my help in training debt collectors to be more humane might directly impact me and my friends. And that much of the money I would be paid by TD would go right back to TD. Just as the money I get from the government in the form of residuals for my Tourism Ontario commercial I send back to the government as tax payments. And last time I got a big residual cheque for my IKEA ad? I went right out and bought myself an EKTORP.

Is that bank training gig more or less weird than the hours I spend providing the voices of miscellaneous cheerleaders, teachers and passersby on Degrassi: The Next Generation? More or less weird than my friends who fake various aches, pains and diseases as "standardized patients" for health care training? Or my old theatre school friend who bought his house and feeds his child with money made dressed as a giant tube of toothpaste? Or is it really weird that I have never been able to describe what my mother does in twenty-five words or less? That my stepmother gave many overworked, worried years of her life to the noble cause of possibly helping Royal Bank post a slightly larger profit every quarter?

AAAARGH! I've got to stop thinking about this! My head is going to blow up. I think I've breathed in too much Raid Flying Insect Killer. Raid Satisfaction With the Status Quo Killer. With Instant Levelheaded Commonsense Knockdown. Hey, that's catchy copy; we might just have something here.

I'm off now, to bake a batch of cookies and change in-the-pants icepacks (because I can), and then pack for a couple of days in Niagara-On-The-Lake. There, I will attend a tribute to the late and great Neil Munro, a director who was an excellent guy and probably the biggest risk taker I'll ever know, and whom I feel lucky to have worked with. Weird job or no.

But before I go, what have we learned today, boys and girls? Why, that your hero, the Skeptical Tourist, is a loser just like you. (Though as far as losers go, she's pretty cool.) That your job is weird and pointless. And that, next time, you will throw a parade.

Yours, not even stoned, not really,

The Tourist