The scandal scoop

Shocking!

This kind of thing is worrisome...

... and relevant to Jacy's post today.

Coming up: Notes on a scandal

Even though we haven't covered the subject in ages, we have learned about startling new developments with regard to this scandalous and laughable object of RTK's attention. We'll be back later today with the scoop!

Old Man Crush: A Possible Mental Illness?

I hesitate to mention this, but I have a thing for old men these days, particularly men in their 70s. Yes, if you were born in the 1930s and 1940s, odds are good I will become utterly smitten with you (Dale ... this means you have a chance).

I have four suitors right now -- one in his 30s, one in his 40s, one in his 50s, and one in his 70s. Guess which one is the funniest, the wittiest, the smartest, the sharpest and therefore the sexiest? The guy in his 70s.

I know, I know ... Daddy issues! And in fact, my father was of this generation. He would have been 80 this year. And with the exception of a couple of pervs, most of the men in his social sphere and his age were witty, urbane, wise-cracking women-lovers who could flirt like nobody's business without seeming in any way lecherous. Yes, they occassionally did women wrong. But they wooed with all with the grace, charm and wit that men of this generation -- their sons, actually -- do not possess. Think Cary Grant versus Vince Vaughan. Man versus boy. Tough guy with a heart of gold versus emotional guy with a heart of stone. These were the kind of guys who called women "broads" but did so with no small amount of reverence, but also made it very clear that they would brook no bullshit. These were not wimpy men.

Because I don't really want to sleep with men in their 70s and 80s, however, I do what I always do with my old-man crush. I take care of him, just as I did my father, for whom I used to religiously make salmon loaf and maple fudge once a week, and my father-in-law, a truly adoration-worthy man with about 100 times the wit and charm of most ordinary men. On my last ski vacation with him, he was ailing, so I routinely ran a bath for him and made him tea and sandwiches in the afternoon. And at least once a day he said something, perhaps borderline inappropriate but very wise, that made me laugh with appreciation.

Today I was so worried about my old-man crush when he didn't answer the phone at his condo that I made his concierge go and check on him. He'd had a terrible cold and I was afraid he'd died in his sleep of pneumonia. He was fine, and called me up to assure me he was on the mend, and we had a good, almost tender laugh about my concern and his appreciation of it. He was utterly grateful I was checking up; I was insanely relieved he was OK. He thanked me again for the carrot cake I baked him to thank him for the water-colour he sent me that he painted last summer of the ocean and gave to me because he felt the blue/green he'd mixed was the same colour as my eyes. Old-man swoon!

Sadly, however, I can never sleep or even make out with my old-man crush, no matter how many sweet and intelligent little gestures he delivers my way, because I just can't physically go there. And that's despite even knowing that the guy pictured above once looked like the guy pictured below (and the sad thing is -- my old-man crush actually was close to this Adonis level as a younger man ... he was smoking hot). Perhaps that's the appeal. If I don't sleep with them, they can't hurt me, and I can have a lovely and flirtatious friendship with a debonair gentleman who just appreciates looking at me and is happy I exist, and wouldn't push anything beyond that.

Which is perhaps a shame, because I sure like old men.

RTK Wunderprodukt: Sticky Toffee Pudding

Now available in individual portions. Dr. Oetker, eat your heart out. We recommend it with some Chilean blueberries if you're not a greenie boycotting foreign fruit.

Nine Gram Brain: RIP (Now Updated)

Gah!!


Reminds me of the Trainwrecks demise. January seems to be the cruelest month as far as blog suicides go. Fare thee well, Nine Gram Brain.

Feb. 1 update: Here's an article on the whole Rebecca Eckler blogging controversy. I think it frees me of my obligation to write anything more on the topic.

Oh My Aching Arse

So today my friend Nancy and I did the marathon spin. Thankfully, it was only three hours, not four -- I had it wrong. But still, three hours going full tilt, long climbs, sprints, more climbs, flat roads at full speed ... it was intense.

Six teachers teach the class for a half hour each. Every half hour, you're allowed off the bike for two minutes to have a snack or change your shirt. I went through four shirts, drenching every one of them.

And now my arse is REALLY sore. But you know what? It's also hard as a rock!

And I have reassuring Nancy update: she is going to get in touch with one of his exes, a woman in the same profession (they're all lawyers) who is well-respected and apparently very sane, smart, funny, etc. She is going to listen to whatever this woman, who's well-removed from The Bad Man now, has to say about him.

Nancy says she feels weird doing this but there is too much about how he explains his past that doesn't add up for her. I told her she was making one of the smartest moves of her life by getting in touch with this woman and hearing her side of the story. Women are so quick to demonize one another because of a man. If we actually heard one another out, I am sure a lot of heartbreak would be spared. Sisters looking out for sisters! It can never be a bad thing.

When Are You Close Enough Friends To Urge Someone To Run Like Hell From Their Newest Paramour?

So I have met a new friend through spinning, let's call her Nancy. We go out for a sandwich or a drink sometimes after spin class and tomorrow, for the first time, we are both attempting, together, our first marathon four-hour class that supposedly knocks you on your rear end for a few days afterward.

I really like Nancy. She is almost 10 years younger than me, a single mother with a 10-year-old boy, and is really sweet, funny, smart, pretty -- but very lonely. She wants a boyfriend. She hasn't understood why she couldn't get one for so long after her marriage broke up. I keep telling her, feeling like some bitter old hag, to understand that a man is not the prize in life. The prize is her child, her happiness, her emotional well-being. The wrong man can screw all that up.

And boy, is she falling for the wrong man.

This guy is 50 and just out of his second marriage. In addition to the two marriages, he's also lived with two women for almost 10 years each, and had a child each with two of them. One of the women also had children from a previous marriage who grew very close to him throughout their seven-year marriage. Basically, since he was in his early 20s, he's jumped from one woman to the next with barely a single break.

The guy left every one of his wives and girlfriends, leaving a lot of broken-hearted women and children in his wake. Nancy actually knows one of his exes, who took her aside and tried to warn her about the fact that he is an effortless liar, a serial philanderer and a narcissist who needs BIG LOVE in his life all the time or else he gets bored and moves on to the next one. If the woman he's with fails to provide BIG LOVE almost constantly, he becomes resentful and looks elsewhere.

Nancy has convinced herself this woman is just bitter and is trying to sabotage his happiness because she still wants him for herself (I've met the guy briefly and how he gets so many chicks, I am not sure -- he looks a bit like Donald Trump but with slightly better hair ... ewwwwww.)

Anyway, I don't know what to say to Nancy. The guy has an excuse for every broken relationship, and in each case, including the case of his baby mommas -- one of whom he left for another woman while she was pregnant with his son -- it is the woman's fault for what went wrong. His women simply haven't appreciated his love. And this is the kicker -- all of the past relationships that have failed to make him happy, that he was driven out of by cruel and unloving women, have simply served to lead him to Nancy, the truest love of his life. Now his life has meaning! Now he knows what all the heartache was for! Uhhh-hhhuhhh.

I am the wrong person for Nancy to tell this story to, because I have my own complicated issues about love and commitment right now, but I have managed to listen to it for a few weeks as she ponders moving in with the guy. Impressively, I have managed not to kidnap this otherwise intelligent woman to save her and her child from the certain heartache that will come her way, perhaps not now, but at some point in the future.

All I can bring myself to do is to urge her not to ignore someone's patterns. Judge by someone's actions, not by his words. Look at his life. Do you HONESTLY believe all four of these women were awful, unloving shrews? He chose them. He loved them. So what does that say about him? And did they really turn on him? Or was he insufferable in some ways, causing them to turn on him?

I love women, I really do, but dear God we can be stupid about men sometimes when we're lonely and hurting. Nancy needs to take a step back and look at this guy intelligently and dispassionately because in all other areas of her life, she is so smart and successful and savvy. And yet for some reason she cannot. It is sad, but people have to make their own grim mistakes in life, I suppose. It's just hard to watch people do it when the gods seem to be shouting warnings from the sky: "Don't do it!!!!!"

The Weekend's Tennis Hottie

Thanks to MDG for reminding me about this cute young guy. He won the Australian Open!

Today's Tennis Hottie

Roger Federer doesn't do much for me facially speaking. But this sinewy frame? Yes please!

I Am Seriously Bummed About Heath Ledger

a. He was a brilliant actor. That performance in Brokeback was really astonishing.

b. He was apparently a very kind, though haunted, person who was truly devoted to his little girl and trying to kick his drug habits and get his life under control.

c. He was physically beautiful, in my opinion, even during his recent so-called homeless person phase.

Perusing all my favorite celebrity blogs tonight, I stumbled upon a comment from someone who knew him from a movie set. I was struck by the person's comments:

"To each of you I ask this, in his memory: If you know of ANYONE hurting and alone tonight - a friend whose been through divorce, or lost a job, or someone recently finding their life in upheaval...call them or see them tonight. Tell them that they are loved, are not alone, and that a brighter day does lie ahead. LISTEN to their problems, and offer them love and friendship. We should never let those we care about feel alone and under a dark cloud. You might just save a life. Sometimes cries for help are silent...and masked with a smile."

Great advice. Decent people don't really need to be told that, but when life gets busy it's easy to forget to check in on troubled friends and those who mean or once meant something to you. I read it and called a friend whom I know is going through a tough time right now. I am glad I did.

Poor Heath!

The Drudgery Of Housework

Today while toasting my son's waffles I had a thought: I wonder how many times in my 17 years as a mother I have toasted someone's waffles? How many sandwiches have I made? How many eggs have I poached? How many loads of laundry have I done? How many grilled cheese sandwiches have I cooked, how many socks have I matched, how many times have I emptied the dishwasher?

And I realized the answer is THOUSANDS. Thousands and thousands and thousands of times.

My kids, as they get older, are getting better about helping around the house. My daughter will at least start her own laundry. My son will bring his snack dishes up from the TV room and put them in the dishwasher. So there is, finally, a light at the end of the tunnel. But still, there is no escaping the endless drudgery of housework. And when you start nearing the 20-year mark of the voluntary slavery that is parenthood, you begin to understand those women in their 50s who simply stop cooking and refuse to do any more housework. If I never toast another waffle, poach another egg or fold another basket of laundry, I'll die a happy woman.

Still, cooking is far from my most despised chore -- most of the time I quite like it, especially yesterday when I made a carrot cake with cream-cheese icing that would crush the competition in any bake sale, and I didn't even think I liked carrot cake.

To me, the absolute most despised household chore is folding and putting away the laundry. Nothing depresses me more than seeing two huge baskets of unfolded clothes staring back at me malevolently. Even cleaning bathrooms and scrubbing the fridge seem like a breeze by comparison.

But I know some people who love doing laundry, all aspects of it, like the cheerful mother and daughter above. So I am curious to hear what your most hated household chores are. Dusting? Vacuuming? Oven-cleaning? Tell all.

Tennis Hottie of the Day

Australia's Lleyton Hewitt. I am pretty certain he said something nasty once. But I'll try not to think about that right now while taking in his rock-hard abs.

Two Tennis Hotties in One Photo

It's brutally cold here today. So there you go ... two tennis hotties in one shot to warm the cockles of your heart, or other cockles. That Spanish hottie Nadal comforting some French guy who had to forfeit the match due to injury (the names aren't really important, are they?).

I know people who are seriously hot for Nadal. Doesn't really do it for me personally, but to each her/his own.

A 16-year-old does not have the right to choose

Many of you were not able to make it through the avalanche of words that comprised the ultra-dumb article I cited earlier this week on a 16-year-old's right to choose. I can fully understand your difficulty. After all, it's next to impossible to figure out what this actually means:

Britney's "virginity" was nothing but a sales-pitch to young girls. A fallacy used to manipulate little girls into following in her footsteps and we all know where that lead (sic). If Britney's virgin image made her a role model then what harm can her sister's pregnancy really do?

So, let me save you all the trouble and skip to the conclusion where the author responds to Caitlin Flanagan's much-discussed New York Times op-ed in which she writes that teenage pregnancies have "devastating consequences." The opining Mummy Blogger writes:"

Could it be that "devastating consequences" aren't always so devastating? There are happy endings contrary to what Caitlin Flanagan had to say.

I didn't make a mistake having my baby. .. The right choice for me may not be the right choice for you and the right choice for you may not be the right choice for me and the right choice for Jamie Lynn Spears may be the wrong choice for you and your family but come on, now. Let's all have some respect for people's procreational choices.

No, I wasn't sixteen when I chose to be a mother but what if I was?

Well, for starters, you would have almost certainly had no way to support yourself and your baby. You would have been relying on others, most likely adults. And you would have failed to recognise that the right to choose comes with responsibility. It's one thing for an adult to choose to have a baby -- and even then there can be complications when the adult is unable to support herself and the baby, or when the sperm donor doesn't wish to be a father, or, in the worst case scenario, when he was lied to about birth control.

A 16-year-old is not going to look after a baby on her own. Her parents and/or the state are going to have to help so "her choice" is going to involve a lot of other people who might have chosen otherwise.

Personally, I have no moral qualms about first trimester abortion, but I know people who do and respect their point of view. I would never want to talk someone into an abortion or "force" a child to have one -- and, frankly, I'm not even sure if I have the legal right to do so. What I know, however, is that I will almost certainly never have to. But in the highly unlikely event that I were faced with a 16-year-old telling me she was keeping her baby, I would tell her quite clearly that I was not going to be helping out. No financial aid. No babysitting. No nothing. If she made an adult choice, she would be on her own as an adult to deal with the adult consequences. She would be looking look after the baby on her own because it would be her choice not mine -- and I would have done everything withing my power to point out why I believed it was the wrong choice.

That may sound cruel, but it's what I would do. Now, of course, if I did it to Jamie Lynn Spears she would have the financial resources to tell me to stuff it, which is, what separates Jamie Lynn Spears from all the other 16-year-old pregos. As for Juno in the movie, while she was charming and I enjoyed the flick, her character was hardly realistic. And much as it was in keeping with that unrealistic character that she chose to have the baby and give it up for adoption, there were few real life lessons to be learned from the movie other than use birth control. This is doubly, triply, quadruply so if you are a teenager having sex who does not believe in abortion.

Big Sexy Russian Tennis Hot Guy

I have had a thing for Marat Safin for many years. He is obscenely hot. Here he is at the Australian Open today. Discuss (I don't know how to make that bigger any picture, but trust me, it's a hot one.)

And here's another one:




P.S. Tearfree, I think we know what time it is. Remember the soccer hotties of a couple of years ago? It's January. We're all cold. Can't think of a better time for a daily tennis hottie!

Funny Teacher Stories

Sometimes I forget how funny school was. I was reminded the other night when I went back to my high school and laughed hard a few times remembering some high school hijinks. But today I also heard stories from my son and his friends about the bad teachers they've known in their years in school, and how the entire class often works together to exact their revenge against especially authoritative and humourless teachers.

My son has an English teacher this year who my daughter also had when she attended his school. To say she is humourless is to suggest Britney Spears might have some mental problems. I heard from her fairly routinely while my daughter was in her class, and now I am hearing from her again. The principal of the school has basically told me they are just waiting for the poor woman to retire, and that every year she fights with every class about all manner of stupid stuff. Every year, every class eventually starts to try to torment her. You know the games; we all did them: "At 10:15, everyone fart!"

The black and Asian kids in my son's class this year, however, began to notice she treated them worse than the white kids. So the class got together and decided to monitor instances in which, say, she would allow a white kid to go to the can twice in a period but refuse all of the black and Asian kids' requests to go to the restroom for two hours or more. Kept track of how many times she sent black and Asian kids and not white kids to the principal's office. Counted how many times she took the white kids' side in a dispute. The evidence was overwhelming -- humourless, strict, only likes whiteys.

But it's not that they intend to use this information for any official purposes, my son and his friends say. They monitored her so that they wouldn't feel as bad about doing the old: "At 2:30, everyone pretend to pass out!" stuff. It alleviated their guilt.

I find this quite funny -- kids of all races came together to prove to themselves that the teacher is racist only so that they could continue to comfortably torment her with their goofy 13-year-old tricks and laugh their asses off together every day. The boys were weeping with laughter when they told me about some of the truly funny Ferris Bueller-ish stunts the entire class participated in, even the shy little studious and timid kids and the new Canadians who are still learning the language, and how hard they all laugh together at lunch or after school when they see each other. It kind of warmed my heart.

Poor teacher. Sort of.

I love this story, by the way, on the students of a New York high school who went on strike because their principal was such a hard-ass. Make sure to watch the video because the editing at the end is brilliant.

Do people still have secretaries?

Yep. And apparently men still flirt with them. Now, can we help this person out? What do you all think the about-to-be-married man should do?

Mummy Blogger waxes dumb on teen pregnancy

It's been a long time since I've ragged on Mummy Bloggers but this post on teenage pregnancy has to be one of the dumbest things I've read in a while. Rivalled only by the perhaps dumber comments praising the author for her insights.

What insights would those be? That 16-year-old girls can make good mothers? Come again.

A Surprisingly Misty Trip Down Memory Lane

So tonight I accompanied my son to his high-school orientation night. He is in Grade 8 and deciding what high school he wants to attend. One of them is my old high school. Not just mine, but the high school that my parents and grandparents attended. He is interested because he's a jock and it's a big sports school, even though it's out of our neighbourhood.

So we went and it was so weird being back in that building. For one thing, I dream about the school so often that I instinctively knew my way around like I'd never left. There were still three -- THREE!!! -- teachers teaching there who had been on staff when I was a student. My name was up there painted on the wall, one of 21 Ontario Honour students of my graduating year (not bad considering about 1,200 kids were in attendance, but I did take easy courses -- two histories, two Englishes and two languages, as my older brother, who took all maths and sciences, never fails to remind me.)

But the oddest thing of all was how I suddenly got weepy sitting in the auditorium remembering my dead friend Dave.

My dead friend Dave was Ferris Bueller quite a few years before Ferris Bueller arrived in theatres. In fact, when my friend Fritzi and I went to see Ferris Bueller's Day Off, shortly before Dave's death in a plane crash in 1986, we looked at one another in astonishment as the credits rolled and said: "OK, so that's Dave."

He was charming, he was cocky, he was adorable, he was insanely silly (once stripping down and putting on our one-piece Danskin bathing suits and modelling them all despite his bits hanging out) and all the chicks loved him -- which meant many of the guys didn't. Female teachers adored him and so did all our mothers. He even had a sister who resented his popularity. We knew of the devil that lurked within, however, since we'd been friends with him since Grade 4. I got weepy, in fact, remembering how he ran successfully for student body president and then was impeached not long after for some sort of T-shirt scandal in which he and his friends were pocketing some of the profits.

It was his constant flirtation with trouble that ended up leading to his demise, in fact. At 21, he got in a small floatplane in the Muskokas with a friend who was under the influence -- Dave probably was too -- and after the friend started attempting to do tricks with the plane, it hit a boathouse. Dave died, the wealthy friend survived, and my friends and I were confronted with the first real and terrible grief we'd ever known. It was brutal. And all of us still think of him and dream about him a lot, because he was the type of friend who would have still been in our lives today if he hadn't stepped into that plane with a hotshot 22 years ago this summer.

Anyway, my son looked at me like I was completely insane but I didn't tell him why I got emotional. He thinks it was from seeing my name painted on the wall, not from having hilarious, and ultimately wrenching, memories come back to me sitting in that auditorium and remembering the glory days of my own Ferris Bueller.

"Bueller ........ Bueller .......... Bueller ......... Bueller ........"

Sports teams and driving in bad weather

There's surely not a mother alive whose blood doesn't run cold when she hears stories like this one about the seven members of a New Brunswick basketball team, who were killed, along with a teacher, while driving home from a game in snow and freezing rain.

I had just put my teenage daughter on a ski bus when the report came over CBC radio news, and my mind flashed back to a novel I once read, before I was a mother, about a high school ski-trip bus, which went over a cliff killing everyone on board. And, of course, I also remembered a Quebec ski bus accident last year, where, thankfully, no one was seriously injured.

But the personal memories that bothered me the most were those of a synchronized swim meet in Jonquiere almost two years ago. To save money, the swim team coach cancelled the bus she had originally planned on hiring, and had parents car pool up along one of Quebec's most treacherous highways, the Autoroute des Laurentides. My daughter went with a friend, the friend's mother, who was driving, and a synchro judge while I stayed home. When they left, the weather was okay, but it turned nasty along the way.

I ended up in a complete panic when they didn't call at the appointed arrival time, and, since they were in the boonies, cell phones didn't work so I couldn't get through despite pressing redial every five minutes.

Later, the friend's mother told me it was the worst drive of her life and she would have stopped if the judge hadn't been urging her on. Apparently, the swim coach put pressure on other parents to drive no matter what, but some of them simply refused and checked into hotels.

I had never been comfortable about this particular trip and felt tremendously guilty for not speaking out, when the decision was made not to get a bus, and to send 10 cars along that road in winter. I felt worse when the journey ended up happening in a storm.

Unfortunately, this kind of thing happens far too often when the decisions about whether to go, what transport to use, and when to cancel or reschedule events are left in the hands of young coaches and sports-obsessed organizers, who mean well but have very poor risk assessment skills.

A van with a basketball team travelling in freezing rain in the middle of the night should be avoided at all costs.

My sympathies go out to the parents living this unspeakable loss. There but for the grace of God...

When The Handyman Can't, Dave Chapelle Can

My handyman has turned out to be a disaster. A small number of fairly routine house repairs that were supposed to be done a week before Christmas are still not completed. He keeps telling me he's going to show and then doesn't, and I can't reach him for days. He claims he has gout and is on medication that is making him all wonky, but not so wonky, apparently, that he didn't trick me into already paying him before the end of the year while assuring me he'd be at the house during the week between Christmas and New Year's to finish up. He never showed.

So he is at the house today, calling me every hour because he's lost the list of jobs I wanted done, and I am really starting to lose my patience with his continuing "I'm just trying to do a favour to a pretty single mother" line of defence. So yes, I snapped. It went along these lines:

"First of all, don't worry about me being a single mother, OK? I'll worry about that. Secondly, what favours have you done me? I've paid for eight hours of work and you've been to the house a total of three hours and haven't completed half the jobs I wanted done. So you're doing me no favours. Just complete the jobs that I asked for, don't say you're coming and then never show up, and stop pretending you're doing me any favours and giving me any breaks. Because you're not." I haven't heard from him since. Eldon is a goof.

I am so riled up that I needed to watch some Dave Chapelle to chill. I urge you to check this out.

"I PLEAD DA FIF!!!"

Hello, Newman

Last night I watched one of my favourite movies ever with my kids, my teenaged nephew and my friend Mitzi and her yappy thug of a boyfriend -- Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

Once again, I was astonished by how absolutely and utterly beautiful Paul Newman is in that movie. Don't get me wrong -- Robert Redford is no slouch; he too is unbelievable looking. But Newman? Newman is a work of art, he's a living, breathing Adonis in that film. The bone structure, the eyes, the age starting to show, the profile ... I am not sure a more astonishing-looking man has ever graced the silver screen.

Plus, the movie is fantastic, just as good now as it was in 1969, and Newman's character is not only drop-dead gorgeous, but funny as hell.

UPDATE:

Here's another shot I just found. Honestly. Has a better-looking man ever existed?

I Can't Decide: Is This a Small Victory, Or a Slap in the Face?

A few posts ago I blogged about the abysmal service I got flying Continental Airlines to New York City. I sent the airline a long and, I felt, eloquent but well-mannered complaint.

Today, I received this in my e-mail. And cannot decide whether I won, lost, or we called it a draw. What say you?

Dear Ms. Jacy,

Thank you for taking the time to share your comments and concerns regarding your recent experience while traveling with us from Toronto to Newark on December 27, 2007. Please accept my sincere apology on behalf of Continental Airlines for the unpleasant circumstances you described.

We value your business and hope you will not judge us based solely on the behavior of the employees you encountered. This experience is not typical of the level of service we expect from our co-workers. Your comments were submitted in our monthly Customer Care report reviewed by all of our respective Airport General Managers and senior management as an opportunity to improve our local services. I am confident every effort will be made to locate the employee involved and immediate corrective action will be taken.

One of Continental's primary goals is to have the highest standards of excellence exemplified through our service and employees. I regret this is not what you experienced during your recent travel. Please continue to fly with us, and permit us to demonstrate our true commitment to earning your trust and confidence.

To encourage you to fly with us again and as a tangible means of acknowledging your disappointment, I will forward by separate e-mail (2) $25.00 Electronic Travel Certificates. The certificates are transferable and valid toward the purchase of a future Continental ticket and expire one year from the date of issue.

Ms. Jacy, again I apologize for the circumstances associated with your travel. Given the opportunity to welcome you aboard once again, I am confident you all will experience the outstanding service and operational reliability we traditionally provide.


Kind Regards,

Theresa King
Customer Care Manager

It Is Odd Having No Hopes or Dreams As You Ring in The New Year

This year I spent New Year's Eve lying on my friend Mitzi's couch watching The Sopranos. At midnight, we briefly raised our heads off our respective pillows and noticed fireworks going off in the city around us. We muttered something bitterly to one another and returned to watching Phil Leotardo's execution.

For the first time in eight years, I was in Toronto on New Year's instead of with my ex and his family. I missed him and them badly as the clock struck midnight. Last New Year's Eve, I was scared but also hopeful. I knew we'd had a bad year but thought we were going to put it behind us. My ex even gave me a long, long hug and kiss at midnight and told me how glad he was that 2006 was behind us and a new year and a new beginning was ahead. The next morning, before our kids were awake, he made the moves on me and remarked on what a nice way that was to start 2007. A week later, I was dumped. A week after that, he was openly in another relationship.

So I suppose maybe it's not too surprising that as 2008 gets under way, I have no real hopes and dreams for the year to come. Do I hope for love? No. I don't want it. I don't want to hurt or be hurt, and that's all that romantic love has meant for me. I don't dream of the future anymore in terms of nice vacations or new furnishings or anything like that, because I am too broke as a single mother pretty much raising my kids on my own and going from paycheque to paycheque.

What I do hope for is that my kids continue to recover from the shock of 2007, and that I continue to nurture the wonderful friendships that have helped me survive the year. But I do find it to be an odd place, not having hopes and dreams for the future. Very odd indeed. Maybe it is the smart way to be, because if something wonderful does come my way this year, I will be pleasantly surprised.