Sunday, December 11, 2011

Grey's Anneatomy

I tried to watch Grey's Anatomy once, but soon realized there was no doctor I'd rather have tend me than George Clooney, and sadly he's moved on from the field of medicine. Not that I'm one to judge the competency of a medical professional. The only reason I'm alive today is because I got hoodwinked into going to the local family clinic after three days of a fever due to an infection I like to call "clubfoot", that doesn't even have a remotely good story to along with it. No, instead, I wore a pair of pumas which cut open my right achilles while walking the dog, only to reopen the wound a week and a half later by wearing the same pair of shoes again during a catering gig that lasted not even 4 hours. That sounds so lame it rivals the one where I went too slow over a six inch drop that ended my first and last day of mountain biking. I need a better story.

Possibilities include but are not limited to:

"Went skiing in the Alps with half of the German slalom team. I was racing Hilde and Sepp when I cut a corner too sharp and opened my heel trying to stop myself after losing one ski, both my poles and a glove. I could have bought hoegaarden for the entire country with the revenue from that yard sale!"

or

"An entire theatre full of teenage girls attacked me during the premiere of New Dawn when I called Edward a fairy, and Stephanie Meyer the devil's mother for birthing the literary wasteland that is the Twilight series into this world. Floyd Mayweather had been difficult to beat into submission in the fourth round, but this was a whole other story."

Regardless, I'm pretty sure I was doomed from the start. I have this sneaking suspicion that my family members and I have all been subconsciously trying to sabotage ourselves into winning Darwin awards from day 1. For example, one summer's night when I was fourteen I experienced excruciating pain on my right side. My mother told me it was just cramps and to sleep it off. The next day I had my appendix ripped out just as it was about to burst, and spent the next three days in the hospital doped up on morphine.
My brother has a steel plate nailed in his shoulder. The other one cuts the casts off he seems to get once a year off himself. We bought custom-made crutches because there will always be a need, and clinics rarely have ones made for those six feet or taller.

So it was that I found myself discussing tying my tubes with Tijana Saturday morning at the family clinic, as some child tried to bash his toy truck into my head, and I am now relegated to sitting at home doing nothing because of injury, from sitting at home doing nothing because of unemployment. Add to this no music to listen to as my laptop got wiped when it went in to get fixed and I have become a Betty Draper without children, contemplating life as a member of the Terry Fox club. At least she had horses.

Sunday, December 4, 2011

Remember when we met?

There must be some kind of perk to being the only single person in a room with three couples, all staring googly-eyed and unable to lose physical contact with one another. Like, maybe a bag of candy, or psychadelic drugs to hallucinate yourself a partner to match the other groups. Not that everyone should act like a single person to appease me; that would be elitist and wrong. But I felt slightly mislead, as I thought I was going to a party. Subjective in nature, a party could really be anything, however I think we can all agree that it rests somewhere in the vague realm of less than a wedding, but more than a poker match. I'm not sure what this was, only that it was dangerously close to a smoky backroom and a deck of cards (high Twos).
A friend recently informed me that at a dinner party, she once sat between a couple, only to have them hold hands behind her back whilst reminiscing fond moments, like the time they met. Really?

It's not like I haven't tried being a non-single, or the subjuntive form, a "couple". It's that every time I try, I become uninspired and unmotivated. I realize it's difficult, being a whole couple of inches taller than most people. One suave champion told me not that we would have beautiful babies together, but that we would have giant babies together. In my top ten pickup lines received are the bold "You must bench 350.", the more predictable "Can you slam dunk a basketball?", and the painfully emasculating "I had to wait until you were sitting down." I'm still confused about the third one. Were we to ever enter a relationship, would I have been sitting down the whole time? How would I get from place to place? How would I slam dunk a basketball? How am I not married with children?

The dating scene in this city is dismal. I am either confronted with men who can't place Spain on a map, men who think a P.Eng will earn them a one-way ticket to the bedroom, or men who try to recruit me for rugby. I'd even try dating one of them, like say the engineer with the watermarked business card, except at dinner he'd probably end up with a fork in the eye and I'd end up with the hospital bill, which I could only afford if I was married to the P.Eng in the first place. They say a bird in hand is worth two in the bush...is a ring in hand worth a fork in the eye?

The saddest part of all is that there are so few eligible bachelors left in this socially-wasted metropolitan that unbeknownst to him, a friend of a friend actually tried setting me up with my own brother, because, of course, we were both tall! Because when there's no one left to turn to, take a note from European royalty! It's not incest, it's succession!