The RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers is happening again this year, only this time it’s open for poetry. Once again you need to be under 35, unpublished in book form and without a book contract, but also have at least one previous publishing credit in a literary magazine or journal.
Personally, I feel as though this is somewhat ageist – because quite honestly, a person can come into writing at any age. In fact, if you’re older, you may face more challenge in being accepted as a publishable writer than someone younger. (Plus, I’m thirty and in five years will be too OLD for this competition. What the heck?! )
This is a great competition because it would be HUGE to win, plus there’s no entry fee. How many competitions do you know with NO ENTRY FEE?
Therefore if you are a poet, and you know it, Canadian, not over 35, without a book contract or published book and have been in a literary magazine or journal (gasping for breath as I write these conditions!), please do consider submitting your poetry. It’s a great opportunity.
Take care! And click the image to read the PDF details for submission.
Okay, The middle of a hot flash may not be the ideal time to start this post, but I don’t care! Happy holidays everyone! Your celebration of choice is fast approaching and I dare say there’s a little cheer in the air.
Zsolt and I are big partakers of Christmas. We love our Christmas traditions. I’ve been holding off getting all festive for the past several weeks, just itching to pull out the miniature plastic tree we bought at Woolworths when the chain still existed, and the ornaments we’ve collected on our travels (latest edition: Santa waving from a NYC yellow cab), and the 50s Christmas records of hymns mixed with upbeat swanky party sounds, plus the Hungarian children’s choir singing tunes like Kis Karácsony, Nagy Karácsony
*Reflective sigh.
I won’t even go into what it means to me to be HERE, to celebrate NOW, to have my HEALTH, and to be so full of LOVE. I won’t go into it because you probably already know that it means everything to me. (Though I’ll likely go into it later, as the season progresses – I get so stupidly sentimental.)
Instead I’ll tell you why shopping online is pretty much just as challenging as shopping in the store.
Now look, I’m no advocate of Black Friday or Cyber Monday (Though even at the thought of those words, my mind lights up with sales for Soia & Kyo or Karen Miller – my current favourite designers of beautiful clothing for beautiful woman, meaning every woman.) but the plain fact is that Christmas is a time when along with celebrating rebirth, miracles, good will . . . we allow ourselves a little guilt-free indulgence. (Which very easily turns into guilt-full overspending if not careful, as you are about to see.)
Right: The man, otherwise known as Zsolt, wants a Nexus 4 for Christmas. Years ago I promised him a Sony hand-held play/toy thing if he graduated from his PhD. But then we were rather hit-up for an extended period of time, and that graduation present just kinda fell to the wayside. Now it’s a dated device. BUT the Nexus 4 is apparently not dated. I don’t why, maybe because it’s brand new? Who cares, he really wants it and has been working so hard I’d love to give it to him. Therefore, it has become my mission to get him this phone/toy/mini-computer thing for Christmas.
So, plan of attack:
Follow twitter feeds of people who tweet about Nexus 4.
Change homepage to Nexus 4 sales page.
Sign up for newsletter.
Wait.
Which is exactly what we did until today. TODAY I get a call from Zsolt.
“Catherine, it’s going on sale in Canada at 3.00pm today!” (By the by, how could I have missed that? I’mHOOKED UP for this kinda information.)
His phone call was 10 minutes before 3.00pm.
So, what can you do, right? Drop everything and start hitting F5 on the Nexus 4 page . . . which, according to a blog post I read, refreshes a page very quickly and easily. So I’m all F5, F5, F5, F5 for like 10 minutes. And as I’m hitting this button, I’m thinking, GEEZ, so much for not engaging in commercial craziness. But, at least I can do it from the comfort of my home.
F5, F5, F5, F4! Wrong! F5, F5, F5, etc.
3.00pm arrives and still, I’m getting a sold out message from the Google people. But then my mobile phone rings. It’s Zsolt, he’s got the sucker in his shopping cart.
“Buy it!” I say. “Buy it right now before it expires!”
And we hang up. So much for Christmas magic and Santa surprises. I’m barking orders to the giftee to BUY BUY BUY the gift. And as he does this, I don’t stop – cause you know what it’s like with online shopping, things happen.
F5, F5, F5, F5!
Ah! I finally have the option to load it into my shopping cart. (The shipping date at this point is 1-2 weeks.)
The mobile phone rings again.
“It won’t take my card!” he says.
Ah ha! Zsolt has been struck by the cursed requirement to start a credit rating from scratch upon arrival in a new country. Really, why can’t we carry credit ratings country to country? And the same thing goes for car insurance. But anyhow. . .
“Here!” I throw him my card details and hang up after leaving instructions for him to call me back with an update.
(FYI last time the Nexus 4 was available, it sold out almost immediately. Maybe I should have mentioned that earlier – we were panicked because we knew that out there in cyberspace was a flood of competition, unseen but fierce.)
Then I return to my shopping cart and debated closing the screen. But his purchase hasn’t gone through yet . .. and anyhow, it would take several more clicks to the actual purchase confirmation . .. so instead I try to go forward just another step with the order. But no! Google isn’t letting me because their website is being swamped with requests.
F5, F5, F5!
The phone rings again.
“There’s an error in the order! I don’t know why, but it won’t go through!” he tells me.
He taps out of the fight, and now I’m in the ring.
“I’m on it,” I tell him.
Again we hang up.
F5, F5, F5 – success! The shopping cart advances me to the next step. By now the shipping is 3-4 weeks, but that’s still fine. So in go the details, and out comes the order confirmation. Wooohooo! I got the man a phone/toy/thing for Christmas.
Feeling pretty satisfied. I call up Zsolt. “I got the phone!”
And he’s not quite as excited, for some reason.
“Hello? I got the phone?”
“I think I might have gotten it too.”
Yeah, he did after amending the purchase details – though he didn’t realize it initially. So, we both bought this crazy phone. And for some weird reason, neither of us trusts our order enough to cancel the purchase. So either I’ll gift myself with a mobile device, or we’ll return it this evening. Either way, please take this as a warning: Shopping madness can set in anywhere, anytime. Tread carefully through the amazing sales, the free shipping, the yummy samples, the discount card with your next purchase that you feel the need to redeem right away. (Enjoy the shopping, but beware – don’t lose your head, is all I’m saying. ‘Cause it’s easy to lose your head!)
But on the bright side of all the maddness – We got the phone! Wooohooo!
I hope you enjoyed this heart-warming story about the miracle that is Christmas shopping. Or at least, the miracle that is F5.
I am thinking about Jasper, Alberta and a small bit of pathway that winds behind some of the homes of the tiny town. We’re walk along this black path at night after the bars closed, (we as in me and my friends, we were Tram Kids – working for the summer at the Jasper Tramway) on the way back to the giant house where many of us lived. It was completely unlit, and I’d have to trust my memory of having walked that path a hundred times before during the day as we took the shortcut to our home.
Jasper, just so you know, is a town inside of a National Park. That means animals cannot be hunted here, and it’s perfectly normal for elk to roam around the streets and chew on people’s lawns. It’s also not unheard of for other wild animals to find their way into the suburban streets, parks and pathways. A small part of me always wondered if there was a bear in the shadows as I walked back home, though a larger part of me just wanted to go to bed.
Anyhow one night as we were coming home, we stopped in this black pathway area and lay on the ground. All of us were tired, sweaty from dancing and high on being young. But, knowing there were meant to be shooting stars, we lay on the grass beside the path and looked up into space – big, black, never-ending space. One after another we spotted shooting stars, clusters of shooting stars, herds of shooting stars. If there was ever a night to make a wish, that had to be it. I cannot remember what I might have wanted, but I think on that evening with my friends on the damp grass along the path, I had pretty much everything I could ever wish for.
. . .
Except for Zsolt, but I didn’t know to wish for him back then. And that’s another story.
*
I am thinking about how difficult it must be for small businesses, particularly restaurants that can’t afford to set up in the trendier parts of town. There are some really nice, cheap and cheerful venues around Vanier – unexpected compositions of flavour at reasonable prices. And yet the seats are empty. This afternoon I attempted to go to Golden India for their lunch buffed having heard their food is excellent but the restaurant is struggling, and somehow instead ended up at a place called El Tucan, which was also rather nice. The food was comforting, and the atmosphere had South American flare thanks to the 70s South American film playing over the speakers and on the television by the bar, and a lovely lady . . . possibly from El Salvador (just a guess since the restaurant had Salvadorian food), helping us with our meal choices. It wasn’t as cheap as the Snack Shack, but she was most certainly cheerful.
These little places have so much heart poured into them. It must take heaps of courage to start a restaurant and say: “I don’t care about the failure rate for restaurants, I’m starting up (insert restaurant name here) and it’s going to be incredible!”
A highlight of this particular restaurant, apart from their really yummy spicy jalapeno sauce, were the drinks. I had a cashew nut fruit drink, which started off nutty and then switched to floral sweetness. Zsolt had a sweet and sour drink, which (can you guess?) started off sweet and then moved to sour. We were impressed.
After the meal we walked just a little bit along Montreal road and looked through the windows of all the small restaurants. So many small restaurants, so much competition, and so many empty seats. . .
*
I am thinking that grammar is one tricky b*ch. There are so many rules, and it changes depending upon location and organization . . . Zsolt and I keep getting into confusing disagreements whenever he asks me the random English language question. Like why are ‘pants’ considered plural? How do you shorten a quote? Is it that or which? And you know what – I hardly ever know the correct answer.
Forget the MLA handbook or Harvard guide to whatever. Lately I go to TheOatmeal.com or the Grammarist, or just plain GOOGLE the phrase to see the debate of its usage. And there’s always debate. I know of only one woman in this entire world who may have a handle on all these rules, but she’s particularly brilliant with this stuff and far above normal human capacity regarding theory around language. She’s like the Super Woman of Grammar.
*
I am thinking we don’t have enough candles. The lights just flickered here in Ottawa; we have a total of one Glade scented candle, and I’m guessing its little light wouldn’t be enough to sustain us for an evening. Hmm. Isn’t that doom day soon approaching? But then, what good would a few candles do if the whole world went kaput?
*
I am thinking that I need to make dinner, and yet have no clue what to serve. This is a daily occurrence. 😉
P.S. TONIGHT is PRIDE AND PREJUDICE at the NAC. Awesomeness wrapped in petticoats!
Bumpyboobs ~CatherineBrunelleWrites 