Say I want a resolution

by RAF KATIGBAK

Happy New Year! Whew. Can you believe it’s been another 12 months already? It’s like time is like, totally flying! Okay, fine. While I’m sure some godforsaken culture somewhere on this Earth is actually celebrating a new year in their twisted non-Western calendar, it’s not New Year’s. But I feel like Montreal is experiencing a rebirth with all of this sticky humid weather we’ve been having.

As most of you living here know, Montreal is, essentially, two cities. There’s the Winter Montreal: cold, white, barren yet magical, where everyone complains about the cold. And there’s the Summer Montreal that’s humid, lush, alive with excitement and where everybody complains about the heat. So disparate and extreme are the two Montreals that I’m convinced that people that live here long enough develop some strange brain anomalies.

Every year it’s the same. Throughout the winter months, we bitch and moan and scream, “Why? Why are we here? Why do we submit ourselves to this icy torture!” Then suddenly it gets warm and we’re all, “Winter? What winter? This city is a tropical paradise! Yay! Let’s break out our unicycles and devil sticks!” Ask me to conjure how I felt in the winter and I couldn’t tell you. Right now all I can think about is A/C and the financial viability of a Mr. Freeze enema kit.

So yeah, I also want to say Happy New Year because I’m all about making resolutions right now. I figure, since this is a new beginning, it’s time to make some serious changes in my life. It also might have something to do with my near-death experience driving a motorcycle on the 40 (long story). Anyways, here is a list of things I need to take care of this year (aka this summer).

Taking up yoga First off, let me just say that I find a lot of yoga culture mind-numbingly eye-rolling. There’s a lot of new age-y stuff in there that my cynical East Coast mind just can’t let sink in. I don’t need my chakras aligned or my kundalinis tingled, thank you very much. I hate Lululemon and the only sun salutations I usually partake in is holding a 40 to the sky as I stumble home wasted at 5 a.m. So yeah, not much of a fan of yoga—plus, the way I hear some people talk about it, it sounds a little cult-y to me. However, my friend Thea runs an all-dude Yoga class in the Mile-End and she promises that she doesn’t do any of the lame shit most creepy yoga fanatics cream their designer sarongs over. I like to think of it as a punk rock yoga. Of course, being in an all-male yoga class has advantages and disadvantages. The main plus being that I don’t have to embarrass myself with my disgustingly poor flexibility in front of members of the opposite sex (I still don’t believe that God meant for us to touch our toes); but the biggest drawback is that I’ll never be able to confirm the rumour that certain yoga moves cause air to enter then escape the female nether regions, the result of which has been described by a female friend as “a symphony of queefs.”

Learning to swim Okay, I admit it. I can’t really swim. Put me in the water, I sink like a brick. I mean, sure, I can make the motions of a swimmer, flap my arms and kick my legs, but it basically looks like I’m having a wet aneurism. I used to like to think that I didn’t float because my muscle mass is too tightly bound to my body. “Thanks to my incredible super-human strength, I don’t float,” I’d remark to friends. Inevitably one would respond, “Come on, even dead people float!” To which I’d reply, “Well guess what asshole, I’m not dead, I’m alive and I want to stay that way.” As a kid, I was confused. I’ve got tropical Filipino blood, swimming should come naturally to me. Well, I suppose if that were true, I’d also look at my friend’s Dachshund as a nice light snack.

Not learning to drive I know I was talking about getting my licence a while back, but since then, a bunch of things came up… and I had some Battlestar Galactica episodes to catch up on, okay? Anyway, as much as I love the idea of driving, I realized that as soon as I’m fully mobile, my apartment is going to turn into a complete disaster. Let me explain. I’m a procrastinator. I will try and do anything except what needs to be done at any given moment. This means that instead of, say, writing this column, I’ll mop my floors, dust my baseboards or rearrange my sock drawer using a colour gradient/ankle height matrix. Since I got my scooter, procrastinating out of the house became so much easier. As a result, my floors sit un-mopped, the baseboards un-dusted and my socks piled higgledy-piggledy in the corner. Basically, my productive procrastination level has decreased significantly. If I had a car, I could travel even further, leaving my place looking like Edward James Olmos’s face.

Riff-Raff@sympatico.ca