Tag Archives: drinking

“Natural” Soda Pop? What the Zevia?!

Today I enjoyed an impromptu food court lunch with a good friend: intrepid gossip blogger and general internet shockster, SoJu.

Drunk karaoke - circa January 2011

Okay well “enjoyed” might be misleading – actually it was the crappiest shawarma I’ve had in months. What’s up, Anoush? You did not bring your A-game today! The company was lovely, though.

After walking with Soju to the scene of her meeting in Yorkville, I decided to have a wander through Pusateri’s on my way back to the office. For those of you who don’t know – Pusateri’s is a chi chi frou frou gourmet food store where lunch costs 85$ and they offer valet parking and pet minding for your diamond-collar-studded yapper named Pookums.

So I poked around for a while, but eventually I got tired of being shoved and jostled by wealthy matriarchs and sunglass-wearing socialites who could obviously smell the middle class on me and did not spare the snake eyes. So I grabbed the cheapest drink in the cooler and got the hell out of Dodge. Read more »

The Ghost of Christmas Present(s)

Posted by gwenstyles on December 14, 2010 2 comments

*UPDATE* So my mother called me about ten minutes after I posted this to provide me with a detailed list of all the awesome Christmassy shit she does, thereby refuting my claim that she’s a grinch. And she’s right – I just like to poke a bit of fun at my mom sometimes, I love her. She made a very valid argument: it’s not that she hates the holidays, it’s that she hates what the holidays do to some people. Totally true.

Normally I’d pretty this post up with a picture or something but y’all are just gonna have to deal because I’m not having it today.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the holidays. It’s my favourite time of year. To begin with, my birthday is just a week before Christmas, so growing up the two events a kid looks forward to all year were, for me, back-to-back. I love almost everything about Christmastime: the lights, the decorations, the music, the food (oh God the foooooooood), the parties, the drinking, the gift exchanges, the shopping (yes, I even love the shopping), and of course, spending more time than usual with friends and family.

But this year, it’s been a real struggle to go through the motions, and I’m not sure why. It seems I’ve lost my holiday mojo. I can pinpoint a few things that may have caused this:

1. Holiday Haterz. They’re everywhere this year! What the holly? I have a couple of Grinches in my family – you learn to grin and bear their grumblings. If it were anyone else I’d go postal, but you don’t tell your mom to STFU. I get that not everyone enjoys the holiday season. You’d like to think they’d be sensitive to others and would try to curb their rage, but ragey people aren’t really that well-known for their rage-curbing abilities. Anyway, I already know how to deal with my mom’s bah-humbug attitude: I just keep her nice and tight. Hey Ma – ever wonder why I drink three times as much during the holidays as I normally do, and why I always take you down with me? It’s cause I LOVE YOUUUUUUUUUUUU NOW HAVE A MERRY GODDAMN CHRISTMAS. (lol) This year, I’ve had to deal with a couple of bitter angry people in my workplace, too, who have entitlement issues and decided to kick up a big stink about what they’re NOT getting for the holidays. And that’s discouraging. With the poverty, hunger, political chaos, and serious bullshit going on out there in the world, knowing that some people really think that much of themselves is a real downer when the holidays are supposed to be about everything other than receiving (although trust me, I do get the irony in that). While these two lovely, lovely individuals DID almost succeed in ruining my holiday happiness, I am happy to say I managed to get back on track (helped in no small part by my good friend Mr. J. Daniels) and am back in the ho-ho-ho spirit.

2. Busy-ness. I’ve been damn busy, son. In October, I spent a month away from my job; instead of answering fifty phone calls a day from pissed-off people with entitlement issues, I spent 70 hours a week following a little guy with big dreams all over the city in his progressive, and unfortunately unsuccessful, bid for Mayor. I had a great time, made many important contacts, and learned a lot of super neat shit. But I mean, I am a sedentary, middle-aged office drone, and it took a toll on me. The day that gig ended I fell sick from sheer exhaustion and I feel like I’ve been playing catch-up ever since. I spent the entire month of November up to my arse in grievances, harassment and discrimination complaints, and discipline issues. All this on top of my regular job, which as I mentioned before, typically involves eating shit on the phone all day from people who really don’t see the point in being nice to poor call centre assholes like me. In early December, I was elected to the executive board of my union’s area council AND I was recruited to lobby my member of provincial parliament about how my good friend Dalton McQuinty wants public service workers to take a pay cut next year (and how we’re gonna tell him to blow it out his butt). On top of all this, I was in night school once a week until recently (and am now an accredited union counselor, BOOYA). So uh, how’ve ya been? I’ve been a mite busy, kids.

3. Mo’ money, mo’ problems. Our problem, however, is definitely not mo’ money. It’s less money. But I won’t bore you with an explanation. Yes, I do see the world’s smallest violin player sitting on your shoulder playing the world’s saddest tune just for me. Shut up and get me some Bailey’s, shorty.

4. C’mon get up, get down with the sickness! And oh baby, what a sickness it’s been. My best friend’s had it for almost a month. My ex had it for over two weeks. I started shovelling Cold FX and Vitamin C horse pills into my maw the moment they started sneezing but all it got me was just barely healthy enough to go to work, not QUITE sick enough to stay home without feeling guilty. SO BASICALLY I BLAME DON CHERRY: FOR ENDORSING SUCH A MEDIOCRE COLD REMEDY AND FOR CALLING ME A LEFT-WING PINKO LAST WEEK. (What? It hurt my feelings?) (Okay, it really didn’t LOL.)

Anyway, my first official round of holiday parties is this week, and on Saturday it’s my (30th) birthday, so I hope that all this liquid happiness will be enough to put a bit of mojo back in my step.

In Which Gwen Drinks For Free in Jerusalem

Posted by gwenstyles on November 28, 2010 No comments

One night earlier this year, my ex and I went to dinner at Jerusalem Restaurant. It’s one of my favourite restaurants – it’s a Mediterranean buffet. The food is incredible. Several different kinds of chicken and lamb, tabbouleh, seafood, grilled veggies as far as the eye can see (asparagus, zucchini, eggplant, cauliflower), saffron rice, salads, roasted garlic, lentil soups, Warak Enab, hummus and baba ghanoush, falafel, hot freshly-baked pita bread, and more!

Yum! The food here's so good.

Even better, they feature belly dancers every night of the week! We love watching the belly dancing.

Gorgeous! I love belly dancing

So we were just sitting down to our first plate of food. Our table was in the aisle that had a direct path from the kitchen to the bar. A busboy was coming from the kitchen with a dolly, and the dolly was stacked with five crates of clean water and wine glasses. The stack was about four feet high. Suddenly, the wheel of the dolly caught on the rug right in front of our table and all of the crates tipped forward, crashing into Stuart and I with a booming sound that almost shattered my eardrums! The plastic crates smashed into my left knee and Stu’s right foot and over a hundred glasses broke all over us! I was literally ankle-deep in broken glass, and couldn’t even move because of the sea of jagged glass around me.

So scary! Thought I was going to be hurt!

The manager of the restaurant comes rushing over yelling “Oh my god are you okay? Oh my god oh my god!” She was snapping her fingers for staff to clean up the glass, calling the head waiter over to move us to another table, promising to bring us replacement drinks (we were just drinking Coke) and apologizing profusely.

The indicent scared and embarrassed me. Not only was everyone in the restaurant was looking at us, but it happened so fast that I thought I was going to be hurt! I had no time to move out of the way. For several minutes afterwards my heart was beating a mile a minute and I had a mild panic attack on the way home. Imagine if we’d been cut by a falling shard of glass, or if my knee had actually been hurt by the plastic crate that hit it!

So we were moved to a new table (a MUCH better table, might I add) and were offered free unlimited wine for the evening to make up for the incident (would have been better to offer us our meal on the house, but I am NOT one to pass up free booze!). The rest of the evening passed very pleasantly, the highlight being towards the end when we watched the belly dancer coax an old grandpa up to dance with her. The guy looked just like Frank Barone from Everybody Loves Raymond. This guy gets up and starts dancing with the belly dancer, and he’s better than she is! He even taught her some sexy moves! It was fucking hilarious.

What’s the scariest or most embarrassing thing that’s ever happened to you in a restaurant?

Creepiness From Away Home

Posted by gwenstyles on November 9, 2010 2 comments

I found this blog post on an old site, and just had to share it. I wrote it about a year ago, after a super fun all-girls weekend road trip to Montreal. It’s a fun (albeit creepy) example of the types of weirdos you run into on the road. What’s your craziest from-away story? Who’s the absolute weirdest person you’ve ever run into on vacation or on a business trip? Leave me a comment and tell me about it!

Just take. the. damn. picture. so. we. can. go. buy. beer.

On Saturday night, Michelle and I went out for a (very very) late-night stroll along Rue Ste-Catherine in Montréal. If my mother knew I’d been out wandering around the busiest part of an unfamiliar city, full of cheap wine and straight-up Absolut, at the ungodly hour of three o’clock in the morning, she would probably freak out. (Oops, forgot she reads this. Good thing I’m almost thirty and she can’t spank my bum anymore!)

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The place we stayed in was kinda grungy, and by kinda I mean I kept my shoes on to sleep.

After picking up some amazing pineapple juice at a busy late-night Lebanese eatery, we strolled (stumbled) our giggly-ass selves back to our hotel, and as soon as we walked in the door the attendant working the 24-hour check in desk practically POUNCED on us. Obviously he was bored, lonely, and desperate to chat us up.

Well, wouldn't YOU pounce on two such beautiful women?

He started off the conversation in a weird way: “Hey, have you guys been drinking?” We replied that we indeed had been (I thought briefly about lying, until I realized I probably smelled like I’d had a bath in Bright’s House Wine), and he then asked us if we’d just been out eating. Not wanting to say “no you freaking weirdo, we were out smoking meth in public and trying to get into a strip bar that turned out to be a brothel and since neither of us had the required 50$ to get in we came back to this dump”, we told him no, we had had a big dinner earlier.

Wait. What?

So then he proceeded to offer us each a piece of fried chicken. Uh….. okay. He was being kinda weird about it and, not wanting to offend the sober weird guy while we were drunk, and also (admittedly) being a little hungry, we each accepted a piece and stood at the check in desk chatting with the guy and kinda not eating the chicken.

When I was thinking about it the next morning, my initial thought that it was my inebriation that made the whole situation so weird was ruled out by the fact that dude, this guy was fucking WEIRD!

He told us that he was “just helping out his dad’s friend who owned this dump” by working the night shift, and that he’d much rather be partying. He then told us that he likes nothing better than to drive up and down Mont Royal at breakneck speeds after “chugging back a few” because it was exhilerating. He proceeded to offer us each “a Heineken or a Corona” since he keeps the trunk of his car “well stocked”. (BETTER BELIEVE WE SAID NO TO THAT!!)

At this point, we’re slowly backing towards the stairs, but he’s still chatting us up, man! Tells us how much money he has from going to the casino and from “a little side job I have” that he was extremely elusive about, divulging only that “it wasn’t anything to do with drugs or anything like that”. What was he hinting at? Racketeering? Human trafficking? Prostitution? Did he honestly think we would be IMPRESSED somehow?