Waiting for Optimum Redemption

“You’re almost at the next reward level!” A Shoppers Drug Mart sales associate breathlessly exclaimed to me a couple of days ago. As per usual I had come to Shoppers for one thing (toilet paper) and left with a vast assortment of impulse purchases ranging from deodorant (I was had by the sign that said: savings when you buy 3 or more), a couple of bags of Real Fruit, and 2 litre’s of skim milk, purportedly “on-sale”.

When I looked at my receipt – I realized the cashier was right. I have now amassed over 37,000 Optimum Points. When I get to 38,000 the good folks at Shoppers will give me $60 off my next purchase of toilet paper, milk and deodorant.

Halle-fucking-lujah. After 9 years, yes 9 years, of swiping my Optimum Card - redemption is nigh.



Although it was almost a decade ago I remember the day I started Optimizing my life. The year? 2001. The place? Pharmaprix on St. Catherine St in Montreal.

An early adopter, I joined only a year after Shoppers launched their ubiquitous loyalty program. Today, almost 10 million Canadians are Optimum members and over 2.5 million people in the Greater Toronto Area answer positively when a Shoppers cashier asks: Do you have an Optimum Card?

For a country with few cohesive national motifs Shoppers Drug Mart and the Optimum program may have come to displace the long-since departed Eaton’s Catalogue in our collective nationwide retail psyche. All we need is for someone to update Roch Carrier’s Hockey Sweater with the story of a mother in Quebec who tries to redeem her Optimum points at the local Pharmaprix for a Montreal Canadians jersey and we’re good to go.



That being said participation in this Part of Heritage moment doesn’t come cheap. I figure it has cost me over to $3600 to accumulate my current point total; you receive 1 Optimum point for every $10 spent in-store. If I redeem my points now it means that Shoppers will give me $1 off for every $63.33 I’ve already spent (assuming I spend $3800). However, the true Shangri-la for the Optimum obsessed consumer is to point hoard until you reach 95,000; at that point Shoppers will knock a $170 off your bill. Mathematically this works out to $1 free dollar for every $55.88 spent.

Admittedly – I’m not your prototypical Optimum obsessed Shopper’s customer. I don’t buy high-end make-up or cologne from the beautyBoutique, and in Ontario (unlike other provinces) you don’t receive Optimum Points for prescription purchases. I’m also not one of those wacky people who strategize their purchases so they fall on a 20x times the points bonus weekend.


But maybe I should become one of those point obsessed Canadians - it does seem somewhat disappointing that it has taken me over 9 years to benefit from what many business analysts consider one of the most successful consumer loyalty programs in Canada.

Perhaps I’m just not smart enough to get to the Optimum logic. According to Shoppers PR folks, when people redeem their points they usually splurge on things like “expensive perfume they wouldn't normally buy. With the Optimum points, the perfume is essentially free."

Uhm… sorry; can we rewind - how is spending $3800 to get $60 “off” anywhere close to free?

The program seems even more useless if you factor in “the time value of money”. As my finance professor would yell at my class during every lecture: a dollar today is worth more then a dollar tomorrow. Subsequently that $170 off that you’re being promised in today’s dollars won’t be worth $170 in twenty years when I actually amass enough points to redeem them. Using a steady 3% rate - $170 of Future Value is actually worth less then $100 today.



Furthermore, if you look at the capitalization of my investment in Optimum Points ($400 per year for 9 years) and using a growth rate of 3% my $3600 is actually worth over $4000. So thanks Shoppers, for offering less, while actually taking more.

In execution Optimum could be Canada’s greatest letdown since Paul Martin’s ascension to power.

If anything – Optimum maybe the most unexciting rewards program ever. With other rewards programs, such as Aeroplan or Air Miles, you’ll always remember the “free” trip you took upon redeeming your miles. In comparison the Optimum point redemption seems fairly unsexy; unless of course you're buying “free” condoms and lubricant with those points. And even then I'm no sure I'd describe condoms and lubricant as very sexy; its sort like calling a fork the sexist part of your meal....

Which of course leads me to my current issue: seeing as I could die before I accumulate 95,000 Optimum points, I’ve decided that it is high time to start getting my “Free” rewards. As soon as I reach 38,000 points I’m redeeming my $60 faster then Bieber fans destroyed Esperenza Spalding’s Facebook page.

Only thing is, I don’t know what to spend those sixty bucks on. Therefore it would seem apt to ask this about the Optimum program: did I shave my legs (using Gilette Foamy purchased at Shoppers) for this?

Storytelling

I realized over the weekend that the majority of my life consists of two things:

1) Googling Things via the Interweb;

AND/OR

2) Having Coffee with Men in Random Starbucks;
- this includes both my personal and private life;

And yes my favourite days are spent in Starbucks, googling people and meeting random men.

Because I had some spare time today I made a pie-chart, which categorizes how I begin most of my sentences.

How Detail Oriented Are You?

In my current career, which oscillates between consultant, rogue man about town, international man of mystery, retiree and business analyst depending on whom I’m talking to, I tend to read a lot of job descriptions. Mostly this is because my beloved sister, Bold Sharon, is convinced that the best way to get a job in this town is from Monster.com or Workopolis. Every time we have a discussion about my sort of unemployment (which isn’t really full-time unemployment) – I like to think of it more as an interregnum between taking over the world and not taking the world – Bold (because she cares) is always on my case to concentrate less on networking and more on actual job postings, “Its great that you met with the CEO of a company, but does he have a job to give you?” Such is older sister love.

But back to job descriptions and back to the Seinfeld-esque, have you ever noticed joke that I’m about to make: have you ever noticed that almost all job descriptions contain the words: detail oriented (or the variant: strong attention to detail)? I don’t mean this as some sort of ode to late nineties observational humour; I’m being serious, every f’ing job description literally has that phrase listed as a final bullet point under the section “required skills”.

The problem – what if you’re not detail oriented? Does everyone simply lie as they write their hundredth cover letter, “as a detail oriented person I look forward to spreading my detail oriented-ness all over your place of employment. I also look forward to discussing just how detail oriented I am at your earliest convenience.” [Sidebar: You know who’d I’d like to spread my detail orientedness on by the way – Ryan Gosling.]

This is not to say that I am not detail oriented (dear prospective employees who are reading this blog I am so detail oriented you won’t know what to do with yourself) because I am. Well… I’m not. Sometimes I am very detail oriented – I can probably tell you when your hair colour changed, or as I type this sitting across from a random person at a coffee shop I can tell based on his ring that he’s Jewish (magen david ring), snowboards (small Burton sticker on his clipboard) and from his datebook, I suspect he may be cheating on his girlfriend (if I told you how I figured that out – I’d have to kill you). Does that make me detail oriented or am I just perceptive, a la Sherlock Holmes?

Detail orientedness has become some weird demand of our society; odd because I’m pretty sure NO ONE is actually that detail oriented, with the exception of those Type A people who freak the $hit out of me. If you’ve ever worked for a boss who is Blackberry/iPhone obsessed you’ve probably noticed that detail is often lacking in the smart-phone age. I had one beloved boss whom would write quick task oriented emails from the subway. What they lacked in detail (I quickly learned her short-forms and words she commonly misspelled on her blackberry) they had in earnestness. Actual task oriented missives meant more in terms of actual job productivity.

The reality is that most people aren’t that detail oriented. My dear friend M worked in advertising for many years before her own retirement to become a Calgarian socialite. Most account executive job descriptions in the advertising world say they want someone who is detail oriented. Yet at some point in her career M. had to stop the production of an advertising flier because there was a huge spelling mistake. How many “detail oriented” people do you think looked over and read the proofs and approved it? 2? 5?

Was everyone in this instance awesomely bad at his or her job? No, not really. “Detail oriented” isn’t a task; it isn’t a job description; it’s a falsity. We’ve created an economy where we somehow expect everyone to be detail oriented – because they lied to you in their job interview – but managers don’t often actually ask people to be detail oriented. Imagine if in the above situation, a job description specifically stated: must be able to proofread. Proofreading is different from being detail oriented; proofreading is a skill and subsequently proofreading is a specific requirement that not everyone can lie about. Because it is also specific employees view it as a task, NOT as an expectation.

Our expectations from employees shouldn’t be nebulousness. By demanding that everyone be detail oriented however, we risk creating an employment marketplace wherein we prioritize generalism (whatever, apparently that’s not a word) over requirements. In the interim – detail oriented has simply become a cliché of the HR world.

The time for rebellion is nigh!

Dick > Latkes, or Latkes > Dick?

In my younger and perhaps more experimental days I wrote what I consider to be “the semin-al” [that’s a pun, so laugh] article discussing the topical situation of being Jewish and gay in Toronto. Using the leitmotif of Toronto’s village structure I expressed my discomfort at what were meant to be “my two villages” i.e.the Church and Wellesley Village, Toronto’s gaybourhood, and the Forest Hill Village, our city’s de-facto J.A.P. nabe. While I recognized that both were part of my identity – I admitted that I felt at home in neither. At the time I was 24 and I had moved back into my parents’ house in Toronto after completing my undergrad degree. I found myself alienated by Toronto Life; the choice that I felt was imposed on me between suburban heterosexual normativity versus downtown homosexual hedonism. My larger insinuation was that as Torontonians we prescribe to a set of villages as a sort of safety net; we chose where we lived because we feel comfortable only in certain areas. My theory, to put it succinctly, was that we wanted to be surrounded by people who had Longchamp purses because we all had Longchamp purses [at the time I think Coach was the purse du jour, so consider this an update for the new decade].
After going to business school and spending 70k I learned that this whole village mentality was what organizational behaviour professors call an in-group bias. We like those who are most like us.

In the intervening years I discovered my own Toronto Life, which precariously found itself on the second floor of an old Annex Victorian. The apartment that I nicknamed Buggeryville sat about halfway between the centre hall normalcy “up-hill” and sexually charged deviance “down-hill”. Equilibrium was temporarily reached - temporary being a key word of course.

Habitation in Toronto’s villages is somewhat time sensitive. I recently moved back into the Faux Hill,, housesitting as my parents travel around the world, and now that I am pretend lord of the manor I’ve actually begun to enjoy the uptown lifestyle. Its quiet, and clean (compared to Bloor Street) and if I want some gay I can turn up the Katy Perry and invite over some friends who will try and see if any of the hot neighbourhood construction workers have the Grindr app installed on their iPhone.

And yet, in truth, I’m still Faux in Faux. Forest Hill is not really my home. But where is? A part of me realizes that the need for a village trumps a lot in this town, which begats the age-old question: if you belong to two different communities just where exactly do your loyalties lie? Temporary respite in the Annex, or Ossington only leads to the same sort of question later on in life. Does gay trump Jewish or does Jewish trump gay?

I was talking with a gay and Jewish friend recently who admitted that he really longed to meet a nice Jewish boy, even though this desire made his dating life fairly difficult by severely limiting the pool of potential choices. Why the desire for a Jewish mate? When pressed he admitted that he felt more Jewish then he did gay. As I jokingly responded, in Chanukah theme: latke’s > dick.

And while being Jewish and gay isn’t mutually exclusive, I would argue that there is
an underlying current in Toronto’s broader Jewish community of you’re either in the Village or you’re not. This is not entirely due to Conservative Canadian Jewish indifference (at best) towards homosexuality, but the factual realities about being gay. Any gay with any sense of religion (from Jewish to Christian…_ has to coalesce their sense of religiosity with their [homo]sexuality. Bridging that divide is still something that inherently requires a personal thought process. If you’ve grown up kosher but come out of the closet do you suddenly start eating breakfast sausage because you’ve started to eat breakfast sausage?

I think this question underscores the strong desire and perhaps in different terminology, the need, for gay Jews to find a place that fits within the heteronormativity of Torontos’ Jewish Village. That lingering insularity of present day cultural Judaism is surprisingly prevalent for those of us who may have blown the closet doors of those Faux Hill Centre Halls wide open. Just like our sister’s, who wanted to marry Nice Jewish Boys, shockingly a lot of gay-Jews have that same want. A friends’ boyfriend recently hosted a gay, Jewish bar night with the caption: “the event you’ve all be waiting for” and for the hundred plus gay Jews who attended… it really was.

The pull of the Jewish Village even for gay Jews is specifically strong in Toronto. We have one the best-organized Jewish communities in North America. UJA Toronto, the defacto organizational nucleus of Jewish Toronto, is the benchmark to which other North American Federations aspire - few can speak to a $400 million capital campaign. Yet within this well organized core there are relatively few gay Jewish organizations; unlike major gay centres like New York and Los Angeles - Toronto has no gay synagogue. Even cities with similar sized Jewish gay populations such as Boston and Philadelphia have LGBT specific synagogues; Atlanta, with fewer people, fewer gays and fewer Jews also has an LGBT synagogue. In some ways this probably speaks to Canada’s greater tolerance of LGBT issues (especially in Toronto from a broad socio-political perspective) yet it may also speak to the fact that Torontonian Jewry hasn’t really found that happy medium in terms of figuring out what to do with its faygellehs.

One of the problems may be that Toronto Jews, when it comes to religion, are far more conservative then our American urban counterparts. According to research by UJA Toronto only 19% of Torontonians consider themselves Reform; in the States, however, Reform Judaism is the largest of contemporary Jewish movements, with 35% of American Jews classifying themselves as Reform. In Toronto Conservative synagogues are the principal places of worship, housing almost 40% of Torontonian Jews (in the States the number falls to 30%). On top of this and what is most concerning in terms of being gay and Jewish is that Canadian Conservative synagogues have actually started to break away from what was the major governing body of Conservative Judaism in North America: the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism. Four Toronto-based synagogues (including Beth Tzedick and Adath Israel probably the two largest and wealthiest synagogues in Canada) formed the Canadian Council of Conservative Synagogues. While certainly geography played a role in this schism, social issues came to play as well. According to the Canadian Jewish News: “[there were] growing theological differences between Adath Israel and Conservative synagogues in the US who tend to be less traditional in practice and where the Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary has begun to admit openly gay students to its rabbinical program.”

Thus my issue when it comes to finding a place in the Jewish Village is that I worry that homosexuality in Canadian Conservative Judaism operates under a Don’t Ask Don’t Tell type of anachronism, or even worse, is simply trotted out for political opportunism. While officially non-denominational (Conservative, Reform or Orthodox) UJA Toronto’s vision speaks to conservative and traditional mores; ie, “supporting core Jewish values” and to preserve and strengthen the quality of Jewish life in Greater Toronto, Canada, Israel and around the world…. When core Jewish values are often defined by mispocha, education and supporting the next generation wherein do we begin to question where Judaism and sexuality intersect, if at all? The only reference to LGBT issues on the UJA website has little to do with acceptance of gay people, and more to do with politics (i.e. the decision to march in Toronto’s Pride Parade had NOTHING to do with acceptance and everything to do with contemporary Israeli-politics).

And still… gay Jews just want to be a part of that Jewish Toronto Village. So where is our place? Is it through organizations like Kulunu (supported by Hillel, which in turn is supported by the UJA), which has a fairly religious bent, while Jewish parties at gay bars pose the rather awkward question of: are we just going out to get drunk and hook-up with other gay Jews where simply knowing that your partner has had a bar-mitzvah is as much a form of in-group bias as a Longchamp purse is for your typical Village JAP (not that there’s anything wrong with it)?

My worry, much as my initial problem with the Village, is that it is a bit insular isn’t it? It’s a bit, trying to buy into the hetero-normativity of the Village when as gays, we don’t have to; especially as “day-walkers” gay-Jews have the potential to cross the insipid boundaries that modern day Judaism likes to put-up.
This of course leads to the very relevant discussion of whether conceptions of Judaism in the twenty first century are based on religious or cultural affiliation. If culture is the case, (and lets throw in Israel into the mix), then really Canadian gay Jews should be quite angry at the short thrift we’ve been given from our Conservative Jewish fore-fathers. Why must Canadian Conservative Judaism cling to unnecessary traditions regarding homosexuality?

But in the same vein it should be asked: why do gay-Jews want to be part of the Village? Do we desire a sense of political representation (ie to implement community change in terms of acceptance of homosexuality), or are we trying to hook-up with each other to fulfill some sort of cultural manifest destiny?

Singing to Make It Rain...

(NB: I consider this my end of year blog-jam so enjoy.)

Unlike the religious right I don’t blame Bill Clinton for much. In fact I think his wife Hilary was the greatest lesbian President since Eleanor Roosevelt. I even have a soft spot for Bill’s daughter Chelsea who, after her gawky teenage years, redeemed herself by marrying a nice mensch in an old Astor estate, natch. With maturity Chelsea has also become the prettier of the two famous Chelsea’s easily eclipsing Prince Ginge’s on and off again escort: Chelsea Davy.

But I do blame Clinton for something: singing politicians. It is because of Clinton’s seminal appearance (during the 1992 primaries) on the Arsenio Hall Show, where he whipped it out (I’m talking about his saxophone, get your mind out of the gutter), that it has become de rigeur for politicians to use whatever artistic talent they do or do not possess as a quick and dirty way to gain political favour with a jaded public. Bill’s big blow was so successful that pundits actually argue that his performance saved his campaign. The gimmicks success proved that musical talent earns quick political points from an unsuspecting public. In the years following the Clinton-era it is clear that war-room strategists who obsess over dips in polling numbers see falling personal approval ratings and think: we need to get our candidate on the View to talk about Snooki, stat.


The Harper political machine has clearly learned a fair bit from Clinton deploying his pianist skills at opportune times. In 2009, just under a year after he declared war on culture with spending cuts and his infamous statement: "I think when ordinary working people come home, turn on the TV and see a gala of a bunch of people at a rich gala all subsidized by the taxpayers, claiming their subsidies have actually gone up, I don't think that's something that resonates with ordinary people,” Harper (with four by-elections on the line) found himself “shocking” the crowd at the National Arts Centre Annual Gala by playing a Beatles song.

The crowd and the Canadian public went wild. With that one twinkle on the old ivories suddenly that creepy dude in a blue sweater clutching onto a kitten wasn’t so scary after all. Harper was just like us.


With the success of 2009’s “Get By With a little Help From My Friends” I can just see the machinations at the Prime Minister’s Office this year, how could they one-up last years efforts? This year the Conservative brain trust had Herr Harper strut across the stage at the annual conservative party Christmas party (which is probably the least fun Christmas party since Hitlers 1941 Christmas Party in Munich – “are there any Jews in da house?”).

For those who haven’t seen Harper strutting his stuff – check out the video posted by the good people at CTV. I love the 3:35 mark at the end of his encore when he appears to be mouthing the words: ok. You can almost see him exhale the huge sigh of relief – he looks almost as nervous as Gwyneth Paltrow did while singing at the Country Music Awards (that’s also probably the only thing Paltrow and Harper have in common, at least until Harper unveils his post retirement lifestyle blog: Hoop.)



The best, however, was the over zealously laudatory CTV commentary. CTV just couldn’t get enough. Watch as Stephen Harper lumbers across the stage like a zombie extra in the Walking Dead to gingerly pat his guitarist on the back, while the CTV reporter comments on how he gets to into the moment he "slaps his guitarist on the back” (Minute mark 1:33). Its almost as if they were trying to imply that Harper is Bono manhandling the Edge in front of 200,000 people at Glasto. Almost.



Because our politicians have the mental capacity of my four year-old nephew so anything Harper can do, obviously Iggy can do better (except win an election, I went there…).

So in retaliation here is Michael Ignatieff, leader of the official opposition, sang some sort of Christmas song for the cameras. The whole 50 seconds is awkward and bordering on awful, but look at the smirk of self-satisfaction on Michael’s face. His thought process is clear: “Haha Canada. You think I’m a stick in the mud. But would a stick in the mud sing!!? I mean, SING!? Clearly I Michael “author, auteur, journalist, professor and NOW singer” Ignatief am no stick in the mud. I am like Diana Princess of Hearts. I am your prince of darkness, I mean Prince of the People. I SANG FOR YOU BITCHES.” And the final smirk coupled with a tinge of self-doubt: “you’re going to vote for me right?”



Thank god 2011 will probably be an election year folks cause I can’t wait until Harper and Iggy unleash round two of their sing-off.

Happy New Year.

The Pseudo Relationship for a Pseudo Age

As soon as I started my MBA and thusly became an impoverished student I began to cull eating out at restaurants. Resto-hopping was a nasty AND expensive habit that I had acquired during my carefree days as a 25 year-old YUPPIE. However, as I re-joined the proletariat it was time to cull restaurants and rediscover boxed pasta and pre-made Classico sauce. More often then not, and because I hate cooking for myself, I’d invite my fellow student and friend, Kenny, over for a cheap dinner; at the time his girlfriend lived in Vancouver and it was somehow more enjoyable to sit in silence, albeit together, reading different sections of the Globe and Mail, then to eat alone (obviously I read Sports while he read the then titled Review, or not). Our bromance became so domestic that at one point while my house was on the market and being shown to a prospective new owner, a real-estate agent, touring my apartment, turned to Kenny and asked: “so how long have you two been living here?”

Jokes aside, however, I soon graduated from quick pasta and meat sauce to more elaborate dinners. Wherein after cooking, I would set the dining room table, light a candle, poor (haha) myself a glass of wine and stare out my window.

Once, in a fit of boredom, I began talking to myself:

“How was your day?” I asked to no one in particular.

“Not too bad.” I responded, as I jabbed at my chicken.

“Did you get that thing done at work?” I asked back.

“No, oh didn’t I tell you? That whole project got delayed. We’re waiting on a new direction from the Power That Be.” I answered to myself, chuckling at those spirit-like bosses.

“No. You didn’t mention. That sucks.”

"Oh. Sorry. I meant to email…”

“Nah don’t worry about it.” Awkward silence as I swallowed, “Hey did you still want to have dinner this weekend with the Caplan’s?”

There are of course no Caplan’s. In fact the whole thing was made up and well… I guess a little depressing. Disheartening perhaps for my inability to find a dinner companion but also a bit sad for my perceived mundaneness of everyday conversation.

Two married friends invited me over for dinner a couple of months ago and when I voiced concern about intruding on their date the wife laughed and said, “honestly if you weren’t here we would probably sit in silence.”

I wouldn’t really know from such monotony. I am single. Generally I am always single. I wake up in the morning, shuffle about to work and go about my merry way, with nary a person to care about beside myself. Sometimes this bothers me, most of the time it doesn’t. Realistically I’m pretty sure that if I was ready to be with someone I’d find someone. For whatever reason I obviously prefer putting the mono in Jono.

Singlehood has made me an increasing anomaly amongst some of my friends, plenty of who are starting to shack up with members of the opposite (or same sex) and gasp, marry. A friend told me that since I was the only single one left in our group of friends it was up to me to bring home the gossip.

Being an outlier in the relationship bonanza doesn’t particularly bother me, however, what does worry me, and what worries my mother even more, is not my inherent singledom (as a wise friend once said: we could lock you in a box and the right person would still find you) but the ease at which I find myself in pseudo relationships.

What is a pseudo relationship? I’m assuming at some point almost everyone has been in a pseudo relationship and perhaps hasn’t realized it, so for the uninitiated a pseudo relationship is one that provides some of the emotional (or perhaps physical comforts) of a LTR but is not entirely real. And regardless of how comfortable it may feel at the time, a faux boy or girl friend is really just a relationship crutch on the road to nowheresville, population Norman Bates.

My experience with the pseudo goes back some years to the days immediately following my return from undergraduate. Armed with a BA from McGill and not much else I found myself a stranger in my hometown, sort of friendless, clutching an email address for a former flame who lived a couple of thousand of miles away (I’m actually pretty sure he had written his email address by hand on a piece of notebook paper as these were the days before smartphones). For months the former flame and I would email each other obsessively 3 times a day; we’d send long and lengthy tomes, passionately beaten out over keyboards and delivered to each other via our Hotmail addresses. Our relationship was not particularly real, and yet, a fresh email at breakfast, lunch and dinner somehow meant as much as a warm body in bed. Somewhere in the empty recesses of cyberspace is what amounted to a fake relationship between two dudes who both probably knew that it would never amount to anything beyond cyber-love.

My pseudo relationship history didn’t end there; I’ve done long-distance too, which as much as it is a relationship, has its moment of fakeness. I mean… sure its fun to fly into a foreign city, rush off to a romantic restaurant and screw for a weekend, but like… that’s it. All of those times when you’re standing at in baggage claim waiting for your luggage don’t really count in terms of the everyday reality of washing someone’s post-gym workout gear.

The pseudo relationships can be passive as well. For at least two months after I broke up with someone whom I had been dating long distance, I would use his characteristics to describe a boyfriend when I met people in bars. I mean… did my life really change now that we had broken up? Quite frankly, my life barely changed at all. And because I wasn’t ready to dip my toe into single life, the fake boyfriend worked better then no boyfriend at all.

While many of my friends are happily committed; others are clearly not. Many it appears are instead joining me on the pseudo relationship band-wagon. As one female friend noted, her friends actively replaced her need for a significant other. If she was bored on a Monday night there was one friend to go out to dinner with, Tuesday meant gallery hopping with a different friend and a third friend escorted her to work events. With the exception of sex, who needs a boyfriend?

In today’s hyper communicable world, where social networking has helped to redefine the concept of friend and wherein we manage to keep in constant contact with people via BBM, email, text, Facebook and gchat, the need for a significant other has declined. And for a generation that argues “if its not on Facebook it doesn’t exist” the cyber relationship, as per above, may not be that weird. While you can’t have sex on Facebook, you sure can communicate over and over again on Facebook; you can even declare a fake relationship status.

Of course I’m pretty sure the real reason for the pseudo relationship is that it allows you to select what you reveal and to whom. In some ways it is easier to get naked in front of someone you don’t care about, while spilling your emotional shit to someone who hasn’t seen your bits. Relationships are inherently intimate and perhaps for many of us in the twenty-something generation, it feels easier to reveal only part of ourselves to some people, while revealing other parts to others.

The irony of this, however, is that the pseudo relationship, predicated on an ability to reveal part of oneself, is a trend for a generation that has come of age in the voyeuristic age of Facebook where supposedly everything is shared.

But then again – Facebook is an edited version of real life anyway… and with that the pseudo relationship suddenly makes sense.

P.S. I’m pseudo registered at William Ashley China and Restoration Hardware.

What I Learned at Starbucks? Or How a 21 year-old JAP Taught Me a Life-Lesson…

In the olden days, during the period I consider my Faux Hillarian Era (2004-2006), I wrote a blog entitled: Confessions of a Faux Hiller. The tagline summed it up fairly succinctly: “So if you're like me you've graduated McGill and you've moved back into your parents' house and you're unemployed and sit in the Forest Hill Village Starbucks every day wondering why so many people wear Lululemon? Welcome to the Village, bitch. This is how it’s done in Forest Hill.” Why such anger? Well… I was 22, I lived at home, I was unemployed, and the OC was vaguely au currant. Obviously what else would I do with my life but sit in the Forest Hill Village Starbucks and sanguinely reflect over past decisions?

After a couple of years of the “live blog” I stopped habituating said Village Starbucks and was quickly dethroned as the Fresh Prince of Faux Hill. Why? I became employed and sadly working is to Faux Hill royalty as Wallace Simpson was to King Edward, abdication much.

Anyway - I happened to recently revisit my old haunt and as Bruce Willis will tell you: old habits Die Hard. As soon as I stepped foot into the old Starbucks I fell back into my old milieu of mocking the Village.

This past Tuesday I was lucky enough to sit next to a girl (let’s call her Jessica) and her father. Jessica was looking resplendent in her UGG, bejeweled hair band combination that screamed Blair Waldorf but alas this was no coronation for Little J. This was a “home for the holidays we need to talk about your spending habits” coffee with Dad.

Because I am a bad person (I believe someone once called me a class traitor) I spent the next hour of my life listening to Jessica and her father’s conversation (I know… I’m creepy); and because Sim Sim Sima has self-styled herself after Rob Ford, which has allowed her to declare that she has too has stopped the gravy train, i.e. no Hanukkah Gifts, I consider the following transcribed conversation my Chrismukkah miracle.

Dad: I feel bad for you because your flight to Cancun is so early.

Jessice: I feel bad for myself too. And everyone is complaining about how expensive the trip is. It wasn't that much. $1,000 for a week of vacation?

Dad: Well it was actually more.

Jessica: Ya it well was what, only $2,000 everyone can afford that. Like it wasn't that bad.

Dad: Well it was closer to $3,000 because you wanted a private room.

We then moved on from Christmas vacation to her work prospects once she completed her undergraduate degree in media studies at Western.

Jessica: OMG I did not do four years of a media degree to work at Aritzia, for ten dollars an hour. I'd rather not work.

I won’t lie – at first I contemplated not ‘publishing’ this girl’s conversation; I didn’t think it was right to entirely mock a conversation I snooped on (no matter how retarded it was). Obviously there are privacy issues and I am also sure that if anyone listened to some of the conversations I’ve had at Starbucks they’d conclude that I was a man-whore who has slept with half of the Upper East Side (I totally just wanted to say that and pretend like I was Serena VanDerWoodsen).

Certainly my first reaction to Jessica was: girl, shut the fuck up. But then I thought that maybe dearest Jessica had a point. Maybe Jessica was most brilliant person I had met of late. Maybe Jessica shouldn’t be working at Aritzia; maybe Jessica should be working at the Weitzman Institute! Maybe I’m being a bit overzealous.

Jessica truly raised the salient and pressing issue of: how do real people afford real lives?

All of Jessica’s life (mind you a protected Forest Hill existence) – a $3,000 vacation has been a fact. And to give her some credit – making ten bucks an hour at Aritzia isn’t going to pay for a week in Cancun; she’d have to work at least 300 hours not taking into account any taxes. Now… not everyone gets to go on a $3,000 vacation, but let’s be honest a two-week trip to Europe will probably set you back around $2,500 (that’s if you’re staying in hostels). And because I am a left-wing latte drinking downtown snob – I think going to Europe for two weeks is something that most people should have the opportunity to do (see my new charity called Birthright Europe) once every other year. And before people accuse me of being a snob… remember that George W. Bush was accused as being a simpleton because he had never left North America. In polite society we consider the Grand European Vacance a right of passage. And as much as $2,500 is, it’s not THAT crazy an amount of money. People who have to fly home to Vancouver at Christmas probably pay a grand just to go home and see their parents…

Being an intrepid reporter I decided to do some Statistics Canada research on Canadian spending habits. According to StatsCan the average individual in Canada spends around $38,000 a year. Of total expenses $6600 is taxes. Interestingly however, a Canadian who makes $37,000 should pay $7,400 in taxes (based on tax rates posted here). This actually means that the average Canadian individual pays $6,600 in taxes and therefore earns less then $37,000. No big surprise, but kind of awkward, right?

Interestingly in Stats Canada publications on spending patterns vacation expenses aren’t accounted or mentioned. Primary expenses are, no surprise, food and shelter, which accounts for almost 50% of spending (after taxes are taken into consideration). Leaving $16,000 to pay for clothes, car expenses etc… Suddenly that $3,000 is a lot of guerno.

All of this is to say that for someone to be in a position to afford a $3,000 vacation – they’re going to have to make significantly more then your typical Canadian. And so as much as it pains me to say this Jessica is “somewhat” right; she shouldn’t really work at Aritzia. And to empathize with Jessica’s frustration after four years at university she isn’t going to immediately make enough to “keep her in the style to which she’s been accustomed”. And while we can blame her parents, her friends, her neighbourhood, and society in general for creating out of whack expectations the ability to do some travel should be some sort of Canadian middle class right, no? Heck – you can’t visit this entire country without spending a couple of grand on airfare.

If anything Jessica, in her colloquial JAP twang, has identified the same thing that University of Toronto professors have spent years and probably thousands of dollars researching. Jessica’s Starbucks conclusion: Whither the middle class…