I apologize in advance to readers from Winnipeg, or who have relatives in Winnipeg, or who just goshdarn like the place and wouldn’t dream of badmouthing it: I am about to do something you won’t like.

Thirty-six hours in Winnipeg almost killed me. What does the city’s name mean anyway, ‘Place Of Malevolent Spirits’ or something? Three weeks of rain left the city saturated in every pore, with a scarcely-credible 110% humidity that turned my hair into a huge ‘fro beaded with condensed water. I looked like a Christmas ornament. And breathing the stuff? My God, it was like trying to inhale sewage-scented cotton candy. Every five minutes we were looking up leerily to check for tornadoes - the sky had a funny cast to it, like the skies you see when you dream drunk. One of the contractors excitedly showed us photos of the Elie tornado: “They say the winds got up to four hundred miles an hour!” Marvellous.

And, of course, three weeks of rain busted the city’s water treatment plant at the seams like a cheap pair of hotpants. This resulted in water that looked and tasted like it had run through forty manure-laden fields, then through the same number of tubs filled with rotting algae. When I turned on the tap at the hotel to wash my hands, I had to run out of the bathroom choking from the stench. Luckily I was staying at the Delta, which (like the one in Edmonton) gives you citrus bath products, so you end up smelling like a can of C-Plus run amuck, but it’s sure got the edge on smelling like fertilizer. Oh! And the hotel had heated bathroom floors. God that was so nice. That was the only good thing about the entire city.

The whole city looks run-down and depressed, and ghettoey, like the nastiest parts of Edmonton got together with a really big trailer park and about a million tons of fine, brownish dust. On Tuesday morning we had to eat breakfast at 6 a.m. (that’s 5 a.m. Calgary time) in a thing called a ‘Salisbury House,’ which appears to be a local chain of restaurants - I didn’t bother checking. Suffice it to say I’ve never eaten anywhere worse. This place is lower than Denny’s - no, what am I saying? It’s lower than McDonald’s… it’s lower than… OK, I’ve no idea. And they call their hamburgers ‘nips.’ I assume that’s one of those regional things I’m supposed to find endearing, but a Saskie calling a hoodie a ‘bunnyhug’ is endearing. ‘Nips’ are not. At a Salisbury House, you can get a Home Run Nip (two patties), a Morning Nip (egg and cheese), or a Chili Nip (which I coincidentally had all day).

God, what else. There was a very irate wasp in my hotel room - and I know that’s not technically Winnipeg’s fault any more than the crazy humidity was - but I’m still mad. I ran around trying to kill it for two hours, little fucker, by which point it was 1 a.m. and I couldn’t get to sleep. And their roads aren’t on a grid system (in a city of 650000 people!). Everything’s named. And the crazy drunk guys, they get into fights right in front of tourist attractions that I want to photograph. Plus also their airport was superdupersketchy - as soon as I disembarked in Calgary and walked across our airport’s shining, fossiliferous floor, and looked up at the suspended pterodactyls, and bought gum in the Discovery Channel Store, I knew I had come - well, not home. But I was back in the firm, warm grip of money - which Winnipeg does not have. Seriously. Am I going to have to do this for the rest of my career? I hope I get hit by lightning.

Here is a horrible thing which I photographed in The Forks.

Here is the river, which is insanely huge and bloated and out of control. I pointed to a little nub sticking up about three inches from the water and said “What’s that?” and my companions said, “That’s the guardrail on the stairs leading down to the river. There’s twenty steps underwater.” I said, “Better them than me.”

But here is a good thing: the museum of human rights is going in Winnipeg! Which makes sense, because Winnipeg also has the Royal Canadian Mint. (No it doesn’t make sense. I have no idea what I’m talking about.) If that’s the real design, I’m sure it’ll look very nice when it’s done. All shiny and phallic-like… too bad the artist didn’t also conceptualize the thousand or so homeless guys that’ll be sleeping on its lawns.

My parents popped up this weekend for a concert, bringing the usual treasure trove of gifts for their only daughter - chocolate, mangoes, frozen samosas - and a couple of surprises.

So it appears that all the banana plants in our house - which have lived since 1976 and survived three moves - died almost simultaneously a few weeks ago. (Some sort of banana plague?) However, before they did so, they managed to produce a handful of babies apparently unaffected by whatever killed the adult plants. The parents brought up a few for me and we repotted them this morning, fingers crossed, cooing as if over newborns.

I feel impossibly tender towards these tiny, fragile plants. They’re only a few inches high, they’re almost transparent, and they look very alone in their respective acres of potting mix. (That first one is in a Gladware storage container about five inches across, for an idea of scale.) I look at them and I think, “Oh, poor little survivors!” Probably if you adopt a shellshocked orphan from some warring nation you get a thrillingly huge dose of this pitying, adoring protectiveness. No wonder Angelina Jolie plans on getting thirteen kids. I feel a little bit high myself.

Living alone, I find, makes me painfully conscious of my own mortality. For one thing, living on the thirty-third floor is far from reassuring; if there’s a fire, that’s a long way down to run through stairways presumably filling with smoke. And it’s also a long way down if I get into a scuffle with a friend on the balcony and ‘lose my balance,’ not that I, uh, get threatened with that much. Then there’s things like slipping in the shower, choking on a fishbone, having a heart attack (go on and laugh: with my low-grade angina and infrequent, unmedicated arrythmic episodes, I’m at exceptional risk), getting botulism from warm canned mushrooms… I mean, these are things that go wrong when you’re in company (slipping in the shower especially), but they take on unusual significance if you’re alone. Because you could die alone. Which is so much worse.

And then there’s things like getting stabbed while walking home from the symphony, or stomped by a wayward bull at the Stampede; having a brick dropped on my head from construction workers on the fiftieth storey, getting shot outside a popular underground club, or being vaporized by a Smartcar at a crosswalk (a weekly near-miss). Then there’s all the other stuff.

On the plus side, my family history is pretty reassuring on what will and won’t likely kill me. They don’t get cancer, my progenitors. No one in my family - either side - for innumerable generations - has ever gotten cancer. (A family friend got a melanoma on his foot, but that doesn’t count, does it?) I keep checking with relatives, incredulously, but so far nothing - not one malignant mole, not one iffy lump. We’re like sharks - minus the biteyness, minus the denticles, minus the reversible stomachs.

No one’s ever gotten Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, or MS. Our kidneys are OK; our livers are OK; our brains, despite popular belief, are OK. What we infallibly get are bad hearts (my dad’s only brother died at 38 of a heart attack, for one; and a number of apparently healthy and even sporty types on my mom’s side suddenly dropped dead of undiagnosed heart problems), junk blood (the beta-thalassemia trait runs on my mom’s side like crazy - four cousins so far, plus me), and adult-onset diabetes (all of my dad’s sisters - five in all - plus himself). Then there’s depression, which obviously isn’t a disease, but if it does shorten your life significantly then I suppose that has to be counted as well.

And there have been a lot of accidents, but those aren’t hereditary, one hopes. (Though they might be, given that one summer when my brother sprained his ankle falling off a counter, broke his finger playing basketball, sliced his head open on a pencil sharpener, and almost amputated his thumb on a putty-scraper. When my family hears about Al’s exploits they shake their heads, sigh, and go, ‘Karan’s nephew.’ Uncle Karan is the only person on either side of the family who didn’t get chicken legs… because he broke both his ankles once jumping off a sugarcane truck, only one of his many, many hilarious accidents. He’s got nice, thick ankles. And fingers.) Given the number of train tracks I run across on a daily basis in Calgary, I really, really hope accidents aren’t inherited.

Anyway, now I’ve given myself the creeping heebie-jeebies. Does someone want to move in with me? I’m all up for spooning on cold nights…

I know, I suck, because I’m sitting at home all lonely and bored-like on a warm Saturday night (I shake my fist, by the way, at the friend who ditched me), so I’m drinking some stuff that my Vulcan pal left in the fridge (and I’m drinking it out of a secondhand Ikea mug because I’m classy like that), and I’m watching Best of Bowie, and… stop me if I’m wrong…

But like, he sang ‘John, I’m Only Dancing’ and also ‘Let’s Dance’ and ‘Dancing in the Street,’ but he can’t dance. At all. What’s up with that?

Also, I got a haircut today, and (briefly) felt like a million bucks. I heart you, Aveda Academy Salon.

The student who did my hair did an excellent job and it only cost $25. Rock on.

Sometimes, you start things and then partway through you say (out loud, on a bus), “Oh for fuck sake. This is just BONKERS.” And then you give up.

Sometimes, you start things and then partway through you find yourself turning into Hedonism-bot, preferring to lie on the couch watching James Bond movies rather than get up and do one more minute of that goddam Pilates DVD. And then you give up.

Sometimes, you start things and then partway through you begin to rationalize to a perplexing degree – referring to Ben ‘n Jerry’s Chunky Monkey as a ‘calcium supplement,’ then cackling with glee and telling yourself that the walnuts have essential omega-fatty acids and what with all the antioxidants in the chocolate chunks, you may as well have a second pint! because it’s practically health food, after all. And then you give up.

Sometimes, all three of the above things happen – on the same day – when otherwise sane people like myself attempt to reform their dietary habits. I made it about a week this time, doing things like Mini-wheats for breakfast and grapes for snacks. I loaded up my freezer with delicious, healthy meals that had extra vegetables, lean meats, and sometimes beans for easily-digestible protein. At lunch, I briskly strolled Eau Claire after consuming (in about four bites) my high-fiber, low-fat sandwich and usually an apple and some carrots with calorie-wise dressing. I drank a lot of decaf green tea and water; I took the scenic route home; I ate only Smartpop popcorn from the snack-sized bags. And then I gave up.

Me and dieting, we don’t get along so well. Exercise I can do (for some reason), but any attempt to voluntarily alter my incredibly unhealthy eating patterns (Breakfast Pie is a good example of that) to do anything – lose weight, get more iron, anything – is just about sabotaged from the beginning. I like food and I like cooking and I even like gastronomic criticism, as evidenced by my recent purchase of Steingarten’s ‘The Man Who Ate Everything’ and the sequel, ‘It Must Have Been Something I Ate.’ (Note: they are hilarious and erudite, like a slightly better-travelled ‘Good Eats,’ and I really recommend them. But I digress.) There is no possible way that I, living on my own, have ever been able to prevent myself from eating crappily all the time. Once, in Saskatoon, I ate an entire box of Wagon Wheels. Over a long weekend. You’d think that’d be about four per day from the box of a dozen, but it was actually about ten on the Friday, then one each on Saturday and Sunday. I really thought I was going to die.

So I decided that what I needed was some structure – a lesson plan, please, not chirpy people telling me to eat whatever and whenever my body tells me to eat and I will lose weight and become an earth goddess and also a gymnastics champion! I need a lesson plan because my body is telling me to eat cake all the time, twenty-four seven, even after I have just eaten cake, even while I am eating cake. I feel I have to stress this: my body wants me to eat junk food in the midst of eating junk food. My body does not know what is good for me. It thinks it’s in Mauritania, where I won’t find a husband unless I weigh 200 pounds. After a bit of research, I found what looks like a pretty good option for someone as a) prone to suggestion, and b) desperately in need of guidance as myself. It’s in this book, which has been universally praised to the heavens all over the interweb – which is rare enough – and looks reasonably healthy and practical and won’t make me go broke buying things like fat-free butter-flavoured cooking spray or pasteurized egg substitute. They will tell me what to eat, and since it’s written down, I’ll obey it. (I know, it’s strange. But that’s just how these things work.) The exercise thing can come later, but for right now, I think I am probably getting no nutrients at all into my system. I think Volumetrics will help. I’ll keep everyone posted. And I won’t give up.