September 2015 – thoughts of Melissa

Hey there, Toronto. It’s been a few months since I’ve seen you – but alas, I made my return this past weekend for a brief, barely-planned excursion up to the 416.

This was a very last-minute planned trip – literally, I planned this on Friday for that following weekend. After some searching, I found a hotel in Oakville, about 90 minutes from Buffalo and a short distance outside the metro area of Toronto itself. A rainy drive on Saturday afternoon with stops at a Walmart in Fort Erie, a Wendy’s in Niagara Falls and Oakville Place eventually led us (my fiancé and I, that is) to the Country Inn & Suites by Carlson.

I will disclaimer here that I paid only $15 for this room. I had a nifty Hotels.com reward to use, which took care of everything but the taxes, and it was great! The room was spacious enough, simple and nothing extravagant, but it served its purpose well enough. The staff was friendly, and I loved the “country” decor in the lobby. Parking and wifi were both free (always key points IMO) and there was also breakfast included. I didn’t eat a lot – I wasn’t feeling great – but there was enough and it looked halfway decent.

We spent Saturday evening at the Cineplex Cinemas Oakville and VIP, where we saw the new Mission Impossible movie. Now, I paid a pretty penny for the movie tickets and really didn’t get it. Sure, the VIP lounge to sit in before the movie was cool – but I’m not that high-strung that I require that sort of thing. The in-seat food service was probably the best part, but the menu was incredibly limited and the food wasn’t great (hello, please tell me how I’m supposed to eat chicken fingers COATED with Buffalo sauce in a pitch-black movie theater, thx). If I ever go back, I’ll get regular movie food in the lobby.

Sunday, after checking out of the hotel around 12, we headed to Toronto!

Continue reading “Headed to the Six (Without Any Woes)” →

Another book that had been on my “to-read” list for a while: Bluets by Maggie Nelson. I have to say I was intrigued by this book before picking it up; after all, how often do you see an entire book based around a single color? It’s an interesting premise, and led me to investigate. After requesting the title through my Interlibrary Loan (a great feature, for the record), and waiting a few weeks, I finally got my hands on it.

It’s a fairly short title – just about 100 pages, depending on which edition you read – and as a result, took me only about a day to get through. The lyrical, prose-style writing is also quick and generally easy to read.

So – how can I summarize this book? First & foremost, it’s about the color blue – but it’s also about love, relationships, sex, depression, music and more. The author interlaces the color blue with all of these facets of life; the result is often deep, sometimes basic, sometimes genius, occasionally breathtaking and generally… humorless. If you’re looking for a “funny” read, this isn’t going to be it – but it is a somewhat philosophical memoir/mediation/whatever else you want to call it.

I enjoyed this book in the beginning, but as it went on, it got a little away from me. There was no real plot, which made it challenging to stay attached to any piece of it. The quotes included are appropriate and thoughtful, but they may be some of the most thoughtful parts of the entire book. It also gets somewhat awkwardly and uncomfortably sexual at points – not exactly what you’d expect from a book that starts off with the author talking about how she didn’t choose to fall in love with the color blue.

In the end, I walked away from this book feeling, well, undecided. It didn’t make me look at the world differently, didn’t make me appreciate things more or look at colors more deeply or anything; it was disjointed and stilted. It wasn’t horrid, it wasn’t great, it just…. was.