Ai yai yai! After twelve hours straight of reading, editing, fact-checking, double fact-checking and dealing with the egos of terribly erudite but exhaustingly pedantic professors who think they know English better than me (you talkin' to ME?!), je suis completement crevee. (so crevee, in fact that I cannot figure out how to insert the proper accents over the “ee”).



In the end I was just too tired and cranky to join friends at Jah-Pan, a great club in the Florentine neighbourhood, for live music and drinks. (I must be getting old.) I just wanted to shower off the day and crash…



Dinner consisted of crackers, cottage cheese and carrot sticks (I swear, I really do know how to cook), consumed while watching the hysterical reality TV show, Double Date – hosted by the ever-cynical, hyper-cool and reliably funny comic duo, Dana Modan and Ro'i Levy. The premise is this: attention-seeking guy and attention-seeking girl are set up on a three-part blind date that consists of (1) an initial meeting, (2) participation in an event planned by the show's producers (e.g., circus acrobatics, visiting a sex shop together, going hand-gliding) (3) an intimate dinner for two – usually at one of the dozens of restaurants within a 5-minute walk from where I live. The TV audience is amused by thought bubbles over the participants' heads, catty captions and special effects such as red lasers extending from the guy's eyes in the direction of his date's breasts. Dana and Ro'i provide commentary between each of the date's three stages – and man, are they mean.



The highlight of my day was the warm, funny and utterly unexpected letter published today by an old friend of Adina's from her days at Concordia University. Ran and I have never met, but Adina tells me he is a wild, cool and generous guy who is an amazing athlete and a very creative person (who is obviously a hell of a lot more adroit with Web stuff than I am). Ran was born in Israel, raised partly in Jerusalem and partly in Montreal. Today he lives with his wife, whom he married at a drive-by wedding chapel in Las Vegas, in Hong Kong. What he does there, I do not know (but I will find out).



Ran's post was in response to a letter I wrote to Adina, which she posted on her blog. I hesitated a lot before linking to that letter. As I wrote in my first post, this is not a political blog. It's not that politics doesn't interest me (it does); it's just that humanity (human beings and being humane) interests me a lot more.

Ashley, I hope you will forgive me for betraying the tacit pact of the non-political bloggers with this slight – and, I assure you, isolated – deviation!



And I hope that everyone, no matter what her opinion, will see that mine are musings on humanity – and not a political manifesto.



And now I really must get to bed so that I'll have enough energy for my 8:30AM yoga class.