Britney's Vagina Or, Melissa Has Bad Ideas #47

It's been an absolutely beautiful weekend here in Toronto - sunny and warm and breezy. Add in the dazzling multi-coloured leaves and you've pretty much got the kind of October long weekend dreams are made of.

Naturally, as a budding photographer my first instinct is to grab my camera and capture the moment on film so I can brag to all my friends about how lovely it was and no big deal yeah I took that shot of the ladybugs having sex. So I set out for the Mount Pleasant Cemetery around sunset this evening to do some shooting in the favourable light.

I've actually spent a lot of time in the cemetery - it's a great place to bike or stroll around, particularly in the old part with its majestic trees and interesting tombstone variety - and since all the graves in there are super old so it feels more antique-y than super creepy. Plus all the hot joggers are in the old section, so I mean really? It's a no brainer.

Luckily for me tonight I was rewarded with more than buff, sweaty, super toned, barely clad (I could go on...) men - the trees were truly stunning and in the soft sunset light they appeared positively luminescent. I set about the picture taking with zeal, snapping off a round centered on the giant orange beast by the front gates. In my zeal, however, I managed to get my glasses totally covered in fingerprints, which is absolutely hands down the most irritating thing on the planet to me (somewhere in a posh New York brownstone Elisabeth Hasslebeck sleeps a little more soundly on her 500,000 thread count sheets made entirely of hair recovered from Dubya's shower drain). No matter where I am (super important work meeting? a nudist colony?) I absolutely have to clean my glasses at the slightest sign of a smudge.

After cleaning my lenses approximately 400 times I decided to take the damn glasses off already and hang them over one of the straps of my teeny tiny walking "purse" (it's the size of my cell phone and I can literally fit that and my house keys in there - perfect for a casual stroll around a cemetery or for Accessories That Are Impractically Small Day at the office). As you've probably already predicted, this was the worst idea that I've had since trying to untangle my Ipod headphones by a sewer grate - and yes, it just about ended up the same way.

After a particularly rigurous photo session in which I piled up a bunch of leaves and then kicked them around while taking pictures of it (it's called Artistic Vision and I'll thank you not to comment the methods I use to achieve photographic brilliance), I noticed that my glasses had somehow gone missing. At first I thought I was going a little crazy so I triple checked that they weren't actually still on my face or propped up on my hat. I think to an outsider I must have looked like Helen Keller trying to learn the word for face (what? too soon?)... either that or I just looked plain nuts, which is a very real possibility as only minutes before I had been chasing around a super cute squirrel who had a nut in its mouth and calling directions to him like he was the bitchy, hungry wannabe model on ANTM and I was a skinnier version of Tyra Banks (zzzzzzzzzing!).

After being absolutely sure that the glasses were indeed not on my head and must therefore be lost somewhere amongst the leaves I set about trying to find them. For convenience's sake, I'm going to make a brief list of all the reasons why this is possibly the most futile search and rescue mission since Britney Spears started looking for her dignity (some things we just can't unsee, Britney. NSFW.):

1. I lost the glasses underneath a 200 year old maple tree and if you've ever seen a 200 year old maple tree you know they have a LOT of leaves... 3/4 of which were now piled all over the ground, like a leaf version of the perfect storm.

2. As I was kicking up piles of leaves and basically making a mess of the area, the likelihood of the glasses being in the same position as when I lost them is very very slim. The likelihood of them being buried under a giant pile of leaves or kicked into a whole other location I'd never think to look in? Very high.

3. Looking for glasses without the aid of said glasses is a lot like watching the Mini Me sex tape : you aren't exactly sure what you're looking at, but you're pretty sure that it's going to end badly.

So I'm frantically kicking through the leaves, muttering to myself about glasses and squirrels and jagged pointy tongues coming at me, when the cemetery security patrol pulls up to inform me that the cemetery is now closed. Knowing that there's no way around avoiding looking like a total spazz, I tell the guard the truth. I think he must have felt badly for me (I would have read the expression on his face except that it just looked like a fuzzy blob) so he got out and helped me.

Together it took us nearly 15 minutes of kicking around leaves (and possibly a squirrel or two) to find my glasses. But the point is WE FOUND THEM! Unlike the Ipod situation there was no $400 rainbow at the end of this tunnel: there was a free rainbow, which is better than a $400 rainbow because it allows me to purchase something pretty for myself from LA.

Take a look at some of my pictures - let me know if you think the 15 minutes of misery and shame were worth it. I vote yes, but only because funny stories like these are why I started a blog in the first place. It's called Schadenfreude, and I will ride that horse until it dies from exhaustion.