shit person

O has recently taken to calling someone he thinks is a jerk a shit person. i'm not sure how to tell him his mom is one too. 

or has been. i have been a shit person. i have had affairs. i have lied. i have been a coward. i have disappeared. being a shit person might just be in me. it's not like i don't try - haven't tried - to not be a shit person. but i have been nonetheless. 

i'm sorry to everyone i have ever been a shit person to. i'm sorry for not knowing how to make things better, for not apologizing, or coming clean, or explaining why. for not being better. 

it's funny, realizing again and again how you haven't measured up to your own standards, let along somebody else's. i used to feel guilty about this. i guess part of me still does. but guilt doesn't really do anything except make you feel even shittier and in some ways feel like you're doing penance for the shit you did to become a shit person in the first place. so i've tried to make that feeling of guilt a signpost. don't do it again. remember this feeling and how it sucks and don't do it again. 

the problem i have now is that sometimes not repeating the same mistakes makes me feel like a shit person in other ways. like i haven't responded to someone else's needs or fallen short of their expectations of me. like i don't know how to continue in a relationship - friendship, acquaintanceship, whatever - once i feel that. 

i went back to the enneagram yesterday to see what it had to say. in reading over this blog - all the things i had forgotten about - i saw that i had once done the enneagram and landed on a 4. this time, i got a 2 or a 5. which is funny because they're different types entirely. heart vs head. 

without making excuses, this seems to be the crux of my shittiness - being caught between my heart and my head and not knowing how to find the middle ground. or maybe looking for a middle ground in the first place is the problem. maybe it's about commitment to one or the other. 

or maybe i'm just a shit person. 

if 8 years pass in an echo chamber, does anybody hear?

in a moment of wondering, i typed in the address of this old blog, thinking that by now, with years of inactivity, it must have been gobbled up by the ether. but lo! here it is. i skimmed it, thinking of course, that i sound(ed) like a broken record. wondering who all the characters in these plays were, way back then. what friend? who did that? huh. interesting. 

i remember most of the moments i wrote about here. but what is also striking is the torrent of life that has passed between bouts of writing. the thrash and roll of every little thing that hasn't been spoken - that resides in fading and faltering memories, most of which i haven't bothered to record.

but this blog had its first foray into the world nearly twenty years ago now, which seems bizarre to me, and unlikely. how much has changed and how much the same? if every cell in a body is replaced every 7 years, then we are a whole new world almost three times over, and everything that is now is an echo of what came before. the burn of a long dead star in the night sky. 

i am tempted, as i clearly have always been, to make a crack about my absence, and fix this post into a moment - write as if i will keep on writing, as if someone is reading, as if this post is real, as if we are, as if permanence can be penned. 

but i won't (or i won't go on about it at any rate). what i have been thinking about lately is aging. i am 51, battling the vague symptoms of menopause, reading with amusement and relation the struggles of my peers, as this generation of women - my generation - is perhaps the first to get so successful as to feel their experience relevant and so actually writes about it. brain fog, bloating, insomnia, skin conditions. aging pretty much blows. and yet, as they say, the alternative is worse. 

i wrote maybe fifteen years ago about hitting up against the spectre of my potential and feeling like perhaps the time had passed to gestate into anything. yep. still applies. apparently, you can run down half a century and still be dogged by the thing in your brain that makes you feel like you haven't measured up. and god, i KNOW i haven't. i was supposed to be someone (cue laughter) but now what i am is a greying asian queerdo whose most important contribution to the world is a brilliantly flamboyant thirteen-year old.

sometimes i look in the mirror and have a conversation with the person looking back at me. this is enough, i say. is it, she says back to me, familiar eyes asking those ridiculously hard questions. it is, i say. it has to be. because this game is almost over. 

i mean, she agrees, i know. she has to. she's me. and i look at o - his young mind tracing out his future paths, figuring out how to be in the world, still holding on to my hand, but less now than before - and i know i've done good. he's a good kid. he will be a good citizen, which in true diasporic fashion, is nearly all i've ever hoped for. and i don't know if it's enough. but it's something. 

perhaps this last section of life will bring something new, some other way to face down that old phantom. but if it doesn't, then i think i'm okay with that. at least for today. 

what goes around

yesterday, someone's life changed, and not for the better. i'll skip the details but will say that it was a long time coming and telegraphed for years. it shouldn't have been a surprise but i'm sure it was. i will also say that if i were to have a least-favourite-people-in-the-world list, this person would be on it.

and yet... it's hard to celebrate karma in earnest, especially when karma is a bitch. will my life be better because of what happened? probably. but there is suffering at play, and suffering sucks, even when it's directed at your enemy.

it does make me think, though, of all the ways in which life changes on a dime. the ways we can be sailing blissfully along, unaware of the storms that could capsize us at any moment, unaware of the all the ways we are not in control of our own lives. the irony in this particular case is that the person in question is motivated almost solely by a near-rabid desire for control. karma really is a bitch.

and if that's the way she rolls, i'm sure to find myself shredding fingers, bone, and heart in pursuit of an aloof and contained lover. perhaps one day i'll wake to find myself stripped of all armour, emaciated for love, savouring crumbs of affection as if they were feasts. i can only hope.

david gray - falling free

 

On being seen

an addition to the refrain of excuse me, i'll be right back. i'm like a bad date in a bad date movie - taking off for the washroom and stiffing the guy for the bill. but i am back, however fleetingly, to raise a flag, or send up a flare, or carve my initials into a tree. i am here.

and yes, i am changed. different from the last me that was here the last time i put anything out into space. i have become quieter. more accustomed to the troughs of my mood, more able to ride out the waves of ecstasy (well, that might be pushing it) and despair. i don't want to sound as if i'm without hope for wisdom. i do hope, fervently, for the coming on of some of my own. it's just that there's so much repetition - here and elsewhere - that i doubt my own epiphanies, have become bored by the frequency of my resolves (to be different, to be better, to be other).

but what i want to say, today: to be seen is the hardest thing. but to see perhaps is just as difficult. to shake the dust out of the eye and take stock of the thing in all its ugliness and brokenness. to see beauty in the rusted hulk of that once-floated barge, to find kindness beneath the scoff of self-protection. and to see too beneath beauty to the scars within - the invisible bruises of violent fathers and absent mothers, the fractures left by all the ways the self has failed its own deepest hopes. and somehow to accept it all, to not wish it to be otherwise, to not wish the beloved more like the self, or less like the other. is this the challenge of relationship? or more, the challenge of becoming?

you said that you hope to be different ten years hence. that there will be more you will know, more understood, more lived. and there will be, yes. what will it look like to be seen, then? who will i be? who will you be? more of ourselves, no doubt. and hopefully seen, and loved, whatever that may look like.

Tracy Chapman - All That You Have Is Your Soul

Starting over

Another year or so down, a million resolutions unresolved. So I'm gonna try to beat the new year and get my fresh start while the old year is still breathing.

A friend of mine - an acquaintance, really, but one I like very much - recently lost her mother. She is a funny woman, my friend. Hysterically, roll-on-the-floor, quick-as-lightning funny. We know each other mostly through facebook, truth be told. And when she posted about her mother's death, stripped of the defense of humour, there it was - that old pain of loss, the one we will all feel eventually. The orphaning, the dropkick into maturity, the irrevocable shift in identity from child to parent, if we have been of the breeding type. My friend, who was to deliver her mother's eulogy, feared her ability to hold it together. It sucks, I wrote her. But don't worry about the tears. Whatever you have to give on that day will be the most honest tribute to your mother, and that's what counts. Off-wall, I added that giving the eulogy for my own mother was the hardest thing I have ever had to do. And that not a day goes by when I don't reach out for her in some small way.

When mom died, I fumbled my way through the funeral, sending the wrong outfit for the body, calling a halt to the fire and brimstone send-off of the hired minister, speaking over the piped-in organ music. It was, in short, a shit show. But was it honest? Yes. It was honest. It was me in all my brokenness and sorrow and pain and confusion and loss. It was also me before I had become a parent myself.

Now, nearly 15 years after my mother's death, as I try my best to be a good mother to my own four-year-old son, I think maybe it is time for me to let go. Maybe it is time to release my mother's memory from the stranglehold of my grief and give her my blessing to leave - not because my grief about losing her is any less, but because I want to be able to tell my kid about her without crying. I want him to understand his unknown grandmother as joy, not loss. For my mother was, in her own way, a joyous, silly, quirky, smart, and loving woman. Who loved me because I was her child.

And so it is with me and my son. I love him, I realize, as fully and selflessly as my mother loved us. And the grief I hold in my heart is a tightness that I don't want to pass on. Already he looks wide-eyed and tender at the tears that accompany any mention of my mother. Are you sad because your mommy is dead? he asks. And when I tell him yes, he holds me tight, intuitively comforting a grief he doesn't understand. It's okay, he says. You still have me.

And he's right. I do. And it's more than enough.

transit of venus

a few years pass and it's like, well, no time has passed at all. of course it has. there's now a child. and a new home. and a swath of gray hair at the temples. but then, in the grand scheme of things, that's just a blink of an eye.

today is the transit of venus, which won't pass in between earth and the sun again for another hundred and five years or something like that. and a sea of people all over the world are going to don special glasses to stare into the sky and watch it pass.

i'm gonna look at it on the internet. i guess that's a postmodern thing to say. but in the end, putting on glasses and watching an astronomical event simply because it's not going to happen again until we're dead is probably pretty postmodern too. the transit of venus as a marker of our own mortality. we look at it, marvel at it because it's just going to keep doing, even after we're just dust in the wind. we want to be part of it because someday we won't. but isn't that just life? shouldn't we want to be part of it every day because someday we won't?

deep thoughts for a tuesday morning.

Conor Oberst - You Are Your Mother's Child (retro-added 5/25/15)

because i don't have anything else to say

but feel like i should be saying something, reassert my squatting rights, send up a flare... whatever.

and because the songs almost always come first.


james taylor - carolina in my mind

the best parts of lonely

my girl gave me an ipod carrying thingy so i could have some tunage when i run, since i've been complaining about how hard i find it to not think about running when i'm running if i don't have music to keep time. but my ankles are all messed up these days and i'm not sure when i'll get the chance to use my new accessory for its promised purpose.

so yesterday, i walked flanner to our new friend g's house. backtracked to the liquor store - the dundas/dovercourt one where the vintages section isn't half bad - plugged myself into my ipod and for about an hour, watched this small part of city unfold to a soundtrack.

i used to listen to music all the time when i travelled - walking, being in transit, being pretty much anywhere by myself. headphones kept the world at bay, deterred questions, awkward social interactions. images tagged to music - even now, i can catch a few bars of certain tunes and be brought back to a particular place in my head, an experience i had when out on my own out in the world. i don't remember why or when i stopped plugging in. maybe i began to think it was antisocial (it probably is). maybe i got tired of my music collection (i kind of am). or maybe i lost some of that intense passion, one i always associate with youth, that comes with mining the words of songs for that perfect line, the one that says everything for you. the tune that vibrates perfectly with each lovestruck, rage-filled, fuck you impulse that you thought made you lost to the world. turns out other people feel that shit too. maybe i stopped needing that community, or stopped making the space for it.

but i got to trip back into it yesterday afternoon on dundas street. men spilling out of sports bars, the smell of roti in the air, my feet sidestepping slick gobs of spit on grimy sidewalks, and me with my headphones on and my dog trotting alongside, and the comfort of being alone with my music in the world. it felt good.


the weakerthans - left and leaving

you are yourself the animal we hunt

i'm thinking about paths. about the grooves that get worn down among the ferns and vines on forest floors, about the scars left when we travel those paths we know by heart. and even if a path lies unused for centuries, somehow, at some time, the earth will bear traces of its existence.

in may, j and i went to head smashed in buffalo jump. it's a real place name - i should have written it with caps or hyphens to emphasize the proper-nameness of the phrase. anyway, Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump is a site on the plains of alberta where the aboriginal people of the area used to run buffalo herds off cliffs. they would run the herds, which were blinded by groupthink and besides, couldn't see very well even when they weren't, by laying cairns, masked with mud and branches, along an increasingly narrow path that ended in a freefall - skull against rock and a pile of broken beast. a terrifying, efficient death. an ingenious survival technique. they think the last time the jump was used was in the mid-1800s but that it had been used, at least intermittently, for over 5000 years before.

now there's an interpretive centre at the site - a fenced-off observation area, a map of old drive lanes, and pointers on the cairns. archaeologists have dug down into dirt ten metres deep to unearth remains of ancient buffalo, each of whose hooves ground the earth down on those drive lanes, shaped the path that millennia later, we can still make out. the earth reclaims so much, but not everything. walk a path long enough - or run it to death - and there's bound to be scars.


robbie robertson - broken arrow

prodigal

i would say "i'm baaaaack" and grin, if it wasn't such a tired story and so overdone. not to mention self-evident. suffice to say that sustaining is not the thing i'm best at in the world. but i am back, ass in seat, fingers at keyboard, resolving to be better at this, at keeping in touch. resolving to be better at showing up for so many things i've let slip away from me.

i'm just back from chicago - a subsidized trip since j had to be in town for the AGM of the journal she works for, and i could freeload on the cost of those very expensive sheraton sheets. but i feel a bit like i'm back, or that i've come home, in more ways than flying into pearson from o'hare, more ways than the comfort of the stair that creaks so reliably, the dripping faucet, the shape of the cat taking up way more than her fair share of our small double bed. i feel like i've begun stitching some disparate bits of my life back together again. like i'm starting on some path towards making whole.

in chicago, i sat in a theatre at the old town folk music centre, in a room full of people trying hard to listen to the person inside of them who calls themselves a writer. i sat there with a white plastic table in front of me, a binder of looseleaf paper, a handful of pens, and tried to make stories happen. i sat there, with lynda barry at the front of the room - MARLYS! - all flesh and 3D and committed to pulling pictures out of each of the hopeful minds in front of her. one guy came all the way from florida, i heard him say when he checked in. it seems far to come, though maybe it seems far to come from canada too, since i had to travel with a passport, could shop at the duty free. and i sat there in that room, in that other city, in that other country, and tried to make some space for myself.

making space is no small feat. i knew this, of course, before i showed up there. but i came to know it more over the course of those days in chicago. i came to know it, not only from the writing, from the conjuring of images, from the hard work of shutting down the inner critic - but i came to know it too from sitting in that room next to my friend k. k who i haven't laid eyes on in seven years. k who, more than anyone i have ever known in the world, has helped me become aware of my own shape in the world. it's not always been pretty - we both know this well. it's not easy to confront the contours of self dripping with self-pity or pushed up against anger, making that face in the mirror so impossibly foreign, so unmistakeably you.

but we sat next to each other for two days. went for beer after. played pool, and it was exactly as i remember it being those years ago in buffalo. and it was easy on that first day. harder on the second. k said "it feels like we're moving too fast." i'm not sure i got what she meant, exactly. but to me it felt like a wish for more time. a wish for all of this to be more ordinary. less overdetermined.

but going away for a long time does that to a body. we make strange with each other, with ourselves in relation to the other. we thrill to the reunion, feel the stab of separation well before the plane is in the air again. and the question becomes, for me anyway, how to stay connected. how to keep the channel open. how to make the space to conjure those images, those stories, that love, this friendship.

and in that room, with k to my left and all these marked up quarter-perfect pages in front of me, lynda barry stood up and said simply, "don't try." and you know, i think she's probably right.


bright eyes - i must belong somewhere