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

potential disaster

pretty much every day for the past couple of months, i've come up against that bogeyman that's shadowed me for most of my life - my potential. it used to be friendly. it used to be that i liked when people noticed it, commented on how prominent it was, tripping along beside me - or, more like, in front of me. in truth, i feel like i was often preceded by my potential and the rest of me was the shuffling, crooked, nascent thing that had yet to catch up to the majestic spectre of Who I Could Become.

these days, potential is lagging behind. the problem is, i still feel so much like that unformed beast travelling in its wake. i keep trying to slow down, waiting for potential to overtake again. waiting for the moment when we might coincide. i'm beginning to realize that that might never happen. and that's more than a little bit disturbing.

even more unnerving, though, is that i've realized that potential has a toehold in the personal as well. when j and i were new, everything was potential. we could be anything and everything to each other. we made new promises, scratched out the lines of commitment in the blank blank slate of our glorious untapped future. three years later, i realize that now we have a history. whatever glory we're bound for doesn't live in potential, in that mysterious future us that we cast ourselves into when we were new. the here and now, baby. that's where it's at. of course, none of this is rocket science. common sense more like. a kind of naive stating of the obvious. but what hasn't been so obvious to me, until now, is that i can't keep living in the potential of who i could be in this relationship either. the "who i want to be when i'm with you" - or worse, the "who i am and have always intended to become" - doesn't hold water without some evidence of being leakfast in the present. i don't have the luxury of deferring my true and good self to another time or place. truth be told, i don't have the desire to defer it anymore. the downside to that, though, is that if i don't project that impossibly perfect me into that impossibly perfect future, i've kinda gotta be okay with the me that's sitting here in the present. and man, some days, it really isn't pretty...

*

this bit of poem is so out of context. a verse pulled from a longer piece. but i like it on its own, too, and think it maybe has something to say for me even so.

Land to Light On
...
V vi

Light passes through me lightless, sound soundless,
smoking nowhere, groaning with sudden birds. Paper
dies, flesh melts, leaving stockings and their useless vanity
in graves, bodies lie still across foolish borders.
I'm going my way, going my way gleaning shade, burnt
meridians, dropping carets, flung latitudes, inattention,
screeching looks. I'm trying to put my tongue on dawns
now, I'm busy licking dusk away, tracking deep twittering
silences. You come to this, here's the marrow of it, not
moving, not standing, it's too much to hold up, what I
really want to say is, I don't want no fucking country, here
or there and all the way back, I don't like it, none of it,
easy as that. I'm giving up on land to light on, and why not,
I can't perfect my own shadow, my violent sorrow, my
individual wrists.

- Dionne Brand


Barenaked Ladies - What A Good Boy

just to get the song out of my head

and because it's an oldie-but-goodie and because there's not nearly enough shane mcgowan in the world these days


the pogues - the broad majestic shannon (live)

you know it's summer when

i need a road trip. one of those ones like in the car ads. me, two or three good friends, a cooler, a tent. cityscape, country roads. big sky and mud and a kayak on top. i want to drive in 5th, the hum of the gearshift under the right hand, the windows open. i want a pile of cds to keep time - songs to sing along to, silly songs, sad songs, songs whose lyrics i've never known but manage to make up anyway. i want campfire nights in a place without mosquitos or smog alerts. i want afternoon swims and loons calling in the morning coffee hour. i want to eat doritos and winegums and have to stop to pee at truckstops. i want to miss the right exit and end up in some unexpected little town that sells homemade fudge and has a dimly lit bar with a 25 cent pool table. i want to plan to be back home in 2 days, but end up calling in sick for 5 more. i want to get away.

wanna come with?


modest mouse - dashboard

sold

when i was young, my grandparents used to come and visit from ottawa. maybe they came once a year, usually at christmastime, though i can't be entirely sure. i remember counting down the days until they left from about the time they arrived. they would fly into town into a house filled, or so it now seems, with my childhood anticipation. i loved my grandparents; my grandmother, especially. but thinking back, i wasn't so good at sustaining the pleasure of their company. i was always more concerned with endings than with beginnings. so when they touched down for the week-long-or-maybe-more visits, i enjoyed them for a day or so, then started thinking about how sad i would be once they left. when they finally did, i was, as i had expected, truly sad that they were gone, but also relieved that the waiting game was over. even then, i was queen of the long goodbye. you'd think i would have outgrown that with my baby fat. alas, i'm missing only the latter.

for a long time now, i've been scrapping with my mother's condo. it's been a bit like a prize-fighter, this property, full of legal left-hooks and uppercuts, and it's been refusing, almost valiantly, to go down for the count. but now it seems like we're in the final round and i'm the one that's going to claim the belt. eight and a quarter years later. i mean, i should touch wood there; god knows there's been enough twists and turns and hurdles to trip even the nimblest of souls (of which i am not one). but last night, my sister called with the news that we had two offers in on it. we took the higher. and i'll know for sure next tuesday if it all goes through.

i thought i would be relieved. after so many setbacks, after jumping through so many hoops - this is what it was all for. and yet i realized last night, as i looked for sleep to win out over grief, that the condo - as much i've cursed it, ignored it, imagined hungrily the day when it would be out of my hair - has been a kind of dam against the full swell of loss.

i suppose there was part of me that hung on to it as the backdrop to memory. if the set had not yet been torn down, maybe the show could still go on. access to the space, however hypothetical, gave me the cues to remember the lines. different scenes blocked to different floorboards, furniture, walls. my mother, alive, moving through the rooms, making noise, making dinner, making jokes, making arguments, making me feel at home.

when my grandparents came to newfoundland, i focussed so hard on the end of their visit, i lost track of their present company. for the past eight years, i've been focussing so much on the present, i forgot to look at the end. either way, the goodbye became longer than maybe it should have.

so here's to the end of this long goodbye. it's as bittersweet as i remember it.


fleetwood mac - landslide

digging deep

i know i'm being less than regular with this blogging thing of late. somehow it seems harder to make the time to do it at this time of year - the earth warming up, birds clearing their vocal chords, summer breezes.

i've been out back, clearing the yard of a truckload of overgrown "native plants" (aka weeds). so far i've taken out almost 10 yard bags worth of stuff and 2 (diseased) trees. it makes a body feel good to shake off the evidence of neglect in such a tangible way. the problem i'm having, though, is that it's decidedly harder to weed the stuff inside. my own emotional backyard is proving rockier ground to till.

it started, i suppose, with the waitlist thing i posted on a couple of weeks back. the public side of not making good (and god knows the need to achieve is a thing i've struggled with for most of my life and that battle shows no sign of resolving itself anytime soon. the irony is that in waiting to resolve it, i seem to be achieving exactly nothing). then there was the family visit. my dad and sister in town for the may long weekend. the old patterns re-enacted: more of the same desire to make good, only desperately so. more failure, only less public. there's the pressing issue of the plan B. now that plan A seems less and less a possibility, what to make of the Future? in the park today, jane and mary making commiserating noises about the feeling of not knowing. the transience of the feeling-good-today, the blindsiding force of the not-so-much-now.

and it troubles me, too, that on some days, my plan B seems to reside in a notion of children. what would it be like to have kids? would that bestow some purpose to this rather bleak landscape i've been contemplating? and isn't that exactly the wrong reason to bring new life into the world? i've always said it was. god forbid that i should trip into that now.

35 is a funny age. it's a bit of a threshold really - biological clock winding down, approaching the time when more than half of your life has likely been lived. living up to one's potential starts to become a bit of a joke, and deferral seems just downright stupid. and yet. what to do when you've been stuck in the notion of potential too long? i remember having a brief conversation with my cog sci buddy wendy about this right before the exam last month. there was a time when it seemed principled to reject the conventional trappings of ambition and success. when rejecting expectations seemed a valiant thing to do. i can't remember why that was anymore, and what i thought was so bloody noble about that position. and i'm hoping it's not too late to turn some of that around.

i weeded the backyard wholesale, with a spade. efficient as it was, there's something kind of violent about ripping away so mercilessly at all those roots. it's a shame that planting new growth involves so much death.


dave matthews band - digging a ditch

phil, i hardly knew you

i remember when i interviewed to volunteer in palliative care, i thought that what i wanted/needed/felt compelled to do was to bear witness. see a life through. sit with. be with. stand by. i remember being asked what i thought it would be like, and tentatively imagining the way small comforts could mean something so much bigger at the end of a life. i thought about the stories that needed to be told, or the silent being-with that might lessen the fear that must always, somehow, accompany the closing in of the inevitable. i thought mostly that the significance of the work there lay in being of service to the dying.

of course, i had a personal stake. for me there was the death of my own mother to contend with - that i missed it, that i was not able to sit with for her, that i missed the long goodbye. i figured that spending time in palliative care might stand in for some of that, allow me a proxy with which i could exorcise some of that impotent love/grief/care that i've carried around for a good number of years now.

and this is going to sound trite, but what i hadn't envisioned - and i mean really envisioned - was how changed i become in doing it. how those small comforts and conversations with the dying become part of *me*, part of my ongoing memories. the dying die, and with them go the only other witnesses to those moments, which in the grand narratives of their lives play no role at all. but i've got memories now, laid out in a small shrine to the scraps of lives that i've been given by people i know hardly at all.

so thank you, ursula, who never did get that nail moved out of hospital room wall. and thank you, joan, who was so concerned about disturbing her roommate with her 2 am near-death experience which came only days before the real one. and thank you, phil, who showed me his wounds with something close to pride, who could talk a blue streak through the morphine, who asked me sheepishly a few weeks ago to be his date for his daughter's july wedding, and who died two months short of it. i had thought you had more time. i'm sorry i didn't get a chance to say goodbye.


dylan - knockin' on heaven's door

heads are for thinking

mental note: wear a bike helmet.

on second thought

i remember reading somewhere recently that athletes who medal silver are less happy than those who medal bronze. i thought that was kind of odd, but the more i thought about it, the more it made sense... it kind of sucks more when you think you were just *that* close to the gold and didn't quite touch it, whereas if you're taking the bronze, it's somehow easier to just be grateful to have made it to the podium.

those of you who know me know i ain't no athlete. hell, the closest i think i've ever gotten to anything that resembles a medal was getting some kind of ribbon in the three-legged race in grade 4 sports day. but today i got waitlisted for acceptance to medical school at mcmaster, and it feels a little like the silver medal.

don't get me wrong - i'm way grateful, and even still a little surprised. i was pretty much psyching myself up for the "thanks but no thanks" letter (even as a tiny part of me was holding out hope for the "hell yeah c'mon in!" letter) but this morning, as i was heading to an early morning coffee date with my friends susan, jeff and wee dominic, i thought to myself: i think the waitlist might be a little more hellish than being rejected. i don't mean that i wish i had've been rejected. i really don't. it's just that i am SO BAD at waiting. the astrologers call it venus in aries. i call it jonesing for the now now now.

and i've been trying to be patient, trying to melt into the heat of anticipation, trying to embrace the que sera sera. i've been practicing talking myself down, perfecting the couldn't-care-less. but the truth is that i do care. and i hate waiting. and even though i know some things are worth waiting for, it doesn't make the silver shine any brighter. 'cause even when you've got the silver in your hot little hands, you've still got your eye on the gold.


ani difranco - the waiting song

homecoming, homegoing

there's something about coming home after being away for a time - even a very short time - that makes me see where i am from a whole new vantage.

we've just been to calgary for our friends suzette and tonya's wedding, and took a few days at the end to kick around wild rose country. j's been wanting to take this trip for a while - the loop of highways and back roads that wind through the rockies and open out into endless plains and big big big alberta sky. j grew up in alberta, worked in jasper, started growing her adult skin, maybe, on the columbia icefields, in bear country and backstage of the ski-hilly glitz of banff and the CP majesty of lake louise. her alberta a slightly different landscape than that of oil fields and rodeo kings. we didn't see any of that alberta - at least not up close and personal - but the swell of calgary's freeways attests to the prosperity of oil and gas, and i've a suspicion that the bootjack in the basement of her dad's suburban home isn't just for show.

it's always a bit of a trip - literal and otherwise - to walk through the childhood museums of your partner's heart. there's family, of course: the meet and greet, putting faces to the names of people who have been central foils - the heroes, the villains, the clowns - in the fables of the beloved's youth. there's the pointing out of landmarks: old houses, sites of first kisses, the well-worn and not-quite-forgotten paths from schools to home. there are stories full of people in cameo roles, whose names you commit to memory like you're playing concentration. the memorable stops on the route your partner took to become the person - the one standing next to you, the one you wake up with, the one you love - that you think you know inside and out. you probably don't.

maybe the thing about travelling with someone, and probably too about travelling solo, is that you end up tripping into all kinds of unexpected tenses. past, present, future conditional. home becomes a shifting state of mind; we have, have had, so many different homes. so coming home to the now-home, the here-home, is a little bit jarring. a little bit suspect, even, for the inevitability of its underlying transience.

and here, on this toronto street, in this toronto morning, the leaves have come out on the trees in our absence. everything looks different. smells different. and our stuff is still our stuff, and our animals still remember us, and our friends still know where we live. but things are kind of different. or maybe we are. still, it's nice to be home, whatever that means.





simon and garfunkel - homeward bound

off to cowtown

so we're off this afternoon to calgary for tonya and suzette's wedding. looking forward to wide open sky, and if we're lucky maybe a little spring skiing? i've no idea if that's even possible at this time of year, but my board skills are so rusty and aching for a little grease...

and in the vein of a little cowtown music from way way back, with a dusty childhood memory attached too, with an acknowledgement of the disturbing misogynist and ridiculously racist overtones, a little marty robbins. let's call it consciousness-raising - it never ceases to amaze me - and disgust me - how much morally objectionable garbage i was exposed to as a kid, and my fondness for it persists by way of nostalgia, despite all that i know better.

marty robbins - el paso

the thing about the morning

is that it's a slippery mo-fo - all full of promise and possibility. tricks you into thinking it could go on all day. i hate that.

so the fact that i have wasted way too much time this weekend playing on facebook and wandering the internet is making me a little nervous, but the wide open space of 9:30 am is doing nothing to make me stop. viz:



apparently, i also resemble susan sontag, maria bello, and debra winger, but this one was the funniest.


belle & sebastian - my wandering days are over

uh oh

one word: facebook.

the ultimate distraction. this might require therapy.

it's only a couple more days (get over yourself)

i hate cognitive science. no - i mean, i HATE cognitive science. it's not that the stuff isn't interesting (it is). it's not even that i find the prof annoying, pompous, and ineffectual (i do). it's more that it's my last exam and i feel like i know the stuff already and i'm fighting my inner 2-year-old who is adamantly protesting the fact that i have to jump through hoops like studying and exam-writing to finish this stupid course which i probably shouldn't have taken in the first place. and yeah, i know this will all pass by monday eve, and i'll be glad to have done it, and i'll get to feel the release of having wrapped a rather long and grueling course. but in the meantime, i feel like embracing my internal temper tantrum and jumping up and down, and screaming at the top of my lungs "BUT I DON'T WANT TO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

phew. that feels better.


the ramones - i wanna be sedated

hey you, i know you...

in studying for my psychology exam, which i write this afternoon, i came across this concept of self-evaluative maintenance. basically, it's an ego-preserving non-compete clause among friends - i.e., if your friend is better than you at something that counts to you, you either get a new aspiration, or ditch the friend. evidentally, this same impulse also leads people to associate themselves with winners and disassociate themselves from losers.

so in this vein, since i am not currently a writer or a photographer, and as i'm not much in the mood to cull friends, i hereby associate myself shamelessly with a couple of winners:

a shout-out to zoe whittall, whose new novel bottle rocket hearts, just published by cormorant, is gonna be launching on wednesday, may 2nd at the gladstone. ontario literati zoe, sky gilbert, maggie macdonald, and elvira kurt'll all be there. and so will i, although a bit late. doors 7:30 pm.



and also at the gladstone, as part of the contact photography festival and all the way from beautiful montreal, my pal pierre dalpé. he's exhibiting his personae series of photographs -- way cool visual explorations of identity, perception, and reality. check it out. opening on thursday, may 3, 7 - 10 pm, at the gladstone art bar. runs to may 27.






morcheeba - part of the process

and the sun is still sleepy warm too

i'm not an early riser by nature. i love me my bed. but the past couple of mornings i've been up shortly after the sun, and i can see why people do it. on the back deck with a coffee and the wet smell of night's end, the muted citysounds, and the chipper conversations of starlings and those ubiquitous little brown birds whose names i have never known. even if it's all an illusion, it's peaceful out there.

i once had a cat stevens album that got stuck in my car tape deck for an entire summer (cat's greatest hits on one side, and paul simon's graceland on the other). i couldn't listen to either for years thereafter, i was so sick of them. and while this isn't my favourite tune, it's apt. and this morning has got me feeling so expansive, that even if it isn't, and even if it's cheesy and maybe a little too christian-like, i'm gonna post it.


cat stevens - morning has broken

okay jen, i'll bite

Read my VisualDNA™ Get your own VisualDNA™

it's 21 degrees outside and i am happy

the summer my parents split up - that would be the summer after my first year of university - i had a love-on for the indigo girls. i don't listen to them very much anymore, but that summer i must've played nomads, indians, and saints - the cassette version no less - upwards of a hundred times over. i have this image of driving across saskatchewan, moving my mom out to the west coast, and forcing everyone in the car to listen to watershed just one more time. it's a tune that says summer to me.


the indigo girls - watershed

9 car pile-up

one of the weird things about losing someone you love is the way time piles up, like some awful freeway accident, starting from the minute they die, and going on, i imagine, until you do.

it's my mother's birthday today. she would have been 63. and in the time since her death, the world has slid into a new post-9/11 state of perpetual war, paranoia, and profound distrust. i still imagine having conversations with her - we always were good at the chatter - but i can no longer imagine what her responses would be. the world, in some ways, seems so irrevocably changed. of course, i imagine people thought the same during and after the vietnam war, during and after every war, every major cultural shift probably, and maybe they were right. i mean, things always change... i guess the difference is that my mom is no longer changing along with it. and i am.

so mom, i don't know how to tell you this, but the world has gone to hell in a handbasket. there's a bunch of crazy right wing fucks in charge of everything, kids are shooting each other at school, there are bombs going off in iraq that are killing folk by the hundreds daily, and apparently we're frying ourselves to death by consumption (and not the kind they used to send you off to a sanitorium for). oh, and i'm kinda jobless at the moment. happy birthday. i miss you.


barry mcguire - eve of destruction

straining to hear

it's the horror of the non-stop coverage of disaster that just compounds it all for me - the eyewitness interviews, the first-person accounts rehearsed over and over again for the cameras, the grainy cellphone video footage. and my own morbid curiosity - surfing the net to find new information about killings that have so much of the world in thrall but which are so very far away.

there's a magnitude, to be sure, to this kind of firebombed violence that forces us to sit up and pay attention. an explosion that brings home how even in the most serene places - "these things just don't happen in places like this" - we're always, maybe, just a hair's breadth away from our own apocalypses. and we want to know why. we want to pick the details apart, replay the moments over and over again as if doing so might help us identify the attendant horsemen should ever they ride into our neighbourhoods. but i suppose that's also what drives the horror of it all - maybe there are no horsemen. maybe there is no why. maybe it really is senseless.

(which isn't the same as saying that there aren't causes. like guns. and poverty. and alienation. but while causes might explain, they don't necessarily make sense in any moral way, which is always what i feel like so much of this news coverage is trying to do.)

as k points out, it's the commonness of tragedy that can overwhelm in our own lives. and things like the shootings at virginia tech, at dawson college, in pennsylvania, at columbine - they're megaphones against the eardrum. sometimes, i guess, i just fear that in devoting so much attention to them, we become desensitized to the other tragedies. to the tragedies that occur in precisely those places where we do expect them to happen - in iraq, in the inner city, to the poor. and if we expect them to happen, does that make them any less tragic?

sigh. i'm not sure what i'm saying. i'm not trying to diminish what happened in virginia. it's horrific. i guess i just wanted to check in on myself to see where the horror lies - and to remind myself that the extraordinary relies on the ordinary. and the ordinary is where i live.


bach concerto in d minor for 2 violins, mvt II, largo ma non tanto (perlman & stern)

my perfect lunch

so i've recently determined that i'm going to try and eat better - you know the drill, more whole grains, less fat, more veggies and legumes. and to complement this oh-so-responsible new dietary stance, i've started taking multivitamins (but did you know you can get things called calcium chews, that are kinda like tootsie rolls, but they've got mineral goodness in them? really! it's true). and today, i finally hauled my ever-widening rear end into pool for a bit of a swim. whole new me, i tell you!

but then i got home, and i was HUNGRY. and this week, the grocery angel (also known as my dearly beloved) had delivered to my house the ingredients (by express request) for my perfect lunch:



wonder bread - white. cheese - american kraft. ketchup - heinz.
damn the resolutions. those can wait. this lunch made my day.


rufus wainwright - cigarettes and chocolate milk

post-overnight

on my bike on my way home this morning from last night's midnight shift, city streets empty save for a few souls who might be waking, might be heading home. the city smells different when the asphalt is cleared of people. i'm not a morning person but i do like being up for the night's end, for that 5 minute fadeout as streetlights become redundant. i don't know if it's the light or my own fatigue, but the world seems somehow more innocent, more primitive, more hopeful in the bleary light of 6 am than it ever does when it's fully awake.


and because i'm clearly a little bleary-eyed and sentimental myself this morning, a little early tom waits



ps. a little word of the day i was gifted with last night: pukeatrocious. i think this could be my new favourite.

the squid or the kale?

one of the perks of being underemployed and overschooled is the freedom to watch daytime television. it's a perk i don't often take advantage of since i tend to prefer the serendipitous meanderings of cyberspace to the stuff that seems to show up on my digital tv box. but yesterday i tuned in while i was eating lunch and was rewarded by a discovery channel show on the humboldt squid.

now i'd never heard of the humboldt squid before, but apparently they're known as vicious predators - a sort of lower order (not to mention smaller sized) kraken. even so, they're pretty big puppies - some can grow to a length of 6 feet, and weigh a hundred pounds or more. they travel in schools of a thousand animals plus, and feed crazily, since they only have a year to live, and they clearly have a lot of growth to accomplish in that time. the thing is, they've been associated with attacks on fishers - and on each other - in what sounds like a sort of sharks-gone-mad sort of way, so they tend to be quite feared, and then of course destroyed with the wrath we reserve for those things that show us up as vulnerable.

the purpose of this documentary, though, was to recast the humboldt as a gentle giant that only attacks when provoked (for example, by the fishers that are thinning their ranks in a rather barbarous fashion). otherwise, the squid show a remarkable level of playfulness, curiosity, peaceability, problem-solving ability, cooperative behaviour, and communicativeness. in short, the humboldt, cast in the right light, might look a lot like us.

i suppose it's kind of naive on my part to be moved by this. i remember years ago hearing a quirks and quarks show about the play behaviour of octopuses (octopi?) and thinking that i really had to reconsider my selective pescevegetarian stance (i did, though not the way i had intended... instead of dropping the pesce part, i dropped the vegetarian part).

i'm not entirely sure what i'm musing about here - only that it really does seem alarming how divorced most of us have become from the means of our food-getting. and how, in becoming so, we've also moved away from an understanding of other animals as sensate, let alone cognate. i know i'm guilty of this kind of thinking, if only as justification for my weakness for the 25 cent chicken wing... which makes me feel pretty crummy. not to mention cheap.

and while i love the stuff i stumble on on the discovery channel, it almost always presents what is for me, moreso than it is for my friend jen, who posted in a similar vein yesterday, a struggle with the moral quicksand that underlies my gustatory carnal pleasures. so thank you, discovery channel. thank you, humboldt squid. even if i don't end up riding the vegetarian bandwagon again, i'm glad of the reminder of the agreement implicit in my love of sushi, in that whopper i crave at least once a month, in that brilliant lamb tibs at the queen of sheba. sigh. i expect i'll be flailing around in the quicksand-space for a time to come yet...


the beatles - octopus's garden

and i wasn't sure they would ever get along...

so much for fighting like cats and dogs.

9w1 and you?

grey, wet, and freaking cold here in toronto today. it feels like november in vancouver. a morning spent shivering in the dog park, then bathing the resultant filthy beast. i feel like i should mention vonnegut's passing, if only to admit that i've never read anything he wrote. but now that that's done, i'm fresh out of thought. and whenever that happens, i figure i may as well go fatalist - and what better way to go than via the enneagram. since k first mentioned it a couple of weeks ago, and my friend j just sent me a link to an even better online version, i've been obsessing (read - wasting valuable study time) about it.

so instead of yammering emptily on today, i'll let the fine folks at eclecticenergies.com amuse you all for the afternoon (well, anyone who hasn't already done the test), and challenge you to take the enneagram test. then tell me what you are.


jenny lewis with the watson twins - the charging sky

interior

it's about the turn inwards, the way the mind detaches, becomes still, watchful. it comes on like thunder, a rumble under the breath, the downward shift of the barometer. it suffuses, fog-like, diffuse, rising up from inside, spreading outwards the way frostbite travels inwards. it's a numbness, an enoughness, a too-muchness. it's elusive, this old travelling companion, slippery like light off a chrome surface, or maybe more like that halo that frames - no, bleeds into - your target when you shoot right into the light. you'd think after all the time we've been together, all the terrain we've covered, i might anticipate it with a little more accuracy. but it's always a surprise guest, the one that slips in with the invited, the one upon whom it would be rude to close the door. "come on in," i always end up saying. "come on in and make yourself at home."


ryan adams - damn, sam (i love a woman that rains)

googlestalgia

i've gone on here before about getting lost in cyberworld. i slip into it easily - skipping my way through other people's cyberworlds, hyperlink to hyperlink. but every now and then, i stumble on bits of my old life. current photos of ex-lovers, old friends, the people i've lost reminding me of the person i've been. and for all those ancient hurts and dusty grainy remembrances, for all the times i've thought "i'm sorry" and the times i've thought "fuck off" and the times i've justified/forgotten/buried the things i found hardest to accept, i can't get past the nugget of affection. that is why we came together, and sometimes it's why we came apart. but it's still there, somewhere, under the avalanche of future that buried it.

cheers to you, clm. you look well, and happy. i hope you are.


norah jones - those sweet words

god in the details

so yesterday was passover, this weekend easter. on my way home from the dog park this morning, ann, the eldest of a brood of four homeschoolers whom i know only through my cordial relations with the owners of a doodle named basil, wished me a happy easter. i returned the wish, though with the realization that i know pretty much nothing about easter. i mean, of course i know the basic story - it's hard to grow up in this country without grasping at least that - but i don't know anything about easter, in much the same way that i don't know anything about christmas either.

j is always amazed by this. over the winter break, i revealed to her that the only time i had ever been to church was to listen to or play music. church doesn't simply doesn't signify to me in the same way as it signifies to her. i often wonder what i missed by growing up without it... would my world look different? my mind? does faith allow or encourage a way of approaching "fact" in some fundamentally other way?

in a somehow related way, i talked to e about passover this morning too. if i know little about jesus and easter, i know even less about passover. so she told me the story, and we talked about the relationship of belief to tradition to... well, belief. and we both noted how, in growing up with a lack of god in our lives, we find the ability to believe (which seems more to me to be about the ability to suspend disbelief) almost unbridgeably foreign. and it's not that i don't want to believe; it's more, truly, that i can't. like there was some critical period in development that related to developing the ability to believe - truly believe - in god. and i missed it. and some days i wonder if in missing that, i missed out on some important way of seeing the world. and then on other days, i think maybe that the god i wasn't raised with just took another form for me - maybe it lives in science, in thought-space, in relation-space, in my own reluctance to dig too deep, and in the idea that anything is possible and we couldn't, or maybe shouldn't, work too hard at understanding. maybe it's just that my non-god doesn't wear human-like clothing. but in the end, i suppose it's just as ineffable as any religious deity, and just as powerful.


ry cooder - i think it's going to work out fine

high fidelity

when i saw the movie, i was so taken by john cusack's character. the obsessive tape making, the effort to get it just right. i remember making those tapes when i was a teenager... it was such a fine art. or so i thought at the time.

first there would be a list: all the songs that came into my head, that conveyed the mood i was trying to get at, that i wanted to share with whoever i might be sharing the tape with. then came the shuffle: play the song list in my head, imagine the breaks between and the effect of one ending leading into the opening chords of the next track, rearranging accordingly. then finetuning: where on the tape was the sideflip going to occur? was that appropriate? would it work there? rearrange again, accordingly. then the final pass - last chance to change a certain song. remember, this is going to be permanent. this is going to *say* something about you. and finally, the naming. what to call this mix? and the sides? will side A and side B suffice, or does it need something more clever, something more personal? and the finishing touches - the case. get the right pen - something that won't smudge. all caps or all lower case? definitely not cursive, but should there be two colours of ink? so much work went into those old tapes, so much of self, so many attempts at becoming a self.

a few years ago, when i replaced the last tape deck in my life with a cd player, i got rid of all those old tapes. i still think of them sometimes, though. and miss them.


Mixed Tapes

They almost ask for musical backing, some feelings,
or even to be sung, but since life (you know this)
isn't opera, and your all-too-spoken arias
are prey to mundane upstaging, missteps
of the tongue, you pick tracks of singers scattered
in time, and temper -- yet bound by the way
they overheard your heart, and pinched
its unformed lines -- and you record them
in skewed new orders:
.......................Nick Drake opening for Nina Simone,
John Prine in bed with Edith Piaf,
and later, languid and alone, tragic smoker
under a Gatsby-green light, on a summertime pier....
No, you choose the name.

You know how clichés, the same
you'd never leave in a poem, that would shame you
breathed into a mouthpiece, are disguised
somehow -- or are they renewed, justified
by the right tune? Still missing you.
Keep kissing you.
Maybe that's what a tune is for. Maybe
it's why you burn mixed disks, make tapes
in hi-fi, normal bias - 60 to 90 minutes
is best; no rushed declarations of love.
You'll sit up with a bottle of something red,
a tape deck, and this clichéd, constant
aching, to reclaim lines you mean so deeply
they must be your own.


With this kiss my life begins.


You're not alone, anymore.

-- Steven Heighton, from The Address Book


Nick Drake - From the Morning

it'll grow back...

when flanner was a pup, there was a woman in the park who was adamant that she was the spitting image of falkor, the flying luckdragon from the neverending story. i had a vague recollection of seeing the film when i was a kid, but couldn't quite picture the character in question. then j and i rented the movie to get an idea of what exactly boca's person (naturally, we only know the woman by her dog's name - this is the way it goes in dog-park world) was talking about. i was amused; could see the root of the comparison. but falkor is this really weird looking dog-dragon with a big poofy head and skinny little flipper leg-wing-y things. my dog doesn't look like that. or didn't - until yesterday when we brought the poor neglected mat-ridden creature in for her spring groom.

flanner, circa end of february:




flanner, this morning:




falkor, the luckdragon:




i get it now.


jane siberry - everything reminds me of my dog

organ music

on wednesday we talked about getting back to the body. "what does your heart, what does your stomach feel about that," she asked me, "if your head stops interpreting, stops interrupting?"

i've been sitting with that for a while now, off and on, for the last day or so. what does it feel like - what is the lived experience - of inhabiting the body? those of us whose heads do all the talking, who are deft with a turn of phrase, who use language like a scalpel and pretend like the very act of dissection arrives at the truth of the matter, might have trouble with this kind of question. how to arrest the language of the mind, let go of the clever weave of mental and emotional that knits up the explanatory scarf? i guess a body could get strangled with a scarf like that, and yet be none the wiser.

and it's funny that we can find ourselves chasing down - with the blind urgency of ambition - all those things that we find lacking in ourselves. a subconscious drive to completion. suffice to say that i'm finding the irony - or is it a lesson? - inherent in my pursuit of a career in medicine (for what career could be more literally about the body than that?) revealing.

so on her couch, in her basement office that is beginning to smell a bit like home or some semblance thereof, i dug in and listened hard for the sound of the body stripped of mind. and if it's talking, i'm not hearing much. but i'm willing to keep trying. it seems important. as j so often says, and i say perhaps not enough, i *am* teachable...


ani difranco - work your way out

it's how the light gets in

in the stuff i've been reading for psych lately, there's a lot on neurotransmitters - on the balance of dopamine or serotonin in those all important gaps between neurons. too much and the mind tips into overdrive - rage, euphoria, hallucination. too little and it sinks into the muck of depression, the flatline of disaffect. the input signals and the output signals so shaped by the weather in the all-important space, that critical synaptic cleft, between them.

and maybe it's a metaphorical stretch, but just today i'm feeling caught in the synapse with nary a weathervane around.


leonard cohen - anthem

after enlightenment, the laundry

to be honest, i have no idea how it went. it felt good. i felt in control and surprisingly un-nervous by the time the interviews actually started. but it's a weird subjective space, with no feedback, and encounters too brief to get an overall sense of how i played. so now i guess i just sit back and wait. until may 15. which at the moment feels like a long time, but i'm thinking that once i get through the next week (2 exams, 1 paper) the time'll pretty much fly by.

what has been brought home in this past nervous month, though, is how good it is to be loved, and to be told so. i feel incredibly fortunate to have people in my life who hold up, who care, who rally, and who listen. so for all my grand prepared ramblings about the humanity implicit in doctoring, this is the humanity i know - my friends, my family, the random people in the dog park who send good wishes my way even though they don't even know me.

thank you. i hope i can return the favour.


natalie merchant - life is sweet

and we're off!

catch y'all on the flip. thanks for all your good thoughts.


be good tanyas - light enough to travel

the morning after

it occurred to me last night as i was wrestling sleep down for the count that my evening song post might have been construed to mean that i was drawing an analogy to myself as JC. i swear, that's not what i meant.

of course, since it was a post on subliminality, who can be sure? he was, after all, just a man... and i've had so many men before in many different ways; he's just one more... oh wait. that's a different song. :)


wilco - jesus, etc

subliminal

there's an ann tyler book, i think, in which there's a character who gives up his secrets by whistling or humming tunes that articulate the unspoken thoughts in his head.

i find this happens to me a lot. and this evening, this is what's in mine. maybe i do want to take care of myself after all.

unbecoming

Unfinished Landscape with a Dog

Not much of a dog yet,
that smudge in the distance, beyond the reach

of focus. It's just an impressionist
gesture, a guess. From the edge of the clearing, the farmhouse
materializes, settles

into wall & stone. The water,
making the surface

of the stream, makes
reflections. So why shouldn't the dog

accept limits, become

a figure? Is it like the girl who sits
in the hall closet and says she's not
hiding? She's inside --

listening without the burden
of sight, letting locations

release hold. Out of body,
they seem lighter: her parents' voices no longer

hooked to their mouths. They seem
cleaner. Even the electric can opener;
the sounds of children

that rise from the yard, and fall; the opening
window, these are no longer

effects, things expected
of a subject and verb. The world anyhow is too
straightforward.

Maybe the dog
does not want to be a dog, does not want
to be turned into landscape

but to remain in the beginning, placeless:

with the wind opening, the wind
a vowel, and the stars and waters
that flash, recoil, and retch

unnamed as yet, unformed, unfound.

-- Kate Northrup


emmylou harris - hickory wind

is this a good sign?

mr breszny's prediction this week:

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): Writing in *American Scientist,* professor of neuroscience Irving Biederman says that human beings are literally addicted to learning new ideas. At the moment when we grasp a concept we've been grappling with, our brains experience a rush of a natural opium-like chemical, boosting our pleasure levels. I suggest that you take advantage of this fact to get really high in the coming week, Aquarius. Your ability to master challenging new information is at a peak, which means your access to natural opiates will be abundant.

i wonder if i can work it so those natural opiates kick in on saturday and last until after my exams on tuesday....

and since i seem to be on a "post music from way way way way back in your distant past" kick, i figure i may as well keep doing so. if i could have, i would have put up an old cover version of this song by a long-defunct newfoundland band called the dervishes. nick rockel, older brother to childhood friends of ours, did this totally deadpan baritone version which was just brilliant. but that's lost to analog world, so this one will have to do...


katrina and the waves - i'm walking on sunshine

budget conscience

so the harperites delivered their second minority government budget yesterday. aside from the whoosh of pompously hot air blowing through chicago as a result of the conrad black trial, it's about all the news there is in the canadian papers this morning. and i'm finding it troubling.

i'm not troubled by it for the reasons that i expected to be troubled - my left-of-centre leanings are almost never in step with the conservatives, so i'm accustomed to disagreeing with their positions. truth be told, my face adopts an almost expectant sneer whenever stephen harper's name is mentioned, and my hackles seem to have a pavlovian relationship to any reference to conservative policy. but this budget bothers me in another sort of way. it bothers me precisely because there's little in there for me to disagree with.

sure i recognize it's probably gonna be an election year. yes i see the tokenist spending being promised. but tax credits for the purchase of hybrid vehicles? tax penalties for the purchase of gas guzzlers? 300 million for cervical cancer research and vaccine? i'm hard-pressed to argue against this kind of spending.

i know the media optics are key, and i get that you could park a fleet of those gas-guzzling tax-penalized vehicles in the shadow of the environmental pollution caused by industry, which was not targeted by the same gun. and there is still no national daycare program, or coherent transit strategy, or anything to address poverty in first nations communities. indeed, coherent strategy doesn't seem to be a lynchpin of this budget, unless you count "get the votes" as a solid plan (it's for sure a motivation).

but my problem is this: the budget has, at the very least, *something* to it that i consider progressive. flaherty has delivered a set of promises that at least seem to have its heart in the right place. it doesn't go far enough by any measure, and there's obvious room for improvement, but it is a start. and as far as i can tell (and admittedly, that's not much) it does no great harm. what i don't know what to do with is this mistrust i have of the conservative government. as they're in a minority government position, i'm suspicious of their motives. the party has arisen from the ashes of a movement that has shown itself to be rabidly socially right-wing in some instances, and the current prime minister has shown himself to be adept at keeping his members hushed up (for example, since when did stockwell day become the exemplar of the discrete cabinet minister????) so i can't be sure how much of that social conservatism is still seething quietly under that friendly, inclusion-seeking surface.

and here's the nugget - i don't *want* to like them. but i'm opposed, at a very deep level, to disliking on the basis of prejudice rather than on true observation. but on the other hand, is it simply wilful - or worse, complicit and stupid - to take that proverbial gift horse and avoid looking it in the mouth? is there a way to do both?


sinead o'connor - black boys on mopeds

human kindness, overflowing

my friend esther (thanks e!) gave me this nina simone dualdisc - that would be the audiovisual equivalent of the 2-in-1 shampoo/conditioner - for my birthday. problem was, the wrong disc was inside - a straight-up audio copy of the essential nina simone. which is all on its own a great album, but i'm looking forward to exchanging it for the intended one, so i can see all the dvd stuff, and check out this new technology (though maybe it's not so new and i'm just out of the loop...)

but i played the disc that came with anyhow - though i do already have a copy - and ever since, i've been keeping time to her voice. as i said to e, that woman could sing a grocery list and make me weep. the undercurrent of memory, of sadness, of been-there-done-that-and-still-we-keep-on that flows beneath, even as her voice dances, smiles, desires, harangues, grieves. and makes me want to do the same.


nina simone - i think it's going to rain today

what would you do?

working through a slough of questions in preparation for this interview - a week saturday, 11:45 am EDT, hamilton, ontario, in case any of you feel like sending up a flare to whatever god/dess of good fortune you've got on side.

the trouble is how to know oneself in such a way as to be able to present the picture of knowing oneself. how to think through the big hairy problems of ethics, of policy, of commitment, of self, and distill those thoughts into 8 minutes of speaking time, with 2 minutes of prep. you can spend a whole life, or at the very least a bottle of scotch and hours of heated conversation, teasing out the nuances of these kinds of questions.

should medical schools preferentially admit students who commit to abstaining from smoking? what do you do when a friend with a gambling problem asks to borrow money? is it ethical for healthcare professionals to strike? what do you think about organ donation from non-viable infants? what would you do if a fellow physician has a drinking problem that you believe is endangering the lives of his/her patients? how do you feel about a two-tier medical system? should we fund private healthcare? how would you describe the relationship between science and medicine? who are you, really?

and with all of these questions, i start with the obvious end - the thread that's poking out, that tickles my gut instinct, and i pull on it. and it unravels, knots up, turns in on itself, disappears. to each question, a million possible answers. the underdetermination of the data by the theory. or is it the other way around?

120 minutes. 12 stations.

gulp.


shawn colvin - steady on

breaststroke

begins with a strong kick-off. feet planted firmly against bulwark, body solid against water, straining for fluidity. you gotta feel it. point the fingers forward, tuck the head. set the ears snug against that uppermost curve where bicep meets shoulder. revel in the velocity. you're a wire, pulled taut from digit to digit, knife sharp, a skeleton key slipping into the space between water and more water.

the thing about it is that it's the only stroke that makes peace with water. freestyle is a churning thing - the body a sluice, the water at work. likewise backstroke, which to me has always held a hint of drowning in its refusal to submerge. and the fly. oh the violence of the butterfly. if its wake is anything to go by, the fly is the tsunami of the individual medley. water and body both subjects in the reign of the stroke.

but breaststroke is a different kind of affair - the body and the water in conversation, a back and forth, a quid pro quo. in that lunge forward, the one that stretches into glide, the body seems to move by the grace of the water. which holds up, pushes along, lets be. and in the breath, the body plays master, rearing up, kicking through. we make the water resist with our cupped hands, our frogged legs. the pool is the foothold for the next lunge to extension, the next glide-through, the next chance to feel held and exposed and full of possibility, all at once.


bright eyes - train under water

memento mori

when i was a kid, i loved the saturday paper. the big thick version of the evening telegram, served up on the kitchen table, packed with flyers, the tv guide, the colour comics, and, more importantly, the expanded version of the in memoriam section. i read that section obsessively, and furtively - i was not unaware that such macabre interests in ten-year-olds tended to be frowned upon by the grownups in the room.

of course, i didn't think of it as macabre. there was something in those columns of bad verse, headed up with a photo of the dearly beloved if the family had the money or maybe if a good photo was available, that i was drawn to. i counted the number of years that had passed since the people had died, contemplated the span of the memory relative to the span of the life lived. i said my small agnostic prayers, especially for the young, or those whose frozen smiling faces caught my attention. i imagined writing such a column for my grandparents, for my parents, for my sister, for my cats. i imagined such a column being written about me. what would be said to sum up a life? how would you pick just the right verse, say just the right things? how would you craft a fitting tribute in 32 agate lines, an inch and a half wide? how, though at ten, i'm certain this would not have been my language, do you bear witness to a life?

and now, 25 years later, i spent this morning making beds and serving water, combing hair and holding hands, in a palliative care unit. and i'm thinking a lot about what it means to bear that witness, to be present at the end of a life. to be present takes on such different meaning when the future has become so short. it seems to me that all you can do, sometimes, is to not look away unless you're asked to. to let an hour go by without pushing it into purpose. to let life run its course. which ends. inevitably, indiscriminately, intolerably, infinitely, infallibly.


lucinda williams - side of the road




postscript: i know i said i might stay away, but i lied. this seems as good an antidote as any to heavy snowfall warnings and falling rocks that might come my way, and it's good to talk. however virtually that might be.

avalanche warning

panic sets in like a tidal wave. feeling up to my eyeballs in work, in anxiety, in the preparation for Life - whatever that may be. on a good day, i can roll with the uncertainty, buoy myself up with the excitement of just not knowing, comfort myself with the sense that everything always works out in the end. and if it doesn't, i'll deal with it then. on a bad day (today), that sounds like a fairly laughable prospect.

so the warning is for me, to not make any sudden moves lest the world come tumbling down. and a heads-up that this space may become a little less active for the next few days. surf away.

the hidden cameras - fear is on

we are family

my aunt is in town. she calls pretty faithfully, as does my uncle, whenever they happen to pass through whatever city i'm living in. i know them not at all, or rather, i know them only from the vantagepoint of a set of memories a quarter of a century old.

the challenge has always been how to avoid discussion of boyfriends and marriage. how to seem perfectly well-adjusted - and perfectly in the closet. i tell myself it's because i don't see them enough for it to matter. i tell myself that it's for my 93-year-old catholic grandmother's sake. i tell myself that they're not politically equipped to deal with it, and i don't want to be the one to explain it to them. all of the above, of course, is bullshit. especially when you consider that i'm also not out to my other uncle, the one on my mom's side, whose immediate family - save his partner, me, and my sister - is all dead.

i don't tell them because i'm scared to. i wonder if it isn't time to do something about that.


the tragically hip - scared

IWD

when i was a younger woman, maybe in my early 20s, international women's day was a big deal. then, for me, feminism was one of the first ideological spaces i lived inside. the beauty myth had taken the media by storm for a couple of years in the early 90s and, along with some carefully sought out classes at mcgill, kickstarted my reading back to the earlier days of feminism. i went back to walker, to lorde, to millett, to woolf, back even to wollstonecraft. i went forward with butler, with hooks, with trinh. i ate it up, as j. would say, with two forks. feminism was first the explicit, then the implicit, lens through which i read my world.

and as i got older, my world got bigger. other ideologies presented themselves and postcolonialism, deconstruction, socialism, and now, more recently some cherrypicked tenets of buddhism, moved into my house. feminism got mixed in - as i firmly believe it should - with other perspectives that made my world make sense, that helped me build the ethical and moral standards by which i try to live my life. it became less important to fight on any single feminist point, than to attempt to harmonize, to respect the individual, to acknowledge the infinite variation of interpretation out there. in short, that we all see things differently, and as long as nobody is getting physically hurt, we can allow for the validity of other people's positions. sticks and stones, and all that jazz.

of course, i've been fortunate to have a community of friends that espouse many of the same values. by and large, we talk on the same page, rant at similar things, bang our fists on the same tables - or at least in the same restaurant. my social world, small as it is, has become a sort of utopic space.

but every now and then, the scales fall from my eyes, and i realize that that utopia i live inside is... well, utopic. feminism is not a fait accompli, as i so dearly wish it was - and as in many ways, i have been allowing myself to believe. just the other night i was at a psych lecture at the university of toronto, that venerable institution of higher learning, and the prof essentially made the unqualified claim that women wear make-up to make themselves look like they are about to have an orgasm in order to attract the men around them, thereby fulfilling the biological imperative of procreation. that science plainly claims that biology is not destiny does nothing to dissuade such ridiculous proclamations from a man entrusted with the minds of hundreds of 18-year-olds. on the subway coming home from that lecture, the tv screen with the soundbite news put up a little item about the gang rape of an unconscious 16-year-old girl by four young men who videotaped it on a cell phone, and then passed it around the school. it's pretty hard not to connect the ideological dots.

we are not beyond feminism, i remind myself. we cannot be complacent in the name of humanism. and if all we've got are words, then we at least have to speak. and i missed my chance in class the other night. i failed to stand up and find my voice. i sent a carefully worded, and likely too-polite email instead. but man, i'm mad. and it feels surprisingly good.


pj harvey - who the fuck

hard egg

i grew up with the cbc. cbc radio, cbc television. good wholesome canadian broadcasting, with no ads, a lot of weather, and a dearth of popular music. moreover, my parents - who maybe should have been hippies, but as new immigrants born just shy of boomerdom, never made it past the cultural sidelines of the age of aquarius - tuned our house to opera, to classical, and if vocals came into the picture, to the musical stylings of pat boone, james last, patti page, and a smattering of broadway musicals (oklahoooooo-MA! where the wind comes sweeping down the plains...)

and i really never noticed that i was out of step with what all the kids were listening to. i went to a small montessori-inspired school - a one-room joint where the health of our hatching ducklings and the state of our stamp collections were vastly more important than what was where on the billboard charts - so my peer group was just as clueless - if not moreso - than i was. the only exposure i think i had to pop music was what was playing in the skating rink or the swimming pool during our weekly school outings. indeed, i have a fairly vivid memory of grooving out to some song about hard eggs at the skating rink when i was about six or seven, and it being one of the first songs i remember liking from beyond the confines of my parents' musical worlds.

when i went to public school in grade four, i became sort of painfully aware of how much there was to learn in the encyclopedia of cool. which bands to like, which actors were the dreamiest, what tv shows you needed to watch, which girls were the cutest, which guys were the cutest, which of the cutest guys liked which of the cutest girls. and man, did i study hard to learn it all, having come from a world that was, in my 10-year-old mind, the antithesis of everything cool. i learned all the codes, and then learned which ones to reject to appear even cooler (because in the lexicon of cool, it's only cool to reject the cool codes if you *know* that you're rejecting them). i practiced being blasé about the most exciting things, and because i was never pretty enough to be cool on the virtue of looks alone, i learned how to keep a secret (even, or maybe especially, the cool kids need someone to trust with their deepest and darkest). more disastrously, i learned to reject things - activities, interests, sometimes even people - based on some imaginary cool quotient.

now, of course, i look back and cringe at how hard i worked for that label. i mostly try to shrug it off like some hallowe'en costume, claim that it wasn't me, laugh about the stupid things i did in its guise. the trouble is, though, that in holding the pose of cool, the body learns some things, and learns them deep. like fear. like loathing. like how risky it is to just love doing something and showing it. like how wrong it might be to just be you.


bonnie tyler - it's a heartache

when silvern voices

ralph has posted, has been posting, some slices of home lately. pictures he took from a trip to st john's, though i don't know when. today's entry a picture of quidi vidi village, picking its way up the sides of the narrows. you can't see it from the picture, but the village lies under the protective shadow of signal hill; now, too, under the shadow of the rooms, the newly built cultural centre of the city that pretty much dominates the landscape. i haven't been to see the rooms yet - god knows i don't go home enough to have seen the way its changed. and in many ways, i haven't the desire to.

how to go home to a place you never felt belonged to you in the first place? or maybe, better, how to go home to a place you never felt you belonged to in the first place?

my relationship to newfoundland has always been complicated. moreso, interestingly, since the shipping news brought the place into the north american imagination (though this last bit is a longer story, and one that i'll save, maybe, for another time). it's a place that captures the imagination, to be sure. how could it fail to? a wind-hewn rock in the middle of the ocean, the youngest child of confederation, and then only ever a child adopted with a too-strong memory of its past, a yearning deep inside it to return to its natural parents, who have long since put that past behind them. newfoundland is the oliver twist of the north atlantic.

but a place so steeped in past creates its own orphans. i was one. a cfa from the start, i moved there when i was three, and stayed for fifteen years. and never quite fit in. my body betrayed me, what with skin that could never have held, through blood anyway, a name like stokes, or parsons, or peddle, or - and the irony here is priceless - dyke. i never had people from glovertown, or gambo, or old perlican, which conferred some sort of belonging, the outports being the seat of authenticity, the places with a memory for life before the orphanage. i learned quickly to curl my tongue around the rounded vowels of newfoundland english, to crack the double t's, and play loose with leading h's. but learning the language doesn't a citizen make, no matter how kind people are to you. the question always comes up, even when you think you've sidestepped it with your clever accent, with your knowledge of place, and food, and custom: "so where are you from?" i'm from here, i want to say, but it's never enough, because i know what the question means. where are your people from? where's your home? and when it's the only home you've known, then how do you answer?

and i know this isn't a new story. it happens all the time, still, here in toronto. it happens to 3rd, 4th, 5th generations of canadians whose bodies don't spell europe. and it's funny because when i'm asked that here, i smile, and say i'm from newfoundland. and oddly, that seems to satisfy. indeed, it seems to make me a lot more interesting. i just don't tell people the part about not belonging. because it's only when i'm away that i can easily claim newfoundland as my home. when i'm actually there, i feel as orphaned as the place itself. and as at sea.


ron hynes - sonny's dream

sad songs say so much

for the past month or so, i've been having an ongoing e-correspondence with a friend i haven't seen in many many years. part and parcel of that are those big who-are-you questions - you know the kind: ten things you'd take to a desert island, favourite person (living or dead), books you're reading, top three movies. and then more personal ones based on the life you're living, affairs of the heart, a request for something more than the list, something that stands in for touch, for all the years you haven't spoken, for the intangible community that resides in the sound of the voice or a hug or just breathing in the same space in some pub in the same city.

one of the questions she asked me was about music. specifically, what songs make you cry? and of the list questions i've been asked, i like this one the most. i might as well admit it - i'm a sad sack. i love sad music. my ipod is full of it - the more melancholy the tune, the more i'm likely to fall in love with it. (i once tried to make an upbeat playlist from the songs on my pod, something to go to the gym with, and realized, there on the elliptical, that rufus wainwright does nothing to help get the heart pumping. and that was one of the happier tunes). and i don't know if identifying what songs make me cry says anything about me, and if it does, what exactly it says. but it's a question whose answer holds some emotional honesty, however inarticulate it might be.


dar williams - when i was a boy

serendipitous nostalgia

the other night, j and i went to see a band called moo'd swing at the free times cafe. j's old friend kathy's partner, bob, was playing in the band - he picks a mean banjo, let me tell you - and we had missed them the last time they played the space, and so we went. they're a friendly troupe - played a lot of what i guess i'd call the "good old tunes" - depression era singalongs, 40's swing tunes, the sort of songs that seem to come prepackaged with north american culture... songs you sing in the shower or hum under your breath and don't even know how it was you came to know them.

and in one song - not one of the oldies, but somehow suffused with the same nostalgia - a tom paxton tune called "my pony knows the way" or some such, they did a little riff. interspersed it with a couple of other songs about ponies, one of which was lyle lovett's "if i had a boat." and despite lyle's republican (and by this i mean vs. democrat) proclivities, i've always loved the man's music. so there i was, sitting in the back room of bella's free times, the only non-white kid in the club (and yes, i do notice these things, despite my best intentions not to) and that one nod to lyle - "me upon my pony on my boat" - dumped me right into a memory.

1993. mcgill. this boy i liked from my lit crit class, in the way that i liked boys then - only the quietest ones, the blankest slates upon whom i could load up all my impotent imaginings. i think his name was craig, though how i knew that, i couldn't say, since i don't think he ever talked. he had square shoulders, and he would often be sitting in the alley, that old cafe in the basement of the SUB (aka the Shatner building), in those long afternoons when i would hide out with some friend - astrida, laura, susan, risking a daytime beer, and so demonstrating how adult we were. or wanted to be. i never did talk to that boy, but he introduced me to lyle lovett through his t-shirt - a white concert shirt with 5 small words on it: if i had a boat. and in pre-google curiosity, i somehow found out more about lyle lovett, and picked up a copy of pontiac, and have loved it ever since.

i posted a little while ago about what the body remembers. and while i know my thinking on this is undoubtedly being influenced by all the intro level psych i'm reading on memory, and the attention i'm paying these days to all things neural, i'm constantly amazed and heartened and, in a way, softened by the army of russian dolls that hold our memories. all the people we are and used to be nested in chance lines from a song, in a waft of cologne, in the shape of a person's handwriting.


lyle lovett - if i had a boat

jill told bill

one of the things i'm finding interesting about this blogging thing is that now that i'm coming out as a blogger to more people (yes, it's true, now there are 7 of you who know what i'm doing out here in the privacy of my own public broadcasting station), i feel more and more obliged to find something interesting, or at the very least, *meaningful*, to say. and trust me, this is no easy task for a person who spends much of her day looking at spreadsheets, or else procrastinating by following celebrity gossip, or reading interesting-to-me-only articles on health policy and research -- although the latter will undoubtedly provide fodder for future installments of this humble blog.

another thing i'm finding is that as i'm deciding who to come out to, so to speak, i'm also doing some kind of evaluation of my relationship with the people i'm telling. am i comfortable with this level of intimacy with such-and-such-a-person? will i feel judged or stupid if they're privy to my little forays out into the world? how much does this me i'm putting out here - which in weird ways is both more and less honest than the me i wear in individual face-to-face encounters - coincide with the me that each of you knows? and will blogger-me negatively impact your sense of who i am when we meet in person?

what i mean to say, maybe, is that we're all so multiple, and text is so deconstructable, that when we put ourselves out into the world, textwise, we risk allowing our own dismantling. and that can be pretty frightening.

i'm not entirely sure what i'm trying to get at here. except that i'm grateful to have a few people in the world that i feel safe around. and if i shouldn't feel safe, then please, whatever you do, don't tell me.

i'm kidding. sort of.

does this count as interesting?

and for my free-to-be friends - glad to have a friend like you

synchronicity

in linklater's excellent, if a little boy-trippy, film Waking Life, the-character-who-is-ethan-hawke-in-animé is lying in bed (of course!) with the character-who-is-julie-delpy-in-animé and talking about crossword puzzles. there are studies, he claims, that show that crossword puzzles are easier to solve the day after they've been published, because the answers are already out there.

as a skeptic (some would say cynic), i'm often caught deriding the suspension of disbelief necessary for leaps of faith. i'm wary of the free-fall of fervent devotion, be it to an ideal, a person, a single way of being in the world. i'm fearful of fixing myself to any one cross, or, in a more mundane way, of hanging my clothes on any one hook. but if i'm being truthful, i have to admit to a surreptitious paradox in this reluctance to believe.

i don't believe in the empirically unfounded because i believe that i can't know. or, to put it in a less convoluted kind of way, i can't believe in the supernatural explanations put forth to explain the Great Mysteries of Life because i am so committed to the idea that humans can't possibly hope to understand the machinations of the universe because we're too small. i.e., there is something bigger than us. i told you it was a paradox.

so every now and then, there are things that both affirm my implicit sense that the something bigger than us is at work, and challenge my commitment to skepticism. like coincidence. or what j calls synchronicity. for example, yesterday i make my brief entry into blog world, and put up a snippet of glenn gould's goldberg variations. and yesterday night, j asks me if i have looked at our friend ralph's blog recently. i hadn't, though ralph has been much on my mind as he has been weathering his own storms lately. and lo, there, on feb 25th, this entry. a small coincidence, but kind of weird, since it's not like i'm a gould afficianado, and i really have been thinking about ralph lately. and the skeptic in me says "yes. coincidence. so what?" and the believer says "yes. coincidence. so there."

ants, apparently, and bees, and even some species of moles, exhibit something that biologists and psychologists call dispersed consciousness - a sort of atomically located brain, where each ant functions in a way that is analogous to, say, the different neurons in our brain. each performing, unconsciously, its part in a script that is much bigger than it. and the faithful part in me, the one that notes coincidence and synchronicity, likes this model very much. because, well, why not? why couldn't this be true for us, if it's true for the ants?

and then, true to form, that other part of me says, "prove it."


everything but the girl - time after time