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

on the phone

"That the other has no meaning except the infinite aid which I owe him -- that he should be the unlimited call for help to which none but I can answer -- does not make me irreplaceable; still less does it make me unique. But it causes me to disappear in the infinite movement of service where I am only temporarily singular and a simulacrum of unity. I cannot draw any justification (either for my worth as a stand-in or for my being) from a demand that is not addressed to anyone in particular, that demands nothing of my determination and that in any case exceeds me to such a degree that it disindividualizes me."
-- Blanchot, from The Writing of the Disaster


glenn gould - aria, bach's goldberg variations, bwv 988

if you don't demand it

in my house - or at the very least, lately, in my head - there's been a lot of talk of expectation. what it means to me have something expected of me, how it is i dig my heels in, what threat is latent in the pull of the possibility of a promise. if that sounds like one deferral too many, it probably is. i'm sensitive, you see, to expectation. work myself up in knots about it, respond - very grumpily - to anything i perceive as remotely pigeonholing.

so when j asked me this morning if i was happy in our relationship, my stomach started tying. we have different modes of expression, she and i. in general, she's much more effusive (she would say "enthusiastic") about her emotions, about her discoveries, about happiness, about pretty much everything, than i am. she's more heart-on-the-sleeve, let-it-all-hang-out. and me, i'm more reserved, some might say stuffed-shirt, stick-up-my-ass (i *do*, however, prefer the former to the latter). so her question stopped me for a second, and aside from the obvious "yes, i am happy" i had to acknowledge the shape of that nascent knot. how is it that i find it so hard to talk about, let alone express, large declarations of happiness?

i don't know if i've always been like this, or if it's something i've learned over the years, but enthusiasm sometimes frightens me. and here's the tie-in, maybe, with the expectation thing. i get freaked that somewhere in the heart of enthusiasm lies the possibility of disappointment. and if there's disappointment, then there must be expectation. and if there's expectation, i'm bound to disappoint, or be disappointed. enthusiasm = expectation = disappointment. it's a faulty equation, intellectually, but try telling that to my stomach.

and on that note, here's an old gem, circa 1993.
the skydiggers - i will give you everything

in the soup

on the subway today: two young women, pretty, well put-together, early-20s maybe. they're holding hands and cuddling like the newly-in-love. i smile to myself. think about how things have changed since i was that age, since the times when i thought the only safe places to be out were in the darkness of tallulah's on a saturday night, or the harbour of home, and then, once a year, maybe, in the psychedelic daylight of pride. in a way, i feel proud of these women. want to encourage them, send a smile their way. i wonder if they feel brave. i imagine them full of youthful confidence, and i get a charge out of what i read as fearlessness.

most people on the train aren't looking. a few sneak glances their way. a few, like me, smile. i think the couple is mostly oblivious. or if they're not, they're doing a good job hiding it. but then the train stops. goes out of service, and we all herd off, and wait on the platform for the next one to come along. me and the women lean up against the wall; i'm slouching to the tom waits on my freshly-repaired ipod, and they're canoodling.

and then this guy notices them. starts to stare. stares and stares and stares and stares. without shame and without blinking. he stares them down, then he stares them away. they move down the platform, looking for a different car to ride in. and i want to say something. anything. i want to tell the guy to fuck off. i want to tell the girls to stay. i want to stare right back. because the stare can be a knife when you're different. can be a gunshot, a fistfight, a curse. and how do you defend yourself against that? how do you ward it all off?

i remember d. telling me that the danish, in response, answer the gaze with a question that i'm sure has lost something in the translation: "did you have stare soup for lunch?" we laughed a lot about that, and used it often. but there's only so much laughing off you can do. and so many times you can sing about sticks and stones. because sometimes your shoulders get tired of shrugging, and you get fed up with moving down the platform.

and staring back doesn't seem enough, 'cause you almost never win. it makes me crazy sometimes that it's all we've got.

tom waits - bottom of the world

eyes wide shut

do you ever wake up with a diamond in your stomach? a glitterhard rock of worry that for just a moment - the time it takes to drink coffee, to take a shower, walk the dog - slices through everything, blindsides you, and leaves you shivering and speechless? and the crazy thing is that everything is the same as it was the second before the panic came down. nothing is different. except you. your insides. your mind has wandered off like a three-year-old in the mall, and your body is dragging behind - the frantic parent who looked away for a second. who forgot to be vigilant.

it's hard to explain, i suppose. the morning woke me up like that today. no easing in, no slow swim to consciousness. more like BAM, you're awake and here are all the things you NEED to worry about. NOW. and i've been up in it for a couple of hours, and it's starting to abate and things seem a little more manageable. and it's one foot in front of the other, exhale after inhale, and slowly things come back together. get focussed. how they fall apart in the first place, though... that's the kicker...


The Smiths - Panic

you drink how many cups?

the good news is that i'm not going deaf. in fact, my hearing is actually *good*. or so says the hearing specialist at the toronto general.

the bad news is that the only thing to be done about my tinnitus is to stop drinking coffee.

now that's a crummy choice. can i have a different one?


Peter Bjorn & John - Objects of My Affection

on blogging

lately i've been trying to blog more regularly. considering i have an audience of exactly 3 not counting myself, it's sort of weird that i am. j, too, thinks it more than a little odd, and has been asking me what it is i am *doing* here. she's a writer, so is interested in the mechanisms of blogging as they differ from say, the mechanisms of journalling, or email, or writing for print publication. and i'm not sure what the answer to this is for me. it started as journalling, since i'm swifter on the keyboard than with a pen, and found myself more in front of the computer than sitting in a cafe or in my kitchen or wherever with my moleskine. it started as a personal thing, but i think it's becoming less that, now that i'm aware that people other than me (all 3 of you) might be reading. then i think i tried to model it more on the genre i had seen in other people's blogs - links to pertinent news stories, the odd rant about the state of the union, the putting-out-there of a certain political identity. but that didn't feel right either, or at least, i felt that was more contrived. in short, i was *thinking* too much about it. performing it too much.

now i'm approaching it more as a scrapbook that i don't have to worry about organizing. it's stuff i find in random moments of my day, things i'm thinking about, most often when i'm fooling around on the computer. it's a way for me to practice writing and showing up for it on a near-daily basis. and of course it's not everything. it's stuff that walks the line between the private and the public (the publate? the privlic?) because i can imagine that you three aren't reading this and it's just me and my keyboard and so be a little more honest. on the other hand, i can also shape my thoughts for public consumption; spend a little more time with my fingers over the keys, waiting for just the right word to come along. decide to post on things that i want you to know about me. omit the things i don't. i'm getting to like this space more and more. it's the foyer of my fixer-upper and i'm slowly redecorating, making it look more like me. and that feels good. so, come on in. make yourself at home. just don't look in the bedroom, and please excuse the mess.

a little more Josh Ritter - Man Burning

so back to britney's hair

or at least the media's take on it... (yes. i am *this* vapid).

i'm kind of fascinated by all the hullabaloo about poor old brit's turn on GI Jane. so what if she just got out of rehab? so she just split from k-fed, and the romance with the lookalike rebound didn't work out? i don't get why her shaving her head must automatically equate with madness. or a cry for help. or some clear evidence that the girl is losing her marbles. i mean SHIT. hasn't every sane girl in the world chafed just a bit at the requirement to walk the very narrow runway of feminine performance? haven't we all, some days, gotten a little bit tired of having to look just so, smile just like that, giggle in just the right way to affirm the world's notion that we are proper girls? and haven't we all, some days, gotten tired of it and said fuck it, and gotten a tattoo, or spit in public, or let out a big long belch on public transit?

i mean, don't get me wrong - i have no idea if la brit was actually thinking all of these things when she grabbed hold of the clippers and took it all off for the cameras, but i like what it represents. or i like my representation of it. :) since in the end, isn't that all celebrity culture is good for?

Michael Franti & Spearhead - Stay Human (All the Freaky People)

issa

i've not been a huge jane siberry fan in my life, though i've followed her career on an on-again-off-again basis, and i own a record or two of hers from way back when. i had a surge of new love for her after seeing her show at hugh's room in summer 2005 (that it was that long ago strikes me as inconceivable, but it's right here in my blog and we all know that blogger don't lie!) and today she's rolling around in my head. perhaps because i've been thinking of k and i know she loves this song, and maybe too because i'm wondering these days what's become of my friend heather, with whom i once had a good laugh about the difficulty in taking seriously artists who change their two word names to one word ones...

anyhow. for k, and for h, wherever you've gone to...

kd lang (because i can't find an embeddable version of jane/issa's) - love is everything

more vacuous surfing

i just got a whole helluva lot more respect for britney.



it might not go with the pearls, but it's got a certain je ne sais quoi.


and in honour, a little nugget from free to be you and me, that good ole childhood staple.

waste time much?

the thing i love about youtube is that i can get completely lost on it and end up in the weirdest places, and on the strangest trips down memory lane.

viz:



when was this? 1986? 1987? i'm pretty sure it was junior high, and i'm pretty sure i had a big old crush on belinda carlisle. but then again, who didn't? she was a go-go after all...

metastasis

from this month's scientific american:

"The complexity of this system [the relationship of any single gene with the myriad networks in which it participates] in normal cells is evident in what we already know about cancer -- that it results from the stepwise loss of such cellular self-control, which becomes more and more complete as the disease progresses."
-- Renato Dulbecco

The Hallmarks of Cancer
The six abnormal capabilities listed below together give tumors their lethal power to overrun their native tissue and spread through the body.
Self-sufficiency in growth signalling
Cancer cells amplify external growth cues or generate their own.
Insensitivity to antigrowth signals
Cancer cells become deaf to quiescence cues from surrounding tissue.
Evasion of cell suicide
Mechanisms that should trigger or carry out a self-destruct program in damaged cells are disabled or overridden.
Limitless replicative potential
Cancer cells evade intrinsic limits on the number of times a normal cell can divide.
Sustained blood vessel growth
Tumors emit signals promoting the development of new blood vessels to deliver oxygen and nutrients.
Invasiveness and motility
Cancer cells defy multiple signals and forces that hold a cell in place and prevent it from traveling to - and thriving in - other tissues.

and then, from atwood, morning in the burned house, circa 1995 (courtesy j.)

Cell
Now look objectively. You have to
admit the cancer cell is beautiful.
If it were a flower, you'd say, How pretty,
with its mauve centre and pink petals

or if a cover for a pulpy thirties
sci-fi magazine, How striking;
as an alien, a success,
all purple eye and jelly tentacles
and spines, or are they gills,
creeping around on granular Martian
dirt red as the inside of the body,

while its tender walls
expand and burst, its spores
scatter elsewhere, take root, like money,
drifting like a fiction or
miasma in and out of people's
brains, digging themselves
industriously in. The lab technician

says, It has forgotten
how to die. But why remember? All it wants is more
amnesia. More life, and more abundantly. To take
more. To eat more. To replicate itself. To keep on
doing these things forever. Such desires
are not unknown. Look in the mirror.

martin sexton - hallelujah

on the climate change bandwagon

and let me make it clear - there's nothing wrong with being on it.

this morning's globe and mail has a feature section on climate change. they call it the climate change almanac, with alphabetic listings of things we should all know about global warming. and i'm reading it, and agreeing with it, and j and i are lying in bed with coffee and our sections of the paper and discussing how to live with a smaller environmental footprint.

and there's a picture splashed across the head of one of the pages - polar bears on these tiny little bits of ice - and i say to j, "this is the saddest picture i've seen in a long time." it's so sad that i want to clip it out and post it on my bulletin board in my office to remind myself of the slippery slope of self-justification, the larger impacts of my decisions.

so i go to my office and google the photographer, one Dan Crosbie, and the picture. and i find that the pic itself, apparently taken in 2004, is famously controversial. evidently rush limbaugh has found out that the picture is a "fraud". the polar bears, he says, are "frolicking" on said ice floe, and that use of the photo to illustrate the effects of global warming is, to paraphrase, bullshit. in fact, while online, i find a whole bunch of right wing pundits taking issue with this picture, as if the fact that it's being used out of context (apparently, the original title of the photo presented the bears as being on naturally occurring ice sculptures) makes the fact of global warming untrue.

wtf???? that the photo captures the pathos of global warming - that the image of polar bears stranded on an increasingly small bit of arctic real estate eloquently expresses something that scientific talk of carbon loads and acidification and desertification fails to - is in my mind the beauty of the photograph. because whether or not the bears were, at the moment the photo was taken, waving or drowning makes little difference. they're drowning now. and the discrepancy in those two positions makes the pic all the more poignant.

so i'm still clipping the pic and posting it on my bulletin board. because my heart responds to it. and if my heart responds, then my head responds. and if my head responds, then maybe i can live my little life a little more mindfully. and it might not be much in the grand scheme of things, but it's something. and that little something is all i got to give.

two little feet - karen savoca

so how does this thing work anyhow?

A couple of weeks ago, my friend Jen sent me instructions on how to put music on my blog. I've tried, unsuccessfully, to get it to work that way (doubtless due to my own ineptitude and impatience, and not to Jen's excellent instructions) but it seems there may be another way to do it. So I'm testing this now. If this post comes up and down a few times, my apologies. Am just trying to get this to work.

And so, if it does, a song for a snowy february afternoon, when my girl has just recently come back from doing just this, melancholy and all.

John Prine - Taking a Walk

driven to distraction

i can't concentrate. jacqueline went out for dinner with a friend of ours last night, and came back to report that her son had been diagnosed with ADD. i'm not sure exactly what that means, psychologically or medically, but i'm getting a sense of what it might be like to experience living in that right at this moment. j has a theory, which i think isn't half-bad, that the internet and its short-term surfability, its ability to condition us to expect interruptions (popups, flash movies, you have mail) impacts our long term attention capacity. if she's right, then my day today might be considered data for the theory.

i've been sitting in front of these notes for my cognitive science exam all morning, banging my head against my cognitive wall, and the fact of my lack of will, and am trying - though i recognize i'm not trying very hard - to make sense of what i'm reading. and i'm sitting in front of my laptop, which might actually be the root of my problem. but anyway, i've now checked my gmail a million times, read through pretty much every rss feed that's come through on my reader, checked out the goings on on a premed forum, paid some bills, applied to u of t for undergraduate admission, in case this med school thing doesn't pan out, and now i'm blogging. surely this is the outer edge of procrastination.

at what point do i get to label it clinical? and can someone give me a prescription for this?

you have got to be kidding me

now, i have a reputation for being a little overly hard on academia. it's true -- i've been known to rant for hours about the overspecialization of knowledge in the ivory tower, and the too-oft vacuous push towards research, when maybe teaching would be a better use of one's time. indeed, just last night, some thread of this came up in a discussion that j and i were having, and i found myself trying to clarify the fact that i am by no means anti-academic. rather, i think that there is sometimes a tendency in academia to make hay from germs of ideas that might have been better left as ... well, germs.

and then, my friend austin, who is much renowned for sending tidbits of information he gets from god knows where, sent this.

and i rest my case.

of course, as a postscript, it occurs to me that maybe they *are* kidding me. in which case, i stand down. irony can sometimes get lost on the net.

still crazy after all these years

8 years ago today was the last time i talked to my mother. i remember sitting on my bed in montreal, slow-brewing winter storm outside. we talked weekend-style - it was a saturday - an hour-long conversation, verbal tussle with a smile. politics. i seem to remember something about kyoto, but i'm not even sure if that's possible. the reform party, certainly, and the dramas in her condo. i had to go to pick up that old creaky violin i was getting fixed, with the full intent of playing it. (i never play it.) i remember walking up st-denis on the way home, the city blowing with white. i bought d. a ring in all that snow. it was time for a new commitment. it was time to live in a promise. it was also before the towers came down. before, even, the global panic party for the millenial changeover. it seems so long ago. it seems like yesterday.

a lot can happen in the blink of an eye. you were alive. then you weren't. a lot can happen in 8 years, too. so much i'd like to be able to tell you. like, for example, that i got an interview at mac.

i wonder what you'd think about that.


Buhrstone

Morning after morning

The awakening village howls
Like an insect
About to be dipped in amber.

I separate myself from the sky

But still carry the inevitable
Dream of your body
Covered in butterflies or in bees.

Here's a living blanket for your grave.

Here's who I've quietly become:
A slightly wilder version of you. Your hands
Knead the dough for my bread

And my husband's flesh, thick and smooth.
They wash my breasts and hips, they light
my cigarette, they crack my beer.

You've been dead too long.

Morning after morning
The heavy amber of you
Around my neck, inside the heels

Of my boots. I wear your gloves.
Your winter scarves, your winter hair,
And that heavy shearling coat.

Soon I will forget how to preserve you.

But for now I continue to dream daily,
Morning after morning: your body blooming
In yellow wings, thousands of butterflies alighting

And you just lie there.

Morning after morning
The orange grass keeps burning
Under the grey grey sky.

-- Olena Katyiak Davis

i've been lately thinking

studying sort of half-heartedly for the cognitive science midterm i have in a couple of weeks time - catching up on stuff i got behind in. are humans rational? how is our unconscious processing information? how much do we, can we, really know about how our minds work? is there such a thing as epistemic boundary when it comes to thinking about thinking?

and i know the researchers can't and won't believe in the latter, though for my part, i like the idea of a mysterious core and there being Something More Besides This at work in what we call human (i know, i know, it's suspiciously spiritual. shhh. don't tell). more than that though, sometimes just accepting that things are the way they are - instead of dismantling, dissecting, chasing the whys down infinitely smaller rabbit holes - seems so much more peaceful. of course, this may be simply the purview of the generalist, and god knows i'm a posterchild generalist. i can't help but thinking that there's probably a link between this "let it lie" view and my own resistance to what the psychologists call "expert" knowledge.

but i digress. i had actually sat down to write about the fact that i sometimes like the idea that there's a cohesiveness to my mental world that i'm not fully conscious of. like this morning... i woke to the memory of big snow at whistler and a weekend with an ex-girlfriend. and there's all kinds of conscious reasons for me to be thinking of whistler (jane last night, talking about heading slopewise in a couple of weeks; jen mentioning her guy's compensatory fondness for wintersport and his checking the weather at BC's most famous resort) but this particular memory came up. and it wasn't until i sat in it for a while that i realized that the memory in question would have happened right around this time, give or take a week, four years ago. and i like that despite the fact that i'm not so good with dates and times in my waking life - if it ain't in the agenda, i'm extremely likely to forget - my body is keeping track of at least some trace of where i've been.

i'm not being particularly articulate but i wanted to get this down. all the people i've been and the things i've done are right here. even if i lose the edges of them, even if they blur, even if i think i've forgotten... they're here. and i find that comforting.

dona nobis pacem

kelli's mother died this morning.

i feel like there should be words to send, words that i've learned to say to comfort, words that comforted me when i lost mine. but i don't have any, because in many ways, i don't believe there are any.


sometimes the only thing big enough to hold what you need to say is silence.




for dane. for kelli. for mom. for me.
peace be with you.

for k

You sent me this book, years ago, and put a piece of it up in the world a while back that held for a month or more. There's many in here, one I'll save for the 6th, for my own mother. but in the meantime....

Around the Edges of A Cold Cold Day

Under the ice they're dragging the river,
but I don't mean for this to signify
some kind of casualty, some kind of loss.
Even now a bicycle is being stubbornly
pedaled around the edges
of this wintry day, the cold
snapping in its spokes, the red metal frame.
Hitting everyone in the face,
the fevered sun wants things
to be louder, a little something
in exchange for the patina, a little
something for all this gloss.

But just the breath of the figure
floating above the bicycle,
and that clump of warmth
I think I'll call his heart, pumping
petals wrapped in a flourescent wreath
of thorns, is just the evaporation of loss.

This day feels like it'll crack,
the ice will surely part and unveil
the flushed body of the guy
you heard of on the radio, finally
found, hunting underwater caribou
all these months; his wife still sweeping
the river with the hook of her mind.

Funny how the river lived.
Funny how my life continued.
All the glaring stories I walked over
as I collected my mail by way of the frozen
slough. They seemed solid as ice.
But how expertly I must have swum
through this prolonged winter, how deftly
I must have navigated this cold body
of water, not to have lost the feeling
in my fingers, this feeling in my lungs.

-- Olena Kalytiak Davis