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