MID-DRIFT

because i don't have anything else to say

2007-11-01T10:50:00.001-04:00

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

2007-09-07T10:22:00.000-04:00

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

2007-09-06T09:45:00.000-04:00

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

2007-09-04T14:30:00.000-04:00

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

2007-06-21T23:47:00.000-04:00

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

2007-06-16T19:06:00.000-04:00

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

2007-06-15T11:12:00.000-04:00

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

2007-06-13T07:10:00.001-04:00

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

2007-05-30T10:59:00.000-04:00

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

2007-05-23T09:31:00.001-04:00

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

2007-05-16T14:46:00.000-04:00

mental note: wear a bike helmet.

on second thought

2007-05-15T19:46:00.000-04:00

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

2007-05-13T09:33:00.000-04:00

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

2007-05-03T10:59:00.000-04:00

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

2007-04-29T09:28:00.000-04:00

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

2007-04-28T16:41:00.000-04:00

one word: facebook.

the ultimate distraction. this might require therapy.

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

2007-04-28T08:58:00.000-04:00

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...

2007-04-25T10:07:00.000-04:00

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

2007-04-24T06:42:00.000-04:00

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

2007-04-22T14:13:00.000-04:00

Read my VisualDNA™ Get your own VisualDNA™

it's 21 degrees outside and i am happy

2007-04-20T11:11:00.000-04:00

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

2007-04-18T15:32:00.000-04:00

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

2007-04-17T11:15:00.000-04:00

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

2007-04-16T15:20:00.000-04:00

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

2007-04-14T06:32:00.000-04:00

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?

2007-04-13T15:00:00.000-04:00

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...

2007-04-12T15:54:00.000-04:00

so much for fighting like cats and dogs.

9w1 and you?

2007-04-12T12:26:00.000-04:00

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 changing sky

interior

2007-04-10T17:03:00.000-04:00

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

2007-04-04T11:56:00.000-04:00

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

2007-04-03T12:53:00.000-04:00

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

2007-04-01T10:32:00.000-04:00

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...

2007-03-31T09:59:00.000-04:00

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

2007-03-30T09:45:00.000-04:00

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

2007-03-28T11:12:00.000-04:00

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

2007-03-25T09:20:00.000-04:00

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!

2007-03-24T07:59:00.000-04:00

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

be good tanyas - light enough to travel

the morning after

2007-03-23T10:21:00.000-04:00

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

2007-03-22T18:42:00.000-04:00

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

2007-03-22T09:30:00.000-04:00

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

gillian welch - hickory wind

is this a good sign?

2007-03-21T08:47:00.000-04:00

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

2007-03-20T08:45:00.000-04:00

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

2007-03-17T10:23:00.000-04:00

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 gonna rain today

what would you do?

2007-03-16T10:23:00.000-04:00

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

2007-03-15T15:09:00.000-04:00

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

2007-03-13T12:42:00.000-04:00

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

2007-03-12T11:12:00.000-04:00

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

2007-03-09T09:26:00.000-05:00

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

2007-03-08T07:39:00.000-05:00

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

2007-03-05T15:09:00.000-05:00

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

2007-03-04T11:59:00.000-05:00

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.

the wonderful grand band with the great ron hynes - sonny's dream

sad songs say so much

2007-03-02T12:23:00.000-05:00

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

2007-03-01T11:02:00.000-05:00

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

2007-02-28T09:29:00.000-05:00

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

2007-02-27T09:14:00.000-05:00

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

2007-02-26T11:55:00.000-05:00

"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

2007-02-25T09:42:00.000-05:00

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

2007-02-23T12:00:00.000-05:00

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

2007-02-23T08:55:00.000-05:00

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?

2007-02-22T14:13:00.000-05:00

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

2007-02-21T09:59:00.000-05:00

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

2007-02-20T09:07:00.000-05:00

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

2007-02-19T18:06:00.000-05:00

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...

jane siberry (aka issa) - love is everything

more vacuous surfing

2007-02-19T12:02:00.000-05:00

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?

2007-02-18T17:43:00.000-05:00

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

2007-02-18T13:52:00.000-05:00

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

2007-02-17T11:44:00.000-05:00

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?

2007-02-16T13:37:00.000-05:00

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

postscript: wow. it worked. cool! which doesn't mean i'm not going to keep trying the webjay solution offered up by jen - since the untimely death of my ipod, i'm hungry for digital ways to override my stereo...

driven to distraction

2007-02-09T14:07:00.000-05:00

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

2007-02-08T16:58:00.000-05:00

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

2007-02-06T07:26:00.000-05:00

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

2007-02-03T09:07:00.000-05:00

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

2007-02-02T14:09:00.000-05:00

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

2007-02-01T07:51:00.000-05:00

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

because i know you love her

2007-01-30T09:45:00.000-05:00

and i love this one, too.

on closure

2007-01-30T08:47:00.000-05:00

it's been a strange sort of week, or at least a strange sort of weekend. thought about posting this sooner, but wanted to sit with it for a couple of days, think on its significance. way back in october 05 i had tracked down someone from my past and written about it. linked to her blog. noted, i thought in passing, that we had nothing to say to each other, that the past was ancient history, questioned the wisdom of getting in touch. so i didn't get in touch. in fact, i didn't come back to this blog for over a year. and shortly after i had written, she found me (courtesy of the bits and pieces of ourselves we unknowingly shed over the internet - a scent trail? the forensic traces of cyberworld), left a comment. made an entry about it on her own corner of the universe. and i didn't see it until she had traveled the world and come back. until i had jumped my own ship and was making a go of swimming to shore. or out to sea. i'm afraid i'm a bit lacking in direction. but that's not the story.

the story is that i finally saw the comment and wasn't sure what to do with it. how to make amends, where that 19-year-old me, and that 19-year-old her, fit in the story of who i have become. and what would it mean to reach out? what would there be to say apart from hello how are you and i'm sorry and i'm different now i swear? what's the measure of across the ocean and 15 years in a friendship that lived for a few months in that time of so much becoming? as i wrote back when i first tracked her down, what, now after all these years, would there be to say to each other?

but on a whim, or in a fit of self-confidence, or maybe desire to connect, a couple of weeks after i had seen the comment, i sent her an email. wanted to say, at least, that i saw that she had been here. and she wrote back, with a lot of kindness and a lot of honesty. and i wrote back to that. and i don't know if we'll keep corresponding, but i think it kind of doesn't matter anymore, though if this chance collision strikes up a friendship with two people who used to know each other, so much the better. but what mattered, i realize, is not what there was to say to each other. it was that we said anything at all. there's some closure in that, and some small weight that comes off, and some sense that in this big opaque world, you never know what might happen. so if we never connect again, i wish you happiness. and i thank you for writing. it's been a good surprise.

Everything's Okay

And the sun with spin on it now, with hover. Lower over
the light industrial west end, shot back by windowed towers
of the Big Three, it blinds you coming

and going, something smart with your name on it. Spring
walks all over us on sharp heels. Spring chants its way
through the playoffs. Things, being things,

have never been better. Here on the grid, you have reason
to appreciate urban planning more than anything
your parents ever taught you, as Lake Ontario sleeps

with its freighted eye open under sky like a smoker's
bedclothes. Say Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus
until you mean it, say Roncesvalles until you buy that bit

about beauty in ugliness, under oath as you are to living
for the moment, uncut, blow by blow. A woman sings
karaoke in a third floor flat, while below, an engine grinds,

trying to turn over. Behind café glass, a man leans
to his companion as though he loves her. You believe one idea,
and then another. That is, in the instant, at the time.

-- Karen Solie

---------------------
box: gould - goldberg variations

you asked for it

2007-01-29T09:05:00.000-05:00

This being human is a guest house
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
Some momentary awareness
comes as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

-- Rumi

You had wanted me to post something happy. Or happier. I don't know if this counts. But you have to admit, it has some hope in it...

would someone please

2007-01-24T11:48:00.000-05:00

disabuse me of my jennifer aniston crush?

it's kinda embarassing. and the fact that this story makes me disproportionately happy is a little worrisome. maybe i'll just blame it on this low-grade depression and leave it at that. guess i shouldn't knock the fact that something is actually making me happy....

come to my window

2007-01-23T22:13:00.000-05:00

so this is the colour of the sky in my world today. is this what they call the bleak midwinter? feels like it. and i'm annoyed with myself for letting it go so long, for being so dragged down. today on the subway i felt like crying only because the tracks seemed so damn close to the imagination. this is not the way i meant to become. thank god tomorrow is another day.

home renovations

2007-01-18T13:29:00.000-05:00

the image of scaffolding has always appealed to me. skeletons on the outside to shore up skeletons on the inside. i used to think of scaffolding as support - but i'm wondering now if it's not a way of getting around the walls. a way of scaling when knocking them down just won't do.

yesterday i met with anna and we talked a lot about my neat and tidy compartments. the challenge of living a life within the confines of some very thick walls. and as she was talking, as she was telling back to me my stories of stoic restraint, i had this image of mike holmes swinging a sledgehammer, tearing down drywall, making open space. i need a way to access that space. i need my own sledgehammer. because this scaffolding i've constructed isn't doing the trick. or i've been misusing it. misunderstanding it. maybe it's all gotta come down. and then let's see what happens.

-----------
box: yo yo ma, bach's cello suites

monday morning, freezing rain

2007-01-15T10:43:00.000-05:00

'nuff said.

okay i have a problem

2007-01-11T16:43:00.000-05:00

i'm wondering if there's a term for this aimless internet wandering i get stuck in, to the detriment of ALL productivity and any profound thought... viz, my current, and seemingly lasting obsession with go fug yourself, wikipedia, cbc.ca, yahoo entertainment, the globeandmail.com, and - and this is truly embarassing - people.com. my mother did not give birth to me for this. i blame rss feeds and the easy way gmail fixes me with them.

it puts me in mind of buffalo - a stoner moment, for sure. jessica campbell had come to visit me. i had pot, which i smoked only occasionally, and, truth be told, never really enjoyed all that much. we sat on my futon in that creaky old apartment on richmond ave - the one with all the centipedes and the grey lo-pile carpet that got pockmarked with the remains of k's cigarettes, and which i later painstakingly repaired with crazy glue and carefully shorn carpet graft obtained from less visible corners of the apartment so as to get that precious damage deposit back in full - and watched kids in the hall reruns. i got ridiculously high. and ridiculously paranoid, convinced i was going to be stuck in stoner world for the rest of my life. and poor jess, who was being sweet and kind and who never really has been my friend, though we've both been earnest in our showing up for the label, didn't really know what to do. what's the parallel? being stuck in stoner world. only now i'm not stoned. i'm just stuck online in some ridiculously mundane mobius strip of non-entertainment and meaningless gathering of trivia that i will never ever use. it's a damn good thing i don't have a job at the moment, since i would have to get fired for getting nothing done.

okay back to the surf. surely someone must have posted something new in the last 5 minutes.

--------------
box: tom waits, orphans. all 3 discs, but in keeping with the truth of my moribund musical tastes, it's the bawlers that get me.

bedside table: the wars by timothy findley, two girls fat and thin by mary gaitskill. course reading in artificial intelligence.

just watched: shattered glass (hayden christensen, peter sarsgaard) about the downfall of steven glass; capturing the friedmans. liked 'em both. and i never thought i would say this - but i'm actually grateful to blockbuster. for some reason, they're stocking some damn good films in my neighbourhood outlet (sorry e. i know this drives you mental).

and i had thought they for sure would have disabled me

2007-01-11T13:37:00.000-05:00

okay. so back to this blogging thing. i never have been very good at sustaining. see that last post. (am thankful for the comment, which i just saw today - over a year later. talk about not being with the program). i haven't written yet, just so you know (though i imagine after over a year, you'd hardly be sending a thought this way), not because i don't want to. there's something in me that wants to get it right. that wants to make it right. and until i can either figure that out, or let it lie, or just plain stop angsting over it, it's best for both of us if i keep myself small and quiet. but btw, i love that you use the word mawkish. it's a good one.

there's wind where i am. big gusting skylight shaking wind in the midst of a snowless winter. the dog oblivious at my feet, and me as lost as i ever was, googling in a half-hearted sort of way, and thinking of where you are today. and all the other you's in my life. the yous that left. the yous i ran off. the yous who just disappeared or changed into something else. those yous. and, for that matter, those mes.

procrastination is the worst kind of purgatory - self-inflicted. how to figure out which world to have a foot in?

it's almost november for chrissake!

2005-10-26T08:03:00.000-04:00

has it really been since august that i've not posted here? seems impossible that the time has cycled through so quickly and now here we are, almost at all hallow's and i've had nothing to say for myself.

weirder still that the thing that has me posting this morning is a dream i had last night, involving the seduction of a young boy. me seducing a kid. well, not a kid, exactly, more one of those boys from my bio class - these slim spiky-haired eighteen year olds. still more weird, the boy in question was asian, slight and reedy, with halting english. and he was afraid of snakes. but oddest of all: when j jumped frantically out of bed, having slept through her alarm clock, and shook me out of dreamworld, i was disappointed. i wanted to see where this thing would go, and i hadn't even gotten the poor guy's shirt off.

i won't even start asking what it means, but something in the dream i found sweet.

so of the quotidian: in a fit of boredom-induced googling, i found an old friend of mine who i haven't thought of in ages, and who, more than she knows, played a huge role in getting me to where i am today. or perhaps more accurately, who i am today. the first girl who ever held my hand, who ever in any way reciprocated that rampant crazy obsessive thing that falling in love can sometimes look like. she's in england now, with a husband and no kids, and a blog that is thankfully full of pictures. i haven't seen her since we were 19. she looks great. i debated sending her an email, posting a comment, but decided against it. might be the first time i've stopped for a minute and curbed the impulse to get in touch: what would we say to each other? what, after all these years, is there to say to each other? things ended badly. we stopped talking. or i stopped talking to her - i can't even remember why - i think it had something to do with my not being able to deal with what was starting to go on between us. but i suspect that my turning away from her was the first indication of my predilection for flight. at least that's how i think of it now that i'm trying to reform.

thanksgiving was lovely, thank you, though a little lonely. i think i posted a thanksgiving ramble last year and had much to say about nostalgia and fall and the like. it still to some degree applies, which makes me think it might be tagged to the weather rather than to any depth of feeling in me, but this year it was again just j and me, and another tofurkey. and i missed a community. i was wishing, i think, for that mythical circle of friends, of family, and found myself anxious about the possibility that this could be the new normal.

and i've started seeing an osteopath, which i think might be latin for body psychic. it was pretty cool - as j says, it's like they have eyes in their fingers. only got to the diagnostic part, where she told me of some oddities of posture - genetically, she said, i've inherited a pelvis that juts forward, a hip-first walk which i think might be what gets called my strut. and you thought it was all for show - it's in my bones man! what else. i've got a uterus that's tipped forward, and a hypermobile lumbar area (L3, 4, and 5 to be precise). but what convinced me to believe in her most was the way she laid her hands gently, so gently, on my temples and divined my sinus problems and allergies. that sealed it - as gratifying as it was to have all my other ills (the sore back, the stiff shoulders, the cricky wrists and finger joints) physically confirmed by someone else, it was her telling me what i hadn't revealed to her that made me an accolyte. i signed up, courtesy of maritime life.

and now off to work. today is lab test number 2 in bio. i've a feeling that nothing i studied actually took, so wish me luck.

soundtrack today: Woody Russell, Time to Go

blotter

2005-08-12T11:28:00.000-04:00

about to tear july off my desk (as always, the requisite 2 week delay applies, my usual inability to let go) and i had a sudden memory of cleaning out my mother's office at her work the week after she died. her notes to herself of things to do three weeks hence. three weeks that never arrived. or did, without her. what happens to the consciousness in those always arrested plans? me and d. due to arrive for a visit a week and a half after her death. d. set to come in the night before me, my mother with a note to pick her up, with flight info. a note to pick me up the following morning. shorthand blotter scribbles noting vacation time for the visit that ended instead as bereavement leave.

it doesn't go away, this missing. this grief is not a wound, or a scar. it's something more like mercury - poisonous, beautiful, never solid, never stable...

rain, finally

2005-08-12T08:48:00.000-04:00

i have a sneaking suspicion i've been overly optimistic about this new job of mine. i mean i like it better than my last one - don't get me wrong - but it's still sales. it's still trying to get people to notice us. it's still cold-calling and publicity and talking to authors who are way way smarter than me and often see the marketing of their damn books as beneath them. and then there's the money thing. there's the figuring out how to live on less money a month than just about all of my friends, and the arrogant part of me that thinks that just because i'm as smart than most of them, i should make as much (never mind, of course, that i don't WANT to do law and i've not the discipline or the personality for full time freelance). sigh. the maw of the house, too, stretching me at every turn and j and me incompatible on that front. she seemingly so much more comfortable with living on the edge of what we have, and spending into credit world. i've not, in the end, that much faith in us to make it back and can imagine us in a mountain of debt in a few years that we need a backhoe to get out of.

which is not really fair of me to say. she certainly does adjust her expectations, even as i know she wants to be other. had a conversation with susan the last time we saw each other about this - the different relationships we (who grew up in financial comfort) have with money than our partners (who grew up with none). anyway. i'm fussy still at j, which is annoying me no end since she's being very kind to me, and since i spent so much time missing her while she was away only to .. what? be bitchy at her once she comes home? that's mature...

anyhow, it's friday and i should hightail it to work and do some invoicing for freelance work and put a plea into my old boss for some more, cause this life i'm leading is costing more than i make. and that makes me anxious. and irritable

as does the fact that i met d. for lunch yesterday. and we still get along, and it still smarts to see her.

a kinder gentler

2005-08-03T23:33:00.000-04:00

just back from the jane siberry show at hugh's room. three words. oh my god.
it was truly wonderful.

i guess there are miracles

2005-08-03T08:39:00.000-04:00

in the shapes of planes that come skidding to the ground, all smoke and fire, scorching the side of the highway, with all passengers walking away alive, and no one on the ground even scratched.

and so this morning, even as i know i'm going to be late for work and those cursed heat bugs are buzzing on the trees and signalling yet another boiling day in the smog, i'm gonna say a small prayer of thanks to whatever god or force or stroke of chance that lets things not turn out as bad as they might.

tonight to jane siberry at hugh's room, last night out late at the 3-day novel launch. met up with barbara, and then also a whole lot more of claire's friends - tom, iman, people i fear know of me only because of what's been said. but connected more with peter, who i like more and more every day. on the day he came in for his intern interview, he wore a tie, and glasses i haven't seen since. he sat on our low couch, knees to his chest, and was a little awkward. i remember being unsure of him, both paul and i slightly wary, but willing to be convinced. funny how quickly our first impressions can be discounted if we're open to it.

anyhow, the long and short of it is that i've become quickly very fond of peter, and protective. which is funny, cause i don't usually have a way of talking to the gay boys... maybe i'm learning.

colour theory

2005-07-31T18:03:00.000-04:00

just back from the AGO with gabor and csopi. saw an exhibit on colour theory - mostly painters i don't know, with the exception of rothko, who of course everyone knows, and it's becoming a cliche to like him. i did see a few pieces i quite liked but since i haven't a head for names, i of course can't remember them. guess i'll never be an art historian.

our tenants just moved in today too. i think they'll be good - he's an oil painter, she's a puppetmaker (!) and massage therapist. weird to be sharing this new space so soon with people we know not at all, but it's a relief to have someone in the suite as the money situation is a little tight these days. am contemplating getting in touch with Peter to see if he can toss some work my way. the advantage of freelancing on the side, of course, is being able to write things off...

oops

2005-07-29T20:40:00.000-04:00

it just occurs to me that the words to that bad song are actually "whatever i did, whatever i said, i didn't mean it." which changes everything. scratch that last post.

double take

2005-07-29T15:10:00.000-04:00

6 or 7 years ago there was a very dumb song on the radio, the chorus of which ran something like this:

whatever i said, whatever i did, i'm sorry.

despite the fact that it seemed to me at the time to be some dumbass stereotypically male reaction to the girlfriend's anger, today i'm reading it a bit differently. maybe it was really about someone truly not understanding what went wrong, but wanting badly to make it right...

ha. life lessons in lite pop.

resolution xvii

2005-07-29T08:23:00.000-04:00

awoke this morning to that fleeting resolve to *do* something more creative. to find some way to get past fear into something more constructive. part due to talking with j last night - her stories of the landscape of sage hill, the luxury of days spent writing, the discipline of sitting with a poem and making it work. in my head i've always entertained the fantasy of writing - of someday being able to put pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard, and coaxing out something beautiful. i think i'm beginning to understand that beauty, like everything else, requires practice to reign it in, make it coherent.

so there are tasks to finish. so what? the house will be here, always, always hungry for improvements, always willing to take more. i'm reading cunningham's specimen days at the moment, and quite liking it - there's some stuff in there about the hunger of the dead, of the animate in the inanimate. the dead are in the grass, in the machines. in my house?

the tasks that are more important should be this quiet growth, the building of faith and courage. the finishing of that cursed thesis, the practice of writing, the freedom of painting. light work. or lightening work maybe?

i know i've had these moments of resolve before, and as with so many things, played with it for a while and let it slide, only to pick it up again months, years, later with a commitment to do it right this time. i suspect this is a fatal flaw. i guess the goal for me should be to mend it.

and so off to another day at work, solo in the office today - fridays are my lone day. on the to do list today: writing back to noam chomsky and howard zinn. sometimes my job makes me laugh.

and thankfully, today there's lunch at markham and painting to end the week. and the heat has seemingly abated for a time and it's a perfect summer day outside. there are always morsels of grace to feed on, i guess, no matter how insatiable i feel.

over the hump and into the

2005-07-28T08:26:00.000-04:00

a thursday morning that finally doesn't feel like swimming through smog. we'll see if that holds til noon.

am settling into this business of being solo in the house. putzing around with lists of tasks to accomplish - buy these shelves, paint this room, clean this floor, wrestle with the couch (which, incidentally, i finally managed to get into the apartment - after widening the downstairs door, took apart parts of the deck and pretty much forced it through j's office door). freakin' stuff. even as i resent the fact that i have it, i seem to be fairly adept at acquiring more.

been battling that familiar low grade depression thing lately - you know, the one that involves lying on the couch and staring at the pets, thinking you should read or at least do *something* that sort of counts as productive, but the only thing you can muster is to crack another beer and flip through the million and one channels on the digital television and end up watching infomercials for some amazing new tupperware system (we just got digital cable installed - it's nasty shit... to defend myself, i should mention that we only got it to sweeten the deal for our tenants. i was afraid nobody would rent the apartment, but in the end, these two very nice artist types did, and on my first ever showing. probably didn't have to throw in the cable and the internet but at least now we can write them off, kind of). soooooo i finally hauled my ass off to the gym yesterday and i think it helped. don't feel like calling it a day already, so that must mean something.

what the fuck is wrong with people?

2005-07-25T10:32:00.000-04:00

a quick rant:
total spent in the past 3 years on replacing stolen bicycles and bike parts: $1253.27.

what is *with* that? and what does someone do with a shitty old cracked bike wheel anyhow? (this morning greets me with an empty set of struts, and sagging brake cables... people really do suck).

in other news, just back from hillside - a weekend away in the midst of sweltering ontario summer, lakeside, and browning, and listening to some really great tunes. run, don't walk, to get all of josh ritter's stuff. of course, i might be the last person on earth to know how great he is, since i've clearly been out of touch for the past few years. but i'm listening to him nonstop since coming back from hillside and it's making everything feel a little more sympatico.

j left this morning for saskatchewan - a two week flight to the plains. wide open skies, wide open land, wide open mind. the familiar growl of anxiety in the pit of my stomach that signals the shoring up of resources for so much time spent alone. how does this work again?

june sneaks up

2005-06-17T15:27:00.000-04:00

today lunch, removed a few months from the schedule of lunches, these buoyant affairs, with free-flowing wine and chicken cut into perfect portions, and served always in that dish, that blue and white hand-glazed dish of csopi's, where the onions i painted once sat, and whose presence i have come to count on in these uplifted fridays. if we had a salon, it would surely be this.

gabor, my hungarian artist, with his easy laugh, and easier appreciation for the women in his life, gabor today showed us a picture he had painted, a nude. emily, he said, as he imagined her. gabor, who had scrawled out some tulips a few weeks back - tulips for spring, in vibrant pastels - a picture emily had loved, had wanted to buy - gabor points to the tulips behind the nude, proclaims them THERE but for the grace of emily's love. "i painted these tulips because emily loves them." and emily next to me, reddening quickly, said just as quickly, as g's eyes landed on her expectantly, said "i love the tulips, gabor."

and then, on the steps up back to the office, a man slouched, looking like the smell of booze, clutching a bag in his hand. i veer away despite myself, until i notice the bag. a book, i think, and am reassured. until i realize it's not a book, but porn.

cathy i'm lost, i said, though i knew she was sleeping

2005-04-27T08:27:00.000-04:00

montreal, laurier ouest and avenue du parc. on this corner the PA, my old grocery store from my old life. julie asked me this morning if being here was a too-large reminder of d. i hadn't thought about it, had willed myself not to think about it. i'm wanting to stare through the ghosts of this city and see instead where it lives in me as home. i watched the city approach from dorval on, montreal by train - triplexes, factories. over the river, south of the market. the gentrification of rundown buildings - lofts with grand curtains behind facades that wear washed out advertisements for sugar, for machinery parts, for meat packers, like old denim. i'm home, i think, say silently to the ribbons of highway, the atwater tunnel, the urban playgrounds full of unattended children on a tuesday night. the cross on mount royal from this window - from the side, it's all scaffolding and naked and unlit in the rainy grey of this end of april morning.

i used to pass this corner every day on my way home from work. stop into the PA, me and d. and katie. we walked our bikes, or else it was winter, and we didn't have them at all. but we'd almost always break at the PA, for yogurt, cheese, veggie pate, and those improbably red tomatoes in the middle of february. that was before i moved to BC where the gregariousness of tomatoes is never improbable.

at this corner, from julie's window: the red striped bus stop, traffic light, the croque en bol pet store, where i used to buy food for lady, treats for camille. the banque laurentienne, and across the street that upscale vietnamese restaurant, chez van. i've never seen anyone in there. and i've never been. i can't see it but i know the banque de montreal is kitty corner, its wheelchair access ramp strewn with bus commuters, though maybe not today, in the rain. under this building and in front, the starbucks. the only freestanding one in the city, or maybe only the first now. there was a protest to keep it out when it first opened 5 years ago, but now i notice that it's full of happy sipping people in familiar low light and cherry wood accents. the funny thing is that laudan used to work there, and she said that in the mornings, when it was new, the starbucks used to be a meeting joint to michael - the artist, the street man with the cart of animals - 2 dogs, a cat, some pigeons - and an assortment of other odd montreal characters. i learned that michael had an apartment. he just chose not to live there. i wonder if now that the starbucks has established itself, if they let those folk in any more. i like picturing that - a table full of well-lived-in people, the city staining their skin, animated and alive, boisterous, over grande lattes in the starbucks. if only it was that kind of place still.

accidental death and dismemberment

2005-04-21T11:49:00.000-04:00

i can't believe i'm posting about mortgage insurance. actually, i'm NOT posting about mortgage insurance, i'm really posting about being aghast at the fact that i'm tempted to. reaching a point in my life when mortgage insurance is something i think about - devote way too much time to thinking about. the value of a life. the value of my life. of j.'s. and the impact on our joint investments... god. so much for being committed to slumming it.

i used to always think that growing up was for grown ups. that i'd be immune somehow, peter pan-ned in my early twenties. i wonder, now, if my dad felt like that. or my mom.

but she had life insurance, and a good thing she did, my life the richer in money for it. death has a way of growing you up but good.

a note on the wisdom of the cynic

2005-04-20T09:47:00.000-04:00

Mercury Retrograde

I don't quite understand what makes the planets pull
us into believing that where they are makes history happen –
clocks stop and contracts go bad
and bank accounts drain with a stealth
that thieves should envy.
The astrologers know.
Or they say they do and the starstruck faithful
queue up in virtual space clamouring
for the next Freewill,
impatient for the month to trip into its neighbour
for the next installment of Susan Miller's uncanny.

It's a matter of blind faith you said, over coffee
and a donut, or a danish –
that bit of something you always ordered
to keep your tongue busy.
You were on your soap box that day,
in good form and on about the wisdom of the cynic,
your head back in laughter
or otherwise leaning forward, a question mark hanging invisibly
from the furrow of your disbelief
at my will to believe.
(We used to argue about that a lot –
the empirical, the spiritual –
and usually
you won, or I let you win
so I could watch the victory slide quietly
into your hips and know that by lunch,
we'd be on to something
else.)

I let you win that day,
or you thought you did,
and you got up to pay, all loose-hipped and winking
only to return, hand out for a tenner,
face flushed by the faux pas
of your insufficient funds.

there are about 5 things i'm trying to tell you

2005-04-20T07:10:00.000-04:00

too long since i've written, anywhere, or anything. back in touch with k. who has her own blog - a true blog in the style of deft bloggers everywhere. that would not be me. but i'm self referential and narcissistic, so i'll make particular note of her bukowski entry of friday april 15. that would be me.

caught in the funk of april. my girl tells me that it's only the profound who suffer from depression, as if my depression were evidence of my Very Deep Thoughts. she's kind, but i think too generous. me on last night about my own superficiality, the constant soundbiting. my fraudulence. funny how these troughs always follow those smooth sailing moments of balance.

i was reading in the globe and mail on the weekend (a leah mclaren article no less - small digression: i used to hate her, but am hating her less. does this mean she's getting less annoying or have i become immune?) about the children of the boomers. Generation Fearless, she calls them. they would have that name - all bravado and look at me and self-confidence that will either bowl you over or bore you silly. i don't know that there's any in between. i have to wonder about my own ambition, that *i* fear *them.* too, my kneejerk cynicism and sense of being somehow wiser, superior, to this next crop of pretty young things.

j. on the election of benedict xvi: "wait a minute... the guy is 78 and he's GERMAN???? don't you think there must be something in that?" god knows i'm prickly about stereotyping, but it got me thinking. apparently, other people are thinking the same thing.

and in the realm of the mundane, i got a new job, starting may 24.

that's 5. seems enough for 7 o'clock on a wednesday morning.

learning relation, again, at 32

2004-09-17T14:17:00.000-04:00

-----Original Message-----
From: ajk
Sent: Friday, September 17, 2004 10:08 AM
To: jjl
Subject: RE: all of this

i remember those leg pains. lying in bed, ache in the shins, smoothing the sole of my foot up and down on my sheets trying to stretch it out. but how to stretch out a pain in the bone? the usual remedies don't apply.

so yes, growing pains. this learning anew, reforming, reshaping. becoming. hard - despite the wonder of it - to shed old habits, old patterns. constant vigilance the price for the privilege of standing this one foot to the left, of seeing new perspective.

i'm believing in the work, though, and in the benefit of it all, the move towards wholeness. we can do this.

-----Original Message-----
From: jjl
Sent: Friday, September 17, 2004 9:53 AM
To: ajk
Subject: all of this

when i was a kid they called it growing pains. unexplicable leg aches or other mysterious forms of suffering. which i felt. and may be feeling now. growing pains. the ache of change. how the snake feels shedding its skin. how a newborn mammal gets squeezed so hard in the muscular grip and hard bone passage of its mother's body. Condensing oneself down into a tight shape, being pushed along by larger forces. a body has to take a lot of pressure to come into the world. so here's to that pressure. here's to coming into the world. we can do this