what would you do?

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

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

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

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

120 minutes. 12 stations.

gulp.


shawn colvin - steady on

breaststroke

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

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

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


bright eyes - train under water

memento mori

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

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

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


lucinda williams - side of the road




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

avalanche warning

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

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

the hidden cameras - fear is on

we are family

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

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

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


the tragically hip - scared

IWD

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

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

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

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

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


pj harvey - who the fuck

hard egg

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

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

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

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


bonnie tyler - it's a heartache

when silvern voices

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

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

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

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

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


ron hynes - sonny's dream

sad songs say so much

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

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


dar williams - when i was a boy

serendipitous nostalgia

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

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

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

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


lyle lovett - if i had a boat

jill told bill

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

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

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

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

i'm kidding. sort of.

does this count as interesting?

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

synchronicity

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

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

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

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

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

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


everything but the girl - time after time

on the phone

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


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

if you don't demand it

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

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

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

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

in the soup

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

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

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

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

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

tom waits - bottom of the world

eyes wide shut

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

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


The Smiths - Panic

you drink how many cups?

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

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

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


Peter Bjorn & John - Objects of My Affection

on blogging

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

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

a little more Josh Ritter - Man Burning

so back to britney's hair

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

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

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

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

issa

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

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

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