digging deep

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

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

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

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

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

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


dave matthews band - digging a ditch

phil, i hardly knew you

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

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

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

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


dylan - knockin' on heaven's door

heads are for thinking

mental note: wear a bike helmet.

on second thought

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

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

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

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


ani difranco - the waiting song

homecoming, homegoing

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

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

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

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

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





simon and garfunkel - homeward bound

off to cowtown

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

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

marty robbins - el paso

the thing about the morning

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

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



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


belle & sebastian - my wandering days are over

uh oh

one word: facebook.

the ultimate distraction. this might require therapy.

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

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

phew. that feels better.


the ramones - i wanna be sedated

hey you, i know you...

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

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

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



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






morcheeba - part of the process

and the sun is still sleepy warm too

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

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


cat stevens - morning has broken

okay jen, i'll bite

Read my VisualDNA™ Get your own VisualDNA™

it's 21 degrees outside and i am happy

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


the indigo girls - watershed

9 car pile-up

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

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

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


barry mcguire - eve of destruction

straining to hear

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

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

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

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

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


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

my perfect lunch

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

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



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


rufus wainwright - cigarettes and chocolate milk

post-overnight

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


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



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

the squid or the kale?

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

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

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

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

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

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


the beatles - octopus's garden

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

so much for fighting like cats and dogs.

9w1 and you?

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

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


jenny lewis with the watson twins - the charging sky