let it fall.
I don't know why I never seem to have an umbrella, suddenly. I got drenched this morning, right down to my underwear, for about the fifth time in a couple of months. Portland was the worst for the sudden cloudbursts pinning me smaller soaking wet under the weight of the whoosh, but today gave it competition. I was disjointed to start with -- was supposed to meet D for breakfast at 9:30, woke up at 7:00, went back to sleep and woke up with a start at 9:15. Hurled my reading and ibook into my backpack so I could go to the library after we ate to work on my dissertation proposal... took off, late and scattered, hair wet, ... and then after our nice little connected brekkie, the deluge.
Freezing, I ended up going home, drying off and changing, writing at my kitchen counter, cosy with the rain outside, Bach and Yo Yo Ma the inside climate, good inroads. And... still wondering why I am so out of joint. Too many things, some flowing unbelievably, others just not quite making the catch as I leap from one trapeze to the other. Still faltering on generating meaningful new client work (for the second time in a month didn't get a piece of work because I'm "too experienced"), sleeping out of synch, leaving a little too late for times agreed on, never having an umbrella. And yet, my school work is flowing and feeling possible, F and I are creating something together that continues to awe me in its potential, my conversations with people I love are full of richness and affirmation for each other, I'm running faster and further than I have for a while. Balance, I guess, pushing the edges of what my space can accommodate, creating elasticity.
Saturday, July 22, 2006
Wednesday, July 19, 2006
How we are seen
I've been doing a lot of reading/writing/thinking about identity lately, how we construct our ideas of self, how we discern how other people are constructing us and how we coordinate those dynamics. Some of it is in very personal contexts ("I am the strong one") and some of it is about how we interpret and enact more collective identities -- nationality, queerness, what it means to be female.
Yesterday I bought something that lets me "perform female gender," as Judith Butler would have it, at a level that I've never attempted before -- gold strappy tall party sandals. A convergence of all sorts of different contexts -- B's upcoming wedding I need black tie for, a yen for a Betsey Johnson dress for years and suddenly finding myself right at the store after a lunch, too much Sex and the City, playing with different versions of self, including the one that my online pals are jokingly calling StraightCate. (Who is, according to my ex, "fancy"). Tropes of an exploration of a kind of version of self that might be open to possibilities I've never contemplated before.
I was buying the shoes (and a fantastic, too expensive, pair of dresses, about which no more will be said) at the same time that a little yellowed newspaper clipping lay on my desk. One of the bits of ephemera I retrieved from my grandmother's house after the funeral, it's the newspaper obit from my grandmother's mother. It reads:
Mrs. Calixte Seguin
With her brother, Very Rev. Raymond Piche, OP of Fall River, Mass., officiating, funeral services were held in Assumption Church on Wednesday for Mrs. Calixte Seguin, lifelong resident of this district, who died Saturday at her home, 3229 Baby Street, after a long illness.
Mrs. Seguin's nephew, rev. Norbert Chateau of Detroit, assisted as Deacon... [long list of priests, deacons and subdeacons who were all part of the funeral mass].
Ladies of the Altar Society of which she was a member attended in a body. Pallbearers were her nephews: Ernest Piche, Alvin Piche, Paul Piche, Hector Renaud, Arthur Langlois and Ernest Seguin. Burial was in Assumption Cemetary.
**
Nowhere. No. Where. in the obit does it actually mention her actual NAME. Maria Seguin, nee Piché. Nor her three children. Nor her grandchildren. It locates her inside her husband's identity, within a huge phalanx of priests and other male representatives of the church, her male relatives who were her pallbearers. It mentions a clump of ladies as a body, also Church related.
Despite my fairly extensive reading on the history of marriage, and my finely honed interpretation of the possibilities and limits of the institution, and my lengthy engagement with the implications for the queer world of the legalization of marriage, this obit was shocking to me. This was 1944, when my parents were both young children, and in the public record, in the narrative that sums up her life, her identity was completely subsumed to the men of her world.
I try to put my strappy little sandals with the gold bows in the same world as this obit where my great grandmother doesn't even get a name or any details from the life she lived out, only the institutions she was situated in. The truism is about the depth of change over those decades. Neither marriage nor the Church look anything like they did six decades ago in terms of how they structure people's lives.
On one level, the institutions still have the same basic frameworks and literal meaning -- and in another, they have a completely different social force. It provides an interesting dilemma for us, in the 00s or whatever we're calling this decade. We can recoil from the institutions, recognizing the historical force and purpose of them, rejecting the tenets wholesale -- and we can also engage with them as fluid constructs, living embodiments of the way that contexts shift and the meaning of what we take for granted shifts.
All of my work on same sex marriage left me with some unease about a wholehearted embracing of an institution that a mere six decades ago pretty much erased my great-grandmother's identity. And, it's also clear that that version of marriage was part of its specific historical context. Recognizing the historical version of marriage and its force and engaging with it as a place to look at our relationship paradigms, what we mean when we "do" commitment, provocations to what we take for granted about gender -- we can also reinterpret the institutions.
I'm not sure that at any previous point in my life I would have been so unadulteratedly pleased to be witness to a fairly traditional marriage ceremony, would enjoy the costuming. But I'm really happy to be part of B's wedding. Maybe the point is that the revolution of the past half century is that we can also hold multiple truths in the same fist, making a world where my dykely self forged over two decades can coexist with straightcate and her fancy shoes, making me, in context, constantly shifting.
Sunday, July 16, 2006
Memorials
I had a little free time Saturday morning, so I decided to get out of the antiseptic, muggy world of the hotel area (manicured grass, fake ponds complete with geese, no real life) and go downtown. I got off the metro at Dupont Circle and browsed kramerbooks for a while and then sat with a cappuccino and my laptop, making some notes on my proposal.
Since this is our last time in DC for national session (the July meeting is in Kansas City next year), I thought I should wander down to the mall and look at the Vietnam memorial one last time.
I first saw it in the summer of 02, right after I started at Fielding, when the entire core of the city was hyper-militarized. It was my first time in DC, and I was over-aware of the signs of flexing muscle, so I came to it with that underlay of raw dread, sorrow, fear, yearning that we all carried after September 11th in different ways.
The wall was overwhelming, that first time, the descent from the thin line of a few names down to the deep well of names names names, crowding out everything else. Lives lost living out a flimsy story of empire.
That time, I came to the wall at a time of day where somehow, eerily, I was able to see a reflection in the black granite, superimposed over the names, of … fighter jets, landing at a base behind me. Echoes of the images from September 11th, interpolations into its aftermath. The Lincoln memorial posed another ironic question – how do these two contradictory images connect, make a coherent narrative? And all of this was triangulated with the little kiosks between Lincoln and the wall, on the edge of the mall, selling military memorabilia, insignia. Including unfathomably crude iconography of imperialist might, like the bumper sticker that said “I’d walk a mile for a camel” – with a 19thc-style cartoon figure of an grinning arab on a camel with a bullseye over him.
A couple of years later, Mary Alice and I went to the newly opened WWII memorial, and I was struck dumb by that addition to the collective story of self. It’s downright Victorian in its empire and excess, the Albert Memorial for the American love affair with power. Giant eagles, huge bold names of battles, the war years punctuated through the American lens (1941 – 1945), not the rest of the Allies. A stunning reassertion of inward-focused, unquestioning imperialism. Beyond ironic.
It reminded me of the time that a friend of mine returned from her father’s funeral wearing his clothing, apparently unconscious of how stunning it was to see her rawest grief and yearning worn in public. I still squirm at how shocked I was that she didn’t seem at all aware of what she seemed to be doing, trying to be him, hold him alive, when it was so naked. The memorials feel the same way to me, shouting clear questions into the national discourse – questions that the people making their poignant pilgrimages, leaving teddy bears and notes about how much the soldiers are loved for their sacrifices, should be knocked over by – but which apparently echo only silently around them.
Crossing Frontiers
Crossing Frontiers
My week – my double-stuffed-with-cream-rich week among my tribe is done… a very good space, as always, affirming, provoking, tweaking, in all possible ways. I leave national sessions every time a sharper person, operating in some more complex set of neuron firings and noticings and connections.
So many vignettes and stories all woven together in this chaotic, high-octane system. Hours of conversation with Linda and her flint sharp mind, roving over the territory of both of our studies, our theoretical base flushed out and located, Such thinking-with support from my faculty guys. A committee meeting that pushed me to the next level on my dissertation. Presenting to the newbies on social construction, feeling myself living it. Talking talking talking, a multilogue of ideas resident as much in the system between us as in ourselves, talking concepts with Jan before our heads are off the pillows. Intellectual gluttony, almost disembodied, bodies that are just thoughts and hugging and glasses of red zinfandel. Running in the heat to assimilate it all, celebrating the grads at the end of the week and dancing barefoot into the night. Support in our village.
Of course there’s some lunacy – I was nonplussed by a reaction to one piece of work I did, where a pretty searing analysis of my own failings of moral authority and engagement with my identity was met with the observation of “cute.” And we sometimes pay hyper-attention to the ebbs and flows of energy, reading friendship rifts and minor tears where they’re really indiscernible. (Someone I care about and had noticed nothing but support from apologized for an “act of micro-aggression” she’d committed on me). Some frustrating clashes of epistemology. But… these are the inconsequential fissures of an unprecedented kind of community of practice, where we work on making the social worlds we believe are possible.
I left with some clear deadlines and a sharp sense of purpose and timing. Frank and Barnett pushed me to timelines and deliverables and it’s all good. I feel grounded in my project and am aiming at my graduation date of January 08 in Santa Barbara with a strong sense of purpose.
I’m pondering all of the frontiers crossed since I started this program. I was emailing Beth from my treo while I was eating breakfast at a (shudder) TGIFridays at the airport this morning. She replied, I never in a million years, 5 years ago – 2 years ago, even – would have believed that you would ever send me an email, “I’m in Washington DC on my blackberry in one of the most Americanist food chains in Ronald Reagan airport.” I would add to that, “on my way home to touch base briefly and then rush off again for a squeezed in overnight date with my male lover who lives in NY state.”
So many boundaries opened up, edges rubbed open. Two literal border crossings in one day, identity frameworks bursting apart, stories full of possibilities written. Navigating the hyphens.
My week – my double-stuffed-with-cream-rich week among my tribe is done… a very good space, as always, affirming, provoking, tweaking, in all possible ways. I leave national sessions every time a sharper person, operating in some more complex set of neuron firings and noticings and connections.
So many vignettes and stories all woven together in this chaotic, high-octane system. Hours of conversation with Linda and her flint sharp mind, roving over the territory of both of our studies, our theoretical base flushed out and located, Such thinking-with support from my faculty guys. A committee meeting that pushed me to the next level on my dissertation. Presenting to the newbies on social construction, feeling myself living it. Talking talking talking, a multilogue of ideas resident as much in the system between us as in ourselves, talking concepts with Jan before our heads are off the pillows. Intellectual gluttony, almost disembodied, bodies that are just thoughts and hugging and glasses of red zinfandel. Running in the heat to assimilate it all, celebrating the grads at the end of the week and dancing barefoot into the night. Support in our village.
Of course there’s some lunacy – I was nonplussed by a reaction to one piece of work I did, where a pretty searing analysis of my own failings of moral authority and engagement with my identity was met with the observation of “cute.” And we sometimes pay hyper-attention to the ebbs and flows of energy, reading friendship rifts and minor tears where they’re really indiscernible. (Someone I care about and had noticed nothing but support from apologized for an “act of micro-aggression” she’d committed on me). Some frustrating clashes of epistemology. But… these are the inconsequential fissures of an unprecedented kind of community of practice, where we work on making the social worlds we believe are possible.
I left with some clear deadlines and a sharp sense of purpose and timing. Frank and Barnett pushed me to timelines and deliverables and it’s all good. I feel grounded in my project and am aiming at my graduation date of January 08 in Santa Barbara with a strong sense of purpose.
I’m pondering all of the frontiers crossed since I started this program. I was emailing Beth from my treo while I was eating breakfast at a (shudder) TGIFridays at the airport this morning. She replied, I never in a million years, 5 years ago – 2 years ago, even – would have believed that you would ever send me an email, “I’m in Washington DC on my blackberry in one of the most Americanist food chains in Ronald Reagan airport.” I would add to that, “on my way home to touch base briefly and then rush off again for a squeezed in overnight date with my male lover who lives in NY state.”
So many boundaries opened up, edges rubbed open. Two literal border crossings in one day, identity frameworks bursting apart, stories full of possibilities written. Navigating the hyphens.
Tuesday, July 11, 2006
Vicky Barr, Where are You?
I have a little weakness for series books about career girls from the 40s and 50s.In a box in the upper level of my loft is a complete-but-for-one set of Cherry Ames, Nurse books. Nudging her competent elbow is a clutch of Vicky Barr, Flight Stewardess volumes. Shiny, pert, pretty, independent, glamorous career girls who were always getting proposals from handsome doctors and businessmen, but who laughed them off for later, after they finished their madcap adventures and mystery solving with their chums.
Vicky would have been baffled by my experience at Pearson yesterday. First the usual tedium of the long check in line, customs (the agent never understanding what the hell I’m talking about with my distance learning program), extra phalanx of security for DC, the long wind to the far-thrown antiseptic gate U for DC, emptied of all possible hiding places and things-that-could-be-turned-into-weapons. Boarding plane, delighted to have exit aisle to self after Koreans banished for insufficient English… and then watching the pelting rain. Pelt. Down.
Three over-airconditioned hours on the tarmac later, we were released back to Gate U, electrical storms daunting the air traffic flow, no doubt more caution after the Air France flight slid in flames into a gully last August and all of the freaked out passengers ended up on the 401 flagging down cars. They also hurtled our luggage back into the free world so we had to find our way to arrivals through some previously unknown hidden warren, then run the gamut of check in, customs, security again.
Vicky embodied an overlay image of air travel as filled with tycoons and mysterious heiresses tended by sweetly flirtatious, china-cup-coffee-carrying trim-waisted women – a glamour that grimly tugs at our ankles as we trudge through the beeping sweaty melee of flight today. And yesterday, I realizes that another entertainment form has made me positively sanguine about traveling – the few seasons of The Amazing Race I watched. Watching those teams cajole, bargain, sneak and generally make indomitable pests of themselves, I imprinted a frame of travel as a game, and learned something about the porousness of the system. I don’t follow the instructions so much anymore. I called and rebooked myself on a flight while we were still on the plane. I wheedled my way in the back door to customs to avoid the long check in line. Recognized that, like the mess when the Air France thing happened, no one is really organized for contingencies – so looking for openings in the patterns and good-naturedly taking advantage of them seems to work.
This is a really crappy airport to be stuck in – it ain’t no wonderland of mini-massages, lattes and space-age sleeping capsules like the behind-the-customs-veil in Vancouver airport. My battery on my suddenly vital treo dribbled away (product of my defiance of the “cellphones off” order while we were on the tarmac) and I had no brain to read anything meaningful. And when I finally took off… it was 11.5 hours after we were supposed to leave – for a one hour flight. But. I wasn’t in as bad shape as the Russian couple coming from Rome, whose flight was hours delayed leaving Italy because none of the baggage handlers showed up to work after World Cup celebrations, and whose flight attendants put out a box of self-serve drinks and then snored in the back. They missed their connection home to San Francisco and had no idea when they’d pick up another one. And I wasn’t in nearly as bad shape as the woman with the two year old, on a leg from the UK, whose husband suddenly picked up a loud edgy fight in the holding pen back at Gate U at 9:30 p.m.
I didn’t get any real reading done. A few notes and articles, some kibitzing with my online pals, a few email flickers with F in Germany, a phone call with Renee. But I was fine with my earl grey and my John Irving novel, wondering how much of my life forward will be similarly measured out in airports, a distributed life incoherent to the Gutenberg-era guardians of territory, assessors of my documents and right to travel. Vicky
Vicky would have been baffled by my experience at Pearson yesterday. First the usual tedium of the long check in line, customs (the agent never understanding what the hell I’m talking about with my distance learning program), extra phalanx of security for DC, the long wind to the far-thrown antiseptic gate U for DC, emptied of all possible hiding places and things-that-could-be-turned-into-weapons. Boarding plane, delighted to have exit aisle to self after Koreans banished for insufficient English… and then watching the pelting rain. Pelt. Down.
Three over-airconditioned hours on the tarmac later, we were released back to Gate U, electrical storms daunting the air traffic flow, no doubt more caution after the Air France flight slid in flames into a gully last August and all of the freaked out passengers ended up on the 401 flagging down cars. They also hurtled our luggage back into the free world so we had to find our way to arrivals through some previously unknown hidden warren, then run the gamut of check in, customs, security again.
Vicky embodied an overlay image of air travel as filled with tycoons and mysterious heiresses tended by sweetly flirtatious, china-cup-coffee-carrying trim-waisted women – a glamour that grimly tugs at our ankles as we trudge through the beeping sweaty melee of flight today. And yesterday, I realizes that another entertainment form has made me positively sanguine about traveling – the few seasons of The Amazing Race I watched. Watching those teams cajole, bargain, sneak and generally make indomitable pests of themselves, I imprinted a frame of travel as a game, and learned something about the porousness of the system. I don’t follow the instructions so much anymore. I called and rebooked myself on a flight while we were still on the plane. I wheedled my way in the back door to customs to avoid the long check in line. Recognized that, like the mess when the Air France thing happened, no one is really organized for contingencies – so looking for openings in the patterns and good-naturedly taking advantage of them seems to work.
This is a really crappy airport to be stuck in – it ain’t no wonderland of mini-massages, lattes and space-age sleeping capsules like the behind-the-customs-veil in Vancouver airport. My battery on my suddenly vital treo dribbled away (product of my defiance of the “cellphones off” order while we were on the tarmac) and I had no brain to read anything meaningful. And when I finally took off… it was 11.5 hours after we were supposed to leave – for a one hour flight. But. I wasn’t in as bad shape as the Russian couple coming from Rome, whose flight was hours delayed leaving Italy because none of the baggage handlers showed up to work after World Cup celebrations, and whose flight attendants put out a box of self-serve drinks and then snored in the back. They missed their connection home to San Francisco and had no idea when they’d pick up another one. And I wasn’t in nearly as bad shape as the woman with the two year old, on a leg from the UK, whose husband suddenly picked up a loud edgy fight in the holding pen back at Gate U at 9:30 p.m.
I didn’t get any real reading done. A few notes and articles, some kibitzing with my online pals, a few email flickers with F in Germany, a phone call with Renee. But I was fine with my earl grey and my John Irving novel, wondering how much of my life forward will be similarly measured out in airports, a distributed life incoherent to the Gutenberg-era guardians of territory, assessors of my documents and right to travel. Vicky
Sunday, July 09, 2006
Moonpie's Great Ruckus of a Night
My insane wonderful online friend Melissa (well, we've actually met in real-life, so she's really just my friend Melissa) just got back home after a week at Cape Cod. She posted something in the middle of the night last night that I just had to guest blog -- she gave me the shake laughs.
***
Please make a note of the time of day of this post. This is NOT A GOOD THING. I'm down here and possibly headed for the couch (debating now, as I'll definitely startle/wake the Mr if I head back upstairs). We (meaning he, due to a Very Bad, Very Excruciating Headache) got very little sleep last night. Had stuff going on all morning and he went into his office w/J before 7am! to just do some shit post vacation and pre-back to work. He napped this afternoon and I went to bed at about 10 (to the sounds of him downstairs, googling and printing and listening to and then singing, over and over, the French Nat'l Anthem)...he came up soon after.
So the night's disruptions began w/the focking cat in the hallway, scratching shit. The Mr whisper/mumbling about it, and me getting out of bed and saying, "kittykitty" or what the fuck ever, and going back to bed and finding that the whisper/mumbling Mr was not at ALL awake after all, and I got the Big Death Yell as he freaked out upon me coming back to bed. Back to sleep and then the phone rang. Wrong number. Back to sleep and then the fucking, fucking, dirty, viscious, verminous sons of whore raccoons came and knocked over our garbage (the garbage that I put out this afternoon and forgot to put into the garage, as we do in the summer). Well, fuck that----I went downstairs and hit the outside back light and opened the garage door and waited for them to startle so that I could see what the fuck it WAS (not going out there to get sprayed by a skunk---will risk my neck on those murderous raccoons, though). Little fucker stared right at me. I was SCARED---this was 1:30 am and I know that they ATTACK! and maim people or something. So I hissed and made noises and when they got far enough away, I ran over and grabbed the trash can and popped it into the garage----hit the "close" button and ran back into the house.
Back to bed (not asleep now, now listening to the Mr (don't want to overstate this---he wasn't being that pissy) go on about what a horrible, horrible night's sleep it was. Then round 2 w/the cat----the boy yelled MOM! or something that sounded like it...and cat (as she always does, it's her favorite place) was sprawled out over his pillow after having nibbled on his ear, lol. Grabbed the cat, back to bed w/cat (she never stays w/us, but I try). Almost asleep and then the cat decides that she's not just going to scratch at doors in the hallway, but she's going to leap up and scratch shit at the same time. Don't know what the fuck that was all about, but it was a Great Ruckus, and I just said, Fuck, I'm going downstairs----she'll follow me. The Mr asked me to close the door----I said, Scout will just scratch on it later...he didn't care. So here I sit, contemplating going up to bed (which will mean opening our bedroom door and freaking the Mr right the fuck out and waking him up again) or sleeping on the couch (which will be totally fine, if the CAT. leaves boy and Mr and upstairs doors alone and just goes to sleep.
All while reading this thread, I've been mouse-clicking w/one hand and playing w/the cat (waving that cat dancer toy) w/the other, hoping to tire the little motherfucker out so that she'll sleep on the couch w/me.
And in keeping w/topic, I do have some concern and am going out of my way for the Mr here, as he is running 14 miles tomorrow am and then going to pick up my Nana so that she can watch the soccer match w/us. He has had two really bad nights' sleep in a row.
There goes the CAT up the stairs. Fuck.
***
Please make a note of the time of day of this post. This is NOT A GOOD THING. I'm down here and possibly headed for the couch (debating now, as I'll definitely startle/wake the Mr if I head back upstairs). We (meaning he, due to a Very Bad, Very Excruciating Headache) got very little sleep last night. Had stuff going on all morning and he went into his office w/J before 7am! to just do some shit post vacation and pre-back to work. He napped this afternoon and I went to bed at about 10 (to the sounds of him downstairs, googling and printing and listening to and then singing, over and over, the French Nat'l Anthem)...he came up soon after.
So the night's disruptions began w/the focking cat in the hallway, scratching shit. The Mr whisper/mumbling about it, and me getting out of bed and saying, "kittykitty" or what the fuck ever, and going back to bed and finding that the whisper/mumbling Mr was not at ALL awake after all, and I got the Big Death Yell as he freaked out upon me coming back to bed. Back to sleep and then the phone rang. Wrong number. Back to sleep and then the fucking, fucking, dirty, viscious, verminous sons of whore raccoons came and knocked over our garbage (the garbage that I put out this afternoon and forgot to put into the garage, as we do in the summer). Well, fuck that----I went downstairs and hit the outside back light and opened the garage door and waited for them to startle so that I could see what the fuck it WAS (not going out there to get sprayed by a skunk---will risk my neck on those murderous raccoons, though). Little fucker stared right at me. I was SCARED---this was 1:30 am and I know that they ATTACK! and maim people or something. So I hissed and made noises and when they got far enough away, I ran over and grabbed the trash can and popped it into the garage----hit the "close" button and ran back into the house.
Back to bed (not asleep now, now listening to the Mr (don't want to overstate this---he wasn't being that pissy) go on about what a horrible, horrible night's sleep it was. Then round 2 w/the cat----the boy yelled MOM! or something that sounded like it...and cat (as she always does, it's her favorite place) was sprawled out over his pillow after having nibbled on his ear, lol. Grabbed the cat, back to bed w/cat (she never stays w/us, but I try). Almost asleep and then the cat decides that she's not just going to scratch at doors in the hallway, but she's going to leap up and scratch shit at the same time. Don't know what the fuck that was all about, but it was a Great Ruckus, and I just said, Fuck, I'm going downstairs----she'll follow me. The Mr asked me to close the door----I said, Scout will just scratch on it later...he didn't care. So here I sit, contemplating going up to bed (which will mean opening our bedroom door and freaking the Mr right the fuck out and waking him up again) or sleeping on the couch (which will be totally fine, if the CAT. leaves boy and Mr and upstairs doors alone and just goes to sleep.
All while reading this thread, I've been mouse-clicking w/one hand and playing w/the cat (waving that cat dancer toy) w/the other, hoping to tire the little motherfucker out so that she'll sleep on the couch w/me.
And in keeping w/topic, I do have some concern and am going out of my way for the Mr here, as he is running 14 miles tomorrow am and then going to pick up my Nana so that she can watch the soccer match w/us. He has had two really bad nights' sleep in a row.
There goes the CAT up the stairs. Fuck.
Saturday, July 08, 2006
Roaming goats
I'm peering through my glasses darkly this morning, a little fogged by the residue of half a bottle of the goofily named Goats do Roam red and a scotch I pegged unwisely to the end of the meal last night. My friend Stephanie and I went to a Fringe play (decent play, Teaching As You Like it, memorable for at least one funny-in-context line about "Shakespeare, me and the Dutch" being the only people to not treat adults like children) and then ate salmon in the treetop-like patio of Kensington Kitchen. The kitchen was slow, and we drank almost an entire bottle of wine before the food arrived. We have such good rich conversations that make us both guffaw, simultaneously intimate and arch. Living in hyphens.
I was thinking about how many of the people in my life right now have fluttered in this year, really, and how I'm hooking my meaning and self into them as much as to the people who've been around longer. And how others have floated out almost completely, like the wholesome little couple and their kids I ran into at Moonbean today. L&A were part of the Great Lesbian Switcheroo of 99 and we uneasily run into each other every couple of years, maybe on Pride, shiftily exhuberant. People sliding out, new ones ripening in, stories of futures written that I would have never imagined a year ago.
I managed to steer my torpid little body down to Nathan Phillips Square for the art show. I didn't see anything this year that made me gasp the way I felt about the Bathers or the Jane station piece I bought in January after seeing it there first last year -- but I bought a fun little print of a french bicycle and a man wrestling an alligator from this woman, and a collagey thing with a bunch of machines and some text on it from this artist. Do It All it says. Over my desk it goes.
Off for a hot run to force myself into a less sluggish physical space, and another Fringe play, with D. A little playtime before the intensity of DC, school, an six months' worth of conversations in five days.
I was thinking about how many of the people in my life right now have fluttered in this year, really, and how I'm hooking my meaning and self into them as much as to the people who've been around longer. And how others have floated out almost completely, like the wholesome little couple and their kids I ran into at Moonbean today. L&A were part of the Great Lesbian Switcheroo of 99 and we uneasily run into each other every couple of years, maybe on Pride, shiftily exhuberant. People sliding out, new ones ripening in, stories of futures written that I would have never imagined a year ago.
I managed to steer my torpid little body down to Nathan Phillips Square for the art show. I didn't see anything this year that made me gasp the way I felt about the Bathers or the Jane station piece I bought in January after seeing it there first last year -- but I bought a fun little print of a french bicycle and a man wrestling an alligator from this woman, and a collagey thing with a bunch of machines and some text on it from this artist. Do It All it says. Over my desk it goes.
Off for a hot run to force myself into a less sluggish physical space, and another Fringe play, with D. A little playtime before the intensity of DC, school, an six months' worth of conversations in five days.
Friday, July 07, 2006
The Bathers
A year ago today, I moved into the apartment in J&S' house. My chosen family in the typically queer sense, held in the warm borders of their little trio-with-large- Saturnic-rings.
It was a good space for re-finding feet, letting myself feel through the waves of letting go, moving forward, that I staggered through over the next few months. It started out with a carapace of mimed strength, scaffolding my trembling self through the unfamiliar motions of figuring out solo future. Painting my bedroom crimson, vowing to not turn it into a monastic cell, my trip to the Nathan Phillips Square art show to insert some narratives of my own into my space. Dripping tears on the subway over my art on the way home, so sad that A couldn't meet me even in the closing ritual I wanted of buying each other a piece of art. Buying some for myself.
I hung that image of The Bathers on the wall at the end of my bed, and gazed at it many times over the next few months. It's the sense of memory. Smiling, relaxed, women by the seaside, recreated from snapshots, colour added by the articulator, seen through a yanked-through-time lens, fogged over. The bottle that floats half up through the image feels like the last picture on a roll, the stuck moment in an old-fashioned slide show when you split the pic in half and see it from the middle.
How we make stories, bricolage of what's there, our own memories, our own hopes. Certainty and wonder always contrapuntal. We are so knowing, then the story shifts slightly and all is questioned. Emulsions of perspective, slivering of meaning. I realized last week that I thought for years my Grandmother's middle name was Evelyn, but read something a couple of years ago that made me think I was wrong. I never asked her. Her obit didn't include it. I'll never be certain, just as I can never remember if my dad's death day is March 21 or March 22 without checking the perpetual calendar for 1992 for which day was Sunday.
Much of the last year has been about living into my Cateself, my me so joyful in this flat, enlivened by the work I'm doing, the way I am me with people whose hands I didn't know I'd wander with, watching myself unfold with F in a wholly open, grounded way. It's also been about framing the story of the self-with-A, the decade and a half that made so much of me, facing the parts I played in that theatre of acceptance and rejection, recognizing them in me now as backward-through time, fogged through a split lens, tangible to look at, no longer possible to remember what the inside really feels like.
Wednesday, July 05, 2006
Melange
It's been a weird little blend of days. Since I got back from Windsor, I've been trying to hunker down and get some real reading/writing done, and I'm making progress, but my committee meeting next week is looming at me. I have a magnet of a cartoon on my fridge that says "Clive was about to come face to face with the ball he had dropped long ago." I haven't exactly dropped the ball -- am doing a lot of reading and thinking about this project -- but not much of it has coalesced or made it to paper. Still a lot of uncertainty, the kind that Frank and Barnett help me walk through, but Lita tends to squish a bit. So I need to get on top of that.
In the middle of this stewing of ideas, my little online world had some upheaval. A grating cohabitation of worldviews finally came to a head (I think it can best be described as a some flailing badly-hidden judgement from a bunch of small minded christians and the final burst of impatience from a bunch of hooerish pagans -- the usual clash of civilizations). After a Battle Royale, a bunch of us just left and set up a new place. I like to think of it as a Quiet Revolution, abruptly creating a new world where we are no longer bound by the strictures of the Church and they sell unconsecrated hosts in the local depanneur. More drama than I wanted to deal with, but it feels much better to have an online hangout where the complexities of my life aren't met with tight-lipped head-shaking.
I'm trying to create some mindful, quieter space in all of this. I had a good longish run on Monday, hot and elemental, and a stroll-y walk to and home from the dentist yesterday. The view across Riverdale park from Broadview really is one of the best moments in the city. It was good to immerse myself in it, glide through the balmy air and the baseball playing and the people sitting on their porches in Cabbagetown and the honking shouting Italians and the yacking cellphoners on the streetcar. Ran this morning and detoured to my old street so I could see what A has done to the house -- I knew she was doing some work, and it looks good. It's yellow, now, with some really nice landscaping.
Many things in my life are crystalizing -- getting crisper on my conceptual framework for school, a couple of work possibilities, the shape that's starting to emerge for who I can be with F. The lake is in the way, and a few other distractions, but it feels like a life, a space, I can, want to, live into. Quite giddy-making, really.
And this morning, I toasted my bagel in my Grandma's toaster. This toaster doesn't pop, it glides the bread up. I like that sensation.
In the middle of this stewing of ideas, my little online world had some upheaval. A grating cohabitation of worldviews finally came to a head (I think it can best be described as a some flailing badly-hidden judgement from a bunch of small minded christians and the final burst of impatience from a bunch of hooerish pagans -- the usual clash of civilizations). After a Battle Royale, a bunch of us just left and set up a new place. I like to think of it as a Quiet Revolution, abruptly creating a new world where we are no longer bound by the strictures of the Church and they sell unconsecrated hosts in the local depanneur. More drama than I wanted to deal with, but it feels much better to have an online hangout where the complexities of my life aren't met with tight-lipped head-shaking.
I'm trying to create some mindful, quieter space in all of this. I had a good longish run on Monday, hot and elemental, and a stroll-y walk to and home from the dentist yesterday. The view across Riverdale park from Broadview really is one of the best moments in the city. It was good to immerse myself in it, glide through the balmy air and the baseball playing and the people sitting on their porches in Cabbagetown and the honking shouting Italians and the yacking cellphoners on the streetcar. Ran this morning and detoured to my old street so I could see what A has done to the house -- I knew she was doing some work, and it looks good. It's yellow, now, with some really nice landscaping.
Many things in my life are crystalizing -- getting crisper on my conceptual framework for school, a couple of work possibilities, the shape that's starting to emerge for who I can be with F. The lake is in the way, and a few other distractions, but it feels like a life, a space, I can, want to, live into. Quite giddy-making, really.
And this morning, I toasted my bagel in my Grandma's toaster. This toaster doesn't pop, it glides the bread up. I like that sensation.
Monday, July 03, 2006
Tessellations
I'm quilted with images from the weekend. 
My last glimpse of my grandmother, cold and small and dignified. My ex's hand in mine, tight, so familiar and so foreign, in front of my grandmother's coffin. Taking my cousin's hand and leading her inside to see Grandma, her a little sister for a moment, her gorgeous children in her husband's hands. Stef strolling the graveyard in her cherry red hair with a sharpie, correcting the spelling of our name on the signs. Back at Grandma's, Em finding a fossilized egg, Tony 1982, solemnly holding it up. Issy and Seb dancing for the video camera on my phone. Em playfully dancing for the same camera. 
Jane's firefighter friend inspecting the plug on Grandma's toaster, the one I've always loved, before I took it as my memento. Jeff and Beth dancing in the hall, practicing for their wedding, earnestly playful.
My last Windsor image -- pulling off the expressway for a moment in Ste. Anne's cemetery, to see dad, leaving him a pink gerbera daisy I tugged out of the flower arrangement on his mom's coffin. His stone looks a bit lonely -- the ones around are obviously more frequently visited -- and it feels so ironic, given that he was always the centre force of whatever was going on. I find him there, though, always, just a brief connection, telling him where I've been and where I hope to go. Usually I bring him small rocks from where I've traveled, but I forgot to find something in Oregon. The single daisy -- his favourite flower -- sparked some vividness into the grey stone.
My drive home was far more floaty than my drive out, less time in the speedy zone with propulsive music, more intuitive but relaxed traffic flow. I hit a storm near London that plunged me into the familiar world of my childhood storm watching, the weird grey charged sky counterpointed the suddenly vivid greens of the trees, lightning flicking down all around me. I miss those overheated moments of heightened ions, where colours are stark, the air alive, my breath shorter and giddy. Storms always evoke the family nexus of the cottage, so distant now, my mother's entire family dissipated, my hours of staring at the lake stored in the place of fragmented dreams and dimly remembered novels.
This has been such a year of reminding me of the allotment of decades, the stacking up of history that is simultaneously part of the learned present and snapped suspended into an image that I need to peer at to remind myself of any resonance, struggle to remember. My split, the scattering of some friends of my life with A, the deaths of friends' parents, John, Grandma. No reconnection with my mother's sister. So many shifts, and here I am, made of all of this mosaic of life stories, looking where I want to go. With F, with my work, with my bio and chosen family. Living into as much vividness as I can.
My last glimpse of my grandmother, cold and small and dignified. My ex's hand in mine, tight, so familiar and so foreign, in front of my grandmother's coffin. Taking my cousin's hand and leading her inside to see Grandma, her a little sister for a moment, her gorgeous children in her husband's hands. Stef strolling the graveyard in her cherry red hair with a sharpie, correcting the spelling of our name on the signs. Back at Grandma's, Em finding a fossilized egg, Tony 1982, solemnly holding it up. Issy and Seb dancing for the video camera on my phone. Em playfully dancing for the same camera. 
Jane's firefighter friend inspecting the plug on Grandma's toaster, the one I've always loved, before I took it as my memento. Jeff and Beth dancing in the hall, practicing for their wedding, earnestly playful. My last Windsor image -- pulling off the expressway for a moment in Ste. Anne's cemetery, to see dad, leaving him a pink gerbera daisy I tugged out of the flower arrangement on his mom's coffin. His stone looks a bit lonely -- the ones around are obviously more frequently visited -- and it feels so ironic, given that he was always the centre force of whatever was going on. I find him there, though, always, just a brief connection, telling him where I've been and where I hope to go. Usually I bring him small rocks from where I've traveled, but I forgot to find something in Oregon. The single daisy -- his favourite flower -- sparked some vividness into the grey stone.
My drive home was far more floaty than my drive out, less time in the speedy zone with propulsive music, more intuitive but relaxed traffic flow. I hit a storm near London that plunged me into the familiar world of my childhood storm watching, the weird grey charged sky counterpointed the suddenly vivid greens of the trees, lightning flicking down all around me. I miss those overheated moments of heightened ions, where colours are stark, the air alive, my breath shorter and giddy. Storms always evoke the family nexus of the cottage, so distant now, my mother's entire family dissipated, my hours of staring at the lake stored in the place of fragmented dreams and dimly remembered novels.
This has been such a year of reminding me of the allotment of decades, the stacking up of history that is simultaneously part of the learned present and snapped suspended into an image that I need to peer at to remind myself of any resonance, struggle to remember. My split, the scattering of some friends of my life with A, the deaths of friends' parents, John, Grandma. No reconnection with my mother's sister. So many shifts, and here I am, made of all of this mosaic of life stories, looking where I want to go. With F, with my work, with my bio and chosen family. Living into as much vividness as I can.
Sunday, July 02, 2006
The Pollard Triplets
Yesterday was a very. full. day. I kissed F goodbye at 7:00 a.m., knowing I wouldn't see him again for weeks, ran back in with a latte for him, clutching my own americano, then hurled myself onto the highway. I was still on Spadina at 7:30, impatiently cursing the four enormous Chinese tour busses moving like whales to my tiny aggressive fighting fish, but then attacked the road. Being late for the funeral would have been Not. On, so I focused all of the energy in my body into driving fiercely and fully, fast but very focused and attentive. Pulled into the parking lot at Sacred Heart Church in Lasalle just before 10:30. This was a Feat.
First people I saw were my stepmom and youngest sister, then my dear cousin Matt, then, in the foyer to the church, A. She was weepy, and we held each other. She held onto me as I said goodbye to Grandma, crying and saying, "she always accepted us, she was always nice to me." This was true. She was a very accepting woman in some profound ways -- picky about things that related to *her*, but not about how other people lived their lives. Bloody independent. Fiercely determined. (These things I apparently come by honestly).
Being with A was so resonant in this family space. She stayed for the mass, and I could feel the shift from loving connection to a more guarded place as the hour beside each other wore on. But that was okay. We quietly provided entertainment for my cousin's two year old in front of us (A's sunglasses, my business cards), Laura matter of factly referring to A as "Auntie A" to Serene. Still family, of course, in this swirl of a clan that included all manner of exes as well as currents. Stef and I joked that the obit should have just said "survived by a giant unruly brood," and this captures it -- roles not so important.
I do love my clan. From the three aunts who fostered me into being in so many different ways to my cousins who are so in my heart to the impromptu queer caucus Jen, Stef and I found ourselves in. Jen has come into being the person she has been navigating since she was about 3, and this is so good to see. Em and I planning a road trip together because we don't spend any alone time. Petra whispering to me at the sign of peace "don't forget us, there's no one to hold us together." We hang together softly and tentatively, poky bits here and there, shaping each other more gently than my mother's family did.
It's all about belonging, seeing ourselves in our quiet roots, telling the stories. We went back to Grandma's afterwards and went through photo albums, drank some beer, ate leftovers. Looked for the easter eggs that were still in the rafters -- Em found one that said Tony 1982. The annual hunt my dad made. Heard the stories of my dad cramming all the kids into his van without telling anyone else and taking them for ice cream. My dad taking the giggle of girls for a walk on the train tracks in their easter dresses, bringing them back a bit shredded and grubby and overheated with adventure. My dad so missed in the leavening of the clan.
Looking at the pictures, we cooed about resemblances -- "look, this picture of Tony at 8 -- I never noticed before how much Raymond looks like him." "Is this Matt, Chris or Ray?" Mocking our foibles -- "which wedding was THIS, Aunt Susan?" Trying to trace the stories that wind us together. "What baby are you holding here, Mary Ann?"
Some of the stories are so peripheral they evaporate even as we look at the pictures. "I think that's one of the Pollard triplets," said Mary Ann about the mystery baby. I have no idea who the Pollards are, really, remember hearing the name, maybe neighbours, like the 1930s mom bathing her tiny baby (Dick, 5 weeks, it says on the back) in a bowl on a table, gone forever now, an erased extra in our central narrative, someone who shaped my grandmother at some point in her life. Recognizing that we're all like that, vivid in our present moments, eliding into an cypher in an album in an old lady's house as decades slide by.
It all makes me determined to continue to grab onto the present with fierce joy. I want to find a way to help make sure there that without the centre to our clan, we still stay connected. That I keep building the sense of family with A. That as I figure out what kind of a "we" there could be with F, it stays vivid and rooted and about delighting each other.
I left my grandmother's with her toaster as a memento (I love that she used it everyday), and an old pie plate and muffin tin for Melissa. I think she'll like those. My bag is full of photos to scan and build into our mythology about dad, our senses of self among the brood. Stef was worried it would feel like pillaging, but it didn't -- we were building stories together, respectfully talking about what kinds of mementos people would like to take. Using my new treo to take little videos of Issy dancing, Seb kung fu fighting, Em dancing when I bid her to. A swirl of an unruly brood, carrying ourselves forward, connected.
First people I saw were my stepmom and youngest sister, then my dear cousin Matt, then, in the foyer to the church, A. She was weepy, and we held each other. She held onto me as I said goodbye to Grandma, crying and saying, "she always accepted us, she was always nice to me." This was true. She was a very accepting woman in some profound ways -- picky about things that related to *her*, but not about how other people lived their lives. Bloody independent. Fiercely determined. (These things I apparently come by honestly).
Being with A was so resonant in this family space. She stayed for the mass, and I could feel the shift from loving connection to a more guarded place as the hour beside each other wore on. But that was okay. We quietly provided entertainment for my cousin's two year old in front of us (A's sunglasses, my business cards), Laura matter of factly referring to A as "Auntie A" to Serene. Still family, of course, in this swirl of a clan that included all manner of exes as well as currents. Stef and I joked that the obit should have just said "survived by a giant unruly brood," and this captures it -- roles not so important.
I do love my clan. From the three aunts who fostered me into being in so many different ways to my cousins who are so in my heart to the impromptu queer caucus Jen, Stef and I found ourselves in. Jen has come into being the person she has been navigating since she was about 3, and this is so good to see. Em and I planning a road trip together because we don't spend any alone time. Petra whispering to me at the sign of peace "don't forget us, there's no one to hold us together." We hang together softly and tentatively, poky bits here and there, shaping each other more gently than my mother's family did.
It's all about belonging, seeing ourselves in our quiet roots, telling the stories. We went back to Grandma's afterwards and went through photo albums, drank some beer, ate leftovers. Looked for the easter eggs that were still in the rafters -- Em found one that said Tony 1982. The annual hunt my dad made. Heard the stories of my dad cramming all the kids into his van without telling anyone else and taking them for ice cream. My dad taking the giggle of girls for a walk on the train tracks in their easter dresses, bringing them back a bit shredded and grubby and overheated with adventure. My dad so missed in the leavening of the clan.
Looking at the pictures, we cooed about resemblances -- "look, this picture of Tony at 8 -- I never noticed before how much Raymond looks like him." "Is this Matt, Chris or Ray?" Mocking our foibles -- "which wedding was THIS, Aunt Susan?" Trying to trace the stories that wind us together. "What baby are you holding here, Mary Ann?"
Some of the stories are so peripheral they evaporate even as we look at the pictures. "I think that's one of the Pollard triplets," said Mary Ann about the mystery baby. I have no idea who the Pollards are, really, remember hearing the name, maybe neighbours, like the 1930s mom bathing her tiny baby (Dick, 5 weeks, it says on the back) in a bowl on a table, gone forever now, an erased extra in our central narrative, someone who shaped my grandmother at some point in her life. Recognizing that we're all like that, vivid in our present moments, eliding into an cypher in an album in an old lady's house as decades slide by.
It all makes me determined to continue to grab onto the present with fierce joy. I want to find a way to help make sure there that without the centre to our clan, we still stay connected. That I keep building the sense of family with A. That as I figure out what kind of a "we" there could be with F, it stays vivid and rooted and about delighting each other.
I left my grandmother's with her toaster as a memento (I love that she used it everyday), and an old pie plate and muffin tin for Melissa. I think she'll like those. My bag is full of photos to scan and build into our mythology about dad, our senses of self among the brood. Stef was worried it would feel like pillaging, but it didn't -- we were building stories together, respectfully talking about what kinds of mementos people would like to take. Using my new treo to take little videos of Issy dancing, Seb kung fu fighting, Em dancing when I bid her to. A swirl of an unruly brood, carrying ourselves forward, connected.
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