Home. Sleep. Work.

We went to the aquarium yesterday before going to the airport and bifurcating in different directions. I was completely enamoured of the sea dragons -- tiny filmy flying creatures that seem part plant, part animal, almost translucent, completely hypnotizing. I'd never seen them before. Couldn't quite capture them with my camera phone, but you can see the orangey little outline in the background here. You can see the essence, anyway.

I liked the lumpfish too -- very PRESENT. F laughed about the metaphoric nature of them for us this weekend -- lumpy with fatigue and illness, but with a hidden store of roe. We did enjoy each other despite the malaise -- a good thing.

The odd anemones from the PNW habitat tank also made an impression. So cartoony, so sireny. It IS my place, that part of the world. I miss the glowing purple starfish and the salmon that jump right out of the water A and I saw kayaking off Quadra Island. Need to have my paddle in that sea again soon.

The aquarium was the perfect place for the not-so energetic -- after lunch, when we were flagging but it wasn't time to go to the airport yet, so we just leaned against the glass in the lower spiral of the big tank and stared at the bottom feeding fish for about 20 minutes, not really talking but just happy to be there, not having to do anything. Very peaceful.

Like my flat, here, Peggy Lee and her ilk pumping through I-tunes to my remote speakers, waiting for my pal L to come for lunch, working away at my desk. Home is good.

Eloise in Boston

Big cushy hotels are the perfect place to not feel terribly well. I've orbitted around this tower of a posh insulating bubble for the weekend, working perched up in the Heavenly Bed, stretching toes only blocks out the door, for a couple of lunches with friends, and a frustrating attempt to procure Advil Cold. I didn't realize I would be suspected of alchemizing crystal meth from 8 tablets of pseudoephedrine in the bathroom on this 32nd floor of the westin and forced to produce id, which I'd left in the room when I just grabbed 20 bucks. Both F and I are sick with some virus with an apparently endless parade of diverse symptoms... this being sick together thing is deeply intimate, fluid-bonding of a completely raw kind.

P keeps joking about Tales from the Dr's Girlfriend. I didn't see F speak yesterday, though apparently he was the hit of the meeting. Speaking to 4000 people is some level of self-presentation I've never contemplated... despite feeling like crap, I think he wowed them. Here I am, waking up with a "state of the art" speaker, and being Supportive GF at a fancy professionally plotting dinner with a species heretofore unknown to me, transplant surgeons.

Transplant surgeons are apparently driven people, creative and about as unsqueamish as you get. Dr. S emboddied this, tearing at her tbone with her teeth, fishing mushrooms out of the communal dish with casual but precise fingers. Hair flying and eyes a little small at the end of the meal, ripe with rich food and wine, she evangelized me and M about needing to have children, repeatedly thrusting a picture of her late-in-life son on her treo at us. When we protested that this wasn't in the cards, and F and R actually laid their vasectomies on the table as trump cards, she offered to perform some reversing tabletop microsurgery. Then she went off to hear some jazz.

Home this afternoon. After the aquarium. Will drag my viral-laden self back across the border to a loooooong sleep.

Pouring in Boston

Snatches of life from Boston, conference groupie at a meeting of liver doctors...

1. If you fly tango, you have to pay $50 to check your bag. Even if it would fit as carry on. Because of non ziplocked liquids. And all of this after navigating bitchy Air Canada Line Lady who wouldn't direct me to the shorter line for Those Who Bothered to Print Boarding Passes at home.

2. Everyone on planes now fused to their blackberries and treos until the last possible moment. Wonder if it would be possible to muster muscle if cockpit-storming required.

3. High concentration of French liver doctors. Why french? Foie gras? The french are stylish.

4. F's friend R's gf M also v. stylish. Flinty and girly and smart. Couple dating. F and I have the same level of ambition about dining out -- good not grand food, quickly brought, except on Fancy Occasions. Last night was a bit of a misfire -- reservation not until 9:30, and even then not honoured by 10:20 -- yucky contretemps with smarmy tanned-like-cheap-leather-ottoman manager, eventual eating too late in lower key place. But good. Suddenly the people I know do research and have fellowships and know what the inside of human bodies looks like.

5. Third time in boston, first time it feels perfectly right. The first time, tense weekend leading up to running 26 miles through the streets in an undefined quest to own myself. The second time, Cambridge with Suzie to learn more about dialogue across incommensurate positions with the Public Conversations Project, tense with loss of my marriage. This time, the third time, just right. Some of my own work, meetings and conversations with my friends from online and life and school, and waking up beside a man who makes me happy. Just right. Despite the absolutely hosing down rain.

Just right.

Stacey

I have some pretty hot new shoes, too. I wore them last night on a really datey date, with my betsey johnston black silk dress and a lot of girly attitude. Had a sublime time.

A long weekend here in this leafy, rainy so-American suburb in western NY... in a completely unexpected narrative... working at the dining room table of a man I could have never imagined being my lover in any previous context... as he taps away on his work up the little windy twisty stairway to his lofty little office and mozart drifts through the house. Life unimagined, alive and joyful. A little surreal, especially the manic supermarkets and heavy car culture... but a portal to so many possibilities.

And now back to analysing truth claims in positioning theory-based research. Even more surreal.

Katrin

The name of these shockingly amazing boots, that is. Katrin. From Fluevog. Feel free to stroke them.

My present to myself for finishing my human development course, finally.

I'm going to sleep with them on the pillow next to me tonight.

It's still bloody pouring out, and I'm a wet dawwwg. But a wet dawwwg with some bloody hot boots.

Indira

One of my school friends is up for an award as a community organizing hero from Volvo. She's originally from Bosnia and works with expats who experienced violence in their homelands. If she wins this, she'll get a bunch of money to support her organization. Voting for her would be a great thing for anyone who stumbles across this blog to do.

To vote, go here: http://www.volvoforlifeawards.com and enter the keyword Kajosevic in the "find your hero" search box. Then vote for Indira Kajosevic in the voting option on the left. (There's a profile of her there as well).

To find out more about her organization, go here: http://www.raccoon.balkansnet.org

Half shells

Stephanie and I went out to Oyster Boy last night. We had an urge to slurp raw seafood, and we're evolving this pattern of enjoying Friday night dinners together when we can.

Oysters are a funny thing for me -- I never ate a raw one until a couple of years ago -- my ex was horrified by seafood in its most aggressive form (she shuddered for years everytime she thought about the "lobster massacre" in PEI that literally made her turn pale and flee the scene). Oysters just weren't on the menu. I could smuggle smoked ones into dinner party appetizers (which she avoided), or eat the occasional baked one on the west coast, but no slurping of the briney juice. I ate my first raw one on my first mid-breakup date, and have been pursuing them with some vehemence on the right occasions since. I indulged in a bunch at a great vaguely-south-american restaurant in Portland the night before I came home, sitting at the crowded bar, talking to a guy who wanted me to go hear jazz with him. Such a CateSelf I hadn't ever imagined.

Last night was a bit spontaneous, and we hadn't made a reservation. We ended up getting our table through a funny little loop in time. While striding down the street to meet S -- first time wearing my red wool coat this season -- I heard someone say my name tentatively. It was K, half of K&R, the "couple friends" A and I had spent New Year's Eve with for 6 or 7 of the years we were together. We had drifted away a bit in the last 2 or 3 years, but I was also a little bit ... well, hurt might be too strong a word, but I noticed that they never called me once during my divorce. K checked in once via email when I sent out a group change of address notice, but no call, no dinner invite, etc. Not a big deal -- they weren't really intimate friends at that point -- and they are also an incredibly enmeshed couple, who probably can't fathom what people really need in that kind of circumstance. And I hadn't exactly called them up and said "let's all go out for dinner" either. Still. They clearly qualify as "people I'd spent good friend time with who were no longer in my life."

And here they were, on Queen, K trying to figure out the parking rules, R waiting in the car. "Where are you going?" she said. "Oyster Boy," I chirped. "Oh, we were going to go there, but they told us we'd have to give up our table by 8:30." (It was 7:00). We chatted a bit, awkwardly, I knocked on the window of their CRV and said hi to R, who was canceling their reservation. Then I skipped off. At the restaurant, was told, "yes, we have one table for two, you'll have to be done by 8:30." No worries, I said.

S and I drank cosmos, engaged cute pierced waiter boy in trying to get us the food before our deadline, more cocktails. And then? At 8:30? They offered to move us to another table, so we could stay as long as we wanted, shifted our original table over to make a six.

We had a great time. And I remembered the fussing that K&R could do, the hesitancy that comes from worrying about constraints. Constraints that frankly? Just aren't there. I think I used to fret about things like that too -- "ooooh, the table is needed, we might not have enough TIME, it won't be FUN" -- instead, we rolled, we flowed, we slurped, and it was yummy and perfect.

Seriously. Snow.

There's a freaking snowstorm grinding Buffalo to a halt.

I never cared so much about the weather patterns in western NY before.

Mayhem

I came home from lunch on Wednesday and there were five streetcars backed up in the northbound part of the spadina transit lane, a bus coming south in the streetcar lane. The drivers, fire fighters and cops were all milling about, stalled, no clear story. I turned onto my street, and there was an ambulance blocking the road, a paramedic ferrying a woman with a big gash on her head out of one of the stores on the street level of my building. I opened the door to my building, and there was a big sign from another resident that someone had tried to break into their loft at 4:30 a.m., that their dogs had scared them off, beseeching the rest of us to be careful about who we let into the building (note that these signs disappeared quickly, which irked me -- I want this community grapevine). Edges of chaos.

Then yesterday? Walking home from my meeting? I felt wet drops... but they looked oddly visible... and then, there it was. Snow. Snow falling. On October 12. Leaves whipped around me and the snow blew straight at me and I was out without gloves of course. Because it was October 12th.

I spent the evening in bed reading Dan Savage's book about marriage and eating good things. It seemed the right thing to do.

Inversions

Had a vivid and soggy evening last night. Soggy literally – my umbrella was lost in a melee over chairs as dykes of all types scrambled to cram the Gladstone to the rafters for the Ivan Coyote/Alison Bechdel “not a reading series” reading, and I wound up stalking home fiercely in the rain, thoughts swirling, my vintage lambswool and fur jacket clammy, hair soaked. My head was so full (can I make this blog play “Mind like a playgroup” as soundtrack?) that I was quite distracted from enjoying my dear friend D who was walking with me from Parkdale down Queen; I’m sure she was relieved to climb on the streetcar and leave me behind.

The reading was stellar. Ivan is the consummate storyteller, so genderqueer flirty and funny and moving. Her stage presence is bigger than Alison’s – her medium is oral telling, and in the Q&A after she quite nonplussed Alison with some arch banter about Alison’s long, buffed fingers with the carefully trimmed nails. Alison was so touching, the narrative around the images about her father coming to life as she read slowly, giving us time to savour the graphics huge on screen behind her.

One of the… well, episodes, for lack of a better word, in that memoir (still the best thing I’ve read this year – Fun Home – buy it! is the section about lilacs and lust, inspired by her father’s affinity for Proust. She counterpoints her father’s closeted gayness to her own emergent butch self, her own coming out, with a play on “invert,” the clinical term for queerness contemporary with Proust. It’s so painstaking, so painful, all of this weaving of never-uttered but so visible narrative across their lives in that obsessively restored, obsessively ornamented home in the small town in Pennsylvania.

It was pure joy to see both of these amazing truth-makers in person… I’ve loved Bechdel since I came out, fell in love with Ivan the first time I heard “I like to wear dresses” on Bill Richardson’s show on CBC a few years ago, the story about her queer child friend Francis in Yukon, whose growing up and into the world she continues to chronicle. And I also felt a fair amount of inversion myself… so at home in these stories, but simultaneously in the edge of them.

The crowd was huge and pulsing, and I think this was part of my dislocation. A lot of people with different history for me, from good friends (S&L, who identify so tightly with Ivan’s experiences, I think), to a woman I went on one date with who then started ignoring my emails, to a few other people it was just nice to run into. But one unsettling conversation as well.

I ran into a guy who was half of a couple that was “the” stalwart couple of the poly world, someone my ex used to hang out with. He and his wife seemed to make a marriage that tolerated what seemed to me to be almost unbearable levels of poly activity, unbearably raw pushing at what just about anyone would inscribe as comfort levels. They would have deep “in love” relationships with other people, cc-ing each other on their emails with the others; I once saw the female half of this couple making out with the woman I knew her husband was head over heels in love with. This just seemed… unbearable to me. I always thought they had terrible, loose, guardrail-gaping-over-the-edge-of-the-cliff boundaries… frayed edges that made me feel deeply uneasy just to be around them… but I would shrug a bit – “clearly this works for them, wouldn’t work for me, it’s frantic and overheated and too much, but maybe they are proof that this is possible.” And of course, they’ve split up, badly, a messy breakup leaving an infant and a preschooler in its wake.

My conversation with this guy shook me, made me uneasy, made me think hard about how to make intimacy where the “right kind” of honesty prevails, where the frame of “telling” isn’t everything, but really listening and responding to what’s happening, what’s truly happening, knowing and choosing the stories that could be written in one split second bifurcation moment.

I guess this comes back to the neglected dissertation proposal, the question of how we make each other in intimacy, how we choose what we are making for the other person. I watched Ivan and Alison, the truth tellers who do it so well, who make rich meaning and humour and raw emotion all woven together, elevating meaning. I think about how F and I have grappled with some of the what if questions – what are we writing now with these choices that could make the patterns for later if we’re not careful? I think about the bifurcation for myself in that crowded room in the Gladstone last night, where I’ve Cajun danced (badly) to Swamparella with my ex, been to karaoke parties, seen my sister dance in her burlesque troupe, surrounded last night by dykes and my history, pondering on my tongue possibilities that could look so different, so far away from the city that has really made me. Choices. Truth. Stories. Enacting the “real” parts of ourselves in different contexts, like Ivan’s narrative about becoming the nice young man on the plane who loved to hear the 89 year old widow’s story. The part of her that is true and real, despite the widow’s friend’s eagerness to tell her friend that she was mistaken about Ivan’s gender, that she’d entrusted herself to something she was wrong about. Who she was in that moment. Where we choose to be who we can be.

Covetousness

I spent last night with my ex, loading up her shiny new silver nano with the music of her life. Music I shared with her, music that writes her stories since we've been apart. She sat in my cosy blue armchair next to my desk while I did the techie thing, and we ate ice cream and chatted. Warm and family now, knowing each other, both in the same place that we are where we need to be in exploring the various possibilities of our separate lives. It hasn't escaped us that her current squeeze is exactly half the age and a different gender from mine. It's almost absurdly pointed.

It was a good connecting evening, and I caressed her shiny silver toy with incredible covetousness. But what I *really* yearn for is this one -- black, 8GB, perfect, tactile. Calling out for a fondling fingertip. I am shameless.

Onto a busy rainy October day -- client work, a networking lunch, continuing to write the paper I finally made the good explosive assault on yesterday, a good queer evening with Spidertattoo, to see Alison Bechdel and Ivan Coyote, storytellers extraordinaire.

Me, happy

F took this pic this weekend. Me, gelling my hair, after a shower, after a shared run, looking at him.

I noticed this morning that he had left a chair in my living room turned around. He always does this, twists a chair around to put on his shoes, then doesn't turn it back. I like this little mark he leaves on my flat. A tiny rearrangement of my furniture, a substantial rearrangement of my life, sense of who I am. Bodies in motion.

The most heterosexual thing I've ever done

I went to Harry Rosen this weekend and bought a man a tie. The most perversely heterosexual act I've ever committed. F has an Important Interview next week in LA, and this was a talisman for him. The experience was surreal -- but oddly fun. More impersonation :-).

It was a good weekend, real watershed "here we are as a we" moment. Good time to fold into thanksgiving. Low key turkey at D&D's was just about perfect last night.

And now, I'm sleepy. Finished setting up the shiny-covet-one-of-my-own nano I bought for A for her birthday (on these fronts, I may be the Best Ex Ever), and now I'm eyeing the paper I should be pecking away at, the theory I should be trying to blear my way through, and instead I think I'll end up picking up either the new Alice Munro I bought yesterday or the Lynn Peril social history of women as college students. Sleep. Popcorn for dinner, in bed, I think.

"Here I am at my most hungry....

.... and here i am at my most full..."

Ani difranco finds the right phrase again. Just home from B's wedding, such a full and resonant weekend, and feeling topped over with astonishing connection with F... and so hungry, so hungry for all of it. Learning to breathe and trust that even though it still feels like we're making our way up a tough climb with ice axes sometimes to be able to orbit the same space, that we are going to the same place, a place that just gets more sure. We had fun at the wedding, playing with my old prof Tom, dancing, just being together.

B was beautiful, and the wedding was quirky elegant, and she and J are very happy. It made me glad to be there to witness it...feeling absolutely certain that it doesn't approximate anything that I aspire to. Not that particular variation on commitment, anyway. Wrapped up in F though I was, I was also experiencing the edges of being able to look, in a crowd like this, like a couple who takes this for granted, an unremarkable pair, really. Such privilege, the ability to just lose ourselves in each other, self-conscious only about being a little too starry eyed for public scrutiny, not living the reality of my last two decades where even acceptance is active, remarkable, pointed.

I was thinking about my sister's wedding, four years ago this very weekend, where dancing with A was of course unremarkable among my family -- such acceptance in aunts and uncles who went out of their way to assert that if *we* ever got married, they'd want to be there. But realizing that even among that crowd, even as I danced with her in a swingingly joyful way that was captured in one of my favourite pics of us, we were never *intimate* in a crowd in the same way, always a little self-conscious and a tiny bit wary. We were the last people on the dance floor at that wedding, A and I and another female couple who actually worked at the resort and slipped into dancing in that last moment, joining us as my youngest sister pliéd around us, a poignant moment of claiming space when almost everyone else had gone to change for the bonfire. That was a moment of acceptance... but an assertion, not the taking for granted.

I lived into "straightCate" last night -- betsey johnson dress, gold strappy sandals and all -- and loved wearing the floaty dress, loved F's amused admiration of me. Was joyful that we could be at this place at this moment in time together. But also so clear about what I'm carving for myself (for us?) as I intersect with this taken for granted place, where my notion of queer/unconventional will always prevail. One is not to take this for granted, to always have the radar about privilege open, and to try to assert solidarity where it's important. The other is to recognize that I can still carve my notions of what it means to love separately from the forms -- even when the forms seem to be the obvious ones.