World AIDS Day

It's World AIDS Day. The story is familiar -- nearly 40 million people are living with HIV worldwide. In sub-saharan Africa, 1 in 16 adults has HIV or AIDS, with the stat in some southern African countries one in THREE. The pandemic in Africa has left children orphaned and raising other children, grandmothers desperate for food.

I was overwhelmed by the story of Africa before... and now that I'm involved in this orphanage project, what I always knew sort of intellectually is a constant source of humility.

I'm now talking several times a week in email and once a week or so on the phone with the director of our orphanage, a surreal hands-on connection to the most other-worldly life imaginable. When Danny and I called her last week, she was in the middle of being questioned by security police from the government who were investigating an adoption that took place from the orphanage. About a third of our children have HIV or AIDS, and their life stories are searing -- babies left in empty buildings in plastic bags. A little boy castrated and left for dead by rebels who killed his parents in front of him. Children living like wild dogs in the streets of villages. Malaria, TB, fear, worry.

And here they are, being fed, going to school, housed, their medical needs being taken care of. Loved by the staff as much as possible and so bizarrely, so uncomfortably but necessarily, by the mezengu -- foreigners -- us -- who show up to fix the showers and beds, buy mosquito nets, figure out how to buy food and pillows and shoes.

Making meaning of the post-colonial discomfort of this project, trying to make this grassroots development that creates a self-sustaining, locally based entity, provides the kids with a healthy, educated upbringing, sets them up as productive members of their communities. All good things, and constantly catching me behind the knees.

These are some of the kids.
This is the breathtaking landscape.

My friend B went to the AIDS conference in Toronto this summer with her now-husband, who's an HIV doctor. It shook her. When she was getting fitted for her wedding dress a week later, two of the Wedding Dress Store Ladies were rabbitting on about the Problem with her hem, the height of her shoes, etc. She suddenly blurted, "THIS is not a problem. You know what a problem is? A grandmother in Africa who has to decide which of her kids gets to eat tonight."

Check out the updates from the UNAIDS website. Donate to the Stephen Lewis Foundation. Sponsor one of our kids for a week, month, year. Just pause for a moment and savour the perspective.

Angles

I've had a few really nice connecting moments with my ex over the past couple of days -- we went out to talk about her trip and see photos on Tuesday night -- and then I offered to update her ipod. Had some technical difficulties, so I had to go over last night and pick up the USB cord from her -- my former -- house.

I was fiddling with the controls and wondering if it was going to rain as I walked past the house A and I lived in from 1991 to 1996, just before we bought our house. Our former landlord was in the front yard, briskly raking leaves in the dark. I hadn't seen her for at least 10 years, and I stopped abruptly, sort of surprised that she still lived there.

When we lived there, she was half of a slightly oddball, endearing couple. She's a housing economist, and her husband is a Brit nuclear physicist who also has a master's in English and was given to declaiming Shakespeare at the most unlikely moments. Most evenings, he curled up with heavy duty dark beer and his computer to write science fantasy novels filled with highly sexed literary characters come to life. He looked like a Seuss character -- grinchly -- but kindly. They have a son who was about 12 or 13 when we moved in, with lead soldiers still scattered about, and who, when we moved out, had reached a theatrical stage that involved fencing, silk lounging gowns, cigarettes and glasses of wine at 11 a.m. on the terrace.

The woman is a prof at a university about an hour outside of Toronto, and lived in that town during the week while the son and the husband lived downstairs from us. They were always a bit quirky -- Marion was given to shouting a little when she got excited, a sort of displaced English headmistress type, and D maintained all sorts of fictions about his level of cigarette consumption (M reported 6 a day, which we knew to be a gross underestimation) and general debauchery. They were excellent landlords -- M built us a little balcony for our barbeque off the living room before we even moved in, and added a terrace on the third floor for us, both times hiring people she thought needed the work, with the expected vagaries of excellent storytelling while the work was underway and slightly off centre results.

After we moved out, and the son went away to school, a couple of our friends moved into our flat. Left to his own devices, D apparently gave full rein to his appetites, and L&N reported Outrageous Shenanigans -- L spotting D at Full Mast through a window about to roger two spritely chicks when she was walking her dog; a visitor to their place accidentally ringing the wrong doorbell and being greeted by D in a leather codpiece, etc.

So. I heard through the grapevine that eventually they'd split up, that D had moved to the east coast and was living with an opera singer in a very dirty house and regaling the locals with his many tales down the pub. But I hadn't seen either of them in years.

Last night, when I saw M, we chatted, and we had the weirdest conversation all about our breakups, framed entirely from the perspective of a housing economist. "Are you still in the house up the street, or have you moved up?" "Actually, we're not together anymore, A is still in that house, I bought a loft in Kensington Market." "Ah, well, see, you both benefitted from that investment, it let you both be in the market. D bought me out and has a nice house in L--, though he complains about his property taxes."

Then there was a bit of chatter about her gay nephew in Calgary and why he had never procreated, and why he would live in Calgary of all places as a gay man, and how she and D were on good terms, which is best, really, and all of the lesbian couples who had inhabited our old flat, and how now two straight grad students were there, Americans, who disturbed her a little in their straightness, and then the size of my flat and the likelihood for the market to continue increasing, and well wishes all around, and then she muttered something about trying to get tulip bulbs into the ground despite the tree roots (um,and the fact that it's DECEMBER?) and then we bid farewell, both a little chuffed by the encounter.

Paradoxes

The Harper govt is reopening the conversation on same sex marriage. Sigh. Another round of bombast and heightened, hair-splitting rhetoric that creates us/them. More bullying in the guise of "I'm not opposed to GAYS, just to the changing of MARRIAGE, why can't they be satisfied with common law rights," blah blah blah blah blah. The same familiar, wearying strange loop of legitimacy extended and then questioned as soon as it's cautiously trusted.

In an earlier round on this topic, during the US marriage revolution in San Francisco a couple of years ago, Alison Bechdel made one of the cleverest comments on the complexity of the marriage project, having Sydney sink to her knee with a bouquet of flowers and propose to Mo: Will you do me the honour of paradoxically reinscribing and destabilizing hegemonic discourse with me?"

This is the core paradox -- the re-shaping of the idea of marriage while simultaneously taking it on as "the" expected frame, shaping queer families and life to look like the normative societal pairing. Yes, it's a basic right, to be treated the same as any other unit -- but the social effects are also clear, and not the ones that the conservatives imagine. Married queer couples become the "norm" and thus those outside the norm become a bit more queer, a bit more suspect -- I've heard comments like "when are you going to make an honest woman of her?" now that marriage is a possibility. The laws also create language to discuss what was once off limits -- when I was doing my little research project on marriage, several people noted that their relationships were now more available for public scrutiny -- parents who'd never acknowledged their kids' lovers in concrete terms suddenly started asking about wedding bells.

The inverse is also true -- I certainly notice that my relationship with F is more "in the public sphere" than any I've been in before -- people feel much more free to pass commentary on whether it's unfolding according to some predictable pattern or not (will you get married, do you think? (how ridiculous a question is that at not-quite-6 months?) You're not spending christmas together? REALLY. etc.) and to show more... interest than I noticed with other relationships. Of course there is the novelty factor of his being a guy, but the questions flow faster and more practiced than they ever did with women for me. One more conscious friend actually apologized later, noting that she'd done this and acknowledging an inadvertent dimunition of my queer relationships.

The bruising tumult of the debate that will surely unfold over the next few weeks will be too familiar -- people committing what feel like unspeakable acts of unthinking bias without apparently having a clue what they're doing...like the anti-gay-marriage parade I came across one day a few years ago, mostly filled with the usual suspects, but to my astonishment, including a large group of Christian Chinese Canadians. A minority group oppressing another minority, shockingly ignorant of a history that had once denied their own group marriage rights. Spotting one of the young women -- university age -- later cooing with delight over a tshirt with a stick figure formula marriage=1 man + 1 woman -- "OHHHH, so cuuuuute!"

Among all of this will be the usual wielding of the civil rights language (ads from a couple of years ago about drinking fountains and race evoking marriage), which then leads to the claims about biology and queerness "not being a choice," which of course then invokes the squiggly among us as Suspect... and misses the point, as far as I'm concerned, which is that in a just society, choice should count as much as pre-determination.

There will be people who mean well but still miss the point and hurt (like my online gang who got into a "I am glad my kids aren't gay because it would be hard on them" conversation last year and who couldn't hear those of us who said we were HAPPY to have gone through the experience of coming out, self-definition that comes with queerness). There will also be people queers have thought of as friends and allies saying astonishingly hurtful things, like "not if this costs me one penny."

In the middle of that, there will be the usual tentative attempts of the majority to signal that they are on-side, that they think the whole conversation is ridiculous. Like my mail carrier who
conspiratorily whispered to me one day a few years ago that he'd seen a New Yorker cartoon that he thought was very funny -- why would gays want to marry, "haven't they suffered enough?".

The discourse is shifting over time, and the whole thing is a deeply obvious example of the social construction of reality right in front of our eyes, how even having a public conversation creates space to make new meaning for people, to see connections ("why shouldn't queers marry -- it doesn't seem to have changed anything for me"), to change what we take for granted. Simultaneously reinforcing and destabilizing. But as wearying as once again reopening the Quebec question.

Yielding

I'm still in ROC, stretching myself over the US thanksgiving weekend, working away in the med school library. Making some progress on my... stuff, my unnameable stuff that might become something.

It's warm, here, climate-change weird warm, the gasp of faint sunlight that comes before winter smothers everything. F and I seized the moment to finally ride together on his bike, the avatar of some of our initial flirtation but which we'd never managed to get out on before.

Before my first date with F, when I was fussing about what to wear, my wry wise 8 y.o. friend Amelia firmly cooed at me, "He has a motorcycle? Oh, you're going to end up with him -- you always end up with the guy with the motorcycle."

Amelia's precognition aside, I always saw the bike as something potentially fun, a key element of some of F's most important narratives about shared dreams and voyages with his ex, a tie to my sister and BIL and their penchant for touring on a BMW. I never really eroticized bikes in the way of most dykes, or had the hankering to ride one of my own that my sister and several other female friends had, but I also never had the same level of horror at the potential risk of them that some of my friends did. I'd ridden with my long lost elfin Chris M and always expected another bike to show up someday. They simply ...were, a possibility, something interesting to someday explore, maybe, if the opportunity presented itself.

So Saturday, F taught me how to properly climb on behind, and we went off through the faintly clammy thin sunshine, stopping to buy me a properly fitting helmet, try on various armoured and waterproof jackets. Began to fantastize about trips of our own. Within about two miles, I knew that I loved it -- could imagine driving a bike of my own -- and even more, loved being behind F.

It's remarkably intimate, this thing of riding behind someone you love. There's an astonishing kind of ... yielding. I implicitly trust F's driving -- I've driven in the car enough with him, and I see what he watches for and sees -- and more than that, there's a flow of handing over control, letting myself lean with the bike, follow F's lead. There's a rush and an awakeness to it, but there's also an incredible peace, an entirely different, wordless dimension of presence. A suspension, like good yoga or the perfect run. The kind of yielding that makes rhythm with someone else, balanced on thighs pressed lightly around hips, F's hand reassuring on my knee when we're stopped at lights. So much movement, no desire or need for words, the sensation of energy lifted out of time, world clear and vivid as it passes, people putting up Christmas lights, trees without leaves, cars moving too ponderously, the lake sparkling like Cockburn's diamonds conjured up by wind and sunlight.

I think one of the things I'm learning in this relationship is how to follow a lead. When we were dancing at B's wedding a couple of months ago, F said with sudden amusement, "you're letting me lead." This is foreign for me. Letting his ideas weave with mine, welding together something new. Picking up and building.

When I last went to Chicago, I went to one of P's classes where she teaches improv as part of creative living and working, unlocking set channels. This was really the first time I'd done anything resembling improv, and at first I was all pleased with myself for being so open and creative in my enactment of the fragmented instructions. And then I realized that while I had interpreted the word "portrait" to refer to painting of some kind, everyone else in my group had seen photography and had some shared meaning. And I was sort of stubbornly clinging to my interpretation as the "right" one -- not noticing and flowing with everyone else's aligned meaning. Not much to build on, then.

A lot of my life and work is about finding my own unique voice, synthesizing other people's perspectives into something new. So many of my relationships have been about me leading, me in control. And with F, I'm learning a kind of yielding that makes a flow, a dance -- not a submissiveness, but a welding together that is about taking someone else's perspective that is different language, different angle than mine, and letting myself look through that lens, refracting both sets of ideas, seeing so much more.

The flow of the bike, the dance that's us, the yield, was counter-pointed last night by a bit of an Incident with F's friend R's girlfriend. R & M have been staying with us through the week. They've had a few bumps of their own, and M's way of coping is to be a bit... strident and polemical. I was in a quiet post-dinner space last night, just pensive and low-key, thinking about my work, calmly present with F, when they came in, full of a lot of energy. M somehow got off onto a tangent about whether Lincoln was gay or not that resulted in a fairly aggressive rant in which she attempted to pin me to the conversational mat with the verbal equivalent of a martial arts war cry at every point. I realized that I no longer have any space for this kind of aggressive form of "debate" -- as I've moved my work into deliberation, discussion, dialogue, I realize that I can only learn by hearing each other's perspectives, not obstreporously trying to refute them through rhetorical superiority.

Last night I was tired and I just sort of melted away and weakly, abruptly, excused myself to go to bed. Pondered the difference between the soft, open, generative yielding of flowing with someone you trust, and the air-sucked-out version of being made to yield to a show of force. Both forms of acceptance, one underbelly exposed and submissive, another expansive and inviting. Energy displaced or generated. Standing stronger, or bent and drained.

Hope is a thing...

My new passport arrived. Delivered by Gus, my toothless sweet female mail carrier. Scratching the little edge of itchiness I've had for the past two weeks while it was in process and my old one had CANCELLED stamped across it. The new rules that come into effect in January about needing one to fly to the US make me feel like it's just part of my basic should-have-on-me-at-all-times documentation. The wasps of a dispersed and cross-border life.

I got the last one right before I started my school program, and I think at the time I fully expected that by Feb. 15 2007 -- the expiry date -- I'd be done. Don't know where, who or what else I imagined being by the end of that span. That little booklet thingy punctuated many a flight in North America, but now that I think of it, not outside. Stories woven across the continent, a life left behind, whole new worldviews. The new one -- holds hopes -- feathered images of sturdy birds flying across oceans. It will be tucked in the outer pocket of my bag when I cross the car border this weekend to be with F -- nominally for thanksgiving, but really just a weekend. When I fly to CA this January, for my last winter session, maybe, as a student. With me when F and I strike out on some of the treks that will allow us to live into our imagined intrepid selves. Against my skin when I fly off to -- finally! -- claim the degree whose path seems so gnarled and knotty right now.

"Hope is a thing with feathers" indeed, perched in my soul. Hope and some bloody focused work.

My neighbour Kat

Wrote a brilliant blogpost about Christmas. She got stuck in the Santa Claus parade too. I un-endeared myself by muttering exCUSE me! rudely as I pushed through the crowd at Avenue and Bloor that I just happened to hit at the exact moment Santa did. Bah.

Kat's post captures it.

Full Mast

It was a patchworky weekend, resettling myself in my space after being away so much, shaking off the kinks of a dispersed life. Laundry, lots of visiting with babies and little kids, getting trapped in the santa claus parade crowd while walking home after brunch with D, fun gay boy party at which I comprised 1/3 of the women in the room.

The gay boys were the best graze of gays I've encountered in a while -- all very sweet and pretty and full of burble about their interesting jobs. One of them -- a contemporary dancer -- had been doing quasi-improvisational dance on the subway yesterday as part of a city project to... I dunno, put confrontational art into public spaces? Very cool -- I'd like to be on a subway car with an unexpected coloratura sometime.

Lots of little weavings -- the party was Trev's, and I went with S (pointing to blog links over on the side -->), and S and I had dinner with her brother B first. First we established the requisite degrees of separation ("I was at a lesbian running party in Riverdale last weekend" -- "I'll bet it was my friends B&E" -- "Yeah, that was them! And there was this guy I was SURE was gay but he claimed to be straight.." -- "my friend K!" -- "YEah, that's him!"....)

And then we moved into Gothic WASP Family territory, with B recounting the tale of his and Stephanie's grandmother and an Unfortunate Confession while he was driving her to the cottage a few years ago, her somewhat deaf then-husband obvlious in the back seat. "She told me about my grandfather's affair, about coming in and discovering him 'at full mast with that woman.'" B paused and arched his brows. "Full mast." Pause. "FULL MAST." Pause. "I nearly drove off the road." (Muttered) "Full mast."

For the rest of the evening, at any lull -- "Full mast." Darkly uttered, ironically uttered, exasperated. A catch all term for everything unspeakable. Invoking Wittgenstein: What we cannot speak of, we must pass over in silence.

Edit: Heh, I click on Stephanie's blog and see that she indeed posted about this same story today. Reached us both at the marrow :-).

While I was out....

...my neighbourhood went to hell in a handbasket. Our strictly no logo zone has acquired its first truly corporate retail outlet -- a fancy bread store with Heretofore Unknown Baked Goods. Confession: out of curiosity, I bought a cheese/olive scone to have with my chicken noodle soup. It was good.

I'm working on a paper right now for a course about Jane Jacobs' ideas about livable cities, and how this neighbourhood reflects the principles that make a "great" city, how the diversity of Toronto pushes the systemic edges beyond the tropes of food and ethnic dancing multiculturalism. I think there's a fair bit of bleating in the market about this shiny new store, and there are certainly people concerned that its a wedge of gentrification. It's a bit low that the market bakery moved out of there three doors down a few months ago because the landlord wouldn't make some key repairs, and the hard core market denizens certainly won't frequent it. I think the relative obscurity of the brand will soften its impact, though -- it's not the rallying point of a starbucks or some other american brand -- and it will likely make a less resistant path for more corporate chains.

This certainly creates a tiny bit of conflict for me -- I moved here because I like the edge of the market, like the self-referential and self-creating system, love the goat meat coexisting with the shiny produce and the xylophones and chinese bathing suits. And I don't want the three excellent, ramshackle, independent coffee places displaced. But hm, it's also nice to have new options for food, and yeah, good to know that maybe my property values will stay steady. Chaos and complexity, bleah.

Knowing me, I'll probably end up buying something at the market bakery for everything I buy at the new place. And I'll just end up pudgy out of my own wishy washy values.

My niece the cow

My littlest niece will be five months old tomorrow, on the 18th. Here she is, the cutest little cow ever, on Halloween. Here's what she can do: sit up propped against you; try to stand up on her own teeny feet; follow a conversation with her genetically less-likely blue eyes; bat at the little dangling toys and gurgle; demand to be on your lap instead of on her own on the floor; almost-a-push-up; joyfully, gurrrrggggly laugh.

Mica is also a shadow marker for me and F -- our first in-person meeting was the day before she was born. Her development milestones seem to put ours in perspective :-). Like Mica, we don't have to be handled with *absolute* care, we can be tossed around a bit. Kind of a good thing.

Invincibility

Postscript to post of the suburbs, gmail chat with Stephanie:

me: I passed two cemeteries on my 4.5 mile run

also 2 high schools

and 2 golf courses

shn: that's lots of dead people, people who think they're invincible and nearly dead people in a very small area

Heh.

It's not a bad place. The starbucks is nice, if in a rather twee building set off on its own, rather than tucked onto a busy urban street, the way a starbucks should be. There's a good carwash. And F's house is lovely, if prone to making a LOT of haunted-house sort of noises and being WAY too far apart from the neighbours for the comfort of a city mouse who likes her neighbours on the other side of a wall.

A hedge back home in the suburbs

over which I never could see...

Here I am, in a green leafy suburb in western NY. Rain across the continent, rain and gloom outside, working away suspended in this warm kitchen while F is mostly at work. Linked through a tangle of wires and wifi to the rest of my world -- taking advantage of F's digital phone for calls with clients, my colleagues, my sister, my friend -- endless yammer -- and the patchwork of email and online links. Between my treo, the gmail, ramshackle sympatico email, wifi --- I'm still in my world, but hovering above it.

F and I are sort of experimenting with this workaday connection, how we fit together when we're both in work mode. It's a little un/surreal -- he's in his own space, trying to navigate around me, I'm trying to find physical and head space to work remotely. An odd combination of the dispersed life, emotional and cognitive connections I have to keep alive across distance -- and the reverse of how F and I usually connect, our physical proximity the most real, the words and sketched out lives in relief behind us. It's working, though the rhythm is so strange when we're always in each other's space, each other's routines, no real shared world yet. We do work together, though we can both be fiercely autonomous and just a little cranky. But waking up together... feels right, it's where we should be.

I feel as if we're crossing all sorts of lines, previously recognized and maybe a little invisible. If I leave shampoo and girly bodywash in F's shower, is that a territorial marker? What do we take for granted, and where are assumptions too early? How do we make space for each other in our routines, when one of us is never at home? Gentle navigation, acknowledging our own edges. Little reels with switching of places and set steps, testing the ground, gradual movements.

There are a lot of actual borders and lines... Sprawling houses artfully arranged on this cul de sac so the neighbours are rarely visible. Dogs hurling themselves after me while I run, then caught short by invisible fencing (what happens if the power goes out??). A simultaneously incredibly dumb yet officiously prick-ish border guard when I entered the country on Monday, who didn't notice that my passport was actually CANCELED (waiting for the new one), but peppered me with endless questions about who I was visiting, how I knew him, what work I did, why I was crossing near Ganonoque when I lived in Toronto, how often I make this trip, whether I had a criminal record, whether the vehicle was registered to me. Thankfully, A never got around to transferring the title, and Not-so-astute Barking Man wasn't curious about why I co-owned a vehicle with a woman at an address I don't live at.

But of course, it's crossing into a new kind of lover territory for each of us, visas of another sort. Learning who each other is in every context. Intimacy unfolding, lines weaving together, layers coming off.

Now, must run (avoiding the dogs), go find the car wash so I can return my ex's car in decent shape, unlock the stuck patterns in my head about my dissertation proposal. Life spread out.

Shine forth upon our clouded hills

In the chill rain yesterday, two very different stories of loss. My sister and I took my nieces to the Remembrance Day ceremonies at the war memorial. I'd never been to any of the formal proceedings -- only watched them on TV, always moved by the now-quivering vets marching, the governor general taking the arm of the Silver Cross mother, the woman designated to stand infor every parent who'd lost a child in combat.

Actually going to the ceremony was more about the crowd than about the tropes of the tribute itself. My sister and I ended up losing each other at the beginning -- I was with Lulu and got stuck behind a barrier, while she was somewhere on the other side with Mica -- so my experience was fairly focused on a two year old in a soggy red snowsuit navigating a mass of people with a fair bit of calm and grace. She liked the elderly planes in the flypast, and she clapped for the veterans when everyone else did, though all we could see above the heads of the crowd were flags, and the giant television.

It's a complicated thing, remembrance day. Honouring people who fought and lived for ideals and country, recognizing the sacrifice of the individual for the collective good -- this is a good thing to do, something it's important to pay attention to. The nuances of loss and fragility of connection - the moms, the lines written in the now ancient veterans' faces -- are so moving. And of course, it's always contextual -- a "good" to honour the vets of the now decades old wars, the losses of the Afghan war more problematic, and where is the line between honouring the individuals and mindlessly condoning bad policy decisions?

And there is always an uneasy risk of glorifying Sacrifice when the social forces that push people into the military are rarely about "ideals" -- it's no accident that the Silver Cross mothers are usually from NFLD, where the military is one of the few viable career options. And our own "personal" ancestral war dead -- my father's father's brother, Joe, who was shot down over Germany in 1942, clearly joined the Air Force because it made an adventure, some kind of alternative to his small life as a young milkman.

I got Joe's military records from the Archives a few years ago, and the scraps of paper write a life of poverty, a punitive system, a smart punk with a lot of energy and few options. Letters from his high school and employer about how bright he was, stern assessments from his military testers of his intelligence but terrible ... can't remember the word, but they meant attitude and class, flunking out of radar school because he constantly went AWOL, two episodes of the clap -- one here and one in England -- that resulted in hospitalization, contracted from "girl met on train, amateur)" and "girl from London (amateur)." (Amateur clearly being Military-speak for Not a Prostitute, rather than Innocent Girl Ravished by Joe's Charms).

Then a couple of missions as a gunner, then anti-aircraft guns over Hamburg that met their mark. German civilian police reports, telegrams of missing then dead, then letters from the Air Force detailed Joe's effects sent to my great-grandmother -- totally about $27 in cash and a cheap suitcase. Ironically, it had cost me approximately $27 to get the file photocopied.

Joe as an undercurrent, today's war a terrible question mark (how do we wage a nation-state based war on a dispersed underground?), my niece a humming, unfettered tumble of joy drawing smiles from the crowd.

And then, later, a horrible store from F. He has a friend who had met someone online -- like our story, corresponded in different cities for a couple of months, felt a rich connection. They met a couple of days ago for the first time, felt the spark they'd hoped... they had food, he complained of a headache, they went back to his place, the headache grew worse, he collapsed, an ambulance, and then he was dead of an aneurysm. So much hope cut abruptly short.

It's so easy to say "live full" -- harder to not mouth it and let the irritabilities, the prickles, the fears of any quotidian moment overtake "be here now," richly seized life. But that's what those remembrances have to be for, really, a wedge into the assumptions we take for granted about our days. Gratitude for the now.

Two decades, vanilla swirl

November 10, 1986. Twenty years ago. The day I first truly kissed a woman, melted into the soft richness of enfolding, silky female skin, the culmination of years of yearning, weeks of breath-held flirtation with T.

There had been crushes before T, but when she arrived in my MA program that September -- urban, playful, charming -- she'd embarked on a chemistry-filled, mercury-slippery courtship of me that had only one inevitable conclusion. A rose in my mailbox, notes on post-its in invisible ink on my TA office door, scraps of poetry.

I went away for a weekend at the end of October to visit D and found myself buying T a pad of tiny, colourful origami squares. Flutters of notes on the squares soon appeared in my mailbox, on my door, in my books. Zooming close, skittering away. She had a boyfriend, back in Toronto, a stolid sort of guy, but she’d acknowledged a couple of affairs with women, a trip to the famed Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. One night in early November, breath held, I’d agreed to her offer of a shoulder massage. I lay under her fingers, unable to make the tiny gesture that would affirm what we both knew was time-honoured seduction, both of us suspended in desire that we couldn’t name.

For two days, I walked around, no other thought but wanting to touch her, paralyzed with the inability to imagine how I could make that happen without risking… I didn’t know what, everything, in some ways. She invited me over for supper, we made a stirfry, then she asked if I wanted to sleep over. This wasn’t the first sleepover for us, and it was something I did with other girlfriends – but I knew this was different. In pyjamas, in the dark, she whispered, “I want to kiss you.” Exhaling, I uttered “me too.” I found her lips and skin, unbelievably soft, yielding, opening to me.

The trajectory on T was predictable -- two months of utter devotion, a tearful return to her guy and her "real" identity and life, another year or so of come here/go away clutching at each other. Such drama, such yearning.

And since then...two decades of identifying, mostly, as a dyke -- skirmishes with men interludes, not the landscape of home. And now, the psychogeography shifted, completely. Like emigrating a second time, looking backwards from the deck of the swiftly moving ship, wind whipping my scarf around, fond of the shore I'm leaving, humming an anthem of a new undiscovered land. "I'm your America?" F laughed at me when I mused this image at him. I just smiled lazily, waiting for a Whitman-like declaration of electric desire.

When I flicked through the comments I'd missed on this blog, some Anonymous someone had posted something very provocative in response to my "most heterosexual thing I've ever done" post back around Thanksgiving, the post about buying F a tie at Harry Rosen: "Sometimes it can be daring, even counter-cultural to frame an act as heterosexual; it all depends on your culture. Which begs the question: what's the most vanilla thing you've ever done?"

An excellent question, and entirely contextual, and probably none of the answers utterable in a blog members of my family read.Even the most porous girl has some boundaries. But F does joke about the subversity with which I greet even the most "missionary vanilla" of heteronormative acts, from bed to handing over one of his shirts to a hotel staffer for cleaning.

Suspended between cultures, nothing feels vanilla, it's all boundary-crossing and an overlay of constant questions. Awareness of the veneer of privilege offhandedly accorded me when that hotel staffer calls me Mrs F's Last Name, when we hold hands or kiss in a restaurant. Awareness of the privilege of perspective I have from living in so many territories, feeling as deeply and resignedly the anti-marriage successes in Tuesday's US election as my queer friends. Gratitude that at the end of the day, no one in my immediate space much cares about the gender of the person I seem to be beginning to make a life path with.

'awrence

I just got an email from my ex, who is on a tour to Egypt and Jordan.

Apparently she got lost in the desert where they filmed Lawrence of Arabia (she loves that movie, btw): "It was the most stunning part of the trip. Unfortunately I got lost when the sun set more quickly then I expected but I simply found a rock to sit on and watched the moon rise. I figured as soon as they missed me for dinner they would come looking. Every couple of minutes I would give a shout hello and turn my flashlight on. I was actually found by another Bedouin guide who insisted on giving me a welcome tea while he called my guys on his cell to come and get me. It was actually very peaceful and I would go back there in a minute. The bad news was my camera did not like all of the sand and it is now frozen open. (grrr) I will have to try and get it fixed in Amman."

Makes my visit to Ideal on Augusta with Kat to inject more espresso into my veins while I further fucked the dog and ignored my work a little um unremarkable.

Off to Trinity library.

Unheimlich

There has been Some Kind of an Incident on an escalator at Union Station -- a suddenly speeding up escalator, pile up of people at the bottom, nine people with mashed up necks etc.

Another example of the "estranged familiar," the category of uncanny that is related to Freud's unheimlich, the opposition to the cosy and homey that can frighten... and yet lead us back to the comfortable. Of course, Freud thought the MOST unheimlich was female genitalia, "this unheimlich place that is the entrance to the former Heim of all human beings, to the place where each of us lived once upon a time and in the beginning."

I'm not so put off by the Mythic Vajayjay. Escalators have always made me suspicious, though -- I must have internalized flattened cartoon characters sucked through the mechanism flapping helplessly against the hard metal. The horrible story of people helplessly carried to their blazing deaths via escalator in the London tube fire a few years ago didn't help. I always pause just a moment stepping onto a down escalator, and find myself grimly looking up to escape the vertigo of the loooooooooong crevasse ones like the ones in the DC Metro.

My own appliances continue to create just the tiniest undercurrent of estrangement, though. I haven't quite made friends with the Miss Vev -- her sprouts are still a little too harsh. After two years, I still haven't really figured out how to plug in my Shuffle and get it to charge without the endlessly blinking orange light. My toilet continues to erupt into occasional unearthly grinding howling moans when I flush it at night. What the hell IS that? low water pressure? the need for some new flapper thing? All I know is that I have learned to whip off the back of the tank and hold up the floater ball thingy until the tank refills, as any poor guest who had the misfortune to be the flusher of the thing huddles against the wall, gasping for breath and unlikely to relax in that bathroom again.

I guess I could call a plumber, read the ipod help pages, talk to someone about water and coffee ratios. But there's a tiny thrill of this intersection of the homey and the frightening, some primal heartbeat of awakeness.

Or not. Sometimes a blinking ipod is just a blinking ipod.

Nieces of all stripes

On Monday night, my two year old niece called me and told me a very succinct yet evocative story about a bird? in the house? in the fireplace? and the ceiling? is all DIRTY! and she was SCARED! A perfect narrative, in about 25 words -- and it was the first real back and forth phone conversation we've had.

My sister tells me that Lulu is always more eager to call me than to call Grandma -- and she thinks it's because Lulu knows Grandma really LIKES her calls and I, Cate, am merely pleased by them. A tiny girl with full understanding of the ways of becoming more enticing by withholding affection.

I'm happy I'm going to see her and her tiny vociferous sister this weekend, after the joy of meeting Stef's guy's little girls last week. (Heh, and Stef tells me a fantastic story about Molly and her squiggly ways: "the fairy came home to find her husband...but when she got there, she saw that the person there was...her wife! And then they had dinner").

So my middle sis has Lulu and Mica, and Stef has these two sweet shy little monkeys in her life, and Stef also forwarded this great pic of her meeting her bio-daughter, Hope. A tremendous gift, those eggs, and Hope's parents are overjoyed... and there she is, floating out there, watermark niece, tracked against the vividness of the other four and the other little girls in my edges. So many stories to be lived full.

A Private Conversation

Good lord. I have been secretly moaning to myself for weeks now that no one EVER COMMENTS ON MY BLOG, and wondering why on earth my site counter shows that people actually READ it, but no one ever seems to have anything to SAY, so I've been all paranoid and self-loathing and feeling like I'm talking to myself... and then my sis twigged me that J had posted something, but it wasn't showing up, so I futzed with my settings and I'd clearly fucked SOMETHING up because I had about 40 or 50 unpublished comments, just waiting for me to "approve" them -- and yet, I hadn't remembered requiring approval at any point.

(Although, come to think of it, I was getting annoying spam comments, and must have done something to block that without realizing that I was causing all of the voices to just pile up in one little sealed off room).

What a treat, flicking through all of this, what a sigh of relief that I'm not blithering into a vacuum :-).

Coffeemaker introduces oneself

For an inveterate espresso slurper like myself, it's always been a little odd that I don't have a means of producing the slurry brew at home. Two reasons, really -- generally I like to leave the Production of Essentials to the experts -- I don't sew my own jeans or tinker with my own transmission, so I tend to hold that in matters of americanos and machiatos, a barista will do a much less makeshift job than I will. And I like the social process of coffee procurement -- my morning chat with Alan and Evelyn at Moonbean is part of what grounds me in my neighbourhood.

There's also the Cautionary Tale of the refurbished espresso machine my ex once bought me for my birthday. Seemed like a good idea, but it incrementally edged my espresso consumption up to a point where I started to feel some kind of brain activity that my alarmist GP thought merited a neurologist, and months of pointless tests were made with no conclusion (well, a completely outrageous diagnosis of "idiopathic epilepsy," but with not a single seizure detected) until I finally had the brilliant thought that it had to do with sleep and coffee. Stopped drinking coffee for a month et voila, weird perception states ceased.

Since then, I've thought it best to control my intake by being able to measure out the number of times I actually hand over $2.65 to someone holding forth on a big, gorgeous hissing machine.

But F keeps nudging me about getting a better means of actually making coffee at home -- the french press really just doesn't do it -- and while jauntily hopping out to get myself a double americano before working on a Tuesday morning provides a nice little demarcation between asleep and work time when you work at home, it's more problematic on a Saturday morning when you really don't want to get dressed. Plus, his "Herculattes" cost more than twice as much as my fairly austere little americanos. And he'll slurp them throughout the day.

So. Yesterday I sprung for a sweet italian stovetop 6 cup stainless steel brewer thingy. With no clue how to actually USE it, I blithely turned to the instructions. That they seemed to be in 9 different languages was the first clue that the translation might be a bit ramshackle... and the first english header -- "coffeemaker introduces oneself" -- confirmed it. My new Vev Vigano boasts a "hillow" column for pouring of coffee. It apparently has a gender -- I'm asked to remove my "Miss Vev" Coffeemaker from the flame. And coffee "sprouts." (I'm actually not sure what the right word IS, come to think of it -- "blend thicker first-sprouted coffee with lighter coffee sprouted afterwards").

There is also apparently some complicated inaugural period involving washing the Miss Vev with soda and bicarbonate (what IS that? I remember bicarbonate from the Archie comics of my youth, but does it still exist? perhaps it's a Euro thing?), and allowing multiple sproutings of coffee to burst up and be tossed aside without drinking, to allow the coffee aroma to soak into the pot.

There aren't actually any instructions on how to *make* the coffee. It's Very Very Complicated. And Italian. Maybe I should have bought the Contessa (twice as much but very pretty), but I'm sure she would snub me as well. My Miss Vev -- more of a commoner, but just as elusive. I'll admire her pretty lines as I sip just one more americano sprouted by Alan, turning to wikipedia or google for a more mundane description of the process.

Joyful howls

The snow isn't falling yet here, though my niece called me this morning and told me it was snowing in Ottawa... this is the interlude where fall is really gone and winter hasn't set in yet, and it was a full-voiced and warm weekend.

Had a stellar time with F -- intimacy increasingly intertwined through everything we do together, cooking and eating and walking and shopping and of course the barely- being-able-to- pry-ourselves- off-each-other long enough to make coffee thing... but we also shopped -- introduced F to the street cred of Fluevog -- and went to see Shortbus, which we both thought was brilliant.

Then today, a huge chunk of my family came for brunch -- the place was full of punks and scientists and little girls -- and I fell in love with S's guy's daughters. I love to see the kind of quasi-parent S is with them -- she just slots into the role perfectly, still able to be herself fully, relaxed and so present with them... and J is such a sweet and clear and firm dad whom the girls clearly adore.

My sisters' mom seemed to think F was a Divine Intervention sent to provide E with career advice, which was fine with me -- he was happy to give her some ideas, and she was grateful for them. He just fits with them all in a sort of astonishing way. We all had lots of food and interwoven conversation and the little girls' shyness was thawed by the colony of finger puppets. When Molly asked me politely if she could keep the sheep, and if her big sister could have the mermaid, I decided it was time for those puppets to emigrate... and they were happy then to whirl themselves into my arms,and in a few moments we were dragging the little girls around the cork floors by their arms while they squealed.

Metaphorical cartwheels all over the place here, full-throated joy. The dishwasher churns and the dryer hums and I try to reset myself back into work... need to set Real Goals for the week, before I go off to Ottawa for a weekend full of more gorgeous little girls and sisterlove.

Light

At this time of year, the light is golden and rosy outside my window. Warm and crisp at the same time. It's only 5:00 and the sun is sinking quickly, but the light is astonishing.

The perfect entry arch for a weekend that will include the expanded family introductions. Just, "these are people who are in my life," on all of our parts, no big Significant Intros. A porous, translucent circle.

Nesting

I think I'm really really happy to be home in my flat for a while. I'm feeling all nesty. Banana bread baking in the oven (a nod to Matt, who is my God of the Spatula), laundry churning, dishwasher chugging, list assembled for production of various meals over the weekend, including a chunk of my extended family for brunch on Sunday. (Youngest sisters, their mom, S's guy, his kids). F on his way after work, still toting his cold.

I have a long list of things I should be doing for school, and it's all simmering... but the season change is gripping me and instead I want to finally tackle those five boxes of files I haven't dealt with since I moved. And my closet is bellowing at me to reorganize my summer/winter clothes. Something is making me involuntarily climb the ladder to the space above the kitchen/bathroom and Deal With the box of rubbermaid-ish things I can't imagine ever needing.

This is the kind of impulse that results in every piece of paper I ever owned being scattered across the dining room table in a great fury of organization, until I get distracted by another shiny object and abandon the project. For months. So I'll resist. But maybe make a batch of blueberry muffins. Wheat-free. For S's new -- gasp -- stepkids.