Is it me...

or is this giant bubble santa scene terribly, terribly creepy? Peeping Tom Santa.

This is what it looked like when we drove by yesterday. Today it was all deflated and flat on the ground. Natural causes, or neighbour with a bb gun?

This is what happens

...when you leave shopping for "one of those funky scarves talented people make for their friends" for your mother to the last minute. It's beautiful, and it was more than 100 bucks.




This is what happens when you tell your hairdresser to "be creative." My online peeps tell me it's very Run Lola Run. I have to say, I'd rather be dashing through a desperate pomo narrative than rolling down the 401 to the city of my youth. But I'll take it.

Tangled yarn

Such a busy week... I'm not used to getting dressed like a grownup every morning anymore. Clients crawling all over the place, breathless with needs... deep angst about my looming dissertation committee meeting (I've been suspiciously silent with them for months)... tedious shopping (my mother telling me last week "I'd like one of those funky scarves talented people make for their friends" -- um, where do you BUY something like this, and wouldn't it be nice if I'd been able to look for more than the 17 minutes I have alloted between various gigs this week? ) Still no gift of significance for mom, and I head southwest in about a day and a half... with my ex... and my sis.... after we drop my ex's girlfriend off at the airport.

Swirly life, spirals and well-lived-in stories. Christmas is such a tangled ball of yarn, this constant pull between "do the family thing because that's what you DO at xmas, and why hurt mom needlessly?" and "what do I *get* out of it??" It's always so very very very stressful because it comes right before my bi-annual trip to CA for school, and I'm always *exhausted*. Mom wants us there but doesn't seem to enjoy us -- or me, anyway. My presence is a neutral force but my absence would be hurtful. Double bind.

My friend Amy and I were talking the other night about how to navigate this time of year when we don't give any credence to the religious part of the holiday, but want to somehow mark the changing of the year, depth of darkness, pull to add light. Trying to cobble together what feels right for me, but never quite hitting the mark.

I was thinking about Christmasses past -- the too-often-retold moment when I was 4 or 5 when all I wanted was a Walking Thumbelina doll, and I crept out in the night to see her under the tree -- oh, so magical! Santa! -- and could barely sleep the rest of the night with excitement... and then somewhere in the tumult of the next day, heaving mass of aunts and cousins and uncles and grandparents, Dad got too enthusiastic in his playing with me and yanked the string out of the back of the doll, rendering her unable to walk or wriggle. I wept, howled, so disappointed, he got mad, told me I couldn't have another one. Mom tried, they were all sold out forever. (Until the time travel of ebay).

That's Christmas -- all that yearning, and the inevitable combustible moment that blows it to bits. Occasional moments of deep peace -- a palpable sense of serene, meditative well-being falling over a church at midnight mass as the last strains of Silent Night trailed off -- and the complete inversion, my mother desperately angry at me when I finally refused to continue accompanying her to church anymore, completely unable to even temporarily tolerate an institution that was actively persecuting my basic civil rights.

The only really resonant note for me is the undercurrent of Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas -- the yearning to connect across distance, to have the people you care about warmly connected into one place. It's why I still send cards, and why I relish accidental encounters.

I had a lot of those today, unexpected trippings over people -- mostly because of the solstice festival of lights in my neighbourhood. Some were serendipitous -- like the guy who just adopted the little boy from the orphanage in uganda, with his new son -- and one was jarring -- my friend of more than a decade who recently decided, basically, that she doesn't like me anymore. Instead of a warm greeting, a weird grimace and a hurrying past. Other welcome hugs. More interpolations, new possibilities, frayed wires. The constant interplay between a grim miming of connection, reminders of losses, and transitory moments of peace, deep knowledge of and gratitude for each other.

That, and some very crass decision making. Turns out my amazing neighbour is one of those talented people who makes funky scarves for their friends. She delighted me with a gift of one today. But I'm keeping it for me, continuing to look for something for mom. My own little balancing point.

Dislocations

I have had a crazy busy week -- client stuff coming out of the wordwork, some of it very generative, some of it a little "help me, it's MESSY here." Panicking about getting back into my schoolwork with an impossible deadline breathing down my neck. And I'm at F's, stickhandling client stuff, trying to scrape together some holiday shopping, staying reasonably fit in this crazily warm weather.

Found myself yesterday sitting on the floor of the hallway outside the library, blundstones kicked off, talking on my cell to a client-who-needed-soothing for an hour and a half while people threw me amused glances. Hard to keep impersonating a med student in the library when I'm actually doing client work. I told my colleague D yesterday that sometimes it feels like I'm running my life from the back of a van down by the river.

Dislocations all around me, though, some of which make me cock an eyebrow. The entire institution whose library I use to read/work when I'm here is an entirely NO SMOKING zone. This results in the crazy image of people in scrubs, little head coverings and all, standing across the street, smoking and talking on their cells, at the entrance to... a huge cemetary. (A cemetary across the the hospital? Ironic enough to start with). I really wanted to take a picture of the smokers, but thought that would be a little too voyeuristic, tracking them beaten back as far as they can be.

Reciprocity

Numbers: 600 km covered thursday and friday for 12 hours with N, 72 mph in a 55 mph zone on the 290 that resulted in a 4 pt ticket. Apparently NY state and ON have reciprocal agreements, so unlike my one previous speeding ticket ever, in Ohio in February 1997 when T and I were on our way to Kent State, I can't just hand over the visa and wash my hands of it. Simpler times, those were, when I was tickled that Mr. State Trooper had a visa sliding thingy in his patrol car.

Configurations: had dinner last night at J&S', a little "welcome to TO" party for Modo, who is finally moving here from Iqaluit. My people, my chosen family, expanding, reciprocal. A-my-ex there with her current gf (who is sweet, smart, funny, charming), modo with her new gf, me with my friend S, B&E and J&S in their reconfigured family life that seems just right. Friends embedded, lives entwined, circuits resetting in warm ways.

Reinstall: successfully held breath and clicked "erase and reinstall" on my ibook, and managed to get it back in running order. Migrated the contents to the imac first, and as far as I can tell, lost nothing. After a lot of fussing, managed to get the airport reset (what the heck WAS the password??) and get both the imac and the ibook back on line, wirelessly and ethernettily as needed. V. proud of self.

Now taking hermit sunday self out into the world. Jammies still on at 3:36. Perfect day.

Jujubes and porn

For years, I had an unsettling recurring dream. Christmas Eve, had forgotten to buy presents, found myself in a highway service station convenience store (usually specifically the one off the 401 in London that A and I used to stop at on the drive to Windsor, the one with the big magazine racks and no good bottles of water), was frantically grabbing random things from the shelves as gifts. Cans of pringles, ju jubes, cigarettes, magazines.

Kind of like the "I forgot I took this course and now I'm in this exam naked" dream, except all twined with the conflict of Family Occasions, institutionalized generosity, side by side twitchy attempts to find affinity through the thinnest of threads, long-left-behind religious overlay and the implied affront at my no longer honouring it.



My dream became insitutionalized as "ju jubes and porn," a trope for all-the-pressure-which-includes-a-genuine-desire-to-provide-a-token -that-demonstrates -we-care-about-people-but- CHRIST-there's-too-much- intensity-and-unreasonable- expectations. Shopping through December, big sighs, sometimes with real inspiration and delight, sometimes some thudding placeholder. Crazy crazy peregrinations across the province to be part of family.

Two years ago, a deeply snowy cold Christmas, and A and I were on a glum quest, first to Windsor for xmas with her family, then crossing the entire breadth of the province to Ottawa for dinner with my family, my then baby niece. It was a trudge, both of us uneasy with each other, mostly silence between us in the car as we navigated unbearable weather (7 hours to Windsor, instead of 4), played the mercifully long Time Traveller's Wife through my ipod. Warm enough in the disquiet, practiced affection, practiced affinity through the ridiculous treks, but raw patches in the middle, distance unbridgeable. Lavish, perfect gifts to demonstrate the connection we could no longer enact. (A lusted after silver thumb ring and an mp3 player I'd loaded for her, a refurbished spinning bike for me).

While we were doing this, my friend D was iced into his small town on lake huron as his mother breathed her last on Christmas Eve.

So after making our grim way back to Toronto, on the way to Ottawa, we detoured off to the lake for the funeral home visit, homage to a long friendship with D, his mother who was always affectionate to me, his family I hadn't seen in almost two decades. All of them the same, bigger, pudgier, children tall and looming. Stayed the requisite hour, picked our way back out through the icy dark for the almost unthinkable 6.5 hour drive to Ottawa that faced us now.

D and his partner followed us out to the car -- "wait, we have a gift." "A Christmas gift??" I asked, incredulous -- D and I don't do xmas gifts usually anyway, and he'd been completely immersed in his mother's hospital room. "Yeah, yeah," they'd said.

It was in a cheap gift bag, printed with garish elves, tissue paper at attention in that perky fluffed-by-a-gay-boy way. I opened it...

...and it was jujubes. And porn. (Cheap porn, the kind you can get in the mac's milk in small town Ontario. Juggs or something like that).

We laughed, hugged tight, climbed back into the car, my visiting-the-funeral-home skirt settling around me, so wrong for a winter car ride. I ate the jujubes pensively, flicked through the magazine in the illumination of the streetlights as A silently found her way back to the small highway that would keep us moving. The cold dark outside completely oppressive, the journey before us unendurable.

Our last Christmas together, hyperbolic enactment of every family holiday we'd done together, compliant daughters, living out inorganic roles, finding ourselves almost running out of gas at frigid midnight when an unexpected detour around brockville took us off the 401 past a service station and nothing else was open, stretched to an unbearable point of fatigue and anxiety and distance, distance covered and felt between us. Finally crawling into my cousin's house at 2:00 a.m., huddling into sleep, wondering how, why in the hell we were doing this.

Last year, I truncated the family requirements, visited Ottawa before xmas, drove there and back in daylight, had xmas dinner with my chosen family in TO. No huge gifts for anyone. Not quite snatching at ju jubes in a frozen service station, but minimal, thoughtful.

This year, A and I are talking about driving to Windsor together again, three short nights, touching into our respective families and then leaving for our separate, respected lives. Completely different, lighter touch with each other, knowing each other and urging each other into fullness in lives we know the other could never accompany us on.

Then back here, new year lived into with F, a trip to discover some corners of Montreal together.

New stories, woven loosely, completely different, breathable fabric.

Gouging out my words

Keyboards are really personal things, like toothbrushes. The kinds of things you don't really pay attention to when you're using them -- I couldn't tell you what colour my current toothbrush is, for example -- the tools that fade into the background, used without any conscious awareness, extension of mind.

But I've had people using my keyboards on occasion lately, and every time I'm a bit abashed when they say HEY, WHERE ARE THE LETTERS?

Apparently I'm so... ferocious... in my typing that I've worn off most of the letters on my ibook.



And I've also ... GOUGED... actual dents in the keyboard on my imac, apparently pounding away with jackhammer-tipped fingers, fiercely, insistently driving text and words into being.

Apparently, I type with talons.

So much of my life carved through these worn-out keys, flayed evidence of plots and ideas pursued, wrestled into being, threads tangled and unrewoven. Courting F through text, fingers flying as synapses snapped together -- mangling ideas and concepts unsatisfactorily as I try to find voice in my academic work -- finances sorted and agonized over -- friendships made and deepened and dismantled -- online worlds entered, constructed, amused.

The most mundane, the most transcendent, transmitting the oils of my fingers into the plastic until I fuse mind and e-world and body-world into life.

Confession: when I wake up alone, I reach for my ibook and check my email, my online friends, before I pee. Confession: when I'm driving, if the traffic is stalled, I'll click the "versamail" button on my treo to see if anyone has sent me anything juicy.

My life dispersed, carved through keys, self saturated. What Ken Gergen calls "multi-phrenia" -- the pomo extension of self to multiple places/selves at once. Sometimes we need to step away from it and breathe, let the corporeal self catch up...and sometimes the physical evidence of what's possible now, lives made real because of these keys -- a bit breath-taking.

Icons

I have this folk art painting of Trudeau on the wall next to my desk. You can't tell in this image, but the flaky things around the edges are shredded money -- $2 and $5 bills -- and it's painted on a hunk of wood.

It was made by a rasta guy from Salmon Arm (hm, can't get away from the rastas) who did a series of Superheroes. It tickled me that everyone in the series was fictional -- Wonder Woman, Obi Wan Kenobi, Lt. Uhuru -- except Trudeau and Che Guavera.

Pierre came into my life on the first evening my ex and I spent on Galiano a few years ago. We were in the cosy market café and the art had just been hung; I squealed with delight and instantly started peeling off bills to buy Pierre, and got into a bit of a Tense Standoff with a local woman. There was some Disquiet at the off-islander flashing cash like this. I was kinda insistent, though (no urban eastern stereotypes there), and when the gentle tussle was over, I'd prevailed and Janet from Galiano was grumpy.

So now Pierre presides over my work space -- once hung, appropriately, in the bedroom I shared with my ex ("the state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation"). Sort of a partly ironic, partly genuinely appreciative, icon of ... some kind of idealism, tapping into that swell of genuine excitement when some political leader emerges who seems to truly coalesce a desire for some significant change. I'm always a little aware of the direct contribution the Charter has had in creating the society we live in now, the direct impact it's had on my own life, my own ability to claim whatever form of love I choose.

So there's Pierre, and this weekend I was a little caught up in the leadership convention, sort of out of the corner of my eye, and to my surprise, felt a little of that excitement in response to Kennedy's speech. I'd never particularly warmed to him, but he tapped into that part of me that incubates a little idealism.

My friend D was in Montreal, for other reasons, and he and I were texting about the speeches, and the next thing I knew, he'd sort of accidentally found himself in the Kennedy party. Then the phone rang, and he was burbling over with a story of having run into Justin Trudeau ("gorgeous and intense,") and having gone up to him -- "I have a friend in Toronto who'll kill me if I don't meet you -- she's a huge admirer of you and Mr. Kennedy." Goof. And a blow by blow cellphone report on what Trudeau was wearing, his peregrinations among elevators as he attempted to draw supporters to Kennedy. The two of us giggling at him stalking Justin Trudeau on "my" behalf, two 40-somethings who teeter between pragmatic cynicism and starry eyed idealism.

I'm not unhappy that Dion won. I haven't actually voted Liberal since the Trudeau era, and would not vote liberal in this riding in any case, having zero regard for the scurrilous Ianno. But touching down into that moment of belief in ideas that matter... sort of giddy-making.

Propping eyelids open

Had a lovely rich demi-weekend with F. Art, coffee, books, food, talk, us. Navigated various tasks this morning that threatened to chomp up my entire day after F left at an inhumane hour. Finally wrested myself away to the library where the undergrads were, for a change, not in serious, nerve-grating need of kleenex. Quiet, productive, deep dimensions of thought, and I'm written out. If I could have another 75 or so days like this, I'd actually get this thing done.

All I can do is cut and paste. Random words from my clipboard:

Acknowledgement of diverse perspectives is a requisite part of any researcher’s ability to form a robust analysis and interpretation within this realm of scholarship. Multiple interpretations and internal contradictions are core aspects of Bishop and Yardley’s scrutiny of their research question, and are cleanly laid out and interpreted as illustrative of the agentic dilemma facing people with cancer: they are always navigating between autonomous self and passive patient, negotiating contexts that enable or limit those different versions of who they can be. The contradictions within the accounts given of treatment choices are seen as conversational strategies for managing this dilemma.