Spot the moment of festive cheer

So I'm at Spot, my favourite café in roc, trying to extend the flow of my day in the library. Finally energized by my writing, feeling like something meaningful is actually being made.



I've been quite offhand about the holidays this year. I put some white lights up around the windows in my flat, and sent out a few -- very few -- cards with little penguins on. B and I had a shared moment of sadness about the boxes of decorations in her basement that are the postscripts of the lasagne-and-tree-trimming parties we had for years. Touchstones of a community. But overall, I'm good with F's resolute focus on new year's as the holiday to mark. I like the shift of the year, and it feels good to let go of the accumulation of jagged raggedness that christmas represented for years -- all the shuttling between families, never a chance to be peacefully at home. The pent up angst of the year spurting out in all the close proximities. It feels right to make new rituals, and I'm excited about the trip we're planning on the west coast between xmas and new year's. The right coast.

And yet, here at spot, the Seasonal Music I much despise mercifully muted, an instrumental version of Partridge in a Pear Tree catches at my ankles. So fused to my memories of my dad, fiercely insisting that the extended family pause to sing along. The dramatic -- if tuneless -- intonation on Five Golden Rings. Missing that moment of optimistic intensity. A moment of yearning.

And then back to a warbling, despised Ella version of Santa Claus is Comin' to Town, and it passes. Time stretched, rift opened, sewed firmly shut again.

Suspension

Self-referential and annoying though this is, I think a little self-conscious meta-bloggery might get me through this sort of fuzzy-headed block I have about my dissertation. What I've been doing since September: collecting "data" and assembling my basic argument. Data, in this case, means asking long-suffering couples to record their private conversations and then to submit themselves to an interview with me.

I finally finished all of that last week, and now I'm supposed to be in the infamous "writing" phase. It's tough. I feel like I've kind of lost sight of what it is I'm trying to say, and the lightest flicker of a distraction can send me off the path. Like, there's a new book related to my topic,and I tried to get it, and it seems to be unavailable, and so this creates some kind of synapse gap in my ability to think about the topic. I *do* work in bursts, but the bursts aren't firing quickly enough for the time pressure I'm under.

So. That's where it is. I'm kind of floaty, and I feel like I keep head-butting into a big foamy block like those things football players slam their shoulders into in practice. Move forward -- SLAM. Fall to the ground on my ass. Hop up. SLAM. Distraction by scrabulous mania, holiday gifts, travel booking, navel-gazing about my relationship, checking BBOD to see if they're finally broadcasting the vital two episodes of Torchwood we missed, intense conversations with those among my compatriots who are near a computer and equally divertible during the day.

That's me, now. Floating and angstful. Now, back to waiting for UPS to arrive.

Beth's Chestnut Story

(This is beth's voice).

Well ....

I was in university and was grocery shopping with Dan. WE happened upon some chestnuts and I squealed in delight, having eaten them often from the street vendor in TO. So I bought some.

We went back to Dan & James' place. I remember them all doing normal things whilst I waited on my chestnuts in the oven (I didn't know how to cook them): Dan was on the phone, James was fiddling, Bill was reading... So, I figure I should check on the chestnuts, but didn't know how I'd tell when they were done.

I removed one from the oven and popped it into my mouth and bit it open. It exploded. There was a loud bang.

I remember vividly Dan, saying to whomever he was speaking to, "Oh my God! A chestnut blew up in the stove!" and dropping the phone and running to the oven and opening the door. He didn't notice me standing there, leaning forward, chestnut dripping from my mouth, until I began loudly grunting, "Oh oh heeew! Oh oh heew! Hewp me!"

My tongue was shattered to bits, all flesh and skin hanging. They had no ice, so James tried to give me a frozen chicken leg to suck on until we could get some. I still retained a spec of dignity and flatly refused, though I kept my tongue stuck in a glass of water whilst Dan drove me across the street to the donut shop, where they gave me a cup of ice, then to the emergency room.

This was back in the days when there was a woman/nurse sitting at the typewriter at a window in the ER. Becauth I couldn't thpeak becauth of the ithe on my tongue, Dan began to explain that a chestnut exploded in my mouth. He barely got the words out of his mouth when he completely lost it, just collapsed with the kind of laughter that comes usually when one hasn't slept in days and is completely on the verge of hysteria. He was weeping with laughter, and as he managed to finish the story of what happened to me?

The lady collapsed, completely and embarrassedly and with complete abandon, hysterically laughing over her typewriter. At one point, I remember she
managed to catch her breath, and she looked up at me and spit out, "I'm ss--ss--ss-orry!" then collapsed again, unable to speak, shaking across the top of her typewriter.

Eventually, someone took me to the examining room. Whilst I waited, my tongue stuck in a cup of ice, I heard shrieks of laughter erupting outside the door. Finally, a small, bright Chinese doctor came in, fighting to keep his composure while the corners of his mouth twitched. As he attempted to examine my tongue, he lost it. I remember him saying, "I just don't know what to do....I mean, I could *try* to bandage it..." then he collapsed.

The next day, my tongue hurt so badly I could barely talk. I went to meet Michael D before our class. As I told him what happened and he began to visualize the story, he completely collapsed. Across the table, gasping for air, pounding his fists, unable to speak. In other words, I was beginning to learn, the usual.

At one point, he managed to catch his breath, take in a deep gasp, and spit out, "I'll bet your deadly with a baked potato" before collapsing again, across the table, and practically onto the floor.

To this day, he swears he tells the story to everyone.

Smacked into posting

"In truth, it is a lonely life." Hm. Miranda said that on SATC when she was pretending to be a stewardess. But I guess it's the life of my blog too. Sma

Updates? Dissertation angst. I wrote 2678 words yesterday, finishing up the section on the methodology of the analysis and part of my intro. Exciting, eh? Some of it I like -- just whispers of it. The rest of it, blergh. Maybe I'll ask B if I can post her chestnut story, because reading it is the most amusing thing that's happened to me in days.

Another thing that makes life joyful? A man you love bringing you coffee in bed. Made perfectly right.

More later.

What would jesus do?

Blog-o-mind

I've been reading about Emergence (for a paper, of course), and Stephen Johnson has a thought-provoking examination of whether the internet could actually become self-organizing, a kind of conscious mind. His conclusion is no (the higher order patterns that do emerge come from the users, not the net itself) but his exploration is pretty compelling.

In that vein, I was reading Kat's blog and thinking I'd link to it, and wondering if the blogs could just eventually start linking themselves. Here. I'll nudge the pattern forward. Link to Kat's blog. She's a brilliant photographer. I loved the image she captured I'm posting -- her blog has some really eyebrow-cocking images of the city.

Grace

I spent labour day weekend climbing Mt. Katahdin in Maine with F, his daughter and her boyfriend.


It was a really good mountain, and the four of us made an easy little team, despite the cold virus we lobbed around the car like a wobbly balloon. On the hike, I was unbelievably ungraceful -- twisted my ankle, fell on my ass once, hobbled over on my twisted ankle as I passed someone who had stood aside to let us go ahead and grabbed at his.. paunch... for balance. But the mishaps were minor and there was real flow to the time -- about 8 hours up and down, 10.5 miles covered, about 4200 feet of ascent/descent.

Meeting J completed the collection of F's constellation of family that started when I met her brother my birthday weekend in February in Manhattan, but which really amplified this summer. I also met her mother (F's first significant ex), which made the grand total four exes, four offspring and two parents.

Seeing your Significant Other in so many contexts really fills out dimensions that can only be hinted at through stories. Ken Gergen talks about the concept of the "inner others" that we're always in dialogue with in any present conversation -- the actual people of our pasts, the discourses we're engaged with. Meeting the people who represent some of F's "inner others" is like being handed a pack of coloured filters for stage lighting -- the shadings are so much brighter, multi-variate, explanatory. I imagine it's the same thing for me when F sees me with my family, with A.

Meeting J really struck a chord with the "inner other" of my dad. Always present, watching J's relationship with F is like stowing away in some alternate universe. Rose and the doctor in the London where her father hadn't died. J is the same age as I was when my dad died -- who was 3 years younger than F is now. It's comforting, somehow, watching F and J engage with each other in the way that my best imagination would have had written for me and Tony, if he hadn't been ill, if my 20s had been less carved over by identity angst and my inability to just be confident in who I was -- with myself, with him.

J has a rare kind of grace. She's the kind of person that I learn things about myself from just by watching how she is in the world. And watching F with her is a little twist of bitterly dark chocolate, a rich rush of intense savour that slows down the tongue. Possibilities unmet, constantly unfurled new strands of life.

Tangles

How many ways can you lose an entire half day? #76: Spend most of the morning in a tangle of trying to find a new power adapter for your macbook. A non-universal adapter in a city very short on apple resellers. Where the one apple store is closed for renos. In a country where apple won't ship you something to a US address if you have a Canadian credit card. (And won't leave it in your mailbox without a sig in ANY case, and even when you use your boyfriend's credit card, tell you can have that power adapter round about September 10th. Or 14th).

So you use your very sweet and flexible boyfriend's power adapter, causing him to use his lumpy old powerbook. And you spend an hour on the phone with your friend who just lost her very beloved dog. And then you spend another 45 minutes on a call with a colleague talking about a client until you say "FUCK! there it IS!" when you spot your power cord nestled with your underwear. Thus outing yourself as unpacking while talking about client work.

I am not too grounded in one place these days, that's for sure. Let's recap. Hurl passport on ground in Niagara Falls 5 days before trip to UK. Open new bottle of wine while two perfectly good bottles of wine are already open. Whack doorframe with new nightstand. Add water. Repeat with variations.

At least I didn't cause the algae and frog plague in the pool.

Crosswinds

I'm in Toronto again, one night at home, after another whirlwind tour of Ontario. Good to see my family in Ottawa, and important friends... then home. Only my second night in my own bed in August. I went out for coffee this morning early (after being skeeved to notice that there is an unopened carton of milk in my fridge that expired in July -- like the chip pan, I'm afraid to open it) -- and saw my friend/neighbour's cute-head boyfriend leaving for work. My glimpse of him the closest I've seen of her all summer -- synecdoche for Kat, like her nice little vintage honda (C500?) that perches in my parking spot.

Pulled by currents across the border again this afternoon, feeling a low level hum of anxiety about the time/space continuum between now and my dissertation deadlines. Have to have a full draft done by March. A constant thrum of worry under the skin. Sometimes it feels possible, and sometimes I feel implosive about it.

I'm having that same experience with so many things in my life -- everything feels like a STRETCH right now. I have a car that I *admire* but haven't quite bonded with yet, and I still stall it on hills. I have a kayak that makes me feel so jaunty, so powerful, when I'm paddling away, but when I'm hit by cross-winds, I suddenly find myself battling against the boat, not gliding as part of it. I have a relationship that fits me until I'm suddenly cold-water-bucket hit with a moment of GEEZ, I don't know how to do THIS, and I feel like my arms are flailing for the edges.

I was noticing what was happening with the hills in the car the other day. I was all confident until I was in Oakville visiting J one day and, inattentively, I stalled when the stoplight turned green on a pretty steep hill. I jittered, and threw it into gear, and roared onto the 401. Then, found myself on Spadina, in the same kind of position, and started fretting while I was stopped that it would happen again... and of course it did. Now I have this total approach avoidance, and I find myself all hot with fret through the whole red light, and sure enough, I'll stall. I get *tense*, self-conscious, and then I do exactly the thing that sinks me. The adrenalin stiffens both my body and my ability to reason.

It's the same thing with the kayak -- I think, damn this wind, and I start to FOCUS REALLY HARD on going EXACTLY where I want the boat to go. It doesn't go, and I work harder, and I start grunting like Monica Seles with every stroke. I fight it. I emerge out of the wind and F asks me how I am and I burst into tears. What's the opposite of flow?

F and I have conversations where I feel like the same kind of terrier, going for the same answer with ferocity. And it's what happens with my work -- I drive myself into a fret that leaves no room for creative thinking.

It's all deeply circuitous, given the focus for my diss. on generativity. Knowing that it's the open-sidedness, loose coupling, that seems to create space for generativity. What's the opposite of pouncing? But there I am, reliving almost physically, constantly, the reminders that the tight grip on anything limits the possibilities for what can happen.

So. Back across the border, light foot on the clutch, prying my internal hand off the gearshift one clenched finger at a time.

Insistence and chip pans

The thing lurking in that wad of plastic bags is a chip pan lathered in 5 year old oil. Gooey, rancid oil.

We were cooking a couple of weeks ago, and lamenting that each other's eating habits tend to nibble away at each of our basic "try not to get too fat while eating joyfully" regimens. I noted that I've been shoveling fries into my piehole at most opportunities since I met F, ranging from the luscious perfect chips of Skye to the indifferent dried out things that accompany my BLTs at the diner near the university. "Remind me not to order the chips with my next grilled cheese sandwich," I asked. "Oh, I can make much better chips!" he said. And burbled happily over to find the pan... which he realized had remained unwashed, well, since the last woman he'd lived with had moved out. Nearly 5 years ago.

"Hm, when an englishman is sad, he stops making chips," he observed. As we both gazed into the unearthly goo that had become something between liquid and solid. The sort of thing that guy at 3M would have made postits and a fortune out of.

Nothing so serendipitous. F attacked it with a scrubber and managed to pry the inner basket out of its glutinous prison. We ran out of time and inclination to deal with the cast iron part, the plastic bags containing the worst of the stink of disturbed rancid oil.

I mentioned it, in passing, to my online friends. "YUCK!" they chorused. "I'd INSIST he throw that out! He can't try to clean that."

I told F about the conversation. He's a good sport about my chatting about our lives online, but we both got stuck on this point. "I don't think I could *insist* about anything," I said. "It's your thing." It came up again in the car on our long drive back from la verendrye a couple of weeks ago. "What kind of relationship is it, where you could INSIST that I throw this out?" he said. It was partly that word that hung us up, but it also made us pensive. We couldn't put our fingers on it, exactly, but fumbled to describe the kind of merging we don't want, where one person's idiosyncrasies become the stuff of the couple, where I could paper-covers-rock trump this foible that's a bit gross but doesn't really affect me. Even if the pan sits on the counter, it doesn't affect me -- and even if this were really my kitchen, not just the terrain slightly uneasily shared, where I buy and produce good food but F still gets edgy if I put the glasses back upside down, let the potatoes on the stove boil over.

But -- what's the right level of merge, if it's not domain over each other's doings? What *is* the twined-together unit, and when *is* it okay to assert your own preferences (a fancy word for needs) about the other person's choices?

It's the essence of trying to figure out how to integrate, this chip pan. This one's a clear line -- it's his project, his icon of some cultural connection, his kitchen, at the bottom line. Not my place to really care, one way or another. But it also represents the 98% of F's life that's taken place without me. So many stories I don't figure in. I've never really had to consolidate this much history in my relationships, never had to "start over" with someone when we've both trod so many maps with other people, lived completely different lives.

It does jar sometimes. It's so easy, so tempting to try to insist on what meaning should be made of the past, to downplay what counted before we met. I've seen other people do this, to declare at second weddings that they've never known love before -- and I've been enraged by it.

But finding the right thread isn't that simple, either. Two fully formed beings merging is harder fought in many ways than supple, open-eyed beginnings. When you're jammed full of your own stories, where do you find the clean loom for new ones without forcing each other's perspectives, pasts, underground? What's the source of generativity, when it's not finding newness together, when the possibilities are less about what you can discover together for the first time, and more about seeing things with new eyes, the familiar in a palimpsest over always visible, sometimes achingly present, past lives? It's stupid things, like the disparity of realizing that I've never been to cities he's tired of. Part of me wanting to childishly stomp my foot with annoyance over that. The sensible part of me knowing that what we do together is new because it's us.

A recognition that there are things I won't do because I'm 42 and didn't do them with A... as well as realizing that there are things that for some reason, A and I didn't make possible for each other, that F and I will find together. It's constant gear shifting, finding the flow of the now and a vaguely sketched out future, when the past is present, waltzing ghosts we sometimes duck, sometimes nod in rhythm with, sometimes grab the hands of to make new dances with.

Firenze

I just booked two nights in a fancy hotel in Florence for our trip to Italy in September. At this place.

It's a short trip -- a week in total -- mostly in Rome, where F is giving a talk at a conference, and then two days in Florence. It feels strangely overdue, like I'm embarrassed at the fact that despite spending 1972 - 1974 rolling around every then-open country in Europe, vaguely carsick in the back of the orange VW popup camper as my parents' marriage fell apart, I have rarely traveled off this continent as an adult. A few trips to Spain to see Janet, a few trips to the UK and Ireland, and that's it. Doesn't fit my picture of myself, to not be the sort of person who flies to Berlin for a long weekend.

So, Italy. Mid-September. One of the few places I really want to go to that neither F nor I has been. (I have an oddly fitting, completely misplaced grumpiness at the fact that he has a million stories in Paris, and I've never been there. Like it's something I Need to Rectify immediately, some basic task of life left unattended, like paying off student loans or something).

Want to run off and plan my wanderings, but need to sink myself back into Systems Theory.

"She had a love of exotic pets"

So summed up the life of a woman killed by her pet camel, as it attempted to fornicate with her. It had previously attempted to kill the family pet goat by "straddling" it.

Oddities, fragments that say so much. My life this summer, so ineloquent. Flickering fragments. Our shared refrigerator as a way-station for food that gets tossed out. A pool I'm learning about bromine and algae balance in. Learning to make friends in a community I don't intend to be in long, and where I have no "formal" purpose. Conversations in bed about the likelihood of non-earth life forms and the time arc from learning to use tools to spinning off into space. A newfound obsession with Dr. Who (the Torchwood years, not the mangy old stuff). A motorcycle ride through the green roads where I catch a glimpse of two people dancing a waltz in a garden, awkwardly, before we rocket on.

Pulled by currents across the border, tentatively palpating the possibilities of America. Living in a low-level buzz of anxiety all the time about the 11 months I have left to Finish Everything related to my phd.

Loving my new yellow greenland style kayak, even as I battle with it in the crosswinds and go from serene exhilaration to clenched frustration. Learning to feel the water, not feel like I have to fight against it. Everything's a metaphor.

Status updates

One-line facebook status updates seem to have taken over from this blog for me. Cate is offline, in Scotland for two weeks. Cate is working on her dissertation proposal. Cate is at her last client meetings for sometime. Cate is irked with her branded products and is in a dysfunctional relationship with Bobby from Mercedes and Wayne from Apple. Cate is having an expat Pride experience. Cate is spending most of the summer on US soil, working on her dissertation.

Me, by the pool, "working."



So maybe some basic stats will revive my blogging ways. Seven subsequent days of exercise now -- four days of running, a day of lots of weights and some hoppin' about to a TV fitness program beloved by F, another day of hoppin' about followed by some very windy kayaking, and a good run this morning.

Now, some real work.

Flakiness

F and I did the most romantic thing this morning. Last week, I parked my car in Niagara Falls, ON and walked across the rainbow bridge, where he met me with the bike and we zoomed home. The zoom was real life -- poetic perfection in intention, a little bumpiness in the execution, mostly to do with cramming a LOT into one day and then misjudging how early restaurants in rochester close. But it was incredibly sweet to walk across an international frontier and be greeted by my lover.

We had a sweet productive weekend, more riding, some good food, lots of work, if not quite enough. And this morning, he drove me back to the bridge. Walked me to the turnstile, kissed me sweetly and full. I floated across the bridge a little dreamily, trying to ignore everything I need to do this week before we leave for Scotland on Saturday.

But I *did* pause to take a picture -- the falls were gorgeous, the sky was blue, the sun was out, blah blah. I was so delighted to be strolling and not part of the tailback of cars.

I found my car in the parking garage, put my bags in, and then thought I'd go to starbucks for one more coffee and a pee. Accomplished those, negotiated sweetly wit the parking attendant, who was incredulous that I admitted to parking for more than 3 days even though I didn't have my ticket. He undercharged me, I drove away.

And then, well onto the QEW, the phone rang. Mysterious 601 area code. I almost ignored it, but picked it up. Could barely hear. "Catherine, it's Mr. sfdkasflj your passport."

!

Apparently, I'd dropped it somewhere on the sidewalk (outside starbucks? outside immigration?) He found it near the duty free, I guess. I'd been sensible enough to put my sister's phone # in the "in case of emergency" space; the fates shone that she was actually home from Italy and actually HOME.

Mr. 601 area code called me back to tell me he'd left the passport at the Hard Rock Café. Ironically, the site of F's and my first "date" -- the first time we met in person, "halfway." Nearly a year ago, now.

Panicked and over-caffeinated, I circled back, parked again, fetched the precious document from Jeremy or Carlos or whatever his name was, who insisted I show him i.d. "That IS my i.d," I pointed out. I had to produce a visa. Got the passport. Navigated the parking guy who just waved me out, eyes narrowing at seeing the smartcar for the second time in half an hour.

Drove home, busy busy busy... and realized that I hadn't managed to actually take a successful picture of the Falls either Thursday or today. More flakiness.

Oh well, everyone knows what the Falls look like. Add in some dreamy romance and a little preoccupation, and that was me. And now, a HELL of a lot of relief at not having to find out what the hell the "emergency passport" routine is in the boondoggle that is the Canadian Passport Office right now.

I am not sure how I can go from being a person who drive this car:



to a person who drives this car:



in the space of two years. I guess the same way I can go from a person who dates small female artists to a person whose partner is a big ol' alpha male scientist guy. Or maybe I'm just lazy and it was easier to trade in my horrifyingly badly depreciated wee car at the place that sold it to me than to try to offload it on the saturated open market.

Those germans are wily. If I hadn't bought the smart car from them, it never in a million years would have occurred to me to contemplate mercedes for a car. But now I'm their customer, and they somehow converted granola girl to a Serious Brand.

My sales guy was very Solemn. He was rabbiting on about safety features, and when we got to the absurd claim that the hood was designed in such a way that if I -- god forbid -- hit a pedestrian, the hood would absorb 90% of the impact so that there would be less likelihood of head injuries.

Look, Bobby, I said. You have been talking a lot about safety. That's all good -- but is it because I'm female? If I were a guy, would you be talking about performance?

No, he said, straightfaced. I talk about safety because I used to work for volvo.

The only decision left to make is whether I want to spend $500 on roof and bicycle racks and get a free devinci bicycle.

This car comes with everything. I think it even comes with a kid.

Ceci n'est pas un pipe

No, it is a plumbing pipe. And I am death on plumbing, apparently. Like those people who claim they have the kind of electromagnetic fields that cause their watches to skip about like sandpipers and never keep time.

The day after my sister gave birth for the first time (at home), I flew up there to coo over the baby and help out. Using the sprayer hose on the kitchen sink while doing dishes, I broke the whole sink. (Apparently it had one of those invisible-only-the-people-who-live-here-can-see-this DO NOT USE signs on it). My brother in law had to go to home depot and replace the whole faucet etc. On no sleep. Instead of bonding with his new baby.

Last week, my ex came over to replace the guts of my toilet. So friendly. She left, it started leaking, $125 in cash to a plumber plus a tip to my super and the toilet worked.

At F's, the disposer issue that ate my Tuesday, when an attempt to clean out the fridge resulted in two sinks full of vile rotting-meat water. An unassuming internet plumber,a snake, an astonishing amount of money.

Today, no water flowing into my (only) toilet. The super, more fiddling. Problem with the new guts.

Flushing VERY gingerly.

And consoling myself with the thought of buying a new car.

Pansies

Quiet weekend. Lots of domestic stuff, currently batting even. Got car in shape for trip to roc and stuff put in place to list it for sale this month (this makes me sad, letting go of my wee car, but I am doing a LOT more highway driving than I expected to be when I bought it, and it's just not the right car for that). My ex KINDLY came over and replaced my toilet parts, but now the tank is leaking. Sigh. It's ALWAYS somethin'.

A propos of nothing, pansies around the corner from my house. Note the graffiti on the tree.

Nicoise perfection

I had a perfect day yesterday. It's finally mudluscious shoulder-baring, patio-sitting spring here... and I'm downright giddy.

Got up yesterday and marched purposefully to St. Lawrence market. Dropped $23 at every counter. Spent $30 on exotic vinegar (pomegranate champagne? really? how very Silver Palate/1985). Bought Good Fish. Marched home, humming with warmth, and literally could NOT prevent myself from hopping into real running shorts and a singlet and heading out into the sunshine.

Then, made a Perfect Salade Nicoise. F arrived for lunch (after an unbelievably busy week) and we seared two small perfect piece of yellow fin tuna to barely cooked. Drank half a bottle of a cold spritely chardonnay. Best lunch I've ever made, I think.

Had a lovely entangled relaxed afternoon to the beat of the crazy drummers (verdict: drummers quaint and amusing to walk by while eating an empanada, not so much as a permanent soundtrack right outside one's windows). Walked through the streets together to have a beer with a friend while listening to some jazz, let the warmth flow over us.

In just-spring, and the goat-footed balloon man whistles far and wee.

Traffic islands

I keep finding myself in the middle of busy streets, in that fake-safe point on the yellow line between two different traffic directions. I realized last week when I was with F at the university, I keep putting myself into the middle of the street so I can cut across the parking lot to get back to the library -- going to either traffic light seems like an insufferable burden, a waste of precious time. I keep doing that on spadina, too, have become one of those people pushing my way through traffic, perching on the little ledge that separates the streetcar lanes from the cars, darting like frogger between vehicles.

That I've noticed this repeatedly lately tells me something -- some new level of impatience, feeling pushed, no time, dashing from one place to the next. This week, I'm bloody tired, and "technically," there's no reason to be -- I've been sleeping a reasonable amount, am just WORKING, really. But just... no restorative time, and never ever getting to the one thing that's hanging over me, the pilot. So I cross streets in the dangerous middle, find myself hovering in suspension between here and there, never getting there fast enough.

April is busy. I'm peering over the hedgerows to the end, really needing breathing space.

Petals

I'm feeling frazzled -- just way too much client busy-ness this week, my dear friend and business partner S leaving for Europe indefinitely -- a lot to do, not so much bandwidth. But I needed to stop and look at the tulips opening so gorgeous-ly in my dining room. Was walking home with groceries the other day and stopped at the flower shop downstairs and asked "I have $11 in my pocket -- what can I get?" Then, miraculously, my cousins brought me some stems that matched perfectly. Perfect and luscious today.

Now, fitting in a quick run. It's above freezing and *almost* sunny. Maybe will brave the lake.

Hoot

My cousin is achieving Great Things as Miss Hooters.

I learned on the weekend that one of my other cousins apparently got a boob job as a gift from her husband. ("What'd she have done?" asked another cousin. "Bigger? Raised? Lowered?" "I don't think anyone has them lowered" offered HER husband. Then we talked about vasectomies).

The hooters thing is just... sigh.

Egg, redux

We had a family ritual while I was growing up that easter was the time we got new, cheap, one-season outdoor toys like hula hoops and skipping ropes. My dad would stress test them to their limits most easters. He'd also ringlead an egg hunt at my grandparents' in which we always maintained the fiction that we had "not found" eggs the previous year -- they were, of course, always resquirrelled after they'd been rooted out. I've blogged about this before.

Today, coincidentally, my cousin brought me over a little bag of things that my aunt had retrieved from my grandmother's house after she died. Including one of the petrified eggs planted at least two decades ago by my dad.

I miss you, dad.

***

(The package also included a hilarious thank you note that I wrote to my grandparents when I was about 8 -- "Thank you for the card and the money. It was the most money's worth of a dollar bill that I got. All the rest were one dollar bills." And to be clear, I signed my full name).

A thousand ages in thy sight

Conversation reported by my cousin, from two of her more secular friends:

Wife: What's good friday anyway? The day jesus died, right?

Husband: How'd he die again?

**

A little mind-boggling, this lack of basic cultural knowledge -- but at the same time, charmingly other-dimensional. I remember a fracas back in my grad school days in the mid-80s, when we were being introduced to the wonders of mainframe computers, and Dilworth instructed us to "type the lord's prayer" as a test of our ability to use the word processing program. There were at least two or three people in the class who said they had no idea what he meant, and he responded with some outrage about this being a basic cultural artifact, like shakespeare or the national anthem.

The conversation pings me also back to a second year comparative religion course I took as an undergrad -- I wrote something in a paper about the crucifixion being the "mythology of christianity" and the prof scrawled back "IF christianity has a mythology, this is not it."

(Again, mindboggling in a professor of comparative religion, but I supposed discovering the narrowness of realms of academic expertise has been part of my gradual awakening into adulthood. I will note that I seem to recall that this prof had some sort of seamy interlude later on in life in which he was knifed outside some bar in detroit, and I didn't have quite the same gasp of horror as I might have if he hadn't made me squirm in disgust).

All of this is really postmodernism in freeze frame action... assumptions that one's own mythology is the lens through which we all make cultural meaning -- and at the same time, so much *is* refracted against it, including the basic structure of canadian holidays and the tying together of redemption and the new life of spring. My online friend in Chicago notes that their cardinal was blessing easter baskets (wtf is that about, she says --I thought the baskets and the bunnies and the eggs were all pagan fertility symbols) when he fell down and broke his hip yesterday. Again with the absurdity of it all, like the enacted Passion in the streets of the italian neighbourhood here in which at least one of the Christs over the past decade was purported to be a well known gay leather boy sub quite into the flogging.

All balled together, creating riffs of bizarre intersection, some grappling by well meaning people for christianity that is about caring for others, all obscuring the way that religion is so efficiently used to create a "we" that others everyone else. It's easiest to think of easter as the affirmation of wanting to Do Good that my mother wants it to be, or the playful spring ritual of eggs and outdoor toys after the bleak winter my dad always made it. I squint at all the pieces that filter together across my own life, and can only find the bricolage of mud luscious spring, propulsion for rejuvenation after the bleak grey winter. Fresh hope for a drive around the lake where my car isn't in danger of being blown off the skyway.

Here at the right time

It's easter again. Last year at easter, I was such a newbie blogger, so unsettled in so many aspects of my life. Had hit the nadir of misconnection with my ex, had moved, was exhausted and feeling my fumbling way toward the next thing. Not sure where my paying work was and even less sure where my real work was. I went to windsor to see my family at easter, and drove home still frayed at the edges. I have a vivid sense memory of being in the dark car on that sunday night, driving faster and faster as the car filled with music, and in that cocoon, able to feel reborn, opened up, letting go of the stuff that was besetting me. My therapist called it my own redemption -- christian metaphors aside, it did feel like emotional crocuses.

Into that space, I reconnected with F, went to Portland, got back into my work and refound the pacific. Then really connected with F, and found our way to where we are now, a full fledged couple of six months this week. Found my way, fumblingly, so much closer to my real work.

Today, driving back from roc after dropping F at the airport for a work trip to europe, I dragged a whole new basket full of frayings. It's... so full with him. Loving joy between us, he makes me laugh and sigh in all the right ways, supports me in my work, drives me forward with his ambition. Makes it okay to be me, in all my foibles and complications, sees my future.

And yet... I can't just relax into it, can't be happy in it. I'm always *poised* for something to be wrong, can't roll with the natural disrhythmia of trying to figure out how to balance our intense then apart time, life here and first lines of warp on the loom of us there. Less tangled into lives here, not in anyone's life in roc except F's. Not sure how to be "here" when here is in love, partnered but not in the same place, no "next life" yet clear, my life in toronto still pinning down the corners of my tent every time I try to up stakes (necessarily in the work sense), but yearning for a next place where I can feel a bit settled and find a rhythm. Colleagues and friends I click with here, flesh and ideas I click with in a place neither of us particularly wants to be.

The outside world glosses my current state as "busy." "Stuffed" is more like it -- gills bulging, eyes popping, touching down into each realm just long enough to almost get it right and then resent it for not being the only thing. I want reassurance that isn't possible from F, and it's about wanting so much -- life that holds everything I want to do more comfortably, more gracefully, more easily than now, life with love and work and home and friends entangled.

When I got home from Portland last year, I wandered around my flat in my bare feet playing Josh Ritter, just feeling the now, ripening with the imaginings from F, from the sense of my work that was starting to take shape. The colour of the sky in portland still perches at the edge of my consciousness, so much promise for clearing, for the energizing splash of coolness before and after rain. So much promise for feeling at home somewhere new. I am halfway to somewhere new, and am feeling ungraceful about knowing how to hold what's important in the past, threading into onto the loom of the new.

Guest blog from F

A propos a conversation my online gang were having about easter and the purpose of the whole resurrection thing.

**

I've always been hard to disgust, but here's something that disgusts me. How come, when the dead return looking all decayed and unappealing, and stagger around a remote village, or a top-secret research facility, or an outpost on Mars, eating a bit of human flesh and moaning incoherently, and are then heroically defeated and pass into legend, that's a BAD thing..and yet, when the dead return looking all serene, pass a few apparently harmless remarks, and start a cult that intimidates, tortures and crusades its way across the world for a couple of millennia, killing millions of people and displacing millions more while espousing the highest motives, that's a GOOD thing? And now, this weekend, everyone wants to celebrate? That's what disgusts me.

Snips

Actually having a couple of days at home without meetings gives me space to breathe... it's pure delightful coincidence that it's spring like and the mud-luscious world etc. is abounding.

On my streets:

- while running, yesterday, down sodden, grimy spadina to the lake: a man, running with good form, in running tights and good shoes, a running shirt... and a navy blue satin corset, and a ponytail high on his head.

- at yonge and wellesley today, a guy in a white tshirt, running shoes, the sort of red busy cargo shorts that are completely overtechnical for anything short of a rockface, and a red santa hat; then, suddenly, a naked torso as the shirt was too much for him.

- in the cafeteria at Trinity college, working in a beverage-friendly environment: an earnest young man intoning "but in nature you are CLOSEST to GOD." And an earnest, plump, long-haired, spotty young woman who could be plunked out of any of the past four decades, tutoring an older woman on the praxis of ministry -- sermon writing, managing lay people, really making people FEEL your faith.

The sun is still a bit stiff and disused, not certain it wants to lure people outside just yet. But it's making me restless.

Shedding skin

It's been just over a year since I moved into this place. An overstuffed backpack of a year, with shoes stuffed awkwardly into side pockets and not-quite-dry jackets bungied onto the back. If I string together the runs I've done over the year, I patch together a trek through the humid, ominous suburbs of Houston, a "river" trail in albuquerque where I discovered the bizarre practice of fishing in a completely created pond in the middle of the desert, a loop around the dusty old market centre of Santa Fe (where I face-planted on a loose cobble), the verdant river of central Portland, the raging open beach of the Oregon coast, the civilized sunny beach trail in Santa Barbara, the rocky beach of Monterey, the stiff suburbs of Penfield, the damp concrete of Toronto. Not as much mileage in actual *running* as many other years, but so many different touchdown points, such a map of desire and yearning and experience.

Last year at this time I was an open wound, really, still. I had moments of connection and smoothness with people, and half-formed ideas of what I wanted next, and a lot of yearning -- but a lot of blind fumbling and bouts of bleakness. Today? Lucrative, involving paid work and good collaborators. A much more focused sense of my academic work, life's work. A lover I'm passionate about and see a future with. A warm friendship with my ex. Tight bonds with other core friends.

One of the most sharp-edged effects of that year is about that emergence of "core friends" -- and a lot of chafing shedding that's gone along with that. Many factors in this -- on the surface, time, and at another level, a transmogrify of self and arenas people who can be part of this sometimes very navel-gazey shape-shifting. I've had incidental losses of friends -- people who fell off the map when B and I were not longer coupled and the connection patterns disappeared -- and I've had more wincing losses, where people bluntly told me that they didn't really like the person I am now. I can make easy meaning of this -- I *am* more self-absorbed -- simple time and also trying to focus on some pretty massive things I'm doing -- but it still stings.

It's a kind of... consolidation process. A collecting of the critical mass of people who are my compatriorts through the different gateposts, who have lust for an resilience and acceptance about continual self-creation. My tribe, as it emerges and shifts.

There are people I wish I simply had more time to hang out with, more space to let in -- because they're fascinating, lovely, warm and amazing people. And I've also found new...deep clicks. One completely new friend who is a loving co-conspirator as we each go through our different self-authoring... and two people in my academic world I am always more tightly wound to. A colleague I am partnered and balanced with as never before. F, of course -- so much possibility, so much now.

The people who've fallen away... skin shedding is the right metaphor. They were part of me, they helped shape who I was, they wrapped around me. And, as I grew, as I went through new seasons... the cells were no longer vibrant and alive. The hollow, dried husk of skin left behind is reminder, is poignant, is something I'm grateful for... and I feel twinges of regret and guilt for not being the person they could have stayed connected to. But I'm not unhappy with my vibrant, wriggling self, scooting forward, more aware of what I'm doing in my relationships, how we're making each other.

Stories to tell

Such a bad blogger I am, not shaping any of my busy little life into stories. Lots of activity, not a lot of movement.

Am in ROC for the week, pecking away at some work stuff (which just keeps MULTIPLYING) and trying to figure out what my pilot project for my dissertation is. In the middle of this, I received an email from the woman-I-met-on-a-plane whose wedding I randomly went to in Santa Fe last summer. She spent a year in Afghanistan working on an alternative livelihood project, and just wrote a really riveting piece for the Washington Post about the futility of such development work.

Her email also said:

After the piece ran, I received nearly 200 responses from all over the world, many of which stunned me with their humanity and kindness. After all was said and done, these responses proved to be more moving and meaningful than anything I had written. I hope to find a way to share some of them at some point.

Very sobering stuff, and pokes even more sharply at my questions about how my work can be meaningful. Sometimes I really envy F the concreteness of his science :-).

Instead, I spend my time with distractions like scouring the internet for an extremely good coq au vin recipe. Apparently StraightCate can cook things like this.

Hidden from view

My cousin sent me an email this morning:

"She posted one last entry about how well-laid she was, and then she was never heard from again!" [Your Mom doesn't check your blog, surely?]

Yes, too damned busy and nothing coherent to say. Working working, fretting about school and momentum, enjoying my life, drinking too much good wine, trying to put some shape to a distributed life.

It was a year ago this week I took possession of this flat. So much frenzy that was, so many pages now flickered through the year. It still doesn't exactly feel like "home," but it feels like *my* place. And a jump-off point to whatever comes next.

Feh, more work to do, more words words words later.

Blood oranges

I spent a very restful weekend with F, finally getting the breather and connected time I needed. Lots of snow, lots of lying about, a bit of skiing. Actually read most of a a novel for the first time in months, it feels like. Spending, by Mary Gordon. Some passages that made me gasp with resonance.


This one is about the artist (the protagonist) reflecting on how her work has changed since she acquired a "muse"/lover/patron:

And the sex did make the work better. I was a lively body, looking at bodies. The rind that covers the sexual underskin when you're not having sex, the one that keeps you from despair, was pulled back. The fruitlike flesh was exposed, palpable and porous as the skin of an orange. A blood orange, a mixed color, orange bleeding into red. After sex, I was free of anger and bitterness. What others did, how they moved ahead of me, how I hadn't got what I deserved and they'd got so much more, all that was melted. What's it called when something disappears on brass or copper, and the fresh plate is there, ready for impressions? That's how I was after we'd been together; a peeled fruit, a fresh copper plate. That was how I worked when I left his bed and went to the Brera. It almost frightened me to feel so alive.

Lend a hand and play the game

I'm in the middle of a crazy busy week -- four marathon days of facilitation followed by another half day of meetings on Thursday -- and this means tweaking designs in the evening and dealing with the flood of daily emails. So I was pecking away at my (shiny quack quack new keyboard!) in my jammies tonight, and in the corner of my screen, IMing with a friend.

This friend had a personal achievement in the world of intimacy (how's that for coyness?) this weekend. I said "you need a badge" and hauled out my store of ancient brownie badges. We rejected the broom, the skates, the dog, the palette, the wheelbarrow, the golden bar, the symbol for the Elf Six ("here we are the jolly elves -- think of others, not ourselves!") and finally landed on the golden hand as the appropriate emblem (snort).


"You were a good brownie!" said my friend, in awe at the list of images I was rejecting.

"Oh, these aren't my badges," I said. "I bought these on ebay. To make ceremonial markers for just this kind of occasion. I *lost* all my badges."

And once again I sank into resentment at the Injustice done to my idealistic, unironic little 8 year old brownie self, the one that liked to wear the uniform just so, revelled in the sense of Belonging in the 4th Rhine Valley Pack of Canadian Brownies on the military base in germany.

A prelapsarian world, that little paramilitary gang. So earnest I was, uttering with complete conviction the "promise to do my best, to do my duty to God, the Queen and my Country, to help other people every day, especially those at home." Making oatmeal and eggs for my father so I could get the cooking badge, hiking through the Black Forest and painstakingly collecting plants so I could get the Outdoor Explorer badge (little binoculars? a magnifying glass? can't remember), sweeping the kitchen and being generally Obedient to tick off the little accomplishments in my little book and work my way up the golden bar, golden ladder, golden HAND, and then FLY UP to guides with the little wings made of coat hangers and tulle!

My own Fall from Innocence, that Brownie Pack. A camp out weekend, in a little hostel in the woods, vats of macaroni and chemical-tasting cheese and all sorts of wholesome and satisfying activities. "You need to wear your feet pjs," had insisted my mother, "it will be cold." "NO ONE wears feet pjs," I said doubtfully. "They'll laugh at me." "No they won't," she said. "They WON'T," I reasoned silently, "they're BROWNIES. Brownies are KIND," a total sucker to the sticky world of bluebird Helpfulness in the Brownie Handbook. So I wore them, then after being lulled to sleep by our Snowy Owl serenading us with her guitar and Me and Bobby McGee, a fire drill in the middle of the night, me attempting to hide the feet in my jammies by pulling socks over them, then every. brownie. in. the. camp pointing and laughing at me.

Despite the crushing humiliation, I dogged on toward the badge acquisition, still determined to be a BETTER brownie than all those bitches -- not REAL brownies! -- who'd laughed at my jammies. By the time we came home from germany, I had 22 badges marching up my arm -- skating! housekeeping! reading! art! (more macaroni, dried this time) -- and was within a hair's breath of the grail of the Golden Hand. Had almost accomplished all there was to accomplish as a brownie.

Then back to Canada, and, with a thud, into a world of secularized brownies, no sheen of the paramilitary that infused the pack on the base. Brown Owl Mrs. Kondruk, a lump of a woman and a pale imitation of the crackle pop pantheon of the revered overseas Owls. The toadstool that we were supposed to dance around drooped, and Brown Owl pronounced thickly, "you can't keep those badges - how do I know you earned them -- how do I know you didn't just buy them from someone?"

A squint eyed skeptic that Mrs. Kondruk, and the last gasp of wide-eyed innocence for me. I quit, in disgust... until a post-script flirtation with Girl Guides a few years later. One weekend in a little exchange with a Girl Scout troop somewhere in Michigan, being singled out with my friend Rachael by the Coolest Girls in the group, my first brush with Rumours of Lesbianism. Corruption complete.

My ebay badges belonged to someone named Josie H, according to the little Brownie Record. Josie wasn't the keener I was, apparently, her checkmarks much more lackadaisacal. She *did* have a Prayer for Catholic Brownies that I somehow escaped, which concludes Help me this day to be like You; teach me to be brave in denying myself, and to be good, gentle, kind and brave. AMEN.

F gets quite exercised about religion of all kinds. framing it all as a virus we must be able to create an innoculation from. It seems pretty simple to me -- Brave Denial x Selfless Obedience/Individuality = Belonging. Yet so alluring, the skipping in unison around the toadstool -- "We're the brownies/here's our aim/lend a hand and play the game" . I should be grateful to those girls who laughed at my feet pjs and the cynical Mrs. K -- they disrupted the inevitable trajectory and saved me from a life of Missionary Zeal.

Impulsive me

Marched on out and bought myself a new macbook today. Mac #7, starting with the SE back in 1988. Was thinking about my classic with the 2 megs of ram. Heh. This one: 13.3 inches, 2 ghz processor, 2 gigs ram, 80 gig harddrive. It's PRETTY and SHINY and makes me very HAPPY. And I don't have to write the letters on the keys with a sharpie when someone else wants to use it :-).

It has this silly photobooth thing. Maybe I'll start reading my niece stories online :-). Like I don't have enough distractions...



I'll miss my little 12 inch ibook -- I had a lot of intimacy with it, watching lots of movies on my chest in bed, emailing and chatting late at night from under my covers, conducting so much of my "courtship" with N, writing some serious papers, practically being able to shove it in my pocket. This one is fancy, but not quite as vin ordinaire as the other. As soon as I can migrate all the data, that one will continue to live a useful life (until it inevitably abruptly dies, judging by its sporadic recent behaviour) in the hands of my ex, who will be much much MUCH less abusive of it. I'll have to write the letters on the keys, though -- with a permanent marker.

My 42 year old bottom

It's my birthday, and I realize that I'm 42 and still not completely skilled in basic life logistics.

It's bloody freezing here. On Tuesday, I put on a really old pair of tights that I remember being warm because I had to walk to a meeting. There was something awry. About a block from my house, I felt an ominous... creeping. I did some ungraceful but ineffective clutching, and by the time I got to the meeting -- a 10 minute walk -- my tights were *completely down below my ass*. I was wearing a) a short skirt and b) an ass-baring thong. I was as *exposed* as a land-flopped fish.

So. I was on the corner where my client is. I had to navigate some horrible filthy muddy construction, then waddle, thighs pressed together, to the elevator. There was one other woman in there. A stranger. So I took a leap of intimacy and said excuse me, I'm having a wardrobe malfunction, and I did all of this maneuvering and clutching while trying to not give away the fact that I was accidentally mooning the world. I wriggled and yanked, she laughed, and then when we got out of the elevator, she *came into my meeting*.

SHE WAS A NEW CONSULTANT ON MY PROJECT.

I had to walk home *clutching* the tights and then I pulled my skirt up to see how far down they were and my whole big huge white ass was just hanging out there, straight in the air.

Maybe I should buy myself some new tights for my birthday.

Touching down

I'm packing, again, this time in ROC after two nights here, getting ready to go to NYC for the weekend. Terribly self-indulgent, but it IS my birthday next week, and F's son is playing in a band ... and the project we thought had disappeared has sprung back to life like some self-regenerating alien, so I'll be working a lot more over the next months than I'd thought. So two days in an amazing city, in love -- then home to snowy TO and a lot of angstful clients.

I have some fantastic pics from our otherworldly afternoon on a deserted beach in Big Sur on Monday, but there are cable and software issues, so the download will have to wait until I'm home. For now, I munch my way through the giant slab of trader joe's chocolate I brought F from my first CA trip, and reflect on the fact that F seems to be turning me into a gangster flick fan. We watched Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels last night and both of us have adopted "It's all fucked up! No money! No weed! It's all been replaced by a pile of corpses!" as the perfect stock phrase for project fuckups.

I did actually manage to finish a paper today, a reasonable draft of my third of three comps papers. A good morning of editing and all three should be in shape tomail off, a milestone of sorts. This one was a bit hard to churn out, but it should serve the purpose of demonstrating what I've learned on the bizarre little snakes and ladders game of theory that my phd has been.

Life charmed, stories still unwritten, from one coast to another.

Peregrinations

I'm perched at this upstairs lounge at a an odd little café in Monterey. There's free wifi here, and some quiet jazz, and the smell of movie popcorn because it's attached to a very non-chain little cinema, and the rooftops and sunshine are at my eye level. There's a pair of young white people teaching each other arabic at the table in one corner, a very california type oddball with perplexing dreadlocked facial hair and a burnt stare slurping an apparently endless tub of yogurt and grunting behind me, another guy waking from a snooze on the sofa to speak loudly and an unfathomable language on his cellphone -- russian?

The surf at the Asilomar state beach is roiling, and so many nodes of life twining together. Here, with F, our first shared taste of the ocean we both love so much and yearn to live within a touch of. Echoes of my lost prof and friend John, a Steinbeck scholar, my memory of Steinbeck's depictions of tidal pools my first real understanding of fractals, life in miniature and large at the same time. Walking this street with L two weeks ago, eating well and expanding mind into the next space as a thinker, scholar, what my work is. Learning to be peaceful with the echoes of F's history, knowing that this is a well-trodden space for him, that he'd shared it with so many other people, learning to put those stories into a place that shows me how he became who he is, here with me. Writing a paper that synthesizes my scholarly "journey," how I came to situate myself right here, this moment of self and mind and worldview.

So many strands that point to the question -- how do we come to live the lives we're living right now, be the people we are right now? I'm in this poised, privileged place, high vista vantage point on my history, choices I made, life I made from the bifurcation points, assimilating all of that into how I want to be next. Sometimes it's so transcendental -- how is it I am lucky enough to have found, at this moment, space and resources in my life to flit about from landscape to landscape, be with a man who challenges and affirms me in the most profound ways, have work in front of me that sharpens and pushes me... it's a perch of a completely different level of awareness, movement, choices... and it's overwhelmingly powerful... and sometimes so BIG that I just pause, unable to figure out how to keep moving my feet without stumbling or tripping. Steady huge waves, thrumming and unceasing, carrying forward, making me so tiny and so strong at the same time.

Feet on cork, heart in hand, facing forward

My friend J really loves to crawl into a tightly tucked bed and kick her feet gleefully free of the covers. She's generally a serious kind of person, that J, so mindful, so I love that image of her fluttering madly under the sheets, unfettered and delighted.

I get that. My version is the sound that my bare feet make when they slap the cork floors in my loft gently. There's an infinitesimal stickiness, a little suctiony noise, a little tiny thwack, a momentary caress between flesh and warm surface that is oddly grounding, distractingly meditative. It's this aural focal point, a pointer to a profound, quiet, listening-to-your-belly space.

I find this space in my loft, alone, especially when I've come home from somewhere. I haven't been home much lately -- Windsor, then Montreal, then California, then several days in ROC. Leaving again on Thursday. But when I'm suddenly, quietly, alone here, I can find a sort of suspended time, a chamber of heightened senses. Like in the quiet padding around, slap slap slapping in a whisper on my floors, I can hear things through the palimpsest of history, stories, stuck patterns, for the underneath, the elemental desire or need.

The most powerful sense memory of this was the night I arrived home from my time in Portland last spring. I got home, late, quietly alone after a long traveling day, the calm space of this flat open on a saturday night, humid hectic early summer toronto pulsing outside. I put some Josh Ritter on my itunes -- the quieter thoughtful stuff -- and walked around, barefoot, eating raspberry gelato out of the freezer, bite by bite off a big spoon. I felt simultaneously calmer, more poised, more awake,more full of possibilities, more infused with a kind of emotional chlorophyll than I'd ever remembered feeling -- simultaneously deeply satisfied and deeply yearning for something more. I was alive with having been in a west coast city that deeply suited me, able to write some important things, unfolding into a rich correspondence with F that had led to a decision to meet a week later, a connection I never could fully open myself up to until I was fully alone in Portland. All of these folded together, my feet in tactile contact with my floor.

I've lived here almost a year now. It's a rich space, open and forgiving. Warm, silent, space for the slap of my feet, listening to everything that I know how to hear. It doesn't feel like a permanent space -- just one to grow in, quiet grounding, knowing who I am at my most elemental, disheveled and joyful and *awake*. My most loving and strong.

I was reading a series of emails from three years ago, and I find it hard to find myself in those words, sometimes. Articulate, held together, so certain. Now I find myself rarely certain... but confident, knowing, feeling sure through my body right to the palpable contact of foot on floor.

Fieldnotes.

LAX, noon.

Allowed myself to be rerouted (thus courting rebooking pitfalls) to gain a voucher for free travel on United anywhere in US in next year. All good until I went to check in at Air Canada for LAX -- YYZ flight and discovered that United agent in Santa Barbara had given me a TICKET but had not booked me on flight. Much Clucking and Blaming from an oddly eyebrowed agent later, I'm at the gate.

And puzzling. So now you can bring liquids and gels in your carryon if they are "less than 3 oz each" and all packed together in a quart-size ziplock see through bag.

I had a ziplock freezer bag that had in it an almost empty thing of toothpaste (normal size) and one TINY tube of prescription cold sore ointment. Nothing else.

The guy at the SB security said my ziplock bag was too big -- it needed to be QUART size and mine was GALLON size.

I'm canadian. I don't know from quarts and gallons. And I pointed out that the idea was that I could have that MUCh, right, not what size the BAG actually was, and said bag was actually ALMOST EMPTY, and wasn't the whole point of the bags so everything was in one place, which mine was?

No. My choices: dump toothpaste and $90 tube of zovirax; put shoes on, retrieve computer and go to back to gift shop and BUY A SANDWICH BAG.

Luckily, I had in my purse a small sandwich bag I had ibuprofen, dramamine and advil cold in.

So I shoved my toothpaste in that and he allowed me through.

Charmed life

Another week in CA, another collage of talk talk talk sun ocean ideas writing deep collaboration in my tribe. The inauguration of the week was a wonderful grounding -- Linda and I established a "first annual" ritual with a drive down the Big Sur coast that featured a lot of hiking, gabbing, dinner at the cliff edge watching the sun set over the pacific while we sipped our beverages of choice (mine a pinot, hers pretty much straight gin), peeking through the fence of the henry miller library, falling asleep amid the debris of a bottle of malbec, a gorgeous fire, wasabi peas, gummy bears and a bit of west coast bud and talk talk talk.

This is where I belong, this is where I'm alive, and so I'm coming back in two weeks with F. My life is about as good as it gets.

And in other mysteries...

Remember these?


The hosts my sister bought me in a depanneur in Quebec, alongside the ju jubes and sesame snacks?

My cleaner has been surreptitiously eating them.

Out of beta? Out of blog? Out of fog?

There's a header now on this blog infrastructure about being "out of beta" on the new techy platform. In parallel, I feel like I'm out of blog steam. Have been so RUSHED in so many ways, that I just puffed out of energy in a lot of ways.

I'm still wracked with the residue of some respiratory virus my otherwise adorable babyniece inflicted on me when she coughed in my MOUF over the holidays in Windsor, a virus that I toted hither and yon around the province, across the wee ferry to take Porter Air to Montreal for New Year's with F, scattered widely across that city and then left lodged in F's lungs for his trip back to western NY. Now I'll take it on a plane to CA tonight, where it will trail with me from SF along a drive down the coast, through Big Sur overnight and onto Santa Barbara.

Where school awaits, and more recalibrating about my plans, my work, what AcademicCate really is and can become. Another committee meeting where I'm not ready to have my proposal approved, though they're a lot happier with me since I sent a note about my status and my thinking two weeks ago. It will be rich -- it always is -- and I'll ground in my tribe, and anchor myself a little.

So many suspended stories as 07 begins...where will it take me and F? will I be able to cobble together meaningful and lucrative enough paid work that lets me live my other two lives? how can I throw myself full force into school this year? Two days ago, the work path looked evident, but ow it seems this huge grant we were working on may be buggered up, and I'll have a lot more flexi time in the first quarter than I thought. The intrepid life of a consultant, as usual -- one moment it looks as though I might be able to earn enough for my whole year in the first 3 - 4 months, the next moments it's pffffted back into Ministry coffers and vanishes. Back to basic income, eking it out a bit, trolling for work, trying to focus the time productively to write.

This moment right before Winter Session for school is always a little fraught for me -- last year I was poised to buy my condo, to sever the going-nowhere, energy-sucking relationship with T, to try to refocus my academic work after a year where I just milled about, really. I'm in such a different place now -- life stories being tentatively co-written again with someone complex who... feeds me.. in so many ways, so much more clarity about the field I want to play in, less angst about income even when opportunities surge and vanish, a loft that feels home-ish, even if not HOME yet. A really-makes-me-alive project with the orphans. A strong web of people scaffolding and stretching and buoying me. A body reasonably fit, though not at its peak. Places touched and felt over the year -- Portland, New Mexico, Oregon coast, Houston, Montreal, Santa Barbara, Vermont, DC, Vancouver, ROC, Ottawa -- and some across an ocean to be savoured in the coming year.

Still a bit edgy in all of this -- the sproinnnnng of a suspension bridge across a gorge, where you're really not *positive* that your backpack isn't going to tip you over -- but trying to just give over to the bounce, the spring.

And by the way?

My sister's comments on my peeping tom santa post? Hilarious.


-Any depictions created by religious factions who, having accepted the inextricability of Santa from Christmas, attempt to gain-by-working-WITH the secular fence-sitters, and show Santa happily working hand-in-hand with Jesus. No matter how they try, it just always winds up really really creepy. These Santas never seem wholesome, they seem like Santa got some favour from the mob years ago, took his time paying up until he found a reindeer's head in his bed, and is now shilling for Jesus only because of the unseen machete digging into his back, a look of terror always visible behind the forced smile in his eyes.