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.