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.