Jamais Vu

I'm in the town I lived in for two years when I was a kid, and I'm having an odd little jamais vu. I know I've been here, and I found the apartment building we lived in no problem, but almost nothing even taps an echo at me. I even had the number of our building wrong -- for years I thought it was 12 Nelkenstrasse, but it turns out to be 14, along with a 14/1 in the form of a little annex on the side which, along with a "new" fourth floor, stretched our tiny building of 5 apartments to 11. The back yard looks smaller, but unlike the cliché of "returning to one's roots," that's because it actually IS.

The bridge over the tiny river the Murg and the path along its banks are the most familiar, but even walking the streets and finding things I knew must be there -- a church a few blocks down, a park across from the church -- doesn't bring the pavement back under my feet. And the town square, which has clearly been there a few centuries beyond the 34 years ago I was last here? The only bells ringing are in the spire, not in my memory.

My inner narrative about the time here is SO vivid -- the most formative of my life -- that it's harshly jarring to realize that I can't find the physical space remotely resonant. Says so much about how the way we re-create our narratives, feed them, strengthen them, is an act of interpretation. If there's such a fuzzy space between the volumes of stories that I "KNOW" happened here, but re-inhabiting this space doesn't make it all flood back -- says so much about how much memory resides in its own time and context, and doesn't have to be a hard edge around how we interpret our histories, string together the coherent narratives of our life. Weirdly, weirdly freeing.

Rastatt is a good contrast from Heidelberg -- almost none of the old bavarian charm -- just a small utilitarian town with lots of quiet staid houses and small apt. buildings, reasonably prosperous from the mercedes plant. All shops organized around sensible offerings, lots of hair cutting places, kebap houses and travel agencies specializing in turkey, so I guess I know who works on the plant. Although, the old town that I don't remember is pretty charming square anchored by an old church and a huge schloss in the style of versailles that now houses the museum of german liberty.

No pics, because I forgot my camera cable and can't for some reason rig up the bluetooth McGyver to my phone that's worked in the past. Just chewing on this, as I walked through the town in the grey drizzle all day.

The one thing I do know? On the autobahn today, even in the crappy Opel rental, it was very clear that I developed my ideas of how to drive in Germany. In my element pushing the car to 160 km/hr, actually chortling about the brilliance of the way the germans drive fast and sort themselves perfectly into the right lanes. Auto ballet.

PS. Seriously. How could I FORGET this???

Also.

I'm in Heidelberg, in the incessantly romantic old town. And those charming church bells that ring every 15 minutes, just metres from my Romantically Encased sleepyhead? I sure hope they stop at 10 pm.

This is my hotel, built in 1592 or some such nonsense.



Happily, it now boasts fluffy white crisp duvets and lots of hot water.

It's very hard to blog

WHEN ALL THE COMMANDS ARE IN DEUTSCHE!!!

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Dr C, party of one

A few weeks ago, Renee commented that I seemed to be revisiting a lot of long-ago stories in my blog, lately. I guess that's part of what we do when we're in the middle of some kind of transition -- scan our pasts to kind of recreate the coherent thread, look at the most resonant bits from a different angle and suddenly see a new constellation.

I'm at the airport heading for my crazy trip to Europe for the week, this indulgent little pilgrimage to the part of germany I lived in when I was a kid. I can't quite articulate what moves me to do this, exactly, except it's something about drawing a line under some stories and patterns from my history that still have too strong a watermark, and about going back to the place where I was pretty strongly formed just as I'm trying to shape the next life. I don't expect some kind of Exorcising of Demons -- it's not that dramatic -- more like circling back through space that's as echoing as being in interaction with people I've known for decades.

This eve-of-the-journey is a demarcation between three days in south florida for a conference with my colleagues J&D and my little spree into germany by myself. The florida conference was a cool tonic -- the time before I left was pretty overheated on a number of fronts, and it was a pure joy to be able to just absorb and listen and talk and muse at this conference. I knit a sock through most of it -- cast it on in the opening plenary and finished the gusset decreases on the plane -- and the sock became kind of iconic, even making it into the final conference slide show.

The knitting gave me a chance to feel my way through that space, a possible offshoot tribe of my fielding world. I had the honour of being named an Associate of the Institute, and now I'm plotting about collaborations, and workshops, and writings and links. But for now, just good to open doors, and reflect hard on how happy I am with the person I seem to be able to be post-doc. So many threads, all of them red and potentially powerful. Feeling space to keep growing into.

No pics of the conference (or the sock), since my dialogue with technology has been a bit monologic and profane this week. My phone has been turning itself off and draining the battery, there was almost no wifi where we were (even the phones didn't work), and I forgot my camera cable. But I'm tickled by the juxtaposition of current-future-me bobbing in the ocean in Sarasota and (badly) salsa dancing with social constructionists on Saturday and landing in Heidelberg and pelting down the autobahn on Monday. So more when time.

Suns and no tummies

It's been a mostly worky weekend, though I managed to go for what will probably end up being the last long bike ride of the year yesterday -- 32 miles through a perfect September day in upstate new york, until I was abruptly stopped by a Bridge Out detour and a quick phone call to F to pick me up at some difficult-to-describe place. All sunny though, embodied by the drawing my niece did this week.

Pondering lots of possible futures right now, and having many conversations with immigration lawyers and the like.Very much in the "any path could lead to becoming a slightly different version of me" zone... but it's all pretty cool. I keep waiting for the expected anvil of post-doc depression to drop, but so far, even though I've been crazy busy, it's all been pretty energizing.

A week from today I leave on my weird little pilgrimage to germany, to re-stomp the steps of those two formative years in my childhood...I'm trying to marshal a way to articulate why this is so important for me to do now, and what I want to get out of it. More to come, I guess.

F's house is on the market, and the real estate agent has been running around hiding things she thinks might somehow detract from people's interest in the house. I came in on wednesday and found that this postcard had been taken off the wall above my desk and hidden under a pile of papers:



Now, I am pretty good at understanding other people's points of view, but seriously? This particular nude would be offensive to someone? Presumably the same people who are flocking to buy Sarah Palin's glasses.

The thing is, it's a pretty unconventional house -- so I can't match up the agent's notion that the same people who would buy this house instead of any number of pretty how town suburban houses festooned with Harvest! Outdoor Home Decor would be offended by this image. And then I really, really hope that they don't paw too deeply in my underwear drawer.

Fiats

I started three different posts today, but my PMS ADD took over here as with everything else in my life (I have four knitting projects sprawled across my kitchen countertop, and nibbled at 5 pieces of different work today without accomplishing anything). But I have some vague nothing that keeping my finger on this blog (like the way you press a shoelace to hold it while you're tying the bow) is somehow a way to hold together all the flapping laces. All this traveling, plotting, exploring, trying to figure out how to make the next life happen. But I had all this impulse today that amounted to nothing.

So enough to say that I had a really lovely weekend with my family in Ottawa, particularly with my nieces, who are at a delightful stage. It was a pretty low key weekend -- a nice brunch at M's, lots of playing and dancing with the girls, good talks with E, monitoring my other sister's recently lasered eyeballs for signs of alien invasion. Last night we had a birthday party "for EVERYONE," complete with ice cream cake, balloons, and candles, and I grinned all the way to the airport in loopy's 1969 cinquecento.

It was a good weekend, but getting back monday morning and knowing I'm leaving in 48 hours again apparently serves the same function as jet lag, where I just want to lie down quietly and knit the cuff of my sweater AGAIN, after ripping it out for the third time.

I found the picture

from the walk I was talking about in the sand dollar post. And notice that, contrary to my recollection, that sand dollar wasn't even intact. And I look like such a YOUNG LITTLE BUNNY! Gah! Not even 7 years ago. Time, ebbing, etc.

Running on the Beach

I'm not sure how these will show up, but the horses through the fog on the beach on Saturday were just magical. (Why is fog *always* magical, except when you're driving in it?)

I'm wishing I were riding my horse on the beach -- and I don't even particularly like horses. Was just doing inventory of the projects on my plate right now.

- two BIG multi-month programs to do development work with teams and groups in two different hospitals, just starting, with D
- one BIG multi-month program on my own, in a different hospital, in partnership with a client
- 2 papers I have to lead the writing on that we've all ignored for MONTHS about work we did last year; in a group that can never get its shit together (unpaid, the joy is in the publishing)
- a course we're developing that is still in an ambiguous state; paid lower-than-usual rate
- possibility of a research project with a university out west that won't pay me nearly enough but will be a grand networking thing
- trying to develop a grant proposal and attract funding in collaboration with someone from new england that I have to basically develop from scratch, including finding a research site, preferrably in seattle
- one day thing that I'm getting paid very little for that I agreed to do as a favour and which is taking up WAY too much of my time, scheduled for friday
- another 2 possible grants to develop also related to the health care work; development is unpaid;
- overseeing the implementation of a multi-site coordinated care project that we got a grant for months ago, in one of the previously mentioned hospitals

Hm. I think that's it. Why does it seem so overwhelming?

Oh yeah, the orphans. Might go to Uganda in November.

Where's my horse?

Waves

(of a different kind).

Just before she left for Ireland, Aine and I met for breakfast, and she reminded (told?) me of a passage in The Waves that she said my work evoked for her. It fit my work so well that I made it the epigraph for the final section of my dissertation:

“Had I been born,” said Bernard, “not knowing that one word follows another I might have been, who knows, perhaps anything. As it is, finding sequences everywhere, I cannot bear the pressure of solitude. When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke around me I am in darkness – I am nothing….I only come into existence when the plumber, or the horse-dealer, or whoever it maybe, says something which sets me alight.”

Of course, it's all about punctuation -- when you pull the frame back further, Bernard is actually lamenting this, feeling insubstantial. My work is about how being set alight by others' words is how we make ourselves. But the images... so perfect.

I found a book for a thank you for P last week in a rummage through a well-appointed, tidy used bookstore in seattle, a very tactile little collection of essays by jeanette winterson, Art [Objects]. Through one of those synchronous moments, she has a passage about the Waves that also thrust itself under my skin, concluding with Woolf's words:

"Lines and colours almost persuade me that I too can be heroic."

Waves of all kinds, the sea, concurrence, ripples backward and forward. The right moment. Puffins spotted on the beach on the weekend.

Sand dollars

My orientation to my school program was a week in Santa Barbara in March 02. It was my first experience of SoCal, and I sat on the beach, scrawling in my journal that I felt AWAKE for the first time in memory.

At the end of that week, I met up with an online friend who lived in the bay area, and we drove up the coast to Pismo Beach to meet another online friend. We went for a loooooooong walk. The wind on my face and the cool sand under my bare feet seemed to be tapping out a new language for me -- the pacific, and connections, and unuttered possibilities.

I have a picture of me from that walk, somewhere -- probably 3 hard drives ago -- clutching an intact sand dollar I picked up on pismo. I'm wearing a pale blue, very california, Life is Good tshirt with a yoga logo and "stay centred" on it that I'd bought that week in SB. I look... delighted. And I'm holding the sand dollar loosely, unaware of how fragile it is, and how it would crumble by the time I got it home.

That shirt also turned out to have a paradoxical quality to it -- it became iconic for me, mutating into a night shirt when it got tattered, and then a cleaning rag, about six months ago. An admonition that I never quite heeded. The walk on the beach was a thread into a relationship that cracked open what I took for granted about my life, cracking that I needed so much that I got a bit blind to who it bruised. Not so centred, but so critical.

I spent last week in Seattle, exploring possibilities for the next life, mailing off the final version of my dissertation in tandem with J, making it an act of mutuality that nicely encapsulated how this process has unfolded. Mostly me, but with such an assortment of companions who showed up and filled in the colours at so many important junctions.

I can't see the way through to what comes next... there's no set narrative in any way. I want -- I need -- to be by the ocean and the mountains. It's how I need to spend the next part of my life. But it's not moving for a job, or a relationship, or for pure adventure. It's trying to find a way to translate the pull of the pacific that made me feel so awake 6 and a half years ago in a frame for a life. With a lover and work and ideas all threaded in, me at the centre.

F and I went for long walk on an open ocean beach on saturday -- I'm not even sure which one, really -- I was driving, not navigating. It was initially a thin substitute for a mountain hike we'd hoped for but had to scuttle because of a virus he had. But it turned out to be the wind and fog and sand I needed. And this time, I found two perfectly intact sand dollars, and managed to get them home in one piece.

Anti-climax

Congratulations Cate! Your tuition charges were stopped as of 08/31/2008.

Your tuition “stop date” was based on the date that the final version of your dissertation arrived at Fielding, ready for the proofreader, unless you had other outstanding requirements. If the latter is true, your tuition “stop date” was based on the completion and approval of your last academic requirement.

You may call yourself "Dr." as soon as the four bindery-ready copies of your dissertation arrive at Fielding. At that time, your degree will be awarded automatically and you will receive a postal letter verifying your legal name for the diploma and notifying you of your official degree date. The diploma will take approximately ten to twelve weeks to reach you after we have ordered it. We place our orders on a monthly basis.
***

Finished dissertation, submitted it, traveled to seattle, pondered many futures, had sublime kensington moment watching Kat sing, pondered relationships and an impending trip to uganda. Yet, no blogging. Am, however, DONE.