Manticores and Tsetse Flies

My friend Jeff made this image for me, when he was thinking about the trip to Uganda I'm planning for the end of November. Kind of a resonant doodle. It's interesting to me that this is what emerged for him... something about one of the ways he sees me. It really sort of wrenches at me... evokes thoughts about the ways that we want to be seen, the gaps between what we feel we can really live into and how other people might see us.

It's been a really emotionally overladen few months. Some intense joy, and some energy for doing things after more or less finishing my phd (still just finalizing some tedious proofreader type changes) that is simultaneously about a Great Unblocking and a bit of manic snatching at all sorts of possibilities. Mostly all of this coalesces around different travels, and the travels as a kind of enactment of different versions of where I want to really shape myself.

I never really blogged very much about my trip to Europe -- I doodled while I was there, but didn't write much about the meaning I was making of it. It was too... active... in some ways. I think the basic narrative is that I went to Germany partly to face some demons, my trip through the cave of Jung, as remembered through the writing of Robertson Davies. Facing self and my manticore.

I think the trip was about my own myth-making, a desire to grab the pen, stop annotating old stories and start writing new versions. There was a lot about the two years we spent in Germany that was "formative" in all senses of the word -- my parents' marriage broke up, and I learned about anger and a kind of humiliating sense of exposure, of Wrongness, somehow. A sense that at 9, I was radiating a kind of misery that the small community around us didn't know how to handle, a kind of misery that I sort of tucked around me like a sleeping bag and never really learned to be buoyant about.

So many core stories in that time, and so many of them continually looping back through my life. I conceived of this jaunt after having a powerful conversation with my friend P about where we develop the rifts of free-floating anxiety in the soft jelly of our brains, give it words that become the shorthand for every other fear we have. "Abandonment, invisibility, not being taken care of" -- all of these fears that we learned when we were kids to be hyper-vigilant for, and never learned how to let that flag down. Preemptive pushing at the walls in some futile attempt to avert -- which of course, paradoxically, just exhausts the people we love. An endless loop.

So I decided that visiting The Scene might free some of this. And in many ways -- it did. The fact that I couldn't "feel" the memory of place, or recognize the site of where I lived except as if from a dream or a novel -- this was really freeing. This was the building I lived in -- and while I could recognize it, I had the street number wrong all these years, and I didn't ... feel it. Certainly didn't have the sensations that I thought I might, the whimpering on my parents' bed while a babysitter tried uselessly to address my broken wrist by wrapping it in gauze. (Kind of shocked when I think about it, that my parents -- and other people's -- would go away for days to Poland, Czechoslovakia, Russia and leave us with 16 and 17 year olds who didn't have cars or any phones!)

It was a good thing to do, this trip, even if I didn't have any epic kinds of revelations. The dimness of the memories really shouted at me -- THESE STORIES DON'T HAVE TO BE THE DEFINING ONES! Which is, I guess, a revelation of sorts -- even if not all that poetic.

I think, though, more than this, the trip underlined for me that all of this rewriting, claiming desired self, living into what I want to live into -- is actually an ACTIVE process of rewriting. There are reminders, and milestones, and frames, and metaphors -- stories like "I went to germany because I don't want to keep reliving some of those 9 year old self stories anymore" -- and those are good things. But the insights and the frames don't change things unless you keep them active.

I had a crappy week last week, for a bunch of reasons -- a road trip with F that should have been kind of magical was instead ragged and tiring for both of us, partly because I let my old anxiety stories be completely foregrounded, couldn't pull forward some of the other ones I'm writing. The familiar misery that comes out of anxiety dominated, and then I looped into the kind of remorse that just keeps me fixated on the thing that upset me in the first place. Not a good pattern. No magic to the insight -- just recognition that there is always a need to keep writing, actively create. I was just talking about this with my younger sister S -- that growing up is a process of actively learning and stretching and making decisions -- that it's not, to borrow an image from Carolyn Knapp, like sticking a turkey in the oven and watching it emerge roasted without any more effort.

When I step back, all of this travel IS about a new self I'm crafting, the baby steps toward living the kind of adventurous life that I've armchair-envied reading endless books about women riding their bicycles around the world solo for years. The Uganda trip is part of that -- there are some things that are kind of worrying about it (ranging from the obvious discomforts of travel in a land filled with car crashes and malaria to concern about making it productive for the work with the kids, to hoping that the history with the founder of the orphanage, who is no longer involved, doesn't lead to some Drama). But I'm also trying to grab at the adventure, trying to add a trip to Bwindi National Park to track gorillas, trying to not just go along for the ride.

I've been reading one of Jane Goodall's books about her work with chimpanzees in Tanzania, and I'm just blown away by her casual comments like "my blood became immune to the poison of the tsetse fly, and I no longer swelled up with every bite." So much "soldiering on" encompassed in that tiny statement. I take it to heart, and vow to keep trying to be that person who no longer swells up with every bite.

Those Europeans Know Something

Last xmas I was trying to find some german moisturizer that F's ex likes, as a little gift when I was going to her place just after xmas. I couldn't locate it online or anywhere in Toronto, but when I was in Germany last month, it was everywhere in every corner Apotheke. I bought her a body cream (as desired, apparently) and bought myself a face cream. And I am completely, utterly in love. I don't want to turn into a person who has to go to Europe to buy toiletries (my sister claims she has to go to Paris to buy bras and argentina to buy... I dunno, can't remember), but this is totally worth it. Silky, sinks in immediately, leaves my skin soft and seems to really address the redness that I always get at this time of year. I have become an Eubos Evangelist. I'm not proud, but there it is.

It's like a gift from heaven

ThanksKatsGiving

I was trying to explain to F this weekend about why thanksgiving is my favourite holiday -- and how I think many people I know feel this way. Canadian thanksgiving is about two things -- harvest and gratitude. There's no religious link (except, I guess, among the people for whom all gratitude has a spiritual element), and there are no gifts. And the second monday in October, when Canadians do thanksgiving, is always a gorgeous gorgeous weekend -- whether that gorgeousness is PerfectEarlyFall with crunching leaves and the waking tang of cool, or like this weekend, out of sync warmth and sun that reminds us of our weather at its best.

I had a good weekend, with quiet decompressing time with F (we can't fit our schedules together very well these days), and then dinner with my chosen family -- B and her smart funny lovely gf A (or Tank), and D&D, my most rooted friend (long-ago lover) and his partner. I made the best turkey I've ever made (dressing cooked separately, turkey stuffed with onions, garlic and herbs, rubbed with olive oil and more herbs, then covered in olive-oil soaked cheesecloth, basted liberally with chicken stock). And was really happy to have my people in my beautiful loft. None of them is much given to making Pronouncements about gratitude (mocking me gently for mine, more like it), but I think they were appreciative too.

So I'm very very grateful for everyone who was in the room last night, and for the time and space to notice the pink of the sky right now, and for the many doors opening in front of me since finishing my phd. And for finding myself much less stressed, much more present. And.

More than that. I wanted to blog about someone else I'm grateful for. My neighbour and friend, another Katherine-of-many-variant-names. Her most recent blog post is about thanksgiving and her fervour for it, so it's a propos, I think. But more than that, I wanted to just... acknowledge her a little.

First, she's the best neighbour ever. She left a note on my car when I first moved in, praising my smartcar and noting that its puny size meant that maybe she could fit her scooter in my spot. She offered to pay, I said no -- but other than lending her some space I wasn't using anyway, I have given her NOTHING in comparison to what she's given me since I moved in. She does all the standard good neighbour stuff -- looks after plants and mail when I'm away, checks that I've turned off the iron, helps me when I can't figure out where the fuck that beep is coming from.

But more than that, her PRESENCE in my life is just a gift. She's generous, warmer than a good pair of hut booties, , wry, and joyful. She connects herself to people everywhere she goes. She's unbelievably resourceful and creative -- the only person I know who can resuscitate a dead ipod, keep a slightly crotchety old Honda 250 running with flair, stuck vintage suitcases on her hallway wall to create a cunning way place to store undies and socks -- and can make soup out of a hunk of garlic.

As if all of this general GOODNESS wasn't enough, Kat is also unbelievably talented. She's a designer who has written some cool stuff about greening the cab industry, a fabric artist, a ceramic artist with a piece featured in Toronto Life this month, a dj and... a singer-songwriter. When I first met her, she was singing a lot of covers, in dinner clubs and sometimes small bars. But over the past two years, her voice has just... soared, expanded, blossomed, ripened -- whatever the term for "wow, this person is something special." Now she's writing her own songs, and working on a CD, and she's just... sublime. I heard her sing about a month ago and was impressed; I heard her again the other night (when she hosted a thanksgiving potluck and a gig) -- and maybe it was my state of mind, and maybe it was her singing in the awkward audience of her family (hee, her mom needed to leave partway through her set and asked her to find some part of the potluck while she was on stage and she just made it work, making everyone laugh), with a piano that had no F -- but this time she seared my guts. A song about her friend Christina, who died too early, has replayed itself for me since then... along with a song about Canadian and culture that's all too vivid with the current election... just, ringing, true, lovely.

I am cooler because I know Kat. And I'm grateful for her.

Escalation

I officially have a Bag Problem. Anyone who's ever been intimate with me for more than 7 minutes figures this out pretty quickly. It's not the sort of shrill girly bag/shoe fetish that is tediously replayed in SATC and the kind of chick lit novels with kitten heels or stilettos on their pink covers -- it's not about brands, or look, or status. And I can't quite wrap my head around the idea of "wearing" a bag, which is how the people in stores talk when I'm caressing a new contender. But I am constantly scanning for the perfect bag, the bag that will hold everything I need and nothing more, transform me into someone at once Prepared and Organized and Uber-funky. ArtsyGirlGuideConsultant.

I keep my bags on a sort of bag banana tree in my kitchen/office. A quick glance at this ever-expanding bunch makes it pretty damn clear that if the search for the perfect bag is the search for the iconic talisman of my desired identity, I'm pretty confused. There's the teeny yellow pockety bag
that is too flimsy to hold even my wallet, but which has a funky little inset on it,and the recently added purple Village bag from Roots. I bought this one in Westboro in Ottawa, abandoning my sister trying on yoga tops at Lululemon (her own yummy mummy identity, I guess :-)) -- and it's a bit ... momish. It's perfectly practical, and I have this hope that the purple is distinct enough from the more classic tribe brown leather to go beyond GirlGuide... but I doubt it.

The bag thing isn't just about handbags and purses and all that sort of thing. It's also workbags:



And even more intensely, travel bags:



Sometimes this need for the perfect bag comes together in a crazy trifecta, like my purchase of the new MEC pulley mid-size travel bag, a small brown Roots purse and a tan soft leather tote bag for my trip to Italy.

I know what happens when I feel this compulsion. I see a bag, and I instantly get this sensation of things slotting into place, like I like to fondly imagine the hadron collider whacking together with the perfect magnetic attraction. I envision the perfect lipstick, the perfect pen (let's not even explore how long I can play with a wall of pens in an office store), my phone, my juggle of keys, my computer, my knitting -- everything all nestled perfectly into the perfect spot. It's a mythic story about being Whole and Ready -- and yet, Interesting, Creative, Impulsive.

This bag thing can get expensive, and the bag banana tree is actually a bit of a reproach. I mean, I still grab my rust-coloured mandarina duck bag I bought in Florence when it's the perfect size and colour for what I'm wearing (and I realize that my need for colour doesn't exactly align with my need for "the bag that suits every occasion and locale") -- but when the bags start to retreat into a layer or two below the surface, they kind of fade from my consciousness.

So right now, I'm staring at the bags, and making a connection. I've been agonizing about whether or not to sell my loft. The notion is to buy a smaller place here, so I have lower carrying costs, a smaller base, and can have a pivot point for a life that includes some work here, some work in Seattle and Vancouver, some possibly elsewhere. But it's really hard to figure out the right formula -- do I find a place first and then sell, on the assumption that it's going to be difficult to find a small place that suits me? Do I sell first in this market? Do I hold off on all of this until I'm really clear about my visa situation, what work I *can* do outside of TO? Right now I'm sort of in this weird space where I've racked up more than enough work in TO for the next six months, but I'm still working toward a more dispersed future. Different irons are roasting in different fires, but nothing is certain yet, except that F is moving to Seattle, and that's pretty much where I want to be too.

In all of this agonizing, I realized that there is a link between my quest for the perfect bag and this notion that there is the perfect small condo out there that will be the perfect pied a terre, where I can lead a life with everything in the right closet and the right office and I can always hop on a plane with only a carryon for two weeks. I'm afraid my bag problem is escalating, and that I have the notion that if I only had the perfect condo, my life would be perfectly organized.

I'm worried about this development. I can't keep buying condos until I'm miraculously a different, perfectly organized person.

Free wheeling

I mentioned that the Danes were riding those lovely big euro-bicycles all around Copenhagen? (Mostly these big sturdy ones -- but I saw one guy with a bike that he folded up to the size of a laptop and bring it into a sushi restaurant for lunch).

BIke parking areas like this one in front of the train station were everywhere -- just writhing hives of bikes. But look closely... and almost none of them are locked. And the ones that are? Aren't locked TO anything, just have a wee little chain around the front wheel so no one rides them off.

This is the most foreign part to me. And I see it completely differently after reading this clever piece in Toronto Life last month about Igor Kenk, the crazy bike thief, that suggested that he was actually *hoarding* bikes in prep for some dystopic future where they'd be the new capital. In that context, I couldn't help but see these free-wheeling bikes in Copenhagen as some pre-lapsarian world of optimism.

When I wasn't busy feeling stumpy and SHORT and not-blonde, that is.

Mega Penis

The phrase book I had for germany -- the Rick Steeves one -- likes to mix it up a little. Doctor, I have a problem with my eye/my hip/my wife. This hotel room is too small/has bugs/has too many prostitutes.

F and I had fun parsing this with the few german phrases I know -- Das Freundenmachen ist zu schmutzig. (This prostitute is too dirty!). Ich moche ein bessere freundenmachen. (I would like a better prostitute). Etc.

I did NOT, however, learn how to say "this hotel has too many prostitutes in Danish.

And actually, this hotel does. It shares a building and a street corner with a LIVE! NON-STOP! SEX SHOW! FIlled with TOPLESS LADIES! (And, judging by my peek inside, insidiously drunk young men).

I went for a stroll and discovered you can buy MEGA PENIS! and that there is a BOYS! convenience store. Also a lot of kebab houses, a few nice-looking bars and cafés and a SPUNK BAR, which, I'm guessing, is not a place to celebrate Sarah Palin and other sprightly women, but for nice boys to meet each other for a hot chocolate or something.

Even in my new italian boots I feel pretty staid.

10 random things about this trip

1. There are stores in heidelberg that sell nothing but gummi bears. The people in them speak less english than people in other stores. I bought gummi bears for family members and ate a whole bag of them.

2. When you are in copenhagen and you notice that you've dropped a stitch on a sock you've been knitting for a week and are in the home stretch of, and you leave the canalside coffee shop in disgust, you turn the corner and there is a magical yarn shop that will sell you the crochet hook to fix it. If you knew how to fix it.

3. No magical Freitag Bag store appears, however, which is probably good, given the indulgences in a Swedish leather jacket and Italian boots.

4. The Danes are as bicycle-y as the Dutch. But, stylish, with their big wheeled black bicycles with wee baskets, blond hair, and perfect scarves. Not really the right place when you're a short north american who feels particularly stumpy these days. See #3 re compensatory spending.

5. I still can't figure out why it took me half an hour to get gas yesterday on the autobahn. Teutonic efficiency broken down. Everyone pumped the gas, then abandoned their cars for loooooong stretches while they went in to pay. However, I did manage to perfectly name the pump I got the gas from, and the zwanzig euros that it cost, with perfect southern german intonation.

6. I can't decide if it's better or not better to have wifi when you're traveling alone. I don't know if I'd be more or less homesick if I wasn't getting email and facebook updates.

7. I've become completely polyknitterous, and can't finish anything. I've developed some kind of serious perfectionism. I was about 6 rows away from finishing sleeve #1 on Cece, and had to be talked off the ledge of ripping it out because I didn't like the way the increases had landed. (A case where wifi good). I am soclose to finishing a bee-yootiful socks-that-rock sock #1 for B's bday and I discovered the aforementioned dropped stitch. I picked up some heavy wool in Heidelberg I've been knitting a pretty ugly scarf out of that may never be finished. And I've toted around the pink yarn for Lulu's wallaby since I left home. I'm sad about the sock :-(.

8. The Danes seem to all speak English. And they're damned friendly. And the sushi is GOOD.

9. I walked and walked and walked and walked around today, but forgot my camera in the hotel room. (Which turned out to be slightly nicer than yesterday's, but only because I asked nicely for a non-smoking room after I saw the room they'd assigned me -- with a narrower bed than the one my 4 year old niece sleeps in and reeking of despairing single-bed inhabiting smoker-ness).

10. When you are a bag addict, and you see in your guidebook that there is a store called The Last Bag that sells only one kind of satchel that is the same Perfect Design that they've been selling since 1956, you get all excited, and you think, maybe this IS my bag, maybe this is the last bag I'll ever need to buy, maybe this is the bag that all those other bags were getting me ready for! But then you realize it just won't fit your stupid too-big macbook and some knitting, even if you only carry one sock around at a time, and the big cable adapter thingy for the macbook, and maybe some gummi bears, and some pens. So then you're back to #3, the elusive Freitag bag that you realize with a sigh you're going to have to buy in CANADA, because of that stupid magnetic force repelling you from Stuttgart yesterday.

So you eat more gummi bears on your bed and rest your feet before going out to eat some Fisk of some kind.

What people eat in the airport in Frankfurt

at 8:00 a.m.:

potato chips (crisps, since they're english)
tankards of beer
chocolate

Currently carrying in wallet: five different currencies. Who knew that the Danes don't use the euro?

Off to copenhagen.

gummi sheep

I started my morning with a VERY windy run along the path of the little river that I used to ride my bike along when I was 8, and had the only visceral recognition of landscape when I came across the community gardens I remember riding my bike along. An elderly couple was picking up apples off the ground, and I also had a little frison of recognition of this couple, who called out something german and agreeable to me, presumably about the folly of running in the windy rain.

Then I poked around the town a bit, and tried to find the Schloss Favorite, which I most vividly recall for the big slipper you had to put on to schlep across the floors... that and the swan that tried to pull me into the pond, and the mating frogs my mother told me were "copulating" but I heard as "kuppenheiming," which was the name of the town. Confused me for years. But, I was lost today in a housing estate, and found myself on the road to Hugelsheim... which, though now twinned with Cold Lake Alberta, was kind of recognizable, including the church that I had my confirmation in. (The church of one of my monumental moments of confusion -- the bishop asked me my name, and I didn't know if I was supposed to say my "real" name or my confirmation name, so I said my real name, and was confirmed Catherine Elizabeth Catherine, instead of Margaret. One of the many epic moments of anxiety in my young life).

Then, drove around what was the base, and which is now a small airport and a hodgepodge of recycled buildings. The hangers covered in camouflage grass are a museum, and there's a BMW test track, and a weird tattoo studio with sculptures out front. The only truly recognizable building is the arena, which is now a curling club and eishaus. That tripped me up a bit, though -- suddenly had a vivid recall of black cat gum, of my sister inching her way across the ice on her 3 year old blades and then dropping the plaque for her instructor. A lot held in that space, 8 year old soldiering-on and parental distintegration.

After the base, I headed off toward Stuttgart... I had some notion of finding a place for lunch, and maybe buying a Freitag bag... but here were roadwerks, and roadwerks, and the charm of being on the autobahn wore thin even in german. I was in a tunnel, then I was spinning around a ring road, and as I was searching for the ausfahrt I was supposed to take, PLUNK I was spun outside the north of stuttgart. I contemplated turning around, but didn't have much heart for that choked up tunnel or the tailback that had been facing the other way... so I pulled over, figured out where I was on the map and set off for my ultimate destination, the airport hotel near frankfurt. I had some notion that I'd find the hotel then set off for some food.

Five hours after setting out, I finally found the hotel. It was a day of being lost, and not charmed. Was glad I didn't set out for some place further, because it took me about 5 hours to cover approximately 150 km. Tailbacks and confusion, basically, and having to steel myself to enter the PennyMarkt and utter caveman german to try to find my hotel, after spinning restlessly on the speed of low blood sugar around the wrong town for an hour.

Finally found the hotel... and it's basically an upscale prison. Not a single note of luxury -- a single murphy bed, one flat pillow, no headboard! There were, however, gummi sheep on the pillow:



After a day spent LOST on various autobahns, spinning around stuttgart and environs like there was a magnetic force field keeping me out, and then a dinner where I quaffed two glasses of wine and gobbled a lot of schweine, the gummi sheep made me laugh out loud. Repeatedly.