Random random random

1. Can I just say how annoyed I am that Iceland is so much in the news because of the economic collapse, all when I was quietly plotting to go off to a country nobody ever paid any attention to ever before?

2. I bought my first pair of gardening gloves ever today. I still have no clue what it means to do yard maintenance, but my little yard is a jungle. Also, there are dandelion fluffs in my kitchen.

3. There seems to be a tall ship out in Semiahmoo Bay.

4. I can't figure out how to make my camera do what I want it to do, so I can't capture any meaningful colour in sunsets. Is it churlish to think that the very nice camera F gave me for my birthday isn't the one I would prefer?

5. I've been hanging my organic white cotton sheets on the line, and they smell AMAZING. Unfortunately, they also now have some sort of clothesline schmutz on them. Does it make me a slut in the Victorian sense to put them on my bed anyway?

6. I've been on (counting) five internet first dates since I moved here. One lunatic whose profile I should have read more critically before I drove to town to meet him, one philosophy prof who will become a friend, one pissy former physicist I thought might be interesting but who didn't deal at ALL well with my trying to change subsequent plans, one guy who was promising but became clingy rilly rilly fast, and one guy I like but who has revealed to me that yes, it is WAY possible for someone to be far more driven by the carnal than I am. A girl could get discouraged. What on earth does tomorrow, with the Russian guitar-maker, hold?

7. In all of this, as I sit knitting a sweater that's at my edge of knitting competence, thinking about the work with the CMM community and so much else I have in front of me, I'm realizing I pretty much have everything I need. It's a remarkably sweet spot.

Ducklings (and #300)

My friend Paula asked me if I'd started to establish community out here. Not really, unless you count my shouting "SHUT UP" at the ceaselessly yapping dog behind me yesterday as a way of connecting to the neighbours. I do feel like I have enough people in the region to be able to scare up someone to do something with if my need to be alone wanes, but for the moment, the combination of recovering from such a busy time and the amount of connectivity I have via phone/wifi pretty much fills all of the space I have right now.

I'm trying to make sense of all of the different strands of work, and in some ways, it feels like I am really living two or three lives, even more than when I was doing my phd and working. A pile of Toronto-based client work, an enormous amount of energy right now in the CMM sphere, and then this untended BC-based project. Emails slurping in constantly, with new leaps in the conversation before even I -- multitasking queen of the universe -- can tend to them.

I had an experience about 12 years ago that's kind of a metaphor for how I feel about my work these days... I had gone to Regina for a work meeting, and I had a long stretch of empty time before my flight left. There is not really a whole lot to do in Regina on a spring day ("you could go to the Mountie museum," suggested the visitor person), so I chose to go walk around the provincial legislature building. (Experiencing it geekily as a shrine to Tommy Douglas).

So there I was, walking around the sparkling white leg building, through winding roads with little lakes and trees, and I came across this little family of squawking ducklings. They'd run out of this lake/pond and hopped down a fairly high curb, and couldn't get back up. They kept hurtling themselves against it but couldn't hop up, couldn't get back to the water.

So of course I decided I needed to help. I scootched down to try to pick one of them up... and he slithered away. Hand clench -- slither. Clutch - slither. The little ducklings were hopping all around, squawking, as I repeatedly tried to grab them and found the edge of feathers and then empty air.

I was starting to get frustrated and worried (and I looked like a crazy person, hopping all around), and another woman walked up. She instantly assessed what I was trying to do, bent down and scooped up five of them at once.

:-|

I fluttered around behind her, finally caught one more, and we returned them to the pond and their oblivious mother.

Yesterday, I felt like the competent duckling-grabber... today, not so much.

(And PS -- this is blog post #300... possibly the most consistent thing I've ever done, writing-wise. And now that I don't have someone in my immediate life to process my days with, sometimes a really useful place to work out what I'm trying to do. Waving at my few consistent readers -- appreciate all of you ;-)).

Grace II

Yesterday was a day of Travel Unpleasantness. I was traveling back from TO to BC, and everything minor that could go wrong did. I left in a torrential downpour, and my cab navigated sheets of water pouring off the gardiner and axel-high floods on the lakeshore. The first plane was broken, then there was a gate change, gnarly children, delays. I ended up with a squishy middle seat next to a trembling vodka-sucking man because a family with tiny children had been split up and I gave the mom and baby my seat. My little seatback tv didn't work. I lost my debit card, at a time that my bank account holds ALL MY WORLDLY goods, in the form of the proceeds from my loft sale. My online community was having a meltdown, a kind of aftermath of an intense-supporting-someone time that sort of ... dissolved... in a kind of unsatisfactory way.

And. I had a transforming day. I was working up quite a head of irritability when we were sitting on the hot tarmac waiting for fuel, and I decided that instead of aimlessly flicking through podcasts and knitting grumpily, I should read a chapter that KP had written for our book, on CMM as a spiritual practice.

The piece is magnificent, and it instantly elevated me. K was exploring our transforming communication work as "spiritual" practice, through a very personal reflection of identifying moments of grace through the aftermath of BP's cancer diagnosis. It shunted me immediately to my higher self-concept as "person who seeks complexity and can therefore metabolize complications easily," and I was able to relax into the rest of the trip... and toast my arrival with some ahi tuna and a glass of chardonnay down at the waterfront.

I'm happy to be back here, and things seem so much more possible.

Yearning

Last day in TO for a while. It was a busy errand day (waxing/polishing/haircut/colour/coffee with kat/late lunch with B) kind of day, punctuated by torrential rain, navigated mostly on my bike, until B took pity on me and drove me home.

Then it was a puttery early evening, laundry, packing, cleaning my wee place so I can leave it for 5 weeks. And while I was cleaning and poking about, Josh Ritter came on my itunes. All of the songs from Animal Years, which I so associate with my sojourn in portland three and a half years ago, sitting in the coffee crutch coffee shop beavering away on my human development knowledge area, trying to make meaning of my shifts in identity.

There was such a YEARNING in that music, especially Here at the Right Time. It fixed itself on F, but in some ways, the free floating anxiety I've had as long as I can remember has been counterpointed by a free-floating yearning. I felt it again today, in this music, and couldn't even figure out what I was yearning FOR. I remember once buying a card that had a fragment of a poem on it -- I think sappho -- I yearn and I seek (google is a help here: kai` poðh'w kai` ma'omai -- I yearn and I seek). I think I bought this years ago, while I was still with B; thought about sending it when I was adoring K; ended up, I think, sending it to someone I had a mad online flirtation with that didn't sustain into actual meeting. But it's something I've been carrying for so long that I know it doesn't really have a lot to do with F. There are things we did together that I keenly feel the absence of, and aspects of who we were together that I'll always miss, but the real heart of it is losing the *possibility* of intimacy... and today, I think I'm sad that I've lost sight of myself in a way as a hopeful person about that.

Renee pointed this out, and I think in some ways it's true -- building myself the perfect transitional life where I try to balance and bridge my grounded, open west coast self with my dynamic, busy, successful TO self, where I plan trips to africa and iceland, co-edit books and position myself as part of a broad theoretical community -- all of these are things I want, AND they are tropes for a life structure to essentially compartmentalize and fragment intimacy, to close off the likelihood of meeting someone whose day to day can fold around mine. I can't quite figure out if this is a substitution that I'm not truly comfortable with, or whether it's genuinely grabbing a brass ring of claiming full life. And of course, it's both. Some days the ersatz nature of it has a stronger aftertaste than anything else. Which, maybe, means it's time to go back to BC.

Pages

Nearing the end of my first sojourn in TO in my new place, and I really do love this perch up in the sky, this 15th floor nest with the amazing sunsets.

I had dinner with Shay the other night, and I brought her up here to see it, and she crowed about the cosiness. It is cosy. I like it. It's pretty tiny, but it doesn't have that sense of echoing, untapped vastness that my loft did. And I don't think I'll ever want to live in a place ever again that doesn't have access to the outside -- even the little balcony here makes a world of difference.

I left my loft in good shape, with flowers for the incoming girls, as I posted before.



I feel a tiny bit wistful about it, but I've really taken to this condo life. I like having a concierge, I like feeling far away from the ground and its many noises, but still being in touching distance of shops, NICE restaurants, plush gelato, good theatre, should I want it. I like the pool and the gym and the sauna, even if I don't use them. I like having 15 flights of stairs to walk up to try to force off a tiny bit of the plumpness that's taken over in the high moving, high stress time.

There are a lot of milestones here as I finish up my move and hie myself off out west for august. I went to Pages today, for the last time, I think. It's closing at the end of August. It's funny -- it was never my favourite bookstore, exactly, but it always made me feel *smarter*. I bought stuff there that I aspired to read, that made me think, rather than tripe.

And over the past 25 years, I've bought an endless supply of notebooks there. I always loved these Clairefontaine ones with the plaidish covers -- again, talismans of hope that I'd write something, do something, make something meaningful, worth recording. Tracey was the one who introduced me to Pages and to these notebooks, and it's a funny little synchronicity that so many of the journals and notebooks I threw away last week in my first purge of all of that stuff were these books.

It doesn't make me wistful, exactly -- although I don't know who else would be such a meticulous buyer of cultural theory, the tables of books that made me think and aspire. But it does feel like another closing point, another click pointing me to the recognition that any aspirations I have aren't really nested here, anymore. Like the realization that I didn't have a single qualm tossing my high school yearbooks down the chute, or unloading a whole bunch of these notebooks. They were me then, moment in time that don't mean much in the preservation. I know what I'm drawing on and taking with me, and holding onto them is more of a weight than an anchor.

I did buy one thing today that I hope will push me forward -- an uncategorizable book called The Importance of Being Iceland. A book that has the inexplicable symbol on the cover. My hare-brained plan to hie myself off there next year needs some kind of shape, and maybe I really need to start to learn something about it. Read in bed for a while instead of yacking online.

Here with you

Surreally, I find myself in Kansas City yet again, talking my way through workshops and other conversations about the future of the communication theory I work in with my compadres, at the tail end of my school's national summer session.

Tucked up in one of the Westin truly heavenly beds, mid-afternoon, instead of running. Listening to one Laurie Anderson's Here with you, a short piece that slows me down and stretches time for me. I'm really really tired after these weeks of moving and emotion of so many different species, but elevated at the same time by the conversations. Months and years of accumulated stories, word in word with one of the people with whom I can truly be the Cate I most aspire to, trying to map a path for the next few months that lets me enact this scholar and world-changing self.

I've been thinking a lot lately about the fact that I am a "serious" person. I don't know why I feel so compelled to label myself that way, but maybe it's something about being intentional about carving out a purposeful life. There's more to be revealed there.

3.5 years

At YYZ once more, bizarrely bleary eyed, considering that it’s nearly 1pm. I really need to improve my sleep hygiene with these time zone issues – stayed up waaaaaay too late talking to Mr. Victoria and then watching the last three episodes of season 1 of Damages.

My loft sale closes today, and even as I’m conscious that there are two young women having a big emotional moment when they unlock that door for the first time, I’m feeling pretty detached from the whole thing. Maybe it’s the effect of the endless bloody tedious steps of this move – I was still tossing and organizing and making decisions about stuff on Tuesday and Wednesday (what the EFF could still be there after all of these moves? Books to donate, a fridge and freezer crammed full of stuff, expensive Tupperware filled with rice & flour, a few things under the bathroom sink, the cd rack bolted to the wall that B decided she wanted, etc.). Or maybe it’s just that the loft really was a transitional zone between my divorce and my future life, and it was time to move on.

This space did bracket my relationship with F, as embedded with possibilities and hopes in the front end, scene of dusty sleepless nights and those fleeting moments of half-asleep recognition that things with F were never even sewn tightly enough together to be frayed, knowing the inevitable in that hypnogogic zone of freefall.

Lots of facing of self, finding of feet in the slap slap on the cork floors, encountering simultaneously the Cate who wanted to live in a pretty unfettered way and realizing how much the chaos and noise of the market agitated me. Facing self as a time-compressed person against Kat’s creative all night explorations.

The best aspect of those 3.5 years was Kat, in fact – loving reminder to slow the hell down and notice things, enjoy my quirks, let in the music (and the Indian Jinx-be-gone potion). Also finding Jess, the hairdresser who really found my hair. The worst – well, the facing of all of the angst, although it was also the scene of facing it down and learning to hold it more loosely, with more humour. Really entering my phd and owning it and all it could mean.

I did a final sweep last night of the place, leaving a few eccentric items behind that I hope won’t annoy the new girls – a couple of mops, some lightbulbs, mango gelato and packaged smoked salmon in the freezer. A box of latex gloves that I acquired from a paramedic friend who had a vision of me as somewhat more inclined to random hookups than I am. (Her vicarious hopes, I guess). I also left some flowers and a friendly note wishing them well – though my gut is that buying an open concept loft as a young couple (especially one with two damn much outside noise) is probably a Mistake. (Cynic, I am).

So that scene is faded, and I have my perch in the sky with the inky north west sunsets, and my cottage by the sea, and a pretty strong sense of how I’m navigating the world solo. Missing F from time to time – especially in TO – but every moment of felt loss is infused with immediate reminders of the painful, always-chafing bits. Realizing my time with him and my time in this space left me with a sense of myself as a serious person with lots to do, but also such a strong need to intimately connect, be playful, seize it all.

Not a bad thing to take away from those three and a half years in that space.

YVR -- YYZ -- MCI -- YYZ -- YVR

At airport, heading back to TO. Thinking about the paradox of my life, general and overall happiness and contentment mixed with immediate crankiness. High auditory sensitivity because of hormones, lack of sleep, and wanting to pinch the guy whose hiking boots are going SCHLUMP SCHLUMP SCHLUMP, while reveling a little bit in the iphone-captured photo of my windy, chilly seawall walk last night. I'm going to miss my little house.

Sometimes it feels

as though so much of what I've collected in my life led me to this little house. I don't even remember acquiring this -- I found it in a box of photos -- and it's a bit twee for anywhere else I've ever lived. But it fits this corner perfectly.

Dusk

I've been trying to walk or run the WR seawall every day. Am finding a rhythm where, on the evenings I'm home, I go out around 830 for an hour or so. On a cooler non-holiday night, the seawall is almost empty, the tide is high, the sky pink. I really feel calmer and more peaceful than I ever remember.

Cautionary icons

I’m not sure why I’ve been so non-posty since I got here. I’m happy, so not feeling all reflecty-angsty, but I’ve also been relatively solo, so not full of Amusing Stories. Just me, liking my little house, liking what it does for me, relaxed and feeling like life is ripe. Duck’s back, water, about most things.

It is odd living in a town that feels like I’m visiting it for so many reasons. WR is very white, and the average demographic is downright elderly. I venture out into the town itself to buy food, to buy gelato and eat it on the seawall, to use the landscape as my own sprinting/breathing/striding/riding platform. There’s a tall hill behind my house that I can march purposely up, strengthening legs, and a seawall to run along when it’s not thronged with moseyers. In some ways, the town and the people blur for me, and it’s not that different from living in the country – I orient myself to my view of the water, my sweet house, the hills or road under my feet or tires, google maps to figure out how to get elsewhere, my people in the computer.

One of the effects of this has been to test my mettle on what I can do on my own. There’s been a lot of Assembling required in this move, flat ikea boxes that pop up into bookshelves, bedroom furniture, a little table to trap my keys and glasses at the door so I don’t lose them for good. Too many of the instructions for my furniture started out with a little drawing of the sad man with the aching back and broken pieces of wood around him, much happier when he has a little friend to help him out. Not hard to find symbolism in that.



Nor hard to find symbolism in one of those pieces being the building of my own bed, after I got home from a pleasant but uninspiring online date the other night. Determination, stacks of books, a lot of swearing, especially when I dropped the box spring into the room at large, taking out my alarm clock permanently. But I got it together, along with the dresser and nightstand, my ridiculous snow-white duvet cover,



inordinately proud of myself for figuring out the things that in my previous life have belonged to my competent brother in law, or butch and handy ex. Just me, creating the space that is ineffably soothing, ineffably promising.

Fireworks

I had a puttery canada day, after having french toast and bacon on my deck. Recreating the most perfect breakfast I ever had anywhere, in Queenstown New Zealand in 1996. Then some work, and an abortive bike ride (didn't realize until I was 5 miles out that I'd forgotten my helmet), then more work, then a really miserable run (every step a plod, leavened only by concentrating on the month's old Canada Reads discussions that highlighted The Book of Negroes, which I just read and was utterly immersed in). Then, after shaking the peaches of the tree of plenty of fish, took myself out for dinner on the deck of my local seafood shack. Was gifted with a sweet server named Lizzie who encouraged me to stay until the fireworks. So I had a second glass of wine and did.

And thought about my dad, who loved fireworks, along with amusement parks and freaks, and F, who didn't let us break up just before the holidays partly because he didn't want to think about watching the New Year's Eve fireworks off the space needle by himself. (Not, without ME, mind you, but by himself). And instead of feeling wistful, I was just noting. People of my past, me on my own, decent and unspectacular fireworks, people in couples and families, and me, just fine. My dinner, my engrossing Ian McEwan novel, the sweet young server. The residue of the pink sky over the water. All just fine. Maybe for the first time ever.