Fucking the dog

I went for a long walk through the buzz of orientation week on campus tonight -- frisbees in the street, girls in the height of goth finery, road construction that only U of T would have happening this week, wide-eyed frosh, a few weaving drunks, young women with a coffin effigy for lives lost in the middle east -- the stirring stew of eagerness for ideas and Life and uneasy anticipation.

I tend to pick up phrases of conversation as I roam through, and one that rung out at me tonight, a few young guys on a patio on College drinking beer -- was "fucking the dog."

A lot front-loaded into that. The person I most associate with that phrase is my lost friend H, who tended to the small-town-Ontario language of his roots, homage, in some ways, to his father, like his continued membership in the Legion. He'd use these terms in his round radio-announcer voice, simultaneously ironic and assertion of a foundation that had made him. We had an ongoing riff about that term, which I'd never heard before I'd met him, and which he frequently used in contexts that made people blanch -- like the time he was trotting merrily down the street, walking his friend's tiny terrier, and ran into a couple of pals. "What'd you do all day?" they said. "Oh, fucked the dog," he chirped, bark laughing when the two fastidious guys turned their gaze on the terrier with horror.

The big irony is that I haven't talked to H in four years, after a friend-breakup that was as wrenching and unkind (on my part, mostly) as any lover breakup -- but I came across his blog on the weekend (while idly trying to discover, deep in my drunken night with S, whether he still worked at her firm). And, this triggered a lot of reflection about our friendship, where it had gone off the rails, cringing at my part in its ending.

So I emailed him. An apology, of sorts. Not just about our finale, but about the whole arc of it. I see now that I needed, always sought, a kind of intimacy from him that was a displacement of something missing with A, and I was as miserable when he couldn't meet it as I was with the lacks with her. I played out a lot of of those lacks on him, culminating in a final burst of "you know what your PROBLEM is?" flaying arrogance.

I'm very different than I was four years ago, I think. So much more tentative about how I relate to people, shape them, so conscious of how I've expected other people to follow my narratives of need, how I've railed at them when they haven't. A bore the brunt of that; H carried a fair bit of it.

And I'm also conscious that part of the uneasiness with him was that we both had a fair bit of the same kind of arm's length yearning to fulfill... something... about our work, shared bursts of optimism when we touched near it (he with poetry and fiction, hopeful new loves, running a marathon), deflation and misery when it receded and we didn't know how to grasp it differently.

The uneasiness is wrapped up in the touchstone phrase, too -- our friendship was, in a way, fucking the dog -- marking time near each other, shaded near but not of real intimacy. Time spent wanting to do things differently but only approaching it.

I'm working through a lot of this stuff about how to grasp and live into my voice, my passion, put my work and my life in the same place, not sit around the edges of it. I do more than my share of measuring out the coffee spoons and not just doing what I can in the day. Posting, in particular, letting the very real rewards of the online community take up so much time. I think "getting obsessed and staying obsessed" is partly about the "bursts of brilliance," as Pamela calls them, but also about the steady building of the tedious, the dividing up the units of work, as F levers through his day. Just... doing the tedious things, staying at it, until the bursts of brilliance come in the sides.

I do know that living my life and doing my work are inextricably intertwined in a different way than, say, if my work were in a lab -- my way of loving, talking, walking through the city -- when your work is about making social worlds, all of this is part of knowing. But knowing and doing something with the knowing are two different things, and while the two are more latched together for me than for some people, the doing something needs to be more tightly shaped for me than it is.

Faking it

And now I'm clicking around like mad, finding more of those luscious tiny image narratives. This one would have resonated in my earlier mood, when I was walking around outside taking my doubts too seriously. I like the way I got punted out of that space by the little "Respect the Art" exchange, the same way I was pulled up short by Amelia last summer, with this conversation, in my tiny bathroom in the apt. in J&S's house:

Amelia: Why are you putting that stuff in your hair?
Me: Because I have a meeting and I need to look nice for work.
A: Because you need to look like a businesswoman?
Me: Pretty much.
A: But they're GOING to KNOW you're faking it!

She then explained that my eyebrow ring was a clear signal that I was Not a Businesswoman. But I do carry that silly little story around, her recognition that I'm not exactly mold-fitting. There's a big question mark there about what I was thinking about earlier -- when is being cross-disciplines, cross-conversations generative, stimulating, vivid -- and when is it a failure to buckle down and join one seriously already. I don't think I'm "faking it" -- but I do need to pick an academic/practice conversation and just JOIN it. Seriously.

Respect the Art

I had the bloody strangest little exchange with a new poster on my online community Tuesday night. We were talking about that postcard site with the confessions that I linked below, and she ventured a rather categorical opinion that they were actually all professionally done. (Implying that it was all Fake and that we were Internet Rubes being taken in by a Scam). I offered the thought that actually, they probably only post the best ones, but that I knew a lot of people who would be able to produce those kinds of tiny perfect narratives. This poster did the online equivalent of snorting and huffed, "Easy to say--hard to do. Respect the art."

Well, this simultaneously pinched me and made me guffaw. I mean, respect the art? It's not like I said I knew how to make an oil painting of a fucking CLOWN or some other ambitious claim. We're talking about postcards with a sentence on them.

This exchange rifled into a ruffle, as they tend to, with Katie clamping down on the new poster and everyone getting all rustly for a bit, but then it all simmered down, with a request for her to be less categorical, less judge-y in her opinions.

But I'm still giggling over "respect the art." I think it'll be my new motto. It came at the right time, too, when I was in a little state of agonizing too much over my own doubts about MY "art" -- my research, my work, my thinking -- remembering the Garp line about building fucking bookcases instead of writing books. It's true. It's absurd. Respect the art. Make a postcard with a sentence on it that speaks volumes about being human. One after another. Put them into the world, collaboratively and openly. Call it a dissertation, joining the conversation. And that's all I have to do.

Secrets

I've never seen this before:

http://postsecret.blogspot.com/

It's fantastic.

It's Life

My dear friend Renee sent me a link to this poem today. Very a propos for my slightly too tangled, fretful mood.

The ending is beautiful:

It's life that will consume you in the end, but in the meantime...
It's life that will eat you alive, but for now...
It's life that calls you to the street where the wood smoke hangs,
and the bare hint of a whisper of your name, but before
you go...

Too late: Life got its tentacles around you, its hooks into your heart,
and suddenly you come awake as if for the first time, and
you are standing in a part of the town where the air is
sweet -- your face flushed, your chest thumping, your
stomach a planet, your heart a planet, your every organ a
separate planet, all of it of a piece though the pieces turn
separately, O silent indications of the inevitable, as among
the natural restraints of winter and good sense, life blows
you apart in her arms.

Haiku for my morning

French press sat too long
While wheedling computer guys
Harsh coffee, no mac

***

I am trying not to get torqued out about the fact that the geek boys can't even give me a diagnosis on the ibook until tomorrow -- Wednesday -- when I have to have resolved my issues to enough of a degree by the end of the day on Thursday so that I'll have a computer to take with me on my 10 day trek from the pacific to the hills of vermont. I'm trying to decide if I'm more fretful about not being able to WORK or not having my online lifeline. I'll have basic email with the treo, but no FULL emailing (and so much of my life happens in email), no blogging, no online community. The twitchiness at that possibility is a Big Sign that maybe I need to go off on an electronic-free quest.

I sure know that my ibook-free stretch of time since last Wednesday night has meant I have MUCH better sleep hygiene, when I fall asleep with a novel in hand instead of dvds on my chest and chat with my west coast peeps. Important to remember :-).

Open windows

The window is open on very overcast skies, my oven is on, and I'm actually *cooking dinner* for the second time in three days. Even more impressively, I'm cooking dinner *for myself*, and making enough to have leftovers.

Today, labour day, the notorious first day of "new resolutions" for all of us who actually looked forward to going back to school, got excited about pencil crayons and empty scribblers and pristine mathbooks, was a good recalibrating day for me... on all sorts of fronts. After a weekend of both some excess and just a little too much socializing (all of it *good*, mind you), I've been completely quiet today. Reading, working on a paper, making comments on a chapter my friend P wrote for a book on transformational learning, lying on the couch reading Bitch, emailing Important People, hanging out a little bit with my online friends.

Inside my loft, the space feels restful, finally, in counterpoint to the agitated outside, the busy market, the grim skies (tail end of Ernesto), the fighter planes flying around aimlessly for the airshow down at the lake. (Sidebar -- what IS this anachronistic display of "might" about? We HAVE no military planes to speak of -- why are they zipping around showing off tandem dives when, presumably, we're over-committed in a war already? The air show thing always evokes my childhood moments on the airfield at the base in Baden, me in my brownie uniform shaking hands with Prince Philip while the mounties rode through their paces, other Exciting Moments with planes darting about. These are probably the same planes that created awe in 1974).

Today, 10 years ago, was the day A and I got possession of our house. I can't imagine having predicted a decade ago where I'd be on September 4, 2006. In some ways, I don't know where I am, of course -- but I can see some of the paths that are taking shape, starting to be shaded vividly in, all past this milestone date of January 08 when I am aiming to be done the phd. The dissertation proposal is in my committee's hands right now, with a conversation planned for next Monday -- my life will get new organization around that once it's approved. Eek. So exposing, sending that proposal out into the world, such fragile ideas.

One of the things I've been doing this week is rereading two of my favourite John Irving books -- Garp and Hotel New Hampshire. Both are heavy handed, Hotel in particular, which doesn't stand up to the joy it gave me in my early 20s -- but I obviously gravitated to it this week for a reason -- the aphoristic messages of pursuit and purpose: life is serious but art is fun; the leitmotif of the perfect ending of gatsby and the green light, and the ending he set up to rival Fitzgerald's: "Coach Bob knew it all along -- you've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed. You've got to keep passing the open windows."

I feel the dissertation worming its way into my soul, singing along with other barely sketched out dreams, making me obsess in all the right ways. More green tea, more home-cooked meals, more time making this place feel like a space for Real Work.

Oof.

It's official. The Pace of My Life is a Too Hectic and I need to simmer down and drink a lot of green tea while reading books quietly in my flat.

I'm moving in too high a gear these days, lots of too revved stuff happening. Went out with my friend S last night and we drank our faces off. I'm not really sure why we thought lakes of wine and three tequila shots were necessary for the flow of our always textured, weaving and cracking-each-other-up conversation, but somehow it made a grammar to the words, and next thing you know it was 3:30 a.m. and I was putting myself to bed in her spare room. Not a pretty picture this morning at ALL.

I think the shape of my life gets stretched out too easily when I'm more-or-less-single, like a hoodie with elbow puckers and a zipper that doesn't quite meet any more. I think I'm not always good at just Staying Home Quietly when I'm not working or when there's no one else here to just provide drifty, semi-engaged companionship. One of the things I haven't learned well about living alone, yet.

But... this whacking great hangover is a Warning Sign that I'm pushing myself hard in not particularly healthy ways -- like the little scrape to my car, yesterday, where I backed into a pole in my parking garage because I was trying to do too many things at once (take my busted ibook in to the geekboys to see if they could fish out any data from the hard drive I apparently fried in the blink of an eye on Thursday, talk to D who was in the car with me). Good thing the smart car is made of plastic.

Tonight it's warm time with five friends who are coming for dinner, and I'm actually *cooking* -- the weather is cooperating with rain and chill that makes it appealing to turn the oven on -- and then I will keep the rest of the week, between here and the west coast, completely empty of frantic activity. Pace myself calmly through a paper, lots of tea, a bit of client work, looking ahead quietly. Yoga. Prana. Quiet.

Gertie and Hope

Two things happened today I would not have anticipated when I woke up.

I found myself toting a ball python named Gertie around in my car in a tupperware container. (She woke UP while I was moving her -- that was a bit unnerving -- but she didn't push the lid off her little box, and it was all GOOD). And, was glad to help Mary and Sarah move into their house, their first "real" place chosen together. They're happy and warm together, and it makes me feel content for them. (And, apparently I'm still enough of a dyke to get into the zen of helping people move :-)).

And my wonderful sister S came over for sushi, sistertalk, a viewing of the final eppy of Arrested Development, and a leeeetle too much wine/beer. And one of HER pieces of news was of my ghost niece Hope, who was born a week or two ago, biochild of S's eggs and generosity of spirit.

Pretty miraculous, this birth, and miraculous the way S and I can hang out, and how much wisdom about living in the space of porousness I gain from her. Am grateful to have her in my life.

The other tedious stuff like the crashed computer? It just recedes. I'm outside the scripts, writing stories, and grateful to have people like Stef alongside me, finishing the sentences.

A midnight smoker

After a flirtation that had been going on for months, coy, yearning, increasingly seductive, I had a full blown affair last week. Cigarettes. DuMaurier Special Mild Regular, to be precise.

I'm really not sure what this was about, still. I quit smoking before I turned 30. Kept the flirtation confined to Truly Rare Social Occasions for a decade -- a smoke or two when I was hanging out with Gillian on Festive Occasions, a fitting accessory for a party that had me clad in a corset and unleashed inhibitions. Filching one from a stranger on the very rare occasion where, drink or coffee in hand, it seemed the right punctuation. Part of the debauched Prides over a few years where the drinking started at brunch after our 5K run and didn't end until a rain-soaked, weaving bike ride home at 3:30 a.m. Maybe five a year, and those carefully counted out, felt toxic in my blood the next morning.

The allure of running away with it was always there -- the first always made me crave a second, which I usually had, and then stopped. I'd regret it in the morning, cough my way through a run, feel my lungs like reproachful bellows. But always, I saw myself as a non-smoker, saw the rare cigarettes as acts I committed in particular contexts, out of my "real" self.

Through my divorce, I held to the usual pattern -- had one free for all night that involved about five cigarettes and a lot of damp emotional squalor when I was with L&G at the first event that A was at separately, but otherwise, no craving at all. But then. I moved here. The gritty market, the place where the edges are more open and gaping than anywhere else, random life. And the streets -- the dingy, dirty little streets -- just ached for late night walking, butt in hand.

I noted the pull -- every. single. day. I wanted to smoke. It wasn't seeing other people smoking, it was more about a sensation of wanting the single thing I'd always truly loved about smoking -- walking, alone, in the dark, cool air outside, cigarette sparked in unison to thinking. My late adolescent yearnings in poetry and autumn and movement as I walked the streets of my muted suburb, the grimier, frowsier streets of my first solo apartment in Windsor, the tussle of love tangled, becoming self, blown and breathed through the walking and smoking. Brooding looking at the river before I flicked cigarette into the water. Smokes secretly shared with my dad over dinner, long after he'd quit.

Somehow, that 20 year old Cateself kept pounding at the door of the 41 year old LoftCate and smoking seemed to be the main medium. I held it at bay until one night I smoked some pot with D, and my defenses to the whole idea were down, and I dragged her with me to buy a pack, asked her to sit with me while I smoked one, then two, in my courtyard. It was still a little too cold out to sit outside -- but that's the perfect moment.

The next morning, I handed off the pack ($8!!! btw!) to a ravaged guy in front of the liquor store ("part of your cunning plan to secretly kill the homeless?" Ted asked me). Put aside the thoughts of smoking. Went to Portland, to Vancouver... then asked Katie for one of hers. Just one. Came home. Pride. Filched a couple more, standing on the street in femme garb, in a beer garden. Found myself a couple of weeks later buying a pack after a wine-sodden night with S. Smoked two, put the pack in the freezer. Unfroze it and gave it away. And then another pack, same process, only this time, the freezer became more of a "keep them here until I want another one" zone.

And last week... full blown immersion. Walking in the dark, pondering, wondering. Sneaking down to the lake after dinner with SB to look at the dark water and think and smoke. In my flat, at the kitchen counter, wine in hand, cautious strangled hope in my throat, while talking to F on the phone. Some kind of inverted desire to breathe in a new way.

Every day for four days, I smoked a little. Not a *full* pack over the week, but close. And already could feel my lungs tighter when I was running, could see myself strategizing -- "hey, Matt will be at that party, HE has smokes, maybe I can cadge one from him." Could look forward to another one.

Well. This clearly just would not do. I needed to rewrite that script and pronto. I am not going to fall into that abyss out of some crazy image I have of myself as some brooding post-adolescent romantic. It hasn't escaped me that in most of the truly alluring photos of my young dad, he's got a smoke in hand -- but living fully, by definition, means breathing full oxygen, not sucking the air out of your own skin, wrinkling up like the post-40 coworkers who scared me into quitting in the first place more than a decade ago.

So. I packed it in. Threw out the rest of the freezer pack. Find myself weirdly, unexpectedly, breaking up with cigarettes again, pushing aside the "one more time won't matter" voices, reminding myself I've written them completely out of my story for so long that they can't nudge their way back in.

But. The allure of just one. So fucking tantalizing.

Tony Head Shot

If my dad were alive, today would be his 65th birthday. It's so hard to imagine this man an Official Senior Citizen.

Something tells me that this would not be an identity he'd be embracing too whole-heartedly. The man living into his mod story in this picture, the one who wanted to imagine himself in full body, full thrust experiences, the one who took the little girls out to the walk on the train tracks in their easter dresses and constantly wove the story of easter-eggs-so-well -hidden-we-didn't-find- them-until-the-next year, the one who brought poetry to the kids who hated school... this man is not the one who'd be buying a tilly hat and fussing about discounts.

I often wonder what Dad would have made of my life, in the end, how I'm living the life full that I know he wanted. I think about the deep immersion into experience that textured him -- like the time he was lost in the caves in Belgium with M on his shoulders and the lights started going off... his fear translated into a deeply thrilled retelling that I overheard more than once over dinner parties. Sometimes deep misfires -- like his need to put himself against the wall in the gas chamber at the concentration camp in France we visited, him trying to imagine with his body and full senses what it would have been like to be herded into that room.

In many ways, Tony wasn't remotely governed by convention -- he veered wherever he felt he could live fully, pushed the bounds of "taste" and hesitance, ordered the 10 scoops of ice cream in the amusement park in Copenhagen just because they offered it (and found himself juggling balls of it in his hand), had the passionate affair that resulted in his leaving my mom, who didn't really know how to play or live in vivid relief without him. Looked deeply at poets and people living in their art, wanted to live inside Leonard Cohen's music or characters on stage.

But there was also deep convention, the tight immersion in his family, especially near the end, the immersion that irritated me when I had no time alone with him. When he got sick, the living fully was infused with a kind of sentimental portent, a fear wrapped in a deep yearning for love and more. He'd kiss my arm fiercely if I gave blood, clutch my little sisters and P to him, try to find his way through my prickles and fears and glum uncertainties of my early 20s and connect with me as an adult.

The Raymond Carver poem about endings resonates here:

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

I hope he felt that. I think he did, though I know I didn't let him feel that enough.

I know I want to live fully too, I want to feel myself beloved here on my earth. I'm quailing a bit this morning about what living fully means for me. My long conversation with F last night reinforced that connection, the sense of rare intense closeness that embodies living fully, to me... the transcendent moments. But, no room in this space for embracing it completely... so what IS living fully? Letting that go and living strong and autonomously? Quietly cupping my hand around that possible heat and trying to keep it aglow? Letting bursts of it be part of my life, followed by the empty spaces? Which of these let me live fully vivid, experiencing it all -- and to feel beloved on the earth?

My dad had that, jumped into heat and vividness... and also carved a life where he felt beloved. There were a lot of ashy moments along the way, though. The time in his tiny crappy bachelor apartment with the pull out couch after my mother drew her lines and made him leave, even though P was still in Europe (the time that my uncle claimed all he did was lie around and smoke pot -- but how much to trust that crazy uncle who outed me at my grandfather's funeral?). Losing us out of his immediate life, my conflicting way of never letting him feel truly loved. All of his fear as his illness got bigger, his bargaining, his hallucination and nightmares, no real peace with me.

The ashy moments are part of the texture of the vivid, I think. We live safe or we live leaping. My dad lived leaping.

Keeping plants alive

I had dinner with my friend Stephanie last night, which was wonderfully connecting, as always. I'm so grateful she's come into my life -- she's so wise and graceful and warm and funny. I am blessed with the relationships of my world.

She met me here before we went out for pasta and cheap wine on a patio, and we were talking about plants. I realized I've had this little shadow project since A and I split up to start being the kind of person who can keep plants alive. The verdict is still out on this.

The pothos is the one leaf-turned- toward- the- light in my space. It started out life as a gift from Beth when A and I moved into our first apartment together. It endured a lot of benign neglect for 13 years, occasionally tossed a cup of water, very rarely food, insufficient light. It crouched glumly in the corner of our dining room, not thriving but not giving up either.

A handed it over to me a few months after I actually moved out. My friend had given it to us, it should be mine. I moved it, but left it in the car overnight because I needed help hauling it and its pot in. Early October freeze, bad idea.

I moved it inside and -- as is my wont -- messed with it too much. Repotted it, fed it, watered it. "All fresh and new," I thought. "It'll be so happy now."

Of course, that was way too much stress and trauma. It started to wither, then did the plant equivalent of panting on the ground, tongue lolling. I panicked a bit -- it seemed to represent... something -- about who I'd been, who I could be -- I didn't want it to just disappear altogether. So I took some cuttings, rooted them (while squabbling with T about what the right actions would be), and eventually stuck the new pieces into the soil as the old plant was still dying off.

Today it's richly thriving, basking in the light of my new space. And I'm learning the same lesson over and over with my other plants. Moving causes trauma. Plants do NOT recover from trauma by fussing too much with them. When a plant starts to show distress, yanking it out of the pot and overloading it with activity makes it wither even more.

Plant life, human life, apparently all the same. Learning to not poke the sleeping bear, letting people have their own processing time, trusting that there will be a resurgence of life... hard for me. Learning how to do that.

Coffee chaff

I took my dog-eared pages of my almost-done proposal to Moonbean this morning to read and edit and scribble on the little patio outside with my usual fair-trade americano. While I was reading, a shaking of little ... flakes.. of some kind, brittle little organic leaf-like fragments... kept sweeping over me. In my hair, into my coffee, over my papers, my shoulders. Allan roasts his own beans, and this is apparently the chaff from the beans, flying out through the vents, covering all of the coffee drinkers, readers, chatters, smokers, neighbourhood gazers. Birds build their nests from it, Allan claims.

Being covered in periodic shakings of coffee chaff is just one of the odd, serendipitous, surprising moments of what it means to live in the market. Counter-culture in so many ways. There's the overt, active pushing at some edges -- the aggressive anti-car activism, claiming of the streets for street theatre, people, human scale movement, direct confrontation of the pot laws. Crack heads in the same park as the squealing little kids in the wading pools, all part of the same system. And there's more organic flowing texture into other cultural edges -- the woman who came into Moonbean today dressed in full Heidi garb, a blue and white checked gingham dirndl, big blond braids with giant blue delphiniums perched on the top of each braid; the out of shape middle aged man riding a bike down the street whistling "if you could read my mind" in perfect pitch, the topsy turvy melange of caribbean, asian, european and african food and garb, the countless pierc-ed would be artists, dancers, writers.

There's so much here about benign coexistence that I'm not sure how to make meaning of. It's more than cross-cultural appreciation. There's a chippiness to the more political elements of it, a hefty dose of the mushy minded left conspiracy theory/anti car crowd combined with some pretty sharp-edged anarchism -- but there's also, somewhere in there, a real accommodation of a system that is fundamentally about people and their differences and a sort of dynamic self-reliance.

Not sure yet how to understand my place here, what drew me here. But locating myself in it is a constant question mark about how we can coexist without othering.

Cumulating Cumulos

The clouds are heavy and stacked outside my window today, unfortunate for the bbq I'm going to this afternoon, celebrating the end of the fundraising intense tri-athlon my friend Danny dreamed up and made happen. Stephen Lewis is supposed to be at this event, presumably because Danny's been so instrumental in raising money for the SL foundation over the past several year.

Good place for me to keep shedding my vague unsettlement of the past days, a pivot point for a couple of things. The sense of feeling like I need to be more purposeful in my life, with schoolwork and what to do with it, and with my meandering sense of direction on other things. And Stephen Lewis as a key embodiment of that -- not only as an inspirational sort of figure, but because he was the spark for a paper I wrote on the social construction of emotions a few years ago, the first paper that really sent me down the path I'm on.

I remember the interview that triggered that paper on emotion as speech act, the first place I really recognized that emotion is performative, is in service of something, a request, a turn in the conversation, rather than this sort of unbidden, purely "visceral," "irrational" thing. I also remember that as a bifurcation point recognizing that how I see human interaction is so vastly different than how most people do, a perspective that means I sometimes bob along just under the surface of knowing how to talk about it, interpret it, use it in a useful way, because I feel sort of alone in the conversation.

When Suzie heard that same interview, her response was to want to take Stephen Lewis home and give him a good dinner to comfort him. My response was a sort of dawning awe that his emotive response to the AIDS crisis in Africa was possibly the only thing that would evoke the kind of reaction that people would have to pay attention to, and suddenly I understood emotion as a whole grammar in and of itself. And I also felt small and inconsequential in terms of what I've accomplished in my life, motivated to do something more important.

I haven't done anything important. Maybe my research will help further some kind of understanding about connection and responsibility, and if I can turn it into something applied, it might be useful. I hope this bbq will be a good cementing of my commitment to supporting Danny more concretely with his orphanage project in Uganda.

I had a really resonant conversation with my sister Friday night. We were talking about my niece, and she said she and my mom had a conversation about how Lulu is clearly smart, but, my mother said, "smart like me and you, not smart like C." And then she went on about how hard it is to raise a child you think is a lot smarter than you are, how you don't know if you're doing the right thing. I just looked at M, shocked, and she said, "you didn't know we talk about this all the time, about how we're smart but you're in a whole other dimension?"

That was a gaping little moment for me. The exposure of my mother's frustration her whole life, the ridiculousness of overplaying any brains I have, but more than anything, recognition that sure, I might have some capacity, but for so long I've been feeling like that is mostly muffled, unfulfilled, just muddling along, not doing anything substantive with it. I'm 41. I can't muddle anymore.

One of the truly sorrowful things I feel about the loss of the "could be" story with F is how tantalizing it was to envision a space to live into that "better self" -- the sharpening of my mind and resolve, the space to chisel the edges of ideas, all wrapped up in mutual opening up and curiosity. I hate that the timing was off, that it dissolved into more muddying, wet sludge instead of the crystaline, icy light-filled possibilities we found in the interstices. And I have to shake that off and find these other paths for substantive, edged thinking.

And on the way, maybe a little playfulness.

The Legacy of Mel

Someone posted a story about a former child star charged with drunken driving and marijuana possession and a car crash on my online forum, which included the line, "in which he suffered a broken rib and a shoulder injury, but did not go off on any anti-Semitic rants." I've decided that this is the perfect catch-all "you know, it could be worse" subclause. "She dropped her groceries all over the ground and swore loudly, but did not go off on any anti-semitic rants." "She defiantly lit up a cigarette right in front of the bar, but did not go off on any anti-semitic rants." "She sputtered furiously as she watched her ex openly smooch her new love on the street, but did not go off on any anti-semitic rants."

It's all perspective.

Goldfish have no memory

I've just spent an hour scrubbing my apartment of the rice and floor-mashed bananas and cheese bits and heaps of laundry and dislocated keys and all of the other residue of the lovely, too-short, sweatily chaotic visit of my sister and her family. My nieces are absolute delights, M and her husband calm amused parents, Loopy eating up all of my unwanted ice cream, all of us constantly shoveling food into the gaping piehole of my sweet grubby two year old niece. The four of them slept puppy-like in my silly blow up bed, Mica protected by a little boxy frame, M clinging to the side of the bed.

It was good to have them here in my place, and they left a mess and in the most indie girl fashion, I've spent an important decompressing hour with loud music and lusty wailing about loss and hope with cleaning tools in my hands. Ani DiFranco really knows how to capture that "little plastic castle/is a surprise every time" sensation about how we navigate life, loves, dreams, work that we strive for. The gleeful, eager greeting of the incandescence of new connection, the crumpling of the bruising moments, the surprise anew when what follows is difficult even when we know what to expect.

M and I had a good conversation about the role of a partner in one's life, about how it's more than just about domesticity, but also about the continuity of conversations like the one about the dilemma about voice/disclosure in my blog. I think I was partnered for so long I still need to keep learning about how to be content when these stories are more distributed, more dispersed, through my willow-branch-strong network. Like my learning, like my life in so many ways, I'm in community, not in a dyad or always in face to face connection. I keep learning about that from my so graceful long-time single friends, like M-who-was-in-Rwanda, like S, like J.

The real trick for me, I think, is to be present to where I am, content with what is. Listen to the silly reassuring earnest reggae, the prana of the yoga mat and the grounding of my feet, no restless mind about what *could* happen, no endless checking of email.

The probable-ending of my more-hope-than-real-relationship can certainly be traced out in Lucinda Williams and Ani and Tori and Liz and all of the other open yearning sometimes-angry grrls. But I'm 41, not 24, and the path forward doesn't have to be full of drama. Pluck Growing-up-Skipper (whom I dressed and redressed for Lulu about 50 times, after teaching her to say "Skipper, I'm sorry I pulled your head off") off the lamp. Put away the piles of towels and sheets and napkins. Turn off the lights that Lulu turned on with the dimmer remote. Scrub the counters. Go for a run. Finish editing the proposal chapter I wrote yesterday. Nap before D's party tonight. Take the skyline, my neighbourhood, the restorative energy of the now into my cells. Scan Nerve and summon up openness to diversion.

And besides -- what the HELL does "peel out the watchword" mean anyway? Definitely too old to be a real indie-grrl :-).

Love and other Near Death Experiences

Mil Millington writes the best titles, even when his books are really plotless, chortly adjacencies of witty turns of phrase. The title of his latest is really resonating for me this week.

I woke up this morning feeling a little azure, a little bereft, a pattern I've acquired in the last few years. I often wake up a thin malaise. Sort of like an inverse shivasana, an accumulation of simmering worries or sorrows. It dissipates over the morning and as I pick up steam, it vanishes and I get to be my usual optimistic and robust self. But first-thing-in-the-morning-Cate has a hard time not giving expression to the bruises or the soggy, quiet fears. I need to develop some better practices about calmer bedtime (no computer, no dvds on my chest) and not reaching for the email stream before I'm even out of bed.

These habits are a lot like the "Secret Single Behaviours" Sex and the City did a silly episode about. Unlike the SATC world, though, I suspect most people's "SSBs" aren't as much about examining pores in the mirror or eating crackers with jelly over the kitchen sink, and much more about what we do when we're alone and feeling the lack of refraction for the utterances that need voice. One of my clients, who's lived alone in the last few years since her kids both moved on, asked me seriously over dinner one night a few months ago, "when are you lonely?" Bedtime was her time, the echoing time between the day survived and the release of sleep.

My vaguely malaise-y morning was interrupted today with an email and subsequent phone call with a good friend going through her own near-death love experience. Discovery of betrayal, a hidden relationship, wrenching loss of trust, anger and self-lament. A story we all know, the set and the words hurled at each other the only specifics. (And even those words, so well-rehearsed -- "I thought you loved me, I trusted you;" "I was protecting myself, you were part of this." Scripts we all know). In my phone call, there were tears, reassurances, the girlfriend script enacted. Regrounding.

As I hung up, I was reflecting on a couple of things. This was a deep relationship for my friend. It's rare, really rare, to feel the kind of connection to someone that makes the air around you sing just because you're together, where just sitting and reading together can feel *active,* where you're not *working* to find things to look at together or talk about, but just flow. That's rare, and when we have it with our friends it makes us whole, and when we have it with people we also want to be naked with, it's an unbelievable, undeniable spark of good fortune. Dangerous to believe in, maybe, because we all know where it can go off the rails, and as we get older, we all carry so many other interlayered stories whose characters and voices appear suddenly in the now, twisting at it, reshaping against hope. But it hooks you in, that connection, that simultaneous threading of those moments in the dark when the music and flesh and shadows make you one, just right, the intense fragility of intimacy, and those moments that result in the tear-stained phone calls, the seeing yourself as foolish for the decisions you made that let you burrow further into intimacy.

When we connect in that depth of dimensions, that's also when de-connection becomes the frayed cord plugged into the socket -- and we all do that differently. Some of us cry and lament and yearn, others -- like her guy -- pull back, get cold, retreat.

My friend I was on the phone with is one of the open-hearted of the world, one of the warmest people I know, who gives and deserves so much love. This is a hard moment for her -- but she'll continue to offer her full self into her loves. I know that about her, and that's one of the reasons I love her so much. She believes that she'll find that connection that will bring her lightness. I believe that too, for her... and for me.

I don't know what's going to happen with my friend and her guy. In many ways, I hope this will give her the chance to let go of a story that she's tried to feed for a long time, a chance to let in another opportunity for that kind of connection, one where the map is more aligned. I don't know what's going to happen with F and me, either, not really. I wish our maps could be more aligned, but I certainly also understand that the leap from "I feel this connection" to "I'm going to dislocate my life abruptly" is pretty profound, and frankly, I probably wouldn't be able to do that quickly either. I get it. And... despite my friend's tears, the apparent folly of it all, I believe in that green light, and would like to be able to see if we could continue to feed the connection. But if we can't, if we can't find a way to do it that feels okay for both of us...I'll keep wriggling to find that current, that connection that infuses, that the edges of hope/fear that I feel every morning before my day takes me over yearn for.

Time after time

I ended the day in a cosy bar downstairs, crammed with people who are all living out their own stories in fluid, squiggly ways, listening to my neighbour Kat sing. Jazz, standards, her own songs, full-voiced, ochre spirit.

Kat "retired" one of her songs tonight, the Cindy Lauper song Time after Time, which she used to sing with her friend who died about a month ago. caught up in circles/confusion is nothing new/flashback warm nights/almost left behind/suitcase of memories.... Gorgeous rich focused moment, a crowd who loves her, soaring catching voice. A moment of perfect balance.

I dont really know Kat, but we touch edges now and again. I let her park her vespa in my parking spot, and we have little conversation fragments now and again -- my doorway, my countertops, me showing off my gold sandals to her and her young gay boyfriend Matt, my rescuing her from trying to cart her end of year project to school on her teetering bicycle.

I let myself live in my neighbourhood today, live into people who matter to me. M back from Rwanda, wrung out but so steady and sweet. Kat, a tentative friendship over coffee and muffins and talk of what happens to your energy when you die. Bethy and Huckleberry. A rueful phone call with my best friend D. Email chats with S & D, who matter despite their recent arrival into my life. A run along the water and an accidental encounter with an old pal. Dinner with J&S and Carly and so much love and warmth. Then the bar and the music and such... crowded warmth.

I was here today, present to loss and looking at everything square on and owning my parts and looking forward and sanguine shrugs. Tomorrow, I need to really get some work done. Today, I was living into being happy with the Cate that I am. A thread of disappointment, acknowledgement of my part in that, a belief that my richest stories are still before me.

The lure of narrative, the dull weight of the now

So F and I have realized that the vivid narratives of an imagined future we were weaving together had overtaken the possibilities of the now. I feel very foolish in many ways -- just two weeks ago, when I was in New Mexico, I said blithely to L "I'm happier than I've been in a long time, buzzing with all of this excitement and possibility." And then the plane hit the mountainside of F's existing commitments, his recognition that he can't let go of his current entanglements to really reach for the heady whispered stories we uttered in the dark and through our feverishly tapping fingertips. SCRITCH. Paper ripped from the typewriter and crumpled into the corner.

It feels so... jagged -- there were so many points of intersection, so many places to nudge each other's words and ideas and flesh into places we were both a bit afraid to go to, a rhythm of nosing each other just a little further into delight, held gaze, deep recognition, an edge of difference that illuminated. A truly rare dance. Wrong timing, maybe. I don't know what would have unfolded, been written, if we'd both come to this untangled. But this... this was an overwhelmingly raw opening up, an abrading shutting down.

From the perspective of narrative psych, you can call this kind of deep connection a lot of things. Love. Shared imagination. Excitement at new possibilities that seem to fit. Uncommon chemistry. Predestination. Whatever terms, mutually crafting the story should make it real...and it's flattening when the shared story that seemed to capture us both equally fragments and the so solid possibilities just dissipate into the ether.

I always feel like the powerful story should be enough for faith, for optimism that it could happen, should bulldoze over other obstacles. But, stories collide, that's the point of multivocality. They're never straightforward.

Being with him was... tauntingly connecting, such a fit in so many ways. It's flaying to lose that verdant shaping something that I've yearned for for a long time -- this particular kind of connection that includes a dream of a life on the ocean, shared ideas, provocative physicality, seeing the world. It's about F specifically, and a more general, long-set yearning. A narrative I'll never be able to let go of, not really -- that desire for the side-by-side gaze.

I'll be fine, I'll focus on school, scan the space around me for new stories to write, drink beer and flirt and live in my network of tight connections. But. It was a big story, one I've wanted for a long time, one I thought I'd finally found a co-author for... and it's wrenching to let it go.

Vertigo

This week has been a real test of living in the deeply uncomfortable space between places. What my dissertation chair Barnett called "the vertigo of lost certainties and the exuberance of new possibilities."

With F, trying to find a way to live gracefully in the cleavage between the now-space and the potential future, when there seem to be so many painful steps between here and that vivid tomorrow. How do we stay grounded, stay connected, hold faithfully to an image of what could be, work through a wrenching letting go of what's real today? Trust that the filters will all dissipate? I feel like my grace has fled the building, leaving me dancing to the music of a lumbering, one-beat-behind too loud bar band.

I'm struggling, too, with focusing on this research proposal I'm trying to write, finding the right words and flow that seem so present when I'm running, but the ideas become darting, indistinguishable minnows on the page. Dripping algae, when it should be silvery life.

And finally, this jarring experience last week in the form of a letter from the daughter of my lost friend and prof who died in May. She found this blog, where I wrote with the only kind of meaning-making I know how to do, trying to interpret and give shape to my own sense of loss, my failures and moments of gracelessness, trying to describe my experience and make sense of it. I did not expect it to be public -- naively -- and it's very distressing to realize that I've caused pain to people I feel nothing but kindness toward.

There is, of course, a discussion to be had about memoirs and blogs in general, and "who owns memory," and whether my experience and interpretation of that experience is more or less legitimate than the experience of someone closer. My book club had that exact conversation last month about Ann Patchett's memoir about her friend, Truth and Beauty, and I remember a rich conversation about that a few years ago when Toronto Life published a piece by Sylvia Fraser after Peter Gzowski died called "Peter Light and Dark." I thought it was a riveting and unflinching piece; many many other people thought it was a violation of his life.

Perhaps they were right -- but I'm so caught up in trying to capture and make meaning of all of the fissures and shadows and curves of our lives that I tend to see that kind of full portrait as an honouring of the person, not a slap in the face. I like to imagine that I'd feel the same way if someone wrote about me the same way, that I can see how my intensity and fierceness is not always leavened by the light and warmth and striving, that I can be a big pain in the ass to be intimate with. Maybe I'm kidding myself, and if I heard it in someone else's words, I'd flinch too. I'd certainly want to hear the part about the warmth and brains as balance, not just the fierceness. And maybe that was part of the problem with what I wrote about John, I failed to honour him enough.

Regardless of where my posts originated in terms of my beliefs about how we tell our stories, of course I'm distressed to cause someone pain. So I took down those posts and wrote K a note of apology.



All of the ravels of this week... they twine together, underlining for me that my stories are always so damned multivariegated, so complex. It's how I live... and sometimes it does make me yearn sometimes for certainty, simpler narratives.

Just before I moved to this loft, when I still lived on the street lined with narrow houses full of families, I was coming home one day and came across a little street poem. One, two, three telephone poles with little red construction paper hearts taped to them, with one word on each: Sorry. I couldn't see where the hearts led to, if they went up a path or not, and they ended just before my house. A few days later, one of them had blown onto our porch, and wedged itself into the ice and snow on the step.

I can imagine so many things about that story... from the mundane First Big Fight between a newish couple, to a generalized apology from the universe for pain and graceless moments. But the simplicity of the speech act -- the careful cutting out of the hearts, the tracing of the one word, the taping to the selected poles -- runs as a thread through my yearning. Cutting to the centre: we don't mean to cause pain. Sometimes we do. Forgiving moves us forward, both as the guilty and the hurt.

License plate bingo

is no fun by yourself. This is my conclusion after spending an hour and forty five minutes waiting in line at the Lewiston border between NY and Ontario yesterday.

It's ironic, this cross-border dating thing I seem to have going on right now. I grew up in a border town. Both my grandfathers worked in the US their entire lives, zipping back and forth across the bridge or tunnel every day. I have a strangely paradoxical internalization about that frontier. On one hand, we treated it like a bit of a game when I was growing up, hiding the clothes my grandmother bought us at Fairlane mall under our existing clothes, my mom sneaking into the duty free to buy smokes and booze even when we were just driving through the hour and a half to Sarnia to take the faster route to the cottage. On the other, I was raised with a sense of Scary Other about Detroit, cautionary tale of the "race riots" with their fires and smoke visible from our side of the river, of people hauled out of their cars at lights when they'd neglected to lock their doors, robbed or throats slit. Poverty and desperation folded into a kind of frightened racism that later integrated itself into a pretty strong aversion to the entire country, what I saw as a culture of self-absorbed smugness, consumerism and inability to understand its impact on the rest of the world.

The place still astonishes me. Driving across NY I-90 today, I listened to a real country station -- not the Dixie Chicks new country "empowering" stuff, but the kind filled with little announcements of gratitude to specific soldiers for doing their patriotic duty and songs about what you lose when you choose to spend your money on a cheap motel and a cheap woman and cheap alcohol instead of... I dunno, church? your wife? I also flipped the dial and heard an ad for the "Ave Maria group of funds," "ethical" investment choices for Catholics who don't want their money going to companies that support choice or non-married benefits. And you can't get a decent cup of coffee to save your life anywhere between Rochester and Lewiston.

At the same time, none of my American friends fits anything resembling the US stereotypes we all have. They're all passionate about participatory democracy, revile the administration, mistrust the way God is invoked in the public discourse (even when they actually go to church themselves), bend over backwards to understand diversity and inclusiveness.

It's all a big paradox... and constantly forces me to rethink my assumptions. I'd always seen this country as "over there," within view but arm's length from me -- and now seem to be spending more and more time becoming who I am in this context. Forced to face my own fears and fairy tales about the "affable menace" which is so much more multi-variegated than I'd ever allowed for.

(On, and for the record? Scored New York, Ontario, Connecticutt, Pennsylvania, Washington DC, Maryland, Wisconsin, Florida, Massachusetts, Quebec, Ohio, Michigan, New Jersey, Maine, New Brunswick, New Hampshire and Utah! while I was waiting in line at the border).

Swanning about

I've been swanning about again, heading home today from Albuquerque. It's been a full more-than-a-week. Am glad I did this New Mexico trip, though I'm ready to be home, need to be thinking and working and focused. I always get good movement on ideas and connections when I'm away, but need the home time to make something of it.

Spent the last five days in Albuquerque at a small conference, the division of the National Communications Association that concerns itself with social construction. It was a good reshaping place for me -- I always orbit the edges of this "real" academic world, the tenure track teaching/writing/publishing crowd. It pulls me into defining my work less from a studenty vague "some day I'll write some things" perspective and sharpens me into realizing I can do this now. Spending time in the Comms. discipline also reminds me of the deep multi-disciplinarity of my work, and underlines why straddling and lateral connections infuse my work -- am grateful I'm not a purist about eating food paid for by pharma companies, for example, unlike the guy who did his dissertation on the shifting discourse from impotence to erectile dysfunction. I liked him and his wife, both profs who do interesting work about commitment and performance and sexuality, but also realized how narrowly framed their worlds are in some ways.

The best part of this time here was L, my school friend who's becoming closer and closer. Funny that we sort of rubbed each other the wrong way when we first met, and now have such symbiosis. We're close on ideas, and I'm really happy to be her student reader, and I like her sharpness, her energy so much. She awes me, what she gets done in her life (three sons, one with severe cerebral palsy, an important job in a university, her research -- and she knows how to dance and let go). We had some giggly giggly can't-stop-laughing moments among our talk talk talk, and I love that we have that.

We spent the first couple of days at the beginning of the week in Santa Fe, with another school friend, and it just felt so RICH. We ate well, and hung out at K's, this crowded-in-so-many-senses sprawling ranch house (five teenagers, two tiny dogs, four adults, unbelievable flurry of art and antiques). Went to an exquisite spa in the mountains on Monday -- sat naked in the hot tub under the sky, dipped into a cold plunge pool, had hot stone massages. Talked and talked with these two smart, wise, funny, warm women. What a full life I'm leading.

And the opening note to my whole trip, last Saturday, Holly's wedding, the woman I met on a plane last summer, who spent the year in Afghanistan. Very pretty wedding. Some of the conventions give me the shivers (father presenting her to be married, introduced as Mr. and Mrs. with her husband's first and last name), but everyone there loves her very much, and it was lovely to be part of that crowd, and I'm just tickled about the ephemeral but durable part of the connection.

So many little plugs going into their sockets in my life, connections linking things together, electricity humming down the lines. Will get home late tonight, catch up with Darrell, who's been in Europe, see S for her birthday, do some work. Work on Monday, then drive off to ROC for a flying visit when F gets back from kayaking with his daughter in Maine. Work my ass off this week and deserve my planned weekend with F in TO. Somewhere in there I need to find me some client work, but it's all humming.

The rain won't change my mind

let it fall.

I don't know why I never seem to have an umbrella, suddenly. I got drenched this morning, right down to my underwear, for about the fifth time in a couple of months. Portland was the worst for the sudden cloudbursts pinning me smaller soaking wet under the weight of the whoosh, but today gave it competition. I was disjointed to start with -- was supposed to meet D for breakfast at 9:30, woke up at 7:00, went back to sleep and woke up with a start at 9:15. Hurled my reading and ibook into my backpack so I could go to the library after we ate to work on my dissertation proposal... took off, late and scattered, hair wet, ... and then after our nice little connected brekkie, the deluge.

Freezing, I ended up going home, drying off and changing, writing at my kitchen counter, cosy with the rain outside, Bach and Yo Yo Ma the inside climate, good inroads. And... still wondering why I am so out of joint. Too many things, some flowing unbelievably, others just not quite making the catch as I leap from one trapeze to the other. Still faltering on generating meaningful new client work (for the second time in a month didn't get a piece of work because I'm "too experienced"), sleeping out of synch, leaving a little too late for times agreed on, never having an umbrella. And yet, my school work is flowing and feeling possible, F and I are creating something together that continues to awe me in its potential, my conversations with people I love are full of richness and affirmation for each other, I'm running faster and further than I have for a while. Balance, I guess, pushing the edges of what my space can accommodate, creating elasticity.

How we are seen

I've been doing a lot of reading/writing/thinking about identity lately, how we construct our ideas of self, how we discern how other people are constructing us and how we coordinate those dynamics. Some of it is in very personal contexts ("I am the strong one") and some of it is about how we interpret and enact more collective identities -- nationality, queerness, what it means to be female.

Yesterday I bought something that lets me "perform female gender," as Judith Butler would have it, at a level that I've never attempted before -- gold strappy tall party sandals. A convergence of all sorts of different contexts -- B's upcoming wedding I need black tie for, a yen for a Betsey Johnson dress for years and suddenly finding myself right at the store after a lunch, too much Sex and the City, playing with different versions of self, including the one that my online pals are jokingly calling StraightCate. (Who is, according to my ex, "fancy"). Tropes of an exploration of a kind of version of self that might be open to possibilities I've never contemplated before.

I was buying the shoes (and a fantastic, too expensive, pair of dresses, about which no more will be said) at the same time that a little yellowed newspaper clipping lay on my desk. One of the bits of ephemera I retrieved from my grandmother's house after the funeral, it's the newspaper obit from my grandmother's mother. It reads:

Mrs. Calixte Seguin
With her brother, Very Rev. Raymond Piche, OP of Fall River, Mass., officiating, funeral services were held in Assumption Church on Wednesday for Mrs. Calixte Seguin, lifelong resident of this district, who died Saturday at her home, 3229 Baby Street, after a long illness.

Mrs. Seguin's nephew, rev. Norbert Chateau of Detroit, assisted as Deacon... [long list of priests, deacons and subdeacons who were all part of the funeral mass].

Ladies of the Altar Society of which she was a member attended in a body. Pallbearers were her nephews: Ernest Piche, Alvin Piche, Paul Piche, Hector Renaud, Arthur Langlois and Ernest Seguin. Burial was in Assumption Cemetary.

**

Nowhere. No. Where. in the obit does it actually mention her actual NAME. Maria Seguin, nee Piché. Nor her three children. Nor her grandchildren. It locates her inside her husband's identity, within a huge phalanx of priests and other male representatives of the church, her male relatives who were her pallbearers. It mentions a clump of ladies as a body, also Church related.

Despite my fairly extensive reading on the history of marriage, and my finely honed interpretation of the possibilities and limits of the institution, and my lengthy engagement with the implications for the queer world of the legalization of marriage, this obit was shocking to me. This was 1944, when my parents were both young children, and in the public record, in the narrative that sums up her life, her identity was completely subsumed to the men of her world.

I try to put my strappy little sandals with the gold bows in the same world as this obit where my great grandmother doesn't even get a name or any details from the life she lived out, only the institutions she was situated in. The truism is about the depth of change over those decades. Neither marriage nor the Church look anything like they did six decades ago in terms of how they structure people's lives.

On one level, the institutions still have the same basic frameworks and literal meaning -- and in another, they have a completely different social force. It provides an interesting dilemma for us, in the 00s or whatever we're calling this decade. We can recoil from the institutions, recognizing the historical force and purpose of them, rejecting the tenets wholesale -- and we can also engage with them as fluid constructs, living embodiments of the way that contexts shift and the meaning of what we take for granted shifts.

All of my work on same sex marriage left me with some unease about a wholehearted embracing of an institution that a mere six decades ago pretty much erased my great-grandmother's identity. And, it's also clear that that version of marriage was part of its specific historical context. Recognizing the historical version of marriage and its force and engaging with it as a place to look at our relationship paradigms, what we mean when we "do" commitment, provocations to what we take for granted about gender -- we can also reinterpret the institutions.

I'm not sure that at any previous point in my life I would have been so unadulteratedly pleased to be witness to a fairly traditional marriage ceremony, would enjoy the costuming. But I'm really happy to be part of B's wedding. Maybe the point is that the revolution of the past half century is that we can also hold multiple truths in the same fist, making a world where my dykely self forged over two decades can coexist with straightcate and her fancy shoes, making me, in context, constantly shifting.

Memorials

I had a little free time Saturday morning, so I decided to get out of the antiseptic, muggy world of the hotel area (manicured grass, fake ponds complete with geese, no real life) and go downtown. I got off the metro at Dupont Circle and browsed kramerbooks for a while and then sat with a cappuccino and my laptop, making some notes on my proposal.

Since this is our last time in DC for national session (the July meeting is in Kansas City next year), I thought I should wander down to the mall and look at the Vietnam memorial one last time.

I first saw it in the summer of 02, right after I started at Fielding, when the entire core of the city was hyper-militarized. It was my first time in DC, and I was over-aware of the signs of flexing muscle, so I came to it with that underlay of raw dread, sorrow, fear, yearning that we all carried after September 11th in different ways.

The wall was overwhelming, that first time, the descent from the thin line of a few names down to the deep well of names names names, crowding out everything else. Lives lost living out a flimsy story of empire.

That time, I came to the wall at a time of day where somehow, eerily, I was able to see a reflection in the black granite, superimposed over the names, of … fighter jets, landing at a base behind me. Echoes of the images from September 11th, interpolations into its aftermath. The Lincoln memorial posed another ironic question – how do these two contradictory images connect, make a coherent narrative? And all of this was triangulated with the little kiosks between Lincoln and the wall, on the edge of the mall, selling military memorabilia, insignia. Including unfathomably crude iconography of imperialist might, like the bumper sticker that said “I’d walk a mile for a camel” – with a 19thc-style cartoon figure of an grinning arab on a camel with a bullseye over him.

A couple of years later, Mary Alice and I went to the newly opened WWII memorial, and I was struck dumb by that addition to the collective story of self. It’s downright Victorian in its empire and excess, the Albert Memorial for the American love affair with power. Giant eagles, huge bold names of battles, the war years punctuated through the American lens (1941 – 1945), not the rest of the Allies. A stunning reassertion of inward-focused, unquestioning imperialism. Beyond ironic.

It reminded me of the time that a friend of mine returned from her father’s funeral wearing his clothing, apparently unconscious of how stunning it was to see her rawest grief and yearning worn in public. I still squirm at how shocked I was that she didn’t seem at all aware of what she seemed to be doing, trying to be him, hold him alive, when it was so naked. The memorials feel the same way to me, shouting clear questions into the national discourse – questions that the people making their poignant pilgrimages, leaving teddy bears and notes about how much the soldiers are loved for their sacrifices, should be knocked over by – but which apparently echo only silently around them.

Crossing Frontiers

Crossing Frontiers

My week – my double-stuffed-with-cream-rich week among my tribe is done… a very good space, as always, affirming, provoking, tweaking, in all possible ways. I leave national sessions every time a sharper person, operating in some more complex set of neuron firings and noticings and connections.

So many vignettes and stories all woven together in this chaotic, high-octane system. Hours of conversation with Linda and her flint sharp mind, roving over the territory of both of our studies, our theoretical base flushed out and located, Such thinking-with support from my faculty guys. A committee meeting that pushed me to the next level on my dissertation. Presenting to the newbies on social construction, feeling myself living it. Talking talking talking, a multilogue of ideas resident as much in the system between us as in ourselves, talking concepts with Jan before our heads are off the pillows. Intellectual gluttony, almost disembodied, bodies that are just thoughts and hugging and glasses of red zinfandel. Running in the heat to assimilate it all, celebrating the grads at the end of the week and dancing barefoot into the night. Support in our village.

Of course there’s some lunacy – I was nonplussed by a reaction to one piece of work I did, where a pretty searing analysis of my own failings of moral authority and engagement with my identity was met with the observation of “cute.” And we sometimes pay hyper-attention to the ebbs and flows of energy, reading friendship rifts and minor tears where they’re really indiscernible. (Someone I care about and had noticed nothing but support from apologized for an “act of micro-aggression” she’d committed on me). Some frustrating clashes of epistemology. But… these are the inconsequential fissures of an unprecedented kind of community of practice, where we work on making the social worlds we believe are possible.

I left with some clear deadlines and a sharp sense of purpose and timing. Frank and Barnett pushed me to timelines and deliverables and it’s all good. I feel grounded in my project and am aiming at my graduation date of January 08 in Santa Barbara with a strong sense of purpose.

I’m pondering all of the frontiers crossed since I started this program. I was emailing Beth from my treo while I was eating breakfast at a (shudder) TGIFridays at the airport this morning. She replied, I never in a million years, 5 years ago – 2 years ago, even – would have believed that you would ever send me an email, “I’m in Washington DC on my blackberry in one of the most Americanist food chains in Ronald Reagan airport.” I would add to that, “on my way home to touch base briefly and then rush off again for a squeezed in overnight date with my male lover who lives in NY state.”

So many boundaries opened up, edges rubbed open. Two literal border crossings in one day, identity frameworks bursting apart, stories full of possibilities written. Navigating the hyphens.

Vicky Barr, Where are You?

I have a little weakness for series books about career girls from the 40s and 50s.In a box in the upper level of my loft is a complete-but-for-one set of Cherry Ames, Nurse books. Nudging her competent elbow is a clutch of Vicky Barr, Flight Stewardess volumes. Shiny, pert, pretty, independent, glamorous career girls who were always getting proposals from handsome doctors and businessmen, but who laughed them off for later, after they finished their madcap adventures and mystery solving with their chums.

Vicky would have been baffled by my experience at Pearson yesterday. First the usual tedium of the long check in line, customs (the agent never understanding what the hell I’m talking about with my distance learning program), extra phalanx of security for DC, the long wind to the far-thrown antiseptic gate U for DC, emptied of all possible hiding places and things-that-could-be-turned-into-weapons. Boarding plane, delighted to have exit aisle to self after Koreans banished for insufficient English… and then watching the pelting rain. Pelt. Down.

Three over-airconditioned hours on the tarmac later, we were released back to Gate U, electrical storms daunting the air traffic flow, no doubt more caution after the Air France flight slid in flames into a gully last August and all of the freaked out passengers ended up on the 401 flagging down cars. They also hurtled our luggage back into the free world so we had to find our way to arrivals through some previously unknown hidden warren, then run the gamut of check in, customs, security again.

Vicky embodied an overlay image of air travel as filled with tycoons and mysterious heiresses tended by sweetly flirtatious, china-cup-coffee-carrying trim-waisted women – a glamour that grimly tugs at our ankles as we trudge through the beeping sweaty melee of flight today. And yesterday, I realizes that another entertainment form has made me positively sanguine about traveling – the few seasons of The Amazing Race I watched. Watching those teams cajole, bargain, sneak and generally make indomitable pests of themselves, I imprinted a frame of travel as a game, and learned something about the porousness of the system. I don’t follow the instructions so much anymore. I called and rebooked myself on a flight while we were still on the plane. I wheedled my way in the back door to customs to avoid the long check in line. Recognized that, like the mess when the Air France thing happened, no one is really organized for contingencies – so looking for openings in the patterns and good-naturedly taking advantage of them seems to work.

This is a really crappy airport to be stuck in – it ain’t no wonderland of mini-massages, lattes and space-age sleeping capsules like the behind-the-customs-veil in Vancouver airport. My battery on my suddenly vital treo dribbled away (product of my defiance of the “cellphones off” order while we were on the tarmac) and I had no brain to read anything meaningful. And when I finally took off… it was 11.5 hours after we were supposed to leave – for a one hour flight. But. I wasn’t in as bad shape as the Russian couple coming from Rome, whose flight was hours delayed leaving Italy because none of the baggage handlers showed up to work after World Cup celebrations, and whose flight attendants put out a box of self-serve drinks and then snored in the back. They missed their connection home to San Francisco and had no idea when they’d pick up another one. And I wasn’t in nearly as bad shape as the woman with the two year old, on a leg from the UK, whose husband suddenly picked up a loud edgy fight in the holding pen back at Gate U at 9:30 p.m.

I didn’t get any real reading done. A few notes and articles, some kibitzing with my online pals, a few email flickers with F in Germany, a phone call with Renee. But I was fine with my earl grey and my John Irving novel, wondering how much of my life forward will be similarly measured out in airports, a distributed life incoherent to the Gutenberg-era guardians of territory, assessors of my documents and right to travel. Vicky

Moonpie's Great Ruckus of a Night

My insane wonderful online friend Melissa (well, we've actually met in real-life, so she's really just my friend Melissa) just got back home after a week at Cape Cod. She posted something in the middle of the night last night that I just had to guest blog -- she gave me the shake laughs.

***

Please make a note of the time of day of this post. This is NOT A GOOD THING. I'm down here and possibly headed for the couch (debating now, as I'll definitely startle/wake the Mr if I head back upstairs). We (meaning he, due to a Very Bad, Very Excruciating Headache) got very little sleep last night. Had stuff going on all morning and he went into his office w/J before 7am! to just do some shit post vacation and pre-back to work. He napped this afternoon and I went to bed at about 10 (to the sounds of him downstairs, googling and printing and listening to and then singing, over and over, the French Nat'l Anthem)...he came up soon after.

So the night's disruptions began w/the focking cat in the hallway, scratching shit. The Mr whisper/mumbling about it, and me getting out of bed and saying, "kittykitty" or what the fuck ever, and going back to bed and finding that the whisper/mumbling Mr was not at ALL awake after all, and I got the Big Death Yell as he freaked out upon me coming back to bed. Back to sleep and then the phone rang. Wrong number. Back to sleep and then the fucking, fucking, dirty, viscious, verminous sons of whore raccoons came and knocked over our garbage (the garbage that I put out this afternoon and forgot to put into the garage, as we do in the summer). Well, fuck that----I went downstairs and hit the outside back light and opened the garage door and waited for them to startle so that I could see what the fuck it WAS (not going out there to get sprayed by a skunk---will risk my neck on those murderous raccoons, though). Little fucker stared right at me. I was SCARED---this was 1:30 am and I know that they ATTACK! and maim people or something. So I hissed and made noises and when they got far enough away, I ran over and grabbed the trash can and popped it into the garage----hit the "close" button and ran back into the house.

Back to bed (not asleep now, now listening to the Mr (don't want to overstate this---he wasn't being that pissy) go on about what a horrible, horrible night's sleep it was. Then round 2 w/the cat----the boy yelled MOM! or something that sounded like it...and cat (as she always does, it's her favorite place) was sprawled out over his pillow after having nibbled on his ear, lol. Grabbed the cat, back to bed w/cat (she never stays w/us, but I try). Almost asleep and then the cat decides that she's not just going to scratch at doors in the hallway, but she's going to leap up and scratch shit at the same time. Don't know what the fuck that was all about, but it was a Great Ruckus, and I just said, Fuck, I'm going downstairs----she'll follow me. The Mr asked me to close the door----I said, Scout will just scratch on it later...he didn't care. So here I sit, contemplating going up to bed (which will mean opening our bedroom door and freaking the Mr right the fuck out and waking him up again) or sleeping on the couch (which will be totally fine, if the CAT. leaves boy and Mr and upstairs doors alone and just goes to sleep.

All while reading this thread, I've been mouse-clicking w/one hand and playing w/the cat (waving that cat dancer toy) w/the other, hoping to tire the little motherfucker out so that she'll sleep on the couch w/me.

And in keeping w/topic, I do have some concern and am going out of my way for the Mr here, as he is running 14 miles tomorrow am and then going to pick up my Nana so that she can watch the soccer match w/us. He has had two really bad nights' sleep in a row.

There goes the CAT up the stairs. Fuck.

Roaming goats

I'm peering through my glasses darkly this morning, a little fogged by the residue of half a bottle of the goofily named Goats do Roam red and a scotch I pegged unwisely to the end of the meal last night. My friend Stephanie and I went to a Fringe play (decent play, Teaching As You Like it, memorable for at least one funny-in-context line about "Shakespeare, me and the Dutch" being the only people to not treat adults like children) and then ate salmon in the treetop-like patio of Kensington Kitchen. The kitchen was slow, and we drank almost an entire bottle of wine before the food arrived. We have such good rich conversations that make us both guffaw, simultaneously intimate and arch. Living in hyphens.

I was thinking about how many of the people in my life right now have fluttered in this year, really, and how I'm hooking my meaning and self into them as much as to the people who've been around longer. And how others have floated out almost completely, like the wholesome little couple and their kids I ran into at Moonbean today. L&A were part of the Great Lesbian Switcheroo of 99 and we uneasily run into each other every couple of years, maybe on Pride, shiftily exhuberant. People sliding out, new ones ripening in, stories of futures written that I would have never imagined a year ago.

I managed to steer my torpid little body down to Nathan Phillips Square for the art show. I didn't see anything this year that made me gasp the way I felt about the Bathers or the Jane station piece I bought in January after seeing it there first last year -- but I bought a fun little print of a french bicycle and a man wrestling an alligator from this woman, and a collagey thing with a bunch of machines and some text on it from this artist. Do It All it says. Over my desk it goes.

Off for a hot run to force myself into a less sluggish physical space, and another Fringe play, with D. A little playtime before the intensity of DC, school, an six months' worth of conversations in five days.

The Bathers

A year ago today, I moved into the apartment in J&S' house. My chosen family in the typically queer sense, held in the warm borders of their little trio-with-large- Saturnic-rings.

It was a good space for re-finding feet, letting myself feel through the waves of letting go, moving forward, that I staggered through over the next few months. It started out with a carapace of mimed strength, scaffolding my trembling self through the unfamiliar motions of figuring out solo future. Painting my bedroom crimson, vowing to not turn it into a monastic cell, my trip to the Nathan Phillips Square art show to insert some narratives of my own into my space. Dripping tears on the subway over my art on the way home, so sad that A couldn't meet me even in the closing ritual I wanted of buying each other a piece of art. Buying some for myself.

I hung that image of The Bathers on the wall at the end of my bed, and gazed at it many times over the next few months. It's the sense of memory. Smiling, relaxed, women by the seaside, recreated from snapshots, colour added by the articulator, seen through a yanked-through-time lens, fogged over. The bottle that floats half up through the image feels like the last picture on a roll, the stuck moment in an old-fashioned slide show when you split the pic in half and see it from the middle.

How we make stories, bricolage of what's there, our own memories, our own hopes. Certainty and wonder always contrapuntal. We are so knowing, then the story shifts slightly and all is questioned. Emulsions of perspective, slivering of meaning. I realized last week that I thought for years my Grandmother's middle name was Evelyn, but read something a couple of years ago that made me think I was wrong. I never asked her. Her obit didn't include it. I'll never be certain, just as I can never remember if my dad's death day is March 21 or March 22 without checking the perpetual calendar for 1992 for which day was Sunday.

Much of the last year has been about living into my Cateself, my me so joyful in this flat, enlivened by the work I'm doing, the way I am me with people whose hands I didn't know I'd wander with, watching myself unfold with F in a wholly open, grounded way. It's also been about framing the story of the self-with-A, the decade and a half that made so much of me, facing the parts I played in that theatre of acceptance and rejection, recognizing them in me now as backward-through time, fogged through a split lens, tangible to look at, no longer possible to remember what the inside really feels like.

Melange

It's been a weird little blend of days. Since I got back from Windsor, I've been trying to hunker down and get some real reading/writing done, and I'm making progress, but my committee meeting next week is looming at me. I have a magnet of a cartoon on my fridge that says "Clive was about to come face to face with the ball he had dropped long ago." I haven't exactly dropped the ball -- am doing a lot of reading and thinking about this project -- but not much of it has coalesced or made it to paper. Still a lot of uncertainty, the kind that Frank and Barnett help me walk through, but Lita tends to squish a bit. So I need to get on top of that.

In the middle of this stewing of ideas, my little online world had some upheaval. A grating cohabitation of worldviews finally came to a head (I think it can best be described as a some flailing badly-hidden judgement from a bunch of small minded christians and the final burst of impatience from a bunch of hooerish pagans -- the usual clash of civilizations). After a Battle Royale, a bunch of us just left and set up a new place. I like to think of it as a Quiet Revolution, abruptly creating a new world where we are no longer bound by the strictures of the Church and they sell unconsecrated hosts in the local depanneur. More drama than I wanted to deal with, but it feels much better to have an online hangout where the complexities of my life aren't met with tight-lipped head-shaking.

I'm trying to create some mindful, quieter space in all of this. I had a good longish run on Monday, hot and elemental, and a stroll-y walk to and home from the dentist yesterday. The view across Riverdale park from Broadview really is one of the best moments in the city. It was good to immerse myself in it, glide through the balmy air and the baseball playing and the people sitting on their porches in Cabbagetown and the honking shouting Italians and the yacking cellphoners on the streetcar. Ran this morning and detoured to my old street so I could see what A has done to the house -- I knew she was doing some work, and it looks good. It's yellow, now, with some really nice landscaping.

Many things in my life are crystalizing -- getting crisper on my conceptual framework for school, a couple of work possibilities, the shape that's starting to emerge for who I can be with F. The lake is in the way, and a few other distractions, but it feels like a life, a space, I can, want to, live into. Quite giddy-making, really.

And this morning, I toasted my bagel in my Grandma's toaster. This toaster doesn't pop, it glides the bread up. I like that sensation.

Tessellations

I'm quilted with images from the weekend. My last glimpse of my grandmother, cold and small and dignified. My ex's hand in mine, tight, so familiar and so foreign, in front of my grandmother's coffin. Taking my cousin's hand and leading her inside to see Grandma, her a little sister for a moment, her gorgeous children in her husband's hands. Stef strolling the graveyard in her cherry red hair with a sharpie, correcting the spelling of our name on the signs. Back at Grandma's, Em finding a fossilized egg, Tony 1982, solemnly holding it up. Issy and Seb dancing for the video camera on my phone. Em playfully dancing for the same camera. Jane's firefighter friend inspecting the plug on Grandma's toaster, the one I've always loved, before I took it as my memento. Jeff and Beth dancing in the hall, practicing for their wedding, earnestly playful.

My last Windsor image -- pulling off the expressway for a moment in Ste. Anne's cemetery, to see dad, leaving him a pink gerbera daisy I tugged out of the flower arrangement on his mom's coffin. His stone looks a bit lonely -- the ones around are obviously more frequently visited -- and it feels so ironic, given that he was always the centre force of whatever was going on. I find him there, though, always, just a brief connection, telling him where I've been and where I hope to go. Usually I bring him small rocks from where I've traveled, but I forgot to find something in Oregon. The single daisy -- his favourite flower -- sparked some vividness into the grey stone.

My drive home was far more floaty than my drive out, less time in the speedy zone with propulsive music, more intuitive but relaxed traffic flow. I hit a storm near London that plunged me into the familiar world of my childhood storm watching, the weird grey charged sky counterpointed the suddenly vivid greens of the trees, lightning flicking down all around me. I miss those overheated moments of heightened ions, where colours are stark, the air alive, my breath shorter and giddy. Storms always evoke the family nexus of the cottage, so distant now, my mother's entire family dissipated, my hours of staring at the lake stored in the place of fragmented dreams and dimly remembered novels.

This has been such a year of reminding me of the allotment of decades, the stacking up of history that is simultaneously part of the learned present and snapped suspended into an image that I need to peer at to remind myself of any resonance, struggle to remember. My split, the scattering of some friends of my life with A, the deaths of friends' parents, John, Grandma. No reconnection with my mother's sister. So many shifts, and here I am, made of all of this mosaic of life stories, looking where I want to go. With F, with my work, with my bio and chosen family. Living into as much vividness as I can.

The Pollard Triplets

Yesterday was a very. full. day. I kissed F goodbye at 7:00 a.m., knowing I wouldn't see him again for weeks, ran back in with a latte for him, clutching my own americano, then hurled myself onto the highway. I was still on Spadina at 7:30, impatiently cursing the four enormous Chinese tour busses moving like whales to my tiny aggressive fighting fish, but then attacked the road. Being late for the funeral would have been Not. On, so I focused all of the energy in my body into driving fiercely and fully, fast but very focused and attentive. Pulled into the parking lot at Sacred Heart Church in Lasalle just before 10:30. This was a Feat.

First people I saw were my stepmom and youngest sister, then my dear cousin Matt, then, in the foyer to the church, A. She was weepy, and we held each other. She held onto me as I said goodbye to Grandma, crying and saying, "she always accepted us, she was always nice to me." This was true. She was a very accepting woman in some profound ways -- picky about things that related to *her*, but not about how other people lived their lives. Bloody independent. Fiercely determined. (These things I apparently come by honestly).

Being with A was so resonant in this family space. She stayed for the mass, and I could feel the shift from loving connection to a more guarded place as the hour beside each other wore on. But that was okay. We quietly provided entertainment for my cousin's two year old in front of us (A's sunglasses, my business cards), Laura matter of factly referring to A as "Auntie A" to Serene. Still family, of course, in this swirl of a clan that included all manner of exes as well as currents. Stef and I joked that the obit should have just said "survived by a giant unruly brood," and this captures it -- roles not so important.

I do love my clan. From the three aunts who fostered me into being in so many different ways to my cousins who are so in my heart to the impromptu queer caucus Jen, Stef and I found ourselves in. Jen has come into being the person she has been navigating since she was about 3, and this is so good to see. Em and I planning a road trip together because we don't spend any alone time. Petra whispering to me at the sign of peace "don't forget us, there's no one to hold us together." We hang together softly and tentatively, poky bits here and there, shaping each other more gently than my mother's family did.

It's all about belonging, seeing ourselves in our quiet roots, telling the stories. We went back to Grandma's afterwards and went through photo albums, drank some beer, ate leftovers. Looked for the easter eggs that were still in the rafters -- Em found one that said Tony 1982. The annual hunt my dad made. Heard the stories of my dad cramming all the kids into his van without telling anyone else and taking them for ice cream. My dad taking the giggle of girls for a walk on the train tracks in their easter dresses, bringing them back a bit shredded and grubby and overheated with adventure. My dad so missed in the leavening of the clan.

Looking at the pictures, we cooed about resemblances -- "look, this picture of Tony at 8 -- I never noticed before how much Raymond looks like him." "Is this Matt, Chris or Ray?" Mocking our foibles -- "which wedding was THIS, Aunt Susan?" Trying to trace the stories that wind us together. "What baby are you holding here, Mary Ann?"

Some of the stories are so peripheral they evaporate even as we look at the pictures. "I think that's one of the Pollard triplets," said Mary Ann about the mystery baby. I have no idea who the Pollards are, really, remember hearing the name, maybe neighbours, like the 1930s mom bathing her tiny baby (Dick, 5 weeks, it says on the back) in a bowl on a table, gone forever now, an erased extra in our central narrative, someone who shaped my grandmother at some point in her life. Recognizing that we're all like that, vivid in our present moments, eliding into an cypher in an album in an old lady's house as decades slide by.

It all makes me determined to continue to grab onto the present with fierce joy. I want to find a way to help make sure there that without the centre to our clan, we still stay connected. That I keep building the sense of family with A. That as I figure out what kind of a "we" there could be with F, it stays vivid and rooted and about delighting each other.

I left my grandmother's with her toaster as a memento (I love that she used it everyday), and an old pie plate and muffin tin for Melissa. I think she'll like those. My bag is full of photos to scan and build into our mythology about dad, our senses of self among the brood. Stef was worried it would feel like pillaging, but it didn't -- we were building stories together, respectfully talking about what kinds of mementos people would like to take. Using my new treo to take little videos of Issy dancing, Seb kung fu fighting, Em dancing when I bid her to. A swirl of an unruly brood, carrying ourselves forward, connected.