Covetousness

I spent last night with my ex, loading up her shiny new silver nano with the music of her life. Music I shared with her, music that writes her stories since we've been apart. She sat in my cosy blue armchair next to my desk while I did the techie thing, and we ate ice cream and chatted. Warm and family now, knowing each other, both in the same place that we are where we need to be in exploring the various possibilities of our separate lives. It hasn't escaped us that her current squeeze is exactly half the age and a different gender from mine. It's almost absurdly pointed.

It was a good connecting evening, and I caressed her shiny silver toy with incredible covetousness. But what I *really* yearn for is this one -- black, 8GB, perfect, tactile. Calling out for a fondling fingertip. I am shameless.

Onto a busy rainy October day -- client work, a networking lunch, continuing to write the paper I finally made the good explosive assault on yesterday, a good queer evening with Spidertattoo, to see Alison Bechdel and Ivan Coyote, storytellers extraordinaire.

Me, happy

F took this pic this weekend. Me, gelling my hair, after a shower, after a shared run, looking at him.

I noticed this morning that he had left a chair in my living room turned around. He always does this, twists a chair around to put on his shoes, then doesn't turn it back. I like this little mark he leaves on my flat. A tiny rearrangement of my furniture, a substantial rearrangement of my life, sense of who I am. Bodies in motion.

The most heterosexual thing I've ever done

I went to Harry Rosen this weekend and bought a man a tie. The most perversely heterosexual act I've ever committed. F has an Important Interview next week in LA, and this was a talisman for him. The experience was surreal -- but oddly fun. More impersonation :-).

It was a good weekend, real watershed "here we are as a we" moment. Good time to fold into thanksgiving. Low key turkey at D&D's was just about perfect last night.

And now, I'm sleepy. Finished setting up the shiny-covet-one-of-my-own nano I bought for A for her birthday (on these fronts, I may be the Best Ex Ever), and now I'm eyeing the paper I should be pecking away at, the theory I should be trying to blear my way through, and instead I think I'll end up picking up either the new Alice Munro I bought yesterday or the Lynn Peril social history of women as college students. Sleep. Popcorn for dinner, in bed, I think.

"Here I am at my most hungry....

.... and here i am at my most full..."

Ani difranco finds the right phrase again. Just home from B's wedding, such a full and resonant weekend, and feeling topped over with astonishing connection with F... and so hungry, so hungry for all of it. Learning to breathe and trust that even though it still feels like we're making our way up a tough climb with ice axes sometimes to be able to orbit the same space, that we are going to the same place, a place that just gets more sure. We had fun at the wedding, playing with my old prof Tom, dancing, just being together.

B was beautiful, and the wedding was quirky elegant, and she and J are very happy. It made me glad to be there to witness it...feeling absolutely certain that it doesn't approximate anything that I aspire to. Not that particular variation on commitment, anyway. Wrapped up in F though I was, I was also experiencing the edges of being able to look, in a crowd like this, like a couple who takes this for granted, an unremarkable pair, really. Such privilege, the ability to just lose ourselves in each other, self-conscious only about being a little too starry eyed for public scrutiny, not living the reality of my last two decades where even acceptance is active, remarkable, pointed.

I was thinking about my sister's wedding, four years ago this very weekend, where dancing with A was of course unremarkable among my family -- such acceptance in aunts and uncles who went out of their way to assert that if *we* ever got married, they'd want to be there. But realizing that even among that crowd, even as I danced with her in a swingingly joyful way that was captured in one of my favourite pics of us, we were never *intimate* in a crowd in the same way, always a little self-conscious and a tiny bit wary. We were the last people on the dance floor at that wedding, A and I and another female couple who actually worked at the resort and slipped into dancing in that last moment, joining us as my youngest sister pliéd around us, a poignant moment of claiming space when almost everyone else had gone to change for the bonfire. That was a moment of acceptance... but an assertion, not the taking for granted.

I lived into "straightCate" last night -- betsey johnson dress, gold strappy sandals and all -- and loved wearing the floaty dress, loved F's amused admiration of me. Was joyful that we could be at this place at this moment in time together. But also so clear about what I'm carving for myself (for us?) as I intersect with this taken for granted place, where my notion of queer/unconventional will always prevail. One is not to take this for granted, to always have the radar about privilege open, and to try to assert solidarity where it's important. The other is to recognize that I can still carve my notions of what it means to love separately from the forms -- even when the forms seem to be the obvious ones.

Hope and fragility

I'm home, now, and borrowing from my friend P, I think my aura is a couple of time zones behind me. A lot of life between now and the last time I blogged, including Santa Barbara space, Pamela space, school space, flights and questions and frets and landings. And then a long weekend of F-space, on highways and in the hills of Vermont, filled with openings and silliness and lust and hope. I don't know if I've ever enjoyed an 8.5 hour car ride so much, had such connected and intimate conversation that seems so full of possibility. Not for a long long time. The person I am now -- that person has never had it. It feels... rich, still fragile, still complicated, but so... possible and real.

And against this -- along with my own qualms and tremors as I flew eastward on Thursday -- my friends seem to be in a vortex of different kinds of fragility. Health pronouncements and shadows, breakups, despondencies, doubt, running face to face with the results of inertia and a loss of yearning. Lots of worry and loss and fragility and restlessness, in several realms. And I'm just trying to hold it light.

It's good to be home, rain falling outside my window, a quick dinner with my dearest friend at my kitchen counter, work in front of me. Focusing my hamster mind to really writing, still a little spinny with the dancing whirl, the quiet side-by-sideness, the guttural connection, of the weekend. Looking ahead with hope.

Trip #6

to Santa Barbara starts tomorrow. Six trips to that particular west as part of my school program -- a program that was ignited, really, by September 11th. So fitting that five years later I'm off to be a "student anchor" -- mentor, really -- to incoming students. They'll be all bright-eyed and bushy tailed and wanting to know how to speed through the program with great alacrity. And here I'll be, life still mostly unpacked by the experience, re-constructing before their eyes. Some of them will speed through, to be sure, though my OPS gang have taken our weaving way, only 3 or 4 of us having finished yet. (Though many many who started after us are fully Doctored and onto the next thing).

I'm okay with my pace, will convey my "your pace is your pace, everyone's is different, don't compare yourself" message, and most of all, will be so full of the ocean, time with Pamela, the interstice of sky and beach and sea and hills and sun that first brought me to life four and a half years ago. My place, the west coast.

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.