Blood oranges

I spent a very restful weekend with F, finally getting the breather and connected time I needed. Lots of snow, lots of lying about, a bit of skiing. Actually read most of a a novel for the first time in months, it feels like. Spending, by Mary Gordon. Some passages that made me gasp with resonance.


This one is about the artist (the protagonist) reflecting on how her work has changed since she acquired a "muse"/lover/patron:

And the sex did make the work better. I was a lively body, looking at bodies. The rind that covers the sexual underskin when you're not having sex, the one that keeps you from despair, was pulled back. The fruitlike flesh was exposed, palpable and porous as the skin of an orange. A blood orange, a mixed color, orange bleeding into red. After sex, I was free of anger and bitterness. What others did, how they moved ahead of me, how I hadn't got what I deserved and they'd got so much more, all that was melted. What's it called when something disappears on brass or copper, and the fresh plate is there, ready for impressions? That's how I was after we'd been together; a peeled fruit, a fresh copper plate. That was how I worked when I left his bed and went to the Brera. It almost frightened me to feel so alive.

Lend a hand and play the game

I'm in the middle of a crazy busy week -- four marathon days of facilitation followed by another half day of meetings on Thursday -- and this means tweaking designs in the evening and dealing with the flood of daily emails. So I was pecking away at my (shiny quack quack new keyboard!) in my jammies tonight, and in the corner of my screen, IMing with a friend.

This friend had a personal achievement in the world of intimacy (how's that for coyness?) this weekend. I said "you need a badge" and hauled out my store of ancient brownie badges. We rejected the broom, the skates, the dog, the palette, the wheelbarrow, the golden bar, the symbol for the Elf Six ("here we are the jolly elves -- think of others, not ourselves!") and finally landed on the golden hand as the appropriate emblem (snort).


"You were a good brownie!" said my friend, in awe at the list of images I was rejecting.

"Oh, these aren't my badges," I said. "I bought these on ebay. To make ceremonial markers for just this kind of occasion. I *lost* all my badges."

And once again I sank into resentment at the Injustice done to my idealistic, unironic little 8 year old brownie self, the one that liked to wear the uniform just so, revelled in the sense of Belonging in the 4th Rhine Valley Pack of Canadian Brownies on the military base in germany.

A prelapsarian world, that little paramilitary gang. So earnest I was, uttering with complete conviction the "promise to do my best, to do my duty to God, the Queen and my Country, to help other people every day, especially those at home." Making oatmeal and eggs for my father so I could get the cooking badge, hiking through the Black Forest and painstakingly collecting plants so I could get the Outdoor Explorer badge (little binoculars? a magnifying glass? can't remember), sweeping the kitchen and being generally Obedient to tick off the little accomplishments in my little book and work my way up the golden bar, golden ladder, golden HAND, and then FLY UP to guides with the little wings made of coat hangers and tulle!

My own Fall from Innocence, that Brownie Pack. A camp out weekend, in a little hostel in the woods, vats of macaroni and chemical-tasting cheese and all sorts of wholesome and satisfying activities. "You need to wear your feet pjs," had insisted my mother, "it will be cold." "NO ONE wears feet pjs," I said doubtfully. "They'll laugh at me." "No they won't," she said. "They WON'T," I reasoned silently, "they're BROWNIES. Brownies are KIND," a total sucker to the sticky world of bluebird Helpfulness in the Brownie Handbook. So I wore them, then after being lulled to sleep by our Snowy Owl serenading us with her guitar and Me and Bobby McGee, a fire drill in the middle of the night, me attempting to hide the feet in my jammies by pulling socks over them, then every. brownie. in. the. camp pointing and laughing at me.

Despite the crushing humiliation, I dogged on toward the badge acquisition, still determined to be a BETTER brownie than all those bitches -- not REAL brownies! -- who'd laughed at my jammies. By the time we came home from germany, I had 22 badges marching up my arm -- skating! housekeeping! reading! art! (more macaroni, dried this time) -- and was within a hair's breath of the grail of the Golden Hand. Had almost accomplished all there was to accomplish as a brownie.

Then back to Canada, and, with a thud, into a world of secularized brownies, no sheen of the paramilitary that infused the pack on the base. Brown Owl Mrs. Kondruk, a lump of a woman and a pale imitation of the crackle pop pantheon of the revered overseas Owls. The toadstool that we were supposed to dance around drooped, and Brown Owl pronounced thickly, "you can't keep those badges - how do I know you earned them -- how do I know you didn't just buy them from someone?"

A squint eyed skeptic that Mrs. Kondruk, and the last gasp of wide-eyed innocence for me. I quit, in disgust... until a post-script flirtation with Girl Guides a few years later. One weekend in a little exchange with a Girl Scout troop somewhere in Michigan, being singled out with my friend Rachael by the Coolest Girls in the group, my first brush with Rumours of Lesbianism. Corruption complete.

My ebay badges belonged to someone named Josie H, according to the little Brownie Record. Josie wasn't the keener I was, apparently, her checkmarks much more lackadaisacal. She *did* have a Prayer for Catholic Brownies that I somehow escaped, which concludes Help me this day to be like You; teach me to be brave in denying myself, and to be good, gentle, kind and brave. AMEN.

F gets quite exercised about religion of all kinds. framing it all as a virus we must be able to create an innoculation from. It seems pretty simple to me -- Brave Denial x Selfless Obedience/Individuality = Belonging. Yet so alluring, the skipping in unison around the toadstool -- "We're the brownies/here's our aim/lend a hand and play the game" . I should be grateful to those girls who laughed at my feet pjs and the cynical Mrs. K -- they disrupted the inevitable trajectory and saved me from a life of Missionary Zeal.

Impulsive me

Marched on out and bought myself a new macbook today. Mac #7, starting with the SE back in 1988. Was thinking about my classic with the 2 megs of ram. Heh. This one: 13.3 inches, 2 ghz processor, 2 gigs ram, 80 gig harddrive. It's PRETTY and SHINY and makes me very HAPPY. And I don't have to write the letters on the keys with a sharpie when someone else wants to use it :-).

It has this silly photobooth thing. Maybe I'll start reading my niece stories online :-). Like I don't have enough distractions...



I'll miss my little 12 inch ibook -- I had a lot of intimacy with it, watching lots of movies on my chest in bed, emailing and chatting late at night from under my covers, conducting so much of my "courtship" with N, writing some serious papers, practically being able to shove it in my pocket. This one is fancy, but not quite as vin ordinaire as the other. As soon as I can migrate all the data, that one will continue to live a useful life (until it inevitably abruptly dies, judging by its sporadic recent behaviour) in the hands of my ex, who will be much much MUCH less abusive of it. I'll have to write the letters on the keys, though -- with a permanent marker.

My 42 year old bottom

It's my birthday, and I realize that I'm 42 and still not completely skilled in basic life logistics.

It's bloody freezing here. On Tuesday, I put on a really old pair of tights that I remember being warm because I had to walk to a meeting. There was something awry. About a block from my house, I felt an ominous... creeping. I did some ungraceful but ineffective clutching, and by the time I got to the meeting -- a 10 minute walk -- my tights were *completely down below my ass*. I was wearing a) a short skirt and b) an ass-baring thong. I was as *exposed* as a land-flopped fish.

So. I was on the corner where my client is. I had to navigate some horrible filthy muddy construction, then waddle, thighs pressed together, to the elevator. There was one other woman in there. A stranger. So I took a leap of intimacy and said excuse me, I'm having a wardrobe malfunction, and I did all of this maneuvering and clutching while trying to not give away the fact that I was accidentally mooning the world. I wriggled and yanked, she laughed, and then when we got out of the elevator, she *came into my meeting*.

SHE WAS A NEW CONSULTANT ON MY PROJECT.

I had to walk home *clutching* the tights and then I pulled my skirt up to see how far down they were and my whole big huge white ass was just hanging out there, straight in the air.

Maybe I should buy myself some new tights for my birthday.

Touching down

I'm packing, again, this time in ROC after two nights here, getting ready to go to NYC for the weekend. Terribly self-indulgent, but it IS my birthday next week, and F's son is playing in a band ... and the project we thought had disappeared has sprung back to life like some self-regenerating alien, so I'll be working a lot more over the next months than I'd thought. So two days in an amazing city, in love -- then home to snowy TO and a lot of angstful clients.

I have some fantastic pics from our otherworldly afternoon on a deserted beach in Big Sur on Monday, but there are cable and software issues, so the download will have to wait until I'm home. For now, I munch my way through the giant slab of trader joe's chocolate I brought F from my first CA trip, and reflect on the fact that F seems to be turning me into a gangster flick fan. We watched Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels last night and both of us have adopted "It's all fucked up! No money! No weed! It's all been replaced by a pile of corpses!" as the perfect stock phrase for project fuckups.

I did actually manage to finish a paper today, a reasonable draft of my third of three comps papers. A good morning of editing and all three should be in shape tomail off, a milestone of sorts. This one was a bit hard to churn out, but it should serve the purpose of demonstrating what I've learned on the bizarre little snakes and ladders game of theory that my phd has been.

Life charmed, stories still unwritten, from one coast to another.

Peregrinations

I'm perched at this upstairs lounge at a an odd little café in Monterey. There's free wifi here, and some quiet jazz, and the smell of movie popcorn because it's attached to a very non-chain little cinema, and the rooftops and sunshine are at my eye level. There's a pair of young white people teaching each other arabic at the table in one corner, a very california type oddball with perplexing dreadlocked facial hair and a burnt stare slurping an apparently endless tub of yogurt and grunting behind me, another guy waking from a snooze on the sofa to speak loudly and an unfathomable language on his cellphone -- russian?

The surf at the Asilomar state beach is roiling, and so many nodes of life twining together. Here, with F, our first shared taste of the ocean we both love so much and yearn to live within a touch of. Echoes of my lost prof and friend John, a Steinbeck scholar, my memory of Steinbeck's depictions of tidal pools my first real understanding of fractals, life in miniature and large at the same time. Walking this street with L two weeks ago, eating well and expanding mind into the next space as a thinker, scholar, what my work is. Learning to be peaceful with the echoes of F's history, knowing that this is a well-trodden space for him, that he'd shared it with so many other people, learning to put those stories into a place that shows me how he became who he is, here with me. Writing a paper that synthesizes my scholarly "journey," how I came to situate myself right here, this moment of self and mind and worldview.

So many strands that point to the question -- how do we come to live the lives we're living right now, be the people we are right now? I'm in this poised, privileged place, high vista vantage point on my history, choices I made, life I made from the bifurcation points, assimilating all of that into how I want to be next. Sometimes it's so transcendental -- how is it I am lucky enough to have found, at this moment, space and resources in my life to flit about from landscape to landscape, be with a man who challenges and affirms me in the most profound ways, have work in front of me that sharpens and pushes me... it's a perch of a completely different level of awareness, movement, choices... and it's overwhelmingly powerful... and sometimes so BIG that I just pause, unable to figure out how to keep moving my feet without stumbling or tripping. Steady huge waves, thrumming and unceasing, carrying forward, making me so tiny and so strong at the same time.

Feet on cork, heart in hand, facing forward

My friend J really loves to crawl into a tightly tucked bed and kick her feet gleefully free of the covers. She's generally a serious kind of person, that J, so mindful, so I love that image of her fluttering madly under the sheets, unfettered and delighted.

I get that. My version is the sound that my bare feet make when they slap the cork floors in my loft gently. There's an infinitesimal stickiness, a little suctiony noise, a little tiny thwack, a momentary caress between flesh and warm surface that is oddly grounding, distractingly meditative. It's this aural focal point, a pointer to a profound, quiet, listening-to-your-belly space.

I find this space in my loft, alone, especially when I've come home from somewhere. I haven't been home much lately -- Windsor, then Montreal, then California, then several days in ROC. Leaving again on Thursday. But when I'm suddenly, quietly, alone here, I can find a sort of suspended time, a chamber of heightened senses. Like in the quiet padding around, slap slap slapping in a whisper on my floors, I can hear things through the palimpsest of history, stories, stuck patterns, for the underneath, the elemental desire or need.

The most powerful sense memory of this was the night I arrived home from my time in Portland last spring. I got home, late, quietly alone after a long traveling day, the calm space of this flat open on a saturday night, humid hectic early summer toronto pulsing outside. I put some Josh Ritter on my itunes -- the quieter thoughtful stuff -- and walked around, barefoot, eating raspberry gelato out of the freezer, bite by bite off a big spoon. I felt simultaneously calmer, more poised, more awake,more full of possibilities, more infused with a kind of emotional chlorophyll than I'd ever remembered feeling -- simultaneously deeply satisfied and deeply yearning for something more. I was alive with having been in a west coast city that deeply suited me, able to write some important things, unfolding into a rich correspondence with F that had led to a decision to meet a week later, a connection I never could fully open myself up to until I was fully alone in Portland. All of these folded together, my feet in tactile contact with my floor.

I've lived here almost a year now. It's a rich space, open and forgiving. Warm, silent, space for the slap of my feet, listening to everything that I know how to hear. It doesn't feel like a permanent space -- just one to grow in, quiet grounding, knowing who I am at my most elemental, disheveled and joyful and *awake*. My most loving and strong.

I was reading a series of emails from three years ago, and I find it hard to find myself in those words, sometimes. Articulate, held together, so certain. Now I find myself rarely certain... but confident, knowing, feeling sure through my body right to the palpable contact of foot on floor.

Fieldnotes.

LAX, noon.

Allowed myself to be rerouted (thus courting rebooking pitfalls) to gain a voucher for free travel on United anywhere in US in next year. All good until I went to check in at Air Canada for LAX -- YYZ flight and discovered that United agent in Santa Barbara had given me a TICKET but had not booked me on flight. Much Clucking and Blaming from an oddly eyebrowed agent later, I'm at the gate.

And puzzling. So now you can bring liquids and gels in your carryon if they are "less than 3 oz each" and all packed together in a quart-size ziplock see through bag.

I had a ziplock freezer bag that had in it an almost empty thing of toothpaste (normal size) and one TINY tube of prescription cold sore ointment. Nothing else.

The guy at the SB security said my ziplock bag was too big -- it needed to be QUART size and mine was GALLON size.

I'm canadian. I don't know from quarts and gallons. And I pointed out that the idea was that I could have that MUCh, right, not what size the BAG actually was, and said bag was actually ALMOST EMPTY, and wasn't the whole point of the bags so everything was in one place, which mine was?

No. My choices: dump toothpaste and $90 tube of zovirax; put shoes on, retrieve computer and go to back to gift shop and BUY A SANDWICH BAG.

Luckily, I had in my purse a small sandwich bag I had ibuprofen, dramamine and advil cold in.

So I shoved my toothpaste in that and he allowed me through.

Charmed life

Another week in CA, another collage of talk talk talk sun ocean ideas writing deep collaboration in my tribe. The inauguration of the week was a wonderful grounding -- Linda and I established a "first annual" ritual with a drive down the Big Sur coast that featured a lot of hiking, gabbing, dinner at the cliff edge watching the sun set over the pacific while we sipped our beverages of choice (mine a pinot, hers pretty much straight gin), peeking through the fence of the henry miller library, falling asleep amid the debris of a bottle of malbec, a gorgeous fire, wasabi peas, gummy bears and a bit of west coast bud and talk talk talk.

This is where I belong, this is where I'm alive, and so I'm coming back in two weeks with F. My life is about as good as it gets.

And in other mysteries...

Remember these?


The hosts my sister bought me in a depanneur in Quebec, alongside the ju jubes and sesame snacks?

My cleaner has been surreptitiously eating them.

Out of beta? Out of blog? Out of fog?

There's a header now on this blog infrastructure about being "out of beta" on the new techy platform. In parallel, I feel like I'm out of blog steam. Have been so RUSHED in so many ways, that I just puffed out of energy in a lot of ways.

I'm still wracked with the residue of some respiratory virus my otherwise adorable babyniece inflicted on me when she coughed in my MOUF over the holidays in Windsor, a virus that I toted hither and yon around the province, across the wee ferry to take Porter Air to Montreal for New Year's with F, scattered widely across that city and then left lodged in F's lungs for his trip back to western NY. Now I'll take it on a plane to CA tonight, where it will trail with me from SF along a drive down the coast, through Big Sur overnight and onto Santa Barbara.

Where school awaits, and more recalibrating about my plans, my work, what AcademicCate really is and can become. Another committee meeting where I'm not ready to have my proposal approved, though they're a lot happier with me since I sent a note about my status and my thinking two weeks ago. It will be rich -- it always is -- and I'll ground in my tribe, and anchor myself a little.

So many suspended stories as 07 begins...where will it take me and F? will I be able to cobble together meaningful and lucrative enough paid work that lets me live my other two lives? how can I throw myself full force into school this year? Two days ago, the work path looked evident, but ow it seems this huge grant we were working on may be buggered up, and I'll have a lot more flexi time in the first quarter than I thought. The intrepid life of a consultant, as usual -- one moment it looks as though I might be able to earn enough for my whole year in the first 3 - 4 months, the next moments it's pffffted back into Ministry coffers and vanishes. Back to basic income, eking it out a bit, trolling for work, trying to focus the time productively to write.

This moment right before Winter Session for school is always a little fraught for me -- last year I was poised to buy my condo, to sever the going-nowhere, energy-sucking relationship with T, to try to refocus my academic work after a year where I just milled about, really. I'm in such a different place now -- life stories being tentatively co-written again with someone complex who... feeds me.. in so many ways, so much more clarity about the field I want to play in, less angst about income even when opportunities surge and vanish, a loft that feels home-ish, even if not HOME yet. A really-makes-me-alive project with the orphans. A strong web of people scaffolding and stretching and buoying me. A body reasonably fit, though not at its peak. Places touched and felt over the year -- Portland, New Mexico, Oregon coast, Houston, Montreal, Santa Barbara, Vermont, DC, Vancouver, ROC, Ottawa -- and some across an ocean to be savoured in the coming year.

Still a bit edgy in all of this -- the sproinnnnng of a suspension bridge across a gorge, where you're really not *positive* that your backpack isn't going to tip you over -- but trying to just give over to the bounce, the spring.

And by the way?

My sister's comments on my peeping tom santa post? Hilarious.


-Any depictions created by religious factions who, having accepted the inextricability of Santa from Christmas, attempt to gain-by-working-WITH the secular fence-sitters, and show Santa happily working hand-in-hand with Jesus. No matter how they try, it just always winds up really really creepy. These Santas never seem wholesome, they seem like Santa got some favour from the mob years ago, took his time paying up until he found a reindeer's head in his bed, and is now shilling for Jesus only because of the unseen machete digging into his back, a look of terror always visible behind the forced smile in his eyes.

Is it me...

or is this giant bubble santa scene terribly, terribly creepy? Peeping Tom Santa.

This is what it looked like when we drove by yesterday. Today it was all deflated and flat on the ground. Natural causes, or neighbour with a bb gun?

This is what happens

...when you leave shopping for "one of those funky scarves talented people make for their friends" for your mother to the last minute. It's beautiful, and it was more than 100 bucks.




This is what happens when you tell your hairdresser to "be creative." My online peeps tell me it's very Run Lola Run. I have to say, I'd rather be dashing through a desperate pomo narrative than rolling down the 401 to the city of my youth. But I'll take it.

Tangled yarn

Such a busy week... I'm not used to getting dressed like a grownup every morning anymore. Clients crawling all over the place, breathless with needs... deep angst about my looming dissertation committee meeting (I've been suspiciously silent with them for months)... tedious shopping (my mother telling me last week "I'd like one of those funky scarves talented people make for their friends" -- um, where do you BUY something like this, and wouldn't it be nice if I'd been able to look for more than the 17 minutes I have alloted between various gigs this week? ) Still no gift of significance for mom, and I head southwest in about a day and a half... with my ex... and my sis.... after we drop my ex's girlfriend off at the airport.

Swirly life, spirals and well-lived-in stories. Christmas is such a tangled ball of yarn, this constant pull between "do the family thing because that's what you DO at xmas, and why hurt mom needlessly?" and "what do I *get* out of it??" It's always so very very very stressful because it comes right before my bi-annual trip to CA for school, and I'm always *exhausted*. Mom wants us there but doesn't seem to enjoy us -- or me, anyway. My presence is a neutral force but my absence would be hurtful. Double bind.

My friend Amy and I were talking the other night about how to navigate this time of year when we don't give any credence to the religious part of the holiday, but want to somehow mark the changing of the year, depth of darkness, pull to add light. Trying to cobble together what feels right for me, but never quite hitting the mark.

I was thinking about Christmasses past -- the too-often-retold moment when I was 4 or 5 when all I wanted was a Walking Thumbelina doll, and I crept out in the night to see her under the tree -- oh, so magical! Santa! -- and could barely sleep the rest of the night with excitement... and then somewhere in the tumult of the next day, heaving mass of aunts and cousins and uncles and grandparents, Dad got too enthusiastic in his playing with me and yanked the string out of the back of the doll, rendering her unable to walk or wriggle. I wept, howled, so disappointed, he got mad, told me I couldn't have another one. Mom tried, they were all sold out forever. (Until the time travel of ebay).

That's Christmas -- all that yearning, and the inevitable combustible moment that blows it to bits. Occasional moments of deep peace -- a palpable sense of serene, meditative well-being falling over a church at midnight mass as the last strains of Silent Night trailed off -- and the complete inversion, my mother desperately angry at me when I finally refused to continue accompanying her to church anymore, completely unable to even temporarily tolerate an institution that was actively persecuting my basic civil rights.

The only really resonant note for me is the undercurrent of Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas -- the yearning to connect across distance, to have the people you care about warmly connected into one place. It's why I still send cards, and why I relish accidental encounters.

I had a lot of those today, unexpected trippings over people -- mostly because of the solstice festival of lights in my neighbourhood. Some were serendipitous -- like the guy who just adopted the little boy from the orphanage in uganda, with his new son -- and one was jarring -- my friend of more than a decade who recently decided, basically, that she doesn't like me anymore. Instead of a warm greeting, a weird grimace and a hurrying past. Other welcome hugs. More interpolations, new possibilities, frayed wires. The constant interplay between a grim miming of connection, reminders of losses, and transitory moments of peace, deep knowledge of and gratitude for each other.

That, and some very crass decision making. Turns out my amazing neighbour is one of those talented people who makes funky scarves for their friends. She delighted me with a gift of one today. But I'm keeping it for me, continuing to look for something for mom. My own little balancing point.

Dislocations

I have had a crazy busy week -- client stuff coming out of the wordwork, some of it very generative, some of it a little "help me, it's MESSY here." Panicking about getting back into my schoolwork with an impossible deadline breathing down my neck. And I'm at F's, stickhandling client stuff, trying to scrape together some holiday shopping, staying reasonably fit in this crazily warm weather.

Found myself yesterday sitting on the floor of the hallway outside the library, blundstones kicked off, talking on my cell to a client-who-needed-soothing for an hour and a half while people threw me amused glances. Hard to keep impersonating a med student in the library when I'm actually doing client work. I told my colleague D yesterday that sometimes it feels like I'm running my life from the back of a van down by the river.

Dislocations all around me, though, some of which make me cock an eyebrow. The entire institution whose library I use to read/work when I'm here is an entirely NO SMOKING zone. This results in the crazy image of people in scrubs, little head coverings and all, standing across the street, smoking and talking on their cells, at the entrance to... a huge cemetary. (A cemetary across the the hospital? Ironic enough to start with). I really wanted to take a picture of the smokers, but thought that would be a little too voyeuristic, tracking them beaten back as far as they can be.

Reciprocity

Numbers: 600 km covered thursday and friday for 12 hours with N, 72 mph in a 55 mph zone on the 290 that resulted in a 4 pt ticket. Apparently NY state and ON have reciprocal agreements, so unlike my one previous speeding ticket ever, in Ohio in February 1997 when T and I were on our way to Kent State, I can't just hand over the visa and wash my hands of it. Simpler times, those were, when I was tickled that Mr. State Trooper had a visa sliding thingy in his patrol car.

Configurations: had dinner last night at J&S', a little "welcome to TO" party for Modo, who is finally moving here from Iqaluit. My people, my chosen family, expanding, reciprocal. A-my-ex there with her current gf (who is sweet, smart, funny, charming), modo with her new gf, me with my friend S, B&E and J&S in their reconfigured family life that seems just right. Friends embedded, lives entwined, circuits resetting in warm ways.

Reinstall: successfully held breath and clicked "erase and reinstall" on my ibook, and managed to get it back in running order. Migrated the contents to the imac first, and as far as I can tell, lost nothing. After a lot of fussing, managed to get the airport reset (what the heck WAS the password??) and get both the imac and the ibook back on line, wirelessly and ethernettily as needed. V. proud of self.

Now taking hermit sunday self out into the world. Jammies still on at 3:36. Perfect day.

Jujubes and porn

For years, I had an unsettling recurring dream. Christmas Eve, had forgotten to buy presents, found myself in a highway service station convenience store (usually specifically the one off the 401 in London that A and I used to stop at on the drive to Windsor, the one with the big magazine racks and no good bottles of water), was frantically grabbing random things from the shelves as gifts. Cans of pringles, ju jubes, cigarettes, magazines.

Kind of like the "I forgot I took this course and now I'm in this exam naked" dream, except all twined with the conflict of Family Occasions, institutionalized generosity, side by side twitchy attempts to find affinity through the thinnest of threads, long-left-behind religious overlay and the implied affront at my no longer honouring it.



My dream became insitutionalized as "ju jubes and porn," a trope for all-the-pressure-which-includes-a-genuine-desire-to-provide-a-token -that-demonstrates -we-care-about-people-but- CHRIST-there's-too-much- intensity-and-unreasonable- expectations. Shopping through December, big sighs, sometimes with real inspiration and delight, sometimes some thudding placeholder. Crazy crazy peregrinations across the province to be part of family.

Two years ago, a deeply snowy cold Christmas, and A and I were on a glum quest, first to Windsor for xmas with her family, then crossing the entire breadth of the province to Ottawa for dinner with my family, my then baby niece. It was a trudge, both of us uneasy with each other, mostly silence between us in the car as we navigated unbearable weather (7 hours to Windsor, instead of 4), played the mercifully long Time Traveller's Wife through my ipod. Warm enough in the disquiet, practiced affection, practiced affinity through the ridiculous treks, but raw patches in the middle, distance unbridgeable. Lavish, perfect gifts to demonstrate the connection we could no longer enact. (A lusted after silver thumb ring and an mp3 player I'd loaded for her, a refurbished spinning bike for me).

While we were doing this, my friend D was iced into his small town on lake huron as his mother breathed her last on Christmas Eve.

So after making our grim way back to Toronto, on the way to Ottawa, we detoured off to the lake for the funeral home visit, homage to a long friendship with D, his mother who was always affectionate to me, his family I hadn't seen in almost two decades. All of them the same, bigger, pudgier, children tall and looming. Stayed the requisite hour, picked our way back out through the icy dark for the almost unthinkable 6.5 hour drive to Ottawa that faced us now.

D and his partner followed us out to the car -- "wait, we have a gift." "A Christmas gift??" I asked, incredulous -- D and I don't do xmas gifts usually anyway, and he'd been completely immersed in his mother's hospital room. "Yeah, yeah," they'd said.

It was in a cheap gift bag, printed with garish elves, tissue paper at attention in that perky fluffed-by-a-gay-boy way. I opened it...

...and it was jujubes. And porn. (Cheap porn, the kind you can get in the mac's milk in small town Ontario. Juggs or something like that).

We laughed, hugged tight, climbed back into the car, my visiting-the-funeral-home skirt settling around me, so wrong for a winter car ride. I ate the jujubes pensively, flicked through the magazine in the illumination of the streetlights as A silently found her way back to the small highway that would keep us moving. The cold dark outside completely oppressive, the journey before us unendurable.

Our last Christmas together, hyperbolic enactment of every family holiday we'd done together, compliant daughters, living out inorganic roles, finding ourselves almost running out of gas at frigid midnight when an unexpected detour around brockville took us off the 401 past a service station and nothing else was open, stretched to an unbearable point of fatigue and anxiety and distance, distance covered and felt between us. Finally crawling into my cousin's house at 2:00 a.m., huddling into sleep, wondering how, why in the hell we were doing this.

Last year, I truncated the family requirements, visited Ottawa before xmas, drove there and back in daylight, had xmas dinner with my chosen family in TO. No huge gifts for anyone. Not quite snatching at ju jubes in a frozen service station, but minimal, thoughtful.

This year, A and I are talking about driving to Windsor together again, three short nights, touching into our respective families and then leaving for our separate, respected lives. Completely different, lighter touch with each other, knowing each other and urging each other into fullness in lives we know the other could never accompany us on.

Then back here, new year lived into with F, a trip to discover some corners of Montreal together.

New stories, woven loosely, completely different, breathable fabric.

Gouging out my words

Keyboards are really personal things, like toothbrushes. The kinds of things you don't really pay attention to when you're using them -- I couldn't tell you what colour my current toothbrush is, for example -- the tools that fade into the background, used without any conscious awareness, extension of mind.

But I've had people using my keyboards on occasion lately, and every time I'm a bit abashed when they say HEY, WHERE ARE THE LETTERS?

Apparently I'm so... ferocious... in my typing that I've worn off most of the letters on my ibook.



And I've also ... GOUGED... actual dents in the keyboard on my imac, apparently pounding away with jackhammer-tipped fingers, fiercely, insistently driving text and words into being.

Apparently, I type with talons.

So much of my life carved through these worn-out keys, flayed evidence of plots and ideas pursued, wrestled into being, threads tangled and unrewoven. Courting F through text, fingers flying as synapses snapped together -- mangling ideas and concepts unsatisfactorily as I try to find voice in my academic work -- finances sorted and agonized over -- friendships made and deepened and dismantled -- online worlds entered, constructed, amused.

The most mundane, the most transcendent, transmitting the oils of my fingers into the plastic until I fuse mind and e-world and body-world into life.

Confession: when I wake up alone, I reach for my ibook and check my email, my online friends, before I pee. Confession: when I'm driving, if the traffic is stalled, I'll click the "versamail" button on my treo to see if anyone has sent me anything juicy.

My life dispersed, carved through keys, self saturated. What Ken Gergen calls "multi-phrenia" -- the pomo extension of self to multiple places/selves at once. Sometimes we need to step away from it and breathe, let the corporeal self catch up...and sometimes the physical evidence of what's possible now, lives made real because of these keys -- a bit breath-taking.

Icons

I have this folk art painting of Trudeau on the wall next to my desk. You can't tell in this image, but the flaky things around the edges are shredded money -- $2 and $5 bills -- and it's painted on a hunk of wood.

It was made by a rasta guy from Salmon Arm (hm, can't get away from the rastas) who did a series of Superheroes. It tickled me that everyone in the series was fictional -- Wonder Woman, Obi Wan Kenobi, Lt. Uhuru -- except Trudeau and Che Guavera.

Pierre came into my life on the first evening my ex and I spent on Galiano a few years ago. We were in the cosy market café and the art had just been hung; I squealed with delight and instantly started peeling off bills to buy Pierre, and got into a bit of a Tense Standoff with a local woman. There was some Disquiet at the off-islander flashing cash like this. I was kinda insistent, though (no urban eastern stereotypes there), and when the gentle tussle was over, I'd prevailed and Janet from Galiano was grumpy.

So now Pierre presides over my work space -- once hung, appropriately, in the bedroom I shared with my ex ("the state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation"). Sort of a partly ironic, partly genuinely appreciative, icon of ... some kind of idealism, tapping into that swell of genuine excitement when some political leader emerges who seems to truly coalesce a desire for some significant change. I'm always a little aware of the direct contribution the Charter has had in creating the society we live in now, the direct impact it's had on my own life, my own ability to claim whatever form of love I choose.

So there's Pierre, and this weekend I was a little caught up in the leadership convention, sort of out of the corner of my eye, and to my surprise, felt a little of that excitement in response to Kennedy's speech. I'd never particularly warmed to him, but he tapped into that part of me that incubates a little idealism.

My friend D was in Montreal, for other reasons, and he and I were texting about the speeches, and the next thing I knew, he'd sort of accidentally found himself in the Kennedy party. Then the phone rang, and he was burbling over with a story of having run into Justin Trudeau ("gorgeous and intense,") and having gone up to him -- "I have a friend in Toronto who'll kill me if I don't meet you -- she's a huge admirer of you and Mr. Kennedy." Goof. And a blow by blow cellphone report on what Trudeau was wearing, his peregrinations among elevators as he attempted to draw supporters to Kennedy. The two of us giggling at him stalking Justin Trudeau on "my" behalf, two 40-somethings who teeter between pragmatic cynicism and starry eyed idealism.

I'm not unhappy that Dion won. I haven't actually voted Liberal since the Trudeau era, and would not vote liberal in this riding in any case, having zero regard for the scurrilous Ianno. But touching down into that moment of belief in ideas that matter... sort of giddy-making.