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.

Propping eyelids open

Had a lovely rich demi-weekend with F. Art, coffee, books, food, talk, us. Navigated various tasks this morning that threatened to chomp up my entire day after F left at an inhumane hour. Finally wrested myself away to the library where the undergrads were, for a change, not in serious, nerve-grating need of kleenex. Quiet, productive, deep dimensions of thought, and I'm written out. If I could have another 75 or so days like this, I'd actually get this thing done.

All I can do is cut and paste. Random words from my clipboard:

Acknowledgement of diverse perspectives is a requisite part of any researcher’s ability to form a robust analysis and interpretation within this realm of scholarship. Multiple interpretations and internal contradictions are core aspects of Bishop and Yardley’s scrutiny of their research question, and are cleanly laid out and interpreted as illustrative of the agentic dilemma facing people with cancer: they are always navigating between autonomous self and passive patient, negotiating contexts that enable or limit those different versions of who they can be. The contradictions within the accounts given of treatment choices are seen as conversational strategies for managing this dilemma.

World AIDS Day

It's World AIDS Day. The story is familiar -- nearly 40 million people are living with HIV worldwide. In sub-saharan Africa, 1 in 16 adults has HIV or AIDS, with the stat in some southern African countries one in THREE. The pandemic in Africa has left children orphaned and raising other children, grandmothers desperate for food.

I was overwhelmed by the story of Africa before... and now that I'm involved in this orphanage project, what I always knew sort of intellectually is a constant source of humility.

I'm now talking several times a week in email and once a week or so on the phone with the director of our orphanage, a surreal hands-on connection to the most other-worldly life imaginable. When Danny and I called her last week, she was in the middle of being questioned by security police from the government who were investigating an adoption that took place from the orphanage. About a third of our children have HIV or AIDS, and their life stories are searing -- babies left in empty buildings in plastic bags. A little boy castrated and left for dead by rebels who killed his parents in front of him. Children living like wild dogs in the streets of villages. Malaria, TB, fear, worry.

And here they are, being fed, going to school, housed, their medical needs being taken care of. Loved by the staff as much as possible and so bizarrely, so uncomfortably but necessarily, by the mezengu -- foreigners -- us -- who show up to fix the showers and beds, buy mosquito nets, figure out how to buy food and pillows and shoes.

Making meaning of the post-colonial discomfort of this project, trying to make this grassroots development that creates a self-sustaining, locally based entity, provides the kids with a healthy, educated upbringing, sets them up as productive members of their communities. All good things, and constantly catching me behind the knees.

These are some of the kids.
This is the breathtaking landscape.

My friend B went to the AIDS conference in Toronto this summer with her now-husband, who's an HIV doctor. It shook her. When she was getting fitted for her wedding dress a week later, two of the Wedding Dress Store Ladies were rabbitting on about the Problem with her hem, the height of her shoes, etc. She suddenly blurted, "THIS is not a problem. You know what a problem is? A grandmother in Africa who has to decide which of her kids gets to eat tonight."

Check out the updates from the UNAIDS website. Donate to the Stephen Lewis Foundation. Sponsor one of our kids for a week, month, year. Just pause for a moment and savour the perspective.

Angles

I've had a few really nice connecting moments with my ex over the past couple of days -- we went out to talk about her trip and see photos on Tuesday night -- and then I offered to update her ipod. Had some technical difficulties, so I had to go over last night and pick up the USB cord from her -- my former -- house.

I was fiddling with the controls and wondering if it was going to rain as I walked past the house A and I lived in from 1991 to 1996, just before we bought our house. Our former landlord was in the front yard, briskly raking leaves in the dark. I hadn't seen her for at least 10 years, and I stopped abruptly, sort of surprised that she still lived there.

When we lived there, she was half of a slightly oddball, endearing couple. She's a housing economist, and her husband is a Brit nuclear physicist who also has a master's in English and was given to declaiming Shakespeare at the most unlikely moments. Most evenings, he curled up with heavy duty dark beer and his computer to write science fantasy novels filled with highly sexed literary characters come to life. He looked like a Seuss character -- grinchly -- but kindly. They have a son who was about 12 or 13 when we moved in, with lead soldiers still scattered about, and who, when we moved out, had reached a theatrical stage that involved fencing, silk lounging gowns, cigarettes and glasses of wine at 11 a.m. on the terrace.

The woman is a prof at a university about an hour outside of Toronto, and lived in that town during the week while the son and the husband lived downstairs from us. They were always a bit quirky -- Marion was given to shouting a little when she got excited, a sort of displaced English headmistress type, and D maintained all sorts of fictions about his level of cigarette consumption (M reported 6 a day, which we knew to be a gross underestimation) and general debauchery. They were excellent landlords -- M built us a little balcony for our barbeque off the living room before we even moved in, and added a terrace on the third floor for us, both times hiring people she thought needed the work, with the expected vagaries of excellent storytelling while the work was underway and slightly off centre results.

After we moved out, and the son went away to school, a couple of our friends moved into our flat. Left to his own devices, D apparently gave full rein to his appetites, and L&N reported Outrageous Shenanigans -- L spotting D at Full Mast through a window about to roger two spritely chicks when she was walking her dog; a visitor to their place accidentally ringing the wrong doorbell and being greeted by D in a leather codpiece, etc.

So. I heard through the grapevine that eventually they'd split up, that D had moved to the east coast and was living with an opera singer in a very dirty house and regaling the locals with his many tales down the pub. But I hadn't seen either of them in years.

Last night, when I saw M, we chatted, and we had the weirdest conversation all about our breakups, framed entirely from the perspective of a housing economist. "Are you still in the house up the street, or have you moved up?" "Actually, we're not together anymore, A is still in that house, I bought a loft in Kensington Market." "Ah, well, see, you both benefitted from that investment, it let you both be in the market. D bought me out and has a nice house in L--, though he complains about his property taxes."

Then there was a bit of chatter about her gay nephew in Calgary and why he had never procreated, and why he would live in Calgary of all places as a gay man, and how she and D were on good terms, which is best, really, and all of the lesbian couples who had inhabited our old flat, and how now two straight grad students were there, Americans, who disturbed her a little in their straightness, and then the size of my flat and the likelihood for the market to continue increasing, and well wishes all around, and then she muttered something about trying to get tulip bulbs into the ground despite the tree roots (um,and the fact that it's DECEMBER?) and then we bid farewell, both a little chuffed by the encounter.

Paradoxes

The Harper govt is reopening the conversation on same sex marriage. Sigh. Another round of bombast and heightened, hair-splitting rhetoric that creates us/them. More bullying in the guise of "I'm not opposed to GAYS, just to the changing of MARRIAGE, why can't they be satisfied with common law rights," blah blah blah blah blah. The same familiar, wearying strange loop of legitimacy extended and then questioned as soon as it's cautiously trusted.

In an earlier round on this topic, during the US marriage revolution in San Francisco a couple of years ago, Alison Bechdel made one of the cleverest comments on the complexity of the marriage project, having Sydney sink to her knee with a bouquet of flowers and propose to Mo: Will you do me the honour of paradoxically reinscribing and destabilizing hegemonic discourse with me?"

This is the core paradox -- the re-shaping of the idea of marriage while simultaneously taking it on as "the" expected frame, shaping queer families and life to look like the normative societal pairing. Yes, it's a basic right, to be treated the same as any other unit -- but the social effects are also clear, and not the ones that the conservatives imagine. Married queer couples become the "norm" and thus those outside the norm become a bit more queer, a bit more suspect -- I've heard comments like "when are you going to make an honest woman of her?" now that marriage is a possibility. The laws also create language to discuss what was once off limits -- when I was doing my little research project on marriage, several people noted that their relationships were now more available for public scrutiny -- parents who'd never acknowledged their kids' lovers in concrete terms suddenly started asking about wedding bells.

The inverse is also true -- I certainly notice that my relationship with F is more "in the public sphere" than any I've been in before -- people feel much more free to pass commentary on whether it's unfolding according to some predictable pattern or not (will you get married, do you think? (how ridiculous a question is that at not-quite-6 months?) You're not spending christmas together? REALLY. etc.) and to show more... interest than I noticed with other relationships. Of course there is the novelty factor of his being a guy, but the questions flow faster and more practiced than they ever did with women for me. One more conscious friend actually apologized later, noting that she'd done this and acknowledging an inadvertent dimunition of my queer relationships.

The bruising tumult of the debate that will surely unfold over the next few weeks will be too familiar -- people committing what feel like unspeakable acts of unthinking bias without apparently having a clue what they're doing...like the anti-gay-marriage parade I came across one day a few years ago, mostly filled with the usual suspects, but to my astonishment, including a large group of Christian Chinese Canadians. A minority group oppressing another minority, shockingly ignorant of a history that had once denied their own group marriage rights. Spotting one of the young women -- university age -- later cooing with delight over a tshirt with a stick figure formula marriage=1 man + 1 woman -- "OHHHH, so cuuuuute!"

Among all of this will be the usual wielding of the civil rights language (ads from a couple of years ago about drinking fountains and race evoking marriage), which then leads to the claims about biology and queerness "not being a choice," which of course then invokes the squiggly among us as Suspect... and misses the point, as far as I'm concerned, which is that in a just society, choice should count as much as pre-determination.

There will be people who mean well but still miss the point and hurt (like my online gang who got into a "I am glad my kids aren't gay because it would be hard on them" conversation last year and who couldn't hear those of us who said we were HAPPY to have gone through the experience of coming out, self-definition that comes with queerness). There will also be people queers have thought of as friends and allies saying astonishingly hurtful things, like "not if this costs me one penny."

In the middle of that, there will be the usual tentative attempts of the majority to signal that they are on-side, that they think the whole conversation is ridiculous. Like my mail carrier who
conspiratorily whispered to me one day a few years ago that he'd seen a New Yorker cartoon that he thought was very funny -- why would gays want to marry, "haven't they suffered enough?".

The discourse is shifting over time, and the whole thing is a deeply obvious example of the social construction of reality right in front of our eyes, how even having a public conversation creates space to make new meaning for people, to see connections ("why shouldn't queers marry -- it doesn't seem to have changed anything for me"), to change what we take for granted. Simultaneously reinforcing and destabilizing. But as wearying as once again reopening the Quebec question.

Yielding

I'm still in ROC, stretching myself over the US thanksgiving weekend, working away in the med school library. Making some progress on my... stuff, my unnameable stuff that might become something.

It's warm, here, climate-change weird warm, the gasp of faint sunlight that comes before winter smothers everything. F and I seized the moment to finally ride together on his bike, the avatar of some of our initial flirtation but which we'd never managed to get out on before.

Before my first date with F, when I was fussing about what to wear, my wry wise 8 y.o. friend Amelia firmly cooed at me, "He has a motorcycle? Oh, you're going to end up with him -- you always end up with the guy with the motorcycle."

Amelia's precognition aside, I always saw the bike as something potentially fun, a key element of some of F's most important narratives about shared dreams and voyages with his ex, a tie to my sister and BIL and their penchant for touring on a BMW. I never really eroticized bikes in the way of most dykes, or had the hankering to ride one of my own that my sister and several other female friends had, but I also never had the same level of horror at the potential risk of them that some of my friends did. I'd ridden with my long lost elfin Chris M and always expected another bike to show up someday. They simply ...were, a possibility, something interesting to someday explore, maybe, if the opportunity presented itself.

So Saturday, F taught me how to properly climb on behind, and we went off through the faintly clammy thin sunshine, stopping to buy me a properly fitting helmet, try on various armoured and waterproof jackets. Began to fantastize about trips of our own. Within about two miles, I knew that I loved it -- could imagine driving a bike of my own -- and even more, loved being behind F.

It's remarkably intimate, this thing of riding behind someone you love. There's an astonishing kind of ... yielding. I implicitly trust F's driving -- I've driven in the car enough with him, and I see what he watches for and sees -- and more than that, there's a flow of handing over control, letting myself lean with the bike, follow F's lead. There's a rush and an awakeness to it, but there's also an incredible peace, an entirely different, wordless dimension of presence. A suspension, like good yoga or the perfect run. The kind of yielding that makes rhythm with someone else, balanced on thighs pressed lightly around hips, F's hand reassuring on my knee when we're stopped at lights. So much movement, no desire or need for words, the sensation of energy lifted out of time, world clear and vivid as it passes, people putting up Christmas lights, trees without leaves, cars moving too ponderously, the lake sparkling like Cockburn's diamonds conjured up by wind and sunlight.

I think one of the things I'm learning in this relationship is how to follow a lead. When we were dancing at B's wedding a couple of months ago, F said with sudden amusement, "you're letting me lead." This is foreign for me. Letting his ideas weave with mine, welding together something new. Picking up and building.

When I last went to Chicago, I went to one of P's classes where she teaches improv as part of creative living and working, unlocking set channels. This was really the first time I'd done anything resembling improv, and at first I was all pleased with myself for being so open and creative in my enactment of the fragmented instructions. And then I realized that while I had interpreted the word "portrait" to refer to painting of some kind, everyone else in my group had seen photography and had some shared meaning. And I was sort of stubbornly clinging to my interpretation as the "right" one -- not noticing and flowing with everyone else's aligned meaning. Not much to build on, then.

A lot of my life and work is about finding my own unique voice, synthesizing other people's perspectives into something new. So many of my relationships have been about me leading, me in control. And with F, I'm learning a kind of yielding that makes a flow, a dance -- not a submissiveness, but a welding together that is about taking someone else's perspective that is different language, different angle than mine, and letting myself look through that lens, refracting both sets of ideas, seeing so much more.

The flow of the bike, the dance that's us, the yield, was counter-pointed last night by a bit of an Incident with F's friend R's girlfriend. R & M have been staying with us through the week. They've had a few bumps of their own, and M's way of coping is to be a bit... strident and polemical. I was in a quiet post-dinner space last night, just pensive and low-key, thinking about my work, calmly present with F, when they came in, full of a lot of energy. M somehow got off onto a tangent about whether Lincoln was gay or not that resulted in a fairly aggressive rant in which she attempted to pin me to the conversational mat with the verbal equivalent of a martial arts war cry at every point. I realized that I no longer have any space for this kind of aggressive form of "debate" -- as I've moved my work into deliberation, discussion, dialogue, I realize that I can only learn by hearing each other's perspectives, not obstreporously trying to refute them through rhetorical superiority.

Last night I was tired and I just sort of melted away and weakly, abruptly, excused myself to go to bed. Pondered the difference between the soft, open, generative yielding of flowing with someone you trust, and the air-sucked-out version of being made to yield to a show of force. Both forms of acceptance, one underbelly exposed and submissive, another expansive and inviting. Energy displaced or generated. Standing stronger, or bent and drained.