Under Pressure

I actually missed this, this confessional, this op-ed column, this typing fiasco of a blog (luckily I'm quick to correct most of my mistakes...). I prefer it to Facebook, which, to me, has an element of cookie-cutter, pre-packaged dumbed-down small talk. Not all the time, mind you, but often enough that I log out feeling unsatisfied.

It's like a non-stop party, in a way. And I am am lover and hater of parties. It's that old extroverted introvert thing. By nature I'm shy: a cautious, careful person who opts for calculated risk and controlled situations. But I can be a quick thinker or dynamic or charismatic under the right conditions, usually a matter of a suitable comfort level (or the right time of the month). Occasionally I will push myself into a bigger gamble, usually because I feel it would be good for me (see 'The Zen of Waitressing').

But when it comes to parties, I most often feel an intense social pressure -- a need to be "pretty, and witty and bright" (to quote 'West Side Story'). Usually I flee to some temporary sanctuary, like the outdoors or the bathroom, where I can be alone for a few minutes. When I'm not perusing the contents of the medicine cabinet, I work the room to the extent that I can stand it, while secretly despairing that I'm boring the other party goers to tears or saying incomprehensibly awkward things. I suspect I take things too personally sometimes, as if my awkwardness were a zit on my nose that, to me, looks like Mount Vesuvius, but barely registers with anyone else.

Give me a small dinner party with good friends, or a coffee date and I'm in my element. My attention is focused and reciprocated, and I can say the odd awkward thing and it's laughed off: I am immediately forgiven. Being accepted for who I am is so much easier in a more intimate setting than trying to make a fabulous impression in a crowded, clamoring kitchen or among a group of virtual strangers. Hmmmm. I may have to re-think my plans to go to that high school reunion...

PROGRESS!

I know I'm off the hook and I don't have to post every day anymore, but I can't seem to stop.

I think I had a minor breakthrough with The Boyfriend's Younger Daughter (TBYD). As I had written earlier, I was very stressed at the thought of her living with us again as the last time was equivalent to the 'ol pouring-rubbing-alcohol-on-paper-cuts-day-after-day routine. In a word: harrowing. So I was not looking forward to the sequel.

Well things have gone better than expected thus far. We have passed the three week mark without any major fits or doldrums and, although she is still leaving detritus in her wake (books, shoes, apple cores, wet towels, dirty mugs), she is more cooperative than last year.

I'm most excited about the fact that today I helped her with some math homework and she didn't roll her eyes (not that I would see them, for they are artfully hidden by sweeping manga bangs -- see illustration), burst into tears or make cutting remarks. She was practically civilised. And, despite being as math-challenged as she, I learned some trig into the bargain! I won't go into minute detail but at least she let me nudge her a little which, to me, is a big deal. And hopefully I may have planted a learning strategy (mnemonic devices) into her head which helps her in the future. The mere fact that she tolerated my interference was a very good sign.

TBYD probably still thinks I'm a barely tolerable, dweeby moron, but it's better than hating me. Onward... into the breach!

The Enviro Rollercoaster

Well, so much for Earth Day. I did my part by cycling to my singing lesson and taking transit to a recital. But I kind of messed things up with the gas-sucking car ride to get groceries. It was a lot easier to be environmentally virtuous when I was single. Of course, being poor and not owning a car helped. I'll just try to bumble along in my 21st-century, modern consumer-ist way.

Sometimes I wish I could perform a grand gesture in tribute to the environment. Something big, brassy and lasting. My feeble attempts at cycling and recycling and taking 5-minute showers seem puny and unimportant at times. I know/hope I'm one of many doing the same things and that our cumulative gestures amount to xxxx number of cars taken off the road. Earth Hour was kind of comforting that way, with a whole community doing something very visible all at once. Then I read an article in the paper that said our energy consumption during Earth Hour actually exceeded last year's total (probably due to the harsh weather this year, although that wasn't entirely clear in the article).

I suppose the sight of all those blue and green bins lined up like little plastic tanks on the sidewalk, come garbage day are another indication that there's a widespread willingness to help. But then a monster SUV drives by, or I hear a car idling, or I see another "RRRRRoll up the RRRRRim to Win" cup tossed on the sidewalk, and my spirits take a dive. Up, then down, then up again for a while. Ah well, at least the enviro-snowball has started rolling... I dream that someday, eventually, it will flatten those guzzlers.

Word-o-philia

I published a paean to the Wednesday Guy a while back and I want to expand on it slightly. I wish I could tell him this directly, but since he's a single male in serious search of a mate and I am a mated female who blithely trolls the CL Personals for amusement (or in this case, inspiration), it might be a little hard to explain the fan mail.

WG, as I will henceforth call him, is a very good writer. One of the best I have seen in the personals. Unfortunately, that's not saying much. The average male posting on the Internet personals (on CL or anywhere else) is "looking for a women (sic.) in to (sic., again) fine wine, cottaging, going out and staying in to watch a movie". There's absolutely nothing wrong with all that, it's just... conventional... that's all. Intellectually and emotionally tame and uncreative. Prosaic. Yeah.

When I stumble upon a guy who can sling words around, turn a phrase, and open up his heart, I'm hooked. That goes for the ladies, as well (however, I don't find myself cruising the w4m ads as often). And, since I'm on a roll, as mentioned previously, that goes for blogs, or... or... anything, really! More and more, I find I'm a sucker for the literary-minded, I suppose.

I suspect I'm partly drawn in by the extra courage it takes to express oneself more creatively. Not only does it entail more emotional vulnerability, but it requires more guts artistically. There's a risk of appearing too snooty, or like too much of a bleeding heart, or like a poser who doesn't really have a genuine command of the English language. WG's intent -- to reveal his inner emotional world -- is immediately unique, but the word pictures he paints are what truly get me. This guy crafts his posts carefully. I pay attention to the phrases and descriptions and the choices he makes to express himself 'just so'. I've never had writerly ambitions, but if I did, I would look up to him. That sounds lofty, but it's true. He may be a hunchbacked, bug-eyed, pimply, halitosis-plagued lonely guy (or not), but he gives good copy, dammit (for the record, so does Ian Brown):

"...I think about Pt, and I think about Pr. Two fine fellows, writers both, whom I once knew years ago.

"One evening, in the mid 90s I guess, we sat in deeply comfortable armchairs in the attic of a dilapidated house and talked about the thoughts we had lost. The ideas not jotted down, the ephemeral dreams dispersed by alarm clocks, the unfulfilled promises of early drafts that become ghosts haunting the final revisions.

"We were three poets, sharing between us the ego of six and maybe the talent of two. We'd each just had some slight works published in small journals read only by those who have their names on the inside cover of that issue...

"...On that evening in the attic we talked about the thoughts we'd lost, and we praised each other with the false modesty of young writers who think they invented the vowel. And as we read each other's works, and believed each other's praise, our heads swelled and swelled and swelled some more.

"Ever since then, whenever the topic of lost thoughts comes up, I think of that night in the attic. Pt, who fought the world and gave his mind to the fray. Pr, who embraced the world but never someone else. And me, still riding and writing and trying to find some place between them. Some place connected to the world, and connected to someone within it. The reason I'm writing these letters."

Blog on Blogs

Well, it finally happened. I dropped the ball, and failed the April challenge to post every day for a month. No special reason, really. Everyday life just got in the way and I forgot. I work on Saturdays, and as soon as I arrived home, I dove into cooking dinner (veggie stuffed peppers, in case you were wondering...), then The B had rented a movie ("Casino Royale', if you're dying to know...), and poof! Just like that it was time to go to bed.

Lunch time at work, rather than posting, I surfed a few other blogs instead. Came across one called 'Pictures of Everything I Eat'. Some guy in Australia who takes pictures of all the food he ate in a day (WTH?). He's 27 and likes cola and corn chips, apparently. This put me in mind of one of my early posts about amateur food pictures. Seems to me a lot of people like taking pictures of the food they're enjoying. Or just plain writing about the food they eat. Every bloody day (just search 'what I ate today' and see...). Other trends I noticed in the blogging world: the 'family blog, the 'team sport blog', the 'fashion blog', the 'scrapbooking blog', the 'travel blog', the 'photography blog'.

All of the posters have a need to share, most are highly visual, very few are opinion pieces, even fewer have good, interesting writing. There are also what I call 'confession blogs' (of which mine is occasionally one...), but the majority are self-obsessed, highly derivative, and shlocky (sentimental and low quality). I'm just calling it as I see it. I generally skip over anything with poetry because 99% of it is just plain awful, IMO. Now, admittedly, mostly I'm just randomly surfing using the 'Next Blog' button at the top of the page, so my sample group is not very specialised, and I guess I could be accused of being lazy myself. But, as far as English-language blogs go, I don't land on that many sites that truly capture my fancy.

The upside of this is a) I don't waste huge amounts of time on trash, and b) when I do find something I like, it's all the more special. Some blogs I have recently bookmarked:

The Carrot Revolution
Anonymous Works
Angry John Sellers
Todd Babiak
Nervous Birds

Enjoy!

Feeling the Fear

I'm embarking on another venture. A bigger venture than blogging every day for a month. This one entails co-writing theatrical scenes for the museum at which I work, and performing them -- as a pilot project -- for the public. My partner-in-crime and I started out with a ballsy, shoot-for-the-moon proposal which was, to put it mildly, unrealistic, but it served two purposes. It got their attention, and it made us dream. Or scheme. I'm not sure which; they are fairly intertwined at this point.

I often find myself emotionally restrained on some levels. It's as if I hold myself in check, almost like little Walker Brown (see April 13, 2008), so that my gallumphing emotions and enthusiasms don't flail around and hurt me. Or someone else. Yeeeeaaaahhhh. Maybe I'm a little more repressed than I should be sometimes. IMO, that's one aspect of being and extroverted introvert: seemingly outgoing on the outside, but shy on the inside. It probably also explains some of my more common digestive troubles... :)

So to counteract the fear of not just harm but failure, I push myself to cautiously creep forward, or stride ahead blindly, hoping things will sort themselves out along the way -- which they often do. "Feel the fear and do it anyway.", pretty much sums it up. When I asked my former husband for a divorce, when, shortly after that, I moved away from the city we lived in to a totally new place, or when I recklessly auditioned, in the worst of circumstances for a program waaaaay over my head, I wanted to be brave and true to what I felt I needed to do. And I was curious to see what would happen. Sometimes I was pleasantly surprised. Sometimes it was truly a trial. Sometimes it turned out pretty well, in ways I never would have predicted. There were also times I've regretted being so reckless, but I've always come out wiser.

So bring on the wacky theatrical antics. Should be an interesting, probably bumpy, ride...

Must. Post. Entry. Before. Midnight.

Arrrrghhhhh!!!!!!

So, this'll be a lot shorter than the last one, because it's late and I have to go to bed.

Exactly a week after I bought the $800 keyboard, the stand collapsed and the whole shebang landed -- hard -- face down on the floor, mashing some of the black keys in the lower register into the keyboard assembly. The gods had a good laugh over that one. Luckily, The Boyfriend rode to the rescue and pried them out. Now it's back to working good as new. Yay B! I love him.

I also love that the word 'shebang' didn't register on spell check. Go figure.

Mother Mary Said to Me...

I'm listening to Bright Eyes singing "Waste of Paint". So angry/sad:

So now I park my car down by the cathedral,
where the floodlights point up at the steeples.
Choir practice was filling up with people.
I hear the sound escaping as an echo.
Sloping off the ceiling at an angle.
When the voices blend they sound like angels.
I hope there’s some room still in the middle.
But when I lift my voice up now to reach them.
The range is too high,
way up in heaven.
So I hold my tongue,
forget the song,
tie my shoe
start walking off.
And try to just keep moving on,
with my broken heart
and my absent God
and I have no faith
but it's all I want,
to be loved.
And believe,
in my soul.

It's not in church. It's inside us. I sing in a church and I don't believe in all of it. I believe in little bits, but not the whole elaborate construction that weighs it down. They pay me to sing at the church. My fundamentalist cousins didn't know what to think when I told them that.

There are a LOT of religious people -- mostly Catholic and Mormon -- on Blogger. A LOT. It's intriguing, actually. I get the feeling they see it as a new, less overt way of witnessing. For some of them, I wager there's some pressure to 'get the word out'. Why not do it on the Internet where, potentially, millions of people could get the message about how right their path is? Having come from a fairly devout, if not fundamentalist, religious background, I can understand the seduction of assurance -- of being told that one's faith is exactly what's needed to bring meaning to a life. And then the high of sharing it with others.

I just have waaaaaay too many doubts. My belief, such as it is, is that there may be some greater force out there which connects everything, does inexplicable things, brings us into existence for some purpose, but there's not much point in defining it. As far as I'm concerned, trying to explain it just imposes our own wishes upon it, which then transforms it into a being of our own construction rather than simply its inexplicable self. Besides, isn't this attempt at explanation presumptuous and arrogant? It also necessitates further explanation to explain the first explanation. Layer over layer, agenda upon agenda, assertion and rebuttal 'ad nauseum'. I say, "Let it be." And let yourself be. Love yourself and love others. 'Nuff said.

From the CL Vaults 6

Some of the more outstandingly, hilariously weird posts from Missed Connections and Personals. Yes, they're all real...:

Will kill spiders and zombies - m4w - 40's

I'm particularly versed in disposing of zombies. Like, the effectiveness of boarding windows, 100 myths about zombies, Chainsaw? or Shotgun? amongst other things. Will asses (sic.!) your home to see how zombie proof it is.

Also fairly good with Grizzly Bears.

Horny centaur seeking nymphs, dryads or even a hobgobliness. - m4w

Very horny centaur looking for oversexed forest spirits.
Well hung!

Can also protect you from bears should the need arise.

Hmmmm, could those first two be related?

Botanical Stripper - m4w - 20's

You were the young adorable stripper working Saturday night at the *******.
I was the awkward skinny guy wearing a tie that only brought 40 dollars.

It's not that I'm asking out a stripper or think those eyes batted specifically for me. I'm just pretty sure we're supposed to be friends or you're my guardian stripper. either way, something (besides your nudity) has drawn me to you.

anywho, you'll never read this and people will mock a missed connection with a stripper. but on the slim chance you ever do see this, to prove it's you, you gotta tell me the province you're from, school you're going to, area of crackheads you live near or your favorite movie.

talk to you never.

Up to date glasses and levis incasing your bubble butt. - 40's

I love you to tickle my chest hair (possibly dyed) peeking out of my Ralph Lauren Polo Shirt. No Turks. Please be vertically challenged, Jewish, not Turkish, with damp thunder thighs. Bi-Sexual, Non-Turk, Switches also encouraged.

If you are turned off by 2 for 1 coupons please do not respond. Also no Turks.

The Garden of Weathered Delights

My father's backyard is a junk garden. It's a combination of grass, open patches of dirt, raspberry canes, opium poppies -- yes, those big red ones (needless to say, he doesn't do anything he shouldn't with them), strawberry plants, and assorted junky paraphernalia. Over the years, he has tidied it up some, so that it was fit for his grandchildren to play in, without fear of finding them impaled on some old, rusty bicycle part.

But there's still a certain odd, crazed beauty to that yard in the summer, with its random old bits, splintering, weathered shelving and that blazing assault of poppy blooms. Then, after the strawberries and the poppies, the raspberries come in, more than he could ever eat alone, and when I'm visiting I pick them and make ruby jam for his dark winter mornings.

The house will probably be sold within the next few years. It's not in the safest part of town and he wants something that requires less maintenance. He'll still need a place to fulfill his urge to tinker -- for that, he built a two-door garage in the back. So eventually, he'll probably find a smaller, more modern space, with a garage or a basement full of nothing more than potential. When he does move on, I suspect most of the junk won't move with him.

Part of me hopes that will be the case: less to deal with in the more distant future when he's no longer with us. Part of me will miss that topsy-turvy back garden with its rusty, worn-out totems and berry bounty. It's a reflection of my dad's mix of love and disinterest in material things and his constantly roving mind, picking things up, then leaving them to weather on the slivery shelves when he finds the next interesting piece of junk he "might need someday...you never know". Eventually I'll have to say goodbye first to the junk garden, then to my father, but hopefully I can squeeze in a few more visits in the meantime.

Pretty Good Life So Far

I have recently been reminded that, despite my relatively low income, I'm still leading a life of comparative luxury and privilege.

Two nights ago I read Ian Brown's deeply moving and thought-provoking piece about his disabled son, "The Boy in the Moon". He describes in exquisite detail the struggles he and his family have faced dealing with his 11-year-old son Walker's Cranio-fascia-cutaneous syndrome, which renders the boy incapable of speech, ultra-sensitive to touch, and ridden with digestive system complications -- among many handicaps. Brown also struggles with his emotions surrounding his seemingly flawed son and his search for Walker's significance in the lives of his father, his family, and the society around them.

This morning I read a few posts from "Life Must Go On in Gaza and Sderot", a Blog of Note. I read of the siege of Gaza, the blockades, the resulting unemployment and despair, and the plea for One Month of Ceasefire. The posters state over and over that the conflict is not generated by the average citizens, but by militants who seemingly don't desire to stop until one side or the other is brought to its knees and begs for mercy, or is annihilated outright.

Reading these stories sobers me up considerably, but also makes me extremely thankful for the life I am lucky enough to enjoy. The fact that I can bike to and from work without riding over a land mine and getting blown to smithereens is, when I think about it, almost dumb luck. That I have a roof over my head, relatively robust health, good food in my belly, clean water to use and am surrounded by people who love me? Practically an accident of birth. There are billions more people who suffer much worse, in one way or another. It makes me want to do something, anything, even the smallest thing to help out. So I give blood and sign petitions for Avaaz.org. Peanuts, really, but it's better than willful, blissful complacency.

Martha Wainright (Rufus' sister) has a song that pins down the sentiment of someone who never takes a safe and comfortable life for granted. "Pretty Good Day" is a perfect meld of the sardonic dark and bittersweet light of such a situation.

I slept through the night, I got through to the dawn
I flipped a switch & the light went on
I got out of bed, I put some clothes on
It was a pretty good day so far

I turned the tap, there was cold, there was hot
I put on my coat to go to the shop
I stepped outside & I didn't get shot
It's a pretty good day so far

I didn't hear sirens or explosions
No murders coming in from those heavy guns
No UN tanks, I didn’t see one
It's a pretty good day so far

No snipers in windows, taking a peak
No people panic, running scared through the streets
I didn't see any bodies without arms, legs, or feet
It's a pretty good day so far

There was plasma & bandages & electricity
Food, wood & water & the air was smoke-free
No camera crews from my TV
Pretty good day so far

It was all such a strange sight to behold
Nobody was frightened, wounded, hungry, or cold
The children seemed normal, they didn't look old
Pretty good day so far

I walked through a park & you would not believe it
There in the park, there were a few trees left
And on some branches, there were a few leaves
It's a pretty good day so far

I slept through the night, I got through to the dawn
I flipped the switch & the light came on
I wrote down my dream & I made it this song
It's a pretty good day so far

Sign of Spring

Hmmm. What to write, what to write? Shall I rhapsodize about how happy I am that the crows are back? Or rail on about the incompetent parents who visit the museum and want you to lie to their children for them ("Would you please tell little Johnny that you actually DO close at 2:30 p.m. in exactly five minutes?")? Or should I tell of how sad I was to see a little dead bird on the way home from work?

No. I think I'll sing the praises of spring, even though it's @$$%&()^ cold outside. Still, the snow has retreated and green things are pushing bravely out of the ground. And I'm finally riding my bike again. I get so much joy out of this small event that it's ridiculous. The feeling of the wind sweeping past my cheeks as if it's glad to see me again fills me with bone-deep pleasure. When I finally started commuting on my bike on a regular basis, I realised how much more sensuous cycling was, as opposed to getting around in a vehicle. Sounds and sights and smells surrounded me. When that realisation sank in, I was overwhelmed with delight.

I know I'm rhapsodising, but it's all true. I was almost bowled off my bike. Even now, being aware of the passing of the seasons is that much sweeter because I'm right in the midst of the changes.

Except of course, when it rains heavily, snows or the routes ice over. Yup. I'll freely admit I'm, by-and-large, a fair-weather cyclist. I only have one bike and I don't want to mess it up more than necessary. It could already star in the pilot episode of "The Bionic Bike" ("We can re-build it. We have the technology."). Aside from the central frame, the seat, and the handlebars, that bike has had just about every major piece of it replaced. As the guy at the repair shop said, "Nobody would want to steal it, to look at it, but they'd be getting practically a brand new bike." So, having stuck with it this long, and through this much money, I don't want to torture it and lose it. Besides, riding through the rain a lot means I get very dirty. Ew. : )

Anyway... yay spring!!!!!!!!!!!

I'll Have What She's Having

Noticed at the restaurant: 'Monkey-See-Monkey-Want'.

There is no better way to sell an item, be it animal, vegetable, or mineral, than to flaunt it in the moments before a customer is to make up his or her mind. I have seen it over and over again since I started waitressing: the latte days, the tea days, the french fry days, the dessert days. The customer all-of-a-sudden craves one of those dishes/beverages that were paraded past their nose a moment earlier, and I'm convinced they often have no idea they were so easily seduced.

A picture is truly worth thousands of my lame attempts to promote something. BTW, today, was, indeed, another fries day.

Oh god, I think I have to go turn on the deep fryer now...

Canada Eats its Artists

Item: Artists Fight Tax Bill 'Censorship'

When Pierre Trudeau said the government has no business in the bedrooms of the nation, I don't think he was thinking specifically about film, but it's an apt response to the idea that the federal government could even presume to revoke tax credits from films deemed "offensive or not in the public interest". How is it fair that a film called "Young People Fucking" could potentially even have credits revoked retroactively? As decided by whom, exactly? Some federal bureaucrat with no stake whatsoever in the industry?

I understand the concern over public funds going to projects perceived as wacky, like the (so-called) porn-esque films produced in the nineties. Though I understand the hue and cry, I don't agree with it. Culture is incubated and then nurtured by those who take risks. It doesn't advance or evolve if it's hamstrung by "propriety". It just shrivels up and becomes dry and "safe". Both risky and safe are necessary for a healthy cultural landscape, but one cannot exist without the other.

Leaving that aside, the Canadian film and T.V. industry has a hard enough time as it is trying to eke out an existence in this nation. Sometimes it barely makes a blip. With little thanks to the government. The CBC is folding domestic productions left and right, film distributors are constantly assailed by competitors from other nations lobbying for protective rights. Those who normally work on the productions directly are facing huge reductions in income due to lack of work. Why is it a country like Australia or France can support films for its own people that are actually seen and heard round the world, and yet, in Canada, most filmmakers scrabble and claw to get the meager funding available?

Stepping even further back, why is this government so seemingly dismissive of home-grown culture?? Why was there nary a murmur regarding funding for the arts in the last budget? The status-quo is not enough. As someone wrote recently (sorry, can't remember who -- so I'm paraphrasing here), "The pervasive invasion of other cultures has exposed us to amazing international works of art, but what good is it if we can't produce our own works in kind?" Not only that, but study upon study shows creative industries benefit the economy as a whole, rather than siphoning money away. Isn't that a good and desirable thing?

At the very least, if we can't get any more money, can't we artists at least be allowed to save a little? Rather than having it taken away, robbing us of our reason for being, and kicking us in the heiney for being "offensive"? Bloody Conservatives. I wish they'd go eat some environmental polluters, instead...

So, If I Die With The Most Toys, Do I Actually Win Something?

I just bought an $800.00 Yamaha electric piano. Last week it was a Blackberry. What the hell??? O.K. I saved up for the keyboard, and bought it used, and I feel I've needed one for a long time (the 64-key, non-weighted, 48-voice polyphony number that The B bought for his daughter in the '90's just wasn't cutting it anymore, bless its little cotton socks). As we were sliding it into the car, the girl who sold it to me said, "You know that this doesn't have a built-in speaker, right? That you need an amp for it?" I said, "Uh-huh. no problem." All the while thinking, "I just dropped $800 and now I have to go and buy an amp, too??????" Ah well, at least it acts more like a real piano. Maybe that will help when I'm desperately trying to play along with my voice students. Up 'til now, that has been one of the more painful episodes in my work week. And it 'only' weighs 37 lbs., plus the weight of its case. According to the online experts, that's supposed to be featherweight compared to most keyboards. Huh. Well, at least it's portable...-ish.

The Blackberry wasn't quite as essential, but if I learn to use it right, it could be a valuable tool. That's a big 'IF'. I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer when it comes to gettin' jiggy wid da high tech doodads. As I mentioned before, I feel a bit lost in its labyrinthine options, but I'm getting closer to the Minotaur with each passing day. Today it was learning how to re-configure my ring profiles. Who knew there were such things as profiles for one's rings? Marvelous!!! I wonder if it can play 'Blue Skies' for my student next week?

I'm very lucky to have had jobs close to nature -- even in cities. I have worked at provincial parks, and at a city museum with a nature preserve and as a guide for the snowshoe department at a local ski hill. All of them allowed me the chance to go outside and watch and listen to birds, and look out for furry creatures. I have seen moose cross the front yard, a fisher (a large weasel) lounging in the tree outside the office, deer cropping grass just over the hill, a muskrat ferrying grasses to its nest in the marsh bank down the path, rabbits looking scared as I biked past them on my way to and from work.

The museum I now work for is near the aforementioned, small marsh. In the summer, if I'm feeling at all stressed, I go down there for my little dose of nature. It's a great spot because of the water, which attracts a lot of different birds as well as turtles (some of which were dumped there, by people who didn't want them anymore) , goldfish (ditto), and frogs. I also get the occasional glimpse of a snake or toad. I consider toads way cuter than their reputations would make them out to be. So squat and knobby and blending in with the background, their round, protruding eyes looking everywhere but at you, they remind me of quiet little kids who don't want attention drawn to themselves, so they sit, squished down and unobtrusive, until the moment when they can't wait any longer and have to leap for safety.

These jobs and their idyllic settings are one reason I have been been able to bear not being able to afford traveling often. They give me the gift of a hundred opportunities to escape, if only for a few minutes in a day. The birds wing overhead, frogs chant, muskrats paddle, fish leap for an insect, none of them bothered by my presence for long. All of them living their short lives as best they can, because that's all they know how to do.

From the CL Vaults 5

The challenge: find a catchy ad of 100 words or less. Success!!

Seeking a Smoocher. NOT a Moocher - 20's

You don't need me to buy you food or drinks or gifts out of obligation. You can do that for yourself.
You do need me to kiss you. Trying to do that yourself just looks weird.
Me: 5'7, fit. fun, with the cushiest lips you've ever put a pucker on.
You: Eqivalent.
We: KAPOW!
Write me back and let the osculation begin.


And this slightly beat-poem-ish ad:


Gin and platonic or Scotch and sofa - 20's

this is fairly simple...

Anais Nin look look looking for her Antonio Artaud...

sans those couple years in the insane asylum...

that probably isn't the best thing to put on here.

hummmmm...

i'm funny or witty
playful and sweet
i like walks and pubs
and beer
i'm quitting smoking
i wear skirts and high heels to work
i don't know that i like my job
particulary
i'm a bit eccentric and expect the same
i read a lot
i'm passionate
i love music

you
are
lonely/depressed/lost

or

just a witty good looking smart passionate guy who reads a lot and wants to lay in fresh cut grass with me looking at the poetry in clouds...

Uhhh, o.k. 122 words or less...

Welcome to the Now

I mentioned earlier that I had bought a new Blackberry thingamabob. It's replacing my 6 yr. old, steam powered cellphone. Golly. It's fancy. I didn't order the web browser option which , in the minds of many technophiles, is probably an almost sacrilegious choice. I figured I would have enough to worry about with the e-mail-only and text-messaging functions. Yeesh. Another $120.00 per year to browse the Internet and waste yet more time? Mmmm...no. I may change my mind later. Heaven knows, the phone company won't penalize me for upgrading my plan.

My efforts to navigate the arcane and multi-layered world of my Blackberry applications is daunting, to say the least. But I really want to do this. I picked the Blackberry so that I could roll a lot more of the functions I need in my paper agenda, like full contact info and a calendar, into one unit. Now I have it. Might as well make the effort to use it as more than a glorified, ringing paperweight with undersized keyboard, full colour screen, and web browser capabilities. Hoorah. I've made it to the 21st century.

A Bit of Cat Porn to Brighten Your Day

The cat has a new love: her scratch pad. Best $8.00 I've spent in a long time. It's made of corrugated cardboard and a enhanced with a bit of catnip. I bought it to save the cat from imminent annihilation courtesy of The Boyfriend. She was shredding the base of the newel post on the main floor, going on eight years now, which was sitting less and less well with The B. She also focused some scratching effort on the new back porch supports. Not destined to improve her standing. Bad/good kitty! Doing what she's supposed to do without scratching the furniture! Shredding the $14,000 porch!!!! Although...I wouldn't have minded a reason to do something about our sad excuse for a loveseat... Oh well, at least kitty's happy, as you can see...

Getting the Wrinkles Out

At one of my places of employment I do many interesting things, lucky girl that I am. One of them sometimes involves sharing interesting news stories with the public. Wednesday, one of the stories was about the cloning of human/cow embryos. "That was a tricky one.", she said, not overstating the case...

When you dig a little deeper, the stories often unfold like the wrinkles in a shirt being ironed. What, at first, appears to be a mess soon starts making sense. The cloning story is a perfect case in point. On the surface, it's an ethical minefield full of the nastiest explosives you could wish for. What to do with a hybrid (chimera) embryo? Allow it to develop to term? Would it survive? What about the genetic diseases carried by one cell to the other? How would the eggs be acquired? What about the notion of "playing God" -- messing with the perceived natural order of things? Not to mention: what would they call it? Cow-boy? Too confusing. Boy-cow? Sexist. Moo-man? Too 50's sci-fi...and STILL sexist.

Enough to make most sensible, rational-yet-non-confrontational people run screaming in the opposite direction. But wait. The powers that be are trying to do something (cue the superhero music). The UK (from whence the story originated), like most other countries that need such a thing, has a standing Authority that regulates all legitimate research in that field, and each application for permission is considered on a case-by-case basis. There are also many rules in place to handle a lot of those sticky questions, including the one about the life of a hybrid embryo: answer: max. 14 days (most don't even survive half that long...).

The difficulty is that these regulations are constantly playing catch up with gallumphing advances in the field. Just when someone claimed chimeras to be so much pie-in-the-sky, along come the Chinese, way back in 2003, cloning embryos using rabbit eggs and human DNA. It's no wonder churches and other watchdog groups make a considerable (and understandable) noise, questioning or outright opposing such research. Add to that the "your worst nightmare" scenarios, which make people verrrry jittery, and unfortunately rational, informed debate falls by the wayside. Those who wade into the debate shoulder-deep should be the ones to do the kind of background work I have to do. It doesn't take long (yaaayyy Internet!!!!) Too bad they can't all work my job for a day... maybe that's a good thing.

Pillow Talk

I had a long-winded post about genetic engineering all ready to go, but I think I'll hold off on that one. It needs some...ermmm...radical re-tooling.

The Boyfriend has two daughters. They lived part-time with us until just under a year ago when the elder (now 18) picked up and moved without any to-do to her mother's full time. The younger (now 15) soon followed. Not a bad plan, really. It's hard to split your time between two fairly different households, and overall, they usually get along better with their mum, anyway.

The younger has moved back, on the 'suggestion' of her beleaguered mother who was butting heads with the teen over her reluctance to go to school on a regular basis. She seems to have a problem with how hard school is and would rather just stay home and sleep when it stresses her out. This is a habit going all the way back to kindergarten, and it was not exactly discouraged by her then stay-at-home mum.

This moving back in with us has now stressed ME out. I'll state it bald and plain: she's bloody hard to live with. Yeah, yeah. I know. What teenager isn't? However, she's not MY daughter, and, had she been, I suspect she would have lived with slightly different expectations. The gap between what is and what I feel (or wish) should (would) be is what makes me crazy. I struggle to be positive and zen. My expectations need to be relinquished. I know that. But I have a hard time accepting and acting on that reality. £%^*(&_)&&%$@!!!!!!

I am straining not to go on a rant/vitriolic diatribe about this. I guess I have to retreat into, "If you don't have anything good to say, scream into your pillow instead." Consider this my cyber-pillow.

Aural Smoke

A few days ago, I heard the world's earliest recorded voice. A scratchy, haunting off-key version of 'Au Clair de la Lune' sung by what sounded to me like a girl (listen to it here). It was produced in France, by Edouard-Leon Scott de Marinville, one hundred and forty-eight years ago, on April 9, 1860.

There are a few things about that recording that blow my mind. First, the fact that because Scott was merely trying to get a picture of sound so that he could study it, he created a machine, called the phonoautograph (a very suitable name for that purpose, IMHO) which would scratch impressions of the sound waves onto paper covered in soot. In that age, when sound was probably considered one of the most ephemeral of all phenomena, his ingenuity is astounding.

As a result, I'm also blown away by the fact that the recording was preserved lovingly enough that a team of determined researchers could untangle the scratchy lines and actually produce something audible for our lucky ears. The recording was produced with no suitable means of playing it back. It was 'sound writing', that's all. Scott never thought when that girl sang it, that he would be able to hear it back again in his life time. The machine for that task didn't exist. As it turns out, he lived long enough to witness Thomas Edison's triumph (and subsequent fame) 17 years later, with wax cylinders. I read somewhere that he was rather bitter about Edison taking the credit for producing the first sound recordings. In the purest sense of the word "recording", he did beat Tom to it.

Most of all, I'm blown away by hearing such an old, young voice. She sounds like she's about ten. And can't hold a tune to save her life, and doesn't care. It's kind of corny, but I feel privileged to be able to hear something that old, that still holds a hint of the person who sang it. A bit awestruck, the way I felt when I ran my hands over the stones in the Acropolis, imagining the hands that carved it thousands of years ago. A blip on the geological clock, but, relative to my little blip of a life on earth, it's huge.

The advances that humans have made in the last century, let alone throughout our history on earth, are staggering to me. I so often take for granted all the technology I can use now, from the computer I use to write this blog, to the Blackberry I bought yesterday, to the can opener that opened the cat food this morning, that I welcome these reminders of how far we've come. I can't wait to see what comes next. Should be occurring in the next few minutes or so...

From the CL Vaults 4

Today I have to start blogging everyday for a month. The NaBloPoMo theme for April is letters. We don't have to stick to that, but it might help. Anyway, I came across another fabulous set of posts from CL last night. April 1 - done!!!:

Salmonchanted Evening - 3o-ish

You can call this chinese cod; Rob,
I'm a game fish, not a bass player.

I've cruised the dating stream, been trollin' down the pike a few times,
Fact is been to every oyster bar; got the usual -
a Rusty Snail, hold the grunion, shaken, not stirred;
With a peanut butter and jellyfish sandwich on the side,
heavy on the maaco.

I just can't fathom why i can't find an angel in this aquarium.

Many have a whale of a time: dinner; dancing to popular tunas;
a bouquet of flounders.

But I get tossed that same old line: "Not tonight, I got a haddock."
Looking for a cute yellowtail in this can of sardines interested in a deep LTR.

Not interested in one-time midnight baits. No crabs or clams please.


re: Salmonchanted Evening

Holy mackerel, Rob! Sorry to hear you've been struggling so to make it upstream.
Now, I don't mean to be koi, but maybe you've been swimming in the wrong pond.

If you don't want to be just another catch-of-the-day,
don't get hooked by shellfish goldfishing anglers
who just want to know hamachi you have.

Time to stop swimming around in circles.
Patience and fin-esse are required.
Find plaices and groupers you enjoy.
Spawn a reel friendship first, with no strings attached.

Keep casting,
and wait for the right bob, Rob.
Timing and smelt ARE important.

Keep your pole steady.
Lure her in slowly.
Without a trout, you'll soon be buying herring.

Best of luck!