Weathering Summer

Source: Photo by Daniel Cooper

I keep getting caught in summer storms. They inspire terrible ambivalence.

On the one hand: ecstatic relief. On the other: electric anxiety.

I love them. I love the wildness of them, and the way the sky churns like an upside-down sea. I love the trickery, the reversal of day and night. I love the rain. It falls as if weighted with lead, as if thrown down. I love the feeling that the earth is drinking deep, slaking enormous thirst. I love finding myself in the minuscule shelter of a bus stop or a parked car and listening to the percussive music of it.

I both love and fear the sudden zig-zag of lightening, and the wide-eyed counting before the thunderous boom that inevitably follows.

*

I was coming home on the bus the other day when one of the more violent storms hit. The stress is a bit amped up at that job lately (not necessarily a bad thing, but an adjustment to be sure) and the atmospheric pressure did nothing to help. That particular time I escaped getting soaked, but not getting panicked. The flash and boom were simultaneous and I sat there, peering out through the fogged window at the sheets of rain chanting Faraday cage, Faraday cage, Faraday cage, willing myself not to touch any metal surfaces.

*

Traveling in Montreal is precarious enough without fear of electrocution. Those bridges, especially the Champlain and the Mercier, seem set to crumble and I hold my breath as we cross them even in fine weather. When we must cross during a storm - oh my. My pilot is unflapable, but I am all aquiver. I want to pray for safe passage, but to whom? Sometimes being a non-believer is a real bitch.

*

Yesterday, another storm. Fierce, but fast. It was gone halfway through my commute. I was sitting, looking out at the sky as we inched along. The clouds over in the direction we were headed seemed greenish and odd. As if another, stranger storm was up ahead. Traffic was immobile. I pulled out my earphones to see what I could hear. Sirens, actually. Off in the distance. We got closer, eventually, and those weren't clouds.

A fire was clearly raging somewhere in my neighbourhood.

Shortly it became clear that getting out and walking was the quickest route home.

The fire turned out to be at the end of my street, a couple of blocks from my place. An old, abandoned motel was burning. The main road passes in front, and was blocked off and full of red trucks. Hoses snaked along all the roads around it, water pluming out trying to reach the dancing flames. A sizeable crowd had gathered, snapping photos, filming, observing. Our local security officer held court in their midst. I see him at the library sometimes, he's quite a character. I can just imagine him waxing nostalgic about The Great Blaze of '11 in the near future.

*

Today was the first day since spring that felt cool. Yesterday I wore a little jacket in the morning. Two days ago I saw a leaf fall. It was still green, but in tumbling from that branch it signaled the very start of the end.

Summer, with its relentless heat and lashing storms will soon be over.

Art Therapy

I have files on my computer, heavy with pigment. Folders full of photographs, paintings, illustrations and digital renderings. I seek them out, almost compulsively and then I collect them, hoard them, stash them away. I use them as my desktop wallpaper and sigh each time I close a window. When I feel low, or when I just want to see something nice I pore over the images and find a balm for the ugliness that can, at times, threaten to overwhelm.

The above two photos are by Tim of that's just it photo

Concept artwork for the film Coraline, by Chris Turnham

Flight 3 Cover, by Kazu Kibuishi

 

Santa Monica Pier by Alice Stevenson

Portrait with Black Bunny, Leaving the Orphanage and Three Springtime Gals by Emily Martin (aka The Black Apple)

Full Body Tattoo, In the Gallery and Birthday by Jen Wang

Oyster Catcher, Bear Mountain (detail) and Anarctic Waters by Diana Sudyka

 



Tangled, Knee Deep, Shark Bite and (I think this is the name) Molt by Stasia Burrington

I'm so taken with Stasia's work that I actually own all of these images in some form or another in real life, not just in files on my computer (her shop is full of beautiful things). I am checking my mailbox this week, for Molt as a pendant. That's actually not the finished piece; the completed version can be seen here, and it is breath-taking, but I really love this stage of the drawing for some reason. I even kind of like the fact that it's not finished. 

Lumos

1999 – Montreal

Daytime talk shows are not the best company to keep but I am the night shift manager at a Second Cup and I have little to occupy me in the period between waking and working.  So, one winter afternoon finds me stretched out on my roommate’s couch flicking between our five or so channels.

Rosie O’Donnell is interviewing an English writer I’ve never heard of. The writer seems a bit star struck, not used to the attention of Hollywood. Rosie is raving about the book. A kids book, something to do with magic. The writer tells us that she wrote it on napkins in a café while her infant daughter napped. They flash the cover. Rosie makes the writer swear to cast her in the movie.

“And mark my words audience – there will be a movie!”

The segment ends with Rosie giving this woman a computer. So she can write the sequel on something more substantial than a napkin.

***

Within a week I make my way over to the Chapters on Saint Catherine. The kids’ books are on the bottom level, but it isn’t the bright cornucopia it will become. I brush aside cobwebs and scan the shelves.

A guy in a red vest goes by with a cart.

“Can I help you find something?”

I give him the title. I’ve forgotten the author, but it doesn’t matter. He’s never heard of it.

“Thanks anyway.”

I turn back and with some diligence turn up a trade paperback with a red locomotive, billowing purple steam and a boy with a jagged scar on the cover.

1999 – Montreal (a few months later)

Things have gotten tricky. I am not a happy person.

Home. I need to go home.

***

I am at the airport. Someone that I love has brought me here, and knows I’m going but doesn’t understand why. He is the kindest person I have ever met. My heart breaks to leave him, but every instinct tells me that to save myself I’ve got to go home.

A painful goodbye, a take-off.  Above the clouds I pull out the book I brought to read. To take my mind off things a bit. There’s a flying car on the cover. It’s silly and sweet and it lulls me all the way across the granite Shield, the endless prairies, over the jagged edge of the Rockies, to where my province dips her toes in the Pacific.

Home.

1999 – Mission, BC

The air is so clean, so wet and green. My lungs drink it in. I am dizzy from the sudden influx of oxygen.

I go to the grocery store with mom, trailing behind her. I am a child again, it seems. I pick up gourmet jelly beans and a book. Some kind of bird-creature on the cover, wings outstretched. It’s a little thrilling to discover that the third one in the series is already out. It’s a comforting place to put my aching brain.

2000 – Vancouver

Things have improved in leaps and bounds. The hardest part is that once your mind has dipped into those dark places, once it knows the way, it threatens to return with ease at some slight provocation. You get a bit wary of the possibility of relapse.

***

The fourth book is coming out, and I'm looking forward to it.

I wander over to the Chapters on Robson Street to pick up a copy on release day. It's only midday and I am surprised to discover that they’ve already sold out.

2003 – Hamilton, On.

I am in this town learning to be a midwife. For a brief span it is my calling, my life’s work. I am happy, working hard and in good company.

***

Lesson learned: I pre-order my copy of book five at a little local bookshop. I am not the only one.

2005 – St. Catharines, On. and then Montreal (again)

I have left the midwifery program. I don’t know it yet but it will be for good. As in, for ever, and also for my own good. For good. It is good that I left. But it also fills me with grief for the loss of this image I’ve forged of myself. Now I can never be her. Now I have to create a new her. 

I find my way back to Montreal, and to him. Even with this new crisis I am in better spirits, better health than last time. I find that despite the time and everything that has passed there is still love. He is still the kindest person I have ever met.

***

Summer. Once again I find myself at the Chapters on St Catherine. This time, instead of rooting through a basement trough I am shuttled upstairs to a special table that’s been set up on the third floor. A long, snaking line is forming for book six. Looking at the crates piled everywhere, I think they’ve ordered enough copies.

2006 (Christmas) – Montreal

Best gift ever. Better than the Barbie camper van I got when I was seven. Better than the combo tv/vcr as a graduation gift. Better than a diamond ring.

I get an ipod. 

No big deal, everyone has them. Except it is a big deal, it is magic. Portable music. Of course I’ve been doing that since I slid “Fields of Fire” into my neon yellow walkman in 1986. But did you know that you can get books on these things? Audiobooks? People who read to you, leaving your hands free to chop carrots or paint or enter data while the story washes over you?

It’s a revelation. 

2007 – Still Montreal

The heat of summer hasn’t really hit. It still feels nice to be outside, at night.

I do something unspeakably nerdy. I attend a release party that culminates at midnight, when the bookshop sellers are contractually allowed to hand over our copies of book seven. The last one there will ever be.

The party is painfully tiny. It’s painful in a lot of ways. It’s like the smallest Star Trek convention ever held. Still, it is fun and I float home on a city bus crowded with adults sporting striped scarves and stuffed snowy owls. I think they went to bigger parties.

***

I wonder if, for the other attendees, this is tantamount to filling a prescription for antidepressants. That sounds crazy. Am I crazy? I have no interest in dressing up as characters. I am only mildly interested in the film versions. I've never read any of the slash fiction, I swear. I don’t have a great deal of difficulty in predicting the outcome of this epic. I count other books, other authors as my precious favourites. But there is something about this series that coos to my hind-brain and makes me glad.

***

I finish the last sentence later that weekend, on a breezy terrace. A short bus ride away from where I began the first sentence, nine years ago, but a world away none the less. 

At first I hate the ending. With subsequent re-readings I will come to like it. At that moment, setting the book down, I feel bereft. But also, grateful.  

Present – Montreal

The books gather dust, but I’m sure I will pull them out again one day, when I have someone small to read them to. The audio versions get played about once a year. Or when I can’t sleep. Or when I’m agitated. It is an auditory soother, hot cocoa for my ears. It’s silly and sweet and lulls my mind away from those dark traps. It’s a tiny point of light when I need it to be.

My Enemy Wears Yellow

 

What a magnificent grump I've been of late. 

 

As one of my good friends pointed out this morning, I've been a bit distant lately. I know I have, it seems to be an inevitability of mine. Sometimes I flow and sometimes, like now, I ebb. I hole up in my shell. I like being tucked away in here, it's quiet and I can think. The only company I seem to crave is Stephen Fry on ye olde ipod. He reads and I slip through the bricks into Diagon Alley. 

One reason for this habit of mine is that I have reverse SAD. Actually, really, it's regular SAD, it's just that I pass most sufferers going in the opposite direction. Summer finds me clumsy with heat stroke while the onset of winter sets my heart ablaze. Whatever else I am, I am certainly a champion hibernator. Despite my urban postal code I act like a country wife of yore and stoke up the oven, kneading and mixing, baking and roasting. I walk around in a haze of cooking smells, wiping away steam from the windows to peer out at the snow. It's wonderful. 

But not in summer. In summer I swelter and slump. I scowl and bite. There's no denying that it brings out the worst in me. 

By the time the copper tones of August slide down the seasonal horizon I am often in a state of nervous exhaustion. So very ready for the leaves to turn, for the advent of frost and apple picking and pumpkins on doorsteps. Temperatures drop from the 30s to the teens and I rejoice, reaching enthusiastically (if prematurely) for scarves and mitts and warm things to drink. 

But then: enter ragweed. 

Just as I start to feel the relief of Fall, just as my eyes shine in anticipation of the wonderfulness that is BackToSchool-Thanksgiving-Halloween-Christmas-NewYearsEve-MyBirthday I am struck back, my (red) eyes now shining with tears. I am reduced to a sneezing mess with an itchy palate.   

 

What a kick in the teeth allergy season is. I'm not complaining, not really (yes I am). This is still my favourite time of year. This pencil case toting, molasses flavoured month is lovely. But could someone, for the love of kleenex, please do something about the ragweed? 

 

 

 

Wednesday's child is full of woe

Yesterday was one of THOSE days.

Wednesday sucked because:

- Actually started the night before, when I read a beautiful but HEARTBREAKING book, which ....
- Lead to a sleepless, tearful night
- Making the alarm (aka foghorn) sound far too early
- No time, no yogurt, no energy for breakfast (which is unusual because breakfast is normally lovely)
- Trudging through slushy snow (in April, thank you Montreal) to the bus
- Sleepyness meant very tiny attention span at work, which meant a day full of distractions and mistakes and needing to re-do things
- A lunch-time stroll resulted in being attacked by a hidden mudpuddle (cobblestones hide these things)
- The tea I was craving was not to be found in any of the dépaneurs or épiceries near work even though I swear I saw it just last week
- Medicinal application of chocolate only gave me a bellyache

Cloudberry ~ from wikipedia

Looking on the bright side:

+ There were homemade muffins (banana, oatmeal & raspberry)
+ Someone handsome picked me up from work
+ I found a different kind of tea to try (which will evidently bring me 100 husbands)

Rubus chamaemorus, also from wikipedia

The eye of the storm is winking at me

Greetings from the not so calm center of a crazy storm.
Ok, so I have stuff due every single day next week, including three oral presentations (not exactly my favorite thing to do), two group projects, two big papers and one research proposal for an enormous paper thats due next April. A kindred blogger posted recently about being ostrich-like and that made me think about how I deal with these stressfull times... not like an ostrich, more like a snail. I retreat into my snail-shell where I have a cozy nest of a space to sit and look out the window, practice seeing the world from my cat's point of view, go on bookish adventures and just generally shut myself away from the nasty outside world.
The outside world sure doesn't feel like my friend a lot of the time. It is nearly December and my student loans have still not been properly assessed ... even though I started the application procedure in July (well actually they keep stringing me along, saying I am refused then saying that no not really, but they are still missing documents before they can make a decision and of course they never actually SEND me this information, I have to keep calling them and getting the red tape run around). I am a little concerned that all of my schoolwork stress will be for naught, if in the end I can't actually pay my tuition. I am also trying to sort out some income tax shenanigans from 1998, that I just found out about recently, which meant that the tax refund I was counting on the help get me through this semester is being held for ransom.
Arg! Money is kind of a weird taboo thing to talk about. I've actually been meaning to write a post about it since this summer, but never get around to it. I think I am avoiding it because I am still not sure how I feel or what I want to say, just that I feel like money really messes with me. I have been making little steps towards being less afraid of dealing with money issues, I got a book (not that I've had time to read it!) and a "money tree" to inspire me. But it is so very hard to pull myself out of a money-victim mentatlity when I continually find myself in these terrible money situations. Of course it could be argued that I create those situation by thinking of myself as a victim... but that seems so unfair and cruel! And if that is so, then I am stuck in a nasty catch-22... the more it feels like the universe is toying with me, the harder it is for me to have a positive attitude about it. I really do try to be a trouper and, after the tears and the foot stamping, I find it in myself to laugh at the whole situation. I mean, it is pretty funny. Sad funny, you know. Just almost too ridiculous to be real. And so then I try to approach the situation anew, with more lightness and the attitude that "this too shall pass". It doesn't seem to matter though, the universe just keeps on sending these big kicks-in-the-teeth.

I know I will get through, I have always gotten through. I had my astrological chart done when I was young and apparently Jupiter being where it was at the moment of my birth, means that I will always be taken care of, material-needs-wise. Astrology is one of those things that I love/hate... I love the poetic notion that we are connected to the stars and the planets and the sun and the moon, in such an intimate, personal way. But I hate how goofy it can be, and how it is associated with the very worst of New Age hooey. Anyway. I have none the less always had this idea in the back of my mind, that Jupiter is SUPOSED to be looking out for me somehow, but that he is just barely doing his job. I mean, it's true, my material needs have never really gone unmet. However. I have worried about them, and my bills, debt, and finances in general every single day of my adult life. And I have mostly only been able to get by with help from those around me. If it werent for Adrien, I would be in rough(er) shape for sure. Which is a rotten blow to my idealised independant (Aquarian?) self.

So obviously this is a big part of what I am going to have really work on in this lifetime. It is one of my obstacles/opportunities to grow. I'm learning to be ok with it, I'm learning to be curious and open instead of scared and closed off. I'm learning not to simply hate the machinery of capitalism and be angry all the time that it is even an issue. I'm learning not to see money as evil or my enemy or inherently anything at all except what we make of it. I'm making friends with people who have a way healthier perspective about money. I'm facing up to my ugly tendency towards jealousy and comparison ("why don't I have that!?? It's not fair!"). I am nurturing a feeling of "plenty" rather than one of "not enough!". I am working on being a lot gentler with myself as I navigate this stormy, pirate-ladden sea of money-learning.

And all the while I am still trying to get my homework done, go to work, volunteer at the local library, eat well, find time to do the stuff I like, spend yummy quality time with Adrien (bicker-free of course), day-dream, get a good night's sleep and get some excercise once in a while. No wonder I am so stressed out.

Where's my shell again?

Ok, come on Jupiter... do your stuff!!

*photos: money tree from random google image search, astrology wood cut and Jupiter dwarfing Earth from Wikipedia.

Swirling into autumn

I have a few started entries... I also have a lot of thoughts spiraling around in a fuzzy halo, but they never seem to make it to the page. This past week and a half has been laughably BAD. So bad. I can almost laugh about it today, but oh it was bad. It included a large (and seemingly impossible) tax debt from 1998 that I did NOT know about until last Wednesday, a few midterms, an over-flowing washing machine (and therefore a flooded kitchen, which was unfortunately where our camping equipment was sitting ... soggy), a big fight with Adrien and ... stepping on a tack. There are a few other things making my heart ache too... things that don't easily spill out in words.
I really just want to be luxuriating in my favourite season; I want to crunch through brittle leaves and wear all my scarves and eat pumpkin pie everyday. I want to curl around a cup of tea and read Jeanette Winterson's new book: Stone Gods (even though it isn't out in Canada yet) or Joanne Harris's sort of sequel to Chocolat, The Lollipop Shoes or my book-club book Plan B by Anne Lamott, or any of several dozen other books I have laying in wait on my teetering shelves like Kafka On The Shore or Hidden Connections or Our Lady of the Lost and Found. My books, they are calling to me. Or I want to take a walk in the grey twilight, listening to Red Mars on audio-book by Kim Stanley Robinson,winking at jack-o-lanterns. Or splashing on a canvas with a paintbox full of red, brown, amber and gold to celebrate the season, or else a paintbox oozing with summery greens, blues purples to remember the seasons past. I want to do these things, but alas I am (STILL/always?/forever...) a student. So I have midterms and papers to avoid. And I am absolutely addicted to selfPITY. I am. I so am. It is hard to truly indulge in one's loves in life when one is busy with the moping and the sniveling and the sobbing. I wish I could let go of that part of me that seems to so glory in the mean reds. I wish I could discard the drama queen. It is exhausting.
Instead of doing the things I want to do, and instead of doing the things I should be doing, I wind up escaping into the oh-so-reassuring land of tele-vision. I don't even OWN a tv and yet, and yet there is the internet. I download my crack. It isn't (all) bad tv, so at least there's that. But still. What a waste of time. I know why I do it, I know that it is a relief to set down my own worries and woes for 30mins while I watch Nancy struggle with much more entertaining and scary troubles on Weeds. I know that I want to live in Eureka and muse on sticky scientific conundrums rather than my own bureaucratic balls of red tape. Oh Bones! Anthropology has never been sexier! Of course it makes sense to want to zone out, forget, let go, stop the swirling darts of angry thoughts. It is shelter from the storm of LIFE. Sometimes life is looking at wildflowers with a magnifying glass, or getting your hair brushed by your boyfriend or swimming in an icy lake or breathing in your cat's purring voice or eating sushi. But sometimes life is a suck-fest. And sometimes it is too much for me to cope with all at once. So I have to shelve everything and then dole it out slowly, one crappy thing at a time. I think what happens sometimes is that, since the world OUT THERE doesn't respect this need of mine, since it continues to send the good the bad and the ugly, regardless of where I am in my nasty inventory, I sometimes get such a backlog of SUCK that I need to close up completely. My inner shelves get full. There is no more room here for that sucky thing, so you will have to wait my friend. I may be ready to think about your little problem next week. But not this week. Not the week with the tax thing and the flooding and the tack in my foot. Nope. Right now I need to balance all this stuff with something lovely. Something simple. Something seasonal.
So I will hang with my pals Tegan & Sarah, Feist, The Be Good Tanyas, The Shins, Badly Drawn Boy and whoever else is hiding in itunes and I will light some incense to mask the scent of SUCK in the air and I will drink spiced tea and I will study and I will get through the midterms. And then I will go to the farmer's market on the weekend and I will make pie.

the world is Magic

Yesterday, even after feeling so joy-full all week, I wound up feeling down right joy-less. I am not sure what it was that triggered my mean reds (the colour blue does not conjure sadness for me, it is too soothing and pretty... red on the other hand I can more easily associate with pain) but in the end I "wasted" the entire day. By which I mean that I spent a great deal of time on the couch with my cat getting caught up on season three of Lost. A friendly voice kept whispering in my ear that I should leave the house and follow the long-awaited sunshine to some café where I could read or write or watch people walk by. That voice specifically invited me to the old port or to the plateau, which are areas of Montréal that I don't visit nearly often enough. I tried to respond to the voice, even put on a watery blue-green skirt after a rejuvinating shower complete with coconut shampoo. Thought about leaving, looked at the door and then... sank back into the couch. Part of me felt that I should stay home and do my chores. The house needed attention. And yet, even though I forced myself to stay in until they were done, I did none of them.
One good thing I can say about my behaviour yesterday is that I continually silenced the Bully. I am refering to the other voice, not the kind one who wanted me to have fun, but the snide one who usually shows up at such opportune low energy moments to dispense charming little observations like: "you are so lazy!" Each time this voice started up I was more or less successful at redirecting my thoughts. Unfortunately I redirected them to the computer screen where downloaded episodes of Gilmore Girls and Lost were playing, instead of towards something a bit more creative (it seemed easier to replace negative thinking with no thinking than recklessly jumping straight into positive thinking) but I none the less see it as improvement.
Luckily when Adrien got home from his fun day out with friends he was in a buoyant mood and immediately started peeling me off the couch, though I resisted obstinately and clung to the throw pillows with all my might. Eventually he was able to lure me into the car with the prospect of eating dinner at one of my favorite restaurants, Le Santropol. I think I like it so much because it is almost like accidentally finding out that a tiny little scrap of Vancouver has mysteriously vanished from Commercial Drive and re-materialized in the heart of Montréal. Not only is the interior a hodge-podge of bright bohemian furniture, and the walls alternate between showcases for 3D artwork that spills right into the room and glittering mozaics but also it has a fenced-in back garden where you can eat under a canopy of faerie lights and birch leaves. There are numerous shaggy fraggle-esque nooks amidst fountains, trees and overgrown flower beds. Cats wander through freely, on important cat missions. And they serve divinely, ridiculously, jaw-stretchingly huge sandwiches which ensure that you will not leave without embarrasing smears of cream cheese and mint jelly on your cheeks. It was the perfect sweet antidote to my sour mood.
On the way home, rushing up the little side street where we parked, and feeling startlingly chilly in my whispy blue-green skirt, I suddenly happened upon a night-time, lit up view of the city. I realized that I live in a pretty neat place actually, and the heavy grouch-creature on my chest finally took off for the rest of the evening. We took the long way home through winding streets lined with centuries old stone houses and I repeated Alissa's mantra to myself while peering out into the lamp-lit night: the world is Magic, the world is Magic, the world is Magic.