My life in stalking

A few weeks ago, when all I was doing was researching my book every day, I ran out of blog ideas for several of my blogs. But this past week I've been on a book-break, doing chores and budgets and stuff, and spending more time surfing. Which generates lots of things to say! So I've been writing up blog postings with future dates, to get me through any dry spells. At this point Practically Moral is ahead by a month. Ease!

But not this blog--this one's real time. Cause I don't care how often I post or not. Anyway, here's the latest: My Life in Pictures

This is my library. It's an important part of my world.

Here are the two cats living in Pablo's old apartment. No people, just cats. I think one's a calico and one's a tabby.

My Future Flamed Fame

Ohhhh I'm slipping off my 4 AM bed rule... mehhhh. Fernando seems to be having trouble sleeping this week, I can hear him watching some show about safety standards on buildings.

I was just reading a few random blog entries by romance author Jennifer Crusie, and one of them was about all the hassle that comes when you write something that Outrages! some people, and whether it's worth it for authors to bother blogging at all.

One of the classic examples she gives is writing something that's meant to be funny, and having Serious Minded People tell you how offensive you've been. Well there's no doubt that crucifixion-by-offensive-humour could certainly happen to me. I mean, it happens often enough in my real life.

But worrying about this now is something I will classify under: Things people spend time thinking about when they're not doing their actual work (be it writing, painting, making music, etc.) Like guys spending hours thinking up the perfect band name, rather than practicing. Or people planning their web sites before they've done anything that merits a web site. Or thinking up pseudonyms, or designing book covers, or speculating on how one will handle one's massive future fame. In other words: You don't have a hope in hell of having this *problem* unless you get back to work!

What is more likely is that I'll have to watch my Editorial Content when I one day get a teaching job. I would probably make this blog private, even though it's pretty benign. The other ones I write should in theory be Google-izable by Students since they're more about my opinions, less about my personal life. (No I don't plan to teach under the name Mabel, but it's in all my email addresses.)

And so... yawn yawn yawn. Off to bed.

Losing My Sleep (but not my religion)

I can't sleep. I've been going to bed at a good regular time lately, and was on schedule to do so tonight, but... whenever I get things On The Mind... I'm done for. So I'll sit here for a bit, listening to Joan Baez and checking on Gustav's progress.

I went Chenoying with Gilby and The Missus tonight. We got to talking about some old friendships, so now my mind's all roiled up like a Gustav again! It was roiled earlier this week, and I finally unroiled it, and now it's re-roiled. Curses! I have lunch with Maewitch tomorrow, so maybe it can be unroiled again. Darn pathetic fallacy! If this were a movie you'd see me sitting here in the dark with my laptop, a sad Joan Baez song playing, intercut with CNN reports about Hurricane Gustav.

Gilby has an amusing but useful new analogy for friendships. He sees his friends as positions in a company, and sometimes you demote someone, or promote someone, or fire someone etc. If you demote a friend they have less responsibility, so you know, yay for them--but it means less benefits and pay too. Amusing, but pretty true. I'm on Gilby's Board of Directors, so I guess I'm alright.

I think my policy these days is to only hire the best... firings suck, after all. I don't want to let people into my life who might require a Clear Out Your Desk.

Changing Topic: Man... the pictures you can find of people on Facebook when you can't sleep... back when The Boy really was a boy. Now I can picture him starring in Annie.


Changing Topic: Céline Dion sings a song I really like called "On ne change pas." I guess it reminds me of my mother's opinion (after watching my brother and I growing up) that people don't really change from childhood on. Your basic character is right there when you're little, and there it stays. I don't know if people find that discouraging, or comforting. I kind of like it--I like the idea that I'm right here where I put myself. "Oh that's where I left me! It's so obvious, I should have checked here first."

On croit que l'on fait des choix
Mais si tu grattes là
Tout près de l'apparence tremble
Un petit qui nous ressemble
On sait bien qu'il est là

That reminds me of a couple favourite bits of writing. The first is from Joseph Campbell's Hero With a 1000 Faces, speaking of the "infantile unconscious:"

"We carry it within ourselves forever. All the ogres and secret helpers of our nursery are there, all the magic of childhood. And more important, all the life-potentialities that we never managed to bring to adult realization, those other portions of ourself, are there; for such golden seeds do not die. If only a portion of that lost totality could be dredged uo into the light of day, we should experience a marvelous expansion of our powers, a vivid renewal of life."

How beautiful is that? And his whole point about the hero journey is that life is always sending out these "calls to adventure"--opportunities which, if we take them, will allow us to dig deep and find the "lost potentialities."

His point is illustrated in his interview with Bill Moyers, when he tells the story of Hanuman the Monkey King, from the Ramayana. When Hanuman was a child he had phenomenal powers, but he was michievious and annoying so his elders placed a curse on him so that he would forget his powers, and this is how he grows up. Lord Rama asks for his help to rescue his wife Sita, and it's only through this adventure that Hanuman remembers his powers and uses them to perform great feats. (The story is wonderfully retold in this children's book.)

I'm also reminded of my favourite Matthew Arnold poem, "The Buried Life." The poem is about the way our true selves flow like an underground river, and that loving someone is often about the desire to escape the everyday noise of life, and drop inwards to our true selves.

"Give me thy hand, and hush awhile,

And turn those limpid eyes on mine,

And let me read there, love! thy inmost soul.
...
But often, in the world's most crowded streets,

But often, in the din of strife,

There rises an unspeakable desire

After the knowledge of our buried life".

Arnold writes that if we were given free and easy access to our real self, we would fuck it up--it's buried this deep so that we can't capriciously change it.

"Fate, which foresaw

How frivolous a baby man would be--

By what distractions he would be possess'd,

How he would pour himself in every strife,

And well-nigh change his own identity--

That it might keep from his capricious play

His genuine self, and force him to obey

Even in his own despite his being's law,

Bade through the deep recesses of our breast

The unregarded river of our life

Pursue with indiscernible flow its way".

He says we use the everyday noise to distract ourselves--we "demand / Of all the thousand nothings of the hour / Their stupefying power; / Ah yes, and they benumb us at our call!"--but that love has the power to push that aside and bring out the truth:

"When our world-deafen'd ear

Is by the tones of a loved voice caress'd--

A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast,

And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again.

The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain,

And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know."

That's a pretty interesting way to regard romantic love. Campbell called marriage "a recognition of spiritual identity. ... it's an ordeal, and the ordeal is the sacrifice of the ego to a relationship in which two have become one." If you think about it, a serious and committed relationship is one of those calls to adventure; think about how vulnerable you have to make yourself to the other, to get anywhere with it.

I remember when a friend of mine was in the early stages of a relationship, and she was afraid to tell her boyfriend such n' such thoughts (I don't remember the details) because of how he might react. And all I could advise was--that's intimacy. Unless you put yourself on the line, and risk rejection, the relationship won't slip into a deeper, more meaningful and satisfying stage. I think that's why Arnold and Campbell were right about the potential of love to help us unlock the "golden seeds" of childhood.

Wrapping Up: Well my eyelids are droopy... one last check on Gustav... "Gustav is 20 miles from Port Fourchon; 85 from New Orleans."

*

"Your sacred space is where you can find yourself again and again."
Joseph Campbell

*

Protesting The Man in Ole San Fran

There are a couple good Activism Sights one can see in San Fran. The University of California at Berkeley is the most famous, both for the spontaneous sit-ins to protest the lack of free speech on campus, and Reagan sending in the National Guard to oust people from the People's Park--when the University was already peacefully handling the issue. (Bast!)



And second, the San Francisco State University--where protests led to one of the first Black Studies programs.



I shall bring my peace flowers and sing Bob Dylan songs in a Joan Baez tone! (Hey, the one thing I never worry about when traveling is acting Touristy.)

(Or better yet, I'm gonna write a song based on the title on this blog post.)

My Life: In Curtains

School's starting... and how glad I am to be sitting on my ass writing posts about my curtains instead of shopping for expensive books and worrying about B's from Soroka.

*

Growing up, when I would visit my grandfather in Edmonton, I would always stay in the same room. I loved that house--I would love to live in it... if it wasn't in Edmonton. Anyway, when my grandfather passed away my mother sent me the room's accoutrements because she knew I loved them.

The primary object I loved was the curtains. The room had gigantic windows and these long blue and lavender flowered curtains, which were really sheets, so they let all the light through. I loved that. I love a light room, so I was very excited to inherit these totally old sheet-curtains. They cheer me up so much.

But I have trouble finding the stud in the right corner of the window, so they weren't hung securely, and when they finally fell my desk was in the way, and I was in school and All That, so they stayed unhung. Sort of. I have one anchoring screw in the middle to support the cheap rod, and I hung the entire curtain on that rod. Of course, it would be crooked. And when they changed the windows in our apt years ago they never painted the new (shittily done) wood frames. And then, at some point Nombly of course PEED on the bottom of the curtain, so I removed them and chopped off the bottoms and washed them. But I was so Schoolified that I only rehung one of the curtains (can't even remember why now--maybe cause it was lighter, for the broken rod).

So you can see here the poor one-sheet teetering curtain, with wood window frame. Sigh.

I managed to move around and clean up this corner enough to get my MA essay done. Notice how I did not photograph the top of the mono curtain so you can't see the crooked. (The chair I make no apologies for--the cover is for the cats to scratch. The yellow table held Haley's sleeping bed, and her favourite Reitman's bag which she liked to lick.)

This was the state of the desk after I cleaned up the rest of my room. I then lost the energy to clean up the desk area, so I've been desking at my bed for months. I think by this point, however, I had painted the wooden frame.

Today I finally pulled all the stuff out and rehung the curtain rod. I think it's secure now. It took me several long nails, the stud finder, my hammer, various screwdriver heads, and pliers. Then I dug out the other sheet, and put curtain hooks into them. You can see, however, that one of the curtains has been bleached more by the sun than the other... sitting here I feel like one of my eyes is more in focus than the other.

I hung up the framed drawing of the Swan theatre which used to hang in my grandfather's bedroom. I rehung the rice paper lamp which I love, and arranged all my writing books, and my current research. (My old compy is tucked in the corner--I still have files on there.)

A little fishy paper clip holder from my grandfather's desk. (Not sure who has the Hear all evil, speak all evil, see all evil monkey ruler.)

I laid out a carefully staged scene as though I was researching my book all day. There's my laptop with its cute gel cover, and notice my collection of Book Holding Apparatusi from my school days. (1) The plastic stand with my notebook; (2) the metal stand with Metallica; (3) the red heavy thingy that holds books open... (4) there's one more you can't see here, a small metal thingy. Don't laugh, I broke two book stands over those 2 degrees.

And as the moose in the Leon's ad used to say:
CURTAINNNNNS!

Here are the pictures from the room I used to stay in--they were all Chaucer related, presumably picked up when my grandfather took a trip to England--he taught Chaucer and Shakespeare. This is Canterbury.

Scenes from The Canterbury Tales. On the right is the Wife of Bath--one of my grandfather's favourite characters and he would love to recite her "Prologue."

The Wife of Bath talks about all her many husbands, but especially the last one, who was much younger than her. And he was always reading stories from a book about how inferior women were to men. One night they fought and he hit her, and she fell down on the floor and lay still as though dead, and he was upset and apologizing.

"O hast thou slain me, false thief!" she said. "And for my land hast thou murdered me? Ere I be dead, yet will I kiss thee." And he came near and kneeled down as though to kiss her, and she punched him. After that she made him give her his money and lands and burn the book, and they were happy ever after.

And I still have some other talismans about... my Alex Ross Wonder Woman...

the Writing Smurf Wai-Yant gave me...

the Terror who watched over my homework, and the little Lips Gorilla my stepmother gave me to get me through the end of my degree.

Imaginary Life on the West Coast

So my brother has finally found the perfect place to live in Vancouver. Check out this sweet listing:

"$725 / 1br - CAUTION - Slum alert (N. Surrey)If you want all the noise and don't mind other people hearing you do "everything", you don't care whether you have a fire, or you like the thumping by psychotic downstairs neighbors, rent this pigsty. Revolving door tenancy."

He'd better rush to grab that one.

My dad is always sending me places to live in Nanaimo. (My boss also, for some odd reason, thinks I should live in Nanaimo.) Anyway, he finally found me a nice place on my dream street: Buttertubs Drive. I would love to have BUTTERTUBS as my address. Buttertubs sounds like a lesser known member of Our Gang (The Little Rascalz).


Here's my sweet little home. I wonder if I can hire on whoever lives there now to do my gardening.

Conventiently located near Buttertubs Marsh, of course. As Virginia Thoreau said: A woman must have money and a marsh of her own if she is to write fiction.

Destination San Fran: Parrots and Detectives on Telegraph Hill

Alright, this time we have a San Fran Destination from the Step-mommy: The wild flock of parrots living in San Fran-- the so-called "parrots of Telegraph Hill."

I gather that Ferry Park at 5 PM would be the place to visit if we want to see them, but maybe we can ask a tourist kiosk and see what they advise.





Telegraph Hill has apparently been featured in these movies (among others).

After the Thin Man (1936)
Vertigo (1958)
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967)
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)

Of primary interest is of course the Thin Man! Apparently they used the base of Coit Tower as the outside of Nick and Norah's home.