Friday, July 26, 2013

a nice day to start again

BB got married today.  Fuck cancer.  I love that she is winning.  Shawn drank a lot of gin and was friendly with my colleagues, which was amusing because he has even more disdain for socializing than do I.  The gin helped.  It also helped that RW and his wife were fun, and so were the McDs.  I think Shawn might be better at people-izing than I am.  I wore 3 inch heels (which was ambitious on my part) and was the designated driver.  At this point in life we are not invited to a lot of weddings.  Instead our friends, who are already married, are starting to divorce.  This was a nice change of pace.  The End.


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Thursday, July 25, 2013

end of June

D was drunk at the golf course, and a little bit slobbery.  I would have considered myself merry, but this improved my swing and made me able to pass for someone who had golfed a couple of times instead of never, except for the fact that I was in a cow costume rather than in dress code.  When T walked by, he asked if D was my "young man", and I said no, that D used to work with us.  Didn't T remember him?  Apparently not.

T did not seem able to believe that D was not mine.  D said, He thinks we're a couple.  We should have been a couple.  We would have made a good couple. 

I told D,  You're too young for me, which I thought was a compliment but D seeemd offended by it.  He went off in search of RW and another cigarette.

I am not a good golfer.



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Tuesday, July 23, 2013

consumed with what's to transpire

You told me you wanted me to talk to you during sex and I struggled with that request because the thing I most wanted to say was that I was wondering why you had your name, first and last, monogrammed on your winter coat.  You gave me your older coat to wear, also monogrammed, and it felt like your arms around me - almost.  The other thing I tried not to say was I love you because we didn't know each other well enough for that, though I was always convinced afterward that I would have loved you excruciatingly.  I also tried not to ask if we were really going to do this outside in the winter on the prairies, which seemed unnecessarily adventurous.  I said nothing at all, undoubtedly a disappointment, and then woke up.





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Friday, July 19, 2013

forgive them if they never find their freedom

My mum wants to talk about things that make me uncomfortable.  She has written a book that is meant to be published in October (as October is known to be the most harrowing month).  I have not read the book yet, and I do not know if she means to let me read it before it is published.  She has asked many other people who appear in the book for their permission to use their real names.

She has not asked me if I mind being in her book.  Or if it is okay to publish photographs of me.  Or if my memories of what happened match hers.  I know the answers to these questions, or at least I think I do.  Facts are facts.  The photographs are her property to publish as she wishes.  And me, I was there.  I cannot pretend I wasn't even if that is my preference.  I am not allowed to pretend myself away.  Just like attending the memorial and trying to sleep on the pull-out bed in the living room open on all sides.  Feeling raw and exposed is my own problem.

Or I am not kind enough to notice why she wants to know if I ever saw myself as an abused child.  I tell her no, obviously not, because we went to Hawaii and we had a house with high ceilings.  And because I never would have dared her to do things I was afraid she would really do.

I do not really really really know what these things mean.  Only that my mum wants to talk about them and I find myself saying what is meant to keep her safe from any more hurting because I know she suffered too.  Because I know she is looking for peace and I want her to have it.  All of us.

My Dad, he listens on the periphery and wanders off to take photographs when he sees something more interesting.  I would like to follow him instead of having this conversation, I would like to follow his eye which almost always knows when to look away.

My relationship with these people has improved greatly in the last few years.  But I still feel I do not know them as well as I want to.  I try to absorb the excess love they express for J.  We laugh a lot, all of us.  We have always done that in my memory, laughed at things because they are otherwise impossible to navigate.  I prefer that to the difficult and pointed questions.




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Wednesday, July 17, 2013

Who's the guy that you and I just love to adore?

This afternoon I took J to the mall (sigh) for new shorts.  She agonized over which ones to choose, but we finally found some she found acceptable.

While waiting for her at one store, a saleslady encouraged me to try on a dress I'd been looking at.  I said no, it wasn't really my style, I was just looking, but she kept pushing and then J chimed in.  I tried it on.  And I looked almost exactly like Minnie Mouse.  With some ears, a tail, and a bow on my head, I could have gotten a job working at Disneyland.  Everyone agreed it was godawful and even the saleslady laughed at me.  Very good for the self-esteem.


My parents are coming to visit starting tomorrow.  And I have spent most of this week cleaning my house in preparation.  Though I am resentful, sometimes, of the way I feel compelled to try and earn my mother's approval by having a sterile-clean home, it's also a good thing she visits once a year or I would eventually succumb to being choked to death by dust bunnies.



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Saturday, July 13, 2013

a flower-making basket

We saw Pacific Rim this afternoon.  The 3D glasses were remarkably like ski goggles and they hurt my face, leaving an imprint that lasted an hour.  I fell asleep a little bit, which I almost always do in movie theatres, but was simultaneously sort of scared.  An unsual combination of feels.  It did not make sense to me that monsters who came out of the sea should have such scaly, dry looking skin.  (I am obviously focused on the wrong things.)  It always strikes me as strange that my husband makes these kinds of things as a career.

I ate Triscuits for dinner, which was fantastic.  Triscuits are one of my favourite things to eat.  I like it when no one notices that I am eating them for dinner instead of the kinds of things that other people think are supposed to be dinner food.  I also ate a giant dill pickle that was so cold it hurt my teeth.  (I do not mean to make it sound as though I have an eating disorder.  I don't.)

The Trayvon Martin thing is impossible to discuss.  Will Americans riot tonight?  I hope not.  Enough pain has been wrought already.  He was only seventeen, which is the same age as my grade twelves who are so frightened of growing up.  SZ has been writing to me asking advice about aquiring a doctor's diagnosis over the summer before she starts university.  I am proud of her for finally taking this step toward self-advocacy.  And wish she had taken the help sooner.



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Friday, July 12, 2013

up all night to get lucky

I used to write pornography.  I mean, I would write it and then send it to someone who owned some kind of online bookstore dedicated to porn, and that person would sell it on my behalf and then send me money at the end of each month based upon how well my writing sold.  It was never a real job because, a) I did not make enough money doing it to pay my mortgage, b) I never received a T4, and, c) I did not use my real name.  Rather than a job, it was exactly the distraction that I needed.

I got the idea of writing of writing pornography from B's wife.  When she told me she planned to quit her real job at a bank and write full time, it caught my interest.  I read some of her work and became convinced that I could do that too - with fewer spelling and grammatical errors.  And this turned out to be true.  My writing sold well.  (In fact, someone is still making money selling my stuff on Amazon, which is irritating but also entirely my own fault since I lost interest and cut ties with the seller.)

The thing is that writing is work, whether it's porn or legitimate, and work always seems to get boring.  I lost interest in writing pornography just the way I lose interest in real writing.  It became repetitive.  And I guess I do not find it as easy to write a sex scene as I ought to, considering how dedicated I have been to the research.  Perhaps it is because I was raised by Brits.  It isn't that I'm a prude but I have difficulty finding the right language to say what I want to say without being scientific, crass, or poetic, because I find all three offputting where it comes to sex.  Writing about sex, that is.  When I was given an assignment in a creative writing class to write a sex scene, I wrote about a pair of seahorses.  The class seemed to think it was quirky and hilarious, but in fact it was just a dodge.

So it's odd that I should have taken a brief trip in this direction.  I learned how to spin it.  Spin spin spin.  And then I got tired of it and stopped.  I wonder why writing about sex becomes boring and having sex does not.



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Monday, July 08, 2013

Sensitivity, sensitivity

I dreamed of you last night.  It was the first time in a quite awhile that you have interrupted my sleep.  You appeared backstage before a play, and so, to my embarrassment, I was dressed in a costume.  Queen of Hearts, maybe, or Queen Aggravain, the point being that I was dressed as someone who is arrogant and self-important, but is seen by others as foolish and ridiculous.  The dress was large and fluffy and I was heavily made-up, wearing a tangled wig and exaggerated everything.

And you were dressed as a grown up, a man in a suit or some kind of simple and sleek business attire that indicated you actually were important rather than just trying to appear to be.  You did not look the way I remember you, you did not look like the person I miss.  And yet seeing you made me ache.  You said you could not stay but that you would be back to watch the play tomorrow, and I asked you not to, which was what I always used to say to boys who thought they were supposed to see my plays to indicate they were supportive.  And you said you wanted to, which was what those boys always said, and I knew you would not be back.

And I still miss you.




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Saturday, July 06, 2013

For example

From And The Mountains Echoed:

"It was the kind of love that, sooner or later, cornered you into a choice: either you tore free or you stayed and withstood its rigor even as it squeezed you into something smaller than yourself."


Thoughts about this are private.  But I thought about it carefully enough to write it all out and erase it.



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Friday, July 05, 2013

satyagraha

And The Mountains Echoed was very beautiful, as all his books have been.  Now I am reading something over my head about quantum physics.  I keep going back to quantum physics although I do not understand it because it gives me a sense of being in church (not a little prairie church on the open plains, but a beautiful Italian church with frescoes and the preserved skull of a tiny child martyr)  and having utter confidence in what I am being told without fully absorbing what it all means.  Awe and wonder.  And sometimes joy.


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This is your vocubulary lesson for the day (based upon the arrogant assumption that if a word is new to me it must also be new to you).  Satyagraha is insistence upon the truth.  Firmness in the pursuit of truth.

I like new words.  I would not like anyone besides Shawn to see me reading in my bed at night.  Hair (usually wet from the shower) twisted up in a tight Olive Oyl knot to prevent it from getting in my face and distracting me.  Kindle glowing in the dark (because I have made the full transition to e-Books as there is no more room in my house for paper books), and phone light also glowing so I can go from Kindle to phone "notes" application to type in (two fingers) new words or phrases that I like and want to remember.  Often salivating and panting slightly with excitement.  Books make me horny.



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