dimanche, décembre 25, 2005

today please...

have a wonderful day. Whatever you choose to celebrate.

Even if you've got nothing-celebrate vicariously, through me, because I finished the moehair monstrosity. And it doesn't look half bad.

As usual I have nothing profound to relate, I just hope that whoever reads this is surrounded by people who love them, lots of food and wine, and music.

mercredi, décembre 21, 2005

ethics

la famille was out to dinner on Sunday.
A friend of mine, and the daughter of the family who were feeding us, is working on her PhD. She's doing something related to business ethics.

She taught her first university course this past semester and was regaling us with anecdotes of university scholarship.

The best one concerned plagiarism.

She had a student lift his entire term paper from the internet. Which is not actually that funny.

Except that the course was on ethics!

mercredi, décembre 14, 2005

poetry-life-poetry

(with great thanks à János...such a necessary reminder right now.)

"...Ah poems amount to so little when you write them too early in life. You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime, and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines. For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough)- they are experiences. For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and Things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly, and know the gestures which small flowers make when they open in the morning. You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighborhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you had long seen coming: to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained, to parents whom you had to hurt when they brought in a joy and you didn’t pick it up (it was a joy meant for someone else-); to childhood illnesses that began so strangely with so many profound and difficult transformations, to days in quiet, restrained rooms and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that’s rushed along high overhead and went flying with all the stars,- and it is still not enough to be able to think of all that. You must have memories of many nights of love, each one different from all the others, memories of woman screaming in labour, and of light, pale, sleeping girls who have just given birth and are closing again. But you must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the scattered noises. And it is not yet enough to have memories. You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return. For the memories themselves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves- only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them."

lundi, décembre 12, 2005

brief joys

-painting clay penguins

-Tracy Chapman singing "Never Yours"

-flying down a rolling hill, half blinded by late afternoon sun, the wind in my face and the snow sizzling under my skis

-sleep. Long, uninterrupted, sleep.

-watching the sun inch over the mountains across the lake, the golden wash of light spreading over the valley...

vendredi, décembre 09, 2005

my newly cut hair looks like...

...the love child of Chewbacca and Jennifer Aniston circa 1993.

Trust me, people, when I tell you that this was not the look that I was going for.

Fortunately, as the owner of the tutoring business that I work for pointed out, I don't get out much. (She made this comment after I spent 5 minutes expounding on the greatness of a cbc radio documentary I heard last night about the history and political culture of Alberta. Given the fact that I was both enthusiastic and mentioning Alberta and Politics in the same sentence I am surprised that she didn't immediately conclude that I was drunk.)

Thus, few people will ever see the hideosity.

In other news:

-yes, Jeremy, I probably did misspell Chewbacca... I don't care.

-I am dealing with my mental meltdown in the best of WASPy ways: total denial. No, I am not terrified of the distance. Yes, I love the fact that I have no plans after the next 6 months.

-Christmas knitting is continuing apace. By which I mean that I don't have a hope in hell of finishing what I planned to finish...Someone will doubtless find me mummified in red moehair yarn sometime around New Years.

lundi, décembre 05, 2005

crash and burn

In classic fashion, I have managed in the past two days to nosedive off the bandwagon of my staid little life. It's nothing serious, and I will pull myself together directly, but it's always alarming when I realize how self destructive I can actually be.

This all sounds very melodramatic and overwrought. Which is fine, because it is how I feel right now. I'll probably recant the whole thing tomorrow!

I don't handle change very well. Even if I am not happy in my current incarnation, and it's certainly been the autumn of my discontent, change in the equilibrium scares me. I knew the whirlwind would start in late November when my parents arrived back from their holidays, that it would intensify when my dear brother returns from kangaroo land, and that Christmas week itself would be stuffed full of relatives, friends, food, and noise. I was hoping that the chaos would distract me from niggling doubts about my choice to leave everything familiar and move to a place where there is one flight out per week, and long distance phone rates are astronomical; or the rising ball of hysteria that rises in my throat every time I think about applying for a master's program.

This too shall pass, and I guess once I am on the plane I will have the choice to settle down or spontaneously combust.