endurance art

I've been procrastinating this afternoon. My sole task, to re-jig one paragraph of a cover letter, loomed like the proverbial mountain and I spent the better part of four hours reading the interwebs.

There's been a lot of that the past month. After two years of nearly non-stop stuff I needed a break. And then I got one and realized that unemployment doesn't suit me. I'm too neurotic to relax and, when I finally do relax, I am too lazy to rouse myself or even just my mind.

However, there is only so much Gawker a girl can read before her eyes bleed, and I found myself listening to The New Yorker's podcast of Adam Gopnik talking about magic. Talking about David Blaine, Gopnik referred to him not as a magician, but as an endurance artist.

I like that.

Dealing with the unemployment and the uncertainty and the terror and the boredom? That's not coping. That's Endurance Art.

My inner twelve year old is less impressed with a kind of magic that relies on patience and a stubborn aversion to quitting. The twelve year old likes time travel.

And she got a taste of it earlier this week when I went back to Montreal for the first time since I graduated from university. Three years isn't very long in geological time, but enough stuff has happened since I vacated 88 Bagg Street that three days in the Plateau were challenging.

The little Chinese restaurant has closed. So has the tiny grocery store with the ancient cash register run by the (similarly) ancient Jewish couple. Otherwise, the universe was as it should be. Sort of. I guess I thought I'd just slip back into the city and it would fit, but what I thought I was slipping back into only exists in memory. (I can't remember if I've written here about my relationship with memory, and, unsurprisingly, I'm too lazy to check right now... suffice to say that I spend most of my time in the present - the past too full of pathos and the future unknowable.) Stomping through what used to be home, I kept slipping into scenes that only played out before my eyes. It was like suddenly becoming a reflective 93 year old man.

Fortunately, I was kept from total reminiscence by wonderful people who filled me with delicious food, wine, beer, tea and laughter. There were long walks to the pastry shop and midnight jazz and enough time spent at Thompson House to make up for the three year lull.

I could get used to such endurance art.