abridged_journal
epitome of incomprehensibility My sociolinguistics essay is the only thing not being cancelled and I want to take a break from writing it.

So here is my abridged journal, in which I write a sentence or two from each page of my latest journal, which started Dec. 21. 		200325
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e_o_i Dec. 21, 2018 to be precise. Anyway, here goes:

In the interest of cleaning up, I'm taking an old height chart off my closet door.

The top and bottom are fixed by square foam pads.

My mind also wants to call these miniature people "elves," but maybe I'm just seeing the world through Christmas-coloured glasses.

Dreams: the "rastaferrugian" layer of the sea is the one with bubbles about two metres down.

Then I was trudging up a dirt path on foot, and the book was no longer a book but some kind of TV episode.

I wasn't afraid of being killed, though; it was more dreamy, more like practice-afraid, like what I'd done with breathing sea bubbles in case of an emergency.

Now, why "Rastafarian"?

In the boardroom, someone asked if it was the Rastafarian brother living in Toronto; apparently it was the non-Rastafarian brother living in Jamaica, but [person] is traveling to Toronto to be with her family.

Why get a nightmare that you accepted a job? It was more a sense of foreboding, that I couldn't do what I promised, and that this boss I'd also have a fraught relationship with because bosses were bossy and I was stubborn.

Never mind that I'm not altogether enjoying the holiday.

Was he asking to use the computer? Angsting about the weather (not enough snow)?

"Impaired visibility" is a phrase, but one colleague underlined the "as they say" and wrote "do they?" while another just crossed those words out.

So many papers.

Anyway, my point isn't about listing everyone I know who's ever worn a hijab.

I mentioned for the third or fourth time that I can't stand people using "concerning" as an adjective.

I'm supposed to write something against humans mating with Trisolarans.

[Person] stares at me as if to say "There's no accounting for taste" or "Some people have weird kinks, you should know that by now, seriously, how old are you?"

My research interests are sexually amorphous, characteristic of the gold-flecked architecture prevalent in the mitochondrial toeholds of the Han Dynasty.

Sibling arrivelry: you have to go there and do this.

Mind you, this is the same woman who talked about Ted Bundy for a good five minutes as an example of how environment and previous choices shape your writing. Something like that. It was in the context of feeling self-confident about your writing. What best illustrates that? Serial killers!

And you get a sense that war is like that, but without the dramatic music when someone dies.

Even if real-life Sister Souljah hates bisexuals, it doesn't affect the fact that a flawed author-insert character is more interesting than a perfect or omnipotent one.

And then...but that'd be a Spoiler Alert.

I also wanted to go to the climate protest happening in Mount Royal park.

Personal my ass.

Was he deliberately trying to prove I couldn't do things in short blocks of time?

Am I always late?

I just had a very minor epiphany. The reason why the pronunciation of Antigonish can't seem to stick in my head - I'll say an-TI-ga-nish instead of an-ti-ga-NISH - is because of the play Antigone.

I'm in an airplane, Air Canada flight [number] to Halifax.

Anyway, the plane is definitely going forward now.

Maaaybe the play-by-play is a bit boring, but I just scored some FREE orange juice.

Like being on a smooth but noisy train.

Louder.

A bit bumpy, like gravel under wheels.

The hidden agenda of feminism: stopping people from writing dick jokes on their lawns.

That turned into the stuffed animal costume.

Mitchener may be formulaic, but he formulizes well. It's a short novel with a simple structure: harrowing water rescue, calmer land part, scary part again in the air.

As I was getting some clothes out for tomorrow, I thought, "Was Madeleine L'Engle bisexual?" after thinking, "Was she fair to gay characters?"

Idea for CNF: CV. Anecdotes from jobs.

I am modern; I am also capable of retroactive bad influence (9/11 Symphony was more Lord of the Ringsian and composed, I think, when I was 16).

Yup, the bloodthirst is Tolkien villianry - "towers ringed with flame," indeed. And maybe the run-on sentence is too. Sauron, like Molly Bloom, might not be fond of the full stop.

Goslings, a bit older, two of them. Their Canada goose mother hissing at a deer that passed too close.

Not to get deep into clothing, but accessories would be fun.

I'm 31.

Nah, I'm a mystic Five People You Meet in Heaven-er. IT'S CHEESY AND IT MADE ME CRY.

Creative Writing class worries me. I mean, it was the best class of this unit and it went well.

Oops, I'm not God.

ANYWAY, the problem wasn't with others' reception of this scene.

She said I could think of it as flattering that a younger boy liked me, even if I didn't like him back.

But some of them were already teasing him for acting "gay" or feminine, since being hyper and having a high-pitched voice are apparently marks of femininity in a prepubescent boy.

If he had ADHD too that wouldn't be irony.

And I'd forgotten about the part with a T-Rex trying to eat Baby Jesus but getting shot by a robot monster (it's where Bean is playing with the department store displays). TRUE ART.

You win, Dale Carnegie.

He was the one whose father used to work in the World Trade Centre, according to him.

Though eighteen speeds sounded impressive at the time.

I was dreaming of something vague invoking "boring corporate slogans" and the impression of roast beef.

Doreen is a short name for a short person.

And then I checked the lamp.

Why is the power off, anyway?

Why is my life so ridiculous?

Why do I feel like I need to talk to somebody to stop panicking?

I couldn't be more ridiculous if I tried.

I'm currently a passenger in a car on the way to the Glengarry (Maxville) Highland Games with my parents and brother.

Then I asked something like, "Why isn't the bird, Nora Joyce, on stage?"

This time it was Leftover Soup.

Question in the vein of Mr. Leftover Soup: If you talk to an object, are you praying? (Discuss in the forum.)

Well, would I write about a brown-haired bearded guy who wasn't there?

So I wrote again to apologize.

I do that a lot.

Should have met the summer deadline.

Then I decided to see if I could do harmonics with my voice - I'd seen a YouTube video on that months ago.

Not in tune, not with every note sounding clearly, but I could do it!

I said I couldn't make them very loud yet.

Oh yeah, and then there were the commenters saying "nice cleavage" or the like (not that much cleavage, and her vocal range is up HERE, thank you very much).

We went through:
-World War 1, the Treaty of Versailles, its aftermath
-The Communist Revolution in Russia

Aside: is nationalism always racist? I didn't used to think nationalism could be racist in North America.

The third one was whether there was enough justification for the use of atomic bombs and to what extent using weapons of mass destruction is justified.

I mean the essay, not the war.

A Japanese student teacher came to [school] and we learned to greet her with "Konichi wa, Osaka san."

Talk about surprise attacks!

Happiness is good, but it's not focal.

What are you supposed to do, read or listen?

I like it that Apple Computer is less Obviously Poetic than a symphony.

No, it tasted like celery.

I say it doesn't smell bad, just a bit dusty.

NOW INCLUDING SPONSORED CONTENT.

But overall, fun.

Long-sleeved, too.

Except for the part about waking up in a panic.

How can you adjust phone settings like that?

The place I saw the word "parthenogenesis" and how it could possibly relate to war - I was looking up some things for Victoria's classes.

Her novel has a character who's one of the Tuskegee Flyers, a group of black American fighter pilots.

The idea would be to see how much money/time was saved by having less traffic and tracking the increase in ridership.

But what can I do against Bill 21?

-Finish next History outline for Eva.

"Literally like" is weird, though. You can't confirm or refute it.

Can you have a literal similarity??

Then I figured out the utterance must've been "psycho bitch" and this was said by a pedestrian to the driver of the fast-moving car.

I'm also working on some batiks.

-Process rest of grapes

The grapes are dealt with - Aunt Sarah finished picking & washing them.

Linguistics might tell you why those rules exist.

Mix ethics, drama, debating, and sociology? Why? WHY NOT.

As for Cabaret, the movie anyway, Sally seems to have more bisexual vibes than the guy (whose name I forget).

I don't always apply my morality.

Do other people get hung up on things like that?

Dad used polyamory as an example of a behaviour that would have to be accepted.

Finally I admitted what really bothered me in this instance, which is the idea that being bisexual = 2 partners at once. I mean, you could. As an organized and/or extroverted person.

He knew me too well to think I'd stop arguing.

But I wish I could make a point without being a pain in the ass.

Does "gilt-edged" even make sense? Why not "gold-embossed"?

And it was going to be a musician's name.

Tamra, TAM-ra, was easiest. Besides, Barbra Streisand was a precedent for vowelectomy.

Maybe she isn't depressed. But I think she is, and the miscarriage and existential crisis about being afraid of eternity contribute to and result from that, respectively.

David thinks she feels guilty that she couldn't save her cousins, but she doesn't think that's the main reason she goes to Europe in the winter of 1997-1998 (missing the Ontario-Quebec ice storm) to learn more about them.

That's how classical and classical-adjacent composers are: German until proven otherwise.

The bike class makes me think about how I used to assume the phrase "spin classes" meant something more complicated than stationary bikes.

In yesterday's Creative Writing class, [name] said that Toni Morrison's narration was "merciless" in a way - Morrison apparently treats ordinary and terrible events with the same matter-of-fact tone in much of her writing.

This state of mind, at least, is attributable to ADHD.

Misheard from TV: "Those pro-Russian Innu voters can get a field day done." But of course they can.

I vaguely remember something about Christmas presents - a train set - card games.

I wrote - maybe I said it aloud too, I don't remember - that it's hard to wrap my mind around the fact that some people treated their slaves with kindness and familial affection, not because I expect constant cruelty from people in power but because the practice of chattel slavery as a whole was so awful.

And then about how "things" are categorized.

She described it as "lighthearted," which is apt.

Forgot to say that I won the "Ugly Christmas Sweater" contest at the [place] Artisans Christmas Party without even wearing a sweater.

So I'm kind of a disaster, but at least I have goofy Christmas T-shirts, right?

Exciting news: I have a boyfriend, perhaps! I meant to lead with that, but apparently the duck quacking "Ode to Joy" had to be dealt with first.

But love, there has to be something of goodness in that, it can't just be selfish.

Mom would hesitate, then say, "At least it'd be politically incorrect."

That expression doesn't make sense in that context, does it?

The narrator doesn't laugh - she remembers what was happening in Persia just before the war started.

Very teenagery, the whole scenario!

It was just about what food would go with red wine.

There are people buying beer because a holiday when alcohol is prohibited has just ended. Apparently it's Catholic. Everyone seems to be Catholic, including me.

So there's sort of a "real or not real" question lingering over the whole romance, which is clever, but I kind of missed the "why are you crying / because you're going away" sequence from the book.

After reading the trial records reproduced in the book - specifically the testimony by psychiatrists [...] - I'm convinced that Pound had some kind of paranoia.

At a few points he was saying he thought he could end the war by just talking to world leaders.

Imagine him going to Russia and demanding an audience with Stalin. Stalin, also paranoid: "Not sure he's important, but better shoot him anyway."

He was more extroverted and generous, especially with other writers.

The thing is, from those lines it sounds like this crime is treated as a bad thing; the incident is stated without commentary, but it doesn't sound good to attack people's homes and kill them, does it?

If anything, it'd seem to illustrate how prejudice leads to bad military decisions.

But Norman has other examples of Pound blaming Jews for things.

Conclusion: if Pound were alive now, he'd blame the Muslims for everything and champion someone who wasn't Trump - probably a Trump ally whom he'd consider more cultured.

Zukofsky isn't always the easiest to understand either, but this seems clear enough to unpack.

All 176 people on the plane died.

His brother might not see it but it'd show support without being something anyone would feel the need to respond to.

That's part of the reason for the stuck, lazy, fruitless feeling.

Fold those stupid clothes I left in the dryer.

The scenario is that Anne Shirley is trying to launch a space satellite, an enterprise doomed to failure.

But also: can converse with people I disagree with.

What I'm thinking: the perceived linguistic patterns of neurological disability and/or how neurodiverse people will try to "pass" by adopting other speech patterns.

You need a child in order to be a parent, for example. And you need yourself.

Maybe not after, but soon after, I replied, "I missed looking at your face."

Also helpfully labeled "Vegan" and "No peanuts."

The MRI itself I survived, first by humming when there were pitched beeps, then by reciting Wordsworth's "Daffodils" poem in my head.

I asked [brother's name], who was in the kitchen finishing up the dishes, if I could listen to Lana del Rey's "Summertime Sadness" because, as I said, "It's not summer and I'm not sad." 		200325
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e_o_i So, farewell to YouTube, farewell to Nova Scotia, now I'll have that stuck in my head all night, but Praise the Lord Hallelujah Amen, the mini-essay thing is done and I'm falling asleep.

So now I have a war-with-Iran dream.

Canadian stereotype, sorry.

"Iconic" did she say?

I won't hazard a guess on the Americanness/Canadianness.

At least do a cover version.

Suddenly I see a curved metal door, grey with some red trimming, fall from the sky and land at the side of our across-the-street neighbours' house.

I start running and I know I can't run far.

I ask Dad what's going on exactly and he says that the Americans shot down a plane and blamed it on Iran. I say - somehow knowing this - that it was unfair since the plane had nothing to do with Iran. It was full of feminists from Helsinki.

Intermittent wind made things whiter but not obscured altogether.

Working on descriptive techniques, are you.

But I said, "This is why I don't understand Calvinism."

In which "terrorist" means "person who says offensive things on purpose."

Or just that poetry readings in general had a lot of sad poetry, which was why she stopped going to them as much at the tender age of eighteen?

Memory. Has the moon lost her memory?

So it's about Anne Frank and Sylvia Plath, not Roland Barthes except for the beginning, slightly.

A running theme was the ability of nature to alleviate fear/sadness, as shown in a story just called "Fear" that had a surreal, absorbing quality.

Sylvia Plath died because of communists. They don't want you to know this.

It was hard to work that part in, to reconcile the tones.

I felt I had to eat a lot of jellybeans because the ones in the bag were ones I didn't like as much.

You may think you're subverting the "slow = stupid" stereotype, but...

But it's time we caught some spatchka, froods. Namárië.

Like Dorval but with an Arabic accent, Carol categorizes. Miriam starved to death in Dorval. With an Arabic accent.

The category error thing is interesting, though, because I'll often do things like substitute "train" for "bus" or "brush" for "comb" without noticing.

And why do this?

I hadn't brought the jacket.

With a bit of a trying-to-make-you-feel-better and also this-is-amusing smile, he'd said something like, "If your parents give you a hard time, just ask them if they'd rather have you fall for a Presbyterian woman."

Ostensibly it was about the jacket.

I said that Mom and Dad didn't like me falling in love with someone who wasn't a Christian, and [brother] said things like, "You should stop seeing this fellow. You shouldn't be seeing a man. It's inappropriate for people like you and me."

I said, "I don't think she's evil because she's socially conservative," implying that there were other reasons.

Me: "Well, it had to be. It was an origin story. They had to be able to reproduce."

They weren't too impressed with that plan.

-When they say "the novel coronavirus" it sounds like an actual book.

And they didn't want to be political, at least not in any real-world, straightforward way.

[OK, caught up to the present.] 		200328
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e_o_i Everyone's nipples are pretty much the same.

Maybe I'll dress up just for the hell or heaven of it.

Carol says she's missing the point - a Christian party means it won't actually be fun.

So it would be an added tritone specifically.

Then I felt bad because my first reaction had been, emotionally speaking, "What? I'm not autistic!" like that was a horrible thing. And L. is (autistic, not horrible).

Get distracted because of facts; avoid finishing because of emotions.

I blame partial differential equations.

So I won't know if I've managed never to hit anyone again until I die, and if I die in a sudden way I may never know.

And then thinking she must have died of coronavirus because Iranians are more susceptible to it somehow.

It was 1527! No, wrong song.

Oh, and I'd watched all six episodes of their "Spanish flu" series when I was supposed to be doing my essay - one via Mr. Terry, the others on the Extra History channel.

In between there's the issue of hand-washing.

It was like walking from spring into summer - or would have been if I'd been paying attention.

It felt like a reality check, in a good way.

Mom asked me to open the fridge a few minutes ago, saying, "My hands are chicken hands."

E.g. a sum formula pasted from an invoice draft for a tutor who had 4 classes in a month would have the cells, say, G8-G11 in the formula.

Although "balls" has a perfectly acceptable non-testicular meaning too.

"Smart" is one of those dubious exaltations of "potential."

What happens is what happens, not what has the potential to happen.

I felt angry right then - it flashed into my mind that he was equating deeper-seated executive functioning problems with mere habits and implying that they were easy to change.

I doubt the parsley will grow.

For someone well-educated, I don't know much about what jobs people actually have.

Touching shared things is more the issue, maybe.

I'm drawing on various sources - mostly earlier versions of pieces of the novel found in my four plaid-patterned notebooks.

And back to our regular programming, the fact that Schoenberg's 4th string quartet isn't the worst/best possible example of avant-garde dissonance will only serve to highlight the disconnect between daughter and mother - who, unlike my real-life mother, doesn't care much for music anyway.

I wonder if he wished on them an early death, using the word Sheol for grave.

Literally not metaphysically.

Q: Why isn't there a Sylvia Plath musem?

A bad dream after the Toronto trip was an image of something like a YouTube comment section; someone writes that The Place Now a Museum should be made "functional" again and "the Muslims" sent there.

I was telling her about the differences in religious upbringing between David and me and the tensions my parents were bringing into the equation, revealing that J. had told me about H.'s mother harassing H. about dating "a sort of Muslim" (J.'s words) and repeating rumours of a supposed "love jihad" in India, where Muslims' insidious plans are to fall in love with Sikh and Hindu women in order to convert them.

This seems to fit her talents as well as interests.

Yes, I had a bad micro-dream (a different one, earlier) about it.

In any case, I don't need to exploit tragedies past and present for my personal anxiety pool. A pool party pity party.

On a lighter note, when I was talking in his mother's kitchen about us possibly visiting Aunt S. together sometime I mentioned going to look at her art and the stained glass art in the United Church, and he joked that I was doing a "love jihad" to convert him to Christianity.

Fear of things changing: my father had just retired.

I probably downplayed the last item, which was how often I'd felt that "something terrible was about to happen."

But was that thinking something terrible was about to happen?

I didn't tell Dr. R. all that, though, just talked about the incident in brief (but in a cowardly way at first, because I said "hit someone by accident" and then clarified - hit someone with a glass when I meant it to be only with my hand) and how it led to increased and unprecedented-for-me panic attacks in the summer and fall of 2012.

Who thought it was a nuclear bomb??

Does some part of your brain have a worry that you later articulate?

I went into the living room, probably saying something about how I didn't "feel well" (it's fading now, but for years I used that phrase to describe emotional and not just physical upsets - including anger, unwillingness to wash dishes, etc.) or that things were bothering me.

I said, crying, "I don't want to think about children starving to death!" and Mom said to Y. that maybe now wasn't the time, etc.

I was attempting some perspective-taking, saying to myself that it was self-centred to worry about something just because you had some personal connection to it, including one with degrees of removal - the relatives on her mom's side wouldn't be mine by blood, or not closely, anyway.

I was waiting with L. at the bus stop and asked her, hesitantly, "Was your mother's family, uh, always in Canada?" as if they could have sprung up from the ground thousands of years ago - not that it was really Canada then.

Oh yes, so L. told me a bit about her grandfather since it was talk-about-family time and the bus was a long time coming.

I guess the family feud that concerns me more is between L. and her father Uncle R., whose books from the cottage I'm currently going through and who wants to read my novel, though he misplaced the files of the chapters I sent and thinks it's "an interesting mix of fact and fiction."

And then going off on tangents.

It's like Katy Perry sang, "You're my experimental game, for a scientific paper."

In any case, you want to hear the naughty parts, right?

And why are the words disparaging or at least alluding to sexually promiscuous behaviour often classist (or at least references to lower-class things)?

Dying = living forever, apparently.

Global pandemic, protests against racist police violence, and these are the things I worry about.

The undiagnosed life is not worth living, said Socrates.

The plan is to have a webpage up with links to artisans' profiles, so people can buy items online.

Of course, the discussion wasn't "should police discriminate against racial minorities or not?" So I sympathized with David's frustration.

I thought he was being a little tough on critical theory and said that absolutist thinking was more a result of people being young and latching onto the first thing that resonates with them as the One True Key to Explaining Things.

Anyway, goodbye to this journal.

[Current notebook is filled up.] 		200903
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e_o_i The current pandemic is apparently not a thing.

This is selfishness and a shallow sort of identity politics, I fear.

Perfume is particularly capitalist, like plastic.

The decision itself was...

Maybe wind = money in this analogy.

It's still funny to me, but I guess the contrast with the frustrating and dull index-making heightened its appeal.

Gah, this is why I love him; he has imagination but he's downright reasonable at times.

But it's partly technology.

Only the distant friends have to buy things to appease my capitalist lust.

Then he said I should buy clothes that had a greater diversity of prices.

David laughed and said it reminded him of Lewis Carroll.

That's the word I thought of, lying idly in bed (yes, the word was in bed).

I'm doing the Nine-Eleveny Chapter 5 but my thoughts centered on where to inject bisexuality.

Cue the existential crisis and the fearful "Am I a lesbian?" Mac-aimed query.

Also, it's hard to take back extra pencils because they stick to the desks.

Also, in introducing the books, I say, "In this one the main character's non-binary, which is cool," as if "coolness" is the issue.

ANYWAY, the characters didn't go through as many changes as they did in the dream.

Online teaching. Multiple examples.

The first in a series, I said, as if I'd planned it all out.

Must be because we ADHD-ers have a different sense of time, like the dolphins in Madeleine L'Engle's A Ring of Endless Light. (Our skin also feels like resilient pewter. Check it out!)

It's very theological, like Paul Tillich's The Eternal Last Minute. We are always in the End Times, just before the essay is due.

She also sent me four emails in a row telling me to hurry up and get on with my writing. (IRL, I'm waiting for her comments on Chapter 4.)

Ignore it and it'll go away (unless it won't, and then you have to find another strategy).

It seems like it's gone from 0 to 60, like in the Rihanna song where driving is sex, all at once.

That'd seem to be a thing, but I don't have anything in my notes that explicitly says you can change a vowel to a consonant.

That's why I'm still confused about vowels.

Dreams Had Under the Influence of Large Sushi Meals Eaten in a Carpe Diem Fashion Because Restaurants Are Closing Indoor Dining Areas Again Due to the Plague: Y. and I are both childish because we don't want to jump into a cold swimming pool, according to Mom. So I dive in.

Her practical and well-informed nature lends itself to leftist DIY zines of the Concordia Co-op Bookstore sort, and one of these describes how to use old "computer tubes" to fashion rescue snorkels if you fall into ice water. According to the pamphlet, it's important to use flexible tubes for this, not rigid tubes from sex toys, or else you'll drown.

Spaghetti squash attacked my historical linguistics textbook.

"Yeah, maybe you should go back to bed."

I didn't tell him about fearing I'd have a panic attack on the bus, and when I hopped on another bus continuing downtown the conversation had made me feel better.

That has nothing to do with anything, it seems.

That seems a fair assessment.

I don't know what I'm talking about.

But I got 100% on the midterm!!!

What's if this journal survives into a future where "doodle" means "penis" or something?

Dreams: I'm staying as someone's houseguest when a man-and-woman duo spontaneously perform a vaudeville-type song called "The Bends" - about diarrhea. The man claims he gets it if he eats too much beans and rice. Why rice?

What is this "drafted with her an email"? Am I being Badly Influenced by German word order?

He was both disappointed and pleased with the results. 		210503
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e_o_i (the rest of my last journal; I notice an unexpected amount of references to Tolkien)

...

But am I really on top of things like that when I'm not externally busy? (On top of people. But not in a sexual or in a trampling-their-rights sort of way.)

It's not like I want to be disorganized.

We're in one of the larger classrooms, which has gotten bigger and has a large window overlooking silvery and glassy skyscrapers.

Improbably, when we're listening to the concert, he leans forward and kisses me on the cheek.

"How deserted lies the city,
Once so full of people!"

The latter was possibly a parody and people laughed at it for its spelling, grammar, and phrasing - but then the "remove" phrase got picked up by genuinely racist types.

The first part was just about a misunderstanding I had with Janet where she thought I wanted to buy some clothes she was selling on a site called Poshmark.

Anyway, my whining came with no threats of violence or morbid remarks attached.

This dream, though, carried no overt awareness of the pandemic - which was refreshing, although it touched on other anxieties.

I saw a bridge, a sunset, a giant but unthreatening beast.

"Look, he has pocket nipples," I said, which made them laugh.

A picture that accompanied it, or at least one that I envisioned, resembled the open-pit underground factory shown in the Fellowship of the Ring film, the one Saruman has hundreds or thousands of Orcs working in to fuel his military-industrial ambitions.

Even if you're just the least bit Freudian, you might appreciate this as a punnish reference to the second part of my conversation with Elizabeth - well, you wouldn't, because I hadn't mentioned it.

All that to say that the joke is about being in the closet.

Luxury should be rare and unusual-looking.

Then I was outside, and a pleasant-sounding woman who was now stern - a teacher or trainer, evidently - told the group I was with, all young women, that we had to grab a spot on a robe ladder with wide rungs that stretched down from this dock and rested in the water, only we weren't to go on the rungs that were too close to the water.

Was everybody sick at once, and how would we all take care of ourselves??

"I don't want it to be an iPhone 8," was my frustrated thought.

One thing led into another, but a common refrain (said at least twice, okay) was the relative unimpressiveness of Estonia compared with the great cities of Middle Earth.

The rest of the dream involved a sexually explicit encounter with a made-up-in-the-dream character, which I'm not withholding from the page only because of embarrassment (like, what's if the Clerk of Presbytery of Cambodia reads this? ...It wouldn't be "of Cambodia," would it, but of a city. Curse you, cities!) but also because it's late and I need to get going.

Speaking of puppies: my parents somehow got booted off the waiting list of a "goldendoodle" breeder, so now it's back to Square No Dog.

Is "stratographic" even a word?

The context was me putting a tea bag into the compost box after turning off the computer I was using to study Germysprach.

Anyway, I'm impressed with the song, I hope not just because I'm a morbid terroristika searching for something outside herself to be sad about, but because the melody, especially the instrumental bridge, grabbed my mind and heart, which then told my fingers, "Here, fingers, you have to learn to play this song; it has vaguely Lord-of-the-Ringsian chord changes!"

There's also a talk in the
Palais des Congrès, 17 years after the 2001 events, about sex robots in literature.

But xylitol, not saccharine.

That I'd say is my primary responsibility in terms of "responsibility to others" right now.

She probably wants me to hurry my lazy ass up.

And then she goes on to joke about how food could contain secret additives to help people become computer programmers.

But she's cheerful enough now and besides, that didn't happen to me, so there won't be things I'm sensitive about (as if that logically follows).

Her justification for this, I think, will be amusing: "Aviva and I are closer cousins because we're the same age, but Elise isn't my cousin as much because she's older."

Then I realize that I've got my imaginary three-sibling families mixed up.

So, I rise - like Lady Lazarus, just less suicidal.

One old woman stood near the wall and she scared me by opening her mouth wide.

All of the mansion's dwellers, I realized, were ghosts.

They're not too far away from each other, are they?

Anyway, my point was that she probably recommended it with the thought, "OK, here's a famous novel about Jewish Montrealers if she hasn't read it already," not "the Kirstenblob can get schooled in comic timing and structure courtesy of Richler-senpai" (because "senpai" would be Lia's word).

I guess now the cliché would be more "oppression Olympics" of the "my problems are worse than yours" variety, rather than "we're better 'mixers' than you" - though you do see that a bit with a few people who want to stick to the "Asperger's" or "high-functioning autism" label. Not all, of course.

THE LEFT: Organize!
ADHDers: But we're not organized!

But "hockey sticks"!! That's the Canadianest thing anyone's ever said about Sanskrit.

He said, dramatically, "You have to decide what you want to do. I believe you could be a good linguist! Or a novelist! Or an English teacher! But you can't do everything at once!"

Anyway, in one dream, Dad came in the living room and told me that my "asking for a sign in a dream" thing just wouldn't work. Talk about meta-something!!

Free Palestine, divide by zero, Philippians 4:13.

Why guilty? I'd just been dreaming that I slapped Dad in the face three times for daring to suggest that I wasn't helping out enough around the house because I was too busy going after "a little bit of education." A little bit!

Then he said, "Ah, but you didn't specify whether the fight would be on land or water."

And don't get me started on Proto-Indo-European!

I figured either religion/mythology or Whatever You Want It To Be, since the guests were dressed up too.

Hey look, I'm having nightmares from poetry books.

Even the cover, which shows a colour wheel but with two shades of green and no yellow (it works, though).

Breathe in thinking of a colour, the good things associated with it; anything negative, breathe out.

You can't count on me to be non-ridiculous for long.

My other idea, this time about early childhood education in general, is that people should place more writing - plus random math equations - lower on walls where small children can easily see and read them.

And that surprises them, because I don't have a reputation for eating lots of sugar (as if).

He's half ice-cream-man, anyway, because of Baskin-Robbins.

Especially since David is going away.

But that's the poppy calling the ketchup bottle red - you see, they're both red, just different shades and in different areas.

I'll miss him, even though he's only going to Toronto for the fall - it's after that he's headed to England.

Be open-minded like you say you are. Worry has a tendency to narrow focus.

Then I stayed up until 4:30 looking at things on TV Tropes.

And to David:
We'll always have Verdun.
Fields of Verdun!! 		210928
...
e_o_i But the universe needs to hit me in the face for things to be fair.

So gute Nacht, Journal (although I think that's "newspaper" in Germish, but yes).

I hadn't quite realized, before this, how much I'd missed socializing - especially the variety that involves conversation (and food).

Let me just fix a few names down before I get sleepy.

And Krista's husband whose name I forget doesn't seem like that.

Lacuna matata, a wonderful phrase.

At least, he thinks so.

Another of the people who had kids looked Spanish to me but said her last name was Tremblay; we talked briefly about blueberries.

The other Marie and I: impressed.

She said she'd have liked to read more about how the author defined "hanging out" for it to be a more meaningful difference, but otherwise she found the book instructive.

Yup, that's what our intelligentsia (and the Kirstens with pretensions thereabouts) strive to define: the gathering-ness of picnic parties.

And someone joked whether the "family business" was the mob, but she said it was just routine stuff.

What I thought but didn't say is that emotion is a natural part of human thought so belittling it wouldn't work either.

Maybe it does and I just haven't read about it yet.

Mostly I didn't say much then, except to ask Gretchen if her podcast was scripted (no, but they plan ahead a list of topics to cover, and edit out and redo parts that aren't clear) and later to suggest that Jake talk to Julia about the math podcast idea.

He was worried about idioms in particular - whether they translated idioms well.

Gretchen said that this was actually true of all stop consonants - the initial consonant's silent, but you can tell what shape someone's mouth made by the effect on the vowel afterwards.

Sustainable? Continue-able all the time, I mean.

I say I'm going to get to the point and then I talk about people's conversations on the colour turquoise.

It's not particularly high or dramatic, but it is The Waterfall.

So I went back along the bike path, past Cedar Park station, but started feeling nervous again at the hill passing through the golf course.

So I decided to stop at the children's park and find a bench to sit on.

"...Whether the anusvara is connected to the colon."

The joke is that David, upon first seeing the word, pronounced the first two syllables as "anus."

I had one once before, I think at Second Cup.

This is how life is confusing.

One thing I noticed about being frightened is that my mental scope narrows.

Unity in diversity, the uniqueness of easily triggered liberal snowflakes swirling forth from the Mixed Metaphor Snow Gun.

I took the peach
you were saving
for your poem
and put the "ass"
in assonance. Peach emoji.

But do snooses snoose?

As for sleep!

Waking up at night: I usually do once or twice.

Today I have nothing programmed, except in the Non-Hidden Agenda.

Is this exciting for others to know?

But a very flexible writer, I think, very adept.

"Are you complaining?"

So I can relate.

I think Cameron and Emma both said they had ADHD. I'm beginning not to feel special.

Yes, but only with American spelling.

But the device of Murphy, a main character, working as a reporter plausibly gives readers glimpses of famous movers and shakers.

After learning about what Churchill did, or rather didn't do, about the Bengal famine in the early 40s, it's hard to see him as a hero.

The perks of not being powerful.

I miss Christmas.

Something about hypothermia, best to wake her up even if she wasn't in immediate danger.

And then she woke up fully, heard what was going on, and scrunched up her face, going, "Don't call the fucking ambulance!"

"I'm all right."

If she is, then having a guitar is at least something.

It's morning, we're getting up, congregating in a lounge room near the bedrooms with carpets and velvety furniture.

Aunt Sarah is a red blob.

So she leaves, I continue working, but it's turning into a bracelet, not a ring.

I need a way to make things stick.

Someone's left a tag or pamphlet on the table and I know with dream certainty that any place mentioned in the text will be where my second cousins live.

I look at the text again and think, Okay, if you're local, that's not the only thing the town's known for. It's also a major centre for car manufacturing: the cars are assembled in Dachau and sent to Munich to be sold.

I have a vague notion that there's some current problem with them, but it'll soon be resolved so that Canadian Detroit can go back to making cars again, I'm rebelliously optimistic.

She knows the German customs around tipping. (IRL, they don't? Much?)

A pamphlet that's not about cars anymore?

But I don't know what to replace it with, if anything, and I'm behind. 		211211
...
e_o_i Don't let me try tequila straight again, though. It's just too much alcohol at once to taste good.

And there was no dessert. What's with people consuming all their sugar in the form of alcohol? Why not have it so you can taste it?

Thing was, I hadn't gotten any gifts, so I just looked for newish books lying around.

I can't argue with that, not knowing enough about French Nouvelle Vague, but I didn't think the movie was such a disaster as David seemed to. Or that references necessarily need to make an impact to justify themselves.

Nope, and I need to get up and finish an essay.

...or "hiding" in the triangle space afforded by the corner door and opening it to yell "VAGINA!"

Persistence is needed, too, as it takes a number of tries.

That's the good part of organized people: they passively help you in your own organization.

No, "chagrin" is stronger in French than English.

I got scared and rushed down, only pausing and mumbling, "You're not naked, are you?"

But I couldn't sleep for a while.

Then that man got out a square of plaster (what do you call it, drywall?) and started hammering, patching up the wall!

"Do you have to do that in the middle of the night?"

Dreams of train travel, of looking for missing objects.

When I told Mom, she insisted on me giving her all my writing notebooks, everything I'd written autobiography or fiction in, not for her to keep indefinitely but for her to look over.

I'm not trying to be fake woke (waking, woke) but honest about what I'd feel.

Overall, she seemed a brilliant writer with an enviable wellspring of ideas.

That doesn't sound so bad, does it? 		220706
...
e_o_i Stressed about work and school, I dreamed of a sci-fi dystopia - refreshingly escapist, actually.

This time, though, I get some context: Mom brings in two designer dogs, genetically engineered for cuteness.

No, seriously, but that so-called safety measure seems more for the benefit of companies than consumer.

And I hope it's not something like Aunt Sarah's gluten intolerance.

Erlauben means to allow, which is similar to the English if you squint. Squint your ears.

Props to the electric workers who repaired or rest lines at 6 AM-ish! 		230526
...
e_o_i edits (again, without two typos):

Stressed about work and school, I dreamed of a sci-fi dystopia - refreshingly escapist, actually.

This time, though, I get some context: Mom brings in two designer dogs, genetically engineered for cuteness.

No, seriously, but that so-called safety measure seems more for the benefit of companies than consumers.

And I hope it's not something like Aunt Sarah's gluten intolerance.

Erlauben means to allow, which is similar to the English if you squint. Squint your ears.

Props to the electric workers who repaired or reset lines at 6 AM-ish! 		230526
...
e_o_i Rachel professed partial cluelessness about music, but she sang tunefully and harmonized at a couple of points.

Evidence against?

Won't take meds for fear it'll hurt his lyrical genius, said Lia, and this time she was a bit sarcastic.

"Oh, me too," went Rachel.

Anyway, this interaction with church figures apparently prompted me to go back to Proverbs, seeking relevant verses or something.

Two worries: one that I can easily pretend my imagination spits out messages from the divine.

The second thing is worry that David will stay in England.

Out loud to [my brother], I ranted, "I don't want to move to England! They just speak English there! I'd rather die." Which is an exaggeration.

"This is my punishment for not having definite enough goals - making me think of eating dog testicles," I said (again, more-or-less-ishly) to David.

I feel right now like asking me about goals is like getting me to predict what puzzle piece goes in the middle of a puzzle when only the outer frame is complete.

"But if you cooked them and served them in a cream sauce? With tarragon?"

Take patriotism or pride in going to a storied university such as Oxford (a smile at David): isn't the link to the other people in your nation or the history of your school somewhat illusory?

I'll look back on this and think, "Well, I can't exactly hold him with my antennas, can I?"

Hey, the Kirstenblob focused on positives for once. Progress?

Jesus Bob, I'm too literal: my eyebrows frowned to see her [Kesha] talking about diamonds when the music video showed turquoise rings.

Are we statistically significant yet?

Blurk, a McGurk, lurking in the murk.

UNDERSTAND LINEAR TIME, PEOPLE!

"Are you sure those hairs aren't just blond? Where are they? Is ALL MY HAIR going grey??"

I'm secretly a bit smug that I'm two years and two months his senior and my hair has less grey.

Now I just have to come up with about $3,000 by next week and about $2,000 the next week.

Pretty good talking-to-people days lately.

She's in Classics and taking Advanced Latin, as well as various leadershippy roles.

She rather casually tossed out that she knows ten languages.

A retired John Abbott math teacher, she has a better overall grasp of German grammar than I do and overall seems to possess a logical, organized mind.

She and Hannah were the ones last term who decided historical linguistics was queer. In a good or at least non-bad way.

Dreams last night were unusually Jewish.

You know when you're trying to correct your EETC students' homework, but you get distracted by Knox Hill's and Scru Face Jean's breakdowns of Epic Rap Battles of History episodes on YouTube, and then you dawdle in the shower, thinking up part of a rap duel between Noam Chomsky and William Labov?

And I'm afraid Mariana will be disappointed since she thought the poem was about propositions, not prepositions.

They should team up with Nevis of St. Kitts and Nevis - Tobago and Nevis, like the often goofy Garfunkel and Oates.

Or, Dad said, you might not see any of your money, they may just go bankrupt. Way to be an optimist.

GERM is what I have a problem with.

But you can make a case for Kully in Irmgard Keun's novel having her imagination either unacknowledged or her ambitions belittled (at one point, she wants to write a novel to pay off her father's debts), and not having "good" examples of female writers.

Essays are whatever you can get away with.

But now it's somewhat dissolved. Hm. Kabbalah.

He was sort of mystical, anyway.

Even if they're your lover.

No panicking.

But I think with the composer case, I think I had some idea that I could use ideas for the Carol Winter novel, but then that made me think as I was trying to arrange my backpack and things on the chair so they wouldn't fall off, who stories belong to and whether it makes sense for me to intrude on real-life trauma with fiction.

Since Schallié had been so philosophical about narratives and agency and all.

None of the other writers were there.

Old-school, I write by candlelight.

Anyway, I think this would've been an acceptable exception.

You can be unreasonable and still functional.

Kirsten's adventures continue apace.

When I got to the window at the stair landing I paused: a large branch of the big tree at the end of the yard had fallen down.

Sure enough, yes - the "flat" part of the tunnel is a little lower in that spot and water had gathered there, a puddle meters long, still as a mirror.

Two people came to it from the other side, going, "Oh, it looked like a huge hole. Oh, that's trippy."

New goal: walk to Dorval Circle.

She answered promptly and said she'd give me another attempt.

Arrgh, the power came on just before 10 and then went off again at 10:30.

June seems to far away and May too close.

Well, I don't want to start another fire.

Bathroom - the windowsill candle is flaming up with a large flame and melting.

Thankfully the alarm worked and the fire hadn't spread to the wood around the windowsill.

Today I won a free 7-Up because of Eswatini.

In the old old days of my old undergrad.

"How old were you when you could read a book on your own? Which book?" maybe.

What is life without German placement tests? Complacent. (Move over, Plumtree's Potted Meat.)

Focus more on grammar and speaking...but what to give up?

I am on a plane which is going down a runway.

Think about language.

Bitte warten = please wait.

I almost got lost in both the Zurich and Frankfurt airports, sort of.

What I didn't mention was that I found a nice Turkish grocery store called Al Madina Markt on Jägerstraße.

And now I'm afraid of being alone.

How many letters depends on how big the place is.

Okay, I put in more drops of snot-water and we'll see whether it goes.

I still hear from her indirectly, through Facebook: I think she's a full-fledged lawyer now.

Last night, I looked up things to do in Amsterdam.

Someone recommended the tardigrades, which, as animal badasses, are the internet's new honey badger. Or not so new. Ich keepe nicht mit Trends sehr up.

So I was able to say with some authority that it'd be ausgebucht - indeed, she scrolled down and it talked about booking in advance.

ANYWAY.

And I think her exact words to me were "a shitty boss" but maybe I reconstructed that in the shower this morning.

I had a weird conversation today.

He found that funny. "Ja. Naturlich bin ich hier," and he pointed at the ground.

Is he flirting with me? I don't want to flirt, but I don't want to be rude.

Why did I keep mentioning Canada?? What's if he thinks I'm some sort of Canadian supremacist???

Weirdest place to eat lunch, so far: in a bus surrounded by the wall of a former Nazi rally site. Built specifically for that purpose. OK, the bus has started: I was beginning to feel a bit anxious, hemmed in, sort of.

The nature park around the lake was designed back in the 1820s, if I remember the placard right.

I passed a man playing guitar and singing Bob Dylan's "Blowing in the Wind."

(OK, caught up.) 		230527
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