e_o_i's_exciting_life epitome of incomprehensibility I just finished watching the first Narnia movie with my mother. I don't think I've sat down and watched a whole movie in a long time. Maybe a month, or at least three weeks. I'm impressed at movies' ability to pull you into their world, even while you're making the odd snarky comment ("If Aslan is Jesus, is Christmas his birthday? And since when is Christmas right before spring? And what do they mean about the beaver having a bath once a year? Beavers swim all the time.") Now my arms and legs feel stiff, and my throat scratchy. I hope I'm not getting a cold. I don't know where I'd have gotten it from. But I was singing a lot this morning and afternoon before work, trying to record a song. I got a workable piano track down but no singing recorded yet. The key to the instrument part is to take the accompaniment I've been developing for weeks, record it over and over, discarding the recordings I don't like, until I do something that follows the pattern while still including a small amount of improvisation. The pattern, as I have on a paper: 1. Narnia 2. CW 3. Da da da da da 4. An Indictment of Nationalism 5. CW 6. CW again - Gentle accompaniment 7. Da da da da da 8. Gentle (Pause) 9. CW - harmony piano / Leonard Cohen 10. CW - harmony / Nationalism - ending DIF 11. End on high note (What I mean is Verse 1 Chorus 1 Other Thing Verse 2 Chorus 1 x2 Other Thing Bridge Chorus 2 & 3 ...but where's the fun in that?) Of course, I'm supposed to be applying for more jobs. And writing. And cleaning. And buying my King Arthur-obsessed brother another John and/or Caitlin Matthews book. His Christmas list helpfully includes prices. "5.95 + 3.99 shipping." But the lightbulb of an idea finally lit in a fluffy bubble above my head this morning. I'd been worrying about how to record songs. The tape player is how I used to record things, but it's old now and makes too much background fuzz, nor do I have a decent microphone for it, so I can't go completely old-school. (I still collect cassette tapes, though. I got five tapes of Dvořák symphonies at a garage sale for a dollar, because hell yeah. And a radio/tape player at Value Village for $5 last year - this one doesn't seem to record, but for playing stuff, it's less scratchy. CDs are obsolete; they're too new.) Anyway, my laptop's sound just doesn't go very loud. I got J to look at it this summer. My concern then was speaking loud enough for online tutoring; J gave me a mike she'd found on the side of the street and it worked. But for recording music? I needed something with louder sound. My mom's laptop is new (because I killed her last one by spilling water on it - unintentionally - I am not always a pillaging vandal) and despite its annoying Windows 8 set-up, it has good volume. So I downloaded Audacity on it a while ago; bored permission was granted. Problem? New laptops only have one sound jack. Mine has two. When I plug J's found-on-the-street microphone into Mom's laptop, I can't hear the tracks I've already recorded at the same time I'm recording. Solution: position both computers on the piano bench and record the piano track on both at once. Then listen to the piano part on an old headset attached to Laptop Old while recording vocal track on Laptop New. And it is working, it is working! the thing I am not satisfied with now is my voice, despite drinking lots of water. It's cold outside. The air is dry. I'm not Billie Holiday. 131212 ... e_o_i Revisited the piano part last Tuesday (by then I knew I had a cold, so no feeding_the_poor_with_dandelion_leaves; that will resume after the holidays, with me or without me) and I realized the rhythm was impossible for me to sing along to, if there was any. Efforts to record it again, better, didn't work. Back to square zero. Which is a little discouraging because Canadian_Winter is the first song that I've made that I'm sort of proud of. But I have more practice and more ideas now. Of course, I've had to put things on hold because of minor viral infections (achoo!) and, coming up, physical manifestations of religious holidays (the piano being moved to make room for a small Yule tree). Now things are in front of it. It hasn't been tuned in more than five years, so only the low notes sound good anyway. On a more discordant note, it was back around the time of Ameristani Thanksgivukkah that my aunt, L's mother, was hit by a truck, but I didn't find out about it until last week. She was on her bike, the truck in front of her grazed her handlebars, she fell down and the front wheel of the eighteen-wheel truck rolled over her and her bike. As she says, the driver got out to see what was the matter instead of first backing up. When he finally did, she was still conscious (and swearing up a storm) but she couldn't move much, and at the hospital they found she had a broken pelvic bone. This would get better. It would just take a long time. ("Just.") So the accident was a few weeks ago when my immediate family, along with L, visited her in the convalescent hospital on Saturday. She's been able to walk a bit with a walker. Mom forgot the books she bought for her, but I brought mine - Theories of International Politics and Zombies - which I'd bought for $1 at The Word. So we got to talking about books, and I learned she likes mystery books. Similar to my aunt on my dad's side: into Serious Literature, but has a fondness for genre things, particularly mysteries. L's mom gained my admiration years ago for having a James Joyce T-shirt (just a picture of him and "1882-1941") but sadly she didn't tell me where she'd gotten it. (I was eighteen and I thought my life would be improved greatly if I had a James Joyce T-shirt. And some red Doc Martens, and a necklace shaped like DNA...) I hope I wasn't still contagious. After that, L came over and we had tortellini and played Dutch Blitz. She thinks I'm old enough to get married. I think I'm also old enough not to. The visit seemed to cheer her up, though, and she's also coming for Christmas on Wednesday. She's always come for Christmas. Nobody's going to say that brown-haired Jews and red-haired Presbyterians don't mix; we have proof to the contrary, including almost-blond casual agnosticism named for cherry-flavoured Christianity. 131223 ... e_o_i Kirsten = Norwegian-German cherry-flavoured Christianity. Not particularly Norwegian or German, and prefers orange. Names. That reminds me of the depressing story I'm not finished yet in Centennial_Park. Damn. I kind of wanted to go there today in real life. But dishes to wash, and subsequent laziness. Anyway, the point was, if we're going with real-life analogues, the start date should be Dec. 28, not 27. We'll see what we can do. 131223 ... e_o_i The title was only slightly sarcastic, but here I am, stuck at a university library desk, filling in for my father. For some reason, people don't want to come rushing in to borrow books on a cold January Monday. Item: there is dark chocolate on his shelf. Do you think I'm justified in taking some? 140120 ... e_o_i I feel like singing "I volunteer too easily" to the tune of "I Fall in Love Too Easily." But I can't sing because there a grad student here who looks like he's doing something serious. Perhaps he's writing down justifications for murdering me and one of them is "She started singing," so just in case, I'd better be quiet. 140120 ... e_o_i Sometimes I volunteer carefully, answering emails for an online microfinance platform. People who want to volunteer as French-English translators will say "Hey, I want to volunteer as a French-English translator" (except sometimes when they send full CVs and I feel compelled to remind them, No, we do not pay you for this) and I will say "Great! Here are some instructions. Email me back if you're hopelessly confused." ...All of this in more formal language, however. So this morning, when I saw from this guy's CV that he lived somewhere in Quebec, I refrained from my initial impulse to go, "Hey! You live in Quebec! I also live there, in Montreal! In fact, we have several translators from roughly the same geographical region! Yay for us!" Instead I sent my usual boring reply. Business, eh? ... I'm also waiting to see if something else I applied for will come back and say, "Hello, I will pay you to do this." It's only part of a job, as usual, but it may be useful. Everything seems to break and then you need money to fix it. But I'm also trying to write a long poem on Ezra Pound, which isn't very long yet, because it turns out I'll need several more biographies to get the level of detail I'm looking for. I recommend the poet HD's "End to Torment" - it's short and has some beautiful passages. 140317 ... e_o_i I'm in the library again now, and there's no chocolate. I'd non-literally kill for some chocolate. But I ate the rest of a green pepper, which is good for me, and I just got two fillings at the dentist this morning. He seems to have filed down my wisdom tooth as well. It feels shorter now. "If it gets any serious problems, we'll pull it out," he said. "Most people don't keep their wisdom teeth as long as you have anyway." But pain. And money. So I guess sugar isn't the best option. 140604 ... e_o_i Now I have a chip in the tooth exactly opposite that one. Ah well. On Friday I left for my summer vacation - my summer going-away-from-home-although-I'm-still-working vacation, my whatever - and that was with the parents to see my brother at camp and take us all, on his day off, to the Maxville Highland Games. The Maxville Highland Games were the Maxville Highland Games. I ate a bit of haggis, I bought a glass of lemonade for four dollars, and I watched men try to flip telephone poles over. Perhaps my brother, having an external sign of Scottish heritage in the colour of his hair (red - the Scots aren't the only people who have red hair, of course, but they've got the highest percentage of redheads at about 15%), is genetically predisposed to be more excited about this stuff. The highlight was hearing a bagpipe competition - the high-grade groups did more difficult songs I don't usually hear, and the drumming was amazing - and hearing and seeing the massed bands at the end. You hear Amazing Grace on pipes and it's a clee-shay; you (I, rather) hear fifty different bands playing it at once and it's properly grandiose. Camp was interesting. I saw three of my former campers among the staff. Ones who had been twelve and thirteen were sixteen and seventeen; one who had been sixteen was nineteen and going into university. In the lounge was a globe covered with little bandages. I laughed at it, thinking some kid had made a mess, but when I bent to look at it I saw bandages on Ukraine, the Middle East, Nigeria, another African country to the mid-north (Libya? Mali? and why? I didn't want to take off the bandage to check) and other places that had suffered recent problems, so I figured it was part of one of the family camp activities. Healing the Earth, one bandage at a time. Right right. On Sunday, the day after the Games, I followed the camp tradition of swimming to the other side of the lake and back. I was swimming with two of my former campers, one who was a lifeguard and the other in training to be one, so I figure they'd rescue me if I tired out and started to drown. I didn't, in fact I was less tired than I though, but my brother started out when I was far ahead and could barely recognize him - I wasn't wearing glasses in the water - and he finished before I did. Then I left with my parents for my aunt's house further west, near Kingston, where I am now. My aunt has an art store and I'm working on some batiks - the material to do that is fairly specialized and not easy to get. I'm also writing, tutoring a bit online, and eating absurdly healthy food, courtesy of my local-food-fan cousin and cousin's girlfriend who also live here. It helps to have a hunting license and to live with a mother who has a country property with great garden potential. My garden is less than a tenth the size of theirs. ...But I'll stop for now. I feel a little wary of using the wireless for non-work things; the payments are fixed and monthly, so it doesn't affect that, but I have to keep their power bar on in the other room. (From whence cometh the diaristic impulse? From within. Like diarrhea. I mean, they begin with the same letters. I used to dislike calling my journal a "diary" because of this resemblance. Children are weird.) 140806 ... e_o_i I was craving a plantiful existence. Time spent picking strawberries sated that desire, as well as a weekend trip two weeks ago to see my brother's summer camp, where I used to work. In turn. Now I can close my eyes and picture the docks, or the time I spent taking a picture of a moth using Mom's new camera. You zoom and crop afterwards. Zoom-lensing too much before makes the picture all fuzzy. Perhaps I spent too much time with the camera and not enough time with plants. But I spend enough time looking at sea and rocks and feeling the dock creak under my back. More recently, I planned something ahead of time... entirely by accident. That is, I planned for a tutoring course one session ahead instead of the one I had today, and then I had an hour to prepare the class. I was frantic. Thankfully it turned out all right, and now I have next class mostly organized! Let me take my successes where I get them. If I can be organized by accident, surely that says something! Something like "A broken clock is right twice a Salvador Dali painting" from not_quite_truisms, perhaps, or the think about portals_of_discovery. I'd hardly call myself a person of genius, though. 150625 ... e_o_i I get lonely when I'm staying alone, but I eat better (unless sugar comes into the picture, which it does from time to time). Wednesday night, though I was very tired, I cut up the plantain I'd bought and fried it in peanut oil with some onion slices. The smell of that! The smell! It was just glorious. Now, the taste was a little too sweet, but the smell was beautiful. But the taste was still quite good. I ate it for supper with green pepper and carrot slices on the side (half a green pepper, one carrot). Last night - squash soup, a small piece of homemade cauliflower-bacon-olive pizza, and leftover potato salad. For lunch I had potato salad too, but added a bunch of things to it: sliced black olives, parsley, basil, green onion, dandelion leaves, and two garden tomatoes on the side. For supper I was lazier. Tonight my first course was steamed green beans and snow peas plus a sliced carrot. Now I'm eating a sardines interspersed with grapefruit slices (half a grapefruit worth), which tastes surprisingly good. No grains, because I ate eight graham crackers as a snack (see what I said about sugar). 150807 ... e_o_i Finally finished the editing and now I get an email, "Oh, here's some appendixes to proofread too!" Ah well. Life isn't bad. I'll sleep first. Hmm. Tomorrow I was planning to go to a protest. Nothing very personal; it's just about this "pick up artist" that says awful things about fat people, for one, who has a talk in Montreal. I wouldn't go if it were to harass the man, who after all is a person and not a business or government group, but it's more to speak out against bullshit. Yes. That's a very precise activist motto - "Speaking out against bullshit, since 1968!" (Why 1968? I've no idea.) Well, I guess I'll see what time I have. I need to stop blather-writing, too, alas. Good night. 150807 ... e_o_i (My sentences are all mangled, bleh. I really do need sleep.) 150807 ... flowerock Because of this I craved cooked plantains thismorning... but I have neither plantains nor stove... 150808 ... e_o_i I was just thinking, if you want something smaller and cheaper, there are stovetops - a burner or two without the whole inside part. My mom and uncle's cottage has one (my parents used to keep a stove there but it got old and fire-hazardy). 150811 ... e_o_i But who am I to tell people what they "should" have? People tell me I should have my own phone, though I don't think it's worth it yet. 150811 ... e_o_i My mom just told me "enough is enough" - I should stop "looking up berries on the Internet" and start cleaning up. There are times when every mother has to say this to her child, I imagine. 151221 ... e_o_i Finally feeling better. I was kind of sick since Thursday, but not sick enough to skip working. Friday night I had to wrap up an editing project after work and then submitted some poetry to Room Magazine's contest. One of those poems I'd worked on for months (on and off). Dunno if it reflects that (in a good way). Oh yeah, and I got it in half an hour before the deadline. Early! And then, the next day, I see an email announcing they'd extended the deadline until July 30. Sigh... But why sigh? July 15th was also the deadline for Vallum's poetry contest, but I didn't submit this year. First of all, I have about a zero chance. Second, the poetry there isn't really my style, though I always find a few things that I like per volume. Vallum volume. Not vellum, not Valium. See, I'm too silly for them. But that's okay. 160717 ... e_o_i Huh. Vallum's extending its deadline to July 31st too. Maybe people aren't submitting as much as they hoped? And literary journals, even relatively big ones, aren't raking in cash. So the $15-35 they charge for entering contests might be an important source of revenue. 160720 ... e_o_i Since 2016, I've been working at the same job. Well, the tutoring has been a constant. With the admin work, I've been fired and re-hired and fired again. This past fall I thought things were going better between the boss and me, but after my class one day he mentioned that he was withholding a refund/discount/whatever from one of my students until she took down the bad review she'd posted. My reaction - it was 2 PM, I'd just finished a class and was hungry for lunch - was an eye-roll and a muttered "How would that work?" or the like. Then, as I wiped down the whiteboard, he asked me to explain and I said something like: "Are you even allowed to do that? She can write bad reviews if she wants. It's a free country." I probably wouldn't have said that if I were looking into his face and not at the whiteboard. Anyway, it didn't go over well. At first I thought, "Oh, I shouldn't have said 'it's a free country' - it IS a stupid phrase, since no country is completely free - and he'll think it's a jab at him coming from Iran." Missing the point as usual! He didn't think that, as far as I know, but he said I was being disloyal to the company by criticizing his business decisions and also playing favourites by defending my student. I wasn't, but... To be fair! I was rude. To be fair! The student had been difficult to the admin team. To be fair! His was a shitty idea. Blackmailing people for writing bad reviews? Anyway, he took me off admin work. I hadn't really liked a lot of what I was doing, but I felt disappointed, worried that I'd failed in being professional and in maintaining harmony. That summer and fall I felt anxious for other reasons - my lack of organization, I feared, was preventing me from finishing the novel I wanted to write. And writing was the main thing I wanted to do in life. I was taking weekly creative writing classes that would soon be over because the teacher was moving to the States. I also missed CD - why do I call him that? his first name's David, that shouldn't be too identifiable - because he wasn't taking the fall session of the class, being busy with his thesis. Then I had an idea that could connect a couple of disparate elements in the novel, so I started to work on it with renewed focus. But now I'm late for supper. Coronavirus-precautions-induced family togetherness, to inject some topicality. 200419 ... e_o_i Oh! Before that, in the spring, I went on a plane for the first time in 12 years. Montreal to Halifax. I was low-key scared (as the kids might say) and I scribbled in my journal the whole time. But I got free orange juice. Then a bus from Halifax to Antigonish, and I arrived in time for my brother's graduation. Major in Celtic Studies, Honours. My parents had driven there in a car - not their electric one, they swapped with a neighbour for the week - but I couldn't go with them because I had tutoring and a choir concert. Anyway, we didn't have enough tickets for all 4 of us to go the lobster dinner afterwards, so my brother threw his ticket away in a show of solidarity (he could have given it to someone else). Anyway, we had dinner at a Chinese restaurant. My parents and I went to the "reception," which had no free food or ceremony; it was just a DJ- dancing-drinks affair. One girl with a 50s swing-style dress and pink hair had some energetic dance moves, which that made me happy but nostalgic for some past I didn't have. (No, I wouldn't like to be a young adult in the 50s, but maybe to go to that school? I dunno.) The place wasn't obvious to get to either. We walked through the dark, me in wobbly heels, going around a hall with weird vaulted windows that made it look like a cross between a gym and a castle. The next day saw us visit the Gaelic College, which wasn't holding classes yet but had an open gift shop, and visit a Presbyterian church where one of Dad's old students preached. I bought James Michener's The Bridges at Toko-Ri from the books-for-sale shelf in the basement and played on the piano in the storage room while they talked. Then we drove up to Cape Breton and checked in at a hotel that was actually the top floor of a cabin. We walked along the shore, which had pastel-coloured rocks in different shades. My brother left his shoes and socks behind a rock to go wading, but both of us forgot about the tide coming in. I caught them before they washed away but not before they got soaked. It was early May and pretty cold, but Y. was stoic. The cabin was set up like a cottage, with children's books on a shelf and a fireplace - I don't know if it worked, there was central heating. Anyway, it was pretty cozy, in a nice way. The next day we stayed in New Brunswick and visited Grand Falls. I was torn between mocking the $40 zipline and going on it, but it wasn't open until June. The waterfall was more crashing, roaring, and voluminous this time of year, anyway; it looked like a milkshake, churning itself white and yellow. I went on a wooden bridge and took some pictures/videos. When I got home, I did almost absolutely nothing. The next day was back to work. 200421 ... e_o_i I just asked my brother "Did you see what you were finding?" when I meant "Did you find what you were looking for?" On Thursday he's leaving for the summer camp but just to volunteer. They can't afford to pay him. There are little retreat things and individual groups, but there won't be any of the regular kids' camps. Anyway, he was looking up something about the camp. 200608 ... e_o_i Dealing with: anxiety (wrote about it there), a misunderstanding about a payment owed. But also: I finished the 4th chapter of my novel! And I am: misusing colons! (I mean, they're for digesting food, not smuggling baggies of cocaine in, right?) and : now : I : am : goofy :: why 200818 ... e_o_i THIS summer my brother's getting paid for working there. Gratitude - money-related, which is why I thought of it: the people I was proofreading for gave me $150 instead of $104 for their last installment. A mistake, I was afraid, but no, they sent a nice note explaining why: a little extra, they wrote, so you can get a coffee with your boyfriend (one of them knows him). How do these people live that coffee costs $46? (Just joking, I'm not THAT literal-minded.) But it was sweet! Even though it made me think, "Well, I can't do that - he's in a different city." 210813 ... e_o_i And this summer means more travel than the last. Not far, just 1) to Toronto to David's house for a week (after an exhausting evening helping him pack up his remaining things from the apartment, the visit was more relaxing, despite apprehensions of the future and spurts of work) 2) to my parents' cottage these past two days, where I saw the shooting_star (the cottage is my uncle's too, and Dad's hoping that if he cleans up the said uncle's unwanted stuff from there that he can help resolve a feud between Mom's two brothers - good luck, Dad) 3) and, fingers crossed, to my aunt's at the end of August and start of September, where I might finally get to make new batiks and David might visit for the afternoon (I cautioned him that it'll take longer than he thinks; Toronto to Kingston is one thing, but this is an hour north of Kingston) Exotic travels in Quebec and Ontario, because who said globe-trotting had to be trotting all over it? You can trot on a small portion. Now that carbon footprint is a concern, especially. But next year, when the loved one goes off to Oxford, I hope to visit at least once. 210813 what's it to you? who go blather from