Sometimes the good overwhelms the bad

My family has gone through a tough few months. Plans fell apart, people were hurt and sad, big steps were taken only to fail, changes and more changes and reversals and then more changes have happened. Even the good things were full of stress and anxiety and really felt diminished by how much energy they were taking.

But this week, two things happened that were unexpectedly wonderful, so wonderful that I have to write about them:

I sing with a choir which is premiering a new work by a world-famous composer. Tonight, the three choirs that commissioned the piece rehearsed it with the composer himself accompanying on the piano, and his son playing percussion. It was magic. The concerts (two this weekend) will be better, no doubt, because the audience always pushes the energy way up. But there was something wonderful about the intimate making of music which has never been heard before, not the way the composer had envisioned it until tonight. I hope Paul Halley was content with this 'first time' experience.

Tonight I also won a VIP ticket to a big event with internationally acclaimed speakers happening in my home town next week. I entered the contest (write a response to my blog posting & tell me why you should win! ) completely not expecting a thing. I never win these things, and my entry was pretty cheesy (you know, sincere and quirky and stuff). Lo and behold - I won! Next week I will attend the Art of Marketing with Mitch Joel, Guy Kawasaki and others. I cannot wait to hear what they all have to say, and am hoping like fury that the presentations help kick me out of my Masters' project doldrums.

These two good things are not much to set up again the weight of sad, frightening, stressful, worrying moments we have been going through over the past few months, and I am not Pollyanna-ish enough to claim that they are. But they are reminders, I suppose, that life comes in a variety of colours and flavours, and if you concentrate too hard on the bad, sad, mad things, you may just miss out in the moments of transcendental serendipity.

Using Q-R

So, for one of my course I have to promote a social enterprise. I am much better at thinking of non-profits, but I've come up with something that I think will work, at least in theory which is all I need at the moment, at least.

I made up this Q-R, but I can't read it myself: I don't have a Q-R reader! Irony: I haz some!

Dark Knit of the Soul

I am writing two assignments at once. Being ADD has never been a problem for me. I am listening to my kids fight - it was very quiet in the house five minutes ago, but now it is very noisy. Being ADD has never been a problem for me.

One assignment is essentially finished, and is comparatively short (500 words). That is a huge problem for me. It takes me more words to introduce myself. I like to write lots of words but I do not like to cut them. So I write several hundred words over the limit, then I cry and snivel and simplify my lovely complicated sentence structures to lose words one by painful one.

The other assignment is 1500 words. I like that length - it is possible for me to stretch my arms in that space and say things the way I want to say them. I like to let a sentence meander and expand and get to know itself. However, the assignment is a case study, which is neither interesting nor difficult enough to capture my competitive nature. Because it is business writing, the assignment needs to be focused, compactly written, well defined, and obsessively organized and referenced.

Oh dear.

So I am writing this blog to propose my NEW blog: Dark Knit of the Soul. A knitting blog. Where people can post their weird knitting projects that make no sense and couldn't possibly be worn by normal people. Weirdly, no one else has used this blog name (well, it surprises me!), so I will be in on the ground floor at least.

Of course, there are lots of great sites where people post their oddly formed projects.

But the name is ALL MINE!

Okay, time to get back to my assignments.

ADD is sometimes a problem for me.

I guess.

Isn't it odd

that people I meet online, or in books, or in music, are sometimes more real to me than the people I say hello to every day?

I spend a lot of time online, I admit, and some pundits and many parents warn that millenials (a term for children entering college age during the 'new millenium') are becoming disassociative - separating themselves from the 'real world' and connecting only to people online, to people who may 'not be what they seem to be'.

I am the mother of four millenials and I spend as much or more time online as they do. And I am connected to people online, through Facebook, Twitter, LiveJournal, and GoogleReader, because we have some interest or hobby in common, like my writing group or choir discussion group, or because I admire their work, like Neil Gaiman and Stephen Fry, or have been introduced to their work by said admired people, like Zoe Keating. I follow the RSA in Britain, where smart people talk about things I know nothing about, and where other smart people talk about things I am passionate about, and I follow Smartbitchestrashybooks, where smart people (mostly women) talk about life and love and romance novels and sometimes about men's bodies. I laugh at Cakewrecks and squee at steampunk on Epbot, and sometimes I get an email from this totally obscure band that no one's really heard of, but I found out about them after one of their songs was played on this show I like...

At work, I pull staples out of papers.

Online, I am a writer who is followed by more than one hundred readers from all over the world, including at least one from the United Arab Emirates. At one point, I was publishing several times a week, and I heard from up to 20 people a day, asking why I had written that, or how was this going to end, or couldn't I just put the guys in cowboy hats, or why do I write like an American but spell like a British writer?

At work, I answer the phone and talk to people who need answers I don't have to questions they don't know how to ask.

Online, I get to participate in something bigger than myself - I can step out and join a million people standing for democracy in Egypt, or find a better way to prepare dandelion leaves so my children will eat them, or share a factoid with my cousin's 16 year-old daughter whom I have only met a few times but feel connected to when I see her drawings and she 'likes' my link.

At work, if I do it right, no one notices. And if I get it wrong, everyone does.

Online, I can be whatever I want. I can say whatever I want. I can write whatever I want.

Okay, I can do most of that IRL as well. I'm nearly 50 - I don't care what people think of me as much as I used to.

But online, I can reach out and ask a question and follow a trail and see where it goes. I can look up the strangest fact I can think of and find out something even weirder in a couple of clicks. I can find people and follow them and see what they are interested in. Do you know started following me on Twitter? Chris Garver. From Miami Ink. (I think he'll stop soon, because I'm boring.) But how cool is that? For a few days, I was connected with a tv star, who is also an amazing artist, not that I would ever let him touch me with his needle.

How, you might ask, did a big-time, bad-ass tattoo artist from Miami connect with an small-time, mother-of-four administrative assistant living in Vancouver?

Well, I could tell you. But that would be no fun. Tell you what. See if you can figure it out. Go on. It's all there. Just... follow the trail.

Stunned and overwhelmed

When I can no longer focus on what I am trying to do - for work, for school, for my family - I take refuge in the multi-layered world of the web, where it is easy to lose oneself for hours. Today I watched three RSA videos: on the evolution of leadership (for class - not that anyone else will pay attention), on the Future Mind (not hopeful), and on making mistakes (a topic I know all too well).

The I checked Facebook, and Twitter, and gmail, and all the other ways I connect - not so much with people as with ideas and trends and what is going on out there. And as always, I followed a Twitter link from Neil Gaiman and found the link to Christopher Salmon (who grew up in the BC Interior, which was unexpected) and then to Kickstarter...

I am fascinated by the fan-culture explored by Henry Jenkins - he was interviewing a professor from Athabaska U (also in Canada) talking about fan culture, which led me to think about kiva.org and freethechildren and ways people seek to influence the wider world around them - knowing that everything they do is just a drop in the bucket and rather than taking that realization as a sign that they should give up, instead getting their friends to drop a little something into the bucket too until the bucket overflows. And a film is made or a novel published or a well is built... $10 at a time until the job is done.

And this fills me with such hope - such enormous energy - all the feelings that I thought I would find in the programme I am enrolled in. But it only fills me with a deadened sense of "do it the way we've always done it because otherwise people won't take us seriously."

And I say - who cares? Who cares if people take you seriously? Do what you want, break the mould, try something new, make mistakes and learn and grow, make a mess and clean it up and learn something from the doing of it...

I am angry half the time and frustrated all the time, and then I go to my magic mirror on the world and I see people doing so much with so little and I think, "Wait. Why am I taking this course? In this programme? Banging my head against this brick wall with people who really just want me to do things their way (and when I refuse, punish and humiliate me). Do I need this degree? Do I need to be accepted by these peers? Is this important?"

And I have to reluctantly admit: it is. It is important to me to complete - if not this degree then A degree. To be accepted in this world. To have my work acknowledged and accepted. I am too old (and I mean that literally) to throw off the idea that my worth is somehow bound up with what other people think of me.

But I hope my kids will have better ways of dealing with the world.

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New Year - every fall

It's been a while - but time to find a place to drop some thoughts and let the words flow again.

I am back at school - not teaching but learning. Not learning but studying. Not studying but reading. Not reading but thinking. Not thinking but worrying. Not worrying but procrastinating.

I wanted so much from this course. Too much - I know that. Always want too much. But I feel that I am getting nothing - not even the minimum. Then I feel ungrateful and bitchy. Not wrong, just unkind.

I am interested in the concept of community and community-building. Which is the programme's focus. But it is limited in its view to face-to-face economic or social justice communities. It is tied to paper and text. Nothing wrong with that - it has sufficed for 1000 years and more. But what about the virtual communities that exist, that flourish, that succeed, and achieve, where people never meet f2f, never know the tone of each's voices or the colour of each other's skin? What about the words that fly, float, spin on screen and never fall dead on paper? What about hyper-text and inter-net and webbing-4-good?

I want more - and less. I want to write-my-own-adventure because I hate to be led, to be told, to be judged. I want less prescript and more flex - I want to write a film-script, movie-score, poem-rant with cast-of-1000s.

I want to do it myself. And not be corrected.

Writing in Concert

I found this on one of the blogs I am currently following: there is not much room in my head for reading much material, and a blog is usually just long enough without sending me into a panic over time.

Dacre Stoker, nephew of Bram Stoker, has written an authorized sequel. He and his writing partner have developed an interesting partnering technique described in the National Post article referenced. I couldn't do it myself - I am not very good at partnered writing. I tried with one on-line friend - it was fun, but we lost interest. A plan, like Stoker and his partner had, would have helped avoid that.

I know two other people presently working on their first novel after co-writing several fanfic pieces. I think it is a great exercise - I look forward to seeing whether it ALSO produces an interesting and compelling story.

Computer time =/= Wasted time

I spend a lot of time, when I can, reading on the computer. I read blogs, look up information, search YouTube for choirs singing music I might want to use. I correspond with other people interested in the television shows, bands, and writers I like, and have made some very strong and I hope lasting connections with people around the world through my varied interests.

Why do people assume that time spent in front of the computer is wasted time? I do read books - when we moved we sold or gave away close to a thousand books, and moved nearly twice that (twice now in a year). I buy books, borrow them from the library, trade them, and give them away. I love books. I want to write them, to edit them, to watch them being birthed.

I also read them online, on the computer, and as soon as it is more readily available and cheaper (any time now in Canada), I will probably read them on a handheld device - my iPod, Blackberry, or an e-reader, so I can carry hundreds of titles at once in my bag. Why do so many people roll their eyes and snicker at the idea of words being so 'demeaned'? A couple of years ago, Norwegian TV put out a hilarious spot called Medieval Helpdesk introducing the 'beek'. It illustrates with humour and grace the constant issue of change - how can one keep up, even get ahead, and not lose the core, the essential nature, of what is being changed?

I love books - the smell of old paper, the feel of leather-bound covers. I think the hand-crafted illuminated books of the early Medieval times are some of the purest forms of art known to Western Civilization. Handmade paper, brightly coloured card stock, rich inks and metallic embossing powder: stationary stores fill me with a sensory glee - I can spend hours in even such a utilitarian place as an Office Depot or Staples.

But it is words I revere - words and ideas, the challenges, the images, the concepts they force into my head. It is words that I remember, that I will keep with me under any circumstance fate may throw at me. Should everything I own be swept away by tide and time, the words I have read - the way they have changed me - the resonance they have set within me - that cannot change. Even in the worst case - brain damage or disease which steals all the words from my head - the effect of those words on how I have lived my life and affected others cannot die. Painted on parchment, incised in sand, typeset in moveable type, or produced in pixels: words will wind their way through authors to readers to auditors to the world in new and fascinating ways as long as there are people with something to say and someone to say it to. Technology - from quill to stylus - is only the medium; the message will continue on.

Re-Inventing the "Real"

Who do you say I am?

Every few months, it seems, I face the shocking truth that I am not the same person I was a few years ago, a few months ago - hell, a few minutes ago. I'm not talking here about the fascinating creepiness of the much quoted factoid that a person's skin is regenerated every seven years, although that is a thought that frequently keeps me up at night sweeping the floor of the discarded bits of myself. I am talking about the ever-lasting fascination I have with identify: the way who I am and what I do changes depending on the place I do it, and the name I use.

My mother named me within hours of my birth, but before I even came home from hospital, she had re-named me with the nickname my family uses. She says now she did it to give me a choice, and that has been borne out in my life. The trouble is not choice, but consistency - I have never been good at giving the right name in proper context, and by now, nearing my fifties, I am hopelessly confused - my 'professional' name is commonly used by people I consider intimate friends, but met on-line or through work, while my 'family' name is used by many I would prefer not to be acquainted with at all.

And the name is just one aspect of the problem. For 15 years, I taught a skill I now am paid to perform. I was a director; now I am back to being a performer under someone else's direction. I stopped writing nearly a year ago this month, and yet I have more to say than ever, and am more confident in my ability to say it well. I keep turning in a new direction, then turning back to look longingly at where I was: unhappy and frustrated as I was there.

I may never find the person I want to be, may never decide on one single persona to fill for the rest of my life. My history, my varied interest, my very name(s) argue against such integration of all the things that compel and intrigue me. I am like a fractured mirror: there are too many people in my life that are given one small reflection of me for me to ever pull it all together into one portrait. Some of that was protection, some fear, some simply circumstance. I cannot, and perhaps would not change any part of me to make a different whole.

But I find the process of disintegration and reformation sometimes exhausting. It cannot be a coincidence that these periods come on the heels of concerns about physical and mental health, about profession and money and family. I know these dark days - these questioning, troubling times - usually pass by like the storm presently dumping a month's worth of rain over the next two days. Beware of the floods, and know that the waters will recede.

And I will be a new person, washed clean by the storm.

Again.

On my way Home

I am sitting at the Quebec city airport, surrounded by glass and the cacophony of a hundred voices in conversation. After six days in French Canada, my ear is attuned to the rhythm of French, so much so that an English voice stands out. My poor mind struggles to keep up, catching a phrase here or a word there, snatching a hint of meaning before losing the thread.

After a few days of being around French-speaking people, my ear does not tune in better. It actually seems to get worse, as exhausted as my poor legs are after walking up and down hills in Vieux Quebec for the past six days. Strangely enough, my eye seems to be better focused; I find after a few days I can read and understand French almost as easily as I did in the days when French was not so much a foreign language as an exotic one - one I used only in special circumstances.

My children are bilingual. They are comfortable in both French and English, although French is mostly restricted to the world of academia and profanity (they are kids, after all). I bought them books, in French (although translations, this time, from English authors they already know). They will roll their eyes, and thank me with a long-suffering tone, I know. But there is a difference in the intention of words when you heard them in a different language. And I want them to remember that, because it is important.

Today I was reading a sign, which talked about le dommage done to a building after a fire in the 1970s. I remembered my French lessons: C'est dommage (That's too bad). But in the first instance, damage is intense; in the second, it is merely a polite saying. I am sorry in English becomes Je sui desolé in French. How much worse does desolated sound, compared to merely sorry?

Je suis desolé que my langue Français est pauvre. I speak baby talk in French, laced with numerous errors and English interjections. Even when I work a phrase painstakingly out in my head, I stumble and trip over the pronunciation (not helped by my ever-so-snotty children). One day, I tell myself, I will learn to converse in French.

A la futur. Peut-être.

On knees and pictures and yes, plans

We have had a week! Record temperatures pushed me to my tolerance level - no hothouse flower me. I am a temperate zone kind of person, and I prefer not to sweat. Ever.

After a few days at the beach with some of my family, man and I drove into the interior to visit a surgeon. Training for a marathon and then a triathlon finally paid off for him - the surgeon confirmed he needed knee surgery. On Friday.

So we returned home to send some kids off on an adventure up north then drove back (3.5 hours each way) and put him under. The surgery was fast, and his recovery has been steady, but none of this had been planned - I would have said I had too much else to do. But a cancellation meant a possible three month wait became a three day wait - not something to pass up in any system.

Next week, the big birthday bash - my sing-a-long movie is all ready, and my presentation is nearly done. It should be a fun time - I am looking forward to seeing everyone, meeting the newest baby in the family, and just enjoying the people I grew up with - many of whom are still pretty great people, even if they no longer play "Let's pretend..." with me.

Then my man and I are going on our first ever vacation sans kids. Quebec City for a week of sights and strolls and laughing at each other's French (without being mocked unmercifully by my bilingual children). I am looking forward to it enormously, and hope that everything goes as planned.

Spent the day with unplanned repairs going on around me - a new house for us doesn't in any way translate into a new house. Dryer stopped worked two weeks after we moved in, microwave stopped working before we even got here, lights clamped together to keep them from falling apart - old houses are pretty, but impractical. Luckily, handymen can be efficient, friendly, and skilled - what a difference a day makes.

Kids and I went through two boxes of pictures to the music of the hammer and drill - ten thousand pictures of first born. A measly handful of the youngest. Sigh. (More) Proof that we don't love him. So hard to be 13.

Plans for tomorrow: finish presentation and make sure it will fit on a disc. Clean kitchen and hang out laundry (hope for dry, windy weather). Pick blackberries. Find a project for daughter eagerly waiting to get back to school.

Yeah. I should be able to handle that.

The harvest begins

This past month, I have accomplished the following things:

• Moved (again), giving me the opportunity to once again face all the things I no longer need, all the hobbies I no longer do, all the passions I no longer follow, and to choose, once again, the most important things in my life to pack up and carry with me (a few blocks down the road this time, rather than several hundred kilometres)
• Applied for seven jobs, and got one
• Learned how to use iMovie
• Prepared a presentation for my mother's 75th birthday and realized once again how little photographic evidence there is of me
• Turned 48 (see previous post)
• Made plans
• Worried about plans
• Changed plans
• Made new plans

It has been a hard month. And the worst/best news is also the best/worst - I have a new part time job. I applied because... well, because it was a job and I have been under-employed for nearly a year and my employment insurance is about to run out.

But I would be lying if I said that I felt good about it - it is a job that sits on the fence between deadly boring and deeply engrossing (have to see where that falls out); it is in an area of town that makes me very nervous; and it is not a job that uses my gifts, merely my skills.

Yes, that might change. No, I don't actually expect it to.

When being interviewed, I was asked where I see myself in 5 years. I hate that question. I never have any plans that go further than a week if I can help it. No matter what plans I have ever made, someone else has always changed them. When you are in a family of six, four of whom are young enough to look to you for every kind of support, there is little point in making plans. I have a friend who asks me to commit to events happening three or four weeks ahead - I always feel sick when I agree. I never know what is going to happen, but I am always sure that my plans, at the end of the day, are the ones which will have to adjust.

That sounds whiny (and it is), but at the same time, it is reality, I think, for many of us. When a child needs the family to pull together, the family pulls together. When a partner needs more time or more support, that happens. When the whole family is affected, there has to be one person who pays attention to that. In my family, I am the one whose plans come at the bottom of a long list. Practicality, finances, time, and priorities: all have an effect.

So here I sit, at that place in my life I could never have planned for because I never really expected to be here. And the only thing I can think about is, "What will I wear tomorrow when it is supposed to be even hotter than today?"

Because that's as much planning as I can manage.

Re-thinking the face of evil

I watched an episode of CSI:New York last week. No big newsflash there - the show has been one of my obsessions for a few years now.

Last week was the Yahrzeit episode, about people selling off Holocaust items. Starring Ed Asner, it was, as expected, by turns touching and shocking, action-packed and introspective.

Ed Asner never fails to deliver, and he has this character down pat: the concentration camp survivor who wishes to simply move on and forget the past, surrounded by a society which wishes to commemorate it.

And yet, in a really stunning reversal, his character is revealed in the last few moments to be nothing like the persona he has played for a lifetime. Without spoiling the details, I will say that the moment Asner looks up at Detective Mac Taylor (whose father was an American soldier liberating concentrations camps) and speaks in German is a chilling one: one that resonates long after the final credits have run.

And that moment made me think today (while doing a fairly repetitive task) about evil.

Perhaps what is most shocking, still, about the Holocaust is the banality, the every-day ordinariness of it. I know that people will protest that term. It was an incalculable horror, unimaginable in its scope and execution. More than 6 million people put to death is a number we can hardly grasp the edges of, much less the whole.

But the people who perpetuated most of that horror did it, at least originally, ONE PERSON AT A TIME. It wasn't until late in the Third Reich that mass gassings were performed. Most of the atrocities - the beatings, rapes, starvations, petty cruelties, de-humanizing and degrading actions - were performed against individuals by individuals.

Hitler had a grand plan, but the bureaucrats, officers, and soldiers who herded Jews, gypsies, gays, and the 'mentally deficient' out of their homes and onto the trains looked each one in the eye, pointed them towards life or death, and choose to act in horrific inhuman ways. Neighbours, co-workers, even family members picked and chose: betrayed this one and not that, reported suspicious activity knowing the possible consequences, sold out people who worked and lived and taught and learned beside them every day.

It may be some kind of excuse: "We didn't know what was being done." But they knew people disappeared in the middle of the night and never came back. They knew houses were torn down, possessions were trucked out. They knew men with guns walked down the street and left sorrow and fear behind them.

And they did nothing.

Sometimes, evil is the sum total of all that nothing.

47 years old, hmmm?

No matter what you think about Idol-type pseudo-reality shows (does anyone actually believe Simon is not warned about contestants to watch by the producers who preview all comers?), Susan Boyle made the world stop and listen for nearly 3 minutes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=deRF9oEbRso

If you haven't seen this moment, or at least heard about it, you must have been eschewing all forms of media for the past few weeks.

All the obvious things have been said - about her looks, about her situation, about what she should and should not do next, about how the world judges cruelly and quickly...

Blah, blah, blah.

None of this is news. There are great artists all over the world who are never discovered, never have the opportunity to step out into the limelight, and never even begin to realize their potential. Some people get that one tiny break, and are able to ride it to stardom. Others snatch at the chance, and fall spectacularly short of their goals. Time will tell where Susan Boyle fits into that huge continuum of talent.

But what struck me to the heart was her age.

My father died at 47. One month before he turned 48.

This year, my brother and my husband turned 49.

This year, I turn 48.

I am not a believer in numerology or mystical significance. But this year has been one of great turmoil. Mostly good. But the ground does not thank the plow for breaking into it and tearing it to pieces, even if that makes it more fertile and complete.

This year - my 47th - has been a great plowing year.

I used to say that I spent the first 25 years of my adult life planting roses, and harvesting vegetables. There is nothing wrong with vegetables - they are more practical and useful than mere flowers. But I mourned the loss of the roses I had planned, could see in my mind's garden.

This year we have pulled up roots and transplanted our family. We have fertilized, weeded, and watered. I wonder what the harvest of my 48th year will look like?

Like Susan Boyle, I am standing on stage, joking with the disbelieving audience, and opening my mouth to sing.

I dreamed a dream. And planted a rose garden. (And mixed a metaphor or 12).

Stay tuned for the harvest.

Home No More

We still live here.  We will live here still for months, I am sure.  There are rooms to be cleaned out, boxes to be sorted, things to throw out and give away.  There are walls to be painted, repairs to be made, bathrooms to be re-modeled.

But this house is no longer our home.  We are looking out, looking past, looking down the street to a new home, a new community, a new city.

A new life.

It is time, and more than time to leave.  My children do not want to go, and I understand that reluctance.  But it is time, and more than time to go.  

And the house already in my mind belongs to the next family who will move in.  I hope there are children, and a dog, and a happy, noisy group of people to enjoy the neighbourhood my children grew up in.

And we will find a new place to be.