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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.