June 8, 2006

Last night I had a dream that I was meeting my mom to go see a movie. In Toronto no less, but when I arrived in the city I realized we hadn't said which theatre, or even which movie, or what time.

But luckily I had my cellphone with me, so I could just call her and make arrangements.

Until I realized that I didn't know her cellphone number and she didn't mine, and so really I had no way to get in touch with her at all.

I went to the theatre anyways, and hung out in the lobby, hoping I had picked the right one.

I woke up this morning and didn't feel so hot but hadn't managed to put it all together until just now, when the Decemberists came on the itunes. Damn you itunes you're better than any therapy.

Losing a parent early is like having a knife thrower behind you at all times, and you don't know when he's going to strike.

Okay now that's that's been dealt with, I guess I can stop acting like such a whiner and get to work.

March 6, 2006

I should write a book called what colour is your Self-Destruct button.

I was actually born with a self-destruct pedal, which is right next to my accelerator, which is why I spent last night drinking Baileys and watching the Academys race-cam get trained on Jamie Foxx every time someone on stage said the word black.

Oh yeah and watching Jon Stewart go pedal to the medal with his self-destruct button. What was up with that? So not even kind-of-funny.

I really missed my mom last night. So I walked up the hill to the house of a friend to get lost in tv-land for a while.

November 13, 2005

The unveiling was really amazing.

This whole thing has been..I don't know what to call it a reckoning or a resolution or a return and words have failed me and they're going to fail me again now.

I am listening to the Joshua Tree and feeling the entire book of my life fluttering through the valves of my heart.

I would put the letter I read to my mother here but my father quite wisely said; "what you just said was very beautiful - don't blog it okay."

When I was 16 years old I used to sit in my bedroom listening to this album and draw pictures and write poems and think about all the things I would do when I was a grown up. which would be now I guess although I don't really believe that.

I can't believe it's finally coming to a close. I can't believe I stood there over my own mothers grave and talked to the women who gave birth to me and doesn't exist anymore. I am going to put one sentence from my letter in because i think it's the only thing I have managed to get right.

"I miss you. I miss everything I lost last year. I miss being a child and I miss certainty. I miss being your daughter."

There was a lot of crying - but it wasn't sad it was amazing. People are amazing. Not because of their strength but because of their fragility and their courage. I am so thankful for the people who came and stood with my brother and I and shared that moment with us.

Families are strange and funny and moving and irritating and constantly shifting organisms. I think that for me at least the rules of membership are not defined by blood or by nomenclature. Maybe only our histories need to pull us together and apart and then together again.

November 11, 2005

I am leaving tomorrow for my moms unveiling. This is the pre-flight documentation as such.

I just burned an entire pot of noodles trying to book a ticket to toronto and answer email at the same time.

It turned out that I knew the dude who was working the phones over at VIA rail - small world. We shot the breeze a bit - the noodles caught fire. Such is life.

Now I am calling all my famblys to invite them to my moms unveiling which is this Sunday.

There is this laundry issue that needs to be worked out too.. I think if I had one of those star-trek lapel pins that I could talk through I would be doing so much better right now.

Woah weird, one of my cousins has a Philippino Nanny. crazy...

Now I am talking to my Bubi she is doing really poorly and wants to pay for perpetual care. That's when you plant flowers around the grave forever and ever amen.

Of course half way through the Bubi conversation I realize I have forgotten to find somone to do the service.

So now I have to call aunty Ruth Ellen and panic.

First I am calling my best friends mother who is a member of the temple sisterhood to see if she can help me. Why is no-one home on Friday?? Worse yet, why don't they have answering machines.

Now I am calling my best-friend in Whitehorse to ask why her parents don' have an answering machine.

I like this it's like writing as instant catharsis - it cannot be possible that they are not home either No-one is at home.. Okay just left long garbled message on best-friends machine.

This is such a primo garage sale. I am bungling a memorial service - I am such a grade A jerk.

It is less and less likely that I will be wearing clean clothes at my own mothers unveiling.

I love my best friends mother; (Reading through on edit that was not meant to sound as Sally Jesse as it does. I really do love my best freinds mother - she's a nice lady who has helped a lot, but I do not Love my best friends mother.)

"...Unveilings are really very unformal, there's no service you don't have to do very much - find some poems your mother liked, say the Kaddish. When my mother died my brother and I went, we said some words and then we went to have a coffee. "

Thanks BFM.. I am gonna relax now, and make some dinner

*** - two hours later - ***

Bags are packed with dirty clothes.

Dog stole piece of chicken off plate while my back was turned and then cowered while I screamed at her for being both incredibly disobedient and incredibly stupid looking making her cowering bad dog posture under kitchen table.

Went back to torched noodles and made a rather tasty tomato sauce with pickled eggplants and ate that on the blackened pasta while talking to friend in Whitehorse.

I am off tomorrow, wish me luck.

October 13, 2005

I am at the new art building monitoring for the swank-dank new computer room. It's like a G5-a thon in here. But I should be debugging my sites and there isn't a PC to be found in the art department, the art department think PCs are lame. Worse luck for me, I have nothing to occupy my head.

The Scottish monument salesman finally called me back to make excuses for why they spelled my moms name wrong twice. I didn't even get all up in his face about it I just meekly said yes I understand a few times, when really I didn't.

But I talked to Jane afterwards and she said all monument places spell names wrong -it's not like I am receiving especially bad treatment. So I have decided to shut-up about it from here on.

But before I shut-up...

Yesterday I went to to discuss another web project, it's a site for conference that I was supposed to be at the week-end my mom died. I am enjoying the project and the people I get to work with are great, but it's a little bit of a mind-fuck all the same.

At this meeting the art director was showing us samples of the works to be featured on the site. There was this one picture of a small outboard motorboat on lake Ontario that really gave my heart a bit of a kick in the nards. In the picture the sky is grey and the water is blue grey and the boat is an even lighter grey. The horizon is a thin line of green brown. That's all there is, it's a really simple picture, but I think I am going to paint it.

When the picture came up, I was sitting in the meeting and feeling really kind of bad. Jealous that I had missed this awesome event and then guilty/ grieving at the reminder of the circumstances..Sitting there feeling like a bitter old pill and playing this painful game of, "What if my mom hadn't died - how would my life be different" in my head.

When I looked at this picture, I had a vivid feeling of sitting on the boat with wind in my face and lakewater mist hitting my face and arms, the smell of gasoline from the outboard and the low hum coming up from the thin metal hull. Then an equally vivid sensation of being at the shiva sitting in a black dress in the damp august afternoon on moore avenue in toronto, and I wondered, where I was when this man was on his boat, and then about the idea of bearing someone away across the water instead of throwing them underground to be topped up with a heavy stone.

So I am going to make this painting, and then maybe I will give it to my brother, who has another picture I painted of my mom standing with her bicycle on the shore of lake Ontario when she was, I imagine, about the age I am now.

October 4, 2005

so from a moving and probably psychologically enabling experience this whole headstone thing has turned into farce.

They spelled my mothers last name wrong. Not on the stone itself but on the sketch they sent my brother instead of me. And the image is positioned like a little weed on the side of these huge block letters.

Oh well, I guess the important thing to remember is that another private and better memorial will take place with my brother and I at some later date and it won't involve dealing with some lazy disorganized and (for the first time i am angry about this) not so very customer-oriented monument factory at lawrence and bathurst.

This is making me think all about the relationships people used to have with monuments - how important they were and how each different type of stone had a certain meaning and how masons were like the top dawgs of the artisanal economy in the middle ages.

I don't think in my present cultural mileu I am that notionally attached to a stone holding my mothers mortal remains in the same place until the day of judgement so that I can find her again once the dead rise (Thanks Dylan!).

So really this whole thing gets a little weird after the fact, now that I am not afraid of the process (more annoyed with) and there are so many spanners in the gears I would be suprised if I am forced back out to the creepy memorial park before first snowfall.

What would I and my family have done to make commemorative gesture for my mother if we had't decided to go with a by the book Jewish funeral. That's my question for once this whole by-the-book-business is out of the way.

But thanks to everyone who comented on my previous post on this subject. Your words were touching and very kind...

(ps: Ruth I now think what you are referring to was our confirmation retreat - not the same one as the young mc retreat. We would have been about 15 and way past the young mc stage... does that sound right?)

September 28, 2005

Last night I finished the drawing for my Moms headstone. It's really simple and didn't take all that long, but I have been putting it off and avoiding for about 12 months now or more.

I thought I would write a bit about the avoiding. Safe here, listening to my itunes randomly produce all the songs I spent a year listening to while I tried to come to terms with this new life experience.

My Bubi kept bugging me about the unveiling and when it would happen and saying; " I don't know how much longer I will be around.." and when you're 95 years old that is not an idle threat.

And I started to feel worse and worse about not having done anything, seeing as my job was the easier compared to my brother having to manage the estate. Until this whole thing of commemorating my mom who was lying under the ground began to feel as nasty and defeating as the Torah portion I couldn't memorize for my bat-mtizvah.

I feel a little better now that I have done it. Much like I felt better once I sat down with the tapes and just memorized the damn portion but now it's almost winter and to all intents and purposes we are late late late and my mothers been lying out there near King city with nothing to tell people where she is or anything about her at all.

The worst part is that this feels so selfish, because I am aware that the reason it's taken so long is that I am scared to death to go back to that place.

I'd rather spend a night underground where she is than have to be standing over her grave. I know that sounds melodramatic but it's true.

Last night I had a dream of what we could do instead of having a horrible unveiling out at that remote jewish cemetary, where my last viable memory of the funeral is of my brother and I climbing backwards into a limousine and speeding away from all the people I loved who weren't allowed in the car with us.

In my dream we are having a giant breakfast in a big white tent with lots of crepes and maple syrup and everyone we love drinking yummy coffees and eating unkosher but excellent breakfast sausages.

In short, I don't want to go to my mothers grave, I would rather eat pancakes. I am certainly not going to chastise myself for this, because it's probably perfectly logical. Maybe, or maybe not, it doesn't matter that's all part of the lean into it mentality, and if I wanted to chase down what drives this fantasy it's probably the fact that my last good memory of my mother alive is of eating breakfast with her, my brother and my partner at the time, at her apartment when I visited in June of 2004.

Ahhh...sigh, okay there goes some of my tension.. I don't know though, I think this is going to be scary until I actually go out there. What a cliche.

Now that I feel better, here's a picture of what we are putting on the headstone.

This goes with a quote from Leonard Cohen;

"There's a crack in everything/ that's how the light gets in."

September 20, 2005

I was chasing mice tonight.

That's my new phrase to describe tasks as mundane as fixing errors in french in web texts that had apparently already passed a final edit.

I am not complaining, no way. I love making good use of the find and replace option.

More important NEWS

I am trying to be better at promoting myself. See that use of bold and caps.. yeah uh huh.

So to that end, this Friday September 23rd from 2.15 - 3.15 I will be participating in around table discussion on Blogs as Art at the conference Artivistic:

Heres the address:

22-23-24 sept | Quartier general du colloque _ homebase of conference
loft Eva B
:: 2013 St.Laurent, 2e etage / 2nd floor, Montreal
514.849.8246
http://www.eva-b.com/location.htm

Here is the program for the rest of the day. It looks pretty interesting...

***** Found the best song at Laurens today***

I borrowed her Great Lakes Swimmers CD. Actually Ned already played me this song once but I was listening to it on shitty laptop speakers and didn't get the full effect. The song is called Moving Pictures Silent Films. I will link to it following this blurb.

Don't listen to it if you are feeling too happy about things. It will be so much better if you are feeling a little like you feel those days you are wandering around by yourself in a vacant lot listening to headphones ...

Moving Pictures Silent Films

nb; I just removed a whole lotta text about parents dying etc.. because it sounded fake and it was.

There are some feelings that I just can't bring myself to blog and the ones I feel when I am listening to this song are of that type.

Oh here's the website : very pretty

Great Lake swimmers

Here are the lyrics to the song, don't trust me trust the great lakes swimmers.

Oh wake me please when this is over
Oh when the ice is melted away
And the hunger returns
I will feel the same but older
And I'll be twice the man that I thought I was

Where have you been?
And what have you done?

I've been under the ground
Reading prayers from this old book I found
Under the ground
Saving it up
And spending it all
On moving pictures
Silent films
Moving pictures
Silent films

Oh is this the dream I've been saving?
Oh where the heart beats slower and slower
To almost nothing
Almost nothing
Almost nothing

I took care for longer
At least something beautiful
Out there in the spotlight
But turned around softly
Turned around squinting

It's all they heard was headlights
And then the truth
The truth was unbearable
Oh and iminent
Bearing down on these two shadowed animals

Called painting a dotted line
Called painting a dotted line

Where have you been?
And what have you done?

I've been under the ground
Reading prayers from this old book I found
Under the ground
Saving it up
And spending it all
On moving pictures
Silent films
Moving pictures
Silent films

September 14, 2005

A Terrible Sadness

One of the developers of my favorite CMS commit suicide On July 16th.

I was out crawling the forums and found the above announcement.

If you read down the post it's a really touching thread. It's also an amazing example of how much community can build online.

I really like textpattern, I like the community as well as the thing itself.

June 20, 2005

The subhead for this entry should be Jewish Guilt from beyond the grave.

I am trying to cheer myself up. To that end I am blogging just before leaving to catch a train to go to the T-dot to buy a monument for my mom.

I don't really want to go. I have all sorts of good reasons, I am really busy, I am trying to save money etc..

Mostly, I just don't want to go to another sweet-smelling death boutique, and pay for something that is going to pin my mom even more firmly into the ground.

I had a dream last night and my mom was getting mad at me for focusing too much on other things in my life and not her. Weirdly enough we were both naked sitting side by side, while having this angry discussion. Weird too that she was actually mad at me, that would never have happened when she was alive. She either never had tha capacity for it, or worried that I would leave her if she got upset.

Not that I don't know what that feels like.

Anyways, she was pretty pissed at me last night, mostly because I don't want to go on this yucky shopping trip.

I am trying to compromise in my head so I can feel sane, and say that in this dream the figure of my mother represents my own sense of guilt and responsability, but frankly I don't believe it much, I just think my mom came back from the dead to give me a serious talking to.

Good for her. I still don't want to go. (picture stubborn daughter sticking tongue out at dead mother)

okay I have a train to catch.

June 6, 2005

I have something weird to write, I don't know even why I am writing it here. I haven't used this as a forum for my grieving process in a while, mostly because I haven't felt it as much in about a month.

Today though, I am crying periodically while I am working. It's really strange, I am not crying for any specific thing, I just miss my mom. Like I should be calling her right now this instant to tell her about my year and about this big trip I have planned, and all my work that I am doing, so she can be proud of me, cuz I know she would be.

I can't decide why it's happening more today than any other. The only thing I can come up with is that the past few weeks of my life have been pretty great. I have been feeling a lot of love and support from a lot of great people and from the universe in general so last night maybe my heart felt strong enough again to go into a new part of the grieving process.

It's not really being sad (at least not the way I am used to being sad),Its definitely not about me..if that makes any sense, I just wish so so much I could have one more chance to talk to her, and I don't get that chance.

I think actually (and this probably is going to make me seem like a wingnut for sure), but I really do lie around expecting to see her literally materialize in a doorway so we can talk, because I know I am right, and I do deserve to talk to her again, and in this one circumstance death is in the wrong.

I kind of wish this would stop for the day.

Another even more flaky feeling I have about this experience (because its not the first time I have had this sort of "possession" type grieving thing.) is that maybe the recently deceased really do get to interact a little bit with people who are still alive. Cuz sometimes when i am crying I feel like I am crying for both of us, and my mom is sitting somewhere really close by and she can't really touch me at all, but the reason I am crying is for the fact the she is also sad.

April 25, 2005

The next day - April 26th
I took this down because I thought it sounded horrible and whiny and self-hating and all sorts of bad things. Then I got an email from someone saying some really nice positive things about it. I guess some days are just bad - and maybe they need not be hidden. So now I think I will re-post it. I should add another post for today, about how I feel brighter and better and I do. But there is another longer post coming up later this week, that will hopefully do a good job of illuminating some of the silver linings to all the bad nasties that are in this post. But later. now is bedtime.

The title is from an incomplete manifesto by bruce mau. There is an exhibit on in Toronto called "Massive Change" about his work, and I am going to see it with my Dad and my brother.

From this point on you have a choice: You can read the rest of this entry on the front page and then stop reading, or you can hit continue, and read how I am really feeling. I am not sure about this day or this entry, so I thought I'd give fair warning.

Okay the rest of the front page part of my day.

I woke up feeling awful, and I went to work, and I came home feeling awful and called my dad who I love to pieces. He said; Grieving is hard and it is slow, and the parts of you that you are trying to change are not going to shift overnight. All you can do is your best, and you should focus on your strengths, not always on what you are doing wrong.

Then he told me about creative inferiority. A term coined by a swiss psychologist to describe people who suffer from a feeling of inferiority that actually compells them to work harder and try to do better than they would if they had an innate sense of self-satisfaction.

Then we read some of Mau's incomplete manifesto together. The two I liked the best will end this entry. I realize Mau is referring to the design of dirigible-cities and recycable housing units and not a persons fragile psychic design scheme, which is how I am currently applying it, but heck. If the manifesto fits, wear it.

from an incomplete manifesto:

1. Allow events to change you. You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you. You produce it. You live it. The prerequisites for growth: the openness to experience events and the willingness to be changed by them.

2. Forget about good. Good is a known quantity. Good is what we all agree on. Growth is not necessarily good. Growth is an exploration of unlit recesses that may or may not yield to our research. As long as you stick to good you'll never have real growth.

March 30, 2005

I am not really in the mood to write this. This blogging thing I have decided, is a technique I m using to avoid pursuing other, more rewarding avenues of self -expression.

That's right Cisco. I think its time I explored: On Expressing Your Personhood Through The Magic of Pastels

As I write there is paint drying (slowly slowly) to my left.

This morning I ran out of suger and had to pour cafe latte into my suger bowl and swish it around some and then I had to use maple syrup to make up the difference. I think I should build a giant easy chair stuffed with suger and call it "sweet and lazy".

Last night. my moms ghost arrived and sat on the bed with my cat, who was purring, and made me sad. I started to think about the fact that we need to order a headstone soon because apparently headstones are not like pizzas and you can't just order them and have them arrive in half an hour all piping hot from the stoneyards. So, if the family wants one before august its time to put pen to granite and start commemorating.

Of course this is not my decision it belongs to the whole family. What follows are just my ideas and not representative of what other people who loved my mother are thinking of. Also a short note on tradition. Since we are jewish and my mother was buried in a Jewish cemetary we have an obligation to put up a headstone and do and unveiling of the grave before the anniversary of her death.

So lying in bed with cat and ghost I was thinking of putting some lyrics from Leonard Cohen on the headstone because mom loved his music and bought me my first Leonard Cohen cassette when I was 14 or so at the Yorkdale Sam The Record Mans.

Then I had one of those intense body memories, of sitting in the car with my mom, on a new spring day, much like the ones we have been having recently here, her hand is on the back of my head sort of stroking the nape of my neck and we are listening to Laura Nyro singing; "Put on your high heeled sneakers, 'cause we're going out to night.."

I wish it weren't terribly innapropriate to use that line because if there was ever anyone who enjoyed the best parts of her life in high heeled sneakers it was probably her.

I was going to follow up with some of my moms other favorite artists and my car memories of their music, 'cause that's how I fell asleep, composing a mental mix-tape called 'music my mother drove too'. but I can't decide if that's just going overboard. Besides she didn't have exhaustive taste, theres's only about 4 artists.

Maybe I will make the mix in webjay and then post it. I don't know how I am going to find anything by Nana Mouskourie (especially since I can't spell it) or the song, "My Louis" by Neil Diamond though, and those are essential.

A quick image of the Neil diamond memory. It was my favorite car song for a while. I used to think I was "very cool" when we listened to it, and my mother and I would sing along;

"Hey my cherie
If I take you home
Will you make me plead?
My sweet amour
If I come to close
Will you close the door?"

My mom had this crazy black hair that would push out the window if it was open..and we would be wiggling around in our bucket seats snapping our fingers etc..

January 28, 2005

So I am on-hold for a friend who had a nervous breakdown a while back and is at home with her parents recovering.

A fitting start I think, for the entry I want to write today.

Yesterday I had a marathon coffee with two friends who lost family members this year.

The days before that I spent reading a "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius", mulling over how I wanted both to get a tattoo about my mother, and make a comic book about her being invisible and watching me cope with her death, in the vein of "A Wonderful Life"except she doesn't get to come back in the end and I have to get over it.

All this mulling and thinking and perhaps it's true, over-analyzing of lifes recent events have led me to some startling conclusions about a quality I had previously taken to be without question one of the most important and neccessary human attributes in our arsenal of coping skills - namely strength.

January 14, 2005

Listening to Dave Mathews Band and Souljive covering Joyful Girl by Ani Difranco.

It goes like this;

i do it for the joy it brings
because i'm a joyful girl
because the world owes me nothing
and we owe each other the world
i do it because it's the least i can do
i do it because i learned it from you
i do it just because i want to
because I want to

everything i do is judged
and they mostly get it wrong
but oh well
'cuz the bathroom mirror has not budged
and the woman who lives there can tell
the truth from the stuff that they say
and she looks me in the eye
and says would you prefer the easy way?
no, well o.k. then
don't cry

and i wonder if everything i do
i do instead
of something i want to do more
the question fills my head
i know that there's no grand plan here
this is just the way it goes
and when everything else seems unclear
i guess at least i know

i do it for the joy it brings...

My mothers cousin Corrine died on sunday of a disease called scleromderma.
She was called auntie Corrine by my brother and I, our families were close. We used to go swimming at their pool every summer and I would watch my athletic cousins do swan dives in the deep end and drink lemonade from tall bumpy plastic glass's.

What else is there to say about the family, Uncle Danny had a passion for bicycles, he had a poster in the basement that had many many naked girls sitting on bikes getting ready for a race. I thought it was pornographic. - maybe it was. Now I wish I had a copy of it in my living room, so I guess time can really change a person.

Kenny was a big computer nerd when I was growing up, I think I got interested in Macs watching him play flight of the bumble bees on a midi keyboard attached to a mac classic.

Janice had the coolest everything because she was about 4 years older than me, and I was jealous. When I had an eating disorder she took me to the mall to try and get me to start eating and behaving like a normal teen. It didn't work, but it was a good effort.

When I was growing up my life naturally revolved around my cousins and their activities, we all hung out in the basement or in Janices bedroom with its hang-ten throw rug and the adults did their thing in the main part of the house. I know Corrine had the good sense to raise her children with kind hearts because I remember enjoying myself immensely when we went to visit them.

Auntie Corrine was really sick for the last few years of her life. When she came to my mothers funeral she had to carry an oxygen tank.

I feel like such an ass. Sitting here being sad again, whenever I start crying now, I just end up saying something like dammit and try to stop right away because I am so sick of it all.

My brother is going to the funeral with my other aunt because he is in toronto, in fact he's probably at the funeral right now. I think Auntie Corrine might be buried in the same park as my mother, I don't think there are that many jewish cemetaries in Toronto.

I don't really know what to say. I hate death I wish it would stop.

January 5, 2005

I received in the mail today the official guidebook + regulations for my mothers burial site.

The first thing I noticed was that in a memorandum devoted to spring flower bed laying it says;

"Please be advised that any planting must be done by cemetary staff. Unauthorized gardens will be removed."

I don't remember how much we paid for this plot of earth located on holy ground situated so far outside the city limits that my brother and I will have to lobby various family members for lifts out to visit the gravesite.

I am going to vent some spleen here so that when I call the folk over at Parves Shalom I will be able to sound like a reasonable human being.

My mother loved gardens. In the summer, when we still had the house she would spend the days out back working on her roses and drinking a beer. She had a kiddy pool filled with water and she would sit on a deck chair and soak her feet too sometimes.

When her health began to fail it was harder for her to really fix things so the garden became over-run. I remember one day before we sold the property Evan and I had to go and do a massive clean-up, and I spent a few hours wrestling a 12 foot long raspberry stalk to the ground.

The hardest thing for her about moving to an apartment complex was giving up her yards.

Her favorite flowers were roses. But her plot at Parves Shalom is in full sun so there is now way a rose bush would survive there.

It makes me furious to think that my mothers remains are somewhere so bizarre and inhumanely beaurocratic as to deny my family the opportunity to garden my mothers plot. A privalege that I think is not just our right as mourners but also something my mother would appreciate as a significant gesture of our love for her, and the spirit in which she enjoyed her life.

I will write again to give an update - any suggestions about what kind of flowers grow well in full sunlight are also appreciate. I don't want annuals, I want perrenials.

December 16, 2004

This one's a little strange.

I was reading my Concordia Alumni magazine today, and happened upon the obits section in the back. Probably I should have stopped reading, I can't really deal with obituaries these days.

I didn't though, and I guess they organize tham according to age because the last three were for really young women, One who was 31, one 33, and the last, Kelly Anne Drummond, who was 24.

I went and did a little research and Kelly was stabbed by her boyfriend in October.

This made me cry and I am still crying while I write.

November 4, 2004

Just a couple of notes.

Last night after a painfuly awkward conversation about relaxation and my inability to.

I was lying by myself in the semi-darkness thinking/feeling trying to figure out exactly what is going wrong in me.

Like if you shake a clock or tap an engine, looking for the loose peice. There were a couple, most notably the fact that even while lying safe in my bed with my partner in the next room and all. I still had this persistent ache in my chest - that doesn't lay-off, not really.

So then I wondered what stage of grieving am I at? Just like that, like; if there were stages to when I addressed my attraction to women, then there must be stages to how I cope with my mom kicking the bucket.

Worse yet, than I thought, maybe I'll google it, at midnight at fucking midnight to climb out of bed and do a search on the seven stages of grieving or some such crap. Just so I can fall asleep. As if knowing; oh yes, helpless anger and high tension. I must be in stage four, the weepiness is stage three but I guess I am transitioning. Stage five is irrational decisions - watch out for that.

What if I can't quantify this? What if there are no stages to go through? What if I just have to sit here and deal. How much does that scare me.

October 8, 2004

Read this

...article about whether keeping a journal/diary is tatamount to picking your scabs. It is interesting that I stumbled across this entry today via Geeked.org since I was just sitting around eating raw cookie dough and feeling wretched. And I do want to talk about it.

Today is probably what is called "a mental health day" in the parlance of office work and " just another day where I didn't get much of anything done" in self-employed terms.

The "j.a.d.w.i.d.g.m.a.d" has inevitably resulted in a bit of a panicked "what if I am really this ineffective all the time and yesterday when I felt effective I was lying to myself", kind of a reaction.

But see, today my mothers life insurance came through and I conscientiously toddled off to the bank to deposit it. Which was weird. It didn't feel weird at first, it felt weird when I got home and really thought about it.

August 31, 2004

It's been while, I have been busy working on the estate - not doing much else. Death is really a beaurocratic exercise.

Here is a list of odd things that I found in my mothers apartment;

- A mechanical peacock toy with a real feathered tail that swooshed back and forth when you turned a switch (in the bathroom)

- The Story of O (in the bedroom in a cupboard by the bed)

- A giant bag of yarn and crochet hooks. All the yarn was for baby blankets she had started makiing when my older cousins started having babies. We also found a box with her most recent blanket and an unsigned card. Which my brother and I kept for our babies when we have them. I am sure somewhere somehow that is wrong. But at the moment I don't care.

- A folder full of letters and cards about her commencement (she recieved a phd in educational psych in 1992)

I started this entry on my last day in Toronto. Now I am home, and I have distributed some of the things that are part of my mothers legacy around my home. I tried listening to her Laura Nyro cd. I remember liking Laura Nyro when I was younger and we would listen to her tape in the car.

Now I can't really stand it.

Some of the stuff I have taken home is really just practical, large bottles of unused expensive shampoo which I normally can't afford. A great matte corkscrew (the irony in that does not escape my notice).

August 13, 2004

I am having trouble adjusting to living in my bro's apartment.

Take for example this morning. I had finished the book by the crazy toronto jew/girl (Mini review: It was less entertaining to read about a life suspiciously like my own than I thought it would be. Instead of imagining the characters surroundings I kept replacing them with my own. Up to and including the point where she and her beau go to Switzers deli-stand at the Ex for a sandwich. Candice Switzer are you out there? What happened to you? Does your dad still run the deli stand or has he retired? The weird palimpsest of my memories on top of the authors meant I didn't really read the book, I was living my own life on top of the book..)

It just occurred to me, that it would be nice if I could have granular categorization in my posts, ie the above paragraph belongs in my seriously underpopulated book reviews section and this paragraph is a technology idea etc..

Maybe not everyone is in such a schizoid topic-frenzy as I.

Anyways before meandering back to my original topic, I just wanted to mention that I had a really nice beer with my friend Jeff last night and I wanted to post his site for all to see.

It's really good to go out for a beer with someone and be feeling kind of crappy and down, and through the precise application of cold beer and really caring conversation as opposed to the kind that 's about gadgetry or impressing each other, find that I am going home yes, mildly intoxicated, but also genuinely comforted. So that's my little extolling of the power of friendship.

Okay back to the topic of being a room-mate again after 5 years.

August 11, 2004

I can't decide if I should file this under the d&d category or under whatever. It's both.

I hate Toronto, except I just found a book called "then again" by Elyse Friedman about a girl who goes to a blast from the past party at her suburban toronto home, only to find two look-alikes portraying her dead parents.

which;

a/ makes me think thank g-d my dads not dead.

and,

b/ only in toronto could I find a book by a girl jew from toronto about dead parents after spending ten minutes at a used bookstore.

About that last comment, I do feel very much like my past is here with me as I try to work through my mothers records and deal with my family, not just in terms of family histories and narratives that formerly only involved me as an observer ( the child of..) and now involve me as a subject (sort of executor) but also in terms of trying to understand what kind of dynamics I have inherited from my mom. I.e why should I get along with this branch of the family and not this, why should I be reluctant to accept help etc.. These are all conjectures of course, I am trying to weed out from my own thoughts, positions I unknowingly inherited from my mother and which may not serve me too well in the coming weeks.

On a more personal level, I am lonely and I miss my home. I would like to make the embarrasing admission that I just googled mike ( again {cringe}- I googled him first when I was crushing on him, and wanted to find out his " specs" ) so I could look at a BSDcan picture of him in a red tee-shirt. I was actually pissed because I know there are other pictures out there.. but I can't find them. How lonely/pathetic can you get? (don't answer that - I don't really want to know if it gets any worse.)

Pity me, send me pictures/aftershave samples/old socks, I live in a room with a towel for a curtain and a Raggedy Andy lamp next to the bed.

Final point, and I know I should have gone on to "the read the rest of this article" but I don't want you kids getting bored and running away just yet..

Why are people in Toronto such sucky fashonistas? 3 million people thinking payless shoes, action pants and a stripey shirt are "good looking enough" is driving me crazy.

The people here are ugly, they walk funny, dress funny, and are full of this sort of normative ennui I can't even describe. And by no means do they drink enough.

GAAAHH!!!... Next time I go drinking I am bringing the Raggedy Andy** lamp that has become my new bed-time buddy. At least I know he won't beg off at ten-thirty before any decent conversation has started.

** for my friendswho are possibly at a cultural disadvantage here is a picture of Raggedy Andy.

sigh.

August 8, 2004

I thought I would add a category for things related to my moms death, more so that I will have a single place to find all the entries I end up writing in one place - some time later on.

It's a week since she died. Actually she died at approximately 7pm last sunday and today the hour passed and I didn't even notice.

I thought that was weird, but than I thought , probably I haven't even begun to understand what it means to be dead.

I was reading eris's latest about her binary roots and it got me to think about the fact that certain of my own roots have definitely undergone either a shift in the soil or perhaps a transplanting.

August 5, 2004

This week-end. I can now add funeral organizing to my resume.

How odd.

I have lot's to say about this, but it will have to be later on.

For now, I am thinking about her a lot and spending much time with my family, my boyfriend, and friends all of whom are being very supportive.

Donations in my mother's name (Susan Rose Hershfield) can be made to Sheena's Place or to the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health