January 1, 2006

So MK's gonna kill me, because I said "Hey blog this because I can't, I am trying to ween myself off blogging..."

But it's too good...

Merriam-Webster's Words of the Year 2005

Based on your online lookups, the #1 Word of the Year for 2005 was:

1. integrity

Pronunciation: in-'te-gr&-tE
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English integrite, from Middle French & Latin; Middle French integrité, from Latin integritat-, integritas, from integr-, integer entire
1 : firm adherence to a code of especially moral or artistic values : INCORRUPTIBILITY
2 : an unimpaired condition : SOUNDNESS
3 : the quality or state of being complete or undivided : COMPLETENESS
synonym see HONESTY

The other 9?

2. refugee
3. contempt
4. filibuster
5. insipid
6. tsunami
7. pandemic
8. conclave
9. levee
10. inept

September 7, 2005

Everyone is blogging about this, as well they should, mostly for the comments.

Being Poor

Makes one aware that poverty is a completely relative condition. Even when married to the economic definition everyone is going to have different signifiers and different senses of when they have been poor.

Huh, I have been feeling a little wack lately about my tendency to be grudingly thankful. Or maybe, always a little dissatisfied, and this post is making me feel it in a big way.

I need to start being truly appreciative, and then doing something about it.

Also it would have been my moms birthday today, that just occurred to me, reason#2 to be feeling wack.

June 15, 2005

Hey there,

So I have been asked to contribute my top ten homo/queer/bent blogs for Nows pride issue.

What an honour. I am not really one for top tens actually so I thought I would see if any of my peeps could tell me their favorite queers bloggers. Than I can use this golden oppportunity to discover some good new reads.

So please, because i only have until this friday, fire away....

correction: not top ten, actually a best of....

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..

March 23, 2005

I like this, I have grief counselling on Tuesday and then on Wednesday I read rabbit blog and something wise generally gets planted front and centre in my brain causing my left eye to twitch with the profundity of it all.

Sorry, that sounded snide. I am trying not to sound snide but its always my first reaction to having a cry-ey feeling in my throat, and I am in a public space and someone is right behind me so I am not going to let it all hang out right now.

So here is the context;

well no, here's the link;
For the widows in paradise

..and here's the context;
Worthwhile digression #1 ** Nota bene this is an excellent, excellent entry. If it weren't so long ( and my grief counsellor weren't so opposed to tattoos). I would recommend tattoo-ing it somewhere on your body where you can read it without getting a crick in your neck.

and here's some more;

Something more comfortable

For people who can't/won't/haven' the time. Here's a summary,

This guy who has hard luck in love finally gets to be with the woman of his dreams after 15 years of crossed wires. Then she gets cancer, than she dies, AFTER THREE WEEKS...

He's been on a road to getting his head straight anyways before this whole badness happened. So despite his grief and rage, he's trying to cope with the black humour burlesque of his life. However, following christmas his disabled elder brother gets a brain tumour the size of a golf ball, and dies IN THREE WEEKS.

Yeah, so Rabbits been a spiritual advisor for this guy, and here's is what is going down on the blog (and if you have read all my links you can skip this)

rabbit;
Lately, I think I'm translating sadness - which is a constant, in some form, no matter how happy you are - into 1) anger, 2) irritation, 3) nitpicking, 4) road rage expressed through spitty, unoriginal outbursts like "Cocksucker." and "Fucking idiot." as opposed to livelier statements like "Ah, very nice. Way to drive, chumpy!" or "No, you first! I insist! Tonight is your night to shine!" 4) alienated feelings, but the flat, colorless kind that don't lend you any real insight into anything. I'm experiencing sadness only occasionally, through 1) sad dreams, 2) sad songs, 2) the low moments on "Deadwood." But those experiences aren't really sinking in - they're fleeting, consumed like other transient bits of media.

I'm blocking it all out. And that's a pretty normal state of things for most people. You can't always feel everything the right way - there is no right way - or the healthiest or most complete way. When you're sad you forget that happy is an option. When you're happy (relatively), you block sad out of the frame.

Blocking sad out of the frame sucks, though, because then your negative feelings take ugly, annoying forms, like self-hatred and moodiness and depression. Comparing rich, deeply-felt sadness to irritation and vague depression is like comparing a heartbreaking Italian opera to the hollow sound of nails screeching across a blackboard.

So. When you go to Europe and contemplate an odd, lonely new life or a sudden, untimely demise, when you wander around nibbling on really good cheese and tasting good wine and thinking it's all bullshit because your woman is gone and your brother is gone and who the fuck will be the next to go anyway?, what you're actually doing is exploring a warmer palette of colors to paint with for the rest of your life. You're ensuring that good will be beautiful and so will bad, that tiny little things will always matter way, way too much and music will hit you in the gut and the sky will look very very different from day to day.

So I don't know.. part of me wants the opposite of that, and Modest Mouse sums it up when they sing;

"If life isn't beautiful without the pain/then I guess I'd rather not see beauty ever again."

Or maybe it's this; - I don't want to cry to sad songs, I want to be stoic, and I don't want to "lean into it," I want it to leave me alone sometimes.

But I was talking to a friend the other day who has a black belt in emotional restraint and I said I thought my problem was a lack of emotional control and she said she thought that people should feel whatever they were feeling - regardless of the outcomes. So maybe there is a certain grass is greener here for all of us, whatever we do we never feel its the right way to be doing it.

Or here's an idea...

Riffing on this "okay to have my feelings whatever they happen to be"; I think I conflate having feelings with enacting them on other people and on myself.

Ie; people can be sad, I can be sad and not *have to* hurt myself for it or because of it.

My mom, could have been sad and chosen not to hurt herself because of it but she couldn't make that choice for some reason that I will never really understand (I don' think). Which kills me, she could have had depression and made a choice to stop hurting herself for feelings of sadness she had very little control over and she couldn't and not surprisingly I couldn't do it for her either.

And now, I am realizing that I think I do the same thing she did to a little lesser degree.

woah.

Niki said 27 is a hard time because the astrological signs all make full circle and you are sitting under your birth sign again - which apparently is very sucky. I don't feel sucky (precisely, I feel like I just got this glowing blue sword and sometimes I accidentally cut myself with it) but I wish sometimes I could stop thinking about this shit - you know a week-end break from a psychic break.

March 22, 2005

Yeah really - now that the treadmill has worn off I am just tired.

I did want to mention that I am reading Larissa Lai's book "when fox is a thousand," and over my bagel this morning I read;

"You will get what you want, but you will be sorry you wanted it."

It was said as a prophecy oddly enough.

An excellent definition of regret to boot.

It made me think of a bunch of things but the hardest one to swallow was that when my mother was killing herself in front of my eyes, I often thought about how much easier it would be for everyone if she just stopped being. What did I know about death? Now that she's gone I could easily take more midnight calls, and her stupid _f*ing high heels even though her hips weren't evenly balanced anymore.

In a larger sense it makes me think of my carefully nurtured north american mores and how I personally don't take much time to think about the outcomes of my desires, be they material or social or personal.

My friend once read a book about how to get rich young, or save lots of money, or be a happy self-employed person, or something... A book that came from an aisle called financial self-help I imagine. But anyways, the first rule in the book was never do anything that will take a significant amount of your time, buy anything, or invest in anything without thinking about it first for a week.

After that week ask yourself again, do I really want to; own that thing, eat in that restaurant, participate in that event, join that small cult-like association, be that persons friend, et infinitum... if the answer is still yes, than do it.

So my new task is to try and give myself a week for decision making. Testing my desires agains the reality of the objective result.

I rode my bike today for the first time in 2005, halle- hella - lujah. I love the springtime.