Growing Versions

Days go by and I do not look in the mirror.  Occasionally, I'll steal a glimpse of myself in the rear view mirror or when I pass a shop window or in the kettle as I make tea. I catch images of me in my thirties.   I have begun to observe how my face is changing. The lines have finally emerged to illuminate all of the hidden, withheld, carelessly and freely expressed feelings that I have and continue to channel through my facial muscles.  A close friend once told me that what I'm feeling is always so obviously written all over my face. This surprised me initially, but I have tiny witnesses day in and day out who corroborate this opinion. They take note of the subtle crinkling of my eyes or an askance turn down of my lip, telegraphing subtle shifts in my mood.   As I age, I allow the gauzy mask to slip.  What does it reveal? How will my kids remember me? How will I remember myself?

The Voice "There is a voice inside of you That whispers all day long, "I feel this is right for me, I know that this is wrong." No teacher, preacher, parent, friend Or wise man can decide What's right for you--just listen to The voice that speaks inside.” ― Shel Silverstein When I was a kid, I thought that cursive was a different language.  Printing was English and cursive was another language.  I used to curlicue it up, hoping that somehow these fancy letters would translate into another yet-to-be discovered-by-me language that would permit me entry into another world.   Teenager and adult conversations, were like the cursive of the childhood languages.  I would be sitting on the edge of my lawn, in front of my house, playing, talking to myself, when teenagers would come walking down the street towards me.  They would amble by talking about very interesting things, things that I couldn't even imagine, but that I supposed was about boyfriends a...

As a parent of young kids, I have often struggled with being present.  I demand of myself to not look away, to keep myself engaged even when I am cranky and feeling mutinous. Many days I am not present.  I drift to attend to other tasks like working or cleaning or facebook to keep myself going and often even relish a day working at the office as a way to not be so present. Many other times, there is no other choice but to be present.  Covered in vomit, forced to stay awake all night or endure a long trip together, now is all there is. So, not unlike other parents I know, I have turned to facebook and twitter to somehow either get through this experience or, as I would argue, experience this experience. My baby will not sleep!  Why won't she sleep? Twitter in particular is so instantaneous that its role in revolutions like the Arab Spring has become legendary,  although how pivotal its role has been in the eventual outcome has become a matter of debate: ...

Right after I posted last week on the connections between haiku and twitter, I came across this interesting article: Twitter: the New Haiku? . It has crossed my mind more than once that it is a real shame that  Mitch Hedberg   died before Twitter was invented. He would have been a master at it! "I was walking by a dry cleaner at 3 a.m., and it said "Sorry, we're closed." You don't have to be sorry. It's 3 a.m., and you're a dry cleaner." "That's be cool if Spider-Man shot hammocks instead of webs. You're not a criminal, but you do need to relax."  "This guy handed me a picture of him, he said,"Here's a picture of me when I was younger." Every picture of you is when you were younger."

Think of the last book that you read?  What was the setting of that book?  Had you been there before? Wait, let me explain. I will be reading a book, any book, and within 1-2 pages I will have already formed an image of where the action is taking place.  Not just any image, and I am sure the writers would not want to hear me say this, but I picture each and every book I read, no matter the description of the surroundings in the same 5-6 different locations. Most of these locations are from my memories of places I knew well from ages 6-9.  Perhaps this has something to do with this being the period in my life when I was first doing reading on my own. All I know is that the most carefully described settings in the world cannot seem to supplant these grooves, these imprints in my mind that every book I read settles into. I'll start with my favourite book of all time, which I read for the first time about 13 years ago, The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. ...

  It does not take long for us to ramp up to senseless busyness after the holidays.  We went from an intense work week, into a day of intense socializing on Saturday.  In between the spurts of lurching madness, there were sweet periods of decompression.  The first period of unravelling happens right after we pick up our daughter after school on Friday.  For a few hours, she gets busy stripping away the layers of all that is expected of her all week by going into another world of her own making. This week, she wanted to help me with the laundry and then took it upon herself to hang it up on the folding rack.  She had a number of projects on the go... We had another good stretch of unaccounted for time on Sunday.

For those of you who  have not read the book Room by Emma Donoghue , I will not spoil the ending.  But I am  not giving anything away when I tell you that it is about a woman and her son who are held captive in a tiny room for years.  The book, told in the voice of the four year old, did not make me cry, even though, it is heartbreaking (for reasons that surprised me) and horrifying.  The boy's voice is so true and full of wonder and curiosity that it is difficult not to see everything from and be compelled by his untroubled perspective. I think, my lack of emotion, was also because it reminded me so much of my own experience with young children at home in the country, with no car.  We lived in a house, but  the living room is where we spent the majority of our time.  Unlike the Room in the book, we had a big picture window looking onto trees and, of course, I could leave it whenever I wanted to.  Even though we had plenty to eat, we t...

Exploring the wide open terrain and narrow, narrow crevices of twitter, instantly reminded me of something.  Something I couldn't put my finger on.   The feeling of deja vu came  over me as I read tweet after tweet.  The restrictions on characters force you to say what you really mean to say, to paint (in the case of twitter, project) an image, convey a feeling.  It has a rhythm to it.  Finally, after stumbling on a tweet by a haiku poet who puts together a lovely blog called the  Red Dragonfly , I remembered, it reminds me of poetry. 5/7/5, 140 characters, Self-contained image. A very high number of tweets are about insomnia, which is no surprise since it is the reason so many of us cannot sleep. Sleep like a child That is my quest for this year Odyssey goes on

For ages, twitter has been in my peripheral vision.  I dismissed it as a sound bite craze . Now, I think it can be the haiku of the internet .

I am hopeless at instructions.  When they come with something I buy, I always toss them aside.  Later, I may have to retrieve them out of the recycling bin, but I use them sparingly, on a strictly need-to-know basis. When it comes to crafts, the instructions always have to be pretty general, otherwise, I'm just not interested.  However, my daughter really likes to order things and narrate with instructions while she makes projects.  She has helped me have a new appreciation for instructions.  She likes to let me know the steps.   Here are the steps to making a "Welcome/Good-bye Book". 1. First, fold a piece of paper. 2. Glue a picture from a calendar on the cover. Like this. 3. Write "Welcome" above the calendar picture. Like this. 4. On the back cover, glue a picture of someone you know. 5. Write "Good-bye" above the picture of someone you know. 6. Inside, write things you want to put on a menu or anything else you want to use it for. So, there...

Is it a formula? Is it a trick of the light?  Does it come from emptying out or filling up? Is it brought about by chance, exercise, time alone or time together?  What gets your motor running when it comes to creative projects?  This recent article in the  The Guardian  by Laura Barnett   features 20 creative people from the worlds of culture, art, music, film and theatre answering the same question: what gives you creative inspiration? My favourite answer is by Wayne McGregor, Choreographer - Do     - Empty     - Panic   - Forage   - Generate  - Embody      - Edit     - Decide    - Persist  - Practise I like these ones too:  I go through messy phases and tidy phases. Being messy during a tidy phase is never good, and vice versa. -Susan Philipsz, artist Don't wait for a good idea to come to you. Start by realising an average idea – no one has to see it. If I hadn't ma...

The first phrase that my daughter mastered was "in a minute".  She'd be talking away in unrecognizable chatter on her "cell phone" when she would be chirp, "in a minute".  This phrase has taken such prominence in my language since having kids that it has come to be used by both of my kids to my disadvantage almost on an hourly basis. "Can you move these trucks out of the kitchen?" "In a minute." "Time for a bath." "In a minute." "Get your boots on." "In a minute." I misused the phrase for so long, it is hardly surprising that it would be misused by them.  Looking back, I'd say it all started in the early early days of first-time parenthood when I was shocked by the transition into the present that breastfeeding demanded.  RIGHT NOW. NOT  penciled in for Saturday , NOT  in about an hour , NOT  whenever , but, RIGHT NOW.  Preferably sooner.  Because, well, because what else is there exc...

In yesterday's post, Laugh Until You Cry , I was telling you about my effort to not know something and just wonder about the answer instead.  The compulsion to seek out an answer, any answer, electronically is strong.  There is a gushing waterfall of comments, ideas, pieces of information saturating our inclination to wonder. This guy, Pete Holmes, made me laugh really hard about search engines and how they are so efficient at dispensing information that they have zapped the wonder out of everything.  He bemoans our inability to be "impregnated with wonder".  He compares google to having a "drunk know-it-all in your pocket."  I did not laugh so hard I cried, but I got pretty close.

My daughter caught wind of the expression, laugh until you cry,the other day and ever since, she has been asking me how this is possible.  "If you are laughing, you are happy so how can you be crying?"  At first, I responded by saying, "well sometimes you are so happy you just cry, it happened to me the other night in fact.  I was telling a hilarious story to a friend and by the end of it, she couldn't hear the story because I was crying so hard".  Her eyes widened, but the questions persisted.  My answers continued to be pretty vague and lame and she continued to think out loud about this question. As her questions have evolved past "why?" to inquire about increasingly complex concepts, I've tried a few different approaches to answering them. I've used the "sometimes we are overtired and then we cry after we laugh really hard...",  make-it-up-as-you go along type response or I google "why is the sky blue" and give her a p...

After all of the wrapping and unwrapping of gifts at Christmas, I still have a hankering for selecting some goodies to go into little packages and popping them in the mail.  I like planning a surprise to receive on a cold (-20 this morning) day in January when all of the anticipation of the holiday season has come and gone.  It is time to start putting my energy into making a friend feel cosy about winter or dream about spring I just love this woman,  AmberLee 's ideas that I first saw on  Design Mom .  She assembles all kinds of inventive packages to send through the mail.  The only rule is that the package has be 13 ounces of less.  Check out her inspiring Happy Mail .  She really triggers some ideas to take my mind off of horizontally falling snow and getting back into the dull routine. I also enjoy the  13 ounces or less flickr group .  I would be delighted if any of these packages came my way. My favourites so ...

I had a dream last night that I was in high school still. I have a dream like this about once a month.  I usually wake up, terrified that I haven't passed math or that I have forgotten to finish the assignments for a particular class.  Then slowly, as light creeps in, I remember, oh yeah, I finished high school and then I went on to university.  All the math that was required to do both of those things, and a bit more, has been completed.  This dream was a little different though.  I look up, across an auditorium-sized room, to see my teacher droaning on and on and I notice that all of my classmates are superbly bored.  I get the distinct impression that the teacher is way past caring and resigned to her fate.  There is a green tinge to the light in the room and it makes me feel like this place is not a good place to be. It suddenly occurs to me that I can complete high school by correspondence!!  Woah!! This will totally free me up, I think!...

Back in the summer, I returned to the neighbourhood where I spent a big part of my growing up years to discover that our neighbour's house was no longer there.  The foundation was there and the front door, complete with the numbers, and the front steps were still entact, but the rest of it was simply not there anymore. The chunk of front step evoked the essence of what had been and, as always happens when I come across an empty space where a structure once stood, I had that feeling of air sweeping through in a way that it hasn't for about 100 years.  The air circulated through that space in a certain pattern before the walls, for ages and ages, and then it did not and now it does again. I picture the fights that were had within those walls , the groceries that were put away, and then cooked and eaten and discarded , the floors that were scrubbed, and the roof that was fretted over. The tea that was sloshed onto a table, the phone calls that were missed, the mirrors...