Born in the Sign of July

The lion inside me
roars mute, quiet to
the outside world

A victim of my
misplaced sun sign,
born perhaps a month too late

A victim of my
constant craving for
warmer weather

Summer in the city
feels foreign
hot pavement aches underfoot

I long to be
beside the lake,
feet dangling

Sweat melting all
signs of sunscreen,
hearing your car

Drive up the road
butterflies everywhere
including my stomach

It’s been a long year
long road, from
childhood to now

Where I still fit
on your lap
in your heart

At least for now
until we leave
summer vacation

Spent, like the last
few dollars
in my wallet.

We don’t fit
in places with
hot pavement

I roar up north
rip my clothes off
during a thunderstorm

Let loose that lion
that privilege of my birth
for you to hear the roar

Poetry Wednesdays

My friend Kate just started a really cool blog. She's brave enough to put her poetry right out there for comments, throwing it to the virtual wind and seeing what it catches. So I'm going to copycat her and post a new poem up here on Wednesdays. Considering I've only written about a dozen poems, I can't do it every day. So here you go (see next post), please keep in mind that this poem was just rejected by Contemporary Verse 2. Bastards!

Little Victories

Ah, what fun the mail brings! In this cyber-centric world, I'm always impressed when I get exciting mail. Two things came this week: 1) the new issue of Taddle Creek, the one with my poem in it; and 2) my advance copies of Frankenstein and Robinson Crusoe, which look amazing. They go on sale March 28, so mark your calendars now—just kidding. Kind of. They'd be perfect Easter presents, come on! Support the arts! Support the artist!

Testing Tests

There comes a point in any sick girl's day where she's entirely sick (ha ha) of a) taking medicine and b) having tests. This point comes very soon after a burly woman of Eastern European descent pokes, pulls and prods her, leaving bruises all over her chest, during an echo cardiogram (which is an ultrasound people, an ultrasound—there's no need for bruises, no need!).

Entirely tired of bringing along a book to read in waiting rooms while waiting for a doctor. Entirely tired of seeing a puffy, pimply face. Entirely tired of being so bloody tired. Entirely tired of watching daytime television, even for a moment (with the exception of Ellen dancing, that's always fun).

Ah, but the end is in sight. The great prednisone countdown of 2005 has begun. As of tomorrow I've only got two weeks left on the evil drug. Whee-hoo! Now that deserves a bit of ass shaking and some high kicks!

Medical Analogies

Sooo, I'm so out of it that I've been reading way, way too much celebrity gossip. How do I know this? I just had a short conversation with an old friend via IM and this is what I said:

Ahren says:
which med is causing all the grief...the 3 weeker or the 6 monther?

ragdoll says:
the three weeker

ragdoll says:
it's the tara reid to the paris hilton

Yes, the prednisone is the bad fake-breasted, falling down drunk, low-rent version of the meds I'm taking right now. I am going straight to hell.

Missing Out On Life

Now that I've added a cold to the ever-growing list of ailments, I'm starting to get seriously peeved at the number of things I'm missing being stuck in the prison of ill-health otherwise known as my house.

1. The Lowest of the Low Goodbye Shows at the Horseshoe. I spent so much of my youth seeing this band, and one of the first post-high school rock shows I went to with my then friend, now RRBF, was the Low. So many memories. So crappy that I was stuck at home blowing my nose into kleenex.

2. Going to the movies. I want to see Harry Potter, Walk the Line, Rent and so many more—but I can't. Because I can't leave the house. Because I'm sick. AGAIN.

3. Holiday shopping. 'Tis the season and we've got a new niece who needs Christmas presents. Grrr.

4. Dinners with friends, old-fashioned drink-ups, catching up over a pint, basically being social beyond email and instant messenger. I'm sick, tired and lonely.

5. Looking good while leaving the house for trips other than to the doctor. Which I haven't done all week really. Oh, and the RRBF keeps laughing at me and saying things like, "It's okay honey, I know what you're supposed to look like."

What's Led to What

A bit of exhaustion (a mere understatement), led to a sore throat, being in the company of other ill people, led to a sniffle, a sneeze, a splutter. All of this led to feeling under the weather, caught in a snow storm, a fury of fickle attention to good nutrition, being lazy, being tired, being medicated. Which leads to a cold, a bad cold, an achy cold, a fuzzy head, a heavy chest, a dose of vapour rub, a dash of cough medicine, a warm scarf, a cup of tea, vitamin c, and garlic, nature's cure. A good night's sleep, a warm blanket, a good book, a mediocre movie, a long day's journey spent between the many walls of my house. Will be spending today writing, sleeping, reading and resting in an attempt to led the cold right back out where it belongs, on the side of the street covered in slush, buried in muck, well away from my brittle constitution and my lack of immune system.

The Globe 100

The annual Globe and Mail 100 list comes out today, telling us all about the best books published this year. It's my second-favourite issue of the paper, right behind the truly awesome crossword they do at the end of every year.

I've read 6 out of the 100 (Saturday, Three Day Road, The Wreckage, The Time in Between, An Audience of Chairs and The Year of Magical Thinking). I've got about another 7 or 8 on my to read list, but they don't count. I also think it's kind of funny that neither of the GG winners are on the list: David Gilmour's A Perfect Night to Go to China nor John Vaillant's The Golden Spruce (which I have read). The Giller winner is there, which sort of shows they kind of got it right, but I still am in shock that Three Day Road didn't win the GG, it's by far the best book of the year, IMHO. Or maybe I've got it all wrong and the Globe's list is way off, but somehow, I don't think so...

And I don't see Best Abridging [ragdoll] for Little Women. Heh. Just kidding.

Money Changes Everything

In addition to being the worst songwriter in Canadian songwriting history, it is now confirmed that he's also a giant a**wipe. And people are still buying Nickelback records? If the drummer played on the record, he should get royalties. Like Chad's not making enough bloody money already? And his name is Chad which is preppie for a**wipe anyway.

Knit Wit

A couple of years ago, I took a beginner's knitting class at Romni Wools here in Toronto. For $75.00, and for three Sundays in a row, you meet at the bottom of the store and they teach you how to knit. My friend Sam actually introduced me to the class, after she had gone and found it extremely helpful.

My grandmother tried to teach me how to knit when I was a teenager. She gave up after a while because I was left-handed and couldn't figure out how to knit in reverse. This time, I'm knitting right-handed and not worrying about being left-handed and trying to figure it out that way. It's a good exercise for my brain anyway.

My mother, of course, in addition to being a wonderful cook with her own burgeoning catering company, was also a great seamstress and an excellent knitter. People hired her to make sweaters for them. I still have a couple of them. Nothing I would ever wear but they are beautiful. In my quest to know my mother better, to know myself better maybe, I've tried to be like her and do these things, more because it helps me remember her than the fact that I'm any good. Because I'm so not good at either sewing or knitting. I think I'm a half-decent cook, but that fact was highly debated this summer at the cottage by my brother and my RRBF.

Annnywaay. I've been knitting for a few years now, but haven't graduated to anything bigger or more complex then squares, well, rectangles if we're being specific. I can knit scarves and have made one really nice one, but I want to make something more interesting. Like a sweater or a poncho. I don't do it enough to get really good, but I keep trying, which I suppose is all that matters.

The problem being that I don't knit consistently enough. I do it in spurts, a bit here, a bit there, so that when it comes time to start a new project (I'm knitting a scarf for an ex-neighbour), that I forget everything. Oh, the basics come back to me, knit, purl, knit, purl, but I can't remember other things, like how I was taught to slip the last stitch at the end of a row and then what? What comes next? I try purling, it looks funny; I knit the stitch and it looks okay but it's not the clean 'ladder' look that I was taught at Romni. Who knows. I'm just making it all up as I go along. Kind of like when I was in grade 10 and decided I'd make myself a skirt by sewing two pieces of material together and that's it. And I actually wore it. More than once.

OMT (Add-ons To Trials and Tribulations)

6. So glad that Tom Cruise fired his sister aka "publicist" just in time for this juicy bit of fright night to find its way before the eyes of the unsuspecting public, I mean, his fans. What a wingnut. And why and how is this news anyway?

7. In response to a very loud, shouty email I sent to this fellow about getting unwanted spam, I received this (it's now my most favourite email EVER):

Thought I bid you good bye - we have no business - no need to
communicate any further - hopefully it's good bye forever....besides it was just
some friendly advice - I hear a cry for help. You seem like a very very very
angry, tense, moody, miserable person aren't you - is life that
un-pleasant that you let a little email work you last nerve - you let someone you
don't even know effect/affect you like that - some more good advice from a
NOW concerned community colleague who shares this city/country/world with
you - I hear they have a lot of good doctors and lot of shiny new pills
that'll cure this - go visit somebody for that - or try breathing, stretching
and just letting it go, or tai-chi. Whatever you do something but do it b4
you break into road rage or hurt seriously yourself or somebody seriously +
never be a reaction to anyone or anything. have a beautiful life - try
having a more positive outlook to but now your scaring me.....

Dude obviously has way, way too much time on his hands. But, heh! How does he know me so well after such a short period of time. Not.

Band Widow

So I'll be a band widow tomorrow night as my RRBF heads up to North Bay to play a show. He's got rehersal tonight, and then he's away tomorrow night. There are so many things I could do, writing, reading, sleeping—but I'm so bored of being in my house feeling crappy that I wish I could actually leave and go see a movie.

Wow, this blog post is boring even me. I'll stop now.

Working From Home: Trials And Tribulations

1. Is it really too early (10.22 AM) to be eating cheesies?

2. How long should one wait before taking that shower she really should have taken three hours ago?

3. Why, oh why, must every site I turn to give me juicy information I can't help clicking on about the utter and final demise of Jessica Simpson's marriage?

4. Is it that bad to want to get all your work done so you can watch The Notebook at 4 PM for the, like, 18th time? Because it's so not over for me, either, dude, totally.

5. There's snow outside! It's winter in Canada! I'm so excited. Yawn.

#59 The Time In Between

I've been reading David Bergen's The Time in Between for months now. I started the book way back in the summer, read about a quarter of it, then went on vacation. By the time I got back, I had moved on to so many other books that it took me some time to get back to it. It took a conversation with a co-worker to get me to pick the book up again, when she mentioned that it hit her so hard she still hasn't completely recovered.

And at first, I didn't see it, I found the book kind of slow going; it didn't grab me like so many of the others I've read this year. But now that I've finished it, I can totally see what she means—the slow burning, sparse prose creeps up on you and takes a hold almost like a good ghost story.

Set mainly in Vietnam years after the war, the book tells the life story of a mainly absent Charles Boatman, first through his eyes, then through the eyes of his daughter, Ada. Having fought in the war, Charles returns to hopefully deal with his demons, and then goes missing. Ada and her brother Jon arrive in Vietnam to try to find their father, or at the very least, find out what happened to him. There's a pivotal scene in the middle of the book, exactly placed, that I won't spoil, but it's a moment that grabbed me so hard that I had to put the story down and take some deep breaths before I could continue.

The setting is such an unrelenting part of this book. Forced to deal with their tragedy in a foreign country, Ada and Jon, while looking for their father, inevitably fall upon their own paths of self-discovery. Rich with metaphor and filled with mystery, the backdrop of being an outsider in a country already riddled with the aftermath of the war becomes an intrinsic part of how Bergen chooses to tell the story. It's almost as if Vietnam becomes a character in its own right, a living, breathing part of The Time in Between.

Dealing with themes of loss, family, understanding and the cultural differences between life in northern British Columbia (where Charles eventually settles with his three kids after their mother dies) and life in Vietnam (where the majority of the story is set), the book feels so universally human, if that makes any sense.

Having it win the Giller seems fitting, and it does a little to take away the sting of Three Day Road being shut out of the awards this year. All in all, I'm glad I actually took the time last night to finish it, to read the last 10 pages that had been bookmarked for months. The time in between The Time in Between finally coming to a close.

Rejection!

So Contemporary Verse 2 doesn't want my poems. They "reviewed [my] work carefully and unfortunately [my] writing does not meet [their] needs at this time." So carefully that they've cut and pasted the form letter into an email addressed, "Dear Poet."

Kind of reminds me of my rejection letter from UBC when I applied to graduate school—they paid careful attention to my application as well, and then spelled my name wrong on the letter.

At least my Taddle Creek poem is coming out in two weeks. That's one success for this miserable failure of a year anyway. I'm getting pulled down by the tired, achy, exhausted body...what does that Superman show say: "Somebody save me?"

Okay, now I'm even depressing myself. On to the next journal!

#58 Bee Season

While I was waiting to see my kidney specialist, I finished Bee Season by Myla Goldberg. It's the story of fifth-grader, Eliza Naumann, who suddenly finds herself the apple of her over-achieving father's eye when she wins her school's spelling bee. The book follows Elly's spelling bee successes right to the nationals, where she comes this-close to winning.

The intimate and delicate balance of Eliza's family life starts to fall apart against this backdrop of the spelling bee season—and through her experiences studying with her father, her life also changes.

I liked the book a lot, but thought that maybe it tried to do too much, and it became a bit overwhelming towards the end. However, I think she's incredibly talented, and I'm looking forward to reading Goldberg's new novel, Wickett's Remedy. I also have no idea how they've adapted it into the movie that's currently playing...but again, I'm immensely curious.

Doctor Update

Today I saw my kidney specialist about all the strange exhaustion stuff going on. He confirmed what I sort of thought anyway, that it's all probably a side effect of the small amount of prednisone I'm taking. This gives me hope. It means I'll only be feeling crappy for another couple of weeks. He also wants me to tell everything to the super-special disease doctor that I'm seeing in two weeks who might have more insight.

So things are looking up. I've talked to work and they understand everything. I've seen the specialist, and he knows what's going on and doesn't think it's my kidneys (yay!); and I have an appointment with the fancy disease doctor in two weeks if I'm still feeling like there's a bowling ball on my chest and I can't walk to the corner because I'm so tired I feel like I'm going to fall down.

I still have to have the test on Monday, which is kind of yukky, but at least it'll rule out for-sure-for-sure that I don't have an infection in my heart.

Are We In Trouble?

Because we're much, much older than the norm (link via Gawker). Um, and we're Canadian. Do you think that makes a difference? And what about all those 20-year-olds who got married and are now divorced, huh? Huh?

The Worst Part...

...is that I don't feel like myself lately. My brain can't focus, I have no energy to do anything. I keep crying because I don't like not feeling like myself, not feeling useful, not feeling like I'm living up to my potential, whatever that might be. There are so many things I wished for when I was a kid, I think, or at least I knew to trust my instincts, that everything would be okay. That I would be okay. The worst part of all of this is losing that inner voice. The lost cry of my own personality being drowned by the disease and my seeming inability to wake up these days.

Would anyone think less of me if I took a break?

OMT (One More Thing)

Yesterday, we were sitting backstage after the show, and I can't remember where it came from or if JKS said it himself, but I found this incredibly inspiring:

"I'm an artist. I create the world, not the other way around."

So that's my approach to life and art and blogging and working and being sick and being alive and being tired and reading and thinking and everything. It's truly my world. I'm creating it. It's not creating me.