Filed under: a city called montreal, friends, st. henri, that weird feeling i like to call attraction, thoughts about thoughts
my cat misses me. i come home and she’s angry, intolerant of affection, constantly needs to be near me. i can’t explain to her what’s going on, that i’m hurt and sad and can’t be in the apartment where i used to be happy. why i’m sleeping in friends’ spare rooms or their empty beds or on their couches until august 1st when i can move out and put distance between myself and the last two weeks of sadness, mistrust, and loss. all she knows is that i’m never home anymore, there’s no one to cuddle up to on those sweltering hot nights in the muggy loft bed where all of the day’s smells have risen and are trapped between our bodies and the ceiling. and she isn’t sure why i haven’t honoured our morning meeting on the fire escape where i drink coffee and she sunbathes with her tiny nose bent upward, reading the wind like a newspaper. i feel bad: she has a history of being abandoned and while i’m trying to visit her as much as possible between feedings, it just hurts too much to spend time there and feel nostalgic for the friendship i’ve lost.
that’s where we are these days, my cat and i. we’re stuck between not okay and okay, waiting to move on.
today i am thinking about summer. probably because i walked home from the poet‘s at six am through the slush, my boots leaking cold water into my socks and wishing for early mornings where the heat isn’t fully awake but you can feel it coming and your body anticipates it, the day ahead full of thick, syrupy sludgy air. this is definitely a symptom of winter because i hate heat- i like warmth very much, but i can really only stand one super hot day every once in awhile. if the heat is intense every day i get grumpy and irritated and no one wants to spend time with me.this morning, in the slush, i was thinking about the music festival in my hometown- we’ve gone to it every year since i was about six years old and it has grown and grown. the first year i lived in halifax was the first time i missed it after twelve years of going. i missed it last summer and will miss it this summer too, since my visit home (yes! i am going home!) is going to be in may, not july. anyway, this music festival takes place on the exhibition grounds back home, which consist of four fields and some forest next to the river. i never wear shoes there. you leave your shoes at the tent in the mornings, maybe put them on to use the porto-potty or if you have to walk on gravel. the paths through the fields are dirt and over the weekend your feet get coated in a warm grime of dust and grass-stains. and (probably because my heavy socks were waterlogged and every step i took i could feel my cold feet squishing) all i could think about was that warm layer of dust on my feet, dark around the cuticles of my toenails. it sounds odd, maybe, to miss dirty feet- and if i’m confessing, i’ll add that 1. i don’t really like feet much as a general rule and 2. the bottoms of my feet are so perpetually dirty that they have become somewhat infamous in my group of friends/housemates- but i associate the freedom of barefeet with warm late-nights, outdoor music, warm dry grass. all the things i miss in this season of soupy streets and intimate layers of thick clothing.
i wonder if i’m going to get a lot of foot fetishists visiting my blog now?
in case you were interested, this is j.cat’s solution to a lack of love for winter:
gluten-free pancakes with strawberry syrup
(yes, i got to eat it after i took the picture)
Filed under: a city called montreal, a city called vancouver, friends, photos, st. henri, thoughts about thoughts
i just wrote and deleted two entries about the olympics, because i don’t know if i can say anything new, if my anger and despair over the games can add anything to the current discourse. because i am sick of writing about the olympics, posting things about the olympics, and feeling impotent stuck here in montreal while my friends and people i don’t know are fighting and being brutalized by the police.
so i’m not going to write. but here, in pictures, is a bit of my week:
coffee (from le frigo vert) outside of the university
free, vegan lunch at the people’s potato on the 7th floor of concordia university’s hall building (located on maisonneuve and mckay)
hanging out at the sootpit with hyena and the poet
gutter ribs on my walk home, easily a favourite photo of mine.
Filed under: a city called montreal, friends, that weird feeling i like to call attraction
i walked my way quietly, meditatively to the poet’s house last night and holed up under the covers in her bed with my overdramatic heart keeping me company as she organized her newly-painted room. someone in her house had found paint in the exact shade that she wanted, a dusty sage green, sitting on the curb nearby. eventually the poet came and sat with me and i rested my head on her arm while she strummed out newly-invented music on her ukelele, quiet and contemplative and wordless. the poet’s ceiling is whipcream swirls of white plaster layered in semi-circles, makes up the floor of the workshop room upstairs. the walls and floors are thin in the apartment, and sometimes we hear t’s music leaking down to us as they work upstairs. last night, though, it was just the poet and i and the ukelele, me trying to figure out the tangle of myself. i’m over dramatic, i often fall into the poet’s bed sighing and asking her “why?” and she tries to answer. it’s a weak insufficiency i dislike about myself, needing people to respond to questions only i can actually answer.
at some point i became someone who is known for her baking. i am not really sure how this happened, or how my love for baking sort of came about overnight and then became something my friends know about me, or that i would have particular things requested by them.
i kind of feel like a fake, though, because while i know baking is about chemistry and measurements, i don’t do it that way. what i do is sort of follow a recipe but almost never use measuring cups or spoons and then i end up adding or substracting things until the recipe is different. mostly, i use what i have on hand- sometimes my hands themselves- and just do what feels right. (this is how i cook best as well, caught in a sort of distracted haze of smells and thoughts)
i know this is sort of antiethical to what attracts a lot of people to baking: they come for the measurements, the surety that adding x amount of flour and x amount of eggs will make x dish. i understand that in the same way that i understand- and completely disregard- the comfort of mathematics. i can see how having math is like picking through a metal scrap heap and finding two connecting pieces to form a hinged elbow joint… i just prefer to not anticipate the equation and do things my way. i am remarkably bull-headed for someone who is so bent on pleasing everyone (“your sick and disturbing desire to please” the smartest lady ever once called it, her voice a lot kinder than it comes across written down.) and my brain doesn’t work in any mathematical sense, is a jumble of short circuits and wires braided and tangled into other wires. i don’t see it as anything having to do with neatness- my brain and organization don’t even grow in the same field, let alone from the same root. i make weird connections. the irish con-man we met this spring told me he wanted to analyze my brain because of the weird connections i make between things, but i don’t think my head is anything particularly special (also: con man.) it’s just that i am so mentally disorganized that sometimes things find their way to each other randomly simply by being thrown haphazardly in the same direction. my brain is like a hallway junk closet or an attic storage space or dark basement full of old ornaments and broken chairs.
the other day i met up with t to hang out, and they started telling me about these chains they had found attached to some boards that might be super useful, that they were excited about. and i stopped them and said “by the firehall? leaning against a wall there? i wanted to take those the other day but i didn’t have my pocket knife and i couldn’t get them off!”
“those are the ones.” they said as we started walking “it’s funny because i thought: no one else is going to want these.”
which is how i feel when i find someone i can share my thoughts with, the sense of odd similarity that resonates with me when i realize someone else wants something i have that i thought no one would ever be interested in except me.
late-night winter cold
school starts soon, which means summer is almost officially over for me. i’ve had a good summer, really. a growing summer in a lot of ways. but it always feels over for me in september because my birthday falls on the 11th and so the addition of a year to my age seems especially significant as the weather starts to change and the school year begins. yesterday, our friend JS came over and tattooed my leg. Side B has started the tattoo about a month ago, but i’m a bleeder and it worried her so she stopped, telling me we would do it again in a few days, though we never did. i have to say, i was a lot more frightened about the process than was necessary. it does hurt, but you get used to the pain after awhile. needles were a huge fear of mine till i got my septum pierced, which lessened it somewhat. spending over an hour watching as someone pierces my skin with one? removed the fear.
the word is significant to me, and the tattoo is in Side B’s handwriting (which is important because now Side A and i both have tattoos in Side B’s handwriting on our bodies- Side A on her ankle and me on my outer-thigh.) i chose the word because it is something which, in my anxiety, i always forget. when you are an anxious person, it seems as though only the worst could ever happen to you, the terrible things you imagine are the only potential outcomes. it helps to remember that you can only imagine a fraction of the things that could occur because there are always varying factors, different aspects that create a situation which you could never, ever predict. so this is what i chose to mark on my body as a reminder that really, anything wonderful could happen.
i was reading a book today where the narrator mentioned that she was happy to see magical creatures still exist. sitting on my front balcony i sighed and said (outloud, as i am apt to do when alone) “i wish i could find proof that magical creatures exist.”
a few moments later, i looked up at the sky as a red balloon floated by, followed by two more in yellow and blue. close enough.
…
the poet, an accordian playing visitor and i went dumpster diving in the plateau the other day. we haven’t found anywhere around here yet, and the poet was familiar with places in the plateau (since we all used to live there and she used to dive with fnb) so we got into accordian playing visitor’s truck, parked by de buillon, and went for a trek. the first dumpster was our best: fresh cilantro with roots, 9 heads of lettuce (we had plans to take it to fnb that did not come to fruition) apples, 4 pacakges of sprouts, garlic. the next two places yeilded halved pineapples (3, which went into a vegan carrot cake i made) a huge glass jar, bruised fruit galore (which turned into a delicious fruit salad) a box of unopened- albeit melted- chapman’s ice cream cones, turnips, two bags of spinach, raisin bread and some meat paté. as it is, we’re over our heads in lettuce due to our inability to deliver it to fnb…but everything else is being used quickly (except the sprouts, as it turns out i’m the only person who loves white bean sprouts.) so we’re eating a lot of salads and trying to give it away, which has been unsuccessful so far because the fact that it was found in a dumpster seems to deter people. i kind of understand that…i’ve had bad experiences with dumpstered food, even got mildly poisoned in van once. however in this “country”, at least, things are so mass produced that perfectly good food is thrown out daily…and there is no shame in eating so-called garbage, especially when it is in perfectly good condition and you’d rather not spend what money you have on overpriced food. i’ll take slightly bruised but free apples over waxy store bought ones any day.
it is thunder-storming outside and we are in our new place, have been for a week. my room, the smallest, also has a balcony looking out over the street below and i have tacked towels over part of the door to keep the pounding rainwater from soaking my pink and white paisley comforter where i am lying. (yes, pink paisley. i’m really fond of it, purchased at atlantic super store with weasel’s employee discount during our first halifax winter.) down the hall my roommate is hanging out with the guy she hooked up with last night, a dudely punk-rocker who spent the morning in the living room with us, playing youtube videos of social distortion. in the living room, Side B and alj (the poet’s boy-whatever) are lit up by the glow of computer screens. everyone (except me) is hung over. i am simply tired, having stayed awake till 4 am and gotten up at 10:30 am.
it is one of those days where i feel like lying with someone in bed, having my hair played with, blissing out to a stupid movie. but, being the only perpetually single person in the house, i suppose i will be content with spooning the cat and writing this instead.
i love rainstorms very dearly, love the feeling of a quiet rainy day spent with books and tea. what i really want to be reading right now is some ivan e. coyote. on my trip to halifax, i bought “close to spiderman” from venus envy bookstore- partially because i wanted the book, partially because i wanted to have an excuse to talk to the girl behind the counter. (yes, it is a sad excuse.) but i left the book somewhere in my friend yar’s (hi!) apartment and it sort of disappeared and was never seen again. now i am looking thoughtfully over at the books on my desk…is it a time for poetry? for prose? do i want to finish re-reading “where she was standing” by maggie helwig, knowing full well that it will reduce me to tears? or maybe i’ll act out “spoon river anthology” quietly to myself, though i prefer to wait till the place is empty for those kinds of dramatics (my margaret fuller slack gets kind of loud.)
how odd that last night, my room was full of people. four of us on the bed, several on the floor, the balcony, the chairs. originally, i was hiding from the house-warming party in here with one other person, but eventually more and more people gravitated to us until we had a good half of the party in my small space (not, sadly, a very interesting person i had seen arrive and introduce themselves to my sister’s girlfriend, k.) i’m not used to having people congregate in a place i have chosen to hide, but i liked the disturbance of my social anxiety…it felt good to have people in my safe space, mostly because the majority of them were politically correct queers (the first is really the only one of the two that is a requirement for being in my safe space…we don’t do slurs here- including “retard” which, sadly, seems to be a favorite even among progressive people these days. when we have parties, Side B and i tape a sign to the front door that states exactly what we do not tolerate, in case there is any confusion.) now it is quiet and empty, though several empty cans of pabst blue ribbon and labatt as well as a mostly-finished bottle of wine are still hanging around.
it is now that i stop and reflect and realize i’ve changed a lot since i arrive here last august, feeling quiet and shy and confused and closeted but to three people. i haven’t become a bar star or anything (and don’t want to) but i know people, i’m out to everyone (except my parents and…that will come. it will be easy when i do- they are really pro-queer- but i have to find the courage to tell them anyway.) i talk to people now instead of hiding in my room. and i am working, working on the body issues. that is a longer process, methinks, but not a futile one.
i think i’ve decided on a half-nap, and maybe some episodes of daria, and an apple.
