d.jack

It's hard to say what the best part of the trip was. It was a blur, a lot of it. People, buildings, people, sun, the food, shadows, beer, wine, the faint smell of gas in our apartment. We stayed on the Upper East Side - a bit tonier in some ways, a bit rougher in others, than the East Village or Brooklyn's Park Slope, the neighbourhoods I've stayed in before.

We walked. We walked and walked. We walked so much my shin seized up and I was limping.

We saw the Met by mistake, we walked the MoMA till our eyes were too full of beautiful things to take in any more.

We cut through a glinting Central Park, blanketed with snow under a blazing sun. A warm spring sun. I tried to wash the taste of the worst breakfast ever out of my mouth with swigs of the worst tea-like substance ever bottled. I bought a smoothie to wash that away. We left the tea chilling in a snow bank near the building where John Lennon was shot, where Yoko Ono lives.

Seeing Yoko Ono perform Monday night - the eve of her 77th birthday - was surely one of the highlights.

She is bananas.

Not in the ululating way, which I far prefer to the lyrics she was singing. The first couple of songs I sat there, listening to what she was singing with my arms and legs folded up as many times as I could make them. I knew my body language was parlaying the fact that the lyrics were making me want to tear something up into tiny little bits. I could feel D.Jack noticing, and I kept trying to unwind my limbs and facial muscles so that at least one of us could have a good time without worrying that the other one wasn't.

But then finally, finally, the music took over. She ululated more and spoke less and the tension I had eased out of my body stayed out. And then Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon came on stage and they played skronky guitar while Yoko wailed about mulberries. And I loved it with everything.

We drank a bottle of really good wine while eating tender noodles. We drank bubbly wine after. We walked up and down Broadway looking for J. And lo, I am here to give you these two tips:

1. there is no 1087 Broadway in Manhattan
2. always check what borough you're supposed to be in, since, maybe, perhaps, there is a club playing raucous riot grrrl covers in the deep depths of Brooklyn instead of pigeons cooing in the park that should rightfully be where the music is

We were tired a lot of the time, tried to fit in naps, or at least rests every day. I always forget how tiring it is just to see things. To soak up the reflection of all the light reflecting off all those buildings, the new faces, tones, voices, the cars, the honking, the honking. How the sheer masses of people in New York, particularly, make my head swim and my brain use up glucose faster than I can produce it.

The problem with stopping for a moment is that you realize how goddamn tired you are.

Possibly too tired to mop the floor.

I'm off to New York City tomorrow, another weekend date with D.Jack. We've been sort of planning this since, I dunno, November maybe?, and for serious planning it for a month.

But only about 15 minutes ago, when I was sweeping up the dirt from sweeping in preparation for mopping, bent down industriously trying to get the last bit of remaindirt, did I think "Holy fuck. This time tomorrow I'll be with D.Jack. In New York."

My body thrilled, a little tremble all through it.

But right now, I'm tired. I've spent the evening cleaning and packing, getting ready to come home to a clean house, which is something I love to do, even if it tires me out to rush it all in at the end because I inevitably fuck around and leave 80% of what I need to do till the night before.

I will interrupt this post to sing the praises of my iPhone. I got one a few weeks ago, after about two months of blithering about it. And pretty much immediately fell in love with it. After price, my main resistance was that I thought it might be more hype than anything else. It's not. It's a beautiful piece of machinery, beautifully and thoughtfully designed.

It is, as Steve pointed out, a bit heavy and bulky for a phone. It is, as I pointed out in return, very very small for a computer.

Which leads me back into the post. I think that I am not going to take my computer to New York.

Now, there are some of you out there that are gasping in shock at such a heretical though. There are others of you who don't understand why I would consider bringing it in the first place. Suffice it to say that I cannot remember the last time I went somewhere for more that 24 hours without bringing my computer with me.

I would say we had a symbiotic relationship except the computer would do fine without me.

The tug of anxiety that I'm feeling about leaving it behind - but what if? what if? - is actually the deciding factor.

Time to cut the cord there.

Or at least transfer it over to a smaller machine.

This year has been quite something. The big things that have happened have either been supremely excellent or heart-rendingly hard.

Hard or excellent, take your pick, it was a mostly unbloggable year Chez Butch.

Since not long after I started it, this blog became one of my main places for working internal shit out. We've all got that shit, I figure; most of it's not all that different from person to person. Maybe the details, but often not the reasons or root. And most of us feel terribly alone while we're trying to work it out. I wanted to feel less alone myself, and hoped that it would maybe make other people feel the same.

Which works fine if the emotional stuff you're working out are the increasingly weak aftershocks of things one or two decades old.

Peeling back the layers to get at the raw stuff means sharing the details. Without the context, it's just senseless wailing.

If the stuff you're dealing with is unfolding in real time, around you now, it isn't ghosts conjured by your messed up chemistry. It involves the details - and, more importantly, the feelings - of the lives of people you love. Who would, perhaps, choose not to share their lives with the internet.

And so, the hard stuff has been absolutely unbloggable.

It's all to do with family. I started 2009 with a lot of certainty as to what my life was going to look like in the near and distant future. That has shifted significantly and I have no real idea what my life will look like in 12 months, 5 years, a decade.

None of us do, not really, but I always liked to pretend. I clung to the visions I conjured up. I'm not sure that doing so was particularly good for me. This year I have been learning how to open up to what happens a bit better. That hasn't happened without a lot of crying.

The excellent stuff was both very much and only slightly more bloggable.

Chronologically last, I wrote a novel this year, which you've already heard more than enough about. It was a door slamming shut on one phase of my writing life. The next door is open, and I'm taking a breather before stepping through to take a look around at what's in the next room. It's exhilarating and a little terrifying.

Chronologically first, I fell in love. It crept up kind of slowly, which is an emotional first for me. I've tended to not so much fall in love with people as throw myself out of a plane at super high altitude without checking my parachute. I moved in with my band boy ex after we'd been dating for 6 months. Eric and I had our first four dates in four days.

The unspoken plan with D., at least back in May, was that we'd have a fun summer together, full of kisses and larfs, and then he'd head back to London and we would drift quietly and amicably back to being acquaintances. Except he didn't and we most definitely didn't. He stayed and I though that was excellent.

Normally I'd have been blogging it the whole way along, as I have with the other people I've dated in the past 4 or 5 years. This time, I wanted the space to feel all my feelings, to not pin them down or push them along the most narratable path. Those feelings continue to grow and I continue to want to give them free rein.

2010 might also be nigh unbloggable. It's hard to say. The stuff that started this year will still be playing out through the next.

We'll see how much I want to write about it.

I did something today that should be making me really happy but is leaving me feeling more mixed: I booked tickets to go to London, Ontario at the end of January.

Why, you may well be asking, should anyone be happy about buying tickets to anywhere in Ontario at the end of January?

The answer, of course, is love. I'll be flying to that fair city in the dead of fracking winter to visit D.Jack. And when I get there, you can be very certain that I'm going to be very happy about the getting there.

But the going that precedes the getting? Oh, not so happy about that, not at all.

I've been putting off buying the tickets and putting off buying the tickets. Tomorrow maybe, or I'll just wait for [issathing]. My hesitancy was throwing me off a bit.

Why wasn't I on booking that visit like white on rice?

It hit me this evening, not so long ago. Because it's also making me sad. I think one could properly say that today I have been moping. I pulled it together for a coffee with Steve, but other than that, I have been Eeyoring around the house and all along my route of chores.

Of course, it's fine. It's only for a few months, and now we have plans to see each other in January and in February. It's not like I'm lacking for stuff to do of an evening and the internet - our main method of communication, even when we live close - is always right there.

Notwithstanding: I'll miss him, and sorely.

Though the fact that he is in my life to miss? Some happiness in and of itself, right there.

Steve mailed a few days ago and mentioned that I sounded kind of wan. I just wanted to take a moment to rectify that, in case others of you out there are thinking the same thing.

My life is a bit strange right now.

On the one hand, there's all this stuff I have to do. My work is putting on a conference starting this weekend. If you or your work has ever put on a conference, you know that it's a lot of details based on a lot of people who change those details on a seemingly regular basis in a way that is very difficult and frustrating to track. It is super stressful.

I've also got two writing assignments due in early November, which means getting them done by the 31st. Also super stressful, though more fun and satisfying.

And then, Halloween, though fun, is ill-timed this year. Apparently my work doesn't get that Halloween is the GAY XMAS and so I have to have a good costume and go to a party full of cute girls in their costumes. (A word of advice? If you are over 30, you should avoid American Apparel during the week leading up to Halloween.) So it will be a quiet and not drunken GAY XMAS for me. That, oddly for GAY XMAS perhaps, ends with me picking up my man-beau at another party. Because apparently Halloween is also INDIE ROCK XMAS.

This leads me to the other hand.

I have to tell you, and no one is more surprised than I am, that this dating business seems to be going remarkably well. I am, dare I say it, happy. If I were still the gushing kind, I might even have added some superlatives to that. Suffice it to say that I leave my office after a hairy day of "What the fuck now?" and on the short walk home, I find myself looking up at the grey sky and smiling for no good reason.

You know, it's just really nice to feel like that. I'm grateful for it.

What a Friday!

The excellence started before midnight, actually, but carried over into the wee hours. The nervous making email I sent off a few days ago was an email to D.Jack, in which I laid out what was going on in my head and heart. I thought there was a decent chance it would be well received, but there was enough doubt that I did not get very much sleep. The decent chance, I'm more than happy to report, was much much better than that.

Which means I did not get very much sleep.

When you do not get very much sleep, 6.30 am rolls around even faster than normal. But I hauled myself into the shower, got dressed up in my office drag and headed off to the wrap-up meeting for a work project. I met my boss there and drank too much coffee and fruit that tasted of onion. All went well, so I was glad about that, not to mention being in a too-tired dreamy happy good mood to start. As we were cleaning up, my boss got the call.

The letter of understanding was in from our funder. I had a job.

Not that I was ever without one, but my last day was rolling around with alarming speed, and the thing about a house is that it's expensive. And also, if you have been looking for a job in Ottawa in the last little while, you will know that there's not a shit ton out there.

On the way back from the meeting, we hit the LCBO and the bakery. When everyone who was away assembled again, we gathered in the board room and called the people whose last days had already come and gone. None of them were home, but we left happy cheering messages for them.

That, I will tell you, is already a fucking good day. I am lucky to report that there's more.

At around 6 pm, I headed off to the airport to pick up one Chris from Winnipeg. Chris and I have been friends now for 10 years. One decade! We met in the third week of library school, and spent nearly every damn spare minute we had together for about 20 months. Since then, we've visited back and forth, though she has been far more back than I have been forth.

On her way here, she was sitting beside this bear hunter guy, and they got talking about far away friends and keeping in touch and he said "How long does it take you to get used to seeing each other again?" And she said "No time."

It's true, every time we see each other, it's like she just walked the four blocks up North Street from Gottingen to pop in. Though usually an hour or so in, one of us almost always says "It's so strange that it's so normal! It's so great!"

And we are always right.

By chance today, I ran into Janey on the street. We rarely see each other in real life, though it turns out she lives about 5 short blocks away from me.

We talked only briefly, it being jesus cold outside and both of us on our way somewhere else. About the fifth thing she said to me was "National Novel Writing Month! You should do it!"

"Yeah," I said. "I'm pretty sure I'm going to. Not so sure that I've signed up or anything, you know."

Well. Now I can say I am that sure.

The title of the post is pulled from the email right after. I'm not so great with imperfection, so I've started seeing NaNoWriMo as just as much an opportunity to push myself on that as to get a novel written. Either way, in that case, it's a winning proposition.

++

It's been a bit of a day. About 30 seconds before signing up for NaNoWriMo, I sent off a nervous-making email. Several hours before that, I cried in the Bridgehead while J. and I were having warm beverages. Having used her hanky to wipe up some spilled tea, she patted her pockets and said "If my hanky weren't already soaked, I would lend it to you!" and gave me a napkin instead. Now that's a good friend.

Other than that, the weekend's been lovely. Lots of warm beverages with good friends, an amusing trip to the Landsdowne Market, cranberry sauce, wine and more wine, dancing with d.jack, sun and hail and brisk air.

There's a breathless moment that I love, right before a date.

You've prepared all you wanted to prepare:

• your house is clean (dishes done, toilets wiped down, couch vacuumed, cat hair swept);
• your self is clean (trimming, tweezing, scrubbing, bubbing, good smells applied);
• your props are assembled (the right purse, the new lube, lipbalm, keys, we're ready).

It's like fall, this feeling, or the first warm smell in March. It's possibility. It's humming anticipation.

My problem is that I am long winded. Writing a short blog post is hard for me, and feels a bit unsatisfying. Because also my problem is that I like details. I live for details. I live through them. Details take a long time to write down.

Let's just say that this weekend, I managed not to get so drunk I had to lie down on my kitchen floor in the middle of a date. Let's say that I loved sharing a bag of popcorn with J. and giggling through Julie and Julia. Shall we say that I loved too a green-whipped ride along Scott Street one way and then the other, with Mars having risen higher between them. Let us dwell for a moment on the look of pleased surprise on D.Jack's face when I made myself an Unexpected Megan.

Let's say that I had a great time in Kingston at a wonderful brilliant art show. Let us add that I loved drinking beer outside as part of a faggot sidewalk party. Let us commend the homophobe Kingstoners who shouted that at us for their obviously perceptive nature.

To paraphrase -
Meghan: Do you think you have a thing for musicians?
Megan: I've dated about 3 non-musicians since I was 16.

Maybe too let's say that I tried very hard not to be a pill about my travelling arrangements, but that I only half succeeded. We'll say that I learned a few things about how I need to travel if I'm going to a place where the trains and buses run infrequently out of a station that is inexplicably way the fuck up Chebucto. Let us repeat these four words: Chill The Fuck Out.

Let us also ponder Mae's loveliness, the Mae who said "Okay, you should take the train because we probably won't leave for noon and then you'll be stressed and we'll be rushing. And this way you don't have to make small talk."

Finally, let us say that there are beautiful things, and here is a morning that is a string of them: waking up in a gigantor bed with your best friend, with the craziest bedhead after spending a muggy night tossing and turning. Being in a house with a perfect circle iron grate in the upstairs floor that you can press your eye against to spy on the main floor. Making coffee and eating breakfast with special-bought soy milk and more friendly friends and a nice dog and a cat you buried your face in deliciously even though doing so made you sneeze three times. And let us say that the coffee was good coffee and that the windows were opened onto the densely-leaved backyard.

And we will say that string is sparkling.

Well, Internet, I've been keeping a secret from you.

Okay, not so much a secret. Just private. It's going around, it seems.

Normally, I'd be spilling all over myself to tap tap tap you out all the news concerning this information. With selected details and careful gushing.

I have been dating.

It's true. There is a person I have been meeting on a regular basis. We go out, we get tipsy, we remove our pants. Not always necessarily in that order, and occasionally one of those elements is absent.

In and of itself, this is not particularly remarkable. I've dated a fair few people over the past few years. Most of them have morphed from lovers to good friends. Occasionally they've hip-scotched over that line, one way or 'tother.

Thing is, I blogged about them all, and while I don't think blogging had anything to do with anything at the bottom line, I am reminded of a saying I stole from Jennifer. Do what you've always done, get what you've always gotten.

While I am not going to complain about the getting of good friends, the word that I have for the feeling that I'm feeling about my dates with D.Jack is this one: protective.

Blogging dating puts on some pressure. It forces me to say something, to make decisions about what I'm feeling, to make borders of definitions. And make them public.

So I am doing what I have not always done. I am giving this one room to breathe.