friends

Two things totally cracked me up today.

+1+

Shelley is, thank god, back from her vacation. She was on the west coast, visiting a friend of hers. It’s beautiful out there, but obviously, flowers or no flowers, she belongs in Ottawa.

The following exchange happened while we were catching up on the way to Bridgehead. It made me bark with laughter in the barista’s face.

Megan
Oh no, it was an internet date. If it’d been an in-person date, you would have heard about it.

Shelley [with a lar lar grin]
Heard it all the way in Victoria!

Megan
Well, definitely by email, that’s for sure.

[our intrepid heroines enter the place of coffee]

Megan
It’s been a pretty quiet week though. What else. Huh. Um, I think I pulled something in shoulder stand during yoga this morning.

Shelley
That’s what you get for standing on your shoulders before breakfast.

==

Hm. I was worried about that. Without the perfect timing, the pause pause ZING, I feel like it falls a little flat.

My lack of humour-writing skills aside, it was the "before breakfast" part that got me, I think. Like if I’d just had some toast in there…

+2+

Jennifer wrote this to me today - I'll leave you to imagine the context.

"I can see why. You have some things in common with daschunds. You are skinny, cute, and shy in new situations."

The weekend did include some lowlights.

The overtime working?
I did look longingly out at the beautiful Saturday afternoon, but really it was fine.

The sore throat getting worse?
Not great, but it wasn't really bad until early early this morning.*

Spending over an hour sorting the overcooked beans into chili worthy, dip worthy and detritus?
Not the most fun I've ever had. The thrill of categorization wears off quickly, I am here to tell you.

But the rest of it was full of the following great things in no particular order:

- The Plan 99 reading series with Jennifer. We were lucky enough to run into a couple of the Irregulars (we got to watch the Erratic Genius build a house of coasters!), and so talk camera talk, talk blogging talk, talk Ottawa talk and eat good food.** Later on we got to talk writing talk and music talk with Dave O'Meara, who is brilliant at both poetry and table wrangling. And one of the suddenly millions of Daves I know.

- Friday night Grace said "Why does Henry's head smell like chocolate?" and I said "Because I was rubbing my lips on it." And she just said "Oh" like that was an entirely reasonable answer, before I even explained to her about the lipbalm. Henry is their very adorable new baby, by the way. His head is very soft and he smells really good even without a crazy auntie rubbing her lipbalmed lips on him.

- Impromptu date!

- Sunday I did a crazy amount of grocery shopping. Anyone who's been to my house before knows that my fridge is like the main street of a Western just before the villain meets the hero at high noon. It actually makes that Morricone whistling sound sometimes when you open the door and then the cat food tin tumbles into your hand. The massive amount of shopping then lead to a massive amount of cooking. Which lead to the bean incident, but we've already talked about that.

*I feel fine other than the throbbing tonsil, thank you for asking, and I have a doctors appointment tomorrow afternoon.

**Though another thing I am here to tell you is that the Manx menu has suddenly gotten very The-Butcher-Unfriendly. I don't eat wheat and I don't eat dairy and I didn't feel like pork tenderloin or either of the (altered) tofu mains. So. I had the fish tacos*** and just sucked it up when the fish came breaded. Figuratively and literally. It was really tasty.

***Heh. Heh heh. Heh heh.

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.

The festivities for my birthday started on Friday, when Shelley took me out for a fancy dinner. We gossiped and laughed and drank wine and ate a lot of tasty food. They ended last night, when D.Jack took me out for a fancy dinner and we gossiped and laughed and drank wine and ate a lot of tasty food. In between, there was cocktail drinking and present getting and family members singing to me.

This is a crazy corny tradition in my family and one that I cornily get crazy excited about. At the end of my nephew's message to me, I heard my brother: "Say bye, buddy." Followed by Deckie's wee voice: "Bye Buddy!" Then Chris left me a good early morning message, saying that she hoped I was doing all the things I liked: breakfast with good people, booze, yoga, sex. Oh, I laughed and I laughed. Hilarity and cuteness is a very good way to start a birthday.

It is also a very good way to continue a birthday, and would describe the small gathering that Shelley held for me on Saturday night, at which were many cute people and many fun gifts (such as the amazingly fun Fashion Crimes Bingo, from J.) and many delicious drinks and snacks.

You may not know that I am what they call a lightweight, or "a cheap date," with regards to my drinking stamina. You may also not know, since I did not, that that if I have a reasonably-sized bowl of noodles and several delicious snacks I can, in fact, double my alcohol consumption without feeling particularly drunk. Which would be an advantage if said food also staved off the concomitant creeping hangover, where you feel pretty fine when you wake up and fucking awful by 3 hours later.

Still and all, what a great weekend. When you manage fit in most of the things that you're known for liking, it's really can't be too bad at all.

Looking at my house this morning, one could only assume that I'd had a very busy and very good weekend.

My favourite pair of heels had been abandonded in front of the closet, one of them tipped over after I tripped on it rushing out the next morning. The bed was pushed over about 6 inches and there was a pile of [redacted] that had ended up on top of my dressing table after being moved around in a clump from flat surface to flat surface. There were clothes hanging to dry in the spare room, there were piles of dirty clothes on the floor in every room. There were clothes hanging on the doorknob in the bathroom.

The main floor fared no better. A big pile of dishes, pepitas left in the oven after roasting. Clean clothes hanging in the bathroom. Dirty yoga clothes in a pile on the stairs. Bulk food still sitting in bags on the counter after being bought Saturday morning.

One would be right.

It was a very busy and very good, and in some ways very hard, weekend. The very good included a Sunday night friendly friend potluck, a Friday night puttering by myself (2 loads of laundry! 2 episodes of Top Chef! 1 giant bowl of soup! 2 beers!), a shit hot Saturday night with D.Jack, which can be further subdivided into three categories of overlapping fun, including live music at Raw Sugar and nice drinks and food at the Moon Room and a whole pile of [redacted] at my house.

The bulk of my days, however, was taken up with hours worth of yoga anatomy instruction. It was crazy useful (who knew the foot has three arches!) but fucking hard. It's hard for me to sit for 5 hours straight, no matter where I am or what I'm doing. Add a second-day bleeding backache to that, add a few hours in stilettos to that, add some brutally hard concentrated yoga to that, and by Sunday at 2 pm I was severely uncomfortable.

And then we started on the shoulder work.

It's hard for me to do shoulder work no matter, since my shoulders are square but not strong. But add to that a possibly sadistic teacher who had us do said shoulder work with the soles of our feet pressed together and brought as close to our crotches as we could and by about 8 minutes in I was crying, because that is what happens when I spread my legs and externally rotate my femurs.

I'm pretty down with that. I've been therapized up the yin-yang, and I'm not so sure I've got much else to say to a kind person who is listening without stake to my babbles. At some point you need to just let the fuck go of what you learned to hold onto. What I am holding onto, I am holding somewhere in my hips and hamstrings.

I'm good with doing that in yoga, I'm good at managing its public manifestations. But add to that a sore back, add to that various floods of cyclical hormones, add to that sore legs, add to that the swirls of nausea that sometimes accompany the leak of tears, add to that a room full of strangers who didn't want to partner with the weird tattooed girl with the hairy armpits and oh, oh, I was hollowed out, leaving the potluck in the first wave, crawling into sheets that still smelled like d.jack and falling hard enough asleep that the firecrackers didn't wake me up.

When I woke up at 4 this morning I was lying on my back in the exact center of the bed, my arms flung out straight to the sides, hands limp over the edges. My legs pointed straight down.

Everything was wet. The bed around me was soaked, the top sheet and duvet were on the other side of damp. From the inside, I could feel that my whole body was covered in sweat.

"Thank Christ," I thought. "That's it then. It's broken."

I promptly rolled over into a dry spot and the deepest sleep I've had in a couple weeks.

This flu kicked my ass. My nose is still stuffed up and it'll probably be quite a while before I'm able to clear all the gunk out of my lungs. Maybe a bit too, before I recover from the lack of solid sleep and appetite.

My fridge is a bit of an embarrassment. Not to me, when I'm on my own and not thinking about it. But when I look at other people's fridges, or at my own through someone else's eyes. There is often more compost in it than food.

I say embarrassing because visually, it's a little sad, this giant stainless steel behemoth often containing only a few slices of bread and a variety of alternative milks. But I also half-pride myself on it. Very little gets thrown out of that fridge.

Both my work and my house are close to grocery stores of all kinds. I'm passing them all the time. I don't really need to have an army's worth of food in my larder.

Until, of course, I don't have the energy to make it to the grocery store. At that point, my sketchy pantry becomes a liability.

Luckily, I know lovely people. Shelley's done bits of grocery shopping for me as she's gone to and from the back house, and dropped off quinoa salad and strawberries this morning. Just a couple hours before Mae emailed to ask did I want some of her leftover portabello mushroom soup. Umm, yes please. Steve, Jennifer and Greg have all offered to bring me anything I need.

For the most part, I've been wanting random things.

I mostly don't want to eat, and disturbingly seem to have lost my taste for coffee. When I do want to eat, it's kind of random stuff. A muffin. No, any kind is fine, just a muffin, thank you. Tortilla chips and salsa, procured finally from one of the two wacko convenience stores near my place.* Dinner last night was 1 red pepper, which sounds pathetic but was the only thing I could imagine eating. A lot of toast and peanut butter, until my bread ran out.

Shelley brought me a loaf today though, so now I'm all set.

*When I walked into the first place, I was shocked. There were about 20 bags of chips in there, a few random magazines, and the shelves were two-thirds bare. There were 4 small jars of salsa at nearly $5 a pop. The shelves behind them were completely bare.
"I'm looking for tortilla chips?"
The guy smiled a jolly smile at me.
"Oh, nope! They just came and took those away!"
Uhhhh, okay then. Off to Little India and the woman with the gross fingernails and rheumy eyes.

You know, I'm not even the hugest hard core post-punk garage rock three chord music fan. I like it, sure thing, some of it I love. My go-to music, though, is moodier and more angular.

I didn't have grand hopes for The Gaga Weekend. I thought it was cool that it was going on, and I liked the bands on the bill that I'd seen enough to make me want to see more. Just how much fun it was kind of sideswiped me. Fun enough that I did enough and drank enough that the thought of going to Westfest tonight went completely out of my mind.

It was amazing not so much for the music, or even the company. Though there was Jennifer, of course, who makes music more fun just by being there. There was Steve and Maggy, who danced with us too. Earlier and later, too, there was d.jack. There were some excellent bands, which Jennifer ably described, and some pretty good bands, and even a couple I really didn't like.

The sense of community, though, was amazing.

I loved how those two girls that I'd never talked to before yesterday lost their shit during The Balconies. I loved how about three songs into The Statues, the audience climbed on stage and took over singing from the singer. And how at another point, Davey did the same by himself and then forgot the words. And the jumping and the joy and the people I haven't seen in years who I thought wouldn't be happy to see me but were. And the keyboards sometimes! And all the girls in those bands! And the sloppy fuck you DIY feel of the whole thing. And the sheer force of the volume. It's one of my favourite highs, ever.

++Promdemonium 2009++

I never hit my stride last night.

Oh sure, I mean I was on the arm of the hottest thing ever seen in a velvet blazer. With our matching but not matchy-matchy green outfits. Wearing the prettiest corsage I've ever gotten on my wrist.

Oh sure, I got to kiss a girl in tight white jeans and a ruffled shirt, a girl who had never kissed a girl before. And okay, another kiss from someone who had a kiss-pass from her gal and wasn't afraid to use it.

But my game was lost from the start and I never really found it.

Though I must say I didn't really think about where it might have gone when I had my thumb hooked through my date's belt loop while we slowdanced.

Still. I felt like I spent a lot of the night overheated and chafed by my enormous dress, dancing to one bad 80s song after another until the nostalgia wore off. One of those nights where I couldn't think of what to say, and my voice hurt from talking over the music within a couple of songs. Mostly because I didn't want it to be saying anything.

Still. I was there with a posse of my friends, and we were Done Up. There were bow-ties and leather ties and ruffled shirts and polka dots and crinolines as far as the eye could see and the 2 would take us (which is the Rideau Centre now, FYI). We met lots more of other friends there.

But it wasn't our crowd, not the way I'm used to. If I wasn't with my people, I felt adrift in a sea of faces I didn't even recognize.

++Prom 1993++

My giant dress of last night is the same dress I wore to my actual prom in 1993. That is me on the back deck of my parents' house.

Funny, because last night the dress was pretty par for the course, whereas in 1993 it was an affront to good prom-goers everywhere.

Funny also because I took last night's prom more seriously than I took my actual prom. For my actual prom, I went with a friend, someone I hardly knew and hadn't ever really liked very much, though he turned out to be a really nice guy.

I was actually seeing someone, had just started dating him, but he was 27, and there was no fucking way in hell I was going to bring him to my stupid prom, the stupid prom I was only going to because my bandmates were going and I knew we'd all have fun together. And, well, okay. I really did want to go to my prom. Even if I thought it was a stupid tradition, and was mad that the prom committee was only selling tickets for couples, I still didn't want to miss out.

When I asked Mike P. - a close friend of the bassist in my band - if he would be my date, he nodded a cool yes. I went to Kensington and bought this dress for $12, the docs for $100 something. Mike found a tuxedo jacket with tails in some other thrift store and wore it over black pants and a black t-shirt. I think we slow danced together awkwardly once or twice, standing far apart and making desultory conversation.

Before that though. The night of, I got all dressed up. I'd dyed my hair the night before, so I slapped on some frosted make-up, hiked up my mom's decade-old electric blue exercise tights and me and my dress piled into my decade old Buick Skylark and picked Mike up.

The dance was in a tent; I think there was maybe dinner. But maybe not. I don't really remember much of the night. Not because of drinking, just time.

I do remember coming home the next night, after having stayed up most of the night at the afterparty, which I believe was in T.'s big backyard around the fire pit, drinking, smoking, doing drugs and making out with my decade older boyfriend. Worn out and in desperate need of some sleep.

And immediately perked up by my sister's story.

Cindy V. was getting gas at the station where my sister worked. Cindy forked some cash over to Amy, and said "Your sister ruined prom."

"Pardon?"

"Your sister. Ruined prom."

Maybe it was the blue hair and giant green dress. Maybe it was the mosh pit I started during the fast part of Stairway to Heaven. No matter. To this day, I am inordinately proud of the fact that I ruined someone's prom.

You know something that I am very glad about?

Other than the fact that it is almost not-February?

That I am not dating.

Oh, I know, I was all mopey and sad about it a couple weeks ago, and lord knows, I probably will be again, but it is such a relief.

Last spring, a few days before my first date with Mae, I was chatting with a co-worker about the date. He asked me if I was excited. I'm not sure if he was expecting my response.

Well. Yeah? She's really cute and seems really interesting. But I don't know about dating, y'know? Either you go on one date and it's bad and why did you bother, or you go on one date and it's really fun, so you go on another. And it's really fun, so you go on another. And so on and so on until they rip your heart out and stomp on it.

It's true that perhaps I was not quite yet ready to date.

But even now, even with that wound well-healed. I'd maybe change "until they rip your heart out" to "until it becomes obvious it's not going to work and hopefully no one's feelings get really hurt."

What it boils down to is that I can't see the start of dating without seeing the end of dating.

In some ways, that's fine. You can learn a lot about yourself and other people by dating for a few months. To continue the example, I really enjoy the connection that Mae and I have, and if we'd never dated, it wouldn't be as rich. I would consider it a loss.

What allowed me to open myself the way I did with her was the thought of something more permanently romantic. The hope that this one might not end.

I'm not entirely sure what the last straw was as far as my hope goes, but what I do know is that right now I'm not in the mood to start something that I most assuredly will finish.

Harold Hoefle will be launching his first novel, The Mountain Clinic, published by Oberon Press.

Saturday, February 21st, 5 p.m.
The Manx Pub, 370 Elgin (@ Frank)

++

Harold and I met years ago now, just after my ex and I broke up. He seemed like a nice guy, and I thought he was vibing me, though I found out this summer that he hadn't been, and that I probably shouldn't have blogged about it, even if he had.

This past summer, out of the blue, he dropped me a line, he was going to be in town, did I want to go for a beer?

No vibes.

Why not, I thought. He'd seemed like a nice sort, and he writes good emails. If it's a bad time, I figured, it's likely to be a good story.

It wasn't a bad time at all. We got on like a house afire, as it turns out. I found him easy to talk to, easy to share really personal stuff with. He gave me one of my favourite compliments ever, though I've forgotten the exact words. Something about not having travelled much in terms of geography, but having spent my time instead quite thoroughly exploring the sometimes rocky terrain of relationships.

He was working on the book then, a draft just returned by our mutual friend Dave O'Meara.

This is what it's about:

++

The Mountain Clinic
Harold Hoefle

Harold Hoefle has published both fiction and non-fiction in literary
journals all over the country. This new novel traces the life of Walter
Schwende, a Scarborough boy who seeks out his past in travel. He lives with
Czech refugees in a Vancouver rooming-house, then works in a northern
mining town, later settling on a Nicaraguan coffee farm. He ends up as a
college teacher in Montreal, where he tries to imagine what life in his
family’s native home of Austria might have been like. This becomes an
obsession that finally takes him back to Europe.

Harold Hoefle teaches at the University of Victoria. His work has been
published in a number of journals and anthologies, including The Antigonish
Review, Exile, Front&Centre, Grain, Kiss Machine, Matrix, The Windsor
Review and Telling Stories (New English Stories from Québec), as well as
in Spray Job, a four-story chapbook. Hoefle’s non-fiction received an
Honourable Mention at the 2006 National Magazine Awards. The Mountain
Clinic is his first book.

++

When he wrote me to tell me about the launch, I said I wouldn't miss it for anything. Turns out I was lying.

If I've had to put my cat down just a few hours before, that will probably make me miss it.

But you shouldn't.

++

Speaking of: not much news on the Freya front. She's home with me now while we wait for the radiologist's report. We spent most of the evening on the couch, her curled up and purring, me reaching for the keyboard over her body. She seems fine, so everything else seems very far away.