happy

Followed a link from David Scrimshaw's blog and listened to this song.

Don't just listen to the song at the top of the page, though, read down through the story first. Then listen to it. And see if your heart hasn't just grown three sizes.

I mowed the lawn today for the first time in years.

Given my general interests and demeanor, you might think that's a euphemism for something at least slightly dirty. It is not.

There I was, with a half hour till my flank steak warmed up enough to prick it and rub it. There I was, with a front lawn that was becoming long enough that even I thought that perhaps enough was getting to be enough.

Last year was a bit of a home disaster.

I felt distanced from the building and the land; I was unsure of my future here. I'd never gardened before, I hadn't had a lawn to mow in 15 years, and I wasn't sure I was going to be able to put those kinds of roots down here.

Last year, the tomato plants got planted, but never staked. If you don't stake tomato plants, they creep steadily along the ground like the vines they are. I was "harvesting" tomatoes on the other side of the garden from where we'd put them in the earth.

Everything in fact, just grew how it grew. We watered it sometimes. Sometimes we forgot.

Eventually we got around to tying up the cosmos, but only because we were worried one of the small children in the neighbourhood might mysteriously disappear. It got cut back long after Halloween; I know this only because the dying foliage was thick enough to use as a backdrop for spray painting my luchador boots.

We forgot what we planted last spring. Just a week or so ago, taking a quick survey, we kept finding new plants. Lily of the valley! Cosmos! Sedum! Halfway through tearing out a mystery plant that smelled like something that might make good tea, I remembered that the neighbour across the street had given me some bee balm.

Last year, I never mowed the grass.

Partially because we didn't have a mower and never got around to either a discussion about buying one of our own or talking to the neighbours about borrowing theirs. Partially because our next door neighbour, whose 3 feet of grass joins our 12 feet of grass, likes a shorter lawn and cut ours when he was cutting his. Partially because I just couldn't manage to care.

Things around here have evened out now. Have gotten better. Not that I didn't like it the way it was; I did and very much. But I like it the way it is now, too. Everyone's getting more of what they were looking for. You can only be thankful for that.

This year, we've planted seeds and watered them.

This year, I'm not walking by the garbage on the front lawn and thinking Someone should take care of that..

This year, Shelley talked to the neighbours about their mower.

Which is why tonight, while I waited for my meat to warm up inside, I push push pushed the clanky whirring blades through the lush grass of my front lawn.

Last Saturday night, Jennifer and I headed out to Wakefield to catch some of the HiFi reunion weekend at Kaffe 1870. I never made it to the HiFi – its glory days in Ottawa preceded my own – but I liked everyone on the bill. The Recoilers, Jim Bryson, Janice Hall – I may not have been at the HiFi, but I've seen all those people play elsewhere and liked 'em.

We got into the bar, which is a lovely little place. We got our beer and got settled. We stood around chatting lady chat, as we do, and I mentioned that d.jack had rescheduled his return from London so as to come back a day earlier.

I must have looked slightly sheepish when I said that, because her response was to laugh and say “Did you Elinor Dashwood again?” And my response was to also laugh and look more sheepish and admit that I had.

If you've read the book, it's in there too, but what’s burned in my brain is Emma Thompson’s face at the end of Ang Lee's version of Sense & Sensibility. There's that scene, where Edward tells Elinor that he did not get married to the woman he did not love but felt obliged to marry. Elinor, played by Thompson, has been restrainedly and impossibly in love with Edward for a very long time. When she finds out the news, she isn’t happy. She breaks.

It was going to be a surprise, his early return, and that is a very sweet idea, but it may well have killed me, just finding him in my house unexpectedly. But he couldn’t wait, was maybe unsure of how I’d take it, too, and spilled the beans over chat.

I looked at the screen dumbly for a moment.

I typed "really?" a bunch of times and then variations on "are you joking?" a bunch more.

I felt a big lump in my throat. I thought Honestly, Butcher. Am I really going to do this agai- and started honking out jagged sobs. It didn’t last very long, but it was a relief, even if I felt slightly foolish after.

Today? Today’s that one-day-earlier day. As I type, he’s just started the drive back to Ottawa. Back home. Back to his family, his friends. Back to me.

I can’t fucking wait.

One of the first things I do most mornings, after yoga, after putting the kettle on for coffee, after putting the bread in to toast, after feeding the wee cat, though sometimes before all those things, you never know, is to open my email. I could pretend that I'm not looking for an email from my lover first and foremost, but we'd all know I'd be lying.

Monday morning, there were a couple, maybe a few. Shortish notes, all of them. One of them was a recap of the fun the night before. The next was an email saying he'd just found out he didn't get a position in London he'd applied for.

Which meant, I knew, because we've been talking about it for weeks, that the 4 months we were going to have together in the same city had just magically stretched to 8.

You would think - and I expected - that when I got this email I would go into paroxysms of delight. That I might dance a happy dance around my house and maybe sing a tune or two of joy.

What I did instead was nothing. Exactly nothing. I, in fact, forgot about it. Completely. I archived the note in Gmail and erased its existence from my conscious memory.

It wasn't until hours later, when I was leaving work and the door clicked softly behind me, that I remembered. Something about the click, I think, or the colours on the street as I walked out, or a smell in the air. But it was suddenly there.

Remembered the way you remember one piece of a dream from the night before. I could see the email in my mind's eye, the shape of the words on the screen. Hyper-sharp in the centre, wavery around the edges.

I couldn't remember if it was real or not.

It was, I ascertained after a few texts exchanged as I walked home from work. And I started leaking around the eyes, just a little.

All Monday night and all yesterday I felt bloated with tears, you know that feeling?, where you can feel them pressing against the inside of your skin all over everywhere and you feel puffy, about to burst.

This morning, I emailed Jennifer to tell her the good news and my weird reaction and I hit send and I started bawling. Gaspy-breathed, puffy-faced, snotty, red-eyed bawling.

It's the first time I've cried since he left.

When I fell in love with him, I did that fully conscious - and accepting - of the fact that he's based in two cities, an honest-to-goodness nomad travelling a worn path between two homes. So when I've felt sad or lonely this winter, I've mostly just pushed through it. "What can I do?" I thought. "Four months isn't a big deal," I thought. "Just x days till the next visit," I thought. "It'll go fast." I convinced myself.

When the subject of his plans in the fall came up, I said "I'm just going to work under the assumption that you'll be gone. That way I won't be disappointed." And I thought that was fine. I was steeled for it.

And now he's home in a couple of weeks, and now I don't have to brace myself for him leaving quickly after, and now, god, now I am crying.

The tearing feeling of saying goodbye once a month; the inability of skype to transmit smell; the camera right there by his chin where I might usually put a kiss; how he can still make me laugh till I snort over chat; the way I have been Holding It Together; the relief of not having to be this strong in the fall; the incredibly luxury of 8 months together.

It's just all a little much to take, all at once.

So you'd think I'd get that email telling me I'd have him here for more than two seasons and you'd think I'd leap up out of my seat and dance and sing. But I think it was more than my brain could handle. So the info got filed somewhere safe until I could start to process what those feelings might be.

I'm excited, fuck yes, and I can see the dancing and the singing on the horizon, but now, for right now, I believe I will have to lie on the floor and let those feelings feel their way through me.

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.

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.

If I had to hazard a guess, I'd tell you I was happy. The only explanation I can think of for the number of strangers who smiled at me yesterday is that they were smiling back.

It's fall, though not technically, but that's what my skin is telling me. Fall is my favourite season. I love its hues and crisp air.

Last night d.jack and I took in the Astronaut Love Triangle at Milan's art opening. There was beer and flirting. There were pretty pictures and BLEEDING GUMS.

Which you will only understand if you were there to appreciate the genius that is ALT.

Now I'm waiting for my mom, it's her birthday today. I'm taking her out for a fancy dinner. We'll maybe go to yoga tomorrow. Go shopping for new interview clothes. Eat peaches and corn, bought on the side of the road.

+One+

Grace and I quite handily beat Greg and Bobcia at 4 games of Sequencia, mostly, we decided, because of the Polish Diagonal Sight Disorder with which both are afflicted. This, you will have to trust me, is hilarious, and I would explain why, except that by the time I finished explaining, complete with diagrams and flow chart and game plans, it would not be amusing in the slightest.

I love this game, though. I'm not a huge board game fan, having been turned off them at an early age by a childhood friend who cheated like mad, lied about it, and then made fun of me for losing. But I find Sequence - "It's part card game, part board game!" - thoroughly enjoyable. It's enough to keep your hands busy while you're chatting, and not so difficult that you have to pay much actual attention.

Bobcia also called me a boozer all night, as in "Get a load of this boozer here!" because it took me an hour to drink my one and only beer of the evening. I found this also to be hilarious, for reasons that probably do not require flow charts.

+Two+

One of CT's pictures from his trip here in August has been chosen by Schmap for the Downtown Neighbourhood section of their Ottawa site. I'm very excited about this. I was standing right. There. Swear to god.

+Three+

Does anyone want a yowling cat? I've just about had enough.

I've heard her through the earplugs, the past two nights.

If I thought it would make it better, I'd get her one of those automatic feeders. But it would have to have multiple compartments so that she could get fed at 3 am and 5:30 am, and probably 4 pm too, so I didn't have to generally listen to an hour's worth of yowling when I got home.

And sure, I could feed her earlier, but at what point does it stop, yknow? She's on a pretty strict schedule. Between 6:30 and 8 am, 5:30 and 7 pm, and 11 pm and 12:30.

If I fed her every time she started yowling, she'd go through a case of cans in a couple days.

Basically, if you are in the house and she hasn't just been fed, she's either yowling or I'm hunched up waiting for her to yowl.

At 5:45 this morning, I took my earplugs out, wrapped myself in a robe, stomped down the stairs and shut her in the basement. Then I stomped back up again, shut my door, plugged my plugs back in and slept, solidly and deeply, for about 90 minutes.

You know what I want?

I want my pre-diabetic cat back. I want the cat who ate dry food 5 kibbles at a time, who slept with me at night and put me to sleep by purring. Right now, I do not want the wet-food eating, stink-drooling, demon-infested yowl monster that my formerly sweet natured lovely cat has become.

Not much of a salesperson, am I?

+Four+

I didn't go to the Slow Dance Party tonight because the thought of strangers touching me made me want to back slowly out of the room instead.

+Five+

I think my post yesterday came across as less hopeful than I meant it.

It's really quite a relief to have stopped looking, and all in all, I'm pretty happy about it.

I don't really think I'm going to be alone forever, not necessarily, at any rate. Hence the wry half-smile and the murmur.

Maybe I'll find someone, maybe I'll find someones. Maybe I won't find anyone.

But what's the worst that can happen? Most of the women in my family who are over 50 - all but two of them - are single, either through divorce or death. And those are just the ones who are alive. All my great aunts were either spinsters, or widowed young enough I never met their husbands.

I come from a long line of women who have ended up without a partner, though not alone, not by a long shot. They've all lived full and happy lives.

What I need to do is fight against what pop culture tries to shove down my throat as the one true way. Difficult to do, because being coupled in some form or another feels right to me in many ways. But wrong in many others.

So I'll write and I'll knit and I'll run and skate and lift weights and practice yoga. I'll play board-and-card games with my friends while drinking one beer. I'll put on short skirts and go dancing with other friends while drinking several. I'll go to California to visit hot boys. I'll travel. I'll go back to therapy. I'll laugh at good jokes, read good books, eat good food.

And happily, mostly, I'll warrant.

Not too long ago, very randomly, I checked the comments on my old blogspot blog - remember her? It's rare, but I do get the occasional comment over there.

A few days before I checked, someone named Hannah had left a message saying she wanted to include one of my photos in a book based on the website We Feel Fine.

I thought it might be adverstising. I'd never heard of We Feel Fine, and while the comment was better written than other similar marketing ploys I've seen, still. Why not just email me? I am definitely not the hardest person in the world to find.

Anyroad.

No ploy, it's all on the up-and-up. And it's a totally crazy wicked website, though I would suggest reading the explanation before opening the actual app. Once you figure it out though, holy fuck. Expect to have half an afternoon sucked away in the click - or two or three or so - of a mouse.

Funny thing: turns out it's not my photo. Well, technically, it is my photo, in that it is a photo of me. But a photo of me taken by Woodsy while I was very happily sporting a binder clip in my hair.

We've both given our permission for the authors to use our words/image/likeness, and if/when the book comes out, believe you me, I'll keep you informed.

Okay, now I'm really really excited. With no melancholy. I think my mood started to lift when I realized almost half of what I was packing was pants removal related.

And also, while I'm about this happiness business, I love:

• eating tasty beet risotto with house friends
• bike rides for vegetables, even when cars honk
• orange vegetables
• being pleased, but not too pleased, upon running into my ex
• traces of campfire on my pillow
• knitting weather
• Winter Gloves

More from Chicago, I'm sure.