June 3, 2010
ah my sport, my sport, sometimes she defeats me. I tore or injured a leg muscle doing another sport and it came back to haunt me ce soir. I had to take an isolationist approach and couldn’t do any moves that involved a lunge in or out or anything with leg extensions.
That left me with the elusive back flip. Over and over and over the cheese yolk. With a dollop of fury it’s getting longer and stronger even though I was a bit legless.
June 1, 2010
In a sharp switch in tone, days like today, what a grim day, a day where we wonder when will enough be enough, or is the well bottomless? A day where language fails us. The convenient toss of words like “regrets” regrets! One regrets missing a bus, or dropping a glass or knocking a cup of tea, one doesn’t “regret” in relation winching commandos nor the subsequent murder of protestors on an aid ship. It was no tepid, tentative action that earned these tepid words.
And what exactly will these activists be charged with? Being on a boat, in international waters? Isn’t that like being convicted of taking the ferry?
It’s interesting to see which governments will come out and condemn this action. And our own government spineless propping up Netanyahu handing him the telephone to convey the order to shoot these people. And just as our government doesn’t represent our condemnation, so too does the Israeli government not act for nor express the will of the many people engaged in the peace movement there.
The indefinable it of it is not just depressing it is arresting. You’re powerless and feel like this desperate lunacy will never stop. Like I said days like today. What will become of us all? We’ve been here before, it’s hard to recall how it ends. It does end, doesn’t it?
May 30, 2010
Was just reading this excerpt of Paul Quarrington’s (RIP) memoir in today’s Globe. Read these few lines and they seem to articulate “a something” is the only way I can put it. A something that often stops me in my tracks or mid thought and puts me into a similar described state of panic.
I tried to be stoic, saying as how I had led a good life, and had lovely friends and loved ones. But then the sight of a very pretty girl reduced me to convulsive sobs. “I’m going to miss this so much,” I managed to get out, although my throat was so knotted with remorse that speech seemed hardly possible.
At last week’s memorial for Anna, for every extraordinary story and anecdote and remembrance shared, I would slump in between recalling that the life so vividly depicted in striking images on the wall and rousing words spoken on a humble community hall stage, that the very life I was learning so much about, had been irretrievably snuffed out. It made the whole thing all the more vicious. And another story or person would stand and my sense of the woman would be enriched further and it became more and more difficult. Yet I was glad to be there, despite the broader struggle it provoked. I also had some distance to take note of this in this situation whereas in other situations I haven’t had that.
I just watched a brief video segment of an interview with a poet, Leslie, 66, who died today. Her face was so extraordinarily beautiful, eyes so vivid and she spoke about losing her breath in Nepal. The above struck me. How can all this, all of this person, now be gone, a once and for all gone? And it can, of course it can and yet how to confront that. The only reassuring thing is that when it happens to an individual they do not “know” it once it is over. But perhaps it is in life leading up to that point we individually confront it. Or not.
The language we use around death does not suffice. We have so much language and yet we use such a select and repetitious series of words to express when someone dies.
May 29, 2010
This evening’s weather continues to wonder. It had almost a wintery hint to it, a November blur. Yesterday at the garden the beans have started to come up, but they’re not happy, they’re struggling. It’s the soil I think. I can’t quite fathom it, but i know an unhappy bean when I am looking at one. They look parched, and yet it had been raining down on them.
Last year they sprung out of the soil wide and green. This year it’s more a coughing, tickly, half cut yawn. Had a look at another gardener’s beans which are a little ahead of mine and same diagnosis.
The strawberry plants, however, look like they’ve gone on holiday to Sellafield. A kind woman gave me a new plant from a botanic (?) garden in Tofino. I have my original alpine strawberry which I grew from a seedling the size of my little finger. Now she’s a “big hair” strawberry plant. Bouffant.
May 29, 2010
The weather, ce soir, is close. I have that sky encroaching (barometric pressure) headache. It may also be caused by a glimpse at a perplexing series of headlines such as this one from tomorrow’s Irish Times:
Single parents to lose welfare payment when child turns 13
(and the costs after that child turns 13 go up, up, up! Bright stuff lads. Well done. )
Earlier this week there was a headline that said 1 in 25 in Ireland are in mortgage arrears, while their tax dollars go to fund NAMA.
Then this headline from cbc.ca/bc
Auto-erotic B.C ads too racy: minister
(refers to an abandoned ICBC TV ad campaign to educate young male drivers that cost 2 million, but was deemed too racy and has been dumped)
And finally from The Vancouver Sun.
B.C officials admit warnings over ‘little girl’ parties based on hearsay.
(story that broke earlier this week of grade 8 girls being targeted for sexual conquest competition by older high school teens)
May 28, 2010
Ball scratching etiquette
There is some room for improvement in etiquette at my favourite local pool. Today an older fella was laid out across the entirety of the steps to get into the pool, or splayed out, hand up his trunks, scratching his left testicle.
That BBC voice of Sorry we interrupt this programme … came to mind.
May 28, 2010
Tony Judt’s latest memoir piece in the New York Review of Books has a great description of American (university) libraries rising out of the land in places like the midwest in between billboards, strip malls and motels. I loved this co-habitation. Worth a read. Not available in its entirety online, but certainly available at yer local (or Central) library.
May 28, 2010
Did I mention someone asked me if I had grandchildren last week? I was aghast. Regardez mon visage ! Regardez moi bien dans les yeux! My son was beside me! i had to quickly recall that time someone on the bus asked if he was my younger brother….
Then yesterday at gymnastics, (where your back handspring and tumbles are the only marker of anything) I realized I could technically be the mother of many of them, who could have offspring, and then I returned to bouncing about and upside down ness and recalled some of my favourite women in the world are 70, so if I am up beside them this is a fine thing! Next time I will reply — yes. I left them in the car with their grand dad, Mick Jagger.