In Which Defeat is Only the Tiniest Bit Agonizing

I have a friend who posted her engagement on Facebook a few years ago, and then confided that she felt stupid for having done so when it fell through. I told her she shouldn't feel that way at all, because her real friends wouldn't feel anything but sympathy and she had nothing to be embarrassed about. But I confess that I felt slightly the same way about broadcasting my first job interview attempt in twenty or so years in serene confidence that it would go positively and then.... well....

True, I could have slunk away and licked my wounds in private then. But in all honesty, people, is that ever how I roll? Let's see: depression posts; period posts; condom posts.... NOPE.

It's all very well to say that clearly I was overqualified and they were just afraid I wouldn't stay long. The bottom line is that I put myself out there and they said no thanks. And that stings a little. But it was still a good experience. Before I whipped that application together I was paralyzed at the thought of trying to put together a resumé after so much time. Now I know I can, and I can get a response, even if it's ultimately not the response I want.

Plus, now I can go to my friends' cottage this week-end instead of working. We all went to the bar last night (we do most Tuesdays, I wasn't deciding to chuck the employment idea and just become a barfly) and when they invited us to the cottage I said I would only come if I could get drunk and belligerent and tear up Indigo bookmarks. One of the hosts looked concerned and said I should bring my own because they don't have that many. (Silly. I wasn't really going to do it. One does not rip up a perfectly good bookmark even in the face of cruel rejection).

Also, I was going to have to call Zarah and say, in a good news/bad news kind of way, I can't do our girls' week-end this fall because I have a job. Now it's a bad news/ good news kind of thing. Which is good, because somehow circumstances have evolved to the point where I can only buy bras at this little shop in Barrie, and I need a new one. So, Zarah... call me.

A couple more things that happened this summer:

Zarah and the kids came for Bluesfest:

We all fell even more in love with Melissa Etheridge:

There was a lot of reading:




Oh, and Eve and Alex got haircuts.

Then we got ice cream. Obviously. 

I Don't FEEL Like Writing

Or doing much of anything, if I'm being honest. I'm done all but three and a half hours of my work placement and I was looking forward to a quiet week with Matt gone AGAIN, but I kind of miss working, and I can't settle to any wholehearted loafing and it's been mostly too cold to walk much (yes, I do have a treadmill now that you mention it, how kind and helpful, shut up). I went to a Lumineers (and Kaleo, swoon) concert with friends that was wonderful even way up in the cheap seats, then I had book club, which was great, and not only because I actually managed to go to the right house this month (don't ask), and yesterday I finally started cooking again after a few weeks of an absolutely pathetic showing in the kitchen. I also made a couple of significant phone calls, to book driving hours for Angus and pay off a forgotten FedEx taxes and duties bill, so, you know, that used up a fair number of spoons. I still have to make a doctor's appointment for me, make dentist appointments for everyone, make an appointment for Eve to get orthotics and *goes fetal with hands over ears* THAT'S TOO MUCH TELEPHONE.

I picked up Eve and two friends from after-school play rehearsal today and took them to Wendy's. They regaled me with tales of their sex education class where they were asked to list reasons why someone might practice abstinence and why they might decide to have sex. Someone had left a paper behind with answers on it: answers on why to abstain included "penis petit (small penis)" and "si tu es un enfant de Dieu (if you are a child of God)". Answers on why to have sex were "penis gros (large penis)" and "I like getting girls pregnant and runnig (sic) away". Ladies and gentlemen, our tax dollars at work. I told them about book club last night - let's just say that if you bring accidental-dong biscotti to book club, I AM going to be immature and giggly about it and make inappropriate comments until you fervently wish you'd just gone with cannoli (apparently the apple doesn't fall far from the tree).

Angus passed his driver's ed and starts his ten driving hours next week. His BFF since nursery school got his G2 on the week-end and showed up to pick up his younger brother from school after band, resulting in Eve pointing and screaming "OMG, NOAH'S DRIVING - oh, he saw me, he doesn't look impressed".

And now it's 8:41 and I'm not sure where the day has gone yet again. I did just throw out an empty carton of buttermilk, having used it all on four magnificent batches of biscuits. Often I forget about it and end up pouring some out. So there's that.

Bluesfesting While Anxious

Before I had kids, I went to Bluesfest regularly, usually with a friend (my husband isn't really into live music. It's okay, he has a lot of other good qualities). It was downtown so I would bus nearby or to my friend's place and we would walk over. I saw John Hiatt, Buddy Guy and Saffire and the Uppity Blues Women (they were great musicians and hilarious - one of their songs was called Silver Beaver, and it's about pretty much what you'd guess from the title - and while I was looking them up to embed the link I read that one of them died and now I'm sad) and The Blind Boys of Alabama and a bunch of bands I didn't even know or can't remember now.

We moved to even more of a suburb. We had a couple of kids. Bluesfest moved somewhere a little less accessible and I stopped taking public transit and got less comfortable with it. Bluesfest got much less Blues-packed, but that wasn't really a factor for me - I like the blues, but I understand that the festival has to attract a wide demographic to sell more tickets. It fell off my radar a bit, it always took me off guard when it started in early July, and whenever I thought about it, I would think "I have to go back someday" but I kept not doing it. Until last year when Alison and I saw Styx and Foreigner in the pouring rain, followed by a double rainbow.

This year I was determined to make myself go. I thought I should bring Eve to at least some of it, since she likes music, and we like doing things together, and it would be the summer! Yay! Mother-daughter adventure, live music in the sun! I told her we could go see Iggy Azalea if she wanted to, and she was stoked. I bought us both passes at a good price the first day they were available. I felt all smug and cool and culture-consuming.

For about four days. Then I realized that Eve and I both have tendencies towards anxiety, and we both kind of hate crowds, and we're not that great with really loud places. Also, I don't love driving, especially downtown, especially when I don't know exactly where I'm going, or where to park. And I also hate hot weather, and Bluesfest is in Ottawa, in July. And as it got closer, I realized my husband wasn't even going to be home to walk me through the route I should take and possible parking spots - he was going to be in freaking Detroit or Dallas or some other city in the states that begins with D, and I was going to have to do this TOTALLY ALONE, except for my kid who I would probably scar for life by screwing up and driving the wrong way down a one-way street, or parking fifty blocks away and not getting to the festival site until all the music was done, or just sobbing in absolute terror.

Basically I looked at myself in the mirror going "THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU???"

School went on. School ended. Zarah came for a week and that distracted me. Then she left and I spent half a day in full-blown panic. I actually thought I might have to cancel.

But here's the thing. This is me at the beginning of every canoe trip, and dance, and party, and any event where I have to leave my reading chair and my house and my comfort zone: Why am I doing this? Who thought this was a good idea? I can listen to music and look at nature and make up witty quips at home. Why didn't I stay there?

The first night I had to breathe exaggerated deep breaths on the drive down and literally almost threw up.

The second night, I put on the dress I wanted to wear. I opened the door from bedroom to the hallway and Eve said "you look pretty!" I said "I feel like I'm showing too much of my boobs." She shrugged and said "enh."

The third night I took a couple of her friends who had tickets and met my friend Nat, who is WAY too cool to listen to Hedley but hung out with me out of a mixture of friendship and pity, with which I am TOTALLY fine. 

And partway into the experience, I remembered what I always realize: Sometimes you just have to get out of your house and do stuff. Because the world is big and inside your head can get very small. Because amazing opportunities will present themselves. 

Because you'll meet people who are a little different. 

Because you'll hear a familiar line of music, or fall in love with an unfamiliar one, or see an amazing view, or navigate a new stretch of river, or stretch a new set of muscles, and inside your head will get a little bigger. 

Because you'll be All Out of Love, Lost in Love, Making Love out of Nothing at All, and Every Woman in the World.

Because you'll find a seniors' centre that offers their parking lot as a fundraiser, and you'll know that most of your friends will refuse to pay for parking on principal, but you don't give a flying fuck because now you know exactly which address to punch into the GPS every time you drive down, and where to park, and how long a walk it will be (not long), and after Iggy Azalea (who is surprisingly very sweet and whose music is much less noisy and unintelligible than you assumed it would be, even in the second row) your daughter will sigh ecstatically and say "You don't even know how happy I am right now."

Because your husband will say "you should be proud of yourself, in some silly little way", and you'll say "uh, yeah, but not quite", and he'll say "sorry, I was trying not to be condescending" and you'll say "then you're doing it wrong", but it will be okay, because, yeah, it was kind of silly and little, but you did it. And next year you'll do it again. Hopefully minus the Kanye, because, *visceral sudder*, gah, the sweaty heaving mass of humanity you had to drag Eve through to get to the exit after Hawksley Workman? NOT pleasant.

Taylor-Made to Make Me Feel Like a Chump

When I was at Zarah's last week-end (why have I not written about my fabulous Week-end at Zarah's one day this week instead of the endless, grating whinge-fest? Why, I don't know, it's a perfectly valid question) we enjoyed a wide variety of Songza playlists while cooking, eating, cleaning up the kitchen or getting ready to go out. Okay, it's probably slightly inaccurate to say we enjoyed a WIDE variety of playlists. We figured out in short order that if we were presented with any option containing the word "Mom", (Mom-friendly pop hits! Classic hits for Moms! Mom's hanging-out music!) we should just take it. Apparently, as far as Songza goes, we are eminently predictable and mainstream and Mommish.

We picked something with a Joni Mitchell theme at one point, and this song came on. Without thinking, I said "I love this song." Which I do. But I didn't know it was a James Taylor song. I heard it in my head sung by a sweet, high female voice - no idea whose. Later that night in bed, I tried for an hour to find that version on iTunes, fruitlessly, and now I have three or four versions of it and they're all nice, but none is exactly RIGHT, and it's vexatious.

Then I remembered this guy in university telling me that Taylor had written this song after some friends of his had bought his wife a plane ticket to see one of his concerts and the plane had crashed and she had DIED. I mean, Jesus, right? And, well, the lyrics: "Just yesterday morning they let me know you were gone/ Susanne, the plans they made put an end to you", and "Sweet dreams and flying machines in pieces on the ground". Plus, I was nineteen and highly credulous.

Thing is, it's a load of crap. A fairly widely-disseminated load of crap, because it's mentioned on Wikipedia. The actual story, that a friend had committed suicide but the news was initially kept from Taylor, is arguably equally as sad, if less Hollywood. The other night when I mentioned the first anecdote at a dinner party, my friend's husband immediately said "that has 'urban legend' written all over it". But like I said, young, unskeptical, and there was no internet back then. And the thing is, I don't even know if the guy who told it to me actually thought it was true or if it was a line (he did kind of segue into "oh, you look so sad, let me hug you after I remove these incredibly heavy and cumbersome pants").

I'd like to think I've become a bit more discerning in the intervening years. I hardly ever give money away to strangers with sob stories any more. Eve still gets me every April Fool's Day, though. I guess that's okay.

Now I'm going to see if there's a playlist for Moms Doing an Excel Assignment, or Music to Accompany Your Laptop Flying Through the Air.

Scintilla Day 3: Finding my voice

Scintilla Day 3: 

B: Talk about a time when you were driving and you sang in the car, all alone. Why do you remember this song and that stretch of road?

I'm finding it difficult to get any real traction on the prompts this year. Last year I had to reach but it still felt within my grasp; this year I'm just starting to emerge from weeks of leaden, joyless trudging, and I'm wondering if maybe I'm just not up to this right now. I'm torn between not wanting to submit what feels like mediocre splattering and wondering if just making the effort will help me move out of the Slough of Despond.

I don't think I drive anywhere alone without singing. Once a year I drive four or five hours to Barrie to visit my best friend, and I think I usually choose the music for the drive before I decide what clothes to bring. Angus and I used to measure how long it took to drive to somebody's house by how many times we could sing the Spiderman theme song before we got there. Eve sings in three languages. I don't have nearly the upper register that I used to - asthma medication, hormones, lack of practice, whatever - but in the car I still reach for all the high notes with a complete lack of self-consciousness, and sometimes I get there and sometimes I crack and squeak horribly and then kill myself laughing. There's no way I could pick one song and one stretch of road.

So I'm going metaphorical. 

I was told from the age of seven or so that I had writing ability way above my grade level. I was always praised extravagantly for my essays, short stories and any other assignment where I could string words together (long division and completing the square were another matter entirely). I sailed through a few years taking it for granted that I would have some kind of career featuring writing. 

Then I started really thinking about what that meant. I considered journalism, until I realized that my crippling fear of questioning, talking to or in any way interacting with people I didn't know would probably be a bit of a hindrance. I went to university, got undergraduate and graduate degrees in Comparative Literature and then realized that, although I was pretty good at it, I didn't really love academic writing. Engaging in exhaustive, analytical, recursive discussion of brilliant literature by other people was engaging and amusing up to a certain point, but I didn't think I wanted to spend the rest of my life doing it and teaching other people to do it. 

I left school. I got married. I went to work for an audio publisher, thinking I would start writing fiction in my spare time.

I wrote some fiction. The fiction sucked real bad.

I tried a variety of attack points. I wrote literary short stories based on pivotal moments in a character's life. I wrote science fiction short stories. I started collaborating with a friend on a mystery novel with a strong romantic sub-plot. It was all bad. I couldn't find my voice. I knew the way my favourite books spoke to me, and I knew without a doubt that nothing I wrote was going to speak to anyone in that way. It wasn't going to say anything, in fact, except "hello, I am some really grotesquely bad fiction written by a complete waste of a human being who hates her job and still watches Beverly Hills 90210 even though she's well above the appropriate demographic". 

I took some time off to be horribly depressed. I worked in a couple of bookstores, which was twenty percent good and eighty percent wretched, on account of a large proportion of humanity being absolute wanking assholes. I quit working and had a couple of kids. Someone said once again to me that I was a really great writer. 

I said "but I never write anything."

And I didn't. I gave up. I read somewhere that if you hadn't been published by the time you were thirty that it was really all over. I felt, in a lot of ways, that I had already wasted whatever early promise I had, that I had missed some crucial turning and lost all my chances.

I heard about blogging. I rolled my eyes and mocked and wondered why anyone would think the world desired access to their thoughts, and declared that I would never, ever blog.

I started blogging. And within a very short period of time, I felt like I was singing the most soaring of arias after years of laryngitis. Trying to give a thoughtful or entertaining shape to my thoughts was vastly different from just.... trying to make things up. When I was trying to write fiction, every single sentence seemed limping, crooked, pitiful. When I was blogging, words flew faster than I could type them. I had a place to put all those thoughts that hummed or chanted or raged in my head, and see what I could do with them. Reading my own words over MADE ME SMILE. 

I often say that one of the most wonderful gifts that blogging confers is the almost-instantaneous knowledge and comfort and reassurance that, no matter what your burden, you are most assuredly not alone. But the other thing, for me, is that it gave me my voice. Some people seem to look on their blogging as a kind of consolation prize or second-best endeavour that either salves their regret for not having fiction published or keeps them from writing more fiction. And I get that, because some people are meant to write fiction, and many of them probably deserve to be published, and it's hard to get published, and maybe blogging IS sort of second-best. For me? It feels a lot like I finally found the song that I was meant to sing, the song that gives me the greatest joy and peace, and blogging is my long, straight stretch of road. 

Untamed Music

It was my third time, I think, at the Ottawa Folk Festival. I was on the lawn chair side, sitting beside a friend. I love the Folk Festival. I've been to the Blues Festival, and I love the music but it's too big - I feel overwhelmed by the crush of people and it almost always rains on me when I'm there. The Folk Festival, at least at this point, was smaller and more civilized - a neat division between ground-sitters and chair-sitters, no trouble being near enough to the stage. Here I fell in love with Jesse Winchester, who was quiet and unassuming in speech and wove an unbreakable enchantment in music. Here I developed a huge crush on Fred Eaglesmith, who was the very opposite of quiet and unassuming and made me wonder why I had never realized how great songs about cars, freight trains, and big ass garage sales were. Here I began decades-long love affairs with The Wailin' Jennys and David Francey.

In the warm August air, under the stars, I heard the Wyrd Sisters sing Warrior a cappella for the first time.

For the first time, I understood why dictators have poets and musicians murdered. It seemed less like music than wild magic, sowing seeds of potency and passion in each transfixed listener.

I don't know if it changed my life forever, but I think of it often. I am an older woman now. And I am much less afraid of speaking out. Because those who cannot speak for themselves need us to be warriors for them.

*****************************

Whew. Okay. Scintilla Project, Day 1. Patti, I can't figure out if I love you or hate you right now.