The Sky is So Very Blue

Just before Labour Day Week-end, I started on a nice little hyper-manic upward slope. Even if I didn't HAVE to be early, I popped out of bed first thing in the morning with no brain fog, I got some organizing done that I've been putting off for months, I walked the dog four times a day and never felt too tired to do one more thing in the day if it occurred to me. 

Along with this, as usual, came some less awesome stuff: a sort of hardened mental glaze over my mind, obsessive thoughts that wouldn't clear for more than a few seconds at a time, and that uncomfortable sense that the air around me is crowded with screaming or crying. 

Honestly, it's not the worst trade-off in the world. Going to bed every night knowing that the morning is going to be either a battle-slog out of a pit of quicksand or another dismal failure is really demoralizing. A bit of mental glitchiness isn't too high a price to pay for some time above water. 

Yesterday, I suddenly felt a strange puncturing and it was like a balloon inside my head had popped. Obsessive thoughts - gone. Vague feeling of doom - gone. It was sort of like my mind had been slightly short-winded, and suddenly it could take a deep, lovely breath.

Okay, I thought. It was nice (ish) while it lasted. I fully expected to be back to business as usual today - stabbing the snooze button and dreaming about getting up five times before actually managing it.

Woke up fine, early, no brain fog. Had dinner for a friend in the crock pot by nine. Coursework, gardening, dog walked by eleven. I had lunch at regular lunch time. I'm going to have to go clean out a closet or something because the kids aren't home yet and suddenly there's more DAY in my day. I went outside and sat in the swinging chair in my weedy back yard and looked up at the sky and laughed because, holy shit, this might be one day's grace, and it might not last, but for the moment I'm so purely grateful I could weep. 

Newbery Medal Series: Holes by Louis Sachar

Synopsis from Goodreads: Stanley Yelnats is under a curse. A curse that began with his no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather and has since followed generations of Yelnatses. Now Stanley has been unjustly sent to a boys’ detention center, Camp Green Lake, where the boys build character by spending all day, every day digging holes exactly five feet wide and five feet deep. There is no lake at Camp Green Lake. But there are an awful lot of holes.

It doesn’t take long for Stanley to realize there’s more than character improvement going on at Camp Green Lake. The boys are digging holes because the warden is looking for something. But what could be buried under a dried-up lake? Stanley tries to dig up the truth in this inventive and darkly humorous tale of crime and punishment—and redemption.

This book has been on my radar for quite a while, both because I have the impression that I like Louis Sachar as an author without actually being able to name any Louis Sachar books that I have read, and because I had the vague impression that the Dulé Hill, who I adore, was in the movie, which I've never seen. 

Clear enough?

So I had to take my mother to the hospital for an eye test last week and I grabbed this for the waiting room. It's one of those books that I really wish I had read as a child, because reading it as an adult trying to imagine it from the perspective of a child is disorienting. It's quite harsh, but then so was Annie, and 101 Dalmatians was terrifying, and  The Rescuers - poor Penny being lowered down the well to search for the diamond... hey waitaminnit, Holes totally rips off The Rescuers! 

So, yes. It was harsh. The camp environment made my stomach hurt. The injustice and cruelty were so upsetting, and then the descriptions of the past in Latvia where the threads of destiny begin to weave this story are sort of charming, and then the story of Kate Barlow and Sam the Onion Man is so wonderful but so desperately sad, and then wham it all comes together at the end and overall I liked it, but I had a slight impression that some of the parts didn't quite match the others in tone. 

What do we think about stories where young people are powerless in the grip of self-interested adults without conscience? Is it cathartic for them (since usually the children triumph, through a mixture of ingenuity, pluck and some kind of intangible force for good in the universe, over the bad guys?) or does it just heighten their feelings of powerlessness? It always fills me with a kind of impotent rage, knowing that as cartoonish as a lot of the situations are, there are real-life situations that are dishearteningly similar. But I do enjoy the redemption.

And speaking of impotent rage, remind me to tell you about being stuck in a tiny traffic jam with my mother, who was convinced we were going to be late for her appointment even though we'd left an hour earlier than necessary and were already halfway there. The world does not understand my pain. 

Well here we are

I'm restless. The kids are back in school. Eve has calmed down, although her stories of her homeroom group wandering the halls looking for their next class, complicated by incorrect timetables and sections that are closed for construction are quite entertaining. Angus has somehow ended up as the only grade ten student in an eleventh-grade fitness class - no one is quite sure how this happened.

I don't know quite what to do with myself. I don't feel like working on my course. I don't feel like writing. I barely feel like reading. So right now I'm just walking. I get the kids to school, and I get Lucy leashed up, and I wander all over Barrhaven. Sometimes I stop in somewhere. Sometimes I don't. My feet hurt. My hips hurt. My back hurts. But my dog is really happy.

I guess for now I'll just keep walking until I get somewhere.

Mondays on the Margins (or whatever, it's still summer, shut up): Sacré Bleu by Christopher Moore

I bought this book quite a while ago because I had read and loved (and reviewed, to a thundering silence, geez man) Lamb, and I found the synopsis intriguing, and ultramarine blue is one of my very favourite colours and has always seemed a little mysterious to me. . Then I put it in my stack and promptly forgot about it or passed it over for library books that were about to expire. Over the summer, I packed it every time we were going somewhere where I'd want an actual book to read - in the sun, on the beach, anywhere it wouldn't be convenient to read on my ipad. It took me all summer to finish, and it is now extensively foxed and sandy and water-swollen, and I savoured every line of it and never once wished that I had brought another book (yes, another summer has passed wherein I read no Trollope). It was magnificent.

I accidentally just glanced at the praise page and now my head is crowded with the phrases of others that describe the book perfectly: "Art history is playfully - and perilously - rewritten" (Publishers Weekly); "exultant joie de vivre" (Kirkus Reviews); "surprisingly complex novel full of love, death, art, and mystery" (Library Journal); "consistently delightful journey into the sweetly demented mind of novelist Christopher Moore" (Philadelphia Inquirer).

More than anything, it just seemed like Moore had a hell of a good time writing this - immersing himself in the art and history of the Impressionists and then swirling it all into a mad reimagined palette of riotous colour. And like in Lamb, the humour, the debauchery, the cutting wit, even the suffering and death (frequently by syphilis), is rendered with such a light and loving hand - it is for this reason that I'm contemplating reading nothing but Moore's entire oeuvre for the next while. That or inventing a time machine so I can go back to 1890 and hang out in bars and whorehouses with Toulouse-Lautrec. This, along with Jaclyn Moriarty's A Corner of White, busted me right out of my "oh my god, I'm so jaded, every book seems like an echo of a bunch of other books, nothing feels fresh, nothing feels new, nothing feels transporting and fantastic and galvanizing" rut. It also gave me the same possibly spurious but still warm feeling that I got from the Vincent Van Gogh episode of Dr. Who - not that Van Gogh needed to be rehabilitated, but that he has been gathered in tenderly by history and imagination more than he ever would have imagined. 

It's very much not for everyone - I'm sure it would seem heretical, or glib, or silly to some. I love reading about people who are passionate about something, I love witty banter, I love fantastical elements like stopping time and time pockets, and the word 'penis', coupled with the phrase 'Accident. Couldn't be helped.' made me giggle helplessly almost every single time. So loved it. I really, really loved it. 

Memorable Quotes (A very narrow selection - I felt like highlighting most of the book):

-"'Yes, painter,' said the blond. 'But you make your living as a baker, right?' 'I sold two paintings just last month,' said Lucien. 'I sucked off two bankers just last night,' said the whore. 'I'm a stockbroker now, no?'"

-"She smacked young Lucien in the head with a baguette. The crunchy yet tender crust wrapped around his head, bending but not breaking, showing that the oven had been precisely the right temperature, there had been exactly enough moisture, and in fact, by the ancient Lessard test method, it was perfect.. Lucien thought this was the way of all French boulangers, and he would be a young man before anyone explained to him that other bakers did not have a test boy who was smacked in the head with a loaf of bread every morning."

-"Monet had trained himself to be a machine for the harvest of color. With brush in hand, he was no longer a man, a father, or a husband, but a device of singular purpose; he was, as he had always introduced himself, the painter Monet."

-"The Colorman is like that carp, Lucien. In all of our paintings, Pissarro's, Renoir's, Sisley's, Morisot's - even poor Bazille, before he was shot in the war - even back then, from the first days when we all met in Paris, he is there, in all our art, just below the surface."

-"'Yes, but when you did the poster for the Moulin Rouge you didn't do a clown fucking a windmill.' 'Sadly, no, they rejected my first drawings. And I'm good friends with one of the clowns there, Cha-U-Kao. She would have modeled for me. She's both a clown and a lesbian. At the same time! Art weeps for the missed opportunity."

-"Toulouse-Lautrec unfolded the map until he had revealed the seventh level below the city, then looked to Lucien. 'It follows the streets as if on the surface.' 'Yes, but with fewer cafés, more corpses, and it's dark, of course.' 'Oh, well then, we'll just pretend we're visiting London.'"

Last night

It was late, and Matt and I were in bed after a whirlwind of preparations for his trip to Asia early this morning - mining the piles of camping laundry for clothes for him to pack, getting the garbage day details straight since he wouldn't be here to do it (THEN WHY DID I MARRY YOU, I usually say), figuring out what baseball events I would have to drive Angus to, and a few other things (but this is not that kind of blog - usually). Matt was asleep and I was reading on my ipad in the dark. Eve was asleep down the hall and everything was dark. Then there were quiet footsteps on the stairs and through the crack in our slightly-open door I saw the bathroom light go on. I realized that I had assumed Angus was already in bed, but now here I was, lying in bed listening to the hum-and-rattle of water, the soft click of toothbrush and soap dish. It was a complete reversal of being small, tucked up and listening to the sounds of my parents getting ready for bed, which was always such a lovely, comforting feeling, and that last light going off was the signal that everyone was in safely for the night. As it was now, and everyone was still in safely, but the signal was sort of reversed.

It didn't make me sad. It was nice. It was just... different.

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.

Summer Stuff

Okay, I'm just going to start small or I'll never start at all (great, now I'm BLOGGING in Air Supply lyrics).

I love when Zarah visits because most of our conversations go like this: "Want to go for a walk?" "Yes"; "There's a really good bagel place on the way home, should we-" "-Yes"; "There's a new ice cream place by the-" "-Yes". "Are we letting the kids stay up late to watch another-" "Yes".

Eve was in a basketball camp at Carleton University last week with two of her friends, one of whom plays competitive and is crazy good but also amazing at encouraging people who aren't as good. The first couple of days she came home happy but flat-out exhausted and a bit worried that the counselors would assume she could do things she couldn't actually do, like dribble between her legs and behind her back. But they got lunch in the cafeteria and swimming in the afternoon, so it was good enough, and in one five-on-five a boy who kept refusing to pass to her finally had to and she swished it, and she said "then he high-fived me - I guess because he figured out I had arms".

THEN the third day was "the best ever" because one of the counselors (they're all players on the university's team, and the girls found it hilarious watching the big tall guys in the cafeteria with eight glasses of orange juice and three trays of food) traded to get her on his all-girl team, and she was with her friend, and they ended up being the first all-girls team to win the end-of-camp tournament. And she can almost dribble between her legs and behind her back. Eve is quite good at a lot of things but doesn't have a lot of experience with that kind of intense activity, which I think is good for everyone to experience now and then. She came home with blisters and scrapes and bruises and was falling asleep on the couch by eight - she loved it and already wants to go back next year.

Lucy is sitting on my foot, so I'm going to go walk her.