After one and before another.

Okay. It’s been ten days. Enough of the silence already! I’m deafened by my own reluctance to type in the box and hit publish. I even missed marking my 3rd blog anniversary (which was the 11th) cause I haven’t been so enthused lately with personal promulgation.

That doesn’t mean I haven’t been writing. I’ve recently delved back into an activist project I started sometime ago and have been researching and churning out material for that – hoping to get a first draft finished by the end of summer. I have been writing long emails to lovers. I have been writing bylaws and members messages and updates for my union. I have been penning cryptic notes to myself for use in future personal essays…. but despite all of that, I have not been posting here.

A quick recap of my life in a spin: I’ve been in Ottawa since Sunday night, returning home yesterday after a few days of union negotiations and then a meeting at my employer’s office yesterday morning, and before the 10th of June I will be making three more trips (Eugene, island and then Ottawa again). I am glad to have the first of four trips out of the way, and am looking forward to a much more relaxed summer schedule. I am hoping to come over to Victoria near the end of June (or whenever Masha plans her birthday party for!) to see friends and family.

While east, I met with a new director who wanted to give me the once over before saying yes to giving me the national project-management gig I have been vying for. I am quite pleased to report that she pretty much said yes after a half-hour “informal” chat yesterday, and so I’m just waiting for the bureaucracy to move on that one so I can get started. It’s slightly higher pay, national responsibility, and I get to stay in Vancouver and take some control over a project I have been involved in over the past year. Because of the weird politics between the center and the regions, I had convinced myself they weren’t going to consider me for the position – but apparently one of my counterparts out there has been talking me up quite a bit and I’m sure that’s helped immensely along with everything else.

I’ve also decided to see if I can get my employer to pay for a diploma in conflict management and negotiations through the Justice Institute. I don’t even mind partnering in paying for the training if they are willing to kick down some over the next couple years. I wouldn’t mind getting another piece of paper behind my name, and this program has a lot of practical application to both my work and union life. ( At work we are expected to put forward an annual training plan, which can be for anything related to career goals – so I’m well within my rights to ask for this – the answer being contingent on whether we have the money as a unit).

I’ve been in a bit of a reading-frenzy/squirreling-books-away-mode again and I’ve got a stack to read sitting in my living room as a result (plus the 3 I ordered secondhand online today because I’ve decided that it’s time to satisfy my curiosity about japanese writers besides Murakami). Recommended at the moment: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer and The Black Book by Orhan Pamuk (I haven’t finished this yet, but at mid-point I am very pleased I took a chance on this after hesitating ever-so-briefly in the bookshop).

Oh! And yesterday I went to the National Gallery since I had the afternoon off before my flight, and saw the Modernist Photography exhibit which was worthwhile – but not nearly as satisfying as hanging out with the Tom Tompson paintings in the Canadian art wing. I never used to understand what made his (and the Group of Seven’s) paintings such a big deal until I saw them in real life as opposed to the crappy reproductions they make for greeting cards and posters and napkins (yes, they sell TT napkins at the National Gallery). The richness in tone and the paint depths and textures are what make these works – far more than their subject matter – an aspect completely lost in the one-dimensional replications encountered in schoolbooks across Canada.

The gallery also had a small collection of Carl Beam‘s work that wasn’t there last time I visited including Time Warp which is an epic painting (at approximately 10 x 40 feet) on linen documenting the history and impression of colonialism on native people. Also, the work of Daphne Odjig was exhibited as part of the GG award winners gallery selection – including her piece Genocide No. 1 which made me think of a Guernica for First Nations (you can see what I mean here). And! I also came across a video installation about Arab stereotyping, Palestine and the intifada by Jayce Salloum – a local artist I actually know (funny to run into the works of people you are acquainted with in the National Gallery – it’s a little exciting). I took a lot of notes this time so I could remember what I had seen, so perhaps I will write more about art in the near future. It’s something I know little about, but am trying like hell to absorb in myself as a way of informing my psyche and my writing more fully.

I have little planned for this weekend except some hanging out with friends and a Saturday-morning hike – which is just what I want after one trip and before another. One thing I will say about Ottawa is that I am beginning to like it even though a good cup of coffee is hard to find there and the sushi is too damned expensive.