Red Cedar
More apocalypse, less angst
A non-working kindof day.
I’m having a hard time getting down to work this morning – fuzzy-headed from staying out too late last night, clicking through Internet pages rapidly looking for inspiration of some sort. Goddamn if things didn’t end up exactly the same as they started. Not that I’m convinced it’s a bad thing for the NDP to have failed, for a victory last night would have meant four crappy years of floundering around for a policy platform followed by a real trouncing by the right in the next election. Four years of not being able to fight back against “our party” is four years too many of complacent plodding. Really, the voter turn-out says it all, when there is no difference between the two parties why bother?
So it was an excuse for drinks at the WISE which isn’t a bad outcome either way – B. and I haven’t been there once since moving a month ago. So much going on these days between family dramas and getting ourselves set up in the new house. Tomorrow is Brian’s birthday, Saturday our housewarming and his party, I’m trying to finish a story I’m writing, I’ve got plants to go in the garden… Etcetera etcetera. But I’m not complaining because this life is way more interesting than the thin politics offered by the electoral system – friends, family, creative life, digging in the dirt. Did I mention before that we are planning a small pond in our front yard? I think that’s way more intriguing than whether Carole James steps down as leader now.
My library experiment, incidentally, has been working wonders on my financial health – noted here because yesterday I took five landscaping books out – my impulse to purchase new books on a whim has pretty much ended with a constant stream of new books in the house to keep my interest. Still have a small budget for special things (local authors, small presses, poetry) and secondhand – but in the last month have purchased only one book for myself (Elizabeth Bachinsky’s new poetry collection God of Missed Connections). Brian has bought me a few small additions for the collection as well, so I’m feeling satiated on every literary level without spending my average $200-300 I would have spent this past month otherwise.
Besides that, I’m feeling a tad perplexed about my brother these days, stumbling ahead to getting married despite what seems to be a pretty miserable relationship. The wedding is in July and beyond showing up for the actual event I’m declining to participate in a situation that depresses me this much. It seems my brother and I had opposite reactions to our somewhat dysfunctional upbringing. I have tended to leave any relationship that shows signs of verbal/emotional abuse – where on the other hand my brother seems to believe there isn’t anything better out there because it’s all that we knew growing up. I’m hoping that I’ve read the relationship situation here incorrectly, but I doubt it. I have no idea what to do except hold my tongue and try to stay out of the choices of others.
Looking forward to warmer weather, camping trips and lots of down time this summer. That’s about the long and short of it. I don’t feel like working very much at the moment.
Soundly emerging.
Fingertips sore this morning from playing the guitar and the fiddle for the first time in moons yesterday – the pads of the left hand, the fingering digits, strings cutting black lines into calluses eventually but I’ve got to work my way back up to that. A couple weeks, a month of playing daily and the muscles will come back, the skin will grow rought first and then shiny-hard – to hammer down on the strings without whimpering. I miss it. That’s what I always realize after picking up my instrument from a long absence. Miss performing, miss goofing around making the bow bounce across skittering notes, flinging tunes out the window halfway done and then onto something else more sombre, or not – more chaos at the right moment is always worth going after if the crowd is right for it. I’m my own favourite audience.
Springtime is usually when I pick both up again if there’s been a dormancy. Season of campfires and outdoor jam sessions – I feel like a bit of a fraud that it’s on the fun stuff that entices me – I’ve never been much of a working musician after all with my government gig – and as much as I love to play here and there, I’ve never loved it enough to do it all the time. It’s a lot of hard work to play professionally, make a living of it – and the stage time doesn’t always make up for that grind. Even back in the Flying Folk days I never thought – gee, wouldn’t this be great to do full time – though I did often wish we had more time for touring and recording than we did.
It’s always amazing once I have that fiddle back in my hands how much a part of me it is without trying. The fit under the chin the V of my elbow angled perfectly just the way I was taught at age five. It is mine and me when I bring the bow up to meet strings. A muscle memory from earliest childhood, the fingers go down in patters automatic as I pull back and forth, belongs to me all over again. Why I put it down in the first place never fails to make me wonder. What’s wrong with me? How could I leave this, this part of me abandoned on the wall?
Bits and pieces.
I just hate coming back to work after a week out of the office. Hundreds of emails, the to-do list I didn’t finish before taking off, a nagging sense something will get forgotten in the week ahead of catching up. All that, and it wasn’t even a holiday! Damned union convention.
But I survived it – this, the national triennial convention of my union is a big deal – a thousand people attending, hosted at the new convention center in Vancouver (first triennial hosted in BC since 1986 no less), late nights and early mornings with lots of talking in between. By the end of it all I was pretty much done, but managed to drag myself through an obligatory May Day demo on Friday evening anyway. Which left me feeling annoyed rather than militated or even committed to the cause. I spent the whole demo just wanting to get on a bus and go to dinner. Sometimes I just hit my limit.
I spent the rest of the weekend at home, cleaning up after the concrete-grinding dust that got all over my house from the downstairs renos, grocery shopping, meal-planning, and gardening my backyard. I’m getting pretty excited about that last part now Brian has dug out the dog area and built the dogshit composter, and I’ve worked all the other beds to get a lot of plants, bulbs and seeds into the ground. We’re not developing any new beds this year but rather working with what we’ve got in order to keep expenses and work low while the basement is being finished. But even with limited planting space dug out I’ve managed to put in kale, cabbage, lettuce, peas, basil, parsley, dill, radishes zuchinni, and cucumbers not to mention hostas, gladiolas, poppies, yarrow, lilies, anenomes, bleeding heart, columbine, sweet peas and a few other assorted flowers as well. I’m working on a mixed planting scheme for the first time which means not having a stand alone vegetable garden but interspersing vegetables, flowers and shrubs where things fit and look attractive together. We’ll see how that works, I am slightly afraid of forgetting where and what I’ve planted – particularly the stuff coming up from seed.
Last night I saw an owl in front of my house which is the first time I have ever seen an owl in urban Vancouver. It was hopping around on the ground and at first I thought it was a big cat, but it flew up into a tree when I opened the door to look at it better. It made another appearance on the ground in time for Brian to see it also, so we both got silly-excited about it and we hope it lives on our street among the big trees at night all the time. I’m going to look up how to attract birds to the yard in general, and I’m hoping we can get hummingbirds even – though I have never seen a hummingbird in the city, Brian has heard that if you put out a feeder you do get them. I suppose it’s worth a shot, after all, it’s not like the sugar water costs much to put out there.
I have about eight million ideas for both yards, and it’s hard not to get out the shovel and just start digging all over the place. But plants either have to be cultivated/divided/dug up at the right time or they cost money – and either way you can’t just rush around with no planning. Still, I am thinking woodland garden with a small pond for the front yard, maybe in a couple of years when we’ve finished the shed and patio in the back. The good thing about woodland garden is the availability of native plants, particularly in areas being turned into horrible developments – no one complains there when you dig up a fern or a salal bush – so I can dig them up as I find them, and plunk them in one small plot at a time. I suppose that makes for screwy planning. but since when have woodlands ever been organized?
I will post pictures of the backyard shortly in any case, and the inside of the house. I have been waiting until the lumber is out of the yard first, and I haven’t had a chance to take pictures inside since we got all set up….. Though soon.
Charter rights and me.
Today I was officially registered in Ontario Superior Court as a litigant in a court case filed by my union (the PSAC) – one that could (eventually) prove integral to further defining the rights of unions and their members in Canada should it be accepted and heard through a labyrinth of legal proceedings. Since I’m not a lawyer, I have no idea the odds of a favourable outcome in a case like this, but as a unionized worker, a union representative and a woman working for the federal service I am hoping they are good.
The paperwork filed with the courts today is a response by the union and several individual complainants in response to the Expenditure Restraint Act and the Public Sector Equitable Compensation Act tabled by the Tory government as part of the omnibus budget bill in January 2009. Among other things, the Acts opened up previously negotiated collective agreements, rolled back negotiated wage increases for some federal workers, severely curtailed the ability of federal workers to seek redress for gender-based pay inequalities, and removed the right of unions (under penalty of severe fines) to represent or advise its members on pay equity complaints. Further, it redefined a female-dominated pay group from one which comprised 55% of its population from women, to 70%. My pay group being one example – that at 69.1% women, we are no longer considered a female-dominated group and are now removed from the possibility of pursuing pay equity complaints in the future. As further insult, pay equity is now to be addressed at the bargaining table which gives you an idea of how backwards this legislation is – implying that basic human rights are up for negotiation and can be traded away for other “perks” like wage increases or dental benefits.
Quite serious stuff, particularly given that we are talking about the fundamentals of Charter rights in Canada – Freedom of Association (Subsection 2 (d)), Freedom of Expression (Subsection 2 (b) and the Right to Equality (Section 15). These rights don’t simply exist in documents but have been further reinforced by Supreme Court decisions like the 2007 HEU case which enshrined the right to collective bargaining in Canadian law (a decision which literally brought tears to my eyes).
I have before me the papers filed this morning and I wish I could do justice to the arguments summarized within for the purpose of this brief post – but at heart it really comes down to something which happened to a friend of mine last month. My friend B. is a painter – interiors, exteriors, you name it – and a good one at that. Having few opportunities for work in this declining economy, she took a job at a non-unionized worksite painting condo interiors in Burnaby – physically tiring work which demands a great deal of skill (I can’t paint a straight line to edge a ceiling for the life of me – can you?) After a couple of weeks it became apparent to her that she was being paid $2 less per hour than the men on the site, although her output and skill level was the same or greater of those she worked with. Afraid of losing her job, she said nothing for a couple of weeks, continuing to work alongside the men for less pay – but eventually she got fed up with it, particularly as she picked up the slack from those around her. She approached her boss and asked him (nicely) if she could get paid the same as every other painter on the site, to which he said nothing and walked away from her. At the end of the day he came and told her she was being let go because she complained too much and she could pick up her final pay a few days later. She has no real proof, of course, that she was laid off because she asked for equality, but there is no question that for several weeks she was paid less than the men she worked with because the boss thought he could get away with it. That’s just one anecdote from the trenches of unregulated, non-unionized work, but I guarantee stories like this unfold every day and are the reason women are still reported to earn 70% to every male-earned dollar in Canada (stat from 2005).
Although my friend is not unionized and not a federal government worker, in fact living a much more precarious employment existence than I do, her situation seems inextricably bound up in mine. While it is true that those of us in the unionized federal service are privileged in comparison to some, I also believe it gives us a greater responsibility to champion the rights of all. If the federal government can legislatively write itself out of its requirement to pay workers on a gender-neutral basis, then where is the incentive for any other employer in Canada to pay workers in an equitable fashion? If the federal government can muzzle unions that come under its purview and halt the right to representation, then how long is it before private sector employers lobby for legislation that would similarly limit all unions in Canada from supporting their members in any variety of rights-based cases? And most importantly, if women in the federal service are legally barred from achieving pay equity – how can Canadian women as a whole expect to close that 30% wage gap?
So I’m thrilled, you know, to come forward with a complaint that may do some real good in addressing these issues – but frustrated at the same time that we will spend tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of dollars before this is all through. And it’s only one of many court challenges my union has filed over the years in response to legislation that aims to disadvantage those of us who chose to enter the federal service and thus serve the Canadian public and government. Sometimes we win (pay equity), sometimes we lose (pension grab) – but if we don’t defend our rights (and expand them), every other worker in Canada suffers somewhere down the line. Which may sound dramatic, but there’s no two ways about the fact that a government which changes the law to suit itself as an employer sets a bad example for employers everywhere to follow in whatever shoddy practices they engage in.
I notice here that I have failed to delve much into the wage rollback piece which I will do in another post – but for now I will leave off saying I am glad to contribute to this effort, proud to be a part of a union which is pushing ever forward the rights of workers in Canada.
Thinking more about writing, post-move wrap
Well it’s done. We’re in the new house, unpacked, things set up and mostly put away, and on Saturday we even started in the garden. How’s that for a week after move day? Seriously impressive according to most of those who have come for a visit in the last week. Lucky us, we could afford to take a week off to get organized (and take lots of baths in our new fabulous bathtub from which you can see the mountains).
That really has been my whole last week though, working nonstop on the house, running errands to pick things up, drop things off, clean up the old apartment, put groceries in the empty fridge. It’s a hellofa job to move, but moving two houses simultaneously is exponentially more work. Not to mention the part where we had tradespeople in to do painting, build shelving and walk through our basement finishing project over the last few days as well. A lot to contend with, but once the art is on the walls you know you can relax and curl up with a book from time to time, the work isn’t everpresent when its visual cues are gone.
I started back on my writing schedule today, delving into a poem I wrote before moving which was critiqued at my writer’s group yesterday afternoon. (A very hungover group I might add, as we had thrown ourselves a little spring cocktail party just the night before). Our assignment before next group is to submit some piece of work somewhere, and I’m thinking the poem I am working on just might be it. If only I can finish the last three lines which I started rearranging this morning. Oh, and the title…. it still needs one that isn’t simply a “working” one. Though I now believe this body of work produced in the last several months is becoming an interlocked collection, it’s more difficult to separate out one or two pieces to go into the world alone. How much they lose when not alongside the others! Still, I want them to stand on their own, and so they must go out in the world soon. I have three poems perhaps ready, a short piece of flash fiction already submitted somewhere, and another four pieces partially worked.
I really feel the need to start turning out more than one piece per month, I’m hoping now with the move done I can focus more keenly on writing, but then I always hope that and it seems the only way is just to keep doing it. Fortunately I am very compelled by the world my characters are drawn in, so it makes it easy to enter and enter again to the same places. Daunted though, I think, and lazy too. Sometimes it just seems *too hard* to start a new piece, and I have to block my computer from accessing the internet so I don’t waste my time in the morning.
There is a part of me still secretly plotting to do a Creative Writing MFA one day. Perhaps if I ever give up the union gig, or lose an election and have no choice but to give it up – then I could justify the indulgence. For now I’ll just stick with trying to get something published…….
I’m faltering here because I just had a fairly extraordinary phone call that I can’t quite talk about just yet. A union matter, and certainly an interesting situation – so I will sign off and write more on that later.
Red Cedar 