Red Cedar
More apocalypse, less angst
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.
If my body was a house….
If my body was a house, I would be shuttering the windows right now, closing the doors around my heart and crawling under the quilts in the bedroom at the centre. This image is so present, as I detach myself day by day and slip inside to find the places where my anger has been nutured, and where no one else can touch it except for me. I want no consolation for this fester, I don’t want to be told it will all be over soon, I want no arm around my shoulder in my perfectly boarded up body.
This self-contained trauma belongs to no one else and in this I am self-righteous. This analytical outrage pores over documents until I litter the floor in shreds of paper. I am sick to the bottom of me when I read my life between the lines of these others, and howling when I come up for air.
And yet, I am comforted by these symptoms – relics of grief and process that will get me through the final few weeks of stress and allow me to become again with one more chapter completed. I revel in that hardness knowing that it will disappear as soon as it is no longer needed – I allow myself small leaks so I can stay unemotional when his jumpy voice comes over the line all hopped up on legal accusations and sentencing arguments.
It is certainly not the apocalypse that it once was; it is the last thing before the next. And the next will be a homecoming party in a not-so-distant future during which the doors will be unlocked and my windows opened wide.
Direction.
Itching to get out of here – Ottawa, Oregon, anywhere – all just over the horizon and this stasis has got me down at the moment. Just 10 more days and a planeride and I’ll be east, three more weeks and a trainride and I’ll be south. Which direction will I be facing when I finally settle in myself again? The northward shift of my heart is doing me no good at the moment; perhaps west towards the islands and the sea is where I will find the release after a long winter, breaking my past out over the shore and allowing the salt water to curl my hair. Lying in the sand as the foaming current sucks the land from around me, leaving me afloat in the stars of phospheresence. Like this, caught between the dark night and the deep sea, among creatures giving their glow to predatory feasting, I am afloat in an empathic ancient ocean. As easily drowned as cradled as cocooned as lost.
A simple redirection and I would not be here at all.
Do I have to be zen about this?
I am trying to be zen about the fact that the lover who ended things with me in December so he could try having a “real relationship” (his words) is now married to a woman from rural Japan who he has spent only 2 weeks with in the past seven years. Yes, I know. This is not about me – it’s about him and his dysfunction. But somehow it still stings, and any respect I once had for him has completely gone out the window. Midlife crisis? Commitment issues? Communication problems? The Asian bride is certainly not an original solution, but it seems to work for lots of North American men.
Okay, so I’m nowhere near zen either. Obviously.
Thinking about this a bit further, this really is a sign that a) I’m glad I’m not him, b) I don’t want to be with someone like him and, c) I was right in breaking off contact with him in March – it meant I didn’t have to pretend to react nicely to this news when my friend shared it on the weekend.
And I’m not even going to go into the whole “why do I keep dating dysfunction?” rant. It’s so not worth it and we all know the answer anyway.
An intake of breath.
I haven’t been writing much of anything lately except the occassional erotic missive to a long-distance possibility, such has been the lack of interest in settling myself down in front of the computer in between meetings. I come to work, stare at the screen, eke out some minimal amount of content for my department’s web presence and then turn my attention to union cases and other demands instead. I am not sure why the words only flow some of the time, but they do and they haven’t been lately. Perhaps it’s just the lack of time for reflection as I muddle my way between work and the gym and social/artistic events and just keeping up with life. I think that because I am waiting on a number of things (Darren’s hearing, my new possible job to start, my return to Ottawa in May) I feel a bit stalled out workwise at the moment.
In any event, in the past week I have somehow managed to keep myself relatively intact through weekend union meetings (in Victoria), dinner with my parents, a memorial for a friend who passed away last month, seeing Derrick Jensen speak, and a labour council meeting last Tuesday. This week is only turning out to be more of the same with lovers returning to my life suddenly, some health appointments I finally booked, a reading and show by my friend Bronwyn and union meetings this weekend plus the CATS gathering which starts at my home on Friday night. Tonight, I have booked a date with myself alone at the QE to see the VOS staging of Tosca – an opera I have not seen before. It’s a good thing that next week is looking to have a relatively open schedule so I can catch my breath!
One thing that I have been increasingly focused on in the last 4 weeks is getting myself to the gym 4 or 5 days a week which I think has started to show some small results already (I can tell, I’m sure no one else can yet). I’m really working hard towards not only the trip at the end of this summer, but better shape overall and a cleaner internal system. I’m finally over the point where going to the gym makes me tired and it’s started to become my fuel instead. My real success measure at how well I am integrating this into my life is going to come when I’m on the road again from May to June – with the intention that I keep as much of a stable workout schedule as possible no matter where I am.
I am still waiting to hear about the possibility of the national project management gig but it *is* looking better every day and I will have an answer by the end of May at the latest. Also, I have pretty much decided to run for the position I’ve been talking about even though it’s still a year away! I haven’t told anyone in my union yet except a couple of close friends, but even doing that set the fears arising in me. Whoo. It’s going to be some kindof a ride if I make it all the way without some sort of event to upset the whole affair.
So there it is, me busy and pretty happy though a little unproductive at the moment. More in-depth writing to follow soon I’m sure.
Red Cedar 