Barefoot Ponderings

A question I have been wrestling with for my entire life is what makes me happy. Sometimes my family or friends make me happy. Sometimes spending time alone. Sometimes, paradoxically, confronting the shit in the world makes me happy, if I can go to bed at night feeling like I’m facing it bravely and truthfully. Other times the only way it seems I can be happy is when I step back, cover my eyes and ears a little bit, and pretend the shit isn’t happening.

I mean, the obvious statement is probably that balance between work and play, between spending time with the people I love, with the people who aren’t as easy to love but who need a little love, and by myself, and between creatively taking responsibility for the things I can make better and making peace with the idea that there are some things that aren’t my responsibility to fix. That’s what a lot of people are trying to do, and I know this is not a unique situation. I guess what might be the comlicated part, is that a lot of the time happiness just feels fake to me. It’s like there is not enough space in my heart to feel everything I need to feel, and before anything else, the thing I can always let go of is happiness. Then I’m not feeling it, and I focus so much on the other stuff, and so I fake happiness for other people. That sounds so depressing, but it’s honestly not. I feel awe. I feel curiosity. I feel connectedness to some things and some people and I feel a struggle that I can seldom begin to explain and that is so tightly woven into my identity, that I tend to choose it over happiness, being unable to reconcile the two.

Amid all of that, happiness punches its way through all on its own sometimes, when I least expect it. And THAT is when I feel really happy. Because I didn’t make it. I didn’t have to pretend something else didn’t exist in order for the happiness to come about. I had one of those moments today, and rather than writing about it, I decided to write about all of this that’s behind what makes it so special. And it makes me feel ok, like I’m a human who feels things honestly, the best way I know how, and it makes me feel privileged to welcome happiness when it does come. Anyway, I just wanted to say that. That I think it’s alright to be what you are, where you are, and to love that.

I am:

-writing this from my windowsill, where I can borrow internet signal from the coffee shop next door, while Jayda is perched on my head and shoulder.

-tragically, allergic to my dinosaur pajamas. I have been scratching so hard that my legs are covered in bumps and green bruises, but this doesn’t happen as much when I wear different pajamas.

-not presently in contact with any forms of excrement, to the best of my knowledge.

-not sure which is more awesome: my ” ’80′s perm” (Dave’s name for my current hair-do, which consists of really tightly French-braided-when-wet pigtails unbraided and put into a high ponytail the size of my thigh), or the fact that a lady walking by on the sidewalk had a very similar do…

-coming home to Alberta in a few days! Talking to Bri this morning, I realized that I forgot to tell most people, so this is me telling some of you!

-in love with this picture, posted to facebook by someone I know in Cameroon.

You will be pleased to know that I can now add BEING PISSED ON IN MY OWN BEDROOM, WHILE SLEEPING, BY A STRANGER, to my list of ways that disgusting things have touched my body. Let me back up a little…

Maybe a week ago or so, Jayda was chasing ghosts around our apartment. She does it a lot, and I get a real kick out of watching her go from a sound sleep to a full out gallop, crashing into walls and furniture, leaping into the air grasping for things I cannot see, hear, or sense in anyway. Anyway, I was sitting at the kitchen table plinking away on my computer, when I was suddenly startled by the distinct sounds of my steel drum and glass shattering, followed quickly by Jayda’s rapid dash into the kitchen, and behind the fridge (which I have discovered to be her spot of choice whenever the fire alarm sounds, if I’ve accidentally stepped on her little paw or something when she’s under my feet as I’m cooking, or when she knows she has done something that she shouldn’t have). Upon walking into the living room, I found wet, black soil peppering the entire room and everything in it, two large clay pots completely shattered in a pile, two surprisingly healthy looking plants upside down with roots exposed in two other piles, and a steel drum that looked dirty but unharmed. I cannot say exactly how this event transpired, but I will say that the combined mass of everything that toppled was significantly greater than the mass of one medium sized cat. Part of me wishes I’d seen it, just to better understand the physics behind it all, but most of me is glad that I didn’t, since I fear Jayda may have acted as the insulation between the pots and the drum, which can’t have been a pleasant experience for her little self. Anyway, I got it all cleaned up, gave Jayda some yogurt to cheer her up, and cuddled with her while I did the rest of my homework.

That’s all to say that lately Jayda’s been more rambunctious than usual, that I’m not sure why, and that it’s been on my mind. That’s important for you to know when I tell you that a couple of nights ago, she woke me from a sound sleep with her moving around the bed. When i reached out to pet her, her little body was rock hard and she was panting a little and seemed very tense. I switched the lamp on and checked her out. She didn’t seem hurt, just all out of sorts. I shut the light off and tried to clam her down, but sadly, I think I fell back to sleep before she calmed down. The next morning I opened my eyes at around 6:30, smelling the strong, unmistakable odour of urine. Obviously, my first thought was that Jayda had peed, probably in my bed, during her mysterious late-night episode. I got up, felt all over my mattress and floor, crawled on all fours, sniffing, but could not find the spot. It was completely perplexing, since Jayda has never once peed inside, ever, and since I could smell it in the air, but not on any surface, anywhere in the entire apartment. At that point, I had no choice but to go to school.

As soon as I came home, I could smell it throughout the place. Confused and annoyed, I opened the bedroom window to let some air in, and sprinkled carpet de-odourizer on the bedroom floor until I could think of something better to do. Dave came over and we sat on my bed chatting for about an hour, and the entire time I could just smell it so strongly, despite the open window, and was becoming angry about the whole situation. After he left, I stood on my bed, looking out the window, and suddenly realized, to my udder disgust, what had happened. My large bedroom window is directly above my bed, and consists of a fly screen on the outside of the building, and a miniature glass door that functions as both a window and an emergency exit if there’s a fire. I’m in the basement, so the window sits right on the grass, facing  Broadway, which is kind of an equivalent of Jasper Ave in Edmonton, roughly. Anyway, someone, presumably a human, had relieved themselves of a GREAT DEAL of fluid directly on my screen. The tiny holes in the screen were filed with dried pee, the glass door was covered, and (get ready), a sizable puddle had pooled and dried on my foot wide windowsill and had started to run a little bit down the wall! Fortunately, this little yellow stream had stopped before making it to my head, but I was still mortified. I got some soap and water and cleaned it off VERY thoroughly, burned three sticks of incense of the windowsill to rid the place of the foul smell, and maybe to symbolically cleanse it, I don’t know, and apologized to Jayda for suggesting that she had been involved.

So, there you have it. Just when you think you’re safe, that’s when you get pissed on. That’s the lesson that I’ve learned from all of this.

I try to have a good attitude. I don’t think having a good attitude means being happy all the time, but rather being honest all the time about feeling deeply, whatever you’re feeling. That’s what gets me through, sometimes. Because if all you’re hanging onto is the hope that you can just be happy, you’re going to be sorely disappointed, I’d say.

The last little while, I haven’t had too much to feel bad about, for myself; life’s been good. It’s just that people I care so, so much for, go through so, so much, and I can’t help but feel it with them. That’s hard, but maybe the best way to be there. To have another feel for me and with me, accurately, is about the most transcendently incredible experience I’ve known, and has been hope itself to me on several an occasion. I am just hoping to create that, a little bit, for some others.

The human being is a painfully beautiful creature.

I had Subway for supper tonight. I spent about five minutes in line, during which numerous goings-on made my wait very enjoyable.

Situation I:

Girl with an arm cast: I don’t want to take this thing off.

Boy: *looks at her for a long time” Right now?

Girl with an arm cast: Ya.

Boy: *looks at her for a pretty long time again* Are you supposed to?

Girl with an arm cast: No.

Boy: …

Girl with an arm cast: What kind of sub are you getting?

Boy: Pizza sub.

Girl with an arm cast: I don’t eat those anymore. I got sauce on my cast. See? *points to spot, which I cannot see, but which may be there*

Boy:…

They paid seperately and he didn’t wait for her. I don’t think they had come together.

Situation II:

Mother, on telephone home to family: Ask the boys what they want. I know Ferguson will want ham, but I don’t know about Hamilton.

Their children’s names are Ferguson and Hamilton. Ferguson. And Hamilton. It is beyond rude and inconceivably judgemental, but my thought upon learning this was that regretfully, this woman had forgone any future opportunities to name any future dogs Ferguson, when she wasted that name on her son, who will inevitably opt to use his (hopefully less doggy or sirnamey sounding) middle name, or the initial F.

Situation III:

Nice lady making the sub: Which veggies would you like?

First girl: Lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, and olives.

Second girl: I thought you didn’t like olives.

First girl: I don’t love them, I just like how they make the stuff next to them salty, and then I pick most of them off.

And that, my friends, was worth waiting in line for. If you’re someone who walks around with an ipod in, this is the kind of pure gold you are missing, FYI.

Also, my blog is 3 now.

It keeps thawing and freezing, thawing and freezing, and so the sidewalks are a network of uneven ice slicks these days. I had to walk about four blocks to the library this morning. A block in, I stepped in a fresh, juicy puddle of throw up. Whatever, I’ve stepped in a lot of puke in my day, and happened to be wearing my Iceland boots, one of which has been through a lot worse than that. I scraped it off on the curb a little and moved on. No more than a minute later, I stumbled, very literally, upon what could only be the remains of a dog shitting convention, where various sizes of (hopefully) dog turds were strewn throughout a square meter patch of sidewalk on the corner where I needed to cross. Whatever, you can’t win them all, and a little dog poop on my vomity boots couldn’t make anything much worse. Which was a good frame of mind to be in as the #66 bus passed me, incredibly close to the curb, very quickly, spashing my entire body in sludge, some of which possessed the all too familiar scents of my boots. I would not be defeated though, and walked the remaining block to the library quickly and purposefully, dropped my books in the chute, and plodded home, avoiding eye contact with the abundance of pedestrians passing me. Yesterday some run off from a roof destroyed half of my sandwich, but that trauma of that event has since been diminished in the light of recent events. I may stay in for the rest of the day today. 

In other news, I had a nice birthday, with much nice mail, a surprise skype party with some of the Mustard Seed crew, some phone calls and texts, home made falafals and cake, and presents. Good day.

Why don’t you go grab a refreshing beverage before you sit down to read this, because I can tell it is going to be a long one.

Everything is all connected, and for better or worse, where you’re at is so much the product of where you’ve been. Whith this in mind, I’m going to work backwards through my life a little bit, up to the point I last checked in here.

Today I am really, really happy. I’m wearing some brand new pants. Ordinarily that would be good, but it’s great right now because I got splashed head to toe by a bus that I boarded only seconds later, at the stop just outside Value Village where I had just purchased said pants. I didn’t mind too much because being splashed can only happen when the weather is lovely, and it is, and it also made a baby on the bus laugh very heartily, which can only be a good thing anyway, and I happened to be on my way to the pool (and shower), and now had a clean pair of pants with me.

I think I was happy to begin with today, because yesterday I spent a lot of time making gifts for people out of scrap fabric from Arts Junktion, and listened to Vampire Weekend a lot, and wore my onesie pajamas. Vampire Weekend was making me happy for obvious reasons, and because a couple songs are now burned into a special place in my heart. I, days earlier, finished the final pages of “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” while listening to the album, and found that the words and feelings of the songs were aligning in a goosebumpily way with how the ending of the book was making me feel, and the moment was one of the kind that you can’t explain with words to anyone, but just experience in a real (maybe an extremely loud and incredibly close) way. I will come back to that, if I figure out how to. Making presents was making me happybecause I think they will make some of you happy, and because making them keeps my mind and hands working on the same thing at the same time, which almost never happens in life, since we’re almost never doing exactly what we want to or think we should be doing, or else sometimes we are, but we haven’t caught onto the fact yet. That’s why art makes people happy sometimes, I think, and why it lets people be very sad in a way that’s ok, I think. Also, making nice things out of stuff that would have been hucked if Arts Junktion hadn’t saved it, made me happy, for obvious reasons.

Arts Junktion is a place not unlike the Reuse Centre in Edmonton, and you likely know that the Reuse Centre makes me very happy. I was lamenting the fact that no such place existed in Winnipeg, until a few weeks ago I was wandering about, and I met Gord. I was in Goodwill looking at a painting and then Gord came up and started talking to me about the painting, which I didn’t really like, but I said I did, because he liked it and he seemed nice and I didn’t want to be rude. And then we walked all throughout Goodwill (and it is a big one, with three two enormous floors) commenting on all the paintings, and after maybe an hour, we were still talking outside Goodwill. I think we started telling each other interesting things about our lives, and it was the most exciting and necessary experience I’d had in a while, because I think I had been craving a spontaneous and honest conversation with a stranger for some time now, and one had not come my way until then. I’m not going to tell you what we talked about, and maybe that is not fair since you are reading faithfully through all of this, but in a way, it is just between Gord and I, and I will just tell you that it changed some things for me, for the better. I said I had to go home and he said he was going to this place where you could get free art supplies a block away and would I want to come, and I said if it was that close I would come for a minute. And then he tried to lead me into this creepy back alley and I went a little balistic for a minute and asked him why the fuck he thought I would follow him into an alley that lead nowhere, and I started walking away, very upset. But then he came back, and he asked if I would go with him if we went on the sidewalk, around the block, not through the alley. And I got mad at him again, but I went, because then I could see the sign, and that he really was only using the alley as a short cut, and the whole way there I told him it was really stupid of him to try and take girls into alleys, and then we laughed because he said that he supposed it was too. Anyway, that is how I discovered Arts Junktion, and I feel that maybe sometime I will run into Gord there again, which would make me happy.

I think I had been craving a spontaneous conversation with a stranger because I had realized that everyone I love used to be a stranger, and that I am always unknowingly teetering on the brink between not knowing strangers and then loving them. That made me really, really happy, and I think I had been thinking about all of that because of some sort of new friends I have been making a school, who I know will be important to me later, and I had been trying to take snap shots in my mind of the moments in time when the teetering between not loving and loving them met one another. And, obviously, I had been thinking about loving people because I had just come back from Alberta from Christmas break. Being with just about everybody that I needed to be with in those few weeks was really good, and gave me something to measure my life in Winnipeg up against, in a new way. I think I had been wishing for more people to love, and then when I had that and remembered how good it was, I knew that I had to work harder on having people here to love, and that realization made me really, really happy, because there are undoubtedly a lot of loveable people here.

And to properly set the background for having fate bring interesting things into your life, Rubin Carter came to my school! I wanted to ask him a question, but then I got too shy and also we were running out of time, and I regret it now, but it’s ok. If you don’t know who he is, I think you should watch “The Hurricane” or maybe just google him or something if you don’t have time. One night me and Dave were playing cards on my bed and I had my itunes on shuffle and “The Hurricane” (the song, not the movie) by Bob Dylan came on, and I said I liked the song but didn’t know what it was about. Dave said it was about this guy named Rubin Carter and that there was a movie and we should rent it. So then a couple days later we rented it, and I became obsessed with Rubin Carter, and how the reasons he is alive and fre today are tangled up very much in coincedence, like the situation that lead to me hearing about his story in the first place. So then, in my obsession with Rubin Carter, I was walking around campus only a couple days after that, wondering if he was too old to still be alive or not, and then I saw a gigantic poster of his face, saying that he was coming to school the next week! So I saw him, and it was very cool, and his hands are maybe big enough to palm my entire head.

So, I think that’s probably enough for now. Of course there are lots of other things I could write about, like how I got a bad steam burn on my hand that is never going to heal and keeps bleeding all over the place in an embarassing way, or how much “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” answered questions I didn’t realize that I had yet, but I don’t really know how to explain to you all, so I won’t try to right now, or how I am becoming a way better swimmer and don’t have to wear the embarrassing florescent belt like the seniors in aquasize anymore, or even how I have, as of late, been making amazing salad dressings with ingredients I hadn’t thought to mix before. But I should quit, and will, and will let you get on with your lives. If you actually read through all of that, thanks. If not, I can see why. As usual, I haven’t spell checked it, and so I hope you waded through this alright.

The end.

Sometimes you’ve got to adapt your behaviour to the social context in which you find yourself at a particular moment in time. You know, little things, like how you mind slip in a wee cuss word when in the company of certain people, but keep it pretty G-rated around others. It’s not that you’re not being yourself, you’re just choosing to expose different aspects of yourself to make it work. I don’t know if it’s an attempt at authenticity or continuity, or something far less valiant and more related to the general dissonance between where I usually am in my mind and where I am in my body, but I sometimes marvel at my incredibly slow transitions between social contexts.

What brought this on, was my spilling a third of a cup of coffee on the walk from picking it up at the counter in a yuppie little coffee shop, to my table, 15 meters away (oh, on an unrelated note, I’m using meters these days, rather than feet. It was inspired by the GPS system we used in the summer when we were out here looking for apartments, when I realized I have poor distance-in-meters estimation skills. I figure I’ll get a really good handle on that, then hit the weight-in-kilograms thing hard, since that’s the real struggle. But, I digress…). I sat there for several minutes before realizing that I’d done it.

At The Mustard Seed, everybody dribbles coffee. People bash into each other, or have shaky hands, have missing fingers, gesture with their hands as they tell stories, might be in a hurry to get in line for clothes or something, might be sick or weak, might be completely preoccupied mentally and not realize they’ve spilled, or might not give a hoot if they did spill. And it’s awesome (not for Tom, who cleans the floors, but he’s trooper). As much as it’s not socially appropriate in almost any other situation, you can spill coffee at the Seed to your little heart’s content.

There’s not much of a point to this story, per se. I guess I’m just thinking about being back there soon, spilling coffee and eating stale cookies and being myself, and just lovin’ it.

AND, speaking of continuity, my favourite pen died today. Hey Sarah, if you read this, it was a pen you lent me at that Calvin conference. I secretly never gave it back to you because I really liked how the ink came out, and it seemed like it was almost out of ink anyway. But, it was a real Hanukah pen, and the ink has lasted what, 3 or 4 years, and finally bit the biscuit today. I guess I owe you a pen….

AND, speaking of getting out of here, I think it’s high time. Dave’s been gone for a number of days already, and I have been hunkered down in my apartment “studying” and watching movies and writing mail. I haven’t interacted with anyone other than Jayda hardly at all for 6 days. It has been awesome, but I just caught myself causally saying “Jayda, I don’t stick my face in your bowl of tuna, would you please not drink my coffee? That was rude.” Suffice to say, I will be VERY happy to interact with all of you when I see you.

All I can say right now, is that sometimes your desire to throw a sack of hammers at the girl who talks loudly on her phone in the library computer room, is tempered by the boy with his face 2 inches from the screen, who seems to have just discovered google earth.

The shenanigans of the boy in front of me (who likes to use the washroom frequently and walk out while the toilet is still flushing, indicating his disregard for hand washing), sitting next to the girl who has sanitized her hands three times since I came in, is delightfully distracting. If stats has taught me anything, its that there seems to be correlation, and potentially causation in their two behaviours.

Using public computers is not good for my productivity, but great for my quality of life.