07.23.07
Dollars and Cents
Our spending had started to resemble the pooling of pasty flesh over too-tight ultra-low-rise jeans. There was just too much of it, and our very real constraints of income and “waistline” could no longer contain it. Thus, we have limited ourselves to *gasp* only spend what we make, less a few dollars put aside for the ubiquitous rainy day. This was our first month.
We have one week to go and an empty fridge. But, money left over in the gas budget and an extra 20 in the “discretionary” (formerly known as “nice to haves” and now thought of as “in your dreams”) fund gives us hope that we’ll be able to adjust both our estimates and our spending in order to ensure a good future and if fortune smiles blindly in our direction like Ray Charles to the camera, we’ll even get to have a vacation one of these days.
There is a strange sort of pride that comes as a result of self-imposed frugality. Some puritan strand that tells us to brag about our suffering as we go to Tim Hortons to purchase, no, not a donut, but a single jelly-filled timbit (because they cost $0.35!!!). Oh, the sacrifice of it all!
Of course there is always a fatal flaw in these things. I had already committed to go camping this coming week (prior to the drunken conversation almost 30 days ago that led to this transformation), so I must be inventive. And find a way to pay back my campmate for spotting me the dollars for this one! (oh well, at least she doesn’t charge interest like our friends at Visa do.
07.20.07
Of Chimps and Chumps
The violinist at Burrard Station plays long mournful notes in perfect time with his prerecorded and synthesized accompaniment. At 5pm for rush hour he plays Pachelbel’s most famous Canon and Vivaldi’s perpetual Spring, the treble swells echoing through the dirty glass enclosure. By 9:15, he’s changed the tune but not the tone. Drama and sadness trill out from the amplified violin as if one of the more venerable-yet-pleasing Classical hits was teasing another penny from our hands to his pocket. My mind’s voice sings the words before I conciously recognize the song: it’s Love Me Tender, by Elvis. No classical but classic hit.
The same evening, I’m walking down Robson. A trophy tart speaks in puzzlement to her beefcake boyfriend “I don’t get how he could date her when she already has a kid.” Kudos to Beefy, as he suddenly realizes what a complete dunce bitch he’s ended up with, and says simply “the kid’s part of the package – he loves her so he loves the kid. who cares whose it is?” She could have retorted, suggesting with solemn irony that humans should be more like chimpanzees. The males of that species will eat the preexisting male young of their new mates. But she didn’t, and instead belaboured the issue with such a lack of skill that she succeeded only in highlighting her own insensitivity and foolishness. I pushed onward through the plankton of tourists and english students who drift aimlessly on Robson.
07.18.07
Applying the Liberal Arts Readings
I’ve been trying to compose some type of post on my last two readings – the Bhagavad Gita and Plato’s Symposium, but every time I sit down to write I just stare at the blank screen and wonder how I can begin to capture what these two works are about. Also, I wonder how I can say what I think without attracting the fervent rage of devotees. Time will have to further cure my thoughts before they are fit to scatter in the ether. That being said, there is something about having read a whole bunch of work about self-control that is starting to have an accidental effect (hopefully this won’t also occur as I read Hamlet, Frankenstein, and Lolita!!). I’d hazard that the infiltration of my mind with a series of directives about right living, the importance of focus, and the great value and importance of non-attachment, is almost complete.
I work in a job with an uncertain future, frequently at the sway of work politics and complex interpersonal dynamics that are far beyond my knowledge or experience. I frequently walk into conflict situations unwittingly, and just as frequently (and naively) am showered with praise and support that has other motives opaque to me. Add to the mix personal ambivalence about remaining (1) working, (2) working in the public service, and (3) doing admin-related work instead of academics, and you have a stage set equally perfectly for self-sabotage or success. How to deal with this?
The Bhagavad Gita suggests that through a combination of mystic practice, mental concentration exercises, and existing in a state of active non-attachment as I move through this life, I will increase my chances of transcendence over several lifetimes. Krishna also advised Arjuna that inaction is as bad as, or worse than, wrong action. In addition, I am to act in compliance with both my prescribed archetypal role in society and in accordance with the tradition of my foremothers.
Plato’s Symposium suggests that practising moderation in all things and, wierdly, also being unaffected by fame or flattery, being impervious to danger or safety, and using logic to dissemble the skilled rhetoric of my companions, will lead me to a greater understanding of the mysteries of life and love. Apparently reaching Platonic transcendence will enable me to, like Socrates, drink anyone under the table and keep debating until dawn. Platonic transcendence also requires mental focus, non-attachment, and attention to social roles and traditions.
Machiavelli prefers a more strategic approach to the same questions, and stresses self-control as the first step towards world domination. Considering the field, developing and manipulating interpersonal dynamics and the power relationships, while keeping one’s own personal impulses and emotions in check, the Machiavellian transcendence is squeezed out from under the oppressor, like the surprise victor of a thumb war. For Machiavelli, it is crucial to avoid being controlled by fortune, and instead to write one’s own future with sheer will.
So as I face this increasingly uncertain and rocky experience of employment, I find myself detaching, keeping my eyes about me for the best options from both a strategic and an emotional standpoint. I am well able to do the job without investment and may be required to as decisions are made and directives passed down. After all, my goal according to the three Masters I’ve recently read, is to transcend this situation and move on to the next. It is the power of my own mind, my own discipline and my own acuity, that will determine to and from what I shall transcend.
07.15.07
Divine Mysteries of the Veggie Garden
We’ve started to eat the small harvest from the garden. I’m cutting leaves of lettuce, fresh herbs, digging up fingerling carrots and snipping peas from the vine almost every day now. Zucchini, cucumber and tomatoes are ripening, and there are white miraculous cauliflowers cradled at the center of big matte green leaves. It’s amazing, and as we sat down today at lunch to eat a home-grown replica of a diner meal (Chicken Strips with Barbecue Sauce and Garden Salad) I felt a sense of connection with life cycles, a kind of connection I don’t know if I’ve ever had.
How is it that the children will gladly eat our own lettuce and not that from the store? It took little Em a bit of time to adjust to the complex flavour of peas fresh from the pod. Now she delights in their inconsistency – what will this pod taste like? Is it young and tender and sweet or older, with more guts and a little bitterness for good measure? She loves the opportunity to pass judgement and fill up at the same time.
07.09.07
Gothic Confidential
Or… Confessional, perhaps. The truth is, I’ve never belonged to one of those identifiable sub-cultures – never been a punk or a hippie activist or a goth or even a member of a superculture like preppies or yuppies or, as we all took to calling them, “normals.” I’ve never been quite geeky enough to be a geek (though, definitely nerdy enough to point out that a true geek is a circus performer who bites the heads of animals, most frequently chickens, and that, therefore, Alice Cooper was actually a geek). I’ve never fit into the superculture, never been quite ‘up’ on the stars (though always did like astrology) and never really knew the details of the megakillers on trial (except relating to the war in Iraq but that’s another post altogether isn’t it, and Bush isn’t on trial…yet).
This is not to say that I didn’t want to fit in, that I don’t yearn for community and belonging, but that i have too many arms to fit in the dolly mold. I’ve accepted I’ll never be quite like them (whoever and whatever they are), but that I can still love and be loved by them.
So, where’s the confession? It’s here: there’s one culture I love to observe. More than Rockabilly Punks and the burlesque girls who entertain them, more than the spelt-bread and quinoa-eating natural foodsies, more than the chunk-streak-hair lululemon-wearing tarts who adorn robson street like some kind of rapidly proliferating fungus, I love the Goths.
I love that they are an international community of people who all think they are alone in their misery. I love their sardonic self-obsession, their sarcastic humour and their deathlier-than-thou aspect. I love their aggressive self-consciousness, their total devotion to fashion and music, and their complete subjugation of non-goth-compliant personality traits.
I love the bravery it takes to walk down the street and know normals are staring (and real punks are scoffing). I mean, this is probably the one subculture that can cause both laughter and fear at the same time.
I float near them without their knowing. Venus Flytrap isn’t aware of the gnat nearby. I cannot help it. I saw a pair of them leaving the station the other day and when they took the stairs instead of the escalator, I couldn’t help but follow. I stare openly. I drink in their platform boots and skinny black-jeans, their layered shades of black velour and polyester shirting and their long stringy purposefully unkempt hair. I loved their hats – a bowler and a top hat, and their matching nightmare-before-christmas bags. I can’t help but whisper under my breath ‘where are you going, little goths’ and then catch myself, realizing I am sounding very, very creepy.
I especially love that goths on facebook try to seem as morosely sexy as possible. They are perfecting the art of kohl-rimmed eyes that say both ‘come hither’ and ‘one day we shall all turn to dust’. The girls love to take pictures of themselves from above, so all you see is forehead and eyes, and their sad, tiny mouths are turned into Louise Brooks. The boys do the same, I suppose hoping to express their disinterest in footballer masculinity by evoking allusions to proto-goth electronic musicians of the late seventies and early to mid eigthies.
When I was in school, I chose a few goths to follow around, whenever I saw them walk across the concourse, I followed them. I enjoyed them from afar. When I was in Calgary I’d go the club and watch the elastic boy-goth dance with the long chain around his neck, spider legs and arms arcing in ecstatic expression. He wore pain like one of those bright-orange vests city workers wear so cars don’t hit them.
I think as long as we have an idea of normal, we’ll have self-marginalizing homogenized sets of individuals using clothing, music, and weltanschauung to create an alternative. What I love most about the goths, and what makes me stalk them, is their protest against this culture’s requirement of happiness and contentment as the only allowable emotion. Like the Jesters in the King’s Court, they too provide a valuable service. They remind us that lurking beneath the cover of zoloft, success-though-a-whitened-smile, and yoga-ballet, the darkness awaits. It’s the only way to have balance in the world.
07.05.07
In Transit
Today I took a hot skytrain from work to home, agressively schlepping my way onto the car in front of all the other overheated and overworked office folk who populate burrard station. Ended up reaching around one person to delicately touch my fingers to the bar and hope against hope that I don’t fall when we hit the wobbly part of the line between Main and Stadium. I found myself staring squarely into the neck stubble of a brown man with salt and pepper hair. each hair was individually colored in one of three shades: white, black, and brown, and none of the ones on his neck were more than 4 mm in length. Clearly, he had recently had a hair cut. He also had large pores dotting his neck, little open mouths sucking in the air.
Like me, he had the essential uniform of a transit rider, a pair of white wires extending from small globes in his ears. These wires inevitably attach the head of the transit rider to his or her document carrier, where a small device transmits distracting sounds, which, in combination and at an appropriate volume, usually sounds like music to the listener.
Looking around the train I noticed most of us had control over our aural environment, if not our nasal one. We had white wires protruding from our ears. It was surreal. Sure, a few riders have chosen a human variant of the same device called “friend” or “bus buddy”, or use cellular telephones to contact disembodied but familiar voices who share their angst about their bosses, filing systems, and the erroneous shipment of hamsters when rats were perfectly fine for scientific testing.
Those of us who choose not to impose our thoughts on a captive audience follow a couple simple rules: Avoid Eye Contact at all times, and Avoid dancing like they do in the IPod commercials no matter how good that rendition of “Bless Your Beautiful Hide” is. I also try to avoid crying at sentimental Irish songs or heartfelt Indie Rock about disappointment and separation – it makes people uncomfortable.
Which is an odd way of explaining that I think we are increasingly distant from each other, in our own little bubbles of thought as we turn our expression increasingly inwards until we turn ourselves inside out. I yearn for a way to burst from this, but it is hot and I really just want to have a strawberry milkshake with whipped cream on top and chocolate shavings.
07.02.07
Happy Canada Day
I never was able to draw a maple leaf. In school it was an inevitable challenge: make your own Canadian Flag for Canada Day – I think I’ve made them out of construction paper, or from paper with paints or laurentian pencil crayons or crayola wax crayons. They all looked lopsided and strange. It may be my aversion to measuring that was the problem. There are 11 points and 12 angles on the sugar maple leaf excluding the stem. I would dutifully draw them all, knowing that nine of them are on the top, and that there are two more sticking out at the bottom somewhere near the stem, which inevitably I wouldn’t have room to draw. Not to mention the unusual division of space: those two red bars take up the two outer quarters of the rectangle, while the leaf itself takes up half. Now, I much preferred, as a child and as an adult, either flags that were in even thirds such as the French or Italian flag, or the complex geometric challenge of the Union Jack.
Apparently, they chose the maple leaf because it was easier to draw than the alternatives.
The maple leaf continued to elude me when I made my first cheesecake in grade 9 for Canada Day from an article in the Vancouver Sun. It had a maple leaf on it, constructed entirely out of evenly sliced and strategically layered genetically modified strawberries. It should have been predictable that in my hands the fruity maple leaf would more resemble a blood spatter. The cheesecake tasted good, though.
I’ve always wanted to actually celebrate Canada Day, like with a barbecue and mile-high desserts, some kind of neat drinks and sentimental songs. I can see it in my mind’s eye, as clearly as my child mind could see the straight lines, 11 points and 12 angles of government-issue maple leaves. Somehow, though, when it comes to bringing that image into reality, my hand wobbles and I lose count and end up drawing an amorphous blob bearing similarity to a hedgehog, or forgetting to go to the store or invite people over.
I’m starting to think that our traditional celebration is of the perpetual Canadian identity crisis. A nation in its teenagehood that cannot conceptualize an individualized or positive future, our citizens struggle to depict its central symbols. For today, we will be taking it easy. Perhaps have brunch with friends or go swimming. Maybe we’ll bake a cake and I’ll get my daughter to inscribe a maple leaf in shakey lines of pink icing, or paint it on in long splats of pureed raspberry.
