Swimming Sound Waves

Music has always been a larger part of my life than I would have thought possible for someone who doesn’t sing or play an instrument. I have always had an eclectic and varied relationship with music. For the most part I will listen to anything and everything. You are just as likely to find my voice twanging on some Dixie Chicks as it is snarling out a line from Audioslave. There are definitely some genres that I have been unable to incorporate into my life’s soundtrack but not because they are bad – they just don’t work for me.

My first tape was Cindi Lauper, quickly followed by Billy Joel and Michael Jackson. I used to wait patiently by the radio, tape cued for that one song to be played. My early mixed tapes were filled with songs caught in mid line. Later, I would have the luxury to access a collective library to create mini soundtracks. The last mix was the last break-up album. There is a line from a movie (Dog Park?) where the character is told that when he can listen to the break-up tape without crying then he will know he is over his ex.

I used to get dragged to noise shows above the Smash Gallery. I would inevitabley fall asleep on the couch. I guess my ear was not sophisticated enough to appreciate the music coming from the front. As a teenager, I spent a lot of time at the Commodore, getting into concerts with my fake id and paying $8 dollars if we had missed the opening act. There was also the Cruel Elephant good for a Punk show and then the variety of booze cans whose location if you asked me today I would not be able to place.

I often play a game with myself trying to create a soundtrack that would encapsulate the specific moment that I am in or a memory that I have. Like scents, an opening bar can propel me back to a specific place, time or person. I Touch Myself by the Divinyls conjures up an ex, a fitting song for a megalomaniac who wanted me to be at his beck and call – his trophy that he could bring out and show off on special occasions. Other songs immediately send an endorphin rush to my cells and if I close my eyes it is 2 am, I am sweaty, dancing and surrounded by a safety net of beats and bodies.

I have begun to introduce my daughter to music. She falls asleep best to Leonard Cohen and likes to play with her ball in time to Blur. I move around the house singing made up songs about what I am doing. Some of the songs are on repeat. I sing her songs that my mother sang to me. I sing her songs that I love, Summertime and Somebody. I listen to mum sing to her granddaughter some of the songs I remember from when I and my siblings were young, others have obviously been held in waiting to be shared only with her granddaughter.

A new melody is being overlayed my own. Together, for now, the two melodies will play together. As she grows older, they will pull apart and become movements to be played independently. I can not wait to hear her life’s symphony.

x365 – Update

Alright I have started it.  Maybe now I’ll be able to sleep at night instead of making lists.  I’ve moved it to another page and as you can see so far it is not about people.  I still don’t know if I will be comfortable with including people.  However, in writing about music, books and places I am writing about people and about a particular place in time that I continue to carry with me.

Ripping Off the Scab

While I was looking for something else today, I came across my notebook that I had used while working on my Masters. As I leafed through it, I began to cry. That tiny nondescript notebook was a reminder of what I hadn’t completed. While I did walk across the stage to accept my degree, it wasn’t the degree that I had imagined I would accept. I also cried because of the pain that I read behind the words. Not the girls’ pain but my pain, the ache that I had carried with me, held close to me. The anger that made my bones brittle.

“I am having difficulties writing about body and space. I feel like throwing the whole thigs away, walking away from it. Bury my head, my body and disappear.

I feel like I am being held together by tiny webs – I expect to see hairline cracks all over my body, like clay when it has no more water left. One quick step and I’ll fall into a heap of dust. Pieces too small to be put back together. Broken beyond repair. The heat of my anger evaporating my remains. I want to cut into my shin – peel back the top layers – expose the blood, membranes and bones beneath. Feel the rush of pain – the pieces of flesh underneath my nails. The cakiness of blood on my shin, the fresh running blood underneath. I want to tear it open again and again. I want to scream. I want to hit. I want to break down the walls. I can see myself through them – throwing myself against the walls. I can feel the screams, see my mouth open but I can’t hear them. I watch as my body, my hands slide down the wall over and over again. I watch and then I think ‘good girls don’t yell.’”

I read this and realise just how much it hurt to force myself to be continually thinking about girls, body, space, place and identity. How often when I read the literature and the studies I would feel sick. Looking back now, I should have changed my focus. My gaze should have shifted to me rather than an external analysis. At the time, that felt too self-centered, too egotistical.

Ultimately, I did write about myself and my experience researching and writing:

I was eleven when I was sexually abused by my softball coach. For the next two decades my body remembered what my mind chose to forget. I still can not remember fully what happened. All I have is the image of the sun shining through the leaves hanging above the van, the taste of bile in the back of my throat, and the world becoming still. I remember when the other girls mentioned that the police had come to their house but I don’t remember talking to them. I don’t know at what moment I remembered, I can’t place the trigger. It’s as though I woke up one morning and it was just there. I would look at pictures from my childhood and search my younger self’s face to see if I could witness the change. It became painful to read or hear the stories of adolescent girls. How could I listen to other’s stories when I was having difficulties listening to my own? Each time I sat down to write, read, or listen, my stomach would clench, I’d feel the tears well up and I would turn away.

This is a story about my journey.
(“Pandora’s Box” 2006)

I haven’t opened the document since I sent it off. There are only two people who have read it – my advisor and my second. I don’t think that I did myself justice or the topic justice. It might be one of those things that I have to go back to and do it right.

Next Tuesday, I have a meeting with my advisor. I don’t think that I am finished this journey.

Branding the Baby

We decided before Miss Pumpkin was born that we were going to use cloth diapers. We have in suite laundry, are concerned about the environment and its what good parents are supposed to do. However, we also looked at the cloth diapers and knew that they were going to be bigger than her when we brought her home so we picked up some Huggies for newborns. We were appalled to realise that they were decorated with lovely pictures of Winnie the Pooh a la Disney, Pampers were no better with the Sesame baby Elmo and other ‘baby’ Sesame Street characters.

Since then, Miss Pumpkin has voiced her opinion over cloth diapers and it isn’t positive. When we are at home and I am feeling up to it, we will use them during the day. What it has meant is that I have to forage for disposable diapers that do not have advertising directed at my daughter’s subconscious and that don’t make me shudder when I touch them because they feel too much like foam. We buy Simply Kids and Seventh Generation chlorine free diapers. The Simply Kids are awesome and cheaper than Huggies or Pampers but are decorated with some sort of kid friendly characters. The Seventh Generation are equally fantastic and have no decoration on them, they are definitely more expensive. Which ones we buy is determined by where I am shopping when I need to pick up diapers.

Why the long post about diapers? I think it is a perfect example of how branding our children occurs without us really noticing. Winnie the Pooh is cute, adorable and how could Tigger be a bad thing for a baby. It isn’t – except that I am putting this on my child every day, several times a day for most likely 2-3 years. By the time, the toilet training is done and the diapers are gone my child has been fully indoctrinated into Disney’s version of Winnie the Pooh and/or Sesame Street characters. (When we were kids did Sesame Street have all of the dolls, clothing and stuff that they do now? I can’t remember)

Ryan and I had already decided that we wanted to limit the toys that Miss Pumpkin would own. It is amazing how quickly the toys can accumulate and most kids I know don’t really play with all of them. I have always been an aware viewer when it comes to advertising and media in general, in the past 4 months I have become hyper aware. I almost went into an apoleptic fit when I saw the ad for the Dora Explorer cash register which includes a charge card and other great add ons. Bratz dolls are another group of commercials that make me want to throw away the tv and move to the middle of nowhere. What bothers me most about these ads and all of the marketing that is directed to kids is that it creates whiny, mini consumers whose only way of getting what they want is to nag at their parents. Yes, it is the parents responsibility to say “no” but in a culture that is so commodified and where love is more often represented through things as opposed to time, I think this is easier to say than do.

What I find most difficult now is to not simply react to the things that I see, read and hear. It has become harder to step back and analyse my reactions. To ask myself the questions: “what is it that I find offensive?”, “what makes this appealing to children?” and so on.  It doesn’t help that I have read too many articles and books on the marketing to and commodification of children and teens in my past.  More often than not, what I am reacting to is the feeling that we are being controlled by corporations and conglomerates.  Children are being trained to be mindless cogs in the economic wheel of cheap labour and cheap products that make the rich richer and the rest of us and the environment poorer and sicker.

More and more we are becoming removed from what it actually means to make or grow something.  Our sense of what something is worth has been twisted so that items that should be discussed in terms of its quality have been reduced to measurements of quantity.   We process our food so extensively that we have to add back nutrients that are found naturally in it.  We talk about good food being expensive and yet we think nothing of buying Kraft Dinner because it can feed us cheaply and yet the $1 price tag doesn’t truly factor in the cost to the environment not to mention that the processed food is heavily subsidized by governments.  Furthermore, the actual nutritional value of kraft dinner is nonexistent, in that sense it is vastly overpriced.   When asked, I want my children to know what foods are in season, where they come from and more importantly how to prepare them.  We are luckier than most as there is the family farm that they will be able to visit and work on.  I want them to understand that everybody deserves to be paid for their labour, that the environment isn’t something to be pillaged.

In the end it will be about balance and our willingness to say  “no” when so many other people are going to be saying “yes.”  I just hope that Miss Pumpkin and any other squashes we find in the vegetable patch understand that there was a reason behind their parents’ madness.

E-mail to Transit – Updated

To Whom It May Concern,

It came to my attention last week that there will be no elevator service at the New Westminster Skytrain. As a result I went to Columbia station where it turns out the elevator to get to the platform is not working. This was after I had to wrestle with the door to get into the station as there is no button to open the door. Fortunately, I need the elevators not because I am in a wheelchair but because I have a stroller. There have been no postings on the elevator about the Columbia elevator and none about New Westminster until last week when it was on the radio.

It was while I was lugging my stroller down the stairs that I realised Sapperton’s elevators are also out of service. This means that every skytrain station in New Westminster except for 22^nd street is no longer wheelchair accessible. Did you not think that this would be problematic? I can at least pick up my stroller and my daughter (grocery shopping is obviously no longer going to be possible) but people in wheelchairs do not have this luxury, they are in wheelchairs because they can’t walk down stairs.

I realise that luxury condos are obviously more important than the transit users, so I am assuming that there won’t be a stop work order on Plaza 88 or the condos at Sapperton. A simple solution would be to build a ramp in the Columbia station so that no elevator is needed and install a door to make the building wheelchair accessible.

Thank-you for your time,

Me

Update:  Translink did get back to me and explained that they are not the owners of the building at Columbia Skytrain Station though they have been negotiating with them to get the elevator fixed.  Apparently the Eastbound elevator is still accessible at New Westminster Station and then you have to cross at the concourse level.  Sapperton is just out of luck until the building is finished.  I am assuming that the new plan does include wheelchair accessibility, especially as it is the station right beside the hospital.  Translink responded in less than 24 hours; New Westminster who approved all of the building has still not responded.

Kale not to be found

Monday I roasted a chicken. Roasting has got to be one of the easiest things ever. It always tastes like you spent hours but really it is just a matter of sticking it in the oven and then walking away. It was a tiny little bird but very yummy. The only part I hate is scraping out the kidneys before. I have a neurosis about salmonella which results in my hands being washed 20x and everything that could have possibly been touched by chicken juice being scoured and sterilized.

So this was the menu on Monday : Roast chicken with lemon and rosemary, Rainbow Swiss Chard, roasted squash and rice that had a dollop of chicken au jus that had been reduced with the left over white wine in the fridge.

Rainbow Swiss Chard has become a staple since the beginning of October as it is one of the few BC vegetables still in season. I have become even more hyper aware of eating locally and in season. This is partly to do with having a sister and brother-in-law who own a farm and reading the 100 Mile Diet. Currently I am reading the Omnivore’s Dilemma and R half jokingly asked me to stop as he is afraid that we will not be eating anything but what we can grow on our north facing balcony. He looked a little panicked when I told him that I had found a place to order grass fed beef but that we had to buy it in 50lb quantities. It wasn’t the quantity as much as the picture in his mind of a deep freeze becoming our new TV stand.

I think this swiss chard might have also been organic but that is not as important to me as the fact that it is local. I am lazy in my cooking of it. Generally, I saute some onions and garlic with a generous dash of red pepper flakes and a bit of salt and then throw the chard in when everything is soft. 5 minutes later it is done.

The squash was a sweet dumpling (not from BC). I am very fussy about squash, acorn is not welcome in my oven as I find it stringy and watery. Butternut is the standard, but the dumpling is a good alternative. Both of them have a meatier, drier flesh. I also like their nutty flavour, it means that you don’t have to do anything to them but they can stand up to other flavours if they are in a casserole. The chicken was already in the oven at 400 and so half way through its cooking time, I threw in the squash (scraped, cut in half with the flesh side down on the dish).

Yesterday was chicken soup. I had thrown the remains of the bird into the crockpot with onion, garlic, rosemary, peppercorns, carrots and celery and had let it simmer all night. (Got to love the crockpot), by the time I got around to it the next morning the broth was a dark, toffee colour mostly because I never actually bother peeling the onion so the onion skin always leeches its colour into the broth. There was very little chicken left from the day before so I decided to make kale, white bean and chorizo soup.

Off in the rain Miss Pumpkin and I went to find kale. No kale could be found. I had to substitute spinach which is fine but I find that kale, because it is tougher, stands up better to soup. The deli did have dried chorizo, which was good as it lends a smoky flavour to the soup and that means less time is spent staring at the spices and determining which ones to put in. Miss Pumpkin stared at the world while trying to catch rain drops with her feet – I hadn’t bothered to put her rain cover on because it didn’t look like it was raining. She with her usual patience put up with it as we had already that day had a conversation about rain and its place in her future growing up on the West Coast.

And so home we went, slightly damp, spinach instead of kale and two chorizo sausages tucked into the pumpkin mobile. The soup was made and all was well.

x365 – A Year Long Journey Through Your Life

In my time spent strolling randomly through the internet, I came across this, x365.  Since finding it, I have been mulling it over.  As I move through the day, I will find myself adding another person to the list.  I haven’t decided yet whether or not I will actually play this game.  Partly because as much as I say that I want to write essays when presented with the commitment to write 34 words a day I become panicky.  (Side note – this post is already at 105.)  I also don’t know how I feel about naming people.I would also have to include people that I don’t actually know and who are already dead or never actually lived which doesn’t really fit in with the rules but then I am not very good at following rules.

What it has been is a good exercise for my mind.  I like inner reflection.  I could spend hours inspecting my inside toes.  I have become better about not becoming bogged down in it.  On down days I do still have a tendency to dredge up some moment when I said said or did something stupid and poke at it continually all the while squirming.  It’s like playing “why are you hitting yourself” with myself.  I have managed to stay away from self-degradation, instead I have been re-tracing my steps.  Stopping at various rest stops or sign posts along the way, I am realising how much ‘place’ plays an important role.  For example, the Gallery Lounge, is pivotal in my life.  No Gallery Lounge no L, no A, no J and the list goes on.  In fact, the Gallery Lounge had far more influence on my life than any of the professors whose  classes I was missing while sitting in a booth.

If I do decide to do this, I will include it on another page.  It will also be open to people, real or imagined, alive or dead, met or unmet.  It will be open to places, songs, books and any other piece that has made me who I am today.  Look for it.

Sometimes it’s just so hard

I have been drinking fair trade coffee for a number of years now.  I had decided that it was one very small thing that I could do to make the world a better place.  It also assuaged the middle class guilt that I was feeling about slurping my coffee on my way to work to teach kids knowing that the people who were providing my morning fix likely didn’t have the opportunity to send their own children to school.  It is expensive, sure, but we can afford it and I have never been a big fan of the big tins of coffee that you can buy in the grocery store, so it really isn’t much more expensive than what I was buying previously.  (It really is shameful how snobby I can be.)

Since then I have also tried to buy other fair trade products; chocolate, sugar and other baking goods.  My latest attempt at being socially conscious in my eating habits is the desire to purchase fair trade tea.  This is when more of the snobbery comes out.  I don’t like tea bags.  I’ll do it if I have to but it is not my preferred method of tea drinking.  I was raised by parents who have their own traditions and rituals around the art of brewing of tea that may not be on the same level as the Japanese Tea Ceremony but it is close.  Also, we have begun to drink tea in the evening at home.  A tea bag is something you use when you are running off somewhere, not something that you put into the teapot so that you can enjoy a leisurely cup and let the day wind down.  So hence the problem.

It is impossible to find loose black (blended or unblended) fair trade tea!  I have spent a number of hours on the internet and various specialty food stores looking for loose fair trade tea.  I don’t know why I thought I would find loose fair trade tea at the grocery store as it is rare to find any loose tea on the shelves.  My mother, who also drinks fair trade coffee that she mixes coffee from a local roaster because she believes that you also have to support the local small businesses, buys her tea at Murchies and a store on Main street.  Now Murchies says that they only purchase their coffees and teas from growers that pay good wages and provide medical and educational facilities but I prefer to have a bit more proof than that, especially since there is a body that certifies fair trade products.

So on the internet I go, where I search and find a couple of places but usually there is a lot of green tea or rooibus and not the strong black teas that I like.  I also have a penchant for Earl Grey, as there is something so lovely and calming about sipping on bergamot. Furthermore, everything is sold in ounces so I am constantly getting up to compare quantities with whatever I can find in my cupboard that is measured in ounces.  The common quantity that the tea is sold is 2  or 4 ounces.  That would hardly keep us in tea for a month.  It is also considerably more expensive than fair trade coffee but I have already decided to put my money where my mouth is.  Of course, if I also include the amount of time that I have put into locating the tea, the price is jacked up even more.  Thank goodness for long naps in the afternoon.

I also am frustrated by the lack of Canadian companies selling loose fair trade tea.  It kills me that I am going to have to buy tea from a company in the States.  I approached the Salt Spring Coffee Co. but they only have tea bags.  So, I think that I have narrowed down my choices between two companies.  They are Brown’s Coffee located in Seattle and Choice Organics also located in Seattle.  I have decided to bring Seattle into my own sphere of local geography and so don’t feel as badly as I would if I was purchasing from companies in New York.  I am leaning towards Choice simply because they also purchase renewable energy certificates to offset 100% of the energy used at their plant.  Maybe I’ll buy from both and then do a comparison.

I’ll keep you posted.

I write in the shower.  I also write in the car, walking, sitting on the bus and various other places.  The problem is that I am not writing it down physically and when I actually sit down to write it out – I am blocked.  I have always written this way.  My thesis was written and rewritten in my mind.  I would walk away from the computer so that I could get some writing done. So here is my attempt to write what I had already written this morning.

Today, I woke up to discover that I am not pregnant.  This is a good thing.  I didn’t think that I  was but my breast feeding body is not as regular as it used to be.   While I was in the shower I realised that I will never again look at menstruation as a curse or burden to bear.  Somewhere amongst the tissue and blood was a tiny possibility that could have become a reality.  My body felt different – heavier, solid, connected.  There was an ache that throbbed between my legs, pulsing its way up into my uterus where I could feel it expanding, pushing against its walls, searching for something that was no longer there.  I could feel my body pull itself in and then let go – faint echoes of contractions that still reverberate through my bones, carried through my body as a counter tempo to my heartbeat.

My hands moved, tracing the path of the beats as they moved under the surface of my skin.  They rested on my belly.  Its roundness – a reminder of what it once hid.  Tiny purple marks following its swell, tattoos that no artist with their ink could replicate, no symbol found on a wall could evoke the same rich, layered meaning.

I bowed my head in wonderment.  My tears caught by the upturned corners of my mouth spilled down and I gave thanks.