Category: Bloggish Things

Imagine. Imagine that for one night, your city is transformed into a strange and magical place. Art installations sprout everywhere, in dark alleys and concrete plazas and green parks, on streets, dangling in the air between buildings, projected onto the facades of other buildings, inside tiny galleries and indie shops. Huge crowds of people wander the sidewalks and block the roads, all experiencing and participating in a city turned art playground. For one night. This is Nuit Blanche.

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I was searching for a subject for this post and I turned on music to help me think. Choosing a song from my playlist was easy–I’m currently in love with Adele’s Rolling in the Deep. I played it two or three times, then shuffle moved on to Adam Lambert’s Mad World and I had to play that a few times. Besides their amazing voices (I am so serious) and the first two letters of their names, Adele and Adam Lambert have at least one other thing in common–neither is willing to be boxed in by society’s expectations. Adele is…well, what many call “full-figure,” and she doesn’t care. Adam Lambert is gay and out and amazing. Neither is as in-your-face about their individuality as say, Axl Rose, who happens to be another favorite of mine, but neither are they hiding anything. They are who they are, and if you don’t like it then you know where the door/back button/skip command is.

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I recently started writing poetry again, and after a two-year hiatus, it was tough.  It was as if I had never written any poetry in my life, that I was starting fresh.  In some ways, that can be a good thing, but in this case, it wasn’t. My normal process is to freewrite madly, tossing as many ideas and images as I can at myself (generally on computer or sometimes by hand) and seeing what sticks.  Many of the poems in Life as a Moving Target and Without Wings started out as freewrites.  It’s always worked for me in the past, so I figured I’d start there.

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Siri here. I’m thrilled to introduce our very first guest blogger. Kat Anthony is a writer, editor, and founder of Crow Girl Publishing, as well as a student and an all-around smart woman. Today’s post has to do with two things that have always intrigued me: rainbows and mysteries. — We all know the legend of the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow–and yet for me, the rainbow itself is the treasure. The science of light and refraction is straightforward enough, but this doesn’t dispel my rising sense of wonder and anticipation, when I see the sudden brightening of the air in the middle of a rainstorm. The grey sky grows intensely vibrant, and the falling drops turn luminous: sparkling and ephemeral jewels of liquid and light. This exquisite spectacle might seem like reward enough, and yet, it is also the harbinger of the rainbow itself. Even now, when I see the beginnings of a sunshower, I go rainbow hunting. Once I’ve found it, I often as not stand staring, a silly grin pasted on my face (“double rainbow all the way!”), as others walk by, hunched and oblivious, anxious to avoid getting drenched in the downpour. In India, when any of the adults would see a sunshower, and the glorious emergence of the rainbow, they’d smile mysteriously (as I remember it) and say, “Oh–the fox’s wedding and the monkey’s dance”. The observation would roll off their tongues, with a little bit of a singsong lilt, like…

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Autumn is one of my favourite times of year. I haven’t been in school for ten years, but I still love the sense of new beginnings. But at the same time, autumn also makes me wistful, because it reminds me that winter is coming (no, I’m not a Stark of Westeros – just a Canadian). It’s an odd dichotomy. Tell me I’m not alone? If you’re the sort of person who feels left out of all the hustle and bustle, who struggles with the transition because you’d rather hibernate until spring (much like turtleducks), here are some ideas for embracing the season. Hit the school/office supply stores. The tricky part of this is coming up with a good reason to be there so people don’t look at you weird. If you’re a parent, you have a ready-made excuse to go roam the aisles, ogle the shelves, and stock up on all the pretties – the lined paper on sale, the new pens and pencils, the notebooks, the Post-It notes… If you’re not a parent, maybe you’re a writer (or thinking about being a writer someday), which is still a good excuse. Even if you do all your writing and planning on computer. Ahem.

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Turtleducks are oddities, there’s no getting around that. Awesome as they are, they don’t quite fit in. I would hold that they are awesome partly because they don’t fit in. As is natural for such odd creatures, Turtleducks turn up in odd places. Normal places may see them too, but odd places bring them in flocks. One such place this Turtleduck likes to flock is Valley of the Moon (on Facebook here). Billed as “an historic fantasyland,” it’s a great place to go and act odd and have people like it.

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Two weeks ago, I started feeling really bad — almost like a flu bug but not quite: I was run down, severely dizzy, couldn’t think straight, and my head hurt a lot.  For a week I battled this until I found something in the back of my mouth: a little bump that hurt when I touched it.  It reminded me of previous bumps and what they were — jaw infections — so naturally I freaked out. First, let me back up just a bit.  When I was 15 (for those of you playing along at home, that would be twenty years ago), I had extensive jaw surgery to correct severe TMJ.  In order to hold everything together while it healed, my surgeon put in 28 pieces of hardware: plates, wires, and screws.  And unfortunately, as of right now, I’ve had two surgeries to remove the hardware from the left side of both jaws.  Because they got infected and would have (most likely, not being dramatic here) killed me.  And the infections were almost impossible to cure because they were both on the metal, not in tissue.

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Yesterday, my husband and I attended the local Scottish Festival and Highland Games.  This was a third – twice, out in California, we attended the big one at Pleasanton.  We both have Clan Campbell shirts – everyone in California had a clan shirt (in comparison, we were the only ones who had them here, and had several people ask where we’d gotten them). While on the bus, I had a woman sit in front of me, take one look at my shirt, and say “Oh no, I’ve got my back to a Campbell!”  

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My mother is one of my heroes. Let me tell you why. When I was very ill as a small child, and doctor after doctor couldn’t determine what was wrong, she refused to stop digging until she found the answers herself. (I was celiac, a disease that was almost unknown then.) She went against convention and social pressures to raise my two siblings and me.

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Everyone knows that part of being an adult is the art of compromise. That there’s no “I” in “team.” Great things happen when we all work together. After all, they teach us that stuff in kindergarten–pick up, pick up, everybody do your share–and it’s reinforced throughout our lives. “Take one for the team” and all that. But there’s another part of growing up that we don’t often hear about. The art of not being a rug. To me, it’s a harder lesson to learn. At work, in our friendships, no one wants to be the high-maintenance person. No one wants to be the selfish one. We can’t all agree on everything–there has to be give and take. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Or the one.

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