Sunday Sunday...

I began a blog the other day that went something like this:

The Winter Mindscape

It is gorgeously sunny outside, yet I am inclined towards bleaker thoughts.

Caffeine crash notwithstanding, I think my level of general apathy is increasing. I want to care, I really do, but it seems like such a great effort for so little reward.

Work is repetitive. While it requires my effort, it very rarely challenges me. (The people I work with may be challenged though. Does that count?)

School is only a means to an end. A very expensive and far away end. Nineteenth century literature isn't exactly something I spend long hours contemplating. Traditional English grammar... I think the course name says it all in this instance.

What does that leave me with? Aaaaa, the ever illusive hope of a better time/life to be had after years of monotonous toil at things that are both repetitive and uninteresting; I can look forward to the decline of my life, ie: Retirement.

To be trite, I think I was feeling a bit down. Really though, I it may also be a sign that I associate some of my more miserable thoughts with fall and winter. As months go they tend to be more bleak, what better time could there be to think about how dreadful your life is than when you are bombarded with obvious signs that everything green and fresh must wither and change and die? Hello depressing mortality.

Now that I am of a slightly less brooding and wallowy with the "my life is so hard..." whining self, I am beginning to realize that fall is something in the air. No, really, it's in the air. We all breath in a strange mind drug in fall. It leaves us emotionally disenchanted, spiritually bereft and mentally anxious. We are encouraged to confront our own mortality just at the moment the outside world is beginning to hibernate. The weather turns more to the stormy and bleak. The sun sets a little earlier every day, and the little sunlight we get leaves us dazzled and sunblind rather than refreshed. We are left wanting and cold and alone, blindly fumbling for some last vestige of human comfort and warmth. Instead we are bombarded by more bad weather, and Halloween. Too much candy and too much alcohol at parties where we celebrate all that is odd and gory and frightening about death and life and all the thousand states between them. It amazes me that we haven't all gone stark-raving mad by the middle of November. But that's what they're good at. Correct dosage of the mind drug. Because , it's all about the lead-up to...

Christmas.

One of the most commercialized holidays ever. It comes just when we are at our lowest to allow us to buy our way back into happiness.

I figured out all of this while I was recovering from a migraine on Sunday. Don't say it was the Advil, you can't say that, because if you do, then you know you're just buying in to the mind drug of fall.

The old Italian people playing Bocci helped me to see it all. I was watching them, and thinking, "someday I want to be an old Italian lady". I know this is impossible, but they were having so much fun, playing this lawn bowling like game. Imagine all the funny old people you know, the really nice ones, and then imagine that they are playing bocci, and chatting about "the kids" and "the grandkids" and ribbing each other about their poor skills, and then cheering for each other when someone has a really good toss. Imagine all of that and you may see a bit of what I saw on Sunday.

So, watching these Italian people, I began to wonder why fall isn't full of things like that. Why are people so awful, in general, during the winter months when they had been so funwonderful in summer? That's when I came up with my theory of the fall air rotting the brainmeats. It's sort of like an allergic reaction. Some people are immune to it, some never develop a sensitivity to it, and the rest of the world succumbs to it without even a second thought as to the origins of the "oscariness" they feel. The world might be your oyster, but when the mind drug of fall comes, it's like the oyster you found during red tide; you can look at it, but you can't eat it, and if you look at it for too long it will start to smell, and we all know that the smell of rotten oyster is devilishly hard to get rid of.

Grrr

More, with the angries.

20 minutes I took to write this rant.

Now I just want to hug myself and cry because it went into the netherworld of posting.

Why me. It's just not fair.

Anger is so random. RRR.

Edible Joy

I have just come back from a lunch of Dim-Sum. If there were words enough to express the joy of eating Dim-Sum, I am sure I would now begin to describe exactly what it feels like when your tummy wants to sing and dance for joy. Alas, there are not.

Instead, I will giggle about how Paul is now highly caffeinated. Then I will giggle about how Miyuki is highly caffeinated. Then I will giggle because I drank as much tea as they did and I am juuuuuuust fine.

Anger. Real Anger.

I am angry. Can you tell?

I have been trying to post for three days.

I have not been able to post for three days.

Now I can.

But I'm still angry.

I have found the drawback to the electronic journal.

Anger.

A Lesson in Impermanence

The Tibetan horse has been well beaten, I know, and if it is not entirely dead, I'm sure it is not for lack of trying. "Free Tibet": stickers, marches, rallies and many other such things have, no doubt, already said anything I could dream up. But bear with me while I mumble through some thoughts...

I perused Time magazine today, and came across an article on the recent trip the rinpoche lama made to Tibet. One of the things that interested me the most was the apparent need of the Chinese government to wield absolute control over everything. The magnitude of their fear is intriguing.

I never imagine fear on a larger scale. For me it has always been an individual matter; it's me against that huge hairy girl-eating beast with 8 legs that just crawled out of my shower drain. (Do you find that this only ever happens when you are on the toilet and too far away to kill it, or to grab a suitable killing device, before it targets you as its next meal?) I can not imagine the breadth of the kind of fear that would prompt a national government to so oppose a few small cute old religious men. But then, I am just as incapable of imagining another Gandhi type revolution. Maybe some people aren't.

All of this very rudimentary political commentary aside, the rinpoche made a very interesting comment about the impermanence of things. Which brings me, somehow, to questioning if there really is anything enduring. There is a startling absence of any guarantees in life; we are too transitory. Formerly, I may have said that at least religious ideals were likely to prevail, even if everything else changes. But those too seems to have learned a way of slowly becoming like the murmur of a lonely man in a crowd, until finally, they depart, largely unnoticed, and seldom missed.

R-e-s-p-e-c-t

I can't help but spell the word out, letter by letter, just because of that stuipd song. Not that the song is really stupid, it's simply that every time I say the word respect, even if it's only in my own head, I can't help but break it down, letter by letter.

My general Monday aggravation was made worse by the fact that I must commute to work. Transit, while seldom being my friend, is always, unfortunately, the only thing that's really there for me. At any rate, what to my wondering (slightly squinty) eyes did appear but a new cel phone ad. It seems that Reebok has come up with a way to help people gain respect. At least they will help you if you are the kind of person that carries this particular cel phone, and you play "street ball".

While this ad could have encouraged me to type frantically about the deliberate intention of all advertisements to subvert every twelve year old, and to make the populace in general believe that everything can be bought if you have enough money, I am more inclined to wonder about the idea of street ball itself. More precicely, I wonder why I'm wondering about it at all.

I am your very typical, almost caucasian, girlie-girl. I can not throw with anything even vaguely resembling skill. I can count (without using thumbs) the number of times that I have actually made a basket. And I definitely can't jump. Sports have not typically been my strong suit, more by necessity than choice. I am a clutz; it's the only thing I do with aplomb.

While I'm wondering about street ball, maybe I should go on to address my very far fetched ideas about some day becoming a tennis-star-prima-ballerina-surfer-babe-soccer-pro. Somehow I don't think that those dreams are very likely to see themselves to fruition. While I have the ability to greatly distort my facial expression in immitation of the ultra-slow playback, I think that's as close as I will ever get to any real sports related glory. (And I wonder no more).

Evidently, I'm not worthy, but at least I can sing.

My Mom, The Warrior

This weekend my Mom is headed to Kelowna to compete in the Dragon Boat races. She tells me that there is a good chance that she will have to be "stroke". This means that the tempo of her stroke sets the pace for all of the other paddlers on her side of the boat.

My mother and I do not always get along. I still sometimes struggle to become stroke in my own life after following the lead established by my parents for so long. I do not think that rythm is something that comes naturally to me; it is much easier to be introspective and silent.

As I get older, in the tradition of all good suburbanites, I am discovering that I can occasionally see the place my mother is speaking from. Sometimes I even understand her. More often, I find that I am able, at the very least, to respect the things she has to say. It is getting easier to accept "smother mother" behaviour (that would formerly have sent me into a long rant on the completely irrational and freekish nature of my parents) as something she feels compelled to do in response to the increasing independance exhibited by my younger sister and I.

I like to imagine the strangeness of things; how bizzare it must be to watch as something that was formed inside of yourself becomes wholy alien to you. Children are like water.

This is not a memorable occasion. This is an experiment to see if Kim can be taught to write on a regular basis again.

Right now I have that nasty voodoo-shrunken-head feeling that you get when you don't do anything creative. The act of writing used to be my language, I needed to create. I wonder what I've been doing these last three years?

Obviously nothing good. I mean, now I work with Paul.