November
 

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October 30

winter's coming home
the little one is Christian now.
wearing a pink sleeper that Dr. T. gave her, something very

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/02_44/b3806007.htm

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if i entered a writing contest...

blue threads combine us now
i once saw a girl on a bus. she was shredding the edges of a pair of cut-off jean shorts.
dispite her half-hearted attempts to place them on the floor beside her, the threads flew around the back of the bus with the wind coming in from open windows. she was of the age where she didn't really care where they were going, and she reminded me of when i didn't care about things like that either. i felt privately embarrassed to have ever been so immature, and then realized that one day in the future i would look back at this age and feel the same way.
i once met a girl on the web. she wrote a diary there. she seemed beautiful to me, and wrote with reckless inner abandon in a way that reminded of the girl on the bus. private, yet blatantly open. i sent her the story about the girl on the bus and she took it and carefully placed it linked obscurely from her diary. then i sent her another story, and another. each time she placed them silently, carefully, in a particular but random place until they were spread all over her diary. most people did not notice them, but i did. eventually they wove a tale between two strangers who eventually became friends. like blue threads, they remain scattered on the web but still hold fabric together.
here are those 50 threads as excerpted from her diary.
shame i don't ride the bus much anymore.
1.oops. they are no longer online.
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October 29

i grab a magazine to wave colours in her face, oops, dynamite on the cover.
grab another, more dynamite. ouch.

left and center, good friends are in varying states of crumpled.
torn between guilty and grateful, i'm mostly left wondering ... why?

over baptismal choices and folding socks: how hard is the struggle supposed to be? (nevermind comparing my own personal struggles with those of my friends) if we can make it easier, should we? what would God and Buddha have to say in a debate on the subject?
i am truly starting to use the 'be in the moment' mantra, borrowed as it is. ironically, one needs alot of time to have the internal strength for this. i'm thanking God that at least i do now. and so many answers are obvious, don't beat yourself up, don't castigate yourself mercilessly (to borrow a phrase from the Editor of Canadian Living). are the obvious answers always the one?

the missionary from africa has a resounding phrase: "after 40 years, i have received so much more from them than they from me"

baptismal thoughts to come...
 
 
 

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October 26                                              many blessings

counting blessings is a reminder to myself.
the skeleton that is the company i am employed by appears more decrepit and decaying by the week. from the inside; it's your job. from the outside, it's a once-powerful source, cut-down and shredded bit by bit, now left hanging sadly by strings to bleed in the hopes that the winds of change will firm it up once again. by then, barely roots will remain and it's anyone's guess but God's, whether circumstances will favour it's regrowth. let's pray they will, not for my financial benefit and security - but this time, for the sake of a long proud institution called LM Ericsson (and all the others like it) who no longer stand as pillars anywhere, but as needy and hurting.
 
 

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October 24/25                                              my life as an episode
 

today's pondering: what is this human life form, baby?  and why is it segregated so?
when will she no longer be a baby?

i hadn't seen it for longer than i knew and i forgot what it looked like, actually.
and as i opened the box containing a candle that i had kept with me for 37 years
without really knowing why, an entire life flashed before me, first mine then hers.
<insert picture here>

i'm wondering if the two are related: the superficial-ness with which so many lead their lives, and the amount of emotional energy it takes to gaze like that, simulatneously into the past and the future. it most definately is easier to watch oprah.

try to keep things without knowing how significant they might be one day.
it may surprise you in ways you never thought how.

west wing episodes all mixed up make me crazy.
the subtleties of some the conversations from last year are nothing less than brilliant.
twice watched, nearly all of it gets to me.

she may cry for a mere 5 minutes; but i unwind for 25. this grates on the brain-synapes!
tiny little actions get interupted over and over again and my brain just loses track.
even my best neurons are frayed at the edges these days. getting to every thought's logical conclusion is a daunting task, and the ones that i skip are accumulating in an evening's knotted pool of elastic neural tension that can only be unwound by finding enough time to spit it all out in some coherency here.

kinda like having those  summaries of west wing to make the episode into a nice digestible little package. and that's after rewinding.
 
 

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October 21                                                milky milky

what do you suppose would have inclined people thousands of years ago to walk over to a grazing cow and feed it's milk to their child? not i, said the mother, while scouring the house for something non-cowly to eat.
 

evolutionary theories of mine...
newspaper articles talk of evolution and autism, allergies, asthma. of choosing mates for brain not brawn and as a result, passing on viruses that predispose to these conditions. but there just hasn't been long enough for it to have affected our children in that way. how about a barrage of chemicals, changes, and instabilities in our diet and life in the past 50 years which has left our immune systems on overdrive, not knowing which allergens to react to ?
 
 
 

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October 19                                                mEp mediocrity

it's a world of mediocrity.
people nearly aspire to it.
they accept it on a daily basis in the way they communicate with others;
in personal relationships including marriage;
the way they study and work;
and in the way they spend their free time.
i listen to the neighbour from France who greets me brightly with "Bonjour Madame!"
and i'm encouraged by this formality, however small. When was the last time you heard someone say 'Good-day Madam' or even sign a letter with 'Sincerely Yours'?
i've already become an outdated fuddy duddy, and just as my father is, proud of it.
it only occured to me yesterday for the first time that maybe i'm the weirdo in this way,
and not everyone else.

being cultured is a thing of the past.

he wants me to write a short story to send to the CBC.
i've just jotted down a list of over 25 things to do that i feel i should have done in august, and now writing a short story for the cbc becomes yet another brain-clogging great idea, another frustrating reason to stay up past 9 oclock and watch the hands on the clock at these hours spin faster than a top. i don't have the time to think my thoughts to their natural conclusion and i'll keep on telling you that until i do, because nothing frustrates me more and writing it down here helps. even if no one else on the entire planet reads it.
i don't accept mediocrity even in my own head. i read, and i forget. i don't have time to analyze all of her patterns, don't have the energy to come up with a complex table that i could record everything on and chart after a few days to see correlations. no, they're scribbled all over willy nilly and i can't even figure out which data is important and which isn't. driving me nuts. making my back tense. she's asleep. i should be too.

feels so good here. think i'll stay. camping pictures, which year was that? should order her birth certificate, get that lamp fixed, sort out the junk on this table. how can someone have more to do than before? while i'm at work, my energy goes there. i do things well, i keep track of things, i get lots of satisfaction from that. now that home is my work, i won't accept any less. but it's a huger job, an older mess, piles and piles of mediocrity built up over ten years of career-building. now each one needs attention, and i'm frustrated that i can't do it in 6 days. why the heck did i mess up those photos 2 years ago, anyway? how much brainspace can i really need just to organize photo albums?

and my throat gets bigger, tighter, sorer.

happy 10-twenty-one.

poots
 

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we spent the night in the hospital. toots has milk allergies. i could spend days reading about it, becoming an authority. i don't have the time. gotta label those photos. gotta post her new pictures. she'll be Catholic soon. gotta think about that.
 

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October 18

God is a word that describes different things for different people. some people see their God inside-out and yet others learn their own Godliness from a book. it's like learning to ski, really. everyone has one. some even call God 'skiing'.

- - -

i try, but there are certain thoughts that i can't push out. these are not any kinds of thoughts that need to be writ here. watching her in a mEp-way can be dangerous. having the opportunity to understand and then do something about the helplessness of a child is next to Godliness, I guess. there was a compounding effect recently; the bond is now sealed. from here on in, things will really grow.
 

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October 10

the 'she's' are adding up. i think she's real.

imagine if someone would have told us twenty years ago that someone named 'Oprah Winfrey' would be so famous?

she's a hungry hungry hippo these days!
 

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October 03

the sugar looked particularly white this morning, notwithstanding the black sugar bowl.
a purity and richness unmatched by any wealth, that we have sugar so plentiful, and so white. is that a sin?

October 03

how peope make garbage so easily;
donna and i conversation topics;
we have a strange collection of things in common.
 

I'm growing into this mother role, and it's pretty much what they said it
would be. unbelievably difficult at some times and incredibly amazing at others.
and these feelings are juxtaposed in a strange irony!
She smiles at me now when i pick her up in the middle of the night, that's a feeling that no one can describe which is why they don't bother trying. this being, that weeks ago, didn't really respond to anything -! - all of a sudden, smiling, happy, to see you - or hear your voice - it's beyond explanation and makes you cry. so utterly helpless, yet loving. wild.

she brings more magic to me than i to her.
 

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October 02                                      money matters

what you learn on mat leave: installment #1:
-if you put all your bill stubs in one envelope and pay them in the ATM, you only pay one fee
-you spend less money on mat leave CUZ YOU CAN'T GET INTO THE STORES WITH A STROLLER!

the Bush administration said yesterday that the cost of full blown war with the middle east would cost 9 billion dollars A MONTH. know what they should do instead? gather all their enemies and SPLIT THE 9 BILLION DOLLARS!

and i'm blessed again for some unkown reason as large monthly payments are stopped in a twisted windfall-like manner in exactly the same month as my work mat benefits end.

the mail slot rattles as the man who walks the streets delivering mail places envelopes with his friendly hands through the hole and into my home. it continues to amaze me that for less than the price of a pack of bubble gum or a single bosc pear, we can have a letter hand delivered from one end of this country to each and every little other corner of it.

back straight;
tuck tummy;
deep breath;
shoulders back;
toots sleeps.
 
 
 
 

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October 01

happy meppaversary.

what do i think of war?
i only see it as history in the making.