When is a reversal not a reversal?

I feel better today.

I still can't write about half the stuff that matters to me. I'm still stuck in the same situation, (if I ever was stuck) but I feel different.

Yesterday I walked to Barton Springs. It is a natural spring that feeds a swimming pool and a spring (that should have been the water source for the city but never mind). It was sacred to the people from this area and I can see why.

I walked to the springs, put my hand in the water, thanked the water and took a sip. And today, I feel cleansed. That might sound crazy but it is the closest thing to a ceremony rooted in the land that I've been able to have here. And it matters.

More later.

Things are going to be ok.

Winter

In Austin, winter comes in little spikes and then goes away again. By February, summer clothes will be all a person needs here. Right now, there are days when a jacket is a good idea and nights when scarf and gloves make sense but it will never be as cold as it is in Victoria or Ottawa or even New England and the sun shines every day.

I never thought I'd understand snowbirds. All my life I've wanted two things, my freedom and security. Seems to me now that alone, those two things cancel each other out. In order to feel safe enough to consider options, a woman really needs to be married. I was foolish to think it could be any other way.

The paradox of life is very much with me now. Things, places, situations, relationships - yes, they can become yours forever but even your forever won't last. As much as you love anything, everything - life is a temporary condition. It feels permanent but it's not, an element of loss is built in for everyone just because we all, one way or another, love each other.

So we keep our eyes on the things we want to keep - that's the only sensible way.

I can't help but notice the rest of the world is slowly catching up to some of the choices I've been forced to make in order to make my own life livable. I read an article about living in a smaller house today. Apparently it is becoming chic. I have lived for so long in an apartment that is under 500 square feet that I'm no longer comfortable with the idea of living in a space larger than 1200 square feet with someone I love. I look at houses and apartments to imagine how life might be for us some day and find that most of the ones I reject have one thing in common, they are too big.

More than anything else, if and when I am finally able to live with someone I truly do love, I want to live close.

So the year draws to a close and who knows if I will be able to keep my love, freedom doesn't matter so much to me anymore, now it's love and security. Maybe it's a function of the season but really, I think I'm just finally realizing what matters.

Sustaining

If we're all going to learn to live sustainably, eat locally, all that it entails, I think many of us are going to have to become migratory creatures.

I had spinach from a local farm yesterday. Tomatoes and avocado too. Meanwhile, over half the continent has ice and snow already and the only thing that seems to be growing is anxiety.

Texas is heaven. No wonder the PR is so terrible, they're trying to keep people from finding out about it.

http://www.farmtotabletx.com/2010/11/111510-update/

Been too long

I can barely remember how to use this blog. Please accept my apologies for the messiness of it, the repetition of the pictures, all of it.

Writing from Austin, I love it here but I've been silent because I've been threatened. Seems on more than one level, my transparent life has become about keeping secrets for the benefit of others and, I've been told, for my own benefit.

This presents a huge problem for me. Absolute transparency has always been my ally. I believe in it. In the spirit of transparency, I have to say here and now, the conflict between who I am and who I love has reached the point where it must break something or be resolved somehow.

The subject of men and women has been brought into the foreground for me - this wasn't intentional but circumstances being what they are, I find myself being confronted with my own philosophy of life and looking pretty hard at the areas where I've accepted social and cultural restraints that run counter to my own beliefs. It's an interesting time. (and I can see why that's a curse.)

Most recently the issue of my value as an individual versus my social value as a spouse has been pressing at me. My father raised me to be married - my mother was so passive her influence meant nearly nothing. I was lucky enough to be given the raw materials to make me attractive to men and this "training" while it may have been rejected by me, given the choice, did take root.

Feminism is a noble ideal but the fact of the matter is, we live in a civilization where it is foolish to the point of being dangerous for a woman without an economic foundation in place to decide to live independently. I am that woman right now and I am increasingly aware of how the men to whom I am attracted benefit from that without ever having to make an appropriate reciprocal gesture.

That may sound materialistic or mercenary or worse - but it is still the truth that marriage provides a material benefit to women that it does not provide to men at the same time as it provides a social and emotional benefit to men that it does not provide to women.

To date, I have provided the emotional and social benefit with no expectation of the material security. That needs to change. I may think it is only right that I make my way in the world as a man but as Malcolm Gladwell points out in Outliers even that idea is more myth than reality and it is time I made my peace with it and acted accordingly.

That's all for now. More pictures later, this is something I need to hash out. I do so not only for myself but for any other woman who, like me, thought Virginia Woolf was no longer relevant to contemporary women and makes her way through life without a net.

Things begin to settle

I don't know why it seems to take me so long to make transitions. I've been here two weeks now and have barely written a word, just got electricity, haven't got the gas hooked up. I suppose part of me is just as surprised to be here as the people I talk to who tell me I'm brave to go away for such a long time.

But really, I don't see it.

If you can possibly be somewhere you love with someone you care about, wouldn't you do it? Shouldn't you do it? Shouldn't everyone move heaven and earth to be happy? And isn't life short enough without assuming you can't do what you want to do? (provided you do not hurt others of course)

I think life is short. The world is pretty big to a little creature like me and if it is even remotely possible for me to pursue happiness, then I am going to do exactly that to the exclusion of everything else.

The thing is, when I was in my 20's I had this little breakthrough that life without real happiness was pointless. Sure, I wanted to do right by the people around me, be a good person, benefit the world, all that stuff but if I lived in absolute misery while I was doing those things then what did that say about the gift of life that the Creator gave directly to me? After all, that's the only gift I know for sure was meant for me.

Singing is for other people too, so is writing, art of any kind, a sense of duty, the ability to exert oneself on behalf of others, the health I gave to my only son - those are gifts G-d gave me to pass on to others and it was an honor to do so but without a sense of joy and wonder and without some daring, daring to be fully alive - they don't mean very much.

So here I am, finally cracking the crust of my inactivity. Settling like a feather on a ledge, I suppose - probably easy enough to set me adrift again, although I hope not.

I have been true in my heart. True to myself and true to love - in all its many forms. I hope, I like to think, we can all say that but I'm told it's unusual. It shouldn't be.

I've been told I'm lucky but I think I'm just awake. I'm poor - poorer than I've ever been. Certainly poorer than I ever expected to be but if the cost of money is your soul, then I really think it is a blessing to be poor.

It is a blessing to have a mind and be able to speak it, however clumsily. It's a blessing to stay awake, a blessing to draw breath and see the sky. I'm aware of it - so aware I can't dismiss it, can't put it off for even a minute. I can endure the reluctance of others, people I love who are still afraid to stand up and be in the world but not of it but I can't live that way myself. For me there is no other choice and I do need to remember that. Waiting seems kind but ultimately it is wasteful.

I need to write but maybe I also need to just shut up and post some more pictures.

Texas

Subletting is complicated.

Living your life your own way, no matter how closely you stick to the rules as they are written on paper, is complicated.

It's all complicated.

People will tell you to follow your dream and be true to yourself - that's all well and good and it feels good to do it but what they don't tell you is that once you actually manage to do it, things will not get any simpler.

I'm happy to be in Austin. I have a sublet that has lots of natural light in a neighborhood that seems to be about as convenient as it can be but there are still wrinkles to be ironed out, time lost to complications, adjustments to make - this phase of life with its distinct patterns of melancholy is different from the last but there are still patterns of melancholy and still the big questions of life to be wrestled with. I tend to forget that when I am striving to get somewhere or something.

I'm in a starbucks in Austin waiting for my electricity to be hooked up because the guy from whom I am subletting had it all turned off - this will cause me problems the next time I want to cross the border. More problems. It will make the way harder and he did it without a second thought, he did it without mentioning his intention of doing it to me - there is always some complication to make things hard, even when you think you've gotten what you wanted.

The internet will come back on Friday, the gas? Well, I haven't dealt with that yet so it's anyone's guess. Water and electric I fixed today at a premium and of course this means my bank account is taking a hit every time I turn around.

The apartment itself is alright. It has a lot of windows and yet still seems to manage to suffer from whiffs of that overheated cheerlessness so characteristic of Austin. One must choose carefully in these things and one must always remember why you've come here.

Gearing up to write again - that's hard too. Voice changes by context, it just does. I haven't exactly found my voice here. It'll take a while writing crap like this to get there.

Walking makes me a bit of a freak here. Fact is, I can't lead this double life and afford a car. Another fact is, I need a car here. Of course that raises the question, would it be easier or harder to cross the border by car?

The fact that I have come and gone three times now makes no difference to the border people, they do not deal in logic. One must always bear that in mind.

Today someone suggested many Mexican ex-pats choose to fly to Canada and then cross into the states from the northern border because it's easier - well, it's not easier and they treat everyone as though they are trying to do something nefarious even if, like me, you're not.

So every action I take has an element of performance - always wondering how it will be perceived by the border guards. As though they were spending all their time tracking me, one little insignificant woman from Canada. It's egotistical paranoia but they reinforce it every time I cross so it's hard to lose.

At any rate, I'm a writer now - for real and for true so I suppose I should be spending my time writing and not worrying away like some demented terrier at all of these peripheral issues.

I'm in Texas. Expect things to change.

Connecticut Evening

It's a lovely, early evening here. Birds and crickets are singing, the butterflies are having their evening meal. It's peaceful and lovely, everything life should be and missing only one thing, or person. Everything in its time, I suppose. Here are some pictures I took this morning.

Desperation Bubbles Up

Hard not to see metaphors for daily life in the headlines. As the oil in the Gulf keeps defying attempts to suppress it, so do all the other issues that have erupted as a result of our plumbing the depths of our culture to satisfy our greed. You can't turn around without seeing the results of that and no amount of saying or teaching or otherwise reinforcing "nice" or "decent" behaviour seems to be able to keep a lid on it.

There was a time, within my lifetime, when people considered the issue of a fair exchange as the foundation for doing business. You would sell something for a sum of money or exchange your work for a fair sum and along with that basic exchange would go the assumption that both sides were getting a fair deal.

It's not like that anymore. Case in point; the sublet apartment. There was a time when a person who had to be away from home for an extended period was faced with the choice of paying their rent or mortgage to maintain an uninhabited space in their absence or storing their belongings and finding a new place to live when they returned. Some people would get a housesitter or hire a security service to look after things while they were gone. They would often pay for this service on the understanding that it is significantly more costly to store one's belongings and/or pay for an empty place than it is to have someone checking on these things and making sure they stay safe in your absence.

That's changed.

Suddenly, people who need to be away from home see their empty place only from the perspective of potential "customers" They view their home not as a responsibility but as an asset from which they can expect to turn a profit. I find this shift in thinking discouraging for a variety of reasons.

First, that kind of thinking assumes that only you have value in the world and that anywhere you go or anything you do, your value and your comfort are more important than anyone or anything else. This idea that the priveledge (I cannot spell that word I never will be able to spell that word, get used to seeing that word misspelled.) of living in your house and taking care of your belongings should command a premium. It shows me you think you are better than anyone else.

Second, that kind of thinking indicates to me that you think your very presence on the earth makes you more deserving of payment than anyone else. You want to go away, maybe you need to go away, and you need someone to take care of things while you're gone. You think your ability to have acquired a home makes you superior to people looking for a home in your community? It doesn't. When I have gone on long trips, I have sublet my apartment and I've footed the bill for some of the extras because it is a service to me to have someone take a short-term interest in my long-term home. It allows me to keep my place in the community and that is a benefit to me - I am respectful of it.

Third, it shows me that all you care about is money and that's the saddest thing of all. It used to be these situations were rare - recently I've seen ads for "home stagers" where you are expected to furnish, maintain and show a house while it is on the market and also pay for the privlege of doing so.

I cannot think of anything that shows me the complete contempt we have for each other better than that and it makes me sad every time I see it.

What's next? Going on vacation and renting out your dog?

Most of us have our priorities all wrong. I wonder what it will take for us to wise up?

Breather

Today, it occurred to me very suddenly that it is summer.

Maybe that makes me an extraordinarily slow person, that's certainly possible but it did come as a surprise. It happened when I heard someone skateboarding outside and then saw a little girl adjusting a handbag the size of her chest, slung formally over one bent elbow as she approached the gate to her friend's house. Going to play.

It's a summer day, kids are sleeping in or going to day camp. They're swinging their legs over pools or riverbanks or piers and they're talking to their friends. They're wearing their play clothes and enjoying the sun. They're not worried.

And I realized that can be me too. I've been caught up in the idea that I don't have enough and so I need to be concerned about work all the time but all that seems to do is make the days feel like they're wasted even before they begin and truth be told, although my income is meagre, it is there and it is growing slowly.

It's summer. I can wear play clothes, I can stand on my balcony and drink iced coffee, hell, I can work on my balcony if I want to. I can go to the river and swim. I can do all of these things anytime I want. I've made enough sacrifices that my work lives with me, it's part of my life, it's in service to me, not the other way around.

So I took a breather and let myself out of the vice grips. I can do whatever I want because I will no longer do what I don't want to do. I refuse to give my life over to stuff I hate. No way. No more. But it's hard to remember that it's ok to be that way. I often slip into feeling guilty about it and then my productivity drops through the floor. It's a paradox and it's tricky to avoid.

I grew up thinking work had to feel bad or it wasn't work. At the same time I am not the kind of person who can really attend to people or things I dislike. That means I am really bad at most of the things I would consider work and really good at the things I love to do.

Most of the things I love to do are things people would consider to be work - so that's where I earn my living but the guilt gets in the way.

Well, not today. Today, I'll do whatever I want and I hope I'll do that tomorrow and every day for the rest of my life and sometimes I'll get paid for it and sometimes I won't and that's just fine by me.

Oil and Me

So many of my friends are posting videos of the Gulf oil spill on Facebook. They post the worst one they can find and then express their fear and despair over the disaster and/or their anger and frustration.

I suppose this is natural. It's a terrifying thing to see birds, whales, dolphins and turtles covered in oil and dying - terrifying and shameful because it is the result of our desire to lead lives of greater and greater comfort and variety.

But does it help?

During my time as a preschool teacher I learned a lot about what motivates people. One important thing I learned is that children cannot be governed by fear. When you threaten a child they find ways to ignore the threat or they rise to meet it in order to see just how bad something can be and to prove to themselves that they can endure it (or find out if they can't, where their own limits are) or they move on to something completely different. What they don't do, what they never do, is address the threat as you have presented it. In the rare instance when it does seem to work, it works only once and it sets you up for having to increase the fear stimulus exponentially the next time you try the same tactic. (that's why we end up with "delinquent" kids, they have almost always had caregivers who tried to parent with fear and shame.)

People are like that, even in adulthood, the main difference being, in adulthood, it is a lot easier to ignore the fear stimulus and declare the situation hopeless and therefore completely beyond any attempt at personal responsibility.

In my spiritual progress through this life (limited as it is) there have been two contributors that have prompted me to challenge myself on this way of thinking. In Judaism, we are asked to accept moral responsibility for our actions. There is no vicarious salvation and G-d will not fix whatever is wrong with your life or the earth or anything else, that's up to you. G-d, in Judaism, flows only through us, through beings.

In First Nations traditional religious belief, you can only tell the stories that are yours. There is a similar emphasis on personal responsibility and the idea of beings having a soul, a right to be here and sentience extends to everything on the planet. Yes, even rocks. We are also taught that we are responsible not only to ourselves but to our place in the community. Any decision made must take into account the interests of the seven generations that preceded me and the seven generations that will come after me.

While it would be easy to lament the fact that others have apparently not taken these ideas into account when doing things like drilling for oil or establishing economic structures that rely on filling the skies and the waterways with waste - that would be disingenuous and arrogant. I have ridden in a car, I have driven a car. I liked it. I like to fly and many of the decisions taken by people that led to this spill were taken quite honestly with my tastes and my benefit in mind (although not directly.)

It also bears remembering that the oil that is spilling into the ocean right now is oil we collectively intended to spill into the sky.
I honestly do not see how that is very much better. It's less visible, but it still causes death and destruction, more of it every year.

We are upset because Creation and our actions have combined to spill this oil into a confined and highly visible space. I know I will sound crazy when I say it but that is a gift.

We need to see the natural consequences of our actions. Natural consequences are great teachers. Nevertheless, there is a big difference between natural consequences and the kind of fear, anguish, anger and despair that comes of repeatedly watching the results of our actions on the other beings in our world, bemoaning it, blaming others and then obsessively showing it to others so that they too will feel enraged, frightened, threatened and impotent.

For the last 15 years, I have led a life with a relatively small footprint. Much of that has been deliberate. I left a place of comfort and material security in order to move into a life that had the potential to be more meaningful and more interesting. I accept a certain level of poverty as one of the results of that choice and at the same time I wrestle with how much I can assume responsibility for my place in this oil-based culture. How much more am I willing to give up?

I liked being a princess. I liked driving my car and eating whatever I chose. I liked having nice, new clothes and expensive shoes, I like nice restaurants, I like nice houses, I have expensive tastes - tastes that go beyond brand labels which frankly, I still consider to be somewhat vulgar; as far as snobbery goes, I am as bad as it gets. and I will tell the truth - I'm getting awfully tired of going without those things. Just the same, I am aware that I can only heal what my own life touches and so as much as I would like to be able to do a lot of things that damage the environment - fly more often, drive a car every day, those are not responsible choices and until I know for sure that I have the strength to decline consistently, it is probably better that I manage my negative inclinations by a kind of personal perimeter shopping. I work to meet my needs. I publish when I have to and I try to be careful in the world in every other way. Because at heart? I am an irresponsible hedonist and I will not do the things I need to do in order to have the positive impact I want to have on the world. I don't dip into places where I might be tempted to return to that lifestyle. It is too much fun. I cannot manage that addiction.

I think, collectively, if we really want to address this oil spill we will need to come to terms with the idea that we just can't have all the stuff we want to have. We have to pick a place where we live and live there (I am still guilty of avoiding that choice) We have to accept the indignity of public transport at least half of the time. We have to politely decline the delicacies that are brought in from G-d knows where at a cost that is so high it cannot possibly be reflected in the dollar amount we pay to consume them. We have to wear last year's clothes. We have to use last year's computer and we have to keep it and love it and care for it as though it had to last us a lifetime.

We have to take more pleasure in each other and less in our stuff. We have to look at those turtles in the river, those birds in the marsh, those whales in the bay and accept that they have their lives and the right to live them as fully as we do and if that means we don't get the pleasure of observing them up close, well, that's what it means.

And I am convinced that nothing can be achieved by catastrophic thinking. Stop telling your friends how bad they are and how much you regret it and start finding ways you can fix the things you do that add to the problem.

If there's an answer, that's where we'll find it.

Done ranting, go back to sleep.

Last night I went to an opening at the National Gallery.

Pop Life was a pretty banal exhibit and it turns out it was borrowed from the Tate so I guess I'm not surprised. It was probably very resonant to the British public for whom it was originally curated but its snap and smack falls flat in this context.

We all know how Andy Warhol informed north american culture, we live within it. And truth be told, most of the art was pretty boring and not terribly well executed by anyone's standards. People who objected to it were right, it's not good art. What it did at the time was bring art back into line with the personal and the political which I still feel was important. I just don't think its importance rests with preserving or displaying the individual works themselves.

Likewise, I ran into an old friend there. It was kind of him to say hello, he was in a suit, I was in a tee-shirt and jeans, trying hard to be invisible. I am savoring the position of the observer now and do not really want it to be interrupted.

We were at university together and at school he was brilliant, mobile, facing the idea of life, he was an open book and he could have done great things. Now he is flat to me, I was pleased to see he is physically well but knew before I turned to acknowledge him that we would add nothing to each other's experience of the evening. He has settled into a predictable existence and although he feigns a friendly face when he sees me, really? He's not in there.

For a change, I was able to remember myself and not engage with this on any level. I did not wonder why he follows me on Twitter and ignores me on Facebook. I did not wonder about the general lack of insight, the predictable turns of logic and idiom in the few conversations we have had since university, I didn't say what I was doing or worry about fishing out a bit of his old-school soul to show to and reassure myself that there was hope for us all. For a change I wasn't that arrogant.

There doesn't have to be hope for us all with us all. You decide what kind of hope is right for you, you decide who matters in your life. It's ok to let go.

I took out my earbud, smiled and said hello. I said I was fine and asked how he was. He said he was fine, I said "nice to see you," put my earbud back in and carried on. I was surprised and pleased not to have felt the urge to "catch up."

I like to think we are all connected and that everyone and everything matters and I think they probably do but you know, sometimes, the individual expressions aren't part of our own personal universes and that's perfectly ok too.

I open my eyes and the world is created. I close my eyes and the world dissolves. You open your eyes and a world is created, you close your eyes and that world dissolves and when we open our eyes, once again, a new world is born. That's the dance. It's always ok. It does not require our approval.

We only matter when we matter. We exist as the center of the universe for ourselves every day but we only exist for each other in those moments of contact. I guess I am at the point where I can allow some people to exist solely in the abstract. It does not mean I value their place in my past less, it means I understand the flow of time over this plane of existence enough to embrace their passage.

I am also at the point where I am consciously moving to the American stylebooks in terms of my writing and I do wish the computer, the software, the blogs, all of that, would stop trying so damned hard to prevent me from doing it.

Spurious Equality

It is, consider yourself warned, a particularly touchy time of month. I am not one to suffer fools gladly but during this time, I drop the attempt at pretending I do and I don't mince words.

Truth is, I'm pretty damned tired of pretending I don't go through this stuff to anyone and I am tired of living in a culture where one half of the population is forced to pretend we have the same hormonal equilibrium and level of sensitivity (or lack of it) as the other half.

So I'm writing about it.

I was doing my nails this morning when, once again, I remembered the last time I said anything about this particular social custom and two of my male friends piped up about how well they understood because they play guitar and so have to take care of their nails too. The irritation from those fatuous, me-too comments, faux egalitarian BS still galls me when I think of it.

I am doing my nails for the same reason men shave or trim their ear hair, it's not because I want a particular tool to play a particular instrument, it's because, in this culture, it's something women do. I will scrub my floors and do my dishes and my nails will get battered and chipped and I will have to do it all over again in a few days. If I remember to wear gloves, I might be able to go a week. It also requires not only filing but buffing and massaging and polishing and waiting for polish to dry. Whole businesses are given over to this custom and no, I would not do it for myself, I am doing it for two reasons, first - there is a certain level of cultural acceptance that goes with being manicured in my professional circles and second, the man who has my attention really likes it.

See? Like shaving.

When a man complains about shaving, I do not chime in and tell him how I feel his pain because every week or so I have to take a razor into the bathroom and shave my legs. Why don't I do this? Because it's stupid, it dismisses his real and valid complaint about something he has to do all the time to conform to an idea of masculinity here and it misses the point, entirely.

My shaving the scraps of barely visible hair off my legs does not compare to shaving one's entire face and neck every single day and it would never occur to me to be such an insensitive dolt that I would suggest that it does. Nevertheless, say even one word about your nails and some pretend-liberal moron who, if he is married, does the dishes about as often as I shave my legs, I promise you, will sigh and say - "Oh I know what you mean because I play guitar." No pal, you don't know what I mean probably not by a long shot.

This is just one small example of something that happens every day. There are groups of us, male and female, who assume that equal means identical - it does not.

My irritation with these people extends beyond the fact that they say insensitive things, it penetrates into the way they see others, including me, and how they insist on the principles of justice being upheld as though every single one of us were exactly the same and as though we all make the choice, every day, to walk through the world exactly as we are - male, female, short, tall, rich, poor, physically or intellectually inclined. You get the idea.

Society, up until now, has had different expectations for each of these personal traits and it was right to do so. Where it was wrong was in making the assumption that the easiest way to be was the best way to be and therefore all others were something less and deserved to be treated as such.

It is easy to be male, young, slender, straight-identified, white and smart. That is the easy part - at least on the surface. It is easier to have a consistently even temperament, easier for everybody, on both sides. But that does not mean it is always better.

Hormonal women do not take crap from anybody and sometimes that is a very good thing for everybody. Many hormonal women are emotional, aggressive, insightful and perceptive in the extreme. There are things we are really good at that we are not so good at for the rest of the month - wanna get right to the point of a difficult personal issue? ask a hormonal woman. Need to spot a liar? Show your candidates to a hormonal woman. Need to fine tune the nuances of a piece of writing meant for the public? A hormonal woman will have a different take on it than anyone else in the room, sometimes that take seems off base but sometimes it is more insightful than you could have imagined and usually it is on-the-money for the other women in your audience even if they never tell you so.

Nobody can expect to be everything to everyone and human variation is as rich and multifaceted as the landscape of the planet but here's the thing - someone who is experiencing something you cannot experience is not experiencing something that puts them above or below you, it just puts them outside of you. We are not all the same and pretending we are as insistently as we do negates the important differences that are, ironically, pretty general and nullifies the subtle differences that make each of us individual, makes each one of us interesting.

I am hormonal right now. I get this way every month. I've been ashamed and kind of horrified by it all my life but now I am trying to embrace it. This is when I do my best poetic work (for what it's worth) this is when I am most empathetic, most tender, most physical and most volatile. If you need to fine-tune your communicative/diplomatic skills, I am a great place to do it right now. I am easily hurt and yes, I do lash out. On behalf of my sex, I'm trying to reclaim the good parts of this and still keep my dignity as a writer and a fully functioning member of society. I'm still me - just a little more exposed than usual.

If you go through this too, I hope you will find your own way to embrace it. If you don't, I hope you have people in your life who recognize your own particular swings and times and tender areas because I do think we all have them but the thing is this; they are all different. And if you broke a nail that you use to fingerpick your guitar, here's the deal; when you have razor burn or cut yourself shaving, I won't whine about shaving my legs and you don't compare your broken pick-substitute to something I have to deal with on a daily basis.

We're different. I like it that way.

Grace

I can see how it would be possible in some post-apocalyptic world to describe the way my day is unfolding today to someone and have them not believe anything could ever be so easy. Or even to describe it to my grandmother.

I am on my balcony, using my laptop on a warm May day. I am working on an article at my leisure and chatting to a few friends as they come and go on their computers in three different cities.

Two men just came and replaced my toilet. They're gone now and my bathroom's clean. There are the makings of a tasty dinner thawing out in the kitchen, ice water in the fridge and I am listening to a radio station out of Austin, TX.

Sitting in my desk chair, with an ottoman, surrounded by glass panels to waist height, at the perfect height above the ground to see what's happening in my neighbourhood and in the sky but not so high as to be in the grip of the wind and not so low as to be in the midst of the street action - it's pretty easy to be me today.

Everything's clean, nobody is complaining. I'm not rushed or worried. Life is a pretty good place to be if you're me today. Even 20 years ago my lifestyle would have seemed impossibly indulgent. Yet, by most people's standards, I lead a very modest life.

I know there will be times when this won't be nearly enough. There are already people I miss and places I want to be,obstacles to be overcome, problems to be solved. Change is in the air and it's welcome but it is nice to see this moment as the people who came before or those who come after might see it; I know where I am, I know what I want and it's feeling as though I'll be able to reach it from here without having to die trying.

That's a good feeling.

Ok, Oil

I am no expert on oil wells or drilling or underwater engineering so I want to be clear here, this is my opinion and it is based on common sense, gut feeling and the lessons taught to me by First Nations Elders over the years.

There are certain things I accept as being true and some of my argument does rest on those things. Primarily, I am writing it out here and now to keep myself from putting it on my FB page, to kill off the urge to reply to a friend's comments on FB and also to keep it and the feelings it generates from seeping into my other work. I don't know if this happens to other writers but I often have to clear my head before I can sit down to something that pays - and clearing it in private, for some reason, does not work. How's that for a neurosis? I'm managing it by publishing here, where nobody reads it. Works for everybody, I think.

Anyhow - here are these certain things I accept as being true:

The earth functions as a unified whole. Geographic or climactic change in one part of the world will have an impact on all of the other parts even if that impact is not immediately apparent to us.

The things we do not know far outnumber the things we know.

Deposits of oil or minerals have changed the nature of the earth to an extent where their continued existence in situ contributes to how the rest of the planet functions. This means - oil deposits have a purpose and are useful to the planet and we are, in all likelihood, ignorant of that purpose and that use. (safe to say, it probably isn't to run cars.)

We are an organism on the planet and our actions contribute to the growth of the planet as a complex organism however, we are not more nor less important in our biochemical presence than any other organism - what gets us into trouble is that we think we are more important in the biological sense and we tend to use our brains to try to prove that and so we get into a lot of mischief.

I also believe (and this is the most contentious one, I think), that there is a Creator and that the way the world runs is designed to a certain extent to teach lessons through consequences. Hit your brother - he will take your cookie. Stuff like that. G-d to me is like the benevolent force that runs through all of us, through your consciousness and through the earth itself, not a Daddy but the sense of right and wrong. I believe in that and to me, that's non-negotiable. That force is the voice that and suggests to us that we do not hit our brother in the first place. Once the brother is hit, consequences are in play and there is no stopping that part. Gotta have free will - but you have to live with the outcome of it too.

With these issues in place as my personal foundation, I have to say, I do not think Top Kill or the Junk Shot are going to work to stop the leakage of oil from the rupture in the floor of the ocean in the Gulf of Mexico.

First of all - ask your gut. Does it seem reasonable to you that piling mud into a burst artery is going to stop that artery from bleeding out? Doesn't seem reasonable to me. How about throwing little pieces of garbage into that cut? Another crappy solution that only looks at the oil gushing out and doesn't seem capable of understanding that the oil is under pressure from a much larger system and that pressure will continue to overwhelm the bits and pieces of gunk we throw at it.

Secondly, it's time we learned new ways of coping with our messes. The old ways aren't working. This incident is giving us the chance to see that reacting in panic doesn't work. Once all the panic-stricken, childish responses have been exhausted, we will have to actually sit down and think about how this is happening and what kinds of things we actually can do that will help us to fix the mess and solve the problem on our end.

This means we need to find a way to get the oil out of there. It's not going to stay in, that much has been proven. So how do we get it out?

It will require a lot of calm, sensible, engineering skill to think this one through but it seems to me that there must be some way to bring the stream to the surface where it can be captured and piped out - probably to be used for its original dubious purpose, but anyway, away from the damage it is doing to all of the people, (fish, birds and wildlife included) that it is hurting right now.

So there are my thoughts on the subject. Junk shot - won't work. Top Kill - no way. Dome? you're kidding, right? We have to actually do the work and fix this one from the ground up. I wish us luck and a measure of common sense. And now I can go back to work - my deck is cleared.

Zeitgeist

Over the last week or two, it seems as though everything I've felt compelled to discuss has turned up a day or two later as a major issue in the news. First, it was water. I found myself thinking about the way water moves between the three countries in North America, wrote about it and then an article popped up - Canada legislated against water exports.

A similar situation occurred with the tar sands - thought about it, wrote about it and the next day a bank quite close to my house was fire-bombed, apparently to draw attention to how dirty the tar sands are, the next day, a group of environmentalists went to the media and launched an organized protest against the proposed pipeline set to bring the finished product of tar sand mining and processing from Alberta to Texas. (A project I think would be ill advised on all sides, at best.)

I don't believe in anything spooky or supernatural. I think that anything that happens to me in my life is completely normal and probably happens to everybody else the only difference being; I write it down.

Given that these are not issues that suddenly spring into being and given that there must be some indication in the common discourse, I do wonder what tips a mind like mine off to what some people call "the zeitgeist."

I have not been part of the social stream in Ottawa for quite a while now. Out of choice, I've been spending most of my time alone. There are a number of reasons for this, some fall into the personal category that must be put aside for the benefit of others but for the most part, my decision to withdraw from social life in Ottawa comes from my own, personal preferences at the moment.

For the years I was with Jesse, forced socializing was a common occurrence. We spent time with his family, with his friends - constantly. As the relationship wore on it became increasingly difficult for me to spend time with my friends, he didn't like them and we always had other obligations to his family. By the time we were finished with the obligatory socializing, I was done - too wrung out by being "on" all the time to give any more of myself to anyone. The experience was both isolating and exhausting. I never had a minute to myself - now I do.

I'm not a hermit, I get out to go to events, I speak to people in public, in the elevator, at work and in my building. I am not anti-social but I don't enjoy the questions about why I've been out of circulation, don't enjoy the small talk that goes with that re-entry and my political views about Canada, being what they are, I don't engage in the rah rah hockey stuff that passes for social mores around here. I don't want to get defensive about it - we all go through phases. This one's mine.

Anyway, I mention that because at this point in my life, I read the Canadian news when I have to. I listen to the CBC maybe three times a week. For the most part, I read the New York Times, the Atlantic, The New Yorker and I listen to NPR. Most of my time is spent writing. I stay current with issues that concern my writing and have finally reached the point where I'm allowing myself to let the rest go. Canada isn't going to fix itself to suit me, getting worked up over it doesn't help anyone.

Regardless of the relative isolation from Canadian affairs I have managed to be somehow right in the midst of the zeitgeist. How is that possible? I'm not eagerly lapping up Canadian current affairs - are these things I feel compelled to address just so obviously critical to this very minute that everyone else seems to need to address them too? Are we all on some collective thinking track where certain subjects rise and fall at predetermined times like subjects in an elementary schoolroom?

Do we all actually function like variable cells in one single organism? What makes the zeitgeist?

Crusty.

I have a few things on my agenda this morning. Aside from carrying on with my Dante project and making some headway on a new, possibly book length, piece. There are the usual tasks of keeping up with the topics I write about (so as to minimize the chances of looking like a boob in print.) answering emails, sending out queries, figuring out which queries to send and all of the good stuff that while kind of boring by themselves result in the interesting occurrences that make life a good place to be.

No-deadline days are hard to describe. There's nothing I absolutely must accomplish today but there are many, probably dozens, of things I need to accomplish by the end of this month, this week, this year. What this means to me is that I have to find my own way through, there's no boss to tell me how those things need to be worked out. So what begins by feeling like a free day can, if I'm not careful, end up being a lost day with all the stresses and accumulating pressures that go along with it.

Still, it's a sunny day and I'm at my desk. That makes me happy.

On the other hand, the city seems to have discovered my neighbourhood and its very slow process of subtle gentrification. I think most of us who live here have been quietly enjoying all the interesting little shops that have sprung up, the block-party style events, the feeling of neighbourliness that comes with not being the richest people in town but being the most culturally diverse, hands down. As a community we seem to value our proximity to the river, the market, chinatown, downtown, we place a premium on things being both economical and worth the effort and expense of acquiring them. You can buy hand made soap and Indian food, organic produce, chrome hubcaps, vintage clothes, upscale sex toys and holistic pet products in this neighbourhood, you can buy lots of art but you can't buy designer clothes but you can buy an ipad (or order one for when they get to Canada) so it's changing and I suppose it would be foolish to think we could keep the secret forever.

They're replacing the plain cement sidewalks in my neighbourhood with wide, brick walkways and little, Charlie-Brown style treelets that will, no doubt, grow along with rents, property values and taxes. There's lots of new construction on the western edge of the neighbourhood. Most of it involves tearing down the little clapboard houses that really were nothing to look at and replacing them with "tasteful" "custom designed" homes, most of which are coated in a thick layer of taupe plaster or stone facing.

They match the new sidewalks pretty well.

Problem is, for me anyway, I like to work at home and the jackhammers are going from 7 until 6 every day now. I tell myself they can't go on forever, and they can't but while they were annoying a week ago, still blocks from my apartment, they are now pretty maddening as they approach my back lane. Thank goodness for earphones and a decent computer.

That's my whine for the day - I really came here to talk about pie.

My friend Shannon decided to make a pie yesterday. Nearly as soon as she announced this on Facebook, comments on the difficulty of piecrust began to trickle in. Everybody, it seems, thinks making a crust is hard.

As the daughter of a chef, I've been cooking since I could reach the counter. With the exception of a few years in late adolescence when I declared I could not and therefore would not cook - I've made most of my own meals and cooked for friends and family pretty much non-stop from the age of 15.

My parents divorced when I was 13 so my father's influence shifted somewhat. Anyway, I think my sister and I may have discouraged my father from cooking for us long before that. Starting when I was around six, when he would prepare absolutely perfect poached eggs for both of us and we would reject them.

These eggs were no simple task. To poach them he would fill a stainless saute pan halfway with water and white vinegar, he would then watch until the bottom of the pan was perfectly furred with a layer of medium sized bubbles. Before these bubbles lifted off the surface, he would take two or maybe three eggs and slide them, one at a time, from a china saucer into the water bath. Then the flame would be turned down to maintain the perfect temperature. He would make gentle waves in the water with a slotted spoon, washing the hot water over the tops of the eggs to ensure an even temperature and appearance.

During this time, the toast would be in the oven becoming perfectly crisp and a dark golden color - not brown, gold. The toast would come out seconds before the eggs were ready and be covered with a slathering of butter that would melt, perfectly. Then the eggs would come out of the pan, one at a time and he would slide them, carefully onto a perfectly laundered, fluffy white towel where he would dry them gently one at a time.

Once the water had been dried from the eggs, the eggs would go - one each onto their pieces of buttered toast. Which would then be plated and served to us with a flourish. At which point we would both say, "ick. do I have to eat the yolk?" and roll our eyes.

All of this took place quickly enough that those eggs on our plates were invariably piping hot, the yolks were always just cooked to a thickish yet still runny consistency and the whites never had a single raw spot or water blob.

Every once in a while I can reproduce those eggs and when I do, I think about that kind of effort and artistry and I am a little glad that I got to learn these skills young.

Poached eggs are difficult. Pastry is easy.

Pastry does not require perfect timing. It can be stopped and repaired at almost any stage, it follows strict and basic scientific principles and people's standards for pastry are so lamentably low that even if you blow it completely, they'll still eat it and smack their lips in pleasure if you give them some.

However, because everybody tells everybody that pastry is hard to do, pastry becomes hard to do.

I felt terrible for Shannon who struggled, cheerfully, with this last night and I wished she still lived a few doors down the street, I would have gone there and showed her not to believe the stories she hears about pastry.

As it is, I've noticed most of the recipes written out there seem to go along with the assumption that pastry is hard.

So, for my friend and anyone else like her. Here are some basic things I've learned about pastry-making:

What it takes:

A pie crust requires flour and fat (and sometimes a tiny bit of moisture) . Anything else you add because you like it. You need two cups of flour, any kind. As a general rule, if you have enough flour in your bowl to cover the bottom and sides of your pie pan to a depth of about 1/4 inch - you've got enough. You can eyeball it. It's ok.

What you do:

Wash your hands. Take off your rings. Clear a big space on the counter - you are going to make a mess.

Put the flour in a bowl, add any salt, sugar, cinnamon or any other dry dusty stuff that adds whatever taste or substance you like to the mixture then. Mix it around. Use your hands. Be stingy with the amounts of extra stuff you add - it's the crust, it's not the star of your culinary show.

Measure out a generous 2/3 cup of fat. Shortening, Lard or butter, even margarine, anything works as long as it's fat. Pastry chefs swear by lard. I use half butter, half whatever else is on hand but it has to be a pure fat - cream cheese will not work and I don't think those heart-smart spreads would work either but I could be wrong. Your goal here is to mix the fat into the flour and make pockets of fat (NOT STEAM) so that the layers of flour will be forced apart and yet remain dry and be discouraged when they want to form strings of gluten. Gluten is the enemy of a good crust.

Cut the fat into the flour. You can use two knives to do this or you can use a pastry cutter. I've gone through a few pastry cutters, I prefer the solid blade type to the wire style. I don't use either anymore. I start with two knives and finish with my fingers. If you decide to use one with wires you will have to leave your fat out to soften a bit, refrigerated fat will bend the wires and make your pastry making life hard.

Everybody talks about how everything has to be cold, cold cold. This is not true. I once watched in horror as a friend of mine mixed soft butter into flour and then used tap water to make her pastry. She patted it out by hand straight into the pan and yet it was delicious. One of the best crusts I've had. That taught me that all of these rules should be used as guidelines, in moderation.

That said, cold is better than warm. Anything colder than liquid will work. (and in fact, some people don't even follow that rule - there's a recipe at the end of this post, that proves it.)

People who write cookbooks will bullshit you endlessly about this. So will your Grandmother, your Mom, your Auntie - fact is, those of us who get it sometimes don't mind that others don't. This seems to be particularly true of people who write cookbooks. (It's not because we don't love you, really. We just want you to love us more.)

So mix the fat into the flour, using your hands at the end if you like. Mix until you have little fat balls coated in flour all through the mixture. Your little fat balls should be the size of the freshwater pearl beads you see in craft necklaces or maybe those tiny little frozen peas you can buy, or orzo - slightly smaller than a kernel of corn, bigger than rice, get it? And relax, you can use your hands to do this, it's ok. Just break up the big pieces of fat into the flour.

Now you add the water. The reason you're doing this is because it is hard to get the stuff to stick together and still stretch over your pan with just fat and flour. You're giving up some ground to gluten here in order to get the stuff to go where you want it to go and stay there.

Mix just enough water into your bowl to get it all to stick together. That's it. That's all.

Punch it around a little and knead it for a few seconds - not long, this is making the gluten you'll use to make the dough do what you want. Less is more.

Now, leave it alone for a second and take out your flour again. Scatter flour all over your clean counter.

Return to your dough.

Slap it on to the counter and roll it out in as round a sheet as you can manage.

Put the sheet, whole, into the pie pan and press it in gently to make sure everything will be covered. Now cut around the edge of the pan. Leave a wide margin cause crust shrinks when it cooks.

Press it down, cover the whole pan. Does not matter if it is sloppy or neat. Prick all over - hundreds of times, with a fork. Prick prick, prick - you are the Norman Bates of forkland here - it should be dotted all over. Do not tear. If you make a mistake and it tears, patch it with the trimmings - not the end of the world. It's food, you don't have to live in it. (save the scraps and bake them later with cinnamon and sugar or jam or whatever - people will love them.)

Here's where the cookbook writers and recipe freaks will get you again. All that junk about dry beans and parchment and pie weights? Ridiculous. Do you think your Nanna had any of that stuff? No, she did not. Do you think the guy who makes the truck stop pies does any of that frou frou stuff? No, he does not. And yet these are the two people who will make you the best pies you will eat in your whole life. Be like them; ignore the chi-chi, frilly, affected instructions you read anywhere. They are pulling your leg.

Now - assuming you've preheated the oven, you can bung the thing in there for five or ten to prebake. If you haven't preheated the oven and/or you don't have your filling ready, you can put it in the fridge until you're ready to prebake it.

Once it is light gold, it's ready to come out and be filled. No, you don't have to do it right away. The idea is just to get the thing half-baked so there's less chance of it being soggy and unpalatable later. If you're doing a top crust, that's the part the crust lovers will remember anyway so doing this is just your way of being an especially considerate cook.

Pie filling is way harder than pie crust. Don't let anybody fool you into thinking it isn't.

Once you have this down, (say you've done it three or four times), you can start experimenting. I put cheese in crusts I use for quiche sometimes. Made a lovely tomato tart by using butter and well aged cheddar cheese for my fats (exclusively) and then filling the shell with fresh tomatoes, basil and thinly sliced spanish onion from the farmers' market. Wouldn't do this every day, it's terribly fattening but it was unspeakably yummy. And you can use it as a main dish or as a side dish to take the place of rice or potatoes or pasta if you're having company for dinner.

You can add sweet stuff for sweet pies, herbs for savoury pies - don't be scared. It is all easy.

Easy as pie.

Here are some recipes.


http://whatscookingamerica.net/piecrst.htm


Now I have to get to work.

Where are we going? Why are we so eager to get there?

I really shouldn't open my email when I'm writing but like most of us, I am easily distracted, prone to procrastinate and I like reading things that are addressed only to me.

The article posted right after this entry just came into my inbox and I read it. Wish I hadn't.

Ten years ago I might have thought this was an interesting move. Twenty years ago I would have thought it was exactly the right thing to do. Now, I think it is a sign of everything wrong with the world and this continent and the country I live in more than anything else.

Are we really so incredibly stupid that we think we can call the world's water a national possession? Do we really think of this planet as a commodity and nothing else? Do we really believe we have the right to assign a monetary value to how people think about water? And do we think water won't flow where it flows? Do we think there will be no resistance to this? No retaliation? Are we ready to pay $10 for a grapefruit? Do we think Texas created its water problems by being so much more reckless than we are that they just squandered it?

These all sound like stupid questions to me. Of course we have to think about fresh water resources as part of the natural landmass that is north america. Of course we benefit from the milder climate to the south and we eat because of that climate. Literally. Of course we are idiots if we think we can cage a river or a spring as we would a dog or cat and expect it to kneel down to us. And of course the Americans are going to be upset when they read that Canada has decided they are bad people who drink too much water so we're going to make sure we don't give them any more to waste.

When climate change exacts its toll and California goes dry, where will we go for the fresh fruit and vegetables we eat all winter? Will we build greenhouses? At what cost?

And it's not as though we're any better at conserving the stuff than the Americans are. The tar sands require an expenditure of 2 - 4 gallons of fresh, drinkable water for every single gallon of crude produced. Some of the water is reclaimed, most ends up in tailings ponds. Call that a responsible use of water? Cause I sure as hell don't. (and that's just the direct water cost, that doesn't include the cost of trucking the stuff, building and supporting temporary settlements in the north, where it's winter almost all the time, the damage done to the native communities who live in the area, the fact that the people who actually own that land never get a penny of these profits because it is - as I have said a thousand times, all owned by the crown - and on and on and on.)

As far as water, carbon, asbestos and virtually every other environmental time bomb is concerned, Canada is the problem not the victim and I think it's time we started taking some responsibility for that and looking to work with our family to the south not against them.

Mind the Gap

How powerful is your mind?

Mine gets out of hand sometimes. When I try to ignore something that's really bothering me, the non-verbal part of my mind, my body, whatever you want to call it, rises up and demonstrates, by metaphor, what's really going on.

I sometimes wish I could control it better and sometimes I wish I would learn more from it but the truth is, there are two parts of my mind at work at all times. The rational, conscious, controllable part and the irrational but deeply pragmatic, unconscious and unmanageable part. I usually keep that part leashed and that suffices to keep the metaphors and physical demonstrations to a minimum.

Yesterday, the difficult part got off the leash and struck me down with a serious asthma attack.

Of course, that part is harder to control when you're not really sure what it's getting at. It will surprise no one to hear that I am having serious misgivings about the political structure of this country and I am quite concerned with the potentially disastrous impact that very seriously compromised structure could have on North America. My concerns about this are not limited to the social context although they certainly began there, they extend to the natural environment as well.

In Canada, the Prime Minister, (as we've all witnessed) is able, if he understands the system well enough to pretend he doesn't understand it at all, to wield practically absolute power. The Prime Minister is the head of his party, his caucus does not ever vote against his policies - they can't. He also appoints and therefore controls the Governor General who is the Queen's representative in Canada and our Head of State.

This means the PM commands the power of the Crown and the Crown owns Canada.

As I have explained before, all real rights to land in Canada are the property of the Crown. All it takes it one PM with an agenda that runs counter to the interests of the environment or the population to wreak havoc on the land. Since we are the northernmost country in North America, we are stewards of the great majority of natural resources flowing south. Water being the most important of these.

As the oil fields destroy watersheds in the North, rivers in the south begin to run dirty or dry. The Americans grow food for export, an industry that requires a great deal of water, and we buy it, consume it and carry on doing whatever the PM wants us to do with our natural resources.

For me personally, the fact of this kind of existence has reached the point where it bothers me enough that there are times when it literally makes me sick.

In Victoria, when the situation got to be too much for me, I ignored it. Eventually, allergies manifested. They were not allergies to things you'd find anywhere however, they were and are, allergies to pollens found in abundance only on the west coast. Pacific grasses.

Now, things here are preying on my mind and I am feeling helpless and unheard, despite publishing on the issue of property rights with some frequency and indicating what it means to Canadians that we really do not have a meaningful stake in what happens to the land under our feet, things seem to be getting quite a lot worse. And to add to that, people seem to know even less about their rights and responsibilities as citizens of this continent.

Apparently, I am more upset about that than I realize. Yesterday, I couldn't breathe.

My physical body/mind is always the first to know. When relationships fail, long before I know I am unhappy, my ability to be physically responsive disappears. In the same way people will get headaches when they don't want to go somewhere or suddenly feel ill when faced with a particularly frightening confrontation - I, like many people (probably most people) seem to manifest these large symptoms in response to large issues.

I have my personal reasons for being somewhat uncomfortable in this particular setting, of course, but it does seem to be the big issues that get the big response. And in my case, my body does not seem to care much whether they are issues about which I can reasonably or measurably effect change.

So the question is this; does recognizing the body's unconscious demonstration of dissatisfaction give one the power to remove it or does it just give the unconscious mind more power to express?

Honest to goodness, if I never saw another birch tree again at this point, that would be just fine with me. And so it follows that if I never had to think about Canadian politics again, I would be a happier, healthier woman. Given the fact that I make my living as a reporter, that seems unlikely.

Can we ever achieve mastery over the thoughts and feelings that roll like tides over and through us at the sub-verbal level? Was that Jung's holy grail? And how do you let go of concerns that you've grown up assuming are vitally important? How do people reconcile all the lovely things about an individual life on this beautiful planet with the things we do daily to destroy it?

I should have taken that job as a fashion editor when I had the chance.

Land and Water

It's all connected.

Most of what I write about, the stuff that pays the bills at least, concerns housing in one form or another. This wasn't true before 2006 but that year my main project was a paper for the International Housing Coalition and the Canadian Real Estate Association on the subject of Aboriginal Housing in Canada. Since then, it seems as though property rights, housing and the whole idea of land and property ownership have taken over my working life.

That's OK with me, these are important issues. I can be moved to tears pretty easily by the thought of someone feeling safe in a home where they had not had that opportunity before. I suppose, in part, that is due to the fact that we moved around a fair bit when I was very small and once we did settle in Victoria my parents divorced and my home life became so chaotic and at times so dangerous that for months at a time I would just up and leave.

I stayed with friends, I house sat, I went back and forth between my parents and eventually I just moved out and lived on my own. The idea of home never really got through to me and I think, in many ways, it slowed me down a lot. I went to university late and I still seem to have a hard time accepting that I might have a place in this world. I'm just not accustomed to thinking of myself as someone who belongs.

In a way, that's a strength for a writer. I'm an observer and while I can certainly see how people would get very attached to a community or even a house, those things have never assumed a larger role in my life than they should. I value happiness, peace of mind, independence and the people in my life - and maybe in that sentence the order is even correct. (ask me on another day and I'm sure I'll have a different answer, human beings are like that.)

Anyway, I am entering the final stretch of my nomadic phase, that seems pretty clear to me. And it is fitting that as I do, the area that seems to be building in strength in my professional and personal life is the idea of belonging somewhere. Housing is at the heart of that.

Three years ago, I spent some time analyzing the Canadian government's First Nations housing policy for a national organization. The thrust of their strategy was really smart if you're interested in politics and thoroughly lacking in compassion if you're interested in humanity.

The First Nations Market Housing Fund was sold as a solution to facilitate home ownership for First Nations families and individuals. (it still is - here's a link ) The fund works like this: A Band ("Tribe" or "Community", depending on your verbiage which depends on where you are on the map, in Canada "Tribe" is considered racist - not so in the U.S.) Anyway, a Band applies to the fund when they decide to start selling houses to people instead of holding all the land and housing collectively. They apply to say they are proceeding with this plan and granting mortgages to people through one of the banks involved. It is the responsibility of the individual who is buying the house to pay the mortgage, just like anywhere else. The difference is, Native land cannot be used as collateral for a debt to any non-native person. So the banks could not, under the old system, foreclose on a mortgage if they had to. This meant it was impossible to get a mortgage to buy a house. Under the present system, the banks will grant a mortgage to qualified individuals because the $300 million fund is there to pay the bank back if someone defaults on their mortgage.

Smart banking. But how does it help poor people who need houses? Short answer? It doesn't. If someone defaults, it becomes the responsibility of the Band to pay that mortgage off. If the Band can't pay then the fund kicks in and pays the bank back. The Band in default must then withdraw from the program until they have paid the fund back. Get it?

The First Nations Market Housing Fund makes it possible for people who could already buy a house off-reserve to buy one on-reserve. Now lots of people might say that's a good thing, for my part, I'm kind of indifferent to it but it is not a means of providing housing to those in need. It does not ameliorate the crowding problem or the mould problem that comes from crowding in most social housing on-reserve. It does not give anyone who is not already on their way to financial independence the means to get there. (I suppose I should be happy about the establishment of this fund, I'm told it was established partly as a response to the paper we presented at the U.N. but somehow I can't shake the feeling that they just missed the point.)

Perhaps most importantly, the capital in the fund, all $300 million of it, will never be touched. Paying that capital back is a priority for everyone involved - and as long as it remains on the books it is a positive entry on the government's ledger that need never actually exist. It generates interest and some of that interest goes into housing education programs but most of it goes to the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation. It has created some jobs, mostly for First Nations Individuals who were already pretty well employed but then again, that makes room for the unemployed to assume the jobs on the bottom of the ladder when everyone else moves up - so that's a benefit. But it has done nothing to improve life for the 80 per cent of people living on-reserve who have bad credit.

It has done nothing to fix the situation for the thousands of native women forced to leave their homes and move to urban centers every year; women who are essentially immigrants to their own country. It has done nothing to help solve the problem of adequate infrastructure on-reserve, it has not slowed down the boil-water advisories that are in place in hundreds of reserves, it has not helped to build one single road or school or medical center. It has given comfort to the comfortable and done very little else.

In the last few days it has been brought to my attention that this situation has not changed. I will be looking into it, this time for publication, and I expect this blog will be given over to those concerns for a while and to the concerns that are related to it.

Another little factoid that was recently brought to my attention is this: Canada is a net water importer from the United States.

I never thought about it but it is true that most of the fresh fruit and vegetables eaten by Canadians are grown in the U.S. As most people know, water shortages have become a real problem in the U.S. They are not, by contrast, a problem here. Not at all. We enjoy pretty cheap fruit and vegetables from California and Florida as a part of our daily diet. Because of the free trade agreement, we don't pay much in tariffs for them either and yet we are terribly concerned that someday Americans might want our water. We frame it as an environmental issue but it's not. We're eating the water they use to grow those crops and we're not giving much back in return.

I'm not exactly sure how just yet but all of this is coming together in my head right now the way the issues of housing and how it is a determinant of social success came together just before the U.N. World Urban Forum in Vancouver.

Even if you don't buy the one-world platitudes, we are one continent and I think we have our priorities completely out of whack in this corner of the continent.

The goal of governing a piece of land should be to prevent harm to the land, to the people and to provide a structure wherein everyone has a chance to prosper, preferably an equal chance. Right now the Canadian government seems to think somehow we are going to win something by ending up as the guys with the most money or control at the end of all this. It's small minded and anyway, it won't work.

I don't know how to address this except to write about where things are going right and wrong. In Canada right now there is an awful lot going wrong, we are going wrong on a meta-political level, not just one case at a time. In the U.S I do see some hope for real and positive change, of course there are all kinds of injustices there too and terrible messes all over the place but there seems to be more dialogue. People don't seem so complacent with the status quo. That appeals to me.

Then there is the fact of reconciling my own gain with all of this - I have always thought that we should not benefit from the suffering of others and because of that I have not made it a priority to further my own journalistic career but that's a weird way to think. If I'm not making money, I get quiet and my getting quiet has never done anything much positive in my own life or anyone else's.

Plenty of times I wish I could go back to writing book reviews and critiquing the arts but like everyone else, I would like to think I might make a small difference on this planet and this is where my role seems to be - housing, water, land, freedom, belonging.

Funny the places life takes you, isn't it?

A note on editing.

It's easy to assume nobody reads this but me. In fact, that's been my assumption since beginning this blog. Sure, a couple of my friends dip in from time to time but really? I figure in the great, sweeping ocean of the blogosphere, my few personal dribbles go completely unnoticed.

As a result, I've treated this space like a letter written to myself in the future. It's come to my attention that maybe that isn't the best way to go about this.

As a poet, I think my work gets stronger as I become more brutally honest. When you take the filter off in poetry and begin to touch the raw core of human experience your work becomes more real and more universal.

Life is always much messier than it appears to be on the surface. And this blog has been written almost entirely from under the surface, sometimes well under.

However - I am not only a poet and poetry is not the writing that produces my income stream or informs much of the work that propels the mechanism of my life along. I work in advocacy, as a journalist and, ironically for this space, as an advisor on how to manage a media presence.

Recently, it has come to my attention that the blog is actually getting read. (Thank you, google news alerts.) That has presented me with a dilemma. How do I keep the tone and ease-of-use of this blog while respecting the personal boundaries of the people in my life? It's a difficult question, one that Leonard Cohen has gone on record as saying can only be answered with "You don't." As a poet, that's true. As every other kind of writer and as a human being making difficult, life altering choices, probably not.

I've always said I'm a person first and journalist second, anything other than a person has to come second or life gets out of whack. In keeping with the spirit of this blog I want to tell you I am doing my best. If you are one of the people who has read the posts that divulge too much, well - that's done. I'm removing them now and I will make every effort, if you're one of the people in my life whom I love, to keep your interests and your feelings foremost in my mind.

When I forget, I hope you'll remind me just as I hope never to sacrifice compassion for honesty or vice versa.

Again with the advertising.

Today A friend posted a video on Facebook - here it is.

Now what do you think the purpose of that was? Do you think it has a purpose? Most of the people I've met think it does not. (If you watch the credits, it's obvious but the way it's structured, with commentary from the people who watched it tacked on the to the end of the thing itself, most people don't watch it all the way to the end.)

If you were one of those people, you should know this is an ad for Trident's latest product, a layered fruit gum that comes in flavors like pineapple/granny smith apple. If you thought that was a fun, spontaneous moment in a supermarket, you were supposed to think that but you were wrong. (Just like you were supposed to think Ikea Heights was a spontaneous theatre project.)

I'm not saying the ad is bad or wrong or even that the approach is wrong, I'm just saying, we need to be aware of the difference between advertising and "spontaneous creativity."

I suppose it could be argued that all art has an agenda but not all art is designed to provoke a smile and hopefully a purchase once you reach the checkout. That is the realm of commercial art, propaganda and public persuasion.

More importantly, art isn't so ashamed of its agenda that it tries to conceal it. Neither is it so determined to play on your sense of happy coincidence and personal enchantment.

So, should we start making art that persuades while pretending to merely amuse? Or should we maybe be aware of who writes the score, directs the video, pays the singer and ultimately cashes the check?

and just in case you wondered if I'm being a paranoid spoilsport....

this is an excerpt from the FAQ section of Improv Everywhere's website:

"I work for a brand / marketing firm / advertising agency, can we hire you?

Maybe. We do not stage official Improv Everywhere missions that advertise a brand. However, we have in the past worked with companies as creative consultants helping to develop campaigns and as video producers creating content for a brand. We have also staged pranks at internal meetings and conventions for corporate clients. We do this work independent of Improv Everywhere, and will not use this site or its resources to promote it.

We also take on sponsorship from time to time. If a company wants to hire us to simply do a mission we already want to do (with their brand having nothing to do with the content,) we would consider sponsorship. We think this video is a good example of a brand sponsoring a project.

Why would you ever work with a brand? Isn’t that against the spirit of IE?

Taking on occasional corporate gigs helps us continue to do what we do. Doing a small amount of corporate work (while keeping it separate from Improv Everywhere,) allows us to pay our New York City rents and fund future Improv Everywhere events. In terms of taking on a sponsor, we see it as no different than a television show being supported by commercials. So long as our content is not influenced by the sponsor, we think it is a smart way to fund our work."

And here is the original video to which they are referring. Remember this? People posted it all over the place, turns out it was for Stride Gum - just like the new one is for Trident Layers.

http://urbanprankster.com/2008/06/where-the-hell-is-matt/

This is the meat of their pitch btw. It bears remembering that the idea of posting a "frequently asked questions" section on your website is useful because it frees you from quoting a source. Anyone could be asking this question. If you're the owner of the website you could even be asking it to yourself, and because it's a "frequently asked question" you don't have to quote a source, there is no source - you're paraphrasing something that has come up any number of times. (good way to get your point across without sounding pushy or even assertive - it wasn't IE that asked this question after all, it's just out there in the ether - the question of How do we make money on this? You have to admit, it's a pretty important question since we all need money to live.

The thing is this, advertising is always going to take new forms and because we tend to think of advertising as a bad thing those forms are likely to be more disguised as the public becomes more adept at recognizing the old ones. Because once we see an ad for what it is, we tend to disregard it.

I'm interested in why we are so intent on preserving the illusion of spontaneous, creative expression even at the expense of awareness of how we are being persuaded to act.

I'm also interested in the response that will make most people who read this post - is anyone does, pissed off that I even mentioned it. Why does knowing this is a profit-based activity change your view of it?

Facebook itself is an advertising medium - and I'm not talking about those irritating little squares that line the top of your screen when you're playing a game or the side of your page when you're engaged in other things. I'm talking about the people you choose to friend and what you decide goes up on your page and why.

Facebook is a consensual, community advertising forum. In a way, it's a variation on Second Life. Where Second Life creates consensual geography, FB creates preferential demographics or aspirational demographics. We choose the organizations and individuals that appeal to our sense of who we are on FB and through that choice we end up cobbling together an advertising demographic that relies on interest and self-identification rather than the usual physical factors of age, income bracket, gender, geography, profession and education.

It's also an advertising demographic that provides an audience that is genuinely interested in what you have to say. And if you can disguise your content to appear to be a quirky, amusing video posted by a friend - well, why wouldn't you pick up that packet of gum that just happens to be squished together fruit flavors (pineapple apple) at the checkout counter? After all, it reminds you of your FB friend and their cute little video, you haven't tried it before and it only costs a couple of bucks, in a way, it's a reminder of a good, shared joke. And that makes it worth its weight in gum.