Tag: canada

the wheels keep turning

Today’s Writing Music: Hey Little Songbird, by Anaïs Mitchell, (from her album Hadestown).

Familiarity. Repeated motions. I’ve been across the border so many times. The lock is broken on the door of the first stall in the women’s washroom. The seat behind the driver has more space for a laptop, but no overhead light, so no reading once it gets dark. No fruit, they will charge you a separate fee for each grape, and bottles are more preferable to cans, which cannot be resealed for transport.

Back from a road trip, back from a wedding. San Francisco, Mendocino, Portland, Seattle. The steep curves of the Coastal Highway, the birdsong next to where we were stalled. Back from hours sitting on the side of a highway in a broken down car, back from driving through entire nights. A midnight food cart, a midnight tow truck. Visits with people I haven’t seen for years, visits with people I haven’t seen for weeks. Sleeping wherever I can find to rest. Priorities: power, internet. A slingshot back and down, around California, not quite enough for escape velocity. At least I wasn’t the one who was bitten by a tick.

Off the bus, I was only home long enough to drop off my suitcase. I’m still sleeping on couches, I’m already looking up ticket prices to get back, basic toiletries crammed in my laptop bag. I didn’t want to keep working as a writer, but it has let me keep moving.

TODAY’S REQUIRED READING: The key that unlocks shared safety

TODAY’S REQUIRED READING: Stories Like Passwords, by Emma Healey

“A story like this is a password. Once you say it out loud, doors start to open. For the rest of that night, and the rest of my time at that residency, the women who’d seen those emails would tell me stories.”

There’s a minor scandal going on in Canada about a radio guy being fired because he’s (potentially) attacked some women. The scandal will go away, the conversations are almost all very one sided, and it’s all terrible. (A bit wag the dog considering Harper’s speech on making Canada a police state). But this article struck a chord with me.

Because yes, there is a girl network and it hums in the shadows. We try to screen for security when we meet someone new, we try to keep other women safe from people we know are suspicious. We ask questions of other women when we’re uncertain about an interaction. We tell each other about the missing stairs, because otherwise there’s no way to know.

Are you a part of it? I am. Let’s talk about this instead: Who do you tell these stories about and who do you tell them to?

“The men in stories like this always have just enough power, in their little worlds and in ours, that to confront them would be to court an ordeal, to invite others to question our own memories and motives. It’s always more trouble than it’s worth. If you don’t have hard proof, if you don’t have a police report, then what do you have? Only what you remember. Only what you felt.”

As someone pointed out in a related thread on Facebook, it’s “reminiscent of recent outpourings in the science communication community following revelations of ongoing harassment”

Which led me to this list, Mixed Up, a list of inappropriate things a woman in science has experienced, framed as things she wants “men in professional settings to know what they cannot do.” She says, “The situations below are mixed up chronologically so you don’t know who did what to me. I’m not naming names. But please note: my name is on this. Life isn’t fair.”

It’s a powerful thing to read. I’m inspired to perhaps write my own in solidarity, but can’t imagine where to even begin. How to put such a thing in order? There are too many.

Travel Diary Day One: May 15th, Montreal

I have just returned from a trip to Montreal for Dee & Freida's ish-wedding, (they eloped last year), and Madison for Karen & Pär 's ish-wedding, (they eloped 20 years ago), and WisCon, a feminist sci-fi writer's convention. I tried to keep a journal of the trip, an attempt to work towards fixing my awful stillness, sadness, and silence.

I feel like I should be taking more pictures, the signs are all French, there are blue and white flags flapping from storefronts, but it has been a very long day, stretched longer by my restless, nearly sleepless night and the dilation effect of crossing two time-zones. The plane ride was choppy, but comfortable all the same. Not enough passengers to fill every seat, so there was room to stretch, room enough to feel like we weren't crammed in a can. How flat this country is, how bleak, I thought, looking over the plains, but then the lakes began to appear. The lakes that freckle the country are still frozen stiff, even in May, small, tidy sheets of white that gleamed like I used to imagine diamonds are supposed to, blazing with the sunshine even as our shadow touched them.

My friends walk arm in arm, a married couple, beautifully affectionate, sweet and pretty. I adore them both, they make me ache to know the language better, so that I could be as quick and fluent with them as they are with each other. I remember their wedding, the sharp joy they gave out, like flares from lighthouses. They live together now by the Olympic Stadium in an apartment I had never been to before, shared with four cats, each with a distinctive personality, a greenhouse worth of plants, and books deeply piled on every flat surface. We are coming back from dinner, I’m to sleep in the front room, on a currant coloured velvet couch surrounded by novels, paintings, plants, and more art. It’s glorious. The building is old in a way that no buildings in the west are old, with painted over wallpaper raised in a repeating pattern of griffons and urns and dark wooden doors inset with stained glass. They are on the top floor, the stairs narrow, circular, and set with stone. It makes me think of castles and timeworn foreign movies. Someone shoots a gun, there are footsteps, someone running, but all you see is a hand on the rail. I love everything about it. I love everything about them. And underneath it all, a constant, the welcoming perfumed scent of sweet-smelling incense.

failing social darwinism


via themythicalman

Today is the first day of the year 5772. I wish I felt more hopeful.

Returning from Seattle, I looked out at the crescent of water visible from the highway near the border to see the the skies over the southern, U.S. shore a bright, joyful blue, (flooded with the scent of flowers when we drove through it), but fading northward until over Canada was silver, all gray and bleak and rain. It felt too pat, too apt a metaphor to be real, yet there it was, undeniable, painted in uncanny symmetry.

There were no apples in honey for me this year. Instead I dropped some sweetness off at a doorway up the street and stayed home, cleaning my room, unpacking from my trip, putting more aside to sell. I may have returned to familiar surroundings, yet this doesn’t feel like home. Everything is drenched in stress. Unemployment, lack of rent, debts and bills I can do nothing about. One of the cats broke her tail in my absence, no idea how, but because we don’t have money enough for a vet, it has gone unexamined, except by my inexpert fingers. I hope she isn’t in much pain. Meanwhile, the first of the month looms, a darker shadow every day. David is unemployed now, too, as the bookstore chain he worked for is closing down their shops, and my welfare cheque is being held, as I am due for an audit, so our finances are in an even worse state than before. Even so, I am considering quitting welfare, as a way to alleviate some of the depression. Fighting the world without a net is harsh, but independence is worth more than security.

oh, to stand tall, to stretch, to dream!

Things I Have Learned On My Summer Autumn Vacation 72 Hour Bus-Trip

  • If the bus contains a man who coughs with the sound of a wet rag being dragged through a dog, he will sit directly behind you.
  • Fresh fruits and vegetables do not exist. All food is fried.
  • All ice-cream parlours in Saskatchewan sell Fireworks.
  • People who Talk To Themselves are likely dangerous. Other good clues are an obsession with silly putty, matching camo-wear clothing and luggage, and unexpected children’s toys.
  • The Rocky Mountain glaciers are almost gone. This is incredibly scary.
  • Small towns contain odd statues of Big Things. They are not good Statues, or even interesting, they are merely odd.
  • Small towns only exist on the prairies as a tangential side-effect of the gravity around granaries.
  • There really is nothing for 50 miles in every direction.
  • Your Time will never be the same Time as when the bus leaves. And, in the same vein, breakfast is regularly at 4:10 in the morning.
  • Calgary smells like cinnamon.
  • Manitoba Bikers have progressed from being people who hit you with crowbars to people who dance to Barbie Girl in A&W parking lots.
  • Trees become exciting half-way across Canada.
  • Winnipeg becomes attractive under the threat of a Bus Strike.
  • Bus drivers are all jolly, except for that one exception to the rule. Even coffee does not help him.
  • Pin-ball machines are perpetually, mysteriously free.
  • Husky Station Restaurants remain the holy grail mecca of truck stop diners.