From my early morning family law class

RE: the effect of lifestyle choices on custody orders:

"Most judges lived through the 60s and 70s...they don't really care if you smoked a joint every now and then. They probably have all smoked a joint at one point. Pot is not such a big deal.

Now CRACK, crack is a BIG deal."

And thus I was awake.

Some Kind of Warped Radar?

Why is it that men wait until you have moved on and are happy with a new guy to come back and say all the things you wanted them to say while you were together?

Is it some kind of twisted radar...they sense that you are happy or that you're seeing someone new and they take that as their cue to come sweeping back into your life?

I'm not trying to be bitter or spiteful...I'm honestly curious. I didn't say a damn thing to guy #1 about guy #2. Not a damn thing. So how does he know??

When it rains it truly does pour...that's the truth of it...relationships cycle in monsoons and droughts. Why is it that the monsoon season coincides with exams...that's really my question.

And why does it have to be so damn cold here...I just want to set up a command station from my bed and never leave.

Butterflies

Second date tonight...I'm way more nervous about this one.
Damn those expectations!

Ill-timed, but Uncontrollable

I am newly twitterpated. Mr. So-Good-On-First-Date, I had a fleeting moment where I understood why some might be so quick to jump on a plane to Vegas.
We went for a winter walk to half admire, half make fun of the Christmas lights. We gave hot apple cider to the homeless guy that asked us for change. We talked for hours and hours until the wee hours of the morning.
He's so good on paper - firefighter, in the process of adopting an abused half-German Shephard half-Lab puppy. She's only six weeks old and was found basically beaten to within an inch of her life. He's handy and is a ticketed auto mechanic. He's from BC, a Canucks fan, a go-cart enthusiast AND a hobby photographer. We both shoot with Nikon cameras and are snobs about them. He wants to go skydiving. He likes artsy films and has seen more of Stanley Kubrick's films than I have. We have the same favorite movies and his mom is a quilter (my mom isn't a quilter, but a home made quilt is the thing I covet most in the world). He brought me a single red rose.
We played the scar game, which is rather sexy, really. You know...like the I'll show you mine if you show me yours but re: scars. He beat me with a dirt bike accident induced compound fracture/skin graft.
But with exams right around the corner...I just don't know. This is NOT a great time.

Awed

I just finished reading perhaps the most awesome book I have read in years: Atonement, by Ian McEwan. He won the Booker prize for his previous book, Amsterdam, but this author is phenomenal...and that is not an embellishment.
To nutshell the book, it is about a young girl; she is an author; she has a wild imagination. She has an older sister and a brother, and her brother's school chum is the maid's son who has had a smouldering love affair brewing for years with the older sister. She has two cousins who come to the house for an extended visit. She is 13. It is 1935 in England. You read the back of the book and it says essentially, that this 13 year old will commit a crime that will reverberate through the lives of the characters and all the way through the war. The book, however, opens up in this lovely pastoral scene: birds chirping, lovely English manor, witty repartee between the characters. You, as the reader, cannot fathom how the author is going to get from this lovely point a, to the awfulness which is promised in the summary. And yet he does. And I'm not going to spoil it for you. It just simply must be read.
As an author, what McEwan truly excels at is understanding the vulnerability and the arrogance of humans. He understands how a nice tableau of life can just unravel and how once things have inertia, they are unstoppable. He understands that actions are set in motion not with one big decision, but are rather a culmination of seemingly meaningless, thoughtless, mundane events in life.
He writes his characters with sympathy, and yet holds them accountable for their actions. You love them, and feel compassion for them, and yet cannot forgive them for what they have done. And that makes them real.
I realize that I haven't given much of a plot summary at all, but the beauty of this book is that you are continually suprised. After finishing it, I read a number of reviews on the internet and was a bit miffed at those which gave away plot details. It is best to go in blind.
The other thing I love about this author is that he writes prose...true descriptive beautiful prose. More like a 19th century author than anything modern, and yet he is contemporary. Critics have compared him, and I agree, to Virginia Woolf. Yet, I would add that his writing is, in my opinion, far more accessible than Woolf's. Perhaps it is the modernity of his language that give me this impression.
If I had to choose one novel to recommend...perhaps even of the last 5 years, it would be this one. It is nothing short of phenomenal.

Could you repeat that?

You know you've been friends with someone for awhile when you start to hear reruns of their favorite life stories...or sometimes you can even recite their favorite stories ("Hey 'Cole...I have a penis and you have a vagina, right??" would be one of my personal favorite friend stories - thank's 'Cole...I still get a chuckle out of that one).
But this is not my point...
Sometimes in your idle chitchat with your good friends they just slip something into the conversation...just nonchalantly, casually, and it causes you to double take. More often then not there is a diamond in the rough story behind it. Like today, my blond haired, blue eyed friend and I were chatting about travelling and she mentioned that she wanted to go to Africa and visit her "dozens of aunts and uncles." And then in the next breath she was talking about something entirely different. ...hold on, rewind, back up, explain yourself. Not just anyone has dozens of aunts and uncles, nor a single African aunt or uncle...and it's not every day that you meet someone with dozens of African aunts and uncles...and I certainly have never met a blond haired, blue eyed person with dozens of African aunts and uncles. There's story there...I could smell it.
I love my childhood friends...there is a certain comfort, a level of trust there...almost more like a sibling than a friend. But friends you make as an adult...there's always suprises, there's a whole life worth of stories. And people certainly do lead facinating lives.
One of my favorite I-have-five-minutes authors is Robert Fulghum. He wrote things like "All I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten", and "Uh-Oh - Observations From Both Sides of the Refridgerator Door." But one of his more interesting books conceptually is one called "True Love." Now granted, even a romantic like me can only take this book in small doses, but if I recall correctly what he did was set himself up at a coffee shop. Stuck a sign on his table that said something to the effect of, "tell me a story about love, and I'll buy you a cup of coffee." It was a success...he amassed some amazing stories...and not just about romantic love either.
My mother laughs at me because invariably when we go shopping I wind up striking up a conversation with someone in a store. I can't help myself. People are interesting.

OCD??

Why is it that some days I frantically and compulsively check my frequently read blogs for new postings? Some times I go for days without reading them, and then all of a sudden I just crave new postings. And I get really upset when I don't get them. What are you all doing?? Where is my daily dose?? Not even a measly comment to wet my whistle.
I'll keep checking...someone is bound to post something sometime.

Barking in my dreams

Last August we put my old lab, Maverick, to sleep. He was thirteen and a half years old, he had hip problems, was almost completely blind, was losing his hearing. In the last few months of his life he grew stiffer and stiffer until he could no longer climb the stairs. A walk just down the block would take up to a half hour, with him painfully and gingerly hobbling the whole way. Sometmes when he was just standing his hip would all of a sudden just give out, and he would be unable to get to his feet again.
His eyes were still young though...I'll never forget the day we took him to the vet, and he looked at us with such trusting eyes as the vet gave him the shot. So calm, so warm, so young...his eyes were like warm chocolate and the friendliest things you'd ever seen, unless he felt he had to defend us. Then...watch out.
Several months ago I heard about this book, Marley & Me, by John Grogan. It's about the life of his lab. It took me all this time to get up the courage to read it. I still miss my dog, in unexpected ways.
It's a phenomenal book...I laughed harder than I have in a long time. But I cried my eyes out. Sobbed, really, to the point of red and puffy eyes. Like the next day I woke up and my eyes were swollen almost completely shut. But it was cathartic. Lab owners are all the same, same kind of people, same kind of experiences. More often than not they have the same temperament as their dogs: enthusiastic, alert, friendly and a little bit reckless. So I identified with the writer. But more importantly, the little silly, annoying, destructive things that labs do...the lovely, friendly, affectionate things that they do. All of those were there. And it made me love my dog all the more...it reminded me of all of those things that he used to do. It made me happy to remember that.

I realized today that it's been awhile since my last post.
Life is chaotic, there's been a pity party or two, a lost election, a trip home, a paper written and a lot of self-indulgence.
I should be back...soon.

Another world

I live downtown. I love the noise and the bustle: the horns, and the flurry of people and the rumble of the traffic, and the clouds of steam coming from sidewalk grates. I love the glimpses of blue sky in between tall towers - or even better, the reflection of clouds in the windows of skyscrapers. I love the concrete jungle. I love it because I never feel alone, I never feel alienated, I always feel like I'm at the heart of things. I've never wanted to be the center of attention, but I've always wanted to be at the center.

I woke up this morning, and the first thing I heard was the weather report. It had been snowing all night, and everyone was whining about the state of the roads. I love that feeling when you are cozy in your bed, kitten curled up in the crook of your arm, and you can see outside the soft falling snow. I always sleep with my curtains drawn: 1) I like to wake up to natural light when I can, 2) the way my windows face, no one really can see in, 3) I like to contemplate the weather before I get out of bed. So I contemplated the snow for a moment, and then I was roused from my warm cocoon by the smell of freshly brewing coffee. (New coffee pot...auto shut off (yeah, I'm not going to burn the house down by forgetting to turn it off)...and delayed brew (I love to wake up to fresh coffee))....

I take the train to school...so the condition of the roads and the disaster of traffic concerned me not. I sliced myself the last of the banana bread, poured my coffee into my spill proof travel tumbler, and headed out into the snow.

I've commented on the silence of snow before, I think. I love to take a walk in the falling, or newly falling snow because it's so peaceful. The world seems muted, clean, calm, quiet. But I've usually considered this in the context of walks through the forest, or along the sea wall - things of that nature. This morning when I walked outside of my building, I was treated to the same effects on the city. No hustle, no horns, no traffic rumbling - just quiet, slow, muted whiteness. No concrete jungle, just drifts of white. It was slow...it was peaceful. I'm sure by the time I go home this afternoon it will be all gone and as I said before, I do love it...but for a moment it was another world...a snowy world...a quiet world...a lovely world.

I'm going to the Dixie Chicks concert tonight.

I think that regardless of what one thinks of their political opinions, or their music, in this world where young girls look to people like Britney Spears and Paris Hilton as supposed role models, it is refreshing and hopeful that a group of fierce, independent thinking and classy women are also on the stage.

The point to me is not what they had to say, but that they had the courage to stand by it when faced with the kiss of death in the music business - loss of fan base. If girls can learn from that rather than how to be a Slave 4 U, or how to star in your own internet porn movie, I think we just might be ok.

Therapy

I've been wallowing a little bit later...in self pity, in self criticism, in self loathing, in self consciousness. It's funny how these things a) come in waves, and b) tend to be slightly contagious. My two good friends have also been throwing themselves a bit of a pity party lately. It's not as if we don't have a thing in the world to complain about, but events which, under other circumstances, we might have been able to roll with, seem to be holding us up.

There is some dwelling going on.

So last night I decided to take matters into my own hands. It was time for some banana bread. I truly think that it is a cure all. Like chicken soup to a physical ailment, banana bread is equally comforting to the emotional self. And it's the whole experience of the bread...the smell of it baking, the slathering of the butter on the steaming slices, the ice cold glass of milk. I've always thought that if you have to have a serious conversation with someone, tell them bad news or whatever, you'd better have a loaf of banana bread in the oven. Real estate agents like the smell of coffee or baking cookies in an open house...I think they're missing the boat - banana bread would be far more effective. Walk into a house baking banana bread and you are immediately at ease, calm, warm.

I don't like bananas, truth be told. I don't like them because I am averse to their consistency. It makes me gag. Fruit should be juicy...not smushy. For a long time I thought I was weird for thinking like this...but just the other week I met a like minded individual - a kindred spirit. Anyways, my point is that I buy bananas, and put them directly in the freezer...cause then whenever it's time for the banana bread, all I have to do is pull them out and defrost them in the microwave.

I have my secrets to a good banana bread. First of all, I can't stand chunks of banana in the bread - see above. So I put them through my potato ricer - smooth like butter. And second of all I like my bread moist, so I add almost twice the required banana portion - but again, smooth not lumpy. The most important secrets are the spices: clearly cinnamon and lots of it, but the lesser known and more important, in my view, one is allspice. Allspice provides depth of flavor, and, most importantly, that dark caramel color to the loaf.

One of my favorite restaurants in Vancouver, Glowbal, serves banana bread with a cinnamon butter at its brunch sitting. It's one of my favorite things about this restaurant (also their Benny - rivals Fruits Folie...for sure) . But under ordinary circumstances, I think that banana bread is best hot with butter, and a cold glass of milk. Obviously if you are just removing it from the oven this is not a problem, but I've found that when it come to reheating, slices of banana bread stand up quite nicely in the toaster. And toasting also crunches up the crust rather nicely too.

Anyways, the banana bread definitely did the trick. The three of us polished off an entire loaf and a litre of milk, and then giggled our way through Grey's Anatomy, and played with the kitten. Terminated/suspended relationships were not mentioned even once.

And this morning, as I run the baking gear through the dishwasher, and tidy up my apartment, I am comforted to know that I still have a half a dozen bananas in my freezer: ready to be mobilized as soon as there is a need.

It's beginning to look a lot like Xmas

I can't help it...I love the season.
This weekend we had the first snow storm of the year...it was one of those gentle storms where the fat white flakes swirl softly. The kind of storms that are romantic and dreamlike. And I wanted to bust out the Christmas music.
But I promised myself, no...not until November.
Well it's November 1st, and I'm gonna listen to the Nutcracker as I read tonight. And tomorrow I just might put up a few decorations.