it's about time I mentioned burkas

Good morrow, fair humans and sentient Internets,

While I was perusing through my Summer School in the Holy Land documents a few days ago, I stumbled across a couple of poetical journal entries that I wrote during the trip's early days in Syria and Jordan. Since returning, I've been pretty much obsessed with Israel, and so I've not given too much thought to our first two destinations. But upon reading these entries, I was powerfully reminded of the emotional and mental state I was in for the first eight days or so of travel, before I fell so powerfully in love with the Hashemite Kingdom that I couldn't bear to think or feel anything negative towards it or its neighbour anymore. My own words brought me back to the overwhelming discomfort I experienced when I witnessed the strange and numerous double standards of Arab Muslim culture, a discomfort that all the mental preparedness in the world could not rid me of. I felt a great deal of animosity most of the time. Now when I speak of Arab culture, I do so with a heavy dose of nostalgia and a beaming smile. (In fact, as I write this, I'm wearing an Arab kaftan.) But it would be naive and short-sighted of me to ignore my initial strong feelings, because even though they were influenced by my ignorance, they had their origins in reality and experience. So now I share with you a nice feminist musing on Syria, written the day we visited the crusader fortress Krak des Chevaliers. I hope the Syrian government doesn't read my blog...

this cavalier's crack

hides kids with elephantitis

while drive-by hair salons lurk in the shadow

of the ever-present, all-seeing, ever-phallic minaret

and don't get me started on those domes, my brothers,

that float atop your halls of prayer

serene in pastoral green

while you disguise the real ones behind reams of cloth

in an attempt to stifle their owners

with the necessities of meticulous propriety

if you really wish to own them

to sport their bits as well as yours on your edifice of patriarchy

in a proud display of biological divisiveness

consider the implications of your real estate desires

since there's no such category as trannie adjacent

you scholars of man and God

who rage your voices to the heavens

(whether or not the heavens listen)

you know nothing of woman, your constant listener

hide her eyes behind a veil

and her thoughts-

which are wont

to edify your unfinished polemic

of a life-

will be veiled from you

I'm beginning to understand your disaster

Sitting in the Ambrose library today, I felt my emotional state slip back to where it idled during my years as a university student. It struck me that my defining characteristic was jealousy, and that that jealousy usually sprang from that which I had no power to know: relationships I couldn't categorize, personal histories I couldn't read, those things left unsaid that tantalized me with their endless unrealized possibilities... I had just been reading essays on the formation of Israel, the first Arab-Israeli war, propagandistic early Israeli history, and the class struggles between Ashkenazim and Sephardim/Mizrahim, and everything synthesized under the green glow of my experientially remembered consuming jealousy. This came to me, and since I've been such a delinquent in my blogging of late (big surprise), I decided to share it with you, my dear Internet and friends.

Folklore is tenderizing my brain

with the incessancy of envy

Eretz

you are and have ever been

a beautiful, mysterious woman

the Levantine Helen of Troy-

and imperishable

The possessive man is consumed

obsessed

driven mad when he considers

who had you first

and so your twin lovers

your conqueror, your conquered

rally armies in the night

in the name of monopoly

since

first love is the only poetic choice, after all

I have been cognizant of their struggles

illuminated the points

where their arguments from entitlement fell apart

I was your dispassionate reporter

but now I feel it

feel the pull

as green as Jezreel

I wrestle with Iago and feel myself renamed

as

Israel the primeval wrestler

beckons to me from shared identity

and I insinuate myself

into the split

personalities of your sinful

suitors

my jealousy brings clarity

You are the righteous temptress

the siren song that pulls

these thousand ships

from every direction

to a shared shipwreck

at the altar of paradise

by way of distraction

Hello, my textual life's companions,

The last two days have been difficult; I had a very promising job interview on Friday (the only promising thing to crop up on the job-hunt-front in the last month) and was told that I would be contacted with a verdict by Tuesday afternoon at the latest. I've been trying to do things that will keep me distracted but still within hearing range of my phone. I went to the bank, got groceries, made a hearty lunch, and watched a few choice episodes of Six Feet Under (showing more restraint than is typical for me, I might add), but nothing took away that nervous jittery feeling from my lungs. Each passing minute only served to convince me further that I had come up the loser yet again, having been led into false hope by the God I just learned to trust again.

But narcissism is transfixing. I find it the most effective of all those bittersweet distractors. It was only when I retired to my study and opened up Tink (my laptop) that I was able to vanquish my squirrelly anxiety for more than five minutes. As I write, it has returned, but I look forward to it dissipating again for a while when I return to the activity that first served to alleviate my feelings of powerlessness in face of uncertainty. The activity in question: reading over all my old top-secret creative writing. All my experiments with stream-of-consciousness and free association. All my nauseatingly self-obsessed contemplations of pain and past and friends and men and boys. I like proofreading my literary spontaneity. I like amending my effusiveness. But most of all, I like being surprised by words I forgot I ever wrote, even if they're not in the greatest combinations and most inspired arrangements imaginable. It's not often that I open a document that is absolutely unfamiliar; I frequently find myself surprised by my forgotten writings, yes, but usually they feel at home in my mind once I've read two thirds of the content. I found a short piece today that I still can't remember writing. None of it sounds familiar, even though its tone and style is unmistakably my own. Even the characters it addresses eluded my recollection for about fifteen minutes. Eventually I had to check the document's info to see when I wrote it so I could put it in the emotional context of my calendar.

It's basically just the weirdness of this memory situation that has compelled me to share it with all y'all. That, and sometimes I just feel the need to put very personal sentiments in very public places. I suppose it's a way of pushing myself out of the reclusive pattern that I find so flattering to my complexion.

So play on, player...

the days are so long when you don't look at me like you used to. the wise man says I don't want to hear your voice, but as everyone knows I am fortune's fool. you know this but you pretend not to for reasons beyond me. if you loved me when I'm sad like I wish you would it would all be better, but you only love me when you laugh. you only look at me then, only write to me when we feel the sadness making waves across the space between us. and every moment I think without thinking of the endless possibilities of my life, what would have been if his family didn't have a history of alcoholism so I could've seduced the experienced older brother. would I feel shame or disillusionment or confusion or confidence or anything at all. would I be able to look you in the face and know you want me. would I be able to look myself in the mirror. I'd go without makeup for the rest of my life if you would still turn your face to face me. I can't stand another sedentary day with grey over my shoulder in every direction.

Horchata, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Fall

Poverty blows.

As much as I appreciate the way that my lack of financial resources has strengthened my character over the years, at the end of the day I can't help but admit that "insufficient funds" is an embarrassing phrase. Moreover, it is a cause of huge stress. That stress is what has been bringing me down for the past month- no, wait, in all honesty, the summer as a whole was rife with nothing but insufficiency. Life looks pretty bleak when you're worried about making rent and can't eat any of the groceries in your pantry because your recovery from (two words:) oral surgery makes consuming non-puddingified foods painful at best.

This money-stress-hunger-sadness that's been weighing on me was made worse this morning while I was reading newspaper articles about the current Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. The magnitude of the Middle East's volatility hit me in a wave of despair. I considered- surprisingly for the first time- that if the violence that extremist groups are threatening should these talks produce an unfavourable outcome for them actually comes to pass, I might not get back into the land where I left my heart. I realized that most of the factors that will determine the possibility of my return are absolutely beyond my control. That probably sounds silly. It was heartbreaking.

So there I was, silly sad hungry Nans despairing on her olive ultrasuede couch. I decided I had to do something to yank me out of the groove I had made in my mind and my living room seating. I gathered up all my overdue documentaries, got dressed, and set off down the road to the library. And waddayaknow, it was gorgeous outside. After days of dreary grey and the rain I love to romanticize but hate to walk through, the golden leaves were glistening in the sun and crackling with the crisp autumn wind. For the first time in a long time, I noticed a bounce in my step. My feet in their hot pink shoes kept pace with the beats of Vampire Weekend as I turned the corner and let my eyes catch up with the view in front of me: happily stout white clouds rounding their way down to the peaks of half-frosted mountains seemingly vaulted up by a base of gold-and-green-speckled hills. There in front of me, a portrait of what I love best in the world. A free joy: an autumn landscape. A death necessary for new life, a stop on a never-ending cycle. And I remembered other joys. I remembered dancing to music in my head. I remembered the many autumns that never died in my mind's eye. I remembered the immensity of feeling that summer's end always brings. And I looked forward to future falls in new places that I can only envision with the help of my desperate imagination.

This is autumn for me: the beauty of the unknown that is to come, and the heartache of that same unimagined world. A whole sea of deserts and baptisms that are impossible to predict. Such poverty, such wealth. Such unmapped possibility.

(Here comes a feeling you thought you'd forgotten

Chairs to sit and sidewalks to walk on

Oh you had it but oh no you lost it

Looking back you shouldn't have fought it)

Life is still sufficient when it is lived with insufficient funds. It's just not enough to know that in theory.

too much 'burban calls for self-assertion

Good morrow m'darlings,

I haven't written in such a grievously long time because I've been consumed with all the little tasks and concerns that go along with relocating. I've moved into a house with two of my friends, and we're slowly but surely settling into life in the straight-up 'burbs.

My internal compass has been slow to adjust to my new northwestern orientation, and sometimes I feel as though my personality is also taking its merry time catching up with me; it's hard to write when you don't feel like yourself. I sit and look around my room and wonder when its rightful owner will show up to oust me from my roost on her eggplant-and-robin's-egg bed. My essence has been supplanted somehow; I feel young, aimless, naive, boring... these are not good things to feel when in truth you are a passionate, interesting person who has recently celebrated a birthday. The worst thing is that I am unable to pinpoint the cause of this feeling. Even decor-wise, I can't solve the mystery of my missing person. Is she hiding in a different colour scheme? Would she feel more comfortable in a messy, haphazard living space? Has all my uncharacteristic laundering and organizing and cleaning caused her to fear that she too might be scrubbed away or hidden at the bottom of a deep drawer? I'm thinking yes to all of the above.

I've been watching a lot of Ally McBeal lately, and let me just say, I wish they still made shows like it. Fantastic! But here's my point: in an episode I watched this morning, Ally turns 29 and delivers a great closing argument in court that revolves around her recurring birthday sentiment of being an underachiever, and how her hopes for life and the actual life she is living never quite reach alignment. Maybe this is what I'm feeling. Maybe I have the extended birthday blues. After all, here I am sitting alone in a big house, wondering why I haven't yet found a job or love or friends who stick around or the strength of will to shed all the things I find embarrassing about myself. For the majority of the past year, I have been blessed to feel like my soul has got it together; that makes it all the more unfortunate that the rest of me hasn't caught up.

Just because I think this entry could benefit from further disjointedness, I'm going to transition to another topic right now. Thanks for your cooperation.

It was exactly a year ago that my life changed. I still can't quite assemble the proper words to describe what happened in any way that doesn't sound like a wheel of cheese, but I will say that when my heart and priorities got all shook up by the Almighty, I took hold of a magnitude of freedom that had previously been unattainable to me. Sometimes it's hard to remember that I am free, hard to accept that I have accepted myself. Sometimes kicking at the darkness takes more energy than I think I can spare. But it's been a year. A year. As the world remembers the ninth anniversary of the 9/11 that brought destruction and grief and terror, I simultaneously remember the first anniversary of the 9/11 that brought repair and joy and hope, albeit to but one person. So when I think of my birthday blues, of my rejection from the world of the outwardly admirable, of my rejection by the male population, of my restlessness in face of the future, of my unadorned walls, of my well-made bed, of my recently-laundered wardrobe, and all the numerous unnamed things that make me feel not at all like I am used to feeling, and not at all like I would hope to feel, I find I must also think of of the baptism and temptation of Christ. One year ago I was baptised by the Spirit. In February the Spirit sent me out to wander in the wilderness to be tempted with hatred and disgust and fear and faithlessness and lack of compassion. In May I felt the renewed presence of the firey Spirit at Pentecost on Mount Zion. And now, in September, I look around me and find that I am in the wilderness again, although I am painfully far from Judea. But what is necessary in the wild is to remember the water and the flame. To be reminded of fulfillment's reality. To be reminded that fulfillment is always beneath the surface, waiting to be claimed like an inheritance.

And so, there could be no better time for me to reach down, take hold of what is still mine, and fling it across my bare walls with reckless abandon. A Jackson Pollock painted instead by asserted freedom.

To quote Anne Sexton,
"Darling, the composer has stepped into fire"-
again.

ode on a nostalgic turn

G'day, my precious interwebs and gentle readers,

I realize that of late I have been inordinately focused on the future; I can't write a single entry without somehow mentioning Jerusalem (whoops!) or my lofty goals (here we go again) or how things will get better for me soon (sometimes I just have to say it). This is pretty hilarious to me, because although I've always been one to dream and plan and hope, however misguidedly, I've also always hated people whose every action is aimed at the distant future. I am always aware of the the many factors in life that are beyond my control, like the timing of my death or the deaths of those whom I love, natural disasters, world wars, the premature explosion of the sun, blah blah blah, and so in truth I am loath to live only for a far-flung future that is uncertain at best.

Moving right along to the actual point...

Today I lived in the past. Not recent past, not Jerusalem, Jordan, etc. I mean high school. I mean elementary school. I would even mean junior high if I had gone to junior high; thank goodness for small mercies.

I have been gradually packing up my bedroom over the past few days, strategically avoiding any items that would require me to make qualifying decisions based on sentimental value. I've been throwing letters and cards into boxes without the slightest glance at return addresses. I've been consolidating all my lotions and makeup and contact lens cases and Pez dispensers and shampoos. I've kept the washer and dryer in constant use. I've done everything that's simple and surface-level. But today I went into my room armed with a green garbage bag and a huge cardboard box (from some cheesecake company that apparently makes white chocolate peanut butter cheesecake- uhmmmm, yes please!) and went all soullessly cut-throat on my earthly possessions. I found boxes that hadn't been emptied since I moved back home from the Renfrew house with Nik and Mads. I found roughly 4,000 bank statements, still sealed. I found all of my Jason Lang scholarship letters and certificates. I found my high school diploma. I found souvenirs I bought in Italy. I found concert recordings from three summers of SCF Choir Camp. I found shoes that I forgot I owned. I found journal entries written on scrap pieces of paper, wedged between empty cd cases. I pretty much felt like Lara Croft by the time I left for work.

But the important thing is, all this home base tomb raiding gave me the momentum and sheer force of will necessary to face the ultimate nostalgic catalyst: the yearbook. Now, I only have yearbooks from grades 11 and 12, and it's not like I feature prominently in them or think that they adequately reflect what my CMHS PVA/FI experience was all about, but they were a poignant read nonetheless. I read every comment, looked at every page. I tried very hard to remember people's names. I recalled a landslide of inside jokes. I remembered plot lines to numerous terrible plays I wish I could forget now. I recognized faces and marvelled at how easy it is for people to move from obscurity to prime importance to insignificance in my life.

And then I found the Thom Collegiate yearbook from 2001-2002. I had flipped through half of it before I realized that I wasn't actually in it, and that all the comments written therein were addressed to my brother. Good one, Nans. Way to do math. You were in grade eight when this high school yearbook was bound. The funny thing was, I had almost memorized the layout of those pages. I had kept that yearbook in my room since before we moved to Calgary. This is because in my grade nine year at Thom, I used it as a reference guide for all the hotties in the grades ahead of me. Looking through it this morning, my eyes knew exactly where to look on every page for the face of a guy worth lusting over. Their names even sounded familiar, and I know I never talked to these boys. I realized two things: 1) adolescent girls are THE LAMEST THING EVER and I am their queen, and 2) wait, I'm still awesome regardless.

Beside the Thom yearbook were three binders: one from high school film class (featuring a cut-out from a Gap men's undershirt ad with the word "boyfriend" scrawled across it in my handwriting), one containing my grade four creative writing, and one full of Pokemon cards. [I kept two of the three, and you get to guess which ones. Turn this blog upside down to reveal the correct answer.]

I spent approximately an hour reading through the stories I wrote as a nine-year-old. One was told from the perspective of a muskrat musician. Another was a pre-teen poli-drama about the daughter of a fictional US president. What I love most about young writers is that they think a page and a half of hand-written, double-spaced material constitutes a complete chapter. Oh wait, no, scratch that. I love most the names they give their characters. For instance, I named a character in one of my opuses Jeroldine. Yes. Actually.

Well, I'm going to head to bed now. More on this later.

You know you love me.

xo xo -

Jeroldine

rainy days and pens and paper

I am

standing here in my disaster zone

of a bedroom

reading Coleridge out loud

to the mirror on my wall

I was

packing up novels, anthologies, Bibles

into wine and vodka boxes salvaged from the Co-op liquor store

boxing up academia

as if it were the remains of

a frat party

or

a pretentious hors d'oeuvres-laden meeting of the undergrad minds

my Harbrace, my Nortons, my Gilbert 'n Gubar

are now just the makings of some wicked upper body strength

and an increasingly defeatist attitude toward relocation

my precious findings from the poetry bookshop in Hay-on-Wye

are now just decisions to be made

(can I really not take it with me?)

but this Golden Book of Coleridge that I'm holding is so small

and delicate as a robin's egg

I can't not take it everywhere

(I hear my Kantian self whisper chidingly,

"my dear, this is your duty")

so as I look in the mirror now

I see myself not dimly

but in future tense

laden with tattoos inspired by Ondaatje, family, and the Romantics I count as bedfellows

reading odes to solitude on the Mount of Olives overlooking the Temple Mount

recalling generations of others' forebears-

wanting anything but solitude-

offering up precious sacrifices in hopes of reconciling

with a god who would know them

I see myself recalling Wordsworth on the terrace

overlooking Gai-Hinnom

a terrace mottled with countless gunshot wounds

an everyday monument to the six-day sacrifice

of a breathing ancestry finding its footing again

rebuilding a future from the rubble of history

binding bricks with the bloody mortar of controversy

and I hope I will not have cause to wonder then

whither the visionary gleam has fled