Slow days

it isn't all bad, of course. take yesterday morning: sun flooding the kitchen and mo gone to work, leaving me to my quinoa and david gray -- an actual CD played through speakers, not an earbud track: an unformed day brought to you by my new theme song, "life in slow-motion."

while I was watching, you did a slow dissolve...
life in slow motion, somehow it don't seem real

i do seem to be moving so slowly i might dissolve. it's hard to get used to. no one has ever accused me of being a dawdler. one of my graduate students refers to me as "a woman of instant execution." i am fatally attracted to a clean inbox; i honor fordist efficiency; and i always believe there is room to accomplish one more thing before the minute/hour/day/week is up. to take 15 minutes to unload the dishwasher, because every dish is a separate, left-handed trip, is deranging. the 90 minute shower is a new and alien experience. how it can take a person over 20 minutes to dress in the morning i can't fathom, but it does, every day.

for these reasons, i don't find my days long. even when I do nothing, they are full. but it's more than that. i am on good terms with solitude. watching sunshine move across hardwood floors, reading books, thinking, blogging, walking to the neighborhood flower shop -- all of these things make me deeply happy, particularly when they unfold at a junkie's easy pace, on a smooth percocet plane.

one of the unexpected pleasures of convalescing has been music. i walk a lot -- can't drive -- and when I do, i listen to a broad range of music. normally, my tunes are running-trail functional: the scissor sisters, lady gaga, new pornographers, and a Much Music dance album from the 90s keep me working out. when I walk, I listen to fanfarlo, vintage joni mitchell, the new gorillaz album, iTunes impulse buys like chile fuerza, new yorker darling esperanza spalding, eric clapton unplugged. stars, always. the shins, of montréal, conor oberst (all his projects), the mixed tape andrea made me with the BeeGees and fine young cannibals.

i see things when i walk, too.

i have seen odd little houses in my neighborhood:









and houses with cheerful trim:










and artworks' yellow and black display.












i have seen late afternoon sun turn industrial space soft and beautiful:

and i have seen the spring come in this year. it takes place so imperceptibly you can't believe anything is happening, yet winter has dissolved, and the world is different.

January despair

WILL THIS GODFORSAKEN MONTH NEVER END??? i am starved for sunshine, desperate for color, chilled to the bone, and it's not even that friggin' cold. my retinas can't take it anymore, this grey on white on grey, this wintry dim. my optic nerves have atrophied.

in addition:
january entices EVERY GROUCH IN THE WORLD out from the woodwork, and they all have my email address. apparently it is my job to assuage hurt egos, smooth over disagreements, and make nice with people i don't even like that much.

and:
i can't stop eating.
i can't stop sleeping.
i can't find a thing to write.

i have Routine Fatigue. each day is a monumental struggle as i think: no, i simply cannot [brush my teeth/check my email/make a meal/say hello] one more time. every morning i drag myself to the bathroom and wonder, "do i really have to wash my face again?" i mope down to the kitchen and bemoan the human addiction to food, to coffee. i am a january robot. sammy-juice-yogurt-fruit for mo: check! sammy-water-veggies-fruit for heather: check! diet food for madge. kitten food for fidget. shoes and boots and coats and keys and gloves. set the house alarm. open the garage door close the garage door. drive the same roads to the same job for the same meetings. monday tuesday wednesday thursday migraine. saturday errands. jo. sunday short. repeat.

i have been doing this for my whole life and it is STILL JANUARY. how is this possible? i'm getting older; time should be flying; i should be dragging my feet to slow these painted ponies down. have i fallen through a crack in the space-time continuum? has the earth itself got stuck? is this - the here, the now, the endless endless winter - all we've got and all we'll ever have?

january, you are not for the faint of heart. and you are not for me.

Best vacation?

one of yesterday's questions - what's the best vacation you've ever had? - is still rolling around my otherwise empty head.

my first inclination was to say buenos aires, because i so love that city. but that answer ignores how dirty it was, and the fact that i was robbed, and how lost we were with porteno spanish, and how ready i was to go home when we did. the objective evidence suggests BA was not in fact our best vacation, if by that you mean a smooth period of carefree bliss where everything goes well and every moment brings new pleasures.

then again, if it's moments you're talking about, i'd have to name nevada 2006. in the last week of our trip, we both started to feel maudlin, and arriving at great basin national park only made it worse. "it looks like jasper," we agreed. we sat glumly in a campsite for a few minutes, then got back in the car and headed south for six more hours, ending here:


another great vacation: new york city, the year i got tenure. we stole five days around the november 11th holiday and visited deidre in manhattan and catherine in brooklyn. the city was so loud we couldn't sleep, and as i recall the weather sucked, but it was the trip we learned to vacation together. i was advocating for van gogh at MOMA and dance at the joyce, while mo's idea of heaven was a corn dog at coney island. (i wasn't aware until then that coney island was in new york.) going to NY with mo made my world bigger.

or maybe we learned to travel together the summer before, in waterton. each of us planned a day, free from debate by the other. on my day, i hiked carthew-alderson, an 18-km one-way trail, and on mo's day we tore around red rock canyon on rented scooters.

the northern alberta tour of atrocities (summer '99?) - to hythe, where wiebo ludwig had just been arrested for the first time, and to fairview, home of the cooper-snider murder case - was filled with calamity: the car failed to start at the end of a deserted dirt road well into the front ranges, and the french press coffee maker exploded, burning me quite badly, and we almost hit a deer. yet i think of it fondly. ditto the southern BC tour of atrocities the following summer. we saw TB sanitoria, WWII internment camps, and logging clear-cuts, but on april 28th we caught the first ferry of the season across lake revelstoke, under a bright full moon.

this spring's trip to utah would qualify as a bad vacation, given that we received troubling news about a dear friend early into it. i found it hard to completely relax while worrying what was up at home. yet that's also the trip we saw bryce and zion, cycled the colorado and hiked horseshoe canyon. so - a good vacation, no?

london, feb 2007, was terrific: imagine taking kids to the tate.

riding that little cesna to molokai (may 2003) was like taking a holiday to the 1950s. watching the planet produce itself at volcanoes national park was mind-blowing even in the sulfurous deep night heat.

we had fun in boston 2004 - remember taking the train back to NY with crazy phyllis? and what about the first season we had the tent trailer? lightning storms at big knife; the river boat tour of chicago; scottish glens and irish roundabouts; shell casings in the black rock desert; making it out of death valley alive. oh, our first ski trip together, when mo was so broke she wore brown corduroys, a fuscia headband, the purple skis we bought at play it again sports, and the yellow-red-turquoise OP jacket she had in high school! laughing ourselves silly at the KFC in red deer while we counted out our last thirteen cents. hope BC....

the word vacation comes from the latin vacatio, meaning freedom or respite, and it's been in use in english since at least 1386. vacation is frequently paired with leisure, also signifying freedom or opportunity. and this confluence points to why i think vacations are important: by definition, they make things possible. vacations release you from the habitual, take you away from your everyday preoccupations, and thereby put you in the way of the unexpected. you can have unexpected moments in the everyday - yesterday felt like a vacation - but these moments stand out when they're decontextualized.

by this definition, every vacation is a good one.

Better

working again this year has brought several moments of concern. whenever i have a bad spell, i worry that i am sliding back toward madness and despair. i scrutinize every thought, fret over every action, put the sharp knives and bourbon away.

i thought i'd return from my long time off with profound thoughts and insightful Rules for Living, but it's not like that. wasn't it gertrude stein who said, "knowledge is what you know"? knowing runs deep, like an orientation or a sensibility, and not like a list -- which means it's not always on the surface, available for a casual check-in.

still, every once in a while i get a glimpse into the before and after. today, in the middle of pulling together a presentation for tuesday, i went into my amazon.ca file. i know there are better ways to organize ideas and keep track of books, but i use the amazon shopping cart to store things that intrigue me, but not enough to shell out money for. i decided i was ready to move the following from "save for later" to "delete":

• julie jensen, i don't know what i want but it's not this
• barbara winter, making a living without a job
• nicholas lore, the pathfinder: how to choose or change your career for a lifetime of satisfaction and success
• barbara sher, i could do anything ... if only i knew what it was

i'm not quite ready to delete every day's a weekend: an insider's guide to early retirement and exotic travel by newton hockey, or bob clyatt's work less, live more: the way to semi-retirement -- but it's a start.