Mad Endeavour

That, my friends and neighbours, is what you get when you go off gallivanting for a week and forget to empty your kitchen Green Bin. Generations have lived and died, between my departure and my return; whole tribes are happily ensconced, in all their various territories and villages -- Surlafridge, Trashbinville, Cupboard Heights and Sink Valley. They are clever, and only a few have fallen to my cunning trap, consisting of an old yogourt dish filled with cider vinegar, and covered with plastic wrap pierced with a pencil.

I left on Saturday, and met up with the Creative Genius in his temporary digs in Toronto. I'm either about to be rewarded by the fulfilment of one of my fondest fantasies, or punished by the mutilation of same; I'll find out through personal experience next week. I don't see how the vision of the CG strutting around a stage nattily clad in my grandfather's bespoke morning coat alternating with my vintage silk dressing gown 1 could possibly be altogether painful, theatrically speaking, but there are of course so many other levels of possible agony in the wild world of Sherlockian pastiche (see just for starters, Christopher Lee; also, Laurie R. King; also, Guy Ritchie).

He's grown, at the director's request, a set of rust-coloured sideburns for the role, and when not inside a stiff shirt and starched Mornington collar, looks rather amusingly hipsterish. I brought him an early birthday cake (strawberry cake with cream cheese icing and strawberries on top) and we ate that and ran lines and wandered round the Danforth.

Late on Sunday afternoon, I continued on to Ottawa. There, I first watched a lot of television with my brother, culminating during the wolf hour in, I think, something starring Michael Douglas, and slept for the tattered remains of the night rather sordidly on the couch.

The rest of the week involved Fringing, and an overnight jaunt to Merrickville, and the parents' return from Germany. My Fringe experience encompassed four good-to-fantastic shows, balanced by one that was at least seven different kinds of awful 2, which is pretty good odds, I think.

My friend M. and I had a lovely and productive time in Merrickville. Our trip was intended as a Serious Writing Retreat for Maupin, but of course, we had to wander about. Merrickville is one of those quaint Ontario towns full of beautifully-maintained Victorian homes with cottage gardens, and probably the highest concentration of artists I've ever personally experienced. Seriously, there's an entire street that's almost completely lined with in-home studios. We shopped (mostly without buying anything), ate very good local, organic food, and then got down to an intense creative session, which ended up producing about a dozen quality pages.

Our departure the next day was marred by the mysterious disappearance of my keys, which had last been seen when I removed them from my pocket the night before. We searched the room. We emptied and searched our bags. M. went off to check around the path by the canal where we'd walked after supper the previous evening, and I searched the bags again. I tipped my purse (which is not very large, and which I had previously emptied) upside-down, and they fell out. Most peculiar! Ghosts! Pisgies!

I left on Sunday, so as to be on time for my singing lesson on Monday. (Alas, AC left a message on my cellphone Sunday afternoon -- he was very sorry, he was at the Montreal Jazz Festival, no singing. And no singing next week either, as he is once again away. A shame, as I'm very keen to get started on some new repertoire, hopefully a something or three from Cecilia Bartoli's selection of 18th century Italian songs, to which I listened incessantly (and howled along to) during all this driving.)

I met the CG in Toronto again, and he took me out to a couple of the final events of the Toronto Festival of Clowns. That finished very late, and I stayed over (imposing on yet another temporary host to the CG's nomadic lifestyle). On Monday, we went to see Wall-E, which is everything everyone said it was, including brilliant, moving, fantastically animated, and offensive to fat people.

Low points included a parking ticket (about which I should call the Toronto parking enforcement office, since I had in fact found a helpful policeman the night I got it, and he wrote me an exemption), and a rather crushing revelation about understood agreements that weren't, resulting in something of a current emotional malaise. And the fruitflies, of course. On the other hand, my copy of the 2008 Rhysling Anthology was nestled in my mailbox when I returned.

Now it's back to daily yoga, raw food, and three days of work (one of which is of course already past), and then another week of theatrical overload.

1 My wardrobe chest and I provided a certain amount of enthusiastic costuming, accompanied by cranky commentary and an introduction to collar studs, both of which appeared to amuse their victim. About that dressing gown... it's a man's dressing gown, rather tailored and longer than most, in dark red textured silk with ribbed silk lapels and cuffs. I bought it back in my early twenties, for around sixty dollars (which was a lot for vintage then, and a lot for me at the time) and wore it daily for several years.

When I saw it, hanging there in my wardrobe trunk, I was utterly surprised. "Where'd this come from?" I'd completely forgotten about the thing. It's perfect Sherlock Holmes material, right down to the various little holes and stains from my wear and tear, and the CG looks devastating in it.

2 Which, I see now on visiting the Fringe site again, won an award. I... uh, okay. There's no accounting for taste, I suppose— possibly mine, although word in the Beer Tent was very mixed when I was there.

AC's singing recital was last night, and my little segment went reasonably well. I wasn't too nervous (and wore flat shoes) so I didn't have last year's problem of shaking knees and a lack of grounding. I was, however, nervous enough that the bits in the passagio (that awkward middle ground of the break) had a tendency to emerge somewhat unsupported. My compensatory technique of taking them right down to the chest voice and going at them from below didn't work too well either, as then of course one is faced with an awkward gear shift back into the head voice when coming up again.

I'm not too terribly upset about it. On the whole, I think it was about the best I can do right now, as my passagio isn't altogether reliable at the moment even when I am completely relaxed. I didn't screw up the timing (my real weak spot) and I listened to the accompanist. My friend J. came out, and she said my voice completely filled the church. "That's what I came to hear," she said. Considering that there were only two other women who truly managed to let it open out like that (and one of them was — oh the pain! — singing slightly flat throughout her piece) it's something.

And an older couple gave me a really nice compliment. "Do you think," the man asked me, "that you would have sung it differently wearing a dress?" I said that I didn't think so. And then he and his wife told me a story of touring the Canadian Opera Company once, and seeing a show in final rehearsal. Everyone had their costumes by then except the leads, whose clothes weren't finished. "And it didn't matter," the gentleman said, "once they started to sing, you forgot what they were wearing. I thought that's what your piece was like." Of course, AC gave me a wonderful introduction, in which he talked about Orfeo ed Euridice, and recapped the story leading up to Orfeo's heartbreaking song. I don't know about the audience, but it helped me a lot.

 

And, elsewise—I know you rely on me, Voxy neighbours, to Bring the Flake—so I have to tell you, I've been eating almost completely "raw" for nearly three weeks. I have no particularly elevated motives of morals or "detox" or even weight loss about it; it simply felt like something I wanted to do. I like Carol Alt's book about raw food; she eats things like raw-milk cheese and raw meat and fish, and generally seems to have a happy, relaxed feeling of enjoyment about her food, rather than the more typical raw foodist stance of Body Purity and the Higher Vibrations.

It feels good—after a serious misstep the first day when I didn't eat enough and developed a full-body starvation headache by 2 p.m. (A lot of raw foodists would say to me, I'm sure, "Ah, that's detox, as your cells eliminate the corruption of cooked food!" But no. I know the misery of starvation and crashing blood sugar when I feel it.) I ate several sugary, fatty, glutenous, cooked, impure squares from the breakroom, and felt better within, literally, minutes. Since then, I've been more careful to ensure that I have a plenitude of raw calories in my lunchbag. (Also: a green shake and nothing but fruit for breakfast, purifying to the system though it might possibly be, simply isn't enough to keep my particular metabolism happy. And I know that, raw or not. Whatever else I may eat, or not eat, through the course of a day, a large and sustaining breakfast is essential for me.)

I've been sprouting things in jars, which is very satisfying. Supper as science experiment! I'm trying to stay away from the more complicated raw recipes (and raw junk food, for that matter), in particular purchased dehydrated crackers and things, and the many tempting recipes for luscious raw cakes that are all cashews and agave nectar and such. As it is, I'm still eating too many nuts, and a bit too much dried fruit, 1 but I'm looking on this as an evolving exploration into my body's happiness, not a question of "doing it right". And I'm not necessarily going to get all superior and avoid any contamination of cooked meals with friends or families or beloveds, unless there's some compelling reason to do so.

Mind you, I have noticed, even in this short a time, that a "cooked" meal seems to clog my digestion for hours afterwards in a way raw food doesn't—but there are worse things. I've already been a vegan asshole, and an anorexic asshole, and a body-building asshole, to people over food, and frankly the people should be more important.

So there it is. I'll keep eating raw until I don't want to any more. A typical day, at the moment, is around 70-99% raw (there are still matters of the cups of coffee I allow myself, and a few condiments and spices).

1 Given my assertions immediately following, I should clarify that by saying that I base that judgement purely on the fact that nuts and dried fruit, while tasty going in and satisfying immediately after, also seem to weigh on my system somehow, sometimes to the point of making my stomach feel unpleasantly acidic.

Thanks, Maleghast. You know, the longer one goes without posting, the harder it is to get back on it again...

The rules of the game get posted at the beginning. Each player answers the questions about themselves. At the end of the post, the player then tags 5 people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know they’ve been tagged and asking them to read your blog. Let the person who tagged you know when you’ve posted your answer.

1) What was I doing 10 years ago?

I was working at the same place I am now (sigh); I was one year married and very happy, except that the home renovations had stalled as soon as we actually got into the house. I think that was the year the Chicken came to join us, which would have been right around this time too.

2) What are 5 things on my to-do list for today?

Today's almost over, so there's not much left....
i) A yoga DVD, probably Baron Baptiste's since I feel vigorous.
ii) Something about that quinoa in its jar; it's sprouted and ready but I had leftovers for supper, so I should rinse it and put it in the fridge.
iii) (still undecided) Possibly send an email to this guy and ask him for "an honest critique of my voice." Yes, I've been chickening out and retreating, confidence shattered and fear of insecurity in full activation, but... After the serious bout of "I'm useless and hopeless" with which I inflicted the Creative Genius yesterday (his response: "Does thinking that make your life better? Is it serving a purpose?") and reading this column today (the bottom bit, Your Turn), it is clear to me-- that I need to get back on it. And that guy is quite close to me (uh, geographically), and from his website, seems sensible.
iv) Sing Che Faro a couple more times, to make sure that I retain the insights from today's singing lesson into certain of the more difficult passages, because (eeyieee!) I'm singing it in a recital on Wednesday evening.
v) Either work more on that painting and see if I can either get back to where I was originally going OR start going somewhere else that pleases me.... or watch the rest of The Darjeeling Express. (Mm, shirtless Adrien Brody!)

3) Snacks I enjoy:

Chocolate. Dates on crackers with goat cheese. Grapes. Cheese of any kind. Nibbles out of jars of jam in the fridge, or (even better!) jars of chutney. Pickled anything. Wasabi peas.

4) Things I would do if I were a billionaire:

Pay off debts. Give money to family and friends, if they'd take it. Probably become extremely eccentric and dilettante-ish. Travel a lot. Found and/or fund theatre companies and grants for artists. Paint, draw, design, write, and be dismissed for it because "I'm just rich". Meddle professionally.

5) Places I have lived:

Otterburn Park, Quebec (a suburb of Montreal)
Chandler, Quebec (on the coast of the Gaspesie)
A small country town just east of Ottawa, Ontario
Here.

6) Jobs I have had:

Sales clerk at Marks & Spencer; nanny; museum tour guide; museum conservation work (textiles); window cleaner (for one day!); box office clerk; various data entry and secretarial jobs; theatre usher; book reviewer; reporter; actor (I have been paid for acting!); clothing designer and seamstress; graphic designer.

7) Bloggers I am tagging who I will enjoy getting to know better:
Oh, you know, I really don't like the tag thing. Makes me feel like a vacuum cleaner saleswoman. However, if you would like to answer this, please, by all means consider yourself tagged and stop by my comments!

Last week, driving over to visit a friend of mine, I passed a couple of roomy wooden crates left out on the curb. So I put them in the back of the car.

What? I'd been thinking of planting a garden on our deck, and these were crying out to be filled with plants rather than planted in the landfill. Saturday morning I got up early (despite having been up very late the night before, watching Notes on a Scandal with the Creative Genius's sister) and spent a few hours going to nurseries and Home Despots and such, picking up another few planters, a whole lot of bags of earth, and plants to put in same. I spent a long, hot, humid day planting.

I felt rather wistful as I did it. Back when A. and I first got together, and were deeply in love, he helped me put in a container garden on the balcony of the apartment I then had. (A. has a thumb so green it practically has sprouts on it.) I didn't do all of the things he taught me then, but I remembered them all, and remembered that sweet time, when our relationship was perfect and full of promise.

That night was the closing night of Asphalt Jungle Shorts IV. This iteration went rather well, I thought-- and the singing is finally, finally paying off in my voice. Several people commented, and I feel it; I project effortlessly. Very gratifying. The cast party followed, and I accidentally got much drunker than I meant to, drunker than I've been in years and years. See, I brought a modest can of perry (like hard cider, but made from pears) and drank that. However... however, there was one play that featured "double martinis, with a fresh strawberry soaked in vermouth for a couple of days," and one of the actors in that made those when he arrived, and offered me one. I had to experience that taste sensation, and drank it. It was very good, a wisp of strawberry over the icy gin that was more a scent than a flavour.

Another play involved a drunken bride, and tequila shots. And not very long after the martini, the host... passed round a tray of tequila shots. The martini, I presume, impaired my judgement, and I had a tequila shot. Not wise.

I didn't do anything terrifically embarrassing (other than be much more impaired than probably anyone I now know has ever seen me) and I continue my unbroken record of never having a hangover... but still. I'm not really fond of being that drunk. I also tore a hole in the ass of my favourite, but well-worn, pair of jeans, probably while leaping on the host's giant backyard trampoline. (I always wanted to try one of those! They are just as much fun as they look!)

Anyway, since then, the weather has been cool and rather damp, and the transplants are doing very well, as you can see at right. The railing boxes hold pansies, a licorice plant, and a pineapple mint. The fibreglass urn has dill and chives in it. (I'm hoping the chives may survive the winter. I had chives in a pot back in the garden of my house that overwintered very well, although that pot was on the ground, which might make a difference.) There are cherry tomatoes in the barrel, and Roma tomatoes in the antique Wabasso crate (which unfortunately isn't holding up very well under the strains of wet loamy contents). The smaller crate holds basil, parsley and a nasturtium. So exciting!

The Creative Genius is away in B.C. at Magnetic North until next week. He left last week, first attending some conference with his parents... which has given me a lot of time to Think About Things. It's been nice, and I think productive. Clarifying to the intentions. I'm looking forward to when he gets back, brief though that will be.

And I've been doing yoga videos daily 1 and running regularly, making me feel all healthy and vigorous. Except for today. Yesterday afternoon I started to feel a little weird around the innards, and then spent most of the night popping in and out of the bathroom like a cuckoo in a clock (not throwing up thank everything). This morning I was still feeling pretty dysenterous, so I called in sick.2 Blah. I feel mostly better now, though.

1 Baron Baptiste's Power Yoga: The Initial Challenge, and Ravi Singh and Ana Brett's Kundalini Yoga for Beginners and Beyond, if you want to know. I used to not enjoy yoga -- it bored me -- but something, I suppose, has shifted, and I'm liking both of these. I'm considering exploring further at one of the plethora of nearby yoga studios. Of course, yoga classes are excitingly expensive, but at least one of said studios offers a cheap summer all-class pass for July and August. The power yoga is fun. It involves plenty of strength and muscle, which I like, but it's not as much of a strain, on body and life altogether, as a return to iron would be.

2 I might be sick-- there's a nasty flu going round the office -- or it might be from the course of antibiotics I finished on the weekend. Poor little intestinal flora.

How are you spending this Memorial Day? How will it differ from Memorial Days past?

Working. I am not in the Centre of the Universe, apparently. Funny that Vox didn't ask me, last weekend, how my May 2-4 was going. Voxpeople, it's called the World-Wide Web for a reason.

Here is my latest painting. I call it Spring Field Sky, because that's what I called the folder where I put the reference pictures. (It comes from a bunch of shots I took of a ploughed, flooded field in the early dawn just before work, just north of work.)

I did it in a kind of "class" I took with a local artist. It was really more of a small group mentoring session, and I was fine with that once I figured out the deal: he doesn't give assignments or anything -- you do your thing, and he prods you, encourages you, and points out things you might have missed. I decided at the time that I needed more work on sky, picked the largest canvas I'd used to date, and went at it. The canvas happened to be a very coarse one, so it ended up being mostly knifework (where I'd originally imagined a kind of Parrish-esque smooth, glowing glaze effect) and it was fun.

I also made Nigella's Chocolate Honey Cake last night, and glazed it today. The bees are made of marzipan with little sliced-almond wings, and it is harder than you would think to put chocolate stripes on sticky marzipan with a toothpick and sticky hands. If I ever make this for company, of course, I'll glaze it on a rack over a pan, so that it's not sitting in a veritable lake of chocolate, and take more time over the bees. We haven't cut into it yet.

That pretty much sums it up, right there. Still here, yes. Haven't updated much, because I haven't felt like there's much to say. Not much liking where I am, not much seeing any possibility of change, not much with the will to change. Is there any point, anyway?

Yes, that's about it. Maybe later I'll take a picture of my latest painting and post that instead of whining.

Everyone is over lolcats by now, I suspect, and I never really got into them. (They remind me of an Internet version of those photocopies of wet kittens disgruntled admin assistants pin to the half-walls of their cubicles. "I have one nerve left, and you're getting on it.")

Okay, okay. Now that I've defended my elitist snobbery, I can go on. Despite the fact that I am far too refined to enjoy the low humour of ordinary lolcats, I can laugh like a normal person if it's combined with poetry. T.S. Eliot in LOLspeak?

LOLcat Wasteland

Heh.

Supposedly, it is April, although the lilacs, like everything else, are still shuddering under quite a lot of snow.

 

The sun came out over the long weekend, and on Monday I finally managed to drag the Creative Genius away from heavy farming work in Final Fantasy for a walk. He squinted, goblin-like, at the brilliant sky. "I'm not meant to be in the light."

I pushed him out the door. "It's good for you. Exercise."

"Skin! Burning!"

We walked downtown to a building I've long admired. Barra Castle is a Neo-Gothic apartment building built in the 1930s by a woman named Molly Marquette, who apparently modelled it after her childhood home in Russia. That must have been some home. Her interpretation has towering parapets, beautiful detailing on the outside trim and arched doorways, generous windows, heavy wooden doors. Inside, rumour has it, are sunrooms and Moorish archways and tiled bathrooms.

Naturally, of course, it's been a squat for years, owned by a series of slumlords, its occupants moving down the social scale from artists and musicians to crackheads. The outside is designated under a Heritage Conservation Act, but the inside was legendarily unmaintained. (In an interview, one former tenant said, "I never lived in such a ----hole in my life. The bathtub wouldn't drain and every time it rained the telephone wouldn't work." Another had to have stitches after a nail protruding from a banister (which she couldn't see because the lights in the hallways and stairwells didn't work) ripped her hand open.)

Anyway, last fall the city inspectors shut it down for a list of violations (copies of which were helpfully stapled to all the doors, sheathed in plastic page protectors), and cut off power and gas. It's sat (officially) empty all winter, and is visibly falling into an even more ramshackle state of disrepair. The current owners claim they were just—really!—making some repairs and getting loans to make more when evil inspectors shut them down, but who knows? In the meantime, there it sits.

The stucco shone very white in the sun, crumbling though it was. The elaborate trim was sloppily picked out in pale blue paint, and one snarling lion impotently guarded the front door (his mate on the other side had been bashed faceless). The piles of snow surrounding the building were marked by a few deep boot tracks and pathways. Most of the barred and padlocked doors were, on closer inspection, visibly compromised; many windows out of sight of the front were broken. On the second floor, a sunroom window, absent glass, billowed faded flowery curtains into the breeze. In the deep, arched front porch (decorated with a really impressive wasp nest in the centre of the arch) was a filthy blanket, along with other signs of recent occupancy.

We walked round it with increasing boldness. The CG wondered how much it would cost, to buy it; how much, then, to renovate? We could, he said, get a collective together.

If one did a lot of the work, I said, it would be cheaper than hiring people. But we could see where the stucco was exploding over water-damaged bricks, and where the actual walls were beginning to warp. After a winter without heat, and the weather we've had, it's probably a structural nightmare from the ground up, riddled with mould.

It could be an artists' cooperative, he said. Studios. A gallery and shop in that building at the front.

I looked through a broken sidelight, and up a grubbily carpeted staircase with beautiful banisters, littered with trash, and debated going in. That would turn my photographic expedition into actual trespass, though, and besides, silent though the building was, it felt somehow occupied. I took pictures of the twisted remains of leading around the sidelight.

We walked around the back. Paint cans still stood in freshly painted, empty rooms on the ground floor. A rusted radiator leaned against a wall, and an ancient, avocado-green grill lay half-buried in snow.

"It would cost a lot," the Creative Genius said.

"Yes," I said. "The roof is flat. It probably leaks."

"What a sad waste," he said.

We walked home again, and I thought about living in castles.

I was going to answer a QOTD, purely for the sake of updating the blob, but what an array of morose questions!

What talent do you have that you wish more people would recognise?

Uh, any of them. Maybe I have no talents, and that's why people don't notice them. Oh, except baking sweet things. "You made those from scratch?" Yes. Next question...

What have you tried in life that you're just not very good at?

I'm not as good at anything as I would like to be, and I'm plagued by laziness and procrastination—such that instead of spending every waking hour singing scales, or memorising monologues, or doing gesture drawings, or writing chapters or editing drafts, I nap, and read fantasy novels, and surf the web watching World of Warcraft dance videos on YouTube.

 

What quality in your best friend are you most envious of and why?

She doesn't cower in security; she makes a living in the arts, and is gaining a reputation for it.

Why do you think it is some people don't get along with you?

Because I suck! No. Because I assume I suck, and withdraw, and don't keep in touch with anyone, assuming they have better things to do than hang out with me. Thus, others assume I'm stuck up, and a snob who doesn't want anything to do with them.

Brilliant. Okay, now that's over with. Looks like I planned to do a Part Two of the Montréal trip, but I don't think that's happening. I had a birthday... it was marginally better than last year's, but still fell far short of the Ideal Birthday, at least in my mind. (Lesson learned being this: I am not one of those girls who needs fancy presents, but I do like to be Princess for a Day on my natal anniversary. Giving me nothing because one can't afford anything and "handmade crap isn't good enough for you" is... not a successful strategy, it seems, despite its superficially complimentary appearance. Lesson two: there's nothing like a rousing fight sometimes.)

I saw the Creative Genius perform in an ensemble show in our city's largest professional theatre space, and promptly got sick with a terrible cold that lasted right through the holiday weekend. No connection, as far as I know (although I might have caught something from someone in the gratifyingly large crowd, I suppose). So far, I'm batting two for two in the Deathly Illnesses and Major Holidays Tournament. This is less exciting than one might think.

My friend M. said some trenchant things to me in chat as I was electronically crying on her shoulder, among them that artists living with artists is a very touchy thing to negotiate. It's sad but true. The CG And Ensemble gave a fantastic show to, as I mentioned, a well-filled house, and may tour... and meanwhile, I've not felt so low about myself, my "potential" and my apparently-invisible gifts (see beginning of post) in years. It's a dreadful, dreadful thing, isn't it—jealousy, the mind-killer. Being ill hasn't helped, I expect.

Oh, and I missed singing yesterday, which was sort of my fault. I cancelled last week, with the devastating sore throat coming upon me, and assumed (with all the usual definitions of assumed) that AC would not be teaching on the holiday Monday. Wrong... I do still have a bit of a cough, so it's not a huge loss. We're working on a little piece from Handel's Semele, Where'er You Walk. I wish I had enough keyboard skillz to properly learn the Habanera (L'amour est un oiseau rebelle) from La Boheme; I don't have a decent recording to gank. (Pathetic, isn't it? Although AC says (scornfully) that with the Current Decline in Musical Application, there are professional artists out there who can't read music, and pay someone to sing their repertoire for them so they can learn it by ear. I would, myself, prefer not to be one of those. So add another item to the list of things I should be doing instead of surfing YouTube—earnestly practicing sight-reading.)