Category Archives: Diary

Mutants and Anniversaries

We saw X2.

One word: Kewl.

Okay, no, two words: Damned kewl.

Now I get to bounce up and down waiting for Matrix Reloaded and Finding Nemo.

Bounce bounce bounce.

Oh, and four years ago this weekend, my husband proposed to me. Needless to say, we consumed the rest of the Taylor Fladgate port in celebration. I’m looking forward to many, many years of celebrating this weekend over and over again.

And for anyone who was concerned about my health, I’m back up to my regular summer weight. If I don’t look like I am, it’s due to my exuberant fashion choice to no longer disguise my body with clothes that are too big for me. Hail summer!

Defending The Stand

Thanks to my circle of friends who bought me the Uber-Music-Stand last summer for my birthday, I am happily equipped for home practice and concerts. No one, I thought, would ever have a stand like mine. (Mainly because no one else would be enough of a loon to cart the six-ton thing around. But I digress.) Solid and sturdy, with a beautiful shiny black desk that folds out to both sides, creating space enough to lay out an entire string quartet if I so desired. Adieu, page turning! Of course, adieu to page turning at home, not at concerts; we’re usually packed in like little musical sardines, so there’s no room for my Uber-Stand to achieve its full wingspan in public.

Well, at our last concert, I set up my Uber-Stand and went downstairs to stash my coat. When I came back, a second violinist was walking away with it.

“Hey! Hey!” I said. “That’s my stand!”

We argued about it for a moment, then I convinced her that it was mine and off she went in a bad mood to locate hers, which she had just bought. (Someone had put it behind the door. Go figure.) So, with my beloved Uber-Stand back in my possession, I then and there resolved to find some way to identify it as mine forever and ever.

As of yesterday, I now have sparkly Harry Potter Hedwig owly stickers to put on it in a relatively inconspicuous place. Heck, I’ve had one on my laptop since I got it; why shouldn’t I put some on my music stand too?

No one will try to claim it as theirs now. No, sir.

Ow

My right wrist has been inflamed for a couple of days, and it hurts when I type or use my mouse. I just finished editing a thirty-page document that was time-sensitive and a pleasure to edit, but I’m now pretty useless for most of the things I usually do, like typing, writing, and playing the cello.

Yesterday, I heard that a friend got a light tablet and stylus to use in place of a mouse, and it’s an attractive thought. So’s an ergonomic keyboard at this point. I’m using a rolled-up towel to rest my wrist on, but the mouse keeps bumping into it. After I post this I think I’ll take a walk, which requires no wrist work at all.

I’ve been seized with the extremely odd desire to write verse lately. Not that I’m being inspired with poetry, I just want to be writing it. This is extremely frustrating.

I slept for ten hours last night. I think I’m officially back on track.

Good Travels!

Well, today is the day Roo heads out into the wild North American yonder on her MA pilgrimage, gathering hard data, soft data, experience, and mileage to collate into some sort of coherent report in order to graduate. The cool part: she’s studying the SF community phenomenon by attending F/SF conventions all summer. The drawback: she’s studying the SF community phenomenon by attending F/SF conventions all summer. One con is fun; two’s okay, if they’re well spaced apart. If, however, you’ve at any time ever been involved with the SF community, you might have some inkling of how homocidal she’s likely to be by the time September rolls around.

Good luck, Roo! Safe trip! I wish you infinite patience, and may your sense of humour remain intact!

Off and On

The past couple of days have been odd. I’ve been restless, moody, terribly social, terribly anti-social… I’m not quite sure what’s going on, but I’d like it to settle down. I slept a grand total of two and a half hours last night, then had a staff meeting this morning, managed to completely forget my god-daughter’s birthday family gathering this afternoon, arrived at said gathering with the hatchings of a migraine, left quietly two hours later, came home and hid under the covers for two hours of solid, blissful sleep. It got rid of the headache, but now I’m awake and my sleep schedule is even further off-kilter.

I’m now reading Virginia Woolf’s diaries, and I’m incredibly gratified to learn that if she wrote between fifty and two hundred fifty words per day, she considered herself successful (well, as successful as someone that self-critical can feel; perhaps ‘on-schedule’ would be a better term to use). If I pull off a minimum of two thousand per day, then, I’m doing just fine. Mind you, I entertain absolutely no notions that I’m any sort of a Virginia Woolf. None whatsoever. So no one needs to get nervous when I’m around water.

Family Visit, Virginia Woolf, Brief Miracles

We had glorious weather all weekend in Oakville until a wonderful thunderstorm during Sunday dinner (mmm, rack of lamb). I saw my grandmother from the west coast, old family friends, and all in all enjoyed a lovely trip. I wish we could have spent another day or so with my parents, but both my husband and I have to work today.

I managed to get a thousand words or so written on Saturday afternoon, too. I’d been dithering about a chapter in the Great Canadian Novel, unsure about how to handle the next step (or, rather, to choose what the next step should be from a pool of four different events). I plunged in and finished the chapter, and even started the next one.

And then, I crashed. Why, you ask? I picked up a secondhand hardcover copy of Michael Cunningham’s The Hours. When I read work like this, I wonder why I even bother. (Yes, yes, I know: different styles, all kinds to make a world, different tastes in readership, blah blah blah. I’m sharing. Be quiet.) I despair of ever becoming capable of painting word and thought, of arranging language to convey a depth of emotion with only a few words.

I’ve read scraps of Virginia Woolf’s journals, and she too uses sparse language, and yet conveys something so much larger than what the words say. Is that what genius is? Everything I read of mine seems mawkish and heavy-handed (though not as heavy-handed as some of the published stuff I’ve read, thank all the gods), no longer as airy and bright as it seemed when I set it down. I’ve ordered a copy of Woolf’s journal so I can read the whole thing, not to further depress myself, but to try to understand how it is that she manages to succeed at what she does, even in her own private notes.

When I moved I found a humour coloumn that I’d clipped from the English department newsletter during my BA. It’s an “Ask Your Author Agony Column”.

Dear Author:
Lately I’ve been feeling that my life has no meaning. What should I do?
Signed, Pondering the Meaning

There are several witty samples of what various authors might have responded (“Get your archetypes straightened out,” recommends Robertson Davies), but here’s Virginia Woolf’s imagined response:


Life is just a series of brief miracles. Stay away from water
and for heaven’s sakes get a room of your own.
– Virginia Woolf.

Life’s just a series of brief miracles. This comment was meant to be fun, but it says something important. Juxtaposing the words “just”, “brief” and “miracle” creates a tension that Woolf’s work displays as well. How can something be “just” a miracle? Is it a miracle because it’s brief? Shouldn’t miracles, by definition, be life-changing? Or is it our observation of the miracle and how we choose to be changed by it that defines it as brief or enduring? If they’re brief, is it the knowledge that life is made up of miracles that keeps us going?

More people should see the miracles around them, however brief. And more people should remember that life is a series of miracles; we just have to find them.