Category Archives: Deep Thoughts

Lest We Forget

Ceri and I took in the Remembrance Day ceremonies this morning at Place du Canada, and I saw a schoolgirl pass out in front of us. I am quite ashamed to say that the first thing that ran through my head was, “Would my NaNo protagonist pass out at a Remembrance Day ceremony?” The second thing, of course, was, “Is she okay?” Looked like her teacher had it all under control, and I know the last thing I would have wanted if I were fourteen was to have a bunch of strangers crowding around me. It was well-handled.

I was stunned by the reports of anti-war graffiti on the cenotaph, though. It had been cleaned off by the time we arrived, but I saw some on the park benches nearby. Defacing public property on the day the country commemorates the senseless deaths of our citizens in unwanted battle – great way make a point, whoever you were, and to encourage us to admire your skulking ways and your whiny protest. No, war isn’t the solution. I agree with you there. But attacking the spirits of hundreds of veterans who risked ther lives in confrontations beyond what most of us can envision – that’s low. Your ways do not justify your means.

Sorry. Rant over. Stuff like this just sets my teeth on edge. You honour your forebears for the courage to stick to their beliefs, whether you agree with them or not.

NaNo Reflections

It’s snowing again. Wet, messy snow that’s sticking to cars and sidewalks. The roads are wet, and I can hear the sticky hiss of tires on Sherbrooke street.

Ladled up from Ceridwen’s Cauldron:

She told me that after the first day she had gone to friends’ blogs to find out how the first day had gone. She was disappointed with the result. Sure, some of us had posted word counts, but that’s no indication of how the day actually went.

It was an awkward time of day to call people, I didn’t want to e-mail anyone and put them on the spot, so I surfed web logs instead, and no one had really said anything. I mentioned this to Ceri in passing, and now that she has blogged about how she felt on her first couple of days of NaNoWriMo, I figure that I should, as well. She credits me with the stimulus to talk about the first day or so, after all, so unless I wish to be subject to tomato-throwing fans, it’s only fair that I do so, too.

It was good. It was comfortable, and I felt like I was accomplishing something. I didn’t clock-watch; I wrote what I needed to and just let new things unfold, as if I was reading someone else’s story. It can be tidied up later. Better words can be carefully chosen some other time. I haven’t really reread it all from beginning to now, but I’m fairly certain it flows.

Not that it matters. This is about hitting a quota, of discipling yourself to sit down daily to do something, and, of course, to say at the end, “I have a big gloriously messy novel” and then say, “neener, neener” to anyone who asks to read it.

I mentioned to a few friends that I wouldn’t be comparing word counts; this project is for me, it’s not a competition. When I went to post my word count the first time on the official site, though, I wandered around a bit and looked, because I was curious. I didn’t want to beat myself up, I certainly didn’t want to gloat… I was just interested in seeing how others’ works were unfolding. Yesterday I discovered that three people claimed to have hit 50,000 words already, and that one actually claimed to have reached something like 999,999. In three days. Right. I went back this morning to check it out again, and found that the individual in question has been removed. Good to know the organisers thought it as unlikely as I did.

This leaves two people who have achieved their goal already, one of whom joined on November 3 itself. Which would mean s/he likely registered after she wrote the novel, because I checked late morning on the 3rd, and s/he’s in Virginia, so the pretext of a vastly different time zone can’t even be used. What gets me is that the word-count programs don’t go on-line until November 15th, so these counts and claims can’t be verified until then, which gives anyone claiming to be finished the morning they joined a two-week buffer to actually hit his or her count.

No, I don’t care. It doesn’t affect me. What bothers me is the idea that some people don’t care about the rules. I have no way of verifying if this person has a novel or not; s/he just might, and that would be great. If s/he doesn’t, then s/he’s just cheated him/herself.

Back to me, though.

I love writing, and I love being able to write. The two days I’ve sat down and written for three or four hours straight have been terrific. As Ceri says, I felt like a “real writer”. I feel like that already, though. I don’t need (another) novel, finished or in progress, to prove that to me.

However… this is the first novel I’ve written where I actually feel like I might be able to do something with it afterwards. I have a context imposed upon me from the outside, so I won’t be too sprawling. I feel more focused in my efforts. The Great Canadian Novel feels similar; I’m focused, not reaching out wildly on tangents, but I’m letting it unfold as it wills, too. I think the difference lies within the knowledge that there’s an ultimate word count goal, so I’m just letting the NaNo novel run on. I don’t really edit myself in the GCN, either, but there’s still a difference, and I can’t quite put my finger on it. The GCN is more complex, but I’m assuming that comes from the less-frantic approach. The GCN has time to breathe. I do write primarily for myself, but in the back of my mind I’ve been thinking about attempting publication sometime in the future; I just need a likely manuscript to sacrifice. The NaNo script will likely be that sacrifice, since the GCN is too precious. I’ll cut my teeth on the NaNo novel, and then we’ll see how things have gone before I go leaping into the publishing fray with the GCN. Publication is not validation, not by a long shot. If you have a finished novel, though, why not try? The worst they can say is “No”. (Which is plenty crushing for any author, thanks very much.)

I won’t be writing as much as I’d like to be today, because my fellow professor e-mailed me to remind me that I had volunteered to teach two-thirds of the class tonight. I had agreed do it last week, and then in the next seven days my free time sank spectacularly in Kingston television performances, rituals, teaching, NaNo writing, and crisis-handling. This leaves me today to finish reading two books and to prepare a seminar on them. In addition, with all this snow, I have a sneaky suspicion that my husband will be home by early afternoon. Now, if only I could work those books and seminar into the NaNoWriMo novel somehow…

On Creating

So there�s gloating going on over at Ceridwen�s Cauldron, too. I really need to break this down, for my own sanity.

You have a vision. You design your vision on paper. You struggle with dropping far-fetched elements, or elements that would just be too difficult (as cool as they would be!). You research methods and materials, then purchase materials. You begin the process of bringing your vision into the tangible world. There are obstacles, challenges, mis-read directions, the discovery that the process you theorised would work in fact would defy physics. Methods are re-evaluated. Shortcuts are taken. Certain steps are lingered over. When a step is completed successfully, there is joy, pride, excitement. When the entire project is done, those emotions are directly proportional to the amount of time spent from conception to delivery, anguish felt during the process, challenges triumphantly defied. There�s a physical proof of your talent in bringing vision to reality.

Hallowe�en costumes aren�t about impressing people (okay, I grant that there�s a bit of thrill when people behold your work), they�re about having fun during the creation process; and since both Ceri and I are costume addicts, creating a new costume calls for more time and energy than the average person usually thinks is sane. Ceri and I aren�t building things up by gloating; we�re simply celebrating a couple of months of work, of fun, and now we�re anticipating even more fun when we get to share all that work with others and generally have fun at a party with friends.

Kind of like planning a wedding, now that I think about it. Except without the irritations of caterers and finalising food.

Champagne � okay, sparkling cider � should definitely be involved at this party, I think. It’s a celebration, after all.

Visual Pun Alert

Weather
————
Me

Okay, it’s lame. I really am feeling under the weather, though. Yesterday I didn’t pay much attention to my body, mostly because my husband stumbled in around noon with a migraine and went to bed with a cup of tea. I was more concerned about him. By the evening, though, I had horrible stomach pain, and thank all the gods that my co-professor agreed to take our Monday night class, because I, too, began developing a migraine. By the time I arrived in the classroom all I could think about were the evil twin stabs of pain in abdomen and eyes. I went home to a bath and bed and was asleep by eight. Bless you, Scarlet. You are a goddess.

I’m still unhappy this morning, but at least the headache is gone. Bed is my friend. So is laptop. Good bed. Good laptop.

I finally developed some film that had been sitting in our camera for an unknown amount of time, and discovered about fourteen photos from last Hallowe’en. If it had been Hallowe’en costumes it would have been more interesting, but it’s all store decor: bales of hay, gourds, corn stalks and so forth. They’re terrific, but not what I was expecting. I had no idea what I was expecting, but hay was definitely not it. Ironically, the remaining four or five photos from the roll are of this year’s Hallowe’en costume, that precious record I absolutely had to have should the next step fail, in order to prove to future generations that yes, it was lovely before I tempted fate by taking it apart again.

The very last photo is of me, playing my cello. As far as I know, a single photo exists of me playing my cello, taken at my only public recital at McGill about five years ago. There are three other cellists with me, playing an ensemble piece as the finale. Yes, there have been orchestra photos taken from our last two concerts in which my head is visible, but you can’t see me playing the instrument. There does exist a sketch, done by my ex-fiance as I played Handel for hours in an empty church with a flutist, and I love it, but it isn’t a full-length sketch; just the upper third. I’ve always wanted to see what I really look like with my cello, from the floor all the way up. This photograph does just that, and I love it too. I’m going to slip it behind all my music on my music stand so I can peek at it when I get discouraged.

The fact that it’s taken a year to finish a twenty-four exposure roll says to me that we’ve moved beyond the need to capture certain visual moments on film. We knew we were losing interest in photographing things when we realised that we were taking our camera on all our trips, but leaving it in the suitcase when we went out. Taking it along simply didn’t occur to us. Then, of course, the battery died, and it’s taken about six months to replace it – more proof we don’t think of the camera that often. I believe that we’ve reached a point where if we see something beautiful, we’ll pause to appreciate it, and then carry the memory of it in our hearts. Photos are a pale, pale reproduction of something that had colour and life, and I’ve been so disappointed by pictures I’ve taken that don’t look at all like the beauty I beheld with my own eyes. In addition to the disappointment, I find that if I carry a camera around, I look at my environment in a very different fashion. With a camera in your hands, you instinctively look for pictures and evaluate what you see in terms of a snap, and end up not enjoying where you are or what you’re doing as much as you could without it. Now, if you’re a photojournalist, that’s fine, or if you go somewhere with the express intention to photograph, then sure, that’s different too. I also understand the anonymity granted by a camera, as something to occupy your mind and hands.

However, for me, cameras have a time and a place. As a record of some sort, of what people were in attendance at an event, or what people were wearing (I’m a costume junkie, remember?), or the layout of a objects or a building… all those I can understand. Pictures jog the memory. There are excellent photographers, too, who have mastered the art of using eyes and camera simultaneously, who I’m sure don’t feel any loss to the experience for seeing it through a lens. I, on the other hand, can’t do it. I also understand photography as an artistic act. The camera can be used with the intent of creating art, being a tool like a pencil or a paintbrush. Again, though, it’s not for me, although I dearly love looking at the artistic photography produced by friends like Rob and Hobbes.

For me, a camera gets in the way of the experience. Glass and metal and light-sensitive film serving as the communication device between my heart and life? I’ll pass.

Shock

I’m not sure where to begin.

I’m back at work this week — yes, retail; covering for another full-timer who’s on a well-deserved vacation. It was fun for about half a day. Then I started to get tired. I have thirty more hours of this, mostly with new part-timers I don’t know and have never worked with.

After work was my regular class that I teach on Monday nights. I was tired, but onwards I went. I wish things could have ended on a better note; I was trying to make them understand the individual steps in writing a research paper, and one student was seemingly being stubborn on purpose until we discovered that the term “research paper” meant something completely different to her than it meant to the twelve other students and the two professors. Misunderstanding cleared up. Frustrating at the time, though.

The I came home to two messages on my answering machine, one from my orchestra contact asking me to return his call, the other from a member of the LLO board asking me if I would help out backstage since I didn’t get the part. (Nice of you to ask; snowball’s chance in hell.)

I called my orchestra contact back, and sat down, stunned, as he told me that our conductor had been in a rather bad road accident on Friday, had severe head trauma, was in the Montreal General Hospital where unsuccessful surgery had taken place to staunch internal cranial bleeding, and was being kept alive by machines. So our weekly rehearsal has been cancelled.

This is the man who founded the orchestra thirty-odd years ago. Every member of the orchestra has been called and advised of the situation. Of course the rehearsal’s been cancelled!

The situation is even bleaker than it first appears. The family expects to make a decision within the next couple of days as to whether or not those life-support machines should be kept functional. Andres has just retired from teaching high school music to be there for his wife, who is battling terminal cancer. After a promising spring she has taken a turn for the worse, and now she has just been transferred to the Montreal General to be with her husband. Family is being summoned from his native country of Latvia and other places of residence. Evidently, things don’t look good all around.

I don’t know Andres other than as my conductor for a single year of orchestra. He has a sense of humour, a true love for music, the ability to communicate his ideas and visions, to corral forty adults of various levels of competence and with them create a thing of beauty. He taught years and years of string students at Lindsay Place High School. When I saw him last on Wednesday, he was in a wonderful mood.

The strangeness of knowing that he’s now lying somewhere hooked up to monitors and IV drips and pumps and tubes is unreal. It’s so difficult to maintain two opposing realities in the mind: that you expect upon extrapolating from the last time you encountered someone, and the reality that someone has told you which completely contradicts it. I suppose the necessity for closure is directly proportional to how well you know the individual in question. I’ve only known Andres for a year, despite the joy he’s brought me and the work I’ve done for him to meet the standards he’s set. My stunned feelings must pale next to those of the orchestra members how have worked with him longer than I, and to those of his already stressed family. I’m angry at the senseless tragedy; all I can do is pray, and I’ve been doing it since I heard the news. If he’s meant to live, let it be with peace and no pain, with health and positivity. May his doctors’ minds be clear, their hands steady, their acts inspired. If he is meant to die, then let him pass gently, with no further trauma, and may his family be spared further agony. He is an admirable man. Why did this have to happen?

This reminds me that if I walk away from someone in anger, or even indifference, there may not be another opportunity to erase that final image I’ll hold in my mind of them ever afterwards. Like my cats and our dog, he might not be there next time our orchestra gathers. My contact assures me that we’ll likely go on, although Andres was our heart. Perhaps we will; he wouldn’t want the orchestra to dissolve. Music is eternal, although people who create it are not. It will be strange, and it will be different; but for me, it will be a way to balance the senseless and tragic loss of life, if it is indeed confirmed that there must be loss of life. For every destruction, there must be creation, after all.

Loss

I heard today that my parents lost the last pet I’d grown up with. That makes all three within one year.

You have to wonder about the skewed idea of justice that the world has. Last year, it was our female cat Bo’sun, of lung cancer. Last month it was our dog Megan, also of cancer. Yesterday, they put down our cat Grey, of Cushing’s disease. These were animals who were deeply loved, and well-cared for in every sense of the word, who still developed fatal diseases. And everywhere, there are strays and feral dogs and cats, scraping out a living on the streets and in the wild, living to an astonishingly old age.

My parents aren’t completely alone; they brought their new Maine Coon kitten home last week, of course. When I go down at Thanksgiving, though, there won�t be a dog bouncing at the front door when I come in, or a familiar thin hyper-purring cat climbing into my lap when I sit at the kitchen table.

Why do things move so fast? Do you ever get the sense that the world is moving inexorably on, and you’re just standing there, bewildered, not knowing how to keep up? That things are changing, and you don’t know how to make them stop, even just for a little while?

I’m upset about Grey, of course; I’m upset for my parents, too. More than anything else, though, I feel like there’s been a link disrupted to my life as a teenager, when I still lived with my parents. I’ve lived on my own for ten and a half years, but only now do I really feel like I can’t go back in quite the same way. Our family pets have always played huge roles in our lives, and this particular set of three was around for about twelve years. Every time I went to visit my parents, there they were, waiting for me along with my mum and dad. And now, it’s just not going to be the same. At all.

Life goes on, of course, the way it does when anyone you love dies. You adjust. Sometimes, though, when I get really upset about the death of a pet, I wonder why we do it to ourselves; why we bring these little fuzzy things into our homes for a decade and integrate them into our hearts and lives to such an extent if we know they’re only going to go away some day, leaving us lonely and in pain. Of course, you can say the same thing about friends, or lovers, and some people do. They don’t let anyone close, brood over the past betrayals, and end up bitter, lonely individuals. I think, though, that we seek animal companionship for the same reason we reach out over and over to men and women: for love, for warmth, for interaction with another intelligence. To provide care and support; to receive those same things in return, to a varied degree. There have been times I have cried, and my cats have actively sought to comfort me; times I have been very ill, and they have stayed with me. When I am happy, they share that with me as well.

So we do it repeatedly; we open our hearts to these creatures who cannot share our seven to nine decades of life, because even those ten or fifteen precious years count for something. The pain is worth it.

At least, so it seems while you still have the comfort of their warmth and love, and that pain is still only a vague future. When tomorrow becomes today, and you cry, and protest the injustice, the story reads quite differently. And, as always, I wish I could rewrite the ending, so that everyone could live happily ever after.

Orchestra Etc

Married three years and I still feel a flush of excitement when I call a gentleman to firm up a coffee date. Sheesh. Some habits never die.

Last night was the first orchestra meeting of the year. I brought along my oldest friend who plays as many instruments as she has fingers (okay, perhaps I exaggerate; as many instruments as she has fingers on one hand, then). It was terrific. I knew I’d missed it, but when we picked up our first piece of sheet music and played the first phrase, I felt like I’d slipped back into a set of well-broken-in shoes and a comfy but still attractive sweater.

I replaced that A string with the Eudoxa A, and boys and girls, I’m in love. I’m off to pick up the rest of the set today after coffee. I mean, wow. Talk about a sultry and mellow voice! It does blend well with the three Aricores I still have on the cello (which do need to be replaced), but I can just imagine the deep, rich, dark sound that all of them together will produce… mmmm.

Okay, I’ve snapped out of that lovely little reverie. Ceri was over when I unstrung the old A and put the new one on the other day; “Oooh,” she said, “I’m listening to you play the cello!” as I plucked the string in order to tune it. It made me laugh. What wasn’t as amusing was the amount of stretching this string needed before it became playable. If I had to estimate, I’d say it has stretched a full two inches so far, and while it’s slowed down, I know I’ll have to tune it up again late this afternoon. Gut is very sensitive. It also doesn’t last as long, but seeing as how my Aricores lasted two or three years, and a yearly replacement is recommended for strings, I’ve done very well so far.

There’s something else I have to mention: the local riot revolving around protesting the scheduled appearance of former PM of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu at my alma mater Concordia University.

Flying in the face of the basic respect for open discourse that a true university is supposed to represent, the violent crowd prevented Israel’s former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu from speaking on campus. If not powerfully and clearly addressed over time, this act will register the breakdown of academic freedom at a major Canadian institution of higher learning. .

Go me. Two degrees at an academic institution rapidly becoming known as a joke.

There are degrees of expression, people. Yes, you have the freedom to protest. The man also has the freedom to speak. Why is it that every protest at Concordia has to turn into a violent uprising costing hundreds of thousands of dollars to clean up after? And why is it that stopping a statesman from speaking is considered a victory for oppressed people across the globe? How does violent protest make a persuasive case? Fear and pain and destruction are threats to keep people in line, not intelligent arguments calculated to make a case for your beliefs. Force a man to do something, and he resents it. Let his work it out by thinking about it and making his own decision,and he’s yours. And you look like less of an idiot.

What’s the point of echoing the mindless violence in the Middle East? It’s not working over there; it’s certaonly not going to work here in North America. We’re in Canada, for the gods’ sakes.

It’s shameful. That we in North America cannot conduct a civil lecture and allow both sides of a story to be told is nothing less than shameful.

Frederick Krantz, an historian and a teacher at Concordia for thirty-three years (and a teacher at the Liberal Arts College while I studied Western Civilization there) has written a very insightful and thought-provoking article about the narrow-mindedness which resulted in the riot on Monday which is a good read.

In the meantime, I am shocked and disappointed that any Canadian student body cannot conduct itself with honour and civility. As soon as you resort to violence, you’ve ensured a loss of respect for your beliefs. I’m embarrassed; I am ashamed that the student body of the educational instituation that I spent ten years a part of repeatedly illustrates that they are nothing more than bullies attempting to make everyone believe the same thing they do by committing violent acts. Unfortunately, I’m not the one who should be feeling this way. And I highly doubt that the mindless protesters are feeling anything but injured and righteous about their acts on Monday afternoon.