Daily Archives: March 11, 2002

Expanse Of Poetry

We now have a new refrigerator. “New” in this case means “new to us”; it’s actually about eight to ten years old, possibly older. It’s huge! Being used to a five-foot high fridge with a single door that opens up to reveal a freezer unit inside, I was highly unprepared for the reality of a grown-up fridge. It has room to stand pop bottles and wine upright! And it has two freezer doors on the left – the upper one has six ice trays and boxes, the lower one has room for lots of ground beef and chicken and frozen juice. Best of all, though, is the fact that it has seperate temperature controls – I can turn the freezer temperature up high enough to keep ice cream solid while not freezing lettuce and celery in the crisper. Woo-hoo! We hosted our book club last night, and it even fit the drinks and food that guests brought over without having to take out things like salad dressings and jams (foods that don’t spoil during a single evening without refrigeration). It’s glorious!

So with this new expanse of fridge door, I’ve just spent half an hour moving around my magnetic poetry and discovering all sorts of potential hidden messages within the seemingly random mess. I adore magnetic poetry, but I think I miss the point most of the time: I see a couple of words and a whole line of poetry leaps to mind, so I search for the other words to make up the phrase and I don’t have them. I think other people use the words which are there to create unique sentences – sort of like a Choose Your Own Adventure with the English language. I have two poetry sets – the original set I got for my birthday last year, and an out-of-print Hallowe’en set that I found on eBay last fall. It glows in the dark. That’s a lot of words already, but I want one more – the Shakespearean set. Maybe the Cat set too, because it has words like “purr” and “whiskers”. Just think – I could have poems like “believe and summon arms / of sweet spring / call forsooth thy knavish gods / and purr o calico creature / in worship of raw steel”. Or something equally outlandish.

Sleepover

Spring. Ha. Saturday night turned into a hurricane-type rain and wind storm, followed by baby blizzards on and off all through Sunday and a temperature high of Damned Cold. Only in Canada. More specifically, only in Montreal. I expect my mother to call any moment to tell me that the forsythia is blooming in Oakville.

I had a fantastic time on Saturday night at the slumber party. Most of the time I hang around with guys, so the last time I was at an all-female sleepover was in elementary school. It was terrific to just sit around, chatting, munching non-nutritious foods (although we used very high-quality European chocolate for the fondue which means more cocoa and less sugar, and there was a lot of fruit involved), sharing daiquiris and watching movies. We even made a montage video for the one person who was unable to attend due to pregancy complications and total bed-rest orders. We all surprised ourselves by actually staying up until five (everyone was secretly certain we’d call it a night around one), and we slept until eleven when we got up to make pancakes and bacon and tea. All in all, a wonderful experience. It’s an odd feeling to realise that I have a group of girl-friends I can hang out with as well as guy-friends. It’s not that I choose to hang out with guys over girls; it’s just that I see people as people, and spend time with interesting ones, no matter what their sex.

In other news, I have been dubbed a Forest Breeze in the Natural Wonder allotment of titles:

Not only that, in a Major Arcana multiple-choice, I came out as the High Priestess:

The High Priestess is the third card in the Major Arcana sequence and focuses on mystical knowledge, intuition, wisdom, the unconscious mind, hidden knowledge, silence, dreams, ebb and flow of movement, female mystery, and so forth.This is a card that comes up a lot for me, and it’s usually trying to tell me that I should trust myself. Ironic that this card should be the one that best describes me in an on-line test. Coincidence? Or is it conspiracy? I think the universe is laughing at me.