I closed my eyes and the water rose up over my shoulders and rushed into my ears

This is the tattoo I just got:

This is my horoscope for the week:

I dare you to say yes to a possibility you've said no to in the past. I double dare you to try an impossible thing before lunch each day. I triple dare you to imagine you're a genius at inspiring people to like you and help you. I quadruple dare you to drive overly stable people crazy for all the right reasons. I quintuple dare you to fantasize that your so-called delusions of grandeur have begun to contain more than a few grains of truth.

Hmmm.

So, clearly I have not been keeping up with el-jay. I honestly mean to, but then I don't. I get distracted, or what I have to say is, ultimately, too much to say. I've been having a good-bad few weeks. I'm not actually sure where to start, if there is a point starting or if I should just say that I've been turned inside-outside-inside-out, a little. I feel odd, like I'm not going to make sense. I was going to tell the story of my bruised face (accident involving my bike and my fist and some mud and a hill) and my 6 hr biking trip (from the Plateau to Verdun to the Old Port and back home to St. Henri again) and how I've cut my hair again (short on one side, shorter than I've ever had it...the other side is longer. I like it.) Maybe about what I've done this week (watching a meteor shower on the canal) or what I'm going to do (queer bookfair this weekend and then probably the pride parade.) But it seems like too much to spit out right now.

And Jill just walked in and recounted to me a story I told her about how whenever a member of my family came home from Vancouver, they had to bring coconut buns. Then she handed me a coconut bun. So I'm going to go make tea and eat the bun. But I'll probably be back when I have more time.

we're moved in...6 hrs up and down stairs to the 3rd floor. But we're here! With no internet....

I was thinking today that I might want to get a tattoo of a blackberry bush on my shoulder, maybe even a quarter sleeve (though dad- usually so unconservative- once told me he thinks sleeves are the least comprehensible tattoos ever.) I went to google image search to see if I could find other people's blackberry tattoos, and came up with images of the electronic Blackberry device tattooed on people's bodies instead. Sigh. I don't understand that but whatever, whatever people want. For exmaple, I still want blackberries.

Because they grew alongside my house, because I once decided I wanted to be reincarnated as a blackberry bush. Mostly for the way each section breaks open in my mouth.

Yesterday we went to see the Drag Races at Montreal Fringe and despite having to stand for two hours, it was pretty amazing. The ladies were hilarious and very, very dirty (at one point during some intense simulated sex between an audience member and a contestant, I could feel the mum standing in front of me with her daughter  cringe.) The point of the Drag Race was that each contestant complete this series of tasks: Pick an audience member, make them up, ride a trike to a table of drinks, make a drink and walk through a tire-course, serve the drink to the audience member and while they drink it, jump rope (if the drink is judged to be bad, you have to go back and remake it) then pick a number and dance/lipsynch to that song onstage. There were two teams- one of professional Drag Queens, one of Fringe Festival actors/directors/etc- and one winner from each team. None of my favorites won, though Jill's did. The event was mostly in French, but I'm happy to say I understood all of it which kind of surprised me because I can read and understand French, but often humor is lost on me because I simply do not know the slang. I get why people fall in love with Drag Queens, though- they are so beautiful and have such huge personalities you can't help but feel a little fluttery around them.

This is...the roughest of rough drafts. I don't even think it is particularly good, and I'll probably delete this in like 20 minutes when I discover it is ambling and trite and too-wordy and not at all good enough for my standards (I already hate the ending and several of the lines in the poem.) But I was missing home- and dad's muffins- so badly this morning when I woke up that this is the first thing to occur to me.

( here )

Sometimes when I am reading poetry I come across a poem that quiets everything- the room, the noises, the anxiety, my thoughts- for the few moments I am caught up in it. Maybe not the whole poem, maybe just a line of it. Whichever. I like this one tremenduously.



Love After Love

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

--Derek Walcott

Also, after I had been asleep for an hour last night I woke up or "woke up" at 4:30 am to see a gigantic spider crawling up my wall. I freaked out, jumped up from my bed...but it wasn't there anymore. I ransacked the bed, the sheets, pulled the mattress up, moved my clothes out of the way...no spider. I'm still not sure if I had a particularly lucid dream or if there was a spider, but I spent the night on the couch and unless I have the chance to go over that whole room today (which is not looking likely because my ankle is so swollen and it's about 6 pm) I'm going to be sleeping there again. I'm really quite unhappy about not knowing if I was dreaming...I feel like I was, but am unsure at this point.

I had a somewhat surreal evening. We went to see opera under the stars downtown, sitting outside with hundreds of others watching an opera that was going on inside being broadcast to us, drinking sangria out of a carton of orange juice, eating apple & nutella sandwiches on baguettes and munching at the vegan carrot cake I made. I fell in crush, as I often do when out and about in this city (there are many attractive and talented and intelligent people here and I'm swayed, I'll admit, by them at times.)

Then Jill had an asthma attack and no inhaler, and we went to find the medics who insisted we go to the hospital. The woman thought Jill and I were a couple (I was holding her hand) and acted kind of oddly, wouldn't look at me as she helped Jill even when I talked to her. We got in the cab and went to the nearest hospital, which was small and French, so I translated for Jill and the nurse and then sat in the waiting room for two hours, writing my observations down because all I had was a blank notebook (I went through Jill's bag later and found a book of poetry to read, thank god.)

So here's a sample of my train of thought (punctuation intentional, since I wrote it this way)

in the hospital waiting room everyone is watching the hockey game. the ambulance attendants have parked a man in a stretcher awaiting transport at an angle where he, too, can see the screen. i don't know who's playing- men in red and blue jerseys face off on a rink ringed with ads. the guy across from me looks over every once in awhile, goes back to sleep. man in the front row of seats, IV bag and open hospital gown, cheers loudly has a rubber glove balloon with a grinning face on the pole he drags to carry his meds. i have used every ounce of my french abilities trying to translate for jill, who has been taken somewhere in a back room. man waiting to check in winks at me, i frown, look away. i am worried, where is jill? pull the neck of my tanktop up feeling tougher than i have in awhile i refuse to panic to feel the anxiety that steps on my heels. people with protective masks over their faces- one is a man wearing a red sports suit but nothing else. the man who winked before approaches, retreats like he's negotiating a strike. i bite viciously into an apple,want to learn a face that says: "i am no one's prey, buddy" instead of this soft, collapsable snarl. proof: the man sits a seat away from me, makes small talk, tells me i am beautiful, my eyes are beautiful, and i can't be rude afterall give in and answer him. he has been stabbed through the foot- i make short answers read my book tap a finger. he gets the message, leaves with another wink. a loud woman from georgia spells out her information for the french attendant nearby, her accent clanging against the plexiglass barrier.

I keep staying up later and later. Last night it was coffee at 8 pm and up till 3:30 am, almost tempted to go find the sunrise but sleep won before 5. Tonight I want to eat pancakes on the back porch wrapped in my pink and white comforter till the wee hours, but I don't want to do it alone. And I only have healthy food, no pancakes or sweets, which is what I want...last night I went to the store at about 2 am, and the minute I closed and locked the front door (you can lock it from the inside and close it behind you as you leave) I realized that my keys (on their rainbow-star keychain, nonetheless) were sitting on the couch. Went to the store anyway, wondering if the guy who sometimes makes up songs about what I'm getting would be there (he wasn't.) Came back and tried to force open the screen in my bedroom window, but it wasn't budging at all, the latches on either side doing their job for once. Finally, searching with the pads of my fingers, I found a tiny hole off to one side, slid my index finger in and felt around for the latch. The cat watched me from the desk as I pushed up the screen with one hand and levered myself inside with the other leaving my shoes on the top steps below. She wasn't concerned, just curious.

Instead of spending time with people while I can't sleep, I'm writing poetry I won't show to anyone and thinking about pancakes.

I just spent four and a half hours doing math. Pretty sure I promised myself after I finished grade eleven math that I would never, ever do math again. I know that is kind of a ridiculous promise, but math has always brought me to intense panic. Formulas leave my head faster than a bathtub drains of water. I couldn't tell you the equations I used all afternoon to calculate median, mean, or mode...they are simply no longer there although I spent so long on them today. I have to struggle to make sense of the lessons, reading them more than once to get even a basic gist of what I am supposed to be doing. Math makes me feel so stupid- can I admit that I'm not used to having to struggle this hard in school? It sounds pretentious and I don't mean for it to be, but I'm used to being on pretty firm ground in general. I love to learn things and I would love to be able to find math beautiful, but it is so abstract in a way I cant understand. I work so much with emotions, but I get nothing from math- it is cold and blank, doesn't even blink when I throw feelings at it. I wish I would see it like I imagine mathematicians do, as the fabric of the world, intersecting formulas that stitch everything together, but it won't even meet me halfway, or I've got a mental block when it comes to our relationship. Damnit. Five more weeks of intense work. (I really avoid telling people about this, because they just tell me tell me it's going to be good for me, or maybe I'll learn how to do it or I just need to persevere and my problems with math are that I just don't try. It isn't that, though I wish it were...it would be so much nicer to just be a lazy ass than know I am actually not intelligent when it comes to this subject.)

I always forget how good exercise feels until I do it after a long period of not doing it. I haven't actually done guided exercise in awhile- I walk almost everywhere, so I get some good exercise, but I haven't done any guided or direct exercise for awhile, mostly because I have a very mixed-up history with exercise. I know I've explained a bit about my problems with body image...

( obviously this might be triggering )

For the first time, in my dream last night, I experienced physical pain. I mean, I've experienced other feelings and sensations in dreams- lust, sexual feelings, anger, fear- but never anything quite this physical. In the dream, I was at a doctor's office in only my underwear, and she was prodding my stomach telling me that in a moment she was going to find the tender spot that would explain why I was so sick. I clenched my toes and fingers in anticipation till she found it, and then the physical pain was intense. She told me I had what is called a Renaissance Sandwich. (I don't know...) The rest of the dream was a muddle of working for business environments where I was not dressed in business attire. (My head, I tell you. The other night in one part of my dream I was trying to strangle a puppy...)

Hmmm, back when I started writing this at 10:45 am Jill came on facebook and asked if I wanted to go dumpster diving with her. Of course I did! It actually turned out to be a horrible day for diving, as her bike was broken and the shops we did hit up were empty. After that didn't pan out, we decided to walk up Mont Royal to find this bulk foods store Jill swears is there, but we didn't see it, so we turned onto St. Denis and found a chocolatier where we got mugs of coffee and some odd little chocolate-and-marzipan bird's nest cake.

Then Jill and I took her new bike to the bike shop and headed to the park to sit under a tree and sing until she had to head to work and I came home for some dinner and...essay writing.

It was a really beautiful day, actually. Sunshine and a good friend. Yes.

I was looking through my old entries recently, and I came across the (badly drawn, by present standards) comic that began the new version of this journal. And looking at it, I realized that nearly everything I had drawn as a possibility there had actually happened. I even ended up hiking up the mountain with Jill to see that exact view of the city, illuminated at night. I'm not saying this is mystical or odd (per say) but kind of comforting. I did things. I always forget to look at what I have done, instead focusing on what I have not accomplished. It's like Bo was saying to me when I was unsure about whether or not I should have feelings for that person- I have done a lot of things I thought I was incapable of doing. And that's something, and I need to stop bullshitting myself and thinking that I haven't made any progress, because I have.

( the comic )