You will know them by their fruits

Today, in the produce section of the local grocer, the price of cherries finally fell to just moderately atrocious.

At home, savouring my first cherries of the season (they’re probably my favourite fruit), the only thing that I found disappointing was that my brother wasn’t around to share them with me.

I don’t remember laughing very much when I was growing up, but I have delightfully silly memories of sitting around the kitchen table with Joe and a basketful of freshly-picked cherries. We would have contests to see who could put the most cherries in our mouths at once (I think the record was 24), which invariably resulted in ghoulish streams of deep red liquid dribbling and gushing down our chins. It was great fun making each other laugh, and we were rather heedless of the tummy upsets to come a couple of hours later. :) Sometimes we had friends sitting with us at that table, but Joe’s tanned face (and his shock of tousled white-blond hair, already bleached by the early summer sun) is the only one I clearly remember.

As I was fondly reminiscing about this, I realized that I will always associate this particular fruit with my brother. And that there are other fruits I will always associate with different people:

Peaches – My mother. She used to spend hot days in the kitchen canning them. A LONG time ago.

Oranges – My dad. He used to eat oranges (like most of his lunches and snacks) standing at the kitchen counter. He probably still does. My co-worker Neno does the same thing in the company kitchenette, and it always reminds me of my dad.

Raspberries – My late Uncle John. He loved them so much, he grew an entire patch of raspberry bushes. He was so proud of them. When he and my Aunt Anne sold the house, the new owners got rid of the raspberry bushes pretty quickly. I think he and I would have agreed that that was a damned shame.

Gooseberries – My Aunt Marie. I have no idea why. Also my old black lab, Lucky, who would eat the berries right off the bush.

Blueberries – Jean, my mother’s best friend. I went blueberry picking with her and my mom a couple of times while in my twenties.

Apples – Also my mom. I don’t think she would appreciate it if I told you why.

Bananas – The old vice principal of the boys’ middle school where I taught English in South Korea. One day I was eating a banana in the teachers’ room and he came by, smiling, said something in Korean, which was translated to me as some kind of comment that Korean women don’t eat bananas in public. Dirty old man. It was around the time of the Monica Lewinski scandal, and most Korean men seemed to associate Western women with bold sexual behaviour.

So, am I the only one who has strong associations between people and food? :)

MSNBC news anchor refuses to report about Paris Hilton

Pure gold ... so good that I have to wonder if it was staged.

Anger

Today, in the forum for a community we share, my friend Erik wrote the following:

Anger doesn't fix anything, action does. All anger does is reinforce the negative and prevent you from moving ahead. It also has the unfortunate side effect of driving people and opportunities away from you.

... I've noticed that anger can become a "security blanket" for people that feel short changed. All I have to say is that if you want to continue to get short changed in life just continue being angry... You'll get to keep your security blanket, but that's about all you'll have one day...

Erik wasn't writing to me or for me directly, but it certainly applies to my life and certain people in my life at the moment ...

A bed of nails

Do you find that some stories you hear stick with you and are replayed over and over again in your own head?

Years ago, my friend Ryan told me about an amazing experience he had while at karaoke, and I think about it with surprising frequency.

The bar where Ryan and his friends liked to go (back in the days before marriage and kids and mortgages) was near the theatre where “Mamma Mia” was being performed. Well, one night the cast of the hit musical showed up for karaoke!

One of the actors sang Bon Jovi’s “Bed of Roses”. Ryan said that until this incident, he didn’t realize that there were such high notes in the song; this guy had an amazing vocal range and could hit and hold every high note that Jon Bon Jovi just grated through.

When I think about this story, it fills me with wonder – what would it actually sound like??? I imagine it would be just a little like a blind person trying to imagine the sky without ever having seen it. I can't imagine being among the audience in this humble karaoke bar, perhaps after fumbling through my own performance of "I Will Survive" or listening to some drunk guy try to sing "Billie Jean" and then be pole-axed, gobsmacked, awestruck by such a display of enormous ability and talent. I imagine it would have been thrilling to be there that night.

And yet, I think about the lyrics:

I want to lay you down on a bed of roses
For tonight I sleep on a bed on nails

If memory serves, the highest notes are on the phrase “bed of nails”. When Jon Bon Jovi sings those words, he does pretty well until the end of the song, when his voice scratches a little bit like fingernails on a blackboard. And yet, it’s a little appropriate, don’t you think? I can imagine some operatic tenor singing these lyrics, and yet the vocal perfection would undermine the whole sense of heartbreak and hard knocks. So if I could hear it performed by someone with an amazing voice, would it forever ruin the song for me?

Yes, I am obsessing about a performance I will never see. :)

Cute toddler story alert!

See here.

Light spills in

Scenes from the forest
Originally uploaded by Rob Millenaar.

Do you ever find yourself overcome by some kind of negativity, whether it be sadness, anxiety, anger, etc. and it totally surprises you? Maybe for something you thought you'd dealt with a long time ago? (Or at least months ago?)

This has been my experience the last few days. It doesn't really matter what it is or why, but for someone who likes to consider herself fairly self-aware, the feeling of clouds pushing down on my head have been a bit of a shock.

So, gradually, determinedly, I'm working through it. Trying to address the thoughts and behaviour patterns that led up to this. Hoping that I can use this experience in a positive way to learn and grow. Maybe this is something I can only handle iteratively, successively deeper each time.

But slowly, light spills in.

Toronto schools to power up rooftops

Forget the Pickering nuclear plant – you could soon be running your fridge on electricity supplied from your kids' school around the corner.

As the first step in an ambitious plan to create a green grid from the rooftops of schools across the city, the Toronto District School Board will spend the summer devising a renewable energy plan involving all 558 of its school sites.

If everything goes smoothly, windmills and solar panels will cover the roofs of 10 schools across the city as early as next summer.

"Because schools are so strategically located throughout the city, we could create a perfect green grid," said Josh Matlow, a board trustee and a driving force behind the idea.

More here.

No Springs, Honest Weight

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Originally uploaded by Noisypond.

Photo taken Saturday at Holtom's Bakery in Erin, ON (est. 1946)

Running with Scissors

Have you ever read a book - not for school, but voluntarily, willingly - and then said, "Oh thank God!" when it was over? This happened to me for the first time today as I finished Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs.

Running is a memoir of a bizarre childhood spent with people clearly suffering from various mental illnesses. His mother, self-centred and sometimes psychotic, ended up dumping her youngest son with her "unconventional" psychiatrist and his family in their filthy, bug-infested home, where he would later be sexually assaulted by another of the doctor's "adopted" sons. And yet Burroughs writes so well and engagingly - allowing the reader to distance herself somewhat from events, just as he had to in order to survive - that I kept reading despite my repulsion for his circumstances.

I'd like to be half the writer that Burroughs is, but not if I have to live through what he did ...


Update at 6:40AM June 25th - I must have been thinking about this post overnight, because when I woke up this morning, I had a thought or two to add. So here goes:

Running with Scissors is told in as light-hearted a manner as possible. I'm sure it's intended to be comedy. And I really, really hate to be so friggin' literal, but I just couldn't find much about his situation to be humourous. Yet it was a compelling read. It was like watching a car wreck - I wanted what was happening to not happen, or at least to tear my eyes away, and yet I was riveted. Which explains, I think, why I was so relieved when the book was over.

Learning the Hard Way

Today I spent hours taking photos outside of a group of people doing conservation work. There were Boy Scouts there to help and everything. I worked really hard to make photos that they would enjoy. And then, when I got home, I realized that there were a few problems (WARNING: the photo-geek talk to follow; you might want to skip to the ***):

1. everyone was wearing hats and I wasn’t using my speedlight flash, so in most photos, people’s eyes are in deep shadow;
2. from my studio work earlier in the week, I had left the camera at a high ISO, which was far too sensitive for the bright outdoors;
   
3. since people were in constant motion, I should have used the auto focus of my lens rather than rely on manual focus;
   
4. I should have used my polarizing filter to alleviate some of the glare from the sun, since I didn’t actually take photos in deep shade like I thought I would.
   

Rookie mistakes.

***Also, this morning, as I was rushing to meet the carpool that would take me to the conservation area today, I got my first speeding ticket ever. I thought the section through which I was driving had a speed limit of 100 km/h, when it was actually 80. I was clocked at 109 km. I should have paid more attention to the signs; I have no one to blame but myself. The officer reduced the penalty so I won’t have to pay such a large fine and I won’t lose any demerit points, but I still feel … what I did was just dumb.

So I am chastising myself a bit for these two things, but also acknowledging that I need to slow down and stop mentally rushing here and yon: to be in the present and to be observant. I want these lessons to really sink in. I guess as long as I can learn from these experiences, it’s all still good.

On a more positive note, I really like these photos I took today:

Also, the group that I organized to help with the conservation work today seemed to have a great time and to find the experience rewarding. We were using logs and brush to create a sediment trap in order to narrow a stream in a section that was too wide (too wide = too slow and too warm for fish to spawn in).

Anyway, in the abacus of the day, the sum total is still positive. Just how much so is up to me.

Machu Picchu, Peru

Machu Picchu, Peru
Originally uploaded by This Is Your Life.

Oh to have lived on such a green mountain among the clouds!

To: Guy Who Screamed Obscenities at the Ballet the Other Night

Via Julie's blog, this posting on Craigslist, which you should read from start to finish:

Date: 2007-05-07, 11:59AM PDT

It was Don Quixote, a rather fun full-length ballet, nobody dies like in the dreary Giselle or Swan Lake.

Another fantastic performance by the SF Ballet. I know you enjoyed it. Our whole section knows you enjoyed it. Every time a dancer would perform a particularly impressive jump, or a series of 3+ pirouettes, you would say, "Whoa!" or "Jaysus!"

This, I didn't mind. As a former dancer and now a season-ticket holder of our City's fine company, I get a kick out of hearing others' excitement for an artform I hold dear. Much better than the guy next to me whose head started to fall like a kid in an 8th grade math class.

So, the curtain falls. The end. Applause.

Curtain comes up and the dancers begin to take their bows. You notice a few people standing up. Was it an ovation? NO! They were LEAVING! These people could not WAIT to get to their cars (they were obviously not MUNI riders, walkers or cab-hailers like most of us in the City)! They had no time for CLAPPING! They had to get out now!

It was then you yelled, in your beautiful gray-haired old crotchety man voice, "WILL YOU PEOPLE SIT DOWN AND LET THE *POLITE* PEOPLE SHOW THEIR APPRECIATION?!," slight pause, "YA ASSHOLES!"

Now, I have seen dozens of ballets in my relatively short lifetime of 25 years. Never, not once, have I encountered a fan of ballet quite like you. At the ballgame, sure, that kind of yelling is par for the course. At the ballgame we eat peanuts and leave the shells in piles at our feet.

Sir, this was THE BALLET.

And for your outburst directed at the people who think somewhere in their tiny brains that it is even remotely acceptable to get up and leave during the curtain call, remotely acceptable to not even clap for the world class artists who just performed a most difficult and worthwhile ballet for our enjoyment (artists whose salary is about that of a standard office receptionist), remotely acceptable to WALK OUT while the house lights are up and we can all (including the dancers) see...

Kind sir, for your outburst, screaming at these "assholes", I thank you from the bottom of my art-loving heart.

I've been wanting to say that for a long time.

And WOW! They sat their asses down, didn't they?! A few were even clapping.

You are the BEST.

Cordially,
Fellow Supporter of the Fine Arts in San Francisco

Doesn't that just rock your socks????? :)

Time for a break from this crazy ride

Callaway County Fair 8.3.2006
Originally uploaded by 10thAvenue.

Now that some big time commitments have eased for me, it’s time to focus on a little self-care: cooking, getting back to the gym, reading, meditating. Hell, maybe even a little more sleep! :)

But the blogging will continue … tomorrow. :)

The nicest thing anyone's told me in a long time

… is “Boy, you’ve got a tough job!!!”

That’s what the “new guy” told me yesterday, after sitting at a desk near mine and hearing the various conversations that were taking place. Granted, yesterday was a hectic, stressful day, dealing with mass confusion, an impatient boss, someone else’s lack of foresight (= cleaning up someone else’s mess, which still might produce customer wrath), people walking up to my desk out of the blue to request something done, support requests to deal with, project work to do, etc. So it was pretty much just a regular day. :-D

But what was nice was the acknowledgement. You know, a little bit of appreciation can go a long way.

I was worried about myself for a moment there

After spending far too much time reading Alex's blog and preparing my assignment for my photography class, I turned my thoughts to what I might blog about tonight. Something quick, I told myself, so I can go to bed at a decent hour for once. So I looked in my "Drafts" folder of my e-mail account, where I store links, etc. so I can blog about them when I need more time. I looked at a couple of things that I had started, and then found this:

I’ve been reading your blog for about 6 months, I also read all of your archives. Ive never posted a comment.

Hmmm, I thought to myself, whose blog am I writing about here? I'm a bit fuzzy about this ...

I feel compelled to do so today. I too struggle with drinking.

Really? I struggle with drinking??????? I seriously wondered for a moment whether I had a split personality like in that episode of Magnum, P.I. where Deirdre (played by a then-unknown Sharon Stone) was utterly confused by what her evil "twin sister" was doing to her life - until she realized that her sister had been killed by the kidnappers (!) when they were children and her personality had been splintered by the trauma and that she in fact had been the very person who was doing these terrible things! (What? It could happen!!!)

As recently as last week, I’ve decided to stop. My husband drinks ...

Husband? Okaaaay, now I know I didn't write this. And it comes rushing back to me ... Remember a few days ago I posted about Linda's incredibly brave sharing of her drinking and driving experience as a cautionary tale to anyone who might be tempted to do the same? Well, if you didn't follow my advice back then, go back and read it - and read what other people had to say. It's incredible how one courageous step can inspire many people - strangers - to avoid making their own huge mistakes, or to address addictions, or to own up to their own mistakes. Like the commenter quoted here. I will let her finish her story:

... and I fear that It will be very difficult to live with him, and still love him, when I am fighting like hell to change my behaviour, change the old drunk me, into the new sober me, while I watch him to continue to drink. I fear for my marriage, because I have decided that my becomming sober is the most important thing in my life right now. I have not yet looked for outside help….I suspect I will at some point.

All of that being said, I’m sure you realize how lucky you are to have a husband that stood by you, and I assume helped you though what was probably one of the worst times of your life. You have given me inspiration to push forward with my plan to sober up… You beat the booze, you stood up for yourself against that bottle and took control of your life. And I will use you as a guide post, when my road takes unexpected turns.

It all makes me think I could use a little more courage in my life. Though I think you must concede that admitting I actually wondered if I had a split personality - who wrote about her drinking problem - might qualify as some kind of bravery. Kinda. Maybe. ;->


p.s. - This post is dedicated to my brother, who is likely the only one of my readers who has any chance of remembering the episode of Magnum, P.I. to which I referred tonight. :->

Hope

I have a friend who is going through hell.

Have you ever tried to be there for a friend when it’s one setback or calamity after another? And eventually you feel as though you’ve run out of words to reassure?

I guess we all experience seemingly hopeless situations at one point or another. Maybe the lesson we need to learn when it seems the world is falling down around our ears is to be open to the help that comes from unexpected sources. Maybe it's persevering until things get better or the calvary comes.

Over the weekend I’ve spent a lot of time reading stories posted on the website for the Rolling Dog Ranch. The RDR is a refuge for disabled animals who would otherwise be euthanized, such as blind horses and three-legged dogs and deaf cats. Okay, I know it sounds weird, but check it out for yourself. Their stories are remarkable and a testament to love, life, and compassion. Start out with the story of Spirit, the paralysed Yorkshire terrier, who was beaten and crippled by her drunken owner, then rescued and brought to the ranch. Like every story, Spirit endures incredibly bleak conditions, yet somehow retains the will to live and the ability to love. Notably, the hand that plucked her out of her predicament came out of nowhere. Such stories are testament to hope.

I know not every story ends rosily, but enough do for one to wrestle with fate, to grapple with the odds, and fight as hard as one can for a positive outcome. That’s what my friend is doing, and I along with her. And I have to believe, like Spirit, her story will be one of grace, love, and determination.

Cutie

DSC_0066
Originally uploaded by Noisypond.

Hong

DSC_0024
Originally uploaded by Noisypond.

Rob

DSC_0041
Originally uploaded by Noisypond.

This is one of my very favourite portraits from yesterday. Rob has an interesting face.

Linda

DSC_0042bw
Originally uploaded by Noisypond.

I love this shot - both in colour and in black and white.