june 25, 2001. Summer is finally here. It's been asserting itself in spurts: a sweltering moment here, a sticky afternoon there. Yesterday brought wonderful warm showers, cooling the intense stickiness to something more manageable. Today I can think about making pasta without automatically giving up the idea as 'too hot.' No, I'm not doing the traditional 'oh my god who let it get this hawwwt?' whine. Summer as an abstract season is not a big surprise to me, but I am living in a very different climate this year, so let me off the hook a bit, willya? In reference to the linked xeney entry, I'd like to proudly declare that we have no air-conditioning at work or home. We have these funny external portals called windows, and we keep them open as much as possible for as long as necessary. This is really the way to live: instead of shivering through another artificially chilled summer-in-office, I can a) dress like it's summer so I don't melt during the trip to & from work b) smell the summer when I work and feel the warm Edenic air on my skin c) know sharp, exquisite relief when it rains for 2 days and I can finally wear clothes. (Last night I was walking around in my underwear and I was still too hot.) I dunno. I'll probably have a whole different opinion when August hits and we're panting on the floor like long-haired dogs and I can't think about eating because the process of digestion will raise my internal temperature to an intolerable level. At least the cat will have a worse time of it than I. It's been a weird weekend. A good weekend, because it was filled with good things and expanding experiences, but a weird weekend because I was severely depressed all through Saturday and I didn't once feel through the last 3 days that the effort of writing it down would be worth it in the end. The depression is rare; the apathy towards writing is very rare. My life is so quiet these days that when something fun and interesting and exciting happens, I can't wait to get it down on…errr…zeros and ones. I'll just have to summarize and see what happens. Thursday: I floated through another day at work. Every once in while I would feel a flood of shame admixed with anger when I thought of my $500 computer problem, but on Thursday it became clear that there was very little that I could do about it. I became more and more resigned to the idea of enduring this spell of shit luck and it made the day pass on wings. More or less. The Boy was late coming home again, thanks to the vagrancies of his delivery schedule. I buzzed around our nest unplugging appliances, feeling a huge lift from the simple act of unplugging the toaster and the 4-track...despite the fact that unplugging those items would not contribute greatly to a drop in consumption (we don't make toast 24 hours a day, unlike some people I know.) It's funny: I like to think that I can entertain myself without electricity, but 20 minutes of silence had me twitchy and restless. I need me my background music! How humiliating. Since I was filled with nervous energy anyway, I decided to leave a note for the Boy and walk to the Solstice celebration. I put my hair into pigtails, pulled on my short shorts, a black tank top and the ubiquitous 8-holes - all of which I mention only because the Boy caught up with me as I was walking down the hill, and claims that he was checking me out before he realized that a) he knew who I was and b) he was married to me. It was a little uncomfortable at first, since the gathering seemed to be composed entirely of hippies who knew each other. We shouldn't have worried: there's something uniquely casual about Maritime people and being a hippie doesn't hurt the ability to be welcoming. Soon I was part of a Frisbee circle and getting in touch with my general Frisbee suckiness (I can catch all right, but my throw is terrible). But I didn't hit anyone on the head and nobody asked me to sit quietly under a tree, so I suppose I did all right. We also played a couple of touchy-feelie drama games that served to break the ice a bit, as well as allow us to ricochet off one another in a shouting confusion of friendly bodies. We tried to do something ceremonial with the floating candles, but the pond was too big for a surrounding circle and our snaking procession lacked leadership. Still, we tried. No one could think of anything properly unifying to sing and all I could think of were hymns so I kept my mouth shut. Eventually some people splashed barefoot into the water and finished the circle. And oh god: The Mosquitos And Blackflies Were Just Abominable. There is nothing quite as irritating as being in a buggy park with a bunch of nature-types when your pride insists that you pretend to 'be cool' with the Nature in all of her constant bug biting glory. I refused to smack quite a few of the little vampires when we were all holding hands, because I didn't want to screw up the atmosphere. And did I have any self-control in the days that followed? No. I did not. I scratched my body with apish abandon, thus making everything worse. I am still covered in enormous welts. I even got a few new ones yesterday to add to my collection. Still, it's better to be covered in welts and mild peeling sunburn than to spend an entire summer in an air-conditioned box. I have spent enough summers in the box to be certain on this point. The park gathering broke up shortly after 10:30. I was sort of sleepy and wanted to go home, but the Boy was excited by the prospect of jamming. We resolved to go for a little while, stopping en route to pick up the ukulele (of course). Miri & J showed up with drums and a didgeridu. We played on the pavement until the neighbours complained, then we moved into the basement. What followed was beautiful. I don't think that very many people there would've considered themselves musicians in anything more than a dilettante sense, but there were enough competent players on rhythm and guitar to let the rest of us fool around happily. I sang and danced and shook whatever instrument I found in my hand. I did some nice work on the drum set and some really horrid wailing on the harmonica. The Boy was over the moon with joy, playing jazz chords on the ukulele and harmonizing effortlessly with the didg. I was particularly happy to introduce a few song scraps directly from my last percussion jam at the UC Jaymore: "Papa Was A Rolling Stone" and "Cecilia." (Yes yes, the beauty is all a wonderful triumph of the collective…but look at what I did! Me me me!) At about midnight we made our excuses and went home to plug in the alarm clock & sleep. We returned tired, bitten and hungry but very content. Friday was the beginning of a very dark period for me. The Boy rushed in the door and hauled me to my feet, overjoyed at the prospect of the ritual Friday night grease-fest. Instead of succumbing to my usual bad-week remedy (a few pieces of Unlucky Fried Kitten), we tried out the Italian/Greek place in the heart of the beautiful stripmall district. (I suppose they had to concentrate ethnicities for greater power against the overwhelming manga-cake atmosphere). I wasn't expecting very much at all, but they surprised us with excellent souvlaki, calamari and spanokopita. The baklava was an extra added bonus. I can only hope that the Italian food will be as good - I haven't had a good piece of proscuitto in a long time. (Ha. Don't let my assumed ethnicity fool you - I haven't had any proscuitto since my uncle slipped while cutting off a hunk of the meat, sliced up his hand, and managed to get the cut infected. Devil meat.) After returning home with swollen kitten bellies, we made the first big mistake of the evening: watching Unbreakable. I still find it difficult to express how much this film disturbed me. I have a big fear of pain and perhaps an overdeveloped sense of my personal space; this meant that the home invasion scenes were torture to watch. And the twist at the end! Let's put it this way: I have a horror of the depths of the human heart. I also tend to live a great deal of my psychological life on a metaphorical plane. I don't think I'm really Rocketbride or that my purse is in some mystical way The Pink Bag of Justice, but I do have fun with those ideas on a very deep level. As Q once said, I drink the drama that is my life. I am, in a way, a personality in search of an archetype. And to see a character that is also in search of an archetype turn so profoundly evil shook me to the core. And what made it worse were that all the bad things in the movie were relatively local and shabby examples of evil. They were not, shall we say, Desire or Loki quality evil as in The Sandman. All the same, I went to bed terrified and had awful dreams that night. Every day since I've closed and locked my door as soon as darkness falls, despite what the cat may have to say about wanting to go outside. It was an awful, awful experience, and I'm puzzled that I'm the only one who has been so affected by it. That gave Saturday a pretty bad start. I tried to catch up on housework with the Boy, but he was in one of his rare 'you have to trick me into being responsible' moods, in which he acts like a sulky 12-year-old when ripped away from his video games. "Mark often helped [with the housework]; but as he always took the view - and Jane could feel it even if he did not express it in words - that 'anything would do' and that Jane made a lot of unnecessary work and that men could keep house with a tithe of the fuss and trouble which women made about it, Mark's help was one of the commonest causes of quarrels between them." - that hideous strength, c.s. lewis I was already cranky, tired, sad and (although I didn't realize it at the time) profoundly lonely & restless…so I have to admit that I didn't respond as well as I might. We ended up in a big screaming fight that quickly morphed into a hideous depression on my part, one which took the whole day to shake. For hours I felt as if I was literally going insane. I didn't really recover until the Boy began to barbecue corn and chicken on our borrowed hibachi. It was the first time we've ever barbecued together, as well as the first time this summer, and we were dumbstruck at how well everything had turned out. (The roasted corn was particularly wonderful and we ate it crouched on the porch as we waited for the potatoes and chicken to finish.) This was good, but it wasn't quite enough. My depression was finally banished once and for all during Rev. Robyn's sermon on the nature of evil. She said, quite sensibly, that it's easy to push evil into a metaphor when our babies aren't being machete'd. And she also said that evil usually came from fear, which is why it was important to trust and have faith. This really hit home for me. I realized that a lot of Saturday's anger had come from the secret conviction that I would always be as lonely and isolated as I am now, and that if the Boy couldn't completely fill my need for human society, then I would forever be alone & sad. Considered in the light of fear, it seems ridiculous. How could the Boy fill the shoes of dozens of friends and relatives? And why should he? It was my fear that had made me despair on Saturday, and it was my fear that led me to say mean, poisonous things to my husband. A small evil to be sure, but one that ought to be seriously considered. This revelation made it much easier to attend the subsequent end-of-year choir party with a light heart. The gathering was at a lakefront cottage on the South Mountain, and as we drove I discovered the difference between 'country' and Country. Hell, I lived in an area with paved roads and convenient fast food. This was rural Nova Scotia. This was the woods. Through the afternoon we managed to have a really excellent time without making too much effort. There was lots of food, lots of laughter, lots of kindness, lots of everything that makes a choir a community as opposed to a committee. I played with the choir director's daughter (a.k.a. the baby cougar) in the pouring rain and truly relaxed for the first time in days. There is really only one incident worth mentioning. After lunch, everyone went out for a swim in the lake. Everyone, that is, except for me: I was far too bloated after lunch, so I decided to sit quietly until my kitten belly subsided. This was, of course, boring beyond belief. As I watched my husband swim out to the lake and as 80-year-old parishioners paddled around, I became profoundly jealous and shortly afterwards slightly reckless. I haven't swam long distances since I was a pre-teen; what in heaven's name convinced me that I was still able to go to the float without preamble? Easy: stupid, stupid pride. And yes, I nearly drowned. One of the most terrifying moments of my life occurred when I realized that I was both too tired to reach the float and too far out of the shore to touch the bottom. I swam on my back, but I panicked & turned around again when I saw how far off course I had drifted. I started swallowing water. I began to panic in earnest. I was saved, of course. One of my favourite fellow parishioners ran out to get me as soon as he heard me cry out; by then I had reached solid ground, but I was still pathetically glad to see him splashing towards me. He took my pulse efficiently and led me back to shore without one word of rebuke. All the while I felt hot & humiliated. Adults don't do stupid things like this, I though bitterly. Kids misjudge their capabilities and almost drown, not grown women. I was furious with myself and still deeply afraid from my panic attack. The Boy soon came to join me, completely unaware that I had thought I was dying just a few moments before. We sat on the beach for awhile, feeling scared and sad. When I had recovered somewhat, I decided to go back to the house and get some clothes on - there was no way that I was going back into the water that day. I started brushing debris off my feet, including a damp little leaf. A persistent leaf. And then I figured it out: LEECH! I started to laugh. It was just perfect, really: I make a series of stupid decisions, almost drown, and then get attached by a bloodsucking invertebrate. No, it didn't hurt. No, I didn't bleed very much; I think the leech just found flesh and not a vein. It was just…hilarious. Leech. Heh. The Boy immediately ran off for the salt shaker. He was very soothing too, the model of bed - er - beachside manner. That is, until he found the leech between his toes. Suddenly the salt shaker was needed elsewhere… It continued to rain all day, a soft sweet rain that washed the world clean. I felt it soak into my hair & body and I was comforted. this time 4 years ago: you can't spell 'whiskey' without t~r~o~u~b~l~e