Okay, so, what is loud, messy, wet, naked, and on fire?
The Late Night Adult Show of the 2005 Waterloo Busker's Festival. OH my. It started off with about 45 minutes of pre-show abuse of irresponsible parents who wouldn't take their kids home... and then it got dirty. A spelling bee of crude sexual euphemisms was the low-light, but the buskers-turned-Full-Monty made up for it. Trulee Odd wearing a string thong with a 3 ft long gold lame, uhm... appendage while working the crowd for donations was definitely something youngsters should not be able to see. Costume particulars aside, though, the tandem fire-breathing by scantily clad men was not a bad concept overall.
Despite the fact that I have neither the funds nor the inclination to keep up with my photographer honey, there are moments when I wish I had a half-decent point-and-shoot on hand.
Unfortunately, the weather gods did not like the near-nudity and the rain began bucketing down just as the fire breathers were really getting going. They toughed it out for as long as they could, after a full day of scrambling to avoid inclement weather already, so at the very least, my hat is off to the performers and crew for a very interesting weekend (and yes, I did put a $20 in the bin for the Late Show, which raises funds for the festival itself).
Cheers all. One more summer weekend, but somehow I don't think it'll top this one.
Monday, August 29, 2005
Monday, August 22, 2005
Life-altering experiences, 7 years after
Today is my 7th "not-dead" day. I feel in many ways this is much more an accomplishment than any old birthday - I mean, *I* wasn't the one who did all the work associated with my Birthday, for that reason I think birthday presents should be given to Moms on their kids birthdays. But not being dead was something that took a hell of alot of bloody-minded determination, I think.
Seven years ago today, sometime between 9 and 10 in the morning, an insignificant and otherwise undetected gallstone made a play for lasting notoriety and took out my pancreas. While pancreatitis is a commonly known complication in middle-aged male alchoholics, usually following advanced cirrhosis and other things, its appearance in an only-slightly-overweight, active, generally healthy 27-year-old woman boggled more than one doctor. During the following weeks of intensive care and months of bed rest, reparative surgery, infections, rehospitalizations and increasingly strange complications, more than one idiot tried to insist I must be an alchoholic or drug user of 10+ years, just to make themselves feel better that they knew the REASON. Laughable given how much more of a "drunk" I seem to be now - my bi-monthly benders of more than one glass of wine in the same weekend NEVER happened before I was 27.
What a trip it has been. The same doctors who couldn't believe I'd live out the week eventually came to be equally astonished by how well I had recovered. I now teach aerobics classes on a semi-regular basis, do yoga weekly, walk or bike whenever I can manage, and work like a fiend at a career that has only gone up since my illness. I remain diabetic (due to the near total ablation of my pancreas), but can't for the life of me convince either of the endocrinologists or the gastroenterologist I've seen that there's anything to be concerned about. I deal with unexplained, recurrent bouts of fatigue, pain, and sometimes fevers, but hell, so do people I know who have all their organs. I think that's actually due to a lingering and determined sinus infection that survived the whole pancreatitis thing along with me. I get heartburn much more easily, probably due to the repeated gastroscopy procedures and the fact that my stomach was impacted by complications... but again, some people suffer worse just for eating a donut.
I think the most profound result of the experience was a realization of my utter mortality, rather earlier in life than most people have to confront it. This is good and bad. I can now present a very morbid side to some people. I am not traumatized by death and loss, though it is still sad when it touches me and mine. I can smile at a funeral and the thought that the next one could ever be mine. The idea of being dead and gone someday, soon or late, doesn't really faze me. I mean, I'm not looking to hasten it along, but it'll happen, and this is the way of things. Don't plan any grand wake for me - I'll be long gone and not there to enjoy it. Take the insurance money, plant a tree if you must, just make sure someone feeds the cats. That's all.
I am anti-materialistic to a point that frustrates some who know me, so ready can I be to discard clutter from my life. Even when the result is a baby going out with the bathwater, I'm more prone to shrug it off than run back to Value Village and dive back into the donation bin. I still hoard food, a relic of the experience of going 5 months without being able to eat, many weeks of that not even being able to drink water while medical science walked the fine line between nutrition and liver toxicity with TPN therapy. For almost a year more I could not eat much without pain. Now, despite that, I also can't seem to lose weight, partly due to the hoarding psychology - eat now, against future famine. VERY hard to deprogram when such trauma has entered the cellular level of one's being.
I've lost my fear of heights. For a few of years, August 22 was "lets do rollercoasters" day, something I had planned to do, for the first time in my life, the very first Day of the Gallstones. It was a year later that I first made it. I had never flown before this happened and had misgivings about it, but since have found myself a fascinated airline passenger, eager to demand a window seat and happy to watch the skies for hours on end.
My sense of humour has changed - I'll leave it to its victims to decide if for better or for worse. It's sharper than ever, but more than a little sarcastic. But I've grown a sense of art, as well, and have realized the vitality of creative endeavour, of some sort, any sort. I've come to seek quality - in lovingly and aestheticly handmade articles filling my home - than quantity and economy.
The days go by quickly still, but always a little more noted than I think they were before this. I love the smell of the air. Noting the rainfall is a small joy, not an excuse to grimace about the weather. The heat is oppressive this summer, but that just makes every small breeze, even the one instigated by the bedroom ceiling fan, a treasure. Email from a friend earns a deserved smile. My insane cats, maddening as they can be, are the loveliest things when the wiggle and purr just to be near me. A new baby (my Endo doc's little girl, actually) beamed a big smile today when I talked to her and held out the bright yellow thing she had been gazing at with fascination. On my lunch hour, I took an enjoyable little drive for 15 minutes and brought back some treats for the team slogging away here.
It is so much more important to me to find these moments in my days, because really, I've learned that moments are all we really get to have.
Happy live-day.
Seven years ago today, sometime between 9 and 10 in the morning, an insignificant and otherwise undetected gallstone made a play for lasting notoriety and took out my pancreas. While pancreatitis is a commonly known complication in middle-aged male alchoholics, usually following advanced cirrhosis and other things, its appearance in an only-slightly-overweight, active, generally healthy 27-year-old woman boggled more than one doctor. During the following weeks of intensive care and months of bed rest, reparative surgery, infections, rehospitalizations and increasingly strange complications, more than one idiot tried to insist I must be an alchoholic or drug user of 10+ years, just to make themselves feel better that they knew the REASON. Laughable given how much more of a "drunk" I seem to be now - my bi-monthly benders of more than one glass of wine in the same weekend NEVER happened before I was 27.
What a trip it has been. The same doctors who couldn't believe I'd live out the week eventually came to be equally astonished by how well I had recovered. I now teach aerobics classes on a semi-regular basis, do yoga weekly, walk or bike whenever I can manage, and work like a fiend at a career that has only gone up since my illness. I remain diabetic (due to the near total ablation of my pancreas), but can't for the life of me convince either of the endocrinologists or the gastroenterologist I've seen that there's anything to be concerned about. I deal with unexplained, recurrent bouts of fatigue, pain, and sometimes fevers, but hell, so do people I know who have all their organs. I think that's actually due to a lingering and determined sinus infection that survived the whole pancreatitis thing along with me. I get heartburn much more easily, probably due to the repeated gastroscopy procedures and the fact that my stomach was impacted by complications... but again, some people suffer worse just for eating a donut.
I think the most profound result of the experience was a realization of my utter mortality, rather earlier in life than most people have to confront it. This is good and bad. I can now present a very morbid side to some people. I am not traumatized by death and loss, though it is still sad when it touches me and mine. I can smile at a funeral and the thought that the next one could ever be mine. The idea of being dead and gone someday, soon or late, doesn't really faze me. I mean, I'm not looking to hasten it along, but it'll happen, and this is the way of things. Don't plan any grand wake for me - I'll be long gone and not there to enjoy it. Take the insurance money, plant a tree if you must, just make sure someone feeds the cats. That's all.
I am anti-materialistic to a point that frustrates some who know me, so ready can I be to discard clutter from my life. Even when the result is a baby going out with the bathwater, I'm more prone to shrug it off than run back to Value Village and dive back into the donation bin. I still hoard food, a relic of the experience of going 5 months without being able to eat, many weeks of that not even being able to drink water while medical science walked the fine line between nutrition and liver toxicity with TPN therapy. For almost a year more I could not eat much without pain. Now, despite that, I also can't seem to lose weight, partly due to the hoarding psychology - eat now, against future famine. VERY hard to deprogram when such trauma has entered the cellular level of one's being.
I've lost my fear of heights. For a few of years, August 22 was "lets do rollercoasters" day, something I had planned to do, for the first time in my life, the very first Day of the Gallstones. It was a year later that I first made it. I had never flown before this happened and had misgivings about it, but since have found myself a fascinated airline passenger, eager to demand a window seat and happy to watch the skies for hours on end.
My sense of humour has changed - I'll leave it to its victims to decide if for better or for worse. It's sharper than ever, but more than a little sarcastic. But I've grown a sense of art, as well, and have realized the vitality of creative endeavour, of some sort, any sort. I've come to seek quality - in lovingly and aestheticly handmade articles filling my home - than quantity and economy.
The days go by quickly still, but always a little more noted than I think they were before this. I love the smell of the air. Noting the rainfall is a small joy, not an excuse to grimace about the weather. The heat is oppressive this summer, but that just makes every small breeze, even the one instigated by the bedroom ceiling fan, a treasure. Email from a friend earns a deserved smile. My insane cats, maddening as they can be, are the loveliest things when the wiggle and purr just to be near me. A new baby (my Endo doc's little girl, actually) beamed a big smile today when I talked to her and held out the bright yellow thing she had been gazing at with fascination. On my lunch hour, I took an enjoyable little drive for 15 minutes and brought back some treats for the team slogging away here.
It is so much more important to me to find these moments in my days, because really, I've learned that moments are all we really get to have.
Happy live-day.
Sunday, August 21, 2005
Quilt in the Works
Hallo, Sunday afternoon.
If any are still popping in based on my rec.crafts.textiles.quilting call-for-help - thank you and stay tuned... I've taken some folks advice and gotten down to it. I have removed my "in progress" snaps, just because they were, well, in progress, and I don't want the Mommy and Daddy of the baby-to-be having their surprise ruined, just in case they stumbled on my blog, which I don't think they know about, but still. I will pop up a final pic when I have it.
There is something both wholesomely productive and very zen about the production of a quilt. I'm slow, and not in any danger of ranking with the $10,000 per commission art quilters I do admire, but it is a real accomplishment to hand-craft something meaningful in this way. I use a machine, but the quilting gets done at its own pace. And the time is mine, gratefully claimed away from the outside world and the noise of the everyday. It clears the mind, just to focus on thread and fabric and where the next stitch should go.
It is also my quiet way of a rally against the Wal-mart mentality of mass consumerism, for cheap cheap cheap. True, I quilt right now for little ones who won't yet understand the difference between a handmade and unique quilt and the mass-printed Spongebob bedsheets they'd rather get for their birthday party. I hope that in time the quiet durability of a home-made quilt will outlast the latest TV marketing fad, and prompt them to see and hear the story of a quilt, and to learn to treasure the shabby finery of the handcrafted over the mass-market sameness of sweatshop imports. I can't make a quilt worth my time, ever. It is my meditation and prayer to put in those hours, time I will never get back, but I'm grateful to have the luxury of doing so. The only payback I might get is know someday that a child is dragging around the worn scraps of a much-loved blankey they've never been without. And that would be just fine.
Back to it. Before enlightenment, stitch fabric, trim thread. After enlightenment, stitch fabric, trim thread.
Friday, August 19, 2005
Profile Photo
Well, you'd never believe I taught meself some mad HTML skills back in the early nine-oh's when it was still so fresh .... I'm struggling with getting photos into my blog profile nowadays.
Here's what I'll use. An old self-portrait I still really like, probably because it's got all the flaws washed out by the photoshop filter I was playing with at the time, but still is *generally* recognizeable. It must be almost 10 years now... at least 8, as I was living in my ramshackle little Fountain Hotel apartment on Gordon St. when I did this. Which means it was pre-pancreatitis, and the 7th anniversary of the Day the Pancreas Blew Up is Monday.
Tornado Watch!
I seem to have begun my blogging the way I've always managed to keep journals... very sporadically. Gotta do something about that. It seems I have a tendency to neglect the recording of my life, except when things are bad. But today, I got around to opening an email my dearest old friend sent, which was a link to his recent blogging, and I've been hit by a moment of motivation again.
This is a generally mundane day in a generally ordinary life. But it is my day, again, as was yesterday, and as will be tomorrow. I guess it is what I have.
My work day was tiring, though my job is generally rewarding, with a slight undercurrent of insane of late, just as those of us who survived the latest round of layoffs are working out our frustration and survivor's guilt on each other as we try to avoid taking it out on customers. Mid-day I had intended to make one of my too-infrequent forays back to my old grounds in Guelph to retrieve the latest installments of my Fabric Club subscription from the Greenwood Quiltery, but after several torrential downpours and reports of tornadoes in the region, travelling in my tiny car on an open highway through flat farmland didn't seem so appealing.
Instead, the Spousal Euphemism and I headed out to the local Gourmet foods emporium and made an indoor picnic of some exotic prepared take-out, a selection from the olive bar and whacked-out cheeses. Then I popped in here to review all the emails I haven't had time for, caught up on Dear Friend's blog and decided it is time to make more of a regular exercise of mine.
SE just finished watching Dead Poets' Society for the umpteenth time in the other room - a movie which, while superb from idea through final execution, depresses the hell out of me. I think because when younger, I always felt like one of those over-achiever kids who was nonetheless never good enough, and I rode that self-destructive razor's edge for so long. Hate being reminded of how it felt to be that. I prefer my entertainment to be much farther into the escapist genre.
SE is expected back here momentarily as for some reason he's decided to work on his Photo Journal in a corner of my office for a while.
I may follow this with another entry if I can find an interesting photo somewhere in the heap. SE has become my photojournalist, but I'm bartering him rights to use pictures of me (which I generally hate, but have to admit, are technically quite good) for rights to use his pictures of me, my quilts or my cats to demonstrate *my* art, because it's really hard to get the cat itself to sit still on a scanner.
Such was my day, then... or only the later part, I guess.
This is a generally mundane day in a generally ordinary life. But it is my day, again, as was yesterday, and as will be tomorrow. I guess it is what I have.
My work day was tiring, though my job is generally rewarding, with a slight undercurrent of insane of late, just as those of us who survived the latest round of layoffs are working out our frustration and survivor's guilt on each other as we try to avoid taking it out on customers. Mid-day I had intended to make one of my too-infrequent forays back to my old grounds in Guelph to retrieve the latest installments of my Fabric Club subscription from the Greenwood Quiltery, but after several torrential downpours and reports of tornadoes in the region, travelling in my tiny car on an open highway through flat farmland didn't seem so appealing.
Instead, the Spousal Euphemism and I headed out to the local Gourmet foods emporium and made an indoor picnic of some exotic prepared take-out, a selection from the olive bar and whacked-out cheeses. Then I popped in here to review all the emails I haven't had time for, caught up on Dear Friend's blog and decided it is time to make more of a regular exercise of mine.
SE just finished watching Dead Poets' Society for the umpteenth time in the other room - a movie which, while superb from idea through final execution, depresses the hell out of me. I think because when younger, I always felt like one of those over-achiever kids who was nonetheless never good enough, and I rode that self-destructive razor's edge for so long. Hate being reminded of how it felt to be that. I prefer my entertainment to be much farther into the escapist genre.
SE is expected back here momentarily as for some reason he's decided to work on his Photo Journal in a corner of my office for a while.
I may follow this with another entry if I can find an interesting photo somewhere in the heap. SE has become my photojournalist, but I'm bartering him rights to use pictures of me (which I generally hate, but have to admit, are technically quite good) for rights to use his pictures of me, my quilts or my cats to demonstrate *my* art, because it's really hard to get the cat itself to sit still on a scanner.
Such was my day, then... or only the later part, I guess.
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