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enfinblue's Bluey (credit to Fifi for the nickname!) Diaryland Diary

"I am seeking, I am striving, I am in it with all my heart." -Vinc3nt V@n Gogh

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Long, long, long. Mes excuses. Mi scusi!

OK so I have so so so much to write. I hardly know where to begin.

What I'd like to sum it up as is the observation that I've been making lately that everywhere I turn I'm reacting differently to things than I have habitually reacted to them.

I love this! Change! Change! Fresh, spring air into my soul! This is what I've wanted for so long.

At the same time, I have had mysterious, creeping anxiety today. This is not good. I say mysterious and creeping as I literally found myself holding my breath as the day went on, a tightening in my chest...even though externally and generally I couldn't point to any immediate cause. It wasn't a particularly bad day at work or anything. In fact, it was a productive and rather straightforward day.

Oh, too, and maybe this is it, I realize as I write it, I received an inquiry as to whether I'd be interested in a job back at my old department. It's actually the perfect job for me, and it's at a higher level.

Believe it or not, however, I told the woman to wait. That I needed to wait. That I needed to fight through this job a little bit longer and to talk to my boss, review the options. I don't know. Maybe it's Anglican guilt or something but it's what I feel I need to do right now.

It would be funny, wouldn't it? - Work at that department for six months, come over to this side of the river for six months of winter, return to the other side of the river once the snow has gone?

The snow is gone, by the way. It was an exquisitely lovely day.

Oh! Before I go on to after work stuff, I'll mention that the poet scientist really irks me. The difference in his irking me today was that I realized WHY he irks me. He doesn't live in the present. It's always oh woe is me no one wants me and why does everyone else have a child and I don't.

You see, this sounds an awful lot like the things that I've been saying all the time here! But really, not. I've been fighting those impulses. And unlike him I pretty much never think as he did today that he would not go to the party for the woman in his office who had brought her new baby into the office. No, I can rejoice in the joy of others. I really can do. As I told him, I firmly believe that life can turn on a dime and things can change and what benefit is it to me in my growth or my heart and of COURSE in the present moment not to revel in the beauty of life and the happiness of others?

What point is there to OH WOE IS ME?

I've understood this point for so long. It's just difficult to put into practise.

So we've discerned that the poet scientist claims to understand beauty -an in his way he does - but he fails to see so much of it. Again, I realize, that he is not a fall back option for me. He is solid and well-meaning and utterly smitten with me but that is not enough. Not enough.

SO that rant is done. After work, I walked to the N@tional ARch!ves for the writers festival.

This was an amusing experience, sort of like when I go to those poetry readings on Sunday nights - I walk in and think, "No, I don't fit in here. These are not my people."

Where ARE my people?

But then they open their mouths and pretty soon I realize that they don't look or act like my people, but they're pretty close to my people. Maybe not quite. But in the same hemisphere.

:)

So I walked into what was a pretty empty room for the first session (empty, it turns out, because most people were having dinner at the dinner session in another room - very civilized, authors, I applaud you :)).
And right away a table of greasy poets turned to me and seemed quite interested in me.

I say greasy not out of disrespect but rather to indicate that I do not understand why poet and bad hygeine have to go together?

A couple of the guys were rather cute, only the all, and I repeat ALL had too much hair in all the wrong places.

Kind of disconcerting, that.

In any event, I was not there to pick up guys. I was there to check out the atmosphere. (I realized on the way home, actually, that I've mastered a certain kind of process of intriguing, whilst utterly failing at accessibility. The accessibility thing, that's my problem. The speaker actually kept on staring at me after the lecture and looked like he wanted to come over - not sure at all why for I did not open my mouth (perhaps that's in fact why :)) - and he hovered around in the next row and came back after the next talk...but I made it impossible for him. I was too reserved.

He actually had nice dimples and I loved his piece. But, again, TOOO much hair. The hair has got to go.

I didn't meet him in the end, don't worry.

No, now is a time for musing, not jumping too quickly.

Let me run and get the notes that I made sur place.

The talk was on By Gr@nd C3ntral Station I sat down and Wept, which you might recall from long distant entries I had a fondness for when I was younger. It was also on another book which unfortunately I have not read.

SO here it is:

"I'm at the writers festival right now (or not now, but at least when I wrote this). Incidentally, I do wish I had some little laptop thingy - some magic device, rather, that would allow me to...

oh crap - the thing is starting now.

There are men here - though men who look like their cuorduroys probably smell and who have too much hair. Or maybe it's hair in all the wrong places. I think I've forgotten.

Ther's a creepy guy with a very large camera by the window. Every time I glance at him he's looking at me. I hope that my ass or something doesn't end up in one of the festival slide show pictures that I see flashing across the screen.

The writer introducing the session just got the book title wrong. BWAH! "By Grand Canal I sat down and Wept."

Where did they find him?

I'm preoccupied by a woman sitting some distance in front of me, who is not *very* large but who looks like a sausage stuffed into a very small spaghetti-strapped dress covered with red "bubbles."

I wish I could read the text of her tattoos.

I've decided that some writers need to learn how to read. I'm thinkng more and more as this guy drones on that I'm missing the sardonic "fuck you you're all stupid and can never understand me" of M@rgaret Atwo0d.

I have a new rule of life: Do the opposite of what I have done before, i.e. I don't want to dwell - any longer - bah humbug what a stupid strategy for happiness..

???? Aside: Honestly, I have no idea what that was supposed to read.

Some older woman is now speaking about how she actually met Elizabeth Sm@rt once. The author who had forgotten the name of the book asked if anyone had met her. This was a brilliant question! The woman who responded looked about 80. She told a story of having gone to a gathering arranged by a local poet upon ES's first return to Canada and Ottawa society in twenty years or so, or at least before the war.

And at the end of the story - delightful woman - she mentioned that ES was very grateful for the party. Oh and what else? That ES liked to drink that she had drunk too much.

!

I like her better already!

Joking.

So the woman beside her started to speak about how in the fifties or something they had asked ES to be one of the first speakers at the writers series that she and someone else had started at the N@tional Arts Centre.

I was fascinated by this woman - in disguise an old lady in navy blue with white polka dots and ruffles but with a bit of fire in her heart. ES had been a drinker, but OH the little old lady's father had thought her marvellous, as she used to dance barefoot on the grounds of the country club in the thirties.

(The speaker then piped up to mention that ES had also been having org!es at the Mackenzie King estate in the 30s, when no one else in OTtawa was saying the *word* orgi3s.)

Totally inappropriate and uncalled for but I loved it! Zing! And of course the older reading writer-loving lady was completely unphased.

SO it was cool, this being in the presence of people who knew. (Not that I know anything about org!es, but I like to imagine that I could imagine people who would know about them.) :)

They were my kind of people after all. Not the 0rgy lovers, I mean.

That's it for the first talk. The second talk was EXCELLENT - on anxiety. But I won't bore you with the details.

I should do something. I'm not sure what. I'm afraid I've been over-indulgent here and you must think me a truly self-indulgent and annoying bore. Hell, I'm one big borefest these days. And oh- mme. Fifi, I keep on meaning to email you and I'm sorry that I haven't yet.

SOOOO...THe night was so lovely and I walked home from the archives. I insisted in walking in my heels, which was STUPID. I now have blisters. This is particularly so because I passed by Parliament and walked through the grounds.

You know how it is - one never visits things like this when one lives there. Our Parli@ment is magnificent, however, particularyl at night. It looks in its gothic state as if it hangs on a precipice. It sits exactly as it should in the black night, atop a cliff. I love it.

Best yet, there were no people there. I only like P@rliament when there are no tourists. I noticed that it looked more lovely than usual, too, and I realized that it was exactly because they have finally finished cleaning and restoring and have taken the darned scaffolding down from the Peace tower! Yay! It is so lovely.

SO I next walked around behind Parliament to the river walk above...the river...to visit my great grandmother's cousin, the first woman magistrate in the C0mmonwealth. I have to self-aggrandize with mention of her yet again, please forgive me! I just love the story. I derive strength from her. She's seated in a group of standing and sitting suffragettes with whom she worked to have women legally declared persons in Canada in 1929.

But oh the sadness! The sculpture grouping is large and grand and perfect but it is shunted off to the side of Parliament and...get this...it is unlit!

ARGHHHHHH!

How could it be unlit? I suppose that that's an environmental thing. I wanted it to be showcased more. I miss these ladies when I don't go to see them, inanimate and all. They give me a notion of what is possible with a little bit of...gumption and peasant solidity. They remind me of my grandmother's temper and her ample bosom.

SO, I'm full of it, I know. I wish the "it" were gumption, but I think we all suspect that it is something quite entirely else.

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9:46 p.m. - 2008-04-17

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