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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I can only think of trivialities today, in spite of the day.

I woke up feeling very much HERE! I exist!

I'm having a very bad hair day, though.

I have a new rule about hair: can only wash every second day.

My hair is kind of fine and can be kind of wavy or - dare I say it - even FRIZZY in the humidity, so I do not like to wash it all the time. It makes it dry. It's also annoying because it still feels too long and is falling over my face all the time.

Actually, dry is a huge problem right now, as it is in general in the winter. I'm surprised that I haven't shriveled up into a little raisin yet.

My apartment is quite warm, not only because I'm on the top floor, but because I have those old fashioned radiators. Unfortunately my landlord controls the heat. It is warm. I wish it were colder, but as I said, there is the small problem of me being on the top floor.

So I have a problem of drinking water. Every day I wake up feeling a bit hung over from the heat, I think, and then I must rehydrate myself. The other night I drank three glasses of water before I went to bed, but then I had to get up to pee in the night twice. That doesn't help me in my new goal of GETTING ENOUGH SLEEP! :)

EEK!

I suppose I could open a window, or get a humidifier. (Hmm..actually I have a humdifier somewhere...)
But I don't want to heat the outside.

Do you know, in Italian they have an expression like, "Red sky at night, sailor's delight."

They don't mention sailors, but still I knew that that was the expression. I learned so many funny expressions when I was a kid, but no one else there knew them. Perhaps that is why I had the feeling last night that I don't exist. Maybe I inhabit a parallel universe. Spooky!

Just kidding.

Today is Remembrance Day, as you all know. I was wondering how it came to be that we had Remembrance Day on the same day as the American Veterans Day, particularly since Remembrance Day came to be because of the Armistice at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, to end WWI, which was relatively not a very important war for America.

So what I discovered was this: it was a holiday first in the Commonwealth (British Empire), but Woodrow Wilson declared November 12 an Armistice Day in the U.S. shortly thereafter. (All of this occurred in 1919.) It wasn't until 1926 that the day in the U.S. was moved to November 11, the day on which all of the Commonwealth nations always observe. So it's interesting. I think that Memorial Day is more the regular day in the U.S. for observances, anyhow, am I wrong?

Remembrance Day used to be special in my view, as when I was growing up it was always one of the most important days of the year. My grandfather was always participating in ceremonies on this day for this or that, because he is decorated on account of the fact that he was shot down and the remaining crew landed the plane safely and survived. His pilot died right in front of him.

Remembrance Day is a very important day in all of the small towns of Canada, because particularly in the Great War, these towns lost quite a lot of young men. The death toll was something like 68,000 men in WWI for Canada, out of a population of something around 8 million people. Nothing like the death tolls in Britain, say, or in places where there were massive civilian deaths, but still something that every little town across the county commemorates with a giant cenotaph and benches in the names of the boys who died, etc. WWI is big here.

It's very interesting, given that it's the last war that we fought in which historians think that we were not really a country separate from Britain. It was not until the 1920s that most historians would date Canada's declarative, burgeoning independence from Britain, and of course we did not officially repatriate our constitution from Britain until 1982! Yes!

Anyhow. I mention all of this as I don't FEEL this day today. I usually go down to the War Memorial, or at least listen for the Snow B!rds to fly overhead, but I really don't want to think about war today. I just don't want to do it.

In fact, I woke up today much more delightfully engaged: my Kl!mt book of drawings was beside me. I must have fallen asleep with it. There was a line in the movie that I saw this past weekend (il y a longtemps que je t'aime), in which Juli3tte says, "In prison I would fall asleep with books by my pillow. They were a sort of rampart against the world."

YEs! I always fall asleep with books in my bed. About once a week I have to clear them off, else the pages start to get bent or they fall down the side by the wall. SO I end up with a stack of three or four on the floor BESIDE the bed, a half dozen on the night stand, and currently two in the bed. It's a neverending cycle. I suppose I will have to move them if I ever get a boyfriend. :)

Just joking. Do you have any peculiar book habits?

The other thing that I thought about this morning as I lay in bed was about how cool the job was of the woman who is the forensic scientist for the Department of National Defence. She gets to identify the remains of soldiers that they are still finding buried in French fields. There is quite a lot of archival research involved in this. That's my specialty!

I was thinking, How do I get a cool job like that?

I was also thinking of that when I was on the tour of the vaults at the POrtrait Gallery this weekend. I wanted to ask the girl how much education in art history and how much luck I would need in order to get a wonderful job like hers, researching art!

But then I soberly thought that if I was researching art all of the time I would never learn to do my own art practise, or my time would be limited to do so, so I went through a process of thinking through what I would most like to do...if I could do anything.

Yes! My brain is pathetically meandering!

This morning I also heard a news story from the Quebec side of the river, in which people with angry French accents complained about a lady who lives on their block and who has taken in many stray cats. You can guess where this is going. Plus ca change...

I don't want to become a smelly cat lady.

But there is a cat who climbed my fire escape the other day and I wanted to take him in.

Can I be relieved from this destiny if I just get a dog?

Well, c'est tout. I'm hungry. I also need to make a plan for today so that I get something DONE before the tango concert tonight. TANGO! I love it! A big show! I think I might even wear my red dress, in spite of it being a bit summery.

9:49 a.m. - 2008-11-11

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