hello? is it me you're looking for?

[heartbreak]

many days ago, I got an email from my stalker. he said he was happy to hear that I was dating again. he was adamant that I deserve to be treated specially, because, you see, I’m a hell of a catch. coming from someone else, this email might have made me all warm and fuzzy inside. instead I’m thinking, I better change my walking route to Tim Hortons.

let’s rewind a bit.

a few years ago I met stalker-man at a party. I didn’t really say much to him, but he was pouring the wine, so I exchanged a few pleasantries with him. that was pretty much it... until months later, I bumped into him downtown by my office. it turns out stalker-man worked close by. actually, I work in the financial district, so I know quite a few people working close by. the coincidence was not a surprise. we had coffee a few times and exchanged emails.

a few emails and coffees later, he started appearing everywhere. he was downstairs in my lobby shopping at the camera store (before it became a Starbucks). on my way to lunch, I found him sitting by the food court doors, and so he invited himself to lunch with me. walking through the underground office mall, I see him passing by, and he’d stop to chit chat. the emails began to get more frequent.

and so I stopped communicating with him all together. by this time, I had moved closer to work, which allowed me to go home for lunch. no more surprise food court lunch ambushes.

a year goes by and I get an email from him. I thought that time heals all delusions, and so I figured it was safe to reply. I wrote back a nice neutral email and got an equally nice and neutral email back. I was relieved that stalker-man had got the message and ceased to stalk me. life was a bit crazy then too. Y and I just broke up and the last thing I needed was stalker-man to grin fiendishly at me from his bowl of fried rice in the food court. a few emails later, I told him innocently – oh, let’s be honest here, stupidly – told him that I was single. faster than a speeding bullet, able to leap a tall asylum in a single bound, stalker-man in all his blazing glory, appeared at my office.

I got a call from Maris the receptionist. she mentioned his name and that he was waiting for me in the lobby. for a brief second, I contemplated calling security. down I go to reception, and there he was, stalker-man in a nice suit, looking like an English man on the way to the King Edward hotel for high tea. stalker-man gallantly said he didn’t want to take up my time, and handed me a letter. he bid good day and dashed into the elevator. nervously, I open the letter and read the contents, anticipating some crazy declaration of love or some other nonsense.

but I was wrong. it was a sweet letter, expressing his concerns that I was sad and that my relationship ended. it was thoughtful. it was touching. it was also handwritten on some foolscap, with a calling card attached. it was also disappointing that it came from stalker-man and not someone else. I sent him a note back to thank him, and then decided I better cut all communication again.

fast forward to a year later.

I bumped into him on the way to lunch with mark, which triggered an email, and here we are again exchanging pleasantries. the last email he sent ended with a declaration that he knew he wasn’t my type and that he wasn’t going to be hanging on. maybe I’m projecting or unfairly pitying him, but his words had a ring of sadness to it. between the lines, I’m reading that stalker-man has confirmed he will not restart his stalking again. I think for a brief second that I’ve lost an admirer. I’ve lost the one person whom I knew at least liked me. before I could type a big nice warm reply back to him, clarity hits me in blindingly fast seconds. I’ll wait a few weeks before replying back to thank him for his note. and then maybe not a word again from me.

still, my heart hurts just a tiny little bit. after all, my stalker dumped me.

my room with a view, obstructed

[reflections]

the plates sailed across the room and landed with a loud smash into the corner. sharp bits lay in random destruction. mr. B quietly sat back down, and instructed us to write what we saw. he gave us about 15 minutes. fear of writer’s block kicked in, as I scribbled in my notebook, recalling only moments earlier our puzzled faces looking at our guest.

we then read our own bits aloud, each person conscious of his/her own malformed words, some needed to dull the jagged edges, others needed to sharpen their vision. except for Drew, who was a somewhat cute geeky boy who wrote beautiful but somewhat pretentious poetic prose, we all felt we were trying to impress mr. B., even if we only knew him barely 5 minutes.

I read my two bit paragraphs confidently, as I learned early in life that one must always bullshit with authority. I described the scene as I saw it, noting only small details that stuck out, like the fact that one of the plates had a gold rim, looked a little expensive and was probably bought as an orphan at the local Good Will. mr. B asked us all of our backgrounds, and only one other girl than myself, sarah, was a science major. everyone else pretty much specialized in English. mr. B explained that sarah and I both reported what we saw in a fairly clear and straight way, because of our own innate perspectives. Drew wrote an abstract picture of the smashing plate, his words danced like a dream, but told me nothing. Josh, my favourite writer of our group, wrote with such melancholic confidence that I was jealous. another guest writer wrote from the perspective of the plate.

I learned two important lessons that day. one: our rhetoric professor, who also participated in the exercise with our visiting writer, wrote like she wore handcuffs. her words were heavy, weighted down by carefully selected symbols gleaned from tomes of tired academic knowledge. she was teaching us the rhetoric of fiction. we learned that she had the tools, but she was no artist.

two: the first thing that ties down our words is our perspective. whether it’s the perspective of the characters or objects in the story or the perspective of the author, the first thing we choose consciously, or not, is the perspective(s).

I am reminded of this class weeks ago at lunch with mark. I was telling him about going to the AGO to see the Christo & Jeanne-Claude exhibition and found out that he doesn’t get much out of the visual arts. he says he doesn’t have the language, the set of skills, the tools needed to appreciate it. while he can appreciate the aesthetics of a pretty picture, he just doesn’t enjoy it as much as, say, reading a good novel. he’s got the writing tools for that (and he is most excellent there). I know what he means, and I certainly don’t have any abilities to do or critically assess visual arts. but I like to think I do “get” some of it. I love the art gallery and I love walking through and just looking at the pieces. I love looking at the rawness of Gauguin nudes or the personalities in Modigliani’s portraits. I love standing in the National Gallery and just be immersed in the inexplicable simplicity and wastefulness of the Voice of Fire. I shake my head and think what does it matter if I don’t have the language to understand art?

then I remember this English rhetoric class and mr. B’s thing on perspective. I am fascinated by the perspective we bring to the work we create, the window we open into, the angle from where we describe that story we want to tell. I look at that painting and think where is the artist taking me? from where can I follow his view? what am I bringing to the painting? forget the technical aspects of the use of lighting in medieval art or the practical techniques on bronze making in the early 19th century. the first thing I see is the same thing as what the artist sees. that trip to his/her eyes grabs me first.

and so, mark’s perspective on art isn’t the first thing I think of. I agree wholeheartedly that there is that language we are missing that may not allow us to appreciate it as fully as we can. but that doesn’t take away from what I enjoy about art. his perspective is equally valid. it’s just that I’m fascinated by perspective itself.

years later, I read in a magazine that mr. B had committed suicide from the Bloor St. viaduct, the bridge over the the Don Valley. he was described as a failed writer. I wonder still how he saw the world and if I could follow his view downward to his death.

M.

[poem]

Like a pressed flower
you fold me in your arms
my cheeks burns from the warmth
your heart is the sun
rising, falling with every breath
waves that tickles, an ocean breeze
so gentle
that my tears fall
floating petals caught by the hand
musk mingles with crushed yellow blooms
sea-salt stings your tongue
drowning, drowning in your scent
and I am drunk
with the thought
that i am pressed into your arms
forever

I'm pretty horrible at keeping up with emails. on my PC, I have emails from 1998, copied several times over in an old version of Eudora. even at work, my inbox has over 900 emails, which I haven’t gotten around to sorting and filing. unless it’s junk, I hate hitting the delete button and wiping away the email. if all my emails were printed out (and I used to print them all when I first used email way back when), I’d have rooms full of paper scraps. I keep almost every letter I receive, every bit of correspondence from friends and family. I collect postcards sent to me from around the world, from friends and acquaintances that are kind enough to indulge me. at home, I get these lovely emails from friends and even photos too. I read them and then I think I'll write a nice long email back later, probably before I go to bed. of course, I surf the net and visit blogs and then the email melts away in my slumbering dreams.

many weeks ago, M. writes me several times without one reply from me. finally, he writes back and thinks maybe I don’t reply because I'm in love. I wish I was in love, because it would be a lot better than this strange pining I have for this something, someone, untouchable. because I had fallen in love with M. a long time ago, I dug around my old files to find this poem I wrote, shortly after I returned from my trip to San Francisco. I remember standing in Sigmund Samuel library at school writing emails using Pine mail, when I suddenly stopped typing and grabbed my notebook. I finished this poem, feeling this irrational pining for him, knowing that he was untouchable, unreachable. I was happy and sad all at once.

I feel a little guilty for not being reachable, for being so silent. and so for M., here’s your old poem I wrote so many years ago, written from a naïve hope that, like my emails, I can’t throw away nor reply back.

why is everything made of wenge?

[hiatus]

in blog terms, April was a write off. I didn't blog. I didn't visit my daily reads. but I was the busiest as I've ever been. Y and I almost finished renovating his bedroom. we have been shopping intensely for furniture. he's got the livingroom to furnish, and I got the dining room. in the last few weeks, I've learned so much more about furniture than I thought necessary. I read up a couple of papers pertaining to trade dress and the Eames lounge chair. (visit us in a few months, and you'll get to see Y's latest collectible). I fell in love with this chair I found in a second-hand store, but couldn't afford the price the dealer was offering. there was a stress crack on the back, just below the t-bar, so I didn't think it was a deal. we've also been watching the stock market madly. I've been pining for an iMac. I'm watching my apple stock. I've been reading about wireless networks and WPA encryption after setting up my new wireless network and hooking it up to Y's Airport Express. I've not gone on any dates since a few posts ago, but I'm as happy as I've been in long awhile (minus the never-ending lunatic stress at work, of course). maybe I'm just too busy to be sad.

I've been bad. I've got a whole list of people to email back, including Gerry, M & WTF. Gerry even left a voicemail msg on my cell when he was here in Canada. I missed him. Ya gotta come back Gerry! I missed M's email. I think I missed WTF before she went off to visit Germany. I missed calling bluelotus before he moved temporarily back home to mississauga. (eek. suburbia. I don't think I'll be visiting.)

when I got caught up with this renovating, I didn't mean to leave people behind. they are still there, of course, but I feel like I had jumped iceburgs for the moment, floating on a new current.

but I'm back. and I've visited a few of my favourite blogs. left a few comments (if you didn't get a comment from me, don't worry. you're still my favourite. hehe). I'm mad with posts in my head and photos on my hard drive. the world is almost back to normal. but I'm happy. and I forgot to email -s-. absence makes the heart grow fonder, or maybe it just slowly squeezes the love out of me.

let them eat crepes

[dinner]

back at the cabane, the tables were being set up for a traditional sugar shack dinner. kids were running around, adults were busy conversing in the corners, and food was being prepared in the kitchen by the chef, while I waited by the rows of tables. Y was busy chatting up with big hunky cousin forest-dude, a forester. I always had a soft spot for forest-dude, because he’s so tall and like a big tree. standing there, it felt like we were really in some snowy cabin somewhere in the Québec wilderness, and I was about to sit down with tables of manly lumberjacks after a hard day’s work. well, it was hard standing out in the cold waiting for food. and being cold, we were prepared to eat a artery-clogging dinner.

each table was quaintly set up with mis-matching plates and bottles of maple syrup. the syrup was made there at the cabane, from the maple water that dripped into the buckets, from which ranger P* collected the sap everyday. okay, it’s called sap (as Jay and sirbarrett have pointed out), but I thought maple water was so much more descriptive. I could’ve called it maple tree blood, but that didn’t sound sweet.

to start, we munched on creton (ground pork spread) and bread and oreille de crisse (fried pork lard/fat), literally “Christ’s ears”. they were really salty. never knew his ears were that salty. why they’re called that, I don’t know. for dinner, we had bacon, sausage, ham, baked beans, powdery scrambled eggs and potatoes, all drenched (to your taste) in maple syrup. yum!

for dessert, we had the chef’s special caramel maple syrup crepes. they were the best! no one else at the table seemed to like them as much as Y and me. maybe they were all sugared-out.


after dinner we all went out for maple syrup taffy. the chef came out and poured some hot syrup into the snow, which quickly hardened the syrup into candy. I twisted some onto a popsicle stick and chewed on the taffy. yep. novelty worn off pretty fast as I chewed sticky syrup. after an evening of music and watching the family do some farm folk dancing, we headed back to the Québec City, excited but tired, full and satisfied. the rest of the weekend included a trivial contest about eggs at Easter dinner and playing the werewolf game. thanks to momo, the highlight was the cabane à sucre! next winter, I want to come back for Carnaval.

on the drive back home to English Canada, to the big city, it felt a little like returning to a different world on a different planet.