Avoidence strategies

Larry put some visitor tracking software on my dashboard. I had a visitor from California who googled “while babysitting i did a sexy dance for me brother-in-law.” Sadly, the new software advised that the visitor from California stayed less than ten seconds.

I was going to go to the Y this morning after dropping off Jacob at school but came home and snuggled up in bed with sleeping-in Larry. I fell asleep again too but felt cold the entire time. Nobody likes that feeling.

I have to get back to my novel revision. I’m feeling nervous about it.

I bought new bowls at Ikea and one got broken already. It wasn’t me. I got mad when it happened.

We have a new fridge that sticks out further than the old fridge making it hard to use the microwave in the cupboard above the fridge.

It snowed the night before last.

The astrology website I visit most has a new format because the code for the old format died. Some of the contributors are writing posts about the change sounding very depressed about it.

I better get back to work.

Ella's graveside

Larry’s uncle Ella died. We got in Larry's brother Mike’s car after the service to head over to the cemetery. We complimented him on his car. I thought he would have had a more relaxed driving style. When we got there Larry's mom Jenny gave me some gloves she had bought for me. They were in the trunk of Mike's car. She was worried they wouldn’t be big enough. She’d even been talking to her friends about whether they’d fit. But they fit. I said for a person my size I don’t have big hands. And she agreed. Which I’ve told her before - but she still acts surprised and almost titillated about it. Actually they fit tight. But there was no way I was going to tell her that.

There was a newly filled in grave beside Ella’s and on the other side a big dirt pile which would be filling in Ella’s grave. It was muddy. Shifra, Ella’s wife, had a Pilipino health care aid holding onto her right side and a daughter-in law holding on to her left. They were also holding umbrellas which weren’t really necessary anymore. It was barely drizzling. A small girl, in bright coloured clothes wandered smiling and cooing around the hole to the grave too. Her mother had hair curled close to her head but hanging down like a variation on a flapper style and was continually squatting down to be at her level and putting her big pretty grown up smiling face in her daughter’s.

I was looking the other way when Shifra slipped and was practically lying flat on her back on the mud of the filled in grave beside Ella’s. Larry said she almost hit her head on the gravestone but made a twisting move and saved herself at the last moment. The daughter-in-law was pulling Shifra back up by the arm like Shifra was a pop up punching bag clown and I was standing right behind them and grabbing the umbrella away from the health care aid so she could use two hands and holding Shifra up from behind saying, gentle, gentle, gentle.

Best Canadian Poetry

I went.

I went to the celebration of the Best Canadian Poetry 2008. I stood in the back behind the coat rack. I didn’t want to go over and stand beside the bar because it looked too low. Gauging the height of the people leaning against it I determined they were all incredibly short. Another voice in my head was telling me there’s no way the bar and all the people standing at it could be that short. That standing by the bar would not equal me - in an attempt to lean against it - slumping heavily forward, my shoulders and back forming a negative attention drawing exaggerated question mark. It was telling me; here I was going at it again, with my literal delusions of grandeur. And I was listening to it. I was considering the possibility of it. But I still preferred it where I was despite the conceivable refutability of my own logic.

Eventually poets were reading and more people were coming in and it almost looked normal, I was thinking, me standing – not exactly behind – but behind and beside the coat rack. Anyway, I could see everything perfectly well. I could hear it too.

Before that though, before the comfort of feeling it was possible I was blending in, the publisher, Halli Villegas sent a very warm smile in my direction. When she was smiling at me I wasn’t sure who she was but then what she was wearing - a gorgeous red suit jacket and skirt - plus where she was situated – hovering over the books on sale- plus my remembering a picture of her I saw visiting her company’s - Tightrope Books - blog all came together like specially encrypted electronic surveillance data in a Mission Impossible movie. But I didn’t smile back because of all that. I smiled back because what her smile was saying to me was that even though she could see the awkwardness of how I was feeling she could also tell I was secretly like a cat who doesn’t mind, when necessary, holding the position of uncomfortable social dynamics even if I didn’t know it yet myself.

Clock tamborine

Larry’s brother Mike is too sexy for his body. He’s in his mom’s kitchen in front of me. I’m washing something in the sink and he’s looking at me and doing these dance moves with his mom’s clock he took down off the wall to change the time only the nail that hangs up the clock got stuck inside and its making a rattling sound so the clock is his tambourine and he’s banging it on his hip.

He has nice moves. He’s turning sixty this year and his wife is arranging the party and we’re going to be invited and his moves are way nicer than sixty. They’re nicer than a colostomy bag in his pocket he’s always had since I’ve known him.

He can never buy pants without big pockets for his baggie. Just like his mom never buys short sleeves because of her missing arm.

You can know everything about your brother-in-law and they can know everything about you. It’s the same family. It practically could be them you’re married to. He’s not acting seductive. I don’t think. But his seductive side shows. It’s there to see.

Even when I know that when his wife hit menopause she kept being nice, she kept being practical. She didn’t change. But those qualities then somehow began to add up to leaving him to his own devices which maybe haven’t turned out to be all that much after all.

Waiting for the art walk

Jacob didn’t finish his French homework so I let him stay home and finish it and took him in late to school. I wanted to get him to school on time because I always take him late on Friday. Because I don’t go into my day job on Fridays. Oh well. I let Jacob pick up a coffee for his teacher. His teacher likes it when the kids bring him coffee. But Jacob got him a latte. “A latte!” I exclaimed.

Larry and I are going on an art walk. It’s really nice out. There won’t be another nice day like this for another half a year probably. I’m waiting for him. I’m writing this on my computer waiting for him. What is taking Larry so long I wonder.

I went to my “the challenge of anger” class for women at the BJCC last night. I liked it. I had a headache that had been coming on all day. When I got home Larry asked me questions of what it was like. It seemed like I wasn’t telling him as much as he wanted to hear. We watched a show on TV. I got in the bath and went to bed with my headache. Now it’s gone. But my back really hurts. There’s two variables that may be why my back is hurting. Doing yoga again in the mornings - maybe I pulled something. I have a new desk cubicle at work - maybe I’m sitting different.

Larry told me he didn’t get to bed until two. Then when I get home from dropping Jake at school he thinks I’m being standoffish when I’m stretching my sore back when he’s coming over for a hug and I tell him his assessment is incorrect and he says nothing.

I picked up some pamphlets at my “challenge of anger” class. This one was showing how when you don’t express your feelings, often, it comes out as anger later.

This one woman in the class said she understands, theoretically in her head, that’s she’s angry. But she can’t feel it. This other woman said she hasn’t felt angry for a long time but now she does and she didn’t expect it and the way she acts when she’s angry reminds her of when she was a teenager. She doesn’t know what she’s doing.

The class leader said because women learn to keep their anger in check, they’re not good at it. She said it’s like learning to drive a car, you need to practice. But when she said “it’s like learning to drive a car,” the woman who couldn’t feel her anger said, oh yeah, I remember that, and described how she was berated for being stupid and every other thing all the way through learning to drive a car by her ex-husband.

I laughed and reached over and touched her lightly on her arm.

Adorability and disability

I hate my last blog. I don’t mind the story of the ink. It’s just I’m so cloyingly adorable in places. It’s the repeated conditional verb tense.

Sometimes, in my head, I’m all down on Larry when I think he’s being too adorable.

Blech – adorability. But I don’t want to be all bitter either.

I found out through my day job this friend I knew in high school - who I met again a while back at a party at another friend’s place and was being all obsessive about wanting to change her name back to her maiden name which I have always regretted being snide about especially when I found out that subsequently her husband who was in my grade 12 creative writing class and was cute in a way that was brash and innocent at the same time, committed suicide – is on the Canada Pension disability pension.

So her two kids are getting both orphans’ benefits and dependent of a disabled contributor benefits. Seeing her getting that pension when before she was pushing frenetically, the way she always did, to get in as a high school French teacher makes me think she must not have recovered from what he did. But I never knew her. Each time I knew her she was a friend of a friend.

She was nervous and fragile in high school anyway. You’d come back from summer vacation and suddenly she’d have switched into a new identity. One of her older brothers played saxophone in different jazz bands. He had a reputation of extreme attractiveness to women. Which was way too far away from me for me to see. He had brown curly hair.

She is going by her maiden name again.

Larry's ink

Larry was tired and he spilled his ink on the living room floor. It’s okay. He cleaned it up. We have a hard wood floor that needs to be refinished anyway. Then he was in bed already and I was in the bathroom and his ink bottle had gotten in there. I don’t know how. It doesn’t make sense his ink bottle being in there. The living room is different because Larry is always listening to movies while he’s working in there and his art supplies are spread all around.

The ink bottle in the bathroom was on its side and spilling. Don’t worry, I said, I’m just going to put some tissue on it and you can clean it up in the morning. The good thing is our bathroom counter is black already, the colour of Larry’s ink. So if we had some alien house inspectors come in during the night they wouldn’t even be able to tell. Then Larry almost didn’t clean it up in the morning because he had forgotten about it and couldn’t tell it was there.

There’s always scrap pieces of paper around with little ink painted squiggle lines painted on them. That’s proof of Larry getting the tip of his brush smooth just the way he likes it. It’s no good painting with ink when there’s blobby bits on your brush. Your work would end up with blobs in it.

Recently he spilled ink on the remote that plays the movies. Now we can’t rewind our movies back, like ten seconds to hear someone say something over again we missed the first time. Larry tried to empty the ink out of the remote, to dry it out completely, but it still wouldn’t work after he did that. We didn’t get a new one yet either because it would cost eighty dollars to get that kind of remote back again. Doesn’t that seem awfully expensive? What we do is use one of our other remotes to move us back to the start of the scene we’re in. That’s a big hassle though because we have to watch the whole scene over again just to hear one little word we missed.