Week’s end

I have decided to grow my hair out again, partly as an aesthetic experiment, partly out of economic necessity – perhaps ‘decided’ isn’t the most accurate term. And as the humidex pushed the temperature close to 40° today I remembered the particular kind of pleasure in being able to pull my hair off my neck and pile it on the top of my head instead. While I’m never happy about this sort of oppressive heat, I’m at least thankful it waited until my parents’ visit was over. We walked around the city for three days, and I finally made it to the Botanical Garden (pictures forthcoming on flickr). They brought homemade, dog-safe cookies for Alice, and my gift is breathing beside me – a bottle of my favourite baco noir. So the string of summer visitors is officially underway, as another pair arrives in a week.
Rather surprisingly, I turned down a dinner invitation this evening, opting instead to unfold my largest lawn-chair (those metallic clacks bringing back dozens of similarly sticky summer nights at my brother’s softball games, my friends’ cottages, small-town Canada Day fireworks), and work on my dissertation, a chapter of which The Supervisor insists is due on Monday. Now, with only one meaty part unwritten, I’m mulling over the week’s events, and, admittedly, keeping an eye on my portly neighbours’ ardent window-front make-out session; others are drunkenly belting out “Paradise By The Dashboard Light.” Ambience.
My parents and I got along well. More than that, I genuinely enjoyed spending time with them. At times my relationship with my mother is rocky, and my father can get self-righteous and grandiloquent when he’s drinking (you can keep your quips about heredity to yourself). But the familiar – familial – tensions and triggers never appeared, and we went through a lot of wine. While the parent/child dynamic didn’t fully fade, this was one of a handful of instances in which I actually felt like an adult (mooching meals notwithstanding).
This is not the only relationship on my mind. People like to make lists of reasons why a romance has ended. With a mental catalogue of such lists – about me, as they have been recounted to me – I’m noticing themes. In the bold light of day I write them off as the result of consistently gravitating toward the wrong kind of guys. In the dark, when no one can see me being self-indulgent, I wonder if they sketch out an innate undateability. Neither easy explanation is the entire truth. It’s frustrating, though, to think that you carried through with lessons learned, to believe that you did better this time around, to feel that your performance showed improvement, just to get the same report card at the end. It’s like failing a test for which you had a cheat sheet. In there, somewhere, a variable is unaccounted for. I should start working in pencil.

Derailed

Today didn’t go as planned.  Instead of slamming back a cup of coffee and heading to campus, I was cross-legged on the floor, cradling my dog’s head in my lap and persuading my vet to make a house-call. There isn’t any definitive answer for what’s wrong.  There are a few possibilities, which is better than the hours of uncertainty this morning in which my imagination threw out increasingly awful scenarios.  Such is the condition of adopted pets – they have a largely unknown history and panic prompts me to fill in the blanks with the direst outcomes, especially when all my speechless dog can do is look at me through big brown eyes that are glassy with pain.  Yet even as she tried to keep herself from moving, she wagged her tail each time I ran my hand across her head; that gesture, more than her intermittent screams of pain, made me cry.  Her tail wagged harder at that, each of us desperate to reassure the other that they were okay.  My little trouper – she breaks my heart.
The adrenaline has drained and I’m exhausted, still on alert, parsing every sound she makes, and I know my sleep will be fitful.  She is mightily drugged and sprawled on the bed; I get up every few minutes to check anyway.

Hell yeah.

5-0.

Perfect strangers are high-fiving each other on the street, men lurching out of bars are handing me beer (and pouring bowls of it for the dog, since she’s attached to me by a snazzy Habs leash), every car is honking, and, embarrassingly, I’m a little misty - being in Montreal when the Canadiens are kicking ass has always been a life goal. I love this feeling.

UPDATE/P.S. I didn’t mean the hooliganism. Sheesh. Save the torching and looting for when they win the Cup. Doing it now is a little undignified.

As if things weren’t stressful enough

What I’ve got

Blisters on my fingers from the staple gun, splinters in my palms from the signposts, more strategizing emails than I can wade through in a day, and a sneaking suspicion that we may just be having an effect.

Some reflections

1. A new dog is a process. Maybe not for everyone, but for me. I loved Isis so much – she came with me through so many big changes: three cities, two degrees; the start and end of my first big relationship; always curled up beside me on the kitchen floor when I was crying about the one that got away. She stared solemnly at me when I got my BA, danced with me when I got my MA, and always climbed into the car first. And now there’s Alice. She’s not Isis, she never will be. There are times when I resent that, because I wish, childishly, that it could have been Isis forever. But that’s not the way pets work.
I’m no longer ambivalent about Alice’s role here – that was hammered home a few weeks ago when the protective grizzly reared its head, that surge of “Nobody fucks with my dog.” We’re having buildy moments – when she walks into the room, plops down on her ample rump and yawns something inside of me aches and smiles at the same time. Like when she stretches beside me on the couch, accidentally kicking me without apology. Or when I ask her to “heel” and she does (these moments are fewer and farther between). I look at her and know that I’m moving toward the ownership mixture of taking her presence for granted and looking at her grinning because that’s my dog.

2. The past few weeks have been spent bouncing from one important thing to another. I’ve been doing lots of talking, but along the way the kinds of conversations that matter, that have become part of the daily routine (not to be equated with the daily grind, but ‘routine’ in the way that the afternoon coffee is routine – necessary, needed, anticipated, cherished) have fallen by the wayside. So has my dissertation, and, reassuringly, I miss it too. These important things hit their expiry dates soon and the routine will return, just in time for terraces and slathering on sunscreen and late-night bouts of inspiration with nowhere to be in the morning. But still…

Happiness is a warm run

The canal path is, for most intents and purposes, snow- and puddle-free. I nearly flew along it this morning, hitting my stride so much faster when I don’t have to stop for cars and crosswalks. I’m sweaty and spent and grinning; staring at the sunshine out my window I keep thinking “I want to go again!” Madonna might be on to something when she says* that those who run seem to have all the fun.

*I envision my dissertation defense looking something like this.

(Deceptively) quiet on the sud-ouestern front

The blog’s been quiet, I know.  I’ve been marking, and marking, and writing, and marking, and writing.  And wearing sneakers rather than boots, and cheering for my boys making the play-offs, and marvelling at the cross that wasn’t there during Earth Hour, and eating melty-fresh maple candies from the market, and having my dog diagnosed with a (luckily treatable) condition.

The blog just might stay quiet for awhile – with a 79% vote in favour of a strike and little progress in negotiations, things are probably about to get a different kind of busy.  Solidarity forever – the union makes us strong.  For those of you into that whole Facebook thing, join the group, and tell your friends.

There are things to chronicle, lack of recent words notwithstanding.  I will, of course, return.

(Dis)Comfort

One of those nights when you feel like a parody of yourself, of the selves you’ve been over time.  Moving from one room to another with the wineglass between your right fingers and the bottle between your left, Ani on the stereo and an HBO series on the television, a cigarette trailing off on its own as you get distracted.  Ignoring the dog’s obvious “You woke me up” tolerance for snuggling, googling yourself to see what you may have been up to, pacing.  Not physically per se, but pacing nonetheless.  Counting down to bedtime by how empty the bottle is.  Blogging.

CanCon

I met Sheila McCarthy yesterday.  She’s petite and chipper and I managed to not call her Polly.