Success of a sort

Excuse me while I geek out for a moment.  I did my first dungeon this evening in WoW. From my (limited) understanding, this is where a group of players band together, enter some sort of area with lots of bad guys, and try to make it to the end of the area.  Being still new to this, I don’t have the lingo or the strategy down and ended up being the subject of an irate discussion for not “AOE”-ing properly (which, apparently, means using spells I have that cover a big area rather than just targeting one guy – it means all the bad guys within the area get walloped at once).  I’ll spare the suspense and say we made it through regardless, though at the end the other characters asked if I was a “real babe” – I was playing a female character, and I assume they wanted to know if I was actually a woman, and not just playing at one (don’t get me started on gender performativity here).  Once I verified that I was indeed a “real babe” (after making a crack about sexism) they seemed much more impressed, and even made their characters dance for me.

A few random thoughts on this: I was initially miffed at the cracks about my character’s performance, which has more to do with pride than anything.  It’s one thing to run around with R.’s character, which outperforms mine every time.  He’s been playing for years and knows all the ins and outs.  But being in that kind of group situation and not being the best (alright, being the worst) bugged me.  A pride thing.  Secondly: I know this is a male-dominated game, in terms of the players, if not the avatars, but seeing firsthand the response to the presence of a “real babe” was interesting.  I think it increased the informal reputation of R.’s character more than mine, and I didn’t take well to having my lacklustre skills blamed on gender rather than experience. I have many more thoughts brewing about how these sorts of roles play out, but I’ll save those for later.

But all’s well that ends well, I suppose.  I managed to gain a level, got a neat staff to hit other bad guys with in the future, and R.’s character and mine retired to the nearest inn for the night to rest up:

The real life night is ending somewhat differently, in that I’ll be spooning a dog.  Just as adorable and comforting, and Alice will just shrug and go back to sleep when I get up in the morning to write.  She won’t bother putting on a pot of coffee, though.

Back

R. and the dog and I spent the weekend at a tiny cottage in Ste Agathe.  The constant rained trapped us inside, and, having agreed to go sans laptops and without a cell connection, we played a lot of gin rummy and watched a lot of movies and ate a lot of food.  And lots of not wearing pants.  I’m unpacking now, and I’m tired – not from the weekend, but from being back and realizing that real life starts again pretty much now.  Between his work and his school, and my school and my work, “quality time” is hard to come by and even harder to let go.  What I can’t shake, though, is just how after all that quality time I still want more.  Right now.  For the resolutely independent person that has generally grown frustrated with (the interpersonal demands of) a significant other fairly quickly in the past, this is a new sensation.  It’s not even rattling me.

That’ll have to sit with me for awhile.  Other updates that will be elaborated upon soon: the new laptop (better WoW graphics, whee!  Still not good enough to play Spore, boo.  Ah, well, all good things in time).  I’m working my way into chapter four.  Only four classes left in my course, and my students are still most excellent.  Before I get around to all this, though, I’m going to fall asleep pretending it’s not yet Monday.

Confession

I have something to confess: I now play World of Warcraft (or, as I’ve learned, WoW). It started simply enough, when I humoured R. for his birthday by agreeing to a free three-week trial. That was months ago, and I’m still playing.  I’ve moved past my initial uncertainty about throwing fireballs at boars who were just minding their own business, but that isn’t yet the same thing as knowing what I’m doing.  I still wander randomly into a forest, turn my avatar around a few times to figure out where I am, and in the midst of killing things that attack me, eventually find whatever I’m supposed to be after.  I check maps a lot, and seem to have just as poor a sense of direction in virtual life as in real life. I have two characters (I can’t yet bring myself to call them toons) – a sly redheaded mage that I play with one of R.’s, and a muscular hunter elf that I play on my own.  The latter has just recently tamed a pet bear, now named Borus, which increases his killing sprees immensely. To my surprise, I’m enjoying this.  It handily diverts me from thinking about how I’m not drinking in the evening, and I’ve even had a WoW-styled dream.  I can see how the game gets addictive.  So there you have it – geekdom really is a slippery slope.

More notes about Alice

My bassadorable dog continues to go straight for the eyes of any unattended stuffed animals.  She can smell a just-opened banana at fifty paces, and will bounce excitedly until she gets a piece.  A tennis ball was of little interest when I suggested it, yet as soon as R. touched it the ball became fun.  She will mash her face into the closest soft object rather than watch me play with the latest little kitten that wanders into the house. Everything on the ground is potentially edible. Spooning in the morning is tolerated only if she can be in the middle.  Car rides are hotly anticipated, and she will take any open car door as an invitation.  Peanut butter is the best thing ever.

Slow motion

Notwithstanding that Friday is an hour away, this week feels unending.  I think back to Monday and it’s like trying to remember what I was doing on a particular day in the middle of last month.  The grinding repetitive revision of a grant application – into four succinct, clever, clear, fundable pages – knowing that these competitions are always crapshoots, not wanting to think about next year yet.
I curl up in the evenings now with a cup of tea rather than glass of wine, as the purse strings are stretched so tight that only a bottle a week can squeeze through.  This doesn’t help time pass.  Neither does the damnably optimistic sunshine and temperate weather, which makes me want to stretch my legs along the balcony and daydream about disposable income and faraway deadlines.  Sigh.

Boys

So Chapter Three isn’t as done as I thought.  In keeping with the spirit of the chapter (on masculinities), some anecdotes:
-Multiple cars full of guys passed as I sat in the backseat of a cab heading home last night.  Most of them were eating – things they could hold in one hand and tear at with decisive, teeth-baring head-shakes.
-R. sometimes falls asleep with his head tucked into that intimate crook between my ear and my shoulder.  I love that.
-I overheard a guy telling his friend about the other night when his drunken girlfriend changed her mind partway through sex, and that he continued anyway because ‘no’ doesn’t count or matter when she’s drunk.  And that she cried after… “bitches, eh?”  I turned around and told him he was a rapist, and got a “Fuck you, you fat cow” in return.
-An ex-boyfriend once told me he could empathize with the ending of Nobody Waved Goodbye. Watching it again with my students last week, I can too.

The Way of the Porch

The obligatory summer photo – toes flexed against a railing, a verdant background, and, more metaphorically, against the coming of fall.  Not as a season, but as a shift back to what passes for real life: writing, lecturing, writing, grading, writing.  At the moment I’m resistant, unwilling to give up my porch-as-office laziness.  But rather than get wrapped up in a fairly predictable future few months, here are highlights of the past few:

-our softball team, The False Consciousness had its first winning season in four years (a fine example to set for our hockey team, the Ten Left Wingers – Marxists!  Marxists everywhere!).  Not enough to get us into the playoffs, but more than enough to make us feel genuinely sporty, as we managed beat teams that didn’t have a bottle of tequila parked beside first base.  I was promoted to second base, and even performed admirably at a few points.
-my hair has tentatively inched to my shoulders.
-I’m officially in the last year of my twenties.  Thirty doesn’t scare me.  Twenty-nine, however, is making me face up to all the things I’d pledged to do by the time I turn thirty.  Good thing I never wrote any of those down.
-romance.  Not just breathlessness, numb toes, and satiated fun bits (though there’s been plenty of that), not just weak knees and blushing smiles at his number on my caller ID (totally worth $7 a month), but more-than-a-summer-fling romance.  Embarrassing moments that spin into shared laughter, someone else’s fingers brushing the hair from my face, whispered banalities in the middle of the night.  That feeling, which I barely remember from its only other appearance in another lifetime and another city, of this being not only what it should be, but what I want it to be.
-passing out in the hallway at a wedding, in a dress with stains that mystified even the dry cleaner.  Running into another wedding-goer the next morning who thanked me for letting him touch my breasts.
-I finished my third chapter.  I am now officially past the halfway mark.  It’s shorter than the first two, but I prefer to instead think of it as “tight.”

The porch is brisk now, at night.  Real life looms.  There will be a few days in September when I can pretend, briefly, that I am still on vacation and the porch will be splattered again with wine stains.  In those fleeting few days I will forget (or willfully ignore) that this year I will finish my PhD and will have to find some way other than ‘graduate student’ to define myself.
And when the temperature dips for good, I will remember how my toes curled over the edges of multiple balconies this summer, how I laughed until I cried and cried until I couldn’t anymore and drank until I forgot. Such is The Way of the Porch.

Exhale.

Back from a few days of napping on the beach, a riotously drunken wedding, driving untold kilometres through dense torrential rain.  And back to where I was before, wrapped in R.’s long limbs and soft palms.  We talked about the future tonight – not the capital-F Future, but the one that hits in about a month, the shift from the giddy laziness of summer to the stringent schedules of school.  Fine-tuning my fall course syllabus the past few days, there’s apprehension about something being lost in the shuffle – delirious unproductivity and pant-lessness won’t be as rationalizable as the stack of obligations grows.  But just imagine the study dates: one hand turning the pages, the other’s fingers trailing absently along his lean calves; swapping snippets of his gleefully capitalist and congratulatory business manuals for my earnestly leftist social theory; rock-paper-scissoring to see whose turn it is to grab beers from the fridge.  I’m not even going to characterize this as idyllic.  Chalk it up to a few nights spent staring up at a big big sky; such cynicism feels groundless. There are still butterflies, satiated sighs that escape just because he’s there, caught-canary grins when he’s not and I’m thinking about him anyway. I don’t want to let go of the sheen that summer casts on romance, but this grin will outlast it. A novel sense of surety for someone who reads a lot of leftist social theory.

Oh, those summer nights

Sitting on my porch earlier this evening, waiting for the sheets of rain that have only now just started to fall, I watched the ever-expanding gang of backyard cats chase fireflies, the bats swoop down and then disappear into the darkness. Off in the distance a train hollered, the dog lay snoring at the top of the stairs, my neighbour popped her head out to exchange pleasantries about the break in the heat.

I entertained an avowed Plateau-er earlier this week. At one point he took a long drag on his cigarette, shifted so my legs rested more comfortably across his, and in a tone typically reserved for cottage country remarked on this peacefulness. I’ve worked this theme before, trying to articulate the intangible reasons why St. Henri feels more like home than most of my (many) other apartments. It’s how the quiet is barely broken by the quick pop of someone down the street opening a third beer, or the way the light from my window pools around the nape of your neck as you prop your legs up on the banister. Laundry lines snake between tall old trees, and when the moon is full its reflection captivates the surface of the canal. Hot July afternoons smell like cut grass, sunscreen, and barbeque. I will admit that the Plateau-er’s air-conditioning is a powerful aphrodisiac, but that’s not what makes the 3am, $17 cab ride worth it – it’s spending those final few moments of replay and relish on a bona-fide porch with the humid summer night resting wetly on my skin. A hangover, perhaps, from growing up in cottage country, but home is where both the beer and I are sweating in equal measure.

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.