dear

dear lover:
you are a saint. thankyouthankyouthankyouthankyou for watching the kids when you got home from your (12 hour!!) night shift. when i got home (at 3 pm!) they were happy, well fed and clean. i'll find a way to repay you.

dear baby:
you can sleep now, it's ok. in fact, babies all over this time zone are sleeping at this very moment. go ahead.

dear sock:
please knit your own damned self. and be done by monday morning, ok?

dear obama:
when you started choosing your cabinet i was bummed, it looked like all the hype was going to come to nothing, based on your choices. but you've proven my pessimism wrong, so far. i definitley don't agree with you 100%, but you've gotten more right than any other politician active in my lifetime. thanks!

dear money: you should consider entering in along-term, stable relationship with me. i'm very nice, i promise.

dear daffodylic: i really wanted to talk to you last night, then again this afternoon. i wish you lived next door.

dear self: you're doing ok. things aren't perfect, but you are doing well. please take moments to be peaceful and grateful.

dear winter: enough already, get lost

dear ikea: i'll see you in april, and i can't wait.

kisses,
me

breakable

this evening my partner started to read to me the article associated with wikipedia's picture of the day. some bug that lays its eggs strategically so that the newborn larvae can devour... i made him stop. it was making me really sad.

bug cruelty, sad books left unfinished, crying at songs and pictures and thoughts... what's going on with me? i'm not pregnant and i don't have pms. but i have been keeping up with the news coming from the middle east. it's affecting me deeply. physically. i'm a mess, emotionally. i'm not sleeping well, and it isn't just the baby's fault. my shoulder muscles are rock-hard and in pain. and i feel horribly guilty for complaining about these things; the people in gaza are dying.

white phosphorus, depleted uranium, cluster bombs. after years of systematic deprivation and degradation, interspersed with air attacks, israel is invading gaza on foot. hospitals, universities, and homes are becoming mass graves. i don't care if you support hamas or not, this isn't even remotely any way to treat a population.

the western world owes the jewish people a debt of guilt for their silence and complicity in the holocaust. we also owe such a debt to homosexuals, gypsies, people of colour, pacifists and the handicapped, and i don't see that being paid, but i digress. silence and inaction were, effectively, permission for millions of people to be rounded up and slaughtered. it was a wrong of inexpressable depth. but does this mean that the world needs to stand aside and allow aparthied, collective punishment and genocide to take place, as a way of making amends? i understand that north america's 'special relationship' with israel is about more than just the holocaust, but that's the seed from which it grew, from the little that i understand. but no matter what, nothing justifies our inaction. innocent people are being slaughtered while the western world sits on its hands. as usual.

i desperately wrack my brain for something, anything i can do. my mp is tired of hearing from me. everyone i know has been made aware. a protest has been attended. the situation goes around and around in my anxiety-ridden brain. i check the news obsessively. it all means nothing; i am powerless in the face of such a huge evil. it's fucking depressing.


for those who really want to know, read here and here.

on voting

first:
congratulations, world, on ousting bush. felicitations, americans, on electing a black man. may things turn out as well as you hope. (because, you know, he's secretly a marxist muslim arab terrorist who eats babies, but he won't reveal his true self until after he's sworn in.) (i'm kidding, people)
the only way nov 4 could have gone better is if prop 8 had been resoundingly defeated in california and i had won the lottery.

but i digress.

a few weeks ago we canadians had our federal elections. being the political junkie that i am, i was reading and talking and theorizing about the whole thing nonstop. i would have gone out and volunteered, but my son was sick, then my parents were here.
on the day of the elections my partner and i had a discussion on why voting is important. i consider it to be a duty and one of the most important things i can do. especially as a woman. i owe the women who fought and suffered so i could vote this much, as least.
but, he said, if everyone else is voting one way why even vote? if we vote with the crowd it makes no difference and if we vote against the flow it makes no difference. why bother?
i bumbled and stumbled and tried to articulate why we should always vote, but i didn't have the right words for it.

this past sunday i went to a bob dylan concert. his showmanship was mediocre at best, but the thrill of actually being there was incredible.it looked like this.

in the middle of the concert, when the whole arena was clapping and screaming and whistling, i had an epiphany.

voting is like applause.
really, it makes no difference if i join in applause. i can clap or not, either way it's a deafening noise. you can choose not to clap, too, it's ok. but if everyone chooses not to clap, you don't get applause, do you? if everyone chooses to put their hands together for someone or something, something amazing and communal happens. so, fine: don't clap. don't vote. but you're just standing there like a douchebag while everyone around you is contributing.

the last great adventure (that i missed)

five and a half years ago the western world was in a tizzy. bush was certain that iraq harboured weapons of mass destruction and was pushing as hard as he could for war. many people were equally certain that no such weapons existed and bush really just wanted some cheap oil. many, many people didn't really know what to think. it was fun times. remember?

my life was all in a tizzy, too. i had just started working at a homeless shelter (which i loved) and gotten engaged to a heavily tattooed man (whom i love) and was about to start jewellery school (which i loved). thins generally rocked. but this war thing - it bugged the hell out of me. and i didn't want to sit around and talk about it over a bottle of cheap wine. rather, i wanted to do more than that. my partner and i were considering joining cpt and going to iraq as human sheilds. yes, that's the group that included the people that got kidnapped a few years back. they're evangelical christians, but so were we at the time. the idea was that we'd document human rights violations committed by both sides during the conflict. when bombs fell from the sky we would be in hospitals and schools, hoping to protect the brown people with our whiteness. i was so noble and so naive.

it was actually pretty complicated. on the one hand, we could stay in canada and make out and plan a wedding and i could go to school and we could make out and things would be good. on the other hand, we could get married in a hurry and go to iraq and possibly make a difference and make out and have experiences that we could never replicate elsewhere and make out. so what did we want, to make out in the safety and boredom of canada, or the danger and adventure of iraq?

obviously we chose to stay here. we wanted to have a chance to be married and stuff before going into such a stressful, dangerous situation. at the time it felt like the impulsive, wild part of me was being squelched.

but it's good that we didn't go.

• the foreign aid workers were given an ultimatum right before the war began: get out or do what you're told. mostly they were told to go to weapons factories and power plants when the bombs dropped instead of the more humanitarian-type places. but hussein used foreign aid workers as pawns, the same way he used every other resource at his disposal. can you blame him? the dude ended up in a hole in the ground eating doritos, it's no wonder he did all he could to avoid that fate.
• 4 cpt team members were kidnapped. one was killed. that would have sucked. especially for our families back in canada.
• our families would have freaked right out the whole time we were gone. that's actually one of the main reasons we didn't go.
• our first year of being married was brutally hard. my birth control made me incredibly depressed. i was too young to be married. i was 20, for crying out loud! i'm glad that we got through that year here, with all the people who love us, instead of in a dusty war zone.

but there's a little part of me that looks back at that choice with melancholy. it's the last chance i had to go do something wild and extravagant and inadvisable. now i have kids and so i can't throw myself in harm's way. and i've gotten soft. i like having showers and a bed. running water, people who speak english pretty much everywhere... i'm used to this. it would be really hard for me to go back to being as flexible as i was. i was made of rubber back then.
anyways, i can't really blame the utter dullness of my life on anyone but me. i chose not to go to iraq.