Night skiing etc.

Full moon night ski tonight, fast and bright through the dark trees. The wind was warm.

Last week I went to the neighborhood bar hoping to catch a hockey game. The bar is near the airport and when I got there, the big screen was playing The History Channel - that's what it said - and that's what I gasped aloud, feeling kinda pissed, and then several tablefulls of silent men turned to me, and one said "We're aviation junkies." The show was called something like Northern Ice Pilots and seemed to focus on a bunch of cargo stuck somewhere in nowheres NWT, while people got angry somewhere else and made a lot of irate phone calls. The men were rapt, and chuckled in unison when the dispatcher yelled down the phone and the mechanic tried to spin a frozen propeller. We drank our beer and I ate a club sandwich and watched them watching.

I met someone new at work. One time I told her I'd slept poorly and she said she had too, but it was okay, she just got up and went on the computer to "check on her animals". She said she follows a whole bunch of animals on webcams around the world. She told me she's an elephant person, but lately she's been into checking up on a whole bunch of baby pandas. All those tiny pandas and their video cameras. This week I heard someone ask her about her weekend and she said she'd done "nothing much, gassed up at cheap gas."

People's lives. The wonder and variety in the world.

Pictures of people I don't know

I like my camera because it allows me to take pictures of people I don't know without being too obvious about it. Here are some from the past couple years:

Two men on their cell phones in Helsinki.

Also in Helsinki: two friends with green glasses.

On the couple theme, here's a bunch of pairs that fascinated me:

This St. Petersburg couple were posing for someone else.

Also in Russia, I took about a million photos of this couple with cool hair. (I also like the expression of the bored cafe attendant).

Not really a couple below. This woman was touring a museum accompanied by three burly men in jean shirts. Their look said Khazakistan to me.

Happy couple in New Orleans.

Also in New Orleans, dancing couples:

Could this sleepy guard in the Winter Palace look any more Russian?

This woman loitered in the Hermitage hallway. Her bruised knees fascinated me. I didn't get a very clear shot because I was afraid she'd accost me. She looked a bit crazy.

Beautiful woman in a restaurant on Main Street, Vancouver.

Beautiful woman on a train from St. Petersburg.

Actually, I could do a whole post on all the beautiful women I ogled in Russia...

Thinking about architecture

Last night I read an interview with Guy Nordenson, a structural engineer, in my The Believer magazine. Nordenson worked with Isamu Noguchi, Buckminster Fuller, and, recently, with Steven Holl, on a project called the Linked Hybrid Building, in Beijing. It looks so fricken cool, a cluster of linked apartment buildings, joined by pedestrian bridges high in the sky. Look at all the description and pictures here.

(As an aside, after I read that article I thought how fun it would be to have a baby and name it Buckminster.)

I have been lucky enough to visit a couple of Holl's buildings. I liked the Chapel of St. Ignatius, in Seattle, particularly, especially the doors, hand-blown glass lamps, and the lovely light on the curved white walls. I don't have photos, but you can read about it and take a virtual tour here.

I saw the same curved white effect at the Kiasma Gallery in Helsinki.

Kiasma inside:

Kiasma outside:

And then this morning I dragged my sorry ass out of bed by 9 (I know) for the opening of a new architectural marvel in Whitehorse, called by the unfortunate name Women's Annex, at the Whitehorse Correctional Centre. This building was designed by Kobayashi + Zedda Architects, and they did a fine job.

Not that I have anything against starting my day off in jail, but this didn't even feel like a jail: it was so thoughtfully and practically designed. Simple but perfect for the purpose, with some good touches, particularly the way the light was captured and held in the hallway, lessening the institutional feel, and the many windows, some at chest height. My favorites were the long, recessed windows beside each bunk bed. Those will be appreciated.

The mucky-mucks seemed pleased with the building, and I heard the residents were too, running around and putting dibs on their rooms.

I felt proud of my friend Jack and lucky to know him. Since I now know how to put links on my blog, here's a link to Jack.

Like every art, architecture has a language. The Linked Hybrid Building is described as a "porous urban space," and, in the article I read, Nordenson described the Statue of Liberty as "a speech act in the marketplace of urban ideas." Ha ha ha. That shit kills me.

Moving water

(Best with the sound off.)

I know it's not always November, but sometimes it can feel like November forever.

Tonight there's an insidious and determined wind. It got into all my clothes as Bella and I toured the neighborhood just now. I know the barks of all the individuals in these backyards. The dog we know as 'brindle boy', whose real name is Tex, is going through a change. In summer he was sweet, silent and indolent, positioning himself on the yellow line and staring all the cars down. Now he barks and startles, hurtles down the road after trucks, and skulks around the edges of houses. I think he's becoming a teenager, and, as he doesn't look to be 'fixed', I'm predicting trouble.

Everything was a perfect deep blue just before dark and we made it home without getting too cold.

These are some of my favourite photos in a long time. I spent part of the day trying to get them printed the way I want. So far no success: the paper not thick enough, the ink needs to bleed a little. Anyway, they're from after the freeze, before the snow. Oil slick on a swamp:

Everything reminds me of my dog

Bella has big eyes.

She is really smart.

Bella likes road trips.

She dresses for success.

Bella enjoys a hike.

Bella is my favourite dog.

And pretty much my favourite person too.

Intimacy...

...is not the consequence of a nearly equal and towering fear of both rejection and disappointment.

I got roses this week. That was nice.

I like barnacles.

The way they look so inviolate, so hard and dead and solid. Then I noticed if you touch them in the centre there's a slight softness there, a little give. They flinch slightly and curl inward. After that I couldn't stop touching them, giving a little poke and watching for the contraction.

Notes from Glacier Bay:

Late night on the catamaran the full moon rose in the last dusky dusk and orca fins cut the ocean blackly.

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More lovely sea otters curious and mobile. Porpoise. I always think of Lewis Carroll: "With what porpoise?"

One dead floating sea otter sad still feet. Tonight at dinner seven river otters ran down to the ocean, changed their mind(s), ran back into the alders, then after a few minutes emerged again, only six brave (foolish?) enough to make it to the water, one chickening out.

Tonight a humpback is feeding close in this small bay, surfacing, humping, going down in small fluke-lifting dives. And a seal saw me off to bed.

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Hummingbird alighting on a branch above my head. Salmon swarming roiling the surface of the bay. That harbour seal gray-spotted. Puffins with orange eyebrows. White butts of diving murrelets; better underwater, their flight is comical: they bounce, touch down bellies on their way into the air.

Black and white murres. Oystercatchers orange beach bill. Kittiwakes. Songbirds thrilling trilling. Sea lice suckers onboard the pink salmon Ken caught.

Sea lions humping and bumping into the water then surging forward boiling the water like eels in a pot, like hattifatteners towards obtuse encroaching paddlers.

Half-moon arc of porpoise. The sea is so calm now. The sun is umber, ochre. Waiting for the watery breath of a whale. The rusty squeak of a bald eagle. Sea lions from afar sound like bullfrogs, like distant thunder. From up close, like Tyrannosaurus Rex.

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Here in Glacier Bay the air is thick, everything is alive, the sea breathes a great sucking wet breath every twelve hours.

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On July 10 we wake to fog damp drops hovering. But later it lifts then clears in Adams Inlet a herd of seals bobbing eyes so deep and watchful. Porpoises humping arcs and a mother moose and two long-legged calves.

Tonight at McBride Glacier it's all heaving and grinding ice, oystercatcher alarm calls, terns squeaking and then a humpback puffs by, wolves mourning as we eat our rice.

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Here the birds fly underwater and the fish fling themselves skyward.

How hard it is to communicate

An excerpt from Moominland Midwinter, by Tove Jansson:

A herd of small creatures with spindly legs came blowing like a wisp of smoke over the ice. Someone with silvered horns walked stamping past Moomintroll, and over the fire flapped something black with large wings, which disappeared northwards. But everything happened a little too quickly, and Moomintroll never found time to introduce himself.

"Please, Too-ticky," he asked, pulling at her sweater.

She said kindly: "Well, there's The Dweller Under the Sink."

He was rather a small one, with bushy eyebrows. He sat by himself, looking into the fire.

Moomintroll sat down beside him and said: "I hope those biscuits weren't too old?"

The little beast looked at him but didn't reply.

"May I compliment you on your exceptionally bushy eyebrows?" Moomintroll continued politely.

To this the beast with the eyebrows replied: "Shadaff oomoo."

"Eh?", asked Moomintroll, surprisedly.

"Radamsah," said the little beast fretfully.

"He has a language all his own, and now he believes that you've hurt him," Too-ticky explained.

"But that wasn't my intention at all," said Moomintroll anxiously. "Radamsah, radamsah," he added imploringly.

This seemed to make the beast with the eyebrows really overcome by rage. He rose in great haste and disappeared.

"Dear me, what shall I do?" said Moomintroll, "Now he'll live under our sink for a whole year more without knowing that I just wanted to be friends with him."

"Such things happen," said Too-ticky.

Absolutely fictional fiction

You’re Fucking Beautiful or How I Got Rejected by a Twenty-three Year-Old

He sucked me in by being so young I didn’t take him seriously. I got a fun crush, first on his friend who was cuter but turned out to be kind of dumb so I ended up laughing at the jokes of the shorter chunky one with the nice glasses. He had really nice curly hair and his voice was like an old man coming out of this scruffy boy.

This was in a college astronomy class. I was auditing it so I could have a good reason to stare at the sky. I was the oldest one in the class by ten years. When I noticed how cute the two young men were I started wearing my tightest t-shirts to the class.

After the class ended I ran into the two of them at a concert. I pulled my shoulders back and went over. “Hey, it’s astronomy class girl,” they said.

Outside I lingered and the short cute chunky one came over and leaned in a bit and asked me if I wanted to do something sometime, “like a date” he said, enunciating the T. “Okay,” I said and I stayed close and he kissed me and it was sweet.

On the date we sat in an empty bar and talked about comic books and other books. We went back to his place to get the address of a party. His apartment was very small and the things in it looked cheap and quirky and temporary, like a place a young person would live. I looked in the fridge and there was only orange juice, bacon, ketchup and beer in there. Instead of going to the party we stayed in and watched a DVD on his laptop computer on a small coffee table, from knees-touching distance on a sagging couch.

After the movie he put some music on and it got awkward again and I couldn’t think of anything to say and I thought that he had good taste in music and it made me like him and that made me more nervous.

Sometime after that he kissed me. “That wasn’t scary, was it,” he said, and kissed me again and again and then a whole bunch more times. I kissed back hard and it was like we couldn’t stop then and there was all of a sudden nothing awkward about it, it was the perfect opposite of awkward and he pulled me onto his lap and lifted off my t-shirt and then he said “You’re fucking beautiful,” and he actually growled it, shouted it a bit, said it with a vehemence that would ring in my head and my stomach for weeks.

Then we went into the bedroom and we took all of each other’s clothes off and it still wasn’t awkward, maybe only a few small times, and then he fucked me and it was over pretty quickly and then he brought me some orange juice. We lay there and talked and then I moved over close again and his dick moved against my leg and I moved closer and he said “You can touch him, it’s okay,” and I felt like I was twelve. Then we did it again and it was still over pretty quickly and then he said I was swell and that word made me very happy.

I went home late and I woke up early and I felt so good I had a smile on my face all day and that was when I started to stop thinking it was ridiculous to date a 23 year-old and started to fantasize that he might be this exceptional 23 year-old who would go crazy for me and move to Newfoundland with me and have a baby with me and be this young cool dad. I thought this might be the exact perfect thing to stop me having to think about all my thoroughly adult ex-boyfriends.

That was the beginning of things not going well. I’d left some things at his house and so I emailed him and he emailed me back with good comma usage and I felt smitten but when I went over to his house he was sleeping and acted out of it but not in a sexy come get back into bed with me way, more of a here’s your watch and your necklace way.

I went away then, on a three-week trip, and thought about him a lot and thought about how free I felt – finally – from my lingering thoroughly adult ex-boyfriends. Free from both the ones I still loved and the ones who still loved me.

When I got back from my trip I went to the Laundromat for the first time in three years, to wash my dog’s blanket, and the cute young chunky guy, the 23 year-old with the very nice glasses was sitting there alone, reading with his feet up among all the big machines.

That was too much. Why bother having romantic coincidences if it’s not going to mean anything? That’s what I ask myself, now. At that time I thought that romantic coincidences were not coincidences and I sat down and listened to him talk about himself and watched him carefully fold his t-shirts and his Tommy Hilfiger underwear.

Outside I offered him a ride and he smiled and said no, he liked to walk, and I got in my car and watched him walk away with a big hockey bag of laundry on his back and I felt charmed again.

The next time I saw him he was with a group of people and he said they were going for a drink but he didn’t ask me to come directly. I came anyway, a little nervous all of a sudden, and when we got to the bar he took the only available chair and ordered a beer and started talking to someone and I stood there and thought, fuck. I thought I might have to leave then, but he turned around and after a moment he said, “Did you want this chair?”

We were talking and he was doing most of the talking but every once in a while I said something too. It was hard to tell if things were good or not and I started to feel all off-balance like how I felt for so many years around the ex-boyfriend who I still loved. That off-balance feeling made me tired and quiet and I couldn’t keep up with his banter even though I tried which made it worse.

He walked me to my car but he didn’t get close, not close enough at all for kissing to be even on the table. He said he’d see me at an astronomy lecture that was happening the next week.

By the time of the astronomy lecture I had talked myself back into some good fantasies about the whole Newfoundland, young dad, having lots of sex thing. When I got there I stood next to him and he said hi but then after a few minutes he walked away and sat somewhere else. I tried to keep the sinking feeling at bay but it was coming on fast and I could tell that my friends who were there saw it and knew it but I kept pretending to be okay.

After that I didn’t look at him at all and I went and sat with my friends and my ex-boyfriend who still loves me came over and gave me a big hug and said something self-deprecating and made me laugh. I loved him for that, almost enough, but not enough not to care that the 23 year-old was leaving without me.

I guess I know I got blown off, but I don’t really know why. I asked my friend Thomas, the one who is so honest he tells me when I’m too fat, what he thought, and I went through the whole story and I said, “So do you think he likes me? Or do you think he doesn’t like me?”

And Thomas said, “I think he might be a dick.”

I guess that might be right but rejection is rejection. I guess I might feel bad for a while. My ex-boyfriend, the one that I still love, told me one time that he admired people who opened themselves up to love, even when they got hurt over and over, the way sea anemones shrink up and open wide again. The sea anemone metaphor was his, by the way, but I feel it now.

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There is a postscript to this fictional story. A year later, the 23 year-old emailed me out of the clear blue and said he was in Nashville and he'd seen a fiddle player that looked like me. He said if I still wanted to move to Newfoundland, now was the time.

I'd learned enough by this time not to take that offer too seriously. But the message renewed my faith. In what? In picking up the right kinds of strangers, and that certain kinds of mistakes are not only okay, but possibly beneficial - at least from an artistic perspective, to make, and that there's all kinds of possibility out there for sea creatures.

Lists

Beverages:

1. Latte

2. Smoothie

3. Apricot juice

4. Vodka martini with hardly any vermouth and small olives

5. Red wine from Spain

6. Earl Grey tea with milk

7. Any herbal tea without that hibiscus shit

Things that are inconsistent:

1. The double standards I have in relationships.

2. How I usually want two or three different drinks all at once, like "I want a coffee, but also a smoothie and also juice" or "I feel like a beer but I also want some green tea" or "I want a martini but I'd also like a big glass of red wine or maybe a big frozen bellini thing". This isn't really inconsistent, but it's consistently irritating.

3. The way everything is so inconsistent.

Things that might be embarrassing:

1. I like John Mayer.

2. All my STDs.

3. When I pronounced the word "leper" like "leaper" and the other 12 year-olds taunted me.

4. The pimple on my back I can't reach.

5. When somebody asks me a question and for some reason (embarrassment, error, trying to please them somehow, mishearing them) I say something that's a total lie, and then stand there, horrified, thinking why did I just say that, that's completely untrue, but don't retract it.

Places to live:

1. Barcelona

2. New York City

3. The Bush

4. Montreal

5. New Orleans

6. Whitehorse

Places to visit:

1. Tangiers

Things I like this morning:

1. Bella's ears

2. That line in the song "Pimp Juice" where he says, "You really want to put your feet on my rug, don't you?"

3. Non-celebrity celebrity interviews in old issues of K Composite magazine

4. Kissing

5. Ducks: the word, the quack, the animal, and the way my friend from Yorkshire said it, like "dooks"

6. The Meters

Names my friends and I have for some people in this town:

1. "Chunky Cute"

2. "Volatile Mullet Man"

3. "Lady-pants Dance Man"

4. "The Flirtatious Loiterer"

Sauces:

1. Worcestershire sauce

2. HP sauce

3. Gravy

4. Hollandaise sauce

6. Teriyaki

7. Wasabi and shoyu

January

I wish I were in New Orleans right now.

I was there last spring. It was a festival in the French Quarter. There were bands playing up and down the street, in Preservation Hall and on the grassy bank of the Mississippi. Saxophone, accordion and clarinet and horns and more horns. We walked around in the thick warm air drinking luridly coloured drinks. We lucked into Tujague's Creole restaurant that first night, drinking juleps with fresh-ground mint, standing at a bar that was ordered from Paris in the 1850s. The bartender was perfectly perfunctory and free-poured.

People danced everywhere. 

The only thing like snow was the powdered sugar on the beignets.

There was rust and flowers and heat and brass bands.