I’ve decided to wait a bit before getting another cat: my children are about to leave home, and I don’t want to have the cat(s) sitting alone because I’m flibbertigibbetting around town.  People laugh at me when I say this.  My best friend gave me six months before I get a cat, ’cause she was trying to be polite.  My children said rude words and suggested we’d have more feline companions within two weeks.  My sisters are being tactfully silent on the subject.

Oddly, I found this while I was looking for academic writing videos on YouTube.  This has nothing to do with academic writing.  It is, however, an excellent example of how the world looks and sounds to me on a spinny day.  The irony being, of course, that I can’t watch the video without spinning out, and I can’t half of understand what he’s saying. (So don’t watch it if you have Meniere’s Disease.)

Still on Cat Vigil. Not much to do but catch up on a lot of work that I’ve been meaning to do. And some other stuff that’s just more interesting than the work.

In the article Adventures of a Supernumerary, Tom Jokinen says, “I’m a meaning junkie; even better if someone else parses meaning and I can parrot it at a dinner party as my own. Maybe it’s because I can’t bear the random. A musical text, whether Strauss or Kafka, invites interpretation and digging because the alternative, the possibility that great art is as random and arbitrary as life, feels unbearable. The point of a mystery is to figure it out.”

Do you ever feel inordinately happy that there’s someone else who thinks the way you do? Suddenly, you’re not convinced you’re really the odd one out.

I’m also a meaning junkie. Sometimes it’s a matter of etymology (could the word possibly have another meaning that I don’t know about?); sometimes it’s a matter of philosophy; sometimes it’s a matter of finding a meaning I approve of ‘cause I don’t like the one that’s staring me in the face. Perhaps that’s part of my addiction to books: I’m always looking for that bit of order and control that comes with “the real meaning”. However, I don’t generally like to parrot someone else’s parsed meaning. Probably, they’re dead wrong.

ADOLESCENCE: Meaning Is My Birthright, Damn It
When I was in my teens, I looked at everything for meaning. Art, literature, words, body language and facial expressions, that banal over-the-fence conversation my mother had with the neighbours: everything had to have a “real” meaning that I just wasn’t getting. My world – small-town Eastern Ontario, the town of anti-Francophone messages scrawled on the walls in the alleyways and one Chinese restaurant that promised “real food” as well as sweet-and-sour chicken balls – could not possibly have the anima to truly understand things. I looked deep and hard for the meanings that had flown over the heads of the uncultured and uneducated. Somewhere, there was a meaning to life that these people had just obscured with Zellers slip-covers.

POST-SECONDARY EDUCATION: The Relevance of Meaning
When I went to university, and had the pleasure of immersing myself in Eastern Religion classes and Gwendolyn MacEwen’s poetry, I decided that there was no other meaning then the one that was right in front of me. A painting was just an image of whatever it portrayed. The books were nothing more than the stories the titles promised. Life had no meaning behind it at all: we were just creatures that were born, lived, procreated and died. People who looked for alternative meanings and interpretations were highly deluded. And juvenile. And clearly bored. “WHY WOULD YOU LOOK FOR METAPHORS IN LITERATURE?! WHAT WILL THAT GET YOU?! DO YOU LOOK FOR METAPHORS IN YOUR POTATO CHIPS?!” (In those days, Owen Meany sometimes got in my head. That happens when you believe you understand everything.)

MOTHERHOOD: What’s The Meaning of Sleep?
As a stay-at-home mother, I decided there had to be meanings that had passed me by. While I didn’t search them out with the same ardent passion I had fifteen years previously, I figured there was likely something hiding behind the world I could see. Though I read Where The Wild Things Are fifteen times each day, I believed there would come a time when I would understand Max’s wolf suit to be something other than a wolf suit, and the night of his very own room would be liberating and enlightening rather than four walls and a ceiling. I’m still waiting. I check the book every once in a while, just in case.

MIDDLE AGE: Maturity Learns How to Pick Its Battles
I’m a little more lax about meaning that I used to be – it’s all relative, I know. Sometimes I feel stuck in the adult world where there’s not enough time for alternate meanings. While I’m still fickle about etymology and, of course, there have to be several meanings to a novel, there’s got to be a purpose to analysing anything else. What, after all, would a new meaning get me? In the grand scheme of things – between The Big Bang and The Final Fizzle (or The Big Bang II, if Bush gets back into politics) – is an alternative meaning going to change anything? I justify the literary analysis because it’s going to make a student’s life better in the long run; their career will benefit from the good grades, and their children will benefit from the career, and so on. Finding meaning in the Occupy movement will make a lot of people happier. Finding meaning in the relationship between the English and the French is probably cruel to that dead horse that’s getting kicked, so we’ll just give it a rest for a bit. Sometimes, things just have to come at face value.

Still, there’s that thrill. It’s the same kick that I get from daydreams: the excitement of something totally new, totally of my own making. Where other people find adventure in mountain biking or travelling, I get it from thought: original thought; uncommon thought. That less-travelled cognitive road gives me such a high.

I am sitting in a very quiet apartment, drinking tea and watching over my dying cat. The kids are both out with friends; I’ve deliberately turned off the big computer so that I can get distracted by this/that/the other thing and not think about the work that’s waiting for me. There isn’t even any traffic outside. All I can hear is the blurble of the fish tank filter.

‘Cepting for the cat, life is good.

My godmother wrote me a letter, which I received a few days ago. (Yes, a letter. Not an e-mail. One of those pen-and-paper things. Some of us old people still do that.) It was a nice letter, in which she talked about the things she’d been doing. Then, in the middle of a paragraph on Death of a Salesman (she’s an English teacher), she asked if I laughed very much.

This doesn’t strike me as an odd question: it’s really quite logical. My godmother has known me all my life, and she knows that I’m a serious person. Polite people describe me as pensive. I admit that I rarely smile, and I laugh even less. I don’t think I’ve ever laughed a whole lot. Things entertain me, and even amuse me, but they infrequently elicit any sense of hilarity. I’ve never quite gotten the thrill of stand-up comedy. “The Funnies” aren’t actually all that funny to me. Jokes are usually something that I withstand because my ESL students’ parents are paying me to listen to them talk.

To be honest, I don’t like laughter. It’s loud, and it feels weird. While I understand the science, both chemical and behavioural, behind Madan Kataria’s Laughter Yoga, it’s one of those things that I have relegated to the “don’t get it” corner of my mind, along with shopping, sports and math.

Sometimes, though, things strike me as funny… and very few other people understand why I’m laughing. I don’t look for funny things: they’re funnier if they just come around when they’re ready. For the past couple of days, I’ve been making a list of things that make me laugh.

· My son says, “Meow, I’m a horse.” He says it in a voice that’s both offhand and deadpan. Gets me every time.
· My daughter’s laughter – a deep chortle that often reduces her to tears – is highly contagious.
· black humour (Was looking for a site to link to this and found the Black Humour Facebook page.  That photo has me laughing.)

· Rowan Atkinson’s 1980’s obsession with carrots. He doesn’t deliver the carrot lines the same way now, so I guess he doesn’t think carrots are funny anymore. I still think carrots are funny.
· Duck.

This is Duck.

He’s my replacement for Peaches, who was a puppet with a very expressive face. But Peaches wore out. Now Duck does the expressing. Sometimes he indulges in an identity crisis and pretends he’s Saint Andrew on the cross.That’s all I can think of. There are other things that I think are funny, but they don’t make me laugh.

No, dear Godmother, I don’t laugh very much.  But the best medicines should be taken in small doses.

Only my younger students get so excited that they have to stand up to tell me things.  I never see this in my older students.

Carlo Ricci put this video up on YouTube today.  He doesn’t answer the question.  But I suppose it will be easier for me to find the answer now that I know the goal.

Just in case you didn’t get it, my sisters have both given birth to perfect children.  Absolutely perfect.

And they all like to read.  This summer, Perfects #1 – at ages 2 and 4 – read for a total of about 2.5 hours per day.  They would literally hold me down on the couch and pile books on my lap.  When the pile showed signs of potentially getting low, they would stick some more books on the bottom.  At bedtime, the two of them were slumped on either side of me, their eyelids drooping, but when I turned the page they would perk up, making sure they weren’t missing anything.  It didn’t matter that they had memorised the book (and would correct me if I mis-read a word).  They just wanted a warm body, a soothing voice, and a story that they could count on.

Perfect Nephew #2 had a rough birth, and so reading became a way to get through treatments, etc.  In May, when he was about 14 months old, my sister sent me this:

A quick  story about Perfect Nephew #2 – every night when we check him before bed, we leave some books in his crib which entertain him in the morning from the time he wakes up (usually about 5:30) until about 7 am or so. We sleep with our door open so don’t have the monitor on, so I can hear big things but don’t hear the little mutterings. However he’s been sick the last few days so I’ve had the monitor on to hear his breathing, and apparently when he wakes up and sees his books, he exclaims with delight “Ohhh, books!!!” as if we’ve never given him a book in his life and he’s been dying to read one. It’s hilarious, I’ve heard it the last couple of days. I wish I could tape record it!

I received another message this morning:

I meant to tell you in our phone call that Perfect Nephew #2 had his biggest temper tantrum/meltdown ever last Wednesday -and it was about a book. He developed a new obsession with Dot the Fire Dog which is a “teacher book” at school – which means he doesn’t have access to it all the time, it comes down off the shelf for the whole class to read at once, or when one of the kids needs a little one-on-one time with a teacher. I made the big mistake of telling his teacher that Perfect Nephew #2 had been asking for Dot the Fire Dog, and Perfect Nephew#2 went running over to the shelf pointing at it and yelling “Dot the Fire Dog! Dot the Fire Dog! I need that!”. So then I read it to him and all the other kids on the couch, but then Perfect Nephew #2 cried when I wouldn’t read it again, so the teacher said we could borrow it for the night – which was a huge mistake. I must have read it 15 times, and he didn’t want to come to the table because he was reading it, didn’t want to get in the bath, etc. So the next day as soon as I showed up at daycare to pick him up, he ran over to the shelf and tried to insist that Dot the Fire Dog come home with us, and I said no – and the weeping and wailing, and stomping, and fist-pounding continued for about 10 minutes straight, so much that another teacher came in from outside the room to see what was going on. It was absolutely nuts. On the plus side we have solved the unwillingness-to-eat-vegetables problem with books – he’s willing to eat a bite of anything to get another page of a book read to him! He ate about 10 bites of broccoli last night just for Leo the Late Bloomer which we’d probably already read 3 times that day.

That’s my Perfect Nephew!

Now, you’re probably going to tell me that a temper-tantrum over a book is a bad thing and that it’s not normal for pre-schoolers to read for 2.5 hours per day.  Hmm.  I’ll agree that not every society requires such devotion to literature.  The Wodaabe tribe, for instance, (which has fascinated me since I was a child) would have no use for my Perfect Ones or their books.  In North America, though, in the great bustle of Southern Ontario, where one’s “success” is defined by school grades and career, I know for a fact that kids who measure their daily reading in hours and would eat broccoli for a book are the ones who are going to “succeed”.  Perfect Nephew #2, who was in danger of having all kinds of developmental problems to go along with his health problems, has avoided pretty much all the psychological doom-and-gloom that was predicted.

I haven’t done any proper studies on this, but with the evidence from Perfect Nephew #2 and Cushla and Her Books, I’m willing to hazard a guess that children who are obsessed with books don’t have as many problems as children who aren’t obsessed, or they are better able to overcome the problems.  Physical problems are overcome, too, I think, because there’s nothing more healing than having someone wrap their arms around you and give you their undivided attention for a couple of hours per day.

Oh, and I know for a fact that English tutors don’t have any students who are obsessed with books.  Whatever money my sisters are spending on books for their children is money saved on tutors.

See, Mum?  If you had convinced David Leavitt to write The Indian Clerk forty years earlier, we could have avoided that math tutor.  Or not.  ‘Cause sometimes even books don’t have that much power.

This was found in an old monastery manuscript – a happy and gratifying thought for victims of book theft:

For him that stealeth, or borroweth and returneth not, this book from its owner, let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck with palsy, and all his members blasted. Let him languish in pain crying aloud for mercy, and let there be no surcease to his agony until he sing in dissolution. Let bookworms gnaw his entrails in token of the Worm that dieth not, and when at last he goeth to his final punishment, let the flames of Hell consume him forever.

Think it was a warning?  Does she know about all the… damn it, no way am I gonna incriminate myself here.

I will, however, allow that what goes around, comes around.  Just this weekend, I found a replacement copy of Flowers for Algernon – which can currently be found on my daughter’s bookshelves – and A Clockwork Orange – which never even made it to my shelves, just went straight from my hands to my son’s.  I regularly visit their rooms to retrieve all the tasty morsels they’ve thieved, only a few of which have my father’s name in the front.

The irony in all of this is that my mother and I don’t share the same taste in books.  My father, on the other hand… I hope he doesn’t start writing curses in any of his books.

P.S.  Do you suppose this curse has any posthumous effects?  If so, I pray my grandmother didn’t have any particular attachment to the Anne Frank short stories.  I’m checking my members for blasting.

Perhaps the Pope hadn’t read the word in the top left-hand corner?

Perhaps the Pope has forgotten Paul’s instructions in 1 Corinthians 16:20, “Greet one another with a holy kiss”?

Perhaps the Pope is so sure of his white mitre that he believes God would have him hate Ahmed Mohamed el-Tayeb?

Dear Pope,

In the wise words of Peter Gabriel, “and the eyes of the world are watching now, watching now”.

Sincerely,

The World

Why is Pedlar Press not on Twitter?  I want Pedlar Press to be on Twitter.  If there’s anyone intelligent in this city, it’s the writers from Pedlar.  Someone needs to be feeding me flashes of brilliance several times per day. Please.  (I just “unfollowed” a person who believes that Twitter is a forum for stupid jokes about genitals and for overusing the word f***.  I’m now looking for someone to compensate for his idiocy.)

***

I have not been part of the Occupy movement.  This is not because I don’t believe in it, but merely a matter of logistics (I don’t see giving up my job and leaving my teenagers to their own devices while I camp out for a while).  Actually, I think it’s a wonderful thing.  People have been complaining that there’s no clear purpose to the movement, but that’s what I like about it.  Sometimes, life just gets to the point where you break down and cry (or drink cheap wine, or eat too much chocolate), and you can’t really say what’s wrong other than “life sucks”.  When small children hit that point, we call it a meltdown.

I like the fact that we can admit to having an economic meltdown.  Everything is wrong, and we don’t know how to fix it, but we’re wailing at the top of our lungs in hope that someone – anyone – will come and help us get things in order.  The wailing (or sleeping in a tent, if one is a respectable adult) has gained the attention of eloquent people such as Michael Stone.  He’s the sort of person who might be able to help the different groups clarify their particular problems.

Once the problems are identified, we can start to solve them.  But it would be unreasonable to expect everyone to sneck up and fly right until they have the problem and the solution worked out.  Human beings don’t work like that.

Of course, once we identify the issues, we need to get on with fixing them.  Sure, the economy has been unsuccessfully changed just once or twice in history, but we are now able to communicate with the entire world.  Surely, with the knowledge gained from history and the wisdom 7 billion people, we can try something that might be better than what we have now… okay, 7 billion people minus one, ’cause you really don’t want me involved in anything requiring numbers.

It’s going to be the 99% who solves the problem, though.  If history has taught us anything, it’s that the peasants with farm tools and rocks are stronger than the aristocracy, that slaves are destined to uprisings, that the oppressed will only stay oppressed for so long.  We just have to get ourselves together and figure out what we’re going to do.  Hopefully, the governments of the world haven’t pushed it to the point where the “getting together” part ends up happening in whispers in the middle of the night; hopefully, mankind has evolved to the point where this can happen in a reasonable manner.

I know.  sigh.  The Bubble….

But it has to work that way.  We are the ones who can trade whenever possible, the ones who can share what we have with people who are in need, the ones who can leave Corporate America and start a small business so we can hire the right person for the job.

My mother sent me this video:

A friend of mine re-posted it on Facebook, along with the disappointing comment “We can only dream.”

No, Miklos, we’re not limited to dreaming.  We can get on our bikes and ride.

Yes, I’m procrastinating a nap.  As I’m sure my parents will confirm, I’ve never liked sleeping.  There are always better things to do.  But with the time change, I’m up at 5 a.m. to teach the Chinese kids, and that means the poor Canadian sot who gets the 8-9 p.m. slot often finds me at the end of my rope.  Which isn’t a problem if the students before them have been reasonable, and they themselves are also reasonable.

My students are rarely reasonable.

I’ll go sleep in a bit.  But for now, I’m playing the Andrew Bird song on repeat.  This summer, Mississauga finally finished Celebration Square, which I have to walk through to get to the library.  I’m not terribly moved by the square itself, and am particularly annoyed by the extra-large video screens that constantly play movies, etc.  But last night, I walked out into cool darkness – already in a good mood after a pleasant evening with no little buggers at all – stepped into the empty square and heard Mr. Bird’s violin coming down from the heavens.  I just stood still on the grass and let it flow over me for a while.  Here: close your eyes and imagine it.  (The song starts around 9:25, if you don’t want to listen to the whole thing.)

On Sunday, I ditched reality and went to see Anonymous.  The ratings weren’t all that good, but I’m in search of a movie that will introduce Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Era to students; this movie ain’t it.  It’s a good movie, but if you don’t already know the language, the history, the plays, the religion and the politics, you probably won’t get much from the movie.  Oh, and you have to deal with the frightfully clumsy flashbacks (in which all the hot young boys with long blond hair look alike, but they don’t resemble their adult counterparts in the least).

What I liked about the movie was that it was written for writers.  Shakespeare doesn’t have too many jaw-dropping-and-awesome lines, but the script writers found them all, and there are scenes where the writers are just standing around, jaws dropped in awe, at the words.  Of course, they then ruin it by having the writers explain that these words are wonderful and that everything they’re doing is to protect the words, but I suppose we must spoon-feed the plebeians.

Right.  Must go nap.  The librarians will get really annoyed if I rip the kid’s throat out and make a bloody mess on the floor.