Pretty Little Dirty

First, thanks Shumi for your fantastic, thought provoking, and most encouraging comment on my last post. You rock!
So last night I went to the first meeting of the book club I had been invited to join. I was pretty nervous as I only knew two of the people who would be there and it involved bringing food which is always a big 'but what if nobody eats what I bring and I'm labelled 'the wan who brought the manky such and such' forever! ('wan' being a Dublinese pronoun usually referring to a woman).
As the title of this post suggests, the book up for discussion was Pretty Little Dirty, by Amanda Boyden. I bought it Monday morning and did a power-read to get it done by the Tuesday evening. Not exactly a sisyphusian task - I didn't have much else that had to be done, and it's a quick read. And it's well written for the most part, flows well, is nicely observed, but I have probably enjoyed thinking about it more than I enjoyed reading it. Pretty Little Dirty is Boyden's debut novel and is, to use a cliched phrase - a 'gritty coming of age story' about two best friends in the early eighties. There are a lot of really nicely worked-in themes - I particularly like the recurring images of body modification and mutilation, characters lose chunks of flesh, are bitten, cut, burned. Hair is dyed, chopped, moulded, shaved. At one point, an older artist, Hank, says to the narrator Lisa that he thinks she is a sculptor and she is impressed by his observation because she does sculpt in her high-school art classes. Having finished the story I think that he picked up on, not her clay modelling skills, but something that really permeates the story - a sense of self-moulding, creation, evolution. Lisa says later on that she felt as though she and her best friend Celeste never thought about the future, that they were just pushing blindly forward through parties and punk shows and drugs and sex. And yes, it's a story of self-destruction, but also of self creation. Just as Hank sculpts the girls out of marble as they float on his pool, Lisa and Celeste also seem to chip away at themselves, whittle themselves away, perhaps in pursuit of some kind of self. It's definitely an interesting book, and we had a good chat about it last night. There's more to it than just a story of excess and lives off the rails though those elements of the story are certainly foregrounded. I'm not expressing this very articulately but I felt that the behaviour of the characters, the shock factor really I guess, was almost a distraction from the subtleties of the story's imagery and narrative. I felt a bit nauseated when I finished the book (it's not a feelgood story by any means), and would probably have left it at that, but the conversation last night did spur me on to think about it a bit more. I'm glad that it did because it helped me to recognise some of the nuances I would have overlooked otherwise. Which is why discussion groups rock, even with first-night nerves.

PMS and the rest

I did something I promised I would never do. I deleted a post. I have been in an almightly funk the past week and a few days ago I got up in the middle of night, logged on, and wrote a 'last post' on this blog. I had been feeling quite discontent about blogging, and feeling frustrated because people would tell me that they read my blog but no-one was writing any comments or even responding directly to things I had written about. And I'm just not really a monologue kinda person (well, perhaps after a few drinks...). So, I got frustrated, and felt as though I should switch my focus to other projects. Which I should do, but as I've come to decide, that shouldn't mean any big dramatic quitting of the blogging, or throwing of the dummy. Because, I have to be honest, the blogging is good for me as it is, and I really do think it is up to me to press on with it. Anyway, to the point - I also have really shitty PMS. Which is usually something I say wryly on the phone with my mum or with my girlfriends, after I tell them about a big cryfest or chocolate binge I've had. When I realised that I didn't want to quit blogging I thought about how I would explain the deleted post/change of heart and I realised that I have to be honest because I know that, had I not been in the grip of the gremlin I wouldn't have written the post at all. PMS is, for me anyway, such a weird thing - it manifests itself so sneakily and so effectively that even after sixteen years of it I still get taken unawares. It feels very unfair at times that my personality and emotions can make such a dramatic shift without my consent or even knowledge. I usually notice after a couple of days that I am being negative, anti-social, weepy, overwhelmed by the merest things, and realising 'oh, it's PMS' does help. To a point. I've tried taking vitamin B and evening primrose oil, I've tried giving into the junk food cravings and I've tried fighting them with healthy eating. The worst part of the way my PMS has developed (it has developed and changed and has actually got much worse as I've gotton older) is the anti-social bit. I'm usually a really social person and I love to hang out with friends and chat on the phone. But for the past few days, as has been usual in the week before my period over the past year or so, I've been avoiding the phone like the plague, glad our voicemail is broken so I don't have worry about messages lying in wait for me. I'm down, I'm negative, I'm irritable. And I feel guilty. Yes, my old friend the big 'g'. I feel guilty because I'm not good company, and because I bail out on plans and obligations, because I resent obligations. I also feel angry because PMS is something that we don't tend to talk about much (in my experience) other than those wry comments to other women. It does not garner empathy or sympathy as an illness might, yet it can be just as debilitating. Periods are dirty and icky and PMS is an excuse for being bitchy. Except that it's not. It really really sucks.

Great post at Feministe

But then, there are always a lot of great posts at Feministe - it is certainly one of my favourite blogs ever. (end gushing). Do check this one out though, by Jill, on 'Dressing like sluts'. It's a very thoughtful and thought provoking piece that takes on the question of what it actually means to say 'she dresses like a slut' and finds out that, although, the term 'slut' refers to a woman's sexual activity:

One’s sexual choices and one’s manner of dressing are just not correlated. Indeed, I’d bet a pretty penny that “slutty” clothing has more to do with the weather and the fashion cycle than with the status of one’s hymen.

Yes! My summers in Taiwan had me in shorter skirts and skimpier clothing in general than I've probably ever worn before. That was, however, because it was so stinking hot that I could barely move, that the mere idea of more than one layer of (very light) fabric covering my body would give me heat exhaustion. I was careful though, to wear knee length skirts and light but still with-a-sleeve shirts when teaching because I felt it was a bit more professional, which I suppose means that I didn't want my boss or students or their parents to say I dressed like a slut. Because we all know that being sexually active or simply dressing like an idea of someone who is sexually active means that you can't possibly teach five year olds the alphabet. Actually, now that I think about it, a lot of my teaching credibility rested on my appearance, but perhaps that's another post.
Anyway, check it.

that girl

The heatwave that has given us lovely long hot summery days this past week in Calgary means that I've been spending a lot of time outside on the front steps of the house, soaking up the sun and shooting the breeze with whoever happens to stop by. On Monday a good friend and I passed the evening with a bottle of vino, a papaya salad, and a lot of conversation. In the course of putting the world to rights we talked a bit about her fear of being, as she put it, 'that girl'. That girl, she described, is the woman who is cheated on or lied to or both, who is the last to know, whose love and devotion and committment to a relationship are not reciprocated. She has been that girl before, and she is terrified of going through the humiliation and dissappointment again.
We talked about the sense of shame that both of had felt at different times when we had felt foolish and betrayed. Neither of us wanted to be that girl because we were ashamed of her vulnerability and weakness. Fuelled by the wine and sun and company, I suggested that perhaps we need to make peace with the that girl inside us. It is curious to me that, although I cannot control the actions of others - for example those of a lover, I still feel that it is my responsibility to prevent myself from being lied-to, cheated on (etc.) and that if someone does leave me or betray me, that I feel ashamed of the soft underbelly of distress and abandonment that I might reveal. Like a lot of Irish people, I seem to be programmed to respond to any 'How are you?' type question with the ubiquitous 'grand!' regardless of what is actually going on in my life. And I think that's more than just a quick reply - it's so easy to let people know your good news or about an achievement, but it can be so difficult to reveal a failure or a sadness. My rejected or failed or depressed self often gets the same treatment as a nasty boil or wart or some such thing - it's hidden, it's not given license to be a part of the 'real' me. We sat out on the front steps, my friend and I, until the sun had long gone down and the air was getting a bit nippy, both of us maybe losing a bit of the fear we have about being ourselves. And I think to myself writing this now, that I really am getting somewhere with myself, that I am learning and growing and all that feel-good stuff. Or perhaps it's just that I give good advice, or am good with the theory of it all and not so much with the acting out of that theory. Perhaps I am cut out for this academic stuff after all...

I am a snail

I must be the slowest blogger in history. It takes me forever to write even a teensy post. So today I'm lazy and I'll point you over to a post I wrote at Chora, a group blog that I'm excited to be taking part in.
Now I am off to have some lunch because all there is to snack on are these baked torilla chips which, though described as 'premium', are like little bits of cardboard. How am I ever going to get healthy when things like this happen to drive me back to the Cheetos?

A Tale of Two Cities

I've been trying to organise my thoughts from the Ireland trip over the past week but have been finding that new observations of Calgary keep seeping in, and the two end up jostling for position in my poor old brain. So I'm going to keep this fairly brief and write a little of what I've been thinking about, about each.
So, Ireland. Well it seems difficult to have a conversation with anyone these days in Ireland without talking about the price of property. It could be that a lot of my friends are on their first or second house purchases and so it's a favourite topic, but it wasn't just my own gang who were banging on about the cost of housing/strategy of house-hunting, no, everyone from my mum's neighbours to the taxi driver who took me to the airport was talking housey housey. It's easy to see why - as my friend E commented 'The prices were crazy a few years ago. Now they're off the richter.' She's not wrong - in the past two years a 2 bedroomed home near the city centre in Dublin that my pals A & F bought when they got back from Australia has gone from nearly 300k to over 600k in value (Euros). I'm delighted they did so well on their house and I'm happy for all of my friends who have found places and have done such a great job with them (they all have such great taste) but I also feel sad because, much as I'd quite like to be a part of it all again, I know that it is not practical, that I can't afford it, that I might be able to in five or six years but certainly not before then. It's interesting too because there is a similar feeling here in Calgary now as there was in Dublin just before I left (1999) with the economy booming, jobs a plenty, and house prices beginning to soar. People here (Calgary) are frantically flipping houses, buying without viewing, 'for sale' signs go up and the 'sold' sticker seems to follow in a matter of days. These are days when there seems to be more pressure than ever to be focussed, savvy, smart, not to miss an opportunity, indeed to make more of them. Progress I suppose. Now that LJ and I are trying to get moving on our careers, are finding what we want to do and thinking about the future, I do feel almost coralled onto this success train - I think about stragegic moves and smart decisions. I am afraid of missing an opportunity, of failing. And when I ask myself what I am afraid of, I guess it is of some kind of destitution. Which seems silly on one hand, and really not silly at all on the other.
Which brings me to the second part of this post. Yesterday and today I walked from where LJ and I live into the downtown business centre of Calgary. Yesterday we were headed in to buy some pants for LJ, today I went to meet him for lunch in Chinatown. While I had noticed before, for some reason it really struck me on both occasions just how many homeless people and really strung out looking people there are in downtown Calgary. Particularly the latter. Pretty much every time I walk downtown I am asked directly for money. Not by someone sitting on a corner with a cup or a sign, but by someone coming up to me and asking me personally for change or a loonie ($1) or something. If I'm with LJ I really don't mind and if I have change I sometimes give one of the homeless people who live in our neighbourhood what's in my pocket. But I don't like being approached when I'm by myself and I do get scared. I think what really scares me is how messed up a lot of the people around look. I've read a bit about meth and the physical affect it has and some of the folk I see around do look like they're on meth but maybe it's crack or something else. It just makes me so angry that in a city where there are help wanted signs everywhere, where most people seem to be doing really really well, that there are also such a large number of people falling through the cracks. Why can't more money be put into drug treatment programs, mental health facilities, education programs?
Writing all of this makes me wonder if my fear of destitution is stimulated all the more by seeing very real evidence of just that around me. What I don't like is how that fear and its cousin desire to 'get ahead' almost shunt me away from feeling anything for people who are less fortunate than myself. There's an element to the culture in which I find myself, that is really about getting what you want, and protecting it, preventing yourself from losing it (with 'it' being, I guess, a particular lifestyle or standard of living) and it makes for a more selfish way of living I think. And that frightens me. More than a high dude asking for a dollar.

Green green grass (of home)

Um, well I guess that 'light blogging' really meant no blogging. I could blame it on the dial-up but truth is that I was really having such a lovely time being at home that it seemed somehow fitting to take a break from all things associated with daily life in Canada. Although I did cook a lot, and actually even painted a window frame for my mum. So perhaps that's a rubbish justification for blogger-laziness.
Any-way...it was a holiday, and a brilliant holiday at that. I spent most of my time at my mum's place in the sunny south-east of Ireland, surrounded by the juciest looking green grass ever - its lushness perhaps all the more apparant to eyes accustomed to the frost-fried brown tangle that has been Calgary vegetation over the Winter and into Spring. The Irish fields just seemed so, I don't know, bouncy or something. And the gorse (or furze as it is apparantly known elsewhere) was out in fabulous flower, bright bright yellow and smelling of coconut up close. Primroses, blackthorn, hawthorn...it was a rural idyll. I walked on the beach and sucked up lungfulls of sea-air, I tramped over fields and stroked the noses of horses. I ate fresh fresh fresh organic vegetables and wholewheat Irish soda bread with Greek honey.
But of course the most important part of any trip home is the time spent with loved ones and that was much much better than it has been on previous trips. When I arrived, my Grandmother was there, then my step-sister flew in from London for a couple of days, then I toddled up to Dublin and spent a few days with friends there, saw my father, met one of my favourite lecturers from my undergrad days, got to see my friends' babies, my sister came home for a few days and it went well and wasn't stressful at all, and saw several close family friends aswell. Phew! It could have been exhausting but it wasn't, and I did get sick for a few days but even that wasn't so bad because we all know that the best possible place to get sick is with your mum and she was fantastic and did the whole hot-water-bottle, cups of tea, medicinal chocolate thing so well!
Perhaps the most important feeling I'm left with is that I finally feel at ease with my home country. It's not easy to admit it, but I really did have a chip on my shoulder there for a while. I was very negative about Ireland and what it represented for me, what it reminded me of. More than anything I think that I didn't know how to be comfortable with my own choices (spending so long in Taiwan, not taking the career-house-marriage-baby route in my twenties) without belittling the choices I chose not to make (if that makes any sense). I found it hard to connect with my friends in Ireland at times because I was insecure and snippy. And now I'm not. Which is really great. And it meant that I had some really good, honest conversations and I am very very thankful that, despite the geographical distance I have put between us, some other kind of distance has been bridged. I'm such a cornball I know.
Perhaps the babies had something to do with it. Of course they were all really cute and adorable all that. But they were extra cute because I could see their parents in them, and I know their parents and they are pretty funny people so I am anticipating that when these children are older and more talkative, they will say and do some pretty funny things. I also got to learn a lot about pregnancy aches and pains and cravings, childbirth, the importance of early school enrollment, breast feeding, breast leaking, and breast pads (which may go missing and turn up under cushions when guests are around).
Anyway, this is a bit of a start on what I want to write about my trip. I guess it's the 'personal' bit. The more intentionally analytical bit will come later. I'm planning to write couple of posts based on my observations of Ireland during my trip, with less gushing about my lovely family and friends. I'll try to have the first up those up by the weekend, and blogging should be more consistent over the coming weeks. I'm also excited because I'm getting involved with a couple of blog-related projects which I may or may not talk about here depending upon how much I want to keep this a fairly personal blog and others more professional endeavors (I do not like having to do this, but needs must).
And so, as usual, I am off to clean and paint something.