Work to Indulge

Two of these kids are doing the same thing
Two of these kids are one and the same

Josh (far left) and I quit our jobs. We have different reasons and we're going different ways, but I thought I should say that now. He's gone and I'm leaving after my next show, in New Orleans at the end of July.

I got a really fabulous job thanks to a friend of my parents. Out of the blue; I didn't think I could really get it, but I did. And the best part was all the support I got from friends and family. Who knew? I'm like one of those Tibetan sand drawings: you tell me how much you love me, and soon after I've let the wind wipe that away and I'm wondering all over again. Lovely, isn't it? :)

Anyway. I am beating this Mercury retrogade like Toshiro Mifune.

After an unnecessary and stressful ordeal during the first days onsite here in San Jose, I made a Sarita-worthy decision (Sarita's my mom) and received a lot of welcome support and help from my co-workers. You guys are awesome! Things went smoothly from then on. In an unrelated decision, I finally got to put into practice the idea that shifts and decent hours make for better overall moods and dispositions. Worked for me!

So now I'm getting ready to pick up a rental, drive across the Golden Gate bridge, and lounge by an authentic California pool until my best friend from high school, Elvira, shows up tomorrow afternoon in her... convertible! Yeah! We reserved one hour fancy-schmancy mud baths at the Mermaid Spa. On Saturday we will create our own version of the movie Sideways. I guess I can repeat my favourite line:

Miles: [while tasting wine] It tastes like the back of a fucking L.A. school bus. Now they probably didn't de-stem, hoping for some semblance of concentration, crushed it up with leaves and mice, and then wound up with this rancid tar and turpentine bullshit. Fuckin' Raid.
Jack: Tastes pretty good to me.

That's us. We're Jack. We took a one week vacation in San Francisco in 2004 and it was great. It went pretty much like this:

"Hey, what do you feel like doing now?"
"Hm, I was sort of thinking of this, what do you think?"
"Sounds good to me!"

I'll see you when I get back.

update 06/21/07

Such a weird Summer, I can just feel it in my bones. Is Summer the weirdest season of all? How come so much important stuff happens in Summer?

Anyway: guy downstairs moved out apparently, not without first *stealing* all of his (ex?) girlfriend's stuff. She had a handful of cops listening to her cry on Tuesday. Mostly about her shoes. Then she called him and accused him of sending "that bitch" over to do the stealing. I don't think he denied that. I was hoping she had finally washed that man right out of her hair, but she caved and said she'd give him "whatever" he wanted as long as he returned all her stuff ASAP. She told him to come over that night; that she'd be "waiting". That made me sad for her. I guess breaking up really is hard to do, even when you're in a corrupted relationship between an idiot and an asshole. Was that too harsh? I do feel sorry for them, but man...

Canada Post messed up my passport delivery. They mailed it to me but didn't notify me of it's delivery, so I never knew and eventually they declared it "undeliverable" and sent it back to Passport Canada. It was still in transit on Tuesday, so I had to change my flight and rent a car to drive to Burlington. I'm liking Burlington. The border was a breeze, with only me and an elderly customs agent who was as friendly as you'd expect a Vermonter to be. Way better than New York! And the Burlington airport is small and efficient, with no line-ups or hassle. You should have seen how amiable the security was. And I'm sure they all do their jobs just as well as mean-faced people in airports everywhere else.

I'm in San Jose, California, waiting to set up my registration area. My tech is lost in transit. He missed his flight, and I'm not going to give any details here because that wouldn't be fair. It just got me thinking: what would happen if the tech never showed up? What if the tech died on the way to the meeting? Anyway...

There is no pool in our hotel. I'm wondering what kind of a California hotel doesn't have a pool? My top-floor room does have an iPod docking station, a 16:9 flat screen tv, a Melitta One:One coffee/tea maker, and sleeping aids like eye mask, ear plugs and a soothing CD soundtrack. I don't need this. I wake up in the middle of the night on a regular basis. I obviously don't want to miss ONE SECOND of this crazy Summer.

The violence of summer

“Why do we keep shrieking when we mean soft things? We should be whispering all the time.”

-Magnetic Fields, 100.000 Fireflies

The couple that lives downstairs from me is infiltrating the rest of my life, both waking and asleep. They continue to have yelling matches, throwing competitions, and God-knows what other forms of violence at any hour of the day or night. On Saturday morning, they woke me up at 8. Monday morning I got a 4am wake-up call. But it could be two in the afternoon for all they care.

I’m somewhere past the point of this being about my annoyance with their total lack of concern for the people around them. I’m becoming worried that one or both of them is going to get hurt, and I don’t just mean emotionally. I heard her yell “you can’t even throw things right!” one time. And this weekend there was a hallway shout out about a knife. There’s also a lot of swearing involved. Don’t ask me why they don’t just break up, because I wonder that ALL the time.

Because of them, I’ve become sensitive to the other violence around me, on the streets, everywhere. Sunday night, as I walked out of Eduardo’s Italian Restaurant, I saw someone shove a drunk young man so that he toppled into the street, like a pile of newspapers. “Are we joking?” I said, shocked. I couldn’t help but say it out loud. The two girls standing with the pusher guy giggled and made weak disapproving comments. They all thought it was hilarious.

Earlier that day in Carre Saint Louis, the bums were swarming over the beautiful ladies, serenading them and otherwise trying to start up conversations. The man in the photo with Amy was so beat up, his knee was protruding at a strange angle. I think he was missing his front teeth. He was trying to play guitar with her, but he would lose his train of thought in the middle of a sentence and somehow seemed to require her to do or say what he wanted. To me, he seemed to have the exact sense of self-centered entitlement that drunk men at bars and dance clubs have. As though all women should be available to listen to them and dance with them, because that’s what they want, and if the woman isn’t interested, she’s a bitch. Amy seemed alright with him, though. Sometimes I'm too protective.


“There’s a plane flying over my head, so you may not be able to hear everything I’m saying right now”, the man said to Amy. I wanted to point out to him that it was flying over all our heads, not just his.

Is it clear that I don’t think of aggressiveness exclusively in physical terms? People who invade your space and expect things from you make me feel just as threatened. Loud people. People who leave anonymous personal insults on blogs. People who accuse you. People who make underhanded comments. People who break your heart and then act like they had nothing to do with it. People who become instantly defensive and retaliatory.

I definitely acknowledge having acted in the all the above ways at times. If you think I make your life difficult now, you should have met me when I was 16. I have my own history of violence, and I guess that made me more reactive than others. I learned to protect myself (and others) in my own way, but I suppose the fear is latent in me, that somehow, someday, the violence will come back and I’ll be powerless against it. The downstairs couple is reminding me of that constantly, in a very uncomfortable way. I'm no hippie; I believe violence has a place in fiction and in real life, but I was sort of hoping that we could all do our best to try to make it easy instead of hard.

Impatient re: Patience

I can feel the earth begin to move
I hear my needle hit the groove
And spiral through another day
I hear my song begin to say
Kiss me where the sun don't shine
The past was yours
But the future's mine
You're all out of time

-She Bangs the Drums, Stone Roses

I have never been a patient person. Somewhere along the way it became very obvious to me that there is no reason on earth why I shouldn’t have what I want when I want it. It’s not that I was particularly spoiled. On the contrary, I have just spent a lot of my time being frustrated, I guess. I never got to disappear in a pool of coloured plastic balls (still a fantasy); I never got one of those plastic cars with the yellow plastic roof I wanted; my mother wouldn’t buy me a black leather mini-skirt no matter how much I promised that I would *only* wear it for Halloween (yeah, right); a gazillion people have passed by my life for varying amounts of time and I never got what I wanted from them. Kind of sucks.

So sometime during my university years I did a little reading on Buddhism, and that seemed like an interesting way to calm those urges. And sometime after those years, I took up yoga and that seemed to calm me down a lot. A man who read my birth chart recommended I “sweat” (yoga being an acceptable method) and live by the sea. I haven’t managed the second yet.

My dad says I’m too rigid; that I expect people to be a certain way (ie exactly how I want them to be) and if they’re not I don’t bend. I probably got mad when he said that. My brother and I have chatted about how demanding we are with others, particularly the people we date. We laugh about how ridiculously picky and hopeless we are. I sometimes wonder which of us is really worse. I have certain un-stated quotas of how much attention has to be paid to me (re: answer my emails, call me, make me feel like a priority). My brother is so stern that if someone, say, cuts him off in traffic, he’ll follow the car and somehow –don’t ask me how- he’ll try to “teach them their lesson”. I have a list of people I wish I could teach a lesson to. It keeps growing too.

Today, for instance, I’m blaming my impatience partially on my downstairs neighbours. They’re new, and I’ll bet they have woken me up 50% of the nights they’ve been living below me. They’re either fighting or having sex, usually one followed by the other (and not in the order you’d expect, either). The walls in my apartment are so thin, I can quote parts of their arguments and I can say for a fact that when they screw, it’s over faster than when they argue. Whenever they wake me, I begin drafting a letter in my head that I’ll slip under their door to “teach them a lesson”.

I’m impatient at work when my deadline is coming up and other parts of the project are behind. I try to calm down that anxiety by rationalizing that it can still get done on time… that venting will not help… that it’s not anyone in particular’s fault.

But no matter how much rationalizing and slow breathing I do, no matter how much I control my impulse to throw a huge fit, I can't stop the impatience inside. I’m impatient with people who block the sidewalk and walk too slow. I’m impatient with people who actually drag their feet when they walk. I’m impatient with people who decide it’s time to count their coins when they get to the cash. I’m impatient with people who hold the elevator for other people who are taking forever. I’m impatient with people who can’t make up their minds when it’s time to. I’m impatient with small dogs. I’m impatient with people who don’t get back to me. I’m impatient with friends who obsess about anything that’s not interesting to me. I’m impatient with cashiers and servers who “ignore” me (that’s how I see it anyway). I’m impatient with the week, because it’s not the weekend. I’m impatient with websites where I can’t find the answers to my questions. I’m impatient with people who tell me what’s wrong with me. I’m impatient with strangers’ babies who make a lot of noise for no reason. I'm impatient with people who yell, honk or play the car radio really loud. I’m impatient with noise in general.

Regular yoga, reminding myself that people are not obliged to behave in the Isabel-approved way (but wouldn’t that be great?) and some forms of mental distraction are helpful. But like U2 said, some days are better than others. Sometimes I am just sooo tired of being patient, and that’s when I know it counts the most.

Un Tour la Nuit

photo par Robert Saucier

Hoy fue le Tour de L'Île de Montreal. Literalmente es la vuelta a la isla. Para los que siempre se olvidan: Montreal es una isla, anclada en el río San Lorenzo. La isla mide 30 kilómetros de largo y 12 de ancho. Una vez al año treinta mil ciclistas de todo nivel la recorren en masa, y de fiesta. Son 50 kilómetros. Eso fue hoy, pero el viernes fue la versión mini, de noche: Un Tour la Nuit. Esa fue la versión que vi: doce mil ciclistas recorriendo 20 kilómetros, con luces, gorros extravagantes, tocando bocinas, aún más fiesta que el recorrido de día, seguramente.

Los vi bajar la calle Berri, una bastante empinada que -en la parte donde yo estaba caminando- tiene un paso bajo nivel en pendiente. Ahí gritaban todos: wuuuuu! bip! bip!

Yo iba con tres amigas camino al Théâtre L'Olympia en el barrio gay a ver a la cantante canadiense Feist, cuyo concierto estaba agotado. Conseguí entradas por suerte. Tontamente no las había comprado la semana antes, y aquí, muchas veces si no atinas, perdiste.

Algo como encontrarse con le Tour de L'Île es tan Montreal que quise compartirlo acá en castellano para los que están lejos. Es tan Montreal porque de junio a septiembre esta ciudad "está de fiesta", con un festival tras otro. De hecho, mis amigas y yo veníamos precisamente del St-Viateur Street Fest en el barrio de Mile End. Cierran esta calle, ponen un escenario y los comerciantes sacan sus parrillas a la vereda. Música en vivo, sangría, salchichas, bagels, gente del barrio, niños con las caras pintadas, cerveza en bolsas de papel.

Todo eso fue el viernes. El sábado caminé (camino al 90% de mis destinos) al nuevo departamento de mi amiga Geraldine, una francesa que conocí a través de mis otros amigos franceses Benoit y Crystèle. Seguramente Ge está tratando de traducir este post al francés ahora mismo. En su "housewarming", como se le dice en inglés a las inauguraciones de casas, se hablaba inglés y francés. Los europeos se reían del barbeque ("barbok" parece que era el slang francés para la parrilla) tan norteamericano y las sillas "de capitán" como le llaman aquí a estas plegables con respaldo y brazos de género que todo el mundo lleva a ver la competencia de fuegos artificiales (otro festival que se viene) y que había en su patio.

Me fui de la fiesta, que estaba buenísima, a otro traidicional pasatiempo canadiense: donde un amigo a ver -en pantalla plana y gigante- el tercer tiempo del partido de hockey entre Ottawa y Anaheim (California, qué absurdo, ¿no?). Estamos en los Playoffs, a máximo 4 partidos de saber quién se gana la copa Stanley. Los malditos y violentos californianos van ganando 2-1 la serie. Un paso flash por una fiesta en el patio común de 8 departamentos, otras largas caminatas de ida y vuelta de la discotec, y una parada a comer bagels antes de dormir fueron el fin de mi fin de semana. Y recién estamos a comienzos de junio, o dios.