Great Expectations

I don't really feel like doing this anymore. Everything is fine, great, but I'm just not really in the mood to keep posting things for the sake of posting something. It's not really very interesting, and the original purpose of this blog was to communicate with friends and, well, now they should be on Facebook. In any case, I won't be gone for anyone who is close to me.

Maybe I'll come up with something eventually. Feel free to keep me in your feed, but don't count on it. I can't think of a better to way to shut this down then to be meaningless and apparently cryptic one more time.

`Dear Pip,' said Biddy, `you are sure you don't fret for her?'

`O no -- I think not, Biddy.'

`Tell me as an old, old friend. Have you quite forgotten her ?'

`My dear Biddy, I have forgotten nothing in my life that ever had a foremost place there, and little that ever had any place there. But that poor dream, as I once used to call it, has all gone by, Biddy, all gone by!'

Nevertheless, I knew while I said those words, that I secretly intended to revisit the site of the old house that evening, alone, for her sake.

Credo

Il était une fois... a close friend told me "your problem is that you're a romantic". Ah yes, both assertions in that sentence are correct. I am a romantic and it is a problem.

Je m'baladais sur l'avenue le coeur ouvert à l'inconnu
J'avais envie de dire bonjour à n'importe qui
N'importe qui et ce fut toi, je t'ai dit n'importe quoi
Il suffisait de te parler, pour t'apprivoiser

Aux Champs-Elysées, aux Champs-Elysées
Au soleil, sous la pluie, à midi ou à minuit
Il y a tout ce que vous voulez aux Champs-Elysées

Tu m'as dit "J'ai rendez-vous dans un sous-sol avec des fous
Qui vivent la guitare à la main, du soir au matin"
Alors je t'ai accompagnée, on a chanté, on a dansé
Et l'on n'a même pas pensé à s'embrasser

Hier soir deux inconnus et ce matin sur l'avenue
Deux amoureux tout étourdis par la longue nuit
Et de l'Étoile à la Concorde, un orchestre à mille cordes
Tous les oiseaux du point du jour chantent l'amour

-Joe Dassin, Les Champs Elysées

My body is a cage

The word "cromagnon" often conjures up the image of my history teacher at Sacred Heart, Mrs. Filipovich. Her skin taut against her tiny skull, hair tied in a neat ponytail at the bottom of her nape in a black ribbon... in my mind she's always wearing some shade of grey or black. There was just something about the way she said the word, with a bit of a French accent: "cromagnon" instead of crow-mag-nin.

If I were living with my ancestors in Western Europe about 15 thousand years ago, I think I would be dead by my age. I'm 32, but I'm a genetic disaster of a 32 year old. My eyesight was detected to be going bad by the time I was 10, but I'm sure I remember seeing blurry long before that. At 22, an observant doctor was the first to notice a sad but quirky fact: my left leg is a full centimetre shorter than my right leg. Incidentally, my right eye is a little better off than my left eye (0.25). And, I have had cavities. Lots of cavities. All the teeth that you can't see in a photo of me smiling have fillings. And one particularly sad tooth was the recipient of a root canal at least 5 years ago.

This tooth is why I'm writing today. Funny how teeth and eyes, such tiny things, can overpower our senses when something's wrong with them. I remember the agony and impotence I felt last summer in L.A. when I somehow scratched my cornea and was practically blind for a few hours. I went back to my hotel room and I cried out of pure misery and loneliness. I think that if I had been in Europe during the Ice Age when that happened, I would have curled up in the forest and let a bear eat me alive. Luckily, no bears came into my hotel room and my family and friends came to the rescue. Also, the scratch was due to my contact lense and they didn't have those tens of thousands of years ago. But I would have been blind as a bat anyway. Without glasses, I can't see clearly beyond 15 centimetres. Seriously.

And teeth! Teeth are huge. In Chile there was a program started by the last president's wife to help poor (and "poor") women get their smiles fixed, "Sonrisa de Mujer". The objective was to raise their self-esteem as well as their job opportunities. That's how huge teeth are.

Last Thursday as I ate some salted corn & flax chips (on special!), I heard the crack. I knew it was bad. I had cracked that tooth before, which is about when I had the root canal done, but oh.. I didn't know it could get worse. I will back up a bit. I have two marvelous dentists: one in Montreal and one in Santiago. The one in Santiago did my root canal. The one in Montreal praised it and said "but now it's time you got a crown on that tooth". My health insurance said "hahaha. good luck paying for that, don't count on us". So I made several appointments with my Chilean destist for next month, when I'm travelling there on vacation. A tooth-motivated vacation. Anyway, a month away from the intended crown thing and crack!

What would you do? Ignore it, of course! But it hurt. By Sunday it hurt so much, I wanted to accept Andre's offer to rip it out with pliers. I dosed on Advil, which kind of gives you an indication of how exaggerated I am. It wasn't *that* painful, I suppose. But I could feel the cracks between the outer shell of my original tooth (since circa 1984) and whatever Mr. Dentist had put on the inside. Are you grossed out? I couldn't stop touching it.

Anyway. I called up Ms. Dentist this morning and said "please look at it. I need to know if I can hold on a month -at least- like this". This afternoon Ms. Dentist told me it was a good thing I went to see her. The tooth was broken, good as gone, and could get infected if left alone. She STABBED me in my palate with a needle so painful I had to use up all my grown-up self-control to stop from swatting her arm away. I was curled up in the chair, not screaming but making the high pitched sound of my inner fight against pain. "eeeeeeeeeeee!!!!" Then I started laughing; she must have given me drugs.

What she did next is almost inconceivable to me still, even though I've looked up there with a mirror and I know it to be fact: she took out half my tooth. She just removed it. I saw it, too. My tooth, that has been in my mouth for over 20 years, broken, a piece of junk in her latex-gloved hand. She said I had options: an implant, a bridge, surgery... horrors, just horrors. I wish a tiger would eat me now.

Ecología

Ahhh, tanto tiempo. Me dieron ganas de escribirles un post en castellano y además hablar de algo que sí me interesa en el último tiempo: la ecología. Bueno. Eso es mentira. Me interesa hace mucho tiempo. Recuerdo haber pasado unas vacaciones en la biblioteca del museo de historia natural de Cape Cod, Massachussets, "robando" fotocopias de un libro acerca del medio ambiente y cómo salvarlo. Debo haber tenido unos 10 años. El libro era de los 70s, lo sé por sus dibujos, aún claros en mi mente.

En todo caso, el punto es que hoy siento un renovado interés en lo que yo puedo hacer para minimizar mi impacto sobre el planeta. Hasta ahora he hecho cosas como:

-Reciclar. hay un programa municipal acá que acepta papel, plástico (salvo el 6), vidrio y metal. en un almacén aceptan las bandejas de plumavit así que las guardo para reciclarlas ahí.

-Compostaje, otro programa local. me inscribí, me dieron las llaves del sitio y voy una o dos veces por semana durante el verano con mi colección de recortes de verduras, a depositarlos en una enorme caja de madera con los recortes de otras personas. en la primavera, nos repartimos la tierra - el compost- que se forma a partir de todo eso.

-Detergente biodegradable. Para los platos, la ropa y al menos una parte de los que uso en el baño. Mi compañera de trabajo que es brasilera dice que aquí usamos muchos químicos para limpiar mientras que en sudamérica un poco de jabón y agua y yastá! Me encantan los productos de limpieza, lo admito. Ahora estoy vuelta loca con una marca llamada Method.

-Reduciendo la cantidad de bolsas plásticas que uso. Por ejemplo, llevando mis propias bolsas de tela (o fabricadas con plástico reciclado!) al supermercado. Y las bolsas plásticas que sí acumulo las reciclo, obvio.

Pero hay cosas que sé que no hago suficiente:

-Comprar comida producida localmente, para que su viaje hasta mis manos haya costado menos bencina, ergo contaminación.
-Comprar comida orgánica, para que en su producción no se hayan usado químicos, pesticidas, etc.
-Intercambiar más productos químicos y cuya producción crea subproductos dañinos al medioambiente por otros más sanos. Lo hice esta semana cuando se acabó mi shampoo Pantene. Compré uno biodegradable, natural. Pero tanto maquillaje!
-Menos envoltorios! Si te fijas, todo está envuelto! Individualmente, incluso. Es absurdo, y lo que no reciclo... bueno, ahí va, llenando el tarro de la basura y yendo a llenar un basural al lado de la casa de alguien, cayendo al agua que alguien usa para regar, evaporándose en el aire de todos.

¿Qué haces y qué planeas hacer?