Explanation

This blog was taken down by me, Isabel, sometime in late 2007, I guess. It's now back up. I won't be posting to it anymore, though. I'm starting a new blog...Bonus Time.

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?

Word of the Day: Pleonastic

I came across it in a translation forum I use when I'm stuck.

Pleonasm:

1.	the use of more words than are necessary to express an idea; redundancy.

2.	an instance of this, as free gift or true fact.

3.	a redundant word or expression.

It reminded me of an earlier post re: tautology.

American Streamlined Design

At the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Until this Sunday, October 28. Free Admission.

They applied the principals of aerodynamics to household objects, beginning with tools and appliances. They created a look, mostly in the 30s and 40s, that just would not let go of its grip on our collective psyche. There's something that remains "modern" about these designs, even almost 80 years later. We have made the materials lighter and more sophisticated (not so much steel and bakelite anymore) but we have not really created a "look" that says "future" quite so loudly. Is it better to live in the future ("future is now") or to live in a time when the future is brightly illuminated ahead of you?


“Modern design entered the American home not through the front door, but by way of the kitchen, bathroom and garage.” -Walter Dorwin Teague, Design This Day

Oui, c'est moi!

I wish I could write poetry. I would write a piece about my multi-blooming Candy Wind hibiscus and how she is me.

I *heart* Interpol

Here's the video I took at Osheaga 2007. I thought my camera had sound capture at the time, silly, silly me.

...they hadn't wanted it

Before Time Altered Them

They were full of sadness at their parting.
They hadn't wanted it: circumstances made it necessary.
The need to earn a living forced one of them
to go far away -New York or Canada.
The love they felt wasn't, of course, what it once had been;
the attraction between them had gradually diminished,
the attraction had diminished a great deal.
But to be separated, that wasn't what they wanted.
It was circumstances. Or maybe Fate
appeared as an artist and decided to part them now,
before their feeling died out completely, before Time altered
them
the one seeming to remain for the other always what he was,
the good-looking young man of twenty-four.

Constantine P. Cavafy

[In the years after my parents' divorce, I found this poem, bookmarked by my mother in a translation of Kavafi poems. It still makes me cry to read it. I am afraid of pain, but I am more afraid of ignoring its existence.]

I went to my first ever march on Saturday. Somehow I manage to have the best friends ever, including but not limited to, Brian and Andre, who went with me to join the hippies for a bit, hoping perhaps for a little molotov cocktail action. No such luck. It was a silent march, so quiet along Sherbrooke on a rainy Saturday that Brian decided he *wanted* to chant. The organizers shouted a couple in English and French once we reached "Norman Bethune Park", ie the sliver of dirt on the corner of de Maisonneuve and Guy. I was wondering: is it weird that Norman Bethune was so tied into China when we're discussing their unispired lack of action vis a vis Burma? Just a thought.

It felt good to do something that can be qualified as solidarity. But I am no fan of what seems like "professional activism". Someone Brian knows, who he calls "an extreme vegan" (ie eating honey is "obviously" immoral) was a busy bee these days, going from this "demo" to another about the next controversial topic du jour. Not my thing. I guess it is this type of person who must be in charge of sending emails entitled "protest went great!" Is this, like, "tried your recipe, it went great!"? Or "had that date last night; it went great!"? Woohoo. I don't know. Not my thing. I'm still really glad I went, and I'm thrilled Brian and Andre were there too. Some people are just awesome.

An article in WIRED about `open source politics` and the group on FB through which I found out about the protest.

click on the image

Let your heart feel for the afflictions and distress of everyone. - George Washington

What is the difference between an outpouring of compassion for people displaced and killed by a tsunami and this?

Rapa Nui

Mamá & Axel with the moais... not, not a giant bottle of pisco, kids.

I learnt that each of the big heads was meant to look like the dead person it represented. Axel also told me he was able to ride his bike for 4 hours (he enjoys marathonic trips) without seeing a single human on Easter Island.

MyohMy

"China hopes that all parties in Myanmar exercise restraint and properly handle the current issue so as to ensure the situation there does not escalate and get complicated," Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said Thursday. (From an Associated Press wire)

I have news for Ms. Yu: it’s already complicated.

Have you heard what’s happening in Myanmar? I hear it every morning on the radio news, like a slow, persistent, deathly drumbeat. I bet these monks are in it for the long haul. If you’re a Buddhist monk, I would guess you’re not too concerned about whether it’s you getting beaten to death or the next guy, and that’s how you win a battle, I think. Individualization of soldiers annoys me, because I feel it undermines the concept of a united front, where each man is everyman. Samurai, Spartan, whatnot. Didn’t they do it this way? I don’t know much, but I hope these monks and their compatriots win. From what I gather, they have nothing to lose.

[the photo is of the Japanese photographer, Kenji Nagai, 52, who died after being shot while trying to photograph the events]

We all need to feel secure, we're so middle class

Tautology

From the book Armed Gunmen, True Facts and Other Ridiculous Nonsense (comments by Mental Floss.com)

• “False pretense”
If pretense is “the act of alleging falsely,” as Dictionary.com asserts, then wouldn’t a false pretense be … true?

• “Advance warning”
A warning delivered after the fact is known, I believe, as “Monday morning quarterbacking.”

• “Convicted felon”
If we’re guilty until proven innocent, there shouldn’t be too many convictionless felons running around.

• “Surviving widow”
Kallan defines it thusly: “The last woman standing in an all-widow game of Russian roulette.”

• “Fall down”
Gravity tends to make this modifier unnecessary.

• “All throughout”
More pervasive than occasionally throughout.

• “Close proximity”
As opposed to a distant proximity?

• “Sum total”
This really gets the point across … and then sum.

• “Shared dialogue”
When was the last time you heard a shared monologue?

• “Mass exodus”
When everyone leaves church at the same time? And speaking of church …

• “Holy Bible”
I’m so tired of these unholy Bibles.

I need a housewife

What I am looking for is someone to:

*clean my apartment
*make small home repairs (see post re: my broken curtain)
*run errands

More about me:

*I'm out of the house a lot, don't have time to sit around waiting for a load of laundry to get done in the building's basement before anyone steals my basket (again)
*I like to eat healthy, simple things but can barely get around to purchasing them at the supermarket, much less preparing them into lunches
*Life is chaos, things break, my list of items in need of repair or change is growing and I'm not doing anything about it. Can you help?

Ideal housewives are:

*Equally opportunity employer
*Harassment free environment
*Fair pay, fair labour conditions
*Must enjoy taking care of *moi* and *mes needs* and thrive on praise

What am I doing here?

*

Spandex, lamé, headbands, short shorts, athletic socks, grinding up the dancefloor, crowd-surfing to DJs who plays squeaky sounds, DJs who mash up samples and call it groundbreaking, some drug I can’t even tell you’re on, teenagers, kids who look like teenagers… what am I doing here?

Maybe it’s because I’ve been to “too many” dance shows lately. Maybe the planets aligned differently this summer and I’m suddenly no longer the same person I used to be. I like to dance. I like to dance a lot. My preferred style of dancing is called “jumping up and down and shaking” (jumping down is an interesting concept but we can talk about that another day) and I have been doing it freely and wildly since, oh, 1993. Before that, I danced but it was comme il faut. I was all awkward circle dancing at the Loyola gym, or waiting for some boy who turned out to be gay to make out with me to Roxette. I looked around at how the other girls danced and I just couldn’t do it like them. Thank God for Britpop. Thank God for Damon Albarn releasing the hoppy dance craze. Thank God for wicked fast drum beats and pounding electronica. Thank God for Franz Ferdinand and Interpol and every other nerd-jerky kind of music that finally was in sync with what I’d had in my body the whole time. No more of this sinewy, cool chic dancing. Dance, dance, dance to the radio.

And then, I don’t know. People started saying the kids at the places I like to dance at are too young. I said I ignore them. And then, suddenly, at the MSTRKRFT show at the SAT on September 1, I suddenly saw them. I had seen them before and suddenly I *saw* them: the dayglo tube dresses, everything cheesy about the 80s, tap dancing, gyrating, we-just-got-out-of-8th-grade-gym-class kids. So what am *I* still doing here? I swear that night I could feel the gap between me and the rest of the crowd stretching wider right before my eyes. I can barely listen to these people chatter, much less commune with them on a sweaty dancefloor. I am on the verge of not understanding a thing about them anymore. I am old. I am a hasbeen. And I don’t even care what they think.

When I was 17 I used to go dancing at this club with a particular boy and his friends, and I remember how we used to be shocked if anyone as old as 25 came in. What were they doing there, it was so weird!

Ultimately, I don’t think age has everything to do with it. I had friends who were never into the debauchery of dance, drugs and delirium, no matter how young they were. And I know there are people who will never want to leave that environment, no matter how old they get. It’s not them; it’s me. Scratched record, something skipped. I opened my eyes and I saw that I was in a foreign country that used to be mine. I decided I wanted to leave. But not before Justice on October 19 (!)
* if you can tell me who this is, you are a young shooting star.

inneresting fax

* I haven't posted anything here since August.

* Most people visit my blog on Wednesdays, and the most popular keyword used to find it is... halloween (??) followed by nancy kerrigan, which is really the same thing since what they find on my old site when they google those words is a picture of me and Button dressed up as tonya harding and nancy kerrigan one halloween. I am probably not helping to reduce these hits by writing about them now...

* The top 3 blogs sending visitors my way are Bubi's, It's All Grey to Me, and Amy's. Thanks, ladies!

* I write more when I am living less, I suppose. Now I can only think of things like this to say: my curtains broke; I like the dog park on Dr. Penfield for lunch; my kitchen stinks due to leaving a rotting blob of couscous and chickpeas out and I can't wait for trash day; my hibiscus is multi-blooming and I love it; I have a new used tv; I got notification that my new laptop has arrived in the mail; I think the fighting couple was relocated to the first floor of the building but it's only a hunch. I know everyone always wants to know what's up with them...

How I spent my summer(s)

Two summers ago I dated three guys in quick succession. I knew they were all wrong for me. A) great on paper B) a great idealization and C) a great conversation that ended the very second we became a couple, as correctly predicted by him.

Last summer, two of the characters from the year before played starring roles in the Polanski directed version of my life. Murky waters. The third had only a cameo role. Thank God.

This summer, I have learnt about karma, retribution, deceit, and -ultimately- how your adversaries can become your allies by taking the dead weight you've been carrying around off your hands. At first, it's unpleasant but when you realize the major favour being done for you, it's hoorah!

Sarah came over on the day my fridge horoscope (a magnetic calendar with a new message for each day) said the following:

To get what you want, it helps greatly to know exactly what that is. What you want is defined by your real desire, not what you think you'll probably get.

Apt words for our activity that night -besides drinking mojitos-, creating a list of my so-called dealbreakers. I ended up with six, which Sarah thinks is too many, but I had to fight her on it. Dealbreakers are things you will not accept in an FLP (as Sarah calls them), and therefore we converted my list into a contract, which begins thus:

I, Isabel Brinck, hereby solemnly swear that I will not pursue a relationship with anyone who:


and then the points we came up with follow. I could have copied the list here, but it's kind of too personal, I think. Plus, you don't really need to know unless you are a) one of my assigned veto-empowered friends who may axe any undesirable candidates or b) a candidate.

Most of my list is made up of the-worst-of-the-worst of what I've already experienced. If I read it that way, it's pretty pathetic. But going back to the adversary-cum-ally, if I realize that I have been thankfully released from all of these things, than hallelujah, I *love* this list!