just in! being self helps

ha! sometimes i really enjoy the environment that comes with my job. customer comes in, buys some books, asks me where "those kids got their ice cream". i tell her about the place up the block that's so fancy you could ask for m&m's and guitar strings on your ice cream and they'd do it. off she goes. a little while later, the drunks outside the pub next door are getting all emotive. we check, and it appears the bookstore customer, parked right in front of the store, has a dead battery and wants to know if any of the drunk guys can help. the poster-child for drunk brits decides they should push-start her car (or at least, he's the loudest about it) and gets all the other smoking drunk people to help. keep in mind this is a major thoroughfare. so this little car goes careening off into traffic with maybe five big guys behind it. it starts! and roars off. and guess where the ice cream ends up? in the hands of the poster-child. that's how community works in big cities, i think.

it's probably a funnier story with the soundtrack of seven or so men laughing hysterically, eating ice cream.

trying to settle into a routine, a summer routine. finding it difficult. i still want to spend most of my time with the queen, but he works days (early starts, getting earlier) and i work largely nights. he gets weekends off (for now) and i get random weekdays off. so we see each other rarely, and not necessarily at our best - one of us is half-conscious. he's very sweet, coming by the store when he gets off work, and coming by for lunch occasionally. i wish i could visit his work, but its nature makes it impossible. more than half the time he isn't even in the far-away office anyway.

and i like having my own time. i do. i just have pre-worry about the quality of our time together because it's harder to be fully present with each other right now. and when i think about the idea of that being all it would take for us to forget the awesomeness, i roll my eyes. i mean, come on. but it's hard to keep teasing my worry when it's really worried. and he'll end up working sixteen-hour days this summer, he's warned me. worry worry.

okay, so find a strategy that helps with the worry, find a special thing that can happen in terms of shared time, and set a check-in date with self after the summer is over, like november, where we'll have had a chance to see each other again in real daylight hours. and show my love in the meantime. acknowledge that the relationship means a lot.

meditate. make dinner. consciously live while time is passing.

it's weird how often my strategies boil down to eating and sitting and doing my own thing. i wonder if that's really the secret to peace? that and trust. trust the relationship, trust my self, trust the person i am with.

caribou!

gallant moment in time

late at night, for some reason, restless. downstairs at the goodwitch house, cat sitting in the dining room at night, the queen upstairs sleeping with the regular housecat, beautiful and black.

a cake in the oven, product of a moment's decision; cupboard cake (cake made with whatever's in the cupboard) with yogurt, cherry butter, eggs, sunflower oil and saskatoon berries, flavoured with cinnamon and maple syrup. a few eggs and some celiac flour, poof. (well, the poof might actually be the baking soda.)

hung out with the wife tonight on the back porch. she's a-glowing, enjoying her own space. we chatted, mostly on her end while i sat, kind of dazed. we talked about future living arrangements, life plans (as long as there is life, there are plans for it).

great day off today; bit of housework, bit of reading, bit of errandry; lot of mild catching up and downtime. i love these days. the cat relaxes, the house gets lived in. moments are savoured, pulled apart and chewed up.

this is a form of richness.

general effusiveness

such busy, busy days. for me (translation: am not sitting at home in front of the computer).

quick story: pigeon got into bookstore's furnace ventilation system through panel left off furnace on roof.* pigeon ended up at the other end of the furnace system, pecking through ceiling grate on the first floor, shitting all over the carpet and worrying an animal-rights-inspired customer browsing. of course, we couldn't get the grate to open, only to bend. eventually, i called the queen, who came riding down in his white steed and accomplished the pigeon rescue by opening the ceiling panel next to the grate and propping the furnace vent itself open by cramming bad romantic suspense books between its bits. for his trouble, he got some free vinyl and the knowledge of one more pigeon out there, free (as a bird?).

now, it has been another day since i started this post. interruptions; queen and i went to pick up stuff we successfully bid on at the book release/punk? show/silent auction for humanitarian efforts in iraq we went to on friday night (after my two meetings; that does not count for a day off). the show was great, and the band we went to see excellent. the show on saturday night was also great; several bands at a local drinking hole. i enjoyed plainclothes and touchitandyouwillsayow.

on sunday, we jammed with our lovely friend, a little bird who lives on the edge of town. he comes in rarely, so it was a special treat for all the gnomes. the occasion also marked the first time the queen and i jammed since we fell in love. i felt sort of euphoric. another friend of the queen and little bird's came by, who likes to play a lot of metal and is amazing on classical guitar. he jammed with us a bit and then "had to thrash" so did so. i went out to the fire in the backyard. there may have been scotch.

the queen and i are moving into different kinds of learning with each other. hesitancy is coming up, viewpoints we differ in are being discovered. i feel very lucky to be with someone who is passionate and intelligent, who is patient and sometimes makes mistakes. who makes me breakfast in bed and then teases me mercilessly about the silly things i am sensitive about, including my inability to tell when i'm being teased (which has led me to plaintively question "is this banter?" whenever he says something i hope isn't true). who loves me and receives my love. i just end up feeling cheesy when i try and talk about it. spout spout. effuse effuse.

i have been invited to continue living with the lovely woman i am housesitting for. this means she gets a nickname. i have known her for years, she has a lovely black cat and this old beautiful home. she works on poverty issues (among others) and strives for a balanced and emotionally authentic life. she plays the fiddle, drinks wine around the fire and has a deceptively innocent face. i will call her the good witch.

emotion: amazingly lucky to live three houses up from the queen and the wife. and to know all the people in between. brewing contentment.

yesterday evening around the fire, the queen and i were conversing about different kinds of scotch and their growing and distillation processes. little bird laughed (i love it when shy people laugh) and said he could see us discussing important things together when we are both ninety.

people keep saying these things. it reminds me to take it one day at a time, even as i want to skydive a message across the sky proclaiming eternal wonder at this amazing connection.

the purring

today, a day off, a lovely day.

waking up, doing my thing, uninterrupted even inadvertently. coffee, breakfast, then reading on the porch until my mother comes by.

she shows me the photo album she fished out, with pictures of my parents' honeymoon on the icefields, my baby pictures, pictures of my sister and relatives. mixed emotions surface, but mostly i am glad simply to be that much more informed of my past.

we set out, shopping for a spring coat, in this weird retrograded moment. maybe it reminds me of what shopping for back to school clothes could have been, if we had tuned into each other like we did today, graciously reaching out instead of cloaking ourselves in pain. it was entirely ... amenable.

after slogging it through the indie clothing boutiques, we finally found something that wasn't beige or grey in a secondhand shop with pink floyd playing (not the early stuff, which is actually really amazing; no, it was the dark side of the moon, i think. i actually tuned it out and am not sure, so it may have been the wall) and rainbow-coloured clerks. a three-quarter length chocolate brown leather and suede coat (secondhand, secondhand). gorgeous, i think.

we completed the consumer tour with a lunch stop at a local organic place (where they photocopied the gluten-free food guide i found at the back of this book) and then a visit to my favourite enviro-local-independent-culture store. i picked up some potting soil for the bookstore.

altogether, it was a lovely day - and i haven't even written about multiple gnomal activities, with dog and cats abounding. or the nearly-brewing thunderstorm as i read wilkie collins on the enclosed porch.

tomorrow i go back to work; today is about spring.

sitting here, middle of the night.
beautiful night with fresh snow on the trees,
hanging on surfaces, soft and clumpy.

let the spirit move you.

let the spontaneous response, informed freedom, reign.

from the royal bed; feline update

i have a slight cold, happily stuffing my sinuses, so this entry promises to be even more distracted and abstract than usual. i might even ramble.

i suddenly moved, and am now one third at my friend's house for whom i am house-sitting (but not til the end of march) and two-thirds at the gnome home. i am fully enjoying being in my neighbourhood again; the street of gnomes and cats. c-light's roommate was out playing guitar on her porch with her dog while the queen and i moved my boxes into the new place. the cats were wandering around - a large grey cat named magellan lives across the street and visits all the other cats (and their food bowls). he sits with his tongue hanging out just a touch, and while he isn't a snob, he maintains the indifference that all cats convey with their body language. molly, the cat i will be looking after, was all dirty from sleeping in bushes and rolling around on patches of sunny sidewalk.

olive has been totally seduced by the queen - she lets him rub her belly for long periods of time, purring and stretching her belly open to him, whereas i get to scratch her for maybe three strokes before she rolls away. scandalous. even my cat is in love. she doesn't tend to develop an affinity with anyone i date. i see it as a passing vote when she doesn't leave the room as they enter (that happened multiple times. she tolerated Special Friend the best, only sending him baleful looks. a friend of mine i dated two years ago still talks about how much olive hates him).

i think the queen has some kind of insider info on olive. he calls her olivia, and she likes it.

oh the perspective; thanks science, thanks music.

an interesting blurb about relationships here. there's a bit about online dating, but the part that really touched me, at the end, is about people who suffer from depressive episodes and how it affects their relationships. oh mister mcferrin, can you say it again?

it really is neat though, how simply it divides relational uncertainty. if you are in a relationship (and everyone is in one kind or another) ask yourself the three questions:

• how certain am i about how i view this relationship?
• how certain am i about where the other person wants this to go?
• how certain am i about the future of this relationship?

i am more certain of the last two than the first one. i think i still have trouble trusting myself on relationships. i only just realized they aren't about fixing. so i think i love this person for who he is but what if, in some subconscious way, i am still trying to cut a deal with the universe, with my fate, with my past?

oh well, i resolutely say to myself. we deal with strange bugs under rocks when we find them; no need to unearth the whole field right away.

lastly, if you are curious or concerned about your mental health, read this and check here.