foto friday: four fluffy feathers on a fiffer-feffer-feff

Some photos that are mildly entertaining and, at very least, diverting on a Friday afternoon.

 Dinner at a friend's house - after spoiling us rotten with an incredible meal, we were presented with this homemade dessert.  Haze courtesy of its heavenly aura.

 

 

My brother, and basement tenant, helping us set up our new couches from IKEA.  We assumed that couches would, at least, come fully assembled and not require the hated allen key.  We assumed wrongly.

Andrew and my sister-in-law, Sarah.  Not so much helping.

A fancy photo of the juicy tomatoes we harvested from our garden.

Our new video conference screen, whereby we can view all four, newly merged offices: Toronto, Montréal, Atlanta, and New York.  The top right-hand corner shows me, in Toronto, taking this picture.  The bottom-right screen corner shows New York's office, looking at Toronto office, and me taking the picture of them in New York...and me in Toronto.  Next up: holodecks.

A fancy picture of our dog, Solomon, attempting to retrieve his yellow tennis ball in a carpet of yellow leaves.  Photographer: my husband.

These make me want to call the number.  EVERY SINGLE TIME.  If it wasn't for my husband's logic I think we'd have one of those crazy cat houses.

I'm offended that this is the type of junk mail we're receiving now.

Melissa's adorable little salon set-up, where she did my hair for Jordan & Noel's autumn wedding.

Her vintage salon chair.  Can you stand it?  I can't stand it.  It's too cute.  Make it stop.

Jordan (screenwriting graduate) and Noel (journalist-in-training) and their incredible, theatre-themed wedding held at Capitol Event Theatre.

This guy is superhot.  So, incidentally, are my red shoes.

I don't know if I would ever seriously wear one of these, but I'd give respect to anyone who did.

Our cat, Oberon, in our bedroom.  Where he should not be.  Which is why he is looking ruefully back from whence he came.  Because am in bed...with a squirt bottle in my hand.

My awesome brother dressed up as his hero, Antoine Dodson for Hallowe'en.  Actually, for Sunday church on Hallowe'en morning.  Which makes him even awesomer.

And as soon as Hallowe'en is over...

I love packages from our Montréal office.  I'm "Mme".

 NICOLE, LOOK!  CHRISTMAS CAME EARLY!

wifercize wednesday: suzie home-maker

It hit me like a sneeze.  At first, a slight tingle - an itch, really - barely perceptible and mostly ignorable.  I think it began when my mom gave us a subscription to House & Home for our one-year anniversary.  No harm done.  Just a magazine.  But then the tickle grew, the eyes began to twitch, and the mouth formed a turned-down crescent.  I began to bake (a foreign tradition to me, as my mother was more of a cook than a baker).  I discovered I liked baking.  And Andrew liked my baking.  I tried my hand at gardening.  I requested patio furniture.  For my birthday.  Now, the urge is irresistible.  No amount of superstitious preventative measures could possibly stop this impulse.  I weekly check home decor blogs such as Covet Garden, Remodelista, and Design*Sponge.  We ordered two matching grown-up couches.  I revel in doing laundry, cleaning dishes, and Swiffering.

Eyes squeezed tight, face distorted and stretched, a large gasp of breath, held, and...

I've caught the home-making bug.

As surprised as I am to have been struck with this contagion, I largely blame my married status, my home ownership, the influence of my wife-friends, and my biological clock - which once I assumed was digital, but has now morphed into a city hall clock tower.

Don McKay, a Canadian poet Andrew introduced me to when we were dating (the story is a little more romantic than that: we were at Starbucks on a date, one of those Starbucks attached to a Chapters, when he grabbed my hand, pulled me into the poetry section, selected McKay's Camber from the shelf, and read selections to me out loud, such as: "I want to spread the shed years on us as a mulch"...I know...I win - and others which I posted a few months later) wrote in his book Vis-à-Vis: Field Notes on Poetry & Wilderness:

"Home, we may say, is the action of the inner life finding outer form; it is the settling of self into the world."

I love that sentiment.  Our home, our little house nestled in what otherwise would be a strictly Portuguese neighbourhood, with its butter-yellow stucco exterior, its heating/cooling issues, its dark bamboo flooring, its seamless blend from living room to dining room to kitchen, its two matching grown-up couches, and its tiny patio furniture on its tiny patio is an expression of Andrew and myself.  The bamboo floors are scratched because we love our chocolate lab, Solomon.  The dish rack is nearly always full because we love to feed our friends.  We have three 6.5-foot bookshelves, all full, organized into fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and reference, by author's last name, because we both graduated with English degrees and love literature...and we're anal retentive.

It's our little plot of land.  A little plot of land that speaks of who we are on the inside.

What McKay continues with explained my current fancy with home-making:

"To make a home is to establish identity with a primordial grasp, yes; but it is also, in some measure, to give it away with an extended palm.  We might try to sum up the paradox of home-making by saying that inner life takes place: it both claims place and acts to become a place among others.  It turns wilderness into an interior and presents interiority to the wilderness."

I've been pondering what a funny thing home-making is. Its a dusty concept, buried behind suffragettes, feminists, and mommy wars.  It makes me think of Betty Draper, coiffed and at home, preparing meals, keeping house, and gossiping with neighbours over cocktails.  But if home, as McKay puts it, is weighty enough to warrant the definition "inner life finding outer form" why should a the role of home-maker be so drôle? 

I'd like to think that the movements begun on our behalf by women who we will never meet were to give us the freedom of selection.  When home-making was the only entrée on the menu, our choice was limited, and social norms cruelly kept us there.  Likewise, if being a career mom with children in daycare were the only widely accepted option for women, the equation would still be unbalanced. 

I watched the movie Mona Lisa Smile when it first came out, and one speech in particular stuck with me all these years:

Joan Brandwyn: You stand in class and tell us to look beyond the image, but you don't. To you a housewife is someone who sold her soul for a center hall colonial. She has no depth, no intellect, no interests. You're the one who said I could do anything I wanted. This is what I want.

I'm eager to experience for myself what home-making will offer.  I'm eager to see what my particular brand of home-making will incorporate.  I'm eager to turn wilderness into an interior and present interiority to the wilderness.

---

She looks over a field and buys it,
   then, with money she's put aside, plants a garden.
First thing in the morning, she dresses for work,
   rolls up her sleeves, eager to get started.
She senses the worth of her work,
   is in no hurry to call it quits for the day.
She's skilled in the crafts of home and hearth,
   diligent in homemaking.

(Proverbs 31 woman)

mama monday: change the world

I've made a shortlist of the worst things (that I can think of) to wait for:

1. Waiting for a method of public transportation, outside, when the weather resembles Voldemort's return to power.
2. Waiting for your turn at a government subsidized office when turns depend on complex letter/number system, like Bingo, and the letter/number system does not progress alphabetically nor chronologically.
3. Waiting in line at an amusement park for a ride that your peer group chose by democratic vote, wherein you were of the minority group, in the blistering sun, having eaten very little.

Waiting to get pregnant (to be pregnant? to turn pregnant?  to pregnacize?) is definitely up there and follows a strict mathematical increase of vexation whereby the axes are represented by "amount of time you are not pregnant" and "amount of time you've been thinking about being pregnant, including contemplations about, dreams about, poetry about, and blog postings about".

Unlike other experiences in waiting, however, I find that this one is difficult to explain.  In fact, other than disappointment, the waiting period is generally pleasant: life is good, I have a fantabulous husband who loves me to bits and makes me laugh, friends surround and support me, an amazing extended family, a great house, and many aspirations for the future.  Compared to examples 1, 2, and 3 above, the actual waiting process involved with parenthood is benign.  A baby would only be the addition to an already agreeable existence.

Simplistic, maybe, but also true.  So why not focus on what we have instead of what we're missing?

When Baby Gaz makes his/her debut and makes us parents in the process, will he/she want to hear that we were excitedly planning for his/her arrival while making the most out of every opportunity?  Or will he/she have an image of Mom and Dad weeping and complaining their way through the months before he/she was born?  I don't want whining to be a family trait.

Jon, new dad, wrote this in his blog just before the birth of his son, Noah:

...many of the characteristics, habits, mannerisms, modes of speech, and even culture that my son will learn are already in me.  The lifestyle of fatherhood began long, long ago (not too long ago, I’m only 25 here!) and continues to grow and deepen as I do. What I’m getting at is the effect my life has on my son’s life even before he is born.

I want to live life now in a way that positively affects my family to come.  If I want them to live in a world with less hatred, I'm going to start loving people more.  If I want them to live in a world of possibilities, I'm going to stop limiting myself.  If I want them to live in a world of hope, I'm going to cultivate it so they'll have a harvest of it when they're born.

I want to make my children proud.

---

“Be the change you want to see in the world.”

(Mahatma Ghandi)

"Once you bring life into this world, you must protect it. We must protect it by changing the world." (Elie Weisel)

I'm starting with the man in the mirror

I'm asking him to change his ways

And no message could have been any clearer

If you wanna make the world a better place

Take a look at yourself and then make that change

(Michael Jackson, Man In The Mirror)

mama monday: hope

One of the hardest commodities to hold on to while trying to conceive is hope.  I guess the same is true of any situation where the outcome is just out of reach - whether hoping to be hired, or hoping to be accepted, or hoping for healing, or hoping to find someone to spend the rest of your life with.

I once felt hope was cyclical.  It germinated, sprouted, bloomed, and then seemed to curl up and die before it was reborn again.  Over the past year, I've realized that it isn't cyclical at all.  The hope I have today of becoming pregnant is not the hope I had last year, or even last month.  It's stronger, deeper, and truer.  The growth/dormant stages I felt were actually spurts of progress and less obvious progress.  But it was always progress.

On a bad day, I still need my friends around me and I'll sometimes send out an email to ask for prayer (community is so helpful in times of extended hope-a-thons).  On a good day, I feel like my friend Naomi did when she so elegantly quoted these words in response to a piece of music called "Radio Protector" by 65daysofstatic.

I've included it here and recommend listening to it while you read.  The video is an unofficial one, but nonetheless enchanting:



While listening to the crescendo of the song, Naomi mused:

It feels like something's alive inside
Like I have motivation to fix whatever I want to
I have all the hope in the world

...I'm learning what it is to be content
That not everybody needs to know everything
There is beauty in the mystery
There is beauty in things not unveiled

It's not easy to hope.  It takes time and energy and a lot of guts.  But as my wise husband says, "It takes the same effort to worry as it does to have faith."  Worry tears and corrupts and demoralizes and although hope might sometimes feel like an uphill battle, its only goal is to mend and clarify and hearten.  As long as time and energy and guts are required I'd rather be hoping.

And when I'm tempted to give up, I like to remember the words of C.S. Lewis: "There seems no plan because it is all plan".

---

 

Yahweh, Yahweh

Always pain before a child is born

Yahweh, Yahweh

Still I'm waiting for the dawn

- U2 (Yaweh)

“There is nothing that wastes the body like worry,
and one who has any faith in God should be ashamed
to worry about anything whatsoever.”
- Mahatma Ghandi

foto friday: mixed nuts

I promise that this feature is going to pick up soon.  It's just that the company I work for decided to get it on with another company in the States and this week can only be described as administrative-clean-up-from-the-wedding.  But, for now:

Remnants of the filming of Hairspray on Roncesvalles still linger, including this 1960s men's/boys' haircut style guide in the window of a barber shop.  Just another visual aid to further my fantasy of living on the set of Mad Men.

 

 Nothing says class like "Brash & Sassy".

 

Unless, of course, it's shopping at "Ghetto".

I wonder if ancient Rome would believe that one day we'd be selling blinged-out versions of their most gruesome method of execution and wearing it as jewelry.  

 Gifts sent to my boss, who secured the new relationship between Us and Them.  His new title: Elderius Golfius Maximus.

A great new app for my iPhone (OK, it's not new...I'm just behind) called Instagram.  Yet another technological aid to further my fantasy of living on the set of Mad Men.

The practice fire drill we endured this Wednesday.  We're on the 26th floor of our building.  And I was wearing heels.  It's safe to say that if there was a real fire, our corpses would line this stairwell as employees panic and trample each other.

wifercize wednesday: domestic bliss

[Note: this is a post I saved in draft form on October 7th, 2009.  It was left unfinished due to a hunt for the quote at the end of the post - a hunt that took, apparently, AN ENTIRE YEAR.  Fortunately, the post is still true today as it was a full year ago.]


Perhaps it's the change in the season, and that change signaling the long months of hibernation to come. Perhaps it's reading "A Room with a View" recently, with its cozy, early 1900s colloquialisms. Perhaps it's hormones. Perhaps it's age.

I'm just so happy being a wife. Having a home. Sleeping in the same bed, next to my fabulous husband, night after night. After night.

Not ground breaking for you homebodies, but you who suffer from wanderlust? yes, you who are already plotting your next trip? you who can't seem to settle down but rather feel that what you're searching for is Out There? This is for you.

Instead of browsing more travel porn, let me give you a piece of advice. "You may need to see the world in order to find your place in it". That was God's advice to me in 2004, as I was weighing the pros and cons of spending a year in Korea teaching English. I took it as a green light (what traveler wouldn't have?), packed my bags, and spend a fabulous year in Asia.

I spent my 25th birthday on a beach on the coast of South Korea and discovered something: no matter where I was, there I was.  The same fears haunted me, the same hopes, the same dreams, the same desires, the same frustrations.  The only difference was that, on the other side of the world, I was miles away from a hug or a coffee or a kind word with anyone I knew well.  And anyone who knew me well.

It was while in Korea that I read A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry and discovered this quote:

How can I leave that earth?  It is not good to go far from your native village.  Then you forget who you are.

The quote stuck with me, I wrote it out in my journal, it trailed behind me like a cartoon thought bubble for the rest of my time in Korea, it comforted me when I experienced re-entry difficulties back in Toronto, and it still makes me smile today.  My native village turned out to be better than I ever thought it could be.  And I know who I am.

mama monday: healthy competition?

Too many of the blogs written by women trying to conceive only focus on the negative.  Not being pregnant YET.  Not having a family YET.  Not being a mom YET.  The competition with other women who are pregnant can be particularly vicious, which is something that has never made sense to me. 

I'd assume that if one is so keen on babies that one would celebrate babies wherever they are, in any circumstance that they are. 

Pregnancy isn't the only stage on which girls have showdowns.  It's found everywhere from home ownership to home decor to marriage to weddings to relationships to fashion to careers to education and alllllll the way back to the playground.  Girls can be mean.  And usually to each other.

I'd like to take this Mama Monday to celebrate the girls who aren't mean.  The ones that let other girls into their heart, no matter the cost, and keep them there.  The girls who listen as well as speak.  The girls who give the hard advice as much as the easy advice.  And here's to hoping I end up more and more like one of those girls.

Melissa and her hubby, Jon, gave birth to the littlest friend in our group on October 10, 2010 (10/10/10) at 10:15 p.m.  His name is Noah Contstance Börger and although we've been saying hi to him womb-side for 9 months, it's amazing to meet him in person.  He's very, very fortunate to have a mom who doesn't have a mean bone in her body. 

Mama's hello.
Papa's hello.