Author: Allegra

I have been studiously avoiding my purpose in life for a long time now. I am not going to do it any more. The relief I feel is quite incredible, and hopefully I will now feel a lot more energetic and focussed.

Unfortunately, re-orienting myself means that I will have to p*ss off and disappoint a large number of people, but continuing to breathe carries that rap too, and I can’t help that.

I had been hoping that joining a church and becoming involved in its inner workings would help me become a better person. You know what? It DIDN’T WORK! I’m still an *sshole. I’ll be an *sshole for the rest of my life. A self-conscious *sshole is a TERRIBLE THING! You just get better at making excuses AND you feel guilty all the time. Watching this process take place on the inside of one’s skull sucks.

I thought that going to church would help me deal with the urge to slap people when they’re being stupid, and that didn’t work either. If anything, my pent up demand for slapping people out of their socks and into some sense is MUCH HIGHER. That’s why I’ve been so depressed. I have been straining LIKE YOU WOULD NOT BELIEVE to find a loving way to speak my truth, but there’s no loving way of doing it, and what gives me the right anyway? I have two clear choices; put up or get lost; the rules are really clear. If you can’t say something nice….. oh, the tyranny of the nice. Except, in my case, the process of saying something nasty is how I find myself, so I won’t be lost at all.

Being angry with Unitarians is surreal and pointless. And it could be argued that I’m only p*ssed off with myself. You might as well say, I’m really p*ssed off with the QUAKERS! What a bunch of (floral homophobic reference, plural)! Well of COURSE they’re non-violent and peaceloving, that’s why they’re Quakers! If all the Quakers in the world took up kickboxing and gun club membership, I personally think the world would be a more interesting place, but it would be hard to argue that it was a better place. I had to delete the next sentence. There’s places even I do not wish to go, at least while my grandmother is alive.

So I lovingly acknowledge and respectfully reference the really amazing work that Unitarians do, but I’ve hit the wall on one of the principles: The free and responsible search for truth and meaning. You would think there was nothing in these words to jib at, but alas, free is NOT responsible, and responsible is NOT free. They put a nun and a temple prostitute in the same donkey costume and called it a principle, and I’m the poor slob that noticed that there is a problem that goes way beyond semantics and out into politics, human nature, reality and my sub-version of reality, in which there’s a damned big rip in the donkey costume and I can see Sister Mary’s undies.

There are few things freer than an 18 month old child, and few things less responsible. If I want to subscribe to the principles of Unitarianism I have to reconcile free speech and responsible community, and I can’t do it. I’m not saying others can’t but I pronounce myself incapable. I am miserably unhappy about this crack in my reality tunnel. But I can’t pretend it isn’t there. It’s the same thing that happened with Paul – he said that I’m verbally abusive and he’s right. That’s what made the alarm go off. I’m not supposed to be abusive towards anyone! But I can’t help it. The trick is finding the right things to be angry about, as Aristotle once remarked. It’s either that or stop attempting to communicate at all.

So I come up on the rocks of free speech. The landscape is jagged, and the wind comes from the future, and smells like struggle and death. Because it all comes down to this. Until the last 24 hours, I thought “I can tell the truth – my truth, which is mine, belongs to me and is not prescriptive – or I can be loved”. I never put it in those terms before but that’s how I was feeling. “If I want people to love me, I have to do things their way.” But there are only four people on this planet whose opinion matters to me, and they will love me no matter what I do. I think I was mistaking approval for love. Approval is provisional. Love isn’t.

Free speech is not free. We are living in a culture that is shutting down not just the rights of people to freely assemble and speak, but the mechanisms that teach people what free speech is. The internet is not a substitute for learning to think for yourself. That is something that only talking to people who are smarter than you can teach… and only if you admit that they are smarter! That plus reading, honest self-assessment and learning how to correct your course, even when it sometimes means you must abandon ship and swim for the rocks. The last year has made me realize that there is NO SAFE PLACE for me, except the inside of my head, and I only get to be here for another 30 years or so, and only if I’m lucky, and stay healthy. When I went to church I was looking for a safe place for me to be, but I didn’t know myself as well then and I didn’t realize my *job* is to be offensive. It’s what I do. My mental state is to live in the boundary layer between what is acceptable behaviour and what is not. Culture is fluid – that boundary layer exists – it’s a place where creation and destruction take in each other’s laundry. This is sometimes good and sometimes bad, but it doesn’t go away, and it’s the best place in my world.

Any place that feels safe for me is likely to be unpleasant for other people. I am going to go live where all information is provisional, except that I am carrying the heft of the history of the universe in every cell of my frame. Everything else, as far as I can tell, is up for grabs.

Don’t feel like posting, so I won’t, much. Saw Joni Mitchell River last night which is a sort of concert play based on Joni’s music. It was interesting, but not entirely successful; it had ‘moments’. I’m not used to being in the front row, and having cried so much in the last little while it was really hard to keep my eyes open, so I ended up not really watching the show except in bits and just listening to music. Musicianship was uniformly excellent.

The last time I cried this much in this period of time my cat had just died. I figured I had stopped last night but it just started up as soon as I woke up this morning… had to phone my mother to make it stop.

I bailed on the pot luck at the North Shore church tonight; I’m just barely going to make it over to Peggy’s for the canvass meeting as it is. I would put my mood as fifty fifty tremulous exhaustion and blank despair. No, (she said) I am not suicidal. Suicide is for people who don’t know that chocolate heals all wounds. So I ate a chocolate croissant and Katie’s putting on tea water for me.

Very very interesting Tarot reading last night. Matt had FIVE major arcana come up. Katie’s was “You are working very hard and you hate school”. Keith’s was “You will have a successful career but a big change around the home front is coming for you”. Mine is the usual, quit avoiding what you’re avoiding and get on with your life. Some things don’t change.

That’s Jan with a fungus.

Feeling much better these days. Board meeting was interesting. The tarot reading back in December of 2003 indicated we’d be in our own building within 18 months but I was left feeling farther away from the idea rather than closer, last night. ESPECIALLY talking to Tam-Tam about her church in Toronto made me feel a little less sanguine (I called her this morning, mostly to get a report on how she’s doing since she broke up with her squeeze).

On one hand it’s very very difficult to get into a church without swacks of cash and even bigger swacks of debt; on the other maybe we don’t want a ‘real church’ building at all but should consider other models for getting a building, including cohousing with a business, or another not for profit organization, along the lines of what happened in Nanaimo or Edmonton. Who the hell knows. It was interesting to find out that there’s a spring on the property.

At least the church looks to be out of the woods financially for the next year, which makes life a little easier. I was juggling sums last night trying to figure out how to raise my pledge without raising Paul’s ire. Off to work.

One of my esteemed coworkers has a phone ring that sounds like a freaking jet taking off. Another phone sounds like an outbreak of St Vitus Dance in a rhumba band. Sigh.

A wonderful night’s sleep; prompted by going to see a financial advisor for the first time and then off to see a potential church property which is, strangely enough, and with no input from me, in New Westminster rather than in the Tri Cities. It’s about the comfortable edge of walking distance for me.

The Board meeting tonight will mostly be about canvass, but there will also be a certain amount of leaping and twittering about the potential church building as well. Jumpin’ Jiminy Cricket, but it will be an expensive undertaking, if we decide to take it on. I even talked to the financial adviser about it, asking if he had any idea where a non profit organization could find a wad of low interest loan. Oops, better get Katie up. And it’s late… I’d better get out the door to work. More later…

This little girl is from Balouchestan, Iran. She’s either asleep or posing for the photographer. The caption from the satiric Iranian weblog it was captured from (thanks Mo!) is Sss! Let her sleep! A lifetime of suffering is before her…..

My associate DM, a god among men, sent me a pic of the rocket shopping cart guy. If I ever make a music video (collective gasp!) this WILL be in it.

Jim and Carly are off to a soccer game in North Van and then to the excruciating pain that is the ferry situation on a long holiday weekend in Vancouver. He uploaded all the pictures he took so I will post some before I fire them off to his email address. The pork roast was absolutely exquisite and the rest of the food was okay— everybody seemed to enjoy it. Veg was salad, pan fried parsnips, yams, broccoli with home made cheese sauce and of COURSE potatoes, in this case new potatoes boiled in their jackets. Because Carly is a pollo vegetarian, I had to cook a turkey breast for her, but when we got to the market there was not so much as a shred of turkey meat in the joint and I didn’t feel like running all over town finding some, so I bought a boneless chicken breast instead.

Then I brought it home and went Jeezly Hell, how do I cook this? So I wrapped it around a celery stick and a couple of garlic cloves, dumped it in a corningware pot, dumped a five ounce can of coconut milk on it, covered it with pepper and salt and as an afterthought tossed in some fresh lemon juice. And stuck it in about an hour after the roast at 300 F; it cooked for about an hour and a half. Anyway, Carly devoured it with loud cries of glee pronouncing it extremely tender (it was) so I was VERY relieved because if she’d hated it, I would have been embarrassed. Pic is of one of her games…. she may or may not be in the picture.

As for the roast, what is there to say? You take a hunk of pig, cover it to the gills with sauerkraut, put the lid on the dutch oven and cook for 3 hours at 300. Damn but it was good… and there were leftovers! We had applesauce too, yum. Whole thing was Katie’s idea, and much as I love Keith it was a relief to cook a meal without worrying about what HE would eat.

Power went off twice last night briefly. No idea why. I was asleep at the time. Now I get to find out what marching orders I have from Paul for the day… and tomorrow, back to work! Paul got in about 1. He says he was very happy to be home.

I don’t know about you, but I find it’s really icky to be awake at 5:45. I heard some very loud traffic about 20 minutes ago and thought, well, Jim and Carly have to get up at six so I figured what the hell and got up. Glen and Marilyn are coming over for roast pork tonight…. I invited them seeing as how they didn’t have firm plans and it’s probably been a while since we’ve all been in the same room. JIM SET MY SOUND SYSTEM UP. I can finally listen to my LP’s again. Yippee. I have heard a piece of news about church which, if true, is the best we’ve heard in ages; more details will be forthcoming at the Board Meeting, which, inshallah, I will attend on Wednesday.

I know that mocking a gift is insufferably rude, but I just gotta. Jim and Carly returned from the soccer game with Chinese goodies in hand. And by the way, Carly’s team waxed their opponents’ collective heinie, which had NOT been expected, as the ferry bringing the rest of her team and the coach over went mechanical so they delayed the game rather than cancel or reschedule; Carly’s team had NO soccer balls to warm up with and when the rest of the team showed it was like ONTO THE FIELD and PLAY. And they won, three zip, so you can see what adversity does to people. Now Carly, who is NOT a morning person, has to get up and go to Ambleside and start a game at 8:30. It isn’t raining in Burnaby but who the putz knows in North Van, right? It’s like another world up there. You do have a nice view up there…. two months of the year! Carly did tell me that the Kelowna team has a member whose nickname is Sasquatch and that she’s legendary for falling on people.

Katie has finally gotten in touch with Matt, which allowed her to calm down a bit. You can see the floor in her room; a charming state of affairs, wish I could say the same. Off to get my tea and then fill up the kettle again, preparatory to Jim and Carly’s rise from the depths this morning (they are sleeping in the dungeon).

For those of you not familiar with the layout of my house, which is pretty weird, there is a room in the basement (which is technically the ground floor, as it is at grade) with NO WINDOWS. Considering that Paul occasionally works midnights, it’s a good thing to have a really dark, really quiet, really isolated room. Teenagers LOVE that room, it’s like a canonical law or something.

Keith got to Victoria okay. I love that kid. He is so consistently helpful and entertaining; he’s one of the funniest people I know and I know a few. Picture is something random.

Ha! Didn’t tell the end of the anecdote. So anyway, these Chinese buns show up and in amongst them are almond cookies, which I fall upon with joy, because Ah loves almond cookes. I take a bite, and you familiar with the expression “Her Face Fell”? Well something similar happened to my face. I chewed carefully and swallowed and said, You know, these cookies were made with bacon grease. And Jim took the cookie, and the same expression came over his face. Smelled like bacon grease, tasted like bacon grease. Carly said, imagine trying that on a pollo vegetarian (she still eats things with faces, but they can’t have fur). In the entire time I’ve been eating almond cookies, which is over 35 years, I’ve never had such a culinary oddity. It’s not like they were bad, because the bacon grease wasn’t rancid. It’s just they were really weird. Sigh. Now I know why they were that odd… well, grungy brown colour. Okay, now I’m finished. Off to the kettle to put on coffee water.

Sheesh, I forgot to blog today. Musta been having too much fun. Paul’s gone off to Courtenay with Dan T and his son Nicolas; Katie cleaned her room today (check for which direction the sun rises in tomorrow morning); we purchased replacement parts for our LP turntable and Jim P has kindly agreed to help me set it up tomorrow evening; Jim P and Carly have safely arrived and now we’re just stooging about waiting for the cinnamon buns to get out of the oven; Keith found my athletic pass to the Canada Games Pool (and when I said it was a sign from God he said, Yeah, get your lazy ass out and get some exercise; I am feeling much better now that I know that I do actually have something wrong with me but it isn’t serious enough to really rivet the attention of an endocrinologist. John is off filking at the V-Con and I am just really happy that my bed is only about 4 metres away. Picture is something at random from my files.

Jamie Corston of the UK grew this apple. It is apparently not the largest apple ever grown in England….. but cow manure was involved.

Today is going to be a combination of running around, sitting still and work avoidance, so it will be a pretty typical Allegra kind of day. My tarot reading last night turned up Death, the Tower and Judgement, but reasonably well placed. I don’t mind when Death is in my past, and as for Judgement Day, isn’t it always in the future? Isn’t it always today? The happy family situation will continue for a while.

I checked. The sun did rise in the east this am. Gotta waken Katie in half an hour, she wants to be ready when Lexi gets here. Sent Keith out into the garden; he plucked herbs (mostly spearmint) to bring back to put into a bowl with boiling water so he could inhale the steam and we could get some air into him. He’s not breathing very well through his nose. This extremely funny family anecdote, involving a handkerchief and dimsum, deleted as there was no way to get the point of the story across without being really disgusting.

I assume Paul got to Courtenay okay; the cops haven’t called.

Every once in a while you see a picture so marvellous, so ringingly evocative of the human condition, that you just HAVE to share it. Pictured is a man working on Big Tex, who is part of a display for a (one would assume) Texas sized theme park.

Yesterday I went to one of these parental events that fills one with dread. In this case the Parent Teacher night was bloody marvellous, and I’ll tell you why….

A black rabbit hopped over my foot while I was talking to the Math Teacher, Dave.

I got to see a black widow spider. And to listen to the Science Teacher Tim kvetch about how he doesn’t know what to feed the babies. Thasss right, there are BABY BLACK WIDOW SPIDERS crawling around (safely stowed) in my KIDS’ SCHOOL. And nobody seems to think anything of it. Which is Even Cooler. A goth schoooool! Oi! They have a gecko, which eats the excess African stick insects, so the kids get to see nature’s way right there in science class. The gecko barks, apparently, but I didn’t hear it. Company manners you know. I got to listen to Kelly the Socials teacher say that Katie was a pleasure to have in class, and Keith’s Socials teacher say that once he put his novel down he did quite well.

So my kids are BOTH getting 70’s and 80’s in school, and doing homework assignments, and generally acting like school is if not cool then at least tolerable. If somebody had told me this was in the cards a year ago I would have been right peevish with them. Oh yeah, Katie and Keith enjoying school. Riiiiight.

Started the family reading thing again, after a year long hiatus; gave up on Dorothy Dunnett’s last work, Gemini, and am reading Phillip Pullman’s The Golden Compass instead. We have reached the end of the second chapter; Lord Asriel has escaped being poisoned and we have learned that Lyra has a great role to play in the upcoming war, but she must not know her role or she will not be able to play the part. (The whole unconscious Neo the hero thing.)

Went shopping at Army Navy yesterday. For $64 we got a two year planner, six pairs underwear (three thongs, three of the dreaded ‘granny panties’) and they’re called pairs even tho’ they are units because they have TWO LEGHOLES, I just figured that out, and a pair of knockin’ about the house trews for me, and a pair of white and baby blue runners for Kate and a hat. I am deleting the next sentence. Katie knows what I want to say; it’s quite rude, and NOT directed at her, so I’ll leave it at that. There is more than one trial in the life of a parent, and sometimes it’s not provided by one’s child, but by the prospect of watching your child restrain herself with respect to the actions of her friends.

So there you have it. Our house is an abode of bliss, I am enjoying my time off mostly because I’m doing NOTHING, and Paul is LEAVING ME THE CAR for the weekend. Yeehaw. I even got something resembling enough sleep. Off to the Parole Officer Natalie today. I hear Jim and Carly are coming for the weekend. Maybe I’ll cook a turkey. If I have a car, I’ll be able to bring one home! There’s a thought. Okay, time to post the bite me picture and get on with my day.

What you are about to read may shock you….but our meeting today with the Parole Officer was a warm human experience during which we all communicated reasonably well and left with a feeling of having accomplished something important.

The Crown may still elect to send Katie to court. Extrajudicial Sanctions is at the discretion of the Crown.

Katie has quit drinking, had perfect attendance at school and is actually getting good marks, is working out, going to see a counsellor (next week, likely), no longer hangs out with the kids she got in trouble with, is orders of magnitude more pleasant and responsible than she was even three months ago and recognizes perfectly well that she screwed up – all of which revealed itself during the course of the interview. So there are conditions – and I have to say Katie got off pretty lightly – but she is prepared to go to court and take her lumps if she must. It’s unclear how long the conditions apply. It helps that she doesn’t even know where this girl lives and has no intention of raising a hand to her again so the condition about staying away from her will not be a problem.

In other news, an 11 year old girl tried to kill her 34 year old babysitter with a machete that she found lying in the yard after a dispute with the babysitter about the dog. You know, you hate to blame too much tv but you have to wonder sometimes. And any householder who leaves a machete lying around the premises should be hauled in along with the kid. (Parents’ reaction upon returning home… “Sh*t, now we’ll NEVER get a sitter for the Halloween party. And I guess New Years’ is a write off too….”)

Picture is something random from the Katie files.

http://samkass.com/theories/RPSSL.html

I think my brain would implode learning the new rules, but it’s a great idea. Pic is Leda and the Swan, if you’re wondering what the hell it is.