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No more

I must stop looking at Craigslist.  For anything.

It makes me feel like I will never fit.

The Wish List, Part 1

It’s only in times of stress that I start thinking about all the things I’d like to have, and all the impossible projects I would love to complete. Sometimes I find some strange “prizes” on craigslist, particularly in the “free” sections, and they become all I need to set the dreaming in motion. Spring is coming and the levels of stress, like sap in the sugar bush, rise easily. So I want to indulge in a small amount of hedonistic desire.

To top things off, everything at this point is exactly upside down and up in the air and looking very damned precarious. I am, sigh, once again in the seams between the proverbial rock and the hard place. I am @#$%!*@!!! tired of it, too. While driving around today I contemplated bridges in that old familiar way no one wants to hear about anymore–then realized the only way out is through. Consequently, everything is irritating me, everything is an agitation. All my thoughts naturally turn to consumption. The timing is perfect then: desire, consume, create.

The antique gas range, above, makes me want to convert the fruit barn on our property to a functional, compact loft studio apartment, something I feel it’s been yearning to become since I first set foot in its pineplanked haven. I love its open space, the fact of it being a relic from some other time. It looks out over seyval blanc vines and oak forests on one side; on the other, it opens out to a gravel parking area (where a balcony might certainly come in handy, as well as another staircase to create another entrance). In my mind, that old farmhand’s sleeping space would easily make a home for a single person. It has enough light, height, and room for antique technology to make living in it almost cost free (save for electricity, but it won’t use that much–and this kicks in the other big fantasy of solar panels for passive photovoltaic, and passive solar water heat as well. And ultraviolet light water purification! And a cistern to collect rainwater from the metal rooftop! Or a rooftop garden! Sigh).

When pieces like these are just being given away…well, then I can let my imagination get the better of me. This old stove to the right would never work as a woodstove, which would make heating the old loft that much easier, come winter. Bu it looks much lighter than an AGA, which would fill that demand easily enough except for one thing: I have a fear one of those would go right through the floor, splintering the pine right through to the old fruit refrigerator directly underneath. Of course, that fruit refrigerator could take on another use, I might even revive it’s fruitwood lined pastlife by removing all the odd changes put in to convert the room into a barrel cellar/still closet for the alembic. Yes, that’s what’s there now. Please don’t ask.

Maybe I could use each of the stoves in two different places: the fruit barn, as a means of converting its loft; and the old livestock barn, to convert the entire space into a two storey apartment structure, suitable for one person or two who are willing to share the same sleeping space. There are so many unused outbuildings on this property it would drive an architect to tears. It drives a frustrated architect wannabe like me to tears, or at the very least to distraction. Distraction feels damn good, at the moment, I’m pretending I’m anything but what I am while I design not just the structure but the rooms and the entire building scape–like a frenzied little rural planner! And just who would inhabit these new living spaces, so functionally advanced and green? Who?

More shock happens as some old patterns resurface, and financial stresses increase. I think about tucking all those renovation plans away in favour of the increasingly irrational options, consumption with no real goal other than accumulation. Suddenly the wish list includes things such as:

A reasonable time limit (2 hours should do it, not a nanosecond more) and an unlimited expense account at John Fluevog on Queen Street, since sculptured heels have been a reality in his design for quite a while now (and I’m not sold on the ugly Prada “blossom” heels, or the hideous Fendi stumps). Copper’s good against my skin, the heels aren’t that high (fine: yes they are) and Fluevog knocks off no one. The time limit is just to keep the greed level down…after all, a man should be paid for his work, and my appetite for pretty things can be insatiable.

The red “Madly” (from the “Truly”, “Madly”, “Deeply” series) shoes speak for themselves. Though I think they’re a tad on the understated and conservative side, until you picture them being worn with clothes not strictly meant for the outdoors.

Pink? Gold? Okay, these are pretty and they’re chic Bally Switzerland shoes. They’re also a puzzling choice and they don’t really suit me. But for some reason I think I might just clean up real good if I chose something natty and feminine to go along with these. Natty, feminine, pink: it’d be like assuming another persona. No one would recognize me until I let that first curse word slip into my conversation. On second thought, those shoes just don’t look safe anymore.

The Yamaha Virago coordinates with none of the items pictured above.

It always comes in my size, always comes in my colour.

Thoughts That Just Won’t Let Go

Evidently, I have the seduction style of a Prized Object.

Driving down the escarpment on Grimsby’s Mountain road last night, I saw shadowy figures just ahead in the distance, in the road in front of me. They turned out to be a row of skateboarders, wearing wind/motorcycle gear, lined up to skate all the way down the hill’s winding road.

It was just about to become the end of dusk. The lights of the town below, along the lake shore, and across the lake, from Toronto, glittered as the last shade of inkstained blue left the sky during their descent.

At first they annoyed me. Just for a split second. But then I slowed the car and followed carefully, and watched the one in front of me: he appeared to be floating down the hill, poised in the middle of the lane in the roadway, his arms out to the side, like birds hold out their wings. Like the raptors who live around this mountain all year now, circling their way up and down the thermals that spiral over the trees. He never took his feet off the board, never veered from dead centre in the lane. The road was free of ice, free of potholes, smooth and black and steep. When he got to the end of Mountain road, he passed a group of other skaters, all dressed as he was, all cheering him on. He maneuvered his way around a car turning right, then slipped back into the middle of the road again, finally stopping his descent on Highway 8, turning to face me with a look of pure exhilaration on his face, waving to thank me for keeping my distance, giving him his space; running back up to his friends. Watching him, I imagined he felt like he was soaring, just like the eagles and hawks. He was looking at the same sparkling light, the same growing darkness, but he was also feeling the wind against his body, the effect of every one of his movements on his speed, and his control. You could tell he was ecstatic. In his eyes you could see such joy.

Tilda Swinton

A long, cool woman in a black dress.

(A strangely designed black dress, and an unfortunate, lopsided pose.  And yet, still magnificent)

My husband has a woman friend in the city. A confidant. He tells me she confides in him, she’s a divorced woman with a child and a lover who lives in another city, who has a child and family of his own. She gives my husband many little gifts: appointments for manicures and facials at the men’s spa, outings to interesting restaurants together, an hour or so with a Shiatsu masseuse who tries to iron out the snags, physically (but also brings up all the old emotional stuff). He had a massage last Saturday, and told me about the experience the next day.

He said the masseuse said, “How’s your grief?” as he started his consultation, not even giving him a chance to settle in yet.

All his aches and pains reveal him: sadness held deep, halting the lungs; sadness never expressed, made succinct, in the skin; frustration and denial, as heavy to bear as an anvil, hard against a back it makes weak.

(We can’t help but reveal ourselves clearly. No matter what effort we think we make to the contrary).

A Few Requests from the Universe

Just last week someone suggested to me that I make my needs far more clear than they’ve been. That I ask for them to be looked after, outright.

And yet everytime I think about them, I’m struck by the resistance my own thoughts form to this approach: I can feel myself reacting to them all as if I were convinced that I’m simply not deserving of these needs.

It’s such a powerful thought that it acts on its own behalf, whenever I’m out to have those needs be met.

So, what can I lose? Except for some comments telling me to “get off my ass and work for these things, just like everyone else does”, and even that is really no loss given that no one reads this blog besides me and maybe one other person, once, that’s nothing.

Here goes, then.

THINGS I NEED, RIGHT NOW (OR very, very soon)

1. Thirty Five to Forty Thousand Dollars.

Enough to pay off debts, with a bit left over.

2. A New Job In A New Town.

Just like David Bowie.
And I want it to be a big, sparkly new town, with a lot of things around me that flash and glimmer, something that makes me want to leave the sanctuary of what I know will be four walls in a tiny womb of a place.
The Job has to be a real one: something I can feel good about doing, where I can use my teaching ability and my ability to write and come up with solutions, and then implement them. I have to feel like people are actually becoming better from what I do, and that I’m actually learning new things all the time.

And the job has to pay me enough so that I can live in my new home, keep myself alive and have access to all the things I need. I’ll need a lot: I want to see the world.

3. Passion.

More than anything, I need that part of me to come back.

4. Health.

Finally, it’s time for this to return as well.

Just for good measure, here’s my Japanese name:

My japanese name is Nakashima (center of the island) Ayumi (walk; deeper meaning: “walk your own way”)

A Pair of Palahniuk Quotes.

Our Generation has had no Great war, no Great Depression. Our war is spiritual. Our depression is our lives.

Only through destroying myself can I discover the greater power of my spirit.

Dr. John and Me

No one knows why events take place in the way they do, they seem random and unrelated and quite often irrelevant or forgettable, when in fact they hinge on some central force in our lives in a way which may never fully reveal itself in its complexity. I’m not sure I know why Dr. John and I are even communicating with each other, but he’s here and he’s been a presence now for a decade…and not always a pleasant one. But I decided to take him on as my personal doctor once I’d studied under him while I was learning, myself.

I have good reasons for this choice, despite the fact that he’s pricey, he’s way the hell out in Peterborough which just adds more expense to the effort, and politically we’re on opposite sides of the spectrum, a place from where we look at each other with a kind of red-eyed fury. Here they are:

1. He’s persistent. I need someone persistent, who could think a bit more creatively than others. He punched out various possibilities for remedies as suggested by Scholten, he pushed Dr. Sankaran around with other ideas for treatment, he weighed the writings of people like Jeremy Sherr and Lou Klein when the typical polycrests didn’t have the expected effects. He’s convinced I need some kind of mineral remedy: I’m not so sure, and so far I’ve had a sizable amount of insight into my own condition. But we’ve been able to throw around some possibilities in terms of what may actually be taking place with me. I’ve done my share of the appropriate animal remedies, and now I think the mineral might just be the right track, based on a mutual understanding of a physical and emotional reality I just can’t seem to shake: that I am deficient in something vital, and I have been, from the start. So now we shall see.

He was my supervisor while I did my clinic work in school, and he was a sonofabitch in that department, always doubting or second-guessing my choice of medicines for my patients, asking me to replace my own decisions with the choices he’d submit. It was not personal: there was another student he supervised who formally complained about this when he did it to her. For me it this became overbearing, and ultimately, I felt like I should have paid attention to my own decisions about my own patients. But that was the lesson: consider his suggestions as just suggestions, questionable and only potentially helpful. After all, I took the case: it was I who observed and interviewed the patient for two hours; I collected the factual information by observation and interview–his input and decision for remedy selection could only be based on speculation and not inductive reason, and therefore his remedies were bound to be ineffective or less than appropriate. Still, I let him convince me that I should give one patient who needed Aurum Argenticum Nitricum instead; and then another who needed Lac Caninum Lac Humanum (even there, I can see he was pushing me to stand my ground, as these substitution medicines are so close to the original prescriptions I’d made). After that, it hit me that my original choice may have been the best choice, so I fought more heartily for my own decisions in each case, and got them. I think I was so slow to pick up on what he was doing that he made me demand the right to manage my cases myself, after that. Just to be sure the lesson was learned.

2. He thinks in spirals and tangents and parallels and alternative perspectives.
So do I.
The minute he started to talk about Phosphorus as a spontaneously combustive, corrosive chemical, and tied it in with its effects on the liver, then brought it all home by examining so much of the substance’s cultural meaning with discussions of the myth of Prometheus, fire, and the human (physical and spiritual) condition in front of a classroom full of “just tell me what I need to memorize for the exam” doctors and nurses, I knew I found an equally frustrating, detail-inflexible, quasi-highbrow twin thinker. Who might “get” me, after all.

Plus, he presented a paper case he published in the Dutch journal, LINKS, and I was the only person in the class to “figure out” (rather, recall the various remedies discussed in the paper) the remedy which cured the case. It was Hydrogen–how could I forget it? It was a case of extreme nervousness, a sense of never feeling grounded and almost prone to being “abducted” from whatever gravity exists here. And the physical symptoms were so bizarre, I could never forget them. I think I’d know a hydrogen case on sight, even today. So, when I offered the answer, he shot me a stunned, silent “You read the article?” along with his confirmation of the remedy. It became our unspoken little secret: and in return he let me contribute to his lectures without getting too frustrated with me. Now that I teach, I know the generosity of that agreement.

3. Because of the first two reasons, I knew I would never have to worry about transference.

4. Despite differences of opinion in politics (especially about the politics in our work, where we are opposed most profoundly), despite obstinacy on my part, despite having real difficulty finding something that works brilliantly, he cares fiercely about me as his patient. Remedy wise, I’m a god damned shape shifter, and no one hates that more than me (maybe he does, I think I’d hate to have a patient like me, after all). But I know that one day he will knock it out of the park, and I’ll get better.

Right now I don’t know where I stand with Dr. John, in that I’ve finally received my remedy in the mail and it does seem to work to calm down some of the more horrific symptoms I’m suffering with right now. But it’s a very low potency, and I have no idea what the medicine actually is (except I do know it’s quite likely a fluorine compound of some kind, or some combination of aurum and salt). That means that I can give this some time to take effect, and maybe make an appointment some time in the fall, after it has had time to act.

We will just have to wait and see.

Contact

I’m working on translating even more Italian/French to English.  This time, it’s all from research work done about various popes and medicine, and the role of the Vatican in medical history. I tell myself it won’t be as interesting, but the fact is, it most likely will be.

I think of the Vatican as a specifically appointed arm of the Mafia anyway. They have more expensive clothing, and the homosexual preoccupation, though just as violently denied in the Vatican, at least gets more of a sublimation in the materials, colours, and clothing shapes their denizens get to wear than it does in the Mafia.  And exactly who do we kid about this stuff anymore?  Sublimated my eye. 

I’m doing this for a book that will come out in November, 2007, exploring the historical popularity and acceptance of homeopathic medicine, plus the history of its effectiveness and its choice as the preferred treatment of many famous patients–everyone from Darwin (who would never have become well enough to write his Origin of the Species without it) to the Impressionists to successful and well known athletes of every stripe.