The Seated View

Attempting gradual shift into normal with the monthly link-o-rama… Starting with a paragraph about being offended. A group in Nashville wants to censor Shakespeare and a school in southern California bans…. the dictionary?? And who is the filthy-minded adult who looked up the offending term? Some idiots are trying to create an all-white baseball league and there are Bible verses on combat weapons . I don't even know where to start with that. Next, it's all about cats. First, I love them - they have such confidence . They can also be gift wrapped (although I couldn't see Her Royal Catness assenting to that particular practice), like playing with household tools (sent to me by John/TinkPapa) and, sent to me by Jason, should probably not be translated or we'd all feel really stupid. The best viral videos of 2009 , which really ought to include this one of a man walking under the influence and failing miserably. Images from Google View in Canada , a story about l...

How do you go back to normal? At some point, it's essential to trip into life again, because getting lost and staying there does no honour to the one who is gone, instead, you must live on and carry them with you into that life. But how?? How do you pretend at work or the meetings or the bank that everything is fine, because after all, overwhelming perfect strangers with your loss is not polite and yet again, I am back to wishing for the dress code of mourning from a hundred years ago and more. I don’t know what I dislike more: there is the beginning of grief where food has no flavour, little shapes of tasteless cardboard in your mouth and around you, the world has no colour. Watching others go about their lives is like watching a movie, you separate from the crowd you were part of just yesterday and time passes at a snail’s space, as you realize it has only been one day, one week since your world, your life, your self was rent and changed past bearing. And then there is the m...

Almost all of us have one. Someone we grew up with, were friends with since forever. Someone who knows us better than anyone else because they were there during the hard years, the good times and the really awkward teenage years. Someone who’ll keep your secrets, the person you can call in the middle of the night when the shadows get to you, the one who’s the first you want to tell good news and bad. Someone who transcends friendship, is a sister-friend, a brother-friend. Part of the family. Part of you. Claire, Niagara Falls, 2008, photo by ? For my sister, Claire is that person. They met when they were 9 years old, in school when we’d been in Canada barely 2 months – Janne Banana and Claire Bear, stuck together since then. The first time they traveled without adults was when they were 16 and together flew to England to visit Claire’s grandparents for two weeks. The first time they got drunk was with each other and the first time they tried to pretend they weren’t was ...

About 10 days ago, Mojo the Wonder Cat had her first chemo treatment and it went remarkably well. We thought. Due to a miscommunication - because Mercury is retrograde after all and boy, has that ever packed a punch this time around – I didn't fast her, which means she couldn't get sedated for the treatment and the stress turned out to be too much for her bladder. She got a UTI . Popping in and out of the litter box every two minutes, eventually getting so stressed out she tried going on her safest places (the couch, my bed), followed by an "interesting" case of diarrhea due to either stress-induced colitis, antibiotic side effects or chemo (or the perfect storm of all three) which was apparently too heinous for the litter box all meant I couldn't manage her side effects at home, so she went to the vet for a couple of days. By last Thursday, they claimed the diarrhea was largely gone and that she'd stopped peeing everywhere, tentatively diagnosed her with...

Yesterday, it was David's birthday and before I go on, I'll take it brief pause to allow you to sing misc. birthday songs in the comment box, should you be so inclined… That was lovely. Well, except for the one that was as off-key as my own rendition. Still, it's about the enthusiasm with which it's delivered, not necessarily the beauty of the song, right? Or so I tell my family when they wince greenly at my... erm... "singing". Naturally, for a birthday, there ought to be cake, right? There was an added wrinkle, though, as due to my allergies to nuts, said cake need to be nut-free - should the birthday boy wish to kiss me, what he eats needs to be nut-free, as well. We're still starry-eyed enough that he chooses kissing me over cake - get back to us in 10 years and the choice might be different. Anyway! Finding a nut-free cake is a bit of a challenge - there are places in Toronto that specialize in nut-free baked goods, but none of them are in my neigh...

This month, we're going back to basics on MyRACentral: " 1. We Don't Know What Causes Rheumatoid Arthritis These days, much more is known about RA, especially the process that leads to developing the disease - a combination of a genetic predisposition , abnormally autoimmune response and environmental or biologic triggers. However, how it all comes together and why it comes together in some people, yet not in others, is still unknown." The rest of the post is here .

When I was younger, I kept a diary. Or journal - is there a difference? Do they just call it journaling to make it sound less adolescent so adults can do it, too? Regardless, it's what I did. I had a shelf near my dining room table where there were books and books of my past, starting in 1982 when we first moved here, covering well into the 90s where I switched to the digitized version. And then I got a blog and stopped writing in notebooks, actual or digital, but that's another story... And this past weekend, I destroyed them all. Or rather, I had Michele do the ripping while I shredded, but before we did that, I took a look through each, skimmed a few pages here and there, just to see if I could bear to get rid of them. I found that I could, but I also found the writings of a very unhappy girl. And sure, these diaries were much used for therapy and for expressing feelings without a filter and some of it was happy, but most of it was not, most of it was about a young woman, ...

It took me almost 4 weeks, but I’ve finished Stephen King’s doorstep latest novel Under the Dome: A Novel (and then it took me an additional four weeks to get around to writing a review - what can I say, December was a little nuts). A whopper at 1,100 pages – which translates into 34.5 hours of audiobook – it’s classic King. Classic, sprawling, epic King. It's a beautiful fall day in Chester's Mill, Maine, a little town situated in a positively bucolic area and King describes it so with such feeling and detail you can almost see its beauty and smell the crisp, fall air. King also gives us a taste of the rot in this particular bushel of apples when he describes our hero, Dale "Barbie" Barbara - veteran of the Iraq war, currently short order cook - on his way out of town after a latenight parking lot fight with Jim Rennie’s son Junior and his buddies. And right at this moment, the factions in what is to come are established: Jim "Big Jim" Rennie,...

Like so many others, I am fairly fresh from seeing Avatar and aside from wanting to see it again and preferably on a bigger screen and in 3-D, it made me think. Particularlythe part about Jake, the paralyzed protagonist who is given the chance to use his body again in a 10-foot tall blue-skinned avatar and gets sent into the forest to befriend the people of Pandora. Sidetrack: 20 years ago, I wrote a short story with a somewhat similar premise about a disabled girl who through various interesting happenings gets to try out an able-bodied life among another race and for several years now, I've been slowly expanding it into something more like a book. Except, I think my window has just closed, because anything I write will be seen as a derivative of Avatar and I am more than slightly pissed. Damn you, James Cameron! Where was I? Oh yes, blue skin, paralyzed and using your body again. I'm pretty sure there isn't anyone living with a physical limitation who didn't get ...