The Seated View

I had a post all ready and was putting it together in Blogger, when I noticed that today is October 31. Halloween. Because I am nothing if not swift of mind and it’s not like there’s been hints of impending pumpkin takeover in the last few days. I’d like to use the weather as an excuse for my brainlessness – today, it’s 18 (64F) in Toronto. I am not wearing socks and plan to go read a book in the park in 5 minutes. On Halloween. A nd as it is Halloween, Barb, my partner in crime in all things tenant associated has decorated the lobby. Please notice the spiders. I’m not fond of spiders. Really not fond. However, after several years of exposure, I’ve become accustomed to the wee ones in the webs, but this year, she gleefully placed humongous (humungous?) ones right above the elevator. Then she added tarantulas. Very realistic tarantulas. I email her regularly with Spider Watches. I swear the brown one in the middle has moved down the wall. And on the same...

Back in my not-nearly-misspent-enough youth, when I was in erm… gymnasiet (which is sort of highschool, except more – it’s a three-year program, you go there if your career plans include going to university, what’d you call it? And yes, I know I keep asking that question)… Anyway, several of my teachers had conspired to delve into a specific important period in Denmark, which I can vaguely recall included the 1700s and 1800s and we spent 1½ years of the three immersed in said era in both history and Danish classes (and maybe one more subject?) and by the end, I was sick to death of it and never wanted to read anything written before 1960 again in my life. Which was unfortunate – instead of instilling a love of history and literature, they created an aversion so deep that I’ve repressed everything I learned. Nay, scrubbed it out of my mind. OK, so I’m a history nerd, but the urge to avoid literature – or perhaps I should say Literature – stuck. Fastforward to sometime in the 8...

I'm in the middle of Exploding Week #2 in a row, running around like a decapitated barnyard fowl and… well. Good thing I’ve been saving stuff of miscellaneous character and can therefore provide you with a Random post, which makes it look like I’ve worked hard(ish) without actually having done so. If you came here for thoughtful commentary…. well. Today is a goofy day . I saw this nifty thing in a cool little store down the road a bit. A global warming mug . You pour hot liquid into it and watch the continents on the outside of the mug disappear. I thought about buying it for myself, I thought it'd make a terrific Christmas present for several environmentally conscious friends and then I reconsidered. This neverending summer (26°C on October 22? In Toronto?? WTF???) is already freaking me/us out enough - facing a disappearing world over your morning hot-beverage-of-choice every single day would be a guaranteed ticket to a permanent cabin at the funny farm . F...

Sometime this week or next and 25 years ago, Michele and I met for the first time. I’d been in Canada about three months, knew no one except my parents, sister and dog and had discovered that being good at English in Denmark was much, much different than understanding university lectures in courses I’d never been exposed to before. One of those courses was psychology and we had a lab in which we did basic experiments in operant conditioning with gerbils, rats and pigeons (we were the last who got our hands on actual animals; by the next year, animal rights’ groups had forced those labs to shut down and rightfully so). After our first lab test, I was trying to see the results that were posted, as all things are, at a convenient height for walking people. I asked the girl who was already checking out the posting to tell me my grade and the rest, as they say, is history. We had a lot of fun in university, especially once I started understanding what Mi...

This weekend, we did the (somewhat delayed) family celebration of my birthday, attended by... well, family-type people. Based on the pictures I took, it appears that I was trying to document every single minute of the four-hour event in still photography. Most of The Tinks, but some of the rest of the crowd. As I don't yet have permission to share one of the attendees with the internet, you'll have to make do with largely Tink photos. I hope you can manage. My lovies have discovered walking and didn't stop, moving very fast at all times. When I was little, my uncle Poul called me Krudtirøv (directly translated as gunpowder-in-arse - apparently, I moved with some speed) and these two proudly carry on the family tradition. When not moving fast, they could be found levitating And gently petting the plants. They were much taken with the old rockingchair And then there was the talking. Both are progressing with leaps and bounds, can count from 1-10 and are beginning to rec...

They're at it again. This time her name is not Ashley , but Katie and she lives in England, not Seattle. Kay over at The Gimp Parade has written a rather brilliant post about it and I’m not going to say much about the case, because I’ve already said it all and more than once. I am weary of the assault, of the atrocities and yet again, feeling that I ought to present a public argument about my rights, our rights and how they ought to be the same as yours. That if I don’t and if all the other voices that can speak don’t, we risk our rights eroding. I feel like we are a tiny force trying to stem a massive tide that inexorably moves against us, like slow-moving lava, unstoppable, circling back to medicalizing us, institutionalizing us, silencing us. It makes me so very tired. I’ve been over there, at Kay’s, trying to leave a comment. Sometimes more than once a day, but I can’t. I read the post, I scan it and recoil, clicking away again, feeling as if I’ve touched a filthy cont...

OK, so I’m getting political again. Ranty, even It all started Sunday evening after watching Brothers and Sisters (which, by the way, is shaping up to be one of the best shows on television) when mor and I had our post-show debriefing. When said debriefing turned to exclamations of delight about Sally Field, I remembered how the part of her Emmy speech that include a comment about the war in Iraq got cut off. And then, Monday morning, I read an editorial in the New York Times about how WBAI , a New York radio station that apparently has a long history of challenging limits to free speech (such as broadcasting George Carlin's "seven dirty words"), has decided it couldn’t risk broadcasting Allen Ginsberg's Howl on its 50th anniversary. Howl, I discovered, was ruled not to be obscene 50 years ago in a landmark case. According to the editorial, “[T]he station retreated out of fear that the Federal Communications Commission would levy large obscenity fines th...

It was the last long weekend before winter hits, now no lazy holiday Mondays until Christmas, nothing but fall and rain and cold. As behooves a transitional holiday, it wasn't quite sure which way of the fence it was on and so, we got a little bit of both. Some fall fog Shadows of dying leaves on the sidewalk But summer still has a hold, not quite ready to go into hibernation Which showed to spectacular effect yesterday, with 39C humidex (102.2F) - record-breaking, sweltering and bittersweet, a last hurrah worthy of remembering.

And speaking of addiction... When it comes to books, I have a small problem. Teeny, really. Hardly worth mentioning. I like to have a stash. The knitters among you will know what I mean. That jittering anxiety in the back of your mind that someday, there could be a yarn shortage and therefore, you have to get while the getting’s good, oftentimes leading to a yarn stash of monumental proportions or, as the esteemed Harlot calls it, SABLE - Stash Acquisition Beyond Life Expectancy. I’ve got that with books. It all started reasonably enough, but then, it always does, doesn’t it? I was given a perfectly reasonable number of credits as an introduction to Audible . Ken gave them to me. I think he may have meant well, wanting to give me back the books I’d lost when my neck couldn’t handle the regular way of reading anymore, unaware that he had just given me a gateway drug. I ’ve continued to purchase a perfectly reasonable amount of credits once a year – a Platinum membership...

Five years ago today, I quit smoking. W ell, to be honest, it was the second time I’d quit. Or the 187 th , depending on your point of view. The first time I quit, it lasted four years. I blame my sister - she started sneaking cigarettes when she was out and the smell of smoke on her clothes when she came home was more than I could handle. I know she's rolling her eyes right now, suggesting that perhaps I take responsibility for my own failings and I'm just kidding - my mother and I both tease her a lot about all the years way she nagged us to stop smoking and when we finally did, she started. With my present understanding of how deep my addiction is, I'm sure that I would have cracked eventually, but I cracked when I did because around the time my sister started smoking, someone broke my heart. I’d tried drinking, but feared barfing too much to really get into it and when the wretched feeling needed to drown itself in something, the scent of cigarette smoke did it...

Cat basking in the sun Ripples and flip-flops Mor, sprung, home and out in the neighbourhood Sun shining through leaves (I'm going to miss that so much) Selfportrait (that's my shadow, I was born n the Year of the Tiger... get it? Eh? Oh, I slay me...) Have you ever seen a sky so blue?