Archives for February, 2007

This is the third time I’m studying Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in a university classroom: first year, second year (though I may be making this memory up), and now fourth year.

I’m tired today. Most Wednesdays I am, but for the last fortnight I have been averaging about 4 hours of sleep every weekday, with desperate, daytime binges of sleep to compensate on the weekends. It’s a system that fits into my schedule, but obviously not a very effective one.

Tired, I feel vulnerable, as though my skin has grown transparent.
I fall asleep on the train. I used to wrap myself in my coat and my silence, to perch my bag firmly on my lap, and, hemmed in on all sides by commuting bodies, fall asleep with a will, at will, determined to regain the hours lost in subway darkness. Now, I find myself waking, the only proof that I’d been sleeping. The light, reflecting and reflecting again off the fresh snow, penetrates the thick windows and slices through my eyelids. I wake up with a slight gasp, to see no sun in sight, but whiteness, piercing and untouched, coating the ground, dusting the trees, fading into sullen grey on the low walls. Continue reading this entry »

He looks like he’s in his mid-thirties. Not a tired thirties, but a suave sort of thirties, the kind of thirty you often find mid-twenties aspiring to. I’ve been wrong about people in this age group before. There is a part of me that wants to skip youth and its appendages altogether, to leap feet-first into old age and to be old like no one has ever been old before. I will be gloriously, fabulously old, with wispy, knotted hair, a screeching and inappropriately loud voice, deeply grooved and shamelessly sagging skin. I will have knotted fingers. Fierce eyes. That is the old I want to be and to be surrounded by arguing voices and to prevail over them all with one harrowing shriek for silence.

The thirties, therefore, confuse me. Continue reading this entry »

In third year, my word was “disconnect.” I used it everywhere, in talking about the Silkwomen’s Petition of the Middle Ages to talking about Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean vs Johnny Depp in Donnie Brasco, in talking about Clarissa to talking about why I hated my MSA. In the process I thrilled many a professor and lost many more friends.

Only last week, I realised that the word of my fourth year has been “binary.” It’s not as deeply satisfying as the word disconnect was, but it is an extremely versatile word. I used it last on Saturday. I don’t actually keep a log (I need a new notebook), but Saturday was a freaking awesome day. It was day 2 of the Global Citizenship Conference, a student run initiative at the University of Toronto, and totally the kind of academic thing that’s been getting my attention lately.
Continue reading this entry »

By: Ruth Porritt

This simple cathedral of praise
How you made, from the bottom up,
Is for you to remember
Of Andromeda. What remains

Until you meet the ancient light
With your sight you can keep ascending
Its final transformation into space.
And uphold

The horizon’s urge to sculpt the sky
Puts into relief
Your family’s mountain land
Upon the rising air. In the distance

A windward falcon is open high and steady
Far above the tallest tree
Just beyond your height.
You see a young pine lifting its green spire

By raising your eyes
Out onto the roof deck.
You pass through sliding glass doors
And up to where the stairway ends.

To the top of the penultimate stanza
Past the second story,
But now you’re going the other way,
Line by line, to the bottom of the page.

A force that usually pulls you down,
Of moving against the gravity of habit,
While trying not to notice the effort
And feel what it’s like to climb stairs

(From Mars)

The site was down for 14 days exactly while I worked out issues with my domain registrar.
But now! I am back!

I haven’t read anything of any real interest – refused to read anything of any real interest on the net in these last two weeks, because 1) if it was a blog, I wouldn’t be able to comment because I couldn’t give a link to an out-of-service site, that’s just wrong and 2) if it was an interesting article, I wouldn’t be able to quickfix it and what is the point of the net if we can’t share.
And so, I spent an inordinate amount of time on Facebook. Which is. I forget.

Point is, it’s nice to have a place to write again. And! I can look through my archives now for all those things I wanted to submit to all those places where I missed all the deadlines.
Yay.

(I have this feeling my grammar is all wonky. Do you know, I have made more than once – more than once, children – in the last fortnight, the mistake of writing you’re when I meant your.
Shudder.
It was horrible.)

So I now know this about myself: that I need markers, that I have journals and notebooks and scrawled-over paperbacks, that my clothes have scribbles on them and my textbooks crowded margins, because without these things I have no proof of being, thinking, anything.
And also, less interestingly, I have the world’s worst memory.

Originally posted on Facebook.

All two and a half of you may have noticed my blog is down. While that gets fixed, I need to write somewhere something I heard yesterday. Facebook isn’t all that bad.

Yesterday I attended screenings of Julie Cohen’s My Terrorist and Mohammed Bakri’s While You Were Gone at York. Both were interesting films. Best of all, Cohen was there for the Q&A session afterwards. Bakri (producer of Jenin Jenin) couldn’t come because he was going in for surgery.
One of the closing scenes from While You Were Gone was an archived shot of Bakri’s late friend and comedic partner, Abu Salaama (the “You” of the title), relating the following story:

Once I went to Cyprus with some friends. Arab friends, relatives, family. There a taxi-driver asked me, “From where are you?”
I said, “I am Palestinian.”
“Yes I know,” he said. “But the Palestinians are all over the world now.
From where are you?”
I said, “I am from Israel.”
He started laughing, he thought I was making a joke, until he made an accident.

But I am not accidentally in this country. I am not accidentally in this country.