Archives for the 'Long' Category

Dear blog,
I’m tired. There are lots of different kinds of tireds, did you know. Here’s hoping that the rain lets up and the sun comes out soon, because this weather isn’t helping.
Talk soon!

A brief lull in the packing. He stands up, and looks at me. “Do you think people can undo judgements?”

We’ve spent the morning emptying the apartment of him. The bed is stripped, and the room is full with the sound and smell of his sheets washing. The dining table lies in pieces, spindly disembodied legs stacked against the fridge, bottles of dressing and sauce knocking against the cold bareness inside it. The study table, cleared of computer and papers, is pushed into a corner. A small forest of potted plants has collected over the cold stove, patiently awaiting distribution to parents and brothers with time and watering cans. Plates and cutlery will remain behind, keeping one cupboard shelf and one kitchen drawer company. The bathroom contains nothing.

Still, despite all our time and boxes, the place retains its character, refuses to empty itself of all its presence. The blinds are up, and the grey of the morning has broken into unexpected sun. The light spills in through that far wall of glass, over the mess of the city’s skyscrapers and onto the shrinking piles of his life’s miscellany. The light catches in his eyes and pools around his mouth. This place is small enough that at all times I can measure the distance between us in arms’ lengths. There was nothing to take down from the walls. They were and remain insensible to us.

We’ve just brought in the electric fireplace from out of storage. We’ve pushed it against the farthest wall, and its top comes up flush with the windowsill. He paused to feel the flatness of that juncture under his palm. Then he flicked on a switch, and we laughed at the fake flames that sprang up in the January sunlight. I tease him for owning it in the first place, and he explains that it came with the apartment, and he had to put it out now because he’d mentioned it in the ad to sublet the place.

He asks me then if a person can undo judgments. I tell him my first lie. “Yes,” squinting in the glare of a ray of sun trained on my face.

Larry and Catherine have separated and are now battling for custody of their two children, Taylor and Brandon. Catherine is now living with Sam, Larry’s former friend and current coworker. Larry now lives with Sandra.
These are some selections from how Justice Quinn, of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, decided their case.

Bruni v. Bruni, 2010 ONSC 6568

[1] Paging Dr. Freud. Paging Dr. Freud.

[18] Larry gave evidence that, less than one month later, Catherine, “Tried to run me over with her van.” [Footnote 6: This is always a telltale sign that a husband and wife are drifting apart.]

[19] On November 21, 2006, Catherine demanded $400 from Larry or her brother was “going to get the Hells Angels after me.” [Footnote 7: The courtroom energy level in a custody/access dispute spikes quickly when there is evidence that one of the parents has a Hells Angels branch in her family tree. Certainly, my posture improved. Catherine’s niece is engaged to a member of the Hells Angels. I take judicial notice of the fact that the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club is a criminal organization (and of the fact that the niece has made a poor choice).]

[23] On October 18, 2007, a nautical theme was added. According to Larry: “Donna Taylor, Catherine’s sister-in-law, yelled out her window that I was going to be floating in the canal dead.”

[24] As can be seen, Catherine and her relatives are one-dimensional problem solvers.

[70] On fourteen occasions, within eighteen months, the parties drew the police into their petty disagreements – a sad commentary on their inability to get along and a shocking abuse of the Niagara Regional Police Service. Although this statistic probably sums up all that one needs to know about the parties, I will elaborate for the doubters.

[71] Larry, who regularly drives by the residence of Sam and Catherine, “often shoots the finger”[21] at Sam and, on about three occasions, has yelled: “Jackass, loser.” [Footnote 22: When the operator of a motor vehicle yells “jackass” at a pedestrian, the jackassedness of the former has been proved, but, at that point, it is only an allegation as against the latter.]

[73] On August 14, 2007, Larry sent three text messages[23] to Catherine within a space of four minutes, saying: “The game is just starting. Prepare yourself for a long winding road”; “Busted! Always look in your rear view mirror”; and, “Blood isn’t always thicker than water.” Two days later he texted: “Loser! Home-wrecker!” [Footnote 24: These do not strike me as the statements of someone who is concerned about precipitating a Hells Angels house call.]

[78] I find that Sandra does not exert a positive gravitational pull in this dysfunctional family constellation.

[82] Sandra testified that Catherine “gave me the finger while driving on Bunting Road.” [Footnote 28: I am uncertain whether this would be considered a hand-held communication device, now illegal while operating a motor vehicle, under recent amendments to the Highway Traffic Act.]

[85] Sam’s attitude toward Larry undoubtedly has been influenced by Catherine, as Sam has been dining at her table of hatred for more than three years; however, this explains, but does not excuse, his deplorable conduct.

[90] On another occasion in July of 2009, Larry said to Taylor: “You put shit in this hand and shit in this hand, smack it together, what do you get? Taylor.” [Footnote 30: I gather that this is Larry’s version of the Big Bang Theory.]

[91] It is to be remembered that, following separation, Larry was confronted with an angry, hurt, confused and rebellious daughter who had been receiving advanced animosity-tutoring from Catherine. [...] Given Larry’s near-empty parenting toolbox, it is not surprising that he handled the matter awkwardly.

[137] A brief recap is in order: Catherine rejected the advice and recommendations of Niagara Family and Children’s Services, Ms. Katz and Mr. Leduc; she ignored my several protestations during the pre-hiatus part of the trial during which I was critical of how the parties spoke of each other in the presence of the children; she disregarded my order that she and Larry were not to denigrate each other in the presence of the children during the hiatus; and, she participated in three court-recommended counselling sessions. After all of that she, nevertheless, sent the text message. Now, in the witness box, she purports to be bathed in the light of repentance and reason. I think not.

[158] I come now to the issue of spousal support, historically the roulette of family law (blindfolds, darts and Ouija boards being optional).

Footnotes:

[2] At one point in the trial, I asked Catherine: “If you could push a button and make Larry disappear from the face of the earth, would you push it?” Her I-just-won-a-lottery smile implied the answer that I expected.

[3] I am prepared to certify a class action for the return of all wedding gifts.

[9] Donna is a devotee of the literary device known as, “repetition for emphasis.” I do not know whether Donna is the niece who is engaged to the Hells Angels member. If she is, they may be more compatible than I initially surmised.

[26] The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines “dickhead” as “a stupid person.” That would not have been my first guess.

[33] I do not know why courts find it necessary to alter the meaning of words. One would think that if the legislators had intended “shocking” they would have used “shocking.”

All my exams are at 9AM and on a good day my commute is an hour long. All my exams are open-book and on a good day my notes are compiled for printing a whole sleep before.

So this last week has found me pulling all-nighters many months after my body had finally learned to forget 5AM bedtimes and replace them with a circadian pattern to rival any senior’s. Printing my notes in time for the finals means heading bleary-eyed and headaching to the 24hr smokestore some blocks down the street well before sunrise, pausing at the intersection 2 doors before its grated entrance to fill myself in the dark on the unbelievable smell of bread from the still-locked Korean bakery. In the store’s backroom, there are 6 computers hooked up to a printer.

The first predawn morning, I am the only person at the computers. I stumble through the counting of sheets and then their stapling and outside into the rain, where I wait for the bus, feeling Vancouver’s winter seep up the cracks in my shoes and through my socks to my toes.

The second morning, 24 hours later, there is an elderly man at the computer I’d mentally assigned to myself and he is playing Farmville, whitehaired and bearded, with veins wrapped vine-like over his hands and up his arms. With headphones in, he is deaf to me and does not look up when I enter or as I exit.

My third morning, the following weekday, someone has changed the wallpaper on the computer to an okaycupid heart and left open a browser window on a site devoted to sharing newborn pictures with friends and family. The baby looks like the oldest of bald old men. She is a girl, and though I can’t see them, but the description says her eyes are blue.

Every morning, the cashier is a young brown man with an Indian accent, dark skin and poorly cut hair, a thin mouth and sharp cheekbones. The second day he tells me he is doing his MBA at UBC. He does the night shift to fit in time for school. I look confused, and he explains his shift ends at 7AM, but his partner is always late. Today, the printer malfunctioned and printed out 10 more copies than I needed of a 12-page summary. The sheaf of papers lies sharp inside my hands and leaves slick plastic residue on my fingers. He has me pay for 8 sheets and then tells me to take all others too “so my boss doesn’t see.”

I’m in school. It is December. This is finals season. I have 4 exams and 3 papers to complete over the course of the next 2 weeks.
Next week, I’m going to be sitting in on the Polygamy Reference case happening here in BC; my legal mentor (of West Coast LEAF) is intervening. Last night, I put together a national listserv for progressive law students and junior lawyers in Canada; I spent much of today stemming the flow of emails that flooded my inbox. Last week, I was part of a demonstration outside Citizenship and Immigration Canada in downtown Vancouver calling for the release of the MV Sun Sea refugees, over 400 of whom are still in jail three months after being detained upon arrival, including mothers and children (more on that day in another post). By next week, I will have had to have sent out a nauseating number of resumes and applications if I intend to secure a summer law job in Toronto. My Directed Research Project next semester, which will be supervised by my Law & Religion professor to whom I owe the 3 papers, is a photoshoot about the culture of law schools, but I’ve fallen out of touch with my camera.

It’s finals season. There are a million things about the law I need to learn, and very little of it will be relevant for the purposes of law school exams and essays. But things are interesting, and I’m grateful.

Am reading Our Fire Survives the Storm: A Cherokee Literary History by Daniel Heath Justice and wanted quickly to note the clarity and vigour with which DHJ writes about “intellectual sovereignty” and grounded hermeneutics. He writes:

To ground one’s work wihtin Indingenous ways of knowing is not a necessarily exclusivist act that seeks an idealized cultural purity. Rather, it is, at its core, a deeply realistic and life-affirming act. [...] Intellectual sovereignty doesn’t presume an insistence on tribal-centred scholarship as the exclusive model of sensitive or insightful analysis. It does, however, privilege an understanding of community as being important to a nuanced reading of the text.

Wanted to note this here, quickly, before I head off in half an hour to host a reading by DHJ, before I forget why his argument matters. It rings with some urgency for me now since I have been thinking quite a bit these days about my position with respect to any given Muslim community (as versus with respect to individuals). My concern is specifically how the delineation of such a group is necessarily exclusivist, and therefore essentialist. My focus is trained on the margins of this definition, on the people who aren’t quite in and aren’t quite out and feel disempowered to choose their position for themselves. In that context, I struggle often with depictions from Muslims of Muslim cultures — are there Muslim “ways of knowing”? but there is nothing generalisable across these innumerable borders — that feel to me, invariably (to the point of feeling knee-jerk), essentialist. The practical implication of this is that when negotiating against the historic and continuing disenfranchisement of Muslim (and similarly minoritised) communities in the West, I feel uncomfortable. How does one, for instance, create a network of Muslim students that can take up a diversity of socialisations — cf. people whose concerns around Islamophobia emerge out of their experiences being visibly Muslim on campus and those who must confront Islamophobia in work as queer rights activists (this pairing being neither mutually exclusive nor exhaustive). How does one create safe and non-essentialising and culturally-grounded spaces to contend with a diversity of oppressions?

There are workshops on this, I know. And it isn’t work to be done, superhero-like, by one person — collective, consensus models ftw. And I’ve taken quite the detour here from DHJ’s text, but who knows, maybe we’ll talk about it more over dinner. Am starving.

I used to buy my mother flowers. We used to live in an apartment building crowded with flats, in a neighbourhood crowded with apartment buildings. Within a decade we’d moved 5 times, 6 if you count that first move across the Atlantic. We’d moved so often, between so many differently shaped and sized spaces, that we lost things along the way. Books went awol, and trunks of children’s clothes disappeared into some kind of ether while we decided which pieces of memory were worth the trucking fees. Still we found ourselves finally in an inner-city neighbourhood, the kind that journalists only ever write about in culinary terms, as though its very concrete were spice, as though every balcony of the stories upon stories of these grey highrises were strung with saris, as though our skins too did not turn grey through the course of the city’s bitter winters. I used to buy my mother flowers here, the only gift I knew to give this woman who would not accept anything easily. There was little space for plants elsewise, still less time for their care. Our balcony functioned as a suspended garage, parking space for the car reserved 16 floors below us, and every other thing whose absence wasn’t immediately noticed crammed into that railed-off strip of whitewashed concrete in the sky. The air in our apartment seemed stifled with the congestion of things and people and our breathing was always interrupted by history. So I’d buy my mother these flowers, these technicolor plants I never learned the names of, and she’d love them and how their shrillness disrupted the overfull bookcases, put them in a vase, and they’d die, spilling petals over the table my father bought 15 years ago, a dangerously heavy wooden thing whose grooves are as familiar and forgettable to me as my own scars.

Then I moved, and so did my mother, she 45 minutes east into the city’s suburbs and I as far west as I could, flying unthinkingly over the entire breadth of prairie sky, until the Pacific stopped me. The house my mother moved into has a garden. This changes everything. The house has a front lawn and a back yard. It’s still semi-furnished, its bedrooms still in flux between siblings who haven’t yet decided where they want to live within those three floors. The living room could still do with couches, the walls are still bare. I’ve stopped buying my mother flowers. She grows her own here. They spilled in careful riots over the balustrades at the house’s front entrance and sprout up in demure sqaures on the other side of the den’s french windows. There is a tree there, which supposedly grows pears. It’s not particularly massive, but it commands a certain corner of the garden and occasionally I watch it. I met a woman soon after I came to visit my mother’s new house this summer and I wrote her a letter about it, an email I can’t remember now. I can’t remember her response either now, except that it was beautiful and made me smile. So I can’t look at that tree again, without remembering how she wrote and the curve of her lips when she smiled. Those days my mother’s tables were always littered with glasses holding the flowers she came home every day to tend, and I never saw them die. It would have been a different creature altogether I would have bought home then, the tendering of money for cheap bouquets a different language altogether.

So I’ve run out of things to buy my mother. At airports, my mother says goodbye with “You are a such a good daughter. May Allah bless you,” and I wonder about the gifts I could possibly give that could make sense of this.

it’s just past 1AM here. 4AM by other clocks. i don’t know which clocks my body follows, i haven’t been able to sleep earlier than 5 in any time zone for the last 3 months.
so because it is, in whatever relevant timezone, some small hour of the night, this email seems entirely reasonable, when i know full well it will seem anything but in the starker light of day.

i’ve moved to this city whose soul evades me, has evaded me for a year now. yet i love place. when my relations with people are questionable, i can say with full confidence that a certain thing i love unquestioningly is place — the way streets meet, how signs light up or don’t at night, how strangers move amongst each other on subway cars, what alleyways do to notions of travel, what the sky feels like on the back of my neck.
and i’ve lived in vancouver for a year, and the soul of this place evades me. lost somewhere between the strange aloofness of this city. i don’t know how to explain it, but when i think of living here, my throat constricts.

i’ve moved into this apartment that belongs in the kind of magazine my mother refers to when she plots how she will decorate this final house my parents have moved into. they’ve been moving for decades, and finally they have a semblance of physical home. you couldn’t see in last night, but the entire ground floor, with the exception of my brother’s bedroom and the den, is unfurnished. strange empty spaces, with bare walls and ugly gifted lamps. it is unsettling seeing my parents go through this process. in their old age, building a homestead, a slow and painful process, at one and the same moment a collapsing of past present and future. it is unsettling and it breaks my heart.
this apartment i’ve moved into has a ladder that leads up into an attic. wooden floors, a sloping roof, an empty ceiling space with windows in the roof. and it has a wide balcony that looks north to the mountains and the ever-bright downtown core. the windows in the other rooms face variously into the sun and open onto the roof of the patio below, seating wide enough for a coterie. the kitchen has deep red walls, the bathroom light blue. one of the bedrooms has french doors.
it is overwhelming, and i am not sure where the sadness comes from, except the deep-rooted sense that i do not deserve this.

i digress, but i’ve forgotten now from what. so this is probably a good place to wrap up.

oh, a story. some girl forgot her wallet on the bus. i was exhausted from not sleeping last night, from flying this morning, then moving furniture, then trying to pretend the costs of moving in weren’t terrifying. and because i was exhausted, i ran after her with the wallet. that causality makes no sense, but instinctively i know if i’d been more conscious i’d have faltered a moment longer. so i picked up her wallet, but she’d already left the bus, and the doors had closed, so i called to the driver to open them. one of those accordion buses, and i’m at the last door, and i never call to bus drivers to open doors. a couple of other people chime in, and the driver opens the door and i call after the girl, who doesn’t hear me, so i have to run after her again, and mostly i’m just very tired and very hungry. i’m supposed to be home right now, not doing this dumb shit. the girl turns and i thrust her wallet at her, turning to the bus even before she’s done saying thank you. and the bus is pulling away from the curb. so i howl please don’t leave at the sky and scrape my hands through my hair like a crazy person. some guy walking by turns around to stare, but the bus is stopping again for me. i run to the door — for consistency, i suppose, since i could have just walked, since he was waiting.
then it’s another three stops to home and my first night here.

But I’d been unfair to Scarborough. I’d let myself forget that this city operates with its own surly logic, distinct from the hustle of downtown Toronto or the exhibitionism of Montreal. Not that it doesn’t have either of those things — not, by any means, that Scarborough doesn’t hustle, doesn’t preen.

Scarborough is its own city, unconcerned with what other cities are doing and liable to tell you off very loudly if you suggest it should care. Where I live, the bus routes are uncooperative. The malls are big boxes, and the streets quickly succumb into highways, lined with open fields where massive insect-like electric poles stand in for trees. The music in the cars is a lot louder, the drivers a little more aggressive. The people arrange themselves into groups, loyalties worn deliberately on their sleeves, separating like oil and water, brown from black from white, class from class, we are who are legal and those who aren’t.

I took a different turn today, walked down some blocks I generally only drive through. Suddenly, there are patches of green sprouting unrepentantly between the model minority backyards. The thick road streaks over an unremarkable concrete bridge that hangs flat over a ravine that descends into a thin, clear brook. There is a small graveyard on the way to the grocery store, a corner lot that bumps against the six-lane road, large enough to contain maybe 60 people, tombstones tottering into the lawn without a house. And there is a tract of land on the way to the bank that someone forgot to turn into a townhouse, a neat rectangle of untended grass with a lone twisted goalpost. The clouds collect here, in this small space, the way they do not elsewhere, and fall over themselves into the grass.

What is … what is the name for those striations in lips, those fine wrinkles that ridge up and then plummet away under the exacting touch of fingertips, that tighten into fragile cobwebs of dryness in frigid winters. And those expanses behind ears, those wide and soft landscapes that valley into the sweep of your neck, what do you call them. Ears themselves — each elaborate whorl of pliant bone under velvet skin must have a title, something I could use to explain why their sight makes my breath catch in my throat.

Suprasternal notch. I learned this name the other day, for that hollow where neck bleeds into chest, where one shoulder meets the other.

“Look up,” I said, almost whispering, with no one else to hear me.
So, obediently, you look up.
“Up.” A finger at the tip of your chin, and your head tilts in the direction of its pressure, obedient, silent.

The picture I take is wholly unremarkable, angled altogether incorrectly. I had been meaning to catch the twin protusions that cradle the dip, that rise knoll-like on either side. But in the photograph, they are too faint, the shadows did not hold, there is an inconvenient blur. The camera caught other things, like the tips of your eyelases and how the ends of your mouth tuck neatly into themselves. And then it didn’t know what to do with those things, so it let them fall, weakly.

And now I miss the days I spent in labs, surrounded by the leathered remains of people’s legs and arms on tables, with hearts and lungs in clear jars arranged on shelves, and silent cadavers resting on tables in the cold room behind. I could have been a better student, then. I could have stifled the nausea and committed more carefully those names to memory (of the people? of their parts).

So these are the inner ends of your clavicles. I could have known the names of these and other bones, of all the muscles and tendons that pull things together, that ripple sleek under my cautious palm.

But it isn’t the same to want to name things as to want to know them. It isn’t the same to want to see a thing as it is to want to photograph it.

Suprasternal notch. I learned this name the other day, and have been unable to look at necks the same since.