Arts & Crafts

Brer Rabbit, Textile designed by William Morris.

and the obligatory book recommendation--News from Nowhere.

halifax me!

I have not really achieved or even come close to setting my self up to achieve any goals I had listed from a few entries ago. No guitar playing. Little writing. I am okay with this because life leads in directions previously unseen. Some friends and I rented a car and drove to Halifax for reading week! It was an 12 hour drive but we had a place to stay in Fredericton so we didn't do it all in one shot. The trip was wonderful and I slept on a hardwood floor and spent too much money and made some discoveries!

1. Drinking heavily after taking a booze break and expecting to handle it well is an unreasonable expectation.
   
2. I also believe in ghosts (spirits? energy??) more than ever, and I am almost not afraid of them.
   
3. I will probably never have long hair again because short hair is so easyawesome. And I just don't have the patience to grow it out.
   
4. I have a few hidden and sad prejudices and internalized fears that I am working on addressing.
5. I have a great capacity to strike friendships and it does not take much for someone to endear her/himself to me.
6. I can drive for about three hours before needing to take a break.
7. Halifax has nothing on Montreal party wise. (Really Jill? Ever take size into consideration?)
   
8. Canada is a small world.
9. Venus Envy!
10. I must get to the ocean and stay there as soon as possible.

A Sandwich

You need:

2 slices of Russian, pumpernickel or black bread (toasted or not!)
2-3 slices of firm tofu, enough to cover the bread (choose your own thickness!)
A few slices of onion
A bit of roughly chopped garlic
Shredded carrot
Toasted sesame seeds
Mustard
Salt, pepper, rosemary, cyan pepper or chili powder
Greens (spinach, lettuce etc)
Avacado slices

Season the pan with a tiny bit of cooking spray or oil and sprinkle the herbs and spices and bring to medium heat. Add the tofu slices, garlic and onion and let them grill, making sure they are lightly coated with the seasonings. This takes a bit of time-- you want the tofu to brown. You may want to take out the onions and garlic early. Meanwhile grate or shred some carrot, add mustard (about 2 teaspoons) and sesame seeds, some salt and pepper and mix. Compile sandwich with the tofu as a base so the bread does not get soggy. Don't forget the greens and avocado! Yum!

What do you get when jack frost and a snowman have a love child?

A Montreal winter.

Things are, well, cold. Montreal cold. Fucking cold. I've fallen on my ass twice since winter started, but I seem only to do so when I have some sort of shopping bag in my hands. The gods of revolution biting me in the ass for buying shit? They were just groceries I swear! Anyway, this is my second winter in Muntreal and fourth semester at Concordia. This means I've lived here for a year and a half. In that time I've managed to make several good friends, two of which (arguably the two most important, one lover, one buddy) have up and left for the tropics of for six months. The audacity. If only I had it. It makes me wish I wasn't in school so I could work as much as I needed to and take off when I had the cash. The other complication is that living in Canada as a non French speaking (gulp) American means I'm on a visa and don't have all the work privileges of a Canadian. I was thinking about getting my permanent residency once I graduate, but then again, I don't even know if I want to live in North America, or any America for that matter. Thats still a complicated matter that will require some thought over the next year or so.

So, I'm here for the winter with tons of reading to do and my two bestest buds off on their own adventures. I should probably make the best of having a lot more alone time without a love to spend it with but I can't help but feel the melancholy eating at my joints like some old lady with arthritis. So I've set ten goals/important things to do for myself:

1. Learn to play that goddamn guitar before Bo comes back and claims that I didn't learn, and steals it back from me
2. Start writing seriously and send things to publishers
3. Make some more stuffed animals and sell them this spring at the Tams for extra ca$h
4. Go on my own adventure (West Coast??) this coming May and June. Anyone want to join me/meet me there/let me sleep on their couch?
5. Find a smaller apartment by July
6. Keep up with the avalanche of school work that has descended on my head since Monday
7. Start taking pictures again
8. Save as much money as possible
9. Keep organized
10. Stay positive through this goddamn miserable winter
    

So now I'm going to hobble off to read about a 19th century french hermaphradite for my Gender and Sexuality in Literature class. If anyone is interested, it's a memoir written by Herculine Barbin, translated by Foucault after the former's suicide. It's called "Hurculine Barbin." The story is, she was born and designated a girl, raised as a girl and then began to show "tendancies." The law then declared that she was he and our poor hero(ine) could not cope with the change in lifestyle. Pretty interesting, a bit erotic and medically graphic. I'm enjoying it.

I also cut my bangs today in a fit of wanting change and I must say they look pretty bangin'.

Okay Montreal, stay warm.

death of a closet mystic

Change comes upon us when we're least aware. Not so long ago the entire world held for me some sort of mystic beauty and mystery that I wanted to explore. That uncertain mystery was what drove me to creativity. It was my source for writing and creating. In the past months though, everything has become more and more what it actually is, and less and less of what it could be, and it's happened without me realizing it. Now two large spiders in a city garden, lit by a street light are just that. I don't like spiders, but I appreciate how they have such precision in their constructions, and are really the perfect little predator. Perhaps a year ago those spiders would have been a metaphor for-- I dunno-- Big Brother? Interpersonal relationships? Dangerous beauty? See, I can't even think of anything remotely unique or interesting. Each thought or idea I have falls flat, hollow and false. The spiders are nothing but spiders.

So with all that in mind, I come to an impasse, a non-creative stretch of time, an inability to write poetry, which for me has always had some sort of transformative, mystical property. I guess I understand now why people look for God or Faith-- it's a comfort and an excuse to look at things in the world with more complexity. The world for me now is dazzlingly simple: the seasons are the result of the earth rotating around the sun. The rise of day and fall of night are the result of the earth spinning on it's axis. Everything has it's perfect, regular rhythems that I can no more question than stop.

So what do I do? I think I know. It's not about ideas anymore for me. No more forcing mystic dribble drabble that I can't really connect with. Now I just want to learn what I can about language and the traditions of writing so I can turn it on it's head. If I can't pump meaning into usless metaphore, than I might as well strip all metaphore away and just make a skelaton out of my creativity, a skelaton to examine and to terrify.

Spicy Asparagus Stirfry in Red Sauce

I got some fresh (organic!) asparagus from a kindly mother of a good friend the other day, and have been at a loss for what to do with it. Fry it up with some pepper and lemon? Kinda boring. Make a soup? I’ve made several in the past few days. No more soup. Stir fry is my default cooking mode when I’m at a loss, so despite not really seeing asparagus as a veggie used along side other veggies, I plunged in head first, and lo and behold, out came this thick, spicy stir fry. The asparagus flavor doesn’t overwhelm the other veggies, in fact it’s very subtle, and using sweet carrots and onions makes a great flavor contrast to the spicy chili.

INGREDENTS
Asparagus, cut into thirds
Sweet white onion, roughly chopped
2 or 3 cloves of garlic, roughly chopped
3 carrots (sweet carrots are especially tasty), sliced and halved
½ can (3) peeled plum tomatoes, roughly chopped
½ cup tomato juice, also from can
2 teaspoons sesame oil
1 tablespoon olive oil (or preferred cooking oil)
½ tablespoon corn starch
Soy sauce
Fresh coriander, roughly chopped
Fresh or ground ginger
Salt
Pepper
Cayenne pepper
½ tablespoon Chili pepper

Blanche the asparagus in a frying pan or wok for about 1 minute, until bright green and slightly tender (you don’t want them too tender because you will continue to cook them). Drain asparagus and add oils, garlic, ginger (especially here if it’s fresh) and pepper and begin to cook over medium heat. Add onion and carrots and let cook for a few minutes, until onions become soft. Add salt, cayenne pepper, coriander, and ½ tablespoon (or desired amount) of chili pepper. Add tomatoes and juice, stir to cover vegetables and let simmer, adding cornstarch a little bit at a time until sufficiently thick. Add a few dashes of soy sauce. Continue to simmer until carrots and asparagus reach desired softness. Sprinkle with sesame seeds and serve hot.

Though I didn't make any, some brown or basmati rice would be an excellent side.

on garbage and dollmaking

Garbage hunting is my new hobby, and in springtime Montreal is a platter of discarded goodies. You would be amazed at what people will throw away. Yesterday I found a BEAUTIFUL, bright yellow chest of drawers that's now in our hallway, and tonight our upstairs neighbor found a vintage TV in working condition. It was about 1 a.m. when we found it, quite far away from home, so he convinced the bus driver to let us take it on the bus. If the TV didn't work we were going to gut it, but the sound is great and the picture is enough to watch DVDs on, if you don't mind weird color and a slightly jumpy screen. All this garbage pecking isn't really helping my packrat tendencies much I suppose, but its a lot of fun, and it lead me to an idea, or perhaps a new vision of my future. I've got this overactive imagination when it comes to the future. I'm constantly reconstructing it in my head, adding and subtracting plans, trying to balance out the equation, if you'll pardon the gimpy metaphor. I want to be a published writer, a publisher, an illustrator, a traveler, a photographer, a florist, on and on it goes. You can only imagine how difficult it was to fill out those high school career surveys. They all told me to be a teacher. Anyway, the other day I started making a stuffed animal out of a old vest I found in the trash. Mogdor, as the creature has been dubbed, is a full fledged monster, complete with a little tag taken off a t-shirt proclaiming him "Mild but Wild."

A mostly finished Mogdor on the yellow
dresser. His arms still need some work

I've never made a doll before, but it took two days of on and off work to get him mostly finished (he just needs feet and claws and some arm fixing) and I adore him, so I got to thinking, "Why not make a project out of this doll making and garbage hunting?" So the idea is this. Start making dolls out of completely recycled materials. The only thing I'll buy is thread because good thread is important and it's cheap, which is good because I'm literally broke at the moment. Everything else, fabric, buttons etc. must be completely free, found or otherwise donated. This could be big! Handmade, recycled stuffed animals. The very thought should elicit a sigh from the "green" and adorably-minded. So the plan is this. Start small, practice my sewing, design and dumpster diving skills, make stuffed animals as gifts for people I care about and eventually start taking commissions and selling them. Ridiculous? Maybe, but would it not be so totally sweet to be a dollmaker, man? I've added it to my list.