My Kid Still Can't Sit

Back in the day, the long-ago days when Gwen was a toddler, she couldn't sit.  "Sitting unassisted for a period of time" was a six-month milestone, and she didn't meet it.  Looking back, I don't feel like I was super worried about this, but maybe I was - I was pretty crazy/hormonal/stressed out about motherhood during that period.  I *do* remember that I had a hard time explaining it to people, who kept misinterpreting me and believing that Gwen couldn't sit still.  No, the problem was that she couldn't SIT AT ALL.

Evidence.

Sitting on hip, not bum.

So at eight months old, Gwen became that rarest of children: a child who can crawl but cannot sit.  "They" say that sitting helps toddlers develop the core strength necessary for crawling, but apparently Gwen wanted to prove them wrong, because she learned to crawl at least a month before she could sit.  Weird, right?

(Spoiler: she finally started sitting at nine months old.)

Here's something even weirder.  Gwen is STILL not so keen on sitting.  Here are some photos taken over the past several weeks.  In every photo, Gwen is watching a movie on TV, so has every reason to be comfortable, stationary, and, you know, facing the screen.  Generally in cases like these, people turn to "SITTING" as a solution.  Not Gwen.

In Gwen's near future: sitting in a kindergarten classroom and doing 'desk work'.  I can't wait to see how that goes.

More Than a Mistress – Chapter Four

This is my favourite chapter so far and might actually be the chapter where I started liking this book.  It’s a slow, fairly non-eventful chapter, but there is some nice character development and good foundation laid for the coming romance (no pun intended, I swear).

So, where Chapter Three featured a visit from Tresham’s sister, Lady Heyward, Chapter Four features a visit from his brother, Lord Dudley.  Dudley is just as self-important as Lady Heyward – Tresham, in comparison, is starting to seem like a half-decent guy, especially as he seems to view his siblings as the boors they are.

Jane Ingleby continues to be an enigma wrapped in a riddle.  She carries and comports herself like a proper lady, and this attitude somehow startles people into responding to her as such, even when they are told she is a servant.  For example, Tresham presents his brother Dudley to her – “this must surely be the first time he had been presented to a servant” – and Miss Ingleby, rather than curtsying as might be proper for a servant, “inclined her head graciously”, which inspires Dudley to make “an awkward little bow”.  This is not the way servants are generally treated, but then, as Tresham himself is starting to suspect, Jane is no servant.  Indeed, when Dudley makes a vulgar statement, Tresham cuts him off and is about to insist that “there is a lady present” before remembering that servants don’t actually count as ladies.

Tresham and Jane have a nice civil conversation about how they shall pass the time together; cards, chess, reading, gambling?  Again, one would not expect a servant to know how to read, but Tresham is onto her ruse and makes a knowing comment about the superiority of the orphanage she attended.  Then it’s time for some lusting.  Jane comments that Tresham will certainly soon become bored with the entertainments she can offer, but Tresham gets a “wolfish” look about him and comments only, “We shall see,” before ordering her to remove her cap.  When she refuses, he asks her a little more softly.  This time she concedes.  Is this to be the pattern of their interactions – she will do as he asks, if he asks nicely?  And teach him a valuable lesson about being kind to people?  Perhaps so.  After Tresham reflects on the incredible beauty of her golden tresses, he asks if she was hiding her hair because of his reputation.  She is unaware of his reputation, so he shares it with her, which is weird if he was worried about her being afraid of it.  He makes sure she is well aware that he has been accused on multiple occasions of sleeping with married women, but promises that he doesn’t seduce unwilling women, or servants for that matter.  “But I would give a monkey,” he says softly, “to see you with your hair down.”  A monkey?  Is this some kind of Regency-era currency?  I wear my hair down every day, no one has ever given me wildlife in return.

That evening, Jane reads from “Gulliver’s Travels” while Tresham reflects how boring his evenings are going to be while his leg recovers.  Usually he’s into the theatre or opera and then getting laid, “the most energetic exercise of all”.  He ponders Jane’s swanlike neck and her cultured reading voice, and longs again to see all her hair undone.  Just about the time I was starting to wonder if Tresham had a hair fetish, he also thinks how he might like to see her naked, too.  (Maybe that would be worth a monkey AND a giraffe!) 

The next day, the physician visits and praises Jane for her excellent job of changing Tresham’s bandage.  Then Tresham tells the doctor he wants to exercise his leg, and curses at the man when he advises against it.  Jane, naturally, has to get in the middle of this, insisting that Tresham owes the doctor an apology.  “He is merely giving you his professional opinion, for which you summoned him and are paying him.  There was no call for such rudeness.”  The doctor, of course, is flustered by this and makes excuses for the Duke, but Jane cannot let it go, advising Tresham that pain is no excuse for speaking abusively.  She feels embarrassed about her outburst, reflecting that “it came of having grown up in an enlightened home, in which servants had invariably been treated as if they were people and in which courtesy to others had been an ingrained virtue.”  Though she again resolves to curb her tongue, just moments later when Tresham orders her to fetch a cushion, she retorts, “You might say please once in a while.” 

This leads to an interesting dialogue between the two of them, with Jane encouraging the Duke to use his manners and also his words: “If I feel any indignation on any subject, I have the vocabulary with which to express it.  I do not need to resort to violence.”  But Jane’s inner monologue tells us that this is “as massive a lie as any she had ever told.”  This hearkens back to her Mysterious Past and the murder she is accused of.  Hopefully the next chapter will bring us more clues because I am getting impatient!

Tresham thanks Jane for bringing the cushion, which surprises her greatly.  He gets all sexy again, pointing out that he is superior in his ability to “amuse and delight women”.  Suddenly, Jane notices that he is a man: “Her awareness of his masculinity had been a largely academic thing until he spoke those words … But suddenly … she felt a totally unfamiliar rush of pure physical desire that did alarming things to her breasts and her lower abdomen and inner thighs.”  What were these alarming things, I wonder, and why were they alarming?  Desire is meant to be pleasant, not alarming.  But perhaps it is merely alarming because it is so unfamiliar.  In any case, Tresham and Jane are progressing quite nicely, as both have now started secretly lusting after one another.  I predict that physical contact will commence in no more than three chapters.  I kind of can’t wait.

Frozen Peanut Butter Chocolate Banana Bites

Last week, I saw this recipe on my Facebook feed and resolved to try it.  There are three ingredients: bananas, peanut butter, and chocolate.  All of those things are awesome and could only be made more awesome by their powers combined.  Plus, the recipe seemed SUPER simple. 

I followed the step-by-step instructions on Snapguide, with one exception: I made double-decker versions instead of open-face.  First, I cut the bananas into coins and put them on a parchment-paper-covered cookie sheet.

The next step called for me to spread peanut butter on each of the banana coins.  I chose to melt the peanut butter a bit, because nearly everything delicious becomes more delicious when melted (see: cheese, butter, chocolate, ice cream).  I applied the peanut butter with my frosting thingy, which made it look either adorable or like runny poo, depending on your point of view. 

The next step is to put more banana coins on top of the peanut butter layer.  Around this time is when I started to remember that banana coins are pretty unpleasant to handle.  All squishy and slippery.  The top coins did a lot of sliding around and sometimes took the peanut butter with them as they slid right off the bottom coins.  Annoying!

Then I put the tray of double-decker banana bites into the freezer for about 10 minutes to help them firm up.  This is what the inside of my freezer looks like.  Awful, isn’t it?  I can never find ANYTHING.

In retrospect, I can tell that I should have left those suckers in there for 30 minutes or more to make sure the bananas lost their slipperiness and really embraced their new role of peanut-butter-delivery-system.  But I didn’t.  And that is why things started to go horribly wrong in the next step. 

Now I have to add chocolate.  The guide says to do this via dipping the sandwich into melted chocolate which is at a “dipping, not spreading” consistency.  I dipped a few of them, but they often fell apart in the dipping bowl, and they also returned to the tray with a LOT of extra (i.e., wasted) chocolate.  I ended up melting way more chocolate than I would have anticipated (about 2 cups of melting wafers) and as you can see, the chocolate didn’t so much enrobe the bananas as languish in their presence.

Because the giant pools of melted chocolate took up so much room, I ended up having to use a second cookie sheet.  This one had to go in my deep freeze.  There wasn’t any room for a cookie sheet (even the small ones that I use) to go into the freezer and remain level.  So guess what happened?  The cookie sheet tipped over and spilled banana-peanut-butter-chocolate-goo all over my deep freeze.  I anticipate I will be finding frozen chunks of this mess for months to come.  But there is an upside to this catastrophe: it gave me the idea for an upcoming blog post, “Ten Things I Really Hate About My House.”  Stay tuned!

So after being in the freezer for a few hours, I took the bananas off the cookie sheets and transferred them to an airtight container.  Here is a picture of how much chocolate remained on the parchment paper when I did that.  It is a TRAVESTY.

And here is a picture of the super-appetizing, “completed” peanut butter banana bites.  Yup, I nailed that one so hard they’re going to have to start calling me “Hammer”.

They are about as delicious as they look.

Call it what it is, peer abuse

I was always shy in school and slow to make friends. I didn't have many. I was socially awkward, didn't dress well, and my hair never looked good. I was smart and got good grades.

I remember the teasing starting in grade 6 or so, the last year of elementary school. Kids were paying attention to their clothes more, and I wasn't. Whatever, grade 7 started and I moved on up to junior high. We heard nice tales about how everyone was more mature in junior high.

Fuck that.

Grade 7 photo, taken in the beginning of the
year. I was happy and confident.

I was in Mrs. Nasadyk's class. Within the first day or two I'd met a bunch of new people, boys and girls, they were friendly and developed a group. I'd never been part of a group before. Pretty soon it was evident that I was different. I dressed differently, I didn't like the same music or tv shows, and I wasn't interested in boys. I didn't draw in the same style (yes, this was an issue). I didn't wear makeup. I was 11 when I started school and turned 12 in November. Then it happened. I DID get a boyfriend. We went to the Halloween dance together. He got me a rose on my birthday. And I... didn't get the point? I was not interested. At all. I wanted to "break up" with him. I confided this to one of my friends and asked how I went about doing that. She'd known him longer, so she told him herself. He broke up with me via passed note. I was confused but not overly distraught.

But then the friendship slowly disintegrated. Except no one told me. They started doing things without me. They had a sleepover and called me from it to tell me what they were doing. I still didn't get it. Shortly after Christmas holidays, the three other girls cornered me at my locker and giggled their way through a rehearsed speech, each taking turns saying a word.

We. 

Don't.

Really.

Want.

You.

Hanging.

Out.

With.

Us.

Anymore.

I was shocked. Speechless. Crushed. I didn't know what to say. In my memory of this I see it as if I'm watching a movie, looking over their shoulders and watching myself in the corner, too ashamed to do anything. They left and it took all I had to keep the tears in as I finished getting my stuff and walked down a reeeeeeally long hallway to leave the school. Perhaps it was a kindness they waited till the end of the day. Probably they just needed the day to rehearse.

My mom was there to pick me up as usual. I started crying as soon as I got in. I told her what happened.

"Well, you must have done something to upset them. Maybe you should apologize."

Or some shit like that. Point is, the victim blaming was alive and well in my house. Previous encounters with teasing had been met with "If you ignore it, they will stop" and "They only tease you because you react."

ADULTS LIE.

Peer abusers won't stop if you ignore it, and they tease you because they can. They tease because it makes them feel powerful. They tease because they are amused by your reaction, and they tease because they want to see how far they can go before they get a reaction. Or they do it because they have no idea how not to. They will not stop if you ignore it. They want to hurt you.

All that advice, all of it, is victim blaming. You know how tight jeans, short skirts, low cut tops, and being drunk aren't an excuse to rape women? Being small, awkward, and uncool isn't an excuse to abuse your peers physically, emotionally, verbally, or in any other way. You stop rape by teaching men not to rape. You stop peer abuse by teaching abusers not to be shitheads.

Back to the hallowed halls of Robb Road Junior Secondary. So either that incident happened on a weekend or I refused to go to school for a few days. I don't remember. But I was a wreck. I dreaded going back to school. Where would I sit? What would I do? The kids who ate lunch alone were losers. I was a loser. I talked to no one all morning. It was weird and scary. At lunch I was terrified walking into the lunch room. I looked around and picked a table where the kids didn't look too intimidating, summoned some courage, and made a really lame excuse about why I needed to sit down (I think I sprained my ankle). They said okay. Phew!

Grade 8. I'm still fearful of sharing this. This
girl? Lonely, depressed, confused, and
awkward.

So I wasn't completely fucking alone, but it didn't really fix anything. Grade 7 was a shit show and it got worse and worse and worse. I was a target now. I was teased for just about everything. I got volleyballs thrown at my head in gym class. I got poor grades in gym class because I didn't participate, but I didn't participate because a) I sucked and b) the teachers liked to mix the teams by skill level, which meant I was always split from my friends (who also sucked) and put with mean girls who didn't like me and wouldn't let me participate.

I had my locker vandalized with nasty writing. I don't remember what it said, just how humiliating it was to walk up to it and have to open it. I was threatened with violence. The rest of it was just that insidious girl bullying. Exclusion and judgement and just general nastiness. Because it's not over or obvious, it gets easily ignored, swept under the rug, and dismissed. Adults have dismissed it when I speak of the experience. I was too sensitive. Oh, we don't let that happen in schools any more (this one said by a current educator). We know the damage bullying causes and we're working to stop it.

No.

We.

Aren't.

It happens every day, all day, and it continues to happen when kids go home thanks to the magic that is Facebook. If social media existed back then I could very, very easily have been Amanda Todd or Rehtaeh Parsons or Jamey Rodemeyer or Aaron Dugmore or Courtney Brown or Ryan Patrick Halligan or Amanda Brownell or Jamie Hubley or Hope Witsell or or or. All the talk is of how isolated the victims were, how they didn't get the help they needed. Nothing talks about stopping the abuse before it happens. All these cases show that it's getting WORSE.

High school was marginally better than junior high in that I had friends I could count on regularly to sit with and not be alone. I still didn't get invited to do things outside school. I was and still am an introvert, but I would probably be more outgoing if it weren't for my junior high and high school experience. Instead, high school taught me to be incredibly self conscious about being enthusiastic about anything lest I be criticised for it. I learned to hide what I enjoy reading, listening to, watching, and doing. I learned not to try dressing stylishly because I wouldn't get it right and would just get mocked. I learned to stay quiet and out of the way as the best way to avoid ridicule. I learned to expect to be excluded from fun experiences. I didn't go to dances because I wasn't invited. I pretended disinterest in the traditional grad class minuet because I knew I wouldn't be welcome. I didn't go to the after-grad party or participate in a single one of the grad activities aside from the ceremony. I was a prolific writer all the way through high school and university and self-published on the internet. I hid that. I still refuse to let anyone read a single word of my fiction (when I have time and inspiration to write), because of my ingrained fear of ridicule.

You know what? All that hiding didn't help. And now, fifteen years later, I still haven't let go of the animosity I hold for one particular girl because she hated me for my very existence. When teachers posted grades, she looked for mine. Every time. The teacher stopped posting names and just posted student numbers. She knew my student number. She would find my grade and curse me every single time. She dropped out of a class because I was at the top of it. I did nothing to this girl I had known since kindergarten. I never spoke to her, never engaged with her in any way. She hated me, for no other reason (that I know of) than my grades were better than hers. Yes, that did give me a pleasant sense of satisfaction in a way, but it didn't help the crippling feeling of powerlessness.

Grade 12 graduation photo. Still choked my
mom didn't pay for the real deal, because
I was proud of myself and pleased with my
appearance for once.

So all the others? Whatever. They were pretentious, self-absorbed, cliquey and mean. I'm over it. But this one? Not so much. That's a lot of talent, creating a lasting 15-year impression on someone. You know who else has left a lasting 15-year impression? The girl who stayed my friend throughout high school even though I probably brought her down a few notches in popularity and is still my friend today. You rock.

I will also take this opportunity to apologize to Rose, Mary-Anne, and Emily. Rose and Mary-Anne - you had no friends. I felt bad for you. People were horrible to you and I ignored it because I was busy trying not to be abused myself. That is not an excuse. Everyone needs friends. I'm sure you were awesome. Emily, you were awkward just like me. We were friends. In high school a bitchy "friend" of ours started an anonymous campaign to tell you either not to be so weird or not to be our friend, I don't remember. It was brief and lasted one day, and I don't even know if you ultimately knew about it. I knew it was wrong then and it's still wrong now. I knew better. I should have stopped it. I'm sorry.

Hey, did you notice I never once used the term bullying? Bullying is so over-used it has no effect. School yard bullying is easily dismissed as just "something that happens." Except it doesn't "just happen" just like spousal abuse, elder abuse, child abuse, and rape don't "just happen." Someone commits an act against another and often other people let it happen. More on victim blaming next time.

I thought it would be hairier...

Penis graffiti in Pompeii,
because I think it's funny.

So on the continuing theme of Fifty Shades, a conversation between Laura and I prompted me to send the following message to my first romantic conquest.

This question needs to be prefaced by some explanation, although perhaps that just makes it more awkward.
So my friend Laura and I have been blogging away together and discussing the (de)merits of Fifty Shades of Grey. She is reading a different blog that provides a play by play synopsis of each and every chapter. She mentioned that she stopped reading in disgust when she reached the chapter when the protagonist has sex for the first time. Her reaction to seeing a penis was "holy cow" and Laura thought this was pretty stupid. I replied that there are many things wrong with the book, but that much didn't bother me as it may have been my reaction the first time I saw a penis had I not already been looking at porn for years. I do not remember what I actually said. So...
...
...?

We are still friends, and given that there is an ocean apart, and our usual general lack of communication, this hasn't caused any animosity for our respective significant others. (actually, I'm just assuming on his part... Scott doesn't care). Still, it's a rather personal question and while I was pretty sure he'd take it with the humor in which it was intended, I was still nervous. Fortunately, several hours later I woke up to my reply.

Lol!
Best Facebook message ever
You expressed surprise that it wasn't hairier. That's all I can recall. Pretty sure I'd remember if you'd said anything like "holy cow".

It's so flattering and romantic, it has to be what I said. I have no memory of it, but apparently thirteen years later he does, which means I must have left quite an impression. I am, of course, a goddess, but it's nice to have that confirmed. All I remember is high-fiving like 12-year-olds afterwards, which he does not remember.

I decided to poll others to get a variety of responses.

• Pretty sure I giggled, or was silently shocked.
• Disgust. So I didn't say a thing. Haha!
• Even though I can't remember that far back of what I thought, I CAN tell you that when I first saw my first uncut guy I was like WTF! What's wrong with your penis (in my head of course I said that). I had never seen or even heard of a penis being uncut. I wasn't too experienced when it came to the human anatomy. I never did anything with the guy because I was mortified. Fast forward to today.. My hubby is un-cut and damn he is the best I have ever had in bed! lol.
• Disgust, horror, wouldn't look at it. It was circed.
• I remember thinking it was smaller than I expected (not [husband], for the record!) and I also didn't really see what the big deal was...penises, in general, aren't all that nice looking, kwim?
• I don't even remember what I thought, lol. It was usually dark? It looked like I expected, I guess. ETA with one guy I noticed the curve, lol.
• I don't know because I am old and can't remember, but it wasn't anyone uncut.
• I thought to myself now I know why they call it the one eyed monster...

So... what did you say? Comments and contributions welcome, anonymous or otherwise. Men are welcome to reply with their first reaction to seeing female genitalia (I will not say vagina, because unless you're a doctor you're most likely not actually seeing the vagina).

Laura Learns to Camp, Part 1

Laura's and my children together attend a church program for kids. We recently celebrated our last session of the year. To celebrate, we had a picnic on the beach. We had previously mulled over the food possibilities for this. Cooking presented a challenge. Laura had a camp stove, but she did not know how to use it. She thought perhaps it would be easier to visit the 7-11 across the street. Pshaw, I said. We can figure out the camp stove!

After work, before the event, I went to the grocery store to pick up my portion of the meal - fruit. I found a great hotdog deal and texted Laura to inquire if she needed any. No, she said, because she didn't get her planned camp stove lesson from her husband, so she was just going to go to 7-11. Nope, nada, no way, I replied. A series of blog posts featuring Laura attempting camping hacks was the initial inspiration for this blog. It was the perfect opportunity to begin Laura Learns to Camp. So reluctantly, she packed up the trusty camp stove and I picked up the wieners and buns we needed (teehee! I said wieners and buns!). Then we met at the beach.

We do generally feel very fortunate to live about three minutes from this spot.

Laura investigates the equipment and successfully opens the case.
We all observed that the camp stove looks like a fancy projector!

Yay, I opened it!

"This looks like something," Laura says, as she attaches the
propane pipe thingy.

We all query if there is actually any propane in that container.

Some time later, Laura decided the propane tank probably wasn't
meant to stick straight up like that.

Maybe this knob does something?

Thwarted! Turns out the starter button was malfunctioning.
Fortunately, Val's husband was able to produce a barbecue lighter
from the trunk of his car.

This photo doesn't illustrate much other than how not to focus
an iphone camera, but Laura successfully lit the stove!

Umm... there seems to be some fire. Is that normal?

No, no it's not.

In Laura's defense, at this point there were three experienced campers watching her set up the camp stove and not one of us realized that the flaming thing was a) the drip tray, meant to go UNDER the stove and b) made of plastic, and not meant to be kept close to a very high heat source or open flame. The photo is deceptive. The smoke was thick and black, not grey. The child in the background is retrieving water to douse this fire. Tongs (good job, Laura, on your forethought to bring tongs!) were used to transfer the flaming piece of black sludge to the sand, where we used our advanced knowledge to bury it in sand to put out the fire.

Camping 101: Learn to improvise.

That'll work.

In the end, we had cooked hotdogs, which was the ultimate goal, so I still call Laura's first camping lesson a success. Her husband, the purchaser, owner, and user of the camp stove, disagrees.

Apparently that was a really important drip tray.
"It just drips grease everywhere now," he says.

He has no defense. He was supposed to give Laura a lesson and didn't.

EDIT:  Nope, it was me (Laura) who was all, "I don't want to deal with the camp stove. I will just go buy overpriced 7-11 hot dogs."  So it's my fault, not Chris's.

Poor drip tray.

Books I was Forced to Read

When you're an English major, you (pretend to) read a lot of books you wouldn't normally read but have to because it's a requirement. Somewhere in my third or fourth year, I took a contemporary Canadian literature course. I'm not sure how I passed this course, let alone achieved at least a B, because virtually all of the books sucked ass. I just found a bunch in my basement I'm going to make Laura read, for validation that I'm not just uncultured and they do actually suck.

My Paris, by Gail Scott

"My Paris is not for those who dislike grammatical experimentation. But for those who do enjoy playing with language, this memoir (billed as a novel) of six months in Paris in 1993 is a pleasure."

It is not a pleasure. Not. A. Pleasure. Here is the first paragraph. I didn't get past the first page because I was too busy gouging my eyes out. 

1. Like a heroine from Balzac. I am on a divan. Narrow. Covered with a small abstract black-and-white print. At end a rice-paper screen. Three mahogany-framed partitions. Pale eggshell walls curving gracefully at corners. Staring up at slender almost ceiling-high radiators. A library with four crescent shelves. Low comfortable black-and-white canape. Low end tables. Glass posed on metal. Grey round dining table and matching chairs on heavy chrome legs. Teak desk with computer. Teak console with television. Video. Fax. Green and yellow rugs on hardwood floors. One with a designer's initials in the corn.

I was a Professional Writing minor. I learned how to edit people's sentence fragments. Then I was required to read this, which government tax dollars helped to publish.

Ana Historic, by Daphne Marlatt

"Ana Historic is written in a stream of consciousness narrative mode, which uses a flow of language that resembles thought, and often a lack of punctuation, to represent an interior thought process or point of view."

Again, I did not get past the first page because I was in the emergency room receiving treatment for my bleeding, injured eyes. Except apparently this makes me uncultured, because this novel is Canadian literary canon, and especially queer literary canon.

Who's There? she was whispering. knock knock. in the dark. only it wasn't dark had woken her to her solitude, conscious alone in the night of his snoring more like snuffling dreaming elsewhere, burrowed into it, under the covers against her in animal sleep. he was dreaming without her in some place she had no access to and she was awake. now she would have to move, shift, legs aware of themselves and wanting out. a truck gearing down somewhere. the sound of a train, in some yard where men already up were working signals, levers, lamps. she turned the clock so she could see its blue digital light like some invented mineral glowing, radium 4:23. it was the sound of her own voice had woken her, heard like an echo asking,
         who's there?

I prefer the books I read to be accessible and engaging. I would rather read Fifty Shades a thousand times over than attempt to complete reading either of these novels. If that makes me uncultured and gauche... well...

Autobiography of Red, by Anne Carson

"The award-winning poet Anne Carson reinvents a genre in Autobiography of Red, a stunning work that is both a novel and a poem, both an unconventional re-creation of an ancient Greek myth and a wholly original coming-of-age story set in the present."

He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet. Born about 650 B.C on the north coast of Sicily in a city called Himera, he lived among refugees who spoke a mixed dialect of Chalcidian and Doric. A refugee population is hungry for language and aware that anything can happen. Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do. Stesichoros' words were collected in twenty-six books of which there remain to us a dozen or so titles and several collections of fragments. Not much is known about his working life (except the famous story that he was struck blind by Helen; see Appendixes A, B, and C).

I made it further in this book. Except most of it's in verse, and I'm not a huge fan of poetry in general, so I have no clue what this book is about either.

Restlessness, by Aritha Van Herk

Restlessness is about a paid assassin an international courier who hires another paid assassin to kill her rather than commit suicide. It's a fascinating exploration of depression and loneliness. And this summary is not in quotations because I wrote it myself, because I actually read this novel and enjoyed it. The only thing I had to look up was the narrator's occupation, which I remembered incorrectly. My copy of this book is riddled by notes in all different colors, which I find visually pleasing. I read this book when I was 20 or 21. I was depressed at the time, but have since gone through several cycles and different types of depression, as well as counselling, and have otherwise got 10 (okay, 12) more years of experience under my belt and may actually read it again. I also wish I still had the essay I'm sure I wrote about it (judging by all the margin notes) so I could more accurately compare my thoughts on depression between then and now.

I am alone in a room with the man who has agreed to kill me.
      Such an ordinary room, without a hint of gothic foreboding or sinister intent, the walls papered with some elegant stripe, the curtains hanging a polite two inches above the floor, which is decorously warmed with good quality Berber. Two armchairs hold wide their elbows in front of the window, a bed, substantial and bolstered and duvetted, metaphor for comfort and the sleep that is supposed to knit up raveled sleeves, rafts the center of the room.

That first sentence alone is enough to suck you in. The description of the room is pretty evocative, except the last sentence could really use some help a red Sharpie.

If I remember correctly, this course also included some plays and several books of poetry. I read the plays, not so much the poetry. One of the books of poetry was written by the instructor of the course, which seemed like a great way to force people to actually buy your really boring poetry. I think this course was probably English 455: Contemporary Canadian Fiction and Poetry, or something close to that as it's the closest one on the list on the English department website currently. It has been rebranded  Canadian Literature in Transnational Times and sounds infinitely more interesting.

The Ecstasy of Rita Joe is about a First Nations woman who moves to the Downtown Eastside and eventually dies. It would have been really interesting to study this after actually having spent time working in the Downtown Eastside, and then post-Robert Willie Pickton.

The Rez Sisters I read, but don't actually remember. Billy Bishop Goes to War was fun cuz I like me some history, and it's a one-man play.

Boringass books with bad grammar aside, if I hadn't majored in English, I don't think I would have come as easily to the realization that - for reals, dude - it's not just white people who make contributions to art, culture, and society. For serious. I grew up in a blue collar home in a really, really white town. The high school books read were, as far as I remember, all about white people. Except Hiroshima and Obasan, so Japanese people existed and made contributions, but they were limited to topics related to WWII. Otherwise it was just white people.