Jingle jingle

So you will no doubt be very relieved to hear that I have largely extricated myself from the embroilment of the previous post. And so life slowly returns to normal.
Meanwhile, a friend posted this on fb and I think it's very jolly.

On being a 'buffer'

In the last couple of weeks I have become embroiled in two separate situations where people have told me fairly significant things that I am then instructed to not tell at least one other person. And I have to interact with both parties on both sides of both situations on a regular basis, and what's more I am involved in both situations, although some of the aforementioned parties don't know that I'm involved, or how I'm involved. So I have to try and remember what I'm not supposed to tell who, and when, and what they already know, what other people know or don't know, and whether I'm thinking of my own purposes or saying or not saying what's best for the other person. You get the idea.
This kind of thing makes my brain tired. I do not like it.

The Butterfly Circus

5'3'' (ish)

I maintain that I am not excessively short. I don't think of myself as short. I am a mental giant, after all. There are many people in the world shorter than me. A friend of mine, for example, is much shorter than me. I like to stand near to her and pat her on the head, because I am evil.
I seem to gravitate towards tall people as friends. At (high) school, I was about 5-foot nothing, and my best friend Anne was about 5'10. People thought I was her daughter. I save up jobs to be done by tall people who visit my house, like put the empty wine bottles on the top of the kitchen cabinets, change lightbulbs etc. I can do it if I can be bothered to pull over a chair from the dining area. I can't reach the top of the whiteboard in the classroom so I can only write on about two thirds of it. I drive rather erratically because I can only press right down on the accelerator pedal if I take my heel off the car floor. I stand further away from tall people and speak up, so they don't have to lean down (which I HATE). I wear heels a lot. Pat me on the head at your freakin peril.
There are always things I can't reach at the supermarket and I find it's kind of a nice way to make people feel good about themselves. Today I wanted a box of Zatarain's beans and rice. They were on the top shelf and on sale so there were only two or three remaining boxes which I could just about peek at the back of the shelf if I stretched way up on my toes. Operation Find Tall Man. Men like to help with things, and my accent goes a long way, so I feel fine approaching a tall stranger (darkness optional) and asking if he could please reach me down some rice. They love to do it, I like to have rice, everyone's a winner.
And that's the story of the day.

The earth is hiring

Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if the stars

only came out once every thousand years. No one would sleep
that night, of course. The world would create new religions
overnight. We would be ecstatic, delirious, made rapturous
by the glory of God. Instead, the stars come out every night
and we watch television.

From this speech.

Hard as snails

AA Milne's poems are like cups of tea after a cold walk. They are Safe and they are Brilliant.

Whenever I read this one, I think of myself as the snail.

And if you click the link below first you can listen to a lovely mellow Bon Iver song while you read. Insert contented sigh here.

The Four Friends

Ernest was an elephant, a great big fellow,
Leonard was a lion with a six-foot tail,
George was a goat, and his beard was yellow,
And James was a very small snail.

Leonard had a stall, and a great big strong one,
Ernest had a manger, and its walls were thick,
George found a pen, but I think it was the wrong one,
And James sat down on a brick.

Ernest started trumpeting, and cracked his manger,
Leonard started roaring, and shivered his stall,
James gave the huffle of a snail in danger
And nobody heard him at all.

Ernest started trumpeting and raised such a rumpus,
Leonard started roaring and trying to kick,
James went on a journey with the goat's new compass
And he reached the end of his brick.

Ernest was an elephant and very well-intentioned,
Leonard was a lion with a brave new tail,
George was a goat, as I think I have mentioned,
But James was only a snail.

By A.A.Milne

Midrash: a story or legend not in the Bible but concerning biblical events

'We all think of the scene in The Ten Commandments movie with Charlton Heston, where Moses lifted up his rod, and the waters rolled back. But this midrash says that's not how it happened. Moses lifted up his rod, and the sea did not part. The Egyptians were closing in, and the sea wasn't moving. So a Hebrew named Nachshon just walked into the water. He waded up to his ankles, then his knees, then his waist, then his shoulders. And right when water was about to get up to his nostrils, the sea parted. The point is, sometimes miracles occur only when you jump in.'

A.J. Jacobs The Year of Living Biblically

Idle Hands

My friend Rosie has gone up to the Northwest Territories for the winter, so she has, and so for the long winter evenings I today bought her the trashiest romance novel I could find at the second hand bookshop. It's called 'Hearts Aflame' and from a brief flick through the book, that seems an apt title. It appears to be set in medieval times, or at least involves a character saying 'do not taunt me, wench' and slamming down his tankard of mead. It's the kind of book you want to wash your hands after picking up. Anyway, I'm pretty confident she will find the idea amusing. I would think amusing ideas are pretty hard to come by when your brain is frozen.
And on the topic of idle hands, this here is a blanket I recently finished and donated to A Rocha's charity auction in a couple of weeks. Minimum bid $150, thank you very much.
I was asked for a description to go on a card by the blanket so this is what I gave them.
'This blanket has magical powers - just looking at it improves your balance and your spelling. It is made from the soft hair of the mysterious multicoloured Andean goats of Easter Island (acrylicus actuallicus) and the ancient geometric pattern represents sanity and long life. If draped over a couch it will make all soap operas intellectually stimulating and your hair sleek and shiny. If it is bought for over three hundred dollars, wonders beyond description will appear and you will instantly understand Icelandic."
With creative writing like this, maybe I should turn my hand, as it were, to romance writing.

The Bubble

The other day I happened upon two documentaries that I watched the same evening on pbs. I had been recording a previous show onto dvd so I was sat on the floor about 6 inches from the screen waiting for the dvd recorder to burn my dvd and spit it out, and watching a documentary on another channel while I waited. And I ended up staying that way, watching with rapt attention like a 4-year old watching cartoons, till the end.

The first documentary was episode four of First Australians, about the Arrernte people of central Australia. It caught my attention because I'd just used some language data from an Arrernte language in class, so I wanted to hear the language spoken. This episode showed images of the Arrernte people and talked about the first white people to visit them - German missionaries who, as the narrator said, sought to bring their two thousand year old religion to the ancient religion of the Arrernte.

Then when that finished I found myself in the middle of God Grew Tired Of Us, about a group of 'lost boys' of Sudan who go to the US as refugees. It follows their adaptation to American culture.

These two documentaries made me think an uncommon amount about connection. The Arrernte people were shown to be deeply, historically and spiritually tied to the land they live in. We westerners have lost that connection, that rootedness in the earth. We had it, especially in Europe, but it's now particularly lacking in the 'new' countries. We westerners value people who travel, not people who stay put. Why? Our western psyche is lacking that depth of connection with a sense of place. I really think we yearn for it. Once it's lost, how do you get it back?

In terms of spirituality, as a Christian, this program makes me feel that I follow a religion that is foreign to me - since I've recently been reading (or trying to read) the Old Testament, this has really struck me. My faith can be eminently relevant to me, but the Bible is foreign. It is stories that happened thousands of years ago to people in the Middle East. Wouldn't it be nice to have a religion that is centred where we live? That is grounded in the trees and mountains, and involves my people, not in stories of battles that took place on the other side of the world among tribes that are racially foreign? I think it would be nice.

And furthermore, the images of the Arrernte people showed them sitting on the ground in close huddles, or carrying children around, and all of them were naked. This was astounding to me. I can quite often go one to two weeks without any physical contact with another person, and it's not great for me, but an aboriginal person would shrivel up and die. What is more normal human behaviour? What is more healthy? To live in a bubble or to sit naked with your community?

The 'lost boys' didn't go around naked obviously, neither in Sudan nor in the US, but they too recognized the lack of community and connection in America. They commented on the fact that people will walk down a street and not acknowledge a passer-by. One of them passed a woman crying and noticed that no-one paid her any attention - he asked her what was wrong. They said they missed community because they were used to living among many people and in their apartment there were only (only) four of them living together.

There are maybe 50 people living within 50 metres of where I live. I know the woman and three children in the house next to mine, and my neighbour across the driveway. I would recognise probably about three more if I saw them in the street, but might not greet them. I don't know the others. My house is just a bigger bubble.

It seems like it's going to be a long road back for us whiteys.

Can't beat it, can't.

See more funny videos and TBT Videos at Today's Big Thing.

Now that I'm an immigrant

I just rented 'Yoga and Pilates for Dummies' from the library and now I have carpet burns on my wrists from too much downward facing dog.

In other news, I have been perusing the Canadian career world that is now my oyster, and a friend who knows about such things recommended to me the Strengthsfinder 2.0 (the linguist in me wants to tell you that that is hard to say because of the cluster of four consonant sounds ng, th, s and f) career-slash-personality test. She said she did it in her 4th year of uni and it came up with a list of jobs and top of the list was the subject of her major. Happy day indeed.

To take the test you need a one-time code that is located in a new (ie non-library) copy of the book. To get the code you must follow the map in the book and bring them the tail of a phoenix. Or you can scratch off the panel with a coin. Actually there are several books you could choose for a code: I chose 'Strengthsfinder 2.0' because it was the only one that didn't end in an exclamation point!

For the test you choose between pairs of options like 'I like people' and 'I like cats' and so on, with strongly agree, agree, and neutral in the middle, and you only have twenty seconds to do each one before it disappears forever, so you have to focus, and try to be honest. It can't tell if you're being honest, but after paying for a one-time code, it makes sense. It takes about 30 minutes. To cut a 30-minute story short, at the end of the test imagine my initial disappointment and surprise when I was not presented with a list of jobs but instead with a list of my 5 best 'strengths' (as part of an 18-page report - 18 pages about me! Imagine).

Thought no.1 was that these were not strengths (out of a list of 34) that I would have assigned to myself so Thought No.2 was that as I suspected I probably didn't know myself very well. Thought no.3 was to wonder what the other 29 strengths are so I could get working on those. Thought no.4 was to remind myself that the whole point of the exercise was to not try to fix your weaknesses (an apparently futile endeavour) but to focus on your strengths and get yourself into a work (or other) environment that played them up.

So I can tell you want to know what my strengths are. And in a new-found spirit of openness and self-reflection I shall tell you. (Sometimes I feel personally responsible for keeping 'shall' as an active word in the English language. 'Shall' and 'higgledy-piggledy'). See if you think they're 'me'.

1. Futuristic: 'inspired by the future and what could be'
2. Harmony: 'look for consensus; don't enjoy conflict but seek areas of agreement'
3. Connectedness: 'have faith in the links between all things'
4. Empathy: 'can sense the feelings of other people, peacemaker'
5. Achiever: 'great deal of stamina and take great satisfaction from being busy and productive'

The more I read the more lengthy descriptions in my own personal 18-page report, the more it sounds like me. I'm wondering if it's possible to be able to sense the feelings of other people but not care. I'm kidding. A bit. Anyway, it occurred to me that every one of these strengths gets hit when I'm at A Rocha (esp now I'm helping them with grant proposal writing) and I'm going to keep the list in mind as I decide what to be when I grow up. I think, in hindsight, that it was better not to get a list of jobs - if linguistics professor had been top of the list, that would have sucked, for one thing. And I would have fixated on those jobs. This list is broader and gives me more to think about. Which I would do, except I'm in the middle of quite a good novel.

Only when

Sad to say it looks like I'll only make it to one of the movies at the Vancouver Film Festival this year. I intended to see 'Home' till I discovered you can watch the whole thing online here. Today I went to see 'Only When I Dance' about two teenaged dancers from the poor area of Rio who aspire to be professional dancers. Both are beautiful dancers, the boy is just amazing. This is supposedly the trailer, although really it's just the beginning of the movie.

It was great to be in the city again for an evening.
PS I finished my book.
PPS I got my Canadian permanent residency.

Words

This was created by http://www.wordle.net. It's from the list of languages and their language families and countries that I compiled for my book. It's a bit small but I think you can click on it.

O Canada, you made me wait

So yesterday I got my passport back with a shiny new permanent residency visa in it. I had to cross a border into Canada to get it all properly stamped and stapled, so I recruited a couple of friends to pop over into the US with me, hit a local grocery store, and slide back into Canada. And now I am a 'landed immigrant'. This means that I'm not at risk of having to leave Canada if my financial support takes a dive, because I can go out and get another paid job. And I'm starting to think about things I might want to do when I move on from my current place of work - I've started helping A Rocha with grant writing for funding and I'm enjoying that a lot so that's a possible avenue.
But for the moment I am just letting my stability, and some alcohol, sink in.
Relaxed sigh.....