Knitnut.net. Watch my life unravel...
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Posted by zoom! on October 4, 2009, at 6:52 pm |
GC’s thoroughly sick with a cold and fever, compliments of his son, and I’m valiantly battling it off before it gets a stranglehold on me. So far I’ve just got a hint of a sore throat whenever I swallow, and a touch of a sore ear. But poor GC.
Last night we decided to make the most of being sick, so we bundled ourselves into bed early with flannel pajamas, his and hers thermometers, 3D glasses, and the children’s movie, Coraline, playing on the laptop. We fell asleep long before the middle of the movie.
When we awoke in the middle of the night, GC’s temperature was over a hundred. He took some aspirin and I took an antibiotic and then we listened to a podcast of an old-time radio thriller – The Whisperer – in which the Syndicate comes up with a diabolical scheme to get 200 high school students addicted to marijuana!
Speaking of addiction, there’s a brand new blog in town, and it’s offering us the unusual view of the streets of Ottawa through the eyes of a drug user. Please check out Ottawa From the Down Side Up
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Posted by zoom! on October 3, 2009, at 10:44 am |
I sent the rented wheelchair back on Thursday. Since I’m not supposed to sit anymore, it seemed pointless to be spending $40 a month on a chair. Besides, I don’t need it anymore. The surgery, while not 100% successful (at least not yet – there are probably still some improvements coming) has increased my ability to walk without excruciating pain. (There’s still pain, but it’s not excruciating.)
It was an illuminating experience, being in a wheelchair and experiencing the world from that perspective.
One thing I learned is that most people are enormously respectful of the chair, but not so much of the person in it. By that, I mean people always held doors open and yielded the right of way and did whatever they could to make things easier for the chair. But quite a few people treated me like I was invisible. They avoided eye contact and direct interaction with me. They talked to GC, who was pushing the chair, rather than me. In the checkout line at Loblaws, for example, I handed my money to the cashier, and she returned the change to GC.
I didn’t take it personally. I assumed people were uncomfortable with me because they didn’t know why I was in the chair or what to expect from me. All they knew was that there was something wrong with me, and they didn’t feel secure in their own ability to deal with whatever it might be. Perhaps they thought I was mentally challenged, or incapable of carrying on a conversation. Much easier to avoid any potential awkwardness by dealing with GC, who appeared to be normal.
There were no doubt plenty of people who treated me the same way they treat every other stranger, by ignoring me as completely as possible, and it had nothing whatsoever to do with the wheelchair.
Not everybody ignored me, of course. There were people at the other end of the spectrum who smiled at me and made a point of talking to me because I was in a wheelchair. (Most of these people were quite nice, although a couple bordered on condescendingly nice, talking to me like I was a child.)
Speaking of children, small children tended to find me much more interesting than usual, now that I was at their eye level. They were no doubt intrigued at the sight of a grown-up in a stroller. Mostly they just stared, wordlessly. I didn’t mind.
(It’s possible that many of the grown-ups who avoided eye contact did so because, as children, they were admonished not to stare at people with disabilities.)
One thing I never did while I had the wheelchair was venture out into the world by myself. I wanted to, but I was intimidated. I wanted to wheel myself down the street and get on the #14 and go downtown. But I didn’t. The first hurdle was the bus. Some of them have those ramps so you can wheel yourself onto the bus. But then you have to fold the front seat up and lock yourself in, and I didn’t know how it worked and didn’t want to be all conspicuous while I tried to figure it out. And then you have to sit at the front of the bus facing backwards, which is an intimidating prospect for someone who just wants to blend into the crowd.
Beyond the bus, there’s the mechanics of working the wheelchair and navigating curbs and construction zones and trying to get in and out of stores and restaurants, most of which probably aren’t accessible, and the embarrassment of getting stuck in potholes and the pain of blisters on my hands, and so on.
Bottom line is I didn’t have the guts. I would hope if I were ever confined to a wheelchair on a long-term or permanent basis, I wouldn’t be my own biggest obstacle.
Anyway, goodbye wheelchair, and thank you for all your help.
Posted by zoom! on October 2, 2009, at 3:57 pm |
 Urban cornfield on the way home from the hospital I just got back from yet another visit to the surgeon. My back incision is infected now. He says the outside doesn’t look too bad, but the inside? Not so good. He did some stuff you don’t want to hear about, and gave me a prescription for antibiotics. The nurse re-dressed it and gave me some medical supplies to bring home with me, just in case it explodes or something over the weekend.
I have to go back on Tuesday morning, before my first radiation appointment.
I’m feeling a little bit down today.
Posted by zoom! on October 1, 2009, at 1:39 pm |
 Still Life with Duncan My friend Fiona dropped by for a visit last night.
“What do you need?” she asked before she came over, “What can I bring?”
“I don’t need anything,” I replied, and then added as a crafty afterthought, “Except maybe a Mars Bar.”
(You can get away with this sort of thing when you’re recovering from surgery.)
She showed up with these gorgeous flowers (don’t you just love the cabbage?) and some magazines and TWELVE Mars Bars. Four original Mars, four Mars Dark, and four Mars Caramel. I’ll keep you posted on my progress. (One down, eleven to go.)
What else is new? I got me a writing teacher/mentor/coach! And a whole pile of writing books, mostly gleaned from your suggestions. (But you know how Amazon.ca is…’oh, if you like that book, you’ll love this one!’)
- Writing the Memoir, by Judith Barrington
- On Writing, by Stephen King
- What It Is, by Lynda Barry
- Page After Page, by Heather Sellers
- Chapter After Chapter, by Heather Sellers
- No Plot? No Problem, by Chris Baty
- Fearless Confessions: A Writer’s Guide to Memoir, by Sue William Silverman
It’s a bit overwhelming. But the good kind of overwhelming, not the kind that makes you wish you hadn’t done it.
In other news, one of Paddy Mitchell’s old girlfriends has been emailing me lately. She figures prominently in his book, and she only recently found out that he died in prison a couple of years ago. Yesterday she emailed me a bunch of cute animal pictures and some of the cats were too adorable to keep to myself. (Sorry I can’t credit the photographers – I don’t know who they are. But a proverbial tip of the hat to Janet.) (Click for larger versions.)
This one’s not a cat, but it’s special for GC.
 Little Dogs
Posted by zoom! on September 30, 2009, at 10:10 am |
I think I’m just going to ramble about stuff today. I’ve got a bit of a jumble going on in my head, and it’s demanding a ramble.
First of all, for those of you who have been intrigued by the reviews of the description-defying Astronaut Love Triangle, but haven’t yet had the rare opportunity to see them live, you’ll be pleased to know that David Scrimshaw has put some videos on his website. Definitely worth a look-see. If you don’t love them, I’ll eat my cat.
Secondly. Thanks to all of you for providing links to various creative writing resources. I’m happy I asked you to do that, because some interesting stuff came out of it. I’ve gotten myself added to a few waiting lists for courses that appeal to me. However, I’m still mulling over the possibility that XUP and Tom Sawyer were right when they said (in the comments) that all this reading about writing and talking about writing and going to workshops about writing and joining groups about writing – it’s all just stuff you do instead of writing. Maybe they’re right. Maybe it’s all fences, not gates.
But, speaking of creative writing resources, my wanderings around the net took me right back to my best and favourite high school English teacher, Peter Carver. He gave me a lot of encouragement when I was a messed-up and depressed sixteen-year old. I wrote journals and stories and poetry and rants, and he read everything I gave him and kept encouraging me to write more. He tried to get me to read some of my stuff in front of audiences, but I wouldn’t. He also invited me out to his place in Nova Scotia for a week-long summer writing workshop. I don’t remember why, but I couldn’t – or didn’t – go. The last thing he ever said to me was “You ARE a writer.”
My other English teacher at Glebe Collegiate was Brian Doyle, another exceptional talent. The last thing he ever said to me was “Keep on keepin’ on.” That’s not true. It was the last thing he ever wrote to me. I still run into him from time to time, usually in taverns or at funeral services for infamous bank robbers. He usually asks me if I’m still writing.
By the end of Grade 11, I’d devoured all the Grade 13 English courses at Glebe, and I felt there was nothing left for me there, so I dropped out of school and became a drug addict.
Anyway. While I was scouring the net for creative writing resources, I thought of Peter Carver and I wondered what he was doing now. I knew he’d left Glebe Collegiate quite suddenly, and had spent some time as a fiction editor in Alberta. Well. It turns out that he lives near Guelph, Ontario, and, among other things, he and his partner offer annual writing workshops at his place in Nova Scotia! The very same place he invited me to when I was 16. Unfortunately I just missed this year’s workshop by a couple of weeks, but maybe if the stars stay aligned, I’ll go next year. I love it when things come full circle.
Posted by zoom! on September 28, 2009, at 4:16 pm |
When I was first told I had to spend the next six weeks lying down, my first thought was “That’s crazy! I might be lazy, but I’m not THAT lazy!”
But, you know what? Maybe I am that lazy. I’m adapting. I’m getting into it. I’ve been writing, and I’ve had visitors and I’ve knit a Rat-Monkey. I have a stack of good books to read, and a book to plan. I signed up for Nanowrimo. My outrageous yarn splurge was delivered today (and for those of you who didn’t read the comments, it ended up costing only half as much as I thought, because Kellie pointed out that the Socks That Rock yarn has double the yardage of the yarn called for in the pattern. Yay!)
Besides, I don’t lie around all the time – I go to the Civic Hospital a lot too. I was there on Friday for incision complications. Then GC, MD, insisted last night that we go to Emergency and get my back incision checked out again because it had split open. (Sorry, I know that’s gross.) We sat around the ER knitting and doing crossword puzzles and freaking out because a) I’m not supposed to be sitting, and b) I felt like a sitting duck – the people we were sitting around with kept doing disgusting contagious things, and the nurses kept paging housekeeping to come clean up their bodily fluids, and finally I said “That’s it, we’re leaving,” and we left.
So today I called the Neurosurgery Unit, which is infinitely more civilized than Emergency, and nicer too, and cleaner, and they told me to come over right away and they’d take care of me. So I went over and had what felt like a mini-operation right there in the examining room. Dr. Lesiuk told me that what was happening with my back wasn’t my fault. Apparently there was a stitch that had abscessed because my body’s defense system didn’t like some of the foreign materials they’d put in my back. He took a swab to be cultured, and dug out the stitch and put in some gauze and put a great big compression dressing over everything and sent me home to lie down. But I have to go back at 9:30 tomorrow morning so they can check it again.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking “What do you mean, you knit a Rat-Monkey?”
I’ll post pictures tomorrow, after I finish stuffing him and sewing him together.
Posted by zoom! on September 27, 2009, at 9:08 am |
I’m only allowed 90 minutes of sitting per day, and the doctor suggested I used these minutes for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Ha! Leisurely breakfast be damned! I’m going to blog for 27 minutes and then wolf down some Raisin Bran.
I’ve said before that the blog knows everything. If I need to know how to get paint stains off leather, or how to get rid of invasive weeds, or how to introduce a cat who doesn’t like dogs to a dog who doesn’t like cats, I just ask the blog. And the blog responds with its collective wealth of knowledge, wisdom and brilliant ideas.
Today’s blog appeal is about creative writing resources: workshops, courses, groups or other resources.
I want to be a writer, because I absolutely love writing once I get into the zone. I’ve felt driven to write all my life, ever since Mrs. Cadigan taught me how to print my ABCs. I was the kind of child whose best friend was a notebook and pen. Harriet the Spy was my kindred spirit. But when it comes to fiction, I’ve always been thwarted by a lack of good story ideas. I’m pretty good once I get going, but I tend to get stuck in that pre-getting-going phase. I’ve tried forcing ideas and I’ve tried waiting for them, but they continue to elude me. It’s frustrating.
Every day I set the timer and I write non-stop for 20 minutes. This is fun and easy, because it doesn’t have to be a story or have a beginning, middle and end. Sometimes interesting stuff emerges from this process. But I want to take it beyond that. I want to write stories.
I think I would benefit from a good creative writing course, or program, or perhaps a writing group. Something that would help me generate ideas, and give me homework and assignments and force me to start, and then force me to finish?
(I’m not as pathetic as that last sentence might suggest.)
So, Blog readers…can you recommend any good writing resources, either in Ottawa or online? Something that will help free my inner writer? Something that will help me get past my impediments, and get the keys clacking once again?
Posted by zoom! on September 26, 2009, at 6:51 pm |
My friend Julia – who had her last breast cancer treatment the same day I was diagnosed with breast cancer – will be walking 10km tomorrow, Sunday September 27th, in Breast Cancer Action’s Paint Ottawa Pink event. If you’d like to sponsor her, you can do so here. (On the “Review Your Donations” page, click on Add special instructions to the seller and leave a note to indicate that you’re sponsoring Julia Ringma.)
I myself will not be walking or running anywhere anytime soon. I was at the neurosurgery office on Friday afternoon because of some weirdness with my incision, and was told very nicely by my favourite nurse, Dale, that I must spend a lot more time lying down for the next six weeks. Apparently I’ve been walking too much and sitting WAY too much and the result is much swelling in my lower back which is putting pressure on my incision and keeping it from healing. It’s also putting pressure on my nerves, which may be the cause of my continuing pain.
It’s so weird that for the last six months I’ve had to spend as much time as possible sitting, and now suddenly sitting is the worst thing I can be doing and I must spend as much time as possible lying down.
I’m starting first thing tomorrow. Today I went out for breakfast, followed by the Wakefield Artists’ Tour. Tomorrow I will lie down and not get up for six whole weeks. Got any good book recommendations?
Posted by zoom! on September 25, 2009, at 12:07 pm |
Police watchdog drops blogger case (Ottawa Citizen, September 25, 2009)
And so ends another chapter in the life of the Bank Street Bully.
There are no surprises here. But how come, in the Citizen article, everything I said or wrote is qualified by words like “allegedly” or “claimed,” which makes it sound like I’m lying? And everything the cops say is stated as fact?
[Hat tip to my friend Gilles Seguin.]
Posted by zoom! on September 24, 2009, at 9:29 am |
 Happy Birthday James Today’s my son’s birthday. He’s a Libra just like me, and in Chinese astrology he’s a Dog, just like me. He was born on his due date, which only happens with 10% of all babies. He’s 27 years old – the same age Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison and Kurt Cobain were when they died. Twenty-seven. Pretty much all grown up.
James has his own internet radio show every Thursday night, so we celebrated his birthday last night. I cooked up a feast – his all-time favourite beer-batter chicken balls, along with cheesy scalloped potatoes, roasted vegetables and home-made, from scratch, cinnamon rolls. With yeast and kneading and everything. I hadn’t made those since he was a little boy.
 James and cats He was such a sweet little boy. Everybody loved him. Especially me. He was smart and kind and funny and very, very cute. He was the best little kid in the world, and I’m not just saying that because I’m his mother. He really was. He had an endless stream of questions and ideas and observations about everything imaginable. Cats used to follow him down the street. (This may have had something to do with the container of Pounce he kept in his pocket.)
When they’re little like that, you don’t really believe they’ll ever grow up. Childhood seems like such a long time when you have a brand-new baby. It stretches out endlessly ahead of you, the way summer stretches out on the last day of school when you’re 10. You’ve got all the time in the world.
But then, just like the cliche, it’s all over before you know it. It goes so fast. And suddenly, the sweet little boy with the endless questions is 27 years old. He’s pretty much all grown up.
 James and Bird Speaking of growing up, when James was five years old, he and my mother and I drove to Orangeville to visit my sister and her family. Over the course of the weekend, the stomach flu struck her house with some ferocity, mowing down everybody in its path. I was sick all Sunday night, and on Monday morning there was a window of opportunity for us to escape – James and my mother hadn’t fallen ill yet, and we figured we should get out while we could. James had breakfast – Alphabits and grape juice – and Deb gave me some baby Gravol for the road, just in case.
 James washed all the dishes! We didn’t make it far. We stopped for coffee at a donut shop, where, without warning, James suddenly threw up a mountain of purple letters on the table. I took him into the washroom to clean him up, and my mom cleaned up the mountain of purple letters. Meanwhile, the disgusted teenaged employees watched from a safe distance, with expressions on their faces that clearly said they were never, ever going to have kids.
When we got back to the car, I gave James a Gravol pill. He swallowed it and then asked me what it was for.
“It’ll keep you from throwing up,” I said.
He started crying…deep, racking, heartbroken sobs.
“What’s the matter?” I cried, kneeling down and wrapping him in my arms.
“But I wanted to grow up,” he sobbed. “I wanted to grow up and be a Dad!”
Happy Birthday James. I love you very much. If there had been a pill I could have given you to keep you from growing up, I would have been sorely tempted. And even though I sometimes miss the little boy that you were, I’m very proud of the man you’ve grown up to be.
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