obvious

I came in from shovelling the other day, soaked to the skin because the snow was wet. I hung my hat up on a nail on a beam that goes across the area where we take our shoes off. I don't normally hang things up here - perhaps this is why it all went down the way it did. This area is also pretty central to the house - we pass through it all the time, to go from living room to kitchen and back again, to go to the basement, to go outside. I hung the hat up on the nail to dry, then promptly forgot about it.

For days afterward I was wondering where my hat had gotten off to. I have other hats, so it wasn't urgent. But then I wanted to wear that particular one - for reasons too mundane to go into even on one's own personal blog - and I searched the house up and down for it. Standing in the area where we take our shoes off, I queried my housemates - "Have you seen my hat?" No-one had.

"Huh," I said. "It's a mystery."

Mum said, "Do you mean this hat?" She pointed above my head. There on the nail in the beam above my head, was the very hat I'd been puzzling over.

"Well, mystery solved!" I said.

That got me thinking about obvious. It was so obvious! Yet I didn't even see it. What else is obvious?

Here's one - and even thinking about writing about it got me nervous, despite the anonymity of my confession - something else obvious is when you like someone. (Which, hey, big surprise, I do.) When you've got a crush so big you think, "OK, this must  be so obvious. Surely when he looks me in the eye he must SEE what I'm feeling. Is my face really that impermeable? Because, it really doesn't feel like it." Yet - nothing changes. You're able to pretend you don't feel what you feel. You don't want to be obvious.

To be obvious is to be vulnerable. To be in the way, to put your feelings out there where someone can see them. To hang them on the nail on the beam in the middle of the house. And yet - maybe you'd do that and still no-one would pay attention. After all, it's possible with a hat.

taking it out on the tub

Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned—and scouring. My bathroom finds this out every time I go through a break-up, and it doesn’t seem to matter how the end of the affair went, whether it was amicable, acerbic, mutual, mean or misled, there is always something to channel into my scrubbing arm, which happens to be my right.

So it was that I found myself this afternoon, listening to DNTO on CBC, on my knees by the bathtub, rubber gloves on to the elbow, Comet all over the place, scrubbing to beat the band. Rather, to clean all the gunk and grime off the tub surface. Funny how it’s hard to find the time to clean the bathroom when you’re happily ensconced in classes and a busy social life, and how it all waits patiently for you until the day when those things no longer weigh you down (or, for those of you who are still doing those things, until the day when you can no longer stand it). Tub gunk isn’t going anywhere, and it tells you that in no uncertain terms as it laughs at you while you scrub. But tub gunk doesn’t know what I’ve got up my sleeve, the most powerful cleaning agent of them all—recent singledom.

Now, I should stop here and say that this is not going to be an out-of-character, airing-of-my-dirty-laundry post. I never have done something like that and I never will—the public domain of the Internet is no place for delicates. Heck, my own clothesline hardly is. I’m only saying that I broke up with someone, which most of you know by now, and if you didn’t know, it probably doesn’t matter all that much to you anyway. The point is not with who, although if you have been reading this for the past few months you’ll have a guess, or how it all went down, but rather that it has been my experience through my long twenty-two years of life that each time I go through a break-up, the bathroom sparkles suspiciously soon after.

It truly is amazing to me how the emotions of a break-up, or of any sort of slight, can fuel the physical actions of the human body. I remember last summer, on a day a bit like this one (i.e. the sort of day women get every 28 or so when all we want to do is eat chocolate and pummel inanimate objects), going for a speedwalk (don’t laugh, if I were to jog, my already-out-of-whack joints would get abused and take it out on me later) and it was raining, a light mist. I was out on a dirt road in the middle of the woods in Cape Breton, a Nalgene bottle full of water in either hand, pumping along for all I was worth, yelling out obscenities into the soft, wet evening. These obscenities were directed at previous boyfriends, and my body was directed straight up the side of a very steep hill, most efficiently.

As I was cleaning, I thought a bit about break-ups. How we work like hell to keep them from happening, but they, like anything else we consider an accident, are an inevitable part of life. This doesn’t make anything about them any more fun, but maybe, like stubbing your toe, the knowledge that the pain will pass makes it a little easier to bear. And like other unexpected demises, oddly enough, some good does come from them. I like to think of it as the “tree dying in the woods” phenomenon: tree dies, tree rots, things grow out of it. There aren’t many things prettier in the woods than coming upon an old, mossy carcass of a fallen giant, covered in new growths. Likewise, we never know what beautiful thing is going to happen to us in life as a result of a choice or a turn in the road that’s happening now.

One thing I do know: my bathroom is gorgeous, for the first time in a while. That one is pretty easy to trace. Also, hold off on the sympathy: I’m fine and I have lots of chick flicks, Maeve Binchy novels and, yes, cleaning products. Instead of concerned comments, however, you could leave your thoughts on your personal breakup remedies. What comfort has stood the test of time, when your relationship didn’t? Also, if you think this topic is a little too personal for the World Wide Web, despite my best efforts to make it as general as possible, feel free to tell me...I am interested in how I come across to you, my readers known and unknown. Just don't break up with me! Leave your comments, no matter what they're about. Let's communicate about this.

after the storm

Wow. Well. Here I am, after a full month of not posting. It feels surprisingly good to fire up the ol' Blogger again, to click on "New Post", to put tentative feelers out into the blogworld --and the world in general-- again.

I can't believe, in some ways, that it has been a month. Each week has brought a fresh batch of challenges, a fresh batch of decisions to make, and feelings to sort through. The "grubby details", as Marlo called them, belong to me and a few close friends, but the truth is simple: I've been sick, am still sick, and am taking time off from school in order to rest and get my strength back. I burnt myself out, more or less, and have had to deal with the consequences, which have been more than I bargained for.

My life has changed since I posted last. The things that remained the same are physical location (Fredericton, New Brunswick, the East Coast of Canada), and the dear friends and family who support this old bean. It's really funny, surreal actually, to stand at the center of your life and watch it change around you, watch yourself stop doing things because you can't do them anymore, and mourn your losses. It's like traveling to a foreign country, not knowing the language or the currency before you get there: you see what happens one day at a time, sometimes one hour or minute at a time, even one breath at a time.

This makes for a more intense experience, for better and for worse. I have certainly become "hyper-aware", as one person put it, of my self, my feelings, my needs and my desires. Having this awareness does not make it any easier to put such needs into practice, but it helps. It also influences what I have to talk about, necessarily! I can't wait for the day when I have a conversation with someone that doesn't include my own issues. But in time, that will come, and I know that having been there for a number of the people who are holding on to the corners of my "safety net" right now means they do, actually, want to be here for me. I'm not a burden as much as I'm just taking my turn at leaning.

What I'm doing right now (along with the physical acts of resting and no longer attending classes, taking a break) is what Clarissa Pinkola Estés calls "homing" or "returning to oneself". She writes about the necessity of this in her bestselling "Women Who Run With The Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype" (New York: Ballantine Books, 1995):

What is homing? It is the instinct to return, to go to the place we remember. It is the ability to find, whether in dark or in daylight, one's home place. We all know how to return home. No matter how long it's been, we find our way. [...]

For some, home is the taking up of an endeavor of some sort. Women begin to sing again after years of finding reason not to. They commit themselves to learn something they've been heartfelt about for a long time. They seek out the lost people and things in their lives. They take back their voices and write. They rest. They make some corner of the world their own. They execute immense or intense decisions. They do something that leaves footprints.

For some, home is a forest, a desert, a sea. In truth, home is holographic. It is carried at full power in even a single tree, a solitary cactus in a plant shop window, a pool of still water. It is also at full potency in a yellow leaf lying on the asphalt, a red clay pot waiting for a root bundle, a drop of water on the skin. When you focus with soul-eyes, you will see home in many, many places. (pp. 283-6).

So I'm homing. I've come through a storm, and now I'm sorting out the mess it left. I'm resting, I'm making good food for myself, I'm taking up things I haven't done in too, too long (writing for myself, drawing with charcoals, pencils, pens, inks, reading a book that isn't for class). I'm mourning the losses, and trusting in something --faith? life? the way things tend to go?-- that the voids will be filled. I'm seeing that indeed they are, one breath, one moment, one day at a time.

Oh and, the picture was taken by Marlo. I like using her photographs to illustrate my writing, because they tend to be of subjects in my immediate environment (since we're room-mates and fellow Fredericton residents and explorers), and she takes such thoughtful and striking photographs. At least, I think so. I also thought that this one, called "iceplants", is both fragile and strong, the kind of strength that comes from remaining, and therefore pertinent. I also really love the colors.

What do you do to go home? What are the endeavors, actions, creations and thoughts that bring you back to yourself? Have you done them lately?

all quiet on the eastern front

When I started this blog about four years ago--I'm not certain how long anymore, especially now that my archives have disappeared--I was living in Whistler, BC, on my own for the first time at 18. My audience was only Janice at first, and a handful of other friends who wanted to keep tabs on me. When I travelled back across the country and then made plans to travel to Australia at 19, it was a great way for people to keep in touch with me, and I with them, without having to do the mass-email thing, and it worked out pretty good.

Two things happened: I started university here in New Brunswick, and I became more aware of my audience. The first means that I'm now staying in one place, more or less, and spending a lot of my time writing essays and their ilk, so not only do I have fewer exciting adventures to chronicle, but I also have less energy to do the chronicling with. The second means that I realized more people than I thought occasionally drop by Huminbean's humble address, which has an effect on what I write about, or the content. This means sometimes I think a post is too personal, and sometimes a post is not personal enough. The same goes for political.

I'm not professing that I consider myself and my posts boring; I don't. And I think the level of reader commenting attests that I'm interesting enough that people stick around long enough to read to the end. I'm also not saying I don't like having such interest; I love having you here. I guess what I'm saying is that over time I've realized that my topics have become concentrated, due to either having written about something already or to not wanting to write about it because it's too personal and details will expose the guilty and innocent alike. And we couldn't have that!

Blogdom's an interesting place, to say the least. Where else do you have the confidence and confidantes of a personal journal, combined with the somewhat-widespread publication and the lack of control over readership of an actual publishing deal, besides in an autobiography? And aren't those usually published after the author dies? Yikes!

So if it seems quiet on this eastern front, it's only because I've either written about a form of what I'm doing right now, before, or because the real news is too personal to write about. This is what's going on in my life right now; if you're particularly interested in a subject, leave a comment and I'll see what I can do. And yes, that's a request for your interest.

• University. Third year--lots of work to be done! I'm studying Sociology--Modern Theory, Sociology of the Family, Statistics and Research Strategies--as well as English--American Literature. We're reading Walt Whitman for that at the moment, but I just finished a paper on Chaim Potok's "The Promise", which is all about Judaism in America after WWII. As for the Sociology, I'm gearing up to do my Honours Thesis next year, and I'll be planning the proposal in the Research Strategies class. I want to do it on food and the sourcing of that food, networks, and some other stuff I haven't quite sorted out yet.
  
• My relationship with the "soyfriend", Dan. This one falls into the category of "my own personal business", but I can tell y'all that it's good, he lives here now, and I think it's pretty rad. I get to see him nearly every day and I can't think of anything else I'd want more.
• Figuring out what to do next year/this coming summer, in terms of an apartment (I might have to move because my dear old landlord might need to live in a retirement home) and a job/potentially travel (for the summer). This is all up in the air right now, but I'd love to make it out West for Dan's graduation, and see some of the West coast again, and maybe even spend a little time on a WWOOF farm again. It would also be pretty cool to work with a professor and gain some experience as a paid lackey in academia. We shall see what we shall see.
  
• The Boost Your Eco film fest, being planned by a group of lovely/hilarious students, of which I am one. It's going to be on the 9th and 10th of February, and soon there'll be a website I can point you to.
• Staying balanced and happy and spending enough time on my own, too.
• Being in Fredericton in winter--mornings walking to class with longjohns on, watching your breath make clouds and come out your nostrils like a dragon's, hopping over and around snowbanks, having your boots make puddles on the floor in classrooms.

christmas earrings

Aren't these just the most darling earrings? They were Dan's present to me. I think they might be a bit much during the rest of the year, but during the Holidays they're rather festive.

Bahahah.

No, but seriously. This is the scene these days: Dan's living room, the Christmas tree, and a lot of hanging out. My daily schedule is getting turned upside down: today I had breakfast at 1 PM. I don't even really notice the hours slipping by. Christmas break is pretty awesome, all around.

I came home shortly after I wrote my last post, and it was a good trip with the Fuller dames, including a stop in Halifax for an overnight stay at the Prince George hotel courtesy of the Nova Scotia Government. While Janice took a nap the next day and C. A. got physio'd, I went for a walk in downtown Halifax, checking out the shops and being in another city, one that resembles a city a bit more than Fredericton. I got my Dad's Christmas present at a used bookstore called John Doule's, for under twenty dollars, and it is a very nice volume (although I can't say what it is in case he reads this blog. But if he actually does read this blog, I would be very surprised. Dad is a man who confessed the other day to living in a "stove museum". I can explain that if you guys want.) And, on the way home from there we made a stop in Truro at the Stanfields Factory Outlet and I picked myself up a pair of stunning grey long underwear (they'll go great with the gumboots, of course!), for only 7.99! Deals to be had all over the place.

Then I spent a few days at home at Mum's, doing really relaxing things like sleeping in, getting a massage, making dinners of various kinds (squash soup with cheddar cheese and Breton crackers, kale/chickpea mash on bread with roasted sunflower seeds and garlic vinaigrette, and other delights), taking walks along dirt roads, reading "The Fiery Cross" (and taking Jamie's advice to "dinna fash [myself]") ... all of which form a schedule that is such a nice contrast to how November went.

And then Tuesday night, three and a half long/short months (long because of the distance, short because where the hell did they go?) suddenly ended when Dan showed up on my doorstep. Since then I've been in Sydney with the Harris family, having a truly fantastic time. There aren't enough adjectives to describe how great things are right now. I guess I might say that I'm so happy I have two halos! And we've continued the relaxation: activities include doing the daily crossword puzzle in the Cape Breton Post, taking naps whenever we feel like it, watching The Office and strange game shows like "Identity", and all of us pretending to be normal while Dan snaps pictures of us. As my Mum says, "it could be worse!"

Speaking of Mum, I think I'll get back her way pretty soon, in time for Christmas. What are you all planning for the December 25th? Turkey or Tofurkey? Eggnog or cider? Boxing Day=Fire Hall or All Fired Up?

happy tuesday to you!

I know this is more of a winter-time picture --port and chocolate-- but hey. I'm having a great old day so far and I just wanted to post something that looked as delicious as this day feels already.

Divine Brown is on for the second time this morning. This is a CD that I took out of the library on a whim, not knowing who she was, just responding to the CD cover, thinking "I tend to like the music that black ladies make," and have so far loved so much that I think I might be getting sick of it. But not yet. Her cover of Joni Mitchell's "Help Me" is fantastic, just enough beats that it is a new rendition, but also just enough of the old song that you know what it is.

Also, this lj post of Rabi's (I've been a loyal fan of hers for years now, so I think I can call her by her first name, rather than "wockerjabby") which inspired me to write today, I just realized is called "hooray for Tuesday", which is another nice little piece of synchronicity. The parts I liked were:

by the time I got home it was much later than I thought, so I couldn't go to rugby. normally that would be bad, but now it means I get to have dinner with tom and spend the evening with him. yay for vegetarian chinese takeout and netflix! (then a have to do a landslide of reading, but it's okay, I like reading.)

and:

"justin timberlake is under a ... strange impression on 'sexyback,'... where he bafflingly claims to be 'bringing sexy back.' does anything need bringing back less than sexy? it's like proposing to bring back petroleum, or the NFL."

I'm going to remember her words every time I think grudgingly of all the reading I have to do (which is fairly often), because 5-year-old me would have killed--or at least given up some sort of privilege--to be able to do nothing but read all day.

Also, yeah, Justin? Baby, sexy is as back as it's going to get.

Also, the weather is perfect today, and by perfect I mean gloomy, overcast and wet, with leaves coming off trees. It's a preview of November, albeit one without colored leaves, still mostly green. But it's just the kind of day I've been waiting for. I do love sunny days too, but there's something about gloomy ones, you can be inside and not feel bad about it. I'm going to ignore the CBC man who says it's going to clear.

And yes, I can't go any longer without mentioning this, (and I do hope if he takes umbrage to it, he'll forgive me), one big ol' wonderful reason I'm so damn happy is.. Dan. I know I'm breaking my own rule of waiting a good long time into a relationship to mention the person on the Internet, but since I don't think either of us is going anywhere else any time soon, I reckon it's alright. All the little ways we breach the distance between Vancouver and Fredericton makes me feel as special and fantastic as if I got to eat port and chocolate brownies every day, for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Only this is better, because there aren't any calories.

On to Tuesday! And just because I like interaction with my readers so damn much, tell me: what makes today special for you? (Make something up even if there isn't anything, trust me, it makes your whole day.)