Night of the Notables -Initiation November 16, 2011

I’ve always seen night of the Notables as the initiation of the gr. 10′s and the gr. 9′s.

I’ll have to make this quick since I have vocal jazz tomorrow and I haven’t practiced the piano part for a while for an insanely contrapuntal song and I’ve really got to do it our face Mr. T’s wrath.

Anyway.

The grade ten speeches were wonderful as usual. I can sufficiently say that the gr. 10′s are now really gr. 10′s and are going to bring TALONS into the Renaissance.

I enjoyed the shorter speeches, and the theatrical part of the presentations and everyone used the “90seconds” very well -it must have been quite a challenge.

I really don’t have that much to say -but I think all the gr. 10′s picked the right people. Gr. 9 is usually ends up for exploring famous individuals that inspire you but you don’t truly connect with. Gr. 10 is when you learn about your person so much, you’ve literally reconstructed a fully living person in your mind and call them by their first name like a sort of long lost sibling.

The learning centers get more and more intense every year and I love it. I was able to power through nearly every single one and I had a wonderful sword duel, Nerf gun target practice, and found out I was Emma from Austen’s book, Emma. I also did a whole bunch of other things, like sing Taylor Swift karaoke and lots of other stuff, which was all really cool.

Gosh, the nostalgia!

I wish gr. 12′s still had a NON. I miss the creation of projects and getting ready for the grand entrance of the gr. 10′s in a little huddle in front of the talons room.

Ah, wonderful, wonderful night!

dreamer. July 28, 2011

Hi.

I’m a dreamer.

I like to dream when I’m awake and when I’m

asleep

Shhhhhh…

Do you hear the stories winding in my head?

Watch my eyes flicker under their lids

and the mist drift from my ears and curl onto the sheets

You can come with me,

If you’d like.

I can write it down for you

A number

An address

On a little rectangle piece of scrap paper

It’ll lead to his house

Of those overlaps of the cinema and daydreams

And subconscious lakes

Filled with little fishes that can be dried and eaten

By little sly dwarves.

But of course.

The dark brown ale to wash it all down

(the bacon burnt black, certainly)

It’s always the white complex on the corner.

They all look similar, don’t they?

Since I can take a pixellated (Gods, resolution)

fancy pictures,

Which,

I will send to you in heavy parchment and stamped with a red

red seal.

It’s a breath to be held.

Choppy, choppy words

That won’t listen to the ups

And downs

Of a flat caked city.

It makes me so sad.

Scratches on Paper June 3, 2011

I love letters.

Not the emailed kind, or ones typed up and then printed, but real handwritten letters. Nothing can ever compare to those and it saddens me that soon letters won’t even exist and they will be even more a thing of the past.

I love how you can see where the person pressed to hard and their pencil broke, where the author took time to make sure each word is perfect, or when they were rushing to get the thoughts in there head out.

I love how the pieces of paper are creased and worn from reading the words over and over, committing them to memory.

I love seeing your name on the top written by someone you care about.

I love seeing when they changed their mind and crossed out a word to put a better one in its place.

I love knowing that they care to actually sit down and write something, not taking the easy way out and sitting behind a computer.

But mostly I love the connection that comes with the letter, seeing the printing, smelling the paper and ink, remembering the moment that letter came into your hands. I don’t remember the time I got any emails, but my memories of letters are there and I for one hope that I never stop getting letters and knowing how much I love them I am sure to send more out to the people I love and spread the joy of a handwritten letter.

Forgotten Child May 30, 2011

He took the envelope off of the counter and dusted the gray fineness off of the crisp yellow whiteness. The window was closed, and the sun streaming in like the answer to a prayer long forgotten. The old whitewashed counters faded dully beside the rusted pots and pans. A glass jar of ginger sat by the sink under the window. The little rooty things writhed faintly. Listening to a bird trilling outside, he ran his fingers across the table, nails catching on the edges of the peeling paint that reared up in dryness. There was nothing else in the pale green cupboards, spare a dead spider or wood bug. He almost drowned in the silence. It was a shared thing, this silence. It was the way it stretched through the walls and down through the floor into the cellar where they had once explored with torches. It went down past the caskets of cider and boxes of withered apples and came back folding on itself, this silence, until to existed in all the times before and in between. It had never been his place, the little kitchen. It was always summer’s. Or was it autumn? Or winter? And thinking back on it now, was it spring’s too? Apple-Tree outside  nodded her head sagely with her head heavy and laden with dripping redness.

The afternoon had come scandalously wrapped in a yellow sheet and tripped along the path to the window and peeked her sunny head in. He sighed. They had danced down that path, everyone of them, laughing or crying or storming and found themselves at this very door. The little burgundy door in the little white house by the sea. The first one was the one he knew best. Her warm hands were the first friends he ever had and her voice the first one he ever loved. She always wore dresses. Sundresses. Or little overalls with striped red and white shifts that danced like little silken sails in the tidal wind. She never wore shoes. Said they shackled her. Plump and painted red lips that kissed the sun and the sand. Wild, windy hair that curled and writhed around her face. She helped him make his first sandcastle and laughed and cried and shrieked when the waves rolled in and melted the little towers away. He never knew her name. Well, her names. She came and went and always told him something different. Who would care in the end? She whispered a promise in his ear whenever they bid farewell on the steps of the kitchen door with the sun slanting down in their faces. She never went inside.

The second one was the one with the lusty laugh and freckled arms. She reminded him of a pumpkin. Round, orange, but strong. They had wheelbarrow-ed the squashes into the kitchen and let them roll across the floor when they overflowed. They would kick the leaves and jump in the drifts. Horseback riding in the fiery passionate trees and licking the sweet sap that dribbled carefully out of the bark. They spent the days in the earth, their smeared working denim hanging by the fire at night to keep out the chill. There were pies. Pumpkin and apple pies. The kitchen was busy. She came swinging down the path with a whistle caught behind her teeth and a shovel over her shoulder. She ate and worked like an ox and left only the harvest in the cellar.

The third one was the one he would never understand. She limped up to the door one night when the drifts of paleness nearly got to the windows. She didn’t say a word, but he let her in. Her hair was icy and wet as it melted. It was white. But as she warmed, it turned the sheen on the yellow moon liquid in the snow. She’d let him touch it sometimes. She was pale. She never got the rosy tint in her cheeks. She talked softly. Her smiles were rare, but he’d feel something in his throat when her cold lips curled up into a gentle smile. They went on sled rides in the snow. She liked building forts better then snowmen. Said it made her sad to see friendly faces melt. He was afraid of her, most of the time. When the rages came, he tried to stop her, but she would throw herself crying and wailing until the sobs overtook the screams and she had to sit down or fall down in exhaustion. Then he would wrap his arms around her until she slept. She would always leave as silently as she came and would leave a little puddle of melted snow by the door.

The forth would knock and then climb through the window and get stuck. She brought laughter and weak watery sun, at first, then came with violent bursts of rays. Her hair was yellow as the rhododendrons that grew outside. She had accidentally eaten some and had gotten so sick that she couldn’t get up, but she couldn’t die. She was immortal, even when her sisters put her to sleep. The wicked glint in her eyes would dim the sun as she climbed trees and chattered to squirrels. The new moons rang with her song she sang in harmony with the new wolf pups hidden in the bud laced trees. He grew used to the smooth palms of her hand, soft as a baby’s belly. Her face would blaze with excitement when pulling him like a sack of grain through the trees, yet her guileless blue eyes would fill with wisdom and ancientness when she sat by the melting rivers and foaming breakers. The kitchen would be full of flowers and little birds that followed her in. She had seen everything and touched everything and the grey cardboard sky would split into hope as she caressed its dry wintry skin. She liked to pretend to be a lady and wear her skirts, but tear them off for white cotton pants and shirts that floated around her frame like the clouds fawning over the sun. He loved her the best. But she told him that her sisters needed him more. I can’t choose! He cried. She never had an answer, but clung to him like a child when she had to leave. The gravel crunched when she walked away.

The envelope sat sadly beside the dustless rectangle it left when he had picked it up. They had all left him now. Or he just forgot to open the doors. They had never knocked, but they never will. It wasn’t their job to remind him. Only angry, nest headed morning dragged him from the bed, hurried, brisk and sharp noons grabbed his lunch for him and delivering papers to go along with them; frustrating afternoons that slide into accusing evenings of silence. They cycle through every day, every week. He’d forgotten when the bigger change outside his window and in the air. But he put the envelope back. He never kept the promises he made to the forgotten child.

I am a brilliant person because I know absolutely nothing. May 29, 2011

Where I live, it is easy to feel like there are restrictions upon us such as school, work, homework, music practice, or sports teams. But what if I simply didn’t do all those things? What if I simply didn’t participate in my life for one day? Well, life would go on. Time doesn’t wait for me, so I choose to keep up with time. After all, there is a reason I do the things I do. I want to be educated, do well in school, see my friends, have money, have job experience, work with people, be active, have fun, learn music… these things all matter a lot to me.

 

I have control over my life and therefore the power to be who I want to be and to make my life awesome. This realization fills me with life until all I can see when I look around is that life is everywhere. There are so many things to discover about the world and no matter how hard I try, I’ll never even come close to understanding all of it. Yet, I can still choose to learn about it and discover and discuss because that’s human. Ultimately though, I recognize that I know nothing. Absolutely nothing.

 

Knowing nothing is reality. Knowing that I know nothing is a reward. My cup is both half full and half empty, but in anticipation to be filled.

Finding Emptiness in a Overflowing Mind May 29, 2011

There are three possible situations for when I write:

1. I have to write- school assignment, application etc.
2. I am overflowing- there is too much filling my head and I need to get some of it down on paper before I implode. Until then, I’m unable to get anything else accomplished.
3. My ideal state for writing: emptiness. Organized desk, homework done, house clean, laundry put away, practice done, family settled, clear sunny day (preferably), no time limit. I have the space and time to reach into my mind and pull out the ideas and the stories that have been brewing there.

 

In the last six months or so I’ve written a bit, mostly in state 1 and sometimes state 2, but I never quite get to state 3. I really want to get there, yet in wanting perfection, I’ve delayed a lot of writing. Now, I’m starting to feel the ideas pile up in my head and I want to get it out written words, share it with people, and let it be.

 

Yet there must have been something that stopped me before from writing, some sort of restrictions or worries. How do I want to write? I want to write without worrying about the piece being “finished” or “edited” or “enough.” I want to write about what I want to write about. I want to write and make people think, therefore creating discussion. I want to write by sitting down and letting the words find their place on the page without having to go back and struggle to rearrange them. I want to write and by doing so, get better, smoother, faster at writing.

 

So, dear readers, fellow frozen tic-tac-ers, people of the blogging world, I’m going to start here. I’m going to go back into my old documents and find the things I started (in the past six months or so) but never quite finished, and finish them. I’m going to carry a small notebook with me and jot down random trains of thinking or intriguing conversation. I’m going to see if I can generate more writing on this blog, both in posts and replies.

 

After all, that’s what blogging is about to me. Having stories and ideas, writing them, and having a place to share them. I mean, if something matters enough to me that I even want to write about it, I think it should be written and have a place to be seen. So here it goes

Take the Train May 27, 2011

This summer, I rode the train from Montreal to Vancouver, a trek of 92 hours that took me from the rolling hills of Quebec, past the Great Lakes in Ontario, through the golden sea of wheat in the prairies, and into my familiar mountainous west coast. During the trip, we would take hour-long stops to fuel up. We pulled to a halt in Toronto, in a Manitoban town that boasted the world’s largest coke can, and in Hornepayne, a rural town of 1000 people and one general store. I began to realize the diversity of my country and grasp at the some different ways that Canadians outside Greater Vancouver live. The experience convinced me of the value of road trips and how much there is to learn from the places in between destination cities. So, I wrote this poem to explain my thoughts.

.

Take the Train

A general store in Hornepayne, Ontario

Nowadays, journeys have disappeared

in favour of destinations.

It’s only being somewhere.

The countryside is disregarded

like a preschool craft

we tack to the wall as scenery,

crayon rectangles

that disappear

beneath the clouds

during take-off.

Besides, there’s no room

to pick up baggage along the way,

It’s one suitcase, 50 pounds

per passenger.

.

Who wants to shove apart

space for stories?

They’re never quite the right shape

to fit between your shirts and ties

and you’ll find the wrinkles

when you lay out

your clothes for tomorrow.

So you’ll stay up late ironing

because flat is best.

.

Melville, Saskatchewan

You are about sandy beaches and dark tans,

collections of hotel soaps and knick-knacks

that arrange in postcard-perfect lines

except you couldn’t fill in the back

because they didn’t sell letters

along with the pictures.

You think it’s a janitor job

to sweep words from

the dust of unexplored corners.

.

You stack your fruit-of-the-loom t-shirts

from souvenir shops

in neat piles in the extra drawer

in your dresser

and they never get too small

because they’re one-size-fits all.

You’re good at making sure

everything remains the same.

That’s why you land

in the pastel-coloured rooms

of five-star hotels

where generic is always on time.

.

World's largest coke can in Portage La Prairie, Manitoba

Take the train, I tell you.

Watch the progression

of the weather

and the weathered people

who live between

Los Angeles and Las Vegas,

Montreal and Vancouver.

Find the somewheres

in all the nowheres

you overlooked.

.

And replace that black zip-up suitcase

you got for your sixteenth birthday.

Shove it in your attic between

the tricycle and the size five roller skates

because you’ll need

something bigger,

something with personality,

to fit all the new experiences

you’ll collect along the way.

The Rain May 27, 2011

I wasn’t able to stop my blood,

from waging war against my kidneys

no matter how many false forecasts

I announced on the morning radio;

how many times I resisted the

questions of teachers in hallways

and doctors with clipboards.

“I’m fine,” when I wasn’t.

 

I hid under store awnings and newspapers:

behind sullen faces with defiant gestures,

slipping on raincoats that

turned out to only be water resistant;

I didn’t read the fine print when I

bought my solutions off the

sale rack last spring:

cheap fixes never work

in the long term.

The pill bottles kept

piling up on kitchen counters.

 

In the end, I had to face it:

one can’t hide forever.

Walking outside and watching

the rivulets form on the pavement,

sending hot summer days

down the overflow drains

I cried my tears into the arms of

my sisters and my mother.

I learned strength and resilience

and the kindness of friends.

 

Listen to the rain’s repetitive beat,

like the words of a sermon.

There’s a moral somewhere.

 

Trapped in the green chairs

of hospital waiting rooms with

bits of dreams left behind like

chewing gum,

I thought of the people who

stood up for me and of the

inner understanding

only hard times can bring:

my ability to withstand

the force of the winds

bad weather brings.

 

I eventually came to accept

that the rain is like the tide:

it comes in and clears away

the footprints to make way for

new ones, uncovering beach glass

and pennies the metal detector

never found.

 

Grandma Marion May 26, 2011

This is another narrative written for my English class. I realize I haven’t written a lot of bloggy posts, but hopefully some of those are coming too.

My black dress doesn’t fit right, sitting low on my narrow eleven-year old shoulders. Adults in dark clothes with somber faces mill around me in the wide beige hall. The coat racks are full and dusted with Winnipeg snow, like the memories drifting back to people’s minds today, melting between conversations. It’s my grandmother’s memorial.

I never saw a lot of Grandma Marion, living in different cities a plane ride apart. It was forever a point of regret for me, to hear how my friends spent afternoons baking cookies or going downtown with their grandparents. My father made little effort to return to Winnipeg. “Swarms of mosquitos invade in summer and it’s negative forty degrees in winter.” Yet, once a year, my grandmother hauled her bags through the swinging doors of Vancouver’s airport arrivals section.

Her skin was loose from smoking and her hair was aged to a glossy white, but she always had energy left for me. When she came to visit, we flopped onto the ragged carpet of the living room for games of triple solitaire, her hands carefully guiding mine into proper plays. Grandma Marion showed me how to make fried eggs. Seasoning lunch with her love, she helped me melt just enough butter onto the bottom of the iron skillet before sliding in the cracked egg. As a goodbye gift, she would leave individual jars of delicious homemade raspberry jam preserved from her sprawling garden patch. I masking-taped my name to my jar and thought of her every time I spread it onto my bread or waffles. She made me feel valued and cared about.

Now she is gone. Her spirit is evaporated into the atmosphere, but these memories of her left inside me are as solid as the ashes from her cremation. Though I didn’t spend much time with Grandma Marion, those little moments of care and love: the games of solitaire, the jars of homemade jam, the lessons in cooking eggs made all the difference. She taught me how much giving a genuine piece of yourself can mean, no matter how seemingly small or infrequent.

Examining the still frames of Grandma Marion projected in cycles on the wall, I vow to take an extra moment, to think of her and write a personal message on birthday cards, to make homemade gifts for my family, or to sit down to a game of Monopoly with my cousins. It is the thought and time that matter most.

First Impressions May 24, 2011

I spent last summer in Quebec working at a nature centre. It was the same time that the Frozen Tic Tacs got started. So when I wrote this narrative for my English class set during that period, I decided to share it. 

The air, heavy with humid heat, has chased all our customers to the overcrowded public pools, away from canoeing on the reflected glare of the lake. I yank my lunch out of the small fridge and slide down the grimy wall to settle beside Renée. My usual work friends are sick or on vacation.

“Hi Renée.” Skinny and small for sixteen, her eyes pop with brilliant blue contacts and her bleached hair blends into her pale skin. Two snakebite piercings protrude from her lip, still slightly swollen from the procedure. She rarely talks to the rest of us, preferring her ipod and her Rob Zombie music. She’s the type of person I normally leave a wide berth around, unable to comprehend the desire to defy society so physically.

“Hey,” she answers stiffly, tugging out an earbud. The conversation begins haltingly. We discuss a heavy metal concert, an irritating group of summer camp kids, her obsession with anime. I lament getting lost downtown. We both find we actually have a lot to share. Over the next few hours, my perception of her slowly shifts.

It is surprisingly easy to dig past the tough exterior she preserves against the influence of others. Facts slip out. Her parents ended their marriage in a nasty divorce and she now lives with her dysfunctional mother who is diagnosed with a severe obsessive-compulsive disorder. Her father won’t take custody of her. At fourteen, she struggled with alcoholism. She still does. Underneath, I discover some of the reasons for her hard face and defiant dress. Maybe she is trying to compensate for her vulnerability.

As the afternoon sinks low on the horizon, I can see that she needed to talk, somebody to listen. I feel badly about my initial dismissal of her. I suppose it’s only natural to categorize in a matter of seconds.  We do this every day: selecting fruit at grocery stores, finding a friendly face to ask for directions at bus stops and scanning for interesting books in libraries. But appearances are only a tiny smudge of information. They don’t depict the layers of personality within or what might cause somebody to behave the way they do. That takes time and effort.

Idly eyeing Renée leaning against the plastic chair legs, I glimpse myself for a moment: the angry, scrawny middle school Saskia swallowing medications that bloated my face and missing a class a week for doctor’s appointments. I was once written off too. I pretended I didn’t care, scurrying to the library at lunch and demanding solo projects from teachers. But I gradually got better and fell into my skin, thanks to a few kind and dedicated people who stuck with me.

Renée is never going to be my best friend, but I can understand where she comes from and respect her. I can find an alcove beside the fridge and have a good conversation or two. She needs that, as I once did. If you give people a chance, you never know what you’ll find.