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.

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.

WOW 1111 April 27, 2011

Hey people – we’ve reached 1 thousand, 1 hundred, eleven unique visitors.

I’ve got work April 10, 2011

I love that phrase so much.

I’ve got work.

Such a rolling, side-ways glancing bunch of words.

But hey, it feels special at some point, especially when the ratio of high school students who don’t have a job is greater than the ones that have one.

Teaching piano and theory is pretty good. No physical labor and the money rolls in like a muddy puppy.

Oh! But the kids!

They make me cry and laugh and mad all at the same time. I thought it was supposed to be teaching piano, but it ended up more being teaching how to wash hands, how to keep fists out of mouths, stay still, be responsible, concentrate, fine motor skills, and patience. They ask me so many piano/music -unrelated questions that I end up teaching them about how dogs are bred and how submarines work. I ended up counseling a student after the death of her dog, reassuring and reasoning with a kid who brought his nightmares into the day, and listening to boy troubles and friendship explosions.

One of them sings songs like a prima dona when his little kindergarten-er self goes to the washroom, and the vibrato echos across the hallway back into the classroom. Two boys play hockey with pencils and erasers and use books as a rink during theory class. (Commentary included – score: 25- 27…something like that…) Another describes farts and other bodily functions with Italian music terminology. (decrescendo – gradually getting softer; Largo – broad, slow and stately; tenuto – held, sustained)

I love all of them so much. Working on Friday evenings isn’t so appealing. No one else wants the slot -so student teachers get them. I just want to go home and sleep the troubles of the week away. I can’t bring my rage from home and school to work, so I’m cranky and tired on the way there, but those nine kids make it worthwhile. They are all pretty weird sometimes, in their own ways -just like me, I guess.

When they finally get something I want to a bit of a British Gigue. It’s to gratifying to know you’ve immortalized yourself in their life.

Oh, how smug I feel.

A Place in the World April 10, 2011

I like having a place in the world.

I place where I fit.

But its a little hole in the wall, a cage, like everyone else’s.

It seems like everyone around my knows the perimeter or their bars and push and fight to stretch them farther. I don’t even know how big my cage in. I feel so brave when I do something new, but in truth, I’m very very scared all the time. I feel like I act confident, but I’m never going to be that angry hawk on the perch flapping to be released. I hate moving past my little roads I take everyday. I’m just a little mouse running through the walls of the same house and scampering to and from the same nest and the same pantry. Stocking up my little food supply for what?

I’m like a magpie – picking up shiny things and looking for little drops and splashes of treasure where ever I go. I hoard everything unceasingly – every memory, every dream, every hope. I like to drown and flounder in them sometimes. It makes me feel richly smug to lie and wiggle in my life so far – I remember everything. But it makes me so frustrated when I pick up a nice fat shiny gem with my curious beak and find it so faded and chipped. It looked so nice and clear from far away, but now it’s just like all the other graying curls of chains in my nest. Just like my memories. After something passes into the realm of what has happened, it blurs and fades. The second that has just passed seems as swimmy as my two and a half year old self splashing water in only my underwear. Little floating islands of sepia everywhere – I can’t seem to string them up in a necklace of red gold.

But music is clear. I can hear the piano playing through the bars. That instrument is the darkest thing I’ve ever seen – but filled with such light in it’s severe case. It makes me cry all the time – how can people create something that makes life worthwhile? Oh Beethoven, how I love your Pathetique. The second movement trembled with spring greens and stole my heart with golden pale afternoons. Bach’s French suites came calling with their delicate steps and unmovable stability. Watery depths and fluttering reflections submerged Debussy’s Sunken Cathedral. Beauty hurts like a blinding camera flash. I can’t see anything afterwards but little blue dots.

I thought I knew myself. The puddles of yellow lamp light never reflect anything, though. I will never see – this blindness can only be cured by music and words. The only way I will know who I am is to tell my entire story again and again – different every time. I created my own history out of blurred seconds ticking in a mirrored clock. It’s in the deepest velvet of the sky and the blinding, blinding white: whistling like the wind funneled into the depths of the city.

Love is so scary. It makes you throw everything away until you grab a hold of yourself again. But I always regret talking myself out of love.

I used to think myself cold. But I never was, I think. I’ve always loved everything so much that it felt like the moments would explode. The world is so beautiful sometimes I can’t even breath and I have to go cry for a while.

I like my cage. But nothing ever happens in it.

I’m afraid I’ve waited too long.

Boredom Complains February 6, 2011

When Facebook crashes on me, I get bored for a bit and go to imdb to see what new movies I should watch, but then get bored of that, so I go to SparkLife for some light blog reading, then get bored after a while-so then I blog.

I’ve been rather befuzzled and my wits feel a little addled. I no longer have a schedule I enjoy and it’s like last semester I was awake and now I’ve fallen back asleep to some prolonged and boring nightmare (bored-mare/night-bored?) of doing chemistry, math and physics over and over again everyday.

I can’t fall asleep properly, I want to strangle certain people, I plot and scheme for entertainment, I feel like I have no hot guys to look at during class and I try to make myself noticed because I feel ignored. I think I need to go throw some (big h….. monkey) balls, or even better, go hunt children in the school with my wicked Nerf gun skills.

I’m very, very proud of my Nerf gun skills. I think I should turn it into a class at Gleneagle. The 60 people can just grab ammo and race around an empty school and play capture the flag at the same time. It would be so magnificent.

Anyways, I feel like an old lady. I live off movies and make collages all day.

I need some excitement, but all there is, is a little speck of hope for Cuba in the horizon that is Spring break and it is hell of a long hike away.

I can’t write stories, I can’t daydream vividly enough to think up anything worth turning into writing, my dreams are dull and I can’t remember them to entertain myself.

I am so bored I want to put my head in a toilet and flush. (quoting: myself, remarking on my experience after watching the Black Swan and feeling like my head just blew up in intenseness and not being able to sleep afterward because it was so creepy.)

I think I’ve turned into a sausage. That’s it. A sausage.

So I have turned to speaking strangely as I flounce out of the door for school: “Hurry my darlings! Make haste, for the carriage is ready and the horses are lean and straining to leap from the cobblestones. Let us depart!”

And then so, another day of sleep begins.

A crazy truest dream I ever had February 2, 2011

Metaphor of my life. coded so no one will know…

There once stood a statue made of stone

rather thin and shapeless

and stood on her grey stone pedestal alone

and complained that she hated it

she watched the couples stroll the square

as they walked the cobbled street

and how she wished her luck would fair

if she could free her feet,

from the grey stone box that she stood upon

that held her tight and fast

she had put herself there, victory from a war she had won

but she didn’t know the barricade would last

the other statues have stretched their knobbly arms

and melted down into the human crowd

only the thin, shapeless master of the charms

stood there alone, aloof, and unbowed

What a silly prideful girl has been bred

she could be running and frolicking in the fields

but all she does is shake her stony head

and stands stoically behind her shields

she waits and waits and waits and waits

and tries to use her words

but plots and persistent digging generates guilty states

and she feels as mean as a cat eating a bird

left with no plots and games and bored to death

she weaves and spins a life

little does she know the words on her breath

will never happen unless she sheaths her knife

as time goes on, she begins to panic

as people no longer stop and stare

a desperate statue is rather volcanic

and she rather overflowed with fear

she thought she would be the very last

or the dream may never come true

but what does a statue know

when it has never moved?

Stories become Truth, Truth becomes Stories? January 4, 2011

Is that a leg?

I gasp aloud and my stomach drops to my toes. Looking around, I suddenly feel silly and hope no one has seen me on my early morning walk on the seaside trail. Ruffling my hair, the balmy moist wind races in from the sea and bringing with it hints of sun beyond the bland grey clouds. It’s warm and the air is heavy, similar to the weather before a thunderstorm. The miniature sandstone cliffs have always brought me a sense of lonely power. It was as if I was the only one in this wild place, and words of fervour had always sprung from my mind, causing me to rush for paper and a pen.

I squint carefully at the thing sticking out from under the overhang of a cliff every beach visitor sits on to take pictures of the crashing surf just a few meters down below at high tide, as it is now.

Are those toes?

I gulp and remember the news stories of people finding a hand or foot washed up on the beach. It’s probably just a piece of dark driftwood, or seaweed. Anything mildly interesting and floating in the murky brine has always scared me witless. The tide slams the boulders down below and the water retreating before the next hammering makes odd sucking sounds like a toilet between the sharp rocks that rear up their ugly, algae covered heads.

Getting on my hands and knees, I crawl to the lichen covered edge and look over. Heights make me breathless and dizzy, so I spread my knees apart for balance even though the ledge below is only three meters down.

I grip the edge tightly. That is not a foot. I lean over the brink, and my ribs press into the surf pounded stone. That isn’t a hand. I freeze in horror. A head rush spins my sight and I blink crazily as the sucking waves seem to steal my air. It’s a man. A man covered in sand. A man covered in blood. One of his feet isn’t feet anymore. The toes don’t seem to be there anymore and the foot looks strangely like a duck’s webbed foot. I can smell it. I have to close my eyes and swallow when I see the shredded skin and glistening flesh.

“Mister!” I scream over the pounding waves, “Are you okay? Do you need help?!” A panicked rush of nausea sweeps upward into my throat and throws my next words into the air, “Wake up! Are you –dead?! Open your eyes!” I DON’T want to have discovered a corpse! What if he’s actually dead? What killed him? Unbelievable thoughts raced through my head blindly. He’s going to get up and come after me. The trail is so empty. “Wake up!” Oh my god –first aid, first aid, 911, first aid, 911! An angry sob tears out of my throat. Wake up!

His eyes open.

“Hey!” I shake with relief. “I’m coming down! Don’t move!”

I sprint down the trail and reach the steep gravelly incline that leads down to the water. Slipping, I fall on my hands and scrape my leg on some barnacles. I turn my ankle as I scramble madly over the half submerged boulders. What if he’s dead when I reach him? I can see him now, lying on the water sprayed ledge. He has nothing but a dark red pair of swimming trunks on. The red is like the paint on a lighthouse. As I come close, I crawl onto the ledge and lose a flip flop to the waves. I search his face. His skin is so pale and his lips are purple and pulled into back in a horrible, twisted grin. His eyes find mine. They light up momentarily in relief. His face softens for a moment.

“Can you talk?”

He looks about in his mid-twenties or so, and his longish brown hair is streaked with blond or the other way around. I can’t tell with all the sand. Is that sand on his face –or stubble? His chest is shaking with whistling gasps as he takes in air. CPR? No, that’s when he’s unconscious. R.E.D.? Wait, how do I treat for shock? My god, the cell phone –I rip apart my pockets trying to find my parent’s cell phone.

911.

The cell phone isn’t there.

I can’t leave him –WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO? Run back? He would be dead by then. I can’t move him over the boulders without breaking his neck. He’s lost so much blood –the stones are stained with it where it drips into the sea like shower water off the side of the tub. My mind was racing at a million miles per second. Where the hell is he from? His foot…it must have been crushed in between the rocks. What dumbass would swim in between sharp rocks?

I take his hand. It’s so cold.

“What’s your name?” I whisper.

He suddenly grips my hand with desperate strength. Something painful shoots through my body. It’s like a hook dragging through my throat. I stare at his eyes. I can see the clouds in the glassy fog. His lips move. Then he sighs.

Sigh.

Sigh.

Silently, the crash of the tide fills the ins and outs of his breath and I sit there gripping his sandy, limp hand as though I was the one afraid to disappear while I try not to lose my other flip flop to the lapping, red waves.

Disturbing canvas December 30, 2010

snake heads in flight

attacks a helicopter

as the fallen body

writhes on the floor

in grey

scrapings

in a frame

.

Bodies splayed

wide

and tongues of fire shoot out from lips

not  until

it showers you

do you realize

it’s fountains of blood

sticky rivers

unreal

spurting

fountains

dripping

.

muddy puddles

along the streets

not until

your foot splashes in

do you realize

it’s blood

.

twisted stick figures

is that you?

it is me

that is my home

is it yours?

it could be

fallen

rumbling cities

where the mortar between the cobble stones

have eroded away

and filled with watery red rain

that dries in

blackish brown

.

this was my home.