Australian Debbie and Turkey - the place, not the food

I met Australian Debbie way way way back in 1987, when we were both about four years old, err, or thereabouts. I went to Australia in 1991 to visit her, the first of what has turned out to be a few jaunts around different parts of the world.
I haven't seen her in 18 years (lordy, some of my students are younger . . .) but we now keep in touch thanks to the glory and honour that is facebook. We facebook chat quite frequently, despite the 17-hour (I think) time difference. This morning we were chatting - 10 a.m. for me. 2:30 a.m. the next day for her. She always was better at staying up late.
"I'm bored," I lamented to her, "And lonely." She responded sympathetically and suggested I take up my blog again.
"I've lost the wee fanbase," said I.
"They will come back," said she. "And say something nice about me."
I think she may have been worried I would write something not-so-nice. Not sure why she would think that but then there was that person threatening to sue me after I wrote about my elementary school friend Bonnie-the-former-gymnast. So you never know.
Debbie and I were just young ones when we met in Vancouver and it is interesting to see how different our lives have turned out. She lives in the outback (but may be moving back to Adelaide) with her hubby of 17 years and her 6 children. I am single (bitterly so but still) and live in Vancouver near the beach. I sometimes travel.
"I have the heart of a traveller but the nervous system of an armchair traveller," I tell the lesbian minister at the wee United Church I sometimes attend. Is it important that the wee fanbase knows that she is a lesbian? I think it's my way of saying that I attend a very liberal church. Oh, oh, coolness - there are 3 elderly women who sit right in the front row - 2 94-year-olds and a recently turned 95-year-old. Amazing! I say. They get the bulletin in large font to follow and people help keep them up on things - like this morning they unveiled the new church labryinth. in our tiny church's case, it is a large piece of fabric on the floor. We are allowed to walk on it but only in socks - dirt will be a problem. The 3 women were given the labryinth on a piece of paper to trace with their fingers.
I like the hokiness (sp?), the liberalism and the calm of that little church.
A bit of a tnent there. In another tangent, my 81-year-old landlady (must everything be about age!) is setting up a mouse trap for me cause I think I have one in my wee apartment.
"I can't, I won't be able to cope with seeing it or hearing it or blah blah," I said.
"I'll come and get it for you," she said. Ick, I'll still have to hear and see it. I think I'll just pretend to put the mousetrap out. There's only been a tiny bit of mouse poo.
Travel. I went to Wales for a book festival for a week and then on to Istanbul for 10 days. The first five days I was on my own in Istanbul, which let me tell you, was oy boy all kinds of things. Hot, amazing, stressful, people people, body odour (mine too I'm sure, no air-conditiong in the cheaper place I chose to stay), men following me to the point where I wouldn't make eye contact with anyone, meat on a spit in the hot sun, french fries in a pita, amazing buildings from a thousand years ago, bread for breakfast, a bit of diarrhea, cold showers, street cats running into my room, BBC Prime channel on TV, heart pounding, hot, hot, hot, lady lady, hey rich lady, the Black Sea (the photo here) tour which was awesome, a Swedish girl on the tour who had cut herself all up and down her arms and legs but didn't hide it and she had a boyfriend twice her age who wore pants and a long-sleeved shirt, narrow cobblestone streets, drivers amazingly not running me over, swimming in the Black Sea and a fine vegetarian plate meal there, crowds and crowds and 35C heat and lady lady lady and let's bring my heart rate back to a better speed, I'm sure I have only so many beats. I am amazed by the history, by the fact that I have gotten myself out to Turkey and broken down my barriers yet again. This was a trip I'd booked four months in advance and had as a carrot on a stick.
I am lucky to have been able to go again to Europe (and Asia, thanks to Turkey being on two continents). I love the UK, I even love the food there.
I'm back now, got back three weeks ago. Caught on odd virus on the plane me thinks and was kinda down and out for a couple of weeks - lots of odd symptoms like night sweats and day sweats and a cough like a seal. I still haven't recovered all of the energy but have returned to my bicycle, the outdoor swimming pool (!) and to neck/back/shoulder pains that have me running to the massage therapist. Back to my life that is lonely and I haven't worked out yet in life how to get around that. Lucky me to be able to travel, oh yes, that I get don't get me wrong.
I think I'll try to keep the blog up a bit more. Wee fanbase, I hope I can woo you back.

Here I am

I think the wee fan base is gone. But here I am.
I've been reading some other blogs lately - www.mattlogelin.com is quite a touching one. Matt lost his wife 27 hours after she delivered their baby.
Touching and kinda wrenching but gosh his little daughter is adorable.
Facebook.
A few cousins have found me on there - most recently, Carole. These are all cousins from my mother's side o the family, since I don't know any from my dad's side. That's almost entirely true - I have seen pics of the three of them and have met two of their wives when they visited Vancouver - but haven't actually met them. Seeing a picture of my father's brother choked me up - the resemblance is striking. And the three cousins - brothers and sons of the aforementioned (now dead) uncle - look strikingly Segalish and I see myself in them.
Weird. Orthodox Judaism has kept them away.
Anyway, Carole. I have lots of cousins - my mother was one of 14, 12 of whom made it into adulthood with only one nun amongst them. Carole is the daughter of the (now dead) Uncle Raymond (mom's brother) and Auntie Maria.
I haven't seen any of my cousins in years upon years and some I have never even met.
Weird.
A couple of my (still alive) uncles could walk up to me and yell in my face and I wouldn't know who the heck they were. Apparently, they look quite First Nations-ish. I remember when I was really tanned one summer back in my 20s, this guy said to me, "you a sister?' "No," I said. Well 1/64 but not really.
Anyway, Carole.
She is younger than me by 3 or 4? years. She's lived at home her whole life and was very close to her father.
He used to cut my hair when I was a child.
Auntie Maria has a really high pitched voice.
Turns out Carole suffers with depression/anxiety. This i figured out from her Facebook status updates. Mental health supporter/obsesser that I am, I suggested a wee bit o therapy to her. I waxed on, waxed off a bit about my great shrink (my great shrink who is going away for a month so tonight I gotta get a whole month's worth of advice).
Carole says no to therapy for now, then tells me a bit more about her life.
Turns out Auntie Maria has an irregular heartbeat and a type of colitis that hits her so hard she pales and passes out. Her lack of energy is frustrating for her, says Carole.
This hits me very hard and I feel so bad for Auntie Maria I can barely breathe (really). She's terrified of running out of money apparently, although that won't happen, Carole keeps encouraging her.
They live in a very very small house I remember.
I haven't visited my hometown of Winnipeg in 10 years - Sept. 1999 was the last time.
I've seen my folks since then of course - in Hawaii a couple of times and in Vancouver as well.
Later this year I'll be spending my holidays in Wales and Turkey.
Exciting.
And far away.
When Uncle Raymond died I read his obituary and it said something about his love of, gosh I don't remember, love of bowling, or something like that.
"I'm too hard on myself," Carole says, who won't post a picture on Facebook because she hates pictures of myself, "dad was like that too."
And I'm hit in that deep darkness again.
I think of Auntie Maria's life - she's bewildered, perhaps, terrified and holed up in her house, waiting for the irregular heartbeats, the passing out pain from the colitis.
She's very very thankful Carole lives at home still.
And Carole is quite worried about her when she (Carole) is at work all day.
Carole's been a secretary for ten years this August for Agriculture Canada, she tells me.
She writes in such a way that I see she has so much more there.
I see such a line of depression/anxiety through the family - Uncle Robert, Uncle Tony, my grandmother I think.
My mother.
My father, but he's on the other side of course.
The side with three cousins (brothers) who don't ever want to meet him.
I've always been so so ashamed and embarrassed by my own anxiety, my own anger-fueled depression (I'm not the kind of depressed person who stays in bed all day, I'd rather be with people actually, I get energy from that. I dig it. Instead, I'm angry, obsessive, some other things) and here I see it in the lineage.
I can't imagine the despair that Auntie Maria feels.
There was never ever any speaking of mental health - even after Uncle Robert hanged himself in his basement when he was 36. Sorry, a tiche depressing here.
36.
I was 19.
Thought 36 was young but didn't realize just how young
until I surpassed it.
For me, it is like a black hole - this denial of darkness. Generational I know and some other things.
Shame
fear
abandonment pops into my head.
French Canadians growing up in rural Manitoba on a farm in the 30s and 40s
didn't know for
what I get to talk about every week.
It's hard enough for me to get my head around.
And really, it's still not that around it.
I've always despised denial of any kind.
To the point where it has become a kind of denial of its own.
Myself
my pokey bits
poke at others.
"It's like you have your foot out on the bus," says my pal, Tracy. She grappled for this analogy but it turned out to be a not bad one.
"And you know your foot is there but you just can't seem to pull it back."
"Can you, you know, cut it off for me?"
"I don't think so," said she. She's gotten wise, that one has, from her own crap and her own wonderful weekly person. We're open about these things and I have permission to say that.
I poked too much at a 4-year friendship awhile back.
Resulting in its end.
Except we still work together.
So that's hard, I find.
Daily evidence of my poking.
And her poking back.
There are a remarkable number of pokey people at work.
Not so shiny, not so happy.
Work used to be - and my god I've been there almost 5 years - a record for me- more fun I'd say in the staff room.
Laughing, god sometimes laughing till I cried.
Then a few people left.
And some friendships died - to the point where we ignore each other even in passing.
And her friend at work, she ignores me in solidarity I think.
High school was a bit like this.
I took it too hard then too.
We even have lockers at work, for goodness sakes.
Turkey will be amazing. I'll be meeting up with Maggie, who I used to work with and who now lives in Ankarra with her great Turkish husband.
She's mellow that Maggie.
and beautiful.
Mellow and beautiful Maggie.
And Wales - a huge book festival. Bill Clinton called it the Woodstock of book festivals.
Two very different cultures - await me in May and June.
In 14 weeks and two days, I will go away for three weeks.
Plane, train and plane and bus and and
Shiny
happy
people

And I'm back yet again

A short little entry as I have a cold and feel crappy. A winter cold. A we have a whole lot more snow than Vancouver has practically ever had in its whole life kind of cold. A flu-cold. A cold-flu.
You get it.
It is Christmas Day.
Xmas Day.
The day Jesus popped out of the Virgin Mary, thus breaking her hymen and making sex with Joseph much easier I'm sure I'm sure.
Can you imagine being known as a virgin for eternity? Sheesh.
This has been the month of epic amounts of snow, something Vancouver can't so much handle. Weird. I was feeling generally unsick until Monday evening, when I noticed that my throat was sore. "It's not really sore," thought I, "it's only the excitement of the Christmas season and the upcoming holiday break." Hmmm. Turns out no, it is actually a virus. It's settled in now, moved from my throat to way high in my sinuses and beyond. I missed work before the Christmas break, an odd thing because they kept the ESL school open despite: 1) an afternoon power outage - what's a little darkness 2) snowy snow snow.
I headed off to the lovely Glenda's for Christmas dinner and her lovely son Geoff picked a bunch of us up in his girlfriend's four x four. Glenda is so sweet and if you check out my Dec. blog of 2 years ago, will see how awesome Christmas at her house is. I'm glad I went, a nice break to my being at home sick. Now I'm back at home, sick. Ick. I get antsy and bored but it's cold and the roads are treacherous so I hibernate.
Slowly, thanks to Dr. Wulff and a few other things but mainly, let's be honest, Dr. Wulff, my thinking is changing for the better. In my 40s, I am awakening to some things - others may be re-awakening at my age, but me, I awaken.
It's an up and down life, this living.
Across-the-street-Roma delights me and I am so comforted by her presence there I can't begin to tell you. Her two new grandchildren, Milko and Giametti(pronounced Gimeddi) from Ethiopia, are awesome kids. Milko made me a get well poster and the two of them picked things out of the pantry that they thought I might enjoy - a can of tuna, cream of mushroom soup, some crackers. I'm verklempt.
So, I think I'll bring back the blog.

bored comas, hotwater heaters, etc.

Oh my bored coma god.
Took today off of work - insomnia, plus, sometimes I know that I need to . . .hmmm. . . good to have a little break from the students (or they from me probably).
Took 1/2 hour to type up the lesson plan, hopefully the sub. had no troubles. I'll find out tomorrow.
Went for a long long bike ride, up the usual big UBC hill. Good times.
Too
much
time
alone.
So, bored coma.
No hot water in the building again. The 80-year-old landlady is away and the owner was simply not answering numerous calls.
I live in an old mansion divided into 12 suites.
I knock on a few doors.
"Do you notice we only have lukewarm water?" ask I.
"Yeah, I've been heating it up in a kettle."
"Were you going to call the owner?" I ask.
"Oh, I guess."
Oy.
We've just had a hot water heater put in so I figured it was under warranty.
I call the hot water heater company, the guy comes over within the hour and fixes it. So I think it's fixed.
I've left another message with the owner, telling her the situation and asking for a bit of a rent break this coming month. Don't know if I'll get it, but I figure two days without hot water and my effort is worth something.
I should have done a test to see how long the other tenants would have put up with no hot water.
It was seemingly an easy job too as it took only about 1/2 hour to fix.
Oy.
So, you see, there is something to be said for my obsessive nature. It may, in general, be kinda wrecking my, well, life but it also got me to fix the water problem.
In other news, I've broken the blinds in my wee living room. They now won't go up.
Is this not fascinating stuff? I'm telling you, bored coma.
Work, for all its workness, is a social outlet of sorts.
Hmmm.
Roma is right now in San Francisco meeting and greeting her two new grandchildren from Ethiopia. Their names escape me. She'll be back up next week and so will her daughter, hubby and kids. All are going to live with her, her partner and her grandson that she is raising. I expect those two new wee grandkids to be feeding the crows with her almost immediately.
Excellent.

Excellent writers

I just went to hear Joan Barfoot and Miriam Toews read and speak tonight. Excellent, excellent writers.
Inspiring and the like.

I'm thinking of

starting up the blog again.
Any of the wee fan base still out there?

next writers' group meeting

July 14

cancelled

July 21 Host: Bruce's at 6:30 p.m. potlucky
Host: Readers: Janis, Raymond

July 28
Host: Karen Readers: Jewels, Alana .

August 4- holiday

August 11 - host: Yaz Readers:

That's as far as we have gotten. With many people away, we'll have to do some re-jigging. Tis the summer.