the Hottest Damn of all

In my last year of university, a prof kindly admonished a mixed group of graduate and undergraduate students to just be nice. His point was timely: as undergraduates we had spent four years learning to be hyper-critical, and we only had months to learn to behave before us tomcats were herded into the real world where we would be expected to behave like tame tabbies. 

I put forward the motion that the American Psychiatric Society should accept the following as a certifiable anxiety disorder:

Galahad Abandanment Disorder (G.A.D.): Similar to P.T.S.D., this occurs after a very traumatic incident.  Most notably, after the defection of a former Galahad-type personality (see also, Don Quixote) in the life of any given female.  Galahad type characters can embody any of the following:

• Those who blindly adore the subject,
• Those who pine in wistful longing for the subject, and
• Those who are willing to humour the subject in any and all matters as a combined result of sexual frustration and romantic fantasy

After such an abandonment, the subject might engage in dangerous activities, such as drinking, heavy smoking, and attempting to win back the formerly undesired attention of he who has gone astray.

I am currently in Seattle, and while here, I received an email from a boy whose attentions I had received with little warmth or excitement, but some degree of vain gratification.  In short: he is seeing someone.

I never thought that I was the type of person who would be tempted by such news to attempt to ween him away from what he so rightly deserves, and kind of needs, but I was mildly irked.  Especially given the past couple of clusterfuckeries from those whom I've dated in the past.  Not only did my Galahad decide not to save me from myself, but I was once a beard.

At any rate, I dealt with my G.A.D. the typical way: denial.  I walked to the Space Needle from the hotel yesterday in order to sort through some chaotic thoughts, of which, admittedly, only a minority related to my current affliction. 

Tonight I attended a gala where adults sipped terrible hotel house wine, and when the sock-hop tunes came through the sound system, conglomerated on the dance floor in a sea of geriatric and adorable waving limbs.  I laughed for a while, sipping Seattle coffee.  After some time passed, I surrendered to the inevitable and removed my shoes, shaking my sweet young ass on the dance floor. 

These things aren't really related, but that's the problem with real life: it never forms a perfect narrative, and it's always a mixed metaphor.  Possibly now it is time for a quasi honest confession: the problem isn't that Galahad defected.  It's that Galahad did it first.

In the past couple of weeks, there have been moments when I would have gladly ripped the heads off of smokers, wrapped my lips around their exposed esophagi and inhaled the smoke from their grateful lungs.  There are days when I would weepingly collect the discarded butts from gutters and brew them into nicotine tea, raise the steaming mug to my cracked lips, and drink deeply without first cooling it with breath, icecubes, or tears.

On a lighter note, I think my life might turn around.  There is an eastward white bedroom that is untainted by yellow paint or negative associations.  There are street noises that I haven't yet learned to tune out, and stairs that my feet don't automatically know to climb in such a practiced way.

In middle school, my art teacher assigned us a "texture project."  We were to divide a page into separate sections, and in each area we were to pencil in different textures.  I seemed to recall that in our art vocabulary lessons for this unit, he assigned us words like "dipple" and "stipple" and "ripple" -- although certainly my memory is not to be to be trusted.

My days pass, all startlingly similar, and all jarringly dull.  They provide the framework for my shambolic self, all awkward ankles in adult high heels and bus ride ruminations.  This week was a study in contrast: on Monday I convocated, and the rest of the days I went to my adult job in Brampton.  When I saw the people that I attended school with and tried to answer their questions, I struggled to describe how I was.  My giant mouth gaped when describing the texture of my days: early morning wake-ups, waiting for the bus at McMaster, the panic that sets in at 2:00, the way that the Bronte carpool looks and feels in an over air conditioned vehicle when I know that time and distance need to be abrogated before I can eat the dinner my parents left me on the kitchen table.

Memories aren't metaphors, and, in their absolute purest forms, not even allegories.  But Mr. Reble might have been onto something when he assigned us an art project so mundane and pedantic as the "texture project," although as pre-teens we would have been loathe to admit it.  I've been struggling to describe where I am right now because there are no events to crystallize this experience into a suitable anecdote.  Instead, I have fleeting impressions: the deer grazing by the highway, my elongated shadow over the fresh-poured concrete near Coote's Drive, the sound of my heels down the narrow hallway between the "Network Place" and the "Business Centre," the repetitive nudge-nudge-nudge of my laptop bag against my right hip.  I can't subdivide these four weeks into convenient stories; instead, I only understand them as delayed reactions to an environment that I did not anticipate.  My life is uneventful, but it does have a new texture.

I wandered around Hamilton today, and last night we drove for hours.  Rachel showed me a beautiful apartment near the bus stop and my heart pinged in longing.  This city is bizarre.  But then, it has been less than a month.  Only time will tell whether I can make it work.

As a mark of how everything has been transformed by sunshine and vitamin D, I've stopped dreaming about running barefoot over broken glass and have started dreaming about my bicycle.  That beautiful brown and ancient contraption languishing in my parent's basement will soon be (as) street worthy (as it ever will be---not very).

The National is releasing a new album, and I'm pretty pumped.

I hung out at the museum today, for several hours, helping out with a birthday party.  I was too tired to critically engage with the kids, and allowed them to run around my legs like tadpoles and waterspiders in the Westdale ravine.  Afterwards, I walked home dreaming of falafel, and ate a sandwich made out of two end slices of Dempster's bread. 

This year could be summed up thusly: I dreamed of falafels, and learned to tolerate the crusts of bread.

"Youth is not wasted on the young, it is perpetrated on the young." -- David Rakoff

I think it's impossible to get an undergrad education these days without having the concept of liminal space shoved down your throat, piped up through your nostrils, funneled down your ears and carried upstream against the current of your tears and down through your nasolacrimal ducts.  In short, one drowns in liminality.

I don't think Vic and Edie Turner would appreciate my casual claims to pre-grad as a liminal space, but I can only assume that by now they're both dead and thus incapable of objecting.  According to last year's dapper summer prof, this is the moment between the tick and the tock, the time where, in literature, things happen.

I had a dream a couple of days ago where a vaguely paternal figure stood at the head of my bed.  I flipped over to my stomach, raised myself on my elbows, and drew my blue sheets past my shoulder and over my ears.

"Emily," the man said.  "We've been awfully hard on you lately, haven't we?" 

I woke up the next morning in the best mood I've experienced in weeks.  I had to go to school, and later to a grad formal, but that morning I had a touch of clouds in my coffee and a Sinatra swing to my steps.  While the night ended in tears and a quasi-formal traipse to Casa Loma, the afternoon was sunny and warm and perfect.

Well, I'm getting Liz-and-Dicked around by the temp agency (not really, but kinda) and I'm brokeback broke.  The only thing that sustains me is stolen sleep, the sun, and David Rakoff.  This is a good example of how David Rakoff is self-help for the truly emasculated.  Fast-forward twenty-eight minutes to Act II and call me in the morning.

Why I shouldn't open my mouth:

1.  I'm all too likely to compare my uterus to something unappealing, and then take that metaphor and draw it out until someone has to tell me to stop.  Earlier this week, I compared my baby-maker to a rusty Ford pick-up.  It was only moderately offensive until I said: "Sometimes it doesn't start, so you need to turn 'er over and wait a couple of seconds."  Followed by, "and then it makes this noise..."

2.  Remarking that a professor's handwriting is harder to decipher than hieroglyphics before the discovery of the Rosetta Stone while brandishing a marked essay is only charming until they walk through the door.

3.  No one should be congratulated on receiving a large inheritance.  It usually means that a close family member has died.

4.  The wrong place to work out your complicated feelings about a half-forgotten folktale about birds is in front of fifteen twelve year olds.  Especially if you've just climbed three flights of steps after three weeks of sleepless nights and three years of straight cigarettes.  Simultaneously asthmatic and spasmatic.

5.  My father isn't interested in hearing me curse, or in examining all the ways in which the waiter at Rocco's Trattoria looks and acts like a cast member of the People Under the Stairs.

This was the final week of undergrad classes.  I'm glad I could nail the coffin shut with some classy moments.

What is your favorite term of endearment? 
Submitted by lostdwarf.

Miss Muffy.  Tired girl.  Sweetcheeks.  Pumpkin head.  Wifie.  Camisole.  The secret "language of affinity" that slips out of tired mouths before ten in the morning most days, and, some days, all day. 

"Although most people think of the gonads as the male testicles, both sexes actually have gonads: In females the gonads are the ovaries. The female gonads produce female gametes (eggs); the male gonads produce male gametes (sperm)." -- KidsHealth.org

Graduating with a B.A. is emasculating.  Trying, with limited success, to find a job in the service industry with a B.A. is emasculating.  Moving back into your parents house is emasculating.  Reading MacLean's, telling you that your generation is emotionally immature, is emasculating.  Having your grades drop in your final semester is emasculating. 

I'm reclaiming emasculating as an adjective for the universal condition of being young and without options.  After all, my ovaries are balls, too.  Me and my lady gametes are dreaming of a different world, a different day, and less student debt.

Exactly like it sounds. 

But then again, nobody likes children anymore.  Or shoes with curled-up toes.  Bottle rockets.  Seltzer.  Hand-shake buzzers.  Lapel flowers.  Vol au vents.  Hair so long it gives you a wedgie in your sleep.

All but the last should be reclaimed.  Shit tips on long, long hair is gross.