Giving Up for Lent

I’m learning that being better and being different are not the same thing. I can choose to be better than I am, but I cannot make myself be different from what I am.

What I am is, as you are, human.

When Spirit Ru ordered her compostable container for this go-round, she chose the Virgo options package—the gory details available in any astrological writing, but the best description I’ve found being in The Secret Language of Birthdays by Gary Goldschneider and Joost Elffers. While reading the profile of those born on September 2, I wondered how two complete strangers could possibly have nailed every facet of my personality. At my mortal worst, I can be fussy, judgemental, cynical, moody, unyielding and/or explosive. Not pretty.

I can also be generous, compassionate, loving, fair and authentic. The pros might make a shorter list than the cons, but the items indicated on the former weigh more than those on the latter. (My story and I’m sticking to it). I suspect most of the pros came with me from Before. The real challenge lies in mastering my dark side. I can be brutally intolerant, and authenticity is not always a positive trait. Staying on top of my human is truly a practice and some days are doomed. I am especially harsh at fiscal year end, when the stress of balancing the books at work chisels away at my sense of humour, not to mention my patience and normally egalitarian nature.

So, for Lent this year, I thought I’d try to dial it back a bit. Despite neither of us being Catholic, Ter has been studying up on it, and her research suggested that, rather than giving up something like sugar or cigarettes, why not try to be better at something like, say, forgiveness? What a great idea! Don’t make it a sacrificial, negative thing. Put a positive spin on it and improve in a more spiritual way. I can do this, I thought, especially since I’m already working on being more Zen!

Alas, by 7:45 a.m. on Ash Wednesday, Ter had said to me, “There you go again,” three times.

Then I arrived at work. During our mid-morning check in, I burst out ranting about some hare-brained new policy and she said, “There you go again.”

D-oh! Recalibrating ...

I realized something in the following few days. Good bad or indifferent, Virgo Ru is apparently here to stay. I can practice improving on my human, but I will not be able to change it. Nor should I; it’s part of what I am, if not who, and the beauty of this life lies in its flexibility. Every day is a fresh start. The day before doesn’t count and tomorrow doesn’t matter. I’ll never be different from what I am, but by being more mindful, I can be better than I am.

Wish me luck.

With love,

Save Me From Daylight Savings

I am a night owl. I can’t be one right now, but once I am retired and can claim my life 24/7, I’ll be up all night, or most of it, and the clock will cease to matter.

I know, I know. It shouldn’t matter now, but it does—never more than on those notorious weekends known for the infamous “time change”. Like this one. I started winding up a week ago, grumbling and muttering at folks cheerily espousing the extra hour of daylight as if it’s a gift. There is no “extra hour” of daylight, people. There’s just a shift in the distribution.

Being a night owl, I am by default not a morning person. A sun that was up before me last week will rise tomorrow after I get to work ... and that vexes me. Terribly.

I know, I know. If I relax and wait a few weeks, the sun will once more be up before I am. In fact, the birds will be awake before the three-year-old who lives downstairs, and by either means, I will still be dragged from dreamland against my preference to sleep until I can’t sleep anymore. Someone who gets into her jammies as soon as she gets home from work doesn’t need the sun to set after nine o’clock. I need it to set before nine o’clock, when I go to bed!

Some night owl. I can’t stay awake past the three-year-old who lives downstairs. That’s my love/hate relationship with time. I get up at crap o’clock because my job demands it—the best job (if not the best money) I ever had was working the graveyard at the local radio station. I’d get home at 6:30 a.m., go straight to bed, get up at 1:00 p.m. and have a life until I left for work at 11:00 p.m. On days off, I kept the routine and stayed up to write all night. I was never more prolific than I was in those days. If only the salary had been as good as my current day job’s. I guess we all make sacrifices to get ahead.

But the spectre of daylight savings continues to goad me. I’m not wild about the return to standard time, either, except it gives me back the hour I’ve missed since early March. Every spring, I ask the question: Why? Why why why why do we continue with this stupid ritual?

It seems I am not alone. There is finally talk of abandoning the time change. The west coast States are considering it, and if they go ahead, BC will follow because of trade agreements and partnerships that demand we all work within the same time zone. California has already voted overwhelmingly in favour of staying on DST starting in 2022. Whatever, guys, just bring it.

Wait a minute. Staying on DST? That means turning the clocks forward in March and not turning them back in November! WTF?

Remember, Ru, says my inside voice, there is no “extra hour” of daylight. There’s just a shift in the distribution. Eventually, the days shorten on their own and it will be dark well in time for bed. Staying on DST means you’ll be walking home from the bus stop at twilight instead of pitch black in December.

Yeah, but it also means the sun will be coming up at nine in the morning! I’m all for abandoning daylight savings time, but let’s switch back to standard first. I mean—wait a minute. 2022? Oh. Okay. Whatever works.

I’ll be retired and a night owl by then.

Mercury in Retrograde

Though I am a Queen fan, I don’t consider myself to be a Queen fan. Not truly; not like someone who has followed the band from the beginning and has every album they ever made. Nope, I’m what’s known as a casual fan. Queen is featured on my life’s soundtrack, but not the way Duran Duran or Def Leppard are. Queen were red hot when I was a pre-teen, so of course I knew of them. I just didn’t know about them.

My older sister introduced me to them simply by asking one night in 1973 if I’d heard the song with the opera chops on our Top 40 radio station. I hadn’t, but since I shared a room with both sisters and my elder tended to switch on the radio when she came to bed after the wee ʼun and me, it was inevitable that I would hear “Bohemian Rhapsody”.

It took me years to figure out that the band responsible for those opera chops was the same band who’d done “Killer Queen” (which I actually liked better), and whose name was—huh?—Queen. They were strange and wonderful and Elton John was my favourite artist at the time, so while I couldn’t help but be aware of Queen, I owned none of their albums and bought none of their singles. I just liked it when I heard them on the radio.

“Somebody to Love”

“You’re My Best Friend”

“Bicycle Race”

Freddie Mercury’s voice was captivating in that one-in-a-million manner; you knew it when you heard it, and the things he did with it were remarkable. I had no idea what he or his colleagues looked like because rock videos as we know them didn’t exist in the 1970s. I only knew their sound. Since I was a kid who collected Elton and America albums, over-overdubbed Queen was apparently not going to win space in my record collection.

Which was okay. I had to mature before I could fully appreciate the intricacies and nuances of both the music and the vocals. Maybe they had to strip their sound, too, because the first Queen album I bought was The Game, featuring lots of bass and Freddie’s off the cuff delivery of “Another One Bites the Dust”. Then, the 80s happened. I became a young adult as Queen’s star began its descent, due in part (so legend has it) to the video for “I Want to Break Free” but probably more because they were an older band and the new wave was happening.

That’s why I didn’t take particular notice of their iconic Live Aid performance on July 13, 1985: I was waiting to see Duran Duran. When I heard a few years later that Freddie was ill, I was saddened by the prospect of the world losing such a charismatic talent. Freddie was more than a rock singer. He was a rock star.

When he died in 1991, I fell in line with industry marketing and bought up the collections. Classic Queen I, Classic Queen II, Queen’s Greatest Hits – and the utterly fabulous, my hands-down favourite, Innuendo. I guess when he learned his time was limited, Fred threw himself into recording as many tracks as he could, and he didn’t hold back. His work on that album is wrenching. Powerful. Tender. Funny. Courageous. Wistful.

Magical.

It seems timely to say all this now, after the much-hyped movie’s success and the Academy Award going to the actor who portrayed him in it. I may not have been present in Queen’s heyday, but I’m grateful for the technological marvels that enable me to catch up on what I missed the first, and even the second, time around. Thanks to Bohemian Rhapsody and Rami Malek’s stunning performance, Queen and Freddie Mercury have come around again.

Long—live—Queen.