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.

Cruising Altitude

How do you feel today, Ru?

Almost immediately, I answered. Misaligned.

Maybe it’s the encroaching full moon. Maybe it’s the mittful of black currant jelly babies I ate yesterday afternoon. Maybe I’m exhausted from slogging through last week’s work and weather. Maybe I’m preoccupied by The Blooding of Jack Absolute. Or maybe it’s just that I’ve been lazy about my practice.

Instead of maintaining my nightly prayer and daily meditation, I let it slip to every other day and every second night. From there, it was easy to drop to a couple of times a week, and then to whenever I remember. It’s hard to be diligent for an extended period, not because I believe any less in the greater power of universal consciousness (or God, to keep it simple), but because I fall prey to the pitfalls of this mortal coil. I’m tired. I’m stressed. I’ve consumed too much sugar. Whatever the case, having achieved cruising altitude with prior due diligence, I coast while the coasting is clear.

Life, however, is meant to be turbulent. It sucks, but it’s true. Smooth sailing is a state of mind, certainly attainable but not sustainable without course correction when things get rough. The waves don’t have to be of epic proportion, either. Little ripples wear me down as easily as resuming my practice builds me up; it takes a few days for the cracks to show, but here’s the miracle:

I can regain my altitude almost immediately.

My mind is a terrible child. She lies in the weeds and waits to pounce when my back is turned. I can’t silence her completely, but I can, as one Middle Eastern sage suggests, know myself to be “the changeless witness of a changeful mind”.

Have you ever watched yourself flip out? You know it’s you pitching that fit, yet you’re remotely surprised at the same time. You may ask yourself later what that was all about – but do you ever answer the question? I confess to being mystified by my own behaviour, and there are often valid reasons for it, but my preferred state is to be that changeless witness, that objective observer who understands what’s happening but who also has the antidote.

This morning, I recognized my dip toward the cloud and caught myself before descent into mental chaos. I knew exactly what to do. Yoga, meditation, gratitude, in that order. My mind is still working, but she doesn’t own me as she tried to do on waking. In fact, she’s almost dopey, thus freeing me up to write this post and perhaps finish another story this afternoon. I wish I could say I nail it every time (even better if I remained at 30,000 feet without effort), but I’m only human ... some of the time.

With love,

“Snow Dance”

The sky thickened like pudding, clear and watery to start, gradually deepening until the colour was obscured by cloud. Ominous cloud. Scowling, gun metal grey cloud, loaded with menace and threatening Armageddon.

The first flakes were pellets no bigger than Styrofoam crumbs, and so sporadic that you couldn’t be sure they were real as they skittered at eye level past the window.

My rose tea latte was perfect, black and half-sweet, blistering hot under four inches of foam. Using a plastic plug in lieu of a spoon, I savoured the mousse while watching the snow pellets blossom into flakes, some joining forces to create frozen flowers, others flying solo, smaller but no less troublesome once their numbers increased. The line up at the counter lengthened accordingly as people streamed in, thinking to wait out the worst over coffee or at least get it to go and beat the blizzard home.

Snow has a funny way of falling. Some flakes float straight toward the ground. Others zip by at an angle, driven hard with no set destination. Still others dance like fairies in the wind, flitting back and forth, up and down; crystalline butterflies sketching zigzag paths against the winter sky. It’s quite simply beautiful. It’s even more beautiful with a hot drink, a warm scarf, and soft jazz playing in the background.

I take forty minutes to empty a medium cup. In the space of those minutes, the world went from bright and sunny to blazing white to the damp, dismal grey customary of February on the west coast. The crazy snow fell but didn’t stick. Like my half sweet black rose latte, it was just enough to be enjoyed without regrettable repercussions down the road.

That’s why I live here.

* * *

It's been a while since I've done a writing exercise. A little artistic embellishment here, but basically this was how my Sunday morning went.

The Red Bag of Courage

It’s my favourite colour. The colour of passion, of life, of rage and the root chakra. Its palette ranges from shell pink to cabernet, but my favourite hue lies somewhere between crimson and garnet; a rich, sanguine, luscious red, deeper than ruby but brighter then blood.

While my hair was dyed fire engine red for years, I was not self-conscious about it, probably because I was standing underneath it and couldn’t see myself coming from half a block away. It never occurred that I might be brave to be so bold. I literally didn’t see it except in the mirror, and even then, my stylist is so adept at her art that the colour was stunning, never shocking.

I admire women who wear red, especially in coats, hats and/or shoes. My older sister has a red wool coat that looks absolutely awesome, but when I remarked on how cool she looked walking up the street, she replied that she felt like she was screaming for attention – something no one in my family (my hair antics notwithstanding) ever does deliberately. I assured her that she wasn’t as loud as she feared, it was the proximity to herself that lent the illusion. The same thing happens when I wear my Flyers jersey: no logo is larger than the one on my chest.

This past weekend, my sisters and I convened to sort through our dear mother’s clothes. Mum was always well-dressed, accenting a neutral outfit with a flashy scarf, a bit of bling, or a pretty cardigan. She wore lots of blue and green, cream and taupe. No black. No grey. Her cardies were mostly floral prints. There was not a lot of red in her wardrobe—yet she accessorized with it brilliantly.

A scarlet car coat hung in her closet. I pinched her crimson pashmina. My wee sis opened one of a dozen (I kid you not) shoeboxes and exclaimed, “Her Christmas shoes!”, a pair of low heeled pumps as red as the slippers of Oz. Mum wore them during the holidays. And then, the purse. The cavernous, multi-pocketed satchel that she carried with her on many a lunch date with Ter and me over the years. It’s red. Cardinal red. I’d have claimed it on the spot but didn’t, not because it’s neon bright, but because it’s far bigger than any bag I ever intend to carry. It’ll be a splendid addition to someone’s collection, though. Someone with the spot-on fashion sense my mother had.

At the end of the day, surrounded by boxes stuffed with sweaters, scarves and shoes, we reminisced with wonder about Mum’s style and my older sister observed, “She wasn’t afraid of colour.”

Mum was right. Be bold. Be brave. Wear red—and if you can’t wear it, accessorize!

Kettle Me This

Green tea is steeped at a lower heat than black tea, and since I drink a lot of green, my next kettle will have a variable temperature feature. There’s one at work , and if you want an endurance test for small appliances, a staff of eighty-plus will surely provide it. The office kettle is boiling—or close to it—from seven-thirty a.m. to five p.m. every weekday, and I don’t remember when it arrived. It’s also worth noting that no “off the rack” kettle is designed for that sort of heavy duty use. We’ve burned through a few in my time (one day I’ll tell you about the nifty “disco” model that last three days before it went back to the store), and this one has been operating for years.

So when our home kettle threatened to blow up some weeks ago, I told Ter I’d prefer one with a variable temperature feature. Naturally, I couldn’t remember the brand of the office version, but of the few options available on the Canadian Tire website, the Oster model looked almost exactly the same. And it was on sale—at 50% off the regular price! Score!

Oh, but then I noticed the online reviews. Only one post recommended the kettle as worth the effort; a handful of others complained bitterly about leaks and shorts and generally poor performance. Curses.

I researched a few other options, but no real luck. Either the price was ridiculous compared to “212 degrees only” kettles, or the reviews warned against investing in any of them. I conceded to the thriftier option: if we had to buy a replacement, I’d settle for a remake of our Black and Decker, which has been stellar from the first go. In fact, I think it might be as old as the office kettle, if not similarly overworked.

No matter. Our kettle wasn’t crapping out; we only thought it was. Having dodged the leaky base/crappy performance Oster bullet, I returned to work the following Monday and started my morning routine: fill up the kettle, set it to 170 degrees and switch it on to heat while I empty the drainer and zoom to my office for my mug and a scoop of Japanese sencha.

Guess what? The superstar much abused overused and years old office kettle is an Oster with an variable temperature feature.

*sigh*