They’re about a month late, but we finally spotted prairie crocuses yesterday. This week has also featured a sprinkling of fresh green leaves, and a large number of runaway grass fires. It’s a very dry spring.
Enter Captain Awesomedog Jr.
I have not been blogging. (I sry, my badz.) The following is a big part of why.
I am very, very fussy about dogs, and so is my husband. Generally speaking, I dislike them intensely. I do not want to be slobbered on, sat on, pestered for attention when I’m trying to visit the owner, have my stuff chewed, be pushed in on when I step into someone else’s home, etc., etc.
But when we met this dog, it was at a home that made me realize: What I dislike about most dogs isn’t the dog. This mutt here was a semi-feral rescue who was fostered for three months at a highly excellent breeder/trainer. She came to us “pre-loaded” with sitting, watching for cues, leash training, crate training, socialization, and food training. (That’s a big deal, because she was starving and desperate, and she’s still learning to get over her instinctive desperation.) That convinced me that the problem with dogs isn’t dogs.
Which makes the solution for me personally fairly simple: If owners are the main problem, I can choose not to be the problem.
Yellowstone: Water and Wildlife
My oldest child told me what kind of bird this is, but of course I’ve forgotten already. I just thought it looked cool, standing there.
Water over multicoloured rocks.
Good Listening: I Am Hope
It’s a rainy Monday here, and after a crazy week and weekend, I’m going to cocoon with my coffee cup and the world of words. But first, I wanted to share with you this stop-motion vid from Canadian musician Deni Gauthier. It tells quite a story alongside the song.
Deni on YouTube | Deni’s website | Deni’s Nimbit Store
I’m off to finish up some work on deadline, and I’ll be back with you once I get my desk cleared a bit.
What did Dove sell me, anyway?
As part of the discussion on Real Beauty and what I’ve learned as a chubby chick, Sheila Hollinghead said this:
I teared up watching the Dove commercial and here’s why. We are more than what we see in the mirror. The personalities of the women showed through, making them more beautiful to those describing them. And that to me is worthy of a tear.
To which I said: Yes. Absolutely, yes. I teared up too, and I watched it several times, including with my teenage daughter. It really does resonate.
The part that felt a bit funky to me was when the one gal said, “It’s so important…I need to be more grateful for my natural beauty.”
I watched it several times, and that bugged me increasingly with each viewing. I felt like something more subtle than the usual selling of discontent and insecurity was happening: I was being sold my own positive emotions, with the company’s products as a rider. But how? It doesn’t have the usual feel of marketing. They don’t even tell you to buy anything.
Or do they?
I’ve used Dove products since long before I heard of the Real Beauty campaign, because I have sensitive skin. So after a bit, I got to thinking about what’s in my bathroom cabinet. Continue reading
Yellowstone: Paint Pots
New this week: A previously published short story of mine, The Significance of Snowflakes, is now available for free in your choice of e-reader formats. If you’d like to read it, click here and scroll down to the download links.
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Real Beauty and what I’ve learned as a chubby chick
In my youth, I had a great body.
And I don’t want it back.
The latest Dove Real Beauty video has been going viral on social media, and it is emotional. It touches a core nerve with women. It makes us cry, and we almost don’t even know why.
I suspect it’s the contrast between what we’re regularly told by media messages and our peers’ attitudes, and the thoughtfully-crafted tagline: You are more beautiful than you think.
On the other hand, Jazz at little drops has a much-needed reality check for us all.
Why are so many females I know having such a strong reaction to the sketches video, being moved to the point of tears?
Because the message that we constantly receive is that girls are not valuable without beauty.
Brave, strong, smart? Not enough. You have to be beautiful. And “beautiful” means something very specific, and very physical.
So here’s a weird life choice I’ve made, or at least, in this culture’s context it is: The conscious choice to be overweight.
Let me clarify that. What I mean is the conscious choice not to manage my weight or worry about it. For me, in my current lifestyle, that translates to overweight. For somebody else, it’d be something different, and that’s normal.
Foliage
New this week: A previously published short story of mine, The Significance of Snowflakes, is now available for free in your choice of e-reader formats. If you’d like to read it, click here and scroll down to the download links.
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More photos from Yellowstone last October. One interesting thing about the highly mineralized water: It very rapidly fossilizes what falls into it. The delicate detail in some of the springs is exquisite (see third image).
Neverendings
Memoirists understand the world in a different way than you or I.
Memoirists don’t like endings because endings signify death.
In a sense, their best skill is time travel,
and for the express purpose of never concluding anything.
-Jill Domschot
They say it was the first day of spring, but it could have been January, or February. The snowbank along the lane was still the height of my shoulder. The path to the house was bordered by a two-foot-tall cut in the drift that swept in over it during the last storm. Personally, I’m waiting for Narnia’s Snow Queen to go sledding by, because that would explain a lot.
It seems that time is frozen. It ceased to pass by, somewhere in the depths of winter, and here we will stay forever.
I think wild thoughts as the hours tick by, second after second. I think of moving away. I think of uprooting my entire life in drastic and impossible measures. If endings signify death, then I’ve become an obsessive fiend, whiling away the days by plotting the murder of winter. I would drop her through a wormhole and into an alternate universe, one where my northern realm is someplace so faraway as to be imaginary. I would vapourize her white, unmoving swells and turn them into an ocean of warm blue-green living water. She is a sea, and she drowns me.
Weeks later, still the snow remains. If the White Witch has been by, it’s to cringe at the dripping of the eaves and to conjure yet another storm. Yesterday, it blew down from the north, cold and sleety. Today, on the icy roads, my oldest ditched the car. It’s not a big deal — it happens in winter, and there’s nothing to hit out here in the middle of nowhere. The only targets are more snowbanks.
Winter writes a memoir. Time is frozen, and if we travel it, we do so by memory of things that have ceased to exist. Things like the colour green, things like leaves. I thought, the other day, that I saw green tips on the stark grey branches as we drove down towards town. It was a mirage brought on by a dehydrated brain that has gone too long without the natural spectrum.
Endings signify death, but sometimes also life. And the death of a foul thing can be the resurrection of the good. I cling to that thought, and complete another pass of the cycle of words begun by my friend:
Memoirists don’t like endings because endings signify death. And yet their duty is to embrace them, because the death of the lesser means the life of the greater. The memoirist’s duty is to impart the presence of a life which lasts beyond the final page.
Even as we freeze the moments, we are still traversing them. That’s winter’s doom, and my hope. Whether we turn the pages backward or forward, or pin them open in one place, at some point the warmth of other days must shine through and melt these chosen portraits — ice sculptures of the mind — to running water.
Things like the colour green — they do exist. I do believe in fairies, or rather, in resurrection. And I hope my best skill is time travel, for the express purpose of never concluding the season to come: The renaissance.
New this week: A previously published short story of mine, The Significance of Snowflakes, is now available for free in your choice of e-reader formats. If you’d like to read it, click here and scroll down to the download links.
Where I’ve Been
I realize it’s been a particularly long spring break here at Scienda. My apologies.
What I’ve been doing:
- Submitting my work for consideration. (Those of you who’ve been around awhile will know that I write magazine articles and books.) Nothing in particular to announce — it’s just part of the ongoing cycle of writerish things. Along with that, planning a revision process for an existing book and beginning concept work for a new one. I know: Boooooorrrring. Done talking now.
- Giving time to an editorial client whose project I love, and who has patiently adapted to my multi-project schedule as we’ve worked together over the last few months. It’s a unique book and one that I feel privileged to be part of.
- Doing a family recording session with our kids and their band. Our sound engineer was phenomenal. He turned our living room into a studio and gave the kids a really positive first-ever recording experience. Worth every cent for that part alone.
- Doing logo design for said band of youngsters. We got a T-shirt design together for their summer gigs, and they’ve been taking pre-order requests from family and friends.
- Working on the logistics and administration of the Bible conference my husband chairs. We’re at the five-year point, and we’re assessing the project for viability and direction.
- Watching TV shows — something I almost never have done in the past. I’m finally old and tired enough that I get it now: disconnecting brainlessly is nice sometimes. Also, Netflix makes it a much more tolerable experience without the commercials. Somebody asked me what I watch: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, space shows, and crime dramas that annoy me with their bad science and worse methodology.
- Learning how to use a smartphone. Can we just not talk about this, please? It’s humiliating that I own such an object.
- Reading about religious and theological issues, and thinking I should write about some of them. Finding I don’t have the energy.
- Judging for a major genre contest. I’d love to be done this weekend, but that won’t be the case, since kids, husband and social circle have me booked from here to Sunday night.
- Reading a new book out from Athol Dickson, which I shall be reviewing. I don’t do a lot of book reviews, but every so often something catches my eye and I get a participatory streak on. I admire Dickson’s writing, though I don’t always emotionally agree with it, so to speak. I figure anyone who can challenge me and capture my interest so well is worth supporting.
- And we’re still waiting for winter to end here in Canada. I’m really tempted to do a Yucky Photo Essay and just expose my corner of the world in all its current miserableness. I feel like time has stopped.
So, I’ll be around as things ease up. In the meantime, thanks for bearing with me.
