Living in

Manchester, England England
Across the Atlantic Sea





Sixties England has a strange attraction much talked about. Though I never understood the screaming JohnandPaulandGeorge (because honestly, Ringo?) worshippers in sold out concert halls of days of yore, there is something about those people and that time and older England in general - the Stones, the Beatles, Donovan, the flurry of minidresses and long hair and technicolour and black and white press photos. Many biographers have discussed it better than I can, but I can appreciate its presence.

We live in a time removed from that one in possibility and attitude. We have our own heroes, more individual perhaps but still there - bike messengers and Michael Franti, Kimya Dawson and Chris Sharma. We can't live in the past, but it's still a beautiful refuge.



Over and out.

Homeward Ho!, For it's Warmer than the Yukon

Long bus rides evoke a sense of movement and it doesn't really matter where to. Nighttime spins around and Bob Dylan's offbeat, off-pitch voice seems vaguely, though falsely resonant. I forget my jacket and remember once more not to underestimate Canadian winters. The border control man is suspicious of me. It's his job to be suspicious, even at three in the morning when I am usually absurdist, desperate, gloriously happy or asleep. I try to look non-threatening. When we clamber back on I note that David, the two-year old who already speaks more French than I do ("Quoi, papa?") is being both sticky and loud, but it only subliminally registers. I think drowsily of Sunday night and guitar strums I heard once, long ago, around the fire that I can't go back to. It takes me a long time to notice that the bus isn't moving, but I don't care. Two hours of stop-motion jerkiness and the black New York bus driver with perfectly round John Lennon glasses appraises the situation in a dry drawl. I don't care. I know many people would be nervous or anxious or irritated at this delay. My younger self would, but I don't care. I sleep and dream of Central Asia sand.

It's morning. We've moved a bit. We are now on a desolate and disconsolate shoulder on a stretch of highway and stuck again. The brakes are frozen. I abandon my seat up front with David and his mother and go hang out with the two New Zealand girls I know. We play the "guess the capital" game. I realize how much my geographical knowledge has deteriorated since seventh grade.

Two hours later the bus suddenly unfreezes. With a disaffected shrug, the bus driver fires 'er up and we roll on out to Albany.

From Albany to New York the suburban stripped sprawl hits. The signs advertising a better life through a better car, a better vodka, a better toothpaste, a better condom. The fast-food, quick and easy simple worthless satisfactions, the millions of closeted lives. I feel sick and sad. All of it imposes, impinges, attacks - the surreal airbrushed longhaired figurine woman who represents an ideal I feel wrong for not desiring, the dirtiness of the broken-down station bathroom, the people who just seem so crass and impatient all the time - "I ain't got no change for no twenty." I want to curl up in a corner and block it all out, but a small part of me is glad I can still feel strongly about something.

We roll into Port Authority five hours after schedule and New York hits all of a sudden. It's overwhelming and we try not to act less like tourists and more like cool indie kids from Montreal with giant climber packs. Because that's what we are. Clearly.

We walk forty blocks down to Chinatown. It's a long trek through the sunlight. I'm wearing only a flannel shirt and a short skirt, and my leggings and legwarmers are too warm for this weather. It's an odd feeling - the feeling of being too warm for the weather. The total absence of snow. We stop in a bakery place. It turns to be a goldmine of cheap delights, disguisting pies and almond bubble tea. We arrive in the heart of Chinatown. Everything is very crowded, pressing, confusing. Everyone seems to be advertising everything, including the harried little woman with the sign and unintelligible accent. She demands ten dollars from us and points us around the corner, where a bus lies in waiting discreetly and unpretentiously. Within five minutes it leaves and spirits us to Philadelphia without the merest of hiccups. And then it's the SEPTA home, the same train I always took to shows at the Trocadero or the Art Museum or the Ritz theatre.

I walk down the streets around my house. They're still the same. Nothing has changed here in the little time that I've been gone. I take the key from its spot and unlock the door. The house is cold and clean. It doesn't change either, on the surface. I throw down my pack and make a mess and ravenously consume whatever's in the fridge, knowing I now have all of the time in the world. Fifteen minutes later the phone rings.

"You have a collect call from..."

The next word is said with so much happiness, so much ebullience, so much laughter at the general state of the world that I can't help but smile into the phone. Suddenly there's no time again.

Post 101! A softer world.

Adventures abound I suppose, but mine have been small of late.

I do laundry.
I try to conjugate the word "faire" in French.
I'm cantankerous.
I read the Czech news and marvel about how little effect it has on my life.
I watch the snow fall and hear it crash off the roofs.
I eat molasses cookies.
I plot with hippies about how to create a humanity that runs on photosynthesis and nutella.
I get strong.
I watch my roommate shake her butt at me.
I pick my nose.
I listen to this song:



and let its ebullience let me fall in love with life

I discover a webcomic called "A softer world" and enjoy with impunity a sort of kitcshiness that was always gently scorned in my direct, pragmatic, dryly witty childhood home.








This is England, this is how we feel.

On a clear day

happiness can be found in a pair of old skates, a free rink on the mountain where they play old french songs and a mexican-quebecois flirts with you in the cutest way possible, leading to a language barrier as you discover that you no longer speak spanish and never learnt french. In skating alone, remembering the crossover and rediscovering that you have no use for a hockey stop. In watching a long line of hassidic jew children run/march/teeter along the side of the lake, chaperoned by tutors who speak in a very proud anglophone. Sometimes one of the children slips off the edge onto the ice, and even though it's a little mean I grin because they remind me of a line of marching penguins with a clumsy waddler here and there. In understanding snippets of French. In daydreaming as you skate. In a beloved pair of climbing pants worn skating. In running errands literally, dodging the crowds and venturing in climbing pants into stores where it is really not acceptable to wear climbing pants. In the slightly melting snow, saddening but yet somehow joyful.

The past few days have held only benign adventures, but life can't always be a whirlwind of excitement.

A woman happily in love, she burns the soufflé. A woman unhappily in love, she forgets to turn on the oven.

The bars of Saint-Laurent are teeming with life every night, but Valentine's day is especially popular if one wants either to grope in public or moon on about how said significant other is soo perfect for them, or, if worst comes to worst, go the cheap hookup route that seems to be everpresent in university.

My compatriots and I visited the Jupiter Room with none of the aforementioned aims. The Jupiter Room is a small bar that thrives on being retro, but I quite like it. The music is old, the lightshow is ethereal, and there is a distinct lack of wanton ass-grabbing. Audrey Hepburn's Sabrina is playing silently on the televisions behind the bar. There are only a few patrons, there is a lack of the swelling sweaty crowds that frequent the more popular clubs. The entire place glows with a dim red light. Though the bartenders apparently can't make a proper martini (my Alaskan climber bartender friend was most disappointed), it's the perfect place to go dance to the songs of yesteryear and pretend to be sixies and fabulous.

I don't know why most clubs today don't resonate with me. I don't like bopping sweatily to the lyrics of "bitches in the club" and being mean to the drunken guys who try to grab me. I find the whole scene fake and somehow hollow. I don't know if this inhibits my ability to have a "good time" by conventional standards, but I can't internally justify to myself getting hammered beyond the point of cognition, dressing in the same low top as every other girl in the room, meshing body parts with strangers and hoping to get some. The possibity certainly presents itself that I am a frigid bitch, but that's the thing - I really, really like dancing. Maybe that's why I like funk concerts and half-empty dancefloors instead of the teeming humanity of places like Krush and Metropolis.

I realize now that when my children ask me what it was like in the days of Kanye and Rihanna, I won't be able to tell them. Instead, I'll say, "Well, I climbed a lot and skied a lot and danced to The Who." And maybe they'll do the same.

I also witnessed my good friends Max and Leon get engaged for québecois tax reasos. That story can be read here, for those not faint of heart or tongue.
I rather like life.

Adventures, various:

I haven't been a very good adventurer this week. I've been tired and sleepy and impetus-lacking. I've decided that I'm not skiing again until I feel like it, which is a decision I wouldn't make in high school but will make in university because I can.

Pseudo-adventures:
-Wandering around a rainy mountain in complete solitude, discovering a stranger's letter to the universe left on a park bench.
-Attending a friend's Valentine's day jazz band concert at Grumpy's pub and simultaneously developing a girlcrush on both his roommates.
-Giving people lit candles at an impromptu ice cream party.
-Going to the vegan kitchen and eating a delicious tupperware meal in complete darkness.
-Watching my friend's band play Beatles songs at the Engineering Pub and marveling at the number of attractive girls there for Valentine's day (normally the engineering pub is a shithole with a female:male ratio of about 1:9.)
-Completely acing two job interviews in one day, being told I had "exactly the type of background they were looking for"
-Discovering an ice bar - an outdoor bar made of blocks of ice in downtown.
-Being verbally assaulted by a pair of used-looking blond girls in the back of a taxi. (My streak of feeling viciously better, cooler, prettier and generally far more awesome than certain blond girls continues)
-Brilliant flowers on a rainy day in February.
-The disturbing spike in free condom distribution around the fourteenth, and a subsequent story from my friend from ski team who started a condom collection at the age of twelve which grew to around 30 pieces. Several years later, after realizing her collection was expired and generally gross, she blew up all the condoms like balloons and left them around a friend's dorm.

Celebrate love, everyone.

Adventure 7: The Odyssey

While waiting around for a job interview in the rain (it rains here sometimes, to add to the lovely weather patterns, and now that I take hydrology I always thing of ) I stumbled into an old used bookstore. I love old used bookstores. I love the informality, the mustiness, the random old photographs, the fact that it's all a mess. I had about thirty minutes to kill, so I browsed aimlessly.

I'm reminded of the days of summer Prague when I had nothing to do but explore the world. I'd go in and out of secondhand book stores and buy up old stories and poetry books and translate lyric poets. I like new books too, but I love the yellow nostalgia of old ones far more. I grew up with stories meant for boys in the 1930's and though it gave me an anachronistic view of life for the first bit, I miss them. When I go home, I'll spend time in front of a fire reading and reminiscing and loving life.

Anyway, these establishments are run by anachronistic people. I could easily see myself being an antique bookstore owner. I bought a book about a guy who did diplomatic and spy work in Central Asia in the thirties and it's the most adventurous, funny, interesting narrative I've ever read. The shop owner talked to me excitedly about how soldiers in India in the 1890s still wore plate armour and carried swords.

Fuck television. Long live old books.

Adventure 6: Canada's really big

The reason I'm behind on adventure posting is an excellent one - I've been having what ended up being one of the bigger adventures of my life to date and consequently can't actually walk.



This weekend I skied the Canadian Ski Marathon. The Canadian Ski Marathon is a 160.4 kilometer ski over two days. It's a point to point tour over hills and plains and woods and farmland. It's beautiful. It's also cold, hard, and long. Ski conditions were slow and headwinds were high, but forests were still and wild and beautiful and the farmland was picturesque (although at points discouraging when one looked across the expanse of Canada and saw the long line of skiers ahead and behind and realized that there were about 56 more kilometers to ski that day, 43 of which had to be skied at a fast pace to make the time limit).

Highlights of the weekend:
-Waking up at five thirty in the morning in a high school classroom to Albertan country music. Sample lyrics:
The Chev got stuck and the Ford got stuck
But the Chev unstuck when the Dodge showed up
But the Dodge got stuck in the tractor rut,
Which eventually pulled out the Ford
With some difficulty
(Full lyrics here)
-Rest stations. I have never been that excited to see chocolate-covered peanuts in my entire life.
-Having my ski bindings fail 15km into the first day. I hereby raise a hearty middle finger to Salomon, the makers of a ski binding that inevitably always breaks down when exposed to snow and/or cold condtions.
-Being served honey water by the Canadian army. I have a rather high opinion of the Canadian army now.
-Being passed by a team of 55 to 75 year old men (they were really cool, two of them had represented the US at the 1968, 1972 and 1976 Olympics)
-Talking about how Emil Zatopek was our personal hero with one of those old men on section six when wax was failing and it seemed highly unlikely that we'd make time limit.
-The long sections of beauty.
-The brutal five kilometer downhill where I fell three times at high speeds.
-The songs stuck in my head: Canada's Really Big, The Barack Obama song, FC Slavia's anthem, aforementioned Albertan Country, lots and lots of Czech folk, songs from Hair and songs from Rent
-team camaraderie and the friendship shared by people who do things like these
-standing on top of the podium with a bunch of guys as the only girl who finished in the shortened limit time. I shouldn't be cocky, but it was a really nice feeling.
-Seeing all the people who were doing CSM Gold - skiing 160 km with a 20 pound backpack and sleeping outside in the Canadian winter in a bale of hay. A lot of them were about 60. I want to be that cool when I'm 60.
-post-race delirium - I literally didn't know what was going on around me and wanted to melt into solid objects
-the showers running out of hot water, resulting in a cold shower post 80km of skiing in the cold

Right now it's difficult to so much as put on pants, so I'm giving myself a break from adventures until Wednesday. I think adventures were had for the time being. I also pulled an all-nighter last night writing a hydrology analysis. All I want is chocolate and sleep.

Adventure! 5 - Lost in the Village

We were going to a movie premiere of Polytechnique, which I scored free tickets to from a random newspaper reporter while waiting in line for HAIR tickets (HAIR is awesome, by the way, despite or perhaps because of a lacklustre plot and odd songs), but we went the wrong way on the metro and ended up in the Village. The village is colourful, happy, and utterly non-threatening. My (awesome, bisexual, dating a French/British rugby player) roommate and I held hands and wandered through various fetish shops, trying to decide whether or not to get our boyfriends pink sequined man thongs. This impromptu excursion was followed my croissants at a cafebar whose proprietor fixed my french accent and offered us free baklava when we sat there for two hours.

[post a heartfelt and prolonged goodbye from the cafebar owner]
Roommate (who is ridiculously, shockingly, mindnumbingly stunning): I always feel awkward when guys are that nice to me.
Me: Taylor, honestly, no one is hitting on you! They were FLAMINGLY GAY! (loud enough for most of street to hear)
Random short fat black dude: Hey ladies, I'm looking for a girl myself right now. Naw, I'm just playing wit'chall! How ya doin'! You have yourself a good night now!

Adventure? 4: A Compendium of Details

Again, I found myself hard-pressed to shatter the world with new discoveries today, but it wasn't a waste. Today I found a ginkgo leaf. A single golden uncrumpled leaf, spry as though it was October, lying on the icy pavement. No ginkgo trees grow in downtown campus, and in any case all the trees have been bare for months. It's tempting to make an analogy or write something pithy, but I won't.

I also explored the den of my residence. No one goes there, the place is deserted, and for whatever reason I had never been in it. My residence reminds me of my mental image of Ivy-league or prepschool housing during the fifties, and the den somehow hit me with a wave of nostalgia. There's an old, unused bar, record sleeves strewn about, a few old books, a foosball table, a musty smell. I feel sad and I don't know why. I feel for whatever reason that I was born into a matter-of-fact age.

Post-script.

Adventure 3: Interview

My day today was fairly lame, but this week is relatively stressful, and I have a rather scary weekend coming up, so I'm cutting myself some slack as far as fabulous adventures go. I had an interview today for a job I really want and I'm not entirely thrilled with how it turned out. Hopefully I'll get hired anyway, I tend to underestimate myself in these things and my credentials are very good. Either way, stressful. Stress is fun!

Adventure 2: Female to Femme

Last night after my midterm (which went surprisingly uncatastrophically, although I did get yelled at for not keeping my eyes on my own paper, which was because I was staring at the driver's license of the girl next to me and trying to determine what province she was from) I went to a screening of Female to Femme given by Queer McGill. It was an interesting experience - I'm pretty sure I was one of the only straight people in the room, and it was fun to watch my friends hit on each other in a distinctly girly way. The movie itself wasn't actually that good - it highlighted the struggle of femmes, which are lesbians who dress and look like straight girls, which is apparently a problem in the gay community because of a lack of identity and a bias against lesbian feminists who dress in a way that "submits to the patriarchy". Essentially it's a counter-countercultural problem, or a counter-subcultural problem, or a sub-subcultural problem, which is a niche that most people aren't used to thinking about. For someone like me, it seemed to dramatize a problem that was relatively small to begin with, but to be fair I've never really had to worry about this conundrum much. Either way, it was an interesting experience to be around people whose lifestyle and dynamics were so different from mine, and it was definitely less uncomfortable than the time when I went to a foodbank fundraiser with a local Christian group and they told me my acts of kindness were entirely meaningless because I didn't accept Jesus as my Lord and Saviour. Fun times.

Adventure 1: Federalists vs. Separatists

My goal to have an adventure every day was realized today with a decent game of capture the flag in two feet of snow. There were proper flags, Canadian and Quebecois, and lots of running and tackling. The separatists lost a lot, just like in real life! I wore running shoes to attempt to invest in speed by sacrificing warmth, which was a horrible idea because my feet got cold. Either way, memorable experience, success.