Archive for the ‘Life’ Category
August 3rd, 2010
Please excuse the over-exposure of this photo. It’s the inevitable consequence of low lighting and late eating. For a recent family birthday dinner, we visited Ferro, and this drink, the Negroni, convinced me to blog the location.
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June 23rd, 2010
A magnitude 5.5 quake hit the Ontario-Quebec border region today. You can see the epicentre here, and read another article here.
Apparently it’s being felt as far as Ohio, but what I felt was one of those mild but noticeable “Is the earth shaking or am I having an inner ear episode?” kind of quakes. (Not that I have inner ear episodes.) That said, I still headed straight for one of the doorframes and stayed there, tweeting away and chatting to my brother-in-law before he evacuated from his building.
The lucky thing? It happened after I finished today’s yoga. Otherwise: epic balance fail.
UPDATE: Although there is no weather warning for my region, a suspected tornado ripped through Midland this evening. Here, we’re experiencing high winds but not much else. So no, the “fake lake” has yet to be sucked up by a funnel cloud. But give it time.
June 15th, 2010
I got hacked this weekend.
My pal René Walling let me know about it in an email Sunday morning, and I immediately phoned up my host to ask for help. I’m hosted through Superb, a company recommended to me by the late, great Emru Townsend (through whom I met René). When Emru made this recommendation, I had no concept of the scope of his illness, or how very dearly it would cost him and his family. If I had known, I wouldn’t have nagged him for web help. But on Sunday, I was grateful that I had.
The site was hacked by a person claiming to represent the “Lebanese Cyb3r Army.” (During the examination of my corrupted files, I hesitantly asked my tech support serviceman, “Is it covered in L337 speak?”) The graphic taking the place of my site made reference to the FlotillaFAIL. Ironically, I had met a very sweet Lebanese couple Friday night after seeing Splice. They offered me a lychee cookie, and then we talked about our favourite desserts. They recommended some local Middle Eastern restaurants. “Go to Jerusalem,” the husband told me. “The restaurant! Not the city.”
“No, not the city,” I said. “The city would be too stressful.”
I said this casually, but perhaps I shouldn’t have. The truth is that people navigate the streets of Jerusalem daily. They work and dance and pray and have families there. At some point, the reality of war must fade, like the high-pitched ringing of tinnitis, into something shrill and persistent but easily forgotten during moments of pleasure. At least, that’s what the recollections of my friends Kung Fu Jew and Miriam Libicki would have me believe.
KFJ has been to Jerusalem. Multiple times. He’s volunteered there, studied there, dated Israeli girls there. The first time he returned, he said, offhandedly, “You know they’re bulldozing homes in Gaza.”
“Empty homes?” I asked.
“Sometimes.”
He later went on to say this:
What Israelis and conservative American Jews don’t seem to care is that a surfeit of dignity for prolonged periods of time foments extremism and increases hatred. If Israel was looking for a policy that would enable it to be rid of Gaza, then it chose the stupidest one possible.
It’s safe to say that I’m with KFJ on this one. I hate what happened aboard that ship. I advocate a withdrawal from Gaza. I advocate peace and dignity for the people who live there. I think Israel’s government should listen to its young people in the diaspora, who are steadily refusing to “check their liberalism at the door” when it comes to Israeli politics. I think KFJ is right when he says that the conflict is not between nations, but between innocent people and purveyors of violence.
I don’t know why I was hacked and I still don’t. But if it forces me to express myself on this very thorny subject, so be it.
June 12th, 2010
I saw Splice last night, and I’m glad I did. It’s not as shattering as District 9 (last summer’s surprise SF hit), but it is genuinely horrific without being visually explicit. It makes a lot of reference to the Frankenstein story, but it’s actually positioned somewhere on the Ira Levin/David Cronenberg side of the horror continuum. The most terrifying things happen offscreen, and but the violence you do see is both quick and intimate, and the creature effects are juicy. Despite some glossed-over science, it’s still a lot smarter than most of the dreck that bobs up in theatres and, as Peter remarked when we left the show, “At least it portrayed scientists as capable of meaningful relationships.”
The trailer would have you believe that Splice is a straight-up monster movie, an updated Universal feature from the days of Karloff and Chaney. It’s not. It’s one of those rare movies that centres on an intelligent but deeply troubled woman, and the consequences her obsession and lack of moral compass. We see stories like this all the time involving men, so it’s nice to see this one told about a woman. Women form the core of the story; in a reversal of traditional horror film conventions, the men are just there to get fucked and splattered when the plot calls for it. That doesn’t mean that the women do everything right all the time and the men don’t (far from it), but truly multi-dimensional characters have flaws and make mistakes. Main characters don’t have to be heroes. They just have to hold your attention.
In short, go see it, even if you’ve been waffling. You’ll be pleasantly surprised. I was.
June 7th, 2010
It starts Friday night with Cory Doctorow in the basement of the Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation and Fantasy. (I’ve linked to his signature in the Collection’s circa-1983 guestbook. While I was busy being born, Cory was already hacking — yes, hacking — the way clear for himself.) Cory is the emeritus member of my workshop, and he gave me my first national publication. The second time we met, he reached out and ruffled my hair. Seeing him always feels like seeing my older and cooler cousin, the one who blows into town during the holidays to say hi to the family and give you a hug before continuing his orbit through places that are bound to be both brighter and darker than home.
Speaking of which, my Friday night ended with this:
June 4th, 2010
May 28th, 2010
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| From Food |
This week, my father-in-law phoned me just to ask if our air conditioning unit was installed, yet. When I told him it wasn’t, he sounded a little panicked. Today, Karl asked me the same question. We’ve received heat warnings for the past few days, and I’ve heard reports of elderly people having trouble breathing and so on. Thankfully that hasn’t been a problem, here: my husband and I managed to wrestle in our A/C unit a couple of days ago, and both we and the cat are glad of it. But there’s no A/C in the kitchen, and that means salad. I dressed this one with olive oil, lime juice, salt and pepper. When you have a whole avocado in among the spinach, you don’t need much else. Well, aside from a chipotle tenderloin sandwich with guacamole on top.
My affection for avocados should never be underestimated. If I could plant one tree and be guaranteed that it would grow no matter what, I’d plant an avocado. I would be very fat, but my hair and skin and nails would gleam.
I also like mango:
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| From Food |
That’s a bowl of sweet and sour pork with mango (mostly mango) over the brown rice I showed you earlier. The sauce is very simple: gochujang, raw apple cider vinegar, and honey. The proportions change each time I make it, so I won’t even bother trying to share the proper measurements. You’ll have to decide if you want something more spicy, acidic, or sweet, and blend accordingly. It’s a good idea to taste the gochujang on the tip of your finger or the edge of a spoon, first, so that you know how hot it is and what you’re working with. When I tried it, I was impressed with the mellow sweetness backing up the spice. Your mileage may vary.
I also made green tea concentrate. I have no photos of that, yet, since I’ve been so busy drinking it and dreaming up sake cocktails involving it that the glass is always empty before I think to bring out the camera. The 1 : 1 concentrate + water mix is the closest I’ve come to approximating Oi Ocha, my favourite drink from Japan. Japan has one of the widest selections of beverages on the planet, but once I made my way through some ume soda and canned whiskey, I found that the drinks I liked best there were the cold, unsweetened varieties of my favourites from home: coffee and green tea. I returned with a seemingly unquenchable thirst for these things. But now I can make the tea at home, and not buy those absurdly expensive bottles of the imported stuff. (The coffee is still a problem; some shops know what you mean when you say iced coffee, but others give you a sort of brownish liquid that tastes like thin birch syrup.)
Anyway, the point of all this is that I am in fact eating vegetables and drinking moderately healthy liquids in all this heat. You’d think this would result in pounds lost, but no. Just the other day, the woman who runs my favourite coffee shop asked if I was pregnant. She always asks this, every time I come in. “No, it’s just fat,” I say, pointing at my middle.
Those avocados. They’re lethal. And delicious.
May 24th, 2010
A lot of people have probably seen this already, but this is for Mom: Peter’s recount of his arrest, this time in audio format. In it, he describes “the summer I’ll never take for granted,” and what it’s like to survive a panic attack in prison.
April 27th, 2010
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| From Toronto |
That sombre-looking fellow is Peter Watts, in case you didn’t know. He’s grimacing because he has a toothache. He’s worried that it’s a giant face-eating abscess, but I suspect it might be five months of nightly teeth-grinding coming home to roost. But the good thing is that he can come to a Canadian emergency dental clinic to be healed, and not a prison doctor, because he’s free.
Not free to visit the US, of course. Not free to visit his terminally ill brother. But home, safe, with us.
Now I can breathe. I can do some novel re-writes, finish a paper and a CFP, and actually mail my mom’s Mother’s Day gift. I can go grocery shopping. I can write an email to Peter without bursting into tears. We can do Squid & Squeak Watch Anime, again.
Spring is really here.
April 24th, 2010
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| From Toronto |
This photo was taken recently in the rotating restaurant at the CN Tower, 360°. It was not a birthday or anniversary dinner, but rather an event hosted by Death Ray’s (very generous) employers. That smear of blue behind me is the view of Lake Ontario from over three hundred metres in the air.
This year, I:
Looking at that list, it seems like I accomplished a lot. But the truth is that I could have done a lot more, if I were a little less lazy. But even writing those words, I know I’m subtly sabotaging myself. One interesting thing that I learned about myself this year was how much time I allow feelings like that to take from me. For Lent, Dave challenged me (teasingly) to give up guilt. At first I thought of it as a joke, but then I started taking it seriously. When I noticed myself spiraling into thoughts of what a lacklustre person I am, I tried to lift the needle off the record and stop listening. My guilt would always be there, I told myself. It wasn’t going anywhere. I could come back to it, when the forty days were up. Surprisingly, I reaped hours of productivity from this process, because I wasn’t spending that time berating myself with abstract value judgments of my own character. (This was another thing I noticed: I spend a lot of time blaming myself for adjectives, not verbs. As much as I hold to the idea that existence precedes essence, it may be important for me to remember, on occasion, that making a bad decision and being a bad person can in fact be different.) I could focus on the next task because I didn’t have to take the time to tell myself how much I’d screwed everything up.
Of course, the event that dominated the latter third of my twenty-sixth year was SquidGate. At Christmas, I said that in lieu of gifts, I wanted money for Peter’s defence. Despite the quality of that defence, he was found guilty. So now for my birthday, I’m hoping that his judge shows clemency and hands down a light sentence. And I’m hoping for the peace, grace, and strength to handle it, even if he doesn’t. I’m spending today at home, trying to establish some sense of calm. If I can dismiss my sense of Catholic guilt, then maybe I can do the same for my anxiety. I know that how I feel about this situation doesn’t change the situation itself, but it can make me a more supportive friend and that’s what I need to be.
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