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Time to change gears around these parts so here are the rules:

i) The following are all True or False questions.  Whoever gets the most answers right gets to choose the topic of an octopus blog post in the next week.  Contest DEADLINE is pretty much whenever the hell I decide it is before next Monday.

i.a.) IN THE EVENT OF A TIE:  Bonus points will be scored for clever and/or otherwise creative commentary and feeback.  

i.b.) BONUS POINTS will be allotted by me and I will of course not care at all if you do not agree with my decisions.

ii) You may include post suggestions in with your responses or you may send them privately to octopusinresidence-at-gmail.com  –  I can’t promise you’ll like the post or anything but I promise to do my best to stick to the the spirit of the suggestion no matter how much you decide to, um, challenge me…  

iii)  Trick questions will be fairly obvious.  Just remember to think like an octopus and you will be fine.

Don’t let me down folks and SEND YOUR FRIENDS. 

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Question# 1.  
I recently spent more than half an hour waiting in line to have my girl bits handled by an Egyptian woman named Isis.

Question# 2.
Quizno’s sandwiches kind of blow.

Question# 3. 
I was once told to rub oil and vinegar into my feet by a middle-aged Turkish man who said he was an ice and vegetable sculptor for the Waldorf-Astoria.

Question# 4.
I am the most patient person you will ever know.

Question# 5.
I hate loud, angry music.

Question# 6.
Celine Dion is the most accomplished singer of her generation.

Question# 7.
One of the better 48hr time periods I’ve lived through involved a sweatshirt, a shower, no less than four gorgeous men and no alcohol whatsoever.

Question# 8.
I have never, and will never have amorous feelings for any of the following:

a portable mp3 player
a digital camera
a large landscape painting
no less than three men named Adam

Question# 9.
Once, a beautiful quiet woman tried to seduce me with peaches.

Question# 10.
Flip flops are a saviour and the spawn of Satan all in one.

Question# 11.
There is a 70% chance that I will get my cat a kitten in the next 6 months.

Question# 12.
Beer is and has always been a last resort alcohol for me.

Question# 13.
One of my favourite things to do is obsessively worry about what I might have done wrong.

Question# 14.
My underwear frequently shows over the top of my pants.  This is deliberate because that’s just how I roll.

Question# 15.
One of my favourite things to do is to give my son a bath.

Question# 16.
I am in desperate need of a shower.

Question# 17.
No one has ever held a drum over my head, banged it and asked me if anyone liked me.

Question# 18.
I love you.

Question# 19.
I have never considered “disappearing” a fictional television character.

Question# 20.
My first boyfriend was a borderline narcoleptic who did a killer Swedish Chef impersonation.

I used to have dreams about tidal waves.  I mean, tidal waves that swallowed mountain ranges while I looked on helplessly or scrambled up to higher ground.  Sometimes I was alone, sometimes in company.  Eventually special effects software kind of caught up to the style of my dreams and by the time movies like Deep Impact and then The Day After Tomorrow were made it was like someone else had been having my dreams and turned them into movies.

They say that water in dreams is all about emotion, life force.  Given that I am an emotional creature it doesn’t seem an inappropriate place to start an interpretation.  I’ve always had a powerful relationship to water even when I’m awake.  There is a spot on a particular beach in Vancouver where I like to stand right at the water’s edge with my feet partly in the ocean.  Somehow the endless battle and caress of the water on the sand - wearing rocks into pebbles into grains - in a horseshoe of mountains staring west out to sea just makes me feel and know that it’s all going to be okay.  A lot of the stuff I hold on to too tightly, chase too aggressively or not aggressively enough, all my unbidden, unexpected tears or fears just seems like nothing with my toes at that border, surrounded by what is an ancient dance of water, earth, air and sky.

Lakes have another power over me.  They’ve always frightened me more than the ocean but compelled me regardless.  The strange smoothness of them.  How hard you have to work to swim in them, how they do not support you or help you in any way.  I’ve had lakes try to drown me on more than one occasion and I’ve always forgiven them because they provide good things and a challenge and an unparalleled coolness in the heat, all kinds of heat - internal, external.

I am also enamoured of rain.  I love to get soaked.  To walk barefoot on warm wet summer pavement with rain that hits so hard you get more wet as it bounces back up then when it is falling down in the first place.  Gentle mists that coat then soak you have their place too and I am just generally more fond of rain than I am of its more chilly cousin snow.

Which is why the avalanche came as a surprise this morning.

I have never before dreamt of an avalanche.  

In the dream, I was driving in a car with an old friend I haven’t seen or spoken too since I was a teenager and of whom my strongest memory is that her last boyfriend was a know-it-all jerk and another friend whose most recent council to me was to be as free and open to things as I possibly could.  It doesn’t take a Freudian dictionary to see Super Ego and Id at work here but whatever…  We’re driving along in a convertible and my Super Ego friend is telling me I’m making an illegal turn while my Id friend is kind of just rolling with the fact that I’m on the wrong side of the yellow line…

There really isn’t much traffic so I get back to where I need to be easily enough and feel more okay with my initial recklessness than I do with correcting it.  My Super Ego friend is still kind of yammering at me - they are both in the back seat - and I turn quickly to look at her like, “Enough already, I’m on the right side of the road now.”  When there is a catastrophic roar and all the cars in front of us are wiped perpendicularly across the road in front of us and down a hill by a furious rush of snow and rocks.

I hit the breaks at the edge of the mostly still mess and we all look up to more coming.  More roar, more snow.  We would have been completely buried - all three of us - if I hadn’t lifted something to hold up as they both cowered behind me.  I think the dream may have become more lucid at this point because I felt like I had taken control of it somehow… Otherwise how on earth could I have deflected an avalanche from killing us with what mostly appeared to be a supersize box of Cheerios?  But whatever.

The avalanche kept coming in waves and I was solely responsible for protecting my Super Ego and Id friends.  I would deflect what I could and then dig us out - the car was full of white and debris and at a certain point I myself was so buried that all I saw was white.  A disorienting shroud of white.  I surfaced to sunlight, though and helped my sputtering, terrified friends.

Out of curiosity, and because I honestly have no trouble believing that certain unconsciously generated symbols might mean generally similar things across cultures and time - I looked up “avalanches” in online dream dictionaries.  This is the most cohesive and least intimidating of the definitions I found:

The material which makes up the avalanche is snow, and snow is frozen water. Water symbolizes your emotions, the unconscious, and, at times, life itself. Therefore, this dream is about rapidly and violently descending emotions and thoughts. Emotions which may have been repressed have finally been unlocked and may be overwhelming you. You may have this dream during emotionally turbulent times of your life, or in your dreams you may be remembering and reliving some difficult emotional experiences. Old dream interpretation books say that burial in an avalanche may result in good luck in the near future. Therefore, they think that it is a dream of the contrary.

borrowed from HERE

The one other detail I found is that it depends on whether it you being buried or others being buried whether or not it is a good omen.  If you are buried it is a good omen.  If others are buried it probably means you will have a change of surroundings.  Given that I just moved I’m going to stick to interpretation rather than prophecy I think.  Plus it was me AND my friends who got buried (unless we see them as being all parts of me I suppose…).

Anyway - it was a powerful and unexpected dream that I’d never had before and if any of you fine folk would like to take a stab at interpreting it for me I would of course relish that so please do get to some mad busy interpreting!!!

a picture is worth a thousand words.

Sometimes a picture is just a picture but it’ll have to do anyway.

I had a therapist tell me once that I am too patient, which made me laugh like a lunatic hyena-woman until she explained what she meant, cuz the last thing anyone sane would describe me as is patient. What it really meant was that she feels I am too understanding. Too nice. Too apt to get mired in the grey of seeing things as much from someone else’s perspective as my own that I often appear less angry, less disappointed, less frustrated or sad then I actually am or even have a right to be.

She’s probably right.

But I’ve also become much more aware of my limits and boundaries. What I will accept from people. What I won’t. My life would not be what it is right now if I hadn’t.

Sometimes, though, all of this rigorous thought about how I deserve to be treated and what my limits should be for giving just gives way to feeling. My intellect can’t touch it. Can’t make me care more about things than I do. Can’t make me care less. I am vulnerable at these times, as vulnerable as I’ve ever been. And, I’ve been trying to figure out why this is. What happens to periodically undermine all this hard work I’ve been doing to avoid being under appreciated, to be a bit tougher and more guarded so as not to be taken for granted, ignored, abused in some way or another?

And then I remember a friend of mine whose baby died a while back. Another friend who lost more than one family member in a year. I think about a friend recently sent for an MRI (routine follow-up but still hit a nerve of worry). I think about women I know who have survived breast cancer and women I know who have not, about the fact that we didn’t know my son needed glasses until he was two, about how the more excited or stressed out he gets the more he has trouble getting certain words out due to a hopefully temporary speech dysfluency and how it breaks my heart. I think about friends with loved ones in perilous places.

And then I remember watching friends fall in love. Figure it out, wrestle with it, make it work, make it last. I remember playing with people’s children and the quirky delicious things children see and say, including my own. I remember moments that are farther apart then I might like in my memory but which live there brightly nonetheless in the curtains of a hotel room brushing over my back through soft damp air, in a million stars reflected perfectly in a lake, in a hidden ski jump that sent me garage sale’ing into the air with a giant grin on my face. I remember stories people have told me about their bright moments and I feel touched by that brightness.

And I realize that there are big things in life. And little things. That big or small, we must deal with each aspect of our lives with the same honesty, respect, energy and effort because the little things make up the big things - small things create the whole. But that sometimes certain things just start to seem silly in the face of other things. Sometimes the big moments, the big feelings, suddenly shrink to nothing.

Everything, it seems, can disappear or turn into something else.
Boundaries built for one thing will fall in the face of another.

There is no fortress of self-protection strong enough to stop a feeling of thoroughly justified disappointment and sadness from fading utterly in the face of relief if the relief is just bigger than the funk. Nothing can stop heartfelt emotion from drifting back into near-nothing if its time has come - even if every barricade is up to block its retreat. No tall light-stealing walls can stop a spark of affection from growing into something imperfect and precious. The sun will just find it because a tiny spark can be bigger than any wall when it must.

And lately, I have to ask myself what I might be missing if my carefully built boundaries didn’t just crumble sometimes, if my intellect didn’t just give way to feeling and leave me wide open and raw to the world. Raw and blitheringly honest, endlessly surprised, endlessly worried overwhelmed and ensorcelled. Often hurt. Often sad. Wanting more then I get and giving more than I should.

Living now and in thrall and with intense vulnerability.

If the therapist is right then I’m at least supposed to make more of an effort to have a thicker skin along with safer, stronger borders and fences. Aggressive, well-defined filters on what comes in and what gets out to keep things healthy and balanced. And, once again, she probably is right. And I won’t give up on being more careful of myself with other people.

I just think I may be more afraid of missing out on all the alchemical emotional fireworks of living raw then I am of being hurt or disappointed (again). I think boundaries and thicker skin don’t live the kind of stories I want to show and tell and that maybe - just maybe - I simply am who I am.

A friend and I are on a walk. There is the potential, with us, for maybe more than friends. We are negotiating the boundaries of what might be. Feeling each other out if not yet “up”. He takes me on a walk through an old money neighbourhood. It’s North America so the money ain’t that old but considering we are west of mountains, it’s pretty much as old as it gets.

The houses are large and shapely. Words like “eaves” and “sconce” and “facia” come to mind though I have no strict idea what any of them mean. There is austerity to some of the lines on these houses, decadence on others. There are huge shrubberies, arched semi-circle driveways and almost no sidewalks as if to say, “We don’t want you even passing through, peasant.”

It’s hot summer. The kind of day where the pavement soaks up the sun thirstily and then lets it leach out into the evening as the air cools as makes way.

I don’t remember exactly how it happened. It may have been a spiteful reaction to the absence of sidewalks, a grand, youthful “fuck you” to the uppity folk who didn’t want my cheap sandals near their lives, but we wound up lying on the asphalt in the middle of the road.

Cool air washing over us, warmth soaking up into us.

We looked up through streetlights and old, old trees twisted by a century’s worth of folly and hypocrisy to an electric blue sky darkening.

I remember we talked quietly for all our street-lying defiance. Almost in whispers. Like kids at a slumber party. I remember we laughed. I may have sung something. We both liked jazz. We both liked Ella. And though I am no Ella, he didn’t mind it when I sang.

At a certain point a car came and there was a brisk, panicked honk, a quick giggly scramble.

No harm.
No foul.

But, we did not lie back down. We took the warmth and our youth with us and drifted out of the old and the money to lose ourselves still further in the cool.

Today, I ate a lot of pickles. I did a few card tricks. l learned a new thing to do with a deck of cards that requires a great deal of practice but when I get it I will look like I am way better at cards than I actually am dammit.

(Can one be a “Card Octopus” instead of “Card Shark”?)

I did other stuff too. It was actually a full day continuing the trend of good food and good company I began earlier in the week. But, somehow, when all is said and done and the sun is setting on this particular day in this particular life this will be the day of card tricks and pickles if for no other reason then when am I ever going to have the opportunity to write about those two things in the same sentence again?

And I don’t think I can ever eat a pickle ever without thinking about one of my older favourite movies called “Crossing Delancey” but I’m too tired (from all the pickles and all the card tricks) to go into that right now.

So.

Have a pickle.
Rent the movie if you’ve never seen it. (It really is wonderful.)
Do a card trick.
Think of me.

You won’t be sorry.

Unless you hate pickles.
Or me.
Or good movies.

And if you hate pickles (or me or good movies) then please just don’t tell me.
I don’t think I could handle that kind of disappointment right now.

(wink)

Of her own daughter. Afraid of who her daughter is. They are a neat and tidy family of four until you look more closely when the daughter materializes as the black sheep. Not a day over 14 wielding her cell phone like a weapon. A weapon of privacy and exclusion. A weapon of distraction. She looks like her father. She has a pierced eyebrow, she has a pack of smokes. Her clothes are trendy if not exactly stylish. She is strangely attractive without being pretty and she cares a lot about that. More about that then about anything else.

And her mother is frightened of her, startled by her, endlessly surprised and confused.

They are on a family outing. The brother is asking questions about where they are going, questions about how they are going to get there. His clothes make him seem like an oversized five year-old, a textbook dork but he’s older than his sister, kinder, more genuinely curious. He kisses his mother after she says something to him. A real loving “Aw Ma” kind of kiss.

Her daughter ignores her as best she can. Not cruelly, but with a strangely adult dismissiveness.

What strikes me is the love. The love through the fear.

I can feel it from partway across a room. Love and helplessness and fear.

And it’s no wonder she seems afraid.

She is.

That I was often distracted, my mind elsewhere. *** That I was often unhappy in ways that had nothing at all to do with him. *** That I sometimes yelled because I didn’t want him to see me cry. *** That I sometimes yelled more loudly than I should have even if he was being particularly annoying. *** That playing with his trains and cars bores me so stupid it actually hurts. *** That sometimes when he whined excessively and threw tantrums I would mutter in a bizarrely neutral way, “I’m sorry, baby, I just don’t care right now.” *** That I developed a mad crush on the Man in the Yellow Hat. *** That watching Thomas the Train (even with the late great George Carlin narrating) is one of my least favourite things ever. *** That sometimes I couldn’t get him to bed fast enough or with any graciousness of spirit. *** That sometime between midnight and 2am a week or so ago I did not hear him fall flat on his face out of his big boy bed (He didn’t wake up and did not appear to be bruised the next day, but still - I should have heard something no?) *** That sometimes I truly bridled at the restraint and responsibility of being his mother. *** That self-doubt about being a good mother made me a weaker, lesser mother. *** That the centre of his world collapsed.

That I never forgot for a second how hard it is being little. Without enough words, without enough control over your own life. *** That I told him how much I love him and held him and hugged him and kissed him all the time. *** That I meant it. Every word, every hug, every kiss. *** That we had fabulous living-room and kitchen floor picnics. *** That we played musical parade making the biggest racket we could in and out of every room on every cold bitter day. *** That we played endless silly echo car games and that the word “poop” makes him giggle uncontrollably. *** That I developed a mad crush on the Man in the Yellow hat. *** That we went to gymnastics and music classes and tumbled and sang and pretended to be every animal you can imagine, including an octopus. *** That we played run and chase in the aisles of no less than four different grocery stores. *** That I sang him his favourite songs (almost) any time he asked, his favourite lullaby several times in a row on the harder nights, the nights with coughs and clogged nostrils. *** That I tickled his palm and held him close to calm him when he was scared or hurt. *** That I always knew when he was tired or overwhelmed and needed a break and made it happen. *** That the centre of his world collapsed because I knew I could do better. Better as a woman. Better as his mother. *** That I am busting my ass to give my share of his new world a familiar shape; a loving shape; a supportive shape. *** That home is where love is. (That I would never admit anything as corny-sounding as that to anyone but him no matter how much I believe it)

That love is here for him.
Always.

That having him has so far been a huge, challenging, terrifying, life-changing, beautiful, inspiring and delicious journey and that even if it’d be a lie to say that I enjoy every minute of it, I can honestly say that I look forward to every minute of it and that maybe that’s what counts the most - that even though it isn’t all going to be sunshine and roses for either of us, I still look forward to every minute I will ever have with him.

Every minute, every day, for the next year and however many more I have left to share with him.

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P.S. Also, if he could see his way to forgiving me for ignoring him a bit while I wrote this heartfelt missive, I would be most grateful…

P.P.S. And for yelling at him when I was on the phone with the warranty people after the microwave died and he came whining to me about the popcorn that killed the damn microwave in the first place and wanting a different episode of George when he was supposed to bloody well be napping in the first place…. Crap. Let’s just remember how very much I love the little bug shall we???

There was chopping and dicing. There was stirring and mixing. There was mashing and baking, steaming, boiling. There was giggling and laughter. There was a fully loaded dishwasher and more on the drain board.

And it was easy. It was comfortable and easy.

To the extent that I can ever just “be” I just “was” today.

And there were friends and friend’s children and words said and written and a scraped knee and a banged head. Bandaids were proffered, ice packs used, a song sung and more giggling and more laughter.

Favours were asked and given. Given and received.
There was genuine affection.
There were spontaneous hugs not stopped dead in their tracks by fear of rejection.

And, it all lead to muffins
and soup
and overtired tantrums and whining
and more giggling
and more laughter

and a still-tiny hand reaching for mine
as we snuggled up to listen to a story for his bedtime.

And as we listened there was almost no going over the day
to second-guess things I’d said or done.
There was almost no worrying that I had not done
something I should have done.

There was me.
And him.

And the worn out tired of a long,
full,
fun,
free,
day done and gone
and it had sure been a while…

And if I can’t tell on a cat
how am I ever going
to be able to tell
on a man?