I recently took a ride-share from Montreal to Toronto. The driver was a Chinese-Canadian engineer, about my age, who's boyfriend worked for Bombardier. Her other passengers were an Israeli geologist visiting Canada to do some work named Gior, et moi.

We had some unusual discussions, the engineer, the geologist and I. Primarily about Judaism, because once I told Gior my heritage, it was, as they say, all over but the crying. Suffice to say he and I had very different views on the state of Isreal. I took great pains not to share my views, because who wants to be trapped in a car with two squabbling Jews? I thought the engineer was very nice and she certainly didn't sign on for supper at the Fishbiens when she agreed to give two perfect strangers a lift.

Anyways when Gior and I weren't being argumentative little kakers, the engineer would say that she really admired the Jewish people for creating such a supportive culture for each other. I had mixed feelings about her assertion in the moment, thinking: "Are we supportive of each other or do we just have bad boundaries and poor social skills? Gior you wanna field that one or should I?" But whether or not Jews are supportive or just way too in each others business, The Great Schlep is a great and hilarious 'movement' endorsed by none other then Sarah Silverman, and it proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Jews do have your back, and also are a bunch of nosy nudgy noodniks.

"The Great Schlep aims to have Jewish grandchildren visit their grandparents in Florida, educate them about Obama, and therefore swing the crucial Florida vote in his favor. Don’t have grandparents in Florida? Not Jewish? No problem! You can still become a schlepper and make change happen in 2008, simply by talking to your relatives about Obama."

The best line: How do I go? Call up your grandparents and tell them to get the couch ready.

This is why being Jewish is both hilarious, wonderful, and annoying all at once.

Yeah.. this morning this afternoon very slow, not sure if it's that the red army will soon be marching over the horizon or because yesterday the brain doctor made me like really kick my own ass. (I am still kicking it in slow motion over here). What am I wasting time with then since clearly I am having trouble with focus?

Weird... I am at Starbucks and working and Anthem by Leonard Cohen is playing. We used some lines from this song for Mom's headstone, I don't think I have actually listened to it since I used to listen to it at Mom's, we both loved this album.

Full Lyrics

"Anthem"

The birds they sang
at the break of day
Start again
I heard them say
Don't dwell on what
has passed away
or what is yet to be.
Ah the wars they will
be fought again
The holy dove
She will be caught again
bought and sold
and bought again
the dove is never free.

Ring the bells that still can ring

So it turns out that my MacBook *PRO* does not have a graphics card sufficiently powerful enough to capture video on the fly. Not that I am complaining, hell no, I love sitting on ma'yace reading blogs and taking 5 minutes to capture 2 minutes of video it's the best use of a rainy saturday I can think of.

Almost as good as wasting 2 hours 'experimenting' with voice recognition software to see if I can "cheat" on my transcriptions. Word, you cannot cheat, unless you are excited by an automatically generated textfile that reads; "Twi. Gyu is r o hynk."

Over at Blogher there's a nice post about passing down body issues. I have just finished an intensely productive work day. I have this desire to blame everything on therapy ie; Look I have better focus, it must be therapy. Not like I have any kind of external influence, the fact that I am behind on every project I have going now? No, it's therapy.

For all those people who want to know if I plan to move back home soon
Big city love

Here's a short one for me and Montreal.

Some days waking up with Montreal is a blast. The sun is shining and the air is crisp and clean, my beautiful spacious apartment embraces me in the sunshine, I walk the dog in the park next door to my house, turn on the ordi and start figuring out what I am going to do with my day. In Montreal, I feel like I can live on nothing but affordable lodgings, dear friends, inspiration and cheap beer. Some mornings.

Other days I wake up and the inspiration is at low-ebb. I take a look at my bank account and realize that I am thirty-one and have never officially lived above what Statscan refers to as the poverty line. I eat some toast in my ragtag kitchen full of old fixtures and even older appliances, and realize I wouldn't know how to cope with a full-time job any more than I'd be able to cope with 4 figure rent.

Those mornings Montreal is a strange version of Pleasure Island, the amusement park in the Disney version of Pinocchio where the young puppet boy takes refuge in delight. Takes refuge that is, until he discovers that if he stays idle much longer he will turn into a donkey.

Montreal I love you - but sometimes I think you let me get away with too much. I need to become a grown up, a real girl. One with real commitments, a real job. Real responsibilities. Maybe we both need to take a break from each other, I need to hop out of bed, put on some clean pants and dust off my resume. You need to stop relying on Festivals and start developing some real income opportunities for people you didn't go to Cegep with you back in '75, that would be nice for all of us non-corporate (ahem) self-starters. (I refuse to use the word entrepreneur). I don't like living in a place where my hourly wage is a race to the bottom. I don't like wondering if my fellow designers feel like they have to lowball to get the clients that they really want. I don't like knowing that when I do sites for community and arts organizations, the project managers administrators and other non-technical professionals there are all still probably making just under 30k a year. That sucks Montreal and as the cost of living in this city goes up, quite frankly, it is not fair.

Montreal pull up your socks and get serious for once in your life, I don't know if you've noticed yet but all your real love interests are growing up and many of them have left you behind.

I just finished reading this very nice article by Eric G. Wilson a Professor of English at Wake Forest University. in his article, In Praise of Melancholy the Professor suggests that by focusing too much on simple happiness as an indicator of mental health, Americans (He writes as an American, about his nation.) are losing an important dimension to their being, the dimension of recurrent sorrow, also known as melancholy. By losing the capacity to feel sadness, these "Americans" of Prof Wilson's essay, are foreclosing on their capacity to feel Joy. By sticking to the middle ground, a neither here nor there kind of generalized contentment, there is no acceptance for the bigger, (okay fine transcendent) emotions.

Wilson writes:

Melancholia pushes against the easy "either/or" of the status quo. It thrives in unexplored middle ground between oppositions, in the "both/and." It fosters fresh insights into relationships between oppositions, especially that great polarity life and death. It encourages new ways of conceiving and naming the mysterious connections between antinomies. It returns us to innocence, to the ability to play in the potential without being constrained to the actual. Such respites from causality refresh our relationship to the world, grant us beautiful vistas, energize our hearts and our minds.

Indeed, the world is much of the time boring, controlled as it is by staid habits. It seems overly familiar, tired, repetitious. Then along comes what Keats calls the melancholy fit, and suddenly the planet again turns interesting. The veil of familiarity falls away. There before us shimmer bracing possibilities. We are called to forge untested links to our environments. We are summoned to be creative.

"The first thing I would advise them to do is to breathe. I want them to breathe and relax. Understand that this is a part of a lifetime journey. Look back at yourself. That person is not gone. This is a shell we are in. This is a body and situations happen. You know, I had my daughter, now I look at it like wow, my body is my badge of honor. I went through that and yes, a lot of us have a lot of battle scars. Things that we can’t get over. But we must. We must embrace who we are. Each stage of our life has to be embraced. You have to understand that you are not going to be twenty with tight skin. Skin doesn’t do that. Skin droops and it sags. Be realistic about what you are looking at and love yourself. Please look in the mirror. Please tell yourself how you feel. I believe in visualizing and everything that you say is basically a prayer to the universe and speak it, talk it, talk to people. Talk to your girlfriends. Talk to your family. Talk to your husband. Talk to them. Tell them what you are feeling. You are not alone. There is a whole community of us that need to get better and if we can just stick together and stand together and communicate I think we can, but you are not alone and you are loved and valuable. "

Kelly Park - interviewed on Blogher.org

Podcast of the interview.

Kelly Park was a participant on How to Look Good Naked. Hosted by Carson Kressley of "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" the show is basically like "self-esteem through better fashion" boot camp for women who are unhappy with their bodies and looks. Miraculously, the motif of the show is not extreme surgery or diets. The basic message is one of self-acceptance and learning to work, and to love what you've got.

I can't begin to tell you how exciting that is.

There's an enormous storm outside. Forks of lightning going sideways. What makes the lightning go sideways anyways?

My friend Alison just left for England, somehow even though we were not rushing when she left, she managed to leave behind a bathing suit, a bathing scarf, a book she was reading, and her bike, cunningly locked to mine outside.

I finally watched the Olympics last night at a bar with Simon. There was no sound, which was a bit disappointing, but I have to say it is much more fun to sit in a bar with a beer in hand and more in the pitcher and watch athletes (who are like the circus freaks of the 21st century) perform feats of incredible strength and stamina.