“To this day, you argue about something that happened long ago. Arguments occur when you don’t put yourself in the other person’s shoes, or when you don’t listen to what is being said. But what would this protect you from? More crucially, what might it be absolutely no defence against?”

Every year I spend the last six weeks of winter checking my watch every five minutes, waiting for spring to show up. 

It’s the least patient part of the year.  

I often pretend to have more patience than I actually do.

It has gotten warm enough to finally make running a better idea. That warm-on-the-inside, numb-on-the-outside feeling wore really thin. 

Distribution and running. 

Running and distribution. 

I think I just spend most days bouncing between the two.

This morning I read this, which seemed to ring true to me at the time.

Then I went to work, and proceeded to have an email exchange with a Board Member who was attempting to express an idea. I suggested a word which seemed to capture the idea he was after. He did not, apparently, know the meaning of the word, and so he explained to me how I had used it incorrectly. 

Yep.

Achy Desire, 2008

I was poking around the files for shows coming up in the next year at work and found Dahlia Elsayed. Which I was happy about. She says on her website: 

Writing and painting have always been close processes for me… The work has developed from book art to work on paper to large-scale installation paintings, that use image and text to create detailed, visual narratives of locations and experience.  

The work draws on my surroundings, informed by autobiography and environment, creating contemporary cartographies of memory, place and dislocation. Part data-tracking, part topography, these conceptual maps examine the aesthetic surfaces and ephemeral cultural markers of recent immigrant populations, of which I am a product. 

You can see more here: http://www.dahliaelsayed.com.

I saw Silent Light this week, where I learned that some people move too slow even for me. Adulterous Mennonites have huge pores, as I know having spent long, agonizing moments contemplating them. It’s possible to linger over everything for longer than you thought possible, which is an idea I like better in retrospect than I did in the theater. It’s a beautiful movie, but uncomfortable, because everything becomes super amplified. 

I finally faced facts today and bought snow boots for the first time in my life. Snow is wet, I’ve determined, and ice is slippery, and because this is true I now have footwear adequate for coping with this reality. Why does it take me so very long to come to grips with very basic ideas? I do not know. 

In a burst of New Year idealism, I have decided to organize my collection of index cards. Jasper helped. 

I’ve spent the week thinking about what I can control and what I can’t, and what a great relief it is to not to have to control absolutely everything. 

I remembered on the train today that once upon a time I had an enormous list of rules for every contingency. A literal list! 

I mean, I was kidding, sort of, but really! 

I think it was the nice catholic girl in me. 

I sent a copy of the list to the person who said the above to me. I don’t think she got it. 

We had a very awkward dinner a few years ago. 

I think she was under the impression that because I wasn’t married and hadn’t given birth that I was leading a much more exciting life than I actually have. 

Or that I was crazy, one or the other. Perhaps both. 

It’s uncomfortable to be in the middle of a conversation with someone and realize they’re not speaking to you, they’re speaking to a projection of the character they’ve made of you in their head.