The boy crosses the street towards the School for Bad Children. It is cold but his jacket is unzipped and hangs from his shoulders. He calls cheerfully to his waiting teacher, “I just saw some of my old friends but I walked right by them!” And I think of all the worlds of meaning in this scene and that sentence. I am going to recycle the following: Some kids from …
So. Things have been quiet here lately! After 20 years, it feels weird not keeping up a blog on a regular basis, not thinking about it. I wonder these days if blogs are fading in favour of other channels. Or maybe that’s just how it’s been with me. I’m not saying I’m going away forever – this blog is a great place for me to share things I’m thinking, or …
Recently, it struck me that 2017 marks 20 years I’ve been blogging. I’ve written about those olden times here before. I started my first website in 1997. I used a pseudonym. There were rotating ankh gifs on it. I was obsessed with it. One day, my boyfriend at the time wanted us to go out somewhere, and I looked at him and whined, “But I want to stay here and work on …
When you move back to your hometown, nobody warns you about the absence of time. The way you can hold your palm to things that have happened. You can watch them happen again, they do happen again, it’s so easy, and makes so much sense. You don’t even have to try. You remember, and you forget again. You can still be surprised, if you want to be. Related: Memory things.
As I wrote about last year when I read Ethan Frome, descriptions of meals in books are one of the things that really catch my attention when I’m reading. I like to imagine how all the elements of the meal work together. I read this description recently in Margaret Drabble’s The Ice Age: Sadie brought her a tray full of chicken soup and chopped liver and cold chicken and cold salmon …
Nothing changes, maybe even me. I wrap my scarf around my neck three times and nestle in. I drive my father’s car in the dark, in the rain, winding my way around random streets, wandering until I run out of coffee. Or I’m an early morning passenger with a bagel in my hand, passing my husband his coffee as we wander together, wondering how our lives will be next year. He drops me off at the …
Days that feel like older days. Lazy suburban summer drives, windows open, listening to a short story read on the radio. Sitting by the lake for an interminable length of time. Browsing at the bookstore I used to spend so much time in, tripping over the carpet. While my mother looks at religion books, I turn around and consider the wicca books, the angel books, remember my teenage bedroom full of ornate candlesticks …
I tried for a week and a half to get through 23 pages of an Ayelet Waldman novel I ended up abandoning, but have spent the past two hours completely engrossed in a book based on the Dragon Age video game series. Draw from that any conclusions you will. (I was surprised to find the Dragon Age novel has a higher average rating on Goodreads than the Waldman novel.)
My friend Teri has an article in the latest Ricepaper, titled Between Representations: Filipinos in Canadian Literature. Teri’s one of my favourite writers so I am always eager to read anything she writes, but I was especially excited to read this. She and I are both half-Filipino, and have talked in the past about how we express that in our writing. For my part, I’d say about half of my stories …
Some of my fondest childhood memories are of playing Nintendo and Super Nintendo games with my brother, and making that long suburban walk to the arcade on summer vacations. In high school and my early twenties, I dropped the hobby for a while mainly due to lack of a console and a lack of funds (and discovering blogging probably helped), but I happily returned to it after a few years. …