Yesterday I played hooky from my life. It was just a little detour: on the way home from school instead of rushing to be with my baby I stopped at one of those grotesque big-box store complexes and picked up a copy of Wendy's new book I'm not the new me. I've been reading it almost non-stop since then. It's inspiring; not because of the weight loss but because her writing is so very good. The stories, the people, the moments, the metaphors...this book is kicking my ass. I liked Pamie's book (I have especially fond memories of reading her book two summers ago after taking the mandatory teacher's test. I was in a coffee shop waiting for the Boy, pregnant, laughing, in my big sloppy holey Guns n' Roses t-shirt I'd worn to show that I was in no way a mindless teaching tool of the Ontario Government. There's nothing classier than a sunburnt girl in a metal tee and maternity shorts, drinking one small beverage and laughing at a novel. Then I finished it, lent it to Javina and never saw it again. It's kind of fitting that the on-line diary novel would be exchanged by two people who met each other on-line and then have its demise explained in an on-line journal. If I could just work Stacy & Amy & Bethany into the story, all my t's would be crossed, all my WWW flies would be neatly stunned and wrapped up in silk.)

Anyway. I was saying that I enjoyed Pamie's book. It was a nice way to pass a few afternoons. This book, though, is singing to me. It goes way beyond the journal entries into reflections on how each incident of her recent life strung together into a non-inspirational weight-loss story. It's all inextricably knotted up with web journalling, with telling the story in public and how that changes everything in every way. It's wonderful. It's complex. I love it.

I've always felt one of the worst things a person could think about me was that I couldn't prevail over my own body, that in addition to my fat I had some poverty of self-worth; I hate the thought that I'm just some kind of Russian nesting doll with the big outside and inevitably, rattling around underneath all of the layers, a crude little peg with a face is the truth of me.

- page 207

A lot happened in the past week. I think I'm starting to block myself off from writing, not because I'm depressed, not because I'm busy, but because I've convinced myself that I need to tell every story in a certain way with a certain level of pathos or humour or cleverness and if I don't I shouldn't bother. Not to mention all of the pressure I put on myself about Blake: I want to tell his stories so badly but I'm always trying to force them to fit into neat anecdotes. This is about the time he dipped his hands in the toilet bowl and ran off to deliberately touch grandma & grandpa's bed, laughing maniacally all the while. This is about his seeming ability to count, how he systematically moves pinecones and counts them off, how he can recite numerals up to 30, how he is fascinated with the difference between saying "one person" and "two people." This is about the fights I've had with my parents that centre on his food refusal; and how I think that his fussiness is an acceptable character trait, not a character flaw or a problem to be solved. I feel like I have to include your recommended daily percentage of Cute Blake Stories^tm and anything less is boring.

And then things happen and I want to write about them, but then I get tired and take the night off and they rot away in my brain for lack of embalming here. The Boy & I went on a date last Saturday, a Blake-less outing that included sublime Thai food at and old East Side Mario's (we sat in the very spot where the teen-me used to sit and eat free peanuts and try to win the trivia contests). The food was so unexpectedly good that I was reminded of Acton's, the 5-star restaurant in Wolfvegas, and the few celebratory times we ate their gorgeous food. That night we saw Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and I loved it. Maybe it was the mushroom dish or maybe it was the knit puppetry sequence. Maybe it was that moment near the end of the first credits sequence when the dolphins were flipping and a chorus was singing and the name Stephen Fry appeared on screen, right after Alan Rickman, and I knew it was never going to get better than that moment.

Or maybe it was seeing a familiar face in the lobby and realizing that it was a clerk at the local Lewiscraft; the fact that she knew me too made me see that my knitting is on the verge of transcending the category "hobby" and move into the one marked "unhealthy obsession."

Because, shit. I'm knitting ALL THE TIME now. It's the way I take a vacation from mothering, the way I avoid my parents, the way I shirk my chores, the way I cut myself off from the Boy (who always finds something he can do by himself on the computer, if I but give him that space.) It's the way I stop thinking about the fact that I seem to have drifted away from most of my friends, including the mommy-friends I tried so hard to establish in that weird year at home. It's the way I refuse to think about the fact that I'm wishing the year away and more than this: I'm wishing my entire teaching career away. Am I just coping with a harsh month in which both myself and the Boy were professionally rejected at every turn? Or does the knitting require an intervention?

I guess when I start spinning my own wool or frogging discount sweaters and selling the wool on ebay, you can feel free to call in the specialists. Not that there's anything wrong with the people who like that sort of thing; it's just that level of involvement for me is way too much and a sign that I'm having a problem dealing with my realities.

In any case, today is the Boy's birthday and I need to shower before he gets back with Blake. Brushing my teeth would also be a step in the right direction, I think. Have I mentioned that I'm sick? Yeah, I woke up sick today. Not that I'm using it as an excuse for my melancholic spew, but hey. You might want to take it into account.

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- Rocketbride's adventure of 5/07/2005 08:06:00 p.m.