livin' off apple fields and old cigars...

It snowed today. My first snowfall of the year. Sure I came home to plenty of snow, but this was the first time I stood between huge evergreens after work and let the giant snowflakes catch on my jacket and hair and eyelashes. It was beautiful. I love the silence that follows a new snowfall. The city seems thoughtful...as though it's momentum has been slowed by the snow and not just slowed, but seduced. Forward movement turns into upward spirals of wind and flakes, the hum of traffic transformed to wind whistling through evergreen needles. A city seduced by snow...I love it!


*post-script: I did take the job with more money...I'm such a sellout

Everyone knows I in, over my head, over my head...

"We never say 'when' because there is something about the possibility of...more" - Meredith Grey, Grey's Anatomy

I have been in the working world for a week now. I'm getting used to making Lattes and turkey sandwiches and punching in prices in the cash register and wiping tables and baking muffins, and I'm starting to like it. I know what I'm doing, I like who I work with, I have great hours...its just the price that is lacking. I have to start my car everyday and I get minimal tips on top of minimum wage. I've been offered a job at a place across the street at a dollar an hour more with substially more tips. I could walk all of 3 minutes to work, but the hours might be longer, less convienient. I wouldn't get to work with the sweet people I've come to know and like at the Cafe and it would be getting used to something all over again. Do I sacrifice good hours and good people for good money? Or do I let a great wage slip out of my hands and continue to bake muffins and slice bread for minimum wage? Neither job challenges me in a way that makes me want to do it for the rest of my life and as my current boss says..."a job's a job...work's work". And thr truth is...I don't like "work". Actually I hate working. I hate having a job and responsibility and day to day always knowing what I am going to do that day, Having my hours scheduled...and so what do I do? Not committ full time to either? Hold out hope for something else to come along that is great and fantastic and challenging to me? Do I hold out for the possibility of more? Do I have any choice?

I can take my first steps as a child of twenty-five...

I just got cut off from chatting to Osaka and my 1/4 good, mostly bad day has gotten worse. It all started with my second shift at work where I conviced everyone I work with and everyone in the cafe that I am an incompetent fool. Dropping things, forgetting things, breaking things, getting covered in things...you know, the usual. Things just progressed from, "oh, everyone has done that once or twice" to "don't worry about it, its not really a big deal" to "hey, would you like to go home early today?" To which the answer was a resounding YES! I have no idea what was up with me, but it was not a good start to my job. I don't like to dwell on all the things that go wrong with me though because i keep telling myself I am a resilient and strong and clever person who can handle life. I believe that the more I tell myself that, if I keep it constantly in my head as a mantra, one of these days I will wake up and become it. And as a step towards that day, let me list a few great things that happened to me today...

- I got my hair cut by my friend Krystal and its SO soft right now I can't help but run my fingers through it obsessively
- I was given a great book of John Donne's collected works from Dr. Arlette Zinck, who always manages to make me feel like my education is worth something and my passions are leading somewhere great
- I ate some fantastic chocolate with Dawn Stiles-Oldring who also manages to make me feel like I'm not as crazy as I think I am
- I got to chat with Jane in Japan who I just love...absolutely, unashamedly love
- I went skating at night with a bunch of my friends who I really like and I took some photos and enjoyed the beauty of a relatively warm winter evening

And now as I sit with a cup of hot apple cider and think about meeting up with Beth and Joel and Mel for a quick pint...I think that I'd had a pretty good day.

I'll be waiting with a gun and a pack of sandwiches...

"Do not be so long to speak...i LONG to die"

I've been watching Romeo and Juliet this afternoon. And though I am quite aware that if I met either of them in real life, I would not take a liking to either one, I am a sucker for their story. In fact, I am a sucker for any kind of tragedy. To be honest, since I've been back in Canada I've been undergoing a bit of emotional instability...I've gone soft really. I used to have a bit of a tough edge, and somwhere along the way I lost it. And now I find myself getting a lump in my throat trying not to tear up at cheesy commercials, hugging my roommates for awkwardly long periods of time and sitting too close (some may say cuddling) with my friends on the couch while watching Grey's Anatomy. And now I sit, watching Juliet and Romeo miss each other by moments. I can't help but wonder if this is theraputic or sadistic for me.

This could be the very minute, I'm aware I'm alive...

This blog entry is for Jane... I sat down this morning and remembered my promise to keep this going for you my friend, so here I sit, thinking about what I can say about being home at the moment.

Last week this time, I left Dhaka in 21 degrees and today I am curled up on my couch in Edmonton while the crisp winter day outside reads -22 degrees. The snow here is incredible though. I could go sledding in my backyard there is so much of it! Already, even though I've only been in Edmonton for 48 hours, I have seen SO many people and this morning I'm headed to bethany's for brunch to celebrate her move in to a new place and her sister's birthday.

Although I don't feel any kind of 'culture shock' yet, I do find it a bit strange to be back here. I have lived in Edmonton now for almost 5 years and it feels so comfortable to be back here. I would have never guess 4 or 3, even 2 years ago that I would have come to feel so at home here. Curled up on my couch, listening to Snow Patrol - I am content. Do I miss Bangladesh and everything I had and experienced there? yes. but in the same breath, I am already in a new and different phase of my life and I must move with the flow of my life and being back here, watching the sun glint off of snow I am ready for whatever may come next.


"As it turns out, now is the moment you've been waiting for." - Lucinda Williams

Maybe redemption is stories to tell…

As I sit here in the Dhaka airport, choking back tears and the giant lump in my throat that has grown so big its hard to get the word “Canadian” around it, I think about how the only thing crazier than the fact that I’m heading home today, is the fact that I’ve been living in Bangladesh for the past 3 ½ months. Going home will be different. I feel older. Not in a bad way, but in a strange, settled way. Its interesting that disrupting my life and traveling to a tumultuous country on a frustrating trip having unknown adventures should make me feel more settled, but in a way I feel I have learned myself more. Not that I have changed or adapted or became something different than what I was before, but that I know myself more. I have exposed a new face of myself that was always there, but that never came forth either because of lack of opportunity or necessity. I feel I have expanded into myself more. They say we use only a small percentage of our brains, and I have a feeling we also use only a small percentage of ourselves as well. I am the same person that came through this airport 3 ½ months ago, but I feel bigger, feel like I fit into myself better.

cinder and smoke...whispers around the trees...

Korbani Eid is probably the most incredibly fascinating religious rite I have seen since coming out to Bangladesh. New Year’s Eve we had a good 5 or 6 goats in our garage under our building and other neighborhood garages also had an assortment of bulls and goats laying between cars, snacking on tree branches brought in for them and making a regular stable of the place. On Eid morning, which happened to fall on the 1st this time around, Alana and Sonali and I walked around the neighborhood and watched as butchers carved up the carcasses of sacrificed animals in the streets. Though I had been told that we might get to see one or two animals on each street, I was not prepared for what awaited us. In reality it was more like 5 or 6 animals on each street, in each garage, in each park being sacrificed and slaughtered. Blood literally ran in rivers down the streets and the Imams went from one house to the next in their white Punjabis spattered with blood, carrying their knives to perform sacrifices the whole morning. We got out into the streets at about 10:30 so many sacrifices had already been done and the butchers were hard at work. The tradition of Korbani Eid demands that one third of the meat from the sacrifice is kept for the family, one third is given to friends and neighbors and one third is given to the poor…so the usual beggars were running around in their barefeet through the mud and guts and blood, carrying dirty bags full of their share and dripping with blood.
We stumbled upon a school yard park not too far from our place where a huge white bull was being tied for sacrifice, so we waited around to watch and it was surreal. There was a crowd of people around it and it took 5 men to hobble its feet and then pull it to the ground. The Imam then stepped forward with his knife and had the 5 men hold the bull’s neck open to his knife. As he lifted the blade, the whole crowd began to chant…Al-lah, Al-lah, Al-lah, Al-lah...and as he brought down his knife, he and the crowd together shouted “ALLAH!” And instantly the whole ground and men and bull were covered in bright red blood. All the while I crouched in the wings taking pictures like there was no tomorrow. I can’t quite remember if it was just my own concentration or if the crowd actually became silent, but immediately after the first cut there was the most surreal quiet which must have only lasted a moment, but at the time stretched and pulled until all you could hear was the blood gushing from the animals heart against the Imam’s hands, the clothes of the men holding the bull and pouring into the mud.
As the animal died, I couldn’t help but be amazed by the symbolism. A giant white bull, covered and stained in its own impossibly red blood…the Imam’s starched white Punjabi spattered with that same blood…his knife, dripping blood on to his sandals... The Old Testament stories pulsed in my head. Abraham, Issac, Jacob…this was their sacrifice, their religious tradition and in turn, my religious tradition…alive in this modern city. Rather than experiencing this Eid as something foreign and disturbing –as many foreigners do I’m sure – I can’t help but feel the ties between myself and my Muslim neighbors strengthened and reinforced; this was something familiar to me, I understood it. The spilling of blood, the demand for sacrifice...Allah is not a foreign god to me, but rather remarkably recognizable…a face of the God of the Old Testament, a face of the God that does not flinch at the sacrifice of it’s own son in the Christian faith, a face of the divine that is bigger than any religious tradition gives God credit for being.


*I have put some photos of Eid sacrifice on my photography site – www.flickr.com/photos/fatalcleopatra - but they are not for the faint of heart as they reflect the reality of the sacrifice.