Kashi's House

2002-08-13T15:08:00.000-07:00

Hello. I don't know if I'll be coming back to this place or not, in future. I wanted to post what happened shortly after my last entry.

Kashi the cat, after whom this place was named, became ill with a liver problem. At first we thought it was fatty liver disease, and after 8 days in the hospital, she seemed to be getting better. The jaundice was gone, and she was eating again.

But then the jaundice started coming back, and she lost weight very quickly. She was down to half her healthy weight, when I realized she could not go on like this. Upon examination, the vet said that the problem had probably not been fatty liver disease after all, but a liver tumor, since the liver was now enlarged.

And so Kashi, my bright one, the light of my life, departed from me late in the morning of February 27, 2001. And all the light departed from the world.

2001-01-16T19:25:00.000-08:00

Kashi the cat says, "What are those people yelling about? I want back in the house."

I have a new hero -- or some new heroes, depending how you look at it. A collective hero of mine is the Metropolitan Community Church of Toronto. They did a historic thing in Canada on Sunday (January 14th, 2001), by performing weddings for two same-sex couples (one male couple, and one female). This wasn't just a joining ceremony as some churches perform, knowing full well that it's only symbolic but without the same legal status of heterosexual marriage. No, Rev. Brent Hawkes of the MCC married these couples in full compliance with the law of Ontario, and has mailed off the marriage certificates as all ministers mail all marriage certificates, expecting them to be legally registered by the Province, having conformed to all stated prerequisites for a legal marriage.

It all starts here, in the Marriage Act of Ontario. Have a gander under paragraph 5.(1), paragraph 5.5.(1), where it says, "Any person who is of the age of majority may obtain a licence or be married under the authority of the publication of banns, provided no lawful cause exists to hinder the solemnization."

First of all, there are two ways to be married, in this paragraph: 1) obtain a licence; or 2) "be married under the authority of the publication of banns." In this procedure, the names of the couples wishing to marry are read out in their church by the officiating minister, each of the three Sundays prior to the wedding date, and people are invited to voice their legal objections if any exist (this is the "reading of the banns"). If no valid legal objections are raised in this time period, the couple may be married and their marriage registered. This is a right that churches have in the Province of Ontario. Marriages performed in this way are given EQUAL LEGAL VALIDITY with marriages performed by gaining a license.

Secondly, note the first three words of the paragraph: "Any person who." PERSON. Not male and female. No specification as to gender is given anywhere in this marriage act except in one place, in Section 31, where it refers to a couple who have "lived together and cohabited as man and wife" for a year, and who are therefore recognized as legally married even if it turns out that the person who solemnized the marriage wasn't qualified. This might be construed as a loophole to get out of the gender-neutral language everywhere else in the Act. But when the actual definition of marriage is given, gender-neutral language is used. It would be easy to interpret Section 31 as referring either to what has been customary to this point but is not a necessary part of the definition -- or as referring to a specific situation where a MAN AND A WOMAN were married by an unqualified person. What does this have to do with a MAN AND A MAN or a WOMAN AND A WOMAN who were married by a qualified person??

And by golly, if you don't get the same gender-neutral thing in Bill C-23, the Act to Modernize the Statutes of Canada in relation to benefits and obligations. This Act deals with all sorts of stuff -- agriculture, income tax, Judges, how to compensate merchant seamen, trade unions, inheritance -- you name it, it's in there. And every single time the conjugal relationship is referred to, whether referring to marriage or common-law marriage, these are the only words used: 'person,' 'persons,' 'spouse.' No gender is ever specified. In fact, at a few points it explicitly amends "wife" to be replaced by "spouse or common-law partner."

Objectors to same-sex marriage say that this Act was amended specifically to define marriage as only occurring between a man and a woman. I skimmed every page of that site, and couldn't find where this amendment took place, though I might have missed it. When Reverend Hawkes was interviewed on CBC radio this morning (I hope that link works after today!!), he remarked that this definition was inserted as a preamble to the Act, which isn't about marriage at all. And Reverend Hawkes says that no such preamble has stood up as law, when challenged in court.

And this is why the four people who were married on Sunday are also my heroes. Anne and Elaine Vautour and Kevin Bourassa and Joe Varnell are indeed prepared, along with Reverend Hawkes and the Metropolitan Community Church, to challenge their right to be married legally, all the way to the Supreme Court. They acknowledge that the process could take up to five years to finally get there, but they're prepared to go all the way.

The stage is set for them. The Supreme Court itself set the stage a year or so ago when it ruled, in a case pertaining to the province of Ontario, that same-sex couples of long standing were to be accorded the exact same legal standing as opposite-sex common law couples. So the highest Canadian Court already recognizes the equivalency of committed couples, of whatever gender. Is this Court now likely to back down and say that these two types of couples are legally equivalent EXCEPT in being allowed to take one further step and achieve official, legally recognized status as a married couple?

It's very exciting. I'm pleased, at the moment, to be living in the Province where all this is happening. Although there are challenges being brought to the man-woman definition of marriage all over the place: British Columbia, Quebec, and again in Ontario where eight couples are challenging the government's refusal to allow them to obtain actual marriage licenses (if they don't want to go through the "reading of the banns," they have no other recourse).

Things are changing, and you know what? The country is not going to collapse if ALL committed couples who wish to honor the institution of marriage are allowed to do so. It may very well become more stable. And I -- even though I'm straight and could take my right to marry blithely for granted -- can't wait to see it all happen.

Kashi the cat says, "I can still be your baby, can't I mom, even if I'm not human?"

2000-12-29T20:26:00.000-08:00

Kashi the cat says, "Don't clean up that pile of paper, mom! I was sleeping on it."

I've come to a point today where I've been several times before. I've been working on a records management project, and it came to an end today. There are various stages and gradations that such a project goes through, and it's always kind of satisfying coming to the end and feeling, "Whew! I made it again!"

I've done about 5 big projects where a small company's seismic records needed to be catalogued and shipped to off-site storage, then integrated into a large database. I've also organized two oil company libraries out of rooms full of boxes and piles of stuff on the floor and on desks. It's always exceedingly daunting to walk into The Room for the very first time and look at The Mess, and realize that by a certain deadline, everything there has to be either shredded, or identified and categorized somehow, and sitting on a shelf or in a drawer or on a database somewhere.

I love it.

To me, there's just nothing more fun than starting to organize what needs to be done first, then second, what can be garbaged immediately to clear some space and make the rest clearer, how to categorize everything. There's a stage where, if someone were to come in, it would just look like you're merely moving piles out of one place and into another. The intitial organizational phase, when a project starts out very messy, stays looking messy for a long, long time. But at a certain point, you have categorized it all, and then you finally Get To Work. And at that point, it goes very quickly because now it's just a matter of writing stuff down and shipping it off or putting it on a shelf/in a drawer/in a file/on the computer.

Or you get the other side of things, where someone has already been almost fanatical about keeping track of every tiny little thing. Cleaning up after them is a deliciously easy job. Mostly it's just cataloging and shipping; almost rote work sometimes.

What struck me about today, though, wasn't so much the KINDS of things I and my co-worker had had to do to finish the job. It was more the ATMOSPHERE that prevails at various stages. On large projects like these, in my experience anyway, I have been very much ALONE for most of the project.

I am often doing these projects in the context of closing down an office or company. (This month's assignment was the end of a 2-year project that everybody else had moved on from.) You may start out with some people around, but they're usually getting ready to go elsewhere. Often they "discover" some boxes of files or other data that they just "happen" to dump on you to take care of. So gradually the people vanish, and the data stays.

I've had jobs where the expiring company took up seven floors of a building, and I was eventually the only living being on three of those floors. I've gone to floors to do some work in their file rooms, and had to hunt for the light switches because the whole place was dark. Even the furniture starts disappearing as offices start emptying, and you leave big notes in red markers reminding people that you really NEED the chair you've been using.

But speaking of offices emptying, that's another aspect of things that's sometimes spooky, and often sad. I often have had to go through people's offices after they've been laid off when one company has purchased another. I have to go through all their files, and shred stuff that is now deemed "unimportant," and catalog and store stuff that still needs to be kept. I've often read a bit in some of the garbaged files, thinking, "This person put five years of work into this project. And now I'm throwing all that work away." I wonder if they've got another job. If they have a family that's worrying. If they got a severance package that will keep them going long enough to get another job. It's like being an undertaker.

But there's another side of that, which I LOVE. I love being informal, dressing like a slob (if you're shifting boxes all day, you're going to wear a skirt and hose??). I love playing the radio full blast on an empty floor, and dancing down the empty halls, singing my lungs out. I love deciding what I'm going to tackle next, and organizing myself, since the people I work for learn very soon that they can leave me to my own devices and everything will get done properly and on time, even if my work mode is rather....unorthodox. I am made for this.

Anyway, today. Everything was labelled, and the movers were coming today to take it all away (as they'd taken much away already, in previous moves). There had been 2 of us in this huge empty room, full of empty desks and file cabinets, for 5 weeks. My companion actually felt guilty that we weren't doing much. I, on the other hand, was enjoying being paid to play computer games (till they took the computer away -- which they didn't, all day, as it happened). I told my friend that this is how these projects ALWAYS end -- with long stretches of doing nothing while you wait to be able to finish the last-minute tiny details. We had earned it. We had worked steadily to get each stage done by each deadline -- and we had done so.

It's kind of a reward, in and of itself, to sit in a room full of boxes, all properly labelled, catalogued, and entered into the database, just waiting for the movers to take them all and leave you and the chair (if you still have the chair) all by your lonesome. You look around the room and remember the chaos that was there the first day you walked in. It used to make me gulp in horror. Now I look at the chaos and think, with a glint in my eye, "Ha! We'll see about THAT." And we always do.

So it ends. You grab your coat, look around the room, and hope fervently that you haven't forgotten one tiny thing sitting in a drawer somewhere. Because there's one last ritual you perform that will make it impossible to go back and get it once the door closes behind you. You go to the Security desk and hand in your door pass. And then you leave.

Kashi the cat says, "I don't need any records to remember I love you, mom. I just need my food dish. Which you could fill right now, if you like, okay?"

2000-12-24T09:29:00.000-08:00

And Kashi the cat had nothing to say in that previous post because she's upset that I'm being taken to a farm today and will stay overnight and spend Christmas day there tomorrow, before coming home tomorrow night. I don't blame her. I hate leaving her behind, ever, at any time. :-(

2000-12-24T09:23:00.000-08:00

This was written last year, as I contemplated my last year having Christmas with my family before moving to Toronto. So the last couple paragraphs are out of date. But I re-read it this morning, and still enjoyed it, so I'm going to post it here.

MISCELLANEOUS CHRISTMAS MUSINGS AND RECOLLECTIONS

My favorite Christmases as a kid were the ones when most of our extended family managed to get together. My mom has four sisters (she's in the middle), and a younger brother (now deceased). Three of her sisters married and had families, and when we all got together there were 14 cousins hanging out and playing together. Usually we tried to gather in one place, the day before Christmas or on Christmas afternoon, having opened presents and then travelled for two hours, so we could have most of Christmas day (and presents!) en masse. Or sometimes we'd have essentially a second Christmas by getting together closer to New Year's. I remember my dad driving us through southern Alberta in our big, round, 1956 Chev, my brothers and I in the back seat with a blanket tucked around us. Maybe half an hour into the trip, the car would finally get warm enough to discard the blanket. I slept through most of those trips, but I know that we regularly travelled in snowy, minus 30 (Fahrenheit) weather, far more often than we do today.

I remember everybody arriving at my house, usually on alternate years. The families would arrive one by one in late morning after traveling their long distances, the women carrying containers of cookies and fudge and tarts in the door, the men making several cold, dogged trips back and forth between car and house with loads of food and suitcases and boxes of presents. The kids would shriek at each other as the newcomers threw off their boots and coats and hats in piles blocking the back door, before thundering downstairs to the basement sounding, as my dad said, like "a herd of stampeding elephants." My mom and her sisters would start talking and laughing the instant they were in a room together, and wouldn't stop except when sleeping, or when everyone finally left a day or two later. The men, meanwhile, those diverse gentlemen who had been allowed over the years to marry into this family (and had no idea what they were in for), would retire to the living room where they would converse stiltedly about farming (two uncles), or small-town utilities maintenance (one uncle), or the food delivery business (my dad), as they waited for their wives to call them to their next task.

My mom's youngest sister had five kids, three of whom were close in age to my brothers and me. My closest cousin and friend was Bernice, who was six weeks older than me. I used to watch anxiously out the window, standing on the couch, waiting for her to arrive. When the car pulled up in front of the house I would leap from the couch and race to meet her at the door. We had our inevitable, predictable rituals. "I got a new Barbie!" one (or both!) of us would say (and also, for a year or two, "I got a new Monkees record!"). And, after discarding the coat and boots, one of us would then say, "Are there olives??" For some reason we both have always loved pimento-stuffed green olives, so either I'd be jumping up and down saying, "Mom got LOTS of olives," or we'd be running to the fridge to find out for sure.

Once we had satisfied ourselves on that important matter, our next stop was also predictable: my mom's bedroom, where we would turn her dresser into a very large Barbie-house, with jewel boxes serving as beds, and other ornaments as chairs. Bernice and I spent pretty well our whole time together setting up a house or two for our Barbies, and then concocting the story that our dolls were going to enact. My own Barbie was an early version, with those narrowed, evil-looking eyes, so she was always the villainess. My Skipper was really mean. Bright, open-faced Midge was the heroine. And Ken for some reason was always, inevitably, as intelligent as a piece of wood, and the perpetual victim.

If everybody had arrived the day before Christmas, sometimes my dad would lead a cavalcade of cars on a Light Tour, driving around the city to watch how people had decorated houses and buildings with Christmas lights. Then we had the challenge of finding places for 22 people to sleep on Christmas Eve. Naturally I lost my big double bed to one set of aunts and uncles, but I was happy to curl up with Bernice in a sleeping bag in the basement, anyway. The kids from our two families were likely to be sleeping side by side, with the slightly older cousins from two other families in another part of the basement. Sleep, of course, was almost impossible until we all exhausted ourselves late into the night from giggling and maybe even having pillow fights. Whenever we were together, Bernice and I laughed almost as much as the mothers and aunts did.

No matter how late I'd gotten to sleep, or how tired I was, I always woke when my mom got up in the middle of the night to put the turkey in the oven. I think one of my warmest, calmest memories of those early Christmases is the memory of waking up to see light coming out of the kitchen and hearing my mother's quiet movements as she set the oven-timer and put the foil-covered turkey in. I don't know why I was the only one who woke up for this, but I remember listening to her, and listening to everyone breathe in sleep around me. And when she was done, I went back to sleep.

Of course we kids would wake up around six, and start hounding our poor parents to get up so we could open presents. Present-opening was mass hysteria. As the families had expanded over the years, we had finally had to give up buying presents for everyone, and began to draw names. Even that had to be given up eventually, since not every family was well off, and in Bernice's family, for example, the name-drawing necessitated their buying seven extra presents. Oddly, it was Bernice's mom who most vehemently did not want to give up the name-drawing, but we did eventually stop.

Christmas dinner was another grand adventure in logistics. Nowadays we would likely pile everything on platters along one kitchen counter and make everybody grab a plate and walk down the line, buffet-style. But in those days, I remember the kitchen and dining room being full of all sorts of card tables, TV trays, and coffee tables, all set with plates, and each table with its own set of everything: turkey plate, bowl of potatoes, small bowl of gravy, bowls of vegetables, plates of buns, butter, salt and pepper, etc. I suppose it wasn't that hard to arrange, with mom and the four aunts all at work on the meal (you'd never catch any of the uncles dead helping in the kitchen). But I still marvel at these details. Who has the energy for such work?? It's only now, when we're grown up and working, that we realize how much labor our mothers put into this event (and our fathers didn't).

Most of the families were Christians, so of course saying grace was a major event before the meal. But we had a nice custom that I still remember nostalgically. Often one person (always a man) would pray over the meal, but oftener than that, there was a song that everybody sang: "Come and dine, the Master calleth, come and dine. You may feast at Jesus' table all the time. He who fed the multitudes, turned the water into wine, to the hungry calleth now, 'Come and dine.'" A couple of weeks ago I only remembered the tune to that song, but I envisioned everybody standing crammed into the kitchen/dining/living rooms, singing together, and the words gradually came back. There's something that gives me shivers, when I remember it now. All the people in the world who I was related to, gathered singing in that room.

What I remember after that was just the laughing. All of us cousins inherited our mothers' hilarious sense of humor, so any family gathering was one huge laugh-fest. It got especially fun as the day grew late, because our mothers got giddier and giddier as they got more tired. My most fundamentalist aunts told the most off-color jokes, strangely (well, they were off-color for us, anyway). I remember one aunt telling a joke about a preacher who had been doing his visitation rounds, and had his bicycle stolen. So he decided it was time to preach on the Ten Commandments. He really emphasized "Thou shalt not steal," but didn't catch any guilty looks in the congregation, so he went on. And when he got to "Thou shalt not commit adultery," he remembered where he'd left his bicycle.

And all the aunts would laugh hilariously, with a kind of wicked daring.

It's been so many years since our last gigantic family Christmas get-together that I don't remember what year it was. I have a feeling that these big gatherings stopped right around the same time my parents got divorced. I wonder now if there was any connection; people just didn't GET divorced if they were Christians, so it was more comfortable not to be around this awkward split family. That may not have been the reason at all, but I wonder…

Which leads me to other Christmases that I remember in isolation, rather than as a consolidated happy mass. The Christmas when I was sixteen, I remember after it was over thinking how perfect it had been. I had my first part-time job, and for the first time I was old enough, wealthy enough, and maybe perceptive enough to find presents for people that really seemed to fit them. The family get-togethers had been perfect, the snow and atmosphere had been perfect, everything had combined to make it the best Christmas I could remember.

A few days after New Year's, mom came into my room and told me what she had saved till after Christmas, so the season wouldn't be spoiled: that she and my dad would probably be getting a divorce. Bam.

Then there was Christmas in Syracuse ten years ago, where the loneliness of the season was eased (or maybe made worse some days?) by one string of little lights stretched across a shelf, and one Christmas CD played over and over. When Christmas morning came and I faced my presents, mailed by the family, I expected to feel awful. But I knew I was opening mine at about the same time they were opening theirs from me, and suddenly it felt as though we were in the same room together. I had done a really good job picking the gifts, which I had mailed a month before, and I sat in a dream state, watching their faces as they opened them and were made glad. And as I opened each of mine, they were with me too, watching. I could feel the warmth of their hands on the gifts they had wrapped. I could hear their voices. The empty living room was full of people (I wonder if my cat noticed). It was one of the happiest Christmas mornings I've ever had, communing with the family I loved and missed.

The following year I was the sickest I had been in years, with a really horrible cough and cold. And I was so happy that I was home, having Christmas with the family, that I hardly noticed. Everything was golden.

Now today. A bit weird, since the family didn't come to my place on Christmas Eve as they usually do, because we had the get-together last Saturday. And five family members are in Oregon, so the group is the smallest it's been in years. My throat is still really sore and I'm coughing a lot, and my legs are weak, though I'm not feeling actually sick. It's a bit sad because it's my last Christmas in Calgary with the family for a while. And because of the financial ups and downs (mostly downs) of the year, I can't give the presents I love so much to give. But I've managed to get something for everybody anyway, being really creative with a few things I made myself.

So it will still be happy today. The brother and his wife who remain here are both real intellectual talkers, so there will still be intense, stimulating conversation. Mom and one of the aunts will be there, so there will still be complete hilarity (and my sister-in-law is hysterically funny in her own right). I still have three Barbie dolls (all bought in recent years in the U.S. on various trips). My aunt will have made her carrot pudding, which we all live for. And I know, I absolutely guarantee, that there will be OLIVES!

2000-12-22T21:20:00.000-08:00

Kashi the cat says, "I don't mind going outside, but those big red things are NOISY."

Check out this site: An unofficial site about the New York subways, but including transit systems from other countries and cities (including Toronto!) This is the streetcar line I travel every day in Toronto.

I've been thinking of subways lately. We didn't, of course, have subways in Calgary; we got an LRT system about 20 years ago. They wanted to have a lot of it underground, but when they tried to dig the tunnels the things kept filling with water. Apparently there's a very high water table in Calgary, which stands to reason since there are two rivers running through the middle of it. And in fact, the downtown is built on the south side of one river, with a high ridge on the other side, with the downtown area being essentially a flood plain. Historically, that area has gotten a major flood about every 50 years. (The latest flood is about 70 years overdue, by the way.)

So anyway. No subways in Calgary. I got my very first taste of subways in New York City (August 11, 1999 in fact). I'd heard so much about them that I was primed -- and I wasn't disappointed. I was completely fascinated.

Have you felt it? That anticipation and even a little nervousness as you hear the rumbling first, then feel a breeze building and lifting your hair, and see the headlights either appearing and growing into a glare or reflecting off the curved wall of the tunnel as the train looms closer? There's a lot of power there. And even more, at least in my case, there's a subterranean, psychological fascination with all that roaring power thundering out of the darkness, then disappearing into it again. There's mystery in those tunnels.

I always feel this kind of hidden, stifling horror at the thought of walking down one of those long, dark tunnels and beginning to hear the train rumbling behind, in the distance, long before you've reached the next lighted station. (Don't ask me how you'd come to be in that tunnel to begin with; this is just a fantasy. Don't bother me with details!) There's a "lost in the depths of Hades" feel to this little vision. I know some tunnels that I regularly travel through in Toronto, where there is light and space enough that you could easily stand aside while the train passes. But I've ridden the "N" and "R" trains in New York, clattering through their narrow, claustrophobic tunnels. I have no idea how you'd escape an oncoming train in there. I just shudder at the thought.

It's interesting to me that the tunnels and stations and the different lines all seem to have a personality of their own. The east-west line in Toronto, at least along the stretches I've travelled, is fairly bland and homogenous. The same plain rectangular tiles on the walls with the colored tile strip along the tops of the walls. The north-south-north U-shaped line has no consistent decor: some stations are decorated with thin vertical metal strips on the walls; others are round, space-age-looking tunnels the train zooms through; one station is decorated with large pictures of former Toronto Maple Leaf hockey players; other stations are essentially open-air except for the glass roof arching over them. The whim sort of changed every couple of stations. But all the Toronto stations have tiled stairs, and usually escalators.

New York is equally varied, but the stops I've been to, at least, seem rougher and in a way more "primitive." New York subways are darker and narrower, with cement platforms and stairways, and often steel girders rising up to the ceiling, undisguised by tiling or any other covering. I saw some stations with tiling even blander than the blandest Toronto stations. But some of them have the most beautiful mosaic decorations, like one of my favorites the Christopher Street/Sheridan Square station.

I don't know what it is that really fascinates me about subways. Something about subterranean mystery and hidden power. I've done some temp assignments lately in buildings that stand above or very nearby the subway lines. And sometimes, at a visceral level, you can feel the trains thundering underneath you. It's a feeling, not a sound, not a shaking sensation in the floor. You just SENSE it, far below. And as well as the mystery, there is loneliness, even sadness. A real isolation, a little cocoon of light and comfort journeying through the rough-hewn dark.

I've heard that in Toronto, at least, subway train drivers only last about ten years down there.

Kashi the cat says, "I'll sit on you in the dark, and rumble. And I won't be nearly that noisy."

2000-12-20T18:32:00.000-08:00

Kashi the cat says, "You look really funny when you jump, mom."

Well, I might as well admit it. The butter knife and I are bitter enemies.

I've never understood the need for a butter knife in the first place. This could be one of the first roots of the conflict. It's hard not to feel enmity toward someone who doubts the utility of your existence in the first place. But really. You use the butter knife, apparently, to put a little pile of butter on your plate, whereupon you use your knife to put the butter where you actually wanted it -- on your bread, your peas, whatever.

Why the extra step? To keep other people's already-used knives from "contaminating" the butter in the dish, lest you get something from their knife in your butter? (By that logic, surely we should have "mayonnaise knives" too, right?) I've always raised my eyebrows at having to use two implements to do one function -- butter my bread. Never understood the need.

So anyway. Where I'm currently staying, the butter dish resides on top of the microwave, which sits on a shelf above the kitchen counter. It's not one of those dishes that has a slot available that the butter knife sits in, so this knife sort of lays alongside the pat of butter, ready to fall off at the merest movement.

That's how the war started, you see. I'd reach up for the butter, and the damn butter knife would tilt, and slide, and clatter to the floor. And I'd have to wash the thing, so that I could use it -- when I didn't want to use it in the first place. It falls off when you reach for the dish, it falls off when it's sitting on the counter, it falls off if you look at it too quickly.

I got so that I just stopped using it. I set it aside and used an actual KNIFE, for cryin' out loud, since that's what I planned to do in the end anyway. I would lay the butter knife aside and ignore it. Occam's Razor, you know -- eliminate all extra, unnecessary steps. But my hosts would stick it back on the dish, and it would fall again next time.

Except that it doesn't just FALL any more. It leaps. It lies in wait for me up there, and just when I've turned to look somewhere else, it hurls itself off the dish, glancing on my head or my shoulder before clattering yet again to the floor. The thing NEVER falls onto the counter, oh no, that would be to easy: pick it up and put it back. No, it wants me to have to go to the trouble of washing the useless thing. Rub in the humiliation.

I swear it waits for me, and throws itself down deliberately. It never used to do that. It's gotten worse since I started ignoring it, or consciously setting it aside. It hates me. I know it. But believe me -- the feeling is mututal! What began as a mere mystery (what is the use of butter knives anyway?) has evolved into full-out loathing. It's only because my hosts seem to like the thing that I haven't quietly slipped it into the garbage bag months ago. But I tell you -- I need to get an apartment of my own one of these days. If we don't get separated soon, one of us is sure to kill the other.

Kashi the cat says, "Well, there's only one important thing you should be doing in the kitchen anyway. Have you noticed the state of my food dish...?"

2000-12-18T16:58:00.000-08:00

Kashi the cat says, "I hate you. You MADE me go out in this weather."

A kind of neat thing happened today -- that is, neat if you were raised in Calgary and have only recently moved to Toronto (9-1/2 months ago). I am used to pretty dry weather. I go to California for 2 weeks, with the extra humidity there (and it's not severe by any means), and when I come back to Calgary I spend a couple of weeks slathering chapstick all over my lips to keep them from cracking, and my hair flies all over the place like straw. And this is in the summer.

In the winter, it gets even drier. It's so dry that the static keeps photocopier paper stuck together. Copiers jam far, far more often in the winter there. And walking across a rug and then touching something metal -- YOWCH! I've always been in the habit, at work, of walking across a carpeted room and slamming my hand against a metal file cabinet, to dispel the static without feeling the pain quite as acutely as you do when you accidentally touch the tip of your finger to something metal. I've petted Kashi at night while she sat on my stomach, and watched the sparks follow my hands down from her head to the end of her tail. It's important to pet all the way to the end and pull the hand off the end of the tail, to dispel the static. You DON'T want to lift your hand partway through, and touch her head or nose without discharging first. You'll both regret it, believe me.

Anyway. So I moved to Toronto, having heard in advance how humid it can get. I gather that the summer of 1999 was almost unbearable. I had a week in New York City that summer, and got a taste of it there. And having lived in Syracuse for a year in the winter of 1989/90, I had also had a taste of the very different kind of snow they get in the East, compared to my dry prairies.

In Calgary, the snow is so dry that it can pack tight and hard, so hard that when cars drive on it, it squeaks. I love the sound of hard, squeaking snow under car tires. Snow can be crisp enough that in the right conditions, you can walk on the TOP of a three-foot snowdrift, and now fall into it. In Syracuse, I would see three-foot snowdrifts and put my foot into them, and it would go down-down-down-down-SPLASH!

I'd heard about the soggy snow of the East, and then finally experienced it. I had NEVER had to carry an umbrella on any snowy day in my life before that. I had heard of roofs and power lines collapsing under all that soggy weight, and I could finally understand why. That stuff is SOAKING. (In fact, we had the roof of a shopping mall collapse late last week, killing one shopper.) Winter in Toronto was not something I was looking forward to, from the beginning.

But something odd has been happening all year. People are constantly saying to me, "This is nothing like what Toronto weather is usually like." To which I usually replied gloomily, "No, because it's what Calgary weather is like, instead." I appear to have brought Calgary weather with me. The spring was late, gray, and wet. Summer came late, and although there were hot stretches, there were more wet, gray patches than usual. Autumn, too, came early, and instead of the spectacular colors I'd been led to expect, we got a fairly quick shift into brown, and then dropping leaves.

Felt just like home, dammit. I'd been looking forward to a mild, early spring, a long, hot summer, and a brilliant, extended autumn. It feels so familiar, to a Calgarian, to be saying, "Well, maybe next year."

But today I had one tiny, great little experience that reminded me of Calgary, and I didn't mind it. I loved it. We've had a couple of big snowfalls in the past week, like everybody else in this half of the continent, it seems. And today, when Kashi and I went out for the regular evening walk that she insists on -- I COULD WALK ON TOP OF THE SNOW. It had melted a bit on the weekend, and then a strong wind had come up and taken the temperatures down, and the snow had become just crisp enough. Granted, it wasn't a 3-foot snowdrift, and after a few seconds my foot did break through the crust -- but I did it.

I hate and loathe and despise winter. But if I have to go through a winter, it's really a Calgary winter I prefer. I got a teeny tiny taste of it tonight, and I felt very good. :-)

Kashi's mom says, "I did not make you go outside. YOU made ME. Thanks, babe."

2000-12-17T20:00:00.000-08:00

Kashi the cat says, "You already know there's a Higher Life Form. I don't have to explain it to you."

So why the seesaw between Atheist days and Polytheist days? one might wonder. I was, after all, raised a fundamentalist -- essentially a Monotheist, except with that odd little doctrine of the Trinity stuck in there. (And believe me, I know it's odd; even before I stopped being a fundamentalist I had concluded that the concept was incoherent and illogical, and moreover not even necessary, since everything essential to basic Christian beliefs about sin and salvation would remain completely intact without it.) But it is an interesting question, why I would be so adamant about this either/or -- it's either atheism, or polytheism, but monotheism is out of the question if some form of the Divine is in consideration.

I wrote it out fully, as I reasoned through it several years ago, in my personal Journal. Said Journal is currently in a box in storage, 2000 miles away. So there are a lot of things I've forgotten, and it would take a long time to reason through them all again. But the gist was that I think the multiple deities would answer the world as we see it much better than one.

If the world was created (or if its coming into being was at least overseen by some Higher Power, whether through evolution or whatever), it looks far more like something that was created by a committee than by a mind of single purpose. That idea could seem trivial just by itself, but there were other things that factored in.

Enter the Empiricist again. I reasoned that if there really were (as I had been taught) one God, of whom the human race had an original knowledge, but whom it had forgotten, then we could explore world mythologies, and the farther back we went, the closer we would come to an original monotheism which had later degenerated into multiple versions of polytheism. So I started investigating. And lo and behold -- the farther back we went, in every myth system I looked into, there were always the Many. There was the occasional One, but this One was always shadowy and nebulous, and usually dismembered immediately so that the world could be created. At best, I felt, this might have suggested pantheism, but not monotheism.

So there were always the Many, and they were always Male and Female. This could mean, as many maintain, that deities were really created in OUR image, not the other way around. But even in Genesis, in which I literally believed at one time, the Creator said "Let us (note the plural, and the original word IS a real plural) create Man in Our image" -- and humankind was created, male and female. Get it? In God's image -- male and female! So even then, I was beginning to think there was more than just this lump of Unity, but that the Divine existed in several distinct entities.

And after the "male and female" business, then my view of ancient mythical pantheons was changed utterly. So maybe there WAS a goddess of love and lust, whose name in one country might be Venus, and Aphrodite in another. These stories about conflicts among the gods could just reflect the conflicts human beings had with each other and projected onto imaginary deitites -- or they could be true. Who knew? But it just didn't seem that a Uni-Mind would answer the vast multiplicity of personalities and the vast variety in the world.

It didn't surprise me, therefore, to start finding major hints that even the God of the Christian Old Testament probably had a consort, who was erased from the texts as they were transmitted into our day. Not all references have been able to be erased; they're still there, in the texts. So I think that monotheism was the later development from polytheism, and not the other way around.

I wish I had my original Journal entries; there was so much more to it than what I've been able to recount tonight. I'll need to re-address this.

But then there's the issue of self-conscious personality. That will have to be looked at tomorrow, or soon anyway.

Kashi the cat says, "Never mind. It's bed-time. Too much thinking at night, when all that really matters is cuddles and sleep. I'll try to explain the Higher Power to you again tomorrow, since you still Don't Get It."

2000-12-15T19:03:00.000-08:00

Kashi the cat says, "I'm not sitting here staring intently at a blank wall. You just can't SEE properly, mom..."

So, on the other hand. My last post and today's post will demonstrate how divided I can be. I tell people that I'm an atheist except on the days when I'm a polytheist. I love physics, and science in general, and logic and reason, and love to think of myself primarily as an Empiricist. I worked it out logically -- I THINK everything can be pretty well explained from an atheistic point of view. But there are a few things that just seem to "jut out"....self-conscious personality being one of them. So on days when those "jutting" things weigh more heavily with me, I'm a polytheist.

So I say I don't believe that either past moments or future exist outside the moment they're actually happening, and are therefore not accessible. And YET. Being an Empiricist, I can't entirely discount people's accounts of experiences they've had that may suggest at least a paranormal origin, if not supernatural (though my reasoning is that if what we normally term the "supernatural" does in fact exist as part of the way things are, then it is as "natural" as thought or grass, because it's just another part of what IS).

I've done a lot of reading. I know people of various faiths -- Wiccan and pagan viewpoints are especially interesting to me. I had someone do my astrological chart and end up knowing things about me that other online friends would never have guessed in a million years from having the same interactions with me that he had. Lucky guess? I suppose one could call it that. But I can't give credence to any viewpoint which automatically calls it a "lucky guess" simply because one has decided in advance that that sort of thing CAN'T happen, and therefore it DIDN'T. It has to be the other way around if one is being really scientific.

So while my predominant view these days is the more atheistic, materialist view....at the same time, I'm not closing the doors. There are other possibilities. I do believe the human mind is capable of understanding almost anything it puts its...well, its mind to, eventually. But I'm not going to claim that I have seen everything, or to be so set in my opinions that new evidence can't possibly change them. And I refuse to define "evidence" in such a way that only the "evidence" which supports my current views will ever qualify as "evidence" for me. That's not how it works.

This is why, on my polytheist days, I look forward to sensing the magic in the shadows just behind me. I look at the huge full moon up there and hold my breath, waiting for Her to manifest. I have looked up at the streaky clouds on an ice-blue winter morning and seen the burning sun rolled up on a cosmic beach, trailing flames with the white airy waves receding across the blue sand.

Kashi the cat says, "I told you."

2000-12-13T18:42:00.000-08:00

Kashi the cat says, "Where were you, mom? I waited forever and forEVER, and you NEVER came home! Take me outside now."

I had some really profound things I was going to say, earlier today, but since I have no Internet access from work, I didn't get to post them when I thought of them, and by the time I got home, I forgot. But this leads me to consider the concept of Time.

The idea of Time has weighed on me for many years (there's gotta be a joke or some irony or something in there). I know this will horrify any physicists -- probably almost anybody who currently thinks about it -- but I believe time is linear, and uni-directional. I don't believe that past events are "out there" on some continuum somewhere, nor that future events are "out there" but just on a different part of the continuum. I think that once a moment has happened, it's gone forever. I don't think they can be accessed, every again, since they no longer exist. All that's left is a memory, if someone was there when it happened (and yes, I believe it happened even if no one was there to observe it). And one event follows another, and that there is no reversing that order.

This means that the Loss of Moments haunts me, most especially when I am in a situation I've looked forward to for a long time, and don't want to end. Like my vacations in southern California, which I love, and which always go so quickly I hardly feel like I've been there before they're over. This is why I can go for a week's holiday and take ten rolls of film. I take pictures of the buildings, the foliage, the sky, everything I can do to capture the fact that I really, really was THERE, even though I'm not now.

This leads into issues of Memory. What does it mean to have all these images in my mind, of things I enjoyed so much? (Or, for that matter, things I didn't want to be involved in.) These are pictures of -- nothing! Those moments no longer exist, anywhere. The places I went -- even the "I" who was there -- are utterly gone. This is haunting, and daunting, and humbling. This is like facing one's mortality, long before the end of one's life. In a sense, one's life is ending every single second that it is happening.

Which naturally leads to questions of personal identity a well. What is this "I" that exists at this second -- and doesn't exist in that second any more but now exists in THIS second -- and so on?

It's mind-boggling. But it also makes me appreciate and love every moment of every event that makes me happy. I memorize as much as I can of every enjoyable moment, so that somehow in the future I can envision it and "be" there again, as much as will ever be possible. I cultivate Memory.

It's all summed up in a song by Rush, the Canadian band, which goes through my mind a lot on these enjoyable occasions ("Time Stand Still" from the Album "Hold Your Fire"):

I turn my back to the wind
To catch my breath,
Before I start off again.
Driven on without a moment to spend
To pass an evening with a drink and a
friend

I let my skin get too thin
I'd like to pause.
No matter what I pretend
Like some pilgrim --
Who learns to transcend --
Learns to live
As if each step was the end

Time stand still -- I'm not looking back
But I want to look around me now
See more of the people and the places that
surround me now

Freeze this moment a little bit longer
Make each sensation a little bit stronger
Experience slips away...

I turn my face to the sun
Close my eyes.
Let my defences down --
All those wounds that I can't get unwound

I let my past go too fast
No time to pause --
If I could slow it all down
Like some captain, whose ship runs
aground --
I can wait until the tide comes around

Make each impression a little bit stronger
Freeze this motion a little bit longer
The innocence slips away...

Summer's going fast, nights growing colder
Children growing up -- old friends growing
colder
Experience slips away...

Kashi the cat says, "Mom, it's time for cuddles. We haven't had a cuddle since this time yesterday, and that was so long ago I can hardly remember..."

2000-12-11T19:15:00.000-08:00

Kashi the cat says: "You're finally home from work. Take me outside for a walk. What do you mean, it's snowing?? Well, stop it!"

Okay. Today is another Introductory Day, so I'm going to point out that I'm Canadian. And yes, we do indeed have a distinct culture up here. Check out the food, for example:

Canadian Recipes

If you have never tasted Nanaimo bars, you have no concept of heaven.

But there is another reason why we want to soften you up with our neat food. We want you to be partly-acclimatized already When we take you over. Don't think it's going to happen? Check out how many comedians and musicians we've already sent down to the U.S. to infiltrate.

Just to make sure Americans really understand us, here's An American's Guide to Canada.

Alright. More to come. Meanwhile, Kashi says, "It's bedtime. I can't curl up on your hip if you're sitting at the computer. Turn it off."

2000-12-10T10:05:00.000-08:00

Starting again. Apparently, if you adjust ANYTHING on the posting screen, your post goes blank and you have to begin again. Not a good omen. We'll see if I like this as a perment thing. Or not.

Anyway. Once again. Welcome to Kashi's House. Kashi is the Cat I live with. She lets me stay with her, provided I give her food, clean the litter box, and take her for two or three outside walks per day. Seems like a pretty good arrangement to me.

For starters, here's my favorite place to go online:

Salon Magazine, where you'll find the Table Talk forum. A vast collection of the most intelligent and interesting people I've met on the Web (or off it).

More to come, as time permits...