The last night of Chanukah

I was thinking of converting to Judaism and in the process Michael had contacted a rabbi he had met a few years ago. That rabbi had left, but the new youth rabbi (they're supposed to be the most open minded of any congregation) invited Michael over for the Orthodox service and then Sabbath dinner. After having a quick burst of a mini-fight on the white stone steps as the men in suits brushing past us pretended not hear, we kissed and made up and entered the building.

After hanging our coats, we approached the doors to the closed off, place-of-worship part of the synagogue. "Usually there is a place for women at the back," Michael told me, and we walked through. First thing I notice is a rabbi bounding towards us with his hand stretched out in front of him. "You must be my guests," he whispered as he pushed us back out the doors. "Hello hello," he continued once he had pushed us out of harm's way. "So good of you to come. Women's entrance is that way."

Myself and about a dozen women had box seats to a service about electric light on the Sabbath. Is it wrong to turn on the electrical lights on the day of rest? What about turning on an electric stove? On the Sabbath, one cannot change the status or stare of any material. What if you asked a trained monkey to start pedaling a bike that started a generator that would then bring electricity to an element?, the rabbi asked. What then?

By the end of the talk/service, I had learnt that if you live in a building with a key swab, you need to ask a non-Jewish neighbor to come down and let you in, and that turning the lights on prior to sunset and leaving them on through the night is the best way to avoid uncomfortable situations.

After service we walked the half block to the youth rabbi's two-bedroom apartment, in what looked like subsidized housing blocks. There was a group of us that had meandered over; a doctor as thin and long as a blade of grass with his silent, culture-shocked girlfriend, a round-cheeked family therapist, two teenagers. The rabbi's wife, bustling about the apartment, looked as if she had just stepped off the kibbutz, strong and stalky in a long cotton skirt with her hair back in a scarf. The family therapist's wife was there as well, in the same scarf and skirt, with two young girls under each arm. Her face seemed chiseled out of stone, with a roman nose at a long angle, and eyes that were sharp and deeply set. We all sat around the table, recited prayers then sang. The rabbi's wife went to get the bread. The doctor, sitting across from us started humming and tapping the table with his hand. Mike and I leaned in to each other and cracked a few jokes about our ignorance of gender placement in the area of worship. The doctor kept humming, louder now.

"I guess I'm your non-Jew in residence," I said. "If I choose to swab you in."

"You can be my monkey for a day."

"I'm not going to be your monkey."

"You'll have to turn on the elements at least."

"You never turn them on anyway. Everyday's the Sabbath for you when it comes to the stove."

"LA LA LA LA LA LA LA," said the doctor, staring at us and now pounding on the table.

The rabbi sat back down after grabbing something from the kitchen. He began slamming his hand against the table too, humming and swaying from side the side.

"Oh," Michael said, and whispered "I forgot. We're not supposed to talk between the first prayers and the breaking of the Halla. Ooops."

We were dutifully silent as the dinner guests swayed and hummed and pounded the table until the bread was passed around. They read from the prayer book, and broke into song. The therapist had moved to Vancouver from the US only three weeks ago, and his wife had only flown in the night before. She seemed tired and barely ate. They were staying there at the rabbi's apartment until their move in two weeks. The doctor wanted to practice medicine for rural populations. The rabbi sang. Lots of laughter. I had this flash of what it would be like to have a framework through which to see everything, one that would unit all the dangling strings of my life, but one that brought laughter and community and God. I felt as if I had had a glimpse of how shallow my life was, constantly skidding on the surface of whatever it was that I was interested in that week. For a second I felt hollow.

With dinner over we cleared the table and started a game of kibbits, which had to do with numbers and dominoes. I found my way to the bathroom, and caught a glimpse of the therapist's wife curled up on a mattress on the floor, as if tucking herself into the rectangle of light from the doorway. When I came back from the bathroom (All the toilet paper had been pre-torn into little squares so that no one would have to change the shape or status of any material) the rabbi's wife and the therapist were standing at the head of the table and the mood had changed. "What if we got the neighbor from the first floor to come and do it?" she was saying. "Would that be allowed."

"I guess so, but I advised against this from the beginning."

"I'm a non-Jew. I can help with any Sabbath situation you might have," I said, kind of in a jokey way, which I immediately realized was totally inappropriate.

"Carrie, there's something you have to do. It's serious," Mike said, a little pale.

"We have a couple of text messages on her cell phone. We can't even touch the phone on the Sabbath, so could you read them for us?"

"Sure, of course, and I walked over to the phone with the therapist.

I picked it up. Two messages. I opened the first.

"Im sorry to say Mom died tonight at 7:30 tried to call yr not answering."

"Oh my god," I said.

He nodded and thanked me and began to cry. He went into her bedroom and shut the door.

I walked back to the table and the rabbi stared at me. "She's dead," I told them.

All we could do was stare at the dominoes in silence.

After a minute, the rabbi's wife said "She had been dying for a long time. She was very ill."

"I told them to wait until after the Sabbath," said the rabbi. "There's nothing she can do except grieve in private until Sunday."

"Maybe that's a good thing," I said. More silence.

"It's your turn," said one of the teenagers, and we continued our game.

Rosanne

Remember the show Rosanne? Remember how revolutionary it was, a funny and smart. The episode where Becky farts in front of the entire school, but her date STILL comes and picks her up, in emblazoned in my memory.

schborgsie schnisie

schborgsie schnisie

Love it. I have this urge to rent all of the Muppet movies tonight and watch them back to back. I watched Muppets take Manhattan last night, and got soooo exccited when the Seasemie Street gang made a cameo at the wedding. I had forgotten about that. I love watching the real people interact with the puppets, making the puppets even more real, and the people more puppety.

Bad Genes

My boss said something today about how this scientist, very well-respected she reassured us, has shown that negative thoughts actually re-shape out genetic make-up, that bad thoughts make us sick on a genetic level. So we shouldn't have negative thoughts, is the logic I guess.

Maybe that's what the downtown east side is, the place where all of BC's negative thoughts go, because they have to go somewhere. Mud piles of negative thoughts composting in the streets. Sopping bad thoughts hanging from the trees. As long as they're out of the way.

I can see how positive thinking helped us evolve as a species. That go-get-'em attitude. Evolution's path is probably lined with the corpses of our early Sextons and Woolfes. Still is, I guess. Someone has to think the negative thoughts for a society that refuses to do so. Who gets stuck with that job?

No, thinking positive is important and necessary and keeps things in harmony and is the word of the ancients. As they say in BC, it's all good.

City Council

I went to a city council meeting tonight, the first I've been to in Vancouver, the public forum doesn't count. I sat in the wrong area the whole time, with the press and the signed-up speakers, totally oblivious that I was in the wrong area. I started to get embarrassed and then realized that I was going to city council meetings for fun, and am past being able to get embarrassed for things like that.

Anyway, it was a specific public meeting about building an apartment building in the Vancouver neighborhood of Dunbar, a community curled around the outskirts of the really rick area of Vancouver, Point Grey. Many residents have been there 20, 30, even 60 years, and would never be able to afford to buy a house there now. But many are urban professionals, lawyers, professors, living in two-story post-war houses under A-shaped roofs, lush, BC gardens spilling out of their front yards. The Knox Unitarian Church has a giant plot of land in the neighborhood, and in order to keep itself out of the red (their halls are near-empty on Sundays,) they have agreed to sell a lot of their land to the developer of a proposed apartment complex for seniors. In exchange for that sale, the developer would build an annex for the church on that land.

Many/most of the residents of Dunbar are opposed to this proposed seniors home. Eleven years ago, a committee of residents got together and created a "Dunbar Vision" document that outlines what they wanted and didn't want for their neighborhood, and it was ratified by council.

This seniors home is technically five stories. No building in the area can be higher than three except seniors homes. It is over what that document outlined in terms of density, except in the case of seniors homes. In other words, if that building wasn't a seniors home, there's no way in hell it would ever get approved.

Also, that annex is going to force a very high brick wall onto the periphery of a few peoples back yards. and they want to put a playground on its roof. The whole building is going to block the sun and dwarf many houses along its street.

So what makes it a seniors home? You have to be 55 or over to live there. That's it. There is nothing else special to the design of the building, including the width of doorways for the inevitable wheelchairs, communal space, library, care attendants, a common kitchen, nothing that actually makes it a seniors home. And if you're under 55, you can pay a fine of an undisclosed amount to an unnamed company that will exempt you from that rule.

It was pretty apparent what the residents thought. The developer (the idea that he was foreign skirting around the edges of their comments) was going to sell his condos for $1.5 million each after having found a way to bust through the laughable "Dunbar Vision" and resulting bylaws for that hood.

It's sometimes boring and uncomfortable at public forums such as these (see last post.) But everyone was amazing tonight. One 90 year old woman walked to the podium and gave a tongue in cheek relaying of what the developers had proposed. "There are plenty of bike racks in the plans for the front this so-called seniors building. Because that's what we seniors need. Bike racks."

Another woman spoke, in an accent that hinted at long-ago Britishness, to all of the points in an astoundingly articulate and thoughtful way (she was the chairwoman of the Dunbar Vision Committee for a reason I guess.) She made the point that there is no law or regulation higher than city council that would force a landlord to stick to an age restriction on a building, making that building a seniors home. It happened to another building in Dunbar - they went back to council and asked that that amendment be changed, and council approved it. This developer can do the same.

The woman sitting beside me, wearing a bright pink scrunchy in her hair and pants that looked as if they were made out of upholstery, was nervous all night. She kept crossing out lines of type on a crumpled piece of paper, then writing them back in. Finally her name was called. She had what sounded like an Eastern European accent. She told council that she had watched as traffic became more and more dense in that neighborhood over the years, and how kids were having too many close calls with cars. That was one reason why she didn't want the thing to go through, the high traffic density.

The other was that in order to build it, they were going to tear down her home, and she had no where else to go. She had been on a waiting list for a co-op, the only other thing she could afford in this city, for nine years. Because her two children are different sexes, by law she needs to find a three-bedroom apartment, and that will be impossible. She is a single mom with two kids in Vancouver. She knows her options.

Pink Floyd the Wall LIVE STAGE ADAPTION

Pink Floyd the Wall Live On Stage was so f-ing awesome. It was a Rushmore-esque, jazz-hands interpretation of the mother-blaming, angst-ridden epic. The wall was made of Styrofoam, and got nudged rather than torn down; the Mother lost her voice so silently gestured her part while someone sang her lines backstage. I saw my high school theater exercises incorporated into the choreography. Two "roadies" changed the sets by walking the furniture in front of the actors. Long minutes passed when no one was on stage at all. The school kids did clumsy jazz circles as they sang "Another Brick in the Wall." In other words, it's the best night of musical theatre I've had in a really long time. The only thing about it that wasn't so-bad-it's-good was the band. They totally rocked it, got every note of the album, brought it all to life. That album rocks, the movie doesn;t exactly hold up. But the stage adaptation will live on forever.

Support your municipality

Right now, the City of Vancouver is $50 million in the hole. By law, municipalities aren't allowed to run a deficit, so they have to find a way of balancing the books. The city has been holding a series of public forums for citizens. What they want to know is kind of basic. Would you rather cut services or raise property taxes? They assume that people don't want property taxes raised more than 2%. But this means services are going to have to be trimmed.

Last night, I went to the open forum in my neighbourhood. Yes, that is now how I spend my Friday nights. In a small, back room of the Kensington Community centre, myself, an elderly couple, three men with obvious mental illnesses, a librarian, and a couple of blue-collar types listened to the power point presentation. The talk was conducted by two city councilors, and half way through, a slightly tussled Mayor Gregor Robertson tip toed in. He had biked the 40 minutes up hill from downtown. Basically, the city is $50 mill in the hole, they have trimmed as much "fat" as they could, which accounted for about $20 mil of that. They need to do something. They need to hear from us.

The councilors looked tired and as if they were going throug the motions. Periodically through the power point, various angry citizens, mostly the three representing the mentally ill, interupted to make a point about what the city was doing wrong. The councilors were respectful, nodding their head and asking people to save it for the end.

The power point illustrated for me how hugely important the mechanism of municiple government is. Water, garbage, libraries, community centres. One woman commented that since the recession, and Vancover has been hit bad, demand for community services has risen sharply. People depend on these services when times are rough. But it's when times are rough that the city cuts their funding. The councilor shrugged. She knew, but that's why we were all there - to find a solution. It was a bit depressing that more people wouldn't turn up for something so important. It felt good to be in a forum where our officials HAD to listen to what we had to say, no matter how rambly and whack-job it was.

One man with a pronounced stutter started to give a speech on loopholes in municiple serivce charges, and how they're related to the work of Hobes. I turned around and recognizedhim immediately. It was William Lim, a bird-like man with a white monk's crown of hair and his pant legs bound up in reflector tape. Back when I was a kid, he was a Ph. D student of my step father's, a Chinese poet who would send boxes of real holly to us for Christmas, and leave poems composed in Chinese script on our fridge. By the time he got to the erosion of democracy in his speech he paused, and said "you want me to sit down now, don't you?" Everyone laughed, because we all kind of did.

After writing out my comments, I turned to leave. I realized I had forgot my helmet and turned back to look for it. "Looking for this?" the mayor asked me. "I'm looking to buy a helmet. Is this a good one?"

"Haven't had to test it yet, sir, luckily for me," I replied.

Mayor Robertson went on to tell me that thhis was a typical croud for the open houses they had been putting on, how disappointed he was. He thanked me profusely for coming. I think he was truely appreciative that I wasn't a 65 year old man with a chip on my shoulder.

Mayor Robertson has been enacting real change within city hall, and it seems as if he's been paying a price for that. There's been an old guard in for 50 years now, one that doesn't question where election funds come from, one that turns a blind eye to conflict of interest and suspicious transactions. Vancouver may be one of the most corrept municipalities in Canada, with no real regulation or oversight. The province has approved a look into municiple election reform, which is sorely needed.

I'm starting to have a bit of empathy for city politicians. They opened up the floor for recommendations, no one came, but when they make their decisions, the general public are going to get all up in arms. Why not be a part of the entire process rather than only indulging in anger once the decisions have been made? Mayor Robertson talked about how the province and the feds have cut billions in community servcies and expect the coty to pick up the slack. But the cities don't get any bigger of a piece of the tax pie.

As I walked out, William Lim ran out of the room calling my name. We exchanged numbers. Gerry still had a few of his poetry books from twenty-five years ago, and he wanted them back.

Yay BC!

Gordon Campbell's Liberals hate poor people. And those who work to save people's lives. And people who make art. Oh, and the mentally ill. But we've got a $500 million roof on the sports dome, and the Olympics are in 100 days!

Adrian Mole is 40! Holy crap!

Rainbow Brite

It makes me sad that dimply, five-year-old looking Rainbow Brite has been made over into this. Why do all representation of girls have to be sexualized? Where oh where has our innocence gone?

Creative Writing Workshop

I lead a writing workshop for people who are going through drug detox in the Downtown East side. The quality of the work that comes out of our little hour-long exercises is impressive. One man, a quite, brick-wall of a dude with a long face and shaved head, wrote a an poetic piece in response to a photo I had brought to class. But another dude, who didn't participate in the class himself but walked through the common room with his ears perked, was angry and disrespectful.

"That picture looks like testicles."

"Ha, it does," I said.

"How would you know?" I couldn't think of anything to say. He responded for me. "Science class?"

I didn't even realize he was being so before Brick Wall leaned in and apologized for his behavior. "That's alright," I responded. "No, it's not," Brick Wall said. And it dawned on me that this guy had been purposefully disrespecting. Well, whatever. I can leave that place, and he can't.

There's something really satisfying for members of the workshop I think about writing a piece and then hearing our response to it. They read their work out loud, and we react. Seeing that people are directly effected by what they write is a really positive experience for people in recovery I think. One woman, jittery and scabbed and overly polite, smiled broadly when we all applauded her work.

On another note, here's Rick Salutin's response to the new CBC news. What the hell is happenign with that network?

On another

Police State

Here's an article about the police state BC is turing into. As well, two citizens are taking the city to court, claiming the bylaw restricts their freedom of speech. In response, the city has claimed they will amend the wording of the bylaw, and that police will not be allowed into private residences, and that there will be no $10,000 fined for the signs. Maybe. They'll probably just wait outside on the street until the people come out of their homes and not give them a fine but arrest them right there on the sidewalk.

And here's a picture of my dog...

Yawp

I went to see a movie recently, and in the line-up of pre-movie ads was this campaign. It was lovely to hear Whitman's voice boom out in surround sound in the dark, the scratch of the vinyl popping all over the place. And the ad was beautifully shot. But the contrast of 80-pound models looking over their shoulders quizzically and Whitman's words, the sense of art that's supposed to rise in us, is just funny now, kind of archaic.

Here's America:

Centre of equal daughters, equal sons,
All, all alike endear'd, grown, ungrown, young or old,
Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich,
Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love,
A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother,

Chair'd in the adamant of Time

First blog

I'm posting this blog as a way to get out of my own head and share some of the things I'm interested in. Warning: there will be discussion of wedding paraphernalia. I'm getting married in July. It's going to be right outside of Tofino, on Vancouver Island, now home to this. Romantic.

I may have had swine flu this weekend. I had all the symptoms, and a friend of mine suffered through it a few weeks ago. It started with a dry cough, and continued with three days of a very high fever. I drifted in and out of sleep for a couple of days, sweating through my clothes. I had a headache like I've never had before in my life, and the coughing rattled my swollen brain around in my skull. It wasn't even the Victorian hallucinogenic fevered sleeps. Just drooping in and out of consciousness.

Michael dodged the swine bullet: He was gone for the weekend, so I was left alone to sweat through the sheets. My best friend brought me groceries, left them on my doorstep, rang the bell then rode away. Totally don't blame them - get your flu shot, folks.

After a day or so I dragged myself to the TV and threw myself in front of that. We don't pay for cable, but a few stations are beamed in anyway, MTV being one of them. Peak Season, a reality show I worked on last year, was in perpetual rotation. Peak Season's a good show and all, I'd even say crackalicious, but it was kind of like a layer of hell. Thank god for the Comedy Network.

It started last Wednesday, and only now am I fully recovered. Not bad, for a flu that is actually killing people, which is awful and terrifying.