Interspersed with Maeve’s narrative, is Louise’s–she’s one of the dead girl, Rebecca’s, best friends (also called “Bex.”). The two together form a better picture of the victim, and you immediately get the sense that Louise is a highly unreliable narrator, which was intriguing for me. However (SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER), if you subscribe to the Law & Order guest star gimme school of thought, you’ll soon become convinced, as I did, that Louise isn’t all she appears to be…

Casey’s writing style really pulses the action forward, and I appreciated that–the book suffers a little from the more-is-more school of genre writing. Our heroine’s fighting crime, involved in a bad relationship, fighting with her mother, and so on. And Casey could have streamlined a lot more in terms of the descriptive writing, it got a bit much at points (we didn’t need to know the ins and outs of a character’s work life that we meet once and who has absolutely no relevance to the plot, you know?). And if you’re going to write from a third character’s perspective, don’t wait until the middle of the book to do so–I would have enjoyed his (Maeve’s partner’s) POV throughout the book. But, overall, I enjoyed the novel, especially the end bits. The violence was it entirely Mo Hayder-level believable? Not really, but Casey absolutely has promise.

But, I’m not feeling diseasy. There’s a win!

There’s a red-tailed hawk that flies outside my window at work and, this morning at about 8.20, before the weather turned, before it got all cloudy and gray, it was out hunting pigeons. Swoop swoop, and it’s so cliched, but it’s effortless and floats on the air. Often, I sit just watching it, swoop swoop, and once it flew so close to my window that I saw the yellow of its eyes. I have no idea if it’s the same hawk almost two years later, but this one is just as beautiful. Sure, they’re horribly nicknamed, common “chicken hawks,” but I don’t care–I am excited to see them. They constantly remind me that there is a world well outside of my own where pigeons are eaten and hawks perch on very tall buildings.

I can’t even remember where I read this recently. Might have been a magazine. Might have been online. And it said that people who get out and into nature are happier and more well-adjusted than their city counterparts. Of this, I wholeheartedly disagree–yes, it’s nice to get out of the city, and I’m looking forward to it this long weekend, but it’s also nice to be in your city. Sidewalks aren’t as delicious as sun decks, that’s perhaps true, but just recognizing there is an outside when you spend much of your day rushing from one task to another and trying to cram all of life into the short, twenty-minute bursts of free time really makes you appreciate the blessed flight of that hawk.

I’m rambling today. Like I do.There’s little to add when you’re not being particularly funny. Or witty. Or insightful. Tomorrow’s another blog post. And Thursday. Thursdays are always better than Wednesdays.

But I have decided that I need a holiday. I need a bit of a break. I am this-close to losing my grasp on just about everything. Having a common cold throws me completely out of whack and I’m back this-close

We made some vegan chocolate chip muffins the other weekend. The RRBB seemed to enjoy them. His emotions vacillate so easily these days — one minute he’s blessed out on vegan-choc-apple sauced goodness. The next he’s face down on the floor shrieking because, woe to be me, I have taken away something, closed a drawer, locked a cupboard, who knows. The other day he cried the entire way home in the car, then shrieked for another hour after we got home. I almost didn’t survive that day. We had dinner guests and a pile of people coming to the house and it was a day where there was no breathing, only moving, forward, forward, forward until I collapsed in a puddle on top of my bed.

And the small changes are working. At least, I think they are. Each week, I add something new, something teeny tiny, hardly noticeable to anyone other than myself, and it’s helping me come to terms with, well, all of the changes. My attitude is better. I’m not so run-down, so short-tempered, but I still have a long way to go. I haven’t managed to rescue myself entirely from the emotional hurricane of the last eighteen-months. It’s amazing to me how little time I have to actually sit and think — something I took completely for granted before I had the RRBB. Entire afternoons spent in a glorious state of an internet coma, doing “research,” keeping up-to-date with friends, and strangers, and bloggers, and books, and more books. Now, I’m caught thinking in the in-betweens, on the way to work, stolen moments here and there, raw impressions, never full, never tender, crammed all together in an endless loop until my days get ever-busier that anything that resembles a thought gets crashed around and out of my head.

Yesterday, while my RRHB was up at the cottage, thankfully, doing all of the chores so we can be ready for the long weekend, the RRBB opened up one of the cupboards and pulled out his animal crackers. He looked straight at me and said, “Mama, ya?” A question! A full and complete thought where he reasoned he wanted an animal cracker and knew enough to ask. The answer was, unfortunately no, he had already had some at lunch, but at least someone that I love and adore has the presence of mind to actually finish a thought, and that is worth revelling in.

That’s not to say that they didn’t have bumps along the way, but her narrative voice, as interpreted by her nephew, Alex Prud’homme, remain so clear and level-headed, that it’s unnerving. The impression you are left with is that Julia Child suffers no fools, and nor does she give up once she’s left onto a path with a cleaver in one hand and an asbestos baking tile in the other.

For all of us still longing to find our calling, or rather, to fully embrace our calling, her book is a love letter to choosing your pursuits wisely. She’s obviously very happy and very content with her choices — even if the book doesn’t even touch the surface of her life before she married Paul. That they loved one another, there remains little doubt, but the decline of his health was discussed so briefly and so, well, simplistically, I had to wonder if there was an essence of the 1950s stalwart, “Keep Calm & Carry On” attitude wherein she would never betray her real, real feelings.

Book club was at my house, and one of my fellow Vicious Circlers came bearing a gift of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. I’ve spent the last few nights just flipping through it, wondering at the sheer magnitude of the project, marvelling at what the three co-authors undertook. I am trying to find the courage to try a few of the recipes this summer — but they all seem so, well, hard. Especially when I’m so pressed for time these days. Yet, I greatly admire the text as a living, breathing document, a testament to how important it is to have a record of how the world once was, and like, The Joy of Cooking, it’s as much a reference book as it is a cookery book. Child makes that point herself in My Year in France, discussing how she wanted to preserve the ways of classic French cuisine before they disappeared. I had never thought of it that way before — that it’s a form of history that truly deserves to be recorded for posterity, for generations, for women like me who can’t live in Paris but who remembers each and every amazing meal she had there all of the times she visited.

It was a marvellous life. I am utterly envious.

Other reading updates: George Orwell’s magnificent Coming Up for Air (poor Hilda! What’s she on about?), which is #41. And I have abandoned many of my Bs: The Children’s Book, Cloudsplitter, and Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood. I will circle back but I was hopelessly stuck and I just needed something simple. I also finished Samantha Bee’s memoir (#42), which I’d consider Tina Fey-light, but it did make me laugh quite a bit, simply because, my goodness, her upbringing was unconventional and full of hilarious anecdotes.

The slowness that I’ve been craving will need to come from my own attitude because I know that if I get manically stressed out about stuff, about work, about life, about the baby, then the disease perks up again and pokes its way out into my body. Learning to manage stress has never been a strong point for me; it’s never been something that I’ve been remotely successful at doing. Sure, I can read magazines and articles and books and talk to people and doctors and blah de blah but it all comes down to the fact that I’m a worrier. My mother was a worrier. My grandmother was a worrier. My aunts are worriers. My whole family’s steeped in a long-standing tradition of completely and utterly freaking out about everything.

So it’s really hard to fight against the genes that rage just as hard as the disease. I wish I had time for restorative yoga. I wish I had time for more exercise (the, um 10 situps I attempted yesterday were almost as painful as, well, the first labour pains, WHAT happens to your poor stomach post-C-section is redonkulous). All of the things that I used to do to calm my life down, the meditation, the yoga, I simply don’t have time for with the pace of life with the RRBB. In all of my discussions with other moms, they’ve all carved out time for themselves, little bits here and there, and I’m doing that more and more. Riding the exercise bike every night or every other night after work has helped immensely.

Plus, I got these super-cute green shoes that put me in a good mood whenever I wear them. There’s delicious spring rain happening that smells awesome. I’m reading again. I’ve got all kinds of ideas bouncing around my head. And that’s the thing that I notice the most when I feel better — my whole body works better, not just physically, but mentally as well. I’m happier. I’m lighter. I’m in a groove. It’s amazing to realize just how being sick is such a drain. It’s something you only see when you’re a few steps out of it, and it’s also awfully easy to take these few good days for granted, which I’m trying very hard not to do.

We were talking a little bit about it at book club last night, and the consensus was that, for the most part, it’s not something people should do. But then, I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, and while I’m not 100% a convert to the “Amazon will save your life & make you a bestselling author immediately” school of thought, I am ever-curious about the kinds of content opportunities that self-publishing offers up to the writer who might want to actually live outside the publishing ecosystem on purpose. Of course, our conversation last night strummed up and around the “sensation” that is Fifty Shades of Gray, and its evolution from fan fiction to literary sensation. We all just couldn’t get it. But that’s because we are, definably, a different kind of reader, a different kind of book consumer. My book club might be incredibly varied in its opinions but we are all book people. And I’d venture to say that perhaps, and please don’t strike me dead in the comments, Fifty Shades of Gray is a kind of book for non-book people, more entertainment than anything else, and that’s not a bad thing — different people get different kinds of things out of reading, I’m not about to judge.

But, in the end, that trilogy is published by one of the Big Six in the US, so someone, somewhere saw a great opportunity and turned it around into a very traditional success — regardless of its origins, its outcome is still seeing the book on bestseller lists all over the place (well, in the US and Canada, I’m not sure about the UK and/or the real rest of the world). I don’t know much about its evolution and how it landed at Random House, which is fine — it’s just that those stories are so rare. It’s amazing to me to see books that transcend format, ones that break out in print, in ebook, land with feature articles in Entertainment Weekly and spawn the inevitable million attempts by other peeps to jump on the same bandwagon only to watch it slowly ride away into the sunset. Will there be a movie? Definitely. Will it do as well as Twilight? Who knows. All I know is that maybe it’ll enable other writers/publishers to keep the lights on a little bit longer and that’s not a bad thing.

So, back to self-publishing. I’m consistently fascinated by the Kindle bestseller list — how the titles on there, outside of the obvious Hunger Games & Fifty Shades titles, are by books and authors I have never heard of. It’s an ecosystem in and of itself — these are books, writers whose whole world is Amazon, are making a living by pumping out ebooks and driving their own marketing, publicity and sales in that one environment. There’s no more slushpile, there’s no bother about finding an agent or a publisher, there’s control over how your content looks, reads, feels, and there’s amazing returns if the book sells. Yet, there’s the harsh reality of unsustainable growth and the inability to separate yourself from the crowd. What tools do you use? Good metadata & search? Great covers? Lots of reader recommendations? Plenty of value-priced content (read: $0.00).

I’m not going to lie, as a reader, I have never downloaded a single self-published book, but I’m thinking that I might try a few now, just to really compare with the multitudes of other things that I read. My reading isn’t remotely varied, though, to keep in mind, I rarely read small press books, simply because I don’t have too much time; I read a lot of Cdn fiction, nonfiction, but not a lot of genre fiction, which seems to me to be the overwhelming type of content available. So, what am I missing about this opportunity? Is there a gap that smaller companies can bridge by being more aggressive and publishing the slushpile, does the best content really rise to the top, and does it make sense just to throw caution to the wind and see what sticks? I’m curious but not convinced. I’m intrigued but not necessarily threatened, despite what all of the news/blogs/twitter says on an almost-daily basis about the decline of big publishing. I am consistently amazed at how technology turns traditional industry on its head and maybe the piracy conversation everyone’s having, the never-ending pricing disputes, and the seemingly ceaseless marked “death” of book isn’t where we should be focusing the conversation. Really and truly its how publishing has evolved because of digital in many ways and my consistent banging on about content was right all along — now we just have to see what happens.

Up until last week, when I would say to him, “RRBB, where’s Mummy’s nose?” He would point to his own nose. “Where are Mummy’s eyes?” He would point to his own eyes, and so on. I found it comforting that he, in a sense, could not define himself outside of me. For the longest time, even when he was growing inside me, I wondered how he would know me when he was on the outside. How would he come to realize that I was his mother, how would he feel about me, would I be enough for him in my ever-depleted state. I mean, there are so many definitions of what a mother is — a baby doesn’t have to grow inside of you for someone to be its mother, but until he had some way of talking about it, I was never really convinced that my RRBB knew what I was — who I was sure, but that’s a very different thing.

Philosophically, I’ve been thinking a lot about mothers over the last little while. I’m sure a lot of it has to do with not having mine for the majority of my adult and young adult life. There was an article in the gossips the other day about how Gwyneth wants us all to stop judging each other, and then there’s all the hullabaloo over The Conflict, which I’m going to refrain from talking about only because I haven’t read the book yet (and I’m not sure if I will; I’m quite happy being the feminist I am, the working mother, AND someone who practiced attachment parenting while I was well enough to do so). It’s not enough that I define myself, I read, therefore I am, I write, therefore I am, I watch TV, therefore I am, I love, therefore I am, but now I’m being defined for the rest of my life by this other person — this person I created. So, it’s not enough that all the other moms getting their good shoes stuck in the playground sand are wondering about one another, passively judging how their kids are acting towards mine, and so on, we all have to be worried about how badly we’ll flapjack up our children too.

It’s amazing to me how language develops, how his language is developing, I should say. He’s been saying a version of “Daddy” (“Daddend”) for months, and it was spectacular. But in the last few weeks, since he surpassed that 18-month mark, it’s like a whole new world — not full sentences, but concepts like, “more!” and really recognizing objects like “plane” and then making the sounds that they make. But what of the “concepts” of “Mumaa” and “Daddend” — how do they relate in his giant brain that’s working a mile a minute. That’s the part that I wish I could climb inside his ear and find out, and I’m sure I’ll still be wondering what he thinks of us when he’s a teenager and we’re really flapjacking old.

Anyway, I’m rambling now. All I can say is that I find this whole motherhood thing utterly fascinating. When I’m not exhausted, sick, pulling out my hair, frustrated, exhausted, tired, exhausted, and oh, exhausted.

Marley.

Let me backtrack. When I was a teenager, I found a copy of Exodus among my parents records. I took it upstairs and listened to it, a lot. It was my mother’s. My dad didn’t even know it was there. At the time, I was 15 and working at Baskin-Robbins with a delightful woman named Yvonne Chin, she was Jamaican. I asked her if she knew who Bob Marley was (yes, I was the dopiest kid, like, ever). She came in the next day with a stack of records almost as tall as me and I listened to all of them. Taped them, bought my own copies, bought more tapes and CDs, and then before I went to university my brother bought me the Songs of Freedom box-set for my birthday and I have not stopped listening to it since. I was obsessed. I read Jamaican writers (Michelle Cliff remains a favourite), I wrote papers and integrated Bob Marley lyrics into them. I listed to “Pimper’s Paradise” about 8,753 times in my old Nissan as I drove around during my first few years of university. I stayed up way too late in high school one night watching the only concert footage I had ever seen of Bob Marley on the CBC. I even went so far as investigating grad school at one of their universities (the cost was prohibitive, completely). I know I’m not the only one. There are millions like me.

Kevin MacDonald’s documentary is excellent. It’s thoughtful, provocative, and barely uses “Redemption Song” (except in a really rough mix, which I appreciated). Seeing the evolution of reggae and how Bob Marley’s music influenced, not only generations, but entire countries, had me choked up on more than on occasi0n. That he fought for the liberation of Zimbabwe only to have it all come crumbling down is heartbreaking. His politics have become all but forgotten, in a sense, when his music is played on easy listening stations to signifying the start of summer patio station. But the film does more than follow the evolution of Bob Marley from young musician to superstar — it looks closely at how he became “Bob Marley,” the icon, and breaks it all back down so the world can see Bob Marley, the man. The most striking part of the documentary for me was a rare clip from an interview where they were discussing the assassination attempt. When asked if he would still perform, Marley answered: “What is was meant to be.” Not performing wouldn’t stop someone from shooting him if that was the intention. Marley, the man, was in the world, the music was there, the unifier, pulling the hands together of Manley and his opposition, he stood on stage and it was important. It was real. It was revolutionary.

And now, it’s different. Sure, the whole world knows “Redemption Song,” and so they should, it’s a beautiful piece of music, but has the magic disappeared? Has its cultural significance evaporated by muzak and terribly dirty teenagers who grow dreds without truly understanding the Rastafarian ways? Does any of that matter? Is what’s important how epic Bob Marley has become — like Che Guevara – where his likeness is as familiar to us as our own, can we celebrate the shift to icon and be okay not knowing how instrumental he was both politically and musically? That’s the amazing balance that MacDonald’s documentary strikes: it’s an impressive, beautiful, wise, and compelling work that does both, proves Marley worthy of his iconic status while humanizing him at the same time. I’m still thinking about it so deeply, which is always the sign of a good documentary, right?

So, I bought Naked Lunch way in the way back from Pages on Queen Street and started it once, twice, three, times, read Junkie in between and loved it, and carted the battered paperback copy around to a half-dozen apartments. Then, when I finally gave in to the fact that I honestly just had to suck it up and read the damn book, it took me a good three weeks because, and I am saying this with all honesty, I could not understand what the heck was going on half the time. So, yes, I know it’s a moderately incoherent, rambling, deeply intense and evocative piece of writing by one of America’s most controversial figures in literature. I can see why it’s important. But maybe I’m so far passed the point now of looking at my life as a long list of the “cool” things that I have read that all I really wanted was the good junkie story and far less of the Interzone oddities.

I really, really liked the Appendix, where Burroughs outlines his drug use, all of the effects, and what worked in terms of him getting clean. His dialogue is terrific, and there are some amazing characters sprinkled throughout the book, but the whole “cut up technique” (as described in my 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die text): “which serves to render the reader equally unable to make full sense of the surroundings.” Indeed. “Narratives begin, interweave, become lost, and are found again; scenarios are glimpsed then vanish from sight.” Exactly. And then all I’m screaming in my head is “What on earth is going on and that’s a lot of naked peeps and body parts and excrement and swearing and shooting up and holy hell I am one tired mother right now.”

However, I did listen to a lot of Junkie via this great link that Brain Pickings posted via Twitter, and was reminded that it is, indeed a terrific book, especially when read by Burroughs himself. Really all I have to say about this in conclusion is that I am really glad to have finished it. That’s all.

Other books read: The Last Tycoon by Fitzgerald (#39).

Then, it’s just a waiting game. Waiting for test results. Waiting for doctor’s appointments. Waiting for doctor’s opinions. Waiting for people outside of my body to tell me what’s going on inside my body.

The conflict surrounding all of that sometimes overwhelms me. My energy curdles throughout the day, turns sour like milk left in the sun, and by the time I get home I’m cranky and unhappy. I can rally for the baby, spend a somewhat energetic few minutes playing with him before bath time if I’m not totally wrecked but then, nothing. And herein lies the really hard part — because there’s so much I want to do.

Living with constant, persistent illness is hard, physically, psychologically. And trying to manage that along with the daily grind of everyday life, well, it’s no wonder some people simply don’t survive. So, I’ve been making my life small these days, like I’ve been talking about a lot lately. Last week I focused on grooming (it’s sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it?). I got my hair done, my eyebrows done, and a pedicure is on the horizon. Feeling like yourself and not your diseased self is a good start. This week I’m trying to take care of some life-organizational things in small batches. Next week I’m getting back to diet-related stuff. I’m going to try one day without sugar. One day at a time. One goal at a time. One success at a time. It takes the pressure off to be completely better, because I’m still feeling so very very tired, but my mind just won’t quit.