my tragic right hip

Now that it’s almost been two years since I had my right hip replaced, I can’t really claim that it’s so tragic any longer. It feels good, getting stronger every day, and it’s the best decision I ever made (not having pain is such a revelation). So, last night, I took a dance class, and even if I was the elephant in the room, literally, it felt great to race across the room doing that modern jaunt I spent years in high school doing. The body has memory, of this I am convinced. Certain moves, Martha Graham-styles, have stuck with me, even if my mind finds triplets totally and utterly impossible to comprehend.

But what I liked most about the class was the inclusivity. It’s a wide open space where you are there moving around as far or as close as you want your body to go. It’s a kind of freedom I haven’t felt in a long time, an exhilarating kind of joy that’s been lost in the pain of my chronic hip failure for far too long, and one that, despite the stiffness in my back today, I’ll be happy to continue.

But then my high came crashing down ever-so slightly after my visit with the nephrologist today. The good news? He’s convinced that with my creatinine levels coming back down to 80% of normal (115) that the disease is almost in remission. The bad news? The damage the disease caused all those months is causing my kidney filters to leak too much protein through and into my organ. That means I might, depending on the results of yet another 24-hour urine test, have to take medicine for the REST OF MY LIFE.

And I cried. A lot. Because I don’t want to take medicine for the rest of my life, not when everything I’m doing is to get better, and no matter what I do, I can’t control what the disease has done to my body. And that’s the worst thing about life, I think, in general, feeling that no matter what you do, some things will never change. I will always be diseased regardless of how hard I work to feel better.

My body is a bleak house today. Tomorrow, I’m sure, will be a better day.

They announced the Giller longlist yesterday. I’ve only read two of the books (Friends of Meager Fortune and Jpod), which leaves me hoping they are at least both on the shortlist so I don’t have that much catching up to do this fall.

Our Faux-Vo will be working overtime in a couple of weeks, which is why I’m glad my all-time favourite show of all-time started last night on TMI, The Wire. It’s such a smart, searing look at life in a major US city, in this case, Baltimore, with each season having a different focus of the wire taps (those of the shows title). This year, their focus is on the kids, the drug runners, the clean-up artists (the chilling opening has a young teenager buying a nail gun, paying for it in cash, and speaking a language I had to rewind three times just to make sure I sort of understood), and the corner rats.

It’s up and down of society, from the higher echelons of politics (and not unlike Brotherhood in that respect) to the politics of the modern drug wars, it’s shaping up to be quite a season. I’ve been saying it for a while, but to borrow a phrase from EW, it’s the best show you’re not watching.

Okay back to abridging. But blogging is just so much more fun.

If anyone’s going to see the Douglas Coupland penned Everything’s Gone Green at the Film Fest this weekend, keep an ear peeled for my RRHB’s “Small Town Murder Scene,” a part of the soundtrack.

Fun, eh?

Mark Haddon’s latest novel caught me off guard. Of course, the expectation that it would be good was off the charts, especially after the success of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, but if I was pushed, I might admit that I liked A Spot of Bother even better.

It’s a more ambitious novel, as it attempts to tell the story of the Hall family, in the weeks leading up to daughter Katie’s wedding. The patriarch of the family, George, is having a hard time coming to terms with life in its latter stages as his obsessive fear of dying moves from a quirky hypochondria to a full-blown manic attack. George’s wife, Jean, has some troubles of her own, namely, an ex-coworker of her husband’s named David. George and Jean have two kids: Katie, the aforementioned daughter (who has a son of her own), and Jamie, who has been involved for the last while with Tony, a man he somewhat refuses to admit he loves. No one likes Katie’s fiance, Ray, well, maybe it’s more that no one truly understands why they’re getting married. The stories of all of these characters are interwoven as the meat of the plot revolves around the will they or won’t they nuptials.

That doesn’t mean A Spot of Bother is Katie’s story, far from it, in fact. The book finds a delicate balance between each of the characters, allowing their own dramas, and their own daily lives, to find a way into the novel. It’s a truthful, honest and biting look at family life, from a truly honest point of view. Not unlike Black Swan Green, Haddon has a way of creating characters, while defined somewhat by the plot of the novel, are also clearly drawn and intriguing. A delicate balance of Haddon’s brisk prose and impressive characterizations means that A Spot of Bother is funny, intelligent and moving all at the same time. I’d highly recommend it for a Sunday afternoon read, for those hours when the house is clean, the shopping is done, dinner is planned and you have an entire afternoon to yourself to enjoy the simple bliss of wickedly written words on the page.

I swore I would never do it. I would never walk into that pretty pink and blue storefront and buy ridiculously expensive, let’s be honest, pajamas disguised as workout gear. And yet, today, I found myself biking down Bloor Street wondering where on Earth I was going to find some dance pants. Yes, you read that correctly. Ragdoll v. 2.0, tragic right hip-styles, is stepping back on to the sprung floor for the first time in well over fifteen years. So I broke down and bought some stuff from the dreaded Lululemon, who kindly gave me 50 cents off for not taking a bag. And I admit it, I was wrong about them. The pants I bought are super comfortable as is the dance top so, bloody hell, I hate it when the hippies are right.

All through high school and up until my second year of university when my hip first started to truly degenerated, I danced. Like so many girls I know, we ate far too little, wore ugly black leotards with pink tights, and plied with our turnouts stretched to the limits. And yet, as much as I enjoyed it, I wasn’t meant for it, and my body quit on me quite early. I could blame the disease, which was a big reason why I stopped dancing. When you’re taking prednisone, they don’t like you do high-impact exercise because the drug is so hard on your bones (hence the tragic hip), but since then, I’ve never really had any form of what you would call regular exercise.

That’s years, people.

Oh sure, I’ve spent many a summer biking all over the city, and we do walk a fair amount being urban dwellers, but the more my hip melted in my body, the less I could do. And then I got sick. And then sicker. And now almost two years of the magical hip have passed and I still haven’t found any sense of regular, healthy exercise. Too afraid, with my “prednisone 25” to put on a bathing suit and jump in a pool, and with the ragdoll aerobics seriously unstructured, I need something that gets me moving, and something that carries on into the winter when it’s too cold to ride my bike.

Hence, Technique I at the school at the Toronto Dance Theatre. A girlfriend of mine suggested it and we’re going to go together, which makes me happy, considering we danced together all through high school. Anyway, if I’m totally crippled and exhausted on Wednesday morning when I go see the kidney doctor for yet another disease check up, at least it’ll be a happy kind of tired, one that might help me finally lose some weight.

Speaking of which, I’ve started my annual no sugar, no wheat (where I can) and no dairy (except yoghurt) diet. Last year I failed miserably and think I lasted about two weeks. I’m already well into week one (pathetic, I know) but haven’t totally cracked. I had some nachos at my first Writer’s Group meeting on Wednesday and a burrito last night when I had dinner with my cousins, but have had absolutely no sugar (fruit yes, sugar, no).

If I put it all together, maybe the goal of being truly, truly healthy this year will actually be achieved. And how nice would it be to cross that mother farker off the list.

While looking around the internet for litblogs to work with, I stumbled across the Greek Mythology Personality Test (high kicks to Bookworm for the link). So, turns out I’m most like Orpheus. It’s good to know that the quiz has picked up on how sissy and sensitive I actually am. Sigh. Oh, and watch out Icarus, you’d better stay out of my way and not the other way around.

Orpheus
0% Extroversion, 80% Intuition, 100% Emotiveness, 57% Perceptiveness
You are an artist, an aesthete, a sensitive, and someone who has never really let go of that childlike innocence. To you, all of life has a sense of wonder in it, and the story of Orpheus was written about someone just like you.

When the Argo passed the island of the Sirens, Orpheus played a song more beautiful than the Sirens to prevent the crew from becoming enticed. When his wife died, he ventured into the underworld to charm Hades but, in his naivete, he looked back becoming trapped there.

You can capture your unique world view and relate it to others with the skill of a master storyteller. Your sensitivity and creativity make you a treasure to the human race, but your thin-skinned nature and innocence can cause you a lot of disenchantment and pain. What’s doubly unfortunate is that, if you try to lose those traits, you never will, and everyone will be able to tell that you’re putting up an artificial shell to prevent yourself from being hurt.

Famous people like you: Hemingway, Shakespeare, Mr. Rogers, Melville, Nick Tosches
Stay clear of: Icarus, Hermes, Atlas

With the fact that my RRHB will soon be so self-employed that he’ll be working just on our house, we’ve come to the conclusion that we’ll have to make the majority of our Christmas presents this year.

Making Christmas presents has been on the backburner for a while now. For years I’ve wanted to get out my sewing machine, actually learn how to use it, and make pretty things; I’d love to knit fast enough that I can get presents done quicker, and in some sense just contribute in a very old fashioned way to the gift giving season this winter.

Well, we started up north this weekend. We made grape jelly, spaghetti sauce and home-made ketchup, all of which are actually super-tasty. It’s hard work but feels good like I am using the products in my backyard to give life to the people I love. I know it’s corny. But I felt kind of proud of ourselves none the less.

So, this year everyone is getting home-made gifts from our Brockton Berries canning company. Heh.

Last year, I went to go see Elizabethtown, which is an entirely mediocre movie, as I’ve said in these very pages. I’ve been rewatching it tonight in bits and pieces. But you know even if the movie is a total mess and the script kind of mundane, there’s a bare twinkle of a heart there. It’s faint goodness, like an almost half-dead star, comes from Paul Schneider, whom I adore. ADORE. Like want to run him up here to Canada and give him a big arty hug.

Because when he says, “This loss with be greeted with a hurricane of love.” I’ve spent every minute since replaying that line in my head, so much so that it’s all over my thoughts for the (I’m hesitating) “novel” I’m working on right now. It’s about death, for sure, but it’s also about mothers who should have never had kids, about a time where it was very rough, and about how the place defines you.

Annwaayyy. Elizabethtown was better the second time around, it became slightly more nuances, due, entirely to the main two male leads. But especially with Paul Schneider. Because damn, if he ain’t the hottest thing in the movie, well, I might have to light fire to a giant freebird myself.