my tragic right hip

But I didn’t necessarily open up my eyes, hence the three signs I really should have stayed in bed today:

1. I broke my office chair. That’s right. I sat down too hard on my chair this morning and snapped off one of the roller balls. Yet another sign that I need to kick the exercise routine up a notch.

2. I dropped my favourite chicken soup bowl on the kitchen floor. Magically, it’s fine. My toes however…

3. Are another story as it landed on them and I tripped more than once today going up the stairs.

Oh and just when we were so pleased that we’ll be out of town for the final World Cup game, the Grand Prix started in the city today. I can hear the cars whizzing around the track from my house. So much for peace and quiet.

There’s a very good reason why my neighbourhood is quiet tonight. And I’m listening to Edith Piaf to celebrate. Vive le France!

Not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, I don’t want to complain too much about how awful it is to have to take prednisone, considering that it’s probably saved my life (in combination with the other disease meds) at least three times in the last (has it really been that long?) fifteen years. But I’m very frustrated with taking only 5 mgs of the damn drug and still having these side effects: pimples, lots of pimples; huge (and I mean huuugggeee) appetite, and not for good foods, but for bad thinks like chips and candy and muffins and donuts and anything else that contains terrible ingredients like sugar, white flour and oil; and “water” weight to the tune of about fifteen pounds (I’m just sayin’ it’s water to make myself feel better).

But, on the plus side, I’ve got so much more energy now that I don’t even feel like the same person I was even three months ago. I can now go all day long and do a whole bunch of things, include my “exercises,” and not want to collapse on the bed in total and utter exhaustion by the end of the day.

So I’m blessed that drugs even exist because they save me from the Wegener’s every day. But I’m also cursed because the treatments are always so much harder than the disease. I can see the fat, cottage cheese on my legs; I can hear my inner voice telling me not to eat that last Timbit; and I can see the roll of chubb on my hips that makes all my clothes look that little bit more awkward than they did with my usual roll of chubb.

And in 3 solid weeks of exercise, I’ve lost and gained the same 2-5 pounds. However, I’m still 3 solid weeks away from my 6 week goal of trying to get in some sort of shape, so I’m ever-hopeful that in two weeks, the super-fancy disease doctor will kindly let me stop taking the prednisone, so I can at least make some sort of attempt to curb my diet along with my good choices of making my body move every day.

It’s all a battle, isn’t it?

Oh, and I’ve decided my song for this summer is “I’m Always In Love” by Wilco. It’s the perfect summer song. Now you? What’s your perfect summer song?

Rush home. Rush to the cottage. Clean 10 years of mouse poop up. Throw out years of crap. Rush into town. Buy eggs at a roadside stand in Mamora. Eat a dripping ice cream cone. Rush back to the cottage. Clean up more mouse poop. Discover my grandfather’s Second World War helmet. Rescue it from the dust-ridden closet. Rush the vacuum around. Rush it around again. Throw out more furniture. Toss out some really old bathroom products. Jump in the lake. Play cards. Drink a beer. Rush back to the city (no traffic!). See Superman Returns (eh, more on that later). Rush to the hairdresser. Now to the hospital for bloodletting. Then back home to clean the house, after leaving a spotless cottage. At some point, will it start feeling like a vacation?

Got only 150 pages read of Until I Find You. Am very, very behind in my summer reading.

Wow. What a stinker. Tara‘s already relayed how hard it was for us even to get to the theatre to see this piece of crap, so I’m not going to go over it again. Suffice it to say that The Lake House wasn’t even funbad. And I was disappointed.

In short, it’s the love story between Kate (Sandra Bullock) and Alex (Keanu Reeves), who both live in a gorgeous glass house on, you guessed it, a lake. Here’s the trick though, they’re each living in separate realities—two years apart. Kate’s in 2006, while Alex is in 2004. How do they have a love affair then? Well, they communicate through a magic mailbox beside the lake house. You heard me right: a magic mailbox.

Yes, magical mail fairies come and deliver the letters (because computers and/or the internet simply don’t exist in the film’s reality) from one to the other across the space/time continuum. Because they have flowery prose and delicious scripted personalities, Kate and Alex fall deeply in love. But here’s the catch (spoiler alert!), because Alex is two years behind, he can try to find Kate in his time, and he does, multiple times. He chases after her train, has the same dog, oh, and hell, they even make out at some party—and she doesn’t remember. Keep in mind that Kate’s a lonely doctor in Chicago whose only had two boyfriends, so you know, making out with some hot random stranger at a party is just something that would slip her mind. Noooo, she wouldn’t play it over and over again in her mind, having some, ahem, private moments at home or anything, noooo, it just slips right away from her because she’s miserable. There’s only room in her brain for doctor stuff and unhappiness.

Then, all kinds of other silly sh*t happens that’s totally implausible, Alex doesn’t show up for a date, she doesn’t even bother to look in the newspaper to find out why, or even bother to do anything except break up with him, in a letter of course, because their love cannot overcome the boundaries of time.

Yawn.

Oh, and Alex dies in one of the scenes in the first third of the movie, only you don’t know that it’s him and, because Kate’s a doctor, she rushes to save him, only, again, after making out with him two years ago, she still doesn’t recognize him. Oh, and he’s not wearing any ID either, and no one at the hospital tells her that it’s him.

See, confusing and silly right?

And why do all miserable female doctors in the movies these days have to have paranormal love affairs (Reese, I’m looking at you)? What’s wrong with a good old-fashioned romance where the couple actually lives, eats and breaths in the same city? It’s a shame too because I like that both Sandra and Keanu are ‘of a certain age’ and they’ve got great chemistry, but my goodness, it’s a mess of a movie.

There’s a happy ending though. Take some solace in that.

(And I’m sorry if I spoiled the movie for you.)

The other day I had a strange allergic reaction to the sun. Earlier in the day, I had stood outside for less than a half-hour, basking in the warm weather, feeling the heat right deep down into my bones. It’s a shame that the medication has negative side effects with the sun—I blew up to the size of a balloon and turned a bright, patchy red all over. And my skin didn’t itch so much as it stung under the surface. The same thing happened over the majority of last summer too, although instead of hives, I ended up with a strange rash where the sunscreen either wore off or I forgot to apply enough.

And then I had a moment of self-pity. One of my favourite things to do in the summer is lay out in the sunshine, all hot and sweaty, wearing enough protection that you don’t burn (and I don’t tan anyway: I go from white to off-white) but still feeling like a sun goddess even if I don’t end up looking like one. I started to be angry with the disease, frustrated that it seems to take all of the things I love to do away from me.

I used to dance when I was a teenager, and then my hip died. And deep down I knew I’d never be a dancer (with shoulders like a brick sh*thouse and a giant ass), just about everything was wrong with me, but I miss the freedom I felt, and I miss the constant movement. Still, in my dreams, I jump around, race about to the music and I still love to go out dancing, but for years my hip prevented me from doing any kind of aerobic exercise.

For a while, I sort of considered myself a not-bad looking girl too. It was funny, we were joking about the peak moments of youth at breakfast a while back, and I sort of half-goofed that I climaxed at 24, 10 years ago now. And then I got mad that the best years of my youth were sort of robbed by the disease too, and I started feeling sorry for myself all over again.

Getting past the negative thinking is the hardest thing to do when it comes to living day-to-day with the disease. Mourning the idea of who I am or what I should be and coping with the reality that my life has turned in a direction I didn’t quite expect. In a few years, I’ll have lived longer with the disease than without, but I still can’t quite bring myself to accept the fact that I can’t do everything I want to do because my body has kind of put a stop to it.

Plus, feeling sorry for myself doesn’t really get me anywhere. It doesn’t get my Page A Day done, it doesn’t get my Summer Reading books finished, and it sure as hell doesn’t make my RRHB’s life any easier. In the end, it gets easier every time the disease flares and now that the meds are actually working, I’m thankful for my life, even if it means staying out of the sun. Hell, it’s better for my skin that way anyway.

Chris Cotterill’s Thirty-Three Teeth fits the idea of summer reading to the tee. It’s a fun mystery with supernatural elements whose main character is the national coroner of Laos, Dr. Siri Paiboun. There’s the usual cast of supporting characters, the quirky nurse, the police officer who isn’t an idiot, and a colourful amount of spirits, all making themselves integral to the procession of the plot.

Thirty-Three Teeth kind of feels like Alexander McCall Smith’s No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series. It has the same kind of light tone, even though there are actual murders in Cotterill’s novel. Unlike a typical mystery, this book is more character driven than pure plot, and I kind of like that. Plus, it’s not often you have a septuagenarian main character, which is interesting too.

I got a bit confused in terms of the actual mystery because there were several strains happening all at the same time, and I was reading the book mainly before bed, so I was already tired, but on the whole I enjoyed it.

And that’s number 2 from my summer reading list! I’m still way, way behind my goal of 30 books by August 30th though.

My RRHB, after hearing “Slips and Tangles,” a song from Left and Leaving, said, “That’s it, I’m done.” Meaning that there was nothing he could create, write, perform that could even approach how much he loved that particular song.

In a way, that’s exactly how I feel about Don McKay’s latest book of poetry, Strike/Slip. I might as well stop even attempting to write poetry at this moment in time because I’ll never come close to putting the words together with such an exacting elegance as McKay, one of Canada’s foremost poetic masters.

Strike/Slip burst open any silly lit crit that nature poems, or the idea of exploring the relationship between humans and the world we inhibit is taboo, over, or even close to being done with. Each poem meditates to some extent on the natural world and McKay’s talent brings it all back to an intensely human experience, a human condition, if you’ll allow me the existential indulgence.

And they are perfect. Perfect in their forms in their metaphors in their similes in their imagery in their substance and in their impact. I read and reread many of them on the streetcar over the past few days, savouring every word like a smartie I wish would never melt in my mouth.

But one of my favourite lines, from “Song of the Saxifrage to the Rock”, goes like this:

Who is so heavy with the past as you,
Monsieur Basalt? Not the planet’s most muscular
depressive, not the twentieth century.

Or “Abandoned Cables”, where “tangles” of overgrown, massive wires are “unshriven entrails”, remnants of our industrial society, and now meant to rust by the side of the road, forever abandoning both their function and use, but still a constant reminder to those “po-mo cappuccinos” that real work exists.

Brilliant. It’s a book of poetry that I’ll keep close to my heart, beyond the subtle self-indulgence of Plath, beside the calculated whimsy of Gwendolyn MacEwan, and way, way up there above everything I long to be.

And that’s #1 off my Summer Reading List. Whee! Only 29 to go…

Life has gotten a little crazy this week. Here’s a breakdown of what’s gone on:

1. We visited with the family for Father’s Day and then drove like mad up to Guelph to see The Weakerthans, who were opening for The Tragically Hip (do you think they’ll sue me for breech of coolness re: the name of this blog?). My RRHB sang on “Dedication” (the Sarah Harmer part) and we watched the rest of the show from backstage. Very Almost Famous, sort of.

2. I’ve been doing my Page A Day challenge; it’s going well. I’ve almost written a whopping 12,000 words. Not bad for a story I only started three weeks ago.

3. My summer reading challenge has gone down the toilet already. There’s just too much to do other than read these days. I’m trying not to be too hard on myself.

4. I met, had lunch with and then interviewed Curtis Sittenfeld today: a totally wicked and awesomely fun experience. She’s super smart, has a very dry, ironic sense of humour and is as fabulous as her writing. I love it when that happens. Oh, and the ladies we lunched with from Chatelaine were equally charming, lovely and funny. I love it when that happens too.

5. Tomorrow is Needle Day, Week Seven. So far, and keep those fingers crossed, I’m not feeling any overwhelming side effects from the new drug. I’m dancing a jig as we speak.

See, see why I have no time? And it’s only going to get worse as the summer progresses…

We spent a lovely evening last night down at the Art Bar, attached to the fancy new Gladstone Hotel, watching Kathleen’s film Dedication. It’s a beautiful little piece based on one of her poems and set to a lovely score by Paul Aucoin. Two manic days of shooting turned out exceptionally well with some brilliant editing and a grand old vision by Kate herself. Oh, and it was her birthday to boot. But the most exciting thing? Seeing my name in the credits as the Assistant Director and remembering how much fun it was to yell, well I mean, keep everyone organized so Kate could her job done. And seeing it up there on the screen looking so vivid and remembering how long it took them to get the shots, gives me a new appreciation for anyone who makes movies, because the work is the same, no matter how bad the end product is…