oh you funny, sunny place!

I moved north at the impressionable age of 14. Wanting to be cooler than I actually was, I adopted the attitude of pitying snobbery that I heard every now and then when I told people I was from Southern California. "Oh," I would say, "southern California." And then I would talk about the smog, how brown and flat it was at the bottom of the sky, and the lack of culture (as if I, at 14, knew anything much about culture, or the lack of it). The dismissal of Southern California became such a habit that I actually started to believe it.

I moved back south when I was 19 to dance with a small ballet company in Orange County. I lived in a bland apartment, but spent glorious hours at the beach, flew down highways late at night with hot air and loud music spilling everywhere, and took for granted the luxury of coming home from work and jumping, five minutes later, into the pool (in November). Still... Oh, southern California, I would say. Vacuous. Land of shopping malls. And the traffic, don't get me started on the traffic.

Last weekend, I drove down to LA with some friends. We went down for an audition (which was interesting, moderately encouraging, and which reminded me exactly how bizarre the world of dance is), and squeezed around the edges of that, we just enjoyed Southern California.

Some of the particular pleasures that I had forgotten:

Gleaming late night diners where the wait staff are all absurdly attractive, the counters are graced with beautiful desserts under glass domes, and the menu includes a ridiculously long list of salad dressings.

Reading the LA Times in the morning. My roommates and I used to save the crossword puzzle for after work, when we would alternate solving them with polishing off a bottle of wine and reading questionably humorous stories in Cosmo.

Wandering a boardwalk, or some other slightly seedy, but generally safe, place late at night, surrounded by cheap thrills. It smells like ocean and people all wear flip flops, like they're the only shoe ever invented.

Days like this.

Southern California has this strange disconnectedness for me now. You have to drive everywhere, so you're forever climbing in and out of the little air-conditioned chamber that is your car. I never used to notice it, but every day is this odd collection of snapshots, interspersed with stretches of temperature controlled air, familiar music, and a blur of speed. It's always possible that you could go anywhere, turn up in a place you've never been before. There might be a thousand reasons why you can't actually go driving off into the sun, but there's so very little that is actually stopping you.

(Except, of course, the traffic. That remains as bad as I remember.)

dis-donc

Just back from a lightning-brief trip to Montreal for an audition. How did it go? Not well. Do you ever have days when everything you say comes out wrong? Clunky, graceless, mixed-up, unclear? Well, sometimes dancing is like that too, and everything you do is just not right.

Montreal is one of my favourite cities though, and it's full of wonderful things:

1. Random strangeness. This is the side of one of those stores that sell clothes made out of hemp, and felted slippers made out of humanely raised wool, and incense, and meditation cds. And that's my sister wielding a baugette.


2. My very favourite croissants in the world so far. I'm a pastry fiend and would probably live off butter croissants if I weren't convinced that such a diet would make me feel like a sluggish lump. The croissants here are the most satisfying cross between crisp, flaky layers that crackle under your teeth and steamy, chewy, butter-scented warmth. They are glorious. The bakery is tiny and the windows are always steamed up and it's full of sweet, French-speaking bakery people who look as if they have just stepped out of some enchanted sweetshop.



3. Gender Mannequin
This shopfront is on Sherbrooke, near St. Laurent. I've never been inside, but the window displays are always so strange and so outrageous. They're completely different from the inside of the shop, which is spare and populated by groupings of pale, still mannequins in an assortment of sizes and shapes. There was also a clump of male torsos made out of clear plastic and lit from within by different colored bulbs.

4. Bily Kun, a bar on Mont Royal that has taxidermied ostrich heads mounted on the wall.

5. The lavish use of the word "donc," which I just like the sound of.

6. My sister and I decided that Montreal has an above average percentage of attractive young men. We couldn't decide if this was because we were walking around near a university, or if the cold had somehow transformed them, or if they were all just genetically fortunate. In the end, my sister declared it to be a similarity to the distinctive French nose: large, but elegant, and somehow good for balancing a face on.

7. There was a man who came into the coffee shop that we were haunting. He had long, wavy hair and a scruffy face. He spent ten minutes sorting through the basket of morning papers, setting aside a small stack of sections that he found acceptable before getting his coffee and taking a seat by the window. Instead of reading his paper, he whipped out a comb and a hand mirror and spent the next several minutes combing his hair with luxurious flicks of his wrist and long gazes into the mirror. He looked like a pirate (or, as my sister says, like an extra from Pirates of The Caribbean who walked into the Lord Of The Rings makeup trailer), but was acting like a mermaid. It was fascinating.

One of the strangest things is how you go through U.S. customs in the Canadian airport when you depart. There are signs everywhere saying, "Welcome to the United States," with the seal of the Homeland Security or State Department or whichever agency it is; but as soon as you're through the gates, you're back in Canada, under a wash of bi-lingual French and English, and waiting for a plane to actually take you home.

things I like about Minneapolis

1. Kat
How lucky am I to have a friend who is such a splendid collection of different kinds of wonderful? Generous, warm, loving, an excellent conversationalist, a fencer, a beauty, an exceptional brain... did I mention that she writes stories and makes delicious tea?

One day, we are going to write an epistolary novel. We don't know what it will be about yet, but I have no doubt that it will be fun.

2. Neil
Yet another lovely, lovely human being, with a deliciously odd turn of mind. And first-rate hugs. And, actually, all the things I said about Kat, except for the fencing bit and the someday epistolary novel.

3. cats and dogs
Almost every single picture that I took, for the whole five days that I was in Minneapolis, was of either a cat or a dog. Absolutely smitten (how could I help it when wee Siobhan curled up on the end of my bed and slept there for the whole night?).

4. Icicles
I love icicles. They are so alien and strange to my California eyes. They look like glass, or like Christmas decorations, and not like anything that belongs on the edge of a house that's not made of gingerbread.

5. Dreamhaven Books
I bought a copy of LCRW here, and that always makes me happy. Also, some books. I'd have bought more, but greed was tempered by laziness (I hate heavy suitcases).

6. Absurd cold
I don't think I'd want to live in it. But the sheer ridiculous scale of the cold there is kind of amazing. It's like an alien world, so when you go outside, you almost can't believe in it. It feels like a solid thing. It slams into you, and suddenly you're encased in it, and your whole world is just coldness that tries to freeze your lungs into tiny, brittle leaves.

I miss Minneapolis.

airport things

Airport delights:

1. Upon emerging from the security checkpoint at Lihue Airport, you come upon two musicians in aloha shirts, one playing the guitar, and the other playing the ukelele. They sing songs in Hawaiian, which has a multitude of euphonious vowels.

2. The newsstand in Lihue Airport sells cookies with chunks of arare (rice crackers seasoned with soy sauce) scattered throughout like chocolate chips.

3. The sensation my new old typewriter made while making its way through security and agricultural inspection: What's in that sturdy plastic case? Oh, just a typewriter. Oh... well, haven't seen one of those in a while.

4. The flight attendant who used the expression: "What the h, blank, double hockey stick, do they think they're doing?" This entertained me entirely too much, and I kept looking up from my magazine and thinking, hah! Double hockey stick.

5. Science fiction exhibit at SFO. Not entirely sure what this was about, because I was on a moving walkway and too tired to go back and look, but there were definitely robots. Big, silver robots. And wonderfully pulpy illustrations in bright colors (I've just looked them up, and they are covers from Weird Science and Weird Fantasy). I love the SFO museum.

old things

My family is a clan of pack rats. We keep papers and books and photographs and this and that hidden away in closets for years. I have my own horde of aged treasure, but I can't hold a candle to my great-grandparents, who apparently set things aside and then ceased to see them. Their garage, which is more of a shed, really, and which I had never been into while they were alive, yielded these treasures. There were others, but these are my favorites.

A gas pump. Notice that the highest possible price for a sale was $9.99.


An ancient typewriter, in a rather terrifying state of deterioration. I expect that it mutters eldritch stories to itself in the middle of the night.

It has been raining in the early morning here, torrential spills of rain that half wake me up; but then I fall asleep and when I wake up again, it is warm and sunny, and I keep thinking that I only dreamed the rain until I accidentally soak my foot in a puddle.

trees

You know that lamppost tree in C.S. Lewis's Narnia? I think it may have grown up into this.

green