Yves Saint Laurent for the Ballet Russes, 1976

That is all.

illustration by Pieter ‘t Hoen (aka Piet-Paris)

"However, few users seemed capable of producing the the precise line-up of cards and codes demanded by the computers, which responded to the slightest infraction with sudden and intemperate error messages - making one long for a return of the surliest of humans, from whom there always remains at least a theoretical possibility of understanding and forgiveness."

from A Week at the Airport by Alain de Botton

But I would add that while a computer will surely change its "mind" if you do manage to come up with the right information, humans give no such guarantee.

I went to visit my father and got into a terrible fight with my sister about the impending holiday. We snapped and snarled at each other for three hours; I at what I perceive as her New Age abdication of responsibility and she at my tendency to "rigid Christian morality." I was livid.

Too bad she's right. Despite a lifetime of self-examination, I still drift towards stoicism, silently accepting my circumstance without regard to justice or entitlement. Neither rain nor sleet nor ulcer nor panic attack will convince me I'm not obligated to carry some burden. I mock people who use the word "deserve." And I'm so consumed by fear of my own weakness, emotional martyrdom is the only thing that keeps me from being utterly despicable. (Proving you can be both dedicated to impossible codes of conduct and self-aware.)

She, on the other hand, is much more inclined to ideas of journey and discovery. There are no Right or Wrong choices - rather one can "only do what they can do" and others have an obligation to empathize. In her mind, unhappiness is not a human condition but a problem to solve. Where I see eccentricity and a fact to work around, she sees disorder and the possibility of change. 

We aren't zealots, understand, and most of the time we get along very nicely - but our pet beliefs are not without teeth.

And now I am home again, with only four days to Christmas Eve. Philosophy holds little sway over crinkly paper and gingerbread. 
g. 

Traditional German Red Cabbage

In a 4 quart pot, melt enough butter to sautee:
3 medium apples, peeled and sliced
1/2 onion, chopped

Add:
1 head shredded red cabbage
1 c red wine
4-6 whole cloves (how much do you like cloves?)
2 bay leaves
1/4 c brown sugar
1/4 c vinegar

Have ready:
flour or cornstarch

• Simmer for one hour
• To thicken, sprinkle with flour (or mix a couple of tablespoons of cornstarch with some water) and stir rapidly to blend. don't start with too much, though, and add more as needed. Nothing worse than goopy cabbage.
• Don't eat the bay leaves - or the cloves for that matter.

artist unknown

It's one of the things I'll miss about this place and living alone. I like getting up at 6 (sometimes before) and puttering around my living space; making coffee, making the bed. Oddly, it's the time of day I get the most done. I write or clean or finish projects. I organize and plan. This morning I wrapped gifts for the girls at work, painting their names across each package in bright red poster paint. Last night I had planned to leave the little boxes on their desks - no cards, no wrapping. But at 6 AM that just didn't seem good enough. 

In the new place, the bedroom door shuts tight. I'll be able to get up early and leave C to his dreams. (It will be much better than it is now, having to skulk around like a thief.) But there is a wonderful freedom in unchecked mornings, the coffee maker spitting and gurgling, all the lights and the radio on. I remember being in high school hating the way mom was up at dawn, hating her cheerfulness at those absurd hours. My teenage brain wanted more sleep - and less cheerfulness in general. Now I can't imagine sleeping in. I try, sometimes; C likes to have a lazy morning and I don't want to be jerk. After about half an hour I'm fidgeting, full of unspent energy. If I'm in bed past 8:30 I feel like I've wasted half my day.

Of course, I'm usually ready for a nap by noon...
And anything that isn't done by 2 PM probably isn't gonna get that way.
g.

Rumballs

rumballs as seen by Juergen Teller. ha.

illustration by Jean Phillippe Delhomme

Just dammit. I'm happy enough - I'm getting the things I want. Work is okay and I've finally managed to get up a little earlier and have time to myself. So why is filling this stupid page so hard?

Russian Tea Cookies

preheat oven to 325° F

BLEND:
1 c butter (room temperature, salted)
1/2 c confectioner's/icing sugar 
2 tsp vanilla extract

ADD:
(with a rubber spatula or wooden spoon - no electric mixers)
2 c flour
1/4 tsp salt

HAVE READY:
jam, preserves, or nuts according to your taste
try to use a variety of colours and textures 

• Roll dough into balls about 1.5' in diameter and place on cookie sheet. 
• The original recipe says to dent the tops of each ball with the back of a spoon, but I prefer to use something that leaves a more defined hollow (the top of a small bottle or even your thumb).
• Fill the hollow of each cookie with preserves or nuts (or both). I especially like the flavour of seedless raspberry jam or pear jam, or chopped pecans with a little brown sugar. The deeper depression (yes yes, very funny) will help keep the jam from bubbling out during baking. Be careful not to overfill.
• Bake 15-20 mins, until the cookies are a light golden brown.
• Let cool thoroughly (that jam is sticky). They suggest dusting these with icing sugar before serving and it looks nice, but they're already pretty sweet, so that's your call.

I got this recipe from the Mrs. Fields Best Cookie Book Ever! (a small but excellent collection). It's also similar to one my mom had for Thumbprint Cookies. The beauty of it is that it uses minimal, simple ingredients, the dough is easy to handle, and the finished product looks fancy. It makes a pretty contribution to holiday parties and potlucks and things, and people get all stoked and think you're a genius.

Parisian street art by Monsieur Qui

It must be Christmas. It's strange, though, despite the snow and the smell of baking, I'm not at all in the spirit of the thing. Maybe it will come. 

It looks like my father will continue his Selective Holiday Embargo. (He's declined to attend half our Christmases since mom died.) The chance he'll participate this year are slim. My sister and brother-in-law are offering to host a lunch on Boxing Day, but they don't seem terribly excited about it. My other sister is hemming and hawing and suggesting we celebrate in January and I am in my apartment making cookies by rote. I had to lay out the whole deposit for our new apartment so I'm not attacking the season with my usual enthusiasm either. It's hard to be broke at the holidays.

But, as with anything attached to linear time, Christmas will come whether I'm ready for it or not. The only thing to do is keep mixing butter and sugar, hoping mind follows body.

I wish I was in Paris.
g.

Old South Shortbread
(aka: Mom's Favourites)

preheat oven to 375° F

BLEND
1 c butter (room temp, unsalted)
4 tbsp castor/fruit sugar*
2 tsp vanilla extract (the good stuff - no fakes) 

ADD: 
(with rubber spatula or wooden spoon - no electric mixers)
2 c flour
2 c crushed walnuts

HAVE READY:
About 2 c icing/confectioner's sugar in a bowl 

• Once it's mostly mixed with your spoon, pat together with your hands. As with most shortbreads, it's good not to overhandle. 
• Roll dough into balls in your hands (about 1.5 - 2") and, when you put them down on the cookie sheet, don't flatten them completely. The cookies should be small and quite thick.
• BAKE 15 to 20 MINS - they can have a touch of light brown around the edges
• When they come out of the oven - AS SOON as they come out of the oven - roll them in the icing sugar so they are well coated. This is definitely going to burn the tips of your fingers but, if you don't do it while they're really hot, they won't be nearly as good.
• Let cool completely, then pack into containers with a sheet of waxed paper b/t each layer. 

*If you don't have this, regular white sugar is absolutely okay. The thing about castor or fruit sugar is that it is super-duper fine and adds an extra delicacy to the texture of shortbreads. But shit is not going to fall apart without it. Let's not get crazy, here.

illustration by coco

I spent my first hour this morning bouncing around the internet looking for images. I'm woefully ignorant when it comes to this stuff, so it's always an adventure. I'm especially pleased with my find above (though a lot of it seems more collage than illustration). Her work is a balance of chaos and restraint. In some ways it reminds me of my editor and I; I'm all restraint and she's all chaos and, between us, we often produce something better than either one.

I picked up my new old cabinet yesterday. It needs a little more work than I thought; the doors are loose and the glass panel knocks around a bit. Whatever - I love it. There's another piece there now, a small wardrobe. C says it's "cheap" but I'm not so sure. In any case, I feel like it would be handy the apartment door to hang coats and stash boots so our outside things don't turn into an unruly pile of crap. I'll have to work on him a little today. I've also begun looking for sofas. I have a feeling anything second hand will have to come from outside the city. Here, it seems anything more than five years old is immediately dubbed "vintage" and priced at much more than it's worth. Things like that Deco piece don't appear for the asking.

Or should I say, "don't grow on trees?"

I have to exorcise the cliches out of my work. All of them. I could get away with it for a while, plead immaturity as a writer - not any more. I know better. The problem is that sometimes, in the moment, it sounds okay and I convince myself that This One Time it's necessary or appropriate or whatever. But inevitably, when I go back and reread, those are the phrases that make me cringe.

My resolution for 2011 is to stop making myself cringe.
g.

illustration by George Barbier

Addressed to my sister, it reads:

Last night a very handsome man told me I was "delightful."

Last week we found an apartment together. Last night he proposed. I'd have to say I'm awfully pleased (though also troubled by my preposition-ended sentences).

But next time I have a "feeling" about something, this evidence of my keen insight will make me insufferable.
g. 

ps: This means I am in possession of my very first diamond. (Possibly my last.) It's very small, but I don't think it' s any less nice for that. Since I don't have gorilla hands it will, in fact, be fine.

illustration by Belinda Chen

The flat roof across the alley from my office window is covered in little puddles. (I admit, I will miss this view. No yellow tailed hawks will land outside the tiny ground floor window of my new office.) The sky is grey as evening - a purgatory sky. The day will start tomorrow.

Eight, eight, the burning eight
Between Sunday and Monday hangs a day
so dark, it will devastate

g.

illustration by Alec Strang

I was kneeling on the floor, scrubbing at the base of some table; it must have been one of those old desks, with a low platform for storage. I noticed a few ants. I pushed it back to discover hundreds of them piled, ant fashion, into a groove on the floor. They were tiny and hard, flesh pink, shiny and anemic-looking - like pale roe, only frantically, senselessly alive. I recoiled, was about to find some way to kill them, when I noticed that they seemed to be moving back and forth to a spot still covered. I pushed back the table again to reveal a jagged hole in the floor as big as my hand. I leaned forward and peered inside.

Just a few inches below the floor surface hung three or four sacs - like cocoons - filled with ants. Five or six inches across, their surfaces seethed and roiled, bloodless, pulsing organs. Suddenly, one of them dropped to the sub-floor with a popping sound. The membrane split and the insects spilled out. 

I decided to douse them in kerosene and set them on fire.

I woke up, repulsed.

It's no wonder my dreams are disturbing; lately my life is charmed. I don't know why, but it's the way my brain works. When I'm miserable my dreams are respite - idyllic, uplifting. When things are going well they are ghoulish.

Just this week we found an apartment and I discovered I have money in the bank (I'm terrible at keeping track of those things). My ancient work PC was unexpectedly replaced with a shiny new one. This morning I found and bought an honest-to-god Art Deco cabinet at the Salvation Army for $60 (see photo blog). My mild-mannered boss at the shop stood up for me with a bullying customer and one of the managers at the office sent me a style guide so I can take their editor's test (which, if they have work for me, will double my pay). C has found money on the ground twice and received a government tax rebate he didn't know was coming. All that's left is for the cat to lay a golden egg.

But while I wait, I will dream of slaughter and plagues.
g.

I
I am so sad I don't know who did this. It's lovely. Well, except that it makes no sense. 
Why would she hold a leash in her right hand for a dog that walks on her left?

The apartment is ours. We sign the lease tonight.

I've already made a plan for the office/den that involves lots of bookshelves and a cozy chair, along with my old wood work desk. I have, in very stereotypical girl fashion, decided on a colour scheme of stormy-lake blues and cool, ashy browns without consulting C at all. I have a delightful idea for a bird motif in the kitchen...

My head has been so full of the new apartment; now the reality of moving is starting to settle in. I have been here for eight years. For the last four, my kitchen, bedroom and living room have been in the same, large space. It was quite wonderful, in fact, like living in a hotel. I'm suddenly wary of having so many rooms. 

But, oh! I'm going to be so close to Roncesvalles! On summer mornings I'll walk out of my door and stroll along the empty street, looking into shop windows and sipping coffee. The little Polish delis and fruit stands will be our grocery stores. Enormous High Park, with its paths and steps and strange little zoo, will be our yard. 

Looking around the nest I've built here, I'm sad - but I'm excited, too. I've been yearning for something - anything - to show me my life isn't frozen in place. It never occurred to me, but this apartment has a lot to do with that feeling. I've watched tenants and boyfriends come and go. One full time job and a pretty serious relationship started and ended here. I'm the only thing that hasn't changed and, cumulatively, there are days I feel I'm being left behind. It's time.

This is a very good thing.
g.