While you were out

So, the elephant in this cyber-room is my 3 1/2 years of blogging silence. Why did I stop? Not sure, and reading the last few posts before I stopped offers no clues. Why did I start again and now? Connection. I am not on Facebook anymore; I don't tweet; I'm not a regular caller or e-mailer. I haven't even kept up reading the blogs of DemonDoll or Lulu or LolaDiana, despite the fact that they have gone on faithfully blogging all this time. Without it being my intention, my actions have threatened whatever connection I was maintaining with people I love. I want this back. And yet, I haven't told any of them I am blogging again. A part of me fears awaking the monster of obligation to claw at my shoulder; a part of me fears I will remember why I stopped and stop again, and push these loved ones even further away.

Still, here I am. For now. And before we move on, I feel like some kind of brief reckoning of the intervening years is in order to bring us up to speed. So, while I was out (not exhaustive and in no particular order),

• we moved apartments and now live mostly contentedly downtown, far from the Jerzys and paczkies of Roncesvalles, but far also from its quiet, leafy side-streets and cheap vegetable markets;


• I applied for Canadian citizenship, and expect that in six months or so, the lifelong taint of being a geo-political undesirable might finally rinse off, and I might finally get to travel again;


• I had my first surgery, a hernia repair that lasted about 40 minutes, during the weeklong recovery from which I read the egregiously awful Girl With the Dragon Tattoo;


• T had a terrifying stress-collapse that still makes my heart pound and that knocked him on his back for several months, but from which he recovered spectacularly, publishing his first novel, doing book tours, and spending two months in Europe researching his next novel on a Canadian arts grant;


• I enrolled last year, at the age of 38, in the University of Toronto, as a first-year undergraduate no less, to study History and Art History, with the goal of going all the way to a PhD and a career teaching Art History at the university level;


• I bought a pair of Vibram Five-Finger shoes, the horror of friends notwithstanding;


• I made one or two of the aforementioned friends;


• I became a vegetarian, because I could no longer conscionably balance the cheapness of a piece of meat with its ethical and environmental costs;


• my sister Vida died, but after a long and hopeless illness, so on some level I felt relief for her;


• I joined then quit Facebook, staging my exit as a three-day suicide countdown, which provoked more than one "friend" to quit me first;


• I got a cell-phone, only to hear the incredulous question, "You don't own a cell-phone?!" change to, "You don't own a smartphone?!";


• I designed this card for the 2010 "I Heart My LGBTQ Family" campaign — the last completed drawing I've done — while the prospect of me and T becoming parents has become increasingly less likely, by mutual assent;


• I have started learning German and, though hearing the language still makes me giggle a bit, I have developed a fascination for German culture, art and history that I never had before;


• my current (and soon-to-be-former, due to his placement ending) therapist informed me matter-of-factly that everything I have been experiencing of late is common "mid-life" stuff, leading to a series of tiny (figurative) explosions in my brain;
  


• I fell in love with Kristen Wiig; and
  


• I grew a beard, which I wear now in all seasons, with more than a little relish for its racializing and politicizing effects.