I would go out tonight, but I haven't got a stitch to wear

white & bright!

I went to the dentist yesterday, a small triumph in my world (especially because the doctor said she could tell that I floss!)... but got a stern talking-to about the vigor of my brushing sessions. Apparently I'm too much of an elbow-greaser when it comes to my pearlies... I always applied the same principle to my teeth as I do to my frying pans: the harder you scrub, the cleaner they'll be! Apparently I need to amend that to "the harder you scrub, the more they'll disappear." Gentless in tooth brushing does not come to me naturally, though! If I don't pay attention while I do it, I usually end up getting absorbed by something else (like Tycho's shenanigans) while my brush gets all mashed to heck between my teeth. That's probably why I have to replace my brush every two weeks or so. Not any more though! Gentleness from hereon in to save my teeth and my dental budget!!!

(after the dentist I saw "Stranger Than Fiction," which was SO GOOD, even if it didn't make sense one little bit... and there was a lot of tooth brushing in it! I was like, "No, Will Ferrell, no! It's supposed to be up and down, not side to side!")

Megan after a crummy workshop... (and a Tycho story)

Sitting in the McGill library right now, looking across their campus which is all decked out with Christmas lights—quite pretty, but makes me ache for Western, with the lights on the massive trees in front of UC. I can see the giant cross way up on the mountain though, which, I have to say, is a one-up on Western.

I got punched up in my writing workshop today. Not badly, and not that I didn’t deserve it—I handed in a lazy piece, an unpolished piece, a piece that some editor of whichever lit mag I sent it to is folding into airplanes, with his yellow fingers and a grisly laugh. I want to reach across time and space and pluck it back, file it away, move on. It’s funny how quickly a work you thought was decent, was passable, was worthwhile can fall several rungs on the ladder without you even noticing. I didn’t even want this piece to get workshopped by the time today came around. I just wasn’t in the mood, and I knew what would happen. I’m putting together a new work right now that is surprising me, that I want to shake in the air and say “No, guys! Forget that one! THIS is me!” Too late this time, though. Workshops are a tough business! Harder than any academic class I’ve had, by farrrrr. Imagine having a child, loving him, raising him the best you can—teaching him how to talk, how to behave, how to make decisions, how to brush his hair—and then on his eighth birthday you plunk him down in front of a committee of your peers who poke and prod him and peer down his throat and in his ears and ask him to perform all kinds of acrobatics while they tap their pencils on their pursed lips and take furious notes. In the end, you’re given a summary: nose too big, armpits smelly, can’t dance the tango, poor judge of character, hair not blonde/curly/shiny enough, too friendly, too naive, too much of a charmer, too timid. Afterwards you wobble out of there and wonder what you’ll do with this failure of a kid. Try to throw the engines in reverse and undo eight years of work? Give him away to a childless couple? Let him wander off on his own to see what the rest of the world thinks of him? Throw him away??

For my India class, I’m writing an essay on a novel whose eight-year-old protagonist is assured by her mother that her future husband will search the world with a candle until he finds her. Well – I’ll search the world with my word processor until I find my breakthrough story! And in the meantime, Brutopia calls, where I can sit with the other writers and rehash today's workshop. I hope Tycho is not worried that I'm not home yet...

...speaking of Tycho, he was making hella noise in the kitchen this morning while I was just waking up, crashing chairs around and chirping and just causing a general caffufle, and finally I went out to invesitage and discovered that he had a sticky note stuck to his foot that no amount of kicking and flailing could get off! Poor little dude! Poor little dude's paws!

Tee-off T's Me Off!!!

This post is in response to the news story in this weekend's Globe & Mail about the Russian (I can hear you snickering, Jen) cosmonaut who is collaborating with a Toronto golf club maker to tee off... in outer space. Apparently, during a space walk set for Wednesday, Mikhail Tyurin "plans to use a 6-iron [first thing that doesn't make sense to me] to knock a lightweight golf ball off a tee placed on top of the Russian docking port at the International Space Station [second thing that doesn't make sense to me]."

I think this is a crazy idea! To explain why, here is a visual demonstration:

PLUS

EQUALS

Translation: golf + outer space = OUTER SPACE DISASTER!

Apparently NASA "held up the golf shot for months while safety experts pored over possible flight paths for the ball to make sure it would not head back toward the station as a dangerous bit of orbital debris." Does that really make everyone feel safe? I mean, isn't outer space the place where we still don't know 99.9% of what goes on? Is it really a good idea to send useless crap up there just for the sake of a TV commercial?

I don't know a lot about golf balls, except that they are dimpled to make them fly faster (I think) and that they are to thank for the wonderful activity that is golf-cart driving... in the two or three times that I've actually been on a golf course (not counting mini-golf, which is a whole different bucket of balls) I got immense pleasure from driving a golf cart in loop-dee-loops around trees and people and flags and other convenient obstacles. This countered the displeasure I got from only being able to hit the ball once every ten or twelve swings, and even then it was usually only a grazing of the ball that result in a plop-plop-rollll of four or five measly feet. (This does not include my driving range experiences, which have been considerably more successful. Perhaps without the distraction of the golf cart I am better able to focus on my swing. Listen to me! "Focus on my swing!" That's what the professionals say.)

Anyway, the point of this rant is to say that I'm fairly sure that the universe doesn't need any more human garbage floating around in it that isn't supposed to be there, especially for a reason as lame as publicity. Who knows what could happen! Example: Unpredictable, floating debris in my backpack is responsible for gouging out the pupils of the cat on my wallet.

I just realized how violent that sentence sounds until you get to the last three words. Sorry! Oh... and sorry for the pun in the title. The internet needs more bad writers just as much as outer space needs more orbiting garbage - my bad.

Hey, Everybody!

It's me! I'm not MIA... well, I was, but now I'm back, after nearly seven straight days of birthday action, beginning outside Union Station on Friday and ending Thursday night (er, Friday morning?) at a bar on St. Catherine St in Montreal. Thank you SSHRC for giving me the means, and thank you Korova for giving me the venue. And thank you, people of my life. 23 will be a year of happiness, made all the more happy for its passing moments of doubt.
Stay tuned!

On the agenda for the next two weeks: polishing up some BRILLIANT FICTION and then reading it to whoever shows at Blizzart's on December 3rd. All of this in preparation for my debut on the bookshelves of stores across the country, nestled right up close to Timothy Findley (date-and novel-TBA). I think it's my sacred duty to keep the calibre of genius on his shelf at a steady high, and Concordia is one more foothold on the way up! By supplying me with beer, fascinating people, and truckloads of snow, Montreal is going to be my muse this winter. My IV of heartbreaking truth, straight to the veins. My long distance phone bill. My damp pant cuffs dragging in the snow, mind buzzing too fast to notice or care. Montreal, t'es tellement froid, mais t'as de la gloire. On y va!

Twenty-three years of eating cake!

I am waiting until midnight to post this blog!

first blog as a 23-yr-old whoooo yowza!!!

A fabulous weekend has just passed, wherein I went "home" (so hard to pin down that wily word these days) and enjoyed a happy drive with my dearest friend Derek, a magnificent meal with M/B/A/D/A, and pretty much the best Saturday of all time heading back to Dundalk and seeing The Sound of Music on the good ol' Dundalk Little Theater stage, starring the beautiful, the talented, and the beautifully talented Ingrid who then hosted an equally beautiful (and talented) soiree afterwards, avec handsome husband and equally handsome stepson Noah. Walking from the Town Hall to Ingrid and Ian's place reminded me of how much I miss Dundalk, and want to live there again. I could hardly believe, when we drove into town, that it was all still there; the Farm Supplies store where I once timidly handed over a resume (and didn't get the job), the train tracks where I went for countless walks with my dear old dog Meg (and Ingrid with dear not-so-old Tia), the lion statue that I used to climb on in the parkette... I know it would never be the same if I moved back there one day, but at least it would be more the same than anywhere else. Being somewhere that familiar then returning to somewhere this strange is like slipping from hot to cold weather in seconds. Causes anxiety, shivers, nosebleeds. Each time I'm in Dundalk again I notice one or two small differences, and eventually those differences will be too overwhelming, and that's what I'm worried about! The critical mass of difference! This time I noticed that the Smoke Shop is now called the Daisy Mart... this is both bad (ahhhh! change! cover your eyes!) and good (now the short story I just wrote isn't quite as much of a blatant copy of my hometown). Other things remain the same, though, like the giant outdoor mural of the Last Supper painted on the side of the Smoke-Shop-Turned-Daisy Mart. These are the details I'll cling to as I make my too-infrequent trips back, sniffing around for roots with my scent on them like a ribby dog.



On a completely unrelated note... Here is Bronwyn's floating head - and a lot of booze! (Is there a connection??)


And here is some cake!!! And some Derek!


And, because he is devastatingly handsome (especially after our brief separation), here is a Tycho from precisely one minute ago. I am also celebrating his birthday now, since I don't know when his actual birthday is (but don't tell him that!!!)


So - nearly midnight now, and I'm nearly asleep ... OH MY GOD I'M GETTING OLD! I feel like I need to do something memorable right now. Something to mark my last moments as a 22-year-old. In the hours before I turned thirteen (back in the Dunalk years!) I wrote a letter to my future sixteen-year-old self listing all the things I hoped to make happen in those three intermittent years. I sealed the letter and taped it to the underside of a dresser drawer and tried to forget what was on it, which apparently worked, because now, ten years later, the only thing I remember writing for sure was something like "Have my first true kiss." And look what happened! My high school should have been wrapped in caution tape. Tonight on the CBC Review I heard Shelagh Rogers interviewing Margaret Atwood, and they were laughing about the hyperbolic torment of high school romances. Atwood was trying to make the point that we change our personal histories as we grow older, and now we laugh about our very first break-up which, at the time, made us cry and write sad, solipsisitic poetry for weeks (secretly Megan thinks: who's laughing?). Then Shelagh Rogers said that she was always the one getting dumped, never the one doing the dumping! Aw! I wanted to give her a hug! Although if I had been standing there in the studio, arms open, I might have had a moment of reconsideration because Shelagh is all snifflysick right now. I might have offerred her a Kleenex instead. Atwood was her usual self, quite eager to talk about how much she hates interviews while clearly enjoying herself at the same time. If I have to hear Atwood's long and boring explication of that LongPen thingymajigger (which was an entirely uninvited explication, and I think I even sensed something like impatience in Shelagh's raspy voice) one more time... and this isn't just jealous-talk! Atwood seriously drives me crazy in-person-on-the-radio. My grams, the most well-read person I know by a long shot and a long-time Atwood opposer, would probably agree (and be glad that I'm done with my mad-about-Cat's Eye stage). I just wish she would add some cadence to her voice, learn to be patient with her admirers, and stop mentioning every second how incredibly busy she is with her world-wide book tours!!!! Hm - maybe this is jealousy talking. I suppose she's just being who she is, and that's a good thing. But Alice Munro is still better, in-person-on-the-radio and in writing. In fact, if you want to hear her, you can go here and subscribe in iTunes. There's an interview with her & Shelagh Rogers from October 18th! Alice Munro, why can't you fit in my pocket so I can take you everywhere with me?

Okay... better go get busy with being 23! I'm going to spend tomorrow in happy bliss, just Tycho and I and some really good books... Thursday is when the requisite party happens, so if you are a Montrealite and want to join us on the town, let me know and I will email you the details!

That's all! This is Megan, signing out for the last time as a 22-year-old! See you when I'm older!

Crisp!

Behold, the fruit of my labours this week! (get it? apple crisp! fruit!)
The last three days would be impossible to describe without these three words: desk, school, desk. I've managed to blitz through a brow-sweating amount of work in order to clear the path for this weekend's partyfest in Waterloo/Dundalk, and managed to work in the Jen-inspired procrastibake that you see above! I also switched my blog over to beta, which sounds all techno-savvy but really blogger bullied me into it with their constant pop-up questions, and it turned out to be an easy swtich which promises to make template changes easier. That means that this christmas there's gonna be some changes 'round here! New year, new blog! Same old Megan!

For now, though, packing for this weekend. Not an easy task, my darling dears. Thanks to recent boot/shoe/coat purchases, I spend a good minute or two every weekday morning pacing the length of my wee vestibule, summoning the muses of footwear and outdoor clothing to inspire that day's look. Of course, the rest of my clothes are all pretty standard Megan staples (although the skirts have been retired for the season), so once the fun outer stuff is shed the "day's look" is fairly predictable. Montreal has not shaped me with its sticky fashion fingers yet! But once I get my hands on some fun-money, that might change. Or I might just get sucked into the stanley st. bookstores again... if I could eat, wear, and live inside books, I'd never worry. I'm so happy that Vincent Lam won this year's Giller Prize, althought it would have been neat to see Carol Windley's collection of stories win, too, since the Globe & Mail dissed it on the weekend. (It wasn't a full-out diss, but they said something to effect of it belonging to "Canada's canon of ten years ago," which I resent! mostly because that's the fear I have of my own stories... the same people also dismissed Lam's book, saying he's "too new on the scene" to be worthy of a Giller, pffft... I'll show you new!) Anyway, I heard Vincent Lam talking to a reporter after the award was announced, and he said that he was writing his stories while working as the doctor on a cruise ship, and Lo! who should be a passenger on that cruise ship but Margaret Atwood? (unwilled visual: Margaret Atwood on a deck chair, sporting a bikini! ahhh! Out, out damn spot!)... so Atwood read his piece and loved it and signed him up with DoubleDay. Next stop: Giller Prize. Hooray for the underdog!

Off to bed now. Tycho has a new favourite toy: ball of paper tied to a string. Hopefully this will be enough to keep him occupied during the next three days, which will, sadly, be lonely for him... little dude! I will miss you, T!

(Aside: next week I have to teach my students The Thomas Gray poem called "Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat." I honestly don't know if I'm going to be able to do it. I remember Joel Faflak, UWO professor extraordinaire of lit crit, sometimes choking up while he talked to us about Fitzgerald... but that was because of the sublimity in the last few lines of Gatsby, not because he was thinking of his little cat at home who may or may not be mortal!)

Friendships, Relationships... All those ships.

Things I learned today:

1. French word for splash? Plouf!!!! Say it. Right now. Out loud. Plouf! Tycho is now Tycho-Plouf.

2. John Wayne Gacy Jr. was a serial killer! I always thought he was a hockey player. Now that Sufjan Stevens song is so much creepier!

3. The Science of Sleep is beautiful, and so are we. All of us!

Dear stomach: please digest all this candy and I'll never ask for anything ever again.

you can't really tell, but Spongebob is wearing a beret on his giant square head, and is going by his French name: "Bob L'éponge carrée". And I won a prize for my "Cloudy with a chance of rain" costume!



It feels funny posting pictures of people who don't even know that I have a blog... is that unethical? Will they find out that I've done this and come after me? Or... stop inviting me to their parties??? Unlikely! But still. I just don't know how you're supposed to spread the word about having a blog. It seems like a narcissistic thing to do. "Hey! What's up? Think your day could use some more Megan? Well - got a pen? Here's a website entirely devoted to her!" I have to admit, I have done a little google-sleuthing on some my favourite people here, and have found one or two blogs which I now read on the sly. Then I feel smug when I'm around them, because they don't know that I have insider information. I let this slip once to my friend Kasper, whose story from a million years ago is published on a website that I found thanks to google gods. The only reason I told him that I had done some searching on his name is that (1) inhibitions were low (and bar tabs were high) and (2) the website that was publishing the story had a little postscript that asked anyone who knew Kasper to please let them know, because they were trying to find him. I thought it was my moral duty to point this out to him! He was very good about it, and only marginally creeped out. But I think he should be flattered. Imagine someone being intrigued enough by you that they are willing to sift through a pile of junky search results in the hopes that they'll find some secret "in" on your life! And besides, as people have often (with the best intentions) pointed out to me, if you put something on the Interwubs, you obviously want people to read it. And whether you admit it or not you probably hope (like me!) that people will do a little grunt work to uncover your secret caché of ramblings! It's like all those famous people who "accidentally" kept amazing diaries which got published after their death (think LM Montgomery, or Kurt Cobain, Susanna Moodie, and about a gazillion others). I'm SURE that these people never once thought, hmmm, I wonder if this will get published someday? I will try and make it as interesting/obscure/controversial/______ as possible, just in case!!!

This is all tied into that question about whether it's possible to write something down without any expectation or hope of someone, other than you, reading it. Admit it! That journal you're keeping? You hope that someone will read it one day, right? Even if it's full of incriminating evidence of your secret life or embarrassing confessions about your private habits... I don't believe you if you say you're only writing it for therapy. I use the "therapy" excuse a lot to explain away the annoyance of that big, pulpy stack of Hilroys sagging on my closet shelf. It's therapy, man! And it's true that my journal-writing peaks when something especially difficult is happening in my life. But really, there's an impulse that is largely informed by the drive to create a legend of the self... a record of existence, an "I Was Here" sticky note left to identify the Megan-shaped hole in the universe for future people to sift through. I want someone to read those someday. Not now! Oh lordy, NOT NOW!!!! but someday. That's why I keep them! Otherwise, I'd write them "for therapy" and then burn them in some kind of therapeutic fire ceremony while reciting therapeutic chants to the stars. I'd have more room in my closet and less emotional baggage staring me in the face. But I like my emotional baggage and I want someone else to know about it someday! Screw therapy and emotional well-being! I want to be interesting!

This has turned into an unwieldy rant, all to say that blogging is rather strange and egotistical (and public) practice, and it's hard to know how to handle that sometimes!

Ah well, soldier ahead. It's sometimes very strange straddling London life and all of its various twists and connections and Montreal life, squeaky-new and still largely unfamiliar. Y'all know me well, while these folks here in M-town continue to know only the bits that I accidentally-on-purpose let out in the open. Unless, of course, they googled me and have been reading this all along! In which case - hi, dudes! It's okay! I probably googled your name, too!

Meanwhile, back on the ranch, D's pumpkin-carving abilities continue to astound, year after year...