not to worry, my fan base

Panic not, people. I'm on vacation on the East Coast of the U.S. until Oct. 5, I will return after that with stories of NYC, hostels and Richmond, Virginia.

Until then may I recommend setting up my first annual fan convention.

- Karen

uh the memory

what memory? I ask. My memory and other things seem to be going lately.

Example. I just but the burner on the stove on to boil some eggs. Unfortunately, I put the wrong burner on. More unfortunately, there was a large glass lid on the large burner.

I finally notice this when the burner is burning bright, bright red. I proceed, with my bare hands, to take off the lid. Ouch.

Then I grab some oven mitts, grabe the lid, throw it into the sink and pour cold water over it. Oddly, it smashed into pieces.

If I hadn't turned around to see the wrong burner on, I imagine the whole thing would have blown into little pieces, all over me and the kitchen.

Oops.

My memory is going too. I can't remember actors' names as quickly as I used to, if at all. Names of simple objects - like that thing you use to heat the room, you know, it's like a square shape or something. Oh yeah, a space heater. There it is.

Or what the heck is the last name of that woman named Joan I knew 10 years ago in Medicine Hat, Alberta? Remember, she was a social worker at the hospital. Nope, gone.

It's a worry.

hairdressing fetishes

I enjoy my hairdresser. I've written of her before, referred friends with curly hair issues like mine. My hairdresser brought my hair from horrible layering to it's current situation. She also hides my gray nicely.

My hairdresser, HD for short, used to work out of her home. That was a truly beautiful experience. It was inexpensive and her home was always wackily decorated.

Wacky is my HD. Tattooed Lady, she calls herself. Her hair is always a different colour whenever I see her. Whatever her natural colour was I have no idea.

She's this wacky chick and yet she has this awesome soft side. She's a single mom and attends the Canadian version of PTA meetings. All very normal, you might say.

Well, about a year ago she moved into a new salon. Had to make a wee bit of money, she did. Her prices basically doubled but I worship her haircutting abilities so I followed her over to Yaletown. Yaletown makes me sigh, what with all of the hoity-toityness of it. The salon clientele are all very dressed up and it's all very Sex and The City. I usually roll in in jeans, a t-shirt and no makeup. I'm not cool enough for this place but for HD, I suffer through it.

I went a few days ago for a cut and colour. You get offered a martini - with alcohol or not - while you wait for your hair to do what it must. I was hungry and HD even went out and got me a muffin.

I heard one of the hoity-toities discussing dominatrixes. I raised my eyebrow at HD, like, see, your clientele is so hoity-toity shallow.

The next thing I know we are talking fetishes. Apparently dominatrixes have nothing to do with sex. It's all power and submission, says HD. Oh, I say.

Once in a while HD attends a fetish party, just to observe. "I can tell you are interested,' says HD. "I know how your brain works. You are nervous about it but you want to expand your mind."

In other words, I'm conservative as hell but curious is what I think she is really trying to say.

So who knows, I may go to one of these things. You have to dress fetish, says HD. Oddly, I have no fetish wear.

Now, don't go thinking my HD is a crazy dominatrix. She has never done that and she is a very good mother. She's wacky.

I'm going to NYC in a week or so. I'm sure they must have fetish parties out there.

boredom, alone time and jogging

I find myself with a four-day weekend. I'm excited about this because, hey, there's no work. And yet, I find that I'm spending a lot of the time alone. That's not so bad - I read, watch tv, listen to the radio, etc., etc. and yet and yet and yet.
Most of the people I know are very very good at being alone, in fact, they seek it out they do. They go a little nutty being around people too much. Me, I like to be alone for short periods of time. After that, like this weekend, I go into what I call a bored coma. I don't mean to minimize actual comas of course. So please, if you are in a coma, don't be offended by my co-opting of the word.
Bored coma. My brain feels tired and I feel restless and lethargic and blather blather. I want to learn how to spend significant amounts of time on my own without being bored and without resenting other people who, well, don't have to spend time alone.
Wow, what a boring and self-involved blog.
I did jog for an hour today. Yee haw, I was all proud of myself. That restless energy worked wonders.
Brutal news these days. In Friday's New York Times there were photos of first of all, the hurricane. There was the body of a woman floating face down and another of a dead woman, left in a shopping cart at the corner of a building. And then the 1,000 people killed in the stampede in Iraq. There was a picture of a wall of pictures of the dead so that relatives could identify them. It is beyond anything that can be written about it. There had better be a god because otherwise what is there. I'm not expressing that well or in an intelligent way as it appears in my brain, really. Elie Wiesel, when asked where god was during the Holocaust, said something like he died there. I am very poorly paraphrasing so I will quote directly from Wiesel:

Where is God now?" And I heard a voice within me answer him: "Where is He? Here He is He is hanging here on this gallows. . . . That night the soup tasted of corpses."

This is apparently interpreted two ways. The first being of course, that god is dead. The second is that god was personified in that child who died. That is a gross oversimplification of course. I continue to detest how god has been and continues to be co-opted. But beyond all of my anger and crap and junk and crap and loneliness and bitterness and blather blather blather is a god who was personified in the gallows. I could cry for hours.

This may not make sense to you, my fan base of 4, but I realize that my blog is becoming a sort of de facto journal for me. Thanks for reading if you made it through.