forty-eight: Yo no soy marinero, soy capitán, soy capitán, soy capitán
(Para bailar La Bamba / se necesita una poca de gracia)
I've known this song by heart since I was four years old, and never realized there was a bit that said: "I'm not a sailor / but for you I will be." Mm. Welp. :)
But, y'know, thankfully aside from being a lot more heyyy than I remembered, also a current operating theme. It has been a month of exceeding personal agency around here: soy capitán, soy capitán, soy capitán.
growth
As is (used to be, pre-COVID; can be; will be again) my habit, sometimes I just do things. Like, major things, on a complete and utter whim. And near the end of January, a thing I just did absolutely on the spur of the moment was sign up for a six-week urban agriculture course through one of my local community centres: four afternoons a week of greenhouse work, job training resources (it's technically an employment program even though every single one of us there has about three uses in mind), and small agricultural theory.
This is the smartest bit of spontaneity I've had in a good while. As a gardener, I know a very top-layer, theoretical amount of what I'm doing? Enough to write convincing fiction about, which is not enough for life. (See: Seriously, stop treating authors as authority, it's making us all look bad.) I putter, I experiment, and ultimately, it's a very showy way of not knowing what I'm doing, which is not good enough. I need some actual concrete skills and less handwavy bullshit.
So all month, I've been working those skills from scratch, and: craft is a wonderful feeling, no matter where you do it. Working with soil properly feels amazing. Working with seeds from a place where my confidence, however new, is actually a bit more merited? Even more.
The clever part of this equation is that for the first time since COVID hit (four years! four actual human years!), I have a solid reason to walk half an hour each way, four days a week, to spend time with people who are interested in building good-faith systems -- and just bump gently into all the life along the way. Situations encountered on that fairly short neighbourhood walk have occasionally been a certain kind of intense -- this included Baby's First Naloxone Kit Administration during my first week, which left me really proud, but absolutely shaking? -- but it's also giving me exposure to the kind of casual kindness, the reflexive mutual stranger-generosity it feels like we legitimately lost for a while there? Every day on my walk to or from that class, something's going pear-shaped, but someone's being good to a perfect stranger about it. We are cutting each other breaks all over the place, every single day, on that tiny commute of mine.
It's regular work with living things and foundationally good-faith people, a chance to stop at the market or the Syrian food stall on the way home, something to sink my teeth into, a routine. I am having so much fun.
The second good act of total spontaneity was getting back to yoga class. One fairly small, body-positive one, offered free twice a month at one of the community centres nearby, and because it was so good, a small sampling at the exceedingly lifestyle-y, faux-Manhattan gym a few blocks away, because, well. It's a few blocks away. I can go on a whim and skitter home quickly in my workout pants without having to fuss with changerooms.
1) I was always a pretty indifferent yoga student but I did miss it. It sucks to do alone in your house. It's great with a little community participation.
2) If you ever want to get the measure of the back/core injury you've been living with -- yeah, go to a nice intro yoga class and marvel at the little things that make your body shake like an exorcism. It's humbling, and I am deliberately saying humbling rather than humiliating. You achieve a strong sense of okay, we are here. Now we know the starting point, and something about the distance to come.
3) One of the classes at the exceedingly lifestyle-y local gym was straight-up wonderful, and I will be back; the other one may in fact be This Investigator stumbling, like Columbo, on a tiny yoga cult. This instructor apparently has a huge following, and the most jarring boundaries situation I've ever seen. It put my hair up so badly I'm almost perversely tempted to do a second one just to see if it was a bad day or if there's an underground lair hidden under the locker room. I do in fact understand that yes, this is how the investigator gets caught by any lurking yoga cults, but: Just one more thing.
logographic soil amendment
Daily writing is still going, although yes, it's slowed down as I sew together the transitions, move scenes around, and generally think in the unit of the whole. This is getting far too long and coming together gorgeously.
Like they keep saying in Tiny Plant School, you don't feed the plant, you feed the soil, so: this month's word soil nutrition, a metric I am still paying a lot of attention to.
Words this month have been fed by locally roasted Ethiopian coffee (notes: black tea, melon, and blood oranges); a lot of sunny afternoon walks; two more seasons of Doctor Who (I still have opinions but thankfully we're out of the Zone of Hurt/Comfort, that was rough on me for a while); the entirety of The Thick of It (heh heh); more secret grocery store figs (price remains right); tacos gobernador; Mumford and Sons; and both Zooms and walks with friends, which the unseasonable weather has at least been good for.
I remain wildly in love with this project and its protagonists, both of whom keep making these perfectly telegraphed, absolute-surprise-to-me decisions which change the entire tone and direction of the whole thing. They're wonderfully textured human beings when they feel like they have room to be themselves. And they are -- and it's such a relief -- unabashedly sexual in a way I've missed when writing YA and more centre-of-genre projects. I can write sexuality from an adult perspective here: no squirming, no mythologizing, no reification, no flinching, no shame. Writing sexuality undistorted.
It has had me thinking: the YA literary body is a mutilated body. The genre literary body is also, frequently, a mutilated body; it's just missing different limbs. This feels like an essay waiting to happen, but I have to decide if I'm up for the inevitable nitpicking. Please do weigh in if you actually want to see that.
But: I have so badly missed what it feels like to have whole, complex people walking the halls of my head, doing things that are frequently smarter than anything I could've thought up, living sometimes-contradictory lives. I don't know how that quite happens, that loophole of a character being smarter than me who invented them. It's inexplicable, and it feels a lot like grace.
(Oh look, we circled back. Just una poca de gracia.)
maritime project management
We had a little milestone for seat-of-the-pants community organizing this month: our lead organizer at the chili situation, Meredith Low, was awarded a Community Recognition Award by one of our local Members of Provincial Parliament, Chris Glover. I am personally taking it as a monument to both our general group relentlessness and how she carried the back end of this thing on her own shoulders for a year and a half before the rest of us got in there properly. It's an endurance run really worth recognition, and I'm really glad she got it.
I rode along partially as cheer squad, partially because a room full of active community volunteers and organizers sounded like the perfect place to network, collectively organize, and cross-pollinate volunteers. And I wanted to see what everyone else was doing, because I am prosocially nosy. >.>
It was a wonderful way to spend an afternoon: There were 29 honorees, and if you ever want to bathe in good stuff, this is a great way to do it. People are good, my friends. They are silently in their communities busting their asses to do good things like a slow, steady tide, every single day: a pharmacist with a 4-month-old who takes time to go to the local underhoused services hub and do safe injection and Naloxone education, and a tiny retired carpenter who's singlehandedly teaching trade skills to teenagers in his community housing and finding them job placements, and residents' associations who are driving neighbour-friendly planning with sheer persistence and just being proactive about everything. It really reinforced my growing conviction that all the best work isn't online, dudes, it's local, and what you make locally will grow.
It was a bit like hanging my soul out in the sun to recharge, and yes, we networked like fuck, put flyers in hands, and got in some tag-team advocacy with the local councillor about shelter services and front-line burnout while we were there. Overall solid afternoon's work.
It's still a crisis out there, but we're out there proving to people, one at a time, that we can get our hands on that wheel and turn things around if we just hustle together and hustle diligently. And: Man, that feels good.
things to read
Quiet on the publishing front this month, but I'm assured that my review of Barrie, ON poet Caitlin McKenzie's debut chapbook, Wifehood, will be available in the March issue of ROOM Magazine, Canada's oldest feminist lit journal. It's a limited edition, and it's very structurally intelligent in a way that runs deeper than clever.
***
So needless to say I didn't figure out the visual options on this thing this month (every list has something that falls to the bottom), but next issue promises a lil' more gardening, probably some short-form reviews as I get back to the hoard of library books, some poetry event reportage, and all else TBA. Ahoy. :)