long lost

my dad has a really complicated and large family and consequently i know relatively few of my paternal relatives-especially not the extended side.

cut to last sunday and i know my family is in the audience and i know it’s awkward between my mom and stepmom and i know my dad isn’t making it any easier because he’s spending all his time engratiating himself to my friends and i know my mom wishes rachel were there… so i come out of the theatre and there they all-together…odd, no? yeah, sorta. so right smack dab in the middle of this crash of awkward people is a very tiny lady who looks like she’d be in her mid to late 50s. i have never seen this woman in my life.

before i can speak my dad pulls her forward,

“michelle! i want you to meet your cousin mary lou. she’s my dad’s sister’s daughter-my cousin! your second cousin”

amazing! and in the 3 minutes we spent together i discovered she truly is amazing. she’s a poet and a teacher and gives the warmest hugs. she also has kind eyes and genuinely seemed excited about what she had just seen.

i discovered later that she had lived an amazing life. she was a nun who left the church to get married and then got divorced many years later after realising she was a lesbian. it would be ridiculous if it weren’t true.

i’m hoping that we can spend some together in toronto and maybe gain a little insight into the family that my dad is so reluctant to talk about. it’s also really nice to meet the artists in the family. when i hang out with my mom’s side of the family i always feel like a freak for not being something more conventional (in their eyes…) and it’s nice to not feel that and know that someone who shares my blood has dedicated their life to the pursuit of what they love as well.

my cousin. wow.

exciting.

as a supplement:

a review of “Travelling Light” a collection of poems by mary lou soutar-hynes

by mary hanna, literary arts supplement, jamaica observer.

“Erudite yet sensual, earnest yet playful, Mary Lou Soutar-Hynes writes with the precision of a retired educator and the passion of a former nun. She is both. Her work is delicate and formal in the best modern style, imagistic and – dare I say it – difficult. It is worth probing and reading many times to reveal its hidden meanings. As with the title of this, her second book of poetry, Soutar-Hynes’s poems revel in double meanings: we can voyage unencumbered or we can move in and through incandescence – Travelling Light accommodates both endeavours and rewards both approaches to the collection.

Travelling Light is comprised of four sections, or major poems, that are refracted into roughly ten shorter poems each. The larger works are “the poetry of hands”, “mother-tongue”, “theory of knots”, and “pool of words”. The opening poem, “writing a life”, tells us in precise terms that there are no guidelines to either writing or life,

No hay camino no road
caminante – se hace one creates it
al andar as one walks

One approaches the collection in exactly this fashion, reading the breaks, becoming aware that the poet is exploring “that dark place between nearly and not yet” (“starting with Unless by Carol Shields: a found poem ii”). Soutar-Hynes is a careful reader of other people’s work and a connoisseur of art, especially luminous abstracts. She pays homage in her poems to these intellectual muses and provides a glossary at the end of the book that explains some of her references.

…”

read more here!

excellent. bye!

dear antartica.

i’m going to come and visit you. for real! i am going to save $7000, buy a digital SLR, learn how to use it (while i save for antartica…) and finally immerse myself in a world of penguines and ancient volcanos. i want to slide on the ice and fall in love with the cold and touch the earth in a way that isn’t possible on any other continent.

sounds romantic doesn’t it. yeah…

i really am going to go. i think it will be amazing. you can come too. you SHOULD come too!

m.

i’m a klutz for real.

seriously. and it sucks.

balls!

so, what would my rather illustrious acting career be without another injury. ha! well, nothing, actually. it seems that i can’t do a show without getting hurt at some point in the process. just shoot me if i ever really mean it when i say, “i think i want to be an actor”. seriously, kill me, if you don’t i’ll just be committing suicide by stepping on stage.

i figure if i have more than 10 lines i’m basically fucked. the last time i had a significant part in a play i broke my foot DURING the show. i’m a mess!

so this time around i fell off the stairs that lead up/down from the roxy stage during my neXtfest tech rehearsal. originally the sprain wasn’t too bad. i was limping but i was good to go and by the time i went to bed on sunday night i was laughin’… monday rolls around and i have the day off so my sis and i decide to do some shopping and catch up on some errands that needed doing. all good right?

wrong!

on our way out of old navy (…i know) i hit an invisible patch of bad road and my ankle loses it and i hit the pavement. after letting out a stream of terrible words in the presence of kids and getting mad at the random gawkers staring at me i look down and realise that not only is my ankle starting to swell but all the skin has been freed from it’s prison on my knee and blood is also escaping. i start crying and then i feel sick and dizzy. the rest of our shopping trip is put off in favour of my couch and take out veggie burger from the high level diner. sigh.

but it gets worse my friends. tuesday night is our dress rehearsal and i’m doing everything i can to stay off my ankle as much as possible. i know i have a show to do and i don’t have time to lose my shit. so the play happens and it’s a terrible terrible run (due mostly to me forgetting almost ALL my lines) and i do my minimal low intensity strike activities and then leave the stage (via the stairs that caused this mess in the first place), pick up my shit, take 10 steps and proceed to lose it all over again. this time i wipe out hard. my ankle is so weak that it barely hurts anymore but i am completely exhausted and humiliated so i burst into tears…i’m sure the people around me thought it was a lot worse than it actually was because i was such a wreck immediately after it happened. i wept, like WEPT, into my hoodie for a good two minutes waiting to die…

so now i’m on crutches. taking my time and doing all the things i can do to make my ankle as better as it can be.

but seriously folks, i’m cursed, right? yeah…pretty much.

anyways, come see NEXTFEST! DO IT FOR MY ANKLE!

m.

leave all your lies. believe in your lies.

question have been being raised and answered all over the place which leads, of course, to thinking. always thinking…

the other day i was at work and i got thinking about someone i should have and could have slept with but didn’t and wondering if i still could knowing now that i definately SHOULD. this thinking led to more thinking. always thinking…

and i got thinking about “sexually charged moments” and about the times in my life where the room vibrated with sexual energy and i came up with my top 4 hottest moments.

4. canada day last year. 2am. i was a little stoned and talking on msn to someone whom i’d been “intimate” with on previous occasions. the sex had always been really fantastic but we hadn’t seen each other for a long time. eventually got into a serious discussion about whether or not we needed to fuck each other and it was decided that we would. he didn’t live far away but i still needed to wait and it was in those moments of waiting that we find #4. not a word of a lie, i was so turned on just from the anticipation of him coming over that i was shaking. i practically jumped him the second he walked in the door. actually i did. ha ha.

3. #3 was 4 years ago and the end result was just a fun night with a friend but amidst all the beer and weed and punk rock and heat of the summer there was a moment when i felt sex sneak into the room, hang out for a moment and then leave. it was better that it didn’t happen because things got weird enough between us further into our relationship that sex would have only made the destruction worse…anyways. i told another friend about this later and she said, “dude, you should have fucked him” and for a while i regret not at least seeing if it was possible but now i realise that would have definately been a bad idea.

2. the one i should have and could have and now wonder if we should… there was so much gin and dancing and drinking and making out and she was so hot that night (yes, i said she…) and i was into it. definately into it. we were making out, surrounding my sweaty dancing people, dripping in sweat ourselves. hell, i would have probably fucked her right there on the dancefloor. the one tiny sober part of me said, “wait michelle, what happens tomorrow morning. this could be awkward…” hindsight is 20/20 right my friends? yep. maybe this is a situation that can be re-created…

1. i’ve talked about this so many times. it’s still the best sex story i have. i won’t get into the details but i will tell you this much: a cold night in D.C., a boy who was much much too young for me and way too bad, a late night, a twin bed, 4 other people sleeping peacefully, no kissing… wow. i sometimes wonder what he’s doing right now…

it’s hot today. today is the perfect to day to think about and have sex.

mwah!

michelle.