Wednesday 29 October 2014

Shouldn't this be more fun?


This is not us.  
This past weekend my boyfriend Galen and I went to a Halloween party out in Oakville.  We went as teenage mutant ninja turtles (I was Donatello, he was Michelangelo). Our costumes were very much homemade, requiring a little suspension of disbelief from other partygoers.  We took our inspiration from this photo, but we are not the type to spend $60 on two ninja turtles t-shirts and two pairs of plastic glasses that we'll wear for only a few hours. The less money we spend on dressing up for Halloween, the happier we are.

Galen loves building things and making things and he's good at it, so he was excited to make his costume. Not just assemble it from pieces in his wardrobe, but actually MAKE it, with scissors and pieces of fabric and safety pins. He enjoys the process of making things, and doesn't really stress too much about the results.  If we vaguely resemble something that can be understood as a mutant ninja turtle at the end of this, he's done his job and he's content. If not, meh.

This is not how I went into the process (or really go into anything).  Making a costume is not my inclination-- not because I want to spend money on costumes I'll never wear again, but because I'm terrible at making things. I can't draw or paint. I can replace a button here or there but it's a bit of an ordeal and other than that I can't really sew (or knit, or crochet, for that matter). As a kid playing with Legos, all I could ever put together were buildings: square towers built out of square blocks.

I desperately fantasize about being more tactile and creative, and every so often I work up just enough courage to try again, even after the last time, when I sucked at it and gave up.  So I went along with making our costumes.  How hard could it be?  The hipster ninja turtle looked like a relatively achievable goal.

We bought our supplies from Value Village on our way to the Go train: two dark green shirts, one taupe coloured shirt that would be the turtle's underbelly, and two kid's tees, one purple, one orange, for our wristbands and headbands.  And some safety pins.  On the train, we whipped out the scissor I'd packed and got to work.  Galen cut the turtle bellies and we began pinning them to our shirts.

It went wrong almost immediately.  At least for me.  The turtle bellies weren't perfectly oval-shaped, but I sucked this up and devised what I considered a clever strategy for pinning the fabric to my shirt that would not tickle me with pins, nor display the pins sloppily for all to see.  I put about a dozen pins in and proudly put on my shirt--only to discover that my "belly" was aligned to the left, not the centre.  Good for a photo maybe, or text, not so much a belly.  I unpinned the whole damn thing and started over.  It was too high.  I started over again.  By the time I'd finished it was still not perfect and I was using the bare minimum number of pins, too aggravated to be bothered.  When I looked over my shoulder I noticed the woman sitting behind us on the train was gazing at me with amused pity, sort of like the face you might make when you see a baby butt-crawl.

Galen's belly was also pinned on a bit crooked, but he didn't care and swatted me away when I tried to obsess about and re-pin it.  In the time it took me just to pin my belly on to my barest level of satisfaction, Galen had finished his costume and was already helping me with rest of mine (he stepped in just in time to keep me from totally effing up my eye/headband--yes, I'm also unskilled with a scissor).  Whether we looked recognizable to anyone at the party, who knows?

Part of me would prefer the pretty t-shirt that is neat and familiar and easy, but the part of me that won this weekend (the part of me that wins every time I venture out of my shell (pun intended) again to try my hand at making something) prefers the adventure of trying something new, even if it's messy and all I end up making are memories.

Wednesday 8 October 2014

6 Books I Love

When I was a kid, I loved the Scholastic book fairs that came to our school once a year.  I'd take home the flyer days before and read it through cover to cover, circling every book that was a contender for purchase.  Gradually, I'd narrow it down to the ones I had to have and bargain and plead with my mom for just one more than she was inclined to let me buy.  At the book fair, I'd wander from table to table reading the backs of books that caught my eye.  My book allowance spent, I'd binge my last few cents on a bookmark.

I still get that same giddy feeling every time I enter a bookstore; I often lose myself for hours.

I recently came across Girl Canon, a tumblr site that invites women to share their own "canon"--books that influenced and changed them, haunted and educated them.  Narrowing down my list has not been unlike my approach to refining my Scholastic book fair shopping list: a little obsessive, full of urgency and gravitas. So why 6?  It could as easily be 100 but you've got to stop somewhere.  And why not 5? Because now, as then, I needed one more.

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
I read Little Women at least a dozen times throughout my childhood and adolescence, at least in part because I recognized myself in Jo: compulsive scribblers, both of us.  To this day I consider Amy's burning of Jo's early manuscripts an unforgivable offence.

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
My first exposure to magical realism.  It blew my mind.  To this day I have yet to read a novel that encapsulates more fully and eloquently the layers of human experience, from the tangible to the surreal to the impossible. If I had to choose one absolute favourite book of all time, this would be it.

The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje 
So many things to love about this book and its gorgeous, poetic language.  But what stays with me is the very end, the way Ondaatje manages to somehow create a flicker in time and space, to connect his characters separated by years and continents and a lifetime of choices, in a single gesture.

Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
Salinger's stream of consciousness style felt like a revelation to me when I first read this book in high school. It felt urgent, more like a conversation than a novel.  I think it was the first time I realized that form was a construct that could be manipulated to evoke different responses from a reader.

Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger
Does anyone know his characters as intimately as Salinger?  He can (and does) devote an entire page to the contents of Mrs. Glass's housecoat pocket and makes it feel both vital and enthralling.

Stories by Katherine Mansfield
The two things I love about Mansfield's stories: the brilliant use of exclamation points (at times ecstatic, at times almost desperate) and the unraveling sentences that mirror the unraveling of her characters.  Not many writers could make ending a story with an ellipsis feel inevitable.