Brain Scan

 Here are the results of my recent brain scan:

As you can see, it's mostly a jumble of string.

We've been in Montréal for over six months now… what happened to a half-year?  It takes a lot to move to a new country, even one you "automatically" have citizenship in.  We needed new furniture, new health cards, new driver's licenses, new passports, new doctors, new library cards and new bank accounts… not to mention une nouvelle langue.  I've spent a lot of time reading maps, navigating in the car, learning the metro system, doing French word searches in the paper and reading aloud to myself from the same to practice pronunciation and try to maybe understand a thing or two about my new world.  We waited six months to bother to get the internet at home.  All that time, I was trucking to and from the library or a café or the nearby park, making myself pay attention to the many other people of my new city.  Making myself order in French, even when the server says "Bonjour, hi!" and I know they speak English fluently.

After a while, I realized I rarely consult the map that I nonetheless carry around out of habit.  I progressed into the "intermediate" level of French class, which means sometimes when I try it out on people in the store or the library they genuinely chat with me, and sometimes they still switch to English.  In other words, exactly as might be expected.  This city contains such an amazing mélange of language identities!  It's fun and fascinating to be a part of.  When people say, "But you don't have to learn French to get by in Montréal," I feel sorry for them that they are completely missing the point.  It's an opportunity!  But the many-sided debate grows fuzzy as a snowflake forming: what about the immigrants who are dutifully enrolled in French language classes, but can't find jobs because they don't speak English?  My language privilege has followed me north… and yet, I feel baby-tongued next to my many, many new neighbors who frequently have two or even three native languages. On this issue I am convinced that more is better, but apparently at least one native Montréaler wonders if her half-anglophone/half-francophone heritage has actually stilted the creativity in her writing by depriving her of a more deeply-rooted sense of one, single mother tongue.  Moi?  Je pense que non, but how would I know? That's exactly the thing I've been blessed with, so naturally I would overlook it, right?

My horoscope says it will be a fruitful year for learning new things.  Good, because that's all I can be bothered with!  

My next challenge, learning to sew myself a house!  Here are the plans:

I will make this, in a pretty plaid that will hopefully replace an old, ill-fitting flannel.  I bought a hard copy of the pattern, but I like to trace my patterns onto parchment paper before cutting them out, so that if I totally screw up or need to alter them or retrace them in a different size I haven't damaged the original.  Plus (and this is the real bonus), I feel like an architect or an engineer when I trace the plans.  Thus, the illusion that I am sewing myself a house… but really, isn't it a lot like that?  I am going to make it, and then wear it around as protection, armor, decoration, comfort, warmth.  A temporary, washable home.  The pages curling up look like this birch tree peeling it's skin:

Speaking of which, I recently read Nicholas Basbane's On Paper: The Everything of Its Two-Thousand-Year History, and it was fascinating!  What was of primary interest to me, throughout, was the fact that paper as a recycled material is actually old news, not a modern invention born of the necessity to curb our excesses.  Once upon a time, almost all paper was made from recycled rags, and many of the world's finer papers are still made from recycled fabric or industry by-products from textile manufacturing.  And/or, paper can and has been made from pretty much any plant product imaginable, and it's only our modern industrial process which has created the monstrous problem of deforestation for cheap, easy, middle-grade but predictable paper products.  Mass-production strikes again, that's all… 

I have been birthing little mini-goals for the myriad new things I should learn, therefore, in this year of horoscopically sanctioned learning.  Here is a sample list of what I will do if all my dreams come true: 

-Take a workshop in woodblock printing on fabric

-Take a workshop in yarn and/or fabric dying with natural dyes

-Sew more clothes

-Knit some stuff

-Make a homemade loom and weave something

-Hopefully grow some plants

That's pretty much… it.  Everything I am thinking about: fabric, string, paper, string, cats, string…  At last, we are at the part of the post where I share pictures of kitties!  This sweetheart stayed with us for one glorious weekend:

We would love to invite a muffin to share our apartment with us, but it isn't quite time for that.  Instead, we volunteer once a week at a cat shelter, and hang out with the likes of Gloria and Gordon:

We are the world's best cat sitters.  Send us your cats.  Actually, don't: love your cats, give them a good home, and just invite us over for dinner and we'll pet your cats.  Speaking of which, any far-away friends want to come over for dinner?  It would be very nice to see you.