ecstacy

electricity arcing in my brain, light flowing in through dark pools of eyes and exploding when my fingers, quivering, meet damp flesh and the sky.

late late nights, talk and skin and words to raise my blood. 8 lbs of muscles bathed in wine and cream, to fuel my steam, to feed my screams. ecstasy: social, solitary, coupled. uncoupled as the days have grown long and somehow, the nights also - when sleep becomes a comma between feverish, quivering days.

dancing close to bodies pressed. running through the bars, the streets, bestowing cool damp strawberries on strange night-walkers, and stranger friends.

i have a need. to be alive and exposed in the streets, in the water. to be folded into dark, damp human warmth with whispered comforts. to touch all who share my little world. to be alone, or almost. to speak.

embracing rationality and being quite mad

I'm deciding to stop trying to be consistent. It's a trap.

Because very little matters, it's okay that I'm a vegetarian who doesn't much care about animals, and loves eating things that swim. It's just fine that I eat mangoes shipped miles from who-knows-where while refusing to own a vehicle, insisting on taking my own packaging (even to take-out!), and dutifully collecting compost for the abandoned field near my home. It's not a problem that I believe in free love, and jealousy. It's fine that I live for exposure, but reveal details in tightly controlled doses through shrouded anonymity: intensely private and an exhibitionist. That I am intensely opinionated, argue on ethical issues till the bloody end, behave amorally, listen to anything, accept absolutiely any behaviour from those I love and strangers too - these things too are quite alright. There is no conflict in embracing rationality and being quite mad.

send me yourself singing

today i pace. make-work learning tasks to tide me over this hump of frenetic energy. i've been in busy la-la land: full of meetings to discuss this summer's research (yay, got all the funding i wanted to go cavorting around talking to people about how they conceptualize health, where they get their info., what they do about it when they make decisions), meetings to pass the torch of student-initiated, multidisciplinary, "sustainable community development through health promotion" on to the next crop of energetic idealists... all this talk with all these marvelous folk...

the hump of frenetic energy should pass when this absurd role-playing activity, "testing" my facility with mock patients in a cacaphony of souped-up sound bites and rote recitations of lists of questions, lists of ways to touch strangers that i might "know" them, or better yet, "know their problems" is finally finished. diagnosis psychosis. one more hoop in a long line of hoops - a proper obstacle course, but the obstacle all seem the same, dammit (what kinda party is this, anyhow?). and then i'll feed my (hopefully) spent brain with something spicy, something cambodian, something fine and soupy before once more taking refuge in notes and books and the happy home that my head built. and a little blaring music if the other winds don't quite clear the mist.

i think i need colour. sound. i need scale - giant scale. to revel in the magnitute of creative energy that steeps the best tea going. i've got t-shirts to make, collages to construct. i've got columns of words, un-columns of words. i want to stick words to everybody, and then see them ripped off suddenly. maybe lick the welts. maybe just love their redness. and i want voices - choral voices, screaming-whispering dirty secrets in languages foreign. let's make a symphony from the chaos of people singing to themselves. let's. send me yourself singing/humming - just the way you sing to you alone. we can make something lovely, just as we are.

authority

I was thinking about teachers, and people trying to get to become professional teachers, and, this got me to wondering about authority (I love adult ed, because people are there voluntarily - when I was supply teaching in Toronto public schools, I saw what a struggle it is for me to be an authoritarian figure, though I've been directing projects of all sorts for years. At lunch the other day I realized how difficult that part of parenting would be for me).

Empowerment: the joy of witnessing the enactment of one's will.

Authority: the joy of subjugating the will of others.

I feel empowered, even enfranchised. And I have authority over no-one. I'll have to work hard to hang onto that, given that doctoring is partly about playing the role of 'authority on health' though I prefer 'expert on medicine' - health is a state of being, experienced by people in unique ways, and I will never be an expert on that, no more so than I will ever be an expert on the myriad expressions of life and death. A witness? Certainly. With a role to play? It seems so. Maybe one day even a bit of a guide, should I get wise along the way. We had an interesting session on ethics of end-of-life care yesterday. Parents of a sick young man were there to tell us about their frustrations when he had been in intensive care. About how much they'd hated the messenger, our teacher, who'd been so convinced that the 'right' thing to do was to "let him go" (for reasons, she now confesses, might have had a lot to do with her own feelings of what would not be doable should she be in the same situtation). It was a good lesson in remembering to check the boundaries of authority - it's innevitable that people practicing medicine begin to feel empowered, start playing the role of authority and get confused about the differences between expert and decision-maker. And it was good to see how the clash of one physician's 'authority' with a family's autonomy played out. We'd all learned something from this. I remain grateful for and consistently surprised by peoples' openness in the name of my education.

I love going to market in the rain. That's where I'm off to now.