Guilty as charged

This article is scary - apparently, since 2008, our use of social networking sites has increased 82%, and people in several countries (the US, Australia, UK, and several other European countries) spend about 5.5 hours a day, 7 days a week, on social networking sites. While Canada isn't listed here (ignored again, sigh...) I bet the numbers aren't all that different for us.
I got on Facebook a little over a year ago - giving in to the fact that it was one of the easier ways to stay in touch with friends I didn't see any more, friends who were still in Ottawa, or traveling elsewhere (like Japan, where one of my dearest friends is living and posting all her photos from her travels to Facebook). Since then, I have to say that I've gotten pretty hooked, more hooked than I'd like to admit - although I think I fall well shy of the 5.5 hours this survey claims people spend daily.
While I might be "logged in" to my account almost all the time, I'm rarely actually sitting at my computer browsing through ... I know this frustrates the heck out of a lot of my friends, who start a chat with me, only to discover that my status is misleading, and that I'm only "online" in theory.
Still, a number like this wakes you up. It's hard to say how much of my FB time is a waste, and how much I really get something out of. I feel a lot more connected with some of my friends than I have in years, and when we do get to chat, I catch up with people I really miss, but I also miss that old fashioned device - the telephone. More talk, less text, I say. Now let's see if I'm all talk.

I came across her writing

in a note on facebook, and though I hadn't seen her in a decade, though I couldn't quite place her location, her life, I felt I knew her essence again, could here her soft voice, her rising cadence, rushing forward, then retreating, as though each sentence was brought by the tide.
And I was transported to old coffee-houses during lit, to high school, to what was, oddly, my best writing time, the period in my life when I could, when I had the luxury, to bend over my notebook for seconds, turning into minutes, into hours, just to find the right word to fit the end of a line, a sentence, a feeling or thought.
I thought I was so tired then, so overworked, with my grade 11 lit and my algebra-geometry homework, with history and physics and world issues. I didn't know where I'd find the time to memorize Shakespeare and solve problems 3 a - i. I was overwhelmed.
It's almost laughable in hindsight, this emotion, this sense of purpose when I hadn't lived enough to have enough to write. And now, with something worth putting down, with my own stories, I am too afraid. If I share, will I be recognized? Do I want the recognition?
We are all afraid, have moments of defeat, of sadness or uncertainty, but we so rarely put them out there, so rarely want to use them as material.
I used to say, "I wrote this, but don't worry, I'm happy;" used to say, "don't worry, this isn't about me"; and usually it wasn't, but isn't life just a series of small joys and small disappointments building into larger moments? Isn't it normal in the day to have a moment where you don't have a clue, where you want to just stop? and then another where you could go and go and go to the ends of the round earth, where you would have to crash into a brick wall not to keep going?
She wrote about her life, and I could hear her in her words and I could see her brushing a wisp of straight black hair behind her ear as she read. I imagine one hand holding the paper, the other randomly reaching up to touch her head. Funny how we remember certain nervous habits, how her voice is still in my mind so many years later. How I can see her smile.
I told myself I wouldn't write for a living. I told myself I would write for life.

Who Knew?

Yesterday M and I and a few of our friends went for a bike trip around the downtown/lachine canal area of Montreal. It was supposed to take a couple of hours, 3 max. 6 hours later we were heading home with extremely sore legs, sunburns, hunger pangs, and huge smiles. I've biked along the Lachine canal before, but never past St-Pierre (the point where Highway 20 meets highway 138). Yesterday, we continued well past that point, and were rewarded by our discovery of Parc Rene Levesque, an absolutely gorgeous little peninsula off Lasalle, sticking out into the river.
On our way back downtown, we left the canal and rode back along the river path itself, through Lasalle and Verdun.
All I can say is that Montreal has surpassed my expectations for natural beauty and gorgeous, quiet neighbourhoods I didn't know existed. I'm somewhat in love with my adopted city right now. Stunning, and totally bikeable.

P.S. My sisters are back home in Cali and Dubai respectively. I miss them insanely but I'm surprisingly not bawling my eyes out every 5 seconds. I'm shocked at my resilience.

The Crazy Subliminal Cucumber Post

Cucumber would have to be one of those vegetables I rarely eat. It's good in salads, but M's not a fan, and when I buy them they end up going bad before I get through the small package of 4 or the one massive one. Plus, you can't cook cucumbers, so you can't salvage the slowly wilting veggie by slicing and dicing and throwing it in a pot, right?
Well, it would seem that cucumber is subliminally trying to convince both myself and a friend of mine that it can indeed be cooked or baked. The evidence:
Situation A
Last week, I was describing to my mom the vegetable soup I was planning to make as part of dinner for a little dinner party M and I were having on Friday night (random note: I ended up making cream of mushroom soup. M made the most divine chicken. No one could believe he'd cooked it. We have left overs. I'm in heaven.) So, as I'm describing the soup, I say it has diced onions, celery, cucumbers, only I'm saying all of this in Arabic, and my mom goes "Wha?? Cucumbers? WHY are you putting cucumbers in your soup?"
To which I respond, "I always put cucumbers in my soup. I got it from you. YOU always put cucumbers in your soup" and she shakes her head profusely and we continue to have this debate for 5 minutes before my little sis says "I thought M didn't like cucumbers?"
I start to answer that "no, no, M doesn't like.... oh, wait, M doesn't like cucumbers". At which point I realise that I've been saying cucumber all along when I meant to be saying carrot. Cucumber in soup jokes ensue for the remainder of the evening.

Situation B
I have been eating everything on my allergy list with complete abandon on and off for about 2 months and I have decided to put an end to it with a 7-day no wheat, no dairy, no sugar challenge to myself. For moral support, and to hold myself accountable, I posted this to my status on facebook and my friends have been very good in cheering me on. So much so that one of them offered me her "cucumber cookie" recipe.... Now, having just had this cucumbers-don't-cook conversation with my sis and mother, I am very skeptical, and ask her what on earth this could possibly be. Somewhere in the back of my mind I'm thinking there's a teensy possibility that a cucumber cookie does in fact exist in some alternate raw food vegan universe, but I'm just doubtful that my friend belongs to this universe. Well, ta-dah! I'm right. Friend meant zucchini cookie. She sent the recipe too. it looks divine, but it has butter, sugar, and wheat flour... I could substitute. I might give an alternate version of the recipe a try. if I do, and it's edible. I will post.

So there you have it folks. Cucumbers are feeling the heat (or they aren't and badly want to be... hardy-har-har).

Catching Up

I, too, have succumbed.

It's like my willpower was only as strong as the self-control of those around me. I always swore I wouldn't get on Facebook, that I wasted more than my fair share of time on the Internet as it was. I even had allies in the resistance. And then the unthinkable happened:
I found out that my kid sister had signed on. Then...
I found out M had signed on (Gasp. Cough. I could hardly breathe!)

I lasted a week after that point. And now, I, too, have a Facebook account. But believe it or not, Facebook is not responsible for my temporary lapse in posting on this blog. No, that has more to do with the general blogapathy that seems to have taken over the blogosphere... That and general beautiful weather in Montreal for a few days, followed by my sudden panic that the summer is about to disappear and so I have to take advantage of what's left of the fabulous weather.
As if to prove my point, the fire alarm went off at work today and we all FROZE in the 10 or so minutes we ended up standing outside, every one of us missing our pullovers/sweaters/light jackets that we'd left at home/on a hanger in our office... Anyway, I digress, back to Facebook:

In my first log in after signing up, I spent about 1 hour surfing to find some friends and rooting around other's pages. But the real kicker, the part that made my new "facebooker" status all worth it, happened a few days later, when I had an impromptu chat with a great friend who's been in Japan for over a year teaching English. There I was, on my bed in my old room in Ottawa, while she was typing away at a desk (in the staff room?) at her school in Japan, and we were writing as though we were talking. It was our first true conversation since we spoke the night before my wedding. Catching up is soooooooooooooooo delightful, and that, alone, was worth the sign-up.