the first day of spring is next week

the view outside our home yesterday

...i'm not sure canada knows that

حرف میشم میرم تو گوشات

there is a whole night life in this city i've been completely blind to--people coming out at 11pm in fur coats, guitars, and glitzy hats (not necessarily in combination); raccoons running across the street, dodging cars; people walking their dogs; walking their children (???); running... god knows where; people standing in the middle of empty streets, texting; people clubbing; people closing up shop; homeless people, everywhere (some selling pants, i think); people who i'm quite sure are drug dealers; smokers; lovers; friends; people in sad, sad homes with the most depressing curtains

... and some people, coming home from a fundraiser with a bag of baked goods and a jar of jam; some people who can't understand why on earth everyone is streaming out of their homes into the noise

i told my parents that i spoke with emma--that she was ok, all things considered...

i didn't tell them how traumatic it was to hear her sounding so weak and how, for a moment, i couldn't stop the tears

Oh my god...is Russia really in the Crimea? What is happening..

ах, мамочка,
на саночках
каталась я не с тем.

... everyone until you.

how we never, never listen to our parents

it's ironic: they're unlikely to know why i feel such sorrow. whether it's the fact that i identify as russian or not--notwithstanding how complicated that identity is in my case--ukrainians may (rightly) see in me a kind of alien who can't begin to understand it.. any of it.

but despite all this, i feel as if they are my own. i hurt with them. i'm anxious...horrified.. unsettled. i understand the depth of russian hypocrisy, intimidation.. and how deeply that has affected their leadership. perhaps that's what worries me... what frightens me most.

друзья
мы с вами

the distance between our phone calls.. our emails.. is ever-widening.
i can't be the one to fix it. i'm tired

i don't feel worthwhile unless i've written... and i've been horribly, miserably stuck

my time in transit--a time to keep my mind blank; focus on the windows, the street, the people--is totally unproductive

baby steps forward only happen in the bath, in total silence...

on a day like this

 

with piles of this

we received an email to clean the snow off our rooftops as a safety precaution.

having previously neglected to purchase that essential canadian weapon--the shovel--the four of us ran to the roof armed with tiny kitty-litter buckets

where, faced with snow up to our knees and a snowbank at least 3 feet high, we toiled for a good couple of hours until parvaneh saved the day by buying two shovels at the hardware store--the very last ones, in fact, since 30 cm of snow always results in a stampede of desperation equally matched by the swiftness of the shortage.

we discovered, later, that we had outdone ourselves in the usual Rasitsan-Ashrafi fashion. the email, it seemed, had merely asked us to do our "best." but because neither of us had read it carefully--and because we take these instructions much too seriously--the result was something like this:

i really object to the feminine pronoun being automatically applied to all advocates of women's rights--and i come across it all the time

men should be proud to call themselves feminists and women should proudly see men as active members of the movement

in the age of smartphones, apps, and twitter, news of philip seymour hoffman's death reached us all in seconds. i wonder how he would've reacted to this..

probably with a hint of irony and a quiet smile

terribly saddened by his loss
RIP

terrified of all my past silliness and immaturity and everything it's cost me

f's text of the day

in a matter of 10 minutes:

doon doon ate her lunch, meowed incredibly loudly, played with me, went to the bathroom, dropped as many items as she could to the ground, came down and played with some of those dropped items as well as the bath mat, and is now sitting on one of her 'hunted treasures' a.k.a my floss

the sophisticated effect of my black coat is somewhat undercut by winter boots that look like two furry animals eating my feet

so much for looking like an adult for our mortgage representative...

"Theorists of nationalism have often been perplexed, not to say irritated, by these three paradoxes: (1) The objective modernity of nations to the historian's eye vs. their subjective antiquity in the eyes of nationalists. (2) The formal universality of nationality as a sociocultural concept ... vs. the irremediable particularity of its concrete manifestations, such that, by definition, 'Greek' nationality is sui generis. (3) The 'political' power of nationalisms vs. their philosophical poverty and even incoherence."

-- from the Introduction to Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities

everyone i saw in transit appears to be in shock. cold winters are the norm here, of course, but winters this cold in toronto, with temperatures approaching those of winnipeg--and for such an extended period of time--are simply disheartening. following the power outages and ice storms of late december, -35C seems like the final nail on the coffin.

i think we all feel now the way we normally do mid-february: exhausted.

Jewish Christmas during a power outage

I should be clear: We did not lose power during the freak ice storm of yesterweek... but the rest of my family did, along with a very large and unfortunate number of others. Luckily and unluckily, you were on the other side of the world during the commotion and the festivities of the days and nights that followed. I wish you could have experienced our first truly full house since the move--the unofficial housewarming for my family--but I'm glad you were oblivious to my clumsy, haphazard blundering about with lunches, dinners, teas, and sleeping arrangements. It may have been the end of our 'marriage.'

Christmas Chair

Jewish Christmas actually began on Dec 22 with a call from my parents and a near-simultaneous text from my sister/brother-in-law: Have we heard and are we powered? (We had not, of course, because we were.) Reading about the extent of the damage (250,000+ in the dark and--worse--in the terrible cold) made the three of us increasingly nervous about what suddenly appeared to be a precarious situation at best: Should we eat all our food immediately? Should we take advantage of the hot water, while we still have it? Should we stock up on groceries? Should we start emailing the neighbours?

Beata and Will came by that afternoon to keep warm and to deliberate: To move or not to move the kitties? Temperatures were plunging and we decided that, despite the added stress, a move was for the best. Kitties were taken--with belongings that outnumbered those of their owners'--and established on the top floor, secured against the primary occupant of our bedroom: Dooneh.

My parents decided to brave it out at home that night (hoping, I assume, that the power would return shortly). As it did not, they came over the next day to defrost and to describe the apocalypse in their front yard: broken tree branches, downed wires, ice, snow, and general frozen misery. It was a warm and lovely afternoon filled with stories, noise, my mother's iPad (which is a presence all on its own), and laughter.

You were sorely missed and your phone call arrived just in time for my mom to make her special 'what's wrong with your voice when you talk to her' face.

My uncle's power returned that evening and my parents left to spend the night at his place while Dooneh continued to fume about the situation upstairs. We slept in auntie Maryam's room for the second night; I tried hard to keep my other half in place and not hissing at the master bedroom door.

The morning of the 24th we decided to play Jewish Christmas by ear. The tradition of opening gifts at my parents' home, followed by a sushi lunch, followed by an afternoon movie, was somewhat out of the question since Richmond Hill was still in the dark and--quite frankly--everyone was exhausted. Beata and Will debated: To go or not to go to Stouffville the next day for dinner with Will's parents? I believe the decision was no until the first Christmas miracle occurred: Beata's neighbour texted with news of light.

We took them home that evening and welcomed my parents back when it was unofficially decided that the 25th would be spent at our place. Dooneh cautiously approached the bedroom, which was temporarily free of intruders, but remained resigned to the fact that the third floor was still off-limits. We spent the night in our frozen living room--frozen due to inadequate insulation, or a heat imbalance, or both--near the fireplace, comfortably and happily cocooned in wool and fleece.

A handful of other Christmas miracles made this a particularly eventful year. It snowed beautifully and sunnily that morning. We found an open sushi restaurant (no small feat downtown on Christmas day, as I now know) that delivered to our door. Parvaneh, who hates sushi, actually had something to eat, because we ate at home. I finally got my period, which was either very late or very early, and successfully pushed the cramps forward into the following day. We did not run out of tea or bread.

A lively couple of days drew to a close as my parents' power returned that evening and the temperature inside their home rose from 6C to .. I will say .. the usual 15C.

"my name is for my friends"

peter o'toole is best known for lawrence--my favourite among favourites; memorized nearly word for word... the movie, in fact, where you first met my parents

but recently, when i think of him, it's among the monster cast of the lion in winter--where this thin, elegant man became a roaring henry II

the screen has not been the same without him...it will never be the same

the only thing that sustains me in the months of -15C to -30C ahead is the thought of slipping into a scalding hot bath and staying there until the trauma of the outdoors is soaked into my water-wrinkled fingertips