Sebastien at the Solstice Party

His energy is way out there. He looks in your eyes like he's digging for treasure while he talks.

"My sister has been trying to make me gay my whole life!" He laughs a real open-mouthed laugh, rolls his sparkling blue eyes, and shakes his head back. Time slows down for a frame-by-frame of the wild masses of curly blond hair bouncing around his face and shoulders.

The gypsy girls at the dance distract him vaguely, but not nearly to the extent that others are distracted by him. When he's dancing, his perfect t-shirt body moves with the rhythm of your own secret pulse, and when you watch him, everything spills out of your heart and out of the closet and it's all in the open, swirling into the air with the music. All the cute boys aren't ashamed to look at him, and none of the beautiful girls feel inhibited from staring. Even you, buhao yisi and blushing a bit, aren't really that ashamed.

"Look at that guy over there," he says, oblivious to his own beauty, "the guy behind the bar. With the dreads. He's so cute! I wanna be like that." He is laughing and happy and he's confident even without knowing that he's beautiful.

As he keeps dancing, all you can really see is that hair. Instant freeze-frame: you glimpse his adam's apple peeking out from beneath his curls. The feelings you had looking at high school guys when you were 12 resurface and catch in your chest.

When you dance with him you move seamlessly together like the tides with the shore. Quickly or slowly, you're like one body, and you're not sure which one of you is the tide, and which one the shore. Is it him who is so in tune that he can pick up your vibe and roll with you, inside your own fantasy? Or is he so entrancing that you are actually being carried along with him, that he has gotten into your veins, and your heart is now beating with his rhythm? Though the thought terrifies you, you think it's the latter... All you can do is hope you don't fall too hard.

Later, your footfalls mute in the luminous midnight snow, you're smoking up together and laughing. He talks about his kids and his job. You tell him he amazes you, because he does. He doesn't find that warranted. "People always congratulate me like I am doing something special, and I don't like that. I am just doing my thing, you know, changing diapers and playing with my boys and going to work." Just being natural, right?

You nod, but really you understand why people congratulate him on holding it together. He's a 22-year-old with two toddlers at home, while most of your circle, already in their thirties, still can't contemplate that much responsibility. People in your demographic can't even tear their attention away from their own insecurities long enough to move their hips when they dance. They just stand there looking at the band in their thick-rimmed glasses and castro hats, thumbs hooked into belt loops, a conspicuously uncontrived-looking stance. With those gen-x-ers, everything is always so "casual-but-i-meant-for-it-to-look-that-way." How do you dance to that?

Has he always been so natural, or did he get this way from having kids? You want to ask him. But you know the answer. Of course he is natural. He is natural through and through. What could be more natural than coming out west from Montreal at 17 to pick fruit in the Okanagan, living his freedom and his energy... reveling in Nature and reveling in romance, and having a bit of unprotected sex?

Now he's part single dad and part big brother. On normal evenings, his kids tug at the legs of his shorts, asking him to turn up the stereo, to dance with him, demanding alternately Kimya Dawson or AC/DC. They scream-sing, they playfight, they jump on the bed, they sometimes eat cereal for supper. But not this evening - tonight, he's out with you, and his kids are at home with his best friend.

He is independent, honest, and hard-working, but he's still fresh, fun, and as poor as you are. He's so much less well-traveled, well-read, or well-fed than anyone you know, but so much better at his second language, so much more experienced at life and living and accepting, so much more experienced at reality, at being an adult.

Meanwhile you, Peter Pan, you've stayed away in never-never-land so long you feel like your own hometown is just a stopover. You've forgotten to grow up. You don't even know what it means.

You may be older than him, but standing here in the snow, your acquired earthly wisdom is reduced to tidbits, factoids: hostel recommendations, restaurant reviews for cities he'll never visit, pat academic opinions, and music suggestions in Mandarin.

You want to offer something, but you have nothing. You feel like a giant sponge. Now this adult boy has his big, steady hands around your shaking wrists, and he tells you he likes the smell of your sweat. It reminds him of peaches.

And you know he means the juicy, soft, real peaches of the Okanagan, the ones that drip and ooze and make a mess... not the small, hard, dainty celestial peaches you and the eight immortals have to peel with a knife in China.

Your skinny wrists are still shaking the next day.

Christmas is from Hell

Sunday was the day we were going to do it. We'd been procrastinating, hemming and hawing, beating around the bush... but we were going to do it, we were going to decorate my mom's place for the Christmas season. My brother and I had squirmed and resisted, chanting refrains of anti-consumerism and de-colonization, but mom had been adamant: she really wanted a Christmas tree, and she wanted to decorate it together. As a family. Well, almost - my dad, the smart one, had already escaped to Barbados. But my brother, his partner, and I were required to be there.

So we'd bent and twisted all our schedules to create a window of time when my me, my mom, my brother, and his partner would all be free. That window was going to be Sunday afternoon.

I wrenched myself away from my selfish lifestyle and made sure I was there by 1 p.m. because I had been informed that if I arrived later, my mom would feel that she was unimportant, that she was merely "tacked on" as an afterthought at the end of someone's day. I didn't want to be responsible for that outcome, so I got there early, but not so early to seem conspicuous. Just early enough to seem eager. I got there at 12:30.

Right away I had a bad feeling. Mom told me the news: My brother wasn't coming. Neither was his girlfriend. Oh shit. I did not for a second bask in the knowledge that for once, I was the "good child"... I knew what this really meant. It meant I was going to have to do this alone. All the pressure of creating a loving family decorating afternoon with my mom was resting on me, and me alone! I needed to regroup! I needed to plan a strategy! I needed to escape to Barbados!

"Mom, I need a shower ok? Then we can start," was the only escape I could negotiate. I fought the urge to smoke up in the bathroom. Wouldn't that just ease the whole experience? I thought. Wouldn't that just help me stay calm if my mom starts to freak out? No. No. That sounds like a person with a substance abuse problem thinking. I don't want to be a person with a substance abuse problem. I will not use consciousness alterants to escape from my problems. I turn on the shower. I will just go back to China as quickly as possible. Or at least James Bay.

Do I have a travel abuse problem? My dad in Barbados... his grandfather who never came back after ostensibly going to buy some smokes... my brother on his way to Indonesia... my uncle who stayed in Fiji until his beard was down to his belly... half my twenties already spent in Red China? Does this addiction run in the family? Why do we always need to escape? And my poor mom, who wants the opposite, is surrounded by us and we're all she has in her life. Waves of guilt washed over me as I rinsed my hair.

I dried off and got dressed. I went out into the living room. We agonized over where to put the tree. Honestly, there is no room for a Christmas tree in my mom's living room, but we moved furniture until we MADE room.

The tree, which we'd bought the other day, was waiting out on the deck, where the recent spell of cold weather had frozen the sugar water in the hummingbird feeder. It turned out the tree was frozen into the bucket of water we had placed it in, too. So we had to boil water and pour it carefully around the frozen trunk and the frozen bucket until our tree could be freed from the ice. Of course, when the tree was freed, it was still covered in ice and snow, some of which had begun to melt and was dripping everywhere. I reached out and grabbed the tree's trunk about halfway up to prepare to carry it into the house... and came away with a handful of sap. This was not going to be pretty.

Mom and I arranged a pathway of towels to catch the drips as we carried the tree into the house. I can't overstress the importance of these towels. Mom's just had her floors redone and she's got some very expensive carpets that she does not want to see damaged.

The tree stand was already arranged where we wanted it and all we had to do was lower the trunk into the hole, towels in place to catch the drips.

It wouldn't go in.

The stand was too small! Should we buy another? No, this stand may be rusty, ugly, and old, but it'sa family heirloom. Mommy's great aunties used that stand. So no, no, let's get out a saw and SAW the knots off the trunk so that it's smaller and it will fit in this ugly defective too-small stand! Great idea.

Now let's stress about the sawdust on the towels! Let's fight about whether we should move the towels and vaccuum the floor right now this very second even though we're not done the decorating and there are going to be needles and crap all over the floor when we are done anyway so we might as well wait until the end and vaccuum up our whole mess in one go!

Uh-oh, now the trunk is uneven and when we put it in the stand it leans waaaay over to the left... not nice. Now let's FIGHT about how to straighten it! Yeah! This is fun! Why isn't my brother here? Do you want me to draw you a picture to explain why we have to actually lift the tree a bit and not just tighten the screws on the left? No? Then quit telling me you don't understand!

"Do you like this music?" I asked in disgust.
"These carols make me sick!" Mom retorted.
"Why don't you turn them off?"

So it was that after an hour of messing with the god damn tree, we decided to take a break from fighting with it for a while, and fought with each other instead! Yeah I am a selfish offspring! Yeah you are a manipulative parent! Fight! Fight! Fight!

Finally I went and made some soup. We settled down a bit and I asked mom to go get the box of decorations. We finally started having fun putting up the lights, unwrapping the antique ornaments, including the little santas my grandma has stolen from her dentist's office as a child... my favourite white plastic reindeer... those exquisite glass baubles...

And then it happened! Just as we were finally starting to enjoy mom's decorating afternoon (which was now 8:00 at night), we noticed something. Something wet on the ground. (Thank god the towels were still in place).

The stand was leaking!

Oh yeah, rusty antique Christmas tree stand juice was running down onto the expensive carpets!

We had to undecorate as quickly as possible, launch that fucking tree back out onto the deck, and throw out the flawed and past-its-prime tree stand. Then we had to carefully ("I said CAREFULLY!") pick up the towels and wipe up the mess and vaccuum and put the ornaments back in careful wrapping and place all the boxes back in the closet and move the furniture back into place. No tree, no decorations... everything as it was.

All that suffering, for nothing! But isn't that what Christmas is all about?

Can I go back to China now, please?

8 years ago, I had a Chinese Christmas experience that I still remember fondly. I was walking through anonymous Chinese crowds on my way to class when a young man's intent face suddenly came into focus. He strode purposefully toward me, calling out and smiling in English, "Happy Foreign Holiday!" I realized it was December 25th.

I thought then that the joy for me in that man's holiday greeting was that it reminded me of Christmas at home with my family. (Of course, China has changed really quickly and these days Christmas Fever over there is as sick as it is here in Victoria BC). Now I realize the true joy in that memory was just the fact that December 25th did not actually have to mean that much. Just a foreign holiday...

If only Christmas could always be that painless.

Home Town Feelings

Victoria is a cool place. I'm staying out of town on the peninsula with my mom, of course, but lately, I have been spending more time out and about in Victoria itself. I stayed downtown the other night at my friend's place, and apart from having a great time doing that, there was another surprise piece of joy: the morning!

I love waking up in the morning in my own hometown! It was so great to be right there, the beach is right there, people are right there, cafes with real muffins are everywhere, people are walking around in the morning interacting with each other... wow. I felt like I had re-entered civilization! I was not surrounded by endless impersonal voiceless fog like out on the peninsula.

And it was sunny. I could hear seagulls. I could smell freshness. People were speaking different languages. I can speak Chinese with people in Victoria. I borrowed a french book from the library and I am practicing my French!

It's easy to feel awake and alive in the morning when I'm in a city, even if it is only a small provincial capital on the tip of an island on the edge of the Pacific. Especially when there is so much here connecting me to my childhood: the acorns being ground into the dirt beside the sidewalks, the chestnuts rotting on the boulevards, bare garry oak arms reaching up from rocky outcroppings, peacocks calling in the park... the scent of vanilla wafting from the ice cream shop on government street... the canned classical music in market square...

The Fine Art of Pretending

I was walking to the grocery store and I saw some people caroling. They were not just caroling though. They had costumes that looked like they were from the sets of historical films, and they had fake English accents and horses with white carriages.

Ugh, I thought to myself as I crossed the road. To me, the general collective unreason that fuels the Christmas season in my culture seemed exemplified by the actions of these actors. These people are living in a fantasy world, I concluded.

Of course, as I was having these typical, western, self-righteous thoughts, I was on my way to buy supplies for the tabouleh, hummus, and falafels I was making to serve along with platters of olives, dates, and halva in a furniture-less, frankincese-fragranced room strewn with cushions, where there would be toy camels overlooking the burqa, sari, and headgear-wearing guests partaking of the hookah pipe, with Xinjiang Uighur music on the stereo and mini tealight fires winking from across the vast sand dunes we were drawing with crayons on windswept sheets of newsprint.

Yup, at my party I used random desert symbols (objects that just scream "desert" at me) to simulate the generic desert of my imagination, as if there could ever be such a thing as a generic desert... Yes, I combined objects and foods of diverse provenances under this one exotic, catch-all generic term, "desert."

The idea of all this was to celebrate my 30th birthday in a way that would allow me to get something out of my unwillingly-abandoned (poor ME!) plan to be on a camel trek in Rajasthan.

And I accuse these carolers of living in a fantasy world? At least the carolers were doing it on purpose, whereas I was proving once again that you don't need a snooty English accent to play a snooty role.

My Camel Trek in Rajasthan

Tomorrow is my birthday and I am at a really interesting point in my life.

First of all, I am turning 30, which seems unbelievable. I have spent half my twenties in China and half in Canada, so I feel like my Canadian age is only 25. I guess that would make my Chinese age 5? (Sounds about right for the reading level... actually, naw my reading is better than a 5-year-old's!) My Canadian age of 25 sounds pretty accurate. I just don't feel like I have the full amount of experience living in this society that other people my same age and younger already have. There's so much I just don't understand about how you're supposed to do things here. So many adult tasks, like getting jobs, finding apartments, talking to bosses, networking, and sucking up to landlords, are things that I learned how to do in China. And I am pretty good at them... over there. Here in my own country, on the other hand, I feel a bit out-of-the-loop. I've never even seen the show Survivor.

Secondly, I am suspended between realities that don't even exist. I know, we all are, since the past is gone and the future hasn't arrived yet... but I really really am! I finished paying off my student loans, finished a two-year contract working at an offshore BC school in northeastern China, and was living in a lovely little apartment up the hill from the park in Kunming biding my time before I could go to the Sivananda yoga teacher training course in Vrindavan, India last October. My plan was to travel after my course: on my birthday, I wanted to be on a camel trek in Rajasthan smoking hash under the stars. Beyond that, I was coming back to Canada for January to go to another three-and-a-half month yoga development and teacher training course in the Kootenays.

It didn't work out that way. When I was in Kunming, I got really sick with a nasty strain of e.coli that also infected my blood. Altogether, the process of being hospitalized for days on end, being released and finding myself unable to digest almost anything, relapsing, and being readmitted (three times) took over a month, and during one of the "released" times I went to India... against my doctor's orders. Well, I already had my ticket! My plan was great! I didn't want to give up my course. So I went anyway, couldn't digest anything except the couscous I had brought from China, and after a week I had relapsed again and was in the hospital in India, and couldn't finish the course I'd gone there for in the first place.

I realized I should just go "home" to get well. So in mid-October I came back to Victoria to stay at my mom's house. I couldn't even digest plain oat bran when I got here. I couldn't digest any oils at all for two months. This lack of oil affected my body a lot, but my mental state even more so. I have only been increasing my digestion of oils over the past two weeks, with the help of a master of ayurvedic medicine. Thankfully, I am having great results so far.

So I say that I am suspended between realities that don't exist because basically my old plans are gone and my new ones are not formed. This past year, my common-law relationship of 4 years has dissolved, which I experienced as part of what feels like a mysterious transformation. I'm not sure if I will be able to go to my course in the Kootenays - it depends how my digestion continues to improve over December. Since I might go there, there seems to be no point in getting a job and getting a new place, but it is weird not having my own place right now! After years of being a student and then being on contract, this life of drifting with no job and no place of my own feels pretty ungrounded. But as I said, it feels like part of a mysterious transformation. I just feel like a completely different person than I was before the upheaval of the whole finsihing my contract/going to Kunming/getting sick constellation. But I don't have any new "this is what I'm doing now" concepts to help me relate to myself... if that makes any sense. I almost feel like I don't fully exist at the moment, let alone the realities I am suspended between!

So tomorrow I won't be on a camel trek. But I will be wandering my hometown, which is like a foreign country to me now... and I'll be wandering with only myself, a person who is more of a mystery to me now than ever before.

Man Hunt!

The first time I heard of it, I thought it was a type of speed-dating activity organized by seethingly horny heterosexual women. Well, with a name like Man Hunt... come on!

Of course, it's not actually that type of hunt... but don't stop reading! You do get to touch people. When you tag them!

Yeah, you figured it out! It's a game of tag! Adult tag. Not "adult tag" in the sense of "adult videos," no, no, not that kind of touching, not naughty... unfortunately, no triple X's. It's just tag, for adults. (The word "adult" still makes me giggle. Am I immature?)

So far I have participated twice. Everyone uses paper-rock-scissors to see who gets to run away and hide within the several city blocks designated as the game area. The last person to be left is "IT." "IT" gets to chase the others, and root them out from their hiding spots, and TAG them. Once the others get tagged, they also get to chase and find people who are still not "it", and then tag them too. Finally everyone is tagged and the whole group meets back at the starting point for a second game.

If this game was on three times a week, I would probably go each time. I love it.

It is so excellent to be able to run around outside playing with people I don't even know. It's like being 8 (but better because I don't have homework and I decide when and if to do my chores). It's so refreshing to know that there are other people older than 10 (besides my own immediate friends) who are still willing to run around busy downtown shopping areas, risking stares and frowns from the more conservative set, to play.

It's great to be able to use public space in a way that is fun. It's awesome to run around playing on the same sidewalks where, in past times, I've walked to work, run errands, or waited for a bus to school. It makes my hometown feel more like it belongs to me again. It also satisfies a craving for something I always miss whenever I am away from China: the feeling that public spaces belong to the people, to use as we see fit.

Thank you Man Hunt!