Web 2.0 vs Flowers and Rocks

Yesterday, while working on a job proposal, and attempting to showcase my Web 2.0 knowledge thus far, I realized that I am a “somewhat” user. Without a cell phone or a blackberry or other form of PDA with which to send and receive a constant stream of Facebook updates, surf the Web for restaurants in the hood and access my e-mail for the latest work requests, I am certainly not a super user. (Remember when “user” was a kind of person you didn’t want to be, and PDAs meant public displays of affection?)

Each morning, as I settle in front of my Google Reader, hot coffee ready to fuel my quest for knowledge, I quickly become overwhelmed by all the news I’m supposed to be digging and all the blogs I’m supposed to be following and all the bookmarks I’m supposed to be tagging for later reading, knowing full well this is an exercise in futility. Later when? Meanwhile, the Digg stories pile up, and I can barely keep pace with the shoveling. The only thing I really want to dig is a great big hole in which to bury my Wasted 2.0 head.

The problem is, I love everything about being online. I just think it might not be a healthy love. I feel like a kid who doesn’t know which ride to get on first because the possibilities for pleasure are legion and I am but one. And there’s no time to take it all in, or even half of it. Hi, my name is Liz, and I have an addiction . . .

Adding to this affliction is the possibility that my Web 2.0 habit has given me ADD. Or perhaps I already had ADD and Web 2.0 just exacerbated my condition (Web 2.0 did seem like the perfect medicine for my naturally distracted disposition, but now it feels more like a bad-influence friend pressuring me to start freebasing). My congenital short attention span has become impossibly shorter: instead of taking time to savour a good article, or even a few good articles, I snack on headlines and tell myself I’m full. Then I panic as I read the Twitter updates of the folks I am following, gobsmacked not only at the amount and quality of information they seem to consume, but how they also swiftly digest and regurgitate the masses of information as quotable, notable, pithy tweets. Do they ever sleep?

Meanwhile, in a desperate race to keep up, I am depriving myself of nourishing content, and watching the wall I am about to hit race towards me.

Yesterday afternoon, my friend, Kim, extended a helping hand. A fleshy, warm hand.


She brought me to exactly the right kind of shop to do exactly the right kind of shopping therapy. As soon as we walked through the door, she led me directly to the back of the store where every imaginable flower extract – bottled and cataloged – was lined against the wall like an olde timey apothecary, offering a balm for every imaginable ill. Kim put the flower extract guidebook into my hands, flipped it open to “Depression and Despondency” and then discretely went about her business, leaving me to read. I mean really read. As I poured through the entries, I am not ashamed to admit that I misted up. I recognized myself in so many of the descriptions and longed for the right remedies. Gorse, for instance, treats cynicism-inflected sadness – when you think there is no more goodness left in the world. Bleeding Hearts are for grief due to loss in general. Wild Oat is for discouragement related specifically to loss of love. I needed to sit down. Just beside me someone had placed a green folding chair with a lovely embroidered pillow placed at the back for support. Such comfort. I flipped through the rest of the book and found flower tinctures for all kinds of other ailments – obsession, complacency, jealousy, desire (for having too much desire in general, or for desiring the wrong person, or for not desiring the right person enough, etc.).

The idea of imbibing flower tinctures as treatments for the soul touched me deeply. The thought of knocking back mini bottle after mini bottle on a particularly bad day made me smile. Imagine getting fall-down drunk on flower remedies, my friends having to mop me off the floor and then peel off my flower-extract-stained clothes, forcing me under a cold shower while loudly complaining, “you smell like a bloody green house!”



I didn’t buy a tincture in the end, probably because a liquid seems so fleeting. But I did purchase a beautiful pale, cloudy pink piece of rose quartz because the little piece of paper with the description said it was good for healing the heart and for self esteem issues. It felt smooth and solid in my palm, like a little . . . well . . . rock.

The night before, as Kim and I were walking along College street to see a diversionary film (Vicki Christina Barcelona: better than the last few Woody Allen films, but didn't touch Crimes and Misdemeanors or Hannah and Her Sisters), I said that I wanted to feel like I was a part of something larger than myself. Last night, squeezing the my little rose quartz in one hand while eating a big bowl of soul-satisfying Vietnamese pork and noodle soup with the other, and with Kim sitting across from me, her own pockets full of blue and black stones for various healing properties, slurping back her own bowl of soup, I realized what I meant about being connected to something larger was about being connected to something more tangible than the online world of networking and RSS feeds. I meant doing things like eating soup with Kim, or stuffing my pockets full of colourful rocks.

During the summer, I did explore my feelings of loss through flowers. I started a project of painting my friends’ husbands – men I love and respect but cannot have – with their favourite flowers taped to their heads.



It's not that I want my friends' husbands. What makes them great is who they are because they are married to my friends. It's who the two of them have become together -- themselves and more of themselves. The feeling I have for these men is as awkward to express as trying to tape their favourite flowers to their heads.

My love for Web 2.0 is somewhat like that, too -- a longing to express myself in a world that I admire but don't yet fully belong to. I feel awkward, but my love is pure. And any hint that I might make it in this world encourages me to keep my fingers clicking my keyboard. For instance, I had a moment this summer when I strategically asked my friend, Mark, amazing husband of my amazing friend, Tonya, (and who I now refer to as Mozilla Mark because he's the Executive Director of the Mozilla foundation) if he'd tried the beta of a Firefox app that had not yet been released. I'll never forget the deep gratification of seeing Mark's head swivel sharply around so that he could fix me with a gaze of amazement and, yes, YES, respect! I was the owner of a piece of bleeding-edge news. I had information! I realized right then and there I'd have to paint him. And soon.


Since the summer, I am sad to say I abandoned the painting project in order to spend more time boning up on Web 2.0 stuff, but it's all in the service of a bigger, and hopefully, better picture: to build a soul-satisfying career. I know that the energy I put into this project will pay off in the long run. But in the meantime, I am trying to balance the time I spend online with the time I spend re-investing in the friendships I missed when I lived in Montreal.

As much as I love the virtual world, I need the tangible world. Tangible like my friend Kim who knows how to make me laugh. And tangible like this small piece of petrified earth that has evolved over millenia, and that will be around long after I’m gone; a rock that shares the same name as a flower I don’t actually love, and the same name as my grandmother who I loved very much, and the same name as my niece who is a living red-headed doll who I love more and more each day, and the name I would give the daughter I wish I had who I would love with all my heart. That’s what I’m talking about. The tangible, hard stuff. Life 1.0.

Liz and Kim Giggle

A Day of Atonement

On my 40th birthday, I watched Atonement and Into the Wild. I had read Atonement years earlier but not Into the Wild, so I had no idea how it ended. Deaths all around. I wept during and after both films as if the disasters had happened to me.

The other day a friend remarked on how much mileage I was getting out of telling friends and strangers about my apartment fire. At the time I bristled, probably because I felt busted. Later, I realized it was because I felt fear – fear of losing the one thing I had left after losing everything else: my story.

And that’s exactly what Atonement and Into the Wild are: they are the what’s left.

In the case of Atonement, the protagonist, Briony Tallis, realizes she must put her writing skills into the service of atoning for her sins. The people she sinned against have all died, but she still has her ability to write her apology. We will never know, however, if Jon Krakauer imagined a reader for his journals because he died somewhere in the Alaskan bush, and his journals were published posthumously. Was his diary a place where he could privately atone for cutting off his family? Or, did he imagine the life he was leading would one day be published as a book in which he could say, “mom, dad, look! I made good on the gift of life you gave me. I lived!” Their atonement, it seems, was to turn his diary into the book, Into the Wild. In it, they are not painted in a flattering light, but they must have believed that publishing his journals would serve as a kind of public apology for not appreciating Jon as he was when he was alive. Atoning was all they had left.

With my own journals, the ones that burned in my fire, I did always imagine a sympathetic audience as I wrote them -- readers who might one day know my inner world. That hope is now gone. But I know it’s not that way with everyone’s journals. Some of us really do need a private outlet, and we might even think we will one day burn our journals in a bonfire of release down the road, with no one the wiser to who we really are...

No matter what fires consume our lives, accidentally or on purpose, what’s always left is our ability to make amends.

This morning I woke up vowing to fast for Yom Kippur (I had already failed after sundown last night – stuffing myself with popcorn and chocolate while I watched a chickflick). At 8:00 am, my vow still seemed possible. By 9:30 am, I had walked around the block and decided that if I were to give proper attention to my atonement process, I would need to caffinate my headache since it was far more distracting than my hunger pangs.

Yesterday, I made a public declaration about taking myself offline and off phone in order to add outside pressure to my commitment. But thoughts of e-mails from friends and hopeful online horoscopes and life-affirming phone calls have been coming as frequently as breath. I keep vacillating between wondering what denial has to do with atonement and registering dismay about my inability to conquer my various addictions. Yom Kippur requires 25 hours of abstinence from food, liquids, marital relations, the wearing of leather, general pleasures and work. After I drank my coffee, I scarfed down a few slices of watermelon, "for health reasons," I told myself. Then I opened my computer and began writing. After an hour of writing, I checked my e-mail. All this before noon. My purity of action had spent itself during the first hour and a half between waking and walking.

And now the guilt is setting in. Which, more than my attempts at fasting and thinking about my sins, is making me feel like a real Jew.

Thanks to a smattering of meditation training, I know that I need to stop letting my id and superego drive. I need to get myself into the observer’s seat. In order to keep pulling my mind back from thoughts of dinner 8 hours away, and the myriad failures of my life – why am I not able to keep my weight down? Why is my career so all over the map? Why I am not marriedwithkids? – I keep repeating, mantra-like, the bigger questions at hand: What are my sins? How can I atone for them? And, since I don’t believe in God, who am I atoning to, exactly?

Not being raised religious, the concept of sin, thankfully, is a tad foreign to me. Don’t get me wrong, I have developed, hopefully, some sort of moral and ethical universe in the absence of a religious one, driving me to right the wrongs I have committed against strangers, friends and family. I guess it all boils down the same thing – “wrong doing” or “sin”, whatever you want to call it, the act and the feeling are the same: bad.

Just after noon, I wrote a letter of admission and apology to a friend whose privacy I had invaded. I read his personal writing when I was not supposed to. The writing was kick-ass publishable, but it was private, and, therefore, not for me to judge, much less read. Far-too-swiftly, via e-mail, came a more-than-generous forgiveness, one I did not feel I deserved. And still I did not feel atoned. The afternoon yawned before me...

As I am writing this, I get a flash of insight: Atonement and Into the Wild provide the best mirrors for my malaise, for why I still feel something is missing in my process today. Both Briony and Jon not only atone in their writing, but they atone through their writing. Not only that, they basically atone through the act of living – Briony courageously carries on while her loved ones have died, and Jon packs about ten lifetimes into one, honouring every moment of his existence, good or bad, chalking it up to experience and gift.

And that's the nugget I have been searching for all day: I am pretty good at atoning in writing and in person, but I often feel I am a waste of my gifts.

What I should really atone for is an over indulgence of feeling sorry for myself. My life is a goddamn gift! This blog has been exceedingly helpful in giving me the space to do SOMETHING; I’ve never been more productive. But I feel more is still required. More work on my book, and on my painting projects. More recognition of how much it tears my parents apart when I am down on myself because what they see is a woman with an abundance of abilities, ones they gave me. Not appreciating myself is tantamount to not appreciating all they have done for me. I must write them a letter...

As much as I want to do more, I am also grateful for all the less I have ... less extraneous stuff I don’t need -- real or imagined or longed for -- thanks to my fire. Truth be told, if what's left is a story to tell, that is more than enough. It’s bloody well everything.

The Dead are Among Us

The dead are among us . . .



We believe we see the dead, hear the dead, and that we can talk to the dead. This belief is no less than the hope that when we die, we too will be seen and heard through the thin veil that separates life from death. While death is a fact of life, it is also the greatest metaphor for a state of being (or, a nothingness) against which we test our aliveness. Death is a mirror of sorts – if I am not dead, I must be alive.


People, alive and dead, also provide that mirror for us, reflecting our selves back to us. And when we can’t find people to do the job, we create mirrors through our creative output, projecting our selves on to another surface in order to see our reflection. Integral to our creative expression is the idea of an audience: the people who see and hear us – our witnesses.

In A General Theory of Love, the authors, three neuroscientists, argue that the people in our lives are not just mirrors, but the very lifeblood of our existence. Through connection, we actually regulate each others’ emotional well-being physiologically. The authours site the mortality rate in orphanages in which children’s needs for shelter and nourishment are met, but not their need for love -- death rates range between 70 – 100%. Whereas in orphanages with poor hygiene protocols and a dearth of other (basic) amenities, but in which the children are held and loved, the mortality rates are almost zero.

The same way women regulate each others’ menstrual cycles through proximity, humans regulate each others’ emotional well being through connection. And I can’t stress this enough: it’s not psychological, it’s physiological. We have a physical impact on each other, and we are required for each other's survival. That's why when the person regulating our emotional centre leaves or dies, we feel as if we’ve lost half of ourselves, and, for a while, we no longer really know who we are, or even if we are. In other words, the other is not just a mirroring element in our lives, but the other is us. You are me and vice versa.



Since arriving home from Berlin, everyone has asked me the same question, “how was Berlin?” followed up with the same statement, “I read your blog and sounds like you had a blast!”

The first words on my lips, which I have suppressed until now, are, “blogs lie.”

A few years ago, a mutual friend told me something similar when I told her I suspected my partner was having an affair. I had found photographs of him on someone else's website; the photographer had captured my partner exchanging meaningful gazes with the girl I suspected (she was barely a woman). My friend tried to reassure me that my partner would never have an affair, asserting that “pictures lie.” But she was wrong. He was having an affair. And with that girl. And I when I found out, I thought I was going to die. And for a while, I was the walking dead.

But I knew what my friend had meant. We get so much and so little information from images. They capture a moment, but, like porn, they cannot convey the meat of the matter: sounds, smells, touch, thoughts and feelings, all the nuance and physical data that makes an encounter truly erotic, truly satisfying and truly life affirming.

Writing lies as well. Like images, text represents what we choose to show, leaving out what we are afraid to say, what we can’t bring ourselves to say, what we wish to hide so that we can project something more desirable, something that will make us more likeable, more acceptable. Whether writing or image making, what we are doing is telling a story. And our storytelling not only affirms our existence, but it also becomes our magnet, drawing someone else into the vicinity of love.

I wrote about this phenomenon, as I see it, in my ficto-memoir:

The following observation is not new, but I think it bears repeating: a story does not pretend to tell the truth. A story acknowledges its own fictional nature, happily disseminating beautiful lies. A painting is essentially no different, except in this one fundamental way: paintings tell the whole story all at once. You see the beginning, middle, and end at the same time, but it’s not always obvious which is which. Time is not linear in a painting. And the painter does not lead you down the garden path the same way a writer does. That’s why painting shows are called exhibitions, because everything you need to know is exposed, like a tree carving clearly trumpeting its truth: I love you so much I carved your name into this tree, making my love tangible, and for all to see. But a painting is more than that; whereas a tree carving expresses a moment of someone’s love, a painting seeks approval for that moment. The tree carver does not care if anyone thinks the carving is well executed, while a painting does more than say, “I loved this person” or even “I was here,” it also (and always) asks, “am I good enough?”

If I could just remember that a story is a version and not a truth, and that it does not have to be good to be told, I might find I could paint with less anxiety. I would not ask if my paintings were good, or if they solved world hunger. I’d just accept them the way I accept the nose on my face. I would not try to defend myself, saying, “no, these are not copies of Chuck Close’s 1968 self-portrait. They are a series of adaptations of Chuck Close’s 1968 self-portrait.” Instead, I would turn on my interrogators and ask them instead, “What’s it to you?”

Still, the question persists. The question someone asks when they look at my versions of Chuck Close’s 1968 self-portrait, or the question they ask at the video store when I suggest which movie to rent, or when I give someone my favourite novel to read and they inevitably ask, “yes, but is it good?” The tone implies that unless they get some kind of guarantee of liking it, they will not risk it. But I don’t know what else to tell them. All I can do is paint a picture.

Lest you think I’ve been stringing you along, my blog is not a total lie. I did have a blast in Berlin. But there were also times I lay in my bed when the sun was shining, and instead of making hay I cried. I overate in Berlin. I experienced loss in Berlin. I hurt a friend in Berlin. I was rude in Berlin. I did not go to enough galleries, or ride my bike through the Tiergarten, or do further research about my grandparents. I did not live the life I felt sure my mirrors wanted me to live: I did not have the adventures my married friends imagined, or see mind-blowing shows my artist friends imagined, or travel outside the city the way my stay-put friends imagined. Sometimes I was flying high, and sometimes I watched myself, as if from a bird's eye view, come crashing to earth.




In Berlin, I made irrational choices in every moment based on my mood, and my mood was also altered by the choices I made, for better and for worse. I had no great insights. I have no idea what’s next for me. I do not suddenly have prospects for an incredible painting or writing career in Berlin, or even here in Toronto. I hoped for a lighting bolt of insight in Berlin, but it never came.



No one likes to sit through someone else’s vacation slides, no matter how good they are, because you were not there, so the pictures can only convey so much of the experience. While I don’t think I started the blog to share my Berlin experience, per se, I am not quite clear why I started my blog except perhaps to have someone to talk to, to project a reader against which to test my aliveness. And in my darkest moments, when I doubted I even had a reader, the blog became a place where I could, at least, talk to the dead.

What really happened in Berlin is mundane. And then I came home. I booked my return flight so that I could attend Nuit Blanche, thinking the event would reconnect me to the art world and a specific community to which I once, peripherally, belonged. But what really happened was I failed to see a very close friend’s art piece because I started at the wrong end of town and was beyond tired by midnight and had to go home (blame jet lag, blame Berlin). But I did manage capture an exceptional photograph of a Zombie hugging my friend, Kim, early on in the evening.

This is the kind of picture I’d see one someone else’s blog and think they must have had a blast at Nuit Blanche. I must admit, this moment was pretty sweet, and I do feel lucky I was able to capture it.