paint me anything

houses + humour

C-3PO makes me laugh because you have to remember he was assembled by a child out of things from a scrap heap. Everything about him makes sense if you bear that in mind. Anakin wanted a droid who could help his mother, but the only AI package he could find was one somebody threw out for being too fussy. The combination of tweaking to give him a worried/caring personality makes him constantly anxious. A protocol droid comes with a fair amount of language packages, but why stop there? Somebody threw out like, three different galactic language dictionaries because they weren’t the recent edition. Just load ‘em all up. all of them, even the packs that contain things like ewok and a thousand variants of different manufacturers’ droid codecs. don’t add half the other requirements most legal protocol droids have included at the factory like emergency wipe protocols or shutdown failsafes, or programmed obsolescence. Build that sucker out of non-commercial materials that are already over a hundred years old and still good, tweak it to withstand tatooine of all places.

i want

It’s 2013. I live in Canada. I teach Irish Studies and love that I can talk and think and write about my wonderful, yet complicated, country for a living. I am on a plane back to Ireland where I have been invited to give a talk based on my research. This is a big deal. I am excited and terrified. My period is late. In the plane bathroom I notice that there is a little bit of blood. This is a huge relief. Back in my seat I feel untethered, loosened from the skein of worry that had been tightening around my muscles. I ask for a glass of wine and search through the movies for something mindless. I try to sleep. I can’t. I stare out the window into the blackness. I think about home, seeing everyone, how it will feel. Going home is always a bit fraught - excitement, guilt, and loneliness all jostling for attention. In the Paris airport bathroom the tampon is bloodless. I freeze, replacing it anyway - travelling and flying always make everything a bit erratic, I convince myself. The altitude confused my body, my womb needs dry land and a secure geography. That is all. I do not think about what the secure geography of Ireland will mean if blood doesn’t come. In Dublin I stay with a friend who is seven months pregnant and delighted to be. In her bathroom I remove another bloodless tampon and concentrate on the cramps that stab through my stomach. I’m sure that cramps will lead to blood one way or another. It’s hard to disentangle jet lag from the exhaustion that drags at my bones, difficult to decipher the spasms that jag between my hips, the feeling that my insides are being dragged into the earth. The nausea could be a hangover. There is a persistent tugging at the centre of me as if something is trying to hook on. I try to work out if I’ve felt it every month. In any case, I decide to ignore everything until after my friend’s wedding. I can be good at denial. Wine helps. On the phone from New York, a friend is reassuring, as she always is. - Cramps are definitely a good sign. It’s just delayed. Don’t worry pet. There’s no way you could be. One night?! It’s really not that easy. I feel terrible for airing my worries to her - she has been trying to get pregnant for two years now. The disappointment is starting to wear her down. My fear would be a miracle for her. I go to the wedding. It is a slight blur. I drink. Wine and endless martinis, that all seem like incredibly good ideas at the time, each one a revelation. I dance, throwing myself across the floor, making best friends with everyone in the room. I am good at this. Parties. New people. Making the dance floor my home. But I can’t shake the murmurs from the back of my head that my breasts are bigger, and tender, and that my mid-section feels like it’s on loud speaker, announcing itself through my dress. The hangover is brutal and I have forgotten to pack any kind of pants so I wear my pyjama bottoms to breakfast. I feel the need to explain this to everyone. I have an insatiable thirst for orange juice. The hangover is trying to kill me. I don’t have the energy to be embarrassed by my pyjamas any more. I don’t care what the taxi driver thinks. All I need is to crawl into bed. The next day I buy a test. I avoid the ones with smiley faces. I skip over the ones with the blue lines. I need the word itself, I need to see the letters spelling it out: Pregnant 2-3 weeks. I only need one test to convince me. It seems inevitable and utterly impossible. I am instantly nauseous. The weirdness of my body makes immediate sense. It is almost as if my body had always known. I had woken in a dead panic a few weeks ago, propelled out of bed to stare at myself in the mirror, convinced in the half-asleep surety that I am 5 months pregnant (instead of just having conceived - which is much more logical, and true). I had scanned Google for confirmation that you could bleed and still be pregnant, which, of course, Google provides in numerous hysterical forums. I am amazed at the way your body could know and think and remember but that your consciousness would only understand part of the story. It was as if they spoke slightly different languages or that one wasn’t the best listener. How can knowing and not knowing something overlap so completely? The sudden alignment of these knowledges makes me surprisingly calm. And the decision is clear. I had always thought that this would be a difficult, emotional, and conflicted moment. I had broken up with my long-term boyfriend because he didn’t want children and I did. But my thought process is simple - this is not going to happen. I am not doing this on my own at this point in time. I am not involving someone who lives far away. It would be unfair. Going through with this would make everything unnecessarily difficult. Meeting someone. Work. Life. I am not ready to do this alone. Decision made. Clear. Certain. No vacillation. Easy.