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Music Monday: Two By Tracy Chapman

How bad, how good does it need to get? How many losses how much regret? What chain reaction What cause and effect Makes you turn around Makes you try to explain Makes you forgive and forget Makes you change

-Tracy Chapman ‘Change’

The Youtube video featured the best performance of the song, I had to cut the Jay Leno introduction on account it annoyed the high, holy, hell out of me. Most people…

Reading Binges and Busts

Winters mean moving indoors, on my couch, my nose in a book. (There’s only so much Netflix to binge at this point.) It’s no different from summer with me laid out on my new reclining chair, outdoors, letting out the occasional laugh then checking to see if my neighbours heard it. Between audiobooks, e-books, and traditional print books, I made my Goodreads challenge of 25 books in 2016. This year…

Music Monday: Two for Martin Luther King, Jr Day

Why would a Canadian woman post something about an American holiday? Let me tell you a story. In another life, as a teacher, I taught To Kill a Mockingbird both as a student teacher and as a substitute. One of the many things I remember while looking at student essays, especially one about comparing and contrasting bravado and courage, a few students wrote a variation of the following:

Racism is…

Music Monday: Song For A Winter’s Night by Sarah McLachlan

This Gordon Lightfoot remake originally appeared on Sarah’s earlier album Rarities, B-Sides & Other Stuff Vol. 1, a CD played nearly to death in my twenties. It’s not the first Sarah track featured on the blog but appropriate for the time of year.

January is not an easy month.

Little by little, the days get longer, but the Christmas buzz has passed for another year with people dreaming of tropic…

I Resolve To Not Make New Year’s Resolutions

Like blowing snow around Winnipeg, the internet has articles about New Year’s resolutions flying around. I remember typing out mine, back in the days of my beloved Brother AX-15 typewriter. They did not seem impossible, more like a set of goals but I did have ‘lose weight’ quite often, and I did try to exercise. That lasted until March while sputtering in February. After years of…

Music Monday: Final Song by MØ

I said good-bye to 2016 with V, her parent’s dog, nibbles, and cans of Sumol, a Portuguese soda. After a post bordering on the morose on the 31st, I figured the Music Monday selection needed some pep. Enter MØ, a singer out of Denmark, found courtesy of a Spotify playlist with happy songs. The song can compliment any playlist for the gym or while running the snow-packed sidewalks outside.

As for…

Pass The Baton: A Reflection on 2016

When news broke about Carrie Fisher passing away, I found myself back in a memory not surfacing for some years. I am back on the hill near Bertrum E. Glavin Elementary school at recess time. On the hill we, two guys and myself, are the only ones playing on that hill, running around dodging imaginary enemies. We heard about this new movie, in my case, I tried to read the tie-in novel. (My aunt…

​My nephew announced the news, eyes still glued to his phone, while I had a partially dried dish in my hands.

“Check two more sources, The Telegraph or The Guardian,” I instructed. Those two newspapers had authority, at least I stayed in denial for a little while longer. 

I pulled out my own phone, opening Twitter to see George Michael’s name trending. Seeing Rolling Stone’s tweet sealed it.

Geor…

Music Monday On A Sunday: Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas by Leslie Odom, Jr.

On parking lot in Valley Gardens in 2005, the worse Christmas rush since working at 15 left me with emotions so toxic, I stopped my car in an empty lot to cry. I cried so hard, I nearly vomited. I had soldiered on through anxious customers, an existential crisis, and dealing with a host of issues in therapy. That’s only a start.

I was done.

I couldn’t face going to Midnight Mass at the time, but…

How do I pass the time on my bus? By looking at a collage I did on an app and writing about it.

Before cutting my cable, I discovered the show ‘Lucifer’, based on a comic written by Neil Gaiman. After racking my brain trying to figure out where I have seen Tom Ellis, I looked up his character from Merlin.  It seems whoever does costuming for tall, dark, and handsome blokes had just the look for…

Music Monday: Dreaming of a New York Christmas

  Sometimes I close my eyes, to picture the sidewalks and buildings on Lexington as I walked down the street to Scotty’s Diner for breakfast, fuel for another day of exploring. The city may not sleep, but it certainly naps. The streets at 7 am barely register any people, or the post-college grads in the Murry Hill neighbourhood don’t want to wake up to their adulthoods. Between cups of coffee, I…

Music Monday: Happy Christmas (War Is Over) by John Lennon

  It’s one thing to read about someone’s life and death, it’s another to stand near the spot where they both lived both died. Picture this, it’s February and half the school age population of New York City flocked to the American Museum of Natural History. Add to this mix one woman from a mid-sized city. (That would be me.)

After spending a few hours at the museum, I had a baked pretzel and…

A Turtle With Snow On Its Shell

Winnipeg gets its name from a Cree word meaning ‘Muddy Water.’ Another name, one I like better and also comes from Indigenous history, is ‘Turtle Island.’  It suits this city as we like to move at a slow pace in regards to everything. Ever wonder how Winnipeg can move even slower than a turtle? Dump a bunch of show and watch drivers forget how to drive in winter. (Cyclist, on the other hand,…

Music Monday: It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas by Johnny Mathis

Winnipeg had a mild fall, with a snowfall evaporating by the next day, with some people hanging onto to shorts for as long as humanly possibly. Could it be, some thought, a Christmas without snow?  December rolled in and with five days into the month, the weather laughed as if to say, Dudes, you ain’t seen nothing yet.The city now finds itself under a winter storm warning. Typical Winnipeg…

NaNoWriMo2016: Wrap Up Post and Look Ahead

This year, I declared myself a rebel and began writing a series of personal essays. It would act as a slush pile for this blog or a grab bag of fiction ideas but my focus was not on the end result, the 50,000 words and the title ‘winner,’ more on the process itself. I wanted to see if my mind wandered, how long it took me to get going or did I meet resistance sitting down and writing. Good news,…