...on Sunday, March 18th, 2007.

aka my 29th birthday.

woooo, excited!

i have been like an alley cat in heat lately, but this, THIS, makes me hotter than anything:

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Native to Africa and Australia, baobab trees are oddly beautiful, with thick, bulbous trunks that can grow partially hollow and thus serve as shelters for people and animals. They have an enormous capacity for storing water, allowing them to survive during draughts. Humans carve and paint their fruits, making them into ornaments, and also use their leaves, fruits, and bark for food and drink. The tree's large white flowers open only at night, and are pollinated by bats. In all these ways, you remind me of a baobab right now, Pisces. You're freakishly gorgeous, have enormous staying power and hundreds of uses, are a rich source of nourishment and comfort, and bloom under the moonlight, when you do your best collaborative work

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18 days till 29!!

- was threatened by Air Canada & maybe blacklisted for being a curmudgeonly passenger

- studied at every cafe worth its coffee on the Drive with Anners

- was propositioned by an ex & considered it

- fell in love all over again with the other ex, whose emails progressed from "i have my sights on someone new" to (in so many words) "i am totally still in love with you and in self-imposed denial about it"

- saw Letters from Iwo Jima, featuring 3 hrs of the most Americanized Japanese conversations i have ever had the displeasure of witnessing

- a university friend (8 days older than me) died unexpectedly in his sleep on the same day that the fire took Jess Debeck 11 years ago

- had a falling out with two other uni friends abt the wording of the eulogy (which referenced Ed's "special friend" until i intervened and had him upgraded to "partner"); an awkward lunch followed

- had an informal high school reunion at Kris K's, saw Keely (soon to be a singer superstar!), Kate (another of my bestest friends in the world!) for the first time in 5 years, Hovan who is now a lawyer dating a cool ex-model from Toronto, who gave us the dirt on everyone we went to high school with, and L for the first time in 7 yrs, for whom i had an unrequited fondness that lasted 6 yrs (thru high school and into uni); met L's fiancee, soon to be wife; drank a bottle & a half of white wine that night, while everyone else worked on the red

- spent a day with Julianne, who was home sick from school; we watched Tom & Huck, and converted her plastic golf clubs into hockey sticks, then light sabers, and jumped over all the furniture in Meg's newly reno'd condo

- saw Meg's rock (indeed heart-shaped!), and had our first sans-fiancee conversation since 2003 (awww, i loooove my baby sister!)

- sold my soul to Facebook

- consolidated two Pedro Barrio crushes; then received a steamy email from my mercenary friend, who (oddly) happened to be in Seattle, and who reiterated a proposition i found irresistable

- convinced the cats that they are both worthy & lovable, and watched Sophie's eyes turn calm over the course of the week; so simple, yet so surprising, what consistent, free-flowing love can do for an animal

- watched Ellen host the Academy Awards, and Forest Whittaker & Melissa Etheridge take it! (missed Al Gore, alas.)

- fell in love with the green/grey city, its expansiveness and sublimity; understood the Kantian sublime while contemplating the awesome spread of Vancouver and its mountains

- postered/flyered half of the city on behalf of my mom's maternity photography business; the first midwifery clinic we hit had Danica's little sister working the desk; hadn't seen her since 1999! she is now married & spent most of the Noughties living in England

- marked half the Phil 101 papers, read half of The Maltese Falcon and a third of Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation... so much to do...

- attended Kris K's dad's 60th birthday party -- 70 people, incl. a man of her father's generation who knew Ojibwe, whom i talked with for a long time about the art of architecture; he asked me later if my tattoo was painted on, and i shocked myself by quipping, "you can try licking it off..." (hopefully his wife didn't hear that...)


- dusted off my Sweet 48 & hit Whistler for the 1st time eeeeever;

noted on the Sea-to-Sky that wet West Coast snow, collecting on evergreens and along stream beds in fat luscious clumps, has nothing in common with the dry, flurrying ice crystals that carpet the East... noted also the awesomeness of snowy islands and coastlines that just drop straight into the Pacific, and the incredibly vast stretches of ocean between.

lost my friends to the crowds & to Blackcomb in the first 5 minutes after arrival at the Village; hit Whistler by me ownsome, unawares that everyone else had gone the other way.

hadn't been boarding yet this season; hadn't ever been on a mountain of this calibre. i taught myself to snowboard on Grouse in 2001/02, and finessed my skills on a tobagganing hill that passes for a mountain in Japan, eventually outriding Hiroshi in Hiroshima (tho he takes the jumps better).

thought to take it slowly on the mammoth Whistler slopes.

graduated shortly from greens to blues, by my own standards -- frustration with the flattening-out greens and all their human obstacles, and just the right amount of fear as i cascaded unimpeded down the blues...

thinking myself well-trained by then, i tackled the sublime backside peak of Whistler Mountain on what was nearly the last lift up, at 3 pm -- no no no no no...!! longest blue run in North America, i.e. a remember-forever memory, and absolutely NOT MEANT for the end of the day. it was sheer ego that made me want to take it.

i ended up on a stretch of black right away, accidentally. utter terror!! ginger, painstaking descent along a v. narrow mogul pathway (2 meters wide? 1.5?), next to a sharp drop (10 fluffy meters down). ate up waaaaaaay too much time, and induced waaaaaaay too much panic.

then on to the precariously marked, wide but steep moguls of the blue run... gorgeous powdery puffs, so steep that you are floating... but too steep for me to ride uncautiously...

i am lucky i made it down alive, and might not have been so lucky had a couple of skiiers not trusted their instincts and waited for me on a later backside road of the mountain. they gave me advice, a strong push, and a talking-to, then disappeared into the backwoods.

during the initial moguls, my vision was swimming and i needed to puke. my friends say that Whistler's peak, at 2200 meters, is 800m shy of the altitude-sickness mark, but i wonder... directly in front of me were waving lines, waving like asphalt on a hot day but in distinct ribbons across my field of vision, with patches of clarity between them; everything kept moving and shifting. and the nausea was intense. it seemed like the only thing to do was go down, so i just tried to keep moving, yet i couldn't handle the grade and had to go slowly... regretting that absolutely no one knew where i was, and that the snowy mountain silence was no longer punctuated by the occasional slice of a snowboard.

at times i had to walk long, narrow flat stretches beside a steep, forested cliff, thru deep, soft snow; i couldn't go quickly enough to take them with momentum on such a narrow road, not trusting my muscle control to risk the necessary speed. the skiiers and boarders who had been passing me gradually disappeared, as the lift closed down and i moved more slowly than everyone else.

my muscles had lost all strength long before i rendezvous'd with other humans at a merging point with another run an hour down. i began to shake violently all over. but after the skiiers' warnings, i was terrified of getting stranded in the impending darkness and only let myself rest for a couple minutes at a time, falling forward down onto my knees, praying to the gods that i had enough control left not to break any bones.

only sheer adrenaline got me back down to the Village, where i met Annamarie and Co. and apologized for losing them 6 hrs before. they chatted amicably, while i shook violently for half the drive back to Vancouver, curled up in a corner of the truck. i got mad at one of the Human Geographers for her inane take on poststructuralism, and after that the conversation devolved into "When They Come to Our Country, They Should Speak English Properly." i sputtered and yelled some very furious, not very kind remarks. it is difficult to say whether my irascibility was due to Good Reason, or purely to post-traumatic shock.

but i can tell ya that i have no patience for academic racism anymore, not local and not systemic. i don't buy "Canada," and i don't buy arbitrary arguments for speaking "Canada's language" that do not take into account the racist Imperial immigration laws of the 1800s and early 1900s. it is exhausting to continually have to explain the concept of a nation-state founded on racial lines to those who haven't bothered to research it for themselves. go read freaking Sherene Razack on Canadian peacekeeping in Somalia; go watch a documentary on the Komagata Maru; go ask my JC grandparents what they think of Canada, circa 1942; go take an Asian-Canadian Lit class and tally up the estimates for how many Chinese labourers died with every mile of CPR tracks laid into Western Canada, and why; go talk to an 80 year old man about what it was like to live in a community of bachelors in the 1930s, because Canada wouldn't let in whole Asian families, nor even single women, using both explicit policy and unwritten economic law -- even as the government sold off massive tracts of unceded land, for pennies, to white families. ...THEN let's have a conversation about whether SFU should offer classes in Cantonese.

and i am tired of arguing with my friends about points that seem obvious, and obviously civil. ...first the Ed thing, the unwriting of his partner from the narrative of his life, and death, by people who ought to be a little more sensitive, out of concern for offending the parents who wrote his gayness out of the narrative in the first place; now this.

after passing thru Squamish, i curled back into my corner and tried to pretend i wasn't stuck in a truck with two women i didn't have patience for, whom i ought to have been nice to for Annamarie's sake. instead i looked out over the darkening Pacific and imagined myself part of the landscape, imagined myself crossing those waters in a cedar-bark canoe, wondering how these lands must have looked before "Canada"... how massive the trees...

but never mind the truck ride. ...i rode Whistler yesterday!!

the good news (the great news) is: fear of death by exposure overtook fear of the blues. as i whipped as fast as possible down the mountain on crapped-out muscles, as waves of panicky chemicals spewed into my flagging bloodstream from my adrenals, there was no longer any question that i could ride the blues. not the blacks, and not the initial moguls at the peak, but the medium-grade blues no longer fazed me by the time i merged with a (blessed!) green run towards the bottom of the mountain. ...bloody 'ell, i did it!! i even did the longest blue run in North America!!

and except for the first half of that run, it was freaking fantastic. there is no power on this earth that can surpass the giggly rush of riding a snowboard vertically thru powder.

the other good news: i rode the gondola with three separate groups of intriguing people, a crew of sexy Brazilians whose Portuguese made me hot, an Austrian/Italian couple who gave me advice on which Alps to ride (as i prodded them on with a wry grin), and some Winnipegers who kept me laughing all the way to the top, and who assured me that i could ride from the peak to the Village in half an hour. ha.

...who knew the ex-pat community i miss so much when i am home in Canada was just under my nose the whole time?? made me wish i'd grown up with my father around, who taught me to ski when i was 3. no doubt i would have made it to Whistler sooner. ahhh well. such is life.

and the best news: 6 years on, i can judge the performance of a snowboard, and my baby blue 48 is sweeeeeeeeeeeet...!! what a good call to buy it cheap from Option when i was finishing up my last round in the factory's Shipping department.

i am already kicking myself for leaving it in Vancouver...

ahhhhh Vancouver.

...back in Pedro Barrio, after a pleasant and courteous West Jet flight -- every muscle in my arms and legs is rock-hard to the touch, and all limbs are so sore that it feels like i am one big bruise.

i suppose i am: beaten by the mountain.

when a whippin' feels good!