The Many Languages of Kacco

Sometimes, I feel like screaming that Simon and Garfunkle song at the top of my lungs… You know, the one that goes: I am a rock, I am an island…

I feel waaaaaaay to much to call myself a rock, but an island? I wonder…

Island: piece of land surrounded by water, without any walkable link to the continent…. (from my own braintionary)

(Momentarily pause to gather my thoughts… reader’s intermission… that’s when you go grab yourself a cup of coffee before continuing to read my lines. I know, I know! The show has just started and it’s intermission already! Though topic, what can I say!)

I have a strong beating heart. It takes me to places so high, yet brings me deep under the sea sometimes. What makes a good life companion? Have I become an island to make sure only the fittest could swim to my shores? Or have I always been, by nature, hard to reach? Or is that out of reach?

I want a partner in life. What a concept! There are many aspects to consider I find… First and foremost, I want to be swept off my feet. That’s quite the romantic concept given that I find a lot of the sweet little attentions down right tacky. But there is no going around that. I cannot embrasse the presence of another being in my life is he does not take my breath away in one way or another. I guess that’s the famous link between love and admiration. Admiration, looking up to someone we find strong, the key to respect. Love, this undefinable attraction that makes you reach for more of that presence. And for that part I must say, I often get to think my heart is indeed a rock. Because I have come accross that undeniable feeling only a few times. A few little times…

And then what? Well, I need that sense that we are accomplices… The Us Against the World. No matter what happens out there, there is us, then the rest of them… We take them on together. There are no times where we will be let down because we care for each other. Our instincts guide us to protect and cherrish each other. We are both whole, but we still want the best for the other and help them achieve it and maintain it. That dimension of the relationship is where should bloom the respect and honesty we deserve and provide to one another.

And after that comes the lifeline… mutual interests, without being exclusive of external activities. Similar common sense… That sounds petty, but you would be surprised what a difference it makes when something makes sense to you and does not for your partner.  You simply feel like you come from different universes and that you will not be able to reconcile. I absolutely believe in compromise. But common sense is black and white. There is no compromising in common sense. It touches your core values, the way you envision life and beyond. It’s not about liking this and not liking that… It’s about what matters most to you. And without sharing that, there is little way possible to unite for life.

What about lifestyles? Well that is the part, I believe, where the compromising takes place. It’s how we do things. Being a morning person… loving to sit and watch TV… picking up after ourselves… eating a lot of fruits and veggies… loving to live with animals… not even owning an iron… clubbing… reading… working… The way we, as humans, take on a day in our life. And every day thereafter.

Anytime I share an opinion, a vision of life… I think back on that project to write a book that would be titled: What if I Were Wrong?

Peace, but most of all, Love.

J’ai vu. Je suis témoin.

La semaine dernière, à l’occasion de la journée de la femme, j’ai assisté à quelque chose de merveilleux.

Vous savez, on entend souvent dire que la planète va de plus en plus mal… Plus de guerres, plus de forces destructrices de cette belle économie de marché, plus d’écart entre les riches et les pauvres, plus de pollution.. Bref, you get my point. Mais dans notre petite nature, nous oublions que de belles choses sont aussi en train de se passer.

Et une de ces belles choses, c’est la magie d’Internet. Oui, vous avez bien lu. On dira ce qu’on voudra sur le fait que ça rend les relations impersonnelles, que ça nous expose à des dangers de vol d’identité… peu importe aujourd’hui. Because I saw something so amazing, which could only be brought to me through the net.

J’ai vu un video, tourné au moyen-orient… dans un pays qui est régit par la loi islamique… qui rend tout acte autonomiste de la femme criminel… même conduire une voiture.  On y voit une femme portant le voile. Elle nous parle au cours du vidéo. Et elle pose un geste symbolique. Elle embarque quelqu’un avec une caméra, et nous amène avec elle alors qu’elle prend le volant pour un tour de voiture.

You know, to anyone reading this blog, I am not sure it has the same meaning as it does for me. It might seem small. It might seem like a drop in the ocean. But to me, it has a whole different meaning. It confirms my faith in great things. I guess… it does not come naturally to everyone… You might need to have been shipped over in a Third World Country to understand the gesture and its importance. You might need to have been standing there, on some tiny square foot of the planet, surrounded by poverty, with no way to reach out to the world for anyone to see or hear your misery. You might need to have felt like screaming at the top of your lungs, to cry out to the whole universe… Please! Look over here! See what is happening! Look at them, living as if there was no tomorrow! Please! Someone! Can you hear me?!?

I have stood there, unheard of, unseen, unthought off… I have screamed in silence. And I have met people who did not have a scheduled departure in a couple of weeks to escape… to get back to a place where you can communicate, be heard, be seen.

Et de voir ce video m’a profondément touché. Dans la marre si tentante de négativisme et de cynisme face à la situation de notre monde… On oublie de constater les merveilles qui se produisent chaque jour. Et cette force en moi me pousse à y croire et me fait pleinement embrasser la beauté de la vie. Je me sens unie à la terre de tout mon être et lorsqu’une parcelle du monde vient frapper à ma porte, j’ouvre tout grand et je l’accueille inconditionnellement.

Ce geste… je l’ai vu, comme des millions de gens dans le monde. Et autant cette exposition aurait pu être fatale pour cette femme, c’est paradoxalement cette même exposition qui la sauvera. Parce qu’elle a réussi à être vue, et entendue… maintenant, ceux qui veulent la faire taire seront également vus et entendus de tous. Elle a réussi à nous faire regarder. Maintenant que nos yeux sont ouverts, c’est plus fort que nous… on ne peut plus détourner le regard.

We’re all watching now. Peace.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54pRJkJ6B6E

J’ai un casse-tête… un casse-pied…

Je n’ai pas d’allégeance politique. Aille yay aye!

Hahaha! Quelle crise! C’est tellement petit face à l’ampleur de la vie. N’empêche que ça tourne en rond dans le fin fond de mon esprit et ça crée une envie de certitude… Dans la petite routine quotidienne, je pourrais certainement m’en passer, éviter, fuir le sujet. Mais dès que j’ajoute un peu de profondeur à mes réflexions, à mes aspirations, à ma vision de l’avenir… Bang! Bang! He shot me down….

Et puis quoi… vous savez, la première chose qui me vient en tête lorsque je pense à mes convictions politiques, c’est ma famille. J’ai le réflexe inné de me rallier à eux. Et là, je réalise, à l’instant même, dès que cette pensée effleure mon esprit… Je n’ai aucune idée pour qui ils votent.

Ça alors…

Généralement parlant, je crois qu’à l’origine, ma famille était de gauche, voir souverainiste. Et puis je les ai vu évoluer avec le temps. Les discussions ont tranquilement dévié du Chartrand et du Deschamps. J’ai vu la déception se creuser sur leur visage. J’ai vu le cynisme s’aiguiser sur leur menton. J’ai vu la confusion s’incruster dans leurs yeux. Mais plus ils en parlaient, plus j’avais le désir de comprendre. Plus leur certitude s’évaporait, plus mon désir d’aborder le sujet se solidifiait.

(disclaimer… -yes, I’m really doing that- the following is a depiction of things I heard. It does not necessarily reflect my opinions or that of my family. There, I feel better) 

There’s my uncle who keeps on complaining about the natives… There’s my dad who wants small and medium enterprises to get a chance. There’s my uncle again who talks about market forces. There’s a cousin who needs something done for young single parents. There’s another uncle who talks about the size of the agro-business mafia and quota business. There’s that first uncle again who can’t pass on his business to his son because it would financially kill the son in question due to fiscal nonsense. And then there are the immigrants who want to play by their rules in our country and our confusion as to whether it’s just a culture thing or their way of life disolving ours. There’s the language we must preserve, the way kids are graded in school, the daycare system… and the ones who left us… What if we had had better, faster healthcare? What if we had instituted stricter laws about driving impaired by aging? Who is going to realise that the sex offenders are being treated as if they had committed petty little offences like peeing in a park?

Now tell me… do you honestly and truly have an opinion, no, I stand corrected….. Do you honestly and truly have an EDUCATED opinion on all of those things? And where does what you live versus what others live weight in? And what about good ideas to reinforce some laws that could actually end up opening a whole new range of abuse in other scenarios?

Il me semble y avoir trop de sujets à débattre, trop d’informations manquantes, trop de solutions à deux revers. Je n’arrive plus à me décider sur quoi que ce soit. Je contemple. J’écoute, j’analyse quelques morceaux à la fois. Et pendant ce temps… ces gens qui nous gouvernent, ou qui voudraient bien le faire, se vautrent dans des affirmations à tout vent. Oui, nous devons faire ceci, pour régler celà. Oui, nous allons considérer que ceux-ci sont affectés par celà et que ceux-là sont affectés par ces derniers. Oui, notre solution est la meilleure. Non, nous ne pouvons faire ceci sans mettre celà en péril. Non, leur solution ne tient pas la route. Oui…….. nous devrons faire……. des compromis.

En fait, telle une typique Québécoise… je me suis tranquilement enroulée dans le status quo depuis que j’ai quitté le CEGEP! Et je déteste le status quo!!! Je le déteste! Pour moi, c’est le retranchement des lâches, le choix délibéré de ne rien assumer. On a pas a défendre d’opinions lorsqu’on en a pas. Et quoi de plus exhibitionniste que de montrer ses couleurs? On est nu comme un vers lorsqu’on ne porte que ses propres idées.

And you know what? If I were to call them one by one, the 64 members of my family… I don’t even think that more than a handfull of them would tell me who they vote for. 2 raisons: On ne veut pas diviser la famille. On n’en a plus aucune idée. J’ai une grossière envie………. une sale envie…….. une envie tout à fait marrante! Prochaine rencontre à laquelle j’assisterai: fête des mères. J’ose secouer l’épinette pour voir ce qui en tombe?

En attendant, je me suis remise à la lecture. Les nouvelles de plusieurs sources… les sites de parti… les blogues à saveur politique… les sites activistes…  Vous croyez que trop d’information c’est comme pas assez??? Il semble toujours y avoir quelqu’un pour me faire douter de la certitude que je venais tout juste d’acquérir l’instant d’avant.

Baah……. 831 mots sur un sujet…

Ouais…. les jours s’envolent comme les feuilles sèches en automne…

Le printemps est déjà tout près. Ça sent presque déjà la boue… sous toute la neige!

Le temps est un concept étrange. On m’a demandé hier si moi aussi je trouvais qu’il fondait à vue d’oeil. La vérité c’est que je le comprends mal. Chaque fois que je crois poser mes doigts sur son impermanence, elle s’évapore, comme le brouillard. On le voit, il nous entoure, mais dès que nous y entrons, il y a un espace vide qui se crée tout autour de nous et il demeure hors de portée.

Maybe you figured, or maybe I’m the only one who feels that it’s pooring through my skin…. My birthday is coming up. Every year, there is that feeling that starts hovering over me a few weeks before that day. I wish I had words to describe it.  It’s not sadness, yet it’s definitly not anything close to happiness. It’s an in-between feeling you know. It’s my pause. That’s what it is. (Wahoo! Guess I do have words to describe it!)

There, every year, I put my feet on the edge of the cliff. And I look up; and I look down. This year, wherever I look, I see nothing.

En ce moment, quand je regarde vers le bas, je n’ai pas d’amerture. Et quand je regarde vers le haut, je n’ai pas non plus de grandes aspirations. Je ne sais pas si c’est positif ou négatif. C’est un peu étrange, je dois avouer. Mais on dirait que j’ai tellement accepté l’état présent que le passé et le futur ne sont plus pertinents.

Je suis aujourd’hui reconstruite de mes cendres. Et demain je serai à l’endroit que j’aurai décidé. Cette affirmation simple rend toute réflexion stérile puisque c’est une conclusion en soit. Est-ce que c’est mal de ne plus être plongée dans l’analyse de mes possibilités et de mes origines? Je ne crois pas. En fait, ça libère de l’espace je crois! De l’espace pour vivre.

So, what am I saying exactly? Aaaah… that’s right! Nothing. I’m just gently pausing as the old year is about to be renewed for another cycle.

Isn’t that simply, simply, simply, great?

’til next time!

Vous savez, j’ai parlé dans un posting précédent du fait que j’étais heureuse, que je me connaissais et que ça m’aidait à être solidement planté sur terre même dans la tempête.

 Et bien tout ça n’empêche pas d’avoir un peu peur parfois.

I did it… I just got promoted! I will be starting a new job in about a week. I am excited, yet I am a bit scared of what’s ahead. That reminds me of yet another posting from my friend (see link Mélou on my page). She was talking about big shoes to fill with her newly appointed duties to replace someone she had a lot of admiration for.

I have had a multitude of work experiences. Some good, some very ordinary, and some damn right nightmarish. I actually went through a period of grief after leaving a prior job. It was the biggest one I had had so far. I thought I was going to make my career there. But I guess there were other plans waiting for me out there. I got burned with ambition in an environment where I had people playing hard against me. I got all the stupid reasons for not getting the job I applied for 3 or 4 times. I even got the You are too young. Little did it matter that I could actually do all the tasks of the people in my department. One time, they actually refused me the job… but in turn… asked me to show how to do it to the new person they had hired. Now that was a slap in the face….

Alors j’ai fini par partir. J’ai mis du temps à me trouver un autre emploi parce que le marché du travail me semblait bien sombre tout à coup. Et puis, après quelques détours, j’ai trouvé cet emploi, que j’occuperai jusqu’à vendredi prochain. Je retournais dans un centre d’appel… que j’avais si joyeusement quitté pour aller ailleurs dans la compagnie dans mon emploi précédent. Je me disais que c’était temporaire, que c’était une porte d’entrée et que je filerais vers autre chose très bientôt. Et bien, presque 2 ans et demi plus tard, voilà, je bouge. Et vous savez? Je ne m’attendais jamais à rester là si longtemps, mais ça ne me dérangeait pas du tout. J’étais bien.

For much more money than a job with bigger responsibility that I had before, I had a great, motivating, challenging job, where I did not have deadlines pending on me. Where I did not have to take decisions. Where I did not have to put things together for executives to approve. Where I was not in charge of anybody. Where I was not doing pieces of projects for others, but only my own things. I had clients calling me with a problem and I would solve it. That was that. You might wonder where my challenge was, but trust me, in taxes, every calculation issue can be quite the challenge. I’d have to figure out what the client did, why, and how our software should respond… And if the expected response was not happening, or if something was actually happening that should not…. then why??? So there… that was my main challenge.

The most responsibility I ever got in that department was to become a contact person. I then had to assist my co-workers with issues they could not solve and I had to be in contact with the team making the software. And that was that. And for once, as driven as I had been in the past… that was way sufficient for me. It was like a period of rehabilitation to the workplace. And I found that place to be the best I had seen so far. I checked… I searched for inconsistencies… for traps I could fall into… for conflicts ahead… for deceptions… And I could not find them. So I started to appreciate a workplace again.

This time, I did not have to push harder and harder to get ahead. Someone noticed me, someone came to get me. And now… I will be back in those shoes. I will have responsibilities, deadline, executives following my work, hundreds of things to learn… And it scares me a little. I have never been so confident about myself and my capacities. I have never been so well, so serene about life in general. Yet, there is that little squeezing feeling in my stomach. How will it be with my new team (of 3 people)? How will it be with my new boss? What will they expect from me? Too little? Too much? Or just the right amount I can give? Will I discover that it’s just like that other place afterall?

That’s what happens when you have experience…. You know more, so you are more competent of course… but not only about the good things. You have been burned, you have been hurt. So, aside from having all the new things to assimilate, I think my next big challenge is to let go of my apprehension. I must be able to recognize if it becomes unhealthy for me, but I should not be going in backwards trying to look for things that might go wrong in advance. Otherwise, like any other being who is scared, I can actually make it be that awful thing I am scared of by focussing so much on what I don’t want instead of seeing what I have in reality.

Wow… that sounds a lot like relationships… This time, it’s for a job. Next time?

We all die.

But how many of us have ever seriously considered our passing? And how many of us have discussed (or tried to discuss) it with our friends and family?

Quand on considère notre propre dèces, il y a une multitude de questions qui nous assaillent. Et je ne parle même pas de ce qui advient de nous une fois qu’on a quitté la vie telle qu’on la connaît. Le terme Dernières volontés, ça vous dit quelque chose? On parle souvent de l’importance de respecter les dernières volontés… Et puis, tout bonnement, un matin, lors de mon rituel caféïné… un ami m’a saisi avec sa perspective sur la chose. Il m’a dit que de toute façon, nos funérailles étaient pour les vivants, pas pour nous… uniquement pour ceux qu’on laisse derrière. Nous, en théorie, on devrait n’en avoir rien à foutre puisqu’on y assistera pas.

Ça alors…

Mais pourquoi alors est-ce que tout le monde met tant d’emphase sur ces incontournables dernières volontés??? Est-ce que c’est notre façon de dissocier ce que la personne était de ce dont nous avons besoin pour faire notre deuil? Et puis si la personne décédée a précisé ne vouloir aucunes funérailles… Est-ce qu’on ne se sent pas un peu abandonné par l’absence de droit à la transition?

So it got me thinking. If I say I want to be incinerated and that I’d like a specific person to keep the urn…. What kind of burden do I really inflict out of some sort of wish to be remembered? Shouldn’t that be person be allowed to move on without a constant reminder? (I’m simply going on a hypothesis here… that’s not really my last wish!)

One thing I know for certain is that it make absolutely no sense to me to have any kind of religious ceremony when I leave this life. And then I start to wonder. My family is not really religious either, but marriages happen in church, funerals happen in church. It’s more of a tradition than an actual belief. What if they needed that part of the process to get together and officialise my departure? What if for some irrational reason, the mystical part about death simply had to go through that route for them to make some sense of it?

But… wouldn’t I leave this world a hypocrit for exiting by a door that I have renounced and denounced?

Maybe I am not a giving person. Maybe I am so focussed on myself that I do not realise how much my death needs to be dealt with in the manner that the living need it to happen.

Can I trust that they would understand my decision and respect it as being a last statement about who I was? Can I speak to them one last time by letting them find out how I want things to be done? Can my funerals reflect who I was, for the last time I will get to show it? Isn’t that more of a goodbye than something so impersonal it does not even contain an ounce of the person you are saying goodbye to?

Ok, ok… maybe I will stick to my plans not to have a religious funeral… but I’ll definitly keep the triangle sandwiches.

Longue vie à tous

Bonjour planète!

I am a woman…

Wow! Not too long ago, that single phrase was one of the hardest ones to say. I’d have to force my mouth to form those words and align them in one blunt statement.

I’ve come to realise that I am not alone in those shoes. (I’ll come back to shoes later!) There are a lot of women in my generations who feel the same way.

For the longest time, I’ve been in denial. I was born and raised a girl. No one tried to force me into being someone else, except me, as usual. There seems to be such an overall, generalised downside to being a woman. And I’m not talking about men/women rights and opportunities. I mean in the simplest things in life… the day to day stuff.

Once upon a time, there was a girl who had one single pair of shoes to wear. She had no understanding, nor any interest in learning, about make-up. She would wear anything that she could find that was clean. Her clothes never quite fit her body and it did not matter. They were mainly slightly baggy. Not that she had any undesireable curves to hide. She had hair alright, but as long as it fit into a poney-tail, she was ok with the way it looked. She hated shopping with a passion and she wouldn’t be caught dead having a girl’s night out. She would dismiss all the cute hip girls as being fashion-obsessed and probably unable to do much else than take care of their looks. She had nice long nails, but that was an accident, solely attributable to the fact that she didn’t bite them off. Hell she helped change a set of breaks on a old trail Jeep….

(Ok…. that would be me… in case the first degree caught you!)

Et un jour, je me suis liée d’amitié avec une personne que je considérait comme étant beaucoup trop femme…. Être trop femme! Quel concept intéressant. J’ai mis mes apréhensions et mon mépris de côté. Je me proclamais ouverte d’esprit, alors en toute intégrité, je me suis forcé! J’ose à peine imaginer comment elle me voyait de son côté! Alors, voilà… est-ce qu’elle est Tom-Boy ou simplement incapable d’avoir du style… Pourtant, je n’ai jamais eu des manières masculines. Je joue de charme… J’ai toutes sortes de petites mimiques comiques… Je bouge délicatement… Je sautille de joie devant n’importe quoi! Et bon, dans ce temps là, je ne faisais même pas de sport. Alors non… ça ne colle pas avec la théorie du Tom-Boy.

Alors là…. nous sommes dans une impasse… Pourquoi, mais pourquoi donc? Je me refusais à la féminité.

Dites, vous savez tout ce qu’on dit des femmes? Quand on s’y arrête deux minutes, on comprend pourquoi il n’y a personne qui voudrait être associé à ce genre humain… 

Girls are what? Girls are bitchy, back-stabbing… Girls are complicated and no man on Earth should try to understand them. Girls are needy. Girls are weak. Girls cry all the time. Girls are susceptible. Girls are easily hurt. Girls don’t like other girls because they are always competing. Girls take forever to get ready. Girls can’t make up their mind.

Now tell me you’d want to be one of those??? I have always and will always roll my eyes when I hear a friend tell me something that starts with: Nous autres les filles…. or: Eux autres les gars. Those darn categories. I had set in my mind that I didn’t want that distinction. I didn’t want those two classes of people. I wanted to be either in the man category or  no where at all.

Plus, there are always those excessive women’s rights battle that go too far… and sometimes I’m ashamed of their demands, I’m ashamed that maybe people would think that I am one of those. Mind you… feminism got us a looooong way from where we were, and without them, I would probably not sit here in all freedom, expressing myself to whoever wants to read me.

Vous savez…. ces talons hauts… Ils étaient une hantise. C’est comme si en les enfilant, je devenais une de ces pauvres créatures qui ne survivrait pas 24h perdue en forêt… alors que la vérité est que j’ai un si bon sens de l’orientation que je ne me perdrais pas bon!

Pour en revenir à mon amie, la Femme… Je l’ai blessé à quelques reprise avec mes regards horrifiés devant le vêtement qu’elle s’était acheté la veille…  Je l’ai fait rire avec mon air incrédule devant ses explications sur le processus de préparation faciale du matin… Je l’ai prise en pitiée d’être si captive dans la complexité de la mode féminine et des attirails les plus inconfortables que l’homme (oui, l’homme) a su inventer pour la rendre plus belle. Et puis jour après jour, j’ai lentement pénétré dans son univers.

It started with a trendy hair cut.

Now I own more than a dozen pair of shoes.

If you had told me 5 years ago that one day I would turn on my flat hair iron every morning, I would not have laughed, I might have actually punched you in disbelief.

I still need my very-woman friend to help me match pieces of clothes… but I can now do a decent job by myself in a shopping mall. I own all kinds of matching jewelery. The cheap type mind you, but all in style.

And I think that all of this is part of a much bigger picture. (Ref: the post titled One day) I have come to love myself. And this means all of me. The child in me, the sarcastic in me, the lazy in me, the strong in me, and the woman in me. I would still put on a pair of old jeans, go off-road in a Jeep, and play in the mud all day… And the next day, I’d dress-up for work as if I had the interview of my life coming up… And you know, it does not matter anymore that I get the looks by some people who stare at me thinking I couldn’t survive 24h hours in the woods alone. I know I can. I don’t need those fashionable clothes, but I want them. I choose. I’m not trapped. I choose.

Alors me voici, finalement, telle que je suis vraiment. Je ne me cache plus pour être une femme. Et j’aime ça!

I have come to my day… You know… The “One Day I’ll Be Happy” day?

Things keep happening, good or bad. Summer still turns into Fall. There are still rainy days. There are still ill-intentioned people.

But here I stand, on my own two feet, happy.

It is difficult to describe an inner happiness that is out of reach of the world events. Maybe I can try. If you know what it feels like, please add to my words in the Comment section, for I feel I will not find the right ones to express my thoughts.

When you are honest and open with yourself; when you know why you do things and why you feel the way you do; when you recognize your strenghts and come to appreciate your weaknesses… things start making sense.

And when everything makes sense, you know that if you are angry about someone’s behaviour, you can still be happy at the same time. Things can go sour, but you are still able to say I’m ok, genuinely. You don’t feel like you put your head in the sand. But you feel unshaken by the earthquakes around you. Your life, as a whole, becomes this solid thing in your hands.

Maybe I should replace happy with serene. Serenity is defined as the absence of trouble. I am not troubled anymore.

Peace

Hello world…

Notez que mes posts devraient alterner entre l’anglais et le français… parfois mélangés dans le même post! I guess people who are fluent in both English and French will be the ones enjoying this the most…

I am currently sitting somewhere on planet Earth, enjoying a warm coffee with cream. First blog post… I think to myself that this has got to have extremely high level content. I’m one to set the bar very hight… But then I wonder for whom. I have no idea who will read this. I like to think the world will read me. That super-hero complex I guess… But then, I’m conflicted because I hold the sweet thought that this will be my own little private world that no one will know about.

Je suis petite sur la planète. Mais mes yeux sont grands, et ils sont ouverts depuis bien longtemps. Il y a plusieurs années, j’ai commencé à me sentir humaine parmis les humains. J’entends souvent parler de désensibilisation à la télé… de gens qui ne se sentent pas concernés par ce qui se passe au loin dans notre monde. Et puis je dois dire en toute honnêteté que je ne me suis jamais reconnu là-dedans. Je me sens toujours concernée. Je me détache volontairement car c’est parfois trop de souffrance, mais je suis toujours concernée par ce qui se passe, tant ici qu’ailleurs.

That would probably be why I’m feeling conflicted about writing this blog post. If I write for my neighbour, how far away is he? Are my comments on the universe going to distract him from a life of pain and war or am I going to be just wasted time on the net where he could not find comfort? Am I going to be some freak blog he found and shared with his friends to have a good laugh? If I want to relate to humanity, is it ok to talk about the shoes I bought, the quality nutrition I’m trying in vain to maintain, the depth of the ties to my family, the way I feel about religion, my modest opinions on politics, my old fights in college against savage capitalism, the flowers that I’d like to grow, the books I read, my experiences in the workplace… What qualifies as human experience?

En toute modestie… en écrivant ces dernières lignes… je me redresse lentement sur ma chaise. Si je suis humaine, alors je dirais Oui. Toutes ces réponses. Ce que l’humain vit, petit, gros, profond, absurde, est de l’expérience humaine. Et je crois que je me demande une tâche impossible en voulant toucher des humains partout sur la planète en même temps avec tous mes posts. Il y en aura qui vous sembleront vains. Il y en aura qui toucheront votre réalité en plein coeur. J’en écrirai des légers, j’en écrirais des chargés. Parce que je ne crois pas qu’on puisse survivre en étant constament dans un état d’existentialiste. On ne peut pas que contempler le monde. On doit le vivre… dans ces petits, comme ces grands moments.

And that is what I’m going to write about.