Moving back to a city I know well fooled me into thinking that moving – not just the move itself, but everything that comes with it, all the emotions and saying goodbye and ending routines – would be easy because I knew what I was getting into. It’s been confusing, then, that, duh, of course it’s still hard. I hate goodbyes, I hate endings, I like routines. We have a little more than a month left in Montreal and I’m suddenly distinctly aware of time.

I feel a little scattered these days. I do things in fragments.

I did a little reading at Drawn & Quarterly as part of Andrew Hood’s launch for his newest collection of short stories, The Cloaca. There was also cake for Invisible’s 5th birthday. I ate a slice with my hands. Afterwards, Caro and I went a few doors down and ate burgers at Nouveau Palais, drank red wine, talked. A few days later I was in Toronto and went to that launch as well because I like The Cloaca a lot and the Invisible folks too. This time Samantha was my date, and we ate pho and it was good.

I’m doing another reading on June 6th at Drawn & Quarterly with Angie Abdou and Mark Lavorato. The reading came up because Angie mentioned on Twitter that she was going to be in Montreal, and I asked her if she was going to read and she said, “No, but do you want to do a reading?” and then we were organizing it.Twitter can be useful. You should come. Angie is great. And even though I don’t have anything new to read, It will be my last reading as a Montrealer.

I forgot to post a link to this article that John Shoesmith wrote for CA Magazine about accountants who are also writers. So, yeah, I really am an accountant.

Did you know you could go surfing in Montreal? You can.

At the last minute I decided to see Joyce Carol Oates. She’s such a huge literary figure and I imagined that someone who has written 70 books could only be stern and, frankly, terrifying. I showed up at the Grand Bibliotheque de Montreal naively expecting to buy tickets at the door only to realize that the event was sold out. Oops. But, just like that, a stranger appeared with a ticket she no longer needed. “Um, I’ll take it,” I said, and then she even shook her head when I took out my wallet to pay.

The interview between Oates and Eleanor Wachtel (a voice that I’m more accustomed to hearing in the car on a Sunday afternoon, not on stage and coming from an actual body), was one of the most fascinating literary events I’ve attended. Unlike my original assumption, Oates was warm and humble. She spoke, amazingly, in fully formed paragraphs. She talked about things like raising chickens when she was a child, the long series of cats she’s had in her life, why places like Niagara Falls inspire suicide, the habits of couples where one or both partners are writers, the myth of Medusa or the concept of an eclipse as ways of explaining the purpose of art, her family and the seeds of many of her novels. Thank you, stranger, for that ticket.

On the topic of books, I’ve read many in the past few months that I’ve enjoyed and meant to write about. It feels too daunting to write about them now, so I dipped into the pile by my bed and had a look at the pages I’d dogeared during my reading. For reference, these are a few things I marked:

From Zona by Geoff Dyer, a shot by shot description of Tarkovsky’s movie, Stalker, which I’ve only seen (maybe?) 15 minutes of. I liked the book a lot, though.

But perhaps that is and always will be one’s deepest wish: to have the terms of the offer slightly amended so that it can be retrospectively applied, to build a time machine, to go back and have another go, another punt, another throw of the dice, this time knowing the result in advance. The question, I suppose, is this: is one’s deepest desire always the same as one’s greatest regret? (Geoff Dyer then goes on to discuss how, if so, his greatest regret is that he’s never had a three-way.)

From The Secret Lives of People in Love by Simon Van Booy (a collection of short stories set in Paris, Rome, Kentucky, Greece – basically every place I am a sucker for reading about):

A filthy homeless man is squatting with the American tourists and telling jokes in broken English. He is not looking at the girls’ shaved legs but at the unfinished bottle of wine and sullen wedge of cheese. The Americans seem good-natured and pretend to laugh; I suppose the key to a good life is to gently overlook the truth and hope that at any moment we can all be reborn.

The Pont des Arts is wooden, and if you look through the slats, you can see boats passing beneath. Sometimes small bolts of lightning shoot from the boats as tourists take pictures of one another, and sometimes they just aim and shoot –I like these kinds of photographs best, not that I have a camera–but if I did, I would randomly take pictures of nothing in particular. How else could you record life as it happens.

A tiny, perfect phrase from Tamara Faith Berger’s Maidenhead, which is actually a big, raw book about teenaged girls and sex and obsessions and finding oneself. Top notch subjects, all of them:

I’d be more than an open book too. My spine would crack, I’d fall out in halves.

From The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes, which I mostly read curled up on the couch at the apartment I stayed in Manila:

When you’re young – when I was young – you want your emotions to be like the ones you read about in books. You want them to overturn your life, create and define a new reality. Later, I think, you want them to do something milder, something more practical: you want them to support your life as it is and has become. You want them to tell you that things are OK. And is there anything wrong with that?

(I also read The Stranger’s Child by Alan Hollinghurst, which I especially enjoyed because I was at the height of my Downton Abbey phase, and was only interested in reading about British families, the rich ones and the not so rich ones. Alan Hollinghurst is a master, and I’m sure I highlighted excerpts from the book, but I read it on my Kindle, and my Kindle is now out of batteries and I can’t find the charger. Real books 1, e-books 0.)

From Wild, Cheryl Strayed’s memoir of hiking the PCT shortly after her mother’s death. I was a fan of Cheryl Strayed before I even knew her name, one of the legions of people who gulped down her anonymous Dear Sugar column over at The Rumpus. Her writing is a kind of magic.

I lay back and closed my eyes and let my head sink into the water until it covered my face. I got the feeling I used to get as a child when I’d done this very thing: as if the known world of the bathroom had disappeared and become, through the simple act of submersion, a foreign and mysterious place. Its ordinary sounds and sensations turned muted, distant, abstract, while other sounds and sensations not normally heard or registered emerged.

I had only just begun. I was three weeks into my hike, but everything in me felt altered. I lay in the water as long as I could without breathing, alone in a strange new land, while the actual world all around me hummed on.

20 lbs of crab from the Gaspe eaten around the kitchen table. We made a mess; we drank wine; we talked loudly.

Pink eggs for Greek Easter. They’re supposed to be red, but my dye came out pink.

A dinner composed primarily of cheese.

Cheap champagne in a hotel room tumbler, new book.

33, I’m ready for you.

I finished typing in the final changes at the kitchen table, which as you can see is a bit of mess these days. The book about home renovation is Andrew’s, not mine, as he bears the brunt of that stuff more than I do. We’re not renovating so much as getting our place ready for sale because, after 6 years here in Montreal, we’re moving back to Toronto, probably in June. Predictably, I have feelings about this, a mix of excitement about going back to a city I love that has changed so much while I’ve been away and sadness for leaving another city I love, where I’ve changed while living here.

I’ll keep you posted on both fronts.

After eating too much (i.e. just enough), we strolled around the grounds of a church looking out onto the most incredible landscapes. The countryside is a muddy yellow-green; I’ve never seen anything precisely that shade.

We also visited a bee farm and, then before heading home, picked up buco tarts, coconut pies the town is known for, and stopped at one of the many fruit stands along the way to buy jackfruit, mangoes and boiled peanuts to eat at home and in the car.

The next day two carloads of us (Two! And that was only a small section of my family!) visited a coconut plantation where we toured a candy pink-coloured museum that housed a random assortment of collections: ornate religious floats, taxidermied animals and mounted insects, coins (I spotted a Canadian nickle), urns, traditional Filipino clothing.

We had lunch near a waterfall, the water gushing around our feet as we sat at picnic tables to eat.

I saw some traditional Filipino dances and went on a carabao ride (water buffalos are all over the countryside).

Baguio was a mid-trip getaway, a chance to really escape the bustle of the city and relax. Baguio is known as a prime summer destination spot since its elevation in the mountains means the air is cool and refreshing. The drive was long and fascinating, and I noticed things I had never seen before: rice fields, varying shades of green depending on how far along they were; white herons swooping into those fields, and if there weren’t herons, then pieces of white cloth tied to stakes to imitate the look of the herons – scarecrows, I guess; mango trees, the squat round clumps of their foliage; pineapple fields, their tops poking out of the ground, the opposite of how I thought pineapples grew (I imagined pineapple trees?).

And then there were the twisting mountain roads, the rising mist over valleys and towns in the distance. My cousin Rene organized the VIP treatment for us in Baguio, and we stayed in a gorgeous hotel with amazing views and had delicious meals throughout.

We visited the Ben Cab museum, which is one of the most stunningly landscaped museums I’ve ever been to.

On our way home from Baguio, we stopped at the Lady of Manaoag shrine. The shrine is known for its miraculous powers, like being responsible for saving the town from wildfires and bombs, and is one of the most popular pilgrimage sites in the Philippines, although on a Wednesday morning, it was thankfully not as busy as it can get towards Holy Week. We waited in line to get a closer look at the Lady (as I like to call her).

I went with my mom because I’m not well versed in church etiquette. The signs on the wall told us we only had a minute with the shrine, and I watched as other people walked up to it, knelt down, prayed and reached in and touched her robe. I noticed they were using napkins to do this, and I dutifully removed a few pieces of Kleenex from my bag. “Use this,” I told my mom. When it was our turn, I walked with her to the shrine, knelt down and rubbed the robe with my Kleenex, assuming that its purpose was to avoid strangers’ (and strangers with illnesses they were hoping to cure via miracles’) germs. Afterwards I tossed the Kleenex in a garbage bin, and only later when my mom asked me what I’d done with it did I realize that people kept their napkins, that rather than being germ-phobic, they were taking a little bit of that miracle back home with them. Oops.

I bought petition candles, though, each one a different colour depending on what you wanted to pray for. At least I knew what to do with those. Kind of.

I landed in Manila at the break of dawn on a Tuesday morning and was that weird combination of delirious and adrenaline charged, too much so to really process where I’d landed and what I was seeing, and in many ways felt the same when I left less than two weeks later. I find it hard to pin down my thoughts on Manila itself. It’s a strange city. Huge, messy. What I call “Manila” is really Metro Manila, a series of cities connected by roads and highways, with no clear cut centre or downtown. The apartment I lived in for two weeks was in a glossier, Americanized part of Quezon City. We were on the 39th floor where my view was a jagged blend of various sizes of skyscrapers, multicoloured houses, slums, roads and the Pasig river, skinny and murky green.

(Street scene)

That first morning, in the car on the way to the apartment, we hit my first traffic jam of the city, and I wasn’t awake enough to realize that it would be the first in many, many traffic jams. The traffic in Manila is a sprawling, lazy beast, an entity unto itself. It’s hard to ignore if you spend any time within the borders of the city.The traffic is indicative, I guess, of how busy and chaotic the city is. Chaotic, but seamless too – cars straddle two lanes at a time and dart in front of other vehicles whenever there’s an opening. Buses and jeepneys barrel down the streets, and then screech to a stop to let passengers off. I didn’t witness any accidents, though, just many close calls.

(In Eastwood)

Mostly what you’ll find in Manila are extremes: extreme wealth, extreme poverty (although more weighted towards poverty) and all points in between. The area I stayed in, for instance, was as North American as could be. Eastwood is essentially a gigantic mall complex with stores like Marks & Spencer and The Body Shop, restaurants like McDonalds or TGI Friday’s. I will admit to having a really great burger at Johnny Rocket’s, an American diner replica, complete with jukebox and, mystifyingly, waiters and waitresses who broke into a dance routine every hour or so. The area was clean, safe, pretty, and I felt more like I was in California than the Philippines when I was there. It’s the kind of place where thoughtful relatives will make sure a North American will stay when they’re on their first trip to the Philippines to minimize the culture shock.

Usually when I travel, I’m with Andrew and we cover a lot of ground on foot. I like culture shock. I research in advance, we look up recommendations online, we attack. This trip was different because it was just me and my mother, and I hadn’t done any preparation. My goal was simply to meet my family. I had no loftier expectations, which is why it was such a pleasure to realize that in the end, I had covered a lot of ground. My family, all relatives I had never met or spoken to before, went out of their way to show me around, to feed me Filipino foods (and the occasional pizza or McDonalds breakfast), to make sure I saw whatever I wanted to see. And so every day I would wake up early, and someone new would knock on our door to take us out.

I’ll be honest: I went to a lot of malls in Manila. There are so many of them, each with their particular slant. At Greenhills I walked through the maze of flea marketesque booths and bought knock off designer clothes. It was the same at 168 mall in Divisoria, but the clothes were even cheaper. In Makati I bought embroidered doilies from Rustan’s, the upscale Filipino department store. I went to an SM in Cubao and then realized that SM (the acronym for Shoe Mart, although I didn’t see any shoes for sale) was the Filipino equivalent of Walmart and, like Walmart, is insidiously taking over the landscape throughout the country. I don’t usually spend this much time shopping, but it was a central activity and a way to see new things.

(In Makati)

But I did more than shop, of course. I spent an afternoon at the gorgeous Ayala Museum in Makati City, and learned about Filipino painters like Juan Luna or saw scenes in Filipino history in a huge room devoted to dioramas.

I went to an antique market and marveled at the piles of wooden carved religious iconography.

(Quiapo Church)

I visited the Church of the Black Nazarene on a Friday in Quiapo. The church was packed, and a long line of worshipers made their way to the altar on their knees.

(Sampaguita vendors)

(Candles for sale)

Outside the church dozens of vendors sold wreaths of Sampaguita, the national flower, or waxy bundles of devotional candles. We walked through the market in Quiapo itself, a crush of people and smells and sights that I’ve never experienced before.

(So many jeepneys)

I went on some jeepney rides. The jeepneys are a mainstay of public transportation and a cliche of the overall look of Manila – hybrid jeeps painted in garish colours, emblazoned with pictures of Jesus or Mary or nonsensical phrases. Like any tourist, I couldn’t stop taking pictures of them at first, and then they somehow blended into the background and I wondered why I had so many pictures of jeepneys on my digital camera. A ride costs only a few pesos and the driver will stop anywhere along the route. They give you the opportunity to take deep breaths of that humid, heavy, exhaust-filled air.

Mostly, though, I spent time with my family and this time usually revolved around food, at restaurants or lunches at homes that stretched long into the day. I still want to write about this – my family, the food I ate – and also the trips I made outside of Manila. So, again, stay tuned.

Until later, here’s a selection of photos I took while I was away. There are more to come, along with details and context, but I’ll start with these highlights.

Hello again.

A trip to the Philippines is harder to coordinate than one to Greece, but we eventually got our schedules sorted out, and on Christmas Day I booked myself a ticket for a 20+ hour journey from Montreal to Vancouver and then Vancouver to Manila. I was excited, but this excitement promptly got swallowed up by day to day life. I worked a lot. I tried to write. We had houseguests and did typical Montreal things involving poutine and skating.

And now the trip is around the corner: I leave on Saturday. I arrive in Manila on Monday morning, where I’ll meet my mother, who has been there for a week and a half already. The weather will be very different from the snow and cold here in Canada, and I’m looking forward to this unexpected winter break. But other than the temperature shift, I have no idea what to expect. Either way, I’ll be arming myself with a camera, a notebook and my laptop. The trip is relatively short for such a long distance (two weeks), but I have a feeling it will be the kind that inspires many words, photos, feelings.

I’ll keep you posted. See you in a few weeks.

Too many consecutive late nights at the office over the past two weeks has made me preoccupied with time. Namely, not having time to write. How did people do it, I wondered: work and write? It was too hard to do it all! It wasn’t just hard; it was impossible.

(I know, cue tiny violins.)

A good night’s rest and a Saturday afternoon doing lovely weekend-y things has given me perspective. I’ve always done the working and writing thing; it’s something I can do. It’s just a matter of getting back into the habit again. Which means: back to Sundays at the kitchen table, back to printing pages out and reading them over at the foodcourt at lunch, back to typing on my laptop in bed on weekday nights, even just a little bit. Back to remembering that writing isn’t such a precious, precarious activity. Write like a motherfucker.

And I’ve found time to enjoy other things these days. Loudon Wainwright III’s Album I, the first season of Downton Abbey, Shame, Patrick DeWitt’s The Sisters Brothers. Today I saw photos from Taryn Simon’s series, An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar. It’s so great: “an inventory of what lies hidden and out-of-view within the borders of the United States” and includes portraits of inbred tigers, a braile version of Playboy, sunken nuclear waste and more. (If you don’t trust my opinion, maybe Salman Rushdie will convince you?) If you live in Montreal, you can see these photos for free at the DHC.

So there is time. It’s just a matter of organizing it.

Two unrelated things:

1) Just wanted to point you in the direction of Carin Makuz’s blog, Matilda Magtree, where she was kind enough to interview me. Carin and I go back to the Humber days. Her site is worth keeping in your bookmarks – thoughtful and beautifully written with great photos as well. And she picks a perfectly appropriate meal to accompany my book.

2) When I was in Toronto over the holidays, I picked up a bunch of my old zines. I’m going to scan some of the less embarrassing pages for an experiment I’d like to do this year to teach myself the basics of e-publishing. In the spirit of the recently released Magnetic Fields song, here’s a sample of a page from melt the snow #5, created at the height of my Magnetic Fields fandom (click to get a larger image so that you can actually read the teeny tiny type).