Frightened

I just banged my knee again on my desk. You would think that I would learn how not to bang my knee. But I haven't. It has been happening all weekend. It's frightening the dog. It's happeneing because there have been some changes around here.

A few weeks ago, I scored (SCORE!) a nifty piece of office furniture which my co-workers call a credenza. I have no idea if that's the proper name for it. My gut instinct is that isn't the proper name. That's not just me being superior (I am a writer, you know). To me, credenza sounds like a dance, an energetic, elegant dance. This bulky, blocky piece of furniture just doesn't seem like a credenza. It doesn't seem like a dance. It's immovable (or nearly). It's a stance.

But it's in the corner of our "den" now, waiting to be filled with important papers, my extra cds, and various other office accoutrements. (By the way, I'm supposed to be finishing my income taxes right now, but I just can't face it. So instead, I decided to check in on my friends' blogs, and just read Meladuck's superior week-in-review.) We had to shift the furniture around to get the credenza to fit. The desk got shifted down the wall. You wouldn't think that moving the desk no more than a foot would make that much of a difference. But it does. I keep knocking my knee on it. The noise is quite loud. It's frightening the poor dog, who is quiveringly afraid of fireworks. Any little bang gets him shivering.

He's pretty gun-shy these days. He's very jumpy. The parents are spending too much time together. Neither one is even close to being happy. It has almost come to a contest between the two of them...which one is worse off. There's no denying it. They're both in rough shape. Neither of them are cured of their cancers (I just typoed "cursed" for "cured"...Freudian slip?). The best either can hope for (or the worst), is some sort of reprive. But as a former friend (as of the moment I read her email) just told me, we're all terminally ill. We're all going to die. Nice. I guess that I'd better just suck it up and carry on.

But most of us (especially this friend), haven't been bombarded with so much in the last few years. I have been sucking it up and carrying on. But it's getting harder. My mother has developed pains in her head/ear which she thought was an earache/pimple. She has also been struggling with pronouncing words. And she has been sleeping a lot. I'm very scared.

Classics

I don't know if it makes me less Canadian or what, but I've never read Anne of Green Gables. My elementary school put on a well-meaninged production of it way back in the day, and perhaps I figured that it was enough that I sat through the play.

The interest in AoGG has risen to a fever pitch in the last few years, undoubtably energized by other countries' fascination in this truly Canadian story. I don't know if it's still true, but a few years ago, Japanese couples were coming to Canada to have a truly AoGG wedding. But that isn't the depth of international interest.

In this morning's Vancouver Sun, there is an article about the answer a British journalist got when he asked one of Canada's international literary superstars, Margaret Atwood. When asked about how she thought Anne's story would/should end, Ms. Atwood replied "She would have ended up a disease-ridden prostitute".

Awesome. That might explain the green hair.