11 ways to visit the United States right now

I got home yesterday evening from visiting my dad and stepmother in Florida, where they’re spending the winter. I was conflicted about the trip, which I booked post the election of He Who Shall Not Be Named, but before his travel ban on people from predominantly Muslim countries. I debated cancelling, but in the end, I went, for a host of reasons that have to do with things like family and the majority of voters in the states who did not vote Republican and my sense that it might be important or at least useful (or is that useful but at least important?) to support progressive, inclusive, Americans and their businesses and communities. I’m not defending or justifying my trip, but setting it in some context.

Being in the States, I started thinking about ways in which Canadians could (more rather than less) ethically travel there. There are no easy answers or perfect solutions or courses of action, but here are some of my ideas:

1.       Acknowledge that being able to make the “choice” of whether or not to travel to the United States (or anywhere else, for that matter) automatically confers a certain amount of privilege on you. It means that you have the time and money to travel. And it also means that you’re likely white- or light-skinned, likely not Muslim, likely not a refugee, and likely not born or currently residing in a country currently torn apart by war. You can’t shed that privilege, but you can acknowledge it. And use it to others' advantage.

2.       Further to that, if you’re a straight white man, acknowledge that EVEN THOUGH you look an awful lot like the demographic most likely to kill another American, you’ll be seen as less of a threat than any of the people blocked by the ban.

3.       In the States, support the arts: visit a museum or gallery, see a play, go to a dance performance. See a Meryl Streep movie. I found the above photograph by David Parise, commemorating the Women’s Marches, at a gallery on NW 2nd Street in Miami, near the Wynwood Walls.

Coke bottle with instructions on how to make a Molotov cocktail, 1970, Cildo Meireles, produced during the most violent period of Brazil's military dictatorship. At the Perez Art Museum, Miami.

4.       Join a protest or attend a demonstration.

5.       Call or visit the local mosque in the community you're visiting. Express your support for Islam as a peaceful faith, and your dismay at Islamophobia. Make a donation.

6.       Donate to a U.S. organization, like the ACLU or the Southern Poverty Law Center, that defends human rights and freedom of speech.

7.       Support businesses that support progressive causes

8.       Visit a national park.

9.       Acknowledge that we in Canada are not perfect, either: we’ve got a bunch of stuff to work on in our own backyard, not least of which are issues around our First Nations peoples and the ghastly Conservative party leadership race.

10.   Talk to people. Tell them you’re Canadian. Say things like, “I’m really thrilled that my country has been so welcoming to Syrian refugees,” or, “It really gives me peace of mind to know that if I get sick or break my arm, I’m covered under our universal healthcare policy,” or, “It was a little unsettling to find the Fort Lauderdale airport just a few weeks after the mass shooting there. I like living in a country with gun control.” Not to put too fine a point on it.

11.   Support actual, real, facts distributed by responsible media. Listen to NPR, buy a copy of the New York Times or Mother Jones.

I’m not telling you to go to the States, or not go to the States. I’m not justifying my trip or disavowing it. What I am saying is that if you go, consider your trip in context. There are hundreds of ways to have a positive impact: so, pick a few and make one.

What can I make? What can I give away?

Gone, making someone else happy.

You know how everyone keeps saying that they won’t be one bit sad to say goodbye to 2016?

I agree completely – except that I can’t say that I’m all that confident that 2017 is going to be much better.

There. I said it. Might as well get the negativity and pessimism out of the way first. The past year undoubtably held many lovely moments, triumphs small and large. Hell, I can even think of some of them right now. I got kittens (a mixed blessing). I renovated the bathroom. I bought, and hung, new art. I joined a choir. I went to Saskatoon. I wrote some things (although very few of them were blog posts, and that’s fine; this blog, and the blogosphere in general, are shifting — really, have already shifted — and I have some ideas about all of that but no grief). I got a new tattoo. I did some good work for some good clients. I made a quilt with Isaac. I played guitar while Rowan sang. More times than I can count, I was awed and stunned by my friends’ capacity for love and for their generosity of spirit. And I guess it’s a good sign that I keep thinking of good things to add to this list.

But 2016 was also hard, on a global level in ways that we all know about, and personally in ways that simply aren’t blog-worthy. Or, at least, bloggable. 2016 was a year in which I leaned, heavily, on my friends’ (and my family’s) love and generosity of spirit, humbled by my need for it. 2016 has been journal entries and conversations, long walks and self-care and self-care and self-care and self-care and breathing when people ask me if I’m doing self-care. 2016 has been about radical acceptance (working on it) and glimpses, moments of clarity.

One such moment came only a couple of days ago: that the way I will survive 2017 and beyond will come down to two things, the constants in my thread of lovely moments. I will thrive to whatever extent I can by virtue of generosity and creativity. In 2017, I will live well by making stuff and giving stuff away, sometimes in the most literal sense possible (cookies, money), sometimes metaphorically or metaphysically (words, space, songs, time, ideas, the benefit of the doubt, intention, by not acting when I’m tempted to). Generosity and creativity. Maybe that’s a version of “love not fear,” and that’s fine, too, with a bit more direction: any time at all, but especially when things are hard, what can I make? What can I give away?

Over the weekend, I got out a stash of quilting fabric that had been gifted to me, looked up patterns online for inspiration. I found bits of it.

I cast half a row of stitches onto a knitting needle, with the faint hope that I might be able to knit just a tiny, tiny bit each day — and felt my shoulders twinge. And I decided to accept, once and for all, the fact that I really, truly, cannot knit any more — and then I gave away All The Yarn, as well as my grandmother’s groovy knitting bag, stocked with a couple dozen sets of needles and gauges and more. Now there is space where there once was yarn, and instead of grief I feel relief, veins of pleasure.

I balanced my chequebook and checked on incoming invoices and responded to any niggling doubts about my own solvency by donating to Syrian refugees, buying grocery gift cards for teenagers. I made gift bags for the kids’ teachers. I bought some presents. Giving, I feel, doesn’t always come easily to me. It’s a skill I need to hone, a practice I need to make more prevalent in my life. I’m going to try. Even if it’s because I somehow sense that I’m going to need to get better at it in order to, well, live better.

What can I make? What can I give away? Let that be my mantra for 2017. Let’s gather up everything, all of it, especially the hard stuff, and make art of it, or despite it. Let’s gather up anything good and share it. It’s just a theory; I’m only just putting words to it as I write this. I’m going to put it into practice, and we will see what happens.

Roasting marshmallows in the light of a million finished words

I was going through boxes of old papers last week — you know, the kind of task you can do when a child is home sick from his March break camp and therefore actual writing is impossible. Not that I entirely minded having the sick child around (at least, not until he broke a bottle of red nail polish across the bathroom counter and then attempted to clean it up with a new hand towel), because this going-through of papers was a task I had long neglected.

I have approximately 25 years’ worth of journals, and the idea that all this cringingly personal writing was lying around the house, somehow uncategorized and — more to the point — vaguely available to prying eyes, has been weighing on me of late.

It’s not that I think that anyone would actually be interested in reading through several thousand pages of my handwritten notes. (Actually, I just did some rudimentary math, and it’s approximately 20,000 pages, conservatively. Ye Gods.) It’s not that there’s anything particularly scandalous in there. It’s just that these decades worth of journals are glimpse (more accurately, an exhaustively thorough probing) into the most trivial, boring, tedious, repetitive details of the inner workings of my brain. This is the stuff that I get out of my brain and onto the page each day in an effort to be a functional human being, to write (hopefully) better and more interesting things that people were actually meant to read. These are 20,000 pages of to-do lists and whining and anxieties and ideas and ruminations on my weight, on what I did and what I didn’t do but wished I had. Ad nauseam. These journals are writing for nobody but me. (I’ll be fair: there’s likely lots of happiness in those 20,000 pages, too, but I’ll wager that the happiness isn’t any more interesting than the less happy stuff.)

And, while some people would argue that the above is a precise description of blogging, blogging to me has always been a conscious decision to write for other people. It’s a highly curated, carefully chosen, absolutely non-daily slice of life. And, yes, I strive to be “honest” online, but honesty isn’t the same thing as subjecting any of you to the ongoing monologue in my head about whether there are enough leftovers for the kids’ lunches.

In my organizing, I came across this, the earliest journal I have:

Don’t judge.

The diary has only two entries. The first, dated, Saturday, December 3, 1983, is also, coincidentally, the day I got my first period. It is, predictably, appropriately, histrionic. Thirty-three years (whoa: thirty-three years? Gah.) later, it still feels too embarrassing to read out loud, or to transcribe for you here. Not because of the biological facts of the entry, but because of my tween-before-tween-was-a-thing need to write about it as though I were performing for an audience. It includes lines that may well have come straight out of Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret, to wit, “‘I am now a woman’ as they say’” and, “I feel so fat. Now I know why I’ve been so edgy all week.” Yeah, like I had any idea.

This is 12-year-old me pretending to write for myself but really writing for other people.

The next entry is a bit over a year later, and my 13-year-old literary critic agrees with me:

This is me. I hate it here. The last entry is a year ago, and it’s stupid. I was trying to write in a dumb way. I’m more open now. I just feel lonely, and wish this whole thing never happened.

Well, then.

I have no idea what “this whole thing” was about now, but 13-year-old me doesn’t care to explain, because she doesn’t need to. She’s writing for herself, in her moment, not for the woman she actually became. And I respect her curmudgeonly little self a little bit more for that, even as I’m trying to applaud the 12-year-old version of her for at least getting some words down on the page. Because that's hard shit.

All my old journals are now arranged chronologically in bankers’ boxes. They have been sealed, with instructions on the top of each box to destroy immediately — without reading — in the event that I die or am incapacitated. Don’t say you weren’t warned. I authorize an Internet posse of you all to ensure this happens.

Or maybe, one day soon, I’ll have a beach bonfire and roast marshmallows in the heat of all those words. I’m not quite there yet, but if I don’t need you to read them, then why on earth am I still holding onto them?