Eva has this idea we should retire to Nice. Hot Mediterranean climate for much of the year. Reasonably close to a lot of other places in Europe by plane and train. Big enough to have amenities. Small enough not to be hard to get around. Colorful. Historical. All sorts of reasons.
Neither of us is hugely conversant in French, of course. That's one drawback, though it does have its uses. We will not be tempted to watch a lot of television. Local politics will not be as pressing an issue. And since it is a tourist city, all services are offered in several languages, for the lazy or linguistically not gifted.
Part of me resists: Too far away. Too unsettling. Too many unknowns. Too many unknowns. (Did I write that twice?--oh, oh. ) Too many risks.
That's when the other part of me checks in. "Too many risks"? How many risks is enough? What happened to the man who used to quit a job and move to a new city for the challenges? (Answer--he settled in to one city for way too long and got comfortable. Well--began to settle for this as comfortable enough.) (Other answer--he got a lot older while settled.)
I still look for ways to get out of my comfort zone as I search for writing challenges, for ways to expand my skills. But I do not usually pursue those for publication, just for information and relaxation. That suggests that I'm just locating a new comfort zone, after all. So to get out of my zone as a way to live my life, at my age? Shudder.
Maybe that's the best reason of all to move. To a new continent. To a new city. To a new culture. In a new language. To get over or at least confront the timidity, get on with living my retirement, rather than living out my retirement. Hell--just to get on with living. Maybe then I can quit looking at retirement as this yawning chasm of boredom, a time spent looking for ways to spend time (which it seems to be for a lot of my acquaintances).
Of course, I'm also afraid of what happens when Eva and I have no fall-back, when we have only each other as "community." My parents divorced right after my Dad hit retirement and the wall of his own diminishing capacity, and began to want to micromanage all aspects of their daily lives--in the home that had been Mom's main domain.
What if I'm like him that way (not that I ever was an Alpha in the pack--but then neither was he. He just hungered for that position and hated anyone who got farther up that ladder he thought was or should be reserved for him)? What if I become too difficult for Eva to live with or tolerate? In a place far from home, not quite making it possible for us to feel at home?
Thursday 20 September 2012
Monday 17 September 2012
When will they ever learn?...
I'm not so much thinking as snorting the past few days at the posturing coming out of Buckingham Palace and Anglesey about the publishing of photos of the Duchess of Cambridge, sunbathing topless on a private terrace on a private property in the south of France on a private vacation with her husband.
First off--yes, they are entitled to their privacy, and a married couple should have the chance to enjoy each others' company in whatever state of dress or undress suits their mood and the occasion. And the south of France is a great place for getting loads of sun on as much exposed skin as you can stand or dare.
And yes, paparazzi are bottom-feeders. So too are the publishers of magazines that would print such photos. But the publishers and photographers would have no purpose without the purchasers. Popular culture in one of its more sensational forms in the making. And nobody courts popularity any more assiduously than the House of Windsor.
After all, surely after all the outrage over Diana, or even Sarah, the Duchess of York, and even recently of Harry in Vegas, the Cambridges might have been a bit more circumspect, found a somewhat less exposed platform from which to soak up a few rays? They have to know by now that there will be a loaded camera in the hands of a canny cameraperson pretty well anywhere they go. And that it does not take much of an opportunity (even in the middle of something like 640 acres) for a long lens to see things it's not supposed to be seeing?
So now, once again, it's "shoot the messenger" time for the House of Windsor. The message was, "You took too much for granted." Now try this message: "You guys need to smarten up."
But, no, they'd rather come out wildly indignant after the fact at the yellow press, than adjust to the unpleasant reality that they cannot be photogenic celebrities only when it suits them and their charities. And they cannot expect that the photographers, all of them, will play nice the rest of the time. It's the non-op photos that pay the bills, Windsors and Cambridges. Learn that lesson and quit with the pouting when your own carelessness gets exposed.
Or, Cambridges, just tell the publishers to take a flying leap. Explain that you are married, young, and attractive to each other, and intend to act on that set of facts, as couples are entitled to do. Just do it in what is truly private, and not in what you incorrectly suppose to be private enough.
Post Scriptum 18 Sept.:
I hear by the news this morning that the Cambridges have been granted an injunction against Closer, which must hand over the digital originals of the photos and start paying fines if it does not. I guess other injunctions will be forthcoming against other publications in Italy and Ireland that have also published some or many of the photos. So maybe the House of Windsor and its offspring have not yet learned not to get careless and not to get caught, but they have learned that they can fight back--something it was apparently unwilling or unable to do a generation ago. I still wish they would just say "publish and be damned." But that is unrealistic on my part.
First off--yes, they are entitled to their privacy, and a married couple should have the chance to enjoy each others' company in whatever state of dress or undress suits their mood and the occasion. And the south of France is a great place for getting loads of sun on as much exposed skin as you can stand or dare.
And yes, paparazzi are bottom-feeders. So too are the publishers of magazines that would print such photos. But the publishers and photographers would have no purpose without the purchasers. Popular culture in one of its more sensational forms in the making. And nobody courts popularity any more assiduously than the House of Windsor.
After all, surely after all the outrage over Diana, or even Sarah, the Duchess of York, and even recently of Harry in Vegas, the Cambridges might have been a bit more circumspect, found a somewhat less exposed platform from which to soak up a few rays? They have to know by now that there will be a loaded camera in the hands of a canny cameraperson pretty well anywhere they go. And that it does not take much of an opportunity (even in the middle of something like 640 acres) for a long lens to see things it's not supposed to be seeing?
So now, once again, it's "shoot the messenger" time for the House of Windsor. The message was, "You took too much for granted." Now try this message: "You guys need to smarten up."
But, no, they'd rather come out wildly indignant after the fact at the yellow press, than adjust to the unpleasant reality that they cannot be photogenic celebrities only when it suits them and their charities. And they cannot expect that the photographers, all of them, will play nice the rest of the time. It's the non-op photos that pay the bills, Windsors and Cambridges. Learn that lesson and quit with the pouting when your own carelessness gets exposed.
Or, Cambridges, just tell the publishers to take a flying leap. Explain that you are married, young, and attractive to each other, and intend to act on that set of facts, as couples are entitled to do. Just do it in what is truly private, and not in what you incorrectly suppose to be private enough.
Post Scriptum 18 Sept.:
I hear by the news this morning that the Cambridges have been granted an injunction against Closer, which must hand over the digital originals of the photos and start paying fines if it does not. I guess other injunctions will be forthcoming against other publications in Italy and Ireland that have also published some or many of the photos. So maybe the House of Windsor and its offspring have not yet learned not to get careless and not to get caught, but they have learned that they can fight back--something it was apparently unwilling or unable to do a generation ago. I still wish they would just say "publish and be damned." But that is unrealistic on my part.
Friday 7 September 2012
Surprises where no surprises need be
I was really surprised, and surprised at being surprised, at the number of people (especially among my Facebook friends) who expressed surprise that a thing like the shootings at the P.Q. rally the other night in Montreal could happen in Canada. They seemed to think it was some weird American contamination of our Northern purity. What crap.
Being Canadian is a whole bunch of ways of being human, within a set of national boundaries and travelling assumptions. But let's not be so naive as to try to deny or escape the fact that Canadians are heir to all the strengths and weaknesses of human nature. We are not and never have been some special case island of moral rectitude, too pure to jaywalk, let alone own or hold guns, let alone shoot something or someone with them. Does no one read history anymore?
(I know our Prime Minister and our Minister of Finance like us to think they have walled us off from the economic mess much of the rest of the world is in--but that's probably wishful thinking, too.)
We--we humans, that is, not just we Canadians--seem to have this capacity for thinking that our special way or our special ways of being human are the right ways, the paths to something everyone should be following towards. And when someone with whom we share some identity or identification (middle-aged Anglo-Canadian Quebecer, for example) does something "unusual," or even perhaps criminal, we find our path defiled, and have to assign the blame to some extra-territorial cause. Or to insanity, especially if the perp claims or seems to claim to be acting in our name.
The cause is within ourselves, folks. Maybe that's what really scares us. Not all the would-be pro- or anti-separatism assassins are Quebecois-speaking, bearded FLQers from the Sixties and Seventies. This act and the shouted claim to be among the waking (I typoed "wanking," first time, and wonder now if I shouldn't have left it that way) Anglos is maybe an exaggeration of a lot of Rest-of-Canada attitudes, but it goes only a bit farther in a direction a lot of Comments were already tending (or trending). Well, maybe quite a bit farther.
But try to think of it not as a deviation from norms, but as a partial definition of norms.
Not a good thing, truly. But not a totally outsider thing, either.
Being Canadian is a whole bunch of ways of being human, within a set of national boundaries and travelling assumptions. But let's not be so naive as to try to deny or escape the fact that Canadians are heir to all the strengths and weaknesses of human nature. We are not and never have been some special case island of moral rectitude, too pure to jaywalk, let alone own or hold guns, let alone shoot something or someone with them. Does no one read history anymore?
(I know our Prime Minister and our Minister of Finance like us to think they have walled us off from the economic mess much of the rest of the world is in--but that's probably wishful thinking, too.)
We--we humans, that is, not just we Canadians--seem to have this capacity for thinking that our special way or our special ways of being human are the right ways, the paths to something everyone should be following towards. And when someone with whom we share some identity or identification (middle-aged Anglo-Canadian Quebecer, for example) does something "unusual," or even perhaps criminal, we find our path defiled, and have to assign the blame to some extra-territorial cause. Or to insanity, especially if the perp claims or seems to claim to be acting in our name.
The cause is within ourselves, folks. Maybe that's what really scares us. Not all the would-be pro- or anti-separatism assassins are Quebecois-speaking, bearded FLQers from the Sixties and Seventies. This act and the shouted claim to be among the waking (I typoed "wanking," first time, and wonder now if I shouldn't have left it that way) Anglos is maybe an exaggeration of a lot of Rest-of-Canada attitudes, but it goes only a bit farther in a direction a lot of Comments were already tending (or trending). Well, maybe quite a bit farther.
But try to think of it not as a deviation from norms, but as a partial definition of norms.
Not a good thing, truly. But not a totally outsider thing, either.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)