PANTS ON FIRE

My sister-in-law posted on FB a picture of one of the Minions from Despicable Me saying, "Just once in my life I'd actually like to see a liar's pants catch on fire."

Loved it!

But then I got to thinking…we'd all be running around like human torches, hurling ourselves into rivers, streams and oceans to douse the flames. The intensity of the fires and the steam rising from buttocks being extinguished would contribute substantially to global warming.

We all lie from time to time but, what makes a lie become a truth.

© Nance Thacker 1990
I found a pile of roughed cartoons and I'm in the process of inking them.

We've all had them, those holidays from hell. Nothing goes in our favour. It's nobody's fault. Or, maybe we've slipped into a frustration induced, period of incompatibility with our travel companions and we're ready to strangle each other. We simmer and seethe for the duration of our return trip home. 

If there is any effort to converse at all, all that passes for conversation is "Humpf" or "What - e - ver" - delivered with "tsk", sigh and eye roll for maximum effect. If you, like me, are of the white Anglo Saxon persuasion then the WASP fight consisting of deafening silence is most likely to be your choice.

What a waste of money THAT trip was! you're all thinking.

But once we're back home, ask us how our trip was and, dollars to donuts, you'll hear, "great"… "good"… or at the very least "OK".

What's happened here? Is it taboo to admit we've had a shitty time? Are we averse to sounding like whiners? If we tell the flat out truth that, "The f***ing trip was f***ing horrible", does it make us sound ungrateful for the opportunity that we've had to even have had a shitty vacation? After all some people never get away anywhere and here we are complaining. What nerve! 

Do we play the consensual game wherein holiday = great time, so we try to keep up with, or even surpass, the Joneses with tales of great adventures that all would envy? In my younger days, before I'd experienced any intimate relationships, I seriously believed (because they made it sound so romantic) that every holiday any couple I ever knew had been on, was INCREDIBLE!  

OK, so I was a bit naive. One of the big attractions of being "in a relationship" was to share in travelling adventures like…well, like Jonathan and Jennifer Hart in that TV show HART TO HART (that ran from 1979 - 1984). Maybe solve a crime or two along the way; not criminally offend the consensual code with a shitty experience.

Jonathan and Jennifer Hart gasp in horror at the very idea
that their trip could be anything other than fabulous

What if we're not glossing over our difficulties at all? Somehow the good times (as meagre as they may be) have risen like cream to the top. We scrape off these stories, embellish their magnificence, and with each re-telling our belief in the truth of we had a great time becomes so increasingly strong that it comes to embody the essence of our whole experience.

Is it a mark of resilience or a default mechanism that our inner Jonathans and Jennifers survive un-singed, bonded more deeply, and ready to tackle yet more adventures?

Staycation vacation

Rod and I have been on Vancouver Island 1 whole month now. We are residents living like tourists which is the best way to discover one's new surroundings.

Scenes from the village of James Bay, a five minute walk from our place. This is where we do our grocery shopping, laundry and grab a coffee (I've discovered 5 coffee shops around the intersection that comprises the centre of the village).

Many cottage-like homes with English style gardens line narrow streets.

Fantastic fare to be found here: baking, local produce, honey, music
and even a  tarot card reader.

Drivers have to be alert for carriages, pedi-cabs, tour busses and sight seers
as well as for the young and old alike who just walk slower here.

I admit that this feels a little weird, this staycation that's really a vacation; no phone calls, no clients in need of emergency care, no one wanting to line up a job, workshop or appointment for next week or the week after that or the next...

Rod's taken to his retirement like a fish to water. Suddenly, free from the demands of customers and the estimating that filled evenings and weekends, he's read more books since we got here than he has during our whole relationship! And I used to think he was a non-reader, a trait, which for a Thacker - voracious readers that we all are - was incomprehensible. Years ago I found the most difficult challenge put before me during a vipasana retreat wasn't not talking. I loved that! That was a piece of cake. But, not reading, that was impossible. My eyes would lite on print everywhere: cereal boxes, t-shirts, boxes of tea and the little tab on the tea bags... I fixated on the washing instructions on the tags of my clothes.

This vacation finds me, at unexpected moments: in the middle of a shower, when I awaken, as I'm doing dishes, chomping at the bit to "make something happen". The underlying catalyst for this is a limboish feeling of dropping into space that washes over me now and again. I'm not the one retiring. I'm on vacation. But vacations have a beginning, middle and end and then you go back to work. With undetermined time, place and work to "return" to I feel eerily unemployed; redundant.

So, just as I acknowledged my compulsion to read and got back to the silence of my mind I feel my redundancy and get back into the headspace of vacation.

This time just for me, away from my practice, is precious. I tell myself there will be work again, clients will call and I will be able to remember how to do what I do.