Where I’m blogging from

That’s it. 2002 is over, or at least it will be, in a few hours. I got up this morning, sat in front of the computer and read what other people had to say on their blog about this past year. This has now become a routine in my life, a daily ritual I miss on the days when I am traveling away from an Internet connection. Some people will call this ritual a form of dependency, a lack of attachment to the ‘”real world”. They will conclude that bloggers tend to have communication problems and that they have to hide behind machines to finally be able to share what they have to say.

Maybe. I do know a fair share of bloggers or, most generally, “Web people”, who are not the best at face to face communication. I have had some warm e-mail exchanges with people, people I thought would become good friends I could hang out with, only to feel disappointed later when I finally met them or talked to them on the phone and realized that the magic didn’t transfer to the “real world”. I am also surprised to observe that a lot of people I have regular contact with, coworkers, friends and even some family members, have no interest in what I do on the Web and don’t feel curious enough to read my blog, not even once in a while. For a lot of people, the two worlds still don’t mix.

But not for me. The real world is what’s real, online and off. In 2002, I have spent many hours at the desk you see on the picture above, in front of the screen, sharing experiences with bloggers and readers, communicating via e-mail and sometimes meeting people offline, in varied face to face situations. On the wall next to my desk is the painting I recently bought from Rachel (click the above picture to enlarge it), a talented artist whose work I’ve discovered through her blog. I saw this painting on the Web, wrote her an e-mail, and a few weeks later, the painting was up on my wall. I love to look at it while I blog. I love the way it has become a tangible expression of that meeting of the two worlds.

So to all of you whose blog I read on a regular basis, and to all of you who come to visit me once in a while and sometimes take the time to comment, THANK YOU. It’s been a good year, on and off. ;-)
MERCI donc à vous tous, lecteurs et/ou cybercarnetiers, qui prenez le temps de partager vos humeurs et vos trouvailles sur le Web. Mon année 2002 a été bien remplie grâce à vous.

As A frog in the Valley says in a great post he wrote today, which talks about identity, an issue close to the hearts of bloggers:
Je sais qui je suis et je trépigne d’avance à vous connaitre.

Note: I would love to see where you are blogging from. If you are a blogger and you care to share, send me a small photo of your desk or favorite place to blog from, or point me to the URL where I can find it. If I get enough photos, I might gather them all in one space and do a kind of “blogging spot” project. I’ll make this my New Year’s Resolution!

I love this time of the year, not because I’m a big fan of Christmas, but because this is typically when I get to spend the most time reading. I mostly read fiction, which is easier to read in short bursts when I’m on the metro or while I wait for my dinner to cook. Fiction is also the only thing I can handle in the few minutes I set aside for reading in bed every night, when I fight sleep and reread the same paragraph 20 times before I decide to turn the light off.

But a holiday is a holiday and when it’s cold outside and the days are short, I have all the excuses I need to stay indoors and dig in all kinds of books, not just fiction. The sun gently shines in through B’s huge living room window, the numerous presents he gave me are still sitting under our majestic tree, the heat is on, my new cds are playing (Frida’s soundtrack, Marc D�ry, Johnny Cash), there’s a drink for me on the coffee table and an ambitious pile of books waiting for my holiday attention. This pile includes:

• Dream Catcher, a memoir, by Margaret A. Salinger, daughter of J.D. Salinger.
• Edward Hopper, a Taschen art book by Ivo Kranzfelder.
• Sydney, a Lonely Planet Guide, a present form B. to prepare for our possible trip to Australia next Spring.
• The Salon.com Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Authors.
• Les Soupes, plus de 200 recettes venues du monde entier. B. gave me this French cookbook for Christmas, and in another one of our weird synchronicity moments, I also gave him a soup cookbook.
• The Conversations, the art of editing films, by Michael Ondaatje.
• Paris l’instant, by Philippe Delerm, photographs by Martine Delerm.
• L’angle mort, by Jean-Fran�ois Chassay.
• La maison �trang�re, by �lise Turcotte. I need to read more in French and Turcotte is one of my favorite Qu�b�cois writers.

I have started 4 or these books already and I switch between them according to my moods and my other plans for the day. I have no idea how many of these I will be able to finish by the end of the holiday, but just looking at this gorgeous pile of books makes me feel happy, especially when this act of contemplation is combined with the sounds and smells coming from the kitchen as B. is preparing yet another delicious meal.

Conte de No�l pour adultes et b�tes urbaines

Un dimanche soir brumeux, un gars, une fille, une bouteille de vin et un tout premier sapin de vie d’adulte. Comment nous en sommes arriv�s respectivement � l’�ge de 42 et 36 ans sans jamais avoir eu de sapin � la maison tient un peu du myst�re. Mais comme c’est notre premier No�l ensemble, nous nous sommes dit qu’il fallait f�ter �a et mettre fin � la disette de verdure dans nos hivers. Notre sapin est grand et gras, il a une forme parfaite et il sent bon comme les No�ls dont je r�vais quand j’�tais enfant. Chez moi, comme dans bien des familles du quartier o� j’ai grandi, le synth�tique r�gnait.

Apr�s avoir contempl� notre oeuvre du dimanche soir, Blork a d�clar�: C’est la domestication de la b�te urbaine en moi.

J’ai jet� un coup d’oeil inquiet vers lui. Il retenait un sourire et des petites lumi�res brillaient dans ses yeux.

� nos pieds, le chat Spiff avait d�j� commenc� � m�chouiller le sapin.

Si vous �tes � Montr�al pendant le temps des f�tes, que vous avez des enfants dans votre entourage et que vous vous arrachez les cheveux � essayer de les distraire, allez voir le spectacle de No�l au Plan�tarium. J’y �tais samedi dernier avec mes deux neveux (4 et 7 ans) et ils ont vraiment ador�. Ce qui est g�nial c’est que les grands ne s’ennuient pas non plus. Il y a quelque chose de magique dans le fait de se glisser dans son si�ge dans la p�nombre de cet auditorium en forme de cercle et d’entendre les cris de surprise de dizaines de petites voix qui font woooooooooooooow! quand la coupole s’illumine et que les premi�re �toiles apparaissent.

Le spectacle est une r�alisation de Nathalie Martimbeau, une vieille copine qu�b�coise qui �tait exil�e elle aussi dans la r�gion de San Francisco pendant plusieurs ann�es. Apr�s un court retour � Montr�al (et un travail au Plan�tarium), Nathalie fait maintenant de la recherche pour le Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Rien de moins pour nos cerveaux qu�b�cois! Nathalie a d� “sentir” que je venais de voir son spectacle au Plan�tarium puisqu’elle m’a �crit un courriel 2 jours plus tard, alors que nous avions perdu contact depuis 2 ans. Quand on parle d’heureuses co�ncidences… Nathalie m’annonce qu’elle s’est mari�e l’�t� dernier et qu’elle attend maintenant un petit d�crocheur d’�toiles. Avec un p�re et une m�re aussi passionn�s par les astres, parions que le petit (la petite?) aura souvent le nez dans les nuages!

20 words, one year. 2002

Freelanced hard. Broke up with wrong guy. Found the right one. Lost my dad, got new niece. Breathed, loved, blogged.

Summing up your year 2002 in 20 words. It’s the challenge proposed for a third year by The MayFly project. (via This boy is toast.) I’ve decided to post my entry here, with a few links to important moments of 2002 in my ni vu ni connu world.

She’s real!

Sometimes when you meet people on the Web and it takes a while before you meet face to face, you start wondering if these people are real, and if they exist outside of your computer…

Well, tonight I had dinner with Lisa, who maintains a Blog from a Broad, and I can tell you that not only is she real, she’s real sweet! She brought me two big chocolate orange Crunch Balls all the way from England! Lisa, who used to live in Montreal, shares my interest in men who wear aprons in the same way Scottish guys wear kilts, and she also shares my love for orange flavored chocolate. (Please note that these two interests are unrelated.)

We had a big Mexican dinner in Old Montreal and there were a lot of people around the table, but I managed to talk to her and her beau for a little while, and I can now confirm that they do exist. Even after a few margaritas, they were still there. (Check out the size of the drinks on the photo!) Now I’m going to go check and see if these chocolate oranges are real as well…

Intimate terrorism

“Disappointment is another of those emotions that blends both love and hate, and it can be a particularly fruitful one. It has the potential to create a new mood between people if they can find an ironical stance toward it, which prevents it from curdling into disillusionment. Disappointment combines sorrow and anger, and it reaches with a kind of yearning toward the other person. At the same time, it keeps the other at bay by treating him or her as a diminished figure, one that failed to live up to expectations. In therapy, when you talk openly with a fighting couple about each antagonist’s disappointment, it helps soften the rigid idealizations each of them continues to cling to through holding on to feelings of betrayal. Unlike jealousy, cruelty, or boredom, disappointment constains secret hints of mutuality. It can interrupt what New Yorker drama critic John Lahr, reviewing an Arthur Miller play about a tortured marriage, called “the cycle of blame that has infected and seems to have stalemated modern life… with an irrational, often righteous fury that is at once a mask and an admission of fear”. It is not such a long stretch from disappointment to empathy. ”

From Intimate Terrorism, The crisis of love in an age of disillusion, by Michael Vincent Miller.

Here’s to all of you who keep sending me e-mail chain letters, asking me to forward them to 5 of my friends in order for me to find true happiness.
(via Good Morning Silicon Valley)

Naked blogging

My own belief is that one regards oneself, if one is a serious writer, as an instrument for experiencing. Life – all of it – flows through this instrument and is distilled through it into works of art. How one lives as a private person is intimately bound into the work. And at some point I believe one has to stop holding back for fear of alienating some imaginary reader or real relative or friend, and come out with personal truth. If we are to understand the human condition, and if we are to accept ourselves in all the complexity, self-doubt, extravagance of feeling, guilt, joy, the slow freeing of the self to its full capacity for action and creation, both as human being and as artist, we have to know all we can about each other, and we have to be willing to go naked.

This text was written in 1973 by May Sarton, a novelist and poet, in her Journal of a Solitude. Even though Sarton was obviously not talking here about blogs but about writing and works of art in general, this paragraph sounds to me like the best justification (not that we need any) for the existence of blogs, especially those of a more personal nature. I do firmly believe that to understand the human condition – a noble goal and the only life goal that truly makes sense to me – we have to know all we can about each other and we have to be willing to go naked. Hey, Karl over at La Grange understood this concept a while ago, but then again he’s always on the cutting edge and he loves to be naked! (Qui aime bien ch�tie bien, cher cousin).

No, it doesn’t mean that every single detail of our daily lives is interesting and that I love to read about what everybody had for breakfast this week. But under the lens of true emotion and with the right perspective, even a slice of bacon can be fascinating.

So I shall keep on going naked on this screen, if only metaphorically…

Tu m’�changes tes Sex and the City contre mes La Vie la vie?

Je me demandais r�cemment si la nouvelle version du syst�me d’exploitation XP de Windows, le Media Center, dont HP a sorti un des premiers mod�les, allait rendre obsol�te l’utilisation des enregisteurs num�riques personnels (ENP) comme celui d’Illico. Cet article, publi� aujourd’hui dans le magazine Salon, offre une perspective int�ressante sur les diff�rences entre les deux syst�mes qui permettent d’enregistrer des heures de t�l�vision sur un disque dur (PC vs appareil d�di� comme ReplayTV ou Tivo).

Autre angle int�ressant de l’article: des utilisateurs am�ricains d’enregistreurs num�riques personnels (appel�s en anglais PVR pour personal video recorder) intentent une sorte de recours collectif contre certains studios de t�l� et de cin�ma qui les accusent de “voler” de la t�l� parce qu’ils sautent les commerciaux et enregistrent la programmation t�l�visuelle sur un support num�rique de haute qualit�.

Les studios n’ont encore rien vu puisque la technologie du Windows XP Media Center permettra aux internautes d’�changer facilement des �missions de t�l� enregistr�es sur leur disque dur. Il est donc fort probable que nous assistions bient�t � la multiplication de groupes d’�change tels que Napster, mais qui se consacreront � la distribution de s�ries t�l�visuelles par Internet.