It’s an easy one. I found this one this morning.

A couple of days ago, someone I know said:

“You’re the same age as me, right?”

I said, “I am not that young.”

The other person then said, “Oh, so you’re older than 37?”

I, with growing horror, said, “What? I thought you were 26, 27.”

The other person said, “No, I am 37.”

So I look 37. I just turned 34. This really sucks.

My friend Maikopunk moved next to an abandoned children’s mental hospital called Woodlands. The times I’ve visited Maikopunk, I kept expecting some Session 9 creepiness. Maikopunk herself has never experienced anything supernatural.

Notorious locally for the treatment of the poor kids who were imprisoned within, the patients lived with rampant physical and sexual abuse. Some youngsters were committed permanently by parents who thought their kids were only going in for a weekend. Other children had their teeth removed if they were violent (or perhaps scared and bewildered). One nurse who tried to report the sexual abuse she witnessed, was herself incarcerated in another mental hospital. Woodlands closed down in 1996.

The government sold the land to the Onni development company, who built condos on the site, surrounding the remaining hospital buildings. The asylum buildings were classified as heritage buildings, which in the local Vancouver parlance means structures that may or may not be one day as valuable as Europe’s venerable examples. Eventually, as Onni’s deal with the City of New Westminster went, the company would spruce up the old hospital buildings.

Instead, they sat behind fences for years (my photos are from 2006) and housed a sizeable squatter population.

Maikopunk and I once went for a walk on the grounds once to find the headstones of BC ghost lore. The hospital’s graveyard was torn down a few years back, resulting in a ghost story that most readers of Robert Belyk’s Ghosts: True Stories from British Columbia remember.

In the 1970s, a Burquitlam apartment block – this area is a few kilometres north of the hospital – got itself some new garden stepping stones. Children flipped over the stones to find out that they were the headstones of Woodlands’ long-forgotten patients. Poltergeist activity then creeped out enough residents that the headstones were removed.

When Maikopunk and I finally found the remaining headstones, they were clustered behind a fence, waiting to be turned into a monument.

I’ve since passed the monument a number of times, but never got out of my car to photograph it yet.

As of last week, there’s no danger of ice picks to the eye on the Woodlands site any more. Good old Woodlands has burned down.

Maikopunk had to evacuate her building for one night. She reports that her place is alright, not even any smoke damage. The blame for the fire goes to the homeless people living inside the building. Of course, we’re all waiting to see what the arson investigation turns up.

Oops.

Onni got permission the next day to demolish what was left of the burned husk.

Conspiracy theories, anyone?

Vancouverites, whether they hated the idea of Woodlands as a heritage building or not, all have an opinion on what really happened.

It’s widely believed that Ruskin, upon his wedding night, was horrified to discover that his bride had pubic hair and couldn’t consummate the marriage. He had seen so many Greek statues and idealized paintings, that the real female body shocked him.

A Victorian art critic, Ruskin’s fame sparkles most fervently for Venetophiles like me. He wrote Stones of Venice, a detailed look at Venice’s art and architecture through its churches.

The romance that led to Ruskin’s marriage started early. Ruskin wrote a fantasy novel called The King of the Golden River for his future wife, the then-twelve-year-old Euphemia, or Effie, Gray. The girl married him in 1846, when she was 16 and he was 26. The marriage was annulled after six years. Ruskin then fell in love with a nine-year-old girl. Wikipedia untangles the possibilities of his possible paedophilia – his wedding night horror, however, is more entertaining.

Effie herself heard a gamut of reasons as to why he couldn’t bring himself to make love to his wife: “He alleged various reasons, hatred to children, religious motives, a desire to preserve my beauty, and finally this last year he told me his true reason… that he had imagined women were quite different to what he saw I was, and that the reason he did not make me his Wife was because he was disgusted with my person the first evening 10th April.” For good measure, he also wrote to her parents to say that her “person” (i.e. her body) was gross.

Wikipedia collects some of the speculation as to what exactly was wrong with Effie:

• Ruskin’s biographer, Mary Lutyens, started the pubic hair theory that many people now take as fact.
• Peter Fuller in his book Theoria: Art and the Absence of Grace, thought it was Effie’s menstrual blood.
• John Batchelor agrees that menstrual blood was part of it. He thinks Effie’s body odour also grossed out Ruskin.

Whatever it was, I feel sorry for the both of them. Effie has gone down in history as the hairy woman; Ruskin slipped in and out of mental breakdowns after his nine-year-old persistently turned down his advances.

Venice is one of my favourite cities in the world. It is the perfect pedestrian city. Even if a car wanted to bulldoze its way on the islands, it wouldn’t make it far before it’s sardined in some alleyway. Quite honestly, I would love to know how the Venetian branch of the Ferrari store got its floor models down those little streets.

I also love Venice for the beautiful old buildings – I want to sneak into them and look about. I snuck into one museum, the Palazzo Correr, overlooking the Piazza San Marco. I was 20, just before my 21st birthday, and the museum, damn it, was closed the day I wanted to visit it. So I visited anyhow, in the dark, forgetting that there were probably security cameras around the place. Yet there are so many other buildings in Venice and I am not as daring as I once was.

Venice’s thoroughfares also make the city into a great labyrinth. The signs pointing, in two different directions, toward the Rialto, simply add to the fun of getting lost. Garden mazes always disappointed me because they weren’t challenging enough. Not so with Venice. When we stayed there last year for a few days, we could never retrace our path back to the hotel each night on the morning route.

When Matt and I took our honeymoon in Italy, I couldn’t wait for him to see one of the great cities of the world. Maybe I was overly excited as our train crossed the big bridge from Mestre across the lagoon, or maybe he really didn’t like our 18th century villa and its fading rococo wallpaper. Whatever it was, Matt, within hours of our arrival, developed an enduring hate for Venice.

We eventually cut our trip there short and went back to his beloved Rome.

Venice was also partly to blame. The tourists swarmed the place (us as bad as the rest). Every second store sold glass baubles; there were none of the wine shops I told him about. A thunderstorm trapped us in the Salute church. The front door of the Basilica San Marco had a long line across planks swimming over water. The Basilica itself was too gaudily ornate for Matt’s more austere American tastes.

Worst of all, Venetian food sucked. Having no kitchen access, we were trapped at the mercy of the restaurants. All of them staffed and managed by Turks, mainland Chinese and Romanians, the food was a dismal disappointment after the epicure’s dream in Rome. We had starved in Padova, where Matt refused to condescend to the Italian buffet I remembered from my first wonderful afternoon in Padova in 1996, and none of the restaurants served food except at awkward times.

Unfortunately, I came to understand, Venice no longer has any Venetians. The Italians who still work in the city’s tourist industry all live across the lagoon on the mainland. Because the restaurants don’t cater to locals, they can serve whatever dead pigeon washed up in the canal that morning. It’s not like the tourists will take their business elsewhere.

I flipped through my book on the city’s history, trying to find some redeeming snippet of Venetian lore that would make Matt fall in love with the city I liked so much. Then I came across some bad news.

Venetians, apparently even in the time of Casanova, were notorious for hosting very poor parties. Guests would chat politely. Their stomachs would begin grumbling. The hosts would eventually wise up and bring out a plate of watermelons.

The excuse was that Venetians just didn’t do dinner parties. Or that sumptuary laws prevented shows of gastronomic exaggeration. Whatever.

Now Matt always shudders at the mention of Venetian food. He’s come up with some allergy excuse just so he’ll never have to go back.

A Telegraph review of a recent Casanova book has this quote hidden in it:

He was born into the ‘last great age of Venetian cooking’, he liked his macaroni sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar…..

So there was a great age of Venetian cooking.

Most likely destroyed by that bastard, Napoleon.

Now Matt and I have to make a make-up honeymoon to Venice and hunt down this elusive good Venetian cuisine.

Monday is the day I spend time with my grandmother at the care home into which she was recently placed.

Last October, we started hearing some rather unusual statements from her. These escalated into accusations aimed at family members who allegedly broke into her house, trimmed down the fringe on her Persian rug, rearranged the toiletries on her bathroom counter, and even replaced the windows in her bedroom while she was sleeping in said bedroom.

In March, there was a severe decline in her physical and mental wellbeing. She evolved into a paranoiac who seemed to forget that WWII ended. There was talk of freedom fighters and liberation at the hands of some president. At her worst, she saw me engage in chemical vices with the nurses, drive drunk, die in a horrific accident, be autopsied in the adjacent bed and, finally, be fed into a meat grinder and turned into sausages.* She spent weeks in hospitals, finally leaving last month to enter a care facility.

Today I walked in while she was in a good mood. The mood lasted almost two hours before she felt sick again. She was in a good mood for most of last week’s visit as well (I haven’t seen her in a good mood since March).

The care home’s social coordinator reminded me I had to take her to music appreciation. About twenty others were already in the room. A youngish woman, who looked like a forty-something Cameron Diaz, rolled her wheelchair next to me. You see, care homes aren’t just for seniors. About one in every ten patients is under sixty; some appear to be very young. The Cameron Diaz had purplish ankles poking out from her shoes. She had to drink her coffee with assistance and kept dropping her music book.

I tried to meet the elderly lady from Vienna – one of my favourite cities in the world – but my grandmother, sitting between us, broke into our conversation, saying that this woman only knew one or two words in Romanian and something about the Germans.

At my grandmother’s worst a few months ago, I realized that, despite my support for euthanasia and the right to die with dignity, I really didn’t want to see my grandmother go just yet. She is the last of of my grandparents; she has also lived a fascinating yet tragic life. I know a few of her stories. For example, I now understand the historical interest women had for jewelry: during political upheavals, when property rights were not honoured or when women have been denied their share of land or when armies invaded so fast one couldn’t load their possessions into a wagon even or when one had to desert that wagon as roads became impassable, jewels were a sort of easily transported and quickly sold commodity.

I should have asked more questions before my grandmother’s health deteriorated. My family has a reprieve of sorts. We can ask away now to get as much as we can while we can.

Today, I prepared one question: what is your favourite colour? Turns out, this is a selfish question only we North American brats have – it’s one of the first questions we answer in elementary school. She was puzzled at first. I don’t think anyone ever asked her that question. My grandmother claimed to like all colours equally – they are all nice.

An hour later, I said, “But seriously, what colour do you like?”

“What?” my grandmother shot back. “You think we had choices like that when I was young? We were poor and didn’t think about such silly things.”

I tried to provide context. “If your parents ever gave you a dress, what colour did you always hope it would be?”

“I never thought about that,” she said. “I was just happy to get a present.”

Music appreciation was frightfully long after that. We had to sit still and pay attention to songs about blue moons and bluebirds and other blue things. During a music quiz, while everyone blurted out songs with the colours in the titles – we went through the rainbow plus black, the Cameron Diaz was knowledgeable – my grandmother turned to me. “You know, the Blue Danube is the best blue song.”

*The next day, she swore that they used the same meat grinder to turn some prehistoric cows into sausages.

Update

Please read the comment from Barry Martinson, the author of Song of Orchid Island. I was incorrect about him being “one of many missionaries who go to Taiwan to help snuff out any remaining aboriginal culture.” Though I am still vehemently opposed to missionary work, I do appreciate his work and am relieved that not all missionaries are there to change local cultures. I also promise to make his book the one on which I will begin improving my Chinese.

May 28, 2011

*****

Orchid Island lies to the far south of Taiwan, only of its last outposts before you hit the Philippines. In Mandarin, it’s Lanyu; in the original Yami, it’s Ponso no Tao. Taiwan, though predominantly Chinese – a group that is itself not as homogeneous as we’re taught to believe, with a distinction between Mainland Chinese and Taiwawese Chinese, between standard society Chinese and the Hakka, among the Hakka themselves, between the Miaoli Hakka and the Taoyuan Hakka, and so on – has a number of aboriginal groups that occupied the island before Chinese colonization.

The Tao or Yami are supposedly the least assimilated aboriginals on Taiwan’s islands – many men still wear the traditional loincloth that makes them fodder for the camera-happy Taiwanese tourist. Many Tao still prefer their traditional houses and some still hunt the flying fish.

On a stormy night in August 1998, I watched a mammoth thunderstorm unfurl over poor Orchid Island. From my vantage point far away, I watched the lightning torment this island. I sat on the veranda of our hotel in the dark, while some tough-talking Chinese girl smoked nearby. (I remember she was one of the few cool Taiwanese people I ever met. Most of the people I knew were cherubic, even when they were cranky.) As I watched the storm, I hoped that everyone on Orchid Island was doing ok. I hoped they were safely enjoying the majesty of their sound and light show.

That was as close as I ever got to Orchid Island.

Back in Taipei, one of my Mandarin teachers had an especially strong distaste for the Tao. She repeated again each month – as if we had forgotten from the previous month – that the Tao were insolent spoiled brats. Here was the Taiwanese government offering to build them concrete apartment blocks and what do they want? To continue living in their grass huts! The nerve!

I thought then, but never challenged this teacher, that perhaps grass huts were better suited to the Orchid Island climate. I had my own militant beliefs that concrete apartment blocks were the breeding grounds of the cockroach, and that the Tao were smarter somehow.

Then I read that the government actually ordered their traditional houses torn down.

There is also the proof that my opinion of Tao housing was more correct than my teacher’s:

The traditional Yami dwelling is a semi-subterranean house built in a shallow excavation so that only the roof shows. Cool in summer, warm in winter, these ingenious houses are nearly impervious to the fierce typhoons that strike frequently from May through September. On one side of these living quarters is a smaller work house with a board floor and an underground storage space. On the other side of the dwelling is an elevated, roofed platform, situated so that it gives a clear view of the sea and catches the cooling breezes, where the Yamis relax and eat, smoke, chew betel nuts, and visit.

The depressions in which the dwellings are built are neatly walled with stone; the level area in front of each house is covered with stones, and the spaces between houses are paved with stone and serve as pathways. The overall effect is of an extremely efficient, highly practical arrangement that is ideally-suited to the local environment.

Unfortunately, these traditional three-element housing units seem in danger of extinction, replaced by government-built square concrete boxes. The old houses have nearly disappeared from four of the island’s six villages; they are preserved in large numbers only in the two villages on the east coast.

(From Earl Wieman’s article, “Orchid Island: A People Lost in Time.” Photos of Orchid Island here.)

Before I left Taiwan in 1999, I bought a copy of a book called Song of Orchid Island. I bought the book more for the fact that I thought famous and tragic Taiwanese author San Mao actually wrote the book. I went upstairs to my library tonight, pulled the book off the shelf and, for the last few minutes, have been dismayed to learn that San Mao only translated the book. An American called Barry Martinson wrote it. He is one of many missionaries who go to Taiwan to help snuff out any remaining aboriginal culture. Can someone whose goal is to supplant a traditional culture with western culture via religion possibly be a sensitive writer? I could better accept San Mao writing about the Tao, because she was depressed and suicidal and everyone knows depressed people are usually nice.

I put the book back on the shelf for now.

Today someone asked me if my husband and I have children. The next question was if I planned to have children. Right away, knowing my interlocutor was a breeder, I stammered something about only being married one year, etc., etc. Luckily, this breeder wasn’t one of those “must have baby” types and she coaxed me to admit that I don’t really ever plan to have kids.

Then I get home and Lyn commented how she’s only held a baby once and liked no baby, ever. All this got me thinking of my baby stats.

I have only held a baby once, a few months ago. I didn’t really feel anything. Sure, I am glad my friend is happy and maybe I will one day encourage this kid to pursue his elementary school studies of the vampire bat or whatever dinosaur he’s into. But, nope, no burning need to have my own.

I have, however, found four babies cute: the little chicklet in the Willow movie, the Sweet Pea character in the Popeye movie, a little boy called Trevor that I met when I was fourteen, and my godson. I guess that should technically be six babies, since they always use twin babies in films, one “acting” while the other suckles, or whatever kind of coffee break babies take. But that’s all the babies I have found that are cute. In 34 years of femalehood. Only two are real babies I have actually touched. All other babies – sorry, if you’re a parent – they look like aliens. Yeah, don’t kid yourself (pun accidentally inserted). Babies look exactly like old people. And no one gushes over poor incontinent grandpa over in the corner.

While other little girls were playing with their dolls, I was taking apart electric sockets, toy planes and cassette players. My parents hid all the screwdrivers, so I began using kitchen knives to loosen bolts. I am pretty sure I was born without any warm feeling whatsoever for human babies.

Like Lyn, I might have some maternal feeling for cute animals I rescue. Except guinea pigs. They are the cry babies of the rodent world.

Lil’ bastards.

One of my guilty pleasures is Swim at Your Own Risk, the shark attack blog. (It also has killer jellyfish, munchy barracuda and other toothy things from the water.) I’ve followed this blog for a while. I even occasionally venture into the Victims Gallery, though, I don’t usually last there for long. It’s quite squelchy, if you’ve followed the link. Sharks manage to make everything they chew up look like abattoir refuse.

Imagine my pleasure when, last year, a small child asked me to write a program about sharks. I had to wait all year to vet my shark program and now it’s a go. So I will technically get paid to research a topic I would anyhow. It’s too bad work is so busy and I have to bring the fun research home with me.

So far I read The Devil’s Teeth by Susan Casey. Yes, it’s neat stuff – there are these islands in San Francisco’s city limits called the Farallones and they’re quite sharky. The islands also happen to be eerily picturesque. Their history is replete with weird characters, fuelled by a chickenless San Francisco’s appetite for the murre’s eggs. Plus there is all this other stuff about radioactive waste dumping and a sea urchin diver with a lot of luck. Then there’s the obsession part of the subtitle – “A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America’s Great White Sharks” – this obsession belonged to someone I didn’t suspect.

But that’s for another blog post.

I gleaned about five pages of notes on sharks. Here are some highlights:

The following stuff has been found inside dissected sharks:

• a cuckoo clock
• a fur cape
• license plates
• lobster traps
• a buffalo head
• an entire reindeer
• a man dressed in a suit of armour

I looked up to see if I could find out who was the nut who thought he’d take on a great white in his suit of armour. If I could find out his story and his name, perhaps I could imagine his life and give it some meaning beyond his famous death.

Unfortunately, there’s not much on him. I found a reference in a book that an eighteenth century shark’s stomach contained a suit of armour. But no mention of the man in the armour, except in the Wordsworth Book of Urban Legend. Hardly a trustworthy source, that one. (Read on in the previous link, however, for whaler James Bartley’s February 1891skin-lightening-by-whale-gastric-juices affair.)

The Shark Friends website has a further inventory of shark stomach contents:

• nails
• coats
• wine bottles
• jewelry
• musical instruments
• torpedoes

But great whites aren’t just about their appetites:

• Sharks are resistant to infections and circulatory disease. They are almost entirely immune to cancer.
• Baby great white sharks can detect .005 millivolt electrical impulses from a heartbeat from hundreds of metres away.
• Great whites are actually black. This camouflages them when their prey looks down into the water. It’s their bellies that give them their name.
• Great whites suntan.
• Most great white shark attacks take place at high tide.
• Great whites are warm-blooded. This helps them hunt better in cold waters where their prey may get sluggish.
• As of 2003 when the book was published, at least 37 great white sharks have died in captivity.

Great white sharks, by the way, are more correctly called white sharks.

I think I was ID’d for the last time ever last week. Heck, they didn’t even really ask to see my driver’s license. It’s a long, downward slope to death from here.

1. Fatigue: yes, I wind down around 10 pm each night. I doubt I can ever go out again dancing all night and returning home as the sun rose. However, I still stay up all night…doing other, boring things.
2. Lack of sleep: I either cannot fall asleep or I wake up anywhere from two to four hours before I should wake up. I haven’t slept in to 10 am in years now. I estimate that my sleep deficit is around 70-80 hours. It’s a good thing I will never have children or else I would be even more decrepit. I can see why skin deteriorates with age, even if just sleep deprivation is the sole cause. I now plan my drinking habit around whether it is a sleeping pill night or not.
3. Wrinkles: I don’t have many of these, but their forebears are there. Plus, I now officially have neck wrinkles. There is no going back now.
4. Fatty tissue: I slapped on a few too many coatings of this stuff on my inner anorexic waif. My family can’t even remember when they used to make skeleton jokes about me even though they won’t let me live down my grade three geekiness. Even Matt has been getting in on the fat jokes. (However, I do have to remark that I have maintained boob perkiness thanks to a lifetime regime of decent bras.)
5. Sun damage: seriously, wtf with this one? I avoid daylight. I have worn 45 spf sunscreen for over a decade, every single fucking day. What the hell happens to people who tan themselves to cajun black? This is wrong. I should have been spared this one.
6. Headaches: this might be related to getting my wisdom teeth out a little late in life. The surgeon warned me that I had a highway of nerves tugging on at least one of my teeth. He said I may start getting migraines. I went to see a doctor after two weeks of baseball-bat-to-the-head pain. She gave me a $10 migraine pill and welcomed me to the wonderful world of head issues. (I had maybe one biannual headache in my pre-op days.)
7. Nausea: just what exactly is the meaning of this? I used to love roller coasters – now I get sick from rummaging through my purse in a moving car.
8. Hang overs: I once showed off that I could drink a whole bottle of wine, barf and then drink another bottle. I was pretty well indestructible.
9. Stomach issues: a tomato can be one day too ripe and I will get violent diarrhea. I first noticed this one about six years ago when milk began disagreeing with me. The one thing I am thankful for is that I have never been constipated. I’ve seen people keeled over, begging for help, while constipated. I hope my days of constipation are far off yet. Hopefully, that will only come around when I am in my seventies.
10. Sore feet: last year I went on a walking holiday, as I’d done plenty of times before. This time, I destroyed some joint and six months later I was still aching as soon as I stepped out of bed. A podiatrist told me that short of bed rest and permanent orthopedic shoes, my feet will always hurt. (On the positive side, my feet have not callused as badly as those of some of my peers. My dad was right to insist that we always wear slippers indoors. Though he made up this rule to prevent foot sweat and dead skin cells from polluting our carpet, not out of any concern for my foot smoothness.)
11. Bad eyesight: I’ve been near-sighted since grade three. Now I can’t read small print if it’s in bad light.
12. Crankiness: I am even less willing to suffer fools. These days I even snap back. I am highly unpopular with dimwitted wait staff.
13. Bitterness: I was never pretty/smart/cool/enough in my youth, so I hate anyone who is this way now. My dad always used to warn me when I was small that I should only regret what I haven’t done. I am now officially older than all my heroes when they first started doing cool stuff. I suck, therefore I will hate anyone younger than me with a more impressive resume.
14. Diminishing maternal feeling: oddly enough, even though I knew as a youngster I never, ever wanted to have a baby, in my twenties, I once asked a boyfriend to get me pregnant once so I could be a single mom. Ha! Nowadays I loathe babies. I am grateful to myself (and the refusing boyfriend) for sparing me from ultimate doom. I don’t care about any stupid ticking biological clocks and I hate the breeders’ spawn. Keep your brat out of my orbit.
15. Attractiveness to old men: first, I get one old coot trying to pick me up by hanging around my table as I drink my tea and ignore him by being engrossed in my book on great white sharks. He finally ahems and asks me if I am Carmilla or Carmen or Caramella or something. I send him off with a withering glance. Then there’s the grandfather who wanted very specific instructions on getting to the mall, which was across the street. No matter how many times I told him to just cross the street, he feigned misunderstanding, probably to get me to escort him there. Sigh. I guess I am in cougar territory; I can’t ever look down again, only up.