vol. 5: may edition.
I’ve done it again and missed my self-imposed deadline! But apparently it’s June now so that’s nice and I hope you are all feeling June-y and optimistic and ready for summer. The peonies in my neighbourhood are about to blossom which is extremely exciting for those of us on peony-watch.
A lot of my May was busy with move prepping (then suddenly postponed due to bed bugs in my Montreal apartment, so my Toronto home now looks like a storage unit but at least I’m packed!), more yoga teacher training, and adventures around Toronto on my trusty bike. As far as literary consumption goes, I’ve been really taken by Ada Limón’s new poetry collection, The Hurting Kind, have been slowly making my way through my cousin Martha’s beautifully written new book My Face in the Light, plenty of yogic texts (love that Christopher Isherwood, author of A Single Man, translated the Bhagavad Gita!), as well as Sarah Polley’s new book of memoirs, Run Towards the Danger, which I just started.
Sarah Polley attended the same high school I did shortly before my time (a performing arts program within Earl Haig Secondary School up in North Toronto) and I loved her film, Take This Waltz, in case you haven’t seen it and need a dose of 2010s indie Toronto lovelorn perfection (now on Netflix here in Canada). I revisited it during a tumultuous time in my life and felt personally affronted by the similarities in its plot/characters to what I was experiencing. Michelle Williams and Seth Rogen perform with understated poignancy, and the set design and locations unabashedly display the grungy, granola Toronto, with which I grew up and love.
The first few lyrics of Leonard Cohen’s “Take This Waltz,” which play over the film’s penultimate sequence, really hammered the synchronicity of the movie with my life home for me as I watched in Vienna (“Now in Vienna there’s ten pretty women/There’s a shoulder where death comes to cry…”). I suppose that’s when you know art is doing its job…!
The most delicious thing I baked this month was absolutely Canelle et Vanille’s Chocolate Chip Buckwheat and Sea Salt Cookies, a gluten-free recipe given to me by my dear friend Georgia, upon whose recommendations I can always count.
Ok, c’est tout - until next time!
