If you ended up here thanks to this discussion of women of colour bloggers on BlogHer, allow me to provide a brief introduction:

• I’ve been online since 1993. I wrote my first online journal posting in 1994 or so using Pico on a UNIX server.
• I’ve had a few primary domains over the years, including babygrrl.com (defunct), formica.ca (defunct, thanks to the Formica Corporation), notformi.ca, and this one.
• These days I blog less and photograph more. Photography has become my preferred method of keeping a journal.

If you’d like to know more, feel free to head over to my about page. Cheers, and thanks for stopping by.

One of the challenges I’m facing on this new path I’m trying to follow is learning to curb my temper. I generally have a long fuse and can ignore things for quite some time, but when I finally go off, my outbursts remind me (at times) of child-like temper tantrums. I pout, I stomp, I scream sometimes; more often than not I just go silent and refuse to talk to the person or interact with the thing that I consider to be the offending party.

When this happens, I let many, many things go unsaid. And that quite simply is not healthy.

Someone who was once a friend once said that not everything needs air. In some ways I agree with that, because there are some feelings, hurt feelings, explosive emotions, and the like, that more often than not are best kept to ourselves. I think apologies are the exception to this rule, because without them, even if two people try to pick up where they left off, or to move toward a new direction in a relationship, the obstacle still exists.

Children, I think, find it really hard to make apologies. The childish part of me feels the same way. Age and experience has shown me that it’s time to put away these childish things.

The New York Public Library recently unveiled their new website design, and I must say that I’m very impressed by the amount of user research and testing that went into seeing this project through. The site is lively, colourful, and eye-catching, and the information architecture, labeling, and information flow all seem to have been designed with simplicity, ease of use, and findability in mind. Of particular interest is the “Getting Oriented” sections of the site that are tailored to new library users. They even made a video tour of the new site available to the public:

In looking at this video I was struck by one thing: the language used to describe some of the features is pretty technical and sophisticated, which leads me to think that either NYPL users are smarter than the average patron, or that this video is really meant to introduce the site to other librarians and library workers. For example, the narrator talks about how the site was developed to assist with “serendipitous discovery” and extols the site’s “digital galleries” and “archival materials”. The video even mentions that the site was built using the Drupal open source content management system. While these are fascinating details to me (because I work in web services and knowing about these things is part of my job), I wonder just how relevant those bits of information are to the average NYPL user.

It could be that the NYPL serves an audience that has a great deal more technical knowledge than most public library users, and if that’s the case they’re fortunate.

I’ve been fighting a cold the last couple of days. I think it may be winning.

Style (well, by Vancouver standards anyway) and safety, all in one package.

If you’re a Person of a Certain Age (and American), you probably remember a time when missing children were pictured on milk cartons. The belief was that by placing the photos on a surface that people see every day, people would eventually come to pay attention to the faces, thereby increasing the chances that the missing child would be found.

Since April, 2009, I’ve felt like one of those missing children. But I think I’ve finally been found.

I had a bit of a breakthrough last week in therapy. I haven’t talked about my therapy experiences here, largely because they’ve been frustrating for me. Lack of money for private services meant that I had to rely on free, provincial services. To make a long story short, it’s a good thing I wasn’t in any worse shape because the waiting list alone might have contributed to my demise. But I digress.

Last week when I met with my doctor, he said he noticed a change in me. I was still depressed, although my mood seems to have shifted. He says I seemed more focused, more determined, and more dynamic. During the session, he opined that the source of my unease seems to be a fear of standing still. I’m a person who needs to keep moving, he said, and if I don’t move, I become surly, I lose all self-esteem, and I fall into an abyss so deep that the only way I can seem to find my way out of it is through explosive actions. Those explosive actions leave some collateral damage; the challenge for me is to learn how to break through and break free, to keep on moving, without laying things to waste when I find myself in a position of having to stay still.

When my doctor mentioned the word “dynamic” it was as if a light had gone off in my head; no, it was more like a fireworks display had gone off in my head. You might not know it to look at me, but I love moving. I love being in motion. I might not like the getting there, and anyone who has traveled with me knows this all too well, but the act of being in between spaces, of living in the potential of a moment is the source of my greatest power.

This need for movement is what makes me love learning and sharing knowledge with others. This need for movement explains why something as simple as taking a bike ride through a neighbourhood I’ve never seen before thrills me so. It also probably explains why little five-year-old me told my mother “I’m never getting married and I’m never having children.”

My doctor says I see life as a series of choices, as experiences to be lived, as vignettes. He thinks that my path is to be someone who gathers wisdom by movement, by inhabiting spaces for awhile and then moving on. When I asked him if I’d ever settle or grow up, he suggested that it wasn’t that I couldn’t grow up, but more that wisdom was more important to me than status.

Well, damn.

Have you ever been seen? Truly, truly seen by someone? Completely laid bare by another person’s insight? I can honestly say that until that moment, I never had been.

What does this mean for me going forward? Decisions. Conversations. Planning, charting, setting goals and seeing them through.

It means moving forward. Ever forward.

And maybe, hopefully, it means seeing this face, this beaming, happy face, more often.

Yesterday’s walkabout at Granville Island was all about colour:

There’s a part of me that really wants to go on this ride tomorrow. There’s another part of me that thinks that police presence will be ridiculously high — especially after yesterday’s protests — and I should avoid it at all costs.

Emotions ran high on the streets of Vancouver today. It was a day of celebration and protest, a day of vibrant life and chilling death. I can’t begin to imagine what the next 16 days will bring.

torch bearer and torch relay spectators

anti-olympics protesters fill the streets