Shawn L. Bird

Original poetry, commentary, and fiction. All copyrights reserved.

wiggle, jiggle and giggle… June 12, 2011

Filed under: Commentary — Shawn L. Bird @ 2:59 pm
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Today a group of us went to Kelowna to watch a performance of belly dancers.  A group from Kelowna performed in the first half, and in the second half the headliners from Get Bent Active Arts Society in Penticton performed their Bollywood Hollywood. Their show was upbeat, energetic and commanding.  I have never seen such fast costume changes in my long theatrical life!  (In the finale, they revisited every number in the costume with about 2 seconds transition).  Beaming smiles, excellent skills, and narrative choreography added to audience enjoyment.  Of particular  notice was the kewpie doll grin of Marianne (her solo begins at 2:19 in the video).  She has matured even more in skills and still conveys absolute joy and good humour to the audience.  It was an delightful  afternoon and so I thought I’d give you the opportunity to participate in our fun by sharing this youtube video of the tour group from a previous tour:

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For more information about classes or to support Get Bent’s work with youth  in the community, please see their website at http://www.getbentyogaandbellydancing.com/  We are hoping that we’ll be able to participate in a workshop with them or go see another performance again.  It was a show that exceeded our expectations.

 

summer invocation June 10, 2011

Filed under: Rotary invocations — Shawn L. Bird @ 11:39 am
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Of course, officially there are still 11 days until summer.  However, I hear that the Americans are already out of school, and with our temperatures in the high-20s it feels like summer at long last!  So to celebrate here is a summer invocation for myRotary friends!

We are thankful for the warmth that summer brings

For friends from afar gathered ’round our table.

For the warmth of the caressing summer air,

humming with chittering, twittering things

For time off work  to do what we are able,

to embrace a hurting world into our care

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Available for free use within Rotary; however, please indicate in the comment section below that you have used it at your club (date and name).
 

ruffling June 9, 2011

Filed under: Commentary — Shawn L. Bird @ 11:42 pm
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Oh- this is a beauty.It takes some talent to do such impressive pattern drafting. This skirt is gorgeous, and it is an intriguing thing to add to my project list!

http://communingwithfabric.blogspot.com/2009/09/self-drafted-anthropologie-skirt.html

 

waving dad June 8, 2011

Filed under: Commentary — Shawn L. Bird @ 6:01 pm
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I love two things about http://waveatthebus.blogspot.com 

First, I love the sense of fun and creativity that Dale Price has shown waking up every morning to wave at his son’s schoolbus as it goes past their house. 

Secondly, I like that his son is 15/16, not 5 or 6.  I love any parent who loves his/her teen age kid enough to be willing to embarass them by goofy fun.  It’s  teaching him something.  You can be cool, or you can be a little wacky.  Coolness is just aloofness.  A little wackiness adds a lot to a day to whomever is touched by it. 

Rain Price will never forget this year and neither will any of the other kids on his bus.  In years to come they’ll be smiling and discussing their favorite costume.  The joy will travel forward in time.

While the website is worth a visit if you want to get a really good look, you can see the whole year’s worth of wackiness here.  Which is your favorite?

 

xyz June 7, 2011

Filed under: Commentary — Shawn L. Bird @ 9:08 pm
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I teach Middle School these days.  One of the hallmarks of this age level is a bravado that overtly declares a certainty over the rightness of their ideas, combined with a secret insecurity about almost everything.  One of the things they’re most interested in and confused by is sexuality.  The idea of any sexual ambiguity seems to really disturb them.

They ask a lot of questions and I lay it out a little more bluntly than some would.  I point out that if 10% of the population doesn’t fit into the neat little box, then that means in a class of 30, 3 people in the room are not going to fit in the box.   Those stats challenge their thinking. 

I want it to.  They are already friends with someone who doesn’t fit in that box they’ve built.  They might be the one who doesn’t fit in the box!    While they’re stewing about the statistics I ask, “and SO WHAT?”  What does it matter?  You are what YOU are, and it doesn’t matter what anyone else is.  Like your friends for who they are.  Don’t worry about their sexuality.   It just doesn’t matter.  

They don’t like that.  They desperately long for the world to be black and white.  They want it to be clear and straight-forward.  While they’re trying to sort out their black from their white, I throw in some more grey.  What about those who aren’t either gender? 

What happens to the people who have physical or genetic components of both sexes?   According to the Ontario Human Rights Commission  4% of births are intersex (the term that replaces hermaphrodite).  Hmm.  In 2009-10 there were 381,382 births in Canada.  That means there were 15,255 parents filling out a birth certificate form who could not put a definitive check mark in either the box that says male or the one that says female.  Consider that in the Canadian population of approximately 34 million, 1.36 million people are in between M and F. 

This begs a question: why don’t we have another option on the paperwork for over a million of our citizens?  This doesn’t even touch upon the transgendered population.  Oi vay.  Our world is not black and white.  Let’s accept the grey and put another box on the questionaires.  I suggest “N.”  You can decide for yourself whether it means neither or neutral.

 

love light June 6, 2011

Filed under: book reviews,Commentary,Literature — Shawn L. Bird @ 12:19 am
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She was bendable light: she shone around every corner of my day.

She taught me to revel. She taught me to wonder. She taught me to laugh. My sense of humor had always measured up to everyone else’s; but timid, introverted me, I showed it sparingly: I was a smiler. In her presence I threw back my head and laughed out loud for the first time in my life.

She saw things. I had not known there was so much to see.

She was forever tugging my arm and saying, “Look!”

(Jerry Spinelli, Stargirl p. 107)

This is the best part of love, isn’t it?  Spinelli is able to articulate so beautifully a special part of the best relationships.  When the world opens up because of the love you share.  When we are able to embrace things that are new to us, particularly if they challenge us, we become better.  We are never able to see things quite the same way when we’ve looked through someone else’s eyes.

The older we grow, if we keep exposing ourselves to experiences that introduce us to new views, we can become large enough to see ourselves as a tiny pinprick on a planet.  We realise our perspective is not the only one, and that there is joy in other places than where we usually find it.  There is pain in new places as well.  Be open to both, and the world expands.

 

ebooking history June 5, 2011

Filed under: Writing — Shawn L. Bird @ 7:17 pm
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One of the benefits of the e-book is that authors and publishers can easily re-release out of print books. The summer I turned thirteen, I read a book by a teen ager. I was so impressed that a young person had been published, and enjoyed the book so much, that I never forgot it. It was  The Green Bronze Mirror by Lynne Ellison.  It was a time travelling book of a girl who leaves modern England and finds herself in Roman times.

Over the years I kept my eyes open for it, but it wasn’t until this year that it showed up. It was available as a very inexpensive ebook download. Yeah! So now it’s in my e-reader and I have read it through a couple times, searching for all the components that captured my imagination as a kid.  Now I can see that there are some rough patches that a good edit could have improved, but I also see what I loved in it, as well.

How easy it is to re-release old books now that there are ebooks!

I just keep thinking e-books are the future, and perhaps it’s worth cutting through all the middle men to offer one’s book directly to the readers.  The more I hear, the more I am convinced that this is the right move.  I am working out the details, but it’s coming together for Grace Awakening to be released as an ebook later this summer.  It was always in the plan that Gumboot would release an electronic version.  It’s quite possible I maybe ready to release it even earlier than the scheduled Gumboot release.  Wouldn’t that be ironic?

Old books are easily re-released. New books are easily released. A good offering should find a readership.   With the right promotion, it should generate the movement it needs to find the readers who will love it.

And so it begins.

Before any great journey, the provisions must be prepared. The day of embarkation is within sight. When the tide is right, we will sail!

 

Flavia rocks! June 4, 2011

Filed under: book reviews,Commentary,Grace Awakening,Literature,Writing — Shawn L. Bird @ 12:42 am
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I have just finished reading A Red Herring Without Mustard by Alan Bradley.  This is his third book featuring 12 year old chemist Flavia de Luce.   The other two are Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie and The Weed that Strings the Hangman’s Bag.

What’s great about Flavia, is that although she is an uncommon genius in the chemistry lab, she has all the same issues that any youngest of three kids could expect- torturing by older siblings, being ignored by a distracted parent, etc.

Her bike, Gladys, is as much a character as Fatima the VW Beetle is in Grace Awakening.  I  like that someone else feels transportation can be a valid character. lol

Although Flavia is 12, these are not books for kids.  The murders Flavia  solves are rather gruesome.  Nonetheless, the humour of her prepubescent attitude adds a lot of amusement to the stories. They are set in Georgian England.  Flavia has a good relationship with their gardener who was a shellshocked WW I soldier and with their housekeeper Mrs. Mullet.  Her mother Harriet was lost and presumed dead while mountain climbing.  Her sisters  are Daphne and Ophelia.  They have their own unique talents.  Their father has never gotten over the death of his wife, and has retreated into a world of philately.

Here is a little taste of Flavia’s voice:

My experience of cod-liver oil was vast.  Much of my life had been spent fleeing the oncoming Mrs. Mullet, who, with uncorked bottle and a spoon the size of a garden spade, pursued me up and down the corridors and staircases of Buckshaw–even in my dreams.

Who in their right mind would want to swallow something that looked like discarded engine oil and was squeezed out of fish livers that had been left to rot in the sun?  The stuff was used in the tannig of leather, and I couldn’t help wondering what it would do to one’s insides.

“Open up, dearie,” I could hear Mrs. Mullet calling as she trundled after me.  “It’s good for you.”

“No! No!”   I would shriek.  “No acid!  Please don’t make me drink acid!”

And it was true–I wasn’t just making this up.  I had analyzed the stuff in my laboratory and found it to contain a catague of acids, among them oleic, margaric, acetic, butyric, fellic, cholic, and phosphoric, to say nothing of the oxides, calcium and sodium.”

Alan Bradley.  A Red Herring without Mustard.  Toronto: Doubleday. 2011 (pp.127-8)

How can you resist a character with so strong a voice?  Even when the story goes just where you expect, Flavia is always a delightful surprise and there is always something interesting to learn!

 

Rotten apple! June 3, 2011

Filed under: Commentary — Shawn L. Bird @ 7:45 pm
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There are people out there who love Apple products.  They glow about how ‘intuitive’ the programs are and how little problem they have using them.

I am  not one of them.

I think I can say quite categorically that I actually despise Apple.

I was given an iPhone.  I didn’t want one. I liked my cute little flip phone with an easy to remember number.  I liked to flip it open and imagine I was in a Star Trek episode, ready to ask Scotty to beam me up.  It did one thing, and it did it well.

I have had a stack of CDs that I want to load onto the iPod app on the phone.  I dutifully load them into iTunes library (a  hellish and confusing place that does not bear any resemblance to the wonderful, soothing, physical libraries in my world). 

Time to sync the iPhone to the iTune library and load up all the updates.  Click.

Up pops a warning “You have purchased items on your iPhone that are not in your iTunes library.  You should transfer them to iTunes library before proceeding.”

Okay.

Um.

How?

So I type the keywords into the “Help” menu.  In Word that always brings me the file I want, and it one or two clicks I’ve figured out everything I need to know.  Not in iTunes apparently.  30 ‘helpful’ boxes appeared.  I clicked and scrolled, but NOT ONE of them told me how to transfer my purchased iPhone apps into my iTunes library.  NO HELP just Hell.  After an hour of raising my blood pressure, I have given up, tossing electronics across the desk and standing with enough force to propel the office chair on a Homeric Odyssey.

I have left my iPhone plugged into iTunes in the basement.  I will hurt it if I see it until my rational brain function is restored.  I have recalled that the last time I tried to sync my iPhone, and the time before when I had the iPod Touch before it was stolen, I had the same problem.  It wouldn’t let me save the files that were on the other devise.  Those times, I gave up and just synced and lost them.  I presume the apps in question are my French subway maps, verb books and dictionary. I did pay actual money for them, and it’d be nice to keep them.

It would be nice if Apple would tell me HOW to do it, instead of just telling me to do it.

It makes me very sure that I will never own an Apple computer.  If a tiny devise like this is so hard to work with, what are larger ones like?  I will stick to my nice little notebook computer (smaller than a text book). 

I’d like my Walkman back, too.

 

pieces of sky June 2, 2011

Filed under: Poetry — Shawn L. Bird @ 11:56 am
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Pieces of sky
fall upon flowers
and flatten summer.

Sky in pieces
weeping and whispering
bemoans gone sun.

Pieces of sky
crack away and fall
flaming to forest.

Sky in pieces
watching and waiting
passes in sighs
by peace.