Mother and her friend R. from NYC visited 2 days ago. Went all right, but Mom had a budding cold sore, as she seems to every time she sees 'friends' or family that stress her out, i.e. practically all of them. Her default 'revert to childhood' reflex also kicked in a couple of times, when her voice goes up an octave and gets all sing-songy and childlike, and she starts asking moronic or nonsensical questions, such as: "Is Dutch a written language"? But, I spent only an afternoon and evening with them, not nearly enough time for me to blow a gasket, as happened a year ago in NYC, when Mom and I got into a full-fledged shouting match right in front of the apartment she had shared with Dad 40 years earlier.
Just saw a dance performance, part of the off-Festival Trans-Ameriques ( are 'off' festivals a uniquely Quebec phenomenon?), featuring 3 separate pieces by different choreographers, the final one by George Stamos, an acquaintance from high school in Halifax. It wasn't bad, in fact all 3 were pretty good, George's being the funniest, especially an interlude when he seems to break character to clean up a bit. I felt less stress than I had at previous performances of his I had seen, mainly because there was no eagerness to please on my part. When I first moved to Mtl I bumped into him and hung out at his place a couple of times in the course of about 6 months, saw him perform twice, the first time actually helping set up before the show, so I could get in for free. It was a low point in my life: no money, no job, on welfare, going to the food bank, and it was winter and I was living in a bleak neighbourhood, in a decrepit cockroach-infested building. So I helped set up, feeling like the Mexican janitor, and had finished half the job when someone told me I had put all the chairs in the stage area, when I should have put them on the raised platform, which I stupidly took for the stage (a raised platform for dancers!?) Anyway, after that I didn't see George for about a year-and-a-half, at which point I saw him in the second performance, really good, by choreographer Benoit Lachambre. A couple of months later, I called him up and left a couple of messages asking if he wanted to get a coffee, or something. He never called back. I had also recently joined the Mile-End Y, and bumped into him there a few times, and he always seemed to make a pointed effort to ignore me, never acknowledging my presence unless I addressed him first. Of course, I took it all quite badly, but six or seven years later, I no longer care MUCH. One can't be liked by everyone one wants to be liked by, one of life's tougher lessons, one many people never manage to master.