Stopping Traffic – Part 1

I haven’t had a very good relationship with my car in the last couple of months.

It all started when I was driving home one night and the alternator gave up. Even though we soon gave it a new one, I wasn’t driving the car as often.

A couple of weeks later, I went to start the car and it wouldn’t respond. My husband took a look at it and saw that the battery needed to be recharged. This was done and the car seemed to be back to normal when we tested it.

For some reason I was still reluctant to drive it; I just didn’t feel comfortable in doing so. I think I was scared something else would give way, and I could now see that it was all about the fear of having my car conk out on a main road amidst heavy traffic.

My car was good to me when I took it to get groceries not long after, but I let it sit for another week before I briefly drove it again last night, in the rain and the cold, to pick up our dinner.

The car was behaving except that I noticed it struggled a little whenever I’d take off at the intersections. I decided to ignore it.

My mother once read that the relationships people have with their cars, can resemble the relationships they have with themselves. Though interesting, I didn’t read too much into it.

No-one likes having car trouble, but it does make you wonder how some people can drive the shabbiest of cars and seldom have problems, whilst others drive cars in relatively good condition and have constant trouble.

Maybe I should just zip it as I don’t remember the last time I had my car serviced. Um. No wonder it had decided to revolt.

So I’m dealing this with by fantasising about having a new car. It seems to be the obvious thing to do.

Livien: How It All Came About

I once wanted to try my luck with my own ‘e-zine’ (electronic magazine for those who don’t know). Firstly, I needed a special name for it. I wasn’t sure what I was seeking in the name, but I figured I’d recognise it when the perfect name appeared.

I found the answer in a very old Webster dictionary from the ’60s, it belonged to my parents and it weighed a ton. Flicking through the pages, my eyes soon set sight on a word from the Middle-English language — Livien.

Even though the word is not considered part of our language today, I definitely consider it part of mine.

Before long, I registered the name Livien as a domain and the zine lived there quite happily for a while.

When I could no longer commit to the zine, other projects of mine (such as my journal or my poetry) took its place. Whatever it was that I shared on-line always lived in the web space of Livien.

Last month, I made a (very) sad decision to drop Livien as a domain name to make way for registering my own name. In memory of my history and association with the word itself (and everything it stands for), I have named my journal after it. God bless the new owner of that domain. May you treat its space with love and care, as you’ll find that it is sacred.

Well, it was for me.

Tribute To ‘Pip’

A couple of weeks ago, I finished Charles Dickens’s brilliant novel Great Expectations.

Without a doubt, it is one of the best classics I have read to date (probably ties with Thackeray’s Vanity Fair; I haven’t read that many classics anyway) and although it took me 12 months to read the first couple of chapters but only 2 weeks to read the rest of it, I am so glad that I persisted.

That is not to say that the book isn’t brilliant from page 1, but rather – when I sit down to read something new, it takes time for me to get comfy with the opening of a story. I wonder if it is just with classics.

Great Expectations made me laugh (thanks to the character of Jaggars), made me cry, I even yelled out — “No! Don’t do it Pip!” — on more than one occasion actually.

It’s simply a great read; Dickens writes superbly.

This has made me think of my mission to read a bunch of classics. I feel like I need to acquaint myself with the greats, the pioneers, the romantic writers from the olden days… maybe it will help me develop my own style. Maybe it won’t. Either way, I see it as being crucial to my learning process.

Jane Austen’s Persuasion is on my bedside table now. And in my work bag, and on the kitchen bench — yikes — it follows me around everywhere, yet, I’m still doing that thing where a light year or two has to pass before I ride the wave and read continuously. I haven’t seen chapter 3 yet and it’s been more than 2 weeks since I started it.

I don’t know why I do this.