Seventeen years ago this month Catherine was entering her 8th month of pregnancy. We’d just moved into our house at 100 Prince Street, and complicated, dusty renovations were underway. For Catherine it was a hot, uncomfortable summer, and it was my job to try to make things better.

One August night I went along to the video rental store to get a movie, thinking that would be a good distraction. I came home with a VHS tape of Angela’s Ashes, the film adaptation of Frank McCourt’s book of the same name. I thought it would be a light summer romp through Ireland.

I was wrong.

Here’s the introduction to the Spark Notes summary of the book:

The narrator, Frank McCourt, describes how his parents meet in Brooklyn, New York. After his mother, Angela, becomes pregnant with Frank, she marries Malachy, the father of her child. Angela struggles to feed her growing family of sons, while Malachy spends his wages on alcohol. Frank’s much-loved baby sister, Margaret, dies and Angela falls into depression. The McCourts decide to return to Ireland. More troubles plague the McCourts in Ireland: Angela has a miscarriage, Frank’s two younger brothers die, and Malachy continues to drink away the family’s money.

Careful readers will note that packed into that one brief paragraph is one baby death, the death of two children, and one miscarriage.

Angela’s Ashes, in other words, is not the film you want to watch while you are uncomfortably 8 months pregnant.

A few weeks later, we were over for supper at a friend’s house; sharing the table with us were a couple from Boston, old friends of our host. As the evening progressed, I took the opportunity to relate the story of my ham-handed movie curating.

One of the old friends, perhaps not understanding the larger message of my story, decided this would be a good jumping-off-point for a detailed description of every horrible thing that had ever happened to any of her parents’, grandparents’, cousins’ and in-laws’ pregnancies. “My dear old Aunt Gertie had 17 miscarriages,” she might have said (the details escape me), “including several involving packs of rabid wolves.”

I think of that night often, and I thought of it again this afternoon when I came across a pointer from Jason Kottke to 10 ways to have a better conversation, a TED talk by journalist Celeste Headlee.

Number 6 of the 10 is:

Don’t equate your experience with theirs.

In the video, Headlee elaborates:

If they’re talking about having lost a family member, don’t start talking about the time you lost a family member. If they’re talking about the trouble they’re having at work, don’t tell them about how much you hate your job. It’s not the same. It is never the same. All experiences are individual. And, more importantly, it is not about you. You don’t need to take that moment to prove how amazing you are, or how much you’ve suffered.

I am an offender in this regard as much as anyone: I’m not naturally comfortable relating to other people, and in my discomfort I’ll often reach for an “oh, X happened to you – X happened to me too!”

Sometimes this is fine: it can be a way of establishing common interests, or common struggles; often, though, I should follow Headlee’s advice, and let their X stand on its own, without a need for buttressing by my X.

Since Catherine was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer three years ago, I’ve had a lot of uncomfortable conversations about cancer.

More than once, while accompanying Catherine to the PEI Cancer Treatment Centre for an appointment, I’ve run into someone I know in the waiting room, someone obviously there for cancer treatment for themselves or a loved one. What do I say?

Conversely, the last three years saw a gradual unflowering of the news of Catherine’s cancer through our community of friends, coworkers, acquaintances, and people we’ve never met before but who seem to know us.

I meet someone on the street who I haven’t seen in a few years; they know about Catherine’s cancer, but we’ve never talked about it. What do they say?

A couple of weekends ago the brake pad warning light came on in our Volkswagen. On Monday morning, I took the car into the shop and Dave, my mechanic, diagnosed the issue as being a stuck caliper on the left side. So while the brake pads on the right were almost brand-new, and had years worth of life in them, on the left side the pads were worn down to the thickness of a couple of quarters. Dave replaced the pads and the rotors, and the busted caliper, and by the end of the day I was on my way.

I’ve related my brake pad adventure a few times in the weeks since, and it’s never proved to be an uncomfortable conversation. None of the friends I’ve told the story to have felt compelled to tell me the story of their brake pads. Or how their father’s brake pads failed once and he plummeted to his death.

But brake pads are not cancer. Cancer is about life and death and struggle and suffering and hospitals and mystery. And talking about it seems almost necessarily uncomfortable. And so we run to conversational tropes to try to rescue ourselves from the discomfort.

Fortunately, despite the shroud of stress that surrounds talking about cancer, the 10 ways to have a better conversation are helpfully universal, and can work for cancer conversations as much as for any other:

1. Don’t multitask.
2. Don’t pontificate.
3. Use open-ended questions.
4. Go with the flow.
5. If you don’t know, say that you don’t know.
6. Don’t equate your experience with theirs.
7. Try not to repeat yourself.
8. Stay out of the weeds.
9. Listen.
10. Be brief.

Reading through that list I realize that I’m not particularly accomplished at any of them, although I’m trying. Headlee says number 9, “Listen,” is the most important, and I agree: we’re not very good at listening, most of us, especially when there is quiet to be filled up, and it’s in not listening where things often go off the rails.

Which is all to say that the way to talk to people about cancer is the way to talk to people about anything else.

Go with the flow. Ask open-ended questions. Stay out of the weeds. Listen.

Stuck?

Here’s a good place to start:

How are you?

Mediamatic is one of my favourite things. If I lived in the Netherlands, I would be there every day, and go to every event.

In September it is hosting The Chromatic Dinner:

We are all familiar with how food tastes in our mouths, but can we also experience food through a different sense? Can you feel the sound of water, the smell of metal, the taste of fire or the texture of earth? Artist Martin Butler and vegan chef Alexander Gershberg present a wholesome and harmonious eating experience. Inspired by the Chinese five elements, each course is designed in a different color. Interested in the way in which color, smell, texture, sound and taste are mixed together? Join us for this fully immersive second edition of Mediamatic’s Neo-Futurist Dinners.

Under “practicalities” it is noted that “All Neo-Futurist Dinners are vegan.”

This seems like a good, general, rule.

My route into Mediamatic was via the content management system that undergirds its digital manifestation; this was also the CMS that ran the reboot website back in the 1960s, and I’ve always found it intriguing (I should probably update my profile).

Thirteen years ago on this day I wrote about Nagasaki:

The threat of nuclear destruction is still here today (nuclear powers would have you think it’s from terrorists; my money is on the nuclear countries themselves, through accident or intent), it’s just faded into the background.

Oliver is almost four years old now. He doesn’t know about Hiroshima or Nagasaki or the Holocaust or the Bataan Death March or any of the innumerable other inhumanities we have committed on each other. I am stymied when I think of how to begin to tell him. “Sorry, Oliver, humankind isn’t as great as I led you to believe originally…”

And now not so much in the background.

I resurrect a series that had been in stasis for a year.

1. Piatto, the pizza place on Queen Street, in the Kays Building, makes an awfully good cappuccino. They go on a little too much about it on the menu (“creating microfoam to top the coffee”), but ignore that. They hand-pull on a Pavoni, and they appear to be really good at it.
2. The Garden Café on Kent, at 88 Kent Street, across from the Charlottetown Firehall where Interlude used to be, has an eclectic lunch menu. I had the spinach panini for lunch, accompanied by Greek and potato salads and a cup of tea. It was very good, and the service was warminhly friendly.
3. The Bookmark, the local Charlottetown bookstore that keeps on keeping on, has proved an unexpected fount of knowledge on all things pen and ink. I’ve always known they carry art supplies; I never knew they knew so much about them.

Oliver, to me, last night on our walk home from an Island Fringe show:

“I just realized that Košice and Bratislava are both in Slovakia.”

From Olle, a pointer to Hygge, “a short text game about the ups and downs of moving to another country, daylight, school, kids, coffee, lifting weights, learning new languages, working from home, and travelling the world.”

I’m midway in; here’s my favourite part so far, a description of the 13 year old, who’s on the autism spectrum:

She’s weird, but she’s basically not much weirder than any thirteen year old girl. She’s going through the same changes. She just gets excited about things in different ways than everyone else.

Yes.

I was coming out of Sobeys last night after shopping for the weekly groceries when I noticed some interesting weather to the north: huge clouds lighting up every 15 seconds or so with flashes of lightning.

I pull out my phone and pushed the “take a rapid succession of shots” button, and turned the result into an animated GIF.

Here’s a looping animation of one of the flashes:

Oliver made this piece of audio art by overlaying multiple TED Talks and then manipulating the audio in GarageBand on his Mac. I love this.

At the performance of Perk Up, pianist! today at the Haviland Club, Oliver and I sat beside the Heintzman piano in the back of the room (a piano only partially-working, and thus not the piano used for the performance). I took the opportunity to sketch the “Sold by Miller Bros Ltd.” label on the front:

Miller Bros Ltd. was a Charlottetown institution for decades; you’ll find more than 2,000 references to the company in The Guardian over the years, like this one, from 1915 that mentions their Heintzman business:

The summer programming in the theatre here at The Guild–a theatre located mere inches of drywall away from where I work away each day–includes Anne & Gilbert, Seussical Jr. and Dreamworks Madagascar A Musical Adventure Jr. running in repertory.

Because the managers of The Guild are frugal, the air conditioning in the building is only turned on when there are to be theatre patrons in the building for a show; otherwise we are left to sweat in squalor.

Today’s morning performance was Seussical Jr. at 11:00 a.m., and, sure enough, my temperature logger here in the Reinventorium shows the temperature starting to drop from an overnight high of 25ºC starting at 9:30 a.m., hitting a low of 20ºC almost right on the button for the 11:00 a.m. show start. Once the show was over, and the crowd dispersed, at 12:30 p.m. the temperature started to go up, and as I type this at 3:30 p.m., it’s up to 26ºC, which is only 1ºC cooler than the outside temperature.

The humidity followed a similar progression, taking a dip from 50% down to 44% starting at 9:30 a.m. and then gradually creeping back up (presumably, in part, because of the number of breathing patrons in the theatre), and then, with the air conditioning off at 12:30 p.m., taking a jump up to 52%. As I type it’s hovering around 50%.

Here’s a Humidex chart, originally from Environment Canada, that I pulled from the Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety; it shows the “degree of comfort” for various combinations of temperature and humidity:

So at showtime, with a temperature of 20ºC and a humidity of 45%, the Humidex was 22, or “no discomfort.” I can attest to this: it was a very pleasant work environment.

Here at 4:00 p.m., though, with a temperature of 26ºC and humidity of 50%, the Humidex is 20, or “some discomfort.”

Now I’m not exactly exerting myself physically as I tap away at the keys here, so, even if we moved into the “great discomfort” range, I would likely be in little risk of heat stroke (even if I would feel as if in the rain forest).

The interesting aspect to all of this, however, is how I’ve developed a Pavlovian response to the presence of musical theatre in my midst.

No matter the degree of joy that the singing children bring to themselves and to the audience, you might think that you can only listen to “I like to move it, move it” so many times before you wish ill of those behind the 4th wall, but this is significantly mitigated by the improved working conditions that “I like to move it, move it” brings with it via its air conditioned comfort.

To the point where I now look forward to the stirring courses of Anne, King Julien and The Cat in the Hat.

Such is life here abreast the theatre.