Time Off

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Taking some time off for a variety of reasons. Hopefully I'll get back to posting soon. Take care, my friends.

Popular posts from this blog

What is this? Where am I? What's it all about?

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All good questions. Let me explain. My name is Giselle and I'm your new best friend. Well, maybe not "best friend." A best friend usually listens in addition to talking, but that's not me. What I will do is be here every day, starting June 1 2019, to share with you whichever song pops into my head. Why?  What's the point? Well, here's the thing: I'm a writer. It's a pretty lonely job. Over the years, I've become increasingly socially isolated and you know what? It sucks. It sucks bad. The truth of the matter is that a lot of us are socially isolated, these days. And not just older people--younger ones, too.  There are "friendly visitor" programs for seniors, but those of us under 65 are kind of lost at sea. I speak from experience. Let me be your friendly visitor! If you need a no-pressure visit every day, let me be your visitor. I'll bring a song--whichever song pops into my head, gets stuck in my head, or seems relevant...
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#SongoftheDay I Dreamt We Spoke Again (Death Cab for Cutie)

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Last winter, I listened to this Death Cab for Cutie album ( Thank You for Today ) on repeat. I'd probably heard it 20 or 30 times before I clued in to the fact that it was a break-up album, and maybe I was listening to it so much because, last fall, I went through a break-up and never really dealt with it. If you've known me for a while, you've heard me talk about my girlfriend, Sweet. What you don't know is that she isn't my girlfriend anymore. We broke up while my grandmother was dying, which is a stupid time to break up with someone, but the relationship had run its course, we were in very different places emotionally, and it was time to say goodbye. Actually, I lost a 10-year relationship and my beloved grandmother in the space of 4 days. I mourned the loss of my grandmother, and I let that take over. I pushed the relationship loss to the side. I didn't want to think about it. I haven't even told the internet until now. So when I talk about my p...
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#SongoftheDay J'envoie valser (Oivia Ruiz)

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Believe it or not, I've never held myself in high regard. You might think that, in order to be a writer and market my work and all that, I must have incredible self-confidence. I don't. I've always thought I'm bad at everything and I'm not worth much. This is something I managed to convince myself a long time ago, and it wasn't hard to do. I know I shouldn't allow my self-worth to be determined by other people, but there's a part of me that's still as vulnerable as the young girls in the audience of this video. There's a part of me that needs to be shown I have value. My partner and I are not young people. We have histories, past lives, paths we've taken. When we got together, my partner had to make a choice: he could stay in his previous situation or build a life with me. If he'd stayed where he was, he would come into money. Big money. Like, a million dollars or more. He wouldn't have to do anything to "earn" it; thi...
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#SongoftheDay Cheers Theme: Where Everybody Knows Your Name (Gary Portnoy)

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A lot has changed since I first created this blog. Even more changes happened while the blog was on hiatus. Most notably, my partner was diagnosed with cancer. He is currently receiving treatments, the side effects of which make every day incredibly arduous. When you become a caregiver, everybody tells you that you have to take care of yourself first--the whole oxygen mask thing. Even my partner tells me I need to take care of myself first, particularly because I have chronic health conditions that make it almost impossible to function some days. It feels kind of ridiculous sometimes, the two of us trying to take care of each other when we're both sick. We need so much help, and right now we have nothing. All we've got is each other. Every time someone tells me to take care of myself first, I wonder how I'm supposed to do that when my partner's needs are so immediate and life-or-death. He is not a demanding person. Cancer is demanding. It takes over your entire life...
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#SongoftheDay Finally (CeCe Peniston)

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Music from the late 80s/early 90s seems to appeal to many of the visitors here on the blog. I couldn't be more pleased, because this was a formative time period for me, musically.  In other ways, too, but I find myself gravitating more and more to this music.  Every time a song (like this one) hits me square in the nostalgia centre, I look it up and it's from 1989, 1990, or 1991. Those were the years I spent taping my favourite Much Music videos onto videocassettes plastered with music note stickers, so it makes senses. I don't think the me I was thirty years ago would ever have envisioned life shaping up as it has done. I don't think the me I was three years ago would have. I've got to admit, being so strongly identified as queer and then falling hard for a straight man is a little... a little what?  I don't know if there's a word for it.  Part of me feels like I'm betraying my people for settling down with someone who's not trans or non-bin...
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#SongoftheDay Tell Me Something Good (Rufus & Chaka Khan)

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It's easy to get addicted to the news, these days. The world is a 24/7 train wreck. How can we look away? My mother's basically been self-isolating since January. Well, not really, but she had her surgery, she was in hospital for weeks, then when she got out she couldn't leave the house, and by the time she'd recovered enough to be out and about, she wasn't allowed to.  Her immune system is severely compromised. She is very much at risk. Thank goodness my brother lives with her.  She also has lots of friends and sisters who are more than willing to drop groceries at her door. I didn't mean to write so much about my mom.  I only mentioned her to say that she tells me she often turns on the news first thing in the morning, and suddenly it's afternoon.  All she's done in that time is watch the news. There's not much good in those reports. I don't know if there should be. I don't know if goodness seems trite, when so many people are dying. ...
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#SongoftheDay Tuna the Food of My Soul (Garrison Keillor ft. Jean Redpath, Prudence Johnson & Philip Brunelle)

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 I'm watching Murder She Wrote and eating casserole straight from the pot.  The egg noodles and peas and mushroom soup got me thinking about one night more than a year ago, when my siblings and I returned to my mother's house after spending more than ten hours with her in the emergency room. She'd been released too early after a cancer surgery, and had to be readmitted.  That process should not have taken as long as it did. We were exhausted after the day we'd spent at the hospital. It was 11:30 at night, and we opened the fridge to find a casserole my aunt had made for us.  We heated it in the microwave, but started eating it before it was even very warm.  None of us had eaten since breakfast, and we consumed that casserole robotically.  We ate huge amounts of food.  The day had been so stressful and full of worry and emotion that I can't imagine a more perfect food than bland casserole.  In a certain context, there's nothing better than a casser...
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#SongoftheDay Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 (Rousseau)

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I will always associate this piece with the film Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, which was one of my favourite movies of the 80s. It came out at the absolute perfect time, for me. I'm sure I've mentioned in the past that I wanted to be an animator when I was young. Part of that was because I loved drawing, and part of that was because I loved cartoons. Have I told you this story before? I can't remember. I've talked about it on Twitter, but I can't recall if I ever mentioned it here on the blog: when I was a kid, there was a lot of domestic violence in my household. I had a Smurfs blanket on my bed, and at night I would hide underneath it and pretend I was in Cartoon World, where I could play with the characters I loved from Saturday morning cartoons. When Roger Rabbit came out, it affirmed my escapist desires by presenting a world in which cartoons and humans coexisted. That's where I wanted to live. I haven't seen Who Framed Roger Rabbit? in... oh, 30 years, ...
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#SongoftheDay The End of the World (Skeeter Davis)

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I first heard this song, but not this version, in the 1990s.  If you were watching TV back then, you'd have been familiar with Ally McBeal. My aunt had the soundtrack from the show, and I listened to it obsessively while housesitting for her one summer. Ally McBeal's artist-in-residence was Vonda Shepard, and it was her cover of The End of the World I'd been most familiar with until I looked up the original a couple years back. Maybe now's not the right moment to be playing songs on this theme (and I've got a few of them lined up), but this global pandemic we're living through seems post-apolyptic to me, at times. I don't want to bum you out, but this song is a heartbreaker. If you're wondering how you can support me in bringing you songs and visits every day, the easiest thing you can do is tell your friends about the site. Tell anyone you know--particularly people who are isolated and enjoy music. Readers of adult fiction can also buy my b...
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#SongoftheDay The Love Boat Opening and Closing

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The other day, my partner went out to visit a friend who has had multiple strokes and now resides in an assisted living facility. While my partner was out, I watched The Love Boat. Why? Because it was on. And because I remember watching it as a kid. It was pretty hard to sit through, as an adult. The laugh track, for starters. I found I kept leaving the room. When my partner got home, I asked him how his friend was doing. He said, "He was watching The Love Boat." If you're wondering how you can support me in bringing you songs and anecdotes, the easiest thing you can do is buy my books (most are for adults only!) or check them out from your local library.  Supporting my  AudioErotica  endeavour on  Patreon  would also help me hugely. I'm also an  Amazon Influencer,  so hopefully I can make a little pocket change when you buy stuff by clicking through  my affiliate links . I also recommend subscribing to my newsletter. I generally e-mail subsc...
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