Dear Alexander McQueen,

Please stop killing armadillos to make shoes. No, please don't pretend, as others going mental over your abominations are that this is in any way post-modern fashion. In fact, it's not really fashion at all. If you are trying to bring the back surrealist or dadist movement and undermine our sensibilities by presenting such - disgusting clunkers, may I suggest a nice healthy dose of Krazy Katz and Ignatz to wash away those Surrealist blues?

We can even tolerate those...strange stilters tiled with skulls and towering on unwieldy spindles of double platforms. Heck, if Chloe can pull off double platforms why can't you? But - erm, these are not shoes. Yes, of course, we agree with you: fashion is wearable art. These are not art. We're not sure what they are having never seen anything quite so ugly before. We will gladly pick up a pair of Uggs in exchange that each and every one of these...creatures be burned and stamped out.

Ohhh, you clever minx! People just love a trend! They love to be outrageous. Everything seems so accesible! We can have a piece of the fame by owning these shoes! And you know this don't you? Otherwise, what (besides a bad trip to the bathroom) could have prompted you to design these?

Are you trying to unleash an epidemic around the world, now you've heard we're overdue? Are you trying to wipe out any modicum of sanity we have left? May we point out that just because the crazies (gaga and cruella deville guinness) have decided to encase their feet in vases of the 6th century BC, we really don't take that kindly to someone trying to case us in goat's feet?

We hoped that your shoes possessed a shred of transcendental quality - that eventually they would grow on us like the 2008 product of the Madonna and Justin Timberlake collaboration. Rather, we suspect, things will start to grow out of it, soon, given its current toxicity. In any case, everytime we look at it, for some sign of redemption, it, if possible, becomes more and more hideous.

May we suggest, as an immediate tonic, that you return to the drawing board and give Manolo Blahnik a call? Heck, go crazy, make it a party and call Christian Louboutin. Being creative doesn't mean you have to be on crack. You don't have to be alone. Help them help you get through this. Return to us. Also, Lovers: wearing these does not make you a walking canvas - you'd have to be able to walk in them first. Oh and - where did we get with that burning idea...?

About a week ago I received a bill from my family doctor's clinic of all the services that I had used last year and I was assured that they were covered under OHIP.

"Dear Ms. MacKrekar" the letter read, "Please be informed that these services are covered under -"

Hang on just one bloody minute, I thought. I backed up, my eyes hardly believing that what I had just read could be true. Everyone always wishes for this when then get their credit card bills - hoping that all their extravagant purchases are sent to someone else while a batty old woman's can of tuna is the only thing listed on their own credit card bill - obviously the result of a bad mail switch.

For one wild second, this was me: it has finally happened, I thought. Canada Post finally messed up and sent me some old Scottish hag's bill. But upon closer inspection and second glance, I soon came to realize - this wasn't someone else's bill. This was MY bill. MY bill addressed to ME, Sarah Merekar. Or, MacKrekar, according to this doctor's office.

The lack of caring notwithstanding, I blinked and wondered at the level of incompetency and stupidity that must be rife in our society for someone to be able to mispell or enter incorrectly, someone's last name over and over and over again, especially if the creation of the bill was probably just a form to be filled in. All they had to do was enter the right bloody name. So shocked was I that I ran to fetch my health card and, of course, my health card informed me that my last name was firmly Indian, not some strange Scottish variant.

How hard, I wondered, how hard is it to spell a bloody name that isn't more than 10 letters long. It's 7 measly letters! Has anyone ever tried spelling OTHER brown names? They go on forever! Or let's take Russian or Polish names - those are just a long list of unfortunate consonants all rammed together, any sadist's dream. Or how many times can you say "polous" in one greek last name? My last name is not the hardest gawdamn last name in the world. In fact, all circumstances given, it is actually quite simple: two e's, two r's, a K, an A, and an M. And not in that order. It's so simple.

But no. No, they must mispell it. It's not such a big deal, really, people mess up names and last names all the time. Which is why Satish and Rajiv and Chandrashekar have to change their "ethnic" names to Saul and Ray and Charlie. And it was this, this very notion that annoyed the hell out of me. Once upon a time, I was indignant, yes, that anyone with an eastern name had to change it to something seen to be more "easier", more "integrateable" into Western culture. But now it struck me that besides all the tools of hegemony naming and renaming really introduce and apply, it was like a whole new identity. And here was a whole new identity being offered to me. A new form of imperialism? Maybe I'm too quick to judge, too quick to fly off the handle, to spout a theory. But I was affronted - affronted that they couldn't take the time to bother to check the spelling of my name when I, the ethnic "other" the eastern counterpart of Edward Said-like descriptions, would have to do so. And inexplicably puzzled that they had chosen, instead to give me a NEW name. For this is not a mere case of typos or letters being put in the wrong place.

Once - no, many times over - in grade school, I had a friend named Nadejda. The supply teachers would always pronounce it Nad-JYE-da. One day I got so annoyed at this blatant lack of care obvious idiocy that I blurted out loudly, "The E comes before the J!" I got detention for speaking outloud but I never forgot this moment. Thankfully, there are not many ways you can fuck up Sarah but a few had a hearty go at my last name - I got Marker, Meerkat, America, Mareep the Sheep (when Pokemon came out. dear god.).

But here is a psudeo-scot name being offered to me. Being fashioned and given, a new form of evangelical, Christian missionary. Here, it is not the Bible that is the Sign taken for Wonders. It is this identity, this new name, that, when donned, integrates me into the culture but also allows me to stand up, now in the skin of my conqueror and look back at him.

Madness, you may think. Post-colonial theory in a simple health letter? But intended or not, dormant or not, latent or clear, they are there. It is there. It is inherent. And whether the intention is there or not, whether the awareness is there or not, I am very aware. Very aware that it is NOT spelt MacKrekar or McKrakken or any of that. It's Merekar, thank you very much and I think I'll stick to that for now. Unless Gerard Butler seduces me and I succumb, of course.

In the Here. And Now.

These are not New Year's resolutions. Personally, I think new year's resolutions are silly and one dimensional and I'm simultaneously amused and aggravated by the need for a new year to come so that change can be spurred.


However, I'm not completely closed off to the infectious reborn spirit that tingles the air.

The past few weeks have been...tumultuous. I have sunk from one low to the next and have wrote such depressing posts that they are fit only to be unpublished and I hope they never surface and see the light of day. I think that was really important though. I surrounded myself with every single thing, thought, notion and aspect that would overwhelm me in mourning and grief. Music, places, feelings, thoughts, artifacts, plans, pro-con lists. I spread it all around me and devoured every last one.

There are two points in a mourning period. One, in which your grief overwhelms you; the more you think about lifting your head, the farther it drops. You want to grieve, you want to be depressed. And the other is when you completely shake off this feeling - not only of the grief, but also of that feeling of wanting to drown in its swell. People say that this is when you get over it. But that's not true. This point is when you meet the grief head to head. When you've sunk so low that you can finally meet that grief and come to terms with it.

In a manner of speaking, I was grieving. I was grieving for a good many things, good people. The loss seems like a death of sorts - death of a love, death of a dream - and the unknowing: not knowing, as I stand at this crossroads, which path I should take, how much I trust myself, where to turn and whom to turn to. How to pick what it is I want to do, or change or be when there's just so much to do and change and be.


I have finally reached a point in which I no longer want to grieve. I no longer want to sink and wallow and tread. I am still in the process of discussion with that grief; we're still setting out the terms. But there are certain things that we - I - have absolutely established beyond a modicum of doubt.


Firstly, what is past...truly is past. It is gone. It is neither touchable through memory nor through time. It is gone. What could have been will always be rosier than what is now. That is a given. Secondly, from what is gone, something can always be rebuilt. I think of this like the rebirth of a phoenix or the remains of a hurricane. A phoenix dies by erupting into flame and as a piece of matter that once was, it leaves behind other matter - ashes. The death is heartbreaking but it is organic. Because there is always matter left in the wake of the destruction with which to rebuild oneself, to be reborn. The baby phoenix rises from the ashes. A hurricane ravages and eats and completely consumes people's homes, their livelihoods and any ounce of sense they have been able to understand. But once it quietens down, the remains of wood and debris, of cables and clothes, are the symbols of destruction with which people's lives are rebuilt.


Matter begets matter. One is never left with absolutely nothing. One is never washed ashore with nothing. In the chasm between what once was and what is now, there is a vaccum for the birth of what will be.

I'm not yet sure what it will be. But I think that I've been putting way too much emphasis on what it should be and setting myself up for disappointment. There is nothing exploratory in an absolute projection of a future. Telling myself, internalizing, that things will be this way and that, that I will be this way and that, is silly. It makes no sense. I'm not getting out there and doing it, fulfilling it - whatever it may be. Instead, I'm moping that it's not happening and I'm not there. But I didn't know where exactly I wanted to be.

I'm going to go really slow. Intrinsically, that is very hard for me - in fact, is goes against the very definition of me. I'm impulsive and emotional and heady (Aries, after all :D). I jump from one thing to the next. But I'm really going to take the time to take it all in. I'm not going to ride the constant adrenaline wave because, really, I can't anymore. I've lost all sense of direction and I need to regain it. Well, I need to gain it because who knows if I had it to begin with. Everything seems illusatory and dream-like these days.

Anyhow, these are some things that I have carefully thought in what seems like my time in exile. Not hasty, impulsive decisions, but real, actual actions.

I'm going to volunteer. One of my problems these past few months have been that I've been completely overwhelmed. I'm absolutely, mentally swamped with everything - the state of the world. There are just so many causes to take up, so many ways in which to advocate those causes and yet still many more places in which they plague. There's injustice everywhere. How do you tackle it all at once? How do you save the world from it's own catatonic self?

I'm going to write a letter to him. It will not be a silent one. It will not be a disasterous one like the rory-writes-dean-a-letter-and-he-gets-thrown-out. It will be an apology letter. It will be a letter not because I have no courage to face him but because somethings are better said in print. With such fragile memories as people have come to have (slight sarcastic undertone), a letter would seem to have greater longevity. And brevity. The boy I knew is done and gone now and there is nothing so relieving as that lingering note of finality. He is - in a manner of speaking - dead and this new person is a stranger to me. I have no intention that our lives should ever cross again but if it does, I want there to be no bitterness.

I'm going to take dl.

I'm going to create. I'm going to give life to all those ideas. I'm not going to leave them half-baked. I really do think creation is complete immortality and beauty intertwined and forgive me for my follies/vices but I do want to be part of such a beguiling thing.

I'm going to see the city.

I'm going to learn one new thing every single day. No matter its triviality.

I'm going to be wrapped up like this - cautious and deliberate - for a while, until I figure everything out. Most importantly, I'm going to be in the here and the now, Now.