the last two months

I don't know if I can keep up this kind of blog. I enjoy reading about other people's daily lives, but I find writing publicly about mine painful and boring most of the time. I can't bring myself to include the most interesting happenings, because the city I live in is too small and it would become a gossip blog. I wish I had Brendan's dedication (and lived in New York). If I am going to maintain my space in the bloggersphere, I think I need to go back to the poetic prose of exodus laughing, or somehow meld the two styles.

i might be considered a risk

I started a new job this week. I am writing and editing for an internet company out of Vancouver. I won't be working out of the downtown Vancouver office, but in various places around Victoria.

I am currently working in the new part of the UVic library, which is so impressive! I am facing a wall of windows (that open!),which looks out onto a pool of water (a sort of moat, with ducks!) and a grassy hill (bunnies!) that mounts to a wall of evergreens. I am excited to spend most of my summer taking full advantage of the library resources, including the wing of top of the line macs, listening stations, editing rooms, and special collections (where there are some sylvia plath/ted hughes manuscripts i have yet to check out). There is finally a cafe in the library, where I will most likely work some of the time. In the bathrooms, the lights turn on and off when you come and go, the toilet flushes and the taps turn on and off automatically.

I can't believe I only have one more summer as a grad student. This huge technological upgrades always happen a year or two too late as far as my educational institutions go. My high school became a super school the year after I graduated, and was thrust from the middle ages into the new millennium.

So, on my trip to Vancouver last Monday I spent a day in the office. As part of my initiation, I had to complete a sort of personality profile. There were 25 sets of 4 adjectives and I had to choose which, of each set, I felt described me the most and the least. The resulting ten page profile was surprisingly detailed and insightful. At best, it indicates that I am extremely independent, self-motivated, and a strong leader. At the worst, it makes me sound slightly Machiavellian. The graph indicates that my Compliance characteristic is quite low, while my Dominance characteristic is highest. Here are some of the highlights:

M:

Is a capable leader with an influential and assertive approach. Additionally, she has both the ability to persuade and the ability to direct others when necessary.

Is an independent, individualistic and stubborn person who wants power and freedom from supervision.

Is a sociable person who works well with people. She enjoys being the center of attention and may, at times, dislike attempts to shift attention away from her.

Can be obstinate and defiant at times. She hates losing arguments.

May be seen as verbally aggressive and may not always adhere to the rules.

She is motivated by status and the authority to take action.

She wants to be well liked and to have a good reputation.


I love that, despite my verbal aggression, obstinacy, and narcissism, I still want to be well-liked. My co-worker is the complete opposite of me: quite compliant and non-dominant. Fortunately, I do not have the tendency to completely override these types, though I become slightly frustrated with their thorough tendencies and adherence to rules. I think we will complement each other well. I do have more likable character traits (friendly, good communicator, flexible, and optimistic), but those above should amuse anyone who knows me well.

voyeurism

I was talking to my fellow editors at work today about how we arrange our bookshelves and what books are currently beside our beds. The books by my bed just reaffirm how unrealistic I am in my ambitions:

Margaret Atwood's "Oryx and Crake" (one chapter left)

"Letters Home" by Sylvia/Aurelia Plath (re-reading it for the third time, about one-third of the way through)

Proust "Swann's Way" (feel like i will never finish it)

one of Simone de Beauvoir's autobiographies

"A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" (a loaned book)

a few dystopian paperbacks (1984, Brave New World)

and a stack of poetry by Sylvia plath, Don McKay, Al Purdy, and Ted Hughes.

What books are beside your bed?

"99 per cent human"

"Jimmy went in to see the pigoons" by Jason Courtney

I've been reading Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, and becoming increasingly disturbed by the very real possibilities it explores. This headline shows just how real the possibilities could be...

Cow-human cross embryo lives three days

filler post

this coming summer has the potential to be the best summer ever. as long as i can find the right part-time job and finish my Master's Essay my mid-June, everything should fall into place. Yes, I did just re-read that sentence and understand that I may be kidding myself. Maybe I shouldn't be arranging my schedule around Mod night...

I think that I could/would "date" again if anything seemingly pleasant presented itself, though for now i am perfectly content without any of that silliness. i enjoy the knowledge that i don't have to please or impress anyone but myself at the end of the day. and that's fortunate, because i really don't.

i think the best thing about being single is that you get to imagine for a time that you have high standards. its like beginning a new school term and prematurely congratulating yourself for doing all of the reading.

alibi

the last two weeks has been a blur of staying up too late, stressing about being behind at work, conference parties, hospitalizing and subsequently nursing my cat, reconnecting with and then saying goodbye to an old friend, temporary communal living with my cousin and her boyfriend (who are responsible for the better parts of the last two weeks), looking for a new job, stressing about my M.A. paper, fending off my ex-boyfriend, dreaming about the possibility of someday having a really nice boyfriend, and enjoying good (no, great!) wine and food.

hence, no blog entries.

hey, that's no way to say goodbye

leonard cohen is going on tour.

and there are no west coast dates...yet....

i might very well die if i don't see him!

another gold star for my generation

Prince Harry was quoted having said the following: "I generally don't like England that much"

Off with his head!

if pushing a shopping cart through hell and charred babies on a spit can get Oprah's attention, surely I can get published...

what should i expect after reading post-apocalyptic fiction until 1 a.m. but apocalyptic dreams?

I was determined to finish Cormac McCarthy's The Road (mainstream novel soon-to-be mainstream film) last night so that I could begin Atwood's Oryx and Crake. Tonight I am going to see Blade Runner, which I hear is cyber-punk film noir.

My dream last night involved 700-storey buildings, a tsunami, and religious hysteria. All of this dystopian literature is starting to making me slightly paranoid. Any suggestions for my next reading series?

you probably won't think its funny

i went to a volunteer orientation at the spca today and saw a poster encouraging people to spay and neuter their cats:

[picture of cute kitties with a chalkboard that says 1 + 1 = 6]
Cat's can't add, but they sure can multiply!"

heehee...

a daughter's confession

tonight i saw the diving bell and the butterfly



it was overwhelming. there were moments when i was so absorbed in the film that i forgot the person beside me. i would be laughing genuinely and seconds later taste a tear on my lip. i usually have a hard time giving into this unless i go the theater alone.

i don't really want to admit this but i am so self-conscious about the way in which i reveal my emotions. i always feel like i am being scrutinized in my emotional expression and this complicates my ability to allow my physical expression to correspond to my complicated depth of feeling.* i know that most everyone feels this way to a degree, but i am self conscious in a sort of hyper-aware post modern way, if that makes sense to anyone. the result, in my case, is that i either stifle or exaggerate my emotional response.

at the theater, i usually gauge whatever the audience is expressing and refuse to comply with what i believe is a socially conditioned reaction. if they laugh, i purse my lips; if i sense they are touched, i cross my arms and turn to stone. its ridiculous. i really am not that cynical! i'm getting better, really.

maybe it was partly the character's inability to physically express himself that liberated me through the film.

two thoughts:

one: there were some scenes that impacted me like severe blows. my father has als and there is..lets say a possibility...that he will suffer what this man suffered: need a breathing tube, lose the ability to physically express himself without losing memory, imagination, or mental clarity. i could handle seeing the film, but i don't think he could. if i were him, i would want to explore it, but i am not him. am i a bad person for saying this?

two: it encourages me that the last thing someone might want to do in life is to record their impressions in the form of a published book.

i couldn't help but think of brainhell.

*i suspect that this might have something to do with a childhood event. when i was 8 or 9 my sister told me that, after i was asleep, someone would come into my room and watch me while i slept. she may have said that they would film me; i can't remember. because of this, i would pose on my pillow before falling asleep; i would spread my hair carefully around my face and practice a peaceful expression that i imagined was very beautiful. i still have a real problem with posing.

---

one more thought. there was a scene that evoked a memory of mine, long buried. there is a flashback of the main character shaving his elderly father. it was a very intimate scene. once, a boy let me shave his face. he had recently beaten cancer and still had a shaved head and a scar. he was so vulnerable and trusting, letting me do it. his eyes watched me the entire time. i'm happy to have that memory back.

wow

ok. im sure most of you music savvy folks already know about the incredible brilliance of of montreal; if you don't, you absolutely have to get your hands on their album Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? . Incroyable!

good morning world

i was a bit late for work this morning because i was out drinking and dancing and being foolish until 3 a.m. i missed my bus and was waiting downtown, willing my hangover to lift and depart, when i saw a man in a bus shelter drink an entire bottle of mouthwash in one, desperate chug. i nearly cried.

its always fun to read your text message history the morning after a night of ridiculousness. my last text message to my friend Nate, which I must have sent in my sleep, said simply "Might nasdan." What do you think I was trying to say?

tonight's selection

Blow-Up directed by Michelangelo Antonion




this film was fantastic. i love short stories and films from the sixties. they often embrace the oddities in people that today is passed off as quirkiness. human beings are depicted as hungry, flawed, neurotic, passionate and beautiful. this was an award winning film when it came out in 1966. what mainstream film today would feature mimes as part of everyday life?

The scene in the club with The Yardbirds is damn cool. There is a Bob Dylan poster on the door, which, according to wikipedia, is a reference to the lament of the death of acoustic and rise of electric guitars. I love that Jeff Beck smashes his guitar and everyone goes crazy trying to get a piece of it, then David Hemmings' character leaves the guitar neck in the street and it becomes merely debris.

the party scene near the end is hilarious. everyone is smoking at least one joint and acting like they're doing heroin. hardcore.

Thomas: "I thought you were in Paris?"
Stoned Model: "I am in Paris."

the gold in their arms

this is a short passage from the story i am revising.

She wanted to swim under the rush of the waterfall and emerge on the other side. There, she imagined, was an indestructible water fortress. But she knew there was only a rock face and that she would be smashed by the force of the fall and dropped like a stone to the bottom.

She followed his feet to the shore and climbed up onto the cool mud. The banks of the ravine were smooth and tipped with brittle, yellow grass. The earth around was hard and strong and as she stood there she felt solid and graceful as the alders. The branches pointed up to the sun and some, broken, hung above the surface of the water, their straight white fingers just failing to reach their reflection. The opposite side of the bank held endless mysteries. He stood up and looked around at the expanse of water shaded by trees and the walls of rock that allowed their voices to travel but denied the invasion of others.

She felt everything all too much. If they stayed they would be transformed. To leave, she felt, was to make the ultimate sacrifice. Her feminine instinct, which raged sure as a river on its course, told her they could not stay. It was unforgivable. They were each separately, painfully aware of the wrongness that grew. Neither of them spoke while both minds raced in terror. She knew he could feel her shudder in every touch. His hard gaze thumped against the edges of her thought as on the stopped skin of a drum. It had in it a look of cruel, deliberate refusal.

He knew they would not stay, though he wanted it also. They were too pure for the world but would enter it nonetheless. He knew he must; his very maleness demanded it. He watched her, nymph like, her white limbs curled up by the water’s edge, as she stared at the surface. He suddenly resented the pleasure he took in her presence. She would resent him also. He somehow knew it was inevitable, for he was powerless to give her what she wanted or protect her from what would hurt her. This inevitability also, somehow, made him resent her. He wanted possibility, power. She created a sense of duty that could not be fulfilled.

Hatred’s first entrance; it rushes like the water over the lip of the fall, and pools like poison in the blood.

this is funny.

"Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolor disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life?"



this is also kind of funny...

its a sign

Only minutes after I posted that, I received an e-mail from a friend in Halifax who I sent the story to about five months ago, and he had some really good feedback.

promises

The last week of sporadic sunshine has improved my mood immensely. The gray winter skies of november through february churned me into a hard lump of idle matter. I curtailed my inactivity by reading a lot. Now, after absorbing a stack of great literature, I feel a need to produce, so I am going to begin another short story. If I state this publicly, perhaps it will stir me to keep this promise to myself. To further encourage myself, I am going to revise (again) "the" short story, the one I have been sitting on for far too long, and send it out.

I will post a bit of a "teaser" from Gold in Their Arms when I am home from work... and, tara, I will send you the full story to read so that you can give me your honest opinion.

tapestry

I was listening to 'Tapestry' on CBC while drinking coffee in bed this morning. Buddhist Lama Surya Das was on and I liked what he said: "patience is a form of action." He was talking about virtue becoming action. As I rid my life of distractions, what is left at first looks like emptiness and inaction, but in the same way that an artist removes parts of a stone to unveil a sculpture, it only becomes more unified.

Occasional distractions become more like costumes for the sculpture, like a Rodin wearing a cowboy hat or a pirate patch.

Now Irish playwright Conor McPherson is on, talking about his play, "The Seafarer." This is perhaps the only time I will ever have an Irish playwright in my bed. He is reading an incredible description of hell as an icy frozen hole (as in Dante's Inferno) beneath a frozen ocean where you experience time as completely boundless. He believes that in hell everyone is totally alone; he says that in the conventional description of hell, "even if you're in hell, you are still sort of in a relationship; your torturer lavishes attention on you."

He wrote his first play when he was twenty-five. I keep track of these things now.

my apartment decor is becoming more and more odd. my stereo is in the fireplace, there are birds over the bathtub, and now i have a drawer hanging on the wall and a picture frame as a bedside table. i like claiming new uses for old objects.

i am going to volunteer with the spca as a small animal cuddler. seriously. i wish i could do it full time.

i watched the sun go down for two hours last night while lying on the beach in front of the cemetery. there was a wedding party drinking champagne and being photographed on the rocks to my left and a man fishing on the rocks to my right. it was all perfectly satisfying.

friday night was ridiculous. one minute i was in my pj's drinking peppermint tea, the next i was shooting whiskey at badd manor and tossing a just-emptied bottle of wine into the bushes on the way downtown. i stole a beer at big bad john's and gave it to my friend and she had to talk her way out of it when the guy came back (forty minutes later) looking for his beer. our friend got cut off so we moved along to the local twenty-something spot, where i proceeded to hit on a twenty-something guy in a kangol hat and thick rimmed glasses who makes salad for a living. not my best moment. the night ended with a walk home in the rain at three am and a cell phone conversation about chopping wood and the fleeting nature of happiness with a friend of a friend. just a low-key night in.

i have epiphanies when i look into my bathroom mirror. i had one while brushing my teeth yesterday morning that released me from long-harbored feelings of guilt and inadequacy. i love epiphanies. they eradicate blights from the psyche. maybe this explains why for the last year of my last relationship i had a hard time looking at my face in the mirror.