Month: January 2012

finally, a pause

Friday was close to being a complete write-off. First I went downtown to take someone’s photo, only to stand about waiting for an hour in the cold, at home a note sent through the digital, “stuck in a meeting, sorry!”, my lack of cell phone stranding me yet again. Things cheered up briefly when I walked home to find an invitation to a job interview, only to find out, once I’d trekked back downtown, that it wasn’t for legitimate employment, but instead with a guy who wants a girl to “boss around” his home. “Oh good, you’re pretty enough.” Pardon? I explained he should be advertising in the personals section and left, but not before he referred to special needs people as “feebs”, (the second person to do so in my presence in as many days, ugh), and demanded I pay his bar tab. The entire experience lasted perhaps a total of fifteen miserable, uncomfortable minutes, but felt like a shotgun blast to the day. Walking home from that was even worse than the morning’s photography failure. And, of course, at soon as I’m home again, home again, there is a voice mail message with my name on it, from the non-profit I interviewed on Wednesday, “we’ve gone with another applicant”.

But David got home in time for me to borrow his bus pass to go to the Ayden Gallery opening, where I met up with my brother Kevin, in from Montreal, his friend Nicholas, and Diego, recently back from Spain, and the art was nice and the company nice and Diego gave me a pretty necklace as a holiday gift and we got slurpees on the way out of the mall and cadbury cream eggs and there was a clutch of hipsters at the bus-stop all wearing fake mustaches and it snowed a little and I got to show my brother Nightwatch when we got back to my place and everything turned out pretty well after all. Hooray.

Saturday was significantly better. Kevin took me to breakfast at Locus, one of my favourite Vancover restaurants, and we wandered around in the thin crust of snow a bit, talking about our mutual love of Montreal, before I dropped him off at a friend’s place and bussed home. He’s grown from an angry, unpleasant child into someone I am glad to know, for which I am thankful. It spills from me like water in cupped hands, brimming past the edges of our sad memories of childhood, a slow moving river that is going to take some time to get used to.

Then Aleks came over and napped in my bed with the cats for awhile before driving us over to Andrew & Sara‘s for an in-house Molly Lewis concert that was stuffed to with spectacular people. She sang about Myspace and having Stephen Fry’s baby and generally charmed the heck out of everyone and for the first time all week I relaxed. It was wonderful.

Eventually the clever after-party dismantled for a trip to The Whip and though outside it was cold, it was beautiful, with snow, real snow, the dry, enchanting stuff, floating down like feathers after a televised pillow fight. We sparkled up the street, running in bursts then sliding along the frozen road on the flats of our shoes, arms akimbo, all transformed into ten years old. The group splintered at the bisto-bar, breaking off to different tables, mine against the far wall, the kitchen party, with Michael and Andrew and some folks from Seattle. We talked about terrible twitter jokes and a scandalous lot about nothing, but it was as full of odd glory as the weather, if inevitably more silly.

When it was time to go home, we skated down the road again, sliding even farther, whooping with cackling laughter, occasionally colliding, but never remembering to fall. Plans were made, Sherlock mentioned, and I fled down the street, trying and failing to get Andrew with the one tiny snowball I managed to make. S. drove me home, spinning the car down one of the back streets near my apartment, just because he could, with the sort of wicked joy usually reserved for roller coasters and haunted houses, toothless darkness and danger followed by ice-cream in the sun.

Meet New People, Try New Things

I’ve started a number of projects this year.

The 365 Self-Portrait Series: The challenge is to take a different self portrait each day for an entire year. I’ve attempted this a number of times in the past, but every time something came up to interrupt the flow – my camera broken or stolen or a hard-drive crash that locked up all my pictures. According to Flickr, the most I’ve ever managed is 181 photos. Last year I was too depressed to even begin, but this attempt is already unlike the others. Something inside me snapped this spring and hasn’t mended. All that’s left is the determination to make this year different.

My Facebook Friends Portraits: This is the year I expect to have 1000 facebook friends. To celebrate the milestone, I am going to take a portrait photo of every single one. When I am done, I will have a small gallery show. Given that many of my friends are scattered across the globe, I may have to actually apply for arts funding for this one, but for now I’m going to do as many as I can where I am. The website for the project is still in the planning stages, but I’ve already started taking the pictures.

Six-String Samurai: I haven’t picked up a guitar with an intent to play it since my father smashed mine when I was little. Time to move on. To that end, I’ve been given an acoustic guitar by my family, jointly somehow by my mother and brother Kevin, that used to belong to Brenda, and my friend Ray has returned my family’s guitar book, Rock School, that my mother bought through mail order when I was two. I have cut the nails on my left hand short and practicing chords every day until my fingertips go numb. There is an end goal, a VideoSong, but more information on that will come later, once I am farther along the way.

Sell My Stuff: I started this last year to some success, but the pace isn’t moving fast enough. To this end, I’m putting aside a day every week to catalogue what’s left and re-list anything that hasn’t sold. I will also be reviving the minimalfox blog to keep track of my progress. Most of my sentiment’s been excised, so the new rules for the majority of what remains shall be that of good design – if it’s not unique, rare or hard to find, it had better be useful as well as beautiful.

on my way to learn pachabel’s canon

  • bOINGbOING: Stamp semaphore as early emoticons (& secret messages).

    I interviewed with a non-profit this morning. Four days a week, Tuesday to Friday, upstairs from a methadone clinic, less than an hour away by bus. I won’t know how it went until the end of the week, when they contact me to say yea or nay, but it seemed to go well. Fingers crossed and all that.

    Speaking of fingers, I cut the nails on my left hand today to better play the guitar. Most people would find that mundane, hardly news, but I am odd about my nails, I keep them sharp and long. It’s potentially only the second time in my adult life I’ve purposefully trimmed them. Now my fingertips feel downright bizarre, as if I’ve done something considerably more drastic. More than that, it feels as if the nerves under the newly bared skin aren’t sure how to fire yet. I find myself flinching away from touch. It helped, though. Although my fingers still feel like the fattest sort of sausages, I’ve been successfully playing some chords.

    • contemplating a curse

    Bewilderment and sorrow, that simmering concoction, like the aftermath of a murder or the first realization that roses have thorns. I pause, uncertain, blindsided again, memories stirred up, silt from the bottom of the dream-jar. My hands begin to move again, measuring out words, a confused reply, drained of the smile I had been trying to communicate. It is sunny outside, sweetly bright for the first time in a week. The sky is finally open. I had tried to share, some silly self-mockery about depressive dinosaurs and poetry, but the conversation flipped in their beautiful mouth. An invocation of sharp stones, a sudden grappling hook to the chest. Changeling child, fierce, erratic. I remember this, the sound of the crack as my ribs pulled apart, so true it felt like I should carry the scar on my skin.

    Those cruel fairy woods are a dark place, laced with private, uncanny paths that I cannot follow, paved with accusation and marrow deep mistrust. I am left behind. The ways in are a mystery. Those roads too foreign, too strange. All I can do is apologize, blindly, astonished, and reach out as they vanish. Perhaps I am capable of some last, impossible action that might save things, a spell, a sacrifice, a gesture in the air, but whatever is needed is not something I know. Too soon, too late, they are gone. The door between us has shut. I am still a moment longer, waiting for what? Inspiration, a cascade of light, even partial understanding, but I close the computer still wondering, wandering among ghosts, no wiser than before.

    Outside, at least, the sun continues to shine.

    we could have been a beautiful machine

    A Week Later
    by Sharon Olds

    A week later, I said to a friend: I don’t
    think I could ever write about it.
    Maybe in a year I could write something.
    There is something in me maybe someday
    to be written; now it is folded, and folded,
    and folded, like a note in school. And in my dream
    someone was playing jacks, and in the air there was a
    huge, thrown, tilted jack
    on fire. And when I woke up, I found myself
    counting the days since I had last seen
    my husband-only two years, and some weeks,
    and hours. We had signed the papers and come down to the
    ground floor of the Chrysler Building,
    the intact beauty of its lobby around us
    like a king’s tomb, on the ceiling the little
    painted plane, in the mural, flying. And it
    entered my strictured heart, this morning,
    slightly, shyly as if warily,
    untamed, a greater sense of the sweetness
    and plenty of his ongoing life,
    unknown to me, unseen by me,
    unheard, untouched-but known, seen,
    heard, touched. And it came to me,
    for moments at a time, moment after moment,
    to be glad for him that he is with the one
    he feels was meant for him. And I thought of my
    mother, minutes from her death, eighty-five
    years from her birth, the almost warbler
    bones of her shoulder under my hand, the
    eggshell skull, as she lay in some peace
    in the clean sheets, and I could tell her the best
    of my poor, partial love, I could sing her
    out with it, I saw the luck
    and luxury of that hour.

    zeroes and ones

    I signed up for a remote contracting service today which resulted in a morning spent taking multiple choice tests to quantitatively prove my knowledge of editing styles. By noon it was obvious that my Oxford is near perfect, but my Chicago has slipped. How, I don’t know, except that perhaps it’s similar to when I lost my ability to count in binary on my fingers when I tried to learn hex using a similar system, meshing the two and destroying both. (One of these days, I tell myself, I will get binary back, as it was a clever sort of trick, but as of yet I haven’t found reason to bother.)

    a summary

    This is one of my favorite memes. It’s a look at the last year, through the first line of my first blog post of each month.

    1. the failed canary in the lightswitch
    2. a crow carrying pearls
    3. sometimes we have the same colour iris
    4. commitment/abandonment
    5. it's may day: make a joyful noise
    6. confluence
    7. artpost: something I could never do
    8. I'm going back
    9. a memoir
    10. heavy traffic
    11. at the late night double feature picture show
    12. this is it, the only life we have to live

    Looking over my archives, it's clear that this is the year I've written the least. (Two unresponsive partners in a row destroyed my craft to the point where I wonder if I'll ever get it back.) Perhaps I'll find it's a matter of practice. Perhaps I should resolve to write every day, no matter the topic, and if all I have is unhappiness, regret, pain, and sorrow, than I should write anyway, damn my efforts to keep up the tone. I've lost love this year, and trust, and joy, and my partner, and my most intimate friendship. The people closest to me let me down the most, in every possible way. There is death everywhere. And struggle. My body is broken, my heart an open wound, and my life bleak in almost every direction. I have no work, no income, and no future. Losing my writing should at least be my last straw. My writing and my pictures. Once I stop creating, what is there that's left?

    So what about your year? What did it look like?