Tag: notes on nothing in particular

posting because stephen asked me to

Fall from jamie scott.

I’ve been defeated. Bad luck won and this is it, as the cold closes in, there’s nothing else to feel.

Been seeing someone since this summer. It hasn’t changed anything, except that his company’s nice when we’re getting along. Still nothing’s getting in, nothing’s getting out. There’s no love, no shine. My heart doesn’t bump, I don’t lean towards their name. I could say that there’s walls up, except it’s worse than that, as it seems instead that there’s simply nothing left to protect. It would worry me, except that seems scraped clean, too. My internal fires have all burned out.

He’s taking us to New York for New Year’s Eve, an odd, confounding echo of last year. He’s never been and lights up at the idea. I’ve been, as usual, the planner, the toss-things-until-they-stick-er. Finding places to eat, visit, and sleep.

Meanwhile, I remain massively unemployed even though I interview with a potentially life-changing position at least once every two months, frequently as one of the two last candidates. A couple of companies even went so far as to offer me employment before reneging, leaving me panic-scrambling to replace the already scarce gigs and contracts I had cleaned out of my schedule to make room for the new job. At least now I expect my second interview to be cancelled before it even happens, which helps keep the stress down.

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.

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.

    • 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.)

    all counting out musical two three six nine

    Ray

    Plane touched down and homogeneity was there to catch me. Hello Vancouver. Where is your snow? Your corniced buildings? Your attention to culture?

    Thank you so much to Ray for being there for me.

    My camera’s died an inexplicable death. Pressing a power button does nothing to dead electronics. I wish it were possible to hard boot a photograph.

    There is more Japan in my room then when I left. Ryan‘s been unpacking. It clarifies my idea of what needs to be thrown out. Slimming down impedimenta is essential.

    I need to be away.

    The ferret feet wrapped around my wrist are charming, his earlier prancing dance welcoming me here tickled the eye. Skatia is novel because he is a surprise. He was left behind when I went native.

    These letters are the ladder I use to claw my way up to sketching everything as well as I see it. When I do it right, you can follow the path to where I was feeling, to the people I dreamed with. I’m too tired for anything complicated right now but these words are kicking out of me, a last ditch hazy attempt at packing some meaning into me before I promise the bed my body.

    See, my time tells me that it’s three hours more into tomorrow morning. It’s like I’ve crawled from the sea in some kind of discovering dream. I look at the clock and it lies to me. Time here is without teeth, unlike the racing exhaustion cradling my eyes I use to scrape my surroundings. That is teeth with a mask. If I wore make-up, I would think that if I were to strip off my face, my skin might feel the sunlight that’s creeping over the curved edge of the earth somewhere far away. I’m changing the numbers in my head. Three to Montreal, Toronto. Five to the Greenwich. The ones I do automatically, as if my cells were vibrating on a frequency that might drag snow from the sky to blanket me, make me feel at home, instead of just here.

    I should be asleep, but I am left alone too long.
    I am wondering how to describe how implausibly and importantly I am missing someone singing.