pet peeve #3709.1: having to be up

early for a morning commitment that takes about, oh, an hour or so - then having six idle hours before your next scheduled errand. it seems to me that wasting time should always be a conscious decision, rather than a default: if i can't jam-pack my day with efficiency, i resent being made to stand at attention and watch the hours go by.

one of many reasons dance class at university was a constant source of anguish. who makes chronically hung over college students do strenuous physical exercise at 8:30 am?! and worse yet, who gives them a schedule gap of six hours between that an a late afternoon lecture class?!?

i tried to alternate which of the two classes i skipped each week. needless to say, i wasn't a superstar in my dance class - but preferred taking the rap to the embarrassment of being asleep in the auditorium during history of the musical theatre.

time is, time was, time's past. i'm four years out of college; i just directed a complex full-length show that i'm intensely proud of (and that i truly wish my lovely history of musical theatre prof could've made it to - and stayed awake during, hypocrite that i am). maybe things are actually finally, dare i say it, going well for me. all things considered. maybe. it is certainly becoming easier to use the term self-employed rather than unemployed, though it still feels like a little bit of a lie, considering that the emphasis on "employed" suggests i'm making a living.

am i making a living? well, i'm alive. so, there's that. and i almost have rent for the month that's almost over. so... there's that. and i just landed a two-week salaried gig teching the atlantic fringe festival. aha! there is that, too.

there's something undeniably exciting about looking no further than next week. poverty, schmoverty. i wanted to do exactly what i'm doing right now: work on projects that excite me, live a less extravagant lifestyle (well... i didn't so much WANT this as realized i probably SHOULD), stay open to casual work when it came along, and lookie here: three out of three. teching the fringe, indeed. what do i know about teching? not a thing. learning experience! challenge! being able to cover rent for next month! possibly even getting out of overdraft for as much as a week! glorious.

today, i feel hopeful, and even with the darkness of less predictable matters ahead, life is good to me right now. it's probably important to acknowledge that when i can, so i am, and you be my witness: thanks, life, for not fucking me over right this second.

now, i knock on wood. i can't be superstitious enough about these things. who would've thought?

before i get awfully silly, let's go back to what i was talking about in the first place: being up too early when all you need to do happens late, and how i'm not pissed about it for once. my day so far has consisted of having coffee with a friend, solidifying the aforementioned job, and blogging on my porch in the late august sun.

it is on these, all too rare, occasions that i think being awake and functional in the morning isn't so bad... not so bad at all.

fin.

at the same time,

it's really not all bad. what am i even saying - i love it, most of the time.

i went for a long walk around the north end tonight. and while there was nothing particularly special about the night or the walk, on some level it was profoundly memorable. i know i will miss it. i know i will never have it again, not like this. i can already sense the impeding shadows of stress that are just around the corner - stress about the show, stress about money, stress... about other things, bigger things, scarier things.

but right now and right here, there is a calmness unlike anything i've felt before. or perhaps i have, but not since i was a child. nothing can touch me here; i'm surrounded by some kind of golden shroud of peace, and i walk at an extremely even pace, and all my thoughts are so wonderfully lucid. i had a dream last night that they offered me my job back at the restaurant - "it was just a test, you're back on the schedule now" - and i just stood there, watching the boiling bubbling chaos of service industry hell around me, wondering what i could do to make them fire me for good.
i woke up laughing with relief. oh, it's so good to know it was a dream! i wouldn't go back to that life if they offered me twice what i was making. i'd rather eat nothing but kraft dinner for months.

i really would, you know. this is something i was thinking about while wandering around tonight: how it was all too easy to forget that living on a tiny budget can be more rewarding; how fully i had myself convinced in no time that i couldn't do without a serving job i hated, under a boss i didn't get along with. there is literally not a thing about it i look back at fondly. time slid away from under me like quicksand in that job, and so did all that glorified cash i was making. jesus, how much money did i throw right back into that bar? all i ever had there that's worth remembering was fun, but fun and being happy are so fucking far from being the same thing.
besides, come on - even the fun wasn't usually much to write home about. all my best stories come from other places.

i'm realistic. i know i probably won't love the next "real" job i get, either. but i'll be cautious this time, and mindful of what chances i take. it's far scarier to be owned by a shit job than to have to cook your own dinner. i chose the career path i did far from naively: i knew i would end up living in houses that look like junkyards, and that i'd have to budget for things that are bare necessities. i knew and i didn't care. i know how to function under dire financial conditions, it's what i know. i came from that. how to put money away and invest in the future? not so much. i chose a moment-to-moment kind of life, and when that moment-to-moment yielded more funds than i was used to, i spent it just as lightly as i had come by it. and then that's what i became used to.

concentric circles, though, right? i'm here right now, happy to have reclaimed a peace of mind that's been lacking from me for entirely too long. also happy to be in better control of how i'm living and what i'm spending. it will get old, of course, as being broke tends to. in a year i'll likely be making more than i was leading up to all this.
well, either i'll be making more or at the very least i'll be much happier. maybe both. but definitely one.

right this minute, i'm feeling pretty optimistic about everything.

it's not so weird, i guess,

that i've always had this strange sense of displacement. it's probably weirder that i usually get over it. ever since i was little, no environment has felt like home, not entirely.

sure, i would eventually become attached to individuals or communities - given enough time - but never to the degree of belonging anywhere, in the way most people use the word 'belong'. probably that's not what it looks like on the outside. trial and error teaches a number of useful life skills, and i'm pretty adept at giving the impression that i fit into my surroundings quite comfortably.

it's not untrue, exactly. i'm comfortable most of the time. most of the time... i'm comfortably disconnected.

maybe this is a long-term side effect of thrusting an already socially alienated pre-teen into extremely unfamiliar new reality. adapting to foreignness became both second nature and practically impossible - almost like my system overloaded and then crashed, leaving me with the conviction that true integration is unachievable, so i better develop some serious chamelion skills.

i remember how i did it, too. i started making a movie in my head where i was the main character. i would play with camera angles and lighting, edits and various movie magics, until each moment of my life was a perfectly captured scene and everything i said was a perfectly delivered line. movie characters, you see - my young self brilliantly reasoned - are never not at home in the movie. no matter how awkward or vulnerable or destitute at times, they're an integral part of everything that goes on around them. i could do this; i could be this.

it seemed to work wonders, for a few years.

in high school i taught myself - with a fair amount of practice - to tilt my chin at a slightly more obtuse angle when walking, forcing my posture to change dramatically. this made me feel like i appeared more confident, which in turn made me feel more confident. ah, how close pretending things can bring you to the real deal! of course, with this slight physical shift came a general impression that i was arrogant and very likely bitchy. people were so convinced of this, i probably ended up arrogant and bitchy.

other things, too. like language. articulation is power, i discovered, and threw myself into what i can only describe as linguistic acrobatics in my attempts to master this amazing tool of control. no heightened turn of phrase nor lowbrow tidbit of slang was to remain unexplored, because language was a social costume for every occasion and no way was i going to show up underdressed.

well, i met all my goals. i note this with a combination of pride and sadness: i've conditioned myself so well, it's hard to be brutally honest with myself about how i feel in any given situation. when things are tough or strange or awkward for me, i feign okay-ness all too easily.

lately it's hard not to think about it. i'm getting cosmically tested, aren't i? it's just been one blow after another, these past few months. and i've been okay, and i am okay, and i may not belong anywhere but maybe people like me aren't ever meant to.
it doesn't have to be a bad thing, i don't think. just gotta learn how to think about it right. nothing is home, and i can never go home again.

fine. there is worse out there.

so i used to be extremely obsessed

with other people's belongings as a child. right? i couldn't keep my hands off them. i would feel them and smell them and chew on them and play with them, sometimes inevitably destroy them in my enthusiasm, and i would become terribly upset if an adult tried to take away my toy. it felt like emotional robbery. how dare they??

i'm not talking toddler, either. i was completely infatuated with strangers' stuff well into my adolescence. not in a weird cleptomaniac way where i wanted to make it my own: i just wanted to be close to it. like, an all-senses-involved-kind of close. and if ever there was a time when a stranger noticed and graciously gave me the thing i was so consumed by, why then it instantly ceased to be of any interest to me.

i still vividly remember that feeling of rapture, and i think i understand the reason behind it, too. it was the foreignness of the objects that i found so intoxicating, the fact that they had a life within the life of someone else who wasn't me. like they carried within them the essence of another person; a neatly wrapped package of alien humanity that i was desperate to explore... well, it's hard to explain, really.

in later years, i've equated my infantile need to interact with the belongings of others with the need many a fledging mechanic has to take electric fans apart and put them back together. except in my case, it wasn't about the inner workings of actual things. what i wanted to experience was the people who owned them, and the only way i knew how - remember, i was a fairly socially inept child - was to attack the physical manifestations of their personality. maybe this also betrays an instinctively sensual approach to life in general, i'm not sure, but i do know for a fact that the pursuit was intellectual in nature: i simply wanted to understand how other people went about being... well, other people.

objects have stories, you know. they don't have to be especially dramatic or eventful, as most real things are not: they can be as mundane as that time you spilled a drop of wine on your leather wallet and it stained the edge, and now i'm looking at it and i can see the discoloration, but it's been years since the drop of wine was spilled and how could i ever wrangle a context out of it? yet the context exists, out there, beyond mine and even your own reckoning: the restaurant you were at, where they served a really awful pasta salad, and how hard your date laughed when you told her the story about your dad catching you masturbating in the bathroom at his birthday party, and a million other things besides. so many stories. and if i couldn't get them all from one hands-on reading of your personal effects, i would make them up, filling in the blanks. your life - or at any rate, my interpretation of it - passing before my eyes. for a split second, i can be you. i can imagine being you. it's the same thing.

this is most likely how i started being an actor. it begins in your gut. whether or not i would have ended up actually acting is a whole different matter.

the other version of my backstory to being an actor involves watching a really bad river phoenix film as a teenager and being moved to tears, but really i probably just had a crush on him - it's the novelty version that people always dig. i mean, there might be a modicum of truth to it, but i don't fundamentally believe people decide they want to act from just watching someone else do it and being impressed. i think, at that point, it's no longer a decision. you just need a good source of inspiration to bring certainty to the surface. river phoenix was my trigger factor.

anyway, this is what i've discovered, years since and many foreign belongings handled, characters dissected, and parts played:
1. understanding how people work and trying them on for size are not even in the realm of being the same.
2. playing is not exactly being, theatre is not exactly reality: but it is the next closest thing and, when come by earnestly, ought to be no further away than an entirely plausible version of it.
3. being everybody feels the exact same. how you think, reason, and react within the parameters you're given is all kinds of different. but how being a person feels is the exact fucking same, in the end.

so don't tell me i wasn't there, because i could have been, and my imagination is sharper than a pitchfork and i have spent my whole life learning how to walk in other people's shoes.
well, that, and sniffing their wallets.


Let nothing that is inherently human
be foreign to you
- Stanislavski

in my third year of university, i

took this contemporary studies class with the longest, wrongest name ever. from symbolism and surrealism to the new novel and beyond. does anyone else feel that if a course title seems to require punctuation, it probably indicates bad things about the curriculum? well, anyway.

i never did finish the course. i wasn't terribly attached to it in the first place, it had been an elective - and in the end, the credit was mine for the taking, i simply opted out of it. the class was an afternoon lecture i rarely made it to, and whenever i did, i always seemed to end up at the grad house afterwards, drinking wine with the prof and a couple of the other students. it was hilarious to watch the way they idolized him. he was this bohemian-looking british man with a glint in his eye, a bevy of ex-wives and a summer home on the french riviera. i remember once i was behind on an assignment and tried to make him give me an extention on the deadline: he listened to my excuses, flashed a very wolverine grin, and said a sentence i can't forget. don't worry about nonsense. do the things that exhilarate you.

because, really - isn't that what every 22-year-old with a discipline problem needs to hear? give me a break, mr validation.

perhaps it was his attitude, then, that made me pause and decide that i really didn't care enough for maguerite duras to drag myself through a year's worth of the coursework. his arrogance; the decidedly decadent notion that none of it mattered unless it made me drip with passion. the other students tripping all over their own feet in fascination over this man's unorthodox methods and ideas - i didn't get them at all. i wasn't the least bit taken in by the intellectual rebel act. surely, i was already rebellious enough without needing him as a reminder.

so, yes, on some level he completely failed to inspire me - if that was indeed his aim. he also failed to impress me, seduce me, and teach me anything that i might have found useful (i know for a fact he was trying for at least two out of three). maybe i'm being a little harsh here; i don't necessarily believe he was a bad man. but he was full of reverse psychology tactics and poetic pep talks taylor-made for impressionable campus co-eds, of which i wasn't one.

regardless, this isn't about him - although an introduction into his persona is necessary to fully appreciate the assignment that broke the camel's back for me in that class. i had been on the fence for a while about continuing to pursue the credit, procrastinating a term paper on andre breton's novel 'nadia' practically to the point of no return. eventually, there came a moment of truth: do i buckle down and write the damn thing? even though i really, really don't want to? or do i say to hell with it?

or...

the prof had called me into his office to discuss what "options" there were for me. this was confusing, as i thought i had thoroughly examined the options available, and there were exactly the two. yet here he was, telling me no - no, you can still have the credit. forget the term paper. here's what you do.

take three sheets of paper. put 'to have' at the top of the first one. 'to do' at the top of the second. 'to be' on the third. now write, in list form, everything you want out of life.

you're kidding, i said. you're going to grade me on that??

no, he said, and grinned that wolverine grin of his. not grade you.

...oh.

i didn't end up doing it, of course. too weird. and i think i had already given up on the credit anyway at that point. i mean, really: if you can't give away a bag of tricks, what makes you think you can sell it? shouldn't i have been more insulted at being offered special treatment in the form of a parlor game of sorts?

well, i just stopped showing up and dropped the class and that was that. never discussed why. but i did, later, ponder this curious notion: three sheets of paper. to have, to do, to be.

i did it then, just to see what it would look like. and i'm doing it again now, just because. and i wonder if the two versions would have been much different - i wish i'd held onto the first one for posterity.


TO HAVE
- permanent immigration status, for once in my life
- a career
- freedom to travel, move about, or stay put, and do exactly as i please
- fun
- love, in its many forms
- relative financial stability
- excitement - i go through phases where i tell myself it's overrated, but those never last
- good health
- recognition

TO DO
- act, direct, produce, create
- travel
- laugh
- love
- write
- hedonistically consume all the finer things in life
- meet everybody and experience everything (gluttonous, i know, but it's been my burning wish since i was a wee thing)

TO BE
- happy
- intellectually stimulated
- entertained
- appreciated
- working
- loved
- self-reliant
- free
- wise
- real

grade this, dr ***.

it was a good end to the night, but i took

the last conversation to bed with me, and it fermented in my sleep. when i woke up i could feel it: a hot, tight ball of compact rage in my belly. poisonous. deadly. if i make any sudden moves, it could mean absolute disaster.

i have to learn little by little, and cautiously. i thought, for a time, that it would be possible to snap right back like none of it ever happened. it seemed possible. i could just refuse to be angry. life goes on, all that happy horseshit.

it's most terrifying when it happens like that, for no reason. all of a sudden out of a clear blue sky there's a downpour of words i should have said, things i should have done. ways i should have protected myself. blame. guilt. hate. i failed myself, i really did, and no matter how nice people are being about it, i know that's the case. and i feel stupid and weak and broken and nothing can make any of it better.

then. then, the anger comes. it's so ugly and so relentless. i control it, with my mind, and it makes my stomach hurt. i'm sick with fear that i can't contain anger this big, that it's going to eventually unravel in my gut and pour out of me like radioactive lava, destroying the precarious threads of confidence that keep me in one piece. destroying everything.

that it's going to happen when i least expect it. that is, perhaps, my biggest fear.

i build myself on rationality, or at least the aspiration to rationality. i love logic. i love intellectualizing the world into submission. right now, right this second, all that is is a house of cards in a draughty room. how am i supposed to go about not knowing if i'm going to fall off the hinges at any given time? how could this even have happened to me in the first place?

quicksand. no real ground. just a whole bunch of ridiculous notions about the sturdiness of human character and the power of self-assurance.




i want my two years back. i want it all back. i am so fucking angry and i want it all fucking back and i can never win this one.

Main Entry: wan·der
Pronunciation: \ˈwän-dər\
Function: verb
Etymology: Middle English wandren, from Old English wandrian; akin to Middle High German wandern to wander, Old English windan to wind, twist
Date: before 12th century
intransitive verb
1a: to move about without a fixed course, aim, or goal b: to go idly about : ramble
2: to follow a winding course : meander
3: to go astray (as from a course) : stray

Main Entry: lust
Pronunciation: \ˈləst\
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English, from Old English; akin to Old High German lust pleasure and perhaps to Latin lascivus wanton
Date: before 12th century
1a: pleasure, delight b: personal inclination : wish
2: usu. intense or unbridled sexual desire : lasciviousness
3 a: an intense longing : craving b: enthusiasm, eagerness

main entry. wanderlust: warm air mixes the smells of wet asphalt and gasoline.
wanderlust: a 16 oz takeout coffee container.
wanderlust: the gas station attendant wanted to see my id; i didn't bring it but he sold me cigarettes anyway.
wanderlust: like being seventeen at some el corte ingles in valencia - i didn't know the difference between filtered luckies and straights, so i was spitting little bits of tobacco on the pavement all day, giddy and slightly sun-struck and awfully adult.
wanderlust: i'm twenty-seven now and i still don't have a driver's licence.
wanderlust: if i had a car, i would play pj harvey on the stereo and throw a disposable camera in the glove compartment and get the hell out of here.

off early on a thursday night, and i'm taking in

the atmosphere down at the old triangle with a pint of rickard's white in front of me. my co-worker (who's been drinking since the late afternoon) is trying to convince me that i am, deep down, as much a victim of my generation's romantic ideals as any female stereotype - i'm trying to convince him that i have no poetry in my soul. really, we're both just taking the piss. a lovely time is being had underneath the half-hearted guise of a philosophical debate.

there are fiddles, and middle-aged couples dancing, and all the irishness you can handle at one time. the band consists of two elderly gentlemen whose brogue sounds suspiciously authentic, in that daniel day lewis way we know and love so well. i wonder if their beards are homegrown or store bought.

halfway through the obligatory whiskey in the jar number, my co-worker grins and suggests that suffering though the live act must be hell for me. surely, someone with my attitude to life has little enough regard for irish folk music and its traditional sentiments? but, lo! here an opportunity presents itself to screw with his feeble grasp on my personality: i actually listened to enough irish folk growing up that i freely admit to a soft spot for it. that's right. never underestimate the eclectic.

in particular, i tell him, there was one song that haunted my adolescence and has since proved quite impossible to track down. believe me, google has never even heard of the damn thing. it was called 'a-rovin' i will go' and i've never come across another recording of it than the one lived in my parents' tape deck between '89 and '93.
this puzzles my entire party.
"you're certain it's not to be found on the internet?"
"positive."
"well, that's strange. umm... have you tried searching an alternate spelling?"
"i've tried with the g, without the g, with the apostrophe, without the apostrophe, with and without the hyphen; i've tried various lyrics - i tell you, nothing."
"well, why don't you ask them about it? i'm sure they've heard of it before."

and with that, despite my protests, my co-worker snags one of the bearded irishmen just as they're taking a set break. "listen, this lady is wondering if you're familiar with a tune..."
blah, blah blah. imagine my surprise when said bearded guy leans close to me and hums, without mistake, the opening chorus line to 'a-rovin' i will go'.

sadly, that's as exciting as the story gets - he has certainly heard of the song, but that one line is all he can remember. he also doesn't know who and when might have recorded it, but now the whole thing sounds like a bit of a challenge, so he engages his colleague... this lass here knows a song... etcetera.

the colleague peers at me over a pint of guiness. well, perrrhaps if you could quote some of the lyrrrics, he says. and i can, of course.
sweet mary was me sunshine
sweet mary was so true
sweet mary dug me heart out
then she cut it right in two
...ring any bells?

the irishman stands for a moment, contemplating, then shakes his head in defeat. nah, he says, nah i don't know the song. i know the girrul, though. i swear to ya, i know that girrul.

in summary of everything,

i can never decide if i want to be the storyteller or the story.

that's not as convoluted as it sounds. think about it. in the end, you can only be one. live in fame, go down in flame, get used to people talking behind your back, attract passionate waves of love and resentment... but fearlessly, and without stopping to regret a single second. there just isn't enough time. if you choose to be the story, you choose the responsibility to never be dull. even at the expense of... well, everything.

the other option? well, there's always telling the stories. sitting back and observing and editing reality down. cautiously, laborously. it takes forever and is not always worth the output, but it's decidedly healthier and often more stimulating to the mind. not to mention, it's a form of investment in the future and allows for more creative control: after all, the whos and whats and hows of the story are entirely up to you.

and yet. notice how the second paragraph was a yawn to read compared to the first? that's not a coincidence.

some people are probably born knowing they're one or the other. i migrate between worlds, as it were. sometimes i'd gladly trade in my whole bag of tricks just to be able to always live inside my head, where words resonate like symphonies. there are moments when i'm convinced of my own invincibility behind the smokescreen of stories continously being told; i feel protected and ingenious and there is no better feeling in the world. if i can be a tool of myth, and myth is eternal - isn't that the ultimate dream of any indulgently creative mind?

indulgently creative. creatively indulgent. which one am i first? story: i walked down champs-elysees wearing a black catsuit and looking very much like a teenage prostitute in the mid-90's. story: i jumped off a 50 foot cliff into a stormy sea, clothes and everything, just to prove to my friends i could do it even though i was a terrible swimmer. story: i veered off a greek mountain hill road on a scooter at eighteen, very nearly missing being taken out by a tour bus, and sat there shaking for two whole hours, and the scenery was gorgeous.

these really aren't stories worth telling, only stories worth being in. maybe, in the end, i have nothing to say. i guess that would be all right, too. but i can still never decide.

oh god. is this depressing? it wasn't meant to be, i swear.

i am five

years old and playing with my cousin on some beach, while the adults are smoking cigarettes at the bar-and-grill.

i cut my hand on a piece of tinted glass. it doesn't hurt, but it's the first time i have seen my own blood. it's a loud startling red and watching it trickle between my fingers produces an odd, woozy feeling in the pit of my stomach. not bad. not good. just different. even at the age of five, i already know the thrill of different. i don't cry, i watch; i am fascinated.

what i also know: blood is supposed to go on the inside of you, not the outside. i lift my hand to my face and lick the blood off. it tastes like the back of a clean spoon. more blood comes out. i lick that off, too.

my cousin passes out. i mean, literally. he's a blond boy about my age and his eyes roll into the back of his head and he keels over in the sand, just like that.

it's the first time i've seen that happen, too. it's scary. i scream, and now the alarm's going and adults come running and everything gets very confusing very fast. but it's not about my bleeding hand, at all. and yet it is about my bleeding hand. i'm sitting in the eye of the storm, watching red dots in the sand where a few drops of blood got away, and thinking of how fascinating this stuff is.

it has the power to make people pass out? how strange, and how cool. significant moment number one at the age of five: blood on a beach. turned me into a little gothy philosopher.

ok then. it's been pointed

out to me that some of my old writing still exists out there on the three-double-ewes, and while i suppose i did know this in theory, in my self-configured reality old websites wear out like newspaper - the further down the list of google search results, the more yellowed and wrinkly and illegible... no? that's not how it works? damn, all these years of internetting, and still so much to learn.

the thing is, i'm not particularly proud of the shit i was writing then. some of it was all right, but most of it was self-indulgent, awkwardly facetious, and choke-full of so much pop lingo. gag me with a spoon! yeah, like that.

anyway, i forced myself to re-encounter 23-year-old me, and i can (with some amount of relief) report back that she's not all garbage. so, vintage moment! here's a little tidbit of nostalgia that i actually still appreciate, dated july 12th, 2004.


There are days when it's so much easier being warm than being cold.
There are days when I feel like a character from a book, by which I mean rather more real and well-composed than an actual human being: every single tiny imperfection makes sense; every blemish on my skin is deliberate and meaningful. A unique composition of flesh and mind, gritty and paradoxal, continuously invented. This is tragedy at times, but god, what a beautiful tragedy.

If only I knew what those moments - minutes, hours? - were made of, how to replicate them, how to wrap them neatly and present them to loved ones when the world seems threateningly non-sensical. The real tragedy, of course, is that we are all completely unequipped to alter other people, and only barely ourselves.

There are different days. There are days when I am a blank, a non-person, a random incident in a plotless story. Everything I am is entirely futile in the face of everything I am not. I am only words and words are only excuses.

Those days are every bit as subjective as the other kind. Only quite a bit more selfish, and a whole lot more cruel. Why do we do this to ourselves?

There are many kinds of days, many kinds of nights, many kinds of love. There is only one kind of people: the kind who have the capacity to feel happiness and pain beyond any power of reason. We all know this. We all are this.

I wanted to say something else, but I don't know what that was anymore. Take care of yourself, and I will take care of me, and maybe somewhere in the middle we can share ourselves with each other without falling apart in the attempt.


i wish i could remember what prompted this - though it could very well have been nothing. i guess i never did grow out of the capacity to wax melancholy for no particular reason. though i like to think that when i quit capital letters, i also cut down on the pretentious.

still, i like it - so sue me. there's a sweetness there i didn't know i had, and a vulnerability that i'm sure is genuine. maybe i'm just more introspective these days. or just honest about the right things.

facebook killed the blogging community

in halifax like video killed the radio star.

i'm not being cheeky. well, not... a lot. chances are, if you weren't sleeping under a rock some four or five years ago, you were at the very least aware that blogging was a bit of a local phenomenon.

feels so long ago, somehow. certainly, a lot of the key characters that made up that 'scene' still blog, somewhere out in the ether. but many have moved away and the community feel is not there anymore - you can't go to a party, say, and read extensive internet coverage on it the next day the way you used to. the social environments that used to be a convergence point for halifax bloggers have fragmented: bands that are defunct, bars that have changed or gone under - all these undercurrent elements that seemed to sustain it are gone. nothing stays the same, although around here we love saying that it does, probably to avoid being personally responsible for our apathy.

it was mostly philip's doing, of course. i'd like to know how many people threw themselves into self-publishing solely as a result of his influence - by association or otherwise. many more, including yours truly, completely owe their five minutes of blogging fame to being linked to by him at the height of halifax blogmania. here's the outline: everyone who was connected to local music, art and/or alternative performance was reading halifaxlocals. with me so far? everyone reading halifaxlocals was reading philip, and everyone who was reading philip was reading everyone philip was reading, and there you have it: the rise of an empire from a grain of sand.

it's not that we were all friends or even knew each other, except for the occasional "sighting" at any given downtown event. i'd been reading mood surgery for well over a year before i realized that eben was my downstairs neighbour. we then proceeded to spend the summer of whatever-year-this-was drinking beer on our creighton street stoop until the sun was up, amicably arguing about music - it was one of few friendships i made on the internet that effortlessly bled into real life. but the following year, i moved out of that apartment, months later i quit blogging, and after that the world was suddenly awash with a facebook pandemic that effectively wiped out all other forms of online communication (and many offline ones, as well).

am i bitter about the demise of our little self-indulgent blogging circle? not so much - there is a freedom in not reading three acccounts of the same stupid party all the who's whos went to, as well. mostly, i was disappointed that i wasn't writing anymore, but here's a shortlist of things i did miss about it: keeping in touch with people like eben, engaging in verbal banter and debate in a non-social setting, and being able to glimpse into somebody - virtual strangers, even - on a level you never do from reading a facebook status line.

hmm. may be a little bit of a double standard, that. because a couple of nights ago, i put my status on a whim to "needs a whip, got one?" (i really did need one, if you're wondering - the whim was to broadcast it on the internet) and minutes later, eben replied that he could be over and drop one off within the hour. we ended up hanging out for a good three, catching up on years of unblogged-about life stuff, and spawned the conversation that spawned this post.

but yes, we also argued about music. amicably. life goes on, and i promise i'm done with all the self-referential blogging about blogging now... in fact, if you even see me type that word again, you have my full permission to un-friend me. on facebook.

this is a place and a time of

such sweet, precarious perfection. the north end, this house, this spring, this moment. i'm scared i'll blink and it will be gone, drowned out by the hum of bigger and more important life things.

but this is where perfection lives, that much i know. i do double-takes just to double-notice every gorgeous flaw, like paint peeling off houses in the sunlight. trying to read the paper on my stoop and the breeze not letting me. my feet ache because i bought a new pair of converses and then wore them all around the neighbourhood. so glorious.

i quit blogging in the summer of 2005 and i don't remember exactly why. i mean, not the ins and outs of it, anyway. it had something to do with a girl. i wanted to be alone in my head, maybe... it was a bad summer - beautiful, but bad. i only retain glimpses of it: bike handlebars, rain, a jacket that remained on my door hanger for too many weeks. then i became addicted to michelle tea and started missing those 5 am phonecalls.
and then, just like that, summer had turned to fall, and everything changed once again, like these things go. i stopped whiting out paragraphs of my inner narrative.

no, i didn't. well, i did, for a time. then i re-edited everything and i didn't do a very good job.

we travel in such strange concentric circles. i don't remember last summer at all. i want to remember this one. i would like to be new. i think i deserve to be new. i hope the narrative is here to stay, this time.