Artist in need of a real job

Time to write papers

2010-11-23T15:01:00.000-06:00

This feels very, very familiar: sitting around at a cafe perched in front of my laptop getting ready to work. Not sure how I'm going to pull the tangle of language that's been sitting with me and waking me up at 3 AM for the past week into a coherent essay.

I haven't written an essay in over two years by now and in the next two weeks I have three to hand in. I'm trying to talk myself into believing that this is just like writing an article. Which I also used to freak out about but still have to churn out once a week or so. Language is my friend. Research is my friend. Books are my friend. So maybe papers can become my friend with time. The issue is virtually always that I get too wrapped up in them.

Or it was when I used to write them, two years ago.

I sometimes suspect that academics bring out the worst in me: the need to justify myself, a certain perfectionism and obsession with details, and a certain competitive drive I would like to believe is not really there.

Never mind that I'm pretty into this essay, a 20 page 40% term paper on techniques for preserving oral stories in anthropology. That either sounds really cool (which is how I feel) or completely irrelevant (which is probably the case if you don't care about stories or anthropology). Behind me lies a couple of weeks of research, a stack of books, hours and hours of playing with the ideas, several phone calls to my parents, a few weekend evenings sweating over it... the idea of taking short cuts is something I have a hard time fathoming. Seriously. All I can say is that I'm glad that I only had one big paper this term. I doubt I'll be so lucky next term. Or next year, researching a fifty page fieldwork paper as well as my Honours thesis at the same time. Yikes. I like writing, right?

I'm always interested in the difference between how things look on a social level and how they feel on a personal level. I wish I could translate the passion and joy I find in cultural anthropology to other people. Having all this intense experience and keeping it to yourself seems so selfish to me. Not the details of what lead to the emotion -whether that joy you're exuding comes from hours of kinky sex or your feelings about the latest political event isn't as important to me as seeing it. That's one of the reasons I think about being a professor: I like the idea of being able to translate passion to students, to introduce people to something quirky and interesting. Never mind whether the student and anthropology ever hit it off, at least they met.

Approximately two weeks left of class. Needless to say, I can't entirely get how it will all come together. It will (I hope) but until then...

Next term I'm taking a class on ethnographic writing. I don't know if that means doing a literary analysis of ethnographies, or working on presenting our own -but I'm hoping both. Creative writing is one of those things that I just haven't ended up being able to take in university due to only having so many elective credits. I love the idea of just getting a chance to put the focus on writing, not just data. I like it better when there is a balance.

I feel like writing is deeply tied into what I'm meant to do this life time, but I'm still not entirely sure how. I love snarky non-fiction think or opinion pieces, and I love the feeling of putting together research for an essay or an article. That said, when I think about what I would *love* to write it's drama, short stories and novels. The reading for my degree program is virtually all non-fiction so I think that's probably why I'm more inclined to write that way now, but I really, really, really want to someday push myself to work on fiction instead. It's not like I lack for characters, it just seems like that kind of idea lends itself more easily to comics for me as opposed to short stories. Usually.

Before I leave this cafe, I am going to have my introduction and first section of my paper written. I have all the quotes with me on the hard-drive and that's the toughest part generally. I even know what I'm going to say in my conclusion, so I know where I'm going with this. It's all going to require a certain amount of organization, but I also know that I've got something good here. Maybe when I take a break I will type up my appendixes instead of worrying about anything else.

Paper lockdown season: when you look around at Concordia you can feel the waves of stress and intensity coming off of everyone. It practically drips through the walls. As rough as it can be, I like the feeling of being part of this group who are all going through the same things at the same time as you. There is a simplicity to it: when you are a student you have to focus on studying. That's where your priorities are. It's got a beautiful kind of freedom to it, as well as a scary kind of "all or nothing" under tone. Still, as far as I'm concerned everything does.

School may be the culture I'm immersed in just now, but it's still just a culture. It makes up its own rules and then treats them as real. Isn't that kind of the definition of a social system? Sometimes it's good to rise above the matrix and remember that the world won't end because I got a bad mark on a stats assignment, or because my paper due on the 2nd finishes being written tomorrow as opposed to this past Sunday. Still, while you're in it you kind of have to feel that way.

Somebody moved the Buffy comic omnibus that I was reading so I had to write instead, but I'm thinking it might not have worked out half badly. Sitting in front of the page is always a little bit like coming home and finding that not much has changed. Okay, so here I go jumping in. Wish me luck.

Content

2010-11-21T17:36:00.000-06:00

The outlines of the buildings on Bishop have disappeared in the dark. Not even six o'clock and outside the street is the kind of dark that would put a prairie darkness to shame. This moment my soundtrack is Mes Aieux. If anyone can make statistics seem less like, well, statistics it has to be Mes Aieux.

It's been over six months since I blogged. It seems counter-intuitive, like moving to a new place I would fall over myself wanting to write, send things out to be anonymous on the internet (yet somehow heard by someone). Yet... nope. Somehow moving to a new province, adjusting to a new culture, living with a new language, starting at a new university and the rest of those adjustments has been enough to feel; writing about it never felt like a need. I suspect this may end up being one of these things that I end up writing about years later. Distance and perspective are always beautiful things for giving events new outline. Nobody's life is so terrible or fabulous that it couldn't be improved by bits of narration added all the way through.

So what does my narration say now? Well, like all narration focused on the moment, it ignores the big picture. I am that ultimate student cliche: on my laptop with headphones. Next to me is a thoroughly silly book which I really, really enjoyed: Overnight Sensation by Colleen Curran. It's the sequel to Something Drastic which is about a waitress at a theme restaurant whose boyfriend leaves her on Christmas. Last time I read it I was eighteen sitting in the comfy green chair by the window at McNally Robinsons booksellers. I can now confidently say that I did not get any of the Montreal in jokes -like all weird groups meeting in NDG church basements, the language politics and why you don't bring them up in mixed company, what "anglo-separatist" is exactly (and how ridiculous that is), or even what it means to live in Westmount.

Much funnier now. Even thought this admittedly ate a few hours out of my day that was supposed to be a full day paper writing endeavour, somehow it feels so worth it because the book had a happy ending.

I think they are way underrated. Actually, they should really make a come back someday.

Like Lenore, the main character in the books, I truly believe that I get to see more than enough unresolved complicated strange, vaguely depressing tensions to subject myself to it in books. Don't get me wrong, I have a soft spot for bittersweet stories and feel no particular need for characters to have cartoony millionaire weddings or immaculate clothes... It's just that I feel as though the unresolved, complicated wishy-washy endings as just as uncreative and boring as the Hollywood wedding that ended off Golden Age movies.

Make people happy, make them unhappy, hell give them a run-in with artistically inclined rhinoceri who just needs a little start-up capital to get into the interior decoration market... just make it interesting. Why should I be listening/reading what you have to say if it doesn't require me, the audience? If there is no intimacy in the encounter? If I'm not needed, I may as well go home. Or at least do dishes or do telemarketing or any other of those activities where it works out better if you are not in the slightest bit invested. If you reading this are by any chance a telemarketer or dishwasher who is passionate about your work, all I can say is... well, good for you.

In The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle one of the character responds to the question "are you happy?" by saying "men don't always know when they're happy, but I think so". That's where I'm at. I wouldn't say that I'm hysterically joyful or anything. I mean I was nasty sick this week and I got a bad mark on the last stats assignment I got back, which is more than enough to make it non-ideal, but at the same time I feel just generally kind of content. For the first time I can remember, now is just kind of enough. I feel no burning desire to be elsewhere the way I did for, oh the last ten years I lived in Winnipeg?

Sincerely, I don't think I feel any real wish to be elsewhere. The only real issues I have with living in Montreal involve upping my French so I can stay here longterm, not the place itself. My place is beautiful, I love being in the East End and I get along with my roommates well enough I don't anticipate having to move any time soon. The cultural anthropology program at Concordia is fabulous, as is the university in general. I may have applied for fine arts, but I harbour no lingering sense of regret that I should be doing anything else. I'm happy in the program and the school - which is a change after the years of feeling like I was banging my head against the wall at the University of Manitoba.

Sometimes I feel like it would be nice to have more time to write, to sew, the headspace to be in that mode. Despite living in this amazing city, I spend virtually all my time either at school, studying, working or doing those menial things that consume your life like laundry and groceries. Yet I still feel like it's some how more magical doing these things and being here. It's like being an academic nun where Jesus has been replaced by anthropology. I have this paper I'm working on that I haven't been today, and yet I still have that quiet optimism that this is not Cause for Alarm.

Maybe people don't always know when they're happy, but I feel like there is something to be said for content too. Of feeling like things are alright the way they are, but not tied to them. Like feeling more than prepared to give up a Friday night studying structuralist theory at home in favour of having drinks at Reggie's with a friend who is also a school nerd. Or just not having all those established histories with people. Not having people around who I have deep long-term connections with is *the* thing I miss most about being in Winnipeg, but to me it's also the thing I can be most sure will change and happen over time. Personally, I belong to the beta fish style of adjustment: stay in your plastic bag until the water temperature matches that in the rest of the tank and *then* start exploring. Or in my case, just get comfortable with Concordia, coursework, the apartment and living here before going off and taking on something else.

In the meantime, I leave grandiose gestures and big emotions for cartoon superheroes and telenovela stars. Powers that be, you can leave me with contentment. It's enough for now.

More interesting with circus animals

2010-06-01T21:17:00.000-05:00

Wow. Apprently it's been a month since I last blogged. Sadly, this does not indicate that I've been engaging in a nice long session of stare-at-my-navel. Unfortunately. (Not that I'm denying a nice session of pick-out-the-lint or anything!) What it means is that I've been engaged in one of those significant life changes that both keeps you incredibly busy and is full of dreary details that it isn't really fair to inflict on anyone. Moving is kind of like house rennovations: at the end of the conversation when you anxiously say something like "was that good for you" then a silence descends over the room as you realize that they've been sitting in a polite coma for awhile. The other person looks awkward. So. I have this urge to write something other than emails, lists of things left to do, articles ideas, section plans or even tweets but my life feels far too boring. What to do, what to do.

Add circus animals, that's my solution. Like intermissions in a vaudeville show. Something like that. You know, break it up a bit.

With that idea in mind, here we have... ELEPHANTS! They have bright feather headdresses! They tromp around the arena! They honk their trunks and do all those really adorable things that make everybody like them! I mean seriously, have you ever met anyone who is anti-elephant?

Okay, enough about the elephants. Back to me now. So let's start with the big stuff: moving and school. About a month ago I got a rejection letter from the fine arts program at Concordia to the textiles program. No art school for me. The strange thing was that I felt really okay with it. My pride was extremely hurt -but mainly because *I* wanted to be the one who decided art school wasn't for me, not the other way around. This past year I've kind of fallen back into the writing for actual readers and been realizing that I'm not entirely sure studying fine arts is for me. Making creative work, sewing, doing textile art -all of that is for me. Most definitely for me. But I really enjoy the courses where I get to do geeky academic stuff, and I *love* the work I've been doing with the paper. To the point where I'm actually considering whether it's something I could do long term. So cut to a scene with me moping over a couple of days -atleast until the next week when I got accepted into a Specialization (Honours without the essay) in anthropology at Concordia instead. I love anthropology. I'm pretty happy to finish my degree somewhere that there is an actual variety of courses and well, they don't make you study monkeys or bones like they do at the University of Manitoba. And I'm into Concordia which is kind of a relief since I already work there and stuff. Did I not mention that part? Oh, well see...

...and now for the MONKEYS! Your standard varieties of New World monkeys with the prehensile tails as well as a few of the spunkier Old World models! No Great Apes though; they're too smart to get stuck in a circus. (They make anthropology majors study monkeys, in case you're wondering) Now here they go jumping around on the trapeze sets...

(Let's get back to me before they start throwing pooh.) So the beginning of April I got hired on as arts editor for a student paper at Concordia. Which means that once in Montreal, I can actually support an arts habit and be able to see theatre, art shows, get books etc without having to sacrifice eating. Or coffee. I'm fond of both of those. Currently I am somewhere between thrilled-exhilerated-completely-neurotic because we have an issue to put out, my copy deadline for all articles is in less than a week and well, I'm in Winnipeg. Sigh. I can not express how happy I will be to never have to put out an issue working from another province ever again. And I'm also grateful that I get to say things like this which make it sound like I may dislike this challenge, when anyone who knows me can probably tell that it's a thin veneer hiding kind of an intense amount of passion for the job. I may be neurotic, but the upside of that is that it *can* make me inclined to over-plan because I'm terrified of not delivering. It will be a relief to be in Montreal for the arts alone. Opening my work email is both incredibly joyful and painful because there are invitations to all these arts events... which are two provinces away. Which means I tend to wail a lot and get kind of grumpy about the whole thing when I'm not ridiculously hyper and excited to be there soon!

Notice the performing SEAL! Actually, it's a sea-lion because seals don't move very easily on the ground or have those flippers that let them jump around. Still, it's a cute sea mammal playing in an inflatable pool and begging for fish. Luckily the creature is good enough at tricks that they don't stink up the arena. You know, it's good that way. Less smell, more cute idealized animals.

Then there's the actual moving itself, which involves a whole lot of packing and weeding through junk. It is the kind of process that makes me deeply repentant of my packrat ways. When it comes to my kitchen gear, a lot of that stuff I hadn't seen in over a year since I moved in with my parents and boxed up all non-essential objects. How could I have ever in a million years forgotten about the bright red flipper or the wooden salt and pepper set shaped like an apple and pear? It is strange to think how easy it was to forget about things I have and will use on a daily basis for so long. In many ways this period of time living with my parents has felt like an interlude, but I confess I'll be glad to nurture my own space again. Have my own kitchen where I can cook and muck about with feeding people. People's kitchens are very personal spaces.

This was going to be an act involving LIONS jumping through a fiery hoop, but this part of the show got cancelled in the name of animal cruelty.

People often talk about how big moves take a lot of time and energy. Somehow I always thought that would mean schlepping boxes, making lists or saying deeply emotional good-byes. Instead, I'm finding that for me it means a whole lot of time starting at the ceiling/wall/horizon line processing wrapping my head around everything. Like the fact that in about a month from now I will be in Montreal and as of September I'm there pretty much for good. It's such a different this time because I'm actually re-locating there indefinitely. Maybe not forever, but I won't be coming back over the summer either, and that's a big change. It's altering compass points. I don't know how else to describe it. The weird thing is that I'm finding I'm not as emotional about saying goodbye to Winnipeg as I thought I would be. Yes, there's lots I love here and will miss, but on the whole I feel like I really lived here when I was here, know the city pretty damn well and won't regret a list of things I didn't do here. Twenty-five is a good time for a big move. Everyone my age is moving away, getting married, settling down, reproducing or re-focusing on something or other anyways. The other thing is that I get to come back for about two weeks in August before moving for good. Which means that I can have that first "did-I-really-live-here" shock (and it *always* happens no matter where you go) before moving away for good. Yup. It's a plan.

The last act is a DANCING DOG! No stupid costumes, just a natural sense of rhythm as they go up on their hind legs and move to the beat of a mariachi band. Why mariachi? Well, I happen to like melodramatic Mexican music, that's why. Besides, I'm going to wrap up this blog post really soon and I could not compete with something exciting like an elephant. And honestly, I can't think of any other circus animals except for snakes and snakecharmers, and that just seems sad.

So in between packing, working on newspaper related things and seeing friends, I'm working at transcribing. Actually, I love it. It's like professional eavesdropping with commas. When there's a flow it gets faster and smoother. Honestly, this is something I could totally imagine myself doing part-time to support myself -but that's a problem for future Daniela to deal with. You know, once I'm actually in Montreal and can figure these things out outside of email and phone. The one who leaves in about a month to do the Explore program at U de M and still has a huge list of interviews to transcribe, people to say goodbye to, an arts section to organize etc. Yup, that one.

She's calling me now actually.

Until later,

DSF

A rare day of rain

2010-05-02T18:35:00.000-05:00

Living in Haliburton, Ontario, snuggled up next to the hills somebody told me that you can smell the earth getting ready for the rain. It's almost a negative electrical charge -the air becomes unbearable until finally the water falls and everything comes right. Walking out in the rain this afternoon, I could feel the tension ease out of my temples, my breath begin to soften, my feet treading lighter on the earth. Returning to a house with insulation and central heating, my smugness lasted until the power went out. Despite the annoyance of not being able to access email, I find it refreshing to get the occassional reminder that these modern contraptions in the end too have to submit to the forces of nature.

Three summers ago now I lived in a tent for three months, and what I remember most strongly about that time was how connected I felt to the weather. Every shift in temperature, every hot or dry spell left a tangible message on my skin. It wasn't possible to hide away from the wind, and so I became incredibly conscious of Boissevain's weather in a way that I've never been about any other place I've lived. Weather Canada offers a text messaging service where you can get weather warnings sent to your cell phone; I'll never forget the tangible sense of relief I felt the first time I got a warning about a tornado in Boissevain from inside my cozy apartment with a blaring radiator. As nice as the idea is of having a thin membrane of cloth between you and a thunderstorm, I'm happier by far romanticizing said experience from inside a warm coffeeshop where I can wax nostalgic over a latte without anything dripping down my neck.

I love rain with the intensity that only a city girl raised on the prairies really can. Snow, snow is too normal to be cherished but rain is special. For one, we don't get it all that often in Winnipeg, and when we do it isn't for very long. To give you some idea, I never owned a functional rain jacket until this year -I've never really needed one. Within the rare four months or so in which Winnipeg is not covered in snow, rain offers a rare solace from the tedium of our not-winter season. When it comes I feel like a child who has yet to find anything normal -the smell of earthworms weaves its own strange magic over me. I come in from the wet feeling strangely released.

What it is about water that makes everything look so new? Even ugly things like concrete, bus stop signs or lawn ornaments take on a new lustre until it dries out and then everything looks normal again. Sometimes I feel like it rains when we most need rejuvenation, most need to release.

It was a good time for it to rain for me, feeling as suspended as I am right now between things. Two months from now I'm in Montreal; a few hours from now I take over a new work email; four months from now I will be enmeshed in a new university, job and city. Yet for now, I wait. Without any real amount of grace or patience, frenetically fussing over minutae and procrastinating sorting through my junk. In my smarter moments I know that things take the pace that they take, unhindered by my stressing myself out over it... but that self is often on vacation. Actually, I lie: she's blissed out counting the budding tree leaves somewhere while the rest of me is left agonizing over pointless tasks that will never make it into my memoirs.

In the mean time, outside the sky continues to tremble and shift with the wind, a soft hissing carries through the window. For now, it is enough.

Keeping with how stories work | The Manitoban Online

2010-04-26T12:02:00.000-05:00

Keeping with how stories work The Manitoban Online

How to not study French grammar

2010-04-08T11:59:00.000-05:00

Buy dark roast coffee at Degrees restaurant on campus -the place with the longest lines. Justify this to yourself by saying things like "they have the best coffee" (which is true) and "it won't take that long" which is not. Then, drink said coffee in the Toban office very slowly under the rationale that you can't focus until the cup is done. This, sadly, is also true.
Have a long conversation with someone in the office who you haven't seen for a while as you both play on the computers. While doing so, randomly insert excerpts of Lewis Caroll poetry from Alice in Wonderland. If possible, get on to unrelated topics like men and the sexiness of the semicolon.
Obsessively check your email every couple of minutes waiting for an answer to an email you sent yesterday at 9 PM. Regularly consider calling, and then decide that it isn't worth it. Debate this often. Also, leave the browser window open so that you can periodically refresh your mailbox and figure out whether they got back to you yet.
If you have any pressing life-changes on your mind like say, moving to a new city, fixate on the details. Do not by any means concentrate on things that are closer at hand such as, say, a three hour French exam with six compound tenses on it which you can't always tell apart. Instead, think about which of your books you could actually get rid of without crying or feeling like your heart has been ripped out, or how you are going to get there.
Tell yourself that it is somehow possible to cram grammatical tenses into your brain, and that even if you can't it doesn't matter because soon you'll be surrounded by French and have to pick it up that way anyways, and its not like you actually love language or care about learning it or would be heartbroken not to someday understand all the lyrics of Les Cowboys Fringants anyways...
Give up, get off the internet and surrender to the grammar

Transitions like moving and a new job

2010-04-04T18:57:00.000-05:00

Probably at the last updates I was going through some of the assorted projects that I've ended up working on. I think when I wrote it the idea was to go on posting through each process. Then somehow in the spaces between posting, I've ended up being rather busy.

The funny thing about being so occupied, is that describing what I've been doing doesn't always make for good reading. So I've felt no desire to write about it. There is a reason why twitter feeds are a lot more fun to get on your cell phone than when you read a page of them on the computer out of context. With this blog I wanted to put the focus more on putting up interesting text and less on brief intangible updates about my sock colour preferences, so I've tried to focus more on quality than quantity. I feel like the news mentality is that its very important to hear updates fast, but less interesting to go deep. Sometimes I wonder exactly how important it is to be *that* up to date that you hear about events split seconds away. The Ancient Greeks probably thought that there world was changing faster than ever too. (Oh that sounded cynical -I'm not particularly cynical, I promise).Then I think about exactly how many times a day I check my e-mail, and a situation I was in recently where the other person having a Blackberry made *quite* a difference, and I am silenced by a giant fogging cloud of hypocrisy.

Then again, there are times and events which it is worth updating about. Like, let's say, you get hired for a new job which will be starting fairly soon, then find out you're officially moving to Montreal and will be there sometime sooner than originally anticipated...

That's right, yours truly got a job in Montreal and an Explore grant bursary to study French there from July 5-August 5. Which means that I am definitely moving for sure -even though I don't yet have an acceptance letter from Concordia. Even so, I can actually start planning the move with time to streamline my junk, apply for funding, say goodbye to people etc. On one hand, bureaucracy will continue to work at a snail's pace and I have yet to get many forms filled in, but it will happen. The whole finding a job out there was a *huge* stress, and I'm really excited about this one. I was not looking forward to the prospect of finding myself a coffeehouse position where I could easily lose shifts or be screwed over if loyal employee X with seniority comes back from their trip to Thailand too broke to bother looking for a new job.

The irony is how fast it all happened. I only heard about the job opening last Wednesday, got the application on Friday and heard this Tuesday. (Details about the job will stay off the blog until things are more official) The Explore program grant is slightly less surprising, since I had applied in January but then kind of forgotten about it. The idea had been to have the government pay for me to hang out in Montreal, find my way around while learning French. Which is also exciting, because I am an uber-langauge geek.

I think it will make things easier to have had some time to breathe in the air for a while. Much as I find the prospect of working and being in school at the same time exhilerating it will also be pretty intense. This way I have a chance ahead of time to do geeky "I'm in Montreal!" things like go visit the penguins at the Biodome, visit the Spanish language bookstore my profs ordered our texts from at U of M, find myself a place that serves mystically good coffee, and try these bloody bagels and smoked meat sandwiches people keep telling me about.

There's this Lonely Planet guidebook my father picked up at a library booksale a few years ago I've been looking through. Normally I consider guides to be smut for the wanderlust afflicted, but this time I'm finding it thoroughly unsatisfying. As much as I may sigh to find out that there is a center for contemporary textiles, that isn't what I'm looking for in travel books this time. I want to experience new territory under my feet. I want to discover all those twisted idiosyncrasies you only learn about living somewhere. I want to find a favourite coffee shop and that place where I ran into someone randomly and had an amazing conversation. There has to be that place I stumbled into and then never found again. Favourite walks. Deep familiarity.

There are some oft-repeated facts that makes me think that Montreal might be a logical home for an artsy Chilean-Canadian language-obsessed bohemian foodie. I fully admit to sighing over images of markets, old cobbled streets and public parks with people in them. Being in a city which is 350 years old is appealing too. It seems like Montreal has a lot of the characteristics I loved about old colonial Latin American cities, but its still in Canada. I may have conflicted loyalties about my government, but I can't see settling longterm anywhere else. And I'll still have access to English; I'm a writer: I need to be around some people who can access my work. Besides which, generally speaking I get a long really well with Latin (aka romance language speakers) better than anglophones anyways -even though technically speaking I am one.

Now I'm twenty-four; I'll be moving around the time of my twenty-fifth birthday. Right now feels like an ideal time to move somewhere I can settle for awhile. I'm so very ready to start building an adult life for myself. As much as I have lots of friends here, everyone else is at the same place in their life of getting ready to move on and (dare I say it) grow up. With leaving when I am, we can say goodbye to this phase together instead of dragging it out. It won't be the same, but as much as I'll miss people, I'm excited for the future. Besides which, I'm anticipating that the tide of (other people's) weddings and babies is coming which will probably require me coming back...

It's so strange to think that all my reference points will change, that a few months from now my personal geography will be different -based on places and people I don't even know about yet. A whole new world to discover day in and out. New walks to go on which I haven't been down a million times. The thing that is really tripping me up is the idea that I might not always run into people I know everywhere. Winnipeg is the world's biggest small town; growing up here I've gotten used to the fact that everyone knows each other via two degrees or less of separation, and whatever you say and do will haunt you for the rest of your life. Most of the time, this drives me nuts. The rest of the time -like when I'm walking to Osborne village and find half a dozen people along the way -then its great. To not have that anywhere -it's not something I'm able to visualize easily. Although I'm looking forward to being able to go into bars and *not* be able to track who slept with who. Call me crazy, but sometimes that gets to be a little bit uncomfortable.

The down-side of getting into Explore is that it means I can't go to folk fest this year. Still. I'll cope. Probably by finding myself incredibly good food and a place to dance.

There's this graphic novel I started writing about a rooster who has his life changed by an experience with saffron rice, moves to Montreal, becomes a chef and devotes his entire life to good food. So far i've written the first part that takes place in his home town Deux-Loups, but now I'm going to get to pick up the story in Montreal where I can reference streets and locations. It hasn't felt right working on it here, but once I move I can get into it again. My friend Aimee is of the opinion that nowhere else in Canada will a book about the adventures of an ardent poultry foodie go over as well as in Montreal. As an artist I'm at the point right now where I want to be working on projects which I'm going to be able to get out there. I've got enough confidence in my skills to feel like it's time to start submitting my work to places. That is, besides the script I sent out to a local theatre festival. Other than that.

This is where I go back to the non-computer reality of pretending to study French grammar, and waiting for cookie dough to chill so I can decorate them. I've got this plan to make ridiculously geeky cookies with icing that has punctuation marks or keyboard symbols on them. If they work then I'll post pictures. Then I'm going to make a mix CD of songs that relate to language and grammar which I can give to all my linguistically inclined friends.

Come back soon -if you want to. With the next batch of transformations there is bound to be atleast a couple semi-coherent blog posts forthcoming.

Letting the big ones get away | The Manitoban Online

2010-04-04T13:28:00.000-05:00

Letting the big ones get away The Manitoban Online

It's not me, it's you | The Manitoban Online

2010-03-27T15:38:00.000-05:00

This comes from a conversation I had with my arts editor about writing reviews , and how no matter how much you hate the piece you have to be respectful. For some reason, this is actually one of my favourite pieces I've written this year. The book review as break-up letter. Bys the by, if anyone reads this blog and is compelled to try "dating" this book, just send me a message and I'll mail it out.

It's not me, it's you The Manitoban Online

Stories -single or otherwise

2010-03-22T09:21:00.000-05:00

Sometimes, someone says something that you've always wanted to say better than you ever could. This is one of those instances. Wow.

The 'work' in artwork

2010-03-11T14:38:00.000-06:00

There's this feeling of elation I used to get in the middle of a serving shift when everyone had to jump to bring out meals or collect plates. It was an almost zen-like feeling to have these set tasks to do which just needed to be done. Any thought process that would be going on in my head had to tie in somehow to performing the job at hand -preferably with some kind of grace. It's something that I revel in. Feeling useful. Being actively able to do things that help. Having my hands busy and being productive. I find boredom to be a deeply uncomfortable state.

At work I will wash counters a billion times, sort card decks and organize racks of cutlery. At home I tend to go for a "clutter-chic" kind of look. (I am one of the only people I know who will admit to liking knick-knacks). Without something to focus in on I end up feeling listless and disconnected. The idea of spending the rest of my life working at a job which doesn't allow me to be creative is a terrifying one. But the idea of only doing tasks that require thinking without any tangible product at the end -that's equally depressing.

I just sent off the first of two pieces I'm writing this week for the Toban. It's a slightly tongue in cheek book review, and I'd have to say that I very much enjoyed writing it. In the same way that I'm excited about writing my review of the Black Hole Theatre show "HeadSpace" after this. I believe that I'm a good writer, but when you get down to it I tend to see the ability as a skill, not a talent. That same sense of Zen-like joy I get from working hard in a restaurant in the exact same sensation I get from putting together and writing an article.

To me one of the biggest misconceptions out there about creative work in general is that inspiration floats down on fluffy clouds, penetrates the brain in a ray of light from the sky, or shows up in people who are special. In my experience, inspiration is the easy part. Anyone can have ideas. What counts is putting the time and energy into learning how to execute this bits of inspiration. When people connect to my art work that's an amazingly validating feeling for me -but as an artist I want to keep my focus on the 'work' part.

That's one of the reason why I'm drawn to the phrase "artistic/creative practice". It really heighlights the labour side of creative projects which to me is important. A friend of mine used to tell me that anyone could produce a single good piece of art, but an artist was someone who didn't stop there but instead kept experimenting. That just makes sense to me. No matter how good or badly a single piece is received, in the end it's the proccess that counts. The energy that goes in to making things. There have been times when I've been hit with raw inspiration and come out with something that doesn't need that much alteration -but I truly believe that only happens because most of the time I'm agonizing over developing my skills and have been for years.

I am ambitious in that I want to develop a level of craftsmanship in every medium I work in. I like things like textiles which have such a tangible grounded quality to them. Functional objects that get to be part of people's daily lives are some of my favourite projects because I have to meet certain objectives.

Writing feels like that for me sometimes. No, writing copious outlines and notes may not fit with the romantic image of Jack Kerouac's editless first draft of "On the Road" -but I like it better. I love it when I can hand something off to an editor and they make it prettier, shinier, better. I like that I've got somewhat of a routine established by now so I know roughly how long it takes me to write 1,200 words versus 400 words, or how in depth I can go in a 500 word review versus an 800 word one. Skills are good to have. Especially understanding word count -I'm going to do an MA eventually after all.

When I was eight I decided that I wanted to be a writer. Writing hasn't been the only thing I've wanted to do for many years, and it's definitely not my only creative medium, but that resolve hasn't really changed. The first journal I ever started was when I was nine, and I've pretty much been at it ever since. The style changes. The content changes. But the simple act of putting hands to the keyboard or pen to paper -it still feels like a comfortable place, a reassuring ritual. It's getting to the point where I want to start reaching out and looking for other publishing opportunities now. I'm getting some good feedback, and that's really affirming. But mainly, I kind of love that I just get to keep writing.

The audience I write for is slowly starting to shift and expand in a really exciting way, and it's amazing. I've been working at this for long enough that having to write is not a big deal. I definitely still feel some performance anxiety, but I'm finding it goes away as long as I can focus on the task at hand. Treat it like any other job.

Clearing trays or reviewing theatre. It's so good to be hard at work.

A declaration of love for theatre

2010-03-05T13:35:00.000-06:00

When it comes to the things I've loved deeply over a long period, there are always these moments where I feel just as head over heels as I did the first time I came across it. Right now I feel like that about theatre.

The last show of this year's Black Hole Theatre Company (BHTC) season opens on Tuesday, which also makes it the last show I'll be covering for the Toban. With any luck in a few months I'll be in Montreal writing for a different newspaper and covering theatre companies which I haven't heard of yet. Somehow a week ago I had it in my head that I was bored with writing about student theatre. I'm not sure how this idea came about. It's probably just that I'm bored with plenty of other things at this point in the year so I geuss I extended that to the Black Hole 'beat'. In my world this means conducting three interviews, transcribing said interviews (which takes awhile) then writing a preview and later review of the play.

Originally I'd asked for the post when I first started at the Toban because it was really important to me that the student newspaper covers student theatre. The harsh reality is that the BHTC doesn't generally get any coverage otherwise outside of the Master Playwright's Festival in January. Obviously getting to see the shows for free was a bonus, but I was also really interested in using reviews to create dialogue about the plays instead of just trash or rave about them. As an artist it really bothers me when I read reviews where I feel like the critic isn't respectful of the fact that what they are commenting on is something people have put a lot of work into. As far as I'm concerned the least interesting part of a review is whether or not a critic liked the piece. I prefer it when the writer engages with the work, is constructive, responds carefully.

It's so much easier to tear someone's work then it is to create your own. In taking on theatre reviews I wanted to bring to the table the respect I have for creative work because I know what it takes. At Haliburton I had a prof who used to explain to us ad nauseum that art critiques weren't about finding mistakes in other people's work -it was about responding honestly to it so that they could figure out where to take it. Sometimes at the end of a critique the artist might decide that the piece wasn't worth taking any further -but the process of figuring out what worked would ultimately make their future work better. That's how I believe all forms of art criticism should operate. It's really easy to say something is stupid, but it isn't all that productive for anyone. On the other hand any time you pay close attention to a work of art the experience will be valuable whether or not you you like it.

I should explain here that I'm not an actress. I did theatre throughout high school at Prairie Theatre Exchange, my grandfather ensured I've been exposed to a lot of live performances, I read it extensively and I've got a number of friends who are involved in theatre -but it's not really an art form I have that much experience with. But it is something that I really love.

Being involved with writing about the Black Hole this year has just re-enforced that. Getting to talk to all these people involved in theatre is ridiculously exciting to me. The fact I get to write about it -that's almost better. I hope that I can convey that sense of wonder to my readers, but I also hope that the people involved in the play feel respected. Partially because I go all starry eyed at the sight of curtain/stages/dimming lights and I want to honour the art form.

The interviews I did on Thursday about the play only served to remind me how much I love theatre in a very real way. It wasn't just that I'm excited for the show -although I am -but mainly I love hearing how things fit together. I'm an anthropology major, we're all about the holistic perspective and you basically have to use one to talk about theatre. It's a good fit.

Watching people at work in the theatre has inspired me to start thinking about creating my own work. I think I'd like to write more plays, but I'm also initerested in seeing how I could bring theatrical elements into my own work using textiles, storytelling and clothing. It's something I'd like to explore at the very least. Maybe even see if I can take some courses as part of the studio arts program next year.

Sometimes its too hard to stand still with all these passions to follow!

Publicity and such things

2010-02-22T13:18:00.000-06:00

So I woke up this morning too late to get to French class on time. After a few cursory laments I struggled into real people clothes and discovered I had half an hour to kill before catching the bus. Logically, I checked my email in which there was two messages from my Arts Editor at The Manitoban as well as the usual array of list updates and CBC newsletters.

It turns out that The Concordian published the article I wrote on Amelia Curran "Something that can't be said any other way". That's right, my work got picked up by one of the two newspapers at Concordia University that I'm going to be applying to next year! I'm not even a student and they published my work!

It turns out that The Manitoban is part of the Canadian University Press (CUP) wire service; this is basically a database made up of all the articles published in all the university newspapers across Canada. If another paper has space to fill, or just likes your article then they can pick it up. I think I'd heard about the wire a few times, but it had never really occurred to me that my writing might be appearing elsewhere until I got the e-mail from Damian this morning.

That's when I did what any self-respecting artist would do: I googled my name to see if anything else I'd written had shown up elsewhere. Yup. It certainly did.

It turns out that:

University of Toronto's Victoria College student newspaper The Strand picked up my article "The Single Socks Club"

The Tallest Poppy artist residency posted a few of my postcards on the official blog.

My review of the Black Hole Theatre Company's production of Departures and Arrivals was posted to the Carol Shield's website

Not bad, eh? In the New Years I'd made a resolution to get three pieces of art produced outside of the Toban and I think I'm going to count that resolution accomplished. The MAWA article counts as the first, and I'm going to count having my these publications elsewhere as two, three and four. The artist residency is a half-check, but that's just fine with me. Ditto with introducing the bellydance show Zer Prahim on Saturday night.

For the moment, I choose to beam. I may be obnoxious and email a bunch of people I know too...

The earth calls to its own

2010-02-19T15:20:00.000-06:00

I just finished reading Taras Grescoe's travelogue The End of Elsewhere: Travels among the tourists this morning while lounging about in bed and debating which type of espresso beans to make my morning latte out of. (No, this isn't just me bragging about my reading week ability to lounge around). First of all, I would just like to repeat one more time that I have a huge intellectual crush on Taras Grescoe; not only does he write about culture, language, environmental issues and travel -but he also writes ravishing descriptions of food that make me break out into stupid smiles and possibly moan a little. But reading through the book this time, what struck me was how he talked about finding "home". In the last couple of paragraphs he talks about how what he's on the other side of the world looking for as a traveller: 'community, groundedness, connection' (paraphrase, not direct quote) are all things that he's neglected to develop at home. Today that spoke to me.

In the middle of this February winter I am writing this post in the living room of my parents place. On the other side of the picture window is sparse snow and a familiar tree line I've been seeing for seventeen years. I'm in Winnipeg right now, the insular city at the heart of the North American continent that I was born in. This isn't where my ancestors are from, but it is where I was raised, the place I've been coming home to in between all of my travels, my temporary re-locations to a tent in Southern Manitoba, hostels in Central America or a rooming house in Ontario where I was in school. Like most of the people who live in this city, I've loathed it, loved it and ventured away from it but I've always ended up coming back. There's something about Winnipeg that it's really hard to explain to anyone who hasn't been here. The only way I can describe it is to say that it's one of those places that leaves its flavour on you. Think of it like the "terroir" of a wine: even if you only root down as an adult, there will still be a slight urban prairie tang on your skin, a certain territorial pride in your guts.

With any luck six months from now I will be in Montreal studying textile art at Concordia. I don't feel like this is a temporary transplant either where I suck up an education but keep my social base and heart back in the prairies. As I'm thinking about this move, I know that what I'm wanting from it is to re-root myself over there. I'm not planning to come back to Winnipeg ever again -except as a visitor. Yes, my friends and family are here and I will continue to love them, but I'm ready to find a home of my own and I know that it isn't here I want to build it.

I don't know where I heard the expression "the earth calls to its own" but I believe that it's true. I think certain places call to us deeper than others. I don't believe that everyone's home is where they are born, but I do believe that many people do. Mine is not in Winnipeg. Hell, it might not be in Montreal either but for now I feel like that is where I'm being called home. I want to put my roots down somewhere, settle in and take in a place for a good long time before I'm ready to move again. I do consider myself to be somewhat nomadic in nature, but I mean nomadic in the truest sense of the word; my home travels with me. It doesn't matter whether I'm somewhere for a week, a couple of days or a few months -I instinctively settle in to whatever space I can claim as my own. There is a Guatemalan duffle bag full of fabrics which I pull out everytime I move. In each new space, the textiles are re-arranged differently but even the fact I have a settling in routine tells you a lot about my outlook on life. Like a hermit crab I'm unsettled without a home but very rarely go without one for long.

Wanderlust is an ongoing theme in my life -even though it might not be reflected on my passport. I can go without international travel for years at a time, but I can't go for very long at all without exploring new geographies. New cultures. New ways of seeing. I love listening to different ways that people speak, interact, move inside their wiggly little human bodies. For me, this is stimulating. So is walking around and exploring. I learned a long time ago that within the same tiny piece of space lies a zillion worlds to explore. And I feel like I've done a pretty thorough job of exploring Winnipeg. But I'm so ready to move on now. I want a new place to explore in. I want things from my city that I can't get here. I just want out.

What's funny is that the closer I get to leaving Winnipeg, the more fondly I feel towards it. As long as the University of Manitoba isn't going to be where I have to finish my degree, I can appreciate the good things I got from it and think fondly about good friendships or courses versus a bad overall education and nightmare-ish bureautic obstacle course. Then I can revel in the Exchange district with its plethora of art galleries and cafes without taking the generic productions at MTC personally. I want to feel strongly about this city but I don't want to belong to it.

These days all I can think about is making a home for myself -elsewhere. As much as I obsess about moving to Montreal and having a new city to go play in, I also obsess about finding a partner who wants to build a life together. One which doesn't involve staying put. That rich world outside my bubble, I want to taste it. I don't want any place, community, language or culture to have an exclusive hold on my soul. Maybe that's deep rooted commitmentphobia as much as it is a sense of adventure, but that's the way it is. I want to take my nomadic hermit crab home complete with partner and artistic practice all over the place. I want to savour new languages on my tongue and get used to adapting. Then raise eccentric children who feel at home anywhere.

I'm at the point in my life right now where what I really want is to put some roots down. Inevitably there will be a time when my feet get itchy and I will need to up and move to Latin American and work on my Spanish. Or go visit family in Europe. There will probably also be a time when my curiousity about textiles of the Indian Subcontinent gets the better of me, I'll build up my stomache lining with yoghurt and find my way to Nepal... but right now, that's not it at all. What I want more than anything is to have an apartment which I share with a partner where I can nest, make soup, study, write, store all my books and a couch where visitors can stay. I want to work on my own creative practice, get my degree, come home to a place that's my own every night and build those deep new connections and friendships somewhere else. I'm looking for security: emotional, spiritual, physical. Some threads that I can follow home.

It's hard to explain how desperately I'm needing these things right now. How much of my heart and brain these longings are consuming in me. It isn't even like I'm unhappy with my life right now. Actually, I've got a ton of things going on here that are really great, friendships I'll be sad to put distance in and places I know I'll miss because I have every time I've ever left. But I'm getting ready to move on internally as well as externally. (More internally than externally, truth be told). I'm not eighteen anymore, and I'm ready to be done with banging around trying to find which way up is. Yes, the world is an insecure place where you can't exactly count on anything working out the way you planned. Great. I'm ready to risk it anyways.

I know that there are a lot of things that have to happen before I can move. Still, I believe that it will happen because I need it to. And then I apologize the the powers that be that I can't be any less desperate in my prayers.

Artistic Update Time

2010-02-12T11:49:00.000-06:00

Linguistics test has just been written. Depending on how well I do, I may reserve the right to say things like "I hate velar plosives" or "why use words like metaphesis anyways?" Phonetics and phonology are definitely not the part of linguistics that I love. Give me morphology, syntax and language contact anyday.

I feel like there's been a lot going on as of late artistically, so much that I can barely keep track of it all. My solution? Write it all down on the interweb and hope some people start to follow me.

I've got an article on the politics of re-framing 'craft' as art that's going to be published in the MAWA (Mentoring Artists for Women's Art) spring newsletter. I even got paid for it.
There have been many more pieces in The Manitoban. I haven't linked them all, but if you do a search for "Daniela Smith-Fernandez" then you can take a look at what I've been working on
I'm putting the finishing touches on a dress my bellydance instructor is going to wear for a performance next Saturday. She's also talking fairly seriously about commissioning me to design other pieces for her which she will then wear at dance competitions and events nationally.
I'm acting as MC for said bellydance show as well as writing the presentation script
The portfolio has been sent off to Concordia for the Studio Arts Fibres program. This can not be stated often enough. It took forever.
My monologue I am not a Muse is going to be workshopped next Friday in front of a small group. After Dana and I get feedback we're going to figure out where to take it/produce it.
I've got a list in the works of magazines I think might be interested in printing my style of writing -research and submissions to follow
Continuing on with making homemade cards for the Benevolent Postcard Society and Valentine's Day card exchange. I want to do more of these mail exchanges. Feel free to message me if you know of any I can get involved in.
The final touches have been put on my friend Andrea's dress and it looks amazing on her. She's going to wear it to two socials this weekend and I will get pictures
An art group I belong to The Fort Garry Ladies Pony Club is going to be holding a lingerie fashion show and perfume launch featuring my lingerie designs. This means I get to do a full line of twelve outfits, there will be an organist, I can pick my own models, there will be press releases and it will be a little bit of a big deal. (Anyone who has experienced the Winnipeg Arts Scene should know what I mean by that). Add to which, the idea is to create pamphlets and order forms so that I could potentially make a few sales on underwear or custom garments.
I've made contact with one of the papers at Concordia about getting involved for next year. More to follow there.

This year I'd made the resolution to produce atleast three pieces of artwork in any medium this year outside of the Manitoban. So far I've already got the MAWA piece published and the lingerie fashion show coming up in May. I only need one more project and I've completed an ambitious resolution. I feel the need to preen about this. Can you blame me?

The limits of ‘progressive’ movies | The Manitoban Online

2010-02-11T11:45:00.000-06:00

The limits of ‘progressive’ movies The Manitoban Online

Adjectives and problems I would like to have

2010-02-03T13:18:00.000-06:00

I would be an exaggeration to say that a well timed use of adjectives took me out of a slump, but there is a grain of truth to it. (Slump gone, not just the adjectives though)

The fact that there are words out there like "sublime", "notorious', "exalted", "incandescent" etc. gives me faith that the world is a beautiful place. Even if it wasn't initially, beauty is created just to live up to them. I don't know if the best part about language is the sound, the meaning or both. What I do know is that language is deeply, deeply sexy. Just give me words and possibly coffee: there will be a wave of bliss felt by oil-soaked penguins in Antarctica.

*****

A character on Little Mosque on the Prairie made a comment about wish fulfillment wish got me thinking about fantasies. Specifically, how when we fantasize (yes I'm generalizing) we are fantasizing just as much about problems we'd like to have as good things. I mean think about it: you watch a movie where the protagonist is torn between work/job that fulfills them and something to do with the love of their life. Or at least giving someone who could be the love of their life a chance. Leaving aside all of the melodramatic internal turmoil, isn't that kind of an awesome problem to have? I mean really, I don't see how you lose for either one. A friend of mine used to sigh while watching The O. C. wishing she had their issues. Which are mostly based on things being generally pretty great.

So with this in mind I've decided to come up with five problems which I really wish that I had; I've deliberately tried to add some legitimate element of difficulty to the situations.

I'm a few months into an absolutely amazing relationship with a guy when my lease is up. We want to move in together but each absolutely love our too small for two people places, and it's hard to find nice ones period. Add to which, logical brains say that this whole thing is trying to go too fast. Where do I go? (Cue the violins)
I'm working a job that I absolutely love where I write and work on cultural issues, fairly heavily invested in coursework, and still just at the point where I can keep my head above water with regards to health, friends, sleep, caffeine etc. Then I'm offered a good sum for a paid creative project which will eat up a lot of time but be really, really good for my career long term. Do I take it?
I've managed to save enough money to put into replacing my pseudo-functional laptop with one which will be a better investment, and found a way to get a discount. Then I discover an industrial sewing factory is going out of business, so for the same price I could get a really high end sewing machine which meets all my needs, a quality serger, strong wood sewing center and a whole lot of very useful professional quality tools which will not be available again. Which do I buy?
In the middle of my extremely crazily busy (but still awesome) schedule I've managed to book time off to go back to Manitoba for the Winnipeg Folk Festival. Then I find out that it's happening the same weekend as a conference on textile art history and anthropology which I've somehow managed to beg, squeeze and plead my way into where I could meet tons of people who work in the field. But it's one of the few times I go see people from home. Which do I choose?
The government of Canada department of immigration wants to commission me to do a piece of textile art for some big government building around the same time they've made some stupid decision which restricts who gets in to the country. This upsets me, but it's good money. Do I take it?

Too many guidelines

2010-01-28T16:06:00.000-06:00

There are times like today in which the landscape is just one long plethora of deadlines, guidelines, structure and straight lines. These things are particularly oppressive because it's so easy to believe that they are somehow more real than anything else; especially things like imagination, dream and chaos -all those other human things that will eventually intrude. Sometimes it's useful to behave efficiently: metaphorical sword in hand I am the protagonist of an epic story, heroically finishing off French grammatical excercises, meeting article deadlines and getting art school portfolios mailed off in a flurry of sparkles and applause. After awhile, the satisfaction of accomplishing THINGS can only fulfill me so much; that's when I start longing for poppy fields.

No, in this case "poppy fields" is not a euphemism for drug abuse (my substance of choice is coffee anyways). I'm thinking of the poppy field from The Wizard of Oz where Dorothy falls asleep and ends up dreaming. The exact details of that particular scene elude me at present, but what I do remember clearly is how it relates for me to the rest of the book. Here we have Dorothy, transplanted from Kansas into the world of Oz where the rules she knows do not apply and she knows by the logic of story that every action she takes will have repercussions for every other entity in her world.  Then she falls asleep in this fantastic landscape of poppy fields where even her dreams are not longer ordinary, something a little more meaningful than the sleep of the over-tired.

Whenever I think about those poppy fields, I imagine them as the perfect kind of resting place for the creative mind. Luminous, hallucinogenically bright and thoroughly wonderous. If Oz is this magical land full of miraculous and illogical things, then where else could you rest than a poppy field?  Going back to Kansas overnight couldn't cut it, but there still needs to be times and places where Dorothy doesn't have to work quite so hard at believing in miracles or even OZ would become mundane. Oh after her nap there will still be other conundrums to face, but she still gets temporary rest without having to leave the wonderous land of Oz.

After mailing off my portfolio, I'm not entirely sure what to do with myself. Well, I know what kind of obligations I have to do -no shortage of those, but I'm still not quite ready to leave that brightly chaotic wonderous mode of operation I had while focusing whole heartedly on this art project. OK, it wasn't so much a creative project as a neccessary bureaucratic task done so that I can focus on other creative projects... but still. I just think right now would be a really wonderful time for a poppy field interval.

It's like the intermission between two acts of a play. It can be disconcerting to step out of the theatre for the twenty minutes given to buy a drink or visit the washroom, but it also enables you to meet those mundane needs so that you can go back and focus more completely on the story again.

Today is a day for poppy fields. I don't want to do anything that can be checked off a list. I don't want to be responsible, or logical, or even all that smart. I want whimsical bright coloured animals to waltz through my mindscape to the tune of a musical number written in a totally different language. I want the logic that you hit when you spend the whole day doing nothing but staring into a coffee cup, or finger painting with a five year old. What I want is nothing less than magic.

At the edges of every straight line is the suggestion of a spiral waiting to happen. Of chaos ready to errupt. Of wonder incapable of submitting to the tyranny of obligations or disciplines.

If you want to find me, that's where I will be.

XOXO
Daniela

On with the portfolio!

2010-01-24T22:36:00.000-06:00

In my bedroom lies a basic cardboard box with my name on it which is the product of many hours of work, a certain amount of expense and within which I've invested an incredible amount of emotional energy. It's my artschool portfolio: even looking at it makes my heart race in that delightful-yet-anxious sort of way. Tomorrow I send it off into the wild world to go on without me and see whether or not I have a place in the fibre art program I'm applying to. It has practically become sentinent for me. Somehow it's hard to believe that this box is the culmination of so much work.  Shouldn't it be more somehow? Yet it is. For me. Hopefully for the nice people on the portfolio evaluation committee too.

My friend Leif photographed my work this afternoon -all the stuff that couldn't be sent in the mail. Clothing, hangings, sculpture etc.  It was kind of magical. Before today I'd been fairly convinced that textiles just don't photograph well because you can't get the texture or the tactile element. I stand corrected. Leif does good stuff, and I've always known that, but it was completely different seeing my own work show up on the screen.  Ms. Athena showed up to model and look fabulous. This is the joy of having talented friends. I may or may not post some of his shots later. Not sure though.

It's slightly frustrating that I can't just burn the images on CD, pack it up and be done with it. Except that my laptop's D:// drive has died and the CD won't come out of my parent's computer, so I'm going to have to do it at the Toban tomorrow instead. Still. It's hard to believe that this project is going to be out of my hands so soon. A week ago it felt like this monumental task, and here I am ready to send it off. How did that happen anyways?

There was the transcript collection, the zillions of questions to ask, the phone calls, the forms to print off and then the letter of intent to write. I'm lucky in that I've got so much art made already that I didn't need to do anything specifically for the portfolio to fit in 20 pieces because I can't imagine how much work it would have been if I did. To me 20 is absolutely nothing. I could make 20 pieces in a week if I needed to. They might not all get me in to school though. Then again, I did a ridiculous amount of work I just didn't do it with an art school application in mind, I just made it because I wanted to.  Writing the letter of intent was a lot less scary then it would have been for me before I started writing for the Toban.  A friend looked it over for me, but luckily the academic training is useful for things like that.

Now that the portfolio project is wrapping up on my end I can go back to focusing on other things. Like working.  I've got a couple pieces coming out this week in the Toban, and then a few new ideas for the next few issues to tackle. Besides a long-delayed article for MAWA which needs my attention.

And yet it's wonderful. On with the show.

It isn't Friday night without punctuation

2010-01-15T23:03:00.000-06:00

Three weeks in and I have already broken one of my biggest new years resolutions: to not spend my Friday-Saturday nights at home reading linguistics. OK, so I might have worded that to make me sound a little less dorky (in vain) but that was the intent. And yet here I am, three weeks in to the new year on a Friday night reading about... you guessed it, linguistics. Or more specifically, punctuation. Eats, Shoots and Leaves to be precise.

It's a wonderfully engaging book. Well written, funny and interesting. It also belongs to that branch of language prescriptivism which I'm always a little ambivalent about. One where nit-picking grammarians shake their hands over misplaced commas or apostraphes; in the mean time, not really thinking about how this kind of elitism really turns people off literacy in a larger sense because it becomes complex and intimidating.

Gathering from what I've read via the history of the French language and its affect on English, plus my linguistics textbook chapter on English, plus a few other assorted sources I can't bring to mind, English is by and large a really stupid language orthographically. It is meant to be clunky, kind of awkward and actually, generally idiosyncratic. It kept spellings from French and Latin deliberated designed to be too complicated for mere mortals to follow, has a history of early printer free-for-alls to contend with, and then add to that has this whole issue of people with money and vested interests making an industry out of telling people where and when to capitalize (or -ise).

This, atleast, is what I think. It is informed by leftist understandings of power, priviledge and exclusivity; more specifically, why all of these things should be mistrusted. I love language passionately in just about every form I can get it in.  The first time that I heard the philosophy touted in linguistics that the discipline should describe and interpret, but not prescribe the way language is used I may have actually cheered. There is something really beautiful about hearing/seeing/witnessing people revel in language.  After all, I'm a fanatical reader with a book fixation; I'm an academic-in-training who takes pleasure in learning terminology; I'm a writer who has devoted considerable time to the craft of writing and I take a great deal of pride in my word-smithing abilities.

I think that force of expression should always take precedence about fussing over a couple of apostrophes, that elitism is bad, that literacy is about a whole lot more than everyone being able to spell mutli-syllabic words, and that written language isn't everything.

I did say that was what I think right?  'Think' is the operative word here, because it certainly isn't how I feel.  It took me a failed three week experiment with on-line dating to realize that I am not physically capable of dating a man who can't spell: it turns out that written language is kind of vital to me.  Point of fact, appreciation of language in general may actually be on the top of my list of requirements I look for in a man. Spelling mistakes on a dating profile provoked a strong unconscious revulsion in me.  I winced at a particularly horrific use of the spelling "noe" to represent "know". And, to my surprise and disgust, any mention whatsoever of an affinity for word-play, reading, grammar, synonyms etc. kind of made my knees go all wobbly even if the man in question happened to be undesirable in all other respects.

(See the thing is that I'm actually quite suseptible to weak-kneed instant lust and having my heart melt at stupid shallow turn-ons.  Mine just happen to all be a little strange and personal. Luckily/sadly no men have ever figured out how easy it would be to abuse this. I'm not sure I could resist a man who reads, can spell properly, knows how to make a good latte and can talk geek -language/culture/narrative a bonus. Oh that my blog gets atleast one reader who matches said description!)

I certainly feel guilty about my own inherent snobbery at written language usage. As a general rule I try not to go around fixing up people's grammar, re-punctuating sentances or correcting double negatives but on the inside I still wince at an improper confusion of their/they're. After all, theoretically everyone had the chance to learn this stuff in school; cue a deleted rant about the lack of funding/support/respect for the educational system as well as class-based inequities. It's that simple, right?

Just as I'm about to write a rousing dismissal of style-guide nitpickers, grammarians like the one who wrote the book I just read, people who write impassioned letters to the Toban about a superfluous "-e" added to "St" and their ilk I think about the experience I've had with editors through my own writing and go silent. I may snicker at people who consider themselves "grammar nazis" as a point of pride, but the fact of the matter is I am profoundly grateful to the editors at the paper every time I see my articles in print nine times out of ten.

For every case of confused meaning there are dozens of cases where I can see how the tweaking they do has made my voice clearer, stronger, and infintely less ambiguous. People like me who are prone to long latinate sentances and love chances to use the semicolon need editors. They are our friends. Actually, as far as I'm concerned editors, like critics, should ideally be everyone's friend. A good editor or critic is essentially the midwife to those precious print babies: they take care of things like keeping it from getting inadvertently strangled in the womb or a good story from losing an audience via misspellings detracting the reader.

So I'm not entirely who there is left to hate on and/or scapegoat for the linguistic uses that make me squirm. Language changes, which is beautiful, but people who contribute to apathy are villains. Who are these people anyways? English teachers?   See deleted rant on class and education. I can't even hate on prescriptive grammarians completely because it turns out some of them are the people who make me sound smart and coherent in print, and I like that.  Even though I also take exception to elitism and the idea that bad grammar=weakness of character approach espoused by many, there is something to the idea that how you express yourself says something about the person underneath which I don't think anyone would disagree with.

The only conclusion I can come up with is to hate on people who don't love or respect language at all.  The problem is, I don't quite know how you would define this. Using more words does not equal using words better, a sin I'm aware that I regularly commit, but being terrified of them doesn't make sense either.  Strong speech uses silence as much as sound, but there is no way of measuring the power of a pause I know of. Grammar is a tricky subject because it always implies prestige dialects unless you are specifically talking about lingustics.  Orthography is English is clearly ridiculous enough that most native speakers never master it (although I think judging anyone who can't spell properly in Spanish is fair because it's relatively easy).

This is when I start to think that looking for language villains is kind of dumb.  I can guarantee to you that within the next twenty-four hours I will come across some kind of language usage, written or oral, which will make me wince. It might be my sister's pronunciation of "portfolio" as "port-for-lio" or a typo, but the annoyance will happen.

Am I the only one who really wishes that they could reserve their strong emotional reactions for important things like hunger, pollution or genocide?

Waking up with a new eyeline

2010-01-13T20:58:00.000-06:00

Slept over at my friend Kroa's house last night, watching the streetlight flicker on and off through the curtains. Curled up warm in day old clothes, my bra digging slightly in to my skin, the sounds of Tori Amos' Boys for Pele playing softly in the background I realized that it had been a very long time since I had woken up anywhere else. And oh so quietly it seemed like in a new cocoon, the day's texture had an entirely different feel to it.

When I'm at home I go to sleep early-ish, usually after spending a few hours reading/homeworking/geeking out. It's a soft progression usually marked when the laundry room light goes off. Nothing beats the safety of knowing that I'm warm, and will continue to be warm and safe. That all is well, and my clumsy little human body is safe from monsters, bureaucracy and the few remaining predatory animals there is. More often than I need to sleep because I'm physically tired, I need to sleep because it's one of the few ways that my mind knows how to shut off. There is a dark side to having a continually active creative brain. I wake up in the morning at 6 AM to CBC Radio 2 Morning show, slowly getting into my day while I listen to the radio. When I'm up I'm up, ready to caper through the landscape fuelled by caffeine and Canadian music choices. Mornings work well for me. Nights require inspiration.

Yet today there was no morning show, just a slow and leisurely wake up where in the floors below I could hear the house's machinery start to click and whirr. We went downstairs to the kitchen and listened to one of the dogs snore as we compared Globe and Mail stories. Kroa made porridge and coffee while the light started to break out over the cactus plants on the window ledge. There was a new bus route, a new sequence of events to inhabit which were so unfamiliar they practically glistened for me. Just catching the 78 bus I could see the path wind around buildings I never see, meander through old job sites and pristine snow lines.

Have you ever had the feeling that suddenly you don't understand where you are anymore? Like what was once known has become wonderous again, like you're that goldfish with the four second memory who just discovered water again? Even taking those little changes, waking up in a new place and that was all triggered in me. Dorothy in the Poppy Fields gets that she isn't in Kansas anymore: the dust bowl never wielded colours like these.

Day old make up and slept in clothes. I step into French class only ten minutes early for a change, and wonder if anyone can know, or if they did, would take the time to react. Grammar, verbs and silent margin doodles take their toll and the class is over. I need more coffee, except that it's time for linguistics and phonetic alphabetic systems for another hour before I'm ready to settle in and find coffee, whichever one comes first.

*****

My time of late has not exactly been what I would call quiet. Not really. I've been scuttering around been volunteering, and writing for the Toban, and collecting paperworks and the like. Kroa told me that when I tell her about my life she feels exhausted and wonders how I do it; I feel the same way about her life, so we meet part way in a kind of egalitarian mutual admiration pact. Still. It's hard when everything that I'm doing is just so incredibly exciting that the idea of giving any of it up is barely a possibility to be considered. Somehow, it all feels so incredibly nourishing on so many different levels.

Yesterday I sat myself in front of a large piece of paper for an intensive brainstorming session. I need to put together a letter of intent for Concordia and a portfolio, so I put some serious energy into working that out a little. A few pages, one red marker and half a dozen lists later I came to the conclusion that I'm in a lot better shape than I had thought that I was when it comes to portfolio preparation. This would be one fairly significant good feeling for me to have, being a neurotic basket case even at the best of times.

So I relaxed a bit, because it is startly to feel a great deal more do-able. All of this. That becoming a coherent, compassionate, creative and passionate person project. One who can hold tight and weather the currents without falling apart all the time. That one.

There is much work to be done, but I'm finding it easier to believe that it will be.

*****

I'm waiting to hear back about a job I had an interview for on Monday. A restaurant job, of course. Well, two actually if I'm about to be technical. The interview went really well, but the suspense has me left digging my toes into the floorboards (ouch) in anticipation. Funny thing? I didn't even really want the job that much till I got the interview and heard the bosses' philosophy on food.

At one point I started to tell them how when I think sometimes about leaving the restaurant injury, I start getting a little upset. That even though I don't see myself wanting to work in a restaurant for the rest of my life, I might actually be a little bit passionate about them. About the ability to nurture people, feed them and serve. Well run places make me happy to be in. I suffer acute symptoms of server-guilt whenever I'm somewhere that needs help and I'm in the customer role; this is actually how I ended up applying for the job in the first place. Because "we're short-staffed" is a statement that leaves an impact on me. The moment I knew that I wanted to work with them was when one of the managers left, and told me that every single one of them had fought their love of food service before just giving in. You know that you are among like-minded people when...

Balance between various conflicting passions is one of the most difficult things for me to find, but it also may be one of the most valuable. Talking with my mom today about the move next year, she was saying that I seem to be finding a good balance with the part time coursework that I'm doing right now. I am. There's time to shift gears, and when one area of my life is not feeling stellar there are other things that I'm doing to keep myself in check. So I'm actually thinking that I might try to do part time coursework next year. I like the paper writing, chance to focus on my studies, and time to proccess what I'm learning. Besides which, if I'm going into fine arts then I don't have a clue what the pace will be like. It's not in me to rush. Not happily at least. Time to soak in and distill what I'm learning. As much as I don't want to be in school forever, I can always do spring classes or accelerate the following year if it feels like I can once my feet are under me a little more.

I had such plans to be productive today, and by productive what I really mean is sit down and write my letter of intent and do heavy duty portfolio work. But right now, it isn't time. There is time in general, but my success in life is not dependent on me getting up right now to start essay writing in a frenzy. There is no Toban this upcoming week, so I have a bit of a respite to focus on the application proccess. I really need to let go of this idea that it isn't "useful" to proccess, read, talk to people, and basically do anything that can't receive a check mark on a list. It's these quiet grounding moments that allows important things to get done I think. The space for your mind and body to change pace allow deep and transformative moments to sink in deeper somehow.

********

About a month ago I stayed up all night in a caffeine fuelled frenzy processing the discovery that I can actually make things easier for myself. A fairly important concern considering as I'm looking to be living in another province, at another university, in a new program in oh, about seven months from now. This has been something that's on my mind alot lately.

Some of the Toban staff are off at a student journalism conference in Edmonton tomorrow. So I've asked a few of my cronies to see if they want to hook me up with contacts at the Concordia papers. This writing thing is just a good fit and I want to keep doing it. Getting paid would be preferable, and being able to line up some work ahead of time would be pretty amazing. Discovered today that so far I've only missed one deadline, so this whole "the Toban will improve my time management skills" scheme is actually panning out. I feel like keeping the writing in line is a strong way of being rooted. Keep me worded and I'm infinitely happier.

The most promising work prospect so far is the job I'm waiting to hear about, but language has also been (cough) a bit of a preoccupation for me of late with the whole "move to Montreal" plan underway. When it comes to getting around, I know it's possible to get by on English but I'd rather not. I'm doing the French through school of course, but in the interest of doing a little more I've had my eye on the post-school horizon line. I put in my application for the Explore program to start out with. First option Montreal, second CUSB in Winnipeg. I don't know if I'll even end up doing it but I figured it's easier to have the option now then apply later when there isn't any chance to get in. We'll see though. Money making is definitely a concern for me with the Montreal plan.

The more significant feeler I put out is to a French (from France) restaurant in St. B. I love the place because the food is mystical-trance-spiritual-experience good, but I've also met the owners socially a few times. So I asked if they'd be willing to let me come in one night a week to help out and work on my French. With the goal in mind of being able to deliver French language service by the time I leave so I could (ideally) work in a restaurant in Montreal again. The idea of being in the culinary capital of Canada and not being able to serve has been really hurting my heart. This is putting some energy into fixing said conundrum. The owner said he'd get back to me about which night would work, but it was a yes AND the conversation took place in French... I'm incredibly excited. Getting paid would definitely be nice, but even just getting to be invested in a place which I genuinely love, being able to learn about food, and working on the French would totally be worth it to me. Fingers crossed. This would be so amazing that it almost doesn't feel possible or real.

I've also just tended to forget being out of it for, um, awhile that one of the biggest reasons why I've always like working restaurant jobs is that they tend to feed me. Even when they don't, the cost is fairly negligible compared to buying groceries, working out logistics and the like. Being able to get a range of meals cheap is pretty amazing, and so is having coffee available all the time. Only when its good stuff though. Bad coffee is a travesty as far as I'm concerned. So if I'm going to be more of a student, managing my own household, handling a new city and in a demanding fine arts program... having a job that ensures that I get fed properly is probably a good idea. Besides which, did I mention that I love restaurants?

********

With tomorrow coming soon, my belly flutters with anxiety and anticipation. I'm excited to get working on this letter, on my portfolio and getting in touch with the photographer. It's downright exhilerating in its overwhelming-ness. I feel so blessed right now, so incredibly safe and supported. I keep picking at it looking for things to fuss over, but as far as I can tell I know what it is that I need to be fussing over: applications and school. It's not stupidly complicated. I've got a piece to write for MAWA, but while the Toban is off for a week there is some time to concentrete.

Next to the stuffed walrus on my bed is a copy of Isabel Allende's new novel "La Isla Bajo El Mar". Though I'm loving all the French, I've been missing the Spanish and Allende is the perfect writer to come home to. It will be nice to be working again, definitely, but since my life is on the upswing on getting busy again, I'm trying to enjoy the time that I have now. When I can sleep over at Kroa's drinking red wine and watching a movie, spend hours working on a piece of writing I'm not getting paid for, and hang out reading Allende in bed without realistically having anything urgent or time sensitive that I'm neglecting for the moment. With any luck, very soon that won't be possible and on some level I might miss it.

Besides, tomorrow morning I get to wake up to the CBC morning show again.

Something that can't be said any other way | The Manitoban Online

2010-01-13T11:35:00.000-06:00

Something that can't be said any other way | The Manitoban Online

All turn ons are shallow

2010-01-10T18:49:00.000-06:00

Doesn't matter how well you, me or anyone else can justify it: as far as I'm concerned, all turn ons are basically shallow.

I mean, think about it: one second ago the person you are currently ogling/mentally-undressing/smitten-with was just another human being. Species homo sapiens sapiens, maybe of the gender/sex identity that appeals to you, maybe not and then you observe something (herefore referred to as the "turn on") and then that primal libido like instict thing takes over for long enough to make a difference.

The worst thing is that it kicks in sans permission. I do believe that you can pick who you want to be with, but who you're attracted to... HA! Not so much. So just surrender and deal with it. All those rules kind of die and it turns out, nope, you're at the mercy of something deeper/bigger than you. Lust sucks that way. Love is even worse.

I go all gooey eyed when I hear men talk about wanting children/family, or about food. Doesn't matter who it is, because once those topics come up it takes me a good moment to recover myself and/or evaluate whether I actually have any interest in said speaker. Were anyone to figure this out who wanted me in a carnal kind of way, it would actually be a little dangerous. I feel a little ashamed/disgusted with myself for finding such stereotypical things attractive, but it hits before I can think about it.

Sure I can justify these turn ons the same way I can justify the fact I've got a serious thing for geeks, but the attraction hits before the conscious brain offers an opinion. Or a rationale. Sometimes I suspect that the conscious mind is basically an enabler/justifier which only pretends to be logical and rational to get what it wants faster.

Oh, I like coffee, wine, conversation and theatre too. Just in case anyone's reading this who did have an interest in seducing me.

Tallest Poppy Artist Residency

2010-01-07T18:29:00.000-06:00

So in December I did this really artist residency program which I then forgot to make a post about. Working on the theory "better late than never" I'm now uploading my pictures of the work I did. Most of these use ink and watercolour, as well as a stamp pad with metallic inks, alphabet stamps, and a handmade stamp cut out of an eraser in the restaurant.

About the residency: it's run out of a restaurant called the Tallest Poppy located in downtown Winnipeg and has a beautifully informal structure. Arists work on a project for the weekend, and the restaurant provides them with food. The food and arrangement are both so good I feel like there should be something wrong with the program, but it's just awesome.

I choose to work on postcards for the weekend, since that gave me a lot of flexibility to try things out and play without resulting in frustration if that inevitable moment happened when one project just doesn't want to happen. Anyways, here they are.

New Years Resolutions

2010-01-06T13:55:00.000-06:00

Move out of this frozen wasteland and to Montreal
Get accepted into Textile Fine Arts program
Spend less nights at home reading academic books
Learn to plan, cook and eat good food regularly
Make money
Learn to save/handle money
Publish/produce three non-Toban pieces
Maintain A's
Keep up healthy stuff like bellydancing
Improve Spanish and French language skills

Not particularly exciting, but significant at the moment

Ethics and eggplant

2010-01-04T21:22:00.001-06:00

This message brought to you by my caffeine addiction

2010-01-02T05:00:00.000-06:00

Imagine if you will the following scene: it is three in the morning, I would like to be asleep, my mind decides that this would be a *great* time to do lots of cluttered whirring movements. Also, lots of grandiose self-evaluations and planning for the New Years. Now if it could decide to do something a little more productive like give me a new story to write a play about that would be different, but self-reflection is just annoying.  You know how herding dogs like collies will play fetch until the point of collapse because they have this weird sense of obligation to do their jobs? I think one of them re-incarnated into a circus dog and took over control of my brain.

At this point I realize that perhaps, after two days without coffee, drinking an entire pot of espresso to myself and then another brewed cup to hours ago... probably has some relationship to the fact I can't sleep and am hallucinating that there are collies dressed up in circus costumes running around in my head trying to find ANSWERS. And that perhaps, just maybe, this is a sign that it would be a good idea to lay off inordinate amounts of coffee in the PM for the time being.

There was a point when I used to down Red Eye Specials with my friend Peter at work which consisted of triple espresso shots in a full coffee mug with flavoured syrup and just enough cream to make it palpatable. Those times, they are not now.  Now I am sucky and restrict my caffeine intake somewhat.  Though I will clarify that by "somewhat" I mean I need a triple shot of espresso to function in the mornings, and then often another drink later on. Comparatively speaking that isn't necessarily a lot of caffeine to imbibe, but I need it in a bad way.

Once I gave up coffee for over a month. No coffee or chocolate actually. I'd been told that these might be things to avoid when you are, like me, already fairly high strung as it is so I figured I'd give it a try. I noticed that I saved a fair bit of money.  Then I noticed that my headaches stopped. Finally I noticed that having to have my coffee first thing actually provides me with some much needed ritual in my life, and cutting it out was actually a problem. And then after I'd realized that I really truly could give the stuff up, I gave a shudder and decided never, ever to do that again.

I love coffee in a way borders on smutty.  It goes past the smell, or even anything so simple as taste. For me, drinking coffee was how I learned that flavour exist and there were things worth savouring.  I feel vaguely offended by bad brews.  My friend Kristina and I use the phrase "instant coffee" to describe people who aren't worth the effort to have sex with.  The fact I know how to make lattes and cappuccinos properly is a source of personal pride. Any man who knows how to appreciate it and/or provides it to me instantly gains points in my books. The amount of time I spend in cafes is a little obscene.

The addiction is definitely physical, as witnessed by the fact I am writing a blog post at three in the morning when I would really like to be sleeping. But the addiction also relates to my own sense of sensuality and ritual. For me, gulping down a coffee is almost a travesty. No matter how quickly I drink it, the ritual of drinking a cup is grounding. It slows me down. I'm present. I can appreciate the flavours. It's that little bit of something more added to every day. That may sound like a Starbucks byline, but that's kind of how it is for me.

On the whole, the relationship between me and coffee is a fairly deep, romantic and loving one which sometimes gets interrupted by moments like this. Still. The idea of not having it in my life, not a happy one. Short of wanting a healthy pregnancy and so leaving it off for a good nine months, I do not forsee myself giving it up anytime soon.

********

As I lay awake and stared at the ceiling pretending that I was about to doze off "any second now" I start thinking about security.

Lately I've been going through this really strange phase where I'm completely obsessed with developing some stability in my life, growing up, and settling down. All at once (it feels like at least) I'm completely driven by these desires to just ... stabilize? I don't even know if that's what to call it. I feel this pressing need to just get to work on finishing up my BA, to move somewhere I can see myself settling down, and most significantly, to find a partner to make a home and have babies with. Suddenly I feel the need to be more efficient with everything that I want to do, from art to writing to school onwards. In less than a year I'm going to be twenty five and that seems to matter a lot to me.

The weird thing is that it isn't even external pressure. It's not as though I'm surrounded by people who demand babies on a deadline like a lot of people I know, and it certainly isn't as though I've got anyone around me including myself who believes that marriage, career or property are fundamental markers of a well lived life. And still, I'm starting to see myself differently. Yes, I'm young and don't exactly feel like I should have an MA, mortgage, or wedding ring by now... but I also feel like I'm getting really sick of just fucking around too. I'm starting to desperately want to assume an adult place in the world, have my own family, some financial security, and be on track to doing what it is I really want to do.

It's been a hell of a ride from eighteen or so to now, and if I don't regret much of it I certainly wouldn't relive it either. When I was a teenager I used to think "experimenting" in your twenties just meant being really promiscous, drinking a lot, partying a lot and doing a lot of drugs. Consequently, I tended to feel like I was a pretty boring non-experimental person and felt incredibly guilty about not wanting to "experience" these years. And then somewhere along the way I blinked, went through a dozen or so jobs, moved around a zillion times, travelled, messed around with art, suffered obsessive love/lust a couple times, had significant friendships build up and fall apart, had an intense and chaotic university experience, was on my own, fell apart myself pretty thoroughly a couple of times... and here I am.

I'm kind of ready to be done with being fucked up, disfunctional and angsty all the time. I am done with feeling like I'm a mess all the time. Struggling to keep myself together has actually severely restricted my ability to experiment in other ways. It's been limiting my personal freedom in some big ways. I would very much like to be done with the phase in my life where constant instability has been normal, so I can maybe plan ahead to what I would actually like my life to be like as opposed to just focus all my energies on coping.

For the past few months, I've been really struggling with the desperate need for security. Inside my head sometimes all I can hear is the same voice urgently crying out for a home, recovered credit rating, a family, a stable relationship. I'm feeling like I need to start putting my life in order so that I can have kids in a few years. The work "need" being operative. Instead of obsessing about how I'm going to pay rent, now I'm obsessing about getting myself into a position where I can not only pay rent regularily but also support a family someday soon.

It was a shock to my system to find out that underneath this bohemian outerlayer is a staunch feminine traditionalist who yearns for such horribly conventional, traditional things as marriage, children, and stable income. If someone had told my fifteen year old -hell, even my twenty-two year old self- that I would reach twenty four and suddenly become completely obsessed with finding security... I wouldn't have believed it. And yet here I am. Coming to terms with the fact that I'm a lot more culturally conservative than I've tended to see myself as. Not only that, but I'm OK with doing things my way.

So right now I've been working really hard to figure out ways to get myself grounded. Everything from proper sleep rituals, to doing homework on time, to what to do with the degree I want. Feeling awkward and desperate to try and do things. And then it hit me.

If what I really wanted was to be at the age I am now with a career, a stable job, married, owning property and on my way to starting a family then I would probably have it. I would have found an employable professional program, gone straight from high school, worked all the way through, focused on dating and made this very conventional stable storyline a reality for me. But that isn't really what drives me. The decisions I've made -bad and good alike- have often been driven by the desire to explore, to understand and (in some weird way) to create security in my own life. If I don't want to do things in a straight forward way, it isn't just because I don't believe it will make me happy, it's because I don't trust that things like having a career, being married or owning things necessarily builds a feeling of stability. My money more often than not goes to things like good food or experiences than it does to big purchases, in part because finances feel so intangible. In the back of my head, I'm always more than a little bit afraid that if the economy collapses or the government gets torn down then investing in material things will not count for anything.

But when I dedicate time to friendships, or making art, or learning a language, or developing skill it is actually an investment to me. I'm investing in things with the intention of having stability; it's just a different kind. I need to know that I have solid skills, strong relationships and can adapt to multiple environments. And a huge part of that is driven by the fear that someday everything around me could collapse, a belief which stems quite directly from what I saw of Chilean refugees in Canada. I can't speak for all children of refugees, but I know that for me I am actually really terrified of political, economic and cultural upheaval leaving me in a position to have to start over.

I don't feel safe when I'm too focused on one thing at a time, no matter how much I love it because I feel like that makes me too vulnerable. For instance, let's say I'd decided to become a lawyer and spent seven years studying it. Well, that would just be Canadian law. In one language. One profession. Which means that if I couldn't get work as a lawyer, I'd be screwed. If I had to move to another country, I'd have to start over. And as far as I'm aware, it wouldn't really give me a whole lot of options in terms of what kinds of work I could do. Legal training enables you to be a lawyer, but not do much else.

Studying anthropology, knowing how to sew, making textile art and publishing writing may seem like strange ways of seeking stability but that's actually a huge part of why I do these things. As much as it hurts my pride that I can't be good at everything, I also feel like having a strong knowledge base and well developed skills provides me with a stronger sense of safety. If I am good at what I do then no one can take that away from me. If I have a few things that I'm good at, I am even safer. I can adapt to multiple situations. I can live in mutliple geographies.

When I desperately crave stability, it's so that I have the freedom to be creative. What I want is to be employable enough that I'll always be able to pay the rent -but also still have the time and space to experiment and be creative in how I live. Ideally, I want to have lucrative stable part time work which pays the bills so I can dedicate myself to creative pursuits. But it's more than that. I'm looking to build a way of life. When I think about the kind of career I want and the type of man I'm looking for as a partner, both have to be incredibly mobile. I want to be stable in my crazy bohemian, nomadic existence. Being fucked up isn't just a cliche, it's also overrated and kind of boring.

People have been telling me for years that I overcomplicate things, but it's only now that I'm beginning to understand what it is they mean by that. Priorities.

Anyways, I think this is where I sign off and beg the gods to grant me a little bit of sleep and recovery of regular habits...

Buenas noches

A Simple Revelation

2009-12-22T11:42:00.002-06:00

Christmas is the time of year when I get most depressed about being single.

Tis the Season for eggnog-induced reflection

2009-12-20T23:19:00.000-06:00

The tree in the living room of my parents house is a testament to my mom's years of working as an elementary school teacher. Porcelain angels, walnut mice, lace-and-bead candy canes... if it has a story, it goes on the tree. If she remembers the student, it goes on the tree. After all the decorations go on, my father sticks cotton balls all over the limbs to imitate snow. Never mind that my father HATES snow, whines about it constantly, and generally talks about going back to Chile around the time of the first snow fall: the Christmas tree must have fake snow on it because it is tradition.

Then there is the stockings my mom made us all out of felt years and years ago. My father's is red with a fish on it because on the other side of the equator where he grew up, they'd be spending Christmas on the beach. My mom's has rhinestones on it, a relic from her childhood kept since birth. My sister's has a nutcracker mouse cut out from a colouring book, and mine has copihues (national flower of Chile) and music notes. It was made so long ago that it still says "Danielle" on it, since my parents originally named me Danielle Marie to avoid prejudicing me to either culture. This didn't work because my abuela couldn't say it and started calling me "Daniela" instead. These stockings... I just love them. The fact that my mom actually put the time into making them for us all touches something deep for me. They've been around forever, they have roots, they are ours.

When I look at them now, I can't help thinking about what kinds of stockings I will make my kids when I have them. What kinds of deeply engrained traditions we will develop. Because when I think about our Christmases, it is such a deeply syncretic mixture of my parents. We have all these rituals like decorating the tree or fighting over Christmas carol albums which are so completely connected to their famililes and how they were raised. My immediate family goes to get our tree from the same place every year. We have a bear advent calendar we put up on December 1. Every Christmas Eve we read "Twas the Night Before Christmas" before bed. There is such a strong sense of continuity with this holiday; I feel like I could string all of my Christmases in a row and take a good measure of my past twenty four years.

This time last year I was in the middle of a huge feud with my family and only decided to spend Christmas with them a few days before. Up until that point, I'm not sure if I really appreciated how important that sense of tradition, family and continuity was to me. Beginning of December, I ached for the tree. The more carols went on at work, the sadder I got. And the ultimate low point was when I broke down in the Walmart staring at Christmas decorations like some horrible version of a Hollywood cliche. When I was connected to it, all that festive stuff felt shmaltzy; deprived of it they became a source of excrutiating pain, the equivilent of a cruel neighbour who just rubs things in your face. My family and I have our issues, we really do, but as difficult as it was to be there -being deprived of all that cheesy Christmas stuff felt pretty unbearable.

The year before that sucked too. It was kind of angsty-school-ridden craziness. That makes this year the first anticipatedly good Christmas in atleast three years. That has to be some kind of a record. At any rate, no matter what this Christmas may or may not be like, it would be pretty hard to be worse than last year.  Hanging out with the cat watching episodes of Xena was/is generally my idea of a fairly good time, just when it becomes your potential plan for Christmas... then its depressing.  I am fairly relieved that at this point I get along with my family well enough that I can look forward to the holidays instead of dreading them.  Truthfully, I'm pretty sentimental at heart. I value tradition, community, ritual and all those other things sometimes discarded as "old-fashioned values".

Right now, I'm twenty-four.  There is no question of spending the holidays with my family.  I live with them. We're all in the same city. And when I think about the traditions to celebrate, they are the same ones that my immediate family has been practicing since my sister and I were wee little boos about yeah high.  But then I start to realize that it really isn't all that long before I will (hopefully) have a family of my own. This is actually a huge motivating factor for me in trying to get myself together.

Even before I've got kids of my own, hopefully sometime very soon I will have a partner to take into account, another set of family to balance, and a new set of traditions to integrate into my own.  I want to be having discussions with that person about whose family we spend Christmas with, inventing our own rituals, and even geographically figuring out where we'll be. That just strikes me as an opportunity for so much creativity and I'm really excited about it. What kinds of things will we end up building together?

So much of what my family does for Christmas comes from the first few years my parents were together.  Since none of my father's family is here I think it's become even more important for us as a unit to create our own culture around certain events, and the biggest example of that is Christmas.   Some of it comes from the fact that we are a cross-cultural family, but I think as much of it comes from that need for community. Every year my father makes a Chilean sweet bread called Pan de Pascua. Personally, I hate it -but I love the fact that he makes it.  Like anything my family has labelled "Chilean", it takes on this deeper meaning for me as a clear indicator that we have roots and come from somewhere. That Canada can't just whitewash the Latin American in my into submission. We remember that we come from somewhere else. Sometimes that comes to be a real warrior stance.

What will my kids experience be growing up? Will they even grow up somewhere that Christmas is important? I really don't know at this point. So much of my life has been shaped by that experience of coming from a bicultural family it almost seems bizarre for me to imagine my children not having to contend with some kind of radical difference or another. Add to which I live in Canada so who knows. For all I can tell right now, they might grow up speaking a totally different language than me or resonating with a part of the world I currently have no connection to.  Or just being different in some other way. What happened if I ended up with someone to whom religion was really important? All of a sudden the familiar atheistic holiday I'm used to celebrating would change again.

And my offspring would find that new variation normal, any other inconceivable. I find it weird to try and imagine having kids like they come exclusively from me because I so deeply want and look for a man who wants to actively raise a family the same way I do.  So not knowing who the father will be is a pretty important variable for me, and a huge part of why I feel so much excitement and apprehension imagining Christmases of the future. Because I like imagining what it might be like to create something new again. That's a whole other level of letting someone in than just going for coffee with them.

I never used to understand the whole undercurrent of sadness presented in movies like Bridget Jones Diary when the protagonist was an adult still spending Christmas with their parents. Now, when I see it I get that wince reaction. It isn't about not wanting to see the parents, it's the anxiety of not having created a new unit of your own, having your own family. It's connected (atleast for me) to that sense of ...failure almost... at not having a new adult unit that you identify with. That's why there's also that implication that the protagonist must be really immature.

Over the past few years I've already started to feel those pangs; every year I wish that the following one I have difficult decisions to make about who to spend Christmas with -my partners family or mine. The one advantage of last years painful holiday was that it did help me realize that I do have my own adult life apart from my family. I got to spend Christmas Eve with my friend Marlayna at French Catholic mass, went to her father's for the reveille, had Christmas day with my family and then dinner at another friend's with her parents. Just realizing that I have options... it means that this year I can appreciate that I like spending Christmas with my family, but even as excrutiating as being without would be -I'd survive. That sense of tradition, family and continuity does and can carry-over.

So I hope that when I have little ones they can grow up enjoying Christmas as much as I have, if not more. I've come close enough to being someone who hated the holiday season to hope that my kids never have to feel that way. I hope they have their own memories and their own crazy traditions. I look forward to making them handmade stockings, creating ornaments, and basically trying to develop that sense of unity and home. Warmth.

I don't know if that ache just comes with age. Or if everyone gets pangs to hold a little one of their own and develop their own family. But I know for me, right now, I'm at a good cross roads. Right now I'm incredibly grateful to be with my family of origin on Christmas... but I continue to hope that next year is the one when I'm with someone seriously enough to spend Christmas with them. It has to be one of these years, right? Time's weird that way. Next blink, and seriously? It will be me negotiating whether or not to put cotton balls on the tree and watching my dad go nuts over grandkids.

It's a good place to be.

Post Monologue Me

2009-12-12T12:50:00.000-06:00

In my grubby little hands is a copy of my finished monologue "I Am Not a Muse". Actually, it's not in my hands. It's upstairs in my bag from when I showed it to Marlayna last night, stained with bits of red wine and pub food, already starting to look a little worn around the edges... but it's DONE!!! There is a completed draft. It's all together.

Grand total the monologue is five pages single spaced and it should be approximately half an hour to perform. Dana is doing an analysis on it as we speak for her feminist theatre class, and then performing the last section of it on Tuesday for grades. Of course I'm going to go watch it.

It's terrifying having something that I put so much into. Five pages. That seems like it should be nothing until you realize that speech is different, and that every movement is scripted in, and that its already been laboured over A LOT. Right now, all I want for my baby is love and support. I'm divided between feeling like I want to go up to everyone and go look! Then thrust a grubby copy into their hands and wait excitedly. And then also not feeling ready to do anything like that. It's so fresh, so new and I put so much into it. I don't think I'm ready for an objective opinion yet.

Still. There's this feeling you get, this hum when you know that you are on to something good. I can't describe it. It's like you can feel things falling into place with your direction, but it isn't just you that's involved there. Someone else is there too, guiding it along and it's GOOD. Honestly, I feel like this is one of the creative projects I'm most proud of, that I've put the most into. There is something deep here. Something that goes past today. Honestly, I think I'm on to something. I believe in this one.

And I'm proud of what I've done. I've written about a conventional heterosexual relationship from a female perspective with an awareness of gender politics. The heterosexual relationship is one of those things I feel like people too often feel like they get, so it doesn't always get examined -which it should, considering that this is the model we all measure deviation from. But even more than that, I feel like I've written this female character who is human, realistic and nuanced. She becomes more vulnerable, she recounts bickering with her boyfriend, she looks embarassed about being in love, she gets snarky.

Within it all, I feel like you do get this sense that she's deeply conflicted; she loves her boyfriend profoundly, but she also struggles with some aspects of being his girlfriend in terms of how she is seen and treated. It's all this stuff that nobody would ever say in real life, things that don't come out in public. That's how I wanted it. She can say all this sappy, angry, tortured stuff because the public eye isn't on her. I also wanted to make some points about how just because many women end up being silent on gender issues, doesn't mean that it doesn't affect them or that they aren't aware of it. Silence is always a political tool.

Moreover, I wanted it to be a piece which addressed some of the complexities of dealing with social issues like sexism on an individual level. The thing is, very few people are actually malevolent and just don't care that people end up being oppressed. The problem is, when you dismiss it or don't listen that does just as much damage even if that doesn't make anyone in the equation a bad person necessarily.  However, just because the intentions weren't bad doesn't let anyone off the hook. The negative impact still exists. And maybe the most important reason why we should deal with these issues, is so that people can meet eyes and connect to one another.  So it was important to me that she be addressing her concerns to someone who she deeply loves, really respects and is in no way ready to give up on. I think political activism has just as much to do with love as it does with big actions and mobility. I wanted to give that a voice.

This project has consumed me as of late. I would have thought that I'd feel depressed about finishing it. Instead, I feel zooming with energy. I'm just realizing that I can do other projects and other things now.  Oh, it probably will require some edits, work etc. but for now it's just the really awesome script that I finished which Dana will be performing soon. Later I can start to worry about things like getting it published (which I plan on doing), workshopping it, and seeing if we can get it performed in an appropriate venue. I feel like it has a lot of dramatic possibility in that so much is dependent on the actress who does it. And there is a lot of room for each performer to make her their own without losing this basic contradiction between vulnerability and anger.

Oh man. I really want people to read it, and see it. It just feels so weird how I went from having these experiences with open mike nights, to brooding over them for years, to feeling haunted by the dynamics of it, to saying some fly away line in a conversation which inspired the idea behind the piece. And then it went from being a short story that wasn't working, to this narrative style piece before I realized it would work better as a monologue.  I'm so glad that I made that really scary leap into trying to write for theatre. It's been a huge learning curve, and it's been hard, sometimes even scary -but wow have I ever learned a lot. And in some ways, I could see myself doing it again. I'm pretty obsessed with things like movement and voice in a way that might lend itself to writing for theatre, not just for the page. We'll see though.  Usually the project demands its own medium.

Tonight is the Manitoban staff party and I'm really tempted to make myself a dress for it. I haven't made myself new clothes for a long time. I just don't go out that often either. But when they are footing my tab and I'm going to get to have running commentary on karaoke with some friends... it should be good.  We all seem to be pretty damn geeky at any rate.

Who even knows?  Finishing something is a really good feeling. I sometimes think that I don't do enough of it.

Feminism, heterosexuality and other questions.

2009-12-09T21:09:00.000-06:00

Am I a feminist?

In so many ways, this feels like an incredibly ridiculous question. I spent most of the day geeking out on copies of Bitch magazine (byline: feminist approach to pop culture) given to me by a friend last night, the rest of it reading about a feminist approach to analyzing linguistics.  Then all other remaining seconds where I wasn't writing my linguistics test or in French class developing the last section of a monologue in my head called "I am not a Muse" which is going to be performed in my friend's Feminist Theatre class. All clearly identifiable feminist activities, all clearly based on a gendered awareness of reality, all looking at a female perspective on society.

This is a weird question for me to ask, but at this point in my life it also feels like a really important one.

I am completely fascinated by female spheres to an extent that sometimes feels a little bit ridiculous.  I end up writing a good portion of my university papers on women's experiences of whatever I'm learning about, my prefered artistic medium is textiles -gendered as feminine, and I conform quite comfortably with any number of stereotypes of what women are supposed to like.  I love to sew/make things for people, I love cooking and other forms of handiwork, am maternal, tend to make relationships a prioirity in my life and well, am kind of just any number of stereotypes about the (non-Western) woman you might come across.

In appearance -well, let's just say I'm not likely to be accused of androgyny any time soon.  My hair is long. I'm curvy. I always wear skirts, never pants.  And whether you blame socialization, culture or the media I am irreversibly drawn to things which are also gendered as "feminine/girly": copious amounts of jewellery, make-up, bright colours, scarves etc.  I grew up in a family which has a strong matriarchal/feminist bend who definitely did a lot of education and awareness raising with me on the problems of female focus on appearances -and yet, what was I obsessed with as a child?  Ballet and strong female heroines from folktales around the world. All of whom adopted an identifiably feminine gender identity, no matter how progressively they were framed or reframed by the folklorists working on creating ethnically diverse picture books for children. (I will always thank them for that, no matter how many times I know question some of the methadology).

I've read so many stories, narratives, accounts, biographies and ethnographies of women who claim that they wished to be men as children. That the moment that they realized the socio-economic disparities facing them, they just gave up.  I've never felt that way. Don't ask me why, but to me being a woman is a tremendous source of pride and a deeply felt part of my identity.  From what I've seen of the world, not everyone identifies equally strongly with gender anymore than people do with a particular ethnicity; individuals are perpetually engaged in creating meaning out of what they have at their disposal. And for me, gender is a really essential part of how I understand myself as a person. I am a woman, and that matters to me.

In anthropology you go deep into the concept that gender is a social construct, because things deemed appropriate for men may not translate cross-culturally. Then you go into some pretty amazing research which proves the existence of any number of genders around the world, destroying the male-female binary model until it seems like the world is just too deconstructable for words... The thing is, no matter how many genders a culture seems to identify having, there is this basic universal in which people divide the world into two basic genders. I think it's pretty safe to say that these divisions are made on the basis that as a species, some of us can have babies and others can't. The ones who can have babies are "women", and I do believe that this reality of having to contend with reproduction does shape a certain portion of the species differently.

Yes, absolutely, the lines between "male" and "female" are a hell of a lot fuzzier than they are generally assumed to be (from here I'm drawing on the work of Anne Faustus-Sterling and her article on the five sexes, which I may get around to referencing someday.) That said, looking at these boundaries drawn by people on the basis of gender -it's important especially because it is artificial. Claiming that everything is just too deconstructable for words bothers me. I feel like it exaggerates ambiguity and ends up leaving people with a cop out for examining fairly concrete systems of power. It's like saying that race doesn't exist. No, concrete lines between the human species absolutely can't be found -but racialized labels exist and have some pretty severe affects. It's very nice to point out that we live in a constructed reality, but it's also important to accept that human behaviour is communal, so just yelling at the ignorant masses to wake up and embrace the truth -not really that productive either.

I'm reading Deborah Cameron right now, a linguist who works on issues of language and gender, focusing a lot of attention to conflict in male-female interactions. I've got a huge intellectual crush on her by the way. She's outspoken, but never feels cruel, meanspirited or vindicative to me. Important issues. And one of the things that I'm really taking away from her book "Language and Sexual Politics" is that it is dangerous not to examine the "conventional" world of gendered expectations. She makes this comment that really stuck with me which I can't remember now, but basically came down to: it's important to look at heterosexuality just because it is so prevalent; along with researching the discourse about gender deviancy through language, you need to really question those normative assumptions everyone thinks they get. Because honestly, the most dangerous state of all is when people think that they understand something so much they don't have to listen. That goes for any issue. Racism is a big one.

To me the weird thing about "feminist" scholars is that I just don't understand why focusing on women should be so radical. Isn't it just good scholarship to focus on a very specific sphere? And when there have been so very many accounts of male-dominated activities and cultures, going to look at women's experiences just feels like a no brainer to me.  So this is where I tend to get mad, because I feel like when it comes to academics calling something a work of "feminist" scholarship ghettoizes the work a bit, makes it seem like a specialty field. When you get down to it, any time you look at a specific section of a cultural group (no matter how you define it) you end up learning something about how the broader system functions as a whole. That is the beauty of anthropology, and one of the reasons why I still continue to believe in it -as a worthy ideal, not an ideal state.   By saying that these issues are specific to "women" I feel like the broader academic community saves itself from actually having to pull its pants up and, oh I don't know, look at reforming the system so it is better, because analysis' which effectively ignore half the participants tend to be kind of fundamentally flawed.

Where I get the line confused is why having to push for gender inclusivity or awareness of differences requires a label to begin with. Shouldn't it just be understood without having to name it?

If it comes to being deeply concerned with issues related to women, women's lore, how gender systems in general work, the rituals around sexuality, marriage, childbirth, textile production, the politics of the everyday, reproductions etc. then I absolutely qualify myself as a feminist.

But I do have questions about a lot of the stances and purposed objectives of feminism.  Part of this comes from this really shallow guilty feeling of being so entirely un-transgressive gender wise.  I absolutely take exception to many versions of femininity out there, but somehow by looking at the sheer diversity of female experience out there cross culturally I've found something that fits for me. It's a version of femininity which probably owes a disproportionate amount to stories of Latin American female writers like Isabel Allende and Laura Esquivel -women who are strong without ever crossing gender taboo lines. Is it wrong that this is what attracts me?  My biggest problem with understandings of femininism is it's very real ethnocentrism. The beginnings of the "feminist" movements are often cited as ones affecting British or North American women, like getting the vote or getting into "the work force". Which then gets transfered over into the "third world".

This deserves its own paragraph. The treatment of third world women by feminism drives me crazy. On one hand, there seems to be this idea of a "global sisterhood" which everyone is supposed to be thrilled to belong to, but at the same time there is absolutely no acknowledgement that people come from such different experiences and spheres that they really don't face the same issues. I feel like a lot of the time the North American feminist movement tends to (unintentionally) make use of the "rest of the world" as the place infinitely more oppressed than they are. Things may be bad over here, but atleast we're not like THOSE women over there who just have babies and take care of "the house"... Which has so many things wrong wwith it I don't even know where to start. I'll try here though: when a society develops a standard which they then impose on other cultures which it did not develop from, you end up with mistranslation and cultural imperialism. Doesn't matter whether its men or women doing the imposing.

The other issue, is that I'm not sure it's that simple anymore. I definitely used to. Whenever struggling with anything gender related I used to say that atleast I wasn't in Chile where things were backwards and women stayed at home and men left all the time (insert extra stereotypes here if desired). Then I went to Central America and had a really hard time with gender systems there, spent months yearning for the familiar North American model, and then came back to realize that the system I was used to was plenty offensive in and of itself. While realizing that I'd actually learned some really useful things about femininity and sexuality from being in Latin America, including the life saving lesson that you can be overtly sexual/passionate without ever having to deliver on the promise, which has been liberating for me. I appreciate that it might feel ironic that I learned sexual agency in Latin America while supposedly I live in this oh so liberal society, but the sexual norms here haven't really fit me all that well all the time. Knowing there was alternatives saved my life.

That is a bit of a sidetrack, but I geuss where I wanted to go with all this is that I'm not actually sure "oppression" or universal "subordination" is a useful concept. I think it's more valuable and interesting to listen to how people interpret their own worlds. And when it comes to liberating "other" women in the world... I think people usually know what they want and need better then outsiders. Especially when it comes to political solidarity, activism and development work. All of which seem to be focuses of the feminist movement.

The other part of feminism that I tend to feel uncomfortable with is the motivation to include women in positions of power and authority. This is something that I'm especially aware of when it comes to job positions, the arts canons, and trying to get "feminine" crafts like textiles considered to be fine arts. Yes, I do think it is extremely important to get more existing women with training or established female artists recognition. But when you push for all this inclusivity without looking into the conditions which caused the initial inequality... well then that's just selected inclusivity, not a radical re-examination of the systems. And if not approached carefully, that can actually backfire with some serious side affects. All of a sudden you build in this snobbery about which textile arts are considered "legitimate" instead of looking why you want to be legitimate to begin with. Or really pushing a couple of artists while not really acknowledging the other activities which women were engaged in.  Which may not even be the ones we think of as "female jobs". Even if they are well, raising a child is a creative activity too.
This play I'm writing comes out of a lot of things I've been struggling with mentally for years.  My protagonist is a woman who is struggling with gender issues within her relationship to her boyfriend.  It takes place away from the public light on the basis that only when she walks away from it can she speak honestly and openly. Of all the creative projects I've ever worked on, I can honestly say that this feels like this may be the one which hits the deepest. It feels really emotionally honest, even though I'm not using personal experience to write it. Atleast not directly.  She spends about as much time being embarassingly and dorkily in love as she does commenting inadvertently on dynamics of sexism even though she never utters the word "feminist". And that's what I wanted to explore. How you balance loving someone with acknowledging the inherent political inequity of your positions.  Where love fits into dialogues about feminism, power, and art.  And how people deal with these issues.

It's making me think a lot about my own feminism, because it's about a pretty downright conventional subject. Just your usual heterosexual love story when you get down to it. Nothing all that radical. And yet it's the one I'm drawn to tell.

I believe that "feminist" and "heterosexual feminine woman" don't have to be dichotomies, but for some reason sometimes they feel like they are. I don't know.

I would apologize for the ramble, except that I don't know if anyone except me actually reads this.

When it's good, you can feel it

2009-11-29T22:10:00.000-06:00

Dana went home about half an hour ago after we spent the entire afternoon working on the monologue "I am not a muse". She was running late, so I ended up in the coffee shop by myself for an extended period writing. I started telling this story of what led my narrator, Suzanne, to be out by herself in a back alley fuming after her boyfriend read one too many poems about her body out loud. So when she got there, we had a place to start and an outline of some ideas to cover. And some really animated discussion about how to address some big questions proposed in the monologue.

Then we came back to my place and worked on typing it up and working through it. We'd talk about the beginning bit and what needed to be covered, and then do some writing, and she'd read it out loud. Man it's amazing hearing Dana read the lines. And wow am I ever glad we decided to do this together instead of me sitting here on the computer trying to do it on my one. A lot of the wording is my turn of phrase, but holy shit this is at its root a collaborative effort. We've been talking through the purposes of lines, tweaking phrases to better reflect oral speaking styles, and exploring the characters. The boyfriend character has been renamed Andre. It's funny, because I wasn't crazy about Michael, and then she said it didn't fit for her either. She suggested Andre, and strangely that had been a name I'd been thinking of.

It's such an amazing feeling when you're working with someone else and you guys are totally on the same page. We struggled for a good long while about how to have Suzanne talk about the politics of women being included into the Canon, before realizing that we were getting away from our thread. We ended up deciding that sometimes its better to imply something that big without going there, for the sake of the play.

I am so hyped about this project. We both are. She's going to be performing this for her feminist theatre class, but we've both agreed that we want to do something with it afterwards. It's weird, but as we work on this project more and more the character Suzanne has deepened for me, and so has Andre. The name, for some reason it just makes the whole piece work better. It makes him more real for me. A clearer character. As Dana reads the lines, the character becomes more complex and more interesting. Never underestimate the power of human voice. There is this whole element which would just not have been possible to get without us working together and her reading the lines out loud. Just because we're friends I was a little bit worried about us writing it together, but after this afternoon, I can't imagine doing it any other way. It just feels so completely right.

There's this feeling you get when you've hit the vein. It's downright physical. You start to tingle. After all these hours I've spent quick writing about it, scratching down lines, coming up with questions, thinking about it -it's actually coming together a lot faster than I thought it would now that we're writing it. Dana's coming over tomorrow night so that we can finish it. We've gotten to the part of the monologue where she basically starts talking about how even though she is madly in love with her boyfriend, Andre but also feels like he's not as enlightened about gender issues as he thinks he is. It's a big moment in the story, so it will be a good place to start fresh.

I am so excited about this. I'll be heading to bed fairly soon, but not before I do a little more writing about some ideas for where we go tomorrow. I'm also going to type up the first part of the play where she's telling her story so that it's there, even though Dana can't perform it in class for reasons of time management.

It's really important to me to tell a story about a heterosexual relationship while trying to explore complexities of the situation, not just descend into black and white portrayals. I want you, the audience, to love everyone in the play but still hold them accountable for their actions. To want the characters to work it out. I know the line the play will end on, but there's not going to be a clear solution presented because I don't know of a simple answer to the question about how you navigate gender issues in relationships; if I did, I'm not sure I'd be writing this piece in the first place. I'm really interested in the idea that most of the time, people do not mean to hurt each other. It just happens. So how do you work that out?

I almost feel like after this intense a writing session, doing anything else tonight would be wrong. I kind of want to go to sleep -not so much because I'm getting tired (though I am) as because with sleep my subconscious mind can mull these themes over further, possibly synthesize something new out of all these disparate pieces.

All I can say is wow. If our production of this can translate even half of what Dana and I are getting out of this experience, this will be a pretty solid performance.

Fingers crossed. I'm going to bed. Yeah, I know. I'm getting sucky and old.

Why I love being involved with the Manitoban

2009-11-28T10:48:00.000-06:00

In front of me is Gregory Scofield's latest collection of poetry. It's a free copy sent by the publisher so I can write a review about it. However, I would like the outline the word "free". I phoned up a publisher and asked them to send me a book by probably my favourite poet because I'm "with the press" and they did. What's really crazy for me is that this isn't even an abuse of power; he was writer in residence here a few years ago, so this is actually incredibly topical and a good book for the paper to review. That said, I still feel like a giggling little kid who thinks that this is so fantastic it almost has to by definition be wrong. After reading it (several times) then I get to write about it -dialogue, get into conversation with the text and a third party audience. Possibly even introduce people to the work of this phenomenal poet who might not have heard of him.

My name is Daniela and I am an arts geek. A few months ago I saw an ad up saying U of M's student paper The Manitoban was looking for writers and decided that in spite of my tremendous amounts of free time, I wanted to do this. At this point, it's pretty strange to think that was a decision that took any amount of time or thought. Beyond the obvious appeal of "writing", there was the possibility of writing for the Arts section meaning that I could support my addiction since I just don't have the money most of the time to go to all the theatre or buy all the books I'd really like to.

Then there was the appeal of just having my name in print... What can I say? It's exciting! It's like "I made that! I'm part of that! Look, that's me!" every time I see someone pick up a paper (though I tend to avoid saying this out loud). And because it is a student paper, there is a great deal of flexibility in terms of what I can write about. For the most part, the attitude tends to be that as long as you put some effort into writing it reasonably well, anything goes. Well, most non-hateful things at least, but that's a whole other issue.

So I get this opportunity to write about issues, organizations and things which mean a lot to me, which I've thought about for years and actually get to share it. OK, a lot of the time it probably doesn't reach *that* many people, but when you're used to having your audience mainly consist of a friendly cat and a few friends, it feels like a big step up. Besides which, I get to clip them out and show people a piece that's been worked on and copy edited before going into print.

I love the arts, passionately and deeply, and over the years I know how much it has bothered me when I see critical reviews written by people who I don't feel respect what the people who put it together are doing. You don't have to like something to respect what they were trying to do. But at the very least I think there should be that basic level of respect with regards to art, that you appreciate what they're doing. Besides which, I tend to follow the philosophy of an art prof I had at Haliburton who used to say that "criticism" really refers to the proccess of dialoguing about a work, not tearing it to shreds. In my own small way, I would like to do arts critique which tries to embody that philosophy. Which talks back to the work.

It feels like such an amazing gift for me to be able to interview people for pieces. The chance to just ask questions, listen, and find out how people think... it's amazing. I feel like with interviewing I really get this chance to really listen to people and pay attention to them in a way which would read as creepy in almost any other situation. The chance to put someone else on the spotlight and hear them. I'm also finding that having waitressing experience is really useful with knowing how to draw people out and yet not get too personal.

One of the things which is important to me in this process is making sure that we're talking about what the person in question wants to talk about. I mean sure, I don't want to talk about their pet when we're trying to talk about their experience with poetry, but I also don't want to get more personal than their comfortable with or descend into what colour of socks they wear. Personally, I'm of the opinion that when you let people speak for themselves you usually get the most interesting results. It's like letting the type of fabric determine the style of the dress you make as opposed to walking around looking for the fabric the pattern says you are "supposed" to use.

As initially suspected, having deadlines has been good for me. Sure there is a learning curve with figuring out how to get things in on time. Oh has there ever. But even by now I'm learning to better gauge what I can commit to, and I'm getting more efficient at having actual pieces done by a set date. I've got a couple of pieces I'm going to be working on to have ready for January, and it's a really good feeling. It's a confidence builder to find out I can actually write and other people like it, because for the past few years I haven't done a lot of sharing my work. So it's a very validating feeling.

Producing a newspaper is really a team effort, something I'd never really appreciated before getting involved in one. There are all these decisions about space, about content, the proccessing.... it's amazing. Even though I'm a volunteer and don't have to come to the Wednesday story meetings it's become something that I look forward to. On a superficial level, I just really like hanging out with good people, and they all read as good people for me. So basically, it's a chance to connect to people I like and respect. Oh, the hardship.

Honestly, this just feels like a really good match, having me involved with the paper. I'm excited about story ideas. I'm excited about meetings. I'm just excited. And even though it definitely feels like work, it's something that I care about enough to figure out how to do properly.

This has been Daniela Smith-Fernandez raving about how much she loves something yet again. I don't know if it seems excessive, but I feel like being happy or grateful is a form of prayer and worship, a way of honouring the world in a really basic way. I hope that I never lose the ability to feel that way.

Some projects made possible by a strange realization

2009-11-24T23:07:00.000-06:00

The realization being this: pain is inevitable. I think I've always assumed that when something went horribly awry it was because there was a mistake made along the way, a finite moment of transformation. That pain meant deviation from what was supposed to be. When things that are bad happen, I'd assume that it was because something had not been done correctly. In reality, pain just happens, and it isn't any more or less important than any of the other zillions of emotions out there in the world. Joy, unease, comfort, bliss, anger... they just exist. Making decisions based on the idea that you can avoid pain is ridiculous, because it can't be done. What you can do is make choices in which the pain is accompanied by other more valuable places of joy. So believing that everything is up to me -it's arrogant and self-important. I do my best to navigate with love, respect and all that cliched good stuff, but beyond that... well, then it just comes down to normal human being things like trying to listen/understand where people are coming from or trying to resolve conflict. Which, again, is kind of inevitable.

Though this realization comes off as very abstract, it has allowed me to go back to thinking about some projects I've got on the go and be able to talk about them. Which is actually pretty exciting for me.

I did actually get an interview with Amelia Curran, which will be transformed into an article on her sophisticated use of language. I'm also doing a CD review of Hunter, Hunter because it's the way I get to keep the copy she signed for me...
A poem about the paper fairy just came out in the Toban. It's silly, but it makes me giggle.
I did a preview and review of the Black Hole Theatre Company's production of Departures and Arrivals. Which happened to be fantastic. Being able to rave about something amazing made me feel incredibly blessed
MAWA is interested in a piece on the politics of including textile "crafts" into the fine arts canon
The Walrus responded to my query letter with a one line email saying they accept unsolicited stories. Polishing up the Certificate of Cultural Authenticity piece and sending it to them will happen soon.
My friend Dana is probably going to be able to use my monologue "I am not a muse" to perform in her feminist theatre class. We're talking about it Sunday, but I like the idea of getting a bit of a kick in the ass to produce something
First draft completed of a story about Pidgeon English. Work needed, but I like it.
School over in two weeks: on the upside, I'm sitting at A/A+ with both courses

So here I am. I will write more soon, (I say with the assumption I speak to myself)

"Use sadness"

2009-11-17T13:12:00.000-06:00

In front of me sits a tumbler mug full of coffee which is darker than a Russian novel, and about as potent as a very enthusiastic satyr. This espresso thinking coffee nut does not usually denegrate unless desperate to the ranks of sheer brewed coffee, but today is a desperate case. There are no espresso beans in the house, and going out to get espresso beans requires any number of actions which I do not feel up for. Such as interacting with people, or getting dressed out of my night gown... I've managed to turn myself into a morning person, much to my disgust and embarassment. I blame CBC. Being in my nightgown mid-day is certainly not typical.

Today, I am brooding. Really brooding, the kind where you actually consider turning off the phone and it seems like a really good idea to say despairing melodramatic things like "no one loves me"! or "I'll never get out of Winnipeg", only to yourself because any sane human being next to you will be entirely capable of shooting your drama down with a couple of logical statements. The kind of melodramatic where the moment my sister walks out the door, I am going to be blaring the most introspective, gloomy music I can find and walking around the house sighing.

If I wanted to, I could certainly go into a few things that are triggering said gloom. They all happen to be lacking things: the weather is November and I am lacking in espresso beans, someone to cuddle, work, money and (at the moment) company. There are always a billion things I could be doing, and yet right now? I want to wallow. Be grumpy, and moody and self-pitying. Think overly hard about things that aren't necessarily going to matter except when they consume me. Feel horribly sorry for myself.

Natalie Goldberg wrote a book called "Writing Down the Bones" where she recommended using loneliness as a motivator to write, because you will have it anyways. And also, because when you are there, it's always like you are the only one. The only person sulking about being alone in a city they are done with, being single/uncuddled, drinking sadistically strong coffee and unmotivated to turn towards writing, sewing, job hunting or any other number of neccessary things which might alter the mood. Oh yes, I'm probably the only woman in the world listening to "The Songs of Leonard Cohen" right now. Yup. Just me. And also, the only person in the world having computer problems or struggling with French pronunciation. Because I'm special.

Somehow, when I'm in the middle of it, I am. I'm sad while the rest of the world is uncomplicatedly happy. My strange turn of mood has the impact of contaminating pure joy, like it isn't just part of the spectrum. I had a friend tell me that we have this weird idea that we should always be happy, when it isn't like that. In the interview I did on Saturday with Amelia Curran, she talked about the importance of using sadness in art even though she feels like a pretty happy person. Do we always end up expressing the mood we spend most of our time in, or just the one that fascinates me most?

The emotion I find myself most fascinated by is surrender; the kind of surrender which comes from intimacy and letting yourself go into someone or something else. Love is part of this, sex is part of this, but so is intimacy and confession. Close friendship, and art maybe. I'm fascinated by the intricacies of power that shape the dimensions between us. With regards to gender, language, culture... For me, that feeling of surrender is part of every true exploration of spirituality, any real experience of the sexual too for that matter. Connection to something deeper than yourself, communion even.

Being sad, I feel free to visualize what I want love to look like. Sadness and longing existing in the company of every state. Maybe if I was always completely at peace, I'd lose the drive to dream, that necessary feel of believing that something else is possible. I think it's important to keep a feeling of motion no matter how up or down you happen to be... keep the wheel turning.

I'm not going to lament about all the things that I need to be doing right now. It's not the time, even if I do end up shifting myself out of melancholy and getting immersed into a strange spurt of productivity the moment I get off the computer. Like making home made mushroom soup, or writing a piece that has been sitting on my chest for months now. In the face of intense moodiness, laundry may as well not exist.

I don't really know where I'm going with this. I'm just here, I guess. Just myself, moody and gloomy and sad, for no other reason than because at the moment this is my truth. This is the skeleton-bare outline of what goes on for me right now, to decorate or move within as I choose to.

Curtains close. Transition for the next scene to begin.

Legitimacy and other things like it

2009-11-13T13:03:00.001-06:00

I may be interviewing Amelia Curran tomorrow and getting to talk to her about her use of language. Her album Hunter, Hunter has been playing on my CD player almost constantly since I 'borrowed' it from the Manitoban. Some albums hit you right at once, this one has lingered on my bones til I find myself thinking about snatches of lyrics in strange places. Puzzling over them.

This isn't what I neccessarily look for in music, but it is exactly what I look for in literature.

Anyways, I'm crossing my fingers and excited. I will be legitimately researching this afternoon until I hear back.

One theatre preview has been sent to the copy editor. Next week I actually get to review the show (which means I get in for free bwa ha ha). How is it that there is anyone in the world who could not consider this exciting? I have a source of 'legitimacy' for getting to say something about the arts world, and do it my way. This is awesome!

I've got a stack of quick writes from Wednesday I did just to get the juices flowing. Hopefully somewhere in there will be a few crumbs worth using. I've already got the skeleton for a few pieces set up in the back of my brain.

Sometimes, it's good to feel efficient.

The rough draft

2009-11-11T16:05:00.000-06:00

The USB key in my hand contains the rough draft of a story about Pigeon (pidgin) English. Said story is close to 4,000 words, very rough and does not yet incorporate the peculiarities of pigeon spoken grammar. That said, it is written. Actually written stories are always superior to considered stories, even when they are awful. At this moment, I'm at a weird point of exhausted where there is an elation at finishing as well as a sense of nausea, and with all of this, a feeling of wondering if I should go be social or do more cloister writing. I don't know.

First drafts are an interesting specimen. Utterly neccessary. Hard to do. And yet, just that, rough. Important because they are the skeleton.

I would like to work on this one and get it published. How I'm not sure, but I'd like to believe that it could happen. We'll see, right?

Hollow chuckle. Why is it that after long amounts of writing I always feel a little bit emptier?

Come together, right now | The Manitoban Online

2009-11-10T18:01:00.000-06:00

Come together, right now The Manitoban Online

This would be my article on Collaborative Art, agonized over, but also kind of my baby.

Sunday morning with coffee and words

2009-11-08T08:45:00.000-06:00

It's still early. My addiction to the CBC radio 2 morning show means that even when I don't get out of bed, the alarm goes off at 6 AM and I stay in bed listening. I come from a family of avid classical music lovers who signed all kinds of petitions to keep classical music on CBC FM, but I have to confess that I'm glad I didn't get into that kind of activism because I may just be the world's biggest CBC morning fan under 30. Radio is magical generally, but it is so awesome to actually get Canadian non-pop music playing. I've fallen in love with so many artists who don't generally make it to the top hit radio stations I don't listen to. Pacifika, Coeur de Pirate, Alex Cuba, Amelia Curran...

So that is why I'm up so early. The sheer musicality of early morning shows, combined with a vested interest in ignoring the choral concert music show. Add to which, my laptop went kaput. Well, it didn't go kapoot. The adapter did. So until I can get a new one for my dying computer for $70, because there is no way in hell that I can afford a new one right now, I'm stuck at the mercy of other computers. Like my family computer. Oh yes, I'm also writing this early in the morning because that way there is no competition and I can hopefully write up the two pieces on the Black Hole Theatre Company I need in for Wednesday, without getting in the way of my sister or father who use this computer reguarily.

Using borrowed computers has led me to following conclusion: when it comes to writing, I am a creature of habit. Oh I'll write anywhere. I'll write about anything. And though I can't speak for other writers, I suspect three quarters of it was written more to keep the hand on the page then out of any real ability to produce. But even though I journal constantly on paper, I still have it in my head that in order for me to produce something like an essay, article or story I need to be sitting down to type. My body eases into position. My mind settles in for the ride. Add to which, I'm totally spoiled having a laptop. When I wake up in the middle of the night, I've always been able to pull it open and type without ever worrying about upsetting anyone else, or about saving. It's just there. Writing at a computer lab desk is OK, but for writing I crave coziness and corners to drink coffee in while I settle into a story.

I can't believe I actually made it ten years denying that I wanted to be/was a writer. Although I'm really glad I did, because it meant that after all the years of young authour's conferences, writing groups and taking myself far too seriously, the denial what I was doing was developing my voice as a writer meant that I could come in easily without pressure. Besides which, it isn't some fantastically huge deal to me, even though it is. I write because that's what I do. I say I'm a writer to describe the act the way I say I'm an artist to cover all the creative activities. It isn't some fantastically garish tattoo over my back which I happen to pull my shirt up to reveal all the time. Yes, I am looking to start seeking out publishing opportunities, but I hope that I never forget the fundamental relation is with me and the words. It's just that uncomplicated.

This week is Remembrance Day and somehow I feel like I've been gifted an extra day. Not that I don't appreciate it's a serious event... actually, it's one I've thought about a fair bit since two years ago I got a call from my friend Ahsan. Ahsan is an international student from Pakhistan so he wasn't really all that clear on what Remembrance Day was, which I got when he left me a confused message wishing me a happy Remembrance Day and then wondering if that was the appropriate sentiment. For some reason that has stuck with me.

Canada is a country of immigrants, we hear over and over again, we are fortunate to live in a multicultural mosaic where all voices are heard and respected. And yet... what are the holidays, events, and occassions and rituals that get honoured as national events? The ones related to the hegemony of Eastern English Canadians. It wasn't until I started to get over a blase attitude about Canadian history and look a little closer that I realized as a nation, we are pretty much fundamentally founded on genocide and the cooption of other voices. It's a deeply hegemonic structure, no mistaking that. It's not a matter of whether or not we include as a nation, other voices, but how we include them. And in my opinion, we don't include we co-opt. Culture outside of North American British is a pretty decorative thing to pull out when we've got time, but not ever taken seriously as a legitimate lens of experience.

Where this ties in with Remembrance Day? Well, I've been wondering a lot lately about the politics of commemorating some tragedies and not others. I have no interest in ever diminishing the sacrifices made by vetrans, or making any claim that the holocaust wasn't horrific, but I also think that they lose their significance unless you take into account other tragedies they connect to. There have been other equally or more horrible events of slaughter over the world which have affected just as many people who are (legally) Canadians which don't get blinked at. A substantial portion of people who end up here do not come on pleasure cruises for their health or the wonderful opportunity to be treated as dumb. And what happens to the people who were on the other side but live here now? It's a really complicated question, I know, but I just wonder how long it makes sense to commemorate World Wars I and II without linking them a little deeper to other events that are continuing to go on. It's dangerous to historicize atrocities. It makes it seem like they are over.

Listen to me go off again. I don't try. It just happens, I swear.

On other news, things are definitely settling down a fair bit in my world. Getting the collaborative art article done took a load off my plate, and frees me up to think of other things. I'm loving working for the Manitoban, and I've been writing a fair bit. Red Cross looks to be slow until January, when I'll hopefully have a bit more time, and I'm maintaining an A+ in both French and Linguistics. Life is good. Or at least calm enough that I feel like I'm coping, which is a big deal in my world. My friend Shandra and I are getting together today to photograph artwork and me, so in the off chance that anyone actually follows this blog, there will be pictures of me up at some point. Not a lot though. I hold to for an artist their work is more important than them. Although on the other hand, I am a little theatrical and a seamstress, so I suppose a lot of what I do does relate to the embodied and the photograph-able ( know, word of dubious morphological status) ...

I've also got my application ready to go for Concordia. Three out of four schools have been contacted/bribed to send them my transcripts, while I've got to wait to fax off a request to Sir Sandford Fleming for my textile program marks. You know I want to do this when I actually got excited about filling out paperwork (shudder). There's the basic application form, but then also a page of "Enriched/Honours" programs which I had to include where I went through anything I've done which sounds shooshy; turns out there was a lot of it. Anyways. Once I mail it out and get Fleming to send them transcripts, the two big focuses are going to be putting together my portfolio for fine arts, and then making money to go.

The portfolio is intimidating, but I figure I'll concentrate on it once classes end and I can get some help from the Pony Club with what I want to do to be taken seriously. The letter of intent should be (dare I say it?) fun, because words and I get along just fine. The big issue is going to be making money.

If I'm honest with myself and other people, (which I try to be), getting work has been a fairly low priority thus far. I'm hoping that once I give the job hunt some attention and focus it won't take too long, but it's been placed by the wayside so far in favour of learning how to manage all the stuff I've got on my plate. Honestly, I'm proud of myself. I'm working hard at what I want/need to work on, and I have faith that I will get to what I need to.

And I'm continuing to dream. It sounds like a little thing until you've ever been in the position of not being able to, been hopeless and ground down. Then you know that it matters on a profound level being able to see a future which is brighter. A dream which goes deeper than today, deeper than survival. Right now on a prosaic level I dream of being in Montreal this time next year studying at Concordia, but there are deeper aspects to the dream which tint this image. I also dream of being balanced. Of being able to pursue my own creative voice. Of being a good friend, community member and kind to those around me. Having a home. Having open doors and things to excite me. Finding a partner. All bigger things lurking under the surface. Time was I used to keep my dreams hedged and simple, because it seemed ridiculous to ask for something that might not be given. Or more to the point, it was frightening. But I think it's like relationships, where you have to feel like the person you want to be with is improbably almost above you or you aren't really valuing what you've got. Who dreams half-heartedly? It's not worth it.

Oh language. It's almost 9 AM and I've already been up for three hours and been writing for two. It's a good feeling to have. Really good.

Until later.

Walruses and woolly mittens

Daniela

Using this opportunity to glow electronically

2009-11-05T21:14:00.000-06:00

Hmmm... I meant my face is beaming, but the computer screen does too :)

So I just heard back from my editor at the Manitoban about my collaborative art piece... and he loves it. Not only that but I get a full page with a picture. I'm choosing this moment to revel a little.

This is one of those moments where I really wish I had more people to call at odd hours with good news. There will be time though. This is definitely one of the pieces I'm most proud of though. It incorporates inclusivity, politics, individualism, craft, collaboration and creativity. My baby is ready to go out into the world without me.

I am forcing myself to eat after my post-belly dance high. Then I'm going to go write. Because encouragement like this makes me feel safe doing so. Like maybe I might actually be good at this whole word-thing. Imagine me laughing here. Atleast I enjoy it.

The page awaits.

In praise of quiet happenings and moments between

2009-11-05T16:02:00.000-06:00

There are times when my everyday life feels as though it's overdosed on verbs. Where every day is an event, where there is an endless list of happenings to process or people to see. These can be great, obviously. There is a thrill of adrenaline coursing through you, a pulse working its way into your every action. But for all that these times can make for fabulous stories, I generally feel like its equally important what goes between these moments of fireworks and action. What lies between. Because even though the moment when I finish a piece of writing, art or application form is really exciting, they aren't born in moments of dramatic action. They are born in times like this when I am doing something else.

To me, imbalance feels dry. When I'm flowing with everything, surrendering to the cosmos, then I feel like I'm a sea creature swimming because its just what I do. When I am uninspired and lacksadaisacal, I feel as though that fluidity gets lost, I'm dried up and its harder to stay in motion. The hardest thing for me to learn has been that rejuvenation as often requires stillness and quiet as it does action. That I need silence and time to simmer. I move slowly. I require space to process and energy to work through things in my own ways. There are pieces of art which I have been working on in my head for years. Not all of it will get done. But that which will, it takes into it all the experience of the many years in which I've been playing with this idea.

Some of them might end up being given up. Who knows.

It is the first day in a very, very long time in which I do not feel oppressed by a deadline chasing me down. Yesterday I sent in my blood-sweated-teared-over article on Collaborative Art to Damian. It's long, and I don't know how it will work, and I'm nervous not to have heard back from him yet, but at the very least that baby is going to be put to bed. I can have my life back. Nervous chuckle. To give you some idea, I've probably been working on it for a month, it was the first article I pitched to Damian, and I've probably spend a good ten hours on it total bare minimum between the interview, the question writing, the formatting, the comparison and the actual editing forget things like actually mulling it over. Even if he tells me I need to cut half, I'm almost more relieved than believable just to have it out of my hair.

By the time I was done I had that feeling of exhaustion/elation that happens with the end of a creative project. It's delirium, but it's also just plain old relief. This is usually the time when I have to remind myself that starting up again at this point isn't always a good idea. Usually food or sleep is a more appropriate measure.

I'm heading off to coffee with my old room mate right now, and then bellydancing afterwards, but somehow it hasn't yet sinked in that I actually have some headspace tonight. This period of crazy hasn't gone away, but at the very least it seems to be mellowing out a little bit, at least enough that I can do things like projects which have nothing to do with deadlines. And devote serious attentions to two little ones that do.

Oh time. "Time, time, time... see what's become of me"...

High time for coffee

A brooding day in November

2009-11-01T13:21:00.000-06:00

Today's mood is best described by a soundtrack: Leonard Cohen, Rufus Wainwright, Amelia Curran. Mellow, Canadian, introspective, moody.

Time change, and I think I used my extra hour today to brood and navel gaze. It's actually 2:00 in my body, but my deeds today have been limited to a little facebooking and a lot of self-reflection. As usual, there are any number of projects pending and I suspect that right now the best idea is to go for a really long walk, dedicate some time to actually scheduling things, and doing the weird thinking about pseudo-deep things my brain always wants to do at this time of year. As weird as it gets, I suspect that I might actually miss Winnipeg falls in some strange way living somewhere else, so I plan on enjoying as much of it as I can while I'm here. Somehow it makes it easier to believe that I won't be here that much longer.

Last night's Halloween party was pretty fun. I've got this corset I've been working on as part of a Xena costume for the last two years. The black corset is really sexy, is more supportive than a bra, and does good things for my breasts and silhouette. I will make it eventually, but for this year I ended up throwing together a mistress costume at the last moment which was pretty awesome. I've always had this fascination with courtesans/kept women, especially from the days of late 1800's Paris. The boudouir look is so beautiful, and I'm intrigued by this idea of having patronage for the exclusive pleasure of a woman's company. In addition to the black corset, my costume involved stockings, a garter belt, short-ish skirt, a black ribbon chocker, strings of fake pearls, earrings, long black gloves and a red silk dressing gown. Then I put my hair up and did some really intense make up with smoky eyes and dark lips. I've definitely got enough of a theatrical side to enjoy Halloween as an excuse to dress up. I also find it a little ironic that the mistress outfit was a hell of a lot more covered up then most costumes offered for sale this year...

Nyah. Right now I just want time alone in my head to think. It honestly feels like there hasn't been a whole lot of down time lately, and I need it so much right now. Why is it that I can never leave things at a point where they are just manageable? It's not like being stressed makes me virtuous, or a better person. Just stressed.

My friend Dana is interested in looking at my potential monologue as a piece for her feminist theatre class. Which is really not going to possible if I keep putting creative projects on back burner.

Seriously, I think I just need to get out of the house at this point.

Signing off for my own good.

How fragile we are

2009-10-30T16:32:00.000-05:00

Perhaps I shouldn't generalize. In anthropology you say that it's important to identify your positionality, or in normal-speak, to say where you are coming from. So what I really mean to say is "how fragile I am" right now, with some reference to past patterns. Oh dear. The academic-babble has invaded my brain.

Basically, I missed a deadline for the Manitoban. Therefore, in addition to a few other things, I'm kind of not feeling on top of it, stretched thin and am scared I'm inflicting this negative state on other people's lives. Emphatically stressed. Deadlines and I are having an unhappy relationship. I am currently experiencing the kind of nausea which leaves your guts feeling like they'd really like to be somewhere else about now, or at the very least within someone who doesn't put them through this much hassle on a regular basis. Analytically, I could say I'm just really neurotic, and while this would certainly be true, it doesn't seem to cover the raw fragility of how I end up feeling when I go to this place (and I've been here a lot).

It's like all of a sudden once I'm here, I can't even focus on what the issue is at hand because all I can proccess is that my world instantly feels unstable and lonely, and the most important thing in the world is to find somewhere that's safe to hide and someone who can honestly say that they love me. Enough to make up for all the crazy that goes on in my head. And from normally feeling like a pretty sociable and engaged person, I go to feeling desperately alienated and cut off from my own dreams. Like I can't say that I'm someone with friends, and I should restrict air flow to idealism because when I can't do X then how dare I dream about Y? Even when the two may have a relationship so distant that even a geneologist would say they're OK to breed.  Less human somehow, unworthy of being part of a social world which I so deeply adore because I'm too profoundly messy.

In part I think it probably has something to do with being part of a university academic system, and even beyond being a student right now, with that world being the culture which I grow up with. It's a cosmology which is positively based on self directed exploration, but also negatively on competition and your self worth being linked intrinsically to what you do. You are your acheivements. And it's a world which can also be very isolating, because realistically its focused on your individual performance and (supposedly) output. Anyone who has read more than one blog entry here will know how I feel about bureaucracy and the shooshy-title game... If not, just glance at the next entry down. I'm having a hard time taking the whole things you put on an application form so that a university considers you a desirable candidate thing seriously. Even... no, especially, because it turns out my crazy past adult years might actually end up looking really impressive on paper. I can't get rid of the feeling that I'm tricking the institution into believing that I'm a mature and responsible adult. Ha ha.

In my heart of hearts, I know that there is more to all of us as a human being than any kind of stupid rank, title or qualifier game, but whenever it comes down to a matter of me having promised something to someone and being unable to deliver I turn into a shivering mass on the floor. Nothing else matters. I'm actually somewhat grateful that I don't have a cell phone right now, because if I did there would probably have been a few panicked calls made thus far, and I'm really trying to get out of the habit of feeling helpless and dependent on validation from friends to get through these states. Add to which, I really do try to be a good friend to people, and I'm not sure that this behaviour exactly fits in.

This, for some reason, is always when I am tempted to poke at any or all available sore spots.  It always somehow feels like the appropriate time to go facebook browsing on the pages of people I've got some kind of weirdness going on, and of course start deconstructing all my relationships for what went wrong. Where the flaw line is. My friend Robin likes to say that the middle of exam week is not when you should be objectively examining where you are in your life, and yet somehow for me I always come up with some weird reason why it is. Like I'm in denial the rest of the time -and in some small ways, this is probably true. Avoidance is definitely something I struggle with a lot, and I openly admit that there are probably a few tins o'worms that were it not for sleep deprived, emotionally overwrought, over-caffeinated moments when I've got some undelivered expectations to moan about, there are issues I never would ever look at.

Like my love life. If it weren't for handing in really late papers, there's a good chance I would never look at my own love life at all. There's a lot of the time when I think about being single and relationship inexperienced, and I know that there's been some real advantages for me to being my myself this much, to having to deal with my own head and heart. There's any number of aspects in which I can feel strong, confident, and like I'll be a good match for someone, that getting a slow start won't have anything to do with having a good love life later on. Then there's days like this one, where I start wondering exactly how messed up I really am to be this scared of relationships, to feel so unsure of whether or not I'm capable of letting someone in that much -atleast for the kind of intimacy my heart yearns for, of feeling strangely invisible like no one ever really sees me in that sex-love-and-dating kind of way. Which I want, desperately so much that I refuse to think about it or feel it all that often because when I do, it seems to consume my life. And when I'm yearning so painfully for something which I don't have... well, I'll be honest, a lot of the times I'd rather think about the cat or have a great conversation about aardvarks with a friend.

As much as I love the feeling of submission that comes from being passionately into things, when it comes to people I find it a scary, scary place to be. I feel deeply. I'm not saying that I think that being hurt makes me different, marked for pain, or special, but I think saying that I feel deeply is a fair statement to make.  I'm sensitive, everything effects me, and it's hard to draw boundaries or keep myself grounded amidst all the stimulus even in normal situations. Then we apply that reality to me when I'm attracted to someone -let's not even get to the "love" place yet.  It suddenly matters that they find me aesthetically unpleasant or find my subconscious mannerisms irritating in a way that it really doesn't when the other person is, oh, well, someone who my respect is for them as a human being versus as an individual. It's not possible to hide.

All of a sudden it isn't enough to feel like me as a woman has some kind of worth.  There is an element of judgement (hopefully) in looking at anyone in a relationships-intimacy-sex kind of way, and even though I would never in a million years want to be with anyone who didn't put me through some form of scrutiny, any more than I'd want to work for a restaurant that put me to work on the spot after a cursory glance at my resume, it's still scary.  It's not just hard on the ego; I've been in more than my share of situations where what I have to offer as a person hasn't been of value, I've reconciled myself to the fact that not everyone matches. It's scary to think that I might not ever find someone who wants me in that way, that maybe there won't ever be anyone who just gets the level I operate on. And honestly, even scarier, that I would end up damaging someone by loving them, would contribute to silencing a person who I love and respect. Despite all my best intentions, even though I really wanted them to be happy, that I could never quite be able to handle the responsibility of being here, in the world, as much as they'd need me to be. Of disappointing. Of not measuring up, and it ultimately not really mattering whether I can provide a rationale to hide behind.

To quote Richard Rodriguez: "There are things so deeply personal that they can be revealed only to strangers". And every person, experience, or feeling has to revealed somewhere or it infects its feeling of unreality in the world.  This proccess of dehumanization can really only be reversed through voicing, atleast that's what I believe. That's why I'm why I'm here now. Because sometimes, there are things I can't be tongue in cheek about, even though it would make things easier.

Relationships mean something pretty significant to me. All relationships, including the mate-partner-boyfriend variety. More than I want to publish a book, visit Machu Pichu or get my MA I want to be in a strong, healthy long term relationship. Where, as Joni Mitchell would say "half of you pours out of me in these lines from time to time".  I dream of the kind of intimacy which I'd need to express to bear, because for me keeping joy to myself is unbearable.  Logically I try to tell myself (because it seems to be the thing to do) that if I never do, I could always be sad and lonely WITHOUT all this stuff in my life that makes me happy... but this is generally when I stop talking because I secretly slide into Bridget Jones territory images of turning into a brittle, angry person who just feels helpless and frustrated all the time. By the way, I've never confessed that part to anyone before. Somehow it makes me feel all too exposed.

In my heart of hearts I know that there is someone out there who I'm going to be with, who will be a number of things I've longed for and a whole lot I would never have detailed but love even more... That there will be a love story that is more complicatedly real than anything I can even imagine now. But then I wonder if I cling to this belief from a sense of desperate delusion. Because having faith that I'll find a mate who this is all possible with is really hard, even though the only other option is just moping about it and that doesn't seem all that productive either.

I'll also just explain that I use "mate" or "partner" versus "husband" or "boyfriend" because to me, they put the focus on the life-together type proccess, versus the status of being with someone or the act of getting married, neither of which is as important to me.

The worst part, for me, is that most of the time I feel like the other party doesn't even know I'm attracted and that makes me feel vulnerable.  That sense of openness is part of the fun part, for me at least, in getting to know people -but when it comes time to attractive male of even possible datable status -oh God.  Back to the realm of libraries and coffee I go. Atleast there I know that there I can somewhat measure up. It feels safer for me to wrestle with the profoundly sticky questions of how to create a respectful ethnography of people which gathers the nuances of speech and doesn't put the researcher center stage than it is to handle that flicker of fear which comes up at the possibility of a man who I want finding me lacking.

I don't know why this should scare me so much either. I've got nerve, I put myself out there versus pretending dettachment and when it comes to any number of things I've got a weird sense of fatalism which allows me to feel free enough to fuck up and live brakes-off free... And yet.  Relationships? Super scary. All of a sudden I'm not in control of how much I reveal anymore. I can't exactly manipulate my own mythology up close the way I'm probably used to doing. You can't always tell the truth slanted with someone who knows you well enough to call you on your stuff.  So even though I dream about being with someone and having a person who I could be that terrifyingly real with, I'm petrified too.

I've been in love before. It's never been returned, and it definitely never became a relationship, so it would have to classify as the questionable-one-sided variety of love -but I've been there. I know what it looks like.  So that I'm capable of the unconditional kind, of loving someone the way I want to be loved.  I am able to give. I also know that if it came down to it, I believe in fighting for the possibility of something beautiful, and that goes double for what I'll do if need be to make a relationship work. I've been hurt in that excrutiating way you only can by being rejected by someone who you continue to love and respect, and I'm still here.  I don't regret any of it either.

No matter how painful any of it was -and it was- I can still find some peace with having being moved profoundly by having met the other person, positively influenced and inevitably, became more myself.  Of the three times I've ever had someone affect me that deeply, each of them led me (inadvertently) deeper into the world, where I need to be. That cliche "I believe in love" certainly applies here. I yearn.  I smoulder. But I've never sat around and pined for someone. Even in my most tortured states I've also continued doing my own thing, and that I'm proud of. Still.

It would be nice to conserve my energy so I had it to devote to someone who actually wants my full attention. The nice thing about having that intense "in love" feeling with things other than people like sewing, or an authour, or a particular colour is that there really isn't any problem for them with you going as deep as you want with that emotion. Sadly, there also isn't any reciprocity, and that part can kind of suck. Who knows. Maybe when I do fall in love with someone who actually wants me back it will be so intense and amazingly exhilerating that there couldn't possibly have been room for anyone else in my own story. That's what I hope atleast. But until/unless that happens, I'm left here with a lot lot of unresolved questions floating around, being twenty four and single while secretly worrying that I might actually be compensating for a lack of sex through enjoying coffee and language to a degree that's a little obsene. Which though possibly a little more socially respectable in certain arts-and-geeks circles I frequent, really isn't all that different from Carrie Bradshaw's famous shoe obsession in HBO's Sex and the City, or the cat lady stereotype's penchant for collecting Fluffies.

After much speculation, I've come to the conclusion that the best thing I can do (pardon the psychobabble) is to work on being and becoming someone who I'd like to be when I do get into a relationship. To gather dowry, so to speak, although this is of the more intangible variety -experiences, skills and stories as opposed to cold hard cash. (That one will be awhile). So that I've got stuff to bring in to the relationship, and don't just feel like I was no one until this guy came into my life. Like I'll be nothing unless I'm attached to a man. An idea I find more than a little repugnant. I do my own thing. And I leave this whole messy festering pile of questions in a small broom closet in the back of my brain along with the Christmas decorations and the 1980's black lights, in the hopes that I won't have to look at them again unless I for some reason need them.

Oh relationships. Let my love life go back to being unexamined until the next melt down. It can't hurt, right? Nervous giggle.

But does that make it a good idea to delve deeply into these major questions I struggle with everytime ? I don't know. And I'm being serious here.  Maybe I am just taking too much on right now considering that I've realistically only had a few months with any kind of structure or commitments since I was off sick last year. But that doesn't make it OK to not be able to deliver.  Actually, it kind of impedes me from doing most of the things I want to do with my life -like art projects and writing. Neither guilt or nausea are exactly pleasant states to spend your life in, and I spend a little too much time for my own liking engaged in both.

Ironically, while I was writing this long blog post triggered by my non-delivery of an article to Arts, the editor Damian came by and the issue of missed deadlines etc got resolved. Which means that when I go back to working on my article tomorrow (because by now I'm done) I can focus on getting it right versus working myself into a blind panic. I also know that once I've got these bundle of articles and a few other pieces of paperwork wrapped up, my stress levels will decrease exponentially. As a friend at art school used to tell me all the time, this too shall pass.

And it will. There will be other joys. Other events to get worked into a blind panic over. There are still dreams that hit deep. And realistically, as much as it sucks to not have gotten this article in this week, I have managed to stay on top of other stuff like coursework which I'd put as higher priorities. So as I head off into the horizon line of home made soup and an evening away from stress, I'm just going to shift back into a sense of deep rooted idealism and hopefulness. Which, underneath it all, is my natural state.

Bureacracy as a form of procrastination...?

2009-10-27T11:57:00.000-05:00

This is the first day I've had to myself which is unscheduled in weeks. I stayed in bed and listened to the whole three hours of Tom Allen's show this morning (6-9 AM), and am currently drinking real espresso prepared at home with my own Turkish press, checked Facebook and then printed off the Concordia application form I just got e-mailed to me yesterday (!)

Sadly, this joy at having nowhere I need to be today is tampered by the fact that I severely need to get cracking on article work that I owe the Manitoban. Which has been pending for far too long. So this blog is my last stop before I stop procrastinating and go back to working on it. I know I'll enjoy it once I get started. I'm just also really hoping that I'll have some time today between writing which I've already started to spend a few moments working on a few story ideas which I haven't gotten around to yet. There's one about a pigeon I'm really excited by.

Still, the Concordia application form is still pretty exciting to receive. I called them on Friday about various things, and I'm glad I did because it turns out that I really don't want to wait for the March 1 application deadline if I want to get in for next year. Also, apparently it would be good for me to work on sending them all my transcripts as soon as possible too. And I might actually want to focus on getting my art portfolio together sooner rather than later too. Though I don't want to rush and do a bad job. And I do need to figure out what I even want to include in it before I can go do things like have my friend Leif photograph it.

I figure that for my art portfolio, I'll include some of my textile tapestries, but also the three dimensional soft sculpture I did, some of the better clothing pieces, some drawing, and probably the first section of my comic book about Hugh Maximillian XVII. I think I'm fairly well rounded in many ways, but the trick is convincing them. Sometimes I seriously think about sending in an application form which says "I make pretty things" but something tells me that when it involves universities, probably not the right time to be facetious.

I can save that for when they let me into the program. I should probably even be serious in the letter of intent. I don't know what art schools look for exactly, but I'm hoping some variation of "I like textiles, combine it with academics, will make art without you" will help me get in. If not, anthro it is.

Transcripts, oh transcripts. Going to a bunch of different places is great for personal growth and development, but it becomes a bit of a pain when I have to chase four educational institutions in two provinces for my grades. And then pay atleast two of them for the priviledge. Considering that it's November now, I'm pretty sure that I'll get them all in for March even taking into account bureaucratic delays, but my gut reaction is still "yikes!"

Then there's the form itself, which is thankfully fairly straight forward. There is also a section for "enriched" where you add all your extra academic shoosh. Looking at this, I finally understood why my private high school gave out this ridiculous number of special distinctions which they added to your transcripts! Most of them mean something fairly mundane like "highest marks in that course", but they give them all thoroughly impressive names. Finally, there is a use for all these ridiculous bits of paperwork! It's not that I don't take academics seriously, because I do, I just have a really hard time with all the pomp, ceremony and ego wanking that goes along with it. So this will be where I bring out the museum work, the fancy titles and everything else I've done that sounds impressive on paperwork. I always feel a little dirty doing this kind of self-promotional activity, but this is one of the cases where it's neccessary. On to my application it goes.

Were it not for the total lack of finances, I could probably mail it out within a week. As it is, I'm feeling the acute lack of funds. But I choose to believe that they will come, that I will do this, be accepted, and be in Montreal next year immersed in studying as opposed to coughing at the miserable weather in Winnipeg.

In the mean time, my article awaits me. Goodbye application form.

Love and walruses

Daniela

Winnipeg Insularity: A reflection

2009-10-25T00:04:00.000-05:00

Oh Winnipeg, my hometown in the middle of the Canadian prairies.

Sometimes we hate you, other times we love you, but no matter how any of us may feel about you, fact of the matter is that being a part of this city is an all consuming experience. There is no way you can be here without having to be integrated into this long and complex internal conversation we have about ourselves. This obsession with creating a mythology for ourselves out of a disparate and fragmentary history.

For those of you who have never been here, know no one who has lived here and don't have any frame of reference for this city, I will start by explaining to you that Winnipeg is an insular city. Less than half a million people living in an area that used to be muddy swamp land. It owes its creation to the two rivers which cross it, the Red and the Assiniboine, as well as the phenomenally stupid idea someone had about building a city in an area famous for its mosquitos. There are some fairly complicated stories which we don't like to get into about how the Hudson's Bay screwed the Metis and Native American populations out of the land... There's also this weird idea that the colonialist legacy somehow ended and that all the tensions which led to Louis Riel's Northwest uprising of 1885 have mysteriously evaporated, but that's a whole other story.

Or maybe it isn't. Two of the most distinctive qualities that I've found influence living in Winnipeg is the segregated racialized poverty and our geographical isolation. Maybe I'll start with the poverty. Basically, in sociological terms the most stigmatized group of people are the aboriginal population.  This also happens to be the group who is the poorest and this disparity is visible in a way only usually illustrated in stories about Brazil or South Africa.  Almost nobody who lives here would argue with that; not scholars, populace, or even the Canadian government.  What this means or how you fix this, that they argue about, but its accepted that this is an issue.

In addition to being an unofficially racially segregated city, it's also one which is marked by some fairly incredible internal regional disparities. Everyone knows what it means to come from a particular area, and each neighbourhood has its own accompanying stereotypes. Transcona girls are trashy and easy with weird shaved eyebrows, respectable individuals live in suburbs like Tuxedo or Charleswood, the French population centered in St Boniface are all snobs, downtown is decaying and the North End is basically the disease of the city.

People are perpetually talking about downtown revitalization and how to "fix" the city.  In normal contexts this would sound like a great idea which no rational person would disagree with -and yet, here it becomes deeply problematic.  It's true that our downtown is nowhere near the healthy thriving city centre which city planners and tourists go ga-ga for. Buildings aren't in great shape, it's not set up for walking around, the poverty is visible and well, it kind of rolls up the sidewalk at 6:00 PM. Not exactly somewhere that you aim for being at 3 AM. So what the inevitable offended upper class of importance aims to do is things like build more parking and an arena downtown so that we can "get more concerts" (to be fair we have). Then they complain about feeling too unsafe to be there, shudder and head back to suburbia. So my translation of "fixing downtown" is that what they really want is to "reclaim" it from all the undesirable civil elements.

The Winnipeg tourist board is running an advertising campaign called "It's Your Downtown" encouraging people to spend more time there. It usually shows an obviously middle class couple or family shopping or going to a concert. No unsightly beggars in the shot. To me, this is incredibly symbolic of how the city works. Because what it eludes to is the fact that the upper classes feel offended that it does not belong to them; this would suggest that it belongs to someone else, right?

There's actually a lot going on in downtown Winnipeg. Since its not in great shape economically, areas like the Exchange district are the sites of thriving artistic community organizations. There's a ton of arts going on. There's places to go, things to see, people to meet... I've always felt like in some small way it is my downtown. This is where I feel most comfortable, where I've been able to explore the strange counter-culture places and connect with some pretty amazing things going on. And yet I hear a lot of naysaying about anywhere downtown Winnipeg. It's dangerous and disgusting. There are an awful lot of people who won't have anything to do with it, which is kind of a shame because I think a lot of good could happen if everyone worked on getting over their paranoia at having to leave the comfortable bubble of car-home-work, or the equivilent excuse for not exploring.

Now I'm going to bring your attention back to the geographical isolation issue and explain how they tie in to give this place its distinctive characteristics. Look on a map. Look at Winnipeg, then look at where the next cities are of comparable size. To get to Regina it takes six hours by vehicle due West. I don't even know how far you'd have to go East. Depending on whether or not you'd consider Thunder Bay or Kenora real cities, it's about six hours give or take. Toronto is a three day drive. Grand Forks is four hours South across the border. It's actually not worth driving North to Flin Flon, most people end up flying.

So basically, you're dealing with a place which basically fits all the traits of an island culture. During the time of the railroads it was going to be a big deal since we're at the centre of the continent, but then the Panama Canal happened and Winnipeg became the insignificant map dot it is today. Other Canadians make fun of us, when they even think about us at all, which they usually don't.

We, on the other hand, make up for this lack of national attention by obsessing over the creation of our own mythology, striving to give some importance to this small prairie town. We pretend that we don't want what other cities have, but secretly long for the day that we can leave and start over elsewhere. Then there's the magnet phenomenom, where everyone likes to say that when you are born in Winnipeg, you never leave. And there is some truth to it. Like any other insular community, there is a certain pull it affects on other people.

Now let's combine traits one and two! Put together a highly compartmentalized city where a good chunk of the population won't set foot in any of the downtown areas, and then add a serious insularity complex. What you get is a really small core of people who actually interact with each other in any kind of Winnipeg community building kind of way. Basically, this means that it's a really big small town linked by two degrees of separation. With regards to the arts, this means that you end up bumping into the same people a lot if you are at all involved. For the size of us, we've got a pretty strong music scene and an intense bout of festivals in our two months of summer.

It also means that the circles get to be pretty incestous though. This is both what I love and hate most about the city. The insularity means that living here I've been able to informally connect to any number of people and arts organizations who have status elsewhere in the country. When you're starting out on an artistic path, in some ways it can be a very encouraging environment just because everyone knows each other and its easy to make connections that way. On the other hand, it's a limited scene too. Because there are so few resources out there, this means that the same groups are perpetually fighting for the same paltry funding, which has a huge impact socially.  Sometimes this allows for projects to get support which might not otherwise, like special ballet productions which are world premieres or really interesting community developments, but it also means there is a degree of conservatism which can be really stifling.

When everyone is defensive about proving that our miniscule status as a city both nationally and internationally, there's a kind of paranoia that becomes instilled in the air. There are certain acceptable ways of doing things, and deviation is not exactly encouraged or welcomed. So it can be a conservative milieu in that it becomes resistant to change. And also, there's such an obsession with our own myth-making process that to criticize anything which is from Winnipeg becomes a criticism of the city itself and people will go after you for it.  People and institutions take themselves far too seriously because there realistically isn't anyone to keep our sense of self importance in check. It's like when you ever suggest something that you personally think or want to do, it turns into this huge personal matter for everyone to shoot down. Which I don't get, because I feel like the rest of the time everyone's complaining why people don't do more.

Tonight I was at the ballet. A world premiere of the Moulin Rouge, choreographed by a local dancer who trained through the Royal Winnipeg Ballet school and then came back to work for them. It was a lot of fun and visually stunning. Add to which, I'm a total sucker for the 1890's Parisian aesthetic, the bohemian cliches, and anything which screams Latin and romantic mentality.  Going to the ballet was an experience which beautifully illuminated all the contrasts I've been writing about.

The concert hall is right downtown near some of the scuzziest areas of the city, and yet it holds all the high art events which appeal to the socially significant policy makers. So you walk in from the street into this place full of crystal chandeliers, pomp, luxury drinks, donation drives, red velvet and all the trappings of pseudo-European high culture.  Everyone there is wearing their best clothes and behaves with all the expected restraints. When the artistic director comes out, he talks about how this is the oldest continuously operating ballet company in North America while the orchestra follows all the traditional protocols.  The audience meanders out collectedly during the carefully announced intermissions.  Then at the very end, they shuffle outwards to their cars and the area goes back to being the usual landscape of destitute Saturday night streetscape.  I'm deeply grateful that my grandfather made introducing me to the arts a prioirity, enabling me to be raised with ballet, theatre, classical music and literature. But one of the big reasons why I am so grateful, is because it allows me to move out of it as well as appreciate it for what it is.

Every now and then I will have a brush with this upper class milieu that I was raised with and experience severe culture shock. Today was like that. I forgot that you aren't supposed to express support vocally, just through clapping because most of the places I frequent don't operate that way.  Then the real shock was when they had the pass the slipper campaign where they solicit donations to support emerging dancers, and people actually donated money. I don't remember the last time I was at an arts event where there was any kind of significant donation. Most of the time everyone's crawling all over each other for the existing loose change.

So there we go. A brief illustration of Winnipeg's deeply felt stratification.

The reviews will be predictable for the ballet. People will talk at great length about how fabulous it is to have a world premiere, spend a little bit of energy focusing on the actual quality of the work, and then a lot making some statement about the fact that Winnipeg has a ballet at all with our size. Honestly, the work ends up getting lost there. Which is too bad, because I think most of the time it should be able to stand up and speak for itself. Instead, the arts have the Winnipeg Free Press to speak for them.

I don't have any complaints about the people who write about theatre, music, movies or art but the official arts critic Morley Walker is a piece of work.  One would think that someone who works as an arts critic would be a person who actually enjoys them. It's a crazy idea, but in my worldview I'd like the imagine that newspapers would look to hire someone who actually knew and cared about what they were writing about. And hell, arts critic: access to all kinds of events, free books-tickets-entry, the chance to engage in dialogue...

I'm not saying it isn't a tough job, but it really bothers me that the Free Press has kept this dipstick of staff who doesn't seem to find any of this amazing. Instead, he writes scathing articles about how all writers are irresponsible promiscuous crack using creeps and then proceeds to bash anything that anyone ever does.  According to Morley, Canadian literature is all universally terrible, over-praised and supported.

The only events he does give good reviews to are dance or theatre productions where there are naked or scantily clad skinny women for him to peruse. When he reviewed a show my friend Kir was doing spoken word for he wrote in his article that he didn't know what the fat girl was doing on stage with the other dancers. As though it was of some kind of great masturbatory importance that he could salivate over everyone on stage.  This is not an isolated incident. The only fringe theatre show he gave a rave to was called "Confessions of an Art School Model" in which the actress performed it completely naked. He called it "intellectual and thought provoking". It's so bad that my drama teacher actually refused to tell anyone when her show got a 4 1/2 star review from him because it started with a comment on the attractiveness of the actresses.

He does shit like this all the time, is offensive, obnoxious and regularly shoots down any kind of artistic project as a waste of time -atleast those which don't, as mentioned above, involve naked women.  And sadly, as the only reviewer at the only real newspaper in town, he has the power to inflict scary amounts of damage. Within the arts scene, absolutely no one takes him seriously. It's understood that he hates literature, likes boobies, and couldn't give a thoughtful, fair evaluation of anything if you put a knife to his throat. Not that anyone has ever thought about it. Much.  The paper won't kick him out and replace him with someone competent either. Which is really too bad, because if we got a petition going I think pretty much everyone who has anything to do with creativity in the city would sign it.

The fact that people listen to him makes me irate, so for the most part I tend to ignore him on the basis that I don't really like feeling irate and unable to change things as much as I often do when confronted with regular Morley Walker columns.  A few days ago I made the mistake of reading a piece he wrote as a preview to Salman Rushdie's reading. One would think that having one of the most respected English language writers alive today would possibly elicit some kind of commentary about politics and art, or maybe even a reflection on his work thus far. Morley chose to write about how lousy a husband/boyfriend/lover Salman Rushdie is and to comment on things his various ex-wives have said about him. The article ends with a comment about how people should be careful not to bring any lithesome daughters to the event.  Where do you even start on that one?

I feel like as a city we've just resigned ourselves to the idea that mediocrity is a perfectly acceptable thing to strive for. Never mind that we've got these serious issues. Never mind that politically, we're in a bit of a mess on any number of fronts. It's like no one wants to imagine that things can be different. That there could be another way of doing things where maybe people could not spend all their time frustrated and feeling like nothing will ever change. What is the matter with dreaming? Nothing can exist without imagination. People can't live without hope, without creativity and yet its so strongly and negatively sanctioned.

I am too old to believe that all of the issues I'm describing here are exclusive to Winnipeg. I'm also too old to believe in quick fixes or that if I move somewhere else it will all magically be perfect. However, I would just once like to be somewhere where there are alternatives accessible to me. Where there isn't just one show in town, and if the people with power don't like what you do then you are fucked. I'm sick of being at a school where the administrators get away with privatization through underhandedness and mass apathy, and it barely gets marked on at all. I'm sick of living in a city where the attitude is that everyone should just suck it up and suffer because that's what we all do here. Maybe even other voices! It's a radical concept, but I believe that it's possible. I don't believe that it's "realism" to accustom yourself to situations which are blatantly wrong on a number of levels.

To me, when you love something that means actively working to make it better. In addition to appreciating what's there, it's also an act of love to see that you believe in it so much you refuse to accept that the flaws are inherent or inevitable. Love is active as well as passive. But for me, I've come to the conclusion that I just don't love Winnipeg enough to fight for it. I still believe that the city can be more. I love places and people within it as well as things about it. I'm just not prepared to devote myself to that kind of a fight. I have other struggles to embark on, other battles to join, other things to do with my life then bang my head against the wall over the restraints of living in Winnipeg. There are people who do, and I deeply respect them. It's just not my home. Not where I want to be. I've thought about what it would be like to raise kids here, and the fact that I really don't want little ones to grow up with all this crazily deeply engrained racism, this much sense of limitation. The idea upsets me a lot.

And yet, this is where I come from. It's what I know, and I'm grateful for what this place has given me. I don't believe in discarding all things Winnipeg out of hand, or dismissing it because its a small town scene. Atleast get to know it a bit before dismissing it! I've had twenty four years to formulate my appraisal.

Oh Winnipeg. I'm beginning to understand why there are people who spend their entire lives exploring what you mean to them. Though I don't anticipate being one of them. Somehow I think you'll cope.

The same stories told in unfamiliar intonations

2009-10-22T22:49:00.000-05:00

Once a week the Center for Creative Writing and Oral Culture has been running a storytelling workshop run by the writer/storyteller in residence Jan Andrews. There is no diploma, no coursework, just a gentle introduction to storytelling. She tells us tales and illuminates some aspect of them.

It's a magical experience.

All my life I've read stories, old ones, new ones, ethnographic records, fairytales... and following that cliche, I never get tired of them. There is something deeply appealing about searching through narrative. Questioning through narrative. The simple invocation of language would be enough for me, without throwing in a plot line. I've heard so many stories. Depending on how you define story, we've all spent our lifetimes listening to and telling them. What I mean to say is, often when I listen to storytelling performances they are stories which are familiar to me. This adds to the magic, not diminishes, but it is often the case that a story's plot is not unknown.

Jan has revisited a few stories which are near to my heart. In particular, the story of the seal people, the selkies, who can transform into humans. Some become wives to fishermen who steal their skins but once they find out that they have to leave, nothing can keep them. Not the children that they have borne, not their love for their partner, not years of home and familiarity... The sea compells them on a level that nothing else does. There is nothing to be done about it. That's just how it is.

This also happens to be one of my favourites. I squealed like a five year old with a lollypop when she announced the title of the story. At the end, she asked us to say who we were in the story. What was the immediate person, image, texture that spoke our name. Who did we identify with, inanimate or otherwise?

For years that story has moved with me and every time that I've heard it, I've identified so strongly with the Selkie woman. This figure who has to balance so very many contradictions between life in the sea and life on land. One who feels compelled often by forces she can't explain or understand. And mainly, it has often felt like the perfect metaphor for why exactly I'm terrified of romantic relationships. As a woman alone, you may be a selkie, but the moment that you become involved with a man -no matter how amazing he is- socially you lose that skin through becoming a girlfriend/wife and then eventually mother. And yet when it came to be my turn, in this particular retelling I was not. This time I was her daughter who asks the selkie why her father keeps a grey blanket in the shed. The daughter who knows when things aren't right, and feels tensions between people as though by radar.

It was a bit of a revelation. That within the story, I could change. Carrying it with me until it emerged when needed in a different shape.

Then the next week Jan spoke about patterns in siblings with regards to stories. In other words, exploring why the third youngest sibling always succeeds. Those of us who were eldest siblings came to the conclusion pretty quickly that youngest siblings have it easy only because we're the ones who have to break ground for them. Then the middle siblings think they can fix what we've done, and the youngest succeed because they have a clear example of what not to do. This is not a verbatim conclusion drawn, more like my own informed by the workshop. As always, Jan told a story. This one was about the three daughters watching a corpse. It begins with the familiar motif of the mother asking "do you want a full bread with my blessing, or half without?" Of course the older two want the full bread, but the youngest takes the blessing. And of course this becomes significant because only the blessing helps them move on and get the man.

So many stories have this motif. I've read dozens of them. And yet I'd never thought before about how for me moving out of my parents house and trying to find my own place in the world is actually exactly what is meant by "going out to seek your fortune" in fairytales. Suddenly, I had a lot more empathy for the older sisters. It's hard. No matter what kind of environment you come from, you are still venturing into the unfamiliar territory of existing outside of the family unit. And in my experience, which I don't think is unique, it takes a really long time to make peace with where you came from and accept how that has shaped who you are.

Can you blame the older sisters, wanting a full loaf of bread? They've grown up poor. They don't know where they go or what awaits them. The problem, as they learn to their detriment, is that some things are more important than immediate survival. Generosity. Community. Love. If they want a home, that requires them having to consider more than themselves in their decisions. Otherwise they remain alone.  It's only the one who is able to honour their past home who can find a new one on their own. And they aren't on their own. Nothing happens without community.

Somehow the story felt remarkably relevant to me right now and my struggles to leave the family home. I've been away, and I've lived alone, and there's been so many arrangements, and yet the ties to where I come from have been far harder to find an independent voice in than I ever would have believed possible.  Far from the simple one time act I once believed it to be, leaving home has been an ongoing proccess that I've ended up doing a lot of soul searching about.  When I moved in my parents last year it was for health reasons; it's actually been alright, and I don't regret still being here.  The next time I leave I want it to be more stable. When I go this time it will be with a different mentality. A younger sister approach where I try to leave with some stability behind me.  Leaving in order to found a home of my own first by myself, then with a partner and eventually children.

Suddenly I could see myself in all three siblings. The one who needs to get out, the one who thinks she can do better and then the one who accepts the need to make peace with her background.

It won't be long before I'm getting ready to move to Montreal. There is a lot of things that will have to happen first. Paperwork to get, money to make, university to sort out. But I believe that it will happen. I'm nervous to make a firm stand, but I do believe that it will work out so that next year I'll be studying textiles at Concordia. Even though the move is for school, I intend it to be a permanent relocation. Unlike spending the summer in Boissevain or a few months in Haliburton, the plan is to settle in Montreal long term. Granted I anticipate travelling for long periods of time, going to teach English and other activities which will take me away for possible years long stretches. I still feel as though I'm needing a home base to settle into, and Montreal is going to be it. It's not a big deal if I end up being wrong. It's also not the point. The point is I'm leaving with the mentality of actually settling somewhere else and not just keeping the boxes packed for elsewhere. That's really different for me.

It meant something deeper to hear a story that spoke to that proccess directly. The familiar narrative I've had a set relationship with has changed for me.

I don't know how to voice that transformation. How meaningful it was for me to stumble into a story that spoke to what I'm going through. The power ran between Jan's words like an electrical storm leaving off sparks. Her voice is a powerful vessel, but the real power is that it pulls something deeper out of the collective consciousness and allows the audience to feel it.

There was a third incident coming out of yesterdays workshop. We were exploring differing cultural values expressed through riddles in story. Three different tales were told where the protagonists had to find out what was meant by an incident or metaphor. We talked about our solutions, and then she offered the ones given by the story.

Two of them related to authority figures behaving badly. An ape wears the clothes of a religieuse, and when asked for a leader the god gives the animals first a log who does nothing and then a snake who eats them. As she asked us to think about what they meant, I could feel myself anticipating a familiar moral about how you shouldn't trust leaders because of their status. It was only when she gave me an entirely different explanation offered by the culture it comes from that I began to think about why.

If this riddle appeared in a Latin American story, the point would have something to do with the fact that you shouldn't trust people in positions of authority. Something about generations of strictly stratified colonially dictated social policy seems to have made the majority of us on the continent a little suspicious of anyone with a title. I think part of that comes from the reality that those who took over the top ranks of government were actually of a different culture, and that alienation between institutions and grassroots culture is deeply felt.

There are a lot of stories from Latin America which use animals as characters, and many of them are highly political. My father liked to tell me these ones. They fit well within his values as a communist. I realize that I'm making a big claim here, but it seems to me like any Latin American story with an authority figure in it usually involves a decent amount of satirical undermining of their power. Sometimes I feel like this can come off as resentment. In the story I've learned about Latin America, North American imperialism assumed the mantel of colonialist exploitation discarded by the Spanish, so there's an uneasy relationship with English culture sometimes. In this worldview, the message would be that the brothers are stupid for going to go consult all these people who don't know their situation and accept the decision as arbitarary; they are like the people who will obey even an ape because they wear the right clothes instead of using their own judgement to determine their fate.

Then there's a more European fairytale answer to the image. One which I hear in my mother's books on leadership theory as it relates to education.  Authority figures only have power because they have certain characteristics which make them suitable for the position. A professor has undergone schooling. A king was born to the role. Therefore, when the queen has been replaced by an evil witch, the solution is to get rid of the interloper so that the world can go back to the natural order of things. The log is not the right leader so the job of the people is to replace it with someone who is suitable, no matter how long it takes or how hard it is. The snake is a wrongful leader because he can't understand what it required from him and uses his role for personal gain. An easy temptation.

For all that you can compare different "versions" of the same story and look for parallels and disparities, for me the question of how would a culture answer riddles is far more illuminating.  What do we pull out as important.values leading your evaluation?  Political structure informs imagination, and this in turn informs central narratives.

When told in unfamiliar intonations, the same story becomes a compass, a guide, and a mirror.

Buenas noches.

Technology and I need couples counselling

2009-10-22T21:16:00.000-05:00

First of all, I would like to state that I am not a luddite. I love the functionality of computers, and the fact that I'm now able to scan images, record voices and promote my artwork in a way that never was possible ten years ago or so. I also love being able to keep track of all kinds of music and play it from the comfort of my laptop. This is actually pretty appealing for me. What I'm not so crazy about is how much time is required to deal with technology in order for it to do all of these wonderful magical tasks which I am now thoroughly addicted to.

Like actually being able to find the interviews I recorded on the Digital Voice Recorder.

I will backtrack a little into talking about this latest fiasco. As I've mentioned before, I've been writing for the University of Manitoba newpaper The Manitoban. Specifically I've been working on research for a couple of articles, one on collaborative art and the other on the centre for creative writing and oral culture. This has meant interviews. I am in love with interviewing. You just get to ask people questions, let them take the stage, and find out how they think. It's like witnessing a really intense work of art. After my first interview last Friday I came out of the building flying, feeling like this is something I'd like to be doing for the rest of my life. Realistically, it probably will since I'm studying anthropology. So incredibly excited.

Then I do this really amazing interview with the Creative writing centre head Warren Cariou which raised a ton of good points, some fabulous quotes, and in general was something I was proud of. Of course, the issue was that um, the batteries died half way through. Still, I figured that most of the interview would have saved. They're smart, right? At this point I'm feeling pretty proud of myself.

Then came the dance of trying to get the fucking files off the voice recorder. Luckily the arts editor Damian was able to send me my first interview via web hosting, but it turned out that none of the interview with Warren recorded at all. That's right, wonderful half hour long conversation about storytelling, the link between written and oral culture, the place of literature in modern society -gone. Kapoosh. Done. No more.

Then I have a third interview to do. One with the storyteller in residence Jan Andrews. Also turned out really well. However, this one was recorded on a sports section recorder borrowed from the editor Noreen.  The plan was simple: plug in a USB cable to the recorder, remove interview to my laptop, spend the evening writing in a journalistic fervour.   What happened? My computer won't accept the recorder. There are no programs available for download which will help me -atleast none that don't require a significant downpayment or a degree in engineering to access. I figure, hey, I've got Red Cross tonight anyways. Worry about it tomorrow.

Tomorrow (now yesterday) comes. Yup, Warren interview is officially capoot. No, no one is able to figure out how to remove the interview. And this is pretty neccessary equipment. I keep the sports recorder because I don't want to lose the interview. Go over to my friends Leif and Heather's place for knitting and productive writing. That's when I realize that it does not want to cooperate.  Much frustration ensues.

I should also mention that I've been pretty sick recently. Not in a hospital-and-meds way, but this time of year is tough on my health. So time has been restricted by such things as seeing the doctor, sleeping, and well, not getting sicker. These things are much more time consuming than they need to be.

What I ended up doing was rushing to the university on the one day I don't have to be there to get the nice tech people to find me my stupid interview. Which by this point, I'm beginning to hate as a digital entity. They transfer it on to my USB key, hand it to me, and then I give Noreen back her recorder with barely half an hour to spare.

Then we come to now. Specifically, the last two hours of my life.  These have been occupied by trying to find my interview, hearing it play, and then magically losing the file on my computer.  At this point I'm fed up. And stressed, because what I really needed to be doing tonight was using my limited energy to focus on writing and not on battling the technological elements in search of a stupid file.

My frustration knows little bounds.

I suspect that I may end up borrowing my mom's recorder on Sunday for my next interview, and then possibly asking for my own for Christmas. I suspect that I will get much use out of it these upcoming years.

Now my rant is done. On to working on what I said I would a few days ago.

PS. I take these germs settling into my body as a personal insult.

PSS In the immortal words of Athena Kovaks, the Digital Voice Recorder's mother was a solar powered calculator.

First 'assignment' in

2009-10-13T09:55:00.000-05:00

As we speak I have just sent out my first article written for the Manitoban, "The Anti-Ketchup Food Manifesto". Fingers crossed.

Off to do things now.

Compulsions

2009-10-12T12:33:00.000-05:00

When I first started getting into writing they used to tell us to write as much and as often as possible. To jot down lists, to write down thoughts, to journal obsessively. Which I do, and I've done. Sometimes letting months go at a time before filling a single page, others times barely able to maintain my creative fixations in set books. This means that by now I've got a chest full of old journals and sketchbooks dating back from when I was nine years old, all in various states of penmanship and disrepair. There are spurts where I go through more than others, but at no point do I ever not have atleast one notebook on the go. I haul them around from place to place like an anchor, or maybe a map. A tangible thread to follow myself backwards in time.

Most of the times I can just enjoy writing, drawing or being silly because it's just what I do. Without a notebook I feel lost, like I've become a little bit less than myself. But sometimes it bothers me a little when I look at all this -stuff- and wonder what it's for. It's the treacherous reptilian side of my brain that wants a direct cause and effect relationship between time spent and skills gained, wants to understand why I feel this need to record, react and respond. If I spend hours writing, is it with the idea that someday I'll get good enough to produce a fantastic novel, or is it just because I like the meditative act of writing?  Does drawing, or anything creative at all, have to be for something? For an end? Or can it just be?

Sometimes I wonder about that. When I'm scribbling, or not quite getting a leg right. And then I have to stop, because it really isn't the point. Now there is a page in front of me gloriously blank, deep Chinese black ink and watercolour brushes which react to every twist of the wrist.  Who cares about "the correct path to gaining strong drawing skills"? Isn't that something that emerges from following your own inspirations and then working like crazy?

In the Starbucks they've switched from Classical music to country. Some kind of online radio which often ends up stuck on Latin.  The Leonard Cohen discography has finished downloading on my laptop and the coffee is mostly done. Next to me a woman in a red sweatshirt and a ponytail looks at her companion intently while talking about real estate.  The couch across from mine contains a woman clutching a latte and reading the paper. She looks leisurely just now. As though nothing matters beyond this chair, this music and the oh so comfortable angle at which she's crossed her legs.

This is the only place I can see open on Thanksgiving. A sputtering-kind of gray day, cold slowly bleaching away people's inclination to be social. We're so close to hibernation now. I can feel the desire to cuddle somewhere deep and warm away from the outside world starting to emerge. After spending most of twenty-four years in this city, this Winnipeg, I have come to intuit its rhythms on a cellular level. I know when people will cease to go outside anymore, and insist on hiding inside to watch movies or wait for love. Fall I find myself ready to pull inwards. It's a physical relief to have time alone inside.  Then when spring comes, a relief to come out again. Both seasons come when I'm ready to feel like I can't take it anymore.  That it's just too much.

Somewhere outside its snowing. I spent a fall away once, somewhere that it didn't snow until December and when it did the whole landscape looked like a Group of Seven painting. That was when I first began to notice how much time we spend speaking talking about our immediate geography. In Haliburton it felt that every second phrase was about the woods, the lake, the trees. In Winnipeg everything is about Winnipeg. We're insular here, six hours away from the next major city. There's an island mentality about people here, like the rest of the planet forgot to include us a little, like beyond the city borders nothing else is quite real.

I coughed less living in Haliburton.  That I remember.  There was no dramatic allergic reaction as the seasons changed the way there always is here. I sometimes still miss the way it felt to walk to school in the morning around the lake.  Lori and I would make the walk talking about politics, art, or thoroughly logical nonsense. It was peaceful.  Those four months I spent studying textiles were like what I imagine being in a monastary could have been if you were a true believer. All that was left of you after awhile was the refined part, the core self of you which could bear being worn down by the constant need for creation. I came back altered fundamentally, but that place is not somewhere that you ever go back to. Find new environments, yes, but in all its bittersweet reality these times will never be again.

As I stare out the window at the corner of River and Osborne where the village begins, I think about the fact that this time next year I may not be here.  That a year from now I will hopefully be in Montreal studying textiles and anthropology from the window of another coffee shop on a corner which is now foreign to me. Someday there will be other places which feel familiar to me. Other intricate relationships between places and me. Other memories.

Thank Goddess, Creator, and all things holy for that. I dream of going back to that intense meditative headspace where I could devote myself to studies and learning. Of falling in love with a whole different landscape. And yet, I think that you never really replace the one that grew you. There is a reverence for the "hometown" for a reason.  For whatever karmic reason, mine is Winnipeg. This messy prairie island in the heart of the North American continent.

Away from the house and the post-Thanksgiving craze I can find myself again. Look at my own pages, assignments or books and relate them to something that I'm actually doing. To myself.

This is the week I can start contacting the textile program at Concordia. Though anxious, I can barely wait.  It's a step to where I want to be, what I want to be doing.  A plan which is a map and not a schedule.

I love you world.

Written words

2009-10-09T14:26:00.000-05:00

The best time for blog posts is in the middle of something else. It's not even as though it's a procrastination device; blogging is considerably less stressful then jumping into the middle of a linguistics assignment. Even though linguistics is deeply sexy. It's also less commitment then getting into all the surplus French material I got today from my prof; it's going slow, so I'm trying to challenge myself to go further on my own. In the mean time, I'm typing up on the sixth floor of Fletcher Argue in the English students lounge looking over the amazing view with pleasure and the snow with distain. Though chances are good the weather does not feel my scorn.

I just got back from meeting with my arts editor at the Manitoban, while also touching base with the culture editor too. (I *love* being able to say that I have "an editor"!) News on the culture side front is that my mock cover letter will be in print on October 21. So yeah, I'm going to be published, and not in the slightest bit non-chalant about it either. It's cool. I will be scrapbooking it, with the idea that eventually I will have enough clippings to follow "a career", although I can never take that particular word seriously. Still. Following what I end up doing. My article "The Anti-ketchup manifesto" is mostly done but still needs a little bit of cleaning up before I send it off, but I'm pretty happy with how its turning out. Since it's not needed right away, I'm not stressed about it but I'd still like to wrap it up.

Then there's projects up and running on the Arts end of the paper. I'd run a few story ideas past Damien, the arts editor, and it seems like they are all a go from the editorial stand-point. The first article I'm going to be doing is on the new Centre for Creative Writing and Oral Culture, which is a whole new department that I find awesome. In doing this I hopefully will get a chance to talk to the person who runs it, the exciting part being the opportunity for conversation.

And then my baby is a piece I want to write about what I'm calling collaborative art events, or venues where people are encouraged to make without having to worry about competition or judgement about quality. This means that I get to sit down and talk with the lovely Hannah Godfrey about some of the amazing work that Ace Art is doing and promote the hell out of them. Because I can. Not to mention that, well, the Black Hole Theatre 'beat' is mine too. Free plays. As long as I write about it, Damien says he can get me tickets or review copies to pretty much anything I want.

This is one of those situations where I feel like a good match has been made. To me it's an incredibly exciting thing to be able to write about all the arts and culture issues that I'm passionate about, that are important to me, and that I write about anyways -and have other people get to see it. The chance to have a conversation in a public forum about some of the work other people do and dialogue with them just seems so exhilerating.

Deadlines scare me, but part of why I'm wanting to do this is so that I can get used to them. Maybe not everybody would be as excited about this as I am, but to me that's why it's a matter of thinking of it as a "good fit" versus a "great opportunity". It is, but so was the business seminar and I got nothing out of it except the valuable lesson that I'm not interested in business. Whereas the more I learn about writing for the Manitoban, the more exciting it becomes for me. I can look at arts events in the city with a whole new eye, and with the sense of having just a teeny bit of power to give some notice to places and things I think are incredible.

It's a little bit like the feeling I got being research assistant at the Manitoba Crafts Museum and Library. The match between my objectives and the organizations for the book I worked on were not always the same, but I did put a whole lot into the project. And beyond anything else, the fact that I got to talk to all of these authorities in their fields about various craft techniques put me on Cloud nine. None of that would have been possible if it was just me contacting them as a lowly undergrad student who likes craft a lot. This is another reason why I suspect that grad school may be in my future. I can't resist any opportunity to go deeper into a theme or a topic.

So at this point I'm looking at wrapping up an article today, getting my preliminary non-person research done for another two articles, and finally getting around to writing and sending in the cover letter for the Tallest Poppy residency program. Which is exciting for a whole lot of reasons, not the least of which is that I get to be around food for two days and get fed for free as part of the program. It's also not exactly as though spending two days on art is something that would be hard for me to do either.

This being the long weekend -well, let's just say that it's coming at a really good time for me. It's not that I'm feeling bogged down, but just the release from pressure of having to be at school Monday feels like a perfectly timed gift. A much needed opportunity for creativity and a slightly slower pace. Possibly even a chance to make some the-weather-it-turns-evil clothing.

It also gives me a chance to develop some of the ideas I've been scribbling around. I spent most of yesterday writing very rough drafts of some story ideas. It's funny, because creative endeavours just don't work on the same principles of productivity that other work does. If I go to a class, even if it's a slow class you can guarantee that I will get a certain amount out of it. Whereas with art, I can spend an entire week doing nothing but writing or drawing and there's no guarantee that "productive" art time will neccessarily equal "product" of any kind.

Sometimes its just good to get my fingers moving, or the time was good because it contributed to me learning how to turn a sentence or sketch a cheek. But there are no guarantees. Sometimes I've produced things in one straight line, other times it takes years to simmer on the backburner. I've learned to let go of trying to control the shape of things. They are like children who come how and when they are meant to, not a second sooner. And like children, they never turn out the way you thought that they would -thank the Goddess for that!

For example, this muse piece is going to take a long time to develop, and that's just how it is. So far I have six pages of her head, stream of consciousness concerns and ideas. It's a lot. But in the middle of all that, I've gleaned a few really clear important facts about my character, her situation, and what shape it will take which are going to help me turn the idea into a monologue. Slow, but stable. Then I quickly wrote out the first draft of a story called "Pigeon English" about a couple of birds who want to rescue the language from all the people who don't respect it enough. (I don't have a lot of patience for grammar snobs). And further on, a few key ideas to develop out for the collaborative art story.

Back to writing again. I'm starting to think about sending some stuff out to magazines too. I mean, it can't hurt, right? The issue being to find the right venue. Of the Canadian magazines I know about I've never seen a venue with satirical pieces, or stories about animals which aren't for kids, or even cartoons which don't involve three panels or two lines. I'd talked to the Manitoban about if they'd take my comics, but it doesn't seem like it's the right venue for what I do. So I will have to consider some new places to send a few of the more tongue in cheek pieces I like.

And now that will be all for this piece on the progress of written words. In order that I will go and write them. Though I have no idea if anyone actually reads this thing or not.

Lessons from linguistics

2009-10-08T00:51:00.000-05:00

Every sentence has a head. English sentences have the deep structure syntactically speaking "subject, verb, object"; other languages arrange it a little differently. But all languages in the world require each sentence to have a head, something that sets the tone for the entire set of meanings. It's part of the Universal Grammar linguists work at finding out. Once your sentence has a clear head you can add a potentially infinite number of clauses, lasting until either your patience or breath run out, but this requires a clear focus. Even Victor Hugo's 26 pager had a point somewhere; grammatically correct, if not ethically fair to the poor readers.

If I was to analyze my own internal syntactic structure, it would show a marked penchant for long latinate sentences with copious languages for the sheer joy of adding another prepositional phrase. A surprising amount of the time this works out well for me.  This desire to be full: emotionally, spiritually and intellectually is how and why I accidentally stumble into amazing opportunities all the time, and accounts for any number of my friendships. Then again, it's also how I end up all too often seeking sanctuary somewhere warm with soft textiles and hot beverages. Not that this is in itself a bad thing neccessarily. At the moment I'm seeking sanctuary in early Leonard Cohen and a scarlet pashmina, as it so happens.

There was this idea I had to start researching what it would take to turn my assorted creative projects into a fully functional business. This process involved going to any number of free seminars offered by a small business resource center to learn the skills, then *poof* apply them to what I'm already doing. This was a reason to confront any number of deep rooted fears related to commitment, organization, planning, and well, business.  The idea was to get information and build slowly as I can.  Go slow, but steady.

This was the rationale that brought me to a three day business seminar. Three days of sitting in a chair listening to people in suits talk about bureaucracy and money. For a good cause, right?  To be creative and lucrative? I lasted one whole day. I tried, I went even though it was scary, but then I went and it was... well...  It's a great program for people who have their business plan set up. It's also fabulous for walking you through things like taxation and the proccess of applying for a loan. That's around the time I realized that starting a small business is not where I am at.

Being a business person is not the head of my sentence. If it fits in at all, it's as part of some obscure adverbial phrase that gets left off when you cite it elsewhere. Do I want to be a professional artist? Absolutely. I even suspect that I may end up eventually going through a lot of this taxation-bureaucracy-financing crap someday and find it useful. But it's not a prioirity.

I don't want to start marketing my own specific creative identity until I feel pretty secure in my own artistic voice. I don't want to sell badges, bags or cheap scarves because people will buy them. Even though I love making things and consider finding what sells to be a creative excercise, devoting my energy to producing consumer goods feels counterintuitive to my way of working. What I'd rather do is give myself some time to develop as an artist, so that when I do finally start approaching the business side of things I know why I'm doing it. Right now, it just isn't a prioirity.

Besides which, though I'm feeling the constraints of no-cash, I kind of enjoy the uncomplicated nature of being an employee.  Between developing my writing, drawing and learning French, it would be a little refreshing to go and do something where there is a direct relationship between energy put in and gain gotten out of it. And I'm missing restaurants.  I don't want the responsibility of starting a business, and honestly there is no real reason for me to need to do so just now.  Let alone learn all the procedures for Manitoba and then end up transplanting it all to another province.

After deciding to back-burner the whole business end of things, I was left with this strange combination of elation and disappointment.  I feel like I've been given a full two days of my life back, even though they were mine to begin with, and I was the one who signed up for the seminar in the first place. I don't regret giving it a chance, but I also know it was good to just wake up and go to French class this morning. Like I've been released from something fogging up my brain.

A day is so much, so latently full of potential and kinetic flashes that it's ridiculous to waste it. Like cooking where you have to distill the flavours, when every verb my paltry subject-self engages in comes off half-commited then the entire feel of the sentence gets lost. Better to cut out a few clauses and allow each vibrant morpheme to shine through the lips and reverberate into ears. Allow each flavour to simmer out, each sound to find a space in the silence to come home to.

It isn't sound that creates speech; it's allowing sounds to play amidst the silences. And no matter who or what I want to be, I've got to find a place for blank spaces, silences and time to grow fallow. Otherwise its just chaos. Like the text of a Victor Hugo novel without an editor's eye. Even more painfully crazy.

Here's me re-focusing myself. No business plans whatsoever for the immediate future.

It's just good grammar

Fateful accidents and the ones who came before us

2009-10-04T17:28:00.000-05:00

In my grade nine year I was another deeply, painfully bored student in a classroom with (it felt like) no one else who really cared about what we were learning. When the chance came to take a one week thirty hour course at the University of Winnipeg through the enrichment program, I jumped at the opportunity to go deeper into something -anything- then we were in my high school class. On the list of courses to take, my first two priorities were "Greek Mythology" and "Law in the Time of Socrates"; either third or fourth down on my list was a course titled "Women and Art" which I stuck on because I'd run out of serious, interesting topics to choose from. If I had to, something related to feminism would be OK but what I really wanted to know about was Greek mythology.

That's right. The most classical, important, referenced body in English literature aside from Shakespeare and the Bible; though I still love it, in retrospect it seems symbolic that this is what I considered worthy of my attention as a fifteen year old who took themselves far too seriously and planned on becoming a scholar. I even went to the point of calling up the program to see if there was anyway I could be switched out of what I saw as a fairly flaky course with no relevance to my life. I didn't see myself as artistic. I was a writer, a student, and I wanted to focus on serious things that would be useful to me for understanding the work of important dead European guys. There was no way to be switched, but they told me they got a lot of positive feedback from the course. And honestly, the chance to be out of high school for a week was still pretty exciting.

It was a fateful accident. That course changed my life in that it was the right spark provoked at the right moment to ignite a blaze. It was taught by three different female professors at the University of Winnipeg who taught in English, Art History and Sociology respectively. Radically different approaches to the artistic genre, but all presented in such a way to encourage us to think critically about the interplay between gender and issues as big and small as urban geography, the artistic gaze, and within the world of the textbook.

For a week my synapses fired non-stop. I learned about the work of female artists in Winnipeg, witnessed pieces by Lori Millan and Shawna Dempsey, and finally took a good hard look at the fact of my own female sexuality. Looking at the slides of Reuben's muses was the very first time I ever understood deeply that the personal experience of eroticism was not something restricted in any intrinsic way to women with magazine bodies. Eroticism was something more. It may be true that I would, and probably always will be large, but that in no way meant that I had to feel excluded from positively experiencing sexuality in my own way.

Over the course of five days, the word "art" ceased to have fangs in my mind. It stopped being scary and imposing, it turned into something that I was allowed to have a deep personal and emotional connection to. Here for the first time I could put together the fact that I was fascinated with needlework,embroidery, sewing and thread-craft with the word "artistic". That being a feminist could mean things that were different than political party action. But aside from giving me sexual, emotional and intellectual freedom -I just fell in love with all the pretty pictures I got to look at. Then that summer I went to England with parents, sister and grandfather where I actually got to see in person all of these pieces which I'd seen in textbooks and they became so incredibly real.

The year after that I dropped French and took art. Grade ten high school art, for a normal credit, and it was one of the scariest things that I had ever done. The teacher who taught the program at Gordon Bell high school during that time period was an intense, fascinating and intelligent woman who twisted the entire subject area into shapes up to then undreamed of. But that would be later. When I first met her I was stumbling all over myself apologizing for wanting to take it even though I had no real ability, but I really loved art history, and there were all these people who seemed so good but I'd give it a try... It seems weird now, but going on the path of taking art classes was a defining moment for me because it meant opening myself up to trying to do something that I didn't feel like came naturally. Which was hard considering that I'd always excelled effortlessly at school, probably due to having a highly academic upbringing.

From there I've ended up taking a lot of art history courses. I've gone on to do a Textile Surface Design certificate program at Sir Sandford Fleming College. I'm looking at doing a lot more work on textiles and other craft forms analyzed as art. All these disparate elements, and a lot of it comes from passion sparked in that one week course. Something there resulted in an alchemical transformation which I'm still going through.

So now, close to ten years later here I am: looking at doing a fine arts degree, incorporating the techniques of visual literacy into anthropology, working in textiles and generally dealing on a personal level with how to claim a voice as a woman in the arts. Then I end up at a lecture by the same art history professor talking about dance, art and women's bodies to a packed house. You know that you've got to be doing something right with your life when you show up to a geeky academic lecture which you don't even bother inviting anyone to come with you, only to find a dozen or so people you know there. All of whom are just as excited as you are by the lecture topic and style. Who want to talk about voice, power and the possibility of finding a place in the world which doesn't hinge on sexual objectification.

A painting she showed in the slide was of a female weaver whose work I had to research while working on the Crafting the Mosaik project, one Mitzi Anderson Dale. The glimpses given were intriguing. An internationally renowned female artist commissioned to do elaborate tapestry projects for an arts exhibition in Toronto, she taught at the University of Manitoba after emigrating from Norway at the early turn of the century -and I'm getting to learn more about her. The same threads repeating over and over. Female identity, textiles, memory... I don't even know if I can name them yet. But I do know that my life even at twenty-four shows some pretty clear signs of being marked by under-lying themes.

One of these has been the presence of strong women who come before me, those who are doing something inspired. Who walk in their own light. Who have very quietly and deeply sometimes made the decision to speak from their own place of truth. And I just think, whenever I raise my hands, that I can only do this because of all the other hands that came first. Who touched, and worked cloth, and held their children. All these unseen women and men who through gradual evolution have given my body the shape it has today. Through their lives they shaped the contours of my muscles, gave my skin its pigment and sensitivities. So when we talk about the fact that the ancestors are still with us, this isn't as some abstract kooky pie-in-the sky idea of angels, but as a tangible force in the reality of our now. Without these roots, we would not be here. And even when people choose not be breed, they still contribute to that deep potent primal consciousness. That deep landscape of dreams unfettered by human censorship or legislation which no one person holds access too.

And so when I look around me at all this fear, it strikes something deeper than just sadness that maybe somewhere along the way maybe a solitary genius artist got lost. I'm sad for all the people whose experiences have been stripped from them. Who've learned to be too scared to speak for themselves -even if what that means is through other people's words. That co-option speaks of a deeper violence, the disenfranchisement of people to profess their own very intimate human realities. To be themselves at their deepest and most human level. Not by digging through "lies" but finding themselves inside the other external voices -making tangible these conversations between ourselves and our society.

Since I last wrote about hate mongering and silencing it's been on my mind a lot. I've been ultra-conscious of all the ways in which I subtly partake in this process of cutting people down, without even being aware of it. And taking note of it is hard, but I feel like I need to. The first start of trying to live within your principles, I believe, is accepting that on some level you will always be a hypocrite because the best dreams are always impossible to fully attain. It's like aiming to never be racist; a worthy goal, but one that you can guarantee that you have not achieved the moment that you pat yourself on the back because you have. One of the things that I want most is to be someone who nurtures, not tears down. Who can speak with others instead of for them. Who tries my best to engage in dialogue and act with love. Because in trying, perhaps there is a better chance than in not trying. And in the end, all we can do is act with love.

I leave the last word to you.

In which there is finally a scanner in sight

2009-10-03T10:54:00.001-05:00

...and I even managed to figure out how to use it! Luddites: 1, Technology: 0. This means that I can now actually add images to my blog posts. It isn't that I don't draw continuously, there just hasn't been a way to put it up. So exciting news. Cue the non-sexualized cheering squad.

Since I now actually have pictures to put up, I figured I'd put up a couple showing where I work and what my sketchbooks look like. A few sample pages if you will. The pictures here are of my work space. That's right, I am a basement dweller. Notice the copious amount of books and fetishism for knick-knacks. These are not junk because they inspire me, right? Maybe no one else finds this interesting, but I've always felt a voyeuristic delight in looking at studio spaces and notebooks. So if there is anyone else like me out there, this is for you. This way you can see my sewing area. The knitting needles. Creative chaos 101. Though I kind of enjoy it. Granted this also means I have a good couple of hours of scanning which will need to be done.

Then below you have a sketchbook page showing me triumphantly handling yet another completed notebook. For some reason, it always feels pretty satisfactory.

Then a few notes on the sketches below. The one on the left is a page I did while waiting for the Ace Art stitch and bitch to start after bellydancing class. My friend Siobhan works there, hence the figure on the left, and was in a Leonard Cohen-type of mood. So if you are so inclined, visualize her singing to herself, ringing up books and selling Vegan yummies. Everyone else is just a customer. I'm never entirely sure if it's OK to sketch people without permission but to be honest, I do it anyways. There's something so incredibly fun about watching people move. That poise of a gesture about to be made. I like them. I'm unrepentent about that. But even if you don't, well, I'm having fun doing them. No one is getting hurt.

Then the other drawing on the right is of a graduate student dreaming of academic demons. They chase you with guilt and make you feel bad for every second of your life not devoted to Academia. I may send this one to my friend Ashleigh for her office. This uncharacteristically short post is now interrupted by studying for French.

Enough with the hate-mongering and disparagement

2009-10-01T13:26:00.000-05:00

Last night I ended up spending some time with my cousin Brietta, a Creative Communications major at Red River College in Winnipeg. Now for those of you who are not from Winnipeg and are therefore not aware of this program, I will explain a few things about it: it's prestigous, it's tough, and it's employable. People who graduate from this program get work because everyone knows that when you've been through it you've been grilled, disciplined, and trained on an excrutiatingly high standard. One spelling mistake or inappropriate capitalization and you get an automatic fail.  One minute late and you can't hand it in.  I'm really proud of her for getting in, and think that she'll do really well with it -but it's hard work so I haven't seen her since it started.  As we were talking about various things about the program, websites she's come across while writing her blog and experiences had as part of it, she showed me this electronic voice which was shooting down all these projects and people with an amount of negativity and anger that left me feeling appalled.

I am not going to go into what was said, who this is, or give any other details which could lead anyone to speculate on the identity of this voice. This is partially because I'm not interested in giving them any attention, but mostly because it really isn't important. There are lots of people who shoot their mouths off both on and off-line, so this post could apply to many. Because what they were doing was being derogatory, attacking any number or people and organizations who are doing work out there, all in the name of "insightful criticism". And it was hateful, so much so that from a cursory glance it seems like anyone who made any kind of effort to dialogue or speak up in defense of a victim got shot down. Cast into the role of an un-enlightened idiot who couldn't get handle the truth or appreciate anything that wasn't "crap". Which seemed to be virtually everything.

We're all entitled to our own opinions, we're told over and over again. I would amend to point slightly to say that we are all entitled to our own experiences but are responsible for how we express it. Am I saying that this means that we always have to like everything, or publically praise things? No. I'm really not. I believe that part of us being members of a social group is that we have to be accountable for our own voices, and that especially includes making sure that our own voice doesn't get co-opted to support something we don't believe in.

The Brazilian educator Paulo Freire once said that "washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral," and I believe that. The most powerful political tool is silence because it can be used by all sides of a conflict. So I can appreciate people making a stand and vocally advocating their own perspectives. When people say how they really feel then you can work with that. Dialogue isn't possible if no one's talking, because it means that power is usurped by whoever so chooses to speak up.

When I talk about using your voice, I'm not even talking about people making grandiose political statements against injustice or oppression. That's definitely part of being vocal, but it isn't all of it. When people use their own voices to speak from a place of deep truth, it doesn't matter what they speak of, it will be powerful.  To me this is why artists like Ani Difranco, Leonard Cohen or Joni Mitchell touch people so deeply: they are being honest and raw with their own human selves, which allows others to relate and find a voice through them.

It is an act of courage to put yourself out there and be real. It means opening yourself to judgement, not being able to hide your self and leaving behind that protective coat of apathetic indifference. It takes guts.  Someone has put themselves out on a limb to create something, invested themselves into a project and said that they would construct. It's hard to do that. Especially when everyone knows that the moment you put anything out there, the judgement will come hard and fast. I may not, and often do not, like what they are doing. There are lots of people whose work I don't like; but I believe in my heart of hearts that I have to respect that they have gone out and done something, not because I'm an artist but because I'm a human being.

So it really bothers me when people go out there and just focus on tearing others down in some misguided belief that this is somehow a worthy practice. It's really easy to stand on the sidelines and be critical, but is any of them trying to put anything positive into the world? Is shooting people down going to make the world a better place? Is it in anyway going to improve the quality of anything?

As an artist I've come across my fair share of this judgementalism, both from inside and outside of artistic circles.  The word "artist" alone has so much baggage that for years I avoided it whole-heartedly in favour of the title "artisan" before realizing that it wasn't covering what I was doing. From where I stand it seems like as soon as I say that I'm an artist, or a writer -whatever it is- all of a sudden the dynamics of the interaction changes.

Suddenly they want to know how professional I am, what I do, how good I am, have they heard of me -as though these things are important barriers I have to be able to cross before being able to claim such a "prestigous" word. Never mind that no artist ever just wakes up in the morning and spontaneously creates a beautiful body of work, or that the fact I haven't yet had a show doesn't change the fact that I spend most of my waking life engaged in some form or other of creative activity.

Then there's all the stereotypes that start to come in about how selfish, crazy, promiscuous and/or irresponsible artists are. Even though it isn't like there is a guidebook that gets sent in the mail to real artists anymore then there is one that gets sent out to people who self-identify as queer. And if me, or any other artists out there happen to fall into one or more of the above categories, I'm pretty sure that isn't because they are artists. Even the most simplistic pop-psychologist can tell you that you need more then one factor to determine how a person will turn out as an adult.

And yet for some reason, there are all these people who feel some kind of burning need to be disparaging. To mock people's efforts. To minimize them. To tell them all the things that they are doing wrong, as though they could do better.  It wasn't until I started working with kids that I started to realize how very early this process starts.  When I was out in Boissevain I ran a workshop on creating storymobiles, where the kids would draw parts of their favourite stories and stick them on a mobile to help them remember them for later and be able to tell other people. They were encouraged to pick objects, characters, or moments which stood out for them. No one else would be using it. Just them.

This group included a dozen or so children ranging from three years old to about ten years of age, and all of them except one told me multiple times over the two hour period that they couldn't draw.  At five years old, these kids have already internalized this external criticism so deeply that they've decided that they can't draw. At five. I'm pretty sure even Leonardo da Vinci couldn't draw well when he was five. So instead of just being able to relax and enjoy getting their hands dirty, play and be creative, they needed all this encouragement to even get over the first obstacle of picking up a pencil. At this point I'm not even worried about the possibility of losing some potential art genius, (an idea I'm not crazy about in the first place), I'm just sad at the sight of all these kids who are already so afraid that they won't even give themselves the chance to enjoy drawing.

I remember when I was fifteen and first getting involved in the Winnipeg arts scene, I used to take great amounts of pride in being able to find flaws in other people's work. I would go on at great length in my journal and other people's ears about how over-hyped something was, how terrible this person's work was, cut others down for the quality of what they were doing. Partly because when you are fifteen, that's what you do. You're figuring out what you do and don't like. It's identity formation. For some reason I felt like this proved my superiority in some way, though the logic behind this escapes me now.

And at the end of the day, what was the point of this? Well, I started to wonder that question after an experience I had working in a bar in Guatemala. In addition to me, the staff there was a blend between people who were from Guatemala and then a handful of North American backpackers who had to negotiate over what music we played on the computer.

At first I would bash music I didn't like when it came on, because I was used to it being social suicide to admit to liking the wrong kind of music. But then I realized that when I did so, the women I worked with would just shrug and feel sorry for me. The fact that I didn't like it didn't make me a music connoisseur, it made me a sad person who would be miserable sometimes. That was when I started to realize how stupid it is to be self-conscious and narrow minded about personal taste. All that happens is that it cuts you off from experiencing things that you might actually really enjoy, and maybe even hindering the enjoyment of somoeone else who does enjoy it by making them feel inferior.

That isn't to say that there isn't a place for criticism and feedback. When I was in the textile program at Sir Sandford Fleming, we used to have regular critiques. But the point of them wasn't to tear down people's vision, it was to respond, and by responding get a dialogue going which could eventually make the work stronger. Even when one piece was agreed universally to be unsuccessful, identifying what it was about it that didn't work enabled us all to go back to future work with a better sense of how to proceed. Personally, I think there is an important place for the review and the reviewer. That said, the ones that I enjoy the most are the ones that thoroughly engage with the pieces, regardless of whether their overall analysis is positive or negative. Even if someone really hates it, I feel like by giving it their time and energy that is a way of showing respect for the person's work.

The flip side of that is people taking themselves far, far too seriously, and that drives me crazy too. I don't claim to be innocent of either not being negative or taking myself too seriously, but these are things that I do try to work on.  The moment that work starts being about the Artist as iconic figure versus what they are actually saying, then the dialogue stops too and that isn't helpful either.  Actually, the two go together a surprising amount of the time; people who think that they can do better than all these jerks.  Which can be a powerful motivator to get doing, one which has definitely pushed me in some situations. That said, there has to be a way in which people can voice their own truths without trying to co-opt those of others.

I want more people to be unrepetent about their own activities, not because they haven't thought about it, but because they have and believe in what they are doing. And I know that for me that's something I feel like I have to watch for. It's so easy to crush someone else's dreams or belittle them without even conciously trying to. So while I do sometimes wish that I could have a little bit more respect and a lot less sideline involvement from other people who don't have a clue what I'm doing when I say I'm an artist, I also don't ever want to disparage what they are doing either.  Through encouragement we can build people who grow strong and confident in themselves, are able to participate in a dialogue on a really deep level. Through discouragement all we build is anxiety, judgement and fear.

So this is why I find it so upsetting to come across voices who have devoted all of this time and energy towards tearing others down. As far as I'm concerned, you can either be constructive and offer your feedback honestly, or you can pay attention to what you didn't like and keep that in mind when you do your own work, but there is absolutely no reason to devote all this time and attention to ripping people apart. Sure, responses are funny, but they don't necessarily have to be mean to make their point.

A few years ago Neil Gaiman made a post on his blog saying

"I would like to go on record as saying that I think Margaret Atwood's remote mechanical book-signing apparatus is the work of the devil, or at least a really really stupid idea."

Within the post he mercilessly mocks the idea that you can replace the experience of going to a book launch and talking to an author with having your book signed by a machine over teleconferencing. Something which I happen to agree with, but that's besides the point. Even though he made some really pointed comments about his feelings on the matter, at no point in the post do I feel like he's attacking Margaret Atwood as a person.  Her idea, yes, but not her.

To me this is a beautiful example of how not tearing people down doesn't have to mean turning into a dry humorous automaton. Laughter with compassion, while remembering that it isn't the individual who you mock. There's got to be a way to do that. It doesn't have to be big. Doesn't have to me a huge thought-intensive process. But it would make a huge difference to the world.

It's easy to believe that you could be the world's best writer if you ever got down to actually doing it.  Everyone could be a brilliant genius with a special place in the world if you only went by what they've thought of doing with themselves. The key is, all these abstract ideas don't exist. They are potential. Being a good artist isn't some innate gift, it is a carefully learned skill which requires committing copious amounts of time and energy to the endeavour.  So as much as someone may have an idea for the world's greatest play, I will continue to hold a little bit more respect for the play which has been written -even if it's terrible.

I'm going to end this post with a joke.  Isabel Allende included it in her memoir El Suma de los Dias / The Sum of our Days  but originally this is the version I'd been told:

Margaret Atwood was at a cocktail party when a friend introduced her to a brain surgeon. When he asked her what she did for a living, she said she was a writer.
"That's interesting," he said, "I've decided that when I retire I plan on writing novels".
"That's wonderful," she answered, "when I retire I plan on becoming a brain surgeon".

The Benevolent Postcard Society

2009-10-01T11:05:00.001-05:00

The BPS is an art project put together by Lori Langille; I got involved after accidentally coming across the group on my best friend's facebook page and absolutely had to become part of it. The concept is that once a month everyone receives an address by e-mail to which they have to send a postcard, and then they in turn will have one show up on the doorstep. Today being the first day of October is the day we all receive our recipients. Then the cool part is that at the end of the year, we'll send them all back to Lori so they can be collected into a book or exhibit or some other public display of postcards.

Originally I joined with the idea that it would motivate me to create something once a month. Not that I wouldn't anyways, but unlike the sketchbooks I fill up willy nilly these art pieces will actually be seen by people other then friends and acquaintances. And besides which, I absolutely love getting mail. If I could ever find a man who could really get into a love letter correspondense with me where the messages sent and received were deeply sincere and meaningful -I would have to consider marrying him, just on principle.

Communication of any kind is a beautiful thing; I confess to enjoying facebook, email, and browsing people's personal websites. And yet, there's still something very distinctive about the feel of being able to run your fingers over paper. When you touch a letter that has been written by hand, you know that the sender was thinking very specifically of you as they sat down and selected the words that they would use to address you. There's a different anticipation to waiting for a letter than an e-mail. I think it would be a mistake to assume that before computers we all wrote loving tomes of correspondense to one another, but I do think it means something a little bit more special when someone takes the time to put their pen to the page.

You can see the kinetic flow of their body as it moved while writing. Little traces of context cling to it like an aroma or a memory. It is completely situated in a moment of time, an organic messy human body somewhere out there.

So in honour of the Benevolent Postcard Society, and all the effort put into running it by the lovely Lori Langille, who I have never met, I am including here some documentation of my experiences with the Benevolent Postcard Society. Both sent and received.

Projects and Projections

2009-09-29T18:43:00.000-05:00

These trembles are excitement.

Monday at the university I ran into a friend at the library, where we talked and then she had to settle down into working, which meant that I did too. So I pulled out a notebook, and I drew, and I scribbled and then I stumbled all at once upon the solution to my story "I am not a muse". There was this one moment that stuck to me, one in which a twenty-something artist girl tells her poet boyfriend in anger that she isn't with him in the hopes that someday she'll stick him into a poem. In case you are wondering, it isn't in the slightest bit autobiographical, except in being a woman whose witnessed a lot of sexism in the arts.

I've tried to write it as a story and it hasn't been coming, so I put it on the back burner and let it stew. Then yesterday as I was talking to Brynn, I realized that the reason why it hasn't been working as a story is because it isn't one, it's a monologue. A dramatic monologue which takes place a little bit removed from the smoking area at the back of a coffee shop where an open mike poetry night was being held, in between sets late at night. She's at a slight distance away from the streetlights, implying by this that she is also at the edge of a public spotlight, only able to speak using her own voice away from it. Appearance wise, I want her to be a blend between defiant, raw, and very vulnerable. I actually have someone in mind who acts that I see as exactly what I'd need for the part, so I may end up talking to her about whether she'd want to do it with me.

What I'm envisioning it as is a ten to fifteen minute monologue performed to the audience with a very intimate feel. The kind of piece which would really benefit from low production costs and a small, no frills venue. There's actually a feminist theatre festival in Winnipeg which I think would be a really great place to approach with it if I can get it together. Since the point of the story is giving back the voice to women in the arts, I think it would fit and be a place where the message could really get across.  Quite possibly this could be a really powerful piece.

Then here's some other news that's pretty exciting for me: I've been in touch with some people from the Manitoban. The culture editor actually wants to publish one of the pieces I sent him as a sample, a mock cover letter written after hours and hours of writing real ones. My work published! Name in print!  I'm not even going to pretend to be one of these people who says things like "it's not really a big deal, just a student newspaper, not worth getting excited about".  1) because I'm a terrible liar, 2) because I think pretending to be unemotional is stupid and 3) because it is a big deal to me. I am a writer, and I'm getting a chance to share.  How the hell is that not supposed to be huge?

Then there are a few other places that I'm hearing back from as we speak, which I've got my fingers crossed about.

The truth is that I'm really happy right now. Not just because of the article, not just because I'm caffeinated, but because I feel like I've found a way to do what it is I really want to. I'm not longer crazily in denial about the fact that I'm an artist. I've got projects in motion, too much inspiration to deal with all at once, plans for the future and I'm over the moon ecstastic and joyful. Turns out the issue was really as simple as not resisting my own nature, my own tendencies. The reason why trying to be a Responsible Adult Member of Society has never worked out is because I wasn't really doing the things that I really cared about.  Not that I've ever wasted time, or didn't do valuable things, or that I regret a minute of it. But for me, the only path is artistic creative projects. Anything else just won't end up working out because I go missing in the middle of it. And I'm OK with that.

Gushing time on the computer is over. I'm going back to writing and the like.

Adios, curtains down.

Leadership and other things that happen when you don't pay attention

2009-09-27T16:09:00.000-05:00

It began innocently enough; Athena invited me to the Red Cross Internation open house because it was a convenient place for her mother to pick us up so we could all head out to the cooking contest. It was a dreary Saturday, like so many others at this time of year. I'd already spent a few hours working on French at the least-populated Starbucks in the city; I was more than ready to chill out inside a warm building with desks and spend a few more hours working on verb conjugation. And at first that's exactly what I did, taking advantage of the free coffee and cookies to pursue my own independent learning while the nice little NGO did their own thing. Eventually I ran out of verbs so I went to join in to the conversation Athena was having with someone else.

Now it was a conversation about the World of Warcraft and role playing. For the most part, I like to see myself as a fairly open minded person. I do my best to be tolerant of other belief systems, even when I don't get it. And for about the first ten minutes I did, even though I very quickly became frightened at the stories they were telling me about people who don't eat or leave the house so they can play WOW uninhibited by, oh, well, being a human being.  But we all have limits, and ten minutes of conversation about role playing/computer/video games is definitely mine so I escaped from the conversation by going to talk to the organizer.

Of course for it to be a successful avoidance device this meant that I actually did have to talk to her. This is not to imply that it was a struggle of some kind, or that she was in any way an unpleasant person -quite the opposite actually -but let's face it, I wasn't there to be part of the volunteer recruitment. I was there for free coffee, liason with Athena and a ride.  We weren't even initially talking about the Red Cross, we started with talking about mutual friends because I went to high school with her husband. Then we got on to the subjects of arts, since she's a theatre person and I probably mentioned something about being into textiles.  From there, I started telling her about how one of the big things I'm interested in doing is working with kids through the arts to teach them how to respectfully handle cultural differences. Not in a pedantic way, but just start dialogues while we're learning how to sew or make things.

One of the things I'm really passionate about is teaching people how to get comfortable working with their hands. The other thing is working on cross-cultural communication skills and issues; how do you create the dynamics and venues where respectful and equal dialogue is possible so that issues of disempowerment don't get in the way? These are huge questions, but they seem to be ones which really motivate me in all areas of my life.  Being raised in a family of educators, and my father having both the experience of being a political refugee and worked in development, I'm fairly literate in social consciousness raising activities like the ones the Red Cross does with kids. It's also something that I care about really deeply.  Teaching and working with kids is one of the big things I'd like to do with my artistic practice and my anthropology studies.

So as we're talking I get into talking about some of the different projects I've envisioned for how to do this.  Running a literacy program that uses storytelling. Eventually getting into Artists-in-the-Schools. Craft lessons. Teaching sewing.  And the woman in charge starts saying uh huh, uh huh, actually, that's the kind of thing that our organization is interested in doing.  We want to run programming that teaches kids about international issues. We want to use the arts for education. This is exactly what we are looking for, and what's more?  We run workshops teaching our volunteers the hard skills necessary to do this kind of programming.  Look, here you can sign up for courses on event planning, working with use, organizing workshops and creating a culture of peace. Normally you'd have to pay $100+ for this kind of training, but we pay for you to do it so that you can be able to help us out with what we do. Which happens to be something that's important to me: cross-cultural awareness and education.

In other words, somehow me, the commitment-phobe who goes running at the word "organization" got matched up with an opportunity to gain leadership skills.

How exactly does inevitably end up happening to me?  After twenty-four years on this earth, I have finally come to a place of acceptance with the fact that I am kind of all over the place. It isn't a phase, it isn't something that results from what I'm doing, it's just who I am. I will probably always have a billion interests, be engaged in half-a-dozen different activities, and have a mind (and body) that leap around without consciously registering the fact that I'm doing it.  This was not an easy thing to accept, but I finally thought that I had, and reached the conclusion that the best way to deal with this was to just stop trying to commit to things.  Just leave myself with some room to experiment, time and headspace that was not burdened down by expectations. Leave my guilt-complex out of the equation and go about being a human being.

And then what happens? After I've gone about working really hard on de-cluttering my own life, accepted that I'll never be able to do it all and given up on trying to ever be in any kind of position of responsibility and authority -well, here I am. I'm actually working on being practical. But even more than that, I'm actually thinking ahead to what it is I want to do and how I can realistically do it in a healthy way without driving myself crazy. And as I'm actually commiting to the courses at school which I said I was going to, reserving time for art because it's important, researching university programming for next year, and doing important things like keeping myself reguarly fed with appropriate amounts to sleep -opportunities keep presenting themselves for me to do what it is I really want to do.

It's not just the Red Cross, although that is really exciting. A few months ago I accidentally got the date wrong for my friend's chapbook launch and ended up at a Stitch 'n Bitch at the Legion where I end up talking to the folks from Ace Art. Because of that meeting I end up involved in the top secret highly influential and important Pony Club. And that leads to a chance encounter at The Tallest Poppy with some art profs from the University of Manitoba which triggered me into thinking about going into fine arts, which actually ended up giving me a clear direction forward. One that has helped me figure out what I want to do without leaving me feeling nauseous and commitment-phobic.

Honestly, I've probably been busier in the last month or two than I have been in years. I've been making things, looking for opportunities, connecting to different people, getting myself organized and on top of that still engaged in the things that matter to me like resting and seeing my friends. I don't feel burdened by all this stuff I'm doing. I feel like I'm learning to fly. I feel possible.

French class. Linguistics class. Weekly storytelling workshops. The monthly stitch and bitch with Ace Art. Bellydancing on Thursdays. Pony Club meetings once a month. On top of the other artistic things that I do all the time, even outside of the preordained creative days. These all look suspiciously like commitments to me, and yet they feel really, really right. It's not even that they will take me where I want to go, they are where I want to go.

Even art is getting this commitment-ready treatment. Thursday I was hanging out at the Broadway Farmer's Market with Kirsten and our friend Robin. They have a stall set up to sell their handmade goods, so I decided to join them in hopes to find tarot clients. As no one was biting, I'd started working on some sketches of people which I then showed Robin. And as she's looking through these, she starts developing all the things that I can do to turn my prolific creative outpourings into marketable objects which could then be sold. Me, business anything makes me uncomfortable, but as an artist and someone with a sharp head for business, Robin knows how to work with that. And we have exchangeable skill sets, so it really isn't a one way transaction.  I'm actually not that comfortable with being in charge but she is, so when we've gotten together it actually works out really well because I'm far happier taking direction, and she's a natural leader, so we work. When we get together on Tuesday we'll be talking about simple ways to put together the money-making side of my artistic business. In an immediate practical way.

Then I stumbled across a few opportunities to write. I'd been looking at sending query letters to magazines, but somewhere in the middle of that I also stumbled across a poster soliciting writers for the university newpaper. Which could mean writing about the arts, submitting topical pieces, and a way to develop some hard skills for writing, working with an editor, and dealing with publication needs. I've been giving it a lot of thought because I have a penchant to overcommit and then get overwhelmed, but I've ended up deciding that this is something that I really want to do. It's worth it to me. I want to learn how to deal with deadlines, and this is somewhere it would be worth it to me.

So now we return to the title of the post. Things that happen when you don't pay attention. Because let's face it?  Who really is capable of paying attention to everything all the time?  And yet, moment by moment you develop, change and grow unwittingly. They say that love is something that comes into your life when you stop looking for it, and I'm beginning to think that this applies to any number of other things as well. Like life goals, dreams, and even facing your demons. Who knew that it would take me getting myself into so many messes before I'd figure out that when you just let go, things happen the way they need to.

When I titled this blog "Artist in Need of a Real Job", the moniker was born from the frustration of being a creative person struggling amid the world of structure and bureacracy which have been so difficult for me to handle. And yet somehow, I feel like as this blog progresses, maybe I will be able to deal with this contradiction. Maybe even someday make peace with it.

It's a big goal, but somehow I feel hopeful.

Bureaucratic martyrdom and other excuses for caffeine

2009-09-23T23:34:00.000-05:00

After dealing with a certain amount of bureaucracy/university/authority/structure I find myself justifying an extra coffee as proper payment for dealing with such stupidity. Never mind that it's kind of inevitable, no one really likes it, the society I live in requires it, and there is no universal Caffeine Police about to ask me to produce a slip explaining the extra cup should I desire it.

Today is an extra cup of coffee day. The first full time job I ever had it was Paralyzer (so-sweet-they're-cloying cocktails). To say that dealing with any kind of institutionalism makes me grumpy is an understatement. Were it possible to comfortably go without a watch or obsessive minute watching, trust me, I would do so. Mainly because adhering to this rigidly artificial understanding of time seems like a travesty to me. To quote Margaret Randall's poem "Immigation Law":

I will not follow language
like a dog with its tail between its legs.

I need time equated with music,
hours rising in bread,
years deep from connections.

Although she's talking about the serious issue of deportation and I am talking about trivial annoyance at having to run around like a lab rat finding out what and how exactly I have to speak to in order to accomplish some fairly minor task. I'm not comparing them. Really. Just saying I like her non-linear understanding of time. Immigration is a very serious issue which should not be trivialized. Nervous giggle. Anyways.

Were university just a matter of going to classes, learning things, doing homework, and the occasional exam I would find the whole institution a lot less tiring. Distilled to pure academia, the ideal of going somewhere to learn and then possibly even talk to other people about things that you are mutually interested in would be a dream. Hell, I suspect that in some ways it still is for me. Granted I'd still struggle like all other mortals with the horror of deadlines and time tables, but that's par for the course. What I can't stand is all the stupidity that goes along with it. The posturing, ego trips and intellectual wank-fests which seem to be more or less inherent in the environment. Being away from the university for a year, everything seems so foreign and everyone seems so very young. Was I ever that wet behind the ears? (I say at the ripe old age of twenty four). Yikes. Invariably too much time there makes me incredibly ornery. Go to class and leave. Outside of there is the real world where I have allies -oops, I meant friends.

There's a free course on storytelling offered by the Centre for Creative Writing and Oral Culture which I'll be taking, but it starts next week. As I learned after chasing down the elusive ghost of a singular tiny department in a megaplex of tiny insignificant departments located amidst the cow fields. For forty-five minutes I should add. Then there's a newsletter for the arts student body newsletter looking for writers, and the Manitoban student paper needs people too. I really like the idea of getting a chance to hone writing skills, engage in (I hope) dialogue and work on the whole printing things so I can write and print more things. It kind of ties in to this crazy idea I have of doing academic research, writing fiction and all that jazz. Realistically, it can all the summarized as "I want to write". Among other things.

It's fairly tempting for me to see all things bureaucratic and institutional as the antithesis of the creative, the organic and the connected aspects of life that I so deeply value. Never mind that academia does rely fairly extensively on the whole university system, and I believe in the proposed ideals of academia more deeply than I ever did in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy or representative democracy. At heart I'm not against structure per se. Just as it pertains to limitations and the like.

Anyways, adios for now.

The wedding, the bellydancing class, and the cappuccino machine

2009-09-21T20:45:00.000-05:00

Pardon the titles. Possibly the consequence of reading a few too many Victorian era books as a child. And a few English teachers who drilled into my head the importance of titles, and encouraged with ecstatic applause the creation of different ones. It is also an excellent segway into some of the significant activities of the break in blogging, although to be honest the big reason for the blog break is unglamorous seasonal allergies. So on we go:

1. The wedding

Saturday was international talk-like-a-pirate-day, the last sunny day of the summer, and the wedding of my friend Andrea. Out in a provincial park laden thick with garter snake skins and wildflowers, and about a hundred odd people who really wanted to be there. She beamed, her fiancee looked (in a good way) near tears, and every last detail was so intimately connected to friends and family who wanted to help out.  There is something so magical to me in how rituals like weddings which have become caricatures of themselves can still -in that moment of truth- become so profoundly meaningful and beautiful. All of a sudden the words, the gestures, all those miniscule traditions alchemically transform into something sacred. Something deeper.  I think you can really feel when people engage in something like marriage ceremonies conscious (as you can be) of the significance.

I'm not ashamed to admit it, I melted. How else are you supposed to feel watching someone you love so utterly happy, especially when you are honoured enough to get to witness it?  In the back of my head I hear the lines from Fiddler on the Roof when Tevye sings "they look so natural together/just like two newlyweds should be". http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLLEBAQLZ3Q (If the embedding doesn't work this is supposed to be the youtube video of "Sunrise, Sunset".) It was everything I've ever heard that weddings should be. Intimate, unpretentious and utterly joyful. Decorations by a cousin. MC by her hilarious brother.  Fabulous catering by a local woman.  All outdoors in honour of the two nature nerds.

Over the years I've had a lot to do with the grime of the wedding business: rubber chicken, indifferent staff, hysterical bridal parties and a few bridal party garments which required a decent amount of wrangling/counselling to get done. It's tempting to get fashionably jaded about the whole wedding phenomenom; I'm the bastard child of a happily 30 odd years co-habiting couple, neither of whom value that kind of pomp-ceremony-and-paperwork institutionalism. And then I go attend something like this, and I can believe that this ritual has a value that goes deeper than what it can be made to mean. There was this part of the ceremony about how we were all there out of a feeling of deep thankfulness; gratefulness that they are individually in our lives, and gratefulness that they found each other. Them witnessing in a community of faith.  Sometimes I feel like we lose out with removing the sacred content from these ceremonies.

2. The Bellydancing Class

Bellydancing, as I've been told, originated as a way for women to strengthen their abdominal muscles for giving birth.  These dances were performed, not for men, but for other women.  To help in pregnancy. When I follow the steps laid out in this tradition, I can feel that deep connection to women's magic and medicine.  It requires that you move from that place of fertility, sexuality and creativity.  Like no other form of dance I know, it is quintessentially feminine.

And I say that unproblematically because to me, what characterizes women's experience as different from men is our potential to bear young.  It doesn't mean that women who don't have children aren't feminine to me, or that I see women who aren't mothers as failures, and I definitely am not advocating a return to the barefoot in the kitchen/hand your man a martini kind of gender relations.  But that said, even when females of any culture don't choose to have or can't have children, this social and biological basis for segregating according to sex remains, and I really do believe that the fact that we can will impact our experiences on each and every level of our lives. You can live as a woman and not have to contend with cosmetics, wage labour, or marriage, but you can't live and not have to deal with the reality that you can get pregnant. You can (and I do) argue about whether this physiological difference should mean not being able to work certain professions, lesser wages, or being silenced in various environments, but you can't argue that the reason why cultures everywhere have atleast two genders has to do with them dividing the ones-who-have-babies (women) from the ones who don't (men).

Back to the bellydancing class. I haven't been able to go for the last year, but I've deeply missed it. The class I'm in is taught by the same instructor I had before but in a new location. And as there are only two of us so far, we get some pretty amazing one-on-one attention. I wouldn't go learn it from anyone else. She is this voluptuous, entertaining and funny Israeli woman, full of enthusiasm and genuine caring for her students. She pushes, she laughs, and all in all its hard not to full in love with the subject anyways. When I get into it I feel myself vibrating with sheer bliss at being alive, in this body, female and in motion.  I dance, and I am happy to be curvy, feminine, healthy, and bestowed with a flesh which can bring me such joy.

And such a sense of holiness. When I dance, I feel blessed, but I also feel like I can give thanks that I'm here.  Praying, but praying to give not to receive. I go through moments like this and I am humbled by the great gift of just being. It's the kind of mystical experience which you have to speak in code to explain, but anyone whose ever felt it gets instinctively. I try to remember that whenever I'm feeling burdened, that I'm so deeply blessed.

3. The cappuccino machine

Wandering around in The Happy Cooker specialty food-porn-gadget central, I discovered the cappuccino machine section. They have machines which hold enough water to ration an army, grind your coffee beans for you, have intricate and sanitary milk steamers, and measure out the perfectly oil-and-foam espresso shot, can control how long or short it is, and do multiple shots at the same time. They come with stainless steel milk urns and explanations for the science behind their interior mechanics which look as though they hail from NASA. They also come with a price tag of $500 dollars.

I confess to having a brief moment of shallowness; in that instant, all thought of how many good things $500 can do in the world went out the window. My first though was : "I would consider finding someone to marry just to stick that cappuccino machine on the wedding registry". Hell, I would probably go without plates or a microwave for a few months, and omit everything else and JUST stick that machine on the wedding registry. The idea of a green card wedding also briefly occured to me. Wanted: spouse prepared to engage in a mutually beneficial citizenship-for-cappuccino-machine ceremonial transaction. Conservatives and smokers need not apply.

I am weak, forgive me, but you had to be there to experience the raw carnal temptation that was this coffee machine. Even if you don't enjoy coffee, the aesthetics alone would have made you too salivate. Or maybe that's just me. I unapologetically admit that the intensity of my passion for good coffee may have something to do with the lack of, um, a significant other in my life, but even were I to find myself all at once head over heels in a blissful-and-stable whirlwind romance with a man who, oh let's say could talk about issues of cultural appropriation while wearing funny masks, I'm pretty sure there will always be a substantial place in my heart for coffee. It's not even that I drink a lot of it, but that which I do is consumed mindfully and with such gusto as to be considered a pseudospiritual experience. There is a longstanding joke between a friend and I which uses coffee-quality as a metaphor for men; the lowest is instant, and neither of us goes there.

Addendum

The search for a real job goes on. As does the linguistics and French homework. Tomorrow is officially art day sans all forms of scheduled obligations. Will try to sometime this week add in links, photos and videos for previous blog entries. At some point I will also be promoting it on other sites with the idea that those who like what I do will stick around and read. Or not, as they choose.

Some musings on the ethics of figure drawing

2009-09-17T01:11:00.000-05:00

Drawing has always been something I've had a huge hang up about. There are people I know who have been drawing since they could hold a pencil, and require very little effort to produce perfect pencil sketches. I am not one of these people. Where it involves a sewing machine -there I tend to feel pretty secure, but drawing is one of those skills that I really feel as though I need to work on to go where I want to with my textile art. It's a case of "learn to draw to transfer abilities to textiles" as opposed to the other way around. However, through the encouragement of a roommate in Ontario I've come to see it something that requires to work to develop just the same way writing does, lost a great deal of fear about trying, and slowly gotten into doing more of it over time.

My particular weak spot that I would really like to work on is being able to capture the human form. I avoid faces whenever possible, especially when I'm sketching clothing on a disembodied human form. Or atleast, I have. About a month ago I decided that this was pretty stupid since last time I checked there is no "perfect figure drawing fairy" who hits you over the head and gives you a skill spontaneously; like everything, it requires lots of practice and entering into it with a beginner's mind. If I want to make puppets, draw clothing, and create erotic art then learning to capture the human form will be a relatively necessary skill. So I begin. Tentatively, but firmly.

The problem is that there really aren't a lot of situations in which human beings stay put in one position over a long period of time. Actually, pretty much the only time that they do is when they are asleep. So short of walking around peeking in windows, well, there really aren't a lot of sleeping people around to draw. Even if they did exist, it doesn't really help with learning about facial expressions and movement anyways. If I was in drawing classes then there would probably be the opportunity to use models, but I'm not, so getting someone to pose will take a remarkable amount of coordination. Not a bad thing, but it isn't an opportunity that presents itself all that often either.

So what, you may ask yourself, does the intrepid Artist-in-Need-of-a-Real-Job do to overcome these obstacles? Well, she draws in public. Specifically, she draws people on the bus or in crowds. Always strangers, and almost always from the back. There I sit at the back of the bus, carefully selecting a target based on such considerations such as the way they hold their body or really interesting hair. (Yes, as a matter of fact I am a Leo, why do you ask?)

Then I undertake the guerilla-sketching project while trying to pretend that I'm not looking at the person in question, and desperately hoping that no one notices what I am doing in the mean time. I don't like my activities being noticed because this attention either leads to someone critiquing my work or having a conversation that I don't want to have with someone who usually wants to tell me about their own personal issues with artists/drawing/art/people/religion/weather or the like. Some people seem to emit a kind of energy that attracts strangers to share deep confidences with them, and I am one of them.

Generally, I try not to take more than five minutes for a sketch. Partially in order to train myself to capture the key aspects of motion, but also from the practical consideration that people move and its better to catch it fast. I like to use ink drawing pens, marker paint-brush pens, or watercolour pens. The ink is just my favourite medium period, but the brush style gives the nicely spontaneous appearance of movement which I like. After all, it's not as though anything stays still in reality. Even the earth rumbles in a plate-tectonic dance.

Despite my insecurities about drawing, I can definitely see a marked improvement even within the sketches of the last few days. Just in doing it I'm figuring out proportion, which parts to catch first, and the folds on people's clothes instinctively. I like the flowing aspect of human movement. Nothing is ever really hard with right angles. We're actually pretty organic and free flowing creatures no matter how hard we try to concrete-and-glass-window ourselves into machine mode. What I like about the pieces I've been doing is how clearly you can see that the pose captured is one which will not be kept for long. And I like sketching people on the bus or in class where you can so clearly see that they are waiting. They are so calm in their own spaces that they never even look past their own bubbles. There is something beautiful about that, if strange as well.

But I worry about the fact that I'm sketching people without their permission. It's not as though I'm such a good artist that they'd even recognize themselves, or as though the pieces I'm doing are about to be shown anywhere as is; if anything then I might incorporate a few features into someone else, but I'd never put someone into a piece as is. That feels like a boundary transgression to me, and I really, really, really don't want to hurt anyone or make them uncomfortable. Then again, I want to sketch them and it feels equally weird to ask everyone for permission for a really raw sketch. If it was a portrait I'd feel different, but mostly its just rough silhouettes. And mostly its from the back.

Still. I'm a little worried about this. This afternoon I was at a performance put on by the Centre for Creative Writing and Oral Culture where two writers and a storyteller performed for an hour; throughout the performance I sketched all three of them various times, or at various angles. Whenever I'm at a performance I try really hard to respect the people onstage and listen intently. So I did. And I do. Without something in my hands to work with I actually feel naked; I honestly feel as though while sketching I was paying a lot of attention to the artists in question. It's just another way of paying attention. A different kind of people watching, which I've always done. With professors, performers, and other speakers I feel as though they are already out in the public eye so they are fair game -but is this true? I'm not sure how I'd feel if I found out that someone had a notebook with pages of images of me. I'd probably be flattered, but it would be weird.

Though its been good just drawing random people quickly, I'm craving a full on posing session with someone who will stay in roughly the same position for atleast a five minute stretch. In particular, I'd really love to sketch some people in the nude in order to be able to better understand musculature and all that goes on beneath the clothes. Being textile-inclined, I'm pretty attentive to fabric drape when I draw, but I do want to work on the human form. There are a couple of friends who've told me that they would pose for me and I'd feel comfortable about doing that, but I still want to work on what I can until then.

Part of the issue is that I know as a beginner my sketches aren't all going to be that flattering and they aren't yet at the point where you can really see the grace which I see in the model. So I want people who are going to be cool enough with the learning process not to get offended. And different body types so I can learn about the variation in human forms. It's funny though, because I can really say all the ways in which I've been training my hands and eyes even though I don't necessarily draw that much. All that time working on free-hand embroidery, calligraphy, whatever else it is I do... it's actually given me a level of hand-eye coordination which I feel pretty proud of. The sketches aren't right just yet, but you can feel something from them, tell that I'm getting somewhere with them. Or will. It's like learning French and Spanish; it's important for me to keep in mind that it's a long term process where persistance counts for more than brief sporadic spurts of activity.

Tomorrow there is no classes for Daniela, unless you count bellydancing, which I'm not. In honour of a fairly intense couple of weeks I will not be available tomorrow. Instead there will be puttering, there will be knitting and there will be creative time, but absolutely no responsible-adult-stuff.

I'm looking forward to it.

The Real Job

2009-09-15T23:06:00.001-05:00

When I ask the person in the front of the restaurant if they are hiring, we smile at one another and are gracious as they take my resume and we shake hands goodbye. It's a superficial interaction in so many ways, that of restaurant staff. The way you interact with each other is a gracious dance, a ritual deeply established by a very specific set of social mores. Outside of this space there is no guarantee that you would even try to want to like each other, but the magic of the environment is that it dictates this special way of behaving. At it's best, it makes that courteousness sincere, while at worst it leaves you feeling separated outside-from-inside. I still love it anyways.

It's half way through September, two classes into university and a few weeks into me trying to get myself logistically in order. Having set up classes, gotten fairly non-commital memberships, and worked on establishing a routine the time has now come for the magical world of legitimate employment. And by legitimate employment, what I mean is that which provides regular paycheques, not that which is worthy of respect, since as far as I'm concerned tarot reading and seamstressing both count. Desirable wage labour employment in my world always means restaurants.

Food service is such a cliche that I'm ashamed to admit how much I like it -but I really do. Feeding people is a good feeling for me. Working is a good feeling. Socializing and being part of an assembly of people is an amazing feeling. There are other jobs out there for twenty-something year old university students, and I've done a few of them, but at the end of the day I'd rather be working with food. The money is a huge incentive, but the food part of it is still a big deal for me.

I miss being in a restaurant environment.   Five minutes in the door and I find that my back straightens up, my wrist goes into the tray holding position, and I'm automatically checking for how many people there are versus the available servers. The rituals of bringing people drinks, of checking on them, being at someone else's attention... I like that feeling.   There's something wonderfully submissive about the experience, and I want that. No, I don't want to be a waitress the way I want to tell stories, do my Masters or make textiles, but it still deeply matters to me that I learn to be really good at it some day.  And it's a transferrable skill. That's always useful.

Applying at restaurants today was actually kind of enjoyable for some reason. Maybe it's just getting to talk to people that's so awesome, but it just felt really good.  I hunger for that feeling.  And I want a real job with real money so that I have the money to support my textile habit, pay off debts and be able to devote time to creative endeavours. It's so tempting when applying for jobs to just fixate on one place and then stop trying, even though you know that would be a really bad idea because bottom line people work to get money and jobs you don't have can't provide that.

So over time, I've tried to steer clear from that, and yet somehow there is always that struggle not to count on any one place too much. With restaurants it is especially bad because you can't even count on the job working once you have it since the whole industry is notorious for being a nightmare to get regular shifts in. And then there is making sure that you get along with everyone, keeping regular hours, not being able to count on a set amount of tips and so on. All that aside, I do as mentioned before, love it but I still get nervous about the whole starting up fresh proccess.

Swearing off of getting your hopes up about particular jobs is a lot like not getting carried away with crushes; it's pretty much impossible.  Inevitably some prospects will appeal more, and it's hard not to hold on to it even though I know in my heart of hearts from long experience that you can't count on these things necessarily coming through.  Most of getting hired seems to be timing, as opposed to the billion other resume-enhancing activities us wage labour peons engage in.  The place I'd really like to work, I think, is a Mexican restaurant and bar in the exchange district decorated like Frida Kahlo's house with a really good menu. Spent some time there talking to the staff, and emphasized a few times that I also speak Spanish. The way I figure it, I've got about thirty five resumes printed, so if I get them all out by the end of the week hopefully there will be money flow in the distant future. With food. And lots of conversations.

The other alterative I'm considering is looking for work with kids, particularly doing arts and crafts. Teaching is something that I enjoy and am really good at, but I kind of like the money and structure of restaurant work. Showing up for a two hour shift where I'm being paid by the hour feels a lot like a waste of time to me. Although it does feel a lot more rewarding in many ways. It's a deeper level of interaction with people at the very least. This is one of those times when it feels better to let the powers that be decide, since I can't. Yes.

It's about a week into classes and I already feel like I've been going-going-going all week. Not sure if it's just because this particular week being the one where my friend is getting married or what, but I want to make sure that there is time for creativity. Space to breath. Rushing around sounds like it should be rewarding, but I'm not sure that it is actually. I mean, OK, there is that whole "Yes! I have accomplished", but those moments don't last forever.

Then again, I'm starting to re-evaluate my attitudes to what I do. I wonder sometimes if I don't end up feeling like a victim of the things that I commit to, instead of just being a lot more careful about what and how I do commit to. I want to have a lot going on -and I do right now- but I want balance. Space. Time for these things to sink in. It's tempting to try and schedule more creative time this week but I feel weird about that too. Wedding this weekend. Resumes to hand out. It's tempting to say "later" but there's only so much later things can get, especially when a huge part of me wanting to do things like take French, Linguistics, Bellydancing and get a real job is to facilitate having the chance to do creative stuff.

These issues have become even more significant for me because they actually tie into some fairly serious healthy concerns, but the questions apply to everyone I think. On the bright side, the doctor gave me a clean bill of health today and a lot of running around got done. Still. In doing the necessary things, there has to be room for grace in how you perform these acts; I really believe that.

Bohemians in the Corporate Sector, or my adventures at a website workshop

2009-09-14T21:52:00.000-05:00

This is the story of two artists who decided to take a free business seminar together, and what happened to them when they did. It was a decision made innocently enough; they were both in the position of trying to turn the brilliant gold of their creative endeavours into the base metal of rent and debt repayment money. They planned to do this through the reverse alchemic process of learning about business basics, in order to better navigate in the corporate bureaucratic world into which they lived.

Although it was tempting to stay in the happy world of Bohemia all the time, after careful consideration they quickly realized that no one in Bohemia actually had any money so it would be necessary to branch out. "Let's learn about setting up a website!" one suggested to the other one fine day. "It's a free workshop, and then we can have somewhere for people to see our work if they are interested."  So they agreed, and showed up at the office building on the appointed day. Though it was strange to be in an office building with glass, concrete, logos and secretaries, they decided that it would be worth the discomfort if they could come away with some useful skills which could then be transferred into their respective creative undertakings.

On the commencement of the workshop they were ushered into a large room with imposing flags, garbage cans disguised as furniture, official looking pamphlets and complimentary beverages. While they met eyes for support and reassurance in this frightening new environment, they watched as the Suits set up television conferencing with Fort Francis, Moosejaw and St. Pierre using technology out of a spy movie. This was it. The workshop had begun. Another Suit stood up and introduced himself as a website designer for a small business, and then went on to the material.

Except that he didn't actually.  Instead, he read the information verbatim off the twelve page brochure over an extended two hour period. While talking about starting a small business website, he very carefully detailed all of the things that your website designer would require from you when you hired them, and what would make their life easier, and how indespensible they were.  He talked about important website concerns, such as making your page accessible to the visually impaired -especially those who are partially colour blind.  While emphasizing the importance of reaching everyone (or atleast their money) he also let it slip that this high contrast resolution is easier to see on hand-held devices, although the artists would not dream of accusing him of being shwarmy enough to promote his "sensitivity to disability issues" as anything so demeaning as being focused on the wealthy corporate business consumer.

At this point which was barely half-way into the presentation, one of the artists had resorted to drawing a cartoon of the presenter as a rat-looking genie emerging from a lamp with the caption "for all your website needs" and then resorted to starting a game of hangman on the still blank notebook for "important facts". The voice had meshed with the drone of the electronics, and they were forced to take consolation in styrofoam cups of horribly stale coffee. A meaningful symbol of their existential crisis, as neither is inclined towards bad java of any kind.

It was at this point that the presenter also gave them a sliding scale of prices for creating a website. He claimed that for under $500 you could get something akin to pacman-for-the-net graphic-wise, but to get even a half way decent one you needed to put in anywhere from $5k-$10k. The two artists looked at one another; while each knew a plethora of people with websites, neither of them could think of a single one who had ever been able to put together $500 at one time, let alone $5k-$10k. They also wondered to one another why anyone with $5-10k to throw at a website would be at a free seminar on a Monday afternoon instead of just throwing a great deal of money at a website developer and making them do all their work for them.

Confused, they forced themselves to stay in the room and listen while drawing strategic cartoons of various computer items trying to eat people and the like, or just shading in the five minute increments on a clock until the class was over. By the end of two hours, past a few tidbits gleaned here and there among the infomercial for Mr Presenter's company, all they had learned was that they should have a lot of money, be conventional, and not make arty websites with any kind of cheap or free programming.  To be fair, he mainly focused on the first two, the third being more of an after thought.

At the end of the seminar the two artists decided that the free juices provided by the business were not sufficient to make up for their wasted time.  They rushed frantically out of the building in a flurry of purple hair, flowers and pink skirts in search of real coffee capable of cleansing their palettes of the brown-coloured-liquid desperately imbibed within this edifice. While doing so, they consoled themselves with having gotten a few really good ideas for art projects out of it (more of these to come if you follow this blog), although they each felt vaguely used.

It was particularly upsetting to realize that while their provincial and federal government were in the proccess of wrangling the few last available coins out the arts in their country, they put a great deal of money into paying people like the Mr Presenter gentleman to give workshops to people where all they did was promote their own businesses. For the first time, one felt tempted to use the phrase "my tax dollars paid for that?!", a line which as a leftist she usually finds a little morally despicable. This event was made even more troubling because the coffee with which they went to cleanse their systems ended up being just as unpalpatable as that consumed in styrofoam cups scarce minutes earlier, and even the most devoted caffeine addict needs to draw the line somewhere.

There is not so much a moral to this story, as any number of drawings which shall be added soon, all of which feature various insundry creatures from the land of Corporate Sector. It was not exciting.

Between cover letters and applications there is a person drinking coffee and writing

2009-09-13T16:30:00.000-05:00

Apologies for the multiple posts in one day. True to the promise of my last entry, I've spent the afternoon working on various forms of art-related bureaucracy. Even though I definitely agonize over anything written, after writing what it feels like a million cover letters recently, they are getting a little easier. And I've resigned myself to the whole excercise in the first place; on the whole writing cover letters makes me feel like a pompous jerk, but I'm trying to be as down to earth about them as possible.

To date I've sent out an art-related email, written a letter to make a presentation at an event, started to go through the ACI mentorship program application, and have a draft of an article proposal which I want to send to MAWA. There's a few other things I've still got to do but my brain is going fuzzy. There's this thing about trying to give my odd creative expressions some kind of legitimacy through stuff like "artist bios" and "experience" which sits weird with me, but I think that I'll get used to it. As long as I can remember that I can approach these things informed by my values and what I believe art and creativity is really about. Feeling fuzzy though. So much officialness and authority leaves me dizzy.

Still, I'm feeling pretty empowered about doing things like writing cover letters and applying for art related programs in the first place. It's one thing to say that I make things and scribble, and quite another one to actually be trying to do something with it and I feel unapologetically proud of myself for having the courage to do it. Especially because these are things that make me uncomfortable. I've always said that my dream was to be an artist, even when I've added other things to the list, and now I'm actually pursuing this goal. Working on getting my stuff out there, on training, not just brushing off the hours I spend on creative pursuits as a waste of time which I do on the side as a distraction from the real job of being a responsible citizen.

I've given myself until October before I seriously start to look at applying for university next year, putting together a portfolio and the like. Hopefully by that time I'll be a little more settled into a routine and have a real money making job which can financially support this project. The school and art thing, not the blog. Definitely not being done for money. Ha ha. Anyways, back to bureaucracy

Bohemia, balance and other words that start with B

2009-09-13T11:54:00.000-05:00

With all the humidity in the air my hair is turning curly-curly and I am just vain enough to appreciate that. I would dearly love to look like one of those old sepia photographs of curvy women with the soulful eyes who are blatantly feminine, but honestly I like the way I look too. I love my body as is. Kind of a crazy confession to make, I know, but there it is.

Sunday morning and I've already been up for hours. This bodes well for the future. I like the idea of always being running aground at the seams, into a crazy frenzied manic state, and staying up all the time until all hours of the night but the truth is that I feel better when I don't. Besides, that degree of intense emotion, drama and passion is already so inherent in my nature why the hell should I nurture it anymore than I have to?

When I'm balanced, and do all these crazy things that doctors suggest that you do like eating properly and sleeping eight hours a night. So OK, trying to be healthy doesn't exactly have the same romantic and artistic sound to it, but the irony is that I find it makes me feel alot more romantic and artistic. Besides which, do we really need another casualty on the road to destroyed? I don't think so.

The kyanite ring I bought from Kir at our yard sale yesterday thrumms on my hand. With it on, I somehow feel more grounded to that source of creative-inspired-academia.  I've secretly coveted it for years and am thrilled now it's mine. It's a stunning piece with this full elipses stone where you can see the outline of a medieval monk if you look carefully. The band has holes taken out of it, probably to make it less heavy to wear, but somehow they remind me of the moon, and the Loreena McKennit song "Skellig".  To me the narrator is someone who is commited to serving the sacred through language, text, and learning. Of reaching past the human limitations put on that quest for knowledge and eventually working to commune with the divine, surrendering to that greater consciousness. Something that I would like to work on.

Loreena McKennit's The Book of Secrets plays in the background, a slow and sensous belly-dancing number called "Marco Polo". Her music pulls me deeper. Into that place of magic and connection to the earth beneath the earth. Past the superficiality of conversations about bread or which kind of cheese I want in the grocery store and into this cosmology where people living, loving and breathing over thousands of years means something -if only to other humans. A dance of the spheres. It's hard to pin point exactly what does and doesn't have this grounded-connected quality to it but I can always tell you when it's missing. In between the notes of music there is a tangible presence of Spirit, an invocation of something deep and meaningful.  It's the awareness of voicing as a sacred act, but not necessarily a serious one. Laughter is pretty sacred too.

Last night after the yard sale I curled up inside to watch Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios and knit. It was a slow day, but had the advantage of allowing me to slow down a little and crash -which I've been badly needing to do. Probably my favourite Pedro Almodovar movie to date. Zany, dramatic and strange but not that weird shock-for-the-sake-of-it thing he does which gets boring. (Don't for the love of Goddess, God or any other pantheonic deity watch Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del monton).

Knitting some opera gloves to wear to my friends wedding next Saturday, probably mostly on the bus to U of M this week.  Slowness.  With good design, there is a necessary amount of negative and positive space balancing together for the piece to be successful. I apply the same principles to being active versus regenerating. One can not be a verb all the time and still enjoy the verb state of being. You may be able to tell that I struggle with some guilt about this not doing anything for any amount of time fiasco. Well, I'm learning.

Spent some much craved quality time with my linguistics textbook aside from watching the movie and I am completely enthralled with the discipline. It fascinates me that this language faculty within us requires the species to engage in constant acts of creativity. And that as much as we joke about there being very little originality out there, in reality each and every time we say anything we are probably coming up with a new combination never before seen. It could be that human beings developed creativity as a specific way of being in the world, culture and language forming a complex that everyone is required to have. Children are born into oxygen, and then born into language... Isn't that cool?

I'm really interested in making some comparisons with conclusions that linguists have drawn about demarkating languages and applying it to the way that people understand cultural groupings. There are boundaries which are useful to have, but they are artificial research tools. There is no clear point at which we stop being impacted by our ancestry, our environment, or in the proccess of constant change..

The notes of my textbook are spotted with questions I have about the idea of a universal grammar, or about speech patterns in general. I feel pretty comfortable with this non-elist grammar=mutually intellegible communication system idea though. All languages function equally well. I like this. Also intriguing to me is this idea of a directive grammar as one that leads you into learning a new language through the grammar of a previously understood one; I'd never realized before how clearly you are impacted by what your first language(s) are. So totally intrigued. Will be writing more definitely.

I'm tempted to go hang out with my linguistics textbook some more today, but I'd also like to start looking at the French if I'm going to be doing homework today. And I know that somewhere I have written out various letters, applications and the like which if I could get a chunk done from today my next week would be considerably easier. If I thought that I was going to be pursuing arts to get away from writing and bureaucracy then I can already tell that I was sadly, sadly mistaken... Atleast it's my own preference of paperwork, and that means something to me. Also, I really do like writing. Even paper writing, something which causes me no end of anxiety, is something which I enjoy when I really get into it and am not completely panicked about deadlines.

My friend had mentioned something about a place that was hiring, so I'll be looking into that early next week. If today is ye-old-artistic-bureaucracy-day then there will hopefully be more time next week to get into the world of applying for gainful employment.  And well, I do miss working with food. Which is where I head now. Seriously, I have to work on some better concluding lines ;)