trifective

2011-06-02T11:35:00.000-07:00

2009-04-12T17:09:00.000-07:00

2009-02-16T09:20:00.000-08:00

2008-06-22T18:05:00.000-07:00

originally published june 2006, one of the only things from this blog that ever made it anywhere. everything else is archived because it's painfully bad.

1) Most contemporary British writers are obsessed with Shit: Self, Welsh, Amos, Warner. Try reading four pages without running into somesort of detailed description of bodily evacuations.

2) I've got my car back, and my glasses. It's nice to able to see clearly. It's nice to have a shiny red Mazda in plain focus. My friend Chuck And A Half is back from Las Vegas, and he came with me to retrieve my car. My heart was in my throat the whole time, so I was glad to have someone come with me to do it, especially as it looked like I was going to have to do it alone.

3)Pattern recognition : I've just realized that after I date someone, if it doesn't work out, I become a little creepy around them, go to extreme legnths to alienate them, test their patience and how nice they'll be before they finally brand me irredeemable and strange. I have no idea what it's about, and it's way of embarrassing, but it's like a compulsion, like tourettes or something. I've got Creep Tourettes, bourne of insecurity and amplified by problem-solution drinking.

Rot once told me that my behavior is a self-fulfilling prophecy, but I think it's more like, I see what's coming and just start acting all weird so I can blame all the failure on my strange behavior, which I know is actually not who I am so that's okay, right. Which I guess is the definition of a self-fulfilling prophecy, but I think the that term suggests I have some control over things,which I rarely do, it usually goes pear-shaped and then I start acting like a jerk. Does any of this make sense? Dr. Phil? Are you out there reading my blog?

When was the last time you cried, Dr.Phil? Is it hard being the "tell-it-like-it-is?" man? Do you regret your massive donation to the Bush 2004 campaign? What about the universe, Dr. Phil? do you stand under the stars and think of Caesar and Socrates and the Witch Hunts and Dinosaurs? Is Dr. Phil a out-of-control T-Rex of the media, that even you, born Phil McGraw, cannot control? You, born under the same sky (yet totally different, because the stars, Phil, they are always dying )as that great Emperor who met the stars' fate by the hand of his brother? Do you think much about that, when you're telling-it-like-it-is?

What would you tell me, about my own self-defeat, Phil? (for surely I could call you Phil, and dispense with this doctor nonsense now that it's just you and I staring atthe stars)

Perhaps I would hand you the last dreg of the warm beer we'd split, and you'd haul on the bottle, look at me, with eyes heavy from alcohol and impatience and just say "Lainey, some people is just fucked up".

4) I am wearing a thick coat of crankiness today.

5) The end.

6) I bet there is a star named for Dr. Phil. It seems like you can't be that famous and not have had someone name a star for you. Perhaps you or I have even made a wish on the Dr. Phil star. Perhaps it shot through the sky (I have seen so many this summer) as I sat drunkenly staring at it. Somebody once told me I was in love with the sky, but maybe it's just Dr. Phil.

7) I just realized this is the second time I've written about the Good Doctor in as many months. Good heavens (pun intended).

8 or 3 continued) And after we'd named the star, Phil, claimed that little piece of the universe for your namesake, I bet instead of feeling larger, we'd feel tiny. We'd carved out another jack-o-lantern eye in the shape of pop culture, but up there, Phil, you're just a tiny ball of dust and ice amongst others, amongst stars named for great-grandmothers,and unjustly cancerous young boys and astronomers driven to madness by dogma and politics. It would be almost democratic up there, in the sky, past the edge of this galaxy... Your currency here and now, the weight you carry after healing marriages and helping self-esteem deprived women shed layers of adipose tissue so as to further help themselves to a plate of galatic happiness, it would mean little: your star would not live longer or appear brighter against the hoards of light pollution that crowds the night sky outside your Texas home. In fact, Phil, such would be it's fate that, given the speed of light and the Dr.Phil Star's distance from us, your star would already be but a memory made of light, dead millions of years before you ever helped Oprah defend herself against the iron fist of the Texas Cattle Industry. So that glow, that glory, like that newly- found self-esteem of your svelte success stopries, would be but an agreed-upon ignorance, a suspended disbelief as tangible as the satellite waves that beam your hairless skull into pixels on my television.

Do you know what the French word for scalp is, Phil? Cuir de Tete. Literally translated to Texan, that means: the leather of your head.

And we are nothing if not literalist, aren't we, Doctor? That's why you and I get along so well. But for this shared illusion of your star, we're a couple of no-b.s. pragmastists.You're always saying "you gotta get real" and, even though I think we can both agree that your authority is just a another example of a shared hallucination, I couldn't agree more we have to 'get' real or 'be real' or act' real' or 'keep it' real ( though the last one is a little street and therefore a bit scary, non?). We're in the foxhole together, friend. Agreeing to concepts of time and space and love and the vain pursuit of self-satisfaction, because if we didn't, our brains might explode, right through the leather of our heads and out for everyone to see.

And if that were to happen right in the middle of a show, or say in the middle of the "JC Penny Jam for Kids" you so artfully hosted, you can imagine the ramifications. Entire spools of understanding coming undone before our very eyes. 'Getting real' would become a sadly ironic slogan to spraypaint on the cliched brick walls of depressed urban ghettos, and hipster-gentrified hotspots, rather than the life affirming rallying-cry it is today. Long fractures of sanity would snake their way through the sub-urbs and then the cities and then, Phil, there would be the unbearable weightlessness of everything depressing it's thumb upon us. Oh Phil Calvin McGraw, holder of doctorate and gatekeeper of western faith, we can't have it happen.

Let's you and I build a house of televisions and watch repeats of M*A*S* H*.

2008-02-01T16:02:00.000-08:00

NEW BLOG!!! GO THERE NOW!!!

I have a new blog at elainecorden.tumblr.com, called Dangerfield! I know what you're thinking: why do I need a new blog? How is it different from trifective?

For your edification, pie charts.

Exhibit A: Trifective subject matter :

Exhibit B: Dangerfield! subject matter:
What are you waiting for?

2007-07-13T11:54:00.000-07:00

The Tyee's Vanessa Richmond interviewed 6 BC Fiction writers for a piece on young novelists.
I'm technically only a young half-a-novelist,but I was happy to be asked. The piece turned out really well- even if I distinctly remember saying to myself "no talking, just listening" before we went to panel. Bigmouth strikes again.

2007-07-05T16:47:00.000-07:00

A Field Guide to the East Vancouver Male

Further to my post below, complaining about how I can't get a date, allow me to draw you a little portrait of the dating landscape in East Van. No, you don't have to deal with impossibly square dudes, or dudes who want to go to the Roxy, or dudes who don't read, or dudes with shitty record collections but it's still ugly.

Most of my girlfriends are married or in serious relationships, but there also lots that are inexplicably single- brilliant, hot, talented funny women who somehow just end up dating wieners. After extensive research, interviews and my own field studies I've come up with a primer on specific types that haunt Mount Pleasant. Should you go on some sort of EV make-out safari, be sure to bring this along with you.

The Carrbon Copy
Six foot plus and beardier than ZZ-top, this Emily Carr student is likely to be found at a electro-dance party or at a backroom art show where most of the work is, like, panda heads drawn on people or some such combination of wide-eyed cuteness and sinister thrash art. Usually surrounded by a pack of adoring young girls, this kid is the star of his college, and has likely had a couple shows of his own, usually involving neon abstracts, "sound collage" or some fusion of the two ("every note frequency corresponds to a colour" he'll inform you). Yes, the Carrbon copy and his hot, lithe body are minor constellations, glittering with youthful idealism and broad shoulders. You'll feel a little intimidated by all the American Apparel-glad starlets around him, but guess what? The Carrbon Copy is into *you*. He's asked you're friends if you're single. He likes older women, you see ( a minor humiliation only if you fall into the bourgeouise trap of believing a woman's age diminshies her attractiveness). He'll light your cigarettes and ignore everyone else around for the whole night. You'll talk art and culture and even though he sounds a bit ridiculous talking "post" and "parallax" that, you'll still kind of want to french him, because he's young and hot and you are bourgeouise and may not get to make out with an eager 23-year-old again. Proceed with caution: the Carrbon Copy is fun for a night but next week there will be some other woman who catches his fancy, and you'll feel stupid for having a crush on a 23- year-old.

Spot him by
-Ruffled, upkempt plumage
-Belmont mild attached to left wing
-Feathers which slightly resemble that of the female Carrbon Copy, thus making him seem lees threatening to prey.

The Emosogynist
You almost feel sorry for this guy. He grew up in some fuck-nowhere town and moved here after college. He still rates U2 and only came around on the gay marriage issue because of Keith and David on "Six Feet Under". He's in the big city now, though, and free-to-be-me styles, he's gone all indie rock- which means a nice haircut and wearing girls jeans and playing in a band that sounds like, hmmm, let's say... Modest Mouse? You probably met him at a Wolf Parade or Arcade Fire show, and after a few cleverly worded exchanges on MySpace, you made a date. The emosogynist will surprise you by paying for drinks, and later surprise you even more when it turns out he's actually not crap in bed. Here's the problem: the Emosogynist, even though he owns L7's first record, still can't quite see you as an equal. It tears him up inside that he wants to fuck someone that's smarter than him, makes him feel like Keith (or David). You'll go see his MOR band, he'll kind of ignore you in that stupid "I invited you but I'm too busy to say hi because that would mean you're my girlfriend" way that dudes in bands do. Every move you make will be interpreted by the Emosogynist as some play to trap him with your vagina, make him your husband, and suck away from jam time, so you can start popping out babies, because, where he grew up, that's what girls do. Don't waste your time with the Emosogynist. He basically wants to marry his mother.

Spot him by:
-Man bangs
-Tight-fitting band t-shirt
-Preference for Paul McCartney as his favourite Beatle. Aversion to Yoko Ono as the bitch who broke up the Beatles.

The Keirketaard
You can find this dude pretty much at any coffeeshop or dive bar on the East Side. He'll be the one in the corner, reading Camus or some shit that blows your mind its so clever. You'll pick up that he's a all world-weary and sad, and he'll pick up that from you, and being a girl, you'll want to take care of this broken bird and nurse him back to health. And they'll be flashes of hope: he'll be funny in a bitter, sarcastic way, sexy as hell and kind of a broken genius. Just lying on the floor listening to Mingus with this dude will feel like the heaviest shit ever. When you finally hook-up (which will take forever, cause dude has no game except being intense), it will be like sleeping with a Dostoevsky novel. This guy is awesome- it's you and him against the world, happy only when you're together. Problem: you're really only allowed to be happy together. He's like the reverse of Vidal Sasoon: if you don't feel bad, he doesn't feel good. Avoid for obvious reasons: don't try to "stick it out" till he gets happy. It ain't gonna happen (except years later, when you see him all happy with some impossibly cute girl, and you kind of die inside).

Spot him by:
-Checking the darkest corner of a party.
-The book he has brought to the bar (see Houllebecq, Murakami, Pynchon)
-Mating call which resembles the sigh of a disaffected 13-year-old girl.
-Refusal to see a doctor about pathological depression, because that shit is all just the pharmaceutical industry trying to control you.

The Chakra Con
A difficult beast to identify, the Chakra Con seems like the most enlightened character you'll ever meet. He's read Jung and the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and believes in magic and meditation without seeming like a waxy fruitcake. He can make jokes and hang bro-styles with the best of 'em, but he also has a sincere streak that says" hey dudes, I don't care if irony is cool, I'm comfortable enough to be myself". Initially intoxicating, the Chakra Con will probably cry in front of you in the first month, or force feed you his poetry, but instead of losing your ladyboner, you'll think "wow, he really *is* secure with himself!" And then.... it will start with little digs about your "discomfort with your body" and progress further into him using the language of spirituality to undermine you-- your consumption of mainstream media, your penchant for diet coke- they're totally bad for your spirit. He's kind of like the new-age equivalent of an evangelical Christian. It will end when he brow beats you into confessing something really vulnerable about yourself, and he decides that's "unhealthy" and dumps you. You will simultaneously feel better and worse about it when you realize you fell for someone who poetry raped you.

Spot him by:
-Distinctive scent of green tea mixed with last night's stale gin.
-Compulsive need to "journal".
-Spontaneous need to show you "correct form" in yoga.
- Copy of "The Secret" at beside table.

The Dog What Done Shat on the Rug
So named because he's so adorable you can't stay mad at him, this mainstay is pretty much perma-stoned and perma-broke. In some ways, he's like a three-legged puppy. Hopelessly at getting anywhere, but too pathos-inducing for you to simply leave it on the street. At first, it will seem cute, and you will find the two bohemians living in poverty thing charming, but be assured it wears off quickly. Hallmarks of TDWDSOTR include standing you up cause he totally forgot and was just, like, jamming with his bros, drinking your beer, "borrowing" your money and all general crimes committed by potheads. This can end one of two ways- his band will actually go somewhere, and he'll dump you for someone hotter, or you'll look at your negative bank account one day and call it a day (who am I kidding- it's always the former).

Spot him by:

-Leave change on your bedside table. Much like the common magpie, TDWDSHOTR will be drawn to hoarding it.
-A hangdog expression which suggests the world has dealt him a severe injustice.
-Mating call involving the description of "his next album/art show"

The Funnest Guy Ever
He's usually an artist or photographer, and you'll be drawn to him because he's so damn charming and FUN. And hot. He's the dude who will flirt with your friends just enough to make you feel self-satisfied, who'll buy rounds, who wants to go play badminton at the beach at three a.m. He's funny and adventurous and always surprising you. Unfortunately, he's also bi-polar. Or an alcoholic. Or a cokehead. Or he hits women. Or all four! Either way,someone ends up in the hospital.

Spot him by:
-Flock willing to party down with him, but unwilling to lend him money
-Rush of euphoria on first encounter, followed by immense guilt
- Empty bank account at the end of your encounter- he's not stolen it. You've spent it all because you get dumber around him.

The Guy You Can't Get it Up For
Treats you well, makes romantic gestures like mix-tapes and flowers that, even though they are sweet, did you really just buy me a bouquet of carnations with red anthuriums and KALE? Do you know me at all?? How dare you show me love and kindness.May or may not employ baby talk.

Spot him by:
Makes you cringe, basically.
Wide-set, doe eye innocent expression.
Urge to kick/ destroy it.
Waves of regret following encounters.
Grammatical errors you would forgive in anyone else but will not for him.

Pathologically Anti-Establishment Guy
A sort of hybrid of the Chakra Con and the Kierketaard, this guy has no moral compass of his own, so he's just down on everything. People who succeed are sell-outs, people who like to dress nicely are materialistic but people who want to drink sailboats in the park are a-ok. This is the guy who hates every paper in town but would bend over backwards for some column inches in it. At first it seems cool that he hates everything you hate, but then you realize he just hates himself and doesn't want to see anyone happy. Toxic. Possibly the easiest to dump.

Spot him by:
-Contempt for your work
-Willingness to spend the proceeds of your paycheque
-Pre-tied tie hanging on the backj of his doorknob, likely tied by previous girlfriend or IT-eomployed roommate who has been supporting him since they were 12.

*************

I'm sure there's more, but I'm kind of done with this b/c it's depressing me. And yes, I know that's I'm fucked and crazy, too, but that's not the point. I've seen better women than me fall prey to this bullshit. And lest it seem like I'm tarring the whole male gender with a 'toxic' brush, none of my dude friends fall into these categories. It's just ugly out there, is all I'm saying.

2007-07-05T10:28:00.000-07:00

2007-06-27T22:31:00.000-07:00

CBC and Music Picks

Writing about Chet for the Tyee Didn't write the sub-head or head, not that it's important.

also

Cassandra Szklarski from the Canadian Press in TO interviewed me the other day about my piece on the CBC/ Facebook "Great Canadian Wishlist". CP pieces are picked up on a newswire and run in papers all over the country. Here it is in the Brandon Sun , the first of what I'm sure will be many pick-ups.

So basically I'm shooting my mouth off about the CBC again in a nationally syndicated forum.

Let me just say this: I love CBC. I was raised on it, and I'm an active supporter. But when they do things like this stupid Facebook Wish List, I get annoyed. I don't want to sound like one of those old-school fogey CBC supporters who want to dig up Peter Gzowski and put him back on the air, but I think they need to reach out to new (read: younger) audiences more intelligently. CBC Radio 3 does this incredibly well. They legitimately explore issues, pop culture and news and create content that is engaging without being sensationalistic. CBC Radio One is and always has been good the way it is, but now they're adding in ridiculously transparent youth gambits that annoy both older audiences and the young market they're so clearly after. With exceptions, CBC Television (ch 3, not Newsworld) has been the worst at creating intelligent, twentysomething-oriented programming. They're incredible at kids shows, and at news programs, but they're lousy at creating programs for the demographic with the money (which attracts advertisers, and therefore more $$$ to keep CBC running. Thats reality, folks). They've had successes, but when they attempt to ape American programming, on the budget of state-sponsored Canadian TV, it simply doesn't work.

I think they'll find their way. I hope they'll find their way. But they're making some very public mistakes in the interim and possibly putting people off for good. And the Ceeb is already under duress from budget cuts and free marketeers who think state-funded media is garbage, so dumbing things down for the kids really doesn't seem the way to go. I know they need to adapt to changing climates and technology, but they can't just change just for the sake of change.

I have ideas, which I won't share here (i'm still holding out for my dream in which the CBC hires me), but yeah.... I just don't want to sound like I hate on CBC or anything. Cause truth is, I love it more than anything. Which is why I'm so hard on them.

Dig?

Now please listen to my music picks.

2007-06-25T14:20:00.000-07:00

In which Elaine dates outside her caste

So one of the weirder side effects of my midnight mass text was that I got in touch with an old boyfriend-type character from when I was in my early 20s

I met Sean at a nightclub, which some of you will know, called Luv-a-Fair. I f you never went there, just picture every bad '80s movie nightclub, where everyone is clad in PVC and the music is like, the Cult and the Cure and the Smiths, and it's just '80s shittiness and neon everywhere, and you basically have it. Black floor, black booths, black lights, black hair dye. Smoke machines. Cheap booze. Everything that fucking sucked about new wave.

This was in the late-90s, but the '80s never stopped in Luv-a-fair. The clientele was mainly washed-up goths who couldn't let their "clubbing" days go and young kids who knew that the place wasn't really that strict on IDs. According to legend, Luv-a-fair was cool at one point, and reportedly Dave Gahan and Martin Gore from Depeche Mode used to come there after playing concerts in town, reportedly once dancing atop the giant speaker stacks to their own song. The whole place had a vibe of having seen better, coke-fueled days, but now was sad and grungy.

They had an 80's night on Tuesdays, but a friend of mine joked that, in a truly honest world, every night at Luv-a-fair would have '80's as a pre-fix. '80s metal night. '80s alternative night. '80s '80s night.

We went, religiously, on Thursdays, to Brit-pop Night (oh, how that makes me cringe now) with all the other fledgling anglophilic kids in town who loved Pulp and Suede and shoegaze and Manchester. Sure, they spun Oasis and Blur's "Girls and Boys" and fucking James ad nauseum, but it was the best most of us could find, and it was cheap, and the old Greek bartender gave you free shots of Baja Rosa if he liked you. He liked us.

Sometimes, we would dance until 2 am and then go smoke strawberry tobacco with this weird old Egyptian mafioso called Saad who frequented the night club. I realize now that it was incredibly strange for us to pal around with a fortysomething gangster, but we were too stupid and naive to know it was dangerous, and besides, he paid for drinks and was weird enough to amuse us.

More often, though, we would just end up making out with strange and dorky boys with Brit-pop haircuts and corduroy jackets. If ever there was a club conducive to making trolls look cute, it was the darker-than-dark Luv-a-fair. You'd drink $2.50 highballs until you saw double, and then work up the courage to talk to some Damon Albarn wannabe, and then hopefully make out with them before the clock struck 2. Some of us were better than others. My roommate seemed to score every week (which had its own, penecillin-accompanied repercussions), but I got remainders, all of whom I fell in love with like a lost puppy. I had a dyke-y haircut, and wore cheap vintage clothes and was still too hard-up to reject the dudes who would just try to pick up anything with a vagina. My roommate was prettier than me, and I was lonely.

I was, at the time, studying international relations at college. I had moved back from London, and enrolled in a bunch of weird classes, having no idea what I wanted to do with myself. I knew I was a writer, even then, but one university creative writing class was enough to teach me that I didn't want to waste four years of my life listening to other people's bad detective stories and heartbreaking poems about breast cancer, guided by some wacky prof with an Atwood fetish and bad shoes. So I took a lot of Sociology and Polisci courses, particularly relating to developing nations and the scourge of globalization (they don't teach this theory so much now- the new predominant theory is "empire", implying that we're in the midst of neoliberal fascism, rather than at risk of it). Inevitably, I fell under the spell of a number of radical lefty professors and self-identified as a Marxist. I went to anti-WTO rallies, organized against the MAI, Apec- all that stuff.... Like in that Brando movie, the Wild One, when the lady asks Brando's character "What are you rebelling against?" and Brando replies "What have you got?". I was impressionable and stupid. I've forgiven myself.

I saw Sean dancing on the stage at Luv-a-fair, I'll bet to a Blur song, or something equally as obvious. He was 6'4 with bleach blonde hair and he looked like Christopher Walken, and he'd been looking at me as much as him. I don't even remember how we ended up talking, or how I ended up at his house, or in his bed. I think the little university radical with the punky-red pixie hair and precocious vocabulary amused him in the way of a novelty, and I was drawn to him because he was forbidden fruit.

I was a Marxist making her living for slave-wages at the Gap (which I quit in flurry of youthful idealism after seeing a documentary called Maquiladora), and Sean was a British Properties kid, 28 years old and making money off the dot.com boom with his own IP company, driving around in an SUV and jetting across the world.

He seemed wildly adult to me, and though it wouldn't impress me now, I was secretly thrilled by his affluence. He'd talk about steak dinners, and I would lecture him on vegetarianism; he would drive me to school in his SUV and I would bitch about environmental distress; he would gamble what was then my entire rent with his lawyer friends, and I would preach about the evils of capitalism. Under all my protests, though, I was incredibly turned on.

For some reason, the irreconcilable differences only made the relationship hotter. We fought constantly over everything-- but when we weren't at each other's throats we were just at each other, with nothing in commin but youth and lust.

Our most heated argument came when he informed me that I was smart. I replied "I'm smarter than the average bear." He wondered aloud how you would figure out how smart the average bear was. I said you would test all the bears, add up their scores and divide it by the number of bears tested. He said, no, you would take the score that the most bears got, and that would be the average. I said that was the mean score, and not the average. The argument ended with me storming off down the seawall, shaking with rage. It was reconciled with impromptu lust in one of the aforementioned Gap's fitting rooms.

Eventually, I would come stumbling home (to his place) from Luv-a-fair to find another girl in his bed. His friend. He was naked. So was she. Somehow I was stupid enough to believe nothing happened, and it took me another six months to figure out he was just a serial cheat with whom I had sexual chemistry and little else.

I took months to get over him, as he came and went and came back into my life. He was so careless with my 20 year-old heart that my roommate, 5'3, once drunkenly tried to deck him on Seymour Street. I consoled myself with many an ill-advised evening of desparate one-nighters at Luv-a-fair, trying to fill his place with someone else, but still feeling sick everytime I saw a face like his.

My heart jumped whenever I saw his sleek black gas-whore drive by me on the street, though, with a streak of masochism, I watched him entertain countless ladies from my the balcony of our 11th floor apartment, which cruelly looked right into his window.

I finally laughed about it when a midget wedding on Maury Povich set me to crying in front of my roommate and her friends. I was upset, I recall, that even midgets could make love work, and that I could not. I cried until my eyes stung and then I laughed like hell. The next week, those friends I had cried in front of threw me a birthday party, bought my a sex-toy that we named Steve ( as in, "Sorry, Sean. I'm hanging out with Steve tonight) and I got the fuck over it.

By the time Sean and I went out for a reconciliatory coffee two years later, I was really over it, just as I was over my Marxism. The dotcom bubble had burst, and he was no longer a wealthy playboy, just as my idealism had waned, and I was making $55k a year working for the federal government.

Bif Naked was playing on his car stereo. He wore a baseball cap and bad jeans. It's amazing what a romantic's heart can do to a unremarkable man.

We've been friends ever since, because I no longer have any expecations of him, and accept that, to him, I'm just a novelty to be played with when the fancy strikes. We're not as close as we used to be, but when he tried to track down his birth family, he called on me and my government job. I went to his wedding two years ago, to a woman who seems just fine, though my instincts still say he's a cheater. We're as close as two people who have nothing to say to each other will ever be.

Once in a while, he'll call me up, and he'll talk all about his life (never really asking about mine) and teasingly call me his "Marxist friend". I'll gently reply with a reminder that he once said DSL internet had no future, and then we'll both laugh at how fucking stupid we were, me at 20, him at 28.

Now that I'm 28 myself, I find it funny that I thought he was so grown-up and adult. In reality, he was living off Daddy's money and credit cards, and was so immature that he dated a 20 year-old university radical who didn't have the sense God gave a billygoat. He owned PVC pants and was still going to nightclubs. It was not a match made in heaven.

He replied to my accidental text with a funny-but-not-clever joke riddled with sexual innuendo. It could have come from anyone, really, but for a moment I missed him, and missed the sense of the possible - of idealism- that only youth provides.

I dug up an old Oasis record, with the intention of having a living room dance for nostaligia's sake. I sat on the couch, then deleted the text, as quickly as it came in. All those boys that I'd kissed at Luv-a-fair with their silly haircuts and Stone Roses albums were gone too. I was alone in my living room with the Gallagher brothers, grinning like a fool as "She's Electric" graced my stereo for the first time in years.

"Got my mind made up now/ But I need more time".

Publish Post

2007-06-13T00:20:00.000-07:00

And now for something completely different...

What is the proper, easiest way to get your duvet in the duvet cover? I have struggled with this for years and I'm sick of it. My sense is that you actually have to get inside the duvet cover, but this seems ridiculous, not at all how June Cleaver woulda done it.

Suggestions are welcome-- the best one will receive a copy of my upcoming book, How to Put The Sodding Duvet in the Sodding Duvet Cover (Lulu Press, 2008)

2007-06-11T18:38:00.000-07:00

I was looking at pictures of giraffes in Ntnl Geographic today, and I was reminded of how much I used to love The Far Side, and then I got to thinking about my favourite panel of Farside ever..

Instead of these words, you should picture the one where it's a split panel, and on top, there's a chap lying in bed thinking 'I wonder if she likes me... Did I say the right thing....? I wonder what she's doing..' , and on the bottom, there's a girl in bed thinking 'I like vanilla ice cream the best!'

Because right now I seriously think that comic is everything you ever need to know about the perils of the human heart - even the fact that Gary Larson felt the need to draw it tells us a little something about our own condition.

(I scoured the internet for the actual image with no hope. Apparently the reclusive genius Gary Larson does not want his work online. In retrospect this was kind of a shitty post. Sorry.)

2007-06-11T10:54:00.000-07:00

Monday morning catblogging*

Justin took these terrible pictures of me (what is my hair doing?) , but they're also vaguely sweet, and jim looks like he's smiling, so I like them. Scary but heartening. And a nice counter to the ugly post below. I saw Jim last night. Watched Ferris Bueller's Day Off with Justin and his roommates. Jim is better than I remember, Ferris Bueller's Day Off was nowhere near as good as I'd recalled. Fucking hell, nostalgia is a creeping, seducive intoxicant, ain't it. And we've gotten to the point now where we're like "hey, do you remember when five minutes ago? Man, we'll never get those days back."

Fuckin' eh (a?) . Bring me the babbling heads of Dougie Coupland and Chuck Klosterman (I like Klosterman more).

Anyways, I stayed in most of the weekend, but when I did go out I got these:

"I wouldn't come to identify your corpses"-- VT, when called about his ten-year highschool reunion.

"You know you've had a good night when you come home and throw your panties in the air and they stick to the ceiling."-- LP, recalling a line from a friend's grandmother.

FYI, I would never use someone's real name or identifying traits on this thing unless they were totally comfortable with it. And hardly anyone I know in real life reads it anymore, I think. Secrets are safe with me. Always.

* with respects to emily gould, who got me hooked on this blog written by the Editor of Cat Fancy magazine

2007-06-11T09:18:00.000-07:00

Jesus. I swear this is not a shitty metaphor and that I'm not making this up, but I was walking to work this morning, on campus, and I heard the distinct sound of beating, distressed wings coming from a rubbish bin, one of those ones with a lid and a hole in the centre.

I couldn't even bring myself to look inside -- I have always been terrified of birds-- but I gather some pigeon or crow had flown in to feat on garbage and got itself stuck. And God love me, I stood there both figuratively and literally help-less. There was nothing I could do.

Of all birds, I think I fear pigeons and crows the most, so much so that I seem to have created a superstition all my own-- when I see a dead bird, I know something awful is going to happen, that someone is going to leave me.

I will never forget the time I brought this invented voodoo up with my mother (she who gave me the no one-else-has-ever-heard-of-it superstition of saying, when you seen an ambulance with its a siren on: "touch my collar, be a scholar, touch my collar, touch my nose, never be in one of those" and then holding your shirt collar until you see a dog ) and her replying that she's never heard of it. I've since brought it up with others, and no one has the same bird-omen, save perhaps the guy who wrote The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. I even Googled it and got no hits, which really means it does not exist, in this day and age.

Anyways, I feel awful at having walked away from this trapped bird, but fear overcame me, and now all I can hear is the deafening sound of wings madly and with futility beating against the garbage.

I don't know what happens when you see a bird that might die, and leave it there to suffer.

I don't know how one finds the fortitude to leave it to die or stay and rescue it. I certainly saw in myself this morning the uglier side of people that always disappoints me. Jesus.

2007-06-09T18:27:00.001-07:00

I have always been so susceptible to other people's darkness. Show me a wretch with an all-consuming crisis of faith, and I will take on their countenance, feed off their doubt an eventually find myself mired in their dilemma. A bleeding, tell-tale heart will darken my doorstep, and I will cut myself open and bleed all over it.

The bleeding heart does not desire more blood, however, but a certainty or truth to stop the flow. I've never had that certainty at my fingertips.

I've done it time and time again, with books and music and heartbroken souls, and ended up forking over the small peace I've found inside myself for the viscerality of the tragic. Invariably, I come out of it, but not before becoming wholly consumed by the person in the catbird seat to the crisis. Maybe it's because they've been watching the same play a little longer, and they then seem wise to the plot, but my experience has been that, at the end of the thing the charlatan in question never had the answer or even the same crisis that I had in the first place. I've found that, in my arrogance, I think I "get" people's misery, but the fact remains, I never got person one in my whole goddamn life. Never had a chance.

Most likely my longing for connection is such that I will gladly hand over security for the doleur exquisite of fumbling through truth with another human being. Having another brain to confirm things as they unfold themselves to you. Having someone to say "hey, me too".

How I wish I remembered during those times that the answer is always just the placing of hand on belly, breath on back, the feet so soft grass tickles between the toes. The smell of the newspaper at your door on a cold winter morning and the sound of a really great abandoned laugh. Wispy moments of delight. Not more words, but silence and the pitiful magic of kinship.

There was no way to type that last paragraph without sounding like Fred Durst on a cocktail of amphetamines and opium, but I assure you, I am not Fred Durst typing on Trifective. Or maybe I am.

I found this quote, just today from Edward Said's memoir. Perhaps its no accident that he also found work as a critic, albeit a far more brilliant and telescopic one than I could ever hope to be.

"Sometimes I was intransigent, and proud of it. At other times I seemed to myself to be nearly devoid of any character at all, timid, uncertain, without will."

I think the nature of the critic is searching, as if they are looking for the one philosophical leaning, one story or song or piece of art that will constitute some everlasting finality. I wonder then, if the critic is not the ultimate cult conscript, someone who seems to have the fortitude of their convictions but is easily won over by an unassailable desire for satisfaction and, dare I say, love.

I just don't know anymore.

My hope is that, come Fall, when the leaves perform a golden lapdance for me once again, my "What I did on my Summer vacation" essay will reflect my plan:

I think I quit drinking (though who's to say what that means? Do I quit a glass of wine with dinner or do I quit drinking to the point where I no longer know myself? Right now, I have not been touching a drop, but I hold myself to nothing. I will drink when I feel like drinking again, and for now I do not), because I think the time where I create stories with that lifestyle might be over. I was talking with a friend last night, and we agreed that scab-picking one's whole life away was just as much a waste as the unexamined life. Eventually, you have to turn experience into art. You have to do the work, in spite of the fact that the world is so unforgiving and unsatisfying that it hardly deserves it.

I think I will try to remember how inspired I feel right now, and surround myself with people who inspire me while not being so intense that its utterly shocking. Not tie my hopes to anyone but myself. Try to live in the light, and not be heartsick that "living in the light" is such a popsong cliche. I think i will try to remember what I wrote above but not beat myself up when I forget it, because I suspect the great burden/joy of my existence is to learn this over and over and over.

I think I will do silly things like swim at dawn and make music and drink uncountable amounts of green tea in the sunshine with friends in the park. Have another sports day and a roadtrip where we all end up splashing about in a hazy lake. And not expect heartbreak.

I think I will re-read/actually-read-and-not-just-say-I've read the classics, and try to remember whatlasting literature feels like. I think I will learn why to write, because I already know how.
************************
Yesterday, I went into a used bookstore and for $30 I bought a ridiculous amount of literature. I am going to start with Elliot's Middlemarch first, when I finish the book I have going now.

Here is the prelude to that book. I will give it the last word of this post,

Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt, at least briefly, on the life of Saint Theresa, has not smiled with some gentleness at the thought of the little girl walking forth one morning hand-in-hand with her still smaller brother, to go and seek martyrdom in the country of the Moors? Out they toddled from rugged Avila, wide-eyed and helpless-looking as two fawns, but with human hearts, already beating to a national idea; until domestic reality met them in the shape of uncles, and turned them back from their great resolve. That child-pilgrimage was a fit beginning. Theresa's passionate, ideal nature demanded an epic life: what were many-volumed romances of chivalry and the social conquests of a brilliant girl to her? Her flame quickly burned up that light fuel; and, fed from within, soared after some illimitable satisfaction, some object which would never justify weariness, which would reconcile self-despair with the rapturous consciousness of life beyond self. She found her epos in the reform of a religious order.

That Spanish woman who lived three hundred years ago, was certainly not the last of her kind. Many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity; perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred poet and sank unwept into oblivion. With dim lights and tangled circumstance they tried to shape their thought and deed in noble agreement; but after all, to common eyes their struggles seemed mere inconsistency and formlessness; for these later-born Theresas were helped by no coherent social faith and order which could perform the function of knowledge for the ardently willing soul. Their ardor alternated between a vague ideal and the common yearning of womanhood; so that the one was disapproved as extravagance, and the other condemned as a lapse.

2007-06-08T07:09:00.000-07:00

Thanks for all your feedback on the story it really meant a lot to me.

I leave you for today with an excerpt from an email...

I'm definitely turned inside out by the hamster wheel of the news industry. I think calling myself a "writer" and "writing" for a living has allowed me to do some pretty vacuous stuff for a while, still thinking I was doing something that mattered. Now I wonder if it's not more noble to make bolts at a machinists shop. At least you've made something that holds together, and that might matter in a few years, you know? It doesn't matter what you write now. I sent a friend a text the other day, and, worried he might misinterpret what I'd said for bitchiness, I said "sorry. I meant such-and-such." And he replied "That's okay. There's always more words." And I think he meant to make me feel better but honestly I haven't slept right since.

I wish you all peace...

2007-06-06T22:12:00.001-07:00

I woke up in the tarriest of black moods this morning, and I knew the day would be hard. I was feeling a lot sorry for myself-- I am poor again, my phone broke, my best friend is leaving, my job for the day was to prepare a great big book of wedding porn, and the most fascinating and lovely person I have met in sometime has decided to cease communications.

And weirdly, while in the shower in this sorry state, I felt the need to pray. I don't know who I was praying to, but I found my hands pressed together and I said aloud "Just give me the strength to get through today."

I had to take a long walk at lunch, and sit in the garden and try to catch myself and remind myself of all the good in my life. At the end of work, after looking at all the brides and grooms and cakes and dresses that somehow made me feel like I would never, ever have a normal life, I felt like going to the nearest elementary school and telling a child there was no Santa. Then, the busride home was a brutal and noisy cesspool of humanity, with a driver who slammed on the brakes at regular intervals, and a chap sitting next to me who smelled like peanut butter ( why is peanut butter good when you're eating it, but disgusting when you have to smell someone else's?). I had to close my eyes so as not to get pulled down in the undertow.

And again, I said in my head "Just give me the strength." And I guess I found it, because it is the end of the day and I don't feel so bad.

I still have some work to do, before I kick it with a old sitcom turned down whisper-low and the blankets pulled to my chin, but I got just what I asked for from the Universe.

I guess I sometimes I think prayer is like asking for a pony or an E-Z bake oven, but now I think it might be asking yourself for what's already within you. That being said, a pony would be pretty sweet.

(and if the object above isn't the nadir of little-girl-in-the-80s product lust, I don't what is.)

2007-06-05T18:31:00.000-07:00

I write elegies not eulogies

The place where I'm working right now gets tonnes of papers and magazines. I happened to stumble across this in the Utne Reader which is weird, for a number of reasons, not the least of which being I hardly ever read the Utne Reader ( and don't know how to pronounce Utne, after all these years) because I find it to be filled with literary dry-humping.

I had mentioned Carver just yesterday in a letter; saw an old boyfriend-type-chap who had lent me Short Cuts, first thing this morning, on the exact corner where we broke up and I gave it back to him. The writer came up again today in a facebook convo that I would like to unofficially title "Can't we just skip the dating and get right to the unhealthy co-dependence?". It's a sad day when Facebook teaches you something ugly about yourself.

The Facebook of Dorian Gray, anyone?

Also, I had been thinking about Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, and how Ted Hughes, monster talent or no, always struck me as a smug c*** ( make those stars into what you will). Maybe it's the ego of every poet or artist, but it bugs me that Plath was his muse first and a writer second. And had she not the spectacular foresight to off herself, history probably would've written her as the also-ran consort to a UK poet laureate.

This article describes something that's exactly the opposite. It speaks to this sweet interaction between two artists, where they're obviously each other's biggest fans. Friends, too. It's like an aspirational lifestyle magazine, except instead of Danish furniture, dog sweaters and luxury condos, it's salvation for scabby writers. I love the line in the lede: Every artist and writer faces the challenge of how to honor his or her intensity while not being consumed by it.

I think it really speaks to that totally bullshit idea that writers are supposed to be profoundly fucked up, and that you can't create anything real or meaningful if it's not written in blood. To how seductive the idea of lighting yourself on fire and writing words with the ashes can be. Seductive, but utterly useless.

The descriptions of sobriety (or, more accurately, post-alcoholism) are - not being funny- intoxicating.

I went out tonight for Dane's birthday dinner (happy birthday, dane!) , and I didn't have a glass of wine, and then I came home, and now I'm gonna try and write something that's not so bloggy. It's quiet in my apartment, hopefully quiet enough to hear what the fates are telling me.

2007-06-05T13:21:00.000-07:00

Okay. Rebecca Eckler is officially the most self-absorbed woman on the planet. And I know from self-absorbed.

For those of you too lazy to click through, a summary: Eckler, who is like, the *worst* sort of anti-feminist, gold-digging, damsel-in-distress chick-lit pseudo journalist, and an all-round loathsome person, is suing Judd Apatow, the brains behind Freaks and Geeks, because she thinks he stole the idea for his film "Knocked Up" from her atrocious book of the same name (hers with the execrable subtitle "Confessions of a Hip Mother-To-Be").

The premise of the film: woman gets drunk and pregnant. Hilarity ensues. It's not exactly the plot of Being John Malkovich. And the idea of Judd Apatow stealing from this twit is rather like saying .. I don't know- I actually can't think of an analogy that matches the idiocy of this idea.

God. I know I'm supposed to reserve my disdain for genocidal dictators, but Rebecca Eckler is truly a nightmare, a plague upon literary women everywhere.

Right now, I'm thinking of that lyric from "The Only Living Boy in New York": I get the news I need from the weather report.

And now you know why.

2007-06-05T06:56:00.000-07:00

I can't believe not one of you told me if the wiretap link was functional. I give and I give and I give* and nothing! You're missing out, though.

* I do not, as a rule, give.

2007-06-04T13:39:00.000-07:00

I have a roommate this week. I haven't lived with anyone in so many years that it kind of seems like the best thing ever to me. Last night, we slowly made our way through half a bottle of JD and sat around, legs draped over couches in the sticky heat of my apartment, playing guitar and talking and padding out barefoot for hushed cigarettes at the front door.

This morning, I awoke to find her asleep on the couch, a copy of Exile On Main street still in her hands, her laptop lit up like the dying embers of a campfire. My head ached from a migraine (I've had three this week), but I was almost elated.

I think maybe waking up and finding someone there is the tradeoff of adulthood. Christmas morning holds little delight, but the anchor of another presence in the fumblings of dawn counts as pure relief.

Earlier this week, I fell asleep on the shoulder of someone else, aided by a not insignificant amount of beer and a Valium. I kept waking up and forgetting I was alone-- utterly surprised by the presence of another heartbeat. It felt like home, and instead of lying and staring at the ceiling with untraceable furies, I feel back to sleep with the weight of his hand across my back.

Of course, the great kick-in-the-pants is that everyone is leaving, and the sound of heartbeats is made perverse by the Doppler effect- that way that sound is warped when something is moving away.

I've never been able to enjoy moments as they unfold.

You've probably seen the photo above by Gjon Mili. It is, of course, one Pablo Picasso
and one of his minotaurs, drawn in the air with light and captured by slow exposure.

I've always been moved my Picasso's drawings more than his paintings, especially his minotaurs. The sketches and experiments that led to Picasso's epic Guernica are way more intriguing than the final work. You can see his thought process as he uncovers something profound about humanity by dissecting the man and the animal to their most base elements. The sketches are carnal and sensual, and fucking hot as hell, but also ever-so-tragic, sometimes rendered in wisps of pencil but somehow completely weighty and timeless. The savagery and fragility of man rendered by exacting, heartbreakingly-placed lines that seem random until you realize they've taken your breath away, and they were sent to do so with careful instructions.

I digress. The point, if I might beat you over the head with it, is that you can't really take the minotaur out of that picture, and whether or not he really existed is up for debate. I guess moments of connection with other people are like that too. And maybe, now that I think about it, I am kind of under the spell of how fleeting things are- that you can superimpose loveliness on the past with the lens of hopeless romanticism. Maybe Picasso's best works weren't captured by skow shutter speed--- maybe they just existed in his imagination and then in the air as he drew them. Or maybe not. Maybe that's just me being disgustingly optimistic. Or pessimistic. Is it weird that I can't tell anymore?

Or maybe I've just got whiskey blues. Moping about the house, longing for the hand across my back, sending hateful- truly mean- e-mails to people who don't deserve it. A bull in a chinashop, a minotaur on a microchip.

2007-06-04T11:58:00.001-07:00

for reals. is that link working or what?

2007-06-03T16:32:00.000-07:00

Taking the bait?

Somehow, I am inside on this marvelous day, listening to the Smiths.

There is a Smiths song for every type of emotional malady, except there should really be one called "Smiths Fans of the World, Unite, and make everyone else Miserable Now."

Yesterday, I was lit from inside, but I guess I am useless today. And kind of shattered. I think things are always lopsided one way or the other, you know?

Anyways, this is by Jonathan Goldstein, and it's brilliant- I think you need flash to get it to work, or something-- I can't listen to it on my computer to tell you if it even works on mine. That's fucking pathetic, but its that kind of day. Yeah. If someone could tell me its working, that'd be cool.

Why can't things just work like I need them to? I would like the world to be slightly more ridiculous in my favour.

2007-06-03T14:34:00.000-07:00

Summer 2007

I haven't even bothered to edit any of these, but here they are anyways.

Today, I feel like this:

But yesterday I felt like this:

Skidding out in the park.

Andie Maddawhatsis.

Owen is leaving to Mexico.

speed of trees
Dane, from Danetown.
Veronika. The setting on the camera was "for children".
Kid with misplaced daddy issues.

covered in spun sugar.

me, kat and owen. prison bitch, fat dolphin, sunburn. owen looks like katie sketch.

Stilt walking Elvis. Who looks like Wayne Newton.
Mikey. Mark. Greg. The Manvils.
"Owen"
Natsumi. Ribs.

Cotton candy comes from powder.

East Van disguises.

2007-05-31T09:44:00.000-07:00

There's a song by A Girl Called Eddy, one of the most beautiful I've heard (click only if you're into Bacharach and Janis Ian and moping about the house) the lyric is:

"Breaking my own heart to make you see."

Writing this for the Straight was kind of like that.

Speaking of lyrics, you'll notice that I've used "joy in diminishing returns" both in the above article and in the post below. It's a lyric from a Nick Cave song. Sometimes something will get stuck in my head, and I'll work it into everything I do. This was like that. Usually some obsessive fanboy will pick up on it and send me an e-mail and then work me all up into some paragon of music + womanhood that I'm actually not.

Which reminds me. Every year, I teach an honours creative writing to a group of 10-12 year kids from around the school district, and a few years back, I has the good fortune to teach a group that were, no joke, pretty much like that movie School of Rock. I asked them if any one of them played musical instruments, and the children, probably more a product of our tendency to make 6 year-olds overachievers than sheer coincidence, all raised their hands- viola, violin, piano, guitar, drums-- everylastoneof'em played something.

Anyways, I had them listen to a song by Françoise Hardy and tell me what they thought she was singing about. And then we talked about being moved by music, and how to convey that in the written word. I asked all the kids to do an exercise where they wrote about music or a musician that they admired. This kid, 12 years old at most, who had said he played guitar, wrote this positively amazing piece about Jimi Hendrix. I was blown away. It was nothing short of profound.

As part of the program, the kids present teachers with card that they've all signed, and the kid who wrote the essay came up and gave me mine. We talked more about music, and he said he really liked Nirvana. I told him about going to see Nirvana when I was 15, and I think I may as well have told him I lived before electricity.

As it happened, I had just been at Universal, and they'd given me that Pixies singles issue, along with the DVD. So I reached into my purse, made sure the kid was allowed to have that sort of music, and I gave him them both, and told him how Kurt Cobain had been influenced by them. The kid ran back over to his friends, and they were all standing around looking at it, and then looking back over at me, as if they were unsure whether or not to trust me.

I always hope that that kid remembers a woman gave him the Pixies, and that he grows up not to look at music as a boys club where girls are for playing keys or surreptitious on-the-road bjs. I told that to my friend, a bit of a fanboy himself, and he said " you know you messed that kid up for life, right? He's gonna be searching for The Girl Who Gives Him Pixies CD's well into his 30s."

Anyways. Not sure why I brought that up.

It's a lovely day. Get off the computer and go sit in the park with a friend or a book, already.

2007-05-29T18:04:00.000-07:00

Hey blog, you know what? Chivalry really is dead.

And I'm not talking about gender specific chivalry (though that is *way* fucking dead.)

I don't think I ask a terrible amount from other people, and I think I try and practice what I preach ( not always succeeding), but man, I am constantly disappointed by human beings.

For the record:
Unchivalrous acts include:

-Not letting anyone into traffic, ever. (other car-related mis-chivalries: getting into the driver's seat without first going around and unlocking the passenger side, getting into the passenger seat and not reaching over to unlock the driver's side, not slowing down when people are stalled on the road to see if they need help, dropping someone off and then driving away before they get into their apartment safely)

-Letting a friend wait for a cab by themselves after dark.

-Breaking up with someone by just ignoring their calls/acting like an asshole. (Wo)man up! ( who am I kidding- this is a male behavior). Break-ups hurt. If you don't want to be with someone, just tell them. Don't worry about being as asshole. Being straight up is the least assholish thing you can do it that situation.

-Not checking to see if someone is beind you before you let go of a door.

-Hoarding shit.

-Taking out a cigarette/ pouring yourself a glass of wine and not offering the same to your companion.

- Not telling your friends they look good when they're dressed up for a night out.

-Not picking up a coffee for your friend when you are about to meet up.

-Not buying flowers/stupid cheap dollar store shit for someone who is really having a rough go, or has just done something amazing.

-Not phoning your friend after they've made a drunken ass of themselves to see if they're okay.

-Forgetting all of the rules of romance and respect when you've been with someone for a long time ( i was once in a store where a girl was trying to buy a shirt for her boyfriend for his upcoming birthday. he was all "that's not a birthday present. a real birthday present is something that you plug in." And we said "but you look really good in it." and he replied "what do I need to look good for? I already got her." it was a grim fucking spectre.)

-Not once in a while just giving your umbrella to someone because you'll be home soon and there are always more umbrellas.

-Shouting down people's hopes and beliefs.

- Not helping people who genuinely don't know the answers to things.

Man, the list goes on. You know, somebody once said my "no-skids" policy was classist, but I think its classist only in the sense that I'm against peole that have none. I don't care if you're the beardiest, Strathcona living, pilsner-drinking, maiden-loving dirtbag--if you have manners and chivalry, then you're gold with me. Conversely, the lady in the Jetta on the cosway that wouldn't let me into her lane despite me having made direct, pleading eye contact with her? A total fucking worthless skid.

Anyways, I started the day off sunny and bright, but now I'm in a black mood. I'm going to spend time with people I love, in the hopes of forgetting all those people who are not worth my fucking time.

I am lucky that all the friends I love are the most chivalrous people ever. Everyone else gives joy in diminishing returns.

2007-05-27T22:03:00.000-07:00

Are you there, God? It's me, Lainey.

I didn't go to my high school reunion. You couldn't have paid me enough money. I grew up in a shitty sub-urb, with no arts and culture, and I was an unattractive, socially inept pothead teenager who barely had any friends and stayed at home writing fucking awful poetry about hopeless crushes and the first Gulf War and the evils of capitalism.

I don't think about where I grew up much-- it's been ten years since I moved away, nobody in my family lives there anymore, and all the vaguely charming aspects of Port Moody have long since been paved over. I have no need to visit.

Three weeks ago, I joined Facebook. Like myspace for grown-up people. The encyclopedia humanica. Or something. A big ol' index of everyone, ever. Everyone at the office I sometimes work at talks about it all the time. People I know have begun using "facebooking" and "facebooked" as a verb.

Since then, at least a dozen people I haven't thought about in a decade have contacted me in some way. In some cases, these were the few people who were kind enough to befriend me when I was a kid, but in most it's just total randomness and unwelcome intrusion. And I'm just not sure what to say to them. I mean, i guess it's nice to hear from people, and I wish them well and I hope they're happy, but mostly, it just makes me remember what an unhappy and terribly lonely child I was and makes me feel stumped for something to say, an experience I haven't had in a long time.

I imagine it's how all those poor people in the 7-Up documentary series I enjoyed so much feel when the film crew show up every seven years. Desperately defensive of their current lives, really not wanting to dredge up the past.

It's funny, just days ago, I was kind of writing about the internet being like futuristic robots coming back in time to destroy us. But now they're coming from the past with a pornographer's desire to exploit the present.

Facebook = being dragged to your highschool reunion, except you don't even get to buy pretty clothes for it. I didn't think there could be anything more patently sinister than myspace (pog collection made of real people) but now, I am unwittingly at my highschool reunion in my jammies and a beatles shirt with a hole in the underarm.

I guess this is the weekend I am made to feel like a teenager over and over. There have been so many things over the past three days where I've had to catch and hold myself and say "You are Twenty Eight. What the fuck are you doing?"

Even now, I am writing this and I have copy, - homework!- due tomorrow morning.

Sigh. I'm gonna dig up my copy of Deenie and then call (text) a boy I think is cute and then hang up. Might as well go for brace-faced gold.

***update
I was talking to friend today, over facebook, about killing my facebook self (how barf-inducingly meta), because I wanted to retreat into further anonymity. I think it would be easy to be the Walter Kurtz of social networking sites, with virtual heads on virtual pikes warning people off, and long lost souls who find the networking universe equally preposterous seeking me out and getting me back in the fold.

Yep. I just want to join the hutterites and lay out in the sun.

2007-05-27T11:44:00.001-07:00

This is kat. I have known her since I was 7 years old. She moves to Scotland in two weeks.This picture is probably the perfect example of why I will miss her.

We don't have a hell of a lot in common anymore- different friends, different interests- but our friendship has morphed into something better over the years, and now I would say we're sisters more than anything. She knows I'm pissed off before I do (usually because I take it out on her), she knows that, left to my own devices, I will never eat a home-cooked meal. She knows when I'm spinning and overthinking, when I'm wasting my time and when I'm being an arrogant, self-righteous asshole. She's probably the only person besides my mother I could openly cry in front of, and I have, many times. She's genereous and welcoming, and laughs at my jokes. And If I'm in the mood to, watch someone pretend they're a classic rock superfero, kat is always there for me. I never have to worry about saying something that's profoundly fucked-up, or the fact that I feel like I'm failing at life. We hang out, make stupid jokes, talk about boys, talk about music, make stupid short films and take idiotic pictures and invaribly end up lying on the floor, drunk and listening to the same records we've listened to for the past twelve years. At this point, I don't have to worry about being judged. She's seen me at my most wretched.

Yesterday, I went over to Kat's house early in the afternoon for Ceasars, with our friends Andrea (who I haven't really talked to since i was 21) Tarina (visiting from Calgary) and Marn (who is also moving to Scotland) . We were all a little rough from their going-away party the night previous. Kat's camera and records were stolen from her party (with all the pics taken that night on it, and Love's Forever Changes and The Beatles Abbey Road being amongst the records fuck!).

It was a silly and vulgar and funny afternoon, and, even though I thought it wouldn't be, it was nice to spend time with old, old friends. Everyone made their way off, and kat and lay on her bed watching the Rutles, until we both fell asleep, all cuddled up. It occurs to me that's the last time we might do that for a while, and though we've done it a thousand times, and I sometimes thought it made for a less-than-thrilling evening, it puts a lump in my throat now to think it won't be there for me in the future. She's kinda like home, and definitely family, and though we don't hang out nearly as much anymore and sometimes I want to kill her (and her i), I don't how I'm going to cope without her.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna have a good cry. I have more to write, but some things are sacred, even here.

2007-05-26T22:30:00.000-07:00

2007-05-25T21:08:00.000-07:00

a few weeks back, the progresive American news site Alternet reposted my tyee pice on Dr. Phil. A number of commenters shouted the piece down as beneath the site's politically-oriented hard news standards ( you can read the comments below).

This comment copied below really made me hopeful that some people understand my work and what I am trying to do with with TV crit. I am pleased.

Complaints about Dr. Phil and all things pop culture

[Report this comment]

Posted by: Mahogany1 on May 21, 2007 8:10 PM
Current rating: Not yet rated

I really get tired of people constantly complaining about Alternet's focus on anything that hints at pop culture. Focusing on politics (e.g. war, gender, race) is important but pop culture is just as important too. Many of the journalists here are not giving rundowns on the latest happenings with Paris or Britney but people act as if they do. What they are doing is commenting on something that is just as useful as politics itself. Pop culture can serve as a bellwether too for politics.

That Dr. Phil's style of programming exists and how different/similar it is than former talk show hosts lets you know what people are consuming and how attitudes have or haven't shifted. The author sort of hit on it. For example, popular thought swung from curing the inner child by blaming your surroundings to the opposite end of the spectrum. That is, if you have a problem or you have some mental illness, it's your fault. This attitude is evident in the way we view the poor (If you're poor, it's your fault. You're not smart enough or quick enough to seize financial opportunities.), women (If you're single, it's your fault. Maybe if you were pretty enough or witty enough, you'd be married to prince charming by now. Here's a self help book. Try to discover what's wrong with you), and even other countries (We're the best. End of story.).

The fact that talk show hosts have become more self righteous and that the public accepts it tells you plenty. If they can accept this behavior in their talk show hosts then we shouldn’t be too surprised if people seem complacent about seeing this attitude in politicians too. I know this rationale seems simplistic (which came first, really) but the point is that we can’t look at things from one angle only. It all counts.

2007-05-24T09:43:00.000-07:00

Weekly links to prove I'm (somewhat) gainfully self-employed.

Rufus Wainwright review at The Tyee

Miracle Fortress for the Straight

Style/Mediacheck at The Tyee

Vietnam for the Straight

Fiction Plane for the Straight

more to come when they're posted.

That is all. I would like to go to the dentist again at some point. And the shrink. I miss health care. It's a beautiful day.

2007-05-23T03:20:00.001-07:00

Insomnia!!!

It's 4:29 am and there's nothing to eat in my house that's not microwaveable. That I gave up having a microwave (tinfoil hat paranoia) never occurs to me when I'm shopping for food.

I've not been sleeping (never do when the seasons are changing for some reason), and so I got sucked into the blogging world of this guy, the I Can't Believe I'm Still Single guy, for the past two hours.

I first heard about him from my friend, who sent me the following email at the beginning of February.

"so gawker has been obsessively documenting this guy named eric schaeffer and his creepy blog called, "i can't believe i'm still single" and i couldn't quite put my finger on why this seemed so familiar. then i realised that it totally reminded me of the time you were seeing that yogic healer guy.

i mean this eric character even ends all his emails with namaste. oh and he's a manorexic, recovering alcoholic.

dude!!!

http://gawker.com/news/eric-schaeffer/ "

I guess I didn't have as much time on my hands then, but holy shit, it is easy to get drawn into the misogynist, penis-centric, false consciousness ickiness of the dude. The conceit of the thing, if you can't be bothered to click through, is that, at 45, he can't believe a catch like him can't find a woman. That's fair. But then he goes on to reveal himself as this fucktarded grossbag with impossibly high standards and HUGE issues with women and practically no social skills (demanding BJs on the first date and such). There's a 1,000 word plus post about a woman he dated who rejected him, and he goes home and write about how much he would like to literally skullfuck her. (LOVE skullfucker as a noun, btw!)

I'm strangely compelled and disturbed. It's like, every time I close my eyes to sleep, his waxy face is tattooed on the inside of my eyelids. Him and the face of the actual dude my friend is referring to in the above email*.

But, it got me thinking: from time to time, I use this forum to openly moan about the dirth of suitors who wish to go out for steak dinner, and then maybe spoon** on the couch while watching Festival Express and then maybe once, just once, do something really small but gestural like flowers or mix-cds, or you know, not having a secret myspace affair that comes to light on my 28th birthday.

God. It is sobering to think that one could inadvertantly be as horrific as this dude.

Anyways, next time I pull that sorta shit, you have official license to slap me upside the head, or send me the link to one of this douche's posts.

As it stands, I never want to type another word about my own life, for fear of being as fatally unaware of my own flaws as this dude.

Thanks for reading. Writing this was kind of like the blog version of replacing one shitty song that's stuck in your head with another

* removed cause it was mean and not useful.
**I really miss spooning.
*** To be fair, he was not all bad, and we've since highfived it out. ****
**** if I could've written this entire piece in "halloween" font (ghost bayou) i woulda.

2007-05-19T09:07:00.001-07:00

One of my favourite things from the '80s was the moment of ubiquity enjoyed by robot cops. I am thinking first of Robocop , but a cursory troll of Wikipedia and I am surprised to learn that Terminator came first. In any event, that superhuman robot cops ruled the '80s is, well, indicative of everything and nothing.

Today, had I not so much work to do (read: moping about the house), I think I would go rent Terminator 2: Judgment Day, which I have never really seen but understand to involve a good robot cop and a bad robot cop sent to destroy each other. I think the bad one is more equipped with new fangled robot cop bells and whistles, and knows all the weakspots of the other. I think Edward Furlong is in it.

I've never been one for using the tropes of science fiction to highlight the foibles of mankind ( I prefer to use the tropes of Pop culture- to each their own), but I think, right now, I would totally dig that film. Whether or not I would identify with the t-800 (the Mark 1 inferior robot cop) or the t-1000 is irrelevant-- in the end, I think they both get melted down to mercurial pools, the idea of robots cops being a dashed hope best left on the scrapheap alongside other failed attempts to make the world better.

The idea of anthropomorphic robots intrigues me. I am bad for humanizing my technology and I think we're all kind of at a point where our most meaningful relationships are with our technological comminications devices. Blackberries, cellphones, the internets--- are we interacting with the person on the other end of the line, or are we being seduced by the technology itself? The idea that the latter is true is fucking terrifying, a reversion to the Cartesian totally of the mind-identified state. Robots that look like humans are coming to kill us all, the all being the spirit and body attached to one's mind.

Yeah. I'm not really sure what I'm saying, except I'm vaguely hungover and now I feel sick, whether it be from thinking about this or the red wine still coarsing through my papery veins. Anyways, after a night which totally blew me over, and I think would enjoy the plot of Terminator 2: Judgment Day all over again this morning. Sigh. Life has so many surprises for us, don't it?

2007-05-17T15:13:00.000-07:00

Why can't I just dream that I'm flying, like everyone else?

So this morning, before my phone sounded at 8 am, I was fast asleep. As anyone who reads this site regularly knows, I have a lot of sex dreams about weird, random people. Dirty, French-Canadian, Export-A smoking assholes who I worked with at Rev Can, family relations, friends, bosses, strangers, Tyra Banks, American Idol finalists, family members, women, men-- my brain just processes thing in sex dream format. Sex dreams are my brain's OS. I am okay with it. Sex dreams are awesome- except ones about my family, those creep me out.

In fact, I am always telling people " I had a sex dream about you!" and then regretting it, because I sound creepy, and the person, even if they know me and my sex-dream-processing brain, they still probably think I want to go down on them in the washroom at Skybar (which part of that sentence is grosser?)

Anyways, I rarely have sex dreams about someone I actually want to have sex with. It never works that way (obviously, or I wouldn't be an insomniac).

So yeah, my phone went early this am, waking me from a sex dream about.... Ashton Kutcher. WTF?? I mean, the guy is not even in the public eye anymore. I don't know how my brain conjured him. I was like, myself as an old cougar, but I went into the past to tell Ashton all about the hot love he was going to have with my younger self kind of like a television voice-over. It was very strange and random. And in those few hazy seconds after I woke up, I was totally into Ashton. Look at him up there, lookin' like everything I don't date - for one thing, he appears to have bathed and shaved, and for another, he appears, gives off the aura, of having enough money to pay for his own beer.

Weird. But also awesome. I hope he calls me.

2007-05-17T09:02:00.000-07:00

I wrote this for Tyee, and I guess it's okay, but the discussion below is so interesting. Like, make my day interesting. I think I love the internets again.

2007-05-17T00:07:00.000-07:00

Le pont neuf est le pont viel. Over and over,

okay. you should come to this. not only is it free, and not only is it a wake for my best friend, but it's open mike, and I've promised that I will get up and play guitar and sing. Free humiliation! pass *that* up. Serious. Kat is the other half of my teenage heart. Come say goodbye and learn how to deal with me when i call you at midnight lookin to play guitar and sing. Whee!

It's the passing of a giant.

come come.

Kitty & Marns going away party!
The Scribes Rugby Football Club
14th & Commercial
Friday the 25th of May
Starts at 7pm

It's full of rugby dude excited to get in your pants. Wheeeeee!

2007-05-16T16:01:00.000-07:00

Something I probably should've given my mother for Mothers Day.

Lately I've taken to sleeping on my back, which I never did before, because I always got nightmares. My crazy Grandma on my Dad's side told me this when I was younger, and whether it is true and has a foundation in some logic (the Egyptians set their dead with their arms cross over their chests to protect from evil spirits, I suspect the old wives' tale about nightmares and sleeping on your back is rooted in the same phobia.) I have found whenever I have terrifying dreams (once or twice a month now, at one point every night ), I invariably wake up on my back. Because of this, I have always been a sleep on my stomach kind of person, one arm wrapped around a pillow in a misplaced and empty gesture of unrequited codependence.

Anyways, I have taken to sleeping on my back with a pillow pulled over my eyes, my hands folded together across my chest, my legs crossed at the ankles with the blanket between them, one foot over and one foot over.

I told this to my mum the other day, whom I was dropping off at airport (she is going to visit her own mum in Scotland), and as I explained it to her, her eyes widened, and I realized it was because she sleeps the exact same way. Of course, she has done this ever since I can remember, but I never put two and two together.

Let me tell you more about my mother. When she came down from Powell River to go to the airport last Saturday, the day before Mother's Day, she showed up with a housewarming set of dishes, a bag of groceries and a $1 scarf she had bought at the Thrift for me. It was only the latest in a long line of gestures both large and small that have, in the literal and figurative sense, kept me breathing.

You see, now I sleep on my back, but at one point, in the not too distant past, I did not sleep at all. I turned the television on and put it on mute and stared at the ceiling either numb, filled with anxious terror at the black dog of my dreams or weeping to the point where my chest ached. I carved words into my arms and would phone my mother just as I'd done it, not realizing that I had also taken chunks of her own flesh with me. She would and does listen, trying to disguise her fear and anguish, not sure what to do other than to listen to me sob. She told me about Jung, and about conscious intent, she told me to watch my own thoughts and breathe in and out (it seems obvious, but when you are at the depressive end of manic depression, you forget). She got me to doctors and put money in my bank account when I was too sick to work. She stayed at my house and lay in bed with me as I shook with untamable, anonymous sorrow.

And when I unleashed angry torrents at her, or threatened the worst, she lovingly waited until I'd hung up the phone before, I suspect, she wept herself.

So yeah. I have taken to sleeping like my mother, who years before me stared down a black dog of her own. I hope and pray that it is not the only thing I do like her, and that, as I get better and better ( I am fine now, but who knows?) that I give her back the peace that she gave me.

2007-05-16T15:40:00.000-07:00

If you would be so kind...

June 2 -- Mount Pleasant Days-- staff needed

Hey.

I'm involved in this year's Mount Pleasant Days fest, happening June 2 along Main St. We need about six people to help man various booths and the like-- about seven hours for of work from 11-6, I think, for $12/ an hour. It should be really fun, and a good mix of kids with their faces painted like kitties and awesome stuff that big kids will like too. Music (good music, no Raffi, though I rather like Raffi), art, barbeque, stilt-walkng Elvis-- good times.

Anyways, if you want to work that day, we'll pay you to do it. Failing that, you should come out anyways-- it's a nice way to get involved in this community and shape the tone of what is undeniably an awesome neighbourhood to live in. Yeah. Like that.

Anyways, please contact me for more details.

Lovelove,

elaine

2007-05-15T21:40:00.000-07:00

you should listen to this band. I don't know how to embed a player in this blog, but it's worth the subtle motion of your index finger to click through.

And now, if you'll excuse me, i am going to get romance drunk on red wine and listen to it on repeat.

2007-05-15T15:39:00.000-07:00

An interesting discussion of internet dialogue over at The Tyee. Keep watching.

2007-05-15T00:37:00.000-07:00

This falls squarely in the category of "don't bother writing about it" but I saw it in the drugstore today, and it disturbed me. I mean, I looked at it for two seconds, but the insidious nature of media memes and messages is such that that's all it takes.
Let's dissect:
1) Hell is full of vicious, vicious lesbians.
2) White rich lady going to jail = tragedy.
3) lesbian evil > rich white lady culture virus showing her vag and driving drunk even when she could pay someone to drive her evil

Okay. That's some messed up math.

Thanks, Star Magazine. I'm so glad your paid circ is 1.5 mil.

Right, now go ahead and rip me apart for bringing this up.

2007-05-13T12:04:00.000-07:00

And Mary Todd said...

"although, at the risk of sounding hitchensesque, that bit about the laugh and coat was terribly romantic - which has much more to do with love than sex, I find. My opinion, of course. But then again, not everyone can (or should) separate the two - love and sex that is. Perhaps that is the better part of my duplicity." *

Do you know what? My friend has a point. I think the curse of my generation is that we've all been asked to separate love from sex. Educated, liberated, feminists do not believe that love and sex need to be linked, so much so that asking those two things to come in the same package is like asking Santa to leave money for the tooth under your pillow.

So yeah, us liberated women is giving it up to anyone with a PHd in flattering our progressive values, and if you want romance go read Comso and Danielle Steele, you sad little 50s housewife.

And instead of just offering someone your coat when it's cold, you say "I guess the manly thing to do would be to offer you my coat". Ha ha ha. We're smarter than that aren't we?

We're all irony pigs fucked over by the lesser part of our own duplicity.

Anyways. More on this idea later, expressed more cogently. I'm gonna go Naomi Wolff on y'all (except for the part where she becomes a born again Christmastree)

* context.

more on the subject

2007-05-11T16:36:00.000-07:00

I think my favourite thing about this little blog (besides unedited self-absorption! wheee!!!!!) is all the little letters and comments I get from people, maybe 6 or 7 a week. Even if it's "you're a screwed up drunk" (it's happened) i like to engage. So thanks. And even though I'm an asshole and I sometimes forget to reply ( cause I'm just like, so, so busy) it does make my day.

kisses,
e

2007-05-10T22:07:00.000-07:00

Writing about this dude for The Tyee..I wasn't sure if I hated this piece or loved it when I finished, but I am elated to be allowed to talk Phil in public. He's my muse, and kind of the subject of the novel I'm working on.

2007-05-10T12:34:00.000-07:00

Peter Bjorn and John feature in the Straight. Lead feature. Yar.

2007-05-10T11:01:00.000-07:00

If I was one of those columnist that appears in the weekend "review" section of every paper, the ones who ask readers to submit new words for things, I would ask readers to submit a word for "what happens when the blunt force of something you already know hits you again and it fucking astounds you"

I was working on edits for a piece I wrote about Dr.Phil on the Tyee (it'll be up tomorrow! Somebody is finally paying me to write about Dr.Phil after all my obsessing!) and I had CNN on, where The President of the United States was addressing the nation about Iraq . And sweet holy hell - all of it---the fact that the man was installed through family ties and scheming, the fact that he is more grossly underqualified for the presidency that any world leader I can think of, that fact that his ignorance and maleability have allowed a handful of evil men to committ mass murder for their own gain-- it just hit me again like a ton of bricks.

It was when he said:

"...our worst enemy, the United States and its allies..."

when the speechwriter surely wrote

"....our worst enemy. The United States and its allies..."

I quite literally began to weep, openly and without control, deep sobs that came right from my chest. Because here is a man so utterly disengaged with the task of leading the world's most influentiual, all-consuming nation that the words coming out of his mouth mean nothing to him.

I know this is the leftist equivalent of me going "hey. sliced bread!" but it really shook me to the core.

So yeah. That word, please. When overt and obvious tragedy strikes you clean in the face.

2007-05-09T19:01:00.000-07:00

Just got home from yoga. Hitchens in on Anderson Cooper right now. It's like the perfect storm of inappropriate sex dream fodder.

2007-05-08T22:30:00.000-07:00

Did you ever meet someone who made you feel like you were an Alice in a Wonderland of their making?

And then did you ever type that sentance and realize John Mayer had ruined anything-Wonderland related for you, and that, even though you had once liked Lewis Carroll enough to have the Cheshire Cat tattoo'd on your back, everytime you hear the title of his masterwork, you will think of that mop-topped bastion on mediocrity?

Yeah, me too.

Fucker.

Two people I barely know did incredibly nice things for me today. Like, super-duper nice.

Thanks.

2007-05-07T14:03:00.000-07:00

!!! feature in the Straight.

The dude from this band was acutally really lovely to talk to. I love when an interview subject just forgets all the "music journalists are the enemy" bullshit like they're in fucking Stillwater from Almost Famous, and talks to me like a human.

sidebar: I just found this quote from Mitch Hedberg , who played the Eagles' Road Manager in that wonderful film, about the best part of Almost Famous.

"I got to smoke fake pot with Peter Frampton, which is as good as smoking real pot with a guy who looks like Peter Frampton. I've done that way more."

Ha.

2007-05-06T16:42:00.000-07:00

here's the podcast of my interview on CBC. You have to wait for the Rachel Sander intro. She did a great job.

Also, the French elected a Rightist/Nationalist old dude instead of a hot socialist lady who looks like Marianne.

2007-05-04T22:28:00.000-07:00

Friday Nights are for lovers (of porn)

It's true. Today, because my work messed up and didn't process my paycheque, I can officially say I am flat-broke. Busted, outta-favours, get-used-to-eggs-every-day-for-a-week broke. I am learning, finally getting it through my thick skull that their is no nobility in being poor.

[begin rant]
Somebody, please, pay me a decent write/make radio shows/ edit. Avec health benefits, please. I am good at it. I have tons of experience. I've won awards. I swears! I can't eat and be a freelancer at the same time. I have vices to support.

I will write commercials, I will write bios of pro-life country bands from Fucknoweheres, Alabama, whose lead singer has a direct line to Jesus (okay, that's a lie). I will write my own fucking obituary, I just can't live on nothing anymore. I am 28. This struggling artist thing has lost its shine. Please. Don't make me move to cold, cold Toronto. I am already so pale and sallow. And horrible. Can you imagine what TO would do to me?
[end rant]

Anyways, as a consequence, I am staying in, on a Friday, for the first time in recent memory. I thought there would be good movies on tv, and I would have some popcorn (for which, I just realized, I have no microwave) and just be wholesome. Not so much. Because Every. Channel. Is. Porn. Now, I don't get any fancy channels (up to 42 - the minimum someone who writes a tv column can get away with) but nearly every other channel is tits, tits, tits. And not in the good way. You see, channels like Bravo, Showcase, "Slice", Life and City know that their bread-and-butter on a Friday is the wanking set, but they can't just like, show porn. So it has to be arty porn. With big [sexy] seventies muff. Or edu-porn, in which the show purports to be a docu-drama about making it in the porn industry, or like "the history of the orgasm" or some shit. Or that awful Sex, Toys and Chocolate show, which has all those twenty-something dullards talking about ass-sex and dildos in Sub-Kinseyean patter, making the act of boning seems as enticing as, two channels down, the MILF making curtains out of an old prom dress she found in the alley (seriously, ST&C is the worst -- it reeks of Toronto, and it is directly responsible for me once having to have a conversation with my father about whether or not anal sex was appropriate television talk-show fodder).

The point is, after all that aimless whinging, that at least one channel could air something that is not porn, and not a 10 year-old ep of Law & Order: Date Rape and Homocide (yes, I know) on a Friday night. As it stands, I will have to make do with my old standby, CNN. Which is not like porn at all.

Also, in the spirit of not letting adversity kick my ass and make my sad, here is a list of 50 random things that make me happy.

1) Cherry Blossoms
2) my mother
3) Gawker
4) The fact that Veronika traded some clothes from her store to get yoga classes for me.
5) hearing a girl on the bus the other day say " I think he's, like, non compost mentis"
6) Super Furry Animals
7) Graffiti on the corner of 7th and Ontario that's says " I work in a dungeon"
8) Random emails from people I do and don't know, that engage, challenge and make me laugh
9)doggles
10) public art on the corner of 2nd and Main that shows a hand making a bunny shadow puppet, on what I think is mylar or possibly steel.
11) When I say that I think Douglas Coupland is overrated, and the person I say it too says "Oh, thank God I'm not the only one"
12) Spending a Sunday afternoon reading the New Yorker, esp some monster profile on someone I don't know much about. If I don't put pants on all day, or brush my hair, or go outside for anything more than a coffee, and I have read the New Yorker, I consider it a day well spent.
13) good shower pressure.
14) Girlfriends. Both the UPN show starring Diana Ross's daughter, and actual girlfriends. I didn't get this until I was, lets say 27 and 5/8, but the more you value your girlfriends, and your non sexual friends in general, the less likely you are to ache for a romantic relationship (within reason--- girl needs a date)
15)Performing guitar and playing super awesome with no mistakes ever. Playing guitar and singing when no one is listening.
16) Oxford commas
17) Dancing in the living room to ABBA
18) Crappy reality tv shows, esp the PussyCat Dolls Presents: The Search for the NextPussycat Doll
(sometimes, when I can't sleep from anxiety, I just think about what's going to happen on one of these vacuous, campy timesucks, and all of the sudden I'm off to sleep. Yeah, I'm not proud of that. but it makes me happy.
19) sex dreams about celebrities or my friends
20) As it Happens on CBC. Still so fucking good, even though my hero Mary Lou Finlay left. Seriously, the puns at the beginning of the show-- best thing ever. Did you hear they are thinking about changing their theme song? They CANT change it. As my lovely editor, Vanessa Richmond at The Tyee (#21) said "That's the sound of mum making dinner". Amen.
21) Vanessa Richmond. One of the loveliest, most most patient and supportive editors ever.
22) the fact that I haven't intentionally cut myself in over a year.
23) grilled cheese sandwiches
23) turkey dinner- had my first one this past Xmas after 20 years of vegetarianism-- I always thought people who said "Happy Turkey Day" on Thanksgiving were base and classless... Now I understand. It's the day you get to have motherfucking turkey.
24) Guy friends (see #14, but with underlying sexual tension and self-esteem boosts)
25) unabashed feminists who are also hilarious
26) Doin' it (from what I remember)
27) Making out and not doin' it (right away)
28) The smell of October (fireworks and leaves and possibility)
29) Camping, esp sitting at the picnic table at night, lit by the Coleman, playing scrabble and drinking red wine from steel cups. Being in the woods in general
30) Feeding things through shredder- it's just satisfaying.
31) High-fives (still my under-rated solution to the Israel/Palestine debate.)
32) Having a coffee and a scone and reading the paper in a nice cafe with a no cellphone/babies rule
33) putting glue on my hand, waiting for it to dry and then peeling it off ( i haven't done this in years, but I recall it being extraordinarily pleasing)
34) Awesome concerts that restore your faith in music (Jarvis Cocker at the Commodore being the most recent example of this)
35) New socks and underwear.
36) Good manners from strangers.
37) Diet coke and a Twix bar ( i know this makes me a Cathy Comic. fuck you)
38) Just thinking about that Pearls Before Swine comic, where the pig is dressed as Cathy saying "I'm Fat, my boyfriend doesn't love me and I have no money" and the rat replies " Well, why don't you just @#$$%# kill yourself?", and how it was printed in the Province.
39) Mix CDs
40) New crushes, right before you find out they have a girlfriend/ don't like you/ are a total wank.
41) This book, and anything I can read about architecture, even if I have to read it twice to understand it fully
42) British wit, except Christopher Hitchens who is a total twat (pronounced to rhyme with 'rat')
43) job interviews. getting them, at least-- going is another story.
44) Bike Riding!
45) Ferry Riding, esp being on the upper deck on a sunny day.
46) Fantasizing about going back to school (not actually going back--- waaay to poor, and because of my lousy credit, I can't get a loan)
47) Cheap beer in a dive bar with someone who is a great storyteller.
48) Ativan (I'm not taking it anymore, but hell yeah, it makes you happy)
49) New places. New art. new people.
50) You. No seriously. Thanks for reading*
*51) Cheap endings that pander to the reader.

Phhewww. God. Like anyone besides me made it through that. Anyways. Back to porn.

2007-05-01T19:21:00.000-07:00

i done wrote this

2007-04-26T18:00:00.001-07:00

I'm having one of those days where I hate everything. A.k.a. every other day.

2007-04-23T18:37:00.000-07:00

The world is more ironic than two Alanis Morrisettes, duct-taped together.

To wit:

Usually I leave my articles to the last minute, send them off two minutes before deadline and then beat myself up because, if I'd had more time to revise, it would have been better. So this week, I get something done early, lovingly--lovingly-- craft it into something I'm pleased with, and turn it in a whole 12 hours early. I go to bed thinking- "God that is the first thing I've written in a long time that didn't make me want to seek out black market human cloning companies and clone myself just for the pleasure of giving myself a knuckle sandwich.

Of course, it comes back from the editor, revised and with vitriolic comments, the next day. I've written for them before, and received minor, triffling edits, but nothing like this. This person has taken umbrage with nearly everything about the piece - my grammar, my assessment of the work I'm reviewing, my use of "including, reportedly.." instead of "reportedly including". I mean, I like a good rigourous edit as much as the next woman, but this was like a drive-by hurt-my-feelings. I should be tougher-- I *am* tough!-- but this is kind of unprecedented.

No good deed goes unpunished, I guess.

Good news:

I saw two ladybugs today-- maybe I've been in the city too long, but I can honestly not recall the last time I saw one.. I picked it up on a blade of grass and watched it do its thing while I was sitting in campus gardens at lunch. I was trying to think of the evolutionary advantage of their red spotted wings, but i couldn't think of anything--perhaps that's why there's not too many kicking around..

More good news- getting a Wurlitzer, apparently, if all goes well. So excited! Haven't had an organ to play in years. It needs to go to a goood home, as my friend Andrew is, I think, tree planting for the summer. Yay! One more reason not to leave my house.

More more good news-

noone is making watch hockey right now.

when someone doesn't care about you, its super fucking easy not to care about them (this is not from my own personal situation, but its good to know)

I have idea crushes and intellectual crushes, but no real ones.

Anybody else ?

2007-04-19T10:56:00.001-07:00

The freelancer's job market in Vancouvers, as per Craigslist

"Article Writer

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Reply to: robertjmartin@dccnet.com
Date: 2007-04-18, 11:28AM PDT

We've launched a new site about tires. We require an experienced article writer to write short (200-300 word) articles about tires to educate and help consumers with making informed purchasing decisions.

The articles must be informative, educational and written in a friendly one-to-one conversational manner. Articles must be original content and will remain our sole property and cannot be used for others. All articles submitted for our approval are copyright checked for plagurism prior to payment.

To get a better understanding of what our site looks lke and see how our current articles look, visit http://www.tirebuyingsecrets.com"

Fuck me dead.

Craigslist Vancouver

2007-04-19T10:29:00.000-07:00

Music Journalist-type person

I hate to ram this stuff down yer throats but...

Here's something I done wrote for the Tyee

And

Here's what I done wrote about The Books what for The Georgia Straight

2007-04-18T17:30:00.000-07:00

Memo to the Russian lady outside my building, bleach blonde hair, slightly, pleasantly plump, walking a little dog and wearing a hot pink velour track suit:
You are lovely. I think you know you look absurd, and that you keep it that way because you know it will brighten my day. Seriously. Don't ever change.

2007-04-17T19:46:00.000-07:00

I've been watching CNN all day again**- not a healthy activity to say the least. Do you think that weird cowboy radio guy would've been fired if he called those basketball ladies ho's this week?
God, it's no wonder people get desensitized- the coverage of the events at Virginia Tech was handled with the exact same three-ring-circus mentality that the "old man who said nappy hos" was last week. They had Dr. fucking Phil on CNN, talking to the father and brother of one of the victims. As if people who has just lost their daughter want to be subjected to the celebutation of their personal tragedy. God. Why do I watch? What a sick bastard and a sick culture.

** Partly as research. I'm doing a new "watching the media" feature for The Tyeein addition to my monthly TV column and music piece. I've also been getting a bit more work for The Straight. Still starving though, and not helped at all by the fact that my pursegot nicked on the Skytrain today. Not too much money in it, but you know, every 40 bucks counts. Oh well, if CNN has taught me anything, it's that my problems are nothing.

2007-04-06T14:59:00.001-07:00

hello blog

2007-03-20T18:01:00.000-07:00

radar interview with Jarvis Cocker. I met him in my early 20s, and he had herpes face and did not look like the "erotic coathanger" I had seen in videos, but I still love him.

http://www.radaronline.com/features/2007/03/jarvis_cocker_2.php

2007-03-20T17:46:00.000-07:00

Ingredients for living in east vancouver.

(or elaine purges her photo files)

2007-03-19T12:08:00.000-07:00

is anybody out there? sorry my last posts have been depressing. I'm actually pretty happy. Really.

2007-03-16T13:36:00.000-07:00

Long time, no post. I wish I has something that were interesting to say. Or that you had something interesting to say and would leave a comment. I'm temping out at UBC right now- well, not right now, but that's how I'm making a living. The campus is a nice place to work, but I'm jealous of all the students, with their whole, unfucked-up lives ahead of them.

There's a piece by me in today's Globe 7 section, and a piece by me on the Tyee a couple days ago. I had a job interview for a job I actually want- I think it went well but who knows.

other boring life updates:

I have no cat anymore. It's not as traumatizing as I expected, but it may sink in later. No cat hair on anything I own. Huzzah.

I kind of, as usual, got my heart dented a little in the past little while, and lost a really good friend process. Typical Elaine bullshit, nothing out of the ordinary. I make poor life choices and get attached to people who have no absolutely no interest in me, romantically. I'm really drawn to totally inappropriate men. And then I blame it on myself for being obnoxious/ fat/ not good enough/ an unemployed loser. God. I'm an "ack" away from being a Cathy comic.

And the thing that kills me is, I've been doing a lot of thinking about it lately, and I really just am fed up being single and alone, and sleeping alone and eating alone, and going home alone, and bitching about being alone. I'd actually like to have all that domestic life crap I avoided for my whole life. But I have no idea how to do it, and I feel like I never will. I'm so used to things not ever going my way in that department that I can't actually imagine that they ever will. And you go your whole life saying "it's not me, it's them", but what if it is?

And with all the experiences I've had in the past couple years, I feel like I'm the practice girl- the one people date *before* they meet their wife, or settle down or whatever.

And yes, I know I wrote about this a lot, but it's one of the few aspects of my life I am truly unhappy with.... I haven't seriously dated anyone in years. YEARS.

I'm lonely.

And reasonably sure that this is the most pathetic entry I've posted here yet.

That is all.

2007-03-06T21:48:00.000-08:00

Elaine'c continuing quest for a job part 12,893,409

ohh man. i hope they pick me to become a pussycat doll.

here's something i wrote

http://thetyee.ca/Entertainment/2007/03/06/Fox/

2007-02-27T23:23:00.000-08:00

Today went better than most days. Worked for a livin', with some very nice people, just helping with inventory at a bookstore that a very old friend of mine manages. She was kind enough to extend the offer after me bitching on this very blog, after we hadn't seen each other in years (we worked together at a shitty coffee shop for the ghetto-wage equivalent of Meryl in the Devil Wears Prada (picture aprons instead of shoes, brooms being flung instead of fur coats). It was nice to earn money, get a tiny bit of self-respect back. Hopefully I'm on the track to getting back on my feet and being able to pay everyone who's helped me out back, especially my mum, and kat, and the velvet tiger and v-dog. Everyone's been great though. Thanks for all your kind thoughts. If Oprah is right (and she usually is) it helps.

My mum told me last night she did a meditation for me, and others (including George Dubya, whom she can't stand)

May they be filled with loving kindness

May they experience wellbeing in body, mind, and spirit

May they find peace in their heart

May their hearts and minds be free of pain

May all beings be at ease.
Whatever living beings there may be;
Whether they are weak or strong, omitting none,
The great or the mighty, medium, short or small,
The seen and the unseen,
Those living near and far away,
Those born and to-be-born,
May all beings be at ease

kind of nice, huh?

2007-02-25T13:12:00.000-08:00

So last night, after a large amount of whiskey and gin, we started playing 20 questions, and it came up that "the meanest thing that [redacted] has ever done to me that I don't know about"is not tell me that she saw my boyfriend making out with another girl while we were still dating.

He's with this girl still.

This is the only boyfriend I ever really had real feelings for, one of the most significant romantic relationships I've ever had, and for 7 years, I've always thought we broke up because I was crazy and depressive and pushed him away. I spent two years getting over him, always held him in high regard and always felt like he would never lie to me or do anything that would hurt me. I thought it was an honest break-up. Up until yesterday, he was the standard against which all other relationships would be measured. And my friend sat there and watched me agonize over what went wrong and beat myself up for ruining things, and never said a word. I'm sure she said it to other people, and I'm guessing that everyone knew but me.

This is a rather depressing entry.
Apologies.
I'm not actually feeling sad.
Just, like, done.
There are plenty of other things in the world that guarantee you pleasure. I'm going to dedicate 100 per cent of my time to those.

2007-02-20T13:34:00.001-08:00

does anybody want to rob a bank with me?

2007-02-15T12:01:00.000-08:00

I got a job offer from a fake spam job offer company today! Things are looking up! If I get fake job offers, can real ones be far behind?

Nothing like a internet scam preying on you to remind you that you're weak and vulnerable. Bastards.

Also the following took place between 3pm and 4pm valentines day:

Scene: Elaine has just recieved another no-job-related phone call, and is upset. Though she shouldn't be wasting her money, she decides to go get herself a coffee and a scone, because it is really time to get out of the house. Having retrieved her coffee, she is scuttling back to her comein the pouring rain, her pants dragging in puddles, and her cheap, holey shoes filled with water. At the intersection, the east-west traffic has stopped, and Elaine is free to cross the south-north intersetion. She enters, but then realizes the s/n traffic has an advanced green and cars will be turning into the crosswalk. She turns around.

Enter old, posh British man, under umbrella, also waiting to cross the street.
Yells: "Look where you're going! Don't you look where you're going? Haven't you any idea how to cross the street?"

Elaine, on her last nerve: "Look, I'm having a really bad day, so why don't you just back the fuck up, old man, and get off my case."

OPBM: "Don't you use that kind of language with me, young lady!"

Elaine, having lost it: "Then dont *you* yell at strangers on the street. You don't know me, or who I am or what my life is like, so why don't you shut the fuck up and mind your own fucking business."

OPMB yells something unintelligible, Elaine is not listening because all she sees and hears is white hot rage.

Elaine: "You do not want to push me any further. Go fuck yourself. Seriously."

Miss Corden scuttles off like a crackhead in the rain, her upturned hoodand soaked trouser cuffs adding to this effect.

cut to scene of Elaine bursting into tears when she gets home, shocked thatshe could address anther person this way.

The moral of the story: keep your snide little remarks to yourself. You never know when you're going to be the straw that breaks the camel's back.

2007-02-12T20:20:00.000-08:00

job hunting = your soul in a blender.

I seriously have no self-esteem left. None.

Please send donations so I can move to Toronto.
love,
elaine

2007-02-11T22:58:00.000-08:00

http://coachfox.blogspot.com/
"This is a blog about the TV show 'Coach'. I wasn't a fan and I don't remember much about it."

i believe this is what they call "reaching the end of the internet"

umm. so today has been kinda depressing, except I went to the legion with my friend Joe, and he gave me the most amazing housewarming present ever- an amazing triptych of sculpture/painting that i honestly don't know how to hang but I love to bits. I'm so incredibly honoured to have it.

also we won/ didn't really win a pair of fuzzy handcuffs in bar trivia. the answer for 40 per cent of the questions was "ghana" . it was very strange.

this weekend has been inexplicably weird. I feel a little empty-ish.

cat = gone.

e

2007-02-08T17:59:00.000-08:00

this is kind of awesome.

http://www.radaronline.com/features/2007/02/tainted_black.php

2007-02-07T22:53:00.000-08:00

something I wrote for somewhere.
http://thetyee.ca/Life/2007/02/07/CanadianIdle/

I'm still bummed.

2007-02-06T15:02:00.000-08:00

I have to give jim away. no cats in my apartment. my heart hurts like crazy.

2007-02-03T14:29:00.001-08:00

i was thinking this morning about, among other things, how awesome ABBA are. And how awesome Rings Around the World by Super Furry Animals is (especially Juxtapozed - when you first hear it, it's ridiculous and uses a vocorder (vocoder?), but the more you hear it, the more you realize that it's layered and texturized and composed, as opposed to just written, and that, even in a silly little throwaway single, their songs are overflowing with ideas and concepts most of us can't even comprehend . Also, they were gonna get Bobby Brown to sing the chorus. Amazing.)

I dunno. Would it be alright if i just started posting reviews of things that everybody already knows are awesome? Could I make a career out of that? Like "sliced bread- it's fucking tops!" styles? I want to write well enough to pull that off.

I was also thinking of getting everyone I know to rhapsodize about an old album or thing they love and just compiling it in some form.. anybody? Anything from "here's why grilled cheese sandwiches are good" or "here's why I like Love's Four Sail". Are you all down with that? About 250 words or 2500 word. However long it takes you to tell people how good something is. In fact, i think 2,500 words is better. Really disect the glory of something.

Yeah, I wanna compile that and then....
And then pitch it to...something.....

I guess that's where my idea falls apart. Stupid blog culture and death of magazines. Fuck.

Also, I've been thinking about good journalism v. good writing, and how they don't often overlap. But calling one's self a writer sounds ridiculous. You might as well respond "Make other people pay for dinner" when asked about your profession, if you're a writer.

Oh, help me rhonda.

2007-02-02T18:29:00.000-08:00

narcissus with a digital camera.

the eternal dilemma

oates is lookin' at me funny

framptomnipotence: the realization that you, and your hair, are all influenced by peter frampton

I kind of love ABBA. Did you know that "take a chance on me" was written when Benny was out for a jog, and the rhythm of his feet and his breath just made that underlay "take a chance take a chance take a chance chance" part. fucking genius.

2007-02-02T17:26:00.000-08:00

are you kind of loving this aqua teen hunger force bomb scare stuff. I think we're talking abby hoffman levels of genius with these two guys. amazing.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2007/01/31/boston-suspects-tease-med_n_40122.html

2007-01-29T18:04:00.000-08:00

from the headline, i would say someone at CKNW was feeling a little poetic this morning.

http://cknw.com/news/news_local.cfm?cat=7428654912&rem=57180&red=80165423aPBIny&wids=410&gi=1&gm=news_local.cfm

2007-01-23T21:54:00.000-08:00

Maybe you're fatigued on the Pickton Trial already- I know I am, but I can't turn away. I don't get why Robert Pickton's brother, Dave Pickton, isn't a suspect. He had to know what was going on - the habitable buildings on the farm aren't that numerous, and besides, they were both involved in the DTES community, and it's not like his brother wouldn't have seen all the women around, and then heard they went missing. People tend to forget that, and the mainstream media never mentions his brother. Christ. Oh, did I mention that, when I was 17, I went to a rave at Piggy's Palace, on the Pickton Farm, and Dave Pickton pulled a shotgun on my friend who had rented the venue from him? Dave is this big homunculous of a man, lookin' like an extra from Easy Rider and giving off some serious evil energy. People knew for years whatwas going on there-- he had to know too. Maybe he made somesorta deal with the cops.

There was coverage on Fox News, and the anchor's tone implied that the women somehow deserved to die more than women who aren't involved in the sex trade. It's like, "hey, you righteous, holier-than-thou piece of shit, what other unfortunate life choices should be punishable by death? How about single mothers and poor people?How about people who get bad haircuts? How about amputee soliders? Do they deserve to have their legs blown off?" Fuck. You just know that dude is one of those guys who uses "jew" as a verb.

Anyways, I feel a little stupid writing about something that's been so overexposed, but all the mass amounts of information are printing themselves on my brain. On everyone's brain. It's weird when you read all the names of the missing women, and there's your friend's first name, and your first name, and you know at least one person who goes by the same name of all the 60 women. That's neither here nor there but it shakes you up inside, the way only something that hits your own id can.

There has been a lot of *shitty*, knee-jerk art made in response to this case (or rather, in response to the artist's response to the cae) , and to the DTES in general, but this, by femke van delfte, is worth looking at- it's very moving, from a place of no artistic vanity and it a lot of info about how it all happened as well. And the woman who did it got why I hate lincoln clarkes, so I knew she understood the problem with so much academic or art school pap created or inspired by the human disaster zone that is Main and Hastings. A few years back, when I was Arts Editor at WestEnder, we put one of Femke's images on the cover, along with a story about reactionary art to the missing women's case. It was such a powerful image, and the fact that I was able to put 60,000 copies of it into the public consciousness was my proudest moment ever as a journalist. It was the first time I ever cared that 60,000 people saw and read something I had created (that Femke had created, obviously, but you know what I mean). I miss that. My dad threw out the only copy of that issue that I had when he hijacked and "cleaned" my car. Sigh. I miss my job. I miss WestEnder when it used to be a brave little paper. It may have had waay more typos when Carlyn Yandle was the editor, but she fought like hell for the integrity of that paper, and the result, I didn't appreciate till after she was gone, was a really unique voice of community advocacy, that also gave people a laugh. nothin like that in print now, really. Double sigh.

anyways. write me letters. i need attention.

2007-01-20T11:14:00.000-08:00

top o'the mornin'.

I believe today, as a way of procrastinating from packing, I am going to make some of my famous cookies. Message me if you want me to make you some.

Um, yeah. Last night I had a beautiful dinner at Cassis, with all them beautiful girly girls. Creme brulee, some amazing steak thingy, red wine, smoking, really boring art show (full of beardos who think their sketch painting of a elk wearing sneakers is vastly different from the sketch painting of a smoking pandas done by someone else), dressin' up, dancin' at a nightclub- so many things I haven't done in a long while. I'm a hot mess today. There's a pair of gold heels in the middle of my living room, stockings at the foot of my bed and so on.., a trail of silliness.

My inner drunken dialer/ text messager struck again. Oy. There *really* *should* be a breathalyzer on cellphones. I think, judging from my last few misadventures in that department, I might have a crush on someone I'm not supposed to. Is it possible that you can only have a crush on someone when you're high/ drunk on red wine? Because most of the time I just think "not a match. no way.", if I think about it at all- but then, you know, next thing you know, I be drunken dialing someone who is , the evidence would suggest, not super stoked on making out with this particular hot mess. In fact,now thatI think about it, I think it's the disinterest that makes him so damn appealing to my intoxicated alter-ego. What the hell? Does this happen to anyone else? Is anyone else only turned out by people who aren't into them?

Cellphones are just pure evil. I have no self-control.
I don't feel sad about it or anything it's more just like "who *is* that girl".

Now I wish I had something high-minded to put in here, as a reward for reading all my boring personal crap. Don't. Can't. New Dears album is rather amazin'. Listen to that. Down with war. Up with peace. Love sees no colour. People are dying, people!

2007-01-19T17:12:00.000-08:00

oh yeah. here's something that bastard tad friend didn't break into my head and steal:

http://thetyee.ca/Music/2007/01/18/MusicPicks/

2007-01-19T17:01:00.000-08:00

Tad Friend goes ahead and gets into my head and writes something I was going to write. fucker.

http://www.newyorker.com/critics/television/articles/070122crte_television_friend

and then:

work= cbc on my headphones+ paper fasteners that have a really neat design that pleases me+ archiving things. That's it.

and then: going out fer a ladies dinner with telma and christine and lisa and some other beautiful women tonight.Gonna get dressed up. Stockings and everything- be damned the cold.

and also: moving soon. moving is a hassle. However, all the tweezers I've lost and rebought have been recovered, along with about $50 in pennies.

but then: making out with someone who is just your friend kind of ruins your friendship. Don't convince yourself otherwise. I've done it twice in the past two months. Smarten up.

but most importantly:
I really need to work full-time in my industry again. None of this part-time freelancing bolsheviks. I need to work with ideas and structure. I'm back on the trail, actually sending out resumes, the whole nice. Cross yer fingers for me.

Also: I am poor. Send donations.

2007-01-17T13:45:00.000-08:00

holy shit the huffington post linked to something I wrote for the tyee on CNN and AC 360. The link is no longer up on HuffPO, but here's a screen capture from google that proves it's true, it's really really true. My work on Huffpo. I can die happy.

2007-01-16T17:52:00.000-08:00

I suppose I should be grateful that I haven't encountered real job stress in 4 years, but all pof the sudden I'm dealing with things like "the commute" and having to listen to some fucktard in my office talk about the Golden Globes, re-wording in less clever style what he proabably just read on Defamer.That's it. I need a patron or a book deal. Or totally to just get laaaaid, bro. I'd rather have the book deal. sort of. Broke my sugar fast. ate gelato. woo!

2007-01-15T19:22:00.000-08:00

Temping is amazing. No one talked to me all day, and I had to do was archive old treaties and land leases. I hope I can go the whole time without anyone knowing my name. Office money without office culture. Awesome.

Still looking for journalism work. There's no secure journalism jobs in this city. Let's all buy fur coats and move to Toronto! Help me, ghost of Peter Gzowski.

2007-01-13T19:47:00.000-08:00

something for the tyee

http://thetyee.ca/Mediacheck/2007/01/11/CNN/

2007-01-13T16:34:00.000-08:00

Verses vulgaris.

There are potions in this world
That turn a strong frame weak.
That make sensible folk write in verse
and send half-coherent messages throught the night.
There are concoctions which make U2 fans
And summerteeth.
And want seem like need, and need seem like periphery.

I am always wanting that which abhors me.
Sugar
or a next chord
or a meaningful job.
and arrogant men who cannot tie their own ties.
or see that laughter overrules desire,always.
Like paper fortunes
I am unfolding things
-novels and
damp skin and
mouths on my own-
which I would prefer tucked away.

2007-01-05T11:35:00.000-08:00

i promise I will post things that are lovely and wonderful when I get the rest of my life in order. Right now, what you need to know: I am happy, safe and healthy. I cut sugar and starch from my diet 7 days ago and will keep it out for seven days more. I have more willpower that I expected. I eat meat now. And it tastes delicious. I am looking for somewhere to live and i have a couple leads. I am not dating anyone.I am not looking to date anyone. I'm doing some writing work but not as much as I'd like. I haven't touched my novel in a month. My friend Joe made me an awesome mixed CD with a hand-drawn cover. Veronika and Dane had me, and our neighbours, Matt & Fiona, over for giant dungeness crab with lemon butter, and french eclairs that I couldn't eat but looked wonderful. We went to a lecture/salon series where some dude talked about steak and "cuts of meat" for 15 minutes. Another dude talked about pre-juke box music players. I like my life. I will feel happier when I know where I'm gonna be living next month. Does anybody still read this?

2006-12-18T15:31:00.000-08:00

i have *amazing* friends, and an *amazing* mother. I am truly blessed.

2006-12-15T15:15:00.000-08:00

The Poor Me Monthly

Urggg. Today I got a job through a temp agency, a really good one for at least a month that paid reasonably and was close to home and was not horrific. 1/2 an hour later, when I just started relxing, they phoned and said the job was cancelled. Also, I got screened out of a Telus, job- I have no idea why. I can't catch a break. I've been looking for work for a month.... I'm skilled, and I'm not an idiot. I just don't get it, but I feel like giving up. Poor and unemployed. Last chance to ask me out!

Sorry if I'm just whining and being self-pitying, but its my blog and I can cry if I want to. I'm working on productive things, too, but i just don't have the energy to talk about them.

2006-11-29T22:40:00.000-08:00

I'm stuck.

2006-11-28T16:55:00.000-08:00

i need a job. helpskis.

2006-11-23T14:36:00.000-08:00

OKay, haven't posted in a while, cause i'm fed up.

You know what'd be swell? If 2006 was just over. This has been, serously, the worst year of my life. I can't wait till it's over. Lost my job, had mono for a month. Damaged my own arms. Couldn't work/get out of bed for much of Spring. Nearly got arrested for unpaid parking tickets. Lost a major, regular freelance gig because I got a Sheryl Crow songname incorrect. Dated someone who pretty much stole from me and then cheated on me and then plagarized something I had written... dated someone else who broke up with me and then told me to read the Tibetan Book of The Dead to get over him. Had my car stolen. Quit smoking, quit red wine. Other stuff that sucks.

I know my life is pretty fucking amazing compared to 80 per cent of the world, but this is my own personal worst. 2007 has to be better. If you have the time and the wherewithal, could you wish for that for me? My wishes are going unanswered these days.

I'm fed up, and I'm sick of staying positive in the face of diappointment.
Looking for work in this state is vicious.

I wish I had positive things to say, but I don't, so I haven't been writing. But that's where its at...

love,
e.

2006-11-13T13:31:00.000-08:00

As of tomorrow it will be two weeks since I smoked. I want to smoke. ARRGGGG.

2006-10-24T18:08:00.000-07:00

Another one of those cliches that you hear with your ears all the time but only know in your heart once in a while: you can just turn around and love people who hate you. you can. And it doesn't make you stupid or a doormat or foolish. It just makes that person loved, and it is so much more beautiful to see someone who is loved. you can just turn around and love anyone, even people who yell at you and debase you and lie to you and try to cheat you,andyou can just love them, and have compassion, and wish them peace. You don't get anything out of it. Life is not, as I read somewhere, a vending machine where you put in virtue and get out happiness. but that person gets your love. And that doesn't mean there's any less love for anyone else. Unlike any other emotion, or anything in the world, love is bottomless, there is enough in me to give to everyone, and still have plenty left over for myself.

I know this ain't exactly a radical thought, but more the thought of a radical: yeah- that dude Jesus.

Son't worry, I'm not going all fundy-Christian on you. I'm just wishing you love.

Love to my dad, love to the collections agent, love to the person who just yelled at me, who I think today needs it most. More and more and more of it.

2006-10-22T16:46:00.000-07:00

When the battle was over, the war begun.

The rat-tailed soldiers were coming closer this morning, so we gathered the cats and our record collection and anything else of sniveling sentimentality and piled them up in the basement, both of us for once too scared for once to make jokes about the meager tally of two years of what was supposedly love. We could have left, but you and I, nothing if not hopeful idealists as well as procrastinators, left it too late, and now with the city around us in chaos, we could hardly venture out into the street. They would put a bullet through your fucking head, and worse for me. And worse for me.

Padding around thecement-floored basement, you in mismatched socks and your holey old T-rex shirt that I used to wear when I first slept over, you found an old game of Battleship amongst basement junk we had lets it for ages.

My mother had wanted to throw it out when she moved to her retirement community on the coast, but I, falling victim to temporary attachment to the past, had seized it from the box of things meant for charity.

"You can't throw this out! It’s mine." I cried, and I scuttled off to my car with it, a wire basket shaped like a hen and a copy of "Passages"

I never read Passages, and I never played Battleship since.

You suggested we play it now.

I called you an irony pig.

Outside, the streets were so quiet that it was positively sticky. For a while, there had been the occasional siren, or sound of a weeping family, but now, everyone who was going to flee had fled, and there we were- the socialists, the poor, the elderly- left cowering in their basements with naught but our isms and moldy old board games.

You set up the battleship slowly, reading the rules aloud to me

“If all of both players’ ships are sunk, the game ends in a tie.”

"We had the electronic version.." you said.

"We weren't allowed that in my house." I said. "My mum imposed moratoriums on random things like that. Electronic battleship. C.H.I.P.S, but not the A-TEAM. Operation. Frosted Flakes. Three's Company."

"You weren't allowed to watch Three's Company?" you asked, incredulously.

"I told you that when we first got together." I remembered the precise moment, we were lying in your futon getting high and watching TV, and you reacted with the same shock as you had now.

"Oh" you said. You handed me my ships and noted that there were and uneven number of submarines. You offered me the extra one, as if some silent gesture to compensate for your indescretions of the previous weeks. A lock of hair fell across your forehead and for an instant I fell in love with you again, just for a minute. I put the piece in my mouth and chewed it.

"That's fucking disgusting." you said.

"Furkin deaw withit." i snapped, the dusty piece in my teeth.

"I 10" you replied.

“Miss” I said.

We sat playing Battleship by candlelight for what seemed like hours. Occasionally, you got up and peered out the window, you saw nothing. I opened tins of food for the cats, who, in a way endemic only to cats, had lodged themselves between the radiator (not working) and a stack of mostly black clothes.

You had sank all of my Battleships, and so I sat with the cat chewing on a twizzler. Ever a domestic failure, I had not prepared properly for our basement dwelling and so our rations amounted to junk food, some bagels and peanut butter and bananas.

Bored, I paced around he floor striking Charlie’s Angels poses with the banana as a gun.

"You'll never get bored of that joke, will you Elaine." You said, warmly.

I smiled, for the first time since I had sank one of your aircraft carriers.

"Nope." I said, pointing the banana at you. "ya wanna make something of it, punk?"

You pulled me close and sank your head into my belly. I ran my hands through your thick dark hair, sank to my knees and kissed your eyelids, your lovely lips, your neck.

A crash came from above, and you pushed me away, scuttling to the corner window. Instinctively, I grabbed one of the cats, who rewarded me with a long scratch down my forearm before running off into the shadows..

"Nevermind the fucking cats. Jus tget down and be quiet."

You blew out the candles and opened a large synthetic blanket, the one we'd used for camping that last summer.

"Come here"

And so I did. I lay under the blanket with you, and, as had been my nervous habit for the past two years, I traced my fingers along your protruding ribs counting them "one, two, three, four"

The cat jumped up on the shelving and knocked over a tangle of rackets from our brief interest in badminton. Upstairs, the door opened gently, not violently. You had decided that a locked door would make them think someone was still inside.

I could feel your heart thumping, and my own heart in my throat. The T-Rex tshirt was wet with spit and sweat and my own tears, and I clung to you so mightily that I was sure I'd break you into two.

"Not so hard" you said, both hissing and gentle (fuck, you had a knack for that voice)

Upstairs, the hooves of the stranger in our home clip-clopped along the hardwood floors. Kitchen, bathroom, kitchen again.

This person, this apartment reaper was seemingly opening our fridge ("good luck there" I thought, innapropriately)

Then, clop, clop ,clop I heard him make his way to our bedroom. I heard him pick up a guitar- mine? yours? and play some clumsy chords on it over again.

I thought I heard you, an avowed athiest, starting to pray, almost silently. I prefered, your beard hair increasingly irritating against my soft cheek, to repeat "fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck" under my breath.

I thought my heart woold explode, so much did fear and grief at the same moment feel like physical pain.

For hours, the interloper played our guitars. “Ruby Tuesday”, then "Smells like Teen Spirit" then something that may have been a LimpBizkit song.

We lay there, smothered underneath the leopard print blanket, trembling to the sound of nineties classic rock twanging through the heating ducts. At some point, you passed out, and then i did, though hours after you.

Hours, maybe days, later, we awoke to the sound of the dryer tumbling- the power was back on. You got up, relieved yourself in the glass jar in the corner and went for the heavy wooden bat we'd foolishly kept by our side the time.

"Check the tv." I said

You did, and then the internet, and we determined, that the streets were, for now, safe.

We gingerly made our way back upstairs, to find the remains of our apartment looking like it had been ransacked by wild dogs. The wretched stink in the kitchen turned out to be Ziggy, "your" cat, laying, neck snapped stomach kicked, next to her food bowl.

You cried, and though even by then I hated you again, wrapped my arms around you for a second, before you squirmed free. You picked her up with more love than I had ever seen in your eyes and deposited her into a black Glad bag from underneath the sink. You opened the door to the back patio and placed your Ziggy-bag in a flower bed. Surveying the cityscape from where you stood.

Leonard, "my" cat, suddenly reappeared and I picked him up and held him to my chest.

""You can't do that to him, you know?" you snapped "You can just crush him against your chest and expect him to stay."

I let him go and, true to your word he jumped off my lap and headed to the food bowl.

"See?" you said.

"You win."

With that, I began to gather my things- my clothes, toiletries a few books and stuffed them into a wheeled suitcase. I picked up my laptop, flirted briefly with the idea of taking a picture of us in Victoria off the fridge, but demurrred as you scowled at me.

I tried several times to stroke your hair, to charm you back, but it was obvious my touch was like poison to you. You'd always made me feel like a fool for wanting affection, and I had become so used to begging for it that now, in your time of grief, I didn't know how to comfort you without seeming needly and vile.

"I'm going now" I said. You didn't bother to worry if the streets were safe, and I didn't bother worrying where you would go with no money and all of your family, even poor Ziggy slaughtered. You sat on the bed, playing the same riff on the guitar, not even looking up to say goodbye.

Years later, after the armistice, I saw you walking on Hastings Street. The lines that I had adored on your face had grown into deep ridges, and your bent walk had become even more pronounced. You were with a woman- she wore old-fashioned glasses and sweet girly clothes. Her eyes passed over me, and I could tell in her non recognition that you had left the Victoria photos- all of the photos - in the same place you likely left Ziggy.

We were heading to the same place. You entered first, held the door open for your women, and then me,and wordlessly, you disappeared down the hallway.

2006-10-15T16:21:00.000-07:00

Dimestore teenage existential ramblings, written in the inimitable style of limp bizkit frontman fred durst (link fixed) with a touch of flaky hippie shit thrown in for good measure.

**********************

I am not into sluggishly waffling through life, though, in the most dire of circumstances, I can be lead astray by it.

I think, nay, I know, that the process of constantly churning yourself inside out results in a byproduct of unstable mass, but if the scales must tip in one direction, I pick the one with the most room for exploration and progression.

Veronika says that you can’t find everything in one person, and certainly this must be true (even though everything is in all of us), but if you can’t be privy to anything a in a person beyond – what?- the fact of their physical proximity to you? - then, I’m not sure what the point is.

This, by no means, is a condemnation or degradation of anyone who doesn’t send you down the bramble path to alternate ways of seeing things, but rather a simple fact of fit and the ferociousness of the space in between you.

It is not about them being less than you, or thinking less than you, or having any less loveliness or beauty inside of them than you do. No, I don’t want this to come off that way. As I said, I can slip into the comfortable old shoe of consistency or reliability too.

It is, more, to state a ridiculous cliché, about chemistry.

Can you make chemistry? Absolutely. But you have to put yourself at your edge to do it, and I guess some people, including myself, are a little hesitant to do it. You have to commit to never standing still. Ideally, though, your lover or artistic partner o friend pushes you off the goddamn cliff.

Not true, now that I think of it.
The right people make you want to jump off the cliff, of your own volition.

Stupid me, so many times in my life (though not nearly as many as most) opting for that scrap of stable love , is chomping at the bit, not thinking about what I want, just thinking
“how can I keep love”,
“how can I make love happen”
“how can I get a piece of fictional happiness”.
Am I doing that now??? I just don’t fucking know.

Not realizing that all the love I have, as a favourite artist of mine wrote, is in my hands.

The other day, I brought someone a piece of fall, some Japanese lanterns that I had bought in bouquet at the Flower Factory, vaguely asking the florist for “something that looked like fall and smelled amazing”. The lanterns held between my mitten fingers as I rode my bike, coupled with some glossy brown, impossibly smooth horsechestnut I had found on the street, filled me with a simple, overwhelming pleasure. I could have ridden around like that - lantern lighting up the glorious day, horsechestnuts jostling in my pockets, favorite stripey scarf flapping in the wind behind me- for all eternity, just enjoying the narrator’s voice in my head, describing things to my in beautiful, swirling words and metaphors.

As it turns out, I like the chemistry experiments of my own wonder. I have tons of brilliant friends that are the same way – this is called a curious temperament, no? I don’t have the wherewithal to force people’s curiosity however. About me or my insides or the inside of the world around them.

Put simply, if you’re not going to come out and play, and risk humiliations and silliness and learning and unlearning things about the space between us all, then what in god’s name are you gonna do with your time?

Of course, I started writing this about my apprehensions about my relationship with someone, but I realize now that I have been holding back as well lately. Of course, this little essay, as they all do, ended up being about me. Me chiding myself to make myself profoundly uncomfortable in the name of new experience.

I started writing this because I was scared of losing my lover (is there any good word??) but I realize I am more scared of losing myself.

Fucking self-absorbed, yes.

What I’m saying, is, I want to surround myself with people who will show up at my door with pieces of fall, with bits of tiny, silly things that are wonderful. With bits of themselves that are tiny, silly and wonderful. With secrets that are totally fucking obvious.

Life is way to short to cut off your bike ride for a slice of what might be.

And now, though I don’t want to, I’m gonna post this bitch, cause it’s the truth and the truth, apparently, sets you free. ( think Fred durst said that first)

2006-10-15T11:32:00.000-07:00

I love this.

Elinor Carucci

And If I Don’t Get Enough Attention, 2002
[Crisis]

Chromogenic print
30 x 40 inches
edition of 8

here's
more

http://www.houkgallery.com/carucci/carucci1-2006.html

2006-10-10T11:32:00.000-07:00

Practice compassion.
Practice compassion.
Practice compassion.
Mean it.
Practice compassion.

2006-10-09T20:08:00.000-07:00

I just went for a nice Fall walk with my friend Lisa. All the way up to the stadium and back,through red and orange and brown and cats lolling on porches. Sometimes, in fact, most of the time,I am content to take in simple pleasures with people, not needing much more than good conversation to keep me going.

We've been talking a lot lately about impending birthdays, and how each year you turn you aquire one more thing that you're allowed to do, or don't have to do. For example, when my friend Dane turned 36, he decided "i don't gotta go to nuthin" which is fair enough. 34 is "I beat Jesus". 35 is "I can talk at the fire" 28 is "i don't have to go to parties where you have to flush the toilet with your foot". I am hoping 30, which is 2-and-a-bit years away for me,is "i'm just gonna say it."

there's this thing about impending womanhood, that's been coming up over and over again in my life, so much that I can't ignore it. I guess,as a woman you spend so much of your early life learning how to be small and feminine and loveable that there's this huge relief when you finally realize that you don't have to fucking do it. You can be huuge and bright andpowerful and so big that things will orbit around you.

I see it around me in the women, in the people I admire. women, not girls. Men, not little boys.

More of that, please.

2006-10-02T14:43:00.000-07:00

Inspired by Veronika's letter to her Mum.

We were lovers once, I remember that much. I remember teaching you all the spots – the backs of knees, the seams of stomach and hip- and I remember that still you would scold me with ruthless wickedness when I tensed or demurred at your touch. You were uncomfortable, for a long time, but as you traced your fingers along my white belly, you seemed to transfer that discomfort to me – you would drift off and I would be left twitching and spinning into the night. "Keep still" you said irritably.

When you first start out waiting tables, they tell you the worst thing you can do while walking along with a tray of fine-stemmed glasses is to be aware of the likelihood that you might drop them. That, my friend, was the cumulative effect you had on me- constantly reminding me of the delicate tray of sanity and loveability in my left hand, saying “don’t fall, don’t fall, don’t fall”

I barely think about you, though, and when I do you become this sort of amorphous figure in my memory- a coalescence of all the scattered maleness in my life from my great, great, greatest grandfather, who likely beat the crap out of ol’ great—great grandmother Corden, to my tightly wound boss of a few years back, whose slamming of doors and papers during a fit cause me to be physically ill.

You and he and he and he.

Scared the crap out of me, made me smaller, smaller smallest, decamping to the ladies, outing the toilet lid down and sitting, knees pulled to chest, on top of it.

I remember when mum was at school, it was the worst ( I am thinking of another now, because, as I have said, you can morph into any figure of fright I have encountered). You didn’t know how to cook much, except a thin beef stew called “Scouse” (years later, I would talk about this with a Welsh artist I admired – he would tell me that in his house it was called Atleh Scouse, and we would both drift off for a moment, both shuddering at and reveling in the faded dream of the taste). Your version of Scouse was gristly and full of vegetables, with onions that came in thick, unbearable chunks.

The moments between fade out, but I recall Scouse, and then I recall locking myself in the bathroom, the one with the mirror I would grow to detest as an acne-faced adolescent. You pounded on the hollow-wood door, and I cowered in that tiny room, contemplating if I could slide my then-still-skinny bones through the tiny, frosted-glass window that let out to the carport. Instead, I wet myself. As I hid behind the toilet, I wet myself, not because I couldn’t control my own bladder ( I must have been at least 9), but because I wanted evidence, evidence of terror and fear and a need for sympathy. Wet pants to show mum when she got home from trying to escape from you.

I don’t remember her coming home (but she did for six years more), and I don’t recall coming out of that bathroom and what became of me when I did, but I recall that moment – the fear, the horrific fluorescent lighting, the blown-out easter eggs in a hen shaped wire basket by the window. Brown towels with raised flowers. Gold-speckled countertops. The warm, then cold, of urine-soaked pants.

You were not always horrible (any of you). In fact, when you were good, you were lovely. Kind and sweet, and so funny. And I was a star rather than a collection of fat tissue and careless clumsiness.

But we never knew when you’d change. And so we arranged ourselves delicately, in pristine light, trying not to set you off, not daring to act ourselves because, though we hardly knew what we had done, we knew the moment we relaxed is when the blows- emotional, physical - would come. I was fucked up and she was fucked up, andwe all had it coming, coming, coming down the mountain.

And now I go back to the first you of this chapter, touching my skin as a lover is meant to. Do you see now, why I couldn’t let it go? Why I lived in my head and not in the warm candle glow of our apartments. I tried, as it were, to let you know why, o show you the piss-soaked reasons I could not and cannot sit still, but you, as they all are, were too much him, and he too much you.

I was scared you’d leave, and you did and I did and you did and I did.

You made a comment about my bathroom scale the last time we kissed, and it all came full-circle, so circular than all i could do was spin for months on end, as I have my whole life, ending upon the same arc as I wasborn.

I believed, and sometimes still believe, when the furies overtake me, that you’d snap into another person, because of my fault and my inherent failure to keep you at ease. I lived for years as someone else. As two people. One dropping the tray, and another madly picking it up before you’d notice.

Shards of glass in my feet and hands.

We are done here, for now.

I imagine you reading this and in fact, I don't have to imagine, because I know you will. Both of you and all of you, right down to the wire hen. I imagine that this will not sink in, and that the inclination will be to blame this on me and how messed up I am. On her and how messed up she is. On the scars on my arms and the dope in his lungs and the insecurity in her voice.

Thing is, we are all born as perfect. Perfect babies, with no bias or error or horror tugging at our soft skin. With bones so maleable that they're actually harder to break than that of an adult. Did you know that amazing fact? Perfect and new and perfect and new, and, in that one moment, fucking indestructable. What happened between then and now is our own doing, the doing of fate and yes, your own hands. And though I may drop the glass from time to time, I am holding on to that perfect child, because I need to and because you cannot get to her, or even me, and when I hold her, time ceases to exist and all my mistakes are pieces of illusion and nothing else. I am indestructable and it's you that lies cowering beneath me.

We are not done. Not by a long shot.