Not a thing too much

Late night nothing for two days. Sleep now, and forget days of stuttered creativity, blinded down and forgotten.

Another morning musing

This morning I’m being rebellious, and drinking twig tea from a beautiful bowl. A bowl so I can hold my hands curved around it, palms like an offering, overlapping when I take a sip. Small small simple ways of adding meaning through ritual to the everyday. I like being able to see the silted remnants that snuck out of the fine mesh and into the water, a little bit of earth making its way through my system.

Another morning begun watching the gorgeous music video of “Grand Canyon” by Jennifer Terran. http://www.myspace.com/jenniferterran. If I made a film, it would probably resemble something like this. A moody portrait photographer’s delicious colors and frames. I miss taking pictures.

When I was in the Magdalens I had this vague notion of finding the perfect handmade ceramic/pottery tea mug or bowl. I love the idea of having tea each morning with an artist, vicariously, from one set of hands lovingly into mine. The richness of handmade art

Big windows, lots of fine rain. As in, the droplets are small but copious.

Late night, almost sleep dream post

Intricate plotting isn’t my style. Vast and evasive is closer to the bone.

How fast and far we’ve come from peace, only to find it here again.

Rootswept Magdalena, fly, such an airborne girl, tied vivid into the ground, still. Listen there, she’s enveloping words with her tongue to spit out soon like a saturated postage stamp. Rootswoven. It’s too much to bear. How can anyone bear living, to feel the worl pass through the heart and body, it’s extraordinary and spinning. Why are we not drunk and dancing all the time with this blood and water in smooth flows and shocklets running through us? My lips mumble between the silences that I fill with breath.

The house smells like kimchee, and it’s almost sweet and home-like when it’s slightly faded.

of spelling and starts, of sorts

All of these words are just stuttering starts, attempts at writing things I haven’t figured out how to spell. Nothing perfect.

\I made a comment a couple of weeks ago, that it would be great if I could get paid to read books. I should have been more specific about this wish. Today I realized that I do, essentially, make a living by reading; but it’s by proofreading online training courses for grammatical and formatting errors. Not exactly scintillating material. So now, if I could just get paid to read really good novels…

I have these thoughts swirling around that I’m somehow a lesser person doing a lesser job because I got my job through my family, and didn’t really earn it. That, even though I do work, it’s not real work because I don’t have to go into an office every day and suffer through dealing with annoying customers and shitty bosses ( which has pretty much been every job I’ve ever had before).

I’ve been through so many jobs: Jewellery quality control, book shelver at the library, Starbucks. I once spent three weeks taking every single item off the shelves in a pharmacy, dusting the shelves and then putting all the items back on. I worked at Cobs bread, I quit my PNE job as a bingo girl after 2 hours of training, I worked at a clothing store for 4 hours, Safeway, sorted article at interlibrary loans at sfu(by far the best), cashier/usher at a theatre, framed and sold pictures, and probably more I’m forgetting. The common thread? All of these jobs sucked: they were horrible, boring, and I got treated like crap even though I worked my ass off. I’m really good at being a doormat, apparently.

And what did I learn from all of this? Well, part of my brain says “ Anna, you’re a failure, you can’t even keep a mediocre, minimum wage job, what’s wrong with you, everybody else can do it, so you should be able to, too?”. Then, the other part of my brain says, “ That’s completely ridiculous. No one should have to spend their days doing unimportant and meaningless hard work that they don’t even get paid a living wage to do. It’s the job and all the societal expectations wrapped up around that are the problem”. So, I basically have crazy brain most of the time, arguing with myself, stumbling between failure and defiance.

I recognize the illness of a work world, a daily life where people have to spend their worthy time doing tasks that are unworthy of them. Along the way, I somehow bought into the myth that work has to be hard and unsatisfying. That if nobody’s yelling at me, I’m not working hard enough.

I will never be well adjusted. It’s just not in my nature, and I only barely conceal this through my surface quietness. I was always the nice girl ( which is better than being the mean girl, really) who was quiet and unassuming. I don’t always feel the need to talk, true, but unassuming means predictable and boring, and I hate being thought of as predictable and boring. Although I often worry that I am. I would rather stay in and have a Saturday night of knitting and listening to music than go out to a noisy and crowded dance club that plays music I’m not that interested in , and where I have to get exceptionally drunk just to deal with all the competition and random groping. I’m not a big fan of using alcohol as a social coping mechanism anymore. The days of me sitting alone in the corner at a party drinking from my bottle of wine are somewhat over.

Although I never quite fit properly, generic rebellion has never been my thing, either.

I just don’t want to walk through life with a pain in my chest, pretending not to care. I don’t want to keep pushing people away and then blaming them for my loneliness. I don’t want to have to keep this rocky shell around my thin skin, so worried about what parts of me will seep out if I don’t keep them contained and stashed away.

How is it that fullness and emptiness can feel the same? When you’re full of the wrong things, I guess…Façade is a beautiful word, and whenever I say it my palms feels as though they are tracing the edges of the outside of the most extraordinary and lovely building.

Morning thoughts and rantings.

Grey morning, sitting down to my first cup of tea, Twig today since my stomach was so upset yesterday. Not quite coffee, in any way, and I’m craving the warmth and comfort of a really good cup of coffee all full of cream and sugar. The buzz of this loud computer, and the traffic going by. Cellphone constantly within reach in case someone calls, at least it’s a nice shade of red.

Listening to Jennifer Terran’s “Grand Canyon”, waiting for the cds of hers that I ordered to arrive in the mail. Nearly the only music I can tolerate day in and out, so much sounds grating and just so much going on within it, and I just feel bombarded with sound. I have definitely fluctuating tolerance levels for sound and noises- and when I’m feeling aurally sensitive, I get naueseous and increased headaches when confronted with unappealing sounds.

Woke up today tired, a deadened/leadened feeling in my chest. Heartburn tangled up with heartache. So much grief so close to the surface, but I’m so used to pushing it all down and putting on a dull placid face that I can’t process the emotions when I have them, so instead I feel sick, and get heartburn and nausea instead. Pounding headaches because somewhere along the way I learned it was better for me to feel physical pain than to show my emotions and be humiliated through rejection.

It’s entirely traceable, although particulars and exactnesses aren’t stored up in my memory. As a girl, I cried when sad, ridiculed, angry. People laughed at this, told me I was stupid and overemotional. So I stopped crying. Simple as sky or so.

Except now I have this huge mess/mass of blah and god know’s what chewing it’s way through my stomach lining and making me fearful of every little thing. Most times, my brain is not a pretty place to be. It’s worse if I read the newspaper or watch tv.

How do I daily face a world that seems to be coming apart and bursting violence, pain, and fear through all of its already rough hewn seams? What’s the point in even getting out of bed if we’re all going to die horrible painful deaths at the hands of greedy, angry, bitter deathmongerers? Such lovely thoughts to have first thing in the morning, I know.

When confronted minute by minute with an intensity of nihilism and pain, how does one have a successful existential crisis? Success being determined as being able to get out of bed everyday with a sense of purpose and possibilty, rather than crawling back under the covers to think sad and horrible thoughts.

Inside this spiral of though is the grain of answer as to why I find it so hard to be around people, to relate to people. To even feel as though I’m living in the same world as everyone else. I can’t deal with small talk, video games and celebrity gossip when my mind is perpetually concerned with the state of the world and our places in it.

My therapist has accurately described this sensation as my necessity for the real. I can’t function healthily on the bullshit level, though I’ve been trying to fit into it for so long that I’m in this uncomfortable liminal space of knowing I don’t fit into a certain space, but not knowing how to create or find a real space.

It sounds all teenage angst, to judge it, and that’s a problem, to pigeonhole experience in such a way. It denies the reality that so many people suffering from depression and anxiety, and that this is a social problem, not just a hush hush problem to be medicated and ignored. Trying to fit everyone into this social model of well adjusted, driven, high achievers just causes so much physical, mental, and emotional illness. I’m not putting all of the blame on the external world, but I do in fact believe that much of my so-called “adjustment problems” and “mental illnesses” are truly social illnesses that derive from growing up and living within an unhealthy and stifling social system that pretends to be wide open and full of possibilities.

I know all this, and yet, I still feel like a loser and a failure on an hourly basis. I feel like everywhere I go people see me and notice, whisper about that “dorky girl who just can’t keep a job, who can’t pull her own weight, who’s just lazy and whiney, spoiled, insignificant, stupid, and boring”. Yeah. I know. I’m neurotic. At least I find my thinking patterns kind of funny. In a way. But not really.

(weird formatting thing, can't figure out why the last paragraph is in a different font, and I can't get it to change. Oh well...I'll remain computer illiterate.)

Ramshackle Attempt #1

So, I’m going to start simply. Expurgated vs unexpurgated-my own editing process far underway before I even begin to write, of course. If I can’t say it to myself, then I can’t say it to myself in writing. So simply. Today I’m nauseous. And cold and shaky. Problem is, I can’t tell whether my symptoms are psychosomatic due to my anxiety, or if they are side effects of the upped dosages of the medications I take to deal with the anxiety. Medical wonders and worries. Sitting in bed, pillows propped up, curled under my favorite red sparkly blanket, waiting for the phone to ring because I’m a receptionist now. Could I have a better job than being able to lie in bed and answering my cell phone and telling somebody I’ll get someone else to call them? Not really. And yet, I still hate every moment of it. I get panicky and fearful at the thought of the phone ringing. I don’t want to have to talk to anyone, what if I tell them the wrong thing, what if I don’t do it right, what if I don’t get everything perfect?

Being semi-unemployed is glorious and boring. Not so glamorous, because I don’t blow dry my hair or put in contact lenses, it’s all jeans and t-shirts or tea and pajamas. Getting all prettied up is too much of an effort these days. I don’t know if I even know how to make myself look pretty anymore. Don’t know if I ever did.

I guess today isn’t a particularly good day.

Blog theory:

As an explication of why I feel the need to write ( because I feel the need to explain myself here, and moderately well).

I’m terrible at communicating, and I have tendencies that vaguely aim towards hibernations. I tend to keep secrets, and fear telling people things because I believe that they will negatively judge me. I’m sure this includes myself. So, I tend to stay away from people and conversations and public places. I’m no good in a crowd.

So, half of this is just a way for me to sort my thoughts out, and the other half is to let my friends know ( if they are interested) what I’m actually up to in those times when it seems as though I’m ignoring them.

Not so much stories, or action by action dictations of my day and what I did, but more ramblings, sorted through or not.

I want more than just getting by, and right now it feels like I’m barely doing that.

Good thing that happened: I found a pair of fluffy white wings in the backseat of Josette’s car, and they’re going to become part of the apartment’s “pilot” outfit. Which is basically just the silly pilot hat Jo got from dressew while trying to make 19th century mountaineer costumes, which I then decided was my fabulous sassy hat. And now I have wings to match. So, I can put on music and dance around the apartment in a pretty dress, with angel wings and a cheap pilot hat while the roommates cook dinner.

I’m just feeling out of it today, dizzy, headachy, my eyes are strained, and my limbs feel both heavy, and light and shaky. Nausea and heartburn, bad enough that I had to get Jo to drive me to the store to buy a bottle of chalky berry antacid stuff. Went to he bank to pay rent, wandered around in Supervalu for awhile, and went to Safeway to buy cookies and stomach stuff. And the left turn signal on Jo’s car doesn’t work, so we had to try to do all of this without having to make left turns, and if we did have to make a left turn, she’d have to stick her arm out the window into the pouring rain and make the left turn signal. At least this made potentially menial activities entertaining.

Unposted things for two years, I have time resembling a whole lot of open space to worry, so this whole writing thing woven by the idea that it might be read, at some point, is sounding like somewhat of an idea. I even had to go to the effort of actually getting a gmail account just to access this blog again. And the question, do I treat it as journal, or musings? What do I want to tell and how, but has being secretive(which I am, oh I am) has never helped me out any, but only given me heartburn of the sharpest kind. In all of its forms.

So, a trial, an attempt, we'll see what happens.

Start again, perhaps

I'm thinkinking, perhaps, a try, once more, at this writing thing, just to do it....of course there's no one to read it, but...oh well...

Alice #4

So I'm working on this writing project of not adaptation of "Alice in Wonderland" but something about her, using her character as a jumping off point for something...this is the most recent fragment, using place...you won't really be able to see the Alice in here at the moment, eventually it will all hopefully come together, crossing my fingers for some illustrations:

Nothing like the half desert here with mountains rocky and a creek by the way by the side of half shrub trees. Trains at night lights bright white on the rockside that climbs a kilometer above my feet. Echo at the rattlesnakes that don’t or won’t make an appearance in the crunchy gold grass. Drive into town five closed restaurants and a diner small town life in this hot dry place. Still.
It’s true about tire dust flying up into the open windows in my mouth my hair my eyes, gritty scrapings with blinks. The taste of this place like the lack of a smell here. Put my boots down on gravel for a minute, scrape around push around small rocks that get close to my toes through holes in the rubber in the leather. My shins sweat under jeans and laces dusty up to the knees. Maybe 2 3 people in center town. They look at me my car brush hair off their foreheads and go somewhere. This could be a place for a fall but not mine. At the diner I order toast with marmalade take a bite and leave it for coffee. To go two cups for the road, back in my car and I’m gone.

stuff I've been writing, not edited, kind of streamy

the streets are rain-marked
unlike the barrennes I've coome from
Along one road
everyday another
partial end to true one
I remember waiting
though I never did
as the fractured memory of memories
replaces knowledge
the cut off point
when hollow stomachs
and dry eyes loosen themselves
wet with salt
I am in this moment
torn with the moment
five steps from the house
across the street
in Portage wind
orange sweater
watching the cross of streets
deciding I would leave soon
it isn't love but a discontent
sewing with my fingers raw
I can't seem to make anything
hold
hand defies my attempt to bring
lives together
places dictate my meaning
and a room of my own is not this one
train light on the
deserted mountain side
curled and mangled in
the backseat
every noise a shock
three hours sleep, heat
to burn so much skin
exposed
through clear windows

I want a best friend

I was talking to a friend about the need for a best friend last night. All through high school, my greatest desire was for a best friend. Someone to spend all of my time with, who had almost everything in common with me, where it was kind of the two of us against the world. I saw this in friendships around me, and so much in my head. I was just so lost and alone, always searching for this elusive ideal, I suppose the other half to myself. I put this ideal onto others, and whenever I met someone that I clicked with, this hopeful image overshadowed their actual personality. This image has been with me forever, and it’s always centered around myself as the outcast reveling in not being alone in my quirkiness. That I’d never met someone like myself, so everything about me felt wrong. I could never accept myself unless I was mirrored back to myself. Books, art, movies, music, I could never enjoy it for what it was because nothing was me in any of it. Aspects, yes, but not the whole parts combined of me. And I never really understood that this was teenage angst, that this was the search for self, that for most people this manifests itself as the intense search for their soul mate.
And really, I have been searching for my soul mate, in different forms than I guess most people do. But what about the possibility that different aspects of different people combine as a whole to create completion. This steadfast rule of just one other person seems almost ridiculous. And I impede myself in this search, as I have these pre-formed ideas of what said person should be like. So much so, that when an opportunity presents itself that I don’t recognize, I don’t let it develop into anything. I build up these crazy walls so that I both don’t recognize amazing people, and then won’t let them in when I do recognize them.
And I’ve had so many, it’s painful to look back(which I do often) and name them. In the act of naming is a recognition. Of what I’ve done to myself in the name of finding a place where I fit. Most of you probably don’t even know who you are , and are still a very important part of my life. I’m sorry that I’ve been so lost to myself that I’ve only recognized your beauty when it doesn’t directly relate to mine. That I’ve literally left some of you behind as I go from place to place aimlessly. Exile and outside is all that I understand. Leaving and loss is what I dream of because I always thought that there would be nothing else but that for me...to make an impression as I walk out the door, on a plane, in a car. And I hate this, I want it to be gone, I want to relate, to love, to experience full joy. To tell everyone that I’m so afraid of being rejected that I can’t open myself enough to let someone offer me something. And even if they do break down the shell enough, I still can’t accept any of it. Oh, what a silly conundrum I am. I am in love with so many people( in the sense that they amaze and wow me constantly) but but but.....Just know, even if you never read this, that I am in love with you(and I mean all of you), completely wholeheartedly.

Soundtrack-"Left and Leaving"-The Weakerthans
Open this door, leave me to nowhere, and I’ll find something someday. In this moment of love and blood I have nothing left to put into this quarter slot, to pay for my entertainment and joy. No joy in the morning, my coffee’s cold, never hot enough until I heat it at least three times before every sip. Letters too many letters I have mailed that mean nothing to the receiver. Weaker than I was before, but stronger of heart ( you’ll never know what I mean by this) I’ve chosen a new type of taste today. The one of never leaving the house, but not being able to be comfortable where I am. Progress isn’t here today, she’s gone on a little trip to Victoria. The ferry ride always gives her chills.
Benevolence is not the motivation for any of my so-called action. For action in my head is merely passivity, and if I drink myself to genius tonight, I will accomplish only the success of illusion. Maya does not treat me quite right, I have no illustrious visions to keep me occupied . Only blanks and floors so beautiful I spread my blanket out and try to sleep. Bones sore even though flesh pillows itself after nights on the floor. I slept in the doorway, blanket only covering my hips, the rest of my body sprawled out into any space possible. Dizzy for two days afterwards, unsure of what had crept into my system, I read beautiful comics all day while Adriana took a bath, listening to Teresa Stratas singing Kurt Weill.
The road song is singing in my blood again. Two weeks seems to be all that I can stand in any place, no matter how much or little I know it. Snow the first time tonight, taking out the garbage after I cleaned out, not up, the bathroom in the basement. I want to be back in Winnipeg, not for the place or school, but the space. The imaginary memories and what ifs I could have created. More like this fictitious desire I have to be alone in some city as barren as that place. It’s too lush to be lonely in Vancouver. But I lie when I say that this sense is loneliness, because truly it is more like a combination of wistfulness, nostalgia, and general grayness. It has nothing to do with being alone, and everything with just being.
So just give in to sensation and this ever possessing loss of nothing you ever had anyways.
"Circumnavigate this body of wonder and uncertainty"-weakerthans

art #1 of who knows how many

I am obsessed with art. With pretending to look, create, and interact with art. Some need to put down everything in timelessness, perhaps? Or just get it out of me. I think that's what it is, this mumble, jumbled whispers of voices in the back of my head-not true voices, just ideas. Could-be's and maybe's not fully formed anything. In fact, the formation from sense to actuality is painful, stressful, and wholly undesirable. yet I try, and begin, over and over.
I don't want to make anything, really. I don't want to feel as if it is necessary for me to attempt again and again to make something, anything. The pressure of creation, when others tell me that I am a creative person, but I just don't know. I don't really feel like an anything person, honestly. I suppose that I can do things, but I never have the desire to begin. I'm just pretending to be an artist, which really means that I shouldn't be one, because if I really were one than I wouldn't be having this constant argument with myself over whether I am or not. I would be doing things, writing, making things, creating.

Such a push to invent, to be spontaneous and NEW all of the time. Newness, the stench of plastic and chemicals, bright color soon to fade. So much pressure on everything.

shortness

I don't want to leave the house. Before, I was so anxious to never be at home, at least three places a day to visit were necessary.

first of first of something, I suppose

I accidentally erased my first post. I tend to erase a lot of things. My internal editor is always at work. Too bad my writing one never comes out to play. Stream of consciousness it too rigid a word for how I write- and at the same time, too lose. I do select, but I never go back to the same piece again. It seems so gone once something is out of me. The repitition of theater non-workable in my writing life. I feel as though I'm supposed to introduce myself, talking to nobody as I am I see no point. What is my point in starting this up? To write with the sensation that it is being read, whether or not htis is the case? To try and remove myself from the everyday isolation of being unemployed, not in school, and living with my parents again? More like to revel in this nothing-to-do-ness. I will not edit here. Journal, work-posting, whatever I feel like at the moment. Sleep for now, though.