On birds, of a sort

A crow smashed into the living room window yesterday morning. Sitting on the couch, talking on the phone with Corina, I was watching the crow, as they usually swoop uo to land on the roof. This one just slammed belly first into the glash, amking the whole window shake, and shocking me. I screamed, the crow seemed to fall, but must’ve flown away because by the time I got to the window and looked down it was gone.

It reminded me of all of the crow images in Adriana’s “Prometheus” play. I really liked those crows. Adriana, maybe you should create a piece about crows, well not just about crows, but drawn from and tying in and out of crow imagery. Yes, I know you were in a play with raven imagery, and maybe you’re done with crows because you associate them with “Prometheus”. But that was some awesome crow work, and I hate to see it closed in a file on your computer or pressed between pages in a notebook.

In some animal lore, crows are shape shifters, and are both in knowable reality and the supernatural world. A strange balance, outside of time. In other, they are just dirty scavengers.

I remember there being a lot of crows around when I was a kind, 5-7 or so, and then they disappeared for about five years. I also remember that absence, and noticed when they returned.

Twig Tea and Poetry

Usually I make two cups of tea in the morning, but today I’ve been a little wicked and made three. I’m an underemployed artist who values her time to create and stare into space more than luxury goods, so I can only afford to buy a certain amount of the fancy teas that I drink. Therefore, I make two cups of tea from one tea bag. And I hate the thought of the tea all drying up and sitting vulnerably on a plate in the open dusty air of the kitchen, so I make both cups of tea one after the other and then put a plate over the second cup. However, I have a tendency to forget about the tea that I’m steeping, and today, for example, I was happily listening to Bjork and forgot to switch the tea from one cup to the next, and so, it being Ban Cha and bitter when oversteeped, I had to make another cup of tea with a new tea bag. And somehow ended up with three cups of tea, but I’m kind of distracted, and don’t feel like going into all of the details.

Brain’s a little bit cluttered and wispy this morning, so I’m not even sure how much sense I make. Maybe if I listen to enough Joanna Newson it’ll get clearer- Milk Eyed Mender, though, not YS, YS is just to intense and complicated for this morning. Although I love it dearly, it’s just a little bit overwhelming at the moment, since I’m feeling quite delicate and thin skinned.

The Safeway near my parents house didn’t have Twig tea, so I had to settle for Ban Cha, which I also love, but I feel the caffeine effects more. With twig, I can drink it all day, whenever I want because the caffeine level is negligible, but Ban Cha I can only drink first thing in the morning, otherwise I’m mildly jittery.

Twig tea has been my favorite tea, hands down heart full for awhile. I don’t like fruit teas. I like the earthy taste. Tea that almost tastes like dirt, it grounds me, helps me find me feet rooted down. So I loved it when I stumbled upon a reference to “ a picnic of bee pollen and twig tea” (p 27, Hawksley Burns for Isadora) in a Hawksley Workman poem.

I love twig tea more, but “hawksley burns for isadora” is stunning and well worth the read. I discovered it at the same time that I started reading Anne Michaels’ (author of “Fugitive Pieces) poetry, and the two authors are now permantely entwined in my mind, and I love that. I have high poetic standards, and only have a few poets that I keep on my bookshelves and close to my heart. Stephanie Bolster was my first favorite poet, especially her series written from the paintings of Jean Paul Lemieux in “Two Bowls of Milk”. I used “L’orpheline” as my poetic text in second year voice class, and to this day it’s probably the only piece of text I actually have memorized. “White Stone: The Alice Poems” and “Pavilion” are also extraordinary books, with a visceral yet gentle tone to them.

Although I don’t enjoy a large portion of his work, and am more than slightly uncomfortable with his supposed anti-semitic views ( much like Ezra Pound, who wrote a couple of short stunenrs) which definitely reflects on how I perceive his work, I am enamored of some TS Eliot poems. His preludes are potent. Too bad “Cats” stole some of the more gorgeous lines from these short momentous and emotionally vigorous words.

Also, one of my favorite songs ever is Sarah Slean’s “Eliot”. I remember the first time I heard it, and fell in instant love. I was in the car on the Upper Levels Highway in North van, listening to CBC radio, and it was played, and I was in love. I love to sing it, play it on the piano and sing along, listen to the version on “Blue Parade”, listen to the fabulous revamped version on “Night Bugs”.

And then there’s Emily. Miss Dickinson, who has to be put in a category all of her own, because I relate to her work very differently than my other favorites. One of my goals in life is to read fully and deeply each one of her poems by the end of my life.

I wish I had more profound things to say about the artists whose work I love, but it’s all abouit the experience, and the translation of experience into words is such an arduous and loving process. It’s a lifetime’s worth of work.

And I’m writing all this because it’s calming. It brings me back to myself in this moment of anxiety and separation. I think the Zoloft withdrawl sympton hit big time yesterday, and this morning I’m all full of muscle spasms, unahppy gastrointestinal system, unfocussed- I feel like I have a terrible flu, and it’s really hard to do anything. So I’ll focus on small things that I love, like poems and songs. My body really, really doesn’t like pharmaceuticals.

Another note on art

I think that I would be completely different if I had beautiful hair. Long, but not too long hair that can easily be mussed, and pinned up haphazardly with the intentionally messy artistic look. I just don’t have the great hair thing going on.

I put up my hair, put on make-up, and wore a red dress to go food shopping this evening. Often, the trip to the supermarket is the big outing of my day, and sometimes even the week.

The heaviness lifts a bit around sunset, pre-twilight, when the clouds are pooling themselves into finely colored waves and shapes. How can I not feel glorious for at least five minutes when the sky is such brights pinks and purples, and so many blues? And orange…always the orange that I forget, but that adds that final little touch. It’s almost impossible to write about sunsets without sounding completely trite and overused. Some things really don’t need to be directly translated into words.

I’ve had to begin separating creation from creativity. Creation implies that something is, or is being created, whereas creativity is a focus of energy, a flow of the possibility of breing things into existence, drawing them down or in or through the ether and into something tangible, whether it is physical, or emotional, or anything. Creativity is possibility, unproven. Such a vague word, but vagueness can sometimes be helpful when the ongoing attempt at reaching some concrete knowledge or question is unsuitable or too confusing or demanding.

I’ve yet to be able to understand how it is possible to hold both utter hopeful wonder and complete despairing grief in the same body at the same time. With fluctuations and moments of one overtaking the other, but intense emotions, even the positive ones can be paralyzing.

I am all over the place tonight. Restless and distracted, that searching sense turned up high, all shaky and just this side of kind of desperate. I’m circling around something, but I’m not sure what.

I’m thinking about tortured/tormented artist archetypes, and the modern conception of teenage angst, and where indivuals’ experiences of emotional and mental anguish actually fit. No matter how many lectures I get on “respecting the craft, respecting art”, I still believe that art and creativity are emotional outlets, are contained spaces in which to reveal and explore our pains and sufferings, our joys and hopes. The person must come before the art, as the art is only there to present or explain something about the world, and those of us in it. To submerge the emotional and intellectual and transcendent qualities of good ro even great art is to relegate it to complete uselessness. And I have no time nor desire to be useless.

Do we create at the expense of living? Isn’t giving in to creative impules and desires a deep form of living? Isn’t engaging with a project a form of relationship, a form of deepening one’s relationship to oneself and exploring one’s place in the world? Yes we need to consider audience when we’re working, but if we put ourselves too much into the hands of other’s expectations, then we are no longer creating something true, but creating to appease those who are expecting certain things. If playwrights continue to follow Aristotle’s theories of playwriting, then they are not following their own impulses, they are not creating work that is imperative and necessary to the world that we live in. A world on the brink of something, but who knows what because we’re all stuck in our little boxes and containers, so afraid to actually make anything that says something true about ourselves.

Because I deeply believe that if we are able to tap into something that feels fundamentally, deeply, right and NECESSARY in its creation, then other people will respond to that. We don’t need audiences of millions to say something. We don’t have to say anything unique, we just have to say it true and clearly, and it can take so many years, and so much glorious and painful work to get there. There is no finished project, there is no perfection, because everything is just a continuous building on the previous project, on the previous experience.

Maybe I’m not writing my play right now, maybe I’m not even convinced that it is a play, but I am writing what I need to write. This writing is not done to get through to some more important point, to hone my skills, to make me into a fiercer writer, although that happens along the way. I don’t want to take classes to teach me to be better at something, to teach me how I should be writing, what I should be making, and exactly how I should be going about it. I want to take classes to learn from the wisdom of others, to take part in their expansive and extraordinary creative energy, in their trueness. To learn how to be truer to myself and be able to find my gifts.

The artist in me has always been at odds with the teachers I’ve had, that, even in their kindest and most expansive moments, they were trying to shape me into an already predefined and predetermined role of artist. I have no idea what it means to be an artist. All I know is that my fingers twitch, and ache to be involved in some act of creativity when I see or hear the word artist. Not the word art-art seems to stagnant and stable, ad I think of cool white galleries, with all the paintings hanging just right, no jumple, no hope all askew and blissful.

I am askew, naturally. Just a little off, undetermined and off balance. Never quite getting my footing, even when I sink lightly in mud.

And since I’m being honest and forthright, I hate pretension. Experimental art is not intrinsically pretentious-it is the manner of the artist who created the art that is pretentious, or the manner of the audience receiving the art that is creating the atmosphere of pretension. Exclusivity causes pretension. Pretending that people don’t understand what’s going on is pretension.People understand unless they choose not to, and most of us have chosen not to even reach for understanding before we even understand what the word art means.

Simplicity in art does not mean making redundant and cliched work. It means straying close to the bone and tearing through that metaphorical skin to make it all a little bit clearer and brighter. I’m not talking about ripping ourselves apart, although some good introspective revamping is good for anybody. Most of the time, we aren’t even consciously aware of our biases, of what our minds and emotions are bringing into a room to meet something, whether it is a work of art, or another person.

I find this whole social act of ignoring and covering up what we’re really thinking and feeling to be the most destructive thing we do to ourselves, and to our creativity. Each and every person is an artist at heart, the human spirit, the animal spirit, plant spirit, every cell, every ounce of air or airless space is creativity, and needs to be let alone to become what it will become. But we’re too busy shaping and being shaped by each other to let things grow in time.

Two poems.

1.
Capturing light
is an event
still unmechanized
but the flash of broken shutters
lets in too much wind
an element vision
contained to projection
we've turned our limits upside down
and the last wall
has only the smallest cracks
but my fingers aren't as nimble
as they are small.

2.
When the roots went upwards
let our boots fill with water
slipping along slick clay surfaces

this is not a pond or a lake
only a creek that ends
with rust
though this pool is still brave enough
to collect itself
here

brazen wings

I painted a picture last night. A real live picture, at least it was during the time that I was painting it. Well, not so much a picture as colorful swirly greens of any variety possible, but definitely not all the imaginable greens. To be able to put all of the imaginable greens into one small painting on a small piece of printer paper would take years and an intense amount of very satisfying effort. An effort I don’t think I have the energy for at the moment. But it’s a thought.

If you’ve seen my “wall of art” beside my very messy, crayon, paper and dead flowers in a vase “office” ( also known as the left hand corner of the living room if you happen to be facing the window), you’ll understand what I mean when I say painting. Concept stretched from crayon top crayon and ink to watercolor and ink.

It’s 11:42 am and I’m at work. Waiting for the phone to ring. I’m always on edge when I wait for the phone to ring. I can’t relax if something might be about to happen. Sometimes nobody calls during the day, but I still have at least a mildly stressful day, just waiting for the phone to ring, knowing that I could be interrupted from my emotional reverie/ breakdown at any time. And I hate being interrupted while I’m doing anything. Unless it’s a happy interruption, the definition of which escapes me right now.

The left side of my face is kind of numb/ twitchy. I ate strange tasting sweet pickles last night, so maybe I have botulism. Either that, or I’m just having zoloft withdrawl symptoms. I’m hoping for the latter, really, but that doesn’t mean I don’t worry that something horrible is currently happening inside of my body.When you can’t deal with trauma and too much in the outside world, you might internalize, and feel that even your own body is attacking and failing you. At least, that’s how I tend to deal with my problems.

I’m also quite tired in a weighty sort of way, and considering the way my abdomen and lower back seem to have constant aching, I’m most likely in a lovely bout of PMS. Which I still find an odd thing, as my period have had a tendency to get worse as I get older. When I was younger, cramps were almost unnoticeable, and back aches, exhaustion, and lack of appetite weren’t any kind of issue. Now, for about the last six or seven years, my cramps have sometimes been so bad that I’ve had to leave work doubled over, seeing stars spin because I was in so much pain. As stress and doubt have increased, so have physical responses to brain crazy. Of course. Which all makes sense.

I stole some of my roommate’s cheerios this morning. I should tell her, but I hate confrontation, so I may not tell her. One day.
Other rommmate just woke up as I was chasing a fly through the apartment, trying to get it to go back outside. We seem to have way too many flies and moths…what are they trying to tell us in their quiet rustling messages fluttered through brazen wings?

Dictionaries, or I don't believe in art for art's sake.

You know, I don't have a lot of practice in the writing of love letters, especially to inanimate objects. Definitely not up to the level of Hawksley Workman's ode to paper "Claire Fontaine", which is a great song made even greater by the fact that it's about paper, but really not, you know how these things work. And anyways, I'm definitely not the gal to write love letters about paper, because paper and I have a rather long and unfortunate history of being at odds with one another. As in, I stare at blank paper and wait for something to happen, but it rarely does.

As well, I'm terrible at drawing, the point of translation between what I see in my head and what I put down on paper is missing at least three volumes of its dictionary. That doesn't mean I don't have the impetus to draw, though I tend to stick to crayons and swirly lines.

I've been thinking about pottery lately. Something to keep my hands busy that has numerous different stages. Or making clay and paper mache masks/ random art pieces again. I like the action of forming with my hands, then paper mache-ing, and then taking out the clay, and then painting. Not big artistic dreams fueled by distinctively intelligent conceptual ideas, but just letting go of making a product for someone else, and just enjoying spending time creating something, not worry about making the most meaningful and well received piece of art ever.

Because that's one of my major struggles with art and the action and motions of creating: I always feel as though I have to be making art to change the world, art that has so much meaning that it can barely be contained within the form that it is presented in. Otherwise, I see no point in making art. I'm not interested in making art for art's sake. I don't believe in devotion to " the craft", whatever form it takes, just to forward that form of art. If it doesn't have human repercussions, emotional and intellectual, tangible repercussions ( and I consider spiritual, emotional, mental, and physical health to be included in the tangible repercussion category) then I'm not interested. It seems impossible for something to be stunningly beautiful, but vapid at the same time.

Interesting, because I've had my work critiqued as being " beautiful but meaningless" before. Which, if someone is looking to really stab me in the not so hard heart, "meaningless" is about the best insult to strike me with. It's up there with heartless, cruel, uncaring, and selfish. Meaningless.

I struggle every moment of every day with meaning, and my need for meaning. If people have seen my work or even myself as meaningless, it's because I've spent so long attempting to fulfill someone else's idea of meaning, and so my attempt at meaning reads as relatively hollow, because it doesn't resonate truly.

I need to resonate within myself, with everything I think or do. Not be a perfect something else.

I am not vapid. Crazy and overwhelming maybe, but not vapid.

And I'm not a philosopher. Just because I can figure out something in my head, or make it make logical, rational sense on paper ( which I can rarely do anyways), doesn't mean I'm satisfied. In fact, if I can't put thought into action then I often feel as if it is pointless to even spend too much time with that particular length of thought. I can easily out think myself, until my brain is running in fearful circles, convinced of every horrible potential that could ever occur.

Which is supposed to be solved by more thinking, by outsmarting my own brain into disproving all of my negative beliefs. I know, a vast reduction of CBT, but that's how I think of it. Thing is, every negative thing, every fearful thing I can think of could potentially happen...this is where I get all tripped up-how is it possible to look at the world, and not be afraid.

How is it possible to even wake up in the morning and mot just roll over and go back to sleep because there's nothing to get up for when everything horrible just seems to be beating against your skin, barely held out by thinly, single paned window glass. When anytime a person moves it seems as though all she does is create excess waste that can't be disposed of, can't eat breakfast without destroying half the world, can't go to work and earn a living without causing something or someone somewhere to be in some kind of agony. How is it possible to exist when it seems as though your existence is predicated upon someone else's pain.

And yes, I know it's not entirely my fault, and I'm not responsible for changing everything, not is it possible for me to. I didn't create the system, but I do choose whether or not to continue it. Though I've spent my entire life knowing, deep in my gut, how wrong so much of what we do is, not taking part has always been to scary to fully commit myself to. Being even more of a social pariah than I've already been. A person is so much more vulnerable when they find themselves on the outside of a community, particularly a massive, emotionally and intellectually brainwashed one.

I have to believe that other people are driven by the same fears, and act out of the same seeminly impotent vulnerability, because that's the only way the world makes sense. I can handle the fact that people are scared and confused, and that their thought and behaviours stem from this, whereas I can't handle the though that people live their lives unhappily, and make other people unhappy on purpose.

If people weren't scared and fearful and vulnerable, why would they spend their entire lives devoting themselves to meaningless action that they loathe?

A love poem to my ipod.

I got an ipod shuffle. I'm in love, it's true love this time.I lie in bed late at night, in the dark, earphones curled in my ears and the odd blue machine so full of sounds and hopes curled into my palm. Vienna Teng's "Recessional" delicately swirls into my head and passes through my body as the new words strung together pass along the nerve lines between my lips and my mind. Calm and safe in bed for once.

Yes.

I don't think I've ever listened to as much music as I have this week.

Things I know and remember about myself:

I like music with pianos as the main instrument.
I especially like independent female piano players/singers who write obscure, symbolic and earthy watery poem painty lyrics such as:
Tori Amos (ok, not independent artist, but in spirit)
Jennifer Terran
Terami Hirsch
Charlotte Martin
Molly Zenobia
I have a delicate heart in a very strong ribcage ( sinews bones and muscles keep me close and upright).
I like Chagall’s paintings, especially the ones with lost of blue.
I absolutely love my queen sized bed with the torn and immaculate red satin and gold patterned quilt ( thank you Ann, for giving them to me).
I just let my tea steep for way too long, and it may be too bitter to drink-I got preoccuppied, which I often do.
If I get emotionally upset, my stomach gets really upset, and my shoulders tense up and give me bad headaches, and then I just want to stay in bed all day listening to calming music.
I’m actually a brunette, but I feel like a redhead.
I believe that everyone in the world deserves to get paid for doing things they love.
I used to write songs, but I didn’t think they were good enough, so I stopped.
I hate playing and, generally, watching team sports. I get really upset, because somebody always has to lose, and nobody deserves to lose. And nobody deserves to win.
I think that if everybody was entitled to massage therapy and therapeutic/creative councelling in the same way that we are allotted basic health services and presciption drugs, then we’d all have gorgeously loved and healthy bodies and minds, thinking prettier thoughts, and we’d figure out how to solve problems without mass destruction of each other and the environment in the process.
If I do anything that I don’t want to do, specifically jobs and the like, I get physically ill.

Pixies and Posies Part Two

I’ve spent years being convinced that I was dying of some disease. Unsure of which, exactly, but certain that it was inside of me, working working, somehow.

It’s as though no one cared enough to pay attention to who I was, who I am, and instead just shoved me into every corner that everybody else was in. No wonder and raved and raged.

I feel deeply uncared for. unrespected. Parent, friends, teachers, relatives never cultivated what they saw in me. They never saw me, they saw the figure of what I should be, not what I was. Nobody cared who I was, and so I couldn’t care who I was. I’ve never know who I’ve been. All along I’ve been lost and flailing inside my own skin, inside my head no anchors to keep me in some kind of place of self recognition.

I lost any spark of life, the seed of wonder and possibility gone dormant so quickly. Exhausted and beyond, I began to die, right from the beginning.

I’ve been on the threshold of death for many years, time on the edge barely balancing. Fading away before I had the chance of solidity. My body became turmoil, unable to deal with the constant sensation of falling, falling apart, of pushing everything I’d ever felt down and down again, swallowing my words and my tears, brutalizing my heart and having all of my silenced pain embodied.

I feel sick all of the time. I don’t know what it feels like to Not be tired. My body has tried so hard to help me survive, to keep it all contained so I could go on living in the world, so I could look people in the eye and walk out of my room, sit in badly ventilated rooms full of manipulative and pained children. My body did what it could to protect me.

We all have so many smaller deaths that steal pieces of our hearts/souls whatever you consider the core part of your wise and strong self to be. Mine just piled up so much that my mind and body started to believe it. Disease seemed ever present and inevitable. I was just waiting to die. If a disease didn’t get me, then I’d be murdered, or there’d be a war and I’d be tortured horribly until I died the most painful death imaginable, or some strange end of the world apocalyptic happening would occur. ( It’s completely embarrassing to admit that I was, and still am to an extent, obsessed with these thoughts, this implicit knowledge, because it sounds ridiculous). But all I knew and understood was death, since I’ve spent my whole life barely existing.

When I quit my job in October, I knew I was dying. I knew it in my deepest heart. Preparing for death is frightening and simple. If I was going to die, why bother having a job, I wouldn’t need money. I went to sleep each night knowing that I probably wouldn’t wake up, and each morning when I did I was shocked and began the waiting over again. I walked throuigh my days with death wrapped kindly around me, her hands in my hair and her breath softly purring along my neck. I didn’t have relationships with people, I drank tea or gin with a spectre. I couldn’t do anything with my time, because it all seemed too pointless, if I was going to be gone at any time.

Barely alive. I’ve been. Silenced and still. So of course I became an actor, wanted to be a singer, onstage, seen. Prove my existence and worth. I somehow maintained a thread of fervor through it all, a sense of something pulling me along under the waves, a drifting. To be heard To be heard. I don’t know how to talk anymore, my tongue is so thick and heavy from disuse.

Tidiness has never been me. I live for some sense of chaos, threads of slight organization thrown in just so I know that I can find my way out of the labyrinth. I think I’m done talking about death for at least an hour or two.

Pixies and Posies, Part One

Song of the day: Charlotte Martin “Bones”

So, I have this thing that I tend to do. Since I was 16 and started having panic attacks ( which directly coincided with my first job-interesting, isn’t it) I tend to have a complete emotional and mental breakdown, quit my job or barely scrape by in school, and go on some kind of anti-depressant medication. Then, in a couple of months, when all of my problems and temperamental difficulties don’t magically go away, I stop taking my medication out of disillusionment. And in a couple of month, I crash again and start the cycle over. This has happened at least five times-I’m counting different medications, here. I’ve pumped my body through of almost every SSRI anti-depressant available, and never found that magic pill to make me a normal, functioning human being girl thing.

Out of this, I’ve come to two conclusions. One is that I’m never going to be a normal, functioning human being girl thing. I’m really not. Okay. Two is that if I seem to be non-responsive, or just get a little agitated and manic on, all of these different drugs, maybe it isn’t a problem to be solved with drugs.

What I’m really trying to say is maybe I don’t need to be fixed. This is not a failure. I’ve been trying to change myself into something I’m not, someone I’m not since I was born. And I’ve been nothing but encouraged to fit in, to fix myself, by those closest to me, molding me out of shape, smooth clay roughened weak and distorted by time and false frames. Children are less malleable than they seem-it’s all a surface affectation created in the search for love and survival.

And me, I’ve been a worse case than most, I’m not even good at pretending, at playing along. I’ve tried. So hard. Did everything I was supposed to, half-heartedly, without any joy. I’ve never been good enough at anything. I’ve always been wrong, in the wrong place, having the wrong words, not thin enough, not tall enough, not brave enough, not happy enough, not self destructive enough to warrant attention. To exist.

No wonder I’ve felt like a ghost hovering on the fringes of life, as though I’ve been living in a different wrold than anyone else. As though my bones and skin have dissipated, leaving a gentle shadow to meander lostly through the world. I’ve given up so much of myself in the process of just trying to survive and exist that I have nearly forced myself into oblivion. I’ve been cut in portions, each section cordoned off by thick ropes and guards who yell at me in voices that are not my own.

Yelling is the only way I’ve ever been able to make my voice heard. My parents yelled at each other, and argued, and still, never heard each other. When I yell, everyone hates me, but they almost listen. My words aren’t enough, my words have hidden themselves in my chest, in my gut, closed off, knowing that they’re unwanted. How does a girl get to this place? It’s not as though I woke up one morning with this new feeling that I was useless and insignificant, unwanted and undeserving of existence. My parents hovered and smothered, proclaimed their love loudly and seemed to encourage me to grow and flourish. Tendrilling so deeply underneath was years of fear and their own abandoned dreams of wholeness and creativity. What they said was not what they did, and what they taught me.

From them I learned to ignore my intuition, to struggle towards goals and attachments that didn’t resonate, towards things I could never do, and was not meants to do. Somehow I learned and deeply soaked up the belief system that I have nothing of worth to offer the world, and that I am a fragile and silent creature. Broken bird wings from the start.

I honor and love that fragility, it is a part of me, my thin skin and sensitivity, the joy of gentleness and soft voices are thoroughly embedded in some of my chambers. My weakness is a blessing that I hold dearly. At heart I am guileless, and have no need for jealousies or competitions. Underneath I have this strangely connected system, a skeleton held tightly together with pieces of wool and disparate lengths of silk.
But all of this is invisible to the outside, and serves no purpose in the modern marketplace of the world. I am not economically sound, and therefore no one wants to bother investing in my. I have nothing to offer capitalism but empty hands and a desire to create without unhealthy destruction( more on healthy/unhealthy destruction later I’m sure). Doing things that are frustrating and meaningless literally kills me.

Ignoring gut feeling, Part One

It's impossible for me to write on the computer at my parents house without someone reading over my shoulder, or at least being in the room. No privacy. Which is why I had to move out, besides it being complete time. There is no emotional space for creativity at their house, and someone is always hovering.This concept of presence is interesting to me, particularly relating to a conversation I had yesterday, with the always lovely Miss B, who took me out for lunch ( for which I will always be grateful, and I completely have a bottle of wine with your name on it on my dresser. Which is where I keep wine, apparently). She referred to me as an orphan, a concept which I'd never considered, considering that my parents are alive and relatively well, and still very much involved in my life.

Generally, one assumes that an orphan is someone who has lost their parents, or who never knew their parents, who has been rejected by their parents. Well, I just defined that one right there for myself.

I have to do laundry, and it just doesn’t want to get done. Everything I own is strewn around on the floor of my room, waiting to be clean. The doing of anythign is kind of eliding me this afternoon. It’s so much better to just stare into my mug of tea, wishing I had coffee, listening to Jennifer Terran music in the background. My muscles don’t want to move, and my heart is heavy. With sleep, with dreams, with waking and being.

Although my mood could swing and sway away at any time, today seems to be a dull one. Sluggishness and some sort of apprehension.

When did I stop listening to Sinead O’Connor and Patti Smith? Such awe-someness.
When the guilt set in. The guilt of being a girl and listening to music made by other gals. It’s a dangerous place to play, within the guilt of gender. Never healthy. Distance and thought around it, the whys and hows and maybes, but never the guilt.

If I feel guilty about being a girl, it means that I’m completely buying into the belief systems that girls are not good enough, and that yes, there will always be something lacking, to go back far beyond Freud and his presumed enviousnesses. No wonder I feel like shit if I wake up every morning believing, in the back of my mind and soul, that I’m not good enough, not enough because of my gender and so-called gender-isms.That my “girliness” is a hindrance to others, and that what I spend my day doing and believing in is not good enough.

Part of this is no doubt brought up by multiple conversations I had yesterday (with Adriana and Jo) about sports and dance/music classes. I spent most of my elementary school years ( age 5-12){That’s 7 years, a really really long time to a kid} trying desperately to play any and all team sports. I played soccer, volleyball, basketball, softball. I even tried curling. Tried to learn how to skate. Tried to run track and field. Tried gymnastics, even. Essentially, I spent 7 years fiercly trying to do something I hated. Because I wanted to fit in. because everyone played sports, and in order to be anybody or anything, you not only had to play team sports, you had to be good at them. And I never was.

I loathed each and every practice, would scream and cry before every soccer game, and yet, I kept on, determined. There was no other way that I saw, no other potential way to exist and be seen and be a part of school, of community, of life.

I was supposed to toughen up, to get used to the rough and tumble way of sports. I even hated having to go outside and play on the playground at lunchtime, or daycare. I wanted to stay inside and read Nancy Drew or color or make jewellery.

Well, I never toughend up. I am not your typical tough girl, thick skinned and bittersweet. I am these thigns, but it’s in my bones. Deep marrow, the bones that hold me up, but are covered in veins, sinews, muscles and skin. Delicate skin that tears easily and bears all the scars I’ve ever pretended not to notice.

I was discouraged. My courage lost in a full barrel rolled off a rocky cliff somewhere off a distant coast. Disenheartened, fierce heart.

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...