Tag: life in general

topical descriptions of life as we knew it


alt-text: i hear smashing glass in my head, ever time i laugh

I awoke a little panicked, aware of a certain dreadful absence of pinging alarm, not quite damning my day job, but coming close to it. The entire morning thing seemed insurmountable. It had been a long, unexpected evening, the sort I am generally familiar with, but never actually had, so all I wanted to do was sleep in. Drinks in a bar, an invitation up, my cue to pass out chastely on half of a hotel bed, that’s how it goes, how it suits my blood. But he was impossibly sweet and it seemed, after an indeterminate sleepy amount of cuddling, that my desire to cling to the familiar had evaporated somewhere, possibly seared from existence by his fiercely protective intellect, and the only path available was towards a new choice.

We went to the Aquarium after dinner later that night, (foreign dishes in a basement, the beginning of my stories, the tragic litany, the darker side of a thousand and one nights), me to crash the party, him with legitimacy, both with an equally sound purpose. Mine was to sneak in, the better to get me into even more later. We split up right away, once it was assured I had successfully bluffed past security, and that was that, I was on my own, a mercenary butterfly released into the opening party of the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

It’s startlingly easy to make fast friends at the beginning of conferences. There are always a few people who’ve been attending since the dawn of time, but the majority of the crowd are strangers thrown together or people who’ve only known each-other tangentially or on-line, so the ground is primed for the sort of introduction that doesn’t generally fly in public, where you simply walk up like a little kid to a friendly looking face and say, “hi!”.

I almost immediately fell in a lovely women, Shauna, a fellow burner from Berkeley I knew I would like, then together, after taking pictures with the sharks, we found Elizabeth, there for CNN, best characterized by her amazing smile, as permanent as the moon. We chatted about the fish and science and wondered about the whale, elusive and grand, sequestered in an area of the aquarium that the conference hadn’t rented. Occasionally I drifted away, encountering new conversations and faces, making mental notes for later, attaching myself here and there, but made sure to keep swinging back to touch base, so as the night progressed, as I fluttered, I forged a little group with which to found a conspiracy.

Eventually we made a feint at sneaking past security to see the whale, but we’d gained mass, our core blossoming as we went into an unwieldy six or seven, too many to slyly saunter into an area we weren’t supposed to go. Then, sadly, after some magic with the otters and the dolphins, it was time to leave, the staff ushering us past the sleeping octopus and the shimmering glass cube of tiny blue fish that look like living streaks of light to a queue in the the parking lot for the hired buses that were shuttling everyone back downtown. I lost my partner in the crush, perhaps because I lingered too long, loitering in a hope to find him, yet I found surprisingly good company in his wake – Alan, Estrella, and Marc, who I first met inside as part of the attempt on the beluga tank. They wanted to walk, but didn’t know the way, so I put aside my concerns regarding my misplaced self as less important than the possibility of an entire lost group and appointed myself their guide.

The walk home was beautiful, if long. Mostly I fell in step with Marc, who I pressed for details about the Ig Nobels and traded stories of odd employment paths, but got on well with Alan, too, who possesses a Patient Zero level of infectious cheer. By the time everyone peeled off for their separate hotels, we’d discussed several adventures, planned a couple more, and all traded business cards, a habit I was to pick up even more as the conference went on. (The trick is to remember later which card goes to which face).

My fellow turned out to be table camping with the rest of his crew at the hotel bar, which I walked through on a whim, hoping to stumble across where he might be, my lack of cell phone again a strangely crippling artifact of the shockingly recent past. I joined them, of course, and was immediately taken with RJ, a clever young man from Waterloo University who was sitting at my end of the table. I spent the rest of the evening pulling ideas from him, chatting about clean energy and the internet, until the table finally dissolved, leaving me and mine to drift upstairs into the sweet oblivion that promises endless wonder but only ever delivers tomorrow.

finally, a pause

Friday was close to being a complete write-off. First I went downtown to take someone’s photo, only to stand about waiting for an hour in the cold, at home a note sent through the digital, “stuck in a meeting, sorry!”, my lack of cell phone stranding me yet again. Things cheered up briefly when I walked home to find an invitation to a job interview, only to find out, once I’d trekked back downtown, that it wasn’t for legitimate employment, but instead with a guy who wants a girl to “boss around” his home. “Oh good, you’re pretty enough.” Pardon? I explained he should be advertising in the personals section and left, but not before he referred to special needs people as “feebs”, (the second person to do so in my presence in as many days, ugh), and demanded I pay his bar tab. The entire experience lasted perhaps a total of fifteen miserable, uncomfortable minutes, but felt like a shotgun blast to the day. Walking home from that was even worse than the morning’s photography failure. And, of course, at soon as I’m home again, home again, there is a voice mail message with my name on it, from the non-profit I interviewed on Wednesday, “we’ve gone with another applicant”.

But David got home in time for me to borrow his bus pass to go to the Ayden Gallery opening, where I met up with my brother Kevin, in from Montreal, his friend Nicholas, and Diego, recently back from Spain, and the art was nice and the company nice and Diego gave me a pretty necklace as a holiday gift and we got slurpees on the way out of the mall and cadbury cream eggs and there was a clutch of hipsters at the bus-stop all wearing fake mustaches and it snowed a little and I got to show my brother Nightwatch when we got back to my place and everything turned out pretty well after all. Hooray.

Saturday was significantly better. Kevin took me to breakfast at Locus, one of my favourite Vancover restaurants, and we wandered around in the thin crust of snow a bit, talking about our mutual love of Montreal, before I dropped him off at a friend’s place and bussed home. He’s grown from an angry, unpleasant child into someone I am glad to know, for which I am thankful. It spills from me like water in cupped hands, brimming past the edges of our sad memories of childhood, a slow moving river that is going to take some time to get used to.

Then Aleks came over and napped in my bed with the cats for awhile before driving us over to Andrew & Sara‘s for an in-house Molly Lewis concert that was stuffed to with spectacular people. She sang about Myspace and having Stephen Fry’s baby and generally charmed the heck out of everyone and for the first time all week I relaxed. It was wonderful.

Eventually the clever after-party dismantled for a trip to The Whip and though outside it was cold, it was beautiful, with snow, real snow, the dry, enchanting stuff, floating down like feathers after a televised pillow fight. We sparkled up the street, running in bursts then sliding along the frozen road on the flats of our shoes, arms akimbo, all transformed into ten years old. The group splintered at the bisto-bar, breaking off to different tables, mine against the far wall, the kitchen party, with Michael and Andrew and some folks from Seattle. We talked about terrible twitter jokes and a scandalous lot about nothing, but it was as full of odd glory as the weather, if inevitably more silly.

When it was time to go home, we skated down the road again, sliding even farther, whooping with cackling laughter, occasionally colliding, but never remembering to fall. Plans were made, Sherlock mentioned, and I fled down the street, trying and failing to get Andrew with the one tiny snowball I managed to make. S. drove me home, spinning the car down one of the back streets near my apartment, just because he could, with the sort of wicked joy usually reserved for roller coasters and haunted houses, toothless darkness and danger followed by ice-cream in the sun.

accumulating in a great mass of human-interest material

There is a perpetual, combative arithmetic involved in my daily life these days that I want very much to do away with. I am not terrific with math, in fact it’s probably my War On Noun nemesis, so this irks me on more levels than it might somebody else. The problem is this – with no steady income, my life, kneed in the gut by the financial collapse, becomes dictated by To-Do-Later lists. Chores that I cannot address because I do not have the money to purchase the required materials to fix the issue, like the leaky faucet that has been steadily torturing my roommate and I that I’m fairly certain only needs a washer, a wrench, and a youtube instructional video. I appreciate To-Do lists with a near institutional fondness, but my preference is for immediate problem solving, so I loathe To-Do-Later lists. They are Not My Style. If something’s wrong, if something needs to be addressed, now is always better than later. I’m well known for showing up at other people’s houses and suddenly helping rearrange the furniture, because when they drop a comment akin to, “it’s something I’ve been meaning to get around to for awhile”, I’ll jump up and suggest we tackle it right then and there. Yet my life has become a massive sinkhole of financially twisted procrastination, a stack of “when I get my first pay-cheque” balancing. Cold weather shirts versus my credit card bill versus better cat food versus winter weight curtains versus the utility bills versus a can of paint versus groceries versus the zipper on my boots versus a washer and a wrench. Never even mind my Irish passport. It has reached the point where once I do find regular, (lovely! beautiful!), ordinary employment, I suspect that my life will barely change, given that so much has piled up. So here’s the thing, given that many of you are also involved in the poverty economy, how are you managing? How do you make breathing room?

when you burn, what will remain to teach me?

Eric Speed – Maniac

I used to wear a skeleton key around my neck that I found in an old house, a plain metal thing on a utilitarian chain, scuffed from a hundred years of use. I lost it somehow. Given away, maybe, or left behind somewhere after a shower or swim. I wore it for years, but forgot about it completely until recently, when a new, tiny key arrived at Burning Man, a pretty silver thing unsuitable for any actual, physical lock. I like it anyway, though. It is perfect, the artist’s grown-up designer version of precisely what I used to wear. Sometimes the best keys are the ones for inside our heads.

the way of it

Very few updates lately. I still haven’t found work, though I apply to at least ten vacancies a day, my uncle John is still living with us, growing more frustrated with Vancouver by the hour, and David’s bookstore has been suffering, sales wiped out by the hockey season, to the point where the owners seem to be threatening closure. Yet, all in all, things seem static. We abide. Job hunting continues, the search for a way out of this city continues. There is very little change.

the idoru of telemarketing

  • Robotic Ghost Knifefish is Born (w. video).
  • 3D Printing-On-Demand Now Available in Titanium.

    “Please indicate your gender. Press one if you’re a female. Press two if you’re a male.” Even though I am a binary answer, I still flinch, thinking of the graffiti I read earlier in the woman’s washroom at Cafe Du Soliex, (next to Amber’s love note to Silva), FOR A GOOD TIME, FUCK THE PATRIARCHY. Still, the pre-recorded voice is friendly and the questions regarding politics are otherwise banal, so I stay on the line, answering by pressing the appropriate telephone keys. The entire thing is over in under two minutes, as counted by the timer on my wireless phone, and at the very end a truly robotic voice warbles through some syllables, the echo of a Radiohead song, Thank You For Your Time And Participation.

    • cortisol

  • Teach Parents: Send your parents a tech support care package, sponsored by Google.

    I leave for Seattle today to close down a significant part of my life, sift the remnants gently into a suitcase and some boxes, and bring it back to Vancouver. As concepts go, it remains sad, but I am significantly less unsettled about the entire idea. One time-line failed, so another will spring forth from the shift. Possibilities and probabilities. It’s what happens. To combat my residual nervousness, I tell myself that on a larger scale, it denotes almost nothing, only a narrative switch.

    Went to a party Saturday night, Duncan’s house-warming, crammed full of people I adore but never seem to see, perhaps my first house party of the year. Another change in the works, there, my desire to rebuild being social in Vancouver, attempt to drag my carcass out on the town, pick up the phone, wash off my hermit-stone skin and swim through conversation again. I had forgotten how refreshing it is to be surrounded by friends. Too much isolation. Too much concentration on only one topic at a time.

    • sleep

    Long nights spit out like toothpaste into an unfamiliar sink. She looks up, enamel, black tile, an older building. Wooden floors. Tall doorways. Stained glass. A dragon in the next room, sitting on the couch, warming his hands on a sweetened cup of bitter tea. White walls. Cold windows.

    Her hands float up to her hair, straighten some curls, frame her eye in the mirror. She peers through her hands, brought together in a symbol she found in a photograph on the internet – fingers curled, first knuckles together in a twin arc, thumbs stretched, touching underneath – the childish shape of a heart. Her certainty shakes. She lets it.

    He’s wrought of mixed signals, sliding shades of affection and neglect which don’t add up. The smell of his soap. Her heartbeat. An iron-work of conflicting opinions, kissing like he carries a new bastard disease of self-reference, wit, and deflection. Short brown hair. No eye contact. A thousand words in a picture that breaks her framed ideals. Attraction built instead of found. Panic filled breath, though her panties are balled up in her purse already. Feet cold on the tiles. (Uncomfortable echoes of explosive scenarios from younger relationships, feeling exploited). The scalpel of self-examination. Her motivations are an underground factory of facts conveyor-belt punching out hurt confusion. Very little he says matches up with what he does. She doesn’t know why these steps are being taken, but what she lacks in reason, she makes up in loyalty. There is very little new under this son.

    —

    They stood at the bus stop, both consciously skipping their friend’s gathering for opposite reasons. One feeling too welcome, another feeling not welcome at all. “I would have thought you were imagining it, but I noticed it too.” “I cornered him at the party, asked him what was wrong. He said there was nothing. In eight years, I think it’s the first time he’s ever lied to me.” Her thoughts embraced her absent friend, (his fingers so deeply entwined in her ribcage she would love him forever), even as she felt like her words were a disappointed betrayal.

    As they stood close, defensively, against the suffering neighbourhood, she kept up a monologue, quiet like a gentle run of dirty water. Memories, sad and unpleasant in retrospect. “How did you grow up?” A hungry childhood, social friction, hotel rooms. He nodded, implacable, in a way she found welcome. “I read the bible fourteen times, no one ever steals the things. They just sit there in the otherwise empty drawers, collecting dust and lonely people.” Anecdotes, wry short stories, a battered flow of narrative ornamented with sober, dry laughter, breakdown asides, and serious expressions. Later, sitting, her legs swung unselfconsciously under the seat.

    —

    I cycled past my father’s apartment last week. He has a giant poster in the window, an image he’s sent to me. I almost went and knocked on the door. I stopped, looked, put one foot on the ground. I don’t know why I stopped the same way I don’t know why I kept going. Instinct, impulse. Either or. He lives much closer to me than I thought. Near enough that no matter what, we’re on the same bus-routes, we share the same corner store.

    —

    “There was a woman named Ha there who showed me Samurai movies and fed me Korean fried chicken as I sat on a stool in the hotel kitchen. I ate all they had, the hotel had to buy more the next day, and I ate all of that too. I was a starving little thing, so bright and blonde and tiny you’d barely think I could walk, but I was always hungry. I remember my parents would go without sometimes so that I could have food. I lay in bed next to my mother and heard her belly grumble, five years old, listening and knowing that I had a sandwich and she had not. It’s made me a little neurotic about food. (Hell, I’m an adult now and I’m still so poor I’m starving to death.) I don’t like eating alone or cooking only for myself. And I can’t eat in front of someone without offering them any. In fact, I’ll put it off, go hungry for hours, rather than eat in front of someone who won’t have anything themselves, because it was greedy to eat alone, it meant you were depriving someone else.”