It’s rainy, which is not really nice. BUT I had a nice social time with the social committee of the co-op today, so that was really nice. Found out about the goings on of the co-op. Also a lot of families have been here for DECADES which is comforting.

And then I came home and cleaned for a few hours. I can’t afford my cleaner this month so I skipped him coming this next week. So I decided to get into it myself and I did a good job! It smells so much nicer in here. I did my dishes and picked up and swept and washed the floor. Took apart the couch cushions and vacuumed all the crumbs and stuff. Threw out garbage and gathered laundry. I’m going to try and do my extra laundry tomorrow or Monday. I need to wash my duvet and my couch cushion covers. Todd had snuck under my bed and pooped so I cleaned that out too. I just have to finish cleaning the bathroom but that will literally take ten minutes.

I also smudged the house which helps a lot.

There’s this SAD OPPRESSIVE energy that finally lifted in my apartment today and that was really nice. It was probably a mix of the cleaning and the smudging. I’ve also been smelling phantom sweetgrass recently, and I did do a quick smudge with sweetgrass after I smelled it just to double down on whatever that was trying to protect me from. BUT I think I’m going to smudge with it again now that the house is clean. Ha ha it’s like that Zelda Rubinstein meme where she’s standing there at the end of Poltergeist going “This is house is clean!” JUST LIKE THAT!

I feel really optimistic these days which is nice. I think despite my bipolar disorder I’m generally a fairly optimistic person. I think pessimism can be a bit self-defeating. I know some people think it’s realistic, and I admit to private pessimistic thoughts sometimes. BUT I feel like change requires optimism. Not like, reckless optimism. But it does require some optimism and faith. And putting in the work!

One of my jobs is ending this week and then I have my salpingectomy and am going to be resting and doing some other work. But I’m hoping while I am resting I can do some script work. I really want to finish off this step outline so I can start a first draft. If things work out (and they should) I am getting $19,000 this summer, so I should be able to pay my story editor the last half of his fee and finish up this script work FINALLY. I want to get it done before I head into my residency and start my video game. PLUS I want to write this composite grant and that is gonna take a lot of work. Just work all around. PLUS soon we find out about a potentially large project, so I’m thinking optimistic thoughts about that.

In some ways I wish I’d had faster success, and in other ways I can see how all my projects, even the small ones, taught me skills to move on to bigger and better things. I mean they are all good, but you know, I want to do a feature film and it’s been a lot of learning to get to the level where I feel like I am REALLY ready. I think if it had been made earlier, I wouldn’t be in the place I am now with my skillset. Directing is a particular skillset that takes work and time. And openness. So I feel like NOW I’m ready, so I hope we get to do it finally.

I’ve been horrified with what is happening in Gaza, and I share things about it but I don’t know if I have spoken on it enough. I generally left it off my blog but was sharing on Twitter and Instagram and Facebook. In some regards the whole thing is just so sad and there are no words strong enough to condemn it. I don’t know what I can do to change things but it is our responsibility to keep talking about it and not let up. Generally Canada has been disappointing in regards to the government stance. But it’s a colonial government, who are also guilty of genocide of my people, so in that respect it’s not very surprising that the government allowed and encouraged it. And the settlers who live here are also complicit with genocide here in various ways, so yeah. I try to be optimistic like I said, but this is one of those horrifying moments where it does make me feel pretty powerless, seeing how genocide and colonization operate.

I want to make a limited series about my family’s experience being colonized way back in the 1800’s to 1900’s. It was horrifying, a lot of trauma, disease, displacement. My Great Great Grandfather was shot with a gatling gun, which is a precursor to automatic weapons. And if that was happening now, the weapons the USA is giving Israel would have been used on us. My Great Great Grandfather survived his gunshot wound, but like, if some trigger happy teenage drone operator came and wiped out my family for stealing food from the store because we were being deliberately starved, I wouldn’t be here. That would have been the end of it.

And I think about all of those families who HAVE been wiped off the face of the earth in Gaza and like, so many world possibilities have ended because of it. Like, really talented and loving people were obliterated. They keep saying 34,000 died, but honestly it’s probably in the hundreds of thousands now because they killed all the people who could keep counting early on in the genocide. It’s very sad. And enraging. I’m really glad the students are standing up against it even though they will face academic reprisals.

Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if more of my people had survived. Humanity can be so brutal. Not humanity, humanity is a good thing. But COLONIZATION specifically is violent and brutal, in all eras and in all manifestations. Even enforced poverty that we live with today is violent and brutal.