I’m not a dog!
My current favorite piece of software
I love software. I have always loved it. Editing, writing, photoshopping, web pages, power point, whatever. I have a love affair with each one.
My current favorite piece of software is Final Draft. It makes scriptwriting so freakin easy. Not only does it make formatting it properly a breeze, but it will also do really cool things for your script, like come up with various reports on how many characters there are, give you all your locations, and it can even be used to compare your first draft with your later drafts. How sexy is that?
Anyway, after the last pathetic blog, I decided I would write some stuff. Altogether with today and yesterdays work, I have seven and a half new pages. Woo hoo! Including the sex scene, which was a little hard to write because the last time I had sex with a girl was when Bush got into office. Pretty grim. So I felt just as rusty writing sex as I’m sure I’ll be having sex, should I ever have sex again.
I’ve also realized that in a certain way, what has blocked me from writing this story is that it’s a love story, and love has been rather elusive in my life. So I was uncomfortable actually writing characters who fall in love, although more terrible things are in store for them soon.
Soon I have to write the really uncomfortable scenes, the loss of sanity and subsequent hospitalization. It’s all very sad. Hmm. And I’ll be introducing some more characters.
That’s the hard part of writing, you create characters you really care about, and then you have to throw them in a horrible situation.
I tell you we must die
Trundling along with Unemployed Summer. It is Thursday. I applied for two jobs. One is as an Office Services Clerk in a law firm. That would be a nice job to have, considering I’ve already done it. After writing two cover letters and updating my c.v., I sat around and talked to my mother. Then I watched two episodes of Ab Fab and then Mirrorball. I laughed so hard at the scene where Jane Horrocks sings Alabama Song. That’s one of my all time favorite songs when I’m maudlin in a certain “the piano has been drinking” sort of way. Oh show me the way to the next whiskey bar. I tell you we must die. I tell you we must die.
I am a veritable powerhouse of creativity at the moment, and yet I can’t seem to motivate myself enough to pull my script up and pound away at it. The trouble with the writing process is it’s so solitary. That’s something I like about it as well, but when I’m on my own, making myself sit down and write is that hardest thing to do.
So I write in my blog.
Really though, sitting around watching well written british comedy series is probably part of my creative process. Brit comedies rule the fucking planet. If I was ever to do a comedy series, I would want to do it with the BBC.
But obviously, I must first learn to have good writing habits. I do write everyday, just not on my script. I must start everyday script writing. What troubles me at the moment is I have fifty-five pages and I’m only a third of the way through the plot, which means I’ve got more material than I can use. However, I also realize that I shouldn’t start chopping away at it until I’ve completed the whole first draft. Oh it’s tiring. Plus one of my characters really needs an overhaul, poor transdude. He’s been tokenized, and that’s obviously a problem because he’s woefully unfleshed out.
I am my own worst critic.
I tell you we must die. I tell you we must die.
I’m off to buy two cigs now. I’ll be back later.
Diary Haiku
I apparently have but one thing on my mind according to the haiku engine for my diary site. Here’s what it came up with:
are all bacon and
eggs nibble nibble i like
fish as long as it
I am particular about fish. I didn’t realize I talked about food so much in my diary. I thought for sure it would pick up my potty mouth.
Life + Pills
I’m trying to think how long I’ve been taking pills for psychiatric reasons. I’ve been on Epival and two other meds for two and a half years now, but before that there were many years I was on anti-depressants alone. It does seem like a very long time. Probably the majority of my adult life.
Before pills, life was really hellish. I think back on my childhood and so much of it was just dark and intense. I really didn’t want to live. And I was a kid!
I wish there had been some way to treat me back then. Oh well.
But I do remember mornings when I could wake up and feel fabulous, and the smell of the morning dew as I walked to school was the most sensual spiritual feeling I ever had, and I liked life. That’s the weird thing, it didn’t all suck all the time.
So now I’m maintained on three different drugs that work together in different ways in my brain and make me able to function fairly normally. I’ve grown happily accustomed to my prescription, no horrible side effects, but I can’t help but wonder what it would be like to not have to depend on pills. I don’t want to go off them, because obviously they work wonders. But there are concerns, like say my plane crashed in the woods and I ran out of meds. Or the government broke down and there was no way for me to get a prescription filled in all the melee. What the hell kind of crazy would I go?
Still, the little pills are in no danger of being taken away from me yet. Unlike American’s whose health plans only pay for meds as long as you are actively crazy. Once you’re stabilized, they take it away.
It makes me cream my jeans
I just found the sexiest thing in the world on the net. I am rendered completely speechless. I think I am overcome with love and lust. If I had this baby by my side, life would be sooooo ultimately perfect. I have missed having my own camera since I lent mine out and it came back BROKEN! And besides, it also became really old technology.
Thirza sells out and goes High Definition. Mmmmm, sweet sexy sacriligious sell out.
A stark reminder in the midst of gay revelry
I’ve been having quite a bit of fun lately, what with Pride weekend closely followed by Out On Screen’s Queer Film Festival. Love and Numbers is screening again on Sunday afternoon at 2, followed by a panel. I’ve been surrounded by all shades of queer, sexy femmes and swaggering butches and gay men and trannies and bisexuals to be sure. Living in a somewhat cosmopolitan city in Western culture, just newly able to legally marry, things look pretty good for queers here. There still are issues, to be sure. Lest we not forget Aaron Webster, the gay man who was brutally murdered in Stanley Park and whose death was not declared a hate crime. I don’t know, but when a lot of straight men attack a gay man with baseball bats, I call that a hate crime.
But maybe hate crime is not a strong enough word for what it really is. What it really is is genocide.
I was reminded of that this week when a friend forwarded on news about two gay teenagers in Iran who were sentenced to death for the capital crime of homosexuality. They were sixteen when the so called “crime” was committed. You can find pictures of their last moments alive here, here, and here.
I have to say, while all the images shocked and appalled me, I think the first one struck me the most, probably because one of the boys looks very similar to a dear gay friend of mine.
Since the Ayatolla’s took power in 1979, 4000 gays and lesbians have been executed. How can one not call that genocide?
One might argue it’s impossible to commit genocide towards queers, to which I say bunk. What about all the queers shipped off to concentration camps? And while we’re a funny culture in society because we pop up in any family anywhere, we are a very tribal people, having had the history of people being rejected by their families and making new, queer ones.
But really, what it comes down to is western guilt. As a queer in Canada, what the hell can I do to make being a homo easier for people worldwide? I don’t know why I feel this is my mission, but it is an important question.
In the meantime, I will say a prayer an continue being a raging Canadian dyke.
Welcoming song
I have a screening I curated on tonight. I’m nervous I will be asked to get up and say something. My hands shake when I do public speaking. I thought I could get away with it if I stuck a rattle in my hand and said I was doing a welcoming song from my people. Shake shake shake. Shake shake shake. Shake that groove thing.
The joys of being mental.
Passing
When I came out years ago, I was really confused by the term passing. In my history, passing was related to race, whereas in queer terms it means passing as male/female.
I think as a biracial person, most of the hate directed towards me had to do with the fact that I could easily choose to pass for white, abandon the race, and not bother myself with advancing civil rights for aboriginals. At least, to the outsider it seemed like an easy choice. But I wasn’t raised that way. Lightest next to my white grandma in a family a varying shades of brown, I just felt like I was a brown person. I confronted racism in elementary school next to my brown best buddies, I studied my history, I did everything a “good” upstanding Aboriginal was supposed to do.
But it didn’t save me the day some brown girls beat me up for being white and not afraid of them. What I remember most is their fury, and the way they kept denying that I could possibly be an Aboriginal.
It was a hate crime, from my own people. I was forced to reconcile the fact that I had white skin, and therefore more privilege.
I think I’m pretty obvious about my racial background. Still, for some people that will never be enough. They will always be jealous that I’m able to pass for white, not realizing the huge internal struggles that this poses.
Eggs
Eggs are a cheap source of protein. This is what I tell myself when I open the fridge and find only mustard, a wilted stalk of celery, and six eggs. I had devoured my spagetti and sauce, and the bacon had turned an unholy shade of green.
After living for a year on pizza by the slice, eggs have become my main staple as a person living in poverty.
Eggs can be cooked in a lot of yummy ways, unfortunately huevos rancheros cannot be created using limp celery and mustard.
I hate eggs. They have become a symbol of my poverty. They should taste yummy, but when they are the only option for consumption, they choke.
“It could be worse, you could have no eggs.”
True.
Sometimes I have tried to insert moments of poverty in my videos. Counting spare change, taking pills, but nothing has really captured the feelings of utter hopelessness and desperation that come with such actions. I’m thinking of other things I have done, re-roll cigarette butts, that’s a big one, go to the Carnegie, go to Coast’s free Friday dinners. Waiting in line for careless sandwiches.
And eggs, those eggs mock me. I want meat. I want stir frys and salmon and tofu curry. I want fruit and crackers and cheese, and beans, and I make long lists in my head late at night, imagining what I would buy if I got some cash. I’ve grown past the point of living on pizza by the slice and gyros and any other cheap fast food. I like to actually make myself food.
But what can you make when all you have are eggs?