Filling the blank computer snow

Why am I writing so much? Could it be hypergraphia, the need to write constantly? No, I’m just in the middle of doing research and creative writing gives me a bit of a rest. Actually, it’s late, I should quit while I’m ahead. I got a lot of work done today, considering I got stoned and watched Robocop while dyeing my friend’s hair. I hadn’t seen that movie in years. That big robot that shoots up that guy scares me, I mean the giant robot, not Robocop. What a freakin intense boy film. We should have watched something funnier.

I’m tired, but wired, the worst kind of feeling to have this late at night. I think sitting at a computer screen does something to your body. Kinda poops out your eyes.

That’s a really weird image, now that I think of it, someone pooping out eyes. Sounds like something Bataille would write.

Eye poops, is there no dignity?

You, you’re Uninvited

My short film Anhedonia is screening at this year’s Uninvited Film Festival in Paris. Ah, Paris. I would kind of like to go. I haven’t been to Paris in ages, and I wonder if I would like it more going there without a broken heart. It’s such a great city to walk around in, not to mention the sheer plethora of art that is exhibited there. Last time I went the Pompidou was in mass renovations, so I didn’t get to see it. I did, however, get to see the Louvre. I remember seeing this great sculpture of an intersexed person, I think it was Roman. I was looking at it and this guy pointed at it and started gesturing wildly and hissing bad french words I was glad to not understand.

I also saw a painting by David of the Sabine Women. The story is “We are in the early days of Roman history. The Romans have abducted the daughters of their neighbors, the Sabines. To avenge this abduction, the Sabines attacked Rome, although not immediately–since Hersilia, the daughter of Tatius, the leader of the Sabines, had been married to Romulus, the Roman leader, and then had two children by him in the interim. Here we see Hersilia between her father and husband as she adjures the warriors on both sides not to take wives away from their husbands or mothers away from their children. The other Sabine Women join in her exhortations.”

I remember the painting was huge, bigger than it seemed in art history class. I looked into the haunted eyes of the children stuck in the middle of the battle and it reminded me of how I felt as a biracial person. I nearly cried. It never made me feel so emotional when I saw the slides of it.

I wonder if I could get a travel grant to go.

My 12 Inch Stapler

Yo dude, check out my twelve inch stapler! It’s long, hard, and heavy, and it has purple staples.

Okay, so maybe it’s not that exciting, but it sure was pricey, as far as staplers go. I’m awake late and tomorrow I get to see one of my best friends/ex lover after years of being on the other side of the continent from her. She’s here for a few weeks, just as all this school stuff is finishing. But of course I’m gonna make time to see her, I don’t know when I’ll get the chance again. She didn’t bring her man with her, which sort of disappointed me because I wanted to scope him out and make sure he was the right dude for this lady.

Some lesbians get really upset when their ex lovers go on to have partners that are male. Like they’ve been betrayed, like it’s the equivalent of their ex saying pussy’s really stanky compared to dick. Or that they’ve sold out for hetero privillege. Or easy access to sperm. Some lesbians operate on a strict no-bisexual policy, and then wouldn’t you know it, their ex lover falls in love with a man anyway.

Personally, I like dating bisexuals. I like playing with my gender in the bedroom, being a dual gendered person. Two of my ex’s have gone on to settle down with male partners, and the other two ex’s settled down with female partners, and they’re all happy with their choices. I didn’t get picked, but whatever. I’m more or less content with my ex’s remaining ex’s. That sounds like a support group!

Ex’s Remaining Ex’s, 6pm, Community Centre, bring your baggage, snacks of bitterness provided.

Really though, I think my longstanding (since grade eleven! Woot!) preference for bisexual women stems from this desire to be recognized as both male and female, and to be desired for it. Besides that, bisexuals are freaking hot, boys and girls. Period.

Now I’m going to go play with my 12 long inches.

Getting away with art

I have two major projects due in the next couple of weeks, and I’m quite swamped with it all. Luckily I found out tonight that I can make an art project for my science class, instead of a regular paper. I am studying hallucinations, the lovely/scary friend to mental illness, along with many other illnesses as it turns out. In particular I’ll be looking at visual hallucinations, and since I’ve already learned a bunch of stuff on making a zine, I’ll be making a book, with some clear pages that have images that will overlay on top of other images.

My experience with visual hallucinations is really limited, when I went crazy I had auditory and sensory hallucinations. Nobody ever told me you could feel things moving on your body when you go crazy. It’s true, you can! They are quite startling, one happened while I was manically talking to my best friend and I told her about it. It felt like a cloth was moving under me, wriggling and bumping me trying to get me to stop sitting on it. Thank god those days are in the past. However, when I’ve had migraines I get really AWFUL visual disturbances. My vision goes all yellow, blurred, and opaque, except for a tiny spot in the centre of my field of vision. It makes walking in the world really scary, and then I need to rush home and hide in a dark room for a few hours until it goes away. Luckily it’s been a long time since I’ve had a migraine, I used to get them all the time when I was a kid.

The first time I got a migraine I was walking with my school group through the University campus, and as I was looking at the snow I realized I couldn’t see. It scared the hell out of me and I didn’t know what to do. I was scared I would never see again.

Another time I went deaf, but it turned out I just had too much ear wax.

(eeeew, the crowd says)

Anyway, the world of hallucinations is fascinating to me, especially as a video/film artist. And I think it will make an interesting one off book project, although time is running out and I will have to devote many hours this coming weekend to getting the whole thing due in time for Monday’s class. But after making my zine, I think I know how I can do it.

Mostly, I am just relieved I don’t have to write another paper. One is quite enough for this semester. I still can’t believe I managed to write three papers at the end of last semester. Wow. That is insane.

School makes ya crazy!

I’m glad I’m almost done. Soon I’ll be at the grad ceremony, with my mommy, finally getting my degree. And after that I have to find a job.

I still haven’t heard back from grad school. I have some tentative plans in the event I will have to find something else to do, it would just be nice to hear a yay or nay and move forward on something. I hate ambiguity, except in gender, in which case it is sexy.

Launch of the Fit of Pique Zine: Coming soon!

The first issue of the paper Fit of Pique zine has finally arrived! There’s things about it I would change, given the chance and the time, but overall I am pretty happy with it. Finally after about four years the Bottom’s Manifesto has been set into print, and even though it’s been published in another zine, the short true story I Could Kill Myself With My Panties has a really nice section, complete with illustrations. I even dug up an old short lesbian vampire story.

So if you are looking to trade or buy the zine, it’s 3 bucks plus the cost of mailing it (I don’t have an estimate for that yet). Email me and I’ll give you the address to send cheques to, or wait around a while longer while I find a distributor. fanggrrl @ excite . com (without spaces, I’m just trying to fool the roving spambots)

That was pretty much my day, copying and folding and looking for an appropriate stapler.

The class in which this zine was created will be having a launch/opening of all the students work. I will keep you updated on the wheres and whens. It’s a great chance to broaden or begin your zine collection.

Close friends: You’ll be getting your copies soon!

Portrait of a Maniac

Today I did some volunteer work at the school’s art auction. My piece went for 45 dollars. It was a steal of a deal. I actually really liked that piece, I wouldn’t have minded taking it home. It’s was a lomo photo of a bunch of goofy trinkets and knick knacks for sale in a store window. The colors came out really lovely. Plus it’s such a classic manic image, oooh, things to buy that are worthless really!

Anyway, in between doing tasks I surfed online, looking up comparative execution styles (the question: is lethal injection really as humane as we think?), and poverty and mental illness (the question: which came first? The mental illness or poverty?) The answer, according to various studies, is that poverty is a factor in many mental illnesses.

Ever since going crazy I’ve been on a journey to understand why. Why did I go so ravingly psychotic? Me, a generally calm, laid back individual. There’s genetic factors, to be sure. I am far from the first person in my family to go insane. But then as I was leaving school and waiting for the bus, I considered my economic situation when I was running up that hill to fly into cold blue air. I thought in the interests of illuminating the process of going manic, I would explain my lifestyle in the months leading up to my episode.

I was poor, and new to a city where I didn’t speak the language. My apartment had bullet holes in the walls and cracks, I was sleeping on a child’s mattress on the floor in a sleeping bag. Our couch was from the street, the television didn’t have an antenna and you had to tie it to your toe to keep the picture clear. I smoked pot everyday because then I didn’t have to care about the terrible surroundings I was in. We ate kraft dinner and anything else that was cheap and could be cooked in one pot. We had plain muslin curtains and a swiffer. All my belongings fit into two suitcases. I read academic theory a lot, hoping to find some kind of an answer to a question I didn’t fully understand at the time.

The question was about poverty.

I wasn’t eating right, I couldn’t, I didn’t have proper kitchen utensils to cook for myself like I had in Vancouver, and besides that, good food cost money. I was self medicating, I was depressed and for good reason, anyone who had been in that apartment would feel lousy. I felt like urban lichen, hanging on desperately to a life in a big city. But lichen doesn’t really live, it just exists, always hanging on, tenuous, ready to be ripped from it’s moorings at any moment.

Add in an antidepressant at a really high dose, and I was due for trouble.

I think the hardest part of putting my shattered memory of those times back together is seeing all the triggers that were happening for me, and blaming myself for not avoiding them. Too much drinking, too much pot, too much Effexor, not enough soul friends (as in, people you can truly bear your soul to, something I have a hard time doing with people, with some very notable exceptions). I was a car crash waiting to happen, dancing on a razorblade.

My film is now taking a more interesting direction, looking at the crushing poverty of the working poor Urban Indian and her spiral into madness. I think it give my story a much more political bend to it than the themes I’ve been working with thus far.

They didn’t need to do a study to find out poverty causes mental illness, I could have told them that.

Fireworks Factory Blows Up

I had a whole night of no sleep and it has freaked the bejeezus out of me. La la la, trying to do things. I’m finding that I’m more goal driven, which is actually a good thing because I have so much work piled up from what I now suspect was a bit of a depressed slump. I got my zine nearly finished, all I have to do is take it to the copy place on Saturday. I researched the hell out of first time feature film funding. I think I even discovered where I want to work on my first feature. So that was all dandy.

But I HAVEN’T SLEPT ALL NIGHT! My circadian rhythms are all fucked. And I’m being extra careful and nice hoping it isn’t a big manic-depressive catastrophe. I made an appointment to see a psychiatrist, maybe this time I’ll actually get a shrink, instead of just being sent back to my GP.

Having a manic episode is kind of like this VIDEO CLIP of a fireworks factory blowing up, imagine each firework represents a thought, and you’re thinking them all at the same time. AhhhhhhH!

Don’t want to go kaboom again. I feel like a ticking time bomb.

Hopefully tonight will bring blessed sleep.

We made bannock out of my Baby

When I was finishing grade four we got a letter in the mail saying I had been accepted into Actel, an accellerated learning program for gifted students. I still think it’s because I knew what a perambulator was.

Most of my children’s books were british, and they of course mentioned such things as perambulators. Being an inquisitive person with access to a brit dictionary, I soon found out it was the brit term for a stroller. Anyway, one day in class we were reading a british book, when we came to the p-word. What was it? I was the only one with an answer.

I must have done other smarty pants things, because the next year I began Actel.

It was a funny mix of kids, some of us wondering when the Dummy police would barg in and take us back to regular school. They all played Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiago? There wasn’t much plot to the game, beyond naming the capitol of Indonesia and things like that. Still, it was better than my educational game, Math Blaster. I was always weak in Mathematics. Oh yeah, and we all sat around playing Uno during lunch. Uno, I don’t even remember how to play it now.

Even in a class full of nerds, the nerd-popular dynamic soon showed up again. I once did a magic show with one of the popular girls. She would yell Presto-Chango and our trick happened. Her name was Stephanie. She dressed kind of like Madonna in the late eighties, which I guess it was.

There was only one other aboriginal girl in the class, and two years later she climbed out the window and never returned. We drew a picture of her legs hanging out the window on our whiteboard, an homage to the turbulent girl who had departed.

There was this other girl, Karen, who somehow straddled the boundaries of nerd and popular. We were best friends for a very brief time, until my longtime best friend Lyndsey came along. We broke up our friendship a year after high school, it was very sad. Karen was a red head, and in retrospect I think I had a little crush on her. I wonder what happened to her. She was in some religious group, Sisters of Job I think. I think it was a secret society.

There was this other guy, Jimmy, who was such a nerd and had bookish ways, that he was almost above taunts. I think we all instinctively wanted to protect him. He was socially stunted and brilliant, dressing in little cardigans. Now he’s a computer science graduate.

We had all kinds of wacky academic adventures, school was suddenly really fun whereas before it had been quite boring. I remember our first orientation together we had to make something to cushion an egg that would be dropped from a ladder. We covered our egg in foam and cartons and all kinds of material.

Later on, during sex ed, we had to carry around an eight pound bag of flour and pretend it was a baby. This was to teach us that having unprotected sex had consequences. Later we made bannock out of my baby.

I feel like the penguin

Here’s a flash game for you:
Poke the Penguin

It is a holiday

Brr it’s cold in here. Hmm, just picked at my hangnails. I was wanting to write something really amazing, but there’s not much to write about. It is a holiday after all. I have to pee. Watch the creative process unfold before your eyes!
Not that peeing is creative, although it does eliminate waste from one’s body.
I meant more as in, watch me ramble through ideas for a few paragraphs before ending today’s blog.
I had a pot brownie last night and watched Boogie Nights. That film is intense for so many reasons.
I like intense films. Some people don’t, some people get really annoyed by intensity, for personal reasons. I understand that I suppose. As long as they don’t impose their viewing choices on me.
I’ve decided not to finish writing today’s blog. It is a holiday, after all. Supposedly 2000 years ago a religious figure was nailed to some wood and left to die, which he did, and then everyone could point and say “see, he’s not the son of God.” Then he woke up on Sunday and let some dude named Thomas stick his finger in his wound. If that had happened today we’d expect him to wear latex gloves.
So the moral of the story is, always carry around some latex. You never know when you’ll want to stick your hand in someone.