I am a bad rat mom

This morning I woke up, looked around all groggy, and then realized that Clive’s cage door was open. He was not inside. I remembered falling asleep while he was crawling around. He was no where on the bed, and my apartment is still quite a bit messy. Added to this the sudden realization that there was Warfarin in the apartment for the mice.
I was in a state of distress when I found him curled up, happily sleeping in a garbage bag. Rats will be rats, after all. I picked him up and kissed him and said “I’ll never lose you again!”
He’s such an old rat, I’m amazed at his determination to keep living. It’s inspiring.

And when I don’t speak . . .

I spent time with my family today, which was so lovely and wonderful, except for the dangling participle that became involved, and things got very ugly. My family are such sticklers for proper english. Maybe that’s why I don’t often speak.

It’s true, some of you may have wondered about my tendency to not say much of anything from time to time. The real reason is because I am crazy. But aside from that, since all I’ve ever known is shyness, I’m pretty used to my cycles of speaking/not speaking. I have noticed the following interesting trends:

I can speak with up to three other people around. Four or more are out.
I can’t speak to anyone I think is really grand.
I can email people, but that’s not really speaking is it?
I can often be coaxed to speak if given food or pot. Actually, that last part was a lie, I just wanted to see if you’d give me pot to make me say something.
When manic I can speak to anyone, including seven strangers in a bar in Saskatoon one holiday night, and I was so talkative and friendly that soon the whole bar was chatty and someone even trusted me with their hundred dollar bill to go get change.
(I did come back, I was crazy, not evil)
I often find it difficult to think of things to talk about that aren’t going to freak people out. There is a stringent process new friends have to go through during which you can figure out where the boundaries are.
Confessions are my chocolate, I love hearing other people’s dirty secrets.
Ghost stories are also useful at getting my interest.
One on one conversing is usually the best way to talk to me, IF I am not in a weird environment, which I can sometimes be found in, where disco lights are spinning and there’s some naked girl on a stage, or almost naked, and everyone’s pushing and horny. Yeah, so that basically cancels out talking to me at a bar or an event. Also I don’t often tell people, but I have poor hearing and it’s just not the best environment for me. Yep, little disability heads up to you all.
Filmmakers talking shop, come on, sooooooo sexy! I love those gatherings,like in film school when we were accumulating a debt and learning on equipment older than ourselves. (It has all changed since my days there already, they have a decent number of computers. Although I am sad to see the Steenbecks go.)
I will sometimes interject a conversation with an off kilter comment in the hopes of being able to converse. One time I was at a barbecue of some people I had only gotten to know a short time. It was a nice sunny day, we drank Pims, someone was talking about how they fed McDonalds to people in jail. I said “Oh yes, my babysitter used to go to jail all the time, she said they gave you McDonalds for every meal. It was disgusting, she hated McDonalds.”
“What did she go to jail for?”
“She stabbed her boyfriend.”
A curious silence ensued.

Really though, I am chatty when I’m in the mood. I guess Virginia Woolfe was right, manic depressives are cameleons.

Take a chance on Me

Last night I downloaded as much Abba as possible. I am now listening to Waterloo. I love that song.
“How could I ever refuse? I feel like I win when I lose!”
My mother bought me some kicky new shoes for my birthday, they are lime green and ultra cute.
Finishing school has left me feeling somewhat bewildered. I need to figure out some crucial things about my life, like how I plan to make a living, how I can finish this script so I can get funding, looking into further training programs in directing (ie Sundance), and then some more personal issues related to my own health up-keep. It’s all really startling, almost as weird as graduating from high school, but not as shocking. I mean, then I had to move out on my own.
It is a funny thing, moving out on your own. I survived on pizza by the slice for the first year, and lived in a one room apartment in a dodgy neighborhood. Once there was spilled blood and coffee at the bus stop. I was lonely most of my first year.
Then I ended up living with some leather girls and much fun ensued. Fetish parties, poppers, floggings, stories of dirty adventures, ecstacy, I was a bad ass.
I dare not do ecstacy again because of my medications. The mushroom trip to the hospital was quite enough thank you. But I like being around people on e, all that hugging. It can feel pretty religious, just loving everyone for who they are.
I hope I can find a nice job that isn’t soul shredding. It would be great to get work as an editor, because I love editing! WHO KNOWS!

I beg pardon?

My mother and grandparents have arrived, which has left me feeling a bit bewildered by the sudden entrance of relatives into my proximity and the old habit patterns which remain. I really don’t know how to relate to my relatives the way I can to my friends.
Or it was because I forgot some pills last night. My bad.
But I really think it was the Secret Talk I got after dinner with my family. My mother had been watching me like a hawk all day, and then she leaned in and said, “Your grandparents and I want to talk to you about something.”
Oh shit, I thought, I’m crazy and I haven’t noticed, and now she’s going to send me to the bin again, and god knows what that would provoke-
“We think you pee too much.”
“WHAT!?”
“You’re only supposed to pee eight times a day. You should really go see a doctor about that. They have medication for it now.”
Yes, so now my mother wants me to throw another medication into my cocktail for peeing. PEEING!
There’s a comic by Natalie Dee which relates:
I Quit
See more of her daily comics at:
www.nataliedee.com

The bubbles have melted.

I bought a mint Aero bar for my birthday breakfast and I left it in my pocket. The bubbles have melted. It is a chocolate and mint paste.
I’m displeased.

Googly Eyes

I googled her. She googled me. They googled him. He’s gone googly. Ah, Google, it’s one of my all time favorite things, to google. Especially googling people. Recently I googled an ex girlfriend under Images and found a picture of her name on a tombstone, which I promptly emailed to her.
People have told me they googled me, which always makes me feel weird, kind of like the time I found a friend’s webcam site and got trapped in the popups. I tried so hard to shut the windows, but no, they kept coming.
Anyway, whew, that took me back.
I’m glad I have medication.
Well, today is my birthday. The Dali Lama once said that every birthday is really a celebration of your coming death, so celebrate I must. I have some money in my pocket and cigarettes and a small crowd of good friends, going out dancing wearing a sexy outfit, looking for spankings from girls. It’s going to be great fun. Every birthday I try to think if I’ve learned anything over the year. I mean, life lessons, not just what I learned at Emily Carr.
I shall have to ponder while I clean for the mice exterminators.

Nearly there . . .

I met with the prof of the class I was really concerned about passing. We actually had a really good meeting. She told me my attendance was appalling, and I knew that to be true. In fact, it’s the worst attendance I’ve had ever. But she liked my paper, and was even going to keep it for future students to read. That was really great, because I had felt like my paper was so shitty while I wrote it. I guess I was hard on myself. Anyway, basically all it means is that I’m graduating! Yippee!

We also talked about grad school, and she asked why I wanted to go, and told me now the marks they want are 3.5 GPA’s, and mine is hovering at a meager 2.974. But she said I could get into grad school if I made a larger body of work, and making my feature will really help. So, looks like that’s the plan.

Back to Bunnyhug. It will be really nice to write my script again. I like living in a fantasy world part of the time, I guess that’s why I’m an artist. And slowly my characters are starting to develop lives of their own. I’m also really happy about my script right now because a stronger structure is coming into form, whereas before I had really started writing blindly. Anyway, the deadline for the Sundance Screenwriters Lab is coming up in February, so I’m going to submit my script and see if they’ll take me.

Wow, so soon I will walk across the stage and get a degree. It seemed like it would never happen.

A Salute to James Dean

In continuation with my recollections of adolescence, I thought it would be wise to mention James Dean.

See, I was a nerd, and queer, and crazy, and I didn’t really have a life. Oh there was that naughty escapade with the bisexual witches in grade twelve, and the rave scene I was in, and making videos that went to queer film fests all over the world, but before all that life was pretty grim. Watching music videos, playing video games, reading bell hooks. pimply nerd girl stuff. And I needed some kind of outlet, and it came in the form of the movies.

The movies was where I could dream about who I wanted to be and who I wanted to be with, it was it’s own magic world. I was all about finding queer subtext. I mean, I was sticking deep complicated meanings on these movies based on my identity and gender. My two icons were Marilyn Monroe and James Dean.

Ironically my favorite diner in Saskatoon where I whiled away much of my youth is absolutely PLASTERED with James Dean/Marilyn Monroe memorabilia and photos.

I think I wanted to fuck Marilyn, but I was also watching her, trying to figure out femininity. I wasn’t around uber femmes in my life, all my cousins my age were boys. It also made me really want to try out smoking. Fuck, she smokes a lot.

But James Dean appealed to me. Later I would find out it was a gay/lesbian attraction. But what I liked so much was his vulnerable masculinity. I wanted to BE James Dean. He was my role model for masculinity.

I don’t know where it went wrong.

Do you suppose it’s the bunnyhug?

Hazing Parker Posey

I was recently thinking about the scene in Dazed and Confused where Parker Posey hazes all the freshman girls. There is something about the scene which makes it totally hot. Squirting condiments all over other younger teenage girls. I dunno, I always wanted to interact with the older hot teen girls when I was younger, but I had no idea how to do it. And there was this element of hazing. At my high school select girls were attacked with bingo dabbers all over their face. And it stayed for a really long time. I never got hazed. I didn’t want to either. I was going through my angry bleak and cynical year and was just about to realize I was a homo. I wore long hair to hide the growingly obvious fact that I was a butch dyke heading into four years of high school in Saskatchewan.

What mean grim times my friend! It was about a mile from my house to the school, and I walked there rain or shine or snow. Sometimes it was minus 60 with the windchill. I was steadily working my way through the Vampire Chronicles and being very dark and troubled about it all.

Realizing I was a queer was the weirdest experience, next to going to the bin. It’s moments like that when your life totally changes. I stopped being so bleak and dark, sort of. I started being less afraid of people. And more afraid, but for different reasons.

I have often wondered if there is a hazing procedure for the queer community. I think I know what it is.

Queer youth groups.

Now I have a soft spot for my youth group days. I did it for five years, in three different cities. And to be totally honest, I always went hoping to score. I had grand dreams for queer youth groups. I went imagining it would be lead by a Parker Posey look-alike who would demonstrate fisting to us, or something else worthwhile. Knitting, even. Instead it was circle check. Man, everybody telling us how their week was, or something. And terrible things would be happening to everyone. Like live coverage of the war stories of trying to find your way as a queer in the world. So sad. I think it made us all crazy.

And then we’d all go out after. Usually to that place with the really great fries.

The second part was where all the fun came in, because people would gossip and flirt. But somehow we had to endure the circle check. Even if someone was still talking after half an hour.

I still know a lot of ex-youth group people. So in a sense it did serve it’s purpose as a social bonding experience.

Oh noooo, red pen!

I am editing my final draft of my paper and my red pen has disappeared! I think the mouse took it.