My World View, Quiz style

You scored as Cultural Creative. Cultural Creatives are probably the newest group to enter this realm. You are a modern thinker who tends to shy away from organized religion but still feels as if there is something greater than ourselves. You are very spiritual, even if you are not religious. Life has a meaning outside of the rational.

Romanticist 94% Cultural Creative 94% Postmodernist 56% Idealist 56% Fundamentalist 50% Existentialist 38% Modernist 38% Materialist 13% What is Your World View? (updated) created with QuizFarm.com

Terrible is Beautiful?

Last night I was reading an article and I came across the word terrible but my mind registered it as beautiful. The next few sentences stopped making sense so I read back and when I came to the word terrible I remembered thinking the meaning was beautiful but still knowing I had read terrible. If this isn't some form of dyslexia then I'll equate it to my own personal darkness. But at the same time when I look at the word TERRIBLE it's actually a rather nice looking word. I don't mean the meaning; I mean the combination of shapes. It's just pretty. So maybe, just maybe, when I read the word terrible I wasn't replacing the meaning of terrible in my head, I was just appreciating the design of the letters.

Sometimes I just think too much.

Addiction

I am entirely addicted to The Be Good Tanyas version of the House of the Rising Sun. Soooooooooo good.

Bitch and Moan and You Shall Receive

Apparently making grand statements about moving away from this shitty city makes friends fall in your lap. Ha, I dig it.

My one friend in this town who's way too busy with work for her own good has many other friends. One of these other friends called me to see if I was going to the Fluff Girl Burlesque show at the Lamp Lighter. I was, so we met up. Now she and this other dude are totally tolerable and open enough for me to say that they're my kind of people. It probably helps that she's also from a small town in Manitoba. About a year ago I came to the conclusion that people from Manitoba are a special kind of people. Especially people from not Winnipeg. I like Peggers, they do have their own special weirdness but it's less than that of a small town Manitoban.

Manitoba churns out some quality folks.

A Good Cause

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Read the letter and support however you can.

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Personal_Appeal

The light in the dark

Sometimes when I can't sleep I look into the black and see the substance of darkness. It's like the air is made up of sparkly gel with little light flashes of colour trapped in the darkness. I always wonder if everybody sees this or if it's just me. We used to call this acid air but when on acid it had much more to it than colour. My favourite was when it looked like tiny little muppets everywhere with an emphasis on Kermit, Miss Piggy and Animal.

One of the things I always loved about growing up in a small town was the ability to achieve (our idea of) perfect darkness. On a moonless night with little light pollution it was easy to find darkness in which to play. Sometimes we'd play with candles and fire. I took one of those restaurant candles in blue glass and attached a chain to it to swing and whirl around. It had a great medieval feel to it when no other light sources were in the room. We'd play with black lights and colour our yo-yo strings with yellow highlighter. That's how I learned to yo-yo.

We'd play with all things glow in the dark. My friend Adam had an empty bedroom in his house with mirrored closet doors. We'd all lay on the floor while one person would stand in the middle with glow sticks on strings and whip them around the room. Sometimes we'd even think enough to have that person wear glow in the dark nail polish. Glow stick fights with couch barricades were also quite fun. I remember a particular fight where a dead glow stick was in play. Ow.

But we'd also play in total darkness. I remember being in a dark laundry room with my friend, Gord, my boyfriend, Austin and friend, Tina. We were using the tiniest amount of starlight on a dark night coming through the small basement window to watch each other's faces change around our eyes. We really couldn't see our actual faces, just a glimpse of eyes but the imagined faces were spectacular. A mix of all things beautiful and horrific. Monsters and aliens that had Gord diving behind the furnace to proclaim he was quite comfortable there. Until he realized he was laying on a mattress of pink insulation.

After that game subsided and we were waxing philosophical we kept hearing Gord crunching beside us. After a while he asked who had brought the salt & vinegar chips because they were soooo good. No one did. There were no salt & vinegar chips. We flicked on the light to find Gord had devoured a bag of spitz with shells. He had a lovely Ace Ventura grin.

But my ultimate favourite light in the dark would be the Northern Lights. I used to lay on my front lawn and look up and daydream. I've never been farther North then my hometown so I've never seen them as awesome anywhere else and they are fucken amazing in my hometown. I miss them more than I miss snow. I miss snow a lot.

I love the darkness and I love the light that you can find in the dark.

Argh! I can't sleep!

Now that the excess water has drained from my head, I can't get the rush of thoughts to clear out long enough to catch some sleep. It was fine the other night when my thoughts revolved around my comic storyline. I managed to etch out some rather awesome plot twists to deceive and astound readers and an ending that makes me smile with sheer satisfaction. But tonight it's not so much with the literary thought process. It's more along the lines of my life and how to be satisfied with my surroundings.

It's no mystery that my move to Vancouver has proved unsatisfactory. I've been here a year and four months and I've yet to find reason to like this city. Sure, it's got great proximity to other places that are great. But I don't have a car or the money that's necessary to get to these awesome places. Add on the rain and I'm finding few reasons to venture outside of my neighbourhood. Downtown Vancouver seems to be full of trend obsessed clones talking on cell phones with their ugly Gucci bags on their arm. Granville Street's full of hooligans and hipsters. It's as though every drunken idiot with something to holler is out on Granville after dark. It's quite a phenomenon. Not only is everybody drunk, they're also obnoxious. I guess that's free entertainment.

People talk about Main and Broadway like it's the shit but besides two bookstores and the Foundation restaurant...it looks like an industrial zone. West 4th and Kits is ok for a stroll but I've been there, seen it, don't need to go back unless I'm going to the Comic Shop or the Naam. It's also a little too shi shi poo poo for my tastes. Then you have the Downtown Eastside. It's sadness compressed into one little area. I ride the bus through there all the time and it never fails to affect me. It reminds me of hopelessness and what's wrong with our world. I can't avoid it and it can't be ignored. I imagine what the Olympics will bring for those people. More heartache would be my guess.

There are a few pockets of the city I can enjoy. Chinatown is always good for an afternoon. Gastown has some good live music happening and tolerable crowds in attendance. Summer will bring Stanley Park and a few other busable outdoor activities. Commercial Drive is clearly the best area of the city. It has a great blend of awesome little shops and bookstores, cafes and coffee houses, clubs and patios, parks and people. It's where I spend my time. Everywhere else just feel like places to shop, the Drive is more a place to 'be'.

I know my perspective is tainted from my lack of a social circle. I'm sure I would enjoy the city more if I had the money and the friends to enjoy it with. And I suppose I'm working on that but I'm not so sure I'm going to find the friends I'm looking for here. For me friends feel like home. When I feel at home with friends I'm the most confident me I can be. When I'm at home with friends I'm amazing and they amaze me right back. We fall in love with each other and become family. So I guess what I'm saying is that home is where your friends are, so I should go there.

Vancouver is not my home. I wanted to move here for 5 years and I finally did. I'm not done here yet but I don't think I'll be sticking around much longer. I wasted all the nice days last summer working long hours at a shitty film job so I'd like to stick around and enjoy a proper summer in Vancouver. Who knows, maybe everything will be different by then and I'll be loving it here. Toronto definitely wasn't my favourite place to be when I first moved there and I ended up loving it. If not, I'm going back to Manitoba to be with the ones who know me best, to the people who give me strength.

My Mom keeps telling me I'm a small town girl who keeps moving to the big city. I suppose she's right in some sense. It's not the size of the places that matter, it's the lack of community. I rather enjoyed being invisible for a while but it starts to wear on a person. You become more singular, more self centered, less thoughtful. I manage to get lost in my thoughts when I move about the city because nobody's paying any attention to me so I don't have to pay any attention to them. I've become a solitary person who's not so shiny anymore.

I won't ever move back to my hometown but Winnipeg is home enough. I have many friends there and a brother with a baby on the way. Enough of my hometown is there to not be a stranger in the street 24/7. And I have high hopes for my creativity. All of my friends are artists or musicians. I get a creative buzz whenever I visit. So many of them are in line with my ideals, beliefs and lifestyle. The only thing stopping me from living there before was the slow film climate and I'm not doing that anymore. And since I didn't quit the industry because I needed to go home, I feel relief that it's finally ok to go home.

10 years gone and I finally am truly homesick.

Iron Spidey

Spiderman has a new costume.

He's been playing with Tony Stark.

I love Friday the 13th.
It's always a good day.

I've probably spoken too soon.

Sense This

I want to be working on a series of diary entries for my comic characters as a way to flesh out their back stories but I can't stop thinking about the water in my head. My ears have filled up with fluid and my left ear is infected. All sounds are muted and I can hear my own heartbeat in my inner ear. I also can hear the ocean.

My thoughts are constantly distracted to how hard it would be to be deaf. I would no longer hear the sweet sounds of Tori and I could no longer make those sounds myself. At least I could hug a speaker and feel the awesome vibrations of Tool. I'd have a hard time communicating with people outside of the written word. I then stray to how it just might be worse to be blind. I could no longer look at the sometimes gorgeous, sometimes gruesome art of comics. I could no longer write without dictating to someone. I'd have to learn Braille to read and have movies described to me. Both would be difficult to deal with but I already know my alphabet in ASL. And I know how to say fast dirty lesbian, so I'm off to a good start.

It is possible that I will struggle with my sense of smell. My Dad has a deviated septum resulting in several surgeries and a complete loss of smell for 5 years. He did regain the ability to smell strong smells after one of his co-workers moved on to another job. She bathed daily in strong perfume. At least he was lucky to not have to smell that but he could hardly taste food while he worked with her.

If I break my nose I will end up with similar problems. My septum is already curved enough that I often have sinus headaches. I already have a weakened sense of smell but I'm hoping that it's just the after effects of being a smoker and hanging around in constant smoke. I haven't smoked in almost two years and new laws allow us to sit in a bar without our eyes burning. My friend, Tammy said she didn't get her full senses of taste and smell back until three years after quitting smoking. So there's still hope for me. I just have to be sure to not piss anyone off enough to get popped in the nose.

Losing my sense of smell would sadden me. Not only would the enjoyment of food be minimized but smell is our strongest link to memory. The faintest smell can trigger a rush of memories long forgotten. Go and smell some Play-doh, a Cabbage Patch Kid or the Purple Pie Man. Tribe perfume reminds me of a friend from grade 8, CK One reminds me of high school. I love the smell of books and vinegar. I can even inhale the sweet smell of chocolate to curb the craving to devour it in mounds.

My grade 11 science teacher once told us a story about the senses and LSD. He told the story as if he were recounting a friend's experience but it was obviously his trip. The lesson was about synapses in the brain and he got to talking about LSD's tendency to re-route synapses to create hallucinations. He had been wondering around town, tripping out when he was sprayed by a skunk. He was unaware that he had even been sprayed but he was aware of the red cloud that surrounded him and followed him everywhere. It wasn't until he arrived at a party and was told that he'd been sprayed before he realized the source of the mysterious cloud.

I later went to that class on LSD. We had a test that day. My teacher obviously knew what I was up to since he moved me to the front of the class to write my test in front of the skeleton that lurks in all high school science labs. The white brick wall breathed rapidly behind the skeleton as he smiled and twitched to my horror/amusement. At one point my teacher leaned right over and looked up into my face with a giant smile to ask me how I was doing. Yah, he knew but I don't think he minded. I got 19% on that test. I would've gotten about the same sober since he was a terrible teacher. (The next year I had awesome science teachers and excelled in Chem and Bio.) I didn't make it to any of my other classes that day and I never went to school on acid again (well I did once more but I took it my class after lunch so it didn't kick in until my spare - but that's a whole other story).

For an amusing and somewhat gross take on the sense of smell, watch Elijah Wood's class presentation in The Ice Storm. Charles.

Me & Neil will be hanging out with the Dream King

Oooh, there was one really awesome thing that happened in 2005. I met my hero, Neil Gaiman, twice in one day. I asked him about Tori Amos and for the proper pronunciation of the Angel, Aziraphale from Good Omens. He read from Anansi Boys and told stories of working on Mirrormask at Jim Hensen's old home. He signed 4 of my books as well. At the end of the evening, after he re-filled his fountain pen and signed my last book (Marvel 1602), I wished him a good evening. He stopped what he was doing as though he were taken aback and gave me a very genuine smile, thanked me and wished me the same. It was as though no one else who had lined up had considered his enjoyment.

Re-existing

2005 ending was just an all around good event. The year had a very large suck factor with my attitude being a major player in the suckage. I managed to get through the holidays by being very bland and dull and barely noticing much around me. I then drank a pitcher of sangria and watched Carnivale until 2005 went away. Yay! It's over.

2006 started with some awesomeness on the first day. I moseyed on down to my favourite coffee shop to bury my head in a book and surround myself with other humans. It's not as satisfying as real human interaction but it's a good substitute when you're like me and have forgotten how to socialize. The place was filling up and I had a sweet spot for comfortable reading. One of the regulars arrived for his daily mocha and paper reading. We'd had one or two minute long conversations before and I was at his regular table so he asked to join me. After that neither of us cracked a book or paper. We talked for 5 hours about religion, The Odyssey, The Iliad and comics. Shit that I like to talk about. So all is cool. The first day of 2006 I made a friend. We've had coffee once more since then and I have to go see him perform sometime soon. He's a warrior poet and participates in slam poetry nights all over the city.

My old film school friend, who lives in the city, seems to be on a bit of a break from her busy business and pleasure travel schedule. So I am able to have some friend time with her too. I didn't see too much of her in 2005. When she wasn't traveling, I was a negative downer so I didn't hang out with her too much because I couldn't stand the sound of myself complaining. But now I'm over that. Whew.

I also finally got a job. It's only part time and it's retail but it is a bookstore. At least I have a love for the product I'll be selling. Hopefully I'll make a friend or two through work. I'm so in need of rejoining society. It's hard to write characters when you don't interact with real life characters. I'll also be glad to re-introduce myself to the parts of my personality that only come out in social situations. Ah, to be hilarious once again. Let's hope I didn't lose it.

2006 will be my year.
2005 - go fuck yourself.