Not dead.

It's been a while.

***

From time-to-time I am overcome with the memory of an artist who lived in a flat on Brock Street in Peterborough circa 1995. At the time he painted abstract nudes on unstretched canvases with black and white oil house paint. I think his name was Steven or Stephen. He graduated from OCA in the 1980s. He was beautiful and troubled. 

He is one of the few people I regret not sleeping with. 

I wonder what happened to him. I wonder if he lived, or if he’s online. 

***

And the book says, "We may be through with the past, but the past ain't through with us."

 I've been writing for a couple of days. Working on using my voice. Working on the present, active voice.

Working to be better.

HAPPY FREE AGENCY DAY, EVERYBODY!

HAPPY FREE AGENCY DAY, EVERYBODY!

Now, a moment of silence for the recently traded and those signed by Florida, Calgary, Buffalo, and Edmonton.

There is no hockey until October. I haz sad.

***

This 30+C heat and humidity is REALLY starting to piss me off. Spousal Unit took some time last evening to install the AC unit in the hole in the wall provided for such things. That has cooled down the living room, my office and the kitchen, but the bedroom and bathroom are still saunas.

Spousal Unit and I also have an ongoing debate on what temp our (US made) AC unit should be set to.

I say between 72-74F. He says between 65-70F.

He is wrong.

***

My birthday is in 12 days. I don't think I have enough booze in the house to forget that.

Though this milestone birthday year is going SO MUCH better than the last milestone birthday year.

***

Next two weeks are going to be full of introspection, writing, thinking, thinking about writing, writing about thinking, and trying to figure out where all of this is going. Deciding on where I want to be in a year. In 1 to 2 years. In 5 years. When and how I want to die.

You know, birthday-related panic and angst. Big whup.

Wish me luck.

Again, again, again!

Today I fucked around playing clicky games on Facebook until the reminder(s) I set up on my phone could be ignored no longer.

I want to start the habit of writing daily, one that I have stopped and started twice over the past year. It got trashed when we traveled for two weeks last August, and then again when we were in panic mode to get the fuck out of Vancouver in 6 weeks.

I think that I have found a bit of my groove here in Windsor, and I'm trying to prevent that groove from becoming a rut.

So I'm using 750words.com to track my daily writing. Some days I know I am going to type "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy." five hundred and eleventy times. Some days I'm going to try to race myself to the 750 words and hope my typing OCD doesn't stop me.

I'm also using a book called "A Year of Writing Dangerously" that I picked up for some inspiration. I read Day 1 today, and on Sunday (and every Sunday for the next 52 weeks) I will use a prompt from the 52 prompts conveniently located in the back of the book.

This year I will finish my atheist memoir.
This year I will finish my organizing/productivity book, which is a delightful irony. I am having difficulty organizing and finishing a book on organizing and productivity. I could laugh.

I'm also using two writing tricks from Ernest Hemingway.

Stop writing while I still have an idea and flow.
Write drunk. Edit sober.

(I'm actually kidding about the last one.)

(But only a little.)

(I'll probably try it once.)

(I'll try it more than once.)

(A week.)

I also need to find a cheap motel room out by a highway that I can rent for a week and try to write a book in a week. I don't deal well with cabins in the woods, as bugs, dirt, and wildlife ain't my bag.

A cheap motel room, some handheld food (fruit, cheese, bread, protein shakes, Italian meats), a bottle of Wild Turkey, a fridge that makes ice, a vintage hi-ball glass, my teapot and my two favourite Twinings blends, three pairs of pajamas, and my laptop. Bang out 7,000 to 10,000 words a day. Use StayFocusd to keep me from fucking around playing clicky games on Facebook instead of writing.

That would be a good week.

I hope I can afford it sooner rather than later.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Have you ever had one of those lives where every choice you made is wrong, or maybe the choices you made were the least bad of all the options?

At this point, as I enter my 40th year, I am now certain that the only good and pro-active decision I have ever made was marrying my spousal unit. Every other life choice before and since has just been an exercise in failure.

***

I hate it here. I hate it more and more each and every moment that passes.

That said, I am glad I am not trying to make it in Vancouver this broke. And this broken.

Windsor seems like the kind of place where dreams come to die.

***

This whole stupid life of mine makes me want to move the hell away from here.

***

My latest obsession is moving to Detroit. It's got so much more going on than Windsor, real estate is CRAZY cheap, and there are some tech incubators, creatives, and locals who are trying to find a new place for the city in the world.

That speaks to me. For some insane reason, there seems to be more hope for Detroit being awesome than there is is any chance of Windsor being awesome.

***

I want to live in a big city again. In many ways I crave the anonymity that having half a million neighbours can bring.

***

I also hate driving, but doing it 25 days out of 40 has made it less panic inducing.

***

I just want a life worth living. One that doesn't have thrice monthly panic attacks over money and resources.

***

Too much to ask?

Annual Life Crisis

Next year, I will start calling this my Annual Midlife Crisis.

So I had a birthday. I'm 39. I'm in reasonably good health for a fat woman with MS.

I am in a financial panic, again, because my job just isn't coming close to paying the bills and it's going to be MONTHS before all that shit works itself out. Unless... I get my shit together, figure out how to get a small business loan (or Kickstarter my dream job and hope it works out), and just try to hustle more work in ways that I can't as just a person.

I've got a great deal of spare time (because I'm not working enough) and today was the first day where I actually sat and wrote. I worked on my business plan, I wrote a blog post for my real life website, I wrote a little bit about why I don't write (yeah, really), and I wrote about my day.

I think I can make more time to write.

***

The big mystery I am trying to solve in my 40th year:

WHY is it that everything I love to do, no one will pay me to do?

***

I'm not very good at making friends here. Or rather, the people I have been meeting aren't really the kind of people I want to be friends with.

If I have coffee with one more group of women who are carrying Coach bags, wearing D&G rhinestone watches, and Lucky Brand jeans, I will stab myself in the eye with a Starbucks stir stick.

***

I'd also like to meet one childfree woman who isn't out to "land a man before its too late".

***

I'd also like to meet women who know what a smartphone is. And know basic internet terms. Maybe uses the internet a little bit more than just Facebook.

***

I'm trying to start writing again to meet a goal I started about a year ago. I'm *really* behind on that goal, but I think I can make it up if I really put my "taking action" principles to it.

This blog may just become a report of what happened today, or what I'm thinking about but I am going to try to write 750 words a day that aren't for my website and aren't for my business plan. All of those 750 words might not end up on the blog, but a lot of them could.

***

I'll try to keep from boring you.

***

I had another year of waking up crying on the morning of my birthday. Full of fear and dread for the future, and sobbing because I'm now fairly certain that unless there is a polar shift in my life, I will amount to nothing.

***

SO. I. WRITE.

"Who needs action when you got words?"

My current obsessions include, but are not limited to:

Betty White
Finding the time to write
Finding subjects to write about
Cold remedies
Finding a job
Trying to make people like me

***

Will I reach a point in my life where there's nothing more to say, and only things to do?

***

Will I reach a point in my life when I realize that the horizon I am looking at today is land under my feet?

***

I'm never sure if where I am standing is where I planned to be. I knew back then that I wanted to be anywhere but here. But I'm pretty sure that where I am now isn't what I was hoping for.

***

The eastern horizon is a wall of tree covered volcanic rock. In my tired, weaker moments, I find it claustrophobic. I am unable to fly. That feels like the only way to get free of this place.

***

"But those were all just guesses, wouldn't help you if they could."

*pound*pound*pound*

Today has been a day of few words for me. Hardly spoke at all at work, spent 2.5 hours at a meeting where someone else spoke, then had a brief discussion of my evening out with Joe before he returned to his math-doing.

Now I sit down to fill a page of words and nothing comes.

I have this quote I read bouncing around in my skull:

"Real life is far more fucked up than you can imagine."

I agree. I want to have 750 words about  how that is true for me, or for others or for SOMETHING OTHER THAN THIS TEXT BOX full of words that don't matter and don't mean anything to me.

But I don't. I've got yet another blog post full of fucking angst about how I'm not writing. Or I'm not writing the way I would like to be.

I will continue to bang my head against the desk until it comes together.

Holding back

Every night I come to this flashing cursor and I have a tonne of stuff I want to say, but I try to follow the rules I have set for myself.

What goes in this blog has to be about my life, as it relates to my day-to-day, I say nothing that I wouldn't want published on the front page of the Globe and Mail (or New York Times), and it won't hurt anyone I love.

So here is the grey area.  There are things that I would like to say; about my beliefs, my values, my politics. It doesn't bother me much that my parents wouldn't be happy, but they either love me as me am or I don't talk to them. They get that. I think.

The problem is that what I want to say would upset my in-laws and severely alter their opinion of me. That really doesn't upset me much. But I know that it would upset my husband, because they are his parents and he wants them to like me.

So, I pour another glass of wine (#2) and suck it up.

***

This wine is very good.

***

I'm listening to my husband tell the story of his first day at the University of British Columbia.

It's going to be a very, very long two years.

Fail...

...Fail again. Fail better.

                 - Samuel Beckett

You keep showing up. That is huge. 

                - My friend Erin

I have never spent much time trying to be perfect. I have, however, spent innumerable hours just trying to be good at something. I don't need to be, and I'm pretty sure I don't want to be, the gold medal winner or the Oscar winner, or the Nobel Prize winner.

I just want to be good at something that matters to someone other than me.

I love the great projects and hate the daily maintenance. I love it when my to-do list is full of things I only have to do *just this one time* and start changing the due dates on the things that I do every day or are part of my weekly or monthly routines.

Routines are SUPER GOOD for my mental health, and when I get overwhelmed by what to do next my routine list is the place where I set order from my chaos.

But I rebel. I ignore it. I do something more fun.

I stay up all night 'net surfing for tiaras. I read entire websites on stain removal. I use the "Explore" function on Google+. I do anything to avoid the unpleasant or uninteresting.

EXCEPT when I am at work. I do the boring, unpleasant, routine stuff first just to get it out of the way. Also, there is WAY more boring, unpleasant, routine stuff to do than there is interesting, fun, new stuff to do.

Coming to accept that life is very rarely a barrel of monkeys has been especially hard to do since I quit drinking like an asshole 19 years ago. This is how I become a grown-up, I guess.

(Ooo... lights just flickered and there's thunder outside. My battery is charging, so I should bail.)

The Elements of Style

I blog because I don’t have to be good at writing to blog. I don’t get criticized for how I write. No one cares about my run on sentences or that I type how I talk: ‘net shorthand, jargon and colloquialisms included.

I blog because it always surprises me who is paying attention.

I blog because I like hearing “yeah... me too. ”

I’ve got this idea percolating. I know that people will be critical of it, so I don’t tell. So I’m going to spend the next year sketching it out and we’ll see what it becomes. 

Trying not to plan the result is hard. 

Trying not to decide which designer I will wear when I get my first interview on The Daily Show is harder.

(The answer is Chanel, but we aren't going to talk about that.) 

 Joe has convinced me to take a six week writing course starting at the end of September. I have no fucking clue what good will come of that, but it's something. It will make me feel like I am doing something to get closer to where I want to be; even though I'm not sure "where I want to be" is. 

So in the meantime I will pull out my battered copy of Strunk & White and remind myself that...

Rich, ornate prose is hard to digest, generally unwholesome, and sometimes nauseating...

and try to keep myself from puking.

The Johari Window was presented to me by one of the best women I know in the whole world. I gave it a good deal of thought, and chose the word “brave” for the last word to describe her.

She is brave.

She is brave enough to try things and then stop doing them if they aren’t a good choice for her regardless of the consequences. She’s learned to say no, to question her socialization, and to think critically about the world.

That is brave.

* * *

Writing is dangerous for me. I tend to think and rethink and type and delete the words before I get too far. It is as if these pixels that form words on my screen are permanent even though they haven’t been published. I can’t unthink them, but I can make their manifestation, however fleeting, disappear with several pushes of the backspace button. I often publish things I am later embarrassed I wrote. Even if I get better, I suspect I will always feel that way.

Writing sometimes feels like cowardice. My recent post about misogyny and gender feels like a cop-out to be writing about it and not be out there doing something and saying something to someone who might be able to change the world. I’m not that person. I don’t know anyone who might be able to change anything about the world. I just write about it, sending my organized pixels out into the world for all 26 of you who read.

Working on it.

I decided on the eve of my 38th birthday that I would not be the same person on the eve of my 39th birthday.

I've been trying for years now to change my life into something fabulous and awesome. Since the British Columbia Lottery Corporation has not yet seen fit to issue me the $50 million winning LottoMax ticket, I decided that this year I was just going to work with what I have got. And what I have got is not much.

After spending two weeks angsting over it, I finally figured out what I like to do. I'll probably never become rich doing any of it, but I might be able to do it just because I love doing it. I'll worry about making an income later.

Next week I am going to attend an information session on becoming a professional organizer. At this time I am not really interested in starting my own company, but in using the skills that I have with the skills that I will learn to pad my Executive Assistant resume. I am spending the summer working for my ex-boss it seems, and that place is the craziest mess of paper you have ever seen in your life. So I'll get some real-world-as-close-to-hoarding-as-I-am-willing-to-get experience.

Next week I am also going to talk to an educational counsellor at the community college around the corner from my house to see about some English writing classes to fix some of my grammar issues and other brutalizations of the English language I am sometimes wont to commit.

I am also taking part of my upcoming long weekend to write new product descriptions for my Etsy shop (though I am considering changing the shop name and there's nothing for sale at this time because I want to change everything) and I can show off the mad foto skilz of Donna. She did such an amazing job taking new photos of my completed works! I can't wait for you to see them.

In a nutshell, I'm going to try to figure out how to use what I like doing to help me not hate a whole bunch of things about my life. Like my job. Or lack thereof, as the case may be.

No idea if it will work, but I know that 50 weeks from now I will be glad I started two weeks ago. This is my jumping off point. The future is uncertain, I don't know if I'll be any good at any of it, but at least I know I am working on it.

The monsters are crazy.

I have assembled on my queen-sized bed the collection of every DIY, self-help, How-To and planning book I currently own.

This is a collection of 27 books. This does not include the countless books I borrowed from the library or the 10 or 15 books I put in a donation bin about a year ago. This also doesn't include the books that I have borrowed from friends or managed to leave somewhere on public transit. Nor does it include the 2 or 3 e-books I have stored on my hard drive, or my previous membership with Flylady.net and an endless browsing history of sites like eHow.com and About.com. These books are just the ones that I love and use as reference, the ones that I bought and haven't had a chance to read, and a couple that changed my life.


At the book store on my lunch hour, I considered what was in this pile of good intentions and "I had what alcoholics refer to as 'a moment of clarity'", which is kind of ironic since I did a few years in 12-Step recovery in my second attempt (at the age of 19) to fix my failing life. But in this moment today I realized that without order, I am batshitnuts. Love a numbered list, a colour-coded to-do list, a daily agenda of times, places and people, and a plan of attack that includes my personal affirmations:

1. If it will take two minutes or less, do it now.
2. If you take it out, put it back.
3. If not now, when?

(I have more personal affirmations, but those are the ones that are in the back of my head throughout the day.)

I go through what I don't know what else to call but a crisis of faith twice a year. Once in late December, as I realize that yet another calendar year has passed and I am nowhere closer to a fabulous life and again around my birthday, when I realize that yet another year of my life has passed and I am nowhere closer to the awesome life I want. I keep trying to ignore the fact that I don't exactly know what "fabulous" and "awesome" look like as a reality in my life other than to say that I will know it when I get it.


Getting diagnosed with MS has made these periods of crisis heavy. I feel that I must finally get it right this year because I might not be able to walk next year. I might go blind next year. I might lose my ability to think and reason next year. I might be any number of bullshit things that are possibly when you have this life sentence hanging over you.

I feel desperate to get it right. To find the order and the help in all these books and the internet and what I know to be true to make something worth living out of this life of mine.

The one thing I always return to

I have mentioned a couple of times before that I have been going through my old journals; re-reading them before running them five pages at a time through the household shredder.

(As a side note, I really hate the person I was in 1997. If I knew you back then, I am so sorry. Really, I was spaz-tastic.)

(As a secondary side note, if you knew me in 1997 and your name is Virgil, I really am sorry... but upon further reading, you might have had it coming. Just sayin'.)

But I digress.

What comes out loud and clear in my journals of the late 1990s is one thing:

I found solace in barfing the contents of my brain onto the pages of an 8.5"x11" spiral-bound notebook. I found so much solace in this I would easily fill 5 to 10 pages a day of worries, obsessions, ideas, plans, hopes and fears. On and on, for pages and pages, trying desperately to figure out what was wrong with me, why the gods weren't helping me (I fancied myself a pagan in those days) and why, oh why, was I not writing my book or finishing my screenplay when I was practising writing every single day by belching out these  worries, obsessions, ideas, plans, hopes and fears. After I did that, the words of my master work should just come pouring from my soul into my fingers and onto the page via keyboard or pen.

That's what the purveyors and evangelists of the spiritual practice of being an artist had told me would happen. It would all just come out as I got out of god's way.

That never happened. My screenplay still sits as a first draft treatment, complete with sound track and Oscar acceptance speech, in a manilla 10"x13" envelope in my box of journals, really bad poetry, and first chapters of no less than three books that I can remember. There may be more.


In the past few days I have been introduced to the idea of never writing without a purpose. If the words aren't coming for my memoir project, then I switch to writing a blog post. If neither of those are working out, I'll grab a Red Writing Hood prompt from Write on Edge or I will write about the topic of the day from the book A Year of Writing Dangerously or write what I remember about an event that happened on this day in history.

And I'll save what I write for some future time when it is useful as a blog post or it fits in with the memoir work I am doing. (And I am doing it, 30 minutes to an hour a day, and I will get that mutherfucking thing DONE.)


My worldview has changed A LOT in 15 years. I no longer believe that writing is a spiritual path to god, but I am starting to believe that it might be a calling. A vocation, even.

I'm not convinced it is my calling, but it is definitely someone's. "Finding my passion" seems like such a crock of self-delusional shit for the privileged white person that I dare not involve myself in discussions about it.

But I do think it's (not ha-ha) funny that I always end up back here at the keyboard or at the blank page with pen in hand, trying to write something that is less shitty than the last thing I wrote.

(Booyah, monsters. 498 to go.)

There are monsters outside.

I turned 38 years old yesterday. For more than 10 years I have had this annual sulk about how my life didn't turn out like I planned; which is kind of rich coming from someone who never had a plan for her life in the first place.

Since my mid-20s I have had this obsession with trying to keep my personal monsters at bay with massive levels of organization. I blame a couple of years of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for starting it. I was not born organized, but I have learned it over the past 10-12 years. My sanity seems to hinge on it at times.

It started with endless written lists, then Flylady, and a WhoMi agenda, then GTD and Lifehacker (which is the church of my religion) and webapps like Remember the Milk and Toodledo. I got a Samsung S Glide and with my new Android phone, my obsession with Google Calendar and other awesome Google products I am very close to organizing my personal life paper-free.

My new favourite to-do list is Astrid.com which works on the web and syncs with the phone app. I use my Google account to login, so there's not another web account to remember. I heart it to the power of eleventy1. I use Calendar for appointments and events and WorkFlowy for lists of things I want to remember but can't necessary set into action at the time I remember them. I also have a notepad and pen with me at all times, and set the items I write down as either a to-do in Astrid, and appointment in Calendar or a list item in WorkFlowy at the end of each day.

But all of this organization obsession masks my real fear of being out of control (again). I know exactly what to do, and often schedule what time to do it just so I know when to do it.

What the monsters do is fuck with my motivation. What the monsters do is tell me that it doesn't matter what I do, if I am not exceptional at it - it's worthless. What the monsters do is help me check "complete" when it's not really done. They convince me to hit the snooze bar or reschedule to a more "convenient" time.

They enable me to believe that it's just not worth the time or effort because I am not good at anything and trying won't change that.

I woke up this morning without a feeling of dread for the first time in a month or so. I checked in with Lifehacker (as Saturday is my holy day, it seems) and clicked around and found a link to a post that linked to a site that led me to remember two things and decide another:

1. In a year I will wish I started today.
2. I can refocus and start again.
3. I decided to join DayZero.

I am going to try 101 Things in 1001 Days again. I only have 15 things on my list, but coming up with 101 things in about three hours seems a little... over-eager. But I have scheduled the time to do the things on my list and remind myself of my list. I'm making my list public because I have to be unafraid of failing and failing in public.

The monsters are still here. I can hear them laughing as I write this, because they think that I am not good enough to write, to create, and to get what I want and where I want to go.

I've already proved the monsters wrong. Only 499 blog posts to go.

"Letters make words, and sentences make paragraphs"

I surround myself at all time with something to write on. I have note pads and notebooks and pens and pencils all around. I spend some time once a month making sure that every pen I have works and every pencil is sharp.

I suppose this is just hope that eventually the Muses will show up and say “Write this down, it’s brilliant!”.

But that day hasn’t happened. The story, whatever that story is, hasn’t come out of my brain or my fingers or where ever in hell stories are kept before they are put on the page. I find not writing exhausting, but I find what I have written exhausting when I read it later. Sometimes I am just so embarrassed by what is there on the page.

Today I scratched some words out in a notebook I keep in my bedside table. I doubt they will ever see the light of day. They might, but it isn’t likely. Even these words began with a thought that just popped into my head and as soon as the first three sentences were down I just started making shit up. It’s only the first three sentences that meant anything to me, the rest of this is just making shit up to fill in the space so I feel like I wrote more than three sentences today.

I need to write everyday, or I think I should write everyday, but I really can't find the reason to get up in the morning. I can't always show up to eat food every day, even when I am physically starving. I can't always show up to get dressed every day. If I have a reason to leave the house, I can totally get it together. But if I don't I don't show up for anything... not even the blank page.

I Got Nuthin'

In my efforts (?) to have some sort of routine that keeps me off the sofa and requires me to get dressed every day I have set a writing schedule. Sometimes I post what's up on my blog and other days I file it away in my notes for my future memoir. (Though the term "memoir" seems a little grandiose given how it is presently structured.)

I went through my notes and there's nothing from them that I feel is interesting enough to share and my life as late has been in the dictionary definition of "uneventful".

Nothing funny has happened.
Nothing ironic.
Nothing exciting, other than a phone interview for a job I really want, has happened.

I have clean laundry and food for dinner.

What do you have?

I did not write this

This land like a mirror turns you inward
And you become a forest in a furtive lake;
The dark pines of your mind reach downward,
You dream in the green of your time,
Your memory is a row of sinking pines.

Explorer, you tell yourself this is not what you came for
Although it is good here, and green;
You had meant to move with a kind of largeness,
You had planned a heavy grace, an anguished dream.

But the dark pines of your mind dip deeper
And you are sinking, sinking, sleeper
In an elementary world;
There is something down there and you want it told.

— "Dark Pines Under Water," The Shadow Maker (1972)

Gwendolyn MacEwen


When you wrap up some of the most painful experiences of your life in memories of places you were both young & innocent and crazy & out of control and tie them together with a present desperation for change... you get reminded of Gwendolyn MacEwen poems a man you once loved read to you in the half light of a cold November Sunday morning.

When you feel your life ain't worth living...

(I don't think this reggae beat is a good choice for this mashup.)

you've got to stand up, take a look around you then a look way up to the sky.

(What the hell is he trying to do?)

And when your deepest thoughts are broken,

(I get it... you love this song.)

keep on dreaming boy, cause when you stop dreamin' it's time to die.

(Boy is right. He won't give up those metaphoric green tights.)

And as we all play parts of tomorrow, some ways we'll work and other ways we'll play.

It's 3 AM. We're both wasted. Would you just turn off the music?

But I know we all can't stay here forever,

YOU AREN'T GOING TO GET ANY MIXING DONE AT THIS HOUR!

so I want to write my words on the face of today.

(Good. It's done.)

and then they'll paint it

(Dammit. No it's not.)

And oh as I fade away,

(Apparently if you aren't going to fade away, you aren't going to let me.)

they'll all look at me and say,

GO THE FUCK TO BED!

Hey look at him and where he is these days.

(I wish I could change my mind about you.)

When life is hard, you have to change.

Dance with me until the sun rise.

When life is hard, you have to change.

You know this is the beginning of the end, right?

When life is hard, you have to change.

Right.



Edit: Lyrics in bold are from "Change" by Blind Melon

10 August 2011 - 12:45 pm

I must scratch something
down before it rains and my
lunch ends. I must scratch
something down before the
end comes. I must scratch
something down before I forget.
It looks as though I have
already forgotten. I have forgotten
how to wake up. I have forgotten
how to be joyous. Not sure I
ever really knew. Glimpses,
Just out of focus on the edge
of my peripheral vision. Terribly
sad sad sad sad. True. True. True.
This is what happens when I listen
to myself.