bread and roses. i mean, essays.

So.

I'm going back to school this week, which will be weird, to say the least. I've been trying to do some work to lighten the feeling of total anxiety that will doubtless strike (haha) once I return to that Suburban Campus O'Doom. This morning I finished the longest essay that'll be due within a few weeks, only to find when I checked my email that it's due almost three weeks from now. In all reality, this is a good thing, because I'll be able to refine it and whatnot.

Later today: the starting of a short but kind of pain-in-the-ass paper on gender and power in The Bacchae and Antigone.

In other news, I've been crazy broke (croke, if you will) and thus trying to come up with Creative Kitchen Solutions (registered trademark). Last night I made some pretty good whole wheat soda bread, and currently in the oven is some raisin soda bread using the less-hardcore all-purpose flour. In case anyone doesn't know, soda bread is not filled with cream soda...it's a really dense Irish bread that doesn't use any rising agents (like yeast). So it's delicious and requires little-to-no patience! Oh, and usually it can be made with 5 or less ingredients, which is ideal.

I've also been eating a lot of rice and tempeh. Seriously looking forward to having the dough for some fresh vegetables and possibly some juice or something.

So, uh...this is likely not interesting to anyone else. And is poorly written, due to the fact that I've squeezed out an essay recently. My apologies.

Tonight I'm going to an Unsuperbowl Party. Not sure what exactly said party will entail. Meanwhile, my Close Personal Associate is going to be in small-town Southern Ontario watching two dudes beat the crap out of each other on TV. I'm thinking my time will be better spent.

little red wagon, little red bike.

I feel like if my heart was playing a board game, it would be RISK, and I'd be losing really, really badly, because all my little pieces would be spread out on different, unconnected areas of land.

Snerk snerk.

My school is going to be back in session soon. I'm prepping myself for numerous anxiety attacks.

Lately I've been drinking a lot of genmaicha tea and getting up like six times a night to pee, waking up everyone in the process. And eating vegetables. Too many. If I have to eat cauliflower or broccoli again in the next 48 hours, I'm going to hurl.

A couple nights ago, as I was falling asleep on a cramped single bed, I remembered sitting outside The Outhouse (not an actual outhouse, but a big white house on Clarence that several of my friends have lived in at various stages of my life) after a living room show with Rachel and having one the most honest conversations we had ever had. Then her and a boy who she had dated walked me home, and I remember feeling like her and I had a weirdly powerful secret.

We ended up having a secret, but it wasn't weird or powerful.

Secrets and suspension and uncertainty are usually things with a lot of potential, but that potential doesn't always arrive. That's why they're so fun and scary in the first place.

I'll post something more concrete someday.

dishes and last week's papers

V and I were talking on the phone. She was telling me about how so many of our highschool friends are in or applying for med school. How some of them aren't and are horrified with themselves.

We were in a group for "accelerated learners", which is to say, there were 40 or so of us (in a graduating class of about 200 kids) who had all our classes together and were continually told what stereotypes we fitted and given continual tips on how to stick with them. I'm being unfair. There were some great teachers. Maybe the wretchedness of highschool just casts such a program in a grisly pall.

Anyway. "Everyone's just at a crossroads, I guess," V said.

"I'm not. I'm not even at the crossroads yet."
"Me neither."

In all honesty, I don't even know where to go right now. I've been out of school since November 6th because of this bloody strike and I honestly can't imagine going back. The very thought makes me feel queasy. Working three days a week certainly isn't enough, and I'm becoming increasingly unmotivated with my own pursuits.

I need to kick my own ass.

Then again: is it so bad to be the girl who wears braids and reads books but maybe doesn't get all the metaphors and references, who works at a clinic for a decent wage (knock freaking wood) and makes her friends big vegan meals, the girl whose schedule is so flexible that when you call and say "My back hurts", she actually says "I'll be over to fix it in a moment"? I mean, I'm happy. I have more money in my CPP than anyone else I know who's my age. I feel kind of like a grown-up Pippi Longstocking.

In other news, I got a tiny parcel from some eBayer from Maryland today. Three sweet as hell E.T. necklaces that cost under $5 (shipping included). Currently sporting one of E.T. and Elliott where E.T. kind of looks like a disgusting giant penis (watch as my blog counter goes up by 2000 for use of the phrase "giant penis").

Awesomely, The Weakerthans are touring with the Constantines for the first time in four years. It's twenty-five bones, which is approximately $15 more than I've ever paid to see them, but for their sweet highschool meaningfulness, it is worth it to me. I will likely be attending with my favourite set of brothers.

If anything, I just want to hear them bring Reunion Tour alive. It's a good little album, but just didn't quite get me like, say, Left and Leaving. I know, I know. Blah blah they're poets not musicians. Whatever. They are so good at making beautiful things.

What would you say is the most thrilling beautiful process in the whole world?

I would say something involving skin, because skin is such a beautiful, thrilling organ. When I was a young teenager and had never even kissed someone or held someone's hand, I would often daydream of how I would just like to touch someone's face. To feel how someone else's anatomy fits together, I think, or maybe just because I was a painfully lonely kid who felt utterly starved for contact.


But anyway.


I'm reading Kurt Vonnegut's Galapagos at the moment and it, too, is thrilling and beautiful. Feeling a little bit worried about my "big brain". Something in his writing has this ability to push (gently push) at a highly sensitive point in your chest, even with the silliest things.

My bedroom is so cold. I haven't slept here much at all this week and I'm re-acclimatizing. No warm extra body for me tonight! But I'm planning on an early sleep before work tomorrow.

Incidentally, it has struck me how very very lucky I am to work where I do with the people who also do. I know that someday, when I leave that tiny chart room, I will dearly, dearly miss it.

you can scoop out my brain

I'm going to go home soon. Home to Toronto, I mean.

This trip to the homeland has been horrifically, tamely painful. I guess what I mean is that I didn't cry, but I did shake a tonne, sitting alone at a table in the Roastery with my back to the biggest heartbreak of my life. I had a short conversation of polite, bitten-off sentences punctuated by a terse goodbye.

Oh and then I wrote a fucking ridiculous pseudo-cryptic paragraph about (above).

I was going to say "I don't just think about the gradients and shades and mechanics of feelings", but that actually is all I do. And I'm not even good at it!

My beautiful friends opened their arms and let me run into them. Thanks guys. Seeing these people really scared me, because I love them so much and I kind of forgot that I did until I laid eyes on them. Until we were halfway through talking about how much the students' union sucked and even though it was a totally mundane conversation I wanted to burst into tears and hug them. Until I got home, nose frostbitten and jeans frozen from cold and understood that I had just seen them for the last time in months (maybe longer).

Maybe best of all, I made a new friend. A beautiful girl who makes beautiful things and is vulnerable in the same way I am. A girl who, last night, snuck a camera into my face, the flash blinding me in an unsuspecting expression, then threw her head back and laughed maniacally. She is six years older than me and that partially makes me sad, because it is going to take me six years, probably, to get wise(r).

I will be back in four days and I will need familiar faces and potlucks and lots of hand-holding to make me feel sane and whole, okay?

but there's no way we can relive our youthful past

Maybe I should save this for the zine, but there's something that's been hounding me for awhile, and I want to write about it now.

My sister said, "I think there's a certain degree of permanency we expect from love, whether we're conscious of it or not."

I thought about an unerasable memory: kissing on a creaky futon and seeing the boy's eyes trace my unclothed skin. "Please," I whispered, "Don't," turning his chin up with a hand. He laughed, not a mean laugh, a laugh that was bewildered and sweet and said my name in the gentlest voice I have ever heard say my name.

I thought about this, and then thought: We're Not Friends. Not in a mad way, a vengeful way...not in any way except a profound and sad puzzlement. Something that at once seemed so big is now so gone.

what is the light

I feel more and more tired every day, which likely has something to do with goodbye parties and wine and mimosas and sleepovers. I just have to get through this weekend moderately alive. Come on team come on.
Vanessa and I saw Wilco and Neil Young, and it was awesome. Wilco didn't rock nearly as much as I expected them to, but they did play "Company in my Back" and "I'm the Man Who Loves You", which was really good enough. Neil rocked out, but not in an embarrassing Mick Jagger (i.e. wizened strutting peacock) kind of way. Just really pure, as cheesy and idealistic as that sounds.
I got a cellphone. Or rather, Vanessa is moving, so I'm taking over hers for nine months. It takes me half an hour to send a text message. My ringtone is the Star Wars themesong. Badass.
Lately I've been listening to the Flaming Lips' The Soft Bulletin and it's perfect for the weather/time/etc.
I am pretty happy and I don't have trouble sleeping much anymore.