on scrapping and scraping

So the world knows, I'm applying for Graduate studies. Applications going out to Simon Fraser in Vancouver, University of Victoria, and CMU in Thailand. Cross your fingers for me.

Is anyone still here? Facebook and a common disdain for anything remotely emotive seem to have ruined good old livejournal.

Vancouver is home, more and more now. Tim and I have moved into a small castle. It has wood floors that are hard and real - our cat spends all day sliding around crashing into furniture. It's getting warm and I'm swinging back into drinking most evenings. Our best times are spent on the back patio, with drinks and friends and guitars. I miss home a little - I think about Peterborough a lot and how it's changed. I'd like to visit soon.

I need to make this list or else I'm going to lose my mind:

-contact Unitarians, like, right now
-finish collecting addresses for invitations
-make and send invitations
-group hotel/hostel bookings
-buy lighting stuff – white lights, paper lanterns, candles
-rentals – dishes, glasses, flatware
-buy large quantities of alcohol
-get a bartender (Tasha/Dave/Trevor)
-liquor licence from BC Liquor Store
-PA Rental
-track list for Ipod
-gifts for all guests
-gifts for wedding party
-flowers (farmer’s market)
-cake (Caper’s)
-menu for dinner reception
-catering for bigger reception
-decorations – centrepieces, tablecloths, whatever
-plan honeymoon that’s not a honeymoon, it’s just a trip that happens to be after our wedding.
-find Tim a suit
-get wedding bands
-remember to pay Julee (photographer) on day of wedding

That's a fairly long list of fairly important things. Did I mention I'm getting married? Ha! Well, if you didn't know, then there it is.

I've got so much to do!!

Completed:
+lay chaplain booked, deposit paid
+date chosen
+ceremony location tentatively chosen
+dress pattern selected
+bad-ass silk-screening DIY fabric maker found

Not Completed:
-book photographer
-find and book reception location
-complete reception menu and begin testing recipes
-choose and book rental equipment
-finalize guest list
-make and send invitations
-many, many other things

I'm moving to Vancouver. In three weeks. Probably the 6th, maybe the 5th.

I'm so excited, World. I can't wait to lay my head down every night on the other side of the country.

I hope you're excited for me too. I'm so in love with everything.

Bursting at the seams,

Mandy

I am indeed going to Ottawa this weekend. Going to try to make time for people, but I'm already very busy. Saturday is a party at Argyle with a combination of Peterborough and Ottawa friends. Sunday I'm going to see my old friends and their babies. On Monday I need to spend time at my dad's, packing some things and working. I'm going to spend an evening with Smames in there somewhere. If anything, I wouldn't mind a dinner date on one of those days - either Saturday before I take off to that party, or Sunday before I get picked up to go to my dad's.

I propose this: either Saturday or Sunday. So Good's on Somerset. A group of friendly faces. I'm looking at you - dj_cpi, atarigangster, vikki1979, akeru_deshou, dave173... and whoever else is in Ottawa right now. I've got news to share. You should come.

***

"Personally, I'd sooner have written Alice in Wonderland than the entire Encyclopedia Britannica."
-Stephen Leacock

I'm growing weary of my job.

Jeff Magnum Returns!

Axl Rose Arrested for Biting!

The steam of summer is finally, really here. I can hear its' quiet hissing in riverbeds and streetlamp lit patios. Bars and drunks and cool quiet air. Hard sidewalk and a shuffling walk. Two steps at a time and a slide down a metal railing. Rippling reflections on water. All the words on my page and a drugstore light. Arm touching arm in the dim glow. Taxi cab passing with shifting shadows. Skirts and toes and bare legs. Take it all in carefully and with warmth. Taste it on your palate. Keep the days long and the nights ringing with echoes.

Yesterday Andrew told me that in the town where he's from, the air is actually sweeter: "I didn't notice it until I returned. I had read that phrase in books and poetry before - the air is sweet - but I didn't know what it really meant until I went home. When you inhale, it really is sweet."

The fight in the next room has finally cooled off, and now there's talk of the Law outside my window, and the State taking our blood, and I wonder which altar my own blood will fall on.

I've taken to writing poetry in other languages:

khoy hak lao dai baw? khitwaa khoy dai.
dee diewnii jaknoy lai. jaknoy keun pay.
knoy baw yaak thaa.
taa khoy baw kheun, khoy ja tok.

I am as thankful for my home in Ottawa as a I am grateful to leave it. I'm not fully satisfied with being anywhere at all right now. Peterborough is full of lovely, important people, but it's also the smell of stale smoke and cat litter, and too many drunk guys, and a sort of lost feeling that I can't quite place. Ottawa has my father's quiet house that always smells like camping, and some of my most comforting old friends, but it's also long lonely days of never getting dressed and eating bad food, and my father pressuring me to stay and picking at every small thing and just not getting it. I've been thinking about Vancouver, which holds my brother and his wife, and the obvious advantages of the sunny, bohemian West coast. It's the lack of community that gets me though - I've made some bonds one this side of the country that I don't want to sever yet.

Seems everything is like that right now. I can see the positives, and I'm drawn to them, but the negatives prevent me from really holding onto anything. I'm into things, but I'm not committed. I come across as fickle or indecisive, but I'm not changing my mind so much as I'm recognizing both sides of everything, and resigning myself to the coexistance of contrasting opinions. Take Mr. Wrong for example: it's so good and so bad at the same time, and has been that way from the beginning. The bad prevents me from thinking that this is really something real and important that I'm ever going to commit to. But the good makes me not really want to leave it anyway.

Taking the positives and negatives and just accepting them sounds like a good idea. But it makes you wonder if you're missing out on something better.

I'm so serious today...

*little tune in my head*

I'm thinking of breaking it off with Mr. Wrong.

Six months ago I swore I would be happy if I could just find someone to screw on a regular basis without any of the relationship bullshit. Turns out I was wrong. This is empty empty empty.

Another revelation: I'm going to move to a new city in August or September. I had been thinking about staying, about finding a job here, about growing with this community. But I think I need out for a while - to be unsettled before I get settled.

Now I'm going to hitch-hike to Ottawa with a guy named Stink. I've made a lot of promises to go visit people, and I think I need to break some of them. Sorry guys and gals. I miss you a lot, but I'm broke and don't have a lot of time.

"Nobody dies from lack of sex. It's lack of love we die from."
-Margaret Atwood, of all people

I'm almost falling off the edge of the world, just hanging in there, for you, by my fingernails.

I'm working for Historica again this summer, but not for the encyclopedia. I'm writing and collecting content for a number of high school and primary daytimers. It's a little dry, but I'm working on spicing it up.

I'm renting an office for the summer, in the back of my friend's silkscreening studio. I'm subletting it, rather, so it's cheap and roomy and far more conducive to my concentration than my house, which is dirty and smoky and full of loud people. The studio is also sometimes full of loud people, but not nearly so much. Right now I can hear a silkscreening lesson being given:
"The ink is like blood, and this is like your cock. You CAN'T get that blood on your cock."
"So this is like my ink condom?"
"Yeah."

Convocation is tomorrow, and my mom is coming to visit today. This should be an interesting couple of days...

Currently I am sitting on a plastic chair in one of the secret bedrooms in the back of a silkscreening studio. There are comic books and LPs covering the walls, stacks of books in the corner, a pile of old protest posters on the ground, and a bucket that reads: "Pay What You Can (Only If You Can)." The room is dark because J is sleeping on the floor, on a thin piece of foam, with a stuffed animal for a pillow and a sleeping bag for a blanket, and he's clutching my foot. He's all loose little dreadlocks and sleepy comfortable squirming and warm breathing on my ankle. Oh dear.

I'm not going to Ottawa today, unfortunately. Not enough time, too much to do. I'll try to make it in a couple of days though.

Did I mention that I love you all? Because I do.

Check me out in the Peterborough Examiner:

http://www.thepeterboroughexaminer.com/webapp/sitepages/content.asp?contentid=40956&catname=Local%20News&classif=News

That's all.

It looks like I'm visiting O-town from this Tuesday until Friday-ish, possibly the weekend, depending on how things go. Any takers? I don't know anyone's work schedules, but if you're free and want to put me up for a night, let me know.

Feeling a lot of weight and drifting energy, Grassroots closed, sifting sand between friends. Every day has become a primal search for food as we wander the streets looking for the next kitchen to cook in, the next park to eat in. I wanted soothing fresh air summer nights but these days have all been grey drizzle, exhaustion, oversleep and undersleep. It's amazing how quickly people change under the weight of their environments. Look at me, I'm fighting and fucking and giving up and releasing myself and succombing to freedom and kinship and beauty. The hardest part is admitting that you were wrong. The second hardest is committing yourself, at every moment, and watching each moment of committment follow the next. It's something about equality and the way that I perceive myself. I'm no longer trying to step up to the plate to play the game that I'm afraid of, against stronger, bigger players. I reject law school. I reject working in the government. I was asked why there are so few women in politics, and it would have taken a lifetime to answer. Institutions don't die just because you change the way they're described on paper. Slotting women into men's roles doesn't change the fact that our institutions were devised by men and remain unfriendly to women. Women have spent centuries in the background, doing what it takes for communities to function, with their work unvalued. Men have been the administrators, the bureaucrats, the businessmen, the wage earners. Men's work serves capitalism and women's work serves communities. Men's work has been alienated from real living - labour becomes money becomes rent. Women's work is tied to the continual care of individuals and communities - it puts food into stomachs. In my rejection of capitalism, I have the strength to reject labour that ties me to it. I reject the patriarchal system that tells me to work for the economy, rather than my community. I want to touch and interact with the food I eat. I want to stop depending on distant, abstract, more powerful forces to protect me. I want to be that powerful force and protect myself.

so much but so little going on. here's what's what:

-hunger gala is coming up on saturday
-grassroots is closed and i spent as much of the dying days as i could there
-i'm dipping my toes into what seems like a pretty complicated, potentially painful romantic situation... but the water just feels sooo good.
-there's a community potluck tonight at 5pm in bluebell/fleming park (across from villa auto wash on aylmer). please come!
-my last essay is due on monday. i really need to work on it.
-i'm listening to beulah and humming along.
-i'm smoking huge quantities of weed these days.

I'm feeling really inspired by the people around me today. Working on the Hunger Gala, and you'd be amazed what people can do, what they're willing to share, how much they're willing to give. Pablo gave me an incomplete standing, which was way sweet, and the IDS department is being so accomodating. Everything that needs to happen is happening, and quickly and easily. There's some element of intuition or instinct involved. Yesterday I was clumsy all day and kept bumping into and dropping things and Karolyne looked at me for a minute and said: "You're going to get your period tomorrow." And she was right. All the patterns are just coinciding... And today's the new moon.

Am I becoming a hippie? Fuck.

I sucked it up and requested an 'incomplete standing' for one of my classes. I hope he gives it to me. Marks are due on the 30th, which means getting everything in before the 29th, which would mean writing... 40 pages in the next three days. So not happening. With the incomplete standing I'd be looking at 20 pages in the next three days, which is a pain considering I work* twice in those three days, but it's do-able. I knew I should have started working on my Haiti essay earlier. Ugh. Hopefully dear, sweet Pablo Bose will give me an extra week to do it.

Oh, and I'm moving this weekend. Wheeeee!


*Work = volunteer, but get paid with free food, cheap booze and tips worth between 1 - 2 dollers/hour


Update:
Consider me incompletely standing! The wonderful, incomparable Pablo Bose is going to let me hand in my paper "by mid-May"!! This is incredibly relieving and, although it's sort of irritating to drag school on that long, it's also makes me feel far less crazy and gives me hope that my last paper of my degree might actually be good, rather than rushed and barely adequate. It almost makes me wish that I'd decided to go to bed tonight, instead of hopping myself up on energy drinks so that I can write all night. Oh well.

Writing low quality essays about foreign policy and imperialism and searching for alternatives, but I know I've got more in me than this. It's a shame I've got to get all the words out at once - I'd rather hold onto them a little longer, get to feel them out for a while before I put them down, but there's no time. Been wasting it all at Grassroots, where I calmly watch the end of the world unfold before me like a daytime soap opera where I'm a main character that gets killed off too soon. The hippie-punk-riff-raff have taken me in and given me a home hovering over dish pits and deep fryers and spilled Holy Smoke on tap. Gotta paint these days away in hazes of patio smoke and sunlight as we watch the numbers slip off the calendar. Two weeks left. Soon I'll go to Ottawa and look for the boy at punk shows and activist community houses. I can't wait for the next deep breath.