Reaching Out

I have a working kitchen door! Turns out that the door was just stuck, because Vinh (previous tenant) never figured out how to open it, since it uses a skeleton key. OH MY GOD VINH. (I've been saying this a lot in the last month. I think I say it once every other day while trying to do something in the apartment.) The handymen will come by tomorrow to WD-40 my screen door, and install a new screen on my kitchen window.

I really need to teach myself to get to bed by 10 because I keep falling asleep at 2 and waking up at 10, which is bothering me, since I'm very much a morning person. As a result, I got very little done today. Sigh. So, I'm shutting down the computer early tonight and working only on reading stuff so I can finish this abstract for Fantastic Narratives by tomorrow, latest.

I also write to UC Santa Barbara and UC Riverside, and to a prof at UoT about my project. (Riverside Comp Lit got back to me almost immediately, then the English department got in touch like five minutes later, since Riverside is thinking of cutting out the Science Fiction track for the Comp Lit PhD, and grad advisor in the English dept invited me to apply there too.) I'll write to UC Davis as soon as I can figure out which advisor to write to, because they have five of them. I also have to check out UBC and NYU and I think I'll be good to go to start studying for the GREs.

I've rearranged my bedroom a bit, so I can set up a table for my NEW SEWING MACHINE! I've only looked at the main parts for now and will be snatching bits of time to study the machine and manual. So shiny!

Also, bought my tickets to San Francisco and Seattle. And, yikes. When I checked it just a week ago, the whole three-leg-trip was only $619, and now it's $744. DAMMIT! Shoulda bought my tickets then =/ Oh well.

OK. Work.

I got terminated from my job. Before anybody else asks, the marketing department had to go through some re-shuffling, and my position was terminated, they had to let me go. I've got a month's pay and no other job prospects.

I'm surprised because I thought my boss had called me in to give me something else to do.

At the same time I'm not surprised because I'd already said, I don't quite enjoy marketing and the 9-5 was a trial for me, and besides, things were quieting down in the department, leaving me to twiddle my thumbs.

They were really nice about it. I'm upset, not because I loved that particular job, but because I really liked working for those people. It's nice to be surrounded by functional people daily.

Before I left, my boss said to me, "You're a great writer, Jaymee. Find something that has to do with that."

I don't think she really got how much being in the company was good for my soul. Even if I was getting hard hit towards the end. I'm glad I got the chance to work there, and bummed, because the next job I have? probably wouldn't be as good.

Because I get too whiney and self-piteous, I am now going to calculate my privilege, to make myself realize that I can get through this and figure out wtf to do next:

- I still have monies. Assuming I'm not a moron and a spendthrift for the next while, it should last me for the next eight months.

- I do not have any life-threatening diseases and/or conditions that I have to deal with very badly. As such, I will ensure I DO NOT GET SICK.

- Assuming shit does down, I can go home. I always have that choice.

Now to get my shit in order, I will be doing the following to keep me busy:

- Write my novel.

- Work on grad apps. Not like I have anything distracting me now.

- Work on blog posts for tor.com and my regular blog.

- Find some modeling gigs. (Yeah, like that's going to keep me afloat!)

- Find my fucking gloves from Milan which ought to be in this apartment somewhere but are not showing up. Which translates into, clean this fucking house.

'Scuse me, I need to get to work.

Since shared joy is double joy:

Happy Birthday, _juju_! Rest up, we're jogging for two rounds around the North Common on Sunday! :P

Congrats, divabat on winning 3rd place in the New Talent category for Cabaret Burlesque!

Also, today I had a brainfart and was really bored so I wrote an outline for this year's NaNovel. It's a little fantasy story I've been thinking about for the past year. It got a bit more complicated than I initially thought it would be.

And I forgot there were a couple other kingdoms on the map I initially drew as well. Oh well. I think I'll have to redraw the map though.

I'm seriously tired from all that brainstorming, and I did it while hungry too. When I got home I had to drag myself t the microwave to heat up a Bagelful (those things are AMAZING OMG and the batch I bought has chives in the creamcheese YUM)) and somehow catnap while munching before I headed downtown to _juju_'s thing. So I'm going to just listen to music and re-draw this map and somehow make it work.


p.s. I've decided to set the continent around the Equator so I don't have to fuck with writing the four seasons. It's going to be awesome.

THE WORMS ARE HERE! <3

Uh, I probably never mentioned it here though. Anyways, I was looking for some new nifty thing to do while waiting for the ground to thaw out so I can grow shit, and lo, vermicomposting! INDOORS!

Did you know that there's a Worm Farm in Nova Scotia? I didn't! But now I do, and I ordered a half-pound of worms last week or so, and now they're here! WHEEEEEEEE! I'll take pictures when I can find my camera. By the time summer rolls around I'll have potting soil! Yay!

So I had A Moment today. I also had one yesterday, and I meant to write about it but I forgot, so when I had another Moment today, I figured I should.

When I have a Moment, it's really just a few seconds in my life that I realize, "gosh, that's really beautiful".

The first one was yesterday. These days my life's a bit of the doldrums of my going to work, then coming home, and then I watch a bit of TV, and then read blogs, or both at the same time, and RP, and go to bed. Sundays I go write at the Chase. Today I did some reading there. So, I was actually feeling a bit in the doldrums, and was on the bus home, and just looked out. It was snowing, and I just caught a sudden frame of the bus doors, looking out at a house, and there was just this big fat fluffy clump of snowflakes floating down. So peacefully. It was exactly the kind of snow one envisions from cartoons and from pictures. It wasn't exactly very special, it just so happened to call in the right place at the right time and I just so happened to be at the right angle at the time.

And I thought "Wow, that was... amazing." And I thought that I don't actually hate winter as much as I say I do. I just dislike the ice a great deal, but I do like snow a lot.

Today was just a few minutes ago, actually. I'd gone downtown to have cheesecake with Alicia (a habit we're trying to develop) at Stonehaven, which, alas, is no longer there. We caught a bus up to Quinpool, went to Video Difference where I rented the second season of She-Ra and City of Ember (and next time I'm renting Fantastic Planet, Wizards and Barberella. Barbarella has Jane Fonda starring as a heroine. In outer fucking space.)

While walking home, I stopped just a foot away from the steps of my doorway. Because it occurred to me that while there's yellow light across my doorway from the streetlamps, there's also that white glow coming from the moon. To be sure I went up to it and stood here and there to check out my shadow. Yeap, moonlight.

And I thought, "wow, moonlight shines on me."

The last time I had a moment like that was when I was living on Spring Garden, and my window faced east. I was on the 14th floor, so high enough to not get lights from streetlamps. And every so often, I would sit up and admire the moonlight on my blanket.

It's, you know. A Moment. Where you just sit and think, "I really like being alive."

Yup.

Lots of things to talk about.

What shall I talk about first?

- Insane Singaporean Education System
- Modeling
- On Traveling
- Bintan, Indonesia (AKA, the really fucking cheap place)
- Staying with my Cousin (and the resultant differences from last time I stayed there)
- The books I read (and well, still finishing the Book of Saladin by Tariq Ali, which, if I may say, is a darling read.)

Take a vote, efferybuddy!

Obligatory OMG SNOW! post.

Woke up to see one foot of snow and opened my door and was tickled to see it.

Went out around 2pm to return the She-Ra DVDs and get Vol. 2 of Season 1.

FIRST SNOW ANGEL OF THE YEAR FTW! And I had fun tromping through the snow at my doorstop. Hee.

I may be going out tonight for cheesecake, but I can't call GoTime to check when buses are running. Because the snow fucked up the buses. Oh well.

In RenEv's latest post on the SWOP East (Sex Workers Outreach Project) conference in Chicago, she mentioned meeting Rene of Stepping Stone, which is Halifax's program and safe place for sex workers. Sex workers can drop in the house during the mornings for free food and to mingle, as well as to attend workshops on various things like legal assistance, housing and cool stuff. In the evenings, the staff take boxes full of food downtown and walk around talking to the street workers who haven't had a chance to get to the free food in the morning and networking among the local sex workers.

I've been aware of Stepping Stone since earlier this year but it was incredibly hard to get information on it.

Oddly enough, it was reading RenEv's blog regularly that inspired me to find out more about sex workers' rights and organizations supporting them here in Halifax, and thusly to Stepping Stone. A complete fluke led me to the house itself to do yardwork, but I'd kept my eye out, and attended one of their events to meet people.

There, I met Rene, introduced by Holly, who I've known from the SMU Women's Center. She is one of the nicest persons I have ever met. So well-meaning, so sweet, so earnest and so kind.

And yeah, Ren, most Haligonian Canadians are really that nice...


I'm still feeling kind of weirded out by it. In a good way, though.

When I first moved to this building, I was told by the super at the time, Joyce, tht caged animals were fine. Therefore guinea pigs, hamsters and the like were okay. Not bird, not bunnies. So I had a hamster, and that was cool. Joyce was an elderly-ish lady, maybe about sixty or so. The current super, Laura, is about the same age.

When I moved in, I said to my roommate, ( Read more... )

I've spoken time and again about the concept of impersonality in R. W. Emerson's writings to my professor, who finds the concept fascinating, and he has tried time and again to impress on us the importance of impersonality, coupled with the risks of getting too involved. Essentially, the key of impersonality is to become so selfless that the self can encompass anything - everything can be appreciated and loved equally because it all has inherent goodness.

There're, of course, several points where this simply is incommensurable - if you want to be impersonal, then how alive are you? The contemplative life has always been comparable to death - a state of complete stillness to comprehend the cosmos. It's an extremely Buddhistic concept, which I never reconciled myself with.

I don't believe the concept of impersonality helps make a person become a human being - if anything, it lends itself to the concepts of post-humanism with its question of "what is human? Can we be completely impersonal and still be human?" My simple answer is no. Human nature likes to find out about things, it likes to change things in its environment, it likes to experiment, and it doesn't just "let things be", because if we did that, we wouldn't really be any much different than animals.

Impersonality, I believe, also leads to the huge post-modern problem of alienation. We see this all the time, especially with the burgeoning technological advances we make. We don't have to go to the bank and see a real bank teller anymore, because we can do it online. We don't babysit our own kids, we make them sit in front of the television. We don't go out and make friends, we make them online.

Don't get me wrong, the Internet is wonderful. It helped me grow up as a person because I met so many types of people that I never would have met otherwise. But for some, it becomes a dependency because they become too afraid to go out and see who's in their immediate vicinity, and partake of emotional bonds safely behind a screen. (This doesn't include people who become very emotionally bonded to their online friends.) But do we really partake of life if we remain faceless beings behind a screen?

That, in itself, is a form of impersonality - we don't necessarily participate in other people's lives, we just sit back and observe. We oftimes don't pass judgement, because we're not there.

Simply put, impersonality can lead to alienation, a highly uncomfortable human state. There're people who achieve impersonality and are perfectly content with it (I won't say happy, because the word "happy" implies a certain extreme). They're content to just sit back and do nothing, and let the world unfold itself. But I don't think, for most part, that all humans are capable of this.

Alienation is a problem of mine and I know a lot of other people share this too. That is why, I think, it's a dangerous thing to tout impersonality as a good thing. So here's a song that depicts my sense of alienation - David Bowie's Space Oddity.


Ground control to Major Tom
Ground control to Major Tom
Take your protein pills and put your helmet on

Ground control to Major Tom
Commencing countdown, engines on
Check ignition and may God's love be with you

Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five,
Four, three, two, one, liftoff

This is Ground Control to Major Tom
You've really made the grade
And the papers want to know whose shirts you wear
Now it's time to leave the capsule if you dare

This is Major Tom to Ground Control
I'm stepping through the door
And I'm floating in a most peculiar way
And the stars look very different today

For here
Am I sitting in a tin can
Far above the world
Planet Earth is blue
And there's nothing I can do

Though I'm past one hundred thousand miles
I'm feeling very still
And I think my spaceship knows which way to go
Tell me wife I love her very much, she knows

Ground Control to Major Tom
Your circuit's dead, there's something wrong
Can you hear me, Major Tom?
Can you hear me, Major Tom?
Can you hear me, Major Tom?
Can you....

Here am I floating round my tin can
Far above the moon
Planet Earth is blue
And there's nothing I can do.