meaning in the moving design

Lately, I've been eavesdropping on a lot of people talking about greatness. Toronto is a magnet for ambition, and for people who thirst and strive for greatness. I started asking myself if that was something I strove for and the answer came back a very resolute NO. I don't want to be great. I just want to be whole.

It's the difference between growing in a line and growing in layers; filling up and filling out. I don't care for the greatness of stuff, the greatness of ego and self-importance- really, I'd like to trash that whole show. I hate capitalism in part because it engenders this very idea of greatness. I never want my sense of self to be tied to my job title. My thirst is for something different. I want to feel... full. My life choices are all about making me feel this intangible fullness, wholeness, satiated with ideas and knowledge and never-befores...

I keep waiting for reality to kick in, to realize I'm old and need to be making more soberingly responsible decisions... but it hasn't happened yet. I think I'm going to ride this out as long as I can. I hope the world can live with that.

Getting old is a sneaky thing. Everyone always complains about the rumble of the big 3.0 but I'd say that my 30th birthday was perfectly chill- no neurotic impulse to deconstruct my life, no aching sentimentalism about all the lost years of my youth, no reminders of how time has past and the awe or reverence that comes with that.

No... that's all hitting me now, at 3.14159... tricky dick, that 31-and-a-half. Lately I've been running into a lot of old peeps. Not just people I used to hang out with, but also (and even weirder), people that I just used to see around. Like, back was I went out more. It's a strange feeling to be outside of a community you once felt so entrenched in, one that feels like it still carries that version of you with it.

I recently ran into some musician friends from OM days. I'd met their daughter when she was barely able to walk (we had a nice bonding moment when I picked her up as she was crying and she clung to me and fell back asleep. [Especially impressive because it was the morning after a sleepless night during which I was probably up to no good]). Last week, I saw her for the first time since and it blew my mind. She's six now. Six. like a completely real, actualized person. WEEEEIIIRD.

To save me from all these head trips, I recently got obsessed with feather stars, or rather, I reawakened an old obsession. I caught sight of these wily ocean invertebrates in Borneo, I was snorkeling along and suddenly I saw this awesome wiggling, wiggly feather thing. Then, when I dove down to get a better look, it went perfectly still and pretended that it was a plant!

Check it (sorry for the shaky video):

Ambivalence.
I think that's my favourite word. Or at least based on my definition of it. Ambivalence, the way I intuit it, is not about uncertainty, it's about feeling strongly about two opposing concepts. I imagine a line, or a metal pipe. I imagine bending it in ways that purists and bureaucrats would frown on, until the two ends meet, tensely, but with intention; the poles perspiring in resistance. I like being there.
But that was a tangent. This post isn't about ambivalence. It's about action. It's about my ambivalence to action.

I kind of straddle the line between being really active and really... not. Most people who know me would probably say I'm pretty active, and in broad strokes it's certainly true- I'm constantly squirming to do something or go somewhere, I work multiple jobs*, I have a really short attention span, I get depressed when I'm bored...
But I surprise myself constantly because in all these little ways, I am consistently able to do nothing for long periods of time, and do it really well. In fact, I often find myself actively seeking this out, clearing my schedule and opening up a time and space to do nothing. Everyone thinks that travel is so adventurous, so "active," but one of my favourite things about it is getting on a bus for 8-10 hours and dedicating half a day to staring out the window. When I go to visit my grandparents in Etobicoke, I don't even bring an mp3 player for the 1.5 hr commute, I just sit and stare at things: people, passing trees... poles. I savour these quiet times between places, when there are no distractions and I'm forced to shut my mind off and just enjoy the ride.

All my hobbies operate on the same ambivalent principle. I've come to recognize them as experimental adventures in stillness; activities of non-activity. They are pastimes that teach me how to live in real time.

Take scuba diving, for instance. Diving is the only sport I know of where the less energy you exert, the better your perform. It is a sport that's about 10% physical ability and 90% mental fitness. It has two golden rules: Remain calm and Breathe. If you don't remain calm, you run out of air and have to surface. If you don't breathe, or try to hold your breath, your lungs will rupture and you die. So, as in life, remain calm, breathe, and you'll do just fine.
Diving also has the added bonus of making you feel like you are One with the Force, it's the best real life example of positive thinking I know of. When you want to descend, all you have to do is think it. Think down, and exhale deeply... and down you go, like magic. Think up and inhale, magically you rise...

I take to hiking and canoeing for the same reasons, it's moving meditation for the body that teaches me something, in this case, how to focus mentally. It's about planting feet and oars, one step at a time. It's about the mindlessness of repetition, an appreciation for muscles and ligaments, focusing on the minute, the trivial, the inconsequential. It's a mindlessness that is decidedly different from just relaxing with a book on the beach. It's that metal pipe of ambivalence again; pushing your body so hard that your mind goes comatose.

I've just spent the last 3 hours applying for jobs, and I have to say- minus the prettiness and the physical exertion... it's kind of the same. Mindless, trivial, inconsequential. You forget yourself. You go on Auto Pilot and just do it for the sake of doing something. And you know that all this time and effort could be for nothing, but you're ok with that. It's almost... meditative.
There's supposed to be a line there; there's supposed to be a mindlessness that's good and a mindlessness that's bad, and I'm supposed to know- to feel- the difference... but all my definitions are blurry; I don't seem to discern.

I think I'm too in love with the Process. I honestly get no satisfaction out of whether anything ever materializes**... maybe that's dangerous, but I guess I just never feel like the result adds to or takes away from what I've put into something. And I guess that's why I never get anything done... I'm just Sisyphusian by nature. (Note to Self: pick up a copy of Camus' Myth of Sisyphus... I think he's onto something)

But but... Then I recognize that I'm actually like this when I'm focusing on work too. You get into a zone.... mindful mindlessness. Doing something starts to feel like doing nothing. The ends of the metal pipe are kissing again.


* ... or none, as the case may be
**A few notes on The Process:
1. I am writing a lot these days, just not finishing anything... (this entry itself feels like a bunch of parts that don't quite make up a whole...)
2. I'm getting too enamoured with the Process of job-hunting, should try to, uh, set a goal or something

Oh Toronto.

I'm back in the southern True North, basking in the cool summer sun, happily munching on grilled meat and sipping (yes, sipping) Canadian beer.

Back in the warm, cozy cradle of toronto indie music, tdot beats, rep cinemas and art films, street festivals and community dinners, great food, great films, great music, great taste in everything, and great people.

I love this city for all that and more. Yes, it's true, Toronto is busy... but it's busy in a way that is so much healither than the way Asia is busy. Here, people don't pour their energy into their useless 9-5 jobs (unless those jobs are wicked cool and not useless at all), they pour energy into creative, pro-active, community-giving ways of life. People here dare to dream, and it is beautifully inspiring, especially if you're a lazyass half-start like me. This city amazes me.

But I wouldn't be me if I didn't have at least a minor neurotic twitch at the thought of being here again. Coming home is always a little traumatic. If I travel for longer periods of time than most it's because I love the feeling of coming back to this city and having it look slightly unfamiliar... that it can look unfamiliar to me is so exciting. Everything ordinary is given this thin coat of newness and that potential for discovery is so full...

At the moment, Toronto is half living up to this promise of discovery. I'm living in a new hood and getting to know my neighbourhood, I'm discovering new bike roots* and avoiding job hunting by playing in my new garden. On the other hand, I speak the language and most things feel... old. Or rather, everything's the same, and I feel old. Sigh...

Everyone's been asking whether I'm happy to be back, and it's really a hard one to answer. My standard answer is that 'happy' isn't exactly the right word, but I know that it's right to be back. I'm kind of sorting data as I type here, but on a personal note, I feel like I need to "settle down," and by that I refer mostly to internal geography, not external. There are things I need to settle within myself, and Toronto seems the safest and most supportive place to do that. I'm not broken by any means, but I've realized that the challenges of travel and displacement have kinda acted as decoy distractors, they come at the expense of other challenges I'm ignoring, am happy to ignore...

I had a conversation with someone recently, about the idea of wholesale change, of displacing yourself, and why we do it. And we both hit on this one reason- we do it to prove we can do it. There's nothing like diving into a foreign situation, and watching yourself rise to the challenge to give you an incredible- and incredibly addictive- rush of "Yay, Im Awesome!"ness. And then that becomes the easiest way to feel awesome, so suddenly you're doing it all the time and you get all cracked out on this Awesome drug and you can't stop....

So you come down from your Awesome drug and you go home and you find yourself In Transition again, and you're familiar with this place but it's the one place that never stays the same. And so you undergo these familiar/unfamiliar rites of coming home, the settling part, when the universe trembles and pushes and figures out where to fit you into a life that has gone on without you for 2 years. You feel like a triangle shape being manhandled by a fat-fingered kid; you're not sure whether Jolly Bo Gumption here is going to slip you smoothly into the triangle hole or try to jam you stubbornly into the square cutout. There's fear there, you can't help but look back. But there's also this other thing, some sort of inner acceptance that enabled you to go away in the first place. You'll fucking deal. And you'll do it well. Awesome.

And then...

*an honest ta gawd typo, almost but not quite as good as "scene of changery"

Has anyone else had a "metatech" moment? Basically, situations where you are interfacing with one type of technology in order to interface with another one? I've had 2 such moments in the past month or two... And maybe it's because I'm a Luddite and refuse to get on Facebook, but these moments are really novel and amusing to me.

In one, I was on video Skype with a friend, and she received a cell phone call from her sister, who is also a close friend. So my friend answers the phone, puts it on speaker and says "I'm Skyping with Anita!" and thrusts the phone towards the screen. So now I'm staring at a cell phone and talking to my friend VIA Skype VIA a cell phone. Weirdo meta-technologimacal moment that is...*

The second incident was hilarious to experience, but possibly a "you had to be there" kinda moment. My friend and I had arranged a phone date and he, being all Skype superior, wanted to do it through Google Talk. So... this is the chat of us figuring out our Internet VOIP phone call.


It was especially hilarious to me because we were using chat to communicate about not being able to communicate. Which I suppose beats dead silence. But oh, the world we live in.

So, is it just me, or does this kind of thing happen to everyone? Or does it happen so often that we don't even notice? Or was this already a topic on Facebook and sooo last year?** I'm really curious to know if other people experience this... like we've evolved from walkmans to ipods, and from mirror illusions to meta-interfacing. There's something about it that really reminds me of a Beckett play. Maybe "metatech" isn't even the word I'm looking for, maybe it's "Becketttech"

Anyway, if you've got a story, do share.

*The only thing funnier would've been if it was a video phone, and I could see my friend VIA Skype VIA a cell phone. Or if, say, in the background of this video phone, there was a screen... with another friend on video Skype.... and so forth. Guffah, that'd be cool.

**Sorry, been getting more Facebook taunting lately. Listen, I'll join when everyone stops telling me to join, now fuck off. Final answer.

I've had a pretty ambivalent relationship with rituals all my life. In that I don't particularly like them, but sometimes I need them. They can be a nice, powerful anchoring energy... or just a really fuckin heavy anchor.

I've spent a big chunk of my life bouncing between several different jobs, contracts, and countries. And while I've managed to retain the same friends for the past some years, I've got lots of little groups of them to move between. So. What does ritual mean to me? Lately, I've been thinking about the rare rare times in my life when "ritual" has worked. When a constant felt comforting and not stagnating...

Ok, there was the invaluable ritual of going to tai chi twice a week, which gave me two much-need weekly excuses to leave my house in the dead of winter and socialize. I would say this same ritual helped me through a fair bit of depression as well. Um... sushi? Does sushi count? How about brunch??

Truth told, the only time I think it's actually worked was in Cambodia. Against all odds, I managed not only to spend 3 months doing the same thing every bloody day, but I managed to love it, like really feel connected to the ritual. Partly, I think, because I was was so proud of myself for not going rights nuts and succumbing to sheer and utter boredom. Which, to this day, absolutely blows my mind. I was in a remote village with no electricity, no running water, no TV, no pool table, no lights, no books... no distractions. There was one "mountain" (really just a hill) a scooter ride away, but basically, it was never-ending rice fields in all four directions, and not much to explore, with no means to explore it even if there was. My life was scheduled by the hour. The same thing every day:

Wake Up
Make a meal
Eat a meal
Teach
Make a meal
Eat a Meal
Teach
Teach again
Make a meal
Eat a meal
Light a candle/Watch the bugs/Chat/Chain smoke cigarettes and have an occasional joint
Go to Bed

EVERY DAY. Like the only variations were laundry day and getting invited to a neighbour's house for dinner. And I LOVED IT.

Yes, there are obvious factors. I'd been on the road for a long time before I got to Cambodia; I was tired and needed a place to lay my head. But the other major factor was the people. Frank, Anke, Babsie and I were a tight little unit and became incredibly close by circumstance. We never fought, were never awkward or uncomfortable with each other (except for that one time we got too stoned...) and just managed to pool our best qualities for the others to draw on. The people in the village were an endless source of amusement and entertainment, sometimes frustrating and sometimes just the most beautiful revelation.

I've always likened my time in Cambodia to the dizzy syndrome You remember, as kids, how we'd spin ourselves around and then stop and watch the world keep tumbling? I imagined myself as this kid who'd spun herself round and round and round for over a year, bouncing from one country to the next, and then, suddenly, I stopped. And the coolest thing happened- the world kept spinning. I was doing the same thing every day, but suddenly, experiences were finding me. Every big and little thing became totally interesting; every experience a lesson that I could draw on.

I'm sitting here thinking of all this because, yeah, I guess it just depends on the ritual. This 9-6 one, for example, kind of bites. I don't understand how people can breathe life into it, make it fresh, reinvent it. I don't understand how people can watch all their daylight hours slip by through a window (and btw, I don't even have a window) for 10 years and not realize that there are much better things out there to waste their time and energy on. And the thing is, I LIKE my job, so I can't even begin to understand the people who are putting up with this that don't. I guess I should admire their... stamina.

So what is ritual to me? Ritual is the Jedi mind trick of making some place old look new again. Ritual is revisiting myself every couple of years, watching younger and older versions of me spar and dance. Ritual is using the tools I've crafted over my lifetime to learn something new every day. Ritual can't be the same, it has to be different. However subtle the movement, it has to move.

... I think that's my subtle way of saying I need a vacation.

Well, that scary 3.0 precipice is officially at my back- I braced, I jumped, I survived. I even managed to come out of it feeling pretty emotionally unscathed... which, yeah, surprises me too, but there you have it.

It's all just kind of amusing, actually. On Thursday (my actual birthday) I kept staring at my shoe- which is so ripped up that, at a certain angle, you can actually see more sock than shoe- and thinking "... I'm 30." I actually couldn't wipe the smug look off my face all day. 30 is so the new 19.

I like to think of myself in terms of age, because I consider myself to be a bit of an ambivalent creature in this respect, in the best possible way- professionally mature and socially immature (but in the most endearing way, of course). Like, I'm young, I'm so so so young. And this is just a personality thing. Things like squid and ninjas and zombies and tarsiers and hopping vampires will always be funny to me. BUT- I also have my shit together. I'm responsible, I'm smart, I work hard, I know how to deal with people... In other words, I can play all the adult games... but still be ridiculous. Still be thirsty and curious. Still (hopefully) have the energy and blind ballsiness to run out and get slapped around by life every once in a while. I don't think I ever want to lose that. I don't ever want to be too afraid to try. Too lazy, well... that's another story.

This actually feels like forced reflection. I honestly don't feel anything about 3.0... which is kind of hilarious because I remember spouting such somber words of wisdom about turning 21. And now at 30, I'm suddenly struggling to feel neurotic about it, because it's so expected that I should feel neurotic, and because it's so me to be neurotic... But yeah, nothing. My inner dialogue is going a little something like this:

- We're 30.
- Oh no! What does that mean??
- [long silence] It doesn't mean anything.
- ...oh

Maybe it's one of those things that creeps up on you.

Every Chinese character has a story. Often a long, meandering story, rich in symbolism. The charcter for "female" depicts a woman kneeling in submission, and the character for "tranquility", is the female character under a house. Whoever invented these characters, they assumed that the story was a universal kind of truth. they didnt realize how subjective the story was. In some cases these stories become values frozen in time. They outline a narrative that Chinese people are culturally subserviant to, but will continue to identify less and less with.

There is something about this logic that reminds me of myself, though i cant quite put my finger on how. It has something to do with being needlessly complicated, with getting caught up in the details... with being consumed by my own subjectivity. I guess the Chinese way of thinking is just really bloody neurotic- everything means something, and the thread of meaning runs deep. You end up getting stuck in some all-encompassing history that's not even yours. Like using all these ideologically-outdated characters to narrate your reality today. Sometimes things are just coded in ways that I don't relate to, or understand.

We are saddled by our upbringing, by whichever way we were formed. If we grew up feeling negative, its easy to lean towards negativity. If at first we give too much, it's hard to learn how to be selfish later. If we were raised to be conservative, it's impossible to feel fully free.

A few years ago, I was on a personal mission to figure out the difference between habit and instinct. My argument was that there was no difference; that habits are instinctual. They are disguised as natural reactions, but in actuality, they are learned, and so can be unlearned. So, pumped by this new revelation, I took an inventory of all my habits, my long list of bad behavior and I started to unpack. I can't exactly remember what was going on in my life at the moment, but I was convinced that it was something happening collectively, to me and the people closest to me. I had an image of all of us packing up all our baggage, and jumping off a cliff. The lightest of us would fly while the pack rats would fall, like a test to see if we could change with the times.

Life in Taiwan is made for Western kids in their early 20s. You marvel at being able to shop with beer in your hand; you party every weekend; you have no real responsibilities; you work, but not too hard; you don't know what you're going to do with your life in five years time and you don't care.

It makes going through a mid-life crisis all the more... challenging*. I feel like I'm regressing back to 21, except I'm doing more drinking and less gangeing. I haven't philosophized in months, the "me" that comes out here isn't that me, it's the easily-amused, frisbee-loving, go-go energy me. Which is fine, that's a good me... it's like the me that I would've been at 21 had I not been so agro and self-deprecating. But... it feels like a me without purpose.

This regression, and purposelessness, it's all part of the syndrome I've dubbed The Parenthetical Life. Living out here is akin to screaming into a hole in the wall. You can do anything you want, and at the end of the day/month/year, you can go home as if nothing ever happened. Because nothing counts. You live your life here in brackets, and there are no consequences.

When I was on my 2-year travelling stint, I met an Israeli girl, who offhandedly made the comment that travelling was "the fake life", which the self-righteous 22-year-old Me took great offense to. But looking back now, I absolutely agree with her. In many cases, for Westerners, Taiwan is a place for boys who don't want to be men**. My friends and I have decided the threshold is about five years. After five years, you either get out and grow up, or you succumb to being a boy forever. There are so many thoroughly messed up 30 and 40-something-year-old Western dudes here who are stuck in perma-adolescence.

The bright side to the bracket life is that if nothing counts, then there's nothing to lose. So, while this gives closet assholes license to be bigger assholes, it also means that all fears of failure are easy to put down. Here, you have no reputation to protect, no respect to be lost. You're annonymous, and so are your fuck-ups.

Again, there are pros and cons to this scenario. The con is, any yahoo can pick up a guitar and form a band, and if they're white, they will probably enjoy some small measure of success, no matter how shitty they are. All the people who would never get gigs at home, suddenly find themselves here saying "... I've always wanted to be in a band", and voila- Guitar Idol Rock Star with a small collection of adoring fans thrown in, gratis. Same goes for DJs.

Um, and same goes for writers, at least this writer anyway. I've always believed that, given the opportunity, I could write for a newspaper; that I was good enough. Now, I'm not so sure. I've recently started writing for the China Post, the "other" English-language newspaper (the one that nobody reads), Taipei Times being "the" English-language newspaper. What I've discovered is that I don't know how to write for papers- my writing style oscillates between witty mcshmitty blogisms and pretentious grad dissertations, with no in-between.

So, I reason, where else to hone my skills but here in Nowheresville, where nothing really matters anyway. HA! Who says mediocrity gets you nowhere! To be blunt, nowheresville or not, I have to make this count; I don't want to live in brackets. I have to believe that what I'm doing in Taiwan is going to count for something later on. The alternative is to believe that I'm out here spending yet another year skirting responsibility and dicking off with adventures, novelties and cheap thrills... and I don't like that version so much. I'd much rather say that I'm wasting time in a meaningful way. Although now that I think of it, aren't I always?


*I'm exaggerating, by the way. I'm not really going through a mid-life crisis. I'm just feeling especially neurotic this week.
** I would make these sweeping generalizations about the Western women here too, but almost all my female friends here are Taiwanese, so I'm my only example in this case. And it's true- I DO feel like a little boy

this has been bothering me all week...

I was at work one day, innocently doing a grammar check through google, when I came across a youtube video, about a man who was trapped in an elevator for 41 hours. He,
as you probably think you can imagine, goes right nuts. This video totally traumatized me. I'm absolutely serious, I haven't been this traumatized since I read that Iceberg Slim novel a few years back, which (in very graphic detail) gave me all the gruesome details about ghetto life in Chicago, post-slavery. That book told me horror stories about forced abortions and abuse and prostitution and all sorts of nasty shit, and I'm telling you that this elevator video stands right on par with that.

It was so heartbreaking I couldn't even finish watching it. And someone was kind enough to set it to music, which made the whole thing all cinematic n shit, but still, so traumatizingly real. That's the absolute horror of it, of both the book and this video, is that they're so irreducibly real. I can't shake that out of my conscience.

The fucked up thing is, part of my mind wants to go back and see the rest. Not that I expect no fucking sunshine-lollipops-tickertape parade or no shit. Far from it. But there is this masochistic, voyeuristic instinct in me that... wants to know. If he does more crazy shit, how he looks when he's rescued, if he kills himself... sick eh?

So what's that all about? I don't feel good from watching him suffer, I feel bad, really really really bad. So why do I want to make myself feel bad? This is different from film. I can justify films making me feel bad because it's art, it's pretending a type of reality to manipulate my feelings; it's using something fake to produce something real in me, and that's awesome and interesting. Like, watching a good movie, I can step back from my tears or fear or anger or whatever, and give props to the director, like "ooh, that was a good one. that one got me good". But this... I don't know why I want to see a real man suffer. I don't. I wish the masochist in me would just shut the hell up.

Now let's all cheer ourselves up by watching slugs have sex:



Ahhh... that's better.

Every few years, I try to teach myself egolessness. I try to play the humble storyteller. On occasion, my ego will ask me if I'm a good one, and I stumble and fret about that for a while....
And then I try to remember a lesson i learned from a friend a long time ago, probably one of the wisest things I've ever learned- I am ridiculous. We all are. The faster we are able to discern what to take seriously in life and what to be playful about, the happier we'll be. After this, I guffah a bit and feel immensely better about myself. guffah.

So, with the self-conscious bravado of egolessness (and because I was too lazy to re-edit my guy and include this bit), I want to paint the scene for you. And I'll wave it like i just dont care...


The Prologue
I thought that having travelled around Asia a lot, coming to Taiwan would be easier. Not easy, but easier. I was wrong. Despite the long list of countries that I have been to, I think I only experienced my first true bout of culture shock here, during my first week in Taiwan.

I went out to teach at a school Miaoli (aka buttfuck nowhere), and they put me up for 5 days in a house where no one spoke English, and where I was consequently avoided like the plague. I didn't have a car or a scooter (or a key to the house I was living in, for that matter), and had to be driven to and from the school. Neither the school nor the house was in Miaoli city (which was really just a town), and both were about as lively as say, ingersoll, ontario. I didn't speak enough Chinese to know my own address, order my own food, or even tell my roommates not to lock the door because I couldn't get back in. When people realized I couldn't speak Chinese, they initially treated me with annoyance, then pity, and finally avoidance. By looking Chinese but not being able to speak it, I had lost face. Most of them looked embarassed for me, so they decided it was more dignified not to interact with me. I had no one to speak to besides the kids that hated me, and the relatively nice but quiet bosslady.

This feeling of total alienation stayed with me until I came back to Taipei. Things got better, and then got worse again. When I was in Hualien, it was the same kind of reaction from the locals- annoyance, pity, avoidance. It's also a small, somewhat backwards town that tries to pretend it's a city- isolated and isolating, very homogenous culture, very little english. There were maybe 20 foreigners living in Hualien (all white), but I found it hard to break into their clique and hardly ever saw them. Having grown up in a place as diverse as Toronto, I was beginning to go a little stir crazy from the monoculture- everyone looked the same, spoke the same... glared the same. Pont is, this is a town where you'd bat an eye or two if you saw a white boy, and do a double-triple take if you saw a foreigner who wasn't white. And for someone like me, who dressed/spoke/acted like a foreigner but looked like one of them?
... Annoyance, pity, avoidance.

This is when I met Farouk and Cameron, while I was in Hualien. So duh, part of the story is about me too. I really did ask them the assanine question "do you speak English". because besides the new quiet bosslady, and the new kids that hated me, I still didn't have anyone to talk to. I felt like I was in a really small room filled with all these lost conversations, and someone had opened the door and all my words just came spilling out. I was frustrated with Taiwan, frustrated with racism, and looking for people to commiserate with. Oh, and terribly homesick.

That's it. I've said too much. Again.

Ok, I know user-generated content and Web 2.0 are sooo 2002, but it still warms my heart when i see it happen. Like, YAY! Go creative energy! and so forth.

I love radiohead. First, it was about the music, but now I've fallen in love with their politics. While every wannabe rockstar is plying myspace for the elusive record deal, radiohead decided to use the same cyber empowerment to downsize, and get a bit closer to the little people. By releasing In Rainbows as a digital download, they let the community decide what their music was worth. In the same stroke, they also managed to send a big "fuck you" to EMI.


But they didn't stop there. Bent on seeing how far creative potential can go with this new-fangled technology, radiohead is now organizing an online contest to make their first music video off In Rainbows- created by the fans, for the fans (musical FUBU!) They've invited fans to choose any song, submit storyboards, and vote on the projects. The ones with the highest votes get $1000 to make a video, which get passed onto the band, who choose the eventual winner.

So. No more sweaty record exec telling the band which song to release as their first single- the fans choose it. And they do it through this collective democracy. So far, a lot of the storyboards are gravitating towards the same few songs- Weird Fishes Arpeggio, Videotape, All I Need.... that's everything you need to know, right there, by virtue of the collective choice. The other massively cool byproduct of the contest is that you don't just get one music video- you get hundreds. The premise of the contest lets hundreds of people from all around the world borrow a little fame from radiohead to burn some creative energy. That is fucking cool.

So's this (there's something about flappy ears atop a flying humpback whale that instills trust):




And here's a T-dot plug:





I'll end with a tangent:
YouTube, once the amateur online version of Jackass, is now my supplimentary news source. I go to BBC, I read about Tibet or Burma. Then I go to YouTube and find the footage.

I will always remember the VCR, carphones, laserdisc kareoke, dial-up, playing with the phone cord during marathon calls. But god how i love my intermanet.

I started writing a short article on Women in Philosophy for work, and I stumbled upon some ideas from Hannah Arendt that really struck a chord. (sorry im starting to use really cliche idioms, but its kind of an inevitable drawback of working for an ESL magazine... we're training all the non-english speakers of the world to sound like Mr Dress-Up... by golly)
Arendt's known for her political philosophy, her most famous piece of writing is probably Origins of Totalitarianism, but the ideas that really resonated with me were from The Human Condition. Mostly because some of her ideas were things that I thought I'd thunked up on my own... [I don't want to sound like a pompous ass, but that happens to me a lot. Like, I philosophize, I practice the rant, and then I realize that it was actually Someone Famous' rant that I've accidentally plagerized, and Someone Famous has not only said it first, but better. But then I think, hey, Someone Famous agrees with me. And I feel really cool, and better about it all. and so forth.]

Arendt theorizes that every action mimicks the act of being born. That is, in every action we have a chance to break out and do something completely new and unexpected. She gives these actions a kind of reverence, like in action lies freedom; you are never more free than when you do something unexpected. And because you are you, and only you can be you, the actions that you bring into the world are a unique and special miracle.
Ok, here's where it starts to get eerily similar. Arendt also says that your actions are a reflection of your self, but that they only matter in the context of the whole; the community. Because we are human, we use the same apparatus to understand each other, and we want to understand each other. But because we are individual, we each act and relate to each other in unique ways. And with our unique wells of experience, we can forge new networks of understanding, new ways of relating, infinitely complex and unpredictable. Our individuality, our sense of self is the driving force behind all this possibility.

She talks about the importance of speech, that it's the story that makes the person; that seals the identity. Stories live and actions die, so to preserve it, we perform an action, then we tell a story to describe the significance of that action. This happens in history all the time, and there's something really cynical about it.. but we won't get into that.

All this got me thinking about how I use speech in relation to action and identity, and I realize that it's massively important. I have a ridiculous capacity to talk shit. I talk too much. I say more than anyone EVER needs to hear. About everything. Anyone whose ever dated me can readily vouch for that.

Ok, actually, that was a tangent. i really wanted to to talk about narrative. The story is incredibly important to me. Before and after my actions, but especially before. It took 10 years of talking about travelling before I was ever able to leave. When I wanted certain jobs, or career paths, I had to talk myself through it; I had to speak to make it happen. I had to articulate what I wanted to myself, over and over again. Same thing with bad habits, old ghosts of me. I have to tell myself to change, I have to isolate the infection with my words.

The story enables the action, hell, sometimes the story IS the action. In my early 20s, I used to think that I could substitute one for the other. Whenever I was angry with people, I would just tell myself a story- resolve conflicts in neat packets of inner dialogue, without the fuss of confrontation, and declare the matter settled. Which is fine... if everyone in the world was just a figment of my imagination. But ho, looky here, people exist.

Narrative after the fact is also important, but less so. i have a shitty memory, and only a partial understanding of the "now", so most of my cards are stacked for the future, which is why speaking things into action is so effective for me. Usually, memory comes down to binary experiences- I file things in the memory bank as either "good" or "bad". Details don't stick unless I've made a point of crafting them into a story, then it becomes a mixture of memory and narrative, which is arguably all we have access to anyway. We immortalize ourselves. In every living moment, I'm a story waiting to be told later. And Im not the only storyteller. Every time any of us tell a story about a friend; about each other, we make ourselves all the more solid, we become more material. I whisper stories about you all the time, I carry you with me everywhere. You are material to people you haven't even met.

Ok, so speaking of Someone Famous paraphrasing me... i just watched My Blueberry Nights last night, Wong Kar Wai's latest. So in keeping with stories, me, you and me again, here's a line:

Sometimes, we depend on other people as a mirror
To define us and tell us who we are.
And each reflection makes me like myself a little more.

I know there's a movie about this out there. I've never seen the Truman Show, or Switch or Click or whatever, but we all know the one...
My life's a show. There's a wee little tot sitting in the back room getting her jollies out of punching the buttons on an old school cable box, randomly manhandling levers and tuning dials, drool strings hanging from her mouth that will no doubt short circuit something soon... And my life snaps into epileptic episodic fits in the meantime. Every week- new job, new story, new potential, new headspace. I'm just playing the part... Except get this- it's me, I'M the kid. I'm the one punching buttons and drooling on the dials, just to say "well, what happens when I do this?". I'm doing this to myself and I don't know how to stop. Half of me is enveloped in curiosity about the "what if" potential of every action. The other half of me feels like a posessed Raggedy Anne doll. Gee, sometimes my tendency for adventure seems suspiciously masochistic...

At the same time, I really don't feel like any of the choices I've made in the last 2 months can be described as conscious. I'd probably say it was more like flailing, like in the absence of certainty, I just reached out and pressed a button. There's an expression in Chinese that's been in my head lately... sum zhi tou ming. Your heart knows, your stomach understands. In English, we would simply say trust your gut. Well... my gut is a lying, thieving hyper-hypo. It's a strange thing to feel like a helpless observer in your own life, to not have this gut feeling everyone talks about to rely on. It seems weird not be to able to look at a situation in my own life and be able to subjectively say "this is right for me". I guess I've been playing observer too long. Damn, I've lost my inner eye again...

i just found this in the midst of sorting files... it was a poem I wrote for a Dada and Surrealism class. Actually, this isn't the poem, this is part of a paper I wrote to explain the poem. I ran out of things to say about the stupid poem so in the midst of some academic bullshitting, I started ranting about a midget and a goat... which has actually become a prevailing surrealist theme in my life. Even after all these years, I can still tell which parts are obviously contrived... I bet you can too. I don't know why I'm putting this up, I was just like "oh yeah! the midget and the goat! I remember that!". i think it's just an excuse to go on some rant about random order... so maybe you should skip the poem and go straight to the end part.

In more inopportune times, there would only be the goat to thank, but thankfully, it didn’t appear that sanity was bleeding. Horribly disfigured, perhaps, but in essence, I always presumed him to be anarchic in his depiction of the modern burlesque. For the more feeble-minded, an itinerary of degradation would be in order for the convalescence of dear Samson, whose little midget body has suffered the worst slings and arrows of insults. I never realized the extent of his pain- I was bleeding, after all. And it didn’t seem to matter that the clock was ticking backwards, or that the elevator failed to elevate me. Something was missing. It wouldn’t have occurred to me otherwise, but I happened to be sitting at the time. So I grabbed the little midget by the arms (not realizing that the limbs had become autonomous to what was left of the body). I shook it violently and I said “I renounce sanity! Madness is real! To be mad is to be natural!” It was more than she could bear, but I was compelled to do it. For my own part, I had none. Someone had already taken the ferris wheel to the rodeo, had already drawn the superfluous nipple on the Venus, had already bit and barked at the Pope while he drove away in his golf cart. All I could do was applaud the fact that it was funny.

... it occurs to me that I've always loved writing this way. all equisite corpsy-like and autonomation styles. It's why I love fridge poetry too. it's so nice not to have to make sense. Or to make sense in a really nonsensical way. All my fridge poetry makes perfect sense, it just makes it's point via a dizzyingly circuitous path. Here's my theory:

Fridge Poetry is like Vipassina Meditation.
and furthermore...
Vipassina Meditation is like having a box over your head. (stay with me, here). You are confined by a very specific and somewhat arbitrary set of rules; you have very finite limits and you learn to function within the confines of these limitations, this box. You learn to be happy with a little. So that, when you remove the box, you can truly appreciate the space around you, and use it to its fullest potential.
Fridge Poetry is the same- you have a finite set of words, you learn how to use them wisely, in ways they are not intended to be used, but in the end, they work. They more than work. They say more things in the wrong places than they would if used conventionally.

Ipso facto ergo.... Anita knows how to make a beautiful mess of things.

I find myself constantly oscillating between these two, no three feelings:

1. that, like Freddie Mercury so wisely declares in Bohemian Rhapsody, "Nothing Really Matters..."

2. that, in a very real and humbling and raw way, my life is what I make it... so I better get making, gonsarnnit. And it's this compulsion, of always wanting/needing to prove that to myself, of having this visible, discernable record of my evolving/devolving Self-making, that drives these nonsensical weirdo adventures of mine. Epileptic fits of willful displacement. Pedal terrets syndrome. I have this belief (and I know it's wrong) that the life I make in Toronto has too many helping hands, that it's like cheating. And... if I really mean it, if I really believe that I'm good enough and smart enough, then I have to start fresh. with nothing. See what art I can make with these humble hands. It's part personal validation, part arrogant conviction, that I can do anything and be anything... that it's not for lack of skill and ability, only will and motivation.

3. that life is for playing/trying/experimenting. And my personal mission is to play/try/experiment the hell out of life. RE: 1.

This is me. It kinda freaks me out how stubbornly I believe this shit, but I do. I take myself way too seriously. And I take my life not seriously enough.

how do people start these things?

ok. by way of introduction, I will now list off various idiosyncrasies I had as a kid, and/or things that I inexplicably still hold true to this day:

• I always had to wait until the toilet stopped tinkling before I brushed my teeth, for fear that the water pipes would get mixed up and I would accidentally be brushing with pee water

• I refused to call anyone on the hour or the half hour, because I didn't want anyone to think I had waited until exactly 9-0-0 to call them. Later, I tried not to call anyone on the :15s and :45s either. Still later, any minute that directly touched any of the untouchables were also out, lest someone's clock be set a minute ahead or behind mine. Calling people became a tricky and cautious exercise. As you can see, I spent a lot of time thinking about this....

• I used to think that my parents had planted a one-way mirror in the bathroom and were actually spying on me during my long long hours in there. This thought would usually occur to me while I noticed that I was talking to myself, and would make me stop in mid-sentence and look self-consciously in the mirror

• In high school, i took lots of naps. I would always sleep with my keys in my pockets. Not because it was comfortable, but almost specificaly because it was not. I was always about 5 degrees away from absolute comfort, being able to drift off into unconsciousness. and I think I planned it that way

• If you are waiting for a bus or a streetcar and one passes in the opposite direction, this means that either a) your bus or streetcar will arrive very soon b) your bus or streetcar has just passed you, and you're in for a long wait

• If you know what you want to do, you should do it. If you know what you are afraid to do, you should do that too
  

• I like this idea that we are more truthful when we use language abstractly. That, by being inexact we are actually saying more, or at least saying it more truthfully. communication through metaphor. I don't like getting to the point. I think running around it is way more interesting.