Sunday, March 25, 2018

I Love Love, Simon

I saw Love Simon for the first time on my birthday (the Saturday of its opening weekend).  Just got out of my third time seeing it tonight. (Spoilers ahead, so be warned.) The theatre was packed; even the front row was full, which made my heart happy because I want this movie to make lots of money so they'll make more like it. As things got started I could tell from many of the reactions that most people were seeing it for the first time. Yay! Love that kind of crowd. We settled in to enjoy.
During Simon’s talk with his mom later in the film ( ❤️) the screen started getting a bit dark and flickery but it self-corrected after a while so I didn’t worry too much. I was disappointed as it’s a beautiful moment in the film and I hoped it hadn’t detracted from people hearing what she was saying, because seriously… SO important. But I didn’t think much more of it at the time.
Anyway, we’re watching and Simon makes his romantic gesture Creek Secrets post, and we see the production of Cabaret, and his friends make up with him and they go to the carnival together, and it starts to get dim again and I’m thinking Oh no. But it’s still playing. He boards the Ferris Wheel. Ride after ride and no one shows. Last call ( 💔). Martin steps up… AND THE SCREEN GOES BLACK.
Every single person in the theatre screamed. Not exaggerating. One long horrified wail: Nooooooooo.
Then we’re holding our breaths because the audio is still working. It’s like the slo-mo of a clock in the movies where every tick of the second hand reverberates like a door slam. Will the picture come back? Does anyone dare leave their seat to report it? I can feel all these people in the dark around me praying to the movie gods: pleasepleasepleassssseeeee….
And - glory, hallelujah! - the image came back. Dim, and a bit wobbly, but just in time to see Blue bound up and join Simon on the Ferris Wheel. Everyone cheered. The girl next to me spilled the rest of her tub of popcorn on the floor and didn’t even care.
The picture held for the rest of the movie and even brightened to normal for the kiss, as if trying to make up for past sins. When the lights came up everyone was smiling, but with the wild-eyed relief of people whose plane had just landed safely after life-flashing-before-your-eyes type turbulence. We had survived a collective experience, y'allBut Simon got his man and we actually got to see it, so in the end all was right with the world.
(Still… here’s hoping viewing #4 isn’t such a nail biter!)

Thursday, March 15, 2018

:(

It's raining outside, and so gloomy.

I'm supposed to read three articles before class tomorrow and write engagement papers about two of them.

I'm going to see my friend Yohei perform in Rent in about 2.5 hours.

I'm dieting, which means it's hard to think about anything but what I'll be eating next. Dinner is the current upcoming meal. I have to keep it in the 500 calorie range. I'm trying to lose 68 pounds before Vanessa's wedding in August.

I'm struggling with the realization that I'm a failure.

I've told Katrina I can live with her when I come back but I don't think I can. My monthly expenses will come to $1,000 even before rent because of my stupid debt.

I'm struggling with the fact that easily 80% of that debt was accrued just in coming up here to get a degree I don't want in a subject I don't understand in a place I don't like very much.

I'm also realizing that if I don't really kill myself to get stuff done between April and August that I won't even actually get the degree.

I'm screwed in a lot of ways, and the rain is falling outside, and the sinus pressure headache I've been fending off with pseudoephedrine for a week is still there lurking, waiting to strike again.

It's my birthday in 29.5 hours, and I'm lonely and I miss my family and friends.

So, you know. Those are just some of the things I might tweet today on this twitter-feed-for-one. Except they're too depressing. Nobody wants to read what you actually think.

Unfollow.

Thursday, March 8, 2018

Twitter for One (Without the Character Limit)

I'm trying this thing where anything I'd be tempted to post on Twitter I post here instead.

Today's entry:

When you have a migraine and a nosebleed at the same time, it feels like your brain's exploding and seeping out onto your chin.

#goodtimes

Wednesday, March 7, 2018

Green With Envy, and Really, It's a Seasonal Color, So I Don't Know Why You're Judging Me Like That

I'm so bored here.

I don't want to do the things I'm supposed to do (i.e. read articles and books on boring, confusing subjects for class or transcribe for my grad assistantship or write my thesis).

I don't really want to go out and do things, with the exception of seeing movies (up here, it's all "heritage this" and "handmade or homegrown that," and a bunch of bands playing, which I might enjoy except there are all these unwritten rules that make me feel like a dumb outsider every time I try to go to one of these things).

I don't really want to get up and go out at all. Like, it's cold and drab outside, and where would I walk? To campus? Downtown, where there are shops for me to spend money I shouldn't be spending and restaurants for me to eat food I shouldn't be eating (I'm on the diet/exercise regime again, we'll see how long it lasts). I miss having a job, like a real job where I make an almost-living wage in exchange for the things that occupy my time. I was thinking about starting on some adventure boxes, because that was a really fun project over Christmas and I'd like to possibly expand it into a business opportunity, but I don't want to accrue any extra stuff up here because I'm going to have to figure out a way to get all my stuff home in about half a dozen suitcases between now and August, and I'm only returning home once before The Final Return. (Dramatic capitalization to emphasize feelings of dread.)

To be fair, most people I know all have obvious issues too. They have families and lives and responsibilities, but they're open about the fact that they don't have their shit together. Some days are hard. I appreciate that.

Then there's the girl I grew up with at church who was always so awkward and ended up marrying this military guy who seemed so controlling at the time that we all felt kind of bad for her. But she's travelled the world with him, going to all these cool places. She doesn't have my money problems or my health issues or seemingly any mental health problems at all. She has a spouse who loves her, friends who care about her, and in the last several years she's developed a passion for art and been going to conventions and selling her art online and making this successful side business with this creative passion of hers. And now, today, she's gone on Facebook looking for advice for people about whether she should self-publish her illustrated YA novel or try to ship it around to publishers. And the thing is, she's good. She'll find an agent and get the thing published, I know she will. And it's just like - gah. The envy in my heart right now. Like, I could burst into tears. Because she's had this pretty, nice, easy life, right? At least that's what it looks like from the outside. Like she has everything. And now she's going to be successful at the one thing I care about but have never been able to do properly. She's going to have this, and I'm just a failure.

Because of course that's the thing I should be doing with my time. Writing. But the walls inside my own mind seem to make even that impossible these days.

Maybe someday I'll be able to say this was all just me building up experiences I could use in my storytelling. Like, how could I write about how pathetic Sid's shut-in lifestyle is unless I experienced it myself? How could I write about Em's experiences with not having a home anywhere unless I knew that myself? How could I write about the Doorkeeper trapped in the House, unless I knew a bit of that eternal cabin fever myself?

But the thing about writers is our trade is in lies. Even failed writers like me are still good at making up deceptions. And the biggest deception I'm spinning is that somehow all of this will be worth it, that I'm any good at anything, that I shouldn't just give up and never try again.

Ugghhhhhhhhhh.

Maybe I should just call it quits, go back home to my family, and try to clean up all my messes.

Or maybe I should just take a walk to clear my head.

Tuesday, March 6, 2018

If At First You Don't Succeed...

Trying this again. Here's a little tracker which will supposedly change as I progress:




We'll see!

My goal is to be down to 170 by Vanessa's wedding in August. This seems unrealistic to me, but I'd at least like to be below 200 which is slightly more manageable.

Let's do this.

Monday, March 5, 2018

Snow in St. John's

This is adapted from a journal entry I wrote on February 28, 2018.

It snowed yesterday for about seventeen hours straight, the first serious snow we've had this winter. (It's been unseasonably warm.) But this morning when I woke up the flakes had stopped coming down. Because of my attempts to correct my sleep inversion, I managed to be awake for all of it. I'm shifting my sleep schedule forward three hours at a time, and on this particular day I woke up at midnight and stayed awake until five. The flakes were falling thick and fast that whole time.

(I felt a bit like Gilgamesh, tasked to stay awake. Like it was an enchantment, and as long as I could keep my eyes open the snow would keep falling - soft and magical, and perfect.)

But I couldn't stay up. I was nearly cross-eyed after being awake that long, not to mention having done eight hours of transcribing work for my graduate assistantship. I'm not supposed to tell anyone about the contents of the interviews, but I'll be vague here: there was a part of this interview with a woman from Eastern Europe who came to Canada to work after university and just settled here afterward. She was talking about returning to the country of her birth and how it wasn't really home, how she doesn't belong there but she doesn't have roots in this new country either. "I don't really think I know what home is anymore," she said at one point. "That's something I won't ever know again."

With snow falling down outside the window, and this woman's words echoing in my head, I fell asleep that "night" and woke at three the next morning feeling a bit too much cabin fever to stay still. So when it grew light out I went out to wait for a bus so I could go to the mall, walk around indoors a bit, and maybe watch a movie.

It was foggy out, and chill, but not nearly as cold as I'd hoped. The snow piled high, high, high on either side of the road, so I was forced to walk through the remnants left behind by the snowplows  - that velvety brown mush that splats to liquid beneath your boot tread. The house behind the bus stop on Merrymeeting Road had these enormous icicles hanging down from the porch roof, drip-drip-dripping. But I climbed the pure white mountain next to the pole with the bus flag and stood waiting. It's a Rule of the Universe that I'm always either ten minutes early or thirty seconds too late for a bus. Fortunately that day was the former.

(I forget a lot, you know. I forget it constantly, that the sea is right there. Only a few days before this I'd been up overnight with my usual sleep inversion nonsense and realized I could take a walk outside and catch the sunrise, so I walked down a block or two, past the Sobeys grocery store and the Rooms museum, and I found the perfect spot atop this little hill, and I watched the sun come up, and it was such a surprise even then to realized that the glitter in the rosy light was water, and there were boats gliding across the harbour in that orange glow of daybreak.)

But today, in the snow, there was nothing there to remind me. It was cold and white and still like the world is after a snowfall. Even the people who were up and about seemed subdued, caught under its spell. And that's a world, a moment, a circumstance where I might expect to smell pine trees or wood smoke, or maybe mountain-type smells. But I was standing there looking toward the east, because that's the direction the bus comes from, and I smelled it. Not any of those things. I smelled the sea.

It's not a smell you can mistake for anything else. Nothing compares. (Cue Sineád O'Connor.) But seriously. I know that smell. I have a hundred happy memories linked with it - this same sea, glimpsed in Cape Cod or Topsail Island or Cherry Grove or Daytona Beach. I've smelled that smell most often in summertime, with sun beating down overhead, a warm prickle on the skin. I've smelled that smell with sand stuck to my legs. With sunsets and beach chairs, star-gazing and shell-gathering. While watching the waves smooth away castles and messages sculpted from sand. I know that smell like I know my childhood phone number, and the way it feels to hug my mom and dad, and the exact layout of the bookstore where I used to work that doesn't even exist anymore.

But I've never in my life experienced that familiar scent in this way. Standing up to my knees in perfect, pristine snow, surrounded by fog, listening of the plink of icicles behind me, as a bit of wind gusts full in my face and I smell the whole of it, that big, vast, immeasurable mystery, and I remember. The ocean. It's here.

It was the weirdest, most wondrous realization.

Two worlds crashing together, yet making not a sound.