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So I’ve seen a number of films over the past few days but I’ve sincerely limited my time in front of the television, which is good…

On Monday I watched Inside Man (#6). Spike Lee is one of my favourite filmmakers, Crooklyn one of my favourite films, so I’ll pretty much watch anything he makes with the exception of the abysmally reviewed She Hate Me. The trailer looked great but it sort of belies the film a bit; you get the impression that it’s all about action, when it’s more of a film noir take on the traditional heist movie. Denzel’s excellent, but there’s a silly subplot that involves his girlfriend/lover that didn’t need to be there that kind of weakens his character. My favourite though? Well, besides the always impeccable Clive Owen and Jodie Foster, Chiwetel Ejiofor, who he plays Denzel’s partner. As two hostage cops sent to deal with a bank robbery (run by Owen) that doesn’t end up being what it looks like, Ejiofor and Washington are old-school cops in an age of big money and even bigger regrets. The film was a bit too long but it was okay for a Monday afternoon.

On Tuesday, I watched two films (I know I’m sorry!) but I’d been so good up until then and I was so tired and not feeling well after seeing the super-fancy disease doctor that I baked out in front of the tube.

Happy Endings (#7) is an indie film with shockingly good performances by everyone in the extremely large cast. The multiple storylines in the film hold together well, and leave you with a good sense of wanting to know how they all come into one by the end. I really liked this movie a lot, and even came out of it with a bit of a crush on Tom Arnold. Honestly. I’m not kidding.

The Assassination of Richard Nixon (#8). I’d been wanting to see this film for a long time after reading EW’s excellent review. Based on the life of Sam Bicke, a somewhat unassuming fellow whose life falls apart inch by inch turning him into a man whose only goal seems to make a point. He can’t hold down a job, his marriage has fallen apart, and he can’t let anything go, and it’s this incessant longing for respect (for what really, because Sam doesn’t really do anything to deserve it) that pushes him toward a violent and upsetting act of terrorism. Sean Penn’s wonderful, as per usual, but he tended to drop a bit into I Am Sam territory with some of Bicke’s mannerisms.

But now I’ve got about a million shows on the Faux-vo to get caught up with so I might be movieless for a while!

No exact date, Queen’s University, 1991.

Sometimes I feel relieved. Free here from stress. Free from the burdens of my intrinsic life [what exactly does that mean?]. Emotions really take you for a ride [um, yeah, cliche much?]. Maybe it’s better not to get involved. “I laughed.” Everyone always says that when they are despondent. Plato hated the body for this very reason [good to know I’ve got such a solid handle on Plato, wha?]. It’s constantly betraying the soul. Laughs at our emotions because they always seem to get the best of us. They laugh, cry, scream, and hurt more than physical pain can ever imagine.

***

And thus ends Ragdoll’s slightly-post teenage take on the power of emotions within the body and its inevitably duality. Do you think I missed my calling as a philosopher? This stuff is cracking me up.

October 15, 1991.

[Queen’s University, Kingston]

I am drowning in a sea of baseball caps and buttheads. There is no escape. I’m being engulfed and swallowed in the swarming mass. People here are identical messes reaching blindly for the same goal of acceptance. Lost in the comatose world of the university. Mr. Bones [note: I have no idea who I’m referring to here, I can only assume it’s my high school boyfriend, Mike] is my escape. No one is changing at least the rabbit isn’t alone [what freaking rabbit?]. Our friend has just juxtaposed from one stifling situation to another. I am an amicable distaste for them. I am not one of them. Nor will I ever be so. Destitute. Life is desiring more, much more than here will ever be able to give me.

I think I must look lonely because people are always giving me that pitying look. You poor tired soul. The others look at me as a big loser. Stinking, smelling, foul mouthed f*cking loser. Through this I can accept myself. Take advantage of the institution. Don’t let it drown me, but float through. Numb, futile and unacceptable. What is acceptance? Talking to buttheads about a great f*ck or a memorable night of boozing. Not my scene. I need to take pride in my solitude. STOP RUNNING [yes, I actually wrote this in all caps]. Learn, expand and engulf. Not let it engulf me. I will be the winner. And I will be accepted. I can feel it’s already begun. What they don’t know is I’ll reject them flat on their f*cking privileged asses.

***

Good lord. Do you think I took myself a little too seriously in my first months of university. And perhaps I was maybe reading a bit too much Henry Miller. HA!

I might need to think up a new title…

Annnywaaay. The anemia has cleared up, which means they’ve sort of found my blood (yay!). I’m also cleared to go back to work on Monday (which is good because I’m getting a bit bored of being by myself so much). However, the disease situation remains the same. The fatigue, the achy joints, the kidney involvement, the sinus infection, it’s all unchanged. In fact, it’s pretty much the same as I was feeling six, eight months ago. The only difference being they’re still not sure how to treat me. So, we go around the bend again, more tests, and I see him in a month. That’s when I guess they’ll decide which super-fancy drug to put me on to battle the Wegener’s.

Until then, I’ve got to go for a bone density test and an MRI because my other hip, not the tragic one, has been hurting and they’re worried about avascular necrosis. Now wouldn’t that be a fun complication? My body just seems to be rejecting the drugs at every single turn.

Oh, and he’s given me three weeks worth of antibiotics to take, which should be fun…but maybe, at least maybe, it’ll clear up my stupid sinus headaches. It’s a never-ending cycle it seems. The more confused they are about me, the more confused I am about knowing what’s going on…

David Liss is hardly a household name, but I think maybe he should be. I’ve read three of his books now, and I’ve sincerely enjoyed each one. The first, The Coffee Trader, I found fascinating because of all the historical information, but it was also about the early days of the stock market, which isn’t as boring as it might sound. The next, A Conspiracy of Paper, was also good, but not as engaging as The Coffee Trader. Liss’s latest book The Ethical Assassin, isn’t an historical novel per se (it’s set in Florida in the early 1980s, which is not contemporary but not the 17th century either), but it’s a great read regardless.

The Ethical Assassin tells the story of Lem Altick, a teenaged door-to-door encyclopedia salesman, who happens to be at the wrong place at the wrong time while trying to raise enough money to go to Columbia. Lem gets mixed up in the middle of a drug operation, witnesses two people being murdered by the so-called ethical assassin, and winds up on a rollicking adventure that inevitably leads to more crime, redemption and a new girlfriend. I guess you can call it a coming of age tale, a sort of buldingsroman wrapped up in a noir-ish crime novel. But it’s also funny and suspenseful (Liss does that whole end the chapter on a ‘dum-dum-dum’ note that Dan Brown should patent), and really well written.

While the book is mainly about Lem and his dealings with this ethical assassin, Liss manages to incorporate a number of interesting themes in the novel. Crooked cops, backwater crime and the typical bullies aside, the reasons behind the crime behind the crime (the murders) are all tied in some way to animal rights, and Liss is very adept at weaving the socio-political philosophy into the story in an interesting and not remotely pedantic way. All in all I really enjoyed this book, as I have been with many of the more serious (read, non-chicklit) books I’ve been plugging through.

I’m back on the Book A Day track now. And seeing as I’m spending the better part of the next three days at various different doctors’s appointments (super-fancy disease doctor, family doctor, eye doctor, naturopath), hopefully I’ll be able to get a lot of reading done.

I have crashed. Completely. I’m so tired and achy and feeling so gross that I can barely stand up. I’m trying to finish my Book A Day challenge for today, but I might have to get started again tomorrow. I’m am not looking forward to seeing the doctor tomorrow. Not one bit.

Yesterday was a crackerjack day in the city. I’m guessing the spring forward time shift might have affected people in a strange way, including myself. Having been totally exhausted from the film shoot on Saturday, I got up kind of off kilter, far too early (5 AM, cat wanted out), and then switched the clocks. Then I got ready to go see my Movie of the Day (#6), Thank You For Smoking, with some friends.

As I get on to the streetcar, some half-cracked woman was there wearing way too much makeup and oddly mismatched clothing was ahead of me. She refused to move inside the car and stood there beside the driver. I had to slide around her to drop my ticket in, only I’m carrying a book and a knapsack, so of course, I drop the book and one of the zipper-thingys on my pocket breaks so I’m all discombobulated.

I hear the driver say, “Miss, you need an extra ten cents,” but I don’t assume he’s talking to me because there’s a crazy lady standing right there. But then the crazy lady says, “You need to put in ten cents.” Even she gets it. I don’t. They changed the fares and I need an extra ten cents with my ticket. Ohhhhh. Okay.

Then, as I exit at Museum station, I hear a super loud crash just to my left and see two people get into a car accident. They both stepped out of their respective cars so thankfully they were all right but holy crap the woman was mad. She started screaming and yelling and all kinds of stuff. Traffic stopped on Avenue Road, obviously. And since I didn’t see anything, just heard the loud crack, I didn’t stick around. I felt guilty for about a nanosecond. Why is that?

Movie A Day mini-review: Thank You For Smoking is okay. It’s a smartish-satire with a great performance by Aaron Eckhart. Katie Holmes sucks, but thankfully she’s not in it that much; and I’m tired of her in these “she’s the hot one” roles because, frankly she’s just not, she’s droopy. Overall, I liked it, but thought that it didn’t deserve the applause at the end.

And some people in our audience enjoyed it a lot, you know those guys that scream, “Look at his face!” as if we all couldn’t see it stories and stories in front of us at that very moment. Okay, I know booming grannies are older and deserve our respect, but come on, when you arrive ten minutes late to the movie (after the previews), then take another ten minutes to figure out where you’d like to sit, all the while having a conversation at full volume, decide to sit in the middle of an already seated row and then continue to chatter away as if you’re having coffee at the King Eddy, you deserve to be harshly shushed. Please. We respect you, we do, we just don’t want to hear from you—in the middle of the movie…

Annnywaaay. So, then I went off on my quest to find a pair of Livs boots, because they’re crocheted (how cute is that?). I went to four or five different stores with no luck. They’re all gone. Upon my travels I walked by Yonge and Bloor and saw that it was all corded off with police tape because someone lit themselves on fire in a Tim Horton’s. At first they thought it was a terrorist attack, but now they suspect he either wanted to commit suicide or simply torch Tim’s.

So to sum up, one embarrassing moment on the TTC, one fender bender (luckily no one was hurt) and one tragedy where a man felt that it was better to light himself on fire than finish that cup of coffee. Talk about a manic Sunday.

Yesterday, I think I might have found my calling. Kate graciously allowed me to be the Assistant Director on her short film that we shot yesterday. I had a clipboard people. And a stopwatch. And I got to say, “Lock it down, we’re going for picture.” Which was quite possibly the most fun I’ve had in a long while. I spent the whole day being giddy and giggling.

Considering I’d never done the job before, and really had no clue what I was doing, I’m super relieved that it all turned out so exceedingly well. Making a movie has long been on my life list of things I’d like to try to do one day (the others include being in a rock video [done, I was in my RRHB’s first video briefly], writing and publishing a novel [so not close to being done], being an extra [not done], and so many more that it would be imprudent to list them here). I love movies, watch them all the time, and totally enjoy seeing the complex and fascinating process behind how they get made.

It was a long, long day though. But it’s certainly got me thinking about how I’d love to do it again. Making call sheets, assisting the director, organizing people, and still sort of being involved in the creative process was a fun way to spend a Saturday I would have otherwise just been at home. And because it was such a small set, I ended up doing a lot of other jobs too: transport, craft services, some PA stuff, and it was all fun. And I learned a lot too, about gaffers and lights and dulling spray and how much film to use and how to say “rolling” and to gently nudge people in the right direction when they’re taking too long and to joke with the crew and to laugh and all kinds of other things.

Now I’m super tired though because I’m still not sleeping from the prednisone, and my feet hurt so much that I’m not sure I’ll be going anywhere or doing anything today the exhaustion is that deep, but what a grand time I had. I can’t wait to see the final product. I know it’s just going to be fabulous.

When my writing seminar ended the other week, our teacher sent around a note afterwards that stemmed from something one of my classmates had said when we all went out afterwards for a drink (cranberry and Perrier, sigh, my life is so boring!). We were talking about the inner life of a writer, what to reveal, what to keep hidden.

A lot of us were saying we write about other people in our lives, in veiled form of course, because that’s what seems to come naturally. In the note, he told us to try and be brave enough to reveal parts of ourselves that we don’t find easy to break open for the whole world to see. That’s where the good writing will come from, deep inside your own fear and inhibitions.

I guess that’s kind of like the idea behind the blog, a glimpse into the girl behind the girl, if that’s at all interesting. Why I’m thinking about this very early on spring forward Sunday? Well, I went out for a little while on Friday night to a reunion of all of my old chums from my last job.

That job spoiled me for life. Not in the fact that it was the best job I’ve had or will have but more because of the fact that I loved, respected and admired the people I worked with so much. I miss them. I miss the environment. I miss caring about a project so deeply and putting your heart and soul into it and knowing that you’ve built something great.

But what the whole thing made me realize is that I’m still not over the whole bloody firing situation. This goes deep, deeper than the actual event, deeper than the idea of being told you have to leave something that you love, and right down into a lot of my own insecurities and issues.

The old VP showed up. In a way, I hold him responsible for a lot of the crap that happened. Not in the sense of my own personal poor behaviour (the ridiculous emails, the acting like a mean girl, the childish temper tantrums), but he’s the one that hired the Boss From Hell (and then she promptly got him fired as well), and sort of was the worst captain of our already sinking ship. Thing is, I couldn’t talk to him, didn’t even really want to be polite and say, ‘hello, how are you doing, what are you doing?’

I wanted to see everyone else. In fact, I loved seeing everyone else. But I don’t know what it is in me that can’t let this go. I’m so hard on myself, so hyper-critical, that I look upon it all as one big failure. And I’m also still so angry with myself that I let the situation get so out of control, that I didn’t see how bad it actually was and try to make it better.

In the end, I internalized all of the stress about the situation, which, in turn, my body turned back into the disease. And I know how wrong it is to blame some poor, clueless, fired VP for some of that, but I just couldn’t help it. A small part of me wanted to scream at him and say, ‘Look around at how many lives you impacted with your ridiculous and utterly awful decisions. Stand up and take responsibility for your failure. Accept the fact that you messed this up and as a result all of these great people had to make major changes in their lives.’

But you know, in the end, I also got to thinking about how it was my life and I had the power to change it. I could have left that job, but I didn’t. I could have been a better person and climbed up above all of the crap, but I didn’t.

It’s been almost a year and a half since I lost that job. And for most of that time, I’ve been trying to build a new career at a great new employer, and things are going well. But the fact of the matter is I’ve also been battling the disease all this time too. Things aren’t necessarily going as planned there either and being off so much because I’ve been so sick for so long isn’t going to help me get to where I want to go.

Which leads me to the whole point: forces in my life have always led me to change; it’s never been the other way around. I’ve spent the better part of my life just dealing with the tragedy in it and I think it’s about time I turned a corner. It might be a good day, being spring forward and all, to do some changing of my own. Now the only question remains how. A bit of spring cleaning for the soul, if you will.

Things are humming along with one week left in my exile on illness street. A couple of tasks I’ve accomplished and crossed off the list in the past few days:

5. Get groomed – essentially get my hair done. I haven’t had it cut or coloured since before the non-wedding. I’ve also made an appointment to tame my ridiculously overgrown eyebrows. They’re frightening these days.

I got my hair cut yesterday and because I’m afraid of the fact that it’s all going to fall out again (as it does with every new medication), I got it cut really short. However, I did step out of my comfort zone and dye it very dark brown with slightly reddish highlights. It’s very dramatic and I’m not sure if that was the right decision but hey, it’s only hair dye. If I hate it next week, I’ll dye it back.

14. Finish uploading my music library back on to iTunes. Download the rest of the suggestions that friends have sent. And if you have any idea of songs I might like to write to, please send them along, I’m currently taking requests…

Done and done! It took forever, but my iTunes is now 1477 songs richer, bring on the party shuffle!