my tragic right hip

The strangest thing showed up in the mail, well, I guess it’s not all that strange, but it’s an invitation to a university reunion taking place during Homecoming Weekend at Queen’s in Kingston.

For the most part, I hate rewriting. In fact, I hate most things that involve going back and re-doing what you’ve already done. Maybe it’s why I’ve never finished anything substantial in terms of my own writing—I have no trouble finishing up projects I’m assigned to do, so if someone assigned my own novel, told me I’d be graded, I’d probably finish it. But I’d never go back and re-write it, at least substantially, anyway.

And that’s sort of how I feel about class reunions. They had one at my high school a while back, and I didn’t go because, well, I’m just not all that interested in reliving my “glory days.” For the most part, they ended up with me being diseased, half-crazy and quite in need of serious amounts of therapy, which I didn’t receive until well after I’d finished university, where I’ll have to admit, the same pattern sort of repeated itself.

So I guess, with all the bad press high school and university got in the scope of my ever-longer life, it’s no wonder the last thing on earth I’d like to do is re-live it ten years later at a kegger during Homecoming. Am I wrong in thinking that way?

Here’s the thing. Writing a book is hard. Writing a good book, even harder. And finding a good editor, well, that must be the hardest. Because I just took a quick, ahem, break and started to read, The J.A.P. Chronicles. And before I even got past page five, came across the following cliche: “Neither of them slept that morning. First they ate pancakes and eggs at an all-night diner…” oh yes, it gets worse, “They made love until noon, his white hands moving over her with slow, exhilarating skill, his lips finding places even she didn’t know could be kissed…”

Blech.

Between this week’s conference, taking care of my aunt, and the change in the weather, it’s been a strange couple of weeks. Things are always different when you’re not at home, and I was only back from vacation for a couple of days before leaving again. Once you’re back, you need to play catch-up with your own life, try to talk to friends you haven’t seen in a month, get back into the groove of the regular day, find time to read—all things I haven’t done much of since I got back.

Weather changing always makes me slightly melancholy. Perhaps because it’s a concrete example of time passing, of things moving so fast that it’s important to slow down and breath every now and again. After being forced to leave my last job, a topic I’ve been over about a bajillion times since I started this darn blog, my whole world just changed. I was no longer the “BMOC” and have sort of started again, sat back and tried to not be so angry that it all happened. It’s the bane of my existence, dealing with things in life that are sort of thrown at me, things like the disease, things like getting “reorganized” out of the job I thought I was pretty darn good at, things like losing my mum, that sometimes I find it hard to take control of my own life. Perhaps that’s why I needed to go away this summer. In retrospect, it was so healthy to spend some time by myself, even if now everything is back to normal and I’m forgetting I was even gone in the first place.

An Audience of Chairs, Joan Clark’s magnificient novel, is one of the best books I’ve read all year. I read it while in Lake Winnipeg on vacation and almost finished the entire book in one sitting. The book follows the life of Moranna MacKenzie, a wild, precocious child who grows up to “Mad Mory”, a woman living alone in Cape Breton in her father’s semi-abandoned farmhouse.

The novel tells the story of Moranna and her battle with mental illness, in the form of manic depression, although the disease is never qualified. As Moranna falls in love, gets married and has two beautiful girls, her life starts to come apart at the seams. She can no longer handle being either a mother or a wife and slips into a deep psychosis.

Her husband takes the children away and Moranna spends the next thirty years trying to find them. It’s a beautiful tale of love, loss, and motherhood, one that made me cry at the end because of its simple message of forgiveness. Joan Clark is a rare gem in Canadian fiction, her writing reminds me of both Margaret Laurence and Hugh MacLennan, both in its richness and its ability to create characters with deep tragic, yet still human, flaws. I read Clark’s Eiriksdottir last year and also enjoyed it, and am on a quest now to read Latitudes of Melt, because I think it too will be a wonderful novel.

My RRBF picked me up from work today (summer hours, yay!), as I spent the night with my aunt who just had surgery. We decided to go out for lunch (how decadent!) and went to Utopia, a favourite haunt of mine on College Street. They have yummy, yummy vegetarian food.

The RRBF played Brantford last night at the Ford Plant, but I can’t remember the name of the festival. Oh, the life of a rock star. Annywaaay. We sat down and shortly thereafter George Stromboloupolous came in and started talking shop with some fellow sitting right beside us eating a salad.

Ah, to be an artist and to always be able to have a lazy lunch on a Friday afternoon. Oh, but wait, he’s actually locked out right now, and it’s probably not even his choice to be having a lazy lunch on a Friday afternoon.

Okay, now it’s time for me to get back to my aunty. Oh! And did I mention there’s crazy thunder and lightning in Toronto right now? No? Well, there is. I love it.

…they work so well.

Today I feel bad. Not just the usual under-the-weather, low energy, tired-beyond-tired way I usually feel, but low-down and dirty bad. There’s no reason for it. I don’t have a rash (whew!); the meds aren’t making my stomach particularly upset; I’m not travelling; I just feel terrible. Instead of trying to make it through the work day, I gave up the ghost and left a half-hour early, which is unlike me. For days like this, I use the all encompassing ‘Bad Disease Day’ to describe them. When there’s nothing wrong except that I have a disease and it’s wreaking havoc on my system, it’s really all I cling to, a basic understanding of what might possibly be wrong, and a reason to sit around at home watching bad television. Hello Coronation Street!

I’m addicted to Popwatch, EW’s blog. And I couldn’t agree more with their take on the latest season of Six Feet Under. That show pains me, but that doesn’t stop me from watching it—once I start, I find it hard to stop, and I’ve seen every single other episode. But seriously, hasn’t anyone ever heard of therapy? And Brenda’s in training to become a therapist, couldn’t she just say to everyone, including herself, “Let’s all go on some Prozac until we make it through, it’s only one more episode.” Sigh.

Shucks, you go away for a couple of days to come back to find that they’re making your all-time favourite book into a movie. Now, if there’s anyone I might think about sort of maybe trusting into making a movie of Kerouac’s On the Road it would be Francis Ford Coppola. And that he’s teamed up with Walter Salles, who made the amazingly wonderful The Motorcycle Diaries, I feel a bit better about it, but dream teams have gone wrong before. Cough. Anyone remember the absolutely terrible A.I.?

Annnywaay. It’s hard to make road movies at the best of times, Easy Rider being the obvious exception. And as of 2001, when the project was first tossed about, Brad Pitt was attached to star. Um, he’s the hottest fellow in the world, which means he’s too hot to play Dean Moriarty, and I have a hard time thinking he could pull it off—not to downplay his talent at all, but you know what I mean, he’s too pretty. And how would the hip-jazz loving language of Kerouac’s book translate to the cynical age we live in now? The idea of the beat generation, with their constant craving for that sweet spot that’s almost impossible to define, being captured on the big screen seems almost the opposite of what should happen.

Who knows. Maybe it won’t suck. And maybe I’ll lose 20 pounds by tomorrow.

Aren’t these the ugliest jeans you’ve ever seen? And they are so not worth $275.00 USD. And this is coming from a girl who reads the JCrew catalogue the second it arrives in her mailbox. All I can say is “Ew”: these jeans are as smelly as the dirty hippie who sat upwind of me my last night in Ireland, ruining my only drink with his bad BO every time he lifted up his arms to embrace his equally smelly, dread-locked hippie girlfriend.

And before you say anything, I used to be a hippie-type myself. I have a totally embarrassing tattoo of a peace sign lying on a bed of daisies. No, I’m not lying. How could anything that embarrassing be anything but true?