Not Necessarily As Advertised

Isabel is just descending on us now. The trees are whipping around and the rain is falling in sheets. We're not expecting anything too terrible - 7 cm of rain and gusts of wind to 70 km/h. The cat isn't even looking alarmed. Still, it should be a good show.

I've not felt like updating this last while. I'm going through a lot of stress and self-doubt and I haven't had a really good night's sleep in about two weeks. I've been analyzing what's going on and creating entries about it in my head, but when I sit down to write, I couldn't be less interested.

I think some powerful energies are charging in me for some potential positive moves but the backlash against change is frightening. I remind myself that the best thing to do is to just keep accomplishing incrementally.

I sometimes feel enormously foolish about advertising my great, planet-shaking plans here and and to flesh and blood friends. Since I began publically journalling, I have promised I would write and direct a feature-length video, release another album and tour internationally, and probably other promises that I've already forgotten. Well, I'm going to keep promising. Some of these things come true and most don't. I get excited about a lot of plans and the ones that really can work out, work out.

I'm impatient with my life. I want to make art and I want to make it every day. But I insist on doing it in a context that doesn't jeopardize us financially. When I'm feeling bitter and childish, I blame Snake for not having sacrificed his life to encourage me in my dreams. Actually, after years of hyping myself in my head as a hedge against self-doubt, I think I'm better off with a partner who is only somewhat interested in my artistic endeavours. He supports them; he says at the end, "that's great -- good work," but if I decided never to write a song again, it wouldn't really bother him.

What that actually means is that he loves me for other things: for my intrinsic human qualities. This is baffling to me because I sometimes think I'm only worth the quality of my writing or singing or whatever, and I use my talents as my strategy for winning friends. I think Snake's unflagging belief in my worth as a good person is slowly having an effect on me. I'm embarrassed for making high-falutin' rock and roll promises to my friends and then not fulfilling them -- but I'm not devastated. I don't have the same neurotic fixation that I must always impress to be loved.

Last night, I slept better. I still woke up 5 a.m. and tossed for a while, but my heart wasn't racing and I wasn't pinned to some bug-board and ridiculed as the least interesting specimen in the lab. Instead, I spent 15 minutes trying to remember Michael J. Fox's name (I've been blanking on TV and movie trivia lately) and reviewing the first episode of the new survivor (Which was thunderously WOW, by the way).

That's an improvement.

Trivia about stuff I like

The following is evidence that I am not afraid to be perceived as shallow (this disclaimer, however, is evidence that I am afraid):

May I say that Survivor is the greatest thing on television? I know it's a minority opinion, but it excites the hell out of us here at the house of ethnic escapades. And it was a great season kick-off last night, from the surprise shipwreck opening to the first major strategic mistake by Nicole that got her kicked off. No other show can lead us to so many passionate discussions about game play, human foibles and the nature of society.

Also, I'm becoming a teenage Japanese girl.

For those of you who don't know, there are legions of Japanese girls consuming (and creating) stories about gay boys in love. Some are original characters and some are beautifully produced fan comics featuring the big-robot-action manga characters falling for each other.

I picked up the manga, Gravitation, by Maki Murakami this week. It's about Shindou, a Japanese high school senior who is trying to make it big as an electronic pop composer/performer. One night, walking alone in the dark, his lyric sheet flies from his hand and is caught by a sexy man in his 20s who reads it, openly ridicules it as peurile and then moves on.

Shindou becomes obsessed with this man whom he falls madly in love over subsequent, equally humiliating meetings. The book is romantic drivel, but it is enormously engaging, funny and passionate. Shindou, his earnest and ardent passions leading him from one humiliation to another, is sweet likeable and real. Murakami writes her own goading comments in the margins that increase the level of giddiness: Shindou, up all night trying to find the object of his love, hasn't studied for his world history test and during it is blocked by the memory of the cabbage dish his mother made the night before. He keeps thinking the answer to the question about early Christianity is "Flamenco! Cabbage! Flamenco!" and the artist writes in the margins, "It's Francisco, you idiot!"

Holy shit! The website says it's going to be 14 volumes. okay.

Anyhoo, that's some of the stuff I like now.