Seymours

I loved My Salinger Year when I first read, back what seems like a long time ago.

It was easy for me to love it, it felt like it could have been about me. I’d done the writing internship thing. I’d done the long distance thing. I had trod those paths just as she had.

One of the handy things about being a writer is that it’s not hard to relate to stories about and by other writers. When Cheryl Strayed talks about books and her desperate desire to be a writer in Wild I know exactly how she feels. I share this longing and passion. It’s not much of a stretch.

This was back the first time I was living in Vancouver, back when I was still trying to be a writer though I was steadily giving up on that dream. I was learning to create content and churn out words. I was taking my worn notebooks to cafes and scrawling out a first draft of Set Your Watch to Moscow Time. I was trying very hard to be a writer — maybe one of these days I will make good on those efforts.

I too had failed to read much Salinger so I took his books out of the library and meandered through them. Catcher in the Rye never really did it for me but then again I was never a teenage boy so perhaps it’s not my cup of tea. I loved Franny and Zooey, and couldn’t help but notice the Seymours all around me as I wandered around Vancouver.

I’ve been meaning to watch the movie and finally did. It’s a good adaption of what is a fairly introspective memoir. It feels about right based on what I remember.

Really, it’s a bit weird and surreal to watch, to reach back in time to the version of myself that resonated so much with a story that felt like it was basically about me. It’s not my story anymore, at least not in the present tense.

Vancouver doesn’t feel the same, I don’t feel the same. I’m no longer enchanted by these streets and it has become a lot harder to imagine a future here. I’m no longer trying to make a living off my words, I have other far more pleasant options at my disposal. A lot of things have happened to me over the last six years and they have changed me.

I bristle at Jerry’s admonition: write everyday. I do a version of morning pages ever since my hand recovered enough for me to be able to write again, the novelty of being able to perform this act the impetus for overly ambitious daily journaling goals, so I suppose that I do write. But it’s much harder to take those lists, those drafts, those ideas, that love of books and make it into something. Life takes up so much time. Mostly I manage to tread water. I want to make things but I don’t know where the energy comes in.

I am working on it. As I try to take Set Your Watch to Moscow Time across the finish line from draft with potential to real actual thing other humans might read I reach across time to the versions of myself that went on the trip, that wrote the first draft out by hand in several notebooks, that typed it up, that edited it, that thought about working on it but never quite got around to it. I re-read Country Driving by Peter Hessler recently as part of my research for Set Your Watch to Moscow Time, and it was a lovely reminder of how I got to be who I am and why I am so determined to finish this book in the first place. Talking to my therapist about the book I said that Hessler and the other writers I loved at different points in my adolescence raised me. It might be a puzzling thing to talk about in therapy compared to all the other things one might discuss but some books can take me back to a moment in time, to who I once was, to what was going on in my life and what was important to me. My Salinger Year was one of those books.

A poster I made for a Skillshare class back in 2015

On books

The guest speaker in my class yesterday was talking about platforms and digital media, and commented that books are no longer the thing. The latter comment broke my heart a bit even if it was right.

Books don’t make you famous or influential in the way they once did. Some people make it work but if Ian McHarg or Humphrey Rempton were around today they’d be using social media.

He certainly has a point.

But I also still love books. I still love the world of writers I have longed to be a part of for as long as I can remember. Perhaps I am a stubborn straggler in this. The amount of books I read is both a party trick and something that has only ever felt truly understood by others who love books and writing the way I do — this connection is almost always occurs while I am reading.

There are some books that do make things so perhaps he is wrong as well. The Happy City and Joyful come to mind. Both are influential books with long lives, both are books I am spending time with in my research.

I think a lot about these platforms and where to post and what to post, where to spend my time. My scattered energies pull me in so many different directions. I want to leave Twitter, it ain’t what it used to be and it’s only going to get worse. I remember Wordpress and Tumble and Neopets. All of them historical artifacts.

I was a photographer once. In the process of accepting that I would no longer be a photographer I stopped using Instagram, I unfollowed all of the people doing the thing I could no longer do that I used to follow. I went away for a while. Then I came back and I started using Instagram for something different. Now I like it far more than Twitter. My account and life are very different. Things change. Our bodies, our lives, our interests, our technologies.

None of these things are permanent in an endless shifting sea.

Then there’s Austin Kleon saying simple good things last. Email lists, the blog on your website.

I might add books.

Something I can hold in my hand, mark up, fold, bend, mess up, hang out with.

Austin Kleon would tell me that blog posts become books. That I should keep writing, writing everyday. Watch it add up. And if the books make you happy and nobody notices who really cares?

I've been writing a book

Several years ago I did the Trans Siberian Railway from Beijing to Moscow with my dad and sister. At the time I said I wanted to write a book about it. I’d always wanted to be a travel writer and this seemed like an excellent opportunity to write about a big trip along a famous route. It started with a name: Set Your Watch to Moscow Time. Then a bunch of notes during the trip.

I’ve been “writing” that book ever since. I did write out a first draft by hand and then typed it up. I printed it out and marked up various notes that I carried around with me.

Mostly I’ve been thinking about it and trying to get it together enough to work on it. To actually set aside time, to begin.

One of the things I find myself doing a lot since getting diagnosed with ADHD is revisiting things I started and then never quite got around to finishing, I spend a lot of time digging through what old versions of myself got done on projects and trying to figure out how to actually finish them. I have two essays and a book all based off of stuff I started and never finished that are on my mind, that make it to the top tier of to write stuff.

The essays won’t be ready to work on until I find some photos so they aren’t my focus currently. Set Your Watch is. It feels good to finally be working on it, to be finding a pace and routine that allows me to get it done. Right now the goal is an hour a week. So far I’ve made more progress in the last three weeks than I have in the last three years.

It feels dauting and impossible. Ridiculous even. Why keep going with this project? Why commit to this effort?

The answer goes back to who I was as a teenager, the decision that I wanted to write a book. I have other stuff I could work on but it’s all in the gathering/research phase. It’s not in the edit the thing you already spent ages writing phase.

I want to start this thing that I finished. I want to learn how to write a book and this seems like as good a chance as any. Whatever I pick I have to say no to a lot of other things I could be doing.

It feels strange to be working on this project because I am convening with so many different versions of myself. The one that planned the trip, went on it, wrote the draft out by hand, typed it, edited it. It’s been almost a decade since I started. It will be longer than that if it ever gets published. It’s weird.

I don’t re-read books but I’m placing holds on the ones I read back in those days. I wonder how they’ll feel now on the other side of all these years?

fore + shadow

The book I’m reading atm -- Fish do not Exist by Lulu Miller -- has some excellent foreshadowing in it. Things come back around and I’m like yes you did mention that briefly

Do I do this as I minimize things, as I slowly let details unfold about myself, about what’s on my mind?

Do we do this as we test the water for bigger things? Things that we’re afraid to say?

As we ease into phase 2, as we go back into the world what is being foreshadowed? What is being planned?

What was foreshadowed and ignored in reports many moons ago? How do ideas and threads and thoughts echo through time and culture? Through lives?

What is being foreshadowed by this moment now? What choices do we make about the future? In a few chapters where will we find ourselves?


2020.05.09 fore + shadow.png

Distanced care

An interesting read on Lithub by Maya Alexandri about being an EMT during covid.

Two men, friends of the patient, were hanging back by the entryway to the apartment building, remote witnesses to the proceedings. I couldn’t tell if they were frightened, overwhelmed, or just trying to stay out of the way

The weird loneliness of this moment.

The field guidance discouraged passengers

And also the inability to access care when you are scared and sick.

Cough and shortness of breath for an hour? We’re not even going to test him

The weirdness of triaging and limited resources.

He held his phone. He began to push numbers on his screen.

He was the first patient I transported who was suspected of having Covid-19.

Then there’s a delightful section on training and decontamination procedures and how the universe works.

Of course, with an attitude like mine, it would happen—as it did—that I was the first EMT to go through the decontamination procedure

It’s an interesting perspective. It’s also cool to be reminded that so many good writers do other things. For a long time I felt like if I didn’t write for a living I was failng somehow but these jobs make you more interesting.

Umm what

One of the fun things about going through old sketchbooks, lists and notes is that moment where I look at something and am like umm what that doesn’t mean anything or make any sense while also knowing that at one point I thought this thing was super important and worth scrawling down.

Restless

I’ve gotten into the idea of rest and what it means for us that rest is so absent from our society, what it means for me that I’m part of a discipline where rest is seen as optional, to be part of an educational pedagogy where resting is seen as frivolous and optional, where the impossible is endlessly demanded of me.

It seems that in a world that doesn’t know how to be still I am unable to rest.

My body needs rest, craves rest. Still it also doesn’t know what that feels like.

By going back to school I accepted that I was going to be pushed to the brink mentally and physically a lot of the time, that the hobbies that keep me going and time and space to meander that make me content would be gone. I don’t know why I am expected to give up so much of myself and my life by being at UBC.

I am a human. I need rest. We all do.

Today I was feeling tired. I’m not sure why. I am cutting back on coffee because various people who are involved in professions related to my well-being (including numerous doctors and two therapists) have suggested that I drink far too much of it and that perhaps that is linked to my anxiety and insomnia.

I don’t disagree so I am attempting to cut back.

It’s painful. I think it’s gonna take several attempts. The mornings are harder and slower.

I don’t miss the feeling of being buzzed from alcohol (I don’t drink these days). I’m already tired and out of it enough of the time. I don’t need substances to do that. I can get there all on my own. I do love the feeling of sharpness, focus and energy that coffee gives me.

Still, as someone who has never been able to sit still and has generally had trouble sleeping perhaps it’s a bit much. I feel like I’m vibrating.

This past year all my established wellness rituals died fast. In my SALA life coffee was a substitute for taking breaks and sleeping. When I couldn’t focus I drank coffee. When I was exhausted I drank coffee. When I was overwhelmed I drank coffee. When I needed to be on and wasn’t I drank coffee.

I wasn’t drinking coffee because I loved it but because I didn’t have time to take care of myself. Coffee is not a substitute for rest or wellbeing.

I know I need to be gentle with myself as I ride the rocky road of shaking that easy kick in the morning. I no longer have any caffeinated coffee at home and the mornings are much harder. I miss that feeling.

When I first got the suggestion that maybe I should think about cutting coffee I was resistant. I was raised on a steady diet of Gilmore Girls. I’ve already lost enough parts of myself recently I didn’t want to lose that too. I am the coffee girl, the one who drinks far more coffee than is reasonable.

But I am also the girl who is very logical and likes research and evidence based decision making so here we are. I will try and it will be rough.

The point I started with, my digressions have digressions, I felt like I couldn’t stay home all day even if I felt crappy. Granted I don’t want to live my life if I feel lousy, because feeling lousy is just a part of life. I couldn’t tell which thing my body wanted from me. Go out or stay home. It’s hard to tell.

I feel like every day I need to be useful and productive and do stuff. I finished two books today yet that doesn’t feel like much. I organized and cleaned.

Still it’s not enough.

The summer as much as it’s a time to rest is a really short window to do all the stuff I don’t have time for during the semester. I have all these ideas and interests and if I’m not making myself useful then it’s a waste right?

Writing on my phone

I’ve been going through stuff I wrote on my phone either in Notes or Google Docs and putting it up as blog posts. It’s working well for me.

The writing stuff out by hand days are behind me and I rarely feel compelled to sit down and write a post. Writing on the go was jiving with me. As I waste time on the b-line (yes making students bus to UBC from the other side of the city because of terrible zoning is a huge waste of my time) I might start writing blog posts.

I want to post more. I want to be more on top of shit.

I’m not gonna be a student forever so documenting and sharing this moment seems worthwhile I’m just usually too exhausted to do it.

Back

I feel like blogging and writing again. It's nice to be back to that.

I needed a break after writing for a living proved to just be really awful and soul crushing. There were a few years there where I didn’t feel like writing.

If you’re meant to do something you get back to it in time.

I also have more energy and feel like a human again. It’s been a year (more or less) and I feel like I’m getting back to myself.

Remote islands

I never made it out to that island. I really really wanted to, my guidebook made it sound so easy and lovely but it didn’t work out.

I probably should’ve done more research but the impulsive side of me won. I was busy trying to keep up with coursework and didn’t have time to piece it together.

Excuses.

I feel stupid, like I failed, like I’m wasting time. I came all this way and I didn’t make it to that island. I decided not to go.

I swapped maybe not making it to hikes via shoddy infrequent bus service for hiding in cafes from the rain. I generally have been longing for that, wanting to sit and read. I got through 50 pages of a book on plants. All things considered it was a good day.

Still I can’t help but feel like I screwed up, like this long shot off the beaten path plan was always stupid, like I need to stop trying to do this because it just ends with me frustrated.

I’m looking out over the sea, from a harbour, wind that smell, the view of where that overly expensive early morning ferry would’ve gone. A couple hours on the water to an island.

I love these remote islands. They pull me.

As stupid as I feel I can’t deny that I love the sea.

This town is nice. It’s so cute I could pinch it’s checks. Everything I’ve eaten has been delicious and a good price.

I know I’m too hard on myself, that this is what travel means, you can’t control the weather, guidebooks aren’t always reliable. I know still I’m beating myself up instead of enjoying the break. 

If I want to travel to these remote islands I need to start driving again, an unfortunate reality of car culture. Anxiety can be worked on and overcome I just have to decide whether it’s worth it. Then there’s the matter of my back and wrist. Can they take driving? I haven’t asked that question of them since everything got bad. I do know that steering wheels are up there in thing a that prompt pain in my arm. Is it worth the time and money to work on that pain? For the mobility that comes with wheels? Rarely do I see value in autonomous vehicles but for rural transportation they seem appealing. I’d definitely take advantage.

I like the breeze and the wind. I like that I came somewhere further and different. I like this town. Maybe it’ll clear tomorrow and I can go to the volcano. I can move and do and feel like I have something to show for my travels.

Travel + fragility

When I read over my draft of Set Your Watch to Moscow Time I’m always struck but two things.

One, I seem so anxious and hesitant. Its like in afraid of my own shadow. I wish I was bolder and braver but instead those pages and filled with my worries and unwillingness to dive in and trust the world.

Two, how fragile I felt. Travel is intense and demanding. It leaves you exposed and vulnerable. It’s great but it’s also scary. I was sick before my first flight landed, before I’d even left Canada. It was not an auspicious beginning to a seven week trip.

I spent the rest of the trip painfully aware of the limitations of my body and how much harder it is to feel crappy when you don’t have he security of home.

I’ve always been the sickly one in my family. My plan for the zombie apocalypse is to die early.

There are echoes of how I felt the last time I was here. The weirdness of sounds altered by injuries. Ringing in my ears. The oddness of how loud everything is. How peaceful and quiet the city is at 5am while it waits to awaken from its slumber.

I’m not who I was. You don’t get multiple injuries in three months and have your life  fall apart and have your body or mind come out the same on the other end.

It’s been a year. Instead of driving back to Calgary to rest and take a break from how badly everything went when I arrived in Vancouver I am in Japan.

I am doing so much better. I am okay but in some ways I’m also not. That dull ache that haunts my wrist is more of an intense and urgent twinge. I’m going to be leaving my camera behind, not convinced that this is the place to try to answer the questions I have about photography.

Can I still do this? Should I try?

Is photography something I should let go of? Is it something I can adapt to?

Travel is intense and physically demanding. I question whether my arm can take the things I used to ask it to do without a thought.

Now I know that I am far from my dumbbells and yoga mat, and that I probably shouldn’t push it. I must balance the NO that pain shouts loudly with Keep Moving, words I try to keep fresh in my mind.

I don’t know what the pain means or what to do about it. I just don’t know.

The uncertainty and fear. The feeling good sometimes and bad others is one of the hardest parts.

I just don’t know anymore.

I miss that person I used to be, the way I used to exist in and experience the world. I would meander and click. Photography the reason to go outside, the main activity when I traveled, a way of seeing and noticing the world.

If not to take pictures than why go outside?

I have gotten better about just being. Just going out into the world.

I am okay but I’m also not. The damage of that sprain haunts my sinews and tissues and decides what I can and cannot have. I am filled with grief and gratitude. I feel so much better than I once could’ve imagined. Still I miss who I used to be and wonder whether I can hold onto parts of that or should let go.

I am constantly aware of the precariousness of my existence and my body is a way that I never was. There are things I worried about not being able to do that I can now do and I try to enjoy the heck out of them. I feel lots of confusing and contradictory things.

I have my phone. I can snap photos with that while I am here. That’s good enough I guess.

Sit down

Just sit down — or stand if you want to be ambitious like that — at your desk. That's it. That's as much as I usually force myself to do.

I don't have a grandiose theory of creativity. I have lots and lots of ideas. A whole cue card stack with projects to get to lingers nearby. Another pile is all of the things I've had ideas to draw. That doesn't even touch the lists. There are so many lists.

There are ideas and inspiration everywhere. I am a scavenger. 

I am also boring.

A lot of this is mundane. It's the same thing over and over again.

It's doing it until you get good.

Things I learned in fencing. Do it 200 times. Do it 200 more. Over and over again.

If you just sit down you'll find something useful to do. My hands, my brain they want something to do. It might not be the thing that desperately, urgently needs doing. Likely as a freelancer drifting about trying to make something of the time before me I don't have enough structure or deadlines for that anyways.

No there's just a lot of time and I need to find something to do with it.

So I sit and I know I'll find something to do.

It's written blog posts. Helped pick a new name for my photography store. Gotten me started on some photo editing.

It's unstructured and lose but it generally does the trick. If I sit here long enough something will happen. No promise it'll be good but it'll be something.

It goes on and on my friend

Recently someone asked me if I ever thought I'd catch up on my old photos, if I'd ever manage to go through them all and do whatever it is that I plan to do with them.

I answered no. Partially because that would take a really long time, even if photography was the only thing I was doing, which it's very much not, it would take a really long time. Then it would reset. Every photo, every new platform, every new disruptive technology is a new photo that needs editing and posting and doing something with.

Those photos in my backlog, for the most part, I did do something with. They're on Flickr or were on a blog. They got posted somewhere at some point. Just in a place that I no longer spend time or that is no longer up or a blog that ran out of free storage so I migrated to another to another to another.

It never ends. I'll always be dealing with it. I just hope I can do a smarter better job.

I'd love to get more of my photos up but I don't even know if that's really the point anymore. Having the files in order, tagged and well backed up, that's a good goal. Having a place where I post all of them, nah.

If I get them all up here or on Instagram or wherever who knows if it'll last.

These things generally don't. They're fleeting.

I have this place now. I can do what I can do and then deal with whatever's next when it hits.

In this age of crisis and chaos it's hard to think about the future, honestly I try not to because it just feels too scary and sad. All we have is this moment, we are promised nothing else. So for now I'm trying to keep Hootsuite fed. I'm trying to get print on demand running again. I want to post here. One day when money is less of an issue I'll do right by my files and have hard drives upon hard drives and some cloudy meatballs.

It's an imperfect mess but it is what it is.

I can still take pictures. I am going to enjoy it. I'm going to try not to repeat the file management mistakes I've made in the past.

Door closing

When I was a teenager I thought a great way to end a movie would be to have a scene where a person walks through a door of a home they're leaving, moving out of, and then closes it. The camera doesn't follow them it just stays focused on that door and that's it. The end. The end of time in that place, that part of their life, the end of the story.

It seems simple and elegant.

I think of that image whenever I move.

Leaving a place, somewhere you have lived, always feels strange and surreal. Sometimes I'm sad to go. Sometimes I have other things on my mind. Always the chaos of moving and packing and trying to decipher which possessions you actually need and want. That feeling like you own all together too many things and they might just eat you. The frustration of knowing that you have something but that it's in one box or another.

I just moved. Something I knew was going to happen, something I should be excited about.

The last several months of my life has been hard and a lot of things have happened to me. I was more than happy to leave where I was living and get a new start. A bold period was the punctuation mark of choice. Over. Done. New start. New home. New part of town. No reminders, no walking by the things telling me how much of a mess my life was.

Then there's the boxes. You have to unpack, make it work for the new space.

It's bigger and I like the furniture better.

I am trying not to fixate on the various ways in which the building and location are probably toxic and killing me. I did it for the last building and I'm sure I'd do it for anywhere else. Part of it's reasonable, part of it's not. I should spend less time thinking about how the world is toxic and killing me. Then again the world should be less toxic and more should be done to stop things from killing me or slowly poisoning me.

It's nice being closer to things, having more to do nearby. It's nice having a bigger room. It's nice to finally have this hard chapter in my life end. For so long all I wanted was for the housing drama and the injuries and health issues to end. For the door to close, for me to be ready to move on.

After getting here, to this new place, that I will slowly feel more and more settled in, I decided to listen to Sun In An Empty Room by the Weakerthans. It's moving related:

Now that the furniture’s returning to its Goodwill home
With dishes in last week’s papers, rumours and elections, crosswords, an unending war
That blacken our fingers, smear their prints on every door pulled shut.
Now that the last month’s rent is scheming with the damage deposit

And:

Know that the things we need to say
Have been said already anyway
By parallelograms of light
On walls that we repainted white

Sun in an empty room

Take eight minutes and divide
By ninety million lonely miles
And watch the shadow cross the floor
We don’t live here anymore

It fits right?

There's also another song that I can't place or track down that feels like it's by the Maccabees and has a lyric referring to box cutters. I can't figure out what it is but I can picture album art from my high school cd stack and hum a tune.

The beauty of the door closing image is that in a movie, or book, any kind of story really, there's just the end. It keeps going but you don't get to know what happens — blah blah sequels but that's not the point. I really like the ending of Firefly because it's so mundane. They are just doing their thing. No drama, just life.

In reality you don't stay on the other side of the door. You are in a truck or taxi going somewhere else, going to what's next. Tired, wondering. Trying to say goodbye as best you can while dealing with life as it comes at you.