RuffBlog

As long as Oprah still believes in... me....

ah. guilt. drugs. recovery. and facial hair.

do they go hand in hand?

james, i'll buy your book tomorrow.

and that's no lie.

Apollinaire

Someone brought this to my attention today:

"Come to the edge.”
“We can't. We're afraid.”
"Come to the edge.”
“We can't. We will fall!”
"Come to the edge.”
And they came.
And he pushed them.
And they flew.

Guillaume Apollinaire, 1880-1918

the job...

so i've had a new job. for a few weeks now. launching a book project about mental health awareness for senior citizens. and i like it. it feels creative. and meaningful.

except it's on the other side of the city.
it doesn't pay well.
the office isn't efficient. or at least... i'm not. efficient. in it.
the job is not turning out to be the creative opportunity i wanted.
and it isn't working with my school schedule.

so i have a new job. and i guess it's not so great after all.

i've been kind of ballistic this week. trying to juggle it with my macroeconomics midterm, and a paper for FFAR, the Canadian art/issues class.

and i'm starting to realize... if something doesn't feel right... maybe it's not me failing. it's me failing to find the right thing... and if i just pick up and move on... well, it isn't a bad thing afterall.

it's just, still, not the right thing.

so a few more days i guess... wrap it up as best i can... and i'll just move on.

i picked up a book i had on my shelf all year. i only bought it because i thought the cover was pretty:

"Innervation: Redesign Yourself for a Smarter Future" (Guy Browning)

And it cheered me up tonight. It suggested an exercise:

Stand in front of a mirror.

Repeat the following:

"The world is an awful place. Everything in it is conspiring against me. Never has a person suffered as much as I have."

Stare at yourself a little more.

Continue, until you get it.

health spies....?

yesterday i was sitting at my desk at the office... and this pamplet on patients rights/complaint procedures was sitting there. i took a look, then phoned the number on the back...

"i'm just curious... if i had a complaint about Concordia's health clinic, would that fall under your jurisdiction?"

She said yes, and when I declined to actually submit a complaint, she asked for my name and contact info... I raised an eyebrow but gave her the info, then I hung up and went back to work...

This afternoon, I got a voicemail from the clinic... and I don't have an appointment...

I'll find out tomorrow... in the meantime, I'll occupy my time with conspiracy theories. And this book... my mid-term is on Monday:

Naked Economics

i'm getting nothing done

i wish the pieces would just fall together. i'm stuck. the book says so:

"Unstuck: A tool for Yourself, Your Team , and Your World" (Keith Yamashita, Sandra Spataro)

Technorati Tags: vermont

CBC Arts: Study examines Canadian book-buying habits

CBC Arts: Study examines Canadian book-buying habits

Which part is the good news... that Canadians spend almost as much on books as they do on movies, or that 48 percent of all Canadian households bought books in 2001?

Meanwhile, I've taken to Amazon's Prime... it was nearly a hundred bucks Canadian, and everything has to be shipped to Jay's house, but it's basically an incentive program that ships every order for a year via 2-day express post, at no additional charge. It even works on used books! And the $$ of the membership is being offset by skipping GST/PST....

How to Win Friends and Influence Pallets

I'm reading (well, listening) to the 1930's classic "How to Win Friends and Influence People" on my ipod, my pick of the month for my Audible subscription. I've been downloading an audible title each month for a while now, along with weekly editions of NPR's Studio 360 radio show on art, culture, and society.

It's a great way to turn my metro commute into a quiet, thoughtful moment I enjoy, instead of having to feel indignant about being wrongfully subjected to the banality of plebeian drudgery.

A quote:
"It is the individual who is not interested in his fellow men who has the greatest difficulties in life, and provides the greatest injury to others. It is from among such individuals that all human failures spring." - Alfred Adler.

So... as I work through the audiobook, I find myself thinking about the areas in my life where I'm effective, and where I'm not, in dealing with people. And one of them, perhaps, is with critiques.

Is it wrong to feel like I ought to be able tear bad work to shreds? I've been at this nearly a year now. I feel like the same simple people will be churning out the same bad work, subjecting everybody to the same awkward moment where we have to bit our lips, fully conscious that the lame artist knows just how bad their work is.

I don't feel like it's honest. Or useful. I feel like nobody is stepping up to the plate.

And I do sometimes. And then I feel like a jerk for it. Because people smile politely, but deep inside they hate me for saying it, they hate the rest of the class for pretending they don't have an opinion, and the teacher just looks sympathetic... though i'm not sure to whom.

Tonight, I looked at someone's work and thought... "why is he using a georgia o'keefe pallet?". then i felt like an ass, because why can't he? why am i gendering and devaluing COLORS?

I'm doing a drawing studio project where I draw chairs. Lots of them. Chairs alone. Chairs in rows. Chairs with people on them. Chairs in the museum. But mainly, I'm just trying to produce a portfolio-worthy set of glam-ish shots of famous chairs... is that like design porno? it might be. Anyway, I have this book on chairs, and it describes the Eames Chair as "unashamedly masculine"... and I got kind of pissed of at that, like it was some product of feminist discourse, entirely undeserved and inappropriate for a basic "book of chairs".

Then I realized. If I could buy any chair, I'd probably buy an Eames Chair. And I'm a man.

I'm ashamed.

Susan Sontag

I feel oddly, profoundly saddened by her death.

Yet, I've never actually read any of her work. She's just one of those thinkers I sense that I should know.... that someday, as if it's fixed in my future, I'll pick up a book or an article and I'll be connected to some idea that has, for me, always existed.

Free half-year subscription to Maisonneuve: Eclectic Curiosity

It's hip. smart. young. montreal. It's like me, but has more substance, and costs less in the long run.

I was on their mailing list, and this just landed in my in-box. A seemingly no-strings invitation to get three issues free.

Life Outside

I'm reading "Life Outside: The Signorile Report on Gay Men: Sex, Drugs, Muscles, and the Passages of Life"

Everyone should read this book. I think I need to send it to my mom.

The first part describes "the cult of masculinity", in the same way that Naomi Wolf deconstructs the pressures of female "beauty".

I take issue, however, with his fleeting remarks on the "bear" sub-culture.... he's using the bear aesthetic in a positive contrast to the narcissism of the smooth muscular circuitboy.... saying bears are more welcoming of diverse body types, less body conscious, blah blah blah. But he's saying this within the context of his criticism of hypermasculinity.... and this poses problems....

Do bears become bears because they were rejected by the twinks? I mean, I started off as a twink, albeit a furry one, and I never really got very far in twinkidom, but I seem to be infiltrating the ranks of bear country with remarkable ease.

Are bears less self-conscious? Do they have higher self-esteem? Are they more accepting of others? I'm not so sure.

The second thing I want to highlight is Signorile's idea of circuit transience: gay men get lured into the circuit, and justify it as an opportunity to celebrate identity in the face of oppression, and of course, the communal pain of AIDS, because they arrive, like I did, in the urban gay ghettos and fail to find any other compelling options.... quite simply, nothing appears to offer the love, affirmation, and solidarity that we crave and need. And then, as these needs get (superficially) fulfilled, provided the circuit hasn't swallowed us whole, it spits us out, with a new understanding of what love, affirmation, and solidarity are. And I guess we're just supposed to take that new knowledge and search for something more real. It's a mixed blessing, at best.