Mainly because they are famous and don’t know I exist:
Now, how to meet these people, convince them I am not a super-stalker, especially since I put there names on my blog as to how I need to make friends with them, make friends with them, and then feel smug about my new-found famous friends.
From watching Arrested Development Season Four to punching through a bunch of stuff like having a sick child at the airport with missing luggage to submitting a slew of stories, I am busting through the last week of June.
I was invited to my first ever bastion of the thirty/forty something women this month – a book club! I was super excited because I am not good at meeting people or putting myself out there and this was a commitment to do both. Then I didn’t realise the book club was in the afternoon rather than the evening and missed it, which is pretty much par for the course for me. Let’s just say when I told Geoff, he wasn’t surprised. Hopefully I will be more on-the-ball for book club meeting number two.
A year ago I quit my job and moved to the Maritimes where I now write. My situation is somewhat artificial – I have a partner with a job that pays twice the average salary of where we live, I have the ability to go back to my old job should the need, financial or personal, arise – but it’s still my situation of which to take advantage.
So I write more now. Maybe I’m getting better. Maybe the big break is around the corner soon. Or maybe, more likely, I’ll just keep going along slowly without any huge payoff, which doesn’t seem as disheartening as it would have ten, five, even one year ago. I think about the quietness of living here. There’s a beauty to toiling in obscurity, of having the privilege of toiling in obscurity that I hadn’t guessed before.
I went and came back from Costa Rica, my second trip there. I thought I would be sadder because the first time I went to Costa Rica was my happiest time. But I wasn’t. I was stressed sometimes, relaxed others, happy, angry, tired, calm, but not sad. But now I am back and have news to share about things that happened in and around when I was away.
These were actually picked up before I went on holiday but I didn’t have time to post it here. The book on the right is the short story collection of Charles Yu, who wrote probably the only science fiction novel I truly love: How To Live Safely in A Science Fictional Universe, which is a book I buy for people and recommend to people and talk about constantly but I don’t think anyone else I know has read even though I am very strident about other people reading it.
The book on the left is for Tesfa. Maybe you figured that.
I got home from vacation to find a copy of the new Sterling Magazine,
which is exciting because
Can you see it? Right there about half-way down the page under the Fiction heading is my story! The magazine is super-awesome as well, so go out and buy yourself a copy.
Since I have now had my transcripts sent and paid my tuition and been officially accepted, I have gotten into Humber’s One Year Creative Writing by Correspondence Course. I am excited. People I have told are less excited and sort of look at me with the same expression they might if I told them that tomorrow I will be a penguin but that’s okay. I got into a writing program and will have something to do with myself for the next year at least.
then why do I clear my cache/cookies every month once my ten free Globe and Mail articles are up so I can keep reading? I guess I either need to stop doing that or admit that I’m a hypocrite. Hmmm. I only ever read the book reviews, but still, I need to be a better person on this.
Neighbour mowed his grass. We have to mow our grass. This is summer.
I have a lot of books.
Sometimes I think, maybe I don’t have that many. Five Billy bookcases full plus miscellany spread out around the house plus the two books lent to Neil (I remember you have them Neil!) doesn’t seem like too many. Then the insurance agent comes over to verify our policy and takes photographs of the books because, in his words, normal people don’t have so many books and if there was an insurance claim, he wanted them to believe me.
I see those pictures where people have arranged their books by colour. I thought I should arrange my books by colour too and looked at my shelf, only to realize how impossible that is. People who arrange their books by colour seem to have unicoloured books in which this is an easy task. I have books with multiple colours on their spines. Then there are the titles, authors, publishers, etc. written there, disrupting the chromatic flow. So I didn’t arrange my books by colour. I just left them haphazard on the shelf in such a way that I am always convinced I am missing some book and then have to spend twenty minutes going shelf by shelf trying to find it.
I think I should give my books away. I have a lot. Maybe having isn’t so great. I don’t know. Today they just sit there and make me feel heavy.