I am sitting in the green chair that I bought months ago for sitting in. That statement seems rather obvious but my point is that I typically sit in my bed. If you aren’t already aware, beds are for sleeping (and maybe some other fun things). I bought the chair for all of the other things: reading, writing, drawing, doing crosswords, and hey, maybe some other fun things. But here I finally sit, drinking some kombucha (what am I healthy?!) and writing some blog. It’s been a while, hasn’t it?
On family day, Rae read my tarot cards. Three rows of three cards. I kid you not, the main messages were: a trip, an office party, and happiness (among other things). Some sort of clarity when it comes to work and health and men. I realize that this is a kind of pseudo-science that should be taken with a grain of salt but I am literally going on a trip and then going to an office party. Happiness and clarity would be super as well.
I don’t think I will write much today. The winter weather leaves me feeling somewhat ‘dormant’ in spirit. What I need is the sun and less clothing; soon! SOON!
Forget everything I said last week about not traveling. An undeniably great deal came up for Brazil and I decided to get some more mileage out of my visa. By the end of February, I will be on a plane and drinking from a miniature bottle of white wine. I love having that little wine-buzz when the turbulence hits. It adds to the thrill of it all.
Maybe it is a reward that I don’t deserve, but it sure as hell has gotten me to focus more. I work to pay for the surfing classes. I work out to prepare for surfing classes. I’m increasing my endurance on the treadmill like never before and it is all because there is a whole ocean waiting to take me down. But not without a fight!
I’ve started watching the tv show: The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. I don’t understand how it has it taken me so long to get into this show. Actually, I blame the theme font which I think is awful. It is the same theme font as I Dream of Jeannie, which was my favourite show as a child. These two shows are completely different in tone and it makes no sense to me at all. End graphic design rant now.
The show is about a female stand-up and it is set in New York in the late 1950’s. I love stand-up, I love the mechanics of it. I love the evolution of a joke, the eating shit, the fact that its’ main purpose is to move you to laughter (did you know that I love laughter?!) It’s a dream to watch a show about the inner-workings of stand-up.
Can you guess the part that makes this show even more perfect for me? It’s the fact that the show is about the female quest for identity outside of the conventional roles of wife and mother. Maybe I sound like a broken record when I talk about the female quest for identity but I had a conversation with two women last month about how they refused to call themselves feminists and I need to make something clear. Being a feminist doesn’t mean that you hate men. It means that you get to figure out what you want to do with your life, explore your passions and that you have access to opportunities. It means that you get to have a quest for identity. If you are a female with a bank account, a career, a prescription for birth control then maybe you should also have a little respect for the women who fought to make those things possible for you. Those women called themselves feminists and I will too. By the way, I love men.
But I digress. There is a third reason why I love this show. It is written by Amy Sherman-Palladino (who wears the strangest hats). This means that the show is funny and smart and FAST. Amy Sherman-Palladino may wear strange hats but she does write women who are interesting and interested. Women who are interested in participating in this great world and better because of it. My Grandmother once told me that if you want a man to like you: act stupid. Isn’t that incredible? She also loved to tell me that I was eating too many cakes. Her message? Be as small as possible. The world doesn’t need more of you. I think I will spread out though, take up space, explore. I love men, but I love men who make room for women more.
This week has been a vast improvement from the malaise of last week. I picked up a few small freelance projects which have provided just enough work to motivate my own creative projects (you know, the inevitable, work from home procrastination). I’ve learned this week that there is nothing better for the creative process than a deadline and a need to occasionally render video.
I thrive in the sun and loathe the cold, and so it is typically my mandate to spend February in a place that is not Toronto. If this place also has a beach and cheap beers, then I am just about the happiest girl in the entire world. I am not sure if I have earned a trip this year. I have lost focus and I am debating whether a trip would be a distraction, or worse, an undeserved reward.
I am steeling myself for a cold one (and by that, I do not mean beer, but then again, yes I do mean beer. I love beer). It is very cold outside so I’ve been listening to music from sunny places because I know something that many people don’t: music can take you places. A song can be like a short story, a portal to the past. If you want, you can put your headphones on, close your eyes, and be at the Copacabana. I put this music on like I am wrapping a blanket of my travel memories around myself.
This week, I have started to read My Life on the Road by Gloria Steinem and I was struck by this part:
Even the dictionary defines adventurer as “a person who has, enjoys, or seeks adventures,” but adventuress is “a woman who uses unscrupulous means in order to gain wealth or social position.”
When women did travel, they seemed to come to a bad end, from the real Amelia Earhart to the fictional Thelma and Louise. In much of the world to this day, a woman may be disciplined or even killed for dishonoring her family if she leaves her home without a male relative, or her country without a male guardian’s written permission. In Saudi Arabia, women are still forbidden to drive a car, even to the hospital in an emergency, much less for an adventure. During the democratic uprisings of the Arab Spring, both female citizens and foreign journalists paid the price of sexual assault for appearing in the public square.
As novelist Margaret Atwood wrote to explain women’s absence from quest-for-identity novels, “there’s probably a simple reason for this: send a woman out alone on a rambling nocturnal quest and she’s likely to end up a lot deader a lot sooner than a man would.”
I have distinct memories of landing in foreign countries, aware of the severe stress and anxiety it has always brought my Mother. She can’t sleep at night and I need to confirm to her that I am alive. At the same time, I am also the happiest I have ever felt in my life. I imagine that it is a similar experience to someone who is gay having their first sexual experience (is this a strange parallel to draw?) Everything is heightened: curiosity, fear, elation and most of all, like a sentence that in my mind is being bolded and underlined: this is what I am meant to do.
Here is another passage from “My Life on the Road” :
I wish I could imitate the Chinese women letter writers of at least a thousand years ago. Because they were forbidden to go to school like their brothers, they invented their own script—called nushu, or “women’s writing”—though the punishment for creating a secret language was death. They wrote underground letters and poems of friendship to each other, quite consciously protesting the restrictions of their lives. As one wrote, “Men leave home to brave life in the outside world. But we women are no less courageous. We can create a language they cannot understand.”
This correspondence was so precious to them that some women were buried with their letters of friendship, yet enough survive for us to see that they wrote in a slender column down the center of each page, leaving wide margins as spaces for a correspondent to add her own words.
“There have been great societies that did not use the wheel,” as Ursula Le Guin wrote, “but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.”“
I want all of it. I want the quest, I want the companionship and I want to tell stories. It’s like breathing isn’t it? The quest is the inhale and the storytelling is the exhale. I want both, and I want more than that.
Yesterday I was talking to a girl in her early twenties about traveling alone. She asked very earnestly: “What do you do when you travel alone?” The short answer is: whatever you want. The long answer is: you meet people that you would have never met had you stayed at home. You see, hear and smell things that you would have otherwise overlooked. You get to be alone with your thoughts and then you frame them against the world you are from and the world you are now in. Being alone is just one part of the journey. It is just the starting point.
Reading My Life On The Road has been a gentle reminder that traveling is the substance to the stories I want to tell. The stories that I will wrap around myself up in on a cold winter’s day.
Progressively Louder Laughter 