Yearly Archives: 2008

Hanging Party

I feel utter­ly intox­i­cat­ed.

Reading poems around the piano

With a ham­mer and a lad­der, we hung my pic­tures tonight, care­ful­ly decid­ing where to place each one to bal­ance the colours, the ori­en­ta­tions, the shapes, and the con­cepts.

Amongst the wine and the wood, the kids and the colours, we stopped to admire the art in the house. Adrienne dropped by to share her lat­est graph­ic poems with us, along with her alco­holic find­ings. “From The Desk Of” Penelope was writ­ten that day, dense and deep, full of details tak­en for grant­ed. The words must write them­selves, I thought.

Thumbnail: Poem reading
Thumbnail: My fruit and body series wall
Thumbnail: Old fashioned side-table
Thumbnail: Akio
Thumbnail: A hammer and a poem
Thumbnail: Old style heater
Thumbnail: Frederic and Akio
Thumbnail: Nicole Beaumont artwork
Thumbnail: Akio on the ladder
Thumbnail: Wine, ice, and salad

Misun and I seem to share a kin­ship through our appre­ci­a­tion of expres­sion, some­thing I’ve nev­er had with my friends. Not that there’s any­thing wrong with them, but I’ve always felt like they can’t relate to me when it comes to emo­tions or cre­ativ­i­ty. As I seem to be the cre­ative broth­er she’s always want­ed, and she seems to be the sup­port­ive sis­ter I’ve always need­ed, we agreed to be adopt­ed sib­lings.

In a recent inter­view, Frédéric said, in his ebul­lient Parisian accent, that one of the rea­sons he want­ed to open the Salon is to pro­mote dia­logue and inter­ac­tion. Perhaps it’s this hunger for dia­logue that con­nects us. He also men­tioned to me he was stressed out about being inter­viewed; being put on the spot made him freeze up. I told him I had the same prob­lem with pret­ty girls. “You’re affect­ed by beau­ty”, he said, some­thing I knew, but not some­thing that every­one under­stands.

I left, feel­ing like I was a part of some­thing won­der­ful, some­thing greater than myself.

In The News

On the bus today, a reporter from the CBC called me for an inter­view. She start­ed ask­ing me why I got into pho­tog­ra­phy, where I want­ed to go with it, and the like. It was strange to be answer­ing these ques­tions because as far as I’ve gone with my pho­tog­ra­phy, no one has ever asked them before. I sup­pose most peo­ple assume it’s like anoth­er hob­by, with­out pur­pose or mean­ing.

Newspaper article

There was also a lit­tle men­tion of my name in the local fran­coph­o­ne paper. I find it fun­ny that when trans­lat­ed lit­er­al­ly, the title of the arti­cle in English is “Go, all with the Living room!”.

My Mom Keeps Calling

And I keep hang­ing up.

The first thing she asks, non­cha­lant­ly like noth­ing has hap­pened, is whether I’ve eat­en yet. This is some­thing thing she used to say at the begin­ning of every phone call. One of her old habits, to make sure I’m eat­ing enough.

I did­n’t answer her ques­tion, but asked what she want­ed. She told me she just want­ed to see how I was doing.

She does­n’t get it. I don’t want to talk to her. I nev­er want to talk to her again. Every call is a reminder of the wounds that haven’t healed.

It’s like hav­ing your rapist show up at the door with flow­ers.

Psychoanalytic Reflections 01

It’s a full sev­en days between ses­sions, and at this point, my pschol­o­gist is just start­ing to know me. In between, I can nev­er stop reflect­ing. I’ve always believed that I know myself well, but these ses­sions are prob­ing ideas and mem­o­ries I haven’t thought of in a while, and open­ing up com­plete­ly new areas of reflec­tion.

And while I could write for days about these thoughts and epipha­nies, I sim­ply don’t have the time, so I fig­ured I’d briefly touch on them in point form.

  • I need to respect my psy­chol­o­gist in order to accept help from him. i.e. If he was a Freudian and I was a Jungian, I would­n’t be able to agree with any of his meth­ods.
  • I get very anx­ious when I’m in his office. This is because I don’t like to admit to myself that some­thing’s wrong with me, but when I’m in there, it’s a very tan­gi­ble reminder that I have men­tal prob­lems.
  • I’m very con­flict­ed on sev­er­al issues.
    • I don’t want to lose my emo­tions because I need to suf­fer to cre­ate. Yet the emo­tions are bad enough that I don’t want to have them any­more (or have them in mod­er­a­tion at least).
    • I want to love and be in a rela­tion­ship, and at the same time I cling to being sin­gle because I’m scared of being hurt (in addi­tion to the fact that the free­dom is intox­i­cat­ing). I do this by push­ing oth­ers away from me or cut­ting them off.
      • This stems from two sig­nif­i­cant child­hood mem­o­ries, where I felt betrayed in friend­ship, as well as my rela­tion­ship with my par­ents.
    • I want to be set­tled and have some sta­bil­i­ty (in terms of sched­ule, rela­tion­ships, finances etc.), but the strug­gle to be set­tled is what makes me grow and be stronger.
    • Many of these issues can only be resolved from deci­sions I should make. (i.e. No one else can make the deci­sion for me)
    • Turning to Taoism, which is very para­dox­i­cal in itself, has only helped so much.
  • Without my cre­ativ­i­ty, or my desire to express myself, I’m noth­ing.
  • I don’t want to “blame” my par­ents for con­fi­dence prob­lems or per­fec­tion­ist ten­den­cies, but I’m slow­ly start­ing to find out that they’ve affect­ed me even more than I thought before.
  • As a hedo­nist, my great­est fear is los­ing my joie de vivre. If this hap­pened (and it has once), I would con­sid­er killing myself. This is because the joys of life bal­ance out all the bad and makes it worth liv­ing.
  • I’m depen­dent on oth­er peo­ple for hap­pi­ness. I don’t see my friends often enough for me to be sat­is­fied, and it’s a sim­ple fact of life. They all have sig­nif­i­cant oth­ers, and I’m the only one left sin­gle. I don’t blame them for not spend­ing enough time with me, but it makes me very sad.