...and an 'o' key.
Childproofing has been an interminably slow process around here, making do with whatever flimsy rigging will work in the moment. We seem always too tired to do the actual work of it; it's a little like writing papers for university, you inevitably wait until you absolutely HAVE to do it. Drilling holes in cabinets for child locks and tucking away tangles of cords and making strategic areas will come, but so far their idiot cousins are doing the job. Tape is closing the extra bathroom cupboard that is not held with a zip-close child lock. I've moved everything in the cupboards that is dangerous or breakable (learned that lesson the hard way) up out of the reach of Miss Grabby Hands, although we will eventually have to break down and put locks on the silverware drawers. The computer has thus far been 'protected' by a fortress of foam floor squares but my smart little girl has foiled our defenses and is always leaning over them to plonk away at the computer keys. Today she actually managed to rip off my 'o' key, it is now a vacant scab on my already disgruntled keyboard. Clearly we need to rethink the system.
I think it is hard enough trying to find ways to write when you have a little one shuffling about underfoot, demanding every ounce of your attention (and rightly so, for the most part). But in a small space like this there is nowhere I can go to simply sit with my thoughts and try to complete something relatively coherent. My mind is aflower with myriad thoughts and ideas for articles and freelance work, scripts and show ideas, the goings-on of my novel, but I feel like I really need a space in which to work, a Woolfian 'Room of One's Own'. But in Vancouver, where real estate is more valuable than blood, it will be some time before that happens for me (and poor Ez, who has almost everything he owns in storage) - so I suppose a new writing desk, jammed into some corner will have to suffice.
I am trying to figure out how to be a writer, to regain what I feel was ground out of me in the fog of my dismal and mediocre education. It is hard to imagine that as a twelve year old girl I was kicked out of gifted and talented class because a teacher read the novel I was working on (without my permission, from a binder he took from me) and didn't feel it was appropriate to my Catholic education. I was so long bombarded by 'you can't' and 'you shouldn't' and 'it won't work' that I shifted out of writing at far too young an age - regrettable in so many ways. I look at what I love in life, travel and writing and photography and story-telling and documentary filmmaking and I am infuriated that I was led so far astray by those who were meant to lead me. Yes, hindsight is 20-20, but oh! If only I had known how journalism could have filled in the spaces where my passions lay I would have followed that path, a path where I think my intelligence would have been appreciated. I did always want to be an actor, and I have loved doing it, but I think that there is so little satisfaction to be gotten from the business itself that at least with writing, with journalism you have a product that you have created that is good or not good, not subjectively based on whether or not they already have a brown-haired girl (god knows people could never tell two brunettes apart). I have actually lost gigs, so many in a row it pains me to count, because they needed the ethnic card - they once told a casting director to find them 'an ethnic Keegan'. Seriously? This is my chosen career path?
All I really ever wanted to do was travel the world and tell stories, and perhaps now is my chance to do that. More and more as I watch the sordid demise of film and tv I want to pull further and further away. Ez found an island in the Philippines the other day that would cost us a fraction of what our apartment is 'worth', a smidgeon of the cost of a crappy house in Vancouver and I think about it, I really do. I want to roam again, I want to do something more than insipid MOWs and table-scrap parts. I want to live the adventure and so does Ez and perhaps writing is a part of that new life, that new adventure. Certainly I have no blind halcyon view of what that business is like either, but at least I could feel like there is some meritocracy there...
I went last night to a collaborative writing event for the Vancouver International Writer's Festival and it was really fun and inspiring (not to mention my first night out alone since Nahanni was born) and really made me see the potential I have, the desire I have to throw words against the wall and see what sticks. (One of my favourite pieces from last night was a haiku my partner and I came up with using our required words:)
botox cowboys shoot
iced zinc effluent into
carboard-faced starlets
I don't know what will happen. Ez always says that I am miserable about the business until I get a few good gigs and then I don't want to leave anymore -- and I know it's true. It is so easy to get sucked back into that world; the money, the fun, the excitement of it all. One thing about the film industry, there's always a chance you'll win its lottery.
Till then I mull, I sift, I write snatches here and there and try to keep Nahanni from stealing all my letters. At least she didn't bust the 'I'.
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