I’m waiting for my phone to recharge when I would rather be talking to my mother. I’m down to one old green lighter, most of mine are totally dead. I have to invest in a new lighter. Even when I stop smoking, I will always need one around!

Schrodinger is crying in my room. I don’t know what he’s crying about.

Mister chased a garter snake and I got worried it would bite him and anyway, I got made fun of by Mum. And now she is spreading the tale! We went for a picnic out at Blackstrap. We were all surprised to see a snake still out. Mum chased it yelling look, a snake, look! And it was slitherng as fast as it could go, which was at a pretty good clip. Fast little snakey.

Anyway, now I look like a wuss.

Halloween weekend was quiet for me. No major partying or anything. In fact we stayed in on the actual night. Which was the first time I’d done that in ages.

I had one trick or treater. I suspect the stairs were too forboding. Well, there were three of them anyway, and now fifty pieces of chocolate have all been consumed. I could not believe how much chocolate I ate, and my cousin too. It was wild. We even listened to The Monster Mash, Purple People Eater, and the soundtrack to Rocky Horror Picture Show.

And then we watched the Rocky Horror Picture Show, but without props. dammit! We were going to go down to the Broadway, but it was on too early and we had no props.
We also dressed up as Zombies. I had a big slash on my face like a Z for ThirZa!

Yep, that was Halloween 2008. I’ve almost always gone out. We didn’t get seen anywhere in our rad zombie makeup except the McDonalds drive thru. And I still haven’t found Golden Avenue.

I’ve got some work this week and next week, which is REALLY good because I need the money quite desperately. I also have an interview tomorrow for cfcr, the local coop radio station. I’m pretty psyched. I really hope I get it because it sounds like an interesting job.

Anyway, I’m tired of being poor already. Mostly I just want something with set hours and a future, temping is a bit dodgy just because you don’t know when the next job is coming. Plus I have to get up early for work tomorrow, ai! I hope I can do it. Also I need to get my paystubs in to the coop here so I can get on reduced rent.

I’m doing well aside from that, had a very quiet week after I got home from the festival. I mostly just adjusted to being back home, hung out with my cousin and did some goofy stuff. Now I have to clean my apartment. I guess because it is horribly messy. No way could I seduce a woman in this trash heap~!

My libido has ebbed away into a mere whisp of itself. I don’t know if this is the medications, but I can be around perfectly cute single girls and not feel a smidgen of lust. It’s terrible! I think I should talk to my doctor about it. I need viagra to get it up at all! LOL. I’ve never taken viagra. I hear you see blue dots on it.

Penis meds. Ha ha ha! I’m glad I don’t have one of those, they look way too sensitive to tote around. Breasts are sometimes sensitive, but they get jostled around all the time. Dildos are fine though, that’s all you really need unless you’re Making Babies. A queer friend at the imagineNATIVE festival voiced an often felt weirdness about the idea of sex being reproductional, and I have to say it does make me laugh. Making babies.

At this point in my life I have decided not to have babies myself. I think I’m too selfish to care for a child. Is that a bad thing to say? Certainly in the future a foster kid wouldn’t be out of the question, but I would have to be in a different place in my life to do it. For me, 30 is still too young to have a child. For ME. I don’t know about the rest of the world.

I think I like the idea of a child much better. Someone to look after, someone to look after me when I’m old, but see then it starts going back to selfish reasons for a child. And just because you have a kid doesn’t mean they’re going to want to bathe you when you’re old.

My hair is GREASY! I haven’t been able to wash it yet today, having had to check out immediately upon waking. I’ve been on a plane or in an airport since roughly 12:45 Saskatoon time. Mum wanted to know all about the festival so we had a nice chat while she read the ENTIRE list of delegates and asked about who actually showed up. I had an excellent reception to both videos, and people REALLY loved the vampire one so I think it’s going to get a lot of play for sure. I saw my sweet ex-girlfriend/best friend Margaret Flood and met her man, he seems very nice although I think it ended up being mostly girl talk. Poor dude. I also saw my good friend Mikiki and caught up, the eminem porno came up again and I think we’re going to do it (long story that I won’t get into right now, suffice it to say it’s a genderfucked raunch tape that we’ve been talking about making together for a while).

I also got to talk to him about bloodplay and Daddy/boy/girl roleplaying, which was fun. I love it when dykes and fags find common sexual ground.

The parties were ridiculously fun and I met tons of people. I heard some great music and watched some great films and now I’m very beat but still buzzed on festival fun. I also met some people I’d only known through facebook previously, which was cool, and made some new friends. But I was definitely ready to come home today.

I have a few things I want to try and blog in the next few days, but I have to gather my thoughts about them first. In the meantime, enjoy this link to an awesome blog bashing Sarah Palin. I must admit, while she freaks me out, I haven’t followed the campaign in any meaningful way, so this says it better than I ever could.

Sarah Palin is a Bitch . . . There, I said It

And I’m hyaving lots of fun. I can’t believe how many friendly people I know, they are extremely nice and I got a good reception to Madness In Four Actions. People are excited about the vampire flick and I think a lot of my friends are going to come out for it. I’ve been busy with festival things, going to movies, going out schmoozing with the artists and programmers and other filmy related folk. I’ve seen some good work, and I’ve met some really interesting people. I love the comraderie of a film festival.

This afternoon I have nothing scheduled so I am kicking back and enjoying a lazy few hours before I head out to watch more more MORE films and videos!

Staying in the hostel is actually not too bad, even though I am in a six person dorm. I sleep in every morning (something I have to stop if I am to catch my plane), and then I head out to the festival. I stayed out pretty late last night and I think tonight is some kind of party. They sure do know how to party it up at this festival. I met a woman from Australia who lives in the bush with the crocodiles, she was the subject of a doc on the opening night. I saw my friend Cheryl L’Hirondelle perform last night, where I ran into my ex stepmom and an old friend who used to live in Van like me.

I’m having a lot of fun, which is good. I had no expectations when I arrived, which maybe why I’m having such a good time. I’ve already seen more friends than I saw in Vancouver when I was there recently.

Anyway, that’s about the scoop. I managed to snag two copies of NOW with my review in it, the actors want a copy so I might just keep a photocopy for myself and give them the originals for their scrapbook.

For whatever reason I didn’t reorder my meds, thinking I still had about a week left of them. Now either I lost a week of medication or I ate them all. Anyway, I missed two days of night meds in a row, and while I did manage to sleep the first night, by the second night I was totally sleepless in Saskatoon, rolling around in bed in total darkness occasionally snuggling the dog just for something to do. It was awful. All day I’ve felt slightly ill, the kind of ill that comes from lack of sleep. Just cruddy and awful.

So, since it was a thanksgiving weekend, and with my normal pharmacy closed, I had to get pills from somewhere else. And bipolar medications aren’t sold on the street, that’s for sure. Lucky for me my psychiatrist had given me a new prescription that I hadn’t taken down to the pharmacy yet. So we got it filled at Safeway pharmacy today and I’m so relieved to have my lovely little pills again. I was worried I’d really go off track with this not being able to sleep issue.

I’m taking Seroquel, which helps you sleep aside from being an antipsychotic, and without it I just can’t sleep easily at all. So it’s pretty necessary, especially since before I had a prescription for it I often suffered from sleep disturbances like insomnia.

Insomnia is fun when you’re manic (because it just keeps getting you higher and higher, which is also bad!), but brutal as all hell when you’re depressed. You start thinking about all kinds of shit that happens, or makes you feel suicidal, and it totally compounds the depression into this complex black mass of pain.

On another note, my mum and I have been rereading the Harry Potter series ever since we went to Scotland (one of the b&b’s had the first book in their library, which started it all, plus that’s where the books were written), and so I spent part of the night finishing The Goblet of Fire. I’d forgotten Rita Skeeter was an Animagus. Very fun and gripping reading, and Voldemort chills me more and more with each reading! What a fun series!

My film got a good review in NOW Toronto, so I am hoping a bunch of sexy single vampire loving lesbians will come out to see it! You never know!

It’s getting on to the time I spread my wings and fly to Toronto, I leave on Wednesday and I have only Tuesday to get my travel grant. I know for a fact it is coming, but when? It would be nice to be able to use my own money to go, if I had any. I did already use all my money to buy that ticket.

I’ve officially started to smoke again, it’s really been about a week or so I’ve been smoking. I do want to quit again, I think I might have better luck if I stay on the patches for the ten weeks or whatever recommended. Which means I’m going to use up my Indian Affairs one time payment for patches, they cover a course of withdrawal for ONCE in your life! And those patches are expensive man! So I have to go to my lovely Dr. Saffy to get a prescription for Nicoderm.

Co-op Living is working out well, I’ve finally joined a committee, the Maintainence committee. I can’t even spell it. Oh well. It’s very exciting being part of a co-op because you get to help your community and housing run efficiently. Plus once I get a job with pay stubs I can have a lowered rent. $460 would be okay a month, right now I’m paying $551 a month, which is still a really good deal for the gorgeous apartment I have. which is currently messy.

I learned early on that I do better living alone because I am so messy. I got tired of the inevitable roommate squabble over who didn’t clean what. And plus it was always way more stable when I lived alone, no other drama’s interferring with my own. Being bipolar sets one up for many dramas, and just cutting down on them by avoiding another person in my living situation relieves some of the stress.

I don’t know how it would be to actually live with a lover, as I have never done so thus far in my life. My only girlfriend where it got serious enough to possibly consider it lived in Toronto, and I was in Vancouver, so it was just never going to happen. And when I did mention moving there to be with her, she dumped me. AW! Sad! I had a broken heart for a year. Or more.

If someone wanted to move in with me now they would have to pay an $800 share capital before moving in. Well, actually you can pay it fifty bucks a month on top of your rent, but I paid mine all at once because when you have a grant such things are possible.

But it’s a good excuse to keep people from moving in! I don’t imagine I would be willing to leave this place anytime soon, no matter how many sexy single vampire loving lesbians invited me to move in with them.

God do I ever need a haircut, I’m getting a mullet and I don’t like it. Someone once told me to embrace the mullet as a symbol of being lower class, but I never hung around with mullet wearers and I was raised X class.

X Class is what bell hooks calls people who work with art and so on and are cultured but don’t necessarily have much money. At least, that’s what I remember from my teen years as an avid reader of bell hooks.

I’m still poor today, no cheques have come in the mail. My mum is taking me out for tom yum soup today, which I’m looking forward to.

I just spent two hours looking at people’s shitty tattoos on Facebook. They were pretty funny. Some of them were executed well but unfortunate nonetheless. And I saw a lot of misspelled kanji. Based on what I’ve heard about kanji tattoos, people really shouldn’t get them unless they can read it. The meanings can be VERY different from what you expect.

The temping thing is not paying off right now, I’ve had no work all week and it looks dubious for the future. So I’m looking for work AGAIN. There’s a dishwashing job at the university which would pay me a little under $1500 a month, which is a far better wage than the call centre. And it would be steady work. I’m determined not to go to the call centre again, I don’t want to still be working in them when I’m fifty, and there are a lot of fifty year old callers! Anyway, something will come up. I don’t want a career, I just want something that can pay the bills. Although I still think I should be getting editing jobs and I’m not.

Le sigh.. Oh well, maybe when I’m forty I’ll have a masters degree and teach somewhere like the rest of my family.

But I really just want to be a full time artist.

I have to write a script for my Mars Recruitment Video. I could be doing that. I could be editing my film. But instead I looked at Lesbian Hair for a while. Lesbians do have cool hair. But it’s very difficult to get a proper boy’s cut in a salon, because hairdressers are always trying to make sure people gender conform. Well, I’m sure some of them have an awareness of gender non-conformity, but not many and definitely not in Saskatoon. You have no idea how hard it can be to get them to use the number two shaver.

The trials and tribulations of being a butch.

Butches can have a very hard time finding employment simply because of the way we present our gender. It’s a rotten deal. There should be employment equity for butches! It should be on employment equity forms, are you butch? Do you have butch hair?

I dunno, But being upset about the lack of jobs for butch women isn’t going to get me a job either. Unless I could start up a non-profit dedicated to butch visibility. But I think Harper would cut the funding on that.

My appointment went well, nothing major to report. I got a number for a local bipolar/unipolar support group, and I’m getting my blood tested tomorrow for cholesterol, blood sugar, and epival levels. She also thinks I would do well with light therapy, so I’m being referred to a group that does light therapy and lends it’s lights out so people can see if they work.

Anyway, that about sums it all up. I was happy to touch base with my shrink again and make sure I’m okay.

I had $675 in my hot sweaty little hands and it vanished onto my mum’s credit card to pay for my flight to Toronto. Lucky for me I have a thousand dollar travel grant coming to me to help pay most of the cost of my little jaunt to the imagineNATIVE film festie. I am World Premiering You Are A Lesbian Vampire there, and I am also showing Madness In Four Actions there. I’m pretty stoked, plus my best friend/ex girlfriend Margaret Flood might come up from Guelph to see me!

Anyway, when I do get my travel grant, most of that money is actually now rent money. dammit!

I am also waiting for a cheque from the National Gallery, they said it would come in October, which is a little vague, but at least that means my income hasn’t dried up totally yet.

Ah, the grant was so lovely. I will hopefully get another grant in January for my MARS recruitment video.

Anyway, enough about my money, or current lack thereof.

I’m listening to a lot of Tegan and Sara these days, it’s awesome to support queer canadian artists. Here’s one of their songs I really like.

I do love living in Canada, for a lot of reasons. Even though we currently (and hopefully not for much longer) have a Conservative government, we do have socialized medicine, same sex marriage, and good bacon. Yay for streaky bacon! It’s what I missed most about Canada, Scottish bacon is kinda weird, and not smoked!

My friends Carrie and Shavonne had bacon mints and even bacon flavoured rolling papers with little pigs everywhere. Bacon everywhere! Once a lover asked me in the middle of the night if I ate bacon, and she was at the time a hard core vegan. I thought she was going to kick me out of bed!

OH MAN

Last night at midnight a horrible sharp ache stabbed me in the right side and refused to go away. Worried my appendix had burst or some other thing ruptured, I called the Healthline and asked a registered nurse what to do. She told me to go to the hospital. And of course I had no money and no car, so I caled my mum to take me but it was 2:30 in the morning. So I had to get an ambulance, ugh. But they took good care of me.

It was weird to see them write “psych” for previous health problems. It’s true, but I was worried they would just think I was bipolar and making up some health problem.

Anyway, they thought it was indigestion or a stomach bug, because I was also throwing up from the pain and had diarreah. Ugh! It was awful!

It was five in the morning when I was done with the doctor, which didn’t actually take that long. The hospital paid for my cab home, which was nice.

I was so exhausted I came home and crashed for ages. I still don’t really know what that pain was.

Vancouver was fun, though I only got to actually see one friend. Oh well, I was only there for three days, not even, two really.