sunny days

Sometimes I think the best way to experience God is to go through something difficult.

PS- It is a really warm day here in Canada.

in the morning, in the window

photography

Vibrant
bluish, atmpospheric.
I can't
be less than real.

Vibrato,
pitch, consonance.
I tried
to be much better.

Photographs,
traveled, expectation.
Everything
depends on weathering.

Authentic,
eloquent, atmospheric,
whether or not we capture that
which is beautiful.

reprise

It is really gray today. The weather feels a lot like fluorescent lighting, which I do not like. I don't think I have ever been in a good coffeehouse that also had fluorescent lighting, and if it did I probably didn't stay there long enough to remember being there in the first place.

I think I like the sky more when it's sunny. I like it even more when it looks like candles are placed on small candle-holders above the clouds. or, that dark blue quality that the sky has in places next to the ocean, like kitsalano beach. There are, decidedly, a lot better things for the sky to be than gray.

Let's all pray for summer.

Later.

Creativity

Personal advice from experience:

a) Get a good dental plan
b) see a dentist often
c) floss often
d) eat less candy

Apparently I have a huge problem with one of my tooths (intentional grammar), and my dental plan does not cover it, so I have to just get a quick-fix which my plan does cover. This is a frustrating place to live sometimes, the land of junk food. But I can't blame culture, because I should have taken care of this a long time ago. And I can't complain, because I can afford to take care of my problems when I actually become brave enough to.

Hello, by the way. I kind of started this entry in the middle of a sentence. I have noticed that my journal entries have become less one-sided journals and more conversations- speaking with the assumption that people are reading this and trying to understand it.

I have a lot of unexpressed thinking on my mind, most of which comes out in my really great thinking times (in the shower, over coffee, in a coffeehouse) which I have not had any of recently. I heard it said once that "from the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks".

I have noticed that;

a) Writing prose, unlike poetry, is very immediate. Writing prose has to be well thought out. Although, a lot of prose seems to have more of a flow to it, like a well told story. I don't really know.
b) People that hang out at Ethical Addictions, one of my mainstay coffeehouses, all have a distinctive look. There are the quoteunquote "scene" kids that spend a lot of time trying to look very stylish, getting their hair and color schemes just right. Then there are the "artsy" kids that just wake up, and their look happens by default. I fall into this category.

You can always tell which are which. The artsy kids are the ones that act awkwardly around the really cute baristas. Case in point... I am too scared to talk to the cute baristas.

I do not know what I am talking about. This, like a couple of my last entries, have been transitional- trying to get from one place to the next, not fully settling on a theme, trying to find a theme to get settled into for a long period of time (home, creativity, expression of artistic ability, relationships, what have you).

So. Leave me a comment. Tell me something I should write about. I'm getting there. By "there" I mean, I'm searching for a theme to devote extensive thought.

Thus is creativity.



PS- I had an english toffee from Tim Horton's this morning. A very little known secret about me is that I always have one of these drinks before traveling. This or a moch frap from starbucks. Or at least I used to. Everytime I drink these I feel like I need to travel somewhere. Sigh.

here by my side

A lot of news as of late:

One) I picked up some tickets for Matt Good yesterday, a minor expense for an artists who was really big in the late 90's. And I just found out this morning that The Album Leaf is playing this Friday in Seattle.

So somewhere between being broke, and feeling convicted for spending too much money, I will be enjoying some pretty rocking moments.

Deux) I picked up a lot of movies the day before that, on a whim. By on a whim I mean on a sale. Among them are Paris ja' Taime, Good Will Hunting, and Atonement- all movies which are my heart / all movies you should see.

Three) I have not written prose in a long time, again. I blame this on my computer still being broken. Last summer I spent a lot of time in solitude hanging around on the back deck in solitude, while my roommates were still at work. Yesterday my roommate, a roofer, had a day off because it was raining immensely. Which, kind of, messed up my idea of having a day of solitude to myself.

As I usually say, the one thing that wrecks solitude is having too many people around.

Last week I asked myself the question, "if I can't be real at home what is the point of living"? I think we, as people, need to have places in our houses that we can escape to, without the fear of someone walking in to our embarrassing moments of honesty. By escape I don't mean avoiding community, shutting myself out completely. I mean being able to have solitude.

Something I realized back in 2005, is that I can't find the joy of solitude without the strength of community. In order to be confident I need time to myself. This just makes sense to me.

So that is that. The rain was really nice yesterday. I wish you were here to see it. There is always that cool air that you only get to feel when it rains here. BC really is a nice, though horribly under appreciated, place to live. A lot of us living here get so caught up in ideas, and questions, that we forget how easy it would be to just spend a day outside, taking pictures or writing in our notebooks over cups of coffee.

I don't really know. I just think life could be so much easier if I stopped running around and just found solitude. Well, maybe not easier. Just more profound.

4) I owe it to myself to write more. Let's talk more about this.

later.

hope somehow

Some news.

I started compiling some poems yesterday for a new book project, which I hope to have done by the end of this year. I have realized that I have some really down, sad, poems. My theory for this so far have been that I only write poems when I am sad, to express.

Which leaves me with a lot of questions, about creativity. To what extent can we, who write, allow ourselves to be creative? Is being down the only emotion we can express?

In reality I am a pretty fun, hopeful, person (when I am not in some coffee-induced state). So, my challenge is being able to express hope in the stuff I write... writing that is able to say "it is tough, but I'm getting somewhere" instead of always say "bah, I am lost and miserable and sad all the time... bah".

I owe it to myself to start writing about hope, because that is the real me. The real me is not just down all the time.

How about some feedback? How do you, who reads this, think about writing?

I'll continue this thought in the next couple weeks, here in my office of fun.

See you later.

a short introduction, or an afterthought

I am forgetting the quiet of ordinary days,
when I am surprised, by
something unexpected.