the end. (or why all the clothes on the top half of my body were on inside out this morning)

last night was a fun night. nothing too "wild or crazy";  just a group of lovely friends, some old and some new, spending an evening together and celebrating the end of a huge era.  

and drinking a lot.  

so much so in fact that this morning when i got up to get dressed for work i put all the clothes on the top half of my body on inside out. t-shirt and hoodie. I am assuming my bra is on right side in because i don't remember having difficulty fastening it. wait, am i even wearing one?  

checks boobs.  

yes. ok, i am wearing one.

but there it is. clothes inside out and the weight of at least 12 oz of either gin or vodka hanging like a gauzy veil over my brain...  

i remember the night though. well. in vivid technicolor. that feels nice.  

but anywho, last night's festivities of an end got me thinking about my own changes.  

i wrote this elsewhere:

I've dubbed this summer the "no bummer summer" - good times with good people and a celebration of all the wild and wonderful things my hometown (and its festivals abundant) has to offer.

But it seems like I need to come up with a similarly clever rhyme for autumn. The "no fall fall" perhaps? I'm open to suggestions.

I'm being a bit glib because writing this buzz blurb is making me sad...  It is a very bittersweet moment for me in my professional career and I should just be out with it:
August 30 will be my last day as Programmer at Theatre Alberta. I am passing on the Programmer's torch, a position that I have held onto very dearly for the past two years, and will be taking on a whole new set of challenges as a freelance artist.

Were it possible I would thank and each and every one of you personally, I would. I wish I could! Without even knowing it you (yes, YOU!) have challenged me and guided me through the many twists and turns of our programming calendar to help facilitate opportunities that were what you wanted and needed. I have learned so much about this province, its amazing theatre communities and I am forever optimistic about our bright future!

I have a million favourite memories and will look back on my time at Theatre Alberta with great fondness and love. If the measure of a great place to work is the difficulty to leave, consider Theatre Alberta the best place!

I can't wait to see you all again!
Much love.

Michelle Kennedy

Programmer

soon that title will no longer apply but much of the sentiment will remain. it's been a roller coaster of a couple of years here and now i'm getting off the ride.

onto new things. bigger things. different things.  

i'm feeling a bit unable to write about the FEELINGS of it all just yet so i will put a pin in that. mostly, i just wanted to talk about how i was so hungover this morning all my clothes were on inside out.  

 

 

ethan hawke - the love ruiner

in his book   sex, drugs and cocoa puffs chuck klosterman offers that maybe cameron crowe and john cusack ruined "contemporary perceptions of modern romance" because of that boombox serende at the end of say anything. you know the one, right?

this.  

anywhosit, klosterman believes that this moment, forever captured on celuloid, has created undue expectations for women of men. his position is very hetero-focused but i think his point can apply across the multiplicities of sexual expression. as humans, romantic comedies have created undue expectation of the grand romantic gesture. if our partners fuck up, or want to be our partner, or win our favour and achieve sex they must participate in some creative ritual of proving themselves worthy. not an honest discussion or a quiet dinner but rather a big, grandiose, potentially humiliating, and oft ridiculous gesture in a rather (or somewhat) public forum.

maybe it's cute and sure, it's theoretically fucking romantic but what happens when our lovers do not deliver on the grand romantic gesture? our over-the-top expectations are not met and we are disappointed. we constantly set ourselves up for disappointment by expecting these gestures that were created to seell actors and popcorn and by not thinking critically of what our genuine vs. perceived expectations of our lovers are...  

but let's be honest, who wouldn't love their lover bursting into our house, guns blazing, set to save a loved one who they were once hired to kill. (that's my favourite john cusack, ps.)  maybe we wouldn't? i mean, i don't ever really want to be in a position in my real life where i need to be saved by someone with a gun...

but here's the thing, it wasn't john cusack that ruined it all for me... it was ETHAN HAWKE.

last night, while eating some feelings, i caught a trailer for before midnight  - the third in a trilogy that are just about THE MOST ROMANTIC FUCKING MOVIES EVER.

ever.  

And for me, a girl who loved the scruffy 90s greaseball dude, longed for european romance and dressed as much like julie delpy as her uncoolness and chubbiness would allow, before sunrise (the first in the trilogy) was the one that ruined it all for me.

i was 14 and wanted nothing more than to be swept off my feet by some pseudo-intellectual college student aching to find himself and talk about books on european train.  

it wasn't john cusack that ruined love for me, it was ethan hawke (and richard linklater).  also, reality bites .

my unreal expectations involve almost entirely around intellect and scruffiness and books. did jesse read books? i don't even remember. but it isn't about what we remember of specifics. it's about how the perceptions of memory have shaped expectation around romance. i actually said no to someone on okcupid the other day solely for the fact that had an egregious spelling error on their profile. (and i spell words wrong ALL THE GODDAMN TIME)

because "romance" as we imagine is a creation of our own cultural artifacts anyway, isn't it? we define romance differently than other cultures do because of a variety of social, political, and economic factors that affect the pragmatic elements of relationships. when finding food isn't at issue then we are more able to develop pop culture promoting these north american ideals of romance.

so what does this all mean?  

if the world i live in has created a set of expectations designed to always make me upset enough with my lover to watch a movie where the 'bad' lovers become 'good' by returning pens and holding up boom boxes and inviting us to a puppet show in LA... and then i give that machine some more money and they win and i lose... is that right? as i work to figure out what i desire in a 'romantic' relationship with another human or group of humans i also am learning to manage my expectations in REALITY! of course, some mistakes are unforgivable but that isn't what romantic comedies are about. they are about trivialities and it's the trivialities that are fucking us up... people are fallible and make mistakes (even spelling mistakes) and we have to be kinder to them and ourselves. 

mostly, i think we need to be kinder to ourselves... right?  

i am going to keeping loving movies that feature outrageous romantic expectation BECAUSE I LOVE THEM... but i am also going to remind myself to think critically about them when caught up in a sweeping wave of swooning... because that will happen to.  

 

you look like a doily... 

and yeah, i know it isn't ETHAN HAWKE'S fault... He's just so damn cute!  ;)

facebreakup

they say that breaking up is hard to do...

it isn't. especially when it's right. and it's often right.  

i mean, you don't choose to break up with someone if the break up feels wrong. right? this isn't to say that it doesn't usually suck and it often involves hurting someone who might not have even seen it coming. i'm not saying that, i'm just saying that it can be of great relief to end something with a person if it is a unpleasant struggle. love takes work but the work should be pleasant and pleasurable. at least for me... i don't mind working, but i don't want to work on anything that makes my tummy hurt or makes me anxious and cruel.

so anyway, i ended something recently. i felt bad for a couple reasons: a) i know he was developing feelings for me and had been very open about liking me and b) i sent him a facebook message.

i know!

he said some stuff i didn't like and i wasn't sure about him anyway...  we didn't have a lot in common and that's all i'll say. he was never mean to me and i'm totally sure he's the right guy for the right girl or boy; i am not the right girl.  

and here is another thing i am absolutely sure of: i suspect that i am not easy to date. i am selfish with my spare time, i wanna see pals and meet up with lovers late at night to stay up all night talking and fucking, i want to take the emotional parts insanely slow, i am demanding and challenging and for all my faults i rarely let people off the hook for theirs. i am not a grudge holder but i do not keep things to myself. i suppose i could learn to be more flexible...  but self-awareness is the first step and i am obviously working on ME too!

but ok, NONE of this is the what i wanted to talk about. i wanted to talk about dating and facebook!

whatever. fuck...  

anyway, some irony struck me as i sent this dude a "thanks but no..." message last week. i sent a message ending our relationship, it was curtly accepted and then he deleted me as a "friend". severed totally!  

so that's a weird thing. 

because of the nature of my (our?) relationship with social media i feel like i'm the one that got dumped. that little act of "button" pressing has left me feeling stung, even though i am the one who initiated our severance. is there a normal waiting process before you delete someone? don't you wanna keep them around? isn't lurking part of the normal grieving process?  

it's an odd feeling to be aware of that kind of "social" rejection. we always knew it was there: a relationship ends and you hope you never see that person at your local a few weeks/months later... but to know and participate in not seeing someone online either is a very alienating feeling. i had a momentary existential crisis about human connection and how it has evolved (or not) in the internet era. we all know internet dating is fucked up but who knew internet breaking up would equally disarming. 

there's more thinking to do on this issue but i'm still feeling a bit perplexed by my reaction. i suppose it's another on the pile in the perplexities of my brain but it's there. it  makes me chuckle a knowing chuckle, a chortle of sorts; but i  am also curious to think more on where that little moment of hurt originated.

i guess we all just want people to like us!

or maybe i am just a giant self-entitled narcissistic baby who hopes someone is staring longingly at my profile wishing i loved them endlessly...

that sure as fuck ain't happening.

 

 

I AM A CAT LADY!

It's just true.

And I can prove it. What follows is a an actual transcript of a conversation I just had with my cat, Gary T. Cat.

The T stands for The.

NB: there may have been some marijuana involved in the evening and I may have just attempted to take some arty iPhone nudes in my yellow bathroom. I was planning to call the series of tit shots "bruised" but it felt like a contrived and derivative cultural appropriation (and hair looked bad) so I deleted them...

Context: every night Gary T. Cat requires snuggling. He's a slut for snuggles and you know what, so am I! I'll admit it. So every night Gary does his yelling and then hops up onto the bed and onto my chest where he purrs and grooms the top of my hand and gets an epic scratch until he's decided he's had enough and needs to go back to starring into dark corners.

Prologue: and tonight was no different re: snuggles, and why should it be...

Transcript:
Michelle: (during her nightly cat snuggle-a-thon) this is the best part of life.

CRAZY CAT LADY STATUS CONFIRMED.

69107 kilometers to oblivion...

​i didn't drive until i was a 19. not officially or legally anyway.

i did what all my friends did: 14 years old, learners; 16 years old, driving lessons... but it halted there. my arrested driving development was due entirely in part to my VERY aggressive eastern european driving instructor. i tell you that he was eastern european only because it helps if you imagine an aggressive gymnastics coach yelling at me about my dismount while i white-knuckled down the freeway.

maybe driving lessons are meant to be scary when you're 15 ​but i was a huge baby and so i quit. it's not like i was going to have a car to drive anyway and all my friends in high school had cars so i stopped caring. driving seemed too scary for me. then i graduated and moved to europe and obviously i wasn't going to drive there... i imagined every european driver to be of similar mad (wo)man stripes as that first driving instructor.

long story short i came back from europe, started university, got frustrated with city transit and sucked it up and learned how to drive, at 19, like the fucking grown up i someday hope to be. and it was ok, i was ok at it and no one died as i learned to drive. ​

12 years later I'm a decent driver. confident and only appropriately aggressive. some might disagree and i suppose they have that right but in all seriousness i am a good driver. even my insurance company almost completely agrees.

not long after i acquired the skills of actual driving ability and the little plastic card that entitles me to drive, my little sister did the same thing. she was around the "appropriate" age to learn but never quite found the confidence to do it with gusto. instead i drove the car my dad lent both of us much more than she did. i say lent because he never outright gave it to us but he never asked for it back either. at some point it was just absorbed into a thing that was mostly mine. and when i moved to south it came with me... so basically, mine. ​

blah blah blah. ​

the fact of the matter is i don't actually care about cars. i don't have an intellectual understanding of horsepower beyond the speed and power of the engine (?) but metaphorically i love to imagine 200 horses propelling me forward across the prairie. i don't care about under-coating and detailing and all the matters of mechanics and body shops. i try not crash and i get oil changes when the sticker tells me too. i can't change a tire and i don't care to. ​

i don't care about cars but i love driving.​

4 years ago i took my theoretically grown up self to a car dealership and leased a brand spankin' new car all by my lonesome. no co-signer and no big deal. last week i gave that car back. that little vestige of my first foray into grown-up-ness ​and took a second step in the same direction: the same car, same lease, but new and with more doors.

and as i drove away from that little silver car i felt a deep sense of loss and of nostalgia. anyone who knows me knows that i have a pretty deep nostalgia fetish and that i'm often struck, sometimes to my knees, by sentimentality. ​

69,107 km across this province. countless trip between the sprawling cities, gallons of coffee and fucking and tears. my car was the vessel for every human emotion: songs belted in joy and tears shed for rage and frustration and sadness and loss and grief. it bore the scars of my impatience and the revenge weather takes on us all. it lost hubcaps somewhere in the ether and took me everywhere i needed to go. i had 69,107 ​of complete freedom; of the potential to drive off into beautiful oblivion and fall madly in love with the province i inhabit.

those four wheels and joyful horses drove me home when i didn't know where home was; when i didn't know if north or south was right and couldn't figure how to be anywhere.

as long as i had a destination i had potential.

as long as i had a place to go there was hope.

4 years and 69,107 km. more hellos and goodbyes than a person can count. ​

"yuri" - my old friend

​but there i am, driving away in a new silver steed and the world is rich with potential. there are hundreds of thousands of possible interconnections for me to find: freeways and gravel stretches and transcontinental arteries. warmed by the pleasure of the past i am thrilled for the adventure of the future.

that, and blue tooth. ​

​