felis_ultharus

So I'm finally beginning to feel a little more human this weekend. Since the election in October, I've had the stress of a massive financial report hanging over me, and that stress was really eating into me.

I've been tense, irritable, depressed, stressed, distant, and generally unhappy for months, with recurring writer's block. But the auditor got the report back to us on Friday, montrealais brought it into my workplace, and I got everything signed, sealed, and delivered on Friday afternoon -- one business day before the deadline.

Then I collapsed, and slept for what felt like only the second time in five months. I was half-asleep at em_fish's birthday get-together, and I'm only just beginning to feel kind-of awake today.

I finished Payback -- not very coherent, though Massey Lectures rarely are, but I was still surprised to see Margaret Atwood rambling so aimlessly. She's usually so focused.

It was still a really interesting read, though. Her Christmas Carol re-imagined for the 21st century as an Earth Day Carol with its three spirits -- a Pagan earth priestess for past, a hippie for present, and a giant cockroach for Earth-Day-yet-to-come -- was hilarious, though heavy-handed even by Atwood's standards.

I also saw The Watchman, which people kept saying was like the comic panel-for-panel. Sadly exempt were the best panels, those full-page ones near the end. Still worth watching, though.

I've been getting a lot done -- with my writing and other things. I've got a rough draft of the short story I'm sending out next week already put together, and now begins a rigorous editing process.

It's a good thing real life has been going well, because my entertainment has taken a turn for the disturbing. See, I don't like to switch novels or switch video games when I'm in the middle of one, and I made the mistake of reading Oryx and Crake at the same time as playing the horror game Silent hill 4.

Oryx and Crake really is the most frightening kind of "what if" -- not the "what if the bomb is dropped?" or "what if we opened a portal to another dimension," but just "what if we simply just keep doing what we're doing." At first it seemed pretty lacklustre, but now it's become pure Atwood, and I have to keep stopping to digest the more brutal passages before I move on to the next.

She's brilliant though. I'd like to splice her vision and psychological understanding with Heather O'Neill's style. The resulting writer would be able to re-write all of creation with her words.

And Silent Hill 4 is most disturbing of the series of that series of video games. Not because of walls that bleed angry spirits, or the post-apocalyptic empty urban landscapes, or the undefined fleshy things that slither through those landscapes. It's because the only place of safety in it is a locked, sentient room which gradually becomes more and more hostile to you the more the game progresses -- its air becomes toxic, and the room decays, and the atmosphere itself injures you.

The idea of having no place of safety, and no home to return to, is scarier to me than all the gore-encrusted prisons and hospitals that are a mainstay of the series. I honestly don't know if I can finish this game.

I finished Naomi Klein's No Logo yesterday. Like so many other books, it's one I've read a couple sections during my undergrad and post-grad years. Now, post-school, I finally had a chance to read it.

I'd been expecting either a radical, head-in-the-clouds manifesto, or a sincere-but-agonizing-slog through the myriad horrors of neo-liberal economic fanaticism. What I got was clear-headed, clear-eyed, careful analysis written in plain English and backed up with heavy research and personal interviews.

It's less a manifesto, and more like a history book, documenting the successes and failures of recent anti-corporate movements, trying to figure out what works and what doesn't, and where to go from here.

She uses much of the same ideas and explores the same concepts about commons, democracy, and the public good -- the same non-secular-but-humanist perspective -- as a group of other Canadian thinkers that risen to the fore in progressive circles: John Ralston Saul, David Suzuki, and Linda McQuaig. I think at this point we can pretty call them a movement -- the Canadian Humanist Movement sounds nice to me.

Of course, we aren't going to call them a movement, because that might imply we have a culture, or that it might matter - peu importe they're all internationally-recognized names in lefty political circles. Meanwhile, in other circles, the Conservatives have just finished gleefully eviscerating the arts -- this time explicitly killing arts projects that don't fit their neo-con worldview. And I'm sorely disappointed by the lack of outrage I'm seeing.

Last year, Margaret Atwood said of the Harperites' view on artists and writers, "They basically just hate us. You know it’s people who have never seen any arts in their own lives — they would rather not have gardens, they would rather have parking lots. They just think it’s a frill probably."

The problem is, the People-Who-Would-Rather-Not-Have-Gardens have power. Let's hope we can topple them before they turn this rich and wonderful country into a parking lot for their SUVs.

On that note, anyone who's in the three by-election areas -- Guelph, Westmount-Ville-Marie, or Saint-Lambert, please get out and vote. It's September 8th, unless Harper calls a general election. Remember, any vote not cast counts as an de facto endorsement of the winner.

Got called into work this afternoon. Not to do placement tests, but to my old job in administration, which I prefer.

They were swamped. Paper was stacked everywhere. Teachers were coming in for books for courses that hadn't even been entered in the computer yet. We were fed-exing textbooks to Quebec for courses that didn't even teachers yet, but were supposed to start Monday. And nobody knew what was going on because the people in charge of this mountain of paper were stuck doing phone tests all day.

I think I made a dent in the paperwork, though not much more than a dent. I'm still not officially working there though, but if things keep up like this, I won't-be-officially-working-there full time.

Other than than, I'm about 48 pages into my novel, and I'm enjoying Solomon Gursky still immensly. But it seems my big project will be on Susanna Moodie and Margaret Atwood. I can't wait to tell them all my theories of Susanna Moodie's secret life hunting ninjas in the Canadian wilderness.

(It's Concordia university. If I handed that in as a final paper, I'd still only get an A-)