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100×365 #1: Karen Stasko
I wanted to be you and I wanted to get as far away as possible away from you. In 7th grade you called me a baby, knowing that the word would shoot straight into my soul leaving me shattered into a million pieces of shameful skipped-a-grade not-quite puberty. You knew my vulnerabilities and you used them to wound me over and over, but I couldn’t stay away. In 8th grade you were my 5th period best pal only because acting like you liked me kept you safe from the 2nd chair flute who would never challenge her 1st chair friend. [UPDATE: Edited to add that clearly I am not talking…
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The Pressure Of Self Is A Weighty Thing
Not being the sort to wait things out too much before jumping in, I’ve been throwing around links to this blog with abandon this week as if this newborn blog is something long-established. The piece I’m filling in inside my head but that’s clearly missing to the public is that I HAD a blog. I am used to referring to it. I took it down months ago but I’ve missed having one as an outlet for self-expression, the creation of a public extension of my private persona. What I’ve created, then, from this odd missing link, is this: 1. A need to explain. Witness this self-evident post. 2. Pressure! I…
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Parking Parallels
It makes me laugh when the ironies of my life are thrown in my face. Since arriving here in Vancouver 6 or so weeks ago, I’ve been sensitive about my car. For the first week I was illegally parked in a permit-only zone. Then we paid $5 per week to obtain a blue card to stick in the dash for a few weeks while we thought of something else to do with the car situation. There’s another car (uninsured; can’t park on the street) and an underground garage space (with one uninsured car presently occupying) but for now it’s my car collecting bird shit and tree sap at the curb,…
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The Hiatus Is Over
I used to have a blog, and then one day I disbanded it. Oh, I use the word “disbanded” as if my blog was a group of some kind, and I suppose it was. A group of memories, a collection of the Me That is No Longer. It became necessary, in my mind anyway, to let those memories slip away unnoticed. We are fools if we think we are truly anonymous here on the internet, sending our words, thoughts, images, and flotsam from our lives out into a quasi-corporeal public stew. There is no anonymity, and there is no real rest in thinking there is. But still so many of…