Pray for me…

I think I lost my tape. The tape from yesterday where I interviewed Rika, granted wishes to new agers, tourists, rumi lovers and a guy in a navy pinstripe suit on Burrard and Robson street. Took shots of toy dogs and running shoes spinning like a mobile in a cherry tree. An interview with myself about why I dress up in a wedding dress with flowers on it, stick glitter on my face, and flowers in my hair. I remembered why I loved you yesterday, why I love Vancouver, because my mind and heart get changed all the time. I had that on tape, this tape. I think I didn’t change the tape at the Beach, I just remembered, and my sweet mom just went down to look in the sand for me, because she lives in the West End, close to the Beach. I’m so out of it. It still may be gone. I have this yellow raincoat with holes everywhere, and there is a perfect tape size hole in my pocket. I still might need some extra praying, but I probably just need to sleep, and finish this thing, see my Mom, and give her a very big hug.

Living

written July 16th 2008

I am kind of shy. Part of me not shy, the part of me that was doing a little groin to groin dancing with one of the break dancers in Penn Station the other day, not shy. Dirty Doris Day, that’s me. Kind of prim, doesn’t like it when people make jokes or talk about sex , likes things kind of old school, wants to meet someone in a random and romantic way, be brought flowers, danced with to great old music, hand holder, doesn’t like it when people grope each other in public, particularly white heterosexuals, unless their old. Any groping really, its just that white heterosexuals have most of the privelidge in the world, they can contain themselves just this once. So Dirty Doris Day, she likes girls, bald guys with tattoos, hairy, and a few piercings. She’s not with any of them though, getting sexy is scary, more than she feels comfortable with. I have this fear that i will become and that i am a version of Maggie Smith’s Aunt Charlotte in Room with a View and Lumi Cavazos Tita from Like Water for Chocolate. They don’t really get to have their own lives, either of them, they suffer, quietly and not so quietly in service to others, living sexless repressed lives, until of course, when Tita and Pedro are in their sixties and they finally get to be with each other. They combust and die from 50 years of stored love and passion for each other.

People ask me for relationship advice all the time, I find it a little shocking, but maybe its part of the spinsters role, she is a keen observer of the dynamics of human relationships( that’s why she isn’t in them i guess) so she can give some objective advice. I don’t want to write about sex, honestly, its personal. This is more than an issue of sex, its about being comfortable walking in my body in the world, comfort with who i’m attracted to without feeling trapped by a label, the lesbian label, the bi label, or as many people assume, the straight label. Its about letting myself feel alive.

Dreams

I’m sitting at the computer in my fairy dress. Triggered, anxious, and calm. My hands feel cautious on the keys. I am raw. I am in this dress looking pretty, glitter on my cheeks, and flowers in my hair. I am the human sacrifice in a wedding dress. I am going to grant wishes today on the corner of Main and Hastings. A corner that I have spent more time on than any corner in the world. I learned a lot about loving here. I am filming the end of my film project today. I still have some of the middle to complete, but I have been clear for a while about how I wanted to finish my story about Vancouver. I wanted to give wishes to people who might have stopped dreaming, to people I love, to people I don’t know. I wanted to inspire people to think beyond what we accept as normal;poverty, addiction, violence. These normal things have infected our entire city, the entire planet; spiritual poverty, shopping addiction, psychological violence, and we can mix them all around, there are as many combinations as there are acts of violence and types of addiction. I want today to be about dreaming of something beyond this. Beyond offering yourself up as a human sacrifice to your father so he wouldn’t hurt the rest of your family. I want to go beyond this place, and even for a moment, even if it’s just dreaming, to give people, myself included, the space to vision a world without addiction, poverty, and violence, and what it would take to make that happen, even if It doesn’t exist in our lifetimes. Then I think I’m done with the human sacrifice stuff. My dream-To stay open, but safe, to love and be loved back, to do work I care about, to live in a world where people have enough, and feel they are enough. For me to have enough, and feel I am enough.