Red Cedar
More apocalypse, less angst
Money makes me antsy.
My intention this morning was to come in and write about creeping forms of “white flight” in institutional and community settings (and perpetuated by “progressives”) – but instead of getting right down to it I got caught up in some financial messiness that needed to be resolved, which lead to many phone calls and some anxiety, and finally the creation of a list to calm me back down.
I know, not exactly radical. But somehow in the last couple of days I’ve had a number of financial irregularities show up in my life that are both imminent and costly and this is the type of stress that puts pretty much everything else on the backburner. I’m still awaiting one more phone call regarding a property tax issue – but for now I think I’ve got my budget for the next several months resolved around payments and catching up accounts in arrears – and I think I can sort it all out without having to sell my house in Gibsons which is sortof the goal. But it’s tight, because my taxes and electricity costs on the place have gone up dramatically in the last year and the amount I collect from the tenants there doesn’t even come close to covering my monthly outlay. And besides that, my city-cost-of-living seems to be continually on the rise as well.
As much as I can be a bit of a spendthrift (oh books, oh clothes, oh stuff) I also have some pretty significant hangups about financial solvency – having been almost bankrupted by my ex-husband’s refusal to pay half our shared debt upon separation. Not only did it take three years to pay everything off amidst nasty creditor-phonecalls, but it took a full six years before I could obtain any real credit (ie: a credit card that didn’t require a deposit). Want invalidation and humiliation on a regular basis? Live with bad credit for awhile. No matter how much you try, it’s pretty much impossible to avoid all situations in which your credit might get checked. (Renting an apartment, getting a new cel phone plan, having your hydro hooked up, getting a new bank account, getting house or auto insurance – I spent a lot of time explaining to people that my credit situation wasn’t entirely my fault and why I should be given a break.)
Fortunately, that’s a few years behind me and I have re-established my credit and even own a home (though I don’t live there – but that’s a rant about the housing market for another post) – which should provide me with some sense of financial ease right?
I wish. On a day to day basis, as long as everything fits into my budget and projected spending, then I feel pretty good about things. Good income, small savings buffer, etc. etc. But the moment that tilts even one iota and there’s an unexpected bill or payment required, I am gripped with the fear that I’m about to lose the financial position I’ve worked for all over again. That somehow the house will end up with a lien on it, or BC Hydro will blackmark my name for late payment, that I will lose my credit cards and be forever in a position of having to explain to my employer why I need a cash advance in order to travel for business.
You get the idea.
Because it doesn’t matter that our society is drowning in debt and there’s almost no way to live without it, and sometimes things happen and you can’t make a payment, or costs go up beyond what your paycheque will cover and no one will give you just that little more time to stretch one thing to another….. It doesn’t matter that the credit companies give cards to students without incomes and even the poorest people are encouraged to purchase everything on high interest and time, not to mention the 40-year mortgages that ensure you will never own as much of your home as the bank does…. It doesn’t matter that the deck is stacked against mostly everyone except those who do the lending…. Because the minute you miss a payment, you are solely responsible for the humiliation that creeps up your neck the next time a clerk looks down her nose and refuses you something. You were the one who didn’t keep it together. You were the one who fucked up. And clearly, you can never be trusted again (at least not for another six years), so just you go and live with that and try to rent an apartment or get a job without having your name sent to the life-auditors at Equifax.
Doesn’t matter if you have a good income. No credit is no credit. And it sucks.
So I think about selling the house in Gibsons, even though it’s an enforced savings and investment plan rolled into one. A little monthly cash outlay now means more equity in the place down the road, not to mention the longer I hold onto it the more it’s worth. Really, I am plagued with a financial self-esteem issue which is not at all reflective of my actual position, which I guess is a left-over. Certainly, making a list of financial expectations and outlays for the next few months helped me to see that my money worries are more in my head and less in the ledger sheet. But still, I can’t help feeling life would be that much simpler if I didn’t have to worry about the possibility of foreclosure on a house as well as everything else.
It's a Monday alright.
I’m having the usual Monday trouble. You know, slow brain, wistful longing for the weekend just passed, the urge to curl up under the desk and sleep. It’s making a real post difficult – so I’m afraid it’s a life update rather than a witty obeservational post for you this morning!
A little recap would have to include the fact that I have the never-ending cold (8 days and counting) and besides that have been super-anxious – a miserable combination that made last week pretty hard. While there are many things I could be anxious about, I’m not exactly sure what the root cause of this particular round has been. I’m assuming it is tied to my election approaching in less than two weeks and the fact I sent out my campaign letters the day before I woke up seized by self-doubt and anger…. but like all good nervous disorders, it grew over the week to encompass so much more than that and by the end of the week I was in the mood to throw in the towel on everything. Exhausted mostly, and feeling pretty alienated from most people.
Fortunately with the weekend came an impromptu party at my house following the SFU-TSSU anniversary dinner, some interpretive dancing in my kitchen with Marika, some quality boyfriend snuggle and shag time, and some Sunday afternoon singing and guitar-playing. Restorative despite the fact I overdid it a bit on Saturday night and now have a worse cough as a result. Really, I can’t just rest up all the time!
And despite the fact I had a restless sleep (coughing intermittently woke me up), and a bad public transit experience this morning (three busses passed without stopping), I am feeling pretty good today and I think I can chalk that up to some cutting loose on Saturday night. You can’t beat a weekend that includes plenty of laughing, singing, fucking and talking…. So I’ve got that to hold on to as I look at my schedule for the next few days and sigh.
It’s another week of stuff including a trip to Prince George on Thursday night (collective bargaining talk). I was considering Victoria on Friday night but at this point I’m going to wait and see. I might just need a weekend of sleeping in preparation from my upcoming union convention (meetings start on the 17th for me), and if that’s the case I best stay home. I will be in V-town the first weekend of May either way.
As usual, I want to do everything and that always, always gets me into trouble.
Beautiful bicycle. Cyclona.
Last night I had a dream about Mel and Cara – we were scavenging for junk in a Victoria neighbourhood, looking for pieces to make a medieval play out of – warm early summer evening and I standing barefoot on alley pavement surrounded by green trees as we talked. It felt so unfortunate to wake up! I’m obviously missing people right now.
But rather than writing about the potential causes of that – I wanted instead to give a little promo to my friend Kyla who opened an online shop a couple of weeks ago (and is one of the people I’m missing dearly at the moment). As of March, Kyla’s amazingly beautiful bicycle art creations can be purchased online at her Cyclona Designs Etsy shop. Whether belt buckles, pendants, or stained glass window pieces – all of the works for sale feature cycling or bicycle parts in some way, are one-of-a-kind, and made from 100% recycled materials. As Kyla writes in her shop bio, not only does she love the process involved in each original piece, but “the worn out bike parts achieve a new life – after traveling hundreds of miles on highways, byways and soft woodland trails, I like the idea of them traveling hundreds more as art.”
I was lucky enough to receive one of her window hangings for my birthday – similar to the picture I’ve posted with this article, but involving a wrench instead of a cog-dreamcatcher. Once I get a chance to take a photo of it hanging in my kitchen I’ll post that here as well; it’s one of the most treasured things I own. Cyclona pieces are really one of a kind – and totally unlike anything else I’ve seen. Besides being beautiful, they are well-made and very durable, owing the Kyla’s well-honed technical skills.
Enough rambling though – go check out Cyclona and keep it in mind for your next birthday/xmas/iloveyou/whatever gift purchase!
Voice.
I remember the voice coming out of my kitchen radio sometime back in 2003 or 04 – before I moved to the Sunshine Coast – when I still lived above Turks, on the Drive. It caught me, that voice and the poetry it was speaking, and I sat still to listen until he was done. I wrote down his name so I could look him up further and a few days later realized that the voice and the poems belonged to a man who lived up Charles Street from me and drank coffee at the shop beneath my apartment. The small world of Canadian arts, the CBC and the Drive – made perfect sense to me.
A few months ago I saw that this voice – which belongs to Shane Koyczan – was performing with his band Short Story Long at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre. And so I went with some friends and for the first time since that chance radio encounter I heard more than a snippet. This time it was two sets of spoken word set to music in a crowded theatre that was crying and laughing and stomping and sighing all at once. In the struggle of living all of these reactions are appropriate – and Shane encapsulates so much of that strain, joy and grief with a deftness very few writers of any generation possess. I cried through most of the show a little from sadness, but mostly from the relief that someone else out there understood and could articulate love and revolution in just that way.
So, being me – which is busy…. I hadn’t thought about that show for awhile and yesterday I had a bit of a moment where I was wondering if they were coming back to town anytime soon. As far as I can tell from their MySpace page (fuck MySpace is ugly) they aren’t doing any shows at the moment. But! I discovered that in January they released their CD (title: A Pretty Decent Cape in my Closet) which is available on CDBaby and also on iTunes. Lacking any impulse control I downloaded it immediately and listened to it at work. Which was a bit of a mistake, because the pieces still make me weepy and a cubicle is no place for crying. (Or perhaps it’s the most appropriate place for crying but for social convention.) If you want to hear a few tracks off it go to the ugliest site on earth and check out the streaming media at their MySpace site – and then really, go somewhere online and buy the whole album. It’s worth the $10 because it’s some of the most brilliant spoken word out there, but also because you get to support these really cool artist/musician folk who live not so far away – and who have some important things to say.
Now unfortunately, my favourite piece is not online anywhere to share – not on YouTube or MySpace or on their site – otherwise I’d link to it directly because it’s been rattling around in my head with a few other thoughts these past days, and it’s what I’m going to write about next. If you took my advice in the previous paragraph, then I would suggest you give a listen to “This is My Voice” – which is about using the pen and the stage and the words that make change to do right in the world. This was the premise of the Flying Folk Army when we started back in 1997 – to bring social issues to the dance floor – writing songs about what mattered; guerilla humour and social frenzy incorporated into all our shows whether in the labour halls or on festival stages. Unlike my role as protester, I felt heard as a performer, our words and ideas co-written and sung in 6-part harmony. Our crowds were never huge but always energetic – and often singing our words along with us. As Brian has noted recently, it’s something I miss, this particular expression of voice now that the Flying Folk has for all intents and purposes retired itself into other projects.
Last October, as I left Shane’s show, I was acutely aware of this feeling – the words from “This Is My Voice” lingering – lightly cursing myself for not writing more, for leaving music behind to do other things. For abandoning my own voice in a particular way. It’s a familiar frustration in the last two years – since being a union activist has all but taken over my life, and I increasingly have to stretch to simply maintain friendships let alone trying to manage a band, rehearsals and shows on top of that. It’s silly really, because even as I have indulged in this artistic self-pitying (cause lord knows, that’s all it is), my union activity has given me a whole different stage to work from – access to thousands of people to talk to, with a message of struggle to take into even the most conservative workplaces. And here I have learned to speak with a different voice – to a brand new audience.
The other night at the WISE, someone asked me why a radical was running for union office again. Specifically he asked, “what can you do as a union leader that you can’t do as an activist?” And I had to think about that. Because I know that the psychological motivations of being a union leader are not different than any other type of performer. But that wasn’t the answer. And I thought instead about these last few months of talking to our members about their jobs and their kids and how work should be valued, and how the system isn’t fair. I thought about the talk a couple months ago where I literally stamped my feet and shook my fist about injustices in the workplace to the applause of a bunch of women clerical workers who know I am them if only a little bit braver. And so I said, “I’m a union leader because I get to go to where people are at and talk to them about work. Is it radical? I’m not sure you would think so – but in a world that tells us we aren’t worth anything because we work and don’t own, that pushes consumption as a paltry substitute for class power, that tells people their voice doesn’t count unless they vote for a party that doesn’t represent them anyways – yeah, I think it might be.”
It’s not the revolution, I know. But neither was the Flying Folk or the APEC protests. It’s one piece like many pieces and if we’re going to find our common voice and shout it out together – then we’ve got to be ready – and that’s not just those of us in East Vancouver. And as much as I want to be a performer and a poet, I am *so* much more suited to what I’m doing right now. Honestly. I never question whether I should be up there – giving voice to the frustrations of the many – hoping one day that we’ll be talking something much more radical than the picket line. The traditions we come from are many – artistic, political, social – and I’m so damned glad that we’ve got these intersections that bring us back together.
Red Cedar 