Red Cedar

I can’t remember the last time I got as drunk as I did last night – and wow, should I ever know better than that! Started after work drinking sangria with Jess and progressed to the WISE and bottles of wine. Really felt fine until the last half hour – or the last drink – which seemed to put me over the line very quickly.

But despite the great potential for hangover, I have felt pretty good for most of the day and managed to get a major piece of information design done on one of my projects – have been pretty much intently focused on it all day – to my own surprise. This is actually one of the more creative parts of my job – like a puzzle that needs to be solved – how to organize info for the web in a way that is logical, easy to access and aligned with the objectives of my department. It basically was the framework I needed to get done in order to give the job of developing the site to someone else….

Got the draft itinerary for Colombia last night and realized that I have completely spaced on getting my passport application in. Next week it will have to be…..

Also in email news – I got a really creepy reporter request this afternoon which I have forwarded onto the lawyer cause it appears this reporter has some extra access to discovery that he shouldn’t have…. And I also got the first email from my brother ever today (we’re not in touch that often unless I go to see him) – he wanted to let me know that he just got a new job with the City of Victoria in the engineering group – which has been his goal for a long time…. So I was really happy to hear that from him, and I was also glad that he included me in his email out to the family since we often forget each other (it’s not dislike, just ambivalence). Also heard from my friend Jeremy today who is coming up to the coast for David’s party and going to swing by my place saturday for a hang-out before we go up to the creek.

Despite the drinking last night, I think my ennui of earlier this week is lifting (I took Wednesday off as a sick day cause I was so blue)…. I’m feeling again some of my value to others in the world and the critical voices in my head have been pretty quiet today…. Oh, and I’m able to laugh at the absurdity of my life again – which is a pretty essential thing in times as weird as this.

My head is a blur today, my frustration levels raised by an early-morning conference call with Ottawa, and restless with the thought of more creative things than briefing notes and project plans. And so it goes – knowing that I’ll get through this day, and that my counterpart on this work-project out east is struggling with the internal bullshit politics even more than me.

Got back from Victoria on the first harbour-to-harbour flight of the day – a beautiful morning for such a tour of the archipelago, morning sun and mist coming off the sea below. It’s a funny thing coming to work by airplane – but it makes for a much shorter trip than the tedious chain of ferries and highways between the Island and the Sunshine Coast – and gives me a lot more time away than I would otherwise have.

Had a decent weekend in Victoria this time around and got to spend some quality playtime with Greg in addition to meeting the family obligations and visiting with some friends. Actually invited Greg for dinner to meet the folks and he accepted (which surprised me) – which then made me feel awkward because I haven’t brought anyone to meet the folks since Darren seven years ago. I think Greg was more relaxed about it than me, and of course, it was all fine and very civil and a bit funny. Still, I’m finding myself a bit tense about it, mostly because I am in the process of trying to resolve my feelings about this relationship in the context of what has been a difficult emotional period. I think my involvement in Darren’s case – his re-entry of my life in such a dramatic and pseudo-tragic fashion – has hampered my ability to see beyond loss and the full expression of my emotional connections… The only way I see to work through that is to keep at developing and redeveloping relationships that bring sustenance and support – so I am granting permission to myself to have more social time this summer as a part of that healing process 🙂

I am looking forward to having a couple of weekends on the coast over the next little while to do some garden-finishing and to work on a few sewing projects I’ve got rolling around in my head. I don’t know where this urge to make things again is coming from, but I’ve got lots of little experimental ideas and some fabric to try them out with, so seems a good time to get going on them.

(I just cannot believe how much faster this blog is running since the move to the new server on Friday. Woot!)

Oh yeah – Firetrap stayed up real late last night and got the two new Resist! servers up and starting to be functional. This blog is one of the first sites to be hosted on our new box “ash”. Which makes you one of the first visitors to the new servers of our very happy collective.

Thanks Firetrap! Resist! will rock once again!

For all the usual moon-related reasons, I am finding myself increasingly irritable this week, to the degree that I have now had to wall out my co-workers with louder and louder music through the headphones. Cocooned by indyrock and glued to my computer monitor with the pretense of working so intently I can’t participate in the distractions – I’m relying on this strategy to get me through until tomorrow when I can get a bit of a break from it. It’s not their fault, and I realize that – i’m feeling acutely my inability to relax – but in the meantime I don’t want to do or say something assholish. So I’m basically pretending to be a decent human on a day when I most decidedly do not feel like one. Of course, this monthly phase is always compounded by the fact I also appear intensely ugly to myself as well – and I can only suck it up for the 2 or 3 days I go through it and know it will soon pass (as in – Saturday can’t come too soon).

At least I have been getting good sleeps (albeit with bizarre dreams) in the last couple of nights. That definitely alleviates some of the stresses that seem to be pressing on me (work, union, jail support – all demanding a lot of thinking and writing and talking right now). And it has been nice to be going home on a regular schedule all week and spending nights in my own bed. I have found an increasing ambivalence about my home when I am on the road, but as soon as I get some solid time there, I realize how much I don’t really want to move and want to keep working on the place and making it more “mine”.

Got my passport application signed yesterday by my lawyer and the biography and project materials into the union they asked for and heard back today they are happy for all that. A good friend of mine told me last week he was disappointed that I was selected to go on the human rights tour and not him and now it seems that he is not really talking to me at all this week which does cause me some fretting even though I also recognize I haven’t done anything wrong and he’s probably just getting over his own issues (he has age, and more political power on his side, I think he was surprised by the outcome). I think I might be projecting a little because I worry so much about what other people think of me – and because so often my successes have been met with back-stabbing behaviour by others (so much so that I’m actually afraid to tell some members of my local executive about being selected for this tour).

I guess the objective – particularly as I want to run for higher union office – is to develop more confidence in myself and not let the unfounded criticisms of others stress me out so much (while still being able to hear constructive criticism and counter political analysis without getting defensive – that balance)…..

The past six months of having a lot of my political world torn apart and doing the support work has made me more brave rather than more fearful in general – because as I recently realized – I have been and will keep surviving this with as much integrity as possible. This is probably a lesson best extrapolated to other political arenas and life experiences in general.

The more I figure this stuff out the easier it is to be me.

And hopefully the less irritable I will be.