Red Cedar
More apocalypse, less angst
insomnia
stayed with a friend out in the valley last night, and had a blissful two hours of driving in monsoon-like conditions to get to work this morning. it’s nine in the morning and the sky is still twilight with dense clouds and buckets of rain expected to continue through the week.
my life continues on its regular tilt-a-whirl existence. margot came to the coast to visit this weekend, and we got very drunk with my friend fraser on friday night at the legion in roberts creek. that lead to a lazy saturday and then i came to the city on sunday for a resist! collective meet. stayed at margot’s sunday night, spent monday hanging out in coffeeshops on the drive studying for a psych exam i have tonight, and then drove out to chilliwack yesterday afternoon.
and now i am working.
something odd has been going on with me since the beginning of december – while my regular drinking has curtailed to a great degree (my pints three times a week has gone down to drinking once every three weeks), but when i do go out for pints i *always* end up drinking waaaaay too much. it’s like now i store up for a binge and then sorta just let myself unravel every few weeks, when the rest of the time i’m living a fairly straight and over-achieving existence. i’m not happy about this because i think it is speaking to some unfulfilled need for human contact (drinking is entirely social for me), and on some level alcohol has always been about that for me…. but because alcoholism is so rampant in my family (not my parents, but everyone else on both sides) i am aware of the need to keep that aspect of myself in check. i am unsure about the best approach here as abstinence seems unneccesarily harsh, but i no longer trust myself to drink even a little unless the situation itself is very low key. (oh – dear abby, don’t fail me now).
i think this has been contributing to my on and off insomnia in any case – as my sleep schedule is highly variable when i have been drinking – and this alone is probably reason to steer clear of the demon drink… as it is, i have an exam this evening after work and i’m going to be writing it on 3 hours sleep….
now, all things are not bad – and in fact i feel pretty good at the moment… spent last night with a close friend who made me a lovely dinner of pasta and codfish, have a visitor coming later this week who i have not seen in many months, am glad to be getting this exam done with (we’ll see if i’m actually ready for it when i get there), and i’m very very close to finishing the stitched rug i have been working on for the past 7 months. as well i have professional, educational and personal goals that have value to me, and have renewed my commitment to building positive relationships and action attentiveness towards those around me…. but what i have difficulty doing is finding peace in all that i am doing, and finding the space in me that is self-accepting. i am able to enjoy many small moments for which i feel endlessly priveleged, but somehow the whole experience occurs as a struggle rather than just what is.
damn! this introspection is way too much work!
(slightly) melancholy
sometimes i don’t treat people very well – always in a way that is unintentional – which seems to be something based on my own failure to understand that people close to me actually do care what i do, to myself and to them. i often make an action based on this idea that no one really regards what i do with much concern – which of course discounts the experience of those who do want to be a part of my life.
i am just realizing now how my inability to love myself, translates into an inability to understand the needs of others.
not fair!
yes, yes – i know the world isn’t fair. but i have two new grievances i am handling for two different co-workers as of today – and you know what? it is so wrong what is happening to my sisters in the workplace – i can’t even believe it.
the system makes me crazy – and i would love to write more about that but i’m swamped between union and work at the moment.
grrrrrr.
good things
now with that serious and thoughtful post out of the way i can post a list of good things about today
seeing a good friend i haven’t seen for several weeks being gifted with a pound of wild, smoked & candied coho salmon (if you buy this stuff in a supermarket it’s really expensive and not very good, this was caught and cured by my good friend which makes it a million times better) being gifted with a new book to read finishing up voting for the collective agreement – tomorrow i count the ballots, send them into the regional office and my role in the whole bargaining/strike/agreement debacle is officially over! feeling like i really am almost better from the oral surgery having someone buy me lunch being given permission to staff the position my assistant left last april (at least in anticipation of getting the full permission from the big boss) looking forward to a dinner of smoked salmon, brown rice and greens sending a surprise envelope to a friend in the mail with something i think they will like inside looking forward to margot coming to hang out for the weekend and
realizing that the yelling really wasn’t my fault (in telling a story to someone, i realized how fucked up a certain situation really was and how absurd it was that i took the blame)
huzzah!
projects designed to memorialize
i have been thinking since monday night about this memorial project for bob that was discussed and whether or not my involvement is the right thing for me at this moment in time. when the idea first came up, i was excited other people wanted to do something to memorialize our comrade and the politics of his life (the politics that we share, the activist history of our community), and i went to a dinner meeting on monday to talk about these ideas.
the project that we did brainstorm (if it comes to fruition) is something i think entirely appropriate – a book project chronicling the history of the east vancouver activist community, using stories from his life as jumping off points. both a memorial, and yet relevant to activists who will come later on down the line and want to better understand the development of our movements……
so the project itself recorded on flip charts – this, i have no problem with and a part of me wants involvement in some capacity. on the other hand i fear working with other people on a project like this has the potential to damage or at least alter the memories i have not only of my friend, but those of our friendship i hold very close at the moment. something i had not really considered before now is the perspectives of others could affect my own in a way i don’t think is positive for my mental state.
i don’t want my memory of my friend to consist of months of sitting in meetings talking about what he would have wanted, or what type of memorial would be most appropriate. i don’t want to hear what he really thought about a project i was working on when he was alive (but didn’t tell me).
what i do want is to finish a project i started three years ago (totally unrelated to his influence, but later supported by him), as a way of honouring the work we had talked about doing together. this project belongs to no one except myself, and has very little to do with him aside from touching on themes he understood better than most people i know. it does not involve exposing my feelings to those who are strangers, it does not involve rehashing arguments i had with him. and although it is a way of personally working through my own healing process, it has nothing to do with healing or grieving.
it has everything to do with going forward, as an individual, as an activist, and as part of a movement that has its hills and vales and sometimes needs a compass. although the people who are involved with this memorial are those who i hold a great deal of respect for, i am not sure i can participate in the way i intially indicated i would.
how odd to have discovered this new thing – the depth of my grief, the protection of memory at the cost of eschewing a project designed to memorialize, the recognition that a relationship between two people is a third entity that no one else can really understand.
and i thought i already knew everything. huh.
Red Cedar 