Glee got me thinking tonight. It got me thinking about hate.

I had like the anti-high school high school experience. Not “anti” like “against”. More like “anti” like “antimatter”. I hibernated. That’s the way I think of it. I put my head down and woke up on the first day of university.

It wasn’t a conscious decision. I had all the self-awareness of a seahorse when I was fourteen. I don’t know why I hibernated, but I did. I had some friends, but not close ones*. I barely dated. I was super active in the youth group but that was like a separate world to me.

But there was one week. One week when the ground thawed and all the high school crap seeped in. I was seventeen years old, accepted to college, impatiently waiting to get the hell out, just like everyone else. For one week in the spring of 1994 I experienced four years’ worth of full-on pain.

My cousin was dying. We’d known he was sick, but there were a lot of hushed conversations about it. More speculation than frankness. I sat one night with my parents and asked if he had AIDS. They said he did, but it wasn’t to be told. And my aunt, especially, wasn’t to know I knew. She thought of me as a child. It was too much for me.

I freaked out. If I could put together how sick he was, and from what, and how he got it, damned if I was going to accept being thought of as a child.

I couldn’t sleep at night. I’d doze in an uncomfortable chair in the school library.

That semester I was taking a sociology class that made me want to poke my own eyes out. The teacher was so smart, but the other students were freaking idiots. We could have all learned things, but instead we collectively rolled our eyes and popped our gum. The teacher never gave up, though. And one day that happened to be during my week of insomnia and angst, he decided to make a point.

We were learning about deviant behaviour. As our textbook told us, as far as sociology is concerned “deviant” bears no value judgment, it just means the behaviour isn’t performed by the majority of people.

And the example our dear, well-meaning teacher gave was homosexuality. In his mind, homosexuality isn’t bad, it’s just that the majority of people are straight.

Picture me sitting across from the biggest asshole I’ve ever known. His name was Justin. He was a mean kid and my only run-in with him was in t-minus two minutes.

Justin goes nuts. I can’t remember what he said, but it was homophobic and it was passionate. Hateful. Cruel and mean and I hadn’t slept in a week.

So I interrupted him. I asked him what if I were gay. Would he still say those things, knowing he was saying them to a gay person?

That’s when everything stopped. He stopped. He stared at me and I had no idea what was going on. I heard the blood rushing in my head.

And then a whisper from somewhere behind me. From one of the eye-rolling girls. “Oh my god. She’s gay. That explains it.” More whispers.

I remember walking out of that room and feeling such an overwhelming number of emotions simultaneously that I may have stumbled. I have no memory of that night. I don’t remember if I talked to my parents. I don’t remember if I slept. But I do remember having the suffocating feeling that I couldn’t go back to that school. I had visions of every student pointing and staring. Nobody would talk to me. I’d go from being a benignly awkward A-student to being a reviled freak.

But those thoughts were nothing. The part that broke me was knowing it wasn’t true. I wasn’t gay. But it didn’t matter. I couldn’t say so, because if there’s nothing wrong with being gay, why should I care if people thought it of me? I was misunderstood and I was lost and the injustice was so massive that I can barely put words to it even now.

And honestly, I don’t remember what I did. I don’t remember if there were stares the next morning. I don’t remember if I even talked to any of my peers about it at all. All I remember is that I finished the year just fine. I eventually slept. I came out of my years-long hibernation the first day of college. I buzzed my head in the fall of 1997 and then I went to an Indigo Girls concert and many of my friends thought I was coming out, and they loved me and I loved them and I was still straight.

I’m straight, and I’ve experienced crushing homophobia. And I cry every damn time they address it on Glee because we didn’t have Glee when I was in high school. And I wish with all my heart that no one ever has to feel what I felt. And I know that every day people do.

And it breaks my heart.

—
* ETA: I was exhausted and emotional when I wrote this, and I’m embarrassed to correct myself – I actually did have a couple of very close friends in high school who were also youth group friends, which is why I just didn’t think of them. My forgetting of them in the heat of this post doesn’t diminish how important they were to me then, or now.

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GEEK. (That's me last weekend speaking at Northern Voice, wearing the Jayne hat I crocheted during the interview frenzy). Photo credit Carol Browne (CC-by-nc-sa licensed)

Have I ever mentioned that the whole let’s-do-an-interview-about-crafts-with-Joss-Whedon thing was the most fun I’ve ever had online? Well, if I failed to mention it, consider it immortalized here in bytes (until the EMP strikes and all this work we’ve done is obliterated).

The fun started nearly two years ago, the interview was in November of ’08, and yesterday Sci-Fi Wire resurrected it, much to the totally hilarious chagrin of its readers, if the comments are any indication.

During the interview, I asked Whedon if his then-soon-to-premiere-show Dollhouse would contain crafty elements like Firefly did. His response was facetious and funny, and Sci-Fi Wire running an article saying that the absence of decoupage is what killed Dollhouse makes the little green men that flutter around in my heart sing with a special song of laughter and joy.

One of the things I love about Whedon’s approach to talking about his work is that he brings both intense seriousness and great humour to pretty much every interview. If the audio from our chat had been any good, you’d have been able to hear that I was nearly shitting myself with nerves at the beginning of our conversation, but after a couple of minutes my high-pitched phone voice relaxed into its normal range, and we simply chatted for nearly twenty-five minutes. His being a nice guy with a good sense of humour is what allowed me to chill out. And dude, if I’d known he was as knowledgeable about crafts as he is, I’d have prepared totally differently for the interview.

There’s great overlap between the crafts and sci-fi communities (just skim the comments on the original post and over at Whedonesque), and knowing that this interview contributed to both just makes me happy.

Thanks for reminding me of the happy, Sci-Fi Wire. Thanks for reminding me of the happy.

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The Swedish title, Män som hatar kvinnor, translates as “Men Who Hate Women”. Somewhere along the line the title for the English translation of the wildly popular, bestselling novel was changed to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

It’s this difference in how stories are packaged in Sweden vs. North America that’s making me insist you go see this Swedish version of the story*. Hollywood is making a version too; it’s slated for release in 2012. But I can’t imagine how Hollywood won’t end up making a movie more about a tattoo than about men who hate women.

My friend Michelle introduced me to the book last summer. I was sitting in her living room and she raved about it something like this, “Kim, you have to read this. It’s not a genre you usually read [crime/mystery], but you have to. For this book has the most kick-ass female protagonist EVAR.”

I read it in three days.

It’s a very good novel, worthy of international craze. But here’s what sets it apart, and this is why you should see the Swedish movie:

Alongside the gripping whodunit is a powerful portrayal of sexual violence. The entire story really is about men who hate women, and who, in their hatred, beat, rape and psychologically abuse them. It’s about how disgusting it all is. And it’s about women fighting back. And it’s about one woman, in particular, who’s like no other woman I’ve encountered in fiction in any medium. And this woman should remain uncompromised when she’s portrayed, just as she was brilliantly portrayed in the Swedish film.

I don’t think Hollywood can do this story justice. Not when the Swedes have already created the best film adaptation of a book I’ve ever seen. There shouldn’t be focus groups influencing the making of this film. There shouldn’t be a toning-down of the sexual violence to attain a more box-office-friendly MPAA rating. There shouldn’t be a glossing-over of the subtleties of the relationships between characters because there’s an industry perception that Americans can’t handle ambiguity and non-comformity.

Män som hatar kvinnor, which came out last year in Europe, was the highest-grossing film in Swedish history and was 2009′s top-grossing film in all of Europe. It isn’t a “small” film. It isn’t an “art” film. It’s a blockbuster. It’s a blockbuster with graphic scenes of sexual violence without sexualization. It’s a blockbuster where the female protagonist saves the male protagonist’s ass, and it’s not an issue. It’s a blockbuster without glossy hair.

I think it’s dumb that the North American publisher felt the need to change the name of the novel. But at least that’s all that was changed – the story inside was unaltered. A film adaptation, though, now that’s a different story. A film adaptation that really does become a story about a girl with a dragon tattoo will be a shame. A real shame.

Even if you hate “foreign” movies and you can’t stand subtitles, make an exception for this film. And do it fast, as I fear it won’t last long in North American theatres.

* I can only speak to North-American cinema; I’d love to hear from English-speakers from the rest of the world about this!

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When Twin Peaks first aired in 1990, it was a revelation. For one thing, it was my first experience of true, out-and-out geekery. I kept a journal with quotes from the show. I talked about it with my very few friends at school. I was a weird kid and it was a weird show and somehow it made me feel like I belonged. Like there’s a place in this world for weird people to do weird shit and for enough people to enjoy it that it gets to keep going.

After watching the whole series again on DVD this month, I love it even more. It is, in fact, now safely situated among my all-time favourite television shows. And today, David Lynch’s tweet pointed me to this article in the Guardian about the show.

Twin Peaks is terrifying. That’s hard to find even in a cable show these days. In fact, I don’t think any character has ever scared me as much as Leo Johnson scared me. (Yeah, I found Leo far scarier than Bob. And I found Bob scary, too.) And let’s ponder for a moment how the part of the weird show that was the most disturbing was the part that had absolutely nothing to do with forward-backward-talking midgets or owls not being what they seem. The most frightening part was the part about wife beating. Which, frankly, is the way it should be.

The ensemble cast in Twin Peaks is damn near perfect. Each character is believable, with their own past and motivations, and yet the community as a whole is just damn strange.

The score is about as iconic as any number of other memorable aspects of the show. As a teenager I used to listen to the cassette tape in my walkman on the bus to school. It was the soundtrack to my weird adolescence.

And the friendship between Special Agent Dale Cooper and Sheriff Harry S. Truman is about the most healthy, beautiful male friendship I’ve ever seen portrayed on TV.

Yeah, there were a few episodes in the middle of the second season where everything seemed to go off the rails a little, but then they zeroed in on the Windom Earle arc, and all was back to creepy, creepy normal.

Did you watch the show when it first aired? Have you seen it recently? If not, you should. Soon.

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I’m reblogging myself from over at Tumblr because I’m fairly desperate to discuss this. Please, oh please, chime in:

The relationship between Dale Cooper and Harry S Truman in Twin Peaks is the best example of true male friendship ever portrayed on television.

Go.

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It’s grey and rainy in Vancouver, but spring’s pretty much already started so I’m not too worried about any unpleasant prognostications today. BING!

Regardless, instead of passing out from exhaustion at 7:30 last night, I parked myself on the couch in front of the television and finished off my groundhog (huge thanks to June Gilbank for such a fabulous pattern) for the Groundhog-along. As I mentioned in my post announcing this absurd little crochet-along, his name is Ned Ryerson, a name befitting as you can see from the photo to the right.

ETA: Check out more completed groundhogs on June’s blog.

Not familiar with Ned Ryerson? Educate thyself:

And the best follow-up:

Project specs:
Started: 9 January 2010
Finished: 1 February 2010
Pattern: Groundhog, by June Gilbank
Yarn: Red Heart Designer Sport
Hook: 3.75mm

So, has spring already hit where you are? And anyway, will you be watching the movie tonight?

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photo credit Môsieur J. (version 3.0b)

I thought a couple weeks into 2010 I’d do a little wrap-up of 2009. It was, after all, a fairly unusual year for me. Also, I’ve neglected my pal the bulleted list and I feel I owe him a big one.

(Wee note: I’ve gone and put a new theme on the blog, so poke your head in for a peek, hey? I hope you like it.)

• My far-and-away favourite part of 2009 was making new friends. I set out to get more involved in the crafts community here in Vancouver, and I’ve met some lovely people who create amazing things. I also made some new online friends and even met some in person. And let’s not forget the Portland Craftgasm. Overall, I ended 2009 feeling like I was really a part of the crafts community both locally and internetly, and this gives me the happies.
• I spent much of the year not making much of anything, though. I was burnt out on crochet, and on yarn in general. I tinkered with embroidery and had dreams of quilting, but really I just ended up spending a lot of time playing World of Warcraft. The game-playing tickled a different part of my brain, and I enjoyed it immensely. The live-social aspects of the game blew my mind until the relative blathering stupidity of much of it turned me off. Still, I want to game more.
• By the end of the year I’d gotten my craft back. Now I’m crocheting and knitting again, and I’m again dreaming about sewing.
• I’m also writing a lot more. I’m blogging more, and I’m very much enjoying my new gig at the Make and Meaning blog. I’ve neglected The Creative Life blog, but I plan to stop doing that. Both of those blogs are exactly the kinds of things I wanted to get involved with at the start of ’09, so go me with the goal-meeting.
• Two interviews I did at the very end of 2008 set the stage for ’09 in fairly dramatic ways. Discussing creativity and the things that make me tick with Brenda Dayne on Cast-On kept me thinking about what I find most satisfying and kept me focused on providing myself with it. And talking crafty business with Sister Diane on Craftypod ended up being a gift that kept giving. I met so many people because of that interview. And let’s not forget that I got to know Sister Diane better, which is a gift all on its own.
• You helped me raise over $1700 for pancreatic-cancer research. And I thank you again. This spring my father will decide if it’s time to prophylactically remove his pancreas. Whether he chooses that this is the right time or not, the study he’s participating in means his pancreas is examined routinely. That study is funded by the Lustgarten Foundation, and it will hopefully lead to better screening for people whose families are tormented by the disease like mine is, and for the vast majority of sufferers who just get pancreatic cancer at random.
• My sixth book, Crocheted Gifts, came out in the fall. I really like this book, and other people seem to like it, too.
• I turned 33 the day Handmade Nation screened here in Vancouver, and I had about the best crafty birthday ever.
• Over the course of the year I started to read 23 books and finished 20 of them. I loved The Book of Negroes (beautifully told story, historically educational), The Name of the Wind (outstanding fantasy) and On Writing (best writing book I’ve come across and the only one I could get through). I couldn’t finish Made to Stick (it’s poorly written, the “science” annoyed me), The Echo Maker (I wrote about it) and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (great idea, terrible horrible no-good very bad execution that’s launched a spate of monster-classics reboots that hopefully won’t suck as much) (oh, and I wrote more about it, too).
• I did a podcast (with Jenny Ryan, who rocks my world). It was tremendous fun and I intended to do more but was sidelined by my second topic. Copyright can do that to a girl. Still, I learned quite a lot putting that podcast together, and I would very much like to tinker more with the medium.
• It was a pretty epic year for television-on-DVD watching, that’s for damn sure. Freaks and Geeks struck me through the heart and brain and Styx will never be the same again. Deadwood injected a new vocabulary item into near-daily usage. 30 Rock challenges Arrested Development for funniest show ever. Tina Fey is fucking amazing and Jack Donaghy is, I think, the best sitcom character ever written. At least, that’s what I think today. We’re into the second season of Dr. Who, and I love it. (Also, we just named our new car the TARDIS, on account of the inside of a Honda Fit being bigger than the outside. We bought this car because the transmission in our ten-year-old Volkswagen Golf crapped out just before Christmas. Yay, end of 2009.) Television-on-television was pretty sucky, the only exceptions being Dollhouse and, inconsistently, Glee.
• It took me till April to figure out how not to work – before then I barely noticed the compunction I felt to be productive. Which, of course, consisted of sitting in front of my computer “working”. Hiatus FAIL. But after my big epiphany about that, I stopped sitting in front of my computer so much.
• Even while I enjoyed my time off, I did have a big over-arching goal to end up with great work at the end of the year, and I knew the best way to end up with it would be to talk to tons of people about what I wanted to do. I did such a good job with this particular part of my hiatus that I ended up starting to work full-time in September. Four months later, I’m still with LexPublica, and I’m enjoying it very much.

I’m sure I missed whole swaths of important-at-the-time events and trends for the year, but I’m not so concerned about it. With 2010 starting despite my having failed to wrap-up ’09 until now, I’m more focused on the here-and-now, and on the high-level, informal goals I have for this year. I want to read more, make more, and write more both for fun and for pay. I have a vague goal to get paid to speak at events and the like (I like public speaking and I’m pretty good at it. You know, just in case you were thinking about hitting me up but thought I wouldn’t be interested. How’s that for just tossing that out there?).

So thus, two weeks late, endeth 2009.

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Dude. Game knitting. You have to try this.

Lee Meredith’s ebook about it is worth the download. I printed the relevant pages and brought them with me on a wee trip we took last weekend, and I’m not sure I’ll ever be without a game-knitting project whenever I travel from now on.

The gist of game knitting is that, while following a base pattern of your choosing, you perform some specific action whenever some outside event occurs. Like, say you’re watching Buffy and she makes a pun before killing a vampire – it’s like a drinking game, but with knitting (and really, you could apply the same concept to any craft at all).

So into my bag I tossed the skein of Blonde Chicken Bulky yarn I bought from Tara at the Urban Craft Uprising in August (the colourway is called Barack and Michelle, how awesome is that?).

I cast on right before watching the double-dose of Dollhouse on Friday night. Following the chunky hat pattern in the ebook, I made an eyelet every time:

• Topher waved his hands above shoulder-height
• Adele poured a drink
• Someone had a treatment
• Victor and Sierra held hands
• Someone mentioned the attic
• Somebody got punched in the face
• Dichen Lachman‘s character spoke with an Australian accent
• Somebody was remote-wiped

(Little did I know there would be so much drinking by Adele, so much about the attic, and so much of Lachman being Australian. It’s amazing my toque wasn’t just made of holes.) (Also? The last few episodes of Dollhouse are really making me mourn the show’s cancellation. Kudos to all who were a part of it, on account of being awesome.)

I didn’t finish the hat during those two hours, but I did finish it halfway through watching War of the Worlds (which, sidebar, is a terrible movie) (also, this was the kind of wee vacation that involved two hours of Dollhouse, two movies, two games of Scrabble, and 1.5 hats). I made an eyelet every time:

• Something got blowed up
• Dakota Fanning’s character was precocious
• Someone screamed bloody murder
• I wanted to punch Tom Cruise in the face

Game knitting! Go try it.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Sci Fi UK interviews Dichen Lachman. (whedonesque.com)
• (SPOILER) Harry Lennix and Dichen Lachman talk Dollhouse season 2. (whedonesque.com)
• Official Dollhouse Twitter started posting. (whedonesque.com)

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So the first four months of my yearlong amorphous adventure have passed and I thought I’d explore what I did with myself, what I’d planned to do with myself, what I’m doing now and what I might do next.

If you’re unfamiliar with all this, I’ll sum up: I quit my job at the end of last year, sold a business, and essentially set myself up to take a year to do with what I please, with an eye on ending the year in some sort of position to make a living doing work I love, without compromise, that’s creatively satisfying.

I thought I’d take January and February off, whatever that meant. I joked that I’d play video games, but I wasn’t really joking. I played some Spore but became far more enamoured of World of Warcraft. The social aspects alone blew my mind. I’ve since started four types of characters (I play Horde, which I’ve come to understand isn’t as common a choice for women on account of, shall we say, the less than pleasing look of its monstrous characters), one of which I’ve managed to level above 40. I’m now fairly bored with the game, but I might come back to it. General things I’ve noticed about it, in no particular order:

• It’s far more fun to play socially than it is to play solo. Soloing gets boring fast. In the beginning I played a great deal with one of my friends, and that was awesome. He got busy and I went off on my own, but I’ve very much enjoyed teaming up with perfect strangers.
• The only thing about perfect strangers is that the general, public chat in this game is conducted with a level of maturity that would make grade schoolers feel superior. Of course, few people participate in public chat compared to the number actually playing, but then you’re just shooting in the dark when it comes to approaching someone at random.
• That said, when I have been approached at random, I’ve pretty much always had a great time.
• There’s a full-on economy in this game. I understand it spills into real life with all sorts of schemes to trade cash for in-game gold, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the in-game economy of goods, services, and gold. It’s impressive.

Anyway. So that’s the video game part.

Unfortunately, beyond that I didn’t really succeed at taking time off. I mean, I thought I was taking time off, but what I was really doing was allowing the nagging questions at the back of my mind—What do I want to be doing to make a living? How will I get there? Dear god, how do I choose?!—stay at the forefront and colour my every day.

I’ve come to understand what I was doing, though, and I’m making up for it by being far happier now. Another bulleted list:

• I’m throwing off the chains I didn’t realize were binding me—I do not have a job, I do not need to be “working” during business hours. I spent three months in front of my computer during every weekday, and it didn’t even occur to me that I not only didn’t have to be doing that, but that I most definitely should not have been doing that.
• I didn’t make stuff even though I wanted to spend much of this year making stuff. Even though I wanted to learn how to quilt this year, I managed to stay focused on yarn during the first quarter. Why? As you saw in my last post, though, I’ve thrown off the shackles of yarn. I’ve sewn something, too. I’ll show you, eventually.
• If I want to end up making money doing things I love, the way to accomplish that isn’t to sit around thinking about what I love. Good god, DUH.

Television. Freaks and Geeks rocked my world. The finale of Battlestar Galactica was inconsistently brilliant, annoyingly preachy, baffling, disappointing, and satisfying. The beginnings of Dollhouse were a painful disappointment that only made the middle of Dollhouse seem that much more fucking brilliant. The season ends tomorrow and I’m hoping beyond hope that Fox renews the show. We’re also watching Deadwood, which is the only western (save my childhood love affair with Little House on the Prairie, thankyouverymuch) I’ve ever tolerated, let alone loved. Beyond the beautifully foul language, I’m enjoying the lawless morality and lack of it, and despite the brilliance that is Ian McShane‘s Al Swearengen I think my favourite character might be Brad Dourif‘s Doc Cochran.

Books. I went through quite a dry spell with fiction during which few books could hold my attention. This happens to me occasionally, and usually when my brain’s in overdrive. So I occupied my reading time with the first three books of Diana Gabaldon‘s Outlander series. To sum up: Outlander was good, Dragonfly in Amber was awful and it was only the last thirty pages of it that made me want to read the next installment (much to my chagrin), Voyager was a vast improvement despite the painfully contrived plot “twists”.

Our book club read A Fraction of the Whole, by Steve Toltz, which I loved, and Inheritance of Loss, by Kiran Desai, which I couldn’t get into and didn’t finish, chalking it up to my fiction dry spell. Which meant I felt like a total schmuck when I learned the others in book club didn’t like the book either but pushed through in the interest of discussing it. Our next book-club read is Run, by Ann Patchett, which I read in three days. It’s fairly sentimental and a bit contrived, but the subtext is just so compelling, and she’s simply an outstanding writer. I’m currently reading my first “advance” review copy Penguin Canada sent me—The Girl Next Door by Elizabeth Noble. “Advance” gets quotes because the book’s already out in Canada (not in the U.S. till the end of the year), I just got to get an uncorrected copy for reasons unknown. Still, it’s cool to have a bound copy of a book that’s not fully polished. Anyway, reading it after Run highlights for me the difference between literary fiction and popular fiction. The Girl Next Door is good writing, but it’s just a story, and I’ll write more about that story another time. Run is a great story, but there’s as rich a tale written between the lines, and as such it was both a more satisfying and more inspiring read.

Movies. I’ve fallen in love with the documentary. Rip: The Remix Manifesto, despite screening in a theatre filled with people who seemed very concerned with all looking like the same hipster stereotype, was brilliant. Handmade Nation brought me to Portland for the most fun I’ve had in years. Who Does She Think She Is was a wonderful exploration of the experience of female artists and provided food for much conversation. On Monday I’ll go see one of two one-night-only Canadian screenings of This American Life Live that was relayed live to theatres in the U.S. a couple of weeks ago.

People. Since quitting my job, I have forged new relationships with people I barely new before, if I knew them at all. Wildly creative, generous, caring people who have enriched my experience in ways I can’t really begin to describe. I’m not sure how I ended up meeting so many people so quickly, but it’s not something I spend a great deal of energy trying to figure out. I’m just enjoying them, which seems the best thing to do.

“Work.” I set out to blog more, and I haven’t really been doing that. But I’ve been writing about what I want to write about, and I’ve been saying what I want to say. Without qualification, without hedging, and with a fair amount of abandon. My Twitter stream is a jumble of whatever it is I’m thinking about, and very little of that is yarn-related. I’m curious and mystified by the vast proportion of my followers who are yarnies given my disinterest in writing about yarn, but you know, I’ve always loved the unpredictability of online social systems.

I set out to podcast, and I’ve done it. Jenny Ryan was the perfect first guest, except as it related to me having to edit a two-hour conversation down to a forty-minute podcast. Good lesson to learn. I had all the best of brief intentions when I started working on the second episode (which I hope to release soon, really), but, you know, whatever. Regardless, I’m in love with the medium. I’m in love with the challenge of telling a story using chunks of audio, and with the personality and energy that comes through when it’s done well. Perhaps not surprisingly, it’s making me more and more interested in telling stories through video, but I don’t see myself jumping into that until I have a better handle on audio. If for no other reason than I have the tools for audio and not for video yet.

I set out to do stuff with social media. Screw social media. I want to participate in it however I want to depending on my mood, and that’s it. I don’t want to teach about it, I don’t want to talk about it, and I don’t want to read what other people write about it. In short, it got old fast, the conversation got stale fast, there’s never any richness at the end of a get-rich scheme, just go be yourself and have fun and let the cards fall as they may.

I don’t think I wrote much about this, but one of my biggest goals heading into this year was to get more involved in my local community. Having spent years and years working with people online and mostly in the U.S., I haven’t been engaged in my community beyond my circle of friends. I don’t like that. In the last few months I’ve been to more events in town than usual, and I’ve met people who are interested in things I’m interested in, too. I’m very pleased about that, and I’m excited to get to know folks better and to engage more in work and play with them.

Oddly, and not unrelated, my honeymoon period—a very long, 7-year one—with Vancouver is over. I’ve finally come to realize how odd this town can seem, how cold the feeling can be, how inaccessible communities can feel. As someone who thinks “scenes” are dumb but who also battles the insecurity of feeling like I don’t fit in, that’s a daunting reality. I think, though, that I can fairly easily get over my insecurities and let my distaste for insularity and the like push me to behave as if those fences don’t exist.

As the weather is warming up and the days are already long, I’m doing more stuff—be it writing, reading, making, socializing, exploring—and I’m looking forward to what the next few months will be. I’ll keep you posted.

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I had two favourite books when I was a young child. One became the seed of my desperate need to see absurdity in every day life (The Cat in the Hat Comes Back, by Dr. Seuss), and the other led me to befriend monsters and explore my imagination without bounds, knowing that the safety of home would always be there when I was ready to come back to it (Where the Wild Things Are, by Maurice Sendak). For years of my early childhood, my father read me the latter at bedtime, roaring his terrible roars and gnashing his terrible teeth, rolling his terrible eyes and showing his terrible claws.

Since I entered the world of language, I’ve never been without a copy of the book. When I went to university, my mom gave me a new one along with a doll of one of the monsters. When I heard a live-action film of the story was in the works, my heart broke. It’s such a small story that manages to be so big, and it’s as much to do with Sendak’s art as with his words. I couldn’t imagine a film that could do it justice.

Leave it to Dave Eggers (whose book What is the What I consider to be one of the most important works of our time; if you haven’t read it, drop what you’re doing and read it now) to do what is so infrequently done—to create something new from something old.

From the brief movie trailer below I surmise the following: There’s a plot, and possibly a fairly robust one. There’s a back-story. There are personalities and motivations. The questions that remain after seeing the trailer aren’t ones that usually come when a book is made into a movie. I’m not wondering: Will they be true to the story? Will they be true to the characters? Will they be true to the art? Will they change the ending? Will they cast it right?

I’m wondering: Have they really done something so rarely done? Have they created new art based on existing art? Will this film stand on its own? So far, it looks to me like the answers are a chill-inducing YES. I can’t wait to see the movie. Can you?

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