Magdalena O!

I have three photographs in the X and O Show put on by LoverMagazine.com on February 13, 2010. This is my first time exhibiting photographs that aren’t printed yet, so I have to get them properly digitally printed and framed and I’m really nervous because it’s expensive and possibly time consuming. At the moment, taking a poo is time-consuming so…. following is more things that are happening outside of writing essays in the next few weeks because why not?

I am going to be exhibiting some of my ‘future cinema’ work at the York University Augmented Reality Lab Open House Show next week.

I thought I was going to miss my cubic centimeter of chance so I got really flustered and made things a bit messy in the midst of all this unintentionally but I don’t like messy so it’s been contained.

Shitmat/Henry is coming for a gig on the 12th. He is gonna stay at our place for a bit on the condition he will cook for us (or at least once) because he’s always cooking. I’m borrowing a video camera from school again so we’re going to try to make a video and edit it all while he’s here. That’s my plan anyway. I think Henry is one of the most gentlest creatures I’ve ever met. Even among his constant hysteria and fits, he is such a soft cat. Plus he’s ridiculously talented.

I am VJ’ing at a Sensoria/Embrace collaboration party featuring Untold on the 14th.

I have also been getting serious driving lessons with my dad and last week I drove on Bathurst and crossed intersections in Forest Hill! It was very intense, especially when driving up Lonsdale I wanted to make a left turn and he got nervous because he doesn’t know the Toronto roads and grabbed the steering wheel from my hands to turn back into the middle lane and it was Saturday afternoon, so the cars were coming from every direction but I kept it smooth. After he saw me react with such strength he eased up and let me drive around. I gotta say though, practicing parking from the back is hard!

Anytime I am looking to make sense of life I turn to Mitsu -

At each moment, I say to myself, suppose I were at the end of my life, and I were transported back to this moment, to be able to live my life again.  I’m here, new, the first moment of my second chance.  What do I do with it?

We always think of ourselves as at the end of a long history which we imagine is trapping us, defining us and our world; our mistakes, our successes. But if we thought of this moment as a fresh beginning, rather than the end of a history of events, we would see there are vast possibilities in our present moment now. We don’t have to keep doing what we’ve been doing. If we had a second chance, we could do anything, we have the whole wide world in front of us… would we just repeat our past patterns or joyously start fresh?

There’s no reason why, as adults, we have to restrict ourselves to our habits, our knee-jerk reactions, our comfort zone. We can start over, every fresh new moment, with all our knowledge and experience, but not constrained by it but simply informed by it. Simple yet it’s hard to even notice we’re treating our lives as a great big experiment in repetition and not paying attention.

Not paying attention, because: if we really were paying attention, we wouldn’t jump to conclusions quite so readily, we wouldn’t be so sure our story was true, was fact, was set in stone. We would be a little more open to the possibility that we don’t, in fact, know what our world is, what we are doing, and the limits of our world. If we had a moment to look at things new, with a little more doubt, we could see infinite spaces open up in between our judgements and thoughts, and perhaps we’d have a chance to flex ourselves in directions we didn’t even conceive of before.

The same goes for listening, reading, thinking … when we listen to something we’ve heard before, when we read something we’ve read before, or something like it, we tend not to actually think about it again, fresh, re-checking it, but instead we consult our memory and replace the fresh experience of the idea(s) with a memory of having encountered the thought before. We take the memory placeholder as a stand-in for the idea. But this is useless and harmful, for a number of reasons: the memory is itself embedded in habits and contexts which are no longer nearly as relevant now, by doing this, we fail to refresh and re-check the idea, so that it can be expanded beyond the confines of how it worked for us in the past, and we also deprive ourselves of the advantage of putting our minds through the process of thinking about the idea afresh, which is always the best way to “remember” anything — not by remembering it, but by recreating it from scratch. Don’t take that retread: the “memory” of an idea, which is mere propaganda.  Every idea has a vast new possibility of application with each moment; evolution, expansion, even refutation. An idea, repeated, can be a gateway to a new insight, even if we’ve heard it or read it or thought it a thousand times before, by re-thinking it, recreating it as though we’d never heard it before. It’s only then we have the chance to see new dimensions of it, and to reapply it to our ever-changing and always unique presence with the world. – synthetic zero

Permalink: http://www.syntheticzero.com/?p=135

& read this too: http://www.syntheticzero.com/?p=183

me by toby 2002 + 2009

It was sunny for once in Toronto, so I met up with Toby to go hang out in the park. It’s so rare for me to do something that isn’t outside of itself. To just be in the moment. He gave me a large print he developed himself of a portrait he shot in 2002! That is seven fucking years ago. It comforts me that I have known him for nine years. It’s been a really full nine years. Not one of those I know you through partying peripheral friend nine years either. It comforts me that by this point we will probably be friends forever. We walked around the city, ate food and one of his ex-girlfriends was working at Clafouti, meaning we got our order free and she gave us a berry custard tart to take home. It was fun to take photos. We used to take a lot of photos. I used to take a lot of photos. I used to do a lot of a lot of things that I miss now. Always with the yen.

toronto / uk 2004
Lately, several of my old lovers have told me that, “You and J really fit together.” It has an effect on you when someone that was the love of your life tells you that because they know you in that way better than any of your friends. I trust my old lovers because they all lived and died with me. I am all of them now. They are all in me. I could never extract them and I would never want to.

The phrase isn’t unexpected, but I was still very pleasantly surprised to hear such words come… all within the same time frame. Is it because I, myself, feel really strongly about us? I’m trying to be less erratic and forceful and maybe that actually works. It’s been so many years. I don’t write directly about my relationship in here too much, only because I feel it’s something I want to keep to myself, because as laid out I have made my feelings, there are parts of my life I can’t externalize, even if to many it appears the opposite.

I’m fired up about starting school again. It’s been three years. I will be critically engaging with cultural theory on a graduate level! It all seems so surreal. I’m totally romanticizing the whole experience, but I need it, I need to prove it to myself. I need that MA. I will also have access to all of Ryerson’s production facilities. I am making the promise now, that even with the stresses of school work I will use the facilities to their full extent.

x. 2009 is really kicking ass. I knew it would, but there was this nag behind the confidence that was worried maybe it wouldn’t all go as planned. Here I am. Dreams coming true. I’m going to graduate school. I am in love. I’m bringing Instra:mental to Toronto. I am going to travel Europe again. I finally met a girl that shares all my interests including music – a near impossible feat.
x. Last year, I told myself if I got into graduate school I would chop all my hair off to have it kind of like Jean Seberg in Breathless.
x. I’ve been listening to this Math + Science Machinedrum mix from 2007. I can’t find the link online anymore. It’s one of those sets you can just have on repeat for months.

I shouldn’t let coke-head mother fucking spineless lying assholes get to me, but I can’t fucking stand it when people talk shit about people I love, especially the one that I love the most. It is in those moments, my fervent loyalty goes overboard.

…
I feel sick to my stomach thinking about how a close friend that showed me they cared for me greatly & would be there for me (as i have been nothing but there for them through everything) has totally switched gears to be loyal to someone who has done nothing but talk shit about me & also not be supportive of them either. guh.

People are so fickle and have no backbone sometimes…
maybe i shouldn’t be so upset, maybe i should just remind myself of how weak this friend is, if they are able to do all that. but unlike them, i hold onto friendships and my own feelings zealously..

Funny enough the person I am talking about at the beginning of this post, is the same person I am referencing in the second part. However, the second part I wrote a while ago. But shitty people usually stay shitty.

I just need to cut all ties with those who aren’t everything to me & won’y stick up for me or him when needed. Why bother with anything less?

I WISH THE PERSON I LOVED WOULD UNDERSTAND HOW MENTALLY, PHYSICALLY AND EMOTIONALLY DRAINING IT IS TO APPLY TO GRAD SCHOOL.

I take everything so personally as it is, so here it is, the most personal you can get, selling yourself to be accepted for a Masters program. Being able to articulate your vision and entire life past, present and future in either 500 words or less for some programs or five pages for another. Plus portfolios and writing samples and chasing down professors!

I want to throw myself against the wall and scream at everyone I see. Luckily work has allowed me to go in only three days a week for the next short while. When I am there, I am in such a pissy mood and it’s so futile. All I can think about is the deadlines and getting it all in as fast as possible.

Is it too much to expect gentle, “how are you? let me come over with food! let me give you a massage? can i read to you?” instead of, “i am so stressed, i need to finish music, why do i have to commute so far to see you? why don’t you ever think about my feelings?”

Because I have two weeks to finish it all, and I already told you that I need this time and I need more support than ever. It’s not my fault I live downtown and you live with your parents out in the boondocks. I’m becoming a monster.

My roommate Stevos is in love, with a wonderful girl who likes fancy food and is applying to grad school in Sweden. They are so meant for each other I’m already seeing their babies jump around in my head. I took some photos of them at this sex themed cum uninspiring closing party at Keep Six last week.

It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to

cry if I want to

You would cry to if it happened to you

Imagine you throw an event and everything that can go wrong does. Everything short of the party not happening. But the party happened and it was rammed and people loved it. They wanted to go to there. I didn’t love it. I was a mess. From the moment I had to use j’s PC laptop (I’ve never really used a PC too much, especially not for anything other than checking the internet) to VJ because I wanted to buy Resolume 3 for my computer but I couldn’t at the time, everything just went dot nosed. I was so embarrassed that I couldn’t get the computer working properly with the projector in his copy of Resolume, and the screen would pop up PC preferences I knew nothing about backwards. Everyone at the club just sees amateur night, and I’m not amateur, I’m good. But not good enough when everything went pear shaped. I held in my frustration until finally I just started bawling and ran out. A was outside and he talked me down a bit, but it didn’t really relieve the total shit I was feeling. M tried too. I had taken so much time to get ready and to get the coolest clips that aren’t just funky shapes in neon colors mixed with graf train videos. I took the time to search and rip so many awesome clips.

I caused such a scene. It was unnecessary and created more negative energy than was worth. I just couldn’t stop crying. I felt/feel like I let everyone down and made myself look like a joke in the process. Including the downfalls, I was not my supportive self of everyone around me and instead became snappy and irritable. j helped out so much and even he was being understanding about it all. I have to stop being so dependent on him but it’s so easy when he knows everything. I’ve thrown parties before, with way more involvement & even though I can do it well, I can’t seem to do it without causing a fuss. I need to stop micro-managing every minute detail of everything. GEEZ! Funny that the last episode of 30 Rock was a a little-to-real adaptation of my own character. What a dot nose I am. I have regretted so little in my life, but my reaction to the situation is now one of the few.

Everyone kept telling me the party was off the hook but I couldn’t enjoy it, I couldn’t let go of the energy I procured. I’m still decompressing. But at least now I have words like, ‘dot nosed’ and ‘I want to go there’ keeping me alive, because Tina Fey and Sarah Silverman are my tv-bff’s.