found: writings, offered: stuff.

I've been purging lots of late. Two Sundays ago I posted on freecycle - a great yahoo groups list service for people interested in finding homes for their stuff as it has no longer become useful to them. I had a couple of things in the house - shoes I never wore, sunglasses, a pulp Maeve Binchy paperback, a cute dress, some candle holders circa junior high... and I posted this. I had a quick response from a single mom who wanted to pick up in the next two hours. She was elated! She arrived soon after and I was able to re-gift my stuff, and feel good that someone could put these things to good use. Awesome.

Today I posted the chest-of-drawers I felt never fit into this apartment of mine and a wicker picnic set on craigslist - hoping to find them new homes too to make way for some updated things in my place. Change is always fun to kickstart!

Among the discoveries in my house, I found a writing excerpt of mine... interesting snapshot of life, I thought, so why not use it on the blog as a wee window to my brain (not current, though, I should add, this seems to be last year or the year before.) Oh, and I should mention that this was found in a file called "narcissism, self-loathing, world collapse and love" which, I see some humour in... I certainly can be dramatic at times!

Found: Writing

I started taking the pictures one day just so that I could look back on a year in my life. I guess I was needing a change and I’d always liked those one a day type calendars so I thought I’d take my own. I started in November so that the following year I could actually get the thing (hopefully a masterpiece by then) printed and sent to my friends in exotic far flung places.

It was just one of my life projects. I always seemed to have a few balls in the air with my projects. It was the only thing keeping me sane. The world news seemed to be reporting absolute collapse and failure. If we weren’t careful the icecaps were going to melt down because we were all drilling into the oilsands and burning up our air without any thought to the future. Those baby boomer types were all staying put in their jobs because their RRSPs they’d been instructed to save so carefully had vanished into thin air after the US banks began to go out of business. The future was apparently bleak and I was just a wee lemming about to jump of the cliff like everyone else. And this is how my life launched into its 29th year. By now, according to my life plan, I should be married with children but it was not to be so. Instead, I was just a downtown gal, scarf-tied and sullen, wandering the world aimlessly amidst a sea of contracts and looming EI lines. Life was beautiful and it was only up from here.

If I were to write a book I would imagine the emo-steeped low-drama everyday sort of narrative would pour out of me. I don’t think it would sell. Who wants to hear about the life of so-and-so who finds it hard to get up in the morning and whose daily joy revolves around the coffee grinder in her kitchen?

Today’s picture was a cloudy mess. If the skies could speak it would likely talk about the sun hidden behind a layer of protective clouds. My mind wandered to London skies. This would be typical day there but I was not in the thriving city of London. I was in Toronto, a city recently voted number four for its cultural prowess just behind longtime frontrunners, Paris, London and Tokyo. No kidding. We’re number four. Perhaps it’s because in these dreary frigid days, all the artists warm up their back garages and hunker down for four months of hell. Absolute hell. Who wants to live in a city without mountains that gets really freaking cold and where you can’t even ski?