If It Don't Make Dollaz

If you’d shut the fuck up we be cruising

Well, I took a brief sabbatical, and during that time I:

i) Got fired from a job before the restaurant even had its grand opening, but after completing three weeks of training;

ii) Found a new job in the heart of King W., once again catering to douchebaggery and top 40 remixes;

iii) Got accepted to a 3yr Film & Television Production program, starting in September;

iv) Found out that I need to have a new apartment by early morning June 1st;

v) Got punched in the head by a crackhead when my streetcar took a short turn at Dundas and Church at 1030pm on a Tuesday night, and now my tragus has been half severed and I can’t put my earbud headphone in my left ear, which is bloody irritating (EAR-ritating, one might even say).

It’s been a trip. My roommate says I need some karmic cleansing.

rugburned babies

Walking down Queen W, soaking up the sun… We’ve all heard it before, but I am forced to say it again: Hipsters, I do not understand you. I do not possess the intellectual capacity to understand why you choose to look like homeless people. I cannot comprehend why you must all line up outside that coffee shop and perch in a row along a cement block like a bunch of fucking pigeons. A bunch of homeless, ugly-sweatered pigeons. Your shoes, why do they look like they belong to Jack of candlestick fame? And above all else, why do you regard everyone with such painful contempt? You are the ragged elite, up there on your vintage (read: OLD AND AESTHETICALLY NAUSEATiNG) pedestal. Go back to Fagin, you dirty orphans.

You should have shot yourself in the foot while it was in your mouth

Okay, so I’m supposed to be studying for my great big test at work tomorrow (hit me up if y’all wanna know which steaks we’ll be cutting from a giant fucking Canadian-family-owned shortloin of dead cow, I got the answers, and if you’re not eating that shit bloody then you’d best be out of my way), but I’ve been distracted. My roommate came home briefly to prepare for his Odd Future show at Sound Academy, and that involved shots of Sailor Jerry and badass hip hop on YouTube. As such, I’ve found myself in rantalicious mode with a keyboard in front of me.

I’m going to make a case for contemporary romanticism within the works of Hayao Miyazaki. This is absolutely inspired by the Ghibli-fest that I’ve been wanking my heartstrings to at TIFF Bell Lightbox. For those of you who have been preoccupied with better shit to do, romanticism was a largely artistic movement that took place in Europe during the latter half of the 18th century. It does not describe ‘romance’ in the conventional sense (there are no star crossed lovers here, nor the golden Harlequin locks of Fabio), but refers to a certain lens through which one might appreciate the enormity of nature. It delights in the notion of the ‘sublime’; that is, awe and terror, the arguably opposite ends of a certain emotional spectrum (though both sentiments will have a similar effect on one’s heartbeat and how far it goes through the fucking roof). Check out some Keats, Coleridge, Blake, or Wordsworth and you’ll see what I mean… Epic, wistful odes to mountains and nightingales and the like. A dreamy appreciation for nature in all its magnitude, as conveyed through an artistic medium.

So my theory is that Miyazaki exercises the principals of romanticism in an accessible, contemporary setting. He pays tribute to the beauty and wonder of nature in an original format, as demonstrated in My Neighbor Totoro and Princess Mononoke. I don’t feel like writing a fucking essay and I suspect nobody really wants to read an essay, so if you’re intrigued by this notion of mine then I recommend you go out and investigate for yourself. Those two films really illuminate Miyazaki’s passion for life in all its forms, and the way he conveys his beliefs about the natural world and the way we as a species are disrespecting it is touching, lovely, and not at all boring. Totoro playing his flute-thing in a massive tree just oozes sublimity, while those little forest spirits in Princess Mononoke give the forest a voice that a romantic poet would swoon over. (Note: I’ve been meaning to get a tattoo of one of those little green buggers for quite some time now. It’s gonna happen as soon as I have some disposable income.)

“You have a clear and lovely voice, don’t be such a defeatist.”

I can’t tell whether or not it’s a good thing that the looming threat of losing someone puts a magnifying glass on all the details that you loved or took for granted. You can examine things that you never knew existed before in your relationship with this person. You realize that you’ll miss certain things that always existed on a frequency beyond your capability to acknowledge. 

I think it’s impossible to appreciate every single person you care for in the fullest capacity all of the time. There’s no way you can know every quality that moves you. But must it take the notion of somebody being absent from your life to illuminate how much you care? I’ve never lost someone before, so although I know this subject of regret and bewilderment is tired and worn, it’s a new sensation to me.

line up motherbitches

“So if I were to dip my dick in yogurt it would be cured?”

“Yeah, if she’s like, ‘My vagina’s itchy!’ then don’t have sex with her! Men can totally get yeast infections.”

“My friend actually asked me this question one time, and it was like, would you rather have sex with Rosie O’Donnell with a yeast infection or Roseanne on her period?”

“Oh. Roseanne on her period! But not by much!”

I’m sitting in a pub and I have just introduced two of my good friends to one another. There is nothing like getting socially lubricated. On that note, I’ve neglected my pint of 50, AKA mediocrity in a glass, because I deemed it more important to document this conversation between two relative strangers. Cheers.

“I call it freedom of expression, most just call me a fag”

Oh look, I’ve created a blog that I will actually let some assholes read. This demands that I do the following:

i) Stop catering to my vagina (or, va-whine-a) whilst writing. Even though I am addicted to my own romantic conundrums and just need to fucking purge once in a while, it doesn’t mean that anybody else is remotely interested in hearing about silly bullshit that is consistently my own fault anyway.

ii) Stop being afraid to voice an opinion. I’m gonna join the blogosphere, get douchey, make uninformed arguments - so long as they are well articulated and at least a little bit hilarious. I’m gonna abolish my fear of ranting like I’m on BBM, mothafuckas (but make it applicable to less personal situations, as suggested in the previous paragraph). 

iii) Start to learn to suck it up. As you can see, my first post was actually rather personal, and if I am going to offer myself up like that then I expect to be responsible for the consequences. It’s the fucking Internet, which is populated by vicious borderline retards, people who are far superior to me in every conceivable way, and those of us who just kind of pleasantly fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. 

Thus concludes my pep talk to myself. Hai, Internet.

My glass is still half full and you can drink it because you’re thirstier.

“I don’t know, I guess I figure that people try and find jobs that will make them rich because money is the key to happiness, so they settle for whatever will generate the most income. So why not eliminate that step in between and just try to do what makes you happy? I know I’m idealistic…” 

He stared at me for a moment. “You’re right,” he conceded, “You are idealistic. Hold on to that for as long as you can, though.”

This conversation happened nearly two years ago, between myself and a teacher who would later influence me to drop out of my first attempt at college because I couldn’t bear to go in and face him anymore. I couldn’t bear to hear about how my priorities weren’t straight, and how I could be more successful if I stopped working at my job and stopped living on my own and just went back to my mother’s house in the town that I ran away from. I would achieve success by dedicating myself to education and nothing else. The reason why I couldn’t bear to hear this is because I thought that he was speaking the truth and I was ashamed.

This man did teach me something valuable. I realized that, as an idealist, my priority was to excel at living. Of course I am proud of my triumphs, but I revel in my defeats because I recognize that I deserved each one of them. Each defeat and each consequence of my actions and decisions (including all my hesitant inaction and indecision) is setting up another shot in the stop-motion sequence of my existence. This is my narrative, and even when I am derailed and I allow someone else to take over it is still exclusively my own. A guest director just demonstrates, with gorgeous contrast, the lack of control I was experiencing at the time.

I have never been a good student. I fight education in the most devious ways I can muster. I twist my curricula into something that will best satiate my desire to learn, but I refuse to simply accept what is being taught. I regard my education as an intensely personal experience, and as such I am a horror to teach. If I were more self-indulgent I would comment on how innovation has never been welcome, but the truth is, I’m just too stubborn to adjust when I ought to. 

I have experienced utter and perpetual misery. My parents’ divorce was, of course, a turning point in my life. My mother was very unwell, both physically and otherwise, when my father left us. I was never close to my father but this was the first time that I actually hated him, and he deserved it for his weakness. My parents became visibly fallible for the first time when I was fourteen years old. My brother was only four. We - my mother, brother and I - moved into a house that I filled up with my rage and sadness, and although I don’t regret it and I even understand it, I am sorry that I projected such monstrosities onto everything that existed around me. I tried to kill myself when I was fifteen, but it was in that terrible selfish way that gives teenage darkness such a bad rep. It was insincere, and I didn’t let my daddy visit me in the hospital. I abused my body, I sliced it open like a cliche because I was so lost that I just wanted to see what I looked like when I was hurt. I have scars that make me blush. I developed an eating disorder that required adherence to a strict and terrible schedule. I fell into my first bad relationship, which lasted a very long year. I spent some time sleeping around and then fell into my second bad relationship, which lasted three years in the chronological sense but an entire season of my life in terms of experience. I remember him screaming, “I hate you, I really fucking hate you,” out the window at me from the back of a police car. I remember lying on the floor, exhausted from a fight, and having a towel thrown over my head so I wouldn’t be cut when he shattered the mirror beside me with his fist. I remember one of the proudest moments of my life consisted of refraining from driving my car into a monument when he was drunk in my back seat, throwing food at me and kicking me in the head and wrapping my seatbelt around my neck. That moment took so much strength and willpower. I would leave the room and punch myself in the face as hard as I could, just because I couldn’t stand to stay and fight. I remember the hotel on my birthday - Hotel Chelsea - and him spitting beer all over my turquoise dress and then leaving me to go wander alone in a strange city. And I remember trying to leave, over and over again. 

Finally, this is where I’ve found myself. The scene in Love Actually where Andrew Lincoln confesses his love to Keira Knightley with a sign that says, “To me you are perfect,” makes my eyes moist. So did the line I read in a beautiful piece earlier today, which stated, “I cannot imagine anything more incredible than you.” So did the bit I watched in Alias last night, where Jennifer Garner is rescued by her daddy, the debonair Victor Garber, and he simply says, “Hi, honey.” My greatest flaw is my craving to be loved unconditionally. And that is, in my opinion, the flaw of an idealist.