Things I Wanted To Save When I Cleared Out My E-mail Inbox

A few days ago, I decided that I had to get my e-mail inbox under control. It wasn't as wildly out of control as some people's are, but I had about 375 e-mails sitting there, a couple dating as far back as 2007, and every time I signed in, there they sat judging me. I always wondered What have I left undone?

Over the course of the day, I took my inbox down from 375 to 12 e-mails, and my inbox has suddenly stopped haunting me with its perpetual message of my likely colossal failure. If you have an inbox like mine was, I suggest taking a day and killing it. It's been surprisingly freeing to my mind and my sense of well-being.

While I cleaned out my inbox, a handful of things popped up that I wanted to note, and the following snippets are little pieces of my life I didn't want lost to my Gmail archives, because they each point to specific points of time in my slow sea change over the last few years that I want to keep pinned down chronologically.

This is more like personal note-taking out loud.

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MARCH 2009

(The following is my present response to an e-mail I was sent by a counsellor I saw briefly in 2008 but who continued to read my weblog and help me out behind the scenes without my knowing that I had a kind ally within the mental health system. It was a revelation, and she permanently altered the course of my life.)

Dear Bev,

I have no idea if you are still reading this weblog at all, since our last communication was in March of 2009, but I want you to know that I still think of you and the work that you did for me.

At the time, I was lost on waiting lists within the mental health system, too unwell to properly care for my own mental health but not unwell enough to land me in a psychiatric ward, and you heard me. You read my stories here and found me the help I needed at a time when the mental health system in my city seemed to be the least humane. Through a few sessions with a new counsellor, thanks to you, I was able to garner some skills to help me process some of my anxiety, and that has taken my life from barely livable to one for which I feel grateful. You heard me, you helped me, and you changed my life.

Thank you.

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MAY 2009

A friend urged me to "...fill a pigeon with rice, glitter and hundreds of little notes saying I'm outta here... and push it into the HR office".

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AUGUST 2009

I wrote five blog posts for NBC Universal. I never saw my name attached to any of them published online, but I was paid for them, and that cheque bought us a couple of weeks of groceries. Eating makes writers happy.

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OCTOBER 2009

The Palinode sent me video interviews he did of me talking about blogging and quitting smoking:





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NOVEMBER 2009

I went on CBC radio two or three times over the course of the month to talk about my experience participating in NaNoWriMo. I was a little freaked out, because I was still an anonymous blogger and was terrified to have myself outed so publicly. I ended up with my anonymity intact, but I had dreams that I legally changed my name to Schmutzie Pickles while wearing a big, red clown nose.

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I had no idea that clearing out my inbox would free up so much of my energy or that it would be such a This Is Your Life type of experience, but it was, so take a few hours and give your life a good digital clearing. You might be surprised at what you find.

Kevin's Red Telephone

I was working in large room on the other end of town cold-calling for circus ticket sales. The circus tickets were being sold to benefit a local burn unit. We were told that our mission was superior to that of the Shrine Circus, because all of their money was sent to Galveston, Texas and ours stayed in town. They said Galveston, Texas a lot. None of us cared. This was the kind of job people did when no one else would hire them.



I don't know that no one else would have hired me, but I was under pressure to perform. I had graduated high school, but I had no plans for university, and it was better to get out of my parents' basement than sit through tense suppers scored by the nightly news. The evenings had grown long and complicated.

There were about ten of us at that job at any given time. We would filter in from the webwork of neighbourhoods on buses and in peeling second-hand vehicles to sit at collapsible tables that faced white walls. There were two telephones, two telephone books, two ashtrays, two pens, and two pads of paper, each with two columns, one titled "Calls" and the other titled "Hits". We were each assigned a section of the phone book, and then we each worked our way through our lists, crossing off names as people hung up on us, swore out their irritation, or just didn't answer.

It was repetitive work that was met with constant rejection. The first thing we were told when we arrived on that initial shift was that most of us wouldn't be there the next night, so we should get used to seeing new faces. When I showed up the second night, seven of the original twelve had been replaced with people who were told not to expect anything, either, and every night for the next week, half of the people in the room were new.

The person who was in charge of making sure we made calls and keeping expectations low was Sue. Sue never made any calls herself. She just smoked, read second-hand paperbacks, and made intermittent and entirely disheartening attempts at motivation, which she delivered in a gravelly monotone from her chair. Every half hour she would call out how many hits we'd made that night and how many more we needed to get. I could hear her shift behind me as the long hand on the industrial clock turned toward the next thirty-minute mark. Before each report she would stub out her cigarette, shuffle her chair back, and wait out the second hand. It put me on edge, and I would wait, too, wondering how she held her breath for so long with the lung capacity of a schnauzer.

After about a week, the few of us that were still there from the beginning were considered long-timers, and we were organized into pairs of tablemates. My tablemate was Kevin, because I was the only one too quiet to pipe up and say hell no. Kevins were either nice guys or misfits, and it was already clear at that point which one he was, because, on the second night of the job, he showed us his Private Investigator license and insisted that Sue lock his unicycle up in the back room. He didn't trust any of us around his unicycle.

Kevin smoked fat, cheap cigars and insisted on using the one red telephone in the room. The other long-timers took to moving the telephone to a different table every night before Kevin arrived just so they could watch him swear while he dragged his belly around on the carpet and fumbled with phone cords. I felt kind of bad for him and started switching the phone back before he got to work. If the guy had to have that phone so bad, I wanted to save him the nightly humiliation.

It was immediately clear that my switching the red phone back to Kevin's side of the desk made me an outcast with the other salespeople. I had not even bothered to learn most of their names, not even the ones who stayed, so it was actually kind of a relief not to have to go through awkward chatter and non sequiturs during breaks anymore, but the social shunning left me with no allies aside from Kevin and Sue, neither of whom were particularly desirable company.

They both wheezed like tuneless accordions, and I couldn't decide which of their dominant traits I disliked less: that Sue grew her thorny toenails out to thick points she showed off in plastic flip-flops or that Kevin smelled like a McDonalds parking lot. Still, though, they were kind to me. I should have been fired after the first two or three nights during which I clocked hundreds of calls that resulted in zero circus ticket sales, but Kevin continued to whisper his selling tips to me in between calls and Sue, after looking over my sheets at the end of every night, would tell me she'd see me the next day.

"You made a sale tonight," she said in my ear one time. "Maybe you'll make two tomorrow."

It dawned on me that I was maybe the most pathetic person in the room.

I had never been high on the social ladder anywhere, but I had always had others below me, and, from the beginning, I had felt superior to pretty much everyone in there. To me, they all whiffed of despair. It was clear, though, what the others thought of me. I smoked alone. The donuts always ran out now by the time they got to me. People took pens and paper from my desk, leaving me to find more for myself.

This went on for a couple of weeks until one night when I showed up fifteen minutes late after missing my bus. I rushed in and sat down to a surprise at my table. My telephone was Kevin's much-prized red one.

Kevin was already there talking on one of the regular beige phones, writing down a cake recipe from some lady who apparently didn't want to go to the circus but loved angel food. I pushed a piece of paper with a question mark written on it over to his end of table. He pushed it back with No trubble written on it and gave me a little smile. Kevin obviously thought I needed the red telephone more than he did.

The sudden obviousness of my situation startled me. I started to cry right there at the table with that damn red telephone in front of me. It stared me down. It pointed a finger. His act of generosity had unwittingly made my position all too clear: I was, indeed, the most pathetic person in a room full of low-rent assholes.

"Sue?" I said.

"You'll have to get up and come over here, dear," she said. Sue only stood up twice a night, once during break to pour more coffee into her over-sized 7-11 mug, and once to pack up her cigarettes and paperbacks at the end of the shift.

I sucked back a lug of snot that had puddled in my sinuses and walked over to her table.

"We're going to have to let you go if you don't make sales tomorrow night," she said.

It didn't surprise me that she saw my tears as a way in. Some people can't help but poke an open wound when they see one.

"That's okay. I won't be back tomorrow," I said.

"I figured," she said. "You made it a long time. Selling circus tickets is a hard business."

I stood outside at my bus stop after that and thought about how almost nobody I knew was aware of that place and about how all those people hunched over beige telephones right at that moment were gone now for me so immediately upon leaving that it was like we had never been locked into that smoke-laden room together. I thought about how easily I could just step up onto a bus and be gone, just as they were all gone now, and about how we could all just walk away from each other and whole universes would collapse.

My bus pulled up. I sat at the very back so I could look at the streets fold in behind me while it worked its way across town. A universe in which I was the most pathetic asshole in the room had just collapsed, and I felt like a small god who could easily fold her life into pockets if she tried.

Niceness And Underwear

Must we do this? Label every goddamn kind of person, try to pare humanity down into useless subsets so groups of us can declare some kind of solidarity without any actual community involvement?

"The so-called Cheeseburger Bill [in the United States] bans frivolous lawsuits against producers and sellers of food and non-alcoholic drinks arising from obesity claims."

It is likely that it was the ETA who bombed the commuter trains in central Madrid, Spain during morning rush hour injuring 1200 and killing approximately 200 commuters.

More on the nice front: Rose, a lady who works where I do, just came in and picked up a package of scented candles and some chocolates, because she wants to thank the dentist and dental assistant who worked on her last week. Rose hadn't been to the dentist in twenty years out of fear, and these two people took such good care of her. She asked me if that was too much to do for them, and I encouraged her, because I bet dentists and their assistants have a hard time getting nice words out of anyone. Just seeing how nice Rose is has put me in a good mood.

I must salute the jury responsible for this year's Canadian Governor General's Visual and Media Arts Awards. Thanks for picking Istvan Kantor!

It's funny how much medicine has started finding out about women's bodies since they started studying them not so long ago. Our fertility is not necessarily like what medicine once thought.

Sinead O'Connor just had her third child. When did she have the second? Shows how much I keep up.

Lately, I have become more cleanliness-and-order conscious around the apartment, and this has included doing the previously hidden mound of laundry that has been stashed in the back of the closet for eons. While working my way through this pile, I came across many pairs of underwear that I had forgotten about and many I wish had not resurfaced. I am like a guy when it comes to underwear. I don't mean to be sexist; I'm just relying on my personal experience with men. I found underwear from grade eleven, and not just one pair, but several. If you know how old I am, you will now be appropriately appalled at that fact. They're not even a nice kind that I would ever buy. They're that off-white, champagney colour verging on grey with one remaining hanging tatter of the original lace applique left on the right hip. They are an unidentifiable form of synthetic fabric. All of the cotton lining in the gusset looks shredded. I don't what my nether parts do, I mean they're toothless, but they manage to shred cotton with ease. I found another pair of underwear that I don't even recognize. They are navy blue (I hate that colour), they're huge (I've lost some weight, but not that much), and they've obviously been worn a lot, because the waistband does that wavy old-elastic thing. I know they're mine and not some plus-size side-love of the Fiery One's, because they have that tell-tale shredded gusset deal going on. I also found some nice black lacy numbers that I had forgotten, and they are still young enough to remain unchewed! As I went through all this underwear, I mercilessly threw out anything too holey, too degraded, and now I find myself with way too many thongs (I've never been crazy about them and can't figure out how I ended up with so many) and very few of the regular kind that actually fit and are in decent condition. So, I guess what I'm saying is, feel free to send me panties in size medium. I'm not picky about colour, just as long as they're not scratchy (always test the fabric on the inside of your elbow).

On the one hand, people freak out and say that gays cannot be given equality to other married couples under the law, and then on the other they try to make civil union sound equal but different. Fuck them.

This story was only mildly interesting to me until I came upon the line “...leggy honey-blond...”, which refers to a witness who is-or-was an underage prostitute. This is unfortunate. Maybe Lynn Moore can stand by this piece of shit writing, but I can’t.

Spalding Gray is confirmed dead at the age of 62.