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.

I'm Slightly Hung Over, And I'll Take Wine For $20,000

I have been trying to get this entry out for the last couple of days, so my apologies if it’s all old news to you folks out there. My difficulties with getting this one finished have been compounded this morning by a slight hangover (drinking snakebites at a goth dance party will do that to a girl), a really long long-distance phone call from my brother, and a terrible pot of watery coffee that I am embarrassed to say I made. Finally, though, this thing is getting done. The aspirin is kicking in, the phone call is over, and I’ve decided to accept the weak state of my joe. Here goes.

Sometimes, I am truly grateful that I do not live in Texas.

Join the fight against factory farming. Watch the “The Meatrix”.

You know your job sucks when:

The moral of this story is, don’t ever get caught taking bribes in China.

We all have ex-bosses that we think were some kind of evil, but at least they didn’t feed you to the lions.

I don’t know if the jail nurse was an idiot or not, but her job sure sounds like a paperwork nightmare.

Just a happy little link about the possibility of the destruction of the entire world.

If a blind, wild great horned owl from Wisconsin can get new eye lenses implanted so it can see, why do I have to be stuck behind such thick glasses? The world just isn’t right.

I bet you’re wondering where Bush was between late 1972 and early 1973, aren’t you?

The Fiery One and I went out for supper a couple of nights ago. It wasn’t supposed to be anything special. I was hungry, he was hungry, and there was some extra cash lying around, so we headed out to walk to a local haven of north american grease-founded cuisine. We were struck with how not painful the night air was for once. Instead of the biting and frostbite-inducing windchill, we were surrounded by still, blue air, the temperature of which created the sensation of freshness that is so often attributed to winter cold but I rarely get to experience in this frigid province. It struck me how little time we spend outside talking, or doing any communicating at all, during the winter months here. There the Fiery One and I were outside, chatting away and really enjoying the walk, when for the past few months a walk meant a brisk pace with your head down and your lips curled against each other to keep each other warm. It was like those scenes in movies where people are walking outside in winter and having long and involved conversations. It can happen. The weather, by the way, is not the point of this story.
(This paragraph also excludes the point of this story, but you should read it anyway). We were just about at the restaurant of our choice when we were faced with a decision we had not thought to make before. We found ourselves standing in the alley between two restaurants, the one we usually go to and one we have never gone to. We chose the latter, and went in. It was very old-school posh with red-velvet-lined booths and drapey curtains in the doorways and oil paintings of dead Canadian politicians on the walls with brass lamps to illuminate them. We got to sit under Trudeau and some ambassador guy in a corner booth. We were seated close together at the back of the booth by the waiter, and we suddenly knew that this was our seasonally romantic occasion thing. Good thing we decided that, because the food was freaking expensive, and we weren’t going to duplicate such decadence in the same week.
We were looking over the wine and spirits menu, and there was a special section halfway down one of the pages where there were three wines, each in their own red oval to set them aside from the other wines you could order (this is where I get to the point). The Fiery One pointed at the middle red oval and asked me what the commas meant in the prices. I had to think for a second, because the french use commas where we english speakers would use decimals when expressing the prices of things, and the number under this particular wine was ridiculous if I read it the english way. We asked the waiter about it. It was english. The place where we were having dinner has a bottle of wine you can buy for $20,000! I can live on that for a year, or buy a car, or actually go to France and live there for several months comfortably. After that, I didn’t even think about mentioning the cost listed on the menu for a measely five ribs. I couldn’t help thinking about what it would be like to be someone who can just drop $20,000 on a bottle of wine.

Here is what’s been up with Haiti for the last while. It’s not good.

Despite their government's best efforts, there will still be a Valentine's Day for some Iranians.

It is very, very nice to donate 1600 books to our poor children in the north, but it is ridiculous to do so when they have no building to put them in, and it is even more ridiculous to then offer them even more books and still no building.

At the place where I work, a lot of young people from Korea come through. I was never much of a t-shirt reader, because I think clothing that has words on it, especially brand logos, is tacky, but these Korean kids have the weirdest t-shirts, and so I have taken to specifically reading what theirs have to say. Here is a small sampling:

One t-shirt read Boyfriend Wanted: good hair, long sleeves, plays guitar.... Long sleeves are ever so important when it comes to boyfriends.

This t-shirt said Why not chew gum in class? with the word tomboy underneath. Oh, you rebel, you. You tomboy, with your gum-chewing.

A sweater with a zipper up the front that split up words that read Thursday on the first line and And on the second in appliqued letters. I watched this person closely to see if there was anything on the back. There wasn’t. There was just that, Thursday And.

I likes the idea of electric paper, I does. If they can make it so it reflects instead of emitting light and it is flexible, then I am all for the use of less paper of tree-origin.

Read this interview with Dr Mohammed al-Shiekh Mahmood Sayam, the man behind the intifada.

You all have probably heard about this one already, but so what. Here it is again – 30 human embryos cloned!

After all these years, Barbie and Ken are splitting up. (It's weird how adults talk about the lives of plastic dolls. Oh, shit, I'm doing it.)

I HEREBY COMMAND YOU TO READ GEORGE SAUNDERS. Yes? Good. “Jon” and “Sea Oak” serve as excellent introductions to Mr. Saunders and all his wit. If you are so inclined after reading these two short stories, which you will be, here is an interview and a fan site to get to know him by. You can wash all that down by running out and picking up a copy of Pastoralia.

Deliciousness, Uncut Diamonds, And Screw The Facts, Because Sushi Rocks

Britain is going to lift the right to anonymity for sperm and egg donors.

Chinese schools are changing from 'force-fed' learning and have had significant funding increases.

Salmon may contain a mess of chemicals and antibiotics, but the Boston Globe and several others think you should eat it anyway.

For most of my work day today, I smelled delicious. It's true. You want to know why? At approximately 11:52 am, I upended my plate, which was full of a delicious tossed salad with italian dressing on it. I was wearing a wool sweater, so all the salad oil rubbed in very nicely without leaving any noticeable marks, but I had to walk around smelling like good food all day. Several people, while talking to me, commented that someone in the building must be cooking something good for lunch. I would simply nod and agree. No point in embarrassing myself by admitting to being the delicious lunch when I didn't have to. Although, now that I think about it, whenever anybody asked me how I was doing, which happens overly frequently where I work, I should have mysteriously answered “delicious”.

This is something I rarely hear about anymore. It still sucks to live in Nepal after all these years. Fucking Maoists.

Peruse the Culinary History Timeline, but not if you’re hungry.

Since I mentioned that my bird looked a lot like Winston Churchill a couple of entries ago, I thought I would throw in this story about Mr. Churchill's parrot.

One of the professor’s came by at work today and pulled out a small, black box. He told me that he had just been showing one of my co-workers his diamonds. I said, “so, you have diamonds, do you?” I was only humouring him, because I thought he was half mad. He said, “yes, I do”. Then he proceeded to open the black box. Inside there were about two dozen clear plastic containers, like the ones geologists keep rock samples in, nestled in black velvet-lined hollows. Each container had a stone in it, and each container’s stone was of a different size. They were uncut diamonds! He took about three of them out and poured them into my hand so I could take a better look at them. I am amazed that he did that, because cut, their worth would increase from between two to ten times, so even in their uncut state, a box housing that many would probably be worth quite a bit. They looked almost nothing like the cut ones I’m used to, but they were still all sparkly and pretty. I should have clubbed him over the head and run.

It scares me when the meaning of "freedom of the press" may be lost in Canada.

Now Kodak is going to cut its workforce by 20% as it switches over to digital and leaves 35mm film behind. Again people, I just got my camera. Don’t do this to me!

Step right up! Helium 3 from the moon, folks! It's the new fuel for the 21st century!

There will be no facts today, because I must run off to join the Fiery One for sushi and whatnot. Fuck the facts where sushi is concerned! I have exactly nine minutes to get my ass out of the house. Oh, and before I do, I leave you with a personal-type blog I found that I really, really like at the moment – meeyapede.