» November 29, 2002

NaNoWriMo stuff is archived starting with November 3rd. For those of you keepingscore, I just barely missed the halfway mark. This doesn’t bode well for next year, but we’ll see, won’t we?If there’s one thing I’ll take away from the whole month, though, it’ll be the perspective that the whole NaNoWriMo endeavour gave me for most of the thirty days. Having to write a novel was one of those things that puts you in a completely different frame of mind. It was a sign that you’re doing something Out Of The Ordinary(tm), something to be respected even if only because you had decided to tilt at windmills. How can you not respect a crazy lunatic hellbent on producing a novel of no worth or substance?But it’s not just the act of writing a novel itself. I thought of it as a catalyst for the entire month; I pretended to look through other people’s eyes for the sake of writing characters in the novel, and of course soon came to the realization that all those characters were fragments of myself. This is probably one of those devices that good writers throw out fairly quickly; you can only write about yourself so many times before you get sick of yourself. Better writers would simply try to draw on other sources of inspiration. When I got sick of myself, I decided to change. The jury’s still out on whether that was a good idea.More so than ever before, it’s become easy to view life as a sort of evolution from the kid I was ten years ago, or fifteen years ago, or five years ago. So many accomplishments, personal and otherwise—who knew I’d ever try to write a novel? Who knew I would ever have pretensions of running a newspaper, or wanting to act, or writing a screenplay? And yet, so many disappointments—I’m still a total cockup when it comes to relationships. I don’t worry enough about school. I still don’t really know what I want in life. I don’t take the hard steps, make the difficult choices. I’m still working on that, and slowly things get better, even when they seem to be so much worse.So, November. You’re almost gone, and in a lot of ways, I think I miss you already. Maybe I should try writing a new novel in January.

Filed under: Old and Busted
» November 10, 2002

“Holly!” She was almost out the door when Darren managed to catch up with her. “Hey, whoa, hang on, stop…” Darren was a little excitable at times of duress. Two days after a break-up certainly counted. Almost made it, too. I should take speedwalking classes.It was hard to say who was responsible for what, or why it all happened. Holly was still fairly young, but if there was one thing she had learned about relationships, it was that sometimes they end for no good reason at all, and that maintaining one was a sort of black art. Everyone was an alchemist of sorts; how do you turn mutual attraction into everlasting love? Not that Holly was even to the point of wanting that yet.One cardinal rule that Holly liked to stick to, however, was that if a break-up is going to happen, it should be a real break-up for all parties involved-no fights in the hallway, no awkward glances in class, no chance encounters and sad, pained expressions that said “I miss you”. Absolutely no contact was allowed for at least a week, all the better to gather thoughts and figure things out. It seemed like a good rule to keep, mainly because it let her get past a lot of emotional turmoil and look at things a little more clearly at the end before deciding on a course of action. As a result, Holly hadn’t had a whole lot of tumultuous broken affairs and stalker ex-boyfriends. It also meant that more often than not, she didn’t keep in contact with them very much.
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And so the honeymoon has ended. The powers that be have conspired to throw some assignments into my lap, and thus the great start of the past few days has led to a complete halt in the proceedings, with two whole days without any new prose. After Tuesday, I’ll have a lot of ground to make up. Wish me luck.

Filed under: Old and Busted
» November 4, 2002

Another hour, and Holly’s out the door of the apartment and off to school. Fourteen blocks, three traffic lights, two gas stations, and a high school at the end of the trip. Right by an old railway bridge with peeling paint, although Holly’s never seen a train pass by nor heard one while in class. It’s not a particularly long or exciting walk usually, and Holly’s been down this path countless times. Sometimes, though, when it’s early and she’s got time to kill, Holly takes a ‘shortcut’.In the faint glow of the gray dawn, Holly strikes gold: another garage alleyway that cuts through the city block. It’s still dark enough that the street lamps are still on, casting pools of yellow light. The alley is a bit narrow; Holly’s reminded of that one time when she tried to squeeze past a small gap between a garage and a fence, only to find that the garage was actually a lot longer than she had supposed. She imagined, in the darkness, all sorts of things lurking in that small space—a rabid dog, a dead body—but trudged on anyways. She found herself a new path that day that took her towards a park with giant leafy trees, but Holly never ventured down that gap again.This wasn’t so bad, though, Holly thought to herself. Any space you could do a waltz in was plenty wide, and besides, she wasn’t the claustrophobic type anyways. One alleyway lead to another, and before she knew it Holly had found herself in some commercial district, walking along the backs of restaurants and convenience stores and butcher shops and record stores. The day had already begun for them, but it certainly hadn’t lasted long; doors opened as trucks rolled by and unloaded blank pallets of mysterious boxes, while cooks came out of one of the buildings for a smoke break. Holly walked by, apparently oblivious but really watching all the while. No one gave her any notice.

“So who can tell me what the roots of x2 + 2x + 1 are?” With a start, Holly awoke from her slumber. Everyone in pre-calculus class had a habit of remaining as still as possible lest they be called on, so naturally when Holly made a fuss about waking up Mister Simpson asked her for an answer. Holly took a couple of seconds to work it out before replying. “There’s only one root, x + 1.” Suddenly boredom caught up with Holly again and she had to fight the urge to fall back asleep—at least to stay awake until Simpson had directed his attention to other matters. He wouldn’t have any of it, however: “Your work, Miss Stratford. How did you figure it out?” This wasn’t going so well. For Holly, it became a battle of sorts; how much longer would Simpson interrogate her before he called it a day? Holly’s mind wandered as she thought about the countless movies she’d seen with fake-looking interrogation scenes, complete with a towering black figure with a European accent asking for the formula.”Miss Stratford?” Snap out of it, Holly. “Inspection, Mr. Simpson. x2 means that there are no coefficients in front of the x’s in the roots, and the 1 indicates the same for the integer coefficients. No minuses, so a plus. The two roots are the same, then: x + 1.” Can I go back to sleep now? Simpson seemed satisfied and turned back to the board. Holly wondered what would happen if she were being interrogated and tortured for a secret formula. After all, if the evil interrogator didn’t really know what the formula was or how it worked, couldn’t you pretty much give him something plausible so that he’d release you like an idiot, only to find out that it didn’t work and cry like a little evil baby? Holly started riding that train of thought, all traces of the pre-calculus class slowly fading away in the distance.
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Filed under: Old and Busted
» November 3, 2002

As she drew figures on the fogged-up glass, the gray skies and the barren trees slowly came into focus, slices at a time.Holly lived for the overcast days. Blue skies were certainly nice, too, but something about the blanket of clouds pleased her. It was as if Mother Nature were somehow holding something back from the world, keeping the sun under wraps, teasing people with the possibility of rain and sleet and gale force winds. Sunny weather was just too obvious for some reason. Holly sometimes felt like she was being intensely watched by some higher power. Today, though, there was only a sea of gray. Holly could relax.Sitting in an easy chair pulled close to the old copper radiator, Holly was content to stay by the window for the rest of time. Her world seemed to shrink until nothing existed except for herself, her blanket, and her walkman, quietly grinding its little spindles. With not a care in the world and only the faintest strands of thoughts running through her head, Holly lay nestled in the chair and fell asleep as the music faded away.

Holly’s eyes snapped open. She stared straight ahead at the top of the window, trying to make out something in the darkness. Snow. Flakes so small that she almost missed it, but Holly saw gently floating specks of white cross her window, backlit by the full moon. The moon took no notice as Holly drifted back into slumber.
Toronto had, at some point not long ago, stopped the endless cycle of demolition and redevlopment. The result was a city that almost seemed frozen in time, with only tendrils of subsequent growth here and there; a subtle holographic storefront here, a hydrogen fueling station there. Toronto had become the Amsterdam of the new world, its image as a cosmopolitan city augmented by the perpetual trappings of the past. One day, maybe the whole city would just become one big heritage zone, forever protected from political and social machinations. A hermetically sealed city, it would become, and probably soon after Toronto would die.Until then, though, the pulse of life continued, with the continual tension between the people of the present-era and the buildings from the recent past resulting in a vital undercurrent missing from most other cities in North America. New York and San Francisco and Vancouver could all play the game of who could look furthest into the future, with their extravagant angular new buildings and their immaculately dressed urban fashionistas. They were almost hermetically sealed environments themselves, having scrubbed out all of the subcultures and the homeless people and the tiny Thai restaurants. They were cities as imagined by a single entity, the crowning jewels of the new North America that pointed the way to a prosperous future. In that sense, Toronto was an anachronism, almost quaint. And yet, somehow, the world hadn’t passed by the fair city. It was still alive.
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Filed under: Old and Busted