No, really. It is.
In that it’s still Real Winter out there. Damn it. And I suspect it might keep being Seasonal Saturnalia for a good long time. Possibly till spring.
It would be such a colossal bummer if my beloved Left Coast had the same climate as the rest of Canada in the future.
Like I have said before, there is not one tiny trace of nostalgia for winter left in me.
When I first moved to the GVRD in 1998, it felt very strange for winter times to come and go with no winter.
To my senses, it was like a late fall that lasted all the way till spring.
And every year when the days got short and the skies turned grey and then it more or less just stayed that way, I would feel this vague aching tension as if my body was waiting for the other shoe to fall.
And I genuinely missed winter… or thought I did.
But over the years, we had some spates of l’hiver vrai at this time of year, and at the same time I was acclimating to my new home, and then the final blow came :
I turned 40.
And the cold started hurting my lungs. Then the end of my nose. Then inside my nose. And finally, it started to hurt my bones.
And that did it. Fuck winter. I hope to never see it again. At this point, even living in LA, where the sun can indeed shine every day, sounds good.
At least it’s a dry heat.
Hey, it’s a cliché for a reason. It’s vastly preferable to moist heat. Take it from someone who has lived in both.
Meanwhile, I cleverly thought I would stay one step ahead of the fuckery by ordering my groceries a day early to be delivered tomorrow, Xmas Eve, because I had a funny old feeling that getting them delivered on Xmas Day might be tricky.
Alas, I was not nearly clever enough. Every slot for tomorrow was taken by the time I got around to ordering my stuff.
This makes sense because that’s when everyone would be ordering those last minute Xmas Eve/Xmas Day items you forgot until now.
“Oh my god! SUGAR PLUMS! We don’t have any SUGAR PLUMS!”
“What the hell are sugar plums?”
“I have no idea, but we HAVE to HAVE them or Christmas is RUINED!”
“,,, have you been drinking last year’s eggnog again?”
Ah well, live and learn. I added some Xmas treats for myself to the list this time and I won’t be getting them till Boxing Day. C’est la vie.
My room is still too damned cold. I have been poking around the Canadian Tire website to see if I can find what I knew as “thermal tape” in my childhood.
It’s tape you use to seal up the gaps around windows and other small heat-leaking areas. Every year, my Dad would fill the gaps with thermal caulk then cover them with a layer of said thermal tape.
And it worked. No cold air was getting through THAT.
But of course, we live in an era where there’s too many damn many varieties of everything and none of them are the thermal tape of my youth so now I have to plow my way through a forest of potential solutions to figure out which one seems like something I and my roomies are competent to do.
Why does everything have to be so fricking complicated??
More after the break.
With blazing heat!
Well here I am again, needing to do 400 words in 45 minutes, which works out to roughly a word a minute.
I ain’t worried. I type way more than a word a minute, obviously, and I’ve beat the clock like this before.
I have been training myself to be prolific by writing in this blog for the last 11 years and that means this is not even a challenge, really.
I mean, I went through all of the VFS Writing for Movies and Television one year “intensive” program without even feeling the strain until the end. I could have done the program three times over in that year.
Because I’m fucking awesome.
Not having a life helps too, naturally. It’s not like I had to fit my course work into my busy social calendar or anything.
To be honest, the hardest thing about my time at VFS was the same as the hardest thing about my time at Kwantlen and all other levels of education :
Getting there and back.
Whether it’s taking one bus or traveling from one end of the Millennium Line from one end to the other, it’s always been hardest and most laborious part of school for me to go from home to school and back again.
It would be amazing to go to school with a nice warm drive, door to door, for the entire journey. In cabs, or in a friendly friend’s car.
Once I am actually at school, it’s smooth sailing. The courses are easy and fun, and I almost always do quite well in them.
And I am long past the point of worrying about bullying.
So yeah. I’d like school fine if it wasn’t for the travel portion.
Makes a good case for taking courses online, I suppose. Still an option. I could probably get a distance education for pretty cheap or even free, and then I might even get a degree in something with more of a future than writing for TV.
Remember, kids, don’t go for a degree in something with very few job openings unless you know you are a highly competitive winner type person.
Us soft and sensitive creative types don’t stand a chance.
Unless we can get an agent.
In this scenario, agents shine like angels above us all. They are the magical people who can take on all that competition stuff and create that most magical of conditions :
A world where all you have to do is the thing you do. Act, sing, write, and so on.
They take care of the rest and you just watch the money roll in.
Such a beautiful dream. Makes me want to cry.
And now to do today’s TikTok.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.