Look at me! I am starting a blog entry while on break in Creative Writing class. Aren’t I emcool?/em

Just had a presentation by Deanne Achong, a pretty groovy modern visual artist who does cool modern art like installations, online metafiction, and even apps. For some reason,nbsp; I was expecting an older, somewhat matronly woman. But no, she seems to me to be around my age.

Cleary, my mental file image for “respected female artist” needs a radical upgrading.

(—)

Now it is the next day and I am waiting for the bus that will take me to Kwantlen and Psych 1100. Yay, Psych! I love Psych. Plus, I will get my results from last week’s exam and find out just how clever I really am.

I a m hoping for “fairly”.

(—)

On break. I got 96.15 percent on that exam. Holy crap.

Now it is a “scaled” grade, because the average was so low that the prof decided to boost grades in the directiin of the average she had previously projected, but still. Not fucking bad for someone without a textbook.

Unscaled, it is nowhere near as impressive : 84 percent. My usual.

So… Thank goodness for low average grades? WTF, I will take what I can get.

I only got 70 percent on my first assignment though. Fair enough. Looking back, I did a really half-assed (and arrogant) job. I am ashamed of it now.

(—)

And now I’m home, I’ve had supper, I’m full of caffiene, and it’s time to blog.

Great new : my Photo ID arrived in the mail today! w00t! My long personal nightmare is finally over. I will be able to get my student loan, pay off Kwantlen, pay back Joe, and get my goddamned textbooks.

God I hope this never happens again.

Actually, it’s an embarrassment of riches, because I actually got two envelopes from ICBC today. Turns out, I now have a BC Services Card with my photo on it as well as a BC Identity Card with my photo on it.

They are practically identical apart from what it says at the top. I don’t think I would ever use both of them at the same time in some sort of “two forms of ID” situation. I know that if I was the gatekeeper in that situation, I would be thinking “yeah, and I bet you have a stack of these back home that say you’re anything from FBI to George Lucas. ”

Still, what the hell, it’s good to have two. That way if I lose one, I still have the other. Not that I plan on losing either of them. I am going to hold on to these like they were the Pot of Gold and its best friend the Pot of Pot. If anything, I will become an ID evangelist, telling anyone who will listen or doesn’t get away fast enough that they have no idea how bad your life can fall apart if you you are missing that precious little card, so take care of it.

And I have to say, on a purely existential level, I feel more legitimate now. Like I am a real person because I can prove I belong here. It’s the sort of thing most people don’t think about, but then again, most people don’t suffer from depression.

Not yet, anyhow.

I am feeling pretty good. I am having certain attention deficits (for example, I find it hard to concentrate on my writing, my mind keeps wandering. Did you know cigarettes suppress the appetite for carbs?). This suggests that I am running a sleep debt of some sort and I need to catch up. Luckily, it’s the weekend now, so I can catch up all I like.

I have one thing that I need to work on, and that’s the fractured fiction project I have to do for Creative Writing class. I am not super keen about it because we are supposed to take the previous piece of fractured fiction we did and turn it into a website, more or less.

You know, something cool and arty and metafictional. And I have no objection to doing something like that. Heck, I am glad for the excuse to try it. But I would much rather start over with a fresh idea more suited to distributed storytelling.

You can see the site for yourself if you click here, but there’s not much there yet. I will build it up over time.

Probably will restructure it, too.

So far, the idea is that I will turn that story into a conspiracy-type website, where people come together to find out what really happened that night, on the Skytrain.

There will be the original five story sections, each on its own page, but the real fresh content is the fictional comment section I will add to each page in order to make it seem more like a real website as well as giving me a space to add details to the fictional world the story takes place in.

And there will probably be some gentle fun-poking at Internet culture and the bickering it engenders as well.

The problem is, we’re not supposed to go over 1000 words, and this is the sort of thing where I could keep adding content for a very long time. It’s exactly the kind of thing that I have been looking for without knowing it, a way to tell a story bigger than what can told with traditional storytelling.

So what I really want to do is just go to town on it. Invent layer after layer, every detail supporting the story and making it world more real. I could see me investing a lot of time and energy and invention making it something truly amazing, the sort of thing that gets a person recognized as uniquely talented and maybe leads to bigger and better things.

Or at least makes for one weird and enchanting discovery after I die.

But how am I supposed to do all that on a lousy 1000 word budget?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.