Life purpose? Sounds great.

I've been checking out the quirkyalone blog lately. Yesterday produced an interesting post about how to figure out your life purpose. I think I will have to try this.

I have always wanted to live in the Vancouver Art Gallery

And now I will be closer than ever.


Vancouver artist Reece Terris is in the process of putting together a set of apartments (designed by decade from 1950 to now) that will rise up through the centre of the Vancouver Art Gallery. I am looking forward to this (opens May 6).

Tone on tone

I've been noticing little things, lately. Subtleties.



Braids are what all the cool kids are doing these days. I love being surrounded by 18-year-olds.

Except when they use words I've never head before. Like biddy. Of course I've heard the word biddy before, but when I hear it I think of old ladies who are a little bit cranky.

It's slang, apparently, for girls you hook up with, randomly-ish, not seriously. At least, that's what I've gathered. I feel like an explorer in a new world sometimes.

Léon/The Professional

I watched The Professional for the first time about ten years ago, and I loved it. It's violent, but so stylized and gorgeously shot - watching it feels a little like watching a graphic novel. Léon (Jean Reno) is a hit man who lives alone in his New York apartment. Matilda (a stunning thirteen-year-old Natalie Portman) is a young girl whose family is gunned down in a drug dispute while she's at the grocery store. Léon takes Matilda in. Written and directed by Luc Besson (whose The Fifth Element is another of my 90s favourites), it is a sparing, brilliant film about what happens when something unexpected comes into our lives and changes our entire way of being in the world.

Watch it. Again.

Oh yeah, 10/10.

It snowed today.

So I went out and bought a springtime lipstick.


I like pictures where my eyes are closed.

(p.s. it's MAC slimshine lipstick in lovey-dove.)

Instead of writing

My hold came into the library the other day. Plot and Structure: techniques and exercises for crafting a plot that grips readers from start to finish, by James Scott Bell.

He begins by discussing the process by which he decided to take his writing seriously, which included obtaining a number of talismans: a poster of Stephen King, a black mug with the word writer stretched across it. He suggested posting something inspiring, so I immediately put down the book and started trolling the internet for quotes (I've always been a quote kind of girl). I found these ones here.

Writing is the best way to talk without being interrupted.
- Jules Renard

If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud.
- Emile Zola

I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.
- Gustave Flaubert

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.
- Gaston Bachelard

When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.
- Raymond Chandler

Make it new.
- Ezra Pound

Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don't see any.
- Orson Scott Card

English

I want to see (and hear) English as a second language once in a while - hear the things I never do because they are just part of the way I talk - the intricacies - the oddities. I want to think in the kind of poems I love - the ones that work words like the most delicate thread, looping around their meanings to create new ones, building words on words to create so many levels of understanding.

Hear-here-hero-heroin-harrowing-narrowing down.

It's hard work, actually listening to what people say.



(It is raining. I feel grey - in the best possible way.)

My first video diary

I refuse to use that other word (the v word), but then again, I hated the word blog for a long time, too.

I have posted my first video diary entry over on my YA blog. Here are the outtakes. I screwed up multiple times. Woo.

Things I love: Card catalogs; Libraries; Words.