This may be my last post until next week. Maybe. Probably. I don't know. It depends. I'm traveling for work and I still need to run errands and pack. And I'm bringing a laptop and there are no images on the laptop and blah, blah, blah why I am I telling you this anyways?
I have passed through or landed in Vancouver every single Feb for the last three years. I have never been to the Pacific North West during any other month of the year, ever. What is up with that? As long as it is green and the Ocean is still there I really can't complain.
As per usual I am uber stocked with things to do and read on the plane. I like to take advantage of all that free time. This time I have:
- "365 Days" by Julie Doucet. Davin presented this to me last night as a gift for my travels this week. I started reading it at 6am this morning when I woke up with insomnia. I've been following Julie Doucet's work since my late teens and have every issue of "Dirty Plotte," though not preserved in sealed plastic and stored in a temperature-consistent room because I am not even remotely anal enough. Although the daily journal style appears boring and relatively mundane on the surface (much like this site. Ha! p.s. Happy Five Year Birthday to this site last month which I totally forgot) I am enjoying the little stories that capture her daily life and am finding that I most relate to this body of work. I always appreciated what she was doing but didn't relate on a personal level to her stories except in that I was also a female art school student. This time I am nodding along to stories about annoying people who make her angry, frustration with artwork gone wrong, problems with book publishing, applying for art grants for the first time, money woes and moments of self-doubt and uncertainty about artwork. All of that and I'm only a month or two into the year.
- Seed catalogues galore - Of which there are many. I have a lot of highlighting to complete.
- Magazines - Garden magazines. I'll probably buy the new Walrus at the airport and allow myself to indulge in one tabloid which I am only allowed to buy or read on plane and train trips.
- "The One Straw Revolution" by Masanobu Fukuoka. I wrote about this one over here.
- "The Brain That Changes Itself" by Norman Doidge - This was recommended by a friend. I read a little at her place last night and was convinced to go buy it. Written by a psychiatrist/psychoanalyst about new developments in neuroscience, called neuroplasticity, which challenges the notion that our brains are hardwired. It's an incredibly hopeful way of looking at ourselves and our brains, and our capacity to change; overcoming trauma, emotional difficulty, and even some forms of physical damage. There are interesting case studies in the book that outline how psychotherapy isn't just an examination of our subconscious that affects our thinking but physically alters our brains. Fucking awesome.
Song: I've been listening to "Pitseleh" by Elliott Smith from this live show a lot recently.