california kills me.

in a motel in montreal last night, i dreamt i met a friend's baby and i wept and wept. my friend had black and white hair and her baby was the most beautiful baby i'd ever seen. she had her son the day i got to california but i never got to meet him. a headwind followed us out of california and we arrived home late. i have 6 rolls of film to process. please keep up with me.

the city is a patchwork quilt.

there is something oddly disconcerting about your own reminiscences. my life is vastly different from what i would have expected of myself, and it's uncomfortable for me to be in the limbo of living, at least materialistically, half in one country and half in another. that material life is strewn haphazardly in boxes piled higher than i am tall in my parents' already-bloated garage, and i don't have an answer for their requisite "what are you doing with your life" queries. that's a loaded but cliche question for anyone in their mid-20s with no career prospects in sight, but it seems almost a joke for me since it's more than just a question of when i'm going to get a 'real' job. life was so much easier when i wasn't trying to immigrate.

now that my life has been compartmentalised into banker's boxes, it's quite clear to me what i'm petrified to lose in a fire. the morbid thought occured to me whilst trying to avoid dead old daddy long-legses. did you ever pack a fire bag? in mine, when i was 12, was my teddy bear, probably some pictures of friends i have long since figured i was better off without, and a few letters. how realistic is this? now i have an accidental fire bag in the form of my parents' sugarcube-shaped home, and i can't prioritise it when i need to.

the threats are killing me.

halifax threatened not to let me leave by having a blizzard the night before my 6am flight, and pushing all my subsequent flights back by 9 hours. by the time i got to san francisco, it was 12am sf time (4am hfx time), raining at a balmy 15c, and as i was crossing polk street, legally, to get to my friend's apartment literally right in front of me, the 19 polk bus threatened my life by mere inches. the driver never saw me. for a split second, i opted to let the bus hit me and collect the millions upon millions of dollars that sf muni would owe me due to my enormous medical bills, emotional and mental trauma, etc, but knowing my luck, i'd be a bazillionaire quadrapalegic. probably not worth it. after successfully ringing my aforementioned friend's apartment, the threat of sleep never quite took hold and we stayed up until nearly 5am talking about how fucking rad her apartment is and how horrible the following day would be for me, since i had to be up at 7.30am to go catch a bus that would take a grueling 8 hours to get somewhere that should only be a 4 hour drive. my ipod stopped working halfway through the 4th episode of "lost: season 1" so the threat of extreme boredom was very, very real. a tip for the california roadtripper: the drive to and from los angeles from my hometown is far more beautiful though the destination could be the most repulsive place on earth, and the drive to and from san francisco from my hometown is downright ugly though the destination is pure heaven. the drive is even worse when you're stuck on a greyhound bus and you can't even watch pixelated ipod tv. i get home to 25 degree weather and boxes upon boxes of my material possessions threatening to collapse in the garage. i went shopping on sunday. california might threaten to kidnap me.

just to better illustrate that i live almost exactly halfway between los angeles and san francisco (we just got an urban outfitters. my mind is blown.):