January

I walked through the doors of Emily Carr University, out of the bleak January weather, and into the great entrance hall. This gallery, known as the Concourse, is a corridor of polished cement and bare white walls that’s narrowness in comparison to its height sweeps the gaze up, up, up into the red ceder farters with their heavy iron hardware and the glass window ceilings. This grand space is home to a different exhibit of student work each week. The installments are ever changing. One week mannequins in electric clothes. The next, young male student traces chalk lines onto the cool polished cement around play-dead fellow artists, struck dead by government funding cuts. The plain white walls are built to be adapted to their task, and more walls are always being build up and torn down. This last stretch of my commute to school has come to be a ritual where every week I am initiated into the house of this holy work, the outside world washed off me and every week I am baptized anew.

Returning home from Christmas after so much time away it was a curious sight. The Vancouver atmosphere outside is a white grey overcast, bright and dark simultaneously, freeking, drizzly, with the taste of the sea on the air. I emerged from damp scarves and mits into warmth and ambience of this cathedral of whiteness. So strange to see the place that way, not skeletal, not sad, just clean. Ready for the new term. I imagine to myself with a sarcastic smile that at least someone in this conceptualist orgy of an establishment must be smoking a cigarette and pontificating upon this pregnancy of meaning and symbology. We aren’t all annoying beret wearing flakes, but is not shortage of them. I can hear my footsteps echo as I walk deeper into the school, gaze soaring up into the space where people on ladders are preparing for new installations.

The halls of Emily Carr are same, only busier. They are smaller, darker, more eccentric. Walking them has been my new life’s great entertainment. Their every nook and cranny has some little surprise. Art works, finished and in progress, are packed onto of the lockers. They house rallies and protests alike. Even as you walk them they are reconfigured around you, someone is always busy drilling into the huge old cedar beams to install something new. They swarm. They live. They are an ants’ nest, except with crazier ants.

It is my great regret that I didn’t have the time to document in this blog the adventures of my first term at this school, because they were bar none some of the wackiest, most ridiculous shit shows of my life. I regret you, dear reader, most likely brought to this humble blog while searching for prolific anime porn artist Pandora’s Box on google will never know these tales in their full intensity; I could tell them now, but I think I’d spend most of the time just shaking my head in shock over it all. There were malicious gay 82 year old instructors. There was lost projects. There was moonlight dumpster diving in the in the back alleys of Kits. There were pliers and hot glue and band saws and staple guns and all sorts of tools that make my uncomfortable to be around. There was tonsillitis. There was septic arthritis. There was swine flu. There were bed bugs. There was so much fucking rain I’m surprised the sea bed of the Pacific isn’t dry and flopping with slowly asphyxiating fish. A rant in the heat of the moment would have been the only thing to do them justice. Perhaps though I can convey their tone to you through something our principal said to us our first day while giving us a tour of the facilities. Tiny little Gaye Fowler, goddess principal extraordinaire, whose dress seems to be a flirtation with boredom -librarian skirts, square shoes, every hair in place- that ultimately only makes her unmaskable fabulousness more sensational. A joke, and it’s those black cat eye glasses give it away. “Here at Emily Carr we’re extremely nurturing of your gifts,” she told us, “we’re very accommodating of what you need to grow. We let you do pretty much anything short of punching holes in the walls. But the form for punching holes in the walls are in the student services office.”

I guess the old axiom rings true, “Blogging, is for the bored, the single, and the depressed.” None the less, I will try and keep better records of this term…..

So far January has been just as big a shit show as the term before it…. but somehow it all seems more dire. My boyfriend has been incredibly stressed. Through all the rain in the fall he was still smiling, and while I was running like shit just to stand still, I never felt sad. Nowadays, well, it just feels like the sunshine has been sucked out of everything. He came here to work for the Olympic Games, and with them fast approaching, he’s been working around the clock. Then the other day he accepted a better position in Whistler, and just like that…. he was gone.

He’s been getting farther and farther away since Christmas. He knows I can’t travel with him, I’m in the middle of a degree, so has had no choice but to accept moving on. He’s letting go of me. He had planned to stay here till May…. but now what’s the point? He’s trying to find a job opportunity doing something exciting overseas while amongst all the travelers in Whistler, and while he tells me he’ll come home to me again, I don’t quite trust that he will……

I just feel like those sunny days with him are gone and there’s no way to get him back.

These days since he left have been hard. My stomach feels like it’s full of broken lightbulbs.

It was so tense when he left. I’d cried and cried with worry for losing him, and I know I just made him feel worse. He doesn’t want to hurt me but that’s just life. He hasn’t talked to me since he left. I don’t know if I have a love or not, and that limbo is brutal.

I’m left alone in this city for the remainder of the Olympics. With Granville Island being a major tourist attraction school has been let out for the Games. Most of my school mates have taken the chance to fly home to their families. Jens is gone. Vancouver is swarming with upwards of 500,000 visitors in addition to our 2.5 million. In a city of 3 million and I feel very alone. All around me are celebrations. I walk home under a sky filled with dancing 100,000 watt searchlights and nightly fireworks, and when I take those last few steps up the front porch stairs, I turn around and can see the whole city glowing, and beyond them Cypress Mountain, where Jens used to work, all lit up for night skiing. I wish I had someone, anyone, to share all this with.

January was Olympic hell. I felt like the city was at the ever shrinking aperture of a hurricane of evil. Everywhere there are hundred foot billboards of snowboarders back flipping for a sparkling delicious bottle of coke. Half my friends send me facebook invites for anti-Olympic demonstrations, the other half forward me links to become a fan of the Games. All the hippy friends in Victoria abhor the corporate adulteration of stolen first nation land. All the artist friends at Emily Carr are making their careers over them, either by protesting them through art or by selling art to the tourists that come to them. Jens got the feeling that I hated the Olympics, which I’m sure alienated him a little. This isn’t true. But after seven years of hearing the word Olympics more and more and more until it’s every second one, I’m sick of it.

I remember my very first experience with the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Games. It was 2003 and I was living in Osaka Japan with a bunch of Kiwi girls. One of them walks in and in a culturally appropriate fashion breaks the news to me. “Oi, fuck you.” “What?” I ask. “Congratulations. Vancouver won the 2010 Olympic Games.” We’d beat out New Zealand’s bid. I told her I didn’t give a shit.

And here it is. Seven years later. I made myself some dinner and sat down in front of my computer to watch the Opening Ceremonies. I spent the time wondering…… where was my Jens right then? Was he watching them too, in Whistler, in the snow, with a bunch of rowdy Australian skiers? Was he having fun? Was he happy? Did he remember me?

I’ve cried and cried and cried. I don’t know if he’ll be back, but if he doesn’t I wish he’d just hurry up and kill me so I can start rebuilding myself a spring.