Ode to Olanzapine

Night after night in the bleak grip of darkness
I reach for the Olanzapine
Round white pills of things mysterious to me
It is the drug companies biggest seller
You can't say there are no after effects
The first year was a fog
Emotional flatline
They said I was making progress
Olanzapine zombie rarely speaks
Is compliant
60 pounds in six months
New wardrobe, new stretchmarks, new body
I take this drug so that I can keep up with capitalist demand
To be a productive person
To not think magic still exists
To live
I don't mind the olanzapine
I just hate the idea of forever.

Life is strange

Yes it is. I'm having a sort of spiritual crisis at the moment, a result of deciding to walk away from a very long and intense friendship which was stagnant. I know it was a positive decision, but the negative fallout from walking away (including having my dead pet put on my apartment doorknob and which was stolen before I could reach him) has left me feeling shaken. I want to be able to have the ability to love and forgive, but hurtful actions are difficult to heal from.

Maybe I used to think that in order to truly forgive someone, you had to allow them in your life, even if they were severely limiting your ability to live in peace and love. Now I realize this isn't the case, you can care deeply about someone and still put up big boundaries that mean they can never hurt you again. Sometimes people are just too negative to allow them to influence your life anymore. Sometimes the best thing you can do for someone is to tell them goodbye.

Aside from that, I have been reading a lot of stuff on Near Death Experiences. Quite fascinating. I must admit, it makes me quite homesick for a spiritual land far far away. But dammit, I'm supposed to be here, doing my thing.

I'm also considering moving. To either Saskatchewan, Manitoba, or Ontario. Of course, I probably won't, yet. Still, there is a creepy feeling pervading me that this isn't where I should be calling home. I'm really unsure. Too many questions.

Life is strange

Yes it is. I'm having a sort of spiritual crisis at the moment, a result of deciding to walk away from a very long and intense friendship which was stagnant. I know it was a positive decision, but the negative fallout from walking away (including having my dead pet put on my apartment doorknob and which was stolen before I could reach him) has left me feeling shaken. I want to be able to have the ability to love and forgive, but hurtful actions are difficult to heal from.

Maybe I used to think that in order to truly forgive someone, you had to allow them in your life, even if they were severely limiting your ability to live in peace and love. Now I realize this isn't the case, you can care deeply about someone and still put up big boundaries that mean they can never hurt you again. Sometimes people are just too negative to allow them to influence your life anymore. Sometimes the best thing you can do for someone is to tell them goodbye.

Aside from that, I have been reading a lot of stuff on Near Death Experiences. Quite fascinating. I must admit, it makes me quite homesick for a spiritual land far far away. But dammit, I'm supposed to be here, doing my thing.

I'm also considering moving. To either Saskatchewan, Manitoba, or Ontario. Of course, I probably won't, yet. Still, there is a creepy feeling pervading me that this isn't where I should be calling home. I'm really unsure. Too many questions.

The Great Drug Debate

There are some people who go crazy and then manage to pull themselves back to normal through natural remedies. In fact, during my early adolescence, alternative medicine is what saved my life. I do not deny the efficacy of alternative means of dealing with mental health. I'm sure if I hadn't gone to see that alternative doctor, I would be dead long long long ago.

So why do I take pharmaceuticals now? The short answer is that I had a psychotic break and what eventually stabilized me were pharmaceuticals.

Now I am just as aware as anyone of the unethical capitalist practices of the pharmaceutical industry. It's a corrupt system, filled with unfairly tilted studies of new drugs, sweeping side effects like death, suicide, and homicide under the carpet.

At the same time, I think it's just as unethical to tell someone whose medication works for them that they shouldn't be taking it. I'm tired of hearing people tell me "you're not crazy, you don't need those medications."

I am crazy. Crazy isn't a forever thing, it happens in cycles, at least my brand of crazy. And while I can function to a high degree, I definately notice if I forget my meds. If I get depressed, you usually won't know it because I retreat into my apartment. If I get hypomanic, most people will just notice that I seem happier and yappier than normal and that maybe I'm doing better. I have only once gone so crazy as to believe I was the next messiah, and that scared the shit out of me.

So I take pharmaceuticals. Big deal. Five pills a day and I'm a-okay. This is how I'm dealing with my mental health right now. There is always the possibility that someday in the future I will go into full remission and not have to take my medication. Likewise, I may always take medication.

As a crazy community, it's important that we support everyone's personal decision as to how they want to address their mental health concerns, drugs or no drugs. To do this, we have to be given more choices, more options. Doctors should be willing to listen to the concerns of their patients about side effects. The psych ward system needs to have group home options for people who are going through spiritual crisis that will allow the course of a psychotic episode to be resolved naturally. In fact, in the States back in the seventies this was done with manic depressives and schizophrenics, and without the use of drugs or restraints, all the patients were able to resume fully functioning lives. Of course once in a while someone would run naked into the yard, but this wasn't pathologized.

And finally, most importantly, crazy people who are stabilized need to be given more supports in our communities. It doesn't help to go to a mental health team and find out you're not crazy enough to be given services.

Mmm, kissin'

I went out last night, got wasted, and necked with two girls and a boy while their friends took pictures. Much fun. I haven't kissed girls in ages, and it's kind of nice to neck when there's no pressure about going "all the way." Plus I look freakin hot necking with girls. I've never had the chance to look at it from an outside perspective. Oh wait, I necked with one of my friends on Super 8, but I never used the footage. It was pretty funny.

I like kissing. I believe I must get more kisses in my life. I used to kiss so many people when I was in my early twenties. I could neck at the drop of a hat. Most of the time I didn't even care to go further, and neither did they, it was just a fun thing to do when you're at . . . certain events. Like fetish parties. There was this one friend I had who was so hot, and we totally necked here and there.

I remember this one time she was helping me get ready for my bartenders exam, and if I recited the recipes wrong she'd flick my nipple REALLY HARD! Ah, good times.

I must admit, if I look at the people who are my close friends now, I've necked with most of them at some point in the course of our friendships. Or else they were my lovers and then in true lesbian fashion went on to be friends after the break up. Sometimes . . . long after the break up. It's hard to remain friends with someone you still desperately want to shag, but I find if there's a nice chunk of time away from them where you get to work through all those bitter feelings, it can work. I mean, all of my girlfriends have been people I like as individuals for different reasons, so in some way I don't see the point of completely cutting them out of my life based solely on the fact that the relationship wasn't working out.

Yes, I am a mature experienced woman.

I'm not a dog!

My current favorite piece of software

I love software. I have always loved it. Editing, writing, photoshopping, web pages, power point, whatever. I have a love affair with each one.

My current favorite piece of software is Final Draft. It makes scriptwriting so freakin easy. Not only does it make formatting it properly a breeze, but it will also do really cool things for your script, like come up with various reports on how many characters there are, give you all your locations, and it can even be used to compare your first draft with your later drafts. How sexy is that?

Anyway, after the last pathetic blog, I decided I would write some stuff. Altogether with today and yesterdays work, I have seven and a half new pages. Woo hoo! Including the sex scene, which was a little hard to write because the last time I had sex with a girl was when Bush got into office. Pretty grim. So I felt just as rusty writing sex as I'm sure I'll be having sex, should I ever have sex again.

I've also realized that in a certain way, what has blocked me from writing this story is that it's a love story, and love has been rather elusive in my life. So I was uncomfortable actually writing characters who fall in love, although more terrible things are in store for them soon.

Soon I have to write the really uncomfortable scenes, the loss of sanity and subsequent hospitalization. It's all very sad. Hmm. And I'll be introducing some more characters.

That's the hard part of writing, you create characters you really care about, and then you have to throw them in a horrible situation.

I tell you we must die

Trundling along with Unemployed Summer. It is Thursday. I applied for two jobs. One is as an Office Services Clerk in a law firm. That would be a nice job to have, considering I've already done it. After writing two cover letters and updating my c.v., I sat around and talked to my mother. Then I watched two episodes of Ab Fab and then Mirrorball. I laughed so hard at the scene where Jane Horrocks sings Alabama Song. That's one of my all time favorite songs when I'm maudlin in a certain "the piano has been drinking" sort of way. Oh show me the way to the next whiskey bar. I tell you we must die. I tell you we must die.

I am a veritable powerhouse of creativity at the moment, and yet I can't seem to motivate myself enough to pull my script up and pound away at it. The trouble with the writing process is it's so solitary. That's something I like about it as well, but when I'm on my own, making myself sit down and write is that hardest thing to do.

So I write in my blog.

Really though, sitting around watching well written british comedy series is probably part of my creative process. Brit comedies rule the fucking planet. If I was ever to do a comedy series, I would want to do it with the BBC.

But obviously, I must first learn to have good writing habits. I do write everyday, just not on my script. I must start everyday script writing. What troubles me at the moment is I have fifty-five pages and I'm only a third of the way through the plot, which means I've got more material than I can use. However, I also realize that I shouldn't start chopping away at it until I've completed the whole first draft. Oh it's tiring. Plus one of my characters really needs an overhaul, poor transdude. He's been tokenized, and that's obviously a problem because he's woefully unfleshed out.

I am my own worst critic.

I tell you we must die. I tell you we must die.

I'm off to buy two cigs now. I'll be back later.

Diary Haiku

I apparently have but one thing on my mind according to the haiku engine for my diary site. Here's what it came up with:

are all bacon and
eggs nibble nibble i like
fish as long as it


I am particular about fish. I didn't realize I talked about food so much in my diary. I thought for sure it would pick up my potty mouth.

Life + Pills

Edina - "Remember when you could just wake up in the morning and feel fabulous?"
Patsy- "Yeah, without pills."

I'm trying to think how long I've been taking pills for psychiatric reasons. I've been on Epival and two other meds for two and a half years now, but before that there were many years I was on anti-depressants alone. It does seem like a very long time. Probably the majority of my adult life.

Before pills, life was really hellish. I think back on my childhood and so much of it was just dark and intense. I really didn't want to live. And I was a kid!

I wish there had been some way to treat me back then. Oh well.

But I do remember mornings when I could wake up and feel fabulous, and the smell of the morning dew as I walked to school was the most sensual spiritual feeling I ever had, and I liked life. That's the weird thing, it didn't all suck all the time.

So now I'm maintained on three different drugs that work together in different ways in my brain and make me able to function fairly normally. I've grown happily accustomed to my prescription, no horrible side effects, but I can't help but wonder what it would be like to not have to depend on pills. I don't want to go off them, because obviously they work wonders. But there are concerns, like say my plane crashed in the woods and I ran out of meds. Or the government broke down and there was no way for me to get a prescription filled in all the melee. What the hell kind of crazy would I go?

Still, the little pills are in no danger of being taken away from me yet. Unlike American's whose health plans only pay for meds as long as you are actively crazy. Once you're stabilized, they take it away.

It makes me cream my jeans

I just found the sexiest thing in the world on the net. I am rendered completely speechless. I think I am overcome with love and lust. If I had this baby by my side, life would be sooooo ultimately perfect. I have missed having my own camera since I lent mine out and it came back BROKEN! And besides, it also became really old technology.

Thirza sells out and goes High Definition. Mmmmm, sweet sexy sacriligious sell out.

A stark reminder in the midst of gay revelry

I've been having quite a bit of fun lately, what with Pride weekend closely followed by Out On Screen's Queer Film Festival. Love and Numbers is screening again on Sunday afternoon at 2, followed by a panel. I've been surrounded by all shades of queer, sexy femmes and swaggering butches and gay men and trannies and bisexuals to be sure. Living in a somewhat cosmopolitan city in Western culture, just newly able to legally marry, things look pretty good for queers here. There still are issues, to be sure. Lest we not forget Aaron Webster, the gay man who was brutally murdered in Stanley Park and whose death was not declared a hate crime. I don't know, but when a lot of straight men attack a gay man with baseball bats, I call that a hate crime.

But maybe hate crime is not a strong enough word for what it really is. What it really is is genocide.

I was reminded of that this week when a friend forwarded on news about two gay teenagers in Iran who were sentenced to death for the capital crime of homosexuality. They were sixteen when the so called "crime" was committed. You can find pictures of their last moments alive here, here, and here.

I have to say, while all the images shocked and appalled me, I think the first one struck me the most, probably because one of the boys looks very similar to a dear gay friend of mine.

Since the Ayatolla's took power in 1979, 4000 gays and lesbians have been executed. How can one not call that genocide?

One might argue it's impossible to commit genocide towards queers, to which I say bunk. What about all the queers shipped off to concentration camps? And while we're a funny culture in society because we pop up in any family anywhere, we are a very tribal people, having had the history of people being rejected by their families and making new, queer ones.

But really, what it comes down to is western guilt. As a queer in Canada, what the hell can I do to make being a homo easier for people worldwide? I don't know why I feel this is my mission, but it is an important question.

In the meantime, I will say a prayer an continue being a raging Canadian dyke.

Welcoming song

I have a screening I curated on tonight. I'm nervous I will be asked to get up and say something. My hands shake when I do public speaking. I thought I could get away with it if I stuck a rattle in my hand and said I was doing a welcoming song from my people. Shake shake shake. Shake shake shake. Shake that groove thing.

The joys of being mental.

Passing

When I came out years ago, I was really confused by the term passing. In my history, passing was related to race, whereas in queer terms it means passing as male/female.

I think as a biracial person, most of the hate directed towards me had to do with the fact that I could easily choose to pass for white, abandon the race, and not bother myself with advancing civil rights for aboriginals. At least, to the outsider it seemed like an easy choice. But I wasn't raised that way. Lightest next to my white grandma in a family a varying shades of brown, I just felt like I was a brown person. I confronted racism in elementary school next to my brown best buddies, I studied my history, I did everything a "good" upstanding Aboriginal was supposed to do.

But it didn't save me the day some brown girls beat me up for being white and not afraid of them. What I remember most is their fury, and the way they kept denying that I could possibly be an Aboriginal.

It was a hate crime, from my own people. I was forced to reconcile the fact that I had white skin, and therefore more privilege.

I think I'm pretty obvious about my racial background. Still, for some people that will never be enough. They will always be jealous that I'm able to pass for white, not realizing the huge internal struggles that this poses.

Eggs

Eggs are a cheap source of protein. This is what I tell myself when I open the fridge and find only mustard, a wilted stalk of celery, and six eggs. I had devoured my spagetti and sauce, and the bacon had turned an unholy shade of green.

After living for a year on pizza by the slice, eggs have become my main staple as a person living in poverty.

Eggs can be cooked in a lot of yummy ways, unfortunately huevos rancheros cannot be created using limp celery and mustard.

I hate eggs. They have become a symbol of my poverty. They should taste yummy, but when they are the only option for consumption, they choke.

"It could be worse, you could have no eggs."

True.

Sometimes I have tried to insert moments of poverty in my videos. Counting spare change, taking pills, but nothing has really captured the feelings of utter hopelessness and desperation that come with such actions. I'm thinking of other things I have done, re-roll cigarette butts, that's a big one, go to the Carnegie, go to Coast's free Friday dinners. Waiting in line for careless sandwiches.

And eggs, those eggs mock me. I want meat. I want stir frys and salmon and tofu curry. I want fruit and crackers and cheese, and beans, and I make long lists in my head late at night, imagining what I would buy if I got some cash. I've grown past the point of living on pizza by the slice and gyros and any other cheap fast food. I like to actually make myself food.

But what can you make when all you have are eggs?

Look Out!

I am ready to shake off a lot of stuff from my life.

Some people aren't going to know me anymore after this summer. That's a positive thing for me.

At this point I have a very very very low tolerance for people putting crap on me.

I am making space for new friends and lovers, so new folks, feel free to invite me out for a coffee.

I'm not quite sure who I'll be by the end of it, or even where I will be.

Soon it's time to drop the axe.

Condoleeza Rice strikes Again!

In case you missed that post, I once had a dream about making out with Condoleeza Rice.

It truly disturbed me.

Last night she was in my dream again, tight hairdo, pinched face, we were in some kind of a boardroom. I considered telling her about my necking dream.

Why do I dream of Condoleeza Rice?! Something tells me I have a politically incorrect bone for the lady.

I have negative 16 dollars in my bank account. I don't know how I have MINUS 16 bucks.

I just need to survive a couple more weeks and an artist fee is coming in. Oh hurry scurry little artist fee!

I should write a letter to Condoleeza Rice and ask her to send me some money.

Someone keeps trying to tell me I am no longer a lesbian because of some meaningless experiments with boys. It's pissing me off. So I haven't played with ladies recently, so what. Why does that make me any less a lesbian than the first four years I was out and celibate because everyone my age was closeted and all the older ladies wouldn't play with me because there's laws against it? I don't understand. Now I feel compelled to prove my lesbianism to someone who isn't even a lesbian, it's stupid.

Just because I've been single a long time doesn't mean I haven't fallen in love with ladies.

Plus I hate that lesbian identity is so fragile the slightest bit of penis puts it in question, whereas gay men can easily have casual sex with girls and aren't challenged.

Goddamn phallus power. My Condoleeza Rice dreams are far more baffling evidence of my lesbian tendencies.

If anything my boy experiments proved conclusively that I am not bisexual. I could write a paper on why, but that's just wasting more energy on something stupid, when I would much rather be spending more time with lesbians, meeting girls, and getting nervous and crushed out on them.

Tell a secret

I've never been diagnosed or treated for it, but I believe I have a mild form of epilepsy. I've only ever had one grand mal seiziure, I remember it clear as day. I remember the way the morning light came in the windows, and I was eating my cereal, probably fruit loops, reading Gary Larson and laughing my butt off. Then my funny bone hit the edge of the kitchen table and I was in massive pain, yelling owie. Then blackness. The next thing I knew I woke up on the livingroom carpet, soft face smooshed into the weave. My first thought was "It must be Monday. Time to go to school."

There's nothing else particularily remarkable, no further grand mal seizures, but I have petit mals. I get them quite frequently. I'll just stare at a small spot and suddenly no information gets into my head. People could be having meaningful conversations with me and quite often I'll "space out." I've learned how to cover for it reasonably well, just nod your head in agreement once you can move again. There actually have been a couple of times I agreed to something that wasn't . . . agreeable. People sometimes also assume I'm not listening to them, which is true but for a medical reason, and then they get all tetchy.

***************Bonus Secret!**********************

I commonly have auditory hallucinations. Ironically, these didn't begin until I started taking pharmaceuticals to combat depression, then manic depression. There's nothing particularily remarkable about these either, quite often I hear my name being called, during withdrawal from Paxil I kept hearing the sound of a huge truck passing by, sometimes just a pounding frequency. When I went really crazy I had very distinct voices telling me things, and church bells. But my hallucinations are pretty benign, and I cover for them pretty well so I can pass as normal. I've just learned not to react every time I hear something similar to my hallucinations. Unfortunately this sometimes makes me look a bit stupid or standoffish if it's not a hallucination.

Montreal psych ward horror story bonding

Last night I did the something for the first time. I actually met a couple of folks who I knew only through the internet. It was a gas, and this girl had been in a Montreal psych ward too. When I tell people I was in a psych ward, they truly don't grasp the traumatic horrors that occur there.

First off, you are not treated as someone with an illness, you're treated like a criminal. For another thing, I think they take some kind of course in destroying the last traces of humanity, empathy, and compassion. Personally, I think a lot of the psych ward workers I met, particularily in Emergency, were probably the Gestapo in their past lives. You look into their eyes and it's completely cold and soulless.

Then there's the restraints. It doesn't sound as violent as it really is. I'm all for consensual bondage, but when you're put in restraints it's really fucking scary. Usually it's used as punishment for minor infractions, in my case I wanted to use the phone during nap time, and instead of having a rational discussion about why they had some rule against using the phone, I was drugged and tied down for three and a half hours.

Then there's this absurd idea of medical care. They do not care about their patients. Drug em, feed em, let them watch television, that's your life and it won't get better until they decide to let you out. When I got first degree burns on my hands they didn't give me proper medical attention until two days later, even after I went to them saying my hands were burned. My hands were in agony. Finally one of the few nice staff brought a doc to see me. So they gave me this special cream to put on my hands to heal them. Later, when I went in again, I still needed the cream, but of course I didn't have a chance to get it before going to the bin a second time. I kept asking friends and family to go get me this cream, but they thought I was a delusional nut, so instead they brought me hand lotion which didn't do shit for my poor burns.

That's not the only instance I saw of poor medical care. A homeless man who came to the hospital had gone walking in snow and ice in bare feet in montreal. His feet were pretty cut up, and looked frostbitten too. No one did anything for him until I got mad at my shrink and pointed it out.

They don't care about protecting patients from other patients. There was this gross old man who wanted to gang rape me and even though I protested, they put me in a small ward with him and a handful of other male patients. As a rape survivor, this totally triggered off a whole host of things, none of which helped calm me down and bring me to this mythical state they call normal.

Finally, they have a fucked up attitude towards anglos. If you're an anglo and you end up in a montreal bin, they will not provide you with interpreters and they are adamant about not transferring you to an English speaking hospital, of which there are a few. Actually, not just anglos, I take that back, anyone who doesn't speak French is left to try and make sense of arbitrary rules. There were a few people who obviously spoke very little French OR English, and I have no idea how awful that must have been for them.

Anyway, now I have a friend who actually understands how truly soul destroying a stay in a Montreal psych ward is. And that makes me feel a lot more relieved, less alone about the whole experience. I sometimes get so furious about how casual certain people are about my experience in the bin. I have no obvious scars from the stay. But I am a psychiatric survivor.

One day I hope to transcend from being a psychiatric survivor. I think that day is coming. It's taken a lot of really hard honest soul searching, writing, crying, and most notably, coming back to life. I feel I died in the psych ward. But my own personal ressurection and living has made me a stronger person.

Lesbians

God bless 'em. I've spent nearly half my life proudly being lesbian. Then some questioning years, related to gender. Now it's an identity I feel oddly at ease with all over again. Like a well worn leather jacket. Yeeeah! Women rock my world. They really do. Nothing makes me feel more electrified than feminine flirtatious energy. I love butch/femme identities and sexual frission. I love that my town is filled with brazen leatherdykes who love sticking needles all over their bodies. I love belonging to a sub culture. I love being a lesbian.

I want to write something in honour of all the lesbians I have known who have supported me and paved the way for me to be. And yet, thinking of all the wildly talented and hot women I know across Canada, I find it hard to express how truly blessed I have been to have them in my lives.

Instead, I present to you a montage of my top ten favorite lesbian moments in my life.

1. Riding the back of a butch dyke's motorcycle through the streets of San Francisco one hot summer night.
2. The first time a woman's breasts pressed against mine and I realized I loved female flesh.
3. Losing my virginity to the most gorgeous bisexual in grade 11.
4. Getting shy and flustered when Kate Bornstien liked my hair.
5. Getting shy and flustered when I first saw Annie Sprinkle in real life.
6. Butches bonding over fatty fried foods.
7. The time my vegan lover asked me in the middle of the night if I ate bacon.
8. Kissing a reluctant older butch in a courtyard in Germany.
9. Having romantic baths with my femme girlfriend who actually didn't like baths and would always end up laying naked on the floor talking to me. Actually now that I think about it that was kind of weird.
10. Having meaningless sex with an ex for the purposes of art. Actually it was really fun but I was never allowed to tell her that.

Lesbians. God bless 'em.