Fluff

These maps are just an easy way to fill blank space. And a reminder that there is a big, wide world out there to explore.

create your own visited states map
or check out these Google Hacks.

create your own visited countries map
or vertaling Duits Nederlands

neil young

I just finished reading Neil Young Nation, by Kevin Chong. A couple of years back, Kevin and 3 friends headed out from Vancouver to retrace Neil's footsteps in the places he called home, and on the road, particularly his journey from Toronto to Los Angeles. I loved the book. I loved the book because I am a big fan of Neil Young, but I also enjoyed Chong's philosophical quest to understand Young and his music, and his particular appeal to some listeners, especially at poignant moments in their lives.

I -OF COURSE- being the ex-Winnipegger that I am, loved the section of the book when Chang is in Manitoba. Young grew up in my old neighbourhood, went to my high school, and played in the community clubs that are familiar to my youth. Most Winnipeggers will have a Neil Young story to share(they make a claim to him), a degree or three or four of separation from the man. I have a few tenuous ones of my own (my Dad was his mother's lawyer, and my friend Shana Scott lived next door to the house he grew up in).

But my love of the guy's music is more than just a very diluted connected to the famous, more than my pride in coming from a place in the middle of nowhere that just so happened to produce a musical genius. His voice is raw, it's not even very good at times, but there's just something about his music that resonates. His voice is so elemental, the lyrics so sparse but 'spot on.' He was told by many he was untalented and would never amount to much. He persisted, worked hard, and the rest is history.

I guess he presented an alternative to mainstream music way back in the high school days, music that I identified with, and which helped find a path that suited where I wanted to be. He made it alright to not fit in, it was alright to be alternative, even though that had no particular meaning to me at the time. I think he got a lot of people through their akward periods in life. Funny thing, it wasn't just granola types like me that could relate to him, punkers love him, serious rockers love him. His followers defy categorization, just as his music is hard to explain in a sentence or two.

quote from the book i am currently reading (rather, rereading for the n'th time)

"It is wolf willow, and not the town or anyone in it, that brings me home. For a few minutes, with a handful of leaves to my nose, I look across at the clay bank and the hills beyond where the river loops back on itself, enclosing the old sports and picnic ground, and the present and all the years between are shed like a boy's clothes dumped on the bath-house bench. The perspective is what it used to be, the dimensions are restored, the senses are as clear as if they had not been battered with sensation for forty alien years. And the queer adult compulsion to return to one's beginnings is assuged. A contact has been made, a mystery touched. For the moment, reality is made exactly equivalent with memory, and a hunger is satisfied. The sensuous little savage that I once was is still intact inside me."

Wallace Stegner Wolf Willow

trying to be more like Rochelle (a post in under 30 seconds)

Regrets

An ongoing list of lifelong regrets:
-never spending a year at a ski hill just having fun and learning to be a kick-ass ski gal.
-not going out for coffee with that fellow in Wales that late afternoon long ago.
-not trying harder.
-not falling in love more.
-not reading more.
-never being excellent at something.
-being shy on too many occasions.
-not going back to live in Berlin or Montreal or Edinburgh.
-not saying 'hi' to Ben in the movie line-up that night in Montreal.
-being uptight all too often.
-not raising my hand more often.
-hating my body so vehemently.
-not visiting Scandinavia yet.
-not painting more.
-not writing more.
-not asking my aunt enough questions while she was still alive.
-not setting enough goals.
-not meeting enough of the ones I do set.

Does Design Really Matter?

It's sort of drab here in Saskatoon. It's the first thing I notice when I come back after being somewhere else. Why? Besides the buildings looking either cheap or neglected, everything else looks so utilitarian and, well, so plain. I know the sun beats down relentlessly, peeling paint and stunting vegetation. I know the fickle and extreme climate wrecks havoc with the farmers, leaving the agrarian based economy on a precarious cycle of up and down, and most down, years. But do we really need to settle for such a drab environment? I think I could forgive this place if it even struggled to find it's own character, but it unquestioningly consumes the suburban landscape of most of the rest of N. American, and, well, the downtown hasn't had much growth to speak of, so how can one judge (unless parking lot development counts). Whatever the case, not so inspiring (unless you count the riverbank which is very beautiful and very inspiring).

What's a designer to do (besides move on)?

There's a new neighorhood going in, miles from the city core, on the other side of the ring road. It has been told to me that Walmart has given money to the development, so that it may the major anchor of an adjacent retail centre. How the hell does crap like this happen? Are city politicians here so eager to take the carrot that they don't give a rat's ass where the $ spent in the community is going to be funneled for the next umpteenmillion years. It's a big, ugly box, it pays people shit for wages, doesn't give a damn about the local community (or it's existing infrastructure), and is the subject of numerous discrimination and worker's rights lawsuits in the US. It's just bad news. But heck, they're giving us some cash to build this ugly neighborhood in the middle of nowhere, meanwhile we're trying to rejuvenate the downtown and we're shooting ourselves in the foot by stupid schemes such as this that just make Saskatoon even more spread out than it already is, channels retail revenues out of the city, and offers crappy jobs and lots of plastic junk in return. We should have said no.

The mindset here is to not take risks. Don't stand out, for heaven's sake. Build it cheap and get on with it. If anything drives me out of here it will be this conservative attitude to life, civic development, and the world at large.

Pheew. What a lot of dribble and rambling mumbo jumbo, Anna.

the first step

This is my first foray into this world of blogging. I am tired, and I fear that by starting off wallowed in mediocrity, I will never recover and feel truly committed to this. First off, the name of my blog is so stupid, I need to change it. However, I wanted to reply to Rochelle's blog, and I can't do that without setting up my own. Normally, I'd ruminate over something like this for weeks.

But perhaps it's a good idea to blog. You see, I've just turned 40 (yesterday), and it seems a good time to take the time to be reflective, to look back and forward and be a tad more intentional -hopefully- in the process. I've also just made this huge move back to the CDN prairies, this place I have a love/hate relationship with, so there's an loud and active dialogue going on in my brain at the moment, which I should probably -for the sake of my mental health- give voice too. I also want to record the cultural differences I am noticing as the differences between where I am now (Saskatoon, SK), and where I've been (Portland, OR) are often subtle, often screamingly obvious.

I wonder if I'll tell anyone about this???