a month ago
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A month ago, I was really angry. I don’t really like being angry and that just pisses me off more. Makes no sense. Sometimes there is no point. I think it might have been because I had to send my beloved furry companion to Neverland. This lowered my usual faith in unicorns who eat sunshine […]
some things are more important than art
Tonight is my last night with my furry best friend of 13 years. She was a runty, anti-social puppy hiding in the barn of my friend’s mother’s farm. She crawled out and sat on my feet. I left that night and came back 6 weeks later to take my puppy home.
Tomorrow, I will take my doggy home for the last time.
I can’t concentrate enough to write so I re-blogged a post from Byron Christopher about Dave Rutherford.
Censored!
Not again! Please, read this all the way to the end and I strongly encourage you to share, repost, boycott CORUS and anyone who does business with them, and talk about this. Please, tell anyone who will listen. Silence is not golden in this case.
Award-winning broadcaster Dave Rutherford was fired from his job as mid-morning talk show host on 770 CHQR Radio [Calgary] and 630 CHED Radio [Edmonton] on Tuesday, 25th of June 2013.
The stations are owned by Toronto-based Corus Entertainment, part of the Shaw Communications media conglomerate.
The veteran journalist was yanked off the air after he criticized his station’s lackluster coverage of the disastrous floods that have hit Southern Alberta. An international news story, the floods claimed a number of lives and sent tens of thousands fleeing from their homes. Damage is in the billions of dollars.
Turns out, Dave Rutherford was also a victim of that flood.
The “Official Website of the Rutherford Show” has now become a dreaded ‘404.’
Rutherford had a legitimate beef with his station’s coverage — or lack of it — of one of the biggest natural disasters to hit Alberta. Flood victims tuned in to CHQR in…
View original post 1,150 more words
On the Rocks
This is an old photo of me standing on the Giant’s Causeway, a rock formation on the Northeast coast of northern ireland. There is a groovy story that goes with this formation. The science is that it is the result of a great big ass lava fart, forming a series of basalt columns.
I like this one better.
I have to tell you that Scotland has a matching formation on the Isle of Staffa that is part of the same big lava fart.
The legend is that the columns are the remains of a causeway built by the giant, Finn MacCool so that he could fight the Scottish giant Benandonner. If you are wondering they must be giants, then clickety click the link at the end so you can get a sense of how big this formation is.
So MacCool sets off and catches sight of Benandonner , but he runs back home when he realizes that the Scottish giant is far more giant than he is. MacCool’s wife, sharp cookie that she is, disguises him as a baby and tucks him into a cradle.
When Benandonner sees this giant baby, he figures the father of this child to be the giantest of giants and runs back to Scotland, ripping up the Causeway as he goes so that he can’t be followed. Those Scottish lads are hardcore. This bridge was not just burnt, it was so completely demolished that just the ends on either side were left.
Have you ever done that, so completely demolished a bridge that you can never go back? Or maybe you just let it fall into so much decay that it fell on its own. I’ve done both and the results were both good and bad. Maybe it was just time to build new bridges.
I am a bit melancholy, because I am sending my doggy to the Rainbow Bridge in a couple of days. It has been a hard decision and I am not looking forward to it. She has degenerative myelitis which is a progressive neurological illness. It started in a back leg which we thought was broken, and then the vet gave us the bad news that there was no fixing her. She would just progressively get worse. that was in March 2012 and now she can barely prop up her front to eat. This is not a good doggy life and it is time to chase rainbows.
I contacted my ex-boyfriend to let him know. He came to say his goodbyes and we caught up on about a year’s worth of news. His aunt died. His mom sent their doggy to chase rainbows. Maybe auntie Ann and Pepper will play with my doggy there. I hope so.
I should probably be more like a Buddhist and try to find the lesson here but it is a bit too painful right now. I am still trying to learn to be present in the moment even when it is so painful it feels like my face is being chewed off. This has not been a graceful process. I will keep trying, but I don’t think it will ever be graceful.
It’s a rocky path much like the Giant’s Causeway. I fell. I got up. I fell again. I sat for a while. I think the lesson is that there will be falling, getting up, and sitting out for a while. This is the journey.
I had a fabulous furry partner for 13 years of it. I am grateful for that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant’s_Causeway
I will blog about Folk Fest later.
Blah Blah Blog
I made 5 attempts at writing today, but I am tired from too much fun and I can’t seem to gather my thoughts into anything coherent. I had to devote some time to the boring stuff like yard work and house work, so I thought that might help me get focused… nothing.
I have to get focused to go back to work tomorrow and that seems to be taking my attention right now. I accomplished my goal of the drunk and fat holiday with a lot of help from my friends … epic win!
I think that part of becoming the artist I want to be is to fail and today was a pretty epic fail in terms of writing. Tomorrow is another day where I hope I can gather my poop into a coherent group.
Or at the very least, a reasonable facsimile thereof…
Happy Day!
I have a lot to say and I will blog more tomorrow.
I was at the Edmonton Folk Festival with my friends and I am still having fun.
Rosanne Cash is AWESOME!
Related articles
- Edmonton Folk Festival is a Model Green Event (sandmanhotelgroup.wordpress.com)
The Onion Girl Has No Blog Post Today
I wrote day 2 and day 3 overnight so I am taking a break. Here is a funny picture of a fat cat until tomorrow.
The Other Half
I ran out of day 2 whilst blogging about the name The Onion Girl Has No Logo.
Day 3 of blogging will then be the rest of the explanation. I have no logo, because in general, I don’t really buy into the whole lifestyle branding thing. No Logo by Naomi Klein is also my favorite book. And there it is again! She is a female Canadian artist. She is my girl crush because she is a female Canadian writer, but mostly because she wrote a cultural manifesto railing against unfettered capitalism and then she wrote another called The Shock Doctrine railing against unfettered corporatism. I swoon. I’m a shameless girl geek.
I am also a fan of NO LOGO CLOTHING: irreverent clothing for the anti-establishment consumer. I can’t really explain how much the words irreverent and anti-establishment tickle me. I am going to try by telling my lifestyle branding story. It’s not really about a logo, but about a label. In my pointy little head they are the same.
http://www.mediaed.org/cgi-bin/commerce.cgi?preadd=action&key=115
I hope you click the link and go get excited about something.
I used to work for a non-governmental organization (NGO). This sort of work really appealed to me, because these organizations are more conducive to grass roots activism since they have different reporting requirements than governmental organizations. They are not as constrained by layers of bureaucratic bafflegab.
However, these organizations follow the same process as governmental organizations whereby they go through a rather arduous process of figuring out whether they should throw more meetings or money at a project. This process already entails a number of meetings, so I always wondered why we were meeting about whether or not we needed more meetings. I had to ask. I have found that stifling my internal monologue is very counterproductive, because I will eventually say what is spinning around in the vacuum cleaner that is my brain.
This particular meeting was to appoint someone to represent the organization at the series of community partnership meetings that were part of the process. Pointless probably, but required for the project funding. FUN!
Apparently, they wanted someone who wasn’t too WASP. I did not know what this was and everyone was looking at me, so I had to ask. I thought I had discreetly asked my friendly colleague next to me. She has a bent sense of humor which is why we are friendly. She explained that it meant White Anglo Saxon Protestant. I then asked if everyone was looking at me because I am not Protestant. She then stage-whispered that I was not white. I then noticed that everyone else at our discussion was.
I waved my non-white hands around and said,”That is true! I’m not!”
Everyone else turned sort of red, except me, because I am not white. And except for my friendly colleague, because she was sort of purple from laughing so hard. This was how I got to be the anonymously brown person that had to attend more meetings. This was also how I figured out that if I just volunteered for the glaringly obvious role, these insufferable meetings would end sooner.
So I suppose my lifestyle brand is the anonymously brown woman needed at meetings to show diversity. That’s a terrible logo. This is why I choose not to have one.
What’s in a Name?
Day 2 of blogging and I figured out that a better start might have been to explain why I chose the name The Onion Girl Has No Logo. The Photoshop of hindsight…
The Onion Girl part is from the name of a song performed by one of my favorite artists, Holly Cole. It is off the Dear Dark Heart album released in 1997. The song was written by Harding and Hull. It also appears on the Lilith Fair Album, Volume 3. Holly is a Canadian Jazz singer with an absolutely amazing voice and brilliantly diverse repertoire. Lilith Fair was a Canadian all female traveling music festival founded in 1997.
Yes, there is the recurring theme of Canadian female artists. What can I say other than we are an amazing bunch. Women are inherently creative beings. We grow human beings inside us. I am of the opinion that there is nothing more creative. Please, stifle the militant feminism thought that I am implying women are only worth their wombs. I most definitely am not! I am celebrating that we grow babies and we can choose not to. I think both the ability to create and the ability to choose are equally as important to the creative process. I celebrate them both.
The lyrics in Onion Girl resonate with me on a very visceral level. I think we all have layers that are exposed gradually over time and there’s a line about breaking bread and laughing. Eating and laughing with my friends are my favorite activities. I am blessed to be surrounded by a pretty amazing bunch of Onion Girls who will never cease to amaze me with their kindness, creativity, and caring. We eat, laugh, cry, and most importantly, enjoy each other’s company, because we know that there is nothing better in life than to find the people you enjoy eating, laughing, and crying with.
The Onion Girl is also a 2001 fantasy novel by Charles De Lint. Obviously not a female artist, but he is Canadian. I am not ridiculously patriotic. Canadian artists are just ridiculously talented. I digress, yet again. And yet, The Onion Girl is part of a trilogy: the 2006 sequel Widdershins and the 2007 prequel Promises to Keep. He is quoted as saying that “writing is like a peeling back of layers”. My writing process is a lot like that. I’m Canadian. I can relate.
So … that is the story of the first half of the name … The Onion Girl. It is a homage to Canadian artists I admire, a song that resonates with me, a writer of stories about how the same traumatic event can so differently affect people who have come up out of the same environment, and a festival that celebrated the creativity of female artists. But mostly, it is a tribute to my beloved bunch of Onion Girls whose unconditional love and support will never cease to inspire me to create.
click here to find out more about Holly Cole
click here to find out about Charles De Lint
Starting a Blog
I started this blog as a cheating exercise from other stuff that I am writing. I sometimes need a little distance as well as inspiration. At some point, I should figure out how to post pictures and music, because they are important sources of inspiration and might be helpful to a reader to put some context to my pointless, stream of consciousness rambling.
Right now, I just have to write and purge.
By the way, it is just writing for no purpose other than to write and flex different parts of my imagination. Some of it is true. All of it is embellished, because hindsight is like the photoshop of the brain. It makes everything look prettier and makes it fit our artistic vision. I have never been one of those people that believes in fact and objective truth. Everything we experience is filtered through our perception and filtered again through our cognition when we try to communicate to someone else what we are experiencing. Then the person we are communicating with experiences what was shared through his or her own set of filters. It’s all embellished. We are the authors of our own stories.
I think of my brain as a vacuum cleaner. It sucks in all kinds of information, most of the time indiscriminately and it mixes up with all the other stuff in the bag. Seriously. I do try to exercise a certain level of critical thinking, but daily living requires a lot of information processing. Try to imagine driving and only paying attention to blue cars. Not really possible because driving entails having to pay attention to all kinds of stuff in order to stay alive. Especially if you live in Edmonton, where I am. That is a whole other post. Back to the vacuum. So there is a bunch of mixed up stuff in the vacuum that will eventually need to get emptied. When it comes out, everything is all mixed in together and nothing like all of the individual bits that got sucked in.
I went to a mall today and I was assaulted by way too much photoshopped and altered imagery. Yes, assaulted is a strong word and I really mean it. For a fleeting moment, I was confused as to whether I was in an art gallery or stuck in an unending loop of pop up ads. It’s pretty and I appreciate the imagery, but at the same time I am offended because it violates my feminist ideals. Feminism…that will be a recurring theme in all of my posts. However, I digress. My point was that my vacuum got filled with driving junk and advertising junk. I did enjoy wandering around and looking at all the pretty and shiny stuff. Unfortunately, I did not buy a pair of pants which was the entire purpose of the mall mission.
So I came home and started a blog.
Purposeful…we shall see.
The Onion Girl has No Logo 
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