In, Out, In, Out, Shake it all about

Dear Beloved Readers,

I've started feeling really self-conscious about the direction in which my writing is going. It's reflecting my life in Van of course, so the gayer life here gets, the gayer this blog is likely to get. I love you for reading this and I don't want to alienate you. Mimi is the only person for whom this isn't weird, because when we met I was busily living with one girl while falling in love with another. She introduced me to all her friends and they had a mutual friend with the same first name as me. They differentiated between us by naming her the German one and me the Lesbian one.

I recently met a woman who sounded thrilled to be bisexual, she talked about it positively, while I have hidden from it for years because the reaction the word gets mortifies me.* I never once went to Gay Pride with my friends in London, even when I lived with a woman. Why? Because I'm too lazy to march? Because I was afraid people would look at me and wonder what the heck that straight girl was doing there? The simple answer is, I didn't go to Pride because I wasn't proud. As much as I stolidly held to my high expectations of everyone around me, looking to them for support and acceptance, I was busy raging against homophobia while realising I harboured internalised homophobia against myself.

This seems deranged.

It has only recently struck me though, that I actually don't know what it's like to be straight. You think everyone thinks like you until you find out they don't. My newly minted bisexual friend recently married a dude and only later she realised her love of girls in not something all straight women have on the side. She's happy with that, the self knowledge and understanding and experience of meeting other women who feel the same way is enough for her.

Being bisexual for me is like doing the bloody Hokey Cokey for the rest of my life. I wish I knew where it would lead. I wish I didn't have to follow my heart because it is suddenly expansive and wide and taking me places I am afraid to go. And I'm taking you with me. Maybe it'll be fun, think of it as an anthropological case study.

I hope I'll learn to embrace being the unicorn of sexuality; that mythical creature: the bisexual. The gayness is actually not a problem for me, nothing makes my heart jump and down in excitement more than the realisation that the whole world makes sense to me from that perspective, it's just the alignment of it with my ungay self along with all my expectations of growing up to be like Samantha from Bewitched, minus the magic.

In related news, I recently saw WK for the first time since my birthday and told him he was off the hook, that while most of my heterosexuality is currently used up on my crush on him (the rest is still for Lee Min Ho) I would be exploring other avenues henceforth. I didn't actually use the word henceforth, because who does? There's something delicious about employing fancy pretentious language in the written word that you can't get away with in real life speech.

Kind salutations,
Me x

* I am possibly referring to the reaction the word gets from me, myself. Go figure, as they say on this side of the Atlantic.

p.s. edited to add this note - sometimes I just love people so much, like the people who created Bisexual Index, it makes me want to do a better job of not disparaging my own people.

p.p.s. it would be easier not to disparage my own people if their t-shirt section did not look like this. (Although I may have spat something onto the screen laughing at the 'Bi-furious' one, WTF?) Totally 'mo t-shirts are way cooler. Please get me one for Christmas or I could be single for yet another year/the rest of my life.

The Best

I remembered! The absolute Best thing about Van is the public library system. My library on the North shore has the incredible bonus of being newly constructed with mostly glass walls so that if you go to the 3rd floor during the early evening you can watch the splendour of the sunset from the study section. This isn't just any sunset, it is the sunset over the ocean, from a pleasing height. It really is gorgeous.

This does not even have anything to do with the cerebral pleasures contained within the library's heaving shelves. Yes I can make the library sound sexy, because it is. (Especially the downtown library, which appears to concentrate on hiring nymph-like yet vaguely androgynous looking graduate students; the type that have Dewy decimal numbers tattooed on their wrists.)

I like to test the library, just to see if it is really as amazing as I like to think. I think of books I read long ago, books I only half recall the title of, then I look for them on the online catalogue and see if it true that this library could take all my crappiest thoughts on Neanderthalic North 'Cougar and flush them down the loo. This library just never fails. I found the wondrous works of the seemingly unheard of Elizabeth Knox, a book I recalled wanting to read that had Trieste in the title (Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere by Jan Morris) High Art on DVD, the whole of Veronica Mars, the legacy of John Marsden who scared me witless (delightful!) as a teenager....but then the best gift of all. The entire High School Comic Chronicles of Ariel Schrag.

Downtown I was awed to discover that the library not only carries another healthy selection of comics and graphic novels, but it has an entire section devoted to Zines. I had thought Zines were purley a mid-90s phenomena that sprung up solely to inform me of new bands and bad poetry that was being created across the country before the internet was even a figment of our collective imaginations. As it happens, they still exist. I shouldn't be surprised, since Book Art as a genre still exists. Book Art however, protects itself with the sparkling yet invisible cape of chic mystery bestowed upon anything with 'art' in the title. Zines are clearly made by people who do not believe in the value of the invisible cape, they think that what they scribbled on their wall last nigt at 3am is art and that computers and our reliance on them is the true embodiment of evil.

They are my people.

The reading room at the Regional Assembly of Text is another pure joy and it offers a selection of handmade books that wear the Book Art cape but have Zine-like sensibilities. I could live in there.

Wino Forever

As mentioned in the previous post, my lengthy Kevin Costner fantasy was replaced when Jordan Catalano came into my life when I was 13, the exact age that he leaned his way into Angela Chase's life in perhaps the best celluloid interpretation of teenage angst ever: My So-Called Life.

Jordan was replaced by Winona Ryder. I had forgotten about Winona. I thought of her just the other day as I was vacuuming the hall floor. I have forgotten a lot of things, a lot of early influences, which is why I am re-hashing them now. It occurrs to me that who you once were is not irrelevant to who you are now. Like the first time you realise that the reason you keep getting your heart wrecked is because of the people you choose to sail it with. It's just the same person, again and again, in different incarnations.

See this post for an introduction to this topic, but lately I have been playing an ongoing game with myself called 'How gay am I really?' It's a very intresting game. Try it yourself! I know I fit between the two big categories of hetero and homo which is why this game interests me - I'm just like everyone else, pushing myself to see if I can swing it over one way and pick a side. Wouldn't that be easier for everyone? Most of all for me. I'm kidding. To be honest, I'm just curious. And surprised.

I was once told by my very lesbionic friend 'You are the gayest person ever' and it just so happened that the majority of my cultural leanings, thoughts and influences were, upon closer inspection, really very gay indeed. I read Stella Duffy and Carol Ann Duffy avidly. I listened to Sleater Kinney and Bikini Kill. I watched every movie Winona had been in, and when her portrayal of Jo in Little Women made me believe nothing could make me love her more, I wrote to her to tell her so. I don't actually remember anything I said in the letter. I blocked out that I wrote a love letter to a woman when I was 14 (14!) and didn't think there was anything remotely gay about it.

I went to a girls' high school and never once noticed any of the girls in it. I was never in the closet; I lived in Narnia. I was so deeply entrenched in my own world (where I never once questioned my sexuality - why does that word sound like a disease?) that I wasn't even aware a closet existed.

Of course Winona had to move over for River Phoenix who in turn (once reading not one but two of his biographies had influenced me enough to turn me into a vegetarian for the next 10 years) had to make room in my adolescent heart for Dave Grohl (awesomely talented and bearded frontman of the Foo Fighters who had been the lanky, long-haired drummer in Nirvana when I fell for him).

Now Dave was the real deal. I spent hours comtemplating our future together, how I would meet him at The Laundry Room in LA, (his recording studio) how we would sit in a diner and he'd sing 'Big Me' from the Foo's first album (which I had borrowed from the library, ha!) and most of all I worried about how much he smoked and whether I'd be able to get him to stop. These were my real concerns. I never imagined kissing him even though I was sure we would be married. I just wanted to stare at him and listen to him sing. Eventually I had a boyfriend who was incredibly cool (he still is! and he's getting married, but that's a whole other post) and he took me to see Dave play live. I wore my favourite dress, a little black number with an empire waist (adds boobs) a mesh overlay and adjustable spaghetti straps. I bought it with my first ever wages/paycheck (bar what my brother paid me for picking raspberries for him at his summer job and the five quid I earned for forging his signature dozens of times on his personalised business cards in his Ferris Bueller days). When I saw Dave on stage I actually cried a bit.

I was 20!

Ha! Just a year later I was confounded when during a flirty conversation with my not-yet first girlfriend, she declared I would have to fight her for Dave, whom she adored. I didn't understand; she was a giant homosexual, she had said so herself. Surely the rights to Dave would be all mine. Even then I knew I liked her so much I would allow her to encroach on my long held Dave Grohl fantasies. On the street where the bus stopped nearest her house, there was a shop I always wanted to go in to. It was a cute, adorable looking little boutique in Stoke Newington in North London. I saw it every time I got off the bus to go to see her, and I never went in. Going in would have meant reaching her later. Even if I just went in for a minute, it would mean I would reach her a minute later. I couldn't do it. I literally walked as fast as my legs would carry me.

That seems like madness now. Much later, when she was gone and all my longing belonged to another girl who seemed to give me an electrical charge every time we were in the same room, I went back to that neighbourhood. I visited that little boutique and spent an entire week's salary on an Orla Kiely handbag. (It was in the sale even then.)

Now of course, I understand it all completely differently. Probably no one is completely blinded to the attractiveness possibilities in each gender. Kind of like, I can see that Jude Law is attractive, but that's as far as I'd take it. My crush on Dave did not inherently have more value in it that my crush on Winona, merely because he's the opposite sex. My attachment to a man is not superior to an attachment to a woman. This is true for me, and and that is all I can say. I know it's not true for the world.

And so now, even though I will continue to defend the many hideous hairstyles Lee Min Ho deigns to wear in his Korean TV performances, Min Ho must move aside, for my current celebrity crush has a face that lights up like no one else. She also has a pony tail.

The reason I am boing your arses off with a post practically idenitical to one I wrote recently is that I can't keep this stupid smile from spreading across my face every time I think about this. It's like I've been set free. My to-ing and fro-ing over WK, and all the date-ish non-dates I had over the last year with perfectly fine gentlemen (where I kept hoping they wouldn't kiss me) left me feeling as if there was a hole in my heart space that was never going to fill up again, not quite to the brim.

I was wrong. The space isn't empty after all. I've just been barking up the wrong tree.

Woy did you have me if you carnt look after moy?

Having just returned home from coffee (aka wine time) with my old friend, the English Boy, I have made a resolution.

Stop whining. Keep wining. Resume breathing exercises from Freeing The Natural Voice.

Vancouver may be good looking and vacuous, but so was every episode of The Hills and I loved that. I have things I want to achieve and I might be able to do them here. Servitude is not my forte, but neither is work in general, so perhaps I can hack it while I make my small effort to express on paper, in jewelry and in words, what is on my mind and in my foolish heart.

Maybe I'm just outrageously cheered by the discovery of an actual literary festival right here in Vancouver! A mere 2 days after my birthday, it's as if it's being held specially for me! It is only for one day but me and one of my friends here, a Fellow European*, are beyond delighted at the prospect (though her first reaction was 'Are you serious? Can people here read?'). I still think it's a shame that you have to be a virtual detective here to find out what's up in a cultural sense (I'm talking to you lame Georgia Straight).

As expected the English Boy has already fallen for Van hook, line and sinker, not to mention been able to find a pub where you can go up to the bar and don't need to have waiter service, and has made about 12 times more friends than I have. Peculiarly, I still like him, and he's invited me over for dinner next week.

Luckily the pound and a half of make up I had to plaster on before meeting him stayed stunningly in place for the duration of the afternoon. If I had been born before the advent of Benefit cosmetics I think there's a good chance I might never have been able to leave the house.

Please note if the title of this post puzzles you, check out the wonderful Aussie sitcom Kath & Kim. I regret to say I've been resembling Kimmie of late and resolve to stop.

* you are never European when you are in Europe, only once you're in North America, where Europe is just one place. British people never consider themselves European at all until they travel, when they will gladly take on the mantle of European exoticism. That way we can differentiate ourselves from a nation of people who cannot correctly pronounce the word 'out' and another nation consisting of hordes of folk who hadn't heard of Leonardo da Vinci until The Da Vinci Code was made into a movie.