[

mood

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intruiged

]

I just read an article in this weekend's Globe and Mail, and I don't know what to make of everything in it. So much of it hits the core of my thoughts lately. The reasoning for my deleting facebook, the encounters and stalking within exes, potentials, and friends. The fights over the avoidance that happens online, as emails are simply not actively replied to. The persona I have online, the wit and research that can be crafted into each line--a standard I can't hope to live up to in person.

LJ, Emails, MSN, GChat, Facebook... they've all become a seemingly unquestioned aspect of my life. Funny that I've never stopped to think about how that affects my interactions, my self-image, my relationships. How many close friends do you hardly ever see? Can they live up to online standards and expectations? How can they when everything can be researched, planned, ambiguous and interpreted.

I guess it's ironic, then, that I post this to a network of virtual friends...

( Cut for length...enjoy!Collapse )

[

mood

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annoyed

]

I've been trying to avoid writing this for some time now, but I think I really need to come out and say it: I fucking hate the Christmas season.

The moment Hallowe'en ended the stores started rolling out the Chirstmas decorations.  Slowly but surely, months in advance, Christmas lights were going up all over town.  (I wonder how much fossil fuels North America has burned to keep their Christmas lights lit each year?)  Every radio station in the goddamn city has been infested with Christmas music for at least a month.  You'd think at least one radio station might hold off the Christmas songs until they're appropriate but no station will take that 'risk.'   You just don't have a choice as to whether or not you get to celebrate Christmas here; the best you can do is to be indifferent to a holiday you're forced to be thoroughly immersed in.

[

mood

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indescribable

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time doesn't always heal:
it just breathes and swallows memories
like the seasons change -
sending showers;
beating flowers into the mud.

and nothing is
forever in this place.
nothing but the way my heart fits in your hands;
the held breath of hope;
and the sweet lingering taste of grace.

("how blessed we are for crying now,
for we will laugh someday…and how.")



Tres cliche, but I guess posting song lyrics is cliche for a reason...

[

mood

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listless

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It’s 4:36AM and I still haven’t gotten back to sleep since being woken up at midnight.  I’ve spent the past couple hours re-organising all of the music on Rissy’s MP3 player, trying to sort through and salvage the pictures from this summer, and lying in bed staring at the ceiling and wondering were to channel my restlessness before finally deciding to open up Word. 

Being home is hard.  I don’t even know why; I’m just overwhelmed with indifference and usually don’t know what to do with myself.  I don’t think the fact that I have no computer and that our house doesn’t have internet has helped, nor does the fact that I have essentially stopped expressing myself and spend most of my days internalising and avoiding work.  I miss so much that I was immediately overwhelmed upon typing “I miss.”

You don’t want to be here in the future so you say the present’s just a pleasant interruption to the past.

I finally started to clean and set up my room today.  It took 3 weeks before I felt even a hint of motivation to do so, but now that I have I’m feeling a lot better about the coming year and living in this strange house.  The next step is to create some collages to put on my wall like I’ve always wanted to.I’m amazed that in twenty years I’ve never taken the time to create a space that is truly my own.

We don’t have much room to live.

About once a day or so I’ll catch myself in the middle of a hardcore flashback to some aspect of this summer.  The streets, the people, the lifestyle all seem so disconnected from my existence here that I find it hard to believe they’re real.  If it weren’t for the unshakable feeling of unsettledness and feeling hopelessly lost for most of the day, I could likely convince myself that I never left the continent.

I always worry about being eloquent and intelligence in whatever I write.  That’s why I have these raw outbursts like this; though even now I’m almost refraining from writing out thoughts that I desperately need to document.  I used to devote hours of my time to writing huge soul-cleansing emails… I miss that.

Without music life would not be fair.

At what point is constantly quoting things an intellectual crutch rather than stimulant?  I love quotes because they inspire so much inner thought, but it seems like once I’m into them I lose all ability for creative, unique expression.  Writing rambles to myself as the sun rises is my way of trying to reclaim that empowering artistic feeling, I guess.

If I didn’t have roommates I would turn my speaker on full blast and dance around like an idiot until I collapsed.  Dance Mix 95 is the greatest pick-me-up album in the history of life.

All I want to do is be close to you!

Words are inert, frustrating things.  I’ll talk and write until there’s nothing more to say, but still I feel like not enough is expressed, not enough meaning makes it to whoever I’m sending my thoughts to.  Frustrating moments like this that truly make me appreciate those close friends who share some indescribable link with me. 

I spent my last weeks in Ghana fearing that I’d just fall into the rat-race again once I got home.  I only wish those fears had been unfounded.I don’t want to be back in school doing a thousand things.  I want to lay myself down in green grass fields where my soul can rejoice.  There’s nothing worse than living a life full of regrets, yet it seems that I’m constantly selling myself out to a lifestyle I hate and goals that I can’t define.  I don’t know how to instantly re-invent how to live life, but if I could I definitely would.  I don’t know where my food comes from; I don’t know who was oppressed to make my clothes; I don’t know how many people in Hain have died in the past month because of outrageously unjust trade policies.  It’s something so much more than simple ignorance, though.  Most of the time I don’t even want to take the time and effort to change; it’s just so much easier to be a hypocrite.

I don’t know what it will take to calm everything down, to feel stable and in control again.  Going to the gym with Wood every weekday has helped, but I usually don’t even have the energy to put into a good day’s workout.  Staying physically active doesn’t seem to be enough, it feels like all the negativity is reinforcing itself; I need to figure out the critical point in all this, what I can change to let everything else fall into place.  I feel like I’m missing something important.  Countless hours of introspection don’t seem to get me anywhere.  Life is beautiful, as it always is, and I’m certainly not miserable and hating it all.  Yet, somehow, I feel like I’m in the middle of some twisted depression.  Can you be depressed without hardly ever being sad?

A small pause in writing gives a rush; a sense that everything will come together in the end and that my only job in life is to be grateful and to experience everything that I can.  Countless adventures await me in years to come and I can’t wait to find out who I’m going to share them all with.

I find it so hard to believe that a few years ago I was a pessimist convinced that the world was miserable and forsaken.  Every part of my being revolts at the thought of not savouring every moment of this beautiful existence.  It’s not yet 5:30 but already everything is right in the world.  Hours of frustration seem childish and juvenile in light of an undisputable fact:

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mood

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energetic

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Know why these kids are happy?


It's because they went to http://ghanabryn.blogspot.com.


You should too.

[

mood

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Very impressed

]

yes, yes, yes, us people are just poems
we're 90% metaphor
with a leanness of meaning
bordering upon hyper distillation
and once upon a time
we were moonshine
rushing down the throat of a giraffe

yes, rushing down the long hallway despite what the PA announcement said
yes, rushing down the long stairs
with the whiskey of eternity fermented
and distilled to eighteen minutes
burning down our throats

down the hall
down the stairs
in a building so tall
that it will always be there
yes it's part of a pair there
on the bow of Noah's Ark

the most prestigious couple just kicking back
parked against a perfectly blue sky
on a morning beatific in its Indian Summer breeze
on the day that America fell to its knees
after strutting around for a century
without saying thank you
or please

the shock was subsonic
and the smoke was deafening
between the setup and the punch line
because we were all on time
for work that day

we all boarded that plane for to fly
and then when the fires were raging
we all climbed up on the windowsill
and then we all held hands
and jumped into the sky

and every borough looked up when it heard the first blast
and then every dumb action movie was summarily surpassed
and the exodus uptown by foot and motorcar
looked more like war than anything i've seen so far
so far
so far
so fierce and ingenious
a poetic specter so far gone
that every jackass newscaster was struck dumb and stumbling
over 'oh my god' and 'this is unbelievable' and on and on

and I'll tell you what, while we're at it,
you can keep the Pentagon,
you can keep the propaganda
and each and every tv
that's been trying to convince me
to participate in some prep school punk's plan
to perpetuate retribution

perpetuate retribution
even as the blue toxic smoke
of our lesson in retribution
is still hanging in the air
and there's ash on our shoes
and there's ash in our hair

and there's a fine silt on every mantle
from Hell's Kitchen to Brooklyn
and the streets are full of stories sudden twists and near misses
and soon every open bar is crammed to the rafters
with tales of narrowly averted disasters
and the whiskey is flowing like never before
as all over the country folks just shake their heads, and pour

so here's a toast to all the folks who live in Palestine
Afghanistan
Iraq
El Salvador

here's a toast to the folks living on the Pine Ridge Reservation
under the stone cold gaze of Mt. Rushmore

here's a toast to all those nurses and doctors
who daily provide women with a choice
who stand down a threat the size of Oklahoma City
just to listen to a young woman's voice

here's a toast to all the folks on death row right now
awaiting hot oil or guillotine
who are shackled there with dread and can only escape into their heads
to find peace in the form of a dream

cause take away our Playstations
and we are a 3rd world nation
under the thumb of some blue blood royal son
who bought the Oval Office in that phony election

and I'll tell you while we're at it, let me state unequivocally,
he is not President of Me, he is not President of me

cuz I, I am a poem heeding hyper distillation
I've got no room for a lie so verbose
I'm looking out over my whole human family
and I'm raising my glass in a toast

here's to our last drink of fossil fuels
let us vow to get off of this sauce
shoo away the swarms of commuter planes
and find that train ticket we lost
cuz once upon a time the line followed the river
and peeked into all the backyards
and the laundry was waving
the graffiti was teasing us
from brick walls and bridges
we were rolling over ridges
through valleys
under stars
i dream of touring like duke ellington
in my own railroad car
i dream of waiting on the tall blonde wooden benches
in a grand station aglow with grace
and then standing out on the platform
and feeling the air on my face

give back the night its distant whistle
give the darkness back its soul
give the big oil companies the finger finally
and relearn how to rock-n-roll

yes, the lessons are all around us and a change is waiting there
so it's time to pick through the rubble, clean the streets
and clear the air
get our government to pull its big dick out of the sand of someone else's desert
put it back in its pants
and quit the hypocritical chants of
“freedom forever!”

‘cause when one lone phone rang
in two thousand and one
at ten after nine
on nine-one-one
which is the number we all called
when that lone phone rang right off the wall
right off our desk and down the long hall
down the long stairs
in a building so tall
that the whole world turned
just to watch it fall

look, another window to see through
way up here
on the 104th floor
look
another key
another door

10% literal
90% metaphor

3000 some poems disguised as people
on an almost too perfect day
should be more than pawns
in some asshole's passion play

so now it's your job
and it's my job
to make it that way
to make sure they didn't die in vain

sshhhhhh....
baby listen
hear the train?

[

mood

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delirious

]

Your captivating stories
And brilliantly witty characters are nice.
Really.
But I don’t want an ‘escape.’

I want to get the fuck out of here.

Novels are great for the imagination
But they make poor substitutes for reality.
When the book ends,
        I’m hungry.
And I’m not quite sure what to make of that.

Are the times I’m addicted to text
My happiest or my most lonely?
Depends if you ask me now
Or in retrospect.
I guess.

All I know is that I hate where I am
And September is a long way away.
I’ll manage it fine and get out alive
            (I always do)
But I’m looking for more in life than to simply cope.

If my life is literature then I’m a forced metaphor:
    Straining to connect the concepts
            that are out of reach at both ends;
    Wholly unnecessary
            and completely aware of it;
    Devoid of rhythm, meaning, or rhyme
            an eyesore to the rest of the text;
    Lacking any eloquence
            and sounding as forced as this poem.

I wish I was a soliloquy.

[

mood

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ecstatic

]

Hello everyone!!

I hope you're all keeping well!

As you all may or may not know, I'm off to Ghana this summer with Engineers Without Borders. I'm currently in a pre-departure training session in Toronto for a 4-month internship with Engineers Without Borders Canada/Ingenieurs Sans Frontieres Canada in Ghana, west Africa. I'll be living in the Upper West region of the country for the summer working with OXFAM on their Rural Aid Action Programme (RAAP).

I've set up a journal, where I'll be posting pictures and updates as often as electricity/internet permit. This blog will be the main way that I keep in touch with everyone, so please comment often and share your thoughts.


http://ghanabryn.blogspot.com


So, what does EWB do? EWB believes in driving human development through access to appropriate technologies. In the field, we work innovatively with people (not "to" them or "for" them..) to help enable them to better their lives. We work primarily in four sectors: Water and Sanitation, Information and Communication Technology, Agri-processing and Agriculture, and Rural Energy. EWB was founded by two Canadian students in 2000, and what was just a small dream has become an awesome student-based organization that is growing like crazy, with over 17 000 member going strong! In addition to our "overseas" work, EWB believes in working hard, in Canada, promoting the cause of international development and the issues surrounding it, such as trade justice, aid expenditures and making Canada take a stand as a leader in global communication and action. And, contrary to what the name suggests, it's not just for engineers, which helps, since I'm no longer in engineering!

Please spread the word about my journal, as I've discovered that my address book is lacking... If you need to get in touch with me you can direct all emails to brynferris@ewb.ca

Hope you all have a great summer!


Take care,
Bryn

[

mood

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thoroughly frustrated

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In Canada we have a major magazine called Macleans, which is, in my understanding, essentially to Canadians what Time magazine is to Americans.  Except there's a bit of a difference... 

Can you spot it?



That's right.  At about the same time President Bush won his second "Person of the Year" award south of the border (being called an "American Revolutionary" in the process), Macleans ran a story on how only 15 percent of Canadians would have voted for Bush last election....  Now Macleans essentially write that Mr. Bush is the worst president in 100 years.  They even have an ongoing debate about it.

Now it's not necessarily the headlines that are the problem.  The articles themselves are fact based and fairly reasonable, even if they make no efforts to be subtle in their conclusions.  And articles questioning the competent of the current US administration aren't, in my mind, that unreasonable. 

( The Canadian mindset, however, is.Collapse )

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mood

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working

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Seriously, can it get any more beautiful outside?

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mood

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amused

]

www.picturesofwalls.com

Dakshana dearest! You have the front page photo!

(Let's ignore the fact that they can't spell our nation's capital...)

***A DAY LATER***

Fixed! (I'm taking full credit from the very sarcastic email I sent.)

[

mood

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Still in love with my music

]

Various things that make me happy:

• Six (6) wicked awesome people from my first year RC class came to the last EWB Exec meeting with me, and have secured the materials to make and drop a 4-5 story Make Poverty History banner at UNB next week... very exciting.
  
  
• These same people then sang the entire Elephant Love Medley with me to (and in) meal hall.
  
  
• Halleluia, the sun is in my eyes; on my face.
  
  
• In class a couple weeks ago someone said the word "dog" and Andi broke into "Brian Wilson."
  
  
• Joni, Claire Kelly, Tiff, and various others are having a Moulin Rouge & Dance Mix 95 party tonight.
  
  
• Simone was familiar with the song "Good Morning, Providence", the song that first got me hooked on Chris Simpson.
  
  
• I now own a Mineral t-shirt, thanks to the wonderful dizygotic twin that is Rissy.
  
  
• My sister is on the RHS improv team and is doing amazingly well. (They made the finals, which are tonight.) She seems super happy and is really coming into her own, which is both wonderous and sad, since I can't be there with her through it.
  
  
• Apoorva and I are going to Ghana! (Nothing more really needs to be said here.)
  
  
• I have four Zookeeper songs in my possession and LOVE them... can't wait for an album.
  
  
• Next year (January 17-19... ish) Barenaked Ladies will be hosting a cruise for all interested fans. I MUST find a way to afford/attend this.
  
  
• Last week I wrote a reflection paper on this article, ranting about the how it's a cleverly disguised spin column and that you can't refute its condescending attitude and out-of-context quotes without attacking it from the other extreme and cutting off all intelligent debate. Gerry (the prof) came up to me last class and said that he had planned to discuss the article in class, but that I had done a better job in my response than he could ever have, and asked me to read my response to the class. Slightly flattering...
  
  
• Hawksley Workman is coming back to UNB March 16th... you better believe that I already have my ticket!
  
  
• Barenaked Ladies are recording a new album and have been making podcasts almost daily about the process. They're mostly just Ed talking and telling funny stories, though there's also some annoucements, song samples, and snippets of the other guys. I'm starting to realize the Ed talking (much in the way of Steve Page or Chris Simpson singing) is extremely soothing for me... I can't really explain it.
  
  
• I also got my hands on four (4) new BNL tracks. One of them, "Beautiful," is a ridiculously amazing song that I can't wait to hear recorded. It'll very likely be one of my all-time favourite BNL songs at this rate.
  
  
• Parking Lot
  
  
• Pictures of Walls
  
  
• Two people on my MSN list have had subnames that read "Everything is Grace" and "Hug Harder"
  
  
• Life