Leaving Sex Education & Other Spoils of Childhood

This is the year I am leaving sex education, and other spoils of childhood. Because, frankly, I am twenty-two, almost twenty-three years too old for my mother to insist that sex is bad. Bad for me, because no one wants to marry a used vagina.

I am taking my soap, dirty laundry, loud music and my laptop screen-time away from an older, more respectable generation. The unused mess of birth control pills can leave with its immoral, cancerous self; The fertile stink of overgrown teenager can blow away with its cloud of depressive self-doubt; The childish daughter can grow up, and come back when she is woman enough to represent her family.

The black sheep does not need sex education in the first place. She was born out of a black-hole. Literally, she is a black-hole kept warm by black fluff. She is the Boogie-Woman that everyone’s mother warns their children about. The perverse black-hole that eats nice boys who don’t know any better.

It is time for me to quit mother-tit-sucking and fend for myself. Time to stop leaching from all the sons around me. Create a universe to call my own; A home to fill groceries made of my brain sweat. Brain sweat, because it is not appropriate for a bright, talented girl of today to work traditional women’s roles; It is not time to wash dishes and have sex with a lover in return for survival.

Ex’s rise from dead journals

This is a young person’s post-breakup diary entry:

out [Jul. 15th, 2007|11:13 pm]
i don’t care for him much anymore. he is a running dirt string in front of the breeze through the door. i imagine him in that same house, in the same doorway: busy with his life: capoeira on the beach, his new best friends and his brazilian dream. At twenty-five, why would he stick around this retirement town. he has been on two continents, he has about five more to go. funny he is on his way to MY montreal, to MY brother, to MY third language. enough running across maps; as I drive through tunnels, i hold my breath and wish that the world given him all its secrets, so he would stop and remember me. maybe he has seen and felt my secrets, he’s afraid to look at the unmolded, rough sketch of me; young clay spun wildly a few rounds. he wants polish, shine and glaze. i am not a diamond.

the other boy, is convinced, singing, smitten
we both can’t help but move our bodies, stretch our legs out in rhythm walking, kneading granville street into laughable putty. he will start the funk funk mcing, i will dance and sing, weave inside-out the cracks and loops. if i was to grant him “permission” for me to fall in love, in bed: he would be the bone skeleton frame, i would be the soft, worn out, squeaky beat.
oh he was nervous, vanne taught me when he mumbles and talks forever and ever down the never-ending highway, he is nervous.
i know how it is, i scrunch my nose to my toes, bite down my jaw, flex my lips till they don’t water so much

i try not to think of him, though i roll up and down the street in front of his capoeira school peeking through the window; one of his fancy cars are there? now, i don’t even poke into his email anymore. because there is nothing there. my ex is just text.

Winter Finds Misplaced Boyfriend

I’ve been painting with warm pinks and beige yellows since that taxi scurried you away. Far away from the warm fleece blankets we were wrapped up in. You became a small yellow dot in a grey and white city.  I was left cold in a house with wind blasting through a large gap in the wall while the windows were being eaten alive. I almost considered boxing myself in that yellow cab with you, but I’d end up in the wrong place upon arrival to the airport, never mind naked under a red, fleece blanket.

Oh, how you were my fireplace, when I’d stick my toes by you. How do I follow a fire around? You cannot capture it in a briefcase, like you can with money, or your computer. Hugs hold tight and love frees its flame.

I imagined the abstract concept of days like blocks in two weeks worth of stacking. slowly waiting, to stack. And each mocking day is not getting any warmer.

House Keeping Time

Time could be wasted, drunk, poor and unpaid.
Time is spent, folding towels.
Time, counted in spin cycles,
counted in full, knotted garbage bags.

at the hostel, time is
foreign for a four-hour shift.

Love and Bio-Diesel

my mother
my father

are building a room in their house
waiting for when I will fill it.

Our house will be a bio-diesel tank

I will be thrown out vegetable smoothie spilling outta my guts
out that pretty Bistro on Main St.
that pretty pretty Bistro, circulating in and out
pretty pretty girls.

I will smell of kitchen – deep-fryer thickened air
I’ve been marinating in. I am soupy waste oil.

I’ve been at the cold Exit door once before,
but this time, Mom & Daddy’s diesel truck is waiting for me
A tiny little tank for me
for me to grow up in.

when I am one crying cricket
solo, out in a cold, unfriendly field

Ditching Dollars: An Emerging Artist’s Journey to Honest Art

I’ve been thinking of you. You and your power to consume my art, once I expose it to you. You have the choice of licking it, exchanging money for it, chucking it. I’ve been hoarding my art for most of my life, I’ve refused to sell it to you for a long, long time. At the same time, my art has tried to please you, begged you to fall in love.

The art is young; it resolved to not poison its growth with thoughts of money. It’s goal is not to grow up as a mountain of cash.

Also, its direction should not be dictated by the art du jour, preferred subject of its audience, curators, critics, collectors for the goal of popularity. It should remain flexible when it comes to exploration, expansion of ideas, and general learning.

To Art:

• Yes, you can be a simple painting on canvas, your forte in the technique, despite the art world’s current fixation on concept, philosophy and process.
• You can be anything you want, just as long as you are true to yourself (as an extension, expression, and/or tool of expression of the artist or whatever it is).

and the journey of learning and art-making continues…

Advice from Kenya to a Young, Canadian Housekeeper

I did not want him to notice me, because I wanted to be invisible to everyone. He watched me, and my face got angry, remembering the men that called at me inappropriately and rudely from the street as I bike to work everyday. If I was invisible, no one would be able to remember me and make me feel uncomfortable. Nonetheless, the man got up from his dinner in the kitchen, started to help me take out the garbage, clean the sinks and wash the dishes that I was paid to do myself. I did not want to owe anyone anything, but I still wanted to be polite. I thanked him, and told him that he did not need to help me. We went out into the hall, and he told me he is a professor from Kenya. He asked me why I was crying. I told him that some men make me feel uncomfortable, and that it does not help the stress I feel as I try to grow up decently and be successful in my studies, work, and as an artist. He had guessed that someone had yelled at me to work or something, but that was not the case. Instead, I am just ambitious, and sometimes I am a bit impatient with myself when it comes to success. He told me that it doesn’t matter if someone else punches me. It matters, however, when you beat yourself up. He told me to look in the mirror, and smile. He said that every morning when I get up, I should get ready, then when I am ready to go out, I need to look in the mirror, smile, and say to myself: I am the best. I can be successful.

He told me the story of how he came to be where he is today. When he was younger, he was with his dad, and he saw some planes go by. He asked him dad, who drives those planes? His dad said, scientists. He asked how he can become a scientist too. He wanted to be just like those pilots who drove those planes. “You go to school.” He wanted to go to school the next day! No, he was too young, his father said. “When can I go to school?” He put a stick in the wall, at a certain height and said: “when you are this tall.” So the next day, and everyday after that, he measured himself against the wall to see if he was tall enough to go to school. one day, he heard that his sisters and brothers were going to school. it was the beginning of a new semester. he got ready, and he woke up very early in the morning, and ran. he ran to school, 6 miles, and never went back. he passed his first exam, his second. he went to university, finished, then got his second degree in the states. now he is working on his PH.D. I asked him what he teaches, he said something leadership. He told me that it doesn’t matter what other people think, or what they say. What matters is that you know. You know that You are the best. He told me to finish school before he knew what I was upset about. He told me to have fun, but not with alcohol or drugs, with good friends who are good for me. To think of every garbage bag as a stepping stone to get to where I want to be. To buy some nice clothes for myself to look good, no one needs to know where I am from, I need to walk tall, to remember that I am a princess.