A Skewed View

(and look damn excited about it too, eh?) Okay, so it was just to Frankenstein's Creature... ...for Halloween.

Contrary to whatever people thought they could attribute my child-free status, now the sailing is smooth: http://alberta.ca/home/NewsFrame.cfm?ReleaseID=/acn/200810/24550063EBE33-96F3-5ED1-46942B3A9CB6A7DE.html This pleases me. It is about 15 years too late, given that midwives have been registered since 1994, and the fact their services were not funded was always for me the hallmark of government inefficiency, short-sightedness and just how far down polititians would bow to powerful interest groups. (ask ANYONE who works for Alberta Health and Wellness. Nothing kills a policy quicker than physicians putting a contract out on it.) Bygones! Now women can choose who perches between their legs in the catcher position. And if you don't understand just how good this is for couples expecting babies, you've been horribly misinformed about the merit of having choices...and about the brilliance of midwifery.

I knew it! I just knew something was different yesterday! "One of these things is not like the other ..." HA! Look what happens when I move to Edmonton-Strathcona. I have the powah!! (This renews my faith in a very small selection of Albertans. And I am just tickled by how it looks. Some may say "Oh, those liberal university students!" -- but then they'd just be proving our case for us by pointing out that we are the ones with the higher education here ...)

I got the strangest feeling today after I walked out of my designated voting stations ... I felt a rush of patriotism. I was struck by how often we walk through our days underappreciative of just how beautiful and exhilarating our marvelous country truly is -- flaws and all. We have created and successfully defended a system where each individual can walk into a church or a community hall or a school gymnasium and say who they want to speak on their behalf. Some may be able to walk a few blocks to their designation voting station. Some may have to travel for some distance from their isolated homes to a communal designation voting station. But this is a day where each one of us actually count, in a time where not all world citizens can say the same. When I walked out of the voting station, I felt a connection with all the people I walked past on my way to the grocery store (the voting station was on the way to the Safeway -- I was already out, might as well fit in a few chores al...

I have been spending much time organizing things lately -- my apartment, my closet, my life -- and I have given some consideration to whether people who have life plans in place are onto something. Thusly, I have mapped out a life plan for the next few years. For the sake of argument, let's say it is a Five Year Plan: Fix up a few feature scripts I have written that need to be strengthened and then complete a solid television spec script/series proposal ... - so I can get an agent or reapply to the CFC ... -- so I can get a tv writing job or get a feature film produced ... --- so I can get the money to buy a home with a backyard ... ---- so I can finally get a german shepherd. So there you go. The solid scripts, agent/CFC graduation, writing job/produced movie and home buying are all simply a means to an end. At the end of five years, I will have a dog. I have decided.

Time has no meaning when your schedule is your own. When I'm left to my own devices, which used to only be on weekends, I'm inclined to stay up until 3 or 4 a.m., then sleep until about 11 a.m. I'm going to have to do some serious resetting of my internal clock when I'm back to work. Up until Saturday I was spending my nights in a theatre at the Edmonton International Film Festival. Check out my review blog for my comments on the movies I've seen. All 1,255 minutes of them. It was nine days/nights well spent. Festival movies are by nature a bit more skewed than wide release movies. Not that I'd care to write a movie about a 12 year old neighbour girl who happens to be a vampire or explore what my bowels would say if I were struck down by cancer -- but I believe such exposure to stories without boundaries did help widen my own creative thoughtzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz...*snort* wha - What?!