Martine Pagé

Blork and I are in San Francisco again, and like last time, I’m lost for words (or posts). Maybe coming back here is just too strange, since this city was home for me during some very exciting years in my life. Every other street corner seems to have a memory attached to it and yet it no longer feels like I belong here.The city seems a bit sad as well. It’s a tough time to be an American I think, and it’s even worse when you’re a san franciscan and your whole country is going in a different direction from you. The friends we hung out with last night joked that we should keep a space for them in our basement in Montreal, should Bush get re-elected…

This is Blork’s third visit here and our second visit together, so there’s no pressure to see everything and do the complete tour. We’re taking it easy, walking my friend’s dog around, hanging out with cool people, stuffing our faces with great, inexpensive food and taking naps (the jet lag isn’t big but it’s still there). I like traveling to a place I’ve already been to before. Seems like the location holds a little bit of your personal history and you really do the things you feel like doing, not the ones you think you ought to.

Gotta go walk the dog. How’s springtime in Montreal?

Similarly, even though it is nearly a century and a half since Darwin’s remarkable genius enabled him to grasp the process of evolution and its basic mechanisms, we are still working out many of the implications of that jolting dislocation of humans from a wholly unique, hallowed position vis-�-vis other forms of life.

From page 23, sentence number 5 of Can Love Last?, by Stephen A. Mitchell.

This is part of a meme, which I heard about on a couple of sites today. Here’s what the meme suggests you do:
1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

I’m going through an annoying waiting period these days, professionally speaking (like a lot of people who work in film and television in Quebec) and one of the best ways for me to deal with anxiety is to clean or sort through things. It’s usually a soothing process, but the task I faced last week left me in a strange, moody state.

I’m not much of a pack rat and yet over the years, I have accumulated a considerable amount of documents that I have had a hard time parting with. After we moved in our new house last Fall, the boxes containing these documents were stored in the back of a closet. Out of sight but not out of mind! I needed to reclaim that closet space for other things. I’ve also been trying to convince Blork to sort through his massive archives and overwhelming t-shirt collection, so I figured I’d better practice what I preach.

I sat down on the floor with my boxes and wooooosh, traveled back in time. Grade cards from elementary school, university term papers with teacher’s comments (some great, some I would prefer to forget about, which is why I keep them), cards friends sent me after the death of my mother, letters from my mother I didn’t remember I had, photocopies of letters I’ve sent to friends, old diaries, datebooks, love letters, little silly notes from ex loved ones…

I went from laughter to tears and back to giggles in a matter of minutes (but it took hours and hours to do all the sorting work). Foolong said it well: It’s astounding what one can learn, saddening what one can forget. I couldn’t believe how intense I was in my teens, how naive I sounded at 21 (naive, and yet sometimes very, very dark) and how much time I lost over quarrels and worries. But what surprised me the most was the sheer amount of it all, even though I had already sorted through these boxes a few years ago.

Every time I go through these documents, I can’t help but think that someone will have to deal with this after I die. It’s a great motivation to reduce the amount of things I keep. I am now down to two archive boxes, and that includes old tax info I’m forced to keep. Will I ever let it all go?

Specialists constantly try to measure the time we spend watching tv, eating or sleeping. What I really wish I could count are the hours I have spent writing letters, notes, e-mails (and now blog entries)! While I’m glad I kept in touch with my loved ones over the years, I can’t help but think about the hours… All these hours I could have used to get in better shape, write a novel, a screenplay, learn Italian or meet gorgeous boys! (Forget the last item. I somehow found time to do enough of that.)

Speaking of writing less and getting out more, I’ll be doing just that in the next 10 days. Blork and I are taking off on Wednesday to attend a wedding and hang out with friends in San Francisco. I’ll probably blog less and play more, which is just what I need.