2013: An Ecstatic Year with the Exuberant Bodhisattva

January: I start a new job as a French Assistant at a Montessori School. I tell tiny children to push in their chairs, go to the bathroom and wash their hands in French. Some of them stare at me with huge eyes and nod their heads in bewilderment. The rest of them cry all day. When I lie down at night, I hear their screams. I wake up at 4:10 a.m. so that I can cram in two hours of Ashtanga yoga before my one-hour commute and 9-hour day with these newfound darlings.

February: To prevent the horrible skin that comes with sleep withdrawal, I begin to rub coconut oil into my face and body before showering at night. All night I scratch myself unknowingly. My boss asks if I have a cat and if that cat is digging holes up my forearms. My face becomes horrid and blotchy and the Boatman suggests that I might be allergic to coconut oil. School closes several times due to snow and I find this to be delightful.

Also, I am permanently infected with tiny people germs. My chronic symptoms range from a sore throat, repeated sneezing, endless snot, nausea, headache, loss of appetite, and a decisive sense of mediocrity which permeates through all the cells of my body.

March:  I develop adamant views regarding potty training. I decide that all the world’s problems stem from the fact that children are allowed to shit their pants up until the traumatic age of two when they are suddenly given the responsibility of eliminating their waste at appropriate times in appropriate places. I am prepared to devote my life to this, but the Boatman points out that this would require that I make my own child which is a terrifying idea.

April: I start sleeping in until 4:30, but the cumulative lack of sleep has already led to my clinical insanity.  I cry constantly. The ecstasy of snow days is over. The people on the bus smell like stale crushed mildewed garlic. During my break one day, I meditate outside in the playground and the police come by, suspicious. In another blog, I post The Little Savage and the Hermit, the epistolary novel I wrote with my ex-boyfriend, with the hope that it will be an enormous success and deliver me from my miserable existence.  (I take this down before it has a chance to go viral. In 2014, or 2015. I can’t remember.)

May: The clinical insanity continues. I leave the house in a tearful frenzy and fall asleep crying about the birthday parties I didn’t get invited to when I was twelve. My body resurrects its previously latent weird neurological twitches.  At unpredictable intervals, my shoulders shrug involuntarily and my esophagus contracts as through I am going to puke. Sometimes I gasp out of nowhere, like I was sitting in the passenger seat of a car and a tractor trailer was driving straight towards me.

I put my menstrual blood online in a blogpost that despite its extensive preparation, does not go viral.

On May 29, exactly three years since I broke my arm in 2010, my knee swells up on the way to work. I figure I should probably ease up on my 4:30 a.m. ritual of aggressive cranking.



The Blood



 June: I get a good physiotherapist for my knee and start all the way over with Ashtanga. This allows me to get significantly more sleep. I become less obnoxious almost immediately. I read Choose Yourself by James Altucher and my oxtocin levels increase almost immediately.



Me reading Choose Yourself and radiating Oxytocin

Me reading Choose Yourself and radiating Oxytocin

July:  I go to two appointments with an expensive psychologist and then fire him. My bosses only make me work for one week at summer camp. After that I go on E.I. and head east for three and a half weeks. While on E.I., I apply for a bunch of jobs at car dealerships, referring them to this excellent blogpost about 3 ways to make the world a better place. Nobody gets back to me

August: In Ontario and Montreal, I ruminate over what the fuck I should do with my life. There is a Part One and Part Two. I figure that if I want to try and make money writing, I’m going to have to branch out and write about something other than myself. Regardless, I continue to write excessively about myself. I submit a couple of posts to Elephant Journal, who has a new program to pay writers, and am rejected three times.

After almost a month away, I miss the Boatman and the Big Black Dog immensely. I am reminded of how much I love them, and that I kind of like being home in Halifax.



Me and the Boatman. Nothing like true love.



Our Darling Big Black Dog Friend

September: I start a new contract at the Montessori School, giving myself the option of fucking off to India if necessary. But when I get there, I realize that I’m happy to see everyone again. And then my bosses offer me something magical. A seven-hour day. Every afternoon at 3:30, as I head for the bus, the children run to the fence and call out, “Good-bye, Erica.” They’re cuter this year, even the ones who cry all the time.

In much sadder news, Eliot, the Big Black Dog suddenly got old over the summer. One by one, his legs go out on him. We make the heartbreaking decision to put him down on September 27, 2013. His last few weeks and his last moments are some of the saddest memories I have. I miss him every day and still kind of expect him to greet me when I get home and come eat the corn chips I drop on the floor.



Eliot gazes at the sea at dusk. His Obituary

October: I become obsessed with death, and enter somewhat of a creative drought. Over Thanksgiving, I lose my voice in Cape Breton. Perhaps this is symbolic. I turn twenty-eight. I miss Eliot.

November: I go to Halifax BookCamp and meet some obscure and compelling literary people. Also, I learn about Dinosaur Porn. I do not write a novel in 30 days.  I consider writing some catchy, bestselling erotica, but don’t get very far on it.



Dino-porn, an interesting discovery



December: One Friday, I take the school’s compost home from work on the bus. I envision a beautiful chakra Christmas card production, and it is a moderate success.  For three weeks, the children practice four songs for the Christmas concert. The teachers end up singing by themselves. At a fancy dinner at the Bicycle Thief, I ask the Boatman’s father if I can attend his hip surgery. The answer turns out to be no.

The End.

Happy New Year, Love the Exuberant Bodhisattva

@mypelvicfloor

Facebook Adventures
I Let Go, by Erica J. Schmidt

The Exuberant Bodhisattva attends BookCamp Halifax 2013

 

This Saturday, I attended BookCamp Halifax 2013 at the Khyber Centre for the Arts. BookCamp Halifax is a so-called “un-conference” where all the strange and lovely book people in Halifax gather together to discuss book issues such as publishing, marketing, and of course, writing. The event was free and open to all kinds of book people of all calibres.

I started the morning with “Putting the 'Media' in Social Media." I had a vague inclination to live tweet the entire un-conference. Then former Chatelaine editor-in-chief Kim Pittaway reminded us that on Twitter, she doesn’t so much notice your absence as your irritable presence. Over the course of the day, my Twitter fans were privy to a few ingenious comments about a free macaroon, the colourful and delightful Khyber bathrooms, blue underwear and dinosaur porn, but that was about it. From the workshop, I gathered that social media is certainly helpful, however, it can quickly become a huge distraction and time suck. The most important thing about being a writer is how much you write, not how many Twitter followers you have. At the social media session, an audience member suggested brand new tweeters to follow the 2-2-2 rule: two tweets, two retweets, and two replies per day. This is supposed to help you accumulate followers over time.

(To retweet or to reply to my innovative and brilliant tweets, find me on @mypelvicfloor)

My next chosen session was “How to Make Headlines: Writing for Magazines and Newspapers.” The panelists were Halifax Magazine editor Trevor J. Adams, freelance writer Chris Benjamin, The Coast arts editor Stephanie Johns and fashion magazine publisher Amanda Kincaid.  I’ve always been a fan of Chris Benjamin’s writing in The Coast. When talking about freelancing, he said that when he first started, he was attached to a bunch of big ideas that he wanted to write about and change the world. Over time, he found he had to learn to hold these ideas a little less tightly and focus on the story that needed to be told, and the people. I thought that this was good advice. We also got advice from Trevor and Stephanie about writing pitches. Trevor gave the simple model of 3 paragraphs. One about why he should care, one about sources, and one about visual possibilities, something I’ve never really thought about. Overall, I found the session quite useful. Maybe someday I’ll write a pitch.

After lunch I went to Steven Laffoley’s session about Creative Non-fiction. I thought the presenter looked extremely familiar before realizing that he was the English teacher who stands in the Halifax Grammar School parking lot every day greeting students and parents. I walk by him every day on the way to the bus. My boyfriend Robbie, the Boatman, used to be his student. He said he was a wonderful teacher. And he runs like a madman. Apparently Stephen Laffoley also babysat Robbie when Robbie was seven. Wish I’d been around for that.

Mr. Laffoley, as the Boatman calls him, has written six books. His most recent one about boxer George Dixon. He sees creative non-fiction as a cinematic exercise of framing facts in the way that tells the best story, and turns the facts into timeless literature. He also said that writing is like coughing up a lung, which I appreciated. I guess creative non-fiction is selling pretty well these days, especially historical fiction in Nova Scotia where people are interested in their history and there are so many interesting stories from the past. Sounds like a good cure for pelvic obsessions and self-absorption. I may consider this.

The next session was How to Write a Novel in 30 Days, by Stephanie Domet, who hosts the CBC radio show Mainstreet and Atlantic Airways. The horrendous idea of composing a novel in 30 days comes from National Novel Writing Month, better known as NaNoWriMo, a worldwide network of writers who take a pact to write a 50 000 word novel during the 30 days of November. Stephanie hilariously and charmingly described how she haphazardly signed herself up for the trauma so she could report about it on the CBC radio show Definitely Not the Opera.  The month was a disaster of total procrastination. By Day 15, she had some vague ideas about a character who couldn’t leave the house, and a ghost at the Spring Garden Road Library. Over dinner, her friend joked that she might as well add pigeons to the mix. So she did. But by November 27, she had less than 20 000 words down. That meant more than 10 000 words per day. Still, she did not use her time wisely, and on the last day, ended up writing 20 000 words. Writing a novel in 30 days is about quantity, and not quality. People who have succeeded in the past say that it helps to have an outline of your characters wants, fears, the worst things that could happen to them, and how you could orchestrate that happening to them. You can follow this advice, or as Stephanie seems to have done, just write like hell. In either case, in the end you get a draft that you can surgically repair into something beautiful. Stephanie got a published book out of her 30-day novel Homing. And now she knows that if the shit ever again hits the fan, she is capable of writing 20 000 words in a day. But this is to be avoided.

I considered doing the 30-day novel month this year, but I thought that it would turn into an overly ambitious New Year’s Resolution. I suppose that there are still 20 days left…  That’s 2500 words a day. We’ll see.  When I started I Let Go, I vowed that it would be published on Amazon within three days. Most of it was done in three weeks. Not terrible, however, most people can read the entire thing in about 45 minutes. Oh well.

The final session of the day was where I learned about Dinosaur Porn.  In a fragmented skyped presentation, Sean Cranbury spoke about how the internet and digital media has opened up all sorts of possibilities in publication.  Putting publication in the hands of the creator has allowed for the unlikely rise of Dinosaur Erotica on Amazon.  After learning about self-publishing on Amazon, college students Alara Branwen and Christie Sims have taken it upon themselves to grace the literary world with tales of dinosaur boning and prehistoric lust.

I was immediately compelled to do further research on this. In a Huffington Post Interview between author Alaran Branwen and reporter Hilary Hansen, Branwen postulates that dinosaur erotica appeals to our more base, carnal natures. Some people also probably like the idea of a big, powerful, massive male roughly having sex with a smaller female. It’s like the ultimate sexual experience with an alpha male, which is something that we are all inherently wired to enjoy.”


At Halifax BookCamp, I unfortunately didn’t get to discuss this alpha dinosaur sex experience with any of the participants, but this is my only complaint about the event.  Otherwise, I had thoroughly satisfying day, filled with tips and inspiration that stemmed far beyond sex with pterodactyls.

Many, many thanks to the speakers, volunteers, and organizers.

The End.

After you're done with the T-Rex:

Exuberant Bodhisattva on Facebook
Twitter: @mypelvicfloor
I Let Go, self-help book by Erica J. Schmidt

Five Days of Creative Recovery

Creative Practice, Simon's Genies, etc.

Yours Til Ekam Inhales