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Ottawa trip 1
There's a depression setting in.
I'm sad. More to the point. About nothing in particular. Just a feeling of emptiness and sleep. If I were n Montreal today I would drowse a long time. But if I were there I would have packing to do, and I would do it.
I wouldn't mind spending all day alone in this house. There's a bed and a bookshelf full of interesting books. I could get away with never leaving this room, except that it's not home. It's a relative's house, and I have to be social and happy. A reasonable exchange for free bed and board. I have to ind a thank you gift, but I don't know what to get. I don't know what they like.
I'm reading this book, called Hollywood Utopia. It's fascinating. Added to the potentially obsessive interests like Baroness Elsa, anthropology, Marx, Foucault, are now Point Loma, Theosophy and the intriguingly titled anthroposophy. Also maybe Natacha Rambova. It's interesting, reading this, how many of the influential people are female. I wonder how much of that is a product of the author's symapthetic gender.
I want to read more of this author. She's a teacher at Langara (which is both coincidental given yesterday's audition, and perfectly reasonable, since Mum gave me the book), and she's written another one called All Possible Worlds: Utopian Experiments in British Columbia. I'd sort of like to try living in a commune. I think it might suit me. read about places like Point Loma, and I can't help but think ... sure most would dismiss it as cultish, and I guess it is, but it sounds great, and here's my question: did it work? Obviously I don't know enough about it to make a truly informed answer to that one, but the answer initially seems to be yes: it died because of the Great Depression. If not for that, how might it have grown, what might it have been today? I would love to find out more, especially about the children who were raised there. How did they turn out? Was their education beneficial? Were they happy? Successful? Did it work?
I guess that would be my test of a successful commune: first, did it last--although even that is somewhat less relevant--next, was t successful in raising happy, grounded children who are able to function in the "real" world?
A thought came to me during that first chapter. Would it be possible to open a school? I'd always thought of homeschooling--I want to try different ways of teaching so that the learning is useful and productive, because I'm just not convinced by what we have now; it's one reason I want to be a teacher--but what if I could find parents equally unsure about the school system who might be interested in homeschooling...could those kids be combined into a sort of extra-school, out-of-system schooling?
I think I need to learn more about how homeschooling works. I think I need to talk to Eleanor and Mum about how Choices worked. There've been some efforst at finding a new system, obviously. just need to learn more about it.
Here's a quote worht snickering over.
"If you want to arouse sympathy for the hero, you surround him with kittens, which unfailingly enjoy universal sympathy." --Sergei Eisenstein
There's another quote from DW Griffith about how the movies give a man somewhere to go besides the bar. It's truth. Th's what I've been doing , isn't it? That's how I've been dealing with the nothing that my life has so recently been. That's how I survived. I haven't, and couldn't imagine, turning to substance abuse to make life better, but movies have helped me through.
Juno helped me decide to go home in the fall, after all.
You can't stay somewhere because you were happy there once.
You can't recreate a time when you were happy. I couldn't recreate last summer if I tried, but it woke me up. This summer I'm moving forward.
Now I just wait until June to hear about Studio 58. It's out of my hands now, but please oh please.
I believe with my whole being that I can make everything turn out okay. It's in my power to be happy.
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