and much, much more

No sleep at all for three nights and then two nights of drug-induced sleep courtesy of Lorazepam, expired June 2006. But I'm told this stuff never really expires anyway. That's what I'm told.

Last night I slept for a couple of hours pill-free, and had horrible dreams of people dissolving from the inside out, with geysers of liquid shooting out of their bodies like rays of light. I woke up freezing cold, covered in sweat, and drove to North Van to take my grandmother her keys.

Yesterday we had lunch, my grandmother and I, and played Scrabble. She's losing her memory (short-term and long) at 92, but she still kicked my ass by more than 200 points. We also went to the bank so she could take out some money, and I pushed her in her wheelchair up and down Lonsdale. It was only a few blocks but it winded me. Later I found out her wheelchair isn't actually a wheelchair. I mean it has wheels, but it's actually just a transport chair to get her from the car to the door; it isn't designed for more than that. So I blame the chair, but anyway. She gave me her keys to carry and I told myself "don't forget to give them back" and then I forgot to give them back and drove across town.

So this morning I had to return the keys, which I did. Then I came home and polished up a story for my fiction class to workshop on Thursday. The scary thing about that is, not only is it my first submission in fiction class this year, the other two people handing in with me wrote these fucking terrific pieces that I can't hold a candle to. It's sort of inspiring and terrifying and challenging and lousy, how good other people can write.

Typing of which, my dad bought this weird little book in Victoria that consists of one long interview with Alan Moore. "Alan Moore Spells it Out" I think it's called, which is embarrassing, but it's a great interview about writing comics vs. drawing comics et cetera. Which is a thing I think about, that whole thing. Moore talks about his start in comics, too, which I never knew anything about and which really interests me because I can pretend to apply it to myself. Here:

"I probably imagined that I would be an artist, rather than a writer. I did still have delusions of adequacy as an artist until my mid-twenties. I mean, when I first got into comics it was as a cartoonist... which was a weekly gig, and which I'd hoped would improve my art to the level where I was no longer as embarrassed by it as I frankly was. This didn't turn out to be the case. After I'd been doing it for a couple of years, I realized that I would never be able to draw well enough and/or quickly enough to actually make any kind of decent living as an artist."

And then later:

"When I got to my mid-twenties, and kind of wised up a little, I realized that writing would be a lot quicker. I'd got a lot more control over how I wrote than how I drew. I could describe a person in words very quickly, while actually drawing them would be a lot trickier for me. So that was probably why I made the shift, and I'm very glad that I did. I don't think it was any great loss to the world of art, quite frankly, when I became a writer."

That alarms me. That whole idea of adequacy. And even if you know you're better and faster at writing a story than drawing one, how do you just 'make the shift' and abandon drawing? Drawing is so cool. But my dad used to draw comics in his twenties, strips and things, and then he realized "he'd never be good enough", (his words), and switched to something that came easier to him. And I don't know. I just feel like a deluded adolescent for trying to draw at all, sometimes. Because if I'm going to do something that other people are going to see, my demented little perfectionist self wants it to be really really perfect and brilliant. Not embarrassing and inadequate.

It's kind of a surprise to me, at twenty-four, that I am a perfectionist, because I always thought perfectionists got good grades and would know how to spell and so on. Over-achieving, right? I never did that. My own brand of perfectionism pairs nicely with laziness. If I can't do it really amazingly well right away, I just don't bother getting started.

Except sometimes, with coaxing, I do, and then even if a drawing is really clumsy and badly coloured I feel pretty good about it. For like fifteen minutes. Which isn't to say I'm any more confident about writing, except that I must be, a little.

Basically, I wish I were a better writer (by now, already, please), but I really necessarily have to be a better artist, or I'll never do anything with drawing, and that would make me sad because I love drawing so much. Which is a weird little ultimatum to give myself, I'm aware. Probably I'll feel differently tomorrow.

In other news, I have 667 books entered into LibraryThing, and I'm still not tired of doing that.

And I'm maybe probably going to buy a videogame tomorrow. Sssh.