Kate is in Kamloops

Three midterms, three projects, a newspaper review, loan requests, scholarship applications, etc and so on. Welcome to mid-October.

I took a break from blogging, hoping to clear my head at the start of a new semester, and my final year at TRU. …So, that didn’t work. But the year is in swing and I can’t deny that it’s sometimes hard to focus when the “end” is so close and in sight.

What sometimes happens in university or when you’re starting to figure out your job path is a gravitational pull to what’s familiar or comforting. This manifests in things like your group of friends or the kind of things you choose to write about or research.

In that vain, the You Say Party show at Pogue Mahone next Wednesday should provide another opportunity to dip my toes in concert reviewing.

To get tickets for friends and take a much-needed trip away from campus for an afternoon, I headed downtown. I circled the block around Victoria and Seymour, trying to avoid the construction and asphalt trucks. By the time I got to the ticket retailer, the Rock and Smoke shop, the truck was directly in front of it. Road-work serendipity.

A month and about a week ago:

Said the Whale's Tyler Bancroft goes all glowy at the Loft, Kamloops, September 9, 2010.

~K

$1.99 Arcade Fire CD and baby drool. Best. Week. Ever.

This reeks of naivete, but holding a little living, breathing, live-wire of a baby in your arms is a whole ‘nother ball game. I’m not the most sentimental of people, but I damn near teared up.

My friend’s twins are officially the sweetest, prettiest, most adorable babies that ever existed. Doesn’t really seem like hyperbole when you’re holding them or watching a battery-operated rocker lull them to sleep.

The previous weekend was Pride, parks and thrift stores. How getting AF’s “Funeral” at the New West Sally Ann led to another day of polka dot dresses and browsing through travelogues for PEI, I’ve no idea.

Either way, the song “Crown of Love” is my new jam, and I have something old-but-new to wear to interviews with politicians: a pseudo riding jacket.

A few days ago was the Prop 8 ruling. The judge’s decision to deem the gay marriage ban unconstitutional is obviously not a done-deal by any means. But the process is chugging along and, at the very least, the hope of those fighting for their rights and the rights of others? It gives me hope.

Next Friday’s reserved for the show “I Feel Ya, Ophelia”, playing August 13 and 14 at the Surrey Arts Centre.

This Saturday will probably be: interview transcription -> radio station -> Wizard of Oz outdoor movie at Holland Park. …For the Surrey-adjacent, yeah, that Holland Park. The times, they have a-changed.

Six days ago:

Hedy Fry, Liberal MP for Vancouver Centre, Vancouver Pride Parade, August 1 2010.

Green Party leader Elizabeth May, Vancouver Pride Parade, August 1 2010.

CJSF 90.1 float at the Vancouver Pride Parade, August 1 2010.

Vancouver Pride Festival, Sunset Beach, August 1 2010.

~K

Sunday is Pride.

Monday is a mess despite being a holiday. But no matter because SUNDAY IS PRIDE. If the internet provides one main lesson, it’s that capital letters mean EMPHASIS and EMOTION. I THINK.

I’ve been going to Vancouver Pride since I was 17, all wide-eyed and pale and freshly graduated from secondary school. I will now be going with equal wonder, in all the wisdom of 22, excited and happy and still so very, very pale.

Heather Small’s song, “Proud”, is now a sort of cliché; an anthem of the disenfranchised, from those in the varied and wonderful LGBTQ community, to a low-income kid who finds himself on a full-ride scholarship, to overweight people losing weight on national television.

But it still warms my icicle heart to hear the song through heavy woofers, near the beach. It’s brash and overused and it fits like a well-worn hat; one that doesn’t match your outfit but makes you feel appropriately put-together.

Pride also falls on the same week as my Canadian anniversary. Thirteen years this August, with no luck of any sort, good or bad, just 13 anniversaries; a bunch of them spent on Sunset Beach, looking at colourfully-dressed people, faux pirate ships on the horizon and a friend or two close by.

About one year and eight months ago:

*I probably should have watched that Xtra vid two years ago as I make very brief, blink-and-I’m-gone cameos. At 2:04, one may see a decidedly not in Kamloops Kate, sitting on the left of the bus (camera right), swatting at her hair for some reason. Amateur journalist ready to roll. …3:45 is me pulling up my pants in the pouring rain for some other reason. Also very obviously a radio journalist.

~K

I had fantastical daydreams about belting out an acoustic version of Lady Gaga’s ‘Bad Romance’.

Alas, MUSI 1700 (Chorus) somehow turned into POLI 3200: American Government and Politics. Call it creative scheduling, using my prerequisites “wisely”, or what have you.

If Sociology 1110 and 1210 taught me a grand, easy-to-sum-up lesson, it’s that undergrads say the darndest things. The following semester will be even better: SOCI 3160: Sexuality.

Between my Fall and Winter electives (two because that’s what the journo program fits per year), I’d have built a solid tolerance for dumb things people sometimes say. Dumb, fascinating things.

And who knows, at the rate she’s going, Gaga might be mentioned in my American Politics class.

About 10 months ago:

~K

I miss interviewing and editing and sitting outside at a table, trying to use radio station stickers as paperweights for radio station propaganda promotion.

Headlines are my favourite and most challenging things to write. I wrote up some caption ideas in the next issue of TV Week, and whether they’re used or not, I got a kick out of the process.

But I guess satisfaction with your work is relative. “The journey is more valuable than the destination” is such a hideous cliche that it must be true.

I wonder if this is how “legit” musicians (not that I’m not one, with my mastery of three notes on the harmonica) feel after they’ve seen a song go from scribbles on a napkin to studio recording. If you’re not satisfied with the end result, does make everything that came before it useless?

Circumstance obviously dictates content. Take Robyn’s music. Her earlier, fun and disposable pop sound was guided and shaped by a mainstream label. Later albums, like “Body Talk Part 1″, had her exercise more creative freedom, from sound to styling to promotion.

Time, experience and error are cruel, fantastic teachers. But had Robyn, or other musicians/artists/circus acrobats, not had the experience with work and rules that didn’t work for them, could they have succeeded in or even found the circumstances that do work?

The creative process can be like drinking a glass of water upside down. Sure, it’d be easier to wait till you’re upright, but sometimes the fun is just in seeing if you can do it.

About one year and 11 months ago:

~K

I have an unfounded suspicion that my lost voice recorder is lying on a field in northern Alberta.

I’m imagining a moose coming across it, picking it up, carrying it across many kilometers, with the recorder eventually ending up at the Walmart Supercentre by the Wainwright Best Western.

Aside from maybe asking more questions, the only thing I have resembling a regret about my time in Calgary is not seeing a show. Indie, jazz, guy with digeridoo, anything.

I haven’t been to a “proper” (read: loud and noisy and headache-inducing and fantastic) show or interviewed anyone in months.

Seeing shows is like a drug and the antidote for addiction is a mix of busyness and lazyness. Along with their sensible cousin, cheapness.

Post-work, pre-early-sleep-from-complete-exhaustion… song: Mad Marge & the Stonecutters, “No Looking Back”.

Circa 8 months ago:

~K

…no two are alike. And it doesn’t matter much because, at the end of the day, they will probably all feel like sludge.

I was more than a wee bit surprised that I was disappointed at being taken off the TV Week desk. I suppose the root is simply delusions of grandeur. The intern before me got published a few times, and I was sure I could do the same, with a genre I think fits me.

I’ve figure it out, though. I’m either good at the work, so I was moved for a challenge… or I sucked.

Right now I’m settling for the logic of, “change is good, my dad gave me a hard-boiled egg for lunch for some reason, it’s all good.”

Plus new intern should be a great fit, so if I’m going to lose my spot to someone who can at least do the job, that’s a bit of aloe on the burn.

New intern also has a great music background, so I’m prepping my non sequitur music industry questions.

Between this and my friend sending me three awesome punk (and more) mixes (Horrorpops’ “Thelma and Louise” is my new jam), I can take comfort that if I’m not writing about arts, I’m at least experiencing them in the best way possible: on my own terms.

One day ago:

~K

One A, three A minuses, a B+, and one more pending.

Doesn’t much matter when you’re walking towards Gilmore Skytrain Station at 5:15 p.m. and slide gracefully down the gravel and onto your semi-ironed pinstripe grey slacks. The fact that Florence and the Machine’s “Falling” was playing in my ear at the time is just fate being a jerk.

The last two semesters at TRU were a mash of the obviously relevant and the ‘why does this exist, even?’. To say my classes were all rainbows and kittens and completely useful career preparation would be disingenuous.

But it takes a foray into the industry, any industry, to realize how much of your schooling becomes surprisingly useful. You also wise up quick to what doesn’t translate from a textbook to the cubicle.

The internship, so far, meshes work with a kind of education. Plus co-workers/”classmates” who actually watched the World Cup. It’s like the first year of school but nobody on campus is a jerk.

In the workplace, instead of grades, you’re dealing with side-eye glances and scorned egos. Plus it’s a bit hard to worry about getting fired when you work for free. I want to do the best possible job, yes, but I also don’t want to give myself an ulcer. I think that’s a reasonable outlook.

When my mother was my age, she was married and had a child. I’m trying not to miss Gilmore Station each morning and am currently waiting for my mom to come home and tell me how to launder my pinstripe grey slacks.

Two months and two days ago:

~K

*I think.

~K

“The feature that most distinguishes American floriculture from that of Europe is the great preponderance of the cut-flower trade as compared with the sales  plants.”

Did you know that? You do now.

I forgot how journalists and media people can be little factories of random information. For as long as you work on a story or project, you’re a pretend-expert. You know you’ve done your job when you reach the point where you still don’t know enough about a topic to explain it to an academic, but you know more than enough to entertain your friends at the pub Friday night.

“Do you come here often? Me neither, but did you know that greenhouse floral production acreage in Canada has accelerated over the past decade?”

First day of internship went well, though reminiscent of the first day of kindergarten: the smallest flub sometimes seems like the worst error you’ll ever make in your life, and lunchtime is a formative experience.

It was only one day out of six weeks, granted, but there’s a kind of poetry in starting a job and feeling at ease within the first hour because people are discussing American Idol as part of their jobs.

Music for the Skytrain ride home was Rufus Wainwright’s first album, a gorgeous record of melodrama and strained, beautiful vocals, strangely fitting for the rush-hour train car that smelled vaguely like Subway and synthetic roses.

About two years ago:

~K