Chicks and Ducks and Geese

It's snowing again...and this time I think it is going to stay.

We've had a good run of it in November, so I don't want to complain. I could have been contending with winter driving since mid-October, but, as it stands, Saskatchewan has stayed pretty mild until now. December is going to be a whole other ball of wax. Booooo, I've never liked winter.



Although, I have always like Agribition. Agribition is this huge agricultural fair that is held at the end of November here in Regina. My elementary school always took us and I looked forward to those days with great anticipation. I would do my class report on Charolais or water erosion and I would watch the auctions with awe. It must be the residual feelings from my childhood that draw me back to the Agribition whenever I am in town. This year, friendless as usual, I went alone. And I am so glad that I did.



Older now, and slightly more conscious, I observed as much my feelings as I did the animals. What was it that I liked about stepping onto a planet that I clearly do not belong? It isn't even that I want to belong or that I have ever even had a connection to farms or the farming life. But this year, I started to get it. It's not what these people do, but how they do it. It is the frequency at which they vibrate that makes me want to be around them.



I generalize when I say the following, but there is such a clear, safe, solid, contented way about rural people. Roles are still defined, if a little blurry around the edges. There are more women in the rodeo, but most of them still tend to the young and make sure everyone is getting fed. The men all have hands so dark and dirty from years of hard labour that I am, at once, repulsed and turned on. The little boys emulate their fathers, wearing stetsons that are too large for their head and finding tasks to keep themselves busy and the little girls are already looking around for the future cowboy that is going to take care of them. These people were raised on a farm and have no desire to leave! It is amazing to me. Amazing confusing and amazing enviable. They belong to the piece of land and the few animals that they tend to and, of course, the family that they have made a priority. Everyone keeps saying they are going to pray for the other and when Agribition is done they are all going to go back to the small towns they are from and get on with things. Suffice it to say, I didn't see one person in any of the buildings on their MacBook blogging.



I know that I romanticizing it. But I also see that this perception I have is exactly what draws me. Of the animals, my highlights were holding a baby chick in my hand, the elpacas, the sound of the goats and the horse that seemed to want me to come closer. The whole thing was so impactful that I remembered that Friday Night Lights had started Season 3 and stayed up late last night catching up with my favorite Texan football series.



Ah, if only sleeping in until noon and refusing to cook wasn't frowned upon, maybe I could live the farming life one day, too.

Write It Down, Make It Happen

In honor of the new book I am reading, Henriette Anne Klauser's Write It Down, Make It Happen I am about to make a list. I do it for myself, so don't feel guilty if you have a sudden urge to skip this particular blog post;-)

A Good Chunk of My Big, Fat Goals
---------------------------
1. Own several real estate properties including one in Europe, one on a BC Gulf Island and one somewhere tropical.
2. Do a touring road trip of the United States
3. Get a University degree
4. Lead a spiritual community
5. Write a best selling book
6. Write and tour a successful fringe show with Leon and I in the cast
7. Get paid to write this blog
8. Attain the ability to design and develop kick ass websites
9. Teach adults the skills I've developed during my Finding Me adventure
10. Perform a lead in a show at an A house theatre
11. Visit every province and territory in my home country of Canada
12. Attend an Asilomar
13. Reach and sustain my perfect body weight
14. Stay ridiculously happily married to Leon for ever and always
15. Have one, perfect baby and the lifestyle to support it
16. Be a guest speaker at the Agape Centre
17. Be a featured teacher at Hollyhock and Omega
18. Own a black, subcompact, environmentally friendly vehicle
19. Be my own boss
20. Become a daily meditator and truly free soul
21. See a Broadway show
22. Become financially free at a young enough age that I can really enjoy it
23. Hire my friends and favorite people to be my creative team
24. Live until I am - as Leon puts it - damn old
25. Find an adult, female soul mate ... my parallel of Oprah's Gail
26. Study photography and new media
27. Learn to play the guitar
28. Record at least one full CD of my own songs
29. Make humor a large component of everything I do

Konkin, The Reluctant Artist

Just got home after a completely packed night at work and an hour long drive west - cocooned safely in my car and the quiet of the Number 1 highway. High on show adrenaline, I chose to not climb into bed with Leon right away in case I would wake him and instead dive more fully into the new book I was reading. And now - as Elvis might put it - I'm all shook up.

The book is Julia Cameron's autobiography Floor Sample. I have been craving the autobiography of someone that has touched my life in some way and her bestselling book The Artist's Way has certainly done exactly that. But what I am finding about her - both by the stories her chapters reveal and by the way that she is telling those stories - angers, exhausts and saddens me.

Julia Cameron is the ultimate advocate of Artists. Her work has coined Artist into a philosophy. She also involves Spirit in her work which automatically makes me trust it at a deeper level. But mostly, she is all about the Art. Her excercises urge you to write three pages a day, take yourself on Artist's Dates and revisit every creative dream you might have had, but shelved because of a lack of faith. The teacher that writes these words sounds like a grounded, happy, creative woman. Isn't a guide someone that has it, at least, PARTIALLY figured out?

But the woman described in the book is everything that makes me embarrassed to be an artist. She is flighty and insecure and addicted to her craft, feeling that without it she would have no reason to keep on living. She is flaky and emotionally volatile and fragile. She has an addictive behavior and is incapable of being in a sound, happy partnership. She makes tons of money, but doesn't seem to have enough of it when she butts up against emergencies, which is often. She couldn't use a computer if her life depended on it. She is never content, moves her children around like crated furniture and is a hair's breath away from being a stark, raving lunatic.

No, dear readers, it does not escape me that MANY of those phrases describe ME to a tea. But many of them do not and of the ones that do, they are the exact aspects of my behavior that I seek to understand and then release as behaviors that no longer serve me. I see the romance that is built around Artist as Addict and Artist as Technologically Defunct. We weave a magic around Artists as people who can't stay in a relationship because when the 'voice' calls to them to create no one must ever challenge that they must drop all responsibilities and create. Artists feel things more and, as the conduits of emotional expression, we chalk it up as route when an Artist spends three days in bed recouping from a disturbing film or flies off the handle at another human being, raging over a minute detail. It is all bullshit to me. Utter and total.

Or more accurately, it is all Ego. What if we are all Artists and we can stop capitilizing the damn word? What if us all being artists means that we all get to express ourselves in whatever way works for us, freely and out loud? What if being true to that artist part of yourself brought you contentment and peace? And - radical thought here - what if celebrating the art in your life made you so happy that you became an excellent parter, a kick ass parent and a friend that was actually present when they were needed?

I get that I am not a lot like other people and that I have unique aspects of myself. I blog personal feelings, wrote songs when I was nine, taught myself piano, write poetry and plays, danced before I could walk, gesticulate with my hands too much when I speak and get paid - like I did tonight - to put on wigs and costumes so to make huge audiences roll around with laughter. I am an artist, reluctantly. I say reluctantly because, more importantly, I want to be a person who sees the bigger picture. I want to be creative - who doesn't really? - but I want my month to made up of more days of laughter and peace than this cosmic unrest. I want my year to be made of more months that seemed to be 'the best so far of my life' than months that are described as 'the dark times of my soul'. I'm prone to drama and I have a very active Ego, so this is a big declaration of desire, but it is what I want. I want my marriage to be easy shmeesy. I want to realize that if I move every single time I feel unrest I will only succeed in being the owner of a lot of packing tape. If I have a baby, I want to be the kind of mom who is happy with What Is and not teach my child what is so commonly taught in my community- that their artist mommy can only be happy when she is 'being an artist'.

Lately, I have been drowning in my drama about next year. Recently, I blogged about giving that all up. Reading this book and having this button pushed in me has confirmed it. I had forgotten there for a bit about The Person I Want To Be. If I have to suck at human relationships and constantly feel unsettled and forsake all else when a creative project 'calls' me and be addicted to my identity as Artist and probably several other outside Ego induced temptations than I really would rather be a dental hygienist. Because as a dental hygienist I would know something truer - that no matter what I do (or don't do) there will never be a day in my life that I will cease being an artist. There will never be a day when where any of us will cease to be an artist. Artists creative, the act of existence is in itself creative and so we are all artists.

I am ready to get on with what is really important and truly spectacular...

the common and ordinary perfection of being a human.

Giving Up

I think there is something to be said about giving up.

Of course, giving up doesn't sound very good, so the euphemistic term might be 'letting go'. Letting go of the constant trying to make something happen. Letting go of the trying to figure it all out. Letting go of needing a certain outcome. Letting go of the worry that there won't be enough. Letting go of anxiety and panic and, yes, desire.

Instead, just letting it be. Letting it be screwed up. Letting it be half done. Letting it be unknown. Letting it be expensive. Letting it be scary. Letting it be the way that it is. Adding some faith that there will be unfolding of change and in the right and perfect direction. This is all a pretty way of saying that sometimes it is good to just give up.

It freaks me out, though. I think to myself - If I want to go back to school, I have to apply. I have to find out the deadlines and the rules and make it all happen in time so I can walk through the doors in September. I can't just give up and have faith that it will all unfold perfectly!! Faith isn't going to get my transcripts mailed and make the right decision for me about what to study!!

Yet, worrying and fretting and being hyper organized about everything is exhausting me. So, I give up. I don't know what I am going to enjoy studying...not really. So I may as well just go back to school to study something and hope that it all comes clear at some point. As for the rules and the deadlines, I can send some emails and make small efforts, but I am through with staying up until the wee small hours trying to make sense of confusing websites and surfing the web for every answer to life! Right now, we are looking at schools in Windsor because both of us are thinking of going back to school AND we both want to make a savvy next real estate step. Windsor might bring us both those things (plus some hot weather!). But maybe we will visit Windsor in January and hate it and change our minds. Or maybe the AIR grant will come through and we will be staying here. Or maybe my awaited for epiphany will come to light five weeks from now and ALL bets will be off. Overall, I am starting to not care. I've gotta come back to the Now. I've gotta start to enjoy Christmas shopping and decorating our new tree and tiling our bathroom and, yes, even my show.

I'm leaving the other stuff to Spirit. I'm throwing up my hands in defeat and I'm going out to buy some eggnog.

License To Drive

Yay Leon! After 32 years of walking the streets, standing at bus stops in the rain and, in the best possible scenarios, yelling 'shotgun' at the top of his lungs, my husband has finally gotten his driver's license.

It has occurred to me as of late that when I married what I thought was the 'bad boy', I was really marrying the most domestic of men. Lately, all that comes out of the mouth of my true love is talk of babies and bigger houses to hold all the babies and getting a puppy and taking vacations and tiling the shower and - now - getting his driver's license. It is not something that I have ever asked for, but something that has always seemed to cross my path. Domestic men wanting to partner with jaded, bitter old me;-) Maybe that is because they can sniff beneath my tough veneer and smell my secret desire to get pregnant and sew window coverings while my man goes out and earns the income. Ha ha ha ha. Ha.

HIs heart is in the right place, but 2009 scares the shit out of me. I have no work lined up and, even though I would be willing to go back to school in January, I live in a place that offers no schools with new year start dates. We think we are going to sell our house in the spring, but without a clear plan as to where to move TO, it seems like a fruitless plan. I agree that we could just sell to get our best profit out of the house and then gypsy about the world with the cash until we figure it out, but it also sounds tempting to just stay put until we have a goal. Leon and I have even talked about both going back to university to get our Education degrees. Our lives are like spaghetti. Scrumptious, but tangled and messy. Thank god we are in it together.

At least now I can toss the keys at my hunny and tell him to go grab me some Doritos from the store. It is always good to have salty snacks while figuring out the puppy, baby, geographical destination and life purpose parts of one's future.

And baby, I can sleep while he drives.

Bathroom Renovations

Everywhere I look, everywhere I go, people are renovating their bathrooms.

Our adorable little zen bathroom has become a den of plaster dust and gaping holes. The irony is that here in Regina where I am staying the other half of the week while I do my show, Leanne and Dale are also doing bathroom renovations. Their bathroom is 50x worse than ours with only a working toilet to its name. Even a co-worker of mine is redoing his bathroom. My conversations are filled with the follow topics:

1. Drywalling well is hard to do well. It is a skill. That is why we pay people big money to do it for us. I would never expect a normal person to just 'put on a show' well, so I should not expect my husband or I to know how to drywall.
2. Trades people are the busiest people on earth, maybe second to plastic surgeons.
3. Replacing a toilet isn't as hard as you think...but is a huge inconvenience. You will need to go to Smitty's a lot to pee and poo.
4. Bathtubs aren't as easy as toilets to replace. Make sure your new bathtub can FIT in the door because if you can't get it in the room, it'll be hard to use in the living room.
5. What is the best way to water seal your shower? How is water both our best friend and worst enemy?

I have a show tonight, but the priority of the day is to go buy all of our tiles from home depot. We plan to tile ourselves next week. Don't say it. Today we have a drywaller coming to our house to redoing the walls that have been destroyed by the plumber. Our plumber cost us a lot, but was friendly and talked quite a bit about Transformers (yes, the toys from the 80's). Leon himself did the sinking in of our medicine cabinet and now we only have to find the perfect mirror to place overtop. Of course, it'll mean trimming out the cabinet and hinging the mirror because, let's face it, NOTHING CAN EVEN BE TOTALLY SIMPLE!!! *Sigh*

It snowed today. Since that first snow melted, the weather has actually been glorious. But winter is threatening and will come eventually.

Please let us have a working toilet before that happens. Please God.

Thanksgiving

On November Eleventh Two Thousand and Eight here is what I am thankful for:

1. Two Legs
2. My Husband
3. Lots Of Yellow Sun
4. An Extra Day Off
5. Easily Scheduled Plumbers
6. Six More Paychecks
7. Good Sex
8. Family Support
9. Living In A Still Strong Real Estate Market
10. My New Comfy Queen Bed
11. 600 Thread Count Sheets
12. Kick Ass High Efficient Furnaces
13. Leanne's Guest Room As My Second Home
14. Mom's Unending Support
15. My MacBook
16. Taco Time
17. Podcasts That Keep Me Centered
18. The CW
19. Slippers
20. Good High School Grades

Hmmm. That's all I got right now. I mean, I could keep going, but in my slightly less-than-thrilled mood these days, I think I will leave it at 20. I truly hope you are all living the dream and finding things to be thankful for...

Podcast #3 - A Foggy Day In KJ&Leon Town

A four minute synopsis of the utter confusion of two newly married thirty somethings faced with so much choice that they have found themselves practically paralyzed.

Enter: The Easy Part

Ah, finally the opening of my current show! Check it out by clicking here...

Rehearsals are always a challenging time, but now it'll be nothing but blue skies. Well, okay, maybe that is a bit much, but it's definitely gonna be easier from here on in.

As long as you're not expecting Chekov, I would love for you to come and see it.

Now, it is on to the bathroom reno...

Yes We Can

It is official. Obama is the new president and I, KJ Konkin, have cried more times in one week than I have in the last 12 months. Happy tears, frustrated tears, exhausted tears...it's getting kinda soggy actually. In some ways, I DO wonder if it is hormonal. I like to imagine that it is my frustrated body demanding that I get it pregnant. LOL. Or maybe I have some planet squaring some moon. Anyway, it's all good because, like the lyrics from my favorite kid's album FREE TO BE, YOU AND ME say, It's alright to cry. Crying gets the sad out of us.

Glad to state that tonight the tears were mostly joyful as I watched a nation that is so beaten up, become lifted by the steady, zen energy of one man's reminder. Yes we can! Yes we can. Yes we can. It was inspirational to be observing something so profound happening and I was convinced, once again, that we are undergoing a massive, planetary shift. I congratulate America and, for the first time in a long time, don't feel sorry for them.

A few tears were the tender tears of a woman who misses being around her husband. All this separation is so hard on us. We have spent all of our time together for the last year and a half, so to be suddenly having to spend much of our weeks in different cities is challenging. We only get a short time to reconnect and it is natural to try and force it to happen quickly. But connection can't be forced. Making love because you are under a time constraint is never sexy. Or intimate. It's just filled with panic and pressure. And between Leon's exhaustion with this tour and my constant negativity about my job, it is a struggle to find our groove and relax back into our coupledom with only an 18 hour window. Thank god we are able to laugh about everything - loud and long. And thank god that Leon's tour ended today...so now we just have to work around one schedule.

I am thinking that the tears will soon cease. I open the show Friday and then I can sink into the Christmas holiday, make my money and plan out 2009. I'm leaning toward shaving my head - hat tip to Sarah - and moving to Kansas City, Missouri.

And no, I'm not really kidding.

Theatre Of Torture

First off, I think my car has now been cursed. No, not by the proverbial gods, but my yours truly. With all the 'i hate my car' mutterings, I have, via law of attraction, made sure a stream of bad things will happen now to my poor car. Last week, it was my battery and this week, a biker slamming into my car. Now, before all the bikers start hunting me down, let me say that both the biker and I have acknowledged that it was the biker's fault. Poor guy. Poor car. He wasn't too badly hurt, mostly shocked and the side mirror was the only damage on the car. Really, the whole thing has convinced me that I better stop saying mean stuff about my vehicle.

I LOVE MY CAR!!!!

As for my job. Ug. Ug ug ug ug ug. *Sigh* I must also change my tune about THAT or I will be living in hell for the next seven weeks. (Oh God, SEVEN WEEKS!!!) I love my job? Hmmmm, sure, I suppose I could try. While I am standing on stage, my heart heavy, I soothe myself with the reminder that so many people out there have secret dreams to be paid to dress in costumes and sing, dance and act. Do it for the people who don't have the courage yet to pursue the dream, I tell myself. Live the dream for them. Because let me tell you, it is no longer mine. My favorite part of the professional theatre industry is getting the role. But the doing of the role? The rehearsing and the mounting and the running of the show --- THAT is a type of torture. Especially this kind of theatre. Oh vey.

I LOVE MY JOB!!!

I LOVE MY CAR!!

I LOVE MY ANKLES!!

I LOVE MY FRIENDS!!

I LOVE MY CAREER PATH CLARITY!!!

I LOVE BLOGGING ABOUT THE SAME ISSUES OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN!!!!!

Seven more weeks. Ug.