I was going to give this a slightly more polite title, but I like the way Clara worded it. She came to visit me back in August and we had a few days of adventures together. We’ve been pen pals for the past year or so, since she sent me a letter after reading my zines. She includes adorable illustrations on envelopes and in her perzine, Paper Doll.

Illustration by Clara Lipfert

It must’ve been a bit of a whirlwind visit for her, as I kept her up ’til three in the morning in spite of the fact that she’d just flown in from Edinburgh, Scotland, making it eight o’clock in the morning her time. We went dancing at a show at Casa Del Popolo, then had a long walk home after missing the last metro. I love having houseguests, but I’m not always the most responsible hostess. Let’s be honest.

On Saturday morning, I snuck out of the house and let her sleep in while I spent the day hosting open studio at the Ste-Émilie Skillshare. We met up later on for letter-writing and tea. The better part of the evening was spent wandering through the Marché Atwater and lying in the grass by the Lachine Canal.

Reading and writing in the grass with Clara

Lachine Canal

J'ai enfin fini ce beau livre.

Piments québécois, cinq dollars.

Marché Atwater at sunset.

We were so exhausted that night, I think we just read zines in my bed until we fell asleep. I find it really nice to be around people who are content to sit down and read together all evening, rather than have a need to be constantly entertained. There’s just something quaint and relaxing about it. It was also nice to have someone around to talk to about the things I was reading, instead of keeping it to myself.

The next day, Montreal was seeing its small share of Hurricane Irene. We threw a small tea party and were joined by Brad and Susan for an afternoon of chatting and zine-reading, with a soundtrack of Jolie Holland and Leadbelly. Quite lovely, indeed. Thrift-shopping the next morning, and then Clara was back on a bus to her home in New Hampshire.

Rainy-night dance party. My entire neighbourhood is a construction site.

Two weeks before that, Chelsea of Nothing Rhymes had come to Montreal for a short visit as well – mostly we drank tall cans in various parks and talked for hours. It was great. Though I can’t believe we didn’t take any pictures, or even stop by a photobooth.

Meeting up with pen pals is one of my favourite things. It can be strange to go from writing to suddenly speaking face-to-face, but I’ve generally felt closer to my pen pals than anyone else (it’s easier to write down my secrets than to say them out loud), so finally getting a chance to meet them is always exciting. And speaking of… There’s a seat sale currently happening at Megabus.com! Trips between Buffalo, Toronto, Kingston and Montreal from now until December 14th are only $10 if you enter in the coupon code FALL10. So I’ll remind you that Expozine is happening on November 26th – 27th, and I may be organizing a zine reading for the evening of the 25th – why not come see me in this beautiful city?

It’s been eleven days now. I’ve written this many times, only to backspace my words and move on to another project. But I need to say it now, need to get it out of my system and put it behind me for good.

Les ruelles de Hochelaga (diptych)

It was a Wednesday afternoon and I’d just gotten out of the shower. I had my Bettie Page towel wrapped around my body and was walking through the hallway toward my bedroom. The doorbell rang, but we weren’t expecting anyone, so I went out to the balcony to see who it was. There was my ex, standing at the door below. I wonder if he heard me gasp “Oh my god!” from three floors above. I dashed back into the house, shocked and shaking, asking my roommates, “What do I do? What do I do?” I knew that I couldn’t answer the door wearing just my towel (only because it would be too fitting – the first time we met, I had answered the door to him and his band in the very same towel), so I paced back and forth, thinking aloud, “I don’t want to see him. I feel sick. I have nothing to say.” But I figured he must have shown up for a reason, so I went to my room to throw on some clothes and told my roommates to buzz him in. Well, by the time I’d made up my mind, he was already gone.

Les ruelles de Hochelaga: Pizza Vincent

I stared below from the balcony again, and spotted a package leaning up against the door. One of my roommates went downstairs to pick it up for me. Just as I’d thought, it was full of film, all of the film that he’d stolen from me several months earlier. Remember? I wrote about it here. He’d actually emailed me two weeks prior about returning my film and said that it was “taking up space”. As if I had left it behind in order to inconvenience him. As if I hadn’t spent months begging him to return my belongings. I told him to either mail it to me, or pass it along to a mutual friend. The fact that he showed up at my door when I’d made it very clear that I didn’t want to see him was a total violation of my boundaries. I can’t imagine why he held onto my belongings for so long, aside from exerting what little power he had left over me, so this act was something similar. (What was he thinking?)

After he disappeared, I begun to wonder if I’d made a mistake by not having opened the door right away. What if he had something to say to me? Maybe even an apology? Scratch that, because shortly afterward, another one of his stickers was found down the street. He slapped his band’s sticker right up over mine, and I peeled it down just like I do with all the others. And I thought to myself, if he is still behaving this way, then I am awfully glad I didn’t speak to him in person. It couldn’t possibly have been productive.

I’ve told you about this, right? The way he follows me around the city and leaves a trail of stickers everywhere we go? It started on the day I moved into this apartment, when he put up stickers all along Ste-Catherine and through the streets of Hochelaga, making sure my building was surrounded. Then he put a sticker on every streetlight, telephone pole and postbox between metro Mont-Royal and my best friend’s house (actually, he did that twice). Everywhere I go, there he is, always reminding me of his presence. Like he cannot stand the fact that I might not be thinking about him for just a moment, he needs to tell me he’s been here too, make sure that I am reminded of him. He is a dog marking his territory, but he does it with stickers in lieu of piss. Nearly five months since we broke up, and he still can’t leave me alone.

Les ruelles de Hochelaga: Femme à la crème glacée

I will do what I always do, which is to look for the positive in all of this. The stickers have become a joke among my friends, who also tear them down from around the city (sometimes I wish I’d saved them all so we could turn them into confetti). And now that I’ve got my film back, I’m free to take pictures and begin new projects. It wasn’t one hour after he’d left that I was outside with my camera in hand, taking pictures of graffiti and vintage signs – two of my favourite things. The photos belong to an unfinished series titled Les ruelles de Hochelaga. I spend so much time at friends’ places that I’ve barely explored my own neighbourhood, so it’s always an adventure to me. At one point, a man stopped me in the street to tell me about a secret garden that had been planted at an abandoned fast food restaurant; there I found eggplants and cherry tomatoes. I am telling you, this city is magical.

Eggplant: Secret garden in Hochelaga

Lecture publique à l'UQAM

Let me tell you about magical. Memorizing the words to Karkwa’s songs and feeling so proud of myself to be learning how to sing in French. Going to see them play to a hundred thousand people on Thursday night, knowing that they’d played to a crowd of less than a hundred people in my twin’s home city of Guelph, Ontario only a few nights before. Reading Anaïs Nin’s journals on the metro ride home and being moved by her words in a way that I rarely feel. Spending the next day sat in various parks with nothing but my thoughts and a spiral notebook, and at one point finding myself in the middle of an outdoor lecture publique, where literature students read aloud pieces that they’d written about their favourite authors. Wandering through streets that I’ve yet to explore, admiring their unique gardens and painted balconies. Spending an evening with my best friends, then walking all the way home from the Plateau because autumn may be setting in, but the weather is still quite lovely at night. Yes, it is a magical city indeed.

This is the first in what I will call the How To Fight Boredom series, which I will simply add to whenever I have new ideas and the time to sit down and write about ‘em. I’m still getting a feel for this new blog and will soon return with my zine reviews and What I Got In The Mail This Week – now with photos!

Electrodes on my face! Sometimes I feel like I'm in a sci-fi film.

I’m writing to you from the top bunk in one of about twenty bunk beds that are set up in this particular dormitory in a Montreal pharmaceutical research centre. As long as I am here, I am known not as Amber Forrester, but as Vingt-Cinq. There are thirty-nine other women in my group. Some of them are in bed in front of their own laptops and some of them are out in the common area, watching television, reading magazines and socializing with each other. I’m the Quiet One, as I’ve always been. The flirtier nurses call me Mean Girl when they spot my tattoos.

Vingt-Cinq: This is what I look like right now.

Reading material: Journal (1931-1934) par Anaïs Nin. Je lis en français plus souvent que jamais.

This is my second weekend participating in a study on Plan B. I haven’t experienced any negative side effects, in case you’re wondering. The pharmaceutical studies that I participate in are low-risk and generally involve staying at the clinic for two separate weekends, two to four weeks apart. The clinic is testing name brand medications versus generic. Basically, I’m a lab rat and I totally love it. I always bring something of a to-do pile with me, containing zines, letters, my agenda and a novel or two. And things get done! Since this morning, I’ve read three zines (Show & Tell #6, All I Want Is Everything #2 and the Dig Deep #2 / Your Secretary #10 split, all of which will be available shortly through Fight Boredom Distro), written seven letters to friends and kept up with my journal. I’ve also had fifteen vials of blood drawn (which frankly, I enjoy), half my debt is about to be paid off, and only one of the nurses switched to English on me. I’m a very happy girl. My weekends in the clinic are almost a vacation for me – a little tiny break from the distractions of the real world. I always come out feeling refreshed and inspired. Tonight, I know that I am going to write all night long – well, after my snack of applesauce and graham crackers.

My to-do pile: Journal, agenda, countless letters and zines.

Sometimes I have good stories to tell, like the time I did a study on genital pain (actually, I did it twice), or the researcher who was studying couples and told me that it sounded like I love pizza more than my previous partner (true), or the time I did a study on stress that involved doing a mock job interview and it was worse than any interview I’ve had in real-life. I’ll share more with you in Culture Slut #25, which will hopefully be out early in 2012.

The pharmaceutical studies that I do are through Algorithme Pharma (this is not an endorsement of big pharma, just my alternative means of payin’ the billz). I also participate in many of the research studies listed on McGill Classifieds, and I check Flat Broke MTL on a regular basis. Beats workin’!

My bicycle is finally in working condition. Her name is Olive. She came into my life back when I was still living in Lindsay; my partner at the time had put an ad in the local paper describing my dream bicycle and an old man sold his to us for twenty-five bucks. It had been sitting alone in his garage for years. Olive has treated me well since we met, but I sort of abandoned her during the two years that I was living in Montréal-Nord. I felt that I lived too far away from everything, and riding a bike through the traffic on Pie-IX made me feel nervous and unsafe. She did occasionally take me to my French course, but I took the bus most of the time. So she stayed in my apartment collecting dust and makin’ me long for the days of leisurely strolls with my twin; Polaroid camera and vegetarian snacks in the chrome basket.

When I moved to my current apartment back at the end of May, I put Olive in the storage space that I share with my roomies and wondered if we’d ever ride together again. I’d learned to live without her. But over the course of the summer, I’d get asked out on bike-ridin’ dates and feel so disappointed when I had to decline. Or I’d get trapped on the metro at rush hour and feel completely powerless. One night, Brad doubled me on his bike and as we rode through the dark streets of Verdun, I knew that Olive needed to come back. I’ve ridden a couple of borrowed bikes over the past month or so and I never feel so good as when I’m gliding along the paved roads with new friends and lovers. And I knew that my fear of city-biking would be easy to overcome after I spent several days on Maranda’s bike in Guelph. So I finally pulled Olive out of the storage space this week, cleaned her up, put air in the tires and took her out for a ride. Last night I rode from my home in Hochelaga to meet up with people in St-Henri, then all the way to a party at St-Denis and Jean-Talon. I’m a little slow, and Olive is a little jangly, but we had a great time together. And I did it all in a sequin miniskirt!

Myself and Ethel; Maranda's extra bike for friends.

All this to say that I am feeling really fucking optimistic these days. Ever since July, it feels like things just keep getting better and better for me. I’m even shedding a little bit of my shyness, testing myself by smiling at strangers and sometimes (gasp!) actually engaging in conversation with them. (Okay, my nose is still buried in a book most of the time – but even that is quite a feat, as I’ve read nothing but French novels and occasional English-language zines over the past three months).

When I returned home from my trip to Ontario a couple of weeks ago, I discovered that a Special Someone had logged into my Flickr account and deleted it – meaning that I’d lost about four years worth of photos, and that all of the images over at Hello Amber had suddenly disappeared. I actually wasn’t as angry as I’d expected myself to be. It was only a few hours after the discovery that I’d decided to simply let it go – it was a forced lesson in forgetting the past, I suppose. I was almost ready to let my blog go, too, but I enjoy writing it and I’m not ready stop, though I do think that the format might change a little. So I started a new one instead. I may eventually import those old posts to this new site, but for now, you can totally peruse it as an archive. After a couple of conversations with Flickr’s technical support, my account and photos were restored (under a new username and password, of course). I should’ve put this site together a long time ago. I really like the idea of keeping the blog and distro in the same space, and I hope that it’s easy to navigate for you fine readers. So, welcome to my new blog! Please let me know if you find any glitches, typos or broken links. If you’d like to be notified of future posts, please subscribe by using the form on the right-hand sidebar. Happy reading!