30 in 30: Day 29

Another year of skipping the Halifax Pop Explosion; the fourth in a row. I keep telling myself that I'm going to go to the next one, but just like Sappyfest, I don't even bother. Maybe I'm being needlessly frugal or maybe I've reached the age where I can't be bothered to get excited about live music. When my friend was in town last week, he suggested just going out to random shows with no regard as to whether I was familiar with the band or knew anyone else that was attending. Sometimes I just prefer to spend the money on a burrito.

There are nights where it hits me that I live in this amazing harbourfront city, and taking advantage of what it has to offer is just a matter of me willing myself to take a bus out of suburbia. And yet, when I do, I'm at a loss as to what to do, or I realize that I spent the time and effort to do something I didn't exactly want to do, and now have to spend even more to make it back home. If I take my camera, it suddenly becomes a load I wish I didn't have to carry or worry about. If I don't, I come across a scene that I wish I could take a good picture of. I have to justify everything to myself.

Random scenes come to me when I'm out and about, but they dissipate by the time I sit down to put pen to paper. I have an idea for a mood I want to create and some of the people that come to mind as the basis for characters, but nothing much in terms of plotting.

I leave you tonight with a 30 year old Prefab Sprout song.

30 in 30: Day 23

I'm still trying to make sense of why I didn't bother checking out more of Nocturne last night, instead opting to go home almost immediately after leaving Lot Six. I checked even less out than I did last year, which also was a little bit of a bust. Was it just the rain that actually let up fairly early on but dampened my interest to the point where I went home? Was I really in a rush to get home for Saturday Night Live? Do I actually give a fuck about the arts, or do I only try to convince myself that I do?

I haven't really felt that I've been able to take full advantage of living in the city, largely due to financial constraints. Live music, art shows, theatre...I can never really bring myself to go out to any of these. Maybe it's just a side effect of the precarious work I was doing for the last 11 months. It's funny, when I lived in Miramichi, I longed to be in a place with a decent amount of cultural life, but now that I'm in Halifax and close to all this art, I don't normally bother, not even when it's free and involves people I know. Ever since the provincial government gutted the film tax credit in April, I'm afraid that one ripple effect is that the cultural life of Halifax is going to dry up.

How long will I stay in Halifax? I don't know. I'm not especially settled here; I do have a good circle of friends, but I don't have a stable career or family tying me to this place, and I'm very reluctant to be in a relationship or follow through on an attraction until I feel a little more stable on the career front. Life tends to go on even while I'm trying to figure out who I am and what I want: I have to eat, pay rent, try to socialize, and sleep anyway, regardless of whether I write or take pictures. I'm not sure whether either is what I should be or want to be doing with my life.

Then again, as Carolyn Mark sang, "everything happens either not at all or at the same time."

30 in 30: Day 1

I feel awful about not updating this thing more regularly, so I'm forcing myself to come up with a new post every day for the next month (thanks for the inspiration, Daisy).

I have a pile of photos to edit but I never get around to working on them; part of the issue is that I have a desktop computer, and time spent editing is time that I have to commit myself to staying in the apartment. I'm still working on my post about New York three months after the trip, but I've already touched on that in my last post. I don't want to repeat myself.  Maybe that will be one of my 30 in 30 posts, although part of me feels like that would be cheating since I've been working on the draft for ages.

Canada's currently in the middle of a federal election campaign; the big issue isn't so much who will be our next prime minister so much as whether enough people in the country want to get rid of Stephen Harper and the Conservatives on October 19. I definitely intend to vote, but I'm just as ready for the campaign to end. I can't really say I'm overly impressed by either of the three front-runners, but at this point I know what I believe in, and have a good idea where my vote will go in a little more than three weeks time. Four years ago, I was more inclined to get confrontational every time I saw something I didn't agree with politically online, but I now tend to keep my mouth shut. I don't know if this is more a sign of maturity or a growing cynicism. Maybe I'm just self-censoring.

Summer's over. I did manage to go to New York, I went to a few events here in Halifax, and I even went to the beach once, but a lot of it seemed to blend together. I still don't feel like I force myself to go out enough; part of it is because I live on the outskirts of Fairview and Clayton Park in Halifax: it's not a particularly walkable area, and the bus rides are pretty long and convoluted if I want to head downtown or to the North End (usually about 35-45 minutes). There's also the issue of the bus service ending around midnight, and I generally don't want to spend an extra $15-20 in cab fare on top of the cost of cover and drinks.

Next week will be my three year anniversary of living in Halifax; the last two years I've gone out, but I don't really want to spend that much money for food and drinks with a couple of friends, but I'm thinking of doing something lower-key this year. I'm debating whether to just have people over at my place, but that involves cleaning and a conscious effort to entertain. I did have a friend over on Wednesday, but I'm hesitant to try to bring a larger and more disparate group into my space. That feels more like something you do when you've bought a house rather than just rent an apartment.