10 September, 2006 - 23:15

It's official. I am addicted to the soundtrack to Rent; I can't stop listening to it. The music is so visceral, I can see the characters doing what they do in the production.

"Will I lose my dignity?
Will someone care?
Will I wake tomorrow from this nightmare?"

So beautiful!

My head feels like a cotton ginny got stuck inside it. I have about zero points of mental acuity left and I am working in jobs where I need to use my brain twenty four hours a day. The new job is a challenge, but a beautiful challenge. It's working with real people - everyday when I walk into work there are clients, friends of clients, volunteers, children walking around, drinking tea, making vegan chili, talking about their latest dildo adventures...

It, too, is beautiful!

So I have to figure out where my little disconnected sense of satisfaction is. It's almost an ideal type job: here I am, getting paid to talk about sex, to write about sex, to organize events around healthy sexuality and...

yet I can't seem to get it together.

I can't seem to grasp it.

Maybe I am at a plateau. I've been here before, where I've looked out and seen all the component pieces of my life scattered everywhere, my friends doing what they do in tandem. And yet - on the plateau, my brain-eye-hand coordination always fails me: I get stuck.

The IDRC is not the real work but I was content to be there. The office at the UNFPA in Lilongwe was not the real world.

But the rural hospital was real. The HIV positive woman who was slowly being poisoned in her blood because of a pregnancy complication, squatting on the floor of the hospital without a way to get to the central hospital no more than a 2 hour drive away - was real. The fact that the central hospital employees decided to drive into the capital to have a day of picking up stationery supplies instead of being available to bring this women to the hospital - was real.

Oh my god, how could I forget? Coffin road - was real. A stretch of about 5 kilometres in Lilongwe where the only thing you saw were coffin shops lining the sides of the road - was real. The 10 yr old and 7 yr old girls who scavenged the rubbish bins for my used container of chicken and chips - was real.

But the IDRC isn't real. ACO is.

When I was at the Asia Festival today, sitting cross legged on the ground with Ariel, watching all the Asian folks sit cross legged, quietly removing their sandals I was brought back to the feeling of wanted to get back in the red earth. Or, at least, smash the concrete.