As far back as I can remember I have wanted to move to California. I remember one time being on the swing set at Ecole St. Louis de Monfort and asking someone what they wanted to be when they grew up... the correct response when you go to a francophone school is to say that you want to be a NHL hockey player, but I wanted to make movies and move to California. I remember kids telling me that in the USA you had to sleep with guns under your pillow! You got robbed every single day! And my only thought was "COOL".

I am a tremendously lucky girl. I was born First Nations and adopted into a loving half Asian, half European family who gave me an immediate escape from the uncertainties of Native American culture. I get a free pass on both the full vision, dental, and health coverage, plus I get to live and work anywhere I want to in Canada and the United states.
Not only do I have the free green card, but I also got hit by a car recently and the insurance from that accident is funding my entire move and then some.

I have many things to do before I actually move to LA... selling my furniture, packing, dealing with the last of my law suit, quitting my Starbucks job, finding a place to live, buying a car, and so on.

I get to reflect upon being twenty-two.

A few years ago I used to work at a Starbucks up across the Burrard bridge, a mere twelve blocks away from where I currently live. I had just quit music school and was starting to work there full time, doing regular opening shifts. The cherry blossoms had already bloomed and had dusted the streets with pale pink petals, making way for the hefty greens of a Vancouver summer.
I remember being excrutiatingly lonely then, estranged from Levon, trying to come to terms with the remorse I had after quitting school. I was in academic limbo, I had an apartment that I couldn't afford, I hated my roommate, I was at odds with myself, and all I wanted to do was go to film school and get the rest of my post-secondary education over with.

I don't know how it happened.
During film school I was as bitter as ever; I guess I didn't really respect my classmates. The problem with the program was that we were forced to work on each other's projects especially when we had no faith in them (which was all the time), and we were in constant competition with each other even though we were all just barely mediocre. I came to film school thinking that I would meet a class-full of kindred spirits but I found that the school had the same percentage of morons as everywhere else; the same cliques, the same douche-bags, the same self-deluded arrogance as in music school, the bachelor of psychology program, high school, creative writing groups... at least I know now never to get my hopes up about that.
I slept every moment I could while I was there; I slinked off to slumber on secluded campus couches, I dozed on stolen prop cushions and my winter jacket under the desk of my edit suite, I fashioned chair-beds in the studios, I hunched over computer desks, and then there were the ever-popular 30 minute walks home for a 15-minute nap... I still managed an average of 12 hours of sleep against 12 hours of school work.

Then something changed. I got to spend a relaxing, and intensely boring, few weeks at home with my parents and the only thing I managed to do was spend hours downloading the Mighty Boosh. I got in a lot of Monique-time and used it all to think about what I want out of life. When I first went to film school my focus was on drama and the melancholy of North American life. But I left film school realizing that comedy is where I will find myself...
When I was driving an hour-and a half to Edmonton it suddenly dawned on me that I MUST move to California!

And ever since then I have been excited and confident and happy and silly and amazed. Like all that depression and frustration from the past ten years just washed away.


I'm almost 23 and I feel alive. Oh my fucking god.

"Hey Mandy,

"I am up at 4:30 in the morning because I've decided to move to California and I have been too excited to sleep (and I'm not even moving to Long Beach until June!). In lieu of sleep, I decided to go through my old journals and reminisce about my transition into adulthood and your name seems to come up a lot in these books (as recently as 2007).
I guess I'm a whiz at finding people on facebook, which is how I know this is you.

"I really wish we could reconnect on some level because my biggest regret in life is fucking up our friendship. I genuinely adored you when I was in high school but I had such heavy self-esteem issues that I couldn't really deal with any sort of affection. Jr. High and High School were just awful; the harassment, the pressure of grades, dealing with impending adulthood! I was horribly depressed during the bulk of my schooling, and I'm really sorry for treating you the way I did.
I'm not expecting to be best friends again, but I would settle for being acquaintances or just facebook friends. I would love to know what is up in Mandy-world...

"You can decline my friend request and I probably won't bother you ever again; but I'll always wonder about you. I'm sorry.

"- Love Monique"

Every now and then I will gather up the courage to call her house to see if she is still there. I will dream about going over to her house, but things are always strained.
I remember one time when we were 10 years old we made a fort underneath her picnic table, and we were huddled under there with our feet sticking out either side. I don't really remember what game we were playing but I started swearing my ass off and her Mother overheard. I think that was the day that her Mom decided that she didn't like me...
There are other reasons why her Mom doesn't like me though: My tendency to overreact when things didn't go my way, I was particularly arrogant and I would bicker with anyone about anything (including/ESPECIALLY her Mom), I encouraged Mandy to not spend as much time with her family/I was selfish when it came to her and wanted her to spend all her time with me, I had no respect for Mandy's intelligence, I would be unexpectedly cruel, and towards the end of our friendship I was horribly controlling, bitter and emotionally abusive!
So I don't really blame Mandy for rejecting my friend requests on facebook and I don't blame her Mother for not passing on my messages to call.

I give Mandy credit for saving my life when I was 16 years old. It was the worst part of my 10 year long depression; I won't go into any details but I suppose the truth is that I had attempted suicide at least ONCE and was determined to succeed. When you get that far into depression there's a point where you have to rethink things; give yourself another chance to live. Sometimes it doesn't work, but a lot of times this moment of clarity is the thing that allows people to live.
I don't know why Mandy came to me as the ultimate answer to my suicide problem. We had a strained friendship from the very beginning because I was a jealous, awful, snob... but I think her genuine affection inspired me to stay here. It also made me feel very guilty to think of Mandy having a best friend who was dead... someone she had failed in some way (it also made me feel guilty to imagine my Mother with a daughter she failed to save from suicide as well).

When I was in Grade 12 I switched to the public system from catholic because I felt haunted. It sounds really lame to say that now, but when I was at Notre Dame I couldn't get away from the awful memories and associations. There were people I idolized but would never be my friend, boys who still sexually harassed me, people who seemed to know my every move, bathrooms I ran to so I could cry, classrooms where I managed to cut myself under the tables, and even the smell just reminded me of suicide... suicide and academic failure! It's so dramatic to think of all this now that I'm about to turn 23, but high school is life when you're 16. I needed a fresh start.
The only thing I left behind was Mandy and a school that had the same connotations to her as it did to me. She was in the classes below me (I took the standard curriculum but Mandy was in the classes that were slightly lower than that; ones that would get you into college but not into a good program or anything). The boys in her classes were especially cruel, and I was always there to defend her. I was cruel to those boys if they so much as looked at Mandy the wrong way... she considered switching schools but her parents thought that Catholic school was superior.

The point of all this reminiscing is that I still love Mandy and I wish we could be friends. I am the polar opposite of who I was when I was 16 but I doubt she'll give me another chance for friendship.

I suppose that's Karma right there. Fuck.

Before anything existed, God existed, for God doesn’t exist in the same sense that people do. He does not take up the space, he cannot be confined to the cupboard, and the only thing that he can be compared to in the human world is the idea (though God transcends even the immense space of human consciousness).
There wasn’t even darkness back before anything existed; God didn’t grope for light switches, there was no sun with which he warmed himself, nor did he require warmth, there just wasn’t anything… no space, no law… there wasn’t even God.

            Twelve minutes after the “frumpf” and void, there were googles of muffins that God intelligently designed via cosmic “accident” (though not an accident the way humans have accidents, rather an omnipotent experiment that he knew would ultimately go horribly wrong). These weren’t any ordinary muffins; these were blueberry muffins and they were infinite in number and in size and in texture.
           In order to enjoy his happy accident, God first created God-in-body (similar to the stature of man only inconceivable in smell and colour), complete with a variety of senses unknown to humanity. He had the regular five but afterwards he had what he dubbed to be smision, floyds, floyce, drolle, crimp, and volllltre, which are inconceivable. One might wonder why God chose this particular style of body when he created himself, and some might say that he had no choice, while still others might say that it was the only choice he had, but in reality, God liked the feel of flesh and the sensation of blood pulsing through it and it was also the only choice he had.
When eating the muffins, God thought they were so good that he decided to spawn humanity to enjoy them with him! And that’s where Genesis REALLY begins.

 

The truth is that everything written in Genesis is textual nonsense ripped from the minds of the ancients, but the story of God expands beyond time as we know it: for there weren’t always years because the Earth didn’t always orbit the sun, and there weren’t always days, hours or minutes because the Earth didn’t always rotate. There were millions, upon billions, upon quadrillions of “years” where God was just alone with muffins trying to come up with ways to share this divine gift with something, nay SOMEONE who could appreciate it.

First, one has to really understand the true nature of God to get his story, for every story that has ever been told is, in essence, a story about God.
The thing about God is that he has had a body for longer than anyone has ever had a body, but he doesn’t choose to wear it all the time. He hasn’t actually used his body in about 75 years, so he stows it away somewhere along the rails of a distant nebula where no one can get to it.
          Most of the time God exists as he did from the very “beginning”, “floating” in the “massive”- “void” of “space”, looking down from upon the “clouds” in the “sky” with his “choirs” of “angels” at his side. He can create or eliminate anything from existence at will, he can make miracles happen, he can bend the laws because he created the laws, and he can change the laws at will (did you think that the universe always operated this way? No, God changed everything in 1985 to deal with a few nasty bugs in the system, but no one can recall the difference because God changed history and memory in the process).

The Old Testament colours God as this horrible asshole who liked to cause a huge amount of trouble, but that’s an unfair assumption by ancient people who called themselves “prophets.” These prophets were mistaken about the true nature of their knowledge, for these men were nothing special, they were no smarter than you or your friends, they just suffered plain old schizophrenia. For, in truth, God never gave anyone any specific knowledge over their fellow man, simply because there was no knowledge to be given. God never, ever had a plan for civilization; he merely concocted humanity as a method to share recipes with. In the modern world, REAL “prophets” by GOD’s standards are people who seem to have a preternatural ability to understand and complete muffins of all types, even bran muffins!
            In the New Testament God seems to be very concerned with the redemption of humanity and decides to send himself in the form of a Jesus to make things right with the world. But God has no plans for humanity, God doesn’t judge humanity, and God does not have emotions in the human sense of the world. He doesn’t get involved in politics, nor does he care much for the drama of our Earthly lives. No, he doesn’t sit around in the clouds obsessing over the likes of pregnant thirteen year olds, he doesn’t decide who gets theirs and who doesn’t, and he certainly doesn’t feel anything special for us. God is one thing all the time; he is love, though not love in the human sense. At most God thinks that humanity and human antics are silly and cute, no matter what they may be: whether you murder, rape and pillage, or you try to live your life by the “virtue” of an untrue text (whichever text it is). The ONLY thing that God EVER did was create; the rest was up to us.

 

Genesis 1:1-2 “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void: and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.”
After muffins, there was much ado about creating the Earth. The Bible acts like it was simple; as simple as a blink or a whiskers, but there were way more chemistries and physicses involved. The first thing he did was explosively exhale and then there was hydrogens! And then he danced and there was dusts! Gas and debris occupied lightless space for quadrillions of ‘years’ before there were proper elements and things. To God this was instantaneous but we could live at least one thousand lives in that time!
There were many dimensions of law that ascended into truth thenceforth. The moons happened and elements came together to form suns, and these things gravitated to each other. He constructed all these things on dimensions tinier than regular molecules with strings even more miniscule than modern day pollens! Then he set forth law working strictly in space-time, for this is the best playground for consciousness.
          Yes, he created the heaven first but the “heaven” of Christianity resides in the world of dances and dreams. It never even occurred to God in advance to find a place for the soul after death, let alone an eternal award for virtue or sin.

 Long before there were men there were angels who were scattered across the cosmos gathering dust on the book shelves of eternity. They didn’t do much but were merely infallible creations designed as prototypes of men. The first inceptions were ugly and extremely powerful, as God’s themselves (these angels actually went on to cause shenanigans on ancient man with their fancy technologies), with intellect that made God smile and laugh, but they had no ability to taste so he sent them to a distant land to frolic aimlessly on rainbow stars, concocting their own tiny universes like kids on Earth grow sea monkeys, and play make-believe.
Further prototypes of men were developed but abandoned in similar ways; in fact, it wasn’t until God invented death that he was satisfied with his creation and decided at once to develop Earth.

 

Once God came up with his plan for man, conjured the universe, fit the galaxies in place, aligned the planets, and allowed nature on Earth, he had to find the right vessel for the first humans.
            Evolution is truth; it was impeccably constructed to make way for humanity, the same way people finish building their homes before moving in. Without it, the creatures on Earth wouldn’t have been able to survive beyond infancy in the wild winds of Pangaea. Adaptation is the key to continuous life.

It all started with a single cell, then one cell begat another cell, then two cells begat two more cells, then four cells begat four more cells, then eight cells begat eight more cells, then sixteen cells begat sixteen more cells, then thirty-two cells begat thirty-two more cells, then sixty-four cells begat sixty-four more cells until they developed from zygote to embryo to fetus to new born baby.
Adam was not born of the dust, but in regular ways, and his name wasn’t really Adam. He suckled at the breast of a human like creature who was neanderthalic in ape-like tenacity. She had no ability for formal speech but taught Adam to use simple tools, hunt for small animals, and forage for berries in the thick, rich, and thick bushes.
            While Adam was busy learning the ways of the natural world there were other humans being born to other neanderthalic Mothers on the great continent of Africa. There really was no Eve way back then, and there most definitely wasn’t a Cain or immortal Abel (doomed to wander the Earth forever). At least a dozen men were born in the beginning and they had the ability to mate with both the human women and the women who were still in the previous evolutionary phase. This helped to dissuade inbreeding and also to spread the population of men upon the wide face of the Earth, even as far away as Mesopotamia where civilization burst forth unheeded when someone had the brilliant idea to build a few sand houses close by an oasis, negating the trek from water supply to water supply in the long desert summers.

Cooking evolved faster than man did and they were already cooking flat breads on hot rocks by the time there was civilization. They dined at tables fixed low to the ground, they roasted game and sheep over fires big and small, and there were mountains of figs throughout the lands.
It wasn’t until the French people were invented that pastries came into being, for sugar had not even made it from the tropics to the place of baking until the French were born. One master chef in France conceived of muffins in a dream and created them by mixing components of bread and cake together and putting the pre-cooked mixture into a cup-cake pan.
Ever since then the world has been falling apart, because God doesn’t need anything now that he’s shared his gift with someone.

Before anything existed, God existed, for God doesn’t exist in the same sense that people do. He does not take up the space, he cannot be confined to the cupboard, and the only thing that he can be compared to in the human world is the idea (though God transcends even the immense space of human consciousness).
There wasn’t even darkness back before anything existed; God didn’t grope for light switches, there was no sun with which he warmed himself, nor did he require warmth, there just wasn’t anything… no space, no law… there wasn’t even God.

            Twelve minutes after the “frumpf” and void, there were googles of muffins that God intelligently designed via cosmic “accident” (though not an accident the way humans have accidents, rather an omnipotent experiment that he knew would ultimately go horribly wrong). These weren’t any ordinary muffins; these were blueberry muffins and they were infinite in number and in size and in texture.
           In order to enjoy his happy accident, God first created God-in-body (similar to the stature of man only inconceivable in smell and colour), complete with a variety of senses unknown to humanity. He had the regular five but afterwards he had what he dubbed to be smision, floyds, floyce, drolle, crimp, and volllltre, which are inconceivable. One might wonder why God chose this particular style of body when he created himself, and some might say that he had no choice, while still others might say that it was the only choice he had, but in reality, God liked the feel of flesh and the sensation of blood pulsing through it and it was also the only choice he had.
When eating the muffins, God thought they were so good that he decided to spawn humanity to enjoy them with him! And that’s where Genesis REALLY begins.

 

The truth is that everything written in Genesis is textual nonsense ripped from the minds of the ancients, but the story of God expands beyond time as we know it: for there weren’t always years because the Earth didn’t always orbit the sun, and there weren’t always days, hours or minutes because the Earth didn’t always rotate. There were millions, upon billions, upon quadrillions of “years” where God was just alone with muffins trying to come up with ways to share this divine gift with something, nay SOMEONE who could appreciate it.

First, one has to really understand the true nature of God to get his story, for every story that has ever been told is, in essence, a story about God.
The thing about God is that he has had a body for longer than anyone has ever had a body, but he doesn’t choose to wear it all the time. He hasn’t actually used his body in about 75 years, so he stows it away somewhere along the rails of a distant nebula where no one can get to it.
          Most of the time God exists as he did from the very “beginning”, “floating” in the “massive”- “void” of “space”, looking down from upon the “clouds” in the “sky” with his “choirs” of “angels” at his side. He can create or eliminate anything from existence at will, he can make miracles happen, he can bend the laws because he created the laws, and he can change the laws at will (did you think that the universe always operated this way? No, God changed everything in 1985 to deal with a few nasty bugs in the system, but no one can recall the difference because God changed history and memory in the process).

The Old Testament colours God as this horrible asshole who liked to cause a huge amount of trouble, but that’s an unfair assumption by ancient people who called themselves “prophets.” These prophets were mistaken about the true nature of their knowledge, for these men were nothing special, they were no smarter than you or your friends, they just suffered plain old schizophrenia. For, in truth, God never gave anyone any specific knowledge over their fellow man, simply because there was no knowledge to be given. God never, ever had a plan for civilization; he merely concocted humanity as a method to share recipes with. In the modern world, REAL “prophets” by GOD’s standards are people who seem to have a preternatural ability to understand and complete muffins of all types, even bran muffins!
            In the New Testament God seems to be very concerned with the redemption of humanity and decides to send himself in the form of a Jesus to make things right with the world. But God has no plans for humanity, God doesn’t judge humanity, and God does not have emotions in the human sense of the world. He doesn’t get involved in politics, nor does he care much for the drama of our Earthly lives. No, he doesn’t sit around in the clouds obsessing over the likes of pregnant thirteen year olds, he doesn’t decide who gets theirs and who doesn’t, and he certainly doesn’t feel anything special for us. God is one thing all the time; he is love, though not love in the human sense. At most God thinks that humanity and human antics are silly and cute, no matter what they may be: whether you murder, rape and pillage, or you try to live your life by the “virtue” of an untrue text (whichever text it is). The ONLY thing that God EVER did was create; the rest was up to us.

 

Genesis 1:1-2 “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void: and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.”
After muffins, there was much ado about creating the Earth. The Bible acts like it was simple; as simple as a blink or a whiskers, but there were way more chemistries and physicses involved. The first thing he did was explosively exhale and then there was hydrogens! And then he danced and there was dusts! Gas and debris occupied lightless space for quadrillions of ‘years’ before there were proper elements and things. To God this was instantaneous but we could live at least one thousand lives in that time!
There were many dimensions of law that ascended into truth thenceforth. The moons happened and elements came together to form suns, and these things gravitated to each other. He constructed all these things on dimensions tinier than regular molecules with strings even more miniscule than modern day pollens! Then he set forth law working strictly in space-time, for this is the best playground for consciousness.
          Yes, he created the heaven first but the “heaven” of Christianity resides in the world of dances and dreams. It never even occurred to God in advance to find a place for the soul after death, let alone an eternal award for virtue or sin.

 Long before there were men there were angels who were scattered across the cosmos gathering dust on the book shelves of eternity. They didn’t do much but were merely infallible creations designed as prototypes of men. The first inceptions were ugly and extremely powerful, as God’s themselves (these angels actually went on to cause shenanigans on ancient man with their fancy technologies), with intellect that made God smile and laugh, but they had no ability to taste so he sent them to a distant land to frolic aimlessly on rainbow stars, concocting their own tiny universes like kids on Earth grow sea monkeys, and play make-believe.
Further prototypes of men were developed but abandoned in similar ways; in fact, it wasn’t until God invented death that he was satisfied with his creation and decided at once to develop Earth.

 

Once God came up with his plan for man, conjured the universe, fit the galaxies in place, aligned the planets, and allowed nature on Earth, he had to find the right vessel for the first humans.
            Evolution is truth; it was impeccably constructed to make way for humanity, the same way people finish building their homes before moving in. Without it, the creatures on Earth wouldn’t have been able to survive beyond infancy in the wild winds of Pangaea. Adaptation is the key to continuous life.

It all started with a single cell, then one cell begat another cell, then two cells begat two more cells, then four cells begat four more cells, then eight cells begat eight more cells, then sixteen cells begat sixteen more cells, then thirty-two cells begat thirty-two more cells, then sixty-four cells begat sixty-four more cells until they developed from zygote to embryo to fetus to new born baby.
Adam was not born of the dust, but in regular ways, and his name wasn’t really Adam. He suckled at the breast of a human like creature who was neanderthalic in ape-like tenacity. She had no ability for formal speech but taught Adam to use simple tools, hunt for small animals, and forage for berries in the thick, rich, and thick bushes.
            While Adam was busy learning the ways of the natural world there were other humans being born to other neanderthalic Mothers on the great continent of Africa. There really was no Eve way back then, and there most definitely wasn’t a Cain or immortal Abel (doomed to wander the Earth forever). At least a dozen men were born in the beginning and they had the ability to mate with both the human women and the women who were still in the previous evolutionary phase. This helped to dissuade inbreeding and also to spread the population of men upon the wide face of the Earth, even as far away as Mesopotamia where civilization burst forth unheeded when someone had the brilliant idea to build a few sand houses close by an oasis, negating the trek from water supply to water supply in the long desert summers.

Cooking evolved faster than man did and they were already cooking flat breads on hot rocks by the time there was civilization. They dined at tables fixed low to the ground, they roasted game and sheep over fires big and small, and there were mountains of figs throughout the lands.
It wasn’t until the French people were invented that pastries came into being, for sugar had not even made it from the tropics to the place of baking until the French were born. One master chef in France conceived of muffins in a dream and created them by mixing components of bread and cake together and putting the pre-cooked mixture into a cup-cake pan.
Ever since then the world has been falling apart, because God doesn’t need anything now that he’s shared his gift with someone.