Kate Carraway

Eff this pee

2010-11-30T08:23:00.001-08:00

Hey I'm done! I DID IT!

www.katecarraway.com

Let's blow this popsicle stand forever and ever. TO THE REAL INTERNETS!

(I will probably/definitely continue to tweet more than I blog, that is just the reality of life, friends.)

I'm doing this now.

2010-11-16T22:46:00.001-08:00

http://www.formspring.me/KateCarraway

Sorry!

2010-10-27T08:15:00.001-07:00

Sorry my blog is so stupid! If you care/are cool enough to come and read this sometimes then I owe you an apology for how bad it sucks.

I am currently checking out and interviewing peeps to make me a new one. I had hired a guy to make me a site but it didn't work out.

I need someone who can build/set up a pretty basic site, nothing flashy (or Flash-y), and set up analytics etc. I suck at all that stuff and also do not care to do it myself. I pay dollars. (If you're interested in the gig, email me! My nerd friends only have so many developer/designer type friends.)

xoxoxooxox

Nope.

2010-10-24T14:29:00.000-07:00

I'm a little bit sick and thusly a lot bit immature and self-sorry feeling. What's that Marilyn Monroe line, like, "If you can't handle my worst, you don't deserve my best"??? Here's some worst.

Spent three hours at the laundromat today, a first in a very long while. (I have mostly hand-washables and dry cleaning, so usually drop my remaining sheets/towels/hoodies/etc off for wash-and-fold, but owing to some recent parental commentary about how free and easy I am with my discretionary income [taxis, wash-and-fold, occasional cleaning lady BUT ONLY WHEN I AM VERY VERY BUSY], I was attempting Protestant-style thrift.)

Though I have washed my clothes in an en-plein-air basin in the middle of a field in Guatemala and in sinks around the globe and in ten years of laundromats, and have written about the Laundry Experience in a column at EYE, this was among the worst.

EYE column is here.

It included:

My Roots sweatpants (hello, I am from the suburbs, I own several pieces of dense cotton casualwear from Roots that I wear exclusively when I am alone or ostensibly so, like at the laundry place or the unsexy grocery store (not Whole Foods obvi)); anyway my Roots sweatpants (reddish/v. baggy/like a girl with an accountant boyfriend and a desk job to tolerate while planning their pathetic wedding) falling down below my butt, because my day-to-day wallet (a heavy black un-logoed Coach affair that I got long before the grosser Coach items were the most hateful thing) was in the pocket because WTF are you supposed to do with it? Sling your bag around your shoulder while you're making change and pouring soap and stuffing your long johns into the dryer? Anyway, I had boxer-briefs on underneath (just a lowest common denominator fashion situation but my hair was doing this amazing unwashed Bardot thing so I was kind of sunny about it regardless).

Leering (not just "Ew that creepy guy looked in my direction" leering, but the kind where dude keeps opening his mouth at you, waiting for something great to say (those words never arrive)) ginger man who followed me around to the point where I had to just stand and stare at him and give him some Really? eyebrows.

Reading a bunch of Super Sad True Love Story, which is my book club's selection of the month and which I am really digging. Except every time I put it down to check on my shit I kept squirreling out because I'm perennially obsessed with being robbed and a fresh hardcover is something robbable, right?

A total cost of thirty dollars for the whole situation, not including my laundry supplies, which is not enough savings to justify not just dropping it off on the way to work and getting it days later all packed neat and sweet. (Actually I saved probably thirty dollars which is maybe a lot but three hours? Maybe if they did neck massages too.) My sister's old nanny (her name was Princess! FOR REAL, PLUS SHE WAS SO COOL) used to fold my underpants into these little panini-looking things so part of the wash and fold experience is to recreate how nice that was.

I forget why I'm writing this? Ok byeeeeee.

I feel bad for everyone who knows me, at least a little bit

2010-10-16T19:01:00.001-07:00

A few weeks ago, my super-nice friend (who is somehow involved with the band? I don't remember the partics) gave me front-row tix at Massey Hall to see The xx, who I really like. I teach a writing class on Wednesday nights (I have to revise how I say that: strangers always get really excited and I have to be all "Calm down, it's Continuing Studies," a.k.a. I'm not one of those twentysomething Ph.D. genius-cools), and I couldn't get there till 9:30 or so, which meant that an usher had to walk me and Alexis down the middle aisle in the middle of a song to our seats.

I knew about 100 people there so I tried to obscure my face with my scarf/hair (oh and to be extra-extra-cool I later realized my scarf still had two dry-cleaning tags on it, so that's great). This move didn't work: the next day a colleague told me she saw it happen and was like ASSHOLES! and then I was on the phone with a publicist and he was like "Uh yeah I was two rows behind you."

Anyway I just found out that the opening band was Warpaint. Like I just found this out now. I'm SO BUMMED OUT, I LOVE WARPAINT! Not that I could have done anything; the "teacher" can't really skip. Especially when I give everyone a hard time about showing up each week because "writing and workshopping is a collective process" (extra-extra-cool).

Anyway, read this article on Warpaint by Vice's Hunter Stephenson, who I quite like, and sometimes I think he does a similar thing with his writing that I often do, which is to make real and serious use of his personal sensibility and the subculture(s) from which (whence?) he came (comes?) alongside (and this is where it gets good) a pretty formal way of doing journalism. A lot of dude-guy-young-writer-no-rules-mom! stuff can get pretty tiresome in all its overdoneness, so reintroducing structure feels important sometimes. (I'm not saying we're similar writers, but I am saying I relate to his stuff. Anyway.)

http://www.interviewmagazine.com/blogs/music/2010-10-14/warpaint-the-xx-the-fool/

Le siiiiiiiiiigh. Also I cried during "Islands" because I had been like "Nope" to an adored/doomed boy/relationship earlier that day.

Fuck, Warpaint are good.

RIP My Life, My Fault; Long Live As-Yet-Unnamed Advice Column

2010-10-11T18:09:00.000-07:00

Preambles: I had a rad summer, thank you for asking, not quite spent shopping at Chanel and experiencing the bohemian juju of unscheduled days on the Left Bank in Paris (that is a Gossip Girl reference), but one spent living on an island, and everything beautiful that comes with it, including hundreds of ferry rides (I wrote "fairy" by "mistake") and making out in nature, and waking up every day in a house beside a lake. Plus: superiority.

And then it turned into September and I moved back to the city and was instantly mortified that I had to exist at all. Like, this weird thing happened, and kept happening, where the one second difference between being totally engaged in something and then not being engaged anymore would just break me, and I would just close my eyes and want so badly to get to go to sleep. It was Classic Depression (no: "Depression Classic"), but it only happened in small, exhausting moments. Usually when I feel like that for more than a day it is:

1. Boys
2. Friends
3. Family
4. Work
5. the XYZ of internal monologue and vision and creativity and all of that unexplainable, alone stuff.

Turns out it was eeeeeverything, all of the above, and for serious, and for too long.

Then in one period of three or four days, I kind of solved everything at once. (Not really, but life/sanity just came together in a convenient way after almost two months of stress-barfs and frustration, and it's more fun/dramatic to imagine waking up and thinking "Oh, I'm fine." Which did actually happen, on Sunday morning, but only after I had naturally arrived there.)

That's me, cooooold chillin! (He's smiling!)

One big change of a few (the others aren't your business I'm terribly sorry) is that I won't be writing My Life, My Fault anymore. I've been writing my column every week for a while now (months!), and started writing it almost two years ago. Not to gay out too much but that column changed my life, as did the fact of many people responding to it. (Liked it, loved it, hated it, wrote me emails, stopped me on the street, called my boss/father to complain, offered me other jobs and other gigs, stopped being friends with me, asked me on dates, told me to die, scribbled notes on the back of the package they were delivering that said "Love your writing, keep it up - The Messenger.") So, thank you if you ever did any of that.

I play like such a dick sometimes, but that is 90% because a) I'm an extremely melty and emotional individual and that is how we protect our quick-thumping hearts and b) I'm a professional critic of the world around me, soooo it's just good and nice to take a sec to be like "That was for real."

Magnificent.

In its stead I'll be writing an advice column. It'll start in... two weeks! Soon. Here's the thing about that: I need help. The new column will focus on problems that span the experience of one's twenties and thirties: relationships, love, sex, friends, family, work, money, identity, purpose... Fuck, could be God, your haircut, buying a couch, drinking too much, whatever. This will be fun, I think: my project as a writer is not to front as an expert (Trust: I am not "figured out" as a human) but to dig around in the dirt a little, and ask why we do the things we do, why we want what we want, and how to get it, and how to deal with it. (I think that if you liked the Quarterlife Crisis story and/or My Life, My Fault, you'll like it.) SOOOOO if you have a question, please email me at kcarraway@eyeweekly.com.

^^That's the art from the Quarterlife cover.

In time the column will have a name (I think I know what it will be, but not 100%) and stuff, but for now, if you have a question (anonymous!!! of course) about anything that I could point my arrows at, please send.

Oh and I'm going to keep writing essays about myself OBVIOUSLY. Just not in the same forum or on the same schedule. Oh and I want to say a thing here, because I can and because I want to note my friends who have tolerated the emotional and practical byproducts of my weird job: Edward Keenan hired me and on my second day of work I pitched him a column that was "like an indie rock Leah McLaren" (which is gross/gauche, but he knew what I meant and it worked). Chris Bilton listened to me being like "Soooooooo is THIS a good idea? Is THIS?" way too much and told me when I was being a retard. They are both SUCH smart, radical, open-minded dudes. My Private Citizen Best Friend is so patient and overwhelmingly CORRECT about everything that it is almost implausible, and he listened to me wonder over My Life, My Fault a whole lot; WORD also to pals Micah, David, Reen, Aaron, Shaun, Star, Anna and everyone who was cool and didn't get mad/jealous/mean; FUCK YOU to everyone who did. (I wanted to do that for effect, but I don't really care, actually.) (Actually, fuck you guys.) (Jkjkjkjkjkjk.) Nick and Brutal Knights lent me the column's name. The guilt over "being like this" that I've felt since I was 11 or 12 has completely dissipated, even as I wrote about our dog dying, not measuring up to my mother, the way I imagine my father's death, my sisters' six children, and being the youngest child, because my parents and sisters have been gigantically cool and generous about it. That's the BEST part!

Things To Do Before I'm Dead (30): Part One

2010-10-04T19:48:00.000-07:00

1. Finish the THREE IMPORTANT THINGS I have been simu-writing, which is just such a misguided way to get something done. Two are so close I can feel them on my teeth like I just drank a Coke and the sugar is still fizzling.

2. Either get my hair coloured dark-dark again and stop missing blonde, or plug ears to the rational and do blonde again (at the beginning of last winter I found a very long, very blonde strand of hair trapped in my coat's zipper from the year before and was heartbroken to have abandoned it), or accept, really accept, that it will be another few years of a few different colours before I'm a virgin brunette. This really tears me up, I mean it.

3. Have more for-reals girlfriends. I currently have a LOT (10? 15?) of good girlfriends, the kind who slay me for various reasons at various times, who are cool and CONFIDENT (a must) and creative and warm and weird, the kind of girls I talk a lot about in a passive, whateversies way, as if to suggest that their high quality reflects somehow on me (does it???), but only a very few who are on the particular level of my closest boy friendships. I don't know why. Yes I do:

I find it hard as a grownie to be THISclose with women because there are millions of landmines that I never seem to be able to predict (like you're supposed to say this and go there and be like this and not be like that). Despite having two big sisters who are very smooth and very good at that girl-game (I have spent a lot of years watching them Being Women), I never really learned it. And it is im-por-tant. The reasons for this are many and complex and not your concern at the moment. Generally: it's like most of them speak a language that I don't, which is a used-up metaphor but almost literally true.

Anyway I like this:

"I want to have slumber parties even though we’re not thirteen. I want to be able to call you at four in the morning and know it’s OK and that I’m safe and you won’t be mad at me because you love me and you understand that I wouldn’t be calling if It wasn’t important. I want to feel understood and accepted even if I’m not perfect... I want us to be Madonna and Gweneth, minus the weird fight they got in that is still a little unclear to me, and ultimately none of my (our) bizness."

"I don’t want to make-out or for us to have a threesome. I don’t want to sexualize this. This female friendship is a safe zone. We give enough blow jobs and bad hand jobs as it is. The last thing I wanna do is learn about your clitoris. I mean, I’m sure it’s beautiful, but it’s just not for me. Anywayzies, together we are in a safe, fun, cozy, girly bubble. We can talk about dreams and boys, and shopping, and fucking, and taking over the world. I don’t even wanna borrow your clothes. This isn’t about that! I don’t want to lend you money or borrow money, I just want to be emotional rocks for one another and to be each others person to be held accountable. I want to have movie marathons, and go dancing together and maybe even go on a road trip to Vegas- even though I don’t even really like Vegas. I want us to be better off for knowing eachother and being in each others life."

- Selected bits from imboycrazy.com who *gets it*.

TIFF, teaching, other shit

2010-09-16T10:06:00.001-07:00

Today is the last day to register for my Creative Journalism class, which runs on Wednesday nights at U of T's School of Continuing Studies. Issa so fun! Join up! Yes do it.

I've been doing a TIFF blog for EYE. I'm doing it instead of my usual Required Reading blog, which btw is changing format on Monday, because I want to make it better, and I want to be harder (content effort) and easier (desk slavery) on myself. Anyway: TIFF blog has meant a diary of my TIFFy activities, which means "parties". And, even with the weekend off for Lady Isis' wedding, I'm FUCKING EXHAUSTED. It's all here, somewhere.

This week has been a big one for my bosses getting emails/phone calls about me. Which leads us to: my column for this week, also on TIFF but mostly on how something like TIFF demonstrates Toronto's institutional low self-esteem. Read it here.

GUYS I SUCK

2010-09-13T06:54:00.000-07:00

Here is everything I didn't put on my blog and should have:

1. A column about my marriage ambivalence ("What's your beat at EYE?" "Feelings, mostly.") is here!

2. A column about the positive aspect of gossip is here!

3. A column about how nostalgia is the opiate of the hipster masses is here!

That one is probably the best one I've written in a month or so.

Byeeee writing another thing about how TIFF is making me an asshole.

Thuwsday

2010-08-19T07:46:00.000-07:00

"Maybe you should just stay at home and cook dinner for your husband, unless you're some male hating dyke. I'd be more then happy to give you instructions on how to open up a can of soup, but I doubt you would have the gall to email me back because you are nothing more than an uneducated TorStar brain dead skank. You have yourself a wonderful day sweetheart."

What is most fascinating about this kind of email is not "dyke" as pejorative (or "skank", really, because who cares) or its mean-ness, but that they think I'll be offended by it. Want to know how to offend me? Be right about the stuff I'm doing wrong. That is why I scrap with my best buddy all the time, because we Get Real and it can hurt feelings. Generic vitriol doesn't cut it.

Anyway here is my new column about my sisters and birth order, called A Sister Act, in Three Parts.

And here is this week's Love and Sex column (I write one in four of these) about rape jokes.

Losing the plot

2010-08-16T21:28:00.000-07:00

I had a perfect day at work today but since then I've been feeling that periodic revulsion about my profession. It has to happen sometimes. I get five days in a row off starting Saturday; first weekdays off since... March? March. I'll be at a cottage, which means I get to wear my favourite outfit for early rural mornings (some kind of boots, no pants, men's underwear, flannel shirt or fisherman's sweater) and read endlessly and get chronic. I'll be panting to write when I return, I know, but for now I just want to march this computer to the lake and toss it in there and find out it floats and retrieve it and set it alight and give it a Viking funeral. Fuck you, forever, like.

Work

2010-08-12T10:14:00.000-07:00

Here's some new shit I wrote.

1. I get all grossie-obsessy about MIA's XXXO video, here, in my twice-daily (soooo much work guys) Required Reading column.

READ IT!

2. "This Must Be The Place" is my new EYE column and it's about my former local, the bar Sneaky Dee's, but mostly about these places that we make ours, if only for a little while.

READ IT!

3. "Why Queer Women Cannot, By Definition, Be Sluts" ran on Jezebel this week. It got 25,000 hits in like a day. That is a lot. Let me tell you something: it's not so fun to write about sex when you are preoccupied with children and family from the time they wake you up by flinging open the doors to your bedroom until, like, 9, when you're falling asleep on top of your watch on top of the covers. I miss boooooysssszzz.

READ IT!

Vacay

2010-08-08T19:10:00.000-07:00

I'm obsessed with my family in a probably weird way. Tonight my parents picked me up at the train station, where I shook hands with my father's accountant, who was there for some reason (don't care) and then we went out for dinner and then home. My parents are staying at a hotel during this Carraway Summit so my sisters and I can destroy their house in private. My niece Alex and my nephew Max will be sleeping in my room, where there are two single beds (no idea why two single beds ended up in my room; because I used to be slutty?) so I am sleeping on a blow-up mattress (no problem, used to live on one) in my dad's den (where he writes in his diary and listens to jazz, not kidding).

While I cuddled up with my cell phone like a teenager, my parents got on chairs and set up this hilarious thing where a bedsheet is being held against the bay window with three wooden poles. The window has no sheers or blinds because those would be ugly, I guess, and my mom only believes in California-style shutters, which wouldn't work in this strangely cold suburban deco + French bullshit reading room.

When we had a dog (RIP Scout forever) we would create spectacular toy-systems for her, most notably one with an oversized stuffed bear from the '70s with a noose hanging from a stick that she liked to push around with her nose and bark at. It was hilarious. Watching my parents create bedsheet-privacy for me while I just lounged and made jokes reminded me of that.

So far the other gem of the night is when my dad said, incredulous, "That's how wars get started" as a justification for his own grudge-holding, which is epic. My sweet mom was like "Oh, dear." I'm not just like him, but I am juuuuust like him.

At dinner we talked about a few extremely sad situations we are fairly close to, as a family, and even though it was just us in a quiet, pre-Summit moment, with none of the six kids or husbands or big sisters or racket, which is to say the same unit that lived together for ten years after my sisters were graduated and gone, we had a sort of moment, of fully felt, intensive gratefulness. The kids are OK, we're OK. It's not, like, cool to be all worried about this sort of thing: I'm supposed to be all about like dates and the soda shoppe and parties and shoppings, which I am, but getting to come here and have such unironic, sincere conversations about death and chaos and faith and luck and everything else feels so much like home. Even when I'm sleeping on an air bed.

Weetzie is life

2010-08-07T18:17:00.000-07:00

EXCUSE ME, WHAT?

I went to my friend Chandler's today to a) pick her up for brunch and b) to check out her apartment because c) we were thinking that I'd move into it in September (and so I am). While I was there I spied Dangerous Angels, which is the volume of collected Weetzie Bat books, and I jabbed it and was like "This. This was my book." Weetzie Bat the book and character, and Francesca Lia Block, their author, are like the bottom line of my personal girl culture, along with Sassy magazine and creepy fairy tales.

And then I saw this, and was all, Why was I in L.A. then instead of now? I'm spoiled rotten and the worst, non?

Friday night

2010-07-30T19:21:00.000-07:00

I have sand all over my legs, I watched a fire-eater instead of hanging up my dry cleaning, and I have Beach Boys filling up my house. Plus there's wine and gin and flowers and sleeping bags. ISLAND!

2006

2010-07-28T13:38:00.001-07:00

Good morning! I'm on a total high cause I showed up before 9am today.

How was your weekend?

I went to the Sparrow (don't go there) which was nice but they lied about the vegetarian options.

I got so drunk there (and the Horseshoe, and the Bovine) that I fell asleep at my desk when I got home.

[REDACTED]'s party was fun, in that we had a bbq and let off fireworks and stuff ([REDACTED] and i got [REDACTED] a bundt pan shaped like a castle from Williams Sonoma), but I was feeling kind of weird and antisocial (read: high) so I hung out alone a lot.

Yesterday I accidentally let a raccoon in my house and it tore apart my garbage and I cried and cleaned up.

Liveblogging nothingness

2010-07-25T14:11:00.000-07:00

Sunday Lessons:

1. A logical impossibility exists where "Nothing ever changes" and "You can't go home again" are both totally true.

2. I love whiskey on the rocks so much! Champagne, red wine, and this, always plus forever. I only ever drink beer if it's there and cold and I've done something butch like a tough run or dirty chores or "fixing something" (ha, ha) or if my friend orders it first and I want to be a good sport. I mean, I like beer. But I love those other things. I'm appropriately scared of addiction, as anyone who has loved an addict will be, but as a fluid grace note to a day or night, yeah. This.

3. When I'm upset about something, I am unable to remember about neighbours and volume. Isn't that weird? I'm super polite to them and then I'm in a fight on the phone with a friend and it's just like "Yeah. Fuck you guys. You're in on this."

4. I love exercise, I love doing it and coming home from it, dripping and exhausted, and being outside and relieving stress and anger and anxiety through movement. I hate getting dressed up for it in the gay little outfit and doing the gay little stretches and being all precious about "Noooo baby I can't watch a movie I have to do my workout" (I've never said that in my life), and the concept and execution of "the gym." This is why I so often rely on sex and walking around the city for cardio, even though I really like running.

5. I am, like, extremely happy. And lucky. Has to be both.

Life on the installment plan

2010-07-22T06:09:00.000-07:00

This week's column is about subletting, and the three places - a zen den, a Euro-ish hive of wine and good cheese, and the island, where I live now - that I've subletted this summer. Read it here.

Thanks to Benjamin for the title, and Carrie and Lawrence and Eva and Selda and Jeff and Micah and Reena and Rhys for hooking me up.

Hiding in new places, getting wasted

2010-07-20T20:42:00.000-07:00

When it's been seven years since your favouritest (living, working) band put out an album, everything else starts to feel trivial.

The Wrens made me a writer, but that's a story for another time, or never, in case you don't like me but might like them. Sad book pop with nasty fuck guitars needs all the fans it can get.

Buy The Meadowlands, probably. First listen: "Boys, You Won't."

Summer/snatch

2010-07-17T14:06:00.000-07:00

OH yeah it seems I forgot to post my new column (was sick/high; see below). It is called "May to September romance" and is about why getting into the summer heat instead of cursing it is a thing that rules and is sexy and fun. Read it here.

The art is by a woman named Genevieve Simms, who is probably my favourite of the illustrators we use for My Life, My Fault art. I bug Caley, who is Boss of Art at EYE, all the time about getting Genevieve and I'm pretty sure he's over it/the sound of my voice/me. I want to include Genevieve's great piece from this week here, which is a highlightery thing of girls and popsicles, but something is being flukey and weird. It's huge and amazing in the paper (I forgot to write a 100 word promo piece for Required Reading so my column art was GIGANTIC this week; oops/yay) so go pick that up from the street corner when you head out later.

Here's another piece by Genevieve. I've never met or spoken to this woman so I'm not even shilling for a friend (on that tip, how excited are we for Growing Up Jung by Micah Toub????). Go to her website.

She also did art for my column "Rich little poor girl" (the horse) and "What do you want from me?", that one about social obligations that had clouds blowing ships around. Here's a weirdly cropped version because I'm dumb at internet. I love how bored they look. So beautiful.

Another thing I did for the paper this week was write about "Vagina Terror," the reasons for which are handily included in the piece itself, which you can read here. Speaking of column art: this piece was done by Team Macho, who also illustrated one of my most-read columns, which still occasionally hits the Top 5 list on eyeweekly.com even though it is way old, which is called "Loud People Fucking." My friend Denise zinged the art (which is, to be fair, perfectly lovely) on Twitter, saying "What I learned from yr column (well, graphic) is that suit clad white men are most afraid of vag. Single ladies, take note." HAAAAA! (Yeah I can't get that to post right either.)

High life

2010-07-17T12:37:00.001-07:00

I'm beating down the end of a quick-and-dirty cold (the worst of it featured that kind of sad, full-body-woe pain-malaise and hallucinations and total stupidity and the sense that anything touching the skin, like a hand or a sheet or a breeze, is too much to bear, the kind you have before you know you do so you're at the office being a Total Cunt and then are like "Oooh this is why") but had to go shopping (for summery lingerie, which is a NEED when you've felt like shit for four days) and then for groceries (which ended up being some motley selection of ice cream and, like, five kinds of cheese and I think celery? No idea WTF I bought).

Mostly I talked to my buddy Ben on the phone while I sat with my ass INSIDE THE COOL KIOSK-THING WHERE THEY KEEP FOOD and then would realize both this and that I was in the way and that I was laughing at non-things so much that I was crying in the aisle. Disaster. But but but all the while I was waltzing Ben through the entirety of the book proposal that I've been having a lot of trouble with and then all at once figured out as soon as I got wicked-high on Dayquil and eighteen shots of espresso and entered the market. It was drugged-out savant. It was the Dakota Fanning of thinking. I am so relieved and happy.

Old news but eternal

2010-07-16T16:28:00.001-07:00

Even though I was in hotel rooms and on the beach, I spent most of winter feeling bad about a breakup. Now I'm over it. A lot of the trouble was the fact that I like to travel (and not like "Week at all-inclusive Mexican resort!" but "How about three months somewhere?") and often can, because I am in a profession defined by hustle, weird hours and spur-of-moment movement, and that I have a job that indirectly but definitely implicates the people in my life. And the dude before him, who I was agonizingly in love with despite him being a bad idea (also over it, phew, and also NBD since I was deep in my mid/late-20s thing of Bad Ideas) once said he'd never speak to me again if I wrote about him (despite the fact that he has no apparent issue writing and performing songs about his past relationships, aherm, but whateversies). (Actually I shouldn't be so dismissive of what that guy said. When I read reviews of his band that discussed his particular brand of sexiness I felt like vomming in a semi-jealous, semi-proud, semi-WEIRDED OUT kind of way.)

So the macro version of what is for me a micro problem, here writ by Liz Phair and Emily Gould, is both sad and comforting to read. (Also, it's on the Daily Beast, where I once contributed a story about booty calls that was edited into something else entirely, but I like my editor there a lot so I have a feeling it was meant to satisfy a higher-up rather than to fuck with me... And that editor used to work at Nerve.com and assigned my anal virginity story so I know that he's generally down with Carraway Nation.)

Emily: It also seems like it would be extraordinary to find someone who'd be willing to be with you who'd be OK with having his life cannibalized in certain ways.

Liz: It's hard for people - it's hard for men, in particular, to have a partner that people talk about, that people want to meet. I've noticed that.

Emily: Martin Amis has a line, in The Information: "All writing is infidelity."

Liz: Ooh, that's good. In my last relationship, a huge problem was that I would want to spend nights alone. And my boyfriend could not understand what I would be doing. And I'm literally sitting in my house dreaming. It was self-preservation, for me - I'm miserable if I'm not making art. I'm miserable if I'm not being creative. And to be creative, you can't just say, 'From 10 to 2, I will be amazingly creative, and then I'll pick the kids up.'"

Yesterday I got a few emails wherein the senders declared their interest/appreciation/crushiness (unfortunately/fortunately for them I already have a little crush tucked into my back pocket, but anyway) and I find that so sweet and so nice and so cool, but also, it reminded me how two experienced, adult men who cared about me found the writer-stuff to be hard or unappealing, and how that sucks. Is this why writers often get with other writers or artists or whoever? I guess it's that, OR, date someone super mature and turbo-rad, who understands that those emails will not be responded to with blowjobs and doesn't mind being referred to in print, OR someone who doesn't read and is barely aware of the (micro, emphasis on micro) public nature of it. Who knows a cute illiterate?

Sickish

2010-07-15T15:46:00.001-07:00

Because of no-sleeps and cigarettes and science I have a little cold. What that means is that I didn't wash my hair today, or put on makeup, or ummm have an actual shower, and that I ate only cold sugar (Coke; ice cream; iced tea with an amount of honey gotten to by just standing over the cup with the inverted squeezy jar of honey for as long as it takes to whistle along to most of a song). Oh and I've been sucking down a grapefruit Perrier (no sugar) now because at some juncture I'll want to go to bed without cycling my legs all around like a hyper-hypo.

I did, however, sick-miss an appointment with Ronan, Toronto's cuddliest tattoo artist (he's a total doll) to see about a couple new "pieces". I will be branching out this time and getting a quarter-sized amount of RED (all the ink on my person is black, because my personal colour palette is that of Snow White's: black/blue/white/red.... my complexion and attitude has no room for muted anything). And that's the most anyone is allowed to talk about their tattoos without sounding like the purest kind of asshole.

Being sick is the only time I dislike being single. I am generally happy-go-nuts whether I'm in or out of a relationship, which is a good feeling, but when I'm sick the only thing I really want in the world is for a man to bring me a cold drink. And not the kind of man who is just OK but whatever, I mean the kind of man who you can have the sniffles in front of and they're not like "Ugh, boring/gross." But yeah otherwise I'm wicked-cool superfly like a fox untouchable. Right?

Wish list

2010-07-13T21:54:00.000-07:00

I know this is waaaay ridiculous but I turned 29.5 recently and it kind of stuck with me, as a thing that happened. (Not at all negatively: I'm digging it. I am the best 29 year old ever.) Plus I am writing a pretty serious book proposal about how not to be such a fuck-up in your twenties. Plus, this: a while ago I got to write a Wish List for work. I guess it was tied into Christmas link-baiting? Here's what I wrote:

1. Balenciaga boots, the really hot ones that scare off the wrong boys and make the right boys want to tell you what to do/do what you say all at once. That sounds complicated but I just mean that they were sexy.

2. Lindsay Thornburg cloak, which are lovely and retarded at once.

3. iPhone (fuck, I still want that: who knew that the BlackBerry I finally, finally, finally got after missing an important email while I was at the park on a weekday would suck so much stiff stuff at compiling/threading emails? Also, text messages on the iPhone are about 1000x more awesome. Also all these things are awful because I spent most of a morning screening on Monday emailing my boss about an article like a total wad.)

4. A ticket to Bali (Um, yeah, but actually, the Maldives. So so so so so badly. Living in near-pastoral splendor this summer- oh yeah, Island July will probably also be Island August, which rules massive- is in fact making me hunger for even more of this sun and sand and quietude and exotica, and then I made the mistake of reading a British Vogue feature on the Maldives and I'm just fucking done. Maybe... January?)

5. These. So lovely. They match my Somerset ring (which flew off my hand into some bushes and was never recovered; and no, not the same bushes that I was peeing in when I lost my Lip Venom that one time.)

6. Puppy

AAAANYYYYWAAAAY on the occasion of my half-birth I'd like to add a couple of things.

I really want to have Mirah come to my house and sing me this song while I lay on the floor and just feel it. I don't really know why, it's not my usual, I have no specific relationship to the song other than listening to it today while I was crouching on the ferry and had consumed a lot of whisky and my hair had gone all wavy from the wet air and was whipping around my face and it was what it was.

I want to wake up before 11 sometimes, and then instead of just laying quietly in different positions, I want to get up and not feel like I'm entitled to indulge my Cat on a Hot Tin Roof fantasies in the morning the way I am at night. (Laziest.)

I want to stop thinking about the sad things that I have nothing to gain or offer from thinking about and feel stronger for it, not harder for it.

I want more little girls to tell me they think I'm pretty (this happened today while I was putting on lip gloss) because little girls are experts in both Princesses and in Not Knowing What Nose Jobs Are (when adults tell me I'm pretty I always like to follow it up with "Yes but can you see right here where I broke my nose in the ocean?").

Thassall.

Just letting me down all over the place

2010-07-13T21:51:00.001-07:00

Recently at the ballet I saw a girl from reality TV (I guess "reality Internet", because the network that the show is on is one of those laughable channels in the thousands, way after all the porn and sub-HBOs, and I've only seen it online) and was like "Oh yeah!" and went home to watch her VERY BAD (but, I had thought, self-aware and kind of embarrassed about how bad it was) SHOW and the most recent episode was more aggressively awkward than all of the many, many terrible camcorder things I ever did as a yut. And I used to do scene-by-scene reenactments of Ghostwriter so, trust.

And then I watched about forty seconds of a new MTV show because I'm gearing up for what happens when my sweet Whitney Port wises up and stops making The City, which I love (to the point of wanting to corner an MTV employee at a party last week to be like "Can we talk about Whitney's hair and if it's real?" but did not because if I did my best friend-date Benjamin would have subjected me to serious emotional abuse that I would have deserved), and this new MTV show is just another strata of terrible, and it stars a girl who used to appear very often on a blog I like to read.

I don't know why I'm not just naming these shows. I hate blind items. I suppose I just feel bad about it. I feel bad that these shows are so bad.

Then I discovered The SkinNY and all was... a bit better.

If I didn't start laughing hysterically anytime a TV camera was pointed near me (actual serious problem because of all the talking-head possibilities I am way too scared to say yes to), I would want a reality show that is about me doing Real Talk and not inventing problems about disgusting over-groomed near-men. Instead it would be like "My sister feels judged and turned-off our fun sister vibes when I ask her why she took her husband's name but really I'm just curious." And I'd get my hair done every day. Like Whitney Port's but more metal.

xoxo,

Gossip Girl

(Jkjkjkjkjkjkjkjkjkjk!)

Kate.

W.S. Merwin is some guy

2010-07-13T21:41:00.001-07:00

I asked how you can ever be sure

that what you write is really

any good at all and he said you can't

you can't you can never be sure

you die without knowing

whether anything you wrote was any good

if you have to be sure don't write

Word. It's true that I'm scared of elevators sometimes but I'm not scared of being bad, of trying, of failing, of death (related). Thaaaaank fuck.

Impressionistic Rendering of Mid-Sunday Afternoon Communique With An Editor

2010-07-11T12:33:00.000-07:00

Me: "Blah blah blah email me about that work thing work work work"

Editor: "Sure."

Me: "Thanks. Sorry for interrupting anything."

Editor: "It's OK, it's been a boring first half."

Me: "First half?"

Editor: "World Cup?"

Me: "Oh. I was talking about fucking."

Swear to god I'll shut up about it now

2010-07-10T11:46:00.000-07:00

Glad this turned out teeny-tiny because it's creepy to post this probably but I wanted to communicate the tree-house situation I wake up to in the morning. The first try at this shot involved my knee but that breaks my rule about maintaining a semblance of internet privacy and also my knee is currently shredded-but-healing after I fell down like a child and looks bad and I can't stop talking about it. In Guatemala I did sleep in a treehouse for a while and this is like that, but with fewer gunshots in the distance.

This is the stuff. Magic hour is 9pm.

This looked cooler in real life. "Ooh, foggy," I thought. Sure.

This picture blows because I was compelled to pocket my phone and terrorize that black dog with all the love-in-wait I'm housing for Future Dogs of My Own. The little white dude behind him took off in the other direction (smart) (also who cares about those little bitch dogs?)

Not sure why the fire boat thrilled me so much but it sure did. I took a few photos through the ferry window as it was approaching the island and sent one to my dad, who is the only person I think might care about "Fire boat!" other than my nephews Max and Will who are both juuust pre-email.

I took this when I was on my way to work by dangling my new-ish cell phone over the railing. Oops.

The big-tree shade here reminds me of the park I took my dog Scout to every single day after school for, oh, a decade. I pretend I'm Deep South when I'm in expansive shade like that.

When I moved in, my very kind and only sort-of complainy best friend, a.k.a. the co-star of my column even though/because he kind of hates it, Ben, helped me move. I paid him in popsicles. Later, I did a final load by myself and the sunset revealed itself halfway across the lake and every reason that I had to feel weird about leaving the city-proper dissipated immediately.

Ladylike

2010-07-10T10:52:00.000-07:00

New column is about my mom, and more about womanhood, and even more about how finding your own heuristic of femininity (or masculinity or whatever confluence of those things you're after) is tough when you're pressed up against the brick wall that stands between yourself and your natural, home-made models for it. 800 words wasn't enough for all that, but I always feel like I'm going to die immediately, all the time, and have to get everything down first. (My fatal flaw: impatience, restlessness. Working on it.) Dealing with this next week by writing about "heat", as in temperature, which is a thing that can adequately be managed in the space I have.

In other news, here's a picture that I just saw somewhere on the internets. If I were to define an idealized femininity it would be symbolized pretty thoroughly by this, even more if the girl was holding some kind of tool (like a scythe!) and wearing, like, a crown. Decadent and grounded, yielding and soft but also wicked-tough, all of that. I've probably watched too many movies in my life, too many to give in to what other people think of as reality. Because I'm bored to the point of exhaustion by how most people, most women, live their lives.

Three Little Birds

2010-07-04T10:17:00.000-07:00

I'm not a Bob Marley "fan" as in I am not in first year of college BUT...

For the month of July I will smoke more pot than ever before, wear only white cotton sundresses, and refuse to engage in anything that isn't awesome. Done!

I am just newly established on the Toronto island ("I"sland?) and will be staying for a month. For outsiders: the island is like a twee residential hamlet plus cottage country smooshed together and situated a ten-minute ferry ride from the underpass-pit of the city, where all the Big Culture takes place (pro sports, "rock concerts") but nothing good. The ferry dock is a two-minute walk from my office, also, which means I will likely go there more often than When I Have To now. (I started writing my columns more/full-time and not editing Style anymore just as summer happened and just as EYE WEEKLY moved down to 1 Yonge Street, so when I do show up there it's kind of exceptional-feeling.)

This song is not playing anywhere at all right now but it's been in my head for 24 hours. It's not even a good Bob Marley song, which is problematic, but it's definitely something I heard a lot of when I was in Jamaica (though, mostly what I remember about Jamaica was standing in front of a tall, scary man who used a machete to cut fruit off a tree for me; also recall wearing cutoff overalls) and what always came on the CD rotation when my middle sister (ex-mega Bob Marley fan; ex-follower of the Grateful Dead) was in charge of music at the cottage, and so is obviously a song that my subconscious wants me to remember when I am somewhere placid and hot as fuck. (Waking up this morning, late, with a cat wrapped around my ass and sun rushing into my new room, I realized that I make good decisions most of the time.)

Noticed today while I was limping home (injured both my legs, individually, during the move, and last night wore a beige tensor bandage on my left ankle underneath what are basically fetish shoes, and a beige bandage over the gash on my right knee, so, sexy) that my neighbourhood on Ward's Island (the eastern part of the island-proper) is not unlike the 'hood I lived in (stowed away in) in Laguna Beach, California. In both places the deceptively generous houses are swallowed up by the surrounding lushness, and it's all very still and rarefied (on the island, by luck; in Laguna, by $$$$$$$$) but with neighbours wandering through at will. Some dude is fixing his bike in my ("my") backyard right now.

(That house is in Cali, but looks like every place on this block.)

I liked taking walks in Laguna with my oldest sister, who lived there for a long time, because we'd encounter the kinds of neighbours that usually exist only in indie cinema (the art-fortune heir who lived in a garage; the plus-size model and her ex-soldier husband; the leopard-skin-wearing hostess who somehow convinced my often-aloof sister to wear elaborate theme costumes every Halloween).

My last column I forgot to post, probably because it ran on a holiday while I was packing up my (stellar, like, hilariously stellar) apartment and seeing nine not-good plays at the Fringe Festival. (Just kidding: I saw one good play.) It seems that I have also TEMPORARILY started smoking again TEMPORARILY and, otherwise, I am growing deeply concerned that it's not evident to other writers that reverence and irreverence can and do exist together, and very much on purpose, all the time (there was some Facebook discussion about that last column, called Xenophobia For Beginners, and most of it was very much Fair Enough but some of it was just like Could You Just Not?). I have proved the fact of humans adjusting too easily to better circumstances to myself this year: no matter how many people seem to like what I'm doing (cute boys in particular), and how many coolnesses and opportunities have resulted from the weekly emotional and semi-intellectual excavations, when someone that I respect or take seriously says something mean I do not like. Do not like! Internet losers can say whatever, though, that's fine.

I'm more interested in providing a good experience for readers of EYE than I am in getting myself off, and I do think that Twitter-people and commenters and pals like the columns that are about smaller, simpler things better (and, fuck, it's only 800 words long, so, sure), but the letter-writers prefer the more serious and broader stuff. I volley, but then, I also volley between feeling like the most vulnerable, heart-a-glow peanut ever, who wants to think and write about intimacy and love and friends and beauty, and a bitch-ish sex-posi femme-jerk who wants to just be like "Ugh, you're dumb." IRL this works just fine and is very average of pretty much everybody, but as an ordering philosophy for column writing it makes those decisions of What and How a little more fraught, especially when you're doing it from a hanging rope over a snake pit.

Happiness Is...

2010-06-28T17:19:00.001-07:00

So far, with the STAGGERING EXCEPTION of this weekend's mind-bending G20 summit-related terribleness, this summer has been... perfect. It's hard for me to ever find a narrative in a period of time except for those months or seasons that are clearly awful/awesome (I find myself sitting still and thinking hard when I'm writing emails to my friends Star and Anna, who live in Vancouver and Santa Cruz, when they ask how things are, lately).

Stuff is good. I feel happy. Here's a column I wrote about it, called The New Optimism.

On Oversharing

2010-06-16T17:34:00.000-07:00

Peoples, the new column is called Yeah, I Said It and is all about oversharing. Especially the "over" part.

Maybe this is a psychic symbol but I took some non-identifying/obscured pictures of the apartment I'm subletting but they won't upload.

And, recently I decided to just give in to something and believe in angels (like exercising a will to believe, at least, in the same way I violently and anxiously clapped for Tinkerbell at productions of Peter Pan when I was a kid, even though I was an atheist and general non-believer from the moment I got Dad-vibes that that's what we were), because I need something dreamy to tuck into my mostly pragmatic waking life. So maybe it is my angel (she's Nordic, I bet, and really sensitive) being disapproving about the possible feelings-cost of posting a photograph of where I sleep that is making my camera misbehave. ??

I recently taught a workshop and in it careened through an unfortunate-for-everyone tangent about what to share and what not to. Like, I've never written, not really, about the most complicated and damning man-relationship of my life (which is over), and not really about my mom (because she is like this oval glass ornament we have that comes out at Christmas, entirely known and familiar from every angle but also much too delicate to risk fucking around with, even though the impulse to hold it up and stare at and through it is commensurate with how lovely it is). And I never write specifically about bodies even when I'm deep into it about sex, probably because of Waspy reserve and a lifelong aversion to bathroom humour, and because I care so much more about how people relate to each other than about how dinks look. I don't really care how dinks look. What to do with a dink, yeah, probably.

(My very first published article was about foreskins, though.)

(Here are my boobs, and the boobs of various friends of mine, in a photo I have saved as and remember calling the "titty collage". Either my friend Mike or my friend Greg took these. Cleavage is not an overshare but this is a lot of text all at once otherwise.)

Oversharing is perhaps the least of my professional worries. (Getting better concerns me more. Being criticized and praised and feeling like neither are quite right concerns me more. How to get everything done that I want to get done, like books and frequent columns and freelance assignments, when it's just me steering the whole operation, and "me" is talented - I'm 29, I can say that shit now without reconsidering - but also just a regular-type person, concerns me more. How to get more free stuff concerns me more.)

I worry (ew, though: "worry" is passive and unproductive) a little that guys I might like have a problem with it, because they have in the past, and I understand that. This is tres obvious, yes? My ladypeers in oversharing don't seem to talk about this element of it too much. Men don't like it as a rule. Maybe the supercools, the ones who don't get off on it but are nonplussed, should not be included in this estimation. I worry a lot about my friends and family feeling let down or alienated, not because I've written about them (they tend to dig that) but because there is a conflicting, grandiose meta-persona of their friend that exists all around them (such is internet) and that's essentially not fair.

Like everyone else I am, in most of my endeavors, reacting to high school, and in high school I was bored and sad and wild and immature and pretty stock-full of rage and all this emerged in ways that now I would slowly turn on my heel and walk pointedly away from. Now I have this stellar release for rage and sad and wild so that I can function like a regular-type person. At the moment, I feel like I have almost totally captured the potential of using that darkness for good. Soooo it's like I'm Jedi?

I'm a fuck-you-pay-me feminist

2010-06-16T04:56:00.001-07:00

My dad's favourite thing to say to me when I was in Grade 13 (Americanos, for a while in Ontario we had five years of high school, and it was amazing because we were all kind of over it and had cars and just got to be children for longer) was that I'd never get into university (that is Canadian for "college") because I didn't study very much. (Sorry, but my sweet-straight-As-snowboarder-model boyfriend was way more attractive than me and I had to keep him occupied.)

It was supposed to be "motivating." And I got in to all the schools I wanted (so, TRUE, that's not that much of an achievement in Canada where there are three or four "hard" schools), and then went to the only one (U of T, where I now teach a continuing studies class on Creative Journalism!) that didn't offer me a scholarship. JOKES ON YOU, SUCKER. (Jkjkjkjk, my dad is cool, and obviously I'm good-obsessed with my family and write about them too much.)

Clearly, he was suggesting that I was lazy about doing the things that I didn't strictly speaking have to do, and was right, which is why I don't update my dumb blog, but I also don't blog because I'm busy making dollaz.

(Christopher Hitchens is my spirit guide: "Of course, I do everything for money. Dr. Johnson is correct when he says that only a fool writes for anything but money. It would be useful to keep a diary, but I don't like writing unpaid. I don't like writing checks without getting paid." Except Samuel Johnson said "blockhead", not "fool", but still, WORD.)

I understand how this has to change. It has been made clear to me by my book agent. In fact a new blog is being made for me, like a real website. For real. Right this moment!

I'll do this now because I woke up at six courtesy of a flesh-sword pressing into my back (y'all need to manage those things) and drank a Diet Coke in two sips and am now just sitting here.

Here are my sort-of latest columns, friends! Read 'em! This took me forever: I hope the columns aren't about war bonds or the old soft-shoe or whatever.

Cry Baby: I cry a lot, usually in private, but a lot. This column made a bunch of my friends FURIOUS at my boss (who for the record is super-smart and pro-woman and all the appropriately sensitive stuff one requires in a boss if your job description is writing about flesh-swords) because he contributed a sidebar about how men feel about women crying in front of them. HERE!

Not Much of a Joiner: Not so sure about this one. I stand by it, as one does, and it's all true, as it will be, but I do think I neglected to adequately emphasize what it is about adult girl-on-girl friendship that women need and want and benefit from. All of the prescribed Girl World group activities work my nerves, for sure, and it all gets harder with age, but that's not the whole scoop. HERE!

Math is Hard: The severious mind-fuck of being a supposedly smart kid with a learning disability. HERE!

BYEEEE!

Three Stuffs

2010-05-20T18:26:00.000-07:00

1. Most recent column is called Man Up, Bitch (so named by my buddy Chris, who pretty much names half my columns/keeps me on the straight and narrow/is great), and contains some advice for guys, and is here.

2. Heard today that my column, until now a biweekly column, will be running weekly. !!! I've been handling the Style section for a while, which was fun and made me feel like an adult, but I asked to scrap that and do more of what I dig the most. So, at EYE, I'm on for weekly editions of My Life, My Fault; daily editions of Required Reading (also changing, but more on that later); and then less often but still regular contributions to the sex page/features/etc. Let me reiterate: !!!

3. I'm going to do a weird and possibly gross "contest" of sorts for readers on my Twitter tomorrow. So if you don't follow it (or if you're not a Twitter user, in which case I salute you) check it out at twitter.com/katecarraway.

The Blues

2010-05-07T12:28:00.001-07:00

Sooo approps that this week a story I wrote called The Rules to Being Bummed Out ran on Vice's website. (Read it here.) I guess as of Wednesday I've been Charlie Brown sad-walking around town (except for a fun night of free beer with my best buddy), riding the prelude to a summer cold but never really getting it, and being emotionally derailed courtesy of everything that goes along with having been with someone and then not anymore, and having all of that emerge immediately after you were like "Oh phew so life is all fine, that's neat."

I feel better but can still taste a few grains of baby-blue Ativan and am using cheap pop music as alternative medicine. The good news is that it's almost mother's day and my mom can cure me with a raised eyebrow. When I was in Brownies she was Crafty Owl, and at Brownie Camp she brought along Reece's Pieces and would give us a couple (she called them "Happy Pills"- this would never fly at a children's camp after 1990) when we were sad about losing Red Rover or whatever. (We were all probably unconsciously sad about wearing brown bucket hats covered in embroidered handicrafts.) She's really the best.

Unrelated: I'm working on a big story for a big national daily newspaper about sex education that I'm stoked about. I'm looking for interview subjects that, unusually for my stories, will be asked to have their full name and perhaps even a photo in the paper alongside their perspectives on formal (school, church, etc.) and informal (basketball court, rec room) sex ed. If this would be potentially fun or interesting for you, email me. It's katecarraway@gmail.com.

Thassall. HAPPY FRIDAY! Here's my favourite photo of sock puppets.

Shit-storm

2010-04-29T19:13:00.000-07:00

Summer Resolution: Keep personal effects limited to wallet/chain, lip gloss and phone on cutoffs-days and in a minimal clutch or similar on dress-days. DONE. Easy.

I have never been a bag girl; despite this I have three very expensive bags and several whatever most-of-the-time bags and about ten thousand EYE WEEKLY tote bags leftover from some promotional event. AND YET! Ugh. I resent that guys get to wander the streets of a city for a whole day with just pockets or MAYBE a backpack if they have beer/a lot going on. Every day I actively destroy my shoulders (and might I add, I have teensy shoulders and a hugeish rack so they're already fucking distraught) with a thing to hold all kinds of other things. Look at this, from today:

I see: 1 heavy Euro magazine (have to have something to read at all times); 1 chocolate left over from a meeting with my agent at Annex coffee emporium "Aroma" (which is probably all melty); I case of razor blades from a press kit today (???); 1 bottle of anxiety pills (not that I've had any since I flew home from Texas); 1 lightweight cashmere sweater from a few Banana Republic seasons ago (legit, but could be on my body instead of stuffed into a bag); 1 notebook and pen (I guess I need that); gum (for kissing? I haven't kissed a boy since January); makeup (vanity/expensive); iPod, planner, wallet, pass card, keys. It's ridic. Brave new world ahead.

The Spoiled Bitch Report (Actually, I'm totally nice)

2010-04-29T17:28:00.000-07:00

That's my dad, in the overalls, and his brother on the farm in... 1950, maybe '51. I've made mention of my father plenty, in my column and elsewhere, because he's the thing, as a person and idea, that I am the most like and that I least understand. Just like work and friendship, family (I guess "family of origin", specifically) is something I like to write about a lot.

Other things loom bigger, on the daily, notably love-love (like magic/dates/chemistry/sex/belonging love) but I kind of prefer to keep that stuff somewhat uncynical, unstudied, ephemeral. Talking with my friends about BOYS and GIRLS and BOYS AND GIRLS is so much fun, but you know what I mean. The secret stuff. I'd way rather maintain some unarticulated dreaminess about something or someone, even the uncomfortably discordant feelings about something or someone, than jaw through the facts until they're pulped.

Soooo aaanywaaay, my column, just out, addresses just a bit about what Captain Overalls and my mom provided me and my two big sisters with by being successful, which is a buoyant and steady sense of possibility. Which I feel, for real, every day. And, since they were also tough as shit about doing things (not unrelated to success; this is also why I can't tolerate television in the afternoon), AND since this same family has been tried by fire (death, disease, the usual), the understanding that everything is temporary and each moment is crucial (punk rock, these two) creates this unspoken tribal mentality of Fuck You, Get Over Yourself, Get On With It, I Love You.

There is more, about class and money, between people and throughout a life, that I am duly fascinated by. It'll all have to wait for a bit. Oh yeah and my next column is about BOYS. Ha!

Read "Rich Little Poor Girl" here.

Fail Better

2010-04-17T18:49:00.001-07:00

New column is about failure, and failing better. The primary fuck-up in question is regarding this bird:

I liked her. And even though she was wearing Marc Jacobs, my least-favourite popular designer (despite this, also the maker of my most-worn dress of 2009, for its properties of slutty-comfy), she was my most-favourite kind of girl-vision: a little pissy, angular, stunning, forward, delicate.

Read it here.

"I'm gonna spank your face" - Kate Carraway

2010-04-16T19:02:00.000-07:00

"I know you have all that greeting card 'screw you' money..." - dude on Modern Family

"This house is hellzapopping" - Andre Malraux, on Kennedy residence Hickory Hill

"'What did you dress up as, Eliot?' I felt my son press up against me, starting to become shy. At 2, he was not verbally adroit enough to keep up with a vivacious and inquisitive older girl like Matilda. I prodded him to answer, and at last he said, sheepishly, 'A peanut.'" - from a Modern Love column in the Times

Big Time Stuff

2010-04-12T06:15:00.000-07:00

I'm on the train writing a column and just realized I have been a writer for five years this month! If writer means "hired to write things". In April 2005 (aww) I had three inches of black roots/bleach blonde hair, was living in my sister's basement, had just finished my internship and was in my boss' office (wearing: cut-off jean shorts; diamond studs; leather bracelets; long-sleeved gray cashmere sweater with huge holes, ie: exactly what my look is still all about) being asked to staff-write full-time. (Ultimately I stuck with freelance and spent the next couple of weeks in Toronto eating one meal a day at the Green Room and reading comics on the porch.) Five years is 100 years, isn't it?

Time Bandits

2010-03-31T11:20:00.000-07:00

That ^^ is exactly how California feels to me. General update: book leave/seclusion-vacation/torture winter is over on Monday, when I go back to work. The EYE office is moving from Bloor and Church to 1 Yonge Street pretty soon, so if you live or work around there tell me where I can find sugar-free gummy bears or something. Also I will continue to be more or less homeless throughout the month whilst I look for an apartment, so if you see me snoozing at the library... that's why.

New column for EYE is called Time Bandits. "A Time Bandit is is a taker. Not only of time, but also of attention, focus, energy and all the air in the room. A Time Bandit is certain that you care about their aggressively uninteresting stories as much as they do. A Time Bandit is either quietly hostile about their imposing suckage, or blithely unaware of it. It’s not a bad personality that makes a Time Bandit, but a misapplication of personality. Time Bandits are desperate to be listened to, but don’t have a good reason to be." Read it here.

Kool Thing (come here, sit down beside me)

2010-03-30T20:36:00.001-07:00

Cool thing about doing a column that's sort of about your life is that you're the boss of what you write about (provided your actual boss is feeling it) so what you say and don't say about yourself is very carefully regulated. And you (me! I am talking about me) likely have an excellent sense of the value of privacy. I would venture to say that I know more about my second-string friends or acquaintances (with good friends, it's a draw) than they do me because they're the ones who are more inclined to post and say genuinely personal and current things, where I need to focus on themes and experience.

When, in January, a guy broke up with me and I was really sad about it, a lot of people I know IRL didn't know I even like-liked anyone. Sneaky, right? I'll add a grace note to this: I dislike it when profesh lifestyle writers allude to things that they're not just going to say. Like "Can't blog today, going through some heavy stuff, so here's a kitten on a skateboard just going nuts." No, because fuck you. And yet: here I'll say that I'm a little depressed, or feeling what my best friend brutally/accidentally called "the discomfort of the third trimester." (See post below.) (Then he went "WOOOAAAH sorry.") (I'm not depressed about babies, for the fucking record.)

When I'm a little depressed like this, which doesn't happen often, I get this compensatory vim from somewhere else, so I've been kind of having the best and most productive time ever in between cryings. (Briefly considered doing a Crying Blog where I'd list my top ten cries. I was friend-vetoed. Might still do it.) For instance, I made a list of my top five fun blunt-smoking and/or car-related things to do:

1. Smoke a blunt and fuck.

2. Smoke a blunt and get in a chat room about something ridiculous and hassle nerds. Maybe the best night of my life included doing this very thing in a reggae chat room with my second love. (Reggae fans are for serious.) We would still be together if we didn't hate each other so much. (Today I listened to a clip from a radio show I like where the drummer from Superchunk called in pretending to be a Juggalo. Incidentally or not that second love was basically Superchunk's number one fan.)

3. Smoke a blunt and do donuts in the parking lot of a mini-mall. This is ONLY fun with someone else: I tried it by myself and it was the loneliest, lamest time. I just returned videos and went home.

4. Coffee, windows down, rural route, really disgusting hip hop. Is this too much of a give'er? It should be a really hot day for this too so you're just dripping and the empty coffee cup sticks to your shin like the accessory of a motel-dwelling single mom with hard eyes.

5. Smoke a blunt in the little wooden house in the playground at the Catholic school. Should be with a bro or at least a thin novel you can fit in your pocket. Should be quiet and contemplative. Rowdy playground stuff is for the teenagers.

Les Babes

2010-03-19T13:29:00.001-07:00

New column at EYE is about baby fever. Yeah, yeah. Predictable. Such is life, dude! Sorry! (Actually, maybe I don't have baby fever because I personally don't want to have a baby; it's my "area" [sorry again] that has baby fever. It went vigilante on my mind/life and now I can't walk past an infant without wanting to pick it up, take it home, and put it in a bunny-or-lamb-themed outfit with a hood. Forever.)

Read it here.

Locals Only

2010-03-11T18:22:00.001-08:00

I'm on this trip right now. Turns out I'm writing two books, not one book. That = a lot of work for me to do. I won't be finished by the time I'm back in Toronto. No big deal! I took a week "off" my holiday to go to Northern California to see my friend Anna, who is my favourite kind of person: a conundrum. Simultaneously the sweetest sweetpea who is all about (ALL ABOUT) candy and books and comedy, and the toughest tough. Like, the Warriors would fake an injury to avoid her in a battle.

Here is Anna, who is an executive of my Inner Circle, showing the love in Santa Cruz, California, where she lives. NOTE: Her house overlooks an important location from the important film The Lost Boys.

And here is our friend Star (Star = the third point in the Best Coast trifecta) holding a beer glass and showing love a few years ago.

On left is our friend Ryan from Wavelength, and Matt is in the middle. (Matt and Star [and Wolfgang, that cuteface you can see in the background] and some other pals had a band called Ninja High School. When I subbed in for an ill-fated show in Waterloo [ill-fated = after we played another friend got a bloody face when my car window was smashed by a crazy Whisky Tango white-hat fucker] I told everyone who asked that I was Wolfgang. Fun?)

Anyway what's up with the samesie pose? Secret: one of my man-friends finds these women "terrifying" because they are so cool. I guess he is right! They are better than everyone.

Santa Cruz is mad weird. When I got there (I drove from SoCal to Santa Cruz in a sturdy white Nissan, EMBARRASSING) and was GPSing from Anna's house to Anna's work, two hipsters on bikes gave me the peace sign when I let them cross. Like, naturally/reflexively, "Peace". HA! Gaywads. Anyway, my subsequent SC experiences included observing the tuition cuts protest march featuring so many Santa Cruzians dressed like Homeless-for-Halloween; HACKEYSACKERS JUST GOING FOR IT; methy boardwalk people, and the emptiest, saddest hotel I've ever known. Check these grody stairs:

Anna and I were really stoked to see THIS in San Francisco. !!!!!!!!!!!!

TURNS OUT that hot-shit Hurt Locker director (a.k.a. hot-shit Point Break director) Kathryn Bigelow was in attendance at the ultra low-budg re-telling of her epic bank-robbing surfer/Keanu as FBI operative movie (I'm just an average, culty fan; Anna is a BELIEVER and her move to coastal California was in part due to PB). Samename-as-me Bigelow was very attractive, very tall, and very cool/into it. She mostly ran around with a megaphone, "directing". ITWASSOCOOL. When she won her Oscars I was back in Santa Cruz and was extra happy (Hurt Locker was great. However: Generation Kill is better.) The play happened last Friday and I am still wearing my PBL wristband (it is getting grossie:)

Ummm what else. Anyway I drove exactly 1001 miles according to the Nissan, basically through San Luis Obispo to Santa Cruz to Palo Alto (we Caltrained to SF) and back down through SLO, L.A. and Long Beach to Orange County, where I was an intern at OC Weekly in 2005 and where I will be staying in Laguna Beach in a pretty, friendly, semi-busted hotel for a little while.

I forgot to post my last EYE column. It is here! It is a lot about sad goodbyes and when I wrote it and got to thinking about my dog Scout I cried so hard that I took off this boy's Volcom shirt I've been wearing every day and just heaved all of my eye-water onto it. Also I wrote a quiz that helps you assess whether or not you and your boyfriend/girlfriend are intolerable. Lately I have been noticing a lot of couples actively alienating the people around them, drowning them in their coupleness. This is the lowest common denominator of boring. Once, in protest of a front-seat couple's cutesy bickering, I unbuckled my seat belt, climbed onto my boyfriend, who was in the backseat with me, and made exaggerated sex sounds for a minute before sitting down and buckling up again. I think this is more productive.

Only living to get radical,

Kate xoxo

Wipe that face off your head

2010-02-17T13:02:00.001-08:00

New column up at EYE offers some sensible advice to young ladies. Read it here.

Internet is boners

2010-02-15T23:02:00.000-08:00

I don't really like blogging because I don't understand it. And because I don't understand it I'm not good at it. Remain unconvinced that the unfiltered (or so obviously filtered) business of someone's life is supposed to thrill me. Increasingly irritated by the blogs I do read because of how predictably they're written, posed and presented. What I like are tiny moments. Like, look: My niece, age 5, was doing a pretend hair salon. Asked what the name of her operation was, she goes "Um. 'Hair Disorder'". I want to tell you that story because to me, this girl is a comedy wunderkind, and because I have a complete vision of her and her life which emphasizes why this is so spectacular a comment, and because I want you to be impressed with her and thus with me, a little bit, for my relationship to such a lollipop of genius. Maybe this is my new world of blogging. Because the 1,000 word treatise I could offer up on the minutiae of my seclusion-vacation is not something you care about.

Anyway, this is maybe the first extended break I've had from a daily work-life since I was a pup of a freelancer. I've barely been checking email, and have been on T and FB far less than usual, and using them mostly to address the bare min of my social needs, and to track whatever bullshit my best friend is on about. Mostly it's just been really nice to not look at Google Alerts declaring me a bimbo/slut/somebody's mom/the worst/and other, nicer things that are equally untrue. Twitter followers: stagnated. Email inbox: bursting. RSS feed: ignored. Various loves of life: neglected. Usually I'd be all "Call me instead" but I'm screening.

Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

2010-02-03T12:16:00.000-08:00

I wrote a new column, and since it is about drugs, I wrote a bunch of it high. Read it here.

Leave of absence

2010-02-01T08:13:00.000-08:00

Waking up and realizing that you're not signed up for anything in particular that day, that no one is waiting for you, that there is nothing you have to do: sooo dope. There is no Saturday push or Sunday melancholy, just pure time. I've been doing a lot of staring out the window. Plus a lot of just, like, standing. A few steps. More standing. Dinner. Writing. Standing. This shit is better than India (sorry India).

Advertisements for myself

2010-01-24T11:09:00.000-08:00

Here's a funny joke: I'm moving from my pretty, all-white cottage (ok, ok, apartment) near the occasionally bucolic Trinity Bellwoods Park and into a suitcase on Friday. HA HA HA, right? Because currently not one item is packed. And, there is a rebellion taking hold of the to-be-packed items, it seems, because stuff is essploded everywhere. I'm NFA for a little while, which is my favourite state of existence. Usually where I live when I'm rich-people-homeless ends up being a lot nicer than whatever kind of rental I get for myself. (Hotels, guest rooms, besties' couches: all superior to the "IT'S FINE" apartments I choose.) Ok so that's news. There are a few stuffs that I can't talk about because I come from a place where a JINX means something, but, I'm in suspended anticipation-terror-excitement, and kind of like it, despite what the stress of it does to my cortisol levels.

Newish column is up at EYE! It's called Advertisements for myself, which is a Norman Mailer ref, yes, and was my second choice for a Mailer title after Superficial Reflections on the Hipster. It is about hometowns, constructed identity, my dad, and Chapman's ice cream. Read it here, ok?

How do you change a life?

2010-01-13T14:28:00.000-08:00

My newest column is about new year's resolutions and how they are retarded. Considered less negatively, it's about the difficulty of change. Here is the first bit: "We are who we pretend to be, and there’s no better pretend than New Year’s resolutions. Every year, sane, smart people declare that they’ll change a bunch of shit about themselves and their lives, very often the same bunch of shit as the year before, and expect that the promises and the act of making them means something different this time, every time. It won’t. It can’t. I’m sorry, muffin, but it isn’t going to happen like that." Read it here.

Year-ending

2009-12-30T11:42:00.000-08:00

The story I wrote called "Welcome To Your Quarterlife Crisis" has racked up around 223,000 views. That's a lot. (My second most popular story, "Loud People Fucking", has about 5,216, if you're interested in a little compare and contrast.). Anyway, I'm more interested in what stuff you liked, or didn't like. Or, what you would like to read about and why don't I write about it already. Mostly I like emailing with readers better than almost anything. To your right ---> are my email addresses so if you have two minutes and the inclination, tell me what you think. Oh yeah and follow me on Twitter! @katecarraway.

In non-shilling news, EYE WEEKLY arts editor David Balzer and I were the guest cannon dolls in The Nutcracker at the Four Seasons Centre last night. (At every performance, the ballet company puts two media people or local celebrity types [ie: uncoordinated heifers] in the show for about a minute and a half.) Weirdly I was 0% nervous and had a rad time (compare this to the small reading I did at the Gladstone a month ago where I was suuuuper anxious and a little barfy). I didn't do a great job of wiping off my cannon doll makeup on purpose so that on the streetcar home I could pretend a little bit that I was a legit ballerina coming home from work. So fuuuun!!!

Ongoingly

2009-12-26T16:17:00.000-08:00

So Christmas is over, meaning it's time to start thinking about my birthday, which is happening on a surely bleak Monday in January. Maybe I will make the current penis or one of the besties take me out for a high-stakes kind of dinner, but that's about it, because I've been sort of a shit this year, socially, and didn't earn a birthday party proper. Anyway I will really be celebrating my 29th by taking all of February and March off to chill out in Los Angeles. (Half true: I'm going on a book leave to finish my monster-tron megabook of genius, delightful, best-selling essays in sunny solitude.) Oh HOWEVER I did just get my first birthday present: facial and pedi courtesy of my mom. Tonight after dinner while we were all falling asleep at the table she showed up with a homemade cake full of candles, a spa gift card and an appointment note for tomorrow at noon. What a lady, huh?

What do you want from me?

2009-12-20T14:54:00.000-08:00

What's up, jerklets? I've spent my Sunday as follows: eating brunch at a most disreputable Leslieville restaurant/trough/"Breakfast SLAM!" hell hole (I trusted the breakfast-assurances of a sweetly boorish Jock Type, BADIDEA), sewing things (am pioneer person), washing silk things (am smart/listens to salesgirl person) climbing into the bath to clean more effectively (am OCD person), and crawling into an Internet k-hole while I was writing tomorrow's Required Reading. JEALOUS?

My last EYE WEEKLY column of 09 ran last week. It is called What do you want from me? and is generally about social expectations and specifically about how I am occasionally (often) flaky about plans (Boooo, yeah, I know) and don't really dig parties (which are such T.T.H. problem-vessels... Why can't I just hang out with people I already like? Why can't you? Shiiiit.)

"So much stuff about parties bums me out. I don't like the obvious anxiety on display, the performative politics of conversation and positioning. I don't relate to the midnight chasers, the 4am kitchen-dwellers pursuing conversations with people they don't like as an excuse to stay longer. I suppose they, and everyone at a party, is after communion and connection, which I never find there, or to see and be seen, which I don't really care about." Read it here.

Indignities and intimacies of the laundromat

2009-12-05T09:14:00.000-08:00

"The public and private elements of a city are expressed so well in the laundromat. Here we are, in a small, steamy room together, shoving our collections of shirts and socks and boxers and jammies and black lacy things into the machines. I like to do this fast and all at once, having separated and pre-treated the bits and pieces at home beforehand. Handling dirty clothes and sheets and towels feels especially private, not just because they are almost of the body, but because they’re things we do mostly in our own rooms and bathrooms and only with people whose bodies we know. Since the size and scope of city housing and economics means that using a laundromat is overwhelmingly standard, the actual weirdness and indignity of the laundromat is easily forgotten."

New column is about the laundromat. You can read it here.

I'm more famous than you. No big deal.

2009-11-20T14:08:00.001-08:00

Ok just kidding! Maybe! I don't know. This week's My Life, My Fault column at EYE is about my own micro-celebrity. I will not insult your probably gigantic intelligence by explicating the conflicts and dramas I endured when writing this. But there were some. Anyway, fuck, this whole thing is complicated by wanting so badly to be honest and report things like this truthfully without diving headlong into Lake Asshole. I think I did a good job, ultimately. Ok byeee!

Claustro-sucky-baby

2009-11-20T13:56:00.000-08:00

Randomly throughout my life I've encountered serious claustrophobia. Once I was briefly trapped on the subway (so maybe "trapped" isn't totally accurate) and after that just drove and walked and took the streetcar everywhere for months. It took moving to car-only California and then coming back to get on a subway without bursting into tears on the platform (did this one in front of my mom while she was visiting. Not a good look. Also if you're not comforted in a scary-to-you situation by your incredibly sweet mother than you're fuuuuucked). Anyway I thought that writing about a recent, extended episode of claustrophobia in my EYE column would cure me. Sometimes that works. Except, it's worse. I have to meet my friend Rhys uptown tonight and I'm wondering if I can walk it in the cheap flats I'm wearing or if it's worth a fat cab fare. And, thinking seriously about getting back on SSRIs for this even though otherwise I'm happy as a clam. BLEEERG!

Stuff

2009-10-22T14:45:00.000-07:00

Hiiiii. I'm about to go on holiday but look! New column called Tyranny of Stuff about the glut of things we tend to live with. Have a good week duders!

Heartbeats

2009-10-16T14:47:00.000-07:00

Latest column for EYE WEEKLY is called I Feel It In My Heartbeat. It's about the ultra-scary day I spent at the hospital getting my heart checked (turns out: just a panic attack or something non-heart-attacky).

Aunthood

2009-09-23T12:09:00.001-07:00

New column is up today and in print tomorrow: The Agony (and the Ecstasy) Aunt, about me and my four nephews and two nieces. Read it here.

Other People's Sex Lives

2009-09-18T18:16:00.000-07:00

New(ish- the Toronto International Film Festival has meant I've been in the office doing things like "blogging" and "working" about 98% less than usual) column is called The Sex That You're Not Having and you can read it heeeeeeere. This is another entry into my personal canon of trying to make people think about sex in a less squeamish way.

School's Cool!

2009-09-03T18:57:00.000-07:00

On September 24th the fall session of my Creative Journalism class begins. Want to sign up or know someone who might? Link is here. Or email me (kcarraway@eyeweekly.com) with any questions. I'm super friendly! Maybe this time someone will call me "Teach".

Cool Girls

2009-08-27T20:08:00.000-07:00

My friend Ben told me not to use the word "muse" in my column about my girl-inspirations, but I did, despite that word's dusty, self-serious quality. I needed it because the women I'm writing about aren't simply inspiring, but are muses in the classic sense of being central to what I'm making, of embodying what it is I'm after. I get that it's uncool to be so overt with friend-feeling and with discussing inspiration and attempts to live better lives, but fuck it. Nobody who gets drunk on Miller Lite and live-blogs the Rachel Maddow show (this moi) is too cool to begin with.

Can't Sleep

2009-08-23T10:32:00.001-07:00

Newest My Life, My Fault is about insomnia. Read it here. That's all, I guess. I'm busy today doing the writings and had pancakes for breakfast so I'm battling nappishness. Ah, so the sleep-circle closes!

Required Reading

2009-08-08T18:13:00.001-07:00

Hi, so, I have a new column at EYE called "Required Reading" that is a daily (yes, *daily*, which means I have a little less time to get a Starbucks and read magazines on the curb outside the office) roundup of everything you want to read. I mean it. Blogs, articles, books, gossipy whatevers, etc. The first one, from Thursday, is about Vice and ice, the pros and cons of Zooey D., a Gonzo-y collection called Hella Nation, and abortions; the second one from Friday is about "no homo", idiot bankers, whisky, and Africa. If you've read something that I want to know about and possibly include, please email it to me at kcarraway@eyeweekly.com or via Twitter at @katecarraway. Swell!

The Rules of Disengagement

2009-07-30T12:18:00.000-07:00

This week's column is about exes. What I left out is that my friend Shaun, who I was with when the opening anecdote happened, spun around to look just as I was telling him not to. I guess "Don't look, don't look" sounded like "Look behind you right now."

U-Hell

2009-07-16T07:56:00.000-07:00

My column this week is about moving, inspired by just moving in June, to Bloor and Ossington, and moving again in September, to I don't know where. As usual, my desk-pal/the other staff writer at EYE, Chris Bilton, came up with the title. Read it here.

I Quit Indie Rock

2009-07-09T16:47:00.000-07:00

New EYE column called "Slanted and Disenchanted" (har, har) about giving up on the social stuff of indie rock. Read it here.

Dads

2009-06-20T10:31:00.000-07:00

My EYE WEEKLY column this week is about my dad, and other good dads. Basically impossible to write about how much my dad means to me in small-form, when the larger point was about how tricky it is to be a good father. Anyway... Big propers to good dads.

Loud People Fucking

2009-06-04T14:48:00.000-07:00

My Life, My Fault this week is about sex noise. It started out much, much more XXX, but a wise editor/my friend Dave reminded me that not everyone has the tolerance for graphic graphicness that I do. Anyway, read it here.

Pleasure War (plus, Old Maid)

2009-05-20T06:10:00.000-07:00

Column this week is called "It's (Pleasure) War!" and is about my intention for summer 2009 to be about competitive fun. I am already winning, by the way. Give me a challenge, ok?

In other news, I made a list of my best friends in Toronto and guess what? Out of 14, TWO OF THEM are single other than me. What the shit? And most of them are married or will be by August. I'm not all, like, sobbing about this, and in fact am quite pleased that so many of them found people to be with that make them really happy, but I am bewildered about how it all happened so fast. This year saw one new boyfriend, four engagements and two move-ins among them. I kind of thought we all agreed to dick around and drink in the park a little longer, right guys? Hey.... guys? Hey, guys!?

Dealbreaking

2009-05-10T12:05:00.001-07:00

My Life, My Fault is about "dealbreakers" this week. Read it here. Several of my bros and hos got in on this one and supplied their own dealbreakers, but I could only use a few of the many, many, many gross and funny things I was emailed. How does anybody ever hook up with anybody? Alcohol.

Two new columns! Rape and church in that order

2009-04-21T19:39:00.001-07:00

My last column was about the rape continuum, which you can read here. I've been wondering about what to do with this blog ("make a real one instead" is the right answer, probably) so I wasn't anxious to post it here, but for now, wha-wha-whateves. Also, Thursday's print issue of EYE will have my newest column about being an atheist that digs church, and hey! It is already up online, here.

Quarterlife Crisis

2009-04-02T19:06:00.001-07:00

I wrote the cover story for this week's EYE WEEKLY, about the Quarterlife Crisis. Read it here. I pitched this piece before I started working at EYE so I'm really fucking psyched to be done with it. I never had a specific Quarterlife Crisis, but I suuuuure had miniature bouts of it between about 19-25. As usual, talking to people and writing about it helped in that small but always useful way of understanding how common this sort of thing is. And, for sure, writing a long, reported trend story that didn't use any first person was totally great and novel.

Playtime etc.

2009-03-26T06:04:00.000-07:00

My new column is up today and is about playing. This time in My Life, My Fault I incorporated some real expert shizz to back up what I sense to be the truth, in this case, the value of immaturity. It is appropriately rated PG! You're welcome, Dad!

Read it (please, if you like, etc.) here.

When Bad Decisions Are Good Ideas

2009-03-14T18:01:00.000-07:00

This week my column is about bad decisions that are actually good ideas. I am getting a lot of emails about this one, some of them pretty serious and heartfelt. I guess a lot of people relate. Read it here. Next one will be about candy or sunshine or something.

Incidentally, I ran into one of the Brutal Knights (who are playing tonight, possibly even right now) last week at an unlikely bar on Yonge St., where I was bro-ing down with my pal Keith. I sort of sheepishly said thanks again for letting me use the name of their EP (My Life, My Fault) for the column. I feel kind of dumb about that, but it's so perfect. Good thing they are all total cools.

Longshoreperson

2009-03-01T19:09:00.000-08:00

Ryan Bigge analyzed how much swearing ("cursing", I prefer) is involved in my work at EYE on his blog. Issa pretty funny. My dad, who was standing in the kitchen while I read about it in the family room (you know, just watching Devil Wears Prada with Moms), chortled and said "He's got your number."

I do swear a lot in print. Because I feel like it, and because I believe in that kind of immediacy and informality and aggression when it's called for. And yet, I only swear IRL in front of friends, and rarely, and am supremely uncomfortable when foul language is used by or around my own parents or other people's or anyone in some kind of position of authority. Earlier today my dad said "Shit"-something and I piped in, all "Pardon me?" from the other room and he was all "I thought you were in the basement!" My parents don't really understand my thing about being sweary and dirty in stories, sometimes, and a prissy prude about swearing (and any talk about bodies and their functions) at home. Fair enough.

Work

2009-03-01T11:40:00.000-08:00

Last week, I decided to write about work and working for my column in EYE WEEKLY, which is called My Life, My Fault (the column is here). It didn't occur to me, because I am totally fucking dumb about such matters, that I was thinking about work and working because I was doing too much work and working. If I were friends with me, I would point out how useful self-awareness can be, and how I should pursue more of that.

Basically, I've been doing a few things: working at EYE, which has proven to be superior to freelance because of fun and smart and supportive people (addressed in column), and also because of structure and working in a room where I do not also sleep (or drink/fight/fuck); freelance, mostly for publications in the U.S.; book-writing, which I don't even want to talk about; and researching where I might do a Ph.D. in the next few years (maybe).

The trouble with doing all of this isn't so much "lots of work", which I'm down with. The trouble is that when you are living inside a circuitous headspace all the time, occupied with and dreaming about email alerts and Twitters (I'm @katecarraway, obviously) and sections of a story that you're developing or wondering how to spin something you're going through into a piece without totally alienating someone in your non-work life, it gets to be taxing.

That can also be OK and manageable as long as you see a movie and have some good sleeps throughout the week. Buuuuut I had gotten to a point where my fingers, hands, wrists, arms and shoulders started to seize up. This is my ultimate horror, losing the physical ability (it happens, it happens) to be a writer, which is a more physically demanding job than one might think, and ha ha but I'm not even talking about occupationally hazardous hangovers (which is also true). Also, on Tuesday or Wednesday night I had a panic attack, which some people would recognize as "a sign", and on Friday I lost an important document and spent a long time with my heart in my throat, on the phone to Torstar's IT department, before magically recovering it, and so many hours of work. After emailing it to myself about fourteen times, I went home and didn't type for 36 hours.

I drank tequila, listened to Zep and Mariah, took a train ride to my parents' house and read magazines, watched so much television, had a jacuzzi, went to bed in the PM for once. My laptop, my precious sweetie-peanut laptop, was still and silent. I felt real calm for the first time in a long while. Now I'm good and scared enough to think about this more regularly, I think, and ensure that I'm doing right by my arms. Until I'm on deadline.

Friend Love

2009-02-12T11:06:00.000-08:00

My My Life, My Fault column for EYE WEEKLY this week is about girl crushes, bromance (not that I necessarily approve of that word, guh) and platonic love affairs. It's mostly about my friends Reena, Isis, Amy, Rhys and Ben, but I had a few others in mind as well. I don't think we talk about friendship (or work) enough. "We" being youngish culture and life writers and participants, I guess. I think my tragic flaw is that I'm moody and internal and tend to hide away on my own for long stretches, making it tough to always be the kind of friend I really want to be. I guess this was some kind of attempt to celebrate what happens when friendship goes right. Column is here.

Second column, first post about it

2009-01-29T11:07:00.001-08:00

So, I have a column in EYE WEEKLY called My Life, My Fault. My friend suggested the column title (it's a 7" by a fun and good Toronto band called Brutal Knights). I'm super excited about the column BUT the first one that ran in the paper and online was accompanied by a photo that, in its little print form, is fine, if smug-ish, but online is huuuuuuge and not something I'm willing to link to. Reshoot probable. Vanity, maximalized.

This week's column is about social hibernation. I wrote it a day before I went to my first Wavelength (Sunday night indie rock showcase at Sneaky Dee's) in months, and a few days before I went to the Bovine Sex Club (dirty Queen St. bar with too many old men in bad leather jackets hunting for tatted, transgressive pussy) to see my friend Keith's band play their last show with their current singer. Buuuuuut I'm back to it, and set to spend my night with my roommate and season 4 of Nip/Tuck. Column is here.

Freeconomics

2009-01-07T19:11:00.000-08:00

This week EYE releases the Cheap Living guide. I wanted to do something tough for me, something that would make me uncomfortable. So I lived for sort-of free for a week and wrote about it here.

I think this story might alienate some people that I consider my peers. So be it, I guess. It's harshly honest about money, which is something I find difficult to talk about (WASP, right here). For that more than anything I'm glad to have had the opportunity to do it. Also because when I told my parents about it they were very much like "Sure, Kath, sure." That's the Mom and Dad version of when Biggie goes "Whatevuh. Whatevuh." Dis-MISSED!!

What else. Nothing. I'm at work right now. I cleaned my desk and scribbled some stuff down on actual paper. Both semi-epic events, considering.

Hangovers

2009-01-04T12:09:00.000-08:00

I stayed in London (my hometown) way too long. Like, eight days I think? Too long.

I wrote about holiday hangovers- the food hangover, the booze hangover, the emotional hangover, and the financial hangover- here, in EYE WEEKLY.

The business end of the end of the year

2008-12-28T16:13:00.001-08:00

Such is life, that the end of a calendar year requires some editorial reflection. I wrote about what went on in the print, online, and TV media here for EYE WEEKLY.

In his year-end wrap-up in the Toronto Star, Ryan Bigge called an article I wrote a "paint-peeling screed", here.

(My original article is here.)

I'm still on "Christmas Holiday" which has devolved into an orgy of mall sales, apathetic babysitting and listless reading. It's pretty gross.

First Day

2008-12-24T21:10:00.000-08:00

Unless MySpace counts, I've never had my own blog before. When you're good at something, don't do it for free, right? But it has become apparent that I should have one, and so, here it is. Tonight is Christmas Eve, and maybe an unlikely time to start blogging (various members of my family are getting high; wrapping presents; assembling Magic Castles; squirming around in bed listening for deer hooves; sitting back with an ignored book, wondering how it came to this) and I could use the stab of productivity.