Archive for the 'Blogging' Category

Remembering Derek.

Published on May 4, 2011 by Corinna Carlson | 7 Comments

I have a feeling there will be a few of these posts popping up, not everything fits into 140 characters. Not this grief.

Last night my friend Airdrie lost her best friend and her husband while the Vancouver blogging / social media community also lost the same great man, Derek Miller passed away after a valiant fight with Cancer.

Today is one of those days where I grapple with the magnitude of blogging and just how much someone can touch you via words on a screen. Nothing tangible, no pages to turn.

Before 2008, I knew of Derek, I read his blog I followed him on Twitter, I admired him greatly; it was hard not to given how open he was about his battles with Cancer. #fuckcancer

At the beginning of March ‘08 I took a lot of pills and went across the street for an off-sales bottle of wine and downed it which sealed my lackluster attempt at a suicide and I found myself in the hospital. I’ve never denied how selfish of a disorder depression is. And although I received a great deal of support, more than I could have hoped for given some of the circumstances, when I came upon this post written for me by this man that I respected for his strength, courage and his fighting spirit – trying to put into words what it meant to me is almost impossible. Someone who knew they were going to die, someone facing eminent death took the time to reach out and publicly support me. I found it to be and still do consider it one of the most selfless things anyone has ever done for me.

I met Derek that following December, I b-lined for him when I saw him so I could finally thank him in person. I’m glad I have this photo below, my social anxiety kept me from most events where I would have had an opportunity to have gotten to know him better.

photo courtesy of Raul on Flickr

I end this with great sadness he is gone, with sincerest condolences to Airdrie and to the rest of his family and friends but also from a place of peace knowing that he touched so many people.

You can read Derek’s last words here, if you experience technical difficulties due to traffic there is a cached version of it located here instead.

And last but not least #FUCKCANCER.

Now I cried a lot.

Published on February 9, 2011 by Corinna Carlson | 14 Comments

You know how sometimes someone will say something to you about yourself and at the time you think you don’t care? Like say someone said, “and people hate you for it too” [in this case the topic was how I tweet]. I know I said something back to the affect of, “if I cared about numbers I’d have changed how I tweet a long time ago”. And that is true, if nothing else I’ve made a point of becoming even more myself on Twitter and tweeting out the most random of random shit that comes into my head, because in general I tweet how I talk, I also write in a very similar fashion to how I talk, but only to a degree, I don’t talk in under-punctuated run-on sentences [very often]. I’m well aware that my form of humor and almost constant sarcasm and/or realism in my tweets is an acquired taste.

This comment has stuck with me. It’s been bugging me. I guess I don’t understand why anyone would read or follow my tweets if they hate me. I also don’t really know why when I’ve clearly separated myself out from the Vancouver Social Media scene why I’m STILL a hot hate topic. I have made some friendships with people inside the scene but I hang out with them outside of it.

It makes me feel bitter and bullied, like people are just sitting back and waiting for me to lose it, hospital style. If I get upset to any degree on any public forum, including my blog, it feels like I can’t just be upset, it feels like the haters are sitting in anticipation of when they can declare that I haven’t changed.

I have a temper, no matter how hard I work on myself I’m always going to have a temper but I’m not going to blog from the perspective of forcing all the progress I’ve made down people’s throats, I simply write how I feel on whatever medium I’m on. If you have to ask yourself why someone would be as open as I am about my life, and my trials and tribulations then you aren’t my target audience.

Normally I wouldn’t even address this because it feels like I’m defending myself, but I’m feeling pretty down right now. I suppose it only makes sense, to me anyway, given the posts from January that I am feeling a certain amount of insecurity online. I make a point of not checking my stats unless I’m under attack, which I was and so I know that my parents are stalking both my blog and my twitter page. I don’t know if they think this will intimidate me into not posting and if they think it’s been working, when in reality I’ve been super busy with a new kitty who came to us with some health issues which lead to me being pretty down and having a tough time going from taking care of my sick old best furry buddy to taking care of a sick kitten with no one but myself to blame for my emotions. Feeling like I got a new kitty too soon but knowing I couldn’t give up on the little guy. Breaking down somedays out of emotional exhaustion and feeling like a fucking loser because it was triggered by cats. But coming home to an empty apartment after Christmas was hard on us both. I had no way of knowing, thinking we were rescuing a healthy cat, which was naive in and of itself, that the wee Roy Kucing being a bit sick for over half the time we’ve had him would take an emotional tole. I do have an introductory post for Roy in drafts but never got it finished.

I would also be a flat out liar if I were to proclaim that certain aspects of things happening or rather not happening with my immediate family weren’t bothersome. The fact that I’ve made three attempts to obtain my grandmother’s new address and phone number and have been ignored on all fronts. But yet my parents stalk my site. It makes me sick. Regardless of what is going on between my parents and claims that I never contact this woman and then refusing to let me contact her when she’s dying doesn’t even make sense to me. It certainly isn’t making me want to have any sort of civil conversation with them, but if they actually think I’d bring any of this up to my almost 89 year old dying grandmother, fuck it, I can’t even entertain these ideas because it simply makes my blood boil. The fact that they are stalking me instead of giving me a simple fucking address speaks volumes to me.

For me, right now, I’m dealing with the fact that I AM dealing with things. I’m dealing with feelings. I’ve never kept it a secret on here that I’ve abused prescription drugs in the past. This has gotten me into A LOT of trouble online and in my personal life. It made me feel invincible and I got behind a computer screen a few too many times under the influence and well, I think the majority here know how the rest of that story goes. Even this time last year I couldn’t sit in my feelings. That is why it is ok if I simply do sit in my feelings and don’t exercise, don’t read, don’t write, just sit, I can’t do it forever but it’s where I’m currently at: because at least I’m sitting at least I’m not fucked up on a stash of clonazepam and seroquel. Having real feelings is a trip, it has allowed for many breakthroughs with my psychiatrist but it is incredibly hard at times. I’m used to freaking out and then freaking out some more with maybe a bit more freak out thrown in for good measure but not freaking out means the pain has to go somewhere and if it isn’t going into the drugs and it isn’t going into freaking out then where it is going is where I’m going right now and those places suck balls but if I don’t go to them then I can never get better, I will never know if I can be one of the lucky ones who does recover from this at times debilitating illness.

This morning when I woke up feeling suicidal and outed myself with my dailybooth photo I was glad to find myself with words not going straight to draft because I won’t suffer in silence, I will put it out there so that I don’t do stupid shit and end up in the hospital again or have friends running around trying to find me and contacting Adam and afraid for my safety because I know having lost someone who stayed silent and from the life I’ve lead that if there is one thing I’m not no matter how shitty I feel is alone in this and if I have to put my pain out on the internet to keep myself here then I’m going to put it out on the fucking internet and haters gonna hate no matter what, but the people who love me are also still going to love me.

R.I.P. Gus 1994 ~ 2010

Published on November 6, 2010 by Corinna Carlson | 40 Comments

November 5, 2010

It is hard for me to believe that by the time I push publish on this at sometime tomorrow that Gus will already be gone. Adam and I picked the photos for this memorial post a couple weeks ago now, to make it easier to post it. I wasn’t sure if I was going to write anything or not, by my mind is moving at a million miles an hour. How am I going to walk without keeling over to the vet’s office? And how am I supposed to walk back in the apartment with an empty carrier and no kitty to greet me?

It has been incredibly hard trying to figure out exactly when to do this. If this was about us we could probably keep her around for another two or three months, but it is about her. She is in pain and I don’t know how I knew, given that I am not a religious person maybe it is that I do have a spiritual side. In my gut, I knew that I would know when it was time, that she’d let me know in her own way, and when she jumped up onto my lap on Wednesday morning and didn’t purr at all, I knew. No matter how crappy she has been feeling over the past few months she has always kept purring. It took me a couple hours to muster the courage to call but I had to.

I’m not a person who has had to deal with a lot of death in my life. Animal wise, people wise. I have not had to deal with death since 2003. I remember how I felt, parts of it, and I’m dreading it. Especially given that Gus has no say in this. I’m keeping the promise I made to myself and the promise I made to her, that I wouldn’t let her suffer. Part of me feels like I have left it too long but on the other she is still *happy* which has only added to the difficulty.

She led a great life and we went through many a gauntlet together, other than Adam she had never really taken to anyone else very much, but a few were able to win her over. Being the runt of the litter she always had bizarre ways of letting you know you’d made her inner circle, such as drooling on you or giving you a quick chin or nose lick. There are so many things I can’t imagine living without, little things, like the sound of her paws when she’d walk across the hardwood, when she’d purr so hard and drool so much it would soak her nose, so many kisses on my nose and chin I’d have to stop her because it would hurt after a few. Watching her and Adam curled up sleeping together on the couch. All the things that annoyed the shit out of me like her pushing her face under my books all the time so I couldn’t read, I’m going to miss that now.

I’m not sure who is luckier, you all reading this or me that the scanner is broken so the only photos of Gus are ones taken since I started Blogging in 2005. If it were working I’d probably be scanning in kitten photos like mad.

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November 6, 2010

We are home. Today dragged and then it flew. I’m riding the shock wave, hoping it lasts a while I’m not really ready for it to sink in. She was ready but not past ready and even though she is gone, I’m glad she went before she wasn’t recognizable as Gus anymore. I feel completely detached right now so saying anything much else isn’t going to enlighten me to this loss and what it means. I just know for that for a long time that for sixteen years she was the best cat I could have ever asked for. I can’t even imagine how much I’m going to miss her.

You were so loved little buddy R.I.P. Gus.

Bob Lai Photography

Published on August 20, 2010 by Corinna Carlson | 7 Comments

In December 2008 Bob and I met, not even realizing we’d met until the next day. A photo of me enjoying a special moment in my blogography went up from the social media event we were both at and I had people alerting me to it from various directions from the moment I got online. Turned out the person who had caught this moment was Bob and luckily we had met that night, although briefly, we were still introduced. This led to following each other on twitter, reading each others’ blogs, to eventually becoming facebook friends; the regular social media drill.

What originally kept me interested in reading Bob’s blog and following him on Twitter was that I could live vicariously through a lot of his Flickr photos. We both enjoy a lot of the same out door activities but I’m not currently in a position to enjoy them like he is. Bob’s landscape photography always captured me and took me back to good memories from my past, hiking, camping, skiing, made me yearn for those days. Each photo always reminds me how much I miss those sides of myself but reaffirm that they are still there, just tucked away for later.

I learned of Bob’s plans to build his own site, sell his landscape prints and add portrait / headshot photographer onto his resume of services offered. Given that I liked his photos so much I asked if he needed any models for his portfolio, he said yes, I own some nice Betsey Johnson dresses so away we went.

We’d both always wanted to do the whole Vancouver Gastown alley graffiti shoot. We did just that and the set can be viewed here, I wanted to take this post, for the most part to highlight Bob’s work in general and mention about how it meant a lot having him take my photos after having followed his work and growth as a photographer for over two years via the wonders of Flickr.

Bob knew he wanted me in the blue dress but still looking pretty natural which was fine with me, I don’t have a live in hair and make-up artist anymore, so I winged it. The evening itself was super fun, it didn’t take me long to relax, Bob does have a very naturally calming personality, he is very respectful. He wants his shot how he envisions it but he does make sure you are fully comfortable with whatever ideas may pop into his head beyond what is already pictured on the film reel of his brain while planning the shoot.

It was really great getting to help someone start building something towards their passion, it was a pleasure to work with Bob and I would of course recommend him for any of your headshot or portrait session needs! Do check out his site and enjoy the photos I’ve posted here they are a just a few of my personal favourites.