I may have written about this before, I forget --

Have you ever seen "All About Lily Chou-Chou"? It's an Iwai film, around 2001-2002, about an online community surrounding this singer, Lily Chou-Chou; but it's sort of about the interplay between what they get out of the community and what life gives them. The face they show online, and the face they give the world. The reassuring quality of the Ether, the word they give the internet -- and musicians who embody its ineffability -- and the unending cruelty of the real world.

Or rather, I suppose it's about how we choose to cope with stress through life.

It's a very novelistic film. There are segments that just seem like a separate act, basically disconnected except that everyone comes back from it a little different. I just want to focus on one part: one of the characters becomes a bizarrely cruel and sadistic person while still retaining his original comforting qualities in the Ether. And it's this divergence that ultimately leads to the film's conflict as it just constantly escalates.

I feel like this sometimes -- it's like one of the final bosses of my personality, besides my unending nomadic restlessness (itself a recent affect). That is to say, I don't think of myself as a particularly nice person. Often the closer someone is to me the colder I become, and the more the superficial civility succumbs to sardonic scar tissue.

There's this theory of how we hold stress in the body; we guard areas to protect them from injury or pain, but when we accumulate stress, we also treat that as another area of the body to protect. Stress then lives in tiny muscles, maybe a specific region of our body as a whole (for me, seemingly the neck and upper back as well as lower gut?) and we tend to become stiff. Lots of things develop over time if we don't rework the association.

I think our personas can become more or less body guarding. I think that's one reason people move form place to place -- you have the chance to reset who you "are", because the social context removes the continuity that prompts your brain to replay the last pattern. But that never quite lasts, because the persona developed as a reflexive response; if you can't address the reflexive response, if you can't figure out what in your life produced this pattern, then it re-emerges. I feel like in my early 20s I shed and then regrew the basic personality I always had.

This ironically was a big factor in my move to Montreal, this time last year. I was in Vancouver; I was paying a lot to be there, I thought of myself as this cool young professional, but I also felt like I had closed the door on a lot of parts of myself that felt important. I was alone, paying a lot, just wandering, not really reading anything or learning anything new. I thought I needed company -- a life pattern that included others in it all the time -- I thought I needed a lower stress life, I thought I needed more room for creativity. I think all of those things are correct. I just don't often remember that's why I came here.

I guess the overall synthesis here is that I want to be nicer. Always. I know I'm nice online. I know I'm nice to you, reader. I want it to be all of me. And I think that I've made some progress there, but it never feels done with.