No way.

We’re here mainly to help my father who is dying of cancer, and after that there is no way I could stay in Ottawa. I really like my cousins and aunt and uncle I’m getting to know, but I can always drive over to Ottawa to come and see them.

This is definitely not my city (even if I was born here).

My exploring the Canadian medical system has been a biproduct of being here to help my father…granted, it’s been a productive exploration, but I wouldn’t be here in Ottawa now and I *definitely* wouldn’t be staying if he wasn’t so sick. It feels good to do the right thing, even if he wouldn’t do it in return…but that’s a subject for another blog entirely. Sometimes, the best way to send positive energy out into the universe is to do onto others what you know they would never do for you.

My two weeks in Ottawa have already made me realize how much living around other artists–even if they aren’t that talented–is inspiring.

Even though it’s a Los Angeles cliche, things like sitting in a cafe and watching someone type a script, or hearing an actress complain about her horrible agent, is inspiring. It motivates me, makes me feel like I belong.

It’s a cliche I enjoy wrapping myself around–like a cocoon.

In the absent of such energy, I feel like I’m a ‘freak’…I guess I’ve always been a ‘freak’, but I never noticed it amongst my own.

I am the strange electric pulse in a room bouncing the other way. A little salmon swimming against the current.

Sometimes we have to get away to truly feel what it is that we love about where we are. The elements we don’t notice, the elements we take for granted, suddenly in their absence knifes us in the heart.

I miss you.

The lack of the buzz of creative energy. Ottawa is a city of politics, of government workers, of diplomacy. Ottawa is a city of safety. Ottawa is not a bad city–it’s a perfectly nice city for perfectly nice people.

It’s just not the city for me.