Okay, no more hesitating – I need to blog! Sometimes I get intimidated and feel the need to impress when I publish something that anyone can read on the wwweb. I also don’t always feel grateful for things, events, people or challenges in my life, but I don’t want to post anything negative on here, since it’s a gratitude blog. Sometimes I think up the best RANT blog posts ever about how ridiculous people and life can be. Like how this week I almost had to swim to the subway/metro because a giant water pipe burst and flooded downtown Montreal. Perhaps on the side I need to start a sarcastic rant blog called Thanks for the bull#()*%@! 
Would any of you read it? Just curious.
However…. then I get to thinking about writing something here on thanksfortheblues and it forces me to think about what I am grateful for. And I realize there are a LOT of things to appreciate. So here are two recent things that I’m getting a kick out of (in no particular order):
I attended this club for the first time tonight. It was held in the loft on the 3rd floor of Burritoville. My first impression upon walking in was “what a bunch of snobs” because the room was about half full, mainly with men all engrossed in fiddling with and playing with their ukuleles, and no one looked up to say hi or welcome me. I felt like I’d entered some kind of socially awkward experts club where no one was there to socialize – just play the music. This didn’t make any sense to me as it’s a UKULELE club! Ukuleles are not for snobs – they are the most accessible, friendly, cute, fun little instruments (with a kick) that you could find, so I decided I would stick around to wait and see who else might show up. My friend Adrienne arrived shortly thereafter, and she’s one of the friendliest people I’ve met in Montreal so she was happy to share her songbook with me and I was happy to have someone to chat with. The room started to fill right up (about 40 people) and then we started to play songs together, all from the three different song books that the club has compiled. Let me tell you, the atmosphere was instantly joyous as the sounds of 40 different ukuleles filled my ears and my heart. It was so much FUN to play songs like “Help” by the Beatles, “Ring of Fire” by Johnny Cash, and classics like “5 foot 2, eyes of blue”. We were all at different levels of playing skill; some people sang, some people played percussion, and some even had kazoos. We all played songs together for the first hour and then after a social break, the last hour was like an open mic. Anyone who wanted to could get up and perform a song for the group. The first man who performed couldn’t sing to save his life, but he was a decent uke player. When he finished, everyone applauded enthusiastically, so I decided to get up there and play! I said “Hi my name is Hailey” and the whole room responded with “Hi Hailey!!” in unison with big smiles. It made me crack up and one guy piped up “and I’m a ukeholic!” It was so endearing! I played and sang Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” and even though I messed up some chords, I didn’t even feel embarrassed and I played the whole song – some people even sang along and played along. When I finished I swear I thought they were going to give me a standing ovation! They applauded and cheered like crazy! It was a great feeling. I’m totally joining this group!! 
2) Community Art Studio
This is a course I’m taking through the Art Education department at Concordia. I’m taking it at the graduate level and was super excited to be invited to take the course by the instructor, Janis Timm-Bottos. She is a mentor to me – as an art therapist and as a genuine human being. She really believes in the healing power of art and in building community through art making. I could honestly write for hours about this course but I’ll just give you a brief idea by saying that it takes place IN a community art studio called La Ruche D’art (The Art Hive) in St. Henri, Montreal, and every week we do amazing readings, and we make art together. Radical art. For example today we had a zine workshop where we learned about the history of zines and the different kinds of zines you can make like perzines and guidezines etc…
Next week we will be doing an exercise called “Each One Teach One” where we each have to teach a brief skill or artform that can be explained and executed in 15mins. There will be workshop stations set up around the room and we will move to each station and try making/doing/learn each person’s artform/skill. We will also each make a page of instructions for a class zine that we will each get a copy of at the end of the course. Our textbook is called Towards Psychologies of Liberation and is all about how doing community projects as creative acts of social justice is the real way that we will heal ourselves and our world. It’s mind-blowing stuff. 
