A woman juggles caregiving, grandchildren, and neighborhood conflicts while keeping a compulsive inner typewriter that records her life. She compiles a to-do list including a Wind Museum, a deranged, diseased skunk, confronting a former partner who still takes royalties, and a cancelled Mexico City conference. A childhood habit of typing in her head serves as proof of existence and fuels compulsive note-taking. The narrative alternates between domestic comedy and bleak meditations on suicide, guilt, and enforced silence. A cancelled conference invitation and visible cancellation on the program deepen feelings of failure and urgency to resolve lingering debts and relationships.
In a frenetic household set-up in Toronto, keeping an eye on her mother one moment, entertaining her grandchildren the next and warding off angry neighbours in between, she struggles to get her act together and makes a to-do list: Wind Museum. Deranged skunk. North-west quadrant with ex. Conversacion in Mexico City. The skunk has distemper and keeps getting trapped in the window well.
Since early childhood she has been afflicted with a need to write things down: the fingers in my mind would begin typing, and she'd carry on all day, touch-typing in her head, as though that were the only way of proving to myself that I was alive, that what I was experiencing was real. That could be an answer of sorts. Too late, though: she's disinvited from the conference; the word CANCELLED appears across her photo in the programme.
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