Posts filed under ‘musings’
My Day (a post with bad grammar)
Today was a day.
It went something like this:
Wake up with a start at sunrise
Contemplate cleaning my room, say “Fuck it”, go back to bed
Half sleeping, turn on the radio. CBC obviously.
Cant fall back asleep
Say ‘Fuck It” again and get out of bed
Put away dishes.
Get to the café for 8:35 to prep for my 9 AM call that comes at 9:25 even though I told her I had to be somewhere at 10.
Postpone my 10 o’clock by email while on the phone.
Hustle to my 10 (now 10:15)
Have a relatively useless meeting.
Send follow-up emails related to that meeting that need immediate attention.
It is now 11:30
I have not had coffee. My sinuses are blocked and I look like a chapped version of Rudolf. I order the cheapest thing on the menu (grilled baguette with butter) and on a whim add cheese. I’m splurging today.
I get a call form my mother. She sounds well and its less trying than usual. For this I am thankful.
I start writing the article that’s due in 24 hours. I hate it. I start again, I hate that too.
I switch to another project and realize how much I want to fire that client. My work is interspersed with an email exchange so much further in the realm of babysitting than project management that it boggles the mind. I retreat to Facebook and Twitter.
I think about what sex would be like with the guy I’ve been making out with. I can’t seem to make it work in my head. What’s wrong with me that I cant even make my fantasies work?
I revisit the article. I still hate it but slog through it. Its hideous but an almost finished state of hideous and I consider this a small victory.
I am interrupted by the woman next to me wanting to plug into the socket under my table.
We make small talk. She is intense and earnest in a way that is both refreshing and off-putting. She has bright pink hair and in a geneticist specializing in poplar trees. She has a 17-year-old son whom she stresses she had ‘very young’. She is moving to Sweden in June. I couldn’t make this up.
I send of the second project and start a third. I’m know I know what needs doing but I can’t rally the brain cells. I dive in and draft a proposal anyway. It rings false and sales-pitchy but that’s what the industry calls for and I can’t tell if I’m more distressed by that fact or by the fact that it came so naturally to me to write that way.
I look up and see a good-looking man across the room. I bemoan the fact that I am so sick and look like death.
Its 3 PM. I order chicken quesadillas with hot sauce. I try to look cute eating them because now he has seen me see him and there is no way out of this glance-dance. The hot sauce scalds my mouth and hurts my chapped lips. I tear. Tearing up over quesadillas is decidedly not sexy. Fuck.
Once again I delve into Facebook and Twitter. I forward some links of interest to friends who might benefit from them. I look at the hideous article again. I feel an overwhelming desire to scream.
The pink-haired young scientist mom next to me engages in what will turn out to be a 30 minute long and exceedingly personal phone conversation with a man named Doug who I ascertain is her ex. She talks at him about his feelings and motives like she is Dr. Phil. She uses terms like “my reality’ and ‘your insecurities’. I knew there was something weird about her. When all attempts to block her out while I try to edit become fruitless I plug in. The Be Good Tanyas seem to lower my blood pressure.
I get a call from my dearest friend in Toronto. She has a lump in her breast. She is not worried. She’s calling me to bide the time while waiting at the walk-in clinic for a referral. I am happy to hear her voice and her calm is infectious. I too am not worried.
Its 4:25. I get a response to one of the two urgent emails I sent at 11. In it I’m told to make sure I hurry getting back to him. Seriously? Fuck you. Five hours to reply to a simple question when I know you are at your desk is not OK.
I update my invoicing, reply to some personal mail and pack up.
Got home and slacked by watching a movie. Quick dinner then more article wrestling. This time armed with a drink. I become worried that the drink helped and briefly contemplate alcoholism as professional development.
I have an hour-long overdue chat with another girlfriend in TO.
I sit down to write this.
For What its Worth
My ex-boyfriend (for whom I am very much a persona non grata) left with me with little baggage. He didn’t wound me or break my heart, he didn’t spoil me rotten, he just was. Because of this I barley think of him unless something reminds me of him in particular; a photograph, a song, a locale… One thing I do wish I could thank him for though was the gift of Neko Case. He turned me on to her and she remains one of my consistently played favourites. I’m now listening to the ‘hidden track’ on Middle Cyclone called Marais la Nuit. It’s 30 minutes of sounds recorded outside Neko’s country house, all crickets and night bugs and echoes. It’s beautiful and calming and I love it. It’s also what was playing when he kissed me for the first time. It’s moments like now that I wish we were still friends, I’d love to call him and check in- just say hey. Alas, when it come to me his ego is bigger than his heart, and maybe I deserve that, what do I know?
Anyway, thank you JSZ. Shabbat shalom.
Coming to Terms
In addition to yoga, a couple of hours of work, a mid-day coffee with a friend, renegotiating my Rogers contract and drinks with my bestie I also came to terms with some long-term feelings I’ve had. I’ve come to realize that my loving someone happens whether or not they know it, accept it or reciprocate it. This realization, while it may seem sad is actually very freeing. It’s interesting that the more I take responsibility for in my life the easier living becomes. huh.
Not Since The Wall Came Down
Not since the Berlin Wall came down have I been so transfixed by a movement.
I was 10 years old at the time, visiting my family in Israel. We were at my mother’s friends’ house and their daughter, only a few years older than I and I sat 2 feet from the television set, wide-eyed. I’m not sure I was 100% clued-in to the full significance of what I was seeing, but I know I knew, even then, that I was watching something of great historical weight. I knew somehow that I was watching something major unfold and I remember feeling a tingle. A combination of excitement and trepidation, though I probably couldn’t have named them as such at the time.
I feel that way again now, listening to the coverage of the demonstrations in Cairo. There is something so overwhelmingly inspiring that I come close to tears every time I hear an interview or sounds from the crowds. I’m not sure why this movement over all others in the last 21 years has struck such a chord in me but it has and I am once again riveted; excited, nervous, inspired. I wish those who work peacefully toward change strength and patience, and offer, for what its worth, my support.
Get Out of Jail Free
There are people I know who have far larger problems than I do who still manage to smile and live life and keep positive. I admire them, but the part of me who has spent so much time wearing that happy mask of complacency always wonders how much of a lie it all is. I hope it’s not, and maybe it just my own personal shortcomings that make it difficult for me to believe that anyone else can actually pull-off the genuine state of sheer optimism in the face of things like cancer and infertility but part of me wants to pull them aside and say “I may not have very had your problem, but I know, and its OK to want to scream and punch a wall.” I think if we gave each other this type ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card more often, we’d all be happier.
Flying Solo
I’m sitting alone in a vey busy, very hip local venue waiting for the opening band to strike and the headliners to come on.
The DJ has picked great tunes to ride the crowd from one set to another and the vibe across the room is great.
I thought I was being brave, admirable, feminist even. I thought Iwould feel empowered and proud sitting here alone, but I don’t. I feel awkward and lonely and obvious.
I miss my ex-lover, I miss my friends in Toronto and I miss the time in my life when I didn’t wonder almost every day if it really and truly is possible to make new and interesting friends at ‘my age’.
This is clearly not a Happy Moment and I’m afraid that for the first time in 2011 I’ll have to go to bed without one. Unless you count my leaving the house and trying. My yoga teacher says that some days the beauty and the gift is simply in the act of coming to your mat. I hope that’s true, because if so, at least I can give myself points for ‘coming to the mat’.
New Year’s Eve Day, 2010
This made me cry. Im not sure if its because it signifies
an end to something as permanent as a photograph taken or because
film is such a part of the lives of those I love and have loved or
because of the varied and almost mundane choices the photographer
made in deciding what and who to shoot with this coveted last role.
On this the last day of the year, the idea of choices, of what we
choose to take forward and what gets left behind seems magnified.
I’m seeing dear friends make big decisions, i see my nephews taking
new ideas and lessons from yesterday into tomorrow and growing them
in to something much larger. What have I acquired in the last year?
How have my soul and heart and understanding of the world grown,
shifted, morphed? And what will I make of these changes? What will
I carry forward and, perhaps more importantly, what will I leave
behind? My new year’s wish for those I love is clarity of vision,
openness of heart and strength of conviction. and love.
Nostalgia
Maybe its the gray weather, or the fact that my social calender is becoming increasingly filled with weddings, showers and baby birthday parties. Maybe its my very new habit of going through old photos on Facebook, I don’t know, but today I am feeling overwhelmingly nostalgic. It’s not a Hallmark nostalgia steeped in the warm & fuzzies. This nostalgia is piercing and makes me feel sad and lonely. Not lonely because I have no one around me: I have the greatest of friends, but lonely because there is no one in my life that connects me to the pasts, recent and far away, that I find myself thinking about so often these days… There is no one in my life I can share these thoughts with because, for the most part, these figures from my past exist only in the photos and memories, and those close and wonderful friends I have around me now, well, they didn’t know the me from ‘back-in-the-day’, nor my friends from back then and anyway, i don’t want to weigh them down with my gray thoughts.
I’ve also looked back on some of the photographs me ex the photographer took of me while we were dating. I’m trying to see me how he saw me and I wonder now, these months later, if maybe I never really understood what I looked like through his lens. It’s an interesting thing to mull over but also leads me further down a path I recognize well; the one that has me wondering if anybody can really know anybody else at all.
One more thought I’ve been thinking is this: That my feeling of loneliness is the result of experienceing a memorbased version of anomie. I know that there are many many people who share my memories, but somehow I am still very much alone in my experience of remembering. Its and odd sort of feeling….
Inscriptions
I spent some time packing up my books this evening. Packing in general does not phase me. I’m not easily overwhelmed by that sort of thing, but when I sort through books I always find myself feeling melancholy. It like the yearbook of your life. Its the literary equivalent of cutting a tree and counting the rings. What does my shelf say about me this year? What did I read? what did I pick up but never get around to? and what does this discrepancy say about my head space? The pile I bought but is left unread: the person want to think I am, or want to be. The read pile: the real me (?) I guess these thoughts are what give me pause and colour me a light shade of blue.
The other trigger are the inscriptions, or in this evening’s particular case, the lack thereof. I think I have come to another mini-realization: I want to be with someone who inscribes the books they give me. A book is a powerful and bold gift. It says “I know you” and “I want to give you something of substance and longevity”. To me, a book trumps all if it is given with thought and attention. I guess thats why I got a little sad when I realized that not one of the books (all beautiful and well picked I must say) gifted me by my ex, were inscriped. Nary a date, no inside jokes or loving thoughts. No doubt I am reading too far into this (sorry, that pun could not be helped) but I don’t think the thought is without merit…Leaving Toronto
I am leaving Toronto. I have given notice on my life as it is; job, boyfriend, apartment.
I feel light and airy and free and happy for the first time in months. Also, I am scared shitless. I am 30 years old and I will, in 6 weeks, be unemployed. In 6 weeks I will be living with my mother and in 6 weeks I will have nowhere to be on a Monday morning, for the first time in many years (barring minor gaps in employment that I was then desperate to rectify).
I dislike Toronto. It’s not for lack of trying though. 3 jobs and 2 serious relationships later however, I fear I might have listened to my gut years ago instead of learning the hard way that THE GUT IS ALWAYS RIGHT. Ah well, lesson learned.
I expect I will miss little about the job other than the paycheck and while he is a decent and sensitive guy, I doubt I will miss my ex in the everyday sense(things end for a reason). I forsee missing my apartment though. For such a wanderluster it’s always caught me off guard how much I identify with and am comforted by ‘my space’. It’s cozy and has a great view and despite my not liking the city in general, holds some funny/sexy/sentimental/important moments. The independence that living solo affords will too be missed, no doubt.
I will also miss my friends. Its taken my 2 years to get to this small but powerful knot of peeps that I am so grateful to call my own. Some seriously intently intelligent, funny and supportive ladies and gents. We like to think the bonds we form are impervious to distance, but history has taught me otherwise. I will make an effort though to keep them close. I will in particular miss my new friend from down the hall. In the past 8 weeks she has become like a sister and I love her dearly. I expect to miss her more than anything. In her I feel I have found someone I was destined to meet. It seems the universe gives me what I need just as I am leaving. This last thought about timing also applies to a man I have recently met. Only a week into knowing him and I feel sad already to leave. He is kind and bright and optimistic and when he touches me I know there is nowhere else he’s rather be. I guess I’ll accept this as Toronto’s parting gift to me and be gracious about it instead of harbouring the mild frustration I feel now.
Other things about Toronto that I will miss:
Fresh & both markets (St Lawrence & Kensington), …. umm, wow – thats it I think…
Oh wait, I will also miss ragging on the Leafs fans.
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