I was sitting in class, staring at an elderly man who had enrolled in the course, when I became full of fear and anxiety.

All I could think about was the idea that, unless I die young, I won’t always be the person who I recognize myself as.

There was a time in my life when almost everything that mattered, or defined me positively, was lost or taken away, through no choice of my own. I was young, and it was not a happy time.

And so, I started my life over, when virtually nothing was left; I was reborn at 21. (By reborn I absolutely do not mean in a religious manner.)

Some days I feel like I’m 10 years old, but also middle aged, but I look like a teenager.

I remember how when I was a kid, I couldn’t imagine being 18 — 20. I knew I would grow up, but the future was so far away. I would lie in bed, trying to stay as still as possible, hoping that I would actually get frozen in limbo, and not have to experience the terrifying ordeal of being old and become the face of imminent death. I think of how I’m 25 now, and 40 is still 15 years away. The time it took to reach 25 will have to pass all over again — my whole life span, until I reach 50. Terrifying?

And reading historical texts, in that class, where the elderly man sat, from over a thousand years ago reinforces how insignificant and useless angst is, when one day I will turn to dust and cease to be, whether or not I was momentarily pained over the notion of one day no longer being a hip, young thing.

“And I do not see how I can get out of asking this question: Does it matter to anyone or anything that all these peepholes were closed so suddenly? Since all the property is undamaged, has the world lost anything it loved?” – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr, Deadeye Dick

I’m in my house right now in Toronto.

There is so much strain between me on the west coast, and me in Toronto.

I sometimes toy with the idea of moving back here, because I really do miss the familiarity.

I keep going back to this topic from Urban Geography, which was the most abstract dimension — the sense of place. Other dimensions include production, reproduction and…. I forget. I had this essay question on an exam which asked me to explain my sense of place in Vancouver.  I couldn’t.  I had just come back from visiting Toronto for the first time in two years and described how simple things like seeing streetcars and my familiarity with the most simple, originally subconscious, attachments I have to this city made me realize my “place”, and how Toronto is my place.  In contrast, aside from my house, itself, I don’t feel like I have the same sense of place in Vancouver.

Home is where you choose to make it, and I have been trying to make Vancouver my home.

Being in Toronto is nice, but it’s really hard on me, because I miss the past, and still can’t accept that the past will never be the present again.

Conversely, In Vancouver, I don’t have a past that is holding me back, but that lack of past sometimes leaves me empty.

Qualities found ?)

-a need to justify opening a bottle of cheap wine when your co-conspirator has to bail due to a hangover

-watching 50 horror and sci-fi movies in chronological order, with the goal of aggregating some (as yet) unknown data related to… horror and sci-fi movies. (quasi-academics don’t do things for fun)

oh! in keeping on the subject of quasi-academics, such as myself, somebody needs to write a book titled something like “Relationship Advice for Academics: love lessons for those who are not as socially inept as pure-bred geeks, but still lack the proper social skills to form a loving relationship with something other than an abstract idea”

A person is not an abstract idea, technically.. But don’t let me go there.

Tip 1:

I don’t know what tip #1 is.

Which is why someone needs to be commissioned to write this.  The person should either be a refugee of academia, or a hack who is really, really good at pursuading overly-critical minded, individualistic, self-obsessed douche bag knowitalls that their words and advice will actually work.

Perhaps the description of characteristics possessed by said “douche bag”, who needs to be convinced by the latter hack, are the negative qualities that keep “overly-critical minded, individualistic, self-obsessed douche bag knowitalls” from being able to have a relationship.
OH SNAP.  My qualities which have disbarred me from ever having a real boyfriend have allowed me to determine the problem! The difference between myself, and the hack, is that the hack would most likely have some sort of practical suggestions; whereas, I am still waiting for the hack to give me a simple answer that I have made too complex to find.

OH SNAP.  I just wroke the geekery version of what, I guess, is the lame-ass Shakespearean/Kieregarard-y bullcrap rhetorical question of what the poet, Haddaway once asked: “WHAT IS LOVE”?

-A strong disdain for Karl Marx

-loss

-gains

- change/lack thereof/fear of change/awareness of change/ discomfort with the reality etc etc etc

-relationship [s] [?] (see all of the above, save for the strong disdain for Karl Marx)

- effort x 2 x 4 x6 x 2  (see all of the above, including the strong disdain for Karl Marx)

- The happiest day of my life.  Okay, that was in July, 2008, but it deserves a fair mention: sans happiest day, none of the above would exist in the same right which they do.

- Le Temps Detruit Tout (see note just above this).

Sometimes I get carried away and say the wrong things.  I’m aware at the time, and in retrospect I think “maybe I shouldn’t have said that, because I was so close to coming across as well put-together, and there I go without thinking before I speak.”

Sometimes I say things I have already said, several times over.  It’s not that I think I’m particularly interesting; rather, I forget what I have said, and to whom I have said it.  Even if the conversation was meaningful. Other times, the conversation was meaningful, but I don’t know if it was to you, so I repeat myself to understand if it meant anything to you the first time around.

Did it?

- I tended to cross the line a few times, and that damages everything but myself in the end.

- Basically, I reduced everything back to just me, to protect myself, my interests an as a subconscious way to keep outside interests on the outside.

I would prefer not to, but there is a steep learning curve.

- forgetting to use spell check.  I know how to spell, and my grammar is fine when I please.  Technology has made me lazy. I can has smart.

….when life goes on.

I am back in Vancouver and feeling a lot better that I was before I left.  Toronto treated me better than it had in years.  I had forgotten about the bright lights; the lack of mountains; the ABYSMAL transit system; the bluntness of people that is interpreted as rudeness out west; the ignorance; the familiarity; the comfort of being in a place that is chaotic, not merely because of inter-personal relationships, but because the city is so damned chaotic.  This is not something negative.  This is home, and home does not necessarily mean the place where you hang your hat.  Home is where you feel like yourself in a most unrestricted manner.

Growing up in Toronto, you don’t exactly get a sense of how intense of a city it is, and you assume that people who don’t understand the city are hicks, or people who resent the self-appointed “centre of the universe”.  I have a love-hate relationship with the city, and may or may not move back one day when it is safe enough for me to do so.
I could write about the specifics of the trip, but that would take all day.  It was not the specifics, it was the fundamental qualities of the experiences that made it such a meaningful trip.

I had a great time.  I wish I could have seen more people.  I would like to thank everybody who was such a great friend, and so supportive of me during a time when I needed you more than anything.

This is what happens when you get so comfortable crawling into the cave that you can’t get out.

Half a slice of mini-cake.  A few gulps of juice. One potato chip (mighty tasty). Half a pack of cigarettes.  Alcohol, please.  Speedballs, PLEASE.

The only thing more self indulgent than sex is pain, and the self-pity or self-wallowing whence it comes.  I’m an asshole.

I don’t want to be sitting with the emotions bleeding out of me so visibly that it looks like I’m attacking.  I don’t want to experience these emotions that make me feel like I’m an asshole for having them.

No sleep.  No food.  No me.  No you.

I’m going back home to take it easy for a few days.

When you make sure to leave work so that you’ll get the train that connects with the bus you need to take, so that you will not have to wait 32 minutes on a rainy, Sunday night for the next bus.

But sometimes you’ll think, “oh man I wish that last phone call I got at work had been four minutes longer so that I would have missed the train, resulting in me missing the bus.”  Because you missed the bus anyway.  Because the SkyTrain you were on crashed into thin air, throwing all the passengers forwards and backwards, and you narrowly miss smashing your head opened for a third time in three years; for a second time in as many months.

Well, then.  That was not exciting.  If it hadn’t been for the fact that I’ve been having panic attacks as of late, perhaps I would have enjoyed  having my body hurled towards the plexiglass barrier on the train.

This is what happens when you don’t sleep at night: then you float to the 7-11 and you think to yourself about how you wish the slurpee machine hadn’t broken down, and you wonder if it’s back up and running, and then you wonder if it is even appropriate to consume a slurpee at 3:51 AM.  If nobody sees you with that slurpee at 3:51 AM, did it still make a sound and did the associate at the counter even care?

It’s 3:51: it’s just you and the giant moth.  Maybe the bearded lady is working, and just maybe she will enlighten you with stories of smack addicts stealing ice cream and pissing on the floor.  But even the bearded lady has somewhere to sleep, or at least somewhere to go to after the dust has settled, even when the slurpee machine is still broken and the new guy hasn’t a clue how to fix it.

This is what happens when you start having nightmares about something that happened over four years ago, even though you had never previously had dreams about the incident.  Never ever.  If you think it means you’re afraid of sleeping, you’re wrong.  It’s clearly a fear of being awake, and the dreams are  nagging reminders that you can’t turn your back on life until your heart stops beating.

And no, since you asked, mother never told me there would be days like these.  But mother did not need to tell me when she could show me.  I watched her wilt and I watched her die, and still never believed there would be days like these.

The new guy hands me smokes, cause you never really quit smoking.  You never really quit vices.  You go to the next lily pad and try something new, and if you sink, you can just go back to where you came from.  I never looked back, but I kept landing in places from which I couldn’t escape.

Maybe he will make an idle comment about how he saw me earlier in the evening buying a bottle of juice, or how it “sure is awfully late”, but he doesn’t  And hands me the smokes, and makes incorrect change, because giving a quarter back is so much easier than giving back 24 cents.  He’s new, but he already has taken the hopeless approach to his dead-end job.

But this is what happens when you work on a rotating schedule and no longer have a regular sleeping pattern.  You wouldn’t have this job if you hadn’t gone back to school; you wouldn’t have gone back to school if you hadn’t moved to Vancouver; you wouldn’t have moved to Vancouver if you hadn’t cleaned up your life; and you wouldn’t have cleaned up your life if you had known there would be days like these.