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Saturday, October 27, 2007
Something I Am Not Looking Forward ToI'm in a computer lab on campus and there are an awful lot of people creating an awful lot of din. I generally prefer to work in quiet settings, but seeing as I have little choice when it comes to computer access (see: my precious lappy which is still sitting on my desk, near death, after almost a month), I'm here. I've been trying harder and harder to keep my concentration and block out the noise, but try as I might, what I can't stop listening to is the conversation going on behind me. They're both students; the girl sounds young and the guy is from Australia (with an absolutely adorable accent). They're chatting about his time here at the university so far, in the city and country. She's thinking that she wants to do an exchange to Australia. He's been to more bars in the area than she has and he's only been living here for two months. He's showing her photos and telling stories from back home and she's asking lots of questions. It's a nice conversation I suppose, but something about it makes me want stuff cotton so far into my ears that it soaks up my brain juice and then lop the ears off altogether. It's AWKWARD. And it makes me feel awkward just listening to them banter back and forth. I can hardly explain it, but I'm sure you know what I mean. She giggles a lot and says, "Wow..." in that breathy way and they're... flirting - or something like that. You know what first date conversation sounds like? This is that. But more awkward. And it's so awkward that I want to stand up and yell at them to STOP BEING SO AWKWARD! Alright, maybe I'm a horrible person. But maybe (and this is far more plausible) this conversation that sounds so much like First Date Conversation is a First Date Conversation and it reminds me that people are interested in other people when they're single and go on dates when they're single and MY GOD I'm single so does that mean I should be interested in people and going on dates soon? Because, honestly? I'm not and I don't want to. Sure, I crush super easily (see: kayak boy from the first session that I haven't spoken to since, random man with a cane I passed on campus two weeks ago), but I never really get interested in men. Rather, boys, in the case of the selection I have around here. It takes a lot for me to have genuine romantic interest in a person and I guess my busy schedule doesn't really leave a lot of time for me to pursue such things. Which is great, because the idea of dating petrifies me right now. I'm not scared of it per se, I'm just really not looking forward to finding a new boyfriend. At any rate, until I meet someone supa-fly and go on a date with them, I'm sooo not looking forward to the whole thing. Unless they are a superb conversationalist who can avoid awkward First Date Conversation and have a cute Australian accent.
9:07 pm
Thursday, October 25, 2007
On HoldOne thing my roomie Nik hates about school is how it causes most people (herself and myself included) to put the rest of their lives on hold while the academic stresses mount. She admires people who continue to cook big meals, play sports, knit and hang out with their friends and lovers despite having tons of work to do and exams to study for. I admire them too because I've never been one to continue doing all the things I love when I'm busy with school work (except blog, but that's more of a procrastination tool). See, for example, this list I compiled the night before a big midterm: Things I Get To Do When My Midterm Exams Are Over - Eat my orange and Oh! Henry bar - Go for cheap wing night at Morty's (with a pint, of course) - Perform all sorts of personal hygiene activities including, but not limited to: showering and washing my hair, clipping nails, tweezing eyebrows, waxing legs - Go grocery shopping (yay! I get to eat!) - Go to the gym and pool - Do laundry (yay! clean underwear!) Not only do hobbies and socializing take the back burner, all sorts of essential life activities stop. I suppose I see it as reward-based motivation; once I work and study hard enough and get through exams, I can do all the things that will make me happy again because, clearly, during exam time I am miserable from lack of fun, hungry, and plain ol' dirty.
6:54 pm
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Currently Feeling: Mostly AnnoyedAnnoyance of the day: I'm placing UNICEF collection boxes around campus as a sort of informal, personal fundraising thing and I'm targeting all the high-traffic areas (ie: any place that sells food and/or coffee on campus). Naturally, I ask to place one at the Tim Horton's cash register, but am told by some supervisor-manager dude that I can't leave the box there because it has nothing to do with Tim Horton's. *blink* Well, of course it has nothing to do with Tim Horton's, it's UNICEF for crying out loud! You're kidding me, aren't y- okay, no, no, you're not kidding me, you're entirely serious. Okay fine, FINE. And you know what, I'm darn well happy that UNICEF has nothing to do with Tim Horton's and I hope it never does! Yeesh, I'm taking my collection box elsewhere, where they care about saving the children of this world. Annoyance of the semester: The sense of dread that's been inside me for days now because I know I'm going to bomb my finance midterm tonight. My brain just doesn't know what to do with these questions. But there's no more excuses about being an Arts student who doesn't do numbers (I remembered that I got an A- in my stats class). This is entirely my bad - I didn't keep up with my course work and instead spent my time doing things like going to the gym/pool, trying to find people who will let me act for them and working twenty-five hours a week. It really sucks to know that I didn't use my full potential in this class and I'm sooo going to reap what I sowed tonight. Boy, my own medicine sure does taste bad. Oh well, there's always Plan B: drop the class and stay in school for another term - YAY.
6:32 pm
Friday, October 19, 2007
Warning: May Talk To VegetablesI left work today feeling famished - I didn't want that orange sitting in my bag, I wanted to go home and prepare myself a fresh-cooked dinner before my audition tonight. Once I got in, I pulled out my necessities for the meal: garlic, onion, cream of mushroom soup, broccoli, chicken and rotini and commenced chopping. As I'm mincing my garlic, I worried about the smell of it staying on my fingers all night and what the film guy would think when he was about to meet me in an hour. When I moved to the onion, I thought about how handy it would be if I could carry one and sniff it discretely to cry on cue for the scene I had to do. Not a second later, the little onion molecules wafted their way up from the cutting board, into my eye sockets and thus commenced the Great Onion Cry Fest. It was a small onion too, but that little bugger worked its way into my nose and eyes and soon everything was stinging and blurry and I was sniffling like mad. I rinsed it under the tap TWICE and still, I stood there trying to chop the damn thing with my eyes mostly closed and tears leaking down my cheeks. I pressed my eyelids closed and mushed my face into my sleeve, "Wah, stop it! Stop *sniff* making me *sniff* ...cry! Wahhh..." The onion did not respond. I wrenched open my eyelids and kept chopping. The onion kept attacking, as if its smell and ability to make a person's eyeballs scream in pain and nose drip was some sort of natural self-defense mechanism when sharp kitchen utensils came near. My eyes kept stinging and I kept sniffling, "Wah! Stoppp itttt...!!" I soon tamed the beast and killed it into a handful of tiny strips and tossed everything into the pot. Defeated, the onion was cooked deliciously along with his other veggie mates and devoured. My roommate came out of her room while I was eating at the kitchen table. "Oh! Hey Em, I didn't know you were home." "Yeah, I was just studying... Did I hear you talking earlier?" "Oh..! Yes, I guess so - sorry, didn't mean to bother you. Sometimes I talk to myself when I cook." "Well, you weren't really talking to yourself, were you?" "...ye-ahhh, I was pretty much...talking to the onion." Sometimes I feel as though I should have a disclaimer or something, fine print that people should read before they agree to move in with me.
7:32 pm
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Start NewAnd how to start loving again is like the problem of architects in an old city: how to build where houses once stood, so it will look like those times but also like now.
- Yehuda AmichaiRegarding love, I think that that quote is one of the most poignant things I have ever read and is also one of the most commonly felt, yet rarely well-expressed feelings I've ever come across. It's a familiar one, to be sure, and yet I never knew that I felt it so precisely until I read it. For bringing Amichai into my life (among a plethora of other things): Thanks, Shan. I meant to include that quote in a post I was working on around the New Year when I was about to officially introduce Adam to my blogging audience. I worked on that post during the course of the year and by the time summer rolled around, I still hadn't finished it. I guess not posting it in the end turned out to be a good thing, seeing as we're not together anymore. Did my brain tap into some subconscious foreshadowing? Online, at least, I managed to save myself from a bit more of that foolish embarrassment that comes with having faith in a relationship and then having both the faith and the relationship drop out of the bottom of your heart. A feeling all too familiar to me, much like Amichai's musing. That feeling of having everything razed, to stand at ground zero and wonder, How am I going to build that up again?... I did not know it was so central to my being until I knew that someone else had felt it too.
3:51 pm
Sunday, October 14, 2007
How To...work out all your frustrations and yucky feelings when it comes to relationships and anything that brings not-so-happy thoughts into your life: join an aerobics class that lets you jab, uppercut, elbow, punch, knee, kick, and basically beat the crap out of an imaginary being in front of your face. It's extremely tiring and I get drenched in sweat and my muscles rip apart inside my body, but it feels sooooo good.
2:53 pm
Saturday, October 13, 2007
The Next Best ThingLast night, while most KW residents were out drinking their faces off in celebration of Oktoberfest, my roommates and I decided to stay in and depress ourselves by watching The Notebook. I've only seen the movie twice and if it were up to me, I wouldn't have watched it again, not after the first time. Of course, everyone in the theater was crying, but I, I was downright sobbing in my seat. I cried on our way out of the theater, in the car on the way home, after I said goodnight to my boyfriend and went in my house, I sat on the edge of my bed and cried some more before I went to sleep. I hadn't been that sad since I saw The Joy Luck Club. The second time I saw the movie was when I worked as a tour manager, while I was on tour with a school group. The group was predominantly female, and one of them had brought The Notebook to watch on the coach during the long drive home. Not wanting to ruin their fun, I put it in the DVD player and tried to look out the window for as long as I could, ignoring the heart-wrenching story unfolding before me on screen. It didn't work. Halfway through the movie someone handed me a pack of tissues from somewhere at the back of the bus - they had heard me sniffling up at the front. Last night, I was a complete wreck. I was sobbing into my blanket while my two roommates just sat there, taking the movie in like normal people. I can't explain why it gets to me so much. And even if I could, I wouldn't want to open up that whole can of worms on here again. I was in love like that once, Love Lost, yada yada. (Oy, not again!) I lay on my bed curled up in a ball for a good while, feeling hollow and nursing that giant void in my aching chest until we all decided it would be a good idea to go out for dessert. So I doused my face with cold water and we headed out into the chilly night in search of sweetness. A giant slice of triple chocolate almond cake with vanilla ice cream later and I was better; sitting there curled up in a cozy armchair, chatting with my roommates about family, travel, and handsome seventy year old men who try to save the world and inspire twenty-something year old girls like us to do the same. We shared stories, joked and laughed and got closer. We left for home feeling a lot warmer and I, a lot fuller.
4:42 pm
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
I Think I Can('t)I tell myself that I can do anything if only I try hard enough. For the most part, I still think that's true. Swimming has been exhausting (I'm sweating while I'm in the water, I swear), but I can swim more laps every time and I *might* just be getting more muscles from all that movement and resistance. One day, I might even start to feel comfortable in the not-so-shallow end. I can do it, I can do it, I assured myself when I decided to take on another part-time job. I'm now working eighteen hours a week off-campus (Job #Recent), plus my hours as an Ambassador (Job #Original), plus a full-time course load aka five classes. Money isn't that tight, but I for some reason thought that this would be a GOOD IDEA so I could get some experience. Experience with what? Burning myself out, I guess. I'm also going to the gym, the pool and kayaking too. But I can do it! I can do it if only I try hard enough! I bet I can keep my sanity too! I can! So, when I think about all those things that I tell myself I can do when I'm on the verge of exhaustion (and it hasn't even been a week yet), I feel rather ashamed when I think about how badly I want to give up when it comes to my finance class. It's hard. Really hard. And I remember telling myself a few weeks back that I could get through it if only I worked hard enough to beat the hardness of the course. The thing is, my working hard is nowhere near keeping up with the difficulty level of this class. So tonight, halfway through lecture, I pretty much threw my arms up in the air and said, "Well, that's it. I'm done." This was after I put my head down on the table and whimpered, "He wants us to do what?!" and "I don't get iiiiiitt...." My mind has been molded by over three years of a liberal arts education. I know how to research and how to analyze and theorize and write papers. I do not know what to do with numbers (which may explain why I'm so bad at saving...). So when I'm sitting in class being lectured at about valuation and growth models and dividends and yields and RETENTION RATIOS you can bet that I'm sitting there with my eyes wide open while my brain is hyperventilating and thinking OH MY GOD I CAN'T DO THIS. It does not help that the professor speaks in monotone and only (vaguely) smiles when he's talking about stocks and how students get fined for partying too loudly. Despite this horrid frustration at my lack of numerical intellect, there's still some part of me that thinks, "Well, maybe you still caaaaann." I remember being terrified of Grade 10 math class, absolutely terrified. I'd get my binder from my locker and I'd sweat as I walked down the halls towards the mathematical genius that was the rest of my gifted class. It took three years and a lot of help from a dear friend, but by the time the end of high school came around, I liked math. And not just regular math either, calculus. I even did well in my 1st year calc class here at uni. So, if I could go from being afraid of math to really liking even the difficult stuff, surely I can also learn to be good at, and maybe even love, finance. Yeah, that does sound remotely possible. It might just take me three years is all.
10:30 pm
Monday, October 01, 2007
Just Keep Swimming, Just Keep Swimming....So call-backs went well ...NOT. No, there is no story about how I tripped over my own feet again - there's actually no story at all because I couldn't make it to call-backs and no one bothered to tell me that no alternative arrangements could be made even though the director said they could blaaarggghhhh. I was supposed to reschedule the audition for today but I checked the cast list this morning and everything's done, before I even got my second shot. It's not a huge deal that I'm not in the show; the reason I'm pissy is the reason WHY. They told me they could schedule me in some other time if I couldn't make it to call-backs on Sunday, but they never got back to me about it and went ahead and cast the show anyway. Here I am memorizing the scenes I needed to do and singing the songs in my head for the audition and nothing's going to come of it. Timing, AGAIN (or perhaps, in this case, simple unprofessionalism?). From now on, whenever I audition for anything, I'm going to cancel all other commitments for weeks so that I can fit into the show's schedule because that seems to be the only way I can get myself a part in a play or musical or what-have-you so I can be on stage. Since I've got all this free time sans-musical now, I can go ahead and keep trucking along with the other things I wanted to do this semester. I'm still pursuing voice lessons though I haven't had a full one since my first assessment nearly two weeks ago. My singing voice didn't up and leave my sorry ass behind after all it seems, but after being sick and talking all day at the Universities Fair on Friday, I still sound like steel wool in human form (thanks Alex, for that astute observation). I'll also be spending lots of time in the pool this term as I really want and need to learn how to swim. My first self-lesson is tomorrow and I've got some friends who offered to help me out later on. Swimming is a pretty important life skill for some, but seeing as I've never lived near swimmable water it wasn't a big deal to me as a kid. Now that I'm a big beach bum who's been introduced to snorkeling, surfing and other boat-type sports, I've realized that I need to be able to survive if I like being on and in the water so much. Truthfully, here's the thing: I joined the kayaking association on campus. The white-water kayak association. I know, I never saw myself doing something like this either, but what the hey. I'm all for new and unexpected things. I went kayaking for the first time on Cape Breton Island during my family road trip out east over the summer and I loved it. I'd only ever been canoeing before and kayaking was this new, ultra-cool thing. Little did I know... what I did then was sea-kayaking - the kayaks are longer with a rudder and peddles to control them and you use them on lakes and generally calm water settings. What I'm doing now is with white-water kayaks that are super short and used on rapidly-flowing, generally very angry rivers and such. There is no way I'm going into white-waters without knowing how to get the hell out. So, swimming lessons, here I come. During the first kayak session last week, one of the instructors was having some fun with me and tossed my kayak around, threatening to tip me over. "Don't do that! I don't know how to swim!" "You don't know how to swim?! *pause* Then what the hell are you doing here?!?" I survived the session anyway because I know how to, as I call it, "survival swim". Throw me into some water and I'm fairly certain that I can get out, though not gracefully. What I need to work on is getting rid of the anxiety that comes with being near the deep end and having the confidence to brave a surprise push over the edge of the pool. Also, knowing how to tread water might help too. You will be proud to know that I do know how to do a successful wet-exit (when you tip over upside down into the water and no one's around to help you back upright) despite not being a swimmer. I'm working on my hip-flicks so that I can do a roll as opposed to just getting out of the kayak and leaving it upside down in the water. The way I see it, at least it's not me that's floating upside down in the water.
9:40 pm
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