and while you're all over there in your jack jones, you need to let me get behind your back bones

Me at 21 with my fashion mullet...I'm procrastinating, so I'm adding to this. I was reading through my old blog I started as a teenager and ended when I started this one, and I can't even believe how dramatic we all were. It's incredible, but I'm happy we got over that phase young. Someone once told me that I walked around as if I always thought I was the coolest person in the bar, and I always thought they were being ridiculous, but looking back at my old blog entries about all of the "scene drama," as I termed it, I'm beginning to think they were right. It's funny, I'm sure a lot of people don't think I'm as cool now that I'm "nice." I try to make friends and wear my "heart on my sleeve," so to speak. I actually don't like and get along with that many people. At heart, I am a cynical snob in many ways. I can be a jerk, it's true.

But, as I grow up, I realize more and more the importance of maintaining friendships and meeting "good" people. I now let friends know that I care about them, too. I don't know if this is a good thing or not. I'm not talking in terms of romantic relationships, but in friendships. It's funny, because I'm not a constraint and commitment type of person in romantic relationships, but I definitely "forge" connections with friends. I get interested in people and like to find out about their backgrounds and let them know that I care about them. I don't know, is that weird? I like to be "good friends" (shit, I'm using a lot of quotes) with people as opposed to superficial acquaintances, although I have those too, and I don't know if that's a likable or unlikable characteristic. I guess I just try to be genuine and up-front. I think why sometimes I tire of going out all of the time (okay okay, more than once a week) is that 1) I like alone time to be productive and 2) I get tired of having facetious conversations with people all of the time. Although I like to dance and flirt as much as anyone else, I really, really like people who can talk to me about things other than drama and gossip. I don't pretend to be an amazingly fascinating and intellectual person, I feel like I won't ever read enough books or learn enough in this lifetime, but I enjoy different perspectives, even if it's the perfect fresh basil/pine nut ratio in pesto.


IF ANYONE WANTS TO GO OUT ON THURSDAY IN SEATTLE, FRIDAY IN SEATTLE/VANCOUVER, SATURDAY IN VANCOUVER, text/call/email me. I'm finishing a horrific course this week, and need to celebrate.

Thanks to Dizzee Rascal, Deerhunter, Wolf Parade, and, I'm not embarrassed, Sean Paul (I really hope in my next life I'm reincarnated as a much cooler person, people always laugh nervously when I tell them I can't help dancing to "Get Busy," because they can't tell if I'm joking), I survived my move. I have been moving all weekend. I can't believe how many times I've moved in my life already!

Anyone I've talked to knows how I was debating about whether to move back to Canada or what, but I'm sticking it out in America a little longer. I've always been the type of person who followed gut instinct in terms of what to do with my life, but I am beginning to feel like gut instinct is something that's better to ignore. I'm not sure yet, but it always seems like my wants differ from my shoulds. I'd like it if they were one and the same....maybe this is what growing up is? Or not? I can honestly say that I have no idea where I will be or what I will be doing in 3 months. I keep waiting for some kind of intervention or feeling to overtake me and aid my decision, but, so far, I don't trust my instincts at all.

Typical of me, I made this whole decision two weeks ago, and two days later I was putting down a deposit on an apartment. I feel good about this move though. I was really hating my old neighbourhood. It's nice, boring, and yuppie, just not for me. I was getting frustrated with the neighbourhood and my lack of space and various other things. Compounded by a lot of conflicting feelings about where and how I want my life to be....I didn't have the best summer ever.

So, now, I love my new neighbourhood. It's close to bars and restaurants I actually go to, and I can walk to everything.

My new place is pretty nice, too. It was a block long walk home from the bar the other night. You know your night's been horrific when the DJ thanks you for dancing to everything they played the entire night. Every boyfriend gets into the habit of trying to drag me away from parties/dance nights at a reasonable hour or, ahem, getting wastey faced, falling in a ditch, and requiring an escort to a cab. I also sincerely hope that in my next life I'm reincarnated as someone who's a good dancer.

I don't know if there's some kind of sociological difference between the USA and Canada- but I've been approached by more guys in bars/coffee shops/bus/street/parties in Seattle in the past year than in my entire life in Vancouver, despite that I'm now decomposing faster than......a soggy bag of lettuce (that analogy is weaker than....a kitten....and so on). Also despite that I'm always wearing headphones. Maybe people are just more forward here?

That's not how we indirect Canadians work it. We'd see someone out at the bar, not introduce ourselves, stalk them online, and drunk message them. Not that I've ever done that, of course not. I'm pretty sure a frat boy that I met out at the soccer camp with the kids wrote a "Missed Connections" on Craigslist to me. I really attract the best: he wrote "luv ur soccer skillz, want to go 4 a brew?"

I think you can probably tell that I'm in a transitional phase where I'm trying to figure out.....a lot of things. I think in the past year or two I've consciously decided to calm down and be more productive, but something might have been lost in the translation. If anyone has any ideas on how to be an adult in their mid-twenties, I welcome your ideas. It's just like, I don't feel all that more mature (okay, considerably more mellow) than 5 years ago, but I still don't have it all figured out. I know I want something else, but I don't know what that is yet.

I promise this whole blog won't be all about me, unlike my last one (which, of course, still technically exists). I'll write something more interesting sometime. And by sometime, I mean next weekend.

Books

I was just reading the August 11 & 18 issue of the New Yorker and the fiction piece "The Dinner Party" by Joshua Ferris is rad. Read it here.

http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2008/08/11/080811fi_fiction_ferris?currentPage=all

Now that we're on the topic of the New Yorker, also read "The Lie" by T. Coraghessan Boyle here. It's from the April issue, and it's so good!

http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2008/04/14/080414fi_fiction_boyle

Also, I began reading "After Dark," the latest release from Haruki Murakami, who is probably my favourite living author.

If you're one of the few who haven't read his work, do it. Begin with "The Wind up Bird Chronicle." The writing, even in translation, just gets under your skin. Sometimes authors, such as Hemingway and Nabakov, just kill me completely, and Murakami does that to me too.

Here is the New York Times review from 10 years ago:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9800EED9133EF931A35752C1A961958260

Even though I studied English Literature, I don't really review stories and books unless I have some kind of specific response to them. Although, I do miss having built-in college friends around who read and talk about reading.

T




Just some views from the deck up at my cabin. Last week, I spent the week up at my cabin.
If there's any place that epitomizes nostalgia for me, my cabin at Sakinaw Lake is it. I've been going up there my entire life with my family and friends, since before the road to get up there was even paved. Our 1 acre lot and 3 bedroom cabin & additional sleeping cabin, has a big deck that overlooks the 7 km. long lake. The Sunshine Coast area is a funny mix of hippie locals and rich summering Urbanites with summer houses. The closest "big town" (there's not even a real mall) is a 45 minute drive away. I spend my childhood summers up here waterskiing, canoeing, kayaking, chasing around my big cousins, swimming, cliff diving, reading, boating, wakeboarding, playing soccer, and running. There are even 5 islands on the lake I made up all these "legends" for when I was 8 (the best being Pirate Island). The area is so cool, if I go on a 5 mile hill run, I pass the ocean and about 3 lakes.

I love being up there spending half the day being active, and half the day lounging around reading, drinking beer, and eating really good food (well the food is slightly better if you're a meat eater, then it's salmon and steak dinners, but the salads are good regardless).

I feel instantly relaxed when I go up there. It's like being a kid again. To be honest, most of BC kind of sucks. The Northern resource based towns aren't very culturally diverse and they're pretty ugly. The nature is great, of course. But, the only parts of BC I like to visit outside of Vancouver, are on Vancouver Island (Tofino for surfing and camping and Victoria can be fun, if slightly boring compared to Vancouver), the Gulf Islands, the Sunshine Coast where my cabin is, and of course, the Okanagan in summer. I miss those lakeside summers in Oliver too!

Remember biking around looking for local boys and running away when they talked to us? The Okanagan has some rad wineries and orchards, and the river dam in Penticton is pretty cool. I really want to go up again next summer. But, other than that, BC is kind of lame.

PS, I had another birthday recently (how come they get progressively less exciting? It hardly seems fair), so please lie to me next time you see me and tell me I don't look a day over 20. Hah!

Hopeful or hopeless?

So, I'm sure everyone's read about the "latte effect," that economic term that's been banded about for the last decade to explain the relatively recent tendency of middle class North Americans to fritter away money on daily non-essentials rather than save and invest.

I remember a lecture in high school where my counsellor told us how much money we would have thanks to compound interest if we could just save that 5 dollars a day we spent at Starbucks.

Well, anyone who knows me that I'm hopeless with money. I don't even have a wallet. Really. What's the point of a wallet if it just contains receipts, anyways? Everyone warned me about the dangers of credit card debt. Of course, the second thing I did when I was 19 (the first being buying a beer) was to sign up for a credit card on campus. And....another one. Just google "instant gratification" and "generation y" and hundreds of articles will pop up discussing how my generation (yes! just made the cut for Generation Y, apparently) forgoes saving and working hard to achieve the "American Dream" in favour of....yes, instant gratification. Yes, we are in the era of text messages, fast food, fast...everything.

I actually am the opposite of fast. Anyone who would spend a morning happily reading the New Yorker at a coffee shop or perusing a farmers' market for the perfect heirloom tomatoes is obviously not in too much of a hurry. However, I epitomize my generation in the financial department. In a Women Studies and Media class in college, I made a zine which explored the fatalistic and self-destructive tendencies of the generation that came of age in the 1990s.

I used my 10 year old crush, the character of Troy Dyer from Reality Bites (hey! I was ten) as an example of the fatalistic tendencies that characterized the 1990s generation with quotes such as: "There's no point to any of this. It's all just a... a random lottery of meaningless tragedy and a series of near escapes. So I take pleasure in the details. You know... a quarter-pounder with cheese, those are good, the sky about ten minutes before it starts to rain, the moment where your laughter become a cackle... and I, I sit back and I smoke my Camel Straights and I ride my own melt."

In the post-post grunge era, ideas like this have become seriously cliched. But, when I was a preteen/young teen, movies like Trainspotting and books by Douglas Coupland were a part of my cultural upbringing. It was all about the experience, not the future, baby. Let's not even delve into the self-destructive tendencies of the grunge era, since I'd rather not beat any dead horses today (I am a vegetarian, after all).

I had a relatively idyllic childhood. I love my Mom, Dad, and sisters (especially now that we don't fight over clothes), and I grew up in a nice suburb, in a nice house, on a nice street, with an awesome pool. My Mom and Dad have always worked hard to provide for us and, I suppose, our family, albeit Canadian, epitomized the upper middle-class American dream. So, why am I not pursuing this dream for myself?

I have never had any aspirations of a life beyond 25. When I was a teenager, my goals in life consisted of moving out of the suburbs, travelling, going to shows, getting an apartment downtown, and reading lots of books. Basically, all I've ever wanted was to have fun experiences and a good time. I've never been able to picture myself with a house and family. Maybe this comes from living in a time of relative economic abundance and political freedom.

My fear of commitment extends to future goals.

After watching lots of ads on TV telling me that I can start a Registered Retirement Savings Plan for just 25 dollars a month, I made one monthly payment of 75 dollars.

Of course, 3 weeks later, it was Friday and I had seven dollars in my bank account, so of course I went to the bank to attempt to withdraw from my savings plan in order to fund weekend plans. That was my last sorry attempt at saving for the future.

The only time I can motivate myself to save is if I have big plans within the next 6 months- travel, school, or moving. For me, those little daily indulgences that fritter away my retirement are what make life worth living. I personally wouldn't want a house in suburbia if I couldn't afford to buy brie, wine, and records on a Sunday or pay for beers and a show on a Thursday.

Maybe this is partially due how house prices have skyrocketed in Vancouver over the last decade. With the median house price in Vancouver approaching 1 million, owning a home seems like a pipe dream. Of course, salaries have not kept up with the inflation. Due to various economic factors (deindustrialization, two income households, etc.) that I'm really not qualified to discuss, owning a home in the Pacific Northwest seems to be restricted to the wealthy.

When I told my Grandma how much I spend on groceries and dinners out, she was absolutely shocked. I admit it, I waste money. I have expensive tastes. Somehow, meatloaf and potatoes just doesn't appeal to me as much as a salad of arugula, pine nuts, blue cheese, and avocado.

For whatever reason, it's hard for me to envision my future. My dreams have always been a bit left-of-center; I could see myself banging away on a typewriter in Paris in 20 years or living in a house with an orchard in the middle of nowhere, but I just can't picture myself driving a minivan.

Perhaps this fatalism comes out of growing up in an era when the world seems to be on the brink of environmental disaster. When you look at the projected effects of global warming in 10 years, it's difficult to imagine having children.

For whatever reason, perhaps these little indulgences that deliver instant gratification are really just a coping mechanism to distract us from the apparently imminent combustion of the earth.

When I look at documentaries on the 1960s social revolutionary era, I find myself on the verge of tears (yes, even cynical unromantics cry) at the heartbreaking idealism apparent.

I would love to feel that kind of optimism that the world is going to change. Hell, I'd love to feel the kind of optimism about love that the two Columbia students who wed in the midst of the overnight sit-in at Columbia in the 1960s must have felt. It makes me feel nostalgic for an era I never even experienced.

Instead, what characterizes my generation is a kind of tired cynicism. Maybe we all just have unrealistic expectations. If I had been born fifty years ago, I probably would've been married 4 boyfriends ago (although the thought is horrific). I wouldn't have had any illusions about spending my twenties searching for a "soul mate," I would've just looked for a good provider and stuck it out without any searching for something "exciting".

Instead, I find myself wondering if this is it? I frequently say that I'm a total unromantic, but maybe the problem is that I am too much of a romantic. Don't tell me you haven't gone looking for your own "Before Sunrise" moment in Europe. Something about a night spent chatting over wine on a Greek ferry or up by the Sacre Coeur just makes it so much more romantic than a date at a coffee shop in the Pacific Northwest. And sure, I've had amazing nights on travels where I've stayed up all night talking and dreaming about moving to a new city to be with this amazing new person....but, maybe, just maybe, everyone gets a little boring after a while?

I always thought that one day I'd meet a cute boy who was funny, well-read, unpretentious, intelligent, and laid back. That we'd both like to play scratchy records, go for beers, go on hikes, go out dancing, watch foreign movies, and support our local Community Supported Agriculture. And that he would be the type of person who liked his own freedom and his own personal and physical space to explore his own interests- and allow me mine. Someone with who you could spend an entire rainy afternoon inside playing music and reading and writing and not even need to talk. And sometimes we'd go out together, and sometimes we'd go out by ourselves. And we would like to travel and go on adventures and be spontaneous enough to move to Europe, just because we felt like it. And of course, we would be crazy in love with each other. I told my Mom all of this, and she told me those were a lot of unrealistic requirements. True, true.

Real Girls Eat Meat

For some reason, people always ask me why I am a vegetarian.

If anything, at this point, it's partially habit. I became one originally for moral and idealistic reasons, but it's been so many years, I don't even know what a hamburger or steak tastes like.

The most convincing reason to stay one seems to be the environmental effects of the production of meat. According to the Environmental Defense Fund, if every American gave up meat for one dinner a week (what? they don't? do people like this exist?), then it would be equivalent to taking 5 millions cars off the road. Of course, those figures are based on the traditional factory style method of meat production, not based on meat from environmentally conscious local farms.

However, figuring out where meat comes from and how it's regulated is a whole problem on its own. Spending last summer in France made me appreciate the methods of farm production and its emphasis on eating locally. But, that's more part of European culture than North American, anyways. It's so complicated navigating the most morally conscious way to consume meat and produce. For example, the demand for grazing land for cattle in order to feed the North American appetite has absolutely ravaged previously usable farmland and rainforest in South America and Africa; but their economies have now become dependent on the continued exportation of meat. Unless their economies are diversified, the financial consequences of not purchasing meat from South America and Africa are comparable to the environmental consequences of purchasing from them. Anyways, ya'll have heard this song before, I'm sure.

I've struggled with veganism. I've read absolutely horrible things about the dairy industry and cringe when I think of the hormones present in dairy products. I've been a vegan for months on end before, but I always cave in Europe, and since the 2 week New York pizza binge in July, I'm completely off the wagon. Unfortunately, I really love artisan cheeses. When I think about a frittata with goat cheese, fresh basil, and sundried tomatoes, I start mentally making a grocery list.

That being said, I probably eat 90-95% vegan. I do believe it's the healthiest and most ethical way to live, and I hate to be the high maintenance person that looks for vegan wines and asks if the bun on the veggie burger in the dive bar is vegan. But, if someone invited me over for a brie fest tomorrow, I couldn't say no.

Now that I'm on this roll, I have, admittedly, been craving seafood lately. Although I've cut out red meat for the better part of two (!) decades, seafood has been my weakness (save for the one time on my first date with a boy when I was 18, when he thought vegetarianism meant you could eat lamb. I should've taken it as a sign things weren't going to work out). I can't cook it to save my life, but lately, I don't know if it's the late summer sun or what, but I've been having lobster, halibut, and crab fantasies. Ugh.