One Down

I found out today that I passed my first candidacy exam. Relief and elation!

Arachnophobia

I am deathly afraid of spiders. And I have had a few extremely horrifying spider encounters. The most terrifying, I can’t even bear to recount right now, but this one is a definite second. I just found a giant spider in my sandwich. I’m so glad I saw it before I started to eat but I may never eat again.

My Shame

It seems there is always someone in my life who is giving me a hard time for smoking. The latest addition to the list is my Ph.D. supervisor. When he found out last week that I smoke he told me in a very fatherly tone that he was disappointed in me. At a complete loss, all I could do was shamefully apologize. He caught me smoking yet again a few days later and shook his head, muttering “so disappointing, so disappointing.” Somehow it was even worse than hearing it from my actual parents, who, incidentally, gave up lecturing me about it years ago.

But if there is anything that will actually encourage me to quit it will be the alarm system at my house. It is set up so that every time you open a door it beeps and tells you which door was just opened. So every time I go outside to smoke it says “beeeeeep. back door.” This always makes me think of The Doors’ song “Back Door Man” and I immediately feel like I am doing something dirty. Sometimes it’s a delicious kind of dirty feeling. At other times it’s just plain shameful. It’s like having a little electronic watch dog around.

Alone Time

When you’re the kind of person who isn’t very good at being alone, driving 1000 km by yourself is quite the experience.

It started 3 days ago. Things were a little bit rough at home and my best friend, who I was leaning quite heavily on, suddenly had to relocate to Texas. Feeling a little lost and out of sorts, having just thrown my everyday life into complete upheaval, I felt this incredible need for familiarity, comfort. And then it occurred to me, why not just go home? It has been many years since I moved to the coast and since my whole family also relocated I immediately felt I was at home there. Calgary became a past life for me. It was something I had experienced, but as if it had happened to someone else. The me who grew up there was like a specter, something that lingered in my memory but wasn’t very real anymore.

But then here I was, in my car, alone, and headed East. I now understand the expression “emotional roller coaster” in a completely different way. I started out my journey in good spirits. Music blaring, singing along without abandon, excited to be on the open road again. I thought about so many things, from the mundane to the philosophical. I thought about Douglas Coupland’s book Souvenir of Canada, where he talks about driving the Trans-Canada Highway and how he had always wondered why there were so many unravelled cassette tapes on the shoulder of the road. But once he had driven across the whole country and had become tired, irrate, and annoyed with the road trip mix tape he had been playing on repeat the whole way, he lost his patience and hurled it out the window. It all made sense. I thought of this about 6 hours before I had completely worn out my Jurassic 5 CD from over-listening. I thought about the vastness of the Canadian landscape and how it shapes who we are. I’ve been asked so many times what makes Canadians culturally distinct from the rest of the English-speaking world and I always found it a difficult question to answer. But it seems to me now that having that open mass of land, that giant and powerful wilderness, hovering over us must have a tremendous impact on the psyche of the Canadian people. I don’t quite understand what the result of that is yet, but I really believe it shapes us as people somehow. I thought about the time I did this same drive when I was about 19 years old and my friend and I drove right through the night, chain-smoking and reminiscing about past stuff good and bad. After driving all night I was pulled over for speeding in Golden, right near the BC/Alberta border, and had my car impounded because it turned out my insurance had expired 6 months prior and I hadn’t noticed yet. As I snickered to myself about it I realized that I hadn’t actually put my new insurance stickers on my license plate yet and, once again, ten years later, I was driving through Golden with outdated plates.

I’d been consumed lately by this feeling of urgency, like I needed to keep moving, keep doing, like I was full of anxiety and I didn’t know how to make it stop. Driving took care of that. But it was a strange solution because I was moving, the feeling of urgency was gone, but the rest of the feelings were still there and all I had there was myself. I went from feeling free and excited to feeling alone and afraid and frustrated and lost and around Revelstoke I had no choice but to pull over and have a long overdue emotional breakdown. It’s a strange feeling to face yourself after so many years of focusing on others. I’ve know for quite some time that I’ve lost sight of some part of me, but what that is exactly, I don’t know yet. All I knew for sure on that drive was that I needed to be in a city that knows me, a city that raised me, with people who remember the me I’ve always been.

Last night I sat up all night with a couple of childhood friends and read notes we passed back and forth in High School. Some of it was funny, some was heart-breaking, and much of it was embarassing. But it was real. And that was just what I needed. Maybe all the bits and pieces of myself I’ve dropped along the way will slowly start to come back, now that it’s just me. Maybe being alone is alright for awhile.

Life Lessons

When times get tough I like to believe that I am learning something from it all. About life, about myself, about others, anything to make it seem necessary to go through pain. But this weekend I’m not too sure what I’ve learned of value. Maybe it’s too early yet to understand or maybe it was just one of those bleak moments in my life that I’m not meant to gain anything from but cynicism. The only three things that seem clear to me are that I have an awful lot of clothes, even more pairs of shoes, and the next time I want to move in with someone I will consider it with great reservation because moving out is one of the most traumatic relationship experiences I have ever had.

The Craziest Thing Happened To Me Today

At first I was very angry and a bit shaken, but I soon realized the absurdity of the situation and I laughed. I laughed hard.

I found myself in a difficult situation with a person I go to school with, and that person was being very uncooperative, refusing to deal with the situation as any adult would do. I don’t need the stress or the hassle of trying to work something out with someone who is unwilling, so I decided to drop it. But I am still angry, so I told her to go fuck herself.

Now, those of you who know me know that I am generally a nice person. Some even think I can be a bit of a pushover at times. I don’t make a habit of telling people off, but I think she deserved it. She really screwed me over. And to be entirely clear, I didn’t threaten to track her down and kick her ass or anything, I just told her to go fuck herself.

Well, two hours later I get a threatening email… from her mom! And this is what it said:

“Dear Tara,

This is not a threat. This is a fact. If you ever speak to my daughter again in print or verbally in the abusive manner which I have just witnessed you will never have to worry about what she will say or do. It will be me.

I suggest that you cease any and all correspondence and interaction with my daughter from this day forward.”

Wow — now I know how adults deal with their problems. The next time someone swears at me, I’m going to call in my mommy to defend me.

Really?

I can’t say I ever imagined myself suing a person. It always seemed to me like a despicable thing to do to a fellow human being. Not to mention, I think people are too quick to sue over the littlest things in modern society, whether it be a means of shrugging off responsibility for oneself or trying to take advantage of someone else out of financial desperation or greed.

But now I find myself in a situation where I may have to choose between swallowing a large expense resulting from someone else’s negligence or actually suing that someone. My sincere hope is that this person will approach the situation like an adult and take responsibility for their actions. My doubt is that it will be that easy.

The advice of my family is to drop it. “Keep your friends,” they say. Or, “it’s not worth the trouble it will cause you.” But what if this person isn’t my friend anyway? Maybe if we were friends it would be easier. Perhaps a friend would be more willing to be accountable rather than fuck over someone they are close to. I know if I were responsible for causing someone a huge expense I would find a means of paying them back without hesitation, whether they were my friend or not. Maybe it’s not worth the trouble it will cause me. The stress it has brought thus far has led to a lot of random outbursts and restless sleeps. But do I really want to be someone who can be pushed around that easily? The advice of my mechanic, my friends, even my partner, is to not back down, to not let someone get away with what they have done to me, regardless of what their intentions were.

How’s this for a question of ethics?

My Materialism

I am having a bad run with things. I’ve always claimed not to care much about material things so long as life was comfortable. I suppose if that were true I wouldn’t be quite so angry about the following:

Last week, someone who is not me dropped my digital slr camera in a mud puddle and broke it.

Yesterday, someone who is not me KILLED my clutch during a badly failed attempt at trying to drive my car.

Given that I can’t afford these kinds of repairs, I think my new policy is to never let anyone else touch anything that belongs to me ever again. I hate to be possessive – but until I truly don’t care about material things that much, I can’t help but feel this way.

I can forgive the camera because it was a genuine accident, but I am having a hard time not turning this into a hate-on for the someone who destroyed my clutch. Either you know how to drive a standard or you don’t, it’s not that ambiguous a choice. And if you knew how to drive at all you’d know that when you redline a car and smoke starts pouring out from under the hood, IT IS TIME TO STOP. But I guess if you are that person who consistently misrepresents yourself as “cooler” than you are, you wouldn’t want to admit to not knowing the first thing about driving standard.

I could turn this into a much uglier rant but I don’t want to hate myself in the morning.