Monthly Archives: May 2009

pieces, pieces, pieces of you.

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17

I am strangely fascinated by strange things.

Also? I enjoy lists.

So when it comes to finding true satisfaction in life, nothing could make me happier than a really strange list.

Or a few of them.

No, no wait.

What REALLY makes me happy is learning about people and what they do and what they love.

So if I throw that in the mix, then a really strange list (or two) that gives me an opportunity to learn about people is PURE UNADULTERATED MAGIC.

(Second only to hot wings, but I couldn’t find a way to get them involved in this post.)

So here’s what I want to know about your life right now:

1. The last five songs you listened to (and what you listened to them on, be it iPod, radio, TV, or didgeridoo)
2. The last five things you ate.
3. Five things in your fridge right now.
4. Five things in your bathroom cupboards/medicine cabinet
5. Five things in your car glove compartment/purse/wallet/backpack (choose one)

I know, I know… who cares about this stuff?

But I guarantee you the pictures that emerge from these five lists tell you more about a person than they think.

brain-shaped catastrophe.

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5

Every couple years, I hit a point where I am doing so much/thinking about so much/fussing about so much/going through so much that my head kind of implodes into itself.

It doesn’t really do anything dramatic, the implosion (no oozing fluid out my ears, no mall rampages, no psychotic breaks, no Vegas weddings, no underwearless paparazzi shots). It just turns me into a procrastinating, frustrated scatterbrain.

I start losing track of details, putting off tasks, panicking about the future, stressing all over the people I love… and generally creating a big wasp’s nest of GRRR for myself.

And make no mistake: once you start down that path, it pretty much perpetuates itself until you have a much larger mess to clean up than when you initially began to freak out.

Sigh.

I took this quiz today on a whim to see if my stressballdom was actually justified in any way, and it turns out that the amount of life events I’ve gone through in the past five years make me a prime candidate to be a stressball.

I’ve changed jobs (from Stressful Job A to Stressful Job B), experienced financial hardship (freelancing: get clients before you start!), moved three times (and am planning a much LARGER move soon, away from everything I know, which will require a new job and plenty of money), experienced a chronic illness (or two), learned the news of my infertility (which continues to rock me now and then), lost a family member after a long illness, had major changes in my spiritual perspective, started a LONG distance relationship with someone who already has a family (who I met on the Internet, for the love of Pete), and the list goes on and on.

Then I took it for a couple of my friends and my parents, and it turns out that we should ALL be stressballs.

So I can’t really justify letting everything slide just because life is handing me a very full plate. I need to treat the stack of things and stuff like a Chinese lunch buffet and dig in until my pupils dilate and I smell of wontons.

The problem is that I start to see my life as a large tangle, rather than a set of small things I can conquer one task at a time, or one sparerib at a time, to continue the buffet theme (I think I’m hungry.)

It doesn’t even matter how many day planners I start writing in (I never finish one — never have), how many “productivity apps” I download onto my iPod Touch (I forget to update them, or the interface is more stressful than actual stress), or how many gentle nudges I get to make it happen (or forceful shoves forward.)

I lie awake at night and think about everything, en masse, and wonder what to do. And then daylight rolls around and I put everything off until… you guessed it. And then things become last minute and frustrating and disorganized, which is mightily at odds with my other big brain trick, OCD.

It’s like shoving a cat and a dog into a shoebox and expecting them to get along.

I mean, usually the solution to wondering what you’re going to do about something is to DO something, and then deal with the aftermath AFTER, rather than anticipating it right up to the last minute… the minute when you have no choice but to act, and your odds of success have dropped significantly.

I can’t seem to get the timeline right on that one, and I’m feeling it.

But I’m trying to remind myself daily that the worst case scenario isn’t usually the one that happens.

That I have amazing family and friends that I need to open up to and get advice from, instead of crawling into my head.

That I spend a good portion of the day enjoying what I do, and that I can keep growing and developing my skills so I feel even more confident.

That my relationship, while stressful logistically, is a blessing that I can’t even explain to you.

That I am safe, well fed, comfortable, and on the mend, health-wise — and could be even better off if I took action.

That I laugh ten million times as often as I cry.

That I can make a list of things I need to do, and actually cross things off it.

That I need to be accountable instead of avoid-y (I invented that word. You’re welcome.)

Imagine how I’d sleep.

I see it, this more reasonable existence, and I want it, and I’m going to try.

Just thought I’d let you know.

the bus to nowhere.

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14

Before I tell you about my bus ride today, I have to establish two things:

    1. If there is a crazy person to be found ANYWHERE within five miles of me, they will immediately be drawn to me, and wish to make my acquaintance. It doesn’t matter if I am wearing sunglasses, headphones or an expression so murderous even Charles Manson would be all, “Have a nice day!” The bananacrackers are in my space to stay.

    2. I ride the bus/train/Seabus in Vancouver. I know, I know. But I live in the middle of a city, and save for a few sketchy routes around town, they are quite safe, and populated by nice people just like me (and the crazies I have attracted along the way.) We just want to get places economically, and with less wear and tear to the environment. And we do.

    3. I live in the city on purpose. I am not a suburbanite. I know what comes with that choice, and I embrace it.

THAT SAID.

I know what buses not to get on in my city.

I know what parts of town to avoid in my city, if I’m alone.

Even in the (fairly upscale, at least living cost-wise) neighbourhood I used to live in, there were always a few spots that you probably shouldn’t stop if you were a short female like me.

Now I live in an older area with some more character. And it’s gorgeous. GORGEOUS. The houses and gardens in the blocks around me are fragrant with wood smoke from real chimneys, and redolent with the scent of magnolia and jasmine blooming.

But when a neighbourhood is older in Vancouver (unless it’s Shaughnessy), it is generally bordered by equally old, but drastically less well-kept commercial and residential areas (read, slumlord havens.)

I don’t stop in these neighbourhoods.

Not because I can’t hold my own, and not because I don’t know that 80% of the people living there are nothing like the vocal and obvious 20% trundling about, trying to fight with everyone they see.

Not because I’m ignorant of the fact that many of the people trying to fight with everyone they see aren’t struggling with mental illness that they’ve been forced to deal with on their own, or substance abuse issues that are so deep-seated in some families as to be nearly congenital.

No, I don’t stop because there’s nothing I need there, including trouble. And because my dad (my overprotective dad) would have a BIRD if he thought I was hanging out at Hastings and Main.

Today, however, I managed to get myself on a bus rolling through that magic, all in the name of cutting a few minutes off a journey, on an unfamiliar bus route.

DUDE.

Buses usually have 80% working class, cool people just getting places, 10% equally cool old people just getting places, 5% annoying teenagers (they can’t help it, love them though I do) and 5% completely bats#@$ people.

The bats#@$ always sit near me.

No worries, though.

They like to chat, and I can dig it. I can deal with pretty much any conversation for 20 minutes, really, and besides… I’m not exactly devoid of the weird observations myself.

But this bus?

95% WHAT THE HELL.

And I knew it very shortly after I got on, but by that point, we were in one of those neighbourhoods that make my dad shake his fist at the sky and say, “NOT MY KID!”

Some vignettes:

    * A mother (60′s) and her son (30′s) having a loud, graphic discussion about his sex life, complete with hand gestures, sound effects, and zoo references. I like to be honest with my parents about my life, but if I’d told ANY of this to my mother, she would have rushed to find a rosary and SHE ISN’T CATHOLIC.

    * A old woman, overhearing said conversation, muttering aloud about how “everyone has AIDS now. EVERYONE.” and staring pointedly at me with my Whole Foods canvas bag as though I were not in fact carrying feta and vegetables and a lemongrass scented soy candle… but a deadly virus.

    *Two hustlers (no other word for it) who pretended to be deaf to get on the bus for free (which isn’t really policy, but I think the bus driver was just confused by their non-sign-language) and then laughed themselves senseless in the doorway in the back. They got in the way of anyone trying to get off through the door, and nearly got in a fistfight with a guy who looked irritated that he couldn’t get through. Then they exchanged brown paper bags of heaven-only-knows-what with one another, and offered some to me as well. I declined politely, which caused one of them to call me a “snotty bitch”, which nearly led to ANOTHER altercation with a young man who thought that wasn’t quite right (It wasn’t. but neither are fistfights on the bus.) The whole thing ended with me saying, “I’m FINE” and giving them all a look borrowed from my mother.

    *Some guy dealing weed in the back. And when I say “dealing”, I mean his bag broke open, and he swore a lot.

    *Two people, who were either drunk or high or really uncommitted to personal hygiene as a rule, getting on with a baby stroller draped in a sheet. Baby inside? Hard to say. But the “baby” stroller proceeded to roll around the front of the bus as soon as it moved, because they couldn’t figure out how to use the brakes. I reached out a flip-flopped foot when they weren’t looking and dropped the brake (just in case), which led to much hilarity when they tried to exit the bus, and the stroller wouldn’t budge. They joked about leaving it there, which led approximately the ENTIRE BUS to step in and help them take the brake off. They exited singing a Milli Vanilli song.

    *Meg getting asked for change twice. I do believe in change, just not on the bus, especially not when the pitch goes something like, “I need ten dollars.” No “for…”, or willingness to barter, or bidding down. Ten dollars, AND NOT A PENNY LESS. The other pitch was more winning: “You’re pretty. Do you have fifty cents?” This reminded me too much of dating in my twenties, however, and got a no.

    *Two girls got on with giant inflatable baseball bats, and proceeded to go to war in the back of the bus, beaning a man who had been asleep since the beginning of the journey… but awoke with the roar of a lion. He BIT one of the bats, and then flung himself towards the exit at the next stop. The war resumed anew.

    *A man telling everyone he was “packing”, and not for a trip, mind you. He wasn’t actually packing, which was pretty evident, because he was mostly naked, and I don’t know where ANY sort of gun would go.

    *The bus driver giving out the WRONG directions out to at LEAST four people, which got the entire bus shouting the RIGHT directions, or directions they THOUGHT were right, but were ALSO wrong. Bring on 2010, I say!

    *Two Mormon missionaries looking alternately fervent and terrified, as though the bus might have been either the ultimate mission field, or NOT WORTH MY SALVATION, NO WAY.

By the time I was near my house, the bus was filled with nattily-dressed seniors and families and a girl who smelled of patchouli.

But I will never be the same again.