Happy Pay the Rent Day!

I’m so excited to fork up 17 fifty dollar bills today because my landlord keeps his money in his mattress [1].

I’ve decided that I’m not fond of managerial duties. My job entails quite a lot of it, moreso than normal teaching in a classroom. I mean, you could technically apply “management” as a necessary aptitude of classroom teaching, but it turns more into “garnering control” than anything. I’m learning that “management” here means a) being able to stick to a deadline b) being able to talk to people who are older than you and tell them they screwed up, and how to fix it in a non-condescending manner, c) paper pushing organizational skill. But what, you might ask, is the underlying theme of it all? It’s all sweet talk.  ALL of it.  It’s like foreplay with strangers you find out you’re not attracted to, all day, every day, to get anyone to do something for me. Sometimes it’s incredibly excruciating.

In other news… ZOMGH1N1!

That’s right…it’s the lightening fast car of your over-media hyped fears, combined with your apathy to taking the lords name in vain over a fickle thing. And I fucking made it up! It’s mine internet, MINE!

[1] I am pretty sure this is what he does with it…or they stuff it into their pajamas at night to keep them warm,  like they did in 1932 (he was 5).

Goals and life and whatnot

I was subscribed to the tomes of Steven Covey for a few days on course the other week, to make me an effective person. Apparently being able to provide shelter, food and clothing don’t actually make you this, so I was subject to gross hypocritical analogies, and singing kumbayah for about three long long days.

The end result is that while I felt like more of a hideous calibre of human being for all my lack of proactivity on the intangibles of my life (tongue in cheek), I walked away tripping out over how badly I and others actually communicate to one another, as well as with a small amount of tips to help manage my priorities better. What priorities could I possibly have? Good fucking question…the answer is ‘very few.’

While other people are wigging out over their roles of parent, professional, mentor, volunteer, and other such noble things…I am still finding I have enough time for all things I count as important, but little incentive to use it accordingly.

I made a little time-table for all my ‘big rocks’ — painting, writing, caretaker (animals…it’s the nearest thing I could equate to parenting, and lamely, it does take up a lot of my time–I’ve been spending upwards of two hours everyday outside with the cats– enough time eaten by them sniffing poop and chasing string there, to be considered a priority), sister (what the fuck do I even do for this? I don’t know), Aunt (ok, so the goal here should be that she actually remembers who I am when I visit), Daughter (whatevs man, buy you coffee?), teacher (got it), friend (start being more of one and less of an insular anti-social douche).

So far, other than the sibling/aunt stuff, this has been going relatively well, and while I’d originally planned to map every day out by the minute so I would be so busy I would forget I know no-one in my town and am completely alone outside of work, but somehow, things are still going along at a steady clip, and I’m still getting it all done. I’m finding that actually being cognizant of them, more than anything, is helping.

I’m thinking about maybe volunteering in the community. Part of me is “yay, shake up the monotony” but the other part of me is like, “in the town that’s considering a purely christian stream of public education, k-12…don’t get too fucking comfortable.”

Bento and I went to the Telus World of Science yesterday, and looked at the “Building Bricks” Lego sculpture display. I was pretty impressed by the physicality of it– not the size perse, but the absolutely perfect awareness of balance and proportion he created. Bento sort of burst the bubble a little bit by mentioning the guy probably had some killer 3-d imaging tool, but all the same, it was quite awesome. It made me wish that I hadn’t always played Lego’s so begrudgingly when I was little (with my brother). He always had great ideas of what to build, and wanted to have shoot-em-ups, but I always ended up making long lines of yellow ducks that he would run over with his cars.

The rest of the day was spent meeting lots of strange people and being generally confused and scared by the weirdness of “fending for myself” social interaction. I was a little overwhelmed, I think, having basically not spoken to anyone outside of work, for a whole week.  This, coupled with being with “The Mouth” for a year, has made me realize I should brush up on mingling skills.

One of my goals is to blog twice a week.

C’est froid, chalice!

Things have calmed down around the home front as I’ve become more settled into B-town. I have been hard core focused on work, and my social life has improved drastically (which may sound surprising, but it has).

I turned 26 on Saturday and drove up to my parent’s place for the weekend, where I spent most of my time eating cake and making sushi and conversation, or playing with my friend’s wiggly little spawn.

Weird thing about spawn…I’m so very aware of how ready I am to have kids, and 95% of me cannot wait to have kids. The other 5% is uber selfish however, which is enough to dissuade me from hunting down some baby juice and getting the job done. This 5% is comprised of career worries, personal relationship worries, physical worries (stretchmarks, weight gain), and of course, wild card issues.

Despite this, if I did get pregnant tomorrow by some freak inseminative event (there does seem to be “something in the water” here), I do still know I’d be ok. Weirdly enough, it would be better to get pregnant by accident than deliberately, in my mind, because then all that would be left to do is deal with it. Screw that conscious embracing of the miracle that is squeezing a 10 lb creature out of a coffee cup sized opening.

I’ve long realized I’m not the kind of person who needs to agonize over decisions. I’m the “make the mistakes first” poster girl, which sounds awful, but I’ve generally got a good sense of preparedness and flexibility for any of those mistakes that may occur.

The boys and their respective men/women are coming over on Friday I think. This should be good times. I’ve still got loads of birthday cake.

This entry totally is live journal. I’m, like, so impressed by my own skills of verbatim….  Something more intelligent will come later.

who says what’s socially appropriate if you’re going insane and don’t care?

It’s 4 p.m. on a Sunday, and I’ve busted out the gin. Yeah, problem by problem fixed with a temporary salve of ounce by ounce.

I never thought I’d become the type that would become that type.  As it stands right now, drinking time is the only time we get along. I forget that he makes me feel like shit, I forget he makes me so frustrated and angry that I start to shake. In return, his jokes and his abrasive personality seem more bearable, in an intoxicated distant persona. This is the problem with any kind of self-destructive habits, I suppose. It gives you a persona, a distance from reality. I used to think it was just shitty coping mechanisms, but now I realize. Of course, after half a glass of straight gin, I don’t necessarily have a drinking problem yet either.

I just need to get this shit done with. I’m tired. I want my old life back. I’d do anything to only feel sad because I wasn’t getting laid more than once every three months at the longest. That was all I was upset about. If I could pretty please have that life back, I’d do more with it. Promise. I’d do everything I constantly put off for the wrong priority, regularly with a tight schedule. And, I’d never want anyone ever again. If this is what “happily ever after” is, well, I’d just as soon drive into oncoming traffic. I can see it in my mind’s eye sometimes, and know fully well, unfortunately, that it’s a horrible solution. You can’t get someone to let you go, leave you alone, by getting laid up in traction. Drinking problems however, when you think about it, “not only hurt you, but the people around you.”

See, that shit’s gold. If I start drinking for reals-reals, and not for play-play, maybe then he’ll leave me. I may destroy my life in the process, but hey, isn’t that what I’ve been doing inadvertently all along? It makes perfect sense.

I had an interesting thought the other day. He, before turning over and passing out, mentioned, “I just hope you’re not cheating on me, physically or emotionally.” This thought I had centered around that idea of emotional infidelity– it was weird, because when I think about it, I feel like I’m emotionally infidelitous with everyone I encounter who isn’t him. The reason being I realized, was that no one in the world seems as incapable of human connection or normal conversation than he is.

I’ve drunk six ounces of gin in the last twenty minutes. Go superstar! What a role model I feel like right now.

26 minutes after four– ten ounces gone. 44 minutes after 4, 1/3 of bottle left.

If this isn’t an indicator that I need you to leave, I don’t know what is.

“What?! Are you f-ing kidding me?”

It was a very eventful weekend to say the least. The boy and I had planned to hit up the Grove to say good bye to his mom who is going to the motherland for a month, and after a hard days rockin’ (at work), I was pretty much exhausted by the time we pulled out of the driveway.

I kept getting more and more tired as the trip progressed. One thing the boy loves to do is talk, and I sort of picked up on it a little that he was talking more than usual. In his boy-code, he only talks a lot if he is a) hyper, b) a little drunk, and c) nervous about something.

“Hey, we’re going to go to Edmonton before we hit up the Grove, ok? I gotta pick something up.”

“Mnhmm…whatever dude. What do you have to get?”

“Oh, it’s a surprise.”

So we pull up beside the Ledge, and I’m so so damned tired at this point.

“Hey, wanna go for a walk while we’re here?”

Ahhh motherfucker….

“Ok.”

So we walk, and it’s actually pretty nice, because there’s a wicked storm brewing to the west with lots of sheet lightning. It’s a little cool, but we warm up as we get going. I want to walk by the wading pools (they magnetize me) and he instead insists on going down to where the maple trees form a corridor. We’d once sat there for a few hours catcalling some frisbee tossers, and he considered this a very memorable bonding moment.

So we’re standing there, and he stops and looks at me intently, and I yawn and rub my eyes sheepishly.

He gets down on one knee.

Waitaminute, what the fuck?

“Girl [1], will you marry me?”

“Shit-fuck- what? Really? Shit…Crap, sorry, I’m ruining the moment!”

“Uhh…yeah, I would really like it if you said yes.”

“Well, of course I’ll marry you!”

So that is how the famed moment went down. The ring is beautiful (I was really really surprised by the ring and his ability to be so sneaky about it). I’ve been thinking about it a lot, because on one hand, it does seem really soon, but on the other, we’re living together, and it’s been going seamlessly and we still have a good time most of the time we spend so close together. He’s got his quirks certainly, but so have I, and I figure that’s just part of the deal. Plus, history, alongside the present, tells me that the Boy is awesome, and he doesn’t even have to try (“I try really hard though,” he always says) at all. Since this, we both agreed on some things that both of us have to do prior to setting an actual date (the first week of October is what we’re thinking, of 2009), in the name of personal development (ie- I have to quit smoking, for real-reals, not for play-play)

So, just when you think the grand story of my long weekend is over, we had some minor drama yesterday. We’ve both been trying to exercise more (for my boy and I, we are hefty), and so yesterday was a beautiful opportunity to go out on my bike and rollerblades. I started out on the bike, him on rollerblades, and then we switched because he wouldn’t stop complaining about the piss-poor construction of them. He’s on the bike, I’m on the blades, I make him pull me a lot of the way on the shitty pavement but do get some quality exercise in there. On the way back, I had just let go of the bike over some particularly tenuous pavement, and he flew on ahead of me, bouncing on the bike-shocks to see how well they worked. My bike lock was in a bad place on the frame, and when he pushed the shocks in particularly far, while going sort of fast, the padlock lodged itself between the tire and the brakes and brought him to a dead stop–in theory. Physics tells us that a 230 lb weight, travelling about 10 km/h being brought to an abrupt halt has a lot of inertia, so over the handlebars he went.

I thought he landed on his face with the bike on top of him, but it turns out his hand sort of broke the fall [2] along with, well, the rest of his body and the side of his face. He didn’t knock himself out, but he got some bumps and scrapes, and was utterly convinced that he’d broken his metacarpel bone in his hand (read: the “heel” part of your hand–that bone). So, I checked him out and did what little first aid I could (not a lot was necessary) and he decided we should call 911 for his broken hand.

“This is 911, what is your emergency?”

“Uhhh…my fiance fell off his bike. We think his hand is broken.”

“Where are you?”

“Good question…I see some grain elevators and a wheat field.”

We finally got the emergency crews to arrive, and they took care of him [3] and brought him to the hospital. After 3 X-rays, more sitting around, and an awesome callously delivered tetanus shot (“Watch the birdy! Bam!”), we get the doctor to take a look. He squeezes the Boy’s hand a bunch, which makes him go rather white, and scrutinizes the x-rays and says, “you just banged it really hard, it’s not broken.” And the stupid thing is, he’s right, it’s not broken. The boy and I peer at the x-ray, and there’s not a break to be seen, not even a nick, even though he doubles over in pain whenever it gets touched. I felt bad, because the nurses gave him a hard time (as did I), but essentially it boiled down to a very low pain tolerance. So, we decided he should take a sick day (timely, because he just got his brother’s PS3 and X-Box 360) and that he’s allergic to exercise (he thinks, but I disagree).

[1] He did use my name, not some weird boy-band sounding line.

[2] No, we weren’t wearing helmets. I counted four “you should have worn a helmet lectures” in the remainder of the evening.

[3] Gave him a blanket and stood around and shot the shit with the Boy about radio junk until the ambulance arrived, 40 minutes later, by which time I’d gotten home and then back to pick up the trashed bike. He is quite a comedian, and was a pretty good sport through the whole thing.