Stressin'

I think I generally keep things pretty light here, on my little blog. Part of that is because I have a pretty "light" life (take that to mean what you will), but also because I don't really like focusing on the bad things here - or anywhere, really.

Lest anyone think my life is a series of bike rides, city jaunts, camping trips and amusing conversations with my husband, below is a short list of things that are weighing on me right now. I feel like venting.

1. My incredibly uncertain future. I graduate in 9 months - is there a job out there for me? Everywhere I turn right now, all I hear is "cutbacks", "hiring freeze", "it's going to get worse before it gets better." Wait, when you say it's going to get better, do you mean by December? That would be great, thanks.

2. My still somewhat uncertain summer. I've spent the last couple months at an increasing level of panic re: summer internship. Good, solid experiences in the field. Rutgers offers little or no (emphasis on no) help finding them, so I've been sort of flailing around, trying to figure things out on my own. I think I've got it all settled now... but what if it falls through? Additionally, am I doing the right thing? Is there something else out there that would be an even better fit?

3. Oliver's uncertain future. He works for a bank that keeps posting good numbers... a little too good, actually. Can't be real. Any day now, we're going to see his CEO on cnn, being led away from the office in handcuffs. And then Oliver will come home at 3 in the afternoon, box of personal items in hand.(**Sidenote: Oliver works in IT. He is not a banker - not a bad guy.**)

4. Housing. Our convenient, affordable apartment will soon be no longer ours. Our landlord emailed us yesterday, informing us that he is putting the apartment up for sale - uncertain economy... he's not sure how long he'll be able to hold on to his job... needs to unload this mortgage... he's so sorry to do this to us... we've been good tenants... we can stay beyond May 1 if we want... can stay until he sells the place...

Crap. We JUST moved. And there is absolutely.no.way. I am moving in the middle of my final exams. It's just not going to happen. And I've just gotten used to things in this neighborhood. What if we can't find something else in the area? I don't like being told I need to leave. I like coming to those conclusions on my own. Whine whine whine.

Before I Go

We're off to Germany tomorrow, which is really exciting. This is my first trip there, and I'm looking forward to seeing the big sights as well as noticing the little things.

I'm also looking forward to writing about my experiences. I won't be blogging while on vacation, but I'm bringing my journal and plan to write a bit while out and about. It's my hope to write a few blog entries about the trip, but not in a "we did this, then did this, and then went here" sort of way. Instead, I hope to capture specific moments, or look at certain things in detail. We'll see how it turns out.

Basically, I want to use my vacation time to bring a little more writing into my life. I remember being a kid, sitting at the Apple IIGS in my parents' basement and writing stories. There was a blatant rip-off of Agatha Christie's Death on the Nile (Murder on the Mississippi), a sweeping epic of two friends through life and death (Unforgettable), another blatant rip-off, this time of the Little House series (This New Land, complete with detailed passages of meals), and so on. I'm not saying I was any great writer; I just remember how excited I used to feel when I sat at the computer and started to write. I could say anything! I could create whatever I wanted! I've been remembering those nights lately (and if I remember right, a lot of them were summer nights. Setting sun, cozy isolation...), and the memories make me want to recapture that feeling. Just me in a darkening, quiet room. Alone with that universe we all have inside our heads.

Okay, for the record, I did not start this entry with the intention of mooning over my childhood writing habits. I only meant to tell you that I was leaving for two weeks and would return with stories from Germany. I like the diversion though, I like it. I'll go to bed and feel a little melancholy and a little inspired. Good combination.

8-8-08, and all that comes before it

We booked our tickets a couple weeks ago. Two weeks in Germany, divided between time with friends and relatives and time to travel and explore. Oliver is thrilled, and for those of you who have met him, you can get a measure the feverish joy in his heart by the fact that he is actually admitting, out loud, that he is looking forward to the trip. Yup, August 7 through 20. Beer, good bread, Alps, rigidly organized hiking trails, this raw-meat-on-bread stuff that Oliver swears up and down by… it’ll be great.

One teensy little glitch. I talked with my mom on the phone last night, and we somehow got onto the subject of tv. We sold our tv before we left Canada, and have no plans to buy a new one here. This really bothers my mom for some reason, maybe because she keeps thinking we don’t have a tv because we can’t afford one. This isn't true. “How will you watch the Olympics?”, she asked. “I know how much you’ve always loved the Olympics.” I made some flip remark about renting a tv or watching in a sports bar. “8-8-08”, she said. “You’re going to want to see it.”

Wait. 8-8? As in August 8? As in the day we land in Germany? You mean I’m going to spend the entire two weeks of the Olympics on vacation? My heart sank.

Okay, to flesh out this story a little bit, I’d like to give you a short overview of my Olympic history. It started when I was 12, with the Winter Olympics in Albertville, France. I started watching the CBS coverage and got hooked. It's like that character says in Steven King's Apt Pupil: everyone, at some point, finds their “thing”. You know, that one thing that you can’t stop thinking about, can’t let go of until you’ve found out everything there is to know about it. And even then it’s not enough. My “thing” was the Olympics. I memorized all the figure skating medal winners from every Olympic competition. At the age of 12 and at a height of around 5'7", I took up gymnastics. My parents, being the horrible, thoughtless people they were, planned a family trip to Hawaii that happened to coincide with the 1992 Barcelona games. I sulked for weeks, arranged with friends to have every night of coverage taped for me (all 70-ish hours), and wore a black “Barcelona ‘92” t-shirt regularly during the vacation. I bought books and devoured them, making people like Paavo Nurmi, Tommie Smith and Abebe Bikila a part of my own life, somehow. I developed crushes on Norwegian speed skaters . I applied to be in the opening ceremonies of the 1996 Atlanta games. I plotted my rise to the presidency of the IOC. I obsessed.

As I got older, I calmed down. I even got a little cynical about the commercialization and cheating. I still watched, though. All of it. Boxing, fencing, steeplechase, archery, rowing. No sport too dull, no human interest story too schmaltzy. During the 2004 Athens games, I parked my butt on the couch for 16 days, knitting a scarf the whole time. If I was going to lose two weeks of my life, I was at least going to have something to show for it. The scarf was blue and white, the colors of the Greek flag. I thought that was a nice touch. I also look good in blue.

More importantly though, the Athens games helped me realize something about this long love affair of mine. When the first night of NBC’s coverage came on, and the Olympic fanfare swelled as the camera swept dramatically over the Acropolis, my heart caught in my throat and I started to cry. I had been to Athens, just three years before! The memories flooded back and I was filled with longing, not just to go back and visit again, but to… something more. What?

The answer to the questions was a long time coming. It just came to me tonight, actually, while telling Oliver how mad I was that we were going to miss the Beijing games. I was trying to explain to him how much they should mean to us because of the role the city itself has played in our lives. It hit me.

It was never about the sports. I mean it was, but it wasn’t. I hate sports. I don’t like participating (too much competition – can’t we all just collaborate?), and I definitely don’t like watching. You want to go to an NBA game? Great, I’ll be right there. Just let me gouge out my eyes first. The Olympics weren’t about sports for me. The fat, hairy Ukrainian guy throwing a shot put was just a means to an end. And the end was the enormous world out there, that world I wasn’t old enough to go out and see yet. All those beautiful faraway places like Norway, Spain, Japan, Australia. It was about all those exotic people and that beautiful world they got to inhabit for two weeks while I went about my daily routine. Someday, a voice told 14-year-old me, you’ll get to go to places like those.

Fast forward to 2005. Beijing, my home for six months. And if the glamour of living in Asia wasn’t enough, I also fell in love there. With Oliver, of course. We wore the tires out on our bikes, we explored and stared in awe at everything around us while the locals gaped right back. If God ever offers me the chance to choose one six-month period of my life to live a second time… um, I don’t think I’ll have much trouble deciding. Not to dis any other periods of my life. In fact, these last years have been pretty fantastic in their own way. I’m no Mount Everest climber or round-the-globe traveler, but the life I live is exciting enough to me. And even better, we’ve got the promise of further adventure. Where do we want to live next? Where should we travel? Hey, anything's possible, right?

And that’s just it. In the deepest subconscious of my heart of hearts, isn’t this exactly what I dreamed of while I watched those hours and hours of coverage? Going off to a distant, glamorous city and falling in love with a foreigner? Once in love with sed foreigner, didn’t I want the two of us to dash off to strange new places and have unspecified adventures? I know, I just know, that the first notes of the Olympic fanfare, that first shot panning dramatically over Tiananmen Square, the first words out of Bob Costas’ mouth, would reduce me to a blubbering fool.

T Minus Less Than A Week

One week from this moment I should be in Jersey City, sleeping the sleep of the truly exhausted on the mattress we managed to drag out of the U-Haul truck before we called it a day. We're moving next weekend, and that means that today (unless Blogger counts this post as Sunday, since it's after midnight) was my last Saturday in Toronto. The gods were kind to me and made it a beautiful day, and I managed to take advantage of the weather and made a mini farewell tour of some places I have loved here. Nowhere near comprehensive of course; how can you cover a city in one day?


Queen Street East, Leslieville:

I didn't spend much time in Leslieville until after Oliver had left for New York, but I've gone there regularly since. I think it might be my favorite neighborhood in the city. It was apparently a gaping wound up until a few years ago, and there is still a generous helping of pawn shops (photo above) thrown in with the organic brunch restaurants lining Queen Street. It's got a great gritty feel to it, and I spent a bit of time this morning taking pictures of graffiti/murals and old, worn-out signs (below).





Front Street, St. Lawrence Market:

Love that mural. Love the market too. I went in today for what I imagine will be the last time, and ordered what I imagine will be my last ever cheese blintz from the little Eastern European lunch counter in the basement.



Rogers Centre sculpture with CN tower:

The Rogers Centre doesn't really have that much sentimental value for me - though I took Oliver to his first ever baseball game there, to see the Blue Jays play the Nationals - but I love the photo. I also remember flying in to Toronto for the first time and seeing the tower from my window. There was so much uncertainty then; it's nice to take a peek at the tower once in awhile and remind myself how well things turned out.

I'm starting to feel fairly emotional about my impending departure, but that's a good thing. In some situations, it feels good to be sad and wistful. I love sitting here and thinking all these nostalgic thoughts of Toronto, because it reminds me again and again what a wonderful experience I've had here. I hope the sadness overwhelms me as we drive away next Saturday morning - it'll feel fantastic.

The Time Just Before the Beginning of Something New

Our dining room used to look like this:



Now it looks like this. An improvement, no?



While I'm at it, here's our "office" many months ago:


And here it is now. I think the end table covered in a dishtowel really sets the tone for the room.


We're moving! Actually, one of us has already moved. I've mentioned Oliver's new job. When talking about it though, I left out the part about the job being in the United States. New York City, to be exact. He's been living and working there for the last three weeks. I'm here alone in Toronto, saying a long goodbye and packing up our things. I'll be joining him at the end of the month.

Why am I still here? Why didn't I go with him? The answer to this question actually leads to news that (to me, anyhow) is even more exciting than the move to New York. The long version: we had to give 60 days notice to our landlord, and it ended up making the most sense for me to stay and work in Toronto for all those 60 days. When I move, I won't be looking for a full-time, adult job. I'm not sure what I'm going to do, actually. Something temporary I imagine, since come fall I'll be going back to school. Graduate school! I got into Library Science program at Rutgers!

Why the secrecy? It isn't a secret, really. I've been telling almost everyone I know about it - just not the people I know at work. The office politics have been especially fierce as of late, and it didn't seem like a wise move to let people know I was working my way out the door. I don't think anyone from work reads this blog, but a couple people might know about it, so better safe than sorry. This is the big day though, the day I give my notice. Everything is officially out in the open.

It's been so strange not to be able to write about all this. It turns out that I use this blog to process my thoughts - it's a journal minus the revealing personal information. When I wrote about shopping with Oliver for new work clothes, I really wanted to talk about the impending separation and how we would both handle it (turns out I really dig living alone). When I wrote about our snowshoeing trip in Algonquin, I wanted to talk about it in the context of it being the perfect venue for Oliver's last weekend in Canada. And three weeks ago, I wanted to write about our trip to the airport for Oliver's big flight to the U.S. and how I cried as we pulled our suitcases down the street and out of our little neighborhood. The tears had nothing to do with our separation, since it's a short one and there are two visits to break it up. I cried because I hated the thought of him leaving Toronto. This was our first home together. For the rest of our lives we will look back on our time in Toronto and remember the first year of our marriage and all the happiness that came with it. When Oliver boarded his flight it all came to an end, and it caught me off guard. He left me here in a strange limbo, not wholly here (because he isn't), but not at our next destination either.

Three more weeks of limbo, then it's New York. Or to be accurate, New Jersey. Details on all that later.

Water Mains, Letters, Striped Toes

What a strange day! No, maybe strange isn't the right word. Unusual, maybe. Interesting. Good.

A water main broke at my office today, and everyone was sent home at noon. Who doesn't dream of this - the week before Christmas you suddenly have an afternoon free to get all sorts of details taken care of. I ran 17 random little errands and the two halves of my soul kept high fiving each other.

Early in the evening I got a beautiful letter from an old professor. It was a letter of recommendation, and he said such wonderful things that I actually put the letter down and cried for a little while. I wasn't crying crying - it was just a strange mix of things I couldn't quite pinpoint. I think I was touched by the things he said, disappointed in myself for not always believing those same things, and a little nostalgic for the past.

My unexpected crying jag got me thinking about all sorts of things, and the end result (just go with me here) is the posting of a poem I wrote in college. Please enjoy...


The Ballad of the Hot Cooks

We are the hot cooks.
Hairy and thick voiced and heavy are we.
We dance in a cloud of flour and grease
in our kitchen domain with our
tall white hats and striped feet.

We mock the cold cooks.
They have not our skill,
our thick hands so perfect for tearing meat.

Leering at the waitresses
as they scurry away
to avoid our stares
while our knives go chop-chop.

Matching tattoos
done with a rusty skewer
on our biceps: born to cook.

we twirl
we chop
we slide
we grunt
we glaze
we leap
we knead
we play

we link arms and tap our striped toes.

In the kitchen. Evey night.
Into the morning.