This Temporary Life

If there is one good thing about being a blogger or a diary keeper, it is that you can look back and see where you were at a year ago or two years ago or 14 years ago and marvel at how much has changed. It gives you perspective. You scroll back to September 27th, 2005 and through reading your own words you are reminded that nothing lasts forever, joy or pain. As life moves forward in an upward spiral - never in a straight linear fashion - even if you are feeling joy again two years later, it is a totally evolved joy. I am not sure if this comforts me or sets me on edge. If nothing is guaranteed to last then that bodes well for things like this stupid cyst I have grown in between my eyes or my still-present confusion about a future occupation. But it also makes me look over to L sleeping beside me and wonder if in 2010 he will be the father of my first child or a huge hole in my heart that I am trying to heal?

There are no guarantees. Keeps you on your toes. Last year in September, a certain, small bliss was sprouting out of the shit of heartbreak. It was becoming apparant to me in the fall of last year that if HTSNBN really wasn't ever going to love me again that left my future in a wide open state of potential. The updside to being dumped was, for the first time, revealed to me while I visited my prairie home last year. My memory was that I was happy or at least on the road to becoming happy for the first time in 2006. It was a good period of my life.

This year, back in Saskatchewan yet again in time to see the leaves change, I am in love with a tornado of a man who is designing engagement rings for me and I have spent the last six months doing a performance contract, somthing I swore to do no more. My finances are in the best place they have ever been...you know that place, where you just buy something without having to stop and do math in your head before you hit the cash register. My health is excellent (besides this cyst in between my eyes which is more annoying than life threatening). I am about to start a contract that will teach me about myself, a potential career path and the benefits to jumping into the deep end without water wings. Other than having a clear vocation picked out for myself, many of my ducks are in a row. I am happy and in love and the shit of my heartbreak feels more like a whole lotta fertilizer.

But who can know where I am heading? And what does it matter? The future can only exist in my mind. All I have is this moment and the safety in knowing that even if it all falls apart...

it will eventually fall together again soon enough.

Rushed, In a Guest Room

I have almost no time to write this...and haven't had any time since we set out on our road trip to Saskatchewan last Wednesday. Still, my brain has been exploding with things to talk about to y'all and I wanted to at least type a little. So, a ragamuffin summary of what has been on my mind since leaving Chemainus about ten days ago now...

I am so excited to get back to my apartment to nest that it is the primary motivation that is getting me through. The prairies are pretty in the fall. I don't miss the shows at all. My leg is healing, but not quite as fast as it could be if I wasn't spending hours upon hours cruched into a drivers seat. Still certain that I want to marry L, but doubting again that children are something that I am at all ready for. People can be very kind, guests are stressful and my body is hurting from all these different beds. Teaching starts in less than a week and I am terrified. It is good to be home in Saskatchewan and I don't like not having the time to blog the way I want to blog. Oh, there is so much...

But people are now waking up and time has run out.

Next stop Regina and then Moose Jaw, where I will hopefull have more chance to write again.

Bon Voyage!

The place I have called home for the last six months is being packed tightly into bags and boxes. I am busily getting all my ducks in a row for what comes next while saying my goodbyes. I am not sad - at least not yet. I am ready to leave. This contract has been challenging. Ah, euphemisms! At times this contract has been god awful, but how could I regret a single moment of a summer that brought me Leon? It has also reminded me of what it is I don't want, which is a baby step toward knowing what I want. It has taught me alot, it has. And so, tomorrow night, as we close this season, I might be sad. Sad to see the bubble burst because there have been, despite the challenges, happy little routines I will miss. And wonderful people that I will think about often.

But mostly I will be excited to get on with it. I am in love and can't wait to spend the rest of my life with this man. I am also curious to find out if I have any skill at all at teaching. I can't wait to get back to my nest and redecorate yet again...this time with all of L's antiques. Oh, how I long to stop putting on loads of makeup every day and icing my hamstring in an attempt to dull the pain! I want to hang out with lots of non-theatre people and plan an all inclusive trip for the beginning of December. I want my life back again and in 48 hours I will be one step closer to exactly that.

Highlights have been: tubing down the Cowichan River with the cast, Tofino with Mom, my first kiss with L, when the little child laughed in DeLovely, watching the shooting stars on the beach, my excellent suck-it-up day, sitting on the kitchen counter and talking until the wee small hours of the morning, late night Boston Pizza trips, Saltspring Island, playing house at Mark's, Brent David's visit in May, the crazy spider killing day, the afternoon the air conditioning broke down and we cancelled the matinee and spent the afternoon at the beach, taking the bus home from Nanaimo after my car broke down, The Basement video shoots, getting my promise ring in the aisle at Walmart and every other delicious moment I spent with my tornado-of-a-boyfriend.

Goodbye Chemainus. It's been a blast. I'll miss you...

Yet something tells me this isn't that last we are going to see of each other.

A New Konkin Question

With weddings on my brain as of late, I have posted a new Konkin Question all about proposals...

I would love to hear your proposal stories...cool ones you have heard from other people or maybe your own personal experience...

Or maybe your dream of the perfect proposal, if it were to be...

Click and Tell.

Just say "I Do!"

Quack, Quack, Gulp.

God, I suck at confrontation.

I have no doubt that most people that know me would think that confrontation would be right up my alley. I am loud and confindent and extroverted and wildly opinionated. I even have a very articulate, cutting way with words that can be fueled by my deep seeded anger. Makes sense that I would welcome confrontation, unafraid and with fists of words a flyin'. Perhaps I would even be the kind of person to seek out confrontation. I get it. The equation adds up. But the truth is, I am a big ol' coward.

Or maybe I am just wiser. Either way, I clam up when confronted, paralyzed by the fear of the consequences should I say what I am really thinking. And if I feel like confrontation is coming my way, I flee the situation as quickly as possible. The couple of times I have been pushed into responding, my actions have caused chaos. Inexplicably, I seem to have a way to go right for the jugular when verbally sparring and hurting the other person in unforgivable ways. Responding when provoked has never made the situation anything but worse. So, instead, I freeze. Like a well muscled kid being prodding into a bar room brawl, but choosing to just stand there and turn the other cheek, I will not strike back. Yet I am not convinced that it is not always my most noble choice. Sometimes I think I am just plain scared. Sometimes I think it is just plain dishonest.

There are techniques I could use...speaking gently but firmly, stating exactly what I feel while looking the person straight in the eye without letting emotion take over. I know, I know. But it is never quite that easy. The kind of emotionally volatile people that adore confrontation are not subdued by gentle-yet-firm communication. Usually, they just interpret that as patronizing and it sets them off. Pure defensive tones bring them a playgroud of delight and rage just creates Academy Award winning scenes. Shutting them up by spouting the cutting-words-fueled-by-deep-seeding-anger can often do the trick, but not without creating even more destruction in the end. So, I am at a loss. I sit here tonight, writing this and am not sure how to feel or what to do to regain my power.

Suppose I should just get better at treating these things like H2O and work on having the back of a duck.

Like Me, Like You

It was last year sometime when I first realized that I was clinging to an equation that was not necessarily true. The equation was this: I like you and I like them thus you and them should like each other. I have spent much energy trying to force the 1 and the 1 to equal 2, but in the world of humans, unlike mathmatics, 1 and 1 do not always equal 2. More often than not, actually, it does not equal 2. Sometimes is equals something more like 16. So, like Rev B used to say all the time, I have tried to stop pushing that stream uphill.

Having mom come for a visit was fun and exhausting and it forced me to get out and see some more of this beautiful Island. It also woke me up from the dream that this Chemainus bubble is real and now, with only ten days left, it is about to burst. I am ready to move onto the next thing, but I am not without clarity as to how much I have snuggled into a routine here. It has been lovely to get paid every week for six months, to spend every waking moment with a man that makes me laugh, to sleep in every day and be next to the ocean as much as possible. Through its turbulence, there have been great gifts here. But it is time to move on, I can feel the energy at work, brewing inside people. Gypsies at heart, six months of the same thing is a monumental challenge and we are ready to explore new lands. Ah, this industry is excellent for commitment-phobes.

To know who I am and be proud of it, to love deeply and out loud, to let people figure out their own path and allow them to have whatever opinion they want to have, to see gifts in pain and pain as a gift, to trust It All, to understand that it is all a dream anyway and that the only real healing is to wake up, to finally then waken, to do all this and without apology...that is my mission.

Well, that and to figure out how to get all my stuff back into the car.

10, 9, 8, 7 ...

I Hate Horror Movies

One can't help but wonder how couples survive when they have such incredibly different tastes in movies.

You see it all the time. The local video store littered with hapless couples, staring blankly at the wall, one or the other of them strangely silent, watching in horror as their partner picks up and reads the back of a movie that will soon become two hours of their life they will never get back. When I am single I watch these couples with a smug smirk on my face and load up with the kind of romantic comedies and humanistic dramas that a girl can only rent when she is without a life partner. "Haha, SUCKERS!" I think as I imagine those poor girls later that evening, trapped on the couch watching scenes filled with cops and guns and explosions and infantile humour and general idiocy. I realize that it is no more fair to force the testostorone filled boyfriends and husbands to watch hours of emotional sensitivity and beautiful cinematography forwarding plots of complex universal truths. In short, no matter which way they cut it, one of them is going to be spending the night in pain. These are the moments of my past when I have celebrated my man-less-ness.

Of course I am not currently man-less and my movie watching experiences have become tenuous nights filled with compromise. He either simply refuses or avoids and I spend the time in a private viewing with my MacBook or we watch one of his movies and I ignore the screen and focus on less violent images vis a vis my MacBook. (Thank God for my MacBook). In the grand scheme of things I don't think that this lack of common taste in cinema means much at all and I would be lying to say we NEVER find a movie that we both enjoy, but it does cause some stress. I remember an exboyfriend of mine ended up in a ball of fear one night (he was literally a ball -- he was laying on the bed in the fetal position) because he was convinced that our lack of common taste in movies was a Significant Sign that we were Not Meant To Be. Besides the niggling feeling that he was right about the Not Meant To Be part (trust me, that's a whole different blog post), I was able to talk him off the ledge that evening. Still, I couldn't help but wish I could meet a man whose favorite movies couldn't be found by googling 'stabbed in the mouth'.

Ah, well. Let 'em have their Chainsaw Massacre and reruns of CSI. Let the single girls revel in their dictatorship over the DVD player and let us 'coupled' folk plug the headphones into our laptops...

Long live the age of the Cinematic Feministic Revolution.