The wish that came true

Early on, it feels like Christmas morning. Everything is quiet, magical. Your heart jumps a little, your breath calms a little, with each step. Your eyes play tricks on you, your body wants to forget the day ahead, forget consequences.

The second day, it is harder, down-trodden with an icy edge. Glints spark off surfaces, everything seems new, just slightly used. The urge to play, to slide, to throw, tweaks your insides, twitching at every street corner.

By day three you're sliding backwards more than going forward, or simply cold feet. Wet too. The winds are not so much of change, but of mind-numbing dread each time you poke your head out. Fresh - think frozen.

You may have wished for this, make sure you appreciate it, and know when hibernating from your own desires is the best thing.

Top Chef

There's this song on a Back to Mine album that my sister and her boyfriend got me for my birthday one year that keeps going through my head. The first track of the Underworld one, 'B Movie' by Gil Scott Heron.

It seems fitting you see, because, in the kitchen at least, I have gone from being a creator to a cleaner. In the time that I was away, my boyfriend went from being an outer gourmand (enjoying others' culinary creations), to one who enjoys making their own as much as eating them. Montréal's famously cold winters, combined with a healthy diet of The Food Network - not to mention pining for me, of course - have resulted in a new-found fascination and delight of all things kitchen. Not that this means he loves vegetables any more than before, but he is certainly more interested in food, where it comes from, and how to cook it.

Don't get me wrong, I really enjoy savouring the new recipes he tries and it is refreshing to have someone else cook (and cook well). I think what I find hard is that the kitchen was always the one place in the house where I had control, where I could create or mulch around, where I felt most at home. Relinquishing this area to another has been surprisingly...not hard, but it has brought up a lot of mixed emotions.

Unlike lots of hard-up backpackers (in all honesty I'm not sure that there are that many out there anymore), I hardly ever cooked on my trip. At the beginning (in North America), yes. Sometimes at my sister's in Australia... but most of the time, especially in Asia, it was far cheaper, not to mention easier, to enjoy local food cooked up at the market, a roadside stall, or restaurant. By the time I got to Japan I was so used to this lifestyle that, instead of shopping for ingredients to cook something up at whichever hostel/friend's house I was staying at, I would normally go to the 100 Yen Shop and get myself a rice triangle (soon realised the light blue ones were the best) and some fruit.

When I first got back, it was quite shocking to be reunited with my apartment - a whole 4-room space just for me!! - let alone the reality of a fully-equipped kitchen to cook in. But cook I didn't. It just didn't seem natural, after all that time away. And Josh...well, his cooking skills had got rather impressive by this point and he was often offering to whip something up. Yummers!

However, now I must admit to wanting that space back. Not that I don't want him to cook, just sometimes I want it to be only me in there, and only me making the creative choice and putting in the work and reaping the rewards of my labour with him. I miss having the kitchen as my zone, and the meditative nature of chopping, slicing, and cooking things in various ways. It is not that I don't appreciate his efforts nor the meals he makes, but his eagerness to be involved in so many aspects of kitchen life can, at times, feel a bit like crowding.

The other night he was working late and I decided to make a simple dinner for us to enjoy, ready for when he got back. I was starting to prepare everything when he arrived, earlier than anticipated. I kept cooking as he told me about his day and offered to help...call me self-conscious (I am, very much so), but there was something almost intimidating, knowing his leaps and bounds in the kitchen and the simplicity of the meal I was creating before his eyes. Perhaps it had been far too long since I'd been in front of the stove, but I felt almost as though I had forgotten how to stir things properly. Unless it was nerves.

As the song goes: "...And all the consumers know, that when the producer names the tune the consumer has got to dance. That's the way it is. We used to be a producer...and now we are consumers, and finding it difficult to understand..."

16 and Pregnant

So, why am I sitting here, watching this show on MTV that seems to be on continuous loop? Partly because I am sick, home from work and my brain isn't working enough to do anything constructive other than fill the washing machine and tumble dryer sporadically, and numb my brain even further from its headache with TV. Partly because there is nothing else on.

The other part? I guess it is fascination into a slice of someone else's life, and the horrible truth that I want to have a baby of my own. Not now, but then again not years and years into the future (by then I'd be too old anyway). This strange lurching between plugitude and enjoying the freedom of being child-free is starting to annoy me. As more and more friends start to grow bellies that are not linked to ice-cream or beer consumption, I veer between fascination (babies are amazing - the whole process of how they're made (I don't mean the sexual act so much as the millions of possibilities that combine together from conception to birth), how they grow and learn, that they develop into their own person...), deterrence - fuck having kids, growing up, being responsible for someone else FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE - and a tinge of jealousy. Yes, my friends, I have to admit to having green gills sometimes at the sight of you with your wee little one on Facebook or your big pregnant belly at work.

This dichotomy of emotion can be confusing, like a roller coaster I never wanted to get on. Hell, I didn't even buy a ticket. I blame it on what I blame everything on: hormones. I have no idea if there's something that changes hormonally when you reach your late 20s/early 30s, but I was mainly saved from the whole baby thang until I came back from my trip in July, when this whole yo-yo started. I know that your hormones decrease as you get older, which could perhaps explain these signals that are starting to get on my nerves. Not to mention feeling tired so much more often and getting weird spot outbreaks. Damned horMOANS!

So, back to 16 and Pregnant. It is, in fact, rather boring (like most TV these days, especially reality TV), but it fuels my spazzing while making me even more aware of it. Do I regret decisions from my past? No, and watching this show concretizes that knowledge even more. If I woke up tomorrow and found out I was pregnant, would I be happy? Another no. I am enjoying getting to know my boyfriend in a far deeper way than before, have just started a great new job and not ready for that commitment yet. If it happened, then we would deal with it. But for now, it is on neither of our radars. Just my hormone's.

Dear Videotron

Thank you so much for over 6 years of service, but it is time I bid you farewell. Yes, this has been a pretty uneventful long-term relationship, but I am not really seeing the need to continue with it. For some reason you treat your new friends with far more respect and interest than a faithful old dog like me; paying my bills on time, sticking with you through address, partner, work, and other life changes.

So why this sudden change in my sentiments towards you? It is not as though we've had a huge argument or I caught you in bed with my boyfriend, more that I am sick of this one-sided relationship and your inability to see me as someone whose custom you are interested in keeping.

I am sick of paying more money than new clients for the same services, sick of your greedy prices, sick of your vast monopoly over Quebec's TV and internet. So, my old yet not really good friend, I am cutting myself free of your strong grip and heading off to your biggest competitor: Bell. After years of claiming that they were monopolising bastards (much like you! Maybe you should get together and conquer the world) I must admit that, at the end of the day, their prices are far more attractive than yours, not to mention no yearly contract (without the higher fees you charge for said service).

I am sure your other friends will happily keep your plate full and you'll continue to dominate Quebec with your fibre-optic cables and ugly vans. Bye-bye!

Plugs

I've been thinking about them a lot recently. Blame it on the biological clock, ticking away without my permission or desire, changing the way I look at babies and couples with them from horror and fear to something more akin to some kind of ... yearning that doesn't fit at all with my current financial or life situation. Don't worry, I'm not about to pop one out, it has just been rather odd to feel this strange emptiness inside me, a desire to be full with a creation of love. Icky I know. Nothing like reality, I know. Blame it on those rose-tinted spectacles my Dad always accused me of wearing.

However, various discussions and news reports have made me wonder, like many others before me, (there are various blogs on this topic...) if there should be some sort of licence for childrearing. Or, more simply, mandatory parenting classes at secondary schools. I understand that there are many disturbing implications involved in the government or society at large deciding who can have children and who can't; but then seeing as we all end up paying for everyone's biological experiments gone wrong (not to mention the emotional and physical pain that many kids go through), shouldn't there be some sort of ... precedent to be set before people can start churning out the wee little'uns?

I have not really thought this through all that much, but in light of recent (and recurring but mercifully not that prevalent) cases of severe child abuse ending in death - Baby P., Victoria Climbié and a few others spring to mind, not to mention the British government's recent decision to install CTV cameras in some of the homes of 'problem families' (at a cost of £400 million ($668 M)!) it seems like an increasingly important consideration to me. You see, I really think that parenting classes (and a shift in social services, including income support etc.) could help reduce the amount of children born into families who don't know how or don't even really want to look after them.

Let me clarify something here. I am not advocating that those who 'fail' the classes should not be allowed to have children, or that the government should put agents in place to constantly check up on the raising of some (or all) children over others. More that...well... in all honesty I have not researched any statistics but it does strike me that the British government will give you a house and money if you pop out a child and are unemployed (then give you more money and an even bigger house if you have more: where is the incentive to work?) and have more teen pregnancies and 'problem families' (am not making a correlation between the two; more that I think certain behaviours are generational - as in become the norm as are learned from those around us) than most other western countries.

*A quick Google search - what would we do without it? - shows that the UK and US are top on teen pregnancy rates in the developed world (guess Hungary is not counted as developed then).*

Don't get me wrong, I think it is great that there is help available for those who need it; and having lived on that sort of help myself at various points in the past, I would be hypercritical to deem it unnecessary. What really gets to me is the people who abuse the system: most people who grew up in the UK know of at least 1 person in their peer group whose sole desire when they left school was to get pregnant and get a house. The crazy thing is that that is how it works. This is where seemingly contradicotry statements appear.... You see, I hate the idea of the nanny state, but at the same time think that a lot of heartache, pain, time and money could be saved by making some small changes.

- Give teenagers real advice on bringing up children. Give them alternatives to getting pregnant at 16, being given a house and living their lives in unemployed sloth from thereon in.

- Make all teenagers and prospective parents take some sort of parenting class, from the basics of changing nappies and feeding, bathing etc. to more complex things (that are somehow transmitted as objectively as possible) such as child development.

- Reduce income support and jobseekers allowance payments for those who don't show any effort to find work (for those who can work) over a set period of time.

Meh I dunno... just sometimes I wish I could change the world and help it become a better place somehow. However, I should really be starting with myself. As Mahatma Gandhi said "Be the change you want to see in the world".

Other noises

So, I live on a largeish street in Montreal. Avenue, to be precise. Van Horne has quite a lot of loud (read heavier) traffic on it, mainly in the morning and evening. However, for some reason that has yet to be explained to me, it also seems to be home - or passing place - for people who seem to feel the need to talk as though they're in a very noisy bar at 2am.

I know I live in a city. I am not stupid. I don't expect people to spend their lives whispering so as not to disturb the 'hood. However, I don't like being woken up on a week night (not that I have much to do, but it's the principle of the thing) because some people are unable to think that maybe they shouldn't be yelling to each other across the street or having a raucous discussion in the wee hours of the morning.

Speaking of morning.... builders are often accused of waking people up earlier than may be desired with their incessant banging, hammering and other loud noises that you can't escape from, even in another room (when the floor starts shaking in time you know you should just get up and invite your friends over for a party). This morning, after being woken by the strangely chirpy yet insistent meowls of Mr. M wanting to be fed I decided to crawl back into my comfortable bed for more shut-eye. As previously mentionned, I have no reason to get up, also a bit more sleep than the 6 I got before being so hungrily awakened would be nice.

To no avail. The people across the back (to be perfectly correct side) alley from me have decided to bring their party outside... or maybe just start it early. Luckily this is far more auditorily pleasant than builders. Guitars being played, people talking, whistling and joking around. All I need is to get M to sing more and be invited over!

Time travel through my mind

there are moments when you could decide to fling yourself away from everything in your life and jump into something completely unknown. I crave this while I crave to settle down and have all these elements of security that I think would make me happy (in a more conventional sense).

I am feeling useless, again. What accentuates it, and thus makes it even more frustrating, is that it is such a throwback to another time: spinning in the same cycle in the hope it will wring more out of me. Instead I feel, yet again, like my brain is spiralling out of control.

I am forever amazed at its power to turn against me (and itself) when it is not otherwise occupied. Perhaps I am just a pessimist at heart, or lack serotonin in the right levels for my brain to be happier overall, to analyze less and stop thinking ridiculous paranoid thoughts that I then sickly seek to discover are true, negative thoughts that I self-perpetuate through misunderstanding situations, jumping to yet more negative conclusions and generally doing all I can to sink further into the abyss.

A very large part of the problem is my lack of employment. Being unemployed is great in many ways, especially during the summer. You can do whatever you want with your days and only have to worry about having enough money to pay your rent, the bills and buy food. That is simultaneously the problem with being unemployed. Further to this though, is that employment, however dull, gives one a sense of purpose along with which comes a feeling of usefulness.

So, while I continue to look for a job, what else can I do to inculcate a sense of worth? At the moment I fill my days with looking and applying for work, going for walks/bike rides and letting my brain run away with itself. Laziness, therefore, is a key factor in my problem. I need a giant kick up the arse. Given by none other than myself, otherwise I will view said kick as someone telling me what to do.... even though sometimes I long for that - the secret password for me to get that life I dream of.

As I know though, this situation is exacerbated by my mind. It can improve with some 'physical' changes (employment, keeping my mind occuppied in meaningful, positive-reinforcing ways) but the main changes that need to be made involve myself. I have to make myself think differently... this has led to me looking back over my life and trying to find out where this huge lack of self-confidence comes from, and how to deal with it now.

This is a project I will not enjoy starting, but I feel will reap many rewards. Something to jump into, I feel.