Slog, slog, slog. Squish, squish, squish. There goes the work week.

I’ve got a day left and it’ll be a chore, but I know I’ll be done at 5. I know I’ll have the energy to conjure a quick snack (soup’n’sammich, both homemade and upscale, but a real treat when I’m in a rush!), the smarts to have a primer drink, and the enthusiasm to go back downtown via transit, drink the night away, and enjoy a live show, and get my ass home around 3ish, if it all works out right.

Why? Because it’s that kind of a job. Gr-r-r-r-reat! So, even though the day itself will be frustrating and tense, I get to leave when I wanna leave. This is good. Beats the shit out of working until 7:30 on a Friday night and being too drained to take my ass off the couch… much the story of the last few months.

This past week, I’ve still been sick. Today I woke up feeling a million bucks, and had an all right day even though it’s been hard, but I’m still less sick than I was. This is good. Change is good.

My scooter, however, is sick. Poor scootie. It’s putt-putting up hills and making me feel like a victim waiting to happen as it chokes up at certain angles and loses 35% of its power with traffic hot on my ass like I’m showering in prison. Methinks it’s the carburator needing to be cleaned. If you’re a motorbike geek and know that answer, lemme in on it. It’s taking 10 minutes to warm up. This is new. This is bad. I feel all pathetic. The one thing that always rocked about my scooter is that it stormed the hills. Never lost power.VrrrOOOOm. But now, pUtt-pUtt. Ugh. So uncool. And unsafe. And ungood. So un.

So, is it the carburator? Gotta be, right?* Could probably change out the spark plug, too, eh? All of $2 to eliminate that possibility. Better than the $100 cleaning dealie for the carb. Cursed putt-putt.

Anyhow. Hey, look: It’s a weekend! Wow! I’ve always wanted one just like it! Gosh, thanks! And you have one too? Swell! Let’s both enjoy them, then!

(*The Fine Print: The Tech Shit. It’s a Yamaha Vino, 2003, classic edition, 2-strokes, 49cc, never been modified save for removal of the restriction washer in the muffler. Top speed was 65 km for the longest time, but I’m at 23,000km and around 17,000km it started going a little slower. in the last 1,500km, it’s really began to bog down on hills and such. Sounds like it’s groaning a bit. Top speed now is about 55km, and I can bog down for up to about 40 blocks from home after warming up 3 minutes before leaving, and bog down so I’m choking at 30km/hr up hills I ascended at 50 last month. After about 50 blocks, it gets more comfortable and performs a bit better, but it’s still compromised. There, is that more informative? Is it the carburator? Never cleaned it since I owned it, and I’ve had it since Sept. ’04, so 21,000km of the 23,500 it has now.)

After a week of being pretty badly hit by the cold making its way around Vancouver, I kept much more to myself on my birthday weekend than I’d planned to. The weather has been lousy, and I realized I wasn’t as flush with cash as I was hoping, so I figured I’d keep it simple.

Case in point, among the other exciting happenings of my life, in a few minutes I plan to empty out my refrigerator. I’ve been buying way too much way too infrequently of late, and it’s an ass-backward way to live a culinary life. Food has been on my mind this weekend because, well, I’ve been avoiding shopping. As a result, I’ve started thinking of how this can be a good thing.

So, deep in thought all weekend, I’ve decided to simplify my life in a number of ways, in keeping with returning to the old job and all. The biggest of simplifications will be in regards to food. I’m going to return to the Slow Food movement and start taking the time to pop in to the local markets a couple times a week and be inspired to create fresh foods, rather than trying to take the easiest way out. I want to really cook again. It’s such a great way to add meaning and dimension to your life. There’s food, then there’s soul food, then there’s food for the soul. Slow Food refers to the latter two.

The Slow lifestyle’s something that really appeals to me. (Read “In Praise of Slow” by Carl Honore.) I wanna be totally present in the here and now. You hear people talking about living their “best” lives, and it all sounds like so much new age bullshit sometimes. But they’re onto something.

Me, I’ve taken the most important step. I’ve quit the big fancy job with the nifty title and no down time in order to take the pressure-free, life-balanced job. Now I’ve spent my slacker weekend setting the groundwork for something I hope to bring me even greater work-life balance, my self-employment scheme. I’ve come up with a company name and spent my weekend working on personal branding and designed all the graphics that go with such things — business card, letterhead, invoices. It and looks pretty polished. Now I need to spend a week or two getting the rest of my life feeling a little bit more polished to go with. My home needs to be more Zen so I can make better use of my time and work smarter, not harder, as I try to get my life back under my own two thumbs.

The next several months will still be transitional. There are a few ways I see my life going, and I’m hopefully setting the stage for good things, but the only way we’ll know is when it all comes down the pipes. Life’s more fun when it’s unexpected, so I’m just trying to keep an open mind, ‘cos the whole controlling-everything thing wasn’t really working out for me, so…

Anyhow. Here’s how I’ve spent my birthday weekend, I guess… pondering what is and what might come to be, and trying to set a little something in motion towards that end.

Y’know, I’d have thought I’d have had it much more together than this back when I thought of what “34” would one day mean, possibly in my late teens. And, it’s weird, but as much as it’d be nice to have a nice, firm, predictable and together life… it’s kind of cool to know I’m just as open to adventures as I was a decade and a half ago, if not a little more so. Getting older’s mostly all about me not taking myself as seriously as I once did. I still have work to do on that, but it’s all good. What I do know is, being single, kidless, and mortgage-free, I sure as hell have nothing to lose. I’m just trying to think of what kinda license that gives me and what I oughta do with it. What fun.

So, I don’t want to get into anything deep, but here are the snippets flashing through my mind at this late hour.

(I have written… I will not edit. I am sick in the head. Go easy on me. I should edit. Considering I’d overlooked “this lat hour” until this late minute, I should edit. But fuck editing. I’m an adult and I can do what I want. Tomorrow I shall aspire to better grammatical correctedness, perhaps even stellar spelling. Tonight I aspire to sleep, so fuck all else. There: I came I saw, I wrote that ass.)

I had a moment watching a show tonight. I began to wonder just who of my dalliances would be the ones I remember in flashes and sensations when I’m at the end of my days? Who’s gonna rate? When I’m that much more wiser, I’ve travelled more, done more, had more, who is it that’s gonna stack up against The Rest? What am I most gonna remember about them? What gave ’em that memorable edge?

You ever wonder who’s really gonna be memorable at the end of 75 years? 85 years?

A kid died after crowd-surfing at the Smashing Pumpkins gig here in town last night. I’m gonna be 34 on Saturday, and one of the things I’m promising myself I’m gonna do this year is to get back into the live music scene.

Nothing fills the void like a wickedly energetic gig in a small venue.

But here I am, now, right? I’m 34. There was a time when I was front-and-centre at the gigs. I got the close up shots and could see beads of sweat melting into their t-shirts, y’know? Sigh. I don’t know if I have it in me to get into the mix with “kids today” and their “unruly state” and all. Throw this dude’s mysterious “no obvious wounds” death into the mix (drugs?) and I have the “hmm, maybe I’ll find a stool and power up the Bic” bullshit mentality creeping into my head.

I guess I’m starting to want to embrace my inner rebel this year. Hell, I said screw it to the man, quit my schmoozing, networking job for something lowkey and behind the scenes, and who knows what’s to come. First, I’ll get over this cold. 😛

In Argentina, a minor has won the right to have a sex change. It’s an interesting story, and one that I’ll probably look for more information on in the coming days. We like to think that kids under 18 are so ill-informed, but the thing is, we keeping lowering the bar, right? We’re looking at norms and averages, and perhaps a good many kids don’t have the savvy to make informed life decisions, but some do.

You can look at this two ways. One, life’s long. What’s the hurry? Let the kid wait till 18 or 21. They have the rest of their life to live in that body. Don’t rush the knife; it comes soon enough, yeah? Or, two, life is short. Why waste a single day? What if he/she’s hit by a car in a year, or is stricken with some rare cancer in the mid-20s? What then of the wasted days spent counting and waiting on something they knew was the only way they’d ever feel whole after a lifetime of feeling dysfunctional?

Yeah, they’re both great arguments. Who’s to say who’s right? I know what the safe, conservative answer is, but if I was safe and conservative, I’d have ridden out the last job for the usual year, but it occurred to me that I’d already lost a whole summer to overtime and fatigue, and I couldn’t waste another day. But this is a teenager, and how can a teenager truly know the range of emotion and need they might have? They think they’re going through horrors, but wait till their 40 and then let’s rate ’em outta 10, okay?

So, you see, complicated issue and I haven’t the foggiest whether I think it’s the right or the wrong action to take. I bet if I had a beer with the kid, I’d know within the hour what I felt, but going off tempered press, well, who knows anything, eh?

Hmm. So, I have a head cold and I’m going to bed now. Curse you, sinuses. Curse you, I say. But, hey, Happy Wednesday, y’all. Half way there, baby. (Three day weekend for little old me.)

Today I go back to my old job.

I worked there for about 6 and a bit years, and I’ve “returned” now a couple of times. This morning I have that same dread I’ve had at other times, but it’s tempered with more self-knowledge and understanding of the Steff Cosmoverse and how to navigate it, y’know?

The dread is this: “Oh, you can’t cut it in the real world. You need to go back to the safety of your little captioning cave. You couldn’t climb the corporate ladder, so here you are: Back.”

I think it’s unavoidable for someone to have that sense of “wow, I must suck because I’m back again” when returning to a situation like this, so I’m not giving myself a hard time for going there. I wish I wouldn’t, but I’m not going to pile onto the already-existing crap sandwich with more guilt and derision.

Hell, that’s the society we live in. I was raised on Bret Easton Ellis and the yuppyification of North America. We’re the original “me” generation. We came of age with cell phones, personal stereos (the three stages: Walkman, Discman, iPOD). We’re all about image, baby.

So, I go traipsing back to the old cubicleland and it’s natural Eau de Failure should be lingering about me this morning.

But then there’s the “fuck you, I’m 34 and I know better than that” voice that crops up and says “the rat race is for pussies who can’t make it out there without excessive approval”. It’s the voice of the chick who grew up listening to the Ramones and Dennis Leary, who thinks she’s seen both the workaholic life and the successful slacker life, and has the scars to show from each.

I mean, I’m 34 in five days. I saw my mother die at 57. This notion that every person gets a golden age, every person’s gonna retire by 60 and live a life of their choosing is a pretty fucking foolish notion. If I go early, I’ll be going after living a life on my terms. I saw myself looking at my most recent boss and thinking, “Wow. That’s what happens when you let life pass you by.” She works all the time. I remember her sitting in my apartment, looking at my intricately decorated pad and saying, “You have too much time on your hands” and realizing she, in a phrase, summed up the difference between she and I.

See, I always thought I had too little time on my hands. If I was unemployed for the REST of my life, I’d be able to fill every single day. I do not need to be validated by work. In fact, I often feel invalidated by work.

So, going back, tail between the legs, to this comfortable old job of mine is me literally putting my money where my mouth is and deciding that, right now, living life is more important to me than selling out. If I’m going to need to work for a living, then, well, this captioning job of mine is the literary intellectual’s equivalent of Kevin Spacey taking on a burger shack job in American Beauty when he decides he’s missed out on too much of life, and being 20 was the best he’d ever been.

Yeah, I’m cutting and running to the security of Easy Street. The question, though, is why aren’t more people?

PS: I’m fighting illness. I’m hoping like hell it’s just the bank of clouds and moisture over the Pacific that’s fucking with my head. Heroes is on tonight and I wanna watch! So, to steal strength and shore up motivation, I’m drinking copious coffee. The good thing about this job is, I go in whenever the fuck I want to. Means I can write when the whim hits. It’s 9:25. At 10 I’ll shower and go. Nice. 🙂 A week ago I’d already be slammed with customer demands and drama. Ha. Bliss.

I feel like that old woman in The Princess Bride who shouts down the princess bride in the centre of the square. Boo! BOOOOO! Hiss! That’s the story of me and my computer.

I’ve barely had the motherfucker on. I log on to Facebook or any other place that uses lots of cookies and shit, and presto — virus appears in the form of a trojan. I’m smart, I use Firefox, yet it still will cause IE to open and shower me with shitty websites.

And I’m no dumb girlie, either. I know my way around Hijack This, have downloaded all the so-called fixes, checked all the goddamned geek sites via Googling the names, etc. Yet still. I clean some 20 or 30 infections off this bitch each day and still they return.

I know I’m irresistable, but this is highly unnecessary.

I’m on the verge of Calling Professionals. Soon I’ll arrange for them to come by and save my persecuted ass.

In the meantime, you need to wait until I’ve sunny enough a disposition to battle friend and foe to make my way through this muddled web of mine and post a thingie or two on Blogger.

Fortunately for you, I’ve just that sort of disposition on this fine Indian summer Friday eve. I’m keeping to myself with a $9 fancy-ass ribeye steak I’m about to grill and indulge in a bottle of a 2003 Chilean shiraz. The phone goes to ignore. Then I have to decide whether I feel like watching the torrid tale of Rome or if I’m feeling smug and anti-establishmentish and want to watch Thank You For Smoking.

Hmm, indeed.

So, the weekend, a four-day week, and I change jobs. Giggle.

You have no idea how good it fucking feels to realize that I’m at the mercy of MY decision right now. I have taken control of my life. One little decision and my world has 180’d. Cool.

And I was all dodgy about quitting, thinking it’d mean I was losing a week of pay this month. Ooh, could I handle it? Penny-pinch? Know what? Everywhere I turn, there’s money. I’m not losing a week of pay; I’m gaining one! My paycheques are staggered. 🙂 Then I got my medical money back, and something else came, etc, etc.

Things are headed in precisely the right direction, and now, to top all that off, it’s Friday!

Tomorrow I’m cleaning house and shopping for obscure foodie treats at all the proper culinary shops here in town. Hell, I might even make some bread. There’s some socializing, etc. I may play it solo this weekend. Madness ensues for another four days, but I’m having a party next weekend so things’ll get fun in a hurry.

Life, in short, is good. I’m really, really looking forward to all the things coming down my path, whether it’s tomorrow, Tuesday, or two months from now, things look like they’re gonna get fun ‘cos I know *I* am definitely getting fun to be around. It’s a beautiful thing.

Have a bitchin’ weekend, minions. Lord knows that’s my plan. And fuck you, Virtumonde, Fotomodo, and all your cunty little trojan friends! 🙂

I quit my job. I’ve quit it for several reasons, but this is the one that really rocked my boat and inspired me to leave.

Towards the middle of July, my boss called me upstairs for a quiet chat. It turns out she had discovered my secret double-agent identity, that of a sometimes-sex blogger. She didn’t know what to make of it, she said. If clients found out, there could be problems. If so, she told me she didn’t know what her reaction would then be, nor what her cause of action might be.

I was concerned. Very. I didn’t know what I would do. I needed a job. I asked her if I had reason to be concerned. She said yes, in a roundabout way. She asked that I never write about my job, nor mention where I worked. I agreed that I could at least abide by that.

After hours, though, I approached friends and told them how concerned I was. I began asking myself how important my blog was to me, and whether I really felt like working where I thought I might have to put a cork in things and keep my mouth shut. I wondered whether I should get myself as far from my blogging life as I could, especially if it was going to be some stigma following me around for the rest of my life. I started wondering a lot, about a lot of things.

Still, I needed a job. If biting my tongue put food on my table, then that was the first concern. Complicating matters, though, is that I love most of the job. The bustle, the people, the chaos… it all works well with my personality. The more I began to think about it, though, the more I realized how much work was having an impact on my will to write. Worse – my writing, I thought, had seriously gone down hill. It wasn’t creative. It wasn’t inspired. Hell, I wasn’t creative. I wasn’t inspired.

I spent the next several weeks slipping into a funk. I had taken the wrong job, I began to think. (I had two to choose from; an opening came up in my old job the very day I was offered the one I’ve been working.) I was realizing now that I had taken a job that seemed right for me, but instead in was turning my life into everything I didn’t want.

And now I had to censor myself. It didn’t matter that, in my eyes, this blog’s more about me and my wrapping of my own head around the world and my ongoing journey of becoming myself, and not so much about the sex, but hey. Semantics, I guess.

My mind wrought with all these thoughts, I was just barely keeping my head in the game at work. I certainly noticed that my job performance was slipping something fierce. I chalked it up to fatigue.

The thought began to occur to me, however, that maybe all this fogginess I was enduring was because of this prolonged writer’s block I now acknowledged I’d been suffering. Maybe, just maybe, my focus would improve if I could get the writing thing happening. With that thought my priorities began to shift.

It was perfect timing then that my holiday was to begin on Aug. 25th. With my holiday in mind, my boss called me in for a “plan of attack for fall” meeting. At the end of the meeting she again brought up the blog and apologized for leaving me hanging, but reiterated that she still didn’t know what she would do if it got found out by clients and brought up as an issue. Dirty sex blogger…

Afterwards, I walked out of the meeting and into the street, heading off to find some lunch. Sure enough, there I saw a film crew shooting in a nearby store. “Sigh,” I thought. “I sure miss the film industry. Why’d I leave, again?” But I morosely put those thoughts out of my head and instead began planning for how to be organized at the office in the fall.

I got home that day, checked my email, and saw a letter from one of the best post production facilities in Vancouver’s awesome film industry, asking me if I was interested in a position they had available. They had my resume from when I was looking for work in ’06 and held on to it, it would seem.

Was I interested? It took 30 seconds for the answer to hit. Fuck, yeah. After a few emails back and forth, a job interview was lined up.

Then it just so happened that my first day of vacation, Saturday, coincided with when I was having my old bosses over for breakfast. I told them all the drama about work and this job interview and how I thought the time might be ripe for me to make a change. They were more than sympathetic. They gave me encouragement. They agreed that it sounded like my situation was precarious.

With their kind words ringing, I headed in for my job interview. Well, I didn’t get that job (and I’m now happy about it for complicated reasons) and went in to visit the old bosses again Wednesday and thanked them for the support while telling them it was a bust. That’s when they offered me my old job back.

I went camping, pondered it, decided to go for it, came back, and I quit. I’m thrilled with my choice and I’m looking forwards to reprioritizing my life and getting back to my creative roots.

Now, I want to address something before anyone jumps on my soon-to-be ex-employer’s back. A) I’m fucking lucky she’s the honest kind of person she is with the integrity she has. She didn’t need to tell me she knew. She could’ve fired me then and there. Instead, she let me know where her thoughts were, and has been great about my resignation. B) I could have had a fight worth fighting if I wanted to do the whole “freedom of speech” argument, but I decided I couldn’t do that to them.

Why? Because I’m not a hypocrite. I believe I have the personal freedoms to live my life as I see fit, and in the free world I want to live in, employers should have the right to hire the kinds of people that mirror their values and lifestyle (within reason), provided it doesn’t infringe on others.

Freedom is a difficult thing to balance and you sure as shit can’t ask for yours at the cost of denying others’ theirs. I’m mindful of that in my life.

My old employers not only know about my blogs, but approve of them and have read them. I have nothing to hide from them after working closely with them for seven years. We’ve been through some bullshit together and we’ve always emerged well and on the same page. There was some instability in the industry that coincided with when I barely survived a serious scooter accident that should have killed me, and I was sent into a couple years of trying to find out where my passions lie in the world.

After some trials, travels, and tribulations, I’ve decided that (for me) work is work, and the easier it is, the better it pays, the less I need to do of it, the better the rest of my life is. I’m not looking to prove myself in the corporate world. All I wanna do is write, I guess. You can keep your rat traps and rat races. I want all the trappings of success, just not the trap. This job I’m returning to gives me the work-life balance I need and the flexibility to pursue other avenues while working hours that work for me. It caters to writing’s spontaneity and unpredictability. Everything about that job caters to writing.

And now I can do just that. Oh, and get this: My first day back, September 24th, is seven years to the day that I first started there.

Anyone who tells ya you can’t go home again doesn’t know what the fuck they’re talking about.

If I hadn’t been drinking on a relatively empty stomache, I doubt I would have posted this. But booze makes me ballsy, so you can only imagine how cocky I feel after eating lunch at 4 and nothing since… but the three glasses of wine certainly help. So, hi. I’m Steff, I blog, and let’s ignore my shame. Have at this, then. Sigh. It’s Russian-novelist long. Next time we’ll explore the appeal of brevity. For now, tho…

I am, as they say in the vernacular, having a moment.

A heady moment, at that.

I was watching some semi-lame yet cool true crime reenactment on the History Channel when the narrator began telling the tale of how the criminals behind the notorious North Hollywood Shootout had taken booze mixed with Phenobarbital before they set out upon their heist.

And I remembered this foggy old conversation with my mother about how I was on Phenobarbital as a kid when I had epic grand mal seizures nearly every day. I was hardcore epileptic as a child. I’ve never written about this before. My mother insisted I stop taking Phenobarbital when she learned it apparently fucked with one’s hormones.

Wow. Wow. I’ve never really thought about it before. The epilepsy. Much of my childhood is a blur. I remember this one time, and it’s really fucking weird, actually… again, something I’ve never before spoken or written of, but I can remember this third person memory… I remember looking down upon myself, my mother, and my father, all three of us on the old formal red velvet sofa in the sitting room, me either with another of my 104+ fevers, or another grand mal seizure. Both my parents were so obviously scared and totally there for me, holding me and talking about when the hospital should come into the picture, and how I was so precarious that a trip might not be the wisest choice right then. And I remember it from a looking-down-on-me perspective. I dunno what that says to you, but I know I just got the chills.

Fuck, man. Whew. Looking down on myself. That’s taken two ways: the nearly-dead out-of-body way, and the hate-thyself kinda way. I’d have to say this one occasion was a little of each. Let’s ignore the first and think of the second. I’ve lived my whole life more or less consumed by my insecurities. I’m always hyperconscious of myself and my being, y’know? I’m tired of the hyperconsciousness. It’s so over. Now if I can just wrap my head around that.

I’ve always tried to have the I’m Fine appearance, but the reality is that I’ve spent my life allowing myself to be sort of defined by the problems of my childhood. Grand mal epilepsy, severe hearing loss, constant ear aches, and when I was younger I even had a speech impediment. (Now, though, I’m told I have Radio Voice. Hey, practice makes perfect. Just ask James Earl Jones.)

I’ve mentioned recently how I’ve quit my job. The job has been interfering with my after-hours life. I alluded in one posting to my recent lack of desire to write and how I could no longer abide that lack of passion I was feeling for the one thing I once most loved to do: writing. Yeah, that’s one reason.

The irony is, I loved this job. There’s so much to love about it. I was good at it; that is, until I stopped writing. Once I’m not writing, so much of myself falls away from me. I get sloppy, negative, and unfocused. Writing, as Jerry Maguire might say, completes me. It is me. I don’t give a fuck whether others love my writing (okay, I do) but I know that I’m a better person when I’m writing well. (Or as what I perceive to be “well”.) I’m empathetic, passionate, articulate, infused with joie de vivre, and even have a magnetism about me. It’s rare, though, that I write as well as I aspire to do, so it’s also rare that I maximize any of the qualities I’ve just mentioned. Now, however, I seem to be in one of my rare golden times, and I’m fucking loving it.

Nonetheless, I’ve quit my job. The reasons are multiple. Another of them is that I’ve stopped exercising. No swimming, no Pilates, no cycling, no hiking. Nothing. I’m so drained at the end of each day that it’s all I can do to sit on the couch, watch TV, and not fall asleep before 10.

No fucking way to live.

So. I’ve quit. Turned that page. Now I go back to the unstable, unfulfilling, but strangely awesome television job of captioning (i.e. : subtitling) , where my hours are my choosing, sometimes even my days, and the job is routine and manageable… and anti-social, so my mind bubbles over, and when I come home, I blow my proverbial top and write an hour or two. Hey, I’ve built a couple good blogs out of it, y’know?

But, man, did I disgress.

Back to the hard topic, though: I was a serious epileptic as a kid. I was diagnosed early with a rare kidney disorder and had bi-annual visits with the foremost kidney specialist in Western Canada back then. Every six months, a visit with the good doctor at Children’s Hospital. A battery of tests were run on me every time. Blood tests were practically weekly. I had a rare disorder and wound up documented in medical journals as “the kid that could”. I was in the hospital for a prolonged stay when they were about to take a kidney out – it was clinically dead and filling with fluids it couldn’t pump out. Bad things were happening. I was prescribed Bactrim*. Presto! Magic! I went into remission.

My kidney cleared up, so too did my epilepsy, as well as my chronic bronchitis and my ear aches. But the battle with the evils had turned me into a lazy kid. I could never handle activity before that, and never discovered the joys of being active, and my body grew accustomed to sloth. Thus the Pillsbury Era began. Poke my belly and I giggle still. Exercise hurts. Sometimes this is good. But back then? Well. That’s another story.

Here’s a tangent for you: One day, I found myself in my mid-teens, hanging out at UBC, getting tested by geneticists. Turns out my kidneys and ears were a result of my father’s genes. One of the interns working in my lab, testing me, made the off-hand comment that “it would be interesting to see what [my] kids turned out like”. Someone later commented that it would be interesting if I would allow for testing of my child’s genes if ever I was to become impregnated. I’m 33, about to hit 34, and I’m childless. I intend to remain this way. I have no idea if that intern’s comment has impacted my desire to (not) have kids. Probably.

It’s interesting, though. I’m sitting here in my jammies, nursing a glass of wine under the golden tint of my Moroccan lantern, and thinking about how we know how bad pop/soda is to us today, but back in 1981, when I was 8 and visiting my aunt in Toronto, we didn’t know. She let me drink several pops each day when I was there over a few weeks, when we knew how bad my kidneys were, and by the time I got back to Vancouver, I’d gained 20 lbs and started becoming lethargic and depressed. Not to mention fat.

Which I am to this day, and have become increasingly more so since beginning this job I’ve been working the last six months and just quit. I’ve gained 7 lbs since my last physical, and probably 17 since my low point this past year. Not cool. Not sitting well with me. Not acceptable. Not going to continue.

I have a plan in place. Something to work towards. Hence quitting the job.

Long story long? Expect a lot of very, very introspective posts in the coming months. When one suppresses themselves for too long, it’s only fitting they should explode under pressure. I guess I’ve just got a lot to say after not saying much worth saying for far too long. Things are about to get interesting. And I’m digging it.

Tonight’s posting is brought to you in part by The North Hollywood Shootout and David Bowie.

< span style="font-style: italic;">*Drug used to fight infections, bronchitis, ear aches, et al.

PS: There is MORE to the story behind why I’ve quit! I’m saving the juiciest for last! Yes, you must STILL turn in! Doh! Tease! Tag! You’re it.

[ed. note: this first appeared on my original-and-still-ticking first blog a couple days ago but given that my traffic there is, like, 12 or something, i thought i’d double my mileage and share here. two-fer!]

so, i’m a big fan of “signs”, eh? i like to look for symbolism in the itty-bitty happenings of this meagre existence of mine as clues of whether i’m headed in the right direction or just totally missing the target. you know, you get fired, probably a sign you’re not working the right job, right? not like it’s fucking rocket science.

every now and then, though, i start opting for the more obscure shit.

like when i had friends over last monday night. i’d taken out the trash earlier and happened to glance over and see a 5-foot tall standing antique wooden floor lamp standing next to a Dumpster in the back alley. ho! nice piece! needs rewiring and the varnish’s patination has bubbled up like it had bad heat exposure once, and the bottom looks like it mighta withstood a flood ‘cos it’s all dark-like (i’m goin’ CSI on a floor lamp… nice!) but it’s still a plum piece. it’s now my winter project. gonna strip it, sand it, and stain it, then rewire it, and THEN i’ll have TWO antique wooden floor lamps. a lucky gal am i.

anyhow. the sign? well, it coincided with when i first really began to realize how unhappy i am at my job (despite enjoying the job itself… kills my will to write, and that i can no longer abide**) and that i kinda needed to walk away from my job.

so i had one really big sign: work called me on my vacation about something. old-fashioned i might be, but methinks vacations are something sacred. then, two, i “see the light”… literally, when i see this lamp in the alley.

personally, i enjoy the thought of it as some kinda signal of where i was going wrong. i’m gonna really savour that memory after i spend the months ahead turning it from a throw-away find into a must-keep treasure.

y’know, now that i’ll start having time on my hands again. loves me a project. 🙂 that it’ll be worth some several hundred dollars once done doesn’t hurt, neither.

PS: on an aside? keep the hourly pay, people. salary’s just another way of saying “yer staying late this week”. i’m just sayin’. hindsight 20/20 and all…

**but, WAIT, there’s more! there’s a juicier bitsy behind my departure, too. saturday. really. at some point. saturday-ish, for sure. it could be a “stay home and nurse a bottle of red” kind of encounter. after all, i’m getting four cavities filled in the afternoon. medicating is a good thing. medicating and writing? priceless.

Labour Day weekend is a very strange time of year for me. Historically, some pretty Big Fucking Deals have come down on the last real weekend of summer. I’ve nearly died twice, for instance. So, you know, I’m sort of emphasizing the word “big” there. It’s like the dog days of summer trip some biological Change Thy Life switch in my dusty old noggin, and it’s amazing the things that have transpired in the early days of September every year or two.

Now, don’t look, but it’s apparently Labour Day weekend once again. Whatever can this mean? Change is afoot? Why, mysteries never cease. Only time will tell, dear minions.

It occurs to me that we’re all one of two kinds of people. Either we believe one can never go home, or we believe one can always go home. Me, I believe the latter. The neighbourhood I grew up in never locked the doors. So while I believe one can always return home, I also believe it’s wise to expect someone might’ve moved the furniture before your return, y’know?

I sorta digress. With any luck, the repercussions of this weekend’s happenings might also be the kind of thing I can look back upon down the road and know was a catalyst for the start of great times. At least, that’s the hope I now have.

Whatever am I talking about, you wonder? Well, like all secret double agents, I’m not yet at liberty to say.

Soon, though, my minions. Very, very soon. After all, I’ve only really made my decision today. Exciting. Exciting!