Entries Tagged 'Home' ↓

I’ve always wanted to be somewhere else, it seems. Most of these thoughts, these anywhere, but heres stemmed from places of panic, despair and abuse. Lately, as I’ve come to live more inside of my brain and this new found home has started working more efficiently, I’ve found that it might not have just been because of the heinous presents I was living in – maybe I just want to know other places. To live where I haven’t lived before, how I haven’t before. How I saw others capable of, but thought myself unworthy, maybe.

2009 has been a perfect storm, without Mark Wahlburg or George Clooney. Or really any fishermen and very few boats, really. Okay, so the analogy is off, but what I mean to say is this: everything that’s happened in 2009, even the most shitacular of all occurences, has culminated to bring me where I sit tonight, with a cup of tea steaming beside me and my often-overheating laptop held ergonomically incorrect atop two boxes of business cards.

I have grown in leaps from where I was at this time, last year. There’s been more firsts in these past twelve months than maybe in the decade prior to it. No, definitely more. I am proud of me.

Working backwards from present day, I have: discovered that I might just be ready for a real, grown-up relationship; said goodbye to The Ex in every capacity legally possible (at this juncture); spent a holiday with people I consider dear, even if they’re not all near; starting wearing the right bra size; got my nose pierced, professionally; lost 15 pounds without guilt; made some income, designing websites; sought out medical help after the mind fuck that was being manic in the summer and depressive in the fall; gained 15 pounds without guilt; made out with some boys, ultimately deciding that I didn’t want to make out with boys under those circumstances, anymore; spoken at BlogHer; got on a plane to speak at BlogHer; limited The Ex’s visit when he showed up, still reeking of the debauchery of the night prior; spoken at a conference regarding mental health and social media; asked for help, getting to BlogHer; earned (at one point) a nearly full-time income from writing; gone to the gym regularly, without an obsessive need to do so.

I’ve been busy, even though on most days, it feels like I’ve done little.

Along with these acts of doing, there’s been a lot of thinking, obviously. It took a lot of self-examination to get to where I am – a place I’d call a third of the way to where I’d like to be – and the wheels just keep grinding out new realizations, zen passages and ohms, daily. And one of those realizations is that the wanderlust I’ve always felt wasn’t just because I didn’t like where I was, craving to reinvent myself and a new life, complete with an entirely new populace, furniture and schticks.

I truly want to experience more than Vancouver has to offer – not that I’ve experienced all of it, or even a mere fraction. I want to know what it’s like, travelling a few hours to Paris, but living in the suburban, rustic outskirts of it. I want to live in the near-constant sunshine of Southern California and Florida. I think Colorado and Texas and more states that I don’t know anything about have more than just welcoming faces to offer, even if some of the people who live there feel stifled by or alien in their surroundings.

I dream of a day when I can notice an accent in Zoë’s disney-princess-pitched voice. When she owns as many dresses as she does now, but can wear them all, any day of the year. When a bathing suit isn’t something that sits in a drawer, reminding me that I should sign her up for swim lessons, even though we never go in bodies of water larger than our bathtub. When she’s exposed to other cultures, languages and religions, not because someone has moved here, but because we’re the immigrants.

I have these dreams, and there’s only two ways they can happen: The Ex fucks up enough that I pull rank and have his visitation stripped, or he grows up enough that we can consider joint custody that spans lands. I don’t know which, if either, will happen first.

But I know that with each passing day, and each morsel of happy I tongue and discovering of me I find hidden, the lust grows. It feels, like it’s a ticking clock – like one day she might be too old to just pick up and move, but I’ve seen evidence to argue that. It seems as though if I don’t take the opportunity while I have it, I might always wonder what if? in some horribly stereotypical fashion.

It seems quite awesome that I have the ability to work from home, anywhere, and make enough to support us, when and if I work more. It’s fantastical that I’d already decided upon first meeting her personality that she wouldn’t be attending standard education – that she needs something more in tune to her whims and specialties – and read enough to know that unschooling would be our course. It’s amazing that with all of these things that I always have to complain about on here, her quirks and screams and the nearly constant jumping and fidgets, she is the most adaptable child I’ve ever met.

It’s a checklist that seems quite stacked, in favour of.

If – and this is a big if that I’m not promising myself, because god forbid I say I’m going to do something and then don’t – in a year, we’re financially unreliant on The Ex and nothing and no one is keeping us here, we fly.

I’ve been so wishy washy about what to buy myself for Christmas (and my birthday).

I mean, after the post last year, and how nice it felt to actually give myself a real, wrapped up and everything present, I’ve automatically given myself presents-worthy status. However, some guilt has over-stepped that robotic act of self-love.

Firstly, I buy myself shit all the time. It just usually comes in a cup with a mermaid on it, or gets me that much closer to a shortened lifespan (it will be a race to the finish between lung, breast and skin cancer, I swear).

Secondly, well, I can spend $5 here and there and only feel a little guilty, but dropping a c-note on myself when it’s not for like, life-saving surgery? Seems a little too heavy to handle.

Thirdly, as Psychoghandi may have intimated when he said today “please wait while I write this down, before you change your mind¹,” I tend to refocus my energies quite often.

So. It was the sewing machine. Then the wii. Then a yoga mat and gym membership. Then back to the wii. Then a ginourmous book of, like, every single publisher/magazine/trades journal/newsletter known to man and their publishing requirements, then the sewing machine.

Then I went to grab Zoë a book before bed tonight – see? there’s another thing that’s changed, already (damn you, Psychoghandi for your being right-ness) – and I saw this.

We collect them – books. I do, and she’s picked it up from me.

Mine are two shelves packed (plus, uh, about 20 more stashed somewhere else) with awesome. Organized by genre and then height.

Hers are put away however her gluten-free-cornflake-lovin’ little brain saw fit, along with some VHS movies (there’s another more-than-dozen of those somewhere else, too, thanks to a certain Lady who goes by the name of Mr).

Houston, Dallas, Tennesee, Richmond and Paris, we have a problem.

This system is whack. And I want pretty book shelves. I want clean, orderly, dust and ‘whatever might be living in this closet’-free books. I want to display proudly all of these loved ones currently locked up in a closet that, for all intents and purposes, was built at least 40 years ago purely to annoy the shit out of me².

And so, in a perfect world, where I can both afford to do so and remove the stick out of my ass for long enough to pay for it, I’d buy myself this easy-breezy little bit of perfection.

And I’d cover all of the insides with damask-printed wallpaper. Because I’m artsy and stuff, in addition to being a book-collecting minimalist, who can’t write a single non-run-on sentence to save her life tonight.

That being said? Odds are I’ll, like, buy myself a nice mug.