Epilogue: One Year and One Month

   So, this blog is going dark.  Effective the end of this entry.

   Why?  As always, the answer's neither short nor simple. 

   I'm officially moved home.  Keys turned into the apartment last Sunday, stuff moved back.  My room's set up just about the way I want. 

   New job is still going well.  It's familiar territory for me: I worked the first six years of my life in logistics and distribution, so the learning curve is narrower than it would otherwise be.  Busy work that's stressful at times, true, but my days go by quickly, and my work has real-world impact: two things that I've missed for a long time now.  I still haven't been moved back long enough to have developed a routine, and that won't be for at least another month or so, but so far, the basic schedule of getting up at six, having breakfast with Mom, driving out to work in the morning and heading to the gym straight after or right back home to relax with my famiily is shaping up to be the norm.

   There are so many stories that I can tell about the last few months.  Little incidents that have happened here and there. I don't quite feel like revisiting them this soon, though, at least not in detail.  As with everything, distance will bring its own perspective on those details, and if I choose to revisit those stories later, I'll do it then.  For now, a few little summaries and a big retrospective will suffice.

  Leaving behind downtown Burlington was hard.  As I said, the city itself is brilliant: it's a high quality of life, one that provides that subtle push to aspire to better.  It has much of the feel of a big city without the big city, an urban village feel that's wealthy and sophisticated, clean and aesthetically pleasing. Nearly every page of my novel manuscript, Convergence, finds its origins in the cozy confines of the Second Cup at Brant and Lakeshore.  When I think back to the summer of 2010, my mind will always go to Spencer Smith Park, sitting under a tree with a blanket and a book in front of a Great Lake that was so, so blue on some days, your heart literally aches.

    Still, no matter how I try to ignore it, Burlington is always going to be the place where my first marriage and first love ended, and where I went through the single worst trauma I've ever gone through in my entire life.

    Then, there's my apartment at 360 Torrance St. 

    There was a point in September when I looked around my living room and realized that I had the place almost exactly how I wanted it, and that felt good.  That apartment was easily the most high quality place I've ever lived that was mine. 

   But, as Aaron has pointed out, leaving that place was also an opportunity to leave my pain behind.  And I took full advantage of it.

   I left a lot of stuff behind in Burlington, stuff that I'd been keeping from well beyond the end of my marriage, but not beyond my time with my ex.  My old bicycle, a gift from nearly ten years ago, that I used to ride around Westdale with when we lived there: I took it out for a last ride and then left it near the dumpster.  My old picture frames containing images that I bought when my ex and I went to the McMichael Collection one Reading Week; gone.  A few bits of scrap paper containing, among other things, little flower shaped sticky notes that she would write to me when I would head off to whatever job I was working at the time.  "I appreciate what you do for me," one read, "for us."  Another: "I can't wait for you to come home tonight!"  And, the kicker: "I can't wait to call you my husband."   Yep, definitely tossed. 

   Why did I even have these things, you might ask.  Much of it was in boxes that I had brought from the last place that I never even looked in until I found myself moving home, where space is at a premium and where speaking my ex's name is about as taboo for my family as saying "Voldemort" is for students at Hogwarts.  It was good to get rid of this stuff.  It was cathartic.  And yet, so very very sad.  I'm glad I did it there. I might still run into a few odds and ends of my ex's stuff I did bring back to the house, but that's all they'll be: random bits and pieces here and there. I was pretty thorough in jettisoning the old baggage.

     My family helped me move the big stuff out, and I'm very grateful for that.  I've written before about the symbolism of one's circumstances, and the fact that the street number of where I lived - 360 - represented a full circle of the past decade.  When I first moved out, my whole family turned out to help me set everything up in my residence.  Moving back home, they were there again.  Now I'm back here full time for the first time since 1999.  Life leads you back to the beginning somtimes, this is true, but the symbolism isn't nearly as obvious most of the time.

    This blog turned a year old this past February 2nd, started only days after I discovered my ex-wife had been conducting an affair with a friend since the previous summer.  As such, the lifeline of this blog has really been the story of one year and one month since the biggest trauma and change in my life narrative to date.  And now that I've moved home, it's time to leave this behind with the other things, with gratitude.

 ***

     Life is moving on in other ways, too.

    Two days ago, I was at the gym when my ex called.  We haven't spoken in a couple of weeks, and before that, communication was infrequent.  With distance, I'll probably look back on how I kept in touch with someone who had hurt me like that, and wonder what the hell I was thinking.  I think when I was lonely in that apartment, working the previous job where no one gave two shits about me, I needed contact with her to transition.  My ex, for her part, felt the guilt and obligation to at least mitigate the damage that she had caused* by going along with it.  For a while, it worked.

     A few weeks ago, she told me that she has been trying to "move past" what happened, to stop being reminded so much of it. She's forgiven herself for what she did, at least that's her stated intention.  And yet, she refused to visit the separate site I set up for my new project, The Quotable Breakup, because it re-opened those memories for her.  My ex is, thus, intent on erasing her history in order to normalize her current relationship.  The past ten years are, for her, an inconvenient truth in a non-Al Gore sense of the term.

    Still, I wonder.  I wonder: when you're in a relationship that began as infidelity, what date do you pick for the anniversary?  Do you pick the day that you first had that "accidental" sex when you were over at your boyfriend's place?  Or do you pick the day that your husband finally broke through the Jedi Mind trick you'd been pulling on him for months every time he grew suspicious of the truth, and kicked you out?  Or do you just pick the day you moved out together, which is, in reality, not an anniversary of the start of your relationship so much as it is just the time you guys shacked up? 

   These thoughts troubled me as I was in the process of disposing of the old things at the apartment, and when I started finding those reminders of what had been - little notes, little notebooks in which she had done that typical girlie thing and written out my name and hers over and over again with little hearts - I realized I wanted a break from semi-regular contact with her.

     And two days ago, I realized I can't talk to her anymore, not about anything that doesn't concern our divorce.  Two days ago, she called to say that she and the guy she cheated on me with, her boyfriend, are getting married.  They have been engaged for some time, and before they went public with it, she wanted to tell me.  The thing is, she really felt that she was doing me a courtesy by telling me first. On some levels, I appreciate that, and in my shock, I did say as much to her.  On others, though, it just about tore open the old scars that I went through a year ago. 

   If I am being fully objective, I have to acknowledge that telling me was difficult for her, too: I think my ex really regrets what she did, and wishes that she had done things honourably.  Believe me, I do too, because at least if she had given me an open slap in the face and an "I'm leaving", I'd only have to re-examine my own behaviour, instead of having to do that and deal with the massive trust issues and heartbreak that I'm still working out.  And yet, here we are.  And I don't feel like being more objective than I need to be on my own blog.

***

      I decided to use this occasion to take a good look at the people I keep in my life, decide who really mattered, and who I could cut loose.  I assessed, and cut accordingly.   Of course, most of this was on Facebook, which seems trite in the grand scheme of things, but which is quite meaningful to me, given my usage of it.

   First, I cut her loose. I don't intend to speak casually with my ex ever again except on matters of outstanding business between us. Getting engaged to the guy that she cheated me was, frankly, the final insult I was willing to tolerate.  She knew that when I fell in love with her in high school, it literally changed my life, and I was willing to live for her, and I did, for many years.  Hell, if it wasn't for me, she never would have met her new fiancé, and if it wasn't for my work when she was unwilling to step up her game, we wouldn't have been able to do anything.  She knew what she meant to me.  And after all we shared, she could simply do what she did, turn away, and go.  So yeah, that was simple. 

   Also gone are the people who were practically naked in their choosing of sides against me.  I'm not talking about the legitimate neutrals, but the posers who were not nearly as mixed up in their allegiances as they claimed to be  I had said early on that I wouldn't make anyone choose sides, but a division of the friends occurred naturally, as it always does, and frankly, I've inherited the people of higher quality. 

     I've cut out a few friends who were naked in their allegiances to my ex and her boyfriend, who haven't so much as said a word to me since, but who have gone out of their way to make nice with them. 

   I've cut out people who are masters at double-talk, at once assuring me of their "neutrality" but who nonetheless held onto knowledge of the affair without telling me - thus choosing their sides before there was even a split - and who said, behind my back, that they were "disappointed" with how me and those closest to me have chosen to be "biased". 

    People who have honestly handed me a turd telling me it's chocolate, expecting me to believe it because, well, it came from them and they're never wrong. 

   People who, frankly, are in no position to mediate this and who are about as "neutral" as an American president mediating over an Israeli-Palestinian peace talk. 

   People who, early on, manipulated me when I was still in a vulnerable emotional state to not push for the guy who seduced my ex wife to be expelled from the honour society we all belong to.  People who are damaged in so many fundamental ways that they can't or won't see it for themselves.  People who at once set themselves up in their own ivory towers as "authorities" and really feel that they are moral authorities, even as they themselves tacitly endorse those whose entire relationship is rooted in deception, in pain, in lies, and in betrayal. 

   These individuals have not been my real friends in anything but name only for a while now, and it took the shock of my ex wife's new engagement to really make me reflect and realize who's going to watch my back, and who's likely to stab me in the back and then say that I must have just fallen on the knife.  I don't hold onto personal relationships that no longer serve my joy and growth, and so I'm leaving that bit of social baggage behind, too.

***

     There's one last thing I want to leave with this blog, and it's the narrative itself.  The affair and the divorce have become my own personal 9/11.  I don't consider that to be hyperbole, either: my whole sense of the world and my life changed, and has become, for better and for worse, the defining moment of Jody Aberdeen.

   I'm tired of branding myself this way, but I have no other stories to tell.  Acting is still in its infancy and on hold until I settle into the job and find opportunities for time off to audition and take jobs.  I'm still editing my novel.  As yet, I have no new relationship and no prospects on the horizon, nor am I really putting in the effort to do so, given all the other changes I have on the go.  And I now wake up every day in my old bedroom when I was a kid.  As such, the only story that I can tell is the divorce.  Whereas my ex has someone with to create new experiences, even as they wipe away the inconvenient truths of their own histories. 

     You see something similar in Quebecois culture. I once read in a book by Neil Bissoondath that if you really want to understand separatism, you must look at the defeat of French forces at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham. That history stays with almost every Quebecker: they wake up each day and life in a land with institutions, dialects, and little traditions and customs that all find their roots in one single incident.  They are acutely aware, as a culture, of how they came to be an island of francophonie surrounded by an ocean of English.  Meanwhile, the rest of us, living in the lands of the victors, eat our cereal and go about our business not really giving two shits about the Plains of Abraham.  That incident, and that history, still defines Quebec.  An imperfect metaphor, to be sure, but the point is clear: it only takes one event to set everything on a permanent tangent.

    My life can be, and will be, about so much more than one year and one month, but to do that, I need to find a new definition.  Being an ordinary working joe living at home won't serve that purpose: that's just the basic necessities of belonging somewhere and sustaining a living.  I need to have some new adventures and find something else to talk about.  I've learned this past year that it's necessary to first embrace the reality that you're standing on solid ground before you can dream of flying.  For reality to be extraordinary, you have to add the "extra" to an "ordinary" whose existence you're no longer resisting. 

    For the longest time during the past year, I thought that new story would be a new romantic partner.  And it still might be, but I am very guarded.  All of the people in my inner circle have told me, in some variation, that the instant I recognize my own awesomeness is when I will attract the new girl of my dreams.  In a lot of ways, I still behave as though I'm married: I am stuck in a semi-permanent friend zone with girls and I am still running into that natural discipline that I've had programmed in to resist looking at girls or pursuing chemistry with a new female acquaintance beyond a certain limit. 

  That's getting better, but so far, I'm still finding it a challenge to believe that any woman that I find attractive and interesting would see the same thing in me. I don't quite feel worthy of the women who catch my attention.  What that means is very simple: barring any miraculous proof of soul mates manifesting in love at first sight one day when I least suspect it, I need to work on building up my own confidence, self-esteem, and willingness to open my heart for business again.  You never know if the dreamgirl you're flirting with today becomes the bitch who kicks your heart in the ass years down the road, but that's the risk that comes with love and sex and magic.  And I'm still unwilling to risk more than one toe in the water to see if I'm going to get burned again.

  Beyond that, I have no certainty about writing, except that I will finish editing Convergence, complete The Quotable Breakup, and continue the work I started on a new project, tentatively titled The Hour is Certain. 2011 still has the potential to become the year I finally get a real publisher and distribution, though right now, I think I need to do something more for my spirit to move on, and that's travel.

  Michael took a Contiki tour in Europe this past fall that really changed everything for him.  I've wanted to travel for so long, but I had years where I was partnered up with someone who was not open to going to the places I wanted to see.  Nor could I really afford it.  But, one advantage of being single and living at home while working full-time is that I have the means and freedom to go, and that's what I'm doing.  Though time will tell, for right now, Vietnam is looking very attractive....

    My vision board for 2011 is still up.  Sweetheart, Words, and Superstar still occupy my attention.  I intend to take one or two acting workshops and audition for more, and my web commercial should be out soon.  But "Superstar" doesn't necessarily have to apply to the acting alone: I think just being a superstar in day-to-day life is often enough.

  Certainly, my closest friends think so. Michael has called me "the most upstanding guy he knows": not totally unexpected from one's best friend, but still very kind. Alice told me once that Katy Perry's "Firework" always reminds her of me.  "You're going to do great things," she said.  Aaron has said that of the brothers in our chapter, I'm the one who has the potential to achieve greatness, to be the guy that future active members will name when recruiting new pledges and say, with pride,  "Jody's one of us".   Pam has pretty much reminded me of my awesomeness each time we talk, and Julius considers me a close enough friend to be one of his groomsmen, which I consider to be a high honour (hell, he's even throwing me a wedding for my birthday this year!). 

   I don't completely understand why the people I love, love me in return  But then again, maybe I don't have to.  I'll just go with it.

    So I'm leaving this blog at a point in my life when I've gone back to basics, and really, truly started over again. Every year is a transition of some kind in different areas of your life, and I'm still transitioning in many respects.  But for one year and one month, I have been challenged like never before to work at feeling happy, at having fun, at being responsible, and learning from the past while not chaining myself to it.  I'm still learning it, but I think I've learned enough to start building something new, and hopefully throw more baggage overboard.

    I will keep An Odd Place for a Hill up as long as it suits me to, as a primary document of the end of this phase. 

    To those who have logged in from the start, to those I have met thanks to these writings and who have become close to my heart, and to those who may have gained some type of positive input into their own lives from this, you have my eternal gratitude. 

   Thanks for reading.....

......and feel free to check me out at http://jodyaberdeen.wordpress.com/ when I finally have a new story to tell.     

   I now declare this blog dark.

All The Places and People We Call "Home"

  (At the apartment)

  I've got just about three weeks left in my apartment.

  I knew that moving home with my family for a short while would be a challenging transition, but reading the roap map ahead and actually walking the territory are two different things.  With only fourteen or so days left, there's not much ground to cover now. 

  It's such a contradiction half the time, nothing that's really new that I haven't talked about somewhat in the past little while.  You wake up, or you come home, and you think "I'm home!  This is my place!"  It's close to your friends, in a neighbourhood that resonates with your spirit.  A place where you can, if you feel like it, parade around in a bath towel (or less), leave as messy or as clean as you want, where you make your own rules.  A place where you can be free.  And you're filled with some bittersweetness that you're leaving this place soon. 

   You walk in and you've come home, but you won't be there for long. The situation demands that you savour all the moments, live in the now. You take special notice of the little details: the way the baseboards don't quite align in symmetry with the tile, which was new when you got it; the sound of the elevator rumbling through the wall of your bedroom. Someone upstairs dropping something on the ground and the sound of a car outside on the one road that leads inward. The way the trees and the houses across the street look from your picture window. The luxury of being able to take long showers because the water's included in the rent. That's usually the first hour.

From when I was moving in a year ago.

  But then, two hours later - hell, sometimes a few minutes later - you find yourself on the phone calling or texting people because you kinda miss people.  More than kinda.  You really feel like hanging out with someone, or even just knowing you've got someone in the other room that you could talk to if you so wanted.  In the second or third hour of being by oneself, you then think...."Meh." And you remember the reason why you're leaving: because a nice apartment completely on your own with no one to talk to, or even just to know is in the other room, is one of the loneliest experiences you can have.

   One of the great things about having a Fraternity house, we advise our undergrad brothers, is that there's always something happening in the common room: a PS3 competition, a movie, some discussion about some topic or other.  Something.  Come and go as you please, stay and talk as long as you want.  The common room is always there, and there's always something happening that gives you an opportunity to connect with people with whom you share kinship and shared interests.  Within two hours of coming back here, I miss that kind of experience, even though I myself never really had it anywhere else except with my family.

 This wasn't always the case: for the first six months after I moved here, I was pretty good on my own, enjoying the solitary time and the freedom of movement.  My own place.  Hell, my own blog entries back this up.  I can't pinpoint the exact moment that everything changed, but these last few weeks have felt like waking up from a dream....

 (At the house)

  I had started writing that earlier paragraph nearly four days ago now.  Since that time, I found new employment in Mississauga, not far from where I am in Brampton.  I made sure to learn from my previous experiences and feel out a place that looked like a fit, followed my gut instinct, and been smart about recognizing opportunity when it presents itself.  The speed at which everything seems to have led me to here has been incredible and almost a little scary.  I'm due to start Wednesday, so like it or not, I'll be spending more time in Brampton than Burlington for what little time remains in that apartment, which is, at this point, simply a storage depot for all my things.  There is no Internet.  There is no TV.  I had both disconnected a month early to save on money.  As such, when I'm there, there's very little to do.

   Staying there now is just downright depressing, but I have to stick around this weekend for two reasons: to pack up and throw out what remains to be packed up or thrown out; and because I have limited time there, and I want to savour the time.  Mind you, I knew that I'd probably get this way going into the experience.  Giving up the apartment was a sacrifice that my intended changes demanded. 

  I always get a little misty about leaving a place (well, except the last move, but that was only because bad stuff happened there), but this one's quite different. This was the first place I'd lived completely on my own as a grown-up.  In a way, it completes a cycle.  I started life away from home on my own, and I'm ending it that way.

  My first time moving out was to Bates Residence at McMaster for my second year of study in 2000-2001.  I hadn't gotten along with my roommates too well - three Engineers and one Humanities student do not a stable mixture make - and for much of the winter, I spent a lot of time avoiding the place whenever possible. It was a shitty second term, and after having failed a course in the first semester, I had to overload to make up the credits.  Plus, I was a Phikeia (a pledge) for Phi Delta Theta, a notorious contributor for the Silhouette, working at the distribution centre on weekends, and in a relationship with a girl who was still commuting in from Brampton each and every day. So I spent a lot of time away.

  Then, during exam time, and with less than a week to go, I came back to my room one day.  It was April, and we were experiencing warm weather for the first time in ages, so I had my window open.  The door opened, and I could smell that fresh, earthy smell of rain and grass and mud coming in through the window.  The kind that just wakes you up after five months of frozen earth and snow.  And I looked around my tiny little bedroom, and realized I was really leaving this place.  For good.  And I ended up spending most of the remaining six days in that little room, just noticing the things about it.

  A favourite memory was Friday morning.  My roommates and I were down the hall from the elevator, but it was one of the older OTIS models, and the noise the thing made as it came up to the fifth floor sounded like a construction drill when you had one side of your head still pressed against the pillow of your tiny single bed.  The rest of the week, that elevator was a pain in the ass, waking me up at ungodly hours when all I wanted to do was sleep until the last fifteen minutes before class. 

   On Friday mornings, though, it was sweet. The sound would wake me up, maybe around 7:45am or so, and I'd scootch over towards the back of the wall and stay in that delirious in-between stage between waking and sleep.  The light from the window for much of that year would be a pale grey-blue that spilled over everything - from my Gladiator poster on the wall that I bought at the last IMAGINUS sale to my desk and the Pentium desktop computer that now seems like Stone Age technology. 

   I'd hear that elevator - whirrr-r-r-r-r-rr-r-r-r-r-rr-r-r..br-o-o-o-mmmmmmmm! - come to a stop on our floor, and the doors open, and that's how I knew that I was only thirty seconds away from my ex coming through the door of the apartment-style dorm, then opening the door to my place.  She'd have been up since like five o'clock, and would have driven in from Brampton, parked her car in Zone Six, and taken the shuttle here.  She'd be tired, and she'd be ice cold, as girls tend to be in winter (and most seasons, I find). So she'd take off her coat and shoes and just hop into the space in the bed I just made for her, and I'd reflexively grab the comforter and envelope her in it and warm her up.  Then we'd lay there for at least a good half-hour before our morning seminars, and all was right with the world.  We were both 20 years old. 

Main hallway...hell, I should be a rental agent!

   I should probably clarify at this juncture, people might read that and think that I'm pining for her - especially with Singles Awareness Day around the corner - but this is not the case.  A couple of people I've met in the past month alone seem to think that when a relationship ends, you have to press "delete" on all those moments if you're to "move on".  As I've written about time and time again on this blog, that does a disservice to the time you spent, and I have "moved on", while retaining what was good about the experience.  And Friday mornings on the fifth floor of Bates Residence were almost all good. I'm looking forward to more such moments with the next girl who becomes special to me.  Never mourn because it ended; smile because it happened.

  In any case, that was a memorable time that, really, was truly mine, because that was my first home away from home.  Every place since was shared with with my ex, except for the apartment I'm leaving now.

  I don't regret the decision....well, not completely.  The only hangups I have right now involve the loss of "independence" and my own issue with the idea that living with your parents at 30 years old may not make you the most attractive person to the kind of women I'm interested in dating.  Mostly that last one (I have a car and will have a ton of gas money to go where I please over the next year, so I'm still "free"). 

   Still, I'm not at home due to lack of ambition - hell, I only returned home to live once in the past ten years, and that was the summer of 2001 right after Bates - but out of sheer deliberation and choice to be closer to my family and clear up some debt.  As I've written, most single women in my age group won't recognize these qualities until their late thirties or early forties.  In quarter-life, too many of them want a guy who can give them money and toys, all flash and no substance, guys who satisfy those primal urges that women feel to want to feel protected and provided for.  The elusive "spark".  And because they tend to be just a bunch of grown-up boys at this point in life, these twentysomething guys burn them, so much so that some of these ladies create distant early warning systems to flag "issues" and "baggage" in potential mates, using any little violation - he has too many female friends, he lives at home, he watches South Park - to justify not pursuing someone who would otherwise be great for them. 

   Before I get too carried away, it'll take a while for me to get used to the idea that, for the right girl for me, it won't matter that I live at home at all, nor will any of my other perceived "weaknesses" that I think I have.  It'll work when it's supposed to.  We'll leave it at that.

A spring view from my balcony.

   "Home" really is something that we make up.  Anthropologists and psychologists may say it's a primal instinct to be connected to a place, but tell that to a nomadic people, who never stay in the same place for too long.  Tell that to a world traveler, backpacking for years around the globe, staying in hostels, hotels, campgrounds, even the street for little periods here and there before moving on.  Some say it's people, but tell that to drifters and hitchers, to those on spiritual pilgrimages, all on their own and who may meet people on the road, experience whatever they have with them, then let them fall behind them on the road as they press on.  In that way, I suppose one apartment that helped me rebuild and re-create myself in a very transformational year matters as much as my childhood home to which I'm now returning, and any other place I'll call "home" in the foreseeable future. 

   I'm due to return "home" today to continue the packing up of things, and to bring back a number of items before I start work tomorrow.  I'll probably limit the time I spend there, if only to make myself more motivated to be efficient at packing and what-not, but this is definitely one of those times when I'll look back and wonder at how critical this decision was to the other things I was to accomplish in life. 

  Just have to wait and see what happens, as I've been doing.

A Happier Kind of Tired

  I am an author.  I am an actor. 

  I find myself having to repeat that several times a day.  They're not the typical answers that you give when someone asks you what you do for a living.  Especially not that second one. 

  But I filmed my first commercial on Sunday, with a cast of professionals, so that makes the second one official.  Men and women who've taken Theatre Studies and worked for years on stage and on film; who've wandered far distances away from home experiencing life from the perspective of art and spirit; whom I felt a kinship with on a professional level, for the first time in a long time.  And I have a credit to my name.  That's one commercial more than what the vast majority of the rest of the population has done or will do in their lives.  That doesn't make me better or superior, but it is something to be happy about. 

   This isn't all rainbows and sunshine, of course.  I've left my regular day job with the government, and so I'm on the hunt for something to pay the bills in the interim. I've been here before, but unlike the past few years, I'm no longer going to cite my stop-gap job when someone asks me what I do.  Make no mistake: I am an actor, and an author.

   "Author". "Actor".  Repeat as needed.

  A great bit of advice I can give younger guys and gals who are reading this is to never stay in a place that robs you of your spirit and confidence, because that starts to eat away at the other parts of your life that are not the business of the office or your boss.  That's what was happening to me.  With distance and time, I'll have a better perspective on the real nature of the misfit between myself at that job, but I think it had more to do with the people than I might have assumed. 

  On my last day of work, I received no cards, no lunches, no special acknowledgements or send-offs of any sort.  Instead, my now-former boss burst out of a meeting room with about an hour and a half left in my shift, put on her coat, grabbed her things, and rushed towards the exit.  She stopped briefly at my desk, saying "Sorry, Jody, I'm in a hurry."  Grabbed my hand in a quick handshake. "Best of luck to you!  Bye!", and then breezed out the door.  That was it.  I didn't want a parade - this isn't a question of satisfying my ego - but it is not a classy way to end a working relationship, especially not one that lasted a little over a year in an office of only five to six people. 

   Micromanager wasn't much better.  The convention in the modern workplace is that you can leave early from your last shift.  Technically, the employer can't do much except dock you for those minutes you didn't work.  It's not like they can fire you.  It's one of those unwritten rules that you let the guy go home early on his last day.  At least, that's how it is in good workplaces in the private sector, which is not where I was. When advising Micromanager that I had nothing else to do and was leaving early, she actually asked me, "Did you clear it with the boss?"  Definitely one of those WTF moments.  Coupled with a heads-up she gave me that she was "leaving a file on her desk for Monday", I wondered if it wasn't a case that she was deliberately obtuse, but rather that she might actually be off her gourd.  Hello?  Why would I care about the whereabouts of a file folder on Monday? I'm not going to be here on Monday. 

   That was the moment when it became clear to me that I wasn't batshit crazy or insane or otherwise stressed-out, that contrary to what my management had led me to believe, I wasn't doing a job I was unqualified for.  I was not incompetent or an imbecile.  The reality is that there is just never any way to satisfy the demands of people who have absolutely no interest in what you do, no self-awareness, and almost no sense of social decorum, except, of course, for people on the inside of their service branch, and who are, I'll repeat, just plain nuts.  Try to be the only sane person in an asylum run by the inmates, and see how long it takes for them to convince you that you're nuts.  You can clock it with an egg timer.

   No, those two moments completely dissolved any regret and anxiety I felt about abandoning a lucrative day job with nothing comparable to fall back on.  Not a smart move on paper, but the greater price was further damaging my sense of confidence and self-worth. No job is worth that.  Such wounds can be permanent. 

   So, what to do after you've made the leap of faith?  Keep flying.  It's all about the hustle from here on in.

   Finding a short-term stop gap job should be easy once I pare down my resume a tad.  Right now, I could serve coffee and lug boxes again and be happy, as long as I have some days free to audition and write.  For the first time in my life, I find myself overqualified for the jobs I want to work.  It's a challenge, but it's also a good feeling.


   I'm giving Convergence at least one more week in marination before I start editing.  Unlike The Quotable Breakup, I'm looking to publish my novel in the traditional sense - lit agent, publisher, book tour - so I'd rather wait until I can give more attention to the manuscript.

   And, of course, I'm still auditioning.  Got another one tomorrow, in fact.  At some point, I want to take a weekend retreat to study with acting coaches, but I'll need monies garnered from stop-gap wages before I can do that.  Until then, at each audition, I'm relying on my own instincts.

    I haven't been this tired, busy, or seen more of the great city of Toronto than in the past few weeks.  That's the thing about reinventing the self: it's a lot more work, but it doesn't feel like work.  When you're done for the day, it's a different, happier kind of tired. The kind you get when you come home from a wedding reception or a family picnic, or a long-expected party that's now finally come and gone.  One that makes you feel good waking up the next day, knowing you're going to do more.
 
   Creative career paths aren't for everyone, but neither is the corporate grind.  And I'm not going to rule out never going back to that grind: life may yet lead me back to it, albeit richer for the experience of walking the path of the artist for a time.  But I know and feel that what I'm doing now is right, even if the benefits aren't immediately evident, because I'm in the vibe, and when you're in the vibe, it doesn't matter what you do: wealth and joy will manifest when you need it. 

    I am an author.  I am an actor.  And I've never been happier.  Time for sleep!

Two Tribes

    The OLN show Departures is one of my favourites. 

http://www.departuresentertainment.com/about.html

Two ordinary twenty-and-thirtysomething guys from Ontario, Justin and Scott, along with their videographer buddy Andre, set out to travel the world for a year, to finally do what so many people say they want to do, but never do.  The first season was supposed to have been the only one, I think, but the show was such a success, the network picked it up, and now the trio makes a living from wandering the Earth.

    A recent episode featured a stop in Ethiopia, where their local guide took them to a part of the country, in the south, that remained largely untouched by development.  There, a traditional tribe was having a bull-jumping ceremony, as part of a celebration of an arranged marriage for one of the tribesmen.  It's not glamourous - the ritual involves flagellation and some animal sacrifice - but what always gets me about rituals like this is how insular and together everyone is.  The tribe moves as one, even though they all scatter separately in the day to day living.  The sheer harmony of the scene even brings Scott to tears at one point, and this is a guy who's charted more of the world and its plethora of experiences than most of us will ever see in a single lifetime. 

   A recollection from a broadcast of The Moth that I heard two years ago comes to mind.  The American storyteller recounted his work in Rwanda, and how he had a time when he was simply not feeling well. When one of the locals found out, he gathered the entire village together for a ceremony.  The storyteller, in mock humourous fashion, tells the tale of the ceremony.  Highlights: a goat was sacrificed, and he was made to strip naked and have the blood smeared on him. He was brought out into the sun at noon where everyone in the village engaged in a dance ritual that made him feel delerious and disoriented, and by the end of it, he felt elated and much better than how he was. 

   Later on, in another part of Africa, he recounted the experience to another tribesman, who said that his had something very similar to what he had experienced.  He told the American that it was far better than having the Western psychiatrists there.  When asked why, the tribesman responded that the ceremony had several holistic elements that would heal most disease: going out in the sun for the light and heat; moving around rhythmically to get exercise; but most importantly, getting the whole village out to show that whatever you were going through, you were not alone.

  By contrast, said the tribesman, Western psychiatrists brought people into a closed dark room indoors, sat them down at a cold table alone, and made remember all bad things that had happened to them.  "That's when we knew we had to get these people out of the country as soon as possible," said the tribesman.

  That day-to-day living here in the West lacks this harmony is old news, but the trend is changing. Aside from the Boomerang Generation of kids who move back in with their parents in their late twenties and thirties, friends cluster together in the same neighbourhoods, if not the same houses.  Blended families are practically the norm in most urban and suburban centres.  City planners now design neighbourhoods that facilitate closer social interactions, and hotspots like the Second Cup where I'm writing this in downtown Burlington are becoming more commonplace in new suburban housing developments: locales where you can gather and connect with human beings.

   People you meet and connect with eventually become part of your social networks, but really, what I feel we want is not a network, but a tribe.  That's what I want, anyway.  And it's what I have.

   I have two tribes: my family and my friends. Unfortunately, as I make the move home for a few months, I will lose proximity to one tribe in favour of the other.  I need them both, much more than I really appreciated until recent days.  Obviously, thanks to the advent of the internal combustion engine, the phone, and the Internet, we're always connected.  An hour's drive away, an instant by phone or email or Facebook. 

   And yet, that doesn't satisfy completely.  Having my two tribes separated by distance sucks, and neither of them will likely relocate anytime soon to one location or the other. 

  I have a dream archetype that I wrote about a year ago, in which everyone I know and love in the world lives in houses on the same street in the same city.  In that dream, there's nowhere I can walk- the market, the mall, the park, the cafe - where I don't run into someone I know or am related to.  I'd love to have that in real life.

Grandpa and me at  Mom's old house in Trinidad,
 Guessing something like 1982.

   Maybe this is genetic. Mom and Dad's families both lived within the same square kilometre in Trinidad, at a place called the Junction just outside of Princes Town.  Everyone knew everyone else around there, cradle to grave.  Unless soemone there was actually crazy or violent or deliberately anti-social, no one ever experienced the isolation I've felt in recent months.  I'd love to have that kind of community coupled with the diversity of life in Canada and the prosperity of the city in which I'm still residing for the next month.

   The common occupancy of the same shared physical space matters: for the time that we're together in the same place, that's home.  Here the West, we're so used to treating "home" as just the place where your stuff is, but I feel at home at Michael's house, at this 2Cup, at my soon-to-be-former apartment, at Mom and Dad's, out with my friends. Even that transitory space between each person when we're all walking to the bar or a movie or some other gathering place together is, for that time, our space, and feels like home while we're in it.

    Because as much as I may require an intervention for my Facebook habit, for all of my own lone wolf time, I never want to lose the daily real world contact with my tribe.  Never again.  I think next time, I'd much rather share a place with my own bedroom and a common area than an entire place to myself.  Some people are built like that or they're just plain used to it.  After a year of this, such a solitary lifestyle is no longer what I want or need.

 When I move back out, it'll either be with a bunch of buddies sharing a house or something, or my own place that I'll share with my next girlfriend in a city near enough to everyone I care about.  I needed this year to centre myself after my ex and I split, and it's done that, but everyone in transition reaches a point where you no longer want or need to be alone in order to discover yourself.

   Surround yourself with the people you love. Home is wherever you can all be together, the same shared space, even if the space itself changes. And when you're feeling dis-ease, your tribe will bring you out into the sun, they will lift you up, and they will restore your well-being, just by being there for you.

 Only there'll be no need for goat sacrifices. We'll just get pizza.  Pizza's good.

Worth Keeping

   There's only one resolution ever worth keeping, New Year's or otherwise.  It's the resolution to be authentic to yourself.  Temet nosce, in the non-traditional Latin of The Matrix.  "Know thyself".

    Get to know who you really are.  Decide who you want to be and go be it.  Embrace the persons, places, and things that will lead you there; and rid yourself of the persons, places, and things that no longer serve you.  A simple formula, even if only the tinest minority of the population actually goes through with it. 

   Every year that passes by represents, in the personal history of somebody somewhere, a time for taking out the trash and cleaning house.  The places and things are easy enough, but when it comes to the persons, this is where most of these individuals in transition get hung up on the whole process.  After all, nobody sets out to be an asshole, even when the people in question are really holding you back, intentionally or not. 

  This is where the inauthenticity kicks in.  You get used to appeasing those who would put up a fight when you take risks, people who quietly judge and dismiss you, who are only tied to you through some shared history and with whom you create nothing new or valuable.  Maybe you're conflict averse, afraid to get into a dust-up with those closest to you, for fear of losing them, even though you're legitimately pissed with decisions they've made. Because certain individuals haven't acted in a way that demonstrates friendship and loyalty to you. Maybe you've just made appeasement a habit.

  In any relationship, even those with places and things, there's a point where you just get sick of self-censorship for the sake of being sociable and appearing upbeat, a good employee or happy-go-lucky buddy, where you're tired of playing Chamberlain to the unintentional aggressors around you in the false hope of a just peace. When you're just going to do what you want.  Fuck the world. 

  Yes, in case you haven't already figured it out, I'm starting the last day of 2010 in something of a foul mood.  But as always, this is mostly just me taking out the trash in the best way I know how: the written word.  And I may as well vent it out before I party down tonight.

   One of my mentors once pointed out the importance of noticing the symbolism of your outer life.  Handing in the Form N9 the other day to my landlord, I took a moment to appreciate the number of my apartment building on my street: 360.  A full turnaround, where you end by returning to the beginning.  I prefer to think of life's cycles as an upward spiral: you eventually come back to where you started, but at least one level higher up in three dimensional space.  Life cycles involve continuous growth, though at each stage of that cycle, you shed the dead cells and let them fall away. 

    Michael pointed out to me the other day that in at least several entries now, I've said some variation of the phrase "I could give a damn what people think".  Of course, that sends the exact opposite message, especially when you repeat it across several entries.  And the truth is, up until this point, for much of 2010, I have given my power away to others.  I have cared what other people think of me, too much so.  Of everything I've learned about myself in 2010, I believe this is the quintessential root cause of my own self-created obstacles.  I'm grateful to Michael for pointing this out, obviously.

  But you know, of the plethora of concepts I've been meditating on over this holiday break, it's that true family, blood relations or not, will give their input and advice, warn you about potential injury, and otherwise be completely free to disagree with you while not sacrificing your relationships in the process.

  They'll see you experience major traumas like betrayal and shock and not lose respect for you if your reaction to all of it doesn't meet their expectation of what's "appropriate". They'll come around and support decisions that you've made even if they advised against them during your deliberations.  They'll walk their talk about loyalty and friendship and rectitude and not equivocate to suit their thinly concealed personal agendas.  They'll have your back, even if they don't understand you.  And they'll push you to better yourself, in a way that demonstrates high compassion.

  But if you don't test your relationships when you have to, when the occasion calls for you to be authentic to yourself even when it's inconvenient, awkward, or downright offensive to your greater family, you're betraying yourself.  And that's the highest and most damaging betrayal that exists. 

 That betrayal then affects everything you do, from the career paths you take to the friendships you keep to the romantic relationships you find yourself in.  Then you get stuck in vicious cycles of your own creation that hold you back, making the same mistakes and repeating the same patterns over and over again, until years pass by and your hair goes gray and you wonder why, for all of your smarts and ambition, you were never able to figure it out. You become, as the movie line goes, "an old man, filled with regret, waiting to die alone." 

  In 2011, resolve to be loyal to yourself.  To get into a dust-up when a dust-up is called for, if it means that you express yourself authentically.  To give yourself permission to be intense or angry or sad or afraid if that's how you feel at the moment. To stop apologizing in advance to those who care about you for actions and decisions you know are right for you.  To surround yourself with persons, places, and things that are aligned with your own vibrations and allow, with gratitude, everything that isn't going your way to bow out of your experience and fall away naturally.

  In 2011, resolve to put into action all of the things you've thought about doing for so long, to break out of the patterns that society expects of your and actually build an infrastructure for the ambitions everyone else says are impossible.  To give legs to your fondest dreams, that you may end next year in a place far beyond the mundane expectations of what we think life actually is.

  In 2011, resolve to be authentic, inside and out.  It's the only resolution worth keeping, and probably the hardest to keep.

  Personally, I resolve to begin fulfilling these resolutions one day early.

  And how about that?.....I feel better already.