Is happy enough?

I’m going to break a cardinal rule: the one where you’re not allowed to tell people what you’ve wished for. Year after year, on every occasion where I have received the chance to make a wish (be it blowing out birthday candles or 11:11 or standing at a temple in Japan) I have asked for the same thing: to be simply, plainly happy in my life.
I don’t know anymore though if that’ll be enough in my last minutes of life, to have been happy. I am happy right now, I’m more than satisfied with my life and how it’s going but is what I’m doing enough? Is it enough to lead a good life, meet a good man, live in a good house, have a good job and breed good children? I’m a white girl from the suburbs, and to the suburbs I’ll return.  I haven’t struggled to get where I am today, and for the rest of my good, happy, average life I probably won’t have to struggle to hard either. Is it enough to be satisfied with that?
When you’re young and dumb you think you’re going to do everything in life, you imagine yourself being a rockstar and writing that great Canadian novel. You’re going to be an astronaut maybe, the first woman on Mars and you’re also going to be a spy and be named president of your country. The thing is though, most of us aren’t born to be great. The only people that’ll remember our names when we’re dead for several decades are our ancestors, and even they may only have a foggy idea of who you were.
I’m know I’m smart, but I’m not brilliant; and I know I’m ambitious, but I can’t think of anything in particular that I want to sacrifice every other aspect of my life to. Being happy with my life may be the best that I can do.
I suppose it’s a situation of suck-it-up-buttercup. You may as well be happy because the alternative is you living the same life, just miserably.
I’m happy, I really am, I just falter when I stop and think about it.

New Years

The last ten seconds of a year are dizzying. It’s like those moments leading up to a jump from the five meter diving board. You’re standing on the edge but you can clearly see what’s ahead of you. After all, once the New Year strikes the only thing that’s going to be really different is that you have to write down the right number when you sign checks and sign forms.

(Unless the experts are talking about another Y2K disaster, then you might be a little fucking terrified when the clock chimes midnight.

Chances are though you don’t live in Australia and as long as Australia survives the New Year you will too.)
I have to admit, I love New Year’s Eve. As a holiday it beats out its over-commercialized, semi-religious big brother that’s less than a week before it. I think there’s something deeply romantic about the last day of a year and the first day of another. Inevitably I end up thinking about where I was a year ago and what I was doing then. More shit goes down in a year than you realize until you’re standing on the 31st of December thinking:
“Oh yeah, this time last year I still had to make out with guy A, date guy B, date guy C, fail that test, have that argument with my mother, have a massive fight with that friend, celebrate that mile stone in life… and shit… I’m only at June.”
And sure, whatever happened may leave you broken and bruised and a little angry sometimes. But a lot of the time what has happened makes for one hell of a good story six months down the road.

(Shove those words back into my face when I’m getting upset over nothing sometime in February. )

And then there are the resolutions! So much hope. As far as I’m concerned I’ll be looking like Claudia Schiffer, solving fundamental problems in physics better than Einstein and parliament hill will be cowering in fear when they hear my name.
I actually don’t believe that “improvement” resolutions work all too well. Sure, you may want to go to the gym more, you may want to lose those extra pounds and you may want to be more organized (whatever that vague resolutions means). But there’s a thought that’s there that’s important: the thought that you have to continue changing and growing: that this time next year you don’t want to be in the same place as the same person.

As long as you keep moving you’ll be okay.
As long as you keep moving you’ll be okay.

Aden

My husband was on a plane to Aden,
not Eden as they lead me to believe.
A clean shot to the head, my pilot dead in Yemen.
It’s a revolution of killing politicians, blaming Palestinians
but the riots on the streets mean little to me:
I am a silent widow with a baby living in Bremen.

Canada is boring.

I think I can admit to myself that I don’t actually like Canadian politics.
Which is an awkward thing to admit to considering I’m pretty much majoring in polisci and I’m Canadian and therefore whatever the hell I’m doing will most likely involve the combination of Canada + Politics.

Maybe dislike isn’t the word. Maybe if I said terminally bored I’d be describing how I feel about Canadian politics. Let’s be honest with ourselves: the last thing that Canadian politicians did that was remotely interesting is grant universal health coverage back in the early 60s.
Or maybe when Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act in the 70s.

Canada isn’t particularly innovative. We aren’t particularly interesting politically.
There was a great excitement here when Obama was elected as president of the US than there must have ever been for a Canadian PM. Canadians have more heated opinions about decisions they can’t actually influence than about the decisions they can. I can understand why people don’t vote simple because one option is less interesting than the other. The conservatives are stagnant, the liberals are wack and the NDP and the Greens are never going to get into power anyway.
And the leaders for all these parties are about as inspiring as my unwashed gym clothes.

You’d think a political party would be able to find just one passionate public speaker in a country of over thirty million. He doesn’t need to be a Barack Obama. He just needs to be interesting.
At this point I’d be game for the Canadian version of Sarah Palin, even though I don’t think she is a particularly gifted politicians. But at least we’d have something that people would have an opinion about.
I’d take a Silvio Berlusconi who’s been accused of having ties to the mafia simply because for once we’d be talking about what’s going on in our country rather than what’s happening around the world.
Don’t get me wrong – a global perspective is great – but at the end of the day it’s the guys running the hill at home that we, as Canadians, actually have an influence over.

For the sake of spicing up my future boring career – can we have an interesting debate going on? Can I get a little bit of controversy?

18

There is a tribe in the Amazon (whose name I forgot) that have a really bizarre rite of passage to becoming a warrior. They would fashion a sort of glove of live bullet ants and force the person wanting to become a warrior to put it on and keep it on for ten minutes. These bullet ants are the cute, cuddly type that invades your picnic, rather they are considered to have the most painful stinger in the animal kingdom. Wearing a glove made out of those bastards? Good times, I say.

 

From the point of view of someone who isn’t a masochist it’s a little extreme, stupid, annoying. Pick your adjective and alter the ones that are considered politically incorrect.

 

But really, it’s as good a ritual as any. At least you did something to become a respected warrior. What do we have in Canada for officially becoming an adult, a member of society? Okay, so I would rather not writhe in pain for a couple of days but I’m sitting here on the eve of my 18^th birthday, three hours left before I can be tried for murder as an adult, become a porn star and fall deeply in to debt thanks to credit cards. Not necessarily in that order. Besides managing to avoid being killed or killing myself I really have not done much to “earn” adult privileges.

 

Not that it should be necessary to jump through a bunch of hoops to become a legal adult, after all, if they make it as annoying as obtaining your driver’s license (it’s not my fault some people shouldn’t be handling vehicles that move faster than a bike) some people may end up deciding to just be kids for the rest of their lives. At the same time – I kind of dig the idea of ceremony. I used to want to be Jewish just so I would get a Bat Mitzvah. I used to want to be Catholic so I could have a first communion. I wish the trains wouldn’t have been overbooked so I could’ve attended my high school commencement. You get the point.

 

The standard of turning 18 is going out and getting drunk (in the province that isn’t backwards like the one I live in) I suppose but that’s really not any different than any other party. I’m not creative (or crazy) enough to come up with my own version of the ant glove but that’s sort of what I want: something that sets turning 18 and becoming an adult apart.
Sure, I’ve had friends who are already legal adults tell me that it’s not a huge deal to be 18. It’s like any other birthday. You don’t change overnight. Then again, they aren’t the ones that stood outside in the rain in front of a club because they didn’t have a fake and were still 17 with two weeks separating you from that invisible – but, according to the bouncer, incredibly important – line.

Wir müssen nur wollen

I recently had a dream again about Japan. It was specifically about Japan actually, it was more like I was given another opportunity to go. I was ecstatic. I ended up going clothes shopping at a fancy boutique because I needed a formal dress to board the plane in.

Don’t question my dream logic.

Of course me going to Japan again anytime soon is about as realistic as wearing a ball gown on an airplane is practical.
It doesn’t upset me though that I’m not leaving Ottawa any time soon. I used to dream (both while asleep and awake) while I was in Jokeville about getting out of “the bubble”. I used to have a countdown until graduation in my MSN name. It started at 811 days. I think I gave up around 250 days because I thoroughly had lost track. But for a solid year I faithfully changed the number every. single. day.
I’m surprised few people ever called me out on the fact that I displayed such open contempt for living in Jokeville and going to high school.

I’m not trying to say it was horrible. Actually, I’d be really discrediting a lot of people if I said it was horrible. I loved my friends there. I still do. I just didn’t like my life. It’s not home.

Japan, the two times I went, was my ultimate escape. When on my first trip I deplaned at Kansai airport I was overwhelmed. I cried. Actually, saying I bawled may be a more accurate description. When I get emotional I’m rather messy. I apologize. But I was really, truly happy. 

Then after two weeks I returned.

And I was not happy to having to settle into a semester Advanced Functions and Exercise Science. So I planned version 2.0 of my Japan trip. I sacrificed my last semester of high school (and in part my dignity by working full time at McDonalds to earn the money) for Japan. In retrospect it may have been a little really selfish. Fleeing the continent because you’re bored with your life in high school is rather dramatic. I broke ties with people a lot earlier than was necessary.
On the other hand I got the most mind-blowing five weeks of my life so far. I gained more confidence during that time than I did in the 3.5 years I spent in secondary school. I learned how to cook, to do laundry and to navigate the Tokyo subway system. I got first hand experience of what it’s like to be the foreigner.
I’d like to think that I grew up during those five weeks. In the same way that moving from Germany to Canada marked my transition from a child to a teenager when I was 12; my exchange to Japan forced me to take responsibility for myself and well, be an adult (it also helped that I grew to like the fact people thought I was 20 and tried to keep that illusion alive).

I can’t totally say it was the right choice though. I gave up a lot that happened at the end of Grade 12. I probably would have ended up exactly where I am right now – in Ottawa – no matter what I did in Grade 12. If I had stayed in Canada or went to Japan or miraculously found a cure for cancer.

In the end what is making me happy right now isn’t that I “finally got away” from my high school, or that I went to Japan for a miserly five weeks,  but that I’m doing what I want to do. There’s something extremely comforting about figuring yourself out after the existentialist identity crisis we call puberty. Oh, and growing the fuck up and realizing that most things in life that you regarded as tragedies are more than survivable – thank you Nietzsche for coming up with the whole “what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger” mantra… and thank you Kanye for making a really good song out of it.

This day has 38 hours. Wait… what?

June 11th at around 00:15 I walked into a Ramen shop in Japan with some friends to a) eat something because my last meal was a good 12 hours ago and to b) order a beer in a country that thinks I’m much older than I actually am. Fast forward, and at the end of June 11th I’m sitting in my other friend’s kitchen in Canada drinking coffee. I feel like it’s been weeks between those two events. That’s what a plane trip – and the international date line which, by crossing it, caused June 11th to be roughly 38 hours long for me – do to you.

Coming home is kind of wierd too. It’s like nothing has really changed besides the fact that my mom quiet clearly kept on cleaning my room while I was away. That’s what you call OCD. I swear she actually reorganized my books.
It’s nice to have toast again. Yes, my first meal when I got home was toast with cheese. Don’t judge. I went without that for a good month.

Not looking forward to jet lag hitting me like the little bitch it is tomorrow.
I’m in Canada. Lala. Cool…
So when can I leave to go to Ottawa?
And when can I start planning to spend a semester abroad when I’m there?
And when can I go to Shanghai and Istanbul and Kula Lumpur and Theran and Oslo?

Maybe people where on to something when they called me a gypsy, you know.

Last Night

My suitcases are pretty much packed. There are a few loose ends I need to tidy up for tomorrow but that shouldn’t be too much. After that I’m making my way back to Canada via train, boat and plane.
I don’t know. I want to go back, but I want to stay here too.
Here’s a cheer for being completely contradictory.

l’amour ne dure pas toujours

Oh Tokyo

Rule #1 for surviving in Tokyo: LIE about your age. You can’t do anything under the tender age of 18
Rule #2: If anything goes wrong, deny that you know any English.
, smile and then do what you want anyways.

How to have fun when you live in Chisato

Ingrediants
3 gaijin
1 unsupecting victim friend who speaks Japanese fluently
20 minute walk to friend’s house from the university
10 minutes spent talking to a guy that you think SOMEONE in the group knows but turns out to be a total stranger
40 minutes spent figuring out the ticket machine at the convience store
1 coverstory made up because you gave out the private number of one of your teachers
10 yen tofu. Delicious.
39 cards used in playing a game that is a bizzar cross between poker and president
Countless combinations of english swear words
2 minutes to teach the friend who speaks fluent Japanese the phrase “FUCK MY LIFE”
A lifetime of regret for corrupting the innocent
200 yen for a train ticket to… somewhere
1 resteraunt
10 minutes spent in that resteraunt without ordering food
Dine-and-dash without the dining
30 minute walk to the nearest McDonalds to get milkshakes
Several jokes about the local “book” store that sells everything but books… They do have condoms though
20 minutes to finally decied to go to a game arade
100 yen wasted on getting beaten by your friend at a game in about three minutes
5 minute walk to the grocery store across the street to buy milk at 10:30 at night
FINALLY find 2% milk versus whole milk
Also spend 88 yen on ice cream bar
Persons under age of 18 aren’t allowed into many places past 10 at night
21. That’s totally how old I am, right?
11:38pm is the second last train
0 yen to catch the train from point A to point B because the ticket stands are closed
1:30am and thankgod the creepy guy isn’t lurking infront of you apartment for once so you can go home safely