UGH the process

I watched Ms. J get married yesterday to an awesome man - seriously awesome and it was full of joy and hope and all the other amazing things and in a small way it did hurt my heart and yet thankfully it didn't really - the joy was a blessed covering over it all. However, once the party ended the real work, the real work of getting into the rough part of the break up had to begin. And so I started my steps.

Step 1 - Sweat the bastard out of my pores on a dark dance floor, in the company of safe people. My toes are brutalized but that was absolutely necessary.

Step 2 - Be awkward. I am fully, maybe too much so, okay with making others awkward as I am awkward. I will take a conversation to that point etc and I am happy to be awkward in my love and devotion. I'm also apparently down with making myself terrified for a moment while being that possibly cruel person sitting on the fringes of LG's life (this morning literally in church) and poking every so often is a hey NLLL'er, remember me, I'm not going to fade away, I'm going to make you, when I'm damn ready look at me, know me and know that you didn't break me but that you also were an asshole to me - maybe those words you said will ring in your ears like they do mine. On that note I will likely not continue attending, it took too much work to make him disappear from my line of sight while knowing he could see me. I am happy with being a nagging presence on my own terms, I don't need him getting any stealth cornering moves up and yes if you're wondering I was calculated enough to leave his keys at home. I am handing those back on MY terms

Step 3. Stock up your house-sitting with good soul nurturing food and some bad stuff - help ride the waves AND FLOWERS.

Step 4. Being affirmed in the blessed company of amazing new friends and an old one and have the words of affirmation from a female pastor, reminding me that in my Mennonite and social justice ways I am not a heretic for affirming that we must consider socio-economic (and race) issues in violence/war, birth control/family planning and just shalom. Shit is real peeps, and being a white Canadian middle class educated woman means I don't really know how real the shit is but I'm under so illusion that it smells nice, that's for sure.

Step 5. Go to sleep, knowing that AE (and KAB by proxy) will be present to support and love through the possibly brutal process of handing back the keys.

Living on the Other Side of the Line

For all intensive purposes I am currently living below the poverty line.  I knew I would be when I started graduate school.  I knew that things would be tight, at times very tight.  I did not expect that they would be this tight.  I had to contact my church this week to ask for help - after almost two months of wrestling with the idea, knowing that despite how ridiculously tight things are right now, that there are always those who need more than I do.  I have a home right?  I have heat (well sort of - my landlord is stingy in that regard), I have some resemblance of health and more importantly I'm the only mouth to feed. Well in asking for help I'm realizing how socially shameful it is to be on this side of the line - regardless of how you get here. There are strings, lots of strings, and questions and judgements.  All I conceptually understand are well meaning, but they hurt.  They hurt a lot. They imply - they imply that I should have known better.

I guess this is also me venting at God too - I know I try to keep my faith out of this blog - but I guess in all this hurt, is the question of where is the provision? And if this is the provision why does it hurt, why does it come with shame and guilt attached to it?  Isn't that counter to everything that is who you are?  Funny somewhere in this I know there is an answer - just feels beyond reach at the moment.

This is not a hand out moment but may be a moment to remember that when you judge a person on the other side of that poverty line - the world on this side is full of enough hardship without that and for better or worse I now know that first hand.

Victoria Calls them "The Grumpies"

Whatever you want to call them I have them. Maybe because it's a Monday, maybe because my house looks like a bomb went off and the chaos is killing my OCD self, maybe because I just had to deal with a solicitation call, or that I feel like boo or that I cannot even go for a walk outside because my lazy neighbors think that compact ice and slush is a suitable coating for their sidewalks... I think though it's the fact that it's almost March and it sure as heck doesn't look like it.

I have been listening to the Wailin' Jenny's album and it seems to be the only thing that makes me happy - so here is one of the songs from their recent album.



Victoria

Goals for the Week

Now that the weekend is wrapping up and I'm trying to unwind - I have the following goals for myself.

1. Walk for 30 minutes every day - I figure if I can start there that it is do able, it's not high intensity and it's somewhere to start - and if I really just cannot do it, then I need to have a shower to help the soreness, take an Advil if needed and then do some yoga.

2. Keep a calmer pace - so if that means getting up 15 minutes earlier, and conversely going to bed earlier then so be - but make baby steps to reducing as much stress as possible.

3. Learn to leave lists at two things :)

That's it folks just two goals for this week - my Type A self will just have to shelve it's neuroses.

I know this song might not be of interest to many of you but I know I will have this on more these days - there is something soothing about their music.

I need more hours in today
I wish I had more yesterday
Or last night to dream dreams

But alas time is short, no?

On with Monday, today, now.
Tired, stressed and all that jazz *jazz hands*
Listening to Serena sing about love

Want to hear the Bangles sing
I might just do that soon

However, oh how ever will be
Congratulations are in order US eh
You have joined the "communist" world
May you see beauty in universalcare

For those with hate tinged lips
I plead for peace and discourse
For those who claim their beliefs

He believed peace and not slander
justice, equality, mercy and grace changed
So use not as weapons but
as tools to unite, to uncover

Sing, hug and remove the hatred

Back to work, work I go
Then run, falafel dinner and Math
Yay it is math monday weeeee!

Moving Forward

I am slowly putting one foot in front of the other - literally and figuratively.

I pick courses this week - trying to decide if I trust RateMyProfessor more than I trust my barista.
I start training - very slowly.
I start studying for the GRE Lit exam this week - in theory trying to figure out a schedule - like Mondays - Math, Tuesday - Vocabulary, Wednesday - Verbal etc.
I start making a list of who to humble myself before - I have one TA in mind who is now a PhD - got an A+ in his class - granted it was an intro class and ages ago - don't think it will fly - Ms. J claims I have nothing to lose, funny I still think I do, darn pride.

Work is more stressful these days now that my least responsible employee is back from her extended leave, making more work for me. I am sniffling again. Someday I am sure I will be healthy, just not today. And yes because he really needs more blog time around here, I am trying to make active steps away from AB. You know I never realized that having sex with a person would make the tearing yourself away from that person seem like a battle you can never win. If it isn't the sense of loneliness, then it's the sense of shame/guilt and if it isn't that it's the frustration/anger at a person walking away not because they don't love you, it's because they can't grow up (his words not mine - not ready for commitment).

Anyways, apparently it's Monday, so I have word problems and geometry to get to - I love the GRE, I love the GRE, I don't love the GRE. Boo.

I Believe the Hair Colour Has Officially Entered My Brain...

I had the weirdest collection of dreams last night involving AB, a sex text, a large peanut butter cup, travelling, Texas, GRE, literary references, my Blackberry and an assorted cast of characters. Now the peanut butter cup - I know where I got that - Not So Humble Pie's blog , as to the other components - well a huge percentage is intense mulling about of future life options, and as to AB, once the great minds of the world create a liver friendly brain cleaner I will be first in line.

Actually I know why he's there on second though and that is another blog in and of itself - a question HSBFF posed to me. I digress.

I am trying to semi plan with headlong closed minded but not to closed minded perspective, all the while knowing that I will have to move from my home town and country. The PhD/Masters programs are all in another country... one being far south in Costa Rica, or in Europe. So I being that I can say I'm under the influence of peroxide and or ammonia - here are my options

1. English MA/MFA/PhD program - the rough list includes: Oregon, California and New York right now - it will be expanding - I intend on apply to 10 schools

2. 1-2 MBA/Non-profit administration courses most are on the East Coast

3. UN Peace - Costa Rica

4. Drum roll... CC would be so happy if this one happen... Culinary School.

In the end I have a year until I have to make decisions about 2-4... right now it's all about the books - Wuthering Heights has replaced Passage to India because I just couldn't stomach it.

I know the song doesn't really related but in tiny response to the vitriol being pumped out against the Olympics Games in Vancouver, I say that I am proud of it, all of it, including KD's performance (this is from a previous event)

Purging...

Emotions are a nasty bee-atch. In all honesty I texted AB last night, not for a booty call, no point driving a hole through my heart regardless of how drunk I could have been, and for the record wasn't that drunk. I confessed that I still missed him bitterly and I hated that, I hated I couldn't forget him. He said he missed me too and wanted to get together. Jerk.

So what did I do? All day today I cleaned, every corner of my bedroom, scrubbed the windows, the window screens, the walls, floor boards, rearranged the furniture, washed everything. In the faint, small hope that when I got into bed tonight it would feel different, that the memories wouldn't come flooding back in the clarity in which they consistently do. That I wouldn't long for him knowing it was all completely pointless, and that I wouldn't feel jealous. That I wouldn't wonder about the woman who being better for him than me would be able to get him to open up and truly love someone. I know that it is me. Not that woman, no that it is about me. That I can't be that woman, that I'm not that woman. It sucks to try to daily process that, when they are that person. The person who you first really love and open up everything in your life to and they choose to walk away.

So I work to daily purge what I can - leaving the wounds as clean as possible in the hopes they heal, the scars fade ever so slightly and I move on - another one of those faint hopes.

PS It feels no different in bed tonight...

Ohhhh

On a completely different note - I went for a run though it was a very short - ie 30 minute run today. It was my first run in a month, I almost well you know, at the bliss of finally being able to feel that joy of flying around corners, of hearing only the sound of my breathing and the plod plod plod of my shoes on the ground. Even more exciting, despite what is being prayed for, danced for and even supported by the groundhogs, it is officially spring outside - the trees are blooming, the world is green and I ran in capris, a tee and arm warmers - no toque, no jacket, no long tights, no mittens. Was beyond bliss until I started my core work - that's when I put on OM's theme song, though I think we are going to reclaim it and give it to my equally annoying core work out.

I don't want to but I do....

Sometimes life does not grant you what you want or what you need, but rather it grants you an opportunity to rather just extend the kind of grace you sought at one time and couldn’t find.
I could see AB’s answer in his eyes last night, I saw it in him, I had been feeling the answer radiating from him for a while now, so while it came as no surprise, what did surprise me was my response. I found myself standing in my bathroom, hung over from the cold medicine, trying to figure out if one it was too early to drink – coffee people – nothing else, but more so why the shower I had had didn’t strip away the emotions that seemed to want to poke their way through my skin, emotions that I should be feeling, emotions that I didn’t want to feel. Why? Well damn it I’ve cried too much in the last year, ate too much cookie dough, ice cream, consumed more alcohol in the survival of bigger, deeper wounds, crying at that moment felt like crying over spilt milk, crying over spilt vodka I could justify, this just well was just a NLLL type moment. I assembled myself, trying to figure out why I couldn’t recognize myself, why some of these feelings felt so much like last year and not different. AB decided to move forward independently, to grow and find himself, find this idea that it seems men have about the necessity of being a stable/provider type. I find it crazy, but then again I’m a woman, we think all sorts of things are necessities in relationships that aren’t – like being toned, tanned and another t word before he sees you for who you are under all the spanks, Victoria’s Secret and all that.. .
I did cry. I have, since I can’t run, I can’t really do a whole lot other than blog and maybe find some kind of solace in Aapa and Momo. I wish I could find solace in AB, but I’ve decided that AB is needs real freedom from me and I from him, we move forward on our respective journeys, I get to spend my time learning to literally put one foot in front of another on this new journey that the year of survivalship has afforded me. Do I think AB will find me, do I think that AB and S&P will be at some point? I will say that I wish that was so, I wish for many things in regards to AB, small things like I wish he would have kissed me last night, a kiss for all that would never be, could have been and all that, but it didn’t happen. I think for AB the jump is a little too far down, and unknown to venture it, even if he was ready, no matter how much it seemed like he would have with his in hand in mine.

So I know that this song will likely make some of you question my musical preferences, let's just say sometimes it's more about what soothes the heart than your ears.

Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/78099783@N00/2350778044/