1. What did you do in 2008 that you’d never done before? Went to Italy, became a manager, negotiated an acting promotion, ate several foods I’d never tried before (including Arctic Char Jerkey!), read a story about my long absent father on the front page of my hometown newspaper.

2. Did you keep your new year’s resolutions, and will you make more for next year? I don’t think I made any.  Safer that way, really.  I mean, why set myself up for failure?

3. Did anyone close to you give birth? Nope.

4. Did anyone close to you die? My stepfather, Kenny.

5. What countries did you visit? Italy.  And it was glorious.

6. What would you like to have in 2009 that you lacked in 2008? More sleep, a busier social life.

7. What dates from 2008 will remain etched upon your memory, and why? April 10th — the day after my 30th birthday and the day Kenny passed away.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year? Going to Italy alone (well, on a tour, but still…) achieving further career success.

9. What was your biggest failure? Not exercising.  My body is starting to feel ick.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury? Nothing major, as far as I can remember.  Well, there was a cold in September that hung on in my lung FOREVER.

11. What was the best thing you bought? My ipod touch.  Oh the love.

12. Whose behavior merited celebration? The American public for electing Obama and giving us hope that they didn’t have their heads completely up their asses.

13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed? No one, really.  Nothing anyone’s done earned that level of emotion.

14. Where did most of your money go? Italy.  Paying off debt.  Travelling to Barrie.

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about? Italy, again.  My nephew Matt visiting in July.

16. What song will always remind you of 2008? “Yes we Can” by Will.i.am and “A Change is Gonna Come”.  Both remind me of the American election.

17. Compared to this time last year, are you: (a) happier or sadder? (b) thinner or fatter? (c) richer or poorer? I’d say I’m equally as happy as last year, a wee bit thinner, and certainly richer.  YAY!

18. What do you wish you’d done more of? Read, wrote, explored, took more photos.

19. What do you wish you’d done less of? Slept.  Mostly.

20. How did you spend Christmas? In Barrie with a fair chunk of my family.

21. Did you fall in love in 2008? No, alas.

22. What was your favorite TV program? House, Battlestar Gallactica

23. Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year? No.  Again, that takes too much emotion and energy.  New people annoy me this year, but that’s nothing new.

24. What was the best book you read? Probably The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini.

25. What was your greatest musical discovery? Probably Kanye West.  I like him more than I expected to.

26. What did you want and get? I’m not sure there was something specific I wanted, really, which is actually a nice way to live.

27. What did you want and not get? Okay, maybe there was one thing I would have liked — a relationship.

28. What was your favorite film of this year? WALL-E hands down.

29. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you? I turned 30.  Chilled out at home alone.  Was woken in the wee hours of the next morning by the news of my stepfather’s passing.  Celebrated with friends later in May.

30. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying? As I said – a relationship.  But I think my life is pretty good and satisfying without it, regardless.

31. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2008? Meh — I have no fashion style.

32. What kept you sane? Books, writing and the Internet.

33. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most? Obama goes without saying.  No Canadian politician inspired me, which is sad.

34. What political issue stirred you the most? The left coalition.  Fun!

35. Who did you miss? It’s less the actual people than the idea of the people.

36. Who was the best new person you met? Probably Iain, though it’s still early.

37. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2008. Knowledge and work pay off.

38. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year. I’m never any good at this question.

Previously: 2003

I didn’t get to see most of my family this past Christmas, as I decided to visit my brother and his family in Manitoba instead.  While that visit was wonderful, I did miss seeing my Mom and Sisters and the rest of the nieces and nephews.  So I decided to go down to Barrie for this whole new Family Day holiday.  Cheesy name, great idea.  A long weekend in February is never a bad thing.

Anyway, I brought my friend Olga with me this time.  I thought she could stand some down time, as well as some general boring family-esque time.   It’s always interesting to bring family and friends together, because while they both know you so well, they know very different parts of you, and you play different roles with each of them.  I was glad to bring Olga with me because she’s my oldest friend.  I was glad for one of my friends to see “where I come from”, and how my family interacts and all that.

Plus it’s good to get an outsider’s perspective.  It’s only in the last 2 or 3 years that I’ve truly come to realize how great my family actually is.  I’ve spent many years being resentful of being the youngest, feeling abandoned, dealing with some of the stuff that happened in childhood, and while none of that stuff has necessarily gone away, I certainly have had my eyes opened.  I’ve seen how other people interact with their families — and frankly, they generally don’t, or at least not on any real or intimate level.

I’m glad we’re not like that.

When my time comes
Forget the wrong that I’ve done
Help me leave behind some
Reasons to be missed

Leave out all the rest

(Linkin Park)

I haven’t really lost anyone super close to me.  My grandfather, yes, but I was 15 years old.  Too young to really appreciate what a great man he was, and what I’d lost.  It’s only now, as an adult, that I realize that.  Especially last year, when I went to Ireland.  I wish I could have shared that experience with him.  It was his homeland, after all, and he was the reason I went there in the first place.

This past Tuesday, the mother of one of my best friends died.  She was very ill, for a very long time, so it wasn’t really a huge surprise, but still.  It’s been strange.  I’ve always been quite sensitive.  So these things tend to tear me up a bit, even though it doesn’t directly affect me.  I guess I just feel for my friends.  It’s strange, because another of my very close friends mother passed away some years back.  It was very, very fast.  This time it was long and drawn out and horrible.  Neither experience seems any easier.

I feel melancholy, and a little lost.  I want to be there for my friend, and I am.  But we all know that the days immediately following a death are insane and busy and crazy.  She doesn’t really need me right now.  I’m sure she will in the future though, and I’ll be there.

And of course these kinds of situations make you examine your own life, in ways that aren’t always comfortable.  It’s so strange and indescribable.  I find myself tearing up at times, and it probably seems strange to people.  It’s a little weird to be so emotionally…sympathetic.

And it came to me then that every plan
Is a tiny prayer to father time
As I stared at my shoes in the ICU
That reeked of piss and 409
And I rationed my breaths as I said to myself
That I’ve already taken too much today
As each descending peak on the LCD
Took you a little farther away from me
Away from me

So who’s gonna watch you die? So whos gonna watch you die?

(Death Cab For Cutie)

Good on them! I haven’t checked the news, but I hope they (we?) were able to make a point.

There was a survey from Quebec about aboriginals that was pretty depressing, and I hope the rest of Canada doesn’t feel the same way. Like the natives are “exaggerating”. It’s “not so bad”.

Really?

My father is metis. I have a native heritage I know nothing about. There has been a systematic ruin of the native culture in this country and it is pathetic.

I have seen it. I have seen my relatives brought to their knees. Or deny their culture altogether. Or struggle like I do.

This was mine, but it was taken from me.

- By the people who told me I didn’t “look” indian.

- By my father who didn’t care enough to pass on what he knew.

- By the schools and the systems that made him ashamed to be native and gave him a stutter.

- By his family who called him an Apple (red on the outside, white on the inside) when he married my mom.

- By the government who made me feel I needed their “status” to really be anishnabe

- By the same government who denied me that status because they took it from my grandmother when she married a white man (like they wanted her to).

- By my grandmother who didn’t hold on to her traditions and teach the next generation.

- By all of those who think my heart does not lie with the native people as much as it does in the rest of my heritage.

There is a collective unconsciousness. You may not believe me, but it’s there. And it lives in me. It lives in me for my grandmother who was assimilated, and my father who had a bigger war within him than I do. This native man went to church at the Martyr’s Shrine and did anyone think what that might do to a metis child? That it might make him hate himself in one way or another?

So block the highway. I hope it works.

One of my most vivid memories in childhood was watching Little House on the Prairie every Sunday with my Mom and my sisters (for whatever reason I don’t remember my brother being there).

This episode (one of several) stuck with me. The girl who couldn’t walk like the others.

I don’t think they knew how much I noticed when I was little. I must have been less than 10. Maybe even less than 8. But this episode felt like home to me. When I was older I was sad to discover that children weren’t as accepting as Laura Ingalls and I couldn’t be fixed by adding wood to my boot.

It was a heavy blow.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEOoZlMTt0s]

Today I am wishing that I still had that playlist “songs to be happy to” on my iPod.

Have you ever woken up sad?  And I don’t mean inexplicably, or based on a sad dream you just had, but the kind of sad that’s based on something big and real in your life.  The kind of something that normally doesn’t get to you, but every once in a while sneaks up on you, and one unsuspecting day BAM! there it is again, a wound you thought had scabbed over at least a little open and festering.

I’m not sure what it is that causes me to be so disappointed in people, but that’s usually the cause of my feelings.  Or maybe it’s not so much disappointment in people, but regret at how much things can change, how people can be your lifeline one day, and then suddenly you’re no longer important to them, barely registering on their radar.

Life marches on, as always, and I’ve always really sucked at accepting that.  I like people to remain who they were; who they were to me, and who I was to them to never change.  That never happens of course.

As I’ve gotten older I’ve learned not so much to deal with it, as to push it down, ignore it.  To retaliate by distancing myself as well, building a world where only the privileged few get access.  There are consequences to walking away from me.  You may only walk a few feet, but I will turn and sprint in the other direction.  Because what you’ve said to me is that I no longer count, am no longer important.

Not likely a healthy response, but generally speaking, once someone turns away from you they rarely notice if you’ve zipped off even further away from them.  It rarely impacts them; it’s the ultimate in “you’re only hurting yourself”, if you think about it.  But it’s also quite the automatic defense system.

Not to get all maudlin, movie-of-the-week, etc., but I’ve had a lot of people let me down in my life, only to be told time and time again that it’s “natural” for them to do so, or that I need to forgive them, or I need to let it go.  Ultimately that no matter what, my disappointment is my own, and generally unfair and wrong.  And sometimes I even put myself out on the line and tell how I feel, only to have it do nothing.

So be it, then.  It’s pretty tough to be told that the very core of your feelings are wrong.  I don’t believe that any feelings can be wrong.  But I’ve accepted that my expectations are different from everyone else’s, that maybe this is my problem.

And for the most part I’ve dealt with it in my own ways, for the most part, the seeping disappointment doesn’t hurt any longer.

Except for today, apparently.

I know I am a faulty person. I do things that are wrong and and make me difficult to be around. And I don’t always recognise all my faults. But when I do, at least I am able (sometimes grudgingly) to say “Yes, I can be a schmuck.”. I have only ever heard three people say that re: our friendship, and one of them wasn’t even really my friend.

How Will You Go?

A moment,
A man, sitting Indian-style
Hat out for change.
Pavement below,
Pavement behind.

Did recognition
alight in your eyes?
You feigned it well
Much like your life.

There is no worship
to be found. I’ve searched.
No childish memories
That remain untainted
Like the burnt edges
Of a childhood photo
Long lost to the ages.

I have naught from you
But a name
And a history you never
Taught me.
Not a solitary image.

Do you carry one of me
In your empty wallet?

In the end you were
a bow and arrow,
a tomahawk.

A deserter manitou.

I find myself drifting a little too close to a hole that looks a little too familiar.

It’s been almost 2 years since Mel and I broke up (oh my god, where the hell does the time go?) and it’s only now that I’m truly starting to feel lonely, or worse yet, alone.

It’s not that I’m missing that particular relationship, or that particular girl, but I’m missing something. I don’t know if it’s friends or the past in general, fun, connection, or what. But tonight, for whatever reason I’m really rather sad, in a way that I haven’t felt for a very long time.

I’m not sure what I can do about it, really. I mean, I’ve put profiles on dating sites, tried to keep an open mind about who I want to date — but really does my open mind matter if no one wants to date me?

And really it’s not just about dating, if I’m going to be honest. I feel like my friendships are weakening. Not for any reason beyond the fact that I have nothing good to share with people (Went to training today. Spoke french. Came home. Ate. Slept. Lather, rinse, repeat.) and I just don’t see most of my friends that often.

Which leaves me alone, which is fine 90% of the time, but it also sends me spiraling into anti-social patterns and behaviours, which leaves me alone more, and it’s really a chicken and egg kind of phenomenon.

I look online every day at ottawaevents.org to check for things that I can do alone that may also introduce me to new people, but it’s slim pickings.

Blah. Hopefully tomorrow I’ll be past this.

I’m really rather shitty at dealing with change. I dislike that about myself.