On the Path: Notes on Love, Life, and other Adventures

Relationship Ponderings: How soon is too soon ?

2006-03-05T02:17:00.000-05:00

At this time of night I tend to wax philosophical and/or poetic. Often both. To tell you the truth, I really enjoy the night. I have always felt most creatively inspired at night, especially late at night when everyone is in their little beds sound asleep. This is also my most reflective time of the day--it's when the pace slows to a smooth, comfortable glide and my inner world begins to open... and when that happens, I often have a lot of questions.

My main question tonight is when is the right time to begin dating again after a relationship has ended? And I know, the answer seems obvious: when you feel ready to start dating again. But how do you know when you are ready to start dating again?

It has been 7 months since my last relationship ended and you know, it's weird because sometimes it feels like a lot longer, and other times it feels like it wasn't that long ago. I am a firm believer in staying alone to process a relationship... I have always felt that it is unfair to jump into a new relationship with someone else when you aren't ready to fully be present in the relationship. No one wants to be with a person who still hasn't gotten over their ex. I guess I'm trying to evaluate whether I have really gotten over my relationship... if I'm even in the right space to be looking at new guys. This past relationship put me through a lot and I certainly would like to think I've learned enough from it to know not to make the same mistakes again.

That said, miraculously I have noticed myself awakening to men again... believe me, for a little while there, it seemed like that was a long ways off... I didn't find any man that crossed my path the least bit attractive! I didn't even want to look at men, lest date them. I figure this is a good sign. And I guess I'm just hoping that the next guy that comes along will really be fun and easy to be with, someone who makes me laugh, who's really sexy, who looks into my eyes and sees the person underneath it all and really understands what I'm all about. I hope I will be ready for him when he does show up. And I know he will eventually. I guess I was hoping someone might send me a little note to let me know he's coming. Just so I know to expect him and leave the door open. =)

Midnight Meanderings

2006-02-25T01:32:00.000-05:00

Oh blog, how I have missed you. I do have a good reason for being absent however. Well, make that several reasons. I've been writing again. And travelling. And catching up with friends I had drifted apart from. And spending time with family. Oh and I'm not working at my old job anymore. Did I mention I also got a grant to write a play? It's been a busy month. I'm also happy to report that I have been keeping up with my New Years resolutions! I've started exercising every day, and eating better (still struggling with it, but I intend to win this battle!). I also got to visit California for the first time in my life. My family and I went to check out the school I have been thinking of going to for my Masters in San Francisco. Want to know something funny? I have wanted to visit this school for three years (this isn't the funny part). In retrospect, I had built it up in my mind as this school of perfection, where everything would be just as I imagined it. But it wasn't. And I admit, I was a little disappointed. Okay, more than a little--I was heartbroken. I was having a hard time figuring out exactly what went wrong. Something was off, but I didn't know what it was. The right school but the wrong time? The wrong school but the right time? So many questions. So much confusion. But as we drove along the beautiful coast of California from San Francisco to Los Angeles, a little voice deep inside helped me find clarity. Here's what the little voice said: "You are not ready to be doing your Masters right now. You need to travel. See the world. Have some fun. You just finished your undergrad for Christ's sakes. Live a little. This is a big investment. You are going to want to jump into your career as soon as you complete your Masters to pay off your student loans. You aren't ready for that yet. Go! Be off with you!" (It was a sassy voice, but helpful nonetheless). While I haven't completely ruled out the possibility of attending that school one day, the whole experience was very enlightening. I'm not there yet. And you know what? I'm okay with that.

On our trip, we got to visit some places in California that rocked my world. Believe it or not, as much as I liked San Francisco, there were other places that appealed to me more. One of the most enjoyable days of our trip was when we visited the Napa Valley (read: wine central). I am very much an Italian at heart and there are very few things in the world that are better than good wine with good food to a true Italian... well, except good wine, good food, and great sex =) Mmmmm. And an amazing guy who loves good food, good wine and great sex as much as I do, is quite honestly soul-mate material. But I'm getting off topic. The Napa Valley. Right. Ok, so there we were, in the Napa Valley. The weather was exquisite--perfect temperature, warm and sunny but not too hot. And the air was so fresh and clean. Get this, we stumble across an incredible vineyard that had outdoor picnic tables, wine tasting, and you could buy wine to consume on their property with lots of yummy picnic-food items. I don't know if it was the air there or what (my mom kept concluding throughout our trip that the air was responsible for our large appetites, instant sleepiness, and various other things that are eluding me right now) but that was probably one of the most beautiful picnics I'd ever had. We had the most refreshing bottle of white wine, savored every bite, and soaked in the beautiful sunshine and clean valley air. Heaven on earth. We also visited another vineyard that was incredibly beautiful as well. We took a cable car up to the top of the hill where the vineyard was located and got the opportunity to learn about how they make their wines. We tasted several different varieties while looking out on the most breathtaking view of the Napa Valley.

Another beautiful spot that took my breath away was Carmel By The Sea. The beautiful beach and luxurious, picture-perfect homes along the waterfront was absolutely astounding, not to mention the gorgeous boutiques and stores.

It's been quite a month. Things are looking up and I can't wait to tell you more about it.

A Brand Spanking New Year

2006-01-07T19:11:00.000-05:00

So it's a brand new year. Time for a fresh start and to make some of those oft-thought about changes to my life. I went shopping today for a new pair of jeans and I don't know about you, but every time I go shopping and look at myself in that awful lighting (you'd think they'd try to make you look better, not worse) I make some serious resolutions. I think about the fact that I should be more active, that I should be eating better. And usually I decide then and there that I'm going to start exercising at least three times a week and start watching what I'm eating. But by the time I get home I'm already thinking about something else and forget all about it. Well not today. Today I am changing this. For good. It's going to be a battle, but I want to feel good. I want to look good. I mean I look good now, don't get me wrong, but I'm not happy with how I've let things slide with respect to taking care of myself and my body. I'm reclaiming myself. In fact, here are a few new resolutions for the year ahead that I plan on keeping. I will add others as they occur to me.

1) I will make the extra effort each day to try to understand others and restrain from being critical and judgemental.

I think it's way too easy to get sucked into this way of being, especially when everyone else around you is busily occupying themselves with thinking the worst about people. I am going to try and give people more leeway, the benefit of the doubt as it were and stop this ongoing commentary running through my head. I blame it on listening to too many mean radio announcers in the morning. From now on, I will stay away from nasty radio morning shows.

2) I will plan more active activities with my friends.

You know every time I plan to do something with a friend, it's either go eat something, go drink something, or go sit and watch a movie for two hours. It always involves sitting down for a length of time, and often consuming something. From now on, I'm going to invite friends to go skating, take a yoga class with me, play badminton, or go for a walk.

3) I will be kind to others even if they are not kind to me.

Have you noticed that sometimes we are so busy reacting to the way others react to us, that we aren't acting the way we'd like? That's giving other people way too much power. I will smile and be kind... I don't care if you won't be, I will continue to be the way I am. It's great. Try it sometime. It totally confuses people.

4) I will make the effort to stop and remember to be grateful for everything I have in my life each day.

We all have things and people in our lives that are so precious. It can be easy to get caught up in what we don't have and what's not going right, but truthfully when I take a look around me at all the people in my life that I have surrounding me, all that I've accomplished, I am truly grateful and amazed. I have all my basic needs met, I have a roof over my head, more than enough food to eat, lots of beautiful things, I'm safe, secure, and I'm following my dreams. What could be better than that?

Fairy Godmother...Where are you?

2005-12-10T01:12:00.000-05:00

So I've been thinking about a lot of things lately. I want to shake things up, breathe the winds of change into my life a little. You know why? Because I have been sooo bored lately. Bored and boring. Me. Boring. I never thought it would happen. You ever feel like you were going in such a positive direction with your life and then all of a sudden, for no reason that you can adequately explain, something happened and now you're going backwards? Regressing, and that the more you try to change that, the more stuck you feel? Maybe it's just me, and I know most of it is just being hard on myself. But I have been having a lot of moments in the past year or so where I'm stopping and taking a good look at myself and wondering how things got here. Not because I'm in such a horrible place, because I'm not. It's more that I feel like my life got a flat tire and have been stagnating, and not growing as much as I was before, not as happy. Plus, I feel like I have so many things I want to do with my life that it's overwhelming and sometimes I wish my fairy godmother would appear and just tell me what I'm supposed to do. I know, it doesn't work that way. But it would really help me out right now if it did. For example, I have really been questioning whether I still want to live here in Montreal. I've lived here for four years and this is my fifth. And while I do love this city for many things--all my good friends are here, there's so much to do, so much to see, so many interesting artists and shows and such--I miss a lot of things about Toronto. I miss my family. I miss the fact that people don't try to run pedestrians over for target practice. I miss it when people actually say "I'm sorry" or "Excuse me" when they bump into you. I miss being in a city where you only have to speak English for most jobs. I miss the Beaches. Not only that, but if I want to go to school in San Francisco to do my Masters, I need to find some way of doing that financially and I guess I'm having a hard time seeing a viable way of doing that. I'm actually considering moving back home with my parents. They want me home and I would be able to save up enough money to go travelling and then to school afterwards. And I wouldn't need to work a forty hour work week... which can really be exhausting. I'm a creative person, I need to explore creative pursuits. Career-wise, it probably makes a lot better sense to be in Toronto. The crazy thing is I never really liked Toronto when I was there in the first place. I don't have a great deal of nostalgia for it. I feel like I really grew up a lot here in Montreal, that I learned things about myself and learned how to take care of myself alone. Can I really give up my independance and my privacy? Is this the right path for me? How will I know? I'm afraid to even discuss the idea with my parents, I'd hate to give them high hopes if I'm still so unsure.

Anyway, that's my rant for now, I should probably get to sleep before I end up falling asleep on this keyboard =)

A rant about my day job

2005-11-29T11:09:00.000-05:00

So I'm really supposed to be at work right now. But I'm not. I just couldn't get out of bed. Not that I'm depressed either. I'm not. I just can't stand this job anymore. I'm sure we've all been there. The thing is I'm not even 100% sure what it is that bothers me the most. It could be the fact that I sit in front of the computer all day and that I really don't like sitting down all day, having the computer suck out my vital life force. Or the fluorescent lights flickering above me, making everything green and yellow... sooo attractive. But I think that's probably just a side issue. The fact of the matter is I'm an artist, I need to create to be happy, I need to be around other like-minded people. I need to be able to fully expressive myself at any given moment. The office environment is not the right place for me. At least not this one. It's repressive. Not only that, but as much as I like the people in my office, they are just so soo unhappy to be there. Even upper management. No one wants to be there. And you know, it's contagious. The negative energy just floats around the office, bouncing off the walls and rounding up various victims. I try to come in and be positive in the morning, but by lunch I've been contaminated by the complaints, dragging energy, huffing-and-puffing, tension in the air. I make jokes, try to stir up some conversation, but some people are determined to muddle in their puddle. It gets exhausting. By this point I try to isolate myself a bit, kind of go into my own world. Concentrate on work. But I still feel it seeping in... no one wants to be here, and who am I kidding, neither do I...

And to be truthful, I knew from the first day I started this job that I wasn't going to stay here very long. I know what I'm meant to be doing. On some level, we all do. I think part of it is security. That's why I'm still here. I need to pay the rent. I can do this in the day so I focus on my theatre company in the evenings and on the weekends. But you know, it's a lousy reason to be staying at a job for months and months. I can do better than this. And you know, I feel bad. Everyone who has taken on my position has left, usually after a couple of months or so. I'm feeling quite happy with myself actually, I'm tipping the scales out at a full six months. That was the goal I gave myself. My limit is 8 months. I can't be here longer than 8 months. Then it's just getting ridiculous. I know, who stays at a job out of guilt? It's just that they've been very kind to me, and while I know it's not the right job for me, I feel determined to at least stick it out for a while. I'm not a quitter. And I guess this is also about proving something to myself also. This is my first "real" full-time job since graduating from University. Every other job I've had hasn't lasted very long. I've never been fired... often it was contract work or I wasn't enjoying the work and decided to leave. You wouldn't believe how much bad management there is out there. One thing I will not do is let people treat me badly. Some people think because you're young and sweet-seeming that you'll just take whatever they feel like shovelling out. And that's just not cool. I don't need your job that badly. Believe me.

So I think I'm going to use this day wisely. Do some job searching, some yoga, work on some artwork, meditate on what I should be doing right now, what my focus should be. 'Cause I know it's not this. This is just a stepping stone to someplace better. And I'm happy with that. It's time for a change.

From Lovers to Best Friends: Blatent Masochism or Could This Really Be A Good Idea?

2005-11-27T23:40:00.000-05:00

Everyone I know has been telling me that they can't continue a friendship after a serious break-up and I used to feel the same way. At least I thought so, until I split with my most recent boyfriend. We've been broken up since the end of the summer and we're still good friends. Part of it is that we work together on a theatre project we just started up recently. And while we have our differences and I admit he drives me stark raving crazy sometimes, I still really care about him. At the same time, it has been really hard for me to establish some clear boundaries about how this thing is going to work. For example, a few weeks ago, I felt like I was around him all the time and that his very energy and presence were a bit overwhelming and even a bit suffocating. So I told him I needed some space. He was very understanding and told me he wouldn't contact me. A couple of weeks passed and while I can't say he was entirely out of my mind, I felt like I could breathe again. But then we had some work and we ended up in meetings together again and needing to communicate with one another to get the job done. He seemed so happy to see me again and be around me, and I couldn't help but feel like I missed him. So, then we had this really big birthday party for him just this past week. At the end, he came up to me and kissed me on the cheek and told me that he really appreciated everything I did for his birthday. Unfortunately just being around him that night sparked something in me again... something I thought I'd never see re-surface. When I had broke up with him at the end of August, it really felt like the final straw--we had tried to make things work for months, but the more I tried to make it work, the more I seemed to lose myself. It seemed to take more and more from me and wasn't really giving me much back in return, unless you count anger and frustration. Anyway, the problem is that he knows me so well he can tell what I'm feeling just by being in the same room with me, he's very intuitive. He kept asking me all night what was wrong and I kept trying to fend him off but I don't like to lie and he'd know it if I tried to cover it up anyway. The worst part is that his boss (who really cares about him and seems to really like me also) felt the need to corner me in the bathroom that night to tell me that she was secretly hoping that we'd get back together and that she thought he was a really really great guy and that he could be the right guy for me even though now might not feel like the right time. Worst of all, she said she thought he was truly happy when he was with me. Just what I wanted to hear. And while I agree that timing is often very important--the fact that she had really picked a particularly bad moment to corner me in the washroom for example--I honestly thought I had made the right decision. But my re-surging feelings coupled with her advice did end up sending me for a bit of an emotional loop and raising some self doubts. Not enough to question my decision entirely and run out of the bathroom to suggest to him that I'd made a terrible mistake (which I have to say is a wee bit too melodramatic for my taste)... it was however, just enough of a spin to make it seem like a good idea to talk to him later that night, when we were both quite tipsy from the evening's fesitivities and just enough to make it seem like a good idea to ask him if he was really truly happy with me when we were together. And you know, sometimes there are questions we don't really want the answers to. We may think we do, but they only cause problems. We ended up having an amazing conversation, one like we hadn't had in a really long time. And you know, I have to say, for one brief moment, I reconsidered giving him a second shot and trying again. But it was a very brief moment--and I soon remembered all the reasons that it would never work. After all of this, I can't help but wonder if my friends are right. Maybe we can't be good friends, maybe that's asking way too much of both of us right now, especially since our break was so soon. At the same time, I feel like if I cut the cord now, I'd be losing the best friend I've ever had...