9/11: Later

It's unimportant where I was or who I was with on the morning of September 11th, 2001. I remember and that's good enough. I feel like it's kind of bizarre for people to tell that story to each other. It was a Tuesday morning, most of us were doing incredibly mundane things that have no need to be rehashed.

Here's the thing about 9/11: there is an immense disconnect for me.

I am not a patriotic American. I have had citizenship since I was 18 and as of yet, my American passport has not served any other function than being my only proof of citizenship. All of my travels have been done on my Canadian passport.

I do not know anyone who lost anyone on 9/11. A friend of mine had a parent working in the Pentagon who was fine. That's as worrisome as it got in my world.

I do not know anyone who has lost someone in the resulting wars overseas. A guy I know from high school served a couple of tours in Afghanistan. That's the extent of how much the wars have influenced my life.

I despise the Patriot Act, but I have every option to go home if I want. I can pack up and move whenever I decide I want to do that.

I literally have no personal connection to any of it. It's just a terrible, tragic event that happened. And whatever sadness I'm supposed to feel over it (or so I'm told) would only be disingenuous. So I am not sad. I am the same as I am every other day.

If I listen to everyone today, that makes me a monster. But a friend of mine I knew in Prague posted the following as his Facebook update and I think it's accurate: "Cue the shallow and insincere patriotic remarks."

It's not that I don't care that it happened, it's just that I won't put on a sad face just so I can pretend that I'm doing the suitable amount of grieving (or any grieving at all).

I am going to go to a Ukrainian Festival and eat potato pancakes, drink some Ukrainian beer, watch some folk dancing, find me some very pretty men with their sharp Slavic features, hear some increasingly drunken Ukrainian conversation, and make friends with the little old ladies from the old world who make the cool painted eggs. Because that's what I do on random Sundays. 

When it's lost: The aftermath in photographs.

The defining moment for me of the 2006 World Cup was Beckham leaving the pitch with his head down in the middle of the second half of the match against Portugal. Of Euro 2008, it was one of the Czech defenders walking past Petr Cech and patting his head in consolation. Of the Stanley Cup finals this year, it is Ryan Kesler kneeling on the ice with tears in his eyes.

I am not a Canucks fan. I never have been and I never will be. But for the duration of the playoffs, they were who I got behind because some people I love love the Canucks. And because they were the only Canadian team left standing. So when they lost game 7 last night, I was slightly disappointed. Until the camera cut to Ryan Kesler and then my heart just broke.

Here's this guy who, in the course of 15 months has lost the two hockey things he's wanted most, the Olympic gold medal and Lord Stanley's Cup, on his home rink. I have never felt so bad for an athlete as I did for Kesler last night.

Spying on another life: Kundera.

A lot of times, reading Kundera fees like I'm spying on someone else's memories. Like they somehow don't belong to me, even when they do. Like everything that mattered to me at the time is someone else's.

Some of them don't matter -- walking home from Strahov after a football match and the time that Betka ran over that little kid during a rugby exhibition at the Australia-New Zealand festival and all those breakfasts at Bohemian Bagel and all the worthless nothing that pop into my head for no reason at random -- and I don't know why I remember them.

And, like I feel is the case with Kundera sometimes (even if it's not true). Some of the memories lie to me. Jamie had already left the night Lew and I danced in the foyer of that place on Parizska, but the memory tells me he was there. He wasn't. Nick was there. Nick, the blue eyed Spurs fan from London who had replaced Jamie -- the way Jamie had replaced Sai -- and who I hadn't bothered to know because I was leaving soon too. And because he wasn't Jamie.

But some of it is so very real. The music -- the accidental concert we heard, lying on the couch with The Aussie just to absorb the adagietto from Mahler's 5th. Euro 2008. Even the nothing moments...sitting on my balcony watching the piano lessons in the clock tower, the first warm day of spring when everyone was out lying in the parks, watching football in Czech, the last days of summer.

Some of it mattered so much. And some of it didn't so much, but I feel like I remember all of it.

I can wrap myself in the city I love so much because he loves it so much. When I read him, I remember things I had previously forgotten because he remembers. He is gone and I am gone, but he can bring it to life enough for me to lose myself in those memories for 250 pages. And I appreciate that more than I can ever express in writing. I have also walked those streets. I have also left a part of myself in that city.

Arrogant as it may be, at some very base level, I truly understand Kundera.

The Magical Fairyland Kingdom: What is lost.

When we left it, L.R. described Prague as "a magical fairyland kingdom the likes of which we will never see again." And I knew then that that was true. But I didn't realize how much I would long for it once I'd left. I was ready to go when I left. And even though there were tears shed on the flight from Prague to Belfast, I knew what I was doing was right.

But the years pass and you hold on to things. When Beks came to visit me in Belfast in May, it was obvious; I was not the only one. Her heart, like mine, was still in Prague.

I struggle with this a lot. I want to make better things of the places I am. I wanted Belfast to be better than Prague and, while I made amazing friends whom I'll carry through my life, it wasn't. I want Baltimore to be better, but it isn't. My heart is still in Prague and while this has been an ongoing theme since I left, I'm beginning to fear that it always will be.

L.R. was right. It was a perfect storm of people, time and place. My group of friends were people who liked to have a good time, who loved football and who didn't expect me to be someone I wasn't.

Now that I'm back where I started, as it were, I am finding this more and more difficult. Because my friends are the friends I had ten years ago. They are the friends who knew me when I was 20 before I was daring enough to leave the country on a whim and before I completely lost myself in a time and place.

It's harder being back than I had expected it would be. I didn't know I was going to be an alien in my own world. I didn't know that I was going to be unable to break linguistic habits picked up over three years that make my friends resentful. I didn't know that I was going to hold so dear to the memories I made while I was gone.

Most days I can live with it, the wanting to be back there. But there are some nights when I feel like I'm suffocating, like my chest is going to cave in on itself.

The removal of Wagner: My favourite Prague story.

I've been listening to a lot of Mendelssohn lately. I swear this has nothing to do with my weekly brunch/canasta game with my friends; I'm obsessed with his Hebrides Overture. It's just SO good.

All of this leads me, three years after I first learned it, to verify my favourite piece of random Prague information.

My very favourite Prague story is a tidbit I picked up from one of my students. We'd been talking either about classical music in general or Prague's symphony hall, the Rudolfinum, specifically, as we were out wandering around that general vicinity one spring afternoon. We spent a good number of our lessons wandering around different parts of the city, which was fantastic (probably more for me than for him).

The roof of the Rudolfinum is lined with the busts of famous composers and during the second World War Hitler ordered the bust of Felix Mendelssohn removed. Because Mendelssohn was a Jew. The problem here is that none of the busts are labelled and the Czechs had no idea which one was Mendelssohn, so they decided to remove the bust with the most prominent nose. Which turned out to be Hitler's favourite, Richard Wagner.*

I find that story hilarious.

*In general, I love Wagner. He wrote one of my favourite pieces of music of all time (Siegfried's Funeral March) among many other excellent pieces of music.

Don't let the door hit you on the way out: Dismissing 2010.

I've gone to New York City with Fraggle to spend some time with our friend Sam, who just graduated his internship at a microbrewery and is now officially a brewmaster, which is awesome. 

I'm so ready for this year to be over. I've been checked out for six months.

2011 has to be better.

How to spend the Christmas cheque: Channelling my teenaged self.

I secretly, and sometimes not-so-secretly, love the TV show 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' even though I only ever watched the series sporadically after I graduated high school. But I will often sit down and watch a few episodes just because it's on. My brother mocks me at length for this -- I think because I am one of the least girly girls he knows and Buffy is easily on the "girly" end of the TV spectrum. I like to pretend it's just some Joss Whedon appreciation (I literally could not love Joss Whedon more than I do), which on some level is true, but I think that really what it is is that I grew up, as it were, with Buffy.

When I was 17, I fell in love for the first time. And so did Buffy. And while my relationship was significantly less angsty (and vampirish) than Buffy and Angel's, I kind of liked, at 17, that it was more complicated than mine was. Because mine was average and sometimes I really kind of wished I had a brooding boyfriend who was dark and mysterious.

Time, of course, has taught me that the guy I had at 17 was wonderful and the relationship was wonderfully uncomplicated, that dark and mysterious is not always a good thing. I have learned that my most uncomplicated relationships have been the best ones.

But there is still a 17-year-old buried somewhere deep in my psyche who is drawn to the dark, mysterious, brooding boys, who will *always* love Angel -- and Spike, though I'll always love Angel best.

Which leads me to...I finally caved in to my own 17-year-old self and used the money my grandmother sent for Christmas to buy the entire series of Buffy on DVD.

Outwardly, I'm a little bit ashamed, but inside, my 17-year-old self is positively giddy.

And I'm okay with it.

The oldest of friends: Thanksgiving.

I went to Atlanta on a whim to spend Thanksgiving with M.M., who is my oldest friend. I adore him and always have.  On Monday, I had no plans. On Tuesday, I was scrambling to get laundry done and fill the car in order to drive to Atlanta on Wednesday.

In reality, I had planned to spend the holiday here in Baltimore, hiding from the world. I've been having a rough go of resettling here. I've discovered that the last eight years of actively avoiding making friends with people who have a lot of drama in their lives is in conflict with the life I lived when I lived here 10 years ago. As a result, I have grown intolerant of the drama, but my friends here have not...

I desperately needed to get out of town.

So when M.M., whom I've been friends with since I was 13 and have always *loved* , suggested offhand that I ought to join him, his brother and a few friends in Atlanta for the holiday, I jumped. A road trip, my oldest friend and a carefree holiday? I'm on board!

And I had the best time! M.M., his old roommate and I, sharing a room, were like the kids at camp who refuse to go to sleep and kept everyone else awake with our excessive giggling. We read ridiculous kids books to each other and made sexual jokes and just goofed around and it was awesome!

I love spending time with M.M., and I needed an excuse to get out of town, so this was perfect. I'm SO glad I went down...it's always easy to be around him, I get on well with his mates and I know his brother, so it was all effortless. And much needed.

Single serving: Passing encounters with strangers.

I'm moving back to Baltimore this weekend, which is relevant only insofar as I have movers.

I find it incredibly validating as a human being when you meet someone and can connect with them even if it's just for a few hours. The guy who came to move me is Israeli and, as such, has that aura of impossible cool that all the young men in Israel seem to have. We got on well to begin with...he's a funny guy and we shared a bit about our lives...but when he found out that I'd spent a holiday in Israel, that was it for our "friendship." He got to talk to someone who had been there about his homeland and his experience growing up there and I got to learn some new things from a really interesting guy and express my appreciation for Israel as a tourist destination to someone who was interested to hear it.

He will not be the one to drop my stuff off when I move in down there, so the likelihood of ever crossing paths with him again is very slim. But for a few hours today, we each had an interesting new friend.

Honestly, experiences like this, the ability to connect so well with a complete stranger with no ulterior motives, are what, to me, make life most worth living. And that little bit of philosophy explains how I ended up moving to Texas on a dare and how The Aussie came to stay and how a near stranger with whom I'd shared lunch almost four months earlier ended up coming on holiday to Hungary with me, Beks and a couple of her friends.

Unposted: Before Sunrise.

I wrote this post in February and for some reason never posted it. I should have (and I'm clearing out my massive number of unposted drafts -- some written under the influence, some never finished, some inexplicably forgotten) so you get it now.

Do we continue to exist, do you think, for specific moments in time, because of certain memories?

I'm suffering through my quarterly bout of insomnia, which is making me more nuts this time than it usually does. Maybe because usually I have a life to get on with. Not having school or anything specific to do is making me feel like a zombie. I don't love it. I've got a lot of time on my hands, time that I would love to use to get through War and Peace or one of the other two books I'm currently reading, but my brain is so fried that I can't process the words. I end up reading the same page six times and never processing it. I can't even practice the piano all that well because my fingers refuse to work the way I want them to. The muscle memory may exist, but the synapses aren't firing as fast as they should so I stumble too often on passages that normally give me no problems, and on pieces I know incredibly well, and get frustrated by it.

So I watch the Olympics. And movies I've been meaning to see. And get caught up on TV shows I haven't watched for three seasons because I have nothing better to do.

Well, I finally got around to finishing Before Sunrise. And watching Before Sunset. I hate romance movies. I liked these. For three reasons. First, because I believed it. It was awkward at times and uncomfortable and tense and totally natural. Organic is the word I expect douchey critics would use. Secondly, I don't think they're inherently romantic. I think they're hopeful more than anything else. There's an attitude of "it's okay to fuck up...the adventure is what's important" that I can get on board with. It's validation for following a boy I barely knew to Vienna to go see the opera. And for the adrenaline rush of finding myself in the middle of a football riot. And for going on a road trip with four near strangers. Thirdly,  I think maybe because there's a part of me that understands what it's like to meet someone in some European city, purely by accident, and truly connect.

But on the other hand, I feel like the sequel was...I don't know the right word...unsettling? Like here are these two characters who have held on so much to something that happened in the past that it has truly fucked them up. But we do that, don't we? We occupy this reality where memory almost becomes more important than what we have now. And that worries me. But to some extent, we can't escape it. It shapes who we become later. It exists in the music that occupied the same space and time. It is what makes our lives tolerable when it becomes, however temporarily, intolerable. It is why we have pictures on walls and friends scattered across the globe. Because at one time, we shared something that mattered. And it doesn't have to be some random perfect romance. It just has to be some random perfect something.

Our friendship: Eleven years later.

My best friend and I went to a funeral yesterday. Between that situation and the four years it's been since we last saw each other, we really lived up the 36 hours we got to spend together. It was the usual beer and chilling out and making fun of each other. And it was everything I needed. As nice as it's been to see some old friends since I came back, given the choice of all my friends, I would almost always choose to spend the day with him. Because he gets me and I get him and it's comfortable and easy.

We keep growing up (sort of) and leading more and more disparate lives. And even though I know that he'll always know me, sometimes right before I see him I worry that I'm going to show up and our relationship won't be what it has always been. Yesterday, he told me something that made me realize that the dynamics of our friendship will always be the way they've always been.

Yesterday, my best friend told me which story in our long history he tells people who don't know me when he's explaining our friendship. I use the exact same story.

13 August: Life and death and the stories in between

I've been very neglectful. I have nothing to write, these days. I don't feel, these days. I just am. Nothing to do, nothing to feel, just existing.

But not today.

Today, an old friend celebrated her 30th birthday. And my grandfather celebrated his 88th.

This morning the mother of a very good friend of mine lost her battle with cancer.

This afternoon the sister of a friend gave birth.

Today, my best friend called me home.*

Today, I miss my Belgian brother (Nicolas) so much that my heart hurts.**

I always miss Prague so much that my heart hurts.

Today, everything I've lived, all the stories I have about the places I've been, the loves I've had, my friends in all of their myriad countries and cultures and skin colours, my family, everything and everywhere and everyone who have shaped who I am, seem incredibly important.

*I will see him next week. I can't wait. But I still feel an immense amount of guilt over having missed his wedding last summer.

**In fairness this is in part because last night I found his pictures from our semester together that I had totally forgotten that I had and had never really gone through -- in which I found some fantastic pictures of our time together that made me laugh -- and then by happenstance woke up to a fantastic email from him.

Home: My life at 30.

Home is a word that doesn't really mean anything to me. Since I turned 18, I have lived in 11 places in three countries. Home, to me, is usually wherever I happen to be.

As a result, I can feel at home in a lot of places. Reykjavik was beyond brilliant*, Boston was as awesome as I remember. Even S.P's neighbourhood in NYC was somewhere I could feel at home given a month or two. And really, what it comes down to, is how a city feels. I've visited cities I could live in and cities I couldn't. I've *lived* in cities I could live in and cities I couldn't. 

I'm beginning to realize that while I have nothing to show for my 30 years like some of my friends, I have things that are far more intangible that I think make me richer. I may not have one home, but I have travelled more than most of my peers; I have friends in 22 countries and 26 states on 5 continents who I would visit without a second thought given half a chance. What many of them have in a house or a Lexus or an iPhone or whatever, I have in memories and passport stamps and photographs and the amount of quality beer I've consumed. And if we're being honest, I think that I would always choose those intangibles over what they have. They chose to have something they can touch, I chose to have something I will always have. In 20 years, will I care that today I can't afford an iPhone? No. Because instead of buying an iPhone, I went to Jordan and slept in the red desert.

I am okay. I don't need a house; I needed Hungary.

*I loved Reykjavik and while it's true I was there during the midnight sun, it's a city I think I could live in. Unlike a lot of the other visitors I met (honeymooners, students who were there for two months, random other strangers), I had no problem with the constant daylight. I suspect this is because of my natural schedule where it's often getting light before I go to bed. I really, really enjoyed Iceland. It's a gorgeous country and the people were some of the best I've ever met. Icelanders are incredibly friendly, warm people and being that I was travelling alone, that was really awesome!

Happy Birthday: The bittersweet.

Today is the Ex-Fiance's 30th birthday. I never know how to feel about his birthday when it rolls around, but I always feel the same way. We haven't spoken since I moved to Prague and I don't ask and our mutual friends don't tell. This is probably for the best.

I started writing a novel after we started dating the second time around. Some of it was true, some of it was not, some of it was true in the sense that it happened, but not in the sense that it didn't happen to me. But the ending of it was the ending that had always been, in some way or another, with all of my boyfriends. Or rather what the ending would have been if I'd loved them a little more. Or if they'd loved me a little more. It hurts me now to see the ending I wrote for my characters because there's a lot of it that ended up being somewhat accurate. I'll spare you the understated dialogue, but here's the paragraph at at the end...

From the manuscript:

If it had been a movie, there would have been a lingering kiss, the kind reserved for lovers in the purest sense of the word, but this was not a movie where the audience feels some deep sympathetic sorrow for the characters who, under different circumstances, could have spent all eternity together. Brennen and I were never those characters. So there would be no heartbroken sigh from the woman in the third row while we exchanged last looks or worse, last kisses over an agonizingly long period of time, no backwards glances over the shoulder or turning and running through the terminal to catch each other. We said our goodbyes as best we could and that was it. That really was the last time I saw Brennen. We kept in touch for a year or so and then everything changed again. I moved to Prague and he got married and that was that.

That all makes more sense if you can read it in context, I promise, but some things aren't meant for other people to read. Even if they're just fiction. But the basic premise remains. The Ex-Fiance (whose name is not Brennen) and I had a similar final split. The details aren't exactly the same, obviously, but what you read above is.

I didn't know, then, that in the end we would split up, that we would want lives so completely different that they couldn't be reconciled. There was a period of time that I really did think we'd spend forever together. I didn't know, then, that I would move to Prague, it was just somewhere that I'd always wanted to go. Weirdly, we did keep in touch for a while and I did move to Prague and then we stopped communicating. We stopped having more than passing things in common and that's okay.

I sincerely hope he's happy, wherever he is. 

I hope that he got everything he wanted.

The bucket list: Revisited and revised.

As my life changes, so too does my bucket list. Things get crossed off because they are no longer important. Things get added because new ideas present themselves.

(I promise I'll post about Israel and Jordan soon...the trip was great!)

So here's the list revised...

1. Get my doctorate
2. See the Northern Lights
3. Hike a glacier
4. Live in a fishing village
5. See the Midnight Sun game
6. Touch the Stanley Cup

7. Take my dad, grandfather and brother to a Leafs game
8. Have a paper published in a reputable journal
9. Have a book published in my field of study

10. Celebrate St. Patrick's Day in Ireland -- 17 March 2009, 2010

11. Road trip across Canada
12. See as much of the world as I can including, but not limited to: Serbia, Croatia, Iceland -- 3 - 8 June 2010, Greece, Morocco, Egypt, South Africa, Thailand, Israel -- 24 - 27 April, 2 - 8 May 2010, Jordan -- 27 April - 2 May 2010, New Zealand, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Sweden -- 28 April - 5 May 2009, Norway, Hungary -- 31 December 2009 - 7 January 2010, Russia, Ireland -- 22 - 26 April 2009 the first time, the Maldives, the Seychelles, India, Cuba, Spain, Portugal, Turkey, Monaco, Australia, Bolivia and Costa Rica
13. See all 50 US states (I'm at 42 at the moment)
14. See all 13 Canadian provinces and territories (I've got something like half here, which is embarrassingly low)

15. Live on an island -- 3 September 2008 - 3 June 2010
16. Learn to ballroom dance
17. Play the cymbals in a performance of the prelude of Bizet's 'Carmen'
18. Drive a zamboni
19. Walk barefoot on the grass at Camden Yards
20. See every AA ballpark in one summer
21. See every AAA ballpark in one summer
22. See every major league ballpark in one summer
23. Take my kids to watch the ships pass through the locks on the Welland Canal
24. Have kids
25. Make the perfect batch of pecan puffs
26. Run a half marathon before I turn 32
27. Teach college students that history isn't at all what they learned in high school
28. Have a romantic relationship where there isn't an imbalance of power (I've had nothing but...sometimes I have the power and sometimes he does)
29. Complete a triathlon
30. Learn Russian to a point where I can carry on a conversation in the language and not feel completely overwhelmed

31. Visit my grandfather's home town in BC
32. Bungee jump
33. Sky dive
34. Go to a World Cup match (ideally with someone who likes football as much as I do)
35. See England play at Wembley
36. See Spurs play at White Hart Lane (with a little better luck, I'd have gotten this one done last weekend)
37. Host a dinner party -- Thanksgiving, 2007, 18 December 2008
38. Have a room in my house, the sole purpose of which is to serve as a library
39. Read all of the "classics"
40. Have a Newfoundland (the dog, not the province)
41. Stay overnight in a lighthouse
42. Spend an entire week away from the computer
43. Learn to identify ten constellations not called Orion, Casseopeia and the Big Dipper -- in progress
44. Reconcile history with my faith and establish exactly what it is that I believe -- Winter 2010
45. Hike the Grand Canyon
46. Spend a Christmas drinking on the beach in an exotic location

47. Drive the Autobahn
48. Sleep under the stars
49. Bike across the US (or the UK)
50. Ride an elephant (though I would settle for a camel)
51. See a peacock in the wild
52. Ride the Trans-Siberian Railroad

53. Surf (if my mum can do it, I can too!)
54. Scuba dive on the Great Barrier Reef (so cliche, but there must be a reason everyone wants to do it)
55. Go to Burning Man
56. Attend a sporting event as a VIP -- 13 August 2008 Sparta Praha v. Panathinaikos Athens
57. Coach a swim team

58. See a shuttle launch
59. Watch the sun come up on the Charles Bridge -- 19 August 2008
60. Share a road trip with someone -- Ireland, Easter Break 2009
61. Learn to shoot a gun
62. Live for at least a month in a flat/house with a view of the ocean
63. Live on a houseboat for a week
64. Test drive a car I will most definitely never be able to afford
65. Fast for three days to better appreciate the fact that some people regularly don't eat for three days at a time because they don't have anything to eat
66. Hitchhike

67. Go to Wimbledon
68. Ride on a Ducati (I don't necessarily have to be driving...in fact, ideally, there would be a very hot man with a very sexy accent driving)
69. Photograph a demonstration -- 10 January 2009

70. Get through Tolstoy's 'War and Peace' before I turn 35
71. Learn to rollerblade in a way that doesn't resemble a toddler taking her first steps
72. Learn to properly throw a frisbee (because I *totally* suck at it)
73. Become the premier historian in my field

74. Retire to a fishing village in Nova Scotia
75. Have season tickets to the symphony, opera and/or ballet
76. Learn to play the guitar
77. Compete in a masters swimming event
78. Dance without being so self conscious -- 29 August 2008 spontaneously in the foyer of a random building in Old Town with Lew

79. Brew beer -- November 2008
80. Learn to play chess

81. Buy a house
82. Have a real bathtub (read: one with feet)
83. Learn to cook a really great dish by heart
84. Learn one poem by heart
85. Go to an ice bar (as in a bar made from ice)
86. Visit a fully functioning commune
87. Attend an opening at an art gallery

88. Stay overnight in a treehouse (belonging to my kids or in an exotic location...doesn't really matter)
89. Teach my kids to score a baseball game
90. Show up at the airport with just a book, my camera and my passport and hop the next available international flight, no matter where it is headed
91. Crash a kickass party -- 20 September 2008, 7 May 2010
92. Spend a rainy day at home listening to classical music and/or opera on vinyl records
93. Spend a night sleeping on the beach (preferably not passed out from too many Christmas cocktails)
94. Master liquid eyeliner -- January 2009
95. Go to a bonfire party on the beach -- 7 May 2010, Tel Aviv, Israel
96. Try as many new foods as possible -- ongoing
97. Sit in on a rally for something I vehemently oppose
98. Go on a wine tasting tour -- 5 May 2010
99. Go a week without buying anything at all
100. Go to a professional football match with R. (because I think secretly, he'd love it)
101. Own a 1968 manual transmission SS Camaro convertible

102. Solve a Rubik's Cube -- 2 April 2009
103. Participate in a polar bear swim
104. Run a 5k

105. See Roman ruins -- April 2010

106. Learn to appreciate scotch 

107. Submit a photograph to a competition

108. Master an accent

109. See the midnight sun -- June 2010

The future: A cautious optimism.

1. There's some potential on the job front. I found out some promising things about a job I want very, very much.

2. Even if the job doesn't work out and I've still got nothing when I go home, my old roommate, S., offered me the spare room at her house in North Carolina for a couple months while I get myself figured out, which is an infinitely better option than going back to my parents' place in New York where it will be all but impossible to find even a waiting job. 

3. Dear Iceland volcano, please sort yourself out by this time next week. I'm sure you will, but I'm gonna be some pissed if I have to spend my birthday in Belfast instead of exploring Petra with my friends. 

4. I'm really ready to move on to whatever's next even though I'm more uncertain than usual about what that is. I don't know where I'll be or what I'll be doing, but I get the sense it'll be okay. It always is. 

5. The Austin Marathon...I promised Travis that if he started training for the Austin Marathon next February, I would train for a half...and if I'm in Texas, run it. I need to get my ass in gear. Not just because of this half...I've put back on all the weight I lost in Prague, which is making me really uncomfortable in my own skin. It's not awesome.

Leaving Europe: The pros and cons.

After two years and eight months of living in Europe, I will be returning to North America at the end of May. Part of me is relieved. Part of me is dreading it.

The pros: 

1. A car. I will have one again. This makes me insanely happy.

2. Sun. There will be sun. And warmth. And a proper summer.

3. My mental health. Will be much improved.

4. The cost of living. Will be numerically the same as it is here, but without the exchange rate of 1.6 - 1.8 dollars to the pound (depending on the day).

5. Traffic. Will be on the proper side of the road.

6. Living alone again. I love my housemates; they are all really awesome people who I love being around. But I *really* miss living alone. Here, when I get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, I have to get dressed; when I live alone, this is not the case.

7. Anchor Steam. Will no longer be $3.50/bottle.

8. Reykjavik. It turns out that not only was Iceland Air the cheapest option from London to Boston for the return, but they have a tourism program where because you have a layover in Reykjavik, you have the option of going and spending a few days or a week or whatever in Iceland before you complete your journey...at no extra charge. I'll be spending five days there on the way home.

The cons: 

1. Airfare. It will not be $70 to fly to Paris on a whim anymore. New Year's trips to Hungary and birthday trips to Israel will no longer be an option.

2. The Mini-UN reunion 2010 in Amsterdam. I will miss it. This is my biggest regret of the year.

3. The World Cup. Will now be showing at some ridiculous time of the morning for me.

4. Beer. There's damn good beer in Europe. There's also damn good beer in the US, it's just harder to find on tap. Also, I imagine that bottles of my favourite beer will no longer be affordable in large quantities.

5. Jobs. I still don't have one. It is starting to stress me out.*

6. Readjustment. I imagine there will be one, though I doubt it will be as severe as my acclimation was to Belfast after leaving Prague.

*Is it wrong that this is number five on this list after travel, my friends, a football tournament and beer even though it's probably the most important one as far as being able to afford all of the other things?

History, context and the Irish Catholic church.

There's been a whole thing over here with the archbishop/Cardinal of a diocese nearby who in 1975, as a junior priest, was witness to the signing of a document forcing children who had been abused by a senior priest to remain silent. This all came to light a few weeks back and people are very upset about it. 

Let me make this abundantly clear; I do not, in any way, condone the principle of silence that the Church (any church because they all do it, but the Catholics seem to be the most visible) has adopted, nor do I think that sexual abuse is anything other than deplorable.

I do not, however, believe that all the blame should fall on this priest just because he's the only one who is still alive. I think it's awful that that's the way the Church has dealt with things over the course of its history, but I don't think that any of us, living at that time, in that position, would have done anything other than what Sean Brady did. And for us to sit here 35 years later and say we wouldn't is incredibly self-righteous.  

Do I think it was right? Of course not. Would I have done the same thing? Weighing the options, absolutely. If I'm a junior priest in Northern Ireland in the 1970s, you can bet your ass that I'm keeping my mouth shut and my head down. 

So I have a really hard time with the way it's all being treated by the media, both here and over in the states. I think it's a very dangerous thing to pass judgment on history using modern mentalities. By doing that, we brush away the realities of the society in which the events took place and to some extent that makes it too easy to dismiss that society all together. Can we all agree that it was wrong? Certainly. But to condemn it with the self-righteousness of modernity and in the light of countless other exposed similar agreements and payouts is useless. 

Things like this will continue to be exposed and people like Sean Brady will continue to be the scapegoat for a much, much bigger problem. The problem isn't the Sean Bradys. They are merely a symptom. The problem is the Church policy. Addressing the symptom with modern flair accomplishes nothing. Until an international, high-powered group of someone are willing to stand up and fight the problem itself at its root in Rome, the problem doesn't go away. I feel like this is common sense, but there are so many people who are happy to berate the symptom.

Progress, of a sort: Jobs, moves, trips and books.

I used to be so good at keeping up this blog. I used to have things to say. And now I feel like the only time I use it is to exorcise the demons, as it were. Which is all very emo of me. Anyway, a few developments that are mostly non-emo.

1. The trip to Israel and Jordan for my birthday is coming together nicely. As luck would have it, not only are two of my Goucher friends in Jerusalem and Amman, the French member of the Mini-UN just moved to Jerusalem for a six-month project. I'm pretty excited about this trip!

2. I applied for my dream job last weekend, so cross your fingers. It's a job I'm really well qualified for and a job where I have an in. The only "downside" is that it's back in Texas. It's not that I didn't like Texas, I just didn't like the Texas-y hyper-conservative, Jesus-y politics. I don't do well with hyper-conservative, theocratic politics. But I have good people in Texas (even if they're all spread out now. R.A. has moved back and is in San Antonio, Q. is in Houston, Travis is in Austin, Jaime's in Fort Worth, Daniel's in Lubbock and V. is still in Canyon) and I loved the weather and the scenery, so it really wouldn't be bad news. 

3. As for when I return from my extended stay in Europe, it looks like it'll be two months sooner than planned. And two months from now. I'm most looking forward to getting in the car and going on a LONG drive. Like 16 hours. And cheese nips. Seriously. I just hope I can find a job by then.

4. I have accepted that I am not going to finish reading 'War and Peace' before my 30th birthday. I just can't get into it. Someday I'll get through it. But it's not going to be in the next five weeks.

St. Paddy's week: Beckham, Firefly, the races and one half of the Swedes.

1. One half of my Swedish contingent of friends, Rickard and Caroline, were in from Sweden for four days to celebrate St. Patrick's Day in Ireland. I was *so* happy to see them. I'm closer with Rickard than I am with Caroline and because I talk to him probably 3 of the 4 times I talk to them, I had forgotten how much I really enjoy her company. But anyway, it was so much fun to have them here. Four days of drinking and general carousing were much needed; I've really missed having people around who really know me. And they got on really well with my housemates, which was unsurprising, but really great. As it happened, Club Manager Housemate left the city for the week to avoid the rioting that went on in our neighbourhood on St. Paddy's Day last year and generously offered up his room. We bought him two cases of beer as a thank you.

2. I am disproportionately upset by Beckham's achilles injury. I know he's nowhere near as fast as he used to be and he's always been a liability, but everything he has ever said and done has proved that he truly loves the game. And for this to happen this close to the World Cup is really sad. I'd have liked to have seen him go out on his own terms. Such a cruel twist, this.

3. The Vet had a friend over from Belgium last weekend, so she and Lawyer Housemate invited me along to go to the races. A lot of the people racing horses were clients of The Vet (whose practice is in equine medicine), so we got to be up close with the horses and everything. It was really fun. My first ever horse races. I put my first and only ever bet on a horse...I had a bit of inside info, to be fair, but I put a fiver on the horse of one of The Vet's clients in the last race of the day and won 15 quid. And promptly retired from betting the horses. Nowhere to go from there but down. Anyway, it was a great day. The weather was beautiful (which if you read on a regular basis, you know never happens) and I got out of the city (which if you read on a regular basis, you know never happens) and we got down to the beach before we headed out to the peninsula and it was so needed and SO much fun.

4. The job hunt is going. I've applied to a LOT of jobs and gotten few responses from any of them. I'm getting a little desperate. I do *not* want to move back to my parents' place in back ass nowhere...even though neither of them actually live there anymore. I'm a smart girl with a great education and a good level of experience, why can't I find a job? And it doesn't help that I've been watching a lot of Firefly lately and all I can think is "why don't I live in a time when space travel is the norm?" I have met a lot of people in my time abroad who are like me...who would jump at the chance to do what they do in space.The idea of seeing a vast expanse of unknown is fantastic to me and it's unfortunate that I never will. I just wish I could figure my life out.

5. As for The Graphic Designer, it is unfortunate that our relationship has grown since we left Hungary. If only in the sense that he's in one country and I'm in another and about to move across an ocean. This is not ideal. The more we get to know each other, the more I like him and the more I'm aware that it's impossible. As a friend though, he's stunning and challenging and I love it.

Gold: Why this game means everything.

My country won a record number of gold medals in Vancouver. And good for them! That's a pretty amazing accomplishment. 14 gold medals. But before the gold medal hockey game, I would gladly have traded 13 of them to ensure that 14th and I couldn't have asked for a better game to get it.

R.A. and I were just talking about how in the US, what matters is the medal. Doesn't matter which one, it's the count. In Canada, it's about the men's hockey gold. Nothing else matters. It's great that we got 26 medals (a record haul for Canada overall), but if were were to ask the average Canadian on the street going into the game, 95% of them would have sold off the 13 other golds and whatever rounds out the count for a hockey gold because that's the one that *really* matters.

R.A. "I'll take being better at everything else over being better at hockey, any day."

Me:  "Funny, I'll take being better at hockey over being better at pretty much everything else."

What it comes down to is this: in ten years, no one is going to remember who won gold or silver or bronze in the cross country skiing. I will not remember in four years who won the biathlon or the aerial skiing. (I don't remember that now and it was last week, so...) But in 20 years, if you ask the average Canadian on the street how today's hockey game went down, they'll be able to tell you. We were up 2-0, the US came back and tied it with 24 seconds to play and then Sid scored in overtime to win it for us. In 15 years, an entire generation of hockey players will be saying, "I spent my childhood on the pond pretending to be Sidney Crosby scoring the winning goal for Canada in overtime at the Olympics." I promise you that.

If this game was everything that I love and is good about hockey (apart from the heart attack I was sure was coming when the US tied it), this win was the future of Hockey Canada.

This game will be the one that I talk about when I'm 90. It was a fight. And we won. Victory has never, and possibly will never again taste this sweet. A hard fought gold medal on home ice with an overtime goal from the biggest superstar Canada has seen since Wayne Gretzky. 

If you were born to the maple leaf, it was perfect.