home café

I suppose I could write a little more about the previous two entries. I finished A Home at the End of the World yesterday, and it turned out to be quite an engrossing read. I’ve mentioned before that I’d often thought about the possibility of creating a family based on not 2, but 3 individuals, and I wondered how perfect it would be if it actually worked. This idea was the central premise of the novel, which is why I was so looking forward to reading it. And I read it quickly. As I feared, I was finished only a few days after starting, and was forced to return to my world. The only difference was now I had a taste of someone else’s.

** update - It's time for winter, so I've redesigned. For those who may be curious, the banner photo was taken by my grandmother a couple years ago in a park a few blocks away from her home in Saskatchewan. **

I liked how it tasted. Even though the story didn’t go in the direction I thought it would, it left me with a much more real perception of the situation and how it might work in the real world. Needless to say, I’ve been somewhat messed up for the past few days… just wanting to leave everything behind and start something new… I don’t have anything holding me here except my immediate family, so what is there to stop me? I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s felt this way, who wants to try living a little differently to see how it might work out, and then effortlessly return to the life he once knew.

That’s how I feel. I know I can’t because I know people and environments and feelings will never be the same, but I’m tired and scared and repressed. I shouldn’t be, I know, but I am. I realize that moving to a new city and changing everything will likely be more of a negative impact on my life than a positive one. The thing is, however, that I simply need something different to come along.

This isn’t a new feeling to me either, because it is quite similar to how I felt last October… when I quit Mcdonalds, hacked off my hair, quit school, and started working at an office job full-time. To be honest it was a nice change, and one that I want to try again. This is what I was referring to in my previous entry: I told work I would leave at the end of August because I had applied to TWU with full intentions of going there in the fall. When that didn’t pan out the way I thought it would, I needed to find an alternative before I was out of a job… that alternative was to return to school to pursue a degree I had absolutely no interest in, based solely on career security and income for the future.

I’ve accepted the fact that I will fail at least one of my courses, because I have not been attending the lectures, tutorials, or doing any assignments or textbook readings for the past month and a bit. I’ve accepted the fact that I may very well fail a second course because I rarely do the assignments and honestly have no clue what’s going on in the lectures… but I take my notes and give the teacher an attentive look so she thinks I know what’s going on.

And yet I love being here. I enjoy attending the lectures and taking notes, even if I don’t read them or understand them. It’s so great to be around students all the time who are eager to learn and study. I like the grand spaces with hundreds of people wandering about, talking with friends, reading a book, or listening to their iPods. I love it. It makes me feel like I’m a part of something, even if I’m more of an outsider pretending to fit in with this community.

For the spring semester I’ve registered in an Archeology course, a physical Geography course, and a beginner’s Italian language course for two reasons:
1. To keep me busy while trying to figure out what to do my immediate future
2. To be educated on subjects I’m actually interested in but have never pursued before the opportunity is no longer available to me.

If there’s one thing I’ve realized in the past few days, it’s that there is no such thing as a perfect norm. I’ve always been frustrated when my mom mentions how things will get back to normal, and now I can slightly articulate why. I mean sure I’ve known it all along, but now I recognize it more plainly: I’m sure there’s next to no one who grows up, goes to university, gets a job and a wife and lives happily ever after. There will always be something standing in the way, whether it is marital troubles, disease or illness, lack of motivation, bad influences in childhood, birth defects, religious complications, addictions, and so on until everything is covered.

Like I hear every now and then, a life is simply a sum of the day-to-day experiences. There is no perfect life, and there is no ultimate goal to reach… “perfect” is whatever you have and wherever you are when you acknowledge that your life is ok. You might think it should or could be or will be better, but in reality, it already is – you simply haven’t wanted to recognize it for what it is.