This year itself has presented a lot of changes in my life. It was a year that I decided to quit my job in Calgary, pack up, ship my cat via Air Canada Cargo, and drive across country to move back in with my parents; leave a relationship that I knew was going nowhere and basically – start over – again. I did and ended up quitting that job too, starting my own business and diving head deep into freelance designing and programming. How much has changed in a year? Basically everything – right down to my hair colour and style (I’ve got the “ombre” hair look made famous and popular via Sarah Jessica Parker and Lily Aldrige). And I feel great.

I sit in front of my current vision board in my office and smile every time I see it. Mostly because focusing on the things, feelings and experiences I’ve put out there and on that vision board have been coming true. It’s not surprising because that’s what’s supposed to happen, after all! Just exciting, which keeps my mood up – which is always a good thing.

I’ve been attending a lot of events, missing out on some other ones and wishing I knew about even more. Lately, I went to Boobyball Flash 2010 – a fundraiser that helped to create awareness for breast cancer in younger women, with a whole lotta drag; the 2nd anniversary of Lush & Lavish Salon and Spa at 200 Ossington in the Queen West area – where I purchased a couple of new anti-aging face products (I have to deal with the fact that the age is creeping up there at some point) from http://www.eminenceorganics.com/ and a facial package from Carol at Lush. I can’t wait. Okay – so many I haven’t been to so many events, but I’ve been thinking about them.

Somehow, in the midst of all this work and networking, I do need to sleep.

“Most people would rather be certain they’re miserable than risk being happy.”

I saw this quote today and started thinking about life and the way we live it. The way we walk through each day, focusing on the people who cut us off while driving, the rude barista at Starbucks in the morning or the fact that no matter how early we leave to get somewhere, something always manages to make us late. I am no stranger to being this person sometimes. It happens. It’s inevitable. The inability to be positive at all hours of the day.

Then I can talk to people who really are able to put things in perspective for me. Like a sister. Who thankfully is bored enough at work that she can write me emails that remind me to live in the present and not worry about the past. And not the past like last year, but the past like yesterday. It really puts things in perspective, thinking like that. Realizing what’s important and what’s not. Realizing what’s worth expending energy into and what’s not – and remembering how to differentiate between the two.

I’ve happened to realize that nothing is life is simple. It really isn’t. And the harder to strive for simplicity and ease, the harder it is to find. It’s not about finding the perfect routine that will keep you calm at all hours of the day but more about finding that calm within yourself. So that when you are handed a situation that might make you a little colourful, you have that calm that allows entrance for ease.

Over fifteen people came – my highest turn out yet! And I felt it was a great success, mostly, as I realized that we all have so many people in our lives that love us and want to spend time with us – whether we’re single, dating or married. It’s these people that come out from all facets of our lives that we’re able to see just what kind of relationships we are capable of maintaining. I phrase it in that way because it’s hard work to maintain friendships and as the group you’re friends with increases, the harder it is to maintain all aspects of what a friendship entails. The description of what a friendship entails can be grossly misleading as well; depending on whom you’re talking to.

A friend of mine decided to cease being friends with me a couple of weeks ago and I was left hurt, blind sided and (true to form) asking questions to no one in particular about what could have possibly happened. This person was a very dear friend of mine throughout our university years but as we grew older and drifted apart (ranging from what cities we lived in to our careers) our emails remained and the odd phone call was placed. Communication was there between us but we’d definitely lost the closeness we had in terms of breaking news and calling the other on speed dial.
Suffice to say, our friendship hadn’t maintained it’s strength these past few years but I suppose betrayal and loyalty had its hand in the demise of the friendship at the end of the day. I was accused of being dishonest but with no situation – I guess I’m just supposed to know what I did. But I don’t.

For a person who was not in my life on a daily basis, I’m finding it difficult to just let go. I’m constantly wondering what happened and re-thinking everything I’ve done and said over the last month of two. I’m a person who hates being hated. I’m a person who doesn’t like not being liked. Maybe that’s an issue to deal with at another time, but for right now – it feels wrong. Friendships don’t last all the time, I know this, and people grow apart, move on and up or just don’t blend anymore. But I’ve never had a friendship just blow up in my face so quickly with no explanation. We’re done. You’re done. You’re a horrible person. It leaves someone to question – am I?

Could I have done more in the friendship to make sure it didn’t end this way? Probably, I could have done (or not done) whatever it is that garnered me this position of “ex-friend” in the first place – but how are you to know if the other party won’t talk to you?

Many in my life say that dwelling on this situation or even the person shouldn’t matter and I should just move on and rid myself of the negativity. I’m all for it – but tell my mind that. I work in an office alone, being creative and it’s a bit difficult to pull creativity out of the woodwork when you have something blocking it from exposure.

With time, things will improve, I know – they already have, but I can’t help but wonder – if I could go back and do things differently, would I? Probably not. Instead, I would probably go back to the Saturday evening of the long weekend when all the friends that could make it to the cottage, had, and were all eating hamburgers, hot dogs and sausages I had supplied for the party. I stood on the grass watching them like a creep all laughing on the deck and I couldn’t help but smile.

I have amazing friends. I have amazing people in my life that would do anything for me and I’d do the same. I have friends that I haven’t seen in years, yet still make time for me if we need it. I have friends that push me to be the best I can be when I don’t think I have it in me. I have friends that understand my incessant ridiculous love of Sushi and don’t judge. I have friends that will just sit and watch television with me, because I love Cougar Town, even though they don’t. I have friends that love me and fight with me and laugh with me and smile with me. And we fight; I’ve fought with all my friends. The difference is, the friendship is worth way more than the fight and that’s why it’s a hell of a lot easier to maintain.

I went to bed earlier than I have on a Sunday in a really long time. Just because I was tired, and I was bored but I couldn’t help but wonder, as I stared at the slanted ceiling of my new room, why I wanted to do this. To take hold once again, a glimpse of the life I had back in Calgary. Complete independence, proximity to (almost) everyone I know and freedom. A few things that I haven’t even gone without since I’ve been back anyway. Yet, my stubborn head brought me here, with a “Toronto” address, Alberta plates, and Mississauga P.O. Box and a life of vacations and adventures.

Without a photo on the wall, but a photograph of the Manchester Ferris wheel, a birthday gift from my sister one year, and a couple of new cute black boxes from IKEA which now hold my make up – a bed frame made without the metal bars, so a mattress sitting in the middle of it with no support, I lay there, for now, wondering in an empty room.

Has summer officially started? Well, it’s 9 PM before it gets dark, so it seems like it. Only time will tell what kind of summer it’ll be.

The end result (one of):

I’m really excited to see the rest of them! Perfect for my new website that’s currently in the works. I need some updated professional shots! And now I have them. A quiet night turned a little longer than expected and I wasn’t home and in bed until about 3 am only to wake up the next afternoon ready and waiting for my impending lunch date with Keisha – always a lovely catch up.

My Saturday night began back at Lindsey’s where the girls all got ready and drank some lovely wine – always a plus! Lindsey detailed the evening perfectly in her recount of the evening at Mercatto.

We got called the Canadian version of Sex and the City, many, many times:

We unfortunately didn’t get the amount of polaroids that Lindsey had intended, but the night was a huge success anyway. Ended off at Brooklyn on Queen for a quick cocktail, I was on my way home by 1 AM feeling a bit older at my exhaustion and cramped feet.

Sunday was filled with friends, beer and a Blue Jays game, which proved to be a small preview of what this summer is probably going to be like living with the girls in the Annex this summer: Fabulous.

All in all, it was just one of those weekends. A weekend I hadn’t expected nor planned for (every single thing I did this weekend was planned on Friday night with the exception of Saturday night girls dinner). It was one of those weekends when you hang out with true friends and realize who they are. Getting over disagreements and growing up. A weekend of first “I love yous” for some and for others, first drunk texts that weren’t full of hatred and disappointment. It was a weekend that made me full of hope and excitement for the summer. Who can’t love that?

Unfortunately, my nerves kicked in and I felt largely unprepared for what felt like a big test. Simple words I’ve known my whole life escaped me and I was left sitting there, my mind blank, nervous. However, unlike other Italian outings my heritage finds myself in – where I am called out by old Italian men at my lack of knowledge on the language, despite my father being so heavily involved in the promotion of Italy in general – I was encouraged, assisted and complimented on the fact that I was even there. It definitely created a sense of relief at in my attendance. The feelings didn’t help my lack of knowledge on the language, though. You see, when you’re meeting people for the first time and tell them stories about things that have happened in your life – you use a lot of past tense. Oh the past tense, a lovely new set of verbs, conjugation (or as I like to call them – “word endings”) and irregular verbs that have to be memorized in addition to everything else. Past tense wasn’t a unit I excelled in in my Italian classes. Mostly because I didn’t take Italian classes long enough throughout university to even get to them. Every two words, it felt like, I had to stop and ask what a word meant in Italian and how to conjugate it and then figure out if it was a dialect or proper Italian. Prompting me to hardly remember what the story I was telling was about in the first place.

At around ten, my friend and I left and ended up taking in Hemingways in Yorkville for a drink and ended up sharing life stories – which can seem pretty amazing and crazy when you’re summing them up in five minute intervals. We patrolled the surroundings to judge whether there were cute boys or not (yes and no) and dared each other to create random conversations with the ones who proved to be the most endearing at first glance.

We failed. Mostly, though, because of laziness. Getting into our old age, we were both afraid of sparking conversations with cute boys because my Heineken was making me yawn and her boyfriend kept texting to ask what time she was coming over. It proved to be a different night than most of the ones I’ve had lately – and for that I was grateful.

Grateful to be included in such an evening that didn’t feel adolescent, drama filled or weird. It was random, but randomly planned.

And it was nice.

I feel like the days are flying by and somehow at the end of them, I am getting things accomplished and yet I don’t seem to find any satisfaction in any of it – and then, of course, I start to wonder why. My Type A personality tells me I’m not doing enough, every moment spent in “down time” is precious time wasted that I could have been producing something, creating something else and thinking about doing even more. The realist in me tries to take a step back, relax and realize that while going out for Thai dinner with a friend, it’s completely okay that I’ve left my BlackBerry in the car. Completely okay.

What am I addicted to, I wonder. What is so important about receiving an email as soon as it arrives in my inbox at 8 pm? It’s not like I can really do much at that time until I get to a computer. I mean, I can – but it’ll usually involve an apologetic process to whomever I’m with about how it’s work and I can’t let it go. When the truth is, I can let it go, I just choose not to because I think I feel a certain sense of importance at the fact that I’m needed in a work capacity after regular business hours. How insane. Who even cares? If they care, the person/people I’m with, it’ll be that I’m being rude, not important! I know this, yet I check the message anyway.

I need a balance. And I wonder why this balance doesn’t come naturally to me. My birthday is October 1st – smack dab in the middle of the Libra, the astrological sign of balance. So why can’t I concentrate on doing one thing at a time? Loving one thing at a time? Experiencing one thing at a time? Can I control my life enough to create that? Is that something one can do – I can do?

I’m so addicted to being in the know. I need to be in the know. With news – local, national and world – with whatever social media site I’m viewing, technology, bestsellers, movies, music, sports and people. I’m left to wonder, am I tapping into my old high school self? The one who felt a constant need to fit in and therefore “love” everything so I always had something to talk about with a new face. I’m excited for knowledge, learning and education – but every day, with every piece of knowledge – I wonder where the hell it all goes!

Or … is it a reason for a lack of total productivity and procrastination?

I’ve also realized that my fixed expenses for every month has taken a turn for the worse and it looks like I’m going to be returning to “three-job-emilia” to keep up as a part of me is a bit apprehensive over what the heck I’m going to do, especially with the Christmas season coming. The other part of me wants to go …. Relax, like usual, it’ll all work out because it always does.

Perhaps I just begin to feel like this because I tend to listen to nostalgic and depressing music while I wait to board my plane. Habit. But what are you gonna do?

The thing I know is, I can’t believe how much I learned while on this trip. Not only about being a sales person, or an event coordinator, or even a planner. I learned so much about the United States, and if anybody knows me, they’ll know me as a 100% Canadian supporter and very skeptical of anything US related (whoops, did I say that?). The thing is, after being here for five weeks, not touring one specific city but actually experiencing the workforce here, albeit a tiny glimpse, I have a bit of a changed view. The amount of people I spoke to, the information I received on how their own people view others in the same country proved to be half-patriot and half-separatist. I found it extremely interesting.

I also found it amazing the vast amount of metropolis cities and realizing that, coming from a country that basically has three or four major cities that people can immigrate to and actually make a decent living, my view on the US was a bit biased. Okay, I already knew that, but my mind was opened a tiny bit. You really can go anywhere you want and start from scratch and make it. You have about a billion choices. Fifty choices, actually, because every state has a major city with a “headquarters” of some sort, a division and it’s probably roughly a two to three hour drive from the neighbouring state, and cheap to fly to.

It surprised me. I even have a new view on the health care system. Don’t get me wrong, it still is ridiculous that more than 11 million people don’t have health care but, boy was it interesting to see the difference in opinion depending on what state I was in.

I learned a lot of things from a lot of people on this trip. I didn’t learn all of them on day one, or day …. thirty three? I learned them from those close to me, far, ones I’d just met – everyone.

And that was pretty exciting and scary. And really, extremely … humbling.

“It’s ya’ll – say it!” I get reprimanded from one of the lovely ladies I’ve met through this wonderful travelling experience that hasn’t picked up on my sarcastic tone.

“Ya ya, okay – here I go, ‘ya’ll” I manage to spew out between Bloody Mary induced giggles (I have resorted to drinking extra spicy Bloody Mary’s here, nobody in the US can make a Caesar – half don’t even know what Clamato juice is).

“And do you wanna know what the plural for ‘ya’ll’ is?” She asks while I begin to answer her with ya’lls in mind. “All ya’ll,” she bursts out, as if she’s making fun of her own accent, her peoples own accent.

“It’s not the land of the grammatically correct now is it?” I question.

“Well, honey, Bush came from here – what do you think?” She replies.

I probably would have laughed at her liberal-esque comment but I then became so entranced with the random bamboo growing on the side of the restaurant that I completely forgot, and just walked away from her.

“Do they not have bamboo in Canada or something?” The other woman laughed after the group had now begun to wait for me while I attempted to grab a good bamboo shot on my BlackBerry’s camera.

“No, that’s the point!” I shouted back.

Finally, they managed to get me in the SUV that was carpooling us back to our hotel – the lovely Embassy Suites in San Marco, Texas. Finally a good night out on a whirlwind of a tour that started God knows how long ago because I’m just so frazzled when it comes time for “what day is it?”

But I guess that is the life of a travelling businesswoman!

lake louise, alberta

On such a brisk, yet sunny Autumn day, the lake was very calm and serene. It’s funny that things always seem different, relaxed and just when you’re away. It also seems that the second you return back to regular life, things are hectic, crazy and upsetting – all the time. The things that never seem to bother you when visiting Mother Nature now cause you to bite the side of your cheek when stressed, according to dentists.

What if I always lived next to a big, beautiful, turquoise lake? Would life always seem serene, or would the calm laps of water find some way to stress life out for me?