SIMPLY ELABORATE blog

Posts Tagged ‘life’

After a long day on Friday, I went to Vecchio Frak on College for an Italian Meet Up. Now, before you go thinking I participated in some sort of Speed Dating (although, I am planning on attending one of those and blogging about it) event, it wasn’t. Instead, it was a meet up for lovers of the Italian language who wanted to meet other people with a love of Italian. Seeing as how I can manage with my meagre Italian on most days, provided I have my co-conversationalists speak very slowly and I’m allowed ample time to conjugate verbs in my mind before speaking, I wasn’t too worried about holding my own at the meet up.

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 promised someone I would continue working on my latest blog post tonight and post it. But I left my laptop at work, forgetting the document was started, opened and not saved on that computer and not the one at home. So then I started writing another post, same topic, from scratch and I hate it. Sitting in front of my computer in my sister’s old childhood room that has now doubled as my home office as of late unable to muster enough creativity to write something.

I used to be a night writer. Didn’t matter what the topic, as soon as sunset hit I could make these fingers type like nobody’s business about nothing in particular (although topics usually varied from school, the opposite sex, friendships and work among others) and everything in between.

Now, I feel as though I’m out of practice, out of habit and completely drained emotionally out of fear that I’m not pleasing enough people, not enough people care to even be pleased or that nothing’s ever good enough for me to share anymore. It’s a realization that I come to every time I sit down, ready to write. I think it comes from the fact that I sometimes creep over to my old writings and re-read the words that poured out of me, the feelings that overwhelmed me and judge my past self.

I find now, that the words free-flow out of me in the mornings, when the sun is shining and the world seems to be my oyster – a brand new beginning every day. Not that I’ve been so eager to get up early and type away in the mornings, but still. My life has changed me into somewhat of a morning person; if I can just find that motivation every day to get up early I’d be set. It was there for a while and somehow it faded (I’m sure the lure of website designing 24/7 had something to do with it) but it’s creeped back up with the presence of a new office location and a resounding sense of relaxation following my trip to Mexico last week.

So I’m sure the writing will eventually become more habitual, frequent and (let’s hope) more inspiring in the near future.

Next stop, gym.

I’m trying to figure out a lot about my life right now, while simultaneously just trying to live in the moment and accept it as it comes. Do you know how hard that is to do when you’ve diagnosed yourself as a Type A personality with a hint of Attention Deficit Disorder combined with this overwhelming desire to somehow make up for the last two years of my life being spent in oblivion?

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 have felt as though my life has been in limbo for the past few months. I’ve called them “the prospecting months” as I’ve spent countless hours prospecting people, places, marketing agencies, advertising opportunities, events, networking, dates and places to live.

This weekend was jam packed of relaxing work – which sounds more oxymoron than it really is. I’m grabbing more control on my routine and lifestyle and getting into a groove – most days. I’ve been thinking about my life and future so much (even though I know I should only be thinking of the present) and I can’t believe it’s been almost four months since I left Calgary. It blows my mind how much my life has changed since driving east on Highway 1 (16th Ave) and not looking back on October 13th 2009.

After how much everyone’s life has changed since I left, I realize that my life may have been easier if I stayed in Calgary, but I would be internally torn inside with a lot of things in my life and the thought of moving back to Toronto would have become a bigger choice than it was when I left.

It may sound confusing, and truthfully, it is. But I’m still excited. I’m excited for a lot of things because every day, I think while driving home for work and categorically go down a list of all the things I’ve learned that day. That technique in itself was worth the move, the big break up, the separation of the things, the wear and tear on my car, the missing of my friends – everything. Because when I drove home or took the bus from my position in Calgary, I didn’t do that. I didn’t do anything even close to that. I was at a standstill, constantly looking at the bottom corner of my computer screen praying the time to fast forward to 4:30 pm. Every day.

For the first time in my life I’m working hard every single day because I have to. There is no room for slacking in this position because if I slack, I don’t get the feeling of a closing sale; I don’t get the internally proud feeling of accomplishment; I don’t get the satisfaction of knowing that I learned a new way to strengthen a bond or relationship.

I’m doing that, every single day. And because of that, I know that in ten years, when I look back on my 25th year, the year that I moved back from Calgary to begin a new chapter of my life – I’ll remember how I took charge of my life, refused the 9 – 5 job routine, took a beating, took a pay cut, took a new look at the word “humbled” and learned every single day.

That – I believe – is the most important thing.

It’s always tough, realizing that so much time has gone by and you’re nearing the end of an important time in your life – to look back and see that you’ve basically accomplished close to nothing on your big “to-do” during the time until the impending deadline of said to-do list.

I like to look back on the things I’d set to accomplish before my journey started. Usually, I have a to-do list I try and follow to keep me on track but have recently come to realize that sometimes, you just can’t plan everything. Life usually gets in the way. This to-do list I’ve often dictated out probably has about two things checked off and a lot of hopes and new additions. But I can always guarantee that I learn something, as life happens, and I learn from it.

Sometimes I like to revel in how young I am, and then promptly get scared at how fast the time flies and pretty soon it’ll already be time for my 26th birthday. It scares me just thinking about it and I’ve got ten months to go. See? Ten months! That’s already scary because just I felt it was just yesterday that I got a beautiful eight-diamond necklace from my boyfriend in front of my closest friends in Calgary at dinner for my birthday.

It’s been less than two months and already so much has changed at this point. Now I’m lying in my twentieth different bed I’ve been in over the last few weeks realizing I’ve created a habit of playing with the dangling pendant and wondering when and if I’ll ever choose to take it off.

Earlier this evening I opened my notebook and saw the to-do list I’d written on my first flight out of Toronto in October. Even though as I look at it now, not much is checked off, but I’ve done a lot. I didn’t have as much free time as I thought I would because somehow along all the hustle and bustle I realized that life got in the way of my hard-set plans, as it usually does, and I was forced to re-organize.

I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t learn anything on this trip, and I’d be lying if I said some parts haven’t been disappointing. My eyes and ears are open to taking the new experiences in while challenging my pre conditioned notions about business life and meeting people and working with strangers who quickly become family when you all meet together so far from regular lives.

I’m not entirely surprised at where I sit right now, alone in a hotel room, writing to myself instead of sending my usual end of the day messages to my person; but I’m a bit surprised it happened so quickly. There is that saying again, however – life happens. And you can’t change things because they don’t fit into your plans. I guess you just learn to deal with them and figure things out as you go along.