Pretentious, Self-Righteous Essays

Lean on me when you’re not strong.
And I’ll be your friend
I’ll help you carry on
For it won’t be long
‘Til I’m gonna need
Somebody to lean on

My father loved to help people.  He was social, loved people, and always did anything he could to help everyone around him.  He helped my mom’s sisters in the Philippines while my mom was in Canada.  He helped all of the new families from the Philippines get acquainted with the new territory.  Before all of our financial troubles, we always had people over.  He would show them where to go, tell them who they should meet, and give them anything we could give them.  He never saw rewards for it, but that wasn’t why he would do it.  It was unfortunate.  We needed so much help.   I remember being 12 and being bitter about the lack of reciprocation my dad received, and then hitting 15 and blaming him for not making better decisions about who was worthwhile to help.  I learned a lot from it.  I have a lot of really good friends I know I can trust and rely on and who trust and rely on me.

Ever since my father was admitted to the hospital and subsequently passed away, everyone around me has offered “to help in any way” they can, and assured me that I “just need to ask”.  I’ve also been advised to not be foolish by not accepting these offers.  But I don’t know what I’m supposed to need.  I don’t feel like I need anything.  I’m almost certain that everything is okay, and that I have everything under control.  Most of me wants to say “I don’t think any of you realize how strong I really am.  I can handle this.”  But mostly I’m concerned about relying on people.  Not all offers for help are worth accepting.  Not all are unconditional.  Not all are genuine.  Some are vacuous, reneged when accepted.  Some are silent contracts binding you to debts impossible of repayment.  Some are tokens of affection.  Others are just what you’d expect from generous people.  There are others yet that are genuine, out of character, unexpected and welcome.  I’m vulnerable and I’m trying to be open but guarded about the offers for help I’m receiving.  It’s important to recognize what kind of offer you’re receiving before accepting or rejecting it.

In high school, I loved band. Both class, and the extra-curriculars. I spent my evenings practicing scales and sight-reading, and my breaks at school rehearsing solos. I signed out that clarinet so often that at some point I started to sign my name as “Clarinet” Ursabia and didn’t even notice.  (The music teachers noticed, and apparently were amused by it.)

My then-”best friend” also played the clarinet. We were the 1st clarinetists in our high school’s Concert Band. We worked our way up the ranks with the graduation of our predecessors and the lack of talent of our elders. He liked to refer to himself as my Achilles, but in retrospect I see him as more of an ‘Arch Nemesis’.

In grade eleven, I was away sick on the day we began working on an arrangement in class that had a clarinet solo.  Clarinet solos are rare. In my absence, my arch nemesis was given the solo, and upon my return, I naturally contested. I didn’t request that it be given to me (even though I considered myself a better clarinetist). I demanded an audition and a class vote. The teacher/conductor agreed. We each played the solo, and I got the part.

I still remember Daniel walking up to me right after class to say “You turned it into a popularity contest that you knew you were going to win.”

I thought it was bad enough that I didn’t let my worthy opponent walk away uncontested with the solo.  Daniel highlighted a whole new level of selfishness in my actions that didn’t even occur to me.

Do I agree?  It wasn’t conscious, but …

I don’t feel guilty for the offenses committed against me by men that I had let into my life, as if I had a hand in the heartache they caused me.  I take no credit for others’ weak characters.  I’ll only admit fault in not seeing through their acts.  That is, I can concede that I was too generous when I assumed that a man could be strong enough to do what is right.  I do not feel guilty for making that assumption.  I only feel pain when I discover my folly.

Anyway, that being said, I didn’t always feel this way.  I used to feel as though I had done something wrong, or as if there was something I could have done to make him happy and to make things work.  Once Upon A Time captured the short-lived existence of this youthful, romantic, self-deprecating girl.  She’s dead and gone, and the memory of her makes me sick.

Destined to err… fine.  Doomed to bear the burden of my folly?  No longer.

I remember being 14 or 15, saving up my bus fare (by walking home from school) so that on weekends, when I got really depressed, I would take the bus up to the subway, randomly pick a subway stop on the map and then just go to it and see what was there.  The TTC routes are – for the most part – a lovely grid, and it felt impossible to get lost, especially if you knew how the transit system operated.

I remember hitting 16 and knowing where exactly it was that I wanted to go – no more random crap shoots.  Most popular were all of the major malls that were on subway lines: Eaton Centre, Scarborough Town Centre, Yorkdale Mall, and Fairview Mall.  Then there were all of the parties that everyone would hit up.  Primarily I think I went to Jamestown.  As I grew older, I’d meet more and more people who could drive and had cars so my string of small radii that dictated my hangouts (i.e. subway stations) collapsed and then expanded… but until that time would come, this was it.

It was on a subway ride that my sister and I were first flashed.  I say ‘first’ because it would turn out not to be the last time that it would happen.  And of all of the possible times that it could have happened, I would never have expected it to have been on a nearly full train during the evening rush hour.  Sitting side-by-side in double-seats at the back of a train, the flasher seated himself in front of us, held up his coat and suitcase to block us from running and to cover himself as he masturbated while staring at us.  Because of the way we were seated, we couldn’t reach the emergency strip – it was over his head.  We just waited it out and ran when we got to our stop.  I considered running off the train earlier, but experience has taught me that running off a train because of someone following you on it only creates the potential of being trapped alone on an unfamiliar subway platform with that person.  On the train were tons of people and attendants and potential help if he tried to touch us, and at my subway stop, I knew where to go.

Anyway, we’ve seen and experienced a lot by taking public transit.  This is just one example of one of the kinds of things that you can encounter when you’re a teenage girl on the subway.  Fortunately, we were neither raped nor killed.  I used to wonder what we could have done to prevent these things, such as not dress provocatively, but we didn’t, so I don’t feel guilty.  We were just two young females and we let him get away with it.  That’s why it happened.  I stopped letting people get away with their offenses, and they magically stopped happening.

//

For work, I rent out a parking spot south of my office.  It is 2/3 the cost of parking at my office.  The hospital that my dad is in is several blocks away from this parking spot.  I haven’t wanted to pay for parking downtown that’s closer to the hospital partly because of cost, but mostly because I already pay for parking.  So, I’ve just been dropping off my mom at the hospital so she wouldn’t have to do the grueling walk in the cold, then walking to and from the hospital from my parking spot.

Yesterday, on my walk to the hospital from my car, three men asked for my name and number.  The first one made it a point to note that he sees me often and wants to know where I go every day.  The second was polite.  The third tried to grab my hand.  This was when it was bright outside.

I have typically walked over alone to get my car when we leave the hospital in the middle of the night.

I wasn’t before, but now I’m scared.

“The castle’s come down times before on many nights much like this night.”

I was 13 and my grandmother was 78 when she passed away.  It was a December when the ambulance came in the middle of the night to take her away.  She was unconscious and remained in the ICU for a couple of months.  I remember spending Christmas in the ICU.  When the money got tight because of all of the extra taxis getting home (we didn’t own a car), we took the bus.  And when we could no longer afford even that, we walked.

She was really weak and had been losing her memory for perhaps a year prior to her going comatose.  I remember being about 12 when she was no longer able to do all of the things that she liked to do on her own, such as garden and cook, and even longer since she’d done things that she didn’t like to do, like walk me home from school or play with me.  She was so serious.

My sister and dad suffer from the same core of afflictions as my grandmother.  Perhaps about a year prior to my grandmother’s admittance to the ICU, my dad had been going through the worst case of his eczema.  At the time, it was the first I’d ever seen it flare up at all.  He couldn’t move without making his skin crack.  I’d seen it with Marlene throughout our childhood, and it was a real surprise to me when I saw him with it.  Anyway, after a while without any improvement, our doctor had him hospitalized.  He was eventually able to come home and we all took care of him.  The doctors had been unable to pinpoint the cause.  All we knew was what we always knew: that it was an allergic reaction.  We blamed his work.  He worked in the factory of a printing company.  The company paid out disability for a while, but eventually stopped.  He wasn’t sick enough to get Ontario Disability Benefits, but was not well enough to make it through a full work day at a new job without being sent home because his employer could see that he couldn’t handle it. This after years of OT and hauling himself across the city by public transit to get the bills paid.  He was only in his 50’s, and he didn’t know how he would make it to retirement.

My mom couldn’t do much better.  She had been laid off from her job years earlier after she took bereavement time to attend her brother’s funeral in the Philippines. She returned to be laid off.  It made for an awkward situation for my sister who would wind up – by a twisted stroke of fate – doing her OAC Co-Op term in our mom’s old department with our mom’s former co-workers.  Anyway, my mom was well into her 50’s by then, so being hired for a long-term continuing position was difficult.  She wasn’t physically equipped to do labour, but she could do a lot of things, and I know she always tried.  Primarily, she did temp work in accounting.  And she put her crocheting skills to work making kippot for some evil man she called “Barrack” who was so rude to her and made her cry that even though we needed the money, we begged her to stop making them.  She even did call centre work in the evenings – there was no shortage of call centre work.  Out of an eagerness for workplace resiliency, I learned to do it myself.  I learned a lot of things from my mom.  Because who knew?  Maybe there would come a time when it was the only opportunity I had at my immediate disposal to make ends meet during times of crisis.  (For the record, such times existed.)   So she applied for hundreds of jobs and got a lot of interviews.  It was hard to watch her.  She was the sort of person who identified herself by her job.  And with every failed opportunity came more and more frustration.

It’s hard to pinpoint the moment things became irreparable for us as a family.  There were hints of self-destruction much earlier than this.  However, I do remember being 12 and being proud as the low-points brought us closer together.  And then I remember turning 16 and writing The Dancing Princess.  It’s scary now when I look back and read A Peek Through Tinted Glassed and The Days of Grey – words I strung together when I was 18 and 20, respectively.

I’m fine now.  My biggest problem then was that I couldn’t control anything.  Now I control everything.  It’s exhausting, and I get really frustrated on days like today when people assume that just because I’m the younger daughter, that I hold no responsibility.  I’m irritable enough without having to deal with ignorant people thinking they have me and my situation pegged.

[Today, today is a special day.  Today I posted explicitly how I felt about something.]

What is it?  To millions, it was Chinese New Year, and to millions more, it was Valentine`s Day.  Either way, it was a day of celebration.  Now with Canada’s latest greatest statutory holiday – Family Day (celebrated on the 3rd Monday of February) – this long weekend had the makings of a ‘May 2-4′ or Labour Day long-weekend, whether or not you were ‘in love’.

What power there is in a day.  Some days are celebrated monthly, some annually, bi-annually, and so forth by the Gregorian Calendar, or fiscal calendar, or Chinese Calendar, and so forth.

Calendars.  Regularity.  Recurrence.  Schedules to commemorate a future day.  Reasons to remember a past day.  Calendars give days power.

February 14, 2010.  It is the 14-year anniversary of my grandmother’s passing, and the day my father went into cardiac arrest.

My ‘Sweet Sixteen’ was a surprise birthday party thrown for me by one of my then-close friends.  I remember strange bits of the party.  For example, that it was held on the night before my birthday so that we could all be together when the clock struck midnight.  I remember that we had cake and other food that people made.  I remember that the host was nice enough to invite a friend of mine that she didn’t personally like.  I remember Jeff coming from Scarborough by bus to be at my party.  I remember taking his baseball cap and wearing it for the rest of the evening.  I remember Marlene [my sister] leaving early to go with Jeff to the subway, and asking to borrow my sweater because it was cold.  I remember one of the attendees’ asked her parents to drive me home.

What’s distinctly memorable is everything after the party.  I remember driving to the street that my apartment was on and my friend’s parents insisting that they drop me off right at my door to ensure that I was safe.  I remember waving good-bye as they drove away.  I remember the moment it hit me that my house keys were in the pocket of the sweater that Marlene had taken with her when she left.  I remember knocking and screaming really loudly hoping that someone, any one of my family members would awake and let me in.  I remember thinking back to the moment that my friend and her parents offered to wait until I got inside, and shooing them off.  I remember walking to the nearest payphone and collect calling my home in hopes that that would awake someone, and being really upset that it didn’t.  I remember how cold it was, that I bore only a short-sleeved t-shirt [because I had given Marlene my sweater] and thankfully, Jeff’s baseball cap because I’d forgotten to return it to him.  If it weren’t for that cap, I would have been freezing.  And finally, I remember my Deus Ex Machina: a successful collect call to one of my ex-boyfriends who happened to be home, a fun walk in the middle of the night, and free room and board.  He snuck me into his apartment past his mom and let me crash in his room.  I still remember sneaking out in the morning.  Hilarious.

Getting locked out of your home is dangerous and fun when you’re sixteen.  When you’re twenty-seven, it’s just a nuisance.

Several years ago, I was taking a class where I constantly disagreed with the course Instructor.  It was really stressful.  Couple that with the fact that I was enrolled in three courses, and had then just taken on a demanding new full-time position at work, and you get ‘power-trip Carolyn’: the girl who gets a sick pleasure from pointing out all of the ways that her superiors and peers (but never subordinates) are incompetent. She appears mostly in electronic form (i.e. in email, IM, message board posts), but she has been known to appear in person, impatiently ‘telling it like it is’. Anyway, that term, she appeared as an online bully to the course Instructor and TA’s, nit-picking all of their incorrect facts, lack of familiarity with pertinent information, and inconsistent arguments from class.  Through online discussion, she rallied the troops in revolt, fueling dozens of students with the courage [i.e. arguments] to properly defend themselves and file real complaints with the department regarding the Instructor and his TA’s performance.  At the time she thought she was an articulate leader who guided the actions of her peers through thought-provoking wording in her posts.  In retrospect I see that I was just under a lot of pressure, taking it out on the next most available target.  I insult under the guise of concern.  I still do. When I used to write on Misfortunate, I did this as Nylorac, and with strangers I used various other pseudonyms.

I started out the post with the intention of discussing the large discrepancy that exists between one’s online persona and his/her face-to-face one, but instead managed to veer off into the ugly world of regret, where some of my most shameful moments reside.

I’m the type of person who often takes blind leaps. I don’t know if I like to do this but this is certainly what I do when I’m unsure of what choice to make, i.e. when all options seem equivalently as good based on the knowledge that I have at that point in time.  I think  that a number of years ago I realized that the plunge is never as dangerous as we think it could be.  If we take this analogy a little further, I can say that I’ve been injured but always recovered.  The dust always settles, things needn’t always be neat, tidy and perfect, and there exist no situations from which we can’t learn. So when I feel like I need a change, I look at what I can’t control, then take risks where I can.  It’s better than life being stagnant, and me being indecisive.  I close my eyes, take a deep breath, and go.

Warning!  Wheels have been set into motion.  There can be no going back…

It just occurred to me that today is the 14-year anniversary of the day I started dating my first boyfriend!  At least,  I think he was my first boyfriend.  At the very least, he was the first boyfriend who ever told me that he loved me and have the feeling requited.

And contrary to what you would probably expect, I won’t recount how it was that we fell in and out of “love”.  I’m here only to remark on the sweet innocence that it is to be in love at the age of thirteen.  I still remember how my heart raced when in his presence, melted when I heard him speak my name, and stopped whenever our eyes met.  I remember the first time we held hands when we walked home together, our first embrace on Valentine’s Day, our first slow dance (to SWV’s Weak) at my best friend’s birthday party, and our first kiss on a Spring afternoon in the park nearby our school.  Every word, every glance, and every touch was so meaningful.  Relationships haven’t been quite as simple ever since.

I imagine one day I’ll experience such rapture again, and until then I’ll fantasize about it like a 13-year year old schoolgirl would.

NB:  I’m not still interested in him.