Pretentious, Self-Righteous Essays

I was at a pub night one evening about a year ago with a group of loud, crazy executive men who were all about twice my age.  (I was there to chit-chat with and sing for them.)  We got to talking about career plans.  One gentleman asked me what my plans were.  I answered by making a joke, and skirting the issue.  What he didn’t know was that I was and am  in the middle of a very comprehensive plan that I meticulously devised in my first year of university.  It usually takes me nearly an hour to explain it verbally, so I don’t.  I also don’t like to sell myself short.  So, I generally avoid responding when asked by strangers about my plans and am expected to provide a one-sentence answer.  One-sentence isn’t sufficient to express what I’d need to say, and I don’t feel the need to garner the respect of strangers, whether or not they are executives, so I don’t bother.

Anyway, immediately following my response, he turned around and asked the waitress what hers were, and she happily responded in one line: I’m studying x so that I can be a y. So naturally, the gentleman came right back to me to tell me that I had a problem since I had “no direction”…

I then did what I rarely ever do: I explained myself and my plans thoroughly to a set of strangers trusting that they would understand my logic.  Fortunately, I was right, and it wasn’t a frustrating experience.  Nothing upsets me more than to waste my time explaining myself to people who can’t understand what I’m trying to say.  I would have loathed myself for the wasted effort had they not understood, or at least taken the time to discuss my plans thoroughly in an attempt to understand.

By the end of the evening, two had personally invited me to meet with them to discuss career prospects, while the others each ensured that we had exchanged business contact information.

Now, this pub night comes to mind because of recent events.  When I spend time with a particular friend of mine who is noticeably insecure, I take every hit he/she gives.  The reason is because between the two of us, I can take it.  The hits he/she gives tend to be assumptions regarding my career plans, and success in life.  I’ve noticed that he/she needs to feel as if I am an ambitionless person, making her way through life without plans or prospects.   He/she can’t handle the blunt truth so well, so I let it go.

But the truth is, he/she underestimates me, and I don’t defend myself.  Why?  Well, it’s simple: as insulting as that is, I know that to explain myself would be a waste of time.  He/she isn’t able to understand.

But let me make it clear: nothing in my life is unplanned or a mistake.  There is a lot of effort and time that goes into every aspect of my life.  It wasn’t easy or a fluke that anything in my life is what it is.  Ask me, and I’ll take my time to explain it to you.  Don’t ask me, and I won’t bother.

It’s being angry, and not having a reason, then hypothesizing as to the cause, and then believing what you settled upon. At no point was it rational.

It’s being hypersensitive to everything anyone says to you.  The purpose of every word spoken in your direction is to put you down, and every person has ulterior motives. Did you mean to call me fat? Probably not, but that’s how I’ve construed what you’ve said and so that’s what I’ll base my response to you on.

How do you approach me each month when I’m like this? Well, unless you’re a stranger (and I’ll be nice to you), you just can’t beat it. There is no cheat that beats this game. It’s hit or miss, and hopefully you survive my wrath.

Postscript: …and when it’s over, it always feels like I’ve awakened from a nightmare, except, it was real.  I did say all those unwarranted, hurtful, and selfish words, and I did do all of those cruel, unnecessary, and inconsiderate things.  **sigh**  Every month until it stops…

Because of the overwhelming financial struggles I’ve had to overcome this year, I asked for help covering education fees from my Registrar at Trinity College, University of Toronto.

…

I think it’s absolutely fucking ridiculous that in all of my requests for financial help over the years, I always get nailed for making too much money.

What do institutions want from me?  Oh, right, I know: be destitute so that I can be eligible for the scraps that they offer me, as if they are helping me by forcing me into a corner.  As if I were lying about the financial costs, and demands on my time as a caregiver for elderly parents with no other family and no other resources.  I work and make an honest living, but apparently, I’d only be eligible for help if I didn’t, and probably were even on welfare.

…

Well, fuck you, system.  Fuck you.  Just say what you really want to say: I’d rather you go into debt than help you develop a foundation in life from which you could potentially build a future.  This is because I let poor people just barely stay afloat.  If we helped poor people who worked for a living, well, they might actually get somewhere.  These are the real messages you’re sending with the rules that you have set up.

…

NB:  My opinion on going into debt for education is that you shouldn’t.

I am a 27 year old female living in Toronto.  I have a sister, a cousin who has just emigrated to Toronto, a 67 year old mom, a deceased father, and  no other blood relatives in Canada.  My mother has dementia and Type 2 Diabetes and is currently in the hospital.  My father recently passed away.

We grew up on social assistance.  In particular, my dad was receiving Disability benefits because of his poor health, and whenever the caseworker who looked after my dad was  changed, we had nothing.  Initial inspection of my dad’s file always led to the cancellation of our benefits.  He worked for years, but when he hit 57, he was often bed-ridden.

I don’t care what any website/brochure/slogan says.  Applying for OSAP when your family is living on Disability benefits is frowned upon.  Our benefits were often cancelled, and the reason quoted was frequently that there’s no reason why I shouldn’t be working full-time to cover our family’s living expenses.  So, I put my studies on hold and started working full-time.

Because of interruptions in the receipt of our benefits, we were often unable to pay our rent.  When benefits are your only source of income, and they’re constantly being canceled, it doesn’t matter that they will backpay everything you were “entitled” to, you’ll still be months behind on rent…  Just enough months behind to be threatened with eviction, and to not have enough money to pay for representation in court … which is where we were taken for non-payment of rent.  Just enough behind on payments to be starving, using up our credit thinking that the paperwork will get sorted out while we were desperately trying to find any work to cover any payments.  Just enough behind to have made it nearly impossible to dig ourselves out of the holes that we were buried into.

Years, jobs, and thousands of dollars of income later, things are better.  But there’s always this tiny little part of me that remembers what it felt like to be just moments away from being homeless, without any helpful resources, no friends who understood, and no hope for improvement.  I want to feel more carefree, but I can’t.

People are most productive at the office first thing in the morning.  So they say.  I enjoy my breakfast and ease into my workday.  Well, now I do.  I haven’t always.

The past year has been filled with so many derailing events that I don’t remember what I’m like when I’m most productive.  I’m in crisis mode: all focus is on effectively managing the unexpected events as they come.  This keeps me from becoming overly stressed out.  Anyway, there are peaks and valleys, and even though it appears on paper as though my life is filled with valleys, I can’t pretend that I’m not just the slight bit optimistic about my plans for the future.

This post seems all over the place, I’m sure, the way that I seem so to many people around me right now.  But there is focus.  There are plans, goals, and targets being met.  Rest assured that ‘crisis mode’ is not negative, and not an impediment to my attaining my dreams.

What gets me through times like this are the pleasant surprises.  Amidst the unmitigated circumstances that currently govern my thoughts and actions, there are yet the unexpected moments that make it all worthwhile, such as making new friends, having fun in ways that I didn’t anticipate, and discovering new plans that were ever more exciting than the ones I already had.

…marks the day that mom was admitted to the hospital for blood sugar at 47.7  (normal blood sugar is 4), and the second time I’ve been to that hospital in that Emergency room, and that area within it: the resuscitation one.  Frankly, I didn’t realize that it was that serious, but that goes to show how apparent consciousness can be misleading.  My mom needed to be “resuscitated”.

She’s in the hospital now, as they have admitted her, hooked her up to machines, and told us that she has to meet with someone on Monday who will assess her ability to take care of herself and “recommend” “solutions” for her… Or should I just say “confirm her inability” to take care of herself because that’s what it sounded like the doctor was really saying.

In a way, it’s what I wanted: tests to be done, proof that she had problems that weren’t being addressed by her current doctor and specialists, and help for her to address them.  But the way it happened feels unsettling: using her dizziness against her when it was the result of diligently following negligent doctors’ orders.

I’m not sure what to think.

I was advised today to eat well, exercise, and lose my belly.  Well, to be honest, this is advice I get from a particular person very regularly.  And perhaps if I didn’t eat well, exercise, and think I had a belly worth being concerned about, I’d heed her advice.

I’ve spent the morning speculating as to the reasons behind her need to tell me that she thinks I’m overweight, considering fluctuations in my weight, my apparent eating habits, and cultural background.  I’ve been chit-chatting with friends, discussing what I should do, being generous and thinking about how much of her advice I should heed, and commiserating about what it is to be made to feel insecure over something that wasn’t a problem.

The truth is, it doesn’t matter that I do eat sensibly, get exercise, and like my body.  There will always just be some people who don’t know this, think otherwise, and presume that it is valuable for them to tell me so.

I was reading an old Chatelaine magazine today in the waiting room of my mom’s eye specialist.  There was a full article on being happy, and a bullet-pointed list of the things that happy people do to keep themselves happy.  I read it skeptically, but I figure, well, there’s no harm in doing some of these things.  I have been, after all, pretty miserable for a long time now.

There was the obvious one which said to get exercise.  Sure, no problem.  Another thing they recommend we do is list a couple of things that went right and things that I enjoyed every day/week.  Seems simple enough.  Except on weeks where my laptop unexpectedly dies when I’m trying to write a paper, I discover I owe more money to cover the cost of incidental fees for class, I get into an auto collision that’s not my fault but that I could be blamed for because there were no witnesses, etc… [and OMG does "etc" really mean "et cetera"], it’s hard for me to dig through and find the things that went well.  I have this sneaking suspicion that they’re numerous but tiny, including such things as “I ate” and “I woke up”, and that that’s why I can’t find them.  They’re such normal parts of every day that it’s hard to give them any credit as being something worth being happy about.

It isn’t every day/week/year that an earthquake and G20 riots shake Toronto.  I thought it best I document what I was doing as I will likely want to recall this week years from now.

I’m disappointed to report that during the earthquake, I was at work watching my monitor shake, and yesterday during the riots, I was home sifting through personal documents.

I probably wouldn’t even have checked-in with the world had my sister and mom not stopped by for dinner.  When I turned the radio on to hear about all the commotion, I was so disappointed that I wasn’t down there taking videos.  Except for perhaps Immigration issues, I don’t think there was any bandwagon that I would have jumped on, and even then, I wouldn’t have because I don’t think  that a protest is the right forum.  I just wanted to be in the heart of the rare action that Toronto sees.  Oh well.  I’m safe?  I’ll find consolation in that.

//

I’ve finally decided to sit down and go through all of my filing.  They have been in disarray since I moved in with Daniel (September 2008).  Well, “disarray” as in “divided”: there are the pre-Daniel files, and the post-Daniel files.

In setting out about this task, I had wanted to merge them into one huge unified system.  But I changed my mind.

I cracked open the filing cases, and found neatly organized bank statements, credit card statements, bills, pay stubs, tax documents,  and more, all dating to as far back as 2001 – the year I started University.   Well, there were my bank statements from high school, but I changed banks before starting University, and I had no interesting documents until 2001.

So, I peeked through them all.  I looked at what I spent money on.  I expected to find generally irresponsible purchases reflecting youth and negligence, but what I actually found was lists of transactions resembling my current spending, except now I have perhaps 5x the income.  Ok, so maybe it was negligent to spend that way without the income I have now..  But it was still interesting to see that I haven’t changed very much: I love to watch movies, eat out at least once per week, I buy electronic toys, and I like to go away on one big trip every 1.5-2 years.  I’m … predictable.  And apparently, I’ve been so for many years.

I suppose this shouldn’t be a big surprise.  It just is because I felt like the last 10 years of my life were very formative, and that I’d grown and changed a lot, and further that a lot of things in my life had changed.  But I guess some things never do.

As for the files, I’m scrapping most of them.  I admit that it’s hard to just discard my neat and well-kept files, but … why keep them?  Without them I can entertain the myth that my metamorphosis into adulthood was more interesting than the documents would declare.

I saw a couple of ghosts from my past yesterday evening.  It was nice, and I was really happy to see them.  They reminded me of my early 20’s, and what it felt like to feel valuable in a job, as if what I did had a real and tangible impact on the broader community, and my effort was rewarded and recognized.  It has been a long time since I felt rewarded and recognized, or even appreciated.

Then there were the questions.  How have you been?  What have you been up to? And I always pause before I give some generic answer suggesting that all is well, and that everything is perfect.

It was nice to see them.  For an evening, I felt youthful as I smiled and laughed and maneuvered the crowd as I once had done so regularly so many years ago.  But all I could think was What did I do for the last five years?

I’ve reviewed the past five years, I know, numerous times since September 2009, looking at the general upward trend in my standard of living, the stability I’ve developed,  the things that I have, and the people I have around me.   There were a lot of things that got done; things that happened.   All positive things.

So why…