Pretentious, Self-Righteous Essays

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.

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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.]

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…

I was never good at being in relationships, but I was always in one.  I was a hopeless romantic, and I would always let my heart dictate what I did.  But this isn’t a good strategy. It teaches us to betray convictions, and breeds resentment.

I’ve been focusing my energy on finding the perfect balance between being easy-going, open-minded, and having a ‘take no shit’ attitude. That is, I have to defend myself (so as to never become bitter), but also know when to step down (so as to be fair).  I have to be ready for life as it comes (and be easy-going), and not reject it when it’s not what I hoped it would be (because it’s so easy to be hard on people for not giving you what you wanted from them).

It’s the only way to go forward that makes sense to me.  But it’s hard.  Sometimes I don’t know if I’m being unfair when I’m defending myself, or letting people walk all over me when I don’t.

I’m neurotic about managing emails, calendars, tasks and correspondence, in general. I can take almost any product and make it “usable”, but really, I prefer using Microsoft OutLook 2007, and being on an exchange server.  Regarding how I manage things, it all seems crazy, but everyone who has ever used my systems [whether or not it was because I made her] has seen its advantages and has either raved about it or adopted it.

Anyway, considering how I feel about poor punctuality, I suppose it isn’t a surprise, then, when I say that I feel similarly about  unresponsiveness. Although, I suppose, I do understand that there are other reasons, besides being irresponsible, why one would not respond to me.

I’ve been an atheist since I first read the God is Dead excerpt from Nietzsche’s The Gay Science.  For years, I teeter-tottered between theism and agnosticism, and similarly between whether or not I consider myself a hypocrite.  I mean, after all, I did go to a Catholic High School, do readings at all of the masses, and accepted the Christian Leadership Graduating Award.  At the time, I just considered the readings and the leadership roles practice.  They were opportunities for me to get experience and do things that I enjoyed doing.  It just so happened to be the case that they were “Christian” events.  Should that have stopped me from participating?  I almost want to go on a rant complaining that the only reason why there are no advocacy atheist groups is because atheism isn’t something that congregates its adherents … but I won’t.

I find it unfortunate sometimes that I was put into a situation where I felt pressure to keep my opinions to myself, and other times I realize that there are worse fates.

2009 ended with me spending money at a rate never before reached in my life. Contrary to whatever perception you may have of me, I’m cheap.  I hate spending money.   But I closed off 2009 with a 2-week trip to California … I spent money … and I don’t hate myself for it [most of the time].  It was a great experience.  It wasn’t over the top.  It was nice, and it was worth it.

I think it’s because I was so poor growing up.  We could barely afford the bare necessities, let alone a 2-week vacation in California.  I knew very few things regarding what I wanted out of life, but if there was ever anything, it was financial security.  I never aimed to be rich – I aimed for living comfortably and the [near] impossibility of being poor.   I didn’t want to hit 60 and wonder how I’d afford to live the rest of my life.  This was especially because I didn’t imagine having a husband or children, and only have immediate family here in Canada.  I know I was a child, but I was tired of the ups and downs.  I saw the gain from taking risks, and I saw the rewards for adopting moderate strategies.  This is why I couldn’t stand the thought of going into debt for my impractical university education [yes, yes, I had a scholarship, but it wasn't enough money for living expenses].  This is why I’ve planned for retirement since I was 19.  I can only bring myself to invest money – not gamble it.  Yes, I know what I’m saying about my university education.  Hitting 19 and realizing that there exist a plethora of employers [not the least of which being the University] that pay at least $50K for hard-working, intelligent but uneducated individuals was a pivotal point in my life.  By the age of 20, I could either have been able to help cover my family’s living expenses and had a positive net worth, or been a liability with a negative net worth.  And since there was urgency for me to reach a higher earning potential early, is it really surprising that I made the decisions that I made?

Anyway, no matter how technically secure my life is, I think I’m always going to feel like the poor person I was when I was growing up.  There were times when I was probably just 1 month away from living on the street, and I never forget that.

This is what I’m referring to…

Example 1:  Having a particular career in mind for your future, and doing everything you need to do to get there.  Sometimes the outcome is happy, and sometimes not.  But in an educational system like the one I grew up in (sure, let’s pick on it, why not?), you’re encouraged to pick a career and do everything you need to get there.  This is all before you even know what having that career really entails.  Again, sometimes the outcome is happy: someone chose a career, drew out the path, went for it, and they enjoy their career.  Other times people are displeased with their premature decisions and either start over or remain miserable out of inertia.  I’m calling the end point of getting the career “making it”, and the journey “faking it”.  We have an end in sight, and we just do what we’re told we’re supposed to do to get there.  We presumably don’t know better.  We may even question why we have to do some of the things we’re told to do (eg. the necessity of electives in university), but we are told to just do it… to “fake it till we make it”.

Example 2: A romantic relationship where one person has decided that he or she /wants/ to be with a specific other person (or kind of person), and concedes at every turn so as to avoid dealing with all of the problems in the relationship.  So, “making it” refers to having a long and happy relationship with this person, and the “faking it” refers to how he/she just goes through the motions to keep the relationship from falling apart.  The truth is, in a relationship (romantic or otherwise), to be genuinely happy, you need to be honest, and you can’t “fake it”.  So, “faking it till you make it” fails in relationships.

Now with respect to math and physics in high school,”faking it” was doing all of the homework (lots of practice) without fully understanding the bigger picture.  It can be useful for homework: “faking it” (doing all of the calculations without the understanding the theory behind it) enough times actually did help students eventually understand the concepts behind what they were doing.

So clearly, the blind guiding principle of “faking it till making it” is not always bad.  There is a lot of good that may come from it.  In the case of homework, it helped students develop their skills to grasp deeper concepts.  In the case of getting a career, it gets you to your career.  And in the case of the relationship, it helps you keep it.  But! the problem in the latter 2 cases was that the end point was reached, but happiness wasn’t guaranteed.  If you made it to the end and wound up not being happy, then you’d have to either start anew or remain unhappy.  It’s in times like this (where I’ve reached a goal and realized that it wasn’t what I wanted) that I regretted ever aiming for it.  I begin to regret having done all of the things (making all of the sacrifices) that got me to that end.  I begin to ask myself if I’m happy that I even did these things and question if the memories of these things make the goal worthwhile in spite of the fact that the end-point turned out to mean nothing to me.  Or would I have been happier if I had not even tried?  …if I had been skeptical of what I was told I was supposed to do, questioned what I was doing BEFORE I reached the end… what if?

There were also many times when I did hesitate.  I didn’t do what I was told; I didn’t act on blind faith.  I didn’t trust the advice of whoever it was that was “guiding me”.  And in retrospect I saw that if I had just shut up and done what I was told, I would have been able to reap the rewards of my obedience.  I would have come to see the wisdom in their advice. … And then there were other times when my insolence was vindicated.

So when I said “but not even he made it.  I don’t think some things ever become clearer.“, I was saying… =D

[Note: the above two examples were provided for illustrative purposes only.   Any number of examples could have been used.]