Leaving Newfoundland with a heavy heart

I had made the decision to delete this blog, because I am not a very good blogger.  I tend to start lots of projects and then leave them hanging indefinitely.  I can’t categorize posts, and I feel this need to create some highly insightful piece of masterful writing that was black sheepy enough to be reflective of its namesake in order to be worthy of a presence in the vast blogosphere.  And also, the anonymity/privacy of it all is an awkward line to walk, and one I’ll have to sort out as I go forth.  However, after not being able to figure out how to delete my blog at first glance, thanks to my infamous impatience and short attention span, I let it fester in cyber space for months, unattended, until the friend who originally brought me to wordpress urged me to keep trying my hand at blogging.  After all, my thesis has been handed in to external review!!  So here is an update:

1.  I finished my thesis.  I did it!!  3 years and 3 months, 6 months of pretty torturous field work, learning a third language, and 185 pages later, I finished the friggen thing.  The final push was brutal.  I can’t explain it, you just can’t understand unless you’ve been through it.  I needed to get it out, and I got to the point where I was sleeping for 3-4 hours a night, working for 20-21 hours per day, no longer showering (lucky fiance, eh?), losing all sense of time and social graces, mildly crazed and fairly wild-eyed, gaining a 5 lb food baby from hoarding take out and those fatty Indian food tv dinners, and writing non-stop.

It’s now out to external review, and I’m expecting it back next week with a few days’ worth of minor edits.  If the edits are major, I’m done for because…

2. I accepted a PhD position in Geography at the University of Western Ontario, starting this January.  I’m going to be studying climate change adaptation, food security, and HIV/AIDS with smallholder farmers in Malawi.  It’s a fantastic, well-funded opportunity that I truly don’t feel deserving of.  But it will kick my temporarily sedentary life into nomadic gear, as 2012 will see me moving to London until May, then Malawi until June, then back to Newfoundland for the wedding until September, then back to London with husband-to-be in tow.  It also means we’re going into another round of long distance.

3. I have had the chance to work on a really wonderful climate change mitigation-related contract with an environmental NGO that I have worked for in the past, and have just revelled in it.  I feel so inspired, happy, sane and driven when conducting research and applying that research for the public good.  It also starkly contrasts government work I have had in the past, where it is safe to say I feel the complete opposite with.  No offense to those doing government work.  I just know with utmost certainty that it’s not for me, just like my confused life is probably not for you.

4. I’m leaving Newfoundland.

This latter update, is what weighs me down, nay, crushes me.  Now, again, if you haven’t been to Newfoundland, you couldn’t possibly understand the hold this place has on you.  And for any place to have a hold on a nomad through and through, is pretty impressive.  I came here in a somewhat broken, scattered state, and this whole area has this very real sort of healing quality to it.  The rugged, windswept landscape, the genuine kindness of the people who greet you with a “why hello dhere m’love”, the compelling and heartwarming Newfoundland culture, and the profound sense of belonging.  Nowhere have I ever stepped off the plane to a new land for the first time and immediately knew that I was home.  And people want you to feel at home here, they welcome you with open arms, and recognize you as a Newfoundlander so long as you recognize yourself as one.   There’s no doubt about it, I am in love with this place.

So why am I leaving?  I had, after all, a PhD offer from Memorial University, and could have continued to forge my relationships with the local activist scene, the communities, and delved deeper into the causes that I support and love in the place that is my home.   And to be completely honest, a part of me thinks it’s possible that I made a mistake by taking an offer elsewhere.  I won’t even get into the huge debate I had with myself about starting a family versus/in combination with PhD.

But I thought that maybe I put too much stock in head and too little in heart.  I finally found my home, why leave it?  That’s something I can’t fully articulate, but I’ll give it a shot.  In short, it would be too easy for me to just settle down.  While I’ve long wished that I could be satisfied by simplicity and often envy those who are happy with simple lives, it’s just not me.  And I am grateful for this because that drive is what led me here in the first place.  UWO is one of the top schools in Canada, while Memorial, well, doesn’t make much of a cut.  And I don’t actually care about reputation and prestige and all that, but I keep being told I should, and that I have to see my resume and experience from a future prospective employer’s point a view.  Fine, fine.  And so, I am left in the position once more to attempt to make the best decisions for my future self in my less informed present state for which I feel poorly suited to do, and I opted for some more security.  UWO’s offer was much more solid, and after struggling so very hard during my Master’s, sometimes working upwards of 100 hour weeks, I knew I didn’t want to go through that again.  I’m okay with not making millions, but I don’t want to have to work 3 jobs while doing graduate school and never getting days off just to make ends meet.  I mean, after all what’s the point of being somewhere fabulous if you spend all your time typing on your laptop and not drinking in your surroundings?  Numerous pro and con lists were written and rewritten.  Everyone was consulted and re-consulted.  Tossing and turning was done.  And I was assured by many, that Newfoundland would still be here waiting for me when I’m done.  And when I thought of doing my PhD here, it didn’t sit well with me.  I feel like I’ve outgrown the university, and have outgrown the city for now in that respect.  It’s my small fish-big pond drive kicking in again.  I would have stayed if I had the chance at a career with my NGO, but the funding just isn’t there.  And so, with a very heavy heart, I turned down Memorial’s offer and accepted UWO’s, with the understanding that decisions are rarely 100% devoid of regret or 100% backed with certainty.

But as my moving date grows near (9 days officially), I forget all about the technical details and am all heart, with my premature nostalgia cranked up and the feeling that I am experiencing pieces of Newfoundland for the last time in a long time.  It’s a refreshing perspective to have because you stop taking things for granted.  But I have to be honest, I don’t want to leave.

Do yourselves a favour and watch these mini commercials that show off a bit of Newfoundland:

I must resist the urge to re-enact the cliche airport scene so nicely executed in The Garden State, the season finale of Friends, and Family Man, where I throw caution to the wind and purposely miss my flight, run into my fiance’s arms and through tears blubber that I know that this is my place and together we’ll make up a new plan, together.  End scene, cue credits.

What the ending music and cut off choice of those movies fail to translate is what the people who toss away their plans actually do after.  They also don’t show the regret that the protagonists may feel at tossing away their opportunity, or the dullness that gradually creeps into their lives as they opt for what is often portrayed as extraordinary but is usually the ordinary path, maybe even the mediocre one.  Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with choosing your partner or home over a job, IF the choice actually was laid out like that.  But it rarely is, at least in my experience.   And if there ever was a situation that for some reason forced me to choose between fiance and whatever opportunity, there’d be no question.  And I fully support people following their heart wherever their hearts lead them.  But no, in real life, there’s no accompanying music that supports the mood of what you’re doing at the moment (don’t I wish we all had soundtracks though), and in real life, after you throw your plans out the window, you need to deal with the consequences of your actions, which may include some degree of mediocrity, and long-burning regret.  Nonetheless, leaving fiance in that airport in 9 days, will be one of the hardest things to do, and I anticipate the embarrassing awkwardness of bawling my face off without a shred of composure or grace as I’m getting patted down by security, like what happened the time I said goodbye on my way to Peru.

Manufacturing princesses, part 1

As a kid, I had so many toys, and some of them included barbies.  My trolls and ponies got many hair-combings, but my barbies got shaved and decapitated.  Oh no, not out of some worriesome repressed anger-child thing that make your parents contemplate if adoption can still be an option, but mainly because I thought the way they popped out of place like that was neat.  Their hair bore no appeal to me, and I did not translate the anatomically-challenged tippy toed torpedo boobed figurine to myself, at least not on any of the top layers of consciousness that I’m aware of.  Her pink convertibles, boring Ken, and shopping sprees did not interest a girl who grew up on camping and baseball.  And shopping – seriously?  It took a long while to grow out of my compulsion of hiding under those round clothes racks (I won’t lie, the temptation is still there and I still throw fits when I have to go shopping, only I’ve learned to use my inside voice).  I also draw strong parallels between bedazzled shoppers and zombies, and I think the compulsion to hide is some solid evolutionary adaptation emerging and if anything this behaviour needs to be encouraged for the pending zombeh apocalypse.

Along that vein, when I watched Disney movies, I felt bored when the girl gets her prince, and usually had returned to my trolls and ponies by then.  There are 3 princesses in literary history that have captivated my attention (keep in mind my knowledge of said history is rather limited, but ah well!).  These are:

1. The Princess and the Pea.  Remember??  She couldn’t sleep on a tower of mattresses because her princessocity was being tested with a PEA!  I thought her powers of detection were compelling and that she held great potential for other, bigger things in life.  I also rather enjoyed access to multiple mattresses for fort-building purposes.  This princess was set for a really adventurous stay!  On retrospect, I think this chick was batshit crazy. 

2. The Paperbag Princess – obviously.  Oh Robert Munsch, you know the way to this feminist’s cold black heart.  Her resourcefulness and the amazing wrap-up with the dragon deception, the skipping into the sunset, and the independence really resonnated with me, as I enjoy all those things.  Who doesn’t enjoy a good feminist dragon-duping tale from time to time?  I also recalled many ‘dress ups’ where I used large paper grocery bags, drew on them, punched out arm holes, and walked around the house as a heroic princess in my own right, detecting peas from all sorts of distances.

3. Princess Sheherazade.  Though it really sucks that she’s stuck trying to reform a serial killer who happens to be her husband, her stories are awesome and I-wanted-MOAR.  They kept me up for several nights as I just couldn’t put down her crazy tales! 

The point I want to make is that even as a child, I was a black sheepling and a very bad barbie host who didn’t connect with common dreams of “when I grow up…”.  Watching these wedding shows I’ve been watching is like an oxycontin addiction, at least with my brain coring out like an apple.  Many of the featured cookie cutter brides will say, at some point, “this is the dress I wanted since I was a little girl” or something along those lines.  And if this is so, then for real, congrats and all the best.  But I just stare at them blankly without any connection to what they’re about.  I didn’t even see myself getting married or even thought about it until Fyodor D (pseudonym for partner).  No matter the plethora of princesses thrown my way, the pink cars, the shopping, the housekeeping finesse, only the above 3 resonnated with me.  My philosophy professor once described the sexualization of traditional gender roles in advertising as “women having orgasms over the wonders of tide”.  Bingo.  It isn’t rocket science that this idea is still enforced and say what you will about gender equality, until housework and child rearing and everything in the domestic realm is 50-50, it just ain’t there baby.

And now, as I try and tackle wedding planning for our admittedly very unique, non-traditional wedding, I feel like I am losing what little marbles are left in my cored out brain.  To be continued…

A black sheep’s chardonnay-inspired parley

I have actually had this blog for months and cannot, for the life of me, master a sensible customized blog appearance without putting unwitting passerbys at serious risk of epileptic seizures.  My grand ambitions for images that reflected the feel of what I envision this blog to be were draped across the full page in bold repetitive tiles with clashing colour text for contrast and a completely irrelevant header image.  I’ve grudgingly gone with a decent pre-made template for sake of moving onwards with blogging.  I also anticipate many typos in not only this post but many others, as I find blogging into cyber space is best facilitated with chardonnay, and glass number two is smiling up at me as I type!

I’m not normally very good at coming up with brief and witty nuggets of phrases, but I had to give myself a full on shoulder-pat for snagging “black sheep express” after a dozen rejections on better ideas.  With a vague double entendre like that as my pen name, well I have to deliver with appropriate posts!  As such, here’s an intro to your black sheep.

Hailing from Newfoundland, I stumbled upon this phenomenal windy land by a combination of chances and choices, helped along by a graduate funding offer that beat the other schools.  Prompted by the primordial instinct of escape out of my bible belt look-a-like Northern Ontario hick-ly home, I frantically flung out a ridiculous amount of applications across Canada, tore open a surprise series of acceptance letters (not a repeat occurrence as I apply to law schools and PhD, as I’m sure I’ll later rant about, I mean, blog about), packed my bags and high-tailed it towards whoever offered me the most moola.  I cannot stress the urgency of my departure enough.  Let me clarify.  This Northern Ontario town is not THAT bad.  It’s fine if you meet the following criteria:

1) you like small town living

2) you don’t hold a grudge against people who vote in a Conservative MP and dig a Bush-lite government

3) you’re okay with a limited dating pool with questionable genetic linkages, and

4) you’re bat shit crazy or willing to become it. 

I jest; the 4th is optional.  I had a good job offer too as an Economic Development Officer that could have led to a pretty fruitful career.  But I’m one of those annoying types who insists on over-psycho-analyzing myself and obsessing over where I belong and what my calling is.  I also am oddly apathetic about my earnings and am okay with an extensive poor student status.  I probably have some part of my brain missing that disables that function for caring about a nest egg and all that.  And finally, in terms of these life paths, I find there really are two types of people swimming out there: big fish in small ponds and small fish in big ponds. 

So anyway, due to this missing brain part, my discomfort with the four aforementioned criteria, my obnoxious obsession with psychoanalyzing myself, and being a small fish, here I am in this windy, rugged land I knew nothing about.

In a nutshell, I fell in love with it, I fell in love with a cute boy who conveniently happens to be the love of my life (let’s call him Fyodor D. from now on), I adopted two rescue cats (at least 50 blog posts will be dedicated to them), I wiggled into the local activist movement, and I unexpectedly found “thee place” where I want to raise a family, build my awesome eccentric dream home, and do cool things like beekeeping, gardening, join knitting circles, make wine, learn Spanish and not use it anywhere, and make pots.  But the magnitude of meaning on finding “thee place” will need to be covered in another post. 

(sidenote:  I’m starting to see how this stream of consciousness chardonnay-fuelled writing unravels into a series of vague promises and writing goals for following posts)

I’m a compulsive activist and felt that that component of my persona and life, which is really all-pervasive, should be the main focus of my blogtivity.  It’s almost a blessing to cyber space that I had forgotten about this blog during Election time because I was a complete campaigning, writing, obsessing, researching, fuming, fist-shaking, lunatic.  And I KNEW that I was driving my facebook acquaintances batshit crazy with my 80 posts an hour on the subject but I got to be pretty okay with that fact as the elections-car crash syndrome took full hold of my life.  I think deep down we all have the ability to be OCD and my OCD lies dormant, usually suppressed by my own sloth, but awakens for topics that I feel truly passionate about.  I have recently concluded my contract position with a prominent environmental non-governmental organization (ENGO henceforth), and I remain involved in a handful of organizations and alliances.  Aside from being an activist through and through, I’ve also been a black sheep all my life.  I love my family and am generally on really good terms with them.  But it’s like night and day between us.  “So how did you happen?” is one of the questions I hear the most once people get to know my family.  I like it, because it doesn’t pick sides, it just sticks with the enigma of the black sheep.

When I first became vegetarian 10 years ago, the reaction from my parents was akin to a person coming out of the closet to conservative religious parents.  For a solid year they were convinced my pending death would arrive at any instant due to nutritional deficiency, and jaundice was believed to be on the horizon to precede said death.  And with this fear in their hearts, they would try and sneak bacon in my food when I would visit.  Apparently bacon makes all the life-saving difference when it comes to adequate nutritional balance.  It also meant that I hated people who drive SUVs, hate Israel, am of an ‘artsy-fartsy’ variety, and am a member, nay, leader of the black bloc.  As you have gathered, it meant I encompassed the entire “left-wing” gambit of hyperbole – a very busy camp to occupy may I add.  Sounds exhausting.  Miraculously, I somehow managed to survive for 10 years against all odds and my blood tests have consistently shown me to be the “picture of health”.  I just give this as one good example of my qualifying black sheep status.  And so, with this pseudonym and my minimal anonymity (which I grudgingly bestow more for sake of keeping those people and organizations in my life anonymous and unaffected), I will blog to my black sheep heart’s content about all sorts of issues.  My vision is to blend the personal with the political.  I think I would be okay with getting 0 views.  My main goal of course emcompasses the usual catharsis of getting it out and saving on therapy costs.  But more so, my real dream is to one day be a writer.  My friend suggested trying to write every day (and my thesis does not count!) in order to get used to the practice of writing.  This could help me develop some great habits, break down writer’s block and eventually turn out some pretty stellar books!  Just that thought is cause to celebrate: chardonnay glass #3, here I come!