Crazy Face

Dear lost in the past,

I want to keep talking to you. It's nice to hear about your life and all the things that you have been doing since we last spoke. I'm happy for you. It's nice to know that after we split up and stopped talking for so long, you've recovered and become a better person. Better than I could possibly hope to be.

A part of me still loves you. A small part, that fosters caring and hope for a bright future on your behalf. A part of me that fears that if I were to go out of my way to see you again, however, it would only inspire distinct confusion in me. I have not kept a piece of my heart for anyone else quite like I have for you.

I still dream about you, sometimes. Fanciful things that make my heart sing and wake me up with a jolt thinking that any minute now I'll hear you talk again. But I won't.

I wonder why I treated you so badly, and what possessed you to stay with me. I seem to treat all the good things in my life badly, and presently treat the person I have with very little respect. If we had been together, in person, for any prolonged period of time I think you would have had the sense of mind to know I am not worth treating as well as you did.

I hope you can forgive me for abusing your emotions and making you feel like less than a person. I know I am emotionally abusive, and yet still continue to be so. I do not foster an environment conducive to being an individual: I wanted dependence, and I generally get it. You've become your own person, and I admire that in you.

dear person, I hope that by talking to you that you do not think that it would be a good idea to renew affections. I am an emotionally damaging person (and in the past have been a physically damaging one), and am not worth the time of someone who has grown so much as a person. Please disregard me as an interesting human being and keep me on the peripherals of your life, as I ought to be.

No matter how much I offer to love you, do not accept it. My love is worthless, it has no meaning. I make it a game to get my love, and I would rather you not fall into that trap, no matter how much I wish you would. I will respect you more for it in the future.

Know that you are special, and that you only deserve the best, and I dearly hope that you receive it.

Sincerely,

Crazy Face.

Not-New-Years' Resolutions

Epic music inspires epic resolutions.

Maybe they won't work, maybe they will: it's the same thing as when I make resolutions for myself in the shower. Food always seems to get in the way.
A part of me would like to just accept myself for who I am, but then I have to ask: am I actually who I am at this very moment, or simply a caricature of who I want to be?

For instance, if I were to follow my heart and achieve my absolute self, I would very likely have half-inch gauges, at least seven or eight more piercings in strategic places, and a very detailed tattoo on my back, which would include an inuit art skull (between my shoulders), something of a cross between tribal and flowers from BC and Nunavut, crossing the Aurora Borealis with a night sky...
Wow, that sounds gorgeous. If only I could execute how it appears in my head I'd have something I'd be proud to take on as a back piece, or maybe a sleeve.

I also need to lose weight. For eff's sake, I need to lose weight. I feel so trapped in this body... If I could just take my mind off food and put it onto something else, I might actually manage it and would be able to stop being jealous of my mother. That would be nice.
I need to be more social, or at least more able to talk to people. I want to seek out a gym or at least start doing yoga again. Doing art again.
But what do I do to replace my food trigger? I was told water would help, but part of me thinks that smoking would help more... That would certainly impress my dentist, if I happen to show and have picked up smoking in the TWO DAYS before my visit. HAHA.

I want to be a headbanger, good student, Star Wars nerd, non-drinking, proud-to-be ME for eff's sake. I want to get back to everything that used to be me, but now has been put my the way-side. Before I'm too old and jaded and forget what it's like to appreciate something for it's beauty and not its utility. I want to dance, do yoga, run, and just be athletic in my own way. I want to learn buddhism, french, russian and Japanese, and finish my psychology degree.

I resolve to be me, no-nonsense but non-judgemental. I like to keep things clean, but I can function in a mess. Study, but not always at home. KEEP MUSIC IN MY LIFE. I lost it. I lost the music, and I lost who I was...

So, let's review, and look at this from short term to long term:

Short term goals (by New Years):
- Renew my love for music
- Finish my novel
- PASS ALL MY EXAMS
- Discover art again
- Screw the system. I refuse to be a part of your conformity. Just for one minute, I want to do something.
- Get angry. I am angry. H***, I'm always angry. But I can be calm too. I want to find the place where I can be both.
- NEVER TAKE IT OUT ON MY BOYFRIEND. He is loving, kind, and far too nice for me. He needs a little guidance and a lot of love, and will never be what I take out my anger on again.
- Enjoy Christmas, because after it's over I am DETOXING this b**** of a body.

IN THE NEXT YEAR (By the end of my Third year)
- I will love my body.
- I will fight food. No matter how good cheesecake is, a chocolate bar is, it is no excuse to eat it all/put off a work-out. FOOD DOES NOT OWN ME.
- Work. I am not above working retail, being nice to f***ers who aren't nice to me.
- Discover my inner Sith. I will be F***ING HOT by the time I want to cosplay in April.
- Kickboxing, karate: videos, classes, I don't care. Buy a bag, beat it up every other day, but find a new thing to be my punching bag!

By the END of Next Year
- Find an artist willing to do my back piece, or at least collaborate with me on it. (Prefer Strange City: look into that shit!)
- See a Heavy Metal concert and get in the mosh pit. MAKE SURE I AM F***ING DECKED OUT.
- Be MYSELF. I may know who I am now, but I want to be that person by the end of next year. I am not going to be a goth, a nerd, a head-banger, a preppy, a poser... I want to love me, and I want to show myself that I have a thousand different things that make me who I am.


From here on in, I will endeavor to find one thing a day that makes me who I am. It may not show up on here all the time, but I will make sure it is remembered.

#1: I have awesome taste in music. I have a little bit of everything.

Possibly because...

So, by the beginning of November, I am beginning to see the detrimental results of a failed foray into the world of volunteering (long story short, I finished the training but was not offered a position. Boo); it feels like it has affected everything, from my grades to my self-esteem.

The first point has been rather depressing. I had set my standards high, and was rewarded with abysmal payoff after losing multiple weekends to training, as well as one night a week. I cannot, now, achieve the marks I had longed for: best case scenario is to salvage what I do have and try my absolute best not to fail.

The second is actually a more promising thing. I no longer blush to death when speaking in front of a group, nor do I experience heart-attack level palpitations. As well, I have made a friend for every class I am in: an accomplishment over last semester, where I walked away with less friends than the year before.

Perhaps I was not the type of person the volunteer program was looking for, but I am becoming the type of person I used to imagine myself as. I am capable of standing up for my beliefs, and know when to be critical and when to be empathetic (there is a difference between this and sympathy: probably the most hard-earned lesson that I got out of training). I feel like my relationship with my boyfriend has improved, even if it is only reflected by the amount of constructive arguments we have instead of the shouting matches we used to have last year.

Altogether, even though I am not as academically ahead as I thought I would be this year, my character has improved greatly.

The tattoo was not in vain, after all.

Scour Me

I have returned to school. I have not changed a thing, nor have I gone off on one of the many possible tangents of my frustration and flipped my education upside down.
This third year is augmented by my choice to finally figure out what to get as my first tattoo. I ended up with "Patience" on my inside of my left wrist, in a beautiful script.
I like it quite a bit, mostly because it is very simple and straight forward, and depending on who asks about it I can tell them a million different stories behind why I got it.
The one I stick to, and seems to work the best at avoiding jokes, is that I got it to remind myself to continue to patient. I do not wish to be patience embodied, but I also do not wish to always be it's contradiction.

Today was the second of three midterms I have been hastily preparing for. It was not so amazing, but I accept that as a consequence to beginning on bettering myself as a human being. Volunteer efforts are on their way, and my social skills are beginning to become somewhat more developed. There was also two essay written in a panic over the last few days, but for now it's behind me.

I feel very exposed, training to become a peer support counselor through the University. It's nearly a month long process, and after the training is done I won't be allowed to talk about what I do there much anymore. Confidentiality agreements end a lot of my best conversation pieces, although I do understand their importance.
The training is very group building, as there is 27-28 of us all trying to get along best we can. The icebreakers are sometimes funny and sometimes very heart-wrenching, and I am beginning to feel like there is someone underneath what I originally perceived myself as. Maybe this is all for the best.

Ink on the brain

I want a tattoo.

Unfortunately, I am not the girly-girl type that can just go out and demand something with no significance, just "pretty". How does one justify to themselves the permanent branding upon oneself of something that means nothing? I could be getting a Celtic knot, or a Japanese character, or a flower, but they wouldn't mean anything, and I certainly cannot imagine myself being pleased with it in the future.

And thus my inner dialogue begins. I have two tattoos in mind; one a concrete design based on a multi-year obsession, and one a fluid, intangible want to represent who I am at this time. I of course have the understanding that I will not remain of the same mind throughout my life, but rather would like to capture who I am now to remind myself as to who I have been. That is the whole point of getting this tattoo.

Getting inked was inspired by my ever-constant recognition of the human mind and its changing definition of the world around it. As we age, things like dementia and Alzheimers can take hold, leaving a person altered. A tattoo, in the future, would provide me with something to hold on to, a sort of recognition of the person I once was.

A problem I foresee in the pinning down of my person into one image is my ever-changing maturity level. I've been thinking on this for two years, but with no image in mind save the want to utilize something Northern. Ovayok, a mountain in this area, is the most iconic image we have. Yet it is a flat glacial scraping, barely picturesque enough to be transformed into a piece of permanent artwork.

Another thing I had considered was taking a piece of Japanese art. I have a passion for East Asian culture, and have shown that interest quite a bit. However, Hokusai, a popular artist and a favourite of mine, has only one usable piece, and it is a popular mainstay of lovers of Japanese art. Call me hipster, but I'd prefer to at least try to be different.

Lyrics, favourite book quotes, and many other trivial things have crossed my mind. I could get "DON'T PANIC" somewhere, but that would greatly upset my brother; he is much more attached to the Douglas Adams culture than I am. I considered something by Jane Austen, but in seeking out a suitable quote I realized just how anti-feminist she can across. I could get lyrics tattooed on me from a variety of favoured bands, but my tastes in music are constantly changing and I would prefer to not act like a billboard for a band.

My sister is lucky. At 15, she has already decided what her one important piece of ink will be: the cross my mother got tattooed on herself. A little unfair, as it acts as a tribute to my mother in a way that I will not be able to copy.

My brother and I spent some time talking about what we would like to get done, but in the end he has a more concrete idea than I do.

The last idea I have, the concrete and perhaps the most cliched, is to get the Galactic Empire sign tattooed on the back of my neck. I am a Star Wars nerd, and the concept appeals to me. Perhaps this little thing, a love I have held since I was 12, is good enough to at least start with.

Hopefully I'll have this figured out by the end of the summer: my mother will be coming to settle my brother in for University, and she is planning on getting the Lord's Prayed in Spanish, or at least a line of it. I'd like to have company when I pick my tattoo.

Starting over or just being wishful?

This is the seventh blog I have ever started. Each one has had a minimum life span of a little over three months or more, trending towards shorter posts and longer periods between internet-broadcasted thoughts.

I'd like to believe that this is my way of starting over, admitting to myself that things in my life need to change. But acceptance of this daily fact is proving to be harder than I would like.

For instance, my boyfriend of nearly three years has decided that now is the time to put his foot down and banish from his life all things lactose. While it poses no problem in the summertime, with my father doing all of the cooking and my boyfriend fully capable of vanishing off to one or another family members house to seek safer fare, it does mean that come fall semester I will have to trash my entire weekly meal routine in favour of foods that cater to his sensitive disposition. It makes me grumpy, and not just because I dearly love cheese.

Another ongoing saga in my life is my propensity for chocolate. It is neverending, and with a lesser distance to travel on foot each day than I had back at University, I am starting to see the results of my poor snack of choice. This means changing my eating habits now, as opposed to simply waiting until I return to school. My sister is also feeling the pinch of bad eating habits: the upside? We've decided to try exercising together three times a week, something I haven't been able to commit to in ages because of my inability to be my only driving force.

The final change that is looming on the horizon is my third year of University. While this change is regimented, it feels very different from the first two years for one reason: there is no going back on my major now without severe financial reprocussions. How, exactly, does one go about telling their parents that despite having pleasantly slogged through two years of psychology, their interests are no more cemented than they were that fateful day in grade 12 when the applications were sent off? In the past two years the professors in my chosen major have been less than interesting (with only two exceptions out of eight, they presented a dry and unsavory view on my "chosen" field), while every elective I took presented a new and widely different take on the world that I have been aching to experience.

Over the last two years, my interests have guided me towards wanting to work with youth; more specifically, the youth in my hometown who are troubled and in need of guidance. Coming from a small Inuit community in Nunavut, I have seen the effects of a young man's suicide to the neverending dramas left behind by the residential school system, and the scars (both psychological and physical) these problems have inflicted on an otherwise strong population of people.

Unfortunately, if psychology is the way to helping them, I am not seeing it. At least, not for another six years (if I'm lucky). Working with Nunavut's mental health providers would require me to have a PhD, and I'm not even interested in perscribing pills. Another way would be through an Educational Psychology degree, which would equip me with the skills to become a school counsellor.

Except, the only school counsellors I ever saw in my worst years was a career counsellor, and she hadn't a clue how to handle the tears of a recently scorned girl. Here, a career counsellor should be secondary to one that is capable to handle emotions, but I haven't seen anyone even begin the work of hiring one. Perhaps it's because anyone they would find would be white, and nobody trusts a kablunat. Generations of doing what they thought was "the right thing to do", those people who came before me, has left many people unable to take me seriously as anything but yet another white person looking to do my two years, earn the big bucks, and get outta here. Going away for the winter months doesn't help me there, either, becoming educated or not.

Unfortunately, my race is not something on the agenda to experience change. The only thing I can do in this situation is continue to be open to the people I speak to, and try not to come across as anything less than respectful.

How I'm going to cope with the other issues in my life seems to be less trivial in comparison. In time, I will figure out how to cook for my boyfriend again, I will either conquer or succumb once more to my chocolate addiction, and I will learn what it is exactly I want to do with my life. But learning how to become an accepted member of my home community is something more complex. Tukisivunga? Do I understand? Will I ever?

Not likely, but I hope to have an adventure in trying.