tetleytee

I love the Old Spice commercial “The Man Your Man Can Smell Like“. It’s awesome because by the time the commercial ends you think “what on earth just happened?!”. I reference this commercial now because I think this is how my life is. I’m focused on something and even though I’m extremely focused on it, there is something happening in the background that I don’t quite understand or don’t realize or don’t pay attention to, and then suddenly I’m stunned that whatever was happening in the background is now front-and-center and has my undivided attention, but I don’t know how it got there!

When I fly out on Wednesday, I will have spent a total of 2 weeks in Toronto, with almost all of it being vacation. During my time here, I got to not only help Elaine out during her wedding, but I’ve also had the opportunity meet with a few friends who I hardly get to see and spend time talking to my parents. Usually when I book a trip back home, I complain that it’s not really a vacation because I usually work out of Toronto to save my vacation days, and I don’t have a lot of time to see other people, but with two weeks here and me actually making an effort to meet up with people, I feel that this trip has been truly a great experience. Every now and then people need to take that step away from their regular path and look sideways and see what’s passing by.
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when I’m riding in the back of my parents car and I look out of the window and I see flat land for miles and miles and big looming fluffy clouds overhead. If you think about it, we’re all so tiny on such a big plot of land. One of my favourite things to do is to stand under a tree on a beautiful sunny blue-skied day and look up at the green leaves to see the sparkles of sun peeking through. I’m constantly mesmorized by the fact that the tree has been around for longer than I’ve been alive and still continues to grow so big and so tall that I can stand under one, reach up, and still not touch it’s lowest branch. I love being under a giant tree because it reminds me of how amazing nature is, and I don’t even have to go far to give myself a reality check – even on the streets downtown I can easily find a tree to look up at on any street there. Sometimes I get carried away with amazement that I end up causing people being me to grumble as they suddenly have to dodge a crazy person staring at a tree during rush hour shuffle.
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On New Years Eve in 1996, my brother and I had dinner with our family and then quickly begged to be dropped off at Mel Lastman Square. To help ring in the new year the city was throwing a free concert performed by the Foo Fighters, and I wanted to be there so badly. I remember discussing a designated meeting area, taking off my glasses and putting them in my pocket for safe-keeping, and charging into that mosh pit as a fearless little asian kid. Elaine and I squirmed our way to the front, jumped around a whole lot, and then did some crowd surfing. Somewhere along the way, I lost my glasses and no one showed up to the meeting area, but I was okay because I stumbled my way blindly to a payphone and pumped in a quarter and fumbled with the home phone number to get my daddy to pick me up. And I had a blast. The joy of being in a concert with all that live music, of being with a bunch of people who were there to enjoy it as much as you, it was thrilling!

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So funny story. Steph and I decide to go swimming yesterday, and met at the pool around 6 and swim from about 6:30 to 7:30pm. Happy at a successful evening of low-impact workout, we go back to our lockers to get dressed. But I find a note on my locker asking the locker owner to see the lifeguard. And my locker is completely empty, even though I’m still holding the key to it. In one of those dreamy “this can’t really be happening can it?” states, I head over to the lifeguard station only to find that my locker was broken into, and what they could find of my personal belongings was my backpack with clothes, and my shoes. Oh. Em. Gee. I just got robbed.

Thieves took my jacket which had my cell phone, my house keys, my work pass, my bus pass, and my $300 mp3 player. The thing that makes me cry is that they’ll probably play with it until it runs out of batteries, and just dump it and “find” themselves a new one. They also took my wallet and all my gift certificates (to RW&CO, Chapters & Costco, totalling over $250). They were kind enough to leave my glasses (I suppose they had a soft spot for the visually impaired?) and a quarter in my shoe. A and I spent the rest of the evening cancelling credit cards, flagging false purchases (at 7-11, Esso and Sears) and trying to assess how prepared we were in the event that this emergency happened again.

On the plus side, we’ll be moving soon so even if my address was in my bag somehow and they got a hold of it, they wouldn’t be able to rob me (that, and since I have to report stolen/lost keys I’ll now have to pay for new lock installations), and my work pass has been broken for weeks now so they wouldn’t be able to access work property. The bad side is that they have my cell phone with contact information for my home and A’s office, my drivers license (acceptable form of ID) and MSP (sometimes acceptable form of ID).

So my lessons learned is that you should always always always be prepared to lose all your stuff in the blink of an eye. If that happened, would you be able to handle things quickly? In the span of 1 hour from when I found out my stuff was stolen to when I got home and starting cancelling cards the thieves had already made purchases on my behalf. I also spent half an hour trying to remember which card was in which slot in my wallet to ensure I had everything accounted for. I most likely still don’t, I had a separate wallet sleeve for just cards (gift cards, membership cards) and I can’t remember what was in there at all.

I’m so thankful I’m living with A, firstly because if I was living alone and had my keys stolen, I’d be in a wreck, and secondly because a lot of our CCs are joint and so even though my cards are cancelled he can still use his in most cases. He also documents all his personal information, so tracking through him is much easier.

I’m still really upset that I had so much of my personal belongings stolen, but there’s nothing left to do but move on and learn from this experience. Please be careful with what you carry with you. Even when it’s locked up it can still be taken away from you. Make sure you have information about your contents stored in a safe place. Never carry a blank cheque with you (even if they don’t use it it has your address on it and they might have your house keys), or your SIN or proof of citizenship. And if you see someone in a pastel teal down jacket with fur listening to a sony mp3 player, punch them in the face for me.

A and I spent our Christmas back east to see family, friends, and wedding reception venues. Oh the fun involved in wedding reception venue hunting. We visited a combined total of nine reception venues and two church venues. There was only one place that I really wanted to visit but didn’t get the chance to because they never returned my phone calls (I can only assume they took the Christmas break off). We came home to find that our ideal wedding reception of a modern place with a traditional meal would cost twice as much as a generic reception, that our estimated total guest list grew by 73%, that a few of the reception places we visited actually wouldn’t be able to accommodate our new estimated guest list, and that I’m making this wedding more for old people than for myself and A.

I know it’s our wedding and we should do what we want, but deep down inside, I know my parents want it to be a certain way and I love them and I don’t want them to feel heartbroken by being excluded or (even worse) embarassed by how untraditional it might be to the sea of old people. Such is my delimma. But it won’t be for long, because we need to pick a reception venue by the end of the month (my personal deadline) to ensure we don’t have to worry about it for the next six months. Yes, this is how I function.

Another thing that comes up with the word “compromise” is that A and I will be homeless in two months time. We received our two months notice on Tuesday from our landlord (it was just too good to last forever!) because he plans to move back into the apartment. I spent the entire next day whining and moping about how I don’t want to leave and how I’ll never be able to find another apartment as awesome as the one I’m in right now. I believe it was yesterday where we sat down seriously and listed out the wants and needs for our new rental place. While we try very hard to compromise, it seems like the place we want is still non-existant, and more compromising will have to be done. In the meantime, I received an awesome e-mail reply for a too-good-to-be-true apartment rental downtown for $700 from a woman currently in South Africa with poorly constructed English (strike one) who has no one around who can show me the apartment (strike two) but would like me to pay the first month and deposit up-front before mailing me the keys (can we say shady?). I will miss my place, and especially my landlord, who is completely awesome and understanding.

Wish me luck on my hunting!

Clearly I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately.

I grew up in a family that constantly strived to be normal, to fit in with the social norm. We wanted what everyone else wanted, we didn’t like what everyone else didn’t like. We were nobodies.

As harsh as I make it sound, I still loved those times I had growing up and following the traditions that everyone else had. I look forward to going home and watching the Christmas lights turn on at 8pm even though it wastes electricity, decorating the Christmas tree even though we don’t look at it and take it down in a weeks time, cooking Western food for a Western style Christmas dinner even though my mouth waters to think about my mom’s home-cooked Chinese food.

Does this sound strange? I think it does.

I was stressing this weekend of what to get for my family. One year my parents and I bought my brother a Sony Clie which he used for all of 6 months and now I never see him use it even though he claims he does. And it cost approximately $250. I debate for a long time what to get my cousins, whether to buy my parents anything, how much I should spend, what would they like, all those random materialistic questions that arise when gift-shopping. While bringing this up with A, he asked me if it was really worth it.

Is it worth it to spend money on these gifts? Do we really need them? Do we benefit from receiving monetary gifts from others? If it was something we wanted, really really wanted, would we not have gone out and bought it ourselves?

I think a new social norm needs to start. I think people need to stop giving gifts and start giving time. I learned this from A. It’s a very hard concept to swallow, because I get giddy when I buy a gift I think someone would love, and I take so much care into wrapping it that he thinks I’m crazy. But when you sit back and really think about it, it’s all so commercialized that it feels very phony. Deep deep deep down inside, that is what I think when I hand people their gifts. It’s very sad, I know.

How does this new trend start, then? I think our generation is too late in the game. I think the free-thinkers like A with this new concept in giving will be socially outcasted because we’re too based on materialism and it’s the dollar amounts that define the people we are. I see this in myself because while I want to embrace A’s new idea on giving, I can’t see it as something I would do for fear of the social norm.

What do you give, if at all, on Christmas to those you love? Is there a general understanding of the idea of gifts and monetary value that you’ve come to understand, and are you okay with it?

For Christmas, I would like to spend more time with friends. To engage in meaningful conversations on top of the daily “this is what I did”, “did you catch the lastest episode of [insert random tv show]“, “have you talked to [insert random name] lately”. Who can gift me this amazing gift for Christmas?

In my constant trolling for wedding inspirations, I found the most amazing wedding cake.

Bow down in it’s glory. It’s so very cool.

One of my loves in being in a relationship with someone is that you teach each other to see from different perspectives. A finds this extremely difficult to do (teach me) because I’m a big stubborn person who loudly exclaims “I don’t like change, I like things to be the way they are because it makes me comfortable.” But, my friends, the world is constantly changing, and if we want to make a difference, we must change as well.

Being with A has taught me that I tend to go with the flow. I do things because everyone else does them, and I don’t want to look stupid by not doing it or by doing something else. I am comfortable being just another face in the crowd, I am comfortable not drawing attention to myself. A on the other hand, is comfortable when he does what he wants and what he deems to be important regardless of what strangers think of him. While I admire him for his way of thinking, I would refuse to be in the same boat. To each their own.

While I love being in a relationship that challenges me to learn new things, I’m always stuck at the point where I’m more comfortable in my own bubble. A always finds this extremely frustrating and constantly re-evaluates whether the want to teach me new ideas is worth the bickering. We tend to look at things very differently, and I wonder if it makes a relationship harder to grow. Not to say I don’t grow at all – I’ve become better (a lot better) at saving money, I re-evaluate the necessity of items when I shop, I’ve tried to read books he recommends in order to learn more of his interests. I wonder if he notices these things. And I wonder if there is ever a point where he stops to think about whether he would really want to be in a relationship with someone who thinks the exact same way he does. I think I’m a little bitter because we constantly get into disappointing conversations where I don’t seem to care about my future, or my goals, or the use of my time, and all these negative statements are making me wonder how far I need to jump before he says he loves me the way I am. It seems strange that someone would say that and then say “I wish you did _______” or “cared about _______”.

I get the feeling he wishes my in life were in line with his. To be honest, I’m not sure what my priorities in life are at the moment. Is that bad?