I made myself French toast even though it’s too late to eat brunch.
I spent the day with Daniel today after a long time. We woke up late enough to skip breakfast and eat lunch right away, and rushed out the door so we did not waste any more of our afternoon. Our first stop was the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, which is an art gallery here on campus. We looked through all of the current displays, but felt that the gallery was not very well ventilated and left quickly. Our favourite piece of art was this chess set from the late 19th or early 20th century assumed to be from either Alaska or Nunavut, and we left a note inspired by this piece in the gallery’s guestbook.
We happened to leave the gallery just as the bus going downtown arrived, so we got on and made our way there. I took quick snapshots as we walked along to meet up with Grace (one of my friends that Daniel had not met). She met us at the intersection outside of her apartment building and we had a nice conversation about everything going on in our lives and laughed at how there were so many cars turning in on her driveway right when we chose to stand there, even though there usually weren’t any.
By the time we had finished talking to Grace, Daniel and I were both very hungry. We walked over to a pizza place and placed an order for a pizza with mushrooms, tomatoes, and hot peppers on it. While the pizza was being made, we went next door to the local art store, and Daniel bought some pens that he found a good deal on while I took more pictures. We came back to the pizza place just in time to get our pizza, and we ate standing up at the counter by the window. We used to eat lunch while looking out of a window in one of our high school hallways every day, so it was nice to return to something similar. I ate all of Daniel’s crusts because he was too hungry to bother with them, and we saved the last slice of pizza for later.
For the evening, we went to Minotaur, a local games and gifts shop that holds a free board game night on Thursdays and Sundays. We played a game of Carcassonne, which I won (making Daniel just a little bit unhappy). After I took a few more pictures outside of Minotaur, we took the bus home thinking about eating the cookies we had baked the day before.
The day felt warm, in spite of it being a day we spent outside in February frost.
A day in the life of Julia Mei (and I).
No signal and low battery.
How is it that you can end up sitting at home singing to a voice that comes out of your headphones when the whole world sent you an invitation to your own party?
Why I Will Be Able To Write Again
A few minutes ago, I was walking home near sunset when the light is laid ever so delicately over everything. It made me think of all of the pictures that I wasn’t taking at every turn in my path, and how I had let all of this glorious light be wasted on me. This and many other things filled my mind as is typical of any of my walks back home from my classes.
I was thinking about everything that I am expected to take in every day as an English student — all of the greatness that I am exposed to; the greatness that has made me mute. I began to wonder whether my silence was a result of not knowing where my voice would land in a sea of so many others that are so much more worth hearing than my own. But an irking feeling seemed to scratch the back of my mind that suggested that it is not that I am afraid to say anything, but rather that I have had nothing to say. I reflected on the past few months of my life and thought of how it seemed that all of the places where inspiration is allowed to shine through had been closed up by activities that required doing. I had let the necessities of daily life get to me, and I feared that I had forgotten to see things the way they need to be seen in order to create anything.
Carrying on, feeling guilty about my own unfeeling, I stopped at an intersection. Waiting to cross the street, I saw a mother holding her daughter’s hand. The girl who was no older than two years old seemed characteristically excited by being outside the way that children are, and her mother seemed characteristically concerned about her daughter’s safety as she led her across the street.
The event forced me outside of myself in a way that I haven’t experienced in a long time. It took me out of my own mind, and away from my own footsteps, and made me focus on this singular event. Because I live away from home to attend university and don’t see my own mother often, seeing this young girl and her mother made me think of my own childhood spent carelessly under the careful watch of my own mother. It made me miss her terribly, and perhaps miss even more the way that she was able to look after all of my troubles when I was a child myself. The sight moved me in a way that I cannot express, but it reminded me that there is so much to feel only if I leave myself open to it — if I leave room in my daily life for some of the greatness to pass through to me.
I’ve stopped writing. I’m pretty sure that’s a problem.
Cures, anyone?
Outcomes
I’ve always been accustomed to preparing for the worst possible outcome in any scenario. This act is my safety blanket, my shield, my escape route — whatever you’d like to call it. Whenever I’m faced with a particularly important situation in my life (the resolution of which my happiness may depend upon), I’m inclined to picture the worst turnout imagineable and think of a way to handle it. I suppose I believe that as long as I’m able to take the bad news without absolutely losing control, I’ll be able to recover from it. This is not a terrible strategy, and I’m sure that many people employ it as well as I do, but it does create a gaping hole which I have only recently began to notice: I am never prepared for the situation going as planned. When things do turn out the way I would have liked them to, I am often at a loss for how to react. It would seem that being given exactly what you wanted would illicit nothing other than happiness and would not require much planning, but believing this for my whole life seems to have been a faulty assumption. As I start to make some of the larger decisions in my life, and am confronted with situations that have consequences and implications that reach further than those of a good or bad grade on a math test, I find that not being able to handle happiness is just as much of a problem as not being able to handle despair. It makes you question what you want, and that is always something that makes your whole life unstable — perhaps even moreso than being attacked with a terrible outcome.
The Complete Poems and Plays of T.S. Eliot
I am amazed at the way I am reading something that was written before I was born. Before my parents were born, in fact. I am amazed at the format I am reading it in. A book published in 1977 in London which somehow found its way to a bookseller’s store in Pakistan. And perhaps the most amazing of all is that after having lived there for nine years of my life, it wasn’t me who bought this book and brought it across the ocean with me to Canada. A dear friend of mine sent it over with my father in 2010 when I was seventeen years old. Now I am gingerly edging closer and closer to nineteen and here I am reading La Figlia Che Piange from this book for a class devoted soley to T.S. Eliot in my second year of university — a class which hadn’t even existed until this academic session. It is amazing how things unfold. If only a single human life would let you live long enough to see it all happen.
When Alice went through the looking glass, she left behind her reality and found a new one. I’ve been Alice for far too long, and thought I should climb over to the other side. Most of the time I write about things the way I see them through the prism I’ve built myself as a writer. This blog is going to be the place where I write about things just the way they are. If you’d care to read my thoughts, I’d love for you to join me.
