We are, of course, still freezing our collective buns off out here on the West Coast of British Columbia, but hey, we made it through the wilds of winter (on paper, at the very least), and as such, are ready to embrace the warm, wet, winds of spring!
(Should they ever arrive.)
Hmmm, the combination of warm, wet and embrace sounds a little terrible doesn’t it? I feel like I’ve described the new season like I would a one-piece bathing suit, post-dip.
Eeeeeyuck.
Somebody get me some brain bleach.
Scrub, scrub, scrub.
Moving on!
SO.
Over the past couple of days I’ve been working really hard at taking it easy. I went for a massage on Monday in order to deal with some tightness in my upper back and right hamstring, and yesterday, I made the important choice to rest, instead of running, when I arrived home after work.
I KNOW IT HAS ONLY BEEN LIKE, FOUR DAYS, SINCE I’VE STARTED WORKING ON THIS WHOLE BEING KIND TO MYSELF THING, BUT!
I am already feeling a heck of a lot better.
Let’s just see if I can keep this up.
There are so, so many things coming down the pipe over the next few months and I just want to write all about them here and now, but ACK. I cannot.
And it’s killing me.
But soon, my precious(ES).
SOON.
In the interim, here are some snaps from MAD CENTRAL (population: 3) that we’ve taken of late:
Turret.
Art.
Pre-dinner walk.
Kitten dance.
Oh good grief. Are we the absolute worst?
YOU ALL KNOW HOW MUCH WE LOVE NYMERIA!
Either way I just cannot help myself…because, well, it’s just too funny.
Happy Wednesday you beauties!
I’ll leave you with a little something from the master (Keats) of the spring verse:
When we were sixteen, my doubles partner Kristy and I were invited to compete at that year’s Boston Open which was being held at MIT.
Important background information: I used to play competitive junior national badminton. YES I AM AWARE OF HOW NERDY THAT IS SOUNDS – YOU DON’T NEED REMIND ME.
This invitation was very, very exciting news for us.
One, the tournament was taking place on the cusp of Spring Break, so our attendance was basically guaranteeing us an extra long vacation from school, plus the opportunity to spend said extra days IN BOSTON BLOODY MASCHECHUSETTES.
(OMG! I JUST SPELLED MASCHECHUSETTES CORRECTLY ON MY FIRST TRY!)
Ed. update: Okay, obviously I didn’t spell it correctly. But why the fresh hell did it not come up on my spell check? What weird Canadian word of ours is MASCHECHUSETTES!?
Ahem.
MASSACHUSETTS.
Two, we were just at the point where our parents were letting us go to away tournaments by ourselves, and we couldn’t think of anything more fun than bopping about Harvard in between our matches SANS CHAPERONES.
And third, as highly competitive athletes, we wanted to bring our special brand of Canadian kick-ass States-side and see just what kind of damage we could bring to old’ Beantown.
I honestly cannot describe to you how excited I was when our parents gave us the okay to go.
And when I say that the trip was totally bonkers, that, my friends, is no lie.
1.) Flying to Boston on the redeye Wednesday night, deliriously tired, I turned to Kristy and said, “Look how close the moon is!”
She just stared at me, before responding, “WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT THAT IS THE WING LIGHT.”
Good times! Also, this trip took place pre-9/11 so we actually got to go visit the cockpit and chat with the pilots. Can you believe it?
I can’t.
2.) When we arrived in Boston we were picked up by our homestay family, only to quickly learn that we wouldn’t actually be staying in the city proper, but a suburb located approximately forty-five minutes (to an hour) outside of the downtown core.
This was a surprise to us.
3.) Normally homestay families provide meals (usually breakfast and dinner) for the entirety of the athletes’ stay. We were gifted a bag filled with a dozen frozen bagels and a giant fruit salad from Whole Foods.
I ate quite a bit of dried cereal bought from 7/11 over the length of the weekend.
And by cereal I mean penny candy.
4.) Upon arrival at the house we were told that we would actually be driving ourselves to the tournament. Our billets had recently won a car in a fundraiser raffle, and we were to use this car to transport ourselves to Boston and back. We liked to refer to it as the cardboard car.
We had two pages worth of directions, one “new” drivers license (Kristy) and one “learners” license (me) between the two of us.
Driving in that first morning was harrowing and a half.
Oh, hello giant semi-truck encroaching in our space in this turnpike!
5.) I forgot all my shorts at home and had to play the entire weekend in the spandex shorts I would normally wear under my regular shorts to keep my muscles warm between games. Because of this some guy wearing a “YALE” t-shirt sat at the back of every court on which I played, watching my every move.
To this day I just refer to him as the YALE CREEPER.
6.) One afternoon we went to a coffee shop at MIT and the flirty barista gave us a GIANT plastic bag filled with six years of Canadian coinage.
7.) I beat an ex-junior national champion in my quarter final singles game and she threw one of the most impressive post-game tantrums I have ever witnessed. Broken racquets and everything.
8.) On our last night at our homestay, their son Don asked Kristy if she wanted to go down to the river and watch the moon with him. She politely declined.
9.) I started reading Catcher in the Rye while in Boston and finished it on the plane ride home. This EXPLODED my brain and as such, I spent the next three months pretending to be Holden Caulfield anytime I wrote ANYTHING.
10.) I made it to the semi-finals in singles, and we also made the semis in doubles. All the rest of our time was spent shopping (I bought a number of sundresses and peasant shirts – remember them? – at Target), walking around the campus, laughing at everything possible, and just generally being the silly, sixteen year old girls that we were.
Twelve years later I remember this trip like it was yesterday. We still laugh about it anytime we get together, and goodness knows the myth of the cardboard car will live on and on for the remainder of my days.
I would also love to return to Boston.
But this time, I’ll stay right in the heart of the city.
And I will wake up tomorrow, webbed and gilled, a green-skinned lily-pad.
My eyes slick sliver, like salmon skin.
I sit here, watching the skies melt, with a kitten wrapped around herself. She is unaware of this other wet world; this place without food, without fires; warm beds, and sleepy heads.
Myself, well, I am drawn to the grey.
The strange semi-stillness of a night drawing near.
Mischief realized.
Heartbreak thwarted.
Coming home with a grocery bag filled with potential.
Potential?
Or adventure?
Mugs of piping chai, thick woolen blankets, and the tap, tapping of a lost-lover’s knock on my window panes.
I slept right through the night until my alarm went off at six forty the next morning.
I think my body might be telling me something.
Now folks – I don’t mean to sound like a broken record, yammering on and on about how tired I am ALL THE TIME, and how I feel like a recommended serving of peanut butter spread much too thin across the English Muffin of life.
BUT I AM.
On Sunday night my husband turned to me and asked, “How many nights this week do you have nothing planned? And by nothing, I mean, no comedy, no volunteering, no training, no writing, and no hangouts.”
I sat there, struck dumb like a statue, my mouth hanging slightly ajar, like a broken garage door.
“Ummmm….” I said.
“One? If one at all?” He questioned me, exasperated.
(Said exasperation stemming from his concern for the current state of both my mental and physical health.)
Now, technically the answer was none (as I am in fact taking part in things every day this week) but I managed to fudge the numbers just enough so that I could somewhat confidently state:
“One. I have one night this week where I don’t have anything planned.”
“Oh yeah?” He asked. “Which night is that?”
“Friday,” I answered.
“Friday doesn’t count! It’s basically the weekend!”
Alas, I could not argue with this logic.
You see, I have this weird duality to me – part of me NEEDS to be constantly busy, to the point where I have activities and obligations pouring out of my ears.
I mean, I absolutely love every project and organization that I am involved with.
Too much time on my hands really does make me go all squirrely.
But on the other hand, I get to points in my life where I feel so utterly burned out that I start to feel as though I am operating on auto-pilot – flying through my days at light speed.
And if I don’t find a place to make an emergency landing I’ll run out of gas.
So now I turn to you my darling readers.
Do any of you have any tips or tricks for instilling balance in your life? Or do you too careen about at full speed, too enamoured with your passions to be able to operate at a more leisurely pace?
Do let me know.
Any advice you have will be truly appreciated.
And in the interim, I’ll be over here, cooling my jets. Before I go out in about, two hours.
I learned to drive at the relatively regular age of seventeen.
By this point in my life, my parents had split up, and both of them drove manual transmission cars. This meant that I either learned how to drive a stick shift, or, well, take the bus for the remainder of my days.
Now, driving may come naturally to many a-folk, but for me, the double whammy of being a new driver, and having to learn how to (properly) use a clutch, was a little overwhelming. I was the kind of kid that forgot which pedal was the brake, and which was the gas, much to the chagrin of every person who sat shotgun for the first couple of months of my driving career.
So throw in a third, very finicky, but very integral mechanism within close reach of these already confusing foot-operated instruments, and you had a pretty excellent recipe for disaster.
Recognizing the need for extra assistance, my mother signed me up for classes with the craziest driving teaching ever to grace the face of the planet.
First, the name guy’s was named Shaf.
SHAF!
Like, Shaft, but without the T.
Oh, and he didn’t have a last name.
(Also like Shaft.)
During our hour long sojourns about the city, I would sing in my head “SHAF! He’s one bad motherfu….”
(You can imagine just how concentrated I was on my education.)
Anyways, the problem with Shaf was that, without telling me as much, he was doing the majority of the shifting/gear changing during our time together.
This ended up giving me a crazy over-inflated sense of my own driving skills, so by the end of my third lesson, I thought that I had pretty much mastered every gear shift – not to mention the always trickiest thing to learn: getting the car going again WITHOUT STALLING after coming to a complete stop.
With my giant ego in full effect, I told my mother that I was ready to start taking out our car for real-life practice runs.
Luckily, she was still a little weary of just how far I could have progressed in a mere three hours, so she told me that I could take the car, but I could only drive around the parking lot up at UBC, and then the (maybe) five minute drive home, from the campus to our driveway.
Also, I would be accompanied by my older sister, so she could both supervise, and give me pointers and tips as needed.
Now, it should be mentioned here and now that Kate, though a terrific teacher, had recently undergone major surgery to repair a torn ACL, which made her competently incapable of taking over in case of an emergency.
Thinking back, I’m pretty sure my mother’s thinking was something along these lines:
Well, if Vanessa doesn’t know how to drive when I drop her off at the parking lot, she certainly will by the time she leaves.
SMART THINKING THERE MUM.
Anyways, the afternoon ended up being a complete gong show and a half.
I right away realized that I really still had absolutely no idea what I was doing behind the wheel, and Kate, desperate and completely uncomfortable sitting in the passenger seat as I stalled six thousand times, just kept yelling out, “YOU DON’T KNOW HOW TO DRIVE!”
Wiser words were never spoken.
The drive home was harrowing and a half – I tried everything in my power to never actually stop, for fear that I would never get the car going again, and then somehow ended up parallel parking the car in our driveway.
But like all things in life, I eventually learned.
Up until recently, my long-serving and much loved steed.
I passed my learner’s test of my first try (the fact that I did it on a standard is this silly little gold star in my life that will never, not make me smile), and then passed my graduated licensing test, also on my first attempt.
(Here in B.C. you are required to pass two tests.)
I even taught M how to drive stick shift in the early nascence of our courtship.
(I figure that’s a pretty good test of whether or not the relationship is made for the long haul.)
Now, I absolutely love driving, and can’t imagine myself ever commandeering anything but a manual car.
And sometimes when I’m behind the steering wheel, I still catch myself singing, “SHAF! You’re one bad mother…”
Oh good grief. Are we the absolute worst?
Rant and Roll 