I read a lot, I watch a lot of movies, and I have a lot of opinions.

I have decided to single out four movies and two books. Four movies I have seen and the two books that I’ve read that the movies were based on and do I want to read the other two?

The Kite Runner: I was stubborn, very stubborn and for whatever illogical reason refused to read this book. Too many people were going on about it. One of them as coincidence or fate - whatever you want to call it would have it - was one of my BFF’s who lives in Beijing. Every single time we’d get onto MSN he’d ask me if I had read it yet. I can not for the life of me remember other than wanting to shut Jimmy up why I finally gave in and read it. What a read, I read it in, [oh this book even has the exact finish date written in it how you like that?!] or should say finished it on November 24, 2006. It was originally released in 2003, I held out a while. I flew through the book lost completely in the story, it flows beautifully and grabs you from the very first sentence, not unlike how Hosseini’s second book does with its opening chapter.

Due to the fact that I read a lot of non fiction when books like this come along they never feel fully fiction to me and I think that if the writing is good enough this then does nothing but draw me further into the story.

By the time I had read the book and got back online with Jimmy the film that I had no idea about was a month away from wrapping and James sprung the news that he was still in Kashjar, China as Caterer on the movie. HELL YAY! There are one or two photos in my TV and Movies set on my Flickr but due to normally bad connections only half of what he sends me makes it.

I’m always nervous when I watch a movie that has a book attached to it that I didn’t just enjoy, I loved. The fact that my friend was a part of the crew made me ridiculously nervous yet overly excited to watch the movie. I held to my ban of big movie theatres and brought it home shortly after it was released on DVD.

To say the movie was good is a complete understatement, it was bloody amazing. It gives me chills just thinking about it now. It you didn’t know that it was filmed in China you’d swear they had somehow gotten into Afghanistan for more than just reconnaissance and stills. I thought I was proud of James for the locations he had worked in while head chef for the cast and crew of The Painted Veil but it had nothing on the locations for The Kite Runner.

The book, the movie, they both left something with me; they opened up my eyes to a lot of situations that I generally read about from the perspective of a memoir be it a solider, a journalist, a victim and/or survivor. The story is deep and extremely multifaceted yet simple and eye opening in ways that I never saw coming I guess because sometimes the simplest of things are the hardest to grasp.

Into the Wild: I have read three Jon Krakauer books; Into the Wild was the third one I read in April of 2005. The book was a gift and the giver’s favourite book. I enjoyed this book and I got it, I related to it on a couple levels from the character’s relationship with his parents, to trying to find your own way in a capitalist society, his stubbornness and inability to see very far ahead of himself, the feel of needing to do something, anything but to just do it none the less. Without sounding too cliché here I think I can safely say there is a little bit of Christopher McCandless in all of us, I’d say that has a lot to do with why his story is still gripping new people some fifteen years after his journey into his own seemingly private solace began.

For me this movie should have never been made, I wish I had never seen it, I do not recommend it and I think if you want the real story read the book, the visual you are given on the page is so much better than even one minute of what comes across the screen it was almost un-watch-able. From the horrendous use of his personal letters through most of the movie and especially the beginning to casting Vince Vaughn (EWWW), back to the worst decision ever to have used a soundtrack by Eddie Vedder I just hated it. Adam made it exactly six minutes, started to laugh his ass off and went to bed. He has not read the book. The only thing that saved this movie for me to any degree was the use of a narrative by the actress who plays his sister that was touching and well placed throughout the painstakingly long and large cinematic piece of shit and I enjoy Catherine Keener no matter what she does.

I figure the only reason the McCandless family went along with this screenplay crap was because it was so poorly done it worked for them because they didn’t have to see what their son really went through. Have you seen The Machinist? Christian Bale loses so much weight it is awe inspiringly scary and impressive. Emile Hirsch was just not strong enough for me; Justin Timblerlake is the better actor in Alpha Dog, Hirsch did not do the McCandless role justice. If it weren’t for some superb makeup that I’m only calling superb because Hirsch was so ill-equip to handle a role of this magnitude the heavy makeup when he is dying is necessary because he loses so little weight I can’t even believe he was allowed to act in certain scenes. I counted the ribs I have showing with my hands over my head spinning around like on a bus roof and I have the same amount showing as he did since my drastic weight loss from my head crack and I’m not portraying someone who is going to die I just got sick.

The cover of this novel states “He had given $25,000 in savings to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet, and invented a new life for himself,” YET we see the character of McCandless in a different t-shirt in almost every scene. This really bugged me what a ridiculous oversight by the costume department, I just can’t see a guy who abandons his CAR and burns his CASH caring that much about what t-shirt he is wearing and I found it really distracting. I want a movie like this to be REAL not a bunch of wardrobe changes and fancy makeup. Nuff said.

Atonement: In my humble opinion this is the movie that should have won the 2007 Oscar. It is amazing, beautiful, poignant, outright sad, flabbergasting, real - even through the illusion of fiction.

Two words, James McAvoy.

Droooooool central, but it is worth mentioning that all of the performances in this movie are brilliant.

I saw lots of people walking around with this book with the movie cover on it a long time before I saw the movie and now I’m annoyed because it will take me forever to find this book without the movie cover on it. BOOK NERD CONFESSION ALERT: I despise owning books with movie covers, it infuriates me. One time, I lent my copy of The Beach to a friend and she accidentally spilt pea soup all over it but the movie was out then and when she ordered it for me even though she asked for original cover they sent STUPID Leo cover and I was MAD not at her at the book, I had it sent back and it took I kid you not NINE months to get it delivered with original cover I had about given up and forgotten about it when one day I came home to an unexpected delivery of it and had a good chuckle.

I want to read this book pretty bad, considering how incredible the movie is, I think I can safely assume that it will be an out of this world read but I will wait until I can obtain it sans movie poster cover to own.

No Country for Old Men: I walked out of my shrink’s office one day and saw a dude reading and I spied with my little eye the author Cormac McCarthy and the book title was No Country for Old Men. I thought cool beans MAN because I had just recently become a McCarthy fan after falling in love with his latest novel, a post-apocalyptic father and son’s journey called The Road and I had no idea he had written No Country for Old Men until right then.

Although Javier Bardem does deliver a fantastic performance, to be able to still pull off sex appeal with a hair cut like that alone was impressive, the movie was an utter disappointment it felt as if they had taken a story that may or may not be a good one and stripped it down to their favourite parts of its dialogue and severed it up as a movie with guns and blood and Javier delivering some of said dialogue with a sexy psychopathic drawl. When it comes to Oscar worthy I think it would have been a lot harder to pull off the sort of performance delivered by Ryan Gosling in Lars and the Real Girl than a gun toting funky walker dirty talker.

I don’t know exactly where I want to start because my mind is racing. It’s been racing around on the same topic(s) for months. Different scenarios have presented themselves that I’ve been involved in on both ends of the spectrum, disturbances I’ve caused and not caused, respect that I’ve lost and gained. And now everyone and their mother are posting on it in some way or another; Cyber bullying.

If you’d have asked me three years ago if I thought that blogs would posses a form of power outside of cyber space, or a real substantial message, I’d have said no.

In 2004 I started reading Raymi and Dooce, no other blogs. Although Dooce had lost her job and coined the term to be or get Dooced - this did resonate with me because I was fired over an email, I ultimately left the Travel industry shortly after in 2000 - but still, learning what I had from that, it being the only time I have ever been fired [even with my MANY mental disorders] I had little sympathy for her. I know it wasn’t widely known by employees back when she was fired just how much information companies had on you and what you spent your days really doing but I was also one of the early causalities of a firing due to in or out of office use of the internet and what you were doing with it on company time or even off it in her case.

Just under a year later when I had decided that I had to have a blog and I had to own it, that it had to be all mine and all about me I realized just how wrong I was about the rapidly forming culture I was entering.

Blogging gave me a voice I never had before, it gave me a place where I could be me. Where I could hash out all my shit and be a funny fucker in people’s comments. That’s how it all started for me.

I never thought about it, never gave a shit about where I did or didn’t fit into the blogging circles, the blogging world. I’ve always been a link whore but it doesn’t matter in the end, my links have never reflected my readership. There are Vancouver bloggers linked here that refuse to return my link yet have almost every other known blogger in the city linked and still comment and read here. Nothing if you really give it some thought makes a lot of sense in the blogging community whether in or out of Vancouver. The technology that allows for so many advancements within the Social Media Circles is happening so fast that some personal, old school bloggers like me are being left in the dust. Like anything in life, change never ceases to affect it.

The use of my voice through my depression and rage turned out to spread into the States and over a couple of continents and I did feel that I fit in those circles and still do and those are the readers that have essentially kept this site here. But that leaves the question am I really blogging for myself? I know that I started to; I know that I do again today. I know that when I tried to find a place to fit in here in Vancouver that I learned that all I had feared was true and then some, and yet I still got lost in it along the way. And about that…

You’d think that I would have learned my lesson the first time. You know, when I dragged my immediate family over the coals and my Mom had a breakdown and the people who were to become my in-laws probably wanted to hit the streets in protest of our marriage yet kept it to begging Adam not to marry me over lunch.

The only thing I look back on there and really wonder about is that some of the people who still wanted to get to know me off the blog were well aware of all of those rage filled posts, knew I was unstable, volatile, not happy, yet all chose to get to know me anyway this was long before my archive categories randomized and now you gotta search for the really nasty stuff, cept’ all the stuff about my in-laws is gone ‘cause I want a relationship with my SILS and am slowly working on building them. We may never paint each others toe nails but I love and respect them a lot.

When certain people think back I wonder what they think their real motives where, if any, for meeting me.

I look back over the last few months, from about a week maybe two before I was hospitalized and back to when the things I posted may have worked, but were not the right way to deal with my families’ issues and I do cringe. I cringe more over the stuff written during my breakdown because although I wasn’t in my right mind I still had to take responsibility for every word that came across the screens whether I meant it or not. And I haven’t read that shit back over, I can’t.

It saddens me deeply that I’ve been bullied to the point that I’ve tried to take my life more than once and that I’ve bullied to the point that energy projected out at me recently on two separate but very close occasions pierced my heart in a way so painful that I had to re-evaluate almost everything all over again. But in that re-evaluation I also can’t help but remember that I have never slandered anyone in the blogesphere by name, unlike someone who slandered myself and my husband on her blog by name numerous times spewing extremely personal lies and attacking truths about myself and my family that were too personal at the time to blog about, to the point that if this person didn’t already have enough to worry about we’d have charged her ass. And not ONE of the people who I called out in my post who where supposed to be our friends [at the time] stood up for us. In fact some shocked me in saying they had ‘saved her emails in case I needed them’ well AFTER the fact. Maybe I wouldn’t have flipped quite as bad if I’d have known certain things WAY earlier like that for one would have counted as SUPPORT. No one I hung with through blogging at that time let me talk about what we’d been through, no one asked. Behind my back on the other hand…. oh I won’t even get into it. I was SO blind.

No matter what I wrote, these aren’t bad people; they just disappointed me greatly, just as ultimately I’m pretty sure I more than disappointed them. But I think here is also the perfect place to mention that unless you live in Vancouver or are associated with a particular group outside of the city and participate in a very small and fastidious part of the blogging scene, no one even knew who I was talking about, yes it was still cruel and hurtful but in the end I’ve had more people ask me who it was about than anything.

Sure, word got around and that has been interesting to watch, people playing both sides, some people not talking to me anymore, some people starting to talk to me because of it, some people pretending they aren’t talking to me when they really are and thinking I don’t know they are pretending. And unless you are in a pretty close circle of mine I haven’t answered the question of who it was about with a particularly straight answer.

Depression is not an excuse, it is a fact. During the calling out of what I saw as a lot of fake bullshit going on in parts of the local the blogosphere - that I became a part of and ultimately wanted know part of - coinciding with lots of other shit and as bad luck would have it I had a breakdown and made a grand bullying exit from the immediate scene. Of course I have taken heat and I’ve been granted minimal forgiveness aside from my links not being removed from blogs that I thought would instantly remove me. Yes, I greatly appreciate that and it has NOT gone unnoticed.

But the fact remains; I targeted my rage at some of the wrong people and my inability to see straight, think straight, do anything straight has cost me greatly and anyone who thinks it hasn’t needs their head checked, I get mine checked once a week. Each time I have a full break I learn about myself. Someone wrote to me while I was still pretty much in the middle of the madness that they’d had an ex-girlfriend who suffered from depression and SHE’D had control over her actions and emotions. WELL GOOD FOR FUCKING HER! Everyone is different and she obviously didn’t suffer to the extent I do. The close mindedness of even those who have experience with depressed people still floors me. How you can offer up forgiveness to someone who does really stupid and idiotic things related to their depression and not another is beyond me. OH right the person I’m referring to here at this very minute is famous, oops. I have never been good with double standards just contradictions.

I think there is a fine line between telling the truth on your blog and cyber bullying, I’ve definitely crossed that line a time or two and hurt people, I have said I’m sorry and all I can really do is not do it again and the next time I have a breakdown I am seriously going to unplug the computer completely if I’m in attack mode. It has been talked about in session and with Adam, there are new plans in place to help aid in destruction control when my mind is fucking with me and telling me to kill myself because everyone hates me anyway …. You live like that day in and day out for any number of days and let’s see if you fuck up here and there.

I am greatly ashamed of all the bullying I have ever taken part in, on and offline. To me there plainly is no excuse for someone who suffered like I did from as young as I can remember in the hands of relentless bullies to project it back out onto other people but I am long done beating myself up over it, I have enough scars and will never stop learning from them.

When I get sick I am a pretty big baby combine that with seasonal allergies and night time barfing and things have been fantastic!

Boooo last Friday I had to cancel therapy re: being sick, no girl time re: being sick and I had only been looking forward to that for WEEKS! Adam is sick as well so we’ve been passing this shit back and forth and at first I wasn’t snotty I just felt EXTRA balloon migraine head with MILD head cold, NOW I’m getting full head cold and snotty. YAY! I’ve been having really awesome night sweats as well and I haven’t been forgetting to take my crazy people tits and so therefore I can not pin point a reason other than being SICK.

In other news, The Greeper has a new place that she likes to sleep. Pretty exciting shit eh? I know, I thought so too until it turned out she’s serious and has taken over half the spot I sleep in. She has of course had other phases, other places she goes back to. The fashion box, the tent, I’m sure she will get bored of sleeping right below BUT almost ON my pillow soon.

Our camera is not back from being fixed yet so we had to buy a back up one. We couldn’t delay the monkeys any more due to lack of photos, but at the same time we HAVE to be able to take photos of our product. This issue of course led us into a discussion of other things that could happen to slow us down, when we are just about done with a lot of the start up necessities and can now work on picking up our production pace. I mentioned that there would come a time that we’d make a monkey, look at it, hate it or it would not meet our quality standards and we’d have to start over. Really, did I say that out loud? Because it happened the monkey after I said it! YAY! We have informed the buyer, I figure honesty is best, there is only two of us and both of us had a hand in it sucking so we’ve had to start over. Now we have a physically challenged monkey in our apartment, at least Dr. Vegas finally has a monkey that isn’t going anywhere to play with mostly because it is blind and can’t speak. Once that red thread goes on for the mouth the suckers don’t shut up. Banana this, poo in your face that.

My Dad is supposed to be dropping two boxes of stuff off to Adam and I on Saturday, some of my stuff, some stuff they are giving us, some stuff that has been in the family forever that I am taking because I’m the last member of our family and I don’t want it leaving the family till I die I guess. Small problem though, my Dad and I got into one of our infamous fights today. Oh how I love them. Always in regards to the exact same issue(s) hidden by topics seemingly cloaked in difference that spread years, weeks, months some just days - we some how manage to piss each other off regularly even when not in big fights. My mom is going to be all upset now and that’ll be my entire fault too, I’m sure. Super awesome, we both resort to behavior befitting that of two year olds and just generally spin in circles for a while. Fun times. We have worked hard on things as a family but my Dad and I, man we’ll just always scrap, sadly that is just how we are, we can’t seem to communicate in any sort of healthy way. Wonder how many more phases this move to Bali holds in store for us.

Just finished my fifth book of the year leaving me three behind my minimum quota for 2008, I will get off my ass and post on them soon. This year has been good so far aside from The Time Travelers Wife. EWWWW.

Blast from the past!

Grade Seven, 1990 I was already down with the environment. This story got chosen to go in the paper as a special insert paper, only one kid got picked from each class. Small town paper and all, but it was still cool.

Click on it if you can’t read it, although it is pretty bad, only grade seven and I already cared about the Earth though WOOT!

Happy Earth Day!! And may we all learn how to treat everyday like Earth Day.

So I will go BULLETS on you.

• Every single time one of us sits at the computer Gus jumps straight onto a lap she has her head buried in my arm right now. She is the most adorably cute annoying cat in the world.

• Adam hurt himself at work and has been off here and there and so I’ve had to carry some heavy shit and;

1. it made me wonder how the hell I was ever as independent as I was
2. someone held the back door to the apartment building open for me, I made it all the way up the stairs to my floor and swung the door open so I could let it hit me in the back to go through but I didn’t move far enough over and the door knob NAILED me so hard that it happened on Monday and I still have pain shooting in a couple of directions and a massive LUMP.

• COMING SOON!!! HUGE and I mean HUGE MOOOOO-VIE post. While we make monkeys we watch movies, mostly movies we’ve seen or I watch them twice or vise versa, some will be old and some will be new movies. I feel that my one liner-ish reviews are generally better than if I go all out anyway.

• Speaking of movies, and forgive me as I’ll probably repeat some of this somewhere down the road but I FINALLY got my hands on a copy of Into the Wild BUT now I’m afraid to watch it, WHY? Because see, I read the book in April 2005 [NERD ALERT/reminder: I date all of my books when I finish them] I have also read most of Jon Krakauer’s other books. The book Into the Wild is a 199 pages, with epilogue 203. I had this funny feeling having just watched two movies of perfect length so I looked at Into the Wild and saw that it is 143 minutes. ARE YOU KIDDING ME? I’m now convinced that Krakauer and Penn are conspiring against all of man kind, how the HECK does a 199 page book become a 143 minute movie? Krakauer wrote Into the Wild before he became known for being an arrogant thinks he knows it all, extremely repetitive journalist [NOT SAYING HE HASN’T BEEN THROUGH A LOT re: Everest] but seriously is half this fucking movie going to be Penn and Krakauer masturbating their egos and Krakauer getting us back for writing such a short book in comparison? I guess I’ll see once I watch it.

• Also coming soon a very personal review of Dry, Augusten Burroughs, [who has a new book out on April 29 YAY!] and I wasn’t planning on reviewing it at all but I have a few things to say about The Last Days of Socrates, Plato. Once I start talking about the damn Socrates I can’t shut up now, I feel similar to how I felt after I read 1984.

• OUR CAMERA IS BROKEN!!!!!! On one hand I feel really lame getting so upset over a materialistic possession but our camera is not just a play toy for us anymore we NEED it for our business so we are pretty stressed about it or rather I am, Adam doesn’t really stress much about anything in life. I have a couple tricks up my sleeve to hopefully get some photos of two monkeys that will be done this weekend and HOPEFULLY by the time the Jedi one is done THAT IS RIGHT A JEDI ONE, the camera will be fixed. I don’t pray but if you do please say a prayer for our new business. All start ups have glitches. We’ve officially hit a glitch.

• I finally had the pleasure of meeting Raul over the last weekend at Tanya’s housewarming party. I am like the last blogger in Vancouver to meet him I think. He was everything he has been talked up to be and more! I was the one at the party with the sippy cup. I had every intention of joining y’all at Every Third Tuesday this month because the Hamburgler [Monica Hamburg] was the speaker, I call her a friend, she doesn’t read my blog, that is cool man, but she is rad, I heard she did a great job, sorry I missed it, been taking care of my dear husband yo.

• We now have our FOURTH coffee pot in less than two years. The first one I broke in a tantrum of mass destruction, although I was not TRYING to break the coffee pot I just forcefully put it under the tap and knocked it into something. THEN Sarah and Jack bought us a rad coffee pot for a wedding gift [can’t find the post re: FUCKED archives] but even though we know at least four other couples/people who have that coffee pot and they ALL still have it ours broke!! WOOOOOOOOOOO! RIGHT after the warranty was done, probably the day after. I then bought a $24.99 twelve cup coffee pot, cheapest one I could find. Last week the heating plate went on it. Adam likes burnt coffee I blame him. SO I bought YET another coffee pot, and this one makes loud noises and I want to throw it out the window and I don’t have the box to take it back because I am a recycling freak and actually get excited about the amount of things I have to recycle and FUCK now I have to wait out this shit coffee pot, watch it last ten years, seriously.

Ps. Dr. Vegas is always a mentor to the Sock Monkeys, he always gives em’ some advice before they leave our infantry but this particular monkey the Dr. really took to. They had a pretty awesome jam session before he departed, Vegas has already shown off his guitar though so he took it off for the photo.

The last key piece of bringing something around full circle, sometimes it isn’t even so much of an epiphany as it is a readiness within me to receive, process and action the information.

The last year maybe two, you lose track of time when you’ve been going for so long, of my therapy has been heavily concentrated on learning how to breathe properly, getting in touch with my inner body feeling the breath as it enters the exact cavity I aim it into. I also took some Pilates to get in touch with my core with secondary hopes of being able to run competitively against MYSELF again. I have disks on breathing I have paper work on it, we talk about it in session all the time, it is pretty mind boggling that breathing properly can be hard. That it takes specific exercises to learn how. I am wound so tight that breathing properly is extremely hard for me and using it to unlock my body is a long and arduous process.

Gus is getting old, she is getting bitchier. Her personality mirrors mine pretty closely, fourteen years together is a long time.

At the beginning of the year as a resolution type thing whenever Gus would start acting up and taking it past play fighting to OUCH DON’T BITE ME, instead of getting all super mad and OUCH DON’T BITE ME I would calmly look at her at eye level and repeat while petting her “this is the year of a calm Gus, I will not engage you”. Adam probably thought I’d keep at it for a day. But I’m still at it because without even knowing it I made a natural progression from learning how to breathe and calm myself to also changing my energy.

The thing is I have always been well aware of the energy I put out into the world and it has for the most part always been negative I just did not give a shit I really didn’t.

I don’t pay for therapy, if I’m not working, if I’m not making progress EVEN if I relapse here and there he has no reason to expend the positive energy it takes to help me, especially when there have been months at a time when talking to me is like talking to a brick wall, where I’ve spewed nothing but negative energy and he must have been frustrated as shit but he always waits me out.

There are ways that I practice learning that I made a huge part of my life before therapy, I’ve always been able to accept the reasons why people come in and out of my life, I call them good teachers and bad teachers, but if you were a bad teacher for me it in no way means I think you are a bad person, it just means I learned a lesson from you that came from a negative situation. I feel this helped me when I was single and dating, I always knew that what I was putting out was what I was getting back, I remember even buying He isn’t that into You for a friend. You can’t put out sexual sexual sexual and then get pissed off when a guy doesn’t call you back after he bangs you and you email him and you call him again and you page him and you lose your mind because YOU want a relationship. HELLO, just the other ‘night’ you were pressing those girls up into his face and dropping those panties weren’t you? Hmmm I wonder why he went RUNNING.

Even though I have always been a willing participant when it comes to learning new things and learning form my experiences with other people it never dawned on me that the energy I was putting out there was a major part of what holds me back.

My shrink started to suggest that I watch The Dog Whisperer, he suggested it a lot of times before I did but he had also started to talk about energy and how strong it is and for some reason it all just clicked at that moment that even though I hadn’t and don’t practice it all the time, I realized that I decide what I’m going to put out there and even though I have no control over what I get back, I decide, I live with the consequences of not just my action but my energy. If I leave the house having decided to stand tall and portray positive energy even though I woke up to some horrible song screaming in my ear and washed my face with shampoo and forgot to take my tampon out and am just bitchy but just because I’m bitchy doesn’t mean I have to project it onto everyone around me whether unconsciously or not. The Dog Whisperer comes in because this Cesar dude has tapped into this and is making himself millions it is pretty fascinating and beyond helpful watching him ‘fix’ the owners it is rarely the dog that needs the ‘real’ help. I know there are lots of ways to learn how to redirect your energy and how to have it help you in achieving a more positive lifestyle this just happened to work for me. I talk about animals a lot in therapy, I guess the Doc saw an in, who knows but I watch the show a lot mainly because it reminds me to practice the projecting. And what a coincidence that I had already started to practice trying to change my energy towards my cat and didn’t even realize it was going to help me in my day to day life.

The most rewarding thing about learning how to control and direct your energy is that it contains instant gratification. It doesn’t take as much work as learning how to breathe into all of the separate areas of your upper body and deeeeeep deeeeep down into my diaphragm all it takes is deciding to project positive thoughts. I don’t always decide to, but the thing is I never ever used to even think about it, I had no awareness at all for what was going on around me and how my energy was affecting other people. And I don’t know much but I do know I’m happier, not all the time but when I concentrate on it and make a point of watching the show and when I don’t make snotty comments about whoever or whatever, I know it makes me feel good about myself. Almost grown up or something.

I’ve been putting off writing this post because I do not in any way shape or form want to hurt my mother’s feelings. Although this is an extremely exciting time for my parents this is also a hard and sensitive time for my mother and I do not want her taking anything personal but I have feelings and they aren’t negative they are just feelings or I guess some are negative but I’m trying to be as positive as possible.

As I mentioned a while back, my parents have retired early, they are moving to Bali.

ASIA. From PRINCE GEORGE.

PRO: they are flying us to Bali once a year. Paid.

CON: THEY ARE MOVING TO ASIA.

My mother made it clear that IF Adam and I were having children they would NOT be going that far away. The fact of the matter is, and I’ve been given permission to announce it, Adam is having a vasectomy. He is also going to blog his whole experience, as most who read here are aware he has always done guest posts, this will be his first series.

Shortly before it was confirmed that my parents were in fact moving to Bali, I also found out that a woman who is more like the sibling I’ve never had, Rhonda, was moving to Ontario. She has since left because her and her man now own this here Edgewater Motel. Of course again this is a pro, I’m extremely happy for her, proud, every feeling you can have for someone you love so much. But con, she isn’t here anymore. I have known her since I was 13 years old. We’ve never actually lived in the same town or city at the same time but we have always been in the same province and always had regular visits or at least been in touch. Our friendship is one that is so close that I feel a complete calmness [or as close to calm as I get] and one hundred percent of every single part of me is present and Adam can see this other more of ME that exists but is buried come to the surface and sometimes it sustains me for weeks after she leaves. Almost all of my positive memories from my adolescence involve her, almost every thing ‘bad’ I did as a teen involved her which made it twice as fun. Having her at our wedding meant the world to me. Having her visit with Adam and I in our brown shoe box and such visits like last April when we BLEW UP STEVE are beyond wicked memories and watching her and Adam bond and seeing how well they took to each other made me happy because that would have been bad like Gus not liking Adam had it have gone the other way, cept’ Rhonda probably wouldn’t have made it a point to jump on Adam’s balls just to get the point across. There is nothing, absolutely nothing that I have gone through where Rhonda has not been there for me from beginning to end. GOOD LUCK DUDE!

Now I’d best start at the beginning. I never said anything at the time but both of these events although both wonderful in their own right did play a part in my recent breakdown. I’ve played the avoidance card with them both to the point that I just the session before last started to talk about my ‘feelings’ in regards to both. I was holding back all emotion because it isn’t about me and I had enough issues already going on to mask some of the real pain, it is about my parents and their fantastic retirement and Rhonda and her new business endeavor and both parties are flying us in to visit so I figured that I wasn’t allowed to be upset. But I was and as we’ve seen when I hold things in the outcomes are never good. There is no question that in the back ground of some of my misdirected rage was a shadow where these two bits of heavy news were hiding in plain view.

I was afraid if I came out and said “I’m really fucking upset that my parents are moving to Bali” that I would just get back something to the effect of “you are almost 31 and they are flying you both in PAID once a year get the fuck over it.”

I didn’t get that from my shrink, he looked at me with puzzlement and said “No, that is a loss.”

We had discussed briefly after my breakdown that it got lumped in with all the shit that had built up and that the moves wouldn’t be easy but we moved on to what was happening RIGHT THEN and I hadn’t given him that many details. Because some times stupid meaningless shit is easier to have a breakdown over than real life shit that actually matters.

What we know: I’m an only child, I’m almost 31, I’m married, and I’m not having children.

When I moved out here in 1996 I had a really hard time when my parents sent me a massive box containing almost everything I had ever owned and had left in Terrace, at 19 I had no idea that a lot of that stuff was going to have meaning to me now in my thirties and some really important stuff is gone and whether it be materialistic stuff like my old camp fire blanket or fifty plus paper back books I don’t miss at all, I’ve still at times been upset and they know it, that they sent it ALL out to me. I was upset for one because when I would go home to Terrace it was like I had never even lived there and secondly because I moved six times between 1996 and 2000, I simply could NOT hold on to it all.

When my parents moved to Prince George it was even worse, now they were in a town or I guess it has enough people it is considered a city that I had never lived in and didn’t care for, I had spent a lot of time there as a kid and it smells gross and is butt fuck ugly. Granted they did live in the middle of no where taking it back to our Smithers roots of bush living and owning horses and all the fun stuff I missed when we lived in the town of Terrace instead of in the sticks. But like anything in life I got over it, came to love going to Prince George and building stuff with my dad and doing fire wood, my parents making fun of my need to turn the ‘electric’ heat on in the room that I would sleep in. It is hard to believe that everything is sold and/or gone now, even the pets.

To me it is about ROOTS and I feel like I am losing them. I don’t really give a shit if I sound like a baby. This upcoming move is hard for me to deal with. I did not grow up in close ‘healthy’ relationships with my parents. My father and I were very very close, but it was NOT healthy back then. Now we are still very very close and it is healthier and we work on it. My mother and I were not close when I was a child and are working on building a relationship now that I am an adult. My parents and I have worked incredibly hard to deal with our pasts. But there are feelings that remain that I can’t do anything about, there is nothing that can be done to change them, there is no real ‘getting over it’ there is dealing with it which I do and in dealing with that means that sometimes I get upset about it. IT being, that I never had a say in moving to British Columbia, I was born in Ontario and my entire family except one Aunt who stole from my husband’s boss at our wedding live in Ontario. I talk to one of my cousins over MSN and one of my other cousins is on my Facebook but I don’t think we’ve ever spoken. My favourite Aunt died on September 14, 2001 after an amazingly courageous fight with colon cancer. My contact with the family in the east has always been extremely minimal for reasons that would need a whole new post and then some. As a kid I visited once or twice on unaccompanied minor tickets and we went back as a family in 1994 which was a royal fucking mess and I went back alone to see my Aunt for Christmas 2000, but of course pissed off the rest of the family because I only saw my Aunt. Umm she was dying get over it.

A feeling of loneliness even with Adam right next to me is rearing its ugly head. My in-laws are starting to warm to me a little but it is hard because building a relationship has not been easy and it dates back to when Adam and I met. So yes I’m feeling a tad sorry for myself I don’t have any siblings to turn to, I don’t have what I originally dreamed would be awesomely close relationships with my SILS because I was never socialized properly and it fucks with me in a major way in my adult life. As if that isn’t obvious to people who know me mind you. I have nothing left in the north. I have a bunch of season’s passes for the Smithers and Terrace Ski Hills and I WILL ski in Smithers again some day but the north will just feel different now. How long will it take until I’m just another brain washed city folk knowing nothing of the problems the government ignores in the north, how long will it be until I don’t even know about the pine beetles any more until the north burns down and I see it on TV because realistically I have to move on?

Our parents retire and their lives move on without us, and I’m not going to have a baby just to keep them close. In some ways we will probably talk more. Living in the sticks they are on DIAL UP! In Bali they will FINALLY have high speed; they bought us a web cam. THANK YOU! I despise the phone but I’m always on line so Skype will become my new best friend not to mention we should be able to have book club meetings via web cam. I’m trying to just let it go and not think about it but it is so far away if something seriously serious happens it is not just a ten hour drive or fifty-eight minute flight. I’m just worried and nervous and scared and excited all at the very same time and it is all very confusing. It is no secret I don’t have a lot of close friends RE: FUCK UP MOST FRIENDSHIPS BECAUSE I’M CRAZY. Oops am not supposed to call myself crazy. I will punch myself in the arm. There, ouch.

I’m working on it but this is tough, really tough. I’m seeing them in May then probably really quick in September and then that is it until we go to Bali.

So here, I’ll close with the positive, once a year we will fly to Indonesia. In Bali a driver will pick us up because driving there if you are not a native is apparently insane and only those with a death wish would do it. We will be taken to the house or villa I think it is considered a villa, it is ocean front, with pool and pool ‘area’, two storey house, master bedroom up stairs with king bed with wrap around the house patio and doors out onto it from bedroom and main room, lower floor with TWO bedrooms both with queen size beds and doors that open right onto the pool ‘area’. There is much much more but I’ll save it for when we go. A few lucky couples and friends and SILS have already been extended invites to join us after we go alone the first time of course, there is potential for this to end up having many many positives once I get over that they are in ASIA.