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.
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.
Last week was a seriously huge week for Adam and me. We were both completely absorbed in ourselves, I a bit too much.
We had the absolute pleasure of selling our very first Sock Monkey to Phaedra, the ‘official’ site where they will be available is not finished yet, just email us through the contact page if you want details on obtaining one. We have now sold two monkeys.
Phaedra’s Monkey who she has named Bobby has already been out on the town ripping it up. Here he is hanging out with Marc Emery. Oh, I know one of OUR Monkeys is hanging with Mr. Emery, CRAZY!!!. ROCK ON BOBBY!! The Monkeys we make for people never cease to make us proud.
Photo © Phaedra on Flickr
Looks like Bobby will be joining us bowling as well, and the Bollwitt’s [R and J] have a Monkey and we have the original Dr. Vegas so who knows what sort of monkey business will take place. Naked bowling as per Keira’s comment and Monkeys? I’d say sponsor us or I mean me. [Please]
My Parents also dropped the HUGE news on us that they are moving to Asia, Bali to be exact. Everything is happening extremely fast right now. They put their house on the market last week and it is sold already. Adam and I are currently in negotiations with them over what we can have, buy, lease, and/or ship of theirs. Right now we are very concentrated on the Yamaha piano that I played growing up and some other stuff. It’ll be interesting I don’t think we can fit the piano in here Adam says we can and he wants it really really bad. I think our land lord is going to kill us but oh well we only like her 50% of the time anyway.
The kicker the hugest news of all is that my parents are I kid you not, flying us out once a year. Did I mention they were moving to Bali? They are having a house built for retirement and of course once the insanity of knowing we get to go to BALI ONCE A YEAR wears off [if it does] I wonder what phases I’m going to go through with this? I’ve already mentioned to my shrink that I feel like I am losing my ‘Northern Roots’. He said that is normal but it is just starting to bother me. There was a big deciding factor in their decision to go so far away that did consider us, but I’m choosing to keep it private at this time.
That news combined with the sock monkeys starting to sell has us both really excited and really busy. The possibilities feel endless right now.
Some of you may have noticed the new addition to my side bar a smaller version of the 2008 Bowl for Big Brothers Classic badge below.
I participated in the Bowl for Big Brothers Classic back in 2000 and had a great time and being that although I could walk my other favourite charity events around the city they are supposed to be runs and I can not run right now, but I can bowl, and I love to bowl.
TEAM BLOGGER consists of:
Rebecca Bollwitt: Team Capitan aka Miss 604
Corinna [that is me] of Gus Greeper
John Bollwitt of JohnBollwitt Update your links! John has a new domain!
John Biehler of JohnBiehler
Keira-Anne of Keira-Anne She fooked her knee up real bad over the weekend so go send her some love!
Duane Storey of DuaneStorey
Phaedra McEachren of Memoirs of Me
Raul of Hummingbird604
Tod Maffin of todmaffin
I’ve sent an email or two to the Big Sisters and have never heard back from them, being recently inspired from running into some people from Terrace that I went to high school with, [seriously we are EVERYWHERE right now] and discovering that one of them is a Big Brother and has been for four years now he had this to say about his experience and his reasons for volunteering his time:
I thought it was time to give back to the community and growing up with a single Mom I figured Big Brothers was something i would like to do.
Turns out he called. I’m going to call. I think it will be interesting with my past to see whether they would even take me, could be why I never got any emails back. We will soon see. I will keep you posted.
This organization has also always been of interest to me because my father spent time as a Big Brother way back in the day and it comes up on a semi regular basis. My dad has also said I should call. My aversion to the phone is becoming almost phobic. I did make a point to talk on it yesterday though.
My father had this to say about his experience:
I was a big brother many years ago. It was in the early 70’s. I still remember my first little brother’ s name. Bobby Pallen. When I first started as a big brother, I assumed it would take a lot of time and cost a lot taking him places. What really happens is we mostly just hung out and did things. Play catch, go to the park, watch a movie. Just the same kinds of things that you would do with your own kids. Little brothers just want someone to give them some attention and spend some time with them. It is such a rewarding experience that more than 30 years later I still think about Bobby. I moved away and that was the reason I had to give up seeing Bobby.
We are bowling on March 16 at Xcalibur Bowling in Surrey. We all need your pledges please the easiest way to get to our individual pledge pages is through Miss604’s post. Or you can sponsor our team as a whole by clicking here. You can also reach my pledge page by clicking on the badge - top right in my side bar.
I set my goal at fifty dollars because I have to raise that to be able to bowl, but I would of course LOVE to raise more than that so I do ask for your help please dear blogging buddies and readers, anything you can offer is going to be greatly appreciated.
Having a family book club with the limited amount of time that Adam and I spend with my parents means that this was only our second meeting but the interest is heating up and talk of adding web cams or Skype like devices so we can meet anywhere anytime are thrilling until we all remember my parents are on dial up and so we have to wait and wait some more for that option.
The rules are not typical or they are a far cry from the rules of the book club I got myself thrown out of, for being myself too, which is the saddest thing about it. Really there is only one rule, do not talk about the book club book until book club. This is a lot harder than it was in the old book club because I didn’t live with any of the other members. And how can I be sure my parents aren’t pre-discussing the book? I don’t have any Big Brotheresque technology at my disposal to spy on them. And unless I find my Christmas and Birthday presents which I did every single year of my life until they caught on and wrapped them WELL before they brought them into the house with me in it, they are very good at keeping secrets.
Although it makes more sense to choose a book that no one has read, sticking with only one rule keeps it more fun and less ’so structured it feels like school’ and the first book picked was a book that none of us had read. On this trip home we had all decided on 1984, George Orwell, my dad and Adam had read the book my mother and I had not - Adam read it again as a refresher as did my dad - but I had recently bought it having decided it was literally unacceptable that I had never read it.
The end of the year was very busy, what with having to play Guitar Hero III every day and having a job outside the house, plus throwing my back out. I didn’t even make it through The Time Traveler’s Wife, Audrey Niffenegger, so I was forced to do something I almost never do and read two books at the same time, I started 1984 on Friday December 21, and we left on the Saturday. I was not able to read it nearly as fast as I would have liked, I found myself enjoying it so much that not only was it hard to remember the number one rule of book club but I was constantly re-reading over passages and paragraphs I liked but sometimes because a book that deep, for myself anyway, was a lot to digest in the normal speedy fashion I would finish a book I was late on finishing for a club meeting.
The only tradition I took from the previous book club was the one where we’d rate the book out of five stars at the beginning of the discussion and then again at the end of the discussion.
We all kept with our original ratings at the end of our three plus hour discussion.
This meeting I think we all had epiphanies on just how great of an idea starting the family book club was. Being so far out in the bushes there really isn’t a lot we can do together as a family, not to mention I/we have completely different relationships with each parent. But we do play scattergories together, we hike and golf together and we all enjoy reading.
We printed some 1984 book club questions off the internet as a general guide but they were pretty weak and we didn’t end up needing them. The different views brought to the table from four people coming from two completly different generations, two of who had read 1984 at very different times in their lives made for brilliant topics and tangents in themselves. Listening to my parents describe their childhoods and then relate them to Orwell’s novel in the sense that looking back you can now take a glimpse into the beginnings of his fictional world forming, meant learning new things about my parents past as well as the time, bloody fascinating. It may now be the 21st first century but it is still almost creepy how bang on Orwell is with his descriptions of things such as Newspeak, inner and outer party members, proles, telescreens, Big Brother, the recording of history. The fact that for years people have been handing over personal information without even a second thought, OnStar being a perfect example. Sure you don’t have to slam a golf club through your window or walk ten kilometers holding six babies but when you think about it doesn’t the thought of a corporation, fuck the Government here, a CORPORATION knowing exactly where you are at ANY time creep you out in the least?
Adam warned me that once I read 1984 that I would see it everywhere. He wasn’t kidding. For a few days I felt surrounded by 1984. While stuck up North we popped in The Red Violin and even having seen it two previous times the whole Communist China section with the constant use of the name of ‘Comrade’, the speak, the banning of western music struck chord after chord with me. And when we returned home Adam felt like watching Notes on a Scandal, less than five minutes into the opening narrative by Judy Dench she uses the word Proles. I became so obsessed that my first read of 2008 was Animal Farm, it is not at all hard to draw parallels between the two books but I gave Animal Farm only four stars. I found the ending a tad bit rushed.
We don’t know when the next meeting will be but it is my mother’s pick.
And now I have finished two books whilst still reading The Time Traveler’s Wife, I may just start a new trend in my reading ways.
As expected today was slightly crazy.
In between the doctor and the psychiatrist I met up with two seriously pissed me off awesome situations.
I needed to go to Canadian Tire because there is a product on the telly that I want to get for my parents.
Actually, wait, let me be more specific, there is a product advertised on the TELEVISION that people watch, it is a commercial and at the end of the commercial it says available at these stores and one of them is Canadian Tire. I have seen it oh perhaps twenty times in the last two months maybe more and I work now so I watch less t.v; let us not forget that.
I think if it hadn’t been for the information desk that was available to customers at the front of the store I may have let this one go but an information desk says to me that you have information. On products. That YOU sell.
There was no information at the information desk, even after my elaborate story with description of product, name, and the mentioning of the commercial at least six times.
I moved on to the next guy at the paint desk, I was just going to search the whole store because I had close to an hour but he made eye contact with me so I thought HEY why not, I’ll ask him. This guy at least tried to look it up in the computer but I couldn’t see what he was actually doing so for all I know he was watching midget porn.
I wander around and find nothing. I find many similar things, I find things I end up buying as gifts for my parents but no go on the televised product they sell that so far two staff plus the staff they yell out: “HEY HAVE YOU EVER HEARD OF ______” can’t find, no one has even heard of it.
One more try, finally, someone wants to help me, and guess what folks, together we found the product but not in the store in the computer, they were sold out so I went with a gift card and I will print out a picture of it for my parents and if they don’t want it and buy something else FINE but I am never buying anything off of the t.v that looks cool from Canadian Tire ever again. I’m not kidding you in a store called Canadian Tire I questioned myself as to whether it was at all possible that I had seen the commercial on an American station.
Now for the psychiatrist’s office. I intentionally sat down in the chairs directly outside of the reception area so that I could read 1984, it is a bit quieter out there. I am trying to read this book super fast because we are having another family book club meeting and because my dad and Adam have read it and my mother and I haven’t [I can not believe I have never read 1984] we are discussing it. This happened last time too when we went up to visit, everyone was done the chosen book but me and we had to wait on the meeting until I was done. Bad me.
I was trucking along, just starting to get into it when a woman in the reception waiting area started to read out loud to her child. For about two seconds I was cool with it, I was all, I love reading and kids should read and parents who read to their kids are rad and BLAH I couldn’t bloody concentrate at all on my book so I started to make sounds and hand gestures and I slapped my book on my leg. I think she might have noticed because her voice lowered and I was able to digest the words in my book again.
The reception lady wanted to close the doors so I had to move inside. I sat down and began to read my book again but I was so close to the woman and her child that there was no possible way to block out her reading of the Berenstein Bears and because it involved reading and not say an obnoxiously loud cell phone call in a public closed in waiting area where I would have NO PROBLEM telling you to SHUT IT I was torn because it was a kid and it was reading so I myself decided that I would then read my book out loud to myself and so I did and I know she heard me because when she would stop reading out loud, I would stop reading out loud also.
I find it insane that this woman was so thick she didn’t get the point and SHUT IT or AT LEAST lower her voice.
I had all these thoughts running through my head whilst trying to read to myself and of course exploded the second the door was closed. Turns out the shrink was happy that I had the balls to read my own book out loud because he agreed that it IS a small waiting area and that there was no need for her to be reading the book out loud and the only thing I could have done better would have been to POLITELY tell her to shut it by reminding her that it is a public place you don’t own it and I’m trying to read in relative QUIET please.
In the wee hours of last Sunday morning it finally hit, almost like I had been waiting for it, but I clearly wasn’t because just hours before I had stated that I was very proud of myself for making if this far into the ’season’ with just regular old depression nothing major, and then I went to sleep some heavy bricks fell and I woke up later in the day with that feeling of weight bearing down on me.
Getting out of the city can simply not come fast enough. Tomorrow is going to be a bloody hellish day and then Saturday we leave. I really hope that once I get up north this nasty cloud of depression, anxiety and inability to see anything without negative attentional bias [aka paranoia] passes because it is starting to wreak massive [extra] havoc already.
My back is not getting better and I am finding it extremely stressful, I was able to go out and get many missions done today but not without arriving home and realizing how much was left to do and how much pain I was in and how much ass I felt like and I crashed onto the pillow until Adam came home. I am seeing my actual Doctor tomorrow instead of the Chiropractor because I’m concerned I have never had back pain of any kind for this long before and I’m a clumsy bastard so I want stronger drugs is basically why I’m going.
Flying up north on its own is EXTREMELY stressful in the winter or really any time of year for that matter. The airports of Northern British Columbia are notorious for canceled flights due to weather because the planes simply can not land.
I am sure everyone is feeling their own level of Christmas and/or seasonal stress right now whether you love or hate the holidays, I just could have done fine without the crash in depressionville with it, thinking everyone hates you and is out to get you at Christmas it feels EXTRA good.
