life goes easy on me... most of the time.

right now I am listening to bag pipes and the counting crows and wondering where the hell I am.

Its funny how I go through phases with this 'thing,' this livejournal thing.  I think that it must have soemthing to do with my life situation.  Actaully, I know it always has to do with my life situation.  The situation is that sometimes I feel like talking and sometimes I dont.  Sometimes there are lots of things that I want to say and I want people to know and then sometimes I dont.  This seems to be one of those 'dont' times.

Dear Everyone,

Why are you all writing letters in digital form and posting them on your LJ?  Did I miss a crucial memo?

Hugs,
Sacha

PS.  I live with a devil cat.  Her name is Wicket and yes, she is very black.  I am also back in school, living in my final undergrad house and attending my final first classes of the final summer term.  It's pretty intense and all rather too final at the moment.  I'm sure I will appreciate it later.

I went to the opera yesterday.  I saw Luisa Miller, a love story about a poor girl and the (deceiving) son of a count which inevitably goes pear shaped and after which everyone dies.  Fairly standard opera plot in my opinion.  Someone always has to die or else everyone is far too happy for it to be deemed opera at all.  Allison and I got to sit in the Grand Royal Box and feel very important.  We had our own coat closet right there in the box and the seats were big and roomy and comfortable.  I dressed up and did my hair and took photos like a tourist and for a few hours I felt very civilized, even if I only paid $20 for a ticket which normally costs $275.

After four months of living here, I have decided that is the best part about Toronto.  It seems that the beauty of this city is the extreme.  You can shell out extraordinary amounts of money or very, very little of it if you try really hard on each account.  You just have to dig deep enough (into your pockets or your resources) and eventually you get exactly what you want.  I’ve seen a play with midgets for $13, a one man philosophical comedy show for $5, the opera for $20, Edward Scissorhands the dance performance from Britain for $27 and a bunch of other stuff.  Theatre, live music, comedy, jazz, international dance, whatever.  It’s pretty spectacular. 

You can go to the ROM on Fridays for 5 bucks.  You can get free tours of Union Station on the last Saturday of every month.  You can go to the Design X-change for $5 and the Textile Museum for $6 every day of the week (if you’re a student).  You can also get baseball tickets for 9 dollars I am told.  It’s pretty phenomenal.  Adversely, one can find themselves paying $17-20 at the Science Center and special exhibits at the AGO.  Most of the big international bands are exorbitantly priced, and going to the movies is, as in most countries these days, rather pricey in comparison to the deals you can get to see REAL LIVE PEOPLE do stuff but sometimes I still go just because.  Because it’s entertainment that won’t damage my liver and generally makes me smarter (exclude Hollywood from this statement).

The man who sold us our tickets at the opera yesterday had a soft spoken Scottish accent which made my heart ache a little bit, as those accents always do.   I just stood there and listened to him talk as my friends debated which seats we should sit in.  He reminded me of Stu.  He had the right shade of red hair, and it was the right length and the right texture.  He had the same shade of pale and proliferation of freckles and he was about my age and six feet tall with blue eyes and glasses and an accent from the right part of town and that all made my heart ache a little bit more.

Where have four months gone?

Time to move on, time to move on.  Pack up your stuff, get a new phone number.  I start my final semester of my undergrad at Waterloo in three weeks.  It's scary, it's exciting.  I'll be glad to be done, and maybe... just MAYBE start thinking of my life in terms of half years or even full years for the first time in a long time.  Maybe.

I'm ready to move out of Toronto, because as Sharl-tn so nicely put it, Toronto has everything you want and very little that you need.  I'm glad that I lived here, and as much as I say that I wouldn't want to again, I sort of do.  It's a nice test of willpower, to see how well I can remember all of the things that I've learned while traveling and living in other countries, when you figure what you actually NEED and what you can live without and how and when to say no so that your life doesn't lose its meaning.  It's so easy to lose sight of the things that really matter, so easy to unground yourself.  It's a sstruggle to remember the important things, to see the clear light through all the bullshit.

But I think that I did an alright job and now it's just about time to go back to school and fight to keep my head above all the bullshit there.  But it'll be summer and that makes a lot of things better just because.

Time to move on, time to move on.

Have you ever felt like you had too many options?  That there were so many possibilities that you have no idea how to go about picking one and going with it?  That’s the problem that I am facing… and how can one go about figuring out which option is better than all the rest?

As I’m sure most of you know I will be graduating in August.  For the first time in five years I don’t have to conform to any schedule but the one I want to conform to.  I have decided to take a gap year, and hence I have a full year before I go back to school to get a master’s degree (yes, in architecture), and until then I can literally do whatever I want.

I used to think that it would be easy.  I would graduate, know where I wanted to go, find a job and boom… done.  I am set.  But like the rearview mirror reads, things are not always as close as they appear to be.  It’s a decision proving to be significantly harder than I initially perceived it to be.

I can literally go anywhere… which is a problem because the list of places I want to go is endless.  I can literally do anything… which is another problem because I want to do everything.  I have no good reason to stay in one place or move to another and that’s what I think I need.  A reason.   A reason to go one way instead or another, a reason to chose one place over another, a reason for something.  The problem is that I KNOW now that I can go anywhere and within four months have a job, apartment, and friends… a full life.  I know that I can make it anywhere so the question is why should I go to one place over another place and how can I be sure that that place is different/better than the rest of them?

Everywhere that I’ve been sort of blurs together when I get to thinking about it… was it that place that was so good?  Or just that particular situation; the job, the people I was working and hanging out with, the apartment that I was living in, who came to visit me, what season it was, what mind state I was in… would that place be as good if I went back there?  If the job was different or the people were different or the neighbourhood I lived in was different?  Would I like it as much? Would I wonder if I had made a mistake?  If another place would have been a better choice?

Too many choices and not a good enough reason to go with any one of them.

I have found my new deserted beach in Mexico or mountain views in New Zealand.  I like to call it ‘yoga at lunch’ and it is what keeps me sane.  It may not be a natural beauty to marvel while pondering existence but there is something about it that gets me through each day in downtown Toronto bringing me closer and closer to zen.

Proof:  There is actually a command in autoCAD called 'BATTMAN' and one would use when trying to edit the order of attributes in a titleblock.

Perhaps this is a foreign language to most people, and perhaps you think I am a huge nerd for thinking this is funny but there are other people out there who care about this as much as I do.

Yesterday morning when I left for work it was snowing those big puffy snow flakes that get caught in your eyelashes and fall softly to make a  thick blanket on the ground.  It was beautiful and I wanted to stop and take a picture of the moment to last forever and as I walked down Queen Street towards my office I thought about how I should have been in a mountain lodge somewhere, sipping hot chocolate and watching the fire, getting ready to go out boarding instead of on my way to work.  And then when I got back from boarding I would take a nice hot bath and then go meet my friends for dinner and watch some live music.  That would be my heaven and one day it had better happen.

It’s was the type of morning that makes you want to be a kid again, praying for a snow day.

Today proved to be a significantly different type of morning.  Today I met a crazy lady while waiting for the Queen Street car at University Ave.  After a few minutes of quiet waiting, apparently having gotten comfortable with my presence and deeming me trust worthy enough, she started right in on her theory about the TTC drivers in Toronto.  According to her the Toronto Transit Commission is running the largest underground prostitution ring in North America.  They’ve been in business since WWII, following 14 year old girls home and abducting them to become prostitutes, and clearly, since they have been in operation for so long they are incredibly successful and pay off the government.  Who knew?

I, of course, did not want to hear some crazy tale from some crazy woman at 8:00am on my way to work but resolved not to blow her off fully because crazy people are… well… crazy, and at the moment with the neck injury I’m not in top form for defending myself.   After a few minutes of her endless conspiracy theory more people joined us at the stop, one of whom was a man that (probably unknowingly but maybe not) stepped in between the crazy lady and me to act as a shield, just in case she decided that I wasn’t buying her story and chose to attack.

Today was the type of morning that makes you question things a little bit...

I want things.  I didn’t used to want things, but now I do.  Something in me changed in the last year.  I used to want to be by myself and do my own thing and not have responsibilities to anyone or anything and go wherever and do whatever, but now I want things and people and this life that I can’t seem to have and it’s frustrating that I can’t have them.

I want to go back to not wanting things or move ahead to having them because I don’t like all this sitting on the fence.

Every day is entertaining thanks to our office manager, Paul, because Paul is a gay Ukrainian man with flaming red hair and tight t-shirts.  Not skin tight, but a bit tighter than the average guy and he walks around talking about how he wants to steal our carpet samples and put them in his apartment because they are so nice.  Much nicer than the carpets you find at Zellers that are made with glue, you know?  He calls me delicious when I’m in the kitchen making tea in the morning.  In his gay Ukrainian man accent.  He has a bit of a bounce in his step and gets very upset when you mention the new Dumbledor in the Harry Potter Movies.  He doesn’t like the new Dumbledor.  And when Paul starts going off about something, Forde, one of our gay CA guys starts making yapping motions with his hands and rolling his eyes.  It’s rather comical.

At my office, in addition to our Ukrainian office manager, we have soup.  Everyday is soup day.  Without fail… we will always have soup at lunchtime in the kitchen, homemade by some architect that very morning.  We have one of those big professional soup tureens.  It’s a serious business.  There is a little announcement when its ready and a bunch of people go get it and eat it and its there.  Every day. There will be a cookbook, full of our recipes, in publication within a year.

On Friday we are going skiing... well, I am going boarding but whatever.  It's still called a Ski Day.  Tradition, you know?

Also from yesterday:  I was talking on Gmail with Agata in the morning, which I thought was a pretty good way to start my morning.  It had been a long time since I had last talked to her and was starting to feel a bit weird about it.  I mean, quite uneasy.  Anyway, it was good to talk to her again but that’s not really the point of this story.

THE POINT IS that in ending our conversation, I, for a reason unbeknownst to myself even, got the urge to say ‘later tater,’ as a sort of ‘over and out’ to the convo.  TNow lets be clear that this is something that I would NEVER, in normal conversation, ever say.  After typing it and then thinking about how weird it was, I was struck by the irony of it all.  Calling a Polish girl a potato.  How appropriate.