Ice Ice Baby

My friend PL set up a rink in his back yard this winter and I went to his house on Saturday night with SR for an inaugural skating party, which he dubbed the Winter Classic. It was a mild evening, which is to say only a few degrees below freezing during what has been quite a cold spell, and we had an enjoyable and unforgettable evening. It was an introductory night for SR and PL, which is as hard to imagine as it is shameful considering how long I have known them and how much I cherish them both. It had been far too long, but as it always is with good friends, the years quickly melted away and we had a fantastic evening of skating and playing and falling down before retiring inside his impossibly tiny apartment for a taste of his finesse as a DJ. I was extremely and almost awkwardly inspired by my friends PL and SC and delighted to share the same with SR, as well as pleased at her enthusiastic response.

Duck duck goose

For many years I struggled with Christmas: when I was a cynic, I had a simple, dismissive response to it. when I was a small child, I loved it, as do all small children - do they not?

As soon as I was old enough to be cynical however, I became cynical, about Christmas among other things.

I accept it now, but I also accept so many things now which I found so difficult to accept before.

For Christmas this year, SR was rather determined to cook a goose. I was delighted to support her in such an expedition and in fact the only impediment to the entirely appropriate expression of her heritage was her grandmother who made it clear that turkey was the only dinner she would entertain on Christmas. So turkey it was, and goose.

The Ice Storm, part 2

On the Monday before Christmas, we were invited to my friend P's to join P, P, L and J to watch The Ice Storm, which was as fantastic as it was appropriate. I had such fond memories of that film from when I was so bitter and unsatisfied, and of course it is a tragic movie.

Blessed by the calendar

For me, Christmas, and its close cousin New Year's Eve, are inextricably tied, and in a good year overshadowed by, my birthday, which falls a few days before the big day, and in fact on what those of us in the Northern Hemisphere of this mortal coil would dub the shortest and darkest day of the year.
I have nevertheless been blessed in the past two years, as the calendar has favoured a celebration of my birthday: last year it was on a Friday which also coincided with a failed doomsday scenario, but which nonetheless made for a fantastic celebration.
This year was somewhat more subdued but it was still a party, and it was still an ice storm, and despite the large number of regrets, those who attended shall not forget it.

The Ice Storm

While I would not say that the ice storm of 2013 came out of nowhere, as there was plenty of warning, we were nonetheless surprised but the intensity and severity of its effects. I for one, thanks to the irrepressible tendency of  folks given the chance to skew their anticipation on the side of disaster, have grown to expect less and less of a given dire meteorological prediction. In this case I was pleasantly and not terribly inconveniently surprised. The current was interrupted at my house for 24 hours, the vast majority of which was Sunday, and the entirety of which I was absent the abode.
The main interruption for me was that the storm (and more importantly, the forecast) arrived the evening of my birthday celebration at my apartment. It promised to be a legendary event and I do not mean to take anything away from that which it was, which was memorable in any sense, but the impending storm ate significantly into the attendance list and in the end the decent crowd who did make it were compelled to amuse themselves in the absence of those who somehow thought inclement weather legitimately excuses absence.

Opening Day

It is opening day at my new job, and so far so good. I had lunch on Friday with HR, my old boss, and while I guess you could not say we buried the hatchet, it went as well and any such thing could ever be expected to go, and I am proud of how it went and of how I chose to handle it.
Working up the courage to walk away from my engagement with HR had not been easy, but more important is how exactly I approached it. I felt that I handled it in a very mature way and in fact HR himself was left with nothing else to say other than "I don't blame you" when I dropped the bomb.

An Examined Life Worth Living

Tonight I examined the jewellery of my grandfather, which inexplicably ended up in my hands, by way of my mother, who despite being the oldest, was nonetheless one of only two girls among eight then seven children.

I do not not know my mother's father very well. I am impressed by how completely unlike my father he appears to have been. My grandfather, for whom I was named, left me an impressive collection of items, mostly tie clips and pins. A "Past President" tie clip from a valuable and forgotten group. A Legion of Honor pin for 50 Years of service to an organisation called AIME- The American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical and Petroleum Engineers. Dog tags for his service in the armed forces. A beautiful and poetic reminder token from the First Presbyterian Church:

 Featuring perhaps a local Cathedral and a New Testament superfecta, the medallion

engraved in his name (and mine!) on the back side (not shown). 

I am humbled by the accomplishments of my mother's father, as evidenced by his modest jewellery collection.

One only need imagine a comparison with a typical and contemporary man's jewellery (and vanity) to recognise a discouraging contrast.

On again, Off Again

In the past, either to myself or in conversation with any of the various therapists or coaches I have worked with, I have often mentioned that my capacity to act as "me", the me I want to be, is a binary thing, distinctly tied to and essentially a manifestation of my mood, which is itself also a binary thing - essentially I am either on, or I am off, and that makes all the difference.

This summer I was off. The whole summer, unfortunately. It started in May, and ran until two weeks ago. I can even put my finger on it. I have struggled to put my finger on it in the past, but this time I can pinpoint it, the exact moment when it rolled over, like an automobile odometer going from 99,999 to 1,000,000 - all the columns in sync. Two weeks ago, on a Tuesday, after I met with a woman from the tax agency, it just turned around. Or I just turned around.

When I am off, I am off. I do not want to talk about it, I do not want to blog about it, I do not want to share it with my therapist, I do not want to share it with anyone or anything.

Ausweitung der Kampfzone

This morning I had an appointment with my therapist W. As is often the case, as I went in I found myself reflecting that I did not have a very clear idea what we were going to talk about, but as is always the case, we found plenty to fill the hour. My appreciation for the time I spend with him has not diminished even slightly from the first times, when I was in so much pain compared to now, to the later times when I was ebullient and felt as if I were walking on air, to the recent times when I am neither manic nor miserable but a steady somewhere in between.

I told him the story of going to the cottage with my father this past weekend and mentioned how I feel quite disconnected from him when I see him, and how I see him so infrequently as a result. I told him how lost he seems and how I felt frustrated and powerless to help him. Rather than dwell on that, instead he asked me to tell him about moments in which we had connected. I thought about it and told him the story of working on the cryptic crossword puzzle together and how we connected over the hour or two when we worked on that. He smiled as I related it to him and I am getting to know him well enough now that I am able to put words in his mouth almost - I illustrated for him for me with my hands the two verticals representing me and him and how I nonetheless stayed upright. He was effective at convincing me to look on the bright side as it were, and focus on the moments of connection. And I realised that the lesson for me was that I could safely attempt to extend the boundary a little bit the next time we are together, and see if I can carve out a little bit more connection at a time.

What makes it so hard to believe?

One of the ironies of the validation trap (and what makes it a trap essentially) is that the hungrier one is for validation, the more starved one feels for it (and vice versa). I feel this way recently, despite the fact that by all accounts it has been all around me. Today was more than a perfect example, yet somehow the inadequacy somehow shines through and I feel like an imposter.

This morning I had an interview for a somewhat senior contract job at a major hospital in my city. I have been out of work now for several weeks (months) now and having already turned down at least one job, and having been offered another one earlier in the week, I found myself suited and tied on "casual Friday", and meeting with a likeable Irish recruiter in preparation for my time on the hot seat upstairs with the client. When the time came I found myself sitting through a committee-style interview with the department head, the team lead, and the "mobile" point-man (woman). Nonetheless I felt confident and I really knocked it out of the park, even while feeling like I had flubbed it.
This afternoon I met with a recruiter for another job, and once again I approached it with that confidence which really changes everything, and I managed to put myself out there for a job for which I might not otherwise have the qualifications.
This evening I attended an event at my club, which was sponsored for delegates to the national convention. I went with M., my friend and partner in crime, and as is our custom we made the best of the room. We ended up leaving with some other folks from the national council and stayed out for a bit at a bar around the corner from the club. I was delighted to have met a very interesting woman, C., and enjoyed the opportunity I had to connect with her.
And just when I thought the evening was over, as I drove home from downtown to my apartment in the west end, I bumped into my roommate, and between the two of us we actually managed to solve the problems of the world, in an hour, or two. In fact we shared a great deal more than that and  more than I ever imagined we would.
So why am I still so convinced that something is missing? What makes it so hard for me to believe that this is actually working, that life is good?

The greatest compliment

Last year I moved to the west end, to a neighbourhood with which I was already quite familiar. I had actually lived there once, over 20 years earlier, as a teenage high school dropout sharing a basement apartment with another misfit friend. Despite having lived mostly in the east end when I have been in the city since then, I had several strong connections to the area, including a circle of friends who had grown up and remained there, the members of my hockey team mostly drew from that area, and I had also worked at an office there for three years starting up until a couple of years previously.
The office was oddly situated: it was part of a mixed-use development of 1990s vintage which had repurposed a narrow strip of industrial land tucked up against a railway corridor as a set of subsidized-housing townhouses and the commercial building in which we worked. The surrounding neighbourhood was mostly residential, with a large scrap yard a couple of blocks away as a reminder of the area's industrial heritage.
The company had hired a woman, J., who lived in one of the run-down rental houses across the street as a sort of part-time cleaning lady who would take care of the office kitchen as well as help out whenever there was some kind of catered event,  such as little pep-rally type things they would have every quarter, or a barbequeue on the lawn in the summertime. She stood out as rather working class in contrast to what was otherwise a rather homogeneous professional culture in the office, and she mostly kept to herself as she went about her work. Nonetheless, I learned her name and would engage her when I ran into her as I would the other people whom I knew in the office, as well as when I saw her outside in front of her house with her family and elsewhere.
I enjoyed chatting with her and we would talk about our lives and relationships, or gossip about comings and goings in the office. I would help her when she had to move furniture or load cases of drinks or things like that for an event we were having. It was a pleasant and seemingly unremarkable friendship.
Fast forward to a few months ago, just before Christmas I think, and I, now living in the neighbourhood, bumped into J. at the grocery store. We had a brief but nice chat and caught up a bit, and before we parted she paid me a tremendous compliment by way of relating to me a conversation she had recently had at the office. She still worked (and still works) at the company where we had met, some three years since I had left. She had recently brought in someone, a friend or family member, to help her or fill in for her or something like that, and she had been showing the new woman around and the ropes. The woman was surprised and remarked to J. how impressed she was at how well she knew everyone and how comfortably she moved within what was for both of them a rather foreign space and culture.
Her response to her was that she had actually been very shy, uncomfortable, and intimidated in the office when she first started, but that then a certain man, and she said my name, started working there, and he, alone among the entire office, engaged her and treated her as a person worthy of attention and respect. And that consistent respect had given her the confidence to engage with others there to the point that long after I had left the company, she was comfortable there in a way she had never been before.
This is how I want to make a difference in the world.

Aujourd'hui

Today did not begin all that well. I awoke early and while I had pleasant and plentiful dreams, I was initially unable to get back to sleep, and instead gave up and read for a time.
And most of what I read and whither my thoughts was negative and destructive.
Nonetheless at around 7:30 I clawed myself out of my bed and into the shower.

Destiny

I stopped this morning at a telecommunications store, looking for a local SIM card to use with my phone from "back home". I am not at home, you see. Despite being unemployed, rather deep in a confidence crisis, and crippled with indecision, I managed to pull the trigger on what is perhaps a long-overdue getaway. Unfortunately, I am alone, almost painfully so at times. But I was lonely at home as well. And, this being a pattern I recognise, I am getting better at dealing with it. But I have a long way to go.

The woman at the store told me that she did not sell SIM cards, and instructed me to go to the main office of the actual telecom company in town. I had to buy something else so I was lingering for a bit and then I overheard another woman who was in the store mention that she was "going there". She said it more to the first woman than to me, as if she was not quite so bold as to ask me directly, but wanted the woman with whom I had already spoken to ask me the favour. Fortunately for her, and for me, I was listening, and I turned around on my way out the door and directly offered her a ride.

Her name was Destiny. She was friendly and from a (not-so) neighbouring island and mentioned that she had plans to emigrate to my country someday. She rather proudly assured me that she was "a security officer", presumably as I should therefore have nothing to worry about admitting a stranger to my car. In fact she not only directed me to a place I would probably otherwise have had trouble finding, but she used her connections to wrangle me a prime and gratis parking spot behind a closed gate at a bank in the centre of town. Following that, she escorted me to the door of the telecom office and bid me enter with a smile. There we traded thank yous, and argued briefly over whose greater pleasure it was to have met the other. It does not get any better than that folks. That is the zenith.

New horizon

I quit my job today. I had been working there for a bit more than three years.

For some reason I usually use 72 as my go-to denominator when considering lifetime ratios. It may be a bit miserly but it is not far off. And if you consider that eighty is a more realistic life expectancy, 72 nicely allows for a few years at the beginning and/or the end to be hors concours. Perhaps more appropriately, it has a convenient set of prime factors.

So according to my reasoned reckoning, the three years I spent engaged in the pursuit from which I walk away today essentially empty-handed represents one twenty-fourth of my life. Which itself is more or less four percent. And there it goes.

It would be shortsighted to consider that squandered time. Lessons were learned, and if they were not always learned quickly then in most cases it is likely that the pupil was not adequately prepared. Until now, my career has remained in my mind the glaring exception to the otherwise almost universal transformation which I have undergone in the recent past - whether I consider that time frame to be the past year, the past 17 months, the past two years, or the past 27 months, my dissatisfying career and the attendant dysfunctional employment situation in which I found myself is the constant unresolved and unbroken bitter and unpalatable thread weaving through that time.

27 months ago I met LB and my planet shuddered, the reverberations from which would take some time but would eventually shatter the foundations of my entire existence.

2 years ago I stubbornly and courageously took a leap of faith and put an end to a toxic and hypoxic relationship with SO, and blindly charted a solo course, with little other than momentum to propel me forward, and plenty of obstacles.

17 months ago I handed over my home to its new owner and set out on an odyssey of which persists to this day of establishing and/or failing to establish and moving on chasing my comfort zone.

One year ago I embarked on the greatest wave of growth I have ever experienced, a tsunami which sustained me and helped me to build and to grow, which endured for months, and which destroyed all doubt which lay in its path. And while it has seemingly relented, it has yet to exhaust itself, and I feel its effects to this day. This impulse reoriented my perspective on everything.

And this evening, I finally pulled the trigger on a long-overdue execution, banishing a myth which had long since degenerated into rainbow-chasing, if indeed it had ever been anything but that.

Year-end List

Earlier this year, we opened my father's cottage a week earlier than usual, and I posted that 2012 was the year that Victoria Day came early. But it is not so much that it came early, more that it came in abundance, and in that respect it was like much else this year. I have experienced an abundance of love and a wealth of warmth this year like nothing I have ever felt before. Pretty good year, indeed.

I search for the words to describe it, and find words like landmark and monumental, but even with such grandiose adjectives I fall short. It has been a transformational year, the year I finally achieved emotional stability, the year I finally achieved emotional maturity. The year I finally grew up. The year I finally trusted myself and embraced myself. The year I finally learned how to treat other people. The year I finally recognised what truly makes me great, and the year I finally recognised the greatness in everyone.

I am eternally thankful and indebted to those who have helped me along the way. Before I identify them however, first of all I must thank myself -- for  better or worse I am the captain of this ship, and only I could have charted a new course the way I did. It was a monumental step for me to recognise that the biggest obstacle to me getting on track to being the man I wanted to be was me, and it was at least as big a challenge to act on that insight and set about making the changes I needed to make.
But after that there is a whole crew whose contributions need to be recognised and acknowledged, and in the tradition of the end-of-the-year list, I do that here:

To my dearest LB, I thank you for lighting the spark within me and helping me realise that there was another path. I thank you for showing me how beautiful the world looks from four floors up, for assuring me of the greatness I am capable of, and how pointless it is to sell myself short, for setting an example for me of how to set my sights high and for holding my hand and leading me there.

To my dearest LD, I thank you for reaching out and guiding me when I was going through some of the roughest periods I have ever experienced: last year at Christmastime, when I felt like  I was in no shape to be anyone's friend, you were my friend, you had faith in me and in the fact that I could and would rise above the darkness, which I did, with your help. You were and continue to be an example to me and of course to everyone around you. You taught me the value of living authentically, which turned out to be easier than I realised, and more important than I ever imagined. It matters. You introduced me to FSM, and assured me of what a fantastic man he was - and is - and helped me to discover him and introduce him to the world. And you reminded me that I am and always have been him.

To my beloved J, you never gave up on me when it felt like everyone else had, and when I certainly had given up on myself. You were there, to lift me out of the mire when I most needed lifting, you are my hero and my inspiration. You taught me to value myself and the value of treating myself with respect and refinement. You taught me what it meant to receive unconditional love, and I learned how to give it to you. And this year I shared those lessons with the rest of my family, and the results speak for themselves.

To WC, you taught me the value of always having capacity, and how to monitor my own. You taught me how to live forthright and upright: with my feet planted on the ground,  and my head up and oriented to the heavens and to the stars. You showed me where home was, and how it was closer than I ever realised. You taught me that there is only one M., that he is and was and always will be the loveable man that I am. You taught me the beauty of innocence and took me back to look through the eyes of myself as a child, and through the eyes of some of the people who knew me then and have known me since, and what a delightful view I had.

To my beloved sister K., your faith in me never wavered, no matter how desperate or despondent I became, you were there, to help in every possible way and at every conceivable hour. You assured me that I was not my brain, and that it would pass, and despite how difficult it was for me to believe it at the time, you were right - as you are about pretty much everything. My thoughts were just thoughts, and it did pass, and here I am congratulating and embracing you with the love that I never even knew I had in me.

To OW, my coach, you taught me to look within myself and trust myself to know what is the right thing to do. You taught me that what frustrates me about others is what frustrates me about myself.
You showed me that my relationship with woman I date reflects my relationship with the the women in my family. You inspired me to embrace my love for the women and the people in my life in the loving way of which I am capable.  You showed me how I can change my world by changing myself.