It's unfortunate I decided to walk away from my faith just as I entering one of my most depressing years of my life. I knew walking away wouldn't be easy, but having to deal with losing half my socia support network and being jobless was a double punch I wasn't expecting. I wasn't expecting it to be this overwhelming, or this lonely, or this confusing. I didn't prepare for life after God any more than I did for life after school.
The job thing, I'm dealing with it. I'm networking, calling up for information interviews and contacting employers, which so far is more productive than sending out resumes on the Internet. I'm planning to move to Toronto soon, look for a job during the summer (I have yet to figure out how I'm going to finance that now that my brother's wife doesn't want family living with them), and if that falls through, I'm either going to Calgary or coming back to Ottawa, taking French for the year and then trying out for Teacher's College and I'll continue to take French. I'll volunteer at libraries and do whatever I need to expand my network and get more experience. This is going to be expensive and lengthy and put me more in debt, and I can't believe I have to wait a few years before I could afford a trip to New Zealand and buy some really nice silk blend yarns, but it'll get there eventually.
The religion thing, wow. I've been in that church all my life, for twenty plus years. I grew up with the people there, and people there watched me grow up and helped me out and gave me a shoulder to cry on. Sure, there was a teenage rebellious period where I rejected the notion of hell was right and that homosexuality was wrong, and truthfully, I never recovered from that. But for the most part, the church was always there, and I was always at church. And suddenly I cut it off and it was like losing half my family. Sure, I couldn't stand half the people there, and the Chinese pastor made me want to drive nails through my head with his "praying for my future family, there's no need to minister to the single lifestyle because all Christians get married, you got your job because we prayed for you so you better tithe" attitude. (Jesus fucking Christ, I can't stand him! And he wants us to meet for lunch. I don't frigging think so.)
But 20+ years there, they became like family and even though our ideals clashed, we liked to look out for each other. People were giving each other tapes to help improve someone's French, or talking to someone who might know someone about a job opening, or just asking what was wrong when someone looked upset. Whatever I have against the church, the support they gave each other was nothing short of admirable (well, keep the idiot pastor out of it.)
I miss that support.
I guess the thing that bugs me most about my post-God life is that I don't like who I am. I've been prone to negativity, hysteria, and bitterness as a Christian, but now that I'm out of church, I seem to be a much more angry, snappish, and unhappy person. I know it has nothing to do with God. Some of it is losing that connection with all those people, but mostly, it's the fact that my job situation sucks and my finances are dwindling so fast I'm afraid I won't be able to afford job searching in Toronto. But I'm afraid someone is going to look at what I've become and say, "she's depressed and poor and this dull bitter ghost of her former self because she left God."
Like I said, walking away from church at the same time I was entering the job market was terrible, terrible timing.
Anyways, I'm slowly starting my own little network and meeting more people and getting more contacts and hopefully someone will know something that will give me an edge. Slowly, I've been climbing out of this rut and I've got information interviews lined up and plans to call Toronto libraries. I just need to be smart about this and play my cards right. And have a little faith in myself. That'll do wonders.
lika got crap done on Tuesday, May 22, 2007, 08:47 p.m.
Ottawa has been exquisite lately. There was a faint glow in a shape of perfect circle in the night sky tonight, the circle being so large it took up most of my peripheral view. In the middle of that ring of soft light, the moon shone, a small, high moon, but one that shone brilliantly against the dark smoky blue sky. It was as if the light the moon was giving off was radiating away from it in a circle, but was skulking under the sky, getting fainter until it surfaced as that ghost-like ring some distance away. Thin translucent clouds blurred the area outside the ring when I look away, and I saw stars shining through them, and the delicate lacework of tree branches blooming above me. Snow and ice crunched and shimmered beneath my boots. I spent half an hour walking up and down my street, drinking in the crystal beauty around me.
I love winter when it first appear so much. I'll love it decidedly less when February hits, but right now, it's austere and barbaric and gorgeous.
I didn't even mind the ice encrusted branches during that ice freak storm on Friday, but then I still had electricity. I wouldn't have been so enthralled during my walk home if there was no electricity. But we have electricity and I made my kitchen smell like cinnamon and vanilla baking cookies with my best friend. We did a lot of walking last night, the night being absolutely beautiful and she was getting even more joy than I was from it. I wish she was here with me tonight to see that ring around the moon.
lika got crap done on Tuesday, December 5, 2006, 02:31 a.m.
I was walking down the sidewalk today, and there this fierce wind that was shaking the leaves down the trees and causing them to roll down the roads and sidewalk. They were actually rolling on their edges, in circles, round and round like little wheels that were outracing the cars on the road. It was an amazing sight, a flying flipping flurries of colours, all rolling in front of me until the wind got really gusty and starting picking them up into the air and sent them hurling through the trees.
I walked on behind them with the wind pushing at my back. It pushed with such a force that I held my arms outstretched at my sides, almost believing that if I lift my feet, the wind could catch me and I would be able to ride that air current above the streets all the way home. The leaves continued to swirl around me in that speckled array of browns and reds and golds and oranges and greens, fluttering by my arms like butterflies caught in a tornado and rolling like the poverbial balls of hay past my feet.
lika got crap done on Sunday, October 29, 2006, 04:36 p.m.
You know what? I think I'm going to be okay :)
lika got crap done on Tuesday, October 24, 2006, 11:12 p.m.
I know I'm not the only one who was stupid enough to go to university and rack up a five digit student loan debt, but the fact that other people are that stupid isn't making me feel better about my stupidity. It makes me even more mad, because Fuck Frith, are we all so fucking... *sheeps* that we can't think in any other way than go to university learn nothing useful rack up huge debt and spend the next ten years paying back debt with half the payment being used on interest?
Thank god I left YF because there's no fucking way I'm encouraging this huge misstep of stupidity anymore.
Every day that goes back is $4 I need to pay in interest. And fuck shit if I learned anything in McGill except that all professors wants their cocks sucked. Now I'm all about sucking up and pleasing folks like the next two dollar whore, but even I couldn't stomach stroking the egos of the fucktards at McGill. probably why I didn't do as well as other students who were flopping like seals to give the professors exactly what they wanted, even though 99.99% of that was from the 1960's and had nothing to with libraries. Trust me, I've worked in two libraries. Nothing they taught had anything to do with libraries. It was all about sucking their cocks, and me being a frigid bitch who's all about giving creeps freezer burns and all, it was a bad bad combination.
Nonetheless I paid a stupid amont for it and I'll be paying it for the next 114 months. Well, I fucked up, it's only fair I get punished for me. It's unfair that you guys have to put up with the whining of my mistakes - I should be mature about this and realize I made the mistake of going to university therefore shut up and be graceful about it - but we all know I was never a mature, rational person. Ergo, this post, which I promise I will delete in a couple of hours because I do have some bits of decency (that is such a lie), but for now, Canada's student loans system sucks ass for having such interest when tuition fees are going up and the job market is shit.
Give me an evening to get over this. I'll be my normal self tomorrow. Yay LJ! :)
lika got crap done on Thursday, October 12, 2006, 08:25 p.m.
FUCK ME. I suck. She even asked me if I had everything and I should have checked, my stupid fracked up self >_< Frithdammit, I clearly was not made for real life. Just, fuck.
lika got crap done on Monday, October 9, 2006, 01:13 a.m.
Holland: "Lindsey, this is a delicate moment. I nod to Phil behind me and he's gonna put a bullet in your head." Scene, brilliantly delivered, taken from season one's episode of Angel, "Blind Date", probably the smartest and best written episode of the series. I've always love that idea of clarity. Russell Banks wrote about it brilliantly in The Sweet Hereafter (wonderful book, btw) when he was describing Stephen Mitchell, a lawyer who worked on cases about dead children: "Nothing else provides me with the rush that I get from cases like this. There is a brilliant hard-edged clarity that comes over me when I take on a suitfor the Ottos and the Walkers of the world, an intensity and focus that makes me feel more alive then than at any other time... The rest of my time, like most people, I muddle lonely through my days and nights feeling unsure, vaguely confused, conflicted, and aimless. Put me onto something like this school bus case, and through and zap! all those feelings disappear... no ambivalence, did no second-guessing, had no mistrusted motives--I knew what I did and what I would do next and why, and Lord, it felt wonderful."
I think we all want that clarity. Like Mitchell, I spend most of my days in a muddled confusion, so I seek some sort of absolute, which I usually find when coming across small truths in shows like Angel and Babylon 5 and X-Files or reading books that exposes hard facts and bits of human nature, such as the aforementioned Sweet Hereafter, or Jacob Have I loved or Watership Down (ironic as WD is about rabbits), or when I'm with people I love and the only clarity I need is the joy they bring me. But that clarity is, at best, transient, and after a while I'm back in that muddled state of confusion. However, as I prize the struggle and the grappling for clarity and not necessarily the clarity itself, I can for the most part, but not all, live with it.
Still, I love that wonderful dialogue of Holland, describing love as that "sharp, clear sense of self a man gains once he's truly found his place in the world", and that it will be his convictions that will help him deal in a crisis. I think that's so true. I think that's a desire many of us have, including myself. As much as I admire the struggle - and to be perfectly honest, it's cool in theory but it sucks in practice - I so want to know my place in this world, and be clear about it, and sure about it, so much that my certainty will get me through any difficult situation, even death.
Like the Babylon 5 episode "Comes the Inquisitor" where Delenn and Sheridan were tested to see if they were right for the coming war, and in the end, they're told they're the right people, in the right place, at the right time. I had many issues with it with the eppie, but I remember thinking at that moment, "man, it be wonderful to reassured that you will accomplish it like that." It was like that moment in Stargate Atlantis's "Before I sleep" where Elizabeth Weir met an alternative-time-version of herself who assured her that she had the courage to make difficult sacrifices for a better good.
But not all clarity is good. Holland was, unfortunately, the devil's advocate and I mean that literally. We find out in the second season that Wolfram and Hart, the legal firm he and Lindsey worked for, was the evil that was there during the Inquisition, the Khmer Rouge, when the very first cave man clubbed his neighbor. Evil, too, has a clarity, as Angel says, "It's their system, and it's one that works. It works because there is no guilt. There is no torment, no consequences. t's pure. I remember what that was like. Sometimes I miss that clarity."
There are times, folks, when doubt is a good thing.
(An aside, someone who's a bigger geek than I am was analyzing the episode and mentioned that Holland was pitching the idea of using evil for good in the episode, which if he did, I have to say he was brilliant. Because the worst kind of evils comes from good intentions. See Khmer Rouge, aka The Killing Fields. So apt that Holland mentioned Wolfram and Hart was there during the Khmer Rogue. They came into existence due to Pol Pot, who really was trying to better the lives of his countrymen, except evil took over, evil had to take over from the bloody brutal deaths of millions that followed.)
Wow, that thing on clarity took longer than I expected. I'll have to be quick on what I wanted to say about connections. So yes, I've been rewatching Angel season one, and came across the episode "Lonely Hearts", which is a great episode on how desperate people are to make a connection with another person. I'm actually going to go further than the episode and say "that person" is NOT what we're actually looking for, but that connection, which really is a moment. There are people we have more of those moments with is all. In my case, I have several friends who I really connect with, and if I can't connect with one at a moment, I will seek another. That moment of connection is vital to me. Curse us for being social creatures who need others. When we can't find it, it's such a lonely, hellish ordeal and it's no wonder so many people are desperate, and as one girl said in Tokyo Babylon, "people do evil because they're lonely". However, when we do make that connection, it's just sublime.
Last point brought up by re-watching Angel: I HATE IT WHEN BEAUTIFUL MALE FRIENDSHIPS ARE RUINED OVER A STUPID GIRL! Man, it's *hurts* to watch Wesley and Gunn's awesome friendship in S2 and them doing their handshake thing when you know they're both going to fall for the same girl and hate each other next season. SHE WASN'T WORTH IT! YOUR FRIENDSHIP WAS FAR MORE BEAUTIFUL THAN EITHER ONE OF YOUR RELATIONSHIPS WITH HER WAS! FRAKTARDS! LOSERS! MORONS! And if any boy who reads this blog breaks up a friendship over a pair of skirt I will emasculate him myself. You are a disgrace to manhood, and clearly deserved to be emasculated with a rusy pair of spoons, you *BIMBO*.
Lindsey: "I-I didn't want to lie to you. I didn't want to betray you. I just wanted out."
Holland: "Hm. Well, then you're in a crisis, son - crisis of faith. Do you believe in love? I'm not speaking romantically. I'm talking about that sharp, clear sense of self a man gains once he's truly found his place in the world. It's no mean feat, since most men are cowards and just move with the crowd. Very few make their own destinies. They have the courage of their convictions, and they know how to behave in a crisis."
Lindsey: "Like now?"
Holland: "Like now."
lika got crap done on Monday, September 11, 2006, 12:28 p.m.
I feel like I've been let back into Eden.
I've finally read a book after not being able to read for months and it was beautiful to lose myself into the story again. I went to that knitting party with my Minnie yesterday and had a wonderful time knitting bowling pins. I haven't knitted in so long that I forgotten how soothing it was to move my fingers among the needles and watch something being created right before my eyes, even if my Minnie and I spent most of our time bitching and complaining about our mistakes. I walked home from the bus feeling the same way I used to walk home from Elena's in high school, light-footed and blessed from having such awesome friends.
Best of all, the colours are back. After a year of not being touched by sky and trees and deep vibrant colours around me, I walked out one morning and saw shadows and shades that took my breath away. They used to always take my breath away, and it was such comfort and joy to sit at my porch and watch the changing colours of sky and leaves and flowers before me. I always knew how much that meant to me, but I was still shocked how upsetting life was when it left me for a year. I'm so glad to have it back, even if I don't have it at the full extent I used to.
(see, this is why I keep this blog. There's no way I could put this on my livejournal. It's flaky as hell, but oh-so-true.)
Autumn is coming back, that season of nostalgia, where I once again go through all old memories. It's hilarious how I take stock of my various "fandom". I was singing "Strawberry Kiss kiss" and remembering Tokyo babylon and dreaming about X yesterday, and laughing over the X-Files days and quoting from Buffy and Angel and Firefly, and listening to Chinese songs from Jin Yong's shows and other HK entertainment. And there's always a new obsession to add to the pile every year and of course this year is Babylon 5, among others. I'm missing a bunch of past and current loves, but I'll get through them eventually and get all giggly and lovestruck over them all. It's like counting pearls on a string.
I just hope to see the gradients of shades and colours in the Autumn colours now. That would make everything complete.
lika got crap done on Sunday, September 3, 2006, 11:44 a.m.