March 3, 2011

"I know you from somewhere."

Honestly, if she hadn't been pretty, it would have been a pretty annoying way to strike up a conversation, but that's a rant for a different time.

Jess was a hipster. Or she dressed like a hipster. Or she had the haircut and glasses of a hipster. One way or another, she conveyed the sense that not only was she much more committed to her left wing ideals than I was to mine but that she was also intelligent enough to dance her way out of any political criticisms I might throw her way. This intrigued me. Also, despite being very pretty, she stood all of five-foot-two-inches and was hardly intimidating. As someone whose heart was reeling after recently ending a seven year relationship, Jess was exactly what I needed.

Also, she was right. We did know each other from somewhere.

It turned out that a few months prior, we had been in the same "artists constituency" workshop in Ottawa. I should say that her status as an "artist" was quite genuine in that she had been a professional ballet dancer for three years while my own claim was slightly less impressive: I had acted in all of two plays during my university career and in one of them I did so almost passably. I'll be honest and say that I was a little worried my lack of hipster street cred would quickly be exposed.

Instead, Jess took my hand, put it in hers, and gave me a tour of Vancouver that I will never forget.

Next: how I overcame this fear and a long goodbye that almost cost me my train ride home.

The memo was titled, "Growth".

On Sunday, March 6th, 2011, I added a new memo to my phone. I don't think I realized the significance of that particular date when I wrote the following:

I am still capable of feeling real emotions.

I'm not ready to express them fully yet. I can feel how far away from that I am, and I know how alone I will between here and there, but I know one more thing:

I'm going to make it because I'm learning how to be honest with myself.

Kind of a cheesy thing to write, no? The pride in that first paragraph, the loneliness in the second, and the optimism in the third - almost like a 3 act melodrama with a hopeful conclusion.

How have things gone? To tell that story I would have to start by telling you about Jess.

The house

"Can you pause that for a second? I want to see if this is funny or not."

That's Pete. He is the house's meme-aficionado. He has proposed that we get a second TV mounted to the wall so that we can have a constant Reddit ticker in our living room. This idea was met with some enthusiasm, though we are still a uni-television household. Room to grow, I suppose.

The video is a mockery of Cricket as a sport. "And then everyone claps, even though nothing really happened, and then you get drunk (which is the conclusion of pretty much every other British activity I know of)."

"What else do they make fun of?" asks Nik. He is the reason we have this house and the connecting force that brings us all together under the same roof. He put $50k down on this place and plans to have the mortgage paid off within 10 years even while charging Pete and me a fraction of what he rightfully could to live here. What a gem, eh? The truth is he smells terrible so it all kind of balances out.

That's our household, for you. Peter, Nik, and me. Soon: our adventures.