the valentine project, part three.

February 14, 2011, New York City.

Last February, I packed up my house in Kingston and drove back home to Hamilton, where, in what I viewed as a colossal step backwards, I moved in with my parents while I house-hunted and got adjusted to a new job. I had spent most of January wondering what in sweet holy hell I was doing leaving a town that I loved so hard, and by the time I finally rolled into the driveway at Mom and Dad's, I was more than a little frazzled. Luckily, I had two weeks of freedom before my new job started, so I did what any self-respecting closet Sex and the City fan would do: packed up my costume jewelry and knee-high boots and hopped on a plane to New York City.

One of my best friends, Kat, had been living in New York for the past year or so, but last February was my first visit. We spent three blissful, boozy days in the Big Apple, which was snow-covered and somehow quieter than I remembered. During a recent snow storm, Kat had begun taking photos of the mind-blowing inefficiency of New York snow removal, and we continued this surprisingly entertaining project all weekend. We got our nails done on my first day in town, an activity that set the tone for my visit. We have never exactly been the kind of girls you would describe as classy, but that weekend we put on a pretty good show.

On Valentine's Day, I made her ditch her boyfriend. There's a certain kind of friend who will do sketchy relationship stuff like bail on one's boyfriend on a day reserved for demonstrative love and opt instead to get drunk on the street with a girlfriend. Kat is that kind of friend (come to think of it, all my best girls are), and I love her for it. We pulled a self-aware Carrie Bradshaw impression and went on a date with the city. Our stops included the Guggenheim Museum, the Carlyle Hotel bar (where we drank twenty dollar Sours and eavesdropped on high-needs socialites), a restaurant called Cafeteria (where we drank twenty dollar Caesars and flirted with waiters too beautiful for this earth), and finally, the Chelsea Hotel, where regrettably, there is no bar (although the front desk clerk offered us some vodka from a stash under the counter). We stood in line for last-minute opera tickets, but didn't get in (like most things in New York, even queueing up for something is somehow exciting and cosmopolitan). We stumbled home to the Upper West Side, full of soul food and gin, in love with that wonderful town and the incredible possibilities lurking around every corner.

I flew back home the next day and had a hard time readjusting to my non-New York reality. I've thought many times since about how much I really do love New York, just like the t-shirt says. It's the kind of city you never visit twice, because everytime you get there, you see completely different things. It's a place where you feel two-hundred percent cooler when you walk down the street for no reason at all. And there's no better way to see it than with an old friend who understands the importance of framing cultural outings with proximity to cocktails, who understands the dance between low-rent and highbrow, and who can also spot a Brooklyn hipster from five miles away.

the valentine project, part two.

February 14, 2003, Toronto, Ontario.

That year, Valentine's Day fell on a Friday. I remember this because neither my then-boyfriend nor I had classes that day. We were in our final year at Trinity College at U of T, living off-campus in two different houses, each hilarious and sketchy and entertaining in their own ways. It was a constant push and pull that year about whose house we'd crash at--we'd basically spent the two previous years living together, first in his tiny residence room (I only went home to shower, watch the Young and the Restless in the common room, and get sloppy-drunk with my best girls before stumbling back across the street to go to sleep), and then in an ill-fated attempt at cohabitation with two other friends in what we lovingly dubbed the Portuguese Key-Cutting District of Toronto, a West end neighbourhood that is now way cooler than it was when it was the only area in our price range. After that year of sharing a bedroom nose-dived us into near-breakup territory, we made the mature decision to live under separate roofs for our last year of school, although we still spent nearly every night together.

So on that particular Friday in Toronto, we woke up in my poorly-heated house on Walmer Road. I'd spent half of the night having an overblown anxiety attack about the university's exam schedule, which was set to be posted first thing on the 14th. I only had one exam that year (Chaucer. Oh, Chaucer. What a fine way to spend every Thursday evening) and so dreaded the possibility that it might not be scheduled till the last day of the exam period, which, at U of T, went on for approximately seventeen months. I'd been kicked in the tail by this sort of late exam curse every year of my academic career, and it was horrible. I was a fairly neurotic student, and I was so damned ready to bid goodbye to my undergrad career. The first thing I did after jumping out of bed was get online, only to discover that HOT DAMN, my exam was set for the very earliest possible day. Naturally, I interpreted this as a sign from the universe (a decision likely propelled by our tendency to wake and bake whenever possible). Feeling high on freedom, among other things, we set out to spend the day together.

Our relationship was a sweet one, most of the time, characterized by the things that draw two people together when they're young and broke and too smart for their own good: long days and nights spent in bed discussing our desert island records, second-hand CDs, cheap nights at the museum, afternoons trolling bookstores with our arms around one another. Though we both pretended to deplore romance and goofy sentimentality, we also not-so-secretly loved going on Dates, getting dressed up (which in our case usually meant a slightly less faded pair of Value VIllage corduroys and maybe a borrowed peacoat), walking around town, just being two crazy kids in love. Toronto was a good city in which to be head over heels. It was a place where you could delude yourself into feeling like an extra in a low-rent Woody Allen movie about silly heartbreak.

That Valentine's Day, we took advantage of the city at our feet and our empty schedules. We had breakfast at our favourite breakfast joint. We smoked pot on Philosopher's Walk, that funny little pathway between Trinity and the Royal Ontario Museum, the scene of so many of our best and worst nights. We made our way to the movie theatre to see a matinee of Chicago (to this day he is still, I think, the only boy I've ever known who would sit happily through musicals), and eventually walked all the way home to his place in Little Italy. There, his housemates were watching a documentary about Michael Jackson that had captured the attention of the Western world that winter. We watched it in amazement, and tried to parse it in some kind of anthropological, academic way (never underestimate the insufferability of a gaggle of humanities students). Eventually we climbed up to bed, and fell asleep together, spooning, perfectly connected.

It's nothing special, I know. I don't know why I remember it so specifically, but I do. I know every couple goes on dates like this. Maybe that's part of why I love the memory so much: because it feels so uniquely mine, and yet it's not all that different from anyone else's. We're all walking around starring in the movies of our lives, playing supporting roles in others' stories while assuming the lead in our own. There's a whole lot of loving narrative going on on these streets of ours, and regardless of how tragic the inevitable ending might have been, there's something nice about knowing you've contributed your own little piece of the story to the pot.

the valentine project, part one.

I have the usual modern gal antipathy toward Valentine's Day, but I'll be damned if I'm going to pass up the opportunity to reminisce about old friends and lovers. This will be the first in a (hopefully very short) series of Valentines I have known.

February 14, 1998, Hamilton, Ontario.

I was a fairly cynical, boring teenager. I had a group of friends I loved and occasionally we did dorky-badass teenager stuff like get drunk on Dial-A-Bottle-procured vodka and listen to the Rocky Horror Picture Show soundtrack super loud and take off our tops when boys were around. Mostly, though, I kept my head down in highschool. I was silently jealous of the popular types, because sometimes it really did seem like they were having a better time than I was. But really, I was pretty certain that something far better than this dysfunctional universe was waiting for me on the far side of my eighteenth birthday. So I put in my time.

Probably the most typical aspect of my teenage life was my turbulent highschool sweetheart relationship with a boy I started dating when I was seventeen. We were together for two years. We fought as much as we laughed. We passionately disagreed with each other's taste in music (although we also conceded that nevertheless, we each still had better taste than most of the people around us). We were symbiotic and parasitic at intervals. We drove our friends crazy (although other couples drove us just as nuts--all's fair in love and highschool). And we lost our virginity to one another on Valentine's Day. The fact that this came to pass is now hilarious to me, as we were probably the two least romantic people in the world at the time. It just seemed like such a good idea.

The whole thing was so elaborate and complicated. We made the decision a few weeks before February 14th, upon realizing that my parents were going to be out that night, and spent the next little while planning the hell out of it. I even talked my mom into buying me a new bed for the occasion, although she didn't know the reason behind that particular Ikea trip. I remember putting that frame together with the most incredible sense of gravitas. I was giving up my single mattress on the floor, and BECOMING A WOMAN.

It was a Saturday. I'm pretty sure I cooked him dinner beforehand. He gave me a pair of earrings that later made my earlobes turn black. The years have misted over my memory of the done deed itself, and I don't remember any details other than a sense of utter awkwardness, and also complete relief to have gone through something so totally weird with someone I knew so well. The next day I watched Roman Holiday on TV and felt quietly mature, like I was in on the secret of adulthood.

On Monday, of course, we told our friends. After all, the only proof you ever had was in the telling of the story.

My best girlfriend gave me a knowing hug during a cigarette break between periods.

My best guy friend said, "Well, that was pretty dumb."

"Excuse me?" I replied.

"You'll never live up to that feeling again," he explained. "Nothing can top that. You've pretty much ruined Valentine's Day forever."

In some ways, I think he was absolutely right. Still, I wouldn't change a thing.

wholes and parts.

When you get to be thirty-one years old and have yet to find that one person to share your life with (or rather, when you find the person to share your life with only to realize that the lives you're trying to intertwine are so wildly and insanely opposing in nature that you risk collapsing the universe in the attempt, prompting you to each skulk tearfully back into your respective corners), you start to justify things. I should probably take a moment here to reassure you that I am by no means unhappy on my own--far from it. It's just not where I saw myself when I was younger. Coincidentally, it's not where most other people saw me either, whether they knew me well or not. The lone wolf lifestyle is anathema to a lot of people's perception of what's worth dreaming about, which means I often find myself explaining to other people that really, I'm okay, and I don't sit at home by myself eating can after can of Campbell's Healthy Request Soup, praying for a suitor. (This sort of justification is probably largely the symptom of my work environment, which is populated on both sides of the reference desk with well-intentioned and wonderful women of a certain age.) Anyway, a funny thing happens when you're defending your life choices on a regular basis: You actually start to believe that you're in the right place, and that you may have actually done things for the right reasons.

One of the epiphanies that's been coming to me over and over these days is that while I might not have found my soul mate, I found something much better: a whole string of them. Serial monogamists are a lucky breed: we get to fall in love over and over again, collecting keepsakes and sweet cargo along the way. (Also crippling emotional baggage and additional copies of books and albums that you never really liked in the first place, but that's not what this post is about.) Here are a few of my more fortunate treasures.

1. A personalized NASA Space Camp souvenir pin. Seriously, it has my name on it, and it is incredible. Gifted by the first boy I ever fell in love with, who snagged it while on a highschool orchestra trip. And yes, I recognize that placing a Space Camp pin in the same category of some of the other things on this list might seem ridiculous, but when you have a hard-to-spell name, this sort of thing really MATTERS.

2. A solid year spent traipsing across Devonshire Place, away from my own room at St. Hilda's and toward my then-boyfriend's never-dull all-boys dorm, where we'd brush our teeth side by side under the wise beacon of a Hooters calendar and huddle and cuddle ourselves to sleep in one very tiny single bed, every blessed night. I've never been a good sleeper, but those nights, I always nodded off fast, in a tangle of limbs, to the sound of his nightly promise that we'd see each other again in a couple of hours. He was nearly always right; back then we populated each other's dream lives as much as our waking ones.

3. Late nights spent noodling around on not one but two adjacent Steinway pianos in a fire-warmed living room in the middle of nowhere. Helping to house-sit for some criminally irritating neighbours had its perks. If there is a better feeling than playing After the Gold Rush on a grand piano as a man you think you just might care about puts his arms around your shoulders, I have not found it.



4. Sitting up with a start in the half-light of an early winter morning and struggling to get your bearings in an unfamiliar room, steeling yourself for the day ahead. Turning at the touch of a warm hand on your back, and looking down at a smiling face on the pillow next to yours.

"You have a beautiful back," he tells you. "If I could paint a picture of it, I would."

"Stoner," you reply affectionately, nervously, noticing your heart jump up into your throat, hoping your blush doesn't betray that deep-down, terrifying feeling that this is Something.

Sometimes the whole is more than the sum of its parts, but sometimes the parts do a pretty grand job of covering the spread.

Inventories.

Back in highschool, I was one of those insufferable literary nerd types who took Writer's Craft classes very, very seriously. I was highly in touch with my creative side in those years, scribbling down free verse poetry about people I'd kissed at an alarmingly prodigious rate. I really miss that state of misplaced and occasionally wavering self-assurance, the absolute certainty that what I wrote was GOOD--so good, in fact, that within five years I would be offered my first contract with a small but reputable independent publisher (I had designs on Anansi, but I wasn't picky.). I spent so much on postage in those days, mailing two-thirds of what I wrote into publications like Seventeen (which used to publish some really great short fiction, no lie. Sylvia Plath once won the short story contest, as did Meg Wolitzer and also Curtis Sittenfeld, one of my favourite American novelists) and Sassy (where I got my first taste of the staggering genius of Blake Nelson). I actually did have a handful of publications back then in decent-ish magazines and journals for younger writers, successes that only fuelled my delusional flames.

But I digress. Anyway.

In a couple of those classes, I remember starting the year with a writing exercise our teacher called An Inventory of Being. The premise was simple, and, I still think, pretty cool. You basically wrote a long, free-form, rambling poem about yourself that began with your name and ended with the year you were writing it. In between you did your best to capture exactly how you fit into the world, exactly as it existed at the time of your writing. During a recent move, I stumbled upon my 1997 version, which contained such gem-lines as "I know I am in love. He told me as he lit his cigarette outside between classes" and "I wish I could be Anglican, and sing hymns, or Buddhist, and do yoga on a mountaintop." (Sidebar: I have since sung in an Anglican chapel choir and done yoga in close proximity to nature. CLEARLY I POSSESS AN AWESOME POWER.) I also talked about bands I liked (Pavement, Sloan, Tori Amos) and books that were important to me (Atwood, Munro, Salinger). I talked about dyeing my hair a lot (I was obsessed with distinguishing myself, a tendency that often manifested in semi-permanent, poorly-executed aesthetic decisions). Reading my Inventory again, I cringed and cried and laughed so hard. There is something so wonderful and heartbreaking about reading a letter from a version of yourself, an exhaustive description of what it felt like to be you at a particular time and place.

A couple of weeks ago, I was filling out yet another online dating profile, and I realized that one of the reasons I continue to subject myself to such a ridiculous exercise is that, frankly, I really love writing about myself. Not in a showy or self-congratulatory way, not at all. It's comforting, is all, creating a document that sums up exactly what you like and what you're like, here and now. In 2012, as in 1997, I talk about bands I like (Joel Plaskett, Wilco, Aimee Mann) and books that are important to me (Coupland, Woolf, Salinger--still). I talk about doing yoga and baking cookies and generally trying to make the world a better place. I actually use the words "non-lame feminist" and "new-agey" to describe myself (still obsessed with distinguishing myself, I guess, although hopefully in a manner less damaging to my appearance). I hope silently for a boy who might someday say he loves me, although hopefully not during a smoke break. Some things stay the same; others, not so much.

So I guess my point here is that you never know what lessons you might learn from the exercises set out in front of you. I may not find true love on the internet (there is a whooooole other blog in my head detailing the many tragicomic encounters that support this possibility), but I am grateful for the chance to check in. I really urge you to start writing your own inventories every couple of years. You will feel so much embarrassed love for yourself, for the worlds you've inhabited, and for the people you've known. And if nothing else, you can pat yourself on the back for always having had such stellar taste in music.

We are sick, we are sick, we are sick, sick, sick.

If you are among the handful of people who've read this little serial of mine since its humble beginnings, you'll know this already, but here it is. When I get sick, this blog becomes devoted to sketchy recipes and obsessive documentation of classic (and not so classic) television. I've been holed up for the last 2 days and find it vaguely comforting that I still resort to the same old tricks to make myself feel well again. I'm also incredibly thankful to have a real couch now, because taking sickroom naps on my dilapidated old love seat was really angst-provoking. Adulthood ain't so bad.

Anyway, here's what I made tonight.

Quinoa Pudding

(Inspired in part by the Joy of Cooking's rice pudding recipe--Volume II, page 458--and in part by this)

3/4 cup quinoa
1 cup water
1/2 cup milk (skim or soy or almond, whatever. I used skim dairy milk because it was all I had.)
2-3 eggs
another 1/2 cup milk
1/4 cup agave nectar (or brown sugar, if you are feeling less self righteous than I am)
1-2 tbsp. honey
1 tbsp. grated orange rind
1 tbsp. vanilla (if we're gonna get honest here, I actually used brandy. Brandy's my oregano--it works in everything.)
1 tbsp. butter
1/2 cup mixed berries (I used frozen raspberries and mango, which turned the pudding a delightful pink)
1/4 cup chopped dried apricots

Bring water and 1/2 cup of milk to a boil. Add quinoa and simmer on medium heat for 15 minutes or so.

In the meantime, combine eggs, second half cup of milk, agave, honey, orange peel, and vanilla in a bowl. Whisk it up.

Once the quinoa is cooked stir in butter. Lower the heat to medium low. Slowly stir in the egg mixture and fruit. Cook, stirring constantly, for 10 minutes. It should thicken up at this point. WHen it's the consistency of warm pudding, remove from the stove, and pour into a shallow baking dish. Bake for half an hour at 325.

Let it cool for a bit, or eat it piping hot from the oven with a little cream and/or maple syrup drizzled on top. Thank your lucky stars your appetite is back.

Best enjoyed while trying to wrap one's head around Lost. I'm only on the first season guys, but I'm already feeling a little overwhelmed.

january inventory.

Four years ago, I drove out to the Ikea in Nepean to meet my best friend for a shameful post-holiday shopping trip. It was something we did fairly often, usually under some kind of influence. This time, though, we were stone-cold sober, the dim twinkle of parenthood in Freya's eye growing brighter by the day.. "I don't want to chance it," she told me. "Fair enough!" I replied gamely, having no idea, not really. Later that night after an embarrassing spree of Billy shelving and cheap bed linens we went back to her house for dinner. Dinner involved a lot of wine, at least for me and Greg and Greg's friend Tom. It was one of those nights when one things leads to another, one of those nights you try to dismiss the next morning, with limited success. A few days later, Freya called me to tell me she was pregnant, that her weekend of sobriety had not been in vain. I screamed into the phone and then asked her for Tom's number. It was January in Ottawa, and I was spending a lot of my time skating up and down the canal, trying to embrace the cold, embrace the wind, embrace the silence.



Three years ago, my favourite thing about my job was that I could usually sneak out early on Friday afternoons to drive out to Tom's place, two long and lonely hours from my Glebe hideaway. I'd just come back to Ottawa after two weeks in Hamilton at my parents' place for Christmas, and Ottawa felt less like the right place for me than ever. On New Year's Day when I'd told my brother I needed to change something, he said "So, then, make your move." He might be younger, but he's often wiser.

Instead of making a wise move myself, I made the same move girls in love always make, and spent that January running away from our nation's capital every blessed weekend, over and over again. I came back from the lake every Sunday (or sometimes Monday, as I perfected the delicate art of calling in sick) with my tail between my legs. No, that's not quite it, I kept thinking to myself. That's not quite what I meant to do.



Two years ago, Tom picked me up from work at the library in Kingston on a snowy Tuesday night. We drove to the Montreal airport (he adamantly refused to fly out of Pearson, even though all of our flights stopped over in Toronto anyway, adding an hour to our travel time; stubbornness can be endearing in a certain light) and took off for the Oaxaca Coast in Mexico the next morning. Our flight itinerary was an incomprehensible milk-run that involved a three-hour stopover at the Mexico City Airport, where we sat in the Mexican equivalent of a TGIFridays and drank bottle after bottle of Corona. When we finally got to Huatulco and wrestled our way into a sketchy taxi into town, I rolled down the window of the car and breathed in the warm, ocean-dampened air.

"I love the air here," Tom said. "It smells like bonfires and garbage and trouble." He was right, in the best possible way. We spent the next two weeks on deserted beaches and half-empty bars, eating avocadoes by the fistful, feeling like extras in a low-budget surf movie. It was the coziest January I've ever experienced.

One year ago, I was rattling around my Kingston apartment. Tom and I had broken up before Christmas in an epic split worthy of a teen novel, and I was homesick for my family, newly truly on my own. Sometime around the first of the year, I did 108 rounds of Sun Salutations. My teacher talked about creating new energy for a new year, and I thought long and hard about just what I was going to do with all the crazy heat zinging around my body. The next day, I got an email from the library in Hamilton inviting me back for a second interview and I broke down in tears. It didn't seem right to go back yet, even though it didn't seem right to stay put either. "I don't know what I'm doing," I told my mother on the phone. "Sure you do," she replied. I drove back to Hamilton a few days later, called in sick to make it to my interview (again, a fine and careful art). After four hours of questions, answers, and Powerpoint insanity, my dad and brother picked me up, and we went skating at the Dundas Driving Park. That night as I drove back up to Kingston, I watched the thermometer on my dashboard as the temperature dropped, slowly and surely, the further I got from Hamilton. Well, I thought, that can't be a good sign.

I moved home a few weeks later.

So, here we are, then.