Servitude

If patience is a virtue, then I'm friggin' Mother Theresa. I hope none of you were actually hoping to converse with me while I'm overseas, because it seems that the Canadian phone companies have a vendetta out against me. I think my dreams of an iPhone might need to be put on hold until I get home; it's just way too difficult and confusing. I'm not going to go into it, it will only alienate you and make me more frustrated. So facebook and skype it is my dear friends.

This week for me signals the start of 'job search week', which basically involves me making a concerted effort to find employment. Up until now I have been half-heartedly emailing a few resumes without any real success. And I don't blame them. If I was a cafe owner I probably wouldn't be inclined to hire some vagabond Australian who's sat on her arse in an office for the last 2.5 years over some local whiz-kid waitress who can carry drinks and not spill them on people. That's the pinnacle of multi-tasking if you ask me.

So today I did some shortlisting of jobs advertised online, and I applied for a 'burger blogger' position. Eating and writing about it - sounded like my dream job so I was right onto that one. I have been feverishly checking my inbox but no reply so far. Ho well. Considering applying for a position at an Irish pub. Also a quality assurance position for a bottling company...that made me think it might have something to do with beer so I was interested. Other than that there's not much around. I might have to just walk down College Street and hand in my resume at a few places. You never know, someone might feel sorry for me.

Basically I'm looking for anything paying minimum wage and affording me the very lowest degree of responsibility. Experience schmerience. I think employers would find if they gave me half a chance that I can do just as lousy a job as anyone else can. Maybe I should add that last paragraph to my resume. Compelling stuff.

The Grass is Lonely

I know I put 'TBC' at the end of my last blog, so some of you might be expecting that this blog is going to be full of gossipy goodness. That is not the case. All I'm going to say is this: I've met a few really great people now and I'm starting to live a more socially enriched existence.

I experienced my first Tronts gig the other night - Lissie. She was just great. Everything I'd imagined and perhaps even a little bit more. I had two favourite moments. The first was the crescendo in 'Record Collector' and the second was when she finished the set with 'Pursuit of Happiness'.

The support act was quite entertaining too. Bahamas. Their name makes them particularly hard to find on youtube. The displayed hits were all Caribbean-related. On the upside, I now know the Bahamas national anthem. During their set, the singer was talking about how they had been on the road for a while now and how they had been to a strip club earlier in the evening. So ok I know this is a generalisation, and maybe just me making fanciful assumptions, but it made me think what lonely lives they must lead. They might just like titties, but that's not where my thinking took me. Obviously I'm going to get to the point of this long-winded discussion shortly. I need a new paragraph for aesthetic purposes.

So I was standing there listening to the band banter and I thought about how so many of us crave to have the life of a musician; travelling around and being lusted over by pretty girls just because you can play a guitar or sing a few songs in tune. We crave the adventure of it all. The excitement of being able to reinvent yourself so frequently. We want to be enveloped by the mystery. It was interesting then that for the first time I thought how hard it must be to never really be 'home'. The feeling that the 'grass is always greener' is very hard to shake when you're living your normal existence, but when you're living the mystery it isn't as mysterious. It's lonely.

Contentment is something that is sometimes frowned upon, but it needs to be embraced. We're always going to crave what we can't have; what seems exhilirating and provacative, it's just human nature. The settled will always be looking for serendipity, and the restless will long to be grounded.

    

Frozen

Outside at the moment it's -20 degrees; -30 degrees if you count the wind chill. I had a moment when I was out walking this morning where I actually thought my ears were going to fall off. Luckily for me, they decided to stick around.

Perhaps the only thing more paralysing than the cold, is the fear of starting over. The fear that comes with taking that first step out into your new life. Exposing yourself to rejection and criticism. It crippled me on Friday night. I stayed at home. I told myself I'd go out on Saturday night instead, which I did. It may have taken me three 500mL Canadian beers to work up the courage to do so, but I'm very proud that I did. I've never even been out in Brisbane by myself, so to venture out in a strange city without anyone by my side took some testicles. Big ones.

I caught the streetcar to Slack's, which is a lezzie bar on Church Street. Does anyone else find it terribly ironic that all of the main gay nightlife in Toronto is on Church Street? I ordered a Bud LIght and stood at the bar ogling off the crowd, trying to pick if there was anyone hovering by themself or in a small group. I focussed my energies on a group of three girls towards the end of the bar that I had pretty much confirmed were going to be my first conversational target. Two seconds later a bloody Pom starts talking to me. Name: Jay. Here for work from the UK. Nice enough.

Slack's was a little lacklustre so we decided to catch a cab together to Cherry Bomb. Jay and I were dancing but I kind of lost her in the crowd. And then I met Alex.

TBC

Noun Confusion

Belonging. Belongings. We can have things that belong to us, and to some degree we're defined by them. Isn't that a weird concept? We think that if we dress in a certain brand, drive a certain car or buy a certain couch or television or whatever, and we upkeep a certain lifestyle, that we'll fit in. We'll belong.

I don't think I've ever felt like I don't belong anywhere as much as I do right now. But that's ok. I had mentally prepared myself for this. And the preparation is obviously working because I'm not curled up in the foetal position crying myself to sleep. I feel so completely stripped bare - that's the best way to describe it. I am void of my creature comforts. I don't have a job. Or a car. Or a phone. I've been wearing the same wardrobe of clothes for the last six months at least. I feel like a massive loser. I feel like I don't belong here.

And yet I still feel a strong sense of belonging. I belong to my parents; I belong to my brothers and sisters; I belong to my friends; I belong to my workplace; I belong to my community; I belong to my country. Feeling this way just makes me think that our sense of belonging is probably the most truly undervalued part of our lives. We take it for granted because it's omnipresent. This feeling that we unwittingly source from the people we share our lives with. 

What makes us strong and helps us to fit in has nothing to do with the shit we own. Don't be confused, it's belonging, not belongings.

Craigslust

Today's blog is brought to you by Weird Al. This post may not actually have that much to do with me being in Tronts. It may not actually make a lot of sense either. I'm in a strange mood. I feel silly like a kid. I've returned to my rudiments. My rudimentary self writes a lot of short sentences.

I've been thinking a lot about human nature and individual behaviour spectrums. Deep, I know. In particular I've been cogitating over lust and desire and our ability to rationalise what would otherwise be considered aberrant behaviour when it comes to questions of sex and love and attraction. 

There's a website called Craigslist. It's not that big in Australia but over here and in the States, it's a pretty huge deal. Craigslist has a whole gamut of classifieds. Go there if you want a roommate or if you want to sell a bike/computer/child, or, as is my case, if you need a job. There is also a salacious section called 'missed connections' under the personal classifieds. My curiosity got the better of me.

This was my favourite:

westbound on college with greens - w4w (college/ossington)

I think you got on around Spadina, or perhaps earlier at UofT. I saw you waiting patiently for the streetcar with your bags of fresh groceries. I'm guessing you had just come from a farmer's market?

We smiled at each other like old friends and I spent the entirety of the ride trying to decide if I would get the nerve to move one seat ahead and talk to you; to ask your name and ask you if that was bok choy or collards. I wanted to blurt out - "You're Beautiful!" but thought it might be too forward.

You got off at Ossington and locked my eyes again and everything went a little blurry.

The light was red, so I sat in the idling machine and unsubtly watched you walk up the street and when you looked back into the window at me, I waved - couldn't help it.

I hope you are now cozy and out of the cold. Maybe we'll cross paths again.

ps - what did you make for dinner?

I couldn't help but think 'wtf'. The woman who wrote this is probably, by most definitions of the word, sane. Hell, she's probably some professional, an accountant or something like that, just on her way home on the streetcar, minding her own fucking business when 'WHAMMY!'. She got love struck. She got struck so bad that she felt the need to go home, ponder what the lady with the buk choy/collards (what a stupid freakin' name for a vegetable by the way) made for dinner, and put it on the internet. The internet. The World Wide Web.

What kind of person would put everything they're thinking on the World Wide Web...?

 

The Purpose of Purposefulness

Ok. Brace yourselves. This first part could get a little bit deep. A brain is a dangerous thing to have when it has too much time to think. I want to start by talking a little bit about purposefulness; you know, the thing that you have when you have a purpose. For example (borrowing an incy bit of melodrama from the soapies) you might say, "Roger gave Miranda a purposeful look from across the room". The look had purpose. Roger gave Miranda that look for a purpose. Roger had a purpose. And by the sounds of it, that purpose just might have been to get Miranda into the sack with him. I'm getting off track...

Let me put this into context.

I was walking the streets of Tronts today completely without purpose. There was nowhere I had to be, there was noone I had to meet, there was nothing I even particularly set out to see when I left the house this morning. A moment of almost sheer panic ensued once I'd come to this realisation. After I'd spent a minute rationalising with myself I managed to turn my frown upside down. I began to understand what a truly unique position I was in. I don't think I can even count on one hand the number of times since I've become an adult (my state of adulthood may be debatable among some close friends and family members) that I haven't had some kind of purpose. So my prolific message for today is simply this: allow yourself to be purposeless sometimes. It can be scary as fuck, but it also allows a rare opportunity for pure spontaneity.

This is what happened to me today:

I walked to the subway. It was cold, around -9 degrees, and it was snowing. I held the palms of my hands out and let a few little snowflakes fall onto them so that I could see what they looked like close up, but they melted as soon as they met my warm skin. I boarded an eastbound train. I decided to get out at Spadina station because it sounded like 'vagina' when they said it over the loudspeaker. I didn't know where I was. I walked down Bloor Street. I passed through a suburb called 'the Annex', which I remember from the books I've read used to be the gay area. I kept walking even though my legs felt like iceblocks. I reached 'Korea Town' and found a park called Christie Pits Park. I trudged through the snow and sat on a park bench briefly. I walked back the way I came but on the opposite side of the road. I crossed back to the other side of the road when I saw a little cafe that I thought looked interesting: Snakes and Lattes.

This is what happened in the cafe:

IGOTADECENTFUCKINGCOFFEE!!! HALLELUJAH!!!

I also eavesdropped on a nearby conversation.

This is what I wrote in my journal while I was drinking my coffee:

"There's a girl at a table across from me talking about FMV games, which in context, isn't so strange considering this is a board game cafe. FMV stands for 'full motion video' according to the girl. She's describing one particular FMV game and I feel the need to chime in and tell her what the game's called, but I don't. I'll maintain my loner status for now. She's talking about 'Nightmare'. For anyone who wasn't born in the 80s, 'Nightmare' is the board game that has an accompanying VHS that you play along with. At a certain unknown point in time, 'the gatekeeper' appears on the screen and scares the shit out of you. The girl follows up her discussion of 'Nightmare' with an evaluation of FMV games: the biggest flaw of FMV games is that you can only ever really experience the game once; after that, you know what's going to happen."

Maybe life's a bit like an FMV game. I guess we've just got to make sure we keep changing the VHS that's playing.

La Vida Sin Amigos

I awoke this morning full of childlike naivety and hope that today would be the day I regained connectivity to rest of the functioning network of people who own cell phones (yes I did just consciously say cell phone). Up until this point I haven't minded going without; it is after all an expendable appendage when you're travelling with other people who have phones and/or know how to read maps. The most imminent problems that now face my lack of appendage are twofold: (1) I need a phone so potential employers can contact me; and (2) iPhones are cool and have cool apps and other really cool shit on them that I want and definitely NEED to help me navigate my way around the 'Tronts'. I've decided that's what I'm going to call Toronto: Tronts. Just then. I decided.

To make a long story short - Apple can sell me a phone outright and give me a micro sim card but then to actually use it (especially data, and let's face it, what's the point in having an iPhone if you don't have data) I would be looking at selling an organ to pay it off. Bottom line - I need to be patient and wait for my SIN card to arrive in the mail and then hot Maria at Virgin will let me sign up. Huzzah! I guess there could be worse things than seeing Maria three times in one week.

Allow me to digress...

It was a balmy 3 degrees Celsius here today. I actually overdressed and had to take a layer off. I'm sure it's short-lived though. I tidied my room up and unpacked everything this morning before setting off for yet another walk to the Dufferin Mall. Let's call him Duff, because let's face it, I'm going to be talking about the bastard  A <space> LOT.

First bit of exciting news, and I don't think we really need to dwell on this because in all honesty it's not that exciting, but I am now officially a member of the Bank of Montreal. Probably the most important thing you need to know is that the card is pretty.

As well as fulfilling my banking needs, I found a little gem in Duff today. A little bloody rippa' called Dollarama. It truly is Duff's best kept secret. I bought a swag of goods for only $18! And I got all of the essentials: wine glass, almonds, exfoliation glove, lint brush etc etc etc.

So anyway I was walking home through Dufferin Grove Park and I saw a squirrel for the first time. And not just one. I saw about 40. I was very nearly tempted to crack open my bag of almonds and feed the little critters. However, not being entirely certain of the propensity of squirrels I decided against it. Being ravaged by a throng of famished furballs was not on my agenda. Not today. Nuts are hard to crack, that's all I'm going to say.

I spent some time relishing in my Dollarama delights and having a bite to eat before heading down to The Common. A local coffee shop that seems to be teeming with lezzie baristas. If I didn't feel so intimidated I'd probably ask for a job. The lezzie today had arm tatts, wore a flanno, and had hair that looked like Beyonce's in Goldmember. It was a sight. I sipped on a latte and read some more of Breath by Tim Winton. In one chapter he describes a woman as handsome. That's what I like about Timmy boy, he mixes it up.

Moving on with my strenuous day, I met Sahira at the subway and we went to Apple together (please see story of despair in paragraphs one and two). Then we met Veronica and another friend of theirs, Alison, at the movie theatre. Alison is a very interesting person. She is a Canadian who did community work in El Salvador for two years and now speaks fluent Spanish. She even wrote a book in Spanish about the political climate and feminist issues in the country. And now she is doing a PhD in politics. That's a lot of overachieving.

Movie was ok. Then I ate a burrito and came home.

Humble Beginnings

It's nearing midnight here in the white city (aka Toronto) as I sit here sipping tea and typing my first blog post of my overseas adventure. So far, so good. No flooding here, just a bucketload of snow! I've had a cough-like thing since my second last day in New York. I think it has something to do with my lungs getting used to the subzero temps. Skyped the parents yesterday and Dad seems to think I'm coming down with pneumonia based on my 'bark'. 

Spent about an hour this morning at Service Canada which is Canada's equivalent of our beloved Centrelink. But alas, I wasn't there for a handout...if only living in another country was that easy. I needed to get myself a social insurance number (SIN) so that once I get a job the Canadian Government can take out their fair share of tax. This process went well and I was issued with a temporary SIN until my card arrives in the mail.

Next stop, trying to get a bloody mobile phone. This process wasn't so successful. Despite having an impecable credit rating in Australia, the folk at Virgin, Bell, Rogers etc don't really give a shit because I have no Canadian credit history. No Canadian credit history means no Canadian phone plan. Virgin were ----- this close to signing me up using my passport and my new SIN but it was declined by a higher power. Not God, just some Virgin financier on the phone activation line. Plan B is to go to the Apple store tomorrow and buy an unlocked iPhone4. Going prepaid should sidetrack all the credit bullshit.

Also on the agenda tomorrow is opening a bank account. I did a lot of research today and I think I'm going to go with the Bank of Montreal. They seem to have a lot of ATMs (or ABMs as they're called here) closeby and there is a branch in the Dufferin Mall, which is less than five minutes walk from my house. Score! Compared to home though, banking seems a bit shit. Every account I looked at had mandatory monthly account-keeping fees...unless of course you keep a minimum balance of $3000, which just isn't feasible for the average Jo Blo like myself.

I think Sahira and Veronica (my very awesome roommates) might be letting me tag along to the movies tomorrow night too, so that should be gooooood.

It's past midnight now and I'm starting to get sleepy - maybe it's the cold and flu drugs, who knows? Off to bed...