Archive for November, 2009

• Square peg in a vast land of round holes

  Date: 2009.11.27 | Category: Uncategorized | Response: 12

  I was talking to a friend earlier. It wasn’t a new topic for us, it comes up time to time. This whole idea of how to meet people – not any people but your people. We’ve both bumped around a bit, her returning to a familiar place whereas I tend to keep going to the unknown.

  You try to meet new people and it’s not really that difficult to meet them. It just hardly ever gels into anything more than an acquaintanceship. You don’t tend to fit the life definitions that other people have for themselves and their friends. You suck at small talk. You have a hard time connecting. You don’t have the same common ground that other people have. It’s not that the interests and the commonalities are so different, it’s just yours always seem to be slightly skewed. You tend to prefer to sit back from the crowd, you like to observe, you’re a little shy. But when you participate you often do so with gusto, in a way that confuses people. They start to assume that when you’re quiet it’s because you don’t like them, or you’re in a bad mood, that you’re a bitch. Truth is, sometimes you’re just quiet.

  You don’t watch television or many movies. Well, that’s probably a bit of an exaggeration. You don’t watch popular television shows or much of anything regularly. Not because they are bad or you’re elitist. It’s because you get distracted by things and you don’t like to plan you night around a tv schedule. You don’t have a PVR/Tivo/whatever because you don’t want to spend more money to watch television you already pay for. The television is actually on quite a bit but it’s a lot of daytime reruns or Food Network reruns that is largely ignored and mostly on for background noicse. You don’t watch movies that often because you’re moody and lazy and don’t see a whole lot on Blockbuster’s shelves that you actually want to pay money to watch.

  You read books but you don’t often read the things that make the bestsellers list or that is the new hottest book in the literary fiction crowd. A lot of conversations die when people hear that you haven’t read a book that they think is the greatest ever (*coughDanBrowncough*). It depends on what is on your shelf and what you’re in the mood for, which more often than not is not what the person in the seat next to you cares to read or hear about. You’re not the book club type.

  You’re a woman of a certain age, married, yet not a mom nor do you plan to become one. And you don’t hate children, which is what a lot of people assume. You actually quite like babies. You’re just not good with children and you’re not comfortable with them. (There are, of course, exceptions to the rule.) Most women you know are moms, or want to be moms and well, it’s just another way that you don’t “fit”.

  You’re not career-driven, which is apparently what you should be since you’re not a mother and don’t plan to be one. You’re also not a student, though many people mistake you for one.

  You’re girly enough in some ways and don’t care in others.  You don’t want to go shopping. You generally hate shopping. You also don’t want to talk hair and makeup though sometimes can fall into a great conversation about shoes.

  You hate clubs and like pubs, but would prefer to go in the afternoon or early evening and be back home and most likely in bed by 10pm.

  You’re actually in bed by 10pm most nights. Because you like it.

  You knit but you’re not a particularly good or frequent knitter. You don’t play cards or video games. You don’t do sports and do not go outside in the winter if you can at all help it.

  You don’t do many of the things that people do to socialize and when you do you don’t have that same common ground as many of them because of all of the above and more.

  The internet helps. You can pick and choose what you want to talk about, what you want to read about and how you interact with people. You can pick how and when you want to interact. You can be chatty and bubbly here, snarky there, lurk quietly over there. It makes your people easier to find, but your people rarely live close by.

  Sometimes it’s easier than others. Sometimes it’s damned hard to be doing this all over again in another new place, especially when you live with someone who has lived here pretty much their entire life. Sometimes the stark differences in your experience and theirs in the same city is hard to handle. You don’t regret the choices that got you here and you don’t regret being here but it’s not always easy. It’s hard to be the person that stays at home, that doesn’t have people to call for a coffee date. When you don’t possess the easy grace of making friends, it’s not as simple as meeting people. And it’s not that you dislike anyone that you meet, you just don’t fit.

  On a good day you tell yourself that you are simply 32 flavours and then some. On a good day you can flit from group to group, not really belonging but ok with it. Some days it’s enough just to be there. And it’s true, some days it enough.

  On other days it’s a different reality that comes crashing down. Some days it hits you that you are on the periphery, that you don’t really belong. Some days you have stripes when you should have spots. Some days you get tired of people trying to shove you into places they think you should fit. Some days you desperately wish you fit into any of those places.

  Some days you are just a square peg in a vast land of round holes. And while people assume you are looking for a square hole they are wrong – you’re just looking for the other square pegs.

• What you read and save

  Date: 2009.11.23 | Category: Uncategorized | Response: 1

  I’m looking for recipes for a project that I’m working on. I’ve gone through my blog, I picked a few things out of my head and then I delved into my Google Reader. I save a lot of things by starring them but I rarely go through them (oops).

  I save weird and wonderful things. Going through the recipes that I’ve saved I can see that I like simple food. Apparently I don’t like recipes that use fresh herbs (oh right, it’s that winter and no direct sunlight, and I’m generally too cheap to buy them thing…). I go in for simple and hearty in the winter but and simple and crisp in the summer. But flavourful.

  The book posts I save are issues I want to blog about though rarely get around to and even if I do I forgot to go back and unstar the posts. There are books I want to read but I don’t want to more than skim what other people are saying about them in case they accidentally include spoilers. There are books that I mean to add to my request list but don’t want to overload it because I’ll get a gazillion books at once.

  There are random internet comics from Savage Chicken or the Mows. Things that aren’t really funny to anyone else out of context but still make me snort.

  There are sewing projects that I save for the day when I learn how to sew. There are knitting projects for the day that I decide to knit something other than plain socks.

  There are posts that link to other blogs that I want to check out but don’t have time at the moment.

  There are posts that I just like. Ones that say something that strikes a cord with me.

  There are posts about body image.

  There are posts about blogging.

  There are posts that I save to send to other people because they will find them interesting.

  There are posts from friends that I’ve saved and when I find them I have to laugh because they are usually posts about something they don’t normally blog about.

  The posts that I save actually are quite representative of my life. A little bit weird and wacky. Short on politics. A fair amount of social media/networkign stuff.  Lots of food and books.

• Kitchen storage

  Date: 2009.11.09 | Category: Things I Don't Understand | Response: 2

  I’ve complained about the various kitchens I’ve had. Kitchens in rental apartments are frequently bad. When I was looking for my own place in Toronto I took one look at the apartment I ended up living in and said I’d take it as soon as I saw the kitchen. You see there actually was one. Most of the places I had seen online didn’t have a real kitchen. There of of the one cupboard, one shelf and if you were really lucky a drawer and an oven design. So not good for someone like me who cooks 95% of her own meals and owns the cookware to prove it.

  There has been one thing in most of the kitchens I’ve lived in that I never full understood. This:

  

  Kitchen cabinets that stop approximately 1.5-2 feet from the ceiling. It’s wasted space and of course it means that we use it to store appliances and other kitchen goodies that we do not use that often but use often enough not to shove into a closet.

  Being that this is a kitchen we’re talking about these don’t only get dusty, they get grimy. And gross. And just generally disgusting.

  This morning Lee had to leave early for a meeting and just before he left I remembered I needed the crockpot. He grabbed it for me on his way out the door and then I proceeded to clean the crockpot. In fact, I cleaned the crockpot twice because all the grime didn’t come off the first time.

  I’m not big on cleaning in general. I hate doing it, though I do like things to be clean. Especially in the kitchen. (The other thing I hate about our kitchen is how the lower cabinets never look clean, even five minutes after I’ve scrubbed them.) The only thing more annoying than cleaning is having to clean things twice.