Nookish

Alright, so it’s been a while since I’ve posted, and with the coming of the new year – the new DECADE, I felt it was time to look both back on the past and forward to the future.  So take your pick, or feel free to read both

Now:

10 years has gone by so fast, and with it some of the best and worst moments of my life.  This was THE defining decade for me.  I went from a random kid who had a lot of big ideas, to the person that I identify with today.  I don’t always take the easy road, but I always try to be true to myself.  I make decisions, big and small, with the knowledge that whether it’s tomorrow or another 10 years from now I want to look back at myself and feel like that was a genuine decision.

The other day when I was in Toronto I was listening to 102.1 The Edge, which was the radio station of choice for me back in highschool, and they played their list of the top 200 songs of the decade.  I felt like I was in one of those TV flashbacks, since not only could I sing along with every song, but (almost) every song had a memory attached to it.

2010 and beyond will hold the moments of my adult life.  But for a brief time between 2000 and 2010, between when I was 11/12 years old to 21/22 years old – I was in the process of “becoming me”.

So what have I learned?  Things change.  If you try hard enough the things that matter only change for the better, and the things that don’t fall by the wayside.  Good and bad happen to everyone, but whether or not it helps the situation, your outlook will always help YOU.  The world is a disappointing place at times – as Kit always quotes, “a person can be brilliant, talented, and smart.  people are stupid.” – but it’s also a very exciting place.

I’ve learned that sometimes, just living is enough.

Nostalgia:

For those doing the math below – I’m going to be 22 in another month and a half.  So 10 years ago I was around 11 or 12 and had been slowly corrupted by the gifted program for a few years at this point.  I was precocious – I had a habit of finding out the novel study and reading it the summer before we studied it, so that I could choose my own book.  I did Gone With the Wind as a novel study in 5th grade and stunned my teacher .

It’s been 13 years since I read Lord of the Rings for the first time, and nearly 10 since we all ran to theatres to see the first movie.

It’s also been nearly 10 years since I fell for my first musical love – Our Lady Peace   This may sound random, but it was around 10 years ago that I think I started to become my own person, with my own tastes in music and movies.  I’ve known what kind of literature I’ve liked since the third grade (age 8?)  Before that point I kind of went along with what everyone else was listening to – and that would be N*Sync for the most part.  My parents wouldn’t approve of half the movies my friends went to see, so believe it or not that MASSIVE amount of trivia on movies and television that I have in my head is only around 5 years old or so.

My favourite television show was Tour of Duty, which was this random History Channel show about the Vietnam war.  Really random.  But I mean just a few months ago I watched dear Skars in Generation Kill, so apparently an interesting war flick still resonates with me.

It’s been 8 years since I met Kit and Lex (and Xangelo, even though it took me 4 years of knowing of him as a friend-of-a-friend to get to know him) that first year of highschool.  I remember that there were like, 3 of us from IB that had a different gym class (and thus a different lunch time) so we all got to know each other really well.  Lex had more or less her original hair colour (I still remember the first day she went completely blonde), and Kit still wandered around with her nose in a book with those awesome-possum glasses we all sported back in the day.  We ended up on the same bus ride – from the ass end (sorry, the AWESOME end) of the hometown, getting picked up at 6am to get to school at 8:20am.  Sleeping half the time, talking about everything and nothing (and avoiding spitballs from the boys) the rest of the time.  I really really miss those days.

Just 4 years ago I didn’t have a cellphone or a laptop and was restricted to a few hours (for homework) on my parents’ desktop AND our internet had just recently changed from dial-up.  Ha!  There’s a survival skill I no longer possess.  10 years ago I discovered webdesign because I wanted to make my neopets page pretty.  I also discovered Photoshop and graphic design because I had excess pictures of the LOTR cast members (re: Orlando Bloom ) and wanted to make a collage.  Don’t judge I was a pre-teen girl, and that’s just what we did in those days.

I wanted to be a doctor 10 years ago.  Not because I liked medicine or wanted money, but because I wanted to go to third world countries with Medecine Sans Frontiers and was obsessed with the plight of children in those countries.  Has that lessened now?  Not the passion, but unfortunately my talents and interests didn’t intersect with that particular way of helping.  So no Medecine Sans Frontiers for me.  But I will find my own way to feel like I’m making a difference, no matter what I end up doing.

Forward:

I’m always wary of the new year, but then again that’s me – mixed feelings about everything.  This year there’s the added tempest having to do with graduation – while part of my head is getting all blurry eyed and nostalgic, the majority of my mind just can’t wrap itself around the idea that 4 years have gone by so fast.

My classes are interesting, and thankfully fourth year courses are a much better fit than those mass 101 classes were first year.  My economic courses are mostly chosen for interest, International Trade and Game Theory, and my health science classes are geared towards supporting my chosen program of graduate studies.  So the mix of interest and relevance sits well with me.

Are all my professors interesting?  Yes, but not all in the praiseworthy way.  I’ve got one that is a bit of a luddite (we all have those every semester, don’t we?) and the students have adopted a bit of a patronizing and pitying attitude towards him.  There was that incident the first few classes where he couldn’t find his USB folder on the computer, and kept yelling into the phone that there were distracting popups (which were in fact alerts telling him the USB key had been found).  Attempts by the students to inform him about this led to him restarting the entire system and informing us we were wrong.  So yeah, pity it is.  Another professor I have is just beyond belief.  He babbled something on about how Rihanna’s best interest were to stay with Chris Brown because without him she would have no money and no career (what…?), about how Tiger Wood’s had a harpy of a wife who is fleecing him for money (the price a man pays for wedded bliss according to him), and cited Jane Austen as a source for why women are economically dependent on men.  BUT he said this all in a very rushed Chinese accent and I think the class was too stunned to be sure if he was joking or being serious.  He seems like he could be the kind of guy who has one of those razor sharp sense of humor.  His class is interesting, so I’m not ready to write him off yet.

I’ve been enamoured with the idea of getting in a car with my friends and driving off on an adventure, but until recently our age and severe lack of funds precluded any such adventure.  Now, well, there still is a severe lack of funds – BUT! – we’re old enough that it’s still possible.  I’m sure we could scrape together the money, the real thing we have trouble with is the actual plan of it.  While I’m all for literally getting in a car and driving across Canada, I know that this will probably result in us stranded out somewhere in the Prairies staring at a flat tire and repeatedly checking our cell phones.  So the biggest hurdle is our habit of forming half-baked plans.  For us, even meeting up for coffee can result in mass confusion since we usually choose the time/place while we’re in the car driving there already.  I’d rather not do that on a national scale   But now that I’ve gotten all excited for it, I hope it comes through.  It’ll be a nice graduation marker between undergrad and grad school.

I have plans!  Half-baked yes, but plans nonetheless.  I’m terrified and ridiculously excited to find out what comes next.