Monthly Archives: October 2006

My whole life just fell into place, and I’m not quite sure how to deal with it.

Especially since this is a future that makes me insanely happy, a future that I look forward to, where I know that every day, week, year will be as happy as the one before it. It’s a future that holds so much, and so many wonderful things, and so much happiness, that I’m kind of in shock. I’ve spent most of my adult life resigning myself to not really having any specific future – and even when I thought I had one, it would be one that, if stable, wasn’t joyful.

Suddenly, the rest of my life looks totally different than it did eight months ago, and I’m taking a while to catch up. That’s all.

The vague assumptions, the implied future, has been brought out of the background for the time being. Paul and I have spent more and more time talking about the next few years lately, since the prospect of moving in together is getting closer and closer. “I think it’s pretty well understood,” he says, “that we’re moving in together as a pre-cursor to marriage.”

“I wouldn’t do it otherwise,” I say. After all, I have lived with boyfriends before, and no good has come of it. Mostly because those were living arrangements made more for convenience than for love. This is for love – the convenience of NOT HAVING TO DRIVE ACROSS LOS ANGELES is just a nice fringe benefit. This is so that we can wake up together, and come home to each other, and be together all the time.

And because I do want to be with him, for as long as I can be, and it seems to be pretty reciprocal, I want the ceremonial joining. I’m finally looking at marriage as something other than just what happens at the end of the dating road. I thought marriage was more about that final step to security, that the other person would always be with you, that you would have someone there for you, and that together you could accomplish more financially than you could alone.

And now, that’s again, all that seems to just be fringe benefits. The real reason I want to marry Paul is because of what it represents – that we will have the deepest bond possible between us. All the sentiment I always dismissed about marriage and weddings is coming back, about blessed unions and two people being joined and all those phrases I never really got. I want this because it means that we will have the ceremony that brings us together for the rest of our lives.

I never expected this to come so soon in my lifetime, not before my thirtieth birthday. I don’t think anyone else did either. And I know, I’m still a couple steps away from actually being able to make an announcement – but I think this really is it. I think it’s going to be moving in together in 2007 – and getting married in 2008. And by 2011, five years from now, I may well be dressing a future evil super genius in a cuddly baby devil costume (No, really, they make those. Seriously.)

It’s life, and it’s grownup life, and millions of people grow into it and adapt. And I will too. It’s just the idea of the rest of my life, this happy, this content. It’s the idea of marrying someone I love this much. It’s the future I never thought I’d really get – I thought I’d be a nomad forever, changing cities, chasing experience. Now, instead of a series of years that contains moves to new places, and the periods of loneliness that accompany such things, I’m looking at spending the rest of my life settled down, probably in Seattle, close to home, close to my friends and family in BC, a short plane ride from my friends in L.A. I’m not going to be alone, I’m going to have a husband I love very much, and children with green eyes, dark hair, and pale freckled skin. There will be enough money between both of our careers, there will be enough of everything, and I am so lucky.

So for now, the future can go back to the backdrop. We took it out this weekend and looked at it. We talk often about moving in together – but this weekend, more dates came out of the woodwork. I’ll get some sort of creative marriage proposal between March and July. There will be a wedding in the late summer of 2008, right around when I turn thirty. There will be a move back to Seattle in 2009, once both of our careers are stable enough to be transported up the coast to another city. And then, in 2010, once we’re settled down in the Northwest, we’ll buy a house and start a family, and all the other things that go with being grownups.

But that’s all awfully far away. For now, all I can do is work hard, get a raise (or a new higher paying job) and save up for the move next spring. Paul says it’s phase one – work hard, develop careers, accumulate wealth (and for some of us, clean up our credit ratings). I’ll probably keep my head down and focus on that, instead of thinking too much about things taking place in the future (no more surfing Seattle real estate with zillow.com!) But knowing that the years to come will be so happy, actually motivates me to work towards them.

The rest of my life is very different from what I thought it would be a year ago. I’ll adjust to that. I’m still adjusting to happiness.

Well, according to Gothic Beauty Magazine, Los Angeles (or, as they call it, “the city of lost angels”, because that is WAY more dark) is the best city to be a goth in. Provided, that is, one is a goth with a solid job: we may have something like 23 club nights a month, plus random stuff like goth roller skating and goth trips to Disneyland, but we are an expensive city to live in.

I’m not shocked. I don’t think I would have fallen this far back into the goth scene if I hadn’t been in L.A. Seattle’s scene isn’t even what it was when I first got my membership to the Mercury. And I think about this every so often and realize – I’m a lot happier as a goth. I listen to more new music, feel more comfortable in black, and empathize more with the subculture. I’m never going to approach it with the dedication I admire in others, but I’m a lot happier acknowledging my liking for goth, than I was pushing it back. I’m a lot happier now that I’ve stopped interpreting “grown up” as “assimilating to a collective ideal.”

Anyways. I actually haven’t even been out to the clubs lately. Paul and I have devolved into one of those couples that Stay Home On Weekends And Sleep. Or try to. Last weekend, we ended up going out with other couples two nights in a row, both connections of Paul’s. We went out with a couple of his friends who were up from San Diego on Friday, for sushi in Old Town Pasadena. Saturday, we hosted newlywed friends for dinner. Sunday, we thought about going to Malediction – I miss it – but ended up staying in, so I could write blogging.la entries. I find myself more tired than I like lately, and I’ve realized that taking weekends off to stay in with my boyfriend isn’t a bad thing. Paul slows me down from my usual mania, and I drag him out to socialize more than he did before. It’s a pretty fair tradeoff.

This weekend, we’ll obviously be hitting the clubs fairly hard. It is, after all, Hallowe’en – and if anything, the ritual of entry into the dark part of the year is highly appropriate for goth clubs. I’m fairly certain that somewhere in my British Isles mixed heritage, an awful lot of ancestors celebrated the pagan holidays now known as Hallowe’en. However, since the whole holiday has been corrupted, there’s an awful lot of parties going on. I may need next weekend to be lame and sleep again – this weekend threatens to run from Friday through next Tuesday.

So that’s it. For now, I’m going to go get some sleep, and prepare for the upcoming weekend. Which I will be celebrating in the #1 city for goths in America. According to a completely unscientific survey. Yay.

In the last seven months (since 3/18/06), there are 192 gmail threads
(467 individual emails) that involve some dialogue between myself and
Paul. The vast majority are our daily banter exchanges, some are
forwards with replies, some are chains with friends. But that’s still
a lot of email.

Anyways. It was seven months on Wednesday. Seven insanely blissful
months since hooking up on the Bar Sinister dancefloor. This is
really starting to look like, y’know, a relationship or
something.

All that 40s and 50s sci-fi, Outer Limits and Twilight Zone made me a sucker for Jericho. And, four episodes in, I’m hooked. I can’t help it. I have to know what’s going on, who nuked America, what the retaliation will bring.

Of course, I think there’s a reason this show is popular, beyond its use of the new real-time back-story twists. It’s addictive because it’s got that Lost-style storytelling, tiny snippets of info that just lure you in further. But I think it goes deeper than that. I think that, especially with the bomb testing in North Korea, Americans want to know what is going to happen. It’s like there’s some subconscious – or even fully conscious – need to see what the end of the world as we know it, would be like.

Worse yet is the realistic aspect of the lack of answers inherent in the fictional nuclear apocalypse. No one knows who set off the nukes, and it’s totally fucking plausible. America has so many enemies that there’s no telling what happened. Was it a terrorist attack? Was it an enemy country? There’s no answer. When the nuclear scare was in full swing, during the Cold War, at least we knew it would be the Soviets and the Americans bombing each other. It would be a Cuban-fired missile taking out Atlanta. Now – we don’t know.

Add to that, I’m somewhat impressed with the show for dealing with so many of the realities. It’s cheesy at times (“the Internet was invented by the military to survive a nuclear war,” one teenager tells another), but there’s some mention of resource distribution. Where does the food come from when the shipments aren’t coming in? That sort of thing.

So now, I have to know – what’s going on in the rest of America? Who set off the bombs? Is the retailiation of tonight’s episode successful? In the interest of needing these answers, I will have to keep TIVOing and watching the series. And it’s addicting, in a way I haven’t been hooked on TV in a long time.

Now, I’m off to sleep. Unfortunately, Jericho also gives me nightmares – sleeping with the boyfriend settles me down, but he’s in his home, and I’m in mine. I was always one of those hyper-anxious kids that took the nuclear scare very seriously. Perhaps, for Canadians, our lack of involvement – yet imminent fallout – made nuclear war more scary. We couldn’t just vote a pacifist government into power. Instead, we just waited and watched to be sure our more war-like southern neighbor didn’t start the missiles against the Communists, powerless to pressure the governments into peace. I still remember being terrified of nuclear war, at twelve – after finally grasping Chernobyl as a concept from TIME magazine articles. Sixteen years later, I’m worried again – but hopefully, too exhausted to lie awake thinking. Maybe I should watch 30 Rock, over on the other network, instead.

I didn’t get nearly enough sleep last night. So today, I’m tempted to
take a nap. Actually, I TRIED to take a nap, on the couch in one of
the offices. And in order to get there, I tried counting sheep.

Then I realized – all the sheep had little outfits on. Hawaiian
Sheep. Business Suit Sheep. Farmer Overalls Sheep. BatSheep. It
was like the bears in BC – the statues, not the actual ursine mammals.

And the entire point to this post? I’m deleriously exhausted enough
to be imagining outfits on the sheep I’m counting.

Did I mention I’m seeing VNV Nation tonight at Das Bunker? I’m pretty sure I
did, but hey – I’m seeing VNV Nation in a 900 person club show in
less than eight hours. I’m listening to Pastperfect, the
live CD now, to psych myself up (they’re only playing stuff from
Empires and earlier, not from Futureperfect or Matter + Form, but I’m
still extremely happy about going)

And in three more days, I’m seeing Swedish gothic futurepop band Covenant at Knitting
Factory.

Oh, and I’m spending Sunday at Disneyland, but I can only be excited
for so many things at once. Right now, it happens to be an entire
weekend of EBM. Tomorrow, I will be excited about spending Sunday at
Disneyland for the Hallowe’en decor, but right now, it’s the
seven-hours-and-change until the show.

I was at the gym tonight, happily cardio’ing on the elliptical, listening to Doves and idly watching the soundless TVs in front of me, when I realized one of the faces on ABC looked familiar. It was Campbell Scott, best known, in my mind, as Steve Dunn in Singles. Yes, as in the Seattle-grunge movie, Cameron Crowe’s homage to his favorite city.

In fact, I just re-watched Singles last Thursday. It’s been on HBO lately, so I TiVO’d it out of nostalgia. I love that movie. I miss Seattle, and I miss the grunge era, and I adore all the rock star cameos and performances in it. But, because it was so recently burned into my brain, you can imagine my shock at seeing the male lead on TV with gray hair. And granted, I was very young when that movie came out (14 in 1992), but still – a lot of time has gone by, and twentysomething movie actors from 1992 are now playing divorced fathers on primetime TV.

It all sort of serves to remind me that we’re all getting older. This hit over the weekend, too. I was home, after all, at my parents house – but not as a kid home from college for Thanksgiving. I was home as a twenty-eight year old woman, with her thirty-one year old boyfriend. And I’m having a lot of trouble reconciling that with my internal self-image.

So I’m sort of thinking about what really constitutes adulthood for me. It’s not about getting a better car or nicer clothes, because I don’t care about those things. It’s definitely not about ceasing and desisting my habits of challenging authority – I think that associating rebellion with youth and immaturity is a major flaw in our society. It might be about acquiring a permanent home, but surely the nesting instinct isn’t the only defining factor of adulthood, is it? Maybe it’s just about focusing on goals more, paying more attention, taking more care to keep one’s life together. Like remembering to pay bills, and staying organized enough to achieve things, regardless of whether or not those things are in line with capitalist American society.

I guess I feel more like I’m on the edge of a new phase in life. And this time, it isn’t something I’m triggering with a move or a new job. It’s the care and pride I take in my job these days – I’m trying to do more than just get by, I’m trying to really do well and become better at my career. It’s having the extremely stable relationship that is the one I share with Paul. I think of everything in the last three years – since I graduated and left UBC – as beig part of the same phase, the Post-College Finding Myself phase, where I sorted out who I was and what I did for a living. Now, I feel like I’m getting ready to grow into the next phase, and I’m not quite sure what that entails. I can see the patterns leading there, more focus, more goals, but not what being a true grownup is really going to be like.

It’s kind of scary, getting older. Not that I’m afraid of growing out of this phase, but just that I don’t know what’s coming next. Adulthood is different for everyone, and trying to fit the idea of being a grownup in with my own ideologies and ideals and goals isn’t easy. But as I see the faces of my generation get older (isn’t Trent Reznor forty already?), it hits me, now and again – there is no stopping these transitions. There is no stopping getting older.

I was reminded over the weekend that I never wrote about the happy ending for my fat orange cat! That would be the one that travelled to Seattle and back, the one that was supposed to go live with Big Scary Mike. But despite having so much in common with Mike, the cat came back.

“Buddy” (formerly Evil) immediately settled back in as Paul’s roomate. Paul quipped that he was like “that guy who crashes on your couch because he’s got nowhere else to go.” And the two of them got along fine, because Paul’s wonderful with pets. In fact, Paul figured out how to make the cat stop whining for food at 5am: he would give the cat his dinner, a half-can of Trader Joe’s cat food, minus a couple forkfuls. And then he would give Buddy the last bit as a bedtime snack. And Buddy thought he had tricked his human into giving him a whole other meal, and shut up until his handful of breakfast kibble.

But we brought Buddy back for a few days because my roomate Andrew loves him. He was really Andrew’s cat at heart. And when our third roomate left town for a few weeks, we figured we could smuggle him in, and just be sure to clean well when he left. This worked fine, and the cat was extremely happy back in his old home for two weeks. And then, one Tuesday night, just before the Canter’s geek dinner, I decided it was time for him to go back to Pasadena.

So there I was, loading cat things into my car – which I illegally parked in the red zone outside my house for the purpose – when my downstairs neighbor came out to smoke. He asked what I was doing, and I explained – and then had to explain the whole story, about how I was the sole member of the Sisterhood of the Travelling Cat. I told him about how the cat had come to us (temporarily after his previous owner left, until he could go live with Mike), how he came back (because he kept worrying Mike’s other cat) and how he had no place to go (no amount of posters or emails was working, and I hadn’t had time or money to enroll him in an adoption program).

My neighbor listened to all this, and then said, “well, I’ve been thinking about getting a cat.”

I immediately held out my twenty-two pound foster child. “Here.” I said.

“Really?”

“Yes. If you want him, he’s yours. He comes with everything he needs. I’ve got it right here.” And I did – his papers, his litterbox, his food and water dishes. Everything we’d kept when we moved the cat the first time. “Take him now, and I’ll pick you up another month’s worth of litter and kibble tomorrow.”

And my neighbor, dazed with the impulse decision, took the cat. I emphasized to him our proximity, and told him that if he changed his mind, or wanted a cat sitter, we would be happy to take him back, or help out in any way. And then I just hoped: hoped that he would keep the cat, hoped that he would love the cat, hoped that the cat did not escape and get smushed into a fuzzy grease stain on the high-traffic street outside.

But sure enough, the cat is still there. I ran into my neighbor – and the cat – the other day, when Buddy escaped, and his new human had to come retrieve him from outside. And my neighbor told me they’d bonded, that the cat sleeps on him at night, and sits on his shoulder when he watches TV. And as we approach their one-month mark together, I think that my fuzzy orphan has found himself a home. And even when he does escape, he just comes up the steps to his old home, instead of wandering out into the street (after two friends lost their cats to traffic inside of a week last year, I’m just a BIT paranoid)

So there’s the happy ending. Buddy flew to Seattle and back – and ended up downstairs. Life is awesomely hilarious sometimes, and I’m extremely happy with the end result. Now we can visit our former ward, yet not have to live with him. I can breathe again (literally – I have allergies). Happy endings rule.

So far this morning I have:

– checked in for the YVR-Alaska flight online
– moved our seats to the front of the plane
– notified the boyfriend that we will be HITTING THE GROUND RUNNING
– checked bus schedules to the ferry terminal
– received confirmation that I am on the VIP guestlist for Lotus Long Weekend
– reassured Mom that we will be where we are supposed to be (the ferry
terminal on the Victoria side, at 1:45PM tomorrow)
– found out that neither of my sisters will be home, so I stand a
chance of getting more than ten minutes in a bathroom

Now I just need to finish an eighty page powerpoint presentation, wrap
up four new deals for a campaign, and get the hell out of here at 5am
tomorrow.

yay! home tomorrow!

Today, I went with Paul to a costume shop in South Pasadena. I think it was the reason he wanted to go to the Fair Oaks Pharmacy – their soda fountain is just down the street from the best Hallowe’en shop in the area.

I was idly perusing the prepackaged costume wall, dismissing items one by one. I was a pirate last year; this year, I was planning to be a Viking. My roomate and I were both going to go as “Wikings” because they are the ORIGINAL pirates. But then I noticed – the costume selection was actually quite good. Very good. And then I realized they had goth versions of popular costumes.

Unfortunately, goth Snow White (“Snow Fright”) was sold out, and I’ve never been able to look at that character quite the same after reading “Snow, Glass, Apples”. But they DID have “Little Dead Riding Hood”
click for picture