About

I’m Jillian. I live in Brooklyn, with my husband and son, in a wonderful neighborhood called Prospect Heights.  I love Brooklyn: it’s my ancestral homeland and my adopted home, all in one amazing borough.  It feels, however, a million miles away from where I grew up in Victoria, BC.  I write alternately about how much I love Brooklyn, and how much I still miss my home province, a set of conflicting associations of place.

I’m Canadian!  That means I’m nice, and slightly passive aggressive, and more than a little snarky.  Being Canadian means helping people, being respectful and polite, and sometimes apologizing a few times too many.    It means being a citizen of a country where we put the greater good as the highest priority.  I’m proud to be Canadian for all these reasons.  I’ve been in the USA almost my entire adult life, but those are still the values that are important to me. In these times, more than ever, I have discovered that my core values often mirror those of my home country.

I have a passion for social justice, equality and civil liberty.  I’ve combined that with my inner Girl Guide and my status as a parent into being NYC District Commissioner for the Baden-Powell Service Association.  We’re an alternative Scouting organization that welcomes Scouts of all gender identities and backgrounds.  I started as an assistant Otter Raft leader to get a group going for my son to join…and now I work with multiple groups in Brooklyn to try to build an organization that looks like Brooklyn, and represents all kinds of Scouts regardless of their cultural, racial or religious background.

I’m extremely happily married, with one son, born in 2008.  My husband and I have a love story that started when I was 28 and he was 30, when we met in a goth club in Los Angeles.  Our shared love of the goth subculture has also been part of our marriage: we have similar tastes in music, and still go out to goth nights and live shows together.  I’ve somewhat outgrown the aesthetic, but still feel most at home in a lot of black and eyeliner, dancing in clubs that look like outtakes from The Crow.

This is a personal blog.  I’ve chosen to keep it online in its entirety as my own story.  I had  a tough time transitioning it from a constant stream of narrative, to adult observations.  There’s a few years where I didn’t prioritize writing or blogging while I tried to figure that out.  Now, I use my writing space mostly for commentary rather than the Tales of Twentysomething Partying I focused on years ago.

I told myself in the quiet years that I didn’t have time to write, and that I didn’t have anything interesting to write about anyways even if I did have time.  Now, I’ve realized, it doesn’t matter if I’m not telling a narrative story.  How I observe the world, how I continue to grow and change, that’s still a narrative worth writing about to me.  Also, I seriously get like 10 – 15 hits per post so it’s not a huge audience out there anyways.

This is who I am, a series of interests and passions, relationships and history, narrative and commentary.  This is what I write about.  This is a personal blog.