It’s been a year and a bit – an eternity on the internet – since I began my foray into the blogosphere. I remember the good times , the adventures and the setbacks. But mostly, I remember the challenge.

Sadly, “Everything’s not terrible” doesn’t even begin to describe my life anymore. Everything’s just the way it should be, just the way I always imagined it would be, but only in my most fantastically optimistic moments. There are those who live in the past, perhaps spinning their tires remembering ‘best years of their life’ in high school, and those who live for the future, when things will be better. I’ve always enjoyed a good balance between the two – because both are important – but these days everything seems to balance perfectly.

The important thing – if I can leave this place with a bit of advice – is to remember to catch the moments between past and future, because in those moments we can find meaningful contentment. And it is in that feeling that we find the content, the substance, of who we all are.

My muse, my inspiration, and my motivation, K, always says that her blog in an exercise in writing. To do so everyday whether you want to or not, she would say, prepares you for those times where you have to write on command and simply improves your craft.

It’s with that in mind that I begin my new blog and bid farewell to this one.

D.

Posted by D. at Saturday, March 03, 2007 | Permalink | Comments

Sitting on our front stoop, surrounded by flickering candles fighting against the cold, I waited for her to come home, not really sure if she would. Big moments – big decisions, questions, life changing events – tend to plod through my system like molasses would on this cooling December night. I think and ponder, wait and wonder for weeks and months, and create a timeline that works in my head, like a square peg shoved into a round hole.

It started in May of this year, fresh into our new apartment. We sat in the sunroom, I held her hand, and told her I wanted to know about her perfect engagement ring. Not only did she show me, but she whisked me off to Winnipeg to see for myself. She was glowing.

We made the decision to set the date for the wedding long before I was planning to formally ask the question. That is the way our lives seem to work out, in a funny backwards series of split decisions alongside long thought out plans for the future. Go to Europe / Japan for a year? Spend another year in school? Move to a grown-up apartment? Get cats? Sure!

My big ideas and elaborate plans for the perfect engagement based on the perfect conditions that I would create with a deft hand and seasoned planning acumen – neither of which I posses in great capacity – began to seem out of place and chunky. I’m not a show-y Casanova, or a sensitive Don Juan. My quiet nature and guarded emotions would give away the element of surprise in an instant.

I threw the plans to the wind and set out to do the right thing, and tried to imagine what the right thing was. As I walked outside, looking for the right ring, the snow began to fall. K loves Christmas, and I took this light snowfall as the sign that it was Christmas already and again, as we had already celebrated twice. I stopped in the street and looked up into the snow as trench-coated public servants passed around me like a soft dark river. I felt calm and certain, and I found the ring.

In the end, the best moments are the extemporaneous ones, pursued with dogged intent and fought over through emotion and hardship. All of the planning had failed to catch one element; the perfect time was now. It was always now, whenever now was, because it was not about when, or how, or why, or what; it was about who. And the who was her.

So I relit the candles that flicker and go out in the cold wind, fix the ones whose wicks are drowning in wax, and watch the exact spot up the street where the shrubs end and I see her for the first time as the girl I was going to propose to – imminently.

She didn’t see me or the look of hope that I had on my face until she was almost nose to nose with me. I looked into her eyes with honestly and love, kneeled on my toque thrown to the ground in chivalry, and asked her the biggest question I would ask anyone in my life,

“KLDS, will you marry me?”

And she said yes.

On days like this, nothing is terrible.

D.

Posted by D. at Tuesday, December 19, 2006 | Permalink | Comments

For the first time, I’m blogging while looking out a window onto the perfectly uneventful yet scenic street below our apartment. I think, and K of the two blogs will likely concede, that many people have some degree of OCD. I read, or heard, or saw on TV someone explaining how these slight differences in our brains that make up the varying degree of mental health are the same differences that make us unique, give us personalities.

I’ve got some regular signs that, when mixed with my natural laziness make up the essence of D. For example, when I am sitting at a table for a meal, the cutlery has to be exactly lined up, with the fork on the left, and the knife and, if present, spoon on the right. Even when I eat at the ESD, I move my fork to the left of me. Despite this quirk, I’ve spent many years working in restaurants setting tables en mass, and never once have I set cutlery in perfect parallel dimensions while being paid to do so. My desk at work is a mess of papers because I’m a pack rat, but the pens, notebooks, and piles of paper are all perfectly square to their surroundings.

But the point of all of this is to explain why I’m looking out a window. I need to rearrange my static surroundings about three times a year, and I have moved my desk, removed the hutch on top, and placed it facing the window. When I was a kid, I rearranged the four items of furniture in my room every three months. My sister and I even took the unprecedented step of switching rooms once. In my first university dorm, when I had a roommate who was either sleeping (until 2:00pm) or staying out with his friends (until 4:00am), I had the overwhelming urge to rearrange, but I only had half a room to work with, but I did it anyway. I also figured that since he was never around, had no books or computer in the room, and hadn’t taken his clothes completely out of his suitcase, he wouldn’t mind if I took an extra foot or two of area. And now, with the one room in the house that contains my junk, and our jackets – yes, my “office” is a coat room, I devoted my day to the celebration of that quirk. By the way, since May, when we moved in, this is the third configuration of said room.

Now, I have no idea if this will work, but I invite my sparse but no doubt quirk-rich readers to post their favorite personal compulsion. Yay internet!

D?

Posted by D. at Sunday, November 26, 2006 | Permalink | Comments

I’m going to talk about something no politician in their right mind would ever dare to, which saddens me. It makes my heart well up for Canada because we live in a time where no political leader has the courage to say anything other than to pander to one side or the other in ways which may forward their immediate agenda without thought to the greater picture. Whether this can be chalked up to the pitfalls of minority politics, or simply an erosion of bravery since the days of Trudeau, I don’t pretend to know.

The problem, as I see it, with the argument that Quebec is unique hinges on the assumption that they are unique when compared with something uniform. As we all know, Canada is anything but coherent, and that incoherence both troubles us and unites us. Essentially then, the argument is that Quebec is unique in a country whose differences bring us together.

Where would we be without Newfoundland and the Maritimes? We wouldn’t have a sense of humour, that’s for sure. And without Alberta, we would all be a lot worse off in economic terms and in cowboy hats per capita. Without Ontario’s banking and administration, we would be less organized. BC’s street and drug culture keeps us mellow. Without the prairies and their agriculture, we would be more dependent on imports. And without the combined beauty of the Rockies, the East and West Coasts, the Great Lakes, the Canadian Shield, and the mysterious Northern region, we would be a little less proud of our country.

This is not to say that La Belle Province is any less important to Canada, but they are not any more important either. Their industry and research sectors are alive and kicking and they have a unique stake in the history of the founding of Canada. They’ve managed to build a great music, art, and movie culture and star system with a relatively small population, which is an amazing feat considering how poor English Canada’s popular culture is faring.

I have many Quebecois friends and even some family, but I have always failed to see what makes them entitled to have their own nation, whether it be a unique nation currently in Canada, or a nation unique to current Canada, or a newly developed chip on the otherwise unified shoulder of the many disparate nations within Canada.

In the end, we’re all Canadians, we’re all equally different, and for the sake of our country, can’t we all just get along…

D.

Posted by D. at Friday, November 24, 2006 | Permalink | Comments