That Novel I’ve Been Working On

On Monday, while I was on my way to meet Pam for a run, I stopped at a red light.  Crossing the intersection in front of me, coming from one direction were two 20-something guys, each with a puppy.  Crossing the same intersection from the other direction were two young women, each with a baby.  It was, not to put too fine a point on it, too much cute (laughing babies! chubby cheeks! playful bounding! floppy ears and oversized paws!) all contained in just a few square feet and I couldn’t help but wonder if there shouldn’t be some sort of city bylaw in place to prevent this sort of cuteness explosion from happening.  As it is, I may never again be satisfied with just ONE puppy or just ONE baby, or even just one of each at any given time.

I have a really sensitive sense of smell, a fact that is both a blessing (when cookies are baking) and a curse (when I manage to somehow track a tiny piece of cigarette butt into our car on the bottom of my shoe and then spend half an hour wondering why the car smells so strongly of cigarette smoke).  I also love Christmas, perhaps more than just about anything else, and so I find Christmas tree shopping and my trusty proboscis to be two great tastes that taste great together:  the tree lot smells like Christmas trees, and then your car smells like Christmas trees, and then your house smells like Christmas trees.  Eventually your garage smells like Christmas trees and then the side of the road smells like Christmas trees and some landfill smells like Christmas trees and I’m curled up in the fetal position on the couch, weeping and feeling not at all festive enough.  Read the rest of this entry »

For some reason, Mike and I embarked on kind of a cleaning frenzy around the house during the time we had off over Christmas.  We ransacked both of the closets in the basement, setting aside things to sell at the garage sale we plan to have this summer, and then tackled the closet in my office, which was full of a myriad of non-office-related items, as well as some file boxes that contained a bunch of things from both of our pasts that we have never been quite ready to part with.  In one of the boxes was a blue binder that contained about 100 pages of miscellaneous writing that I did during the apparently rather tumultuous and angsty period of my life that covered the tail end of grade 12 through to a few months after I started dating Mike.  It’s awful and it’s cheesy (oh, so awful and so cheesy) and I thought y’all might enjoy a few excerpts and thusly a quick peek into my subconscious from a decade ago.  Read the rest of this entry »

I got up yesterday morning and had breakfast and walked the dog, and it was cold but it was sunny and everything sparkled a little and the dog was really happy, bouncing from snowbank to snowbank, trying to eat a little bit of sandwich someone left on the sidewalk, wagging and wagging and wagging.  I brought her inside and peeled off my sweaty clothes and planned to have a quick shower before my doctor’s appointment, only to realize it was in 15 minutes, not 45 minutes, so I put my sweaty clothes back on in a hurry and drove across town to their shiny new office, and parked in the new parking lot, and opened the door of the car, which was caught by a gust of wind and driven directly into the passenger door of the van parked next to me, leaving a small, barely-noticeable-to-most but glaringly-obvious-to-me dent and smudge of red paint.  I panicked, and wondered what to do, and decided I was late and I should just check in at the doctor and then decide whether to leave a note.  Read the rest of this entry »

It’s only Monday afternoon, and already I’m realizing I’ve scheduled my week such that my life is interfering with my work, or my work is interfering with my life, but at any rate I have it on my to do list to blog today, so here we are.  I just made a wholly unsatisfactory grilled cheese for lunch (story of MY LIFE) and I’m about to make some tea and hunker down for some client writing, but first let’s turn our attention inwards, shall we, and enjoy a little bit of quiet reflection. The title of this post reminds me I can’t ever hear the phrase “personal growth” without thinking of the scene in When Harry Met Sally where Marie tells Sally, “There’s someone staring at you in Personal Growth!” and the someone that was staring at her was Harry, lurking around the bookstore, trying to remember if Sally is who he is remembering.  Oh, you two crazy kids, when will you realize you’re meant for each other?  This is really neither here nor there, but is to say that I’m trying to grow as a person, and if it gives me an excuse to reminisce a little bit about my favourite movie, so be it.   Read the rest of this entry »

So, Christmas is over, which means our holidays are over, which means that after two glorious weeks of sleeping late, I have to set my alarm again which, of course, is something I hate doing, but the pain of which is somewhat mitigated as of late since my parents gifted me with a special alarm clock in which I can dock my iPhone, so as to wake up to something I have carefully selected to be engaging and energizing, rather than the bad news and obnoxious DJ chatter that usually pipes cheerfully but depressingly and annoyingly out of my alarm clock at the top of the hour.  I’m currently in the process of selecting the Perfect Song To Wake Up To, and so far the best I could come up with is Eye of the Tiger, but I think it leaves a little something to be desired and I’d be happy to entertain suggestions or recommendations from interested parties.

At any rate, the one strange thing about this alarm clock, as I discovered on Monday morning, and then again yesterday, and finally had to check the manual to confirm, is that each snooze cycle (the amount of time I get to fall back asleep after hitting that most wondrous of buttons) is only 5 minutes, rather than the standard 9, and it has an upper limit to the number of times you can make use of it on any given morning.  I hit it a handful of times on Monday morning, as is my habit, and finally roused myself, only to discover it was much earlier than I anticipated.  The same thing happened yesterday, and this morning I just raised the white flag and got out of bed pretty much immediately, so it seems to have the desired effect, but I can’t help but feel that I’m being reprimanded or judged a little by Sony, as if they’re saying that yes, I SUPPOSE we’ll give you a few extra minutes of sleep, but you should have been up an HOUR ago, so we’ll check in with you again in 5 minutes to see where you’re at.  I mean, REALLY.

It’s almost the end of 2009, which means it’s officially time to look back, evaluate, suggest changes, and then hope for the best in the next year, which seems to us from the vantage point of mid-December to be a marvelously and deliciously blank slate.  I was talking with my friend Anna recently about how business was in 2009, and we both reflected a little bit on the recession and what we did to try to counteract its effects, and we both kind of felt like we could have done more.  More what, I’m not exactly sure (at least not on my end) but more something, you know?  It’s kind of counter-productive to reflect on something that was largely outside of your control and feel like if you had just done something differently, it might have actually worked to bring the situation inside your control, and things would be different, but it’s tempting to do so, even if just because we all love to wallow in failure every once in a while, just as we love to spring again to our feet, declaring this time things will be different.  Read the rest of this entry »

I learned last week (from an episode of Flash Forward, so take this with a grain of salt) that a lot of physicists believe in a theory that says that there are multiple universes out there, and that the life that would have resulted from every path we never chose is actually still out there somewhere being lived by another version of ourselves.  This idea, that every possible outcome of every possible decision I ever made is alive and well in another universe, has stuck with me and I keep turning it over in my brain, imagining decisions both large and small and thinking about what those realities would look like.  Somewhere there’s a Lauren whose best friend didn’t move away in grade eight, a Lauren who is married to a red-haired guy named John, a Lauren who is still working at Manulife, a Lauren who actually buckled down years ago and wrote a book and lost 20 pounds and started getting up much earlier in the morning.

I wonder, are those Laurens happier than this one?  Sadder?  Taller, maybe?  And more adept at flipping a grilled cheese sandwich without causing the bread to go all cattywompus on her?  (One can hope.)  I guess that is one of the truly good things about the way our lives our structured:  we rarely, if ever, have to be faced with the reality of all of the possible consequences of the decisions we’ve made, what it would look like if we swore things would be different and then followed through on it.  Life’s not like a Choose Your Own Adventure book – you can’t cheat like I always did, flip ahead and pick the best of the two options – and we just get to see the one reality, the one we’re living, but for all we know, it is the best one, the healthiest and happiest and most worthy, of the thousands that are out there.

So.  I fell asleep at 10:30 on Friday night and didn’t wake up again until 7:30 on Saturday morning, which is pretty much unheard of around these parts, and come Saturday I was filled with the vim, vigour, and holiday cheer of a mother whose newborn just slept through the night for the first time.  At least, that’s how I expect that feels, having had no direct exposure to that particular experience myself, but I will consider it sufficient to say that I was so well-rested that it bordered on the sublime.  Read the rest of this entry »

When I was a kid, we always had a Real Christmas Tree, one that we chopped down as a family during a yearly event that I remember very fondly but was likely nonetheless filled with a lot of whining, because that is just what happens when I get cold.  During the first three years of our marriage, Mike and I had a Fake Christmas Tree, mostly because Mike thought it was easier (which it was) and also equally as festive (which it definitely was not).   However, nigh upon three Christmases ago, I was able to convince him that we needed the feel of snow under our feet and the thrill of the hunt and also subsequently the aroma of evergreen permeating our house, so we put on our boots and our mittens and our (okay, my) sock rabbit hat and headed off to Benjamin Tree Farm, where we drank free cider and ate free cookies and chopped down our tree.  I suppose technically Mike chopped down the tree, while I stood close by to offer encouraging comments like “Looks good, sweetie!” and “Are you almost done?  My feet are cold …” but nonetheless I consider it a team effort, and a successful one at that.  Read the rest of this entry »