Six Weeks in Montreal

“He wondered whether home was a thing that happened to a place after a while, or if it was something that you found in the end, if you simply walked and waited and willed it long enough.”
— Neil Gaiman, American Gods

 I moved in on August 27.

Classes started on September 6.

I didn't go home for Thanksgiving weekend — not because I didn't want to see my family, I do! But because I knew it'd throw me off. I'm just now finding my footing here. Things are starting to seem more real, solid.

For a long time when I first got here I couldn't shake the feeling that I was just visiting, that this was some kind of trip I was going on. Finding yourself in a new place takes time, but I think I'm finally starting to grow roots here (or at least heavier shoes). Thinking about it, I think I've officially passed the point where I could go home and have it feel the same way.

It's partly terrific and partly terrifying but I don't really have a place I can definitively say is my home anymore. I switched my saved "Home" location on google maps to my residence here because it makes it easier to navigate, but also in part because this is my home now. Or at least it's where I'm living for the time being.

Home in my head is how I refer to the house I moved out of in August. To the province I was born in. To the city I went to elementary and high school in.

But I know that things have shifted in a solid kind of way because now, when I go home (home back in Ontario) for Christmas, or for summer break once school's over, it'll be a transitory space, impermanent in a way it never was before. My bedroom will be the same as it was when I left, but I'll be different.

This summer, my home in Ontario will be the place I'm staying while I wait to go back to school. When school starts again, home will be whatever house or apartment I end up living in that year. Home is a point of reference — when I say I'm going home after class I mean I'm going back to my dorm room. When I talk about what it was like "back home" I mean the city I grew up in. When I say I miss home, I don't mean I miss a place at all. I miss that time in my life, the people I knew, the person I was.

Soon enough, I won't be able to say that my parent's house is my home anymore at all. I'll have my own place to spend the summers in, and my parent's house will be the place I'm simply visiting, a stop on my way to somewhere else.

I've never really had any desire to settle down and start a family, but the idea of home is something that's just kind of always been a given for me. I know where it is, that single point of reference. Now that I'm starting to realize that it won't exist for me for much longer I find myself trying to redefine what home is. It's not whatever place you're staying, and I don't think it's that Garden State quote about people creating a collective idea around a place together either. I don't think home is a place at all — or at least I don't think it should be. Home should be yourself. If you can become a full person, if you know yourself and are comfortable and proud of who you are, you can be at home within yourself, and you never have to be tied to one place because you are your point of reference. You are your home.

“Where does it all lead? What will become of us? These were our young questions, and young answers were revealed. It leads to each other. We become ourselves.”
— Patti Smith, Just Kids
 

An Open Letter To The Class Of 2016

I graduated from high school on June 26th, and in the weeks since I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about what that means. Mostly this comes in alternating waves of excitement and abject terror; a special kind of butterflies in the stomach that has resulted from the realization that most of the things I once held on to as stable and consistent in my life are no longer in place. The roof, all four walls, and the floor of the safe little house I’ve built for myself here have been removed in one fell swoop. To say I don’t feel ready would be an understatement. But I also know that if I only ever did things I felt ready for I probably wouldn’t get out of bed in the morning.

The scariest part about this whole thing, though, has been my all-pervading worry that I should, by now, be far better at being a person than I currently am. There are so many things I feel like I should have gotten over — my perfectionism, my fear of taking risks, my socially awkward tendency to somehow be simultaneously both overbearing and shy — and as much as I’ve been working on it, it’s hard to tell if I’m making any kind of progress. My growth as a human being isn’t something that can be easily quantified, so as long as I continue to be obsessed with being able to control and understand everything in my life, I won’t be able to shake the feeling that I must somehow be failing.

It’s not that I think I’m supposed to be flawless, but with University right around the corner, I’m terrified that where I am right now isn’t good enough, and even more terrified that I’m never going to change. That there’s some kind of inherent problem with who I am as a person, and regardless of what I try to do I’ll always, deep down, be left with myself.

So, confused and concerned and close to the end of my tether, I did what I always do in this kind of situation: I started to write.

What resulted is kind of my unofficial graduation speech — one last nod to high school before I step out into the “real world”, and a way to reassure myself in attempting to reassure others. I hope it can be of some use to anyone who reads it no matter what stage of your life you’re graduating from, even if it’s just the step between today and tomorrow.

Without further ado:

An open letter to the Class of 2016,

One thing that’s become increasingly apparent to me over the past little while is that high school just kind of… ends. You go to your last few classes, take your exams, get your grades, and waltz out of graduation with a diploma that supposedly signifies some kind of meaningful achievement, and then, well — then it’s the whole rest of your life.

With graduating from high school, as with pretty much every so-called milestone in our lives, we spend so much time thinking about what it’s going to be like that by the time we actually get there it really doesn’t feel as special as we might have hoped. I turned 18 in January, officially making me an adult in the eyes of the Canadian government, but I certainly didn’t wake up that morning feeling any different than I usually do. It was just another day, like every other day, and every other big and little moment in my life that never seem like very much at all while they’re happening to me. The thing is though, all those big and little moments add up to something.

Think about who you were when you started high school compared to who you are now. You’re still the same person, but you’re also someone entirely different. You look a little different — a little older — you like different things, you have different friends, you’re better at some things now (and worse at others). You’re still you. But you’re different.

Growing up doesn’t happen all at once. It doesn’t hit you over the head in some transcendent moment of clarity and change. It happens day by day, moment by moment, ploddingly, painfully, s l o w l y. But it happens. It’s just almost impossible to notice. Simultaneously never-ending and over in the blink of an eye, we are hedged in at all sides by the inexorable passage of time.

This can be sad. You can be nostalgic about all the good moments you’ll never be able to relive. You can worry about the wasted time you won’t get back, the decisions you won’t be able to change, the things you said, did, were.

You can hate yourself for not growing up fast enough, not learning the lessons you feel like you keep on being hit with over and over, you can wish with all of your heart for things to get better right away, for things to stop hurting, for you to finally find the perfect life you know you’re meant to have.

But we all know it doesn’t work like that.

How it does work is the way it always has, and how it has over these past few years. Think back again to who you were when you started high school. In another four years you’ll probably feel the way you feel about yourself back then, about yourself right now. The things you’re scared of won’t seem so bad anymore, the views you hold will feel outdated, you’ll say things like “I was so stupid back then!”, and “what was I thinking!”. You’ll probably be embarrassed. That haircut! Those shoes!

But I want you to give yourself some credit. Everything looks much easier in retrospect. Right now it’s hard. Right now it’s scary. Right now it hurts like hell. But one day, maybe in four years, maybe in fourteen, maybe in forty; one day it won’t anymore. You’ll have new problems then — don’t get me wrong, it never just ends — but these problems, these fears, they’ll be gone.

I’m never going to be able to find all of the answers. I know that. I know I’m never going to be able to completely understand myself. I know there are always going to be parts of me that will never change completely. But I also know that I am who I am because of all the unique ways I’m messed up. Maybe I’ll always be a bit of a perfectionist, but maybe I’ll also always love socks with funky patterns on them, and use quotes in casual conversation, and skip down stairs, and cry at the happy parts of movies. Those things are as much a part of me as anything else is. We can choose what we allow to define ourselves, and there are so many things that I think define me right now that one day I’ll barely remember. And that’s good too.

Who you are right now is only one small point on a path that goes so far away you can’t even imagine what’s on the other end of it. The trick is knowing that the path doesn’t stop. There’s no big end goal, no glowing mountain for you to reach and know that now, finally, you’ve grown up, you’re all better, all done. What there is, is you. Right here, right now. And the will to keep on going anyway.

I would wish you good luck, but you don’t need it.

Things will change, that’s part of being alive. Whether you like it or not, they always do.And I hope that you are always, always, always growing up.

Love,

Ella

Post-Festival Blues

LCD Soundsystem on the first night

Today's post is brought to you by my the giant balloon of pain and snot that my head has become — thank you so much, six-foot-four man who blocked my view of the Killers while periodically sneezing in my direction.

I went to the Wayhome music festival in Oro-Medonte from July 21-25 (the festival itself was 3 days but we got there the day before and left the day after). It was my second ever music festival, and the first one I had to camp at because I was there for more than one day (the first one I ever went to was Field Trip which was at Fort York in Toronto last year). It was absolutely incredible and I had such a good time, but let me just say, music festivals are nuts.

I mean honestly I don't really have any complaints other than the general physical discomfort of seeing The Killers on the last night, but damn there were a lot of people there. Food lineups were the worst — not to mention expensive...

I would go further here to make some kind of poetic point about the communal atmosphere of festivals and how incredible music is but I'm way too sick to do much of anything at the moment. As of right now I am eating curry soup and a heroic quantity of rice crackers and trying to pretend that I don't have to go to work this evening. My cold and working are the main reasons I took so long to write about Wayhome, but I also think I just had no idea how I could possibly express it in writing. If you've never been to a music festival, I highly recommend it (obviously they're quite expensive but if you consider the amount of concerts you're technically getting out of it, it's a pretty good deal). I also highly recommend seeing Arcade Fire live — they're not really on tour anymore so that advice is a little late but at the very least listen to some of their music. They are 100% my all time favourite band ever, and seeing them live was, pardon my language, fucking transcendent. They are so good I cannot even use all caps to fully capture how I feel about them holy shitting shit.

I saw a lot of artists/bands, most of them only partially as I went from stage to stage in between the acts that I really wanted to see all of, but the following is my sketchy unofficial list of my top 10 favourite acts:
**Note: this order isn't necessarily reflective of which bands I like the best, it's just a rating of the ones I thought were the best live (of the, admittedly limited, ones I saw)**

1. Arcade Fire

2. LCD Soundsystem

3. Stars

4. The Killers

5. Patrick Watson

6. The Paper Kites

7. Foals

8. Half Moon Run

9. Beirut

10. M83

Honourable mentions:
- A Tribe Called Red, who were amaaaazing but I only got to see for a few songs because they played during the only time I had to get dinner before going to see Arcade Fire.
- Unknown Mortal Orchestra, who were also terrific but I also only saw a few songs from because they played until 1:30am and I was exhausted and standing way too close to one of the speakers which I was pretty sure was going to kill me

AND NOW, PICTURES!!

The only picture I got of Arcade Fire because I spent the whole rest of their set trying not to die because of how good they were

Brandon Flowers of The Killers, while he was singing a cover of I Can't Help Falling in Love With You 

The crowd at Patrick Watson with sparklers during his last song

The Paper Kites <3

So yes, it was incredible, I got to spend time with a bunch of awesome friends of mine and see some stellar performances, and I do not regret a single second of it — even though I got sick.

The worst part, of course, is the week or so after it's over where you're still reeling about how great it was and how sad you are that it's over, but damn I'm glad I went.

Not sure where to from here. I'm hoping to get better soon so I can actually get on track with my whole sorting my life and routine out thing, but that's being put on hold for a bit while I get better. Sometimes the best way to take care of yourself is to let yourself off the hook.

Until next time,

- Ella

Pancakes and Resolutions

So I worked a 10-hour shift on Saturday from 2pm to midnight (the restaurant I work at was hosting a wedding), and seeing as I was about ready to shuffle off this mortal coil by the end of it, I decided that Sunday was going to be my official "day off". Of course, I still had to go in to work at 6pm that evening, but for me, days off are mostly about my mindset. I decided that I was going to be in no rush to do anything, I didn't have to get anything done, and god damn it I was going to be nice to myself!

Woke up at 11, had a shower, meditated, made some tea and a double batch of Lonely Girl Single-Serve Pancakes (yes, a double batch. I was hungry and these things are my lifeblood), and started The Broom of the System by David Foster Wallace. I got it as a Christmas present from my parents but I hadn't gotten around to reading it until now. I'm quite enjoying it so far — it's interesting to read after having read Infinite Jest around this time last summer. You can tell it's written by the same guy but it's got a kind of lightness that I never really got from IJ. I don't think they can be compared in terms of quality or anything (although, let's be real, there will never be another book like Infinite Jest) but I'm finding it cool that you can tell the difference in the age and maturity of its author at the time of its writing.

Back to my original point here though — that made for quite a lovely morning, but the rest of the day kind of devolved from there. I certainly wouldn't say it was bad; it was quite good, and I think days like that are sometimes necessary to keep me from going off the deep end, but by the end of the night I knew why I can't give myself days off every day over summer vacation.

I'm a person who relies a lot on structure. I'm trying to break myself of that, because on the whole it keeps me from going outside of my comfort zone and is generally not something one should be totally dependent on. It is, however, still important to have a certain amount of structure to keep from drifting aimlessly without purpose or ambition. I read Erich Fromm's The Art of Loving last month and one of the passages I keep going back to is this one where he talks about how to concentrate (concentration or mindfulness being prerequisites for loving, which is a prerequisite for being):

"... To get up at a regular hour, to devote a regular amount of time during the day to activities such as meditating, reading, listening to music, walking; not to indulge, at least not beyond a certain minimum, in escapist activities like mystery stories and movies, not to overeat or overdrink are some obvious and rudimentary rules. It is essential, however, that discipline should not be practiced like a rule imposed on oneself from the outside, but that it becomes an expression of one’s own will; that it is felt as pleasant, and that one slowly accustoms oneself to a kind of behavior which one would eventually miss, if one stopped practicing it" (emphasis mine).

The point of structure is not to force yourself into things. The point of habit is not to make those things unconscious. Structure and habit should be used mindfully so that you end up enjoying and wanting to do the things that you know you should do — and being conscious of the choices you're making when you do them. When I get stuck scrolling endlessly through instagram, or stay holed up in my bedroom all day watching netflix, I know I'm not doing those things because I truly want to. I know they end up making me feel awful, and achieve nothing good in the long run, but I do them anyway because they're habits. I've learned to make those choices, to do the things that make me feel good in the short-term, but I don't have to stay there. I can choose to unlearn them, and make new, better choices; better habits. And they don't have to be externally forced on me through strict rules or structures. I just have to agree to try to do something else, and become cognizant of when I'm slipping back.

So really what I'm getting at with this is that I'm making some resolutions. Some things I've already started (like doing more yoga and learning French and writing more regularly), and other things I've been planning on doing for ages but haven't really gotten to yet (like going vegan and submitting some of my writing to various places). But I wrote them down on a piece of paper, folded it up and put it in my journal, and as of right now* I'm agreeing to try.

Here goes nothing!

- Ella

*although the going vegan thing is a little tentative for now until I move out at the end of August — the plan is to try my best but while my parents are still mostly responsible for our household food shopping, I'm happy enough with them accommodating to my being vegetarian

I'm BAAAACK!

What's up, it's me!!

So, it's been a while... I've been busy with school, mostly, and this blog kind of got sidelined in the process. But I figure now is a good a time as ever to start back up again and hopefully get into some kind of routine with writing. I have a lot of ideas, some of which may end up being a thing, some of which may not, who knows! I also have no idea if anyone actually sees or reads anything I put up here but that's alright, if anything this is mostly a place to archive my writing as well as being a reason to get myself to sit down and put things into words.

Until next time (when I will hopefully have something real to publish here),

- Ella

In Defense of Late Bloomers

Typography by Sherry Qian

Originally published in Show & Tell Zine

I’ve always been a bit of a late bloomer. I was the flat-chested, stick-thin thirteen year old hoping beyond hope that I’d wake up one morning with boobs; the one who watched from the sidelines as all my friends started dating, the one who didn’t start wearing makeup until the tenth grade, the one who saw a concert for the first time last summer. I have this vivid memory of being about eleven or twelve and crying to my mom that I didn’t have a “best friend” like all the girls in movies did -- someone whose house I’d go over to all the time, or who would call me after school to gossip and chat about our lives. She told me it was just because of the school I was at, that most of my friends lived far away, that their parents were strict about when they could go out. She said that it would be better in High School.

Whether or not that particular conversation had much of an impact on me, I’ve heard the same thing expressed in various ways across various mediums for pretty much my entire life. High School. The big one. “The best four years of your life”. Yes, of course the universe doesn’t start and end with high school. There’s a whole world out there, and the idea that the four years you spend trying to get your shit together stuck in a building with a bunch of other sweaty, stressed-out, frightened teenagers will be the peak of an 80+ year lifespan is more than a little ridiculous. But if all we ever hear is “don’t worry, it’ll be better when you’re older” -- well, that’s the same advice I got when I was twelve: just wait. Just wait. Just wait. It’ll be better in high school, it’ll be better in university, it’ll be better once you graduate, it’ll be better when you’re dead. At what point is it too late?

I’m seventeen -- why haven’t I had my first kiss yet? Why haven’t I gotten drunk, or thrown a house party, or gone on a date, or a road trip, or skipped school, or snuck out of the house at night, or gone on any of the amazing adventures with a band of quirky misfits my 12-year-old self was sure I’d be having? When I was younger all I wanted to do was grow up. Now, with one year left of high school and less than three years left of being a teenager, I feel like I’m running out of time. 

In my darker, self-pitying moments I attribute all of this to some personal fault of mine. Maybe I’m ugly or annoying and everybody hates me, or I’m too scared to take risks and do things that I could get in trouble for. Maybe I’m forever doomed to go through life without ever really doing anything because I’m a Boring Person. I feel like I’m missing out on some integral part of The Teen Experience™ that movies and books and TV shows have been selling me for so long, and as long as my life continues to be unexceptional, I’m plagued by the idea that I must be wasting it. 

The problem with this type of thinking, however, is that it’s all wrapped up in expectation. If you’ve spent your whole life expecting that certain very specific things are going to happen to you at very specific times, it’s hardly surprising that you feel like a failure when they don’t. High school comes with a set of expectations, and so does University, and adulthood, and just about everything you’ll ever do -- and as long as I keep focusing on the things I haven’t done yet, I’ll forget about the things that I have. I may not have gone on a date yet, or been to a real “party”, but I have gone to New York, and ridden a horse, and seen Shakespeare in the park, and read a 1079 page novel, and I have absolutely no idea where life will take me next.

So when I worry about why I haven’t had my first kiss yet, or when I worry about whether or not I should take a gap year after high school, or when I worry that I’ll be missing out on something if I go to theatre school instead of university, or when I worry that if I do go to university it’ll be too late to go to theatre school afterwards, it’s because I expect that things always and only happen in one specific way. I was lucky enough to be accepted to a two-week theatre training program at the beginning of this summer, and the actress I was paired with there as my “artist-mentor” gave a me a really good piece of advice. She said that there’s no A + B = C pathway for being an actor. There’s no set of rules or any guarantee that if you do this or that thing, you’ll end up with one specific outcome. Anything you learn can be useful, whether it’s English lit or particle physics, because it’s all about figuring out who you are and what you want -- and this can apply to anything. Maybe it’s a cheesy notion, but that doesn’t stop it from being true. There’s no such thing as Too Late. 

I suppose I could have had any of the stereotypical teen experiences I expected I would have in high school if I had forced them, but it probably would have felt worse to do things just for the sake of crossing them off of some kind of cosmic to-do list than to wait until things happened on their own. Sure, you shouldn’t just sit back and wait for things to happen to you, and yes it’s more than possible to be lazy, or mess up, or make the “wrong” choice, but dwelling on it isn’t going to change anything. 

In the end, whatever happens happens. There aren’t any rules, there aren’t any guarantees, and I’m not going to force anything just for the sake of having done so. I don’t know what happens next any more than you do, but I can grit my teeth, make choices I believe in, and try my best to figure it out as I go along. 

That’s all any of us can do, really. 

Infinite Jest Liveblog Part 5: The End?

credit to: Cody Hoyt

So... I finished it. I knew beforehand that the ending was abrupt, but I wasn't expecting that. Not that I thought it was a bad ending, though, don't get me wrong. To be honest I think it was the best (and quite possibly only) way it could have ended. I still threw it down and yelled "what the fUCK?" several times upon getting to that last sentence, but I'm glad it ended how it did.

I could write about the whole "what the heck happened" thing, but there are a lot of people online who have done a much better job of that than I ever could, so I'll leave that part to them (N.B. of course these are still their interpretations, and not all of these people agree with each other on what happened, but for me at least it was nice to read up on what other people thought so I could compare it with my own ideas and reach some kind of conclusion on it for myself)

http://dfan.org/jest.txt

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/ijend

https://tradepaperbacks.wordpress.com/wordswordsword (I've been reading along with this liveblog, and have found it tremendously useful, so I definitely suggest it to anyone who's planning on starting this book).

And as for interpretations on the book itself, I highly recommend this essay on it - a little long, but totally worth it and really really brilliant: http://www.thehowlingfantods.com/thesisb.htm

Now, my own thoughts... I have a lot but I'll try to keep them brief.

Throughout the whole book I kept thinking of the Entertainment as something fatally pleasurable. As described by Steeply, Marathe, and many other characters, you keep watching it over and over because it's the greatest, most wonderful feeling you have ever experienced and you never want it to end. This, however, isn't ever actually stated as being true. Yes, people watch it over and over again but because nobody sees it and lives to tell the tale, we don't actually know what exactly it is that keeps people watching. All we know of the Entertainment comes from JOI and Joelle, and Joelle's description of it is that describing it as fatally pleasurable was meant as a joke, like her saying that she wears her veil because she's fatally beautiful, but in actual fact she's horrifically disfigured. So what if the trap isn't pleasure, but understanding? Entertainment doesn't necessarily have to be pleasurable, it just has to be entertaining - and there's something inescapably lonely about Entertainment for its own sake. Like the novel Infinite Jest, maybe the film Infinite Jest doesn't give you closure - that somehow through the death-as-mother scenario (in Gately's dream Joelle's final word to him after he wants desperately for her to kill him is "wait") you are fatally compelled to go back to the beginning and try to understand it, and each time you do it makes a little bit more sense, you take it apart a little more and things start to come together but that only leads to more and more questions until you're trapped in an endless cycle of questioning. You cannot escape unless you get rid of your own innate need to understand - literal "analysis paralysis". Remind you of anything?

W/r/t the ending, I think the thing is that finding out what happens next isn't the point. You're plopped down into this novel's universe for a while, you experience it, and then you're pulled right back out again. To use a quote from Gately, "it occurred to him if he died everybody would still exist and go home and eat and X their wife and go to sleep". JOI's passages about figurants and his attempts to not have them in his own films also seemed to me to reflect the novel itself. We get Hal, we get Gately, but we also get Erdedy and Wardine and Poor Tony and Barry Loach. Every single character is equally im- and unimportant.

The length of the novel, the complexity of it, seemed to me to not be some kind of turn-off or a sign that DFW was trying to be smarter than everyone else in the room, but in fact the opposite. Reading this book is kind of like going through your own little 12-step program, one of the largest results of which is learning to get out of 'analysis-paralysis'. Understanding every tiny minute detail, getting all of the math and the politics and the tennis and the long involved drug terminology -- that's not the point. The point is that you don't have to 'get' everything, you don't have to break everything down and have a hold on it all. It felt like a kind of trap for "intellectuals", we who are so used to always being right, always having the answers for everything. We, like Hal "obsessed with the fear the [he] was somehow going to flunk grief-therapy", are obsessed with getting this book "right". "Here was a top-rank authority figure and I was failing to supply what he wanted ... I'd never failed to deliver the goods before".

When you really think about it, most of what this book attempts to do is get across simple, single-entendre principles. Like the cliches of Boston AA that sound simple and banal but are incredibly difficult to actually implement: cliches about love, and family, and happiness, and what success actually means. By placing them in a long and complex novel, we are almost tricked into repeating these cliches for ourselves -- and as with a 12-step program, once you repeat a cliche long enough you start to believe in it.

“The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point. Maybe that’s why they’ll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “Oh how banal.” To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows. ” 

- "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction"