Category — responsibility

Two months ago I left a technical writing contract to pursue…something.

I wasn’t sure what that something would turn out to be, but I’m getting a clearer picture now. I know writing is a major component and my stick people drawings too.

So, fine – I have the freedom to pursue writing and drawing now. Lots of freedom and my husband’s blessing and a good support group – all good things for venturing out of the cube farm.

Last night I set out goals, I made a very doable “to do” list and yet by 10:30 a.m., I found myself mired in MSN conversations about video games, RPGs, personal relationship crises (not mine), random chit chat and idle web-surfing while reading replies.

This is not the work I committed to.

I would never have frittered away the morning on MSN conversations at my contract job. I would have chatted a little, but politely cut it off to get some real work done. Not that I don’t love chatting with my friends, I do. I want to hear about their day, their thoughts, their troubles – all of it. But, never really in-depth talks at work unless it was really dire.

I had rules when I was in the office.

Conversations fell into two categories: Fun/Unimportant and Serious. You can’t decide between whole wheat and white bread for lunch? That’s Unimportant and unless I was waiting around for my project to compile, I never paid much attention to that sort of chatter. You just found out your girlfriend sent all your belongings to your mother’s because she no longer wants to live with you? That’s Serious and I made some time to talk and make plans to continue discussions right after work.

Emphasis on the “after work”. I did my job first, and only rarely – and for really, really Serious things – did the work day take a back seat.

Now that I’m working from home on something a lot less 9 to 5ish, there seems to be an impression that what I’m doing now is really nothing more than a frivolous hobby.

That impression is my fault.

People talk to me and I feel rude if I don’t really listen and respond accordingly. I think I do this in part because a) I was raised to be polite and b) I don’t take what I’m doing seriously either.

I mean come on, I write blog posts and draw stick people. Yeah, that’ll put me on the map. I keep looking at what I want to do and thinking: “This isn’t a grown-up job. I need to do something meaningful.”

For instance, I showed my portfolio of stick people drawings to a few other folks and when I heard the term “artist” come up – I laughed and blushed. Artist!? Pshaw. Waterhouse is an artist. Klimt is an artist. The woman drawing the Mona Lisa on the sidewalk with chalk is an artist.

Me? I’m a doodler.

As for being a writer…I’m a good technical writer. You want a help file that will give you step by step instructions without making it complicated? I’m your girl. These blog posts – well everyone and their brother has a blog. That can’t be serious work.

Except that it is – or at least, it can be if I take it seriously. And if it isn’t serious work, it’s the groundwork for the writing that will be.

So now that I’ve admitted the problem is me, I need to fix it. Maybe I am an artist! Maybe my little stick people are going places. I’ve been a technical writer so why can’t I just say that I’m a writer and leave off the technical part? Besides – no one ever knew what I was talking about when I said “technical writer” anyway and I never thought of it as my lifetime career.

My first step towards fixing this mess is setting my status to “busy” on MSN. If I am going to commit to this, I have to actually commit to it instead of farting around waiting for the Big Idea to fall out of the sky. That isn’t going to happen – I will have to work at this.

Sorry friends, there will be a lot less MSN chit chat in the future so I can focus on the work I keep saying I need to do.

Maybe now I can get on with this new work!

Vanessa Knight, the Director of Events and Student Life at Kwantlen, in collaboration with Ashley Fehr (the Chair and Director of Academic Affairs at Kwantlen) recently wrote a piece regarding the availability of late night transit out of downtown Vancouver which really annoyed me.

As a recap, Ms. Knight is miffed that TransLink did not run transit later than usual on Halloween night while she and her “posse” were out “getting their drink on”. Apparently sobering up in the wee hours of a cold November morning while dressed in a slutty, cold-weather-inappropriate costume kind of sucks.

Ms. Knight also complains that TransLink is more concerned with impressing visitors for the Olympics than its own citizens (and unfortunately, that’s probably true) and that McDonald’s has more sense because they stay open late to take advantage of all the drunk people with the munchies.

I don’t disagree with the assertion that public transit should be available late at night for people too inebriated to drive – that’s one of the great things about public transit – but how late is late enough?

Vancouver, a city that tags itself as “world class” (and don’t get me started on that misnomer), has transit that stops running pretty early considering how late the night life in downtown Vancouver runs. Any city that is truly “world class” (I’m looking at you Berlin) has a 24-hour transit system in place – or at least one that runs until 2 or 3 a.m.

And let’s face it; a cab ride from downtown Vancouver to say Burnaby, Surrey or Port Coquitlam etc. can get pretty expensive – and that assumes you can find a cab driver who will take you anywhere if you’re drunk. Most cabbies, quite reasonably, don’t want drunk people in their car.

That being said, TransLink’s operating hours are not exactly a secret. TransLink didn’t just spring this on an unsuspecting public for Halloween – the hours are clearly posted on their website along with maps of every route and time tables for every single stop. Their website isn’t easy to navigate (the maps are hard to get to), but the information is there.

Perhaps the reason TransLink doesn’t run later isn’t just that they don’t care about the citizens of Vancouver, or that they are financially constrained but, perhaps they don’t wish to be perceived as supporting “getting your drink on” at clubs. I bet they also don’t want to clean up the resulting mess of a bunch of drunks with food from those captains of industry at McDonald’s off the bus seats and floors.

Another good reason for transit not to run late: TransLink performs maintenance on buses and train lines at night to ensure that everyone gets a safe ride during their hours of operation. It seems TransLink is damned if they do and damned if they don’t. Terminate service at 1 a.m. – people complain. Run transit 24-hours and do the bare minimum for maintenance and repairs – people would complain.

Knowing that Ms. Knight, perhaps you should have planned your night out a little better. And that goes for the “other 200 people” you mentioned and the “hundreds of people trapped downtown” every Friday and Saturday night. You could have done any of the following before headed out dressed as a “slutty version” of anything:

• Rent a hotel room together.
• Share a cab to the closest house and crash.
• Plan your time accordingly and make sure you’re on the last bus home.

These ideas are not beyond your intelligence.

Just for the record, I find it very hard to believe that the same people get “trapped” downtown every weekend. Is their ability to remember when the buses stop running hampered by the amount of alcohol they consume? I could see that happening once or twice, but every weekend? Give me a break – if that’s really the case, then those hundreds of people are morons who drink too much.

I suppose your next argument would be cash flow – but, if you can afford to pay cover charges at clubs and pay more to get drunk at said clubs; you can afford to share the cost of a hotel room or a cab.

Your “bleary eyed $2.50” is hardly an inducement for incurring the extra expense of running transit an hour later.

I’ve seen drunken people on transit here – it’s not pretty: loud, obnoxious, reeking of booze (and, in one case, urine) and a river of vomit under the seats. I sure didn’t envy the poor driver who had to hose down and disinfect the bus that night. I wonder if he appreciated those party-goers $2.50?

Your right to pass out on the bus, be a drunken nuisance, or throw up on yourself does not trump TransLink’s policy of providing their employees with a safe and puke-free environment in which to work.

Ms. Knight, as the Events and Student Life Director for the Kwantlen Student Association, couldn’t you find something more important and pressing to write about? This article – written in association with your position at Kwantlen, gives the impression that being inebriated and unable to get home is part of the routine for Kwantlen students. Also, as someone who is in charge of events and student life, you do a poor job of planning your own events and life if you can’t manage to catch a bus out of downtown by 1 a.m.

I’m even more surprised that the Chair and Director of Academic Affairs thinks this is an appropriate story to have associated with Kwantlen.

How would you feel about a $2.50 donation towards finding something resembling journalism at Kwantlen?

The signs are all there: irrationally crabby, moody, easily annoyed and withdrawn.

I need a vacation.

My first thought upon realizing this was “A vacation from what exactly?”

Let’s face it, I have a pretty sweet life. I have a fantastic (and cute!) fiance who has been extremely supportive and encouraging in my quest to run my own business and do what I like for a living. He is my best-friend. We live in a nice apartment, we have lots of books and toys to amuse ourselves with and we eat like kings most nights.

But, amidst all this happy “we”, a canker is blossoming.

I need time alone. I need to get away from our nice apartment, away from my best-friend, away from our toys and routines. I need to regain my sense of space and self. I want to come home with a sense of eagerness and come back to our life with the ability and renewed desire to participate in it fully.

I felt guilty for wanting it, for needing it – I questioned myself about it endlessly. Do I love Joe less if I need to be alone? Does this mean that I’m a selfish person? Does my need to sprawl out across the whole bed without running into anyone supersede my responsibilities to our relationship?

The answer to all those things is no.

I discussed everything with Joe and I should have known that this would be his response: “You should go – a couple of days of doing nothing by yourself will be good for you.”

Rilke said it best:

“I consider the following to be the highest task in the relation between two people: for one to stand guard over the other’s solitude. If the essential nature of both indifference and the crowd consists  in the nonrecognition of solitude, then love and friendship exist in order to continually furnish new opportunities for solitude.”

My thoughts about love and relationships have changed drastically over the past two years. Yet, there is still this nagging voice in my head (the product of too many romantic films and novels) that needing to get away, alone, from your regular life for a few days was disaster in the making. That real love means merging together as one person forever and ever, it means being a mirror for the other, it means bringing them into your fully-realized world where you entertain them with endless delights and teach them how to live within you.

Now I understand fully that those perceptions are all garbage.

I don’t want to submerge myself in someone else’s personality (nor do I want them submerged in mine). I cannot be anyone’s mirror. I refuse to let some half-finished, disorderly mess of a person come and live in the internal world I’m still building for myself because they find it easier than building their own world.

I find myself agreeing with Rilke again:

“[Young people] (who by their very nature are impatient) fling themselves at each other when love takes hold of them, they scatter themselves, just as they are, in all their messiness, disorder, bewilderment…:And what can happen then? What can life do with this heap of half-broken things that they call their communion and that they would like to call their happiness, if that were possible, and their future?

And so each of them loses himself for the sake of the other person, and loses the other, and many others who still wanted to come. And loses the vast distances and possibilities…No area of human experience is so extensively provided with conventions as this one is: there are life-preservers of the most varied invention…society has been able to create refuges of every sort, for since it preferred to take love-life as an amusement, it also had to give it and easy form, cheap, safe, and sure, as public amusements are.”

Before now I had simply withdrawn deeper into myself to come to the solitude I need to be happy. Now I know that Joe and I can create space for the other to live in and leave out all the guilt that is supposed to be associated with needing that space.

So I booked my two day/two night trip to Victoria, BC (I got an amazing deal with Pacific Coach Lines) and that’s that.

Two days of keeping my own counsel and focusing on my own inner needs will go a long way to regaining and preserving my happiness!