I need to do more with my life.

Less than two months have elapsed since I began my current job as a sales associatestyle expert for the psychologically self-mutilating fashion industry that I have learned to loathe.  I'm looking for work again - but don't get me wrong, I actually like my job.  Our holiday staff party, albeit late, was last Sunday evening, and to put it bluntly, it was the best fucking night of my life.  A 6/15 guest count meant that those of us that did show up had a budget of, give or take, $420 to blow through, which translated into drinks on the house, desserts to take home, multiple appetizers, and the most expensive dishes on the menu.  That was just what the budget covered - on top of that, we also were entitled to twice the freebies.  I fell asleep that night very drunk but very happy, with Godiva chocolate covered strawberries at my bedside.  (Bliss.)  I also managed to make a few colleagues, and friends out of some workplace acquaintances.  But when all is said and done, it unfortunately is not friendship and the genuity of people that make the world go round.  It is the tilt of the planet on its axis sharing the best view of the sun, but everyone that inhabits this planet cares about one thing: the economy.

Canada's economy isn't actually suffering that badly, but the lovely, giant shopping centre just a kilometre and a half outside my city's limits hasn't been given a fair chance - and that's a double dip into the company's deficit when the dead season for retail has officially begun.  Now that I've dropped out of school, and I have no more excuses left in me to scrounge together any prior commitments, I'm running out of cash and I need a job.  A real job.  A job that doesn't cost me ten dollars a day to commute for, one that doesn't snag my hours away if my last shift was spent running a Swiffer across the floor two hundred times because ten customers entered the store in six hours - and were simply "browsing" so I couldn't make my goal, and one that gives me as many hours as they say they will, and if that changes, it's only because they give me more, and not because send me home early.  I need to point out that my ranting sounds a lot more angry than its meant to sound.  Like I said, I do like my job - and for the most part, I'm pretty cool with them sending me home early.  With the inefficiency of the employee shuttle, the extra time not only enables me, but grants me permission to spend my time otherwise wasted next to a Vitamin Water machine waiting patiently for a big orange limo, window shopping at every store's newest displays and arrivals.  IT'S FUCKING CRIMINAL! ...and I usually let that slide too.  But the fact of the matter is, my pre-Christmas/boxing day/new years paycheque has been entirely spent, and I'm back on the same compulsive shopping continuum that got me into debt in the first place.  I need money, and I can't afford to be sent home early.  Especially when I know I'll get home at the same time.

We all make sacrifices for money.  I'd been out looking for new employment since before the summer ended, when my life was much simpler and I thought that my relationship was a fairytale.  I thought my search was successful when I'd stumbled upon an oasis that personified my "dream job".  It, of course, ended up being the exact opposite.  I invested nearly two months working for free to please a man I thought was my hero, but he ended up being just as transparent as every other millionaire, and I walked away not only with hopes shattered, but also with pockets empty.  The experience left me desperate and so I had to look outside of the city, and the only job that took me was one at The Faraway Mall.  I really wasn't sure about anything at the time, but I was desperate, and thankfully I'd joined the team at a time where hours could be given generously without any negative consequence.  I got myself out of debt in four paycheques and I finally figured out how to budget my lifestyle and to save for my... future?  I guess that got cut off around now, when our hours got cut and that dream remained a dream instead of becoming a reality.  That whole endeavour has been one hell of a ride, though.  From start to finish, all the hardship that came with being insufficiently funded really gave me a new respect for everyone that slaves away in the retail industry, or hell, in any industry, just to get by.  'cause I mean, that's all any of us are doing, right?  Except for the billionaires of the world that sit on their asses and schmooz thanks to the hardworking efforts of their ancestors, work is work, and the 21st-century entertainment industry can sugar coat it all they want with that "do what you love" bullshit.  Even when people claim to love their jobs, the ones that are the best at it come home late and eat poorly, don't get enough sleep, and get so stressed out about everything that they'll likely drop dead before they get a chance to retire.  The only people that seem to have it easy in the world are trophy wives, and seriously, try to find one that can admit that she (or he) is truly, unconditionally happy.  I dare you.

Our world today is dictated thoroughly and absolutely by what Julia Cameron has coined to be "cash flow and marketing strategies".  Every second of every day, someone in the world is making a poor decision in order to gain benefit for themselves financially.  The sad part is, most of the thinkers don't realize the falterings of their judgment.  They think they're doing the right thing.  I mean, what ever happened to happiness in this day and age?  I don't mean a free trip to the mall with daddy's credit card buying out Abercrombie & Fitch to your adolescent female heart's desire.  I'm talking about good old-fashioned, old school happiness that didn't have anything to do with personal gain or reputation.  Anyone's reputation for that matter.  Life before, or after, adolescence and the years before mid-life seem as if they're the best, because if the cards are in your favour, those will be the years of your life that you'll feel the most complete.  Childhood is supposed to be a simple time where the world is at your feet and you can do anything, absolutely anything that you want, and no one tells you otherwise.  Then inevitably, adolescence rolls around and you come to experience problems that might seem like the world at the time, but can be easily classified as "normal".  You get your heart broken, you experience a few embarrassing moments, your parents hound you for constantly being irresponsible and they try to force you into an undesirable career choice against your will (except for the sad few of us who are raised by shallow people and become shallow people) - and then your early twenties roll around and you feel like you're happy.  People rave on and on about how great their twenties were.  It was a time when they were young, beautiful, energetic, and ready to take the world by storm.  I guess everybody gets that feeling.  And because I'm not even there yet, I guess it wouldn't be right for me to judge, either, but as of right now I'm still going to say that your twenties aren't going to be the best time in your life.  It's a time where people think they're happy, but aren't - because the sources of their happiness are, more often than not, plastic things.  They're in college or just finishing with their degrees.  What does that degree mean to them?  They believe it's important because that's what Generation X decided to tell them.  Generation X thinks that you'll never amount to anything unless you pull through four straight years of university, right after high school, and if you don't - you go to some "second-rate polytechnic college" to get a "useless two-year diploma", or you backpack around Europe for a few years, or get an apartment with a couple of friends and live at the bars every night of the week - you're a totally useless piece of shit.  So whether or not they realize it, their perceived "happiness" only comes from the acceptance of something they didn't take the time to understand and figure out for themselves - whether or not going along with tradition is more important to them, as an individual, than breaking tradition and making their own mark in history.  In your twenties, you're motivated to make money because society teaches you that it's what's important.  You stray away from your real dreams, whatever they may be, whether they're as simple as falling in love and starting a family by age thirty, or walking away from your electrical engineering degree completely and pursuing your love for music.  Most people don't.  Most people don't find the strength to walk away from what's expected of them, and they instead become like the rest who follow in footsteps which are headed for a destination they'd rather not land at.  And when you're in your twenties, you're still too young.  You're all talk, you're all edge - you've got your whole life ahead of you.  But because you haven't lived it yet, all you have to guide you are those who have lived before.

After mid-life, you have retirement.  This is the second time in our lives that I believe we can be truly happy.  When people are ready to retire (people = regular working-class men and women who haven't manipulated their spouses to speed up time), they are finding resolution on many fronts.  First and foremost, people are ready to retire when they are financially stable enough to stop supporting themselves.  They have access to enough money to, in theory, live off of for the rest of their lives.  But being financially stable cannot be sought after as a realistic ending when one feels that they are still needed as an active citizen in the lives of their family and colleagues.  This is why old people retire.  When you see the elderly population depicted in "happy retirement" - golf courses, European tours, country clubs, and power walks through affluent, scenic neighbourhoods - they are usually grandparents.  Their children are no longer in need of their parental support as they are occupied with the task of raising offspring of their own.  The retired elderly can rest comfortably at night knowing that, no, they are no longer needed as a prime, everyday source of assistance to their children, but that they can happily fulfill their role as grandparents.  My mother turned 60 years old this past December and she has one grandson.  He is almost two years old, and although he is a restless bundle of energy, my mother has told me, as well as other people her age who have become grandparents before her, that being a grandparent is much more enjoyable than being a parent.  The concept puzzled me, as all I seem to hear about is how great of a blessing children are to this world, and how miraculously life-changing their existence becomes to their parents.  But to think that later on in life, after we experience the joys of marriage and children, the agonies of deaths and divorce, the disappointment of a career that fulfilled a dream that wasn't yours, and the optimism in learning that it's never too late to start over - we'll reach a time where if we're lucky, our children will live less than two hours away, the loves of our lives will still wake up next to us each morning, we'll be walking away from a career that's treated us well, and we can rest assured that the house is paid, the cars are paid, money is in the bank, and there is always tomorrow.  At this time in our lives, we don't need to be wrong anymore.  The problems we now face cannot be the immediate consequences of our previous mistakes.  We will lose more of our friends and loved ones at this time more than ever, some permanently, even without death.  This time can hurt, but this time is real.  Nothing can be hidden because we'll already have learned much more than we needed to.  To some, the retirement age is the most painful, regretful, and lonely time in their lives.  But for those who have lived genuinely, simply, and honestly, these people will feel no regrets and will need to hide nothing.

On the road where it all began, I became a young veteran of unusual problems who was for the first time experiencing normal problems, and getting the two mixed up.  I shrugged off big things like they were nothing and viewed small, temporary mishaps to be monumental in size.  The endeavour caused me to crave the positively influential guidance in my life that I wasn't getting.  I had guidance, but a part of me always knew I was being guided in directions I couldn't follow.  In the end - after meeting so many new people and saying goodbye to so many old ones, after every shitty experience and every great experience that's brought me to tears in unspeakable bliss, after the many places I've come to and gone from - I'm talking about the same things.  I'm thinking on the same lines as I used to.  And I've learned that if I can't change my own generation (the spoiled, rude, heartless, and sheltered one), I can change my kids' lives so that they can change the lives of their own children, and so on.  We can't go back in time and change our experiences; we can only change ourselves, if we feel that we need to, and change the path that which we travel.  I hate more than my fair share of people and things.  I stand up for more things than I thought I would.  Every day, I learn something new, or I'm reminded of something I want to forget.  It's worth it in the end, and with every struggle I learn to get by.  And I figure out more of who I am.

I don't particularly produce these blogs to spread profound messages across the internet to whomever decides to read up.  But in the process of being normal - complaining about my struggles, rejoicing my achievements, and trudging through the daily grind on every occasion in between - that's when I learn that there's more to life than anything you choose to compare.  I don't back my writing with recollections of annual family vacations or endless conversations with people that were once in my life, for an hour or for a year.  I didn't have that life, that perfect, somewhat sheltered, and transparently affluent lifestyle that the four-person suburban families of my generation seem to live.  Because my heart has broken by family members and not boyfriends, and my life has fallen apart not because of moving away but because death and illness, it's pretty fair to say that I know shit.  You can't force me into a "normal situation" run by people that haven't worked a day in their lives without expecting me to have something to say about it.  I guess in the end, I'm lucky.  For the most part, I haven't been hurtfully or purposefully shunned for my experiences - alienated sometimes because of what others couldn't understand - but rather embraced, honoured, and empowered by the overwhelming support and love that certain people in my life have given me.  In the end, it really isn't about the amount of money I'm making - not right now, and not in twenty years.  And I've learned that I've changed a lot less than I give myself credit for.  Well, thank God for that.

It's a weeknight just like the rest, and I'm waiting.  I'm waiting for my mom to pick up the phone and call my sister; I'm waiting for the next few days to pass, and I'm waiting for Dustin to wake up and respond to all my "call me" texts and tweets.  It's that time of year again, and all I can think about all of this is, "why did it take me so long to feel this way?"

Three years ago Monday, my father passed away from a six month long, unsuccessful battle with lung cancer.  I was fifteen at the time and devastated.  My mother and I have never had the greatest relationship and I felt that the one parent that had truly loved me had been taken away from me forever.  This loss changed a lot of things, and affected me deeply.  I went from being a popular, social butterfly to a withdrawn antisocial outcast, my grades dropped (and never recovered), and I lost all my faith in God.  I was raised a catholic and in the months before his diagnosis, I had been intentionally, and happily devout in my faith and found peace of mind and comfort as a young follower of Christ.  Even though I had questions about the Almighty, I still found no harm in paying homage.  Things quickly changed.

I backed away from my religion because I couldn't accept the fact that my God had let so many tragedies systematically occur.  He took away my father, and at the time that relationship was everything to me; although he was an absent figure in my life, his weekends in the city would bring me feelings of great lightness and love.  I felt like I lived for my father.  Upon the course of my faithful days, I believed much in fate, and that lives begin and end all for an individual reason.  Then came events like Hurricane Katrina and her subsequent storms, the aftermath of 9/11, and every other hurricane that was to ensue in the coming years.  What justification did my God have to kill innocent people by the masses?  Were their lives perceived not to be meaningful enough to be lived to their full potential?  What did they do wrong?  And despite this, I wondered why pain is accepted by our society at large, which is in turn tolerated by an omniscient creator.  So I got a part-time job to work Sunday evenings where my mother would normally take me to church.  In a few months, she stopped asking, or trying to make me feel guilty for closing the door on our religion.  Even in a logical sense, there was no reason for me to continue going to church.  I had already been attending a public high school for over a year where the mention of Christ is purposely abolished.  I was up to no good, committing every sin I possibly could not at my age and with my resources, and I simply believed that God was ruthless idiot.  He sat on his high horse and watched the world from afar, as it destroyed itself, and as people prayed to him for his blessing in their desperation, and would honour him in their states of exclamation, he would be unaffected, as he had no beginning, and no end.

It happened in late September, just about three months ago, when everything changed.  My relationship with my mother had reached the end of its leash and I moved out of my house for the second time, the day after my high school graduation, to live with my brother for two months.  My sister and I were in a bitter argument and were no longer speaking, and all I was interested in doing was getting as far away as possible from everything my hometown had in it: my family, my past, and an expectation-filled mould of a future for a life that wasn't mine.  I did what I could to get by, while trying to find a balance between living the life of an 18 year old girl and the life of an adolescent woman.  While pursuing the former, I met Dustin.  We quickly fell into an unexpected, whirlwind romance (that's lasted) that took me out of my brother's house and back into my mother's, off a plane to the west coast and my feet firmly on Calgarian ground with an opportunity to work my perceived dream job, and with a huge weight off my shoulders removed, suddenly truly happy for the first time in my life since my father was alive.  That happiness, rooted from the feeling of being in love, made me capable of anything.  It made us capable of anything, and that's why we beat the odds, and now we're stronger than we've ever been before.

He went away to school in late August following a three-day road trip we took together across the continent.  Unknowingly, we committed to a long distance relationship that's more fortunate than most, as after the endurance of four months apart we are given the blessing of four months together.  At the end of the first of those four lonely months, he was beginning to slip away.  He was no longer able to talk with me all day and every day, with school, football practise, and a social life, and I could neither do the same, with a new job and part-time school, and the juggling act of resolving a plan for my future.  Our lives became worlds apart from one another and we could no longer relate in the fashion we could so naturally.  I begun to feel alone.  I wondered why I'd made the decision to live at home instead of move away like I wanted to, because nothing changed between my mother and I, and I still had to do everything myself.  I missed my sister.  I wanted her to be a part of my life, but I pushed her away, and I had no idea how to make her forgive me for being such a douche.  My friends flew far away to live the beginnings of their university careers, and as I watched them have the time of their lives, partying and making new friends and getting to legitimately experience living away from home, all I could feel was regret for throwing high school out the window, simply because I didn't care.  Left and right, problems ensued.  I was running out of money on one end, and if I would try to ask my mom for help she'd be consumed by the mood swings and temper tantrums of my brother's impatience.  I couldn't talk to my other brother, or his wife, about anything.  I felt completely and totally abandoned, and isolated, and if the problems couldn't be solved, I at least had to find a reason for everything that was going on.

Everything pointed to my dad.

I realized then that every problem I've ever had, with myself, with my family, or with my attitude - has been a reflection and/or a consequence of his behaviour and poor decisions.  I couldn't relate to my sister because he ruined her, I couldn't understand my brother because he ruined him, and I couldn't even stand to be in a room with my mother for a couple of minutes because she's had to endure 30 years of a broken marriage to him.  And that was when it hit me, that the unconditional love I thought I could only have from him, wasn't real.  For one, my very existence was never purposeful.  I, myself, am a result of a poor decision.  My father selfishly decided to take that poor decision and create a robot out of me, someone that knew only to love him, and to hate everyone else, and to use me to cover up all the mistakes he made in the past.  And it's not like the day I was born made the clouds part and the mountains move; he still made poor decisions, and still behaved dishonourably, up until he decided to leave because no one in the world would notice, or care.  Except me.  I cared, and I didn't want him to leave.  I didn't want him to get up and walk away, to go create a new life for him selfishly because he wasn't man enough to fix his old one.  On many nights leading up to and after his death, I weeped alone, and quietly so no one would hear, because I knew that if anyone knew why I was crying, they'd tell me to just shut up.  Three years seemed to pass me by as I stopped caring about anything with true value.  And when that day came and it all crashed down on me at once, I felt it alone, and I felt it far too late.

For the first time, I thought of death as a gift.  I thought of it as an end to suffering and a key to eternal salvation.  I rationalized that my father went away to paradise undeservingly, and that for him to be dead is unfair.  Because now that I've finally figured it out, and I'm ready to confront him, and even take his life into my own hands for all the mistakes he's made, he's already gone.  He isn't here to try to justify his actions or any of the stupid things he did, for no reason at all.  To die is to cease to exist, and to be rid of not only suffering, but any form of responsibility to your past and to those who have survived you.  It's an easy way out.  And whether or not suicide brings you to hell, the afterlife is something none of us will ever live to tell about.  In terms of our time on earth, all ties are broken, and all relationships end.  If someone you leave behind ever has something to say, they should have done it before you left, because they will never get to again.

For the past month or so, I've been contemplating going back to the church.  The catholic church specifically, but only because that's the only one I know; I've felt that I want to re-establish a personal relationship with God that doesn't involve other people or a sense of community.  At least, not yet.  This was caused by a number of things, what I thought was the main reason being the fact that I'm in a relationship with a proud atheist that hates all forms of public worship.  In my years of religious experimentation, I might have shut the door on catholicism, but I still kept an open mind to those who worshipped other denominations and beliefs.  The experience of being so intimately close to someone who outlaws that openness so rashly, made me feel, for the first time, lucky to have endured ten years of Christian schooling and seventeen years of churchgoing, for all that I'd learned and all that I personally experienced.  Then today, I came home and took a nap, and my mom decided to barge into my room and tell me to get ready because we're having a prayer for my dad.  Suddenly all my preliminary thoughts of innocently going back to the church were replaced with me reacting like I was being choked, suffocating, and trying to get out as quick as I can.  I called Dustin, and he was asleep.  I texted my sister, and she told me to calm down and tell our mother to call her because once she did/does, my sister would defend me.  I was just downstairs having dinner with the rest of my family, minus my sister and her husband, and now I'm tucked back into my room, still without text replies and feeling full, but awkward.  So my mother used dinner to lure her non religious children into involuntary prayer.  Classy.

And as far as where I stand when it comes to my views on church, right now, in this very moment, I don't think I've ever been exposed to a kind of faith in God that has been purely about love.  My mother would drag me to church against my will which made me believe less and less.  My calling to the church is an individual one and other people can't tell me what it is and what it isn't.  Then, I've seen other [christian] denominations, thinking they would be less forceful and more supportive of a free spirit - in many cases it is the exact opposite.  They seem to condone non-believers as sinners and only celebrate the lives of those who think exactly like they do.  And if that's what religion is, how is it any different from politics, or the melting pot of second-generation ethnic groups that is the reality of North America?  I do believe in God.  A part of me always did - just not always in a good way.  I don't celebrate the existence of God, ask for his forgiveness, praise him when good things happen to me, or beg him to change things when they don't.  I've learned to harness the reins of my own life and do what I can with my own two hands, during my time on earth.  But what I do believe, is that things happen for a reason.  Everything that happens in my life has been predetermined, because things will always work themselves out, and someone out there already knows what my thought paths will be, and what my choices will lead me to - what comes out of them, and happens as a result.  I'm saying that's God because that's who I'm familiar with.  I do believe that someone out there is all-knowing, but I'm not so sure about all-powerful.  Sure, anything is possible if you believe, but whoever does possess the reality of being all-powerful isn't using that ability to do anything for the good of anybody.  So whoever has that trait doesn't deserve my attention.  He or She needs to get their shit together, as far as I'm concerned.

I don't believe that religion should be used as something to be exhibited.  I believe that a spiritual relationship is a personal thing, and that the community does not have to get involved.  This is what takes me from being a catholic to a christian because a huge component of the Roman catholic religion is the church community, which I personally feel is unnecessary.  Religion, I think can be comparable to love, as told by the bible, in that it isn’t boastful or selfish and is patient and kind, or else it isn’t real.  And it seems like every religion, every political party, and every race of people hates something.  Someone.  And if people are going to continue to complain about how religion divides us, they should look at politics and see that its doing the exact same thing, what with outlawing gay marriage in New York and depriving cancer patients of their treatment in California, albeit via marijuana.  We’ve abolished the presence of Christ in commonplace urban society and yet it seems like God is what we need the most these days – there are more people that need faith in their lives than ever, and so many of those people are the ones that have walked away.

There is a lot wrong with the world, both in and out of our homes, in my life, and in yours.  I don’t know if the world is better or worse than it was in the last century.  But its a new decade, and we have an opportunity to change a lot of things.  In 2020, I don’t want to be living in the same world that I am right now – but I will be.  Worlds and lives don’t change.  Instead, we come to accept and deal with our problems more gracefully, and that is a form of happiness.*  After everything that I’ve endured, experiences and stories told alike, I want to do something with my own discontent to make sure that the world in 2020 is at the very least, a better place.  It's difficult for me to find concluding insight when I write things like this, especially when at the end of the night, you just pull up the covers and pretend like nothing happened.  But I guess I have a lot to be thankful for.  Things that I have, and things that I'm happy are gone.

*Off the third episode of Bored to Death.  Not original, but fitting, and I thought it was very true