Red Cedar
More apocalypse, less angst
Sad, lonely, and moving.
I’m a bit down at the moment – and am thinking I might want to move later this fall – perhaps back to Vancouver, or maybe Victoria. It just depends on what happens with finding a job there at this point.
I feel a bit stupid about moving right now – I only bought my house last spring – but I’ve been working out my union and work calendar for the fall and it’s shaping up to be as stupidly busy as the last few months have been. Bottomline is I’m tired, and the long commute isn’t feasible when I’m gone three weekends out of four. What’s the point? It’s not as if I’ve got all this enjoyment time of my place to make the commute worthwhile.
Plus (and here’s the part I hate to admit), besides being really tired all the time – I’m lonely on the Sunshine Coast. I really don’t have enough of a social life there, and find it impossible to build one because I’m either too tired, or never around. My family and friends all live in other places, I can’t stay awake late enough at night to go jam with other musicians, and there’s no freak-coffeehouses for when I feel like talking with strangers.
I know you can be lonely anywhere, and it’s my state of mind making this more difficult to bear at the moment – but thinking about another dark winter of 5 am mornings is making me real depressed and I think it’s probably not a bad idea to see if a change of location helps a little.
I’m going to rent my house out for November 1st and one of two things will happen:
1) If I get a job in Victoria in the next few months, I’m packing all my stuff and heading down there.
or
2) If I don’t get a job in Victoria in the next few months, I’ll leave most of my stuff on the Sunshine Coast (packed into one room of the house) and rent a temporary apartment in Vancouver until I can find work in Victoria and move there.
I don’t really want to live in Van again, but I also can’t just give up working, so it’s all really dependent on the job hunt and what happens between now and November.
Interested in renting my house in Gibsons? Email and let me know. I’m sad to be thinking about moving again (that will make three times in three years pretty much), and I love my house – but this lifestyle that was supposed to be healthier is wrecking me!
Job-seeking behaviour.
I just applied for a federal service job in a field totally unrelated to mine – the first job I’ve applied for in at least three years – which is to say, I’m officially looking to get out of here at the first opportunity that looks good.
I know, it seems unlikely that I will actually leave here – but after seven years in the same workplace, I’m thinking it is time for a change. This feeling has been intensified recently by some ongoing stressed internal dynamics and the appointment of our new Communications Director who I find incredibly difficult to work with. It’s too bad really, as only a few months ago I was feeling really good about work – but I am really disappointed with the choice in new Director that was made for us, and I’m afraid that I won’t be able to work under someone who I don’t respect for any long period of time. It’s awful too, after years of only having female directors, that all of a sudden we got another carbon-copy male bureaucrat in the position instead (straight out of Ottawa – no doubt).
Of course, I don’t make it easy on myself since I have it pretty good here and don’t want to give up too much. I think it will be some time before I find something that makes a suitable replacement (I’ve given myself a year to find new work). Essentially I don’t want to leave the federal government, would like to work in Victoria (I would like to merge the places I live and work once again and it seems it is time to move back there), and don’t want to take much of a pay cut (though I am willing to go down at least a level if the right opportunity comes along). If nothing turns up in the next year, then I am willing to consider provincial government opportunities – but since they pay so much less in my field, I would really rather not. Plus, I would like to stay in my union if at all possible…. I guess it will all depend on how desparate I am to get out of here over the next few months. As was pointed out to me, with all the retirements going on, it is mainly a matter of patience until something comes up.
This feeling of needing to change jobs comes on me periodically – probably about once a year, and usually passes without too much serious consideration – it is entirely possible that I will not go anywhere, but since it is coupled with a desire to move back to the Island, I’m feeling a bit more serious about it this time.
We’ll see.
The short news.
Oy – life. I think mine is finally feeling like it belongs to me again since returning a week ago. My digestive system is returning to normal (two weeks of heavy meat-eating in Colombia reminded me exactly why I became a vegetarian in the first place – how do people do that on a regular basis?), work started to feel real again today, and I’ve got a to-do list like crazy that I’m slacking on in other areas of my life.
Mostly I’ve been a bit anxious about not being able to talk to Darren and the fact he has been transferred and has a hearing tomorrow morning. It’s really just sympathetic anxiety – there isn’t much to worry about here – but I know he will be stressed by these circumstances and that is mainly what impacts me. In any case, the whole thing has been a little distracting.
Besides that, I recently found out one or two of my cousins and their families are coming to visit at the end of the month and so have been re-arranging my schedule around that a bit. I haven’t seen one of them in four years and the other it’s probably been eight at least…. We’re not what one would call a close family. I invited my brother up at the same time cause he was always pretty close to them when were kids as well – so hopefully that all works out and we actually manage to orchestrate some sort of family visit.
Medellin: A journal excerpt
Medellín – so badly desiring to capture this place between these pages and also know the impossibility of it. It is noisy and dangerous, polluted, and crowded with throngs of people mostly going in circles – the dispossessed caught in the bowl that is the base of this city. Where Pablo Escobar once ruled is the legacy of paramilitaries and the divide between the people like a dirty river that washes nothing away.
In Botero’s painting of the assassination of Escobar, he is shown as a giant, his feet straddled across three tiled rooftops assaulted by a dozen bullets. Even the leftists who hate him and his mercenary forces can’t help but remind us continually of where he lived and what he owned – a figure of some awe despite his ruthlessness – but then again, Colombia’s history is full of figures as cruel and as ostentatious – perhaps this is absorbed as the way things are. Sometimes the Colombians want us to be impressed by the country’s badass history, and sometimes they want us to be sad for it. In either case, it is simultaneously wounded and mythical – the same well from which Gabriel Garcia Marquez drank.
A quick illustration of security: On the night we returned to the hotel from a party at Nora’s house, I took a cab with two other women from the delegation. Before we left the house, I noticed that Gerardo reached into the car and took something from the driver’s glovebox. Of course it only dawned on me later that what he was taking was a card carried by the driver to identify him and his cab should anything happen to us between his place and our temporary home.
The morbid in me wonders how many of the people we meet will be killed, how many of the women have been tortured, how often the children are afflicted by hunger and ringworm. It seems too cheap to look for hope in these desolate landscapes – and by that I mean the cheap platitudes with which North Americans comfort themselves when by with dark corners. There is no life for the girls of the barrios except to grow into a youthful maternity, or a sex trade hungry for the fresh. And the boys would only be too lucky to get work as labourers – but will more likely end up begging or hawking oranges or cold drinks on the crowded roadways. Everything for sale here in the desperation and madness of extreme privation.
The faces of the street children are black, as are their limbs – their clothes. These human figures move like the blackened imps of nightmares – wily and without a moral other than to get fed – one can only imagine an early death at the hands of violence that reach out from every crack in the pavement. We are the white wealth continually reminded of this with every stare from the doorways. A sex trade worker grabs the arm of my friend James and simply says – you are lucky to be white – by which is means to be rich and to be free from the daily torture of this existence.
Looking at the green mountains that ring Medellín, the condors which fly high above the city , one can see before the buildings and roadways – the lushness of this place unfettered by the tentacles of the shanty towns which crawl upwards forever into the hillsides. This land is beautiful and dramatic – an obvious provider to those who originally lived in the crooks of the mountains and the river’s elbows…. But like all of civilization’s chained lands, she has become a prison to most of her inhabitants. We are both the jailor and the jailed in this context – the Taoist paradox – for which we are raised in illusion so that we cannot see it.
Red Cedar 