Get on with it.

by Camille Posted on December 17, 2011

I am at the point in my life where it’s become absolutely necessary to poop or get off the pot.

Graduated With DistinctionI need to do things. Make changes. Set goals. Accomplish them. I’m 25 now and not getting any younger. I live with a constant fear in the subdomain of my brain: a fear that I will get old and die and have nothing to show for my life; or worse: that I’ll die young and have REALLY nothing to report when I get to the Other Side.

98% of my conversations with Poor Kyle over the past few months have resolved around our marriage, our plans, our dreams and hopes for the future. Around how to achieve the type of life we’d always hoped we’d have. Around what steps we need to take to get from here, where we are, to there, where it would be so freakin’ awesome to be.

Poor Kyle has been amazing lately. So motivated, so driven, so ready to take complete control of his own life. He’s always been a swell guy, but lately he’s taken that swellness to a whole new level. Like he’s growing up or something. It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly; the closest I can get is to say remember how he was reading that one time? Well he hasn’t stopped. And it’s paying off.

As for me, I’ve gone through a bit of culture shock these past few months. The shift from full time student to full time unemployed bum to full-time-and-then-some working person has rattled me, I’m not going to lie. People keep asking me if I’m depressed, and I suppose I don’t blame them—I have been sounding a little glum lately. And when I’m not sounding glum I’m just not sounding at all—I’m barely keeping this blog afloat, it seems. Really, though, I’ve not been so much depressed as overwhelmed.

But things are taking a turn for the better. I am cutting back on some of my work starting in the new year. I will fill that time with projects I actually want to do. I will make headway on long-neglected goals. I will inspire you all with my magnitude. I am strong and independent. I can (and I do) do a lot of things on my own.

I can do a lot more with Poor Kyle on my team.

I believe that 2012 is going to be a pivotal year for us. For each of us individually, and for the two of us as a family.

And you? What do you think? What are your predictions for the coming year?

Posted in awesome., Canada, change, Married Life, Overall Good Things, Poor Kyle, what I'm about | Tagged | 12 Comments

How to Make Proper Canadian Squares

by Camille Posted on December 7, 2011

In Canada there is this thing called Squares.

It’s a dessert.

It’s very common.

It’s nothing I’d ever heard of before until I moved here. Don’t believe me? Look what happens if you google “squares:”

Exactly what you’d expect to happen, right? Normal everyday squares.

But look what happens if you confine your search for squares to Canada:

     Who that guy in the middle is I may never know but I feel bad that he showed up in my google search for Canadian Squares. Poor schmuck.

Now, the first time anyone ever asked me to bring Squares to a church function, I, like many of you, asked (what I thought was) the obvious question:

Squares of what?

What do you mean, Squares of what? Squares of Squares!

I didn’t understand: Yes, squares, but square-shaped what? Quilt blocks? Ice trays? Paper plates? Legos? What specifically would you like me to bring in the shape of a square?

When I finally understood that it was a dessert, I proceeded to ask the next (again seemingly) obvious question: What kind of Squares? As in, what recipe? Rice Krispie Squares? Brownie Squares? Those were really the only kind of square dessert I’d ever had before.

Any kind will do.

Apparently there is no one recipe for Squares. Every housewife has her own, either passed down for generations or made up or forged from her neighbor or torn out of a Canadian Living from years past.

CAN YOU IMAGINE ANYTHING MORE STRESSFUL THAN BEING ASSIGNED TO BRING A DESSERT TO A FUNERAL WITH NO OTHER SPECIFICATION THAN THAT IT BE SQUARE?

I worked myself into quite the domestic tizzy over that one.

Now, after living in Canada for over four years, I guess I’m a seasoned professional at Squares. Or something. At any rate, there’s been another death in my ward, and there’s a funeral on Saturday for which I have agreed to bring a plateful of Squares. So here’s your multicutural lesson for the day:

How to make Canadian Squares:

Make a pan of dessert. Any dessert will do. A 9 x 13″ pan is the standard expectation (don’t worry, I had to ask about that too).

Then slice the panful of said dessert into just-larger-than-bitesize (because exactly bitesize portions look stingy but much bigger is too awkward to arrange on a platter, plus they’re usually rich enough that 1.5 bites is plenty) square sections. Or rectangles. Really any shape is fine. They’re all called Squares.

Place the any-shaped dessert portions onto a serving tray or plate and deliver to whatever party, wedding, funeral, or random neighbor you’ve been assigned/coerced/inspired to Square.

Squared.

I’ll try to remember to let you know how mine turn out.

Posted in Canada, oh brother what next | Tagged , , | 8 Comments

Mormons make it work.

by Camille Posted on December 6, 2011

An hour ago I got home from my ward Christmas social. There were horse-drawn hayrides. There were Christmas movies. There was the Grinch and Rudolph. There were donuts and hot chocolate. There were Santas. Presents. Oranges. Chocolate coins. Sticky-fingered children. Winter coats. Toques. Caroling. General holiday jolliness.

It was a nightmare.

Somehow the church building got triple-booked so there were three wards squished into it at once—one ward undertaking the same chaotic merriment as us and another ward trying for all their worth to ignore the tumult and have a spiritual evening honouring their young women’s achievements for the year.

I seriously felt like I was in that one Book-of-Mormon version of Where’s Waldo where the Waldo (was it Moroni?) was lost among the chaos of both a wedding reception and young men’s regional basketball tournament all in the same cultural hall.

Everywhere I looked parents were corralling—or trying to corral—one or all of their offspring. Cocoa was splashing onto hoodies. Snotty noses were wiped with mittens or bare hands. Candy was consumed wrapper and all. Tears materialised, exploded, then froze on frosted cheeks. Santa was harassed interminably. Infinitely. Children were running around, bouncing off of each other like atoms under pressure, their winter gear acting as tempered shells for nigh indestructibility.

And there I stood amidst it all, untouched, unaffected, completely free of stress, like the eye of some sort of parental hurricane that I’d miraculously escaped.

And while I was standing there, free from cares and sucklings both, the thought crossed my mind…

…how did I get so blessed?

In case you were wondering: Poor Kyle and I will not be conceiving little Worthington scions any time soon.

Posted in Canada, family, fiascos, It's All Good, kid stuffs, Married Life, oh brother what next, Poor Kyle, what I'm about | 3 Comments

Bedtime

by Camille Posted on December 5, 2011

A few days ago I was driving in to work at the crack of dadgum dawn, when it hit me:

THIS IS MY LIFE NOW.

It was surreal, and depressing, to face the day like that, just exactly as I’d faced the day before it and the day before that. And the same way I would be facing the next day. Every day for five days a week. For the rest of my life.

In a flash I saw those days stretched out like the long flat road before me, lined up in a row from midnight to noon, noon until midnight, over and over and over. I wake, I drive, I work, I drive, I sleep. I wake.

I think the catalyst for this particular crisis comes, if you can believe it, from finally being done with school. I never thought I’d say it (Heaven knows I never thought I’d say it), but in some ways I do actually miss it. I miss the deadlines, the goals, the lights at the end of the tunnel. The something to shoot for. I cannot remember a time I wasn’t in school or preparing to be in school. My entire conscious life has centred around it and solely it. My days, my years were broken into semester-long portions, each one its own mountain with final exams the summit and holidays the descent.

It was stressful, yes. But it was also satisfying. I was always on the brink of some great accomplishment—some exam aced, some essay nailed. School was me. I was school. Together, we worked.

But now? Now it’s different. Unsettling. Now my life is divided into those traditional eight-hour units: sleep, work, leisure (though truthfully my leisure time is more like three or four hours).

I appreciate the fact that I’m making money now instead of burning through it with tuition fees. I respect that for the first time in my life I’m doing it—I’m really doing it: I’m working the 8 to 5, holding down a job, answering to superiors, pitching my ideas.

But at the same time I can’t seem to shake this underlying belligerence toward my new reality, like I shouldn’t just meekly accept my fate; like I should fight it or something. Stand up to The Man, embrace my inner bohemian and stick it to them all. But what’s there to fight, really? This is just what everybody does, right? Go to school, graduate; get a job, make money; live, die.

What’s the point of fighting it?

I’m sure you find this all annoying. Like, can’t she ever be happy with anything? She hated school when she was in it, thought of nothing else but finally getting out of there, and now here she is just months after the conclusion of her final class waxing all sentimental about those glory days. I don’t blame you. I’m even annoying myself.

 

Posted in change, failures, I hate change, in all seriousness, introspection, looking back, my edjumacation and me, oh brother what next, woe is me | 8 Comments

Charles P. Wiggins the Third Turns Out to Be a Stress Eater

by Camille Posted on December 4, 2011

To read earlier installments of Charles P. Wiggins the third, click here.

Once upon a time there was Charles.

Charles P. Wiggins the ThirdHe was a simple man. Kind. Humble. A real stand-up fellow.

He lived a normal life, basically drama free and productive (insofar as any stick figure’s live can be productive, that is).

But something was missing.

20111204-213639.jpgAll Charles’s life he’d used college as his penultimate goal: the one place where his potential would be filled, his future realized, his dreams come true.

20111204-213647.jpgAnd it’s true that earning that degree was a gratifying experience; and he did learn a lot throughout it all. But still he found himself, upon graduation, just the tiniest bit lost. Unsettled. Confused. Without the regular deadlines of finals and semesters’ end, he felt there was so very little left to shoot for.

Even worse was that college didn’t really illuminate his purpose in life like he’d always pictured it would.

20111204-213653.jpgIt taught him that he liked to write (especially that he liked to write about how stressful college was), but once he left with his degree his life just seemed so dull. Inspiration, once so everywhere, fled. His notebooks sat dustier daily, their empty lines a constant reminder of how little he actually was.

20111204-213715.jpgHe knew he wanted to write—knew he needed to write—something that would change the world. He could picture his book. He could picture the cover, the design, the perfect way it would convert to e-reader form… He just couldn’t picture what it would say.

He began to worry. As the days trudged on, and his life remained stagnant, he stressed over the unwritten words. Over his unpublished and unpublishable life.

20111204-213659.jpgHe couldn’t sleep. The ceiling fan mocked him.

20111204-213735.jpgHe had bloody noses daily. Anxiety-induced.

20111204-213705.jpgHe pictured himself thirty years later, a middle-aged man barista (baristo?) still living with his mother and cats.

He took to stress eating.

20111204-213722.jpgWhich got him worried about cavities and dental issues.

20111204-213742.jpg

It also made him constipated.

Which didn’t help the situation at all.

Things were not looking good for poor Charles P. Wiggins the Third…

Not good at all.

He was cracking up.

20111204-213800.jpg

Posted in short stories/vignette | Tagged | 2 Comments

Happy Thanksgiving back.

by Camille Posted on November 23, 2011

The first year I missed Thanksgiving with my huge crazy extended family was in 2005. I’d moved to Canada two months earlier to embark on the adventure of a lifetime. I’d just turned 19. I was in college. My little future was bright. Shiny. It made me sad to miss Thanksgiving, but my mom sent me pictures and I knew I’d be there the next year.

The year after that I was in Arizona for Thanksgiving but my family decided to spend it in individual families rather than the usual hullabaloo. It was okay though because I’d be there the next year.

Only I wasn’t.

The next year, a month after I married Poor Kyle and moved to Canada, my American family celebrated Thanksgiving without me. Hullabaloo-style.

Missing Thanksgiving made me sad.

That was four Thanksgivings ago, back when I had nothing better to do with my life than sit around feeling sad about missing Thanksgiving with my family.

I guess I thought I would stop missing them after while. Once I got busier. With more to distract me from my homesickness.

And while it’s true that I’m busier now than ever before—and busy with things that (generally) make me happy—I was wrong about the other.

Missing the hullabaloo Thanksgiving never gets easier. I’ve been out of the familial loop for 7 Thanksgivings now, and I feel just as sad about that fact today as I did in 2005.

Only difference is that in 2005 I had a bright shiny future to distract me.

This year I have nothing.

Posted in change, failures, family, I hate change, introspection, sad things | Tagged , , | 7 Comments