Gearing Up

by Camille Posted on June 2, 2011

My trip to Arizona has come and gone.

Inasmuch as I was able to spend copious amounts of quality time with my immediate family, I’d say it was a smashing success. Also, Poor Kyle even admitted to starting to miss me by the end of it, so that was a bonus.

The good and also bad news is that in T-3 days I will be BACK in the car to drive BACK to Calgary to get BACK on a plane to get BACK on another plane to finally land in Paris.

This is good for obvious reasons, but bad because I’ll’ve only been home for one week in the interim and to be quite frank (don’t call me Frank), I’m exhausted.

Don’t worry though. This is not one of those whiny posts where all these great things are happening to me but I’m still not happy (I hate those kinds, the kinds where people have waited twelve years to get pregnant and then they find out they’re having a boy instead of a girl and woe is freaking them blah blah).

Nay nay, I am quite happy. Just tired is all—but not too tired to understand that what I’m about to do, the trip on which I am about to embark, may very well be the last great hurrah of my twenties.

Or perhaps my life?

No matter, the fact remains: I am extremely lucky, unbelievably blessed, and I know it. I recognise it daily. I am tired, yes, but I have rallied to the call and have been packing my one small suitcase (carrying on only for 2.5 weeks in Europe, can I get a woot woot) in my head these long months.

This is the trip that got me through the last two semesters. It didn’t abandon me when I needed something to live for, and I won’t abandon it for anything, least of all a few gut-wrenching yawns.

Paris: I’ll see you there.

 

Posted in my edjumacation and me, on the road again, Travel | 9 Comments

Crazy is as crazy does.

by Camille Posted on May 15, 2011

I believe that everyone should move away from home at least once in their lives.

I’ve done it three times. (One of those times I moved to a place where I didn’t know a single soul, which doesn’t have anything to do with the point of the post I am presently composing, but it’s something I’m proud of and I felt it should be acknowledged.)

But let’s not digress, because this is important: moving away is key to understanding how crazy your family really is.

It’s the truth. My family is crazy—I know it now more than ever before—but guess what?

SO IS YOURS.

If you don’t believe me, it’s because you haven’t left home for long enough.

Things my family have always done—little things, like the way some relatives will flat-out ask me how much my husband makes or how much we owe on our mortgage, or how my sweet but also opinionated grandma tells me that my haircut at Christmas made my face look fat and she’s so glad I’m growing it out (I’m not, by the way: I’ve just been too cheap to have it cut lately)—these things never used to seem unusual to me but they sure do now.

It has taken years of living away from home for me to realise that not every family has competitions to see how high they can jump (a skull-shaped hole in our ceiling commemorated for years before we finally had it re-drywalled just how good a jumper my uncle was). Saturdays are not automatic Family Work days for some families. Not every family eats salsa on their scrambled eggs (but I will never give that up). Some families actually have dogs that live INSIDE their houses. Even as I write this post my mom is in her bedroom playing an old cassette recording of “The Spirit of God” as loud as it will go (I suspect she’s trying to send me some kind of message like she used to do when I was in high school, though I’m not at all sure what the message is supposed to be).

Yes, my family is crazy. I’ve learned this from spending time away from them.

But I’ve also learned that every other family is crazy, too. It’s just the way families are.

And while I won’t use the old “that’s why I love them” cliché (I do love some of the craziness but often it’s truly nothing but sheer crazy day in and day out, and that can be kind of exhausting), I will nevertheless say that I do love them.

So much.

I love my family.

The day I packed up my bedroom to move away for the third (and permanent-until-further-notice) time, I felt like someone had pummeled my heart in with a rubber mallet. I remember driving away down the 202 freeway with Poor Kyle behind the wheel while I exploded with tears in shotgun. Then we got to Canada and got settled in and gradually I pieced my shattered soul back together, but just in time for another visit back home. And at the end of each visit I get with my family, either in Canada or Arizona (or Utah ’cause it’s only fair to meet in the middle sometimes), out comes the mallet and smash goes my heart, again and again, smash and mend, smash and mend, over and over and over, until one day (I worry) the pieces will be so pulverized they’ll simply be beyond repair, silty heart-dust that’s impossible to glue back together, for which the only recourse will be simply to mix with a little water and form a clay and shape it into a new heart altogether, very much like the one I started with but not at all the same.

It makes me sad to live away from my family.

But I take comfort in the fact that they’re crazy.

Posted in awesome., family, on the road again | 7 Comments

Honeymoon’s Over

by Camille Posted on May 10, 2011

People often ask me what Poor Kyle thinks of me going out of town so often and for such extended periods of time. (For those of you who didn’t get the memo: I’m visiting my hometown for the majority of May before I head to Europe for the majority of June.)


The answer: he thinks it’s great.

When he drove me to the airport to drop me off for my flight to Phoenix, I asked him if he’d miss me.

—I always miss you.

—Really?

—Sure I do. You’re my wife.

Touched by his tenderness (trust me: it was tender for him), I got a little choked up thinking about how sweet it was that he loved me enough to miss me. I got to thinking about how I wished he’d come down with me, about how he used to surprise-visit me when we were dating and newly married. I romanticised our relationship to such absurd states of passion that I nearly called the whole trip off because I couldn’t bear to leave his loving side.

When we got to the airport, he got out and hefted my suitcase out of the back seat (perhaps a bit too eagerly, I see now), gave me a hug and tried to be inconspicuous as he wiped the corner of his eye. (It was just for show.) I gave him a giant hug and a quick little kiss on the cheek (he hates PDAs), and hurried away before I could get too sad about leaving.

As I walked toward the airport’s sliding glass doors, my suitcase’s wheel got caught on a crack in the sidewalk and flipped over. Stopping to set things aright, I took the opportunity to steal a quick glance back at my grieving husband, whom I expected to see waving me off with a white hanky whenever he wasn’t using it to sop up the tears streaming down his love-struck face.

But rather than the Kodak moment I’d so carefully constructed in my mind’s eye, I witnessed instead a sort of spring to my husband’s step. Not only was he not waiting for me to descend into the airport’s maw and disappear forlornly from his sight, but I swear I actually saw him run, jump, and click his heels in exuberant glee on on his way back round to the driver’s side of the truck.

Indeed he looked positively jolly.

He drove away without even waving goodbye as I stood there on the curb of the airport.

I was offended for about as long as it took me to reach the US Airways ticket counter, at which point I’d talked myself out of a real marital hissyfit.

The truth is, Poor Kyle and I aren’t really a needy sort of married couple. I’ve long since known that I need him more than he needs me. And even though I can be clingy sometimes (okay a lot of times), at this point in our sixth year of knowing each other, I’ve pretty much come to terms with that. He enjoys his time away from me wherein he gets to eat Kraft Dinner as often as he likes and hang out at his friends’ houses till the wee hours of the night without dread of getting a lecture from me when he comes home. And I? I love to travel so much that when I’m out in the world on my own I don’t really mind being alone on the trips that he’s not with me.

Would I prefer it if he was always able to accompany me?

Of course. He’s a fun guy, the sort of person who can make even the most tedious of grocery runs seem like a night on the town.

But can I stand being away from his side?

Yes. Yes I can.

And he finds he can bear the solitude very cheerfully.

Whether it’s the secret to a great marriage or a doomed one, it’s how we roll.

Poor Kyle, he loves me. But he also loves me gone.

Posted in Married Life, on the road again | 7 Comments

If you’re not constipated it’s not the end.

by Camille Posted on May 5, 2011

This is the story of the labour and delivery of the last thing I had to do for school, which was also the hardest thing I did for school.

For my entire university career.

That includes dealing with red tape, which if you ask me (of course you did you’re reading my blog) is the absolute most painful aspect of attending any higher education institution: bureaucracy. (p.s. Bureaucracy is the hardest word ever to spell. Not at all how it sounds.)

This paper was way worse than both the spelling of and dealing with bureaucracy.

Here’s how it went down:

I was ready to take the final final exam of my life…

and I was relieved…

but only briefly…

…because the worst was yet to come.

My task: to write a 25-page paper on the contemporary (now dead) literary mastermind David Foster Wallace (none of whose books are at all easy to read/understand [all of whose books are, however, fantastically rewarding to read]), which paper I had to start/finish in six days.

I mean, I did have like four months to work on it. And in normal semesters I would’ve at least gotten a head start on it. But this semester was not a normal semester. And although I did try to think about the paper in advance, by the time I got through with all the other crap I had to do for my other classes, it was six days to due date and I was stressin’.

I came home and plopped on the couch and only enjoyed it for like a second before I had a nervous breakdown because I had a 25-pager due in six days and people, I had nothin.

See: donning the face of stress.

I got a little desperate:

Then I got a little anxious:

It wasn’t pretty:

But poor poor Poor Kyle came home and like a good husband talked me down from my ledge (he’s a good man), and gave me a spark of an idea that got the academic juices flowing and before I knew it I had a very solid outline indeed sketched out:

Of course, I updated my facebook status as I went along, because if a tree falls in the forest and I don’t update my facebook status about it…

I ate some quality meals to get me through the worst of it (you should’ve seen the living room floor littered with emptied DDP cans):

But I trudged along, sludged along, and before long I began to see the light at the end of the tunnel:

My spirits even lifted high enough that I could begin to start thinking consciously about others once more:

And then:


And then:

And now:

I’m exuberant and/or constipated.

Posted in my edjumacation and me | Tagged | 15 Comments

Here

by Camille Posted on May 3, 2011

Can I even tell you how amazing it is that I am finished with my classes?

I cannot.

But I will try.

Eventually, though; not today.

Today all I’ll say is that I’m here. I’m alive. I made it through the last trimester, through labour and delivery (ho boy did I ever labour and deliver). I even made it through the post-childbirth phase of dazed-ness and utter mental stupor.

I made it.

This is the other side.

I made it here.

I’ll be back soon to tell you all about it.

Posted in awesome., my edjumacation and me | 6 Comments

Faith in things hoped for

by Camille Posted on April 17, 2011

The end is near. It is in sight.

Classes are over. Finals just around the corner. By this time next week, I will be freer than I’ve been since that very first day I started kindygarten nearly twenty years ago. By this time next week, I will be, for the first time since I was five, unencumbered by deadlines and due dates and final projects and reports. Even then, way back all those years ago, when school would let out for the summer I could never really enjoy it because it wasn’t OUT out. There was always another grade to start, another semester to trudge on miserably through.

But now?

Now I am finished.

Or nearly finished.

I can taste the freedom. I can smell the relief. I can feel the weight start gradually to lift.

But we mustn’t get ahead of ourselves.

Because I’m not there yet.

Nearly there, but not quite.

Please: just bear with me for a few more harrowing days. Just a few more hard things to get out of the way (including a portfolio, a final exam, a 25 page paper and some major work projects) before I can once again devote some serious time and attention to this blog, and to writing in general.

It will come.

Posted in awesome., my edjumacation and me | 8 Comments