rainy days and lazy ways

welcome to spring, aka: rainy season redux, here in vancouver. today’s forecast is some 80mm of rain, give or take a little. (that’s about four inches for you Yanks.) the alleyway behind my place is a veritable river, an inch or two thick of water streaming downhill without end where the lane dips down in the centre.

i awoke to discover my time of the month had begun, which accounts for why i’ve felt like such a cunt for the last three days. gotta love PMS and the license to bitch it grants. but the Red Tide on the Rise means i feel like being lazy in the face of the inevitable cramps that come with. i tackled dishes and made some homemade toast with fried eggs and a French press full of coffee, which i enjoyed while beginning the movie i’ve had kicking around my kitchen table this past week. i’ve paused it for now because there was a bitter-sweet moment of beauty-cum-tragedy, and i know the tragedies are only just beginning… fitting for this world awash in tears today.

it’s a Chinese film with subtitles, Kekexili, “Mountain Patrol” in English, about vigilantes trying to protect the sacred Tibetan antelopes that had been senselessly slaughtered for a couple decades but are beginning to rise again (if you can call a recent headcount of 150,000 versus the former millions that once ranged those high Chinese/Tibetan plains a “rise”). the movie’s pretty beautiful and tragic at the same time, but it’s nice to be enjoying a quality foreign film. some days Hollywood’s fare feels a bit too much like an enema for my tastes.

i posted something earlier this week that’s had me thinking a lot: the photo in which Kim asks, “so why not be the best Kim i can be?” and i began to wonder, “am i being the best Steff i know i can be?”

the answer’s a glaring no. i’m doing better than i’ve been in a while, but i know the distance that lies between here and there. some of it’s very superficial — my clothes aren’t fitting right (getting loose, which is good), i need a haircut, and i want to get out to the gym. i also want to be a tidier person, too. aside from that, i’m somewhat pleased. being more social would be good, too, but i know that i’m social with the seasons. it’s hard to have positive thoughts about waiting in the rain for 20 minutes for crowded buses or hopping on a scooter to rage through rain and get to where the action is, versus enjoying a quiet drink on a comfy sofa in my beautiful home (see the inset for a photo of my sweet pad).

this new job thing takes a lot out of a girl, though. i’m performing very well, and i know it, but it’s draining, and i’ve made the mistake of overcommitting to my old job, too, and it’s all adding up to be very thieving of my time. when i’m too busy, i like to slack off and enjoy my solitude. tomorrow i’ll work at my old job for the last time for an indefinite period. i will instead work overtime at the new job (snicker… how defeatist is that?) in order to bank time and then i’ll work banked days off at the old job. it postpones the arrival of riches but might ultimately be more rewarding. as i wrote in an email to a friend just now, “it comes down to deciding that my loyalties must lie with my present and my future, and not my past.”

this is a good time of year to be overworked in Vancouver, though. the rain comes in waves, but it’s here more than it’s not. soon i will cease working extra altogether in order to enjoy life and meet new people. my gameplan is to join a couple social clubs — a film group, since i’m a cinematic junkie, and who knows what else. the granola girl deep down inside would like to join a drum circle (i have a djembe that is woefully underused, and i won’t even tell you about my guitar!) so i’m considering the merits of drumming on beaches as the sun sets and weather warms, and the merits seem aplenty.

but i figure that if i’m swearing off this e-dating thing, it needs to be replaced with something else: socializing for the fun of it. i haven’t really tried to meet new people in a long time. my last attempt last year wound up being rather freakish and weird since i met a few people that seemed to want to know me for all the wrong reasons (long story there and one i’m too polite to share) and were very ingenuine with me. i decided i wasn’t in a place where i could handle that weirdness, thanks to the depression i was battling and all of that melodrama that has now faded away from me. they wanted me to be someone i’m not, and the trouble with depression is you forget who you are. i decided to rediscover myself instead of trying to be what others wanted back then.

i tried the e-dating thing during the winter and met some guys who were in the right place at the wrong time, as well as a couple of wackos, and now here i am — about to kick the can one more time, but in a different way and for all the right reasons rather than the wrong ones.

meeting people is an interesting dilemma for me. i’m seemingly good at it, because i have a heck of a personality and a razor-sharp witt, i’m told, but i’m also an intense girl with a lot of strong opinions, and i sometimes don’t know how to water myself down for greater public consumption. i’m also apparently quite inimidating to some, which is not something i try to be and i’m surprised to find that i am. my e-dating tag used to be “an acquired taste… entirely worth acquiring”, but not everyone likes tapenade, tripe, or sushi, so it stands to reason i have select personal appeal as well. which is fine, but sometimes frustrating.

i also have very high standards for the people in my life, and it may sometimes seem somewhat unforgiving, but it is what it is, and what it is is something i deliver on. any standards i have for others are standards i meet and beat at my end. my demands of others recently caused a friendship to fail when the other person couldn’t accept that i needed more from the friendship than they were able to provide. (silly things like communication and actually doing shit together is apparently too much to ask of some people. c’est la vie.) and while i might pay the price from time to time, the friends i do have, i keep for years and years and years. i’m quietly yet fiercely loyal, and they know it through my actions and my words, i suspect.

so, am i the best Steff i can be? hmm. as i sit here in my soiled housecleaning t-shirt and Joe Boxers, the answer’s a dubious “sort of”. i’m the best i can be today, but not the best i will be. and i guess that’s all a girl can do… know who she is at the present and where she’s gonna be in the future, and love ’em both. easier said than done but worth trying to do.

2 thoughts on “rainy days and lazy ways

  1. Beth

    Amen, sistah!

    A friend of mine said to me a year or so ago, in relation to dating, “You’re a snob.”

    “No, I’m not,” I said.

    “Yes, you are,” he said. “You’re too picky.”

    No, I corrected him, I have very high standards for myself and therefore have very high standards for whomever I date.

    I figure, the dating world’s a bell curve. Very few As, lots of Cs.

    I want an A. However long it takes to find him.

    At this point, I’ve waited so long, I’m not going to settle *now.*

    Pretty house. Did you paint it blue or was it blue when you moved in?

  2. scribe called steff

    painted it myself, of course. was white when i moved in, then did a mix of butter-yellow / sage green / indian red, before nixing it for the blue about four years ago. first time i’ve never gotten tired of a colour. kitchen’s apple green. bedroom’s sand and chocolate. hallway needs a new colour, it’s boring terra cotta, which doesn’t work with the mix i have. thinking either cranberry or eggplant instead, but i’m too lazy to make it happen these days. ONE DAY. i’m a decor fiend. big on decorating and doing crafty shit. i’m a little too martha stewart for my own good, but hey.

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