I have a couple blogs. One I use more for writing about writing and about my daily life. One of the things those readers know is that I suffered writer’s block for about six years. One of the little tricks I developed during that lengthy block as a tool for writing better was my “idea box”. It’s a recipe box filled with 3×5 recipe cards and a couple pens. If watching TV and a notion hits, I pull out a card and write on it. It makes its way in to my desk where it then becomes fodder for a post down the line.

This posting was inspired by the idea card on which I scrawled “An open letter to brides to be: BE SURE”. So, if you’re trying to be all bubbly about an upcoming wedding, grab some wood, have a seat, and take a breath. I’m about to burst that bubble.

Divorce stats are changing. More and more, people who’ve been married decades are divorcing. Staying together because it’s somehow “easier” than facing the great unknown is now becoming less attractive than tearing your life apart in the hopes that something better might possibly see you out your days.

There once was a time that an employee would adopt a trade, an employer, and there they would dutifully spend their lives. It was just that easy. You find a job that needs doing, one that might have a future, something stable and constant, and there you stay until you get the golden Rolex and the coupon for a trip to Tahiti.

There once was that time.

That’s all changed now. One can embark upon any number of careers in the length of their working life, and instead of hoping for a good pension and gift receipt with the Rolex, they have investment bankers and multiple properties they own. It’s a different game. You do what’s attractive, or necessary, for any given time, and when that gravy train runs dry or gets chunky, you jet to a new stream and see where the flow goes.

Who’s to say the time for being married only once isn’t on the verge of getting cashed like a big fat reality check? Soon we’re going to chuckle and mirthfully remark, “Marriage? Pfft. That’s so 20th-century.”

There are those with the incredible luck, foresight, timing, and passion that just happen to find that one true love that’s gonna last ’em till their dying day. They ought to hold on and never let that go. We should all be so lucky. We should all find that.

But most of us will not. Most of us will decide it’s easier to either go it alone, or find someone new, than it is to keep settling for what we know is less than is possible.

What is possible is something stunning. True love, when you have it, changes your life and changes you. It changes everything. It takes work and commitment and a desire to keep it real, but it’s a keeper.

When love doesn’t work, when feelings are hurt or just not there, and communication is stilted, if it’s anything at all, then it’s safe to say that “love” is a destructive force that cuts away at who you are. When love isn’t working, it’s like living a failure all over again each day. No matter how good everything else in your life is, there’s that negative. And there’s only so long before that nagging constant just becomes unbearable, like a tap dripping water for five minutes too long, and you just snap.

I believe people take divorce too lightly and that they ought to work more at making things work, or why would I write as I do? But I also believe the taking lightly of marriage is inevitable and far too many people marry without understanding the gravity of the situation. It’s not just sex and cuddles and someone to split the bills with. It’s life ever after. It’s believing — truly believing — that seeing that face every single day of your life would be a step in the right direction. It’s about saying that no matter what comes, you’re in a partnership that’ll take all comers. It’s love hardcore.

And most of the time, it’s going to fail. Most of the time people won’t have it in them to survive the low points that every single relationship will have. Most of the time people won’t recall that our greatest joys come in contrast to our darkest times, and they’ll give up.

So let me say this now:

If you’re about to get married and you have doubt that this is a decision you can wake up at 63, roll over in bed, look at them lying next to you, and think, “I’ve spent these years well”, then maybe you wanna rethink your choice.

Have you ever really talked about sex with each other? Really been truly honest about your fetishes and desires? Are you really on that page together? If not, is there room for growth? And money — are you in sync there? Do you have a financial plan for your future together? Do their spending habits irk you now? Do you think they’re cheap?

If these sound like superficial questions, then wake the hell up. Sex and money are the two biggest reasons marriages fail, so you’d better know now what you’re getting into.

Love’s fantastic, but marriages aren’t easy to survive. Most die, and most die badly. The victims of divorce lay strewn across the globe. If anything in your relationship smacks of “well, we’ll work it out”, then maybe you should consider working that shit out and THEN getting married.

And don’t think that you’re due for your bliss and the good times will roll for ever after. Karma’s what we want to happen, but bad things happen to good people every single day, and sometimes it’s just your number the man pulls from the hat. Remember my heart-breaker letter* from the woman in her 30s whose husband became incredibly disabled, forcing her to become a caregiver even before her 40th? Life is gonna unfold differently from how you envision it. What if it can’t live up to your expectations? What if your lover can’t? What are you gonna do then?

It’s not silly, or nervous, or stupid, or unfaithful of you to reconsider that walk down that aisle — it’s the best gift you can give to you and your would-be spouse. Know you want it when you go there. Know it.

And if you can’t be confident, well, maybe there’s another path for you. And if after this you still know it’s right for you, then you have my best wishes.

(I took the liberty of copying and pasting the comments from the original blog to the comments on this site. Have a read.)

It only took me forever, but I’ve finally joined Facebook. I was avoiding it. MySpace sucks, imho, but I finally thought I’d give Facebook a go after I read a couple interesting news stories on it. Me likey.

But it’s kind of troubling. So troubling I’m having trouble popping a good metaphor. Ooh, troubling. You don’t know the half of it.

It’s the gelcap equivalent of a time capsule or something. See? Bad metaphors. Nonetheless, you get the gist. Or you likely don’t.

It’s like high school, man. You know what high school was for me? I’ll tell ya: It was a Jesus & The Mary Chain song. Ever heard “I’m in With the Out Crowd”? Okay, well, absolutely none of the lyrics apply to me ‘cept the title. [One of those, “Dude, you faked me out with the title!” tracks you totally thought was about something else, so what the fuck, songs.]

It’s as if you spend your life trying to change who you are, only to find out that who you were wasn’t such a bad person in the first place… but what the hell was that in the water anyhow?

So I’ve joined Facebook.

Many years have passed since The Time Back Then, back when I was one of those kids that everyone knew for one reason or the other. I had a lot of friends. I sometimes wonder how I managed it, too, given the mountain of insecurities and fears I lived under. Somehow I projected something better than that, but I just never recognized my own appeal. I don’t mean that in an arrogant way, ‘cos I know how much I lack appeal to some folks. But if you like people who are completely blunt yet possessing of social graces, who are honest to a fault, well, that’s the breed I am. This persona comes with reality Steff, too, and it’s definitely not everyone’s cup of tea. But those whose tea I ain’t, they tend to come around after a while. 😉 Or they stay the path. Whatever gets yer rocks off.

And I guess I was the live-out-loud type that some kids tend to gravitate towards.

Then I dropped out of life when things got tough for a while. I spent the majority of my 20s in a pretty deep depression. Being anti-social was a whole lot easier than trying to fake a mask for public consumption, y’know?

One day the fog cleared and I really started to notice the difference in my social horizons from way back when and now. It’s like I forgot how to be natural for a crowd in all that absence. My new job puts me front and center, and I’m getting my gift of the gab back again after many a hiatus from schmoozing. I used to be the kid who always knew someone at the party, and now I need introducing (then I’m off and running, right, but geez… ). Ain’t like it was.

Until suddenly it is again, thanks to getting a public-oriented job where I have to be the strong, confident chick I always was, and also to the magic of these virtual connections like Facebook. You plug yourself in and suddenly the board lights up. I found out a little late, but it turns out that much of my old crowd from “the golden days” — aka the time before the fall — got together yesterday for the first time in more than a decade. Curiouser and curiouser, to be sure.

Now I’m listening to one of the soundtrack-type albums from that era of my life, that time when music was Never Gonna Get Better Than This (’92-94) and life was the road in front of me, The Black Crowes’ Shake Your Moneymaker. I remember hearing this album for the first time when an ex-lover was driving me and a friend of his home sometime well after midnight and I was pretending to be asleep in the backseat as I listened to them talking, and heard the quiet but good things he’d said about me. I fell in love with the album as the car rumbled on old side roads. It was a good night.

I’m trying to remember why I walked away from everyone and everything, but the opportunity to change things came up and I suddenly found myself living in the Yukon and chasing that dream instead. Came back a year later and everything changed. I felt like the cog left out of a fast-travelling wheel, but the truth now probably is it’s when my depression truly began.

This past winter, the depression’s finally lifted, and it’s funny to see just how far from my past I feel I am and now I see that I’ve never really gone that far away after all.

How weird it all is.

‘Cause, you know what? I’d like another chance to be that girl, the one who existed before all the “real life” came and bit her in the ass. The one with a little innocence and a little mischief and a little zest for anything that’d come her way. I’ve been working towards being that again and I’m just a little baffled to be happening on such timing as I am with the whole Facebook thing. That part I’m having trouble putting words to, so just know that I’m feeling a little discombobulated about it all, and kind of in a good way, too, ‘cos I know the progress I’d been making on coming back to myself long before this came about.

It’s cool, it’s all good. And now I have a house to clean and a lazy afternoon (a Sopranos marathon; you know my thing for mafioso) to atone for. Happy Memorial Day, yanks, and a good morrow to everyone else.

PS: I bought my first-ever pair of plaid panties today. Cute! I’m Scottish, too, y’know, so what better to cover the tush in?

I updated my oneline dating profile. As almost a wilfull act of defiance a couple months back, I stripped it to one of those basic “I Like Stuff, Do You Like Stuff?” just-the-facts type profiles. But writing profiles is something I do very well, so to pull the plug and take a bore myself down approach is bizarre, to say the least.

But this morning I revisited it. It’s all new, all good. My sense of humour shows, as does my big fat brain. I’m pretty amused with it. We’ll see what happens.

Updating the profile is kind of like the new tattoo, don’t you think? Either you’re drunk, stupid, and ready to go, so you update it as some kinda “lookit me, ma” tough-guy thing, or you’re lonely, bored, and need to do something to pretend you have a life, so you update it, or you’re really quite happy with the way things are going but it occurs to you that the only thing more kick-ass than the sweet way things are going right now would be to have that warm body lying all cat-like stretched out beside you in bed as an errant morning sunbeam peeks in from the blinds, showing the soft underbelly of trust and romance, just before a big-ass breakfast with an endless pot of coffee. Yeah, THAT would hit the spot.

(I’m the kind of person who’s keeping an eye out on the horizon for That Perfect Time In My Life to commemorate it with a tattoo. I have no tattoo. I want one and think this birthday might be a great time to begin it — commemorate this part of my life. I have a particular goal I need to achieve before I will allow myself to besmirch myself with a pictorial tribute to That Perfect Time In My Life. I was thinking the perfect tattoo would be one of Edvard Munsch’s Scream on my inner thigh but I doubt anyone else would get the joke, so we’ll see.)

Nonetheless, for now I’ll settle for updating my profile. It’s a sign of optimism. A sign that it’s time to take a chance and let someone in again. It’s like we have to heal to a certain point sometimes before we’re willing to take a risk of getting hurt again. I thought I was ready for a relationship last fall, but then life threw some doozies my way. Dad almost had a date with death, I lost my job, and other fun all came down the pipes.

I found myself looking to love in the hopes that a relationship could play the role of Spackle and fix me in all my cracked, broken glory. That struck me as a bad thing because I knew that if it all went south, I’d have to replace the whole damn compass again. I just wasn’t ready to be resilient in love because I had to be resilient in so many other places in my life.

We have to make choices sometimes about where we’re willing to be vulnerable, just like we have to know when vulnerability is a luxury we can’t afford when getting by’s a fight every day. For me, life in the past year has been a lot about The Daily Fight. Sharing that? I don’t think so.

The trouble I have, and so many others have had, is that it’s so hard to continue believing that being alone and liking solace isn’t some kind of character flaw. It can be, however, an excuse. It can be a way you excuse yourself from the challenge of living a social life. It’s easy to convince oneself that silence is a great companion. After all, who’s around to argue? Being with people can be hard, sometimes, and balance must be found.

I’m a Libra. Balance is my quest in life. The trouble is, every time I find it, I have to rock the boat. It’s like discovering that a) it’s great floating in a dinghy on a little lake in bliss-like sunshine, but b) it sure gets fun when a gust of wind blows up and everything’s up for grabs again.

There was a time when I was loaded with friends. I got into a bad relationship in which I became isolated from others (the early route towards an abusive relationship) and started drifting away from people. Then I moved a few thousand kilometres away, to the Yukon and Canada’s far north, for a little over a year. Came back for the same bad relationship. Got out of it, and then my mother died on me. Taking myself out of the social equation was a safety mechanism back then. From time to time, I get back out in the social world, but once you adopt an anti-social lifestyle, it’s hard to break the habit. Plus, there’s the writing thing. Writing doesn’t happen in crowds, man.

I found myself thinking of that other self of mine, though, the other day. I remembered back when I was The Organizer and The Buck Stopped Here, in my late teens and early 20s. I always had crowds of 15 or 20 people coming out to a flick, going to a club, having a bonfire on a beach. I was the one who said when to jump and just how high, and I loved it. Somewhere along the line, I started believing that selfishness was self-preservation, and I closed the door. One hurt too many. A Krazy-Glued heart tends to beat a little weaker.

I’m remembering the kind of personality I used to life with — a larger-than-life, live-before-you-now, uber-electric presence. I used to be somewhat magnetic, but I never really believed that I was what people perceived me to be. Even today I have a note on my bulletin board: “I must see myself as I am seen.”

After all, isn’t that the big challenge we all face? Coming to terms with the disparity between how others see us and how we really see ourselves?

I’m sort of pulling back right this weekend because I feel like today, for some weird reason, is the last of my anti-social tendencies for a long time. Things are starting to bubble up a bit, and I have faith that the girl I used to be is beginning to mix with the woman I have deserved to become, and I think the mix is going to be pretty kinetic.

Part of it is pretty simple: That’s what I want to have happen, and what I intend to make happen. We’re masters of our fate, aren’t we?

After all, the secret to online dating is the same as that of life… and of under-arm anti-perspirant, too: never let them see you sweat. Let’em only see what you choose to have them see. Any person who walks into your life knows only what you want them to. Show them your best qualities, be the best person you know, and treat them the way you’d like the be treated. How hard is that? Project confidence and charisma. Sell yourself. Be positive.

We forget how easy it is to be a likeable person. We forget how simple the mantra “be yourself” really is. It’s not “be your worries” and it’s not “be your complaints”. It’s be who you are when you’re comfortable, when you’re happy, when there’s nothing clouding your day. It’s listening as much as it is communicating. It’s remembering that “live” is a verb, and so’s “love”.

I talk a good game, and I know it, but right now the thought of going boldly out into the world to try and make the same amount of friends I once had is about as freaky a thought as any. But let’s give it the old college try anyhow. Whew.

Happy long weekend. I should get 12 hours sleep more often!

Okay, I’m not a TOTAL pussy, all right? So I’m a fairweather cyclist. So what? I like sunshine and bliss. Sue me.

I will have you know that had I not already ridden my bicycle to work this morning, there’s no fucking WAY I would’ve gone for a leisurely ride in this evening’s fare — and certainly not for 14 kilometres headlong into it!

MOTHERFUCKING WIND. That shit’s bad enough without throwing long certainly-not-designed-with-crosswinds-in-mind BRIDGES into the motherfucking equation, man! Out of all the bridges in this city, that one sucks the mostest in the wind, on scooter or bike.

What normally takes me about 40 minutes to ride home took me nearly 60 today, and I fought for every damned inch. I get home and my guestimation proved right: 70-kilometre-an-hour winds steadily gusting sayeth the Weather Network’s gurus.

It kept moving me six inches over. I was tacking like a sailboat. Zig-zagging like the amateur cycling pussy I am.

It’s that rare kind of day where cyclists stop to talk and comiserate about what a cunt Mother Nature’s being. Today a guy stopped to tell me he’d been coming over Granville Bridge when a crosswind whipped his glasses off (scratching his face, too) and blew them into oncoming traffic, which then crunched ’em. I took the hint and put my fancy cats-eye spectacles away under zipper. “Sail on!” I commented, and took off.

But, whew! Our trusty blogger lives to tell the tale of jumpingjesusonapogostick wasthatahairyride! Thank god for karma and perseverence. That bridge was one fucking nasty experience. I’m not used to that shit!

Reminds me of the baptism-by-fire first big windstorm I had to ride home from work in on my scooter, Back In The Day. I brazenly came over the bridge because I didn’t know any better. Later I’d find a long, landlocked passage, but back then I just took the regular bridge… which just happened to be the tallest of the bridges across a windy inlet. Holy crosswinds, Batman. Naturally the only way to control a crosswind’s damage is to slow down. To 30 klicks. Cars = Pissed Right Off. Whatever.

Then I brilliantly took the cyclist route up the hill to home, about eight klicks yonder… under heavy tree canopy.

My thinking: Canopy = Shield from wind!

My reality: Canopy = Endless source of big painful branch-like things and other flying projeciles aiming to take me the fuck OUT.

So let this be a lesson to all ‘o you boyz’n’girlz out there: Do dumb shit, then LEARN from it. That minimizes the death-from-dumb-shit probability stat, y’know. Oh, if I had a nickel for every time I’ve stopped mid-thing and thought “What the fuck was I thinking?” But then I realize the important thing: Aha! Another tale to tell!

Today was a bitch. Next time I rethink the bridge. Buses might cost $3.25 but furthering my bid for immortality? Priceless.

Yeah, okay. If you want to hear the whole sordid tale, I told it on my other blog. Click here.

No, really, read it! It’s pretty good.

And I shit you not, even my little finger hurts. Owie.

I’ll write later this week. I mean, geez, my finger hurts! Never mind my boobs! Holy shit, who knew breasts could hurt this bad? If I was to jog right now, I’d die in agony, screaming “My jugs are murdering me!” Thank GOD I don’t jog! One bounce and I’d have to bitch-slap some sense into me. I’m loathing tomorrow and the sheer horror of pain I know I’ll be in after the 24-hour waiting period for AGONY has expired. The second day is always the worst, eh?*

And tomorrow my team needs to fight for its life as they’re down 3 games to 1 in the best-of-seven against Those Disney Bitches.

(Yes, I know the Ducks were sold by Disney years ago. But, still, once a bitch always a bitch, no? Don’t rain on my humour parade, man. Go Canucks, Go! I MUST BUY BEER! That’s what’s been wrong. I’ve jinxed the entire city by failing to drink during the last two games. What in the hell was I thinking? So, beer, then, or wine? Oh, the dilemma… Curse you, cosmos! And I must respect the 1994 Stanley Cup Playoff Towel and put it in a place of honour. No fucking with the juju!)

*But I secretly love knowing I pushed my body this hard and have lived to tell about it. My pinkie’s future is questionable, but I know I’ll survive. Gloria Gaynor tells me so.