Song #4: Dear John

Dear John by Taylor Swift is a song that empowered me to believe there was life after love.

Taylor Swift, as we all know, seems to really understand how it is to be broken up with, to have someone keep you on a string, to be the victim of someone’s head games, to feel stuck in that despite others’ warnings about the toxicity of that relationship, and to finally break free of that and realize how much better it is on the other side of it. It’s a specific kind of relationship and when I heard this song for the first time, I was shook that someone actually articulated how I was feeling and put it into a beautiful and powerful song.

One of my favourite lyrics of Swift’s (or anyone’s, probably) is the line that leads us out of the bridge: “I’m shining like fireworks over your sad empty town.” It is about belittling yes, but moreso, it’s about giving yourself permission to understand that you’re better than that, you don’t deserve to be treated that way, and you’ll move on. Heartbreak is the worst kind of pain. It’s horrible. But it gets better, it can even lead you to your best life.

Song #3: Twilight

I became absolutely enormed with Elliott Smith only a few years too late.

What’s fascinating about Smith is how his lyrics and melodies, even his impressively underrated finger-picking, bleed with sadness. It is enveloping, it is gut-wrenching, it is relentless. His records are so heavy to listen to, sometimes I need a break because that sadness begins to envelop me too. 

I was in the process of collecting all his albums on CD (shoutout to 2008 and earlier) and From a Basement on The Hill was one of the last editions to this collection. A posthumous release, it is probably Smith’s darkest record, one that feels simultaneously like one final burst of vibrant, Sgt Pepper-style psychedelic creativity and an agonizing cry for help. It writhes and then lays down and dies, and stabs you in the heart over and over again. 

Twilight is the kind of song that I can remember exactly where I was when I first heard it. I remember the time of day (about 6:00 pm while I was on my way to class), where I was (walking west towards campus from my then-apartment, about to cross the major intersection right before the invisible borders of the university campus), and how I was feeling (pensive). It was like time stopped when I heard this song. My feet crunched against the wet slush, cars drove by with their lights reflecting off wet pavement, people walked by me like ghosts. But I was focused only on the song. My eyes widened, and welled.

“Haven’t laughed this hard in a long time/better stop now before I start crying” is the first line in a song that pulls you in so tightly and doesn’t let go, that one listen wasn’t enough, never could be. It was a song that inspired an entire story that I wrote in that year of my creative writing class, a story that garnered me both a nomination and win for one of my university’s creative writing prizes. 

Winning this prize was a defining moment in my life. It was one of the first times I ever felt like I was among the best at something. I don’t know that I would have that moment if it wasn’t for this song.

Song #2: Your Heart is an Empty Room

From time to time, I still revisit Death Cab For Cutie’s opus, “Plans”. It’s a record that came along for me at exactly the right time in my life; I had a frivolous first year of undergrad full of hijinx and friends and silliness. But something was changing right around the time I walked into HMV (RIP) on a golden fall-twinged late summer day and bought this record (because Seth Cohen talked about them on The O.C. basically. No shame). I was becoming a more serious version of myself, an artist, someone embracing the nuanced material I was learning: about poverty and racism and the intricacies of film and literature. I was at a turning point in my life where the carefree life I had lived was replaced with ostracism and a weighty sea of late-blossoming teenage angst.

But funny enough, buying this record for the dumbest reason imaginable led me to realizing that this part of myself – that was questioning the carefree nature of life, thinking of things in imaginative ways, beginning to put my own creative words together to create pictures that were formulating in my head – could too, be communicated to me in song.

Your Heart is an Empty Room spoke to me as someone living in a dorm room alone, on a floor in my residence tower where I felt alone. That bed, that window, that desk, felt imprisoning. There were times that year where I was desperate to get out of there. The shine had worn off. I was too old to be living like this. I was different from everyone else. Something that fall just felt ‘wrong’. I heard Ben Gibbard’s off-kilter, soft timbre singing “And all you see is where else you could be when you’re at home/
And out on the street are so many possibilities to not be alone”. And it was this weird epiphany where I was alarmed – shaken, even – how this song could have been about my life, the feeling that in this big wide world of this big city I now lived in, the place where I felt the most friendless, the most isolated, was those four walls, that bed, that desk I was living in.

There are times when the stars align with you and the music you happen upon; that suddenly, an artist you have never met and probably never will meet, pens a song and in doing so, pens a thread between them and you, which guides you, ironically in this case, to feeling less alone.

I love “Plans”. I love its minor chords, its lush ambience, its darkness, its questioning of big unknowns in love and life. But it’s this song that truly got me through a hard year and helped me to embrace the darker parts.

Song #1: The Blower’s Daughter

Oh, to be young.

To be the kind of young where it is not real life, but a song, that helps you realize what love, heartbreak, and desire truly are.

When I was 18, I didn’t know. But I sat in my dorm room one day googling “sad songs” (not the most dignified thing to do, and not an especially enchanting or interesting way to discover new music) and I came across Damien Rice’s song, The Blower’s Daughter.

At this point in my life, I had barely scratched the surface of ‘love’ aside from a brief infatuation with the hot, popular guy in my graduating class of 35, and an even briefer ‘thing’ I had for a guy in my drama class that I knew for four months then never really saw ever again. But in the hefty, pining aged wisdom of Damien Rice’s long, vigorous, raspy repeating of “I can’t take my eyes off of you”, I felt like I knew love. I felt like love knew me. It was one of the first times that a song spoke to my 18-year old yearning so that I felt like I had felt it myself (I hadn’t). A good song – a really good song – can do that.

Much Music, Writing, What Was Forgotten.

The other day, I had the absolute privilege of attending a screening of 299 Queen Street West, a documentary about the origin, rise, and eventual fall of Much Music, Canada’s music station. It was a fun night with popcorn and candy and the Gen X and millennial fellow fans of Much Music gathering together to watch footage, to watch TV personalities, that many of us hadn’t thought of in years. It’s also a great documentary – simple and effective, simply allowing carefully curated footage to speak for itself.

While I enjoyed the documentary, the more I thought about it on the way home, the day after, I realized that more than anything, it made me sad as well. Sad that a very particular time and place can never happen again, sad that the technology that our society relies and depends upon in 2023 effectively killed what used to be good, sad that kids today will never know the pure joy of coming home from school, sidling up to the TV, turning on Much Music and watching Much on Demand and waiting for that video you love to come on, seeing iconic music videos from The Spice Girls, N*SYNC, Eminem, Avril Lavigne for the very first time, and the ‘moment’ that created – that you would go to school the next day and everyone would be talking about what you had just witnessed. The dream that one day, you, a music fan from small town Alberta, might move to a city like Toronto and have a dream job like Much Music VJ, and getting to talk to Britney Spears and The Red Hot Chili Peppers and Coldplay in their youth. But that day, that time, that style of music journalism, is gone. Because of YouTube and TikTok and on-demand music streaming services, it is never coming back. We’re left with memories, and thankfully, this footage that validates that what we saw on TV in those happy, carefree days of our youth actually happened.

It also made me sad to see footage of Taylor Hawkins, Gord Downie, Adam Yauch, Kurt Cobain, giving these poignant interviews when they were youthful and in their prime. And now they’re gone too. Seeing Kurt’s interview in Seattle 6 months before his death took the collective air out of the room. You could feel it.

The other day I was looking for an old email and came across a story I wrote in ~2009-2010, the working title called “In Dying” and I don’t even know why (a friend of mine once told me I was a good writer but I had the most terrible titles and she wasn’t wrong). I read through it, start to finish. Truly, I have very little recollection of writing this story. A vague memory of getting into the practice of ‘writing what you know’ and attempting, for the first and really only time, to write about my hometown of Jasper, Alberta. As I read it, a weird thing happened: I was thinking to myself, this is good. A fact about me is I hate everything I’ve ever written. I wrote, in my youth, for me — so I could release emotions, connect with my inner thoughts, use characters as a vehicle for the plight of women, the ways in which we are trapped in relationships, the methods by which relationships can erode over time (though during this writing phase of my life, I had never experienced much of this myself). I wrote because I wanted to be like my heroes, Carol Shields, Alice Munro, Brian Morton. But I never, ever, EVER thought I was any good at it. I won a scholarship once based on the merit of my writing. I was able to complete a creative Honors thesis despite not being an Honors student. And I still never thought I was any good. I allowed my own negative self-talk prevent me from pursuing any further work on the thesis I wrote after the first draft was completed. I applied for graduate school and didn’t get in, and from there, put the pencil down. I moved on. The dream was over. I went back to school, became a teacher, spent 8 years reading writing that was mostly poor quality and had to take an instructional role helping students improve it. And my writing days were over. Adulthood crushes dreams. Mundane, satisfied days that are not filled with the glittery excitement of your dramatic, Dominican rum-infused 20s crush dreams. Careers in the arts are something everyone wants, but only the chosen few get to pursue. But I read this story, and thought, this is good. And that in itself, was just a small victory for me.

Sometimes I think I don’t want to be that person again. I don’t want to be that dramatic heartbroken girl who thought she was ugly, bad at everything, not worthy of love. And why would anyone want to be that person? But something can be said about that precious moment in time when it’s socially acceptable to be that person.

The latter part of this week had me looking into my past selves, and past loves, and past lifestyle. It was a nice little trip and I don’t think I can stay, but maybe I can come back.

CJ

When I was 22, I got a cat. I had recently moved into my first apartment that wasn’t a residence, I had recently experienced my first real heartbreak, I was dealing with unemployment and the uncertainty of the reality that I would be finishing my undergraduate degree in one year and had no idea what I would do on the other side of that. The U of A was my whole world. My then-best friend was moving across the country. The cat, CJ, was 9 months old. He was my first ever pet.

The minute we brought CJ home, he bolted under the couch and hid and we couldn’t coax him out. At night he snuck out to go to the bathroom, eat and drink (sneaky since Day 1). But we hardly saw him. I had totally forgotten there was a cat in my apartment at all until he scared the shit out of me by one day just jumping out from under the couch and onto its arm. From that day on, he just enjoyed being around people.

CJ moved to Vancouver with me. He was on an airplane in his soft shell crate which was my carry-on bag. He rode on the SkyTrain with me on my way to my apartment, my first apartment away from Edmonton. He loved watching seagulls. One time he tried to attack this giant beetle that got into my apartment. It was gross.

He moved to Edson with me when I got my first teaching job. It was a hard year but I had my cat. He was my best company on cold nights where I truly truly felt the weight of being a first year teacher in a pretty isolated place.

He moved to Red Deer with me. I was isolated again but having a pet is always bringing a piece of home, a piece of yourself, a piece of your youth, with you. I had my first grown up job and there was my first pet, on my bed and on my lap and on my window sill.

We moved back to Edmonton together. He was so loved. His vet loved him. My friends loved him. My husband and his family loved him. He is a lap cat, he just likes to be around you and when he isn’t, he will cry until he gets his way. One time, he pushed my computer off my lap so he could take its place.

I’m about to be 37. CJ is about to be 16. I took him to the vet and his test results have indicated he may have severe kidney disease.

CJ was my youth, that reminder of when I was vulnerable and new to the world and watching him chase his fish on a string and stroking his shiny black fur and waking up with a cat croissant behind me has been my entire adult life. I grew up while CJ has grown older. And the prospect of saying goodbye to him takes me back to that uncertainty, of being 22, of not really knowing what’s next. I’m back at the U of A and I’m back in Edmonton and it feels like I’ve never left. I’m not 22 anymore, I’m supposed to be a real grown up, and I’m at this point with my first pet where being a real grown up is understanding how to confront the reality of saying goodbye.

My Old Life vs. My New Life

There was a time in my life when everything was dramatic, every day there was some catastrophe, some ‘big’ exciting unknown that drove me to peer out rain-drenched windows listening to sad music and yearning. When you’re young, life is so big and mysterious and painful and every day is full of either disasters or ecstacy. It’s when you make all your mistakes, experience all your firsts. My old life was very much that. A messy, riveting, insane, oft-pathetic, angry, heartbreaking drama with each day, an episode where I experienced something bloated with intensity.

Today, life has settled. I have a house, a car, a career, a dog, a very old cat, a husband, debt, and stability. I would rather order Skip the Dishes and sit on the couch and eat while scrolling through my phone than go out to some ear-splitting club. I get my joy from what I can accomplish at work and the cleaning I can get done and the spin classes I attend during the week. Everything is level, everything isn’t either a tearful gut-punch or an uproarious laugh. I lack inspiration to write, though I write emails every day. My money goes to groceries and vet bills and gas. I wasn’t sure I would ever get here. I didn’t want to get here. I was truly hoping to live in that insane state of mind forever, pining after some asshole who didn’t want to date me, getting into dramatic gossip sessions with my so-called friends, making fun of classmates behind their backs, and using all that fodder for all of my short stories for my fiction writing class.

In my new life, I’m comfortable and safe. I live with a mild nostalgia (sometimes intense) and also a mild curiosity for the people who inhabited life as it was. In my new life, things are boring. And often, I’m grateful for that.

An Open Letter to Westjet

To whom it may concern:

I have contacted Westjet before but wish to do so again not necessarily regarding my delayed bag, but to lodge a complaint regarding poor customer service I’ve received regarding the ordeal of my delayed bag.

On December 18, I arrived in Cabo and my bag did not arrive. I was told by the Westjet agents at the airport to fill out the necessary baggage claim form and was told my bag would likely arrive and be sent to my hotel by “the next day”. By the next day, my bag did not arrive. 

On December 19, my mom called Westjet on my behalf and spoke to someone at around 3:45-4:15 pm MST. She was told my bag was not on that day’s flight but would likely be on the flight the following day. The agent had told me to save my receipts for purchases of essential items and email them to the CBS westjet email for immediate reimbursement. The agent also said she would call the following day with an update. She did call on December 20, saying the bag was on that flight and would arrive by the next day.

The following day, my bag still did not arrive. I checked multiple times with the hotel who had not received any bags. On December 22, my mom called Westjet and spoke with an agent between 5 am and 5:46 am. She was told in this call that my bag did not make it onto the flight the day before and she would send an email to the baggage claim in Calgary where the bag had remained, to hold it for me at Baggage Services in the international arrivals area at YYC airport. 

When I arrived back in Canada on December 23, I went to the baggage claim and the agent there told me that my bag was not there. She called the central baggage as well who also said they did not have my bag and that it was likely sent to Cabo, as per the status on my claim online. I had informed her of what we had been told on December 22, and she corrected that agent and said what she probably meant was that the bag “might” not have made it on the flight. This agent informed me in person that they would just keep looking for my bag and it was likely it would turn up. This agent also told me that my baggage claim would be forwarded to a specific agent in 2-3 days who would follow up with me about my bag.

On December 29, I spoke with another Westjet agent on the phone between 12:00 and 12:30 MST. This agent had told me that not only was the agent at the Calgary airport inaccurate and he said my baggage agent would get in touch with me in a minimum of 10-15 days, but that he had no information for me. I told the agent about my frustrations with the process and the fact that I have been a loyal Westjet customer for years and have had the World Elite Mastercard since 2010. His response to me was, “well m’am, with all due respect, all airlines lose baggage. Next time, you should put your essential items in your carry-on or try not to have a checked bag with you at all.” This agent also told me that the previous agent was incorrect in stating I could be reimbursed immediately for my lost luggage. He told me absolutely no reimbursements would be made until my baggage is either recovered, or Westjet has deemed the bag permanently lost. I purchased essential items on vacation under the impression that I could be reimbursed for them immediately and the fact that I can’t has also created some financial challenges for me post-Christmas.

As of today, January 8, I have still heard nothing about the status of my bag. I have emailed Westjet three times, left a message with Calgary’s Central Baggage Claim, and tweeted Westjet daily and have tried twice to send DMs on Twitter as well. Nobody has been in touch with me.

I want to reiterate that I understand what all airlines, not just Westjet, are currently going through. My problem is not delays or even lost baggage at this point. My problem is the inconsistent and inaccurate information I have received from the airline since the loss of my bag on December 18. This is simply put, extremely poor customer service, particularly regarding someone’s lost belongings, many of which cannot be replaced. Not only is the lack of communication about my belongings, lost by the airline, disconcerting, but also, the fact that each agent has delivered wildly different information and literally none of this information has ever been accurate, has made me feel as though Westjet tells blatant falsehoods to placate customers. In all of these calls, myself and my mom have been polite, reasonable, kind, and sympathetic to all of the agents we have spoken to. But I am at a loss as to how a company, one which I used to feel was #1 in customer service, has delivered SUCH poor quality information, service, and reassurance to someone whose baggage has now been lost for twenty days and no new information or communication has been received. 

I write this letter to strongly suggest that you streamline communication processes between Westjet agents and that you tell them to please not make promises on which they cannot deliver as this severely impacts customers’ relations with the company. I am going to tell my story to others as well, so they know to take strong caution with their belongings, and/or essential purchases in the event of a lost bag, if they are to fly with Westjet in the future.

Sincerely,

M

Parenthood, Question Mark?

A friend of mine, who is currently single, was talking to me the other day about how her stress right now and need for job security, is so she can begin planning to have a family. Another couple of friends of mine have recently announced they are pregnant. Many of my friends have had babies and their Instagram pages are now filled with really beautiful images and videos of their children.

Millennial parenting is interesting. It’s interesting because we live in this world where the economy is not in our favour; we don’t get to graduate university debt-free and then go work at the same company from 22-65 anymore, making a salary that is good enough to support three children and a home with a two-car garage and a soaker tub. It’s interesting because we as millennials are obsessed with fervent documentation of our entire lives – but only the good parts and the parts that project this sense of utter happiness. It’s interesting because many millennial parents seem to take on this attitude that parenting is the most important, beautiful, amazing, wonderful thing a person could ever do, and that it is the penultimate bringer of inner peace and joy.

I don’t want to have children. I never have. When I tell people this, I get a few different standard reactions. Sometimes I get the dismissive reaction: “Oh, you’ll change your mind someday” or “of course you’ll have kids!” or “you might just not be ready yet!” Other times I get the condescending reaction where people say to me, “I don’t know how you could ever be fulfilled in life without children” or “I’m really sad to hear you say that.” I’ve also definitely had people react in the way that they’re scared that not having children is a bad investment for my future because they wonder who will care for me when I’m old if not my children.

I ask myself why it’s still taboo to not want children. Families are so much more than a mom, a dad, and 2.5 kids. Families are single-parent, multi-parent, chosen family, a person and their five cats, non-binary couples, asexual folks that love each other, single people and their aging parents, siblings who have lived together for ages, and yes, couples without children, and everything in between and beyond. In the twenty-first century, “family” is what we decide it is. One thing about millennials that we will certainly pass along to our Gen Z peers is the fact that we can take all those old-school boomer traditions and make of them what we want to. So it is disappointing to me that fellow millennials are still so attached to this idea that raising children is the one true key to family and happiness.

I have been ruminating on this for a while because I have noticed that since moving back to Alberta, which is far more traditional than the bohemian lifestyles adopted by so many woke millennials in my former city of Vancouver, way more of my friends are married with young families. And when you’re in your 30s, “young families” when you are a couple without kids is the equivalent of being single when all your friends have boyfriends in your late teens/early twenties. When you’re the odd one out, you get frozen out. People spend time with other young families; they’re not going to bars with you anymore or having wine-d up board game nights or going on girls’ trips anymore. Their priority, and rightfully so, is their family. But people without children often don’t have a place in that life as much anymore. You’re on a different page, and one or both of you turns to the next one.

I’ve always kind of been on a different page than my peers. I was late to the kissing party, the dating party, the relationship party, while my friends were getting boyfriends and making out at the bar and getting asked to dance. I started my career late, returning to school in my late 20s, in one of the most expensive cities in North America, which sat me back versus my house-buying, family-starting, career-track friends. I had to move all over the province to find my place in my career at all. And now, I’m the odd one out of my friends and family having babies and starting young families, who aren’t interested in girls’ weekends or wine nights or going out for crazy Friday nights anymore. We all get older, we all move on, but some of us move on differently than others.

It’s that ‘panic’ of being the odd one out that follows me around in my life. It’s selfish and stupid and so high school, I know, but I chalk that up to insecurities and this fear of abandonment that probably stems from being ditched by my best friends in junior high and high school for people who were more popular and with more social capital than me. And in that ‘panic’, I suddenly think: maybe I could be happy as a mom, maybe I could have kids, would it be so bad?

I’ve been reading in the past few years about parental regret – the idea that some parents don’t love their kids any less and would never wish away their kids as people – but they would wish away the concept of being a parent: the mess, the work, the lack of alone time, the lack of accomplishing personal goals, the lack of date nights and sex, the lack of quiet at the end of a long day, the yearning for the way life was before but the firm knowledge that you can never go back, because parenthood is forever. The permanence, the idea of giving up the time, hobbies, goals, adventures, the list of things I want to do but haven’t done yet, scares me. It scares me so much that the idea of dreaming some kid I don’t even know into the world isn’t worth the trade. I’ve always wondered if this would change for me, if the “I don’t want kids, I have no maternal instinct” me from 15 years ago would still be me in my 30s. It turns out, it is. It’s more contemplative, a slightly more mature version of that idea of that choice, but there it is.

And when I say that, I feel bad, like I’m making a negative choice that I shouldn’t make somehow, or that sounds ‘bad’ somehow. Why is there this pressure to parent? Why is this something that women are somehow destined to do?

At the end of the day, I think we should break free from this heteronormative version of family that we are expected to embody, that everyone around us basically tells us is inevitable, even if they hardly even know us. I shouldn’t feel ‘bad’ that my goals aren’t wrapped up in parenthood. Parents shouldn’t feel like they need to give themselves away and sacrifice themselves for their children. Parenting is hard, and that’s probably fine to admit, too. It’s so hard, I’m just not committal enough to do it. And I hope I don’t get frozen out because of it.

The Five Best Books I Read in 2020.

I know the year’s not over yet so there’s still more reading that could happen. But I met my 35-book goal this year so it seemed like a good time to discuss my favourites.

1. Starlight Tour: The Last, Lonely Night of Neil Stonechild, by Robert Renauld and Susan Reber

This was a thoroughly researched, riveting true crime tour de force that not only told the real story of several young men behind these abhorrent examples of institutionalized racism, but rendered me angry, frustrated, and on the edge of my seat. Sure, this is a story of racism and police negligence, but it is even more, the story of bravery and people who never gave up.

2. My Dark Vanessa, by Kate Elizabeth Russell

It is altogether impossible to describe this book. It is both riveting and horrifying, it forces all of to face uncomfortable truths, it is brutally human and uncomfortable. It is the most honest and accurate fictional portrayal of sex abuse I’ve read (note that this is from my own perspective and I’m sure others feel differently so I wanted to honor that).

3. Me, by Elton John

If you’ve seen the movie Rocket Man, or not, please do yourself a favour and read this book. Think of this as all the best parts of the movie plus more incredible stories, sassy and insightful quips, truths about love, loss, and addiction. This book is wild – it is incredibly fun, crazy, raw, and unabashedly unapologetic.

4. From the Ashes, by Jesse Thistle

As soon as I started this book, it was almost impossible for me to stop reading. In a year of reading people’s truths, nobody’s were as real to me, relatable, and inspiring than Thistle’s memoir.

5. Missing From the Village, by Justin Ling

Ling claims he is not a good journalist but this book demonstrates to me, what good journalism should be all about. Ling seeks answers – and does so passionately. His personal investment in this case jumps off every page. Ling cares about this story and the people in it. In doing so, he turns what could simple be a recounting of a grisly serial killer’s crimes, into a story of queer history, empathy, police relations, tragedy, and most important, a story of McArthur’s victims. They were people. They mattered.