Children

The other day, I was lying on the couch in my living room reading. In the apartment above me I heard the characteristic thumping and chatter of children.

"Cool," I thought. "Kids in the building. Maybe I can play with them."

Let me qualify that statement by first saying that I am not really a lover of children. I am not really....maternal. I like my own siblings - I am mildly obsessed with my baby brother, even though he hates me - and sometimes the children of close friends grab my heart strings a little.

But I am not one of those women who looks at a child and gets a throb in the general direction of her womb and goes "OHMYGOSH....I WANT THAT TINY HUMAN."

No. Mostly, I think of how terrified I am of night feedings and explosive diapers and the the boundless energy that little people seem to have. 

And let's face it. The children of other people are generally brats. No one raises their child as you yourself would raise him, and so behaviour that, to another person is completely normal, might be utterly abhorrent to you. THAT'S frustrating. But it's more a problem of the parents, then of the children themselves.

However, I would agree that children are a somewhat necessary part of life and I hope that, if I have one of my own someday, the oxytocin kicks in majorly, and I come to love Minime as as much or slightly more than I like quiet and chocolate.

By all accounts this is possible.

But back to my upstairs neighbours. While I might not be utterly enthralled with the majority of children, I am very used to having them around. After a certain period of not really being exposed to any, I get this vague feeling of imbalance. There really is something about how young children view the world, and how they put words together, and how unconditionally they love you - or hate you - that I find fascinating.

Hence - after a month with no children - my desire to go play with the thumpers and squealers upstairs. But how to make that happen? Go knock on the door?

"I just moved in downstairs. May I take your kids to the bakery, and then to the river to practice skipping stones? Maybe we could also play hide and seek in the woods?"

*Slam*

An opportunity presented itself later that day, when the cleaning lady dropped off some extra bedding for me. 

"So.....are there kids upstairs?"

"Oh no no no."

"Oh! I thought I heard..."

"No! Don't panic! That was the electrician. He came to fix some things, and had to bring his kids as he had just picked them up from school."

"Oh! Ok."

"No. You don't have to worry at all. Not about THAT. No children in this building. Don't worry your head."

"Oh, but I wasn't....."

"I know. At your age you're not going to want children around."

"At my age....?"

"Well, ring me if you need anything. Bye!"

I was slightly taken aback. But guess what? If I had not been raised in an environment where children flowed at the same rate as Niagara Falls, I would almost certainly have the attitude which desires a complete segregation from children. 

I would not know them as occasionally interesting little beings who are fun to be around. I would not see them as a normal and necessary part of life, in spite of the chaos that swims around them.

I would hear them upstairs and groan, and I would think of myself as needing to be separate from them until such time as I deemed myself ready to somehow join their world with mine.

Having always moved in an an environment where the presence of children is taken for granted and accepted, I now wonder: what must it be like to grow up in an environment consistently hostile to you, simply because of your stage of development?

As a child - today, in this world -  a quarter of your siblings and friends have been aborted, when you appear in public people moan, and your own parents and every other magazine and latest study discuss quite freely the burden of raising you. And don't think that children don't, on some level, know this. They are scarily intuitive little beings. Of course they feel environment surrounding them.

All this at a stage when what you need is love and complete security. No wonder there are ever increasing rates of childhood depression and anxiety. Wouldn't you be sad and scared in a world that seemed to hate you?

In short: Give a kid a hug. Smile as you pass one on the street. Let them know that the world needs them and loves them. Sure, many of them might be brats, sure they can pains in the hiney, but in the end, it's not their fault. And a little love goes a long way.

Butter Can Bring World Peace

The other day, as I was walking down the road to the Intermarche - yes, I am back in France - I had this thought: It is impossible to be sad here.

Sure, there might be moments of sadness - everyone has those - that is normal. But in the midst of such beauty and such peace - because peace is the striking feature here - it is much easier to choose happiness rather than the alternative. 

On top of that, how is it possible to be anything but gleeful, when you can pop around the corner and get.....the most glorious loaf of light brown, slightly sour bread, still warm from the oven?

And then....drift into the store next door to grab butter the colour of the sun?

And then .... walk down wide lanes shaded by leafy green trees....and through narrow cobblestoned side streets which - believe me - have enough stories to tell to fill a lifetime with. Really. I can just tell.

How much, I wonder, is the lack of beauty in our lives, and the fact that we eat Becel instead of butter, and Wonderbread instead of Paillasse, responsible for the excessive use of, say, Zoloft? 

Maybe if everyone lived in beautiful places that insisted on taking life slowly, and ate real food made as it should be, we would be much better off.

I am beginning to think that if everyone in the world lived in the equivalent of a small French town, happiness would be the norm, rather than the exception.

Also....this is nice

Hypnosis

I was lying in bed the other night, in the throes of jet lag and insomnia, trying to convince myself to go to sleep. Somehow yelling "GO TO SLEEP" at myself tends to make me more panicky, and so sleep really was not happening anytime in the next fifty years.

So I tried that trick of relaxing your body starting with your toes. But I lost focus before I even got up to my ankle.

Then I tried deep breathing for a little bit: "slow inhale.....slow exhale...." but the focus on my breath made me think about my heart, and for some reason I have been worried about having a heart attack - everyone worries about that in the middle of the night, right? - and so started having a panic attack instead of descending into sleep-fulness.

Side note: How likely is it that at some point, someone, somewhere is going to use this blog as proof that I should be institutionalized?

The only rational option then became to find something to hypnotize to me to sleep. Obviously.

That's right: I did a Google search and for $24.99 got two hypnosis sessions, led by a man with a quite yummy Scottish accent, about calmly making decisions.

The thing is, it actually worked. I fell asleep.

So, early this morning - still in the web of jet lag - I decided to try it again.

The thing is, I must be the worst hypnosis patient. Ever.

Five minutes into the recording, he told me to start counting backwards from 300, by 3s. I did NOT remember this happening the first time I listened.

How did I miss the fact, the first time around, that I was supposed to be occupying my conscious mind with backwards counting, so that my unconscious mind was left free to explore the possibilities of my life?

I HAVE NO IDEA.

So I started to worry that, by not participating well in my hypnosis sessions, I would get wires crossed in my brain and end up more messed up than before. Things started to become stressful at this point.

And then on top of this, there was the problem of counting backwards by 3s, from 300.

This proved more of a problem than anything, to be honest.

"300....297....ummm....294......291.......OK....288...WHY AM I NOT BETTER WITH NUMBERS? Ok....*quick finger count*.....285......Right? Yes.....Ok....283....WRONG......282....."

And then I got hungry, so went to make myself an early breakfast instead of trying to get back to sleep, and ignored the rest of the recording.

Conclusion: That was $24.99 well spent.

Life Is Not a Punctuation Mark

I had this major epiphany the other day. Part of me wonders if I am excruciatingly slow on the uptake not to have realized this before.

I think I have always thought of "life" as a series of events:

"When I turn five, I get to go to kindergarten."

"When I turn 13, I won't be a little kid anymore. Maybe I can start using makeup!"

"When I turn 18, I won't be a kid at all and I will have to vote. What if I mess up and choose the wrong person?"

And of course, everyone has their "When I...." moments.

"When I get married...."

"When I buy my first house...."

"When I get a dog...."

"When I have a baby...."

"When I go to Africa......."

"When I take over the world..."

"When I figure out how to properly blow dry my hair...."

No? No one has that last one as a life goal? Whatever. You lie. Everyone wants to know how to blow dry her (or his, I suppose) hair properly.

My point is this: if you approach life from the point of view that you are living it only when you have achieved that milestone, and the next one, and the next one....you aren't really living life at all.

Am I just sounding super obvious here? Did everyone else know this but me?

Those milestones, those goals, are just the punctuation at the end of a sentence. They are exclamation points, questions marks, periods. They aren't the story. The real story is everything that happens in between. The real story is the words filling up the page, not the marks that end the sentences.

How absurd would it be to insist that the heart of a book lies in the placement of its periods and question marks?

No: the heart of the book, of the story, lies in the magic of the words.

When you think about life that way, it makes walking to the store rather important. Walking to the store isn't merely to get a chicken so you can impress your cute co-worker, so you can date him, marry him, and then have his triplets.

No. Walking to the store is a whole page unto itself. It's something that must be lived through - and why not joyfully? - on the way to whatever punctuation mark you come to next.

In a way, this makes everything kind of important, because everything you do is your life, and you only get one chance. I'm not saying that you get all hyped up and nervy and act as if on every choice rests the future of the free world. Oh no.

But what I am saying is that whatever you are doing, whatever you are in the middle of: this is life. So enjoy it. Love it.

And stop trying to find the next exclamation mark. Just settle for hopping to the next word.

Private Sin?

I tend to have a problem with sleeping. As in: It's very rare that I get more than four hours at a time, and so, as a result I:

a) spend too much time thinking

and

b) need afternoon cat-naps in order to survive.

Having spent the last week in the throes of intense insomnia,  which attacked me for various reasons that are probably not interesting to anyone but me and a team of Psychiatrists, I decided that this afternoon I really needed to take a nap if I wanted to make it to my next Birthday.

I'm not positive, but I am pretty certain that 18 hours of sleep spread across five days PROBABLY shaves some time off of your life expectancy. Also: it makes you crazy. Like, really crazy. Like...."I don't want to know that girl," crazy.

So, after having plowed through a bunch of work, I laid myself down with my Kindle and the intense desire that I fall asleep just for a little bit. Just for enough time so that I could gain the concentration to put eyeliner on without poking my eye ball out.

Unfortunately, I chose to try and finish Madame Bovary as a method of pre-sleep relaxation, and this hit on sensitive topic dear to my soul. Damn it, instead of sleeping, I laid in bed and thought about many deep, dark things. So much for successfully putting on eyeliner this evening.

Here's the thing. Something that I have known about myself for quite some time is that I have "issues" with trust. Everyone does to varying degrees, but this little problem is especially strong in me. I knew it was there and  I nodded to its presence, but it's not until you actually get really, really close to someone else that you see how any personal "issues" you might have can really affect your life and the other person's life in many deep and undesirable ways.

By the time I was 24, I had successfully avoided the messiness of getting close enough to someone so that my own insanity was reflected back to me and slapped me square on the face. Any relationship beyond the purely casual or completely superficial was something I was just not interested in. Anything headed into anything more would immediately be moulded into the "just friends" category.

Possibly it was because I hadn't met anyone I liked enough. Possibly it was because I had a list of things I wanted to do before actually committing to anything, let alone on any serious level to another person. Possibly because I was just too scared to open up that much. The thought of trusting someone to hold all of me in his hands - what is great and what is bad and what is downright scary - was something seemed too risky a thing to plunge in to.

And then like some cliche out of a "find yourself" chick-flick, I went to Greece and came to the realization that no matter how many amazing experiences I could have, if I experienced them alone, they would be just a little empty. No matter how much I desired to protect myself, if it came at the cost of never actually living the full extent of what it requires to love and be loved, then what a truly empty life that would be.

So, I went "Oh FINE. If someone good comes along, I'll at least TRY."

Four weeks later my heart did backwards flip in a little cafe in Paris (can you GET any more cliche than this?), and I went "Oh. Shit. OHSHIT. I promised I would try."

So I did. And thus began the process of coming to truly know myself: that self reflected back to me by someone who loves me, and is trying to wrap his head around my....own unique brand of crazy.

Which brings me full circle to my initial point (Insomnia does NOTHING for the ability to stick to a point):

I have major trust issues.

In bed today, after delving into Madame Bovary, I was reflecting, yet again, on this sad truth. I kept asking myself why? Why? Where does this come from? Some of it is, of course, the accident of my temperament combined with various formative influences that made lasting impacts on me.

And then part of it has to do with the direct experience of seeing trust broken, over and over again, in romantic relationships. In my own experience, one married man has directly propositioned me (yep, for an affair), one married man has obliquely hinted at it, two men with serious girlfriends have informed me that if I showed any interest they would move over to me, and three men have thrown it out there that I, for some obscure reason which I have not figured out yet, am someone they would love to keep on the back burner for future extra-marital action.

Yeah. I have no idea why either.

And don't get me started on the women who have told me - in the past year alone - of the affairs committed by their well loved husbands.

This, my friends, has instilled quite a strong sense of terror in me. I think any woman who desires faithfulness from a partner would feel the same way, at witnessing such repeated and overt attempts at unfaithfulness, or least an open willingness towards it.

Here's the rub: there is absolutely nothing I can do about the experiences I have had or the stories I have heard. I can't run away from the very real truth that it's a twisted messy world out there, and that shit happens. It really does. I can live in fear of that, or I can just do my best to choose wisely, and trust that whatever happens I can handle it. Because  - and this is rather heartening - in that moment I will have the grace to handle it.

But here is the point of this long ramble: There is a direct and very tangible reason that we all should try really hard not to sin. Yes, it hurts God, but that's a rather fuzzy truth for most of us to get our minds around. What is true, and what might make a bigger direct impact, is that sinning - your own personal sin - really hurts other people.

Someone told me a while back that he didn't regret much any anything that he had done wrong. In that moment, I had to agree in some small part: if you've had a lot of fun being bad, it's really hard to regret it. It's really hard to feel sorry for it.

But...for example - and keeping in our theme of the day - if a man shows a willingness to be unfaithful, he not only destroys the trust he should be building with his significant other - a horrendous thing in itself -  he also risks causing the object of his prospective unfaithfulness to apply his gross standards to all other men.

This could, potentially - not that I have direct experience or anything - harm the woman's ability to trust, and also does a huge disservice to the many truly good men out there.

That "private sin" turns into a chain reaction affecting who knows how many other people.

Conclusion - and you NEVER thought we would get here!......

When you think that what the bad thing you are planning to do will affect no one but yourself, think again. It's really not possible. Give me any "private sin," and I can tell you how it will hurt someone else.

On the flip side: any good thing you do touches someone else as well. So really, the world isn't as bleak as all that.

So go forth and do good.

 .....And try not to stare at the dark circles under my eyes. There is no concealer that will cover what I have going on over here.

NOT the Eiffel Tower

Quite often, I hear my elders rant about the current state of the education system.

No one learns multiplication tables anymore.

No one knows geography.

Grammar? WHAT'S GRAMMAR?

I know I have some holes in my educational background, but for the most part I consider myself at least a little better off than most, since I have always been a voracious reader. Reading covers up a multitude of sins. At the very least you have big words to use and interesting characters to talk about, at the drop of a hat.

But.....

then things like this happen, and I start to think I need to hire myself a private tutor.

A few days ago I was standing on a rooftop patio very near St. Paul's. The view of the London was magnificent. The sky was clear for once, and a beautiful shade of blue. The few clouds in sight were whispy and fluffy. A mellow breeze drifted through the air.

Sigh.

As my eyes scanned the horizon, my insides did an excited little jump. "Cool," I thought to myself. "You can see the Eiffel Tower from here. How ROMANTIC!"

I was about to point this out, when I paused. "Wait a second.....Is that possible? What direction is France? What direction am I facing? How far away is Paris? Is the landscape between here and there flat enough for me to even see anything in Paris from here?"

The thing is, I had the answer to none of those questions, and my Blackberry wasn't connecting to the internet, so I couldn't do a quick search to find out.

And I certainly wasn't going to ask anyone. No. WAY.

Because....while it LOOKED an awful lot like the Eiffel Tower, the logical part of my mind told me it couldn't possibly be. But the flaky part of my mind REALLY WANTED IT TO BE TRUE. However, I had no hard facts at hand to help me reach any kind of conclusion whatsoever.

So I took a surreptitious picture with my phone, as a reminder that when I had access to Google, I was going to do some investigative journalism, and I went on my merry way.

And then I forgot.

Until the topic of Geography came up with my friend, a few days later. My friends and I try to have cultured conversations.

"Can I ask you something? Is it possible to see the Eiffel Tower from a tall building in London?"

"....................I don't think so....."

"Are you SURE?"

"Well...the English Channel is between England and France, and then there is the distance from both London and Paris TO the Channel.....so I don't think it's possible."

"I need to check Google."

So I did. And I went to six different sites. And according to my research, no: It is not possible to see the Eiffel Tower from any point in London. Not even the London Eye.

So...there goes THAT romantic occurrence from my life.

At least I didn't embarrass myself by excitedly pointing out the non-Eiffel Tower from a random rooftop in London.

I Almost Became A Fifth Wife

A few weeks back, I was in Oxford.

It was as beautiful and romantic as you might have imagined it to be. But that's not what I want to talk about. What I want to talk about is the fact that I almost became the fifth wife of a 57 year old Saudi Arabian man.

Not. Joking.

I promise.

It was a lazy afternoon, and after wandering around looking at colleges (that's a lie, I was shopping), I was reaching that mid-afternoon slump. So I did what any civilized person would do, and took myself to a tea shop and ordered tea.

I sat down, savouring the silence, which was a nice contrast to the bustle of the streets outside, and decided that it was the perfect moment to write in my journal. I know: Oxford, Tea, and Journal Writing - they just go together.

My warm tea by my side, a feeling of contentment oozed through me. I should have known it was too good to be true. Very suddenly, I became aware of a dark swarthy man, repeatedly turning from his table to look at me.

"Don't make eye contact. Don't make eye contact. Mary DON'T LOOK UP."

I looked up.

He leaned over. "Sometimes, at the beginning, things are difficult. But as time moves on, they get easier."

You know what my first thought was? "That's so TRUE! I needed to hear that. Maybe this is my guardian angel! I wish he was better looking."

I am not sure normal people have thoughts like that.

I just nodded, because I was not in the mood to have a conversation with a stranger, not even if he happened to be my guardian angel. I turned my attention to my tea and pen, assuming that it would be obvious I was not willing to chat.

Somehow, it wasn't.

An hour later,  after having been asked if I was married or not - "Ahh! You aren't!!" -  I was in possession of an invitation to Saudi Arabia. I was further informed that he had not successfully had any children with any of his wives thus far  but was certain it would happen soon. Possibly he might have a problem, and not the multiple women he is married to - but this is not something I actually wanted to suggest to his face.

As I made a move to leave, he asked if he could show me around Oxford's Covered Market. Having lost the ability to say "no," I slowly nodded yes. He showed me his butcher's and his cheese man, and the place where he buys his bread, and as we entered into the sunshine on the High Street, he asked if I had been into the quads of any of the Colleges.

Having lost my brain, I dumbly shook my head. So he escorted me around some lovely college quads, and tried to explain some gorgeous college chapels to me.

Seeing as how I was the Christian of our dynamic duo, I am pretty sure I should have been doing the talking.

A further hour later, he was informing me that we would see so much more of each other in the future, and his hand had somehow found its way onto the small of my back. *Shiver.*

If the man you like does that, you want to kiss him. If the man who is informing you that you would look lovely with a head covering on, who is as old as your father, and very obviously not your guardian angel does that, you want to castrate him.

We entered a bookstore so that my eager suitor could show me some atlases, and I took this an opportunity to frantically text a Spaniard for help. Seeing as how he was in London, I am not sure what exactly I thought he could do to help me, but seeing as how he is my boyfriend, I thought he better do something.

My phone rang shrilly, disturbing the staid silence of the bookstore.

"Walk away."

"What?"

"Just....walk away."

"Just like that?"

"Yep. And if he follows you, ask for help."

"Oh."

I walked past the Saudi gentleman, motioned to my phone and told him I needed to take the call outside, and walked out the door of the bookshop.

"Oh my gosh. I'm on the street. And I am walking around the corner. And he isn't following me!!"

"So. Why didn't you just say no?"

".....I'm Canadian? I don't assert myself? Maybe?"

"Wow. I need to give you 'no' lessons or something."

And that's that. Except the next morning, the friend who I was staying with was getting a coffee. As she was waiting for it, a man approached her, started chatting, and asked her where she was from. Having been informed that she was from Canada, he did a little jump and said that he had met a Canadian girl named Mary the previous day, and was looking for her.

Shannon, having as she said "No time for drama like that," simply shrugged and told him she knew of no such person.

Somehow she escaped the Saudi man without having to lose three hours of her life to him.

I think I might have to take my Spaniard up on those lessons.