The Empty Bucket List

All week my horoscope tried to talk me off a ledge. “Be your own cheerleader” it warbled; “Don’t take a negative view” it chirped.

None of it helped. I spent the week locked in my apartment, nursing a bowl of popcorn like someone just dumped me.

I think part of my angst fest had to do with the fact that I never finish anything. At work I’m a flurry of lines through my to-do list. But at home I’m more likely to do, well, nothing. There’s nothing personally satisfying about doing nothing. WHY ISN’T MY LIFE FULFILLING? you cry, between mouthfuls of Jolly Time.

Let me walk you through my home office, aka ‘the left half of the living room’.

On your right, folks, an abandoned electric guitar. Directly ahead, piles of neglected scrapbooking materials. On the DVD shelf, Wii games with actual storylines gather dust.

And then, of course, there’s this blog post, which I’ve been trying to write since Wednesday last week.

Yesterday, the fiancé and I were playing what if. He asked me what skill I would choose to learn by osmosis, skipping all the hard work.

“I’d be fluent in French,” I said, though I was uncertain it was true. “You?”

“I’d play guitar.”

“We have a guitar, you could learn that.”

“I don’t want to learn it, I just want to do it.”

That basically sums up my experience with 90 percent of the skill sets I’ve tried to develop. Including the guitar. And French.

Next he asked me about my bucket list. I confessed I did not have a bucket list. There is nothing I feel comfortable saying I want to accomplish before death. I know myself, and I do not finish things.

So should I give up on it all? The guitar? The patterned paper?

I have no brilliant conclusions. I’m really asking.  How do you start finishing things?

5 Tips to Win at Conflict

When I flipped to my horoscope for this weekend, fresh from a state of the union talk with my fiance, I laughed. Oh irony. It warned me to avoid anything that looked like relationship conflict.

If anyone ever tells you you should avoid relationship conflict, do not follow that advice. Two people who never have conflict also have a lot of unresolved issues.

In my case, it certainly helps. Two people in a relationship in our early twenties? We change every day. And it takes some work to reconcile those changes.

So learn from my experience. Here’s five tips to help you win at conflict (but maybe not win THE conflict.)

1. Make lists. One, this saves you from going “Uhhh because! Take that asshole!” halfway through a previously reasonable discussion just because you forgot what your point was. Conflicts, even civilized ones, can make you flustered. Two, having a list encourages you to resolve quickly and move on to the next point.

2. Have clear goals. What do you want from the other person? “Making them feel stupid” is not a real answer (and if it was yours, how’s that black eye coming along?).

3. Always have a ‘here’s why’. Logic is a better friend to you than feelings, because it’s more relatable. Take these two arguments for example:

a) I want you to stop smoking because it makes me feel sad.

b) I want you to stop smoking because it will kill you. If it kills you, I will dump your body in the river and tell your mom you ran off to become a woman.

In some respects, they’re both emotional appeals, but the second one has the added bonus of including dire consequences. Your emotions are never as strong an argument as bad things that will or have happened.

4. Don’t avoid bringing up the past. Lots of magazines tell you never to bring up past behaviour that was resolved. But if it was resolved, you wouldn’t be talking about it, right? The key here is to limit it to useful facts. For example, your smoking spouse might say, “Honey, I don’t want to stop smoking. But I will cut down to one cigarette a month.” You have every right to bring up the fact that the last four times you tried that, it ended with him chain smoking handmade, jumbo cigarettes.

5. Decide what success means. How will you know when you’ve reached your goals? How long before they have to be achieved? Stick with your answers.

You can’t be a saint. But you can make a list. Go for it, and have a happily conflicted week!

A Momentary Aside

The fiance and I had a fight a couple days ago. We already had plans for the evening, so we sucked it up and went to a party afterward.

“When I was younger I thought things were so perfect,” the fiance said to me on the way to the car.

“Like what, life?”

“Yeah, and relationships. I would see these couples and think they were perfect.” He thought this over for a moment. “Probably a lot of them had a fight right before the party.”

This gets to the root of why I blog. Because when couples fight before the party, they put on their happy couple face and carry on.

I don’t want this blog to be the happy couple face. I think someone needs to tell these stories about fucking up and moving on. That’s how we’re going to spend a lot of our lives.

What better time to tell these stories than in my 20s, the age of self-discovery?

Many of my peers rave constantly about their jobs, their relationships and their newest ventures. Are their jobs really 100% fulfilling? Mine isn’t. Is their relationship problem-free? Mine isn’t.

And I’m willing to bet theirs aren’t either. It’s happy couple face at work.

We’re all focused on being perfect – and when life isn’t perfect we try to hype it so at least it sounds that way. I think happy couple face does society a disservice. We all want to be perfect, like everyone else. Except none of us are perfect.

So here’s what I’m doing: I’m not buying my own press. I’m telling you straight up that I’m feeling so lost that I’m turning to a horoscope for guidance. That perfection complex we all have is part of why I feel so lost. With this blog, I hope I can chip away at that complex, both in myself and in my readers.

I plan to do that by fessing up about all my failures as well as my successes. All my fights before the party. It doesn’t mean there will never be good news, but there will be a real life here.

That’s what I’m bringing to the table here: my brutal honesty. Because life is hard, but we’re all in this together.

Back to horoscopes later this week.

Like a Boss

My horoscope on Wednesday told me my balance with someone was wrong, and I was the “personal assistant to their Grand Poo-Bah.” Thanks horoscope, you know how to make a girl feel special.

So when crisis struck at 10 am Wednesday morning, I resolved to deal with it like a boss.

At 5 pm, my parting words to the receptionist were “I’m going to go curl into a ball and cry now. ”

First, an exec emailed me saying some dates on the website were incorrect. Fixed! Oh wait, except those dates are on 400+ posters that we sent to branches. Fuck.

I rallied myself. It was boss time.

I coordinated with branch liasions and the graphic designer to fix the problem. I forwarded the new poster to reps in other cities to split printing and distribution duties. I distributed Edmonton posters myself. I even wrote a memo for the poster package to reduce confusion.

By 3:20 pm, I was happily stuffing inter-office mail envelopes with posters, confident in their Thursday afternoon arrival time – squeaking in under the Friday morning deadline.

A coworker, let’s call him Bob, happened upon me stuffing envelopes.

“Hey,” he said, “That date is wrong.”

He faltered slightly at my blazing glare.

“What?” I said, dangerously.

At that point Bob wisely fled. But the damage was done.

Turns out, the person who corrected my original mistake was also mistaken. Boys and girls, don’t trust anyone’s word, ever. Instead, fact check.

All the work I (and others) had done had to be re-done. By 4:30.  In that moment, I seriously considered doing a smoky burnout in the parking lot, never to return. But again, I rallied myself. Adversity! I thought, very boss-like.

Cue another flurry of activity, which notably included several coworkers making veiled implications that I was some kind of idiot. I sailed past 4:30 in a manic frenzy of envelope stuffing and bitter resentment.

I just take people’s word for shit, it gets messed up, and then I do the grunt work, I thought. I am the personal assistant. Fuck.

I’m being conservative with the f-bomb compared to my unedited thought process. In an Archie comic, it would look like someone held down Shift and played a symphony on the number keys.

When I could breathe again, I realized I was doing things like a boss. And that being a boss kind of sucks.

In the course of my crisis I:

1. Made terribly unpopular but necessary decisions.
2. Delegated.
3. Remained dignified and stayed on-message during calls/emails questioning my abilities.

And, perhaps most importantly:

4.    Did not cry and run screaming out of the building.

And you know what? It paid off. The same people who were cranky over the second poster run sent me emails thanking me for acting so quickly and making everything sunshine and rainbows again.

I have new respect for what bosses go through, and a new mantra. Here it is: In a crisis, stay cool and act like a boss. Unless your boss is Andy Samberg.

Dance, Sing, Everything

This weekend I had a delightful horoscope. At the time I did not think it was delightful. It boiled down to this: Be Social.

Now, I recently embraced the fact that I am an introvert. I’ve read all kinds of stuff about being an introvert at work and at home. I’ve even written about being an introvert.

So I like to think I know something about being introverted. My acceptance has led to more hiding in my cubicle, avoiding social outings and demanding lots of me time.

In short, my weekend challenge looked challenging.

By Saturday night I had all but surrendered to another night in. It was 10 pm, two hours after the latest time I voluntarily leave the house. Luckily for my blog, my friend Patrick invited me out for drinks.

I sucked it up, curled my hair, and set off for Prohibition.

The fiancé and I don’t go dancing. He doesn’t volunteer, and frankly I’m petrified of shaming him with my dorky white girl moves. I save those for home. But I didn’t care if Patrick was ashamed to be seen with me, especially after my fourth gin and tonic.

I busted out all my moves. And no one grabbed my ass, because of Patrick.

Life lesson: If you’re going dancing, bring a man.

Buoyed by my success at sociability, I asked my longtime friend Emily out for dinner Sunday night.

We hit up Sabor Divino, a fabulous place serving three-course, $25 meals for Fork Fest. (Fork Fest is ten days of cheap eats at local, one-of-a-kind restaurants.)

Emily accused me of trying to give her “the pork sweats” when I pushed my bacon-wrapped dates onto her plate, but other than the pig-scented stains on her dress, I thought the evening went well. Every time I bit into a prawn I saw a holy light where angels sang. (Go to Sabor Divino immediately.)

I felt like I was on social fire. For my big finale, I went to a 9:40 showing of Sherlock Holmes with some friends on Monday night. Crazy right? Yeah, that’s my idea of living on the edge right there.

The weird thing is, even though I’ve only had five hours of sleep, and I’m doing the same old thing at work, I’m happier. And that’s making me a better worker, because happy people work harder.

I got caught up in my introvert label and stopped exploring things that didn’t fit the mold. But I’m not a mold, and neither are you.

This weekend, my horoscope showed me:

1. Introvert does not mean hermit – or at least, it doesn’t have to.

2. A happy home life leads to a happy work life. That’s something you’re told that you don’t believe until you are completely miserable.

3. I have to stop limiting myself based on who I think I am. I don’t know who I am. That’s why this blog exists. Because as the Transformers taught us in the 80s, knowing is half the battle. Uh, in this case I guess it’s knowing that you don’t know.

The Prison Incident

Yesterday, my horoscope said something about how I shouldn’t sublimate my needs in the face of others’. That’s a fancy way to say every man for himself.

You know where that rule comes in handy? Trespassing on an abandoned prison. Yes, I went there. So without further ado, here is the story:

We were huddled in the prison’s basement staircase, barely breathing. An initial scan with the flashlight revealed it to be completely flooded. Empty boxes floated to the top of the dark brine.

There were no flashlights now, and no movement. We sat in inky darkness, staring forward, three pairs of eyes fixed on a lighted doorway.

John*, Ryan* and I had made our way into the abandoned Griesbach military prison an hour earlier. The weather was unluckily bright and clear. Anyone watching could have seen the three dark figures high-stepping across the snow.

Getting in was easy. There was no security and a massive hole in the fence. None of the doors were locked (or even closed). It was so easy I half expected to find Jigsaw waiting for me inside.

“Keep your flashlights down,” Ryan hissed. Lights inside the prison would make the adjoining trendy suburb suspicious.

Bars covered all the windows. Names of Sgts and Cpls blazed up from locker nameplates. The ground was crunchy. Aside from that there was nothing to report. I began to wonder why I’d come.

Then we found the cells, with their ancient hand-crank mechanism. Delighted grins lit our faces. A deep metal clang echoed down the hall as the doors slammed shut, open, shut.

Somewhere else in the prison, there was another metal noise. We all froze. Had one of the surburbans called the cops?

No other sound came. It’s just old and creaky, I thought. We headed down to the basement. (Or what was left of it.) Standing on the staircase, peering into the ceiling-high water, we heard it: three fast thumps, like footsteps.

We stood like statues, flashlights off, waiting.

“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” John said.

As soon as we were free of the doors we took off running across the snow. We were closing in on the hole in the fence when we heard voices.

Outside the fence, beyond a sheltering line of evergreens, people were talking. Crouched down, we peered through the gaps in the branches. One of them was a man in dark clothes with a hat – a police officer or a man with a toque?

One by one, we crept to the corner and, with one final burst of adrenaline, jumped through. At that point we “cleverly” ran several feet to one side in order to casually stroll back to the car from another direction.

Yes, you could totally tell by our tracks.

Don’t worry, I checked out the statute of limitations on trespassing. It turns out I’m in the clear as far as Google knows.

This weekend my horoscope says I need to rise several rungs on the social ladder. We’ll see how my combined knowledge of this week pays off: be offbeat, be polite, be social.

*Names changed to protect the guilty

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What’s the Opposite of Progress?

My fiancé doesn’t always get me. He’s an extrovert. He wants to be around people all the time. I’m an introvert. I like people in small doses, but I treasure my ‘me’ time.

My horoscope told me Monday that when people don’t get me, I should embrace the offbeat, untried and fun. I would love to tell you I did this swimmingly, but life is hard so I’ll admit I totally fucked up.

Poor fiancé. He said he was going out Monday night. His friends had a limo package to a strip club. Enjoy that buddy, I thought, Monday night is the C-section squad. All day I looked forward to curling up with my books, my word processor and the Colin Firth version of Pride and Prejudice on DVD.

Then he canceled on his night out. He said he was too broke to pay for drinks, which I understand to be vital in the viewing of gnarly Monday strippers.

Dreams of Colin Firth in a water fountain dashed, I embraced the offbeat, untried and fun. Oops, I meant to type: I sulked in a corner with my laptop shooting resentful looks across the room.

Today, the horoscope said to resist the urge to tell someone what I really think of them. Those of you who know me personally are laughing right now.

So when the fiancé said he wasn’t coming home (when hours earlier he said we’d spend the evening together) I was not harsh. Actually, that’s probably just because screams of frustration don’t translate to text message.

But that’s progress, right? And then I came home and sulked in a corner with my laptop. Totally progress.

In the spirit of being offbeat  and fun, later this week I’ll tell you the story of the time I trespassed on the Griesbach abandoned military prison.

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The Eureka Moment

It was 2:00 pm on Saturday and I was crying. My optometrist had given me trial contact lenses so I could try on frames. Thirty minutes (and a lot of f-bombs) later, they were in. Almost immediately, one popped out onto the dirty mall floor.

Cockeyed, I returned to Lenscrafters and started trying on frames, squinting. I thought, better than nothing, but in fact it was worse. Back at the optometrist’s, the receptionist said everyone was at lunch, they wouldn’t give me another trial lens anyway, and they definitely wouldn’t help me put it in. Presumably taking my $70 for an eye exam had tuckered everyone out.

(Sidenote: Dr. Denis Meyer & Associates in Southgate Mall, specifically Dr. Habib,  I think you suck.)

My horoscope had predicted a eureka moment during a mundane task. With a very mundane weekend planned, I felt well prepared to eureka. How could you not have an epiphany during a Saturday that contained an eye exam, dentist appointment, frame shopping and family game night? There was no set of tasks more ideally suited to wandering thoughts.

But it was all falling apart. At a frustration maximum, I canceled my dentist appointment and canceled on game night. Nice, right?

You’ll be pleased to note that later I felt like a dick and went to the game night. However, despite getting video evidence of my booze-fueled sisters-in-law chest bumping during Cranium, I did not feel like a person about to eureka.

This feeling lasted into Sunday afternoon, causing a small existential crisis. God, my weekend was just so typical, and I never did anything cool and I  felt like I was waiting for life to begin. What was I doing here? (Italics go flying during existential crises.)

“I’m going to be un-mundane,” I said. “I’m going to do crazy shit and tell the amazing stories of my life to dazzled cocktail party attendees!”

Looking outside at the frozen wasteland, I added, “Or I’ll just do some creative writing.”

That was my eureka moment. Realizing that I want to write. All the time. And maybe get paid for it, someday. That was something I knew in high school, but suppressed for six years.

In those six years, I dutifully got a well-paying career, a car, and some furniture. What I did not get was happy. This weekend my horoscope showed me:

1. My personal way to happiness; and

2. My ugly cry face does not add to my look, even in DKNY frames.

That’s not bad for a horoscope calendar.

Lost, But Someday Found. Maybe.

In the midst of my New Year’s Day hangover, while groping for some Mentos gum, I rediscovered it. The horoscope-a-day calendar my mother bought me. On the front were a set of poorly drawn twins, for my star sign, Gemini.

2009 was a loser year for me. Nothing in my personal or professional life seemed to do well without my constant and fatiguing efforts. In December I thought about taking a travel writing course to escape the daily grind of decoding finance-speak, but my enthusiasm waned. After all the holiday year-end lunches, gift baskets of baffling hor d’oeuvres and office silence, my will to live had taken a beating. My interest in the course (and in waking up every morning and continuing to breathe) had fizzled

So I reached for the six-dollar calendar without hope. And there it was, January 2^nd : Focus. Something you’ve been casually thinking about could be the key to your fame and fortune.

How could I turn that down? I signed up for the course.

I immediately felt more creative and cool than I had in three months of newsletters, press releases and pointless semantics. The horoscope did not know my future, but it had some good advice.

These days I need some good advice. My fiancé is unemployed for the second time in three months. I am increasingly bored and fidgety at work. My extra-curricular activity amounts to watching movies and reading romance novels.

Today I decided to live every day of 2010 according to my six-dollar Gemini calendar. It clearly has a better grasp on life than I do. I immediately called my fiancé at home.

“This is going to sound crazy,” I said, “but can you read me my horoscope?”

He barely paused. (Thanks, honey.) “Sure. ‘There are six thousand ways you could be deploying your mental energy, so why spend it on exhuming ancient resentments? Direct it toward something productive – or at least fun.’”

Fun. At work. Right. But I had just been staring at my monitor, building up a nice foamy head of resentment over a particularly stubborn FAQ. Touché, calendar.

I took a coffee break and wrote this post. Then, since I forgot to email it to myself at home, I wrote it again just now. How can I explain how good this felt? So, so good.

Tomorrow, my calendar says I will have a eureka moment while doing something mundane, like “vacuuming the sofa cushions”. I think it’s trying to tell me to do more housework.

Shut ‘er Down: Ad Censorship

Adultery. Atheism. Junk food. Cigarettes. Fast cars. What do all these things have in common? They’re the advertising equivalent of box office poison.

I wasn’t really surprised when TTC, the Toronto Transit Commission, kiboshed a proposal from cheater-haven dating site AshleyMadison.com. With a tag line like “Life’s short. Have an affair.” you have to figure there’s an insecure mate somewhere (read: everywhere) that doesn’t want that out there. Of course, there’s also the fact that the streetcars are city-run, and while they do not necessarily endorse all the ads…well, people get  touchy when politicians have affairs, so endorsing them on public transit might not win hearts in TO.

While refusing the Ashley Madison ads was a smart PR move for the good people of the transit commission, what about  media outlets that are guns for hire? Recently, media company ClearChannel Outdoor took down an Freedom From Religion Foundation-sponsored billboard reading “Yes, Virginia… there is no God” after it netted some complaints. (In Vegas. VEGAS!)

Since ClearChannel Outdoor basically rents out their space to anyone with money and a graphic, I have to wonder if that one is personal. They have no problem displaying pictures of beer (drunk driving kills) or what appears to be an acid flashback or a very confused car. Surely, if you’re picking things that corrupt the children, beer should at least outrank disbelief in god. To be fair to ClearChannel Outdoor, they are still displaying “Heathen’s Greetings” and “Reason’s Greetings” billboards. Until someone complains, I guess.

As for junk food, cigarettes, and fast cars, we don’t want to see them either. Junk food is still in the “voluntary guidelines” rank of censorship (in the US), but cigarettes and fast cars have been blacklisted in Canadian law. That’s cold, Canada.

Back in the day, ads could do almost anything and we had to make good choices with the information available. Is that period over? Does anyone think that the same ad business that has to change or die is single-handedly driving the world to ruin?

I just can’t believe that. And most of the time, I can’t believe in ad censorship either. I like watching fast cars zip around onscreen in moves I could never hope to replicate. I like junk food and I can say no to kids who ask for it. People start smoking because of other’s behaviour, not advertising. I can’t convince you to give up religion or cheat on your spouse just because of a billboard.

Advertising can convince you to buy (or buy into) something. But it can’t do that unless that something fulfills a need you think you have. Instead of asking, why do these ads promote things I disapprove of, ask why the need for that product or service exists. Then solve that problem.