A Habit I Wish I Didn't Have

The title clearly states my topic. I am going to talk more about my personality today. More specifically, my habit of not being very open to personal topics. I'm not talking personal as in super personal. I'm talking personal as in daily life. In a sense I am a very boring person because when someone touches too much on a topic that might be a bit personal I right aways shy away.

Them: 'Hey. Do you run?'

Me, to me: If I tell them go on a jog almost every morning, they might think I'm doing it to lose weight or something and that's not a topic I want to discuss with this  person. Besides, I don't really run I just go on a short jogs almost every day.

Me, to them, after a long pause: 'No.'

End of discussion. Not a very long or interesting one, and afterwards I kick myself because who cares if everybody knows I do a small amount of jogging or whatever it is that people are asking me. I think that people can sense that about me even when they are meeting me for the first time and most people don't try much more than the nicities with me. I guess I'm a bit hard to get to know that way. I don't really ask people about their 'personal' lives either. I'm not one for starting lots of conversations unless it's about me. I feel weird asking my friends specifics about their jobs or exclaiming to my Granny that I saw that her tomatoes were starting to turn red already.

Sometimes I almost forget myself and start a conversation with someone about somewhere I've been and she's going and then suddenly I'm actually in a conversation and have to keep up my side of it and I start silently panicing and then I clam up and feel all selfconcious and quickly put an end to the conversation because I'm actually having a good conversatiom so why would keep that up!

Excuse the run on sentence. I'm (hopefully) going to be a teacher in a few weeks. I'll have to learn not to get so long winded when I'm writing.

And that, my friends, is the post of the week. Written and posted at the last possible moment. Well technically it is about 5 minutes late already, and as I am already lying in bed I will post it without proofreading and go to sleep and maybe fix it up another day.

Ten Years Later

This week's topic is a broad one. I am to write about a memory. I thought of a lot of memories over the passed few days but none of them had any real story or meaning to them. Just passing moments of my childhood that have stuck in my mind. I did come up with something tho. I'll see where it takes us.

I was a few days shy of 11 when we arrived home from our home in Central Africa. We had spent almost 5 of the previous 6 or 7 years there and I had it in my head that that was home. I wondered what Canada was like and I was eager to come back but that walled, red dirt compound was my home. My friends were all dark skinned. My life was simple. Sometimes I had to help unload groceries after a long day in town when all I wanted to do was fall into bed and sleep but that was about the extent of my worries. I attended school a few mornings a week and the rest of my days were spent playing ball outside our compoud gate, or driving for hours to spend what felt like a few minutes visiting some friend or friends of friends in distant villages, or drinking tea with and eating brown sugared rice with the night watchman. Oh those blissful evenings sitting out under the stars with our friends or sticking our head out the window to feel the cool evening breeze, singing those Chichewa songs by memory. That's what I remember.

And then we came home. I don't remember much of the coming home prep but suddenly we were home and eventually the newness wore off and I had to learn a new life here is Canada. Where nobody waved because vehicles and white skin weren't a novelty. Where I had to find a place in the group of a few white girls and moany white boys who had spent the last few years of their lives together instead of in far off distant lands where any number of dark skinned children wanted to be your friend. Where second hand clothes were perhaps scorned and a lot of money was spent on new clothes. I remember crying myself to sleep many nights because this just did not feel like home. I wanted to go back to my easy, sunbleached life in the Warm Heart of Africa. I remember waiting for my sisters outside of some stores in the mall, wishing instead for piles of clothes on plastic tarps on the ground to sift through.

Slowly those feelings wore off and I became used to my new life. It's been 10 years since I left one home for the other. I have had more people come into my life and then leave again, taking more pieces of my heart away from me. I have passed those stores that I used to scorn and refuse to go in to and now I wouldn't dain to enter those stores for the opposite reason. I now live a life where there's things go wrong all the time and I realize that I will have had bad days in my childhood days in Malawi, those just aren't the times I remember. Instead I've got the good memories. Giggling with friends with whom I shared only a few common words, singing the starlit evenings away, living my life to its fullest.

Happy

What Makes Me Happy

• What makes me happy? I used to write 'Thankful Lists' once every few weeks. I still get them from my sister sometimes and they themselves make me feel happy. I don't write thankful lists with items like 'my existence in a community where I am loved and accepted for who I am, yet corrected when I have stepped out of line' or 'the balance of natural and man-made creations, resulting in an ease filled life.' I'm not saying my sister does either. Her thankful lists are definitely a lot deeper than mine but they don't sound corny like my examples.

Here I go again. Procrastinating. Elaborating on something that should be simple.

The happy list of my day/week/year/life

•Sewing - the new dresses I cannot leave in my closet til the day of the event they were sewed for, the bookmarks, bags, quilts, shirts, etc. I make with many scraps I have accumulated, my beloved little sewing machine that finally quit a few months ago. I made it work hard for 5 years.

•Long quiet drives. Just me, the road, and my book. Meandering down dark city lanes or lonely gravel roads. Long quiet hours. Just me, my thoughts, my book, wandering down the driveway on a lazy Sunday afternoon or winging dreamily in my hammock.

•2-year-olds who wrap their arms around you, their little hand absentmindedly patting your back, who run to the door when they see your car coming down the driveway and open the door, grinning at you. Who can talk a blue streak without real words. Who get very excited tones in their voice and point their little fingers at the 'mume' (moon) whenever they can see it.

•Deliciousness like cheesecakes and brie with maple bacon and goat cheese and pesto and corn dip and generally anything creamcheesey or just cheesey.

•The time of evening when the sun leaves us for the day and the sky lights up in a different rainbow of colors every evening. And then the stars. The dark. The 'mume'. Give me a small fire, a few people to softly chatter and laugh in the backround, and a sky full of stars and I'm happy. Or the few early hours of an exceedingly warm day and small patch of Rapids to stare and wonder at.

•Playing baseball or volleyball or hockey with my friends. There's competition and encouragement but no real boohing when someone messes up. Sitting around the fire with them, singing, chatting, joking. These are the people who I've grown up with. We've been friends <or frenemies> since we were kids and we know each others' quirks and oddities and we enjoy their presence because of that.

•My two jobs.
    -Mowing lawns for people I only know by how they keep their yards. Dripping with sweat on somedays (feels like +39) and dripping with rain on other days when the clouds unexpectedly decide to open upon us and force us into the trailer for a few minutes. I love being able to spend at least a few of my days outside.
    -The last three days of my week are spent in an office, answering phones and cleaning and doing anything small-business receptionists do. I didn't like the job at first but I have become a lot more comfortable with my coworkers and the aspects of the job and have been given more responsibilities as my abilities have magnified and I am happy to have this job with these people. I have actually sometimes started to look forward to the phone ringing.

• Family time in the form of a 6 hour truck ride, the girls in the back, giggling over things that most of us would just have rolled our eyes at had we not been riding together for a few hours. My sister who made herself at home in our house that used to also be hers and helped herself to my closet for the afternoon cuz she knew I wouldn't care. My other sister who comes from a bit farther and does the same thing, for a bit longer. And the days and evenings I spend yammering to them and they have no other choice but to listen.