just bad timing

Tag: work

  • Christine In Twenty Eighteen

    On becoming Christine.

    It has been an interesting time, coming into 2018. Just Bad Timing is becoming a physical thing in less than a month and I think I’m going to have postpartum after it does.

    As you might know, Christine is my pen name. Except that some people now know that I am Christine. I’m having a hard time coming to grips with that. A lot of people have asked me if it’s changed people’s behaviour towards me, the facts they’ve learned here. Of course it has! Mostly in a good way. I get to have deep and meaningful conversations with more people than ever! Yet sexually, it’s done something a little odd.

    I did this insidious thing: I connected my personal Tinder to Christine’s Instagram. Talk about a way to get views and warp your gender stats! So now, on top of five super strategically angled pictures, Tinder dudes have access to justbadtiming. “Maybe I can be your next chapter?” I never thought this would be a recurrent pickup line!

    To be honest, I’m a little over the whole Tinder, ONS craze. I will never really be over it as long as I don’t pick a place to settle down, because you know, a girl’s gotta eat. I do however really feel tired of the whole game. I know I can pick up, I know the sex can be surprisingly good (or bad). It’s feeling like the same night over and over again, with slight variations. This is the problem with the game. Once you have enough market research under your belt, you spend your nights waiting for someone to surprise you.

    After trying so hard to be calculated, to be smart, to market myself over the past couple of months, I sit in front of this blank page again, drinking cold coffee, deeply unsatisfied.

    I don’t even know what to think anymore. Throughout the editing process for the book, I have had to go over my life, my decisions, my mistakes, over and over again. The rollercoasters, I’m told make for great story-telling. “Tell us more about that fight”, I’m asked. What is it about human misery, or about someone’s ability to take shit, that is so relatable?

    I have also had to prepare real people for some of the content in my book. No one prepares you for these conversations, especially when you didn’t expect to have to have them. In these conversations, I have had to defend myself, defend my choice to tell the story, defend my plea for vulnerability. How do you do that when you are presently uncomfortable with your own weakness? You push through it. You have to, no one else will.

    So you go home after a long night of explaining why you don’t have a house, why everything you own fits in your suitcase, why you have no money in your bank account, why you want the world to know your secrets… You go home and you sit there in front of a screen, ready to further the cycle.

    And all you can think about, while looking into your reflection, is how you wish someone was there to stroke your hair, to kiss your shoulder or the top of your head, and whisper: “you can do this.”

    It’s a stupid thought really. It’s not like I have anyone in particular in mind. And even if I did, what would I really do about it? Stay, go, leap? I’m craving those instant perfect connections which don’t really exist. The ones that do, they take a long time and building skills. I’m not that girl yet. I’m the girl with the suitcase, waiting to be swept of her feet in some hidden corner of her brain. Yuk, why?

    Why can’t I wish the rollercoasters away? I am trying really hard to be grateful for the glimpses of happiness, for the moments of connection. I am trying to take them as signs of hope, that it’s not so hard to find someone to connect with, that these people who get me, exist. But I’m failing. I’m failing, because I’m tired. I’m tired of having to go the hard way around. I’m tired of being one of those people who will have to go through hell to deserve what some people just stumble upon.

    Or is there such a thing as stumbling upon happiness? Do we just portray ourselves that way, not to let people glimpse into the hardships? After witnessing two “perfect” marriages this week, in their fifth decades of common living, I started to think it was just a relic of the past. Then, I spent more time talking to them, delving into said “perfect” relationships. Both of these women went through hell and back with their husbands. Liam and I’s relationship looks like a walk in the freaking park next to those. That made me feel even more defeated, a coward crippled by egotism.

    I can feel that “expected disappointment” rearing its ugly head and I don’t like it. I am sick of feeling like I need to reassess my decisions, my choices, my life. Can’t someone just want to fit into it? I know this wishful thinking isn’t helpful; I can’t help myself. Doesn’t everyone go through this?

    What are these glimpses for? What do these hyper-fast connections mean? What am I meant to learn from them? Fuck. Can’t one of them just surprise me, and be at least close to my level of crazy? My life feels like driving an old manual car in traffic: stop, start, stall, stop, start, stop, stall, start, stop, sigh. When’s the highway? When do I get to stick my hand out the window, play with the air, feel the wind in my hair and the sun on my face, while I grin stupidly, thinking: “how did I ever get this lucky?”

    “Why did I meet you now?!?!”, exclaimed the last perfect crush. He seems so perfect for me, it hurts sometimes. Dude, I don’t fucking know. I ask myself that on a regular basis, about many of you. Of course, I didn’t say that. I just asked when he would have wanted to meet me. “I don’t know. Earlier?” Well, yeah. But that doesn’t help does it?

    Just when I’m okay with being alone, just when I decide I don’t have to have sex all the time, I can take a break, that’s when I make an impulse decision to take a chance and end up on a perfect date with an impossible guy. Or am I the impossible girl?

    I’m sorry, you’re catching me on a bad day. Most of the time lately I’m good. I’m strong and ambitious and convinced I will succeed. The other twenty-five percent, fine, forty percent of the time, I’m pushing through. I’m putting a smile, my reading glasses and my brave face on.

    “Let’s do this, let’s conquer the world,” I say to myself, as though talking in the plural makes me less alone. I have to be mindful of the intention I’m gonna set for myself this year, it might just come true.

     

    “What is it that you want?”

     

     

    ***

     

    Welcome back my darlings, thanks for still reading. Watch out for the upcoming pre-release of Just Bad Timing, and for cool marketing stuff. 2018 Christine is here to get more naked than ever!

    Yours with all my heart,

    C.

     

  • Chapter Nineteen – The Roaring Twenties

    The blank page, a writer’s worst enemy, today stares at me impeccably mirroring the state of my life. “So what’s new?” “Nothing, I hate my job, my life is bleak and I want to run away…” I have been hearing myself repeating this over and over for the past 6 months. I feel like I am being strangled, and I need to physically cough it out. I cannot believe where I am sitting and the ordinary nature of it all.

    In fact, there have been a lot of changes in my life recently. And no, it is not Liam hurting me again, but thank you for the assumption. In fact, our relationship is going better than I ever could have expected. We are happy. Liam and I have been living together. We met each other’s families on two separates trips. Yes, we get on each other’s nerves and yes, we could be having more sex. Relationships are never perfect, but this is pretty close. The trust is being re-built every day a little bit more and we made space for our respective personalities. I also officially graduated, moved to a downtown apartment and started wearing suits. A lot is new in my life.

    Yet here I am, gasping for air. I have not written a single word in over 7 months. I am working at an HR company, Monday to Friday, 8-4. It is eating my soul away. I have reasons for this pitiful job, with its pitiful pay. It would go great on my resume, and allow me to get my immigration papers sorted. Yet I cannot come to terms that this would be my life. Your twenties are for trying things out, exploring and being broke, they said. Well here I am, in the midst of them, and that is not my reality. “Do whatever you want” really means find a job that you can survive at. It means find a job that shows progression in your life. Do not stall! Grow!

    Fuck that. Let’s do the math together shall we? As a recruiter, I cannot seriously consider candidates with less than a year at each job for simple retail positions. That means that in my last 5 years of my twenties I have 5 things, 5 jobs, that I can try before my body clock starts ticking louder and I start considering life choices that I will not longer selfishly be at the heart of. Wow. That is not soul searching, that is bullshit. I want to waste away the time with loving every minute, and that in our day and age is not sustainable.

    I want to go back to school. I want to travel. I want to drink the day away. I want to sit in a hammock and look at all the freedom I have left to spare. Instead, last weekend I spent two days trying to think of a place where I could go sit in the sun, write, drink and smoke in peace, and even that seemed impossible on this damned continent. I had no money to go away, and if I did, I would not even be granted the time to do so. That summer in Croatia spent living seemed so unattainable and I hate feeling this way. This is not growth; this is stalling. My T4 may be the only thing showing improvement since all I do is work, but my heart and soul, I can feel them shrinking.

    Liam and I went to visit my family in Europe for two meager weeks and I was very happy for those brief 15 days. I did not foresee that they would invite sorrow into my soul. I had these plans after university, to write and live off bohemian positions, earning enough to get by, somewhere in the world. I had this vision of myself in a long flowy skirt and sunglasses, sitting at a frail patio table. Liam would come to meet me for an aperitif after work and we would revel in fresh summery foods. I could see him walking towards me from a distance. He would take off his sunglasses, just to put this little soft kiss on my lips. “Hi bébé, how was your day?” This could be my life.

    Instead I am living in Vancouver, working to be able to stay, not knowing whether that is something I even want. Liam and I are talking about uprooting ourselves, living in Europe, where that easier life can be found. Something always comes in our way. I want to be able to come back if I so choose, thanks to my university and not a shotgun wedding. That requires time and a real job, and so much paperwork. He wants to see if that promotion will happen and try to finish night school. Things would develop one way or the other in the next 6-8months, but what if they don’t?

    This is not how I want to live my life. “Oh, I see what you are going through,” said Sam. “You’re in post-university crisis! During those four years, everyone had been admiring your brains. Your grades served as approval, congratulating you on your efforts. And now, you’re on your own honey! It’s not the same.” Thank Sam! I knew I could count on you. She was right. Life was telling me to shut my pretty little brains up and keep my head down. This politically correct pretend game was the boa constrictor to my soul.

    –  Good morning! How are you?

    –  Amazing!! How are you??

    –  Well, let’s see. It’s 7.30a.m on a Tuesday and I’m at work. I am awake; I showed up. That’s all you’ll get from me.

    You can imagine this does not go well in the corporate world. After being called out twice in four months for negativity, I sincerely started wondering if I was being negative. It seems that my critical skills, that I spent so much time and money perfecting, were now coming across as negativity. Granted, I hate being there so it probably shows to a certain extent. More worrisome to me, is the fact that even in my worst bartending gigs, I was always complimented on my bubbly personality. “How do you manage to smile like that all the time? I don’t know Hun’, maybe it’s just seeing you! What can I getcha?”

    It seems that now, even the little things I used to do have lost a little bit of their sparkle. I used to sit at my kitchen table at UBC looking out the window, smiling as people walked on by beneath me, wondering what their lives were like. That nerdy guy with the backpack, did he have a girlfriend? That girl I saw everywhere, why did she seem so sad? I was curious and still am. I just seem to have lost that little Christine thing and it is scaring me. This is also why I am anxious about waiting to see how plans pan out. What if I have in fact become this boring and negative woman, permanently unhappy? I can handle being broke. I can handle heartache. I can handle Sudbina being thrown at me. I cannot seem to handle idling. I have by all first world standards absolutely nothing to complain about. Yet, I feel that this cannot be it. My life has to hold more sparkle than this; there had to be more bliss in store for me.

    I cannot even bring myself to talk about these things with some of my friends. Fucking brat, is what Lola* said to me. Lola had that Irish twang that made everything sound that much harsher. She had a path. She was working as an interior designer, after having studied just that. This is what she had to say when I showed up at her door, crying about my job: “Granted the pay is shit but I love my job!” She always had just the words, that bitch. She was very realistic and told me how lucky we were to have the possibility of hating our jobs. Most people had it much worse. I said I was not most people. Lola looked at me like, poor puppet with her big girl problems, and buried my head in her enormous, comforting breasts. Lola is right. Yet even she knows that I am supposed to be doing other things, things that make me happy. That’s the key isn’t it? If you have all the necessary means of survival, it seems that happiness is the ultimate luxury. Yet a part of me knows that toying with the ability to survive, taking chances that may see you losing it all, brings you that much closer to a faster heart rate and a bigger smile.