Spinning around to reach full circle

Call it coming full circle or something.

I opened up my computer, deciding again to write. I then looked at that plane shaped icon on the monitor in front of me, to find I am once again hovering over Lake Michigan, 37,000 feet this time. And Wild World started playing in my ears once again.

And my head is all muddled.

Perhaps I expected these trips to help resolve all this uncertainty, this stomach tightening ambiguity that makes what used to be statements suddenly become punctuated with huge bold question marks. But there was no real epiphany. None of those movie-perfect revelations in it all becomes clear, that this is where I’m supposed to be.

I briefly thought I might have found it in one city, navigating through deliciously pulsating neighbourhoods. As I tend to do when I develop a crush on a city, I began the detailed process of imagining myself living on the 5^th floor of a specific building and deciding where I would shop for groceries. It didn’t hurt that the placement I was interviewing for looked absolutely dreamy on paper. But it wasn’t so swoonworthy in the pain in the ass world we call reality. It felt overly competitive, painfully bureaucratic, yet hypocritically disorganized.

And then the programs that made me especially giddy are in cities without that spark. One is a city I already spent a handful of years in, which, though convenient and reasonably effortless, seems devoid of any sense of adventure. And one is just really damn cold.

So, while there is clearly some indication of the right direction to go, I kind of hoped I wouldn’t have to go through that painful formalized step-by-step decision making process. I wanted to just know.

Really, though, this is such a silly debate this is to be having with myself. I still could end up at any of them, and I could make my own little life there for a year. I would learn immense amounts from any of them, and it would still be a pretty epic success to end up at any of them. And, after all, it is just a year.

I think I need to come to terms that major life choices don't operate like the quintessential lightbulb above the head. They are never so clear and instantaneous. Real life doesn't operate by love-at-first-sight rules.

Love harder

Our plea:

Our friend Brandy is a brilliant writer, a wonderful teacher, and a generous friend. And she is in love with a man who has just been diagnosed with multiple myeloma.

We are raising money for the Multiple Myeloma Research Fund in his name. For the price of a cinnamon dolce latte, half-caf, hold the whip, you can be part of an effort to cure a disease that affects approximately 750,000 people worldwide.

http://www.loveharder.org

Every dollar brings us a dollar closer to a cure. And every donation brings a sliver of hope to a girl who needs all the hope she can get.

Love Harder,
Princess Pointful


What You Can Do

• Give. Be part of a worldwide effort to cure a disease that affects approximately 750,000 people worldwide. Every dollar helps.
  
  
• Pass it on. Forward this story to five people. Share this blog post. Become our fan on Facebook.
  
  
• Love harder. Life is short, love is unbending, and no one knows what could happen next. Tell someone you love them today.
  

Where Your Money Goes

• The American Institute of Philanthropy recently named The Multiple Myeloma Research Foundationone of the best organizations to give to in terms of their accountability and use of resources.
  
  
• By working closely with researchers, clinicians and partners in the biotech and pharmaceutical industry, the MMRF has helped bring multiple myeloma patients four new treatments that are extending lives around the globe.
  
  
• The MMRF has advanced twenty Phase I and Phase II clinical trials. They need your support to advance these clinical research programs and accelerate the development of better, more effective treatments.
  
  
• The MMRF's Multiple Myeloma Genomics Initiative recently became the first to sequence the multiple myeloma whole genome in its entirety.
  
  
• A whopping 98% of your donation to the MMRF will be used immediately to support high-priority multiple myeloma research.
  
  
• With diminishing funding for early stage drug development and the next myeloma treatments not expected to be approved until 2011, the MMRF desperately needs your help.
  

So far, an amazing $2000 has been raised today alone by people like you! Please continue this wonderful trend!

Love to the internetz, the amazing Lilu and Laurie for all their hard work on this project, and the wonderful Brandy (who's story you can also find here).

PS. Brandy and your Hot Awesome Dude... this one's for you. Love, The Internet.

32,000 feet over Lake Michigan

It’s an odd thing when flying becomes so routine that the fact that you are hovering 32,000 feet over Lake Michigan isn’t the slightest bit daunting. It seems perfectly natural to be suspended in space, eating complementary Bits and Bites and watching your vessel’s progress via an airplane shapes icon in front of you on a 5 inch by 5 inch screen.

Until I graduated from high school, I had only taken a single round trip on an airplane at the age of 6. At 17, I took my second such trip, and spent the entire voyage in awe, nose pressed against the glass, marveling at the consistency of the clouds and speed at which the building became full-sized again. In the just over 10 years since high school, my number of flights have skyrocketed. I have four such round trips in this month period. I sit in my compact grey seat, not skipping a beat on my keyboard as the world flies past me at 500 mph.

How on earth did this life ever become so normal to me?

I remember at 19, two weeks before I was set to leave my hometown for a big city university, my then boyfriend and I took a road trip to find an apartment. I had never been to this sprawled out on the prairies city before. We had left after work, and, as such, were driving under the big night sky. Each time we came upon a new smattering of lights, I would look at him expectantly.

“No, that’s not it,” he’d say. “You’ll know when it is.”

And I did. The sky exploded in scattered orange lights, covering the horizon. I couldn’t believe that one of those lights would somehow become my light.

Sometimes I can’t believe that this girl who learned to rollerblade in the yellow church’s parking lot and thought that excitement was going to the nearby town with a McDonald’s is the same one negotiating trains in cities of millions and flying across the country by herself to go to interviews.

It’s hard to map out exactly how these changes happen. They just do. And it is often only by virtue of being able to compare yourself to your memories that you realize how much you’ve changed. The Duke recently told me I was one of the most independent people he knew. This set off a feeling of minor triumph in my head, for I never used to be independent. I used to be downright gloomy about the idea of doing things alone, maybe even clingy, certainly naïve. And now I'm not. I don't quite know how.

I just know that 32,000 feet above Lake Michigan on my way to a hotel in a city I've never been to but might move to anyhow isn't nearly as scary as my 19 year old self would have thought.

(Oddly enough, as I type this, the playlist he made me for my travels sings into my ears, the one he forbade me to look at before hitting play. Song four is Wild World by Cat Stevens.)

Little sister

My little sister is getting married. True to her, it is happening in cyclone-like fashion. Move in after 2 months, engaged at a year, marrying 6 months after that. If it was anyone but her, I may be out of breath, especially in comparison to what may seem like my slow-and-steady tortoise like pace through similar choices. But, over the past year or so, I've had to come to accept that this is just who she is, how she operates, even if it seems foreign to me.

The main thing is that she is happy-- which she is.

I sometimes think that the differences between my sister and I were somehow created by everyone else's need to dichotomize us, rather than any inherent variability. The more automatic aspects of us are eerily alike- the way we speak, our sense of humour, our mannerisms, our smile, our clumsiness. But at a young age, my tendencies to voraciously read and hers to dress up in pouffy dresses for the most minimal of occasions were somehow magnified. I became the smart one. She became the pretty one.

Somehow everyone became invested in maintaining those categories. Despite the fact that we regularly become mistaken for twins, I was always more insecure, more critical when I looked in the mirror. Despite her almost constant appearance on the honour roll, she never considered going to university. I make practical decisions, she makes spontaneous ones. She spends money, I save. Despite being three years younger than me, she had boyfriends with cars before I did.

It sometimes feels like she got to make the mistakes I was always too scared to make.

We're living pretty different lives these days. After five years in a big city, including a few changes in direction, and a big heartbreak, she decided that a small town is where she wants to be. And so, she's back in our hometown, getting married, living in a big beautiful home, and likely to start a family very soon. I don't know where I'm going to be living by the end this year, let alone the year after that, although I will be in the city. My life may seem a lot more jet-setting, in some ways, with me about to embark on another cross-country zigzagging trip, with a end of the month conference in Las Vegas, but it is also a lot more modest, given that I have yet to move out of one-bedroom apartment territory. I'm with my big love, too, but despite being together for much longer that her and her fiancee, a wedding is still far in the future, with other practicalities getting in the way.

Despite the fork somewhere in our paths, though, there's still a thick rope stretching across that distance that neither of us want to, or could, shake. When she's hurting, her first instinct is still to hop a plane and fly my way. And for me, she'll always have the spirit of that 12 year old who called my 16-year old boyfriend to scold him for treating me badly.

She sometimes hurts me more than she realizes, not because of malice, but rather than she occasionally forgets that she needs to slip her feet into my shoes for an instant, as they do fit a lot differently. She did so recently, and it still feels more raw than I would like to admit. But I still couldn't help but tear up as she twirled around, beaming, clutching a bouquet in what will be her wedding dress outside the dressing room. Hurt goes away, after all-- but she won't.

Quote of the day- New Years Eve edition

"Celine Dion is basically the White Canadian Puff Daddy."

(I leave it to all of you to brainstorm the similarities. Alcohol may help the process along. And, please, spare me the update on Puffy's latest name.)