It's funny to me to read these posts today. My resolution to "blog" lasted a great and noteworthy 48 hours and I was so full of positive outlook and homesickness for what I left behind. And now, two years later, I'm back from whence I came. Back to those mountains and shorelines of my memories, back to the friends and family who I missed so much and now I can't help but feel homesick for what I left behind.

Opportunity. Mystery. Anonymity.

I have some of that here too. But mostly because people have forgotten who I was in my absence.

When I left home in 2007 for the next chapter of my life, I left a mom and dad, a sister and a brother-in-law, a grandma and grandpa, friends and love interests and neighbourhood that would colour my imagination with landmarks and memories of good times.

When I returned in the last days of 2010, I came back to that same neighbourhood and my favourite breakfast place had burned down and 200 new condos had been built to replace it. My friends are engaged and married and mothers and fathers. My sister and brother-in-law are now a family of four and there are always toys under my feet in their living room. My grandpa is dead and my grandma has shrunk another two inches. My mom is retired and my dad has cancer.

And so it goes.

I try to wrap my head around the changes but there are so many to take in all at once so I instead try to focus on smaller things. The snow on the mountains is whiter than it was during the Olympics. The homeless guy with the bike got a new pair of ski boots. The baby I held and looked at in awe and disbelief is now in preschool and can ride a small scooter. The house with the creepy mannequin heads in the window is still standing, but slanting even more threateningly to the left. My dad who used to fix cars and hang Christmas lights can barely walk to the kitchen to make his coffee. The grandpa who used to spell my name wrong on my birthday cheque is now a plastic poppy and a paper pamphlet of a funeral I couldn't attend.

When I moved away, I took all my things with me. Clumsily packed duffel bags and panicked parcels of papers, old birthday cards and letters from men whose smell I can no longer remember. I thought in order to start somewhere new I needed all the remembrances of days gone by, things to remind me of who I was.

When I moved back, I threw away most of those things. They were on their own adventure, they didn't need to return to the same musty basement I had taken them from. They were meant to comfort me but I wasn't sure they had another cross-country trip left in their tired folds of carefully worded sentiments. Plus, I no longer felt the need to be reminded of where I was from because, as it turned out, where I was from never really went anywhere, it just changed clothes, got some grey hair and slowed down a bit. It grew up, it grew tired and it grew out of it's childish ways. It grew on top of its own cells and took over what I remembered and turned it into a new reality. One where I'm in charge of fixing my own car and hanging up the Christmas lights. Where I have to make the coffee and pick up the grandchildren. I have to imagine my life in all sorts of new ways I thought I had years yet to figure out. I have to stop myself from crying at every test result and second opinion. I have to say hello and have it not mean goodbye. I have to say I Love You and have it not sound like eulogy. I have to look into tired eyes who feel more pain then they ever have before and say I Hope You Feel Better Tomorrow when really I'm just angry all the time.

Angry that I had to come home for this. That this dictates my life. Of all the things that can decide where I live, how I feel and when I choose to be with the people I love, it has to be this. This thing that I hate. This thing that I hate more than global warming and SUV's and people who don't recycle. This thing that has become so normal in my family and such a part of our everyday speech and sentiment. This thing that is so ugly and mean, it just takes whatever it wants and leaves us to deal with whatever it leaves behind.

Every time I get a headache, I think I'm next. With every swollen gland or sharp pain or dizzying cough I think it's found me too. Long nights of itchy eyes and restless legs give way to too many nights of Internet diagnoses and late-night self prescriptions.

Outside there is snow. More snow than this side of the country has seen for a long time. Tonight, I feel connected to that other home I left behind as it too is gently zipped into it's own sleeping bag of white cotton. But there, the sun is about to come up and dazzle the day with sparkles of silver and blinding white. I envy that place because their night has already ended and their future is that much closer to unfolding.

Tonight I sit in a borrowed house full of borrowed things and I wait to feel like I'm home. I wait for the things I love and remember to either come back or change into something I like a little better. I wait for the snow to clear so I won't have to face the idea of letting someone else put my winter tires on for me. I wait for next Christmas so I won't have to take the lights down.

It feels like we just put them up.

Girl Dates.

I just had a girl date.

The thing I forget about when I'm dating someone is how important it is to have girl dates. It doesn't always have to be "girls night out" with pink martinis called things like "man eater" or slumber parties with pillow fights and manicures.

In fact it shouldn't ever be like that beacause that is gross.

Good girl dates are ones over pitchers of beer and nachos covered in failed new-year's resolutions. It's about a date where you don't have to say anything clever, or look particularily nice or make sure you're wearing matching underwear.

You just have to talk and listen and laugh and understand and revel in the fact that you're not alone in all the bullshit your life may seem to offer. And though you probably won't get laid at the end of the night, you can have a smile on your face and maybe figured out a thing or two.

I miss my girlfriends a lot these days and I have found myself propositioning female acquaintances, my boyfriend's friends' girlfriends, girls I work with, girls I "work out" with and just about anyone with a vagina in hopes they'll be my new best friend.

I even toyed with the idea of answering an ad on Craigslist in the "Strictly Platonic" area knowing that these girls looking for friends are no different than me...we're all just lonely sometimes and need a girl to listen to us because our boyfriends will just think we're emotional...or menstruating.

I'm new to this city and although I know a lot of people here, many of them girls, people in this town are notoriously busy. I made a date with a girl friend here and had to book almost 3 weeks in advance. I was in her "icalendar". I was part of her schedule like going to the dentist or getting a bikini wax. Neither of those being fun times. Definitely no beer or nachos there.

I have two best friends. Well, 3 if you count childhood friends. Well, 4 because now I don't want anyone to feel left out. In my 20's, let's say, I have 2 best friends. One is back home in Vancouver and one lives in Chicago. Neither can swing by for tea on a Wednesday afternoon or hit up Winners to buy things out of boredom. They are far away and I miss them.

My boyfriend is wonderful but even he, in all his sensitivity and awesomeness, probably wouldn't have watched "He's Just Not that Into You" with me. Instead, I watched it alone, on the internet, in the bath tub, drinking wine. And I won't lie... i liked it.

Last night I talked to Chicago for an hour and a half, the day before was emails to Vancouver (she's visiting soon and I'm so excited) but even technology and all its video chats, IM's and text messages, nothing really beats the late night talks with cups of tea and afternoon window shopping with take out coffees. And Sunday brunches with eggs benedict and too much hollandaise. And red wine stained musings about boys. And tear stained musings about boys. And grass stained musings about boys...and well, the theme continues.

I miss the girls who know every crack in every broken heart I've had and every word from every love song I've ever slow danced to. These are the truest friends I'll ever have and it's hard to find that connection and the time it demands now as the snow ball starts to gather down the mountainside of my youth.

We're just so busy. Well, some of us are.

Others have time to write about it.

But tonight I am happy to be full of nachos, new year's resolutions, beer and stories from a new friend.

trying new things.

March 30th 2009,

Blogging is strange. I've avoided it for so long, actual blooging but now it seems like maybe it's a good way to keep me writing. But today is for trying new things.

Imagine what the world would've been like if Anne Frank had a blog instead of a diary, or just kept everyone updated on twitter? not quite the same, is it.

But when i was little i always secretly wished someone would read my diary, because it was always written for an audience...most of it was probably fiction after all.

As i write this, I'm cooking pea soup on the stove in my downtown Toronto apartment. It's one of my favourite comfort foods that until this afternoon, i had forgotten i knew how to make. My house smells of garlic and chicken stock and smokey sausages. My cat, Dora, seems to be a perplexed as there is rarely food smells coming from the kitchen these days, unless you count cereal or toast.

Living downtown is new for me. I've always lived in the suburbs or in quiet residential neighbourhoods full of babies in 4x4 strollers and moms in running shoes and yoga pants. Here, it's noisy and loud, full of cars, people yelling at odd hours and at odd people, dogs barking and taxis honking at each other. It's exciting every time a bus drives by and makes my windows shake because it means I am really here, really doing this.

I never thought I would live in Toronto. This far away from my family, my oldest friend, my home, my mountains, my ocean, my first kiss, my first school and the people who love me the best. But here I am. It feels good, but every few weeks, the ties that bind me there still tug at me and say "When are you coming home?". The ocean calls and says " I can sail you here on the high tide" and the Western Wind offers to give me a lift on it's warm currents of homesickness.

But I keep telling them I'm not ready yet. This concrete city made of steel and neon has something to teach me and a present hidden behind it's back. It won't let me see it yet, but I bet it's a good one. I have good feelings about it. Besides, coming here has given me new friends, my new cat (she's a true Ontarian having grown up on the tough streets of St. Mary's), people in the theatre seem to give me the time of day here and I've managed to get me a boyfriend, after having long given up on the idea of all that.

So all in all, it seems to be working out.

I can call myself a working actor here...not just a waitress who aspires to be an actor, even now that I'm between contracts I can say that I'm an out-of-work actor who aspires to be a waitress...I could use the money for sure since 8 weeks of serving pays more than last contract.

Other new things include a fitness class that I started taking today. I'm "working out". I can't seem to write it, even say it without the use of quotes or the dreaded finger variety thereof.
"Working Out". So lame. I'm in a class designed by a dancer named Eva who wears eyeliner at 10 am and chooses to "work out" for a living. My personal idea of hell. The class wasn't so bad, except for my inability to understand choreography, balance, coordination and form not to mention my red-faced, feeble attempts at doing push ups and my bandy legs going every which but the way they're supposed to go.

I capped off the first day of new weekly "work out" by getting a new haircut which makes me look like a Lesbian which wouldn't be so bad, but given the neighbourhood i live in, could prove problematic and then I promptly spent the rest of the day sitting on the couch feeling my insides seize up from usage and napping because I ran out of thoughts to think.

The nap was interesting as my neighbour, who we call Benny Bongos, was in the middle of his daily Bongo practice which usually goes from 5:30 to 6. He's not very good, but over the 4 months I've lived here i have marked a genuine improvement in his bongo styling. I still loathe the Bongos and think them to one of man's lamer inventions, but all in all, it could be worse, he could play the tiny saxophone like Kenny G or be an avid Karaoke devotee like my former Filipino landlords or the gays down the hall who like to rock out Whitney Houston on Thursday nights.

My soup is done and my home smells like I'm 6 and mom has taken us to the Polish deli at the mall. I get a small bowl, which to me is huge, of creamy green soup with bits of random, fat sausages off the ends of what they sold the day before. Leanne gets chicken noodle soup and Mom gets Borscht with a big dollop of sour cream that turns her soup pink. I spread the butter thick on my white crusty bun with the knot on top (I always eat the knot first) and I dip the rest into the soup. It tastes like a memory of an ethnic grandmother I never had cooking me traditions of a place I've never been connected to. But my waspiness doesn't contradict my hunger for good tastes from the Old Country...even if it's not my old country.

My concoction will not stand alone in my memories as a life altering moment in time but it will fill that void that I feel on nights like this. But with my abdominal muscles tightening by the second, the sound of my cat snoring, the waiting for my boyfriend to call and say goodnight and the sound of the traffic outside all combined with the soup bubbling on the stove remind me that I belong here for now. This is the path I'm on and it's going to take me somewhere new. And one day I'll look back on all this as the beginning of that next big thing.