Thoughts From Suburbia

As a kid growing up in the middle of nowhere, I've often wished to live in the city. There is sometimes an overwhelming feeling that everyone else lives somewhere cool and I just got the short end of the geographical stick.

So when I was preparing to make a trip down to the Bay Area, even though I'd been warned that this particular place was boring, cookie-cutter suburbia, to tell you the truth I couldn't quite believe it. Because it's the Bay! Everything there is city! I mean, someone talks about that being boring in the same way that people anywhere talk about their hometown, right?

Nope. Not in this case. This was essentially a couple strip malls and chunks of residential areas plopped in the middle of farmland and given a name.

I used to think that if my hometown got a Wal-Mart or some other cool store suddenly everything would be more interesting, but as I looked out at a sea of chain stores I realized that there still wasn't anything to do. Lots of things to consume, but not a whole lot of activities to do with someone else.

We still found things to do in there somewhere - watching the new X-Men, buying foreign candy at World Market, and visiting a couple tabletop gaming stores (which was probably my favorite simply because of the ridiculously stereotypical responses one of the guys had; he had this stunned look on his face and I could almost hear him thinking "a girl? In here? A girl? WHAT?! DOES NOT COMPUTE!" and I had to turn away a couple times to keep from cracking up).

But most of the rest of our weekend was spent inside, reading, painting, and playing games. I wasn't too worried about that, since that's not far off from my normal routine (man I need to get out more...), but I'd venture it's safe to say that I won't be planning on moving to the suburbs anytime soon.

I realize I've been harping on relationships and people in my blogs a lot recently, so I apologize for being a broken record at this point, but...

I've been thinking about how what I'm looking for in a place to settle down isn't just an urban classification, but also having places around that encourage sitting down and spending time there. Places where you can sit and read a good book, or catch up with a friend, or people watch, and not feel bad for taking up a spot for another customer.

A place where there are things to do and people to meet, not just stuff to buy.

A Quick 'Un

I hope you guys will forgive me for the shortness of this, but it's just before finals and whatnot...

Also, please don't laugh :)

I have a kind of irrational obsession with England. Don't get me wrong - I'd love to visit all of Europe! (as someone who can drive at least 12 hours north or south before hitting another country, and is locked out from other countries to the east and west, the idea of being able to drive for a few hours and be in a completely different country fascinates me) And there are very few places in the world that I wouldn't like to visit - though maybe the more rural parts of Africa might be on that list - because the world is so big and wide, and there are so many fascinating places to go and people to meet and histories to learn.

But anyway, back to England. I kind of feel like it's our older sibling; yes, we've argued a lot in the past, but as we've both grown up we've started to get along. There are still some things that England's ahead of us on (I get the general impression that it's significantly more progressive than America, but I realize that could I could be mistaken) and may try to gently nudge us in the right direction, but we're kind of equals now. Also, I think it's really interesting to have monuments that are more than 200 years old, and to have a country and history that stretches back far longer.

Anyway, back to paper writing. DFTBA, Nerdfi-sisters!

I'm a great big cliché-face

I feel like this is probably the most clichéd answer in the world these days, but I would really like to go to New Zealand.  Really really really.  I've lived in Tolkien's world since I was very young: some of my earliest memories are of my mom reading me the Hobbit before I could read on my own.  The years that the movies came out lined up exactly with the years I was in junior high, and it was the. thing.  Everyone liked Lord of the Rings, whether they were nerds or popular or if they'd read the books or not.  It didn't matter.  Those movies brought us together.  And they were gorgeous.  Middle Earth has always been a bit of escapist fantasy for me, and actually experiencing the landscape I've come to associate with it would just be an incredible experience.

I also want to go everywhere.  I used to have a list in a word document on my computer of all the places I wanted to go and it was three or four pages long.  Unfortunately it seems to have gotten lost in a computer shuffle at some point, so I guess I'll have to start over!

I'm planning to do an exchange semester during my law degree and I'm so torn on where to go.  The places they offer exchanges to are Australia, China, Singapore, Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands, Mexico, and the States.  You can't do exchanges in first year, so I've got at least a year to make up my mind, which is probably a good thing.  I think pretty much any of them would be amazing... maybe not the States, just because it's so similar to Canada that it probably wouldn't be quite as exciting as the others.  I also really like the idea of going somewhere and staying for awhile and really getting to experience a place, rather than just being there for a brief trip and hitting the highlights, so that's exciting too.

Honorary Penguin

This week's theme is where we would travel is we could travel anywhere in the world.

Well, right now, I'd say Morocco since I can't go anymore on account of my school deciding to change destinations after a bomb in Merrakech. All other World Challenge Morocco trips are still going, just not to Marrakesh, but because we have so many parents threatening to pull their kids, the school is changing the destination to Costa Rica. I've already gone to Costa Rica on school trips multiple times and I found out I can't get a refund if WC wasn't the one to make the change. All the work I've done for over a year now to earn that trip to Morocco is not worth Costa Rica, in my opinion.
So I would do anything to go to Morocco right now. That's where I would go.

Other than that bit of an angry rant, sorry, there are tons of places I'd love to go if I could. I'd love to go to Antarctica, Australia, Peru, and a certain country in Africa. One goal I have to accomplish before I die is to visit every continent, I've got North America, Asia and Europe down, four more to go. In a nutshell, I want to go everywhere, everywhere old, new, and exciting. Wherever I go though, I won't go for the sites, I don't want to be a tourist, I want to be apart of where I go and get involved in something.

I'm not sure about Antarctica, though. Not much to be apart of there unless you're doing scientific research. Maybe I could be an honorary penguin? Are the penguins really strict about that? I want to be an honorary penguin.

I'd also really like to go to England, I'll visit my uncle and aunt in London and freeload at their place. I hope they don't read this. But just in case, I will baby sit the twins for you if you let me stay.

There are so many places I'd like to go in the world, I can't even name them all. I want to go everywhere and learn everything I can from the places I go.

Most of all, more than anywhere else in the world, I want to go to Antarctica. So that I can be an honorary penguin.

This was so scattered I just can't chose one place that I would want to go. I spent forever thinking about it and couldn't do it. I think Antartica is my top choice.

Whoops

So, hey.

I could pretend this post is late because I just moved over the weekend and am still in the process of unpacking and getting settled, and didn't have time all day, but that's not true.  I was really pretty lazy about the whole unpacking thing and spent a lot of time standing in my room staring absently at my stuff.

Or I could pretend that the mid-afternoon break that I spent reading ridiculous theories about the recent Doctor Who developments was definitely a better use of time than writing a blog post.

Or I could pretend that it's because I had to go run a bunch of errands with my family in the evening... actually that one's true, but it was only a couple hours of the day.

Or because the new episode of Glee was on tonight and I mean, I obviously couldn't have written a blog post during the commercials.  That would just be way too much to ask.

No, no.  The real reason is because in the hour and a half that I had after Glee, my plan to quickly check my email and Facebook and such before writing a blog post somehow turned into getting sucked into TV tropes...

So, sorry.  I guess I'll await the decision of the punishment thread in the YP group.

I know there was discussion on Rachel's post on Friday about the theme for this week being "I never though I'd say this, but..."  However, since Sarah didn't do it yesterday and I still haven't come up with a good response to it, can we make this another free week and push that one ahead to next week?

As I mentioned, I've been busy moving and getting settled.  It's really weird to move back home after being away for three years.  Especially since we moved here only a few weeks before I left for university, so it doesn't even really feel like home.  The room that I always stay in when I'm here to visit was always essentially set up as a guest room that would work equally well for me or my brother or my grandparents or anyone that was staying here, but for the summer we're rearranging it so that it can actually be my own space.  We've moved a lot of the things that were stored in there so that it's not cluttered up with any of my brother's stuff any more, and we made space for a lot of my furniture from my apartment, and it really feels like home, which is something I've been lacking for a long time.

I never really felt at home living in university residences because, well they were residences.  No matter how long you lived there and how hard you tried to make it your own space, you were still sharing one shower between eight people and the toilet broke about once a month and those are just not things that make you feel at home in a place.  My apartment was a huge improvement, but it was very small and didn't have much storage space so I always felt cramped.  Plus I had roommate issues the first year I lived there and mouse issues the second year.

Long story short, right now is the first time in a long time that I've really felt as though I had a space of my own, and it's wonderful.  I want to make use of the comfortable, nurturing atmosphere I've created as a springboard for self-improvement this summer, meaning I want to do some serious writing, get into a healthy exercise routine, decrease the amount of time I spend on the computer, and finish the knitting project I've been working on for three years.  Those are my plans.

It's hard to deliver on a name like that

Yes, the town I live in is called Paradise. Also yes, there are constant jokes from natives about how it doesn't quite live up to the name (but then again, it would be pretty difficult to fully live up to a name like that).

This area was originally nicknamed Poverty Ridge, and derives its current name from the Pair O' Dice Saloon which is no longer around, though you can occasionally see people with Pair O' Dice sweatshirts (that never really caught on though.)

Paradise is highly dichotomous. Generally the population consists of either people who have come here to retire, or teenagers who can't wait to leave. I'm sure there must be some middle aged folks around here to parent those teenagers, but you won't often see them around.

There's a large amount of chain stores and fast food places, but on occasion you can find a nifty little side shop or family owned restaurant. For instance I happen to live right across from a fantastic Chinese place... as well as a Jack in the Box.

One thing you can't fault Paradise for is all of the greenery, not only because it's in the middle of a forest, but because there are plenty of beautiful parks. Where a railroad used to run up into the mountains there's now a bike path that, if you put up with the hills, offers a lovely peaceful walk (except around 3:00 pm where it runs by the high school - I highly recommend avoiding that area, for small mobs of bored mountain kids are nothing to be trifled with).

Paradise has not lived up to its name, and possibly never will - with limited space for development due to geographic placement; a strong distaste for any sort of change from the status quo; and a distrust, though waning slightly, for any of those "hippie" values of social justice or non-chain restaurants/stores - but it is, after all, home.

Not paradise, but it'll do

As I mentioned before, I grew up in rural Nova Scotia, but I moved to Halifax almost four years ago.  The house I grew up in was surrounded by hay fields, and there was a forest just beyond one of them, which had a perfect little skating pond in the outskirts of it.  Inside the forest were more hayfields, which were perfect sledding hills, and there were the foundations of old old old houses that I used to explore.  Our lawn was full of perfect climbing trees, and we had an old barn that still smelled like hay and animals.  My next door neighbours owned horses, and I could smell the ocean from home.  It was paradise.

So I'm not much of a city person.  It's noisy.  There are no trees, no birds, no animals.  The ocean is a good twenty-five minute walk away.  Everything smells like cars and the buildings clutter up both my wide open spaces and my beautiful blue sky.  Although I do like being within walking distance of everything, and the city does provide more opportunities for people-watching.

That said, I guess as far as cities go, Halifax is probably a pretty good one.  At least we have an ocean, and there are little pockets here and there that are sort of like real places - parks and graveyards and such that at least have trees and flowers and things.  We have the second-largest natural harbour in the world, and if you get up to take pictures of it at sunrise it looks like this:

Which is totally worth it.  Halifax also has a pretty fantastic music scene, although I don't take advantage of that nearly as much as I should.  We also have a bunch of fantastic festivals, like the Halifax Jazz Festival, and International Buskers Festival (the largest one in the world), the Royal Nova Scotia International Tattoo (the world's largest annual indoor show), and a lot of others.  I'm always inordinately proud when my small city has the best and biggest in the world of anything, as you can probably tell.  There's also a really fantastic farmer's market, and the best used bookstore in the world (the one I mentioned in my last post).  So even if it isn't paradise, there are plenty of upsides that get me through until I can move back to my nice rural areas. :)

There's a Ghost Woman on the Beach

Hello! So this week our theme is going to be the places we're from. I found out I had a lot more to say than I thought I did and had to cut lots of stuff out of this.

I am from the planet Earth, it is the third planet from the star Sol with a distance of around 149,000,000 km between the two bodies, it has a mass of 5.9 x 10²⁴kg an- nevermind.

I was born in Jordan and we lived there for a little bit. After that we moved to Seoul, Korea and I lived there for about four years. Finally, after Korea I lived in Saudi Arabia for a year until I moved to America. I don't always know how I should talk about where I'm from. I can't be from the places I grew up but I'm supposed to be from the place I only moved to.

I'm on the Cape Cod area of Massachusetts, named after the cod fish, of which there are surprisingly very few. We've got beaches and lighthouses and an oyster festival. When there are strong winds and storms, you can hear the crashing waves on the sand form miles away. The winters are cold, wet and warm all at the same time. The area is full of marshes, dunes and trees, all protected by the National Seashore. Google images of Cape Cod, there are some very nice ones.

We have some ghost stories around here, too. I was told one a long time ago by some women. And it's what I think of when I think of the Cape.

According to the ladies who told me the story one Halloween, there was a man named 'Black' Sam Bellamy, he was in love with a young local girl named Maria Hallett. One day, Sam left to find a way to support her and himself so that they could live a life together, apparently by going to hunt for treasure. Unfortunately, he was unsuccessful in this and turned pirate while out on the seas. His crew called themselves "Robin Hood's Men" and he was rather generous for a pirate, they captured and robbed many ships under Sam gaining great amounts of wealth. Eventually he captured an English Slave ship named the Whydah. It was then that he decided it was time to return with his fortunes to young Maria Hallett.

Unknown to Sam, Maria had been kicked out of town for having his child while being unwed and had taken to living on the shore and watching the seas for his ship to appear on the horizon. As Sam approached the Cape a Nor'easter hit and sunk the Whydah right off the coast, drowning Sam and his crew in April, 1717. Maria never saw Sam return, today her ghost is still walking the shores waiting for her lover to come home to her. I love that story.

That's where I'm living right now, I could tell you stories about the places I lived before I moved to the US, but Cape Cod is where I'm living until I move again so at the moment it's the most relevant.

Finally, I wrote this hastily so my paragraph and sentence structure must be painful to read.
Apologies. Please forgive me.