For over a decade, my life has been a struggle towards becoming a better person. I’m not sure why I started to live this way, although I suspect that it was the result of a confused childhood, growing up with an almost completely unrestrained guidance. There was no sense of morality, perspective, and most importantly, purpose. I started feeling out my own worldview without being consciously aware of it at the time, and the result of all of this was a collective yearning for self-improvement as an effort to define myself and the things around me.

A few years ago, I realized that self-improvement is the highest form of living, that the best someone can do for him or herself is to be a better person. No other belief has become as important in my life. It sets learning as the greatest good, no matter what the means. Pain, loneliness, and hardship become beneficial. For years, my struggle for self-improvement was almost tangibly manifested. I could understand exactly the parts of myself that I wanted to change and make better, so I would slowly turn my life in that direction. As much as all of this helped me, it was still a struggle.

But even past this “useful” worldview or attitude is a more abstract goal (I refrain from using the word “positive”, because I feel that my understanding is more of what I consider a simple subjective realism, than the connotation of bias associated with “positive”). Whereas a polymath is someone with a relatively academic breadth of knowledge, I try to be rounded in a more general sense. This means an understanding and appreciation of anything, from humour, to wine, to music, to conversation, to narcotics, to relationships.

Simply put, I strive to be a better person in as many aspects as possible. I strive to be a dynamic person, who will never stop learning. I want to be able to have a conversation with any person I meet, no matter how different his walk of life is from mine. I want people I’ve known for years to be surprised by something I may do or say tomorrow, such as Trolley with my orgasm theories, or Pita with my growing securities. I want to be equally intellectually and emotionally powerful. To not have any weaknesses. To never stop improving.

To be truly universal.

A condominium townhouse, more specifically. Two weeks ago I went to the bank, got my credit rating checked, and was pre-approved for a mortgage at one percent below prime (having no student loans, no balance on my credit card, no line of credit, no outstanding bills, no debt whatsoever, comes in handy). I also have a sizeable sum of money, left to me by my grandparents through an inherinance, which I’m putting towards a down payment. The good thing is that the down payment is more than 25% of the mortgage, so I won’t have to spend a couple of grand on mortgage insurance alone. Within a few days, I had a real estate agent keeping an eye out for properties for me. One morning, she sent me the profile of a place a little east of downtown, complete with a series of eight pictures or so. The place looked great, so I got a viewing booked that same day.

The house has two floors. The main floor has an eat-in kitchen, powder room, dining area, and living room. The lower floor has the master and second bedrooms, a full bathroom, and a storage closet. Out back is a little patio with enough room for a barbecue, and a lawn that can fit enough patio furniture for a small gathering. The profile listed six appliances included with the house; stove, refrigerator, dishwasher, microwave, washer, and dryer. There was only one previous owner, and he was a non-smoker. Everything was clean, solid, new, and, most importantly, comfortable. It was a place I could see myself living at for the next few years, and I had a feeling that this was the right one. Even though it was the first place I actually went to go see, I made a bid that evening. At the end of the night, after a bit of negotiation on the purchase price, my bid was accepted, and a closing date was set for the middle of March.

In order to protect me, my agent drew up the offer with four conditions; finance, insurance, inspection, and approval of status certificate. I waived the first three conditions within four days. My finances were already approved with the bank, although I did a little bit of extra negotiating on the rates and saved myself a considerable amount of money (based on a 20 year period of todays rates). I also already had a blanket insurance policy through the condo management, and I was satisfied with the house inspection, which found no major problems.

The approval of status certificate took a little longer, because I had to review the status certificate with my lawyer, and there were a few complications. The main complication was an on going lawsuit between the building company and the government. It turns out that the patios and balconies need to be rebuilt because of a mistake in the materials used. If the building company is found at fault, they will be footing the bill for the repairs. If they are not at fault, all condo owners in the area will have to pay a considerable sum, most likely as an increase in monthly condo fees. I got my lawyer to do a holdback in trust, for an amount slightly higher than the estimated repair cost, with the seller getting the residual. My agent got the seller to agree to this (as an amendment to the offer of purchase), so I won’t have to pay for these repairs no matter what the outcome of the lawsuit. The beauty of this is that property values in the area are expected to increase more than three times the cost of repairs, once the repairs are all done. I waived the final condition, two days ago, which made the deal firm and binding.

It’s a buyers market right now (no one wants to move in the middle of all this snow), so I got the house at an amazing price. While all of this was happening, my bank did an appraisal, and estimated the value to be considerably higher than what I paid for it. On paper, I’ve already covered the cost of land transfer tax, lawyers fees, and made enough money to buy car.

I will be able to walk to work. Across the street is a series of plazas, including a Timmies, a 24-hour Loeb, an M&M Meat Shop, a Wendy’s, a McDonalds, and a Pizza Hut. Right outside my door, not more than a ten second walk, is the bus stop for the #2, which can be taken downtown all the way to the west end where I am now. I’ll also have a parking spot, which I’ll try to rent out to someone in the area with two cars. My monthly condo fees cover maintenance, so I’ll never have to shovel snow or mow the grass.

Trolley will be renting a room from me to help cover my mortgage. I decided to amortize over 20 years, although it actually comes out to 18 years and 11 months because I’ll be making bi-weekly payments. I chose 20 years to be a little conservative (even though I’m on a fixed rate), because there are a few things I can do to pay down my mortgage quicker once I’m more comfortable with all the bills. My goal is to pay it off by the time I’m 40, and only move to a larger place when I can afford it or when this condo appreciates enough to keep my mortgage payable within the next 15 years.

Can’t wait to move in.

Tonight I ordered the escargot, while Tinsley Ellis, a man who seemed to have a certain uncomplex wisdom beyond his years, sang his version of the south Florida blues. I admit that I was skeptical at first, but was pleasantly surprised by the time his first number had ended, an instrumental piece that one could tell was written as more than a simple introductory song.

And while he sang his words with a combination of gruff sincerity and stoic confidence, I sat there. Wondering why sad music can’t make me sad right now. Feeling something I had never felt before.

Lost in a moment of clarity.

Life is a lot like business. There’s investment in everything, and relationships are no exception. One has to spend money to make money, the way one has to give trust to get trust. There’s no guarantee involved that says one willl get their investment back. On top of this, one can choose how much or how little to invest. Just like everything else in life, the more one risks, the more one can lose, or the more one can gain.

And the world can be divided in two according to this classification: those who play conservatively, and those who play it all. Those who stay distant, and those who throw themselves into love.

If we’ve been hurt in the past, if we’ve lost all that we chose to give, it’s natural for us to hold back in the future. But at some point we have to break out, and we can’t be scared to give as much as before. The key to living this way is understanding that our past investments, relationships, have no bearing on the ones we have now. It’s like the coin flip problem taught in second-year statistics, or, more appropriately, the Gambler’s Fallacy: even after 10 successive occurrances of a single outcome, the chance for the same outcome remains at fifty percent. We have to treat every trial, every case, every relationship differently.

Life, in relation to people, is a series of investments. We end up gaining from some, but not all. That’s what life is about. That’s what love is about. Nothing is worth it if you don’t put yourself out there. It’s important to figure out which ones are worthwhile, but not as important as figuring out that the worthwhile ones need to be given a chance. We need to put at least a little bit of our trust into them, or nothing will happen.

For what use is recognizing a good investment, if we don’t treat it as such?

I find this funny. Maybe it’s because I once dated a Jersey girl. She broke my heart, then asked me to listen to Everything In Its Right Place layered over itself with a five second delay.

Some more pictures of Aaron and Karen’s kitten, Chaos, taken one sunny Sunday morning when Aaron and I met to work on a business plan. I think he was off showering before we headed out for bubtea, and as I sat at the table with Chaos at my feet, I noticed that the light from the windows made his fur glow. I had only captured the kitty on (digital) film once before, a few months prior. One can already see how his features will develop when he’s older, with the long, slender body, and the aloofness of the nose.

Wow, it was a rough day. It started off well enough, because I was in what one would call a better-than-average mood before I had even arrived at work. Shirley had stopped at Timmies to get an everything bagel with herb and garlic cream cheese for breakfast, and decided to also buy me a large coffee, which I found, hot and steaming, on my desk this morning. It was the first coffee I had in weeks, and it sent my heart racing after the second sip.

I finalized a two-page ad for a local quarterly newsletter, due for publication at the end of the month. The only problem was that, for the last few years, we’ve had a reservation of only a single page. The middle two pages of this publication are reserved for the most important messages from the organization that runs the publication itself, and are most likely the first two pages looked at by its readers. My boss, besides being the best fucking boss in the world, was also ambitious enough to request the middle two pages (I think of Michael Corleone asking if his credit is good enough to buy out Moe Green). At his behest, I made a call to negotiate the booking of space. I had been prepping for this since Monday, being unsure of how to approach the person at the other end of the line in order to maximize my chances of getting the two most lucrative pages in the booklet. They didn’t know how old, or young, I was, because they couldn’t see me, and this was helpful. I believe that age has worked to my disadvantage in the past for tete-a-tete negotiations, because I can see in the faces of older people how hard it is for them to take me seriously. At the end, I offered to reserve two pages instead of one (something which they didn’t know we had every intention of doing, no matter what the result), in return for the middle of the booklet. I was able to get the middle for this month, but unfortunately not for any subsequent issues. We wanted to hit the local area hard with the energy in our latest marketing campaign, and being the first to take the middle of the publication, even if only for a single issue, was good enough. I told my boss, he shook my hand, and verbally congratulated me.

Then I quickly fixed up and finalized the mailout for this month, to be printed on our new cover stock, a great idea by Shirley, because the thickness and brightness of the stock make everything look fucking slick. By this time, the caffeine was making me jittery. I had slept alright the night before, but I was starting to feel tired, especially in the eyes.

I started to work on a one page flyer to go with a special invitation sent out to over 600 clients and potential clients across the city (which also ties in with the advertisement in the local publication mentioned above — fucking wicked). My boss gave me the material yesterday, and the problem was that it had to be approved by him before the end of the day, because he’s leaving the country on business tomorrow.

I worked through most of the day on the flyer while tons of other miscellaneous things-to-be-done popped up spontaneously, like label printing, printer fixing, and back-up troubleshooting. By this time, the caffeine had worn off, only to be replaced by what felt like exhaustion. Near the end of the day, after getting the flyer mostly done, while colour correcting and space adjusting, CorelDraw started to really, REALLY fuck up on me. If the printing companies we dealt with would actually spend some money on higher end vector graphics software, I wouldn’t have had any problems. Instead, I tried to print a file from CorelDraw, and it either spooled forever, or told me that there was not enough memory to print (with my 1 gig of DDR RAM). If I tried to save, it either gave me an error message about not having enough free space, or crashed, and in the process, made the current working space blank and saved it. CorelDraw seems to lose stability if any other programs are running, such as Outlook Express or Winamp, while there are graphics above 300 dpi in the workspace, and I had over a dozen. In the end, I got the flyer finished, but not before repeating an entire series of steps, several times, due to crashes while fine-tuning.

My nerves were shot by the time I stepped outside to walk to the bus stop. For the first time in months, I listened to my on-the-go playlist. I started working on it since the week of UPS crashes in November (which would bring the entire system down at work, including telephone access), for days just like this.

There is a risk, there’s a risk when your dealing with love
You could snap my neck
Any speed you drive can be dangerous
When this frame fails me
Will I trust you to carry me through?
I know there’s no such thing as safety
But I know what a promise can do

—Trust, Thrice

I’ve alway been one to put a little too much faith into people. Although this often ends up hurting the parties involved, myself included, I’ve always felt like it was worth it. I’d rather give someone the benefit of the doubt, and perhaps this is why I end up being let down so much (John would add that my intolerance is partially to blame). Some people don’t like to take that risk and need others to make the first step, need others to make that leap of faith. I know, because in some cases, I used to be one of them. One may hold back until they know that the other person has as much at risk as they do. It’s the easiest way to not get hurt.

There’s always one person who has to make that first step, to lay everything on the line. It’s one person who has to be the first to go for a kiss, the first to say, “I love you”, without knowing what the other person will say in return. It makes it easier, of course, if one can understand or accept the fact that there are risks involved in any sort of relationship, that not everything will go the “right” way.

There’s a Simon and Garfunkle song that goes, “The roller coaster ride we took is nearly at an end / I bought my ticket with my tears, that’s all I’m gonna spend”. When Paul Simon penned those lyrics, in the manner which he plays with words and rhymes to create his beautiful, renowned lyrical verses, he should have written, “That’s all I need to spend”. There’s absolutely nothing more that one can give.

Tears are a small price to pay for a chance at happiness.

I’m having one of those days, actually, one of those weeks where I can’t seem to write anything down. I have all these ideas floating around in my head without the words to follow through. Maybe it’s because I don’t exactly know what I’m feeling, like a bittersweet mix in the palate, or an indistinguishable taste. For once I’ve started to take control of things, started to be pro-active instead of reactive. Started listening to hopeful, inspiring, energetic music. I’ve realized that I have the ability to point my life in the direction I want to go, that I can’t rely on others to make me happy, that I can start living for myself now.

And it’s all new to me.

It’s called a changeover. The movie goes on and no one in the audience has any idea.

—Tyler Durden, Fight Club

One of the meals I came up with while still in university was a basic spaghetti recipe. I still have it regularly to this day, and think I’ve perfected the sauce now, because it’s nice and thick but one doesn’t lose their noodles in it. I’ve never liked the process of consuming meatballs with spaghetti, so I’ve always used ground beef instead.

Ingredients:

• Approximately 500 grams of ground beef (for an even thicker sauce, use as much as 600 grams)
• Spicy Pepper Medley Seasoning by Club House
• One jar (26 oz) of tomato sauce (I usually use Fire Roasted Tomato and Garlic by Classico)
• A literal dash of sugar (Clemenza’s trick)
• 0.5 lb uncooked spaghetti

Makes:

3 generous servings

Directions:

1. Boil spaghetti in large pot. It should be al dente in roughly the same amount of time it takes to cook the sauce.
2. Brown ground beef in a medium sized pot. Drain.
3. Season ground beef liberally with Spicy Pepper Medley and continue to simmer for three minutes, stirring frequently. (This is too give the seasoning time to bring out the flavour of the beef, which wouldn’t be as prominent if the sauce was added first)
4. Turn heat to high, and stir in pasta sauce. Stir in sugar. Add more Spicy Pepper Medley to taste (I probably end up adding about 10 tablespoons to get the spiciness just right, when it doesn’t burn at the start, but gets hotter as it is consumed).
5. Continue stirring until sauce is at a boil. Remove from heat.
6. Drain spaghetti, and serve with sauce.

Variations:

• For a chunkier sauce and more complicated taste, add in a combination of mushrooms and onions right before simmering the beef in step 2.
• Use a jar of Presidents Choice Sweet Basil Pasta Sauce for an almost dessert-like spaghetti. The perfect combination of sweet and salty.

It’s convenient because all the ingredients are shelf items or can be frozen, so it can be used as a backup meal, yet still be hearty enough to be filling. It’s also fairly cheap and simple.

When I shave, I always start in the middle, then shave the left cheek, and finish with the right. It’s not that I can’t deviate this, it’s that I choose not to. The chin and lip areas are always very irritable, while the sides remain smooth and satisfying.

I have so many things on my mind, so many things I want to write about, have been planning on writing about even, but this seems to be the only thing in which I can properly express myself.

John and I parted yesterday, agreeing that we would plan to see each other over the summer. It was the first time that we parted with embraces, and up to then, we had always left each other with verbal salutations. I realized that I started asking him for advice, a line I had never crossed with him before. Our minds generally don’t match. We may get along well (one may even say famously, in the superlative sense), but we also have different levels of tolerance, different goals, different worldviews, different strengths and weaknesses.

So what has changed? What has made me trust him in this now, when I haven’t in the past? I rarely heed his advice; it’s usually so completely different from what I’m thinking, and I almost never agree on the set of thoughts on which they’re based.

Perhaps this new-found trust is due to the fact that I’m slowly starting to understand a part of his mind that has baffled me in the past: a seemingly inherent evil. I felt like I couldn’t trust him, because I felt like nobody should trust him, and it became serious enough to make me question the foundation of our friendship.

At one point I started to distance myself from him, although later on (perhaps solely) due to the fact that it showed he actually cared about this, I started to trust him again. This made it a blind trust, because it wasn’t based on a train of thought of his that I could actually understand.

Now, I can more make sense of his words, his actions. Even with a liberal dose of some seemingly heartless, coldhearted comments (very broad), which even made me feel like a moral person, I trust him more than ever.

Why do these words come so easily?

Perhaps he can be viewed as a friend in the logical sense. He sees friendship as a sort of symbiosis, a mutually beneficial relationship. Although there are circumstances which he may find beneficial to disregard any sort of proper morals (such as a stab in the back for further gain), he also understands that following these morals and having strong relationships is much more beneficial in the long run.

He can’t be blamed for this approach to friendship. I’m starting to believe that there’s nothing wrong with it. In fact, I’d probably completely believe in it, if my mind wasn’t so hesitant about admitting that I was very, very wrong, and very, very ignorant. I had always viewed it as a being his approach as being too cold for me to be comfortable with it all, but now, I realize that as long as it doesn’t get in the way of my own approach to friendship, there’s nothing that should make me uncomfortable.

And now, trust has solved everything.

Last night I was plagued by nightmares about being drugged with sodium pentothal, held down by sniper fire in a beautifully furnished Victorian home with George Bluth. Between the clinkety-clink of the cubes in her low-ball, Mrs. Bluth said, in a moment of clarity, “If you can’t live for yourself, you might as well live for others”. The words made more sense to me than almost anything I’ve heard in the last month. She gave me a clockwork wink and disappeared, leaving us alone against her hired red beams and smoke grenades.

When I stepped outside to head to work this morning, the winter chill startled me into a false sense of alertness, but it was quickly taken over by a general feeling of uneasiness. The dreams were unsettling to say the least (I haven’t slept so poorly in over a month), and the last thing that I wanted to do was start the day off with a walk on a winter morning before there was any light out. I kept waking up every two hours, and as good as it was to feel exhausted enough to fall sleep again, it felt terrible to not actually be able. It’s as if I haven’t slept at all, and tragically enough, I start work for the new year today. I was hoping to be well rested for the first day back, but that isn’t happening, so I’ll be fighting off a tremendous urge to sleep when I get home. I’ll try to burn through it, which shouldn’t be hard.

In any case, I use the words, “more sense to me than almost anything I’ve heard in the last month” because John is in town. This is the person who knows me better than anyone else I know, better even than myself. Within half an hour of arriving, he helped me realize that I do require acceptance in my relationships, a need that has stemmed from childhood, that the best road to achieving my goals is not always the easiest one, and so many other countless things that I couldn’t have seen for myself. This winter break has been the worst in years, but now, John is here. I haven’t seen him in over six months. Yesterday, I couldn’t stop smiling, after finding him in the peephole of my front door.

This is my vacation.