Rolling Out

In honor of the heat - seriously, Extreme Heat Alert should be a flavour of Doritos, not an ongoing event in Toronto, complete with cooling stations and advisory statements to check on your collection of infirm and elderly friends/family - I'll keep this captain's log entry short and to the point: summertime and the living is...meh.

For the past couple years, summer has been a traditionally bad time for me. I have painful memories of a bad breakup - one that came right on the heels of disastrous news about my sister and her health - and the summer of '07 was compounded by a dear friend being deported, not to mention me moving away from my first Toronto home. It was The Time Of Great Crying, which made me a total drag to be around. But, thankfully, I had amazing friends and a wonderful family to help drag me out of the mud, and I made it through.

But! A side effect of living through really horrible shit is getting to re-live it...again...and again. You know, I've never been through a war, or been horribly mangled in a prison riot, and it's not fair to say that my horrible summer was like either of those things. On the other hand, it certainly wasn't a cakewalk, and trying to pretend it wasn't bad is actually pretty stupid.

In any case, prison riots or no (hint: no), summer usually brings out a host of insecurities. Will I always be single? Will I ever find a job? Am I a huge disappointment to everyone I've ever met?(For those keeping score at home: yes, no, oh god, yes.) And dudes: it's tough climbing out of that mindset sometimes.

A couple months ago, I stole a fantastic idea from my friend Amanda. She concocted a list of 101 things to do in 1001 days, a conceit I admire very much, seeing as how it avoids that dreadful "bucket list" thing and still leads to actual deeds getting actually done. One of my 101 was "cry in public" and ladies and gentlemen: mission accomplished. I am the proud owner of a 2009 Hissy Fit. It was, like me, blue.

Hopefully, the 2010 Hissy Fit will be much smaller, and the 2011 Hissy Fit smaller still. It feel weird to admit that I'm still thinking about it - hell, even my sis seems mostly past it. But I get the sense that "seems" is the operative word there: we all carry baggage we don't want to admit to, because it seems like we should be past it, or that we are past it - except for tiny weekend-long exceptions, of course.

Other items on that list were things like "touch a dinosaur bone" and "fall in love," both of which takes bravery and inspiration. Last year, when the 2008 Hissy Fit was rolling out, those kinds of aspirations would have seemed totally out of reach. Now, it just seems like I'm requiring less trunk space for all my baggage.