my first lesson in upper canada

i am in the business of plunking myself down, making myself at home, overstaying my welcome and peacin' out when the goin's good.  my most recent adventure of doing this may be my last for the foreseeable future as it's time to go on home.  i swear to god i actually heard upper canada tell me to come, take my coat off, stay a while.  so i did.  and now it's time to go.

moving to the mainland is, in my self-respected opinion, a mandatory growing experience for any islander.  let's compare it to all the b'ys from toronto who go and live far away from home for a year in montreal  (i kid, i kid!).  seriously though, let's liken it to some novel about a coming-of-age experienced by traveling by foot abroad.  i recommend east coasters (i mean real east coasters - not BC-style east coast, aka: ontario) spend some time in this part of the world.  it's a different life far away from the calming effects of the ocean.  it's...well.  it's not a thing i can put my finger on it.  it's a million little things.

when i first moved here i met this girl.  now this girl is NOT from newfoundland.  this girl i'm talking about is literally the prototype female designed for the city, with this big exuberant personality and huge hand gestures and confidence just streaming out of her.  she was this girl who just encouraged you to want to be around her - life of the party, smart, witty, opinion on errverything - art, music, writing, the law, the weather, western, london, toronto, vacationing, traveling, family values, gay marriage...  she was absolutely awesome and i whole-heartedly hated her.  this opinionated tall blond is so cocky.  let's be real.  as if the city is so great.

then there was me - bubbly, polite "little emily".  meeting a million new people was my heaven, where i got to break out all my lines and my jokes and sell how great newfoundland is on everyone: yeah, i AM in fact from the iceberg viewing capital of the world, and you are SO welcome to come visit me next summer!  i can already tell we are basically best friends, it is soooo good to meet you.  i'm superflously excited on the most regular of days, let alone among all these new people.  day one of school meant no obligations, no schoolwork - basically just a huge meet and greet, huge party.  i was perceived as sweet and friendly and - let's be real - pretty best kind, and the tall blond from t-dot thought to herself, that girl is so fake.  nobody is so sweet and bubbly all the time.  what a poser.

...and so began our somewhat hostile and entirely artificial relationship.  oh we partied together.  we were facebook friends and we always included each other in the plans of what was going on.  we sized each other up cautiously, rolling our eyes at the others' mannerisms, consistently just thinking - cocky bittie, fake bittie.

finally, it was mid september.  there was a pub night.  after a few glasses of wine that cocky blond bombshell and i found ourselves together...and laughing...and talking...and agreeing.  agreeing on the whole works of it.  it's unclear who said it first now.  but you know what - now that i look back, i'm preeeeetty sure it was simultaneous: "i thought you were a huge [cocky/fake] bitch!"

CUE THE LOLz.

she told me - you know what, toronto is that great, is it cocky if it's true?.  i told her - i actually am this nice all the time.  we began to appreciate all the things that were weird and foreign about the other person - i was so confused to be at clubs without live music: if there was no band then what were we doing here?  she probably just bought me another shot of tequila and reassured me we'd have fun.

i made her shoot screech one time in an effort to make her an honorary newfie - our friendship was almost terminated on that basis.  many a distraught text message was sent begging for forgiveness for the worst flavour she was ever forced to experience.

we bitched and moaned our way through 1L, sat in real strong solidarity as people tried to pull course evaluations away from us as we told certain professors about their many failings.  we ate ourselves into nutella comas and pinky promised to never buy that deletable chocolately goodness ever again.  we messaged each other in shame every time we bought it afterwards.  we ranted about feminism and cried about our long distance relationships and questioned our life paths and drank so many glasses of wine.

two years after those first awkward and erroneous decisions about one another, she told me at the bar one night, "you know, you've got mad swagger for a newf".  i asked, "what's swagger?" - i may have known, but let's stay true to form here.

so the first deep lesson i learned when i moved to upper canada?  that person you look at on day one and you say - yes, you!  you are so like me!  it's me and you now!  that person might become the friend you have a nostalgic moment or two with here or there.  then there might be that person you look at and you think, how the hell did we wind up in the same place at the same time?  that person could have the potential to be your valentine's eve date two years later.

with these things there's no tellin', you just have to wait and see.  friendship is a beautiful and funny looking animal, unknown and perpetually surprising.  that was my first lesson in upper canada.

on shameless self-promotion and the internal struggle it seems to cause

my first ambition was to be a disney princess.

...okay okay okay...somewhere my sisters are reading this and they know i'm lying.  the disney princess was my second career goal...my first was to be a fire truck engine.  i just didn't get it, ok!

anyway, back to wanting to be a disney princess.  i don't mean work at disney world and have a poofy dress on and all that.  what i really wanted was to be in disney movies and be the voice of ariel and belle and jasmine.  to help me better achieve my goals, i spent a lot (i mean a lot-a lot) of time learning all the lyrics and singing the songs around the house and recording myself on this little tape recorder.  there are most likely somewhere between 20 to 25 of these cassette tapes floating around my parents' house of me doing my best rendition of "a whole new world", "part of your world" and, my personal favourite, "little town".

(side note: all of these songs are about learning and exploring which i think might be the next topic for my blog!  the disney princesses get beat up on now all the time because of the apparent anti-feminist themes of the movies, but all these girls just wanted to go out and see something new!  stay tuned.)

with this mad propensity for recording myself and demanding the praise of others from the tender age of three, it's no surprise that i have gone through my life loving to perform on a stage.  there's no greater rush than people watching you and smiling and cheering while you're doing your favourite thing.  i've enjoyed this in all walks of life - sports, music, writing.  i'd like to blame it on my environment - because my whole family is so gifted and they also love being in the spotlight - but let's be real.  i thend to display this kind of behaviour at a rate that far exceeds my extremely talented, and beautifully humble sisters.  sigh.

anyway.  this week was western's law school's talent show fundraiser.  i, of course, decided i'd enjoy hogging the stage so i learned a million songs and got up there again...and again...and again.  hey, it was for a good cause!  let's just call it a shining example of my philanthropic personality.

my mom and certain other friends who weren't here asked me if it would be possible to record some of the numbers because they weren't here to see the event.  i managed to coerce a friend into carting my camera around all night and she recorded videos of a few of the numbers.  after the event, i tried to send them on to the various people who asked for them but the files were taking a super long time to attach and so i decided that uploading to facebook seemed like a good option.  that way everyone who had asked to see it could have extremely easy access to it and i wouldn't have to sit with my computer for 12 hours attaching the stupid thing over and over.

then a funny thing happened.  despite the fact that i love to be in the spotlight, up on a stage singing and dancing around, i started to fret about putting the video on facebook.  would all sorts of people think i'm arrogant?  (because there is a difference between liking to perform and liking positive reinforcement and being arrogant!)  would everyone think i'm cocky without just cause?  is the video actually not very good?  is that dress too short?  oh my god the dress is too short, i forgot some of the lyrics, my technique is not perfect, what am i doing with my hands sometimes, it's like i completely just forgot how to sing, i am not as good as i thought i was, now it's  on facbeook and i look arrogant.  this highly anxious stream of negative thoughts is an actual transcript of my stressed out thought process after the video was uploaded.  i was having a borderline panic-attack.

THEN my sister sent me a picture of my parents watching the video and i remembered why i put it up in the first place.  they loved it!  they think i'm great!  dress is not too short!  i'm not arrogant!  instead, i've put these big smiles on their faces because they got to see it.  mission accomplished!

this experience made me question myself a lot.  why does the idea of sharing a moment of me performing cause me to think, in essence, "everyone will think i am bigger than my britches - oh, and i probably am"?  and is it more than just me who is feeling like this sometimes?  have we become a society fixated on hating on the success and positive moments of other people?  i mean, just look at the mass cyber obsession with ripping anne hathaway to shreds after she won her oscar.  her hair cut, dress and perfect smile is too irritating for her to be a good actor despite that she's a good actor so...what a bitch.

what is this!

why are we happily ripping on the success of other people?  why don't we just love to see positivity in the world?  why do i think i'm arrogant for uploading a stupid video to facebook!

Kid President - who is an effing adorable little bugger - released a pep talk on youtube which most everyone on the planet has now seen.  KP wants us to stop being so boring because being boring is easy.  he commands us to go out into the world and do something awesome instead.  he wants everyone to get dancing and not to quit on things we love - the way that MJ didn't quit basketball when he didn't make the team.




when i uploaded that jolene video to facebook it is definitely possible that there were people who rolled their eyes and thought "oh yeah, tyyyyyypical emily, just putting herself out there for all the world to see".  but it's also possible a lot of people were pleased because they couldn't be at the event and are my friends, my mom, cecil, or my sisters and so love me and support my shit whether or not it looks cocky or arrogant.  in fact, is it possible you don't think your friends are cocky or arrogant if they're your friends?  that instead you just support them?  that maybe showing off an exhibition of a talent that you work on cultivating and improving makes people happy?  that maybe even somebody else might think they should get up there and give it a go too?  maybe people like positive things.  maybe people are inspired by positive things.  maybe that video is a positive thing.

i don't think me putting the video up has caused the world to dance the way kid prez wants us to all get down.  i also don't think the video is going to get me any closer to my dreams of being a disney princess.  honestly, the video doesn't mean much.  soon it'll be lost in the myriad of propaganda and pictures and pithy, witty status updates i post on a far-too-regular-basis that it will soon be forgotten about.  but that moment of questioning myself so much because i wanted to share something has definitely got me to thinking.  i don't want to be scared, nervous, anxious about backlash when i want to share something positive with friends, family, whoever.  i love to see people showing their positive moments, successes, triumphs and victories.  i don't want to read your sad status updates.  i'm interested in seeing what you've done today that's amazing or creative or beautiful.

i think we all need to stop being boring, too, kid president.  and maybe one day i WILL get to be a disney princess.  in the meantime, i love sharing my positive, unabashedly shameless self-promoting crap and so i'll probably keep doing it.  and you know what?  you should start doing the same too.