Moran Abroad

Being left alone in the apartment is great, and also it is ever so slightly gloomy.

It’s great because I go full out introvert and get all kinds of creative and start writing letters and devising comics and reading books and shit. I feel like an adult, I feel independent, and I spend a long time making myself a nice dinner and sitting at the table to eat it, listening to Bastille and James Blake. I also bound up and down the hallway instead of walking. This isn’t part of the feeling like an adult bit.

It’s gloomy because I can’t stop eating and I hear noises that I’m not sure exist outside my own mind. I physically clambered on the kitchen countertop to find the chocolate my housemate had secreted on the top shelf of the cupboard. I have eaten most of the plums I bought today and I have devoured endless packets of Pocky. I can think of nothing but deep and delicious cake. And the noises I hear are other than the infernal beep of the smoke detector that’s out of battery (but not so out of battery that it shuts up). What’s that whistling sound? That tapping?  Why does the fridge kick off every so often and make a racket?

The mysteries of the uptown Toronto apartment building.

On occasion I am granted the ability to poke my head above the bewildering mire that is being a 20something, and I am privy to a world of potential, grounded in maturity. I deposit money in a savings account, I take the recycling out twice in one week, I write “mop” on the whiteboard beside the door, that I might remember to buy a mop.

Sometimes I leave the drudgery of day-to-day and have a fantastic weekend. Friday night was ladies’ night, extra spicy Caesars in an all-but-dead bar. Saturday a fabulous BBQ in the Ontario suburbs with thick slices of pineapple and a specially marinated tofu, Sunday I watched my football team lose the League One playoff final, with sadness though pleased at least to be able to watch from 3500 miles away. Yesterday morning I awoke to a Blue Jays ticket to the baseball drifting majestically onto the bed beside me, and last night I sat by the lake watching Victoria Day fireworks.

It was a brilliant weekend, a fantastic set of events. The key to being a mature adult, I think, is to balance these two seemingly disparate strands of life and living. There will be the day-to-day, there will be the drudgery, but there will always be the fun, the surprises, the hope.

Perhaps, at times, my job seems unfulfilling. Perhaps any attempt at creativity is shot down, and new ideas are overshadowed always by “legacy”. I’ll find another channel for my creativity, I’ll seek pastures new, I’ll stay true to myself and know what I am capable of. Some semblance of happiness can be found in the smallest things. Stick with it, as they say.

The key, I think, is to keep your head above the water. Or at least breach the surface sometimes, if only to see things things from a different perspective.

It came to my attention I’d been working in this office for too long earlier this morning when, with steely conviction, I began changing the fonts on documents I’d created back to what I’d originally put them as. This was after my boss had taken it upon herself to set everything to Arial, 10pt. It irked me, it exasperated me, and then it dawned on me…

This is my life now? This is what concerns me? 

I’ve been here for way too long.

The last thing I heard Zannah say this morning as she walked out the door, late, was “I don’t want to go to work.” If I’m to be on time I should leave when she does, but she was late, and I was still in my pyjamas; stony-faced, displeased, wanting simply to crawl back into bed. 

Yesterday, I got a reply to an email and it said “Can you send me this email as a Word document?” This irked me. This exasperated me. “Are you serious?” I wondered. “Can we discuss the copy and paste function?” I wanted to reply.

And then I stopped, and I thought; why should this concern me so? Why do fonts and copy & pastes, and lost camera lenses and pointless, endless, rambling meetings affect me in such a manner?

Why can’t I bring myself to clamber out of bed at 7am? Or 7:30am? Or 8am for that matter?

Because, as Zannah so succinctly put it, I don’t want to go to work.

I’m uninspired, my opinion isn’t valued, I’m data input, copy and pasting, excel documenting, font changing, I look after the cameras, I’m type type typing… and I just want to go back to bed.