Reflections on old posts

While reviewing a sales flier and saw some pencil cases for sale. I forgot how long I've been wanting a pencil case and it looks like back to school sales are starting. Anyway, flipping through the old posts, I couldn't find anything about the pencil case. Though I've learnt that my monitor has been dieing since last November. It's also rekindled fond memories of my last vacation in Ohio. It was nice, things felt simpler. The memory that sticks in my mind the most right now is heating up and eating that last frozen lasagna that I had. I can still remember how it tasted. I've stopped watching Wife Swap, but still watch House and Intervention. It's been a while since I set a small weekly goal. I don't think I'll start that up again.

Dreaming

Ok, it's the middle of the night and I don't often get much sleep. I was dreaming about my father again. He was sick and we were gathering family together. I'm not really sure what to say but here's to you dad.

Well, Rest In Peace

Somehow there's death alerts seem to have an annoying tendency to be prone to false alarms. However, I still mark the passing of a good friend today. There were all sorts of other things I'd have rather commented on, but this pretty much demands a moment. Oddly, after the news has settled in, I don't really feel a sense of loss. I'm just happy that for a while, my life was enriched.

The Blade Liger

One of my most valuable lessons about money so far was actually taught to me by a toy. It was a blade liger that I bought on clearance at a Giant Tiger. It was only a few dollars, five, I think. I thought that having a few toys would help me regain some of my lost childhood. Though as I finished assembling the kit, I quickly realized that it was going to be little more than an ornament on my desk. A lot of stuff is simply junk and I see that a lot of the stuff I had as a child was simply junk.
On the other hand, some things are timeless. I still appreciate stuffed animals. They're soft and fuzzy and well, soft things are very nice for relaxing. They're also there when you need a hug, granted it takes larger ones now that I'm bigger. If it were all up to me, I'd probably bring my whole collection down from the closet and have everything in bed. People bug me about that though. When I'm around more understanding people, that's something I'll be doing.

The Little Things Growing Up

Something reminded me of some of the stupid crap I went through growing up. I always missed the exciting parts of movies because my sister would ask for water and I was the one that wound up getting in trouble if she didn't get any. My mom always pestered me to pile the cans in the basement higher because she was stubbing her toes not watching where they were going. I was always keeping them low because they just weren't stable and a can falling from three feet is definitely going to hurt a lot more. My brother would tell my sister that I'd get her something and she'd complain till I got in trouble for breaking promises that I never made. I actually wound up doing a lot of things for her to keep her from hurting herself, or damaging the house or the furniture and it wound up getting me in trouble. My brother was always getting my sister to abuse me. Stuff like going through my room and slipping papers they find under the bathroom door while I was in there really annoyed me. My parents told my brother to teach me some responsibility and he wound up trying to extort large amounts of money from me through fines.
I can't remember if I mentioned this or not, but it happened back when I was going to elementary school with my brother. I think I would have been like eight at the oldest. My brother was just pounding me while we were in the living room when we were home for lunch one day. My mom was cheering him on. I didn't want to fight. Several years later, I asked her about that incident, she told me that she wished she had done more to discipline me.
They've been treating me like crap and I've been returning the favor, that's not surprising. What is surprising though is how much I care about their respect.

When the most logical course of action is to sit still

Life might not be getting anywhere right now, but I try to remind myself that change for the sake of change is a futile process. I often find myself wondering if I am doing the right thing. Emotionally, it doesn't sit too well. Keeping with the space travel analogy that I started this blog with, if all you had was all the fuel in the world, it's exceedingly easy to put yourself in the middle of nowhere. Let's face it, space is called space because there's a heck of a lot of vast open space out there. I'm also not fond of the setting out with little more than the clothes on my back feeling that I had when I started university. Besides accumulating resources, I've also been:

• researching different parts of the country that I might want to move to
• looking into the requirements for moving to the USA
• examining the costs and potential returns of buying a small business
• doing a feasibility study for a business idea that I have and might want to take up
• exploring the entry requirements and long term prospects of different career paths

The most frustrating thing about this is that ultimately I keep coming back to the same conclusion, I'm not in the proper mental state to make decisions that big right now. Then to add to it, every time my parents try to interrogate me over this sort of stuff, they disregard all the information I find, tell me how they think things work and tell me that I can't just dream, I have to research.
One of the things I looked into was going into air traffic control. I was told that I was crazy for even considering it and that I can't waste money training for something that there's little demand for. Then they waited till my brother was over to ask him about the demand for air traffic controllers. It's not a mishmash of different agencies where you have to convince someone to hire you afterwards. Everything is controlled by one agency, the employer. Parts of the process are contracted out, but they have a good process set up that weeds out practically anyone who wouldn't be at it for life, they'll also only train as many people as they think they'll need and they'll only train the best of them. It costs $1000 for training, which includes room and board. You'd probably be hard pressed to find four months of food for that much, let alone a place to stay and job training. I'm not totally convinced that's what I want to do with the rest of my life.
Something else I looked into was teaching English overseas. Mainly looked into it because something had me wanting to see what life was like in china where my parents come from. My dad was real excited about this idea. My mom kept pressuring me to make a quick decision on it. Neither of them seemed to show any appreciation for the fact that, it's almost a 1/3rd pay cut from the job I have now and I can expect to make about 1/2 of what I'll be making at the position I'm currently training for.
An idea put forward by my dad was to go into dentistry. Another idea that I had was to go into optometry. The prerequisite for both is fairly similar to a premed program. When I told them how the entry process for optometry went, my parents immediately tried to discourage me away from it. After I pointed out that they thought dentistry was a good idea and the dust settled for a few minutes, I was told that I didn't need another degree because I already have one and they lectured me again on doing research instead of just dreaming. So I looked up the entry requirements and read them out to them.
It's all a retelling of the story of the path I made down the side of the house. When I started, I started under the assumption that they had measured things and started spacing the stones fairly close together, like most stone paths. I got about half way down and went looking for more stones. When it became apparent that was all I had to play with, I tried to decide between even spacing and roughly one pace spacing. Then I set off to space the stone one pace apart. There were a few stones left over, which now level the garbage can. For months, I was pestered to finish the path. I had no idea what they wanted me to do to it. When asked to clarify what they wanted, I was told that the minimum requirement was to get from the front to the back. This puzzled me further as I could do it with my eyes closed. After all, I had spaced them one pace apart based off how I walked. They yelled at me, called me lazy and what not and I couldn't figure out what they wanted me to do. Then one day, "Thanks for finally finishing the path." "Umm, it doesn't look any different to me." "So it's been like this all along?" "It's been like this for months You've had me going crazy trying to figure out what you wanted done with it because you've been too lazy to look at the side of the house?" "Well, you never do any work, I never see you doing any work." Sure, yell at me for not slaving away at something because I finished it months ago and you've simply been too lazy to check on it.
I'll get to watch this again when their attitude bites them in the ass one more time when it comes time to pay for my sister's schooling. I don't know enough about their employer pension plans to guess when the discrepancy between their idea of what's going on and how things really are bites them hard. There's still a chance that it might not, but I'm leaning towards impending doom.

I saw something on TV that really hit me recently. A lot of bad things hae happened to me in the past. More to the point, those closest to me, who should be protecting me, have done a lot of bad things to me. I try not to get too caught up in it, but at times I worry if it's made me too self centered or unable to accept responsibility for things. I worry about reality becoming twisted in my mind and I worry about turning into a monster.
I'm not sure how to let go of things but I am slowly starting to. Last week at work, I took some time to practice my writing. Having neater writing is a very big deal for me. It's the central theme to the story I usually tell people about my past.
My parents did a lot of things to me. They were never happy with the way I wrote. My mom kept trying to ruin my proper pencil grip to some system where the thumb was twisted so unnaturally. Anyway, they had me doing things like copying out the alphabet over and over again. They made me keep a diary and they'd read through it and punish me for spelling things incorrectly, make fun things I wrote or just get annoyed at the lack of neatness in my penmanship. Things got to me. One day I refused to write out the alphabet yet again. As a result, I was spanked with whatever happened to be around, in this case, some wooden paint stirring sticks. It's flimsy stuff, so that snapped easily. Those who've snapped wood before should be familiar with how it tends to split along the grain. This left some rather sharp instruments for my parents. They wound up stabbing me in the rear with them. Of course, the wood broke again. I don't remember why they left after that. I just remember that I was home alone for a while with some bleeding and fragments of wood stuck in me rather deep. It wasn't like a little sliver, they must have been at least one, maybe two inches deep. It was a serious wound that I had to treat by myself. I didn't know much then, but for a while, I was really scared. As for why they left, I can say for sure that it wasn't shock. They didn't go away to calm down after what they had done. I know this for certain because when they returned, I was yelled at for not finishing the exercises I had refused to do that lead to this. There were no apologies, my wounds received no treatment other than my own.
It hurts every time someone asks me how I can possibly be bitter at my parents. With childhood memories like that, it's an insult that I'm asked to justify my anger. That seems to be the story that I tell most often. It seems to be the most extreme.
There's also another story that I tend to tell quite frequently. I tell it because there's a scar on my wrist to remind me of it. I got that scar when my sister bit me. She's seven years younger than I am. My brother would always be placing my toys in her toy box and she'd ruin them or refuse to return them or something. I saw her with one of my toys and chased her into a corner trying to get it back. She bit me to get away. I screamed and everyone came rushing to help. Within seconds everyone was gathered around checking to see if everything was ok, giving comfort and assurances where it was needed, and checking for injuries. This would be nice if she was the one hurt. Once again, I was left to tend to my own wounds. I was the one on the floor screaming and clutching a bleeding wound. Of course my sister is fine, she's the assailant. I on the other hand was the victim and was not ok. I needed first aid, which I had to provide myself because everyone was ignoring me.

Welcome

Welcome to my blog. I started this blog to record my efforts to try to restart my life. A while ago, I graduated with a B.Eng in aerospace engineering. I heard things were booming in Calgary, and my parents live here, so I went back to Calgary to look for work. Things were supposed to be good.
Instead, things just went down from there. Instead of being helpful, my parents simply drove my stress level up. Every time I applied somewhere, my parents would ask why I didn't apply sooner. I'd get told to do things that I had already done, like get my resume reviewed, which was happening on the regular basis. They'd make the same suggestions over and over again as if that was all I needed to do despite the fact that I was already doing better than that. Pretty soon, their interrogations were the focus of my life, instead of my job search. It got to a point where I wasn't able to sleep. I blame them for ruining my life.
There's actually a long history of serious tension between me and the rest of my family. There's a bunch of stories that I usually tell. Right now, there's one that's been weighing heavily on my mind that doesn't get told too often. My parents felt that I had an over active imagination as a kid. One of the things they did to try to suppress it was that one day, I was denied food. My mom just said, "See if your imagination can fool you."
I hate them for a lot of things, though for now, I have to use every resource I can, including them. When I finally have the resources to stand on my own, it's going to be for good. My goal is to be gone without a trace. When I leave, I'm sure I'll use that quote.