#45 Space to create

Being back is weird.

There is sudden pressure to "get a job" and "work". A close friend of mine talked about what he does about mundaneness of life and how everyone has it.

This fills me with fear. We are so busy doing all these things that we forget that time doesn't work in our favour. Time and space work in their own way. We can't control time. We have made little watches and filled our lives with a way to measure time in order to be accountable to others. But we don't own time anymore than we own the space in the atoms of our body.

If we don't allow ourselves to understand that the creative process takes time, we won't be able to create the life we want. We need to be gentle on ourselves.

I was thinking about our need - basic human need - to create, to be flexible and fluid and respond to things in a creative way. I think this is where some of our drama comes from. When an event happens, we have to respond and we use our creativity to do so. We change our plans, our thinking for a moment. We feel satisfied by this. So, we tell everyone we know about how we saved the Office Potluck or how we Managed some Relationship. But this isn't real creativity, you know. This is using a latent skill that we all have, that's so deeply shoved down on our list of priorities that when we have an opportunity to use it, to be resourceful, we get giddy.

I've been reading through my old journals and I came upon this piece that I wrote to myself when I was 18.

"As much as I love achieving goals, I must remember this truth - we must set goals for the right reasons, for ourSELVES. Do not cheat yourself, respect yourself, encourage yourself, give yourself time, space, and love. You are on the journey of life, and though you will meet special people, you are the only one who fully understands yourself. Cherish that relationship."

#44 Fight club

When you come home after living abroad for a while things are really strange. Your friends, who you’ve kept in touch with over Facebook, aren’t the same people anymore. They’ve grown. Sometimes they have gotten sadder. Their houses have changed and they want to celebrate their new curtains. You think of things in terms of how much things cost and how many times you could have paid rent with those curtains. 

You know that you’ve changed. They’ve expected you to change.
They’ve expected you not to know who the contestants on Survivor are this year. They haven’t expected you to be different.  They haven’t expected you to not like watching TV anymore.

Wherever you were, you were free. You didn’t have to hide your reaction to how weak Starbucks coffee tastes now. You didn’t have to hide your outrage about how much fresh fruit and vegetables cost. You were celebrated for your high standards of restaurants, instead of getting the eye roll from your friends that your old favourite place no longer holds a candle to your tongue’s new power. That $23 for lunch is a ridiculous concept that would feed a family for a week. You order tea instead and feel like you are insulting them.

You don’t feel free. You feel trapped. You feel like you need to have answers about what you’re going to “do” with your life now that you’re back and “settling down”.

That’s the worst part about being back. The comparison. The show. The fact that people feel like they have to tell you things about their life to make themselves feel better. The game of “look, I’m happy too”. I don’t mean people who share their lives, their experiences. I mean the ones who really feel so insecure about themselves that they tell you about their great mortgage rate and how they “would” travel but they would prefer to invest in themselves where they can see the money instead.  

People don’t understand that buying things doesn’t make you happy. They don’t know what its like to live with nothing. They don’t understand what it’s like not to have a plan from one day to the next.

They expect you to “settle in” and get a routine and a “real job” because that is what people do.

But you can’t.

Because you know the secret to life.

The worst thing about coming home is that you know the secret to life and you can’t tell anyone. You can’t tell them because it would rip open their world from one side to the other and expose all the secrets that they swallow when they sleep.

You expected culture shock. You didn’t expect the first rule of Fight Club.

#43 Try

I just realized somewhere down the line that I've had this blog for an awfully long while. When I went into this project it was to achieve crossing off 101 things in 1001 days. I've managed to cross a lot of things off my list, most recently indulging in an Eaton Mess which is something I didn't get the first time I ate a week of British food (in Britain).



In a way, my life is much like an Eaton mess. It's something I've waited a long time to try, I had forgotten about, and the best bits are hidden. For those of my friends who have been following my Facebook posts looking on the outside it seems like my travels are filled with whipped cream and mmmm…. strawberries. But those aren't the best bits.

The best bits of me are the hidden parts. The parts that keep on going even when I feel sad and lonely. When I write long messages to my friends after several bottles of cheap wine looking for answers about the relationships in my life. When I decide that I don't, in fact, want to do anything in my life but stay alone in my apartment eating bread which is quite possible in Italy.

When I'm stuck and I feel like a failure because I can't create anything. When the vision of myself coming back from Europe looking skinny and strong and tanned vanishes because I didn't manage to do those push-ups everyday after all. When all I can see is the fact that I'm sick and the weather sucks and I'm running out of money, and not the gratitude of where I am and what I am doing.

Those are the dark parts of life, the chocolate chips, if you're still trying to follow my spontaneous metaphor. Still, as I mention these dark parts they seem very superficial. That's what they look like to the outside person. They look like a bout of good exercise and a bottle of good wine will "fix" the blues in life. Not everyone has the blues and the people who have it don't talk about it. Some people just accept the dark clouds over their heads like the crummy English weather.

I've asked most of my close friends this question at some point in our lives, "when you're driving, do you ever feel like you just want to let go of the wheel and let it go?" The answer has always been yes.

How many people have had that thought? But you don't act on it. You push it to the side and you order your favourite Starbucks and for a minute you're blissfully happy and you forget all about the awkward conversation.

That line - it's the only way I can describe it. It's like someone takes a grey magic marker and colours through your life.  It moves slowly through our lives and we don't know what it wants, when it will come, or what we can do about it.  That line is what I don't understand about life. Sometimes it's so thick that you can't move. Sometimes it's so thin, it's just a memory of a bad dream you had ages ago.

You can distract yourself from it and there are many techniques to do that like going for a run, eating healthy, getting involved in the community, and adopting a pet. Make a list of 101 things you want to accomplish and write about them. Make yourself a better person.

My struggle is my compulsion to find that line and tie myself up in it. It's been years and I still can't let it go like a crazy ex-girlfriend who won't stop calling her ex. When it comes into my life I like to sit with it in a room with a bottle of wine and indulge it. That's not a healthy relationship. When it's not there, I panic and wonder when I can expect it.

Status Update

By Humans of New York

When you're feeling down, it's so tempting to focus on your sadness: you wonder why you're sad, you hate that you're sad, you wish you weren't sad. It's completely natural to do this. But it's the wrong way to be. No matter how smart you are-- you will never change a bad mood by thinking about it. You will only magnify it.

Instead focus on your behavior. Focus on what you can change. Go outside. Exercise. Quit isolating yourself. Interact with friends and family. Accomplish things. Your mind will reward you with happiness.

It is so tough to change your behavior if you are feeling depressed. But it's the only way. Don't say: "I'll act differently when I feel better."

Act differently, and you will feel better.

Now I see more. I see that this line is just the weather. It is there and we can talk about it and we can tuck into a good book when it's raining and that's ok. We can also go out and help other people and that will probably make you feel better. Me, at least. I realize how I feel after I have a class of students - I help them. It makes me feel giddy. I'm good at a lot of things I didn't know that I was good at before I tried. 

A lot of my life I spent not trying things. I spent it waiting for things to find me, waiting for me to be spontaneously good at something or waiting to find that "thing" that everyone else is looking for… you know the elusive "thing" you're going to have to find if you're ever happy and then do it for the rest of your life. I didn't do a lot of things because I thought I wasn't good enough at them. I didn't travel because I didn't have anyone to go with. I didn't go to Europe because I didn't speak another language. Instead, I expected less from myself and it slowly stopped the funnel of creativity in my life. 

I was never a "one thing" person. As a child I loved change more than challenges. I was not tenacious. I would rather do 7 projects 80% right than 1 project 100% right. Some people may disagree. I am messy. But it's comfortable for me to change and that's just me. It's not "finding yourself" to understand yourself. The reason you start to "find yourself" when you're older is that you do enough stuff in your life to be able to attach patterns to your actions. There's no mysterious brain wave that opens up and gives your answers.

When you're in your 20's you look at your parents. You start to see them as human and you think: that's why I'm like that. You get some background. You start to hear about things your family did. People start to divorce. You see failure and success. When you're 30 you've lived enough to have your own failure and your own success. You've done stuff on your own. Maybe you have a family. Patterns start to emerge and you can see what you're like, how you're coping. This is the stage where you need to take responsibility and accept that you are, in fact, responsible for yourself. 

I used to dance in this crazy way when I was in my early 20's. My friends would be really embarrassed because I'd move my hips too much. It just felt right to me. I took some belly dancing classes and I solidified 3 good moves. Now everyone loves my dancing and says they wish they could dance like me. I still just have 3 moves but I'm learning more.

It took me 10 years and living in another country to realize that the people who were my friends and commenting on my dancing were just scared and didn't know how to dance like everyone else. Remember the hip sway, dancing in a circle, looking at everyone else?

At 30 years old, I'm learning how to dance. I'm not doing it to "find my thing" or to make a career out of it. I'm doing it because it makes me happy. I'm doing it because I realize that I can be tenacious after all, it makes me feel uncomfortable, but that's not a bad thing. There is no good or bad in life, there's just choice. 

#42 On Rome

By the time I got to Rome, living in Italy was wearing on me like a non-Italian pair of shoes. I was tired of working for 4 schools and not guaranteed a time or date of payment. I was sunburned and sick of the humidity. The thought of white bread turned my stomach and all I wanted was a piece of toast with seeds in it.

I knew too much. I knew the difference between someone being nice and someone scamming you. I knew where to cross the street the fastest. I was a line-cutter: guilty.

E10 is a lot of money for an Italian. You can feed your family for a week with vegetables from the market. E10 on a pizza and a beer in Rome was unheard of for me. I felt like this city cheats both my Canadian people and my Italian people at the same time.

I feel like this city is huge and full of tourists. The food, of course, is delicious. If you want to go and eat really good Italian food by all means go to Rome.

But in reality, Rome isn’t Italy. Rome is Las Vegas. Rome is grander than life and all wrapped up in a perfectly organized roads sort of way. You don’t get lost in Rome. People don’t yell in Rome.

People are not Italian in Rome.

All the Romans either work in the service industry or outside Rome, missing their city. That is the real Italy. The heartbreak of living away from the place you were born. They don’t have to move to another country to feel it. When you are forced to move away because of work, your heart is always broke, no matter how positive you stay about it.

A friend of mine moved from Rome to Turin for work. She commutes 4 hours a day to Milan and back. Everyday. She is Roman and accepts her life as it is. She is the most positive person that I know.

By the time I got to Rome I was in the bargaining stage of my break-up with Italy. I loved parts of it so powerfully and yet I saw the negative side. Some things grated on my very last nerve.

So, Rome, for me, has a different perspective. It’s like going to Disneyland after you’ve worked for Disneyland. You know too much.

My dad was always interested in marketing and sponsorships in the corporate world. My little brother was fascinated by the behind-the-scenes work in film and theatre. You can imagine my enjoyment when we went to a movie together and I had my dad on the one side commenting, “PEPSI placement. Look at that, the movie must be sponsored by Mercedes”; on the other side of me, my brother was searching for cut scenes and green screens.

This is what I saw when I was in Rome. Marketing, American culture, and the green screens that are smoke screens to cover up the beauty marks of Italy. Yes, you can have an American breakfast in Rome… this thought disgusted me until I realized that tourists can’t accept espresso. It takes a long time to get used it. It’s not fair to ask that from someone.

So I sit here conflicted because you didn’t come to Rome to pay attention to the green screens and the foreign advertising. You came to Rome to get your picture with the coliseum and use the #WheninRome hashtag. For that, I won’t spoil your ideas. I won’t tell you about the guy in the back pulling the strings.

I’m trying not to spoil it for myself either. The truth is, Rome breaks my heart because it’s the last city on this adventure in Italy and every cobblestone reminds me of that. But let’s stay positive and be appreciative of our experiences. It’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.

I will, however, share with you that #WheninRome, you’re paying too much money for Pasta that you can get outside the city. Stop buying bottled water, they give it to for free at the fountain.

I'm sorry, I can't. You can read all this crap on someone else's blog. 

My advice: 

In Rome, take advantage of the E2 wine and get drunk in the middle of the afternoon under a big shady tree and write all the poetry that comes to mind. 

Buy a pack of E4 cigarettes and chain smoke them while you're walking down the street. No one will bother you, they will think you're Italian. 

Talk with your hands. 

Glare at strangers. 

Don't go to any restaurants, go to the supermarket deli section and have them make you a sandwich instead. 

Get lost.  

 

#41 Kids Camp

I've started teaching English at a teens camp in Umbria, Italy. It's been a wild couple of days…

The teens themselves are adorable, but working with them under summer holiday conditions is hard to say the least. I corrected a student today in front of his friends and he told me, "I don't want to do fucking English on my holiday, I want to be with my friends."

I've never been spoken to like that in my life. I was taken aback to say the least. But instead of getting mad, I told him, "listen, fair enough. I understand. Let's work together on this and try and make it fun for everyone." I think I calmed him down, but he was upset that he was missing out on his football game to come to English and "learn".

They come into the class in a rush, high on music and time at the pool. They don't want to listen, they don't want to learn anything new, they don't want to play games… but they do want to be on their cell phones. Which is cool, I mean, they aren't adults, but they aren't in school in either. Their parents work for a big company which helps fund the cost of this camp… a camp which includes English lessons. They know they have to come, but they are finding it difficult to figure out why.

If you play too many games with them, they think that being there is pointless. If you explain an activity to them they find the quickest way to do it so they can be on their phones. I try to choose the leaders and explain the instructions to them so they can help and coach others. I love the leaders, they are my favourite.

Today instead of getting upset that they didn't want to play a game that I planned, I told them I needed to work on my Italian and asked them to help me pronounce some words. They liked that. They want to be the boss. They told me that this year the camp is understaffed and they aren't able to go off the campus and they feel like they are being treated like kids…

So, games aren't a good idea.

But that being said, one of the games that has worked really well has been to teach instructions, blindfold one of them and ask them to direct the others around. One group literally walked around and took the words off the wall… but the other ones had fun at it.

We'll see how it goes. It's not a learning journey with them, but a "let's make the hour that you can't do something you love and you're forced to do English instead" fun lesson. It's challenging, but I'm happy I get the opportunity.

I think, in the end, people want value for what they get. They are interested in objectives. If students see what they are supposed to learn and understand why, they will climb onboard. If not… good luck.

#40 Welcome to the South of Italy

The South. 

I had lived and worked in the North of Italy, Turin, for about a year and a half before I first ventured to the south. I had heard about the south in whispers around the dinner table, “but Stefanie”, (Italians love starting their sentences with “but”) “The South isn’t like this. It’s different. Life there is slow. People eat more.”

I decided to see for myself. I headed from Turin directly to Sciacca, a small city in Sicily where I contacted a woman and her boyfriend who live on an organic olive farm where they made soaps and oils. They wanted to start a language school in their small town. It would be the first of its kind.

So I ventured off into the south, expecting… I don’t know what I was expecting. Maybe there was still a little thought that Italy in the south would be like the movies, with the old women furiously sweeping their doorsteps and children playing football in the street.

The first thing I noticed upon arrival at the Palermo airport was the cooperation between people. I had heard that people in the South were hospitable and open, but they are kind and help people with their bags instead of elbowing them to make room. They seem to leave more space.

The second thing I noticed was the traffic. The trip into town from the airport was supposed to take about 40 minutes. It was the closer part of an hour and a half. It’s not that the drivers were crazy, but that there was just a huge amount of cars on the road. I had forgotten that despite Palermo and Turin being the same size, Turin has a metro and wide Roman-style roads to aid with traffic. To my surprise and delight I soon realized that drivers in Palermo don’t furiously honk their horn.

Nevertheless a delay in my flight coupled with the traffic caused me to miss the last bus into Sciacca [traveller’s tip: never make arrangements so you are on the last bus, odds are you will miss it]. It was a really proud moment for me, actually, because I realized that my Italian was good enough to have a conversation about a cheap place to stay. I booked myself into a cute b&b on Via Roma, which ended up being not so much a b&b, but a hotel. A b&b, in my opinion, isn’t just a hotel with the words “b&b” (and they also don’t charge you E5 for breakfast).

But, when in Rome do as the Roman’s do or rather, when in Sicily don’t worry about getting breakfast at the hotel. Italian breakfast is a croissant (brioche) and an espresso so you would be paying E5 for something that costs E2 across the street anyway (and is probably made by someone’s grandma).

That night I explored around to find something to eat. I snuck into the first Italian restaurant I could find on Via Vittorio and, even though the restaurant was almost empty, I was sat down between a family and 2 men. The people beside me briefly looked at me in pity (I was eating by myself, after all) and then they returned to their meal. This is significant because in Turin people stare at you and they don’t look away. Even when you look back at them, many people just carry on looking. It’s uncomfortable sometimes; you can feel their eyes on you all the way down the street.

I ordered the “fish special” – E15. In Turin this would have resulted in a piece of white fish and maybe some vegetables. In Palermo…

Well let’s just say in the south you “mange bene” (eat well).  I was brought course after course of bite-sized pieces: first a plate of octopus, cod, and two other types of fish I had never tried before (but I will remember the melt-in-your-mouth fresh flavor forever). The next was a tuna and fruit salad, more cod, and some shrimp. The next plate was an anchovy ratatouille (for lack of a better description), fish meatball, and anchovy paste. I wasn’t even done at that point! I was brought some fried mashed potatoes and a small slice of chickpea pancake. In Italian all of these dishes have specific names, but I find it easier to describe what they are (sorry my Italian friends).

I asked the woman if the “fish special” was actually supposed to be for just 1 person. She assured me , “infatti” (yes). 

While I was in food heaven, the men next to me started up a conversation. It was very cute because they didn’t come out and directly start talking to me; instead, they started to pepper their conversation with English words. Whenever I would automatically glance over they smiled to themselves and went back to their conversation. It made me laugh, this coyness, this playfulness that I had never experienced before.

We started talking shortly after my last course. One of the men was in his 70’s and had just returned from 30 years living in New York. It was surprising (and adorable) because he spoke very basic English, peppered with bumper sticker phrases in a New York accent: “I went to New York for 30 years. I just come back. New York is like, are you freaking kidding me man? Are you joking me? I go in Canada once, and it was so expensive, like, are freaking serious guy?”

It turns out that he went to Atlantic City 30 years ago and won 2 million dollars at the casino and stayed in New York until the money ran out. He was trying to marry me off to his friend, a younger dentist in his 40’s.  I politely declined.

As soon as they found out I had been living in Turin they told me all about the “real” Italy in the south. To an outsider it may seem strange to have a country with such a competition over where it is from, but you have to consider that Italy (and the Italian language) was only created 150 years ago. Before that, it was a series of autonomous regions that operated with their own dialects, culture, tradition, food, and climate, each very different from the next. It would be like if each province in Canada was like la belle Province (where depending on the year, feel like they either are the real Canada, or not Canada at all). In fact, there are a few autonomous regions in Italy, most of them bordering other countries where the people have had long histories of changing hands and now consider the country they officially belong to like the changing weather (Valle D’Aosta, Trentino etc.).

When you see Italian food in films and in photos, you generally see Sicilian food. Round loafs of bread sprinkled with sesame seeds piled high on the table, wine, fresh olives and olive oil, risotto, tomatoes that are so fresh that you can eat them like grapes.

You wonder to yourself: how can they live in the land of bread, pasta, and wine and not gain a pound? I’ll let you in on the secrets…

First of all, Italians don’t drink.  It sounds counter intuitive because there is wine on every table, but they just put it out like a condiment. You can have some wine with your lunch just like you can have some olive oil on your bread. Or not.  Because it’s around so often people don’t really use it. It’s kind of like that candy that your grandma always has in her house.

Secondly, Italians don’t snack. We were talking about some Canadian food that I could prepare for an event and I mentioned that I could put some fresh herbs in yogurt with lemon juice and we could cut up some veggies (carrots, cucumber, little tomatoes). Snack foods: that’s where I shine. But in the end, I knew that they wouldn’t be received in the same way.

Snack foods don’t exist in the same way here. People eat proper meals three times a day. If you’re hungry in between meals you can have a yogurt or a piece of fruit. For dinner you can have finger foods like pieces of pizza, bruschetta (pronounced: brusk – etta not brush – etta), crackers with some cream cheese and tomatoes, but you eat salads and vegetables as well. This type of eating is called an aperitivo and it’s like a buffet style of fresh, home made food that can be piled on a small plate (small plate, eh). The other type of eating is a course-style meal where you have a salad and meat with veggies or a small serving of pasta.

Third, people watch their portions (as I’m typing this, I’m making the “in a way” movement with my hands that I’ve grown accustomed to). Let’s qualify that during the week people watch their portions. If you have pasta, you don’t eat anything else. If you have risotto, you don’t eat anything else. If you have meat and vegetables, you have some bread. If you have pasta for lunch you have salad for dinner and vice versa.

People understand what works for their body and they won’t judge you at all for doing what feels right for you. For example, some people love to eat bread with pasta and they won’t eat bread with a meat and vegetable plate. Others will eat bread only in the morning with some Nutella. Some people will eat everything and those people are not called fat slobs. They are called a “buona forchetta” (bwohna – fork- etta). I am, as you can imagine, proud to call myself a “good fork”.

I mentioned weekday eating and weekend eating. This is very important. On the weekend, you can have whatever you want. You can go to a restaurant and have pasta piled high, or a smaller plate of pasta with some vegetables and meat as well. You can go to a pizzeria and have a whole pizza to yourself (with one whole pint of beer!). You can host a party on Sunday afternoon and eat lasagne, and pasta, and meat, and fish, and top it all off with dessert.

But you don’t do all of these things on the same weekend.

I finally arrived in Sciacca and was greeted by the smiling faces of Aga and Alex. They are an adorable Polish-Italian couple that, I soon find out, doesn’t just operate a farm; they have an empire of products and constant mindset of invention.

They say that Rome wasn’t built in a day, but if they had had Aga, it would have been. In just 2 years they have built their soap business, renovated their house, started a school, and built countless projects throughout the house. This couple works really well together; I’ve never seen a couple so focused on their big picture. They may disagree about the way to do something (like why two milk containers are open at the same time), but it’s just because they both want it done right.

Over the last few days the internet hasn't been working and it’s really shown me how difficult it is to keep a business while travelling. Things go wrong. I had this vision of having Skype classes every morning to wake myself up early and make some money for the day, but it seems like that is just wishful thinking. In fact, I’ve had to cancel several due to the spotty connection.

So I decided to put my time to good use and help around the house. They had recently renovated the main floor of the house and there are things covered with dust everywhere. Plus, there is a strong wind that blows dust everywhere. You need to clean every single day. There is always something to do on a farm.

But thankfully, they also believe in siesta in the South!