Tagged: life
Dear university students
- by admin
enjoy yr first week back at school.
May your days be full of decent wifi connections, manageable schedules, and coffee that doesn't taste like it was brewed in a shoe.
May your early mornings and late nights be few and far between (and hopefully not within the same 24hr period).
Live-tweet all of your classes; I hear that's the best way to take notes and also keep us all entertained.
Create clever hashtags like #TrimbleLearns for your school year.
For the love of god if you have to do #JokeJournal please make sure the jokes are actually funny.
Don't let the winter, your midterms, your exams, or the fact that you're the only one actually doing work in your group for your group project that's worth a terrifyingly large portion of your mark get you down.
It's normal. You'll get through it.
And most of all, you'll miss the hell of it once you've graduated.
xox
yr girl Shaner
(University of Winnipeg alumna, class of 2013, already missing the shit out of being a student)
Weekend wedding
- by admin
not mine, obvs. That's still a ways away at this point.
The wedding was Mike & Alicia's and was at a fancy country club and was beautiful and moving and everything you hope a wedding should be.
We dolled up fancy and danced until our feet ached and smiled until our faces hurt
and had the most wonderful time with the most wonderful people.
Afterward John and I climbed up a play structure outside my apartment, still in our fancy wedding clothes, and looked at the stars and talked about our future together.
It was the perfect way to end the perfect day and was 100% worth the resulting hangover.
Congrats Mike & Alicia! Thank you for letting me be a part of your special day!
xox
yr girl Shaner
I lead the best life
- by admin
I don't say that enough because we're trained not to say it.
We live in a big, cynical world and it's cool to emphasize the struggle and be a starving, fucked-up artist or whatever
but sometimes, when life is just right
you have to #humblebrag.
Which is what this post is.
I have amazing friends. It's funny how you only realize who the good, solid people are when you go through yr toughest times, but when they do holy hell does it feel good to know you have them in yr corner.
I have an amazing bf who is funny and charming and makes me feel like the only girl in the world. I love him endlessly.
I have a blossoming career that challenges and inspires me constantly.
I have all of you, who show up here and read day after day & year after year to read this nonsense and comment and send me nice messages once & a while. Because you're beautiful people.
Thank you, all of you, for making my life so rich.
xox
yr girl Shaner
Going to Rainbow Trout Music Festival tomorrow
- by admin
which will be my first year going and I'm excited as hell.
We spent the evening running around getting stuff ready
in-between eating sandwiches on croissants
laughing in back alleys
walking all over this damn town
holding hands.
Right now there's laundry in and I'm drinking a beer and watching John learn a song
but shhh don't tell him I'm watching because it might make him weird
because this is adorable and I don't want to ruin it in the moment
so I'll just capture it in a blog post instead
of course.
Let's Talk About: Inappropriate Words
- by admin
When I was a little girl my parents got me a whole series of books called "Let's Talk About" which were designed to help small children deal with their emotions and attitudes that can prevent them from becoming responsible young people and eventually responsible adults.
They had titles like "Let's Talk About: Bullying," "Let's Talk About: Feeling Jealous" and other stuff like that. I think about those books a lot and reflect on how they provided an opportunity for me and my parents to have a dialogue that was at my level about complex issues.
While I don't want to talk about those books, I want to use this post as a way of having an open dialogue about something that embarrasses me a lot, and something that I'm hoping to change: my tendency to use words like "retard" and "gay" as derogatory terms in regular conversation.
Kind of like my own personal Let's Talk About.
It seems to me that the reason that we use words like "gay," "retard" and "homo" when we're young is because we hear them and recognize that they're insults, but we're too immature to grasp the larger context of what they mean in our society and how inappropriate it is to say them.
So I grew up using these words and they managed to make their way into my speech patterns as an adult largely because most of the people that I knew still used them.
It's easy to feel like calling someone a retard is okay when everyone you hang out with uses that word all the time.
As we get older we're supposed to learn these rules of social conduct, but many of us disregard them because we haven't grown up enough to realize that it's actually really offensive and hurtful to use that kind of language.
(For example, I used this image as a response in online conversations way more than I care to admit.)
Recently though I've had the opportunity to have some productive talks with different people about using those sorts of words and it's made me think about how frequently I fell back on using them, and the extent to which I defended my so-called "right" to say whatever I want (no matter how hurtful) and expressed annoyance at people being "butthurt" over it.
It's not nice to open your eyes and realize that you acted poorly when you could have made better choices, but that's how we learn and I want to take a moment to publicly apologize to anyone whose feelings I may have hurt with that sort of language: I'm sorry.
I could have acted better, and moving forward I intend to do so.
With that in mind, I'm looking for some help. It's not easy to change our speech patterns, and I would love some input for how to remove these words from my vocabulary. What tips or suggestions do you have?
Thanks in advance!
xox
yr girl Shaner
Life's getting back to normal
- by admin
after a week and a half of getting to know John's mom and sister who were in from Windsor which was exciting and exhausting and exhilarating and stressful because it's hard to entertain guests from out-of-town consistently, I've learned.
I've never had family visit and stay with me before so this was a whole new experience and last night as I curled up in bed at my own apartment with Toulouse and a book and dozed off I felt good. It was a nice visit but it'll be nice to get back to real life, too.
Except this week is jam-packed which means no time to breathe as per usual. Here's what's lined up over the next few days:
- dinner with Mum tonight
- The Karate Kid at Movies on Memorial
- PubChat with Adrian and Colin
- Rainbow Trout from Fri-Sun
which either means that I'm not actually going back to "real life" yet, or that my "real life" is spectacularly awesome.
I'm going with the second option.
Hip Hop Sunday: Cadence Weapon - Baby I'm Yours (ft Shad)
- by admin
Almost didn't make it to posting today (again) because of family in town and all the obligations that come with it
which isn't a bad thing, but it'll be nice to get back to normal
at least for the next few days until I leave town for Rainbow Trout
where I'll camp and party and listen to the best local music around
and wrap up the summer real nice.
It's been a hell of a ride.
Hope yours has, too.
xox
yr girl Shaner
Reading this beautiful book right now
- by admin
called "Reunion" by Alan Lightman.
It's about a professor who attends his 30th college reunion on the surface but like a good book it's also about heartbreak and misery and that sad sort of indifference that sets in when you look back on your life and find yourself disappointed. It's also about lost loves, burying emotions and bittersweet heartbreak.
Though to say "I'm reading" isn't really true, because I'm having it read to me. Usually late at night after hours of talking and laughing when we should be sleeping and one of us looks at the other and says something like
"want to do some Book?"
which sounds like a secret term for something but isn't.
We're just both literary nerds.
I haven't read anything akin to a romance novel in a long time. I generally don't care for them.
The last one I read was The Time Traveler's Wife which was recommended to me while in a Chapters with an ex-boyfriend's cousin while living in Hamilton and I bought it on a whim because, looking back, I needed some romance in my life. Even if I was only going to be able to find it within the pages of a novel.
Recently though I'm finding myself drawn to romance novels. Mostly ones about betrayal and heartbreak and making beautiful, fucked-up, life-changing mistakes.
Because that's what we're all doing all the time, really, and that's what I feel my life has been lately: something beautiful that came from a bunch of fucked-up mistakes
which is the story of everyone's life when you step back and look at it.
I read a great article from Elite Daily a few weeks ago called Why Readers, Scientifically, Are The Best People To Fall In Love With which I think is absolutely true.
Being able to draw from the references I've learned from books has made this process easier. I can turn to Wilde and Bukowski and, now, Lightman and see sides of myself in their words because books teach us to love
to look at things from other people's perspectives
to be brave
to make the hard choices
to reflect on the bad ones
to not let the fleeting, inconsequential annoyances of day-to-day life get in the way of living.
I'm falling back in love with books and it's glorious.
It's like coming home.
Tony Pierce asked
- by admin
how hard is it to type type type your feelings?
must be sorta hard because only a handful of ppl even do it any more.
which is true. Both that almost nobody blogs their feels anymore and also that it's hard to type type type your feelings sometimes.
Because even when yr on cloud nine sometimes it's hard to share
and sit down and say
"my life is pretty fucking spectacular. I'm dating an amazing man, getting to spend time with funny and genuine people, and I feel confident in where my life is going"
even when that's true.
Because it's easy to think
that nobody cares
that people only want to read when you're sad
or when you've gone someplace amazing
or when you've had this cray adventure
which are all interesting, of course
but that's just not true.
Because I care.
I always care.
So pour yr fucking heart out for me
I dare you.
Wrote to my aunt yesterday
- by admin
who I haven't talked to in years, which is cray
and embarrassing, because she's blood and family and all that jazz
but life happens and people drift apart
and sometimes we have to take steps to get back together.
Anyway.
I wrote to her today and told her about my life. My friends, my loves, my family, my interests, my failures, my regrets
and she wrote back and said
Alyson, everyone makes mistakes.
which is true and good to remember sometimes. Especially when we're thinking about the mistakes that others have made.
It's easy to forget that we often make them, ourselves, and it's good to be reminded that we all fuck up
we all make mistakes
and that it's okay. As long as we learn from them.
