About Me, Part 35: Loneliest House On The Block

I had found out about the bisexual social group through word of mouth. I had also stopped by their booth at the 1998 Pride Festival in Sunset Beach Park. Eventually, I got up the courage to go to one of the Friday cafe nights. The first was nerve-wracking; the second was still a little awkward, but after that I was comfortable. I was making yet more friends. It was fun and friendly, but with so many good looking women and men around, it felt to me a bit like a buffet. I was infatuated every night that I went out. It was only a matter of time before I met someone, in that case a woman who was a few years older than I was. We were dancing together at Denman Station one Friday night and started to make out. We started dating a few days later.

The relationship lasted about a month. At times, I felt almost high on infatuation, but as time went on, I felt my ancient neediness and desperation surface. I tried to ignore how mismatched we both were and how confused I felt; I felt very much like the "woman" in the relationship. I sensed that I was not what she had expected. I also knew that she, having separated from her husband in New York City (she was stalling on signing the divorce papers), was dating a few people at a time. Polyamory was something completely foreign to me, but again, I submerged how I felt just to have someone around.

In April, I performed in a talent show held in a school gym/auditorium organized by a few folks in the Mastery community. I had invented a drag persona, taking my stage name from a pet cat I had back in Montreal and a the name of my UBC residence during my first year: Miss Penny Fairview. My thing was lip-synching to classic soul from the 60s. I had gone out to buy a brown beehive wig, a green floral A-line dress, make-up, shoes and costume jewelry the week before. After work, on the day of the performance, I headed across town to Point Grey and spent a couple of hours getting ready backstage. I was a few acts in, so I waited until my turn. The sound man played a track from my Beg, Scream & Shout box set, Barbara Lewis' "Baby, I'm Yours". It went over very well. During intermission, my girlfriend brought me a bouquet. Some of the bisexual community was in the audience and I had also invited a couple of coworkers and an old friend from library school. It was a blast. After the show, I got changed, took my make-up off (felt strangely empty) and headed down to the cafe night, my girlfriend giving me a lift. We then spent the night and the following morning at her apartment in the Brentwood neighbourhood of Burnaby. She had plans with someone else the following day, but we also made plans to get together the following Saturday night for a movie and a dinner which I would cook. When that Saturday arrived, I was working that day until five, she phoned me at work. She said that she did not feel well and wanted to cancel that evening. I agreed, but felt the situation to be very odd. When I got home, I phoned a couple of times and there was no answer. I put the dinner ingredients away and had canned soup instead. I went to bed early and had a rough sleep. The following morning, she called me to say that she was on the way over to my place. I felt that sinking feeling one gets when one knows that the end of a relationship, no matter how ill-fitting, is near. When she arrived, I made to tea. She explained that she had lied about being ill the previous night; she had been with someone else. She was now dumping both of us. I cannot remember the rest of the conversation, but I recall feeling numb for the rest of the day, right through my Sunday afternoon t'ai chi class and dinner that evening.

*

The first weekend of May, I signed up to review (participate a second time or more) the Mastery workshop. My first time, a couple of years earlier, I had dealt with my grief over the loss of my mother. Now, I was dealing with feelings of worthlessness and inadequacy. I expressed a lot of anger that weekend. My new support group, as well as my original one, both proved to be very supportive while I went through this. I had also joined the choir again and sang in the spring concert. But, bi community events began to feel tense and my feelings of dejection became much stronger. My ex and I tried to be friends, but to no avail. Sad, but it became a pattern with me as my resentment at being rejection seemed overwhelming, taking months or longer before I finally could see the other person's point of view. Not a quality that I am proud of.

To keep my mind occupied, I performed in another cabaret night, this time at the (pre-renovation) Vancouver East Cultural Centre. The event was divided into two halves: the first for an all-ages audience and the second with mature content. I was in the latter doing another drag routine, a burlesque to Nancy Sinatra's "Sugar Town". Then, as a "guy", I was in the group rendition of the strip scene from the movie The Full Monty. A great night, the fun as well as the green room camaraderie was priceless.

That summer, 1999, I found a new apartment, a block east of where I lived and upstairs with a few gigantic windows, beautiful hardwood floors and clean, white bathroom with a tub. The bedroom and living room were both huge. I invited friends from the Mastery community to help me on moving day, but in the end, much to my chagrin, only one showed up. Surprisingly (or maybe not, as I did not have much to move), we were done in a few hours. With more light in my new place, my mood brightened immediately. Just in time for a family reunion.

To be continued ...

About Me, Part 34: You Little Trustmaker

In April 1998, I decided that the time had come for me to stop going to therapy. After nearly three years of intense work, I needed to move on. I needed to get back to my life and apply what I had learned. Also, my therapist was about to take a long sabbatical by going on the road with his wife, another Buddhist, and then, doing a three year monastic retreat at Gampo Abbey on Cape Breton island in Nova Scotia. It was simply time to bring the work we had done to a close. I left my last session feeling a mixture of satisfaction, relief and sadness; an era, no matter how brief, had passed. But, it was exactly at that point that I was beginning to uncover some long hidden information about myself.

Not long before my last therapy session, I was hosting one of my Mastery support group meetings at my home. The conversation may have been about taking risks and doing something you have never done before; we would show up at a meeting in a costume representing what, for each of us, was a risk. Each of us had our own ideas about what that would mean. Someone else in the group suggested that it would be great if I came to a future meeting dressed as a woman. Other seemed to agree. I, for one, was not so sure, although I felt a mysterious desire to present myself as such, I was not into admitting it. Once, back when I had been at Concordia University, a group of film students had asked if I would be interested in being in one of their films: in drag. I hastily declined. A bit too hastily as I had initially liked the idea, but had suppressed that immediately. Discomfort is what I had felt then, and now at the meeting. But, the idea simmered over the next few months.

In August, I assisted at a Mastery workshop. I had given myself and assignment: I would do a monologue, dressed as a woman. Not only would I wear a dress and make-up, but I would shave all of my body hair as well as my face, very closely. I would go all out. I practiced a song from one of my soul music CDs, a box set called Beg, Scream & Shout: The Big Ol' Box of 60s Soul; the song was Betty Everett's 1963 hit "You're No Good". I rehearsed daily. I spent the Friday before the workshop doing my nails and shaving. By Saturday evening, I was shaking with nervousness, but during a break, I and a friend who was going to do my make-up hurried backstage to get ready. I could hear the workshop going on while I got ready. When it was my turn, I came out to the hall to a round of thunderous applause and went through my routine, hating my low voice the whole way: to this day, the only thing I did not like about my performance. When I finished, I got a standing ovation and a bouquet. My friends, including those who were in my group the previous year, were all there to support me. This was not just a monologue; I had broken through something big. That became obvious the following day when I broke down in front of my assistants team. I had had some very unsettling dreams overnight that had left me with troubling questions. Who was I? Was I not who I thought I was? I felt very freakish, like I had felt for most of my life as others during my childhood and adolescence had bullied and attacked me as weird, or "acting like a girl". I had unearthed feelings that would not, could not be buried again.

*

At work, things sailed along that summer. We moved into a new building and opened it the first week of September. I was beginning to feel more confident in my job and was starting to enjoy the people I worked with. I also wanted to do something with my life that allowed to express and create more. I felt it was time to strike up some kind of balance between creativity and responsibility. I held my twenty-eighth birthday at Kitsilano Beach on one of the warmest days of the year. I had also begun to dress differently. Gone were the pseudo-outdoors clothes. I was now wearing velvet shirts in bright colours or jewel tones. I had begun to wear rings and in early October, I decided to get my hair lightened like so many others seemed to be at the time. I had mine lightened to bronze. I feared that others at work would not like it. They did not like it; they loved it. My supervisor gave me the thumbs up. The night of my new hair's debut, the library was having its official opening of its new branch. There was a huge party complete with councillors, the mayor and other local leaders. All of the staff were there. I got some compliments. At the end of the evening, I was introduced to a councillor as the most "interesting librarian". It had a ring to it.

A Mastery friend had invited me to a Halloween house party over in the west side neighbourhood of Arbutus Ridge. I had begun shopping for costume effects at the end of August before the huge rush for Halloween. I was going to be a Martian schoolgirl. The evening of the party, I got completely ready and then applied copious amounts of green body paint and facial foundation, followed by green fake eyelashes, eyeshadow, lipstick and nail polish. My costume, from a now long gone shop called Cabbages and Kinx, was vaguely Sailor Moon-ish and, yes, very green right down to the knee socks. I also got a pair of green antenna topped with a pair of stars which blinked alternately. I was a hit at the party and managed to get a few pictures of myself. I also wound up on some camcorder footage which I saw a couple of weeks later. I got two glimpses of my future at that party. Many of the people there were from the local bisexual community which I had been looking to become a part of for sometime. Also, another Mastery friend, a woman dressed as a man, asked me how I felt about being dressed as a woman as I seemed so natural. I said that I felt great. To this day, I wonder if she, and many others, knew what was happening within me. All I could say then was that I had never felt better, more alive.

*

I DJ'ed another Christmas dance party at the Mastery house I had gone to the previous year. I was a hit again and was gaining a reputation as party animal. I could deal with that; I had certainly experienced worse. The hosts chipped in to get me a gift which was very sweet of them. I gladly do this as long as I was asked to.

I spent Christmas dinner with my White Rock relatives, only not in White Rock, but one of their relative's houses in Burnaby. I phoned Montreal from there; my grandmother, cousins and others were at an uncle's house for dinner. I spoke to everyone briefly. My hair was now gold. I wore a silver velour shirt with a black wide collar blazer and pants feeling very glam. I would have had my nails done and make-up on if I could gotten away with it. The energy was there regardless.

1998-99 were my peak years in mood, self-discovery and the still pervasive sense that things could only get better. I was on my own, making up for the lost time of my late teens and early twenties and trying to balance that out with being a professional. In those years, it all seemed to magically balance out by itself. As the last year of the century dawned, I felt as if I were caught in an updraft. My part-time position became permanent at the end of January. Then, full-time a month later. Elated, I began looking for a better apartment to move into, one that was not on the ground floor, was brighter with more than one window, and that had a bathtub.

Socially, I was making strides as well. One Friday evening in January, during a week in which I was volunteering for a Buddhist conference at the Shambhala Center, I went to a cafe on Davie Street in the West End. The regular bisexual community social night was happening there and it would be my first visit. I shyly introduced myself to some of the others. They seemed friendly. I recognized a few faces from the previous year's Halloween party. I forget what broke the ice that night, but by the end of the night I had made more new friends. I decided not to join everyone in going out dancing at Denman Station as I had to be at the Centre the following morning, but I trusted that I would be seeing more of these folks in the near future.

To be continued ...

 

About Me, Part 33: Touch a Hand, Make a Friend

By the spring of 1998, the sun was rising in my life. During the previous fall, I had done two landmark things in my life. At the end of September, I had a friend from my Mastery support group accompany me to the rocky shoreline of False Creek, near Vanier Park where I tore a few pages out of my journal containing a letter to my mother, one filled with hurt, anger, guilt, regret, grief and a certain amount of acceptance. We, then, lit a match and watched the pages shrivel and burn among the rocks. It was a very cathartic experience, and I am still grateful that my friend was there to support me in it. It meant that I could start to move beyond my grief and into something fresh and new in life.

Almost two months later, I went to a talk given by the Pacific Northwest-based Tai Situ Rinpoche at the Century Plaza Hotel on Burrard Street downtown. Word came through the Shambhala/Buddhist community that he was going to be holding a refuge vow ceremony and I wanted to take my vow to signify my deepening commitment to my practice. So, on that chilly mid-November evening, I did along with about twenty others. Others in the audience were watching, including some that I knew from the Center. It was a very touching moment for me.

By the following April, I was practicing meditation regularly, staffing the Centre's open houses and participating in study and practice groups. Likewise, in the Mastery community, I assisted more workshops throughout the year, the one in late March being significant because I dj'ed the Sunday night dance after the workshop was over. I played a set with 70s soul and pop alongside some vintage Jamaican rocksteady. It was a hit; and I loved doing it. I had become enamored with soul music and during the 90s cd reissue boom, I was to acquire many new, but old, collections.

*

Work was going fine, but I had to learn how to steel myself in certain situations. One was when dealing with a belligerent library user who would verbally abuse whoever was behind the desk, or manipulate our fears of being complained about. One bad situation, where I was so busy that I forgot to sign a woman's daughter up to a public computer resulted in a very uncomfortable situation where I was yelled at. That evening, I went down to the beach to relax. In early May, the library was celebrating its twentieth anniversary. The theme was a 70s party. It was my day off, but I went anyway, bringing with me some costume items from the previous Halloween: silver Afro wig, elephant pants and polyester shirt and no make-up this time. My coworkers and supervisor were delighted and entertained. It turns out, this library had very playful, irreverent people working for it. By the summer, I was working a temporary, part-time position with regular hours. I was given some interesting projects to work on. It was during that time, in the middle of one of the greatest years I ever had, when my professional and personal growth fueled each other, that I realized that I had finally struck gold.

To be continued ...

About Me, Part 32: Show and Tell

During the fall of 1997, the weather became dreary; it poured almost non-stop. During my previous two autumns in Vancouver, I had been in school and distracted from the weather, but this time, I had none of that. I was working sporadically doing freelance web site and research work for academic publishers at UBC. After several interviews, there were no leads, and soon, no postings either. I began to feel hopeless about finding anything soon. I survived off of my inheritance. I went to a few continuing education programs organization by BCLA and SLA. I networked, handed out business cards and resumes. Nothing. November was a long, long month.

In my therapy sessions, we focused on my feelings of dejection and worthlessness. I meditated regularly and went to t'ai chi class daily, arriving at the martial arts center near West Broadway and MacDonald at just before 6:00 am when it was still dark outside. I would be done by 11:00 am, I would go home for lunch and collapse into a heap on my futon. If there was a job posting to respond to, I would use my online fax software to send out my resume and cover letter; if not, I would listen to music to distract myself. I would meditate in front of the shrine that I had fashioned out of an old computer desk. I had long since stopped writing; I had not done much writing since being in Vancouver.

My creative outlet was now based around the personal growth work that I was doing around the Mastery of Self-Expression. Partly motivated by the social life it offered and also, by the opportunities for catharsis it provided, I got involved in assisting weekend workshops wherever I could. It was at the workshop during the last weekend of November that I assisted for the first time. The week leading up to it had been sunny and cool. I had been at a mini-conference on BC magazines earlier that day at the Alliance for the Arts offices downtown. When I got home, I felt psyched for the weekend ahead. And it turned out to be one of the most enjoyable weekends I would ever be involved with. By Sunday, the weather became colder and frostier. We set up a Christmas tree in the community hall. A number of people we knew were in a choir which came to perform and promote their holiday concert that evening. When I saw the concert, over a week later, I had so much fun that I decided that I would join them for the spring season.

The Mastery Christmas party took place in the same house that I had gone to for the Intro evening over the summer. At some point, during the party, I was asked to through a CD on the stereo to get a few people dancing. I then began to play some of the soul music CDs that I had in my backpack as well as some that belonged to the house. Soon, the living room was packed with dancing guests. By the end of the evening, the hosts thanked me. It was no problem, I told them, I had had fun. Unbeknownst to me at the time, they were making a mental note to have me back as a DJ the following year.

As December began, I began to prepare for the first holiday season that I would not be traveling back to Montreal. I looked around for anyone who I could spend Christmas day with. My former buddy from library school, her then-boyfriend, and a few other friends were going to be at her house that evening; I was invited. I felt a sense of relief that I would not be alone. Christmas dinner, at their apartment near Oakridge Mall, was a lot of fun with lots of laughter. The following day, they came to pick me up; we went to the house of one of the other guests (another library school graduate) for Boxing Day.

That holiday season, much like the one long ago when I was thirteen, was incubation time. I gave myself permission to stay at home, do nothing and listen to CBC and oldies radio. I ate a lot of comfort food and, from time to time, would try to envision a new year which would be luckier than the one coming to an end.

I went to a New Year's Eve party hosted by a male couple, one of whom was a member of the Shambhala Center. Their multi-floor condo right on False Creek was packed with guests. On one floor, they were dancing to Motown, on another they were eating hors d'oeuvres, and on another they engaged in deep, "spiritual" conversations. We rang in the new year in low-key kind of way. A few of us went up to the top floor balcony which looked out over False Creek. Fireworks were being set off near Science World, lighting up the night with brilliant colours. I felt the melancholy the now previous year melt away and experienced relief. I had made it.

*

January was basically a quiet month, although I had a good feeling about it. Things could only get better. I sent out a few more resumes around mid-month. I went to a couple of technical writing career seminars at SFU downtown and at the Italian Cultural Center. By the end of the month, there were still no leads, but I felt more optimistic; there would be something soon. I kept myself occupied. After feeling an incredible sense of isolation and loss after a Mastery support group session in December, the group had decided, to my delight, to have the groups at my place indefinitely; all agreed as I lived in a central area of town. I began to look forward to the meetings for that reason.

Meanwhile, Montreal, as well as southern Quebec, eastern Ontario and upstate New York and Vermont were paralyzed by the great ice storm of 1998. I called my relatives and found out that they were fine. Some parts of Montreal were functioning well, others, not at all. The storm and its after effects lasted a month. By early February, around the time of the Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan, the weather and Montreal had recovered.

Beginning with Lunar New Year that year, I felt a new confidence within myself and began working on my resumes once again. Completely out of the blue, a couple of weeks later, I got a call from a public library. They had received my resume a month earlier and wanted to know when I could come in for an interview. Valentine's Day, 1998 I went out the suburbs east of Vancouver to my first interview in weeks. It was a challenge to take public transit, coordinating three buses to get there, but I managed. I got to the library in the nick of time, a little out of breath. The interview went well, although not fantastic. After a couple of weeks, I had forgotten about it. That's when they called me back. The head of the reference department wanted to have me in to train me. On March 4, I went to work for the first time in months, all the while coming down with the flu coming down with a 100 degree temperature. I went home after work that afternoon and slept, sick, but happy that I had been hired. Already, things were looking up.

To be continued ...

About Me, Part 31: What's Come Over Me?

One warm evening in August 1997, a friend and I went for a walk down to Kitsilano Beach. This was the friend that I had first met at the Sogyal Rinpoche talk the previous year. I had come out to her (as bisexual) a few months earlier and she had been completely accepting. We talked about our respective families and how unaccepting of our personalities they seemed to be. The night was so quiet that we could hear people having conversations on their yachts out in English Bay. At some point, my friend, who had recently been doing work through Toastmaster's, mentioned a workshop that she had done which had helped her work through some issues and put things in perspective. She recommended that I take the next one, a personal growth weekend workshop called The Mastery of Self-Expression. It sounded right. I had grown impatient with how cerebral my therapy was getting. I had long felt that I needed more body in my therapy, more of a centered, physicalized experience. The Mastery, the way my friend described, seemed like the obvious next step.

I went to an Introductory evening at a large, shared house in Oakridge. I remember there being another librarian among the guests. After the organizers introduced themselves, all in a very playful, whimsical manner, they invited us each to get up and introduce ourselves likewise. I already knew from presentations I had done in library school, and from some of the best advice I had received by others in my profession, the importance of making eye contact and speaking with confidence. The advice given to us here was much the same, only less about being professional and more about simply connecting with others, letting them see you. "The eyes are the windows to the soul" was and is a cliche, however it also was true. I had never let people in, as long as I could remember. I had avoided their eyes for fear of being seen, of being slandered or criticized. I had avoided my own eyes in front of a mirror for other, still hidden, reasons. The others in the room sensed my shyness and the intro leader said that would get a lot out of doing this "weekend". Sold.

I paid for the workshop the following week. The workshop started Friday evening. After work that Friday, I took the bus from Burnaby into Vancouver along King Edward to Main Street and got off, bought some food at a grocery store and walked down to the community hall where the workshop would be taking place. It had been a hotter than normal week and Vancouver was in the midst of a garbage strike. When I got down to the hall, I signed in at the registration desk and put my stuff aside. Then I took my seat in the first two rows. After introductions from the workshop leaders, the program got started. Over the next few days I got up in front of the other participants and revealed all the grief that I had been carrying since my mother's death, the hurt, the loneliness, the isolation. I had a chance to vent, to laugh and cry. I saw others work through their own issues. By Sunday afternoon (we did go home in the evenings, incidentally), I felt something that had never before in my life, real connection, the kind that comes from sharing of yourself, the deepest parts and they theirs. I also learned what it meant to express myself with fire and passion. I felt the vulnerability of "being in my body". I felt the thrill of expressing myself (I performed a poem that I had written about a month earlier) in front of an audience that seemed only too eager to support me. All foreign experiences.

The week after the workshop, I found myself missing the people that I had met that weekend. I was hungover, tired during my last week at the Open Learning Agency. I craved more connection and wanted more people around me. Coincidentally, there were two OLA employees in the television department who had been assisting at the workshop. Seeing them in the cafeteria was a welcome sight. I made a point of calling some of the former participants on my phone list, just to see how they were doing. When our follow-up meeting happened, the week after that, it felt like a mini-reunion. We planned to continue meeting regularly in a support group afterwards. I was glad. With my work now sporadic (at UBC) and the rest of my waking hours spent looking for a regular job, I needed to be careful that I did not become too isolated again. I did crush out on someone that I met during the weekend; we had coffee a few times. It was awkward. Looking back, I think I craved connection so much, that I was confused about what I was feeling. I realized that I lacked physical contact of almost any kind, and hurt so much, that I often found myself in tears completely out of the blue.

*

I continued to furnish my apartment with a computer desk and chair. I bought an Mac Performa from a nearby (around the corner, actually) Apple dealer. Next door to them was the insurance company where I bought my first policy. Can you say "adult"?

I had Thanksgiving dinner with many of the people in the Mastery community at a large house in North Vancouver. I felt a bit out-of-sorts, but I was welcomed just the same. I had stumbled on a lively, warm and fun crowd of folks among whom I felt at home. That Halloween (hosted by some Mastery folks at the RCMP detachment hall near Cambie and 33rd Avenue), for the first time in years, I wore a costume. In the retro-70s mood of the time, I went as a disco corpse, with a silver Afro wig, elephant pants, silver and white polyester shirt and death-mask make-up. I was a hit. I also wore lipstick with it. Someone remarked that I was in drag. Really? I thought. I had not thought of it that way. The party was a tremendous amount of fun and it kept my spirits up as life by that point was becoming much more trying by the day.

To be continued ...  

About Me, Part 30: Drift Away

I had three remaining courses and my graduating paper to complete during Winter 1997 session. One course was actually field work: I spent a couple of days each week of the term at the Simon Fraser University Library systems department trying to crash learn all of the ins and outs of an early web-based catalogue software program. My assignment was to put together a report and do a presentation for the library department heads and administration. I was also working at SFU as a graduate student assistant beta testing an information literacy tutorial that our teaching assistant back at UBC was trying to put together for students. This meant a long trek across town from one campus to the other before express bus routes were common in the region; it was a long ride that wore me out. I spent long hours at the SFU campus on Burnaby Mountain, often leaving after dark and most of the other staff had gone home. I was also a graduate student assistant at the UBC Fine Arts, Architecture and Planning library, a quiet branch with in-person service only, no phone service. My supervisor (who passed away some years ago now) was great to work with. I really enjoyed my time there.

I was also becoming more active in the library association world. I was still a member of the Special Libraries Association and went to some of their events. As a British Columbia Library Association student member I was one of the first members of a new interest group focusing on libraries in developing countries; we had formed in late August of 1996 and had had our first Christmas fundraiser that December. We were funding a library in Trenchtown, Jamaica, run at the time by a Vancouver-based entrepreneur. It personally gave me a great deal of satisfaction to be doing some of that work. With the annual conference coming up that spring in Surrey, we were planning a session as well. With all of this work, it was hard to believe that a few of my fellow students felt that I was not doing any work, simply, it seemed, because I took time for myself and was not married to my work. My explanation for this ... life was short, I had seen that first hand ... my epitaph was not going to read "I should have spent more time at the office".

As the year, and my graduate student career, wound down, I began looking around for possible job openings and was beginning to feel very anxious. I applied to the various public library systems in the region and began to respond to the job postings on the BCLA listserv. A number of us SLA members were making arrangements to go to Seattle for their conference in June; we all hoped to network like crazy and get some leads from it.

All assignments and papers in, my last class was on April 11; a minute or so after I had sat down, I burst into tears. It had been such a huge struggle to make it through the program as well as do my inner work, all new to me, and now it seemed that it was all over. Now what?

*

My reputation as a party DJ had grown among the other students; I had DJ'ed the student Christmas party the previous December. For our graduating party, I recommended CITR's mobile DJ unit. Many of us requested 70s soul music and other retro hits from them. The party, held at Heritage Hall on Main Street was a blast. Everyone danced to the point of being exhausted. And when it was over, there were tears.

Convocation was at the end of May at the newly opened Chan Centre on the north side of campus. Being there for me was a bittersweet experience as I wished that my mother and grandfather had been there. Two people who were still alive, yet were not there, were my father and stepmother. This baffles me to this day, they had decided to go to Mexico and had not altered their plans when I told them when the convocation was. They had missed my graduation from Concordia, now they were also missing the one at UBC as well. I just did not get it ... at all.

*

I had also been looking for an apartment off campus by that point. While still on campus, I went on a couple of dates with a student in the year behind me. At first, the chemistry seemed good, but then it fizzled. I had begun to wonder about how to start dating again; my barren relationship life was really starting to bother, but I still did not know how to make a connection.

In late May, a cousin came to visit on his way through town. Then, a friend from the Chaucer course that I took in my first year at Concordia came through town. While out for coffee, we got to talking and, at some point, she asked if I knew who I was. I began to cry. I did not. The combination of meditation, the intense focus of internal martial arts and regular psychotherapy had made me hyper-aware, but it had certainly not made me happier. At the very end of May, I found an apartment in the South Granville neighbourhood, on West 12th Avenue near Pine; it was a ground-level suite in what had once been a house, but had been broken up into apartments. I moved in on the last day of May. At least now, the isolation of being on campus was over.

I found a job, after a handful of interviews, at the Open Learning Agency (now Open University) which at the time was located in central Burnaby, not far from the British Columbia Institute of Technology. It was at the time a whole bunch of things: a post-secondary institution, an information broker for BC libraries and a television distance education school with courses broadcast daily from studios in the same building. I was replacing a staff member in the Electronic Library Network (now located at SFU). This contract position, which I got through the Young Canada Works program, was for two months. I also worked some freelance hours for the academic publishers that I had worked for at UBC the previous summer. Confident that I had my living and working situations handled, I went off to Seattle for the Special Libraries Association conference.

It was, in short, a blast. I stayed at a hostel which was quite rowdy, but manageable. The conference sessions were fantastic. I found American conferences much more lively and refreshing than Canadian ones, the librarians much warmer, and more down-to-earth and sociable. The keynote, introduced by a Montreal-based, Jamaican-Canadian entrepreneur who the outgoing president, was by Bill Gates. I went to a couple of author readings and dinners. Conversations were flavoured by regional accents from all over the US. Those of us who were from UBC hung out regularly, going out to dinner, Pike Place Market and Elliott Bay Books. The city was great. On my last day there, a former UBC student and myself headed for Capitol Hill and had lunch. Later, I caught the Greyhound back to Vancouver. A few days later, I started my contract job at the Open Learning Agency.

My best friend from Ottawa came through town that summer, on her way to Victoria to meet up with her partner who was serving in the navy CFB Esquimault on Vancouver Island. We spent a day hanging around and went down to the West End and English Bay Beach. We both had our cameras and, at one point, took pictures of each other taking pictures. It was a short visit; late that afternoon, I called a taxi for her which came to my place to take her to the train station. I had been to Victoria a few times and so gave her precise directions. We agreed to stay in touch.

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The summer started out fairly well with everything in place. But, something in me was about to give. Most of the people I had gone to school with were moving or moving on. I needed to make new friends. I had some through the meditation centre and through t'ai chi, but I felt that I needed to start from scratch. I also craved physicality and had no idea how to start. With all of the work I had done to change myself, I was still, it seemed, trapped in my head.

To be continued ...