Someday Syndrome

Expanding Tastes

As a child, I hated seafood. Put anything fishy in front of me and I would gag, flail my arms about and fall out of my chair in my efforts to get away from the atrocity placed before me. To this day, the memory of my mother's salmon cakes with undiluted Campbell's Tomato Soup sauce fills me with dread. Frozen fishsticks were bearable, but they were always ruined by the accompanying frozen peas and plain rice.

In my teens, I discovered jumbo shrimp sautéed in butter and garlic and baby shrimp on a fresh French stick with bechamel sauce and swiss cheese under the broiler. At university I added tuna melts and the occasional white fish in cream sauce. Lobster also became tolerable but only in small doses.

I never gave up trying to like more, however. Periodically I'd sample something fishy (like calamari or caviar) and give it a thumbs up (calamari) or thumbs down (caviar). With any thumbs down, I'd wait a year or so and try it again.

In France, I found out that I like most fish and almost all seafood (it's still a no for the caviar). The one thing I just could not do, however, was salmon. The fish oils in salmon would coat the inside of my mouth and stay there influencing the taste of everything else for days, despite repeated tooth-brushings and mouthwash rinses.

Imagine my trepidation, therefore, when Raul bought salmon steaks this past weekend. "Muy rico a la plancha," he promised me and Saturday night we plugged in the indoor grill and threw the salmon steaks on the sizzling hot surface. Immediately our small kitchen/living room filled with the most intense fish smell.

"Oh god!" I thought. "How the hell am I going to be able to eat this? I can barely breathe!"

So, did I eat it? Or did I gag up several euros' worth of high quality salmon? Come back tomorrow to find out...

Someday Lessons:

• Just because you don't like something today, that doesn't mean you won't ever like it.
• Nothing is absolute – stay open to change.

My Apology to Booze

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how alcohol and I could no longer be friends – it just pissed me off too much. Well, I owe alcohol an apology. My foul mood had nothing to do with alcohol and everything to do with me.

How do I know this? This past weekend, English friends who live in my old village in France came to visit. Over dinner we chatted and drank a couple of bottles of Lambrusco between the four of us – to no ill effect. No bad mood, no paranoia, no desire to run and hide from the world.

So what changed from the almost identical situation in June? Only the language. In June, the dinner guests spoke Spanish. This past weekend, English.

And what has that got to do with anything? Well, I'm a bit of a control freak and when I drink I work at not appearing tipsy. Doing so in English is easy because I'm already relaxed. In Spanish, however, I'm tense because I know I don't understand everything and that frustrates me.

The solution? Get over myself. I spend my days writing in English. I speak Spanish a few hours a day. The language has been the number one stress in my Spanish life and it's time to let it go. I'm here for the long haul. I'm doing what I love. The language will come and in the meantime, if I don't understand, I don't understand. No. Big. Deal.

Let's just see how long I can remember that.

Someday Lessons:

• Most of our perceptions are based on assumptions – be willing to change perceptions when assumptions prove false.
• We are ever-evolving creatures – stay open for opportunities to learn something new about yourself.

Pause and Reflect

This weekend my mother sent me an email worried that I'm not as happy as I say I am. Given my many frustrations and my continual insistence that everything is great, I'm surprised she's the only one who has challenged me on this so far.

The problem isn't my happiness (or lack thereof); the problem is the blog itself. You see, I've dealt with the major changes in my life and now I'm simply continuing on, living a conscious life while pursuing my dreams. In trying to come up with five posts a week about my life, I end up mining the minute details, extracting tiny fragments of annoyance or fear then refining them and adding to them until they are presentable as Someday Lessons.

This email comes at just the right time. I've been questioning the role of this blog in my life. I don't want to give it up, but it needs to change. My recently writings (to me) have felt forced and more than a little unauthentic. I've therefore decided to re-examine the blog and its purpose. So, over the next few weeks while I determine and develop the new direction, I'm going to cut back on the number of posts during the week.

Think of it as an anticipatory lull.

Someday Lessons:

• When we try to force meaning we lose authenticity.
• Everything has a life cycle – don't push something back the point it should end or transform.

Out of Context

On Friday night after a night out with friends in Madrid, Raul asked what was bothering me. I told him: "I can't wait for Cate to arrive so I can speak English with someone who knows me well!" then burst into tears.

I'm tired of having no roots in Spain. I don't contribute to about 90% of group conversations because, even if I understand the words, I know nothing about the context: Spanish music from 1998, the Pride celebrations in Madrid from two years ago, the TV shows a certain sexy actor has been in. I'm ignorant about all of it.

It's exhausting, frustrating and makes me want to run back to Toronto where I'd be surrounded by my comfortable cultural context. I know that I chose to abandon Canada and the consequences of moving to a new country include feeling like an alien, but that doesn't mean I can't complain about it occasionally.

Someday Lessons:

• Intellectual acceptance of the consequences of choice has little influence on emotional reactions.
• Striving to realize your dreams will produce frustration. Know that this will happen and don't abandon your dreams at the first sign of crankiness or despondency.

Self-Induced Anger

Saturday night started with a glass of light port on ice then we toasted our anniversary with a glass of Cava Rosada and just before we left to go dancing, we threw back a shot of peach whiskey. A recipe for a fun night, surely.

Not quite so. My mood started out great. After all we were celebrating our one year anniversary and going to San Sebastian's Pride Party (where we met last year). A good friend and his new boyfriend had come over to celebrate with us. As we sat down to eat, however, I felt that Raul's attitude had changed. He had started to make little digs at me – insulting my lack of Spanish, ordering me about and getting snarky when I pushed back at his orders.

Arriving at the party, I decided all I wanted to do was dance. Otherwise I wanted to be left alone. As much as I knew Raul wanted to be affectionate, I could barely tolerate his touch – it forced me out of my private dancing world. Also, as people moved about the dance floor, they kept banging into me, jarring me further out of my world and disrespecting my right to dance uninterrupted!

I tried to ignore them, tried to have fun shaking my booty to the beat, but as person after person pushed past me, my shoulders cramped and my spine creaked like an unoiled bike chain. How dare they bother me! I was here to have fun, not to get pushed around by a bunch of drunken idiots with no respect for personal space!

At the point just before I retreated to a corner where the walls would have protected at least two sides of me, I realized that it wasn't the party-goers nor was it Raul. It was me. I was in a FOUL mood which fortunately was beginning to fade, letting sanity return.

I grabbed Raul, gave him a huge kiss and said (in Spanish of course): "I don't like alcohol. It puts me in a bad mood." I then spent the rest of the night overcoming this chemically produced anger through sheer willpower.

Someday Lessons:

• If the entire world seems lined up against you, check your attitude – maybe it's just a case of a twisted perception.
• Being self-aware doesn't just mean aware of your mind – it includes your body too.

Making Change Stick

I'm really proud of myself. Starting last week, I've suppressed my usual procrastination tendencies and hardcore editing my novel. As of today I'm 30% through the first pass. I say first pass because I'll need to polish out the editing widows, typos, grammar, and a million other little details to make the whole thing shine. For those who know me, there's a word in that last sentence that I never like to think about. Yup, it's "details" – I hate them, but I've realized that if I want to get my novel published (and future novels too), then I need to pay attention to the details in my writing. This means not just working harder than I usually do; it means making a profound change in how I view the world.

To help me with that change, I went surfing on the web (because you can find help for just about anything out there) and came across a great article on profound and lasting changes on the ThinkSimpleNow blog. I'm going to try the advice Tina Su gives in the blog, which means you as readers get to see the process I go through to get there.

Su outlines four actions and five tips, so starting tomorrow and going through to the end of the month I'm going to do and write about each of them one by one. The actions and tips aren't  radically different from what I've posted many times here, but I'm like most people and rarely take my own advice.

Someday Lessons:

• Follow someone else's path for a while – it'll open up new ways of considering old problems.
• The same thoughts expressed by different people in different ways produce different results – don't get trapped into thinking just one way.

There is no Secret, Part II

This past weekend I switched from reading blogs at the site through their bookmarks to reading them through a feed. Suddenly I'm reading more blogs and making more comments in a shorter time. I'd been resisting using a feed, but the increased productivity has won me over.

One of the blogs I added this weekend due to the decrease in time needed to read through the blogs was ZenHabits. Yesterday he talked about the Law of Attraction and stated his opinion about it to 55,000 people (or more). I've mentioned before that I don't really believe in the Law of Attraction. Today, I'll give you more detail than I did in January.

As much as I can't argue with the results people like Michael Losier produce with their followers, I have never bought into it. I believe that the Law of Attraction doesn't work because there are energy waves out there and we tune into them. For me, the Law of Attraction simply encourages people to visualize not just a half-full glass, but one that never empties no matter how much you drink. More importantly, however, the Law of Attraction encourages people to make conscious choices based on clear desires and a full awareness of the consequences.

Every generation of philosophy has had a version of the power of positive thinking, right back to Plato and his cave of shadows. It's nothing new. There is no Secret and there's no Law of Attraction – there's only choice and awareness.

Someday Lessons:

• Success comes from deliberate choice and hard work.
• Personal religion, philosophy, and the personal growth movement are all tools used to develop self-awareness and conscious choices.

A Super Happy Weekend

On Saturday I woke up to an email from an online magazine. They wanted to publish a short story I'd submitted a couple of months ago. I then scared the heck out of Raul when I woke him up (at 7am) to give him the news.

A little calmer, I replied to the email and by the end of the day we'd agreed on edits and I had the contract Sunday. The story went up in the June issue of Reflection's Edge, making me a published author again. The last time I was published (a short story in 2001), I had hit a wall with my writing and took a three year break. This time, I'm ready to take advantage of the publication with more writing and more submissions, building on this success.

I first wrote the story last winter while I was in France, and have looked at it on and off, using the skills I've learned over the past year to make it a great story. It's nice to know that they hard work has paid off! It makes me want to write more.

Enjoy the story: The Soul of Sorcery.

Someday Lessons:

• Hard work does pay off.
• Use one success to spur you on to others.

A Shift in Perspective

When I left France last year for six months of traveling, I had pared my wardrobe down to the bare necessities. Now that I'm in one place, however, I've collected a lot more clothes again, cramping the space in my closet, which is only wardrobe that also holds my shoes, books for work, my outerwear and has two drawers underneath it for t-shirts and pants.

So today I reorganized my shirts and outwear. I wanted to get rid of clothes I don't wear, but got rid of only two shirts and a torn winter coat. I like the idea of having few clothes, but then I see a great shirt and can't resist. Plus there are more occasions to go out and I don't want to wear the same clothes all the time – that would just be socially embarrassing.

At least it's all neat and sorted, even if the shirts do double up on the hangers. After finishing, every time I walked past the wardrobe I peeked inside just to admire my work.

Tomorrow I'm tacking shoes and t-shirts.

Someday Lessons:

• Take time to appreciate your achievements after you complete them.
• Needs change over time, so reevaluate your life periodically.

Cheese is Good Food

Starting this past Saturday, for one glorious meal each weekend, I am opening up my diet. This weekend I reveled in cheese. Raul and I had gone to Pamplona to visit a friend. On Saturday we went out for dinner and I started the meal with a cheese salad – lettuce still crispy but slightly warm cubes of a colby-like cheese, a 3-inch by 1-inch wheel of goat's cheese flash fried on both sides to create a crisp shell, the whole thing drizzled with a white fondue.

My perennial sinus problems prevented me from smelling the dish, but the combination of textures – crispy, crunchy, smoothly grainy, soft and liquidly warm – and the flavours – fresh, pungent, innocuous, and tangy – made worth it every moment of my three months without such foods.

To mop up the last bits of cheese, I used a warm whole wheat dinner roll with a thick brittle outer shell and dense soft innards.

The main course was something I could eat any day: secreto de cerdo, green beans and carrots, so although very tasty, it didn't send me into raptures.

I ended the meal with a square of blueberry cheesecake consisting of a thin layer of cake, a frothy layer of filling made from Queso de Burgos not cream cheese, and topped with a blueberry jelly. The outside world disappeared while I partitioned off small pieces of dessert with my spoon and melted each morsel in my mouth before swallowing it.

Next Saturday, we're going to a Eurovision party. The treats the host will serve excite me as much as (or more than) the party itself does.

Someday Lessons:

• Savouring occasional treats is much more fulfilling than unthinking consumption.
• Having without anticipating first robs you of half the experience.