Third Star on The Right and Straight on Till Morning

The foray into adulthood is so unceremonious that I think it takes people a long time to realize that they have ventured into it. For me, I realized there would be no defining moment and no sense of achievement while I was walking down the road in a business suit and sensible high healed shoes. Here I was dressed like the very adults I had admired while heading to school in London. I looked like an adult, I was presenting myself as an adult but I felt very much like a child playing dress up.

There aren't really any defined parameters to being an adult, other than the obvious achievement of living for over eighteen years. I have always thought, to consider yourself an adult you have to be living on your own, and making enough money to pay your bills, but I certainly understand that there are exceptions to these clauses.

I think when I was younger I was under the impression that everything in life just falls into place once you get older, that being an adult would be one of those milestones in your life that are marked by celebrations and certificates. What I failed to realize is that growing up and growing old is all about learning who you are and where you want to be.

Socailly we are kind of told that getting a great job is tip top most important, number one priority in life, which to an extent can be true. But as I learn more about the world, I keep thinking that perhaps being an adult is more about turning childhood dreams into functional realities. It is easy to get lost in a need for money and status but I think the two things prohibit our ability to really think about things. I know that a lot of my thoughts are obscured by an instant need to make money to live, and really how could they not. It is easy to be adventurous, care free and spontaneous when you have the money to back it all up. Finding a balance between the two is what is hard

I have talked about balance so much in my blog, and so I worry I am becoming a little cliche. Perhaps my blog entries are becoming a little too self endulgent. I write about these things because I truly wonder if people have the same conflicts running inside their own minds. If there is no marker to tell you you have become and adult how do you really know that you have?

My biggest fear is that being an adult is accepting that life is essentially treading the same steps as those before you. Living a hugely similar but slightly differing life to the social norm. It makes me feel like peter pan, running away from adulthood because it seems so incredibly dull. Unfortunately there is no never never land, but perhaps I can try and bring a little of it's ideology here. Maybe I have it all wrong and growing up doesn't mean assimilation instead it is a practical aplication of ones abilities to meet one's dreams.

Seeing as I have no answer I shall just have to put every ounce of effort I have into doing what I love, which is writting and have enough determination to not give up on it until I succeed. Maybe I will have to put aside my desire for some concrete congratulations on growing up, and worry more about who I am than where I am at. Whatever happens if I really get in trouble all I have to do is follow the third star on the right and straight on till morning and then my biggest problem will simply be pirates.

Love to all of you out there.

Meryl

Spice Up Your Life

It was the mid nineties and the entire population of England was unashamedly enthralled by two words that would change the face of feminism forever….Girl Power.

I was 9 years old when the Spice Girls first released Wannabe and it was from that moment that I realized that girls could be loud, brash and naughty and people would still love you for it. So the Spice Girls were of course a manufactured, well researched, mostly auto tuned pop band, complete with five distinct personalities that different girls could relate to, but they were an inspiration to millions of young girls, and boys all around the world.

The spice girls get a lot of flack for the rise of girl gangs in England at the time, and not the ‘lets all braid each others hair’ type, the let’s go down the high street and mug people kind. I don’t think that is what the Spice Girls represented at all. They were a group of friends who were having a laugh, who didn’t need men to make them happy and who would put each other first.  

If you want to be my lover you gotta get with my friends, wasn’t a beautifully written lyric line no, but it was a great message none the less.

The Spice Girls had a resounding effect on young ladies everywhere. Yes we all bought into the merchandise, and if I remember rightly very few desks weren’t littered with spice girl rulers and pencil cases that year, but more than that we bought into the idea that perhaps girls did have power, that we could zig a zig ah without transgressing any socially dictated conventions.

For me it was ginger spice…funnily enough it also was for my brother. She was giggly and mouthy and kissed Nelson Mandela on the cheek when she met him. I thought she was brilliant and glamorous and amazing and when she left the group I was devastated.  I actually got to meet her once when I went swimming with my brother, and he’ll hate me for saying it but he was just as excited about it as me. We also walked to Emma Bunton’s house to drop a note asking for tickets to the Spice Girls tour, something that makes my cheeks go red when I think about it now.

But the reason I bring up the Spice Girls is because my birthday made me realize how lucky I am to have these strong independent ladies around me now. I still find myself being inspired and changed by these great role models who look after each other and me everyday. I doubt all of us have the Spice Girls to thank for not being meek, gentile and unadventurous people, and perhaps they were just a product of changing times. What I do know is having the confidence to find happiness in ourselves and not expecting to find it in other people is definitely what Girl Power was all about

Over and Out

Meryl

PS: If you are wondering if I went to see the reunion tour then the answer is yes. Me and my sister put our hair in pigtails covered ourselves in glitter and sang every word of every song until neither of us could talk...twas magical xxx

The Tale of Two Cookies.

So yesterday was my birthday, and it was a truly fantastic day! Birthdays are both special and a bit weird, there is no real difference between that day and any other but even the sight of the date makes it feel foreign and exciting. September the 16th to me always looks different from every other date because in its own strange way it represents me. Obviously it only does this to me, and maybe my family. No one else see’s the 16th of September and have me pop into their brain….or do they.

Fade to black

Fade in.

(Exciting)

[At the office, early morning, interior shot]

So I got a great gift from my friend Grace yesterday in the early morning, and I get to see all these lovely messages on facebook through out the day, but all in all I’m trying to get through my large pile of paperwork so the day feels like most others end up feeling. All of a sudden the doorbell at work rings and there is a man standing with a box that has my name on it, he looks at me and in a rather unenthusiastic singsong tone he says ‘Cookie Gram’.

Low and behold there in the box is a massive cookie (pizza sized at best guess) with Happy Birthday SMAGE written on it. Now to quickly explain, my friend Sian has called me Smagel for years due to an unfortunate bagel misunderstanding that the Ivers family will never let me forget, but Smage is a new name and I was laughing at the mistake while feeling lovely and warm inside that Sian would work out a way to get a cookie delivered in Canada to me on my birthday all the way from England. It was a great surprise and a great gift beat only by one event.

Cookie number 2. About an hour, and fifty bbm’s of thanks later there is another ring on the doorbell, and standing there as if there were a glitch in the matrix is another gentlemen with a white box in his hands who smiles at me and says, cookie gram.

Two cookies ladies and gentlemen, for one birthday.

Turns out while Sian was trying to book cookies from England her confirmation hadn’t come through and worried that it wouldn’t turn up, her and her brother Kieran had scowered the internet to find another company that made cookie grams and ordered it through them.  The second cookie gram was beautifully wrapped and when I opened it, it was really well decorated. There in the center of it written in Capital letters was HAPPY BIRTHDAY SMEGAL.  Two cookies and neither could manage an accurate spelling, not to mention the slack I got from my co-workers about being named after a character from Lord of the Rings. Either way cookie grams are amazing, as is Sian. Thank you so much for making my birthday so very special and delicious. For the first time ever I really understood the psyche of the cookie monster. I became cookie centric. 

Big thankyou’s to everyone that made my birthday so special. For my gifts and for my messages, they were amazing.  I must be the luckiest person alive to have the friends that I have, which is not what I was thinking when they devoured my cookies in less than an hour. No I’m just kidding you are all beautiful!

I hope you all have exciting plans for the weekend! It’s my birthday party on Saturday and I intend to post pictures and blog about the event. If I can remember it, and don’t drunkly loose my camera…at this point what could happen is anyone’s guess.

All my love to those of you also celebrating your birthday this month, including my good friend Caressa who I adore and cannot wait to see on Saturday!

Love and kisses as always

Meryl x

It's like they made it just for me

If this wasn't made for my blog then it should have been

Click here

M x

TTC Blog

I’m back on the TTC. After almost a year of being driven to work moving has left me right back at square one taking the subway every morning and afternoon during rush hour.  It’s not so bad really, it’s a bit squishy and smells bad but it is certainly a great way to get to work without harming the environment. It is delays that get to me.

Having spent a majority of my life taking London transport to school I am no stranger to delays, but London has a million different lines to accommodate your sudden route change, Toronto has two.  It was this morning, as I stood pressed up against the glass trying to find some personal space while the train lingered in the dark tunnel that I realized I have spent a lot of my life holding hands with a subway pole.

It’s not a big deal really, but the familiar sight of a silver subway pole between my fingers makes me realize how much of your life just slips away right before your eyes. I won’t be the first person to observe that you spend more time with your work colleagues than anyone else in your life. Or that you walk the same piece of pavement or sidewalk everyday until you leave some sort of physical mark there. I used to let my imagination run wild as I walked to the subway, trying to imagine what the area would look like if every step I had taken in it was highlighted blue. If I could retrace my steps over the last year, yes they would take me to India but then they would bring me right back to the very area I walk around like a caged animal pacing.

When I first came to Canada I was far more adventurous. I would get off at different subway stations just to have a little look around. It also helped me get to grips with the city a little quicker. Now that I have moved I get a whole new area to discover which is exciting, although I am sure it won’t even be a month before I’ve devised a standardized route to get to all the things I need.  Routine shouldn’t really be mocked though; I think I may be too hard on it. We create routine out of both necessity and enjoyment. We return to the places we liked and we find efficient way to get to places we need.  That’s hardly a bad thing is it? I guess if I were to give myself advice it would be to try and mix up the two. To appreciate routine for the necessary part of life it is, but also to try and find new and exciting things to do and to see. 

On the topic of breaking routine, Happy New Year to all the lovely Jewish people out there, I hope you have year filled with Happiness, Excitement and Success

Love to all of you xxx

Thirty days has September

September is my favorite month of the year. It is a little self serving because September happens to be my birthday month too but that is not the reason I love it so much. Lots of things happen in September. The weather changes, the kids go back to school, drinking starts happening inside and new television shows are premiered. This predominantly is why I love September. Ever since I was young I had knack for making my imaginary successes accurate, and when I imagine having my television show on the box it would always be premiered in September along with the rest. September makes me feel inspired because I know with a little (or a lot) of hard work it could be my turn to see my script come to life.

September for the last six years has also been my month for moving. Once you get locked into moving in September it is not uncommon to continue doing so. This happens because you sign a year lease and are moving again the same time only a year later. I have stressed how much I dislike moving in September because all the students are trying to do the same only more aggravatingly and expensively and they get in my way, but overall it means September has become the start of something new, and pairing this with new shows and new opportunities I slide into the more introspective and philosophical Meryl I hide away for the rest of the year.

Talking of which the apartment is coming along really nicely. Nearly everything is in place. My kind, loving and sympathetic parents bought me a new netbook for my birthday and more importantly Charlie is back in town. I had asked my parents to look after the dog for a week, just so I could get everything packed up and moved without freaking him out, and he has spent a week in a big house with a big yard eating chicken my mother cooked for him. I missed him a lot while he was away. I think he is settling in, but my new place is a lot smaller than the old one and I think he feels a little peeved that I have downsized especially after spending a week in a dog equivalent all inclusive. Unfortunately for him he is a tiny little dog, so his options are rather limited and I am sure he will be used to it in no time.

I am going to keep this blog short because I am working on an ending to a story I found while clearing out data from my old netbook. It’s just a short story but I can see where I was going with it and feel I need closure by ending it right. If you are really good I will post it for you to read, fine if you are bad I probably will too.

I hope you had a great weekend, I went to second city on Saturday for the new show and it is hilarious, check it out if you can! I also watched a couple of newly released movies. The Runaways, which was poor and had very little happen for most of the film. I will say Dakota Fanning is really a great actress and brought a lot too it, but that was the only real positive to the whole thing. I would skip it if I had a do-over. I also watched Happy Tears, which is one of the weirdest films I’ve ever seen. For some reason I liked it, but it is hard to remember why, hmm if you have seen it let me know what you thought because to be honest I’m not quite sure.


Ok my pretties. Speak to you all real soon xxxx

Why I love Ricky Gervais, Steven Merchant and Karl Pilkington

For lots of reasons, most predominantly this.

Change

If I close my eyes really tight and wish on a shooting star, do you think there is a possibility the rest of the boxes in my house will unpack themselves…yeah I didn’t think so.

If I was Matilda this wouldn’t be a problem.

Anyway onto brighter things, today I want to talk about change (I know, how Obama of me right). Change is really important in life and yet it is one of the things that make us panic more than anything else. As a western civilization nearly everything we do works around routine, we are quick to ‘settle in’ and feel weird before we do. I am trying very hard to do the opposite, to use this change of address as an opening to change all the other things I wanted to but didn’t.

Ok so not all the other things, but lots of them. When Obama talked about change he promised a lot of things he himself may not be able to deliver and I know there are lots of people who are disappointed that he hasn’t really followed through on a lot of his policies, but for me Obama talking about change was more about mental state. For the first time in a long time the American population recognized that perhaps what they had going on wasn’t working for them, that proceeding in a both needless and endless war didn’t make any sense. American’s can be so great, but they are also blindly patriotic believing that being American is supporting everything the government decides to do, even if they think it is wrong. For the first time they had a leader saying, we need change, we need to grow and get better and re-evaluate.

And that is how I feel. I absolutely loved my time in Ossington, I have had a great last two years and met lots of people who I adore and are so important to me.  I got to live with great people and have lots of fun but it changed my focus and allowed me to enjoy routine and procrastination.  I’m ready for a new adventure. I’ve got my own place, I’m downtown in the city and I’m ready to spotlight my focus and write my arse off.  This coming year is going to be different, because like Obama I want change.

So after re-reading this perhaps my comparisons between one of the most powerful men in the world running a country and me moving house are a little presumptuous, but I’m going to stand by them because that’s the kind of arrogant tosser I am.

Love to all of you x

PS: A big shout out to my Grandma and Grandpa on their 56th Wedding anniversary, and to my Uncle J and Aunti S on theirs too! 

Box City

Hello Bloggywoggers

So I’m moved in.  I can’t believe it’s all moved in, well I can because of the 6 hours I spent in the 33 degree weather shifting boxes and beds around.  All in all it was a bit of a nightmare.  It was stiflingly hot which is awful moving temperature and there was just the two of us moving everything. I will never do it again ever. Next time I want 10 strong men packing and moving my stuff while I lay leisurely on a soft chair eating grapes. On the plus side we managed to move for a whopping 30 dollars each, which is quite a saving.

Or is it?

No it isn’t.

Why?

Because I managed to smash my computer the night before we were due to move.

Let me set the scene for you readers. It is nine o’clock the night before moving day and I’m trying to stuff the last of my rubbish into boxes and bags.  My brain is trying to concentrate only on packing, but it is being distracted by worry that I won’t be able to move the heavy boxes I have now packed. I’m running around the house like a bit of a loon concerned I’m going to leave something behind.  I grab one of the lighter boxes and lay it on top of a pile of clothes and it slowly slides sideways and onto the floor hitting a hanger which unearths another box which causes my bed side table to collapse sending my computer flying and with a smash it hits the hardwood floor.

The worst part is that the screen was facing down when it fell, so I have to walk over to it not sure if it is going to be dead. As I turn the poor thing over I’m silently praying to the god I don’t believe in to make it be ok, and unsurprisingly after no divine intervention three quarters of the screen has gone black.  On the plus side one quarter of the screen is functioning perfectly so I know the actual computer is still working and all my info isn’t lost.  This will be my fifth computer in three years so I’m starting to think it is me and not them. 

By the end of moving day, I was sweaty and hot, I looked like crap and my arms were aching, and the after effects today are kind of worse. I can barely lift my arms up and I’m covered in bruises and of course now don’t have a computer to write my blog on. Again you will have to put up with the spelling mistakes associated with writing blog entries on a blackberry.  I do feel happy and calm though. My new apartment is all mine, and although it looks like box city right now, I can see how it is all going to take shape and I’m going to love it. I can’t wait to get it in order.

I want to say thank you to my room mate Mike who really took the lions share in moving stuff, I like to think I did as much as I could but all in all he was the hero of the day. I would also like to thank Dave for driving that huge truck and not taking out any lampposts on the way (scraping one doesn’t count). Oh talking of which how strange is this, while in the middle of moving we had our photo taken yesterday. We had decided to take a break because we were just getting so hot and Dave ran and got us all icecaps from Tim Horton’s. We all took a seat on the end of the truck, feet dangling boxes and chairs scattered in and around us. All of a sudden we see a flash and some man is taking photos of us. To be fair we probably looked like a Tim Horton’s commercial, all ‘stressful day, take a break and cool of with an icecap’ like, but it was a little strange none the less.

While I am doing thankyous, I would like to thank everyone who checked in on me throughout the day, although it was all very hectic it was nice that people were thinking of how horrible I must be feeling moving in the heat. A massive thank you goes out to Jen for feeding me dinner and letting me sit in her air-conditioned apartment she is the best neighbour ever.

Also if any of you want to donate a computer to me, don’t even bother I wouldn’t take it if it was free. Yes I would, yes I would, somebody? anybody?

Meryl