This is my 2nd post today...I'm waiting for my Mom to finish making potato salad so I can help her set up her Skype account. And I found this while perusing the lovely Gala Darling's archives.

The Boy and I went out for sushi and pretended not to know each other. You never know what you'll learn about somebody - for example, I had no idea that my boyfriend invented thought and gave birth to the dinosaurs. They didn't teach us that at my ninja school in Sweden.

Just thinking about how spectacularly privileged I am to be alive enough to receive the world-class ass-kicking the Universe is currently delivering.

(image from http://fatknowledge.blogspot.com)

So I am kinda sorta on vacation now and The Boy and I are packing up our stuff to move out and the apartment is SCARY and we're trying to work out a trip to Cape Breton or SOMEWHERE for a few days before he starts work and I leave on a jet plane.

Also, I have a travel blog that will be up and running as of (approximately) 23 July.

Overheard on my phone

The Boy: So let me get this straight. The Hip "pulled out" of Virgin Fest?

Me: Oh, grow up.

Sassy Tortuga loves: Mortified

Step One: Wallow in self-pity. Temporarily.

Step Two: Eat some ludicrously expensive, high-quality chocolate.

Step Three: Get yourself off. Better yet, get someone to do it for you.

Step Four: Move on.

The breakfast that stole my heart many years ago in Costa Rica was recently featured on The Kitchn (they get credit for the delectable photo). Try it! Oh, and Haligonians: you can get Salsa Lizano at Pete's Frootique, although it ain't cheap.

Need a kick in the pants?

Excuse the BSG montage. I just had a jarring (in a good way) iTunes moment and I wanted to share.

All year it's felt like the world has been repeatedly hitting me upside the head, trying to stir me from my complacence. Maybe I should forget about the job applications that don't really excite me, and if I don't get anything cool just buy a share of a farm and somehow prove the naysayers wrong by building a thriving business selling $17 balls of alpaca yarn to dilettante knitters who don't care about the recession. I have a plan, see. I'm going to buck the ridiculous trend of selling yarn in hanks, which all the local producers seem to think is a great idea. But since we don't all own one of those machines that turn hanks into centre-pull balls. I figure saving my customers the agony of winding it by hand would win me a cult following. Centre-pull marketing. I'm telling you baby, if Wal-Mart brands can do it, the high-enders should, too. All I'm saying. Business plan.

Okay, my apartment truly is disgusting. And it kind of feels like that messiness is manifesting in the rest of my life. So I'm cleaning, for real this time. Scrubbing it from top to bottom, making it my own - somewhere I WANT to live. My fridge doesn't know what hit it.

Spring is in the air and new links are popping up around here like tulips on the front lawn. Check it out!

Okay...

I know I said I'd update on 4 May. But my apartment's still dirty, I haven't been to a yoga class in almost a month and I am most emphatically not a model of spring renewal right now. There's a lot going on! And I have a ton of job applications to do up tonight because The Jenn and I are meeting up tomorrow (it's ladies' night, ohhhhh yeah) and I can't put this off anymore.

xoxo

Maybe I wasn't entirely fair the other day. I am in fact related to some very intelligent people with experiences different from my own. They're frustrated that their ideology doesn't find expression in most mainstream media and to be fair, my horizons consistently expand when I visit them. I spent the exam season ignoring the newspapers but I now have at least an idea of what's going on with the US's economic stimulus, interrogation techniques and why Miss California blames her loss in the Miss USA pageant on Perez Hilton. And it serves as a reminder not to let ideology cloud my own opinions - a reminder we could all use once in a while.

It's just that the sentiment at my American grandparents' house is so emphatically anti-liberal that most of the time I don't feel comfortable expressing my own opinions. Plus, Rush Limbaugh makes me want to bash my head against the wall with his nonsensical rants and trademark tendency to ignore nuance. Apparently when Obama says that he wants the US Supreme Court to include people who understand what it's like to be marginalized or to be outside the system, what he means is that he wants to appoint ex-cons, illegal immigrants and a disabled, black, lesbian single mother with no legal training. I'm not making this up. Here I was thinking that there was a middle ground - that the immensely talented group of people with increasingly diverse cultural, ethnic, sexual and socioeconomic backgrounds that is entering the legal profession might have something to contribute. Dal Law negligently forgot to inform me of how idiotic I've been, that there is no middle ground between a rich, white, male judiciary and total anarchy. Good thing Rush is around to set me straight.

But I shouldn't pick on Rush. It's too easy - I feel like I'm taking cheap shots. And here I am going on a rant of my own - guess it rubs off. Still I feel that it's my right after holding my tongue through approximately 5 hours of Glenn Beck alone. I'm harbouring a week's worth of snarky comments...but I'm going to bed now.

Happy May Day, fluffies. Plant some flowers, manifest abundance or just canoodle in a field. Summer is coming!

Okay, I'm done.

Don't get me wrong. I love my family to pieces. But I can only take so many diatribes against gay rights, so many bitter critiques of the minutiae of Obama's demeanor, so much nonsensical speculation about some apparent liberal plot to destroy America.

Give me Canada. Give me the CBC. Give me my bike and Frenchy's and the farmers' market and people who recognize the comedy in Fox News trying to sell itself as "fair and balanced."

spring. clean.

It was a brilliant and hyper-productive spring day here in Halifax. The Boy is on a plane headed towards Tokyo and, being on my own in the apartment for the next month, I busied myself with upgrading it from "squalid" to "messy." I'll be visiting family for the next week but check back on Monday 4 May because I'll be diving into some inner and outer spring cleaning and I'll need you to be my cheerleaders. It has been an intense, beautiful, enlightening and sometimes excruciating winter and it's time to sweep away the dust bunnies, air out the stagnant places and polish all the ugly bits until they shine.

Green smoothie + chocolate chip cookie - breakfast of chamipions

It wasn't easy but I came out the other end of Second Year in one piece. I actually plan to get some decent content up here, so if you haven't given up on me by now, please stick with me a little longer. Just don't expect much this week - I have loose ends to tie up, job applications to send out and a Boy to spend QT with before he heads off for two months to bum around Asia and then write the Bar. But soon! Soon I will once again be the sporadic blogger you all know and love.

xoxo
ST

I am a consumer whore.

Ok, I'm sure you all know of my love affair with Maha Devi Design. Well, they're currently having a Spring Equinox Sale and I definitely bought a whole bunch of yoga wear...and a pair of "Pixie Pants" that are utterly impractical for yoga but will look superb while I hoop.

They also have a kids' collection and just let me say, I will be the most ridiculous parent because I absolutely will dress my child like an elf:

Whoa!

I'm going to Asia, baby! Singapore, to be exact, for an exchange next year. Yeah, the Tortuga in all her crunchy dirt-worshipping glory is going to spend 4 months in a conservative city-state where it's illegal to sell chewing gum and they increase green space by expanding the land mass into places where the ocean used to be.

And I'm beyond pumped.

Epic!

Long ago, when I worked as a desk jockey, Trainee and I would chat on MSN. Whenever I made a typo (which was often) he would make me come up with a definition for my new word. The Hipstionary has been lots in the sands of time (although a fragment has survived: "delicions" are the particles in food that make it tasty). There's a new one, and you can keep up with it here: Hiptionary. Time to expand your vocabulary.

Are you in on the Icing Transformation Challenge? Why not? This month - for the whole month - I'm going to exercise every day, eat at least 50% raw and totally forgo refined sugar. Please help peek me on my toes!

Looks like Sassy Tortuga needs to get herself to Istanbul.

New

(In which Sassy Tortuga engages in a long-winded and self-serving narrative about her personal journey)


Image from Bristol Life Drawing


Life is full of times of intense inner transformation, and for me this is one of them. A year ago I found myself questioning my path, my choices and the relationship that I had been in for three years. I had stagnated. So took off - across the country, looking for a place to call my own and a magical transformation that would show me exactly what I wanted. But as with so many life-changing experiences, there was no thunder, no fairy dust. I had a moment alone in the forest in Haida Gwaii, a magical place with which many people (some of whom I now count as friends) have fallen in love and decided to stay. But what I got out of that moment was simply "not here, not now."

I kept going with the career path - not because I had suddenly fallen in love with the law, but because it was still a reasonable option before me at the time. I still believed in my ability to use this degree to make a difference where it matters.

I ended the relationship. In retrospect it wasn't a sudden decision, but it was the first time I had found the courage to face that little voice inside. The person I long considered my best friend will no longer speak to me. But it was a sacrifice I had to make.

At that point I thought that things would begin moving, and quickly. I expected bursts of clarity, astonishing vitality. Instead, I couldn't concentrate, I got shitty grades and I slipped into a funk. Again I started to question what I was doing in law school and what I could do to get out - and whether I would have the guts to do what I had to do when I figured out what that was. With the economy in a nosedive I was anxious about money, about my future prospects. I had to think, and think fast, about job applications, and I had never felt less qualified to do what I was expected to do.

I felt like my Self was a dark house and I couldn't find the light switch. I knew it was around somewhere and that once I did things would begin to get better. But I couldn't find it, and I was stumbling and tripping over things in my efforts.

That was two weeks ago. I have since learned the most important lesson of law school so far, and that is not to let my self-worth depend on arbitrary comparisons to the people around me. I had created this identity for myself that was based on being a high achiever in my undergrad, and when I didn't keep doing more of the same I thought that I had failed. But quite apart from the fact that law school is a much bigger game than undergrad Poli Sci, that the players are all intellectual heavyweights and that even getting INTO the game is a colossal achievement, I needed to realize that it doesn't REALLY matter whether I have a superior grasp of the principled hearsay exception or if I'm hyperinvolved in student government.

I have brains in my head, I have feet in my shoes (with apologies to Doctor Seuss)...I make a mean salad, I have the cajones to take off across the country (or the continent) by myself, I'm not afraid to get dirty and I see the world differently than most people do. No matter what, I'll make a great life for myself.

Of course I haven't totally snapped out of it. There will always be things I want to change about myself. But most of the job applications are in, and the response so far has been positive (although I'm not going to elaborate just yet). I'm dating someone who truly blows me away - he's incredible. And I'm really putting the effort into honouring myself.

Instead of making a million and one resolutions this year, only to abandon them and then beat myself up over it, I've made one. I have committed to taking care of my body. The rest, I think, will follow. I'm eating healthy and getting active. I hate the gym so I'm finding ways to never feel guilty about not going: not just doing yoga and taking the stairs, but really awesome fun stuff: salsa dancing on Thursdays, swing dancing on Saturdays and hula hooping on Sundays.

Life is good, my friends, even when it feels like garbage. Thanks for sticking with me. I love you all.

Besos,
Sassy Tortuga