saying no, weddings + a stylin' vote

When my friend Jackie asked me to consider being her wedding coordinator, my first reaction was laughter. Then was a normal human reaction of feeling flattered to even be asked. Then there was my firm and clear response, "Thanks, but no thanks."

Normally I can tend to have a problem saying "no" to inviting tasks, but there are some instances where I don't have to think hard to come to my definitive "no" reply:

First scenario guaranteeing a "no" response: When something is way, way , way out of my area and experience, I will flat out say no.

Now there are certainly those times where it's like "hey, that's something new, different and unknown to me, I'm up for the challenge to try something new and learn." What I'm talking about here are the opportunities that are so clearly not in my realm or reality that they are beyond reasonable consideration, for my sake and for the sake of the asker-of-the-favour.

Coordinating a wedding is one of those things that I wouldn't touch with a 10 foot pole. I haven't even been to that many weddings, considering the age of life that I'm in and considering the amount of people I know who've gotten married (I have a pretty wide network, but the majority of those relationships are not close ones to garner wedding invitations).

I've never even been in a wedding before as an adult. Flowergirl-hood doesn't count as I was too young to pick up any helpful wedding know-how... making it through without getting itchy from the lace on my dress or turning around to look at anyone in the pews was enough challenge then! I'm missing the inside-out perspective of the goings-on of a wedding. [Woah! Am I hyphen-happy or what?!] Bottom line is I'm too ignorant there to be of any real help!

Second scenario guaranteeing a "no" response: When Mike Woodard (a former director I had in my last job) would ask me to do things, I would say no.

This surfaced in an ironic way during one of my performance reviews. I listed in my version of the review that one of the weaknesses I needed to work on was my inability to say "no." In his version of my review, Mike listed "saying no" as one of my strengths. Well, I don't think I've ever said no to someone as much as him, simply for the reason that he kept asking me to do things that fell into category #1 and fell beyond my scope!

So if you ever want to exploit my weakness in saying no, ask me anything in my area of interest or skill. I'm a sucker for helping out with things I enjoy.

Anyway, I digress... all this to get to the point of this post. I am going to be in my first wedding this summer, and am fortunate to have the bride's friend create my dress so that it's hopefully wearable again. (Thanks Viv for being so thoughtful to this end and not making me wear something ridiculous!). Melissa has put some great work into the designs so far and we are getting close to choosing the winner.

The polls are now open... for those so inclined to voice their opinion, which of the following designs (or elements of designs) do you think is best? Which should I say yes to, and which should I say no to?

a black hole sucking gobs of time

Yeesh! I can't believe I just spent the past three hours adding my favourite/regularly-read links to the side of my blog. As if I don't already spend enough time online.

After wavering all afternoon, I decided to choose to be social and went for a visit with my grandparents, then eventually had a good time with Jocelyn and her friends celebrating her acceptance to grad school. I haven't had a proper visit with her in a matter of years, yet thanks to technology (namely, blogging, and next in line is e-mail) I don't feel all that out of touch with her. Of course, online is not nearly the same as enjoying her lively intelligence and humour in person! :)

Anyway, deciding to go for both these visits was a small victory of sorts, choosing to crawl out of my little independent-work-filled hole for the night. And then, on the way home, I "passed" another little "test" of sorts (for me considering my food issues, anyway) and managed to let go of my leftover food to a panhandler rather than hoarding it for myself.

And now, off to bed!

reflections from the ballet mirror

So this morning I started my ballet classes at Kits Community Centre. Might as well post about it since I'm at the office now killing time waiting for my email to get back up and running.

I wondered who might sign up for a Thursday morning class in Vancouver. You never know what kind of weird hours Vancouverites work, since there are so many small businesses, creatives who work their own hours, and so many who take their play seriously. The other day on the bus the guy beside me was telling his friend how he woke up at 11am an worked for an hour, then got on the bus. Sounds like Vancouver to me!

Anyway, so there's 12 people in the class, which is on the large side apparently. The instructor is an older white woman. Then there was other older white woman and a guy (yes! a guy!). The rest? All Asian, most of them international students. Now that is Vancouver for ya.

It was fun to get back into it, but I was reminded again of a few things about myself.

1. I wish I could be an expert now. I'm not particularly patient at waiting for progress and want to be good at everything now. Sadly, my perfectionism and this impatience keep me from trying new things too often, because I dislike the discomfort and awkwardness of beginnings and practice.

2. I hate being told what to do. There was this one woman beside me who apparently is not a beginner who pointed me onto the same page as the instructor. What's she doing in the class again? And why do I always get stuck next to the "experts" in these classes -- like the practically professional calligrapher in the Tim Botts class I took last summer?

3. I'm pretty independent and bluntly anti-social when I want to be and ran off out of the class right after it was over, rather than sticking around and getting into conversation with anyone. Yeah, yeah, I'm on Step 1 in admitting that my over-independence is a problem. Tonight I was going to visit my grandparents and then go to Balthazaar's to help a friend celebrate her acceptance into grad school. But I'm wavering -- I'd rather bury myself in my work at home tonight. (Yes, I'm addicted to my work too).

Just yesterday a friend from Edmonton emailed to ask me if I could host one of her friends in town for a week. Normally I think I am a pretty hospitable and social person. But then these types of requests act as a mirror and remind me I'm not actually that welcoming. I love to host people I know. And I only like to do so when it's convenient for me (this guest would be arriving the evening of my birthday and staying for a week, and I'd be giving up my room). But with people I don't know, I'm just more reluctant, or downright unwilling.

Everyone loves their friends. That's the normal, natural, easy thing to do out of our own capacity. It's going beyond, and loving others outside our natural love-radius -- either people we don't know personally or people we know but dislike -- which demonstrates itself as this other-worldly, supernatural love that comes from God-who-is-love himself. Thank God he doesn't only love us when it's convenient for him.

my pretty pink slippers

When I was in my first year of university, a friend of mine accused me of being boring and undaring with my choice of shoe colours. She had reasonable grounds for such an accusation because 95% of my shoes at that time were black. The other pair that made up the remaning 5% was white.

My habit of black shoes persisted until recently. During my shopping spree in Seattle, I bought a turquoise pair of shoes which I've been wearing around the house for the time being, until it's warm enough to wear some of my brighter matching tops outside as the summer weather arrives.

Then yesterday, I was quite excited to buy some new ballet slippers... a first pair since those by-gone days of lessons that stopped at the age of eight. I have fond memories of my ballet classes (save the time I forgot to bring my dance gear to school for my after-school lessons, so my Grade 3 teacher drove me home to get it, then to my lesson, but in the hurry I forgot to pack my tights and felt so self-conscious about wearing my purple knee socks in class that I couldn't enjoy myself that day.)

I decided to take ballet lessons, starting this week (hopefully the class has enough people in it so they won't cancel it) for several reasons. I miss the freedom of creative movement; somewhere in the way of adulthood, I've become hindered in that freedom. More than that though, my hope is that ballet will help me get back to that same carefree awareness I had of my body as a little girl. I want to be comfortable in my own skin as much as I can and enjoy this God-given gift that is my body rather than keep working toward some crazy ideal that doesn't exist for me.

take a break, or be broken

I started this post a few days ago, and I can't even remember exactly where I wanted to go with it. What triggered it originally is something I read somewhere (don't even remember where!) that says something like this:

"Poor concentration, a lack of enthusiasm, taking longer to do tasks and an insistent nagging from family [in my case, friends] are all signs of the need to undertake a basic human necessity rest."

Last fall I felt so convicted by two messages at church about the need for Sabbath rest. If God needed a break, then don't I? Or maybe he didn't need the break, but took one because it's a good thing. That triggered the convictions I felt from the sermon series on Sabbath 3 years prior to that already. Something I clearly need to work on. (Yes, I think I'm addicted to work... that came out in my 12 Steps session the other night...)

So last fall in response to the heart tuggings I felt, I tried really hard, and succeeded to "keep Sabbath" for 2 weeks in a row. A miracle of sorts for me especially I think. It felt wonderful. You'd think the positive benefits would be enough to entice me to try keeping up the good habit beyond 2 weeks.

Well old addictions die hard.

I've been working pretty hard pulling together an intensive leadership weekend away next week, and in my "spare time" on design projects for friends. As my advertising friend Ann said so aptly, "That's one thing about creative people. We always seem to be plagued with projects, either self-inflicted or friend-inflicted. It's a catch-22. Our restless brains remain in an eternal state of unrest, and yet yearns to rest. We're weird like that."

I can feel the slowly deteriorating effectiveness of this pace I'm trying to keep. I know... I know in my head that I need to take a break.

Thank God for friends who make me stop and take a break. Helene, my travelling partner to Vietnam, insisted on spending some time with me. We set a date and decided to take an overnight trip somewhere. We decided the day before we left to go to Seattle. We bought the tickets right before we left and wandered around town for a bit to explore and find a hotel. She said most people would be unnerved of not knowing where they're going to sleep that night. I think her spontenaety is rubbing off on me; it was a good exercise to not plan anything at all.

Came back from the trip with a good break, but not rested as we were on the go. I still have to process the things we saw and did there (in the next few post!)

Anyway, I should get back to work, though I am totally dragging my feet (the motivation of this post is pure procrastination). What was that again? Poor concentration, lack of enthusiasm, taking longer to do tasks... maybe I should take a break instead.

in the spirit of being Canadian

Apparently Canadians talk a lot about weather. Or at least that's something I've seen The Royal Canadian Air Farce make fun of every once in a while.

So in the true spirit of being Canadian, here is a short post on the crazy weather antics of Vancouver. This morning I woke up to flurries of snow (very unusual for Vancouver... the most likely place to snow in the Lower Mainland is up on SFU Burnaby Mountain). The park across the street was covered with white snow.

I took a nap in the afternoon. I later woke up to gorgeous sunshine and a green park across the street.

Now, close to midnight, there are huge flurries coming down again. All the cars on the street below are covered in a couple of inchese of snow.

This inconsistent and wacko weather that I think is particularly unique to Vancouver reminds me of a news story I saw a few years ago. It was a 3 minute long piece (which is fairly long in the world of TV news) on the weather. And it was the top story of the 6 o'clock news. They showed four different cameras from different spots in the city. One spot was snowing. Another was hailing. Another was raining. Another was completely dry with no precipitation (just a block away from the spot that was raining). This prairie girl thought it strange that weather would warrant the top news spot. But today reminds me how weird it really is.

I'm off! It's kinda fun watching the snow flurries which are as big as loonies now!

an excuse for not posting

I was walking on Davie last night and was struck at how warm it was, when I noticed there are already some early blooming cherry blossoms! After that miserable month of rain in January, this little Saskatchewan-sun-deprived-gal-living-in-Vancouver has totally been eating up the overall sunshine we've been getting. And with the blossoms blooming, it's spring!

It took the cherry blossoms to make me realize that it's already March! And now I am finally managing to make my first post for 2006. I knew when I started this blog it would be spurratic on the best of days. I've had thoughts I wanted to record and post, but the rest of my life was larger than life (ie. barely just managing it all).

Truth be told, I've been spending much of my online time working on moving the website my sister built for me last fall over to its new proper home. She did the grunt work of defining the site objectives and structure, and setting up the initial pages (I totally hate that part!) I managed to rebuild it using style sheets (I love those!!). It was a real team effort. (thanks Flo!)

So please visit my new little home online for my "hobby" at www.itjustflows.ca

I've been thinking about doing a website for a long time, and even praying off and on. It was a divine fluke/provision for my sister to do the site for her class project and get the ball rolling for me. The time was just right - 3 of the 4 wedding invitation designs on the website I've created only as of last fall. And I needed a break to recover from my overload of things online from my last job working 4 years on an e-zine.

It's snowballing a bit now - more friends getting engaged wanting invitations, and others who want business stationery. At a networking alumni event somoeone I didn't know came up to me and said she heard i do design and have a website. Word spreads fast, I told her, because the website was only new as of that very morning!

We'll see where God leads me on this path... I don't know if I have the discipline to make a living at it, and I would need more training (ironically I've ever only taken one design class). For now, I'm just happy to call it my hobby and have this avenue to serve my friends.

an unexpected post-Christmas treat

After 9 hours of travel, I finally arrived back safely at my home in Vancouver. I was only travelling from Saskatchewan, which should take an average flight time of 4 hours. I was too interested in taking the latest flight out in the afternoon and failed to notice there was a 3 hour layover in Edmonton (plus the 2 hour delay from Regina).

Anyway, I got home just in time to make the beds and set the towels and chocolates on the pillows just in time for my cousin Christal from Ottawa and her friend to come stay with me for the week. They're in town for a wedding of a high school friend of theirs who happens to go to my church. It'll be fun to go out on the town and ring in the new year with her at this wedding, though it feels admittedly a bit weird to do that with her (she will always be in my mind my little cousin!) Six degrees of separation continues to be true -- one of her friends in Vancouver turns out to be a friend of one of my roommates who was here for our Christmas party earlier this month!

I was looking in the paper for a show to take Christal to... I thought perhaps improv, but the timing didn't work out. Instead, we went to take in the Nutcracker by Ballet BC. This is something I've always wanted to do but not so badly that I've ever looked it up. I thought it was playing before Christmas while I was away, but lucky for me it was playing this Boxing Week and Christal was into it too.

What a treat! I think this beats the live theatre and symphony for me personally. I just love the grace and movement that flow from the dancers. If I can ever get my butt in gear, I want to take dance lessons again as a form of staying active. I look back on my dance memories of childhood with great fondness.

Speaking of childhood dance memories, while I was in Regina this time, my dad somehow dug out our old childhood dance costumes. They were soooooo cute! Most of the great ones were my sister's. The two funniest ones had to be the cute little yellow leotard that had the rows of soft feathers on the bum for the "six little ducks that I once knew" dance (my sister was 3 I think at the time) and the white leotard with gaudy giant silver sequins that my mom painstakingly sewed on one at a time for the dance where they imitated LA show girls, complete with a white fur thing they threw around. What a hoot we had laughing at the cuteness of the costumes (though we weren't laughing at the not-so-pleasant smell coming from the outfits!).

sorrys and smiles won't get us drunk

After a season of going to see live theatre on subscription tickets to a local theatre with a friend, we got bored with it. So we upgraded to the symphony!

It was a different experience than when I had gone as a teen for my music history classes. Quite enjoyable in fact! The first show we saw was music from the Rat Pack. The maestro for the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra Bramwell Tovey was quite humourous and interactive. Being a performance on Rememberance Day, he had all the vets stand up. That was a nice moment. But he also cracked jokes all night and gave background info on each piece so we could better enjoy it.

Then we went to see a child prodigy play one of Mozart's violin concerto. That was nice too. Mozart is one of my favourites. When I used to play piano as a child, I was pretty terrible at learning and getting the notes off the page. So I prefered Mozart -- simpler notes, but the challenge in perfecting his pieces were in the musicality. That I could handle.

Anyway, on the way home from the Mozart concert, I walked by an interesting sign from some of the panhandlers on the street. It said "Sorrys and smiles won't get us drunk!"

It made a good point, I thought. Just because I choose not to give change to someone, doesn't mean that I should ignore them and brush past like they don't exist. There's a basic human dignity that is respected when we make eye contact, smile and say "sorry, I can't help you in that way" or even "hi, how are you doing today?"

Every time I do say "hi" or some other comment to a panhandler, every single time I've received a polite response -- either "thanks anyway" or "have a good day" or "God bless you." I guess it's true like my friend's husband from England said during his first visit to Canada (Vancouver) -- the bums are polite here! Or maybe it's just that Canadian politeness coming out...

modern day freak show

My roommate was watching Oprah the other day as I walked to the kitchen.

I guess this week is "neurological disorders" week. The show was featuring heart-wrenching cases like the mermaid baby whose legs were born attached together, and a baby that kept chewing her hands, among other cases.

I'm a bit squeamish so I quietly left and went back to my room. My friend who is a massage therapist and thus in the medical profession loves that kind of stuff.

Anyway, I was thinking about it, and pretty much I realized that Oprah was just getting away with presenting a modern day freak show, but with a sentimental twist. As if the attention these people get already in their daily lives isn't enough to ostracize them or make them feel abnormal. Why not broadcast it on national TV?

While I admit to sneaking in a daytime soap once in a blue moon, I guess I never really got the extremity of Talk TV of daytime TV. Maybe there's some sort of odd yet comforting "look how crazy or bad or sad their lives are -- at least mine isn't that bad!" element to it.

I don't get it. I don't know what's triggering it, but it looks like my critical media studies training is resurrecting itself in me again...