My long-winded profile

Hello and welcome to my profile, full of inane and random factoids about yours truly!*

I’m a Canadian, a Torontonian, a farm kid, an office rat, and a nature lover (no one is more surprised about the latter than me – unless of course it is my brother!). An introvert, I also have a part-time job as a social butterfly/cruise director ... I love organizing people. Back when I was very young, it was called being bossy. Now it’s called leadership. :)

I’ve studied (in one way or another) French, creative writing, Italian, Spanish, biology, chemistry, education, Korean, information technology, history, Mandarin Chinese, and literature. I’m fluent in only one language, and that's just on good days! I love to enjoy art in a variety of its forms: photography, painting, mosaic, stained glass, sculpture, music, dance, theatre, literature, gardening, etc.

I once lived in South Korea, teaching English, for two years. I am a vegetarian. These two facts are completely unrelated.

Community is very important to me, both in concept and practice. When I lived in South Korea, I made several amazing friends, but eventually I moved back to Canada because life as an expat is transient. People come and go. And I want to see my friends have babies and watch those babies grow up and call me “Auntie” and know that we’ll be there for each other for decades.

I also believe in karma, paying-it-forward, kindness as a cornerstone of community. At least, the kind of community and world I want to be a part of. All that’s needed is good faith and good boundaries.

I used to be very religious, went through a period of atheism/agnosticism, and now I really don’t know exactly what I believe except that there has got to be something else out there – I’m just not sure what it all is or how it works. For now I call it “the Universe”. But I am definitely *not* open to hearing that there’s only one way (i.e., religion) to express or experience my spirituality.

Among my newest passions is my volunteer work rescuing migratory songbirds that fly into our city’s buildings. This sounds totally fruity and bleeding-heart-ish, I know, but that’s only because you haven’t done it. It is amazing and glorious and heartbreaking. And no, these birds aren’t dirty/parasite-ridden, nor am I likely to contract some kind of disease from them; these are healthy migratory birds that would not have made it this far if they weren’t fit. (People who've banded birds in population surveys have been handling the same kinds of birds for YEARS, so chill out already. ;-> ) Now if we could just deal with why they’re killing themselves on our buildings (at a conservative estimate of one billion songbirds a year in North America), that would be great.

I have one brother whom I frankly adore (after long years of a strained love-hate relationship, emphasis on the strained). He is now married to the most wonderful sister-in-law in the world because she makes him so happy and laughs at his corny jokes. Oh and she’s a very good person and gave the world my twin niece and nephew in January 2007. Lorelai and Reece are the most amazing, beautiful babies in the world. Of course, they share this honour with your own children, should you have any. :)

I have always loved children and it was not-so-gently pointed out to me by my Grade 7 teacher (!) that I tend to mother everyone. (We were reading a story in class that had a character who tended to mother her friends and my teacher asked the class, “Do you know anyone like that?” and the entire class turned to look at me en masse and I was completely shocked. I had been totally unaware.) I try really hard not to mother people today, so I have two cats to baby and keep me from being an annoyance.

I have never met a cat – or a potato – that I didn’t like. For different reasons, of course. (You know that rotten potatoes are an obvious exception, right?)

I love stories. Telling them, listening to them, whatever. I am in awe of J.K. Rowling, one of the most masterful storytellers we have today. Yes, I do mean the author of the Harry Potter books. That's a whole other post.

My ultimate dream is to live in a large, rambling, eco-friendly house inhabited by all the people I love so I would never have to say good-bye. I would of course have an entire wing of said large rambling eco-friendly house to myself because being around all the people I love would drive an introvert like me into insanity. :) Retreating into said wing for some solitude would no doubt create a tremendous amount of guilt that would also cause me to lose my mind, so it is probably just as well that I don’t live with everyone I love. :)

I have a neuro-muscular condition known as “Charcot Marie Tooth Disease”, or also known as hereditary motor and sensory neuropathy (HMSN) or peroneal muscular atrophy. You can look it up, I don’t mind. Fortunately, the kind that is in my family is the mildest form. So I won’t likely end up in a wheelchair or need crutches, which is good - make that excellent - news. However, I walk pretty slowly and can’t run very well and I have bad coordination and balance, and this sucks, because there’s lots in life I would do otherwise if I could. That said, I somehow seem to lead a far-too-busy and very satisfying life in spite of this, so in the end who cares? :)

For various reasons that I doubt I’ll ever air in the Blogosphere, my childhood wasn’t a very happy one. I remember laughing a bit of a belly laugh when I was eighteen, and it was the first time I could remember laughing out loud – at least moderately unrestrained – in years. Things since then have just gotten progressively better. These days, I relish my own laughter, I free it and celebrate it. There’s been a lot of baggage to sort through in the last 20 years or so, and it’s been a lot of hard work, honesty, and introspection, but wow! what a difference. There are always more things to work on, of course, but to go from loathing myself to liking the person that I’ve become has been a true transformation, and I’m grateful to those who have been there for me through it.

Okay, two pages about me – that’s more than enough for anybody! Thanks to all for visiting this humble blog – I hope you find something that will entertain or uplift you.

Peace,

C.

*This post was actually written on July 8th, 2007. I just set the date to 2001 to set it apart. Because I like to mess with you that way. :)

E-mail: noisypond at hotmail dot com