Just when you were doubting…it started to snow

My Snow

Just when the distance
seemed to stretch too far
Just when the voices asked
“do you know where you are?”

When the nightmare faces
Of the people I know
Cried out, “What are you doing here!?”
It began to snow.

 Started like rainfall
As I watched from indoors
The wind caught the white tufts
And dragged it to the floor

 The gusts blew fiercer
The whiteness seemed to grow
I pushed open the glass doors
And went out in the snow

Inside me, things grew quiet
I turned my face to the sky
And we had a moment.
Nature and I.

It’s not always easy,
Here in my new home
But I know I’ll be happy
As long as there’s snow.

Paris Herbert-Taylor

(Image credit wallpapers.net)

Happy Birthday to my Father

Dad

Today is my Dad’s birthday.

It’s been a little while since I have posted (since my I-WILL-POST-EVERY-DAY steam ran out after 2 weeks) and I couldn’t think of a better person to kick start and re-ignite the writing of this blog, since my dad has always been one of the loudest and most encouraging fans of any creative pursuit of mine.

My Dad is a pretty cool guy (even though he has his EXTREME dad moments). He’s artsy and creative, he sculpts and draws. He was a male model back in the day and even dated the famous actress Emma Thompson when he lived in London. (True story, I think she was at Cambridge at the time, once in our garage I was going through boxes and found a playbill from the Cambridge footlights group and it was signed by Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry and Miss Thompson).

My Dad loves the outdoors. He once went trekking in Tasmania in the hills and brought back 5 little wooden figurines that he had carved from his walking stick. I still have mine…somewhere.

He is spiritual – that has transferred to me. Even though I always diss him (in a loving way) I think that his interest in Buddhism and meditation is great.

Both my parents have moved around like gypsy’s, but it was Dad’s job as an Architect and Project Manager that kept us moving when I was younger. His love of living overseas has transferred to me now, and I continue to move around and pick up and put down new roots.

Me and Dad

Dad’s love of sports was passed down from his dad, to me. We used to go and kick the soccer ball around in the park, or play tennis. When I was younger I would Caddy for him on Sundays and I thought it was a pretty sweet deal. I’d get paid $5.00AUD for the whole morning AND I’d get a mars bar AND a coke if I was lucky. It was just Dad and I, and his golfing buddies. Those were the richest weekends of my LIFE. I wonder what I ended up doing with those crisp purple plastic notes. It didn’t matter about the money though, because I was being included in grown-up time.

Parents weekend, Wesley College 2009

In my middle school and High school years, Dad would come along to support just about anything I did. He’d come to waterpolo games, Indoor Hockey, Netball, Softball, Soccer, Basketball. It didn’t matter what the sport was, Dad was ALWAYS on the side, red-faced, yelling encouragement, giving tips. I remember going to watch HIM play waterpolo and Hockey. Dad was always the trimmest and fastest out of his wheezing, less fit friends.

Dad was always super proud of all my other, non-sporting achievements too. We haven’t lived in the same city in years, and yet he still makes an effort to come over to wherever I am for the big moments. He came to Sydney for my Undergrad graduation. He came to to see me at my College for our final parents weekend where I was presented with a huge bunch of flowers and a cheque for contributions to College arts and community. This year he even flew over to Sydney to see my first full length play at the Sydney Fringe Festival.

The sad reality of growing up is that you realize your parents are actually HUMAN and not these mythical beasts that can do no wrong and can protect you from every fear and monster that lives under the bed.

You acknowledge that they aren’t perfect and that as parents, they winged it just as much as we will. It’s weird to see friends of mine starting families and realizing that my parents had a life outside of me.

But I think it makes you appreciate them more. You can have adult conversations that you never thought you’d have with the people who raised you. You realize that a lot of your beliefs and understanding of the world has come from how they guided you.

In my case, I’m lucky to have had such well-educated, well-travelled, interesting parents who set me up (hopefully) for a life of working-hard and reaping the benefits.

Happy Birthday Dad.
And thanks for everything

xxx

Toronto Turns: Fall to Winter

Big Pile of leaves in the street!

Bye Bye Leaves

 

A yellow leaf road

 

The CN tower in the distance

Beautiful, Chilly City

Christmas is Coming!

Problems posed by a Canadian Winter

As someone who has lived in moderate climates all my life, the onslaught of winter is exciting and terrifying at the same time.

I’m pretty low-maintenance when it comes to exercise, diet, appearance, clothing…most things really, but this has all had to change with the first tingles of Winter.

 

I’ve lived a life with very little hardship’s. The climes of Australasia tend to be hotter, rather than colder, and so it is with wide-eyed optimism that I look forward to my first white Christmas. Canada is GLORIOUS in the sunshine filled summer, and Autumn was BEAUTIFUL and yes okay a little chilly, BUT yay me (I innocently thought to myself) I have survived cold that would have been the heart of my normal winter in October and lived to tell the tale.

All that is about to change. I can feel it in the air.

-2 degree mornings. Wind that bites at any exposed flesh (face/hands) and causes actual physical PAIN?!

 

Well this is new.

 

It’s late November you say? This is a WARM day in Winter?

Oh FUCK.

So here is a list of things that I have had to factor in, in the hopes of Surviving my first Harsh Winter.

EXTREME winter jackets
My Puffy $400 jacket has goosedown feathers stuffed inside it. You heard me.
I am walking around Toronto in a fitted Duvet (essentially). Yes that looks as sexy as it sounds. This Jacket zips up to just below my eyes, and has a hood that covers to just above my eyes. I wore my jacket for the first time last week, and apparently, I won’t be taking it off until March. Hello new best friend!

 

Moisturizer
I have been lucky with genes, and have, (for the most part except RIDICULOUS reappearing spots on either side of my bottom lip) excellent skin. I never had many pimples as a teenager and despite the constant flush about my cheeks (and my high colouring during sport) I have always been complimented on my soft skin.

Well guess what? ARCTIC WINDS WANT TO DESTROY MY OUTER EPIDERMIS. You heard. Canada is TRYING to destroy my face and hands.  In Hong Kong or Australia, I’ll slap on Moisturiser every couple of days if my face feels a bit dry, but RARELY will I moisturize any other part of my body unless I’m being seen naked by someone for the first time. Well hello new moisturizing regime. Unless I want to look like *this* then I better get used to spending more time rubbing things into myself.

 

Exfoliating
See above – apparently winter will destroy my skin if I don’t.

Kiss my cracked choppy lips baby!

Lip Balm
Like Moisturizer, I would rarely apply lip balm. My lips rarely get dry and sore. Well guess what, 3 times a day minimum (depending on how many times I’m sent out of the office on an errand) I’ll be applying balm. Eek. I need some Australian friends to send me more Papaya lip stuff.

Food
Apparently food doesn’t just make you live, certain kinds of food can keep you from getting sick, and in cold climates you need to make sure you eat super foods to A) keep you healthy and B) Keep you happy – food can affect your mood?!

No more walking outside
I’ve been sneaking my daily exercise in on myself by walking to/from work and making myself walk to other places rather than take the subway. Not a possibility in Winter apparently!

Underground pathways
In Toronto there is a whole network of Underground tunnels that keep you from ever having to go outside into the harsh climate. My office is near the entrance of some of these tunnels, but still, I will be outside in the super cold for at least a hundred metre’s. Bearable for now, but when it’s minus 20? EEEEKKKK

Never going anywhere and staying inside
Hibernating like a bear. Guess whose going to get caught up on all those TV shows!?!

And last but not least:

Vitamins
I know what Vitamins are. I’ve just never taken them daily. Well apparently because Canadians don’t see much of our friend, the sun, Vitamin D needs to be taken. Who knew!

And there you have it. Things that will now have to change to keep me alive and kicking in this winter wonderland. Let’s see how long I can last before I seriously consider booking flights home.

 

P

4 Reasons I miss University life

As I have mentioned in a previous post, this is the first year of my life I haven’t had an educational institute to attend. It’s kind of scary, exciting, liberating and sad at the same time. This weekend I’m up in the Uni town London, Ontario, visiting friends from camp.

Reasons I miss Uni Life:

1. Student discounts
Movies, bus passes, books, Apple products.
How about a discount for people straight out of Uni who have no idea what they are doing with their lives?

2. Delicious cheap food.
Campuses always have the most scrumptious, affordable, hugest meal deals. When I was at Uni in Sydney I lived off $6.00 thail lunch menu specials and $6.00 steak and chip pub deals (including a drink). Those were the greatest and most filling meals. They have taken on the goldy-sheen of delicious meals past

3. Learning
Remember when you went to Tutorials because if you didn’t, you’d fail? How ironic. I miss learning things. My brain juice is slowing down and turning to mud. I need to get back into some courses.

4. Drinking EVERY NIGHT of the week.
It’s Monday? AMAZING! We’ll go to Scu-Bar. Tuesday?! Lets go to the Roxbury! Wednesday?! Oh it’s time for The Marley….
You get the gist (those are all real places we used to go to around Sydney City btw) every night of the week had potential. Now if I go out on a week night, I need to be back in bed by 1am so that I can get enough sleep to go to work the next day. SIGH.
Real life sucks.

Western Mustangs!

Okay yes. I love that I’m not (always) broke. I love that I don’t have to eat instant noodles for 2/3 my meals.
I love seeing clothes I love and actually being able to buy them. I love the potential that life has before me, every day like a blank canvas.

But there are definitely things I miss. And being on campus makes those things come FLOODING back.

Running Away From Home: RAFHing it

I think I just realized that I’ve been running away from Home for a long time now.
My roommate and I are involved in a theatre project we are devising together, and the theme is “Coming Home.”

This has sparked lots of interesting conversations between us, and me personally with myself. My beautiful roommate is a Canadian in every maple syrup, mounty, Moose sense of the word. But she moved here when she was four. Nationality-wise, she is Bulgarian. Then there’s her best friend, “M” who has Canadian citizenship, but has the thickest bloody Scottish accent there ever was to be heard.

And then there’s me.

Toronto is home for now, for all of us (though I think we all have Hollywood/New York dreams), though recently my Roommate said she was planning to go “home” in the summer, and “M” said that her grandparents at “home” were sending her stuff.

After work I say “I’m heading home” and I mean our little apartment at Bloor and Ossington. But really, Hong Kong is home to me, because my Mummy lives there, and I spent the greater part of my life there. And then there’s Sydney. My home for four years 2007-2010. AND I’m Australian.

But when I say I’m going “home” in the local sense, I mean our apartment. In my new adopted city. My new home.

It’s confusing for a Third Culture Kid, or Global Nomad, like me.

Home is a difficult concept.

And so, meditating on all this, I have come to the conclusion that I’ve been running away from “Home.”

I love picking up and moving on a whim, but I hate change.
When things get too normal, I have to f*ck Sh*t up just so I can fix it again – to keep busy you see.
I’m always getting my roots dug in deep, but then I terrify myself and become all commitment-phobic.

So I always have an exit. I always know the escape routes.

I’m never just “Home” and settled. There is always somewhere to miss. Someone to miss. Somewhere else to be.

When I was living in Hong Kong for 6 months this year, I couldn’t WAIT to out and go to Canada. AND then I was planning to go back to Sydney and get a real job in my industry. But I didn’t. I stayed here…because the concept of “a real” job freaked me out too much. It was too much commitment…but that is an issue for another blog.

When I have my monthly freakout (WTF am I doing with my life?!?!) I always have an insane urge to run, bite, tear my way out of wherever I am and get “Home”.

The silly thing is that…where I want to escape too…

…changes every weekend.

P

Sometimes:

 

And then I realize:

 

IT ALL MAKES SENSE NOW!

5 Things I miss from Australia (which is ironic because when I lived there I spent a lot of time dissing the country)

I have been feeling ever so slightly home-sick for Australia in the last 24 hours.

It actually all started when I went to buy hamburger buns at the supermarket (The chain I went to is called ‘metro’). My boyfriend got a new bbq (that fact is irrelevant but relates to why I was buying hamburger buns) and asked me to pick up a few things (there! you see! all the pieces fit together now!) and because I have a massive sweet tooth, and we were seeing a movie later, I headed over to the confectionary section to choose some lollies to delight myself with.

It was there in that tiny section, beside crackers and opposite potato chips, that I realized that the majority of the Candy that I love, nay, need to live a happy and fulfilled junk food rich life, was missing.

Thus below are the ** items from Australia that I most miss in Canada.

Item 1: Redskins.
Delicious Wonka product, these tough chewy sticks of goodness are raspberry flavoured and are the main cause of braces bracket breakage in Australia.

Excellent eaten in copious amounts, they are also delicious shoved in vodka, left to ferment in the clear liquid and then eaten with your alcoholic beverage. Pffft, Bond can keep his olive martini. I’ll take a redskin vodka thanks.

Item 2: Salt and Vinegar Snakata’s.
Anyone that knows me at all knows that I am addicted to all things salt & vinegar flavoured, be they chips, goldfish, small rodents…

Moving on.

By far my favourite ever of the Salt & Vinegar products is the rice cracker made by Snakata. I cannot begin to estimate how many boxes of them I ate last year during my masters, but they used to have deals at the supermarket that you could get two boxes for $2. So needless to say. I ate a lot. DELICIOUS CARBS AND E NUMBERS!

Item 3: Minties.
Minties, chewy mints. GENIUS. And who can forget their slogan “It’s moments like these we need Minties.” And how every wrapper had a different random situation where something would go wrong. If I am to understand the slogan, a mintie saved that situation. AMAZING peppermint flavoured goodness!

Item 4: Vegemite.
What sounds unappealing

about Concentrated Yeast Extract? Why WOULDN’T you think to spread that on your toast in the morning with butter?

Look, I know the North American’s will never understand it…but it’s something we grew up with as kids. Vegemite and cheese sandwiches. Vegemite on toast. It’s salty and black, and you only need a very thin spread. AMAZING for hangovers – just what your body needs.

Item 5: Yellow Mango’s
Okay this is not strictly an Australian thing.

When I say MANGO – this is what I mean. A glistening, soft, yellow, juicy fruit that is delicious and made of goodness and yum.

Not this….

You looklike an Apple. You can’t tell me what to do, YOU’RE NOT MY REAL MANGO!

WAAHAHAHAHA

*runs screaming into room and slams door*

I’m sure there are more Australian products that I miss, but those are the ones that are really getting me down over here in Canada. Like, come on, they have KoreaTown, ChinaTown, GreekTown, Little Italy. Where’s Little Australia?

I feel like Murray from Flight of The Concords should set up a joint Australia, New Zealand Town in Toronto!

Time

In the last week and a bit I have seen a number of movies that relate in one way or another to Time.

First it was ‘The Timer’ (2009) which my roommate and I found on Netflix and were kind of intrigued by (actually we were tired and it looked chick-flick-ey). The premise of the film is that you can get a timer implanted in your wrist and, providing the person you are meant to spend the rest of your life with has one too, the timer will count down until you lay eyes on each other. The main characters isn’t working because her “True love” hasn’t had one implanted. So it is blank. Her sisters says she won’t meet the person until she is 42.

In the film everyone is obsessed with how much time is left on their clocks, and finding the corresponding person with the timer. Plot holes aside (-seemingly that everyone in America seems to pair up with someone in that country, the pre-ordained nature of life – the timer seems to know you wont randomly move to…Canada say? – And most couples seem to be hetero) everyone in the film is obsessed with finding their “True Love” and rather than comforting to know that you will find that person, people’s lives seem to shut down and it all becomes about, “The One.”

‘

 

In Time’ (2011) is Justin Timberlake’s new (non-musical, take me seriously because I’m a SERIOUS Actor now) film. The trailers made the film look really interesting and a bit sci-fi-ey which I enjoy. The premise of the film is that humans have become genetically engineered to not age past 25. When you hit the age of 25, you get one year of time – also the currency for things like living, food (e.g a cup of coffee is four minutes).

Will Salas (JT) is from the ghetto, where people live day-to-day, hour to hour, working shitty jobs and getting low pay (do you see the analogy there for today’s world? You should! The writer and director hit you over the head with it constantly!)

I won’t ruin the film for you if you plan to see it (don’t waste the money at the cinema) but basically it somehow turns into a Robin Hood/Bonnie and Clyde thing that is so random. And they say TIME like 300 TIMES. SO you get kind of over it.

Oh that movie was about time? Sooooer random, I never picked up on that!

Then last night I saw ’50/50′ (2011) with Seth Rogan and Joseph Gordon-Levitt and the film is about Cancer and running out of time. And unlike ‘The Timer” or “In time” the film doesn’t bash you over the head with the idea of the ticking clock, it obviously does make you think about our mortality, I mean the main character Adam played by JG-L is only 27.

So what did I learn from these films?

Yes I learned something from them, even the first two which were kind of weird/not that good.

They made me reflect on the “Time” that we do have, and we have no timers or numbers counting down to tell us when our life is over, or any indication of how much time is left.

And therefore we must live in the moment, achieve the things we want to achieve. Be spontaneous, strive to be happy, not take things for granted.

People say, and I’ve said it too, that life is short. Compared to the universe, yes, compared to our aging earth, yes, but short is relative. I think that if we strive to live the lives we want to live, life is just long enough.

Paris

My Little Brother Kip

I’ve known you for 21 years.

There is a great picture that dad took, I am a cute blonde little imp, you are a squished up ball of pink screamy flesh, and it is the first moment we met.

I love you little brotherino.

Happy Birthday

2009 - Wesley College

2011 - Hong Kong

2010 - Hong Kong

2011 - Hong Kong

2008 - Perth

2008 - Hong Kong