her real world

The One

Today the Globe and Mail asked me: Do you believe in ‘the one’? I’m sure that the answers I gave them will be part of a future article that I won’t read.

Regardless of the results of that survey, the gist of it is: yes.

I believe in the one…
…who I want to spend all of my time with.
…who I immediately want to tell all of my news to, good or bad.
…who I want to ensure is the happiest person on earth.
…who is in my thoughts as soon as I wake up, all day, and before I go to bed.

Back when I wrote about why I wasn’t blogging in January, I didn’t have the one. I had been assured by friends that the one was still out there and that the one I had thought was the one really wasn’t. This is a good story that I think I’m ready to tell, because honestly it’s about time.

I believe that there is one person out there for you that will be your best friend till the bitter end and not give up on you when even you’ve given up on yourself. I don’t believe that this person is predestined to be with you or that you’ll even meet this person. I believe that some people have to try and fail a number of times before they find that person. I believe that some people are lucky enough to find that person right away. I believe that with love and patience and effort, anything is possible.

I just got off the phone with the one as I wanted to make sure that he was okay with me talking about this online. I told him that I thought he was the one, and he was okay with that. So he’s the one that I want to spend all of my time with and all that jazz. Even though I wasn’t very good at blogging regularly before him, it certainly has been more difficult after him. Not that I’m blaming him or anything. Ahem.

I asked my ex once if he believed in “the one”. We were sitting on the futon and it was facing the big windows in our apartment and he was sitting straight and looking out towards the windows and I was sitting facing him. His answer was a flat out no, which immediately made me feel bad for suggesting such a silly thing. This should have been red flag a bajillion and two. But at the time I loved him more than anything else believed he was the one, and I fought hard to keep him. And it turns out he was right, he didn’t believe in “the one” and left me rather unceremoniously. And if I’m honest with myself I knew that he wasn’t the one a long time before I found that note taped to my wall with duct tape.

It took me over two years to muster up the courage to give my heart to someone, over two years of thinking and creating standards for myself and listening to those around me and not just rushing in head first and making more mistakes than I had time to fix. I thought I was broken beyond repair and that I’d never find anyone, let alone ‘the one’. Luckily I had people (especially V) who didn’t let me think that way all the time.

But then one night I decided that I would peel myself out of bed, put on some nice clothes (blue jeans, cute blue shoes with flowers on them, brown t-shirt, black shawl, gold necklace from my grandmother, brown beaded earrings from E.), put on some makeup (the usual black mascara, black eyeliner, sparkly bronze eyeliner, shiny lipgloss), walk outside and buy a birthday card and attend the birthday celebration of a friend of mine. It was a supper at Café Paradiso followed by dancing at The Rainbow and I had convinced myself that I would go to the supper and not drink too much and go home early.

And then my world changed.

After an evening of gorgeous food (I had the vegetarian salad, it was one of my first meals out as a flexitarian. He had the lamb. I was really jealous) and loud funk music, I knew that I was on to something good. I stayed up really late and got really drunk.

And really, that’s probably all you’re going to hear. Unless of course the one and I decide that I can tell the Internet more stories about us.

Until then you’ll have to look at all my random food photos and hear me rant about various topics.

Oh look, there goes my navel.

*tap tap tap* Is this thing on?

Okay, so.

Yeah, I know.

It’s been a long time folks. Let’s just say I’ve been busy. Crazy in love and super happy and loving my job and losing weight and energized and…happy. You can see from above that I am certainly wearing purple and smiling a lot and enjoying the big fish tank at the Toronto Zoo.

I think about blogging every day. My “inspirations” folders (both digital and paper) are filled to the brim with things I want to do and things I want to tell you about. The “photos I haven’t uploaded to Flickr” queue is growing by the second and the “photos I have uploaded to Flickr but haven’t titled, geotagged or made public” queue sits there taunting me every time I look at my laptop. I’m telling myself to be patient and I hope you can be patient along with me.

This week marks one year on this domain and I’m happy as a pig in poop about that. I’ve finally found an internet place where I like to roost, and it has been a long time coming. My first blog post was on livejournal in 2003 and that was the beginning of a long journey of flitting and fluttering about trying to find my way.

Things you can start getting excited about:

• The launch of my new ‘corporate look’, I’m working with a faboo designer (@kevgel)
• A thousand bajillion photos of delicious food that I can’t wait to share
• The story of a journey I’m about to take, working title “Why I’m putting a king sized bed in a bachelor apartment”
• My very nascent thoughts on the social web and how I’m bringing it to work. Yes, you did hear me just say one of the things I don’t talk about on my blog. But we’re going to be refining the rules!
• A new idea I have for sharing photos, not sure if it’s going to work
• Me showing you how artsy and crafty I have been in the last few months
• Many, many photos and stories about Toronto
• A few ploys on getting a bit more interactivity on this here blog

Have I wet your whistle?

Until then, follow me @herrealworld

I did it!

I was a bit worried about doing Project 365 this year because I knew that uploading and posting every day was going to be a bit much. But for the past seven days, I have successfully done it. And I don’t plan on doing it anymore! Well, upload and post daily.

I’m still doing the project and I’m still going to be uploading to Flickr regularly, but I’m not going to be blogging it as my daily photo. Part of the magic of posting my daily photos is the fact that if I know I’m going to be busy and not able to post, I can schedule posts and still share my photos on a regular basis.

This leaves me to take my Project 365 photos and not have to worry about getting them uploaded right away. Which more truthfully is more like me forgetting to take it all day, taking a sloppy not well thought out photo at 10:30 at night and writing a post about it to make it seem like it wasn’t sloppy and poorly thought out photo. Which is totally what was going to start happening.

I’ll of course keep my blogdiance happy by posting updates perhaps weekly or some such, but this will provide less repetition to those people who subscribe both to my blog and to my Flickr feed. I’m thinking about the hardcore herrealworld fans out there! You know who you are.

This also means that I’m going to try and diversify a bit, and perhaps write some posts (like this one!) that have some real content in them. I’ve got a billion ideas, I just need to focus them and start writing. And then press publish a few times.

Like this.