summer rules, microsporidia drool

it is 11:07 pm on a friday night, and i have been staring at a paper outline about parasitic evolution and honey bees for the past three hours or so. or make that the past three weeks. I DON'T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT SCIENCE! why are they making me do this?

anyways, the point is, i am starting to remember what a procrastinator i am. i have incredible amounts of homework to do, and yet i can never quite find time to do any of it, what with all my dilly-dallying about on the internet, looking a strange facts and pretty pictures. i've spent a lot of time today reading about montreal...its history, its great summer events, its historic architecture and extreme hipness.

i may actually be developing a full-fledged blushing crush on montreal, though of course i realize she's a two-faced fair-weather kind of mate.

two degrees celcius seems to have warmed everyone's blood; everyone looks so happy all of a sudden, and so hopeful. it's strange how exciting it was the other day to feel sun on my face and then suddenly realize that it felt...warm! not very warm, but there was an unmistakable hint of something not cold. summer is coming! now we just have to wait for those 6 feet of snow to melt, and we're golden.

but yeah, i'm excited! montreal is slowly defrosting and it is crazy how palpable the anticipation is. it's really hard to concentrate on Apis mellifera and the various microsporidia that plague their bellies.

choices choices

So. I am at a point where, despite being bogged down by school, i am also realizing that the end is nigh. Once again i am being ejected from the cozy womb of student life into the harsh and fluorescent-lighted world. Somehow i doubt there will be a doctor there to cut the umbilical cord in one easy stroke, nor loving parents ready to put up with my crying and whining and cater to my every whim. sigh.

anyways, what i'm trying to say with this lame analogy is I WANT MY MOM! but she's kinda far away and has her own things to worry about.

So i want to figure out my own life. 25 has in many ways felt ages older than 24. Suddenly i don't feel like it's ok to keep bumming around, meandering from idea to idea without following through on any of them. It feels too old to have big debts and little prospects. So i'm spending all my spare time looking for jobs, internships, apprenticeships, and sugar daddies. Unfortunately Matt doesn't seem into the whole paying-for-my-love thing, and since i'm kinda into monogamy looks like i may have to settle for the former three. double sigh.

But yeah, looking for jobs etc. means making decisions. And anyone who knows me - or has at least spent time in a restaurant/cafe/american apparel with me - knows that making decisions is not my forte. I HATE OPTIONS! (But of course i also deeply appreciate all the options i have in my life, and feel very grateful to be in the position i am in) But i still hate options.

So yes. yes yes yes. Time to get on with decisions. I am having an interview this week for a volunteer job that would take me kinda far away for a while, but could be very fulfilling. I am applying for all sorts of internships that range from leading environmental summer camps to farming to working for all sorts of NGO's to ... well, i don't know, some of them are harder to describe than others. I'm also hoping to apply for a bunch of CIDA internships whenever they post them.

Unfortunately all of these jobs seem to overlap, and none of them seem to allow me to stay in Montreal for the summer, which i would dearly like to do. A lot of them also seem to pay very little, if anything at all. I have started a new volunteer job that i enjoy and there are lots of things i want to get involved in here when the weather gets warm. I am looking forward to bringing my yellow bicycle out of retirement, too, and biking around the city with no coat, revelling in the well-earned warm breeze. Perhaps i'm just dreaming. Perhaps a summer here would be nothing but hard labor and no money or time to enjoy the city. But i kind of doubt summer in Montreal could be less than fabulous, really.

So what to do? Is it bad to pass up interesting jobs to enjoy a city while i can? Is it bad to take unpaid positions when i have a student loan hanging over my head? Is it wrong to fantasize about a summer of minimum wage when i should probably be moving on with my life? Am i getting too old to flit around like this? Is my acute sense of the briefness of life getting in the way of my enjoyment of the moment? When am i going to figure out what i want to "do" with my life? Why do i want to do so many things all at once, and which one is the best for me?

Truly, in the last month or so i have considered a career as a pastry chef, an organic farmer, an educator, a researcher, an activist, a housepainter, a waitress, a world leader, a biologist, a graphic novelist, a regular novelist, vandana shiva's personal assistant, a carpenter, a yoga instructor (ha! not in the shape i'm in!), an epidemiologist, a horticulturalist, a housewife, a lawyer, and a drug dealer.

Do you think these could all be combined into one super-career?

yarg.