buy a condo!!!

So today I finally closed the purchase of my condo... it was sort of like matter of fact - my landlord offered to sell the condo I am living in and it turned out I will be paying less in mortgage and other fees than I paid for rent, so buying it was the right thing to do... I say 'sort of like a matter of fact' because it was still a big decision for the gypsy me... Here I am, not even sure if I will stay in Montreal long enough to see this Christmas... add to it the fact that I am constantly in need of new environments to stimulate me... So I did spend the night before, fretting, crying and just not sleeping...

And that night before, I went out to dinner with a couple of my friends, not to celbrate, but just cos we thought it'd be nice to go have a beer. One of them already knew, and I told the other during the course of the dinner. In recounting why I switched to the 1.5 times higher rate my bank offered me, over the broker who offered me 2.25%, I said how I felt that this broker tried to fool me, and how I felt he did so as his macho side got over him and he thought I was some candy girl with no brains; having felt insulted, I took my business elsewhere, my bank of 2 years, a credit union, Desjardins, overall nice professional people who don't work for a commission, I said "It is sometimes hard to get things done when you are a woman; people think they can just walk all over you because you are stupid, all just because you are a woman"; my guy friend said "well it is also sometimes easier, just because you are a woman"... and I said "yes"... I did agree... Overall, as I have recounted in this very blog before, life is so much easier when you are a woman...

Anyway... fast forward (or just forward) to the day of the sale...

The notary was super nice, he accommodated all my first time home buying fears... I had cried away the night before, while drifting in and out of sleep. And of course my landlord and his ex's parents were nice too (but I did watch as the ex's profits all got slashed away as she wasn't a resident of Canada - she had denounced her residency so as to avoid tax on her apparently amazing income in the Middle East).

But then this evening I went out with a friend... who, to this day doesn't know I bought this thing, and drank whatever worries I had away...

Then I was going to Sri Lanka in a week, so I had lots to take my mind away from the post-buying anxieties of 'OMG what have I done!!!'. It also helped that I actually didn't have to move housesl I was already living there as a tenant... so life continued pretty normally...

But it wasn't until I went to Sri Lanka, that the importance of me buying this place really hit me... To my parents, it was a huuuge deal... I think when I got my PhD they were pretty proud of me... then when I moved to Montreal for this postdoc, even prouder... And then I bought this thing... So for them this string of events, I think, made it possible for them to say something like "see - that's my girl... isn't it everyone's dream to have a girl like her"

I have come a long way from those days when I calculated my life to bring happiness to worldly people... But I am pleasantly surprised how many worldly people I still make happy, albeit, inadvertently.

The biggest purchase I made before this was my car, 6yrs ago, on a loan too, ahead of my friends who settled for less. I made this purchase with 20 times more trepidation than that. I still have that car; sometimes I think of it as my constant companion, seen me through my happiness, my sadness. It has served its purpose well and beyond, in two countries, and done so with minimal bother... Here's to a condo that will do the same...

never say die

so, I am up, after staying up way too late, again, day before yesterday, working... which usually goes like "ag... it's 1am, I should sleep, ah, but lemme finish this tiny step"... "ah it's 2am now, but now I got a new idea, lemme implement just this one and I promise to go to sleep"... "it's 3am.. I should sleep, but wait... I know what went wrong, so lemme quickly fix it..." and now my body starts giving in... but my mind... well my mind has a mind of its own... Pretty soon the sky colors up, it is Montreal, the official sunrise time for today is 6:16am... I still have new ideas, I still have hunches on what I can correct... but I drag myself to bed...

I am up at 11am... have to be at school by 1pm to chair a meeting... Forget the CEPSUM, do I have time for a shower or not...? I jump in the shower because somewhere a little voice says "it's not polite to stink, specially in a meeting". The meeting goes ok, other than that someone accuses me of not speaking loud enough - me???? And the rest of the day, I spend like a zombie, my mind quite not upto the normal levels of logical capacity..., in a way rendering useless, the long extra hours last night that my body pleaded with my mind to please stop. One of the grad students, who's always been an insomniac, who I saw on skype all night long - he's been edgy for a couple days now, the sleep deprivation is finally getting to him. It is a land of the zombies. My speech slurs, I lose words - it is usually the most obvious sign of sleep-deprivation for me.

And I thought of that time that Ammi went everywhere looking for Ensure in Italy, even though it was pretty clear that we might not find it, and she finally found it. I thought of the way, again in Italy, a little after my mom's Ensure saga, I went looking for orange juice, and then walked about half an hour till I found any place that would sell orange juice... When I returned Malli said "what is it that makes you guys never quit?". That night I realized, I got this attitude from my mom...

Tonight I re-thought if it was really a personality strength or a weakness... While this "never say die" attitude is what got me here to where I am today, I am not sure if it is entirely necessary or even productive anymore. The strains my youthful 17year old body could handle, don't go so well with my body anymore. And yet I never seem to learn a lesson, never seem to be able to say, "this is it for today; tomorrow will be a fresher day". The few times I did that though, I was so very well rewarded, my stubborn mind, the very one that insists on keeping chugging on, felt fresher, and thought more clearly. After a good night's sleep, often, problems that were murky the night before, suddenly clarified. And yet, I behave the way I do... And my Exclusion Curves are not any better done, than if I had slept like a normal person...

In so many ways, I am as weak as a person who doesn't try at all, a person who can not get his mind focused on something. I can not let the focus go. We both have not tamed our minds...

And my other sleep deprived friend talked about how he had thought about going totally electricity free for one day a week. I think that would be a good start for me, a good first step to taming my mind and not feeling like someone else is in control... Maybe I will at least go computer/internet/phone free for a day of the week...

old friends in town

So this guy who worked with us, in that dreamy summer of 2008, who has since left us was back in town (ok so he's really not too far from us, but we don't get to hang out that much) so we went out for breakfast. We walked and walked and walked in the bitter cold, till we found a place that satisfied all of us. In reality I bet by the time we were at this nondescript place we were tired, so we just settled for this, having passed much better ones. The food was nothing special, just your typical North American fare - but someone did say that they wanted to have a good bacon and eggs breakfast!!! rednecks!! Atleast it had this cool lunar calendar.

It is always nice to see this friend of ours - more mature than his age, an extrovert with good looks to go with that. I wonder if I ever blogged about him. Less than a month into my arrival in Montreal, after I had recounted my Saint-Jean-Baptiste day celebrations, he said to someone else in French "well she's one of us"... and there was no sucking up, no hitting on involved... And yes, I know it wasn't told after much thought. But I immediately felt very good - it is something that I never heard in all my years in the US. In time, in Montreal, I would hear lots more than I ever heard in the US, some nice, some not so nice, but all contributing to the great memories I will eventually carry away from Montreal.

But so there's this amazingly nice guy who made my life so pleasant when I first came here, right? And then about a year ago I saw a bible next to his bed and then some other memories arose in me that led me to believe that he's religious. And just like that my head was fighting to outcast him. I had to fight a hard fight to surpress the stereotypes and come to peace with the fact that a religious person could still be very nice!!