One of the greatest things about moving on to university is the ability to specialize in a program which corresponds to our interests and skills, and thus never again having to worry about the stuff from high school that we just plain sucked at. We all had our Achilles’ heels, whether it was finding symbolism in Shakespeare, solving calculus problems, dissecting fetal pigs, or conjugating French verbs. I must confess that, like millions of other teens, I was never a fan of gym. I was far too uninterested in sports and lacking in competitive drive to stand much of a chance against my school’s prize athletes, who treated every game of floor hockey like an Olympic match and would flip their shit whenever those of us who were just there to coast to an easy A zoned out far enough to miss a pass. The second I finished grade nine gym, my first thought was, “Now to never play another team sport again, unless it’s drunken bowling.”

I finished my undergraduate studies this year and will be attending law school in the fall. My law school-to-be has a reputation for hosting incredible orientations, so I checked my mailbox with glee every day over the summer, anticipating the arrival of my orientation week package. My enthusiasm only heightened when my best friend, who is bound for med school, informed me that her orientation was basically a full week of drinking and clubbing. But the moment the schedule was in my hands, my face could not have fallen faster.

All of the events sounded like they were straight out of high school gym – touch football, capture the flag, foot races, and even the dreaded dodge ball. Where was the alcohol-fuelled revelry? I didn’t suffer through the hell that was the law school application process for an orientation week that sounds like it was planned by a church summer camp. To make things even worse, it all culminates in a prom. They should’ve just renamed it “Relive Your Awkward Adolescent Experiences Week”, except that they somehow found a way to make it even more awkward – not only will you won’t even know anyone yet , but many of the events are being attended by faculty and representatives of law firms. Every time you fumble the ball, you aren’t just humiliating yourself in front of the cool kids – you’re humiliating yourself in front of your future boss.

Minutes after I had finished skimming the package, I received a text message from the one girl I know from undergrad who is also attending this law school. It simply read “Oh for the love of God! I am not buying a prom dress again.” There was a brief pause before she sent a follow-up: “At least it sounds like we’ll have one night of drunken bowling.” Maybe I wasn’t the only one who took that vow at the end of grade nine gym.

If I can impart one moral from my experience, it’s that you should enjoy the diverse opportunities afforded by your undergraduate orientation week. There are activities for everyone, whether you’re into sports, film, social justice, partying, or all of the above. Enjoy it now, because you never know

One of the most pivotal moments in life is the realization that you can actually have a say in the way it plays out. Up until that blessed eighteenth birthday we are children; constantly being told what to wear, when to be home and what we should do with our lives. While we may resent our parent’s over-protectiveness and endlessly struggle to bask in the glory our own independence, it is that little direction which often keeps us sane.

There are very few rules to living on your own for the first time. There is nobody to tell you to put a sweater on when it’s cold or to nag you about completing schoolwork; and for the first few weeks it seems like ideal living. However, it’s not just the reality of the ‘real world’ that can trigger stress. For me, entering university was a shock to my moral centre.

Being in a relationship during my first year, I was able to remove myself from the feeding frenzy in dorm rooms all over campus. I was unable, however, to continue on with my naivety about people only having sex when they are in love; as it turns out, you don’t even have to like the person. I realize that for both women and men there is pressure to ensure you do not leave high school a virgin. So for the rare few who enter university with their virginity intact, there is even more pressure to give it to somebody, and as quickly as possible. While I’m not recommending you slap on a purity ring, waiting for the right person – and not having a double digit number by midterms – is severely underrated.

Naturally, entering university presents this inevitability of change. While some can be negative or just mere experiences, the concept of changing yourself intrigued me. After being constricted in an itchy wool kilt for four years, I exited my catholic high school with a limited style sense, confusion about religion, and horrendous blonde highlights. Through those troublesome years I had been bullied, teased and overlooked. I knew that I longed to shed the label of the misunderstood girl with big dreams, and as cliché as it may be, I viewed university as a clean slate in which to re-invent myself.

It was easy for me to carry resentment towards the ways I was labelled in high school and even to some degree, let that dictate who I would be in university. But to have thousands not knowing who you are can be quite a freeing sensation. It’s a chance to develop your own opinions, ideas, personal style and grow into the person you want to be. While standing out was usually something to be feared in high school, beyond those walls, it’s something to celebrate. While wearing the right labels may have made you less of a target in high school, or more like the girl you’re envious of, it essentially just makes you another myrmidon in a lecture hall.

My first year can be boiled down to this incessant existential crisis. I was ignorant to how sheltered I had been, and in some respects, still am. I never did university the typical way with keg parties, football games or mindlessly following a set of expectations previously laid out for me, yet I still can’t understand who decided this was how university was meant to be experienced.

If there is any ounce of worthwhile wisdom I have acquired, it’s that university is a different experience for everybody. Some people want to flirt with pseudo-intellectual lifestyles while others just want to party. For me, it was a promise land of likeminded people and an opportunity to securely accept my own identity. For the first time, I am not just living independently or experiencing things for myself, but I have finally realized I am in control of my own life. Whether I choose to drop out and travel, get involved with extra curricular activities, or sit home on a Saturday night to read Samuel Beckett I can be not only accepted, but appreciated for my ideas, hard work and uniqueness. University is essentially, this; a freedom not just from your parents or their strict rules, but a freedom to choose and a freedom to finally be you.

Contrary to popular belief, or my countless “I hate retail” rants, I like people. Really. I’m a social person, I love friendships and I’m an extrovert to the point of having been kicked out of class all through high school for talking too much or making inappropriate comments. That, in all fairness, were relatively funny – just not appreciated during Canadian law class.

But so help me God, I hate forced social situations.

I hate them more than anything. Well, that’s a lie – I hate bad drivers, sudden loud noises, and repeating myself, but I needed to get your attention with that first sentence. I hate making small talk, I hate engaging former frenemies and above all, I hate feigning enthusiasm for “team spirit” and things of the sort.

Once, I hosted a high school pep rally. I did it only for the opportunity to make everyone laugh (because, really, when it comes to high school pep rallies, there’s a lot to make fun of) and because I couldn’t miss an opportunity to wear my brand new Gap sweater in front of the entire school population. It was a different time, and I was 18, what can I say?
But when thrown into things like school orientations and O-week celebrations, I’m more uncomfortable than someone…well, forced into school orientations and O-week celebrations. I’ve never liked cheering, I’ve never liked teams, probably because I was always cut from them during try-outs in elementary school, and I’ve never liked “collective” mindsets. Cue flashbacks of me feeling really out of place throughout the majority of grades nine through twelve.

Weddings – great. Birthdays – aces. Networking events – I can dig them. But “go team so-and-so” and “these are your friends – now go party with them”? I can’t handle it. Likely because the kids basking in collective enthusiasm were always the ones who left me out the most.

Now before you roll your eyes and assume I’m about to wax poetic about the misdoings of teenagers, I promise I’m over it, except that I still rely on some of my resentment to fuel goal achieving and to tell funny stories. But it always felt that the events designed to make you feel more included were the ones that left you out the most. What if I don’t want to paint my face and scream about football? What if I have no desire whatsoever to segregate into colours and partake in dance-offs? Maybe I want to go to a movie, see a great band or sip coffee on a patio. Why am I automatically excluded?

Because orientations – like nearly every “rah rah rah” event – are designed only for a specific demographic. It’s true – look around. I’m not being a snob. And that demographic isn’t bad or less cool than the rest of us who avoid these situations like the plague (seriously – I’ll walk on the hawk if I want, and if you yell at me because of it, I’ll break your spirit). They’re just “the norm”. And the people who feel much more “included” at indie shows, diners and things of the sort are not. And that’s okay. Because without differences, university would just be a melting pot of the sameness – which it isn’t.

But don’t let orientations make you think you should act, think or be a certain way – because if you’ve witnessed anything cheer-oriented, you’ll instantly feel like it’s a how-to manual for university behaviour, and it isn’t. You’re allowed to not like it, you’re allowed to be cynical and you’re allowed to stand on the peripheries with a pal making fun of everyone Daria-style.

Because at the very least, terrible social situations aside, you will find an equally embarrassed counterpart who detests forced camaraderie as much as you. So I guess technically “they” win – because you did meet a lifelong friend after all.

I sat at my desk with the letter unfolded in front of me. The envelope it arrived in had my name written on it in calligraphy and was torn up somewhere on the floor. I scanned the text for reassuring key words: “Congratulations.” “Welcome.” “Accepted.” Nothing. What I saw became a confusion that I can only equate to losing something that you’re positive you remembered to bring: “Although your application was impressive, we regret to inform you that we cannot, at this time, accept you into this program. We wish you all the best in the – “. That was enough. I had been rejected from a school for the first time in my life. A pursuit that I thought would come so simply – being accepted to any and every Masters program I wanted – was not such a breeze after all. There had been a bump in my plans, a change in the game that I was not expecting. And I could not take it.

Faster than I could Google “flights to Berlin”, I contacted every graduate school I had applied to, begging them to formally withdraw my applications. Being rejected from a school that I did not even want to go to was all it took to shake my self-perception. For months I agonized. If I was as intelligent as I believed myself to be, why was I not getting accepted into every grad school I wanted? In my previously more nomadic days, I was rarely settled, always moving. I would have to become this way again. That was when I started my nightly cruises through Craigslist. I considered Paris, New York, Berlin, even returning to a cabin in the Thai jungle that I had once visited. That would be the ticket: something unorthodox and faraway, a place where I could ignore my looming, inevitable 24th birthday in peace and escape the horror that was the rejection letter I held in my shaking hands.

How old I will live to be I cannot know, but a quick look back at my family’s average life expectancy brought me to one conclusion: that I was nearing the end of the first quarter of my life. I have friends who are married, friends who are mothers and fathers, friends who are executives for powerful companies and friends who tour the world in famous bands. My life, although fun, happy and generous, was not as exciting as playing guitar at Japanese music festivals or having a business card that people cared to have in their wallet. I was now in my mid-twenties and an intern, with enough travel experience to know that I didn’t want to be where I was, but no money to go anywhere else. Nights of tossing and turning and creative strategizing about how I could climb the corporate ladder fast enough or somehow inflate my bank account to a size that would afford me an apartment in Florence ensued.

After I awoke from these haunted slumbers filled with nightmares of forever having to brave the morning commute or punch a time card day in and day out, I would head straight for the mailbox and my e-mail account to hopefully hear from another university, finding out that someone had accepted me. It was on a particularly gloomy trip to the mailbox (I had a sneaking, and as it turned out, accurate, suspicion that I was about to be rejected from a university in Vancouver) that it hit me: there is nothing that I’m doing that I can do better at this very moment, and my qualms have nothing to do with me. Rather, I am experiencing a crisis.

I had heard of these before. Soccer moms trading in their mini-vans for Mustangs, grown men suddenly showing up to work wearing leather jackets in hopes of reclaiming their youth. An impossible feat I knew, but the thought of going back a few years and being a little bit younger, having a little bit more time… It was not a viable option, but it sounded better than so strongly resenting my age. And that’s when I knew: I, at the age of 23 years, was experiencing a Quarter Life Crisis. My Google searches went from “Williamsburg loft” to “What the hell is a quarter life crisis or am I just insane?” The results I found were as follows:

The Quarter Life Crisis is a term applied to the period of life immediately following the major changes of adolescence, usually ranging from the early twenties to the early thirties.

I read on:

Characteristics of a Quarter Life Crisis may include:

Disappointment with one’s job
Financially rooted stress
Re-evaluation of close interpersonal relationships
Desire to have children
Insecurity regarding personal accomplishments
Nostalgia for university, college, high school or elementary school life
Boredom with social interactions

In order of appearance: I’m a freelance writer, so being “disappointed with one’s job” is just part of the routine. Enter “financially rooted stress” also part of the job description, and particularly harrowing when you recall my previous affinity for sleuthing Craigslist for apartments in faraway lands. Come to think of it, I had just whittled down my Facebook friends list because I was questioning how many of those names were really my friends. I had also been hearing almost weekly from my very old fashioned, very Italian, very concerned aunts about how hard it is to have a normal pregnancy once you’ve passed the age of 22 – which does not jive well with a promise I made to myself to never become engaged (or for that matter, pregnant) before the age of thirty. I did miss the ease of being an undergraduate student, and I was working so much that I barely had time for Taco Tuesday. Of course I was experiencing “boredom with my social interactions!” It was all starting to make sense.

I was bored, I was on a cusp. I was worried and I was skeptical, but I was not doomed.

Seeing the phrase “Quarter Life Crisis” on paper calmed my tangled nerves, not because it cured the agony of walking with my head down to the mailbox everyday and checking my e-mail with my eyes peaking through the hands I kept cupped over my face, but because I realized I was not hopeless; I was simply adapting. I had previously thought of myself as something of an extremely well adjusted beast, but here I was questioning my self worth because of a few rejection letters.

When I finally confided to some friends about my secret nightly freak-outs and unrealistic apartment hunts, I found I was not alone. My world traveling musician friend admitted that he feared the sophomore slump so much he had nightmares about it, and another friend who had just graduated from the best business program in the country had yet to find a job for himself despite finishing at the top of his class. I took comfort in their instability first, and then in my own. My fear was actually just possibility draped in uncertainty. For the first time in a long time I was not coasting along a semestered school schedule or a summertime that would ultimately end in onward academic progression. I was free, albeit a little fucked up about it.

Fear can be a great educator, and through what could very well go down in history as the worst Quarter Life Crisis of all time, I learned what I wanted and what I didn’t. My expectations were based on unrealistic goals, laid out for me by the MTV generation and the twenty year old millionaires who parade across our television screens. But, like all of us, these figurines of modern life will eventually expire their contracts, be taken off of television, and be just as jobless as any of us have found ourselves at any given time.

The months between applying for graduate school and figuring out my next move will forever be remembered as miserable and discouraging. There were tears, I will admit and there was an excessive amount of waxing existential over excessive amounts of bottles of wine numbering far beyond what my freelancing income should have allowed. There were frequent phone calls to my mother, with whom I could share the secret of my worsening madness, and there were moments in which I questioned whether I was cut out for grad school in the first place. But in this meltdown – this Quarter Life Crisis – I learned that even if things don’t end up the way you want them to, there is always something else. Even if that thing is temporarily punching a time card day in and day out, and even if that thing is an irrational flight out of wherever you do not want to be. There will always be Berlin.

University is described as a next step, a new adventure, and a chance to discover who you are. My first year was all those things and many more. I was recently able to select my courses for my second year of studies, thinking it would be a chance to explore my interests and dive into what I am passionate about. However, it has taken me most of my life to figure out what that is.

I have gone from unrealistic dreams, like professional actor or singer, to wedding planner or interior designer. I even had a phase when all I wanted to do was be a crime scene investigator, a dream that faded once I realized it was a field highly dependent on the math and science skills that I seriously lack. It wasn’t until I was in my final year of high school that I began to seriously think about what my future would be.

The final year of high school is full of decisions and pressures coming from every direction. I was not exempted from these stresses, having been caught between going to either the University of Ottawa or McMaster University. I decided to study political science; it was something that I found an interest in, I saw it as a logical and practical choice of study, and there will always be some form of government. With a deadline to finalize my university acceptance, I was stressed out more than ever.

However, I had a place where my worries would always seem to take a back seat in my mind. To cover my tuition costs, I had taken a part time job at a nursing home. While I was working there, it was as if my stresses and worries just went away even for just a short period of time. It was a feeling that I didn’t even know existed, but I knew right away that I loved it and wanted more.

At first, working at the nursing home felt strange and foreign to me. Having minimal experience with the elderly, I was quiet and reserved and constantly in fear of various things while at work. Part of my job was assisting with dinner, feeding residents who were unable to feed themselves. I was terrified. What if I missed their mouth, or made them choke by accident? What would we even talk about? I feared the inevitable uncomfortable and awkward silence, I had nothing in common with these people. But by my second month of work, I was finally getting the hang of my job. I was learning the personalities and quirks of the residents, and I had yet to make anyone choke while feeding them. I was happy and having the time of my life, and I was getting paid to do it.

I was transferred to secure area as the summer progressed, where residents with dementia or Alzheimer’s lived. Although I loved all the areas within the nursing home, the dementia unit became my home. The residents were witty and fun, and I heard many heart-warming stories that I will keep with me for the rest of my life. There were some bad days, from residents throwing food at me to unfortunate deaths, but the good days outweigh them. I realized I was relating to these residents better than I ever thought I would and they were changing my outlook on life.

There was one female resident in particular whom I will never forget. Though she could never remember my name, she always recognized me when I’d come into work. Before I’d leave for the day, she’d take my hand, look me in the eye and say, “You are so beautiful. You have a bright future ahead of you. Don’t you ever change.” It wasn’t because she was complimenting me that causes me to remember her. It was that she, like many of the other residents, could see the amazing lives that we as students have ahead of us, even when we ourselves cannot.

When September came, I quit my job and headed off to university. As I sat through lectures and attended tutorials, I quickly realized that political science wasn’t my thing. I had taken and enjoyed a gerontology course as an elective, but as the program was in jeopardy of being cancelled, it seemed an unrealistic choice for a major. In early January it was announced that the Gerontology and Health Studies programs would be merged into one new program named “Health, Aging and Society”. The program combined gerontology and a practical study of accommodation for a rapidly increasing aging population. I immediately applied and was ecstatic to find out that I had gained acceptance.

I am now impatiently waiting to quit my new summer job and go back to my school in Hamilton. When I tell people what I am studying they usually comment on its practicality, not on the way I get a little excited when I explain it or how my smile grows when I share the reasoning behind my choice. For me, the love that I have for my program is stronger than the happiness I have for the practicality of it. I have a special place in my heart for the residents that helped me realize my passion without even knowing it.

It is certainly a truism that whenever there is mention of youth, one’s thoughts flutter to ideas of childhood and memories of their formative years. With the recent passing of this year’s spring convocation, ideas of youth, questions of maturity, and the experience of liminality are reintroduced in a purposeful manner as to embed this stage within our life course. As one stage of life ends, another begins and we are forced to consider and reconsider our choices, preparation, and become cognizant that we are now empowered with the ability and responsibility to become the determinants of our future.

It is at this stage of newfound power and duty that we once again enter a stage of youth; relative neophytes to the responsibilities of adulthood and to the monumentality of the choices that we soon will be forced to endure. It is at this stage where we, as those experiencing this movement and growth, would be wise to recollect and reflect on the conditions that made our life’s achievements possible thus far. This is of course in consideration to the parents, family, friends, and any other manner or means of support that provided the necessary conditions to navigate our lives thus far. As we begin this new stage fuelled by the pride and confidence that our achievements have afforded us, we must be wary of looking past and forgetting about the virtues that the experiences of others can offer.

Being in the midst of this change and transition into adulthood, with all the responsibilities and duties that it entails, can seem as daunting as any task one has ever experienced. As feelings of isolation and pressure begin to mount, staying confident and open is essential. While there will be situations that cause wariness and feelings of insularity to creep in, questioning both your preparation and ability to thrive into the next stage, these obstacles much like those in your more familiar youth shall also pass. The difficulties and challenges presented by today’s situation are not as dissimilar or as unfamiliar as they may superficially seem. In a thematic sense you have experienced these challenges before, and the fortitude, support and ability that guided you once will serve you again.

When in doubt, or when the difficulties begin to increase and appear to be unmanageable, I for one find my best advice and source or reassurance not from the bottle, or from any sort of self-help book but rather from my blood donor card: B Positive.

Please note that this short article was merely a vehicle to use that cheap joke, but the message is still valid and holds some valuable truth.

For any of us in the 22-25 age range, who either have graduated, are currently graduating, or will be graduating soon (God willing), we are in a stage of transition. We’re leaving the One Card existence and entering something totally new – which I will not call the real world, because it’s either always been real or never has. This something new, whatever it is brings with it doubt, fear, discomfort, excitement, anxiety, and everything in between.

I’ve gone through somewhat of a crisis myself. I’ve spent pretty much all my time since January thinking about what’s next and all of the questions that come with that thought. All the contemplation has resulted in many crying sessions, breakdowns, and phone calls to my mother. After laying out all of the options, making dozens of pros and cons lists, drinking wine and eating brie – perhaps feigning sophistication brings you closer to it – and talking to just about everyone I know, I made my decision. Now that it’s made, no crisis.

So I guess that’s what the crisis is: the confusion, the doubt, the thoughts, the questions, and which possibility is the right one. I don’t think we have anything to worry about in terms of what’s next; we just have to worry about making the decisions in order to get there. Once you’ve made your decision, don’t look back. Have courage in your convictions. Now that I know what I’m doing, I get to – and should – enjoy getting excited about it.

That brings me to my second point: don’t look back, and especially don’t look back to high school days. I scoff more at people who reminisce about high school than those celebrating quarter-life crises for their 24th birthday. What on earth was better about high school than now? Fake ID anxiety? Listening to “I’m With You” by Avril Lavigne on repeat because your best friend doesn’t love you back? Lying to your Mom and saying you’re going out for “appetizers” when really you’re going to a bar in the village where you order a lychee martini even though you have no idea what a lychee is? It looks like seafood in the bottom of your glass, but it tastes kinda fruity, but I digress.

I don’t think there’s anything to look back at and wish for. I think all the fun is ahead, and that it doesn’t stop. I have a feeling things will just keep getting better. Embrace the crisis, but don’t wallow too long, because there’s a lot to look forward to.

It was around the time that I switch from beer to whiskey, no breeze and Indian summer, that my ex-lover walks onto the patio and asks to move to a table in the shade. We catch up on all the weekly boy/boy drama: who’s fucking who, who’s in Toronto doing what, a funny anecdote about run-ins with drag queens. I drink, laughing and smiling.

Then something shifts. He has more to say about who he’s made cry in bathrooms at parties and who he’s made out with on kitchen counters than anything I could whine about from my past work week. I find myself staring at the smudged admission stamp on his wrist.

I realize that while he’s here to relish in his present, I had waited all week for us to sit and remember the past. A song comes on from two years ago; I stop his story to laugh about the one time we danced to it while waiting for a cab home. He doesn’t remember.

I sit and stare onto the street, watching busses and beaters go by, thinking about when everything was simple. Fake-IDs and drinking away the tips I made waiting tables during the day. Retro nights, with hair dye and old men winking and willing to buy us drinks. Everything I could do and say, opinions I was allowed to have, no fear of commitment or strings, and no reference to repercussions. When people had an idea of who I was when my name was uttered in a room, or called out across the floor. A reputation.

I shake his hand on the way out, smelling the same cologne that had been there years before. I tell him it was my day off, and that I was off for a workout. He talks about the plans he had for the rest of the day, all reminiscent of the lifestyle and culture I’d once introduced him to. I look off in the distance as I say goodbye to him, feeling old, bored and tired. I miss what it felt like to skip down the street wasted, thin-skinned, young, and dancing, waiting for a cab to be called.

On a damp December afternoon, Grandma and I were coming to the completion of a mission: Operation Onions. There was no greater fun to be had, as it never really snowed in Vancouver and there is no such thing as a rain angel. That evening’s meatloaf called for two large cooking onions, of which there was a full sack squatting by the chest freezer in the basement.

Always at the ready and infinitely versatile, this hearty bulb was my Grandma’s rooted twin. I gripped one onion tightly between my eight year-old hands to make sure that I would not drop my precious loot. As we made our way upstairs, I stayed on the tails of Grandma’s talcum breezes. I kept my distance close enough so that my nose could almost skim the backs of her navy wool trousers.

“Now you will go back in the front room and ask your Auntie Linda to go over that Third Sonata with you one more time,” my grandmother instructed me as we ascended the final two steps.

Auntie Linda had received her doctorates in Music Theology and was a professor at an obscure Evangelical college in Missouri. Her authority was diminished in my mind. I couldn’t understand how she could claim she was a doctor when her only patients were first-year students who blushed at the mention of a pianist.

My eyelids pulled together like lips at the spray of a fresh lemon wedge, though as a young thing I only knew of such tartness from reading aloud the explanatory notes in The Joy of Cooking. Grandma refused to buy citrus because it was “frivolity for the bourgeois”. The light bulbs sitting in the kitchen ceiling fixtures, covered in a film of bacon grease and flakes of dead skin, afforded the room a degree of light unknown to the depths of the basement. If it hadn’t been for our regular trips to the bowels of that old house, I’d have just as soon forgotten that the upstairs rooms were wired with electricity.

The day before we had gone to Safeway to pick up a pack of toilet paper rolls, which was a rare purchase. We were only allowed to use two squares per pee, three for a number two. Grandma policed this policy with great fervour. There was a Santa Claus sitting in the produce section and when it was my turn to pop up on his knee, I asked him for an oil lamp. I wanted to win Grandma’s approval by showing her that I was a levelheaded lady.

On nights at Grandma’s house, I drifted off to the musty stables and dank root cellars of the Jeffry farm in Salmon Arm. After Grandma’s death, I unearthed her journal from 1934 from deep within a box marked as kitchen tools. Each Sunday she had written of the sinful pleasure of washing her hair, which I suppose was the only indulgence acceptable for farmer’s daughters.

Just as we were set to part ways – I going to the front room, Grandma headed to the chopping block to finish dinner – I was stopped in my tracks by a pair of tiny black dots, small and piercing through a thick barricade of bifocals. Grandma needed only to bend an inch or so forward to bring her face to meet mine, as we were almost equal in stature. Valna Jeffry had always stood at 5 feet 1 inch. Such delicacy had granted her a range of social mobility unknown to her fellow oxen sisters.

“By the time you leave to go back to Ontario, I will hear you playing that Sonata perfectly. Do you understand?”

There was a perfect stillness in her face as she waited for my answer. I could feel her exhale on my supple cheeks. Her breath was sweetened by the perfumes of age: eau d’old flesh, flavoured with a pinch of Polident. The permed wisps that sat atop her head vibrated slightly, creating a humming halo of grey encircling her age-spotted skull.

At Grandma’s memorial service last week I made an offering to our staunch matriarch, ever reigning silently from beyond the crypt. Before I lowered the box of her ashes – a small green tin no bigger than a box of biscuits – into the dank hole in the earth, I snatched the onion that was tucked in the inside pocket of my down vest. I quickly snuck the bulb into the hole and then placed Grandma on top of it. Like an Atlas who has won her pardon and now sits atop a small globe, its layers soon to be eaten through by grubs and earthworms.

May my fallen goddess rest in peace.

When I was ten years old my mom and step-dad sent me to a Jesus Camp for one week. I’m still not sure why they decided to send me to this camp – neither of them were religious and I could count on one hand the number of times I’d been to church.

Perhaps it was because my mom and step-dad had only recently been married and they needed someone to watch me while they spent some alone time together. Or it may have been the influence of certain relatives who had just become born again Christians.

Either way, it was off to Jesus Camp I went.

On my first night at camp, I felt ill and vomited onto the floor of my cabin. I shared this cabin with six other girls who were my age as well as a teenager who was our camp leader. For the next few days, the cabin smelled like macaroni and cheese and stomach acid. This event caused the other girls to exclude me from their group for the remaining week. Instead, I became friends with our camp leader, who told me that she had accepted Jesus into her life.

On the second day of camp, I discovered that the snack shop offered a delicious dessert known as “the kitchen sink.” The kitchen sink was as many scoops of ice cream as you could eat, covered in nuts, M&Ms, chocolate syrup, and whipped cream. I ate an entire kitchen sink every day for the next week.

Halfway through the week, all of the kids at camp were herded into the central gymnasium for a presentation. I remember this presentation very well. Fifty or so of us sat on the gymnasium floor while one of the camp leaders stood on stage. She held up a paper plate to the audience.

“This is you,” she said to us. “Whole and pure. Virgin.”

She folded the paper plate in half and held it up for us to see. “This is you when you have sex outside of marriage.”

She folded the plate in half again so that it was one quarter of its original size. “This is you when you have sex with two people outside of marriage.”

She folded it again so that it was no longer recognizable as a paper plate. “Each time you have sex with someone outside of marriage, you give away a piece of yourself to them. Only by saving ourselves for marriage can we be pure and whole.”

I was horrified. I didn’t want to become a shriveled up paper plate!

At the end of the presentation she informed us that there were silver rings and bibles for sale. The silver ring signified a vow of celibacy. I bought the ring and bible for $12 and promised that I would wear the ring until it was replaced with a wedding band.

On the last night of camp, my cabin’s camp leader asked me if I wanted to reserve a place for myself in heaven. I wasn’t exactly sure what she meant by this but it sounded much better than not having a place reserved for me in heaven, so I said yes. She led me into a small prayer room and recited a verse from the bible. She asked me to repeat it and I did.

“Do you accept Jesus into your life?” She asked.

I remember looking at her for a while, studying her hands and fingers, and noticing how closely trimmed her fingernails were. Her hands lay palm up in her lap.

Tears welled up in my eyes. “Yes,” I said, “Yes I do.”

She hugged me and said, “Now you have a place reserved for you in heaven. Wasn’t that easy?”

My mom and step-dad came to pick me up the next day. I ran toward them and wrapped my arms around each of them, eager to share what had happened during the week.
I told them about how I’d been sick and that the girls in my cabin had been mean. I told them that I’d saved myself from becoming a crumpled up paper plate and that there was now a place reserved for me in heaven.

They hugged me tight and said that they were proud. They said that we could go anywhere I wanted for dinner that night so we each ate a kitchen sink and then we drove home.

I never went back to that camp or to any Jesus Camp for that matter. I wore the silver ring into my teenage years until I realized that I carried an incredible amount of guilt with it. What that week has taught me is that I do not need to think of myself as a paper plate in order to be valued, that I do not need a place reserved for me in heaven in order to live a meaningful life, and that, most importantly, overindulging in earthly pleasures such as desserts that contain ‘everything but the kitchen sink’ can be incredibly gratifying.