Adrenaline junk and a name that lives in the sky

I was having a conversation with my closest friend from high school the other day. We're both in places of transit or uncertainty. He's just received his medical school placement (although a great city, definitely not his first choice), and I was discussing my uncertainty about what my life will look like in 6 months. I joked around about being slightly bipolar, even though I was completely manipulating the surface understanding of the word to make a point. I started thinking out loud and may have come to the conclusion that I pursue intense experiences in whatever form they take. I love spicy food, robust red wine, beer as black as death, rich coffee, intense curries, long hikes, rock climbing, running, challenging novels, music with lyrics that will move me in my emotions, and relationships where my heart will be filled to the point of exploding and broken like fine china on a ceramic floor. I like to wrestle out my thoughts into words on a page and will refuse to back down from an argument that I feel excited about or a topic I am familiar with. I defend ideas that I don't necessarily believe in and sometime the things I myself ridicule. I love the devil's advocate when challenged. I go out of my mind when the students refuse to embrace ideas and when people around me hide under a thin veil of ignorance. SP is the same way, except he's much more of the adventure junkie and seeks the experiences in a much more motivated fashion. When these opportunities arise, I jump on them, but when they're absent, I become sloth-like. It's like I need to be kicked in the solar plexus to act. I only put a small amount of effort into the less intense facets of my life, but when the passion rises up in me I feel that sense of being alive. This could explain a lot of things. Maybe it can help me be more aware and more in control of my laziness. We'll see.

These traits have lived within me for years. When I was in middle/high school, I challenged any ideas that felt incongruent with my own thoughts. I obsessed over rock music lyrics that would speak to me in order to find meaning. I started going on a few websites that had religious discussion forums and spent endless hours attempting to wrap my own hands around my personal faith while crushing all other ideas that did not line up with my ideas about rationality and legitimacy. I filled notebooks with poetry and lyrics and quotes from people I admired or just thought brilliant. I argued with my parents endlessly, particularly my father, for no other reason than I felt like I needed to defend and assert and be myself. I hated the feeling of my "black sheep" status, but I've long since embraced it. If I hadn't, I wouldn't be doing all the things I've done in my life, from Europe to the Left Coast, to today, as I sit in front of my apartment window in rural China as the spring rains finally begin to fall. I'm perfectly content being the weird kid in the family, even if that's begun to fade in my adulthood.

When I was 17, I was a member of my high school's student council, and was chosen to be Pres in my senior year. One of the perks to this title (only voted on amongst the other members... I would've been annihilated if the vote went out among the general student population) was that I was able to attend a bunch of student leadership conferences around southern Alberta. Most were local, but one was for a full week during the summer in Waterton. This still strikes me as a pretty intensely formative experience, and is probably the first legitimate time I fell in love. The girl who became the apple of my eye was from a town about 4 hours north of me, and even though we both had some really intense feelings over the years after not seeing each other for ages, we never dated and never even lived in the same city. She actually moved to my hometown at one point... the same year I moved out to the coast. Fate works in funny ways. We still keep in touch, but after my own marriage and hers (and now with her new little baby), our lives are much different. But we both pursued the same career and maintain a lot of our old, idealistic passions and ideas.

One of her friends from the same town also attended, and we got along famously. To this day, he remains one of the friends I never see but would still trust with absolutely anything and everything.

At this same leadership camp, there were a number of international students attending... some from South America, some from Europe, a few from Japan and a few from the US. One guy, Phillip, was from Slovakia. He was an absolute riot, and made our group laugh endlessly. He coined the term "1cm water" (you'll have to email me for a full explanation) when going creek-crawling up a small stream near our campsite, and was always happy to show off his short-shorts in the sunshine. We were talking one day and I'd mentioned that my father's family was Slovenian, so he asked me about my last name. I told him. A big smile came across his face as he explained to me that my last name in Slovak means "cloud". Since then, I've loved sharing that story. And I love the meanings behind names. My first name has both Irish, Celtic and Welsh roots. The Welsh meaning is "Big Village", but the Celtic/Irish meaning is "Prudent" or "Wise". I can only hope that "wise" is something that I can embrace as days go on. So, if you combine these two it becomes "Wise cloud" or "Prudent Cloud". If it was "Big village cloud", I guess my mom wouldn't be surprised, knowing her references to Badluck Schleprock (check out wikipedia for the entry about this Flintstones character). Is this a self-fulfilling prophecy? I love my communities and moved to the coast to live in the rain. And I've wanted a tattoo meaning "cloud" for quite sometime. Hmmmm...

T