12:47 PM
Unknown
People frequently preach that the first rule of blogging is to write (and post) every day. when I first began this blog about a year ago, I vowed to not let it become yet another blog featuring photo after photo of its writer standing in her backyard, wearing clothing she believes are incredibly stylish in the hopes that people will commiserate. By sticking to my guns, I have failed at posting daily, or even frequently. I have a full-time job, two children and a clothing line so writing an insightful and interesting piece about fashion and/or style every day has managed to trickle down to the end of my priority list. My other issue with the originally intended direction is that, the more time goes on, the less enamored I am with Montreal's fashion scene. Fashion Week tends to be drab and bordering on tacky, street fashion is a couple of years behind Paris and London and at least one behind New York and local "it" girls are lacking the je ne sais quoi internationally successful ones possess, being swallowed up by our xenophobic, ignorant and often kitschy star system. This week it occurred to me that I'm the one who boxed myself into this genre and I'm the one who sets the rules so it's time for a little reassessment. While it may lead to me changing the blog's current name, I'm okay with periodically straying from the path, for now. I just won't share links to posts that have nothing to do with fashion or style on my facebook page.
Lately I've been taking the time to sit in silence and think.I'm at a crossroads and busting my ass to make sure I come out on the right path. As much as I do my best to not live in the past, it's at times like these that I find it natural and almost necessary to evaluate the choices I've made and what got me to where I am now.
In the last few days I've mostly been thinking about jobs I've had. I've always known that I have four passions and that they are design/fashion, music, writing and acting. The order in which these passions have ranked has changed, depending on life situations. For example, acting had been reigning champ for years when I got pregnant at twenty and it suddenly plummeted to the bottom. For a while I balanced deejaying and designing. For the last year I've thought about designing more than anything else. Writing has always been the drifter. I've written fiction since I could pick up a pen and was published at fifteen but I've never given the craft as much effort and time as it deserves. What is interesting and maybe a bit sad to note is that barely any of my actual jobs have had anything to do with my passions but at least one of them has constantly been at the forefront of my mind and all of them have been in my heart so the convoluted, eyebrow-raising, and occasionally hilarious routes I have taken to get to where I am now just so that I can make ends meet are something to consider indeed.
People who have an artistic career path in mind usually study in their desired field, do internships, study some more, get a job and work their way up. By the time I was of age to undertake post-secondary studies and/or intern, I had burst out of my wretched living situation and was fending for and supporting myself. Two years later, I was pregnant with my daughter with no support form my parents nor from a spouse and so I've (only recently) learned to cut myself some slack for not having walked a traditional path.
All of this said, let's take a stroll through my resumé and see what it is that I learned from each of my jobs, as that's what I need to do before moving on. While I've cut myself some clack (as mentioned above), I have yet to make complete peace with my professional past.
I'll wrap today's post up with a glimpse at the four jobs I had as a teenager.
My first job was my best job ever. My aunt worked for a company that did something for the Canadian Space Agency in St-Hubert, Québec and they needed help creating a document library over the course of my sixteenth summer. It was fantastic. I got paid slightly above minimum wage to file NASA documents and to have leisurely lunches with my aunt. A week into my contract, we realized I had been classifying everything the wrong way. My punishment? A hug and a drive out to a pub where we ate giant burgers and sipped sangria for over an hour. This was followed by ice cream. What I learned was that my aunt is an awesome boss to have when you're fifteen and she's your aunt and that, if you can get away with it, nepotism is okay (even though I thought it was "neffotism" back then).
A few months later, I was told by my parents that I had to pay for my own bus fare to and from conservatory. I also wanted to buy my own trumpet and have spending money so it was time to find a job. I sat at the kitchen table with the yellow pages and our phone and began cold calling every place I could think of that might hire me. Within two weeks I was the new week-end dishwasher at a diner called Chez Moe, in Gatineau. I worked for a jovial but strict Lebanese/Italian man who had the largest belly I had ever seen on a person before, wide green eyes and a full, grey mustache. He was Moe. His wife, Diane, was this thin, redhead woman with sharp green eyes and deep crow's feet. When I got promoted to bus girl, their nephew took my place as dishwasher and, despite the fact that he was nine years my senior, he would constantly flirt with me. I remember it being uncomfortable but sometimes exciting. What I hadn't banked on when I got the job was that my stepmom would give me only $10 of the $100 I made every week-end and would stash the rest in my bank account. Seven or eight months of working from 6 a.m. on Saturdays and 7 a.m. on Sundays only to pocket $10 a week became too much for me, once I'd bought myself the beautiful, silver trumpet I'd been eyeing. I quit and didn't work again until I moved out and could take care of my own pay cheque. I learned a lot about the restaurant business, the most important thing being that I didn't particularly like working in it. I was also able to reaffirm that my step mom was a raging bitch because, when I moved out the next spring, I only ever saw $90 of the money I worked so hard to acquire.
My next job was at the Market Fresh grocery store on Bank Street, in Ottawa. I had decided to take a year off school after high school and was trying to figure shit out. This job was hell. Not only was my supervisor a woman who hated me because her boyfriend had been one of my best friends for over a decade and had only started dating her because I rejected him at the prom when he told me he kissed me and told me he loved me (hell hath no fury, indeed-- she ended up stealing and pawning my mother's engagement ring from my father and blaming it on my boyfriend) but the job itself was rough. I was a cashier and one customer actually threw bananas at me because they weren't as cheap as she had expected them to be. when I began working there, I had been moved into my stepmom's flat but her curfew meant that I couldn't make it back home most nights so I was often forced to find somewhere to sleep, which didn't leave me feeling particularly rested in order to deal with another shift there. I moved into my very first apartment with a twenty-four-year-old boy who ate all of the food I bought so I spent what little money I had left after rent (money I gave to him that he spent on drugs and whatever else instead of giving it to the landlord) on whatever was on sale at work so that I could eat lunch and/or dinner. Everything came to a head when I took the day off work because I had a fever and felt really sick. It was also the only day I could do laundry and so, sick as hell, I dragged my laundry over the bridge from Hull to Ottawa in order to wash my clothing at the drop-in centre. Someone offered me a few tokes of a joint and so I smoked weed for the third or fourth time in my life, right before running into some friends of mine. Friends who hated weed and who were friends with my boss and who went on to tell her that I had taken the day off to smoke weed. (Oddly enough, when I ran into one of them a few years later, he was a huge pothead. 'Wish we could have seen that one coming!). I was fired. I learned to never take a job from someone who doesn't like me (simple enough but I was seventeen), that I'm not cut out to be a grocery store cashier and to find a job closer to home the next time around. I also learned a whole slew of life lessons during that time but a)this is about my jobs and b)it was about to get worse anyway.
The last job I had as a minor was working for the Aldo Company, at an Access boutique, selling luggage, purses and wallets. I liked dressing up for work and I actually managed to be first or second seller on a regular basis. Unfortunately, this job didn't last long due to what was happening in my life. My landlord evicted my new roommate and I because of the money my ex hadn't given him. He wasn't cool about it, though. He changed the locks on us when we were at work so I ended up missing work for that. Then I got sick because of all the stress and couch-surfing and storing things at my dad's and so on. My boss could see that I meant well but that my life was too much of a mess for me to be dependable. I showed up on day in a lovely lilac and black ensemble, really meaning to make a go of it. She met me, we opened the store together and then she took me for a walk in the mall and let me go. I had given her an idea of what was going on and it had alarmed her. She asked me if I needed help and, when I declined, wished me good luck. I learned that I enjoy making myself up to go to work, that my private life should remain private (I say as I blog away-- it shouldn't be shared with employers, especially when you're new to a place) and that I'm good at selling items I personally like.
After these jobs, I found myself on welfare, living in Vanier with a roommate and, for the first time in my life, wondering how I could properly direct myself so that I could make a career out of acting, which I'd excelled at in high school and had already taught to younger teens for fun and for free at my old high school and at the drop-in centre, downtown. It occurred to me that I was working jobs... Just jobs... And that I wasn't getting much out of it, except for a few important life lessons. But, even then, I had yet to realize that I'd learned these things. I was young, passionate and hungry for something to give.
More on what came next tomorrow...
