Contemplation: The Job Series. 1995-1997.

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...

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Roots. Part Four: On The Streets of Ottawa, A Year In Toronto and When I Became A Goth. 1996-2000

i moved out of my home in gatineau, québec and into my aunt's townhouse in nepean, ontario, an ottawa suburb, when i was sixteen. the change of environment was too much for me and, after years of not being allowed to express myself or be a kid at all, really, i went out all and crammed as much ridiculous teenage behavior as i could into one year. this and the fact that i had decided to take a year off from school after i graduated resulted in me being kicked out of my aunt's home after having lived there for just over a year.

i informed my dad that i was moving back in. he had finally broken up with his mentally unstable girlfriend of eight years but lived in the bottom of the duplex, while she occupied the top floor. we loaded all of my belongings into his minivan and headed east. what my dad hadn't told me became clear as we pulled into what seemed like the wrong driveway upon arriving at their home. he was moving me back in with my stepmom and the best part is that he hadn't told her. he just moved me into my old room, in that place, and let me deal with the immense scene she caused upon discovering me and all of my things in her apartment when she got home from work.

i was even more miserable than the first time i had had to occupy that room. the only differences were that now i was allowed to swear when we spoke, i was allowed to shower (she had forbidden us to shower when we were kids and, instead, made us take baths, claiming that we would "ruin the bathroom floor" if we showered), i was allowed to place my furniture the way i wanted it and i now smoked. i got a job at market fresh, in ottawa, and things really fell apart when she imposed an eleven o'clock curfew on me but work finished at ten, one province and two cities over. i started staying out at night, crashing wherever i could, and then coming home to shower and change when she was away at work. eventually, it all blew up and i was out, as we say, on my ass, at seventeen.

i was dating a twenty-four-year-old acid dealer and professional loiterer with a tattoo of lambert, the friendly lion, on his chest, and one on his back of a large skull with a green mohawk that someone was kind enough to give him while he had sojourned in prison. he was the second in a line of tall, lanky, tattooed, blue-eyed men in my life and liked to go by the name "tigger". tigger and i started out by sleeping outside, next to the rideau canal. when it started to get cold, we began squatting in a townhouse on kent street. a bunch of our friends had lived there and, when they got evicted, they left a key under their mat so that we could get in, drink the rest of the keg that was in the kitchen and get some sleep on the couch they'd left behind. when that option was no longer available to us, we crashed on couches, wherever people would take us in.

halfway through the winter, we decided it was time to find an apartment. we got one next to the infamous-but-waning hull strip. it was a newly-renovated two-bedroom for all of four-hundred-dollars a month. i worked and paid for rent and food while tigger went to school and we waited for his student loans to come in. i got a puppy from some street kids we knew. he threatened to kill it. then i found out he wasn't even going to school and so there would be no student loans. for additional icing on the cake, he cheated on me with a fourteen-year-old and spent the rent money i had been giving him on god-knows-what and i lost my job. i met a girl who would be my friend for a dozen years, she moved into the spare room, we got evicted anyway, thanks to tigger, and found a place in vanier, an ottawa ghetto.

here i am, in 1998, hanging out at the steaming bean café, on nocholas street, in ottawa. 

we settled into a routine and, by then, i had become someone everyone knew, downtown. i had also, overnight, become a goth. i suppose that i would have probably starting wearing punk garb as soon as i was out on the street, except that all the punks i knew at the time didn't bathe and i couldn't deal with the stench. that is honestly the only reason i dodged dressing like a punk at that age, wore sporty labels for a year and then, one night, became a goth.

i don't really know what happened but i must have been influenced by some of the kids i was hanging with downtown. i had always listened to all sorts of music so that's not what caused it... i was playing  around with my make-up one evening when i found myself with cat-eye liner and dark red lips. loving that, i ran to my room, grabbed a pair of fishnets, tore them up and put them on my arms. i threw on a bunch of clingy, black clothing, another pair of fishnets for my legs, my doc's, and headed downtown. at first i thought it quite funny that hardly anyone recognized me but that novelty soon wore off and it simple became a lifestyle, as i met up with other goth kids and became really good friends with them. what was interesting is that half the goth kids i knew were a year or two younger than me and still living at home, in suburbia, so i got to see what money could buy me and set out to find all of the same fashions at thrift stores and on sale. i did pretty well for myself, seeing as i could go to montreal whenever i wanted to and hunt through all the secondhand shops there.

until recently, that was the best year of my life. i fell in love with one of the goth kids and became best friends with his crew (we joked around, calling it a "mope of goths"). i finally felt loved and supported and, when my boyfriend moved to toronto to study massage therapy, i moved into a section of his mom's house for a low cost and got a job on parliament hill and another one at the national arts centre. if it wasn't the best time of my life, it was certainly the most carefree. it was the one year i got to be a teenager and i adored every minute of it. friends would climb up the balcony to my room, as i had only read about or seen kids on tv doing, i always had someone to hang out with, i was never teased and i felt beautiful and strong.

here is the crew at the celtic cross pub, on bank street, in 1998.

here i am with my then-chum, paul, smoking indoors (or at all, really!) and everything.

in the summer of 1998, my other friend paul and i went to montreal for a wedding. my mother had remarried and had given birth to a girl. here i am holding my new sister, geneviève.

after a few months and despite my misgivings and the fact that someone artistic and handsome had fallen for me and i for him, i left everyone behind and followed my boyfriend to toronto. that was one of the worst years of my life. i auditioned for theatre school but got put on waiting lists. i attended humber college and couldn't relate to anyone in my classes. i got accepted to theatre school in ottawa but chose to stay in toronto, with my boyfriend, even if we fought all the time. i was incredibly lonely, he hit on everything with a pulse, and we were broke. the only good thing that happened during this time (aside from me getting a job at a music store and meeting the chemical brothers), was that i started to design, as i had always done as a kid but, for the first time, i envisioned it all becoming something. not long after we broke up for the second time, i got pregnant. i was nineteen.

the chemical brothers and i, on queen west, in toronto:

my daughter's dad and i, new year's eve, nineteen-ninety-nine, in ottawa. i was a few months pregnant and he was visiting for the holidays. his mother had lent me the shawl so that i wouldn't get cold. 

january, two-thousand. pregnant with my daughter and about to go dancing at barrymore's, on bank street, in ottawa. 

a then-friend doodling on my arm, in my dad's basement, before going out. february, two-thousand, a week or two before i moved to montreal and four months before i had my daughter. 

i moved back to ottawa, where i took up german studies at ottawa u. i lived with my dad, my brother and his new, also-pregnant wife, in a house in the country. my brother was doing a lot of drugs at the time and he was very aggressive. my depressive moods would set him off and all of this pissed my dad's wife off so nobody really got along. there was no room for me when her kids came home so i was asked to sleep on thin boat mats on the floor, in a room covered in plaster dust and being renovated. i took the couch but that pissed her off too so we butt heads. when i said a certain music made me sad, she turned up the volume; if i coughed because i had a cold, she sprayed lysol all around me, casing me to wheeze and gasp. (we're cool now but those were some seriously shaky first months). i had to rely on my dad or brother for rides into town and, often, this meant going into ottawa at 6 a.m. with nowhere to go and only enough change for a coffee and toast. i would hang out at the main mall and at the library until it was time for school and then wait at another coffee shop until my ride home was ready. all of my old friends had dispersed a bit and those that remained drove me mad with their refusal to evolve. this lasted only five weeks before i'd had enough. i called my mother, who talked to her ex, who was looking to sublet his place in st-henri, in montreal. i packed up the few belongs i had and, three weeks later, loaded it all up into my uncle's pick-up truck and we headed for montreal, where i have been since.

that time spent in  downtown ottawa was the only breath of fresh air i got between one tough spot and another and, even though the memories are hazy now, i can evoke the carefree, happy state i lived in at whim and make any current situation seem better in doing so. it's also another reason i ended up deejaying at goth nights and that i still own a lot of goth and death rock clothing and will always feel a kinship to that subculture and its romantic and macabre aesthetic.

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Roots. Part Two: The Wicked Stepmother. 1987-1996.

after my parents got divorced, my father moved my brother and i to an ottawa suburb and life changed dramatically. i went from living in a rosemont duplex, raised by my parents, my grandmother and my aunt and playing with dirty, poor kids in the back alley to living in a townhouse with my father, my uncle, their friend and my brother, playing with slightly less dirty kids in our backyard and on the lane and suddenly being able to afford outings and take-out and a huge, ninth birthday party. as far as my brother and i were concerned, we missed our mom but we were completely wooed by this new lifestyle and, to this day, we agree that it was the happiest year of our childhoods. a few unorthodox events took place while we lived there but we were used to that beat and none of it scarred us in any way.

the school we attended wasn't so understanding. my dad was called in for a meeting and was informed that our home situation was unacceptable, given that i was living with a boy and at least two men (the friend left after a few months but because he owed the brothers money, they confiscated  his bedroom set and gave it to me until the funds were reimbursed) and that the stories we were telling our friends might seem rather interesting to a child services worker. my father decided that the best way to have the hounds called off would be to ask the female accountant they'd just hired to work a bit of overtime and pick his children up from school so that they could be made aware that such a presence existed in our lives. 

in what seemed like no time at all, my brother and i were sitting in the backseat of my dad's truck, parked in the driveway of an unsightly duplex with aluminum siding in gatineau, quebec, with my father having gone inside the building and his accountant-turned-lover sitting in the front seat. she turned to us and asked us if it would be okay if she moved in with us and we all lived in the home we saw before us. we hesitated and then said yes, knowing we didn't really have a choice. the had already purchased the duplex. our year of fun was over. 

on the very first day we crammed ourselves into the two-bedroom, basement apartment (they took over the living room and my brother and i each had a bedroom), she told us that we should call her "mom" and that, from then on, my mother was to be referred to by her first name when she was not present. 

what ensued was eight years of verbal and occasionally, for my brother, physical abuse. that's why it took so long for me to come to terms with the fact that one of my greatest style influences was the stepmother that had raised me for the second half of my childhood. i've come to terms with everything and so i am free, now, to discuss this woman's fierce sense of aesthetics, without conjuring up any ill feelings.

one of my stepmother's own style icons was elvira, mistress of the dark. we'd occasionally stay up late and watch her on television and a certain spooky seed was planted at the back of mind at this time. around this time, so nineteen-ninety-three or the year after, she took on a part-time job as a barmaid on the hull strip to help with the bills and to finance her car, while she also studied at algonquin college. i absolutely loved watching her get dressed and made up for this job! she had layered the top half of her dyed-black hair and backcombed the hell out of it so that it stood up in a dome of sorts, much like elvira's. she wore one green contact lens and one yellow one, purple eye shadow, lots of black eyeliner and blood-red lipstick. from her closet, she pulled out all sorts of interesting outfits i'd never seen the likes of before, all outfits she'd bought at flash cadillac, on rideau, in ottawa (part of this shop then became savannah deville's, when it had to shut down due to marital conflict between the owenrs). my favourite one was this crazy, off-white, denim, sleeveless catsuit with small gold zippers at the ankles and one wide, gold zipper starting at one knee and going all the way up to its bust line. there were suede booties and studded catsuits and skinny jeans with zippers. there were gold stilettos, wide, studded belts and itty bitty mini skirts with corsets and bustiers. my stepmother shopped at the same store the ottawa punks shopped at and styled her hair in a manner that would make most goth girls of the time quite envious. 

she drove around in a silver, souped up, 1987 audi gt coup, leather racer gloves boasting audi's famous rings on their wrist straps, her left hand resting on the wheel, with a du maurier cigarette usually held between its index and middle finger and her right hand busy shifting gears. she loved classic rock but also played the cult, the cure and the clash when driving around. her absolute favourite band was ac/dc and i can remember "highway to hell", "hell's bells" and "back in black" playing loudly as she gunned down ottawa's highways.

once i started peeling back the layers of anger and bitterness and was able to remember these details, a lot of the fashion paths i've walked began making a whole lot more sense and, as i like to extract and retain the positive from any situation, i guess that's one thing i have to be thankful for. 

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