Personal

There’s no breakup worse than the one with your best friend.

It seems no amount of time or distance can help heal the wounds caused from it. And the Internet only makes it worse — especially the Facebooks, Twitters and blogs of the universe.

Even if you’re not Facebook friends anymore, the rollout of Timeline has caused you to relive past wall posts filled with making plans. It’s also shown you pictures from long ago of the two of you laughing. Giggling for no reason. Cleaning out closets. Facials, pedicures, coffees.

You ask mutual friends and acquantiances how she is. You’re saddened when she decides not to show to friends’ parties.

You saw her once at a public party. You went to wave and smile, she turned her back on you. You were left alone.

Others understand. “I recently broke up with my best friend, too,” a friend confides. Her sad smile lets you know you’re not alone.

You hear of milestones you’re missing in her life, just as she is missing milestones in yours. This time when you move, she won’t help you pack, she won’t help you clean out your closet, she won’t help decorate.

You want to reach out to her. Try to make things right. Try to be best friends again. Do you text? Email? But something stops you from writing that email: Has too much time gone by? Does she feel the same? What if she is happy we’re not friends anymore?

I just miss my best friend.

(Photo courtesy of P.J.M. on Flickr.)

I was 12 years old when Jann Arden released Living Under June.

I remember falling in love with Could I Be Your Girl like I had never fallen in love with a song before. I was too young to know what it meant, or how desperately sad its lyrics are (“I am worthless sounds compared to all your perfect words”), but I loved it. I taped it from the radio and listened to it over and over again, writing out the lyrics in school notebooks, with hearts dotting the eyes.

I added it to my Christmas list that year. I remember standing in the record store a week before Christmas, holding the CD in my hands, wanting it right then like nothing else.

Santa didn’t bring me Living Under June for Christmas that year. Neither did my parents or grandparents. I took the money that I got for Christmas and bought it before the new year came. It’s not only the first CD I remember buying, it’s the first one I listened to front to back over and over and over again.

This Christmas marks 17 years since that Christmas. And while Living Under June was my first Jann Arden album, it was far from my last. Ten albums and five concerts have gotten me through my share of tween and teen heartbreak, self-doubt, self-loathing and  finally, to my own self-acceptance.

I can’t explain what that music means to me. It was a life-preserver when I needed one. A shoulder to cry on when I had none. It was someone who understood what I was going through like no one else could. I strive to be myself, if only because the fridge magnet I got at the first Jann Arden concert I went to tells me to.

I was 24 when met Arden for the first time when she was inducted into Canada’s Walk of Fame in 2006. It was the first time I had interviewed anyone on camera. I interviewed a dozen celebrities before her, including Eugene Levy, Jennifer Coolidge and Brendan Fraser, and didn’t bat an eye. When it came to Arden, my 12-year-old self took over and I broke down crying. She was gracious and helped me get through it, but I was mortified. (And oh, yes, it’s all on video, which I still have and cringe every time I watch it.)

Not my most shining professional — or personal — moment.

So when I heard this year Arden was releasing not just another album, but a memoir as well (Falling Backwards), I knew I had to read it. And when I heard she was doing a Q&A and autograph signing, I set my sights on redeeming myself.

And I did. She didn’t remember me, which is good, but she told me not to let it get me down, “everyone has moments like that.”

I was glad to get to pose for a picture with her without tears welling in my eyes, and to be able to talk to her like the grown up — and professional — I am. Maybe I’ve grown up in the five years since, or maybe I just realize that while that 12-year-old hearing Could I Be Your Girl for the first time on the radio will always exist inside of me, it doesn’t mean I wear her on my sleeve.

As for Arden’s memoir? I’m halfway through it and will give a full review when I’m done (along with some of the other 52 in ’11 posts I’ve been neglecting), but suffice it to say, I’m not at all disappointed with the book.

Thanks for everything, Jann.

Why don’t creative young writers care if they get paid?

That’s the headline on a column by Russell Smith in The Globe and Mail, where he laments that young writers, like me, don’t care if they get paid for their work, unlike old writers, like him.

The column stems from a “recurring argument” he has with young writers about why they choose to write for publications, such as The Huffington Post, where they are not paid for their work. They claim they do it to further their brand, while Smith’s generation (the older generation), would never imagine writing something for free — let alone to something like HuffPo that can afford to pay its writers.

He writes:

There now exists an entire generation of intelligent people who have grown up without any expectation of compensation for imaginative work.

As a young writer, I don’t think that’s entirely fair. Nor do I believe that I contently give away my creative work for free without getting anything back out of it.

As someone under the age of 30, I can only assume I am the demographic Smith is speaking about. I wish he were as right about me as he thinks he is.

I began writing for newspapers at 17, and I was paid for every word I wrote. Sometimes I was paid too little for the amount of work I put into a story, other times too much, but I was paid.

When I moved to a small town, the weekly papers there were happy to have me contribute, but I didn’t get paid from them until I began working as a staff reporter at one of them. Weekly papers don’t have the budget for freelance. (Or at least not the ones in my small town.) Nor should they. After all, being a community paper means the community contributes. Paying every citizen who contributed to a small town weekly paper would bankrupt it pretty fast, I would guess.

When I moved to Toronto, I knew I’d have to take some lumps to make it. I worked for free at a website here and there, volunteered for my school paper for two out of three years, and wrote stories and blog posts when I worked at a national paper that I considered, for the most part, part of my job as a sports copy editor.

Did I make a willing decision not to get paid for my work? I wouldn’t say that. But I do have this blog. And no one, not even Google Ad Sense, is paying for me to write this blog post.

Perhaps then Smith is right. I’m just too willing to give away my creative content, but then I look at what I got out of all that giving away and suddenly things aren’t as black and white.

I got exposure. I got experience. I got to interview celebrities and cover stories and beats I love. I got to find my voice.

And yes, Smith addresses all this:

Somehow, they know, money will come in from another source. They can get famous fast this way, and it’s gratifying to have a huge audience.

That’s right, I do what I do to get famous. And I’m pretty famous, in case you couldn’t tell. (I mean, more than 1,000 people follow me on Twitter.)

Smith explains in his day, reporters worked their way up:

We old farts did that tiring reporting/interviewing stuff for years before we were allowed to write our opinions on things.

Well, people still work their way up, for the most part. The whole getting-famous-for-a-blog-or-something-else-you-did-for-free is prettty rare.

Another difference between the two generations?

I still don’t even aspire to this ideal of not being edited; not being edited doesn’t seem like a benefit to me. I still have a deep-rooted (and unjustified) instinct telling me that something published has value only if it has been commissioned by someone else.

I prefer being edited. I know this blog is not perfect because I wrote it and no one proofed it. I’m not an expert writer on my own, I know that (and so do my editors). Does something published only have value if commissioned by someone else? I say no. There’s lots of great ideas out there, and some of them come from reporters themselves.

Should the Huffington Post pay? Maybe, but if you’re happy getting the kind of exposure you would get writing for a site like that, then there’s no need to complain.

Now, if you’d excuse me, I’ve got to get back to some writing I’m getting paid for.

Everyone has their 9/11 stories. Where they were, what they were doing when they heard or saw those images.

Mine are no different than everyone else’s. I remember seeing it on Regis and Kelly before I left for school. Hearing about the second plane on the way to school. Watching after the Pentagon was hit with j-school students.

And then what came after: My father’s fear of me living in Ottawa, in case Canada was next, falling asleep at night to the sound of the helicopters keeping watch over the city and the beginning of the end for me in Ottawa.

Ten years is a long time. And while many stop and reflect about Sunday’s anniversary, for me it’s not just about 9/11. It’s about the days before and after it. The weeks and months of despair that were about to make me a shadow of my former self.

Ten years ago, I was living in Ottawa. I can almost see myself waiting for the 87 Carling bus across the street from a McDonald’s on a corner. My portable CD player in my hand, my headphones around my head. The soundtrack to Moulin Rouge! blasting in my ears (yes, I have always had bad taste in music).

That was the last time I can remember being truly happy in Ottawa. That was around this time of year. 9/11 hadn’t happened yet. Terrorists, al-Qaida, Osama bin Laden, these were all words that meant nothing to me. I couldn’t even tell you where Afghanistan was on a map.

I was in a long distance relationship, attending my dream school (Carleton), and making plans on how I could get into the journalism program in my second year (I was a mass communications student for my first year). I was writing for the Charlatan, Carleton’s school paper, and the Ottawa Citizen was going to come calling on Sept. 10 to give me my first assignment for their paper.

I was on top of the world.

But in the weeks after 9/11, something in me changed. Like the rest of the world, things got darker for me. I couldn’t see straight, couldn’t seem to come up for air.

Ottawa was no longer an amazing place for me, it was a lonely place. My memories in October and November are of riding the Transitway at night all by myself. No one around. I lost interest in most of my classes. I was a horrible girlfriend.

It’s hard to atone for the sins of your past, I know, but there are times I wish I could. While I know I may not have been able to stop the depression that hit me so desperately, sometimes I wonder if I was hit by it because I had done some bad things in my past.

And while it’s hard to believe the events of Sept. 11, 2001 happened 10 years ago, it’s hard to believe how far I’ve come in 10 years. How different me and my life are now from who I was then. How much I would have missed if I had jumped or followed through on other plans I had.

It’s kind of strange how the events of 9/11 are tied to events in my life that I can never forget, no matter how hard I try. While I remember where I was when the towers fell, I also remember who I was when the towers fell. For better or for worse, I was never that girl again.

It’s odd to look at people like my 10-year-old sister, who was born in May of 2001. She lived in a world before the attacks, but the only world she’ll know is the post-9/11 world. A world full of terrorism attacks, full body scanners and no liquid gels on planes.

I’ll try to tell her about the world before; the ignorant bliss we all seemed to live in, but I don’t know that it matters. I don’t know that she’ll care. This is her reality now, it’s all she’s ever known.

Change is never an easy thing.

Whether you change jobs, change houses or change life partners; change is hard.

This was my baby for almost two years.

Today I sold my car. I didn’t buy another. I am car-less.

And while I feel so free, I feel quite bittersweet about the whole thing.

Logically, it made sense to sell. I use my car about once or twice a month, if that. I pay for parking. It’s hard to justify paying around $600 a month for a thing that really just sits in my garage.

But emotionally, I feel a little mixed. I bought the car when I got my last job. I needed it because the job was about an hour’s commute away, while my life was in this city.

Almost 11 months ago, I quit that job (in fact my last day was almost exactly 10 months ago), I quit that job. I no longer really needed the car, but held on to it. Now, I feel like I’ve totally cleansed myself of everything to do with my last job. Not that I’m trying to erase it, because I’m not, but the experience wasn’t the most positive and now I have nothing to remind me of it, except for a couple license plates that will be buried under my stairs with the other car remnants.

While financially it made sense to sell, it was also due to me and the kind of person I am. I’m just not a car person. Never have been. I didn’t get my driver’s license until I was almost 18, didn’t really care to drive my mother’s car everywhere. Even when I lived in a small town, I loved living right downtown and walking everywhere. I don’t really know car names or makes or models. Instead I like that purple car, or the blue one, etc.

And while you can debate the reliability of public transit in the city, or the affordability of a car-sharing program, both of those better suite my lifestyle than an automobile parked in a parking space.

I’ll miss the freedom my car allowed, but I won’t miss what the car represented.

That being said, it was quite cool to walk into the bank today and go up to the teller and say, “I’d like to pay off my loan, please.”

As I walked out this was going through my head: