ACCOZZAGLIA

Which it is, actually, but that isn’t the point. It’s a cold sun, but I’m less concerned with the temperature and more with observing that the angle is getting higher as the days here are lengthening.

And today, I got some good news, coupled with a really fantastic, intimate lunch.

I was readying to leave for lunch with former Winnipeg mayor Glen Murray when I checked my mailbox. There was a letter from Admissions & Awards, and so I suspected it had to do with the undergraduate grant application I wrote back in January. My chances as an international student were quite slim, I was warned, because of that non-resident distinction working against me. It seemed, in my assessment, that the requisite application process in of itself wasn’t suitable for presenting to a grant committee the key elements behind why I applied and why it was crucial. So, after the cursory interview about a month ago, I prepared a supplemental package to accompany the application and interview notes, along with further itemizations of where my expenses are and have been directed.

So as I walked onto the front yard and onto the sidewalk, I thought to myself, “Great. I’m about to have lunch with Glen Murray, and a rejection now would really screw with my mood for that.” But then I browsed the short letter, which read, inter alia, “You have been awarded $3,500 in grant assistance for the 2005-2006 academic year. These funds have been provided to assist with your educational costs.”

“Huh, I can’t believe this,” I thought. Then I said aloud, “Fuuuck, they granted it?”

It’s like I’m living in Bizarro Universe as it relates to things like winning grants, or being admitted to university. There’s, like, the real world outside the St. George campus, and then there’s Bizarro Universe within its bounds. And within Bizarro Universe, good things somehow happen for me, and I really don’t understand why.

Being at university thus far has taught me more about the feeling of resentment than it has other things, and that I feel degrees of resentment in areas where before admission I simply did not.

• I have come to resent arriving at university a full generation after most of the people around me in the same level of study, and yet I am enjoying that which I learn and that which I am newly introduced to.

• I have come to resent spoilt rotten kids who take it all for granted and then snub others who don’t have their endowed situation. Logically, it’s because these people know fully well that they have it relatively easy on the financial front, and thus without the survival skills that originate from being responsible fully for oneself, they know there is much to lose if suddenly the teat goes dry or it gets yanked away from them. But emotionally, I still have a vulnerability of taking it personally when someone snubs or pretends someone like me couldn’t possibly exist, followed by bragging about a new 60GB video iPod, a new carbon-fibre Cannondale bicycle, a $5,000 synthesizer, or how daddy got them a starting job of $70K at the BMO.
• I have really come to resent being unable to feel safe about my own circumstances. Locally, only two — no, as of this afternoon, three — people in the city of Toronto have any idea what I’ve experienced to reach this place in my life. and have that inkling. And now, in a roundabout but clear enough sense, maybe former Mayor Murray might, too. As for everybody else? I’m sealed on the matter of why I’m the really odd, tense, intense person I am known for today. I’m afraid to open up to anyone. Anyone! Even when comes to visit in a few weeks, I’m going to feel cautious, and it’s not even anything she did which makes me feel this way. People I represent on the board of directors have no idea why I am both so brusque when people goof off while I run the extra mile on matters that previous seat holders didn’t care to bother with.
• I resent my father for failing to be a father once all was said and done. I haven’t heard from him since last September, when Hurricane Rita was threatening to make a New Orleans out of Houston (which, not to be sadistic, should never have happened to Nola, but rather, to every square acre of Friendswood Development Company land surrounding Houston, which deserves to be reclaimed by the Gulf of Mexico and the Big Thicket National Forest). And after six months of absolute dead silence, I think it’s quite apparent that I shame him after a lifetime of his own neglect towards his four kids. I gave him a second chance starting in 1998. He has squandered it. Thus, I am ending my relationship with him.
• And it’s time to admit this as much as I can, because it’s doing me no good to just sit there and pretend like the white elephant isn’t picking up peanuts before me: I resent my ex-gf, who semi-ceremoniously dumped me at an upscale restaurant in my most favourite city in the world without speaking out about the extensive friendship we’d established long before she started to crush on me nearly three years ago. I still find myself rehashing what it was I did to earn this. One of my closest friends — if not one of my four closest friends I’ve ever known — who now lives in the same city limits(!!!), pretends that I no longer exist.

  Like really, how horrid a person am I to make someone never speak to me again after they came to know the most sordid, damning, vulnerable things about me? While two people in my life now look at the matter and suggest that the silence was all predicated by her issues, not mine, I have to interject and say, “Really now, you’re partial to me because I’m your friend. Let’s get real here and be brutal about it: two are needed to tango, and I apparently helped to ruin an invaluable relationship with her.”

  And I’m bitter! Not because there was an abrupt halt, but there was no closure, no communication, no resolution, and no further nurturing of the friendship. I extended the olive branch when I arrived here (partly due to some bona fide, crisis-related concerns that beset her at the time), but after her brief acknowledgment, I watched that branch fall to the ground with no sound elicited, since deaf ears can’t hear.

  So in that deafening silence, I assembled a new impression of her, founded or not, legitimate or not. And it isn’t pretty. It’s an impression of dismissiveness towards others; of pretending that people are like commodities; of relegating the nature of personal affairs as no less interruptible than new business models which will be postponed for at least one or two fiscal years (at which time it will be perfectly okay to return to them as if nothing substantial in between actually happened — nothing personal, at least). And perhaps most painful is the metaphoric feeling that I’m some kind of recipient from a “wealthy” benefactor like a non-profit benefits from a corporate benefactor, miraculously able to help keep the doors open for another day thanks to their generous contribution. She gave me life, and now I’m running with it. But she isn’t here to appreciate that gift, because she avoids me like I’m the black plague. Or, given this being Toronto, SARS [+3 years]. I suspect she’s out there feeling smug about her decision. Or perhaps she once did sometime last summer before later forgetting about any of this footnote with my name on it.

  All I think I want at this point is adequate closure, but I sincerely don’t see it happening. As with other past relationships (well ok, maybe one other relationship many moons ago, which was tar compared to this just being rotting apples), I just want to understand how and why something so strong could end up being relegated to where I feel being misled for such a long time? And I guess it’s going to take a long time for me to continue that healing process, which is proving to be really painful these days. This wasn’t how I ever pictured it to be. Fuck.

On another bright note was lunch with Glen Murray. My first Can Studies prof was there, who had written a positive reference letter on my behalf for that grant application (I do, after all, have one of the only A+ marks in that class of 60). Three others from the follow-up year of Can Studies were also present.

Glen is a really engaging, bright, energetic person. I really wonder if there’s a way I can find myself radiating that way someday. It’s quite inviting.

But the poor bastard got me to lose composure, fall speechless, then cry before a bunch of strangers when he pressed further after asking me what five things I wanted to do before I die (he has asked this of the other two present before saving me for last, ostensibly because I had a dozen years over these two others). The fifth one — feeling safe enough to move about in this world — compelled him to ask me what specifically I meant by that.

I looked at the far end of the coffee table before us, and my world trembled. I could feel months of suppressed pain surge upward. I shook my head, shrugged, and then said, “I . . . I . . . ,” before choking on the prelude to a huge cry. I couldn’t say what I meant or why I was reacting this way. I don’t feel safe to, to him, them or most. I have too much to lose at this juncture, and I’ve come far too far to jeopardize the big prizes. Incidentally, those “big prizes” are the first two things in my announced list of five: completing university study (however far that goes) and securing my citizenship here. Third and fourth can be saved for another time.

Anyhow, I should go. I have a board meeting on which to sit, and it’s a big one prior to the semi-annual, organization-wide meeting where all voting members come to move on some major budget and by-law decisions.

It has been a good day. I’m fairly certain, resentment notwithstanding, that I am going to make it after all. </marytylermoore>