My mom receives Christmas cards with Christmas letters in December. I read them when she leaves them lying around the house. I thought I would take a stab at writing my own.
My Christmas Letter 2011
I wept copiously on January 1st, 2011.
I went back to Bordeaux, France on January 13th and studied full time at the school for foreign students learning French on the Université Bordeaux III campus. I had serious jet lag and took up calligraphy. I listened to radio classique and practiced foundation hand and textura quadrata night after night.
I rented a harp and took harp lessons from the principal harpist of the Bordeaux orchestra. That was great.
My friend Ashlee from Alberta visited me for 10 days or so in February. We planned to go south to the Spanish border but my friendship with M. dissolved and the travel plans fell through.
In March I celebrated my 22nd birthday with champagne, a lovely cake, and some people I didn't know well but later grew to know better. One was a Winnipegger and her visiting boyfriend. The other was a robotics engineer from Australia.
In April I visited Ashlee in Edinburgh, Scotland. I went to the International Harp Festival and did a Wire-strung harp workshop. I also saw some great harp concerts and drank a lot of Irn Bru. I read some terrible, terrible chick lit on the shores of Loch Ness. I did not see Nessie. I ate food that I had heard mentioned by characters on Coronation Street (sausage rolls, eccles cakes, fish and chips and mushy peas that I regretted later on).
I worked a bit as a translator of French fitness videos into English. I also went into the recording studio to dub over a Pilates video and a Latin Aerobics video.
D. came and we went to St-Jean-de-Luz for a few days. We went to the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, Spain, and then ordered a bunch of food from the one euro menu at McDonalds, also in Bilbao. Then we went to a village called Etsaut (even French people didn't know where it was) and rented a donkey that we took hiking in the Pyrénées. We went to Paris. I was also in Paris in April. I do not like Paris. I did like Musée d'Orsay because I took an Art History course in Bordeaux and most of the paintings were in Musée d'Orsay. I surprised myself by how much I could enjoy museums. Now I'm all museum'd out and traveled out.
I came back to Winnipeg in time for convocation. Then I went back to Kenora and worked. I went to Toronto in August and found Jesus. I lost him sometime in November and I'm still trying to figure out where he is exactly (I checked at the right hand of God but God said that he thought he might have gone to the restroom).
I moved to Fredericton and lived with 11 roommates and a landlady with 7 or so cats. She bred Persians and Himalayans. I did three months of my B.Ed. before withdrawing and moving back to Kenora. When I write all this out and think about the things that I am not writing it does seem to make sense that I ended up back here.
My family is doing well. Dad retired last year. Mom retires next year. She is going on a trip to England this Spring. H. is studying Environmental Design at the University of Manitoba. She sleeps at school sometimes, when she sleeps at all. I am happy that she is so into what she's doing that she'll do that, but I also think that it's a messed up world we live in when people have to do that sort of thing for school. I. is in the army reserves and is going to B.C. in January to shoot snow packs and cause controlled avalanches. I think this is every man's dream job.
If this were a real letter I would come up with some conclusion. I'm not sure what it would be. I wonder if anyone would even care to read it because it seems like all I did was move around a lot. Other people usually write about trips (check), and births and deaths (I didn't really have any this year). I guess you could conclude that my life is fairly frivolous. I don't think I'm really a wanderer, I was just masquerading as one during 2011.
If I had one wish for 2012, it would be stability, and that we all learn to want what we have. Maybe that's two wishes.
Merry Christmas.
Just for the heck of it, here's a poem I wrote after reading my Mom's 2011 Christmas letter. She always writes a paragraph about me which always makes me feel a bit awkward.
I aborted that plan
came home
to wear slippers and drink
tea out of the fine china
gilt edges
No comments:
Post a Comment