There seems to be no appreciable current flowing in my body of water and I must say it’s getting more than a little frustrating.

I’ve been back in the city, back in my apartment for over a month now. The second room is painted, the living room floor installed, shiny new carpet laid out..I still don’t feel like I live here. Is that strange?  Only a little bit.

When I first moved in, the job I had made finding a place to live a necessity. Most of my time revolved around that work and a lot of my home time was spent hanging out with my favorite neighbour upstairs (you know, the awesome one with all the good comics and video games who is never alarmed to find me in his apartment when he returns to it). My apartment was somewhat cursory, in terms of it’s use. I mean, I decorated, I loved, I thoroughly enjoyed this apartment. But I enjoyed it as an extension of my ability. It was the first place I ever lived on my own, the first time I paid rent without anyone else’s help. So that made it wondrous and special.

This time around, it’s just not the same somehow. I still love it, I still feel at home here. I just don’t feel like it’s my home. It makes me sad to feel that way and I think it makes the apartment feel a little sad as well. I’m not sure what we’re going to do about that. Perhaps we’ll tiptoe around each other a while longer until it gets really uncomfortable and then we’ll either seek counselling or break up. That’s the reality. You grow together or you grow apart and I hope that there’s enough courage to admit it and move on if that’s the case. Staying together because it’s familiar is not a good way to go.

I’ve been thinking about my next career as well. I really liked working as a lighting tech. I really liked being a boat mechanic. Now that I’m back in a city of marinas it wouldn’t be a stretch to jump back on the boat thing, but the reality is that I don’t feel the same way about it as when I started.  Which was why i stopped and went away to do something else. It wasn’t just the supporting the whims of the super rich that dissatisfied, it was also the enviromental implications of the boating industry that made me very uncomfortable.  And so while I thoroughly enjoyed the work itself, I can’t in good conscience go back to doing it, knowing how I feel about it.

So I think to myself, perhaps some schooling is in order. I don’t have any desire to seek out a diploma of some kind that will allow me to embark on some kind of fabulous career, but I do enjoy acquiring knowledge, so something within the trades, whether it be welding, auto mechanics or electrical might be best. Or maybe teaching english as a second language would benefit me, since my desire to travel is overwhelming and having a skill that would allow me to earn money while doing so would be a good thing.

It really doesn’t matter what it is, because the fundamental issue is that I don’t really feel happy about being in Vancouver. I want to be on the island so I can surf every day. But I don’t want to live on the island. If I did live on the island, I don’t think I would get to surf every day. That’s the reality. I want to live in the kootenays, but I have a fear that the dissatisfaction I feel here would follow me. I thought that coming back to Vancouver was going to be great because there are friends and music and tango and job opportunities and schooling opportunities and the ocean. Could my desire to live near the water be satisfied if the body of water was saltless?