Ten days ago I turned 28. I think more lessons came with that birthday than with any of those that
preceded it. Four days ago I was supposed to go under the knife to have a growth removed from my
saliva gland, the operation was aborted halfway through. Will this thing kill me eventually? I don’t
know. Two days ago at 7:45pm, I was assaulted less than two blocks from my house, at the same
time my father was leaving a message on my voicemail letting me know that the girl who used to live
across the street had triplets.

Today I’m looking back over the last ten days wondering what I am feeling. The birthday revelations
were eye-opening, the failed surgery was worrisome, and well the attack, all of a sudden all the
articles I had been slaving over for weeks to eventually have posted here became meaningless.

What do I feel?

I’m sure my dad feels disappointment that I wasn’t the one having triplets on Thursday. You see,
since the very day her family moved in across the street when I was eight years old, he’s put me into
some unspoken competition with the girl next door. Only I never cared to complete. When she took
figure-skating, I had to. When she took gymnastics, I had to and oh how I loathed fucking
gymnastics. When she took horseback riding lessons, I had to. When she went to church and bible
camp, I had to. When I wanted to take dance (which she had no interest in taking), I had to fight for it.
When I wanted to take up an instrument, I had to fight for it and finally settle for learning it myself in the
basement. There it was, always that unspoken competition. She was more god-fearing, more perfect
GAP-wearing normal than me. She would never dye her hair blue or hide three cases of beer beneath
a pile of dirty clothes in her closet. "Why can’t you be more like her?" But I never was, not even now.

In time I left to go to college to study something "unacceptable", I moved to the big city to pursue a
career in the TV business and then later in writing, I didn’t get hitched in my mid-twenties and start
popping out kids. I am the still black sheep and my dad with all his traditional values probably feels
really disappointed. You see, I am kinda hard to brag about at family dinners.

But what do I feel? I know I don’t feel any regrets for choosing this life over a life like hers. Why?
Because I have good man in my life and I know when the time comes (several years from now still),
we will start a family. I want that too, only on my terms and I am not in a rush to get there. I also don’t
feel regret for not using all these "great brains" of mine to become a doctor or a lawyer. Those careers
aren’t in me. Unlike my father, I don’t think you can just decide to "be" something if you’re smart, I think
it has to be in you first, the desire to go that way. Besides I love being a writer, editor, performer,
photographer, webmaster, and alternative model, I may be anything but rich but I’m rich in variety and
my life is never boring even when it gets hard.

So again, what do I feel about all this? I suppose after the attack, I started to feel anger and that anger
expanded into something more akin to the feeling of total and complete impotence. And I guess that
feeling of impotence was born from the utter randomness of it all, my only sin was being in the wrong
place at the wrong time. Unfortunate but true. The thing with that is that you can’t let yourself think too
much about it because then you realize that so many things in life are about being in the right or wrong
place at the right or wrong time. And while you can work towards influencing your destiny, you really
have no control over the fact that your life and that destiny you’ve struggled towards can be snatched
away in a single random moment / single random confrontation.
So I guess what I am feeling is impotence. Impotent that there was nothing I could do to prevent
myself from being jumped, short of never leaving my house, impossible, and as an urban woman I
have always promised myself that I would never let myself live in fear. And two days after, I still don’t.
Impotent that there was nothing I could do after the attack but cuss and swell up like a threatened cat
then retreat to the false safety of telephone calls to the cops. I say "false safety" because many times
that is exactly what it is. All the witnesses and I can give statements, I can say "yes, I do want to press
assault charges" but at the end of the day if they can’t find the guy, it’s all moot. He’s still walking
around my neighbourhood and so am I.

So that’s exactly what it is, I am feeling a frustration brought upon by my impotence to control the
ultimate outcome of this situation or any similar situations that may arise in life. I am feeling frustrated
at the reminder of how much just living depends on day to day luck, if you will. You can take measures
to act sensibly, take precautions to increase your safety but sometimes and without warning all that
sense and precaution still can and will fail you. Then you’ll probably find yourself where I am,
wondering what you feel, what you should feel and how you can move beyond it.

It is not in our human nature to easily accept randomness, everyone wants to feel like they are in
control, have some control over the outcome of their lives. Unfortunately this isn’t always true. I guess
this is why so many flee to organized religions. Proposed answers to the unanswerable promise
make things easier. Prayer, at the root, is the plea for control, or at least an act that allows you to think
you are making an effort to control the situations around you. Interesting, how we each strive to battle
the random acts that surround us.

So really, the best you can do is keep living. You do choose your terms, I chose a dream and the big
city over some kids and a husband in a small town. By choosing the latter I could have avoided the
events of two days ago but who’s to say some other evil wouldn’t have been lurking in that other reality
waiting for me. You choose your terms but those terms don’t spare you from that unavoidable
randomness. In the end, the only "terms" that matter, are the ones you come to when you grow to
accept your own mortality.

Maybe some crazy in the street will take me, maybe it will be this strange lump in my mouth, maybe it’ll
be years from now and all about "natural causes", maybe I’ll feel this strange frustrated impotence
forever or maybe I’ll find the "terms" to come to accept even that. Regardless, the best any of us can
do is live everyday like it might be our last and take nothing not one second of the good stuff for granted.

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