Trip to SAIT
Well let’s see, what’s been happening lately? On Thursday I went downtown with Kim and Jen just to take some cool pictures. I love downtown I realized. I honestly didn’t know that it was so pretty in some spots. It’s amazing that I can still be discovering things in the city I’ve lived in my whole life. Maybe I should go downtown more often. With my friends. Work hardly counts.
Today I went to SAIT with my mom to drop of my final high school transcripts. Afterwards we just walked around campus trying to locate some of my classes. I don’t think I will be able to express this well in words, but… I don’t know. Somehow… I think my mom… I just don’t know how to react. Like, she went to SAIT twenty-some years ago, and today she was giving me kind of an impromptu tour of the place. Except she hasn’t been there for twenty-some years, so of course most things have changed there. And I do know that she spent two important years there, but like I said, things have changed since she’s been there. So I’m exaggerating only slightly, but when she points to a building labeled “J”!! in a great big golden letter and says, ‘that’s the J block’, and points out marked elevators and staircases etc., I really felt… patronized, and I hate that feeling. Like several times I had to curb my burning desire to say, yes, I can read, mom. Then it just makes me feel guilty because I know she’s just trying to help. But if I act overenthusiastic, won’t I just be patronizing her?
I get the feeling that she needs to walk down this memory lane with someone else who was actually there with her; who could… reciprocate. Or something. It’s like showing someone a photo album in which they don’t know any of the people. It could mean everything to you but almost nothing to someone else.
I feel bad that I can’t… just… fully understand the experiences she was describing to me. She’d deny it, but I have heard her SAIT story multiple times. I know the feeling when something is just so, so special to you but it is meaningless to anyone you try to articulate it to. It’s a bad feeling. It almost takes away from the experience itself. But we’re attending this school under such completely different circumstances. She was raised in a small city, was engaged there, and then realized it was wrong. So she picked a faculty she had never heard of at SAIT, moved out here on her own for the first time after breaking off the engagement with the guy, so not good enough for her anyway. For her, SAIT was freedom, it was different, it was independence, it was the future. For me… SAIT is… two more years of school that I’ll have to do with a different set of friends than I did high school with. None of that romance is there. I’ll be coming home every day to the house I grew up in, and with any luck I’ll still hang out with some high school friends some evenings.
One day I will probably try and analyze further the relationship I have with my mom. It’s not a bad relationship by no means, but it could be more. Maybe it will be in the future. I’m aware that I’m at the exact age at which girls do not get along with or identify with their mothers. And it’s not like I’m trying to be disagreeable or a know-it-all. I can’t even say ‘we’re just very different people’ because that’s not true either. We’re similar people because she has always been there for me and she raised me to be just like her, really. I’m literally a mix of both my parents and nothing more. Any trait I have, personality or otherwise can be linked back to one of them. Maybe she’s just disappointed that I got my dad’s art and linguistic talents instead of her mathy calculating talents. My brother did, though. He can do anything in math but can’t draw a stick figure.
That’s what I hate about this stupid world. If someone can do math but not art, well that’s fully acceptable. But if someone rocks at art and design and can get their ideas across competently but can’t interpret a sinusoidal graph, well it’s time to get that person a math tutor and a shiny textbook to fix that problem.
Maybe watching Gilmore Girls was a bad thing for my mom. No mother/daughter relationship is like that. If you look closely, their whole situation is impossible. Like, come on. So a sixteen-year-old moves out on her own with a baby. She proceeds to feed herself and that baby nothing but junk food and candy. Somehow, that kid turns out to be a perfect, pretty, miraculously underweight, motivated Yale student with great skin. Yeah, right.
Anyways…
Tomorrow is going to be very fun because Jen and I are going to make a birthday cake for Kim, which should prove itself to be entertaining at the least, what with my monstrous lack of baking experience and Jen with her newly acquired ‘touch of destruction’. Then in the evening we’re going to Moxies and then to see ‘The Village’. Yay!
