Tuesday, November 27, 2007

I'm Brack...I mean 'back'

So!

I have returned from England early. I have returned from England with plans to stay for much longer than the holidays. Indefinitely, you could say.

I'd like to stress that I did not come home feeling that The Mission Had Failed. I'm not rich, but I'm not skidding home on an empty bank account. Nor am I throwing up an insulting hand signal to London as it shrinks behind me - I still love London and I don't see that changing any time soon. I've generally left my bridges intact and depending on What May Come, I could see myself returning there. For reasons I may elaborate upon, it just isn't where I want to be for the immediate future.

In essence, the mission - the original mission - was a success. I went to England to look around and decide if I wanted to live there. True, I made up my mind in less than the two year period I set myself. But that period's length was set completely arbitrarily and so I don't feel married to it. While looking over the details of planning a three week visit for the holidays, I starting thinking "What if I just stayed?" and the more I weighed the possibilities, the more the scales fell in favor of that course of action.

I must confess that I have been in the country since late on the 18th, but have kept quiet about it since I continued to be terribly ill and wanted a private week with my parents so that all the kings horses and all the kings men could do a bit of contract work on me. I'm finally feeling better on the whole, but my body is exhausted from fighting off the most tenacious disease I've wrestled with in about four years. What energy I have has mostly gone to fishing through the numerous boxes which I filled up and stored with my parents before leaving for London. If nothing else, I'm grateful for the year in London proving I can do just fine without a lot of the crap in said boxes - why did I save half a dozen He-Man action figures? - and thus giving me whatever I needed to be able to part with a lot of the junk.

I'm crashing with my parents until years end, then heading out of Ottawa to another city - Toronto being the top candidate - and seeing what kind of messes I can make there (or so the plan goes). I'm also taking advantage of this short break from the "real world" to reassess what I'm doing and what I really want, in the hopes that this will lead to a more cohesive decision based on stronger merits than before.

I don't regret going to England, mind. As you can see just by digging through this site I've been updating over the past year, I've been able to see and learn a great deal that I wouldn't have otherwise. It also forced me to be more independent than I've ever been before - though I moved out of home two weeks after graduating high school, I've always been in the same city as my parents and that can lead to the inevitable call for help when perhaps I could have just dealt with something myself. I couldn't give a fiddlers fuck* how corny it may or may not sound - my time in London was a great period of personal development, though I wouldn't say I found myself if only for the semantical reason that I've always been highly aware of my location, but also because that implies a kind of final stage of development. I think that hitting some kind of plateau like that is not the reaching of a pinnacle, but slamming into a brick wall. The day you stop changing as a person should, ideally, also be the day you die.

But I digress!

As with my decision to go to England in the first place, I can choose to sum it up in a sentence, but a proper explanation of why I left could easily get into my drawing up a pie chart of reasons. This isn't due to there being a litany of despair driving me to come back, just that I can barely decide to leave the house without at least three reasons for doing so and thus you can imagine how this plays out with something as big as moving three thousand miles.

I'm going to keep this thing going for now - I may be back from England, but I'm not abandoning the pursuit of success in film. Plus I'll be enjoying exploring wherever I end up next and I'd be interested to find other content threads to weave in here.

No angst filled poems though, sorry!

*Fiddlers aren't terribly good in bed, I guess? You can thank my dad for that expression finding it's way into my lexicon.

5 comments:

jessrawk said...

Toronto is where all the cool cats are at anyway. A most excellent choice.

Oliver Brackenbury said...

The presence of said cats was certainly part of my decision. Going to a big city where you don't know anybody is a very romantic idea, but a far less charming reality!

Shawn M. said...

I will pay you good money to use apostrophes correctly. All you need to remember to do is to reverse what you are doing now. Then you will find true happiness?

Oliver Brackenbury said...

BAH

You use an apostrophe when it's either a contraction or a possessive and you don't when it's a pluralization right? I know I'm on the Internet and I could check this thirty-eight ways but I would like to try using my brain cells first.

Shawn M. said...

You have it, m'boy!

Yes, you use it when it's a contraction - it's no different than saying 'can't.' So, if you are saying 'Oliver is sexy!' you could also write 'Oliver's sexy!'

The thing that will screw you up is that even though you use it for possession as well, the term 'its' (i.e., 'The dog ate its delicious bits!'), though used in the sense of possession, has no apostrophe to speak of. Only 'it is' gets the apostrophe, when merged into a horrible, new, Cyclopean term.