New Best Friends My Mom Hasn't Paid Off

It needs to be at least three times this big!

My room-mate comes back from New Zealand today. Not only did she go traveling by herself (unsafe) she left me with the place to myself for a month (unsafe). Or so I thought... (not that it was unsafe, I knew that, but that I was alone). I discovered there are teeny little ants in my kitchen, usually only about three at a time, and well... I love them. At first I thought they were a nuisance - I was accustomed to squishing giant ants at my old place which made a nice crunching sound - so I flicked one of these little ants off the counter and then instantly felt remorse as I watched it's minuscule little body soar across the kitchen. I actually got depressed. You see, they look like baby ants, and I love babies. Plus there are so few ants at one time that it's hard to see them as pests and not, well, visitors. Would I flick my visitors away? (Depends on the visitor). Would I flick my baby visitors away? (No! Shaken baby syndrome, hello!) Anyway I noticed when Krista left I started talking to my ant visitors. It just happened all of a sudden, like it was completely natural to start talking to ants. I heard myself say "Hi," and felt ridiculous for a second then got over it a little too quickly for a sane person and shouted, "Oh no!" when I  noticed one got stuck in a drop of water, or to them, a giant lake that came out of nowhere. I like to imagine they are the same ants each time and that they now recognize my voice and will come when I beckon them. I think I'm going insane. I feel quite fond of my ants. To the point where I feel bad when I clean the counter because then there won't be any food for them. To the point where I saw one of the ants carrying a quite large crumb and felt ridiculously proud of him. To the point where I thought I crippled one with a tub of flour and felt sick seeing him hobble away. I wonder if I'm trying to fill the void that losing my dog has left. If I am, it's going to take quite a few ants. Kezzie was a small dog, but she was at least fifty times bigger. And fluffy. And adorable. And oh gosh I miss her...

Abruptly and insensitively moving on once again, the strange thing is, I also have other visitors and I despise them. Silverfish. I see one and I instantly murder it. But can they help how creepily they run along? Can they help that they are called Silverfish which somehow seems extra creepy? (I hear Silverfish and I think, "You're a fish! You should be in water! You have no business having those extremely fast moving legs.") No. They can't. What is this hypocrisy inside of me? How deep does it go? I don't know. But I also plan on continuing to kill my Silverfish without remorse and I plan on saying "hi" to my ant friends when I get home and maybe making a mess on purpose to help them feed their massive family.

Now, I haven't really wanted to blog, because I often feel that it is quite self-centered, and I question whether I only enjoy it for the attention (I am a notorious attention-seeker). I mean, why else would someone write a blog about their own life? Who cares about the crazy things I think and say and do? And yet there are people who actually do, and that amazes me. So I'll keep writing them, but they will be peppered with confessions of my failings and examples of how when Faith tries to bring attention to herself, she fails. Just think of it this way, Faith = failure. Oh no, that won't work. Dang you real-word names, always confusing my identity! As a child I didn't even know what gender I was, I thought I was just a spiritual concept. No wait, that's not it, I thought I was going to turn into a boy. Close though. Anyway, the point is when I try to bring attention to myself I fall on my face, which works really well for the attention-seeking aspect, but when I try to bring attention to God, I always succeed, even if it isn't always obvious to my short-sighted eyes (I'm not actually short-sighted, my vision is fine, it just happens to be stuck in a seriously limited human body). So here goes, I've noticed I've been careless with my words lately and hurting people's feelings that I had no intention of hurting. I felt like I was getting better at taming my tongue and it is always discouraging when I back track and need to apologize, which I always try to do.  It's usually in an attempt to be funny; words that seem harmless at the time but only end up tearing people down instead of building them up. I want to be a builder. God isn't calling Bob-the-Crushers, He's calling Bob-the-Builders (wait, what? He is? Bob-the-Builder is actually a missionary called to do relief work in underprivileged neighborhoods for God? Who knew). I just finally apologized to a coworker about something I said a long time ago that has been weighing on my conscience (something to do with sewing to which I said, "Where did you learn to do that, your mom?" which I don't even know how it was funny at the time, but it was, trust me.) You should have seen how happy he was when I apologized. Not only could he not believe I was still thinking about that but that I would bother to apologize for something so trivial. I went from making a bad impression, one of the only ones I've made with him, to making a very good impression and a new friend, not that you can really trust what I say about friends. Example: the ants.

The cruelty of the world is making me think it's time for another all-inclusive vacation, I mean, it's been 26 years since my last one (the womb). Also, FUN FACT ABOUT FAITH: I have never been outside of the country. The furthest point I have been from my birth place of Victoria is Fort St. John. Yeah. Real exciting. My family didn't have money to go on vacations growing up and I went right from high school to university, amassing a fortune in debt, and haven't had money to travel since. I still don't. The difference is I'm going anyway. Hurrah! Where am I going? Pssh, where does anyone go with no money who wants to mindlessly indulge themselves and/or escape government persecution? MEHICO! This is an exciting thing for me, this travelling thing. Now when I say "travel" I mean laying on the beach in the sun and eating lots of food. I don't actually mean furthering my education of a different culture and place. The good news is this Paleo diet has made me lose weight unintentionally, so I've got some real growing room. I plan on doing legitimate travelling some day too, don't worry, just not when I'm travelling with another inexperienced young, female traveller to a country known for it's successful drug cartels and kidnapping abilities. However, apparently Mexico has launched an anti-kidnapping agency! Unfortunately the next headline on Google says, "Mexico: War on Drug Cartels Leads to Rise in Kidnappings." You win some, you lose some. All I know is, I'm taking some time off to do nothing, and I promised myself that the next time I go to Mexico, it won't be for an all-inclusive vacation and it won't be to travel. It will be to help people who could never in their lifetime afford an all-inclusive vacation. Of course, I won't mention that technically I can't afford it right now either, the point is that I will be able to afford it, with just a little (or, you know, a lot) of saving up, and there's people who don't even have enough to feed their families (I instantly thought of the ants. I think I really am going insane). I think I might still have some money in my piggy-bank, unfortunately I might have to use the special limited-time Olympic quarters I collected back when I thought it would be cool to collect limited-time Olympic quarters.