“Girl it’s nice to see the way you be working hard
Don’t nobody really notice you be on your job (job)
Overtime, overtime, overtime, yeah”
Overtyme – Mishon

That song pretty much sums up my 53 hour work week, which still hasn’t ended.

I have 35 days left in Vancouver before I go away for 4 months, and I am spinning like a wheel. Between my two jobs and seeing friends and SailBot, I am barely at home. I don’t have the time to read, and when I do I am too tired to start a new book.

I just realized recently that I will be gone for my favorite season in Vancouver. I won’t be around to see the heat slowly fade and the drops of sun turn into drops of rain. I will miss the local streets blanketed in that warm colour of cartenoid revealing itself. Lund will probably have the same colours! But autumn in Vancouver will always have a special place in my heart.

I remember last year in October, I took my sister out for a bike ride. We biked along Midtown/Ridgeway to Fraser St and came back, and that’s when I looked up in the rare clear sky and thought my life was perfect. I think I will start making a list of moments when I am unhesitating happy. Then probably I will see the best pictures flow through that string of memory.

These last two months feel rushed and squished, like when I’m making a poster and forgot to put in the last paragraph so I try to edit it, shrinking the font, taking away the margins, picking a different font maybe… I try to take in as much work as possible at my job, and then see as many friends as I could, scheduling to see them after dinner or between events. I have different messengers to talk to different people, making promises that I don’t know if I can keep. I’m making plans to travel for September, anxious about the little time I have to study and see places. There’s a long list of cities I want to go to. There’s also a long list of things I won’t get done this summer. Dance, karate, swim, road trip.

I hope I don’t sell out. I hope I won’t trade meaningful experiences for a pretty profile picture in Spain showing off my bikini. I hope I don’t give up studying so I can drink some weird beer in a place whose name I can’t pronounce. I hope I get to see places as souls and not as space.

I also hope the rest of my year will be on overtime. Never standing still even when I am still.