04.06.02 / 15:30

I am a fourteen-year-old Catholic schoolgirl, complete with curly brown hair in pigtails.

I like saying that because it makes me sound a lot cooler and sexier than I really am. Yes, I am fourteen, but act twenty. Yes, I am a Catholic schoolgirl, but we don't wear uniforms and over half the student body is Anglican or E-Free, anyway. Yes, I have curly brown hair, but it is streaked blue red, and is only in pigtails when I don't have time to shower.

My attention span is zero when it comes to TV, but unlimited on everything else. I get bored very easily. I have a wicked tongue and temper, but I only get in half as much trouble as I should. Lots of people find me an angry little person, but this is because I don't talk much, and when I do, it's because of my temper.

I have played trumpet for almost three years, piano for six (only two years of lessons) and acoustic guitar for a year and a half. I fell in love with jazz when I was nine, listening to Miles Davis' It Never Entered My Mind. I can remember sitting on my bedroom floor thinking that it was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard.

I moved around a lot as a kid. India, Manitoba, the Yukon, all before I was seven. Then we moved to Alberta and have stayed here since.

I miss travelling a lot. I miss England, Thailand, Singapore, Japan. Hell, I miss Calcutta. I feel like I'm rotting here. The heat, the cotton, the orange-fired light. Low hum of mosquitoes and sandalwood everywhere, like incense. And the heat - red cheeked, flushed, mirror-pool heat - it soaked into you like water. It's so cold here.

We lived in a company house, because my dad was the coal mine pit manager for the Canadian Development Agency, and it was like a fairy-tale house to me, complete with walled court-yard and nets over the beds. It was heaven.

I think that's where my interest in forgein languages began. I was so fascinated by the words pouring out in barbed wire lines, awed by the dark faces, and always trying to understand. Namaste, namaste.

Peace, peace.

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