Picture the bright lights of a gas station on a road to nowhere. There’s still a long way to go, especially since you don’t know where you’re going or why. But a red warning icon is blinking annoyingly on your dashboard, you’re kind of hungry, and it may be nice to stretch your legs, hell, maybe even go pee.
You have to stop. You just have to.
It’s the wise move and deep down, you know it, even if it slows you down. It’s okay. There’s still plenty of time to discover places you don’t even know exist yet.
Just pull over.
You can do it—even if your favourite song is playing on the radio, even if you could drive all night.
Well, Ottawa—you know, that place I fly to but never fly back to—is my gas station.
To me, Canada’s national capital—never a fun or particularly hip place, even by local standards—has become the place where not much happens except between me and my computer.
I explored and decoded Ottawa and, by extension, Canadian culture for well over a decade. It kept me busy and entertained, but now I’m done.
Feng claims he’s hibernating in Ottawa.
In the room across from him, I’m at a pit stop of my own.
And this is how Ottawa became the place where I always tackle my lists of lists, improve my work processes, find ways to make life easier when life eventually starts moving again, fix whatever I don’t have time to fix when I’m doing something more interesting—namely, travelling.
You have a lot of time to think and reflect in suburbia because distractions are few and far between. The most entertaining thing around may be the weather, and not in a good way. It’s 9°C as I’m typing this, just when the rest of the world is sweating, and no, I don’t consider myself lucky to be spared a heat wave.
“So, how are you going to manage these two months?” my mum asked before my dreaded flight to Ottawa.
“62 days, exactly. Well… I don’t know. Work, if I have work. Fuck. I hope I have work, tons of it. And then… no idea. I have energy, I just….”
“You’re not sure what to put your energy into.”
“That.”
I assessed the situation when I landed in Ottawa, still in winter—okay, post-awful-winter mode.
What’s worth my energy these days?
Weirdly enough, I finally have the time and mental space I never thought I’d have again when Mark was one, two, three, four…
Excuse me for a second.
“MARK, STOP IT, I’M WORKING!”
Well, not working, obviously. You and I both know it. But on the other side of the wall, a new deep voice—aka 13-year-old Mark—is booming away—
“…What?”
“Mark, I told you a thousand times you can’t just play video games and shout at the screen when I’m working.”
“BUT I’M WITH MY FRIENDS!”
“I KNOW, YOU’RE FUCKING YELLING!”
I lost points as a parent again. Oh well.
Just yesterday, it seems, I was putting Mark in the sling and counting down the hours until his next nap. Then I was chasing a toddler who never stopped talking or moving. And somehow I woke up today with a thirteen-year-old who spends hours lying on his bed with his phone and says maybe one word a week to his very uncool parents.
Parenting got a hell of a lot less hands-on and a hell of a lot trickier, if you ask me.
It’s a lot less labour-intensive and a lot more stressful because I can’t control this tiny human being who thinks he has it all figured out and that we don’t know a thing about life.
Okay, I wasn’t going to “catch up” with Mark.
I wasn’t going to magically create work out of thin air, and I’m not desperate enough for cold calls or—gasp—fake, engaging LinkedIn posts and networking with perfect strangers.
I needed a long-term project. I needed something I could build, slowly, day after day, that actually made sense to me.
Oh, right. The blog.
Yep, this project I started almost 20 years ago because I thought this new Facebook thingy wasn’t going to take off.
I still love blogging—I met cool people, and writing makes me happy. And funny enough, this blog is still read by thousands of strangers every day, even though I’m not on social media promoting it. Go figure.
But blogging has changed.
Like, no one is blogging anymore. Go online, everybody says so. It’s just as dead as translation, writing, photography, thinking with your own brain, using reasoning skills, and a long list of things I’m quite into.
I thought long and hard.
I decided I might as well be the last one standing.
So I spent the last month analyzing my own content—more than 2,000 posts spanning the years from my barely-functional English days to now.
And much to my surprise, I realized recurring themes were emerging—themes I never consciously set out to create—like the new “On the Move” tag, a collection of all the times I’m trying to get from point A to point B—and rarely making it there smoothly.
Or “Decoding Places,” because I can’t seem to stop obsessing over small details, from French pink toilet paper to those mysterious churrascas in Chile.
I reorganized everything, rebuilt the homepage to move beyond the old chronological format and a bunch of outdated blog features.
I was telling a story, after all—stories, in fact.
I hope you will keep reading them.
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