Fridays is fish

"I always have the same things:

"Fridays is always fish.

"Sundays is always meatloaf.

"Saturdays is always roast beef.

"Mondays is always pork chops.

"Wednesdays is always lasagna." She pronounces it law-zag-na as she pushes a limp wisp of hair behind her ear.

"Tuesdays I usually work late, so I just have salad. Tuesdays is always salad.

"Thursdays is always spaghetti. Every Friday I go to work and people say you've got pasta because it's Friday, and I say yes, because yesterday was Thursday and Thursday is always spaghetti. Just the same old boring food week after week after week. I'm so predictable and boring..."

Yeah, you could say that again.

"And Fridays is always fish."

I resist the urge to tell her from the other end of the bus that she has already mentioned that Friday is fish day.

"I went to the east coast and bought myself thirteen pounds of cod in a box. I took it with me on the plane. There were live lobsters in there too. They were still alive when I got off the plane and people kept asking me about them. But the cod. There was a lot of cod. My husband thought I was crazy but we were eating cod for months. Fridays is always fish and we had cod for months."

And she kept talking and talking and talking.

Christ there are a lot of boring people in the world. What I can't seem to figure out is if she was merely a boring person or whether her strange fixation on religious food taboos was the source of her boringness. I think too much about these things. It is yet another reason to move out of this shithole suburb in September. It's too wasp, and too wonderbread.

I had the chance to visit the new used bookstore down the street and it was surprisingly upscale for the neighbourhood. I noticed that when I walked in and immediately picked up a hefty volume of 15th century wisdom about the symptoms and cures of melancholy in all its wonderful forms. When I turned around, I found as if by magic a book about semiotics that I had tried unsuccessfully to locate at the library a couple of weeks ago. Contrary to my expectation of countless Harlequin romances I was confronted Marx, Engels, Spinoza, Hobbes, Edmund Spencer, Herodotus, Dante, Tolstoy, Sappho, the Beatniks and Cavalier poetry. I will be back.