Thanks for the tip

We hosted a birthday party at work yesterday, with way too many kids and not enough preparation or equipment. Regardless, it went really well and the kids appeared to have a lot of fun. We organized a scavenger hunt on the water, and they had to kayak around looking for the clues. That took a lot more time than I had expected and the two hours went surprisingly fast.

It wasn't until after everyone had left that we realized that the birthday girl had left her bathing suit behind. Her mother returned for it today and handed us each some thank-you cards. After she left we discovered that she had tipped us for our efforts the previous day. Ten dollars each. It wasn't a huge ammount, but a nice gesture, considering the fact that it wasn't at all expected.

In spite of the fact that I have to work tomorrow, I am so glad that it is Friday.

It looks like I will be moving closer to school and my friends between now and September. Now begins the careful negotiations to have the rest of my family not move in with me. It's not that I don't like them, but I'm sure that having four people living in a one bedroom apartment is not a good idea, even if millions of people all around the world do it all the time.

Maybe it's because I live in Canada or maybe it's because I'm just stuck up. Maybe it's because I can live on rice and peas and old clothing that is too big for me and eat out of old mason jars instead of dishes, but I need some space.

Just a dream

There I was, standing in the middle of the parking lot when a well dressed, middle aged woman approached me. She needed information, she said and I could help her. She began to ask questions about all sorts of things, some of which were fairly personal and I told her everything. I have secrets, but at that moment, nothing was sacred.

We got into her car to talk in private. I told her about life, love, my friends and relationships. Then she analyzed what I was wearing. The informant sat behind me and took off my coat. Then she took off the gold locket that I was wearing and slowly unzipped the back of my dress.

With a scalpel she made several large incisions into my back and peeled back my skin and muscles. Then she remarked a lot as to what she saw there. She then told me that she had to give me a brain aneurysm. I consented and she began to cut open the back of my head and dig around in my brain. It felt nice.

Then she drove me to the nearest skytrain station, while holding my head immobile in a vice grip. She asked more questions all the way there. I saw Angus, Dani and Camila meet each other at what may have been Lougheed or New West Station. She asked me about them too, and I told all. The next thing I knew, she was driving away in her lavender hatchback.

I had an equally bizarre ride home on the bus, and when I got there, I found that there were no marks on my back and that the lady had taken both my jewellery and coat.

What does it all mean? Your guess is as good as mine, but I've never worn that locket before.

White noise

To prove a point once in film, Heywood made us all sit down and listen for a moment to all the white noise in the room. A fan hummed slightly above our heads; the lights buzzed; people shuffled down the halls outside. "Aha!" he said, there is no such thing as silence, so why do you leave white noise out of your movies?

Because we didn't really realize that it was there. We learn to tune out the machinery that powers our lives, so that we don't notice it unless it is defective or it is no longer there. The noise is comforting. It's always there.

We go further though. The cars passing outside and birds chirping is not enough for us. We need our televisions and radios, electrical appliances and talk. There is always talk.

Sometimes I find myself talking to myself just to fill space. Sometimes I find myself talking to other people for the same reason. I don't think I am the only one.

I don't like feeling like I'm just talking to make noise, but that's exactly how I've felt on two separate occasions this week. Running into friends that I haven't seen for a while, I don't realize how much meaningless noise we are creating until we run out of things to say. Then we just sit there, trying to find polite ways to get out of the situation.

Silence is too uncomfortable.

Annual checkup

Another year has passed and what have I done?

Well, if I remember correctly, about this time last year I was nearing the end of a relaxing summer of part time work and a tad bit overeager to go to university. Kathy and I made a couple of mainly uneventful forays up to the university in search of textbooks and the locations of all our classes.

Then the full brunt of the school year was upon us and we discovered that your first year of university kind of sucks, not only because you are new and don't really know anyone, but because social life on campus revolves around the pub, and you can't get into it. I watched with some surprise as many people who I thought wouldn't survive did, and more surprise as a couple people I knew would make it dropped out. The year was decent to me though. I managed to drag myself out the other end with a gpa of 3.35. Not as good as it should be, but okay.

I became friends with some really great people who subsiquently moved away to Japan, France and Malaysia, though I plan to keep in touch. I dropped practically all the extracurricular activities that I had previously engaged in, except for dance. I began to regret this after a while though, so I joined Oxfam. I intend to do more this coming year.

Near the end of 2004, we were evicted from the house I had lived in for nearly 14 years. Within days of leaving, the house was demolished. It ranks as the second worst Christmas I have ever had. Now I find myself living in a suburb that feels like it is lightyears away from where I had previously lived, physically and socially. It is an unrenovated basement suite, which lacks a proper kitchen, bathroom and bedroom. I can safely say that mentally I do not live here, and I never will, though I suppose it could always be worse.

Even after eight months, I am still living out of boxes. I could not even begin to guess at the locations of many of my posessions, so out of boredom I turned to gardening. At first the neighbours were happy that my front yard didn't look like crap anymore. Now they complain that it makes their yards look bad. I can't please everyone.

Aside from gardening, I spent way too much on a camera last month and I am glad to say that I am not tired of it yet. I must have taken nearly a million pictures since then. I also bought a laptop, and now I can safely say that I won't be buying anything else for a while.

No longer tethered by the popularity crap in the small pond that was my high school, I broadened my musical taste a lot. I discovered a strange Norwegian polka/gypsy/rock band called Kaizers Orchestra, which in turn led toward the discoveries of Skambankt, Cloroform, Zeromancer, and Seigmen, among others. I also discovered some homegrown talent that had previously eluded me: Death From Above 1979, Do Make Say Think, Les Sequelles and Matt Mays and El Torpedo. Then somehow or other, I gained a newfound appreciation for a lot of things I used to listen to.

Somehow or other I had managed to not row for almost an entire year. Withdrawal finally got the better of me a couple of weeks ago and I couldn't be happier about it. In June I had vowed to get myself down to coxswain weight by the end of the summer so I could row competitively again. So far I haven't made much progress, and the prospect of losing 18 lbs in the next three weeks is very unattractive to me. I'll do it by December.

After a rough and depressing start to the summer, I am gainfully employed full time, coaching a sport that I know little about. I don't mind the challenge, but I'm quickly becoming tired of it. I've begun to read all my textbooks for the next semester. I'm sure that in time I will be tired of school again too, but not yet.

Who knows what next year has in store.

I'm not sure how to title this...

I had a good day at work today. The sun was shining, kids were swimming and everyone else down on the dock took it upon themselves to police the swimmers' behaviour. All I had to do was sit and watch. I love my job. It's boring, but that's a good thing.

I came home today to an unexpected surprise. After seven months of painfully slow renovations, I finally have a kitchen counter and sink. I still lack dishwasher, stove and bedroom walls, but any progress is good progress. It reminds me of the fact that I might possibly be able to stop sleeping on the livingroom floor before the time I move out.

My sister made me a pie thing out of blackberries and stracciatella gelato for my birthday and I finished eating it today. It didn't exactly look pretty, but it was delicious and made with lots of love, and that is really all that counts.

Tomorow I will take some time to look for my camera tripod. I haven't seen it since I moved in December, but I need it now that my parents bought me a new lens for my birthday. Apparently I don't need a tripod with that particular lens, but it's a little heavy for me to be holding. More toys to play with. Should be fun.

I have three more weeks until summer ends. I can't wait for more mental and financial abuse at the hands of my school, as strange as that sounds. Three months off is too much.

Psychological bandaids

It was my birthday yesterday. I can now legally drink and have my own credit card. Yay. I think more than anything it means that I should suck it up and go for my driving exam so that when people ID me I don't have to hand them my bright red loser license. Though other than that, there really is no point, because I don't have a car and the fact that I have a really cheap government-subsidized bus pass means I don't really need to drive anyway.

Now that I think of it, I would rather have a motorcycle, one of those little quiet Japanese ones, but I don't have the correct license to drive one and as long as I have my upass, I don't think I'll be spending anything on a vehicle.

Unfortunately I was too tied up with work yesterday, today and tomorrow to celebrate by getting completely hammered this weekend. There's always next week. And the week after. I'm sure I will have much more to say on this topic sometime in the near future.

A kid walked up to me at work today, holding his leg and appearing to be in a lot of distress. "My leg is all scratched up and it really hurts," he said, motioning toward a spot near his left knee, "I really need a bandaid."

His leg looked perfectly fine to me, but I grabbed the first aid kit anyways. As I rifled through it, he continued to speak: "It doesn't look really bad, but it is. It's really small but it could bleed a lot. I could bleed out."

Yeah kid, whatever.

By the time I had found a bandaid, I had to ask him a second time where he hurt. I could still see no sign of injury. The kid pointed to a place, I bandaged him up and he left. I'm pretty sure that he had pointed to a completely different part of his leg, but it didn't matter. He was cured.

He went swimming immediately after and his bandaid washed off in a few minutes. He didn't come back for another one.

Split shift

Thursdays I work a really strange split shift and today I am at school, because I work too far away from home and I have nowhere better to go.

Usually I don't like sitting for hours, doing nothing, but today for once I just needed some time to vegetate. The day soon found me sprawled unconscious on the floor in an obscure corner of an almost forgotten hall of the university, with my arms tenderly around my laptop. If the people on the seventh floor of the library can do it, then why can't I?

A few hours later, I was rudely awakened by the alarm clock on my cell phone, which I must have set earlier, knowing exactly how tired I was. My neck was stiff and my back was sore. There really aren't any good places to sleep around here, and everyone is too concerned about paying for tuition to protest the lack of couches on campus. One day we will...

After that, I decided to check out the new sushi place on campus, where the spicy tuna roll was good enough to make me cry. It was fairly cheap too, though because it was cheap, I ate a little too much and now I feel kind of sick.

At the moment, I am sitting here in the courtyard in the AQ, watching the stupid yet amusing antics of some boys in the Science Al!ve summer camp who are throwing waterbottles from heights and betting on which one will hit the ground first. They both land at the same time, and then the boys fight over who won the bet (neither did). Then they get really animated while they argue and then engage in repeated rematches. It's a pity that I am sans camera right now. They would be worth a picture.

It isn't weight but surface area of an object that determines how fast it falls. I'm a communication major and even I knew that. I guess they'll learn eventually, but maybe not today. They fight too much and already their instructors have shut them down.

And now I'm off to work again. Lucky me.

Spreading the love

Mornings are back to normal. Jen cranes her neck to see into the rear view mirror, trying hard to keep still enough through the traffic to put on her mascara. “He’s such a bastard,” she says, referring to her fiancée, “I gave up going to the bar with the other girls in the cul-de-sac to clean the house and then he comes home and says that the house is a mess.

“I should tell him that the garden looks like shit. That’s what I’ll do.”

I think it would be easier for them to break up now before they kill each other, but of course, I can’t say that. I just don’t see the point in marrying someone who you yell at constantly. They aren’t going to change after you marry them, so why bother if you hate them already? The world needs less fighting, not more.

I stumbled across the Complimenting Commenter’s blog quite by accident today. CC is well on the way to completing his/her goal of complimenting 3000 people through their blogs by the end of August. Yay for spreading blogosphere love.

More non fireworks related pictures soon. I promise.

Summer reading

"I just want to remind you that custom courseware is non-refundable," she said, scanning the bar codes.

"Yeah, I know," I said glumly, handing her my card and hoping that she wouldn't say the amount. I didn't want to know. I walked out with the books I need for one class then surveyed the damage: $103.

And what, you ask, do you get for $103?

David Lodge - Nice Work
Irvine Welsh - Trainspotting
Elizabeth Gaskell - North and South
Zoe Druick - CMNS-223 Custom Courseware: Advertising as Social Communication

Not much at all. Not much considering the fact that I still have to buy books for four more courses. Once again, I feel abused. I have a feeling that it's not going to get any better. On a positive note, I have some new things to read for the rest of the summer.

John arrived at work when I wasn't there to say hi. He probably heard that I was working there from Mimi. For some reason or other, I had thought that he had moved far away. At first I thought he was an idiot for not calling, but then I realized that because I moved, he probably doesn't have my phone number or email anymore. I should call him.

Apparently there is going to be a zombie walk downtown on August 27.

Sweet!

But you can't pick your family

Dear Sharon,

I don't understand you.

You told my grandmother that you regret never having the chance to get to know me, and yet in all the times we have met in the past three years, you have chosen to treat me as if I do not exist.

You dance around me as if I might bite. You hold me at arm's length, a child to be seen and not heard. Do you want me to prostrate myself in front of you, begging for your attention?

I suppose I should try talking to you, but I don't know what to say. I don't know you well enough, and you don't have any hobbies or interests that I can talk to you about. What am I supposed to say?

"So, how's widowhood?"

"How did you like working thirty years in a mental institution?"

"I hear you're beginning to regret that hysterectomy you got when you were 22."

"Is there a reason why you're shunning me, or are you just a bitch?"

No, I think it would be a lot easier if you just asked me about how my day was, but you can't seem to do that, can you?

I just don't understand.

Sincerely,

Erin

PS. Happy birthday.