Scooby Doo

At one point in time the four of us became extremely disgruntled with the state of affairs. What was the state of affairs? I don't remember. Who were we? I don't remember that either.

We made a little desert island for us. In the sun. With palm trees. Very stereotypical. We sat around a picnic bench and began to talk about how we like dogs.

I turned to the woman beside me. "You don't like small dogs, do you?" In the distance I could see something moving toward us in the grass.

"Actually, I do," she replied.

"But not like the toy kind?"

"They're really good for hunting," she said "they point stuff out and you shoot it."

It was just then that distant object arrived. It was a mechanical Scooby Doo and it bit the head off of the woman I was talking to. It was actually quite comical.

Then I woke up.

Fairground

Dear Tom,

I had a dream last night that I flew out to see you and we went to some sort of carnival/fair and you were driving the ugliest yellow/cream coloured Volvo I had ever seen. We parked in the middle of a drag racing track and then promptly got separated.

I wandered around for a while, not overly concerned. I had some lunch and considered borrowing someone's phone to call you but I wasn't sure if it would be long distance or not so I didn't. I wandered back to where the car was parked, but it was gone. It was then that I started to worry a bit.

I climbed to the top of a flagpole to see if I could find you that way, and luckily you had a large catepillar thing that jumped up and down on your shoulder and I saw that. To get to you I had to slosh through some knee deep mud and across a set of zig-zagged teak bridges that were over a giant crevasse in the middle of the fairgrounds.

You were angry because I had wasted so much time and screwed up whatever dinner plans you had made. You were also wearing a really nice sweater. Your assignment for today is to find a sweater like the one you were wearing in my dream because it looked really good on you. You told me that I should become acquainted with the person you were standing beside because I had a lot of people to meet and I talked to her for a while, and you promptly disappeared.

I wandered around for a while. I took a tour through an old bus that had been tole painted and took some time to watch the demolition derby/monster truck/elephant show. Somehow in all of this I lost my camera and bag and went looking for those.

I never found my camera but I did find the partial contents of my bag: notebooks and stuff. They were scattered on a pier and some were floating in the water below. I couldn't find my textbooks for school and was pissed off because those things are so damn expensive.

Then I woke up.

Packaging

I bought a pair of shoes a couple of months ago and I haven't really worn them much. I remember them being fairly comfy when I tried them on in the store, but since then they have become increasingly uncomfortable, especially the left foot, which has also developed a very loud squeak.

Every time I have worn these shoes I have thought to myself that they're so damn uncomfortable and that maybe there's something inside them that I can fix and that when I get home I'll take them off and have a look.

It's just like how I always think to myself that I really should throw out a pair of holey socks just as I'm putting them on. I resolve to get rid of them that night once they are off, but instead I'll throw them in with the laundry, into my dresser and back onto my feet. My short term memory isn't overly good sometimes, unless it's remembering useless information.

Today after wearing them outside for a couple of minutes I returned home because there was something really annoyingly uncomfortable digging into the top of my left foot.

I took off my shoes and began to walk into my apartment when all of a sudden I got a brilliant idea! Why don't I look inside my shoe and see if something in there is the problem? And what do you know? There was a big piece of cardboard in there, the kind that they put inside of shoes while shipping them so that the toes don't get crunched in.

The question is why it took me three months to arrive at that conclusion.

Money

Damn you, snow. Piss off. What do you think this is? Canada?

I really feel like this semester is sucking the life out of me, and talking to people doesn't really help. I've had enough of work and I want it to stop. I cut down my hours to one day a week, which means that all of a sudden they know I'm available two days per week, so they can ask me to come in on those days. In effect, nothing has changed.

Telling people about these things only prompts them to tell about their own financial woes, their student loans, their rent, their inability to get sufficient hours or whatever. None of those things are my problem. Could I use more money? Yes, but I won't suffer if I don't work for the next couple of months. I don't have student loans and I'm one of the most conservative budgeters on the planet. I run nothing but surplusses because the moment I'm out of university I need to buy a condo to get my parents off my back. The only thing I can complain about is that the interest rate on my bank account is a lousy 3.75%.

I work and I work and I work and I save and I watch all my friends go off and do fun things like volunteering in Ghana and trips to Cuba and exchanges in Europe. I will be finishing my undergraduate degree with far more money than I had before I started and yet I don't have the time or the funds to do anything other than work. I know that no matter what I do I'm never going to be able to afford to live in this city, something that hosting the Olympics is only going to make worse, just as Expo 86 made it worse.

This stuff doesn't really belong on my blog. My real problem is that I haven't had a good night's sleep in at least six weeks.

32/365: Stu

Stu was not an easy person to like and he had the habit of scaring people away from our team. If anyone could put it in an inappropriate way it was him. A constant stream of negativity and bad words came out of his mouth, but other than that he actually wasn't that bad, if you had a bit of a thick skin.

He loved the Tragically Hip. He took us on lots of trips, which were awesome. Then suddenly, he dropped off the face of the earth, never to be heard from again. Instantly it was as if a huge weight had been lifted off of everyone. In spite of that, some of us missed him, though it was months before we could put our fingers on it.

Pickle juice

So what do you do when the person sitting across from you on the train starts complaining about how she's really pissed off at her boyfriend for giving her a hard time about drinking the liquid out of the pickle jar?

What do you do when against all odds the person sitting beside you joins the conversation and says that she too is ostracised and marginalized in society for drinking pickle juice, sometimes straight from the jar!

What do you do when they begin to discuss the exact volumes and frequencies of their respective consumption of briny water, and begin to debate the merits of chugging the entire jar as opposed to having a spoonful a day?

And what about when a random guy across the aisle begins to add his thoughts on the possible health benefits of regular pickle brine consumption?

Pretend to be asleep. Pretend to be very asleep.

31/365: L.E.

At one point in time she decided that she wanted to move in with me. Could she move in with me, please? She would help with the rent. She would clean. She would do anything to move out of her parents' house. It would be perfect because I have only one bedroom and no private and convenient place to put a second bed, and no way of sharing my crappy dial-up internet. I tried a lot of really subtle, polite ways of saying that I wasn't too keen on the idea and after three months I put my foot down and said no.

The fact was that she, like many of my friends, is fine in small doses but that in all honesty I would have a lot of trouble living with a compulsive neat-freak uber-Catholic who goes into frequent histrionics over the stress that she feels about her two courses. Just way too high strung for me.

Within a week of my refusal, I was mysteriously dumped off her facebook friends list and we really haven't talked since. Meh.

Scattered

I spent some time downtown today at a little film studio that I'm doing a bit of grantwriting for. I find it amazing how all at of a sudden over the past three months through a series of complete coincidences the film community seems to have reached out and taken me in again.

It's the technology I like. Seeing all the cables hung up and machines stacked on top of each other makes me miss doing all that stuff, especially in high school where there was no pressure to actually make anything decent. I really miss spending hours and hours of time alone in the editing suite watching the same footage over and over, screwing with it until it flows together just right. It's like a puzzle that I have to solve. It's how I write posts for this blog. It's how I do pretty much everything.

I really want to take my camera out and take some pictures but it seems every day I have plans it gets really nasty outside. Today it was snow and rain again. I miss taking pictures

I've been having some trouble lately with speaking. I open my mouth and sound falls out like marbles and makes no sense, and in the process of botching the delivery, the thought that led to it stops making sense too. I'm very scattered and having trouble thinking straight. It's really embarassing. It's something completely new to me and I don't like it. It scares me.

How my mom got a degree in economics

"You know Gary, I've talked about him before."

"Which Gary?" mom asked.

"You know, the one that tells the story about the early days of the School of Communication at SFU, back when they were really weird. He's got the this story about how in a lecture one of the profs shut off all the lights in the lecture hall, and came in late wearing a robe or something and carrying a long tapered candle with some poor student he'd found out in the hall carrying a boom box with weird music on it.

He walked slowly down the stairs of the 300 seat lecture hall by the light of the candle, and then, turning to face the students, he began to sway and make odd noises..."

"I was in that class!"

"You were in a class with Gary?"

"That class was what made me switch my major to economics."

30/365: Woman with the Mickey Mouse sweater

"Are you cold? Here, have my sweater," she said. I had been playing out on the pier when she approached me. It was windy and I was a little cold, but it still took a bit of convincing before I accepted it from her.

It was large - it went down to my knees and I had to roll up the sleeves. It had blue and white vertical stripes and a large Mickey Mouse on the front. It was definitely not the sort of thing I would have picked out for myself.

When I wandered back to my parents they were visibly puzzled and perhaps a little disturbed. "Erin, where did you get that?" they asked. I explained, and then led them out to the spot where I had last seen her but she was gone. The fact that I would never be able to return the sweater bothered me in a really profound way and ensured that it was many, many years before I was able to send it off to charity.