And I can't even begin to tell you about poor, dear Charlotte. I can't because her life is not mine to talk about. But everytime she cries it breaks my heart. Whenever she calls, and I hear the tremble in her voice of heartwrenching misery, all I want to do is squeeze her. As if juicing the bitter essences of depression out of a succulent dear friend. But also because there are times I think she deserves to be held.

And then there's me. Tired, hands stained with drawing ink, face streaked with tears, and heart swollen with regret.

Unfortunately, that will have to be a story for another night.

J u n e 21

One of the reasons I was so artistically inclined is that as a teenager I was something of a wallflower. You know -- stuck on a dirt road in the country, only a couple of friends, ridiculously nerdy and profoundly sexually frustrated. So of course, I had all kinds of time to spend drawing away. I mean, it was that or go insane.

When I moved to Ottawa, though, that changed. No longer shackled to the stifling lack of personal space that I shared with my younger brother (a younger brother barely a year younger than I am, who is twenty now...) I grew up very quickly, and became the relatively dashing and outgoing socialite you see before you today. I tried to continue writing (as illustrated by my collection of on-line literary miscellany), but I had less time to grind that old pencil away on paper. Only when I was really inspired did I spend any time making up them funny pictures.

When I was eighteen, I met the first girl I was ever to be at all romantically (and physically) entangled with. About two weeks later, I was introduced to "Phil," who was destined to become my first serious girlfriend. When Phil and I started talking -- rather, e-mailing, because she was a high-spirited university gal, and by gum she liked e-mail too -- it was essentially pretty innocent, but as we got to know each other, became more flirtatious. We met for coffee, finally, on a non-date date, and it was at this point that I realized I could not go on any further without serious complications. I was horribly attracted to the tall, beautiful, pink-haired, writing-me-daily creature I'd come to know pretty well, but I was also happily enjoying a budding if uncertain romance with the wonderful young woman I'd met hardly a month before, and I didn't know what to do. I started, of course, by being honest with both of them. This was initially tear-streaked and messy for me, but necessary. I'm one of these ultramoralfuckingistic people who get upset when their friends toss plastic things out the car window... guilt and shame rule me. I do the right thing (not the "smart" or "Capital show of it, Rob, that was well thought out" things, however) most of the time.

So, for awhile, I didn't know what to do. I was torn and unhappy, having put myself in this position, but finding myself unwilling to hurt either person with that vicious stab wound to the heart (that I now know so very well) known as rejection. One of my coping mechanisms was a return to art. I was in my black and white "pen and ink" phase then, and I created a couple of dramatically melancholy images. One was never finished. There's a way to light the face such that shadows fill the areas around the eyes, and down the cheekbones, heavily shadowing under the nose and mouth. This is the effect I tried for. The rest of the face is bright and featureless, surrounded by blackness. The expression epitomizes anguish and frustration. I've never visually expressed anything quite so perfectly before, or since. His hands are pushing his hair back, and his eyes are closed. I wish I had a scanner. I'd show it to you.

I inked the basics, but it wasn't long before I gave up on finishing it. It was a painful image, and the facts of my life ended up such that my decision was made, heartwrenchingly, and suddenly I had a relationship with my new, serious, girlfriend Phil to forge.

The drawing I finished, simpler and sadder, was given to Lucretia, who unfortunately was already in love with me, and unfortunately had found herself competing against someone I thought at the time was perfect for me. The last day we spent together as lovers was full of tears and passion, both before and after we talked about what I'd decided. When we kissed goodbye, she asked to take the drawing home, which I'd offered to her a week or two before, but she had declined, fearing that with her messy room and four siblings, it would be destroyed.

And life went on. It will be a story for another day. Over the next three years, I hardly touched the tragic image I'd created. It sat on my drafting table, forgotten by my busy life and desire to remain unreminded of the mistakes of my past.

It will probably be finished by this time tomorrow.

Lilith and I spoke today. And not just a little -- a lot. Even though it is long distance to call her house (but not from downtown.. oh no.. just from here.. because this suburb is just plain evil. Stephen King could write three books just about Kanata.. perfect on the outside, creepy on the inside. Oh yeah baby.), we probably talked for a total of two hours (taking turns calling) today.

I won't go into detail about what was said. It's just too painful. Let it be said, though, that we understand how each other felt now, which unfortunately has been something that apparently has not gone on for a long, long time. For months, neither she nor I have really known what the other wanted and expected from our friendship. We both thought we did, though. Lilith needed to know where she stood with me. I needed to know where I stood with her. Lilith was confused and uncomfortable because I had said I wasn't ready for a serious relationship last summer, and yet I kept on with my obsessive loving. I was under the impression that Lilith didn't even want a serious relationship because of her hurtful past with boys, and so I didn't try to force her into one. I thought she was happy with our "more than friends" relationship, and had no desire to be anyone's girlfriend at the moment. She wanted to be my girlfriend, and didn't understand why I couldn't just pick one or the other for us to be.

So, she has a boyfriend now, and it's not me. It happened sometime during the month we didn't speak. I don't know who he is. It's less painful not to know.

I lost someone I'm still in love with almost instantaneously this afternoon, though in essence I suppose I never really had her. She stopped loving me around March or April. Right when our first fights happened. You can read about most of them in the Classic Snivel.

She wants to be friends. She really does. So do I. I missed her, and it felt really, really good when she told me that she'd missed me, too. We'll probably even find ourselves best friends as the weeks go by. But then there's the astonishing sense of regret. Knowing that we could have had so very much more, if only we'd talked about it and really understood one another. I don't know how to fall out of love. I know what rejection and breakups are like... those are wounds that heal. But how do you stop loving somebody who no longer loves you in the way you ache for? How do you just stand aside, as if the love and the intimacy and the times you're called "beautiful" never happened?

I conjured up a metaphor for what I think I'm going through this afternoon, as I walked around and functioned in a way that usually scurries rapidly away when I'm hurt or saddened by something. Especially the loss of someone beloved to me. It's like if you're clobbered in the head with a big cast iron frying pan. For awhile you hardly know what hit you. It hurts, but your brain has just been rattled, and it (being a system accustomed to relatively few massive blows) needs some time from you. Later on the concussion and the bleeding happen. In the meantime, you just stand there dazed.

I'm happier and better off that I was last night -- or any night of this past month of suffering, uncertainty and hell. But in another way it's so much worse. To know what I've lost. To know what can't be undone, even though you regret every little thing oh so much. Now what do I do except know that when she wants to be held, it's his arms she wants. When the phone rings, he's the one she hopes is calling. He's the one who makes her happy, and who she thinks of when she lies in bed alone.

I've joined the illustrious collection of ex-boyfriends who have lied to her, hurt her, left her, scarred her, and whom I've resented for every time she insulted herself, darkened bitterly, and looked ready to cry from the overwhelming tenderness of our love together.

For the encore, I get to hate myself to sleep.

J u n e 20

Go on. Read a little. You'll see.

In any event, I mention such howls to you, because it seemed the only way to properly convey how I'm feeling right now. I've been driven to distraction. Possibly even eye twitches, and most certainly a good long spell of lying flat on my bed, staring upwards at my Trainspotting poster on the ceiling (specifically Renton's teeth) and the fake spider/spiderweb just off to its lower left, occasionally blinking, saying nothing, not moving.

At least I finally bought shoes today. Really, it was the last thing I might have wanted to go about accomplishing, since usually there is just no hope to these foolish missions, but I figured I've been kind of a mope lately, and I ought to go out and do something on my own, without my protective webbing of trusty friends, such as to show my crippling sense of ennui exactly who is in charge of my body; legs, brain, genitals and all.
Not that it was an easy trip. My old shoes were falling apart more and more with every step (I actually made SLAPPING sounds as the soles from each shoe flopped independantly of my steps against the pavement) and it just wasn't the weather for my 20-hole boots, and it was feeling slightly grubby that I headed downtown. And I hit store after store. Often that particular shoe store would just have too many high-tech gimmicky jock shoes, and nothing I'd feel prim and propler wearing. If they had what I wanted, then it wasn't in my size -- and not only wasn't in my size, but it was really not in my size. Ultimately I descended upon Billings Bridge. I hadn't wanted to come here, exactly, since usually the only times I'm in this mall are when I'm with Lilith. Her brother works at the McDonalds beside it, so often she comes into town with him, and I'll either meet her there, or we'll wander back that way when she has to go home. Nevertheless, it was my only hope.

And not much of a hope.

After an additional three stores, I went upstairs, and set my jaw. I was going to be damned if I headed home without a new pair of shoes. This was it. The time of reckoning. I marched into the unassuming Bata factory outlet, picked out the pair of shoes I hated the least, made sure they fit (a snug size 12... just perfect in spite of what are normally size 13 feet.), bought the hell out of them, and once I was outside, I put them on. Now I'm the proud new owner of some savage knockoffs of essentially what I wanted, not significantly cheaper ("cheap ripoff," one would think, implies so much.. but no..), but regardless comfortable, good-smelling, and all around K E E N suede skater sneakers.

With that good purchase behind me, I bought an ice cream cone, and headed upstairs for my bus.
Along the way, I noticed a reasonable looking magazine shop. And I mean, I love Adbusters Magazine, which is of course consequently nearly impossible to find in Ottawa, so whenever I'm confronted by a magazine store, I just have to check. The first thing I noticed was the clerk. Now, perhaps it had something to do with the six-foot height of my first girlfriend, "Phil" (as always, the story of that curious pseudonym can be found in the Classic Snivel Archives), but the young woman working the counter was really quite tall, and while she was at once pretty and physically capable of beating me up soundly, also had a somewhat bookwormy nerdy quality that inspired a small moment of twitterpated pining as I entered. Anyway, I seriously doubted to find a copy of my precious magazine, but I browsed anyway, blushing slightly from the smile that all clerks actually give anyone entering their store. And since I just didn't see it, I walked around the counter to, what the heck, ask if it was possible they carried it.

And she just looked surprise, saying that of course they did, and walked around to where I had just been standing, and there, in plain view, and quite impossible to miss was a big white stack of brand new Adbusters magazines, right at the front row of the shelves.

"Oh," I said foolishly, "right where I didn't see them."

So of course, I had to buy one. With tax, it came to a princely sum of $6.61. I apologized for being an idiot as I dug around in my briefcase for the change I'd stowed after purchasing my ice cream, reached in blindly, pulled out a handful of money, and there, in my hand, was exactly six dollars and sixty-one cents, with change still untouched inside. I knew at once I was destined to buy this magazine. Somehow, I thought, the universe is in alignment again. The simple act of buying shoes is really a kind of closure, and as a sign that things are going to be happy again, I bought a magazine with precisely the sum that ended up in my hands entirely randomly. I thought for sure that I need only go home and call Lilith, and all would be amazingly well.

Yeah. You can smell the irony from here.

I got in around 9 tonight, and that's when I called. The phone rang about five times, and just as I was about to hang up, her brother answered the phone. So, I asked if she were in, and before answering, he asked me who he might say was calling. Immediately dread and paranoia took over my rationality. When I told him it was Rob, he informed me that I'd just missed her, and slowly this creeping icy hand clenched my stomach, and made me wonder if maybe that wasn't entirely true. But I left a message asking her to call me anytime, because it was important. And I spent the next half hour or so trying to calm myself down and give her the benefit of the doubt. Lilith has never done anything mean or dishonest, not to me, or anyone. It didn't seem possible that she would be deliberately screening her calls. I forced myself to trust her, give her the benefit of the doubt.

Charlotte called soon afterwards. She was at the airport, waiting for her sister, due back from a 3-week vacation in Europe. We chatted about secret things for awhile, when she suddenly spotted her much-awaited sibling, and she promised to call back later. Then my sister called, and we talked for something like an hour.

And Charlotte did call again, around 10:45. We talked until 11:30, again about things that I can't really mention, and out of curiosity, I checked to see if any messages had been intercepted while we spoke... and indeed one had. "Could it be...?" I wondered.

And it was. While I was gabbing away and helping my friend out, Lilith had called. My only problem is that I can't say whether her tone was the result of exhaustion (having just returned from a rehearsal), or irritation. I just sat there, rigid, assuming her flat tone was actually anger at the thought of having to talk to me, not sure whether I could really feel relieved that I'd been wrong about my earlier conclusion (which I had certainly wanted to be wrong about at the time). I'm hoping I was wrong about the second conclusion too.

It was too late to try getting in touch, and if she were tired, it didn't seem worth waking her just to talk tonight...
Once again, today we shall attempt to communicate. Once again, I hope we're still the dear, intimate friends we've been for almost two years.

J u n e 19

And I was really going to do it, too.

But first Charlotte called. She was in a bad state. I can't, unfortunately, really talk about it, but I will say (with a sick kind of pride) that I'm the only person on earth with the complete knowledge of everything going on in her head right now, and for some frightening reason, it makes me feel like a big man. At any rate, it also leaves me obsessed with her well-being and happiness, and tonight she was miserable. And all I could do was talk and babble and pretend to be funny, and promise that if she went to talk to a psychiatrist, then I'd get off my milky-white manic depressive bottom and see one too. Somehow after an hour of doing that, she was cheered up a little, and went to try calling her boyfriend, presently and lamentably quite far away, and unfortunately due to be drastically farther in a couple of days. Granted, later that same night I was due to be the one calling in need of emotional support and friendly ears, but of course I'm getting ahead of myself.

After my evening's chores (you know, milking the suburbian cows, walking a mile or so to trade for provisions, splitting some logs for the central air conditioner and all that), I picked up the phone, and pressed the magical pre-programmed button that calls Lilith's house. Usually a task I do with delight. Tonight my heart was pounding, like the last, desperate, greasy throbs of a Heart McAttack. It rang and rang, and just as I thought in despair that no one was home (half-wondering with paranoid uncertainy if she was screaming "NO ONE answer that!"), her mother picked up the phone. This is our conversation.

"Hi, is "Lilith" (name changed, as always) there?"

"I'm sorry, I'm expecting an important phone call, and it's long distance. I can't talk to you right now. I'm sorry."

CLICK.

At this point, I thought I was still connected, because someone on my end (I think it was my end) picked up the phone, and then, hearing a conversation, hung it up again. So I just said "Well, if you could just tell her that Rob called," and, expecting a reply, I realized that the silence was actually me being hung up on.

At first I just felt like an idiot for calling at such a profoundly bad time. Then I felt a little miffed. I mean, it would have taken five seconds to take a message. Just let my friend know that I called, so that she could, say, call me back. Like, after a month of not speaking I really just wanted tonight of all nights to be the night she and I talked about our mutually hurt feelings, and instead I just got a case of really bad timing, and a really rude reception. Not that it was deliberate. Her mother does this a lot, though usually I get the chance to talk to Lilith. I guess she pays for the phone, and deserves priority when important calls are expected, but I can't help but think that 'someday, your daughter is going to be living very far away from you, and I'm going to be the one she calls and visits, and then you're going to wish you'd given her more of a reason to stick around.'

So my plans to call Lilith have been rescheduled to tonight.

For whatever happens, be assured that I'll probably have a whole freaking lot to say.

And as I conclude, I hope you all saw Deep Space Nine's season finale last night. Wowee. Call me a sad pathetic science-fiction loser (because after all, I am), but I love space battles more than anything.

* "Anything" does not include back rubs, cuddling, collapsing my head in damp exhaustion from between the legs of a beloved onto her belly, or endless hours of coffee with friends.

J u n e 18

What happened between us can be read about in past episodes of the Daily Snivel, but as a refresher, our tense silence reached a sort of climax the last time we spoke, two weeks ago. Lilith wished to avoid hurting my feelings by shouting at me over the phone, and so she had taken the time to compose her feelings calmly into a letter, and -- to my chagrin -- she basically felt that until I read her words, and understood her point of view, that we really ought not to discuss our clash of feelings. However, two weeks have now gone by, and this portentous letter remains not quite forthcoming. I should say in the defense of all involved that the mail delivery between our two homes is ridiculously sluggish. I could mail a letter to Toronto and it would arrive faster than the meagre trip to that oh-so remote point in the same bloody Ottawa Valley. In the same time that correspondance can take between us, I could mail a letter to, say, Spokane or California.

And in the past, not all of the letters I've sent have arrived, which is a peculiarity to our specific situation only. Three or four have just failed to arrive in the past year. Now, I still consider her parents to be highly suspect in the matter, but I'd rather blame that faceless and detestable creature -- Canada Post. There's probably some embittered letter carrier taking souvenirs from our intimate correspondance.

So, Joe the Mailman has some bathroom reading but, meanwhile, I've gotten no letter, it's been a month since we've spoken as friends, three months since we've seen one another, and I'm tired of waiting and waiting.
This friendship is dear to me.
Tonight I call.

J u n e 17

I helped a little.

About this time last year or, for that matter, this time last January, I tended to average about 20 megabytes or so of free hard drive space. When I got this computer, four years ago (my god.. four years!), memory was expensive in any form, whether in terms of RAM, or in terms of a hard drive. So, while my 386 may be quite the technologically superior work now (I mean.. for a 386), at the time it was your average piece of work, grinding away with four megabytes of RAM, and a whopping 170 megabyte hard drive (which, at the time, I never for second thought I might ever fill). Now, thanks to Canada's munificent student loan program, I managed to make a few modifications to old betsy here, and I'm now the proud owner of probably the only 386 with an entire gigabyte of space kicking around. And sure, there are only 8 megabytes of RAM, but you'd definitely be surprised at what Windows 3.1 can do with a huge swap file and 8 megabytes to play with. This kitten actually purrs.

So, suffice it to say, I'm no longer really too finicky about what gets downloaded, so long as it wouldn't reasonably take more than maybe an hour (which would actually be something quite large) for whatever it was to come from a server to my hard disk. Last night I even downloaded DOOM from the web, just because I hadn't played it in years, and I wanted to finally hear it with a sound card (another modification). And of course, well, because it satisfies my giant horse penis of a male ego to walk around annihilating things with really large guns, listening to their tortured screams and the splatter of their blood on the walls.

I mean, hey, we all have our issues.

A couple of hours ago, I was reading the Geek Site of The Day, catching up on the sites I'd missed, because it isn't really a site of the day thing anymore, and I only check it once in awhile to see what's been added. One of the sites I read was really strange. It was called "Virtual Woman 95". At first, it seemed to remind me of the "Girlfriend Version 1.0 Manual" or whatever it is, that gets tossed around people's e-mail forwarding lists, and eventually winds up in your mailbox about a dozen times (As an aside, I hate hate hate e-mail forwarding lists. You know, the kind that belongs to your friend away at school, and everytime he gets something forwarded from someone he knows, he forwards it to everyone he knows, and ultimately you'll get it again and again, because as the saying goes, we know everybody on earth by Six degrees of separation). It's just a vaguely cute list someone wrote about girls.

But no -- that's not what it was at all. It was this cheap software company, and on their website, they'd set up a program called Virtual Woman 95. And the idea was that this program simulated a womam. The idea is that they created this really cheap AI, that could sort of talk to you. It was laid out like an on-line chat system... you had a Window, and the "girl" had a window, and you typed messages to each other. Now, it's a neat idea, but then they also provided the woman. There is this horrible crude drawing of a shapely female that looks for all the world to have been drawn in 16 colours using Windows Paintbrush. And she gets overlaid on a background .jpg of your choice -- for example, a 256 colour image of a tropical beach -- so what you get is this high resolution scene with a creepy drawing overlaid on top, that blinks and opens its mouth and things.

So of course, the point is to chat up this mysterious creature. I downloaded it, and played it for a little while. I was distinctly reminded of those text-based adventure games people used to play back when monitors only had two colours -- green and nothing. And there was a fair program running that accepted sentences and one-word commands, and it very crappily ran the adventure along ("You are standing in a room facing south. There is a chair in the Northeast corner, a door on the east wall, and a door on the west wall. There is a sign across the room that you can't quite read from where you are.") until you got incredibly frustrated with the entire thing ("I don't understand 'I hate this stupid game!'") and went outside to pick the heads off dandelions. But that was the 80's for you.

What is sort of hinted coyly at on the website, but essentially is the entire point of the program, is that if you're a real smooth talking coolie you can gradually get the fake woman to start taking off her clothes. Like, basically randomly at some point, she decides she likes you enough to have her shirt removed, so she then just stands there in a bra talking to you until whatever point she decides she can take her jeans off. And that's when she starts saying progressively racy things. Just when you think it's going to go to the next logical step and a piece of underwear is going to fade away, the program ends and you are informed that the girl isn't "allowed" to go any further in the shareware version of the program. So, if you really want to see this creation naked, all you have to do is send them like $30 for the full version. Which would be an amazing way to make a lot of money off shareware, I admit. I mean, I'm playing Doom now, but I wouldn't ever, really, be that tempted to register it for the full shabang when there's still Doom 2 to be had, and reminisced over.

But if you're sitting there, with this monster erection, just aching for a little nudity, and suddenly a splash screen asking you for money pops up, well, half the people with this thing are going to be whipping out their checkbooks.

Which is what would happen, if the concept were somehow arousing. But in the end, it's creepy and tedious. I got really quite far just by whining about my life..

"Whoops, I'm sorry, I thought you were someone else. I guess I'd better leave."

"Yes, please just go... Go and leave me alone with my pain."

And so on.

It's even more insidious, because you can "build" the person you're talking to. Which would make sense if you had a huge obsession with your next door neighbor, or a classmate, or your cousin or something, and you wanted to recreate them in every way... assuming she was a badly drawn blinking machine. You can select the race, hair colour, and personality of the person you're talking to ("aggressive," "cute," "rude," "intelligent," and "curious"), as well as the background image (which, ironically, is of immensely higher quality than the actual "virtual woman"), what she has on, whether she has tan lines, and what kind of underwear she is wearing. Of course, they all have exactly the same face and body -- it's just that there are different colours.

I was reminded a lot of that new Japanese teenybopper fad, which are these little plastic eggs with a small LCD screen in them. And on the screen is this little bird that you have to take care of. You have to press a button to feed it, and you have to pay attention to it when it beeps at you. If you neglect it, it dies or flies away. I think the going record for keeping one is a couple of days. There are even counselors available for people in mourning because their little bird flew away or died.

And it occurred to me that this program would be a cool thing, if you could just engineer some interactivity and risk beyond the clothes coming off and the program ending, and the clothes staying on and the program ending. Like, let's say that they could engineer real personalities -- of a sort -- into the game. And you still had to type, but it would be more like the real fake life of something like IRC, where you would have to make friends with this person over a couple of days. Dates could be arranged for you to talk, and you could talk as long as you wanted, but you would actually be having conversations. If you got in a fight, well, that would be it, and there'd be either a chance for reconciliation, or you'd have to "meet" somebody else. I think even I would play a game like that.

If only because it's so unhealthy to want to undress my real life friends.

J u n e 16

The particular Sunday that I am only now just departing was also that joyous of occasions -- Father's day. I don't like Father's day. I really, really don't. It stinks of obligation, and if you're one of those kids who, like me, doesn't have a father, well, all it does is drive that painful fact home, now, doesn't it? I get pretty uncomfortable when hanging around with my birthday (Christmas Eve) for that reason -- it being the annivesary of my father's death.

My aunt and my grandmother drove to the cemetary today, to put some flowers on his grave. I didn't realize this until the last second, and even when I knew about it, I didn't know that I'd be welcome to come along. I don't especially like my aunt -- for the reason that she doesn't especially like me. I'd be entirely less judgemental otherwise, but what is a boy to do? And by this point I'd already made plans with my dear buddy Charlotte, who was braving the two-hour transit from downtown just to spend the day with me. So, when everybody came back, and the words were spilled out to the effect that my aunt was wondering why I hadn't "wanted" to come to the cemetary with them to put flowers on the grave of my own father, I'm sure the look on my face was more or less of someone who just wanted to run away and sell his body on the streets, because that was when Charlotte dragged me upstairs, sat me down on the bed, and tried quite bravely to cheer me up. There were just so many implications to resent. I think the one I focused on, though, was that somehow I would have to make this trip in a car with a woman I quite dearly dislike (and my grandmother, who is actually a sweetheart) simply to properly "show" my sense of grief and loss. As if I didn't miss him everyday anyway; as if I really wanted a holiday specially created just so that I would feel more guilty than normal about my life.

And so, we decided that watching Clerks would be just the thing for our mutually glum spirits. Quite domestically, we went back downstairs to make some popcorn, helped out with cutting the vegetables for dinner, and just as I thought I might be feeling better about the world and my relatives, we scrambled away to laugh ourselves silly in front of the magic glowing talky box.

Two and a half hours later, we plunked downstairs to clean up our messy snacking remains. Charlotte had some dinner, and I puttered and fussed and hovered nervously (being the timid creature I am), and eventually toasted myself a bagel, ostensibly because I was hungry enough to eat, but actually also because I was neurotic enough not to want to eat anything especially large or messy or time-consuming in front of my best friend.

And it's funny how people save up little moments that can make you feel like you're twelve again for those times that you have close friends over to witness your humiliation, because my aunt struck again, indirectly, through the anecdote (relayed by my grandmother, who thought she was telling a cute story) about how she was having a barbecue later today with some friends, and as part of the preparations, had bought one of those frozen ice cream magic cakes that presumably go well in the suburbian Sunday evening barbecue circuit. So, when she came over for the trip to the cemetary, she left the cake in the freezer temporarily (because, after all, cold things melt), and spent her time saying things like 'Gee.. I hope Rob doesn't find that cake and eat it!'
I mean, gosh, they were gone for an hour and a half. What if I'd come downstairs, like a ravenous oaf, eating everything in sight, when, suddenly, I found this mysterious cake in the freezer that I'd just obviously have to devour on the spot, because of course I have not a bit of restraint or willpower when it comes to food.

At which point Charlotte dragged me upstairs once again, because I'd sort of become extra white, and started staring at my feet, perhaps trying to locate my already crushed and defeated self-esteem, which most probably had scurried for cover under the table.

I don't know. Lately I've been extra sensitive about myself. Largely it has to do with what's going on with Lilith, but partially it's also caused by the summer, where all I really can do is socialize and have fun, and while that's wonderful sport, I'm (high energy... high maintenance) finding myself a trifle unfulfilled without classes. And conversely to my situation, Charlotte is working and constantly busy, but when she's home and finished with the day, or the week, she just doesn't want to do anything. She doesn't want to eat, or go out, or have fun, or anything. Just sit around, watch TV, and go catatonic. Basically, she's depressed, and I'm miserable.
So, we've been hanging out an awful lot.

It was really interesting spending time together today, too. Kanata is for all intents and purposes the middle of cultural nowhere, so rarely do I have people over (usually all the fun is to be had downtown), unless it involves amounts of nudity, sex, and backrubs. And today we just bummed around and did nothing but talk and play CDs, and watch television, and yet it didn't feel the slightest bit pathetic, because we were actually doing it together. Left to our own devices, that's what would have happened in our respective homes anyway, but it was just comfortable to vegetate, stretch out, babble, and put track 5 of the Romeo and Juliet soundtrack on endless repeat (And so it was that I lent the disc to her -- I love to share my personal goodies with trusted friends, and she was obviously enamoured with the prospect of new music.. however, I also could just not stand the sound of it any longer... you know how it is when someone falls in love with a song, and you just want to indulge them endlessly, so you don't complain when you hear it twenty straight times). It was just comfortable. At some point, after the Simpsons, Charlotte had to send some e-mail to her boyfriend, before he left for B.C., telling him about her ennui, and the vague unhappiness and resentment she felt over being left alone to her own devices when so much is actually going on between them, knowing that he leaves for B.C. on Tuesday, and then, when he gets back towards the end of July, there will be perhaps a week or two before he leaves for home in England -- perhaps forever.

And out of politeness, I quietly refrained from babbling incessantly the way I might normally, and instead lay down on my bed, and watched her type (without reading the highly personal message). Eventually I just curled up, and fell asleep, still listening to the CD and the staccato rhythm of her fingers brushing against the old heavily clicking keyboard I normally keep in the closest (versus my squishily sexy ergonomic wavy keyboard that is the frustration and bane of all who visit and use my computer). I was probably asleep for half an hour, just a few feet from where she sat, contented just to be in the company of my dear friend after a long day, and while the significance is difficult to impress upon you, it was really quite sweet. I just felt happy. I also felt awkward upon waking, knowing that I was probably snoring the light little snore that my dear friend Broken finds adorable when I'm all curled up comfortably, but that I regard self-consciously as snoring, and nothing but snoring. It wasn't mentioned when I woke up, though. I just sat down on the floor beside her chair, and helped her send the e-mail (my computer is finicky, and we ended up having to rely on my own means rather than her hotmail.com acccount), gingerly recoiling with my characteristic guilty awkwardness whenever we accidentally touched.

Before she left, she curled up on my bed, and we talked uncertainly about some of her problems. She could smell my aftershave in my pillows. I sat in my not-quite-sufficiently-overstuffed-to-be-evil swivel chair, and kept an eye on the time. And as our day of sulking ended, I walked with her to the bus stop, me in my trenchcoat and decrepit shoes, and she wearing one of my shirts for extra warmth, with a satchel filled with little things I intended to lend her.

I still hate Sundays. But at least I shared this one with someone.

Brought to you by Jolt Cola, with
the buzzing and mild irritation of
caffeine induced paranoia.