Most of my fear, of course is related exclusively to the process of actually getting there, which seems to me only possibly capable of being "half the fun" if you're looking forward to a vacation in some strange country where "fun" involves bloody plunger-handle sodomy inflicted by complete strangers with traditional costumes and no malice whatsoever. I'm not actually afraid of flying, but instead afraid of wandering around strange airports trying to find connecting flights, surrounded by Americans and security types who will most likely profile me as a likely drug smuggler, and request to inspect my holiest of holies with latex gloves and German Shepherds. Luckily, I have an average wait of around an hour between each flight, so I might at least have time to freshen up and wipe the blood off my "Purty, wise-crackin' face" before travelling again.

In every other way, though, I'm terribly excited. Clorinda and I have been talking for well over a year now, and we've become quite close. This trip has been planned, talked about, or merely wishfully speculated a number of times, and finally, finally, it is upon us. I properly expect it to be one of those moments that you get to carry around with you forever, and so of course I plan to cheapen the experience with as many poorly taken photos as possible. If I manage to scan any, they shall certainly be up here for your inspection, keeping in mind that my coolest pictures rarely ever do.

I tend to mention Clorinda most incidentally, so I expect that trying to imagine the proper scope of our friendship is most difficult. This has a lot to do with the fact that while she actually plays a significant part in my daily life (I mean, she e-mails me, unlike you lurking ingrates...) -- and by that I mean that we've shared shameful secrets, shameful exploits, shameful fears and our otherwise mundane life stories, and we value each other's opinions and insights and sarcastic comments as they pertain to all of the above, and anything else possibly mentionable -- we by no means ever see each other at all, and we've also never actually met.

This state of virtuality has many advantages, of course. I discovered it with my friend Kitten years ago, in that you can confide all sorts of scandalous thoughts to someone, knowing that whether she keeps her mouth closed or not, it won't matter because it could never possibly ever get back to anyone. It also means that this person won't really judge you, or find it difficult to look at you the next day, or run away screaming -- because they already live several thousand miles away in an entirely separate life, and if they've seen your face more than once, it's by pure luck.
The disadvantages are, I hope, even more obvious, though. You never have the opportunity to blither and blather until six in the morning (unless you decide to forego all taboos and personal dignity and resort to that most nebulous of social situations -- the (sneer) chat room...); you can never "have coffee;" or see when the other person smiles at the thought of you; you can never fight crime together; and in a way you feel almost like an illegitimate friend. You've never even held that person before. All you can do is exchange wretched electronic text that tries to convey the same thing in unhappy unreal form. It isn't fake, or artificial, but it's not quite real Maple Syrup, either.

And now we can meet. And more than that, we can talk, for hours, unopposed, unchallenged by long distance bills, personal schedules, the time it takes to write e-mail, or work, or school. We have four nights and three whole days to realize our friendship. And feel it. And understand it. I can't imagine anything as wonderful as that experience -- of meeting someone who is destined to become one of your best friends... made no more surreal or mundane by virtue of the fact that she already is. She's announced to her world that for the duration of my stay, I belong to her. Her time is monopolized, and that's that. I mean, certainly she'll want to show the strange little Canadian around, and introduce me to her friends, and see what they think, but she realizes the rarity of this experience as much as I do. We'll only have so much time together, and we'll only be able to visit so often, at the cost the trip tends to require. I'm looking so very forward to this. The past month and a half has almost seemed aligned to prevent me from going, or at least discourage me -- test my resolve. And in spite of everything, I've persevered, and coped, and improved my situation even when it meant somehow bothering or inconveniencing others -- something I am notoriously bad at. I rearranged my mid-term, got a passport, took time off work, made up for all the hours, and the only thing it cost me was six hundred dollars and more stress than I could possibly have when expressed as a quantity of stomach acid.

The only thing I'm worried about with respect to this visit has to do with something that goes kind of beyond our friendship -- our mutual affection. In some strange way, Clorinda and I have developed some manner of serious crush on each other. The objectified ideal of a person who exists not quite in three dimensions has corrupted us both, and we find ourselves oddly infatuated. And on it's own, this wouldn't be that unhealthy, because we have our own lives, and our own real world loves -- the only problem is that our feelings, and our lives, occasionally conflict. This spring, when I was bemoaning and lamenting and pining and moping over the relationship pursued by Lilith and myself, it hurt Clorinda's feelings a lot to have this constant bombardment of my "person who isn't you" woe. And presently, Clorinda is involved with somone with whom she becomes increasingly serious. When she talks about him, and the fun they have, I must confess it hurts. I wouldn't call it jealousy... but certainly insecurity. I can't imagine being jealous -- which basically implies resentment -- of a person who only makes Clorinda happy. Especially when, in terms of her life, I only really exist as a good, and close, but abstract and two-dimensional, friend.

We both agree that there are a lot of question marks surrounding this visit. We'll better understand each other's feelings... and more to the point, our own. At the same time, there is a definite realism already in place... I think we both accept it, if somewhat sadly. I don't know. This is why I have absolutely no expectations of this trip, outside of meeting somebody wonderful, and getting along smashingly. I'd hate for this experience to be soured by the pettiness, and bitterness, and hurt, that ruined Charlotte's trip to see her now erstwhile friend in North Carolina. She expressed much concern along those lines when I confessed my bewilderment and uncertainty over my own feelings, until I reassured her that, for whatever I might be, I'm not dumb enough to throw away friends over a "broken heart."

I think it's painfully obvious that my heart is made of silly putty.

O c t o b e r 28

See, I might as well have trained a mandrill to write my midterms for me. It could only have made so many mistakes itself, and at least they have huge teeth and the ability to snarl and snap at any who try to take the test away from it (such as to, lamentably, grade it). That might as well even be the moral to the story -- don't mess with our primate cousins. They often have superior strength and a savage love of inflicting gruesome death that is so primal and innocent we have nothing similar to fight back with. If only I could lapse into moments of insane monkey-boy fugues when I needed to escape. I could howl and leap into the air, swing from light fixtures and viciously pummel people while simultaneously engaging in any number of obscenely biological functions. I think a mad, half-man half-monkey type creature is the goal of absolutely every single last insane genius trying to play God.

The outcome of last week is that I wretchedly destroyed myself, in spite of elaborate and ritualized preparations conducted in grim studying ceremonies of terror, on my calculus and symbolic logic tests. The only thing I can say is that my laziness pays off well in arts-type courses, like philosophy, psychology, religion, and even linguistics. They're all straightforward, and do well with my unique insights and analyses and grammar. Calculus, naturally, involves less essay questions and more numbers. My brain dislikes numbers, for reasons that a good psychiatrist could probably uncover with hypnotherapy sessions as repressed traumatic situations from my childhood. Perhaps in grade one I was sodomized by a janitor while he grunted a mixture of obscenities and passages from a Sesame street book on counting. I can't really comment at this point. In any event, symbolic logic is just like math, except they call it philosophy. It encodes logical arguments into symbols, using the same dang A's and B's and P's and Q's that a high school mathemetics course (or, for that matter, a university course) would.

And I did badly. Not horribly -- I expect many people did far worse -- but certainly badly. Maybe terribly. I'm not sure. I came close to passing both, but all I can really describe that as, is a desperate grab for marks in the hopes that I can save myself on the finals. The thing is, I can, so long as I just invest an actual level of work that exceeds "none." I'm smart enough that I can pull in A's and B's in any other course with nary a lick of studying or preparation until the night before, but only God is smart enough to ace a calculus test without ever cracking open the textbook, and that's just because when you're God, you basically invented everything and knew everything a billion years before it happened, and if you forget, you just declare that America was discovered by George Washington, and that PI does equal exactly fifteen, and the universe changes to accomodate you.

Of course, if you're God, you are also a figment of people's deluded and superstitious imaginations -- but we shan't go there today.

As for my ten page philosophy essay; well, it was written in one night, and I'm not sure about it, but never yet have I written a one-night essay that didn't net me an astonishingly (and perhaps unfairly) good mark, so I'm not especially concerned.
Tonight, of course, is a crazy night as well, since at precisely six o'clock this evening I have not one, but two mid-terms -- in psychology and linguistics respectively -- but instead of panic I only feel a bizarre, euphoric null-state. I've arranged with my professors that I can write one exam, and then dash (approximately an hour late) to the next, and feel no ill-effects save nausea and sleepiness. But you know, after this, it's all done. Closure will be had, and for whatever happens next in my problematic life, at least right now all the biggies have been dealt with, and I can leave for Spokane with a lightness in my step, and maybe a tune to whistle, and a hat to tip to pretty girls, and (if I'm not asking for too much here) a lightsabre, just in case.

I am being hit with something shocking, though, and while I wish it were so simple as a large piece of wood (something solid like oak), it's actually just that cursed bludgeon called dilemma again. Caira and Mefisto, my adored upstairs neighbors (whose moving in was conditional to my moving in, since I didn't know anyone else in the house at the time), have expressed the desire to move out of our large home. They figure January the first is the best time to accomplish this, since it shall happen in the between-terms break over Christmas, and afford some time for upheaval, and subsequent settling in.

My initial fear of abandonment was quelled when they asked me to come with them, but I must confess to extreme apprehension. This may largely be a result of the suddenness of the situation. Given more time, I'll probably adjust. I have discovered the most amazing coping abilities of late (I expect, given the choice between allowing every terrifying problem and situation to kill me, and somehow managing to deal with it all, my psyche is reacting with uncharacteristic courage and resolve), and I admit that the prospect is tempting.

I mean, think of it: a kitchen... a real kitchen. And a bathroom I could share with a handful of people, instead of eleven. And personal space. And no cats. All the things I've craved from the start. All the things that I still have reservations about, even though I'm happy here.

It requires some serious thought, though, and I hope Caira and Mefisto will invest as much obsessiveness as I will (I expect they shall. Obsessiveness and "Rob's friends" go together like peanut butter and jam) into their consideration. Certainly this didn't seem like a sure thing, but I do realize that they've been fraught with problems since moving in. Now, personally I think a lot of them are just coincidence, but there are some real issues that, over time, must be adding up. The house is a festering pit of politics that may someday boil over with pus and rot and stinky fog, and it needs help, and it needs work. I guess, though, that I'm still in my "I want to contribute" mode, where I crave the satisfaction of making the house better with my presence, and generosity, and moving on only when I can do no more. I'm not at all there yet, and I'd feel horrible abandoning it.

At the same time, I care about Caira and Mefisto lots and lots. If they left, I'd be very lonely, and a lot of the attention-satisfaction I receive right now would be depleted; moreso depending on who goes with them. So if they did move, I probably would be absolutely compelled to leave as well. Oh, worry worry worry.

I leave for Spokane in two days. I think, though, that this final countdown must be saved for tomorrow's Daily Snivel, since I have a lot of work to accomplish today, classes to attend, tests to write, and things to sulk over. May your days be significantly less like mine -- but if they are, please come on over and share some of the goodness with lonely old Rob. Especially if any of it involves nudity.

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

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