When I was younger, we were reasonably impoverished in my little household. I mean, not desperately, starvingly poor, but at a standard of living less than what I had been accustomed to for the most part of my childhood. Around the time I was eleven, my mother left her job with the government, and we moved out to the country to essentially begin a new phase of rural living, at a reduced income. I remember hating it initially, though a period of novelty set in shortly after we moved out there. There was a really excellent environment on our farm, and we had a huge portion of property that could be explored on those sunny May weekends, out running with our dog, Sabbath, whose death was chronicled earlier this Spring. My younger brother and I (by this point, largely due to differences with my mother's new boyfriend, my older brother and sister had moved out, and did not accompany us to the country) did a lot of supremely typical "Country boy" things, like look for snakes, wander hip-deep in flooded woodlands, run around in immense fields of overgrown grasses, and generally get properly messy.

It was a big change, however, and not simply in the surroundings. We had very little money, and living was often kind of day to day. This isn't really what I was used to. Although when I was but a babe, my father was in university and things were pretty simple, our lifestyle had become quite comfortable by the time I had reached a point of real sentience. It was difficult going without big shiny things all the time, and eating Kraft dinner, and calling it "dinner," on more than one occasion, and understanding that, at various points, hydro bills, or whatever, were serious enough that they would threaten to cut off power, or the phone, or something (once or twice, we had to sell a few things to get by); which was a concept completely foreign, and shameful, to me.

I didn't like being out there for a long, long time. I didn't like being poor. I didn't like feeling like a "city kid," at school, and actually getting shunned in my first month of grade seven because I was from a different mode of living (I was also a shy, awkward, Star-Trek-loving twelve year old, but...) than all the other children of the fields around me, when it was obvious there was no going back, and I suddenly was country folk. And it was a source of considerable shame that even many of these kids, awful and cruel and stupid as they were, had a lot more things than we did. Their parents were richer, and their houses were bigger, and their cars were newer (oh, the humiliation I used to feel at those school functions when our big ugly truck would pound into the parking lot, roaring like a tank. Even if half the other vehicles belonging to half the other parents were similarly big, ugly, loud trucks, there were plenty of families who had new, shiny cars, and well-dressed parents that didn't resemble hicks, by and large), and they wore better clothes. It matters so much at that age; when everything you are is measured against your peers, and being found in any way lacking is the gravest sort of embarrassment that makes you want to die on the spot.

By the time I was in high school, this began to matter less. You weren't in the same classes with the same people for the entire day, and somewhere among the faces and changes you made new friends, and developed different routines, and people didn't automatically know everything about your family and lifestyle. At the same time, you still wanted to impress everybody, and I distinctly remember slumping down low in the seat of our Chevrolet Suburban (a big, big truck, with four doors), praying to whatever I believed in, at fifteen, that no one I knew would see me whenever we were driving in town. I didn't tend to have people over to our house, even though it was really pretty nice, if small. My mother has a sense of taste that would blanch Martha Stewart, and yet actually is appealing and attractive. She had all these immaculately tended gardens and elaborate stone paths, and you knew that our family at least had some degree of taste, if not money. But if anyone came to get me, I'd run out and meet them on the driveway, lest they come to the door and see inside. I think until I was seventeen or so, only one of my friends had been inside my house; and we'd been best friends since I moved out there. He knew what it was like to live in the country; I never felt I had to prove anything to him.

I spent as much time as I could in Kanata (a suburb of Ottawa) with my grandparents, enjoying city life and the comforts of a large, modern, well-equipped house. It seems shallow, in a way, but it was just such a treat to come in after a month or two, and have a weekend of change.

When I was seventeen, my grandfather died, and I stayed in Ottawa to look after my grandmother for a term. During this point, I had a room all to myself, for the very first time (I had eternally been bunked with my younger brother since birth), in the finished basement of the house. I had solitude, and freedom, and comfort. I could go downtown if I liked, hang out with my older sister and her friends in our writers' group, express my exploding teenage brain on my new computer, and in every sense, grow up, and develop a different personality. It wasn't a conscious transition at all... but given so much personal space, and freedom, I was bound to change. I gained an entirely new perspective on the world, and myself, and although I've always had self-esteem issues, I developed a sense of confidence in myself (being accepted as the intellectual peer of people ten years older than myself contributed greatly to this), lost a large amount of the shyness that has plagued me, and explored my interests. When I turned eighteen, I moved back into the country, with a different perspective entirely. I appreciated my home in Smiths Falls a lot more. I made many new friends (thanks to a newfound sense of adventure and the ability to better express my charming wackiness), all of whom are still with me today, made the best of my situation, and although I always had my eyes on going back to Ottawa once I graduated grade thirteen, I was a lot happier than before.

In many ways, it was probably to my great benefit that I spent so much of my life so modestly. Part of being comfortably upper-middle-class involved my younger brother and I being quite awfully spoiled, and tremendously obnoxious about a lot of things. And although I found it shameful and humiliating, being considerably poorer for the formative elements of my adolescence humbled me a lot, and the psychological ordeal of being a complete misfit in grades seven and eight did not, in fact, destroy me, but gave me a protective mental shell from the world that incubated my strange, creative, artistic, thoughts while I hid from conformity and slowly met people with similar qualities in high school. My natural capacities for guilt and self-loathing helped tremendously, of course, but I can envision myself being a terribly different young man if, instead, my life had been eternally in the city, living in plenty. Maybe a little less humble, and a little less sensitive. A little less motivated (even if I am the slackeriest slacker ever to cut himself some slack).
This being so, I still swore to myself once that, someday, I'd be in a position where I'd never need to eat Kraft Dinner again. I'd never be poor; I'd always have money, and be comfortable, and never shop at Bi-Way or any such discount (we never did shop there; it was just fun to make fun of the kids whose parents did shop for their clothes there) store of shame.

My older sister still feels this way as well. When she was thirteen or so, it was during a period where money was very tight, and they had to do without a lot of nice things in a time of your life when you just want to be like everybody you know. You want to have what they have, just because being different is the key to being ostracized. She even feels the same way about Kraft Dinner, although the white cheese deluxe stuff is pretty good, and her daughters gobble it, like so many other simple things (to their credit, they have accomplished palates for six-year-olds; you couldn't have gotten me near hummous at that age), right up. But it's a terrible feeling to be without things. This is a huge factor in her (our) intense dislike of the Christmas season -- the fact that Christmas without money is the most stressful and shameful and unpleasant time of the year; where your ability to have the perfect Christmas is proportionate to how much you can afford to spend. I can only imagine what it was like for our mother; when you have these kids, and for them, Christmas is probably the most important time of the year. And meanwhile, rich relatives buy them all of the presents that they really like, and you have to swallow that knowledge that your ability to give them a home and keep them fed just isn't good enough. December 24th was my birthday, but it was also the anniversary of my father's death. For a long time I was allowed to forget this, and it was only quite recently, maybe six or seven years ago, that I could really conceive of the kind of awful reality is must have been for my mother every Christmas, being in that situation.

That being so, let me just say that this year, Canada Post has ruined Christmas. They are the proverbial Grinch, but with tragically minute amounts of style and sympathetic elements; I love the Grinch. I hate postal workers. I have this tremendously large and weepy heart, but my endless love and compassion fail me when faced with the sort of Nation-wide postal strike that we are (keeping in mind, those in the know, that some readers are from America, and abroad, and this kind of news isn't necessarily widespread). Because of my employment contract, my paychecks are mailed to me at the end of every month, thirty days after I fill out an invoice. They aren't much, but these in combination with my survivor's benefits (a monthly stipend that lasts until I'm twenty-five, so long as I stay in university) total enough to pay for my rent, utilities, buss pass, and phone bill each month; with just a little left over to tip my bank balance up a notch. Food and entertainment expenses (and miscellany) come out of my savings, and with some careful budgeting, I've managed to keep myself well afloat this term, even with a six-hundred-dollar indulgence to Spokane. Still, the fulcrum is my income; without it, I'd quickly spend myself into homelessness, and I appreciate every dollar I make.

Herein lies the irony -- everything I make is mailed to me. Towards the beginning of each month, my little post office box is overflowing with Federally-sponsored joy, and the staggering blow of paying rent and bills is nicely offset by that bundle of checky goodness.

However, no mail -- no money.

Today I paid my rent, and took out enough to purchase a bus pass for the month. My bank balance is now precisely enough to pay for January's rent, with about seventy dollars on top of that, and while I could have at least expected my pension check to arrive (the striking union promised to deliver Federal checks, such as for welfare, pension, and unemployment insurance), I could not actually pick it up or anything, because the post office where my post office box is (logically) housed is locked up tightly, and will be until the strike ends. Hence, Rob is poor. I have enough to provide for myself, basically, but I can forget decadence or non-essentials, and I'll probably be eating a lot of samosas between now and the next installment of my student loan in January. I wanted to travel to Toronto this holiday season to spend it with my sister, her family, and Broken, and visit my mother in the country if possible, but it all looks kind of abstract and kooky now.

Christmas, I'm afraid, is cancelled.

I'm no longer ashamed of my roots, but I've worked really hard to have some of the things that I couldn't when I was younger, and it's like everything I've earned is being held back for no obviously good reason. That I, and everyone in Canada, is being punished for a labour dispute between a monopoly and yet an other union that chooses to hold the public at bay to prove a point, versus seriously and earnestly negotiating an understanding. I mean, this time last year I was stranded because of a bus strike in Ottawa that lasted a month, during Christmas exams. I had no sympathy then, and presently I have the same stone cold heart, tempered and embittered by far more than a small inconvenience. I can't afford a single candy cane this year. Every cent owed me is in the balance, somewhere, awaiting an agreement, or a concession, or the legislation that is pending, yet which might well be ignored.

I'm poor again. Really and truly. I was hardly rich and magnificent before -- I mean, I am a student -- but I could at least, occasionally, take my face off the window pane, go inside a shop, and actually buy something.

I'm thankful for what I have. But the ire fermented out of helplessness and frustration is a rich heady brew, like Guinness, and right now ire has a big purple head spilling over the glass.

D e c e m b e r 3

So, anyway, I feel like I'm playing God, because I know I'm going to have to fail one of these exams to save myself on the other -- both are going to be difficult (trust me, the psychology mid-term was all impossibly tragic neurochemistry, to those of you who might doubt the stress of a psychology exam) there just isn't a way to prepare for both successfully. I have to, as such, choose one -- whichever class holds the most appeal, as well as the highest priority, and focus my attention upon mastering its tricky ways. I've already decided that this is going to be psychology. I hate mathematics, even if I rather adore my quirky, Lower-Class-New-York accented, culture-loving, calculus professor; and anyway, I wasn't doing especially well in that course at last check. There may indeed be some weaselly way to avoid mathematics as I pursue my degree, which is my supreme hope, because goodness gracious me but I don't relish having to force my procrastinating carcass into course after course as I strive for calculus excellence for the sake of one computer science course that claims I'll need the calculus credit above the one I'm taking now as preparation.

Anyway, back to my studying I go.

D e c e m b e r 4

Additionally, though, I was extremely unfair yesterday and made a comment about my friend Clorinda that implied she has no self-esteem whatever. And certainly this isn't true. We've had discussions about this before, and I've always been aware of the fact that, certain things being what they are, she isn't like, say, me in terms of psychological weirdness. That being said, I still have issues with my perception of how her general state of self can affect our friendship, but she is certainly a much happier and stronger person than my careless rambling unkindly suggested. It wasn't a deliberate attempt to be mean; but perhaps it was mean. In any event, I was quite wrong, and all I can do is admit it and be extremely sorry.

D e c e m b e r 5

This isn't that day yet, fortunately, but I do have to go to work, and recovering as best I can in the time allowed from the two hours of sleep I stole while studying for exams has robbed me of the time to write today's Snivel. For posterity, though, I performed as well as I expected on those two extensive tests of my brain's relative sponginess -- calculus was disastrous, on account of me devoting my time to studying for psychology; and consequently, psychology actually went pretty well. I'm not positive what my grade will be, but it was a decided boon that I did invest as much time as I did on digesting the section on sleep and dreaming, because the professor dedicated considerable amounts of space on just these behaviours. Your university duckling isn't dead yet; only two more exams to go, and by all indications of modern psychological theory, my problems are not being caused by demons which follow me around, constantly whispering morbid suggestions into my ears and striving to make me so faithlessly depressed, hopeless, and self-destructive that I kill myself, damning my soul forever and (specifically) providing just one more soul to feed Lucifer's Great Diabolical Machine (which, paradoxically, is how my friend Pixiegirl's psychiatrist, with a master's degree in Divinity among other credentials, diagnosed her this week).

Anyway, my well-paid formaldehyde habit calls.

D e c e m b e r 6

For however I actually scored on my psychology final, certainly it can be said of me that I absorbed a tremendous quantity of neurobiological knowledge during my ordeal by studying this week. I managed to digest the better part of my textbook, covering everything from ingestive functions to sleep and dreaming, to the sexual development (and somehow, the book manages to portray the sexual behaviours of rats in an entirely more coquettish way than that of humanity) of various organisms, as pertaining to a function of their juicy brains. Even though there were some number of questions on my delectably multiple-choice-esque exam that I simply had no choice whatever but to guess about, I could, on command, spout any number of interesting neuroscience facts to anybody who asked, any time of the day (especially at four in the morning). One of the most irrelevant, yet personally fascinating, chapters in the history of psychology that I discovered in my studious adventures (while disturbing in many fundamental ways) continues to capture my attention. It involves sleep; which is a subject I find neat for no reason more significant than the fact that it was the field of expertise of my inspirational, and beloved, psychology professor, the late Alan Moffitt.

It also involves dogs.
One of the mysteries of sleep states, which is to say, how organisms sleep in the first place, involved an hypothesis that stipulated that there is a chemical factor in the blood which initiates sleep by sedating the organism and slowing its metabolism. To test this theory, researchers needed (by this logic) to find some way to combine the blood chemistry of one organism with the behavioural responses on another. I might have considered various, moderate, steps, to accomplish this (the obvious one being blood, or blood factor, transfusions, but...), but the experiment the book mentioned briefly was considerably more complete than my humble interpretation of science. What the experiment involved were two healthy, average, similar dogs. They might have been siblings -- the book did not specify. At any rate, they cut the head off of one dog, and reattached it to the second dog -- creating, my dears, a two-headed dog. Only the original head had control over the dog body, but the new head could function, in some sense, though I imagine it needed to be held in place with a harness or something, unless they figured out some clever way to anchor its neck to the skeleton of its host. Anyway, it probably didn't live very long, but they discovered, through this act of God-playing, that the second head did not, in fact, sleep synchronous to the first, allowing for the conclusion that blood chemistry does not play a role in sleep.

The reaction to this story is as unique as those individuals to whom I recount it. I personally found it creepy and awful, but I must say that the prospect of being able to create two-headed dogs is extremely cool. I still felt terribly sorry for the poor things, though thinking about my dogs sewn together like that makes me laugh. Again, the creature most likely did not survive very long like that, which gives the whole thing a decidedly unhappy ending, whether two heads are better than one, or not. Broken had a similar reaction, but Pixiegirl couldn't stop laughing. She laughs in extremely cute ways, though, so I really must avoid the conclusion that she's in any way an alien pretending to be a pale freak. She was methodically reorganizing a Rubic's Cube at the time as well -- perhaps it was doing the talking.
Anyway, science rules. Give me science over religion, or lock me up in a tower and condemn my soul as a heretic. Because the world is round, the universe is relative, and there is no God (unless, of course, you -- heh heh -- play God). As my current phone message actually states, lime Jell-o, when you cause it to shake and connect it to an EEG, vibrates at precisely the frequency which the human brain does, and if I were a (mad) scientist, I couldn't begin to run out of insidious applications for this kind of knowledge. Actually, I'm sure it was the really crazy scientist who discovered this fact in the first place.

Luckily for Canadians, our government is susceptible to the lobbies of huge businesses. Although I'm cynical that in any way the outrage of the public could prompt much legislation to end the postal strike prematurely, the fact that businesses were losing millions of dollars seems to have done the trick. On Thursday, postal workers had their striking asses legislated back into business, so the mail can reasonably be assumed to arrive now and then, once again. This is a distinct pleasure to me, because it means I am no longer impoverished by the cruelty of circumstance. Indeed, while I am not by any means a rich boy, I have at least collected some of the money owed to me, and my bank account is less precariously positioned above the precipice of emptiness than earlier this week. Anyway, at the same time, the postal workers are surly enough that they have decided to, shall we say, misdeliver the mail of large businesses ("Oh darn! Did you say Toronto? We thought you said, 'Moosejaw.' Silly us!"), on account of the amount of pressure said corporations placed upon the government to end the strike. Which is perfectly fair and good. I mean, I'm no dirty pinko, but everybody hates big business.

Of course, I still hate postal workers, and I always will, but I am, nevertheless, bound by my love of mail, and there really is no alternative, thanks to the inconvenient monopoly placed upon the most necessary services in life (that is to say, mass transit, telephone services, hydro, teaching, and the post, to name a few). I thought it was funny though, that (as heard from a friend, who got a job as a bike courier in the swell of business created by the postal strike) all the bike couriers in Ottawa were circling the picket lines of postal workers on their way to make deliveries, shaking packages in the air at the mailpeople and shouting, "Thank you! Thank you!" with glee, and then zipping away as the impotent mass threatened to kill them.

Anyway, I must be off to play this crazy NTN (I think) trivia game with Caira, Mefisto, and Charlotte. You do it in bars. There's this global connection of trivia centres in bars, and they all have these TV screens that flash trivia questions. If you play, you get a console that, as Caira describes it, stinks of a Simon, and you team up and compete for points. It's a personal obsession of Caira's, and while I am indeed bad with trivia, I love me that social interaction, love, and caffeine. I hope your weekends are as filled with it as mine.

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

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