I'm really beginning to feel like an old man. Here I am, in the decrepit state of the twenty-second year of my life, and I'm just falling apart. You'd never know it to look at me, I suppose, although I think I have a face as wrinkly as an elephant's scrotum. Anyway, this morning I have to be at the hospital for my very first ultrasound ever, so that they can determine if my kidneys are being happy and functional, or if they're being naughty, the way an old man's kidneys would. Needless to say, I'm only looking forward to the experience in the sense that I want to have it over with, with some kind of knowledge as to how well my giblets are behaving themselves. Following that experience (I suppose they'll have to grease me up with conductive gel, too. Great. I'll be a gooey geezer...), I still have to wait around for an hour or two to talk with the doctor at 11, and after that, providing all is well and they don't find any alien implants or monster mineral crystals from Satan's own kidney, it's OSAP (Ontario Student Assistance Program) day at my school, and universities all across this province (meaning it's also the first day of classes, so I suppose I get to be truant today as well), so I, and thousands of other desperate and hungry people (or less pragmatically, those who want to buy a new receiver for their stereo system, or add that shiny new DVD drive to their PCs -- frankly I'm just looking forward to a little basic ability to purchase my own food. This past week has been beyond lean for me; I now have three dollars in my bank account...) must line up in the hopes of receiving forms which we can then rush off to our respective banks, and someday, hopefully, money will change hands.

OK, now I must rush off. I still need to drink another 20 ounces of water before I leave (they want my bladder full), and frankly I ought to be leaving right about exactly now. Hoping you're all having a swell Monday, and if any eyes reading this diatribe happen to belong to Caira or Mefisto (who have now moved out of H'Tog, leaving it a much sadder and emptier place), well gee, I miss youse guys.

And that's that.

J a n u a r y 8

Well, I am. And it's an unfortunate state of affairs, to be sure, but this certainly does tend to be the way of my life. Since Monday, it's actually felt rather like a long, continuous day where sometimes I'm asleep, but usually I'm doing something entirely less comfortable. I'm home for the moment, but obligation after obligation continues to send me out the door for missions and errands and quests. Monday started off, as you perhaps recall, with me requiring an ultrasound. Funny as it is, although that particular experience was two days ago, I'm still a little tender in places. I guess it went well, however... I'm not entirely sure.

The whole experience of getting an ultrasound involves you lying on a bed with a flimsy hospital gown hiked up to your chest for about an hour, while ultrasound technicians periodically spurt you with warmed conductive gel everywhere (it makes you appreciate better how porn stars must feel) and press the ultrasound device into the most tender areas of your abdomen with sufficient force to compress the gases in your abdominal cavity and provide a clear view of your internal organs, and as well, hurt a whole heck of a lot. It was fun, because they make you fast overnight and all morning, and before you leave for the hospital, you have to drink forty ounces of water. So, by the time you arrive for the appointment, not only are you famished, but you really want nothing more than to go to the washroom. I was looking forward to getting the experience over with, but when we came to check in, they had trouble locating my appointment, and I thought perhaps they'd lost it and they'd have to reschedule me. So, while this would indeed be an irritating inconvenience, all I could think was, "Yay! Now I can go pee!"

That being so, the first thing they subject you to once you're in the scanning room is to poke and prod your bladder to determine if it's full. A full bladder being necessary for the proper surveying of its interior. And they say things like, "This should feel really uncomfortable," entirely too often, which is not only insulting for the fact that they so dramatically understate how uncomfortable it is to have someone squishing your bladder, but then they say things like "Gee, (poke) you really are (poke) full! (poke poke)" I also got to breathe a lot -- or rather, not breathe a lot. To get good stills for their screen captures, they make you hold your breath while they establish a good scan; usually for about twenty seconds longer than you could comfortably hold your breath under good conditions (which these were), so by the time you get the go-ahead to relax and breathe normally, you're turning purple and your lungs are bursting and it hurts so much, and the only thing on your mind is air! Air! How I need to breathe me some of that sweet hospital air!

I found out that just below the sternum is one of the most sensitive areas of the body; not just because they told me that, but because the ultrasound probe was pressed into it with the force of a playful punch in the gut. Luckily, while I still feel a little tenderized and sore in places, the experience was, at least, rewarding. After an hour of probing, I met with the urologist, who essentially gave me a clean bill of health, under the provision that I keep on drinking lots of water and call them should I feel at all unwell again. I'm a little bit worried by the fact that the office of said doctor left a message on my machine, with no details other than that I should call them back, so now I'm wondering if, on further inspection of the scans, they found an alien implant or a tumour or something. I am not, as such, especially optimistic, as, when confronted with a complete lack of information, I am bound to assume the very worst. Oh well... I'm sure most abdominal health issues are perfectly operable in even the most drastic of cases.

I did spend an hour or so last night thinking about this, though, and wondered what I would do if for some reason my urologist informed me that I had a year to live? It was terribly depressing, and while I could no doubt maximize this remaining time, I doubt very much that I could accomplish all those things I've been dreaming of doing since I was seventeen in the humble space of a year. I mean, it would be exceedingly difficult to become a rock star in that time, and I bet I'd be dead before I could even properly enjoy it. The same problem exists with taking my place among the ranks of the world's most celebrated writers, poets, and philosophers -- you need a certain amount of time to prepare yourself, and in any event most of the fame you enjoyed would be posthumous (not the worst possible scenario, since I crave that kind of immortality, but still). Then I sobered up and it didn't really seem likely that the doctor would wade back through scans that had already been reviewed, and even if he did, anything he found would either have to be so big and bad as to be obvious (which means hopefully it would have been noticed the first time), or so small and unassuming that it was relatively harmless. But anyway, I'll know soon. It's probably as simple as them wanting another follow up appointment.

I spent well over two hours standing in line to collect my student dole (student loan, that is), but I figured that three thousand smackaroonies is sufficiently worth the time (1500 dollars an hour) spent wrapped around Robertson hall three times (the line was in tiers that each ran circuits inside the huge administration building's main foyer), and anyway, I had precisely three dollars and seventeen cents in my bank account, and hunger can drive a man to do strange things (including cannibalism). It took me two days to get it processed, because of the compelling factors of school and work, and I'm hoping I'll be rich soon. The first thing I'm buying is a VCR (and then I'm joining Columbia House's movie club... yum... seven movies for a dollar), and oh but the vegetative shut down will commence then. I haven't watched the Star Wars Trilogy in three months, and oh I'm hurting for it now.

I'm working two days a week now, because I no longer have an entire day free to work eight hours -- so I take two different afternoons each week for my labours... and oh but they're laying down something sweet in my office. Because of the year 2000 computer issue -- computers being unable to successfully reset their clocks to the year 2000, as opposed to turning back over to 00, which is 1900 -- they tested every computer in the building, and all the non-compliant machines are being replaced. So they bought me a new computer. They bought a Gateway 2000 right-out-of-the-box thingie, a computer I object to for the reason that the boxes they ship them in are marked black and white like the backs of cows, as are the mousepads. And I hate cows, really and truly. If I could eat cows and still somehow be a vegetarian, man, I would. I have no qualms about wearing big black 20-hole dead cow boots, nor toting around a $200 dead cow briefcase, because after, they're made of dead cows. So anyway, cows aren't good by me. But the computer is forgivable, on account of all the big numbers and shiny newness it has been emblazoned proudly with. It's sexy, and I'm not even one of those people who cares about computers. I mean, I love my 386 DX. It works well for my purposes, has more RAM and hard drive space than any 386 was ever meant to run, suffers a sound card to exist, and accomodates my half-assedly fast modem. But still. Wow.

I've never seen a built-in Zip drive before. But there it is, below the floppy drive. And a 24X CD-ROM. No one needs a 24X CD-ROM. But it has one. I have no idea how much RAM or hard disk space it has, because it wasn't set up, and the manuals were vague and included several different models, but you can bet it's a lot. It's only a Pentium MMX 166, but I bet it will multitask Hotmetal and Photoshop and Netscape with Windows 95 a right bit better than the 75 I'm using right now, and anyway, what the hell would I do that it's so necessary to need anything bigger than a 166 in the first place? The monitor (drool) is 17 inches, which is a veritable home theatre television screen compared to the fourteen inch monitor I have here, or even the fifteen inch monitor at work. My eyes will either hurt more, or less, after a day of staring at it in a dark office (I never turn my lights on). I'm not sure which.
I'm a little suspicious, in that it seems unlikely that they'd ever spend that much money just for me. Perhaps it's departmental, in the sense that if two thirds the computers have to be replaced (and they're all coming out of date) anyway, then why not just replace all the damn things? Two or three thousand dollars isn't that much from a bill that must be in the hundreds of thousands.

Ahh, the government.

I'm afraid I'll come to work someday, and meet Dr. Excellent, the entomologist they've hired to use this big fancy computer and replace the man whose office I'm using for the simple fact that he died a year and a half before I was hired, and they'd never found anyone to replace him specifically. Still, I'll get to use it sort of until that day, so yay for me.

I should mention that Ottawa is officially in a state of emergency. For the past week, we've been besieged with beautiful attacks of freezing rain, which is glazing the city in pretty sheets of ice. Something like one hundred thousand people are without power; the Queensway (our cross-Ottawa eight lane expressway) is a death zone of sheer ice, plates of ice are falling from the skies on innocent people from office towers, and every school, including (amazingly) the steadfast colleges and universities (which were, at least, insistent upon being open this morning, when everything else was giving up) are completely shut down. Which is why I'm providing a whole world of Snivel here, luxuriously soaking up the idle free time.

And My student loan is in, so I believe I shall promptly go off and spend it.

J a n u a r y 10

Admittedly, it has been bad. Ottawa is still officially in a state of emergency, and Montreal is faring even worse. Montreal was pummeled by freezing rain, and because Montreal proper sits on an island, and they've had to close at least three bridges due to the ice, people are, for the most part, isolated, with at least a million people going without electricity right now. Apparently, a quarter of the trees in each region may have been irreparably damaged by the freezing rain. This I can believe; the streets everywhere are cluttered with debris. There have only been a few fatalities in each city (Montreal had at least ten storm-related deaths, although every case I heard about involved elderly people who refused to leave their homes when the power failed), but the number of injuries has been remarkable and (if not entirely surprising) severe; people are either slipping and breaking hips, arms, legs, or wrists on the ice, or their cars are spinning out of control on the Queensway and smashing into other cars. Trees are snapping in two all over the place, and every building is dropping tons and tons of ice onto streets, onto people, onto cars, onto other buildings. The statistic I heard was that a centimetre of ice over the area of a square metre (or perhaps less) weighs nine kilograms, or twenty pounds. I can attest that most of the glazing I've seen is at least two or three centimetres thick.

Caira made the remark that it seems altogether unlikely that, in her lifetime, she'll experience a world war, or a major economic depression, or anything of historic merit and sufficient human struggle, so at least we can feel proud ourselves for weathering the storm of the century. At the same time, we've both fared well. All schools, everywhere, have been closed, the government, in all non-essential branches, has been shut down, so we haven't had classes, and I haven't been at work. Both our homes have power, working telephone connections, heat, and cable, so it's been, by and large, quite cozy. My mother, on the other hand, lives in the country, and I haven't been able to get ahold of her. At last report, she had no power, and this was on Tuesday. Apparently most of the phone lines have been destroyed out there as well, for I cannot call any number in the area. Luckily she heats the house with a woodstove anyway, and is used to long stretches of isolation, so I'm at least reasonably assured that she's fairing reasonably wellThe most impressive carnage, I think, is the footage I've seen of those big gigantic steel hydro towers that span high above thinly populated areas (like my home in the country) or suburbian parks (Kanata has more than its fair share of birth defects, I say), toppled and broken like toys, or models on a monster movie set where the monster is just some guy in a rubber costume smashing styrofoam buildings that come up to his knees (like Power Rangers). Entire columns are collapsing under the weight of tons of ice, and pulling down others with them as they crumple.

You can't catch an airplane, or a train, and most buses aren't going to be of any help at all. It's really a great reminder to our society of just how fragile everything is -- how little it takes for everything we consider civilized to be removed from our lives, and from ourselves. I'll be amazed if no one goes looting in Montreal. Apparently this is a big fear, with so many shops without power, and so many homes evacuated for shelters; if no one flips and goes out smashing and stealing, I'll at least have some of my admiration for this species restored, because it must be tempting, when you've spent a week in the cold and dark, to take it out on people you don't know. There's really an odd mix of humanity coming to light in this situation. Some people are utterly unprepared. They panic, freeze, starve, or whatever, deprived of their major comforts and security blankets. Admittedly, I'd probably be one of those people. I don't keep food at the house for the reason that I'm still too abhorrent of our kitchen to cook with it, so when Broken and I have had the munchies, I've gone out foraging, or we've ordered in (blessed student loan). But there are others, who really pull it together. They've opened up their homes to friends, neighbors, relatives, and strangers, whether they themselves have had power or not, put some wood on the fire, and made the best of a bad time.

It makes me wonder how we, as a country, or the continent as a society, would fare in a real crisis -- war, or famine, or plague, right here, in our midst. We've been very safe and comfortable for a long time -- and rightfully so, I think, but still... Stores have been packed with people stocking up on essentials, although the only indication of panic that I could see was that apparently people were fearing that they'd be cut off without power, and there'd be no Little Debbie Snack Cakes around, because those shelves are bare.
James Burke (a personal false idol of mine), in his series Connections, did a great episode talking about things like blackouts, and how thin and tentative our hold on civilization really is. If power went out for a week, or two weeks, and it didn't seem like it was ever coming back, anarchy would soon descend. I know the first thing I'd do in that situation is that I'd buy a gun, steal a car, make my way back to the farm, and while away my days, raising potatoes like the good Irish I am. And I wouldn't let any dang old Kevin Costner types mess up with my vision of despotic utopia, either.

Sure, I've rambled, but the moral of the story is that Ottawa will be fine. It might take a week or two, but people's lives will come back to the right gear once power is restored, insurance checks are cashed (I love disasters for the reason that they make the itchy weasels at every last insurance company squirm... Ottawa may be looking at a bill of at least five hundred million dollars). It's been an interesting experience, to be sure, but also beautiful. I've been snapping photographs of trees and buildings and cars, all encapsulated with layers of ice, like fetish kids and liquid latex covered nipples. I've also had other concerns. The call I got from the hospital involved, as it turns out, me having to return to their open arms for a visit to the nuclear medicine centre at the cancer clinic, so that I can undergo a renal scan. I'll be glowing like Mr. Burns in no time, and none too pleased about it either, because everything I've heard about Barium is that it makes you nice and pukey.

My body doesn't seem to like radioactive dyes. I don't get any mutant superpowers, unless it's the superpower that allows the contents of your stomach to eject from said stomach at superhuman speed. Which is a power I could do without. Medical science indeed. Just invent tricorders and get it over with already.

And now back to my regularly scheduled Saturday.

J a n u a r y 11

The problem with the Snivel is that it takes a lot of my time and energy away from e-mail. I just received distressing words from a very dear friend, and today I must focus my resources on writing her back.

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

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