As I have two tests to study for, I'm not entirely certain if there can ultimately be a Snivel today... I promise to try my utter best.

M a r c h 3

I spent yesterday in the frenzy of one who has precious few hours to in some way prepare for two impending tests. In fact, they were within about an hour of each other, due to the scheduling wisdom that placed my computer science midterm right smack dab in the middle of my cognitive science class. This alone is annoying enough -- once upon a time, you could count on your tests and midterms chancing to occur during the class for which you are taking the test, but this is no longer a wise or necessary reality. Oh no. Now someone's taken it into their pea-brained little administrative heads that it's actually a jolly good idea to have tests that may or may not have anything to do in scheduling with the classes you have them in. I find this foolish and disagreeable, and the first thing I do when I am king (well, right after making cruelty to frogs a capital offense, and of course there's the harem, too...) is destroy such errant thought... and any individuals daring to propagate it. This sort of trickery is why I went through hell last October, desperately trying to find some way to write my psychology midterm early, which magically enough wasn't set to happen in-class, but instead (sigh) during the weekend of my magical visit to see Clorinda (and even then, that midterm, written early, happened exactly an hour before my phonetics midterm).

However, I also had a test in cognitive science last night. We're fortunate enough to have a test at the beginning of every class, for which a humble hour of studying is usually enough to ensure an above-average grade. Still, even with that small blessing, I had an entire difficult midterm to study for, and that took me most of the day. It wasn't that my knowledge of computer science is that sparse, but the exam wasn't actually going to be written on computers, and my having very little idea as to what would actually be on the test aside, it remained that my syntax is simply awful in Smalltalk (unlike even Turing, my uselessly instructional high school companion, Smalltalk has an unfortunate and aggravating lexicon of formats), and without a computer at my side to facilitate error-checking, any instance of code I had to provide would probably be atrocious. So, I studied and studied and studied, hoping that the test would be more knowledge-application (like defining terms, multiple choice, short answer) versus skill-testing cases like having to write programs on paper (bleah). Tragically, it wound up being the latter, because apparently last term's midterm involved more definitions and such, and they all complained and hated it, because while them keeners know their code, they're generally idiots when they have to articulate their knowledge in any way with language.

Fortunately for all, I am a god. I mean, I can't transform myself into a swan and waylay young maidens or anything (for whatever Disney might try to (sell)/(tell) you, Greek Gods were bastards), but I think I have a pretty good implant in my brain. It seems to be affected by mysterious and random factors, but when it does kick in, I am practically unstoppable (in the sense that anything you could simply shoot with a gun and kill is ever 'practically unstoppable'). I breezed through the test. It required two hours to write, and I was zipping through it like a superintelligent space chimpanzee such that I was finished after forty-five minutes. Only one person had left by the time I got to the last section of the last question. This was the only thing that caused me to stumble. It was only worth two marks out of a thirteen-mark question, but while every other bit of that question involved the most mindless coding. For instance, you were dealing with instances of the class "box" (which doesn't exist, but pretend) and you had a box with a variable leftX, rightX, bottomY, and topY. The first eight questions were things like a subroutine that returns the variable for leftX, so you coded "^leftX", and then another subroutine would allow you to change the value of that variable to a specified integer, so you put "leftX:= anInteger. ^leftX." and that was it, for each variable. And then you had to figure out how to show the length and height of the box, and the second last question involved determining the area of the box: super easy.

The last question got me because it required making different instances of the class "Box" (box1 box2) work together, even though they used the same variables, and this was the step that caused me so much trouble in my last assignment (my brain wants me to believe that it's impossible for two different objects to use the same variables independently). So I fretted and puzzled for at least another twenty minutes. Then, reluctantly, for the first time ever, I put up my hand during an exam. You often see other students doing this... they flag down a prof or a T.A. to gain clarification of a question, and either through pride or genius, I've never needed to do this. Last night I did. For a question worth two marks, I put up my hand... because I had to know. I couldn't even be sure that the computer science weenies they were paying to oversee the exam would be able to give me the information I need, but I figured I could at least try. And amazingly, although at first he thought I was simply confused about what the question meant, I was told how to distinguish between the two instances making use of their coordinate variables. Five minutes later, I was out of there. I'm sure I didn't do perfectly, but I did mighty fine. Smelling of flowers and relief and everything.

And now that you know the rest of my story, I've got to go to work.
toodle-oo.

M a r c h 4

This was waiting for me in my mailbox bright and shiningly early this morning:

Date: Tue Mar  3 16:46:27 1998
From: spnork@ (wayne)
Subject: down with eggplant
To: an747@freenet.carleton.ca
 
 
Did you know that (Lilith) was a boy when she was three? I know, "Leo"
flashed me at Mooney's bay in 1984.  I still remember his prepubescent
wee-wee much like your sick mind "remembers" "her" prepubescent snatchee
and matching buds, Sickoe. Here's to hoping you implode...soon.
 
p.s. I saw you at rocky that day, your nose is stupid...and silly.

He is referring to the anecdotal tale involving my friend Lilith that involves the two of us when we were tiny children, meeting by chance on a beach without actually acknowledging the experience at all. It wasn't until some fourteen years later that our conversations as best friends would lead us to the discovery of the possibility that we'd met before, when we were much younger. And of course, the only factor that distinguishes us at that time and place were the unusual circumstances (that is, that she was three and naked). So, needless to say, I got extremely angry at humanity (particularly this specific human), and here is what I wrote:

Destroy people. Then the problems will all go away.

M a r c h 5

Pixiegirl dropped by sometime around seven o'clock that evening, and she spent a lot of her time with us crying and looking like the central figure in a painting that could accurately have been titled 'Completely Spent and Forlorn.' We propped her up on the bed, gave her a hot water bottle, and discussed the situation at hand. She was wearing a shirt that a raccoon brought her (there is a raccoon frequenting the third floor balcony where Pixiegirl lives and, oddly enough, it has taken to leaving her offerings in exchange for the crackers she feeds it. The first time it was a pile of black socks when she was actually thinking she needed more socks; the second time, it was a pair of pants that she knew she would never wear; the third time, it was the shirt she was wearing... a black button-up shirt that was actually very fetching; the last time, it was the top of a pen, but she didn't need that), and that was pretty much the only positive thing that could be said for her lot at that point. She was only given 30 days to move out, which is illegal, but what else is new? She was certainly planning to move out anyway, but her decision had been to give her notice and move out May first, not April. This is important because one of her closest friends is going back to Kingston for the summer, and he wanted her to take over his room in his apartment from May until September. The implication of this is that a boy she has a tremendous crush upon will be her roommate for the summer, as well as my delicious goth friend and supervillain-type goon Blackie Sean.

This means that because she was only given thirty days' notice, she would be homeless for the entire month of April, unless she could somehow find temporary accomodations. It seemed to me that there must somehow be some kind of arrangement to be had, if only we tried enough, so I took it upon myself to confront our property manager, and argue Pixiegirl's case. I'm very wishy-washy sometimes, on account of my fundamental personality flaws that create my need to avoid hurting people, but when I do think something is important enough to stand up for, I can actually be uncharacteristically assertive. So, I slapped on my yummy new suede vest (in times of conflict it never hurts to look somewhat charismatic and respectable), stomped to the cafe, and tried to find Lesleigh. The conversation we went on to have went on for about forty minutes, although it seemed like perhaps fifteen to me, for it was very engaging. I wasn't at all certain what to expect -- possibly something easy and conciliatory, and possibly the challenge to a fight to the death. It went somewhere in the middle, although closer to a civil conversation. The only problem with acting on someone else's behalf is that when you speak for them, and the other person starts rebutting you, all you can do is say "Well, yeah, but, I'm not her, so don't argue it, or justify it, to me..." because it's impossible to know precisely what that person is thinking inside.

Lesleigh admitted that, in other circumstances, she'd probably crack, because she said she really didn't want a conflict over this, and I was looming with a twinkle in my eye that apparently spoke volumes. However, the problem was that she'd already rented Pixiegirl's room out, and taken money for it. Given the hypothetical situation of "If suddenly, magically, you two were best friends again, could something be done?" she admitted that, yes, it was technically possible, but if she were to let Pixiegirl stay, even for another month, it would involve seriously screwing some people out of their apartment. And, of course, with things being as they are, she had no incentive to risk bearing the wrath of the people she'd have to let down. There didn't seem to be anything that could really be done on that front, so I tried to impress upon her the fact that Pixiegirl wasn't evil, and she wasn't the bad guy. When people fight, there are obviously two sides in conflict, and each can only perceive the other as the wrongdoer, with oneself as the wronged. It's like in sit-coms, when people tell the same story again and again, each from their own perspective, and each person who tells the story sets themselves up to look like angels and everyone else to be the villains. Both Lesleigh and Pixiegirl gave me the impression that they consider themselves similarly betrayed and victimized by the other -- and obviously, in ways, both probably have valid points. Somewhere between is what could be called "the truth" of what has really happened, but I doubt it will ever be objectively known.

Returning to my room, I recounted what had been discussed, and tried my best to reassure Pixiegirl. Again, there was the same problem that everything I said came directly from Lesleigh, and everyone in my room was arguing with me as if I were her. Being the messenger can be frustrating, I know now. In any case, Pixiegirl went to her room and fetched the letters that Lesleigh had sent her, ordering her eviction. I've decided, riskily, to publish them here, because I think these words ought to be preserved, if electronically, for the purposes of posterity.

So, with that inflammatory set of papers in mind, I went back to Lesleigh to try to get some explanations, because her initial explanations painted her role in everything to something quite reasonable -- she didn't claim to be half as cruel as her messages were. When confronted, she explained that, yes, she'd been cruel -- and more to the point, she'd wanted to be cruel. She was feeling backed into a corner, and messed-up, and hurt, and her defense mechanism was to lash out. She didn't feel like anybody was on her side -- like Pixiegirl had such a compelling, attention getting, broken-wing-fluttering story that no one had a choice but to sympathize with her and treat Lesleigh like the victimizer. She started to cry, and get hysterical, and while I tried to talk her down, and explain things reasonably -- that I wasn't the enemy, that I was just looking out for a friend -- she actually felt like I was going to give my notice right then and there (I had explained earlier my feeling that if I ever got the sense that people could be turned on so harshly by the very person in charge of looking out for residents, then it wasn't a safe house and I didn't want to live in it... and at that point she'd been very reasonable, very understanding, and even a little conciliatory and good-natured) to move out myself. Then she ran away crying, and I so awful and responsible that I just let her go, and went to my room.

And, at that point, I just didn't know what else to do. I had no idea. But it really did seem that, from the perspectives of both people involved, each felt that the biggest problem was that they weren't speaking, and each also felt that the other simply wasn't making the proper overtures to re-establish some trust and communication, while they themselves had given so much. The only possible thing I as a (self-appointed, granted) mediator could hope to do would be to try to arrange a safe meeting on neutral ground... and hopefully they could talk it out. So, once again I put my shoes on, and went in search of Lesleigh. I walked to her door, and knocked. I could still hear her sobbing inside, and I wasn't sure if she'd even see me. She called out, "Who is it?" and I coughed up my name in response. She opened the door, and I was greeted with a tragic scene. I really felt responsible for pushing her over the edge. That in my irate mood I'd been to aggressive and presented too imposing a figure of the accusor. And while I certainly believe Lesleigh has done much wrong, I also understand that I want to be her friend, and I want more than anything for the wounds opened between so many of us to be healed -- and that couldn't be done without giving up some of the rage and blame. At first, she was sceptical, and disagreeable to the very idea of a conversation, but I tried in my most understanding way to calm her down, and reassure her of the only perfect intentions of all involved. I was starting to cry too, because, after all, in spite of my being very angry, she was a friend, and I so hate hurting my friends.

Curiously, she finally agreed, and told me that she would prefer to meet that very night -- so she instructed me to get Pixiegirl to meet her at Dunn's in one hour. I agreed, and departed to prepare the scene to follow. I (at least) tried to massage the awful tension out of Pixiegirl's shoulders for the first half hour, and as the time of departure grew closer, Broken and I tried to impress upon her how proud we were of her for taking this opportunity, and how confident we were of her ability to keep in control, and be mature, and make something good happen out of this conflict.
At ten forty-five PM, I escorted her to Dunn's. At first I thought that Lesleigh had meant the restaurant closest to the house, on Bank street, but upon arriving there we found it closed. They'd just opened a new, 24-hour Dunn's, on Elgin (Elgin a few blocks away, parallel to Bank street, and every bit as central to downtown's hustle and bustle), so I could only assume she'd actually meant for us to go there. So, a fifteen minute detour later, we arrived. We peered into the windows, and ultimately indeed spotted her. She was alone, which was ideal, so I let Pixiegirl go in, and made sure she'd found her way to the seat (there were staff getting in the way, trying to seat her somewhere else, no doubt) before leaving sight of the restaurant; and even then, I lingered a few minutes to make sure she wasn't tossed out on her ear, or came running out screaming with our property manager hot in pursuit. And I never stopped looking behind me all the way home. I didn't see anyone -- a good sign.

When Pixiegirl finally returned, the encounter had, at least in some ways, gone well. It was obviously tense, with much accusation and innuendo, but Pixiegirl had sat and listened to it all. Lesleigh had promised to try talking to the new tenants, and see if she couldn't buy her another month to stay at our house. Not that their friendship was renewed; and certainly it could have gone better. But after two months, or more, of simply not speaking, it was probably the best resolution one could have realistically expected (being naive and sentimental, I was hoping for miracles). They'd started talking again, and that hopefully suggested they'd be speaking again in the future. It's hard to look at someone you've just had a conversation with as an enemy, or an evil alien, versus someone you don't speak to at all, and about whom every bit of information comes to you in the form of rumours, gossip, speculation and hearsay (none of which is admittable into courts of law, but readily accepted into friendships, tabloids, and other such natural disasters). Maybe good stuff will come of this -- I can't be certain, but I can definitely say that it's about a million times more likely than it was at this time yesterday.

Meanwhile, I try to maintain my naive optimism.

M a r c h 8

It's actually easiest when one has only one option in life. I have several. I expect that before too terribly long, FSWEP will be reaping the rewards of telephone calls from prospective government positions -- at least, this is the ideal case. My various (nebulous) talents are at least somewhat in demand, particularly with organizations like the government, which is eternally hungry for fresh, tasty young students and their able, obsequious, desperate-for-whatever-you'll-pay-me brains. I figure as well, if it worked once, even though I mailed my application form to the main office last June (the job came to me in the beginning of July) when the typical deadline would be January or February, then punctuality could only prove even more rewarding. This is, though, by no means absolute or guaranteed. I might be as likely to go the whole summer without having my telephones (assuming I still have a telephone line... shiver) a-dingling with lucritive offers, just depending on how many other goofy geeks there are just like me looking for the exact same summer jobs (I expect there are thousands; perhaps none with quite my innocent, goofy charm or nimble fingers of legendary sexual power, but certainly as capable of hacking up crude HTML or mastering layers in Photoshop) (dimples and proficiency in the pleasurable arts really ought to be qualifications with their own checkboxes in way more application forms than you'll find nowadays).

My boss is presently in Sweden. I expect he'll be back by the time I'm due to appear again at the K.W. Neatby building, but for the time being we have not actually discussed my future with the happy entomologists of Agriculture Canada. I'm concerned with my future for the simple fact that we've finished our website quite successfully and while it did involve simply tons and tons of work that I was most likely somewhat helpful in the realization of, it remains a mystery as to what they might possibly need of me now. Somehow they coped without me before they needed to invest so much extra time into a website, and so it seems likely that I have not become so indispensible that they could ever imagine a time when they couldn't, in fact, cope without me again. Which isn't to say that I don't very much wish to continue being there. So long as I feel needed I'll stay absolutely anywhere. It's a rather desperately large part of my psychological makeup that I fanatically require to feel like someone or something needs me to be precisely where, and what, I am. Subsequently I'm a great friend and a devoted, if ubiquitous (or, if not ubiquitous, annoyingly whiny) lover, but also something of a wishy-washy, inoffensive, eternally unrequited puppy dog just begging for a kick somewhere dangly and sensitive to such things as kicks.

That being so, I've apparently been a good little worker bee (or monkey) because they keep wanting me around (it baffles me as to, exactly, why... I suspect that either past student workers have been such incompetent drones that standards in general have plummeted or my Jedi Mind Tricks really do work) and to my delight also want to pay me lots and lots of money for being around. It may have something to do with my almost religious zeal about everything that I consider important, even when to most it strongly resembles the most insignificant of minutiae. On Friday, I was explaining to Jennifer, the technician I assist (she has extensive backgrounds in both entomology as well as computer operations, so one minute she's jabbing dead bugs with pins and then she's creating databases), that although technically I only work (in terms of hours per week) each Tuesday and Friday until five o'clock, I'll wind up actually staying until I've managed to accomplish the tasks I've been given, or at least the most reasonable majority thereof. This means I'm rarely out the door before six, and sometimes not before seven-thirty. So she sent me home. I'm never sure if I come off as either a real swell kid, or a huge keener of a suckup, but somehow because I have dimples and social skills, I like to imagine that I am seen as the former.

Presumably, I've at least become useful. No one wants to train someone else the next time they need a person who does my job, and in my ideal little fantasies (including the ones where I can fly and have godlike mystical powers over space and time) I'm hoping that there won't be any problems in my continuing on exactly the way I always have at work for the entire summer, and perhaps even beyond. I know my sister has always successfully enjoyed the fruits of government employment (her specialty being geography and Geographical Information Systems) and it gives me hope that I, too, shall be rewarded for my faithful, skilled, fiendishly creative brain (although fiendish creativity never gets quite the recognition it deserves in employment situations). I think, really, that the only obstacle might be the ability of my boss to obtain enough money to pay me for the summer. If I were to work from May to September, it would cost a pretty penny to actually provide me with a salary, unless someone were evil enough to pay me in ECOdollars, which I couldn't spend, or eat, or do anything with except pretend and maybe talk someone who needs someone to carry their boxes away into giving me a box to live in (someday I'll go and do a rant on the LETS system of economics... in the meantime I'll just let you know that it's a sugary-sweet little wishful thinking concept of alternative economics based on theoretical niceties like barter and the dreamland notion that absolutely everyone has a skill that absolutely everyone else needs. Look it up sometime; it has a number of supporters, and most of them are crazy like a fox that stalks other foxes and then skins them alive after repeatedly sodomizing them and before dining on their steaming entrails... and that's one crazy fox).

Curiously, the other day I was approached by a guy I've met a couple of times, and with whom I have a nodding relationship. You know; you pass in the corridor, and you nod acknowledgements at one another and maybe say "Hi, how are you?" and "Oh, fine, how are you?" on the way to wherever it was you were heading. He seems nice enough. Anyway, he wanted to know, as I was sipping delicious chilly government water from the water fountain, if I had any summer work lined up yet. And I said, no. So, he said, that he was thinking of hiring someone for the summer to do essentially the same job I was doing now, because he needed someone to help him with his website. It seemed likely that he would have the necessary money available, and he wanted to know if I would like to come work for him. I replied positively, but cautiously, alluding to the fact that I had no idea what I'd be doing in terms of my present work situation, and it might well be the case that they'd be hiring me back. He said he'd talk to me about it again in the future, and I said, that would be great.

I was apprehensive basically because I fear change. Even though he works on the same floor in the same building as I do, it's in a different section, and it would mean working for a new person with entirely different expectations of me. As well, I'm really happy with my work conditions. I like my office, and my little supercomputer, and my relative autonomy and responsibility. I have no idea if I'd have the same freedom and privacy. This is especially important to me -- I know I can't expect a life where I can afford to be finicky about what jobs I get, but I love the fact that I have my "own" office, where there are four walls around me, a door, a window, and people can come and go as freely as they like, and yet usually I'm left on my own. I get extremely nervous when people hover over me when I'm working, which means I don't enjoy what I'm doing and then I wish for the sweet release of death, or anything, so long as I'm left in peace. I love people; I'm shy but gregarious, and I whine if I'm alone for too long. However, when it comes to being professional and workey, isolation is my friend. My mental space is unpolluted, and my brain happily settles into getting the job done. Even jobs that other people don't like -- like library work, or scanning, or proofreading hundreds of references in the database. All the better when I have my Walkman on, because then the isolation from the outside world is complete; all that remains is my heartbeat, the sonorous laments of my favourite bands, and caffeine.

At this point I'm just wishing for the best. I don't know what that really is, but so long as it involves me not starving, and not being homeless, and having my own phone line that I easily afford because I'm making a student's fortune at a job I adore doing work I'm good at, I'm easily delighted. If I stay exactly where I am then I am pleased. If I get hired on by someone else I suppose I will learn to be pleased. After all, I was once afraid of having this job because it was new and exciting and (above all else) different, too.

Anyway, I really shouldn't complain. I don't have it so bad. And that reminds me. Time to go out, cuddle, and eat me some cake.

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

Return to days past for more Classic Drivel.

Back to Purple People Eater Town.