I'm going to be much more regular in my updates once exams are over (they begin this week) but in the meantime it's going to be uncertain. I'll probably be writing more later today, but I have to go out and about first and I'm not sure exactly when I'll be back. Nevertheless, your patience has been appreciated, and if you want to check out all the web pages created by my colleagues in cognitive science, and compare them against the page I created, you can inflate my ego by finding them here.

A p r i l 14

I actually kept forgetting that it was Easter. You need children around to really maintain some knowledge of which holiday is coming up next, because they're uncanny at instinctively knowing. And anyways, children are perceptive to a hypersonic frequency which adults are deaf to, so we don't get to hear the secret messeges embedded in every commercial and television show. Now that my nieces are living in another city I need to be reminded when Easter actually is. I just kept calling it "the long weekend," secular bastard that I am. Friday (I mean, Good Friday) was the first day of meaningless inactivity I've really managed to enjoy since, like, Christmas. At eleven in the morning I was meeting a gaggle of friends at Dunn's, the local delicattessen (home of some noteworthy cheesecake) for breakfast, so with Broken in arm I made my way there fully bedecked in my suit, which I hadn't worn since the funeral and wanted to bring out into the world to contextualize the bad associations it still bore. I attach great significance to events, memories, inanimate objects and people which might be trivial to anyone else, but signify specific and important parts of my life. I even have bus transfers that I keep in one of my magic photo albums (where letters and memories are stored) because they remind me of a special night from years ago. In any case, my friends were waiting for me by the time we got there (we were a touch late, blush), as were Charlotte and Johnny, though they were outside.

We had a smashing time, all said. There was an awkward sense in that there were a lot of mutual friends who remained strangers to one another (I met one of my friend's long time buddies, who had heard ever so much about me and vice versa; and they met Johnny for the first time, and Charlotte was only now just meeting practically everyone), but we were all decent, intelligent folk, so it wasn't especially prolonged or powerful. We spoke of the latest house gossip, which involves the fact that Lesleigh, our property manager, called a mysterious house meeting last Thursday, and announced that she was giving her notice, and she would be leaving the house at the beginning of June. She'd decided that it simply wasn't working out; that it was too expensive and troublesome and our landlord was a monster (these things are all true), and so that was that. Anyone who wanted to stay, well, the other property manager, Cliff, was planning to take over the lease, so the house would still be there. And anyone who wanted to leave could either eject in a hurry or come with her, to the new project. She hasn't fixed upon a location yet, but she has a more communal establishment in mind; something where the residents exist in a democratic relationship and the landlord isn't a nazi, and everyone gets along and does there part... and it sounds swell but successful houses don't have free spirits. Successful houses have free spirits tied firmly into place by a heartless authoritarian master who kicks ass if the rent and bills aren't paid on time, or if someone dyes their hair black in the shower again without cleaning anything up (damn goths), and sad but true, I'm of a mind to flee communal living for something altogether a lot smaller and anal retentive. Not necessarily by myself (though that will always be the dream) but at least with roommates I know, trust, and genuinely like, who can be depended on to do their share and remain in a conveniently small number that won't get on my nerves.

H'Tog has been great but, I think as of June first I am outta here. I'm not certain how easy it will be to fill the rush of empty rooms in the house when people begin to evacuate, and landlords hate it when you can only pay half your $4000 rent. Plus I won't likely be all that fond of a lot of the people who do decide to stay, and if you've ever sat through psychology lectures where they talk about the rats who start eating one another when far too many are confined in one space for far too long, you might have some idea of the stress the house conjures. I wouldn't necessarily eat the people here, but you'd have to trust me when I say that from their perspective the distinction will be negligable. In any case, someday I'll be somewhere else soon. I had fantasies of a one, or perhaps a two bedroom apartment, but I have friends who want to leave too, and they're in the unfortunate position of not having jobs or student loans or anything, and landlords like (more like, insist) to see people with income sign the lease. I'm a little confused with the uncertainty of who will actually end up coming. I expect to know more ultimately, but Pixiegirl is still possibly moving into a friend's apartment, so the number of people I wind up living with varies from one to three. And Caira's basement apartment might finally be freed up, which has been the opportunity I've yearned for, but taking it means leaving others to fend for themselves and I hate doing stuff like that.

But back to our breakfast.

We wrapped up our gathering over hunks of cheesecake; I walked Johnny outside, as he had a lunch engagement (when you come to a city after a year, there are endless numbers of people who will require lots and lots of your time), with plans to reuinite later that evening at the Royal Oak (truly the best gathering place out of all of Ottawa's pubs). Charlotte was due to leave soon as well -- she'd been getting a start on an essay due today, and wanted to accomplish some reading -- but as well was planning to meet me in an hour or two with her ferrets so that we could take them for a walk. Broken and I lingered with my other companions for some time, and escorted them to the bus stop that would take them back to Kanata (they were due for a shift at work). We'd spent some time exchanging fast food horror stories, which are the sorts of things that you just get to hear an awful lot when your friends and their friends work in the service industry. Things like people having sex with the vats of lard, peeing in the coffee maker, and of course, tales of McDonalds chicken sandwiches garnished with that most trendy of blights -- chicken tumours. I'm glad I'm a vegetarian -- I eat out quite often, but I rarely eat fast food, and while there are bitter employees in every restaurant, usually family sit-down establishments just hide hairs in the food as opposed to soiling it with unclean bodily emissions.

Charlotte brought her two ferrets by the house shortly after we got home, and I frantically cleaned up. Ferrets, unlike say, a dog, have no concept of right or wrong (dogs are usually aware of the fact that you don't like what they're doing... they just hope they won't get caught), so they feel perfectly justified in behaving like a thirteen-year-old with a gun and the fearlessness of being tried as a juvenile. That being so, my cluttered room is a treasure chest of horrendous things for a ferret to do and suffer. Charlotte has two ferrets; a male she bought in December (named Chachi), and a female she bought to keep him company in February (named Molly. If she'd named her Joanie it might have been necessary to punish her). Chachi is humongous and grey, and Molly is tiny and white. I love them both dearly, although their personalities are quite different. Although Chachi is only six months old, he's mellowed out quite a lot, and it's only with Molly's vicious hyperactivity that he really expresses his latent friskiness. I consider ferrets to be in much the same league that I consider frogs, although frogs are, without risk, the eternal favourite. Frogs, however, are not ideal pets (I find them much more delightful in the wild), whereas ferrets to some extent appreciate human company, and it is quite likely that I'll bring one into whatever house (sweet house! with space and a kitchen and bathrooms and closet space to call my own!) I'll occupy this summer.

We took them for a walk downtown. It's really amazing; Charlotte always plans to take her ferrets out when she's got a lot of time, and a sense of sociability, because walking ferrets is a surprisingly effective way to meet people. It usually takes her forty-five minutes to walk around the block. Typically, she's approached by people who either used to own ferrets (or perhaps still do), or have never ever seen one before. Some people want to pick them up and play with them, and others are afraid they'll bite (they're rather good-natured, unless they can see your socks. They really like socks, and the fact that there's tender flesh beneath them doesn't seem to register.). In any case, they swarm. In between the encounters, though, Charlotte and I sat in the grass of a little park near my house, and discussed the future.

Anyway, the rest of my story will find you tomorrow, if you're here to read it. In the meantime, I've got this crazy ICQ software on my computer, so if that's what you're into, I'll probably be entertaining a mild fascination with it for the next week or two before the immediate gratification begins to wane and I put it aside like so many other bits of shareware you've encountered. NOTE: I've decided to remove my ICQ number. I don't use it very often for anything but pestering close friends and I find it pretty intrusive when you can just e-mail me instead.

A p r i l 15

A p r i l 16

She smiled and waved at Broken when we walked in, but didn't recognize me at first. What can I say? I look different. Some might say, I look "better," but I still just feel self-conscious. In any case, it took her a second to realize it was me. We tried talking, but for some reason the bagel shop was really hopping at 11:00pm tonight and it was some time before she had a free stretch of time to chat with us. I don't know if you believe in such things as "six month anniversaries," but it was while we waited that I realized tonight was the three year, six month anniversary of the night Lucretia and I met. Sigh. So I was nervous, self-conscious, excited, and depressed all at once. Definitely an... interesting combination to say the least. Anyway, after awhile we did talk, and it was delightful. We both had way too much to talk about, so our conversations were almost breathless with mirth. She mentioned her resolution to refuse to behave in the ways people epxect her to just so that she can have a concrete sense of identity. Like, she was wearing pants today, and as she walked to work she noticed herself in every plate-glass window she passed. And she was feeling really bad about her tummy (she has a nice, kissable, tummy... but not, I suppose, a skinny one), so she went to Harvey's and bought a cheeseburger. I think that's just an insanely healthy attitude to have about oneself. She also mentioned (quite) possibly quitting her job. If she gets a summer job through FSWEP (the same organization that provided my referral to Agriculture Canada last summer... she was surprised to know I was still there) then she'll stay in Ottawa, but if she doesn't, then she was thinking about heading either to Alberta, or British Columbia. She's always wanted to get away, and in particular she's always wanted to go West. Personally I hope she gets the job in Ottawa. I think the interview's this week, and I really want her to stay.

She told me something about her roommate, with whom she'd been feuding on account of Lucretia having shrunk her $90 Bennetton sweater, and I guess said roommate had left a note on her pillow demanding compensation in the form of money or a new sweater. So Lucretia prepared the counter of "Well, no problem, I do owe you a new sweater, and I'm sorry it shrank in the wash, but I'm going to subtract the $5 you took from the pocket the last time you wore it, the forty dollars from the sandals you wore all last summer and stretched to the point of being unusable, the twenty-five dollars in bills you owe me this month, and the forty dollars in body jewelry that belongs to me, but you're wearing. Which means you owe me twenty dollars."

I told her about my grandmother's death, and the upcoming reading, and the fact that her criticism of my hair the last time we sat down for coffee had stuck in my mind, and finally set the gears in motion for ending the dyeing. I really didn't know where to begin, but I gibbered all the same. We couldn't, unfortunately, stay too long, because she was supposed to be working and we were supposed to be postering, so off we went. I promised to write her, of course, and I really meant it. I was struck with the overwhelming sense that I'd left being in touch with her for too long. I missed her. I think she's changed a bit. Last year she was really trying to be cool in ways I find somewhat hard to quantify right now, but seemed really unlike her at the time. I think she was just far more concerned with how she appeared to people, and what groups she belonged to, what music/clubs she enjoyed, and how she spent her time. She seems far more relaxed and comfortable with herself, and genuinely cool. I really liked the person she seemed to be, and it made me sorry that only now are we really not enemies. Not that we really ever were, but there was something so much easier about talking to her than before. Perhaps it was me.

At any rate, it screwed me up. On the way back, Broken and I stopped in at a Mac's Milk convenience store (on a side note, it is according to Johnny that I quote the factoid which states Canadians buy more slurpees than any other population in the world) for some motivational goodies. We bought some candy, and beverages, and I had grabbed a Dr. Pepper and shuffled it under my arm along with the bag of posters, and the tape, I was carrying. Broken bought some cigarettes and we took off, and it was only because everything else was in a plastic bag Broken was stuffing into her bag that I noticed the cold lump under my arm -- I'd forgotten to put down the bottle of Dr. Pepper. I felt simply horrible and while it was kind of funny, my strange and confusing personal morals were urging me back inside, so Broken took me (sheepish all the same) back in, and we asked the clerk if he'd charged us for it. He was really surprised, because he hadn't, and was appreciative of our honesty. I tossed him a two dollar coin and felt immediately better. Anyway, I intend to write Lucretia and inform her that seeing her once again thoroughly discombobulated me.

Even after two years there's some part of me that really still cares about her her. Not actively; I mean, we've gone our separate ways, and we don't talk much, but I know I'm not going to be able to get her out of my head for awhile. Just... remembering. It makes me wish I was more of the person I am now when we met; I would have been able to deal with her a lot differently.

That's me, though. Way too full of love. You knew that.

If you have no idea who Lucretia is, I'd suggest refreshing your knowledge of the major factors in my life by reading the cast of characters list.

Unfortunately I probably won't be available to write much Friday or Saturday -- I have an exam at 9:00 for each of these days, and between now and then I'm going to be studying my poor little brains out, as well as preparing for my reading tomorrow night.

A p r i l 2 5

I woke up the next morning at eight o'clock, which is an unfortunate thing as I had actually intended to be up much much earlier to review for my computer science exam, which was at nine o'clock this same morning. Because of the philosophy exam I had previously written at the day before nine am, and the poetry set I was to give that night, I had no other window to study than, well, all night last night, so it was extremely disappointing to discover that somehow I had slept in, in spite of all my careful alarm-setting. My theory at present is that because I hadn't slept in the previous two days, I was so exhausted when the alarm went off that I crawled across the room (if i keep it beside my bed, I'll just shut it off, "rest my eyes," and forget the whole thing happened when I wake up a couple of hours later), shut it off, and got back into bed without really engaging in any higher cognitive functions.

Anyway, I made it to school just in time to sit down and start writing, which is actually better than being early because it's a loathsome process to stand around in the crowded corridors waiting for them to let you in, all the while having to endure being packed in shoulder-to-shoulder with people who are saying "So what's.....?" and forcing you to realize that you should have studied whatever it was they were talking about.

Right now I'm just hoping that, for whatever the person marking my exam actually thinks about my answers, he'll at least say... "well, he's got balls, that one..." because towards the end I became increasingly audacious in my attempts to answer ever single question. The last question I attempted was the complete guess. It wasn't the last question on the exam (I think I did quite well on that biggie, actually), but I'd passed it over because I had no idea how to tackle it. So I ended up attempting to reason how, if it were possible for me to know what I was doing, what I might try. So I took a chance, and I made no secret of it, writing down (because it would be too handy to write a computer science exam on, say, a computer) variable names like "hope" and "try."

I'm pretty certain of a lot of my answers, but my syntax was probably sloppy and I know I didn't ace everything, so what happens next is essentially a waiting game. I know I passed the exam, which means I passed the course, but I was hoping to have done really well on the exam, since it's worth 55% of our final grade and being successful in the course depends on scoring rather well on it. The real crappy part was the fact that a quarter of the exam's weight rested on 50 true or false questions, which normally is a good thing (50-50 chance of victory) but on this test, if you get a question wrong, they call it "guessing" and deduct half a mark. So, technically, if you had a crappy day (or dyslexia or something) you'd have -25% staring at you before you answered a single other question.

I actually might have even been better off leaving half of them blank, because a lot of them were guesses "which of the following is not an object? A class? t/f A variable? t/f A method? t/f", but for that day, that one day, I was a gambling man. Every single question. Bang bang bang. It might have even been statistically better for me to simply tick them off at random, but I relied on my intuition (I mean, I knew a lot of them... or at least I thought I did) so the end score is hard to determine. I did really well on my philosophy exam the day before, in spite of the fact that my professor engaged that time-honoured sneaky tactic of revealing critical information to the class on the last day (and what with the funeral and everything, I wasn't much in a "going to class" state towards the end of the term), and let it be known that we were allowed to bring four pages of cheat sheets with us to class. So there I was, writing an essay on rationalism and empiricism out of my head, and my colleagues were cheekily copying down notes. Grrr, I said. It just sucks that there's no way for my supreme intelligence, aside from the ignorance that got me into that ironic situation, to be appreciated fully by the academic world in times like this.

At this point, I'm anticipating just one more exam, and of course now it's the easy one. It's for social psychology, you see, and every last question is multiple choice. I'm going to be so prepared for this exam that I'm just sweating answers. I could sneeze and have four or five questions filled out correctly. Anyway, this last one's on the 28th, and following that I have about five quiet days until work starts for the summer. Work is good, because Broken, Pixiegirl, Kincaid and myself are planning to relocate to a nice big house and escape H'Tog, which is rapidly sinking. Apparently Mary has even expressed the interest to join us as well, so we have to find a house with a basment to accomodate him, because it would be a supreme honour to have him lurking around. In any case, big things are afoot in my life. I'll do my best to keep you informed as to how I'm doing, and what happens next.

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