Well, the reviews are in, and while I was sadly a sleepy monkey last night and did not get a chance to write about my fascinating experience with Corben yesterday, I will quickly assuage the fears of one of my employers, who feared that if all went poorly that I would be simply impossible to work with on Monday, that I had a most marvelous day indeed. After I've had the luxury of a lunch break, you will find today's entry here.

The thing is, though, and this is a classic example of a difference of perception, is that I was almost a little insulted by the question itself, and I know if I'd taken that test I would have in all likelihood seen the question for what it was, and gotten very very indignant about it. To me, there was something about the wording I found ambiguous, and in exasperation Corben pointed out that it was a class of eight year olds who took this test, but nevertheless I was still a little perplexed, because at eight I had the gumption and the unabashed creativity to really come up with a big list of uses for a brick. I mean, children are imagination factories, and anyone who can't see what a smashing (pun intended) murder weapon a brick would take hasn't spent enough time nursing a megalomaniacal contempt of the general public. At any rate, I thought it was an interesting difference between us. Corben is well-read, exceedingly learned, and personally brilliant, but she and I still have a sort of perceptual difference which explains, I suppose, her committment to the hard sciences while I still fritter about in the humble domain of a bachelor of arts. Interestingly, between us we still know enough about Star Wars to make George Lucas himself run away while lawyers are screaming "Get a life, you freaks!" and throwing fistfuls of Chewbacca action figure arms at us on his behalf.

These are all observations, of course, from later that day. After meeting in the Byward Market, I took some photographs of Corben holding up the sign I'd prepared (she has since taken it into her custody and will be decorating her residence room with its neon garishness when she goes away to Dalhousie University in the fall... everybody now -- awwwwwwww!), in the spirit of documenting every second, even the mundane and visually unappealing ones, with film. Since we were assembling a picnic, though, we packed up our respective gear or, you know, whatever, and set about to purchase tasty fruit -- the cornerstone of any good afternoon in a park. I bought some raspberries, and Corben picked up some cherries and blueberries, which are all the perfect sorts of fruits for graceful nibbling, as opposed to say, watermelon, which is the devil's own fruit, and a sickly sweet and messy nuisance to ingest, like all things melony. We also visited the Boko Bakery on (as I recall) George Street, where Corben selected a yummy croissant and I, characteristically fruity, bought a danish. The only other necessary step to complete our preparations involved finding ourselves some beverages, which is easily accomplished on a hot day by civil servants with no fear of frivolously spending money.
Which, coincidentally enough, we were.

Corben and I had agreed to journey to the wilds of Strathcona park, which is easily one of Ottawa's largest and lushest natural environments, and a place I don't visit nearly enough. Of course, I have my reasons. The last time I was there had been on an excursion with Lilith two years ago (and, in fact, probably something on the order of more or less exactly two years ago.... Oh God, why don't I ever see these things coming?); we had been to see a performance of "God What a Night That Was," which was a theatrical performance of some local love/erotic poetry, including a piece or two by my older sister. Parasitized by mosquitoes though we were, Lilith and I curled up on a grassy resting place, me with my head in her lap, and my thoughts trapped by her beautiful hands.

Um, anyway, this is all quite suddenly coming back to me in a horrible nostalgic rush of regret and an urge to jump out my window and fly away, so back to our story.

Corben selected the biggest, oldest, shadiest tree she could see, and an eligible tree it was, too. She had the foresight to bring a gigantic beach towel, which we spread out beneath us and upon it assembled a toothsome assortment of fresh, if rapidly gooifying, fruit (the sun being the mortal terror it always is in July) such as to nourish our young metabolisms whilst we stretched out our respectively godlike leg muscles. It was at this point that the cameras again came out -- Corben's own six hundred dollar camera greatly outclassed my dinky little magic soul-stealing box, so a lucky thing it was indeed that I am not the sort to be envious of superior equipment. Emotionally needy I may be, but I stopped measuring my genital metaphors (and, heck, my genitals themselves) up against the genital metaphors (and cetera) of others a long time ago. This is currently transpiring within the walls of my house, you see. One of my roommates just last week purchased a Pentium II 300 woozlewuzzle with 100 flabbaflabs of glimglob and 32 hemmhaws of hooplah (and so on... just picture something big and expensive and shiny and fast that could eat my 386 like a self-indulgent chocolatey treat as a self-congratulatory reward for having just successfully taken over the world, which this computer could undoubtedly do, if it were used for more than playing emulator games). This means that another of my roommates (see how sneaky and covert I am by avoiding the use of even pseudonyms? This is how I dehumanize them when I'm feeling especially psycopathic and wish not to indulge the bloodlust by braining productive rentpayers who I do actually like, frustrating though they might be, with frying pans) is now beside himself with envy, because his Pentium is only a 233 (not even a Pentium II -- dear GOD!) leased last summer, and in comparison it is, one supposes, were one to notice such things, greatly lacking.

This roommate admits that, in lieu of many of the other validating achievements like school, work, romance, or crime which can be used to give one's life a sense of definition and fulfilment, he has simply been content to conduct his affairs with a swanky computer. And at least he can be honest about that part (although, let me say, it's time to whip out the world's most unsympathetic ear when he starts lamenting about these things in his life which could be so easily changed), and I suppose with that consideration in mind one can certainly see why it is galling to have such an elegant piece of technology in our house, and in the hands of a complete newbie, no less. Having owned essentially the same 386 for five years, give or take a little RAM and a second hard drive here and there, I have long since stopped caring about who has a better computer than I do, because frankly, everyone has a better computer than I do.

The moral of this tangent is that Corben's camera, although I would cough up my soul to spend an evening with it (to speak nothing of Corben herself), was indeed delicious and dandy, but my camera did quite successfully snap all kinds of pictures of her, the park, piles of bricks (we thought it was relevant -- see above), and indeed anything which caught our fancy, so envier of nothing am I. Hopefully I'll have that roll back in my hands sometime next week, so -- who knows -- with her permission I might even scan up a bunch.

Which is to say I have a lot of writing I want to do today, but necessarily it means I can't indulge in ranting. Please forgive me. It's the only day I have left to this frantic weekend, and I wanted to waste it indoors.

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

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