What follows is really bitter, and is the result of certain... personality conflicts going on at my house right now. I'll probably regret saying this someday, but right now it just feels so good to vent my frustrations without having to smash anything.

1. I live with goths.

   Goths like it dark and dingy. They seem able to cook quite happily by nothing more than the small orange light which tells you that the stove is on. For some reason, this means they always forget to turn it off.

2. They hate each other. Try tying the tails of two cats together sometime (well, don't, but follow the metaphor), throw them over a clothesline, and watch them kill each other. The main difference seems to be that cats can't gossip or collect welfare.

3. Although it's certainly loosely true that, perhaps, toilet paper does indeed grow on trees, who do you think still has to buy it?

4. They shed lifeless dyed-black hair like autumn leaves.

5. They fail to clean any of it from the bathroom floor.

6. When one of them breaks one of your expensive plates and leaves it in the sink for you to clean up, all I get for it is a round of "Not me," and -- "If you had washed it, it wouldn't have gotten broken in the first place."

   Aside from the offensive insinuation that if I dirty an expensive plate, it deserves to be smashed, I sure didn't use it, and I'll probably never know who did.

7. A sign, over our sink, that reads, "Please wash your dishes. If your [sic] too tired, leave them in your room. Otherwise, no one else can use the sink," posted and defended territorially and with shouting matches by the roommate who doesn't have a job, doesn't go to school, doesn't go out, and considers a clean sink consequently quite important.

8. The queer mathematical formula detailing the rationality behind the observation that if someone is running low on something, but through the hard work you put in each and every day you have managed to afford to keep it in stock, you obviously have so much that you won't mind if a little bit just goes missing.

9. Confucious say: roommate who leaves computer and television on twenty four hours a day pays bigger share of electric bill.

10. Dear God, why is there a hamster in the freezer?

11. Sure, drink my coffee by the pot!

    Oh, what's that? You want sympathy for feeling ill after greedily guzzling two and a half pots the same day I buy it?! FUCK YOU!!

12. "I clean that bathroom, so it's mine!" -- by that logic, Broken owns the entire house.

13. Without Broken, nothing would get done. The rent wouldn't get paid to the property manager, the fridge wouldn't have been replaced, the bathroom upstairs would be overrun by spiders and bandits, the cups wouldn't be hung, the drapes in the living room wouldn't exist, the kittens wouldn't have food, the living room would be a mess, conflicts wouldn't be moderated, and I'd personally be constructing a tinkertoy castle out of my roommates' bones.

    Broken doesn't walk around with a shit-eating grin and her hand extended out expectently awaiting compliments and praise, but oddly, when a roommate periodically mops the floor in the kitchen, and washes a few dishes, she is expected to give them.

14. Do you hate your roommates?

At any rate, we were both on our way to classes, and couldn't talk very long, but she said she'd be in early this morning around one if I cared to talk at that unseemly hour. I did, actually, and promised to give her a ring again. In the meantime, I'd learned that she'd been extremely busy with her classes and studio time, auditioning for the third year students, visiting her ill brother, and, among other things, posing as a model for art classes. I was a little amazed to hear this, as well as given to blushing and perhaps even (if you'll forgive the indulgence) a few distracting thoughts, but it gives me hope that she's actually mastering her body image and taking a better view of herself and her aesthetic qualities. Lilith has very low self esteem (this coming from me, so imagine the scope of my words), and suffers the anorexia given to almost all dancers everywhere, and her proudly announcing that for a few hours of holding the same pose she got to see paintings of herself naked, and fifty smackaroonies each night, made me think that perhaps she's doing very well for herself indeed with the independence of university life, away from the constraints of home and parental manipulation. I'd like to think that she's learning to love herself a little more, in any case.

When I called her, unfortunately, we were both quite tired, and she had an eight o'clock class to attend (not simply involving sitting through a lecture without nodding off, but donning some tights and running and dancing quite vigorously), so we agreed that perhaps this wouldn't be the greatest night for such conversations. I was still quite deeply touched though, when she emphasized how very very much she wanted to talk to me, and how important she thought it was. You must understand that our friendship, though lingering, has been strained for far more than a year now, and to know that she is so sincerely interested in talking to me touches me in a way I can't convey through simple electronic text -- even with my famous ability to ramble onwards, describe scenes with almost unnecessary detail, and conjure enough metaphors and allegorical images to adequately convey volumes A through F of an average encyclopaedia through witty turns of phrase and bon mots -- and must simply paint through the admission that I was giggling quite idiotically through our entire conversation. I loved hearing her voice again. I loved feeling like she really wanted to talk to her friend Rob. That I was her friend. I was elated, oddly.

And anyways, I'll talk to her later this evening.

I'm thinking about Lucretia as well this weekend. October the 15th, fast approaching, is the anniversary of the night we met; of the night our friendship was sealed by my very first kiss. Lucretia is living in British Columbia, and although I really do miss her, we haven't spoken since she left in June, and in all honesty we didn't speak much even before she departed. Well, that's the way it goes in friendships sometimes. I didn't appreciate her for what she was before she left, and I understand this now as the unfortunate price of pride. Although we'd both moved past the anger forged in our many foiled relationships, we were never as close again -- each just a little too critical of the other, each too willing to move past, instead of move on. I know we both thought of one another fondly, and there were always good intentions of calling, or writing, each other, but our past had written our present, and now she's gone. Even with that distance, we always made the time to spend our anniversary together, and this year I must express my regret that she is entirely too far away, and so on October 15 I will be alone. I've made plans, though, to make good use of this day. I'm going to take a bus to Kingston all by myself, with two cameras and a load of film -- colour rolls for my automatic, and black and white for Broken's manual SLR. I decided that I wanted to document the locales, paths, and memories of that very special evening. It was a night peculiar in its destiny and discovery, and I want to remember it long after the park we swung in, the streets we walked, the store I bought Jolt in -- all of these things and more -- are turned into mini malls or Soylent Green processing stations or puke vats for the unfortunate number of drunken, surly engineers who flock to that expensive-means-prestigious university each year. I'm going to shoot so many photos that the redundancy costs a fortune to process in double prints, pick the best and send them in a letter to Lucretia's house, in the hopes that her parents can forward to wherever she's ended up (she wasn't sure when she left). While I shoot all these photos, I'm going to remember her, and remember that wonderful night we met, and I'm going to drink my Jolt and cry my tears, and listen to the music I had with me that night four years ago, scratch at the itchy sweater I was wearing, and enjoy the cold solitude of that cold October night in a city far away and full of memories.

Which brings us back to Clorinda. A year ago, she and I were both terribly excited about the my trip to Spokane to meet her for the first time. I was wrestling with problems with my passport, an exam which had turned up during the time I was supposed to be away, the cost of going there, and the fascinating scariness of being in a foreign country, meeting a person who could turn out to be anything.

But I'm not going to talk about her right now, and perhaps that says it all.

Incidentally, October 14-15 will be the anniversary of my kidney stone. Honestly, what a fascinatingly painful time of associations October is. I wonder what else this year will surprise me with?

So off I go to sit with family members from somebody else's family, eat eggplant concoctions and some of the savoury dishes Broken was up all night cooking, and the expensive desserts we bought yesterday while out shopping for Pixiegirl's birthday black forest cake (which she adored; as much as I'm mad at my roommates as roommates, as humans we want to like them). I hope your Thanksgiving weekend (although I'm sure half the people reading this live in America) will be at least as interesting as mine. After all, I'd like to think I'm not the only one in this boat.

I wish I had the time to talk about Thanksgiving and my own experiences with it in poverty. Does anybody know what I mean?

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

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