I love imagery. Euphemisms, allusions, allegorical and metaphorical tools -- it's all good, baby. I wish essays allowed for stronger descriptive powers.

I promise to finish the Cruinne story tomorrow. Suffice it to say at this point, she is very frustrated and is trying to figure out what a more or less resoundingly confusing "maybe" means to her plans for the immediate future. Where to go, what to do, when to leave; all that and more. I care about her enough to be frustrated too. This is not to say, of course, that either of us think Ficus is really causing all these problems purely by virtue of being somehow other than the person Cruinne would like him to be in her life. He made her feel cared for and important during her visit, after all, and is obviously stuffed full of a great many wonderful qualities of the kind that can apparently win and keep the heart of a fabulously brilliant, charming and beautiful young woman in spite of many hardships. The problem is more that she is so very in love with him, and is unhappy without him, and so must continue being lonely and indecisive about what step to take next in her life when she can't really return to her adoptive home, and can't stand to remain where she is.

But more about me.

There are various parts of my life which exist with the striking dichotomy of being things which I am either tremendously happy about, or (conversely) tremendously unhappy about. I was thinking about my existence today, and what the people, events, and things comprising "My Life" mean to me. Well, actually it's far more fair to say that I think about these sorts of things all the time. I'm quite obsessive and tend to analyze myself in much the same way that students in first year psychology or medicine will discover all kinds of telling symptoms in themselves and their friends after they've been exposed to the introductory text for a couple of weeks.
What's that? Tender mucous membranes? Cough? Maybe you have the bubonic plague.

Anxiety? Depression? Zounds, boy! I bet you were abducted by satanists when you were three! Let me hypnotise you and we'll find out for sure.

I'm really happy with my job.

I've been working two contracts for most of the winter/spring, and they keep on calling me back for more. I can't say as I mind. Last week I deposited a $950 paycheque -- the bountiful harvest of forty-seven hours of work done in the evenings, over a weekend, whenever I found the time. Smashing, no? I love it here, and that's the truth. Whenever we finish a project at work, it is passed around, displayed proudly, and published online like parents sticking their kids' stuff onto the refrigerator. My name gets mentioned here and there, and with the growing push for online products in the world, there are more and more managers somewhat peckishly looking for a nice morsel of a low-cost, high-yield lackey who won't steal stuff. I guess once you start pricing independent contractors and web development companies, the (to me) absolutely massive scale of $20 an hour for my time is really a pittance. It's really, really nice, let me say, that a gawky introvert with artistic tendencies can still make a living in this world without having to resort to street prostitution or home invasions. I mean, I have a friend with a degree in religion who makes almost fifty thousand dollars a year at an encryption company. It can happen. In any case, the money is good, but by no means is this the reason I'm so happy. I really have a lot of esteem and respect in my workplace, and how many 23-year-old people can say that, truly? I have to admit, I have a lot of friends who between them hold down a lot of jobs, but most of the people I know don't feel at all like their efforts are appreciated at work. It's just expected that you work as many hours as possible, take as much abuse as both the public and co-workers alike can inflict during those long hours, and be grateful that you have the job at all because you sure could be replaced in a hurry. Which is a crappy sentiment, because of course anybody who commits any kind of true dedication and care to a job should be recognized as pure gold simply by virtue of being less disposed to play solitaire, masturbate into the pizza dough (hey -- it's happened. And never drink coffee at the office if you yourself haven't brewed it personally, may I also say...), or steal from you. When I stay late at work, driven by some sense of guilt to slave over a task I feel ought to be completed before going home, I know the extra work is appreciated and remembered. Every time I get hired for another summer, or another contract is offered to me, I know it's because I deserve it -- for the simple reason that people make sure I know I deserve it. Have I told you about how jaw-droppingly amazing it is when my boss brings me a Jolt, or some candy, when I'm having a particularly bad day? Do you know what it feels like to have three contracts at once with the government? It's keen. Two of them are mine simply because of the sparkling reputation I have. It's really amazing. I actually look forward to going into work each week, and how whacked a sentiment is that normally? I admit it, my job makes me happy.
Like, sure, of course the money helps. Let's not get carried away. I bought a scanner this week -- a nice one. 36-bit colour, 9600 dpi, mighty fast, mighty sexy, and it hides conveniently under my desk (which is actually the only place I could think to put it), far removed from the temptation to scan parts of my anatomy, or the respective anatomies of my friends. I really enjoyed having the power to walk into a computer store, look at scanners, point at the shiny one I happen to like (I always like the shiny one, in case you're ever trying to lure me somewhere with various baits tied to strings), and carry it away (with that nasty plastic handle which digs mercilessly into your hand whenever you're carrying off a large, expensive, computery box these days), paid for in full. To know that not only do I have this ability, but know that through my talents and my dedication I have earned this ability, is really empowering and validating. It's also exceedingly fun to have the power to digitize all manner of personal items -- just like the evil robots in Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future. I'm rapidly running out of things to scan. Well, that's not true. I'll probably run out of hard drive space before then. I have all these neat ideas for my page, but just in case the novelty of scanning my weewee, or dead squirrels, or anything else I like does wear off and all I wind up using my scanner for is an expensive place to put a plant on top of, maybe you should let me know what you think I should be aiming at doing with my page now that I'm so freaking powerful.

The dark side to my employment is the uncertainty. I don't know yet if there is actually a place in the new budget for me. Every spring of course, with the commencement of the new fiscal year, a budget is drawn up for each section, including the allocation of funds for such frivolities as, well, summer students. There is a shiny new manager responsible for the budget this year, which is actually a potentially terrible thing, as new managers will naturally want to make themselves quite accountable and indispensible as quickly as possible, and what better way could there be to give the impression of competence than to "trim some fat" (as it were) from a bloated budget in the way of willy-nilly summer help. I wasn't overly concerned about this situation, being rather optimistic on the subject ("eh," I shrugged, "it always seems to work out in the end"), but on Friday my boss mentioned that he hadn't heard anything about the new budget yet, and when I casually declared that I expected a happy ending, he looked worried and said "Hmmm... I sure hope so!" in a tone of voice which can only be described inn the way that it ruined the rest of my day and began a cycle of worry which has endured the entire weekend. I'm looking forward to finding out. My boss seemed more confident a couple of weeks ago, which in turn reinforced my own, because this year he is also overseeing the section that my former boss, Gary (who is in Australia for the year), normally does. That said, he put in a good request for two students; one to help with his own projects, and one to assist with APSS. With the many extra responsibilities my boss has (not quite voluntarily) assumed this year, it seemed reasonable to think he would at least get money for one student, and without seeming too terribly presumptuous, it was certainly true that he would be hiring me. Now, however, I'm kind of worried. I might find out this week, or perhaps next week -- but who knows? In the meantime things are kind of tight. I'm expecting a tremendously nice sum of money in advance of my third contract (to take place in my own time in June, now), but until I know that I'll be assured steady paycheques this summer, I'm not willing to spend money on much more than groceries and crickets lest I be caught in hardship later on. I think I have other prospects, and I registered again with FSWEP (the Federal Student Work Experience Program) this year, but banking on uncertainty can only lead to doom so instead I simply anxiously await the good or bad news.

What absolutely infuriates me today is the incompetence of Commvesco, our ridiculously mismanaged rental company. This isn't even a Farley and Spade kind of rental company; this is a "ten monkeys and a container of yogurt" kind of rental company. An empty container of yogurt! This fall, we were delighted to receive an eviction notice on the grounds that we had failed to pay our rent that month. Imagine our surprise to get the letter declaring this, because not only had we faithfully paid our rent in full once again, but each of us had receipts given to us by the property manager, who at that point in time was charged with the responsibility of visiting each unit to collect the rent in person. What happened? Well, who's to say, except that somewhere between the property manager taking our money and the arrival of the eviction notice they managed to lose the rent cheque? Can you believe it? I hate rental companies for the fact that even the good ones react in a wooden knee-jerk to any kind of problem, without talking to the tenants and attempting to come to some understanding of the situation as it really stands. Our rental company just mails out eviction notices after two or three days. [This is a very italics intensive snivel. It is supposed to emphasize my extreme ire in a visually striking way.] Broken had to give them hell, read out receipt numbers, and otherwise declare in no uncertain terms that we are forced to hand our rent money over to idiots for the mistake to be acknowledged and apologies given.
Now, flash forward a handful of months to April in the amazing year 1999 (no moonbases yet, dagnabbit). Here we are, in the second last month of occupancy in our wacky, and lovely, but crowded home. Come the first of June, we're all going our separate ways to new homes, with Broken and myself taking my frogs and Broken's cat, and probably our friend Dorothy, to a charming house with a garden, if we can find one. This is our last rent-paying month. Next month, we enjoy the fruit of the costly first and last month's rent paid out last June and hand over nothing. Still, responsibly and dutifully as always, we mailed out the rent to Commvesco this week. We mailed it, because they no longer send property managers over to personally collect the rent on account of one or two of them pocketing whatever cash they were given and zipping away as far as it would take them. So, Broken now collects all the rent from each of us at the beginning of every month, and ships it off Express Post (guaranteed, next-day delivery) to the main offices of our company. She sends it Express Post for the sake of peace of mind; if the company claims the rent never came, we at least have the receipt for the delivery which can be confirmed with Canada Post.
So wasn't it indeed surprising when we got our second eviction notice from Commvesco on Saturday, ordering us out by April 28 because once again we failed to pay our rent. You know, like the last time, when they lost our rent? We're dealing with monkeys -- I swear. Those little brown ones that urinate on everything. Instead of calling, instead of confirming any kind of detail, it's just a stupid letter in the mailbox as a ridiculous, Passive Aggressive™ intimidation tactic. They couldn't have inquired to say, "Oh, frightfully sorry, but given that the last time we tried to evict you it was on grounds which were entirely our fault we thought that instead of trying to evict you again this time, we might just stop by to check if, perhaps, once again it was also entirely our fault?" Nope, none of that. So, tomorrow we're taking our cheque numbers and the Express Post receipt to their main offices, unannounced, impatient, and very very angry, to get this straightened out to our satisfaction, apology and all. I am sick of dealing with idiots. We tried all weekend to get ahold of somebody to straighten this out with, but no part of Commvesco can apparently communicated effectively with any other part, which is why we're going to show up at the office of the name signing the letter, and stuff some grade A fury in her face. With a side-order of spankings should the need so arise. Enough is enough.

By popular demand, here is another photograph of me. It was taken exactly a year ago, when I was still living at H'Tog. This was immediately after the incident when, while cutting my previously glorious purple hair, I messed up and was forced to run to a barber (with a toque on my head to cover my shame), where I was formally shorn. In the attempt to deal with the new severe appearance caused by the lack of hair, I dabbled with the follicles embedded in my face, determined to find out whether at the tender age of 22 I could actually grow a passable beard yet or not. Bored? Compare this picture to the image of me in my gallery and see how exactly I've aged in the past year (although the beard adds ten years to my face, so I look like a baby in the ironically newer photobooth series).

I love the power of having a scanner. Which reminds me to ask, what do you think of my melodramatic illustration (above)? Believe it or not, I used to be a promising artist before I got girlfriends and a job and an education and things. Now I'm just a doodle-in-the-margin-of-notes-during-a-lecture sort of fellow. I can't even draw a sad little stick-Cruinne all that well (I was trying for the stylistic stick people as depicted on the artwork for OK Computer by Radiohead, but failed miserably because I didn't have the CD handy).

I had written another segment to go here, in connection to my artistic endeavours in general, but it seems kind of dated now. I wanted to say that my recent dabblings in the way of the pen had inspired me to return to a form of expression I've really ignored over the past two or three years of my life. When I was in high school, I drew an awful lot, in the same way that I wrote a million letters and began (at least) a million stories thanks to the overwhelming lack of girlfriends in my life at that point. I wasn't a complete wallflower during my somewhat painful adolescence (but hey, who hasn't had one of those), but I was a more thoroughly introverted and awkward individual for most of my teenage years. This changed a lot by the time I was seventeen, when I moved to Ottawa for the first time, and discovered a life of my own. Up to that point I had always shared a bedroom with my younger brother, and in the lack of any kind of privacy or personal space I had no freedom to explore my interests or attitudes beyond a certain point. I also couldn't walk around naked, but that is, again, more of a concern now that I have such adult habits as, say, a sex life. When I moved to Ottawa, to take care of my grandmother when my grandfather died for a few months, I had a bedroom all to myself (in that luxurious habitat: the finished basement) where I did a lot of growing in a very short time. I had access to downtown Ottawa thanks to the bus system (miserable though it was), and spent a lot of time writing and socializing with the writers' group organized by my older sister. It was amazing to be accepted as an intellectual equal (and more, a friend) of such a large circle of people, all of whom were older than I was by at least six years. I cultivated a growing interest in music, fed by cable television and my increasingly worldly tastes, and as I discovered more and more interests, talents, and acceptance, my personality began to bloom. By the time I turned eighteen, the metamorphosis into the person I am now was well underway (although I'm a more confidant and stable individual now than I was then, if you can believe that), and when I moved back to Smiths Falls to finish my last year of high school, I was radically more confidant, clever, and articulate than ever I was before, and thus I (slowly) learned how to relax and enjoy myself. I had just acquired my trusty old 386 then, and the liberation of word processing really encouraged me to write a great deal more prose, and even a tiny bit of poetry, although that's quite shameful to think about now. I walked away from high school with an English Award for creative writing (you can still see it, framed, in my visual nightmare of a bedroom), with the very real amount of personal validation that entailed, and less and less time for all the artistic potential I expressed through pencil and paper. It's not that I've somehow completely lost my interest or my talent, like atrophied muscle tissue, but struggling with the inking and crosshatching of even that silly little sketch above would have been more like doodling a couple of years ago, whereas now it required about an hour's worth of work. I want to sit down in cafes with a sketchpad and draw again, versus doodling in the margins of my notebooks during lectures. I have a great idea for the fourth life of Snowball the Cat, now some four years overdue, and with any luck I'll get off my procrastinating can this summer and get back to the fundamentals of my little life. I've been feeling very frustrated and unaccomplished in some ways lately, and I can only suppose that writing and drawing a whole lot more (even without any goal-oriented motivations like publication) would satisfy a lot of those urges.

I was thinking the other day how far I've come, all the same. In the fall, I had deigned 1998-1999 to be the (school) year of self-improvement, whereby I would work out at the gym all the time, and finally master the guitar, and generally embark on projects geared to make me feel better about myself. What turned out to be the case instead, though, was a year of journeys towards becoming a better person, and I must say I'm happy with the person even the past eight or ten or twelve months has seen me become. I've made some amazing friends, like Corben and Dorothy and Cruinne, and restored older friendships with Charlotte and Caira; friendships which weren't flagging or failing, but were suffering from busy schedules and the passage of time all the same. Which isn't to say that all has been smooth sailing steadily onwards, but growth comes from hard lessons at least as much as it does from artificial hormones and hanging upside down in the closet. Although I shall probably always be vulnerable and mopey and overly sensitive and introspective, I am more and more a confident, happy young man and increasingly I understand (and even believe) that I am in control of my life. I'm more and more self-sufficient. I work really hard, with dedication and skill, and as I have said above, this is noticed and rewarded in kind (with even more work). All the clothes I'm wearing today, or on any given day, really, are garments that I bought for myself with money I earned. No trips with mom's credit card to Zellers or Gothmart or Crazy Irving's Slightly Mismatched Sock Emporium for me. The food I eat, and share with my friends and loved ones, is equally the result of a whole lot of hard work. Nobody gives me anything that I haven't earned. I mean, yes, I'm dependent on my student loans for tuition and books and some rent, but they give me less and less as I earn more and more anyway, and regardless it's still money I'm doomed to pay back later on. Sure, that could all change with the breeze, or an office affair gone sour, or alien invasion (or whatever), but nobody can tell me I haven't done well for myself so far in my silly young life. I don't always do good, but I do always try to do good, and for all the love and respect I've managed to hoard away for those lonely rainy nights I sometimes even feel happy, and proud, to be me.

I actually thought that yesterday.
Yesterday, a friend sent me a link -- to an mp3 file. I'm actually unsophisticated enough never to have resorted to that piracy tactic before, so after spending an hour or two downloading it (I have a fast modem but a slow connection) I also downloaded a spiffy player so that I could actually do something with it. It was funny, because it was a kind of silly song, and yet well-produced, quite melodic and terribly catchy in the sweetest way, and I found myself both impressed and curious about the song, so I asked about its heritage. To be honest I wasn't really prepared for the answer I received, which was that it had been written, performed, and otherwise put together by a mutual friend. I confess I was astonished and full of a newfound sense of awe. For the flippancy of the song, it was excellent; betraying a talent I might have assumed but had never personally witnessed. This person could make millions of dollars and find his immortality and fame if only he spent his time creating beautiful music and sharing it with lowlifes from record labels. The truly pathetic thing is, that all that admiration and wistful optimism ("if only he knew how great he was...") being what it was (as well as some confusion and concern about the significance of the song to my friend), I got really depressed after hearing that song three or four times. I have this terrible and dysfunctional habit of comparing myself against other people -- almost always friends of friends (if you remember the pains I put myself through in comparing myself to Charlotte's boyfriend Slash, for example) -- and always as a way of making myself feel worse. There's really no fairness, perspective, or point (even) to be found in comparing other people to yourself; while intimately familiar with your own faults and neuroses, you are exposed only to another person's public persona, and those achievements and attitudes they have so far shared with you. I always wind up feeling inferior. In this case I just realized that I'm wasting my own talents and, really, a great deal of my time. It's not that I have any musical ambitions (beyond plucking a few chords on a guitar and singing in the shower and seeing Hayden whenever he comes to Ottawa) at all, but rather that I can point to somebody I know (though not well) and see how tremendously gifted this person is -- and in doing so look at my own sorry self and how I've frittered whatever humble talents I have on mundane articles and a rather fruitless life. For all the self-aggrandizing accomplishments listed above, what do I really have to show for the past three years of my degree-oriented life? Not bloody much. I can't even say how much appeal cognitive science still holds for me. After all the departmental rearrangements on campus, with courses either being changed or not being offered at all, I'm looking at another two (possibly three) years to my degree, when by any normal schedule I should be expecting to graduate next spring. I feel trapped and unfulfilled, and I'm examining the possibility of changing my major; hopefully to something slightly related so I can jump to an advanced standing and avoid having to start all over again. I'm sitting on my hands, stuffed full of great ideas for stories and poems, but I never do anything with them, it seems. When was the last time I even properly updated my web page? I guess I forced myself to realize that in a lot of ways I'm being a tremendous bum, and my ego (such as it is) took a terrible fall from its lofty heights when I came to terms with how essentially useless I've been.

Partly I had quite the fall because I was feeling so unusually good about myself to that point. After about eight weeks of only seeing each other briefly, say while in class, I managed to spend some time with my friend Dorothy. We've both been entirely too busy with our classes and jobs, lives and obligations (for example; she has a regular feature in a monthly Ottawa magazine and I retie my tricky shoelaces an awful lot) to make any real plans -- leastwise any plans that held together. Dorothy was really sick this week, though. Too sick to do anything -- too sick to see me, certainly -- but she still managed to call and worry about me, which was touching and sweet. She ran into one of her dearest friends in the world (who also happens to be the sweetie of my older brother), who asked during their conversation how I happened to be doing. To her extreme embarassment and guilt, Dorothy could only reply: "I don't know," and that truly made her feel unhappy and concerned. The last she knew, I'd been faring rather (even for me, uncharacteristically) poorly, thanks largely to loneliness and stress over exams, and had some disturbing dreams involving me as a further manifestation of how concerned she was. She recently had a cryptic about me lying in her room, somehow injured and crying unconsolably in her bed, while she could only hug me and hold me for days and days, and meanwhile her parents regarded her grimly, as if somehow she were to blame for my suffering. My own take on this vivid and evocative imagery is dull. I'm partial to the not-so-symbolic symbolism of my apparent need to be hugged by her. It's enough like real life to be eerie. There truly is, I must say, something terribly flattering to my presence in the subconscious states of my dear friend, particularly in such an unusually emotional dream. Normally I'm more dull or lifelike in her dreams, you see, when I appear at all. In any case, she woke up terribly worried about me, and gave me a call last week after she'd calmed down -- complete with one of those "whew! It was alllll a dream!" realizations after the initial panic of consciousness had subsided. I was touched -- touched in the most sappy, aching way. In the way of someone who misses a beautiful person for a very long time, only to have it put very clearly that you yourself are also missed.
At any rate, Dorothy was sick, as I was saying, and although she couldn't really come out to play (and definitely did not wish to make me sick myself) I did want to bring her some love and some cheer, bundled up in some conveniently lavish way (as was the style at the time). Somebody ate all of Dorothy's caramel-filled chocolates overnight (in these cases, isn't it always a mystery? Somebody ate all the chocolates; somebody stole a book; somebody punched a hole in the wall...), and because of her sore throat they were really the closest thing to "solid food" she could attempt to comfortably eat. Although she had asked her roommate to bring her some sickie-type remedies like ginger ale, he hadn't bothered, and she pathetically asked me if I could bring her some after I insisted that I personally had to bring her new, a yummy, replacement garrison of chocolate. And so it was that, equipped with a wide selection of delicious candy (including the new favourite of the world (well: Broken, Cruinne, myself and Dorothy anyway), Dumle), a big bottle of Canada Dry ginger ale, and a container of chocolate chip cookie dough Häagen-Dasz ice cream (which was just a good guess, but actually it turned out to be Dorothy's absolute favourite flavour of ice cream, much to my relief and surprise). It was a lovely spring afternoon in Ottawa, and complete with my walkman and a new mixed tape I wandered over the Alexandra bridge into Hull to deliver my packaged love. Dorothy couldn't really hug me, or entertain me, when I got to her house (on account of being sick), but she did insist that I stay for a little while and watch Jeopardy with her, which really meant she wanted me to try to compete with her as she answered the questions before the contestants did (she has quite the indexical storehouse of astonishing facts in that juicy brain of hers), and as always I never stood a chance. But she gleefully poured me a glass of ginger ale, and nibbled assorted yummies from the big bag o' candy I brought, and said a great many sweet things to make me feel terribly good about myself -- in the sense that I felt missed, and special, and... well... a little bit loved. I couldn't really stay long, and after Jeopardy had passed into the world of yesterday I put on my sneakers in preparation for the walk home. As I said my wistful goodbyes, though, Dorothy decided that, in spite of how sick she was, she really did need a hug from me, and embraced me at the door.

And, I don't know, perhaps you don't do this at all, but I always find that in a hug there's some unconscious mental calculation of how long it can comfortably last between friends. Perhaps I'm the only one who ever sees this dynamic. I'm usually happy letting the person hugging me let go first, but if they don't, then I have to figure out at which point the hug should happily last before getting too uncomfortable. I mean, imagine a two-hour hug with a friend. It is a sweet thought, I admit, and in a wonderful world we'd all embrace like that, but in this world life is unpleasant and people can't really hug for more than a handful of seconds before there's a certain something... inappropriate... to the act. As much as I adore and love Dorothy, I didn't want to extend our embrace past the point where she would feel tragically smothered by my sucky needs for affection, and after a good, solid, beautiful hug, I began to relax my arms from around her body. Dorothy suddenly protested, declaring that she needed far more hug than that, and I quite gratefully pressed close to her again, squeezing her tightly and kissing the top of her head. It was such a beautiful hug; one of the nicest I've ever had, I think.

In a simple visit of forty-five minutes I'd completely turned around the stressful, depressing, frustrating, achy, coughing, sneezy, can't swallow day of my friend, and happily given her as much affection as either of us could stand. We both said our goodbyes happy and close and reconnected, and I walked home feeling powerful, and loved, and content, and incapable of doing any amount of wrong. That elevated sense of goodness and joy was with me when I realized what a bum I am; it took all the pleasure out of my fall, to be sure.

april 28&29

I'm at the end of my exam period.
I'm also at the end of my rope. As it were.

I'm writing my last essay at this moment, and hating every word of it. This take-home exam feels like a personal enemy. It is keeping me inside. It is holding me back. It doesn't want me to have any fun. It doesn't want me to snuggle or laugh or anything. It wants me to sit here, yawning, and typing, all night long. If only it could, it would keep me here in front of these heavy books for the rest of my life.

In sixteen hours my suffering will end somehow.

I suppose I shall see you then.

may 1-5

Later that night I was put into the most hated position of having to say goodbye to an old, dear friend. My friend -- rather, one of my oldest, closest, dearest friends -- Charlotte was departing for Germany a few days hence, but in the meantime she was traveling to her parents house, and Friday was her last day in town. She was leaving quite literally after work -- her last day at work -- and my last chance to see her was at a party hosted by a friend of hers that sleepy Thursday night. I can't describe how much I hate saying goodbye. It is perhaps the thing I would least care to do, outside of the realm of the grotesque. I don't remember what I was watching yesterday, but there was a show on television with a reference to doomed expeditions to the north pole (one of the many) where you were forced to cut open your own sled dogs and shove your hands into their steaming guts to keep your frozen fingers from developing gangrene in the hideous cold of an Arctic night. But, that aside, I really hate saying goodbye. It is something I do entirely too often, with a host of friends far more worldly and adventurous than I am, who enjoy traveling for traveling's sake, and who want to see the world and be as far away from the confines of home as possible. The necessities of life, with careers and educations and whatnot, take care of the rest. In the past year, I've had to say goodbye to Lucretia, Laura, Lilith and Corben, all of whom have joined the already excessive number of people I truly care about who live terribly far away. I freely admit that I'm kind of a homebody. I love to travel when it entails visiting someone I care about, but I'm never inclined to actually want to be somewhere different simply because it's "somewhere different." I'm very attached to my friends and my haunts, and the idea of leaving the familiar comforts of home for very long depresses and scares me. And actually moving, over taking a trip, is an even less happy idea for someone as emotionally needy as me. I require attention and affection far too much to ever want to, say, buy a backpack and join the host of potential victims and hostages already sightseeing their respective ways across Europe, let alone move to British Columbia. It's just not for me at this point in my life. Maybe that's sad. I'm too biased to be sure.
In any case, Charlotte is leaving, and won't be in Ottawa for the next three months. I know this doesn't sound like a long time, but it is. For the past two years, Charlotte has been a near-daily presence in my life and, shucks, I'm going to miss her terribly during all these months when she is so very far away. When she returns, it's hard to say what will happen. Her boyfriend has been in Germany finishing up his studies as an engineer, and has plans to move out west when they get back to Canada. This is probably a good and prudent thing to do, but it does certainly suggest that I won't be seeing a whole lot of my old friend in the foreseeable future (perhaps if I had more access to trendy smart drinks my prognostication would be more accurate and far-reaching, boosted as they would be by the hottest new herbs and preservatives), which has given me great pause to sulk. I get lonely easily, you see, and it's a feeling I've had to try to cope with entirely too much in the past year.

As it stands, I have this week off work before I start up on my job for the summer (which is to say, I finally heard from my benevolant employer and discovered I do indeed have steady work for the summer at what will be, I'm sure, a handsome rate by my naive and studenty standards), so I'm attempting to get caught up on old correspondance and e-mail replies, as well as make some phone calls and generally reconnect with the distant, missed, and beloved friends scattered throughout this annoyingly large world (it's only a small world when you don't miss somebody) while I have all this free time. I've also been spending a lot of time with my friend Dorothy, which is refreshing and comforting in my hour of neediness. Over the past two days I've hardly been home -- I just take my typically excessive gobs of time to complete my morning ablutions, cover up in a large quantity of sunscreen, grab a camera, and spend the day with my good friend, wandering Ottawa and trying (and largely succeeding, given the wonderful company I've been keeping) to feel more content than I am otherwise presently inclined.

I believe I'll say more later today, but until then, I'll mention that today will be the last day of this black-and-white diatribe. It shall be archived accordingly and tomorrow I'll return to the eminently more stylish format which has been temporarily on hiatus while I rambled and paused. Which means I suppose I'll finally have to finish talking about how Cruinne's visit in March went. Sigh. I do procrastinate too much sometimes.

ADDING...

Much has been said about the recent tragedy in Columbine, and I think it's imporant to put that matter into context, which is something sadly lacking.

Too much is made of the appearance of the shooters, and very little at all has been said about the conditions resulting in their actions and state of mind.

Look at me. I spent a great deal of the past few years with blue, then purple, hair, and I earned quite a huge amount of grief for the experience. I think anybody who is belittled for a consistent enough period of time will become embittered towards his or her tormentors, but that's a distant universe away from the hatred and rage which burned at Columbine high school. Those kids were insane with hatred. It consumed them. They hated everyone and everything. They might have been gunning for jocks and African American students, but they wanted to destroy that whole school and everyone in it. That goes beyond the tragically black-and-white world of freaks-vs-jocks. It's in the domain of hatred. Without each other for reinforcement, those bitter, isolated kids would probably have grown up to be solitary, fiendish, serial killers. Or maybe utterly harmless. The human brain is capable of many things.

I honestly have no love of the idea of hurting someone. But then again, I take a great amount of pleasure in the catharsis of bitching and whining about people in a nasty, terrible way.

I think the most interesting and generally overlooked aspect to the recent shootings is not that dark industrial music, or trenchcoats, or freaks, or jocks, or whatever, are *bad*, but that there is a clearly tragic consequence to isolating people we consider different from ourselves and subjecting them to the cruelest social punishment of all. Not only are creepy goth kids mocked and shunned at their schools, but when they go home their parents do no better. These are the kids who stop getting invited to family outings and reunions because they're a shameful little secret. When parents have friends over, these kids are tucked away in their basement bedrooms where they're left to an ever-shrinking world of isolation and humiliation. These are people who wind up ignored and set aside, and when they snap and explode we act surprised because we never listened, and never saw.

The day after the shootings, a single goth was attacked here in Ottawa by six beefy "jocks." He was mangled. It was easy to point at the freaky little guy all in black, blame him for a societal problem and deal with it in a stupid way. And then I'd talk to some silly goths, whose response was seriously along the vein of how evil and stupid jocks were, and how those kids were on the right track after all, if only they hadn't "gone too far" by shooting for as many African-American students as they could. I found both opinions to be terribly offensive. When you simplify a situation so much that you can look at the most superficial aspects of people and either glorify or denigrate them, you're as bad as whatever it is that you hate. Freaks who see the whole world as "we're good, they're bad" are as contemptible as the jocks who beat them up. That said, I think weird kids who want to wear trenchcoats, dye their hair, listen to odd music, excel at calculus, become fanatical buddhists or whatever it is that sets them harmlessly apart, should have all the power in the world to do so -- and if someone doesn't understand that, and belittles them for their efforts at self-discovery, well clearly that person is a thoughtless jerk, no? As tragic and senseless as those deaths were, those killers were made, not born. I think the saddest thing in the aftermath is that nobody is willing to look at themselves critically and see their role in this, in virtue of their existing within this society at all. We want to point at the superficial elements and say, "see? that is why this happened," avoiding the social climate at the school, the parenting involved; the hatred and isolation which caused the tragedy in the first place were fed by these things.

It's one thing to point out how counterproductive and destructive anger is, and it's important to say that we must treat people well. But you can't begrudge someone their anger when they are not.

Myself, I've never harmed a person in my life, and I've never felt anger towards a person whose only crime was looking different from me. Still, I have had some very terrible experiences, and those experiences happened with people I'd consider jocks. That doesn't mean I'm forever prejudiced towards jocks, but there have been some evil bastards who tried to hurt me and people I cared for as badly as they could, though, for no reason other than the fact that they didn't like the cut of my jib, and nuts to anybody who tries to tell me that I was wrong to be angry.

final^-1

The fan in my power supply is dead. It's been rattling and clanking terribly since I bought it, but of course it always "sounds fine" when I take it back to the store. Now, after much lingering and suffering, it's finally gone kaput. So, anyway, you can thank a bad monkey at my computer store for the fact that I can't use my computer. I'm really sorry, but I don't want it to melt.

final

This week has been particularly frantic, for the reason that I have started working full-time again for the summer, and it really fills up my days. I get up at seven in the morning, leave at eight, and on the average day I leave work around five-thirty or six and don't tend to get home before seven o'clock at night. This leaves about three or four hours to do anything with my day before I get too sleepy to function outside the protective shell of my bed. Now, if I happen to want to go out at night so that I might have myself a little spot of fun, I tend to stay awake far, far later than the recommended bedtime for a 23-year-old crybaby, which means being sleepier the next day and having even less time to do anything when I get home. Case in point, I went to visit my ailing friend Dorothy this week, who has been depressed, anxious, miserable and angry due to a personal crisis. Not unlike a St. Bernard in a cartoon (or a cold remedy commercial), I have been rushing to the rescue of waylaid travelers with liquor and attention to stave off despair and the cold touch of night. I stayed with Dorothy for a long time, never really sure of what to say but attempting to remain good company all the same. I brought over half the movies I owned, and in between ranting and talking and cigarette breaks on the front steps, we watched 12 Monkeys and Harold and Maude (and finished off many many bottles of beer) before Dorothy fell asleep at four in the morning. As guilty as I felt about leaving my friend in the midst of her crisis, especially when she was all by herself and looking very comfortable in the manner of someone falling asleep feeling safe and drunk and protected, I knew I had to get to work later that very same morning, and resolved myself to leave. I tucked Dorothy in with a blanket I found in her room, and left a note on the fridge full of sweet thoughts and an explanation that I had to go -- completed by instructions to take good care of herself, and some money to help her buy some breakfast when she woke up. I worried all the way home, and when I stepped in the door at five o'clock, I worried myself to sleep. Still, the next day at work was only two and a half hours away by that point, and this, in a nutshell, was the essence of my first week back. Little sleep, lots of stress. Granted, this is still far preferable to last week, which was relaxing and idle, but confining simply for the excessive freedom. I really didn't know what to do with myself after three or four days of rest and relaxation. I became frustrated and irritable, feeling for all the world like one of those prisoners in anecdotes who has been in a maximum security prison for twenty years, where once he is finally released and rehabilitated he finds the outside world, lacking in walls and rules, so terrifying that he begs to be taken back into the safe constraints of prison. I was also greeted with a hefty raise this summer (I was expecting a decrease from the rate I made on contract, since the payscales for students are arbitrary and fixed based upon your academic standing, unlike the more flexibly juicy world of working as a contracted employee), which makes up for the fact that when the budget was finally released I was told I there was only funding to have me work for fifteen weeks (as opposed to the seventeen weeks of the summer). The only good aspect is that it gives me two weeks of dead time to myself -- the first week I took last week, and the second week I'm hopefully going to have at the end of June, during which I very much wish to visit my distant friend Cruinne in Ohio. The catch to that is the unfortunate fact that we shall be moving at the end of June, and every last detail of the move -- from packing, to painting, to hiring the movers and having a lease signed -- will need to be finalized by the 20th if I am to be able to leave for even a week.

"But wait," you say, "what's this about moving in June? I thought you, Broken and Dorothy were leaving that crazy house of yours at the end of May." Well, that's certainly the way I understod it as little as two weeks ago, but no longer is this to be the case. You see, it comes down to the ugly but timeless debate of "we said, they said." We felt that we had given the requisite notice to end our lease far ahead of the two months required by the landlord-tenant act, but Commvesco (being pricks), declared that we hadn't, due to the technicality that we gave our notice to the property manager (who in our opinion was acting as the official agent of Commvesco, particularly because he came at their behest to find out whether such notice was forthcoming) in, like, March, and not the legal but faceless entity of Commvesco-Levinson-Viner specifically. Although they admitted their mistakes and promised to take every step to make sure that the confusion about notice would in the future be cleared up with all their tenants, they refused to budge on the matter of letting us leave at the end of the lease. Because, by that point, it was less than two months before we were supposed to be moving out, they had decreed we were to be retained as month-by-month tenants, and could not move before the end of June of this year. Heed my warning, students of Ottawa! Never rent from Commvesco-Levinson-Viner! Bah! Each building in their clutches proudly bears a sign proclaiming that it is "Professionally Managed by Commvesco," but I tell you now -- it is not. After a year of living under their roof, that very same roof still leaks. The walls are stained with water damage, and they want us to re-paint those walls we painted simply to cover the damage up, for the logical reason that they now aren't the precisely same, stained, colour they were when we moved in. Sure, my walls are purple, but it's a dang beautiful colour of purple, now, isn't it? Everyone who sees my room loves it. Even the prospective tenants they showed around the house yesterday loved my room. They said, "Oooooooooooh!" in unison as soon as my door was opened for them. Jeepers. You make a few improvements to the old tenement, and the slumlord can't stand it. The floors slant, the kitchen is dark, the hydro bills are atrocious, and the lights don't work properly. Phooey, I say! I actually want to warn the nice new tenants about how inefficient and sloppy Commvesco is, how bad the house really is, and all that, except that they seemed so taken with the house. I must admit, as much as I am looking forward to the green pastures of moving somewhere new and beautiful, I was flattered that they really liked this place as much as they did. We spent the night before (and Broken spent the entire next day) cleaning the house desperately, vacuuming the cat hair from every nook and cranny, washing the floors, cleaning the bathrooms, washing dishes, and tidying bedrooms. My room hasn't looked this nice since reading week. In any case, the condition of the house aside, the good legal entity that is Commvesco is a right bastard in my opinion, and I am plotting my revenge. For the third time since we moved in, they have once again managed to completely lose our rent. For the third time, we have received the N4 form, "Notice to terminate tenancy early for non-payment of rent." I don't know where Commvesco finds its monkeys, but it wasn't at a very good zoo, I can tell you that. These are monstriously inbred monkeys, stinking of their own filth and stupidity, with grubby six-fingered hands they can't keep away from any of their bodily orifices for more than a moment. They claim they didn't get it -- Broken called Canada Post and confirmed that it was delivered (we always Express Post our payments because the delivery is monitored and guaranteed). They still claim they didn't get it. I am going to the bank Monday morning with the receipt from the money order I purchased to confirm that it was cashed. If it has been cashed, and they still claim they didn't get it, my vengeance will be swift and terrible. We have a paper trail a mile long. This time it will not be a case of "we said, they said." This time, it will simply be: we did. And after that point, if I hear any more about it, it's going to the tribunal. I will happily ("happily" as used to describe me storming to the bank, muttering to myself, and later storming out of the bank, muttering to myself) get another money order issued if the original was not cashed, but at this point I would rather give money to child pornographers (they love their work) than to that most insidious, evil, corrupt and immoral agency of criminally deranged fiends. Commvesco gets not one more cent from me. This was our last rent, and that's just the way it's going to be, whether they seem to think they have it or not.
Tell ya what. Every resident of Ottawa who, on my recommendation, declines to rent a home from Commvesco-Levinson-Viner will earn a special prayer from me to Satan. That's right, me, the atheist, talking to the big guy about your good judgment, and why that makes you unsuitable for eternal damnation in hell.
Get it while it's hot.
There is, of course, the unpleasant matter of the small print, but for the sake of brevity let's just leave it at:

"If the worst thing you've ever done is contemplate renting a home from Commvesco, you didn't need my help anyway. Beyond that, your sodomy (or whatever) is still probably between you, God, and the sphincter you love. I probably can't intervene too much. But I'll sure try."

My anger will eventually fade. Eventually we will win, and eventually we will move. I am just intolerably frustrated in the meantime.