Classic Snivel

June 17, 1999

I give up. I can't write a single word this week.
This week has certainly earned a safe place among the top twenty worst weeks of my life. Everything will work out, but I spent my lunch time avoiding a big happy barbecue and instead kind of just crying in my office.

I'm going to Ohio this weekend, to visit Cruinne. I desperately need to escape, although this is the worst possible time for me to be taking any kind of trip. I have so much to pack, so much to plan. Nevertheless, I'm bringing only myself (although I will certainly be the worst possible company for myself) and just enough clothes to leave room for all the film, camera equipment, paper and pens I shall possibly need to get away from my topsy-turvey, everyone-is-leaving, up-in-the-air, stupid, pointless life. Then I'll come back, and then I'll move.
It is entirely possible that after the move I can finally find the strength to take out the Crazy Glue and begin repairing the many, many shattered pieces of me which I've left lying around.

I honestly am sorry that there's nothing here to read, but at the risk of being excessively melodramatic, at least you're not me.

J u n e 30

I am never moving again. In a year's time, when our lease is up and the question "So, are you going to be moving out?" is put to us, I will summon up vivid memories of this experience of not sleeping for even a moment for two entire days, of packing and lifting and sweating so copiously in the sickening humidity of Ottawa in late June that pools of perspiration are collecting in my ears, of ripping my life apart and wrapping it in newspaper so that it can be stuffed into boxes, and of saying goodbye to everything I attached to notions of my home over the past year. Then I will drag out the receipt provided by our movers, and draw attention to the final cost of just under six hundred dollars for the entire move. Then I will say, "No. No, I am not moving out." I intend for my new apartment to remain my home until such time as I leave Ottawa, get married, or can afford to buy a house. Anyways, why should I want to leave? Although I hadn't slept in two days (not having gotten a wink for the entire fifteen-hour bus trip back from Ohio) as of yesterday evening, and my eyes were puffy, dark and red from exhaustion and irritation at being rubbed repeatedly with hands soiled by an allsorts selection of unpleasant contaminants, and my feet and my back were no longer competently equipped to keep me walking upright, I found myself with a strange sense of contentment and peace once the movers had been paid and were on their way. For six hours I had watched the ransack of my former home, thinking about how many good memories had come from the past year, even though so many experiences had also been quite terrible. I met Cruinne for the first time in that very house, and whiled away many a contented evening with Dorothy in front of the TV in my room. I soaked in my first bath bomb from Lush in our tub, I reconnected with old friends from within only my four walls and decorated my bedroom with reminders of people I love, or loved some time ago. I took the possessions with me, but I left behind all the associations. I'm not sure if I'll ever see my friend Corben again, but I still remember the day I walked out the door with an immense neon-bright poster to display so that she could find me in the crowd. I have the book she made me buy ("The Giving Tree" by Shel Silverstein, which we pestered Dorothy to help us find at Chapters, though I didn't know her then), but the memories themselves are irreplacable. Still, I managed to leave all of those good things behind yesterday, along with all the hard feelings and sour times accumulated from the experience, with the end of our monstrous move.

Unfortunately, although my new bedroom shall someday be a delight, at the moment it is completely impossible to navigate. It has been thoroughly packed with boxes and furniture, and there is not even enough room to put down my bed, let alone even walk through the door to get to it. I shall, once again, take photographs to document its evolution into my niftiest room yet, but for the next couple of days (at least) I do not even have the ability to set up my computer, so expect problems caused by my lack of time and inability to whine about things.

I will say, though, that I am a lot happier than I was two weeks ago. The combination of this move (now that it's over) with my trip to Ohio did much to save my soul and my sanity. Anyone who sees me can see that I look so much better and healthier than I did as little as two weeks ago. I've lost more weight, I'm not moody and surly and irritable anymore, and I take pleasure in at least some things again. My week in Chillicothe was perhaps the best thing I could have done. I was filled with poison before I left, and by the time I had crossed the border into the United States it was almost completely gone. I had a giant grin on my face for the last three or four hours of the trip (an impossibility for me just a day or two before), feeling sincerely happy and lighthearted despite the fact that they played "George of the Jungle" for our viewing enjoyment on the bus. I can't tell you the difference that this vacation made. Ohio isn't an exciting place stuffed with "culture" or "excitement," but it is a beautiful, green, lush state filled with vast numbers of baptists who speak in a thick, rural-sounding accent, and it has my friend Cruinne, and it was nothing like the life and the environment I left at home. Really, that was enough. Cruinne is always great company, even when she is sick (which she was), and we did a lot of simple, silly, undemanding things just because we had the luxury of time and one another's company. For a week, I didn't go to work, I didn't type, I didn't make phone calls, and I didn't worry about every last little thing. I could sleep in, and generally did. I watched a lot of movies, I toured the campus of Ohio University in Athens, and I spent a great deal of time being extremely happy with someone who is rapidly (despite this only being our third official adventure together as friends) becoming one of my closest friends in the world. I was actually very sad to come home to all the problems and worries which I had so recently just fled, but the move occupied my mind for the most part, and now that it's over with, I feel utterly exorcised. I love this house. I love the fact that for a month or so, Broken and I have free reign of the space to get everything unpacked and decorated and ready for the arrival of either Dorothy or my older brother (the final decision of who our roommate will ultimately be rests in "which of them gets here first"). I love having a living room that will actually get used. I love having a deck in the back, where the park bench willed to me by the ever-wonderful Caira sits even now, looking fetching and comfortable and perfect. I love the ridiculous amounts of counter space and the endless, huge cupboards we own. The cupboards are so numerous and enormous that there are shelves within them which even I cannot reach without standing on the counter and straining (like a child hunting for the elusive cookie jar). If you opened up all the cupboard doors at once, you would find yourself staring into infinity and your soul would be sucked out. I love our 14-foot ceilings. And, dagnabbit, I love the hardwood floors. I'll show you pictures one of these days. You'll love it all, too.

Anyway, here's to a new start, and to what I hope will be wonderful, blessed happy days over the years to come.

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

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