i ate from work yesterday, for the first time since i started there. i had a baconator with no ketchup, no mayo, no cheese slices and instead blue cheese and guacamole. it was really good.
i actually don’t know that i’m going to be able to finish “melanctha”. aside from how i find it gross how stein seems to be using some half-baked caricatural notion of black vernacular to prop up her experimentation, it just wears me the fuck out to read; characters referring to each other by name like five times in a single sentence, a hundred million sentences starting with “i certainly am” or “always now” in a row. i think sometimes that she was aiming for some kind of a, i guess hypnotic?? effect but it just feels like one trick being stretched way too far. there might be interesting things going on with the characters underneath it, but it’s so hard to keep my brain from glazing over long enough to get to it.
i tried tea in earnest for i think the first time the other day. my whole family save me and a cousin are faithful daily tea-drinkers; i drink coffee mostly daily, although it’s never really got its hooks in me—sometimes i forget about it for a day, and i don’t really suffer for it. anyhow, tea is pretty good. the next day i got an earl gray at mcdonald’s after work and that was good too. slightly related: i think i like burger king’s coffee slightly more than mcdonald’s’s. i don’t think bk has free refills though, so it doesn’t end up with an upper hand really after all.
a few minutes ago i was dozing off on the couch and in a flicker of half-awake moth-eaten by dream thought mixtapes and burgers blurred together in my mind and i think i was somehow imagining drought 3 as a burger. i wish i could articulate this better and also that it was real.
May 2: 10-4; WeLearn computer training course May 3:10-4 (-30min break, ~1:00); bacon / side sandwich May 4: 10:30-4; bacon->front sandwich
Readings:
Self Help by Lorrie Moore:
COMMENTS: Quite liked it; although if I had less so the bag of tricks (second-person and stylistic tics (“…like (x), like (y), like (z); it was like z”)) would’ve probably grated on me. It struck me while reading that a lot of the writers I enjoy the most are women. I don’t know if that’s significant in any way. A lot of dude writers get on my nerves.
some of Three Lives by Gertrude Stein
COMMENTS: I liked “The Good Anna”; the observation about balance of power in friendships. The back cover says something about Picasso inspiring the syntactical repetitions in “Melanctha” (I’m about halfway through) but I get the sense part of it is also some kind of dialogic blackface (i.e. the constant “I certainly do…”s). It makes for a rather tiring read, anyhow.
Listenings:
Acid Rap by Chance The Rapper
COMMENTS: Chance is very very talented but doesn’t quite know what to do with it yet; he’s getting drunk off the potential and spilling it everywhere and that’s what makes Acid Rap so fun. Brandon Soderberg nailed it: “Such an off-the-rails flow creates the sense that at any moment, a verse — or a full song, or the entire record — could crash and burn and overdose on audacity.” It’s not really a great album (i’m saying album because it seems to me clearly to be trying for the albumier end of mixtape) but there’s so much to love about it. He obviously really wants to impress you, but then he’s so good that he totally does and then some. My friend pointed out “rapper song singer suspended subpoena for misdemeanors dreamer held back low key still a seenyrrr” as a particularly great bit, and I still smile big every time i hear “even my haters kinda glad i’m on”. None of the name guest spots save Twista do anything for me but Vic Mensa and Noname Gypsy are great; “practice backflip tragic actress” stuck in my head for days.
this night last year—well, technically the 17th, but the night of today—i felt like everything was ending. (in a personal sense, I mean, not literally—although it still felt pretty apocalyptic to me.) this year, i’m not anywhere much better in a way you could map, and honestly i don’t know if i feel much better (less bad maybe, not to say more good) but my best friend is home from school and i’m going in to his place and we’re going to get fucked up and ring in the summer and hopefully this time around i won’t end up listening to “take care” over and over and sobbing into a pillow.
i have my driver’s license. i can drive, technically. before this past thursday i hadn’t driven at all since i passed the test almost two years ago, and otherwise i’d barely driven outside lessons and my first (failed, slightly) test. by the time i passed the test, i could drive, not well, but competently. i was never comfortable with a car. i was a late driver, didn’t start lessons until i was i think 18, after much coaxing. when i finally got around to it i didn’t take to it at all. i found driving very awkward, never achieved an ease. it never became automatic: every blind spot check, every turn-signal had to be very deliberate—i’d make a checklist in my head of actions to perform a block in advance of every turn, then they would nudge other actions i had to perform in the meantime out of my brain. i had to watch the speedometer closely and it seemed like i always ended up erring on one side or the other. i had a habit of drifting towards the curb, somehow without noticing as it was happening. and whenever i screwed up i would think about how i was piloting several tons of metal at however many kilometers per hour, and how any slight slip on my part could turn that into an awful weapon against whoever had the misfortune to be in the vicinity. and then the awkward would swell into nerve-wracking. i would feel safer and more in control with a gun than with a car. shortly after i got my license i was back to university again, where i didn’t have access to a car anyway, and then when i came home i just didn’t drive. things went back to pretty much how they were before. i took buses or asked for drives when i needed to get around. over time the unease congealed into something almost like a principle and when confronted i tried very very hard to maintain my non-driving status. but the geography here is not very forgiving in this regard. i live far enough from our sole “urban center” that i need a vehicle to get there, and we have severely limited public transit options. mom bugged me about it for months and it came to a point where i was exhausted and didn’t feel like it would be worth the fight to hold my ground, so i conceded to take some lessons. in my head i am framing it in a sort of “obliteration&reconstruction of self” narrative because i am ridiculous and find it easier to reconcile myself to total self-abasement than slight compromise. (also: i was lucky enough to stumble into a group of friends many of whom also do not drive, who made me feel okayer about not being able to drive, and now i feel like i’m leaving them behind somehow, like in marmaduke when marmaduke wins favor with the cool dogs and neglects the misfit dogs who were nice to him before he was cool and helped him get there—except i’m not a jerk like marmaduke (that dog is such a jerk), i’m just at the mercy of circumstance.)
so at the end of last week i took two lessons, 45 minutes each, one on thursday and one on friday, both at 2:00. my driving instructor, his name was blair i think, was a late-middle-aged guy with a mustache, shades, a denim jacket, cowboy boots and a big silver belt buckle. gruff, a little—grumbled in bursts about how poorly all the people around us are driving—but easy-going, which worked much better for me than my previous instructors, who tended to bark at me when i was too tentative (so, most of the time). we drove around downtown sydney and parked a few times. i was and am decent with road rules, but the mechanics of it—my body controlling the car’s—are still pretty difficult. the wheel and the gas feel way too sensitive. i trip from not enough straight into too much, and if i can find the midpoint it’s slippery; any slight change (a car in front of me driving a little erratically, for example) and i lose it. i’m, both intellectually and sort of physically, very aware of the size and weight of the car. it feels like it doesn’t have enough nuance of articulation for its mass. over the course of the two sessions (both individually and cumulatively) i got a bit more comfortable, but i think that was just rubbing the sleep out of my eyes from not having driven in so long. i mean, it wasn’t horrible—it wasn’t as bad as i expected (which i sort of expected)—and i still can drive. still not well, but i think i’m closer to an inconvenience than a hazard. i felt kind of okay about it i guess. i still can’t imagine ever wanting to own a car.
watched simple men; takes a little while to hit its groove i found, but then i really like it. the dance scene is great. took out a bunch of e.e. cummings and gertrude stein from the library bc i felt like some weird syntax stuff, but am trying to make myself finish sentimental education before i really dig into any of it (although i started the cummings—i think i like it??). there was a really nice evening last week—thursday—where it actually felt like spring; the air was just slightly cool, the sky was a nice light orange, it felt a bunch like last year and i got all memoryfeelsy and listened to alopecia and smoked and paced around the park by my friend’s place like i used to pace around the quad. (i even miss the quad a little. i miss halifax in general, i miss my friend and living with him, all of it.) my friend taught me how to make egg in the basket, which was convenient because it’s basically halfway between the (literal) 2 things i’m decent at making (fried egg and grilled cheese). he made me two, one plain and one w/marble cheese; they were both good but the one w/cheese was extra good. he did this thing, for the cheese one, where he sucked up the yolk of an egg into a water bottle, and i thought that was really cool. played monopoly with some friends and some friends of friends who i didn’t really know (pokémon monopoly, bc it was the only one anybody actually owned, and it was missing the game pieces so somebody else dug out a bunch of old pokémon figurines and we used those—i was the transparent gangar) but it was kinda awkward bc there was a very clear split between the people who knew how to play and cared about monopoly and the people who were re-learning as they went along and didn’t really give a shit either way—myself falling into the latter group. (people get really into monopoly! also, i mean i’m sure this is another symptom of my awful attention span and laziness, but usually if a game requires constantly checking back to a rule sheet or cards or something (unless you memorize said) the effort will outweigh the fun for me. this is why i can’t even fathom how people love d&d so much.) tried the spicy chicken at napoli (best pizza place in sydney&area). it was super good, and i’m not usually even big on spicy chicken; there’s a kinda creamy-tangy thing going on with it that i really liked. i didn’t do anything on st. patrick’s day but i’ll probably get drunk some night this week, just cuz. i mean it’s not like i care about st. patrick’s day or like i need an excuse to get drunk but iunnowhatever. just realized today that there are 2 movies in which brendan fraser plays a historical fish out of water character (encino man (which i haven’t seen but know of from an ad from i think a spectacular spider-man issue i had once) and blast from the past (which i watch any time i see it on tv)). my friend pointed out that you could count george of the jungle too if you broadened the criteria just a little.
i hate that question, “what have you been up to?”. well, no. i hate answering it, because i’ve never been up to anything, i haven’t been moving forward in life or achieving anything or even really doing anything personally fulfilling. i am occasionally amazed at how much time i spend doing nothing. like, literally nothing; laying in bed thinking about how lame it is that i’m not doing anything. this is also, as it happens, why i post here so infrequently these days. i’ve got nothing to say! when i was in halifax i’d at least go out for a walk and coffee or something, and that would—i don’t know, stimulate my brain a little bit, but here there is nowhere worth walking within walking distance and i still don’t drive (and hate the thought of driving and am resolved not to do it unless it becomes absolutely necessary for basic function) and there are like no buses and even if i did get a bus everywhere here is still pretty boring, so mostly i just sit around the house. i should be reading more (although, i finally got started on a sentimental education and am liking it, i’d had it out for a few weeks but kept hesitating because salammbô was such a chore) and i should be watching more movies. i am listening to music, though. i’m really liking the new mount moriah. (it reminds me a bit of one hundred dollars, who i should listen to some more.) i like the next day way more than i thought i would, although i still haven’t quite collected my thoughts on it. the mozart’s sister ep is really good. i like popstrangers’ antipodes. i listened to mbv some more and i think i’ve warmed to it a bit. it sounds very good when i put it on very loud and listen to it from a floor up, or in the next room. i finally polished off the beulah albums discog and listened to when your heartstrings break and i don’t love it as much as the two records following it but it’s still really good. “silverado days” is a great song. i heard “pop champagne” for the first time last night and it’s awesome.
other stuff that’s happened: i tried to watch nosferatu but i was falling asleep a bit and also i think it’s the first silent film i’ve actually watched and i think maybe the medium demands a little more of a focused getting-used-to. i got too drunk and blacked out while drinking w/friends (abruptly, and i didn’t even drink that much, so ??) and have felt like an asshole about it for a couple of days since (especially because it was the second time in a row that i’ve blacked out at that friend’s house and the last time i puked on a room). the next night though i hung out with other friends (including my awesomebest friend who i was staying with in halifax, can’t stress enough how much i appreciated that, i appreciate it even more now because if i hadn’t had it there would’ve been four more months of this) and we had beer and some hash and watched ford fairlane and that was a really great night. earlier in the week we sat around and watched the jodi arias trial (very fun watching flustered prosecutor vs. cool as a cucumber jodi) a bunch of honey boo boo and it’s great and i don’t really get why people hate them? i mean they’re weird rednecks and all yeah but they kinda seem like pretty nice people and a close happy family and stuff, i don’t know, i don’t understand how you could get so mad at them. i made a twitter. i am getting kind of okay at making grilled cheeses (still swiss & prosciutto). i made kd with curry paste and it was pretty great. i am already starting to dread mid-april (i will look up the specific dates at some point) because then it will have been a year since last year and aaaaaaaaaaa. when i hear my friends talking about university or when i am around their campus to meet them or go to the library i feel awful and insecure about not being in university and i am watching them working towards things and collecting the materials with which to build a happy successful future, and i am not doing any such stuff and even when i do it will be a purely pragmatic decision and i will win no self worth from it. i realized a little while ago that i’m probably going to think of myself as a failed B.A. student for the rest of my life. (i realize that i could conceivably go back to it someday but i would be older and the kids would be able to smell the take-2 insecurity off me and i would be like one of those old men who dye their hair jet black so that they might as well have left the grey go because all you notice now is how weird and fake it looks)—and also this is not meant to apply to anyone else, this is not really about education it’s just about me being a loser—umm—
it’s 7:18am and i’ve been up all night and my mother is getting ready for work now and she’s bugging me about staying up all night. “is there a porn problem?” she asks. that would maybe be less lame than this, actually. why did i write this? why did you read this? i’m sorry. shit. i hope you all are well, anyhow.
just found out via an e-mail that messenger (formerly msn messenger, as of the last couple years windows messenger) is shutting down; consolidated into skype actually, but still. messenger was an instant messaging service, and from when i was in elementary school through high school, everybody used it. (although apparently this is a particularly canadian thing.) most of my closest friendships were fortified, even formed, through all-night messenger conversations. once, after an update (an early entry in my long tradition of hating when things change on the internet), i tried to redownload the old version from a shady site and it killed my computer with adware. it was through messenger that my typing style (d?)evolved from awful twerp grammar nazi (seriously, like i would harangue people for not capitalizing) to its current erratic-but-usually-kinda-slack character (the near-total eradication of capitalization has been specifically a tumblr development, though). i haven’t used it in quite a while—it’s been eclipsed by facebook chat and texting—but it’s weird seeing it go. i wouldn’t really consider myself a 90s kid, being born already 2 years into it, so the 2000s are the first decade i can really say i was there for. the 2010s are coming into their own now: it’s a good time to let go.
my project for 2013 is to teach myself to think good(ish, at least) and also to stock my brain with plenty of things to think about. so; read a lot, watch more movies/keep up with new movies somewhat, listen to more music/keep up with new music somewhat, keep up with discussions on here probably. also, ideally, get better at writing. also, ideally to the point of absurd fantasy, get better at interacting with people and/or actually interact with people irl.
i’ve never been good with resolutions, new year’s or otherwise, but i feel kind of okay about this project from here.
so, i’ve now had a job. not a particularly good one—though neither a particularly bad one—and for a very short time (not even quite 2 months), but still: it was a job, and i had it, so now i can say “i had this job” where i used to have to say “i’ve never had a job ever at all”. these last few months, i think, have been good for me. i proved, not to anyone per se but i guess myself if i had to point it at somebody, that i could do this, that i could go out and get a job and have it and do it and get paid for it, which i was genuinely not sure that i could. i never sought a job before as much out of dread, that i just would not be able to do it, as laziness. i remember talking to a friend about this once, this notion i had of a job as this big lifecrushing thing, and she said it really wasn’t that hard or that bad and i believed her but still couldn’t shake it—but yeah, it turns out it really isn’t. i mean, night shift kind of wears you out, but otherwise it’s okay. i still have room to have a life (not that i do, but not that i did back when i had all the time in the world either). none of it, really, is that bad—the living circumstance i’m sure is harder on my landlord/roommate(roomlord?? yo, what should i call you anyway? “my friend who i live with” is really fuckin’ awkward and you have a longass tumblr name (like me—btw, ppl, if ever you want to refer to me by name you can just call me john) soo..?) than i, and i don’t find it very hard to live frugally. and hopefully i will someday get to a point where i can honestly say “this is good, i am happy, there is nowhere else that comes to mind realistically that i would rather be than here” but after last year at university—where i curled up in my dorm room and stayed there nearly as much figuratively as literally and worked myself into such a(n oddly cozy, for a while) depressive-fatalist cocoon that i very confidently conflated the end of the school year with the end of any potential meaningful life for me—okay feels great. there was this thing, i wrote a big gushy post about it at the time but i think i deleted it since, it happened one of the last nights i was in res before i came home, right on the tail of the worst of it (about two days of alternating between crying and feeling totally dead inside in a way i never had before nor have since and hopefully it’ll stay that way), and it came upon me very suddenly, i hate calling it a revelation because that’s such a pompous word and also i don’t want its spiritual overtones, but it actually did feel a lot like that—just out of nowhere it was like a huge bright light came on and the big space of useless leftover life that i was hating and fearing ahead of me became a blank page that i could do fucking whatever with, and then i wanted to live and i felt like there was enough, or enough potential for enough, to keep living for—and it wasn’t the kind of daydreamy hope that had kept me puttering along into deeper holes before; it was better than that, i knew to expect things to be shitty sometimes but i felt like i could deal with it until they got better again. since, of course, there have been rough patches, i have faltered—there was a little stretch right after i got home that almost dragged me back in—but all in all there does seem, somehow, to have been a significant change in my mindset. i’m more stable. i still have a lot of days, or stretches of a few days, where i see nothing (see nothing, as opposed to don’t see anything) ahead of me and feel awful, but now i usually don’t let myself fall too deep into these feelings—i stop and remind myself of how okay everything actually is, and then i can pull myself back up to approximately baseline before long. if i had to go through all this and its consequences to get to that point, i think it was probably worth it.
it’s good to be home. mostly small things are my favorite parts: having a house to myself a lot, being able to drink as much coffee as i want without feeling the twinge in my bank account, furniture—and of course, the familiarity of it all; familiarity is usually comforting. it’s good to see family and friends again too. i don’t have many friends anyway, and up in halifax i only really spend much time with [tumblr shorthand name pending], and that does get kind of lonely, so it’s nice to be able to relax and be around people who i know/love. that said, all of this is good as what it is, and i’m not interested in returning to it full time—because i wouldn’t be returning to this, i’d be returning to what i went up to halifax to get the fuck out of because it didn’t work and i wasn’t happy and it was too comfortable too easily and so i stagnated. i think throwing myself out into the (relative) wild like that was the right decision. as of here, i’m planning to go back to halifax in january and try to find another job and maybe hopefully get to a point where i can stand on my own. i’ve been very deliberately not planning in the big picture, because i want to learn how to survive without exploiting extra advantages—you know, like when you pledge you’re gonna beat it without any cheat codes—and also because when i think about the future i either get dreamy optimistic in a way that’s guaranteed to lead to a crash, or i get scared and bummed out and spiral into those old messes again; and also because i don’t know what i want to do, and i don’t want to do a thing until i know what i want to do—i just want to find ways to keep going, to stay (at least kinda) afloat. and i know that in a lot of ways this is stupid impulsive cutting off my nose to spite my face, but this is what i want to do right now and i think that it is my right to do that. the argument mom and i always have: that i don’t know what i want to do, so i want to do provisional stuff in the meantime—which is to say, just jobs—and she says i could get a trade or something and if i wanted i could consider that provisional and use the money and security it would give me to move on to something else later—and that makes sense, and i could, but i don’t want to, and i couldn’t consider it provisional, and she says she doesn’t understand that, it doesn’t make sense, and okay it doesn’t, and i don’t care because that’s how it works in my head and i don’t think i owe it to her, or anybody else for that matter, to follow anything else here.
i think this okayness that i am settling into is as much about grounding my expectations as any (action+effect)s. i don’t think i’m ever going to be what i would like to be, whatever that is. i think that there will probably always be gaps in my life—for people, for purpose. but i think that i can learn to adapt to this stuff, and find a way to be happy, or at least more so than not. and oh my god suddenly i get “i’m okay”, i think it is my favorite jem song right now (i have major issues with the writing in that episode, but fuck, that maybe even makes it work better—kimber and stormer are finding a way to be okay in a world that is literally written against them)!!
recent happenings: so i actually just quit my job (not like walked out, i gave notice, but all i have left is a few shifts this week). the final straw for this was when they cut my 10hrs for the week down to 8—like, shit, that’s basically a shift for the whole week. what appears to be happening is that we’re overstaffed, in which case i don’t know why they hired a new person (she’s really nice though!) like last week, and another guy like a few weeks before that (he’s also cool), and then yours truly about a month before that (he’s lame, i don’t like that guy)…you’d think these would be staggered enough to sound an alarm somewhere in there, no? aaaaanyway, it does have an upside, that being that i’m going home sooner and staying longer, all of december actually, and that’s going to be really really nice.
mom came up for a few days on thursday, left today, which was kinda nice some of the time anyway. she got a hotel room w/an extra bed so i got a night in an actual bed, which, as much as i really don’t mind the floor that much at all1, is very nice (and will be very nice at home, because it will be not only a bed but my bed). it also meant i got some solid meals. (this is maybe the part of being home i am most excited about: food, fairly plentiful food, food that i do not have to buy, better food than i could afford to buy because my grandmother and aunt are very good at food. i mean, not that i can’t afford food, and not that i’ve been starving or anything, but it’ll be nice to be able to really relax about it for a while. oh, also—coffee!!!)
being as this is the first job i have ever had, it is also the first time i will have ever really been able to buy people proper christmas gifts, and that feels really nice.
1. although, i’m finally out of renewals on pillow-book </3! it has been all this time the book on dada and surrealist art, and all this time i have never even cracked it open. i think the dadaists would have approved.
so, finally, after—what, two weeks’? wait and a shitty warranty replacement from bell, i may have a working cellphone again in time for the weekend. it’s weird, by now i actually hardly notice the absence anymore, but it will be pretty satisfying to be able to text people again. (which is again kind of weird because for years, almost on principle i think, i didn’t text—then of course when i started i could hardly imagine how i did without. i find it really hard to imagine how people lived before phones. i mean, before e-mail and texting i can imagine because i came to instant messaging and the like, i think, relatively late in life considering my generation, and for a long time i was a total phone person (up till maybe last year of high school i still often talked to friends on the phone for hours), but before that—or, i don’t know, before telegrams or whatever—before instant communication, i mean; i find that really hard to fathom. i like this constant conversation that texting allows us. i am glad to be alive in the era of texting.) also to be able to call home more easily.
mom sent me the info of a walk-in clinic nearby, so i’m going to drop in there sometime soon. it would be oh so lovely to be able to wake up someday without it hurting to swallow. today i had to batter my throat with halls for hours before it even got to tolerable. this really, really sucks.
andandand—seriously, so much good convening on today—the awful broken-ass heating that had our room constantly at like 35 or worse got fixed today! that was really awful too; windows open all day but still it was so hot you couldn’t feel like doing anything except maybe sleep, except when you tried to sleep it was awful sweaty stuttering in and out of half-wakefulness turning over and over and over sleep, and it was like that for probably at least 2 weeks. so, it’s a big relief to feel, as i write this, the room cooling down,down,down.
my friend is going home for a week tomorrow, so i’ll have the place to myself for a while. i have mon-tues-wed off (working sunday, thursday, saturday—oh yeah, that’s another thing; i’ve been cut down to a steady 17hrs a week, so i guess i’m gonna be looking for another part-time to fill it out sometime soon, that’ll be fun, that’ll be hopefully not impossible oh god). i mean, not that i have much to do with it, but still, it’ll be nice.
still sick, though a different sick than as of last. i passed through that and into another; now sore throat, congested—the latter easing up, the former hanging on fiercely. i used to hardly ever get sick, but i guess the not eating well and stuff is taking its toll. this sucks.
since i started working, it caught me off guard, how—and i’m doing neither particularly strenuous work nor particularly oppressive hours—you accrue this debt of aches. when i sit down and stand up again my joints bark out at me. sometimes at the end of a shift my feet hurt even to stand on. and it puts a new light on what my mother did—or my grandmother, who, if not now (still close though) then certainly a couple of years ago, was doing about as much work as i do in a day, and she’s in her 90s! this, if nothing else, should shut me up—if i’m going to go off on my stupid cutting-off-my-nose-to-spite-my-face proving myself thing and tell them to deal with it, i should at least be able to fucking swallow it when i start feeling sorry for myself about this shit.
why haven’t i been doing that? i’m gonna do that tomorrow morning
have i ever explained about my mornings in detail? so okay, so since i’m staying w/my friend in his dorm room, i can’t get a key and i need him to let me in whenever i want to get in, and i work a lot of nightshifts, get out at 4 or 5, so i have a few hours to kick around in the morning before he wakes up and lets me in. i usually go to mcdonald’s and have a few coffees, i used to/always mean to read but am getting to it less and less, and lately i mostly just listen to music and walk around the city. i like how quiet and empty the streets are, especially in the suburban neighborhoods.
so anyway i’ll probably try to make myself read some for real, but after that…
i think i’m getting sick again (dull but consistent headache; draggy; congested; too warm; eyes burn slightly when i close them, increasingly the tighter i close them), which is really great but whatever i guess, i’m off today and not on till 10pm tomorrow so that’s time for a bunch of vitamin c and sleep, which worked last time.
i was off monday and tuesday and only working at 10 last night, so i was able to squeeze in a quick visit home (shuttled down monday morning, back wednesday morning). unfortunately, largely due to my cellphone being dead fucked, i didn’t really communicate much with people before planning this and it turned out this was everybody’s midterm week and so it was a little tricky to wrangle. pretty much all of both days was spent at the university, seeing people between classes and stuff. still, we got some time in—and i am very appreciative of everybody making the effort so that we could—and it was really nice. it was good to see everybody again; this time in halifax, just short of two months, has felt like a way longer time away than even second half last year, where i didn’t get back for a whole semester. it was good even just to hang out with people at all! lately i haven’t been doing much of that and it’s really kind of a bummer. largely due to the variance in our schedules, even my friend who i live with i haven’t really been hanging out with, per se, much—i mean, we’re in the same room, we talk, but we don’t really hang out very much. they’ve been kind of inconsistent w/r/t the hours they give me—last week was a solid 40, this week only 17—so i think, if people home are free and they continue to give me skimpy/well-spaced hours, i’ll try to make it down a few more times. i mean, if i’m getting shitty hours i might as well make something of it.
i also met my friend’s sister, who i had spoken to a fair bit but not really spoken—only typed media—and that’s always really weird to me, to have a conversation with someone without a face/voice profile to associate. i mean, i don’t read things aloud in people’s voices in my head like letters in movies, it’s just to have a certain sense—to tether the weirdly fragmented things that are our “identities” on the internet (so weird) to some tangible reality. not to say it always lines up; sometimes there’s a dissonance and that is also very weird and sometimes kind of sad. i think, in typed conversations (conversations as opposed to formal correspondences or composed writing), i try to roughly convey what i talk like, which obviously probably does fuck all for people who haven’t already spoken to me, but i guess the aim is that people who do know what i talk like will be able to get some sense of the equivalent irl mannerisms to my typed affectations (which is probably kinda hostile to clear communication, but—). i like when people are able to do this. anyway she was nice, it was cool.
also, i was going to say something about how i’m dealing with/adapting to/settling into/etc my current situation, but heems just basically nailed it so i’m gonna skip the ramble.
it happened gradually, but pretty quickly: within 3 days, it went from “the screen is being a little spastic” to “the touch screen is barely working” to “the touch screen isn’t working at all and i can’t hear anything on voice calls” to, finally, sometime last night, “all it can do is light up”.
it’s actually probably going to be resolved within the week at most i’d say, but working out how has been kinda tricky and through entanglements of circumstance which i’m too lazy to elaborate right now led to me standing outside in the cold on the sidewalk in front of a mcdonald’s swearing aloud at a payphone at 7something am this morning, as i realized that the phone’s coinslot was too small for toonies—a sure inclusion in my greatest hits of patheticness, if ever i compile such.
