It always startles me when I hear someone say the word, “Loaf!”
I usually see it to replace the word “love” when “love” is too strong a word among friends, but it has also been adopted as Sophie Manfredi’s nickname. Soph rhymes with loaf and….
But does anyone know its humble beginnings? Well I’ll tell you.
It started in grade 8 between Audrey and I. It became our affectionate good-bye. Instead of “love”, we “loafed” each other. And that’s that. And now you know. So beware.
My comtemplation of the day was: How green is UBC? Compared to Mcroberts UBC is very pro sustainabilty. My wonderings brought me to ask if other universities are more or less green. Also what determines the eco-friendliness of a campus?
Could the Programs offered and the people they attract have an effect? This I imagine would be that case for UNBC where they are surrounded by forest and little urbanization, and Robyn Chang went there. But what about schools in Toronto? Back East? I am lucky to have so many friends in such different places so I ask you for your thoughts and experiences all across this great continent and elsewhere.
And yay Meghan, Toronto sounds really cool!
I have made my decision. Many moons of constant, unrequitting questioning and searching have elapsed and so I now find myself the proud owner of a rare decision. I am going to Toronto this upcoming September, where I will be living for one linear school year at the very least. The reactions I have witnessed in the face of this news have been understandably varied, an experience which has been both unnerving and joyful. My favorite has been that of my mentor and close friend Jenna, who before I even finished saying “Toronto” threw up her hands and cheered. She has been amazingly unbiased in all our talks that involved me hashing out the details of my choices again and again, and has just now revealed that she was rooting for me to go the entire time. That sort of thing really makes my day. Existence is blissfully simplistic now that I have choosen my path. I walked home tonight in the dusk (at 8 pm! Exciting!) and caught the belly of the peach sky sticking out from the banks of clouds and was caught by the pressing reality that this category of moments is running low, that this is only my reality for a short while now, which is both exhilirating and terrifying. I am realizing that this combination soothes like Vick’s VapoRub, spicy with fear yet overally healing. Each day now is a run through of tasks to complete and tutorials and seminars to show my face at. All my days at UBC are tinted differently now that I know that my time there is limited, and that my stay on campus will be a short, one year window. That said, I truly think that this year has been so purposeful and not at ALL a waste. I plan on using it as reassurance and a base on which to build this different and intimidatingly new life.
Enough rambling and saccharine thoughts. The value of your Tea Collectiveness is enveloping and my tea is steeping, so I must go.
Meghan
July 15th, 1997.
Hello Mommy today we went for a walk with dad to Chapters We saw a new Hercules book. We went to seven-eleven dad baught two ice-creams for us then we were walking home dad saw a cart. He told us to go on but Stephanie went in I tried to but I coulden’t so dad picked me up. But I triped the cart during when I was going up so when Stephanie fell on the floor and she broke her ice-cream so we just went home. but I never ment to do that.
I was cleaning up around my desk, clearing off the clutter when I surveyed my shelf for a vacant spot for a book and instead came across an old green ‘Recipe’ book. Instantly I recognized this as a textured notebook I had claimed 10 years earlier for my summer adventures. As you can tell, I had quite an affinity for the ‘run-on sentence’. I noticed that I also really liked to use the word ‘too’ but you’ll have to bear with me as you read along in my other ‘journal entries’.
I think that entry just about summarizes my attitude towards everything. How deep is it? I will tell you just how deep. Through years of tense misusage, run-on sentences, poor grammar, I became the moral compass you all know and love(I hope) today. This series of my earlier journal entries cements in my mind the epic journeys of my sister and my dad, and our evening walks to the Akroyd Chapters when Chapters was just beginning to pop up everywhere and it still had that new store smell, before the Starbucks was built. I was very shy and as such, I remember the very first time I had set foot in that Chapters. It is fairly large now, so bear with me as I found it to be monstrous when I was but 8 years old. I remember always running to the kids section in the far corner ready to grab a book and start as I knew the timer had already begun. Time would always fly by, and my dad would come by and tell me that hours had passed and that it was time to go home. I’ve forgotten how much fun that was. I was never a very literate child I guess, English was probably considered my weakest subject in school, I read mystery novels and anything with a picture of a robot for nothing more than simple pleasure. On almost every one of these outings I would be lying in anxious wait for my Dad to suggest going by the 7-11 that used to be on the island by the intersection (which now also has a Starbucks). I had too much pride to ask to go to 7-11, so when he suggested it, we celebrated. When he didn’t, I mustered up my breath and walked home leaving the idea behind. Never before had I experienced the night air like this.
Here is the paragon of ingenuity—for the thousands of times a night that the phone rings with the question, “when are you open until?” bellowed through the line, it surprises me that only one employee has figured out that when you answer the phone, “Hello, Cheesecake Etc., open until 1am,” people just hang up.
My co-worker, Inspector Health drearily says as she rubs her crinkly eyes, “I am so tired.” I asked her how late she was up, and said that I was up until quarter after four this morning. To this, she said, “no, I wasn’t up that late.”
“Yeah, I’ve been having trouble going to bed before three in the morning.”
“You should cut the crack, and the cocaine, too.”
“Really, because I was hoping I could just cut the crack…”
“That should be fine.”
After three or four moments of agreeance, I went to bus a table and returned to the couter area with a creamer. As I went to put it in the fridge, I noticed that there was a speck of cheesecake on the side, and went to wipe it off with my apron.
Bad move.
This was seen by Inspector Health, and she went “NO, no no…” as she laughed heartily at my morbid mistake. She aproached, smiling and shaking her head like she was Bill Cosby and I was a kid from Kids Say the Darndest Things who thought that chores were ‘poopy’. It’s a good thing she was there to tell me that I was being unsanitary by touching the creamer, although I was confused as to how the creamer had gotten to the table in the first place if it hadn’t been touched, seeing as that was unsanitary.
“The cheesecake has probably been near or insomeone’s mouth.”
“The cream comes from the tits of cattle.”
Needless to say, Inspector Health was not amused. Speck removal, it turns out, is the number one killer of all imunosupressed chimo patients and other people with no immune system.
Five minutes later, I told her I may have farted in the strawberries, but I couldn’t be sure.
I was wondering how I’d manage to fit my entire Toronto trip into one post then I read Suzie’s post and I couldn’t have put it better myself. So I’ll jump straight into the rest of my trip.
After parting with Suzie, I met up with my uncle, my aunt, and my cousins Jessica and Naomi. Later, we all met up with my dad (he managed to arrange a business trip to Toronto to match my schedule) and my cousin Will (the one I’d never really gotten to know and whose father died in December). We all went out to a Korean restaurant for dinner and it was nice. Not great. Slightly awkward. Yet cozy.
The next day, I took Naomi out for shopping downtown. I was surprised when she told me that she had never been on a subway before. Her parents have always been busy caring for Jessica that they never had time to take her out. I also spoke with my aunt about Jessica and found out that she wasn’t just a quadreplegic but an epileptic. I still don’t really get the difference. Actually, even the doctors aren’t quite sure of what disability she has because they’re constantly being proven wrong by it. In some ways this is a good thing. If they knew exactly what was wrong, chances are, it’d just make it certain that her disability was incurable. But not knowing the exact cause leaves room for the possibility of her getting better. For example, they said that if she couldn’t sit up on her own by the age of 3, she never would. She did at the age of 10.
I took the bus back down to Ithaca on Wednesday night. The real grand finale of my trip I think was my 7 hour layover at the Rochester NY Bus Station. From 12:30am to 7:45am, I spent the night huddled on a metal bench with my backpack and dufflebag watching the place morph into different worlds by the hour. When I first got there, it was simply empty. Perfect for reading. Then around 2am came some action. A mother and daughter came in and suddenly started yelling and swearing at each other. The mother takes the daugher’s suitcase and starts pulling out her clothes and throwing them on the ground screaming, “Bitch this isn’t yours! This is mine!” To which her daughter screams, “What the fuck! Stop! It’s mine!” Bras and thongs start coming out of the suitcase and the daughter starts crying violently saying, “I can’t believe you’re fucking doing this in a fucking greyhound bus station! What the fuck! Go fuck yourself!” The daughter storms into the washroom as she rants to someone on her cellphone and the mother mumbles distractedly to herself for a bit then leaves the station (she seemed like some sort of addict). After a while the daughter came back out and started cleaning up after the mess as she continued to talk on her cell. I couldn’t not eavesdrop in this situation so as I was pretending to read, I found out through her conversation that this kind of thing happened frequently to her and that she was headed to Cleveland on her own to get away from the mother. It was like something you’d see in ”8-mile”… except real.
Things fell silent again and I finished my book at around 3am. That’s about when the homeless started filing in. None of them were troublesome since they all knew it’d only get them kicked out into the lethal cold weather. Occasionally they’d ask for some spare change or a cigarette. They’d mumble to themselves or break out sobbing in their sleep at random moments but with time I got used to it. One of them suddenly woke up to tell me that “the governor” was going to visit the bus station at 1pm. I didn’t know what to say so I simply nodded and smiled. The response satisfied him (I think?) and he went back to sleep.
By 4am I found myself surrounded by about 4-5 of them and being able to comfortably write up a Bio prelab at the same time. By 6am, a couple travelers from other buses started coming into the station and the station supervisor-ish man made a PA announcement along the lines of, “Wake up fellas, those of you without tickets know what to do”, and the homeless quietly took their things and left. By daybreak (around 7am), everything went back to normal and the station became crowded with people who may never in their lives find out what this seemingly dull bus station was like before they came in.
I was back at Cornell at around 10am Thursday. Took a shower and slept until 6pm, ordered some Chinese food, then slept for another 12 hours. I’m glad this trip happened. It was the ultimate succession of “first”s that I needed to break the monotony of what was my January and February.
I don’t know you guys, but our lives coincide and I’m kind of in love with that. 6am bus driver. Hi. Maybe someday I’ll get you something. You’re always polite, which is something everyone needs in the morning. You let that boy off at BCIT where there isn’t a stop, and that’s awesome of you. Morning 496 boy who gets off at King Edward, you always look warm in that blankety coat and I watch you wake up minutes before your stop. I’d like to sleep on the bus with that kind of efficiency. You probably go to York House. What do you listen to? Guy on the evening 496 who looks like Jeremy Clarkson, I do your Sudoku over your shoulder because we always sit in the same seats adjacent to each other. Hey Starbucks Regulars. Americano with whip, I bet that’s good. Today you admiringly called me a perfectionist because a couple weeks ago I explained to you which water tap was best for filling up americanos and the next day you told me you told your friends. That was cool, it made me shine inside. I think your name is Linda, but I won’t call you that unless I’m sure. Tallish guy who has a chai latte to stay, I think last night you told us your name was Sergei. Sergei, you’re awesome for bringing your empty cup to the back for us. How much do you like pumpkin scones? Opera Man. You break my soul. One cloudy day when the sun came out I saw you singing skyward for the first time and I thought you were a crazy person but I heard about you and your wife going to the opera in Italy. If that’s not the most romantic image I can muster, it matches the anguish I fill myself with when I listen to The Beatles or read Douglas Adams and feel like I’m living in perpetual nostalgia. Opera Man, I get you. When your wife died, you didn’t stop loving her and when you sing uninhibitedly like you do, it makes me so hopeful. I like seeing you. I like making your lattes. You’re an icon to me, please don’t stop being you because you’ve got love right. Guy who comes in each day around 3, sometimes I don’t see you but lately I’ve been taking your order. Do you work in Portico? You tend to come in during the lull so I spend more time talking to you than others. Today you came in during my break and we greeted each other with a smile. You look almost identical to another customer who likes Doppio Macciatos, but he has lots of piercings so I don’t know why I get you guys mixed up. Next time I see you I’ll introduce myself properly, but please don’t fall in love with me or misinterpret my politesse because you’re my favourite mystery person and that’s why I smile at you.
I enjoyed Katy’s list style approach to posting so I will borrow that format here (bullet points and all).
Audrey visited me in Toronto for a couple of days and we had loads of fun so here are
The Top Moments of Last Weekend
Who’s next?
I have not written in what has felt like an eternity, but let’s not state the obvious, shall we? I will summarize an elaborate only with incidents that still feel detail rich to avoid a novel and the subsuquent boredom of you all.
Life circa last month…
We drove to Peggy’s cove to buy the lobster. It was exceptionally fresh — > still alive… but then, that’s how lobster is done. I watched as the man in the puffy, salt-encrusted vest wrapped up each lobster in its own newspaper, each lobster becoming a mysterious and somewhat mechanical parcel of joy. The claws were confined by those big thick mailman’s elastics that comes around bunches of broccoli. (They are still mailman’s elastics, even when they are sold with vegetables. Don’t question me.) I thought about how I might have once felt sorry for these creatures — sometimes “playing dead” as they sit out of their element. When they did move, however, they were, as I have mentioned. mechanical in their movements. Through psychology I have come to believe that while these are creatures with brains, they are also little more than a series of reflexes. I have deduced this because there is no variety in their reactions. They act the same way as each other. Every movement is entirely predictable. Predictable things can be eaten without a heavy heart. That is the rule. This is why, after having painstakingly broken the ice in front of my uncle’s house to get a bucketful of seawater, I felt no remorse as I threw the creature head first into the boiling water. Its legs were moving like tiny robotic limbs as it went in and took one breath and met its doom. Mine was named Alex. He was delicious. I ate him with garlicy butter and a pint of local beer. I found out that he was a she. Somebody else ate the roe.
For those of you who do not know, lobster is a smelly and messy business, but is rewarding and filing. I have sucked the meat from a lobster’s leg shell. It was marvelous.
11 Reasons My Roommate Is A Reptile.
1. Attracted to men with terrariums.
2. Dry skin.
3. Can unhinge her jaw.
4. Does a weird air licking thing with the tip of her tongue.
5. Is nocturnal/I am never sure if she is sleeping or lying in wait.
6. Cold blooded.
7. Does not have feelings, only sensori-motor reflexes. (Is therefore okay to eat, but is far to skinny and amusing for anyone to want to.)
8. Does not like to wear clothes.
9. Coils around/ latches on to prey.
10. Dislikes the cold.
11. Has an innate fear of flying prey. (pterodactyls, birds)
I think that’s it. Consider yourselves all missed terribly. I keep walking to Bridge Street cafe, and thinking, wouldn’t it be neat if I ran into the tea collective there? I imagine Michael leaping into my arms in that always surprising way he does it. (Scooby-Doo style… like… ZOIKS!) It just so feels like a place that you should all be.
This blog is now longer than my Herstory paper. I must away.
