Your lives are probably more interesting than not. At least to those whom your lives are not in direct contact with.

Anyway…

see yas!

Hope our kids still play together.

I had lab final today. About algae. I had to be able to identify 30 different species of algae by scientific name and be able to tell what life cycle stage they were. I think it went well. In this lab I have 3 bench mates. They are pretty cool people and we would work together to prepare the slides and identify the algae through out the term. For some reason though I was always the outsider, never asked to join their study group, practically ignored as we walked down the halls out of the biology building. Is something wrong if I like studying by myself ?

I wonder if I’m going to be any good in science if I have trouble collaborating, I don’t really know any profs, and I don’t have a strong group of science peers. I do have some awesome friends at the pool. I wonder if it’s time to leave that frat house behind. Maybe I need a job in a lab.

I need to also stop procrastinating, the daylight savings is throwing me off– it feels earlier than it actually is, my deadlines are closer than I think.

Who’s next?

Hi Chickies.

I’m back. This is back. You are back, reading. Did we ever really leave? Were we afraid to be the next new update because revealing something about ourselves takes away the power of someone finding out? Are we really entitled to the celebrity our facebook popularity spoonfeeds us? That’s thick.

I’m updating.

Why?

Because my life is awesome and you all have to know about it.

Since I was any kind of blip on your friend-dar … in grade ten, from 2004, 6 years ago… I’ve felt overshadowed by your – every one of you – sense of self, motivation, clear-headedness, creativity, vision, and genuine good-heartedness. It didn’t matter so much at the time because I hardly went to school and it was great to be part of what we ended up being whenever I was there and I had my thing being an athlete. Since high school though, your big-ness has thickened my original self-loathing to a sort of… molasses. Don’t think I’m some kind of emotional wreck because of you. I only questioned my every move (question every move?), denied I was ever good enough to pursue anything gainful, and haunted my thoughts with everything I couldn’t do as well as you. Feel nothing but proud of yourselves for making me who I am now, and I mean that in the with most polar-opposite sincerity to the sarcasm it exudes because presently I don’t think I could be happier. Ever. Until I meet my children.

Because I graduated high school with a brain trained for the one thing my condition-ending-in-itis prevented me doing, my molasses crystallized. I wasn’t ready to learn (and now I can see that I spent and continue to spend a lot of grief being afraid of knowledge) and I wasn’t interested in any prospective studies I qualified for having taken courses for amusement rather than foundation. In that, had done something stupid, and I’m glad I paid the time it cost to fix it and I rationalize it to this day by saying, “I never regret doing something, I regret not doing something,” even though I’m not entirely sure what that means.

Being certain is either very dangerous or very stupid, but I’m not sure.

So I decided to write about it instead. I thought publishing literature on how my growing up training for an athletic designation translated so dramatically into educational black holes. If it didn’t help me critically analyze myself it might at least help fund my education, I thought, and so I have since written roughly a hundred thousand words, starting with, “My first dream job is to be The Beatles. My second dream job is to be a pilot. My third dream job? Philosopher. The problem? Too late, too late, and too late… respectively.” And I never changed that part because it was exactly how I felt, in concrete terms. I was too late to have lived in the sixties and grown up with the most empowering culture in recent history, I was too late to re-do every technical course I took in high school to get my C’s up to A’s, and I was too late to enter a 400-years-dead profession. I wasn’t sure if I wanted a career or if I wanted a life, or if I wanted to be creative or if I wanted to be practical. I had grown up comparing myself to others in terms of skill (she got this when she was nine, and I’m nine, and I can’t do it, so either I get better fast or I’m not as good as her). Because you all had (at least seemed to in my eyes) achieved high educational statuses or developed a high-pressure motivation to channel into developing your passions or simply weren’t as disturbed by not knowing as I was, I felt that the letters I got at the end described me because I couldn’t, and I considered myself seriously average. I felt my peer group were the doctors and scientists and not achieving that level of academia reinforced my feeling of being subpar.

And I proceeded to waste time actively liking and pursuing nothing and doing (and hating doing) what I was told. I think my greatest hindrance was being shy or afraid of knowing things. To this day I know all of your birthdays and all of your home telephone numbers, and all those of my near and distant relatives. I know my drivers’ licence number, passport number, social insurance number, credit card number, bank account numbers, student numbers, and I can recite π to the 29th digit after the decimal point. It is simply a strange skill I possess along with the ability to draw perfect freehand circles but since memorizing long strings of numbers and values corresponding with a date or person served me no purpose in figuring out who I was I tucked it away and pretended I didn’t know the answer to questions people asked, because being the only one in a group knowing the answer to something tends to draw more questions than I am prepared to answer. What also tends to draw questions that make me want to get vaporized by aliens are those that come when you respond, “actually I’m not going to school at the moment,” to shocked and judging eyes, it turns out.

Anyways, I continued to sabotage my happiness by applying for programs beyond what I thought my truncated grades could reach. I think it was a combination of getting a credit card and the feeling of needing to reinforce my idea of feeling useless to the world around me whenever I wasn’t accepted, or the feeling of potential when I was accepted. It was all quite a grand waste of time and money. Perhaps it was my mother’s incessant request for updates, or my dad’s silence on the subject of me dropping school like it’s hot. Maybe it was just the constant grief of meeting new people and having them ask me what I was going to school for and not having an answer, maybe it was my sister graduating and the prospect of her continuing to dominate the academic praise my parents never got to give me or maybe I finally grew up and permitted myself an opinion. To all the girls I grew up with: I didn’t like the Easy-Bake Oven or the dollhouse or those weird horse things. Those days we played with fire, rode our bikes in the rain or listened to rock and roll while playing hotwheels were the greatest. Machines fascinate me. Our bodies are machines. Cities are machines. We use machines in the city with our bodies! The achievements of science – blow – my – mind. Manipulating death and gravity? Awesome. Describing physiology and assigning values to characteristics we can see and feel? Brilliant. Science is my art. It is understanding things I sense and categorizing things I experience.

For a while I thought I had to choose: science, or art? Practical or theoretical? Instead, I found out how to apply artistic creativity to scientific methods and learning practical skill by applying relevant theories and what’s really great is that after a bunch of tests and interviews, that all-encompassing field of study is dream job # 2, except that I’m not too late. What was almost too late was the call I got Friday letting me know I had been accepted, and that I can deal with (or maybe it was that I got an acceptance letter from the Nursing program at Douglas on Friday as well, which almost called for an anxiety walk). Now I know what it feels like to be you guys, confident in what I will be and motivated to be what I expect of myself. It’s great on this side of the… depression. Things are sunny and real. I can’t wait to spend so much money and so much time learning. I understand now, the things sacrificed in the pursuit of education and that ideal person somewhere far off, vaguely us-shaped with maybe a nicer hat. I had gotten so expert at dealing with things not working out that this concept of not-failing still has that new-feeling smell. It’s wonderful. I am so high on it.

I can’t wait for my kids to tell people that I fly airplanes.

I spent an hour bloody blogging instead of persuading institutions to give me scholarships. But for the sake of two years from now, based on two years ago, I need to know how I felt exactly now and being quarter-past terrified is my new favourite feeling.

First flight on April Fools’!

You are the masses and I am the orator. 

Earlier this month I happened upon a purchase. Actually, I frequently make purchases and hope to continue purchasing things to effectively satisfy my addiction to itunes and to avoid any chances of affluence. Unfortunately this time I was only buying gifts for other people and not albums from the seventies for myself. Actually I was not buying gifts but instead failing to figure out why my card was suddenly declaring itself invalid. I initially defaulted on Vancity perhaps allowing me a Monday Surprise but that was unlikely because Vancity wouldn’t push me over a cliff now after all we’ve been through and I still needed to buy lunch and dinner. I slowly realized that I was nearing terminal velocity endowed upon me by a Monday Surprise and that I had 37 dimes to spend on lunch and dinner because ATM withdrawals and point of sale purchases were no longer a part of my life – which was accelerating towards an endpoint.

It could have been worse. 

But it wasn’t.

It was past branch hours and I wasn’t going to call the customer service number because my hijacked blood pressure was donning on me streaks of intelligence and because 1-800 numbers probably cause cancer anyways. So I fell into a coma and was awoken promptly at eight the next morning by Ted, an accountant representative, apologizing for the delay in notification and suggesting that my card could have been skimmed and that perhaps I’d like a new one because until then my account would be suspended. Perhaps I would then like a new one, I said, acting like this was information I was learning for the first time and that hearing from him at the crack of dawn was a gift from above but really feeling like my insides were rotting gloriously. My card wasn’t skimmed.

I approached a branch one day during my break like one would approach a heap of smelly suspicion and the teller serviced my account robotically and as though the computer was displaying information she had never before seen. She approached the card-stamping machine like I approached the branch, and it took four tries for her to get the machine to stir, which I simply took as an opportunity to program my phalanges with the muscle memory of a new PIN. I was concerned that perhaps after all this, my card was so overwritten with the same information that it wouldn’t work, but a quick test-withdrawl outside suggested I was in the clear. 

And for two weeks this appeared the case until I spent an extra moment realizing that no money had been coming out of my account assigned to my debit card. This registered as odd to me, and I quickly deduced, in horror, that my debit card had been not only been eating at my European Savings Account, but feasting an extra five dollars from it in service charges because of the type of account it was. The robot in charge is a more expensive one, I guess. Simply, for the sixteen transactions I had processed, I was charged $80. I quickly got this fixed at another location by a polite and intelligent teller, without the use of terrorism and using all the energy available to neutralize any imminent rage outbursts or sudden anger comas. 

In my angry letter to Headquarters, I suggested that this whole experience wasn’t as bad as being secretly charged $5 per transaction before reiterating that that was what in fact happened. I hope the effect of my caustic narration describing this torrid affair wasn’t lost, all in all. I hope they send me to Rome in recompense like I suggested. I also hope that unlike Arthur Dent, my trilogies do not come in fours.

Often and always, and in between bouts of self-pity regarding not being born in the sixties, I find that I have much more in common with children and mentally handicapped people than I do with my peer group. Perhaps I’m angry at people my age because they weren’t born in the sixties either and I’m in denial and maybe because I am arrogant in that respect but the truth is such as I feel. 

On the 17, a man sidled up to me with an ear-to-ear grin and some untended drool, and asked me if I had any experience working with handicapped people. I said that yes, I had, and because one-word answers and disinterest is directed to people of a twentysomething demographic, I explained to him in my teacher voice that I very much enjoyed teaching disabled children and adults at my job. He maintained his discussion grin and inquired as to whether the people I worked with were physically or mentally disabled and then burst with excitement to let me know that he had a mental disability – could I tell? I said that I could hardly tell because I was enjoying the conversation and he was rather more articulate to engage in discussion than a grand majority of the people I acquaint myself with. He giggled like he was opening a birthday gift. “I don’t have enough time to tell you all about my hopes and desires and wishes and dreams because I get off in two stops,” he said, “but I wish I could.” I told him I wish I could listen, but that perhaps he would find someone else on another bus to talk to later on, and he agreed thoughtfully. “Should we know each other by name, or by face?” He asked. I suggested by face, because I am not good at pronouncing the L’s in my name unless I practice out loud a couple of times and because I never before had a friend I only knew by sight, so this concept interested me. “Okay!” He agreed, “We can just be hello and goodbye friends.” He waved as he alighted at Oak. 

So there we were – hello and goodbye friends who knew each other by face. If only people fitting nicely in the middle of bell curves could come up with something like that. Think of the things we could do.

Upstairs pancake house, Amsterdam.
Tea pot o rama

But all is not in peril, I assure you. I’ve lost much change in vending machines and jacket linings so this loss hurts only inside because I bottle up my emotions and my attention span doesn’t extend terribly far about matters concerning me and my happiness. Fortunately, my intellect and resourcefulness overcome those of a bank drone and most acute spells of depression and I have found a neat and cunning alternative to teller hell. In fact, if I am fine with waiting a couple days processing time for deposits, I need never speak to a Vancity human again! Of course this all comes at the price of failure which comes out to be an even dollar.

This Plan Elk does not yet call for a Plan Laugh. I need something to complain about once Richmond is out of the photo of a thousand whines, and the grand exit comes one sunrise from now. But, I discovered that by clever use of the automated Vancity Voice over the phone, I could transfer funds and pay bills instantly and generally quell most of my Vancity Vendettae, even on Sundays and after 5pm. I actually did this while standing in line, and after entering my PIN and hitting OK at the register, I could almost feel my money fly away through bittersweet tears.

The last straw was on Thursday, and the surge was over sixty-eight cents. Three months ago, I innocently moved money from one account to the other in the interest of interest and to overcome the red tape of a locked term deposit. At any other institution (aside from UBC) this sort of thing would cause the employees to chat about my stupidity once I was cast out of earshot. Unfortunately, I am naïve. I enlisted a polo-shirted teller who went by some vowelless gallic name to do The Switch. Either he couldn’t do his job, or I was lulled into a name-pitying stupor upon hearing his rounded R’s and wooden vowels. The task was simple, but not simple enough for me to go on living a life free of service charges, and clearly way over the head of the Tellerman and now I feel the only recompense would be for me to remove his head with a spoon thereby curbing his crimes of apathy. 

I got a letter in the mail a week ago informing me that my account was overdrawn. First, I don’t understand how this happens in general. I understand credit card debt because you spend money you don’t have. But, overdrawing your account? An ATM doesn’t give you money you don’t have. If it did, that would be the only problem the world would have to worry about. A point of sale transaction doesn’t approve if you don’t have sufficient funds and if it did, again, that would solve all problems except one. Chequing? An NSF cheque bounces and compounds interest until you pay it off, like a credit card. Machines aren’t capable of giving you a dime in change instead of fumbling with pennies for eight cents. Machines will not decide to let you have money that isn’t yours. And, in my case, a Teller would never withdraw an amount superior to the one I had originally and gift me the remainder. In no way can I conceive of this alleged overdrawing business occurring and furthermore, I have no part in it because this specific account is not tied to any cards I may or may not use and realizing this, my mind instantly returned to my gallic friend. I (unwisely) strode into my branch and let known my woes to some scummy piece of donkey shit whose head was quickly threatening to become victim of my spoon violence thereby sparing the Tellerman of Yore his slavic jawline. 

I stayed standing while Donkey Shit sat and kept his focus below my acidic glower and he explained that any transaction in the branch is charged a $0.70 fee, and why didn’t I do it online, like someone of dim wattage would? Well, I explained, using words with syllables he could understand, this concerned an account I did not have online access to and there was no need to insult me over service charges that add to his paycheck. Why also, was this simply not deducted from the original sum I had? I wouldn’t have noticed, bloody hell! He fiddled with a cube of post-its. “What can you do for me?” I pushed, showing how polite I could be by omission while he retreated with an offer to unlock the term deposit via future appointment and several signatures and transfer one dollar from there to the overdraft causing it to disappear like I wanted him to. I are you kiddinged him with a powerglare-eyeroll roundoff. “I have a dollar right here,” I said, before politely inserting a 9mm in his temple in a way that projected a raw hatred while maintaining an open-casket worthy complexion. 

Unfortunately that last bit was suppressed in an impressive display of control on my part and I left less a bit of change, a lotta soul, and what I’m sure will be the guarantee of a kindly future letter informing me of the service charge overdraft for this very transaction. I just need to remember, in my Independence, to save toonies for laundry, loonies for shopping carts, and quarters for Threatening Vancity. It’s the least I can do for them.

A right day hands help, 
able the whitest erasable self to be a title.
Theta blue whim rev lover, a stormy
lyceum grit elapse me asleep, slur our ebb.
A broad bye hunts
babel cards.