August 24, 2000 — Is this thing on?

After a solid five minutes of not being able to think of a title for today's journal, I decided to just pick the first line that came to mind from today's conversations, and that was definitely it. Adam was explaining his attempt at making conversation with Mel, a straight edge girl we kind of know, in HMV; when he received no reaction to a joke, he tapped his clipboard with his pen and did the standard, "Is this thing on?" line, which managed a laugh from a passing gentleman assumed to be searching for the country section, but not from Mel.

But let's back up a bit.

I once again managed an adequate amount of sleep and am feeling almost completely healthy again (it's ridiculous, I tell ya). While reading the newspaper, I noticed that Sports Experts had dirt cheap skateboards, and I was hoping that one of them would be suitable for the purpose of transportation in Toronto. My sister was looking for a skateboard to learn with now that she was hanging out with Christina Riley all the time, so it was shopping-with-sibling time, location: Bayshore. It wasn't so bad. It was kind of weird since I think people thought we were a couple, but whatever. The guy in Warren's acted really strangely (my sister thought he was flirting with me), and I was at least a little bit perturbed during those awkward moments when my sister was trying on shorts and I couldn't pretend to be interested in her clothing selections to avoid talking to the vaguely psychotic sales associate.

Anyways, I dropped my sister off at her fabric-cuttin' job down at Bouclairs and drove to Nick Wightman's house to try to fix his computer. Unfortunately, I left convinced that there was something physically wrong with his modem, having tried fixing it by using multiple phone chords, by swapping drivers, by switching ports, by re-installing everything, and even by physically removing and switching PCI slots. I was kind of worried when the mouse spontaneously stopped working, but a quick shutdown, unplug, and restart did the trick getting things fixed up. I hate computers.

While I was at Nick's, I got paged with an invitation to Johnston's house. After about 20 minutes of playing pool at Johnston's, I realized that I had to pick up my sister at work, so it was back to Kanata from Manotick, then back to Richmond to pick up movies and DVDs, and then back to Manotick.

By this point, the turnout had peaked with Dave, Laura, Adam, Steve, Nathan, Andrew, and Casey in attendance. Steve and Laura went to get pizza while decisions were made as to which movie we ought to watch. I looked through Nathan's photography books and was terrified to find two of me from last week. Unlike the ones of me Nathan took with the digital camera awhile back in which I look dorky on purpose, I just look generally and unintentionally dorky in these pictures. If I could only convince myself that cameras are stealing my soul and then violently attack anyone trying to take my picture, none of this would be a problem.

Anyhoo, I owe Steve money for pizza and we ended up watching Clerks. People started to slowly fade and leave for home, and it was weird to have people saying their goodbyes prior to leaving for a different city for a rather long time and whatnot. Normally I just drift out of social circles without really being noticed instead of moving five hours away while still friends with everyone.

Back at the ranch (or Johnston's house, as we like to call it), only Andrew, Nathan, Johnston, and myself were left after Clerks had ended. We played pool and Tony Hawk, and reminisced. I continue to be quite brutal at pool, but am getting better at "hanging out" (or so I'd like to think). Nathan got a standard teasing for emailing my sister, although I'm starting to feel a little guilty about the broken record that this STF business has become. Mostly because it's getting old.

Nathan was talking about how much it annoyed him when people would tell me how brilliant I was, a feeling I'm behind him all the way on. And then some. It was an interesting coincidence though, as I'd just today followed one of Laura's posts by saying that I've every intention of making sure that no one thinks I'm anything but average at the University of Toronto, mainly to avoid what Nathan was talking about. But I digress.

None of us are really sure what this "university" business is going to be like. Johnston and I are convinced that the student body that we'll be dealing with will not be conducive to our meeting tolerable people. I think Nathan and Andrew will be a bit better off at the respective schools simply because they're not taking science courses (the rumour being that kids in science courses are super-competitive and at least vaguely hateful towards each other; plus, they're nerds like us, and we don't like nerds like us). It's not so great that Andrew lives a solid hour away by public transit, but there's always the cold, hard-wood floor of anti-greg headquarters (aka: the room I'm sharing with Johnston in residence) if he wants to stay downtown.

Back at home, I talked to Caitlin briefly on ICQ (she'd been visiting Toronto and had been offline for a few days; since so few people talk to me on ICQ -- my list has a whopping eight names -- her absence cut down significantly on my ICQ usage) and took the quirkyalone quiz. After having read an article about this "quirkyalone" business in the Utne Reader, I'm convinced that this is the designation for me. I'm definitely way more hardcore than any of the people they describe, and I got a ridiculously high score on the quirkyalone online quiz. Unfortunately, the title is supposedly targeted more toward women, so there's much talk of owning vibrators (not that that doesn't apply to me or anything) and that sort of thing. But I remain undeterred.

So let's call it a night, shall we?