December 17-20, 2000 — Tori Amos and minor incidents

In brief, and not necessarily in that order.

Actually, let's start with the executive summary, because this is going to be an epic journal entry. One for the ages. Or at least it will be if the iMac I'm on doesn't crash again. (Don't get me wrong, I'm all for iMacs if they're setup properly so that they seldom crash, and if they have ergonomic keyboards and trackballs instead of the nonsense they're sold with; but alas, this one is not the best I've ever used. And the 'u' key doesn't work very well. So I'll try to avoid words with 'u' in them. That'll teach it.)

But I digress. So the executive summary is as follows: the train ride was long (and involved one death), Gillian and I are getting along exceptionally well, and I can no longer make fun of myself for never having kissed a girl. Needless to say, five days are not going to be long enough.

And now the longer version. You can scroll down to the first mention of Gillian if you’re not interested in my epic, train-based adventures.

After a panicked morning of packing clothes for my trip, my parents drove me to the train station. My mom even put together a plastic bag full of snacks, which was rather nice of her. My train was 20 minutes late leaving, but I figured things would be fine, since I had 2.5 hours in between the Ottawa-Montreal train and the Montreal-Halifax train. Little did I know.

About 25 minutes outside of Ottawa, the train came to a stop. Rather abruptly, actually. We were told that a minor incident had occurred and that no one on the train had been injured. I suspect that a) it’s always a "minor" incident (keeps the passengers happy), and b) it’s pretty bloody unlikely that anyone on the train will be injured (so long as the train remains on the tracks, of course) after hitting something. I learned yesterday from my dad that we’d hit a mental patient who was on the tracks. They didn’t tell us much at the time, but it was about 2.5 hours until the engines started again and we were on our way to Montreal. Thankfully, they held the Halifax connecting train and we were able to catch the only train there until 7:30PM the next day, despite being a little late. I was so worried about how things would go in Nova Scotia that, at the time, I was vaguely hopeful that we’d miss the connection. That way, I could yell at VIA Rail until they gave me a hotel room in Montreal, and then I’d be able to hang around there and try to calm down for the day. In retrospect, I feel stupid for even thinking that. But I didn’t really know what I know now.

So moving right along. 26 hours later, I was in Halifax. Getting off the train was the scariest part. The walk from the platform to the terminal, I mean. It had been reasonably easy to pretend that it was just one of those typical 26-hour journeys across three provinces and not one that ended with seeing my girlfriend for the first time. Such are the joys of Internet relationships, I suppose. I settled for muttering "Everything will be fine," to myself over and over while forcing myself to continue my march towards the terminal.

The first few moments were awkward. My only story was having my train hit someone on the way there (she’d been at the terminal for 2.5 hours; I wanted to explain my absence), and hers involved having read about the controversy over the dinosaur extinction theory as reported in a Halifax newspaper that I didn’t catch the name of. And then we had to share a van with five strangers for over two hours on the way home.

Gillian initially said that she didn’t want to talk while we drove, but we ended up whispering. And we’d started out sitting apart, but had ended up in slightly closer contact by the end of the drive. When we got to her home, I had a shower and we had sandwiches and we went to Gillian’s room. It was out first time alone, ever. It was more difficult to keep a conversation going than it had been during the trip home; I’m not very used to private moments like those.

Editor’s note: Gillian wants to go home (we’re at a public Internet access site now) to have peanut butter sandwiches, so I’m going to try and hurry this up a bit.

So anyways, after a few minutes of awkward conversation, we calmed down a little bit. At one point in the conversation, when I was starting a sentence with, "I don’t," she leaned over and we kissed. For awhile. I remember it quite clearly, but I can’t for the life of me recall how the sentence I’d started was going to end.

After that, it was pretty clear that my excessive worrying had been a bit misplaced.

We stayed awake for most of the first night. (I will now pause to allow you to remove your mind from the gutter, as there was no "putting out," as had been encouraged by some.)

The second day, we went shopping for second-hand clothes and I got a "Let’s keep our kids away from drugs" shirt, a "Fresh fruit" shirt, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles bed sheets. I can’t wait to get the Ninja Turtles sheets on my bunk bed in residence. I can feel my popularity reaching for the stars already.

We had meant to rent a bunch of movies and drink soft drinks and stay up for most of the night, but we couldn’t find enough movies that we were happy with, so we just watched Empire Records and got a bit more sleep than we had the night before.

I might write more about today next time I’m in front of a computer. I’ve learned a bit more about the populace of Nova Scotia. But for now, I want to have a sandwich and I want to be alone with Gillian again. And I mean, really, I’d rather give an update on how things are going with her than whine about people’s haircuts in Nova Scotia or other inane things like that. Today there are priorities, I figure.

The Bran Van 3000 site has followed me here in the form of teleconferencing with some Grand Royal people, but I needn’t get into that. It was just odd to be getting everything up to date while sitting on Gillian’s bed without a computer to even look at the site with. In any case, the site’ll be getting better and better starting in January, and should almost be up to my standards by February. But for now, I’ve got three more days to have other things on my mind.

And with that out of the way, here’s the summary of all things Gillian: we’re getting along well, she thinks I fidget too much, and, well, I wish these five days could stretch on for far longer. The next eight months after I leave are going to be hell, but I wouldn’t want it any other way.