October 30–31, 2001 — The devil will find work for idle hands to do

On Tuesday, I spent about an hour on streetcars and buses and subway trains so that I could make a roundtrip without paying more than one fare. The Staples location closest to me is conveniently located at a transfer point from streetcar to bus, so I took the streetcar to Staples, bought a black ink jet cartridge, transferred to a bus that took me into a subway station, took the subway back to St. Clair West, and took a streetcar home. I thought it was all rather clever of me.

While I was at Staples, I also looked at the paper cutters that they have for sale. Very tempting, what with the first issue of the doomed-to-failure antigreg print edition in the works...

After following the on-screen tutorial on how to change ink jet cartridges in Andrew’s printer, I printed out five copies of my résumé onto card stock. They look pretty nice as far as résumés go, I think.

Having already accomplished everything on my (ever ambitious) list of things to do on Tuesday, I decided to get pizza and movies in an attempt to work up the courage necessary to hand out résumés for the first time in my life.

I rented Brazil and Under Suspicion. The latter was horrible. The former hasn’t aged as well as I would have hoped. But the pizza was great.

I set an alarm on Wednesday morning so that I wouldn’t be harassing store managers too late into their shifts.

It wasn’t so bad after I’d done it a few times. Everyone was nice to me. Ironically, the only person who actually read my résumé was the manager of a store who told me immediately that they weren’t hiring. Everyone else just threw my résumé into a stack.

Needless to say, I’m quite prepared to not receive a single callback.

Relieved to be done with asking for store managers, I went to buy a paper cutter at the downtown Staples because my mother had said I could buy one as my birthday present. I carried it home on the subway at rush hour. I lightly (and accidentally) tapped one woman on the shoulder with it, but when I did my best to apologize profusely, she turned up her nose and wouldn’t even look at me. It made me wish that I hadn’t apologized at all.

When I arrived home, I put together my paper cutter and set to work making little booklets using it and the large stapler that I bought in grade twelve when I was still doing that anti-school newsletter of mine. It seems as though ten sheets of paper plus a cover folded in half is the practical limit as far as trimming the edges of zines goes. But perhaps it will get easier with practice and I’ll be able to do more pages.

I’m also trying to get my act together to get a stamp made with the antigreg logo on it. I’ll need it for the cover design that I have in my head, so I can’t really finish this silly little project until I have the stamp. Then again, I can’t really finish this silly little project until I have the story written, either. I should get on that.

I’m glad that I changed the frequency of our doorbell before Hallowe’en. We haven’t been getting anymore interference causing false doorbell rings, and I’m sure it would’ve been horrible tonight.

As it was, though, no one rang our doorbell because no one thought to try the side door.

Elaine left the first issue of Johnny the Homicidal Maniac here awhile ago for Andrew and I to read, so I finally looked through that. Which was as close to the spirit of Hallowe’en as I managed to get.

My arms hurt again. I need to get a job. Ah, to dream of someone willing both to pay me and to keep me away from computers. If not for the reality of customers and of standing up for eight hours straight, I might almost look forward to it...