December 26, 2001 — Solutions to problems that don’t exist

Quiet music has proven to be too much for me today. With my mood about as low as it’s going to go, I finally changed the CD. Although I should admit that it was more the landlord’s family yelling at one another downstairs than anything else that inspired the change to louder music.

Every time that I hear them moving around on the stairs, I worry that they’re going to come up to talk to me, so I turn down the music and consider my options if I were to hide. I really don’t know how convincing I could be right now at faking smiles for people that seldom talk to me unless I’ve done something wrong or they want me to help them to move furniture.

Anyway. Yesterday’s entry was cut short; I said what happened but there was little substance to it. So some backtracking is in order.

Further observations on a week at home

I had been away for four months and it showed. I wasn’t used to the shape of the cutlery anymore; the spoons seemed too round and the knives were the wrong shape. When I went to the washroom, I worried about the toilet seat falling down like the one in Toronto does at random intervals. And it was strange to have to worry about allergies again.

I’m quite allergic to cats. I hadn’t so much as sneezed since I moved to Toronto, but after a night in my old bed, they were on their way back. (My family has had a cat since I was six or seven, as I remember it.)

I spent most of the time that I was in Richmond with a box of tissues in front of me. My nose was running constantly. Keen on making myself as unattractive as I possibly could, I walked around the house in boxer shorts and a t-shirt with tissues stuffed up my nose and my eyes watering for days on end. More or less.

And then there are cars. Cars are still a terrifying thing.

My dad drove my sister and me home in the snow from the closest bus stop in Kanata on the Sunday before Christmas; I kept a solid grip on the armrest and tried to pretend that the occasional slip of the back tires wasn’t bothering me as much as it was. I’d really prefer not to die in a car accident.

(On the way back to Toronto, we saw what looked like the aftermath of a rather horrific accident on the other side of the highway. There were at least three or four ambulances and the cars had been completely destroyed and were still fused together. They were backwards, facing oncoming traffic from their new home in the ditch. A row of flares was diverting traffic away from the lane reserved for the trail of ambulances and police cars. I was glad it wasn’t snowing; I’ve lasted twenty years without hyperventilating and I’ve no desire to start now.)

Beyond a return to allergies and a fear of being in cars, home is depressing in a lot of ways. I feel like much more of a failure at home. A lot of people ask me how I’m doing at school and I tell them that I’m not in school anymore and watch the looks on their faces.

The feeling that I’m letting my parents down by doing what I’m doing (or not doing) is a lot stronger in Ottawa, too. In high school, I could always more or less get away with what I’m doing now because even though I put far more effort into things unrelated to my education than I ever put into my schoolwork, I still moved along towards post-secondary education and I was doing what a person my age was supposed to do.

And now I’m not. Now I’m “finding myself”, as my dad is fond of saying, when I should be thinking more about my future. Or so I’ve been told.

I stumbled onto this yesterday:

Greg Sullivan is a 15–year-old Grade-10 student in Ottawa who already has a part-time job working with computers. The quintessential “new economy” kid, he’s confidently nonchalant about his employment prospects: “Having a job at all is good, never mind if it's secure. If you do have the proper skills, you've little to worry about and even if your job does disappear, getting another one possibly wouldn’t be all that difficult, depending on what line of work you’re in.” (From an article that appeared in The Globe and Mail in 1997.)

I’m not sure that I’ve quite as much to be nonchalant about these days. Not while I’m lacking the “proper skills” that I was going on about, anyway.

And now I’m not even sure of where I was going with any of this. But that was a bit more of the last week. Which brings us to today, I guess.

My sister called to wake me up at 9:30 am. I’ve had a bit of a headache ever since. (I think I’ll start planning my return to a life in which the world exists before noon without causing physical pain. Each of my previous attempts at setting an alarm to wake me up thirty minutes earlier than the day before until I was waking up at a normal time failed, but one of these times it’s bound to work. I think that Boxing Day shopping might have had something to do with today’s headaches, but I’d hate to mention that for fear of losing the justification for this lengthy and pointless digression.)

The malls were packed and so were most of the stores. I bought a pair of pants and my sister bought a shirt. I don’t remember much else. Lunatic Fringe, one of the stores that my sister was most looking forward to going to, had gone out of business. (This was partially a blessing, as we’d’ve been late in meeting up with our parents otherwise.)

I didn’t end up going back to Peterborough for dinner. It’s a bit of a Boxing Day tradition and I feel vaguely uncomfortable about not having gone. I think it’s the first time that I haven’t been in Peterborough for Christmas, which makes me feel old and a bit depressed.

And I think that’s about it for the day. I’m trying to get caught up on email and I’m thinking of applying for internships as a way to pass the time. I’m also going to rewrite my résumé to be more appealing to people hiring for retail jobs, although I’m not convinced that it will make a difference. “No retail experience” is hard to make sound appealing, after all...

But yes. Lots of things to do, even if none of them will get me very far in life.