January 1–4, 2002 — Cold floors and medieval swords

During the first two days of 2002, I sneezed hundreds of times, used two entire boxes of Kleenex, and ended up taking out my septum retainer (possibly for good) because it hurt far too much to leave it in.

Then, on the third day of 2002, I found out that someone had charged well over $5000 onto my credit card between December 30 and January 3.

What a start the year is off to.

But first I’m going to skip back to December since I posted on December 31 before the day had even begun. Good? Good.

For New Year’s Eve, Jeff and Amy had convinced me to go with them to their friend’s cottage just outside of Warsaw, a small town near Peterborough and around two hours from Toronto.

I took the train to Oshawa and met Amy at Jeff’s house, accomplishing little or nothing before I left Toronto. I didn’t bring a sleeping bag, a change of clothes, or a toothbrush; given the choice between planning ahead (looking like I’ve packed too much for a night at a cottage in the process) and lazily bringing next to nothing (ending up cold, dirty, and smelly by the next morning), I’ll always choose laziness.

Amy and I waited for our drive to the cottage. I sneezed a bit and Amy put sparkles on her nails and then decided to take them off before we left.

The drive itself was fairly uneventful. It was snowing, but we went slowly enough that I didn’t feel the need to start hyperventilating. We stopped at a gas station on the way, but they didn’t have Combos, which was a bit of a letdown. Shona brought a word game called Taboo that I had never played before and was trying to convince us to play it once we arrived at the cottage. If only I’d thought to bring Scrabble, it would’ve been pretty darn close to the ideal New Year’s Eve.

We were in one of the last vehicles to arrive at the cottage, as far as I could tell. (This was a good thing because it meant we would be one of the first vehicles to leave given that we’d blocked almost everyone else in.)

Shortly after arriving, four of us started playing Shona’s word game: Shona, me, Kerry (who I’d met in the van on the way to the cottage), and someone who may or may not have been named Kevin. Kevin had already been drinking a bit, so he made for an interesting partner for a word game.

We played for two hours. The basic goal of the game is to get your partner to say the word given to you on your card without saying any of the five other words on the card. So if your word was, say, “yellow”, then you probably couldn’t say words like “colour”, “mustard”, or “canary”, but you could sing “Yellow” by Coldplay and tell your partner to name the song.

It was fun enough until the second game when Kerry asked me to complete the band name, “Joy ———”, hoping that I would respond with the word “division”. Joy Division being my favourite band, this was a pretty good strategy. But for reasons that I will never understand, my mind short-circuited and I immediately blurted out “drop”. (Joydrop is the Canadian group responsible for a song called “Beautiful” that was popular on MuchMusic in 1997 or so. Not very indierockcool. And certainly not as influential on my growth into the ball of sunshine I am today as Joy Division was.) I recovered moments later and said the right word, but the humiliation is here to stay.

Once the game was over, I wandered around outside for a bit.

Before long it was midnight, and everyone counted down from ten around the fire. I don’t think anyone knew the words to Auld Lang Syne, but a lot of people hummed loudly and that was good enough for me.

It hasn’t been cold for long enough this year for the ice of the lake behind the cottage to be thoroughly frozen, but people went out onto it anyway. No one fell through. Which is good. If less exciting.

Back inside, I played a couple of games of backgammon while Joy Division and Converge were playing on the stereo. A bit later, I found a chair to huddle up on. I had planned on sleeping there, but Jeff and Amy found blankets and a pillow and a floor for me to sleep on.

All in all, it was a good night, even if I didn’t sleep so well. (I kept waking up shivering; I realized in the morning that there was a heater on the opposite side of the room that I could’ve slept beside if I’d just moved my blankets. So I’ve no one to blame but myself. But I’d never slept in a hoodie before, so at least I was learning to do new things.)

It was early in the afternoon when we left the next day. The streets were bright and it felt like a Sunday. I was sitting in the back seat of the van again as we drove through Peterborough and on to Oshawa. We were listening to Q107’s countdown of the top 107 classic rock songs of all time. I felt like I used to feel when my family would drive home to Ottawa after a weekend at the farm where my dad grew up. We were driving the same roads and listening to the same music, so it was an easy connection to make. It felt peaceful. I was tired and I needed a shower, but I wasn’t in any real rush to get home.

After eating in Oshawa, Jeff, Amy, and I were dropped off at the train station. The three of us went back to Toronto, splitting up at Jeff and Amy’s subway stop.

I went to sleep early that night after a very long shower. Nothing all that spectacular had happened, but I’m glad I didn’t stay home for New Year’s Eve like I’d planned to.

The next day, I woke up at 7:40 am. Without an alarm.

To celebrate waking up on my own at a reasonable hour for the first time in months and month (and months), I went grocery shopping. Then I called my mom and asked what I should buy to clean the house. Then I went back to the grocery store to buy what my mom had recommended. Then I started cleaning. (It might’ve been more efficient to call my mom before I went to the store the first time, but my day felt like it was going to last forever with all that sunlight after my early wake-up, so I didn’t feel too bad about the inefficiency of it all.)

I started to sneeze uncontrollably midway through the afternoon. It was awful. I gave up on cleaning and went to bed at 4:00 pm, feeling like I was going to collapse. I fell asleep eight hours later and slept through to the morning.

I woke up (without an alarm) at 8:00 am the next day. Somehow my night out on December 31 must’ve jolted me back into proper sleeping habits. It felt good.

There were lots of things that I’d planned to do and that were supposed to happen on Thursday.

Then I decided to call Telus, a Canadian phone company, to ask why I had received an email saying that I’d signed up for their voice-over-Internet service (and that I’d been billed for it) when I had never heard of it.

To make a long story short, it turned out that my credit card number had been stolen and that someone had been doing their best to make sure that the terrorists hadn’t already won by buying as much as they could. I’m still expecting a call from Visa so that I can go through the final list of items that were purchased using my credit card without my permission so that I can declare them all to be illegitimate; the preliminary list includes $900 worth of fantasy axes from a Web site specializing in props for medieval fairs, countless Internet phone calls, and a $3400 mystery charge that I very much look forward to learning more about.

Jennifer from the credit card company was very nice to me and went on about how it wasn’t my fault. While waiting for her to call, I looked online and found that, the maximum fee the customer has to pay in the US in a case of fraud is $50; as it turns out, I’m not even going to have to pay that. So all in all, things could be worse.

I think I’ll do more of my online shopping with money orders from now on, though.

Thursday night, I went over to Jeff and Amy’s house to watch a DVD and to forget about credit card fraud. And again on Friday afternoon to watch a movie with Amy. Then I returned home to find that Nathan was in the process of stealing my Boo doll. He had written up a sign to leave behind, but Johnston had failed on lookout duty and Nathan was unable to sneak out. I hid Boo, and we got pizza and played Scrabble. I came from behind to win (mostly thanks to xi, the fourteenth letter of the Greek alphabet — moving the ancient Greeks up a notch in my books), but only after Nathan had endeared himself a bit more by asking to listen to and then complaining about albums by Beulah and Death Cab For Cutie.

Then Nathan left and Boo came out of hiding. And now it’s almost midnight and I’m starting to feel tired. So I’ll be going to bed soon, I think. It’s for the best.

Meanwhile, I’ve been writing a bit more lately and the story that makes up the first zine-like print issue of antigreg should be done within a few days. Which is something to be proud of, I think. It’s almost five months old and isn’t anywhere near as relevant as it was when I started, but I’ll be very, very glad when it’s finished.

Anyway. It’s been a long four or five days. But I’m caught up now. So I might try to write some more about less superficial things now that I’ve fewer major events to write about. Especially after so many people seemed happy with my last entry.

But for now, this is far too long. But I’m very impressed with you for making it all the way to the end. For what it’s worth.