January 31–February 5, 2002 — Overlapping and bleeding together

Over the last few days, I’ve tried several times to write this, but I just couldn’t.

I always write my journal entries in the same file, deleting the old one and starting over. Four or five times since I last wrote a journal entry, I’ve opened my journal file, changed the date so that it reflects the current one, and then stopped, unable to think of a title or convince myself that it’s worth it for me to be writing at all.

Keeping a journal online hasn’t felt this awkward in a long time.

I’ve been home from work for around an hour. I worked from 4:00 pm to 10:30 pm with Erin. (For those who haven’t been reading along, I went to the same elementary and high school as Erin, and it’s because of her that so many people I know from Ottawa work at the same smoothie bar in Toronto.)

It wasn’t the busiest of nights; Erin and I talked about some friends from back home that we still knew and about some that we hadn’t talked to in years. I learned a lot about people that I hadn’t thought about, much less spoken to, since I started high school.

Mostly, though, I thought about how strange it was that I had gone to school with Erin for fourteen or fifteen years without really having much of a conversation with her until we were both working at a juice bar five hours from where we grew up.

But anyway: It wasn’t a bad shift at all. I learned to count myself in and to open a safe. For the first few hours, my hands kept shaking like they do when I’m nervous, but that eventually stopped. The night went by quickly, and Jeff visited; things were mostly alright.

A girl who works at the Second Cup next door brought us banana-flavoured hot chocolates during our shift, just to be nice. We weren’t sure if we were allowed to give her something back. Conveniently, I was making a smoothie in a bit of a trance and forgot that I had been asked not to put any yogurt into it. So I walked the one that had been in contact with yogurt over to the people at Second Cup after making a new one for the no-yogurt person. It’s still kind of awkward, though — I’d really like to be nice back, but it’s hard to be sure what’s expected or allowed.

We eventually finished cleaning and closed the store. Erin’s going back to Ottawa soon, and I don’t have any more shifts with her; I managed an awkward goodbye and started on my way home.

The days between my last journal and today have been something of a blur.

I don’t remember Thursday much at all.

Friday, I worked.

Nathan had more or less told our boss about this web site on Thursday night, so I had the fun of dealing with that. Mostly by turning red, and, later, by saying, “I haven’t blushed in months and months. I’d forgotten what it feels like.” I think I was trying to pretend that I’m not as easily embarrassed as I looked to be that night. I’m still trying to decide how to write journal entries now that so many people that I see on a regular basis as coworkers are reading along. I guess that’s something I’ll have to figure out.

I learned a lot about Toronto’s gay community on Friday night, too. (Bath houses — who knew?)

Saturday was the grand opening of the store, and I worked my first eight-hour shift. It was busy, but fun to be working with so many of my friends.

After closing the store, I went to Jeff and Amy’s house and sat semi-conscious while listening to Guns and Roses and talking about Amy’s ear-stretching experiences. (Amy didn’t pass out during the process and is obviously far, far tougher than I’ll ever be.)

On Sunday, I had an opening shift at work. I didn’t get enough sleep, but I’d’ve missed the Super Bowl party if it had been another closing shift, so I guess I’ve nothing to complain about.

The Super Bowl party in itself was pretty funny: Johnston was the only one who really cared about the outcome of the game, or about football in general. We setup a second TV in Andrew’s room and sat around eating pizza and watching football on one TV, with Johnston’s PlayStation going on the other. We used Johnston’s antenna to pick up the broadcast from Buffalo, so we got to see all of the US commercials.

I’d never seen the Super Bowl with US commercials before. (Admittedly, I don’t think I’ve sat through an entire Super Bowl before, either, but the occasionally funny commercial at least made it that much more worthwhile.) The commercials about drug money paying for terrorist attacks against the US were kind of ridiculous; the ones for mlife, some new wireless thingy, were just maddening and made me pledge that I would never visit their site or learn what they really do. (But I went to the site a few minutes ago to make sure that it really is called “mlife”, so I’ve already broken that promise with myself.)

During the Super Bowl party, I finished making pins for m@b. Then, towards the end of the game, Jeff got some good news and quickly started caring much, much less about football.

It was the best Super Bowl party I’ve ever been to. Easily.

The next day, Matt B. came over to pick up his pins. We talked about t-shirts, and he told me where he gets his made, so I’m going to look into getting antigreg shirts. Cuff The Duke ones, too, I think. I’m not sure that anyone would actually buy an antigreg shirt, but it’s something to do, I guess.

Monday was my day off, so I did laundry and tried to tidy my room up a bit.

And then came today. But we’ve been through that already.

Some other random thoughts from the last little while:

First of all, the constant friendliness that I have to try to force out at work is starting to attach itself to my personality even when I’m not at work. I apologize more profusely than I ever used to when I accidentally bump into people on the street, and I smile at people I don’t know without feeling nearly self-conscious enough about it. But I generally feel less dark and unhappy, so maybe there’s something to those claims that smiling makes you feel happier even when it’s a fake smile. (Or maybe I’m the only one who’s ever heard that...?)

And, on a vaguely related note, I’m starting to do my best to give exact change when I buy something, or to at least make things easier for the person giving me change. Who knew a minimum-wage job could make me a better person in so many ways?

I’ve been thinking a lot about what I want to do with myself over the next year, too. I’m starting to realize more and more that I really need to try to focus on one thing instead of doing a haphazard job on lots of things. Web design has been interesting me less and less except as a means to an end, and I’ve found myself wishing more and more that I could be better as a writer and maybe finally finish writing something instead of reworking everything that I write until it’s broken and soulless and too embarrassing to show to anyone.

Really, though, my design sense is fairly limited: I can do simple, useable designs, and I can obsess over little details like whether or not it’s acceptable to use a different font for punctuation than for body copy in a CD’s tracklisting, but I can’t design anything that I’d really be proud of or that I would think was anything but boring if it were designed by someone else. And the same goes for most of the web sites that I make.

But now I forget where I was going with this.

Mostly, though, things aren’t so bad these days. I have a schedule at work that forces me to leave the house, so I’m not rotting in front of the computer all day. And I’m making enough money to pay rent. So I can just stick to waiting out warmer days and thinking about returning to university in the fall.

With emphasis on “thinking about”.