February 13–17, 2002 — Let me pretend

My alarm was set for noon today, giving me plenty of time before my shift at 3:00 pm.

But then Nathan called me at 9:50 am to tell me that I was scheduled to work at 10:00 am, not 3:00 pm. Stopping only to put on pants and to brush my teeth, I scurried to work, arriving half an hour late. Or thereabouts, anyway.

Ah, work. Once I start remembering to write down my schedule properly, it might almost start to be routine. I’m mostly closing from now on, which means a lot less counting of money — a change I very much approve of. There’s also talk of a more or less permanent weekly schedule that calls for me to have Fridays and Saturdays off, with my shift on Sunday starting at 3:00 pm. Finally, my social life will have a chance to blossom.

But yes. I worked from the thirteenth to the fifteenth, spending a wonderful Valentine’s Day at the juice bar. My wrists are starting to stage a revolt over my smoothie-shaking, carrot-scrubbing ways and tend to hurt a lot whenever I try to scoop sorbet (even more than at the beginning), but I’m doing my best to adapt. Between Jeff visiting to laugh at me for taking five minutes to scoop 100 grams of orange sorbet and my boss’s near-constant teasing, it’s very much in my best interest to work on my arm strength a bit. Or maybe I can get one of those wrist braces like the guitar player in Radiohead wore for awhile; if anything’s going to earn me respect, I think that’s it.

Since I only work nights, I’ve had to learn to move my productive hours from the small hours of the morning to the less-small hours of the morning and the early afternoon before I leave for the smoothie bar. It’s almost kind of working, too: Last week, I managed to cut my hair, do laundry, tidy up, and get caught up on email and letters. I might just be able to live like this after all.

Meanwhile, the mail over the last few days has also been pretty darned exciting. My deputy sheriff belt buckle arrived right after I posted my last journal entry (in which I wrote about expecting it), and I received three Valentine’s Day cards in my antigreg post office box. (One of which was a secret Valentine on a Boo-from-Monsters, Inc. greeting card. Unfortunately, there was no return address and I can’t write the person back. But it put me in a good mood when I found it in my mailbox on the way to work, for whatever that’s worth.)

(Speaking of Boo, special thanks to Andrew for the “FUCK YOU GREG” sign that you may or may not have noticed Boo sporting on Friday night on my webcam. I was working with Nathan at the time, and he was plenty impressed when he saw it. He set the wallpaper on the computer at work to that picture and fun was generally had by all. If only I’d remembered to save a copy of the picture before I put Boo back on my desk and the sign in the garbage...)

Meanwhile, the whole week had mostly been leading up to Saturday, my one day off in a ten-day stretch at work.

Saturday was also the day of the Weakerthans show, which Kerry was visiting Toronto to attend. We’d made plans awhile ago to get together before the show, and she arrived early in the afternoon. (Kerry, for those of you not taking careful notes, was one of the people that I met on New Year’s Eve, and we’ve been talking online on and off since. [For some reason this little aside reminds me of the constant explanations of the identities of each and every character in the second and third Harry Potter books. They annoyed me to no end. Hopefully you’re not too annoyed. Maybe?])

We had planned to go to a movie during the afternoon, but indecisiveness more or less ruled that out. We eventually drove to near Jeff and Amy’s house and parked there, walking down to Bloor Street for dinner.

We mostly wandered about until the show. I bought a new copy of Smoke and Mirrors by Neil Gaiman to replace my old, missing-in-action one, and I realized an hour after we had finished eating that my shoulder bag was still underneath the table, so we had to make a bit of a detour to retrieve it. (This is the third or fourth time that I’ve forgotten my shoulder bag somewhere and returned for it an hour or two later to find it where I left it and with nothing missing. Maybe people aren’t so evil after all?)

A decent number of kids were meeting at Jeff and Amy’s house before going to the show, and Kerry and I eventually joined them. Like all true Weakerthans fans, we prepared for the show by listening to a bit of Converge and a lot of Appetite For Destruction, with plenty of air drumming accompanying the music. If only I’d better spent my teenage years, I might’ve had the confidence and experience to air drum along, too. But alas...

We eventually went to the show, arriving just in time for the first opening band. After the first band had finished, shirts were purchased and Royal City played. I had no real idea what to expect from Royal City, but I’ve always been impressed enough with their CD design that I was looking forward to hearing them. I’ll have to borrow the CD from someone one of these days.

And then the Weakerthans played. They always seem to be in such a good mood on stage that it’s hard not to smile. They come through Ontario fairly often, but it will be awhile yet before I stop looking forward to their shows, only having seen them twice so far.

This is a hard journal to write in a sensible, linear order, so I’m just going to give up and jump back a bit.

In all the times I’d talked to Kerry before Saturday, we’d never really talked about being anything more than friends. But, looking back at it now, it’s fairly obvious that we both had that in mind for most of the day, even if it seemed a lot less clear at the time.

Neither of us wanted to be the one to bring this up, though, for fear of finding that the other person didn’t feel the same way (and, in the process, finding that we’d suddenly caused a pretty decent friendship to turn rather awkward). So we didn’t say anything. We teased each other a lot and pushed each other into hedges and generally acted like a twelve-year-old with a crush, but it wasn’t until the last Weakerthans song before the encore that either of us took the initiative and did anything that might move us into more-than-friends territory. And, since I’m a bit of a coward when it comes to things like this, it’s a safe bet that it wasn’t me who took the initiative.

Without giving too many details away, we ended up holding hands through most of the encore, smiling and feeling relieved.

Our timing probably could have been better since Kerry had to leave not long after the show, but it’s a fairly minor regret, and, after sneaking a goodnight kiss in a brief moment of privacy, Kerry was on her way back to Oshawa.

This is the first time I’ve been with someone that I have shared friends with, so it sometimes feels like there’s a lot more pressure to not have things fall apart for no apparent reason after a few weeks. At the same time, though, everything has felt a lot more natural this time through, and, even though Kerry and I have something of a history of not lasting very long in relationships, I’m a lot less worried than I have been in the past.

So I guess there’s nothing left to do but hope for the best.