February 20–28, 2002 — Lacking in resolve

I’ve tried to write this several times now, but I’ve been too sick, unmotivated, and exhausted (although not necessarily all at the same time or in that order) to get very far.

The last week has been very mixed. I’ve either felt so dark that I didn’t want to do much of anything or happy enough that I felt I should just live my life instead of worrying about writing down everything that happens to me.

And here we are, eight days later.

Work is still work. My right arm hurts even when I’m not at work now, and I think I might need to get an arm brace of some sort. I can still affect cheerfulness while at work, but it’s beginning to take its toll on the rest of my life. When I come home, I just want to sleep, and I barely feel anything at all before I leave for work in the afternoon. But it’s a job. And I need to pay the rent somehow. And this is the way things work in the real world. Isn’t it?

The company hosting antigreg.com stops hosting me in a couple of days. I paid for a year of hosting last March and can’t really afford to be on the same host again with the current value of the Canadian dollar and all. So I’m going to be trying to switch to a new host over the next couple of days. Hopefully nothing will stop working, but I’d be surprised if that was the case.

And, while I’m airing my grievances, I guess I’m a bit sick, too. It’s looking like it will be a short-lived sickness, thankfully — not at all like my last cold, the one that lasted three weeks or so.

But it could surprise me yet.

After writing that first bit, Matt and Adam arrived from Ottawa. They’ve been visiting the last few days. Yesterday I watched two of the worst movies I’ve ever seen with them: one involving possessed nuns and one involving Britney Spears. It was a long day at points.

It was Johnston’s birthday yesterday, too. Pizza was purchased, gifts were distributed, and Nintendo games were played. And Johnston went to bed before we started watching the awful movie that Andrew had rented, proving that he is indeed getting wiser with age.

Matt and Andrew had to leave this morning. It feels like they left as soon as they arrived.

Skipping back even further, I visited Kerry in Oshawa last weekend. It was her reading week, and her wisdom teeth had been removed a few days before I visited.

Since Kerry was still feeling a bit out of sorts after having teeth pulled, we mostly watched movies, making the occasional journey into the depths of Oshawa. Her parents took us to lunch on the Saturday morning, and I left that night, with plans to meet up with Kerry the next afternoon on her way back to Waterloo (a trip that involves — or at least can involve — a stop in Toronto on the way from Oshawa).

Since this was our first chance to spend time together since finding that we might kind of want to be more than friends, there was a slight worry in the back of my mind that we might find that things had become awkward with a new context to our spending time together. But even things that quite easily could have been awkward weren’t, and the weekend ended far too quickly.

After finishing work on Sunday, I met Kerry at Union Station and we started walking. The streets were emptier than usual because the Olympic hockey game between Canada and the US had begun; we went to Great Canadian Bagel to get food and to listen to the game.

We left while Canada was leading 3–2 and started on our way to the bus station. The game was over by the time we arrived at the station, but we still didn’t know who had won.

I saw Kerry off on her way to Waterloo and took the subway to St. Clair Station.

When I transferred to a streetcar, it was pretty obvious who had won the game from the honking and from the throngs of people that had taken to the street. A boy who looked to be around twelve years old was running up and down the street with a Canadian flag, and people were streaming out of bars and giving high-fives to passengers in cars as they went by. The streetcar driver rang his bell and honked his horn for the entire trip, and pretty much everyone was smiling. Myself included.

This journal entry says a lot less than it could and should say. But I have to leave for work soon, and I’m busy getting stressed out over the server switch that I’m trying to put together. Having actually started trying to switch things over now (I’ve been easily distracted while writing this journal entry), I think a lot of things are going to stop working and I’m going to have to bring them back one at a time over a few days.

So bear with me. A lot of things are going to be changing in March. Hopefully you won’t mind too much.