March 12–14, 2002 — Destroying the balance I’d kept

So. Three days. One awful, two pretty good, in that order. And this is my third attempt at writing this, so please bear with me.

I tried to write a journal entry on the awful day, but I didn’t make it very far: I wrote a few paragraphs, mostly complaining about the ending of the book I’d finished reading the night before, and then I gave up without posting anything. Which I’ve realized is probably for the best, having reread the paragraphs from that night in a slightly less bitter mood.

A quick rundown of Tuesday, for the sake of completion:

I slept in. My dad woke me up calling about income tax returns and complaining that the answering machine hadn’t picked up when he called the day before. I checked that the answering machine was working and went back to bed.

I woke up again a bit later, worked on some things that I should’ve finished a long time ago, and then left for work at the smoothie bar.

It was a long shift at work. I blushed twice, which is more than I tend to blush in an average month, and I just wanted desperately to go home. It was the first time my ability to affect cheerfulness (no matter how awful I actually feel) ran out while working.

And then there were the blushing incidents:

The first came when Nathan told a couple of regular customers about this web site. (I was surprised that this actually made me blush — I think the fact that the store is so warm all the time makes me blush more easily than usual. Or such is my excuse.) There aren’t many customers that I’d be comfortable having visit this site, but the two Nathan did tell are amongst the ones I might’ve told myself if I weren’t a bit shy about it.

Regardless, I went a bit red and then felt embarrassed for letting it get to me as much as it did.

And then it happened again when two of the regular customers from the ballet school came by. The two who say hello and goodbye to me by name a lot of the time and who sometimes visit several nights in a row. When the teasing started, I snuck away to the back of the store to blush in private while Nathan took their order.

Pathetic.

So yeah: the longest, most embarrassing shift ever. But, if nothing else, hearing the door lock behind me as I left was a wonderful feeling.

I went home and wrote the beginnings of a horrible journal entry. Kerry was stressed out about some things and not in the best of moods, either. We ended up talking on the phone for awhile, and my mood was much improved by the time I went to sleep a couple of hours later. (And I like to think that Kerry’s was, too. At least a little bit, anyway.)

Wednesday was better from the start. It was a lazy day, and I didn’t even pretend that I was going to get anything done before I left for work.

After walking onto the fire escape and seeing how warm it was, I decided to leave early to go to the used bookstore that I like to visit downtown. I bought Post Office by Charles Bukowski and The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus. The former because Amy recommended it after I said that I thought being a mailman would be a fun job, and the latter because I read the chapter that the book is titled after online and have since wanted to read the entire long essay (or whatever you’d like to call it — “book”, maybe?).

Work was a lot easier to deal with, too. I was working with Karen, one of Laura’s friends, for the first time, and it was a quieter night in general. We ended up making over five dollars each in tips and I learned that Karen grew up near Oshawa and went to the same school as a lot of the people I’ve become friends with from the Oshawa area. She made plans to drop by the Cuff the Duke show on Thursday night, having been friends with Shona in high school. And I’d never known Shona to miss a Toronto show, so I figured it was a fair assumption that she would be there.

Then I went home.

I couldn’t sleep, so I read most of Post Office. I set my alarm for 9:00 am in an attempt to avoid getting too much sleep before visiting Kerry, who is going to exhausted by Friday night.

I didn’t sleep until almost 5:00 am.

My alarm went off every five minutes for the better part of an hour. I cursed the designers of my clock for not setting the gap between alarms to longer than five minutes per press of the snooze button and eventually dragged myself out of bed. I had a big day of laundry and pins ahead of me, after all...

I hadn’t done laundry in a long time. I had one pair of clean underwear left and was down to t-shirts that didn’t fit me properly and that I wouldn’t wear unless I was desperate even if they did fit because of the designs on them. But I was desperate.

(On top of that, I hadn’t washed the pants I wear to work since starting work, and the smoothie stains were starting to add up.)

So I dug through my bowl of coins in search of quarters and sorted my clothes into two garbage bags, one garbage bag per load. I still have plenty of dirty clothes to wash, but I wanted to make sure I at least had clean underwear and some decent t-shirts for the weekend.

The laundromat was busier than usual. I was a bit twitchy the entire time I was there, and I started to become irritable whenever anyone would walk or stand behind the chair I was sitting in. I also didn’t trust the man who spent five minutes painstakingly folding his wet clothes and then proceeded to carefully set them in a dryer and turn it on. Just on principle.

I read a bit more of Post Office in the laundromat and finished it after I’d returned home to hang my t-shirts up to dry. I’d still like to be a postal carrier, I think. Just not a postal clerk. Ever. Under any circumstances.

Then I sent some emails and designed the Cuff the Duke pins that I’d meant to design a week ago. Karen eventually called to arrange to meet up before the show. I walked to Jeff and Amy’s house to wait with Amy until the start of the show.

We met Karen outside at around 9:45 pm. Nothing really went as planned that night: Shona didn’t make it to the show, and Cuff the Duke didn’t play until fairly late in the night, so I didn’t make it home until around 2:00 am.

But, on the plus side, Everyone seemed fairly keen on my pin designs and on the work I’d done converting one of Brad’s drawings into something that could be silkscreened. So not all was lost.

And now it’s Friday and I’m killing time until I leave for Kitchener for another Cuff the Duke show. Kerry’s going to meet me there, and I’m staying in Waterloo until my shift at work on Sunday. We’d mostly given up on seeing one another this weekend, so it was a nice surprise that things worked out after all. And I’ve plenty of days off next week, so I won’t fall behind on all of the projects that I have to finish before the end of the month.

I’m actually looking forward to the next few weeks.