March 20–24, 2002 — Insert duplicate title here

Written on March 21

I had a very disturbing dream last night: I was waiting at a bus station with Jeff, Amy, and another couple. Before our bus arrived, I needed to get money from a bank machine, but the only bank machine in the station was run by a demon. When I withdrew twenty dollars, my transaction record showed that my bank account still had the same amount of money in it, and that I was in the demon’s debt. Realizing this, I borrowed money from Jeff to pay the demon back, but, as interest, I had to punch a stranger in the face as hard as I could. So I punched someone in the face and ran for the bus.

While on the bus, Jeff and Amy faded to the background; the other couple was sitting across from me. The girl was eating something. She didn’t notice, but there were insects and slugs and larvae crawling out of the food and into her nose and mouth. Her boyfriend tried to grab some of the bigger ones, but gave up because the bugs didn’t seem to bother her. He smiled and shrugged at me, and I woke up as a particularly large, slug-like creature (more of a massive, translucent centipede, now that I think about it) was crawling up the girl’s nose.

Then I sat up, shuddered, and checked my face and body for bugs. My alarm was about to go off, so I went straight to the shower.

The last few days have mostly been dedicated to Internet-related stuff: setting up message boards and designing Web sites and things along those lines. On the one hand, it feels good to be productive again. On the other hand, I’ve had a lifetime’s worth of faulty MySQL databases and of re-installing message board software over and over again.

But it’s for the greater good.

And I guess I worked yesterday, too. It was a fairly eventful shift, all in all. I didn’t put enough pressure on a blender lid while shaking it and I ended up spraying unblended smoothie ingredients across much of the counter (not getting any juice on myself or the customers, luckily), and Maura, who lives in Philadelphia and who has emailed me a few times, visited because she was in Toronto for a few days to attend a conference through her work.

I was happy when my shift ended, though, knowing that I had a decent stretch of days off to look forward to along with a Converge show and a trip to Waterloo. My next pay cheque’s going to be for less than usual because I worked so little this week, but I’m convinced that it was worth it.

Written on March 25

I returned home from Waterloo yesterday. I didn’t have access to my email all weekend, and I wasn’t able to post a journal entry before I left. I was a little bit antsy by the time I made it home.

But the weekend itself was great: It was probably the best Converge show I’ve seen so far (even if it could have been a bit longer), and getting a drive to Waterloo proved to be less of an ordeal than I expected it to be, so I was able to spend most of the weekend with Kerry.

Arriving in Waterloo after the show, Liam was nice enough to drive me to Kerry’s residence, saving me an hour-long walk. Kerry was under slept and had already been awake for around twenty hours. I was pretty exhausted from seeing Converge, only having slept three or four hours the night before. So you’d think we’d’ve been able to fall asleep pretty easily.

Except that we couldn’t. It was a very strange night, and I don’t think either of us is all that used to sharing such a small bed. There was plenty of delirium and of tossing and turning. And of strangely lucid and grown-up conversations as the sun began to rise.

When we finally fell asleep at some point after 7:00 am, we only slept until around 1:00 pm. At which point we woke up, ate, and took the least efficient bus ride ever to a mall.

Malls in medium-sized cities are sometimes worse than malls in huge cities. All the bad things about big-city malls are still as overwhelming as ever, but I always get the feeling that everyone’s staring at me and that I’m invading someone else’s territory.

Kerry bought shoes. While in the shoe store, she introduced me to a girl from her school, one that I learned I would be seeing again that evening because Kerry had been invited to a birthday dinner of some sort. My awkwardness detectors were beeping wildly, but apparently lying about other plans wasn’t an option.

We took the bus back back to Waterloo and were late for dinner. We were the last to arrive, but a lot of people didn’t show up at all. It’s probably good that we went; the table would have been pretty empty otherwise.

Dinner was at East Side Mario’s. I hate that restaurant. I almost always end up having garlic bread with cheese on it. Or maybe pizza. But only sometimes. Kerry made me try bruschetta; I didn’t like it, but I did learn to spell it, which is half the battle.

I had garlic bread with cheese on it. And I blushed a lot, apparently: Kerry told me that I blush a lot more than I think I do, and I’ve been very self-conscious about potential blushing incidents ever since.

After dinner, we went back to Kerry’s residence. We set an alarm for 10:30 am the next morning (I caught the 11:23 am bus the week before, and I was almost an hour early, so I was aiming to catch the 11:53 am bus this time around), and we watched Kerry’s Nightmare Before Christmas DVD. I hadn’t seen the movie all the way through before, and I liked it quite a bit.

Kerry fell asleep a lot more quickly on Saturday night. I still tossed and turned a lot, but I slept more than I had the night before.

I spent most of the next morning in a panic, worried that I’d miss my bus to Toronto, and worried about the consequences of not showing up for work. The driver of the local bus to the Kitchener terminal took a lengthy cigarette break in the middle of the route, and I made it to the station only seven minutes before my bus was scheduled to leave.

Then I worried about not getting a seat: there was a huge lineup, and there were signs saying that you weren’t guaranteed a spot on the bus if you didn’t arrive at least thirty minutes early.

But, after all my worrying, I ended up with an aisle seat at the very back of the bus, the seat I always pick. (When I can’t have two seats to myself and have to pick a person to sit beside, I always pick someone close to my own age, and never a girl. This is an old habit of mine from when I wouldn’t talk to girls, much less choose to sit beside them on the bus, fearing that any sort of contact or communication with the opposite sex would be interpreted as flirting and would result in me feeling very embarrassed about the entire situation. So it was lucky that the person sitting beside the seat I always pick wasn’t a girl.)

I slept for most of the ride to Toronto. It was a beautiful day, so I got off the bus as soon as I could (there are multiple stops in downtown Toronto) and walked to work. The bus driver closed the door on my arm, and it took a couple of hours for feeling to completely return to it.

As I was walking to work, I saw a swarm of pigeons eating something in an area surrounded by sleeping bags and cardboard signs decorated with requests for pocket change and other pieces of homelessness to which I’ve become desensitized. I pictured pigeons eating the eyes of a homeless person who had died during the night; then I shuddered and wondered what was wrong with me to have that be the first thing to enter my mind. Once I was closer to the pigeons, I saw that it was just a doughnut that they were fighting over, so I kept walking, knowing that the weekend was over.

I walked the rest of the way to work thinking about the fact that I wouldn’t see Kerry again for another month and feeling numb and exhausted.