March 29–April 2, 2002 — Without looking outside

It’s been snowing since this morning. The joints in my right hand have hurt since I woke up, and I think I’ll soon be able to determine barometric pressure by the amount of pain I feel in my hands. And at the young age of twenty! How exciting...

All joking aside, they’ve never hurt this much. It hurts more than usual when the joints crack, too. (I don’t crack them in the way most people crack their knuckles, though. It just sort of happens on its own: my fingers become stiff, and when I bend them again, they all crack. It doesn’t make a pleasant sound, but I’m mostly used to it. It’s been happening ever since I played clarinet in high school.)

Or maybe I don’t have arthritis and I’ve just been typing too much lately. I’ll hope for the latter.

Moving right along, I’ve been doing reasonably well since I last posted a journal entry.

I went to see Amélie on Friday night and felt warm inside for awhile after. I had gone to the latest show, and it was a bit cold out, but I still walked around for awhile afterwards. I wanted to buy candy, but everywhere I went was closed. I eventually bought licorice from a grocery store that never closes and took the subway home.

I woke up early on Saturday morning. My alarm was set for 6:04 am because I was opening to smoothie bar at 8:00 am with Nathan. I hit the snooze button until it was too late for me to shave. Then I had a shower and scurried to work.

Saturday ended up feeling like two days because I’m so used to the day ending by the time I make it home from work. Leaving work at 1:30 pm, I still had an entire day ahead of me — at least ten or eleven hours to squander in front of the computer.

I worked on the punkottawa.com redesign for awhile. It’s moving along, albeit a bit slower than I’d like. I have my heart set on finishing this week, though; I want to get back to finishing antigreg-related stuff.

On Sunday, my Easter plans went into effect: I woke up, didn’t have time to shave, and hurried to catch a bus to Peterborough. My parents and sister were meeting me there for Easter dinner with my extended family, and then they were taking me back to Toronto the next day.

I arrived in Peterborough and called my parents at the farm where my dad grew up to ask them to meet me at the bus station. We went for food and drove back to the farm. Even though I don’t know the city very well, and even though I’ve never lived there, Peterborough still feels a bit like home.

Aunts and uncles and cousins started to arrive a bit later in the afternoon. I feel a bit embarrassed at family gatherings now that I’m the only cousin who isn’t either on the way to a university degree or already in possession of one. My dad jokes about my efforts to “find myself”, and I try to put a good face on things.

My sister and I walked through the barn looking for kittens and feeling sorry for calves whose mothers had been taken away. Allergies be damned, I thought. (Although I think I’m paying for this thought with the cold I’ve picked up since I left, but it was still kind of worth it.)

By around 10:00 pm, almost everyone had left. We said goodnight to my grandmother and went down to the guest rooms in the basement. My sister and I flipped a coin to see who would get the bed, and I ended up on the floor. We stayed awake for awhile sharing gossip and work stories.

I didn’t get much sleep that night, and we left for Toronto before 8:00 am the next day.

Back in Toronto, my parents took me grocery shopping, and then we went to lunch with my other grandmother, the one on my mom’s side. I went to work almost immediately afterward.

The rest of Monday and most of Tuesday were swallowed by work at the smoothie bar. I worked with Malena on Monday night and Karen on Tuesday night; the two of them had returned from a trip to Mexico on Sunday and weren’t easily impressed by my stories from the weekend, stories that mostly revolved around going grocery shopping and seeing a calf mistake a cat’s ear for a nipple. Some day I’ll have to make more of an effort to lead an exciting life, I think.

Work would have been fairly routine if not for a new visitor. He first dropped by on the Monday night wearing a strange, leash-like contraption on his head. He took all of the flyers and free newspapers from the customer counter and threw them in the garbage, and moved all of the stools but one to the far end of the store, as close to the door as he could get them. Then he put all the signs advertising specials and talking about food allergies onto the floor, leaving the customer counter bare except for straws, napkins, and a glass vase holding dying bamboo stalks. Then he left.

We were a bit confused by this, but it didn’t take much to clean things up and to get things back to normal. Malena actually wanted the person to come back — he at least made work interesting for the small amount of time that he was around.

He came back the next day and was less interesting and more bothersome than the first time around. He did the same reorganization as he had done the day before, except he didn’t leave when he was finished. Instead, he stayed in the store harassing customers and demanding food. We called security, taking awhile to realize that there weren’t any security guards on duty until 8:00 pm. (It was only 5:00 pm when he first arrived.)

I called the police non-emergency number and asked for someone to drop by. By this point, our visitor had taken off his shirt and was beating it against the floor. Sometimes it looked like he was sweeping the floor with it. I’m not sure what he was actually trying to do. We worried that he was going to take off his pants, too, so I asked him to put his shirt back on. Then he hugged me and started rubbing my head, and I had to pull myself away. He was missing a lot of teeth, which I think is a good sign of someone with not much left to lose.

He eventually left on his own, bored of cleaning the floor with his shirt and of not getting any food from us. A police officer arrived an hour later, apologized for taking so long, and ordered a smoothie.

The rest of my shift was uneventful by comparison, and I made it home a bit after 11:00 pm. I called Kerry using my latest in a series of suspiciously inexpensive long distance calling cards. This one announced that I had eight hours and twenty minutes of long distance remaining when I first dialed, but I remain skeptical — the last card often lied about how much time I had remaining for calls, and I expect the same from this one. But wouldn’t it be neat if it weren’t lying? Either way, though, it’s five dollars well spent.

I was glad to finally talk to Kerry on the phone about some of the things that I’d been worrying about. I think my worrying about things has caused more problems than there were to worry about to begin with, but at least I know that now. I feel a bit better. I wish I weren’t so moody, though, and I have to try to be less dramatic about all this. With exams coming up, Kerry really doesn’t need the distraction.

And then I went to sleep, hoping to feel less sick by the morning.