March 20–April 18, 2003 — Confusing time lines

In an order I’m not quite sure of, the following has happened:

1. Winter left, came back, left again and now reminds us of the last six months whenever it has the chance. I am still wearing a jacket most days.
2. There was confusion as to whether I’d be living with Jeff and Amy after all due to some miscommunication.
3. I booked several weeks off of work for the sake of my sanity, to move and to sort out my life.
4. Jeff and Amy said it would definitely be okay if I moved in with them.
5. Jeff told me that I was invited along for the Cuff The Duke tour.
6. I rushed to do all my packing and moving in a few panicked days before the tour.

On April 19 I will force three weeks’ worth of my belongings into a van and none of this will matter. Nonetheless, here are some bits and pieces from the last few weeks:

I’m not sure about the last few days. Very stressful; lots of anxiety. I want to tell people that I feel like the “before” actor in an Ativan commercial, but I think I would be the only one to find this funny and have kept it to myself.

I’ve been writing a lot of checklists and checking a lot of things off. It feels like I am running out of time to sort everything out, but so long as everything on my list is checked off by the end of the day, I feel alright. So long as I make my daily checklists short enough, I won’t get too stressed out about the checklist for the rest of the month and its terrifying shadow.

Now it’s Saturday night. I bussed to Peterborough this morning to visit my grandmother and to see my dad and sister; Easter plans seem more and more likely to fall through, so this was probably my last chance to see them for at least two months.

In Peterborough, I sat at the table in my grandmother’s kitchen with my dad, and he corrected death notices as I alphabetized them. It had been awhile since I last alphabetized death notices, and I think I might have made a few mistakes.

(Returning to Toronto, I felt relieved. There were echoes from past trips when I returned to Toronto desperate to get away from Richmond or Ottawa, when Toronto was the place where I could be productive and disappear for hours or days without raising many questions. But I had only been out of Toronto for six hours, so I didn’t have much reason to feel relieved to be back.

I didn’t want to reach the bus station, though — my favourite thing about bus rides is that there is no expectation of productivity, that I don’t feel there are more important things I could be doing; staring out the window and listening to music become perfectly acceptable things for me to do. At home, I have too many lists, too many important things I ought to be doing.)

I didn’t go straight home. I went to a bookstore near the bus station to buy a pocket dictionary. I splurged and bought a book on punctuation, too. I nervously presented the cashier with coupons, my membership card, and a fifty-dollar bill. I wasn’t really sure that she’d accept anything aside from the membership card: The coupons were in my dad’s name, and I hate spending fifty-dollar bills. I was very apologetic.

Leaving the bookstore just before it closed, I went home to read my book on punctuation.

I don’t want to mention how terrible the weather still is or to rant about how depressing getting two or three days of spring followed by a few more weeks of winter can be.

The optimistic are probably excited at the prospect of seeing the start of spring twice, but the rest of us are just trying to pretend that spring wasn’t a month late and that CNN was still doing broadcasts about chess-playing computers and failed technology companies. (How I miss the days when I didn’t know what a videophone was and when pixelated garbage from said videophone wasn’t regularly broadcast with barely audible commentary as news.)

On the plus side, bakery employees keep giving me a free cookie when I buy two. My life could be a lot worse.