A boot and turnip stew kind of week. You don't notice your socks don't match until you get there. The sun shines and there are intermittent hurricanes and you get a letter postmarked July 6th on October 19th. The 15 choice Canada Post phone menu awaits you and you don't, truly, want to crap on the postal carrier's day but hell - that's over three months - so you call and are thanked endlessly for snitching on the poor guy because the woman answering is working for a call centre and this might be taped for quality control.The stuffing comes out of a relationship that matters. It's a one-armed rag doll that you keep carrying around anyway because you still love the doll and it's only one arm after all and you knew the stitches were loose. And you're angry and sad and empathetic - a whole mixture of emotions that generally equal no firm stand of any kind so you make most of a beautiful necklace then pack it in, go to bed and don't sleep again.
In the morning you apply eyeliner to fatique-mushroomed eyelids even though you can't quite focus your eyes. Dab bright orange lipstick in the vicinity of your mouth and Make A Brave Front. Spend the first of the morning teaching an incomprehensible software application to your next minimum wage victim I mean student staff member and find yourself peppy with exhaustion. "It's important," you tell her, after investigating an option that does nothing whatsoever, "that you understand this program is incomprehensible and doesn't actually work." You say it with genuine cheer. You send her off for a break.
During which you guzzle caffeinated beverages and blink stupidly at the sky, count the number of vans parked on the walking street in front of what will someday be Boston Pizza but is now a site swarming with Men and Their Noisy Machines. The pigeons dodder around your feet in fits of pigeon optomism. People = food.
You think, riding the bus, which is crammed beyond the safety point and smells like soured hope and unwashed babies, that your life is really, be honest, the pits and your life is, really, be honest, pretty great. And the fact that those conditions exist simultaneously and that you have not slept a full night in three days is somewhat confusing.
You take pictures of yourself in the present state of near collapse and muck around in Paint Shop Pro with them. You think about posting to your blog. And then, in a sleep-deprived fit of poor judgement, you do it.
