The last 12 hours would have been absolutely hilarious if they didn't happen to me.
The weekend was amazing. Friday night was a very late night filled with very good scotch and very good company. Saturday was a pleasant blur of wandering in and out of comic shops, excellent late breakfast, spicy thai, a Trash Palace special feature that could have been subtitled "The World's Most Boring Orgy," and then more drinks and more great company and a last call and a cab ride. Sunday I was useless, but still managed to drag myself to a breathtaking performance the Element Choir and dinner at Pho Hung before mercifully calling it an early night.
That much awesome just couldn't be sustained. Something had to break, and break it did.
Firstly, my job. That thing I don't talk about here at all. I am making an exception here, using no specifics. My job is awesome. I love the work and the hours generally suit me and it pays well enough and everything is just about ideal. I was prepared to be unemployed over the summer, when they most likely would not need me, and that was absolutely fine with me. They I find out that they're most likely sending me on The Mother of All Business Trips in July, and so my unemployment will only be a month long. It was perfect.
And then I learned that the work does not slow down at the end of June, as I had thought. It slows down at the end of April. Meaning I might be unemployed, or underemployed at least, a lot sooner and fore a lot longer than I had planned. Eep
Gertrude, my lovely 4-year-old supercomputer, has been showing signs of illness lately. She's been running loud and having some startup issues. Yesterday, she flatly refused to boot. She just makes a sad noise and the monitor remains blank. I tried everything in my limited repertoire to get her back online, all to no avail. I am going to take her in, but I am not optimistic.
My lovely roomies are allowing me access to their computers, but the situation cannot continue indefinitely. I May have access to a loaner, thanks to the incredible a-raw, but eventually I am going to need a computer of my own. Hopefully I can managed for a while, as maybe not having much of a job is not really conducive to dropping $1400 on a new Macbook.
And finally: this morning, I woke up with pink eye. I am confined to the house, less I become Pink Eye Patient Zero.
I think that's three. Time for my luck to right itself.
Labels: Toronto
As far as this blog is concerned, all the information that exists about my job is: I have one. Since I don't want to get fired, that's usually where the discussion ends.
In many ways my job is absolutely bizarre and unique. In others, it's shockingly stereotypical. For example, everyone acts as though Mondays are about as bad as having a root canal followed by lethal injection. While Monday mornings always make me want weep, as I've just spent a weekend merrily fucking up my sleep cycle again, Monday evenings are actually quite lovely. Mondays are the one day of the week I flatly refuse to go anywhere. I need that time to catch up, to recover, to stay in and do some work or just watch a movie and be at peace with my little corner of the world.
it will happen before the trees break.
I think I might be becoming left handed.
In late October 2007, I was about to go on tour for a month, and my then-husband bought guitar hero to keep him company while I was gone. When I played it for the first time, I felt like I was having a stroke. My hands seemed broken. I could not get the game to work. My brain knew what it wanted to do, but my hands just refused to cooperate. Then, on an impulse, I tried to play on lefty-flip, and suddenly it made sense to me. My hands knew what to do, and I actually got pretty good at it. I chalked it up to another innumerable little odd thing about me and moved on.
In the last couple of months, my hands have started getting weird again. It's not that my right hand is getting dumber, it's just that my left seems to be reaching up, grabbing nerve impulses, and taking over. I've caught myself mousing, opening the front door lock, and eating with my left hand. It's been neat.
Then, a week or so ago, I remembered a conversation. I was in the 2nd grade (I was in a grade 2-3 split), 7 years old, and at a time when things were still very nebulous. I wrote forwards and backwards (my parents often had to hold my notes up to a mirror to read then), I could read upside down...and I wrote using both hands. When one hand got tired, the other would take over. I was learning cursive at the time, and found I had to practice twice as much to make it neat because both hands needed their chance to commit the new shapes of the letters to muscle memory.
And Mrs. Jubenville, a kind Catholic woman a few years shy of retirement, suggested I write exclusively with my right hand. Whenever she saw me using my left hand, she would very gently take my pencil and place it in my right. I learned cursive more quickly. I kept using my left hand a bit longer, when no one could see me, but it was slower than my right and I soon gave up.
I had completely forgotten this had even happened until a couple of weeks ago, when, for a lark, I tried to write using my left hand, and the memory returned. The feeling of wanting to be correct, to do it "right." And while the memory is not violent or traumatic, it carried with it a great sense of loss.
I've been seeing a homeopath, who suggested I start brushing my teeth with my other hand, to give it something to do. I have chosen a notebook and, like a child, practice writing again. the letters are a little shaky and squashed still but it is coming quickly. My right hands holds the paper steady and seems grateful for the break.
I wonder what my left voice will be life. I wonder if there is a whole other half to my life, a buried lunar twin to all my thought, that suddenly wants out. I wonder how my name looks, my signature, when signed left.
Labels: Ancient History, Clashes with Dominant Culture
