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july 30, 2001.Palaver Dirk Nightshade is here. We picked him up at the airport on Wednesday night, and since then it's been non-stop go-go-go social life on top of a brutal work schedule. The casualty? This diary. And, of course, massive amounts of sleep. I will cut out my tongue if I utter one complaint, though, because it's been unremittingly fabulous. Besides, no one on their deathbed ever wishes that they'd gotten just 2 more hours of sleep. As Hermione is want to say, 'suck it up, Princess.' We've done far too much to be accurately summarized in any kind of detail, and I'm not falling into the Stanfest trap again (one month later and I'm still writing it all down). So I'll just be fleeting & brief.
On Thursday I spent the entire day scanning slides. And when I say the entire day, I ain't whistling Dixie. From 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. I sat at Mr. WashYourHands' desk feeding slides into the scanner, stopping only to run to the bathroom, pick up another carousel from the floor, or refill my water bottle from the cooler. I ate my little peanut butter sandwich at the desk, timing my food handling so that I didn't have to pause feeding the scanner for a second. I scanned 275 slides, finishing off my entire load with 10 minutes to spare at the end of the day. It was not without it's price, however. Between 12:30 and 1:30, my brain melted down and I forgot how to add and subtract. Believe me, this is crucial when you're scanning things in sequence. How did I survive? In classic geek fashion, of course. I kept track of how many slides I could scan in an hour...and then I tried to beat that record. At one point I was up to 45 slides an hour, three times the amount that Mr. WashYourHands had established as a maximum. Principal Skinner: Here's a whole box of unsealed envelopes for the PTA! Finishing those slides was the best feeling I've ever had. Marriage, love, amphetamines - these all pale in comparison. (smirk) So to celebrate, and because we could, Dirk & I went out to karaoke night at the Axe. It was then that I proved beyond all rational doubt that nothing is bad if you can make smart-assed remarks to Dirk. We swaled cheap alcohol, sang brilliantly, and left covered in glory. Before my song I drank enough to sharpen my powers of improvisation to dizzying, Oscar Wilde-like heights...and yet returned to my seat with almost no memory of what I had sung, just the feeling that it had been incredibly cool. We returned home at 1:30 or so, leaving me with a comfortable 5 ½ hours to sleep before work. Gah. (I keep revising my own design load. When I was in highschool, 8 hours of sleep was a crushing hardship, the worst any human had ever experienced in the history of consciousness. These days I can get up after 5 hours of sleep & accomplish demanding tasks for a full day - mind you, without glutting myself with every possible foodstuff, which was my traditional way of dealing with fatigue. Every time I drag myself through another grudgingly productive day on little rest, I think about my young pampered self and sigh wearily. But on days like that, free cake and heroin makes me sigh wearily.) Fortunately, despite suffering the worst fatigue ever experienced by a human being, all I had to do for my cakes & ale on Friday was to burn a few backup CDs of the pictures & audio lectures, and then I was free to slack off. Dirk & I attended high tea at the local historic house and had an enjoyable chat with the curatoress. It was fun.
Saturday we pitched a whole bunch of stuff in the van and took off for Halifax. I overpacked heinously, basing my wardrobe selection on the packing scene from Best In Show: Now, by my count you've already packed 5 kimonos, and we're only going to be there for 48 hours. We checked into the hostel room, which was decorated with a lovely painted American flag on the door. I immediately dubbed it Club America, and then wondered why I have the compulsive need to name everything: Club America, Camp Carpetbagger, Team Saint Thomas More. You know. I still have no answers, and the room remained Club America for the duration of our 48-hour stay. That day we wandered around Halifax's shops, restaurants, comic shops and graveyards, taking silly pictures of statues and refusing to worry about anything. In the evening we rushed to see a wonderfully bawdy "Twelfth Night" performed by Shakespeare by the Sea, then we sauntered by a local bar in the hopes of catching up with Miri & J. We didn't see them, but we did see a really cool funk band called "Doctor Yellow Fever," complete with a flute player who seemed barely interested enough in life to continue breathing. There was some more wandering and then we went to bed. (Well, I told you it was a brief summary.)
The next day we rose as early as we could (which, truth to tell, wasn't all that early). The water in the hostel was shut off that day, so we tidied up as best we could & crawled off to the local United Church rather smelly. (Next to whatliness?) It was Dirk's first encounter with a United Church service, and I was a bit embarrassed at the sugary offertory (one of those 'God is the wind beneath my wings' kind of songs). But, you know. Whatever. At least he's seen that we're not heretics or snake handlers. Or at least, most of us.
After a lovely dinner at Piccolo Mondo (the best Italian food for which I have ever paid money), a bout of severe crankiness set in, centred around the Boy's driving & navigation. The Boy has been driving for a living since September, and consequently his driving technique is very natural and relaxed - for him. Bear in mind that the Boy is twitchy and nervous in person, prone to sudden movements and bursts of enthusiasm that distract his attention from everything else. Driving with him these days is like being in a blender: you never know what's an expression of his twitchy Boy-ness and what's an oversight likely to get you all killed. And he insists on seeing the map himself, even when it's easier just to take direction (since he also sometimes forgets where he's going). The upshot of all this was that Dirk & I shouted instructions at him for the entire 2 days that we were in the city - and there came a point where he'd had enough. The resulting argument smouldered all night, lasting through the goth night, the trip home, and reaching into bedtime when we finally got home. At this point I'm beyond determining whose fault it was. Let's just say that a year of semi-isolation has given the two of us very bad conflict patterns. Patience is little more than a dictionary entry in our house, and this weekend has shown me that that needs to change. But the point I'm trying to make is that things started to get ugly at that point. Since we had nowhere else to go, we visited the Springarden Road Second Cup so that I could get changed and put on my spooky makeup. I emerged from my tiny cramped stall gorgeous, yet profoundly bitter. I thought about every goth who spends hours fussing and putting on expensive clothes (that were paid for with lucrative new media jobs) before going to one of many city nightclubs to talk shit about everyone and complain how no one really understands their coke-fuelled lifestyle (*cough*hilary*cough*). I think these beautiful people should all have to spend several months in the countryside before being allowed attend the only goth night for the month. Then they wouldn't be allowed to shower before they could put on their outfit as they crouched over a Second Cup toilet in a strange city. That would make me laugh like a hyena. A dark hyena. But I cannot bitch. As I mentioned previously, I was typically goth-gorgeous in the Dress, fishnets, boots, and Powerpuff Girls-esque black pigtails (in actual fact, this hairstyle was just to compensate for the lack of running water at the hostel, but it turned out surprisingly well. I was rather surprised when the Boy began to enthuse about my greasy, little girl hair, but accepted it as a welcome departure from the constant squabbling.) The night itself at Shadow Play was kind of fun. I think I might have enjoyed it more if I wasn't slightly dirty, a trifle depressed, and at the end of a long, long weekend of wandering the city. The music was of the boomy boomy goth variety, which made me ache after awhile for a real song with real, you know, words and shit. But there will be remedy. Since the house policy is that any idiot can have their own trial 30-minute DJ set, we're going to put the Boy up as our musical puppet when Dirk returns to the sea-bound coast. That won't be for a couple of months, so I can spend the intervening time making up lists for him. I can be the Nancy to his Ronnie. The Ike to his Tina. "Play 'Headhunter' [slap]. Aww, come on, baby. Ike's sorry." Ok, the slapping part probably won't happen. But it's fun to pretend...that it might...in a humour context, of course. (Sigh.) The people watching at Shadow Play was top notch, though. I had no idea that there were so many freaks and fetishists in Halifax. I've never seen a retail outlet for this kind of thing, so they must do a lot of mail order or a lot of sewing in their spare time. The worst fashion casualty of the night was a portly gentleman in blue jeans and a swirly black cape, who insisted on dancing in a cape-enhancing manner. Shudder. As I murmured to Dirk, "please don't dance with the cape. It only embarrasses us all." He kind of reminded me of the guys who used to hang around Skanktuary (undead but not forgotten) when I was living the Life. Every weekend I would get all dressed up in my finery and walk down the street to Savage. And every weekend the boys with capes & tophats who huddled around the door to Skanktuary would wave & grin. I imagine that they thought I was headed their way. But although I would return their dark salutes, I was on my way to a far better place...and there may have been skanktastic cage dancers at Savage, but at least nobody was dancing with their cape.
this time 3 years ago: the plaque shaque (it's all i gots) |
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After a big, big greasy breakfast at a Greek diner on Quinpool, we headed off for five hours in the funnest place on earth...
