september 18, 2000. Today is Little Spider's birthday. When we were teenagers, we used to make up bundles of purple & black balloons, printed over with Magic Marker salutations. We would make a cake & give gifts & do something low-key fun. Now that I am half a country away and the days of highschool are over, all I have left are telephone greetings. This is a very lonely existence in some ways. There is a girl in my English class who looks & acts like Ophelia. Not really, I mean, they probably wouldn't see the resemblance themselves, but it's driving me crazy. I was looking at this girl out of the corner of my eye & trying to figure out why the similarity bothered me so much when it hit me - I still want Ophelia to like me. I mean, how pathetic is that? She hasn't had anything to do with me for over two years, but I still want her approval, attention & love. Talk about your dead end desires. It could be a function of my loneliness here that I'm retreating to past friendships. Or it could be that I'm a great big loser. Take your pick. (As of today, I've found people slightly resembling St. Stephen & St. Jack as well. It's like the person in charge of casting this part of my life felt like using all the runners-up for the principle parts of the last 5 years. Or something.) "You look like a girl I used to know in Ontario. We were really close and now we don't like each other. I don't even know why I'm telling you this...except if you see me frowning, it's not you I'm frowning at." The Boy met me at the Atlantic Save Easy after class this afternoon for some grocery store fun. I was hungry, which is always bad news in the making. After an hour, our mission of milk, bagels, fruit, juice and oatmeal had mutated horribly into a heavy death trek up the hill. Let's just say that I was happy that we'd agreed to bring the shopping cart and leave the matter at that. Dirk is right: winter is going to be hell. We've been stocking up on canned stuff with that potential hell in mind. On the way up the street, before we'd even gotten to the hill, something horrible happened. We had too many groceries for the cart so we'd put the milk in my book bag with the potatoes on top. BIG MISTAKE. Five pounds of potatoes pressed down on 4 litres of milk pressing, in turn, on some pointy house keys at the bottom of the backpack. The Boy suddenly realized that something was dripping. Then I realized that he was dripping, that my book bag was, in effect, lactating. I moaned. My notes - soaked. My reflective journal - soaked. My bag - full of as much milk as the waterproofing would hold, leaking out of the seams. There was, of course, nothing we could do. We were at the bottom of the hill; our house is at the top. There was no opportunity to clean up; we could only throw out the hopelessly soiled and/or punctured items and slog up the slope. Brothers & sisters, there is nothing on earth worse than a milk spill. You know that if you miss anything, it will sour & stink up your vicinity forever. And I have enough social problems without being known as the girl who smells like spoiled dairy.