A Turbulent Week

Good evening. It's been a while, hasn't it? Mine has been a life of turmoil and chicanery, of late, so let's get caught up.

Tuesday.

I had a brief flash of curiosity about the fallout of that Quebec byelection; imagine my surprise to read the followup news reports and see Stephane Dion accepting full responsibility for the Liberals' ill fates that previous night.

Now, keep in mind that I'm twenty-three years old; I don't think I've ever seen a Liberal leader take responsibility for anything in my lifetime. Granted that this is probably because Jean Chretien headed the Liberals for over thirteen of those years, and Jean Chretien never met a problem he couldn't either purchase or punch his way out of.

Good on Dion for doing such a thing, of course, but the shock of the whole affair understandably left me incapacitated for the rest of the night. I mean, the very idea.

Wednesday.

As you'll recall, Wednesday was the NHL exhibition game between the Coyotes and the Leafs at the MTS Centre.

I wasn't actually inside the arena for the game; by the time I remembered it was happening most everything was sold out, and besides, between the two teams' rosters there are maybe six players I care about.

(Georges Laraque, Alex Steen, Kyle Wellwood... who else... Shane Doan, although that was mostly for his accidental political hilarity last year... I like Mats Sundin, I guess... and, uh... okay, there are five. Hey, I tried!)

But on the way home from work that day, just all of a sudden and out of the blue, I thought to myself -- "hey, wait a minute! That exhibition game is tonight! And I own a guitar!"

Yes, this is genuinely what I did. As soon as I got off that bus and got home (which takes a while, mind you -- my god but our transit system is abhorrent), I set to work; I printed off a few tabs to quickly study en route, tuned my acoustic guitar, and set out downtown.

It went pretty well; it was a nice night, the game was being shown on the building's external bigscreen (!!), and in between periods I caught a few bucks from passersby.

I was pretty rusty, actually; I hadn't played anything on the acoustic in a good long time, and it took me a while to get back into form. Fortunately -- or distressingly, I'm not sure which -- nobody seemed able to tell the difference, and the scratch I made playing an initially shaky rendition of Stompin' Tom's "The Hockey Song" at the end of the night effectively doubled what I'd made to that point.

So:



$24.26 garnered over the span of three hours -- which means about fourty-five minutes of actual playing time, and the rest of the time spent sitting and watching a hockey game I would have sat and watched anyway. I also got a complimentary hot dog, valued at $2.75, and a pack of smokes with one smoke still in it. (Mind you, I don't smoke -- but thanks anyway, random guy!) Not bad for a guy who started the night actually whiffing some of his chords.

If you're wondering -- I took some of my spoils and bought cat food, which is why there's a receipt in that picture. Nothing screams 'damn right I am a rock star' like paying for a bag of cat food with seven dollars in small change. I'm big time, baby! Whoo!

Thursday.

I spent all Thursday holed up at home working on a different writing project entirely. I can tell you about that one later. Be patient with me.

Friday.

Remember back in the summer when my temp job kept getting extended and I ended up working through the entire summer, a notion I wasn't all too pleased with? Well -- ha ha -- at the end my shift on Friday I was abruptly informed that my position had now expired, five months and three weeks into what should have been a seven-week stay.

Ha. Ha ha ha. Ha. I figure there must be some sort of actual employee benefits that kick in after six months at the same place, and that said hypothetical benefits were why they had to jettison me after all of that. Lucky me! Boy, I can't wait to get out and enjoy that October sunshine! Ha ha! Kill me!

Saturday and Sunday.

As a bit of background, I had decided months ago that the end of September would be when I would move back to my Mom's house and start the long haul of saving up money for another run at postsecondary education. (My initial degree has been quite thoroughly useless, and any skeptic who doubts this claim would be quickly convinced by one look at my resume to date.) I don't know where I'm going to go yet -- there are a lot of options, and currently I can't afford a damn one of them -- but I know for certain I have to start scrounging some scratch if I'm going to make it to one of them.

Well, the end of September is now almost upon us; quite serendipitous that my current job dried up a week before the intended move time. I know full well that I've accomplished a great deal with my life since graduating, and I know full well that everything that I'm doing I'm doing for right and justifiable reasons, but nothing makes a man feel small and pitiful quite like the knowledge that he's about to be unemployed and living with his parents.

And I guess I'll be missing both the Loreena McKennitt and Chris Cornell concerts; I mean, I was going to automatically miss one of the two anyway, but fifty bucks is a lot of money to throw at a concert ticket when you don't know how you're going to recoup the cost later.

So the hell with it all, I said, and I spent the weekend asleep. You would have, too. It was for the best.

Monday.

Ha ha. Ha. Ha.

So today I got a call from the temp agency. Starting next Monday they're sending me right back to the same company, at the same building, for the same payrate -- in a slightly different department.

Ha, ha, ha. Boy, are you guys ever lucky that I desperately need money to escape the lightless pit of my current employment prospects! Semper fidelis, I guess!



So anyway!

To answer your question, gentle reader, yes, I have been very busy. And next Monday I start all over again from day one, working at a not-exactly-new job and living at a not-exactly-new place.

In the meantime, I'll have a lot of moving to do before then -- but I'll also do my best to get plenty of blogging done too, during this downtime, and I may have a couple of choice declarations to make by this coming Thursday or Friday.

Ah, life.