By Lucy

I feel like I complain about this every other post, but I’m annoyed anew about how much I’m having to stay put. I had two people who I do travel cards with texted me and asked about the job in Dryden, because I’m local and more likely to know something. I know nothing though, and it just reminded me that I’ve been in one place for a month when I thought I’d be on the road by now. I’ve paid for another month of rent. The snow is just an underline; the season is not starting early this year.

The New Zealand trip is becoming a whole thing. My initial plan was to just go to New Zealand for six months, and then I wanted to stop in Venice on the way back. With the Worldpackers site, I was hoping to spend a few weeks there, working for room and board, and experiencing Carnivale. I joked to Rich that I could also stop in England for a couple of weeks and see him and Damocles. Rich pointed out that he plans to have a car and a drivers license by then, and he could drive down to Venice and pick me up, and then we could sight-see on the drive back. So a ‘simple’ trip to New Zealand is turning into a European road trip, but also I think if it happens as planned it’ll be a lot of fun.

I was pleasantly surprised by getting a job call on Good Friday. The only reason someone’s in the office on holiday Friday asking me to come in on Easter Monday is if it is an emergency, so cha-ching! It’s more than the one day as well, but that’s all I know. He barely wanted to slow down long enough to tell me what time I started. Like a lot of jobs, all I know is where to be, when, and that I’m getting ice cleats. Also to remind people, this work is dangerous and I am well aware of that.

The job is doubly freeing: one, I’ll have a paycheck, but two, I no longer need to ration my remaining cash as severely, because I know there will be more.

It’s been a slower weekend for me, I’m starting to recognize that I do less stuff when I am streaming. It’s not worth my time when I stream less than 4 hours, so my day has to be organized around that. If I’m streaming a first playthrough like I am now, people will also get mad at me if I play outside of the stream, so I am somewhat chained to the stream to play games. It’s been good though, since Winter blew up her stream some of her followers have jumped over to my chat, and money aside, streaming just feels weird if there isn’t anyone talking in chat. Talking in chat is how I met Grave and Damocles, two of my best friends.

Dialing back to Thursday; Scott texted me late in the morning and told me not to come in Thursday or Friday because things went belly-up and also the long weekend. I decided I might as well get my laundry done, because laundromats presumably close for the holiday as well. Towards the end of the cycle, an elder came up to me (an elder here meaning an indigenous person dispensing guidance) and handed me this little teddy bear. He said he found it in his laundry and felt that I should have it. I pointed out the laundromat has a lost and found, but he smiled and left and I realized it was a gift of some sort, so I brought it home, thoroughly confused. So now it will just live on my shelf until I puzzle it out.

After K was done work, he came over to my place and we went to Boulevard for a walk. We noticed a chonky (possibly pregnant) squirrel had broken into a bird feeder and was going to town on the birdseed. We also found someone’s dropped shopping list, which the most baffling entry is “bank US funds”, followed closely by “solids”. What international jewel thief wrote down a shopping list? What is solids?! Comment below your theories!

Then we went to Howl at the Moon, which is a dry bar… a sober bar? They don’t serve alcohol, is the point.

The name is kinda bollocks. Everyone just calls it Howl. We walked in close to 7 and the place was empty, the owner talking to someone at a table. He greeted us and said karaoke starts after 8, but we were welcome to grab a board game from a pile at the back and hang out. I ordered some wedges and a tea – raspberry cream ceylon – and we picked through the board games. I found an unopened Pusheen game, which we absolutely had to try!

It was not a good game, but K takes board games very seriously and won quickly. After that, regulars started trickling in. He grabbed another game from the back, Hanabi. It’s basically a co-op version of Solitaire, where you can’t look at your own cards and have to rely on limited information from your partner for what to play. We got very close to winning, but we started on the wrong foot – he didn’t explain that we were supposed to be working together! I joked that if we play the game too much, we’ll be very familiar with each other’s tells.

Most of the regulars are First Nations’, which made me glad because that is very much my vibe. One person rocked up with stew and fresh bannock (or, since Rich pointed out bannock is a Scottish name, frybread), before grabbing the mike and putting on a rap song, and changing the lyrics to tell all of us that we could grab food for free, which was awesome!

I was very nervous – I’d never done karaoke before. There’s not even a place in Barrie that offers karaoke. They put pens and little scraps of paper on the tables and I’d gathered that you should write down the song you want on it, but I was unsure – do you just walk up and hand it to the MC? K noticed that I was nervous and took the paper up the MC for me, which was very kind of him. The better I get at conquering my anxiety, the more jarring it is when I find something new to wrestle with, especially when I have such an air of confidence.

They called me up to the front and I told him I’m nervous because it’s my first time, so he announced it to the crowd and everyone cheered and told me I’d do fine. Which I knew to be true – not that I want to put anyone down, but I was definitely a better singer than some of the regulars. Which is fine, I think it’s lovely that there exists a place where anyone can belt out their favourite song at the top of their lungs and have the crown cheer unconditionally. And of course, the song I picked was Billy Joel’s “Only the Good Die Young”!

We sat there for a bit longer and I did a second song, “Night Moves”, but I couldn’t convince K to sing and the crowd was starting to wind down. I asked him on the walk home why he had come to karaoke if he didn’t want to sing, and he said because I asked him to and he wanted to be a good friend.

It scratched at my brain and I laid awake in bed thinking about it for a while. I hate complaining about ex’s, but it almost brought me to tears on the cold, dark road. I know if I had asked James, he wouldn’t have been happy about going and would have whined incessantly until I agreed to go home. And if I had gone without him, he would have texted me constantly and complained that I abandoned him when I got home. He didn’t start that way, but towards the end of our relationship he basically refused to leave the house without me, and he resented me for either leaving without him, or taking him to places he didn’t want to go, and left me with no real third option.

Friday I got the aforementioned phone call, and streamed for 8 hours as I had the day to meself.

Saturday was an enforced rest day. I could have streamed or done any number of things, but I went grocery shopping and then lazed around my room. In the afternoon I picked up Hanuman for a normal walk, and then dinner. We went to the Sal; he had a burger, and I had a Monte Cristo. After dinner, he was still hungry (and I was not) so he ordered a dessert they called an ‘apple blossom’. Which was yummy, although tiny.

We also discovered, we have the same birthday! Day and month, I’m not telling you the year. It was one of those weird serendipitous things, I know statistically September is the month with the most babies because it is 9 months after Christmas/ New Years, but I’ve never had a friend with a September birthday.

Sunday I went over to K’s again. He was being a goofball. He mentioned he wanted to make a stew that required red wine, but when I inquired if it was beef bourguignon he denied it. When I got there I requested we go for a walk first, and halfway through the walk he said that he had planned to make a quiche first, then walk, then make the stew. Not that he had told me!

So we went back to his place and made the quiche. A crustless quiche. I pointed out to him that a crustless quiche is basically just a thick omelet and received a playful tap with the oven mitt for my troubles.

After the quiche was in the oven, we started working on the stew, which did turn out to be a beef bourguignon in everything but name. When I pointed out that I’ve made one following Julia Child’s recipe many times, I got handed the spoon and told to brown the meat. When it was simmering away in the oven, we watched Suzume, which is one of my favourite animated movies. Unfortunately, I had to leave before the soup was done. It was to be an early morning Monday!

Maybe this story is tooting my own horn a bit.. but, well, why shouldn’t I? A question from Hanuman prompted this line of thought.

In grade eleven I took a creative writing class. I fought with the teacher a lot – she was smart, but limited. The final straw that helped her understand me was that she wanted to take the class to the movies a lot, and I argued that you really needed to read the book. The new hotness was the Hunger Games, and I challenged her that anyone who watched the movie wouldn’t understand what the book was about. So she asked the class: who had just watched the movie, and what was it about?

“Glory in battle!” “Winning a game show!”

I settled back in my seat with a smug smile.

Later on, we had an assignment to do a book report… I can’t remember, but it was specific in some way. The teacher gave everyone a list of books to choose from, except me. She sent me alone to the library to try and pick something challenging, because she had accepted I was beyond everyone else at that point. My previous English teach was in the library and I told her my assignment. She smiled and took me to a specific shelf with Hermann Hesse books. I’d already read Steppenwolf and The Glass Bead Game, but she grabbed Siddhartha. “This should challenge you.”

I sorted of turned my nose up at it – it was Buddhist, or Hindu, or something. But she got me by suggesting it might be too much for me to handle. Challenge accepted!

I actually really liked the book. I find Hermann Hesse a little too metaphorical at times, but this book managed to wrangle him into a more linear shape. My mother went out and bought me some more Hindu scripture because of my new interest. I still prefer First Nation’s spirituality, but it was the first time I felt like an organized religion might speak to me instead of existing to satisfy someone else’s hubris.

I’ve come to back to it because I’ve been thinking about one of the core ideas. Siddhartha becomes an ascetic monk, but eventually decides that unrelenting self-mortification isn’t the path to enlightenment. You can’t learn about yourself and the world if you shut out and shun every experience, no matter how much you meditate. I have referred to my room as a cell, and I mean a monk’s cell; a place bereft of material comfort, in which to meditate. But I also view it as a way to force myself to leave. Unlike my room in Barrie, there is very little to amuse myself in here, so I have to go out and experience new things.

And relationships. I think, in Western society we like the idea of falling in love and it being perfect without any work. To an extent though, we need those failed relationships to learn what we want and need. In the words of Lt. Kinderman, “you can’t have the notion of a line that’s straight, without the notion of a line that’s crooked” (and I wish I had packed that book so I could quote it properly). I’m not heartbroken by the loss of a love I had, so much as I am upset that my former partner doesn’t seem to have learned anything from it. Brian and James and Winter all continued on with their self-destructive ways, and I viewed it as a personal failing, that I didn’t leave them any wisdom. Of course, I know people would say they need to want to receive wisdom, etc. I’ve learned that, to look for people who want to grow and expand their horizons.

Anyway… back to being a proper carpenter Monday!