By Lucy

Paul is the first to notice that I’ve completely shattered.

“Hello, Earth to Lucy. You’re quiet.”

Of course Paul would notice. He’s the person I talk to the most, currently, partially because he’s also my editor. To an occasionally annoying degree; sometimes I’ll log on to my novel and write a couple paragraphs, just to percolate on something, and five minutes later I’ll get a notification that he’s commented on it already! When Lucy stops writing, something terrible has happened. I’m like a beaver, constantly gnawing on trees.

I’m not even playing Minecraft anymore, just picking away at this tile-matching game I found on Youtube Playables.

I can’t lie to Paul, so I admit I’m not doing well. He offers to take me out for breakfast the next day, but I don’t want to go out cuz I need to tidy around my apartment. He offers to come over and help me tidy instead.

Emily and Hanuman got in a fight overnight. They were drunk – I include this because it was out of character for both of them. I was awoken around 1 in the morning and eavesdropped long enough to confirm that I didn’t need to try and break it up. The mood was still tense in the morning and did not help my depression.

I was glad when Paul showed up. We talked outside for an hour, then we went to Stacked for breakfast so as to avoid going back inside the apartment. When I ran out of excuses to stay away, we went inside and tidied my room for a bit. I played a bit of Minecraft because Paul always hears us talk about it, and discovered there’s a free DLC from New Zealand. I was super excited about playing Minecraft New Zealand since Minecraft is often referred to as Lego New Zealand, but it turned out to be an on-rails experience where you’re just “taking pictures” of scenery. I want a reskin of Minecraft that makes it New Zealandy and honestly I could do it myself… it’s not hard to make Minecraft texture packs because everything is a one metre square cube.

Then I started playing Metroid.

I’ve been looking at Metroid tattoos. I couldn’t tell you what triggered it.

Metroid, and especially the Metroid Prime trilogy, have always been a comfort zone for me.

For those that don’t know the franchise, Metroid is a series about space adventures. The protagonist is Samus Aran, a humanoid female. I say humanoid because she was born fully human, but after her parents were killed by Space Pirates she was adopted by the Chozo and grafted with their DNA… somehow… mostly as a handwave for why she can use Chozo technology and no one else can. The game treads a fine line between hard and soft science. For example, the setting of Metroid Prime 2 is a rogue planet with an artificial sun that is central to the main quest, which most casual gamers wouldn’t notice. Or that Bryyo is tidally locked with vastly different biomes and a twilight zone in the middle, or Elysia is a gas giant with the attendant constant lightning storms.

On the other hand, the game completely skips past questions like how Morph ball works when you’re folding a 6 foot tall woman into a space a meter across, although it does pay lip service to how it doesn’t make sense by having flavour text such as people trying to copy Morph Ball tech and ending up being gooey balls of paste and splintered bone.

A lot of the early games were great because they literally made the first game and then said “hey, what if it was a chick inside the helmet?” and just rolled with it. Samus is a female, but she spends basically the entirety of her games inside her suit of powered armor with its hilariously wide shoulder pads, kicking ass and taking names, and her being female factors into very little of the storyline (unless you play Other M, but we don’t talk about Other M). Her generic backstory is that she joined the Galactic Federation Marines, but was disillusioned and left to become a “bounty hunter”. Although no one has ever decided what bounty hunter means, because she’s definitely not motivated by greed; more that she just chafed against the rigid military structure and wanted to help people in a more flexible way. Military subcontractor doesn’t have the same spirit of adventure, though.

Her characterization can take some hard lurches depending on who’s writing, and not even just because of the gender thing. In Japan it’s very frowned upon to leave the military once you joined up, so she tends to get portrayed as a mentally unstable loner for not being able to follow commands, whereas the American writer portray her more as a “Clint Eastwood lone cowboy” type. The game also can’t decide what the Space Pirates are; you might think of Han Solo, but the Space Pirates in most games are more like the Galactic Empire, with intentions of taking over the universe and not very piratey.

The game tends to get put under “Action Adventure” because it’s hard to describe. Yes, it is a first person game and your basic tool is an arm cannon. But there’s also exploration, puzzle solving, navigating by the Morph Ball. The game is very fluid in how it lets you use the tools it give you. The grapple beam is mostly for crossing large gaps, but it can also be used to pull enemies closer to you or rip down shields and barriers. The plasma gun can be used to weld things back together. The Xray and thermal visors are used for finding hidden openings, power-ups, broken circuits, invisible or hiding enemies…. The screw attack is basically a fancy triple jump, but you can use it to shove enemies off ledges or into laser beams. It’s all up to your imagination!

The plot, for the Prime trilogy, is; there is a mysterious blue substance that cause things to mutate, called Phazon, and it’s up to you to stop the corruption. The story unfolds very organically; the first game has Samus pursuing escaping Space Pirates to Tallon 4, where she discovers they have been using Phazon to breed local wildlife into biological weapons, and destroys their base and the Phazon there. In the second game, she’s called to planet Aether after the Galactic Federation lost contact with some Marines there, only to discover Phazon and Space Pirates, as well as the local sentient aliens fighting a losing battle against evil aliens. This one is good because you can decide what you think Samus’ motivations for continuing are. She’s explicitly stuck on the planet until the war is won by either side, but the evil aliens are, well, evil, and they killed the Marines she originally came to rescue. Is she self-interested and helping them just to leave? Fighting to avenge the Marines? Trying to save the Luminoth? You decide!

The third game has 4 different planets that you can fly between as you choose. It also closes out the trilogy by having Phazon be definitively destroyed.

I found Phazon really compelling as a story device. The ‘corruption’ reminds me how I feel about my cancer; healthy but not; young outside, old inside. Especially in the third game when Samus gets ‘infected’ by Phazon and there’s an implied ticking clock until the Phazon either kills or corrupts her completely, and the way I feel the tumor inside me, corrupting my insides and consuming me. Also because Phazon itself has no motivations. It’s not sentient; most of the spread is caused by Space Pirates going full Weyland Yutani and trying to make a weapon out of it, and the other part is incidental. It just consumes and grows as its nature.

The games are really smart in a lot of ways no one gives credit for. Like, there’s a bounty hunter you encounter in the third game named Ghor. His gimmick is that he’s a nice cyborg, but when he climbs into his large battle suit he becomes violent and aggressive. And he comes from the planet Wotan. Wink if you get it!

The series has some debatable points. One notable thing is the Zero Suit, the bodysuit Samus wears under her armor. I’m ok with it cuz it makes sense, of course you’d something extremely form-fitting under a hypermobile space suit and as she’s very active and fit, sure she’s a total bombshell. To be honest, I kinda like that she’s pretty under the helmet; there’s a tendency to make every action woman a tomboy with a buzz cut, like it’s a law or something. “Thou shall not be kick ass and beautiful, pick one.” The problem is when it becomes male gazey, which is one of many problems with Other M (along with the lack of exploration, the constant unnecessary and boring narration from a usually silent protagonist, the terrible control scheme) is that it strips her down to her Zero Suit constantly. I’ll let Yahtzee keep whining for me:

And if he didn’t convince you, just watch the opening cinematic on Youtube and let me know if you can get more than 30 seconds in to it without wanting to throw the TV out the window.

(Also of note; he spends a lot of time complaining about what Team Ninja did to the game, but a lot of the most contentious design choices were not made by Team Ninja, who were indeed aware that they’d get some stimulating emails as a result)

It occurred to me that I based a lot of my main character on Samus. Hm…

I play through the first couple of levels while Paul watched – I can blow through Metroid Prime in less than 8 hours when motivated – and then Paul left to finish going about his day. I sent him home with the Factor meals I deemed likely to upset my stomach.

The mill’s all shut down. Someone messed up and killed all the bacteria – yes, they have specifically designed bacterial cultures in the sewer to manage the wastewater. They got a new colony shipped down from Dryden’s mill, but some of the old stuff got discharged into the Kam river and killed all the fish, causing the ministry to pull their water permit and keep them shut down. If they can’t run wastewater they can’t run, period. It reminds me that I searched up the stories about the fireball for writing my book and had to search through the multiple stories about people dying and being set on fire at both the Thunder Bay mill and Terrace Bay.

Jeremy won’t talk to me now. Yay.

Monday I went down to Boulevard for a walk, and also for the Labour Day picnic. The carpenter’s union isn’t there, like always, for some reason. They’d better enjoy the next couple years of peace while I travel, cuz I’m shaking things up when I get back. I wore my carpenters union shirt and got a few nods of approval.

Rodney Brown was playing, as he always is. I got the Blackfly song stuck in my head and spent the evening looking at the maps of northern Ontario. It’s kinda wild how much nothing there is here… how on the edge of civilization we are. This map of roads in Canada sells it;

Between Sudbury and Winnipeg, there’s nothing.

John and Kevin finally notice I’m quiet/ left the server. I’m never sure what to say when people ask if I’m alright. I’m almost never ok.

My massage refund and a partial refund I managed to talk Factor into giving me came in, so that was a nice little bonus. Another week survived.

Monday evening I was disrupted by a bolt from the blue. Literally, there was some storm clouds north of us but not over the building, and we were seeing lightning thru the windows anyway. A bolt hit the building and blew out the emergency lights in the hallway (quality material there) and shut down our electricity for half an hour.

It occurs to me that despite my despondence at not being able to get a New Zealand working visa again, I have options. I’ll get EI after I’m done school, as long as I’m in Canada. I could also get a fly-in job in BC and make some coin while I’m not paying rent. The problem then becomes, I want to make it to NZ while it’s still summer there, so at least February.

It’s cold here. The switch has flipped and the temps went from highs of 30 to highs of 6 overnight. I’m now really annoyed about the midnight shift job. I did miss all of summer for it. At least I’m not boiling in my room anymore.

School is boring Tuesday. More bookwork. I finish at least half an hour before everyone else, including the other smart person in the class, Paul’s brother in law David. The other guys have noticed and even the teacher joked he’d have to tie my right arm behind my back so they could catch up. At least it’s subjects I enjoy; engineered lumber. Me and Margaret bonded over talking about the benefits of mass timber.

I flip forward in the book and notice it says powder-actuated devices require a license. At lunch I ask Bruce about it; he says technically it’s not illegal to own and use one without a license, but union regulations are that you need to take an hour-long firearms course before you can handle them. Paul points out that they’re excluded from the firearms act and you can just buy them at Home Depot. The Vagabond’s friend not only gave me one to use on the jobsite, he was annoyed at me for requesting to be trained on how to use what is basically a shotgun.

Speaking of the Vagabond, I’m anxious that I’ll run into him at school. The union hall is not a big building and it’s full of glass walls (carpenters build glass houses) and I’m going to be there for most open hours for 8 weeks.

We have a math test. I do alright. They do math differently up here.

Trauma time! When I was a kid, I was on the math team. Which I have no conscious recollection of. When I was in my late teens I was going through the bundle of papers my mother has about our school careers and found a school newsletter that said I was on the grade 4 math team. I did the math in my head and realized I was actually in grade 2 at the time; when I asked my mother about it, she said I was on the grade 4 math team because there wasn’t a grade 2 math team. So at some point I was a math prodigy, but after grade 3 I struggled with math. Grade 3 seems to be some sort of inflection point in my life, when something so traumatic happened to me I not only forgot how to do math, but I lost all my math skills going forward, but I had no clue what it was. It’s doubly terrifying as someone who has such an iron-clad memory bank and who has many conscious recollections of trauma.

What happened to me?

I’m slowly recovering from my mental breakdown. I rejoined the Discord group. I got an email reminding me that I was supposed to give a speech to the York Soroptimist chapter about New Zealand, so I started compiling my notes for that.

In world news, over the last 30 years, sea levels have risen by 9 centimeters. That’s fun.

Wednesday almost triggered another collapse. Landon wanted us to have our tools here. Most of my tools are here… except my chisels, which are trapped in Kevin’s locker still. He sent one guy home for not having his tools and I started sweating. I didn’t admit I was short my chisels and just hoped I could sneak through the day without anyone noticing.

He brought us to the shop before lunch and started showing us how to mill wood down so it’s perfectly straight and the right size. Despite the basic piece of wood being called a 2×4, most 2×4’s are actually 1 3/4″ by 3 3/4″. Also because it’s cheap SPF (spruce pine fir), it’s usually warped in some way. The jointer (not the planer) will make it straight. The planer will mill it down to size but preserve any warps in the wood. He also explains to us how the SawStop work; it’s a table saw with a conductive blade, so if you touch it the blade automatically stops and retracts, in theory before it does serious damage to your hand.

Then Landon realizes he has to head to the airport. This made me question him out loud, because on Tuesday he said we were going to a hoisting and rigging class “near the end of the course” but he reveals that actually, Bruce is going to do it tomorrow and Friday because Landon won’t be in town.

“Wait, when did you book the plane ticket?”

“Five months ago.”

Wait, you somehow forgot you’d be gone for most of the week when you’ve known it for 5 months? Alrighty then. I don’t think Landon wants to be here.

Bruce babysat us for the rest of the day as we did more bookwork. Yay.

It rained all day and night. I debated going sailing but decided to stay home and work on things. My notes for the meeting. The poster for trivia night.

Thursday and Friday were the hoisting and rigging course with Bruce. I have mixed feelings about Bruce. On one hand, he looks like my uncle to a frankly scary degree, and he is painfully uncharismatic. On the other, he shares my genuine interest in health and safety and we can talk for hours about ways to make jobs safer. My boredom was not helped by the fact that I apparently know mostly everything about hoisting and rigging already, because Duff taught me, but no one else in the class knew much about it. It’s giving me some weird reputation as a know-it-all that I don’t deserve. I’ve started stealing candy from Julie at the front desk to keep myself awake, and walking laps in the hallways at lunch. I wish I could use a laptop to “write notes”, then I could write my book while I’m bored in class.

Jeremy hurt my feelings. He called me melodramatic. Sure, I’ve been a hyper-competent continent-hopping badass for most of the year he’s known me, but one little melt-down and I’m dramatic. Blech. The phrase that jumps to my mind is “if you can’t handle me at my worst, you don’t deserve me at my best”.

He asks me if I want to come over for pizza. I tell him I wouldn’t want to exhaust him with my melodrama. He apologizes, although someone is obviously coaching him, not that I’m complaining with it. Asking for advice is a tool like any other and I do it often enough too.

I dread going home. It doesn’t help that the tense mood from Sunday continued on into the week.

Had my little speech to the York club. The schedule seemed to imply that I would only being speaking for 5 minutes, but they let me go for half an hour, interrupting to ask questions. It was a boost to my confidence after causing me so much anxiety through the week.

After the meeting was over, Kevin surprise messaged me that he finally got in to the storage locker. Yay I can breathe again! I only really needed my tools, but I grabbed out everything. I know he’s trying to whittle his stuff down to the point that he can cancel the locker, and it wouldn’t be nice to leave my stuff there while I’m gone if he can close it.

“Are you ok?” He asks me seriously, as I shiver in the breeze and the dying light.

I look down at my toes. Yes. No. Maybe. Not really but you can’t help me. “I’m getting better.” I say honestly. I’m so used to people pushing me away that I decline help even when it’s offered.

Don’t cry or I’ll give you something to cry about.

Friday was even shorter and more boring. We had our rigging “tests”. Can we tie a bowline and a clove hitch? We split up into groups to test our knowledge of hoisting hand signals. Me, David and Trenton, the other guy who’s on the spectrum, immediately bunched together.

“Yay, the neurodivergent club is together again.” I say. The other 2 frown at me.

It occurs to me that a lot of this information about rigging is really relevant to sailing. I grab a textbook to bring home and show Chris.

I barely get settled in my room when Emily and Hanuman knock on my door. “Surprise!” They got me a card and a measurements sheet. They want to order me work pants for my birthday. I grin sheepishly as Emily checks my measurements against the size chart, mouth open in shock.

“Nothing fits you!” She exclaims.

Hah, nope. People forget, I have an unnaturally thin waist because I’m missing organs. Combined with the fact that I’m so bodacious, there’s a more than 10 inch difference between my waist and my hips. Very few things fit me off the rack, which is why I tend to get stretchy pants or make my own. It also doesn’t help that my body can change dramatically if my guts are upset and I bloat up. I help her select the pair most likely to fit me.

Saturday. I’m 30.

It’s such a mix of feelings, mostly melancholy. There were several points in time when me seeing 30 seemed like a pipe dream. There’s also the fact that I’m not likely to see 60. My life is half over and I have less than 30 years left. If that. The doctor thinking she saw an adenoma on my duodenum makes me wonder if I’ll even see 40, if this trip will be my swan song. Travel for 5 years and come home to die.

And everyone keeps treating me like I’m so young. It’s so annoying to have everyone go “you’re just a baby still”. One, I am more mature than most people my age, nevermind people older than me, and two, I’ve got gravestones in my eyes. I’m not triggered by the usual superficial “you’re no longer in your 20’s” panic. These are real existential questions.

Me and Hanuman were up at the usual crack of dawn. It’s his birthday too, so we had a bit of a chuckle about it. Emily got up at some point in the night and hung up some decorations. When she got up for realses, we made pancakes and stuck candles in them.

Hanuman is one of those guys that doesn’t like celebrating his birthday, so it’s funny that it ended up being my birthday as well. Emily gets to celebrate his birthday while telling him it’s to celebrate mine, so he has to go along with it.

We went to the farmer’s market to check out the antique tool sale. They were being coupley, so I wandered off to the farmers market proper and ran into Li. I decided to buy some milk from Slate River Dairy with the little bit of money I had.

I played Metroid and mucked around the rest of day. I didn’t feel like doing anything. Around 1 all of us ended up going down for a nap, oddly.

At 5 we went out to Tony Roma’s for dinner. I’ve never been there before, but as an Italophile I was not impressed. The food was fine for a chain. I had salmon, Hanuman had ribs and Emily had pasta. They fought over the bill but Emily ended up paying (it’s your birthday, Hanuman, let her pay). Then we went home and Emily made fudge brownies in lieu of cake (no, we didn’t get dessert at Tony Roma’s).

You’ve got front row seats to the penitence ball
When I grow up, I want to be nothing at all

No, I’m not alright. But I’m getting better.