Late night ranting.

What a strange and interesting day. I have not felt so aware in quite some time. Rushed to get the EPP stuff ready for the meeting eith Tena and Eva, but Tena somehow managed to go to the wrong room, but we still managed to agree that we should hand over the reconcilation process to Eva for now - or until a better person or org can be found. Went over and did U-Pass prodction at the Koerner LIbrary and had a fun time trying to learn a card game (the name escapes me) from Allyson, and then we also talked about Australia and travel and living and things in general there. She is going to have so much fun there. Then again, I would be hard put to imagine her not having fun wherever she goes. She and Erin are shining little balls of happiness and no room needs a light when they arrive.

Somewhat doldrumatic this morning , though - I sensed that GRL was a bit on-edge and somewhat testy. This idea of working a 3-day week, is hard enough on him, but throw U-Pass production into the works of trying to tie up the data analization phase of trying to write an important PhD thesis is not to be trifled with and it is definately taking it's toll - and not only on GRL, but all those around him at work at least!

I was somewhat confused that I did not get the job at the Teacher Training College - since I have usually gotten almost all jobs that I have interviewed for and now think that I should have asked for a post-interview interview, but can't really be too bothered - fate will do what fate will. Perhaps something better will make itself known. Sooner rather than later I hope. I had tried to arrange an interview at Aeroguard as I'd said but that didn't seem to come off either as they had only a few select spots for interview times and I gave them up as untenable due to the schedule at TREK. I could have gotten out of my committments there I suppose, but they're just that - committments and do feel some sense of responsibiity there, regardless of my desire to move on and get a decent job elsewhere. It doesn't ahev to be off UBC, but a job with challenge, responsibility, a chance to grow and develop others and soething that pays better. Wered it that we didn't have to worry about money but we do and we must learn to live in the world as we find it and perhaps make it a better place. Would there really be ambition without the enticement of riches or power? Probably not. Then again, there's always love - but isn't that power as well?

Love.

Pensive.

A dual pensiveness-cum-nervous enery is pervasive in the day today and I am unsure of where it is from. I did not manage to secure an interview today with a company that I'd wanted to work with: Aeroguard - they do the security checks at Vancouver International Airport, but the schedule at work did not combine well with the short notice. And so I didn't go. BUt that isn't why. A messed up quietness has replaced the frenetic mess that used to accompany me home when Trish would have been home, busy mussin' it up. She hasn't been there in almost a week and I am half wondering and worrying about where she is and then also some happiness that I now have the opportunity to clean it up a bit and was quite happy with myself on monday night when I cleaned up the kitchen from top to bottom and also the bathroom.

I wrote a note to her mother in Victoria on sunday while at U-Pass and mailed it off on monday. In it I mostly talked about her daughter and what needs being done. I don't know if it was my place, but regardless of how she takes it, I obviously felt that it needed saying since Trish isn't exactly quite "normal" just yet - whatever that means. Her mother is quite determined, however, to bring her wayward daughter back home and while I'd be happy to see her go for now, I felt that I had to offer a bit of a warning. Anyway, it's gone.

I had lunch with Deborah Mac Donald yesterday - we sat on the sunny plaza of Regent College, eating our curries and she scanned the photos which I'd taken in New York. More importantly, we stopped in the bookstore on the way back and I say D. Nagel there in a burgundy top but even as I waalked past her time and again, she didn't see me and I took that as a sign, and combined with being next to Deborah and not wanting to simply cast her off, I didn't go and talk to D. I will see her again if it is meant to be, but my mind was simply elsewhere as well (along those lines) and I have definately been thinking about Dawn more and more.

I had always thought that she was both nice and attractive, but had always put it out of my head as being foolish since we worked together and I assumed that she was going out with someone already - which she was until January apparently. Anyway, suffice to say for now that she is a constant thought for me lately and I am curious to see what, if any, thing may be there. If nothing else, it will have been good to have made a new friend.

Talked to LLRR a bit during lunch. We missed each other (what else is new but I mean in time and space) and didn't bump into each other until about halfway through lunch and we sat and talked on the steps outside the SUB and she was quiet and said that she was tired and didn't have much energy. There seems to be much more there which she either fears to tell me or else hasn't the strength to come up with and I will ahve to let it go for now as it will come up when it should. She is on a juice fast - which she has told me that she has been on before but they must be quite draining - in addition to her new daily regimen of meditation in the wee hours. It must all be quite trying but I sense there there's also something else but well, I'm nothing if not a sticky beak.

Later.

Memories.

The beer and the throng of yelling and screaming Aussies last night had gone to my head and I awoke to a day of another night-get-together: this time with the U_Pass production team. I'm not usually late to these things but I was watching 'Malice' on video and lost track of the time and with the decreased service on weekends, didn't arrive at Vertical (on Broadway, closer to Alma) until about an hour late. At least Chris showed up after me. Gord was standing and was about to speak (gee, some things will never change I suppose) and had brought his wide-grinned daughter, Sarah.

Dawn, Tim (Kirsten Molstand's other half), Kirsten, Erin, me, Chris Eaton, Allyson, Steve, Amanda Murdoch, Mark (Amanda's other half) Carole, Sarah and GRL himself - in that order clockwise around the table arrayed.

Talked about everything and nothing as usual. The banter down this end to and fro'ed between Erin and Allyson mostly and Steve and I interjecting, but mostly Steve. They are part of the residence gang - that timeless mob of close friends that shared the residence at university. I felt a bit of an outsider, which is what I was., but that was okay. They are all so easy to talk to and completely at ease with themselves and others around them. Their style is very earthy Canadian and it is warming to be around.

Dawn came over to visit for a while and I passed my camera to her to take some photos. I did want to talk to Dawn but she was cloistered at the other end of the table and it wasn't until GRL and Sarah had left early and the dinner began to wind down that I moved around and sat across from her and Tim and found they they'd both recently been to Russia and much of Eastern Europe. The waitress "Margarita" was apparently known to Dawn as they both had gone to Kitilano Secondary School. She did, as usual, look very familiar. I'll have to write Dawn since she is going up North to Ft. St. James for a few days. I've always thought that she was very nice, and she showed me her ring on her middle finger, a heart with ground , er.. ground some sort of blue semi-precious stone within. Look, it's been a long day.

The bill arrived somewhat muddled and not everyone's bill was accurately divided and once that had been sorted out, Mark drove some of us downtown to Royal on Granville street. It is at the street level of Hostelling Imternational HQ in Van and is a bit like the Roxy.

So much detail for so short a blurb - so, remember Agri-sci, beergardens, naked bullriding, Erin the barbie doll, pointing finger gestures of Chris, Allyson and Erin, Go Fish, and other mindless drivel that is the stuff od weekend friend get togethers.

Debbie does Dallas?

A tingle. A new hope.

As kirsten goes out to chat with her friend, a beautiful young woman walks into the U-Pass production room aka the-dungeon-for-the-cursed, with a great mane of frizzy brown hair, in a red top and with light olive skin. I didn't get her name but as I discover when Amanda (Murdoch's sister) is looking it up for me, her name is D. Nagel and from Nanaimo. That's it. Other than she has never heard of the Roxy or 5th Avenue cinemas or even MEC, I do not know much else about her. Oh yes, she has a brand new U-Pass. I was looking at her and getting a chill, a tingle running up and down my back and my neck and I was having a really stupid time of trying to saying anything in a coherent sentence to her. I tried to stretch the "schpeel" out a bit and ran through the idea of asking her out but just as quickly quashed it as being to unprofessional. Who came up with the Victorian ideals anyway? Oh yes, the victorians. While I was quite happy to be working beside the ever-chirpy and wonderful Amanda, Dawn and Alison again, meeting D. whatever her name is seem to have made my day. It seems that I shall have to let it go and see if she returns somehow.

Then again. It could just be my illness striving to return to full spate.

Ah, l'amour.

A new day passes

And I am reminded of the unbounded and boundless beauty and mirth in people.

I did not have more or less a restful sleep than otherwise but I think that the fever which gripped me so suddenly last night burnt off somewhat by sunrise. My head still throbs from the battles within but I have begun a small recovery - who knows for sure? Some wave of turmoil, tsunami proportioned, must have crested and crashed upon the rocks of my physical self and I was laid low by my own thoughts of trouble perhaps?

I did spend a good portion of the day reading and re-reading the copy of Cosmopolitan down in the U-Pass production room that is our little dank, dark corner of the Koerner library. Kirsten and Erin will attest to my continued mirth and tittering over what I was reading.

"If you read Cosmo to get a better perspective on women, you will get a pretty twisted view" quoth Kirsten. She spent the day, when uninterrupted by my constant giggling and guffaws, immersed in the 5th Harry Potter book.

I had meant to spend some time this weekend visiting my parents, since I had not seen them since before I left for my holiday in New York, but it was thought quite natual that I should be put to work right away, fevering and rotting away in the doldrums that is the quiet, sunless, flourescent-lit room that is our temporal dungeon of the U-Pass production room.

I have been saying that I am, as yet, unused to the change in pace from New York to Vancouver. Yet what must also be true is that even though this last adventure seems slightly less that my last great one in and over Australia, I am still feeling its lingering hold over my spirit and the wild tumult of the uncompromizing streets. I have always felt that what is inside me is a bird of fire - a flying creature of colours myraid and bright, yet kept chained in a small, close, drab and heavy iron box, in a dark room. Perhaps we all feel that way, but I feel it as strongly as ever and have a difficulty in reconciling the fact that a road of infinite possibilities lies before me and yet I am forced to turn away and return to my closed and darked cell. Something within me yearns to yell and scream about as when we were young and carefeee upon a field of verdant grass. Has life become so staid as to become a small personal hell of diminished and unaccomplished dreams and hopes?

And yet I draw strength and some small confidence in seeing the unrestrained care and youthful joy in Erin as I talked to her briefly today about going to a bridal shower, her trip, her unknown cellular stalker, and her stretching on the carpet. I noticed that she has crystal clear eyes as she lay there, feet up against the wall vertical. Then again, perhaps it was the blood rushing to the brain. I gave thanks for these kind and unpretentious women and their acceptance of my own fun in reading the fabled cosmo.

And for being them. Thanks for reminding me.

Hope.

Bug, bug, everywhere a bug, bug...

Long day at UBC working in the depths of the bunker-like Koerner LIbrary. Someone somewhere has greatly overcompensated or estimated the prowess of the militant student-population and both their propensity to use, as well as their ability to find weapons of mass boredom. The still dungeons of the library, deking you with a facade of polished glass and right angles, has done spectacularly well in incubating some virus dwelling in me for I am sjivering with aches and pains in as many joints that I cannot name and I have one of those achy premonitions that I am falling ill. Perhaps it's from Trish - she insists otherwise. Who knows? I know only that I am feeling unwell and my senses are shutting down and trying to tell e to rest, and here I am, glutton for punishment that I am, hanging on to the flimsy notion that my list living thoughts are important enough to jot down for all those few, if any, willing to sit and read through the festering pile of what my primary 6 English teacher would have called, "utter tripe". Don't you have something else to do Mr. Wambeck?

Burning up...

Thought for everyone: (one that I shall repeat often) Supposition: if a God does in fact exist, and that God would be prefect in every which way, for there is no imperfect God, and therefore that God does not lie or cheat or falsely represent, and God has left his history and covenent to us in the form of written text, that this text should be correct has God has meant it to be and therefore correct as it is meant for us, then by definition, if one thing be proved in that word, then everything else in the word should be true also - for you cannot accept one thing and yet deny another.

That next time seems to have come sooner that I or you had thought. And as quicky as the compulsion to say more had entered my hands to continue the tap-tapping upon the soft-grey buttons or the keyboard, the train of though that had left the station so quickly, indeed before it had had the opportunity to pick up passengers, had derailed after passing the end of the platform. What weak ballast is that that it should be warm rice-porridge and not gravel? Borne aloft upon rails that alternate between the sturdy prongs of steel to the elasticized rubber that are the bits of chicken that dot my mother's weekend rice-porridge. No wonder the trains don't last long upon their route! Are we so smitten by this experiment gone absurd called life that upon the very end of it, wither at the death-bed or in the twinkling of an eye that is our last moment, that we say "yes" to the eternal record keeper? "Yes" to a return to try again, or do better, even to live the life with undenialble sameness. This struggle to contain ourselves, struggle to be free from the evils that bedog our effort - what compulsion drives our need to feel the timeless struggle between the fates? What sign is given in the midst of battle that signals our success or failure? What sounds of horn or trumpet, or wave of flag is given to show that this assault upon our unseen yet relentless foe has been successful?

I am weary of fight and in a wan smile, look with jealous eyes upon those who, whether by simplicity or acceptance, have gained some perch upon the battlements of the foe. Wither love, riches, family, health? Are these tanglibles as important as the struggle itself to banish hate, selfishness, fear, lying? Perhaps a more intricate and clear mind than mine shall expound the answers to us, but shall we believe? Shall we be so dry and thirsty as to believe the very first set of marauding aliens that arrive unannounced and who shall claim to be the forebears of our ancestors and the meddlers of our existence? Are we so short of memory and reading that we thrust our trust into the first hand that rears it's open grasp saying, "give it me, for it is mine"?

Have we come so far and so fast that we are so afraid of our own judgement? Verily, there are 2 powers at work. Quick shall be the one who would now label me and distance from me and my thoughts. Do you not trust upon that inner voice within that shouts without a voice? It shouts and screams injustice, heaped upon you and others and the world and yet you are mute. It calls upon the very ledger of heaven to record your doings all and whereupon you shall, and mark me now that the lingering eveil shall clasp it's hands over it's ears tightly and begets you to do the same, recount upon the last day and fall from your own lips all that you and I have done. I do not mean to chastize nor preach. It is merely a fixture of mine own spirit that hath spoken thus. I weep tears of happiness and those of lamentations upon our beautiful and bountiful Earth. "Theory of Plate Tectonics" - it still is a theory. "Theory of evolution" - this stillborn child of the mind of that traveller of the Beagle; Darwin, is still a theory and is being wrested from it's once unassailable seat upon the throne of man's tiny understanding. We really do not understand the world upon which we live. We have rejected the rules which were laid down for us and have appointed men to assign new ones acceptable to the merchants, politicians, bankers and heretical leaders in their place. The world that is our one Earth knows only one gardener.

Blog: weblog, web log. Does one actually exist if one does not exist electronically and be summed up at once by all those interested enough to peer into your mindless musings and meaningless meandering? Has expression found new soil in man's eternal quest to be heard and understood - if only by himself and then only barely so? Perhaps. I am, for now, happy. It is the wine in the middle of the glass, nether so light nor heavy in the mouth that thoughts transport your wants elsewhere. Shall there be a common sence of rant? Or will this be a forum of the singular? Shall I expound to the faithless readers upon one subject in this my self-destructive and introspective spiral that has been my existence this time, or perhaps it has always been like this; or should I be as the philosophers of old, carousing about the public places, with a class in tow, talking of everything and everyone? WHo knows? I am sure that it shall be as unstilled the bubbling brook that is my mind. Deep as the dark Pacific at night, lonely and haunting as the nameless soujourner in the woods, and as free as the Summer breezes. All these questions and still no answers. We are as one madly dashing car upon the rollercoaster of our destiny - careening towards to the precipice and yet the children within the car are as ever fighting. Our soul within yearns to reach and speak, not just with one another as we have done for millenia, but eventually to our one creator. Whence shall be the day and afternoon that we shall walk together again in the green gardens of our forgotten youth? To talk freely and ask, "What the blazes were you thinking"?

I shall write more again.