Transportation situation more or less resolved, feeling more gooder now, and in comparison to some lives mine isn’t really so bad. I mean the WOE is more or less a subjective measure. And the other lives I am referring to are… Sunny McCreary’s.

Michael H. Kelly wrote another book! I can only assume it will be a suckfest of brobdingnagian proportions, which isn’t an insult because that was the goal. It is available for the very reasonable cost of seven squids, so go buy a copy!

(If any grammarians would like to interject that I ended the title of my post with a preposition, drop dead. I am in a grouch today with.)

(Note: free-consciousness rambling, feel free to ignore, I just have to vent or else I’ll explode into a volcano of tears again.)

So, the new job - hooray! It starts June 30th.

But my carpool guy just e-mailed to say “No, you can’t!” They work in a slightly different area of the plant. It would add a whole extra ten minutes every morning! Ah, so. After three weeks of searching and asking, this was the only carpool available. Evidently Sherritt has 600 employees and only two who live anywhere near downtown. Great.

Rent at my new place is lots of money and coming from Calgary downtown, listen, when I say lots, I mean lot$. Parking is an extra $175 monthly. Plus gas, plus insurance. If I drove, I would have to cut out luxuries like food and electricity. And I don’t have a car. And Sherritt is paying me $14,000 less than Imperial Oil. Such is the price of sanity.

If I stay here at my parents’ place in the Stalbert, I would have free parking. I could steal my brother’s car to drive to Sherritt and he could take the bus. But… living at home again. Sanity?

Plus, can I really break my lease at this point?

What if I do break it, decide to live with Mr. and Mrs. Bonkers, and then immediately find some other way to get to Sherritt from downtown? I shall die. (That is the entirety of the plan.)

What if I can’t break my lease, move in, and have no way to get to my workplace? I shall die homeless and alone because of lack of money. Or I shall die in my parents’ basement. It is unfinished “for tax purposes” (i.e. laziness) and that means my death might be on a concrete floor under exposed wiring and a dripping tap. Which is very Russian-gulag-novel and not so much how I pictured my death.

The move was so horrible. Much worse than my other five moves. I am covered in bruises and black widow spiders, someone else who lives in the building did something underhanded/illegal yesterday that I am being blamed for (and may be fined $300 for because it’s my word against nobody’s), it took two days instead of one - and that meant two drives back and forth from Calgary in the past 48 hours. My arse hurts. My head hurts. I am tired of being so tired that I cry from tiredness every nine minutes. I hate crying in front of people. It seemed like everything went wrong at once. And I thought everything was turning around like in a good way. But it kept turning and now we’re back to bad.

I miss my Calgary friends. I didn’t get to see a couple of them at my going-away party and now I may never see them again. (Due to spontaneous death, see above.) Glass tables are heavy. Steam burns blister and hurt. A bottle of Captain Morgan’s smashed on the mailroom floor. The fumes helped for about two minutes, then we all got nauseated.

I should quit my job before it starts and spend all day in my old bedroom wrapped in a quilt. That seems like the best option at this point. And all over a lack of transportation and a bad move.

Who took away my good life that I was supposed to be starting? I don’t even want to go to my high-school reunion now for I am all self-pity and woe. How can I drink and play pool when I am full of WOE? This life isn’t worth the… yeah.

Move-out inspection on Wednesday

Spilled Thai red curry on carpet half an hour ago

Can’t feel left arm: pinched nerve?

Severe steam burn on right middle finger: defective kettle

Can’t touch-type

Still need to finish packing

SOS SOS SOS SOS

SEND CHOCOLATE

Spurred by the delicious Von’s offer to move in with me and share the ol’ queen-sized in my new place, I turned around and took a good hard look at my bed-sharing quirk. It’s a pretty small quirk (perhaps a quark?) - I just have a really hard time sleeping if I’m not alone in my bed.

I don’t know where it came from, really I don’t. The first I remember hearing about it was when my parents took me (aged approximately ?two?) to stay with relatives in Toronto, and my uncle’s place didn’t have a crib so they just put a mattress down on the floor and Mom and I were supposed to sleep on that. Apparently I kept getting out and wandering around at night, and in the morning they would find me asleep wherever I had dropped - stairs, kitchen floor, whatever. I slept fine for naps on that mattress, but I had to be alone. Weird, no?

I don’t think anything particularly traumatized me into wanting to sleep alone (I do share beds under protest, and usually when beverages are involved so I fall asleep before the quirk kicks in - though sometimes I freak out when I wake up the next morning to another person in the bed. This happened at a friend’s wedding, when I woke up and rolled over to find myself eyeball-to-nipple with my assigned bedmate, who hadn’t mentioned he slept in the nude). In Guyana, I had to share a bed with my mother, and ended up rolling against the mosquito net every night; in the morning, there would be precise rows of bites along my arm where it had pressed against the netting. And it hasn’t come up much with boyfriends, believe it or not; I would do a lot to avoid spending the night, or if the guy had come to visit me when I lived alone, I would usually end up just lying awake till he woke up and got out of bed, and then I’d just sleep in while he did whatever people do in the mornings. (Seriously!)

Having another person in the bed just makes me intensely uncomfortable, that’s all. Just the… I have no idea. The other person’s heat, the breathing, the mass, the small involuntary movements, the AAARRGHHH I just gave myself a massive dose of the screaming heebie-jeebies.

So what the heck am I going to do if I ever get involved with a guy again (ha! Fat chance) and the issue of spending the night comes up? Consulting the Voice of Reason in my head, we came up with the following list:

1. Tell him I’m saving it for marriage, wait till he proposes, make him buy a large house, then spring it on him after we move in. Sleep in second bedroom with visitation rights as needed.

2. Tell him, then make him buy bunk beds.

3. Tell him, then make him buy twin beds to put on either side of sizeable bedroom, as per most sitcoms before the 1980s.

4. Tell him, then make him buy a canopy bed. Install a hammock in the canopy.

5. Don’t tell him, and sneak out of bed every night to sleep on the couch. Sneak back into bed just before alarm goes off every morning.

6. Don’t tell him, and build a little shed in the backyard for him to live in. Tell him it’s one of the major tenets of Cathomuslinduism and there’s no arguing with religion. Then, to keep up the facade, garnish his breakfast with a communion wafer every morning and make him eat it facing Mecca.

7. Don’t tell him, but install clear plastic wall down center of bed and tell him it helps my allergies. If he asks what I’m allergic to, I’ll tell him “Being poked awake.”

Other suggestions?

After one interminable morning dragging my (cranky, whining, and above all cheap-ass) father around Edmonton, I found an apartment. So that’s part one of the Move of Doom taken care of - next comes the other stuff, packing and cleaning and driving and probably crying of exhaustion at 3:30 a.m. on the very last day, as often happens.

I went to the hospital with the good news. Mom said, “How much are you paying?” I said, “A little bit more than my current place.” That, at least, is true. The rent is only $150 more than I’m paying here. “That’s disgusting,” she said, “that’s way out of your budget, you’ll go broke in six months, you should have picked a much cheaper place so you could save money.”

A lot of replies lined up in my head and waited patiently behind my teeth, waiting to jump out and yell at a woman who’d just had major surgery and was doped up on three different types of painkillers. So I shrugged instead.

What I really wanted to say was that I am sick unto death of being told I should live in a dive to save money. Guess what? I did that twice - Saskatoon and the first time in Calgary. I saved lots of money. I also came home to headlights shining on my living room/bedroom wall all night (Saskatoon), one silverfish that sent me into hysterics and caused me to draw up a Rube-Goldberg-y device involving dental floss, borax, a flashlight, twenty feet of acetate sheeting, and a hammer (Saskatoon), a front step literally filled corner to corner with fresh blood (Calgary), deafening pipe noises causing up to six months of insomnia (Saskatoon and Calgary), and cigarette smoke curling up through my sink and down from my bathroom vents (here, right here).

When you first move out, you expect to get a place that sucks. You expect to suffer. It’s even kind of funny, in a way - and of course, it builds character. The experience of living in that bachelor pad in the Toon was something I wouldn’t give up for the world. I was right next to the boiler room and after a couple of months without much sleep, I could hear the boilers talking to me at night. Of course, they also told me I couldn’t repeat the secrets they were telling me. Sorry.

But I’m twenty-six now. And perhaps it will sound pretentious if I say I deserve a nicer place to live, but I will say it and I think I do deserve it. Listen, when I got into my apartment yesterday I shut the door behind myself and almost dropped to my knees in despair and disgust. Although I had taken out all the trash, I hadn’t left my air purifier on (I had to get a goddamn air purifier to live here!) for the four days I was gone; and although I hadn’t left any doors or windows open either, it stank. The reek hit me like the flat of a shovel. It was the smell of stagnation, smoke, age, neglect - a stench immovable by any air freshener, candle, burner, or vats of Febreze. It was the smell of a dive. The smell of a place where a young urban professional might camp out for a while, but never ‘live.’

I can’t open my doors in the heat of summer because my neighbours on three sides smoke pot, and the fourth smokes cigarettes, and the smoke blows in like quilts. At night, I wake up every hour on the hour to yet another siren, yet another riot, yet another stupid or unlucky drug dealer running circles around my block screaming for help. In the year that I’ve lived here, there have been four reported murders within fifty metres of my building. I can’t even fit a full-sized cookie sheet in my oven. It’s too small. I have to use a ten-inch pizza pan when I bake cookies. And never mind the fact that our water gets cut off at least three times a month for repairs. Never mind that I’ve had to wash my face using water collected the night before, left out overnight, and heated on the stovetop in a wok.

So I think what I was saying to my mother with that shrug was, “I think I deserve a change.” To live in a newer building, with hardwood floors so I don’t have to die of carpet dust every time I get a respiratory infection, with a storage room so I don’t have to have all my spare cereal and toothpaste sitting on the floor, with a dining room perhaps large enough to seat more than one, with a bathroom perhaps of a size where I could step out of the shower and not have to crash directly into the counter. To have room to correctly partition my stuff - and no, I don’t have that much ’stuff,’ aside from books. Filling out the movers’ cube sheet I find I don’t even have the rudiments of urban living, such as a coffee table or a couch or a barbecue or a filing cabinet or an entertainment system or a gun cabinet.

Just once, I’d like to live somewhere civilized. Just once, I’d like to see what it’s like to come ‘home’ rather than just ‘back to the apartment.’ Even if it’s only for a few months.

Just once, I’d like to live in a place that doesn’t make me feel worthless.

And I think that’s worth the extra $150.