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Shadrack Topango |
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Our new apartment is the top middle(more pictures on facebook, my computer's too slow with livejournal to put them all up here). The last several weeks have been spent preparing for the move and tying up loose ends in Ottawa. Trying everything I love in Ottawa one more time before we go. Sounds elegiac, but really it's been a lot of fun. Dated someone which was a lot of fun and I learned a lot about myself and her, we may not have ended on the best of terms but I think (and hope) that it was good for us in the end. Met some new friends, Andrew and Joe, who are both really fun to be around, very stylin', strapping young guns who we should be partying with one more time before we go. Its too bad that we didn't meet them earlier. Canada day was a lot of fun as seen below (can you see the fun?).


The Past two days have been spent cleaning the apartment, which was pretty disgusting. It seems like it hasn't been lived in for sometime. Walking in bare feet made our feet black, and there was old mouse shit in the bottom of some of the cupboards. But now it's much cleaner and feels more safe and homey, and our landlord, who seems super nice but may not be so when he sees all our instruments when we move, gave us a bunch of furniture and a microwave, so now we don't have to move as much stuff. I bought slipcovers online so it won't be so gross to sit on garbage couches.
I also had four encounters with socially awkward/mentally handicapped/homeless/fucking lunatics over a period of two days. On the STO bus at 9 in the morning, there's this younger dirty-tracksuit-wearing-bad-haircut guy in the front of the bus, and he goes down the bus asking for change. He asks Cindy for change and she says "no" and he asks me if I have a transfer and I say "no" and he asks the same thing again and I say "no" and so he looks angrily at me and flips me off as he walks back to his seat, and I fake laugh at him, because being the hubristic male that I am I can't let a guy think that he's any threat to me. The second guy was on the Greyhound bus, he was just a middle aged guy who started talking to me, I think he was just lonely. He wasn't so bad to talk to, just seemed lonely and hard to understand, we talked about books and Montreal's jazz fest. He looked like Alfred Molina. The third guy was a thirty-something carpet-kid, on the Verdun Metro escalator, was singing loudly to The Cure before shouting "excuse me" twice to get my or anyone who would turn around attention. So I turn around "yeah?" and he asks "do you speak English?" and I say "yeah". And he asks if I knew where there was an Apple store so he could get his Ipod fixed, and I tell him no way there's one out here in Verdun, that he should go downtown. He says he's been to the Eaton's center because someone told him there was one there, and I said that that person was right and that it was there, but he asks "is it hidden?" and I say "as hidden as a store can be, I don't know check the directory" and he keeps ranting about not being able to find one and I try to get out of the conversation by just telling him that I didn't know where one was and couldn't help him.
The fourth guy we met on the metro. We're about to Leave Lionel-Groulx and this old homeless looking guy with a nasty white ponytail gets on shouting "Berri!?" "Berri!?" and someone responds "oui". He sits across from us and looks as if he's going to sleep, but then he starts waving to get our attention, and he does these hand signals to me and Cindy and James, in which he points at us, and points at his head, and makes his feet make these big steps, and he looks very at peace with himself. He gets me to take his hand and I do because I figure I'll just roll with it to diffuse his craziness, and he closes his eyes as if meditating, meanwhile I'm praying against him because for all I know he's some possessed witch doctor, or at least thinks he is. And he stops and gives me the thumbs up and I give it back, and he says something I assume to be his words of wisdom but I couldn't hear him over the metro. And so he closes his eyes again. the he starts waving to get our attention, and he does his hand signals again and we all sort of try and pay less attention this time because it looks like he's going to keep it up for a long time, but then he smacks the inside of James' thigh, and shouts something angrily about how he's not listening or something, it was loud and he spoke quickly in french so we couldn't catch a lot of it. And the he gets up and stands above James starts making a motion to smack James on the head, and we're all just looking at him and Cindy's saying "touche pas!" at him but he keeps on threatening to do it. And I get up and say "touche pas a mon ami" and he says "lui c'est mon ami" and I poke my fingers to the hobo's shoulder and say "non c'est mon ami" and the metro stops and he pretends to get off but then gets back on and leans on James and James pushes him off, and we yell "touche pas!" at him and he leans over in my face and waves his fists around and says "je vas te battre" over and over and says something about how I would just call the cops on him if he did, and James pushes him back with his legs and the guy gets off at the next stop. When the doors close he smacks hard on the window and smiles and waves goodbye to us, and we wave back breathing a sigh of relief, and suddenly the rest of the train is aware of the situation, and girls start giggling beside us, and James gestures to where the hobo had been at the window and says to the girls "yeah me and him, we were good friends".
I just finished reading You Suck: A Love Story by Christopher Moore. I didn't think I'd like it, because for one I don't like Vampires and for another I don't like romance novels. Thankfully it ended up being more humourous than romantic and had a lot of plot lines and good characters, and any novel that uses "spooge" in the first chapter is worth another look. I'd reccomend it, easy read and good to just pick up and read whenever, but has enough going on if you're looking for something more.
This ends my hiatus, but I'm not promising a one a day blog or anything. Don't put any expectations on me! Happy Independence day everyone!
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