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Well, I’m back in Vancouver—

 

Sorry for the extreme lack of posting over the last bit of the trip. I got super busy there, which is what Montreal is for—and I wrote this and that, without finishing much. I’ll figure out what to do with that over the coming week or so.

 

Time for move on, in the next bit, anyway. Figure out what to do next and how to work it. My schedule is hilariously bad: I am working from 4 to 11:30 today and tomorrow, then I have some time off, then I go back and work a week of 7-230 shifts. If the travel and the jet lag didn’t wreck me, that will.

 

So it goes.

 

Slept in a little this morning, at least. Woke up and had a Wilensky sandwich, then got a massive volume of groceries to fill the empty fridge. Then I got back, unpacked, and now I’m up writing this. Kind of a bland entry, but social media presence means being present—so, hi.

 

What’s happening next? Well, I want to work on the website so it’s actually sorta functional as a website. Evan sent me some good advice, and I’ll revisit that. Also, want to finish fleshing out the stuff I wrote about the trip while I was on it, including all the handwritten stuff and the notes on my phone. I’ll be posting choice fragments of this, and also it’s such a huge volume of text that I might choose to do something more with it. Non-fiction novella or something. Memoir. I’ve never done non-fiction before, so the idea is a little strange and I’m unsure how to approach it, but why not?

 

Also need to finish those last two short stories. Get that collection nice and tidy and ready to send to Willow. Then get moving on self-pub for Vancouver Observed. A few balls I want to get rolling.

 

Finish studying for my driving test, too.

 

It’s good to be back—a week was a nice length for a visit, and now it’s time to digest. Take it slow for a few days.

 

...

 

The second half of the day was an attrition of small disappointments. Silly things, nothing that much worth commenting on. The quotidian sort of misery that you don’t even really notice, but which gets you down when you’re given something to contrast it with.

 

Okay, I’ll comment on it:

 

Public transit was extremely overcrowded. This was mildly annoying but basically alright, because I did manage to read standing and there was something kind of invigorating about it in the absence of any of the rest of it. I hadn’t gotten to work yet, it didn’t feel so bad; I managed to read, still. It was fine.

 

A: Work was blah, but it was fine. It wears on a person after too many hours of it, and there are always too many hours of it. Even if you can get small happinesses out of it, there is too much general wear for them to compete. I won’t get into it—even you understand, or you don’t. I also tried starting to describe it several times, and then simply hit delete: I don’t really want to parse though it. Etc. Etc.

 

B: I forgot to get a zucchini while buying groceries up at Stong’s earlier. I like having zucchini for breakfast, and I was hoping to have some tomorrow. So I thought that I would go to PriceMart (supermarket at the same parking lot as work, I get my lunch there often enough) on one of my breaks and pick up one. I go there, can’t find a zucchini. So I spend several minutes trying to find someone on the floor who can tell me where the zucchini are, looking for possible substitutes as I go (bitter melon? No, that would be weird on cream cheese. But note to self: try it once). I eventually find someone. I have to repeat myself a couple times when I say I’m looking for zucchini—they’ve never heard of that, and ask if I mean a tomato. I abandon them and head to customer service, dumping the iced tea I’m carrying in a basket of chips before I pass the cash registers so that nobody thinks I’m trying to steal it. At customer service I patiently wait for someone to finish buying cigarettes, and then come forward and ask to be shown where the zucchini is. They stare blankly at me for a half a minute before someone pokes someone else into showing me where to look. We pass back through the cash registers and I retrieve my iced tea as someone is getting upset at my helper for not opening another cash. When we do eventually find the place, we find out they don’t have any zucchini. That’s why I couldn’t find it. So, because I don’t want to have gone there for nothing, I buy some chicken breast, which I also need—the price of this has gone up, and it annoys me even though it shouldn’t be a surprise—and then stow in in the freezer at work.

 

C: Burrowing Owl has come in—this is a really well-reviewed Okanagan wine that only comes in once a year, at the beginning of December, in limited numbers. The price of the Merlot isn’t so bad, so I buy a bottle. It makes me a little happy—I’m a wine nerd, so sue me. I know I’ll lay it down and enjoy it in a few months, one of those small things, blah blah blah. I put it in a little brown paper bag with the receipt stapled on it and set it aside behind our customer service desk, per the rules we have going, and then resume my slow war of attrition.

 

(Also, there was free pizza. There to celebrate us getting 100% from the mystery shopper twice in a row. Free food year, but that kind of stodgy stuff usually ends up making me feel miserable when I have too much—and I did have too much. Pizza is good, and it was butter chicken too.)

 

D: So, a few more hours of this and I’m feeling very blah, and I’ve remembered the SkyTrain is still closing early due to the new station they’re building and so, because this shift is so late, I will have to call an Uber to get home. Probably because I’m so focused on this fact, which is not especially pleasant—although, talking to two of my co-workers outside the door while I’m waiting for said ride and they’re having cigarettes before departing, it’s not so awful to get to skip a long transit ride—I forget the wine and the chicken. I remember the wine as I’m in the Uber zipping past the airport, and it’s more intensely depressing than is probably reasonable. Wine is intensely symbolic to me, and I was looking forward to putting it away when I got home. The fact that I know I’m being silly somehow makes this worse. Then I also remember the chicken.

 

Damn it. Damn it. God damn it.

 

Now I’m sitting here writing, to sort of put it in perspective for myself. Or at least make something out of it. I’ll finish this and then go read.

 

Writing out does make it better. It really does.