My Favourite Situations, are Always Sticky Kinds, I'll be the First to Cast Stones, I don’t Let Sleeping Dogs Lie

Nothing like a little Danko Jones to pull me out of a week-long downturn in mood.

Basically, between the last time I posted and yesterday afternoon I didn't leave my house. I migrated between my bedroom and the living room, developing a method for turning our loveseat into a passable lounge chair in the process.

It as interesting in a morbid sort of way. Every day I just felt a little worse, a little less interested in things. By Wednesday of this week it took me most of the day to psyche myself up to go and buy groceries (having eaten every other possible item before even bothering to try).

There were various things compounding the problem. The most major one is that I basically live alone now. Every day I wake up around 10 to the sound of my roommates leaving to go to the library to study. The porker usually leaves within an hour after that. I usually spend this time malingering in bed listening to music.

Then I am alone in my house for the rest of the day. I study, I fiddle around on internet, I eat, and I watch MTV. My existence is pitiful. Around 6:30 or 7 the porker usually returns from work. I am pretty much always eating dinner watching MTV at this time. We have the same mechanical conversation where I ask him how work was, and then he goes down to his room. Shortly after that I usually go down to mine to study more, use internet (I may have said this before, but FF2.0 doesn't think internet is a word) more, and then read a little and go to bed. Until I ran out of reading material. Then I just went to bed. My roommates generally come home at around midnight and go straight up the stairs to bed.

Also, now that I don't have class I am basically the undisputed winner of all "I can go to bed later than you" contests with the porker. Still listening to sports highlights at 1:30 after a lengthy session of porking your girlfriend? No problem. Just let me cue up this 2 hour movie in VLC. I'll be sure to bumble around, take a piss, and trip over some grocery bags in the dark before I hit the sack.

Of course, I'm sure that that hasn't been going over too well with the man, so he mustered his cunning and found a new way to get even: On Wednesday morning I was awakened at 9:30, not by the sounds of Tito Puente issuing forth from my stereo, but by the sounds of vigourous porking through my wall.

Well played, porker, well played. I hope that you enjoy this uproarously loud Rage Against the Machine that's mysteriously begun pouring from my computer speakers. I've made sure to set the subwoofer at max.

Anyway, the only breaks were my aforementioned trip to the grocery store on Wednesday and a little get-together with Blake and Dan Monday afternoon. Blake had told me to meet him at the HMV in the plaza by our schools and I called Dan to see if he'd like to come along. Dan was in an exam at the time, but he had his phone set to vibrate, so I managed to annoy him very thoroughly for about 5 minutes before I hung up and decided to call him back in half an hour. At that point he was on his way to McDonalds to celebrate completing another exam unscathed. I told him to meet Blake and I when he was through.

It was a good time all in all. Blake and Dan bought things at HMV, I bought things at Sugar Mountain, we all went to McDonalds because Dan had mentioned it. Then we all went to Blake's and had meals in his cafeteria. After that we vegged out at my place for an hour or two. We watched this really funny video that someone showed Dan on internet, but I'm not going to link to it. It was that funny.

After that Dan drove Blake home and I slipped back into solitude.

My shopping trip on Wednesday was boring and uneventful. I had to spend several hours convincing myself that there was nothing for me to eat for dinner. Then I tried hard to think of what I would buy, as this would likely be my last shopping trip before the end of the term. After that, I wandered aimlessly around the store getting my groceries in no particular order. However, I did finally muster enough motivation to write a blurb about my apartment in order to sublet it. I posted said blurb on my school's website and hoped that someone would notice it.

The next day (Thursday) I had an exam, and was able to interact with people again. I've actually seen more of my roommates at the two exams I've had so far than any other time in between.

After the exam I went out with Tyler, Julie, Willis, another guy from my program named Jimmy, and Julie's smokin hot roommate. You know the one. We got dinner at East Side Marios and I told Julie that I'd pay her bill as I still owed her from the Chinese food incident in "Liam plays it cool with the females part 1". This was actually part of my cunning plan to get her drunk at dinner so that she'd come out with Willis and I afterwards instead of studying calculus with Jimmy. If she came, Tyler might come instead of going home to bed, and the smokin hot roommate might just hop along as well.

Unfortunately, as dinner progressed, it became apparent that the smokin roommate not only had an exam this (Friday) moring, but she also got light headed and nearly passed out in the bathroom for reasons which went unexplained to me. I did still get Julie drunk though.

After that I managed to keep our fracturing group together by suggesting we all go to Willis' place and cut my beard off. That's right. Several flaming shots of Sambuca later we were doing just that.

That's right folks. It's gone. Dead and gone. I haven't seen my neck in a year, and I'm happy to report that it hasn't defected to another country or anything in the intervening time. Any smokin hot females reading this right now, feel free to drop on by and inspect it for yourself. And by "inspect it" I mean "make sweet monkey love" and by "for yourself" I mean "in my freshly cleaned apartment". Yeah, I am still listening to Danko Jones. And yeah, I really did just clean my apartment.

So, after the spectacle of my face was revealed to our little group of adventurers, it looked like things were going to splinter off again. Tyler and Jimmy were looking to get home, the roommate looked like she might be in trouble if she didn't get to bed (alone) soon, and one of Willis' roommates had made fun of Julie for being drunk and surly, so now she didn't want to go out.

I played my last card.

...

The room stood silent for a number of seconds.

Most of them didn't believe me. I had to restate, and look strongly into people's eyes. I still didn't manage to convince anyone else to come out with Willis and I though, and everyone left soon after.

Willis and I talked about it. Eventually we branched off into general discussions of life, politics, etc. We were both a little drunk so we got pretty heated up over a few differences in opinion. It was a great time.

One of his roommates drove us out to The Duke of Wellington pub to start the night. The Duke is a great place to sit down and enjoy a drink. The table had a large TV with sports highlights on one side, and a great view of the live band on the other. I was the only person sitting on one side of the table. 3 screwdrivers later (piled on the 3 at dinner and the shots I'd had at Willis'), Willis and I packed up and rolled out. We walked almost a block, pausing only to urinate across the street from a cop-shop, to The Silver Spur.

The Spur is a place that I... would never ever go to sober if given a choice. If you couldn't tell from the name, the Spur is a hick bar. Or rather, a place where hick students and "hicks" get together in the middle of a bustling city to get hammed and start fights. However, this night it was rather amusingly filled with kids from my program all getting hammed and... singing karaoke. It's worth noting that I entered the bar quite a few steps behind Willis, my ID having been scrutinized harder by the bouncer than it ever was when I had a beard. No one from my program recognized me.

Willis saw a bunch of his friends (regulars, not the interlopers grinding in front of the karaoke stage) and we stood with them for a while. My Yngwie Malmsteen cap carved a good conversational niche for me, and I think that I did pretty well in spite of the fact that I really know nothing of guitar in general or of 80s shredders in particular. I bought a round for Willis and myself and settled in for a long haul. An hour later all of his friends had gone home, and we left shortly thereafter.

And by "left" I mean "went to another bar called The Fox and the Fiddle".

The Fox (seeing a trend?) is another reasonably decent sit-down pub sort of place. It's named like a pub, and sort of looks like a pub, but there are definitely some bar genes in its family tree somewhere. At any rate, I'd been there once before, and the live music was quite impressive. We stumbled in about 15 minutes before last call and sat down to see what the entertainment was like.

5 minutes before last call we made our exit. Two guys with guitars don't meet my taste at the best of times. When I'm drunk I get this uncontrollable urge to jam. I wasn't really interested in hearing lots of good classic rock songs without any drums behind them. Fuck acoustic music. Play it all you want to your girlfriend at home, but keep it out public places.

Anyway, that was the peak of the evening. We walked back up King St. talking boisterously. We stopped for subs, and then cut through side streets and backyards back to Willis' place. We were halfway through an episode of Fresh Prince on YTV when I heard my bed faintly calling my name over the night breeze. I bid Willis a good night and went on my way.

I breached my front door at about 3:30, attempting to make as little noise as possible on the way downstairs to my room. I performed my nightly pre-bed email check, and found that I'd already gotten 3 responses for my sublet posting. One of them mentioned that he had also left me a voicemail, so of course I clomped back up to the mail floor to listen to it.

After replying to two of the inquiries I hit the sack.

I woke up today at 12:30 to the sound of someone in the house beside me playing loud rap. I felt that not responding to this challenge might foster the wrong impression in my neighbour, so I booted my computer and set up a counter-bombardment. One of the guys I'd responded to earlier that night had already emailed me back again asking to view the house around 6:15 today. So I spent the afternoon cleaning my room and then the staircase down to it. Seriously, it's so clean right now that I could bring girls here. You know. If there were any who felt like dropping by.

So that's that really. The dude didn't show up to look at my apartment. I'm gonna have to email him about that, because I was really excited about it.

Oh yeah. Here's the big news:

The astute among my readership may have noticed that I neglected to mention what my "last card" was in the story above, cleverly replacing it with "..."

I've told a few of you already, so this won't come as a surprise to too many people reading this, but it's time to make it official and make sure that everyone's on the same page.

What do I and this toolbox have in common?

We're both college dropouts. I'm finishing off this term at my school and then I'm tendering my withdrawal. I'll be in Stratford living at home and working where I always work. I don't see that changing for a year-ish. I might very well come back here after, but right now I'm sick of feeling like I'm trapped at school with no other alternatives.

That's that basically. If anyone's jonesing for a place to live in Waterloo from May to August, drop me a line.