If I Ever Meet Steve, I Will Pass Along the Message

So last night we were at the pub, hanging out with some old friends and some new ones - always fun - when I discovered that someone had written "fuck you Steve" on one of the bathroom stalls. Which got me to thinking - what is the point? Will the mysterious Steve ever see this little message? It is unlikely, unless he spends inordinate amounts of time hanging out in the women's washroom, in which case, I guess I could understand the sentiment. I can't even understand how cathartic it could have possibly have been, as ballpoint pen flows so easily on a clean painted surface. So, I started wondering about who this Steve was, and the anonymous girl who was so upset with him she felt the need to vent her spleen on a bathroom wall. Did he break her heart? Irritate her with some intractable position on the literary importance of Tomson Highway? Skip out on his bar tab?

These thoughts skittered around my head until a half remembered story about a guy who was doing a travel book about public washrooms around the world vaguely came to the surface of my consciousness. If indeed, there ever was such a book, I would have liked it to include the women's washroom from Cafe Wim, during the mid 1990's. This washroom wasn't covered with the usual epithets and lovestuck declarations most washrooms are. This one, much to the chagrin of the owners I am sure, had every available inch of writable space covered with poetry, and long drawn out discussions about philosophy and the meaning of art, conducted entirely by strangers. People would write their poetry, others would deconstruct it, and long debates would be waged, all within the confines of this one small space, all happening between people who would perhaps pass each other in the hall, or sit next to each other in the small cafe, but never sign their names. A couple of years ago, Cafe Wim closed it's doors, and the space it used to gracefully occupy is now an aggressively upscale restaurant/martini bar. I met my husband at that cafe, so many years ago, and I must say, that although the menu was over priced, the owners kinda crazy, the service purposefully slow and the coffee really bad - I am so sad it is gone.

Work, Work, Work

Sadly, I haven't had much time to update this darn thing, but I have been working six days a week at my supposedly part time job. Certainly better than being unemployed, but it doesn't leave much time for blogging. Or laundry. Or dishes. Luckily, it doesn't leave much time for socializing either, so no one has had to suffer the disastrous state of my kitchen!

The Top Five All Time Breakup List

1. J. was my first boyfriend, so by law must be ranked as number one. Before that first boy, your heart is all shiny and new, full of hope and too many teen movies. That first boy is so exciting, everything is all fresh and interesting, and cynicism has yet to unroll it's sleeping bag and take up camp in your head. When you get your first "real" boyfriend, everything is defined within this new reality - first "real" date, first "real" kiss, first "official" walk hand in hand to homeroom as a couple. The first boy doesn't have to compete with anyone else for space to etch their name on your psyche. So, for that, he gets the coveted top spot. Well, that and the fact he broke up with me during a school dance. Being dumped by your first boyfriend in public at the Spring Fling is asking too much for the teenaged heart to bear. On the upside, as he did dump me in public, it meant I got to cry in the girl's bathroom while girls who would normally never deign to speak to me offered me hugs and lip gloss. After all, crying in the girl's washroom is a rite of passage up there with sneaking out of your bedroom window to meet the boy who will eventually make you cry in the girl's washroom, right?

2. T. He thinks he should be listed first, as our break up was terribly sad and traumatic, and probably he should, but he loses points because we are now great friends and he was in my wedding party. This means I can't claim total emotional scarring and mental trauma while in the pub comparing war stories, because he is usually there to make sure I don't exaggerate too much, and what fun is that? We dated for about two years. Apparently, to this day, people persistently believe I broke up with him and shattered him forever, turning him into the bitter and twisted man he is today. Sorry folks, he was that way when I found him. For the record, he broke up with me. Not only that, but he woke me up at 2am so he could tell me he was breaking up with me, and walk out the door and out of my life five minutes later. Though, in all truth, the out of my life part didn't last that long. Funny thing is, it took twice as long as we actually spent dating to get our non-dating relationship to the point of friends who *don't* annoy the crap out of each other at every opportunity.

3. Third in the list is another T. Sigh. You know, it's probably a good thing he broke my heart, because I get to remember how fabulously cool he was before he grew up and became boring. So boring. White picket fence and goin' huntin' deer boring. So sad. In high school, he was the coolest. So very pretty, with a motorcycle and the aura of danger faintly clinging to his leather jacket. He was older, old enough to be interesting, but not too old, because that's just plain creepy. Sadly, we had nothing in common other than being attracted to one another - not politics, religion, movies, music or books - he liked hunting, and I was a vegetarian. Of course, when you are young, the "attracted to each other" part is the only one that matters. So our relationship progressed for several months, and then, one sunny afternoon on my parent's back porch, he broke up with me. I learned later that he was apparently afraid that he loved me more than I did him. This was my introduction to the "hurt someone else in order to save oneself from theoretical future hurt" concept of relationships.

4. D. has the distinction of having spawned an entire theory. The theory goes that every girl has to date a crazy person at some point in their lives, however brief, to understand what crazy truly is. This is preferably done before the girl is old enough to get married or something equally as permanent. At this point, the girl has a choice. To continue to date crazy people, and wonder why all men suck so much, or to decide that crazy is a lot more fun from behind a bag of popcorn at the theatre than it is when it is standing at your door at 7pm on a Friday night. D. holds that honour. He broke up with me on Christmas Day - he gave me my Christmas present and then said; "Oh, by the way...." How very sweet. The next week he was going to the movies with one of my best friends.

He was the person who made me realize that as much as I like a little delightful eccentricity, full stop insane wasn't my cup of tea. Sadly, I also chose him to learn another important dating truth: stupid on and off again relationships are like day old donuts - stale and crumbly, and never improve with age. Not only was there the Christmas Day breakup, there was the day before Valentine's Day break up and the long distance phone break up from England. That was expensive. About there it got boring, and I let him go and break up a couple of dozen times with his old girlfriend. Apparently she hadn't taken any little epiphanies out of the first ten times they dated.

I am sure you are amazed I actually dated this guy more than once. I admit, it took me a little longer to figure out the truth about crazy than it should have - I claim being sixteen as my excuse. Sixteen has far too many cultural connotations attached to it in our society, and I truly believe that it would have been best if I had spend that year buried in the backyard, and arranged to be dug up the day after my seventeenth birthday.

5. Brian wasn�t horribly traumatic, but rates as number five for the simple fact that he claimed he broke up with me because I had cut my hair. With an excuse like that, he deserves to be immortalized.

In honour of High Fidelity I have decided to post my Top Five Breakup List, but it will have to wait until after Buffy The Vampire Slayer, because it's the wedding episode, and I am a girl.

The Sound of Silence is Highly Underrated

I like my job, I really do. But, if I have to hear that "Can't Fight The Moonlight" song one more time, I am going to go stark, raving mad.

I am Pretty Sure I Didn't Learn About That In Biology Class

I was awfully productive at work today. I redid a multitude of displays - 22 shelves to be exact. This involved taking all 3 billion items off the shelves, washing them down, and then rearranging everything.

The hardest part was trying to make our newest shipment look attractive. Imagine, if you will, sculptures of chickens, ducks and roosters made from steel wool. These masterpieces vary in height from 6 inches to 2 feet tall. They look remarkable like the frames used for making paper mache, except with little glass eyes attached. The scariest part of these things are that the larges birds have 2 plastic eggs inside of them - even the roosters! Making a display of these things look like anything less than a scene out of Trilogy of Terror was a feat, let me tell you. I am sure that my dreams tonight will involve being chased down by rabid transgendered roosters.

Alrighty then. This week's Friday Five bored the heck out of me, so I am not going to bother.

Well, I'll answer question #2, because it amused me a little.

2.Where do you consider to be the biggest hell-hole on earth?

That would be Hull, which being a border town to a province with a higher drinking age, is a haven for drunken teenagers, crawling from bar to bar, waiting for their lives to start . It is scuzzy and yucky, and once the weekend revelers clear out, it is just plain sad. Although they did try to spruce the place up by putting in a major museum. It didn't help much. Once a person hits 19, they try their hardest never to visit again. Oh yeah, and it's the place where I was once trapped in a bar until 5 am, while the police tried to subdue some idiot who was waving a gun out on the sidewalk, threatening to kill the first person to leave the building.

Although it ranks as the number one hell hole in my book, I must admit that it does hold some fond memories for me, in that teenage-rite-of-passage sort of way. Even so, I don't think I will be visiting any time soon.