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Text of the page (random words):
ve loved this guy i think about him fixing the vcr at my ramshackle undergrad house so we could watch cube a priority for some reason one day we will brag to our kids that we loved each other when there were still vcrs and when people still blew into nintendos and when no one had cell phones so i had to get used to talking to his parents on the landline there are benefits to all this for one he is having the time of his life job friends ocean something called japadogs when i went to see him last month he practically turned himself inside out trying to show me all the things he loves about the west coast and my legs fell off from all those stanley park miles normally i am the one to bring the outclassed enthusiasm to any event it s a novelty to see him so overtly gratified and life is mostly sunshine and candy for me too fabulous new job that still makes me weak kneed with happiness a gorgeous enormous apartment that i get to live in on my own without paying the rent on my own big and little plans that take over the controls just when i m about to implode with loneliness and the cat of course claiming d s empty black office chair with a donut shaped ring of white fur like it s been his forever d would be happier if we were together and sometimes knowing that is enough this is not a problem it s just momentary reality and in the meantime i have filled that empty half of the mattress with books which may not give off as much warmth but they don t tickle and they go to bed at the same time that i do voici moi august 18 2013 in creative nonfiction tags career childhood goals work 4 comments exhibit a the neediness that began in mme henry s grade 2 french immersion class and has never really abated also this might be the only time in fiction or fact when you will see a rendering of me in heels tu aimes moi i started a new job two weeks ago and i am as i ve said to anyone who s asked dreamily suspended in the glowing embryonic honeymoon stage of love the feeling around my new workplace is very be who you are there is no sanding down the edges no drinking from the same punch bowl you identify as nerdball fly that flag brother call yourself literary here s the perfect spot for your vintage olympia we all grew up on the you are special curriculum and now somehow we ve stumbled together into a workplace that lets us be as affectionately peculiar and obsessive and eclectic as our special a hearts desire it s wonderful and to borrow from the parlance of the industry it drives results clients are happy we are happy every day is like a long rib cracking down home group hug with beer on fridays but here s the question where do i fit into that here is the question again this time demonstrated visually two empty shelves on the wall behind my desk i have to decide what to put on these shelves and whatever i decide even if it s nothing will broadcast something about me i could be anyone to my new colleagues only a couple of them really know much about me personally and what they know i ve managed to control in the low lit bars and plushy living rooms where we ve hung out in manageable chunks of time over vessels of alcohol that help me sustain an aura of writerly pensiveness but now we re going to be together for forty plus hours a week and only a few of those will be fortified by vessels of any kind i need to decide yes of course i will be myself but which self should i be and how should i express that on these three parallel plains which will shout my identity such as i curate it to the whole office current and woefully predictable shortlist of ideas 1 a carefully selected mini library this presents its own agony what do i want the chosen titles to say about me is alice munro too predictable victor hugo too pretentious what about strunk and white too didactic or should i really commit to flying my flag and include my boxed set of 90s era ya and degrassi dvds i am paralyzed by indecision 2 pug stuff starting with a pug shaped bookend that sat in place of pride in my last office but even i am finding the fact of my pug love contrasted by the lack of a pug of my own increasingly tiresome and there is the danger that i will give my new colleagues this one very plain 2 dimensional fact about me and will forever receive pug paraphernalia at every occasion as punishment not that such a state of affairs would be at all difficult to endure 3 paris stuff taken on its own not one of these three themes really tells a complete story and i am afraid of creating some kind of clichéd pigeonhole in which i ll reside forever is that where i want to begin with these nice new people seems to me that it was easier to have an identity when we were all little kids and no identify was expected of us our parents chose what was put on display in our bedrooms our teachers chose the wall art in our school hallways and all we had to do was learn to add and divide turn bread mould into science and spell ten new words a week in that kind of environment we really could be whatever the hell we wanted and it was okay if we changed our minds daily i went through the usual fluid succession of career identities that other girls my age went through what the hell made us all want to be marine biologists in grade three but even then i sort of knew well not sort of i knew very very specifically i was going to be a writer it seemed as easy as that to me this is what i am going to do this is who i am going to be after all when you were a kid it didn t take much to be anything at all want to be a firefighter here put on this red plastic helmet and bash these toy fire engines around and if you wanted to be a writer all you had to do in my estimation anyway was announce the fact to your whole class during the sixth grade public speaking competition and because i was already cultivating the bad habits that still plague me today i went several hundred feet too far and used that speech to give myself very specific context i would not only be a writer but i would be one who lived in newfoundland somehow lodged in my brain as a place of fog friendship and free range seaside adventure sort of a benign lord of the flies in a house that would be half on the ground and half hanging out over the edge of a cliff i never won any prizes for engineering these facts were all enthusiastic elements of that sixth grade speech along with some whole grain details about newfoundland s natural history which i used to sneak the real message past the academic gatekeepers and the real message was this whether you are twelve years old or twenty nine discovering the identity you want to broadcast to the world doesn t have to be complicated just make it up and give it a mansion on a cliffside or three deep wide shelves on the wall above your desk i am writing a thing january 8 2013 in fiction tags writing 12 comments did you know that stephen king is the author of more than fifty books i am the author of exactly zero books and this is why stephen king is allowed to publish something with the uppity title of on writing a memoir of the craft and people will read it by the millions and quote it to one another and even pay for it i on the other hand with my exactly zero books can only publish a blog post with the self effacing title of i am writing a thing and people will maybe wander over to it when they are bored and quote it to no one and pay nothing for the privilege this thing that i am writing is not a book though i can hope it might be one day but it is a written thing and it has characters and dialogue and tense rife with feeling plot development it stars two high school seniors named celia and curtis who tell their stories in alternating chapters because this is something that julian barnes does and if you have to start somewhere why not start with one small toe planted in the enormous booker winning shoes of old jb so celia and curtis they are very much the opposite of one another because opposites are interesting but they are giving me a hard time they are evasive and private and i cannot quite wrestle them to the ground and force them to tell me who they are so i have taken some advice left behind for me in a dismal grad school classroom i am staging conversations with my characters in order to get to know them better it s a fun exercise because i get to enjoy the virtuous feeling of writing something without the annoying self doubt of writing something that might actually be part of the thing me who are you celia celia birkshire craw me let me write that down celia birkshire is a stone fence craw is a manure pile me is that so celia that s how i see it me and what about celia celia celia is a disease but i like it me you like having a name that sounds like a disease celia you know how many julies there are in my graduating class twelve i would rather be my own remarkable disease than share a lame one with millions of others people medical people write papers and articles about rare diseases no one writes about the common cold me is that how you see this project like a study of you celia stone fence manure pit a rare thing celia me and curtis langford me yes you and curtis celia brooding silence me you don t want to share this project with curtis celia i just don t get it why him he s such a dude he s vacant me what do you think he would say about sharing this project with you celia that he s humbled to be considered worthy except he wouldn t know what those words meant me actually i did tell him celia and me he gave me a blank stare celia see nothing going on me and then he said celia don t me don t celia i already know what he said me what celia he said wait you mean that faker chick me what does that mean celia i might as well tell you since you re making this all up anyway i used to pretend i was sick me sick with what celia i dunno anorexia brain tumours tourettes that was a fun one whatever came to mind me is that the affliction you want to have a tendency to fake illness celia do i have a choice me nothing s really been set in stone yet we can make changes we can edit celia hm me but you need an affliction something to overcome by the end celia maybe i could be religious or an orphan or a lesbian curtis would say wait that orphaned religious lesbian chick me i want you to pick one celia celia this is boring me writing a book is mostly boring celia then why are you doing it me this is about your motivations not mine celia but who am i me who are you celia i m lonely me you are celia there you go my affliction loneliness me that s not very unique i want you to pick something between orphaned religious lesbian chick and lonely chick celia go talk to curtis i ll get back to you portrait of al s diner and also somewhat of myself november 27 2012 in creative nonfiction tags adventure friends nostalgia ottawa phone calls public transit travel leave a comment i got a mysterious phone call again i hoped it was katya rescinding her abrupt dismissal from the last and only time we talked but no it was shannon and it was a voicemail shannon gets down to business hey megan i work at al s diner your bus pass was found outside i won t mail it because it expires at the end of november and it probably won t reach you before then so it s at al s diner at 834 clyde avenue just say that shannon called you and it was behind the bar tone warm and understanding shannon has possibly been on the losing end of the bus pass life cycle herself so she empathizes i am touched by the small but not insignificant chain of events that led to this phone call like a rube goldberg machine that is triggered when i characteristically fumble my bus pass to the ground without even noticing shannon has to pass at just the right place to see it she has to not be distracted by the flotsam of life swimming through her mind at that moment she has to bend down pick it up brush it off locate my phone number and call me hey megan interpretation shannon is a keen observer she could have just said hello but not shannon she used my name and the familiar hey she probably deduced from my bus pass photo that i am a hey your name sort of person i am not a good afternoon madame sort of person i like shannon right from those first three syllables i work at al s diner my heart swells she is like a john cheever character the romance of the working class she has nothing to hide in fact she and al maybe even be in cahoots do i detect a hint of intrigue in the way she rolls out the open vowel on al you bus pass was found outside shannon is humble she does not seek credit for her nobless she does not say i found your bus pass she is only a regular girl trying to do regular good in the world i won t mail it because it expires at the end of november and it probably won t reach you before then i ve had boyfriends who were less thoughtful than this stranger so it s at al s diner at 834 clyde avenue just say that shannon called you and it was behind the bar ten seconds earlier i did not know that shannon existed now i am on a mission and her name is the code word i go to al s diner on monday morning i pay for the bus with laundry change as i weave unsteadily down the aisle of the 85 i begin to feel a familiar sense of painful self awareness about my get up my only boots are the size of tractor tires and are really only suitable for the most blizzarding of days today they are overkill by a long shot the problem is that i always look out the window at the dog walkers to gauge the weather but the dog walkers have become unreliable after all they are outside at 6am who cares if they are wearing enormous overstuffed parkas and their castoff sorrels all fashion bets are off at that hour by the time i am wrapped up in their image they have deposited their dogs at home and have transitioned to pea coats and slender boots with artisanal stitching i donning my tractor tires and overstuffed parka feel cruelly misled i find a seat on the 85 and begin the complicated process of unzipping and unraveling and untying my outermost layer so that i will not arrive at al s diner like a perspiring yeti this makes me remember the two years i spent commuting to school on the metro in montreal to get to the metro platform you had to descend miles and miles of escalators and with each plunging foot the ambient temperature boiled one degree hotter it was like descending into hades by the time you reached your train you were lucky if you could still stand upright and string a sentence together in the heat people shed clothes down there faster than a dancer on two for one night oh montreal thinking this way triggers a landslide of nostalgia for my old apartment my old route around the city my old friends i look out at boring old ottawa and sigh to myself but it s the first wintry monday of the year in this city and as people shuffle around the bus to make room for one another and as i stare out at a child s first meager attempt at a snowman a surge of generosity towards the city re...