My work, in progress
There is a card game that I’m fond of.
No one will ever play it with me, it drives people to distraction - which may, I confess, be a part of the appeal - because the core principle of the entire thing is frighteningly similar to Real Life. There are finite, punishable rules known to a certain privileged elite (those who’ve sat through the game long enough to know the ins and outs) and these rules must never, ever be stated. The only way to win (perhaps, even, to survive) is to play blindly, learning the rules as penalty cards fall into your hand like rain (“you didn’t say ‘good day’, take two penalty cards!”; “you said ‘good day’, take a penalty card!”) and you sit in bewildered, mandatory silence.
Questions are unthinkable; no speaking is allowed.
And when you get very good at the game, as I with a certain amount of pride can say that I am, it all goes up a notch. Cheating becomes permissible, so long as you cheat by the rules (HAH); and each round, if all players agree, the winner of the hand creates a new rule, spoken only to one other player; invisible boundaries in a world that is already made of glass and mirrors. If you happen to be the winner, or the winner’s chosen confident, you enter into a magical world of secret intrigue. Otherwise ... you either learn fast, or you go mad, throw your hands (and your cards) in the air, and quit.
I think I might be living in a game of Mao.
Fridays at the office are interesting. None of the bosses are in, and so the entire place becomes a sort of secret parallel world in which secretaries and assistants rule. Formerly strict adherences to formality of dress drift down a notch or several, jean jackets springing up here and there to replace blazers, sandals morphing into Birkenstocks. Lunches suddenly extend to (or past) their full hours, eaten out of the office in restaurants rather than crunched rapidly over top of an open Word document and the hallways, which normally echo with the sound of typing and other executive noises started to feel like ghost towns as three o’clock rolled around.
It was like being a part of a secret society, the parliamentary Masons.
I admit it was probably just as well; Fridays are difficult at best, with thoughts of weekends and sleeping in ahead, and with a concert coming up on Monday and a practice tomorrow, my head had been veering slowly from my reports, dutifully read, to Montréal from the moment I’d woken up.
So when Parliament chimed three o’clock, I was happy enough to take myself back to A’s apartment, and get ready to go home for the weekend.
A and I seem to have come to the beginnings of an understanding, as far as sharing her (I don’t dare yet say ‘our’) apartment. I have my space, I keep hers looking as though I was never in it, and I leave anything that could possibly be considered as ‘shared’ the way it was when I moved in, whether or not she’s subsequently made changes. Getting ready to go meant getting my room in order, putting away the dishes (not mine), taking out the recycling (mine) and the garbage (generally not mine), and putting back the damned campaign posters, which stay on all of the windows all of the time, except when it’s cloudy outside, or when it’s sunny but A decides to take them down anyway.
I’ll leave those sort of executive decisions in her capable hands.
I’m getting better at them, though; only two fell down after I’d put them up, and only one of those landed on my head.
The garbage was, in fact, the greater task. There is a small door in A’s kitchen. It leads down an almost stereotypically creaky flight of stairs to another door, old and enormously heavy. The room past this door is dark, and small, and smells like Grimms Brothers’ fairy tales, when it’s not doubling as the garbage room. I’m not sure whether the floor rises or the ceiling falls, but walking from one end of the room to the other made me feel like I I’d somehow fallen into Wonderland by mistake. I am not a particularly tall person; I shouldn’t have to duck in order to be able to pass through a doorway. “Just ask Alice, when she’s ten feet tall”, and all that - so I’m saving further exploration for when I have to do laundry, which seems to lie somewhere Beyond.
Everything neatly put away, Wonderland safe behind me, I set off homeward. The relatively simple matter of traveling a half-hour of distance in an hour was, predictably, complicated by my bus, which arrived late and proceeded more forgivably to get stuck in rush hour traffic.
If it had been up to my bus, I would have been stranded in an hour in Ottawa, ticket purchased, bus long gone. Fortunately, what seemed like half of the city’s population seemed to have the same travel ideas as I did; the Ottawa-Montreal bus had, it apparently, been more than full. It departed, on time, ten minutes before my bus dropped me at the station, leaving behind an inordinately long line of twitchy would-be passengers. Twenty minutes later, it sent a friend to make sure that we didn’t form a mob and scratch out our displeasure into the walls of the building. Ticket in hand, backpack down below, I let myself be swept back to French country.
The rest of the evening has been wonderful, and quiet, and remarkably free of work or eccentric landlords ... although dinnertime conversations on unemployed household labour might indicate that I’m not quite yet able to leave my reading at the desk. Slightly searing curry (yum) and the Fifth Element (an oh so silly classic) with t3hfalcon is basically the perfect end to the week.
And since practice isn’t until 10:30 tomorrow, I get to sleep in!
No one will ever play it with me, it drives people to distraction - which may, I confess, be a part of the appeal - because the core principle of the entire thing is frighteningly similar to Real Life. There are finite, punishable rules known to a certain privileged elite (those who’ve sat through the game long enough to know the ins and outs) and these rules must never, ever be stated. The only way to win (perhaps, even, to survive) is to play blindly, learning the rules as penalty cards fall into your hand like rain (“you didn’t say ‘good day’, take two penalty cards!”; “you said ‘good day’, take a penalty card!”) and you sit in bewildered, mandatory silence.
Questions are unthinkable; no speaking is allowed.
And when you get very good at the game, as I with a certain amount of pride can say that I am, it all goes up a notch. Cheating becomes permissible, so long as you cheat by the rules (HAH); and each round, if all players agree, the winner of the hand creates a new rule, spoken only to one other player; invisible boundaries in a world that is already made of glass and mirrors. If you happen to be the winner, or the winner’s chosen confident, you enter into a magical world of secret intrigue. Otherwise ... you either learn fast, or you go mad, throw your hands (and your cards) in the air, and quit.
I think I might be living in a game of Mao.
Fridays at the office are interesting. None of the bosses are in, and so the entire place becomes a sort of secret parallel world in which secretaries and assistants rule. Formerly strict adherences to formality of dress drift down a notch or several, jean jackets springing up here and there to replace blazers, sandals morphing into Birkenstocks. Lunches suddenly extend to (or past) their full hours, eaten out of the office in restaurants rather than crunched rapidly over top of an open Word document and the hallways, which normally echo with the sound of typing and other executive noises started to feel like ghost towns as three o’clock rolled around.
It was like being a part of a secret society, the parliamentary Masons.
I admit it was probably just as well; Fridays are difficult at best, with thoughts of weekends and sleeping in ahead, and with a concert coming up on Monday and a practice tomorrow, my head had been veering slowly from my reports, dutifully read, to Montréal from the moment I’d woken up.
So when Parliament chimed three o’clock, I was happy enough to take myself back to A’s apartment, and get ready to go home for the weekend.
A and I seem to have come to the beginnings of an understanding, as far as sharing her (I don’t dare yet say ‘our’) apartment. I have my space, I keep hers looking as though I was never in it, and I leave anything that could possibly be considered as ‘shared’ the way it was when I moved in, whether or not she’s subsequently made changes. Getting ready to go meant getting my room in order, putting away the dishes (not mine), taking out the recycling (mine) and the garbage (generally not mine), and putting back the damned campaign posters, which stay on all of the windows all of the time, except when it’s cloudy outside, or when it’s sunny but A decides to take them down anyway.
I’ll leave those sort of executive decisions in her capable hands.
I’m getting better at them, though; only two fell down after I’d put them up, and only one of those landed on my head.
The garbage was, in fact, the greater task. There is a small door in A’s kitchen. It leads down an almost stereotypically creaky flight of stairs to another door, old and enormously heavy. The room past this door is dark, and small, and smells like Grimms Brothers’ fairy tales, when it’s not doubling as the garbage room. I’m not sure whether the floor rises or the ceiling falls, but walking from one end of the room to the other made me feel like I I’d somehow fallen into Wonderland by mistake. I am not a particularly tall person; I shouldn’t have to duck in order to be able to pass through a doorway. “Just ask Alice, when she’s ten feet tall”, and all that - so I’m saving further exploration for when I have to do laundry, which seems to lie somewhere Beyond.
Everything neatly put away, Wonderland safe behind me, I set off homeward. The relatively simple matter of traveling a half-hour of distance in an hour was, predictably, complicated by my bus, which arrived late and proceeded more forgivably to get stuck in rush hour traffic.
If it had been up to my bus, I would have been stranded in an hour in Ottawa, ticket purchased, bus long gone. Fortunately, what seemed like half of the city’s population seemed to have the same travel ideas as I did; the Ottawa-Montreal bus had, it apparently, been more than full. It departed, on time, ten minutes before my bus dropped me at the station, leaving behind an inordinately long line of twitchy would-be passengers. Twenty minutes later, it sent a friend to make sure that we didn’t form a mob and scratch out our displeasure into the walls of the building. Ticket in hand, backpack down below, I let myself be swept back to French country.
The rest of the evening has been wonderful, and quiet, and remarkably free of work or eccentric landlords ... although dinnertime conversations on unemployed household labour might indicate that I’m not quite yet able to leave my reading at the desk. Slightly searing curry (yum) and the Fifth Element (an oh so silly classic) with t3hfalcon is basically the perfect end to the week.
And since practice isn’t until 10:30 tomorrow, I get to sleep in!