i need a hero

tom tells me he will "kiss my feet" if i work this coming thursday, friday and saturday. i think there's something inherently weird in that..

regardless, today was an odd day. it started with my finishing jane eyre- jane, havin refused the hand of her cousin, mr. st john, heard mr rochester's voice calling to her in the night so she went to him, reunited and all was well. in that dreary bronte way. then, i went for a pedicure-

[look, don't even get me started on how weird that was, some lady rubbing my feet with perfumed cremes and buffing my nails. i enjoyed it, but i don't really see it as becoming a regular activity. i'm too damned sensitive.]

next- i went and deposited more money into my bank account and cackled evilly when my bank book was updated. following that episode, it was into owen sound where i spent two hundred dollars on pots. shiny, silver, stainless steel pots and pans. and i have decided that if anyone should harm these pots and pans, i shall break their legs. it's that simple.

then i needlessly bought music.

man, do i ever need to pack. this whole working thursday-friday-saturday thing has descended slightly unexpectedly.

six more sleeps.

space. yeah...space.

i wandered around the fish shop aimlessly today.

it hardly seems like it but i've been home for four months. four fricking months of this place. i figured out that i worked something like five hundred and forty hours or something- not as much as say kate or melissa- but pretty impressive all things considered. and now, with what's going on, after all my griping and moaning- i'd work there for another four months without complaint.

we've hired another new employee.

this time, it's an ex-con, ex-heroin addict who has an anger management problem. "hi," he introduces himself, "my name's steve." he grins crookedly and laughs a lot. he has a wife and daughter at home and another baby on the way. he enjoys life and is jovial. his mistakes have thus far been laughter inducing and worthy of knee slapping.

so between steve, veronica, andy, marmee, tom and i, we have a happy crewe again.

i'm kinda sorry that i'm leaving. except for that whole wicked bad, yet awesome good-ness of school that awaits me in le olde ottawa- replete with new faces and long bus rides and good food.

nine more sleeps.

hey ya

"you son of a BITCH!" tom exclaims, followed quickly by: "you bastard." and then some evil sort of cackle.

today at work there was this giant splake that weighed twelve pounds without its guts- so we're talking about a fourteen to sixteen pound fish when it was still alive. andy dropped it, tom dropped and then it slid out of the bucket when i picked it.

i have a feeling that maybe the spirit of the splake was perhaps a bit upset at being dead and all and was trying to escape.

sadly, he has already been consumed.

sucker.

these are a few of my favourite things

"you have to be shitting me!" i exclaim forcefully, staring at kate's mom in disbelief. "there's two tapes? jesus."

yesterday was the last monday we all had together before we all scatter to the four winds- which will blow us all to ottawa, but that's beside the point. after working for a few hours, i called kate and invited everyone over to her house for a dinner of pesto goodness. dessert, i informed her, woul be "fruit and dough"- in other words, a pie.

we went shopping at good old iga for all the ingredients we needed, which included juice boxes, chicken, montreal steak spice and a bouquet of flowers for laura. total cost: sixty dollars.

next, we went to grey roots to see if we could kidnap candice- alas, jessie had beat us to it but we finally exprienced the "joy" of the circus- i must say that i begin to understand why all those kids looked a little wild in the eyes over at good ole' grey roots. total cost: twelve dollars, but then it was refunded because we only had fiften minutes to look around really. go us.

after calling laura's house, we zommed over there to see if she wanted to come to dinner. sadly, she too was already taken, by sleep. summerfolk always takes it out of you, and she was just plain ready for bed. we gave her her flowers however, and then realized that we had too much chicken. total cost: zero dollars. the flowers were included with the groceries.

next stop was leslie's house, where we stayed for just a moment and then went back to kate's. upon arrival we were greeted by kate's mom, who had been fore warned that her house was being descended upon by an unspecified number of people. she clamy greeted us and i began to make a mess of her kitchen. total cost: let's say three dollars.

for the next hour, i cooked. i finised up the pie and put it in the oven after much ridicule over ym pastry skills. i chopped garlic and made garlic bread out of a nice crusty french loaf. olive oil, pesto, montreal steak spice and garlic salt were smeared on the chicken and it was put on the barbeque. i boiled up whole wheat bow tie pasta and mixed up creamy pesto sauce, tossing it in with the pasta. kate ripped uplettuce and made up the salad. and then- after much ado we sat down and had a damed fine meal of pesto goodness. total cost: two pounds, added directly to my waist. huzzah.

followed by possibly the worst-best-funniest movie i have ever watched at kate's house- the sound of music.

i know it's a classic and all, but i think i may have ruined it for everyone by calling mr. von trapp gayrod, making jokes about him rising to the occasion, laughing uproariously at the lines of the baroness concerning frauline maria and her "never being a nun" [like, what? mr. von trapp's going to de-nunify her or something. and technically, she never was a nun, just a NIT, a nun in training if-you-will. pshaw], and making fun of the horrible horrible singing. if they just wouldnt sing everything, the movie would have been a lot shorter, ken? total cost: my sanity. and the wonderful memories of kate's mom and leslie of the movie. heh.

however, it was all worth it. the entire night.

mainly because of the de-nunifying remarks. heh. priceless.

and i- i will begin again

somewhere between the weiner dog, the two gay men, the old lady smoking, the shopping, the cats fighting with the dogs, the broken dishes, the gropes and slaps and hugs, the guitar playing, the wind knocking things over, the full drive way, the runny lemon pie and over done pecan pie, the excessive amounts of alcohol, the topic of jesus, the shrimp and the crackers and the salad and the smoked fish, the digital cameras, the liquers, the fresh peas from the garden, the laughing and the gassing, the mess, the line up for the bathroom, the precious, the music, the spilled drinks, the many chairs, the unexpected day off, the bowl as an ashtray, the jokes about backing up and virgins, the hand waving and the companionship, the many goodnights, the bright lights and the moon, it hits me:

life is good.

today was gonna be the day

so after sleeping for quite a few hours, waking up and consuming my coffee...

you know, i think i have a problem. i need a group, one of those places where i can stand up and say: "hello, my name is meaghan and i have an addiction." of course, support groups for coffee do not exist- it's the acceptable addiction. i wonder if i had a good hit of heroin in the morning....

anyways, i had my coffee and then came on here because i have to work but not today. i was re-reading my poorly typed entry from last night when the vox piped up that "you sound like a pessimistic fool."

i'd beg to differ, but if i stand here arguing with myself, it'll take more than coffee and a support group to make me acceptable to the world.

pffffft- who digs acceptance anyways? time for a word of two with the vox about tone and interpretation methinks.

these lines of lightening mean we're never alone

after a whole bunch of fish and not enough sleep, i decided to pull out a tarot card this morning and see what it told me. after coffee of course, after coffee. so i stumbled to the table this morning with my pants falling off and coffee sloshing everywhere and managed to pull out a the three of crystals from my mother's innerchild deck.

"hack!" screams the vox, but i couldn't care less. mmm, more coffee anyone?

anyways, my card tells me that i need to seek my inner circle of friends, the people that i am supposed to be with, and play with them. the card depicted little gnome children playing jump rope with a rainbow. [we won't go into the bad sexual innuendos i got out of that right now...] so i sat and thought about it and i pondered and made grinchy faces and then i decided that really, the cartd was telling me that i needed the inner circle of kate.


so tonight i motored to the beach and watched rajassi play and then kate and i went to greenhorns, land of the deepfried everything, bad karokee and even worse singers and had ourselves an evening at the pub. we ate some of the afore mentioned deep fried stuff and laughed our asses off at karokee singers. some old dude winked at me and some young dude sat down and had a chat with kate. kate and i talked about everything under the sun- next year, our relationships with other people, how bad coors light really is, why we think our jobs are stupid, madonna... i think we covered it all.

and then it hit me. "you realize-" the vox has to yell to be heard over the woman droning out dancing matildas in the other room- "you relaize that this is the last saturday night that you have with kate here in the good old grey bruce?"

sometimes i hate the vox for reminding me of things that never seemed that great until they're suddenly not a possibility anymore.

can i be buried here among the dead?

my foot hits the floor, and the van just begins to stop. "shit!" exclaims me and the vox at the same time. "it's happened again!"

on sunday night i went into my gramma's house for dinner. kevin and ali are on a week's vacation and we thought that some quality relative time was much needed. the dinner was fabulous- gramma style food rocked the casbah. after soem off colour comments by gramps [which i refuse to retell here on the basis of them being so entirely racist it pains me to think about it] i decided to go over to melissa's house and see if she was home.

she was. we talked and i stole some old clothes and she gave me a goonies tshirt that my boobs are almost too big for yet is possibly the most majestic thing i have ever seen and then we decided that we should go and see the village because melissa hadn't and i would gladly go about eight billion times. so out we went to the kidnapper, hopped in and my foot went styraight to the floor when i applied the brakes.

so we hopped in the olds, saw the movie [immensely enjoyable, not only as a whole but because of joaquin. pardon me while the girly girl comes out and i comment on his..dreaminess...]

and then, i drove home.

with hardly any brakes.

ssssshhhhh- tell no one that i rolled through ever stop sign between owen sound and wiarton and almost hit six different animals...muahahaha, deer killer almost strikes again, except with a toad and i think a fox, it was dark and i couldn't see so well.

yeah.

might as well have fun cos your happiness is done

i meant to write some interesting or funny tidbit about the day, astonishing my broad audience [HA!] with my wit and charm, making them swoon in wonder but sadly nothing really exciting happened today. i got up, went to work for nine hours, had a twenty minute break in there for lunch at some time and crippled my hand.

oh, and some old dude swore with me in his presence and was quite horrified that i had heard him say fuck. heh. so yeah.

magic genie say: never grow old.

don't let these words be in vain

mom shows me the note heather has left for her father. the front of the envelope says "dad, NOT maureen," the not underlined heavily. so of course we read it. it's not like tom hid it from us or anything anyways.

inside the envelope are four pages full of spite and hatred and blame. heather rants that tom has choosen his wife over his daughter, that he's adopted four children and left three girls orphans. she tells him that because he coddles inferior employees instead of the ones who "work their asses off" his business will fail. maureen is the reason why everyone has left- all of the good employees.

she writes that i am a direct result of my mother.

"cool." pipes up the vox.

is it wrong that after i read her note of hate that i laughed for a good twenty minutes, and then toasted mom with a glass of wine for a battle well fought, and ever better well won?

"no."

oh it's such a perfect day i'm glad i spent it with you

"why don't you go FUCK yourself!" heather exclaims, eyes sliding to the floor, middle finger pointed towards the heavens like a compas pulled by the north pole, as she storms out the back door of the fish shop.

"GLADLY!" is my not so suave, yet strangely satisfying response.

today, like no other day, the shit hath hitteth the fan in all matters related to the fish shop. with the full moon and the north wind, there's been a shortage of fish in general- there's just enough to get us by. in heather howell's world, this means that everything is a commotion and a drama and a struggle. everything must pass her stamp of approval or else it just won't do.

like a tub of whitefish carol cut this morning.

heather stopped what she was doing, and arms swinging in a strangely nazi-ish way, made the few steps over to the fish and began looking at it. after a few pokes and a few prods, she starts talking. "ok carol, i want you to wax this and write HEATHER ONLY on it so that no one else touches it."

[just to make sure we're clear here, i'm the only other person who would touch it. ] however, instead of biting my tongue, i speak up. afterall, i take care of the customers that walk in the door, which is where we profit in this business.

"uh, heather, i'm going to need some fish for the counter." her eyes snap to me, dark like the lifeless forms of dead things in a field on a star less night.

"great for you. I'M trying to do market here, and I"M taking care of eight ounces AND dinners." she speaks as if this settles things resolutely. tom breaks in when he sees me fuming by the sink, telling us it's just fish. i see his point, but am once again tired of letting poor-me get her way, so i tell her to label her damned fish, and comment increduosly about heather only being written on fish, fer fuck's sakes.

oops. i spoke against the princess, so she runs outside for a fag bemoaning her fate.

mom decides that while i've got the pot stirring, she might as well add her dash of salt and throw her weight behind a stirring spoon as well. it's going great until tom tells me and mom to just "shut the fuck up." so then mom storms out, and i storm out because tom's made me cry like a girl.

and then, instead of crying, i make my way back into the shop with red eyes and tears stuck to my glasses and heather is there and the world narrows and there's just she and i. she doesn't know it yet, but i am like a nuclear sub, stealthily sneaking up to her, ready to let forth an array of weapons that no one has ever seen the like of before.

she calls my marmee self righteous and i let it blow. i release the shit.

i call her incompetent.

and then she tells me to go fuck myself and storms out, again. but when she comes back it's to anounce that she's quitting because we've made it clear she's not wanted, blah blah blah.

all i can think is ding dong the witch is dead...

making plans to change the world while the world was changing us

i feel a bit guilty as i hang up the phone.

"yeah, a bit my ARSE!" pipes up the vox, again speaking from a rusty silence. "way to do the one thing that pisses you off the most, the one thing that you vowed to never ever do. beeeyotch."

yesterday i learned how to make pastry. i want to be able to make pie and meat pie and pot pie, well, just pie in general i guess, so mom showed me her fussy pastry recipe and it was a total success. as pies in general are a heart lifting thing i decided to make mini pies and deliver them to those poor souls that i call friends who work at the beach. so i did.

and there was much rejoicing.

melissa and i made tenative plans to go to the movies tonight. and when she called, i backed out, for no sane reason except that tom wanted to go for a drive and he wanted me to come along, to get a feel for the car. i traded in a night with a friend for a car ride.

*slaps self*

i'll have to make up for it with copious amounts of wine, some hot pinup and maybe flowers. yeah.

once upon a time when the world was just a pancake

i blink at the screen, and suddenly feel ill.

today was register for classes day. luckily, i was smart and got all of the information i needed well in advance, made up my schedule and had to only fill in course code numbers. after a bit of grief- the system tried to tell me that i hadn't taken the pre-requisite fro intermediate latin..HA!- i hit the assess tuition payment button, and then the student account summary button.

i like carleton's website because i'm math challeneged. it does all the adding for me. all those random fees i'm forced to pay are collected and displayed and priced for me to see. the cost of my year?

ten thousand and forty seven dollars.

this isn't what made me blink though. after assigning osap to my fist semester, i owe my school a whopping seventy nine dollars. seventy fucking nine dollars. and next semester, i'll owe them roughly twelve hundred dollars. so folks- that means that my out of pocket must be paid school fees for this coming year are a whopping twelve hundred and seventy nine dollars. twelve hundred and seventy nine. that's it. that's like, the amount of money i'll make in the next four weeks at work.

pardon me while my head explodes at the sheer joyful ridiculousness of this.

it was good as good goes

my mouth gaped open, my hand flying to my chest in surprise at what was happening on the screen in front of me.

last night, i went to see the village with heather and my brother and whole bunch of camp persons. although it was not as hard to figure out as m. night shyamalan's previous motion pictures, it was immensely enjoyable. i'd say more, but the screts to mr. shyamalan's movies have a bad tendancy to leak out real quick.

or so i've experienced in my past. like when i accidentally told james what happened at then end of the sixth sense.

whoops.

stay or leave

after about the eightith customer, i feel as if my smile is a mere piece of paper pasted onto my face.

this weekend was busy. very busy at work. and there was more soap opera to endure, and more feelings to nance around and more stupid tourists to pretend to like. however, all in all it was pretty good. we made a lot of money, the soap opera is really kinda in my favour and the noncy tourists are supporting the industry that makes this part of ontario worth living in.

i just wish i could escape for a while.