excess verbiage

There's something wrong with Tim Hortons. I honestly don't understand why it takes so damn long to pour a cup of coffee and/or grab a donut. Today, I ordered a donut and by the time I walked back to the office and opened the bag at my desk, I realized that they gave me the wrong one. And I don't feel like walking all the way back there, so I'm going to eat it and be dissatisfied all morning. But c'mon - how hard can it be? Here's how it works. I order a donut. You grab the donut. Done. Simple, right? Well, apparently not.

Scary to say, but it makes me appreciate McDonalds. Really, at least they get stuff pretty quick, and I've never had a problem with getting the wrong stuff. I'm sure they make plenty of mistakes of course, but considering their volume, it's really not that bad of a track record. But when you're working at a snail's pace like Timmy Ho's, I don't know how you can't get the order right. You'd think that working slowly would ensure a correct order and better, more friendly service, but it doesn't.

Alright, time to eat some random donut that I didn't order.

When I used to take the bus reguarly, I always saw these two women who got on at the same stop and sat near me at the back. They seemed to be coworkers because they were always complaining about the same things. You know how in your head, you give people nicknames because you don't actually know them but you recognize them from seeing them all the time? Well, I call these two ladies Tammy and Faye, because they both look like Tammy Faye Baker - except one is brunette.

They both have that short, permed hair and are kind of heavy-set women who wear caked-on mascara and massive amounts of eye shadow. However, instead of praising the Lord like Tammy Faye, they sit around and bitch about morons at work. It's pretty entertaining.

They sort of don't look real to me because they seem like caricatures. They're loud, brash, tacky and they trash-talk even more than I do. hehe. Looking at them is a fantastic reminder for me to never become like that. Mascara, in large volume, is not your friend. And neither are orthopedic shoes when you're about 20 years too young to wear them.

I don't take the bus reguarly anymore but I saw Faye (the dark-haried one) getting off at her bus stop the other day and it made me nostalgic for all of my favourite old bus characters. There were a bunch of people that I've never officially met but have nicknamed, like: Buddy, Maria, Slowpoke, Mousy, Freakboy, Ukranian Kid, The Keener, and a bunch more. I wonder what they're all up to these days.....

I don't know if it's the law of attraction - where you attract what you're thinking about, whether positive or negative - or if it's just a coincidence and some really bad luck, but I just accidentally dropped the water cooler bottle on my thumb and it hurts like hell. Craaaaaap! It was only a month ago that I slammed my car door on my pinky finger too. I finally just got the feeling back in that finger and now I'm once again gimpy, but now on both hands. Lovely, just lovely.

I'm not entirely sure which one I believe in - luck or attraction - but I think I'm leaning towards the law of attraction. A year or two ago when that "Secret" book came out, I read it for fun, and I tried out some of the suggested visualization methods. My jaw dropped when something very specific that I had envisioned came true that same day. Coincidence? Maybe, maybe not. But it was a good argument for the law of attraction anyway.

I do think that sometimes people get stuck in a rut of negative thinking and that it's a choice to be positive. Is it easy to be positive? Sometimes, it's the hardest thing in the world. But what's the alternative - to sit around sulking or crying? Yeah, you can have your moment to be upset and cry over something bad. But do it, get it out of your system and then move forward. Otherwise, there's going to be a perpetual dark cloud over you, and who wants that?

In relation to my throbbing thumb, maybe it was just coincidence. Though I did drop a heavy box on my foot the other day too. Maybe I'm thinking too much about not injuring myself that I'm attracting more injury? I dunno. But I think I'm going to think about something else, just to be safe!

I like wearing high heels sometimes. As soon as my feet get into them, I instantly have better posture because I feel taller. I have more confidence when I walk, albeit fake confidence. But it's confidence nonetheless. The only thing is that my feet hurt like a sonavabitch. I'm not blessed with petite, narrow feet. Nope. I've got what I like to call fluffy feet. (Just indulge me.) They're wide and the arches have long ago fallen. So basically, it hurts when I walk. I really should see a podiatrist, but I'm too lazy about it.

The funny thing I noticed the other day was that when I was wearing these kick-ass heels that I love, I could barely walk at any sort of reasonable speed. All I could manage was the painful-heel strut. If you see a woman in heels walking ridiculously slowly, it's because she's in an extreme amount of pain. Trust me. Every single step hurts, and in your head, you're thinking, "f*ck these shoes, but I look damn good! Just a few more steps, just a few more steps. Don't feel the pain. I feel nothing, nothing at all!"

It's amazing what women go through in the name of fashion. Sure, it sounds silly that we're willing to endure the massive pain that we go through, but in the end, we do look fabulous, don't we? And that's all that matters. ;)

...I shouldn't have to see it outside my window in mid-April. I think that everyone in Vancouver last night had a collective thought of "This is bullshit!"

Driving downtown in the evening with a friend to meet another friend, we received a phone call saying that it was snowing heavily in North Van. I thought she was exaggerating a little because although it was unseasonably cold during the day, it wasn't cold enough for snow, or so I thought.

Then, as we continued driving down Kingsway, sure enough, it started to snow. It wasn't heavy and wasn't sticking to the ground, but still, that was bizarre to see. By the time we got downtown, it was just light rain - which still pissed us off as we were wearing inappropriate footwear for the weather.

So went to dinner and were seated towards the back of the restaurant, so by the time we left at about 10:15, we were shocked to see that the snow had not only returned, but also had started coming down like a friggin blizzard! WTF indeed. We had to walk about 10 minutes back to the parkade and during that walk, we saw some of the biggest snowflakes I've ever seen. Everyone walking around on the street was muttering the same thing: What the hell is this? It's April, dammit! This is is crap!

I have to say though, that despite the bullshit, it really was kind of an amazing sight to see, especially downtown. But then came the drive home. Last week, I changed my snow tires back to all-season, and I was thinking that I should've waited one more week. But come on - you can't get much later than mid-April!

I'm still bitter that I had to drive slowly, in a lower gear the entire way home. I'm only supposed to experience white-knuckle driving from November to the end of February! But it was definitely a bit nerve-wracking. People in this city can't drive in the snow, myself included, so having to deal with it on what should've been a beautiful, warm, spring day was insult to injury. And it was just last week that it was 21C, with people wearing flip flops and no jackets. Damn you, Mother Nature!

So get this - I was walking over to get some food and this guy walks past me from behind. As soon as he's in front of me, my eyes nearly pop out of their sockets when I saw that he had no shoes on. Yeah, that's right - no shoes, as in, bare friggin feet. Like, wtf is that about?! 

Then I looked at the guy and he wasn't homeless and he didn't look like he just came from yoga class and in fact, he was quite well dressed. He had a nice, crisp, button-down shirt, some khakis, and his backpack. He looked like a normal person except for his bare feet touching the germ-infested sidewalk!

And then all sorts of thoughts went through my mind - how long has he been walking without his shoes? don't his feet hurt? aren't his feet cold? what if he steps on broken glass or a bug, or patch of pee-soaked pavement? And then I was horrified to see that he was going into the same food court place I was going into. This was nasty - like, Britney-in-a-gas-station-bathroom-barefoot kind of nasty. 

The floor in this place has that thin film of grease over it, like in a cheap chinese restaurant. Lord knows the last time it was ever mopped. Ewwwwwww. I was so sickened. Honestly, I walked in behind him, and then I quickly went to get my food and tried to avert my eyes. I just couldn't look anymore. It was so gross. And then I got my food and headed back quickly before I spotted him again. Ugh, so gross. Had to blog this and spread the misery.

When I was a kid, I'd see these guys standing around kicking the hackysacks back and forth. I tried it too, and after about 2 minutes, I was over it. And I've been over it ever since.

I stopped seeing it for a while, except for if I was at the beach or the park or something like that. Usually where there's a frisbee, a hackeysack isn't too far behind. (Come on, you know it's true.)

I'm not sure why, but it seems particularly popular with guys reeking of weed. You'd think that if you were on weed, you wouldn't have the necessary focus to be able to handle the complexity of the hackysack. But the stoners sure do try!

Once I got this job on campus, the first time I spotted hackysackers, I stopped dead in my tracks and was like, no friggin way - it's STILL around. The people playing it look the same. And yeah, I'm still over it.

But now I see it so often that the sight of a hackysack has turned me into a pavlovian-trained dog, except substitute eye-rolling for salivating. Some things never change, unfortunately.

Sometimes I'm really neurotic and anal about certain things, and  pronunciation is one of them. I'm not saying that my vocab is all that great, because quite frankly, it's not. It's pretty sad considering my arts degree and my goal to be a published writer, but that's another story.

So I went to a sandwich place for lunch the other day. Saw that they had gyros, so I thought I'd order one. In my experience here in Vancouver, I've found that it's 50/50 in terms of people getting the pronunciation of the word "gyro" correct. So I said to the sandwich lady, "I'll have a gyro, please." And she repeated it back to me, but pronounced it like "jyro".

I cringed, and my knee-jerk reaction was to immediately correct her. "Actually, it's pronounced yearo, not jyro." She replied by saying, "Yes, that's what I said, jyro." And I'm sure I scrunched up my face in frustration, but I decided to give up. It wasn't going to happen. She made the gyro and rang up the total into the cash register, "Okay, so that was one jyro. That'll be $4.95, please."

I wanted to yell at her, YEARO, YEARO YEARO!!! IT'S PRONOUNCED YEARO, YOU MOFO!!! But all I wound up doing was a combination of cringing, eye-rolling, and shaking my head as I handed her the money. *sigh* It was pretty damn tasty though.

A few weeks ago, I finally worked up the courage to end my relationship with my gym. It's been a rough 2 years, and I felt that I wasn't getting what I needed from it. And in fact, I needed some space. I've been trying to make it work for the past year, but in my heart, I knew it wasn't going to last. We'd drifted apart. One on hand, there was the gym, with the whole exercise equipment and aerobics classes thing. And on the other hand, there was me, not wanting to go. Opposites attract, but I don't think they work out in the long run. Sometimes you really need to have some fundamental things in common, like wanting to exercise, or a willingness to pay a monthly fee to do so.

Don't get me wrong, in the beginning, we had some great times. We saw each other a lot and it was both emotionally and physically satisfying. It was a great match, and I even rearranged my schedule to go more often. But after a while, it became routine and lost some of its allure. Little things started getting on my nerves, like the fact that all the good classes started way too early in the afternoon and I couldn't make it, or the fact that some of the equipment was never available when I went. I tried to brush it under the rug, but my growing dissatisfaction started getting to me.

And then my eyes started wandering. I'd seen ads for pilates classes at the community centre - it was something my gym didn't offer. I couldn't get it off my mind. I'd been wanting to sign up for pilates for ages, but now that I was in a committed relationship with my gym, I couldn't just, you know, start another relationship with another fitness centre. Something didn't seem right, and I felt guilty. But still, I couldn't get the pilates classes off my mind. I tried, but it was hard not to, especially when I hadn't been satisfied by my gym for months. A person can only continue with a declining relationship for so long before something snaps.

Then I started getting cranky with my gym and began nitpicking. "Why is it so damn hard to find parking here? And where have all the damn magazines gone? Can't a person read a friggin magazine while walking on the treadmill anymore?! And I am so sick of the smell of sweat all the time. Wtf - why aren't the fans on full blast?!" Yeah, it was one long, downward spiral.

Finally, one day I sat down and realized that I was tired of being angry and miserable and dissatisfied all the time. I realized that I wanted to be happy again - without having to pay $30 a month. I'd seen others do it, for free even - by jogging around the track, or hiking through trails. With no contract or fees necessary! I also heard that a friend had recently broken up with her gym too. She had a similar story, but she had the courage to end it. I was inspired.

So I worked up my nerve and did what I had to do. I pulled out my contract and read all of the details. My contract had finally ended and I could get out entirely by writing and submitting a letter of intent to leave. I sat and I wrote out what I wanted to say. I wrote and then rewrote it over and over. I had to make sure that my feelings were clear to my gym. And then I worked up the nerve to drive to the gym and deliver the letter. I parked my car and walked through the door. I nervously handed over my letter. My gym did not seem happy about this, though they didn't stop me. They couldn't have been surprised. They had to have known about my declining attendance. But they were quite cold to me, as I suspected they might be. I suppose it's understandable. Breakups are never easy.

They asked if there was anything they could do to make me stay. But I said that my mind was made up and that it was a long time coming. So then they asked me why exactly I was leaving, and wanted me to write it down on paper. So I did. That had to have hurt to read why they were being rejected by me. But that was that, and with one last look around the place, I said my goodbyes, for good.

Now that it's been a few weeks, I'm psyching myself up to get back out there. I'm actually going to go to a couple of different rec centres next week, so I'm a little anxious about that. But it'll be good. Besides, if you don't put it out there, you'll never know how it might turn out. And in the end, don't we all just want to find some happiness?