Girl and City

If you’ve been following me on twitter you will know that I spent all of Monday with HB. I wish I could say that I maintained a strict friends-only policy around him, but, well, you can decide for yourself.

To foreshadow this story, this was my horoscope for the day (I read it in the local newspaper as I was heading downtown to meet him):

You need to put behind you the fears that have been making your life less than enjoyable.

I arrived at his apartment just after noon, and I played video games while he washed the dishes. If you’re surprised by this role-reversal, don’t be. It’s a running theme in my life.

We went grocery shopping to get some ingredients for strawberry shortcake (most importantly, strawberries). On the way home, we stopped at an LCBO and bought a bottle of Alize. I don’t like pre-mixed fruity liquors and would have preferred, you know, straight up vodka or whiskey or something, but he was buying so I did not argue. Again, role reversal. What kind of 20-year-old Asian girl drinks whiskey neat? And what kind of 20-year-old boy buys Alize? Seriously? (more…)

“God, I hate the rain,” WAF remarked as we huddled under her umbrella. Just as we approached an intersection, a gust of wind flipped her umbrella outwards.
“Fuck. I hate this umbrella, too. It’s completely useless.” Without another word, she tossed the umbrella on the ground. It was still open, still flipped backward, and now lying on the street in front of a parked car.
“You’re just going to leave that there?” I asked, as she started to cross the street without checking traffic.
I jogged to keep up with her. “You can’t just leave that there, what if it flies into oncoming traffic?”
“Don’t be silly. How could it do that?”
“Wind! Strong wind! I mean, Mary Poppins could fly with her umbrella!” Nearby, a guy in a suit gave us a strange look.
“Nope, it’s not going to happen.” She pulled out a pack of cigarettes and lit one.

I was downtown with WAF during her lunch break to make sure she was ok – and by that I mean, she wasn’t running back into the arms of BAD. Except now she wanted to run into the arms of her married coworker, who was apparently very sweet on her and open to the idea of a no-strings-attached affair. As if.
We ducked into a 50s-themed restaurant-bar and WAF ordered a bottle of wine before I had even removed my coat.
“Are you not eating?”
“Are you kidding? Everything on their menu has to be at least 300 calories. I can’t afford that. Plus I need alcohol if I’m going to get through today without calling BAD.” So this was how she lost twenty pounds since the last time I saw her. Good ol’ anorexia. Who needs food when you have cigarettes and alcohol? I considered force-feeding her fries, but by the time our waitress returned, I was happily buzzed and had forgotten all about it. Great, I was drunk at noon on a Wednesday off of indistinguishable house wine. And I wasn’t even the depressed one. (more…)

“So… you have no legal experience?”
“No.”
He cocked an eyebrow as he scanned my resume once more. He was going to dismiss me. In a last ditch effort to make myself seem more qualified, I added, “But I do have office experience. I’m very good at organizing documents, doing research, that sort of thing. And I have great computer skills, since I work in IT. I type really, really fast,” I said while bobbing my head up and down to drive home the point.
He studied me again, one eyebrow still arched slightly higher than the other, and slowly nodded his head. Once. “I see…” he said carefully.
“To tell you the truth, I am really hoping that this legal assistant position will turn full-time after the candidate has been trained. And the problem is, well, by the time you are trained, the summer will be over and you’ll be gone.”
The job posting had said nothing about this turning into a full-time position. It had said that a legal assistant was needed to fill in for someone for a few months. I folded my hands in my lap and considered this new piece of information. “I see.”
“I know that you want some real-life experience, but I really don’t want to train you for the summer and then have to train someone else when you are finally able to do real work for me.”
“I understand,” I said. We were both silent for a minute. I tried one more time. “I will need to intern during the summers while I”m in law school – I could come here every summer.”
But it was clear he wasn’t looking for someone like me. He showed me out of the office without so much as a handshake. As I rode the elevator down, I tried to tell myself that it was his loss – if he wasn’t going to pay me, what harm could it do to have another helper around? I’m a smart girl, I could make myself useful. And yet, he was letting me get away.
(more…)

It recently occurred to me that if I put all my stories together and tied it up with a neat little theme and some subtle psychological character analysis, I’d have a damn good book on my hands.
I thought after this weekend, I’d have another excellent chick-lit-esque story for you, involving beautiful shoes, good wine, and mysterious men. While I do have a story that contains all of that, it also contains another rather serious and disturbing portion, which makes it difficult for me to recount with my usual dose of humour. But we’ll see how it goes.

Traveling is never my favourite part of these stories, because it’s hard to recreate the anticipation of an event after the event has already occurred. So I’ll skip over the part where I woke up at six am in order to catch a bus to the train station only to realize the bus was never going to come and then selling an organ and a limb in order to pay the taxi fare to the train station and then being literally one second late for the train I was supposed to go on. Skip all that and fast-forward to when I finally arrive in The City.
I was picked up from the subway station by WAF, WAF‘s boyfriend, who I will now call SubduedRageBoy (this will make sense later), and their friend, PotentiallyGayBoy. and whisked away to lunch. In the car, I changed into my new stilettos and used lunch as an opportunity to practice walking in them.
The food itself was not impressive, but the four of us had a good talk over lunch. PGB and I realized we had a lot in common, and if it wasn’t for the fact that we strongly suspect him of pitching for the other team, we probably would have made a really cute couple. Still, I can always use a gay friend; they’re usually the loveliest anyway.
After lunch we went back to SRB‘s house mansion and I started drinking. We still had a lot of alcohol left over from last weekend and I was determined to at least make a dent in the stash. Meanwhile, SRB and PGB were looking up hotels and planning our getaway to Montreal in two weeks time. Somewhere between my first and second glass of wine, I had donned a pair of rose-tinted glasses and felt as if the world was spinning with me at its center, that everything was right and perfect and everyone was lovely and sweet.
The rest of the afternoon seemed to pass at lightning speed (doesn’t it always when you’re drunk having a good time?). I must have been more buzzed than I thought because I almost sprained my ankle trying on WAF‘s heels and then laid down on the marble floor in SRB‘s foyer and pretended to swim. WAF reminded me that we were supposed to go shopping before meeting the girls for dinner, so I tried to sober up. But it was a long and difficult ordeal.

Finally, finally, when I was sober enough to walk on my own, WAF and I changed into our evening gowns cocktail dresses and headed downtown¹. We went to Forever21 and H&M and only ended up buying accessories, then clicked down the street in our heels toward dinner.
The restaurant we were meeting at was famous for their wine list, which was why I had picked it. The girls I’d invited were all chronically late, always, so I had figured we could just hang out at the bar and drink wine until everyone arrived. Unfortunately, the bar was closed (on a Saturday?!?! Do they not want business?), but fortunately, all my friends arrived relatively on time²! We ordered a bottle of wine, had an excellent dinner, and discussed politics and world issues school and boys and our futures as the most powerful women in the world.
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1. We got a lot of stares on the subway and on the streets. Clearly we were over-dressed for shopping. Maybe they thought we were escorts? [↩]
2. Except SSS who arrived dripping and cursing because she got lost and it was pouring outside and she didn’t have an umbrella, the poor thing. [↩]

I woke up this morning and two things suddenly occurred to me. One was that my ex-boyfriend may be under the impression that I have a boyfriend right now, and the second was that there was left-over chicken wings in the fridge.

You see, a couple weeks after the end of school, we had a “grade trip,” a five-day camping trip. Technically, only a third of the grade went on this trip, but it happens annually. Anyway, it came at the peak of my dangerously flirtatious friendship with HB. So the memory that jerked me awake was from the second night of the trip, when HB and I had gone for a walk while everyone else was at the campfire. During our walk we came upon MFL and The Other Girl. They had shined their flashlights on us, so for a while, I couldn’t tell it was them. I think HB and I were holding hands. Anyway, it ranked pretty high on the awkward scale, but at the time I was too alcohol-happy to care (I wasn’t drunk, I swear!).
So I guess it didn’t hit me until now what it must seem like to him, since we never talked about our love lives after that awful day…

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