So.....
I'm sitting here with a gigantic strawberry shaped lollipop...I can just skip ahead now, and pretty much tell you this doesn't end well. Although no crying jags to report thus far today, laughing jags, as always are in high supply. I should be doing homework, but I'm not. Specifically, I should be analyzing King Lear and researching Alexander Pope and Voltaire, but for some truly stupid reason, I'm not.
This was the lost weekend, where I did just about everything there was to do, expect my homework, which is just starting to seem horribly pointless to me. Yes, I admit it. I've fallen prey to the dreaded senioritis. At this point, I'm just trying to stay awake 'til graduation and prom. I mean everything's decribed, I have my university and I have my rockin' prom dress, now I'm just bored, nothing ever happens here.
Except yesturday, I climbed the CN tower (for the second time, cause I'm that awesome). Can you believe it, dah-lings? Me, the crazy child. And yes, I got paid to climd the thing. It pays to work for the health department.
So now I'm feeling pretty tired, and completely unready for school tommorrow. Hellman's Mayonise! I wish I could just fall asleep, but insomnia is a major mindfucker.
The CN tower climb is basically my personal hell. A few flights steps up, my legs start to shake and my knees in my cozy grey sweat shorts start to buckle underneath me...and I'm going down. This is when I feel like I'm dying, and seriously start to consider exactely how out of shape I am, promising myself (as I do just about every night before falling asleep, promising myself that the next day, I'll start the diet and go on the treadmill everyday again, but then never end up doing in the morning- God, I sound old and boring) to get back into my routines.
But then I find some chocolate... and its abandon hope all who enter here.
i'm weak.
So sue me.
Anyway, so about 30 flights up (there's about a 140), I suddenly get a burst of energy, and I'm flying up the stairs four at a time, jumping up and down during the breaks every 5 or so flights, feeling the rubber soles of my red sneakers resounding on the metal landing benaeth me. It's a pretty nice feeling, actually. Also, my voice gets really high and bubbly and I start to act and babble on like a five year old (as I often do if people spend enough time with me- I really don't need to be drunk to act drunk).
So, I end up climbing with two of my friends, one of whom was starting to have an asthsma attack (sidenote: World Asthsma day is next Tuesday! I'll be manning a booth at the Georgetown Mall, where will you be?), and needed us to keep resting in like ten minutes stretches. This was where I proved once and for all that I am a good friend (the best!), because even though I had the energy to go on, I just waited patiently entertaining myself by paying games in my head and yoga breathing.
Well, we quickly gave up on time, and just started to party up the stairwell, playing games, doing yoga on the landings, chatting up the paramedics and our fellow climbers (explaining like every ten steps, what our shirts said and what Denorm means), and then petting someone's seizure detecting dog for a while.
and me, the girl who slips into childishness when in group situations too long? I start screaming the worlds on the encouraging paintings made by elementary school kids that lined the stairwells (save the whales/snow leopards/ pandas {including the anorexic ones}/ owls/ iguanas, With every step you save an animal, and Keep it up you're almost there, and my ultimate favourite, You're Doing Gret! (who's Gret? Is he cute?) {seriously the spelling was as bad as Claudia Kishi- and that's saying something!}) and pretending I was a cheerleader. It was pretty entertaining actually, I realling think I deserve my own show, or at least a youtube show.
My friend ends up being the last person to climb the CN tower, trailing after the cute seizure dog because of her insistance that if she was going to be one of the last people up, she'd be THE last person up.
I love how after climbing all those steps, getting all tired and angry (especially when you think you're done and all the sadists at the welcoming doors congratulate you and stamp your timecard, and then you find out there's another fifteen flights of stairs to slog through), when you get to the top, you suddenly have all this energy, and feel like you could run a Polyester Marathon. That's when I went shopping. I need another pair of shoes, all mine are getting lonely.
And for some insane reason, everyone was afraid of the glass floor (we also tried to pour water through the grating on the observation deck- for future reference: it just makes the cement rim wet). I don't get it, to me its the best thing since sliced bread (but what was before that?), almost as cool as the pistashio in the spumoni (not a deli meat!) ice cream, which is strawberry, chocolate and pistashio we had later at the Old Spagetti Factory (still getting paid- It's a great job!).
Which is the most awesomly kitsch place ever (and you know how devoted to kitsch I am)! There's stained glass windows, caurosel horses, a streetcar you can eat in, tables perfect to reenact La Vie Boheme on, and even a candy store at the front! It's really my kind of place.
Our time on the climb was so ridiculously long, that I won't even post it here (a guy in our group was like the 35 person out of like a thousand. The same guy was later fined/ charged for not buying a train ticket on the way back). Later, when we were wandering around Toronto and Forever 21 (where I spent way too much money for someone who's supposed to be saying for university- but what can I say? I have an addictive personality) shopping our little hearts out, I would turn to her and say, I wonder what my time would have been if I'd done the climb in grade ten, when I was thin. This just makes her laugh, put a hand on my shoulder and say, But you had an eating disorder, Doll. You would have fainted or something.
True...
Other random moments?
Well today some random person said they loved me because I said consquently.
Consquently, I was freaked out.
Later, after not giving a homeless guy money, he damned me and my friend to hell. Because it's not a party without at least one eternal damnation.
Also, another friend of mine after, I was admiring this cherry red motorcycle and wishing I had one, launched into her whole Bella-Jacob-Edward: New Moon thing (...how facinating... Sarcasm sign!). I recieved yet another critcism of my klutziness. Which was ...fun, as always.
I have to say through, I love Toronto. This is my city, I was born here, and at some point I will have my own little Kensington Market apartment over a chinese food resturant and across from a bakery. This is pretty much as much of the future as I have planned other then my journalism career. I love how its like a little bohemian community right in the city. My mother used to live there (after she ran away from home) and one day she took me down there to go to Courage My Love (where I got this awesome 40's dress) , and we went by the little red house she lived in, that was split into four little apartments. After like 20 years, her furniture, the chairs and the dresser that she left behind, where still there moved out onto the front balcony and the stoops.
Awesome. Just awesome.
She also told me about how she lived in the building next to the bar where the Rolling Stones played a surprise show (her friend called to tell her, and she thought he was playing a trick on her), and she could hear them through the walls. Even cooler is the fact that my dad, who was like seventeen at the time was also there, trying to sneak in. But they didn't meet.
I want stories like this! But I never want to give them up to, settle down.
That's my horror story!
Back on topic...
I just love how all my friends are so scared of the city. The bored and raised Milton Lifers who had never been out of town, were freaking out on our vocal class trip to the Opera (La Traviatta with random bondage scenes) afraid that the homeless people would hurt them. Later, they were counting them.
My friend who I was shopping with, is kind of a suburb girl. She dislikes the noise and the rush of the city, and she really doesn't understand how exciting I think it is.
There was a Jamacian guy by the Go Station playing the bongos and wishing everyone luck a sthey passed by. He said May life take you places and may where life takes yiu, be an adventure.
There was also a guy painted in silver glitter paint (Tobias?) pretending to be a Elvis statue and dancing to Hound Dog outside the Eaton Centre. The guy who chalks outside the other Eaton Centre doors was drawing Batman, and people were giving out packs of gum in the street. And the air was full of music from the guy playing the guitar down the road.
It's a magic place.
What a supremely awesome day.
But will I ever do it again? Only time will tell.
-Star
