My Week 201: Me and Jeffrey, My Author Interview

So on Wednesday, I was sitting with a group of people from work, and they were recounting that some people at the secret agency had actually gone to high school or university together, and that was how they knew each other. One of the guys said, “That’s right—there was me, Frank, Jim, and Jeffrey.” And I was like, “Oh, who’s Jeffrey?” because there was no one at the secret agency named that. My colleague replied, “He doesn’t work with us anymore. You’d like Jeffrey—you two are a lot alike.” And my first thought was “A lot alike? Did Jeffrey just change his favourite bathroom stall from number five to number four?” and my second thought, which came IMMEDIATELY on the heels of the first was “Would Jeffrey give voice to that first thought?” Because if Jeffrey was really like me, the answer to the first question would be ”Obviously” and the answer to the second question would be “Absolutely not” , so based on the second answer, I didn’t say anything—I just smiled and said, “Yeah?” By the time it occurred to me to ask why, the conversation had moved on, and it would have been awkward to drag it back.

Jeffrey? Jeffrey!

But if you know anything about me at all, I spent the rest of the day literally obsessing over IN WHAT WAY EXACTLY I was like the mysterious and elusive Jeffrey. But first, I should explain about the bathroom stalls because I know you are DYING to hear this. If you remember from My Week 177: My Favourite Bathroom Stall and Other Questions, number five was pretty close to my heart, and other parts of my anatomy that shall remain nameless. Lately, however, I’ve noticed that the toilet paper in number five runs out not long after lunch while the other stalls have their full complement. Which led me to the inevitable conclusion that number five was also the favourite bathroom stall of a whole lot of other people. And I don’t want to use the same bathroom stall as everyone else because I like to imagine that when I sit down, I’m sitting on a pristine seat, and that’s impossible to do when you know that it’s being overused compared to the other stalls. Hence my decision to change to number four. So 1) if Jeffrey can write a whole paragraph about his favourite bathroom stall, then he’s my f*cking doppelganger.

Other Ways Jeffrey and I Might Be Alike:

2) Is Jeffrey the King of Worst Case Scenarios?

Continuing on the bathroom theme for a second, we were working offsite when the inciting conversation happened. And if you think I have an issue with sharing 5 stalls with about 30 women, imagine how I feel about sharing a public washroom of ten stalls with around 500 of them. Luckily, there was a trailer on site with portable toilets. The last time we were there, the trailers were the fancy “wedding bathrooms”, all kitted out with wood trim, soft music, and scented hand soap, so I was quite excited to foray out into the parking lot. I was in for a nasty shock though, when I went in and it was just a single, rather bland stall, but there WAS a lot of toilet paper. Anyway, as I was sitting there, I realized that the whole trailer was on a slant, with the front leaning a bit more forward than it should, and that the only window and door were on that wall, and if the trailer fell over, they would be flat on the ground. I had a horrible vision then of the whole thing toppling and I started looking for a roof hatch and whatnot so that I could plan my escape from a sewage-y demise. And I wished that Jeffrey was there with me—not actually IN the bathroom, but available for advice. I’m sure between the two of us, we could have come up with a terrific plan.

3) Is Jeffrey afraid of demons?

A couple of weeks ago, I posted about how I learned that I’m not the only one to do certain things. This was the one idiosyncrasy that I forgot about, even though I had made note of it in my phone. Like many people, apparently, I can’t dangle any part of my body off the edge of my bed because I’m secretly worried that a demon, or a ghost, or a serial killer might be hiding under it, and will grab said body part and tear it off. Or lick it, like the urban myth where the woman thinks it’s her dog but it’s not. When I was about 13 years old, I read Stephen King’s novel Salem’s Lot, and became so terrified of vampires that I hung my late great-grandmother’s cross on my headboard. Every night, I would leap into bed from the middle of the room, as one does, avoiding whatever might be under the bed (later it was the clown with the wind-up nose from Poltergeist that I was worried about), and then touch the cross to ward off the vampires. I no longer have a cross nor do I leap across the room, but my limbs will always stay within the confines of the covers.

4) Is Jeffrey’s Favourite Colour Purple?

Because mine is. The other day, a very nice man stopped me on the street to compliment me by telling me that he loved how my hair and my handbag matched. I don’t know a lot about Jeffrey—well, nothing really—but if he’s a man with purple hair and a lavender Kate Spade bag then Ken is going to have to step up his game.

5) Is Jeffrey slightly OCD?

On Friday, I told Ken about Jeffrey and that I was really concerned that my colleague meant I was like Jeffrey because we were both weird, so I asked him, “In what ways do you think I’m weird?” He thought and thought for so long that I said, “Are you in your nothing box right now?” and he said, “No! I’m still thinking about what you asked me, but I can’t come up with anything.”

Me: I don’t f*cking believe you.
Ken: Maybe Jeffrey swears a lot.
Me: If he’s like me, then clearly he does. Seriously. You can’t think of a single thing I do that’s weird?
Ken: No, sorry.
Me: Come on, Ken! I can think of 5 things off the top of my head RIGHT NOW that are weird about you.

2 hours later…

Me: I forgot to tell you—I had a terrible dream last night.
Ken: What happened?
Me: I’d created a display of glassware on the ledge in the stairwell, and you’d taken it apart. You moved the pieces all over the house, and I had to find them and try to remember how I’d arranged them so that I could put the display back together. It was awful—I woke up in tears.
Ken: Ah. There is it. And was everything arranged in groupings of threes and fives?
Me: Obviously. I’m not an animal, KEN.
Ken: Weirdo.

So you can see my dilemma. I really want to know why Jeffrey and I are alike, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it might be for reasons that are just a tad off-kilter. We’re all back to work next week, so I’m determined to ask my colleague to elaborate. I’ll keep you posted.

(As an addendum, I have to say that even if Jeffrey showed up in a purple suit and had a bouquet of violets, he’d still have nothing on Ken, who just read this and said, “You should totally get a hidden camera and then you could find out for sure which bathroom stall is the least used.” Now there’s a man who understands me.)

My Author Interview

Last week, a blogger pal of mine put a call out to anyone who was interested in an author interview. Gareth of GJ Stevens blog and I corresponded, and he’s just posted the interview that we did. Gareth is a writer of many genres, and has a fantastic series on his blog called “In The End” that he’s just on the verge of publishing into a novel series. His blog also has excellent advice for anyone who is interested in doing their own publishing. You can see the interview he and I did by clicking the link above. If you’ve ever wondered what I actually look and sound like, he’s included a link to the cable show that I appeared on to promote my last novel Smile. It’s fun to watch—I sound just like Jeffrey.

In other news, I just finished my new novel, The Dome. I’ve sent some mark-up copies to a couple of people for feedback, then it’s off to the publisher, who liked the sample chapters, so fingers crossed that they like the rest. Wish me luck!

Black and White Challenge Week 4

My Week 189: I’ve Got The Power

I don’t know about you, but I’m frankly very sick of all this extreme weather. Two weeks ago, we had ice storms. Ice storms in April. As T.S.Eliot once famously said, “Oh my f*cking god, April—you truly are a dick.” I believe that was in his greatest work “The Wasteland”, or “Etobicoke” as it’s known today. (I tweeted this out at the time, and it didn’t get a single like, as opposed to my lame tweet about Canada being ready to defend its sacred Maple Syrup, which got over 200 likes and numerous retweets, all of which taught me one thing: that people don’t appreciate obscure literary references and I should stick to tweeting about Maple Syrup). And then of course there’s terrible flooding out East in Saint John or St. John’s— I’m not sure which one. I initially thought that it must be the height of Canadianism to name two provincial capitals practically the same thing, but then I looked it up and the capital of New Brunswick is actually Fredericton, so I guess the height of Canadianism is to NOT know all the capitals. I DO know that up until recently, Canada had 9 teams in the Canadian Football League, and two of them were called the Roughriders. One of them was the Roughriders, and the other was the Rough Riders, just so you could tell them apart. This would be like if the NFL, for some bizarre reason, named half its teams The Patriots. Can you imagine the play-by-play (which I have to do because I have never watched the CFL)?:

Commentator 1: And the Roughriders take the field.
Commentator 2: As do the Rough Riders. Go teams!
Later…
Commentator 1: And the Rough Riders have scored a touchdown!
Commentator 2: Aw—now the Roughriders are behind by 22 and a half points.

Anyway, about the weather. I came home early this week with the intention of getting some writing done. I had the remaining chapters of my new novel laid out, and I’m itching to get it finished because I sent some sample chapters to my publisher and he said they’re definitely interested in it. But then I sat down to write and realized that I had forgotten about the chapter I had started BEFORE working 16 straight days in Etobicoke, and I had no plan for it. So that meant a lot of pacing, and thinking, and sitting and staring into space while the whole thing crystallized in my mind. By Friday morning, I knew what I was doing and I sat down at the computer. I was getting close to finished when I noticed that the wind outside had REALLY started to pick up, like the trees in the yard were whipping from side to side in a rather alarming way, and things that used to be on the porch were now in the middle of the yard. Then the power started to flicker. Then it went off. I tried to call Hydro but the line was busy, as always. But then the power came back on, so I stopped panicking and finished writing. Ken came home, and we went out to see Infinity Wars at the VIP theatre with K and her girlfriend. It was pretty good, even if I hadn’t seen all the other movies and had no idea who half the people were. Luckily, K was with us, so I could ask her, even if it meant being subjected to a LOT of eyerolling:

Me: Who’s that?
K: That’s The Falcon.
Me: The what? I don’t remember him from the last Avengers movie.
K: Which one was the last one you saw?
Me: The…Avengers? Who’s the guy with the mechanical arm? I feel like I’m really out of touch here.
K: Bucky. Stop talking.
Me: Where’s Batman? I heard he dies in this movie.
K: Mom! Batman is DC, not Marvel. They’re two different universes!
Me: So no Aquaman? You know what this movie REALLY needs? The Wonder Twins.
K: Sigh.

But then the Guardians of the Galaxy showed up, and I was like, “This is so unfair! How come the raccoon and the tree are here, but I can’t have Batman?!” But apparently, the Guardians are “Marvel” too, but just from a different franchise, and I had to resign myself to drinking wine, eating my poutine, and silently wondering where the f*ck Vision and Wanda came from.

After the movie, Ken and I drove home. But as we got into town, I noticed something terrible. There were no lights on anywhere. No street lights, no house lights, nothing. And sure enough, the power was out in the entire town and surrounding areas. I checked Facebook on my phone and someone had posted that power wouldn’t be restored until the next day at 6 pm.

So I did it all by the numbers.

1) Get out all the jar candles.

I have a drawer in a desk in the living room, where I keep jar candles. I currently have 23, all in varying shapes, sizes, and states of use. Why, you ask? Because the POWER MIGHT GO OFF. I started lighting them with a lighter wand thing, which ran out of butane by number 17. I haven’t used matches since I was a teenager, and I couldn’t get them to light on the sandpaper strip on the box, so I just stuck them in the open flames of the other candles. I am nothing if not resourceful. Candles lit. Check.

2) Find all 8 flashlights and realize that none of them work. Look for batteries. Try to install the batteries into the flashlights by the light of a “White Linen and Vanilla” jar candle. Remind Ken that “the pioneers might have been way better at living rough than me, but I bet their houses didn’t smell as good”.

3) Also remind Ken that under no circumstances should he open the fridge in order to keep the food from spoiling. Open the fridge myself to get out a bottle of wine.

4) Lie in bed in the dark, drinking wine and plotting my revenge against nature by candlelight. Eventually blow out all the candles so that I don’t set the house on fire.

Day Two

In the morning, we checked again. Now Hydro was saying the power wouldn’t be back on until Sunday at 6 pm.

5) Have a minor meltdown, and order Ken to take me out to buy a barbeque so that we could cook dinner (our previous bbq had broken during the winter when I rather vigorously threw open the lid and it snapped off). I also bought one of those big camping lanterns. The only instructions for its use involved three pictures that were all upside down. After ten minutes, I lost my sh*t and called for Ken. He looked at it, then pushed the button and it came on. “You have to press harder,” he said.

“Yeah, well, just wait until you have to put together the barbeque!” I responded. Which he did. In under the time suggested in the instruction manual.

6) Call my mom and complain about the lack of electricity.

7) Call my aunt and complain about the lack of electricity.

8) Post on Facebook complaining about the lack of electricity.

9) Realize my phone battery is almost dead.

10) Remember that our neighbour has a generator. Message her to ask if I can use it to charge my phone. She says yes.

11) Take my phone and a bottle of wine across the street. Spend a couple of very pleasant hours with my neighbour, talking and drinking while my phone charges.

12) Go home and light all 23 jar candles again. Lie in bed, drinking wine and plotting revenge against Ontario Hydro, who will rue the day they ruined my plan to kick back and watch Netflix so that I could get caught up on The Avengers movies. Enjoy the aroma of “Lavender Sky” mingled with “Christmas Berry”. Read the fifth book in Stephen King’s Dark Tower series and get seriously pissed off at being over halfway through and still not knowing who the f*cking Wolves of Calla are.

13) Blow out all the jar candles and go to sleep. Wake up sometime in the night and realize that the hall light is on. Wake Ken up to tell him, but he already knows and has been watching Netflix without me. I forgive him, silently rejoice, and congratulate myself on being hardy like a pioneer. Make plans to buy my own generator. Just in case.

My Week 173: Sewage, Spiders, Sundogs, and Stuff

Sign of the apocalypse?

Well, it’s been one of those weeks. I’d finally recovered from our trip to Montreal—the actual Montreal part was wonderful, but the train trip there and back was a total sh*tshow. We’d taken K and her girlfriend, the lovely V, but we couldn’t get seats together. “Don’t worry,” the VIA rep told me when I called. “The service manager has been notified and will help rearrange your seats once on board.” When we finally GOT on board the train, which was already 40 minutes late, the service manager very professionally shrugged and said, “I dunno. Ask someone to swap with you.” The train continued to be delayed at each stop with people getting on with duplicate seat assignments and the staff trying to figure out where to put them. It was a total comedy of errors with one lady finally saying, “Oh, I can just stand, I guess.” The three days in Montreal were great, but then we had to make our way back home, and it was even worse. We left on time, then at the first stop, the train literally shut down. Everything went dark. Car attendants started running frantically up and down the aisles whispering into walkie talkies. Once the train was fixed, 90 minutes later, it was clear we weren’t going to make our connection in Toronto, but no one would tell us what we should do. This, of course, made me super-stressed, because I always need to have a plan. Ken, on the other hand, just sat there unconcerned, making excuses for the train people, and telling me to “calm down”, which, as we all know, is THE BEST WAY to get someone with anxiety to stop freaking out. I got really mad, but then I realized later that it’s just the way Ken is. I realized this as we were watching TV the next night, and a commercial for septic tank cleaner came on featuring a man mowing his lawn and walking right through a puddle of sewage:

Me: That doesn’t make any sense. How could he not see that giant puddle of toilet spew?!
Ken: He was concentrating on mowing the lawn.
Me: Concentrating? He was going in a diagonal line across the lawn. No one mows like that. It’s like he purposely walked straight into it.
Ken: Don’t blame him. It’s not his fault that his septic tank was clogged.
Me: Well, who else clogged it, Ken?!
Ken: Calm down. See? He used CLR and now he can mow his lawn safely.

For the record, I sent VIA a sternly worded email, and they apologized and gave me all the points back that I’d used for the trip, so I won’t have to boycott the only train that takes me to and from Toronto, where I arrived on Sunday night.

Monday:

I saw my family doctor because I was having some pains, which turned out to be mostly from overenthusiastic abdominal crunches. He did, however, considering my age and lack of a uterus, suggest that I start taking estrogen. “Let’s try it,” he said as he wrote out the prescription, “Every day for 2 weeks, then twice a week after that.” When I went to the pharmacy to pick it up, things became very confusing. The pharmacist, who was a very young and good-looking fellow, said, “Have you ever used this before?” and when I said “No”, he pulled out the package and opened it to show me. Inside were cellpacks of long plungers. Each one had a small pill in the end. They looked like the thing you use to give your cat medication—you know, the long stick you shove down its throat and then pop the pill out. But I’m pretty good at taking pills—why would I need to use a cat plunger? Then the pharmacist said, “I highly recommend doing this right before bed. So the tablet doesn’t fall out.”

Me: Fall out?
Pharmacist (slightly embarrassed): Um, yes. You want to keep it in there. So better if you’re lying down for a while…
Me: OH!!! (hysterical laughter as it dawns on me where the pill actually goes) Because it would be awkward if that happened at work, right?!
Pharmacist: Um…
Me: Gotcha. Sorry—I thought at first I was supposed to swallow it.
Pharmacist: No, you—
Me: Say no more.

Wednesday/Thursday

As it turned out, the medication made me extremely sick, so I stopped taking it after three days, but not before the nausea had completely ruined my overwhelming joy at having to attend a two-day workshop on “Evidence-Based Decision Making”. The highlight of the two days was a pseudo-Jeopardy game that we played in teams. The CEO of the agency was sitting right next to me, so I had to bite my tongue and NOT object to the fact that NO ONE was answering in the form of a question. But at least I didn’t have to worry about jumping up excitedly if we won, and having a pill drop out of me. My team had the lowest amount of pretend money, but we were promised Final Jeopardy on the second day. We calculated and plotted carefully, so that we had a chance of winning if the other teams got the question wrong. But then the person running the slide deck put up the question AND the answer simultaneously by mistake. To appease the crowd, who were out for blood, she just gave everyone what they had bet, and I was like, “Oh, come on, Team Two! We all know you had no idea the answer was ‘What is a logic model’! You wouldn’t know a logic model if you tripped over it, Becky!”

Friday

I was finally feeling better and back onsite. I walked into my office, and felt something weird brush against my face. I wiped my forehead and my hand came away with a long string of spider web with the spider dangling from the end of it. The strand was also still attached to my head. I shook my hand furiously and the spider dropped to the floor, but in my panic, I threw off my coat, scarf and started doing a dance which involved hopping up and down, swatting at my hair, and screaming “Ah! Ah!” When I was finally done, I looked up and realized that the nice gentleman in the cubicle across from my office had been watching. “Whatever it was,” he said, “I think you killed it.”

Saturday

Ken and I were driving into town to have dinner with my parents. I was looking up the ballistic missile report in Hawaii that morning, and was telling Ken about how it was 38 minutes before they knew it was a false alarm when he suddenly said, “Look! There’s a sun dog!” So I looked directly at the sun.

Me: WTF! Why did you make me do that? Now I can’t see anything but sunspots!
Ken: Why did you look directly at the sun? You’re not supposed to do that.
Me: I wanted to see the dog.
Ken: A sun dog is a like a rainbow.
Me: Everyone knows you can’t see a rainbow if you’re facing the sun!
Ken: This is different. If it’s north of the sun, there’s a storm coming. If it’s south of the sun–
Me: How do I know what side of the f*cking sun it’s on, if I can’t look at the sun!

Then K, who hasn’t been to church since she was very little and has only been to one very secular wedding, started messaging me that she was at a wedding with V and she didn’t understand what was going on. It was hard to read because of the spots in front of my eyes, but the gist, in her own words, was this: a dude kissed the bible, raised up a cracker and another dude rang a bell. Then the first dude downed a glass of wine. I responded, “Did they try to make you eat the cracker?” and she said, “Don’t worry—I spirit blocked them”. I was reading all this and laughing when Ken said, “So what would YOU do in that half hour?”

Me: Meh, I’d just sit and think. That’s what I do when I’m bored—I think of something to write and then plan it out in my head. I do that all the time in meetings.
Ken: You’d be bored?
Me: Well sure. Plus I’m not really into religion.
Ken: You wouldn’t be scared?
Me: Well, they can’t MAKE you eat the cracker.
Ken: Cracker? It was a ballistic missile!

Then I realized that we were talking about two different things, because I forgot that I hadn’t yet shared K’s wedding experience with Ken. He, of course, was talking about Hawaii.

Sunday

I have to spend the rest of today creating a logic model for what I would do if a ballistic missile was heading towards Ontario and I had 38 minutes. Luckily, I just went to a workshop…