the end is not yet

This being the third sleepless night in less than a week, it's safe to say that the insomnia is back.

The only time it ever really goes away is when Christa is sleeping beside me. But the usual nonsense has been upgraded to full blown frustration.

It's not terribly late, but I hit the hay at 9 p.m. tonight because I was so beat I couldn't keep my eyes open. And now, six hours later, I've slept not a bit. Stupid.

Ask me if I'm amused.

I blame my cold. It's been having me sleep at odd hours this week and it's completely thrown me.

I don't know how many of you still read this, but for those of you who I haven't really talked to for a while, here is what's going on in my life. For ease of reading, I've split it off into handy-dandy categories.

Love life

Excellent. Since she got back from Oz, things with Christa have been almost too good to believe. I could go on, but there's no need. I'm happy with her. That's all anybody needs to know.

Career

Still plodding along. With only a few loose ends to tie up, first year of j-school is done.

Next fall I'm a managing editor for sweat, the official magazine of the Ontario College Athletics Association. It comes out twice a year and is done by final year Humber journalism students. I should also be interning a few days a week at a small newspaper somewhere.

Living situation

Still living in Toronto. It's a love/hate relationship. Everytime I think I've had enough of it, the city manages to show me something about it to convince me otherwise.

Work

Finding employment for the summer is my next big task.

I've had a post about stoicism and apathy on the go since last week. I was going to finish it off now but something more important came up.

One of my banana muffins blew up.

I'm making a half dozen of them now. They're the extremely easy kind. You just add water to a mix, put the batter into a muffin tin and bake. They say you should only fill each thing a little, but when you do that your muffins are a little stunted. What you have to do is fill them almost to the top. That way the muffin rises and you get the great rounded muffin tops.

I just checked on them and something went wrong with one.

You can see that it was starting to rise in a perfect dome. Then the side split and the soft muffin insides gooshed out. But I was lucky. It gooshed on the inside side, so it didn't go over the edge of the tin.

Oh well. It'll still taste good after it's done baking.

Why don't I care? Am I lacking something?

Food? Dealt with that. Vitamin D? Just spent an hour outside. Social interaction? I wasn't alone outside.

Fuck.

I hate this.

Would things be easier if I cared? Maybe.

I wrote my last crime article of the semester this morning. Two of them, actually. And now that I don't have one to do next week, I can admit that I kind of like writing them. I dreaded sitting down to write them a lot of the time, but they're so condensed and follow such a clearcut narrative that they're very centering to write. Kind of like the journalistic equivalent of target practice. Once you know how, it's not that difficult. And the simple act of doing it focuses the mind.

You know, I'm thinking that sleeping only an hour or two last night may have been a mistake.

A couple months ago I ended up in a second hand bookstore on Bathurst Street. It was late and a Friday night and I was a little drunk. How I got there isn't important. What I found is.

I bought two books that night. One was Valediction, an old Spenser book by Robert B. Parker. The other was The Continental Op, by Dashiell Hammett. Hammett wrote The Maltese Falcon, which I had just read and liked.

The Continental Op has sat on my shelf since then. Now, with midnight creeping up and an article I don't want to write (the one I referred to in my last post) still needing to be written, I've picked it up.

The book is a collection of stories about a tough detective with no name. He's referred to as "the Op." His life is his work and it hardens him.

Steven Marcus' introduction to the collection is a literary essay analyzing Hammett's life and fiction. In it I found a passage that describes something that I've feared for a while.

The Op's toughness is not merely a carapace within which feelings of tenderness and humanity can be nourished and preserved. The toughness is toughness through and through, and as the Op continues his career, and continues to live by the means he does, he tends to become more callous and less and less able to feel. At the very end, awaiting him, he knows, is the prospect of becoming like his boss, the head of the Agency, the Old Man, "with his gentle eyes behind gold spectacles and his mild smile, hiding the fact that fifty years of sleuthing had left him without any feelings at all on any subject."

This is why I will not be a hard news reporter for more than a handful of years. While my toughness is still a carapace, I've seen signs of its thickening. First last year with the struggles at the paper. And more this year after living in the city and covering crime in Rexdale.

That scares me.

I just got a hold of the student who hadn't wanted to talk to me for the article about the huge bill from the highway. While she wasn't ducking me, it wasn't exactly easy to get a hold of her. Once I did, I got the quote without difficulty. But I feel ill at ease. I don't like this.

To dispel rumours, the Dead People Server has a list of people who aren't dead yet. Most listings include a brief explanation of how the rumour started. Included on the list are James Earl Jones, B.B. King, Joe Piscopo, "Weird Al" Yankovic and others.

Check out Area 51's New Slang Dictionary 2004 for some slang you've heard, and some you probably haven't.

This one's my favourite:

"AUSSIE KISS - Similar to a French Kiss, but given down under."

Other notables are "Greyhound" and "Johnny-no-stars".

There was a drive-by shooting blocks from school yesterday. A bus shelter got shot up. The guy in the shelter fled. Police don't know if he was hurt. I'm writing the story. The shelter's probably still damaged. And my camera is safe at home on my dresser. This is the second time I've left it at home and the second time I wish I hadn't.

Ireland has banned the use of English on its official maps and street signs for much of its western coast. Gaelic will be used instead.

I scoffed, but I was wrong. Thanks to Christa for sending me here and here to learn about Ambulocetus natans. It's a mammal that's a lot like a crocodile.