So This is What's Up With Me

From a rave at the community centre on Friday night. I met a traveling book salesman who looked and sounded just like Michael Alig from Party Monster.

So I've been living here in Saskatoon for like two months now, chilling out with a million different people, and working a couple different jobs. I work like 60 hours a week so I don't have much time to do anything else -- especially not blogging.

Let me give you a brief overview of what I've been up to:

I've been living at my buddie Lewis' place -- he was in the hospital for about a month, so I spent every other day crashing the hospital there -- hanging out with his family (I wake up to and watch episodes of House with Caleb, I showed Michael how to watch the Simpsons online, talk NGOs and mining with Kerry, feel the pain of working and looking forward to returning to university with Carly, and chat about jazz music with Dave). I eat sandwiches for breakfast lunch and supper. I'm getting so sick of them (eating sandwiches). Haha. I now have a choice of strawberry or raspberry jam, marmalade, and salami or ham and cheddar sandwiches.

There've been a zillion things I've been up to here that I can't really describe them all. I remember the time Lewis and I stole a cantaloupe out of the fridge and took it to the Mexican-style bar "and resort" just down the street by the ice cream shop, and stuck it alongside the limes there just to throw them off. It was kind of an insane day. And then Dave freaked out so hard when I found out the cantaloupe was missing. The cute waitresses seemed so baffled by our little trick, and I guess the magical cantaloupe floated a million different places
around the bar, before we returned to find out why they had "stolen" our cantaloupe. We were seated and ate chocolate bars we had brought along in front of them, while they searched for our lovely melon. We kept bugging them after we had it in our possession vying for free drinks. Instead we got kicked out by the head cook, I think. That was a weird but really fun memory I have now. I thought I'd share it. The first day we went in there we had gotten Pacificos -- genuine Mexican beer. It reminded us of our surf trip last year. And I imagined being South of the border already... That was so long ago already, it seems like another lifetime.


I work at a nightclub downtown called Overdrive International Nightclub, where cowboys, University of Saskatchewan kids, rich suburbanites, yuppies, factory bosses and gangsters (some real but mostly posers) like to frequent. I ride a bicycle (purple and pink ... totally mid-90s rad) to work, and I always swerve in and out of traffic to make it there on time. Sometimes I'm so good at it I think I should be a courier.

I also work at a factory in the north end of the city where I ride the bus to every day that makes burgers. I mean, most meatpacking plants have a kill floor and might make a ton of different types of food. We get meat in slabs and make just burgers. That's it. I work in a huge new facility that does one thing: grind up, stamp out, freeze and package little circular objects that people like to ingest between buns. I ate a burger for supper tonight, and I had a burger at Overdrive last night at the end of my shift (there's a BBQ on the patio). We do all of A+W's burgers for all across Canada. And we even ship President's Choice burgers to the states apparently. And the work is fucking boring. But we just got a raise ($11.50 an hour or something now) because the labour market is so needy out here (an oil boom in the region has sent housing prices sky high and almost every restaurant, lumber yard and factory will have some type of "Now Hiring" sign out). I'll have to write a post sometime and be a little more in depth about what working in a factory is like. I was pretty fascinated at first. Now I want to kill myself. It's that boring. Haha. We take a shuttle bus home -- which is just a taxi van the company loads to the hilt. They left me behind one day when I had to stay behind to help clean up in another department (I usually just do packaging), and somehow I wasn't surprised. It's not the best most exciting place to work that's for sure.

The only day off I have is Sunday. And it doesn't last long enough. I slept until 5 p.m. today. And I was still sore and tired when I woke up.

I can't wait to get out of here. But I don't know how soon that will be...

I'll just have to keep on busting my ass until that happens. For now it's burgers, beer and bike riding.